29591	----	Transcriber's note: Extensive research found no evidence that the copyright on this book has been renewed Getting to Know Spain illustrated by DON LAMBO Getting to know Spain by Dee Day COWARD-MCCANN, INC. NEW YORK © 1957, BY COWARD-MCCANN, INC. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publishers. Published simultaneously in the Dominion of Canada by Longmans, Green & Company, Toronto. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance and hospitality of Direccion General del Turismo in all its offices in Spain, the Spanish State Tourist Department in New York, and Iberia Air Lines of Spain, without whose co-operation the gathering of much of the material and the personal experience reflected in this book would have been impossible. A majority of the pictures were drawn from photographs by Herb Kratovil, taken especially for this book. New York, 1957 Dee Day Editor of this series: Sabra Holbrook Seventh Impression Library of Congress Catalog Number: 57-7427 MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA For My Parents [Illustration] You probably know that it was a Queen of Spain, Isabella, who made it possible for America to be discovered in 1492. It was an Italian sailor, Christopher Columbus, who first had the strange new idea that he could sail westward from Spain in order to reach the Far East. He came to Spain to tell people about his idea, and everybody he met thought he was crazy because they knew, or thought they knew, that the northern corner of Spain, jutting out into the Atlantic, was the very end of the world. Even the most daring sailors and fishermen wouldn't go very far from that shore for fear they would drop over the rim into nothingness. But Queen Isabella didn't think Columbus was crazy. She took time to listen to him and decided she wanted to help him. She didn't have any money to buy ships for his expedition, so she ordered a little fishing village, Palos, to build three ships as a way of paying a fine they owed her. The fishermen of Palos knew how to build good, sturdy sailing vessels, and they soon had the three ships ready for Columbus and his brave sailors. That is why, in August of 1492, the daring expedition started from this little Spanish village. What a sight! Three little ships, the _Niña_ (Small Girl), the _Pinta_ (Spotted), and the _Santa Maria_ (named in honor of the Virgin Mary) cast off from the wharf of Palos. Flags fluttered in the breeze as the sails billowed out from the masts. All the villagers were lined up on the shore to pray and to cheer, and the bells in the church rang as Columbus and his crew sailed off "the rim" to the west in search of wealth and glory for Spain! [Illustration] Many Spanish explorers followed Columbus to the New World, and even sailed all the way around the world, west to east, but the Spanish people today are mostly "stay-at-homes." Sometimes they leave home for a little while to make money, like the Spanish shepherds who are so good at handling flocks of sheep that American ranchers in California, New Mexico, Nevada and other western states pay them a lot of money to come and work for them. But those who leave always go back to their beloved land as soon as they have earned what they need. [Illustration] If you were to meet a Spanish person, you would find that he would be interested in America and other countries, but he couldn't imagine living the rest of his life anywhere except in Spain. "Why should I ever live anywhere else?" he would ask you. "Everything beautiful and good in life is right here." He would feel this way even though he might be very poor and might even have to leave for a little while, like the shepherds. To him, the important things in life are his family, his friends, his church and his country. [Illustration] His country is a large, squarish, mountainous land at the southwesternmost tip of Europe. To the north, over the tall wall of the Pyrenees Mountains, is France. To the west is Portugal and the Atlantic Ocean, and to the east is the Mediterranean Sea. Spain has more seacoast than any other European country and more mountains than any except Switzerland. Spain and Portugal together make up what is called the Iberian Peninsula. It is named for the Iberian people who came there from North Africa almost 5,000 years ago and settled down to become the ancestors of the Spanish people. If you were to stand at the bottom of the Iberian Peninsula, on a hill overlooking a town called Algeciras, you could look right into Africa, only twelve miles away. You would also see the Rock of Gibraltar--a giant rock rising out of the sea and turned into a fort to guard the narrow passage between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. This passage is the Strait of Gibraltar, and all ships must go through it to get from the sea to the ocean. [Illustration] In this mountainous country between two seas, more babies are born every day than in any other country in Europe. There are 29 million people in Spain already, although it is only the size of our state of Montana, where 600,000 people live. This country might seem very small to us, but it is the third largest country in Europe. And because their mountains shut different parts of the country away from each other, there are many differences in ways of living among the 29 million Spaniards. There are 15 different regions in Spain, and each one has a different way of dressing, different music and dances, different ways of fixing food, a different sort of house to live in, and even different ways of speaking. Sometimes you will meet a Spaniard who has never been out of his own region, or even away from his own village, because the mountains make it very difficult to travel when your way of getting around is on your own two feet or in a little cart pulled by a small burro or donkey. [Illustration] Another reason for the many different ways of living is that Spain is a very old country which has been invaded many times by other countries. These countries were jealous of the beauty and wealth of Spain and wanted to get it for themselves. For hundreds of years the Spanish people were always fighting to protect their beloved homeland against invading armies. [Illustration] The Iberians themselves were invaders, because they weren't the first people who lived in Spain. We don't even know the names of those very first people who lived there when most of Europe was covered with ice. We only know that they lived in caves and hunted wild animals, because some of their caves have been discovered and the walls are covered with bright drawings of the animals these people hunted--bison, deer, wild horses and wild boars. [Illustration] After the Iberians, came the Celts, Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Romans. From Rome, Spain took her language, her system of laws, and her church. There were once more than 80 Roman cities in Spain, with roads and bridges and walls which were built so well that they are still used by Spanish people today. In the city of Segovia, the Romans built an aqueduct to bring drinking water into the town from the nearby mountains, and this aqueduct still brings water to the people of Segovia. The Romans liked Spain so much they stayed 500 years, but finally barbaric tribes from central Europe drove them out. A short time later, these tribes were conquered by Moors from North Africa. The Moors brought many new ways to the Spanish people. They spoke the Arabic language, and worshiped Mohammed instead of Christ, in churches called mosques. They taught the Spanish people algebra and the science of astronomy; they introduced a new kind of poetry, music and dancing. They brought many new kinds of trees and flowers to Spain, like the date palm, the orange and the pomegranate, and taught the people how to grow them with an irrigation system which is still in use today. Many little Spanish boys learn how to run it, so that they can help their fathers and mothers. The Moors built many mosques and palaces in Spain which are still in use, and they look like buildings from Arabian fairy tales. These Moorish buildings have their rooms built around open courtyards, called patios, where orange and lemon trees and many bright flowers grow, and fountains splash in the sunshine. The rooms have many pillars to support the ceiling, and all the pillars and arches and ceilings are beautifully carved. The Moors could carve hard stone so that it looks like delicate lace, and this is what gives their buildings such a fairy-tale look. [Illustration] The Spanish Christians, however, didn't like the Moors, and during all of the 800 years the Moors ruled Spain, the Christians were fighting to drive them out. Finally, Queen Isabella and her husband, King Ferdinand, led their Christian army to victory against the last Moorish stronghold, Granada. Because of this victory, Queen Isabella didn't have to worry about fighting for a while, and she was able to help Columbus. [Illustration] When Columbus discovered America on October 12, 1492, he began Spain's most exciting period of history. The next century after Columbus was called the Age of the Conquistadores. Conquistadores were adventurers who set out to find and conquer new lands for Spain in the New World which Columbus had discovered. Many of their conquests later became part of the United States. For instance, De Soto claimed the Mississippi River and all the rivers that run into it, as well as part of the land that is now the American Southwest. Ponce de Leon, looking for a magic fountain that would keep people young forever, discovered Florida and claimed for Spain the land that is now the American southeast. Cortez, who had conquered Mexico for Spain and had sent millions of dollars' worth of gold and jewels back to his homeland, also traveled through the Southwest and as far north as Colorado. The great Pacific Ocean, which washes the western coast of both North and South America, was discovered by a Spaniard named Balboa. One Spanish sailor, Juan Sebastian Elcano, was the very first man to sail all the way around the world. The Conquistadores sent back a huge treasure of gold, silver, copper and jewels to Spain, and more than paid Queen Isabella and her family for her faith in Columbus. In fact, Spain became one of the most important countries in Europe. Her queens and kings and princesses married rulers of other countries so that soon, in addition to being very rich and owning many countries across the ocean, Spain owned most of Europe too. She was sitting on top of the world. Only England had stood up against the Spanish power. So in 1588, Spain sent a great fleet of warships, called the Armada, to challenge England. England won. Spain never recovered from this defeat by England. It became harder for her to govern the lands she had conquered. Today only two places outside the country are still Spanish. They are the Canary Islands out in the Atlantic Ocean near the coast of Africa, and the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean. At the same time that Spain was losing lands she had conquered, her own lovely land tempted other countries, and the Spanish people were called upon to fight invading armies from England and France. The real losers during all these years of fighting were the Spanish people. They had to fight instead of grow crops, and natural resources, like forests, were neglected or used up. Spain fell further and further behind other countries, and even today she hasn't been able to catch up as far as she would like. All the unhappy years of fighting in Spain weren't in the long-ago past. Just a while ago, in 1936, a Civil War broke out between the Spanish people who wanted their king to come back to the throne he'd left in 1931, and the people who wanted Spain to set up a republic, like ours in the United States. This war went on for three years, and in the end, everybody lost. General Francisco Franco and his army defeated the forces which wanted a republic, and also those who wanted to set up Communism. He is now the head of the Spanish government. Because he is considered a dictator, there are many Spanish people who disagree with the way he runs the government and are hoping to change it. In 1947 a new constitution was written in which General Franco agreed that Spain would one day have a king again, but the person who becomes king must be at least twenty-five years old. The old king is dead and there is nobody for the job right now. But the king's grandson, young Prince Juan Carlos, is taking special studies so he will be ready to be king when he is old enough. And of course there are still people who would like to see Spain become a democratic republic, like the United States, and not have a king at all. [Illustration] In the meantime, the Spanish people and their government have a lot to do to make their country stable and strong again. If you were to visit Spain, you would see why the Spanish people love their country so much. You could also understand why so many different nations wanted to conquer Spain. Spain is a very beautiful country and also a country that can produce many good things. It has minerals such as iron, lead, copper and sulphur in the earth. In the south, it has a warm climate that helps grow luscious crops of oranges, lemons, olives and grapes for wine. [Illustration] You might like to take a trip from one region to another by riding on a little donkey as Spanish boys do, or in a little high-wheeled cart pulled by a donkey, the way little Spanish girls might do. Your donkey would probably not have a saddle, but just a rug or a straw mat folded across his back, and he might wear a headband of bright red and blue wool woven into a gay pattern to shade his eyes from the sun. You could carry your food and clothes for the journey in a pair of straw bags hung one on each side of your donkey's back. Along the way, you would see dozens of other little donkeys and burros. The burro is a donkey-cousin but even smaller. Donkeys and burros work with the Spanish men and boys in the fields or carry stones to help build new roads, or carry jars of water from a well to someone's house. These gentle little animals work to earn their keep in Spain. [Illustration] [Illustration] [Illustration] Suppose you start your trip in the north. At the very most northwestern tip of Spain is the region of Galicia, which everybody thought was the end of the world before Columbus showed them it wasn't. People in Galicia call themselves "Gallegos," and they live in a country of rocky seacoasts, where the ocean pokes long fingers called "rias" back into green hills and fog rolls in almost every day. In Galicia and the neighboring region of Asturias, fathers earn their living by fishing or by farming, and mothers make all the clothes for their families from cloth they weave themselves. Families live in houses built from stones cleared from their own fields. This is where the bagpipes are played while the young people, gaily dressed in red and green, dance their lively dances. This northern region is quite different from the sunny south, where the climate is very hot in the summer and never really gets cold in the winter. Here in the south is Andalusia, where mountain ranges may have snow on their peaks all year round, but down in the valleys and plains sweet-scented tropical flowers bloom in bright colors every single month. On the hillsides, grapes are grown to make wine, or silvery-green olive trees make groves against the red earth. This is a region of horses and good horsemen. Here big ranches stretch along the river banks and huge black bulls are raised. [Illustration] The people of Andalusia are full of music, dancing and the love of life. They live in white houses built around courtyards full of flowers, with windows covered with designs in black wrought iron. Black-haired Andalusian women wear black lace mantillas draped over their heads, a kind of veil and shawl. They like to carry lacy fans and wear long flashing earrings. Lots of gypsies live in Andalusia, many of them in caves in the chalky-white hillsides. Gypsy girls wear long red or green or blue dresses dotted with white. They fold bright-colored silk fringed scarves around their necks, and they love to wear many gold bracelets. Andalusia is the region the Moors loved the most, so this is where you'll see many of their lovely stone buildings full of lacelike carvings. [Illustration] [Illustration] It's like going into another world to journey from Andalusia into western Spain. In Extremadura, the land where the Conquistadores lived, and in León, there are great sweeping plains where the land is not very fertile because there are long dry seasons. Raising sheep, fruit and pigs are the main sources of making a living, and the people must work very hard. They don't have time for as much fun as the Andalusians do. These people are quiet but proud. They are especially proud of their universities, libraries and cathedrals. [Illustration] Still another little world in this country of contrasts is found in the eastern part of Spain, along the Mediterranean coast and in the region inland from this coast. The coastal regions are called, from north to south, Catalonia, Valencia and Murcia, all very pretty names. Catalonia has a long seacoast which is cut by many bays and coves reaching back right into the mountains, which rise straight from the sea. Many white sand beaches, rimmed with pine trees, invite you to stop and swim and sun. If you stopped, you could have fun climbing around the ruins of old walls and watchtowers on the hills looking out to sea. Once upon a time on these hills, lookouts used to give warning when pirates were sailing up to plunder the villages. One of these Catalonian villages, called Tossa de Mar, has a whole village built inside the walls on top of a hill above the regular village. People used to gather in this hilltop hideout for protection against pirates. The second largest city in Spain, Barcelona, is in Catalonia, and it has a very busy harbor where ships of all nations sail in and out every day. Valencia, south of Catalonia, is a land of flowers. Carnations, roses, jasmine, scarlet bougainvillea vines, and orange and lemon blossoms fill the air with perfume. Every Spaniard loves flowers, and every window and courtyard is full of blossoms. In the city of Valencia there's a Battle of Flowers every year during one of their festivals. Great baskets of rose petals and carnations line the streets and everyone dips out handfuls to toss over his neighbors and friends. You can imagine that in a very short time the whole city looks as if it were paved with flowers. In Sitges, a small fishing village a few miles north of Valencia where the most beautiful carnations in Spain are grown, there is a Carnation Festival every June, and here the main square actually _is_ paved with flower petals, laid out in gorgeous designs for the occasion. The land in the region of Valencia is so fertile that, with the help of the irrigation system set up long ago by the Moors, the people today grow as many as four crops a year of rice, vegetables, melons and oranges. Murcia has a small bit of seacoast, but the rest of it is mostly desert land where the earth looks like chalk-dust. It gets so hot people can't go out in the middle of the day. They stay indoors in the cool darkness as much as possible. Murcia is very much like North Africa, and in some of the old towns the women still wear heavy veils over their faces the way the Moors from North Africa did. You wouldn't be at all surprised to see a camel train in the chalky dust of the dry river bed, but instead, it's just another procession of little donkeys carrying goods to market in their straw saddlebags, driven by men hiding under huge hats from the burning sun. The regions of Navarre and Aragon, in the northeast, are quite different from Murcia's desert. They have a rich, mountainous countryside with the tall Pyrenees marching across the north. Many wild animals are found in these regions, including some which are rare in other parts of the world, like the chamois, the ibex, the wild boar, bears, several kinds of deer, and the great golden eagle. Like other northern regions of Spain, there's snow in the winter and people go sledding and skiing. [Illustration] Just to the north are the Basque Provinces, on the southern slopes of the Pyrenees and stretching along the Bay of Biscay. The Basque people are known as the "Mystery Men of Europe," because nobody is sure where they came from. Nobody knows where the strange language they speak came from either. We do know that they are a very ancient people, perhaps direct descendants of the original Iberians. The Basques are fearless and daring, and are noted throughout the world as excellent sailors and sheep-herders. When you visit the Basques, you will notice that they all like to eat enormous meals, they like to gamble, and they like to play "jai alai," a very fast ball game which they invented. [Illustration] "Jai alai" means "happy festival" in the Basque language, and the game is a very exciting and happy one. The ball, slightly smaller than a baseball, is very hard and can travel very fast. Players have curved baskets attached to their right wrists, and they must scoop up or catch the ball in these baskets and immediately throw it and try to hit a certain spot marked off on the wall. If it doesn't hit the right spot, the opposing team scores a point. If it hits the right spot, the other team must try to scoop it up before it bounces and send it back, hitting a certain spot on the other side of the court. You can see that it can be a very fast and complicated game. You could see jai alai played in specially built concrete courts in many cities in Spain, also in the state of Florida, right here in our own country. A jai alai court is called a "fronton." But in the Basque country you'd see all the men and boys in the village playing jai alai back of the church, using the high stone wall as their court. Girls don't play it very often, but when they do it is a very pretty sight, because they wear wide skirts of blue or red with many white petticoats underneath. When they run and turn to hit the ball, their skirts swing around wildly and make them look like spinning tops. Completely different from the Basque country and all other regions is the central part of Spain. It is a high plateau bordered by still higher rugged rocky mountains. The weather is very hot in summer and very cold in winter, with scorching or icy winds blasting across the land because there are no forests to break their force. Great gray boulders thrust out of purple-green hillsides, and rivers cut deep gorges in the gray soil. This central part is made up of two regions, Old and New Castile. Old Castile is to the north, and cattle are raised in the green fields fed by mountain streams. Castile means "land of castles," and both Old and New Castile have cities built around castles and cathedrals, sometimes surrounded by walls built during the years of warfare. One of these cities in Castile is Avila, which has high stone walls so thick that four or five soldiers could march side by side on top all the way around the city. There are 88 round towers rising from these walls, where sentries and lookouts were posted, but only 16 ways to get in and out, so that the city could be guarded more easily. [Illustration] Not far from Avila is the famous palace of El Escorial, where most of the kings and queens of Spain are buried. Castile isn't the only part of Spain with castles, of course. If you were visiting Spain today, you could stay overnight in many of these castles and pretend you were a king or queen of lovely Spain. These castles made into hotels are called "paradores," and a visit to one of them is great fun. Because Castile is in the very heart of Spain, the capital, Madrid, is located there. Madrid is a lively, bustling, modern city of more than 1-1/2 million people. It is the highest capital in Europe, being almost half a mile above sea level in the center of the great mesa or tableland of Castile. Madrid is not a very old city compared with such ancient cities as Avila, but it has an old section built around the Plaza Mayor--the main square--where steps lead down into winding, narrow streets with arches and covered sidewalks. The larger part of Madrid is a modern city with wide boulevards lined with trees, where people can sit at sidewalk terrace cafés sipping coffee or wine or lemonade and watching other people streaming by. Sometimes it seems that everybody in Madrid lives outdoors all the time, because there are always so many people on the streets all day and all night. Meals are served very late--lunch is at 2 o'clock or later, and dinner not until about 10. Concerts, plays and movies don't start until 11 o'clock at night, or even midnight. Even very young children and babies stay up late with their parents, to visit with friends at a sidewalk café or to go to a movie. Only in the middle of the day, when it is hot, everybody goes indoors for a long nap. This is called a "siesta," and during siesta time the streets of Madrid and all other Spanish cities are deserted. Shops and offices are closed. There is almost no traffic on the streets and boulevards. From 1 to 5 every afternoon, a stranger in Spain might think that a great calamity had happened and made Spain a land of sleeping princes and princesses. After siesta, the streets wake to an even more bustling life than before. Offices and stores open again to serve their customers until 7 or 8 o'clock at night. The sidewalk cafés and restaurants become busier than ever. Every chair is taken, and the conversation goes on at such a fast rate that unless you understood Spanish very well, you could be lost in the rushing sound of it. Spain has other proud cities besides Madrid. Two, whose history goes way back to the days of the Moors, are Granada and Toledo. [Illustration] Granada is the city in Andalusia which the Moors loved most and held longest. They fought hard to keep it, and when they finally surrendered it to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492 they wept bitterly, for it seemed to them they had lost a Paradise. The great fortress-palace of the Moors in Granada is called the Alhambra, which means "red castle." About a hundred years ago an American author, Washington Irving, went to live in the Alhambra. He found the romantic castle very much as the Moors had left it, except for the dust which hadn't been removed in 400 years. He walked through the echoing corridors and into the moonlit courtyards with their silent fountains. He talked with dozens of old Spanish and gypsy storytellers to learn all he could about the Alhambra. He even claimed he could see the ghosts of the sultans who had once lived there. Then he wrote a book, _Tales of the Alhambra_, which we can still read and enjoy. Because of his book, the Alhambra was cleaned and restored to all its former beauty. Today the carved white and golden stonework of this castle shines with the splendor of long ago. One of its most interesting courtyards is called the Court of the Lions. Twelve very old stone lions, each with a different expression on his face, stand in a circle in the center, supporting the curved bowl of a fountain on their backs. Out of each lion's mouth trickles a little stream of water, helping to cool the air. Everyone who visits the Alhambra loves these funny old lions and goes away with a picture of them. [Illustration] The Moorish sultans entertained their guests and held big parties in courtyards like this one. But they lived with their families and servants in another part of the Alhambra, with gardens and a sparkling pool where the royal ladies bathed. Looking out through certain of the arching, carved windows, the sultans could see the snow-covered Sierra Nevada Mountains. The Sierra Nevada peaks have snow the year round, even in the hottest summers. When the Moors lived in the Alhambra, swift-running slaves would bring snow from the mountains to make sherbet for the sultans and their guests in hot weather. From other windows in the Alhambra the sultans could see Sacro Monte--the Holy Mountain--where gypsies still live today in whitewashed caves. Many centuries ago the gypsies didn't have homes, but wandered throughout the world. When some of them came to Granada, they fell in love with the city and decided to stay. Now there are thousands of them living in Andalusia, many of them in Sacro Monte. Their cave-homes are really quite comfortable. Many have fine copper cooking pots hanging on the walls and beautiful works of art, and hangings of hand-woven fabrics. If you go to Granada, you can visit a gypsy cave and the gypsies will dance for you to a kind of music which is called "flamenco." Nobody knows where the flamenco came from, but some say it is as old as the Phoenicians, and some say--even older. Toledo is another old, old city in Spain--at one time the capital. Toledo is built on a series of hills above a river, called Tagus, which winds around the base of the city like a natural moat around a fortress. Nearly four hundred years ago a Greek painter came to Toledo and stayed to become one of Spain's--and the world's--greatest artists. He was known as "El Greco," which means The Greek, and today most people have forgotten his real name. Perhaps you have seen his famous painting of the city he loved, called "View of Toledo." If you have, you know what Toledo looks like today, for it has changed very little since El Greco painted it. You could take your crayons or paints to the same spot across the River Tagus where he stood with his canvas and easel, and you would see the same rapids in the river, the same arched gateways in the city walls, the same cathedral spire rising from a hill. Then you could cross an old bridge, and go through a Moorish gateway into town. Walking along a cobblestone street, you might pass an old church which has iron chains hanging on its walls. These are the chains of Christian slaves captured by Moors, then freed by Christian armies. At the top of one hill you would discover an old house with red tiled roof and a garden full of roses, geraniums, mimosa, Jasmine and oleanders. This is the house where El Greco lived, and you'd see his easel, his bedroom, his kitchen and furniture just as he left them. In a small museum next to the house you'd find paintings by El Greco, mostly pictures of saints and portraits of famous Spaniards of his time. One of his paintings is in a chapel in town and others are in other churches throughout Spain, and in the Prado Museum in Madrid, along with those of other great Spanish painters like Valesquez, Goya and Murillo. The people of Toledo have a special art of their own--making fine jewelry called "Toledo ware." The Moors brought the knack from the ancient city of Damascus. Threads of gold and silver are woven into intricate patterns with fine steel. When the piece is put into a hot furnace, the steel part of the pattern turns black, then the gold and silver designs are polished until they shine. Originally the Moors made their big swords this way, but today Toledo ware is bracelets, earrings, cuff links and other small jewelry. The people of Toledo also make glistening glazed tiles. Some of these show scenes from the lives of favorite Spanish heroes, real and imaginary. There are some Toledo tiles that will tell you about Don Quixote of La Mancha, a hero invented 350 years ago by Miguel Cervantes. [Illustration] Cervantes wanted to tease his fellow countrymen about reading so many books with stories that could never happen in real life. So he wrote a book of his own about Don Quixote, a foolish old fellow who imagined he was a handsome knight. The poor Don rode all around the country on a rickety old horse dreaming he was rescuing beautiful ladies and fighting imaginary battles for his king. Once he even tried to fight a windmill, thinking it was a giant! Another time he thought a shepherd and his flock were an army! Cervantes' fun-poking book is still read and laughed over by people throughout the whole world. Today, if you were to drive from Granada to Toledo or Madrid, you would pass through Don Quixote's country, La Mancha, and you would see windmills and the shepherds leading their sheep and goats, with all the countryside looking much as Cervantes described it through Don Quixote's eyes. Wherever you stopped for the night, you would see a great walking-around, which begins at 7 o'clock. Every family comes out to join in this evening custom which is called "paseo." Of course the children come too, dressed in their best clothes. But boys and girls do not walk together. Two or three girls will walk by, arm-in-arm, and several boys will walk by, talking together and looking at the girls from the corner of their eyes. In the smaller places, all the older boys walk together in one direction while all the older girls walk arm-in-arm in the opposite direction, or else on the other side of the street. Just as boys and girls don't walk together in the paseo, they don't often play games together either--at least not after they are old enough to go to school. Before school days start, all children play singing and dancing games something like our "London Bridge." They play tag and a favorite game called "Hit the Pot." They put a tin can or an old clay pot on the end of a long stick and blindfold the child who is "It." The others then run around with the stick while "It" tries to knock off the can with another stick. But when they are six years old, all little boys and girls must go to school, and--except in small villages where there are only a few children to study with one teacher--they go to separate schools, so they stop playing together then, too. Little girls jump rope, play with jacks and dolls. Or they play singing games which act out the parts of kings and queens and princesses. Little boys are most interested in games with balls, like jai alai or football. The favorite game of most little boys in Spain is "Torero." In this game they pretend they are bullfighters, who are called "toreros." Every boy in Spain dreams of growing up to be the greatest bullfighter in the world. Bullfighting is one of the most exciting things in life to every Spaniard. [Illustration] Every big city has a great bullring, a round building with many steps of seats and no roof, called the "Plaza de Toros." "Toro" is the bull. The bulls are especially bred for the ring, because no ordinary cow or bull would be able to take part in this colorful pageant. Almost every Sunday afternoon throughout the year, and at holiday times, there is a "corrida" or bullfight, and everybody goes to see the toreros fight the bulls. Bullfighters in Spain are the same heroes to Spanish boys and girls that baseball players are to American youngsters. This is the reason why you'll see all the little Spanish boys playing Torero. One pretends he is the toro and wears a basket over his head as he charges at the one pretending he is the torero with a red cape and wooden sword. Although Spanish children like to play, they are also very serious about schoolwork, because they know that if Spain is to be a wise member of the family of nations, she needs educated citizens. During the Civil War it was very hard for young people to get an education, and some of the schools and universities were destroyed by bombs or fires. Now the universities have been rebuilt, and more schools are being built every year. [Illustration] Some boys and girls go to schools run by their church, and they are taught by priests and nuns. According to law, everyone must go to school until the age of fourteen. Then, if the family can afford it, they can go on to higher schools and the university. If the family is poor but a boy is very bright, he may win a scholarship by getting high marks. Because boys are more likely than girls to go to a university, they study more science and mathematics in school than their sisters do. Of course they all study reading, writing, history, arithmetic and good manners. When a Spanish boy grows up and has a university education, he may become a doctor, lawyer, banker, newspaperman or government worker, just as any of you may. If he is going to be a farmer, a fisherman, or fashion things with his hands as a carpenter or wrought-iron maker does, he probably won't go to school after he is fourteen. If he's going to do the same thing his father does, his father will teach him. Otherwise, he may become an apprentice, which means that he will work right along with grownups who already do what he wants to learn. He learns by doing it with them. Little Spanish girls, who wear pinafores to school and do their hair in pigtails, are more interested in learning how to be good mothers, because every little Spanish girl dreams of marrying and having lots of children. They learn how to read and write, and the history of their country, but they also learn how to cook and sew and bring up children. Recently some Spanish girls have started learning how to be lawyers, doctors and teachers. These girls, like their brothers, go on to universities. Some girls also learn shorthand and typing so that they can work in offices. Before the Civil War there were no girls in offices, but today they like being secretaries and typists just as girls in America do. Still, even these modern Spanish girls don't have the freedom to go to parties or on dates with boys, the way American girls do, unless they are engaged to be married. When they go out at night for the paseo or to attend the theater or a movie, they go with other girls or with their whole family. A strong family bond unites all Spanish people. Fathers and mothers and children spend as much time together as they possibly can. If being together means that children must go with parents into the fields at harvest time, then they go, even if they only play around and don't really help. In the evenings when the father and mother go to the paseo or sit in a café to talk with their friends, their children go with them. Always the whole family goes to church together. One of the most important days in a Spanish child's life is the day of confirmation. Then the family and relatives and friends from miles around come to celebrate. All over Spain, on a Sunday morning, you'll see the little girls in their long white dresses with white gloves and veils, looking proud and happy as they walk to church with their beaming mothers and fathers for their confirmation. When boys are confirmed, they wear white suits, with a cape lined in scarlet or blue satin and trimmed with gold braid. If the family has enough money, they may hire a horse-drawn carriage. The driver wears a tall black stovepipe silk hat and the carriage doors and horses' bridles are decorated with white flowers. The church is very important in Spanish life. The Apostle James himself came to preach in Spain, and later, after he had been killed in Palestine, his body was brought back to Spain for burial. His tomb is in the beautiful Cathedral of Santiago--which is the way Spanish people say St. James--in Compostela, in northern Spain. For thousands of years people from all over the world have come as pilgrims to Compostela. Many little Spanish boys are named Santiago, or perhaps Jaime, another way to say James in Spanish, for Santiago is the patron saint of all Spain. Every city and village also has its very own private patron saint. Once a year there is a village festival or "fiesta" in his or her honor. If you were to travel through Spain you would find a fiesta somewhere every day of the year! These fiestas start in the morning when all the people go to church, which is always decorated with hundreds of flowers and candles. Then in the afternoon or evening there is a long parade from the church through the main streets and back to the church again, with the figure of the saint standing on a flower-draped platform which is carried on the shoulders of young men. [Illustration] Choirs sing, candles and incense burn, and all the people stand in reverence along the route. A bullfight is usually a feature of a saint's day too, with the whole town going to the Plaza de Toros to watch. The paseo will be especially gay at fiesta time, and as darkness falls, the guitars will start to twang, castanets will click and all the young people will gather in the main square to take part in folk dances until morning. Sometimes the saint's fiesta will last a whole week, with bullfights every afternoon and a fair every night. One of the most unusual fiestas in all Spain is held every March in Valencia in honor of St. Joseph. It is called the "Fallas de San José" because of the huge, grotesque figures called "fallas" which are the main feature of the celebration. Every club and religious group in the city spends weeks in advance of St. Joseph's Day building these figures out of papier-màché, and each group tries to keep its design secret until the fiesta takes place. The best falla wins a prize, and at the end of the three-day celebration, all the fallas except the prize-winner are burned in a big bonfire while the people dance around it and fireworks are shot into the sky. Of all holidays, Christmas is one of the merriest in Spanish homes. "Noche Buena," or Christmas Eve, is a time for families to sit down to a wonderful feast. The mothers and older sisters of the family have been preparing this feast for months, and fathers have been collecting the best Spanish wines to store away until now. Turkey is the traditional dish at Spanish Christmas dinners just as it is here. But Christmas is one of the few times turkey is ever served in most Spanish homes, so it is really a special treat. Spicy hams, stuffed roast lamb, and special fish dishes are also served with the roast turkey. And no Christmas table would be complete without "turrones"--a candy made of honey and almonds, something like our nougats. Dried figs and grapes, walnuts and hazelnuts load the table even more. After dinner, the family goes to midnight services at church called "Misa de Gallo"; then they come home and celebrate until morning. There are no Christmas trees in Spain, but each family makes its own Nativity scene, which is set out in time for Christmas Eve. In some cities contests are held for the most beautiful "Belen" scenes, as they are called, because "Belen" is the way Spanish people say Bethlehem. On Christmas Day everybody goes calling to see the Belens in other people's houses. Sometimes grownups exchange gifts on Christmas Day, but Spanish children don't receive their gifts until January 6, Three King's Day. Instead of Santa Claus, the Three Wise Men, Melchior, Gaspar and Balthasar leave gifts in the children's shoes. The shoes are set out in a window or near the fireplace, filled with hay so the camels of the Three Kings may feast. In the morning the hay is gone and toys, nuts, fruit and candy have taken its place. [Illustration] Holy Week, the week starting with Palm Sunday and ending with Easter, is another important time in Spanish life. On Palm Sunday, everyone throughout the country has palm branches from Elche, an old town where the only palm grove in Europe grows. After carrying the branches in processions through the streets and into the churches and cathedrals, people hang them on the balconies of their houses, where they remain until the fresh palm branches of the next year replace them. The most colorful celebration of Holy Week is held in Seville, a city in sunny Andalusia. Every night there are processions of robed and hooded men moving silently through streets lined with thousands of men, women and children. All the figures of saints and Madonnas from all the churches and the Cathedral are carried in one procession or another. The figures are dressed in costly vestments and jewels, and the procession is lighted by flickering torches and candles. As the figures pass beneath balconies crowded with watchers, a singer will suddenly break into a spontaneous, unaccompanied song, called a "saeta," to salute the saint being carried by. The saeta is the same sort of song the Moors used to sing when they lived in Seville and other cities in Andalusia, and today it is usually sung by gypsies, thousands of whom live here. Night after night these processions go on, until Good Friday, when the most gorgeous one of all starts at 3 o'clock in the morning. This is the procession of the Virgin of Macarena, the patron saint of bullfighters and all Seville. The Virgin is dressed up in robes of silver and gold and wears jewels given by famous bullfighters and wealthy people. The men who march in this procession wear costumes of rich red and gold, and there is an honor guard dressed like ancient Roman centurions. The "Macarena" is the most popular saint in Seville, and everyone watches her procession until it takes her back to her shrine in the gypsy section, Triana, followed by thousands of gaily clad gypsies who spend the rest of the night singing and dancing to the throbbing of guitars. Shortly after Holy Week, Seville has another gay festival, this time called a "feria," which is rather like a big country fair. For two weeks everybody celebrates all day and all night, singing and dancing and visiting friends for a glass of wine. Every day there is a bullfight, and at night there are concerts, dance and art shows, and plays. The huge fair grounds blaze with light, and ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds spin gaily round and round. Once upon a time, the feria was an auction for horses and cattle, and today it is still a time when the best horsemen show off their fine horses and their skill at riding. During the feria, the proud horsemen wear leather aprons something like our cowboys' chaps over their tight gray riding pants. Their bolero jackets are black trimmed with braid, and their hats are black too, the flat, wide-brimmed felt hats which horsemen always wear in Spain. Horses are curried until they shine, and flowers and ribbons are twined in their manes and tails and decorate their bridles. Beautiful black-haired girls dress up like gypsies, something they would not be allowed to do at any other time. As the girls ride in the saddles behind their young men, the long, flounced, polka-dotted skirts of red, green or blue fall down over the horse's side. Black lace mantillas are draped over very tall combs in their hair, and a gay flower is usually pinned behind one ear. Every carriage, every farm cart, every house and every person is decorated with flowers. At harvest time, when olives, grapes, fruit or grain are brought in from the land, there is much merry-making, too. At Jerez de la Frontera, a sunny town in Andalusia where everybody works at growing grapes and making them into a famous wine called sherry, the harvest festival comes just before the grapes are ready to be harvested, in September. [Illustration] High-wheeled vineyard carts decorated with vines and flowers are pulled, by sturdy oxen, out of every vineyard in the countryside, carrying all the pretty girls who work there and a basket of new grapes. The carts wind through the streets to the Cathedral, where the grapes are blessed and all the people pray and give thanks for a good harvest. Then, in the square in front of the Cathedral, a great flock of pigeons is loosed into the air. These are homing pigeons, and they fly back to their homes in every part of Spain, carrying the message that the harvest is about to begin. There's dancing in the streets all night, and the next day there are bullfights, races and more dancing. Then the people all go to work to harvest the grapes. [Illustration] On Spanish holidays, there is plenty to eat and drink. For visitors, eating is fun even on any ordinary day. If you were to travel from region to region in Spain, you would notice that people eat different foods in different places. Along the seacoasts, of course, they eat many kinds of fish. In the north, one of the favorite seafood dishes is made of codfish cooked in a delicious sauce of red and green peppers flavored with garlic. In Valencia you would eat "paella" made of many kinds of shellfish, chicken, ham and rice flavored with saffron, a yellow spice which grows in Spain. Paella is made in a big round iron pan over a charcoal fire, and the little clams, shrimps, pieces of chicken and everything else that makes it good are tossed in, a handful at a time, until the whole dish is ready to be served, right from the pan it was cooked in. Most families have a big lunch, at about 2 o'clock. If the weather is cool, this is very likely to be a pot of stew, or "cocido." Depending on what part of the country you are in, this cocido might be made of fish, lamb, beef or chicken. Whatever the meat or fish may be, the cocido also includes all the vegetables that grow in the garden at that time of year. It's apt to be flavored with garlic, sweet Spanish red peppers, and perhaps several spoonfuls of sherry wine. In the hot summer weather in Andalusia, people eat a delicious cold soup as their main dish at lunch, and sometimes at dinner too. This soup is called _gazpacho_, and it is made with Spanish olive oil, vinegar, tomato juice and ice water. Very fine bread crumbs help make it thick, and little pieces of fresh, cold tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, olives and onions float on top. Everybody in Spain eats a great many "churros." Churros are something like doughnuts, but they are twisted into odd shapes and fried in olive oil until they are crisp all the way through, not just on the outside. They are very fine for breakfast with hot chocolate, and they are also good with sugar sprinkled on them as a between-meals snack. Another snack is almonds, grown right in Spain, and shrimp the size of your little finger. Some of the foods the Spanish children eat are the same ones their great-great-great-grandfathers and mothers ate, too. Mostly, the houses where they live are also very old--as old as the holiday customs that haven't changed in hundreds of years. These old ways and scenes are some of the reasons Spain has been called "the land where time stands still." Only just now is this old Spain about to become modern Spain. New roads, railroads and airfields are being built to help people get around the country faster and to send food from farms and seacoasts to markets in a hurry. All over Spain you hear the sound of hammers and chisels, busily building a new life for the people. Spain has joined the United Nations and Spanish boys and girls are eager to join all boys and girls who want their countries to be partners in progress. If, in getting to know Spain, you have learned to like it, perhaps you'll want to say "hello" and "good luck" to your Spanish friends. Here is how to say it: "Saludos, amigos!" History Before 200 B.C.--Earliest people lived in caves in northern Spain; were conquered by Iberians, then Celts. Phoenicians and Greeks came, and finally all were conquered by Carthaginians. 201 B.C.--Romans conquered Carthaginians, began a rule lasting more than 500 years. 406 A.D.--Barbarians, especially Visigoths, came into Spain from central Europe and eventually drove out the Romans. 711 A.D.--The Moors came from North Africa and conquered all Spain in less than 10 years. Although the Christian Spaniards started fighting almost immediately for the "Reconquest" of Spain, the Moors were masters for almost 800 years. January 2, 1492--The Reconquest of Spain was completed when the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella drove the Moors out of the Alhambra in Granada, their last stronghold. August, 1492--Columbus sailed with his three ships from Palos in an effort to reach the Far East by sailing west; on October 12, he made his first landfall in the New World and claimed it for Spain. 1492-1588--The Golden Age of Spain. Columbus discovered more lands in the New World, and Conquistadores planted the Spanish flag all through North and South America. Spain controlled most of Europe. It was a time of great artists and writers like Velasquez, El Greco, Murillo, Lope de Vega and Cervantes. 1588--Spain's great naval Armada was defeated by England and the power of Spain began to decline throughout the world. Last overseas possessions were lost at the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898. 1931--King Alfonso XIII abdicated from his throne, went into exile; Spain became a republic. 1936-1939--The Spanish Civil War. Nationalists led by General Francisco Franco won the war and the General became Chief of State. 1947--The Law of Succession was adopted by Spanish Parliament, providing for a future King and new Spanish monarchy; this law altered in 1956 so that the monarchy may be established sooner than originally planned. 1953--American aid program began; airfields, pipelines and other construction projects using American money and American builders help Spain develop a defense network and natural resources. 1956--Spain admitted to the United Nations. Index Alhambra, 37-40 Andalusia, 26-27, 37, 55, 57, 60 Aragon, 32 Armada, 20 Asturias, 25 Avila, 34 Balearic Islands, 20 Barcelona, 30 Basque, 33 Bulls & bullfighting, 26, 45-46, 51-52, 56, 58 Burros, 14, 24 Canary Islands, 20 Castile, 34-36 Castles, 34-35 Catalonia, 29, 30 Cave drawings, 15 Christmas, 52-53 Church, 15-16, 46, 49-50 Civil War, 21, 46 Columbus, Christopher, 7, 8, 18 Conquistadores, 19, 20, 28 Donkeys, 14, 24, 32 Don Quixote, 42-44 Elche, 54 El Escorial, 35 El Greco, 41-42 Extremadura, 28 Festivals, 31, 56-58 Fiestas, 50-52 Flamenco, 40 Food, 52, 53, 58-61 Franco, Francisco, 21 Galicia, 25 Games, 45 Geography, 11, 12, 25-36 Gibraltar, 12 Granada, 19, 37-40 Gypsies, 27, 40, 56 History, 7-8, 15-21 Holy Week, 54-55 Iberians, 11, 15, 32 Isabella, 7, 8, 17, 19, 20 Jai alai, 33-34, 45 Jerez, 56 León, 28 Lions, 38 Madrid, 36-37, 42 Moors, 16, 17, 27, 31, 32, 37-40, 41-42, 55 Murcia, 29, 32 Navarre, 32 Palos, 8 Paradores, 35 Paseo, 44, 49, 51 Prado Museum, 42 Pyrenees, 11, 32 Regions, 12, 13, 24-36, 58 Romans, 15, 16 Saints, 50-51, 55 Schools, 44, 45, 46-48 Segovia, 16 Seville, 55-57 Shepherds, 9, 33, 44 Siesta, 36-37 Three Kings Day, 53 Toledo, 37, 40-42 Valencia, 29, 30, 31, 52, 60 Sources In preparing this book, the author drew upon her own experience in Spain as well as historical and other information supplied by official Spanish sources both in Spain and the U.S. Teachers may obtain additional information from Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.; Hispanic American Society, Inc. 80 Wall Street, N. Y.; Hispanic Institute, 435 West 117th Street, N. Y.; Hispanic Society of America (Museum and Library), Broadway between 155 and 156 Streets, N. Y.; Iberia Air Lines of Spain, 339 Madison Avenue, N. Y.; Spanish Embassy, Washington, D. C. (Commercial Office and Office of Cultural Relations); Spanish State Tourist Department, 485 Madison Avenue, N. Y. THE GETTING TO KNOW BOOKS COVER TODAY'S WORLD _Africa_ GETTING TO KNOW AFRICA'S FRENCH COMMUNITY GETTING TO KNOW ALGERIA GETTING TO KNOW THE CONGO RIVER GETTING TO KNOW EGYPT GETTING TO KNOW KENYA GETTING TO KNOW LIBERIA GETTING TO KNOW NIGERIA GETTING TO KNOW THE SAHARA GETTING TO KNOW SOUTH AFRICA GETTING TO KNOW RHODESIA, ZAMBIA AND MALAWI GETTING TO KNOW TANZANIA _Arctic_ GETTING TO KNOW THE ARCTIC _Asia_ GETTING TO KNOW BURMA GETTING TO KNOW THE CENTRAL HIMALAYAS GETTING TO KNOW HONG KONG GETTING TO KNOW INDIA GETTING TO KNOW JAPAN GETTING TO KNOW THE NORTHERN HIMALAYAS GETTING TO KNOW PAKISTAN GETTING TO KNOW THE RIVER GANGES GETTING TO KNOW THAILAND GETTING TO KNOW THE TWO CHINAS GETTING TO KNOW THE TWO KOREAS GETTING TO KNOW THE TWO VIETNAMS _Caribbean and Central America_ GETTING TO KNOW THE BRITISH WEST INDIES GETTING TO KNOW COSTA RICA, EL SALVADOR AND NICARAGUA GETTING TO KNOW CUBA GETTING TO KNOW GUATEMALA AND THE TWO HONDURAS GETTING TO KNOW MEXICO GETTING TO KNOW PANAMA GETTING TO KNOW PUERTO RICO GETTING TO KNOW THE VIRGIN ISLANDS _Europe; East and West_ GETTING TO KNOW EASTERN EUROPE GETTING TO KNOW ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, IRELAND AND WALES GETTING TO KNOW FRANCE GETTING TO KNOW GREECE GETTING TO KNOW ITALY GETTING TO KNOW POLAND GETTING TO KNOW SCANDINAVIA GETTING TO KNOW SPAIN GETTING TO KNOW SWITZERLAND GETTING TO KNOW THE SOVIET UNION GETTING TO KNOW THE TWO GERMANYS _Middle East_ GETTING TO KNOW IRAN-IRAQ GETTING TO KNOW ISRAEL GETTING TO KNOW LEBANON GETTING TO KNOW SAUDI ARABIA GETTING TO KNOW THE TIGRIS AND EUPHRATES RIVERS GETTING TO KNOW TURKEY _North America_ GETTING TO KNOW ALASKA GETTING TO KNOW AMERICAN INDIANS TODAY GETTING TO KNOW CANADA GETTING TO KNOW THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER GETTING TO KNOW THE U.S.A. _Pacific_ GETTING TO KNOW AUSTRALIA GETTING TO KNOW HAWAII GETTING TO KNOW INDONESIA GETTING TO KNOW MALAYSIA AND SINGAPORE GETTING TO KNOW THE PHILIPPINES GETTING TO KNOW THE SOUTH PACIFIC _South America_ GETTING TO KNOW ARGENTINA GETTING TO KNOW BRAZIL GETTING TO KNOW CHILE GETTING TO KNOW COLOMBIA GETTING TO KNOW PERU GETTING TO KNOW THE RIVER AMAZON GETTING TO KNOW VENEZUELA _United Nations Agencies_ GETTING TO KNOW F.A.O. GETTING TO KNOW THE HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION GETTING TO KNOW UNESCO GETTING TO KNOW UNICEF GETTING TO KNOW THE UNITED NATIONS PEACE FORCES GETTING TO KNOW WHO GETTING TO KNOW WMO 
29073	----	generously made available by Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org) Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See http://www.archive.org/details/rosinantetothero010672mbp ROSINANTE TO THE ROAD AGAIN by JOHN DOS PASSOS * * * * * Books by John Dos Passos _NOVELS:_ _Three Soldiers_ _One Man's Initiation_ _ESSAYS:_ _Rosinante to the Road Again_ _POEMS:_ _A Pushcart at the Curb_ (_In Preparation_) * * * * * ROSINANTE TO THE ROAD AGAIN by JOHN DOS PASSOS George H. Doran Company Publishers New York Copyright, 1922, By George H. Doran Company Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS CHAPTER I: _A Gesture and a Quest_, 9 II: _The Donkey Boy_, 24 III: _The Baker of Almorox_, 47 IV: _Talk by the Road_, 71 V: _A Novelist of Revolution_, 80 VI: _Talk by the Road_, 101 VII: _Cordova No Longer of the Caliphs_, 104 VIII: _Talk by the Road_, 115 IX: _An Inverted Midas_, 120 X: _Talk by the Road_, 133 XI: _Antonio Machado; Poet of Castile_, 140 XII: _A Catalan Poet_, 159 XIII: _Talk by the Road_, 176 XIV: _Benavente's Madrid_, 182 XV: _Talk by the Road_, 196 XVI: _A Funeral in Madrid_, 202 XVII: _Toledo_, 230 ROSINANTE TO THE ROAD AGAIN _I: A Gesture and a Quest_ Telemachus had wandered so far in search of his father he had quite forgotten what he was looking for. He sat on a yellow plush bench in the café El Oro del Rhin, Plaza Santa Ana, Madrid, swabbing up with a bit of bread the last smudges of brown sauce off a plate of which the edges were piled with the dismembered skeleton of a pigeon. Opposite his plate was a similar plate his companion had already polished. Telemachus put the last piece of bread into his mouth, drank down a glass of beer at one spasmodic gulp, sighed, leaned across the table and said: "I wonder why I'm here." "Why anywhere else than here?" said Lyaeus, a young man with hollow cheeks and slow-moving hands, about whose mouth a faint pained smile was continually hovering, and he too drank down his beer. At the end of a perspective of white marble tables, faces thrust forward over yellow plush cushions under twining veils of tobacco smoke, four German women on a little dais were playing _Tannhauser_. Smells of beer, sawdust, shrimps, roast pigeon. "Do you know Jorge Manrique? That's one reason, Tel," the other man continued slowly. With one hand he gestured to the waiter for more beer, the other he waved across his face as if to brush away the music; then he recited, pronouncing the words haltingly: 'Recuerde el alma dormida, Avive el seso y despierte Contemplando Cómo se pasa la vida, Cómo se viene la muerte Tan callando: Cuán presto se va el placer, Cómo después de acordado Da dolor, Cómo a nuestro parecer Cualquier tiempo pasado Fué mejor.' "It's always death," said Telemachus, "but we must go on." It had been raining. Lights rippled red and orange and yellow and green on the clean paving-stones. A cold wind off the Sierra shrilled through clattering streets. As they walked, the other man was telling how this Castilian nobleman, courtier, man-at-arms, had shut himself up when his father, the Master of Santiago, died and had written this poem, created this tremendous rhythm of death sweeping like a wind over the world. He had never written anything else. They thought of him in the court of his great dust-colored mansion at Ocaña, where the broad eaves were full of a cooing of pigeons and the wide halls had dark rafters painted with arabesques in vermilion, in a suit of black velvet, writing at a table under a lemon tree. Down the sun-scarred street, in the cathedral that was building in those days, full of a smell of scaffolding and stone dust, there must have stood a tremendous catafalque where lay with his arms around him the Master of Santiago; in the carved seats of the choirs the stout canons intoned an endless growling litany; at the sacristy door, the flare of the candles flashing occasionally on the jewels of his mitre, the bishop fingered his crosier restlessly, asking his favorite choir-boy from time to time why Don Jorge had not arrived. And messengers must have come running to Don Jorge, telling him the service was on the point of beginning, and he must have waved them away with a grave gesture of a long white hand, while in his mind the distant sound of chanting, the jingle of the silver bit of his roan horse stamping nervously where he was tied to a twined Moorish column, memories of cavalcades filing with braying of trumpets and flutter of crimson damask into conquered towns, of court ladies dancing, and the noise of pigeons in the eaves, drew together like strings plucked in succession on a guitar into a great wave of rhythm in which his life was sucked away into this one poem in praise of death. Nuestras vidas son los ríos Que van a dar en la mar, Que es el morir.... Telemachus was saying the words over softly to himself as they went into the theatre. The orchestra was playing a Sevillana; as they found their seats they caught glimpses beyond people's heads and shoulders of a huge woman with a comb that pushed the tip of her mantilla a foot and a half above her head, dancing with ponderous dignity. Her dress was pink flounced with lace; under it the bulge of breasts and belly and three chins quaked with every thump of her tiny heels on the stage. As they sat down she retreated bowing like a full-rigged ship in a squall. The curtain fell, the theatre became very still; next was Pastora. Strumming of a guitar, whirring fast, dry like locusts in a hedge on a summer day. Pauses that catch your blood and freeze it suddenly still like the rustling of a branch in silent woods at night. A gipsy in a red sash is playing, slouched into a cheap cane chair, behind him a faded crimson curtain. Off stage heels beaten on the floor catch up the rhythm with tentative interest, drowsily; then suddenly added, sharp click of fingers snapped in time; the rhythm slows, hovers like a bee over a clover flower. A little taut sound of air sucked in suddenly goes down the rows of seats. With faintest tapping of heels, faintest snapping of the fingers of a brown hand held over her head, erect, wrapped tight in yellow shawl where the embroidered flowers make a splotch of maroon over one breast, a flecking of green and purple over shoulders and thighs, Pastora Imperio comes across the stage, quietly, unhurriedly. In the mind of Telemachus the words return: Cómo se viene la muerte Tan callando. Her face is brown, with a pointed chin; her eyebrows that nearly meet over her nose rise in a flattened "A" towards the fervid black gleam of her hair; her lips are pursed in a half-smile as if she were stifling a secret. She walks round the stage slowly, one hand at her waist, the shawl tight over her elbow, her thighs lithe and restless, a panther in a cage. At the back of the stage she turns suddenly, advances; the snapping of her fingers gets loud, insistent; a thrill whirrs through the guitar like a covey of partridges scared in a field. Red heels tap threateningly. Decidme: la hermosura, La gentil frescura y tez De la cara El color y la blancura, Cuando viene la viejez Cuál se para? She is right at the footlights; her face, brows drawn together into a frown, has gone into shadow; the shawl flames, the maroon flower over her breast glows like a coal. The guitar is silent, her fingers go on snapping at intervals with dreadful foreboding. Then she draws herself up with a deep breath, the muscles of her belly go taut under the tight silk wrinkles of the shawl, and she is off again, light, joyful, turning indulgent glances towards the audience, as a nurse might look in the eyes of a child she has unintentionally frightened with a too dreadful fairy story. The rhythm of the guitar has changed again; her shawl is loose about her, the long fringe flutters; she walks with slow steps, in pomp, a ship decked out for a festival, a queen in plumes and brocade.... ¿Qué se hicieron las damas, Sus tocados, sus vestidos, Sus olores? ¿Qué se hicieron las llamas De los fuegos encendidos De amadores? And she has gone, and the gipsy guitar-player is scratching his neck with a hand the color of tobacco, while the guitar rests against his legs. He shows all his teeth in a world-engulfing yawn. When they came out of the theatre, the streets were dry and the stars blinked in the cold wind above the houses. At the curb old women sold chestnuts and little ragged boys shouted the newspapers. "And now do you wonder, Tel, why you are here?" They went into a café and mechanically ordered beer. The seats were red plush this time and much worn. All about them groups of whiskered men leaning over tables, astride chairs, talking. "It's the gesture that's so overpowering; don't you feel it in your arms? Something sudden and tremendously muscular." "When Belmonte turned his back suddenly on the bull and walked away dragging the red cloak on the ground behind him I felt it," said Lyaeus. "That gesture, a yellow flame against maroon and purple cadences ... an instant swagger of defiance in the midst of a litany to death the all-powerful. That is Spain.... Castile at any rate." "Is 'swagger' the right word?" "Find a better." "For the gesture a medieval knight made when he threw his mailed glove at his enemy's feet or a rose in his lady's window, that a mule-driver makes when he tosses off a glass of aguardiente, that Pastora Imperio makes dancing.... Word! Rubbish!" And Lyaeus burst out laughing. He laughed deep in his throat with his head thrown back. Telemachus was inclined to be offended. "Did you notice how extraordinarily near she kept to the rhythm of Jorge Manrique?" he asked coldly. "Of course. Of course," shouted Lyaeus, still laughing. The waiter came with two mugs of beer. "Take it away," shouted Lyaeus. "Who ordered beer? Bring something strong, champagne. Drink the beer yourself." The waiter was scrawny and yellow, with bilious eyes, but he could not resist the laughter of Lyaeus. He made a pretense of drinking the beer. Telemachus was now very angry. Though he had forgotten his quest and the maxims of Penelope, there hovered in his mind a disquieting thought of an eventual accounting for his actions before a dimly imagined group of women with inquisitive eyes. This Lyaeus, he thought to himself, was too free and easy. Then there came suddenly to his mind the dancer standing tense as a caryatid before the footlights, her face in shadow, her shawl flaming yellow; the strong modulations of her torso seemed burned in his flesh. He drew a deep breath. His body tightened like a catapult. "Oh to recapture that gesture," he muttered. The vague inquisitorial woman-figures had sunk fathoms deep in his mind. Lyaeus handed him a shallow tinkling glass. "There are all gestures," he said. Outside the plate-glass window a countryman passed singing. His voice dwelt on a deep trembling note, rose high, faltered, skidded down the scale, then rose suddenly, frighteningly like a skyrocket, into a new burst of singing. "There it is again," Telemachus cried. He jumped up and ran out on the street. The broad pavement was empty. A bitter wind shrilled among arc-lights white like dead eyes. "Idiot," Lyaeus said between gusts of laughter when Telemachus sat down again. "Idiot Tel. Here you'll find it." And despite Telemachus's protestations he filled up the glasses. A great change had come over Lyaeus. His face looked fuller and flushed. His lips were moist and very red. There was an occasional crisp curl in the black hair about his temples. And so they sat drinking a long while. At last Telemachus got unsteadily to his feet. "I can't help it.... I must catch that gesture, formulate it, do it. It is tremendously, inconceivably, unendingly important to me." "Now you know why you're here," said Lyaeus quietly. "Why are you here?" "To drink," said Lyaeus. "Let's go." "Why?" "To catch that gesture, Lyaeus," said Telemachus in an over-solemn voice. "Like a comedy professor with a butterfly-net," roared Lyaeus. His laughter so filled the café that people at far-away tables smiled without knowing it. "It's burned into my blood. It must be formulated, made permanent." "Killed," said Lyaeus with sudden seriousness; "better drink it with your wine." Silent they strode down an arcaded street. Cupolas, voluted baroque façades, a square tower, the bulge of a market building, tile roofs, chimneypots, ate into the star-dusted sky to the right and left of them, until in a great gust of wind they came out on an empty square, where were few gas-lamps; in front of them was a heavy arch full of stars, and Orion sprawling above it. Under the arch a pile of rags asked for alms whiningly. The jingle of money was crisp in the cold air. "Where does this road go?" "Toledo," said the beggar, and got to his feet. He was an old man, bearded, evil-smelling. "Thank you.... We have just seen Pastora," said Lyaeus jauntily. "Ah, Pastora!... The last of the great dancers," said the beggar, and for some reason he crossed himself. The road was frosty and crunched silkily underfoot. Lyaeus walked along shouting lines from the poem of Jorge Manrique. 'Cómo se pasa la vida Cómo se viene la muerte Tan callando: Cuán presto se va el placer Cómo después de acordado Da dolor, Cómo a nuestro parecer Cualquier tiempo pasado Fué mejor.' "I bet you, Tel, they have good wine in Toledo." The road hunched over a hill. They turned and saw Madrid cut out of darkness against the starlight. Before them sown plains, gulches full of mist, and the tremulous lights on many carts that jogged along, each behind three jingling slow mules. A cock crowed. All at once a voice burst suddenly in swaggering tremolo out of the darkness of the road beneath them, rising, rising, then fading off, then flaring up hotly like a red scarf waved on a windy day, like the swoop of a hawk, like a rocket intruding among the stars. "Butterfly net, you old fool!" Lyaeus's laughter volleyed across the frozen fields. Telemachus answered in a low voice: "Let's walk faster." He walked with his eyes on the road. He could see in the darkness, Pastora, wrapped in the yellow shawl with the splotch of maroon-colored embroidery moulding one breast, stand tremulous with foreboding before the footlights, suddenly draw in her breath, and turn with a great exultant gesture back into the rhythm of her dance. Only the victorious culminating instant of the gesture was blurred to him. He walked with long strides along the crackling road, his muscles aching for memory of it. _II: The Donkey Boy_ _Where the husbandman's toil and strife_ _Little varies to strife and toil:_ _But the milky kernel of life,_ _With her numbered: corn, wine, fruit, oil!_ The path zigzagged down through the olive trees between thin chortling glitter of irrigation ditches that occasionally widened into green pools, reed-fringed, froggy, about which bristled scrub oleanders. Through the shimmer of olive leaves all about I could see the great ruddy heave of the mountains streaked with the emerald of millet-fields, and above, snowy shoulders against a vault of indigo, patches of wood cut out hard as metal in the streaming noon light. Tinkle of a donkey-bell below me, then at the turn of a path the donkey's hindquarters, mauve-grey, neatly clipped in a pattern of diamonds and lozenges, and a tail meditatively swishing as he picked his way among the stones, the head as yet hidden by the osier baskets of the pack. At the next turn I skipped ahead of the donkey and walked with the _arriero_, a dark boy in tight blue pants and short grey tunic cut to the waist, who had the strong cheek-bones, hawk nose and slender hips of an Arab, who spoke an aspirated Andalusian that sounded like Arabic. We greeted each other cordially as travellers do in mountainous places where the paths are narrow. We talked about the weather and the wind and the sugar mills at Motril and women and travel and the vintage, struggling all the while like drowning men to understand each other's lingo. When it came out that I was an American and had been in the war, he became suddenly interested; of course, I was a deserter, he said, clever to get away. There'd been two deserters in his town a year ago, _Alemanes_; perhaps friends of mine. It was pointed out that I and the _Alemanes_ had been at different ends of the gunbarrel. He laughed. What did that matter? Then he said several times, "Qué burro la guerra, qué burro la guerra." I remonstrated, pointing to the donkey that was following us with dainty steps, looking at us with a quizzical air from under his long eyelashes. Could anything be wiser than a burro? He laughed again, twitching back his full lips to show the brilliance of tightly serried teeth, stopped in his tracks, and turned to look at the mountains. He swept a long brown hand across them. "Look," he said, "up there is the Alpujarras, the last refuge of the kings of the Moors; there are bandits up there sometimes. You have come to the right place; here we are free men." The donkey scuttled past us with a derisive glance out of the corner of an eye and started skipping from side to side of the path, cropping here and there a bit of dry grass. We followed, the _arriero_ telling how his brother would have been conscripted if the family had not got together a thousand pesetas to buy him out. That was no life for a man. He spat on a red stone. They'd never catch him, he was sure of that. The army was no life for a man. In the bottom of the valley was a wide stream, which we forded after some dispute as to who should ride the donkey, the donkey all the while wrinkling his nose with disgust at the coldness of the speeding water and the sliminess of the stones. When we came out on the broad moraine of pebbles the other side of the stream we met a lean blackish man with yellow horse-teeth, who was much excited when he heard I was an American. "America is the world of the future," he cried and gave me such a slap on the back I nearly tumbled off the donkey on whose rump I was at that moment astride. "_En América no se divierte_," muttered the _arriero_, kicking his feet that were cold from the ford into the burning saffron dust of the road. The donkey ran ahead kicking at pebbles, bucking, trying to shake off the big pear-shaped baskets of osier he had either side of his pack saddle, delighted with smooth dryness after so much water and such tenuous stony roads. The three of us followed arguing, the sunlight beating wings of white flame about us. "In America there is freedom," said the blackish man, "there are no rural guards; roadmenders work eight hours and wear silk shirts and earn ... un dineral." The blackish man stopped, quite out of breath from his grappling with infinity. Then he went on: "Your children are educated free, no priests, and at forty every man-jack owns an automobile." "_Ca_," said the _arriero_. "_Sí, hombre_," said the blackish man. For a long while the _arriero_ walked along in silence, watching his toes bury themselves in dust at each step. Then he burst out, spacing his words with conviction: "_Ca, en América no se hase na' a que trabahar y de'cansar...._ Not on your life, in America they don't do anything except work and rest so's to get ready to work again. That's no life for a man. People don't enjoy themselves there. An old sailor from Malaga who used to fish for sponges told me, and he knew. It's not gold people need, but bread and wine and ... life. They don't do anything there except work and rest so they'll be ready to work again...." Two thoughts jostled in my mind as he spoke; I seemed to see red-faced gentlemen in knee breeches, dog's-ear wigs askew over broad foreheads, reading out loud with unction the phrases, "inalienable rights ... pursuit of happiness," and to hear the cadence out of Meredith's _The Day of the Daughter of Hades_: Where the husbandman's toil and strife Little varies to strife and toil: But the milky kernel of life, With her numbered: corn, wine, fruit, oil! The donkey stopped in front of a little wineshop under a trellis where dusty gourd-leaves shut out the blue and gold dazzle of sun and sky. "He wants to say, 'Have a little drink, gentlemen,'" said the blackish man. In the greenish shadow of the wineshop a smell of anise and a sound of water dripping. When he had smacked his lips over a small cup of thick yellow wine he pointed at the _arriero_. "He says people don't enjoy life in America." "But in America people are very rich," shouted the barkeeper, a beet-faced man whose huge girth was bound in a red cotton sash, and he made a gesture suggestive of coins, rubbing thumb and forefinger together. Everybody roared derision at the _arriero_. But he persisted and went out shaking his head and muttering "That's no life for a man." As we left the wineshop where the blackish man was painting with broad strokes the legend of the West, the _arriero_ explained to me almost tearfully that he had not meant to speak ill of my country, but to explain why he did not want to emigrate. While he was speaking we passed a cartload of yellow grapes that drenched us in jingle of mulebells and in dizzying sweetness of bubbling ferment. A sombre man with beetling brows strode at the mule's head; in the cart, brown feet firmly planted in the steaming slush of grapes, flushed face tilted towards the ferocious white sun, a small child with a black curly pate rode in triumph, shouting, teeth flashing as if to bite into the sun. "What you mean is," said I to the _arriero_, "that this is the life for a man." He tossed his head back in a laugh of approval. "Something that's neither work nor getting ready to work?" "That's it," he answered, and cried, "_arrh he_" to the donkey. We hastened our steps. My sweaty shirt bellied suddenly in the back as a cool wind frisked about us at the corner of the road. "Ah, it smells of the sea," said the _arriero_. "We'll see the sea from the next hill." That night as I stumbled out of the inn door in Motril, overfull of food and drink, the full moon bulged through the arches of the cupola of the pink and saffron church. Everywhere steel-green shadows striped with tangible moonlight. As I sat beside my knapsack in the plaza, groping for a thought in the bewildering dazzle of the night, three disconnected mules, egged on by a hoarse shouting, jingled out of the shadow. When they stopped with a jerk in the full moon-glare beside the fountain, it became evident that they were attached to a coach, a spidery coach tilted forward as if it were perpetually going down hill; from inside smothered voices like the strangled clucking of fowls being shipped to market in a coop. On the driver's seat one's feet were on the shafts and one had a view of every rag and shoelace the harness was patched with. Creaking, groaning, with wabbling of wheels, grumble of inside passengers, cracking of whip and long strings of oaths from the driver, the coach lurched out of town and across a fat plain full of gurgle of irrigation ditches, shrilling of toads, falsetto rustle of broad leaves of the sugar cane. Occasionally the gleam of the soaring moon on banana leaves and a broad silver path on the sea. Landwards the hills like piles of ash in the moonlight, and far away a cloudy inkling of mountains. Beside me, mouth open, shouting rich pedigrees at the leading mule, Cordovan hat on the back of his head, from under which sprouted a lock of black hair that hung between his eyes over his nose and made him look like a goblin, the driver bounced and squirmed and kicked at the flanks of the mules that roamed drunkenly from side to side of the uneven road. Down into a gulch, across a shingle, up over a plank bridge, then down again into the bed of the river I had forded that morning with my friend the _arriero_, along a beach with fishing boats and little huts where the fishermen slept; then barking of dogs, another bridge and we roared and crackled up a steep village street to come to a stop suddenly, catastrophically, in front of a tavern in the main square. "We are late," said the goblin driver, turning to me suddenly, "I have not slept for four nights, dancing, every night dancing." He sucked the air in through his teeth and stretched out his arms and legs in the moonlight. "Ah, women ... women," he added philosophically. "Have you a cigarette?" "_Ah, la juventud_," said the old man who had brought the mailbag. He looked up at us scratching his head. "It's to enjoy. A moment, a _momentito_, and it's gone! Old men work in the day time, but young men work at night.... _Ay de mí_," and he burst into a peal of laughter. And as if some one were whispering them, the words of Jorge Manrique sifted out of the night: ¿Qué se hizo el Rey Don Juan? Los infantes de Aragón ¿Qué se hicieron? Qué fué de tanto galán, Qué fué de tanta invención, Cómo truxeron? Everybody went into the tavern, from which came a sound of singing and of clapping in time, and as hearty a tinkle of glasses and banging on tables as might have come out of the _Mermaid_ in the days of the Virgin Queen. Outside the moon soared, soared brilliant, a greenish blotch on it like the time-stain on a chased silver bowl on an altar. The broken lion's head of the fountain dribbled one tinkling stream of quicksilver. On the seawind came smells of rotting garbage and thyme burning in hearths and jessamine flowers. Down the street geraniums in a window smouldered in the moonlight; in the dark above them the merest contour of a face, once the gleam of two eyes; opposite against the white wall standing very quiet a man looking up with dilated nostrils--_el amor_. As the coach jangled its lumbering unsteady way out of town, our ears still throbbed with the rhythm of the tavern, of hard brown hands clapped in time, of heels thumping on oak floors. From the last house of the village a man hallooed. With its noise of cupboards of china overturned the coach crashed to stillness. A wiry, white-faced man with a little waxed moustache like the springs of a mousetrap climbed on the front seat, while burly people heaved quantities of corded trunks on behind. "How late, two hours late," the man spluttered, jerking his checked cap from side to side. "Since this morning nothing to eat but two boiled eggs.... Think of that. _¡Qué incultura! ¡Qué pueblo indecente!_ All day only two boiled eggs." "I had business in Motril, Don Antonio," said the goblin driver grinning. "Business!" cried Don Antonio, laughing squeakily, "and after all what a night!" Something impelled me to tell Don Antonio the story of King Mycerinus of Egypt that Herodotus tells, how hearing from an oracle he would only live ten years, the king called for torches and would not sleep, so crammed twenty years' living into ten. The goblin driver listened in intervals between his hoarse investigations of the private life of the grandmother of the leading mule. Don Antonio slapped his thigh and lit a cigarette and cried, "In Andalusia we all do that, don't we, Paco?" "Yes, sir," said the goblin driver, nodding his head vigorously. "That is _lo flamenco_," cried Don Antonio. "The life of Andalusia is _lo flamenco_." The moon has begun to lose foothold in the black slippery zenith. We are hurtling along a road at the top of a cliff; below the sea full of unexpected glitters, lace-edged, swishing like the silk dress of a dancer. The goblin driver rolls from side to side asleep. The check cap is down over the little man's face so that not even his moustaches are to be seen. All at once the leading mule, taken with suicidal mania, makes a sidewise leap for the cliff-edge. Crumbling of gravel, snap of traces, shouts, uproar inside. Some one has managed to yank the mule back on her hind quarters. In the sea below the shadow of a coach totters at the edge of the cliff's shadow. "_Hija de puta_," cries the goblin driver, jumping to the ground. Don Antonio awakes with a grunt and begins to explain querulously that he has had nothing to eat all day but two boiled eggs. The teeth of the goblin driver flash white flame as he hangs wreath upon wreath of profanity about the trembling, tugging mules. With a terrific rattling jerk the coach sways to the safe side of the road. From inside angry heads are poked out like the heads of hens out of an overturned coop. Don Antonio turns to me and shouts in tones of triumph: "_¿Qué flamenco, eh?_" When we got to Almuñecar Don Antonio, the goblin driver, and I sat at a little table outside the empty Casino. A waiter appeared from somewhere with wine and coffee and tough purple ham and stale bread and cigarettes. Over our heads dusty palm-fronds trembled in occasional faint gusts off the sea. The rings on Don Antonio's thin fingers glistened in the light of the one tired electric light bulb that shone among palpitating mottoes above us as he explained to me the significance of _lo flamenco_. The tough swaggering gesture, the quavering song well sung, the couplet neatly capped, the back turned to the charging bull, the mantilla draped with exquisite provocativeness; all that was _lo flamenco_. "On this coast, _señor inglés_, we don't work much, we are dirty and uninstructed, but by God we live. Why the poor people of the towns, d'you know what they do in summer? They hire a fig-tree and go and live under it with their dogs and their cats and their babies, and they eat the figs as they ripen and drink the cold water from the mountains, and man-alive they are happy. They fear no one and they are dependent on no one; when they are young they make love and sing to the guitar, and when they are old they tell stories and bring up their children. You have travelled much; I have travelled little--Madrid, never further,--but I swear to you that nowhere in the world are the women lovelier or is the land richer or the cookery more perfect than in this vega of Almuñecar.... If only the wine weren't quite so heavy...." "Then you don't want to go to America?" "_¡Hombre por dios!_ Sing us a song, Paco.... He's a Galician, you see." The goblin driver grinned and threw back his head. "Go to the end of the world, you'll find a Gallego," he said. Then he drank down his wine, rubbed his mouth on the back of his hand, and started droningly: 'Si quieres qu'el carro cante mójale y dejel'en río que después de buen moja'o canta com'un silbi'o.' (If you want a cart to sing, wet it and soak it in the river, for when it's well soaked it'll sing like a locust.) "Hola," cried Don Antonio, "go on." 'A mí me gusta el blanco, ¡viva lo blanco! ¡muera lo negro! porque el negro es muy triste. Yo soy alegre. Yo no lo quiero.' (I like white; hooray for white, death to black. Because black is very sad, and I am happy, I don't like it.) "That's it," cried Don Antonio excitedly. "You people from the north, English, Americans, Germans, whatnot, you like black. You like to be sad. I don't." "'Yo soy alegre. Yo no lo quiero.'" The moon had sunk into the west, flushed and swollen. The east was beginning to bleach before the oncoming sun. Birds started chirping above our heads. I left them, but as I lay in bed, I could hear the hoarse voice of the goblin driver roaring out: 'A mí me gusta el blanco, ¡viva lo blanco! ¡muera lo negro!' At Nerja in an arbor of purple ipomoeas on a red jutting cliff over the beach where brown children were bathing, there was talk again of _lo flamenco_. "In Spain," my friend Don Diego was saying, "we live from the belly and loins, or else from the head and heart: between Don Quixote the mystic and Sancho Panza the sensualist there is no middle ground. The lowest Panza is _lo flamenco_." "But you do live." "In dirt, disease, lack of education, bestiality.... Half of us are always dying of excess of food or the lack of it." "What do you want?" "Education, organization, energy, the modern world." I told him what the donkey-boy had said of America on the road down from the Alpujarras, that in America they did nothing but work and rest so as to be able to work again. And America was the modern world. And _lo flamenco_ is neither work nor getting ready to work. That evening San Miguel went out to fetch the Virgin of Sorrows from a roadside oratory and brought her back into town in procession with candles and skyrockets and much chanting, and as the swaying cone-shaped figure carried on the shoulders of six sweating men stood poised at the entrance to the plaza where all the girls wore jessamine flowers in the blackness of their hair, all waved their hats and cried, "_¡Viva la Vírgen de las Angustias!_" And the Virgin and San Miguel both had to bow their heads to get in the church door, and the people followed them into the church crying "_¡Viva!_" so that the old vaults shivered in the tremulous candlelight and the shouting. Some people cried for water, as rain was about due and everything was very dry, and when they came out of the church they saw a thin cloud like a mantilla of white lace over the moon, so they went home happy. Wherever they went through the narrow well-swept streets, lit by an occasional path of orange light from a window, the women left behind them long trails of fragrance from the jessamine flowers in their hair. Don Diego and I walked a long while on the seashore talking of America and the Virgin and a certain soup called _ajo blanco_ and Don Quixote and _lo flamenco_. We were trying to decide what was the peculiar quality of the life of the people in that rich plain (_vega_ they call it) between the mountains of the sea. Walking about the country elevated on the small grass-grown levees of irrigation ditches, the owners of the fields we crossed used, simply because we were strangers, to offer us a glass of wine or a slice of watermelon. I had explained to my friend that in his modern world of America these same people would come out after us with shotguns loaded with rock salt. He answered that even so, the old order was changing, and that as there was nothing else but to follow the procession of industrialism it behooved Spaniards to see that their country forged ahead instead of being, as heretofore, dragged at the tail of the parade. "And do you think it's leading anywhere, this endless complicating of life?" "Of course," he answered. "Where?" "Where does anything lead? At least it leads further than _lo flamenco_." "But couldn't the point be to make the way significant?" He shrugged his shoulders. "Work," he said. We had come to a little nook in the cliffs where fishing boats were drawn up with folded wings like ducks asleep. We climbed a winding path up the cliff. Pebbles scuttled underfoot; our hands were torn by thorny aromatic shrubs. Then we came out in a glen that cut far into the mountains, full of the laughter of falling water and the rustle of sappy foliage. Seven stilted arches of an aqueduct showed white through the canebrakes inland. Fragrances thronged about us; the smell of dry thyme-grown uplands, of rich wet fields, of goats, and jessamine and heliotrope, and of water cold from the snowfields running fast in ditches. Somewhere far off a donkey was braying. Then, as the last groan of the donkey faded, a man's voice rose suddenly out of the dark fields, soaring, yearning on taut throat-cords, then slipped down through notes, like a small boat sliding sideways down a wave, then unrolled a great slow scroll of rhythm on the night and ceased suddenly in an upward cadence as a guttering candle flares to extinction. "Something that's neither work nor getting ready to work," and I thought of the _arriero_ on whose donkey I had forded the stream on the way down from the Alpujarras, and his saying: "_Ca, en América no se hose na'a que trabahar y dé'cansar._" I had left him at his home village, a little cluster of red and yellow roofs about a fat tower the Moors had built and a gaunt church that hunched by itself in a square of trampled dust. We had rested awhile before going into town, under a fig tree, while he had put white canvas shoes on his lean brown feet. The broad leaves had rustled in the wind, and the smell of the fruit that hung purple bursting to crimson against the intense sky had been like warm stroking velvet all about us. And the _arriero_ had discoursed on the merits of his donkey and the joys of going from town to town with merchandise, up into the mountains for chestnuts and firewood, down to the sea for fish, to Malaga for tinware, to Motril for sugar from the refineries. Nights of dancing and guitar-playing at vintage-time, _fiestas_ of the Virgin, where older, realer gods were worshipped than Jehovah and the dolorous Mother of the pale Christ, the _toros_, blood and embroidered silks aflame in the sunlight, words whispered through barred windows at night, long days of travel on stony roads in the mountains.... And I had lain back with my eyes closed and the hum of little fig-bees in my ears, and wished that my life were his life. After a while we had jumped to our feet and I had shouldered my knapsack with its books and pencils and silly pads of paper and trudged off up an unshaded road, and had thought with a sort of bitter merriment of that prig Christian and his damned burden. "Something that is neither work nor getting ready to work, to make the road so significant that one needs no destination, that is _lo flamenco_," said I to Don Diego, as we stood in the glen looking at the seven white arches of the aqueduct. He nodded unconvinced. _III: The Baker of Almorox_ I The _señores_ were from Madrid? Indeed! The man's voice was full of an awe of great distances. He was the village baker of Almorox, where we had gone on a Sunday excursion from Madrid; and we were standing on the scrubbed tile floor of his house, ceremoniously receiving wine and figs from his wife. The father of the friend who accompanied me had once lived in the same village as the baker's father, and bought bread of him; hence the entertainment. This baker of Almorox was a tall man, with a soft moustache very black against his ash-pale face, who stood with his large head thrust far forward. He was smiling with pleasure at the presence of strangers in his house, while in a tone of shy deprecating courtesy he asked after my friend's family. Don Fernando and Doña Ana and the Señorita were well? And little Carlos? Carlos was no longer little, answered my friend, and Doña Ana was dead. The baker's wife had stood in the shadow looking from one face to another with a sort of wondering pleasure as we talked, but at this she came forward suddenly into the pale greenish-gold light that streamed through the door, holding a dark wine-bottle before her. There were tears in her eyes. No; she had never known any of them, she explained hastily--she had never been away from Almorox--but she had heard so much of their kindness and was sorry.... It was terrible to lose a father or a mother. The tall baker shifted his feet uneasily, embarrassed by the sadness that seemed slipping over his guests, and suggested that we walk up the hill to the Hermitage; he would show the way. "But your work?" we asked. Ah, it did not matter. Strangers did not come every day to Almorox. He strode out of the door, wrapping a woolen muffler about his bare strongly moulded throat, and we followed him up the devious street of whitewashed houses that gave us glimpses through wide doors of dark tiled rooms with great black rafters overhead and courtyards where chickens pecked at the manure lodged between smooth worn flagstones. Still between white-washed walls we struck out of the village into the deep black mud of the high road, and at last burst suddenly into the open country, where patches of sprouting grass shone vivid green against the gray and russet of broad rolling lands. At the top of the first hill stood the Hermitage--a small whitewashed chapel with a square three-storied tower; over the door was a relief of the Virgin, crowned, in worn lichened stone. The interior was very plain with a single heavily gilt altar, over which was a painted statue, stiff but full of a certain erect disdainful grace--again of the Virgin. The figure was dressed in a long lace gown, full of frills and ruffles, grey with dust and age. "_La Vírgen de la Cima_," said the baker, pointing reverently with his thumb, after he had bent his knee before the altar. And as I glanced at the image a sudden resemblance struck me: the gown gave the Virgin a curiously conical look that somehow made me think of that conical black stone, the Bona Dea, that the Romans brought from Asia Minor. Here again was a good goddess, a bountiful one, more mother than virgin, despite her prudish frills.... But the man was ushering us out. "And there is no finer view than this in all Spain." With a broad sweep of his arm he took in the village below, with its waves of roofs that merged from green to maroon and deep crimson, broken suddenly by the open square in front of the church; and the gray towering church, scowling with strong lights and shadows on buttresses and pointed windows; and the brown fields faintly sheened with green, which gave place to the deep maroon of the turned earth of vineyards, and the shining silver where the wind ruffled the olive-orchards; and beyond, the rolling hills that grew gradually flatter until they sank into the yellowish plain of Castile. As he made the gesture his fingers were stretched wide as if to grasp all this land he was showing. His flaccid cheeks were flushed as he turned to us; but we should see it in May, he was saying, in May when the wheat was thick in the fields, and there were flowers on the hills. Then the lands were beautiful and rich, in May. And he went on to tell us of the local feast, and the great processions of the Virgin. This year there were to be four days of the _toros_. So many bullfights were unusual in such a small village, he assured us. But they were rich in Almorox; the wine was the best in Castile. Four days of _toros_, he said again; and all the people of the country around would come to the _fiestas_, and there would be a great pilgrimage to this Hermitage of the Virgin.... As he talked in his slow deferential way, a little conscious of his volubility before strangers, there began to grow in my mind a picture of his view of the world. First came his family, the wife whose body lay beside his at night, who bore him children, the old withered parents who sat in the sun at his door, his memories of them when they had had strong rounded limbs like his, and of their parents sitting old and withered in the sun. Then his work, the heat of his ovens, the smell of bread cooking, the faces of neighbors who came to buy; and, outside, in the dim penumbra of things half real, of travellers' tales, lay Madrid, where the king lived and where politicians wrote in the newspapers,--and _Francia_--and all that was not Almorox.... In him I seemed to see the generations wax and wane, like the years, strung on the thread of labor, of unending sweat and strain of muscles against the earth. It was all so mellow, so strangely aloof from the modern world of feverish change, this life of the peasants of Almorox. Everywhere roots striking into the infinite past. For before the Revolution, before the Moors, before the Romans, before the dark furtive traders, the Phoenicians, they were much the same, these Iberian village communities. Far away things changed, cities were founded, hard roads built, armies marched and fought and passed away; but in Almorox the foundations of life remained unchanged up to the present. New names and new languages had come. The Virgin had taken over the festivals and rituals of the old earth goddesses, and the deep mystical fervor of devotion. But always remained the love for the place, the strong anarchistic reliance on the individual man, the walking, consciously or not, of the way beaten by generations of men who had tilled and loved and lain in the cherishing sun with no feeling of a reality outside of themselves, outside of the bare encompassing hills of their commune, except the God which was the synthesis of their souls and of their lives. Here lies the strength and the weakness of Spain. This intense individualism, born of a history whose fundamentals lie in isolated village communities--_pueblos_, as the Spaniards call them--over the changeless face of which, like grass over a field, events spring and mature and die, is the basic fact of Spanish life. No revolution has been strong enough to shake it. Invasion after invasion, of Goths, of Moors, of Christian ideas, of the fads and convictions of the Renaissance, have swept over the country, changing surface customs and modes of thought and speech, only to be metamorphosed into keeping with the changeless Iberian mind. And predominant in the Iberian mind is the thought _La vida es sueño_: "Life is a dream." Only the individual, or that part of life which is in the firm grasp of the individual, is real. The supreme expression of this lies in the two great figures that typify Spain for all time: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; Don Quixote, the individualist who believed in the power of man's soul over all things, whose desire included the whole world in himself; Sancho, the individualist to whom all the world was food for his belly. On the one hand we have the ecstatic figures for whom the power of the individual soul has no limits, in whose minds the universe is but one man standing before his reflection, God. These are the Loyolas, the Philip Seconds, the fervid ascetics like Juan de la Cruz, the originals of the glowing tortured faces in the portraits of El Greco. On the other hand are the jovial materialists like the Archpriest of Hita, culminating in the frantic, mystical sensuality of such an epic figure as Don Juan Tenorio. Through all Spanish history and art the threads of these two complementary characters can be traced, changing, combining, branching out, but ever in substance the same. Of this warp and woof have all the strange patterns of Spanish life been woven. II In trying to hammer some sort of unified impression out of the scattered pictures of Spain in my mind, one of the first things I realize is that there are many Spains. Indeed, every village hidden in the folds of the great barren hills, or shadowed by its massive church in the middle of one of the upland plains, every fertile _huerta_ of the seacoast, is a Spain. Iberia exists, and the strong Iberian characteristics; but Spain as a modern centralized nation is an illusion, a very unfortunate one; for the present atrophy, the desolating resultlessness of a century of revolution, may very well be due in large measure to the artificial imposition of centralized government on a land essentially centrifugal. In the first place, there is the matter of language. Roughly, four distinct languages are at present spoken in Spain: Castilian, the language of Madrid and the central uplands, the official language, spoken in the south in its Andalusian form; Gallego-Portuguese, spoken on the west coast; Basque, which does not even share the Latin descent of the others; and Catalan, a form of Provençal which, with its dialect, Valencian, is spoken on the upper Mediterranean coast and in the Balearic Isles. Of course, under the influence of rail communication and a conscious effort to spread Castilian, the other languages, with the exception of Portuguese and Catalan, have lost vitality and died out in the larger towns; but the problem remains far different from that of the Italian dialects, since the Spanish languages have all, except Basque, a strong literary tradition. Added to the variety of language, there is an immense variety of topography in the different parts of Spain. The central plateaux, dominant in modern history (history being taken to mean the births and breedings of kings and queens and the doings of generals in armor) probably approximate the warmer Russian steppes in climate and vegetation. The west coast is in most respects a warmer and more fertile Wales. The southern _huertas_ (arable river valleys) have rather the aspect of Egypt. The east coast from Valencia up is a continuation of the Mediterranean coast of France. It follows that, in this country where an hour's train ride will take you from Siberian snow into African desert, unity of population is hardly to be expected. Here is probably the root of the tendency in Spanish art and thought to emphasize the differences between things. In painting, where the mind of a people is often more tangibly represented than anywhere else, we find one supreme example. El Greco, almost the caricature in his art of the Don Quixote type of mind, who, though a Greek by birth and a Venetian by training, became more Spanish than the Spaniards during his long life at Toledo, strove constantly to express the difference between the world of flesh and the world of spirit, between the body and the soul of man. More recently, the extreme characterization of Goya's sketches and portraits, the intensifying of national types found in Zuloaga and the other painters who have been exploiting with such success the peculiarities--the picturesqueness--of Spanish faces and landscapes, seem to spring from this powerful sense of the separateness of things. In another way you can express this constant attempt to differentiate one individual from another as caricature. Spanish art is constantly on the edge of caricature. Given the ebullient fertility of the Spanish mind and its intense individualism, a constant slipping over into the grotesque is inevitable. And so it comes to be that the conscious or unconscious aim of their art is rather self-expression than beauty. Their image of reality is sharp and clear, but distorted. Burlesque and satire are never far away in their most serious moments. Not even the calmest and best ordered of Spanish minds can resist a tendency to excess of all sorts, to over-elaboration, to grotesquerie, to deadening mannerism. All that is greatest in their art, indeed, lies on the borderland of the extravagant, where sublime things skim the thin ice of absurdity. The great epic, _Don Quixote_, such plays as Calderon's _La Vida es Sueño_, such paintings as El Greco's _Resurrección_ and Velasquez's dwarfs, such buildings as the Escorial and the Alhambra--all among the universal masterpieces--are far indeed from the middle term of reasonable beauty. Hence their supreme strength. And for our generation, to which excess is a synonym for beauty, is added argumentative significance to the long tradition of Spanish art. Another characteristic, springing from the same fervid abundance, that links the Spanish tradition to ours of the present day is the strangely impromptu character of much Spanish art production. The slightly ridiculous proverb that genius consists of an infinite capacity for taking pains is well controverted. The creative flow of Spanish artists has always been so strong, so full of vitality, that there has been no time for taking pains. Lope de Vega, with his two thousand-odd plays--or was it twelve thousand?--is by no means an isolated instance. Perhaps the strong sense of individual validity, which makes Spain the most democratic country in Europe, sanctions the constant improvisation, and accounts for the confident planlessness as common in Spanish architecture as in Spanish political thought. Here we meet the old stock characteristic, Spanish pride. This is a very real thing, and is merely the external shell of the fundamental trust in the individual and in nothing outside of him. Again El Greco is an example. As his painting progressed, grew more and more personal, he drew away from tangible reality, and, with all the dogmatic conviction of one whose faith in his own reality can sweep away the mountains of the visible world, expressed his own restless, almost sensual, spirituality in forms that flickered like white flames toward God. For the Spaniard, moreover, God is always, in essence, the proudest sublimation of man's soul. The same spirit runs through the preachers of the early church and the works of Santa Teresa, a disguise of the frantic desire to express the self, the self, changeless and eternal, at all costs. From this comes the hard cruelty that flares forth luridly at times. A recent book by Miguel de Unamuno, _Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida_, expresses this fierce clinging to separateness from the universe by the phrase _el hambre de inmortalidad_, the hunger of immortality. This is the core of the individualism that lurks in all Spanish ideas, the conviction that only the individual soul is real. III In the Spain of to-day these things are seen as through a glass, darkly. Since the famous and much gloated-over entrance of Ferdinand and Isabella into Granada, the history of Spain has been that of an attempt to fit a square peg in a round hole. In the great flare of the golden age, the age of ingots of Peru and of men of even greater worth, the disease worked beneath the surface. Since then the conflict has corroded into futility all the buoyant energies of the country. I mean the persistent attempt to centralize in thought, in art, in government, in religion, a nation whose every energy lies in the other direction. The result has been a deadlock, and the ensuing rust and numbing of all life and thought, so that a century of revolution seems to have brought Spain no nearer a solution of its problems. At the present day, when all is ripe for a new attempt to throw off the atrophy, a sort of despairing inaction causes the Spaniards to remain under a government of unbelievably corrupt and inefficient politicians. There seems no solution to the problem of a nation in which the centralized power and the separate communities work only to nullify each other. Spaniards in face of their traditions are rather in the position of the archæologists before the problem of Iberian sculpture. For near the Cerro de los Santos, bare hill where from the ruins of a sanctuary has been dug an endless series of native sculptures of men and women, goddesses and gods, there lived a little watchmaker. The first statues to be dug up were thought by the pious country people to be saints, and saints they were, according to an earlier dispensation than that of Rome; with the result that much Kudos accompanied the discovery of those draped women with high head-dresses and fixed solemn eyes and those fragmentary bull-necked men hewn roughly out of grey stone; they were freed from the caked clay of two thousand years and reverently set up in the churches. So probably the motives that started the watchmaker on his career of sculpturing and falsifying were pious and reverential. However it began, when it was discovered that the saints were mere horrid heathen he-gods and she-gods and that the foreign gentlemen with spectacles who appeared from all the ends of Europe to investigate, would pay money for them, the watchmaker began to thrive as a mighty man in his village and generation. He began to study archaeology and the style of his cumbersome forged divinities improved. For a number of years the statues from the Cerro de los Santos were swallowed whole by all learned Europe. But the watchmaker's imagination began to get the better of him; forms became more and more fantastic, Egyptian, Assyrian, _art-nouveau_ influences began to be noted by the discerning, until at last someone whispered forgery and all the scientists scuttled to cover shouting that there had never been any native Iberian sculpture after all. The little watchmaker succumbed before his imagining of heathen gods and died in a madhouse. To this day when you stand in the middle of the room devoted to the Cerro de los Santos in the Madrid, and see the statues of Iberian goddesses clustered about you in their high head-dresses like those of dancers, you cannot tell which were made by the watchmaker in 1880, and which by the image-maker of the hill-sanctuary at a time when the first red-eyed ships of the Phoenician traders were founding trading posts among the barbarians of the coast of Valencia. And there they stand on their shelves, the real and the false inextricably muddled, and stare at the enigma with stone eyes. So with the traditions: the tradition of Catholic Spain, the tradition of military grandeur, the tradition of fighting the Moors, of suspecting the foreigner, of hospitality, of truculence, of sobriety, of chivalry, of Don Quixote and Tenorio. The Spanish-American war, to the United States merely an opportunity for a patriotic-capitalist demonstration of sanitary engineering, heroism and canned-meat scandals, was to Spain the first whispered word that many among the traditions were false. The young men of that time called themselves the generation of ninety-eight. According to temperament they rejected all or part of the museum of traditions they had been taught to believe was the real Spain; each took up a separate road in search of a Spain which should suit his yearnings for beauty, gentleness, humaneness, or else vigor, force, modernity. The problem of our day is whether Spaniards evolving locally, anarchically, without centralization in anything but repression, will work out new ways of life for themselves, or whether they will be drawn into the festering tumult of a Europe where the system that is dying is only strong enough to kill in its death-throes all new growth in which there was hope for the future. The Pyrenees are high. IV It was after a lecture at an exhibition of Basque painters in Madrid, where we had heard Valle-Melan, with eyes that burned out from under shaggy grizzled eyebrows, denounce in bitter stinging irony what he called the Europeanization of Spain. What they called progress, he had said, was merely an aping of the stupid commercialism of modern Europe. Better no education for the masses than education that would turn healthy peasants into crafty putty-skinned merchants; better a Spain swooning in her age-old apathy than a Spain awakened to the brutal soulless trade-war of modern life.... I was walking with a young student of philosophy I had met by chance across the noisy board of a Spanish _pensión_, discussing the exhibition we had just seen as a strangely meek setting for the fiery reactionary speech. I had remarked on the very "primitive" look much of the work of these young Basque painters had, shown by some in the almost affectionate technique, in the dainty caressing brush-work, in others by that inadequacy of the means at the painter's disposal to express his idea, which made of so many of the pictures rather gloriously impressive failures. My friend was insisting, however, that the primitiveness, rather than the birth-pangs of a new view of the world, was nothing but "the last affectation of an over-civilized tradition." "Spain," he said, "is the most civilized country in Europe. The growth of our civilization has never been interrupted by outside influence. The Phoenicians, the Romans--Spain's influence on Rome was, I imagine, fully as great as Rome's on Spain; think of the five Spanish emperors;--the Goths, the Moors;--all incidents, absorbed by the changeless Iberian spirit.... Even Spanish Christianity," he continued, smiling, "is far more Spanish than it is Christian. Our life is one vast ritual. Our religion is part of it, that is all. And so are the bull-fights that so shock the English and Americans,--are they any more brutal, though, than fox-hunting and prize-fights? And how full of tradition are they, our _fiestas de toros_; their ceremony reaches back to the hecatombs of the Homeric heroes, to the bull-worship of the Cretans and of so many of the Mediterranean cults, to the Roman games. Can civilization go farther than to ritualize death as we have done? But our culture is too perfect, too stable. Life is choked by it." We stood still a moment in the shade of a yellowed lime tree. My friend had stopped talking and was looking with his usual bitter smile at a group of little boys with brown, bare dusty legs who were intently playing bull-fight with sticks for swords and a piece of newspaper for the toreador's scarlet cape. "It is you in America," he went on suddenly, "to whom the future belongs; you are so vigorous and vulgar and uncultured. Life has become once more the primal fight for bread. Of course the dollar is a complicated form of the food the cave man killed for and slunk after, and the means of combat are different, but it is as brutal. From that crude animal brutality comes all the vigor of life. We have none of it; we are too tired to have any thoughts; we have lived so much so long ago that now we are content with the very simple things,--the warmth of the sun and the colors of the hills and the flavor of bread and wine. All the rest is automatic, ritual." "But what about the strike?" I asked, referring to the one-day's general strike that had just been carried out with fair success throughout Spain, as a protest against the government's apathy regarding the dangerous rise in the prices of food and fuel. He shrugged his shoulders. "That, and more," he said, "is new Spain, a prophecy, rather than a fact. Old Spain is still all-powerful." Later in the day I was walking through the main street of one of the clustered adobe villages that lie in the folds of the Castilian plain not far from Madrid. The lamps were just being lit in the little shops where the people lived and worked and sold their goods, and women with beautifully shaped pottery jars on their heads were coming home with water from the well. Suddenly I came out on an open _plaza_ with trees from which the last leaves were falling through the greenish sunset light. The place was filled with the lilting music of a grind-organ and with a crunch of steps on the gravel as people danced. There were soldiers and servant-girls, and red-cheeked apprentice-boys with their sweethearts, and respectable shop-keepers, and their wives with mantillas over their gleaming black hair. All were dancing in and out among the slim tree-trunks, and the air was noisy with laughter and little cries of childlike unfeigned enjoyment. Here was the gospel of Sancho Panza, I thought, the easy acceptance of life, the unashamed joy in food and color and the softness of women's hair. But as I walked out of the village across the harsh plain of Castile, grey-green and violet under the deepening night, the memory came to me of the knight of the sorrowful countenance, Don Quixote, blunderingly trying to remould the world, pitifully sure of the power of his own ideal. And in these two Spain seemed to be manifest. Far indeed were they from the restless industrial world of joyless enforced labor and incessant goading war. And I wondered to what purpose it would be, should Don Quixote again saddle Rosinante, and what the good baker of Almorox would say to his wife when he looked up from his kneading trough, holding out hands white with dough, to see the knight errant ride by on his lean steed upon a new quest. _IV: Talk by the Road_ Telemachus and Lyaeus had walked all night. The sky to the east of them was rosy when they came out of a village at the crest of a hill. Cocks crowed behind stucco walls. The road dropped from their feet through an avenue of pollarded poplars ghostly with frost. Far away into the brown west stretched reach upon reach of lake-like glimmer; here and there a few trees pushed jagged arms out of drowned lands. They stood still breathing hard. "It's the Tagus overflowed its banks," said Telemachus. Lyaeus shook his head. "It's mist." They stood with thumping hearts on the hilltop looking over inexplicable shimmering plains of mist hemmed by mountains jagged like coals that as they looked began to smoulder with dawn. The light all about was lemon yellow. The walls of the village behind them were fervid primrose color splotched with shadows of sheer cobalt. Above the houses uncurled green spirals of wood-smoke. Lyaeus raised his hands above his head and shouted and ran like mad down the hill. A little voice was whispering in Telemachus's ear that he must save his strength, so he followed sedately. When he caught up to Lyaeus they were walking among twining wraiths of mist rose-shot from a rim of the sun that poked up behind hills of bright madder purple. A sudden cold wind-gust whined across the plain, making the mist writhe in a delirium of crumbling shapes. Ahead of them casting gigantic blue shadows over the furrowed fields rode a man on a donkey and a man on a horse. It was a grey sway-backed horse that joggled in a little trot with much switching of a ragged tail; its rider wore a curious peaked cap and sat straight and lean in the saddle. Over one shoulder rested a long bamboo pole that in the exaggerating sunlight cast a shadow like the shadow of a lance. The man on the donkey was shaped like a dumpling and rode with his toes turned out. Telemachus and Lyaeus walked behind them a long while without catching up, staring curiously after these two silent riders. Eventually getting as far as the tails of the horse and the donkey, they called out: "_Buenos días_." There turned to greet them a red, round face, full of little lines like an over-ripe tomato and a long bloodless face drawn into a point at the chin by a grizzled beard. "How early you are, gentlemen," said the tall man on the grey horse. His voice was deep and sepulchral, with an occasional flutter of tenderness like a glint of light in a black river. "Late," said Lyaeus. "We come from Madrid on foot." The dumpling man crossed himself. "They are mad," he said to his companion. "That," said the man on the grey horse, "is always the answer of ignorance when confronted with the unusual. These gentlemen undoubtedly have very good reason for doing as they do; and besides the night is the time for long strides and deep thoughts, is it not, gentlemen? The habit of vigil is one we sorely need in this distracted modern world. If more men walked and thought the night through there would be less miseries under the sun." "But, such a cold night!" exclaimed the dumpling man. "On colder nights than this I have seen children asleep in doorways in the streets of Madrid." "Is there much poverty in these parts? asked Telemachus stiffly, wanting to show that he too had the social consciousness. "There are people--thousands--who from the day they are born till the day they die never have enough to eat." "They have wine," said Lyaeus. "One little cup on Sundays, and they are so starved that it makes them as drunk as if it were a hogshead." "I have heard," said Lyaeus, "that the sensations of starving are very interesting--people have visions more vivid than life." "One needs very few sensations to lead life humbly and beautifully," said the man on the grey horse in a gentle tone of reproof. Lyaeus frowned. "Perhaps," said the man on the grey horse turning towards Telemachus his lean face, where under scraggly eyebrows glowered eyes of soft dark green, "it is that I have brooded too much on the injustice done in the world--all society one great wrong. Many years ago I should have set out to right wrong--for no one but a man, an individual alone, can right a wrong; organization merely substitutes one wrong for another--but now ... I am too old. You see, I go fishing instead." "Why, it's a fishing pole," cried Lyaeus. "When I first saw it I thought it was a lance." And he let out his roaring laugh. "And such trout," cried the dumpling man. "The trout there are in that little stream above Illescas! That's why we got up so early, to fish for trout." "I like to see the dawn," said the man on the grey horse. "Is that Illescas?" asked Telemachus, and pointed to a dun brown tower topped by a cap of blue slate that stood guard over a cluster of roofs ahead of them. Telemachus had a map torn from Baedecker in his pocket that he had been peeping at secretly. "That, gentlemen, is Illescas," said the man on the grey horse. "And if you will allow me to offer you a cup of coffee, I shall be most pleased. You must excuse me, for I never take anything before midday. I am a recluse, have been for many years and rarely stir abroad. I do not intend to return to the world unless I can bring something with me worth having." A wistful smile twisted a little the corners of his mouth. "I could guzzle a hogshead of coffee accompanied by vast processions of toasted rolls in columns of four," shouted Lyaeus. "We are on our way to Toledo," Telemachus broke in, not wanting to give the impression that food was their only thought. "You will see the paintings of Dominico Theotocopoulos, the only one who ever depicted the soul of Castile." "This man," said Lyaeus, with a slap at Telemachus's shoulder, "is looking for a gesture." "The gesture of Castile." The man on the grey horse rode along silently for some time. The sun had already burnt up the hoar-frost along the sides of the road; only an occasional streak remained glistening in the shadow of a ditch. A few larks sang in the sky. Two men in brown corduroy with hoes on their shoulders passed on their way to the fields. "Who shall say what is the gesture of Castile?... I am from La Mancha myself." The man on the grey horse started speaking gravely while with a bony hand, very white, he stroked his beard. "Something cold and haughty and aloof ... men concentrated, converging breathlessly on the single flame of their spirit.... Torquemada, Loyola, Jorge Manrique, Cortés, Santa Teresa.... Rapacity, cruelty, straightforwardness.... Every man's life a lonely ruthless quest." Lyaeus broke in: "Remember the infinite gentleness of the saints lowering the Conde de Orgaz into the grave in the picture in San Tomás...." "Ah, that is what I was trying to think of.... These generations, my generation, my son's generation, are working to bury with infinite tenderness the gorgeously dressed corpse of the old Spain.... Gentlemen, it is a little ridiculous to say so, but we have set out once more with lance and helmet of knight-errantry to free the enslaved, to right the wrongs of the oppressed." They had come into town. In the high square tower church-bells were ringing for morning mass. Down the broad main street scampered a flock of goats herded by a lean man with fangs like a dog who strode along in a snuff-colored cloak with a broad black felt hat on his head. "How do you do, Don Alonso?" he cried; "Good luck to you, gentlemen." And he swept the hat off his head in a wide curving gesture as might a courtier of the Rey Don Juan. The hot smell of the goats was all about them as they sat before the café in the sun under a bare acacia tree, looking at the tightly proportioned brick arcades of the mudéjar apse of the church opposite. Don Alonso was in the café ordering; the dumpling-man had disappeared. Telemachus got up on his numbed feet and stretched his legs. "Ouf," he said, "I'm tired." Then he walked over to the grey horse that stood with hanging head and drooping knees hitched to one of the acacias. "I wonder what his name is." He stroked the horse's scrawny face. "Is it Rosinante?" The horse twitched his ears, straightened his back and legs and pulled back black lips to show yellow teeth. "Of course it's Rosinante!" The horse's sides heaved. He threw back his head and whinnied shrilly, exultantly. _V: A Novelist of Revolution_ I Much as G. B. S. refuses to be called an Englishman, Pío Baroja refuses to be called a Spaniard. He is a Basque. Reluctantly he admits having been born in San Sebastián, outpost of Cosmopolis on the mountainous coast of Guipuzcoa, where a stern-featured race of mountaineers and fishermen, whose prominent noses, high ruddy cheek-bones and square jowls are gradually becoming known to the world through the paintings of the Zubiaurre, clings to its ancient un-Aryan language and its ancient song and customs with the hard-headedness of hill people the world over. From the first Spanish discoveries in America till the time of our own New England clipper ships, the Basque coast was the backbone of Spanish trade. The three provinces were the only ones which kept their privileges and their municipal liberties all through the process of the centralizing of the Spanish monarchy with cross and faggot, which historians call the great period of Spain. The rocky inlets in the mountains were full of shipyards that turned out privateers and merchantmen manned by lanky broad-shouldered men with hard red-beaked faces and huge hands coarsened by generations of straining on heavy oars and halyards,--men who feared only God and the sea-spirits of their strange mythology and were a law unto themselves, adventurers and bigots. It was not till the Nineteenth century that the Carlist wars and the passing of sailing ships broke the prosperous independence of the Basque provinces and threw them once for all into the main current of Spanish life. Now papermills take the place of shipyards, and instead of the great fleet that went off every year to fish the Newfoundland and Iceland banks, a few steam trawlers harry the sardines in the Bay of Biscay. The world war, too, did much to make Bilboa one of the industrial centers of Spain, even restoring in some measure the ancient prosperity of its shipping. Pío Baroja spent his childhood on this rainy coast between green mountains and green sea. There were old aunts who filled his ears up with legends of former mercantile glory, with talk of sea captains and slavers and shipwrecks. Born in the late seventies, Baroja left the mist-filled inlets of Guipuzcoa to study medicine in Madrid, febrile capital full of the artificial scurry of government, on the dry upland plateau of New Castile. He even practiced, reluctantly enough, in a town near Valencia, where he must have acquired his distaste for the Mediterranean and the Latin genius, and, later, in his own province at Cestons, where he boarded with the woman who baked the sacramental wafers for the parish church, and, so he claims, felt the spirit of racial solidarity glow within him for the first time. But he was too timid in the face of pain and too sceptical of science as of everything else to acquire the cocksure brutality of a country doctor. He gave up medicine and returned to Madrid, where he became a baker. In _Juventud-Egolatria_ ("Youth-Selfworship") a book of delightfully shameless self-revelations, he says that he ran a bakery for six years before starting to write. And he still runs a bakery. You can see it any day, walking towards the Royal Theatre from the great focus of Madrid life, the Puerta del Sol. It has a most enticing window. On one side are hams and red sausages and purple sausages and white sausages, some plump to the bursting like Rubens's "Graces," others as weazened and smoked as saints by Ribera. In the middle are oblong plates with patés and sliced bologna and things in jelly; then come ranks of cakes, creamcakes and fruitcakes, everything from obscene jam-rolls to celestial cornucopias of white cream. Through the door you see a counter with round loaves of bread on it, and a basketful of brown rolls. If someone comes out a dense sweet smell of fresh bread and pastry swirls about the sidewalk. So, by meeting commerce squarely in its own field, he has freed himself from any compromise with Mammon. While his bread remains sweet, his novels may be as bitter as he likes. II The moon shines coldly out of an intense blue sky where a few stars glisten faint as mica. Shadow fills half the street, etching a silhouette of roofs and chimneypots and cornices on the cobblestones, leaving the rest very white with moonlight. The façades of the houses, with their blank windows, might be carved out of ice. In the dark of a doorway a woman sits hunched under a brown shawl. Her head nods, but still she jerks a tune that sways and dances through the silent street out of the accordion on her lap. A little saucer for pennies is on the step beside her. In the next doorway two guttersnipes are huddled together asleep. The moonlight points out with mocking interest their skinny dirt-crusted feet and legs stretched out over the icy pavement, and the filthy rags that barely cover their bodies. Two men stumble out of a wineshop arm in arm, poor men in corduroy, who walk along unsteadily in their worn canvas shoes, making grandiloquent gestures of pity, tearing down the cold hard façades with drunken generous phrases, buoyed up by the warmth of the wine in their veins. That is Baroja's world: dismal, ironic, the streets of towns where industrial life sits heavy on the neck of a race as little adapted to it as any in Europe. No one has ever described better the shaggy badlands and cabbage-patches round the edges of a city, where the debris of civilization piles up ramshackle suburbs in which starve and scheme all manner of human detritus. Back lots where men and women live fantastically in shelters patched out of rotten boards, of old tin cans and bits of chairs and tables that have stood for years in bright pleasant rooms. Grassy patches behind crumbling walls where on sunny days starving children spread their fleshless limbs and run about in the sun. Miserable wineshops where the wind whines through broken panes to chill men with ever-empty stomachs who sit about gambling and finding furious drunkenness in a sip of _aguardiente_. Courtyards of barracks where painters who have not a cent in the world mix with beggars and guttersnipes to cajole a little hot food out of soft-hearted soldiers at mess-time. Convent doors where ragged lines shiver for hours in the shrill wind that blows across the bare Castilian plain waiting for the nuns to throw out bread for them to fight over like dogs. And through it all moves the great crowd of the outcast, sneak-thieves, burglars, beggars of every description,--rich beggars and poor devils who have given up the struggle to exist,--homeless children, prostitutes, people who live a half-honest existence selling knicknacks, penniless students, inventors who while away the time they are dying of starvation telling all they meet of the riches they might have had; all who have failed on the daily treadmill of bread-making, or who have never had a chance even to enjoy the privilege of industrial slavery. Outside of Russia there has never been a novelist so taken up with all that society and respectability reject. Not that the interest in outcasts is anything new in Spanish literature. Spain is the home of that type of novel which the pigeonhole-makers have named picaresque. These loafers and wanderers of Baroja's, like his artists and grotesque dreamers and fanatics, all are the descendants of the people in the _Quijote_ and the _Novelas Ejemplares_, of the rogues and bandits of the Lazarillo de Tormes, who through _Gil Blas_ invaded France and England, where they rollicked through the novel until Mrs. Grundy and George Eliot packed them off to the reform school. But the rogues of the seventeenth century were jolly rogues. They always had their tongues in their cheeks, and success rewarded their ingenious audacities. The moulds of society had not hardened as they have now; there was less pressure of hungry generations. Or, more probably, pity had not come in to undermine the foundations. The corrosive of pity, which had attacked the steel girders of our civilization even before the work of building was completed, has brought about what Gilbert Murray in speaking of Greek thought calls the failure of nerve. In the seventeenth century men still had the courage of their egoism. The world was a bad job to be made the best of, all hope lay in driving a good bargain with the conductors of life everlasting. By the end of the nineteenth century the life everlasting had grown cobwebby, the French Revolution had filled men up with extravagant hopes of the perfectibility of this world, humanitarianism had instilled an abnormal sensitiveness to pain,--to one's own pain, and to the pain of one's neighbors. Baroja's outcasts are no longer jolly knaves who will murder a man for a nickel and go on their road singing "Over the hills and far away"; they are men who have not had the willpower to continue in the fight for bread, they are men whose nerve has failed, who live furtively on the outskirts, snatching a little joy here and there, drugging their hunger with gorgeous mirages. One often thinks of Gorki in reading Baroja, mainly because of the contrast. Instead of the tumultuous spring freshet of a new race that drones behind every page of the Russian, there is the cold despair of an old race, of a race that lived long under a formula of life to which it has sacrificed much, only to discover in the end that the formula does not hold. These are the last paragraphs of _Mala Hierba_ ("Wild Grass"), the middle volume of Baroja's trilogy on the life of the very poor in Madrid. "They talked. Manuel felt irritation against the whole world, hatred, up to that moment pent up within him against society, against man.... "'Honestly,' he ended by saying, 'I wish it would rain dynamite for a week, and that the Eternal Father would come tumbling down in cinders.' "He invoked crazily all the destructive powers to reduce to ashes this miserable society. "Jesús listened with attention. "'You are an anarchist,' he told him. "'I?' "'Yes. So am I.' "'Since when?' "'Since I have seen the infamies committed in the world; since I have seen how coldly they give to death a bit of human flesh; since I have seen how men die abandoned in the streets and hospitals,' answered Jesús with a certain solemnity. "Manuel was silent. The friends walked without speaking round the Ronda de Segovia, and sat down on a bench in the little gardens of the Vírgen del Puerto. "The sky was superb, crowded with stars; the Milky Way crossed its immense blue concavity. The geometric figure of the Great Bear glittered very high. Arcturus and Vega shone softly in that ocean of stars. "In the distance the dark fields, scratched with lines of lights, seemed the sea in a harbor and the strings of lights the illumination of a wharf. "The damp warm air came laden with odors of woodland plants wilted by the heat. "'How many stars,' said Manuel. 'What can they be?' "'They are worlds, endless worlds.' "'I don't know why it doesn't make me feel better to see this sky so beautiful, Jesús. Do you think there are men in those worlds?' asked Manuel. "'Perhaps; why not?' "'And are there prisons too, and judges and gambling dens and police?... Do you think so?' "Jesús did not answer. After a while he began talking with a calm voice of his dream of an idyllic humanity, a sweet pitiful dream, noble and childish. "In his dream, man, led by a new idea, reached a higher state. "No more hatreds, no more rancours. Neither judges, nor police, nor soldiers, nor authority. In the wide fields of the earth free men worked in the sunlight. The law of love had taken the place of the law of duty, and the horizons of humanity grew every moment wider, wider and more azure. "And Jesús continued talking of a vague ideal of love and justice, of energy and pity; and those words of his, chaotic, incoherent, fell like balm on Manuel's ulcerated spirit. Then they were both silent, lost in their thoughts, looking at the night. "An august joy shone in the sky, and the vague sensation of space, of the infinity of those imponderable worlds, filled their spirits with a delicious calm." III Spain is the classic home of the anarchist. A bleak upland country mostly, with a climate giving all varieties of temperature, from moist African heat to dry Siberian cold, where people have lived until very recently,--and do still,--in villages hidden away among the bare ribs of the mountains, or in the indented coast plains, where every region is cut off from every other by high passes and defiles of the mountains, flaming hot in summer and freezing cold in winter, where the Iberian race has grown up centerless. The pueblo, the village community, is the only form of social cohesion that really has roots in the past. On these free towns empires have time and again been imposed by force. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Catholic monarchy wielded the sword of the faith to such good effect that communal feeling was killed and the Spanish genius forced to ingrow into the mystical realm where every ego expanded itself into the solitude of God. The eighteenth century reduced God to an abstraction, and the nineteenth brought pity and the mad hope of righting the wrongs of society. The Spaniard, like his own Don Quixote, mounted the warhorse of his idealism and set out to free the oppressed, alone. As a logical conclusion we have the anarchist who threw a bomb into the Lyceum Theatre in Barcelona during a performance, wanting to make the ultimate heroic gesture and only succeeding in a senseless mangling of human lives. But that was the reduction to an absurdity of an immensely valuable mental position. The anarchism of Pío Baroja is of another sort. He says in one of his books that the only part a man of the middle classes can play in the reorganization of society is destructive. He has not undergone the discipline, which can only come from common slavery in the industrial machine, necessary for a builder. His slavery has been an isolated slavery which has unfitted him forever from becoming truly part of a community. He can use the vast power of knowledge which training has given him only in one way. His great mission is to put the acid test to existing institutions, and to strip the veils off them. I don't want to imply that Baroja writes with his social conscience. He is too much of a novelist for that, too deeply interested in people as such. But it is certain that a profound sense of the evil of existing institutions lies behind every page he has written, and that occasionally, only occasionally, he allows himself to hope that something better may come out of the turmoil of our age of transition. Only a man who had felt all this very deeply could be so sensitive to the new spirit--if the word were not threadbare one would call it religious--which is shaking the foundations of the world's social pyramid, perhaps only another example of the failure of nerve, perhaps the triumphant expression of a new will among mankind. In _Aurora Roja_ ("Red Dawn"), the last of the Madrid trilogy, about the same Manuel who is the central figure of _Mala Hierba_, he writes: "At first it bored him, but later, little by little, he felt himself carried away by what he was reading. First he was enthusiastic about Mirabeau; then about the Girondins; Vergniau Petion, Condorcet; then about Danton; then he began to think that Robespierre was the true revolutionary; afterwards Saint Just, but in the end it was the gigantic figure of Danton that thrilled him most.... "Manuel felt great satisfaction at having read that history. Often he said to himself: "'What does it matter now if I am a loafer, and good-for-nothing? I've read the history of the French Revolution; I believe I shall know how to be worthy....' "After Michelet, he read a book about '48; then another on the Commune, by Louise Michel, and all this produced in him a great admiration for French Revolutionists. What men! After the colossal figures of the Convention: Babeuf, Proudhon, Blanqui, Bandin, Deleschize, Rochefort, Félix Pyat, Vallu.... What people! "'What does it matter now if I am a loafer?... I believe I shall know how to be worthy.'" In those two phrases lies all the power of revolutionary faith. And how like phrases out of the gospels, those older expressions of the hope and misery of another society in decay. That is the spirit that, for good or evil, is stirring throughout Europe to-day, among the poor and the hungry and the oppressed and the outcast, a new affirmation of the rights and duties of men. Baroja has felt this profoundly, and has presented it, but without abandoning the function of the novelist, which is to tell stories about people. He is never a propagandist. IV "I have never hidden my admirations in literature. They have been and are Dickens, Balzac, Poe, Dostoievski and, now, Stendhal...." writes Baroja in the preface to the Nelson edition of _La Dama Errante_ ("The Wandering Lady"). He follows particularly in the footprints of Balzac in that he is primarily a historian of morals, who has made a fairly consistent attempt to cover the world he lived in. With Dostoievski there is a kinship in the passionate hatred of cruelty and stupidity that crops out everywhere in his work. I have never found any trace of influence of the other three. To be sure there are a few early sketches in the manner of Poe, but in respect to form he is much more in the purely chaotic tradition of the picaresque novel he despises than in that of the American theorist. Baroja's most important work lies in the four series of novels of the Spanish life he lived, in Madrid, in the provincial towns where he practiced medicine, and in the Basque country where he had been brought up. The foundation of these was laid by _El Arbol de la Ciencia_ ("The Tree of Knowledge"), a novel half autobiographical describing the life and death of a doctor, giving a picture of existence in Madrid and then in two Spanish provincial towns. Its tremendously vivid painting of inertia and the deadening under its weight of intellectual effort made a very profound impression in Spain. Two novels about the anarchist movement followed it, _La Dama Errante_, which describes the state of mind of forward-looking Spaniards at the time of the famous anarchist attempt on the lives of the king and queen the day of their marriage, and _La Ciudad de la Niebla_, about the Spanish colony in London. Then came the series called _La Busca_ ("The Search"), which to me is Baroja's best work, and one of the most interesting things published in Europe in the last decade. It deals with the lowest and most miserable life in Madrid and is written with a cold acidity which Maupassant would have envied and is permeated by a human vividness that I do not think Maupassant could have achieved. All three novels, _La Busca_, _Mala Hierba_, and _Aurora Roja_, deal with the drifting of a typical uneducated Spanish boy, son of a maid of all work in a boarding house, through different strata of Madrid life. They give a sense of unadorned reality very rare in any literature, and besides their power as novels are immensely interesting as sheer natural history. The type of the _golfo_ is a literary discovery comparable with that of Sancho Panza by Cervántes. Nothing that Baroja has written since is quite on the same level. The series _El Pasado_ ("The Past") gives interesting pictures of provincial life. _Las Inquietudes de Shanti Andia_ ("The Anxieties of Shanti Andia"), a story of Basque seamen which contains a charming picture of a childhood in a seaside village in Guipuzcoa, delightful as it is to read, is too muddled in romantic claptrap to add much to his fame. _El Mundo es Así_ ("The World is Like That") expresses, rather lamely it seems to me, the meditations of a disenchanted revolutionist. The latest series, _Memorias de un Hombre de Acción_, a series of yarns about the revolutionary period in Spain at the beginning of the nineteenth century, though entertaining, is more an attempt to escape in a jolly romantic past the realities of the morose present than anything else. _César o Nada_, translated into English under the title of "Aut Cæsar aut Nullus" is also less acid and less effective than his earlier novels. That is probably why it was chosen for translation into English. We know how anxious our publishers are to furnish food easily digestible by weak American stomachs. It is silly to judge any Spanish novelist from the point of view of form. Improvisation is the very soul of Spanish writing. In thinking back over books of Baroja's one has read, one remembers more descriptions of places and people than anything else. In the end it is rather natural history than dramatic creation. But a natural history that gives you the pictures etched with vitriol of Spanish life in the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century which you get in these novels of Baroja's is very near the highest sort of creation. If we could inject some of the virus of his intense sense of reality into American writers it would be worth giving up all these stale conquests of form we inherited from Poe and O. Henry. The following, again from the preface of _La Dama Errante_, is Baroja's own statement of his aims. And certainly he has realized them. "Probably a book like _la Dama Errante_ is not of the sort that lives very long; it is not a painting with aspirations towards the museum but an impressionist canvas; perhaps as a work it has too much asperity, is too hard, not serene enough. "This ephemeral character of my work does not displease me. We are men of the day, people in love with the passing moment, with all that is fugitive and transitory and the lasting quality of our work preoccupies us little, so little that it can hardly be said to preoccupy us at all." _VI: Talk by the Road_ "Spain," said Don Alonso, as he and Telemachus walked out of Illescas, followed at a little distance by Lyaeus and the dumpling-man, "has never been swept clean. There have been the Romans and the Visigoths and the Moors and the French--armed men jingling over mountain roads. Conquest has warped and sterilised our Iberian mind without changing an atom of it. An example: we missed the Revolution and suffered from Napoleon. We virtually had no Reformation, yet the Inquisition was stronger with us than anywhere." "Do you think it will have to be swept clean?" asked Telemachus. "He does." Don Alonso pointed with a sweep of an arm towards a man working in the field beside the road. It was a short man in a blouse; he broke the clods the plow had left with a heavy triangular hoe. Sometimes he raised it only a foot above the ground to poise for a blow, sometimes he swung it from over his shoulder. Face, clothes, hands, hoe were brown against the brown hillside where a purple shadow mocked each heavy gesture with lank gesticulations. In the morning silence the blows of the hoe beat upon the air with muffled insistence. "And he is the man who will do the building," went on Don Alonso; "It is only fair that we should clear the road." "But you are the thinkers," said Telemachus; his mother Penelope's maxims on the subject of constructive criticism popped up suddenly in his mind like tickets from a cash register. "Thought is the acid that destroys," answered Don Alonso. Telemachus turned to look once more at the man working in the field. The hoe rose and fell, rose and fell. At a moment on each stroke a flash of sunlight came from it. Telemachus saw all at once the whole earth, plowed fields full of earth-colored men, shoulders thrown back, bent forward, muscles of arms swelling and slackening, hoes flashing at the same moment against the sky, at the same moment buried with a thud in clods. And he felt reassured as a traveller feels, hearing the continuous hiss and squudge of well oiled engines out at sea. _VII: Cordova no Longer of the Caliphs_ When we stepped out of the bookshop the narrow street steamed with the dust of many carriages. Above the swiftly whirling wheels gaudily dressed men and women sat motionless in attitudes. Over the backs of the carriages brilliant shawls trailed, triangles of red and purple and yellow. "Bread and circuses," muttered the man who was with me, "but not enough bread." It was fair-time in Cordova; the carriages were coming back from the _toros_. We turned into a narrow lane, where the dust was yellow between high green and lavender-washed walls. From the street we had left came a sound of cheers and hand-clapping. My friend stopped still and put his hand on my arm. "There goes Belmonte," he said; "half the men who are cheering him have never had enough to eat in their lives. The old Romans knew better; to keep people quiet they filled their bellies. Those fools--" he jerked his head backwards with disgust; I thought, of the shawls and the high combs and the hair gleaming black under lace and the wasp-waists of the young men and the insolence of black eyes above the flashing wheels of the carriages, "--those fools give only circuses. Do you people in the outside world realize that we in Andalusia starve, that we have starved for generations, that those black bulls for the circuses may graze over good wheatland ... to make Spain picturesque! The only time we see meat is in the bullring. Those people who argue all the time as to why Spain's backward and write books about it, I could tell them in one word: malnutrition." He laughed despairingly and started walking fast again. "We have solved the problem of the cost of living. We live on air and dust and bad smells." I had gone into his bookshop a few minutes before to ask an address, and had been taken into the back room with the wonderful enthusiastic courtesy one finds so often in Spain. There the bookseller, a carpenter and the bookseller's errand-boy had all talked at once, explaining the last strike of farm-laborers, when the region had been for months under martial law, and they, and every one else of socialist or republican sympathies, had been packed for weeks into overcrowded prisons. They all regretted they could not take me to the Casa del Pueblo, but, they explained laughing, the Civil Guard was occupying it at that moment. It ended by the bookseller's coming out with me to show me the way to Azorín's. Azorín was an architect who had supported the strikers; he had just come back to Cordova from the obscure village where he had been imprisoned through the care of the military governor who had paid him the compliment of thinking that even in prison he would be dangerous in Cordova. He had recently been elected municipal councillor, and when we reached his office was busy designing a schoolhouse. On the stairs the bookseller had whispered to me that every workman in Cordova would die for Azorín. He was a sallow little man with a vaguely sarcastic voice and an amused air as if he would burst out laughing at any moment. He put aside his plans and we all went on to see the editor of _Andalusia_, a regionalist pro-labor weekly. In that dark little office, over three cups of coffee that appeared miraculously from somewhere with the pungent smell of ink and fresh paper in our nostrils, we talked about the past and future of Cordova, and of all the wide region of northern Andalusia, fertile irrigated plains, dry olive-land stretching up to the rocky waterless mountains where the mines are. In Azorín's crisp phrases and in the long ornate periods of the editor, the serfdom and the squalor and the heroic hope of these peasants and miners and artisans became vivid to me for the first time. Occasionally the compositor, a boy of about fifteen with a brown ink-smudged face, would poke his head in the door and shout: "It's true what they say, but they don't say enough, they don't say enough." The problem in the south of Spain is almost wholly agrarian. From the Tagus to the Mediterranean stretches a mountainous region of low rainfall, intersected by several series of broad river-valleys which, under irrigation, are enormously productive of rice, oranges, and, in the higher altitudes, of wheat. In the dry hills grow grapes, olives and almonds. A country on the whole much like southern California. Under the Moors this region was the richest and most civilised in Europe. When the Christian nobles from the north reconquered it, the ecclesiastics laid hold of the towns and extinguished industry through the Inquisition, while the land was distributed in huge estates to the magnates of the court of the Catholic Kings. The agricultural workers became virtually serfs, and the communal village system of working the land gradually gave way, Now the province of Jaen, certainly as large as the State of Rhode Island, is virtually owned by six families. This process was helped by the fact that all through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the liveliest people in all Spain swarmed overseas to explore and plunder America or went into the church, so that the tilling of the land was left to the humblest and least vigorous. And immigration to America has continued the safety valve of the social order. It is only comparatively recently that the consciousness has begun to form among the workers of the soil that it is possible for them to change their lot. As everywhere else, Russia has been the beacon-flare. Since 1918 an extraordinary tenseness has come over the lives of the frugal sinewy peasants who, through centuries of oppression and starvation, have kept, in spite of almost complete illiteracy, a curiously vivid sense of personal independence. In the backs of taverns revolutionary tracts are spelled out by some boy who has had a couple of years of school to a crowd of men who listen or repeat the words after him with the fervor of people going through a religious mystery. Unspeakable faith possesses them in what they call "_la nueva ley_" ("the new law"), by which the good things a man wrings by his sweat from the earth shall be his and not the property of a distant señor in Madrid. It is this hopefulness that marks the difference between the present agrarian agitation and the violent and desperate peasant risings of the past. As early as October, 1918, a congress of agricultural workers was held to decide on strike methods and, more important, to formulate a demand for the expropriation of the land. In two months the unions, ("_sociedades de resistencia_") had been welded--at least in the province of Cordova--into a unified system with more or less central leadership. The strike which followed was so complete that in many cases even domestic servants went out. After savage repression and the military occupation of the whole province, the strike petered out into compromises which resulted in considerable betterment of working conditions but left the important issues untouched. The rise in the cost of living and the growing unrest brought matters to a head again in the summer of 1919. The military was used with even more brutality than the previous year. Attempts at compromise, at parcelling out uncultivated land have proved as unavailing as the Mausers of the Civil Guard to quell the tumult. The peasants have kept their organizations and their demands intact. They are even willing to wait; but they are determined that the land upon which they have worn out generations and generations shall be theirs without question. All this time the landlords brandish a redoubtable weapon: starvation. Already thousands of acres that might be richly fertile lie idle or are pasture for herds of wild bulls for the arena. The great land-owning families hold estates all over Spain; if in a given region the workers become too exigent, they decide to leave the land in fallow for a year or two. In the villages it becomes a question of starve or emigrate. To emigrate many certificates are needed. Many officials have to be placated. For all that money is needed. Men taking to the roads in search of work are persecuted as vagrants by the civil guards. Arson becomes the last retort of despair. At night the standing grain burns mysteriously or the country house of an absent landlord, and from the parched hills where gnarled almond-trees grow, groups of half starved men watch the flames with grim exultation. Meanwhile the press in Madrid laments the _incultura_ of the Andalusian peasants. The problem of civilization, after all, is often one of food calories. Fernando de los Ríos, socialist deputy for Granada, recently published the result of an investigation of the food of the agricultural populations of Spain in which he showed that only in the Balkans--out of all Europe--was the working man so under-nourished. The calories which the diet of the average Cordova workman represented was something like a fourth of those of the British workman's diet. Even so the foremen of the big estates complain that as a result of all this social agitation their workmen have taken to eating more than they did in the good old times. How long it will be before the final explosion comes no one can conjecture. The spring of 1920, when great things were expected, was completely calm. On the other hand, in the last municipal elections when six hundred socialist councillors were elected in all Spain--in contrast to sixty-two in 1915--the vote polled in Andalusia was unprecedented. Up to this election many of the peasants had never dared vote, and those that had had been completely under the thumb of the _caciques_, the bosses that control Spanish local politics. However, in spite of socialist and syndicalist propaganda, the agrarian problem will always remain separate from anything else in the minds of the peasants. This does not mean that they are opposed to communism or cling as violently as most of the European peasantry to the habit of private property. All over Spain one comes upon traces of the old communist village institutions, by which flocks and mills and bakeries and often land were held in common. As in all arid countries, where everything depends upon irrigation, ditches are everywhere built and repaired in common. And the idea of private property is of necessity feeble where there is no rain; for what good is land to a man without water? Still, until there grows up a much stronger community of interest than now exists between the peasants and the industrial workers, the struggle for the land and the struggle for the control of industry will be, in Spain, as I think everywhere, parallel rather than unified. One thing is certain, however long the fire smoulders before it flares high to make a clean sweep of Spanish capitalism and Spanish feudalism together, Cordova, hoary city of the caliphs, where ghosts of old grandeurs flit about the zigzag ochre-colored lanes, will, when the moment comes, be the center of organization of the agrarian revolution. When I was leaving Spain I rode with some young men who were emigrating to America, to make their fortunes, they said. When I told them I had been to Cordova, their faces became suddenly bright with admiration. "Ah, Cordova," one of them cried; "they've got the guts in Cordova." _VIII: Talk by the Road_ At the first crossroads beyond Illescas the dumpling-man and Don Alonso turned off in quest of the trout stream. Don Alonso waved solemnly to Lyaeus and Telemachus. "Perhaps we shall meet in Toledo," he said. "Catch a lot of fish," shouted Lyaeus. "And perhaps a thought," was the last word they heard from Don Alonso. The sun already high in the sky poured tingling heat on their heads and shoulders. There was sand in their shoes, an occasional sharp pain in their shins, in their bellies bitter emptiness. "At the next village, Tel, I'm going to bed. You can do what you like," said Lyaeus in a tearful voice. "I'll like that all right." "_Buenos días, señores viajeros_," came a cheerful voice. They found they were walking in the company of a man who wore a tight-waisted overcoat of a light blue color, a cream-colored felt hat from under which protruded long black moustaches with gimlet points, and shoes with lemon-yellow uppers. They passed the time of day with what cheerfulness they could muster. "Ah, Toledo," said the man. "You are going to Toledo, my birthplace. There I was born in the shadow of the cathedral, there I shall die. I am a traveller of commerce." He produced two cards as large as postcards on which was written: ANTONIO SILVA Y YEPES UNIVERSAL AGENT IMPORT EXPORT NATIONAL PRODUCTS "At your service, gentlemen," he said and handed each of them a card. "I deal in tinware, ironware, pottery, lead pipes, enameled ware, kitchen utensils, American toilet articles, French perfumery, cutlery, linen, sewing machines, saddles, bridles, seeds, fancy poultry, fighting bantams and objects _de vertu_.... You are foreigners, are you not? How barbarous Spain, what people, what dirt, what lack of culture, what impoliteness, what lack of energy!" The universal agent choked, coughed, spat, produced a handkerchief of crimson silk with which he wiped his eyes and mouth, twirled his moustaches and plunged again into a torrent of words, turning on Telemachus from time to time little red-rimmed eyes full of moist pathos like a dog's. "Oh there are times, gentlemen, when it is too much to bear, when I rejoice to think that it's all up with my lungs and that I shan't live long anyway.... In America I should have been a Rockefeller, a Carnegie, a Morgan. I know it, for I am a man of genius. It is true. I am a man of genius.... And look at me here walking from one of these cursed tumbledown villages to another because I have not money enough to hire a cab.... And ill too, dying of consumption! O Spain, Spain, how do you crush your great men! What you must think of us, you who come from civilized countries, where life is organized, where commerce is a gentlemanly, even a noble occupation...." "But you savor life more...." "_Ca, ca_," interrupted the universal agent with a downward gesture of the hand. "To think that they call by the same name living here in a pen like a pig and living in Paris, London, New York, Biarritz, Trouville ... luxurious beds, coiffures, toilettes, theatrical functions, sumptuous automobiles, elegant ladies glittering with diamonds ... the world of light and enchantment! Oh to think of it! And Spain could be the richest country in Europe, if we had energy, organization, culture! Think of the exports: iron, coal, copper, silver, oranges, hides, mules, olives, food products, woolens, cotton cloth, sugarcane, raw cotton ... couplets, dancers, gipsy girls...." The universal agent had quite lost his breath. He coughed for a long time into his crimson handkerchief, then looked about him over the rolling dun slopes to which the young grain sprouting gave a sheen of vivid green like the patina on a Pompeian bronze vase, and shrugged his shoulders. "_¡Qué vida!_ What a life!" For some time a spire had been poking up into the sky at the road's end; now yellow-tiled roofs were just visible humped out of the wheatland, with the church standing guard over them, it's buttresses as bowed as the legs of a bulldog. At the sight of the village a certain spring came back to Telemachus's fatigue-sodden legs. He noticed with envy that Lyaeus took little skips as he walked. "If we properly exploited our exports we should be the richest people in Europe," the universal agent kept shouting with far-flung gestures of despair. And the last they heard from him as they left him to turn into the manure-littered, chicken-noisy courtyard of the Posada de la Luna was, "_¡Qué pueblo indecente!_... What a beastly town ... yet if they exploited with energy, with modern energy, their exports...." _IX: An Inverted Midas_ Every age must have had choice spirits whose golden fingers turned everything they touched to commonplace. Since we know our own literature best it seems unreasonably well equipped with these inverted Midases--though the fact that all Anglo-American writing during the last century has been so exclusively of the middle classes, by the middle classes and for the middle classes must count for something. Still Rome had her Marcus Aurelius, and we may be sure that platitudes would have obscured the slanting sides of the pyramids had stone-cutting in the reign of Cheops been as disastrously easy as is printing to-day. The addition of the typewriter to the printing-press has given a new and horrible impetus to the spread of half-baked thought. The labor of graving on stone or of baking tablets of brick or even of scrawling letters on paper with a pen is no longer a curb on the dangerous fluency of the inverted Midas. He now lolls in a Morris chair, sipping iced tea, dictating to four blonde and two dark-haired stenographers; three novels, a couple of books of travel and a short story written at once are nothing to a really enterprising universal genius. Poor Julius Caesar with his letters! We complain that we have no supermen nowadays, that we can't live as much or as widely or as fervently or get through so much work as could Pico della Mirandola or Erasmus or Politian, that the race drifts towards mental and physical anæmia. I deny it. With the typewriter all these things shall be added unto us. This age too has its great universal geniuses. They overrun the seven continents and their respective seas. Accompanied by mænadic bands of stenographers, and a music of typewriters deliriously clicking, they go about the world, catching all the butterflies, rubbing the bloom off all the plums, tunneling mountains, bridging seas, smoothing the facets off ideas so that they may be swallowed harmlessly like pills. With true Anglo-Saxon conceit we had thought that our own Mr. Wells was the most universal of these universal geniuses. He has so diligently brought science, ethics, sex, marriage, sociology, God, and everything else--properly deodorized, of course--to the desk of the ordinary man, that he may lean back in his swivel-chair and receive faint susuration from the sense of progress and the complexity of life, without even having to go to the window to look at the sparrows sitting in rows on the telephone-wires, so that really it seemed inconceivable that anyone should be more universal. It was rumored that there lay the ultimate proof of Anglo-Saxon ascendancy. What other race had produced a great universal genius? But all that was before the discovery of Blasco Ibáñez. On the backs of certain of Blasco Ibáñez's novels published by the Casa Prometeo in Valencia is this significant advertisement: _Obras de Vulgarización Popular_ ("Works of Popular Vulgarization"). Under it is an astounding list of volumes, all either translated or edited or arranged, if not written from cover to cover, by one tireless pen,--I mean typewriter. Ten volumes of universal history, three volumes of the French Revolution translated from Michelet, a universal geography, a social history, works on science, cookery and house-cleaning, nine volumes of Blasco Ibáñez's own history of the European war, and a translation of the Arabian Nights, a thousand and one of them without an hour missing. "Works of Popular Vulgarization." I admit that in Spanish the word _vulgarización_ has not yet sunk to its inevitable meaning, but can it long stand such a strain? Add to that list a round two dozen novels and some books of travel, and who can deny that Blasco Ibáñez is a great universal genius? Read his novels and you will find that he has looked at the stars and knows Lord Kelvin's theory of vortices and the nebular hypothesis and the direction of ocean currents and the qualities of kelp and the direction the codfish go in Iceland waters when the northeast wind blows; that he knows about Gothic architecture and Byzantine painting, the social movement in Jerez and the exports of Patagonia, the wall-paper of Paris apartment houses and the red paste with which countesses polish their fingernails in Monte Carlo. The very pattern of a modern major-general. And, like the great universal geniuses of the Renaissance, he has lived as well as thought and written. He is said to have been thirty times in prison, six times deputy; he has been a cowboy in the pampas of Argentina; he has founded a city in Patagonia with a bullring and a bust of Cervantes in the middle of it; he has rounded the Horn on a sailing-ship in a hurricane, and it is whispered that like Victor Hugo he eats lobsters with the shells on. He hobnobs with the universe. One must admit, too, that Blasco Ibáñez's universe is a bulkier, burlier universe than Mr. Wells's. One is strangely certain that the axle of Mr. Wells's universe is fixed in some suburb of London, say Putney, where each house has a bit of garden where waddles an asthmatic pet dog, where people drink tea weak, with milk in it, before a gas-log, where every bookcase makes a futile effort to impinge on infinity through the encyclopedia, where life is a monotonous going and coming, swathed in clothes that must above all be respectable, to business and from business. But who can say where Blasco Ibáñez's universe centers? It is in constant progression. Starting, as Walt Whitman from fish-shaped Paumonauk, from the fierce green fertility of Valencia, city of another great Spanish conqueror, the Cid, he had marched on the world in battle array. The whole history comes out in the series of novels at this moment being translated in such feverish haste for the edification of the American public. The beginnings are stories of the peasants of the fertile plain round about Valencia, of the fishermen and sailors of El Grao, the port, a sturdy violent people living amid a snappy fury of vegetation unexampled in Europe. His method is inspired to a certain extent by Zola, taking from him a little of the newspaper-horror mode of realism, with inevitable murder and sudden death in the last chapters. Yet he expresses that life vividly, although even then more given to grand vague ideas than to a careful scrutiny of men and things. He is at home in the strong communal feeling, in the individual anarchism, in the passionate worship of the water that runs through the fields to give life and of the blades of wheat that give bread and of the wine that gives joy, which is the moral make-up of the Valencian peasant. He is sincerely indignant about the agrarian system, about social inequality, and is full of the revolutionary bravado of his race. A typical novel of this period is _La Barraca_, a story of a peasant family that takes up land which has lain vacant for years under the curse of the community, since the eviction of the tenants, who had held it for generations, by a landlord who was murdered as a result, on a lonely road by the father of the family he had turned out. The struggle of these peasants against their neighbours is told with a good deal of feeling, and the culmination in a rifle fight in an irrigation ditch is a splendid bit of blood and thunder. There are many descriptions of local customs, such as the Tribunal of Water that sits once a week under one of the portals of Valencia cathedral to settle conflicts of irrigation rights, a little dragged in by the heels, to be sure, but still worth reading. Yet even in these early novels one feels over and over again the force of that phrase "popular vulgarization." Valencia is being vulgarized for the benefit of the universe. The proletariat is being vulgarized for the benefit of the people who buy novels. From Valencia raids seem to have been made on other parts of Spain. _Sonnica la Cortesana_ gives you antique Saguntum and the usual "Aves," wreaths, flute-players and other claptrap of costume novels. In _La Catedral_ you have Toledo, the church, socialism and the modern world in the shadow of Gothic spires. _La Bodega_ takes you into the genial air of the wine vaults of Jerez-de-la-Frontera, with smugglers, processions blessing the vineyards and agrarian revolt in the background. Up to now they have been Spanish novels written for Spaniards; it is only with _Sangre y Arena_ that the virus of a European reputation shows results. In _Sangre y Arena_, to be sure, you learn that _toreros_ use scent, have a home life, and are seduced by passionate Baudelairian ladies of the smart set who plant white teeth in their brown sinewy arms and teach them to smoke opium cigarettes. You see _toreros_ taking the sacraments before going into the ring and you see them tossed by the bull while the crowd, which a moment before had been crying "hola" as if it didn't know that something was going wrong, gets very pale and chilly and begins to think what dreadful things _corridas_ are anyway, until the arrival of the next bull makes them forget it. All of which is good fun when not obscured by grand, vague ideas, and incidentally sells like hot cakes. Thenceforward the Casa Prometeo becomes an exporting house dealing in the good Spanish products of violence and sunshine, blood, voluptuousness and death, as another vulgarizer put it. Next comes the expedition to South America and _The Argonauts_ appears. The Atlantic is bridged,--there open up rich veins of picturesqueness and new grand vague ideas, all in full swing when the war breaks out. Blasco Ibáñez meets the challenge nobly, and very soon, with _The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse_, which captures the Allied world and proves again the mot about prophets. So without honor in its own country is the _Four Horsemen_ that the English translation rights are sold for a paltry three thousand pesetas. But the great success in England and America soon shows that we can appreciate the acumen of a neutral who came in and rooted for our side; so early in the race too! While the iron is still hot another four hundred pages of well-sugared pro-Ally propaganda appears, _Mare Nostrum_, which mingles Ulysses and scientific information about ocean currents, Amphitrite and submarines, Circe and a vamping Theda Bara who was really a German Spy, in one grand chant of praise before the Mumbo-Jumbo of nationalism. _Los Enemigos de la Mujer_, the latest production, abandons Spain entirely and plants itself in the midst of princes and countesses, all elaborately pro-Ally, at Monte Carlo. Forgotten the proletarian tastes of his youth, the local color he loved to lay on so thickly, the Habañera atmosphere; only the grand vague ideas subsist in the cosmopolite, and the fluency, that fatal Latin fluency. And now the United States, the home of the blonde stenographer and the typewriter and the press agent. What are we to expect from the combination of Blasco Ibáñez and Broadway? At any rate the movies will profit. Yet one can't help wishing that Blasco Ibáñez had not learnt the typewriter trick so early. Print so easily spins a web of the commonplace over the fine outlines of life. And Blasco Ibáñez need not have been an inverted Midas. His is a superbly Mediterranean type, with something of Arretino, something of Garibaldi, something of Tartarin of Tarascon. Blustering, sensual, enthusiastic, living at bottom in a real world--which can hardly be said of Anglo-Saxon vulgarizers--even if it is a real world obscured by grand vague ideas, Blasco Ibáñez's mere energy would have produced interesting things if it had not found such easy and immediate vent in the typewriter. Bottle up a man like that for a lifetime without means of expression and he'll produce memoirs equal to Marco Polo and Casanova, but let his energies flow out evenly without resistance through a corps of clicking typewriters and all you have is one more popular novelist. It is unfortunate too that Blasco Ibáñez and the United States should have discovered each other at this moment. They will do each other no good. We have an abundance both of vague grand ideas and of popular novelists, and we are the favorite breeding place of the inverted Midas. We need writing that shall be acid, with sharp edges on it, yeasty to leaven the lump of glucose that the combination of the ideals of the man in the swivel-chair with decayed puritanism has made of our national consciousness. Of course Blasco Ibáñez in America will only be a seven days' marvel. Nothing is ever more than that. But why need we pretend each time that our seven days' marvels are the great eternal things? Then, too, if the American public is bound to take up Spain it might as well take up the worth-while things instead of the works of popular vulgarization. They have enough of those in their bookcases as it is. And in Spain there is a novelist like Baroja, essayists like Unamuno and Azorín, poets like Valle Inclán and Antonio Machado, ... but I suppose they will shine with the reflected glory of the author of the _Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse_. _X: Talk by the Road_ When they woke up it was dark. They were cold. Their legs were stiff. They lay each along one edge of a tremendously wide bed, between them a tangle of narrow sheets and blankets. Telemachus raised himself to a sitting position and put his feet, that were still swollen, gingerly to the floor. He drew them up again with a jerk and sat with his teeth chattering hunched on the edge of the bed. Lyaeus burrowed into the blankets and went back to sleep. For a long while Telemachus could not thaw his frozen wits enough to discover what noise had waked him up. Then it came upon him suddenly that huge rhythms were pounding about him, sounds of shaken tambourines and castanettes and beaten dish-pans and roaring voices. Someone was singing in shrill tremolo above the din a song of which each verse seemed to end with the phrase, "_y mañana Carnaval_." "To-morrow's Carnival. Wake up," he cried out to Lyaeus, and pulled on his trousers. Lyaeus sat up and rubbed his eyes. "I smell wine," he said. Telemachus, through hunger and stiffness and aching feet and the thought of what his mother Penelope would say about these goings on, if they ever came to her ears, felt a tremendous elation flare through him. "Come on, they're dancing," he cried dragging Lyaeus out on the gallery that overhung the end of the court. "Don't forget the butterfly net, Tel." "What for?" "To catch your gesture, what do you think?" Telemachus caught Lyaeus by the shoulders and shook him. As they wrestled they caught glimpses of the courtyard full of couples bobbing up and down in a _jota_. In the doorway stood two guitar players and beside them a table with pitchers and glasses and a glint of spilt wine. Feeble light came from an occasional little constellation of olive-oil lamps. When the two of them pitched down stairs together and shot out reeling among the dancers everybody cried out: "_Hola_," and shouted that the foreigners must sing a song. "After dinner," cried Lyaeus as he straightened his necktie. "We haven't eaten for a year and a half!" The _padrón_, a red thick-necked individual with a week's white bristle on his face, came up to them holding out hands as big as hams. "You are going to Toledo for Carnival? O how lucky the young are, travelling all over the world." He turned to the company with a gesture; "I was like that when I was young." They followed him into the kitchen, where they ensconced themselves on either side of a cave of a fireplace in which burned a fire all too small. The hunchbacked woman with a face like tanned leather who was tending the numerous steaming pots that stood about the hearth, noticing that they were shivering, heaped dry twigs on it that crackled and burst into flame and gave out a warm spicy tang. "To-morrow's Carnival," she said. "We mustn't stint ourselves." Then she handed them each a plate of soup full of bread in which poached eggs floated, and the _padrón_ drew the table near the fire and sat down opposite them, peering with interest into their faces while they ate. After a while he began talking. From outside the hand-clapping and the sound of castanettes continued interrupted by intervals of shouting and laughter and an occasional snatch from the song that ended every verse with "_y mañana Carnaval_." "I travelled when I was your age," he said. "I have been to America ... Nueva York, Montreal, Buenos Aires, Chicago, San Francisco.... Selling those little nuts.... Yes, peanuts. What a country! How many laws there are there, how many policemen. When I was young I did not like it, but now that I am old and own an inn and daughters and all that, _vamos_, I understand. You see in Spain we all do just as we like; then, if we are the sort that goes to church we repent afterwards and fix it up with God. In European, civilized, modern countries everybody learns what he's got to do and what he must not do.... That's why they have so many laws.... Here the police are just to help the government plunder and steal all it wants.... But that's not so in America...." "The difference is," broke in Telemachus, "as Butler put it, between living under the law and living under grace. I should rather live under gra...." But he thought of the maxims of Penelope and was silent. "But after all we know how to sing," said the _Padrón_. "Will you have coffee with cognac?... And poets, man alive, what poets!" The _padrón_ stuck out his chest, put one hand in the black sash that held up his trousers and recited, emphasizing the rhythm with the cognac bottle: 'Aquí está Don Juan Tenorio; no hay hombre para él ... Búsquenle los reñidores, cérquenle los jugadores, quien se précie que le ataje, a ver si hay quien le aventaje en juego, en lid o en amores.' He finished with a flourish and poured more cognac into the coffee cups. "_¡Que bonito!_ How pretty!" cried the old hunchbacked woman who sat on her heels in the fireplace. "That's what we do," said the _padrón_. "We brawl and gamble and seduce women, and we sing and we dance, and then we repent and the priest fixes it up with God. In America they live according to law." Feeling well-toasted by the fire and well-warmed with food and drink, Lyaeus and Telemachus went to the inn door and looked out on the broad main street of the village where everything was snowy white under the cold stare of the moon. The dancing had stopped in the courtyard. A group of men and boys was moving slowly up the street, each one with a musical instrument. There were the two guitars, frying pans, castanettes, cymbals, and a goatskin bottle of wine that kept being passed from hand to hand. Each time the bottle made a round a new song started. And so they moved slowly up the street in the moonlight. "Let's join them," said Lyaeus. "No, I want to get up early so as...." "To see the gesture by daylight!" cried Lyaeus jeeringly. Then he went on: "Tel, you live under the law. Under the law there can be no gestures, only machine movements." Then he ran off and joined the group of men and boys who were singing and drinking. Telemachus went back to bed. On his way upstairs he cursed the maxims of his mother Penelope. But at any rate to-morrow, in Carnival-time, he would feel the gesture. _XI: Antonio Machado: Poet of Castile_ "I spent fifty thousand pesetas in a year at the military school.... _J'aime le chic_," said the young artillery officer of whom I had asked the way. He was leading me up the steep cobbled hill that led to the irregular main street of Segovia. A moment before we had passed under the aqueduct that had soared above us arch upon arch into the crimson sky. He had snapped tightly gloved fingers and said: "And what's that good for, I'd like to know. I'd give it all for a puff of gasoline from a Hispano-Suizo.... D'you know the Hispano-Suizo? And look at this rotten town! There's not a street in it I can speed on in a motorcycle without running down some fool old woman or a squalling brat or other.... Who's this gentleman you are going to see?" "He's a poet," I said. "I like poetry too. I write it ... light, elegant, about light elegant women." He laughed and twirled the tiny waxed spike that stuck out from each side of his moustache. He left me at the end of the street I was looking for, and after an elaborate salute walked off saying: "To think that you should come here from New York to look for an address in such a shabby street, and I so want to go to New York. If I was a poet I wouldn't live here." The name on the street corner was _Calle de los Desemparados_.... "Street of Abandoned Children." * * * * * We sat a long while in the casino, twiddling spoons in coffee-glasses while a wax-pink fat man played billiards in front of us, being ponderously beaten by a lean brownish swallow-tail with yellow face and walrus whiskers that emitted a rasping _Bueno_ after every play. There was talk of Paris and possible new volumes of verse, homage to Walt Whitman, Maragall, questioning about Emily Dickinson. About us was a smell of old horsehair sofas, a buzz of the poignant musty ennui of old towns left centuries ago high and dry on the beach of history. The group grew. Talk of painting: Zuloaga had not come yet, the Zubiaurre brothers had abandoned their Basque coast towns, seduced by the bronze-colored people and the saffron hills of the province of Segovia. Sorolla was dying, another had gone mad. At last someone said, "It's stifling here, let's walk. There is full moon to-night." There was no sound in the streets but the irregular clatter of our footsteps. The slanting moonlight cut the street into two triangular sections, one enormously black, the other bright, engraved like a silver plate with the lines of doors, roofs, windows, ornaments. Overhead the sky was white and blue like buttermilk. Blackness cut across our path, then there was dazzling light through an arch beyond. Outside the gate we sat in a ring on square fresh-cut stones in which you could still feel a trace of the warmth of the sun. To one side was the lime-washed wall of a house, white fire, cut by a wide oaken door where the moon gave a restless glitter to the spiked nails and the knocker, and above the door red geraniums hanging out of a pot, their color insanely bright in the silver-white glare. The other side a deep glen, the shimmering tops of poplar trees and the sound of a stream. In the dark above the arch of the gate a trembling oil flame showed up the green feet of a painted Virgin. Everybody was talking about _El Buscón_, a story of Quevedo's that takes place mostly in Segovia, a wandering story of thieves and escapes by night through the back doors of brothels, of rope ladders dangling from the windows of great ladies, of secrets overheard in confessionals, and trysts under bridges, and fingers touching significantly in the holy-water fonts of tall cathedrals. A ghostlike wraith of dust blew through the gate. The man next me shivered. "The dead are stronger than the living," he said. "How little we have; and they...." In the quaver of his voice was a remembering of long muletrains jingling through the gate, queens in litters hung with patchwork curtains from Samarcand, gold brocades splashed with the clay of deep roads, stained with the blood of ambuscades, bales of silks from Valencia, travelling gangs of Moorish artisans, heavy armed Templars on their way to the Sepulchre, wandering minstrels, sneakthieves, bawds, rowdy strings of knights and foot-soldiers setting out with wine-skins at their saddlebows to cross the passes towards the debatable lands of Extremadura, where there were infidels to kill and cattle to drive off and village girls to rape, all when the gate was as new and crisply cut out of clean stone as the blocks we were sitting on. Down in the valley a donkey brayed long and dismally. "They too have their nostalgias," said someone sentimentally. "What they of the old time did not have," came a deep voice from under a bowler hat, "was the leisure to be sad. The sweetness of putrefaction, the long remembering of palely colored moods; they had the sun, we have the colors of its setting. Who shall say which is worth more?" The man next to me had got to his feet. "A night like this with a moon like this," he said, "we should go to the ancient quarter of the witches." Gravel crunched under our feet down the road that led out of moonlight into the darkness of the glen--to _San Millán de las brujas_. * * * * * You cannot read any Spanish poet of to-day without thinking now and then of Rubén Darío, that prodigious Nicaraguan who collected into his verse all the tendencies of poetry in France and America and the Orient and poured them in a turgid cataract, full of mud and gold-dust, into the thought of the new generation in Spain. Overflowing with beauty and banality, patched out with images and ornaments from Greece and Egypt and France and Japan and his own Central America, symbolist and romantic and Parnassian all at once, Rubén Darío's verse is like those doorways of the Spanish Renaissance where French and Moorish and Italian motives jostle in headlong arabesques, where the vulgarest routine stone-chipping is interlocked with designs and forms of rare beauty and significance. Here and there among the turgid muddle, out of the impact of unassimilated things, comes a spark of real poetry. And that spark can be said--as truly as anything of the sort can be said--to be the motive force of the whole movement of renovation in Spanish poetry. Of course the poets have not been content to be influenced by the outside world only through Darío. Baudelaire and Verlaine had a very large direct influence, once the way was opened, and their influence succeeded in curbing the lush impromptu manner of romantic Spanish verse. In Antonio Machado's work--and he is beginning to be generally considered the central figure--there is a restraint and terseness of phrase rare in any poetry. I do not mean to imply that Machado can be called in any real sense a pupil of either Darío or Verlaine; rather one would say that in a generation occupied largely in more or less unsuccessful imitation of these poets, Machado's poetry stands out as particularly original and personal. In fact, except for the verse of Juan Ramón Jiménez, it would be in America and England rather than in Spain, in Aldington and Amy Lowell, that one would find analogous aims and methods. The influence of the symbolists and the turbulent experimenting of the Nicaraguan broke down the bombastic romantic style current in Spain, as it was broken down everywhere else in the middle nineteenth century. In Machado's work a new method is being built up, that harks back more to early ballads and the verse of the first moments of the Renaissance than to anything foreign, but which shows the same enthusiasm for the rhythms of ordinary speech and for the simple pictorial expression of undoctored emotion that we find in the renovators of poetry the world over. _Campos de Castilla_, his first volume to be widely read, marks an epoch in Spanish poetry. Antonio Machado's verse is taken up with places. It is obsessed with the old Spanish towns where he has lived, with the mellow sadness of tortuous streets and of old houses that have soaked up the lives of generations upon generations of men, crumbling in the flaming silence of summer noons or in the icy blast off the mountains in winter. Though born in Andalusia, the bitter strength of the Castilian plain, where half-deserted cities stand aloof from the world, shrunken into their walls, still dreaming of the ages of faith and conquest, has subjected his imagination, and the purity of Castilian speech has dominated his writing, until his poems seem as Castilian as Don Quixote. "My childhood: memories of a courtyard in Seville, and of a bright garden where lemons hung ripening. My youth: twenty years in the land of Castile. My history: a few events I do not care to remember." So Machado writes of himself. He was born in the eighties, has been a teacher of French in government schools in Soria and Baeza and at present in Segovia--all old Spanish cities very mellow and very stately--and has made the migration to Paris customary with Spanish writers and artists. He says in the _Poema de un Día_: Here I am, already a teacher of modern languages, who yesterday was a master of the gai scavoir and the nightingale's apprentice. He has published three volumes of verse, _Soledades_ ("Solitudes"), _Campos de Castilla_ ("Fields of Castile"), and _Soledades y Galerías_ ("Solitudes and Galleries"), and recently a government institution, the Residencia de Estudiantes, has published his complete works up to date. The following translations are necessarily inadequate, as the poems depend very much on modulations of rhythm and on the expressive fitting together of words impossible to render in a foreign language. He uses rhyme comparatively little, often substituting assonance in accordance with the peculiar traditions of Spanish prosody. I have made no attempt to imitate his form exactly. I Yes, come away with me--fields of Soria, quiet evenings, violet mountains, aspens of the river, green dreams of the grey earth, bitter melancholy of the crumbling city-- perhaps it is that you have become the background of my life. Men of the high Numantine plain, who keep God like old--Christians, may the sun of Spain fill you with joy and light and abundance! II A frail sound of a tunic trailing across the infertile earth, and the sonorous weeping of the old bells. The dying embers of the horizon smoke. White ancestral ghosts go lighting the stars. --Open the balcony-window. The hour of illusion draws near... The afternoon has gone to sleep and the bells dream. III Figures in the fields against the sky! Two slow oxen plough on a hillside early in autumn, and between the black heads bent down under the weight of the yoke, hangs and sways a basket of reeds, a child's cradle; And behind the yoke stride a man who leans towards the earth and a woman who, into the open furrows, throws the seed. Under a cloud of carmine and flame, in the liquid green gold of the setting, their shadows grow monstrous. IV Naked is the earth and the soul howls to the wan horizon like a hungry she-wolf. What do you seek, poet, in the sunset? Bitter going, for the path weighs one down, the frozen wind, and the coming night and the bitterness of distance.... On the white path the trunks of frustrate trees show black, on the distant mountains there is gold and blood. The sun dies.... What do you seek, poet, in the sunset? V Silver hills and grey ploughed lands, violet outcroppings of rock through which the Duero traces its curve like a cross-bow about Soria, dark oak-wood, wild cliffs, bald peaks, and the white roads and the aspens of the river. Afternoons of Soria, mystic and warlike, to-day I am very sad for you, sadness of love, Fields of Soria, where it seems that the rocks dream, come with me! Violet rocky outcroppings, silver hills and grey ploughed lands. VI We think to create festivals of love out of our love, to burn new incense on untrodden mountains; and to keep the secret of our pale faces, and why in the bacchanals of life we carry empty glasses, while with tinkling echoes and laughing foams the gold must of the grape.... A hidden bird among the branches of the solitary park whistles mockery.... We feel the shadow of a dream in our wine-glass, and something that is earth in our flesh feels the dampness of the garden like a caress. VII I have been back to see the golden aspens, aspens of the road along the Duero between San Polo and San Saturio, beyond the old stiff walls of Soria, barbican towards Aragon of the Castilian lands. These poplars of the river, that chime when the wind blows their dry leaves to the sound of the water, have in their bark the names of lovers, initials and dates. Aspens of love where yesterday the branches were full of nightingales, aspens that to-morrow will sing under the scented wind of the springtime, aspens of love by the water that speeds and goes by dreaming, aspens of the bank of the Duero, come away with me. VIII Cold Soria, clear Soria, key of the outlands, with the warrior castle in ruins beside the Duero, and the stiff old walls, and the blackened houses. Dead city of barons and soldiers and huntsmen, whose portals bear the shields of a hundred hidalgos; city of hungry greyhounds, of lean greyhounds that swarm among the dirty lanes and howl at midnight when the crows caw. Cold Soria! The clock of the Lawcourts has struck one. Soria, city of Castile, so beautiful under the moon. IX AT A FRIEND'S BURIAL They put him away in the earth a horrible July afternoon under a sun of fire. A step from the open grave grew roses with rotting petals among geraniums of bitter fragrance, red-flowered. The sky a pale blue. A wind hard and dry. Hanging on the thick ropes, the two gravediggers let the coffin heavily down into the grave. It struck the bottom with a sharp sound, solemnly, in the silence. The sound of a coffin striking the earth is something unutterably solemn. The heavy clods broke into dust over the black coffin. A white mist of dust rose in the air out of the deep grave. And you, without a shadow now, sleep. Long peace to your bones. For all time you sleep a tranquil and a real sleep. X THE IBERIAN GOD Like the cross-bowman, the gambler in the song, the Iberian had an arrow for his god when he shattered the grain with hail and ruined the fruits of autumn; and a gloria when he fattened the barley and the oats that were to make bread to-morrow. "God of ruin, I worship because I wait and because I fear. I bend in prayer to the earth a blasphemous heart. "Lord, through whom I snatch my bread with pain, I know your strength, I know my slavery. Lord of the clouds in the east that trample the country-side, of dry autumns and late frosts and of the blasts of heat that scorch the harvests! "Lord of the iris in the green meadows where the sheep graze, Lord of the fruit the worms gnaw and of the hut the whirlwind shatters, your breath gives life to the fire in the hearth, your warmth ripens the tawny grain, and your holy hand, St. John's eve, hardens the stone of the green olive. "Lord of riches and poverty, Of fortune and mishap, who gives to the rich luck and idleness, and pain and hope to the poor! "Lord, Lord, in the inconstant wheel of the year I have sown my sowing that has an equal chance with the coins of a gambler sown on the gambling-table! "Lord, a father to-day, though stained with yesterday's blood, two-faced of love and vengeance, to you, dice cast into the wind, goes my prayer, blasphemy and praise!" This man who insults God in his altars, without more care of the frown of fate, also dreamed of paths across the seas and said: "It is God who walks upon the waters." Is it not he who put God above war, beyond fate, beyond the earth, beyond the sea and death? Did he not give the greenest bough of the dark-green Iberian oak for God's holy bonfire, and for love flame one with God? But to-day ... What does a day matter? for the new household gods there are plains in forest shade and green boughs in the old oak-woods. Though long the land waits for the curved plough to open the first furrow, there is sowing for God's grain under thistles and burdocks and nettles. What does a day matter? Yesterday waits for to-morrow, to-morrow for infinity; men of Spain, neither is the past dead, nor is to-morrow, nor yesterday, written. Who has seen the face of the Iberian God? I wait for the Iberian man who with strong hands will carve out of Castilian oak The parched God of the grey land. _XII: A Catalan Poet_ _It is time for sailing; the swallow has come chattering and the mellow west wind; the meadows are already in bloom; the sea is silent and the waves the rough winds pummeled. Up anchors and loose the hawsers, sailor, set every stitch of canvas. This I, Priapos the harbor god, command you, man, that you may sail for all manner of ladings._ (_Leonidas in the Greek Anthology._) Catalonia like Greece is a country of mountains and harbors, where the farmers and herdsmen of the hills can hear in the morning the creak of oars and the crackling of cordage as the great booms of the wing-shaped sails are hoisted to the tops of the stumpy masts of the fishermen's boats. Barcelona with its fine harbor nestling under the towering slopes of Montjuic has been a trading city since most ancient times. In the middle ages the fleets of its stocky merchants were the economic scaffolding which underlay the pomp and heraldry of the great sea kingdom of the Aragonese. To this day you can find on old buildings the arms of the kings of Aragon and the counts of Barcelona in Mallorca and Manorca and Ibiza and Sardinia and Sicily and Naples. It follows that when Catalonia begins to reëmerge as a nucleus of national consciousness after nearly four centuries of subjection to Castile, poets speaking Catalan, writing Catalan, shall be poets of the mountains and of the sea. Yet this time the motor force is not the sailing of white argosies towards the east. It is textile mills, stable, motionless, drawing about them muddled populations, raw towns, fattening to new arrogance the descendants of those stubborn burghers who gave the kings of Aragon and of Castile such vexing moments. (There's a story of one king who was so chagrined by the tight-pursed contrariness of the Cortes of Barcelona that he died of a broken heart in full parliament assembled.) This growth of industry during the last century, coupled with the reawakening of the whole Mediterranean, took form politically in the Catalan movement for secession from Spain, and in literature in the resurrection of Catalan thought and Catalan language. Naturally the first generation was not interested in the manufactures that were the dynamo that generated the ferment of their lives. They had first to state the emotions of the mountains and the sea and of ancient heroic stories that had been bottled up in their race during centuries of inexpressiveness. For another generation perhaps the symbols will be the cluck of oiled cogs, the whirring of looms, the dragon forms of smoke spewed out of tall chimneys, and the substance will be the painful struggle for freedom, for sunnier, richer life of the huddled mobs of the slaves of the machines. For the first men conscious of their status as Catalans the striving was to make permanent their individual lives in terms of political liberty, of the mist-capped mountains and the changing sea. Of this first generation was Juan Maragall who died in 1912, five years after the shooting of Ferrer, after a life spent almost entirely in Barcelona writing for newspapers,--as far as one can gather, a completely peaceful well-married existence, punctuated by a certain amount of political agitation in the cause of the independence of Catalonia, the life of a placid and recognized literary figure; "_un maître_" the French would have called him. Perhaps six centuries before, in Palma de Mallorca, a young nobleman, a poet, a skilled player on the lute had stood tiptoe for attainment before the high-born and very stately lady he had courted through many moonlight nights, when her eye had chilled his quivering love suddenly and she had pulled open her bodice with both hands and shown him her breasts, one white and firm and the other swollen black and purple with cancer. The horror of the sight of such beauty rotting away before his eyes had turned all his passion inward and would have made him a saint had his ideas been more orthodox; as it was the Blessed Ramón Lull lived to write many mystical works in Catalan and Latin, in which he sought the love of God in the love of Earth after the manner of the sufi of Persia. Eventually he attained bloody martyrdom arguing with the sages in some North African town. Somehow the spirit of the tortured thirteenth-century mystic was born again in the calm Barcelona journalist, whose life was untroubled by the impact of events as could only be a life comprising the last half of the nineteenth century. In Maragall's writings modulated in the lovely homely language of the peasants and fishermen of Catalonia, there flames again the passionate metaphor of Lull. Here is a rough translation of one of his best known poems: At sunset time drinking at the spring's edge I drank down the secrets of mysterious earth. Deep in the runnel I saw the stainless water born out of darkness for the delight of my mouth, and it poured into my throat and with its clear spurting there filled me entirely mellowness of wisdom. When I stood straight and looked, mountains and woods and meadows seemed to me otherwise, everything altered. Above the great sunset there already shone through the glowing carmine contours of the clouds the white sliver of the new moon. It was a world in flower and the soul of it was I. I the fragrant soul of the meadows that expands at flower-time and reaping-time. I the peaceful soul of the herds that tinkle half-hidden by the tall grass. I the soul of the forest that sways in waves like the sea, and has as far horizons. And also I was the soul of the willow tree that gives every spring its shade. I the sheer soul of the cliffs where the mist creeps up and scatters. And the unquiet soul of the stream that shrieks in shining waterfalls. I was the blue soul of the pond that looks with strange eyes on the wanderer. I the soul of the all-moving wind and the humble soul of opening flowers. I was the height of the high peaks... The clouds caressed me with great gestures and the wide love of misty spaces clove to me, placid. I felt the delightfulness of springs born in my flanks, gifts of the glaciers; and in the ample quietude of horizons I felt the reposeful sleep of storms. And when the sky opened about me and the sun laughed on my green planes people, far off, stood still all day staring at my sovereign beauty. But I, full of the lust that makes furious the sea and mountains lifted myself up strongly through the sky lifted the diversity of my flanks and entrails... At sunset time drinking at the spring's edge I drank down the secrets of mysterious earth. The sea and mountains, mist and cattle and yellow broom-flowers, and fishing boats with lateen sails like dark wings against the sunrise towards Mallorca: delight of the nose and the eyes and the ears in all living perceptions until the poison of other-worldliness wells up suddenly in him and he is a Christian and a mystic full of echoes of old soul-torturing. In Maragall's most expressive work, a sequence of poems called _El Comte Arnau_, all this is synthesized. These are from the climax. All the voices of the earth acclaim count Arnold because from the dark trial he has come back triumphant. "Son of the earth, son of the earth, count Arnold, now ask, now ask what cannot you do?" "Live, live, live forever, I would never die: to be like a wheel revolving; to live with wine and a sword." "Wheels roll, roll, but they count the years." "Then I would be a rock immobile to suns or storms." "Rock lives without life forever impenetrable." "Then the ever-moving sea that opens a path for all things." "The sea is alone, alone, you go accompanied." "Then be the air when it flames in the light of the deathless sun." "But air and sun are loveless, ignorant of eternity." "Then to be man more than man to be earth palpitant." "You shall be wheel and rock, you shall be the mist-veiled sea you shall be the air in flame, you shall be the whirling stars, you shall be man more than man for you have the will for it. You shall run the plains and hills, all the earth that is so wide, mounted on a horse of flame you shall be tireless, terrible as the tramp of the storms All the voices of earth will cry out whirling about you. They will call you spirit in torment call you forever damned." Night. All the beauty of Adalaisa asleep at the feet of naked Christ. Arnold goes pacing a dark path; there is silence among the mountains; in front of him the rustling lisp of a river, a pool.... Then it is lost and soundless. Arnold stands under the sheer portal. He goes searching the cells for Adalaisa and sees her sleeping, beautiful, prone at the feet of the naked Christ, without veil without kerchief, without cloak, gestureless, without any defense, there, sleeping.... She had a great head of turbulent hair. "How like fine silk your hair, Adalaisa," thinks Arnold. But he looks at her silently. She sleeps, she sleeps and little by little a flush spreads over all her face as if a dream had crept through her gently until she laughs aloud very softly with a tremulous flutter of the lips. "What amorous lips, Adalaisa," thinks Arnold. But he looks at her silently. A great sigh swells through her, sleeping, like a seawave, and fades to stillness. "What sighs swell in your breast, Adalaisa," thinks Arnold. But he stares at her silently. But when she opens her eyes he, awake, tingling, carries her off in his arms. When they burst out into the open fields it is day. But the fear of life gushes suddenly to muddy the dear wellspring of sensation, and the poet, beaten to his knees, writes: And when the terror-haunted moment comes to close these earthly eyes of mine, open for me, Lord, other greater eyes to look upon the immensity of your face. But before that moment comes, through the medium of an extraordinarily terse and unspoiled language, a language that has not lost its earthy freshness by mauling and softening at the hands of literary generations, what a lilting crystal-bright vision of things. It is as if the air of the Mediterranean itself, thin, brilliant, had been hammered into cadences. The verse is leaping and free, full of echoes and refrains. The images are sudden and unlabored like the images in the Greek anthology: a hermit released from Nebuchadnezzar's spell gets to his feet "like a bear standing upright"; fishing boats being shoved off the beach slide into the sea one by one "like village girls joining a dance"; on a rough day the smacks with reefed sails "skip like goats at the harbor entrance." There are phrases like "the great asleepness of the mountains"; "a long sigh like a seawave through her sleep"; "my speech of her is like a flight of birds that lead your glance into intense blue sky"; "the disquieting unquiet sea." Perhaps it is that the eyes are sharpened by the yearning to stare through the brilliant changing forms of things into some intenser beyond. Perhaps it takes a hot intoxicating draught of divinity to melt into such white fire the various colors of the senses. Perhaps earthly joy is intenser for the beckoning flames of hell. The daily life, too, to which Maragall aspires seems strangely out of another age. That came home to me most strongly once, talking to a Catalan after a mountain scramble in the eastern end of Mallorca. We sat looking at the sea that was violet with sunset, where the sails of the homecoming fishing boats were the wan yellow of primroses. Behind us the hills were sharp pyrites blue. From a window in the adobe hut at one side of us came a smell of sizzling olive oil and tomatoes and peppers and the muffled sound of eggs being beaten. We were footsore, hungry, and we talked about women and love. And after all it was marriage that counted, he told me at last, women's bodies and souls and the love of them were all very well, but it was the ordered life of a family, children, that counted; the family was the immortal chain on which lives were strung; and he recited this quatrain, saying, in that proud awefilled tone with which Latins speak of creative achievement, "By our greatest poet, Juan Maragall": Canta esposa, fila i canta que el patí em faras suau Quan l'esposa canta i fila el casal s'adorm en pau. It was hard explaining how all our desires lay towards the completer and completer affirming of the individual, that we in Anglo-Saxon countries felt that the family was dead as a social unit, that new cohesions were in the making. "I want my liberty," he broke in, "as much as--as Byron did, liberty of thought and action." He was silent a moment; then he said simply, "But I want a wife and children and a family, mine, mine." Then the girl who was cooking leaned out of the window to tell us in soft Mallorquin that supper was ready. She had a full brown face flushed on the cheek-bones and given triangular shape like an El Greco madonna's face by the bright blue handkerchief knotted under the chin. Her breasts hung out from her body, solid like a Victory's under the sleek grey shawl as she leaned from the window. In her eyes that were sea-grey there was an unimaginable calm. I thought of Penelope sitting beside her loom in a smoky-raftered hall, grey eyes looking out on a sailless sea. And for a moment I understood the Catalan's phrase: the family was the chain on which lives were strung, and all of Maragall's lyricizing of wifehood, When the wife sits singing as she spins all the house can sleep in peace. From the fishermen's huts down the beach came an intense blue smoke of fires; above the soft rustle of the swell among the boats came the chatter of many sleepy voices, like the sound of sparrows in a city park at dusk. The day dissolved slowly in utter timelessness. And when the last fishing boat came out of the dark sea, the tall slanting sail folding suddenly as the wings of a sea-gull alighting, the red-brown face of the man in the bow was the face of returning Odysseus. It was not the continuity of men's lives I felt, but their oneness. On that beach, beside that sea, there was no time. When we were eating in the whitewashed room by the light of three brass olive oil lamps, I found that my argument had suddenly crumbled. What could I, who had come out of ragged and barbarous outlands, tell of the art of living to a man who had taught me both system and revolt? So am I, to whom the connubial lyrics of Patmore and Ella Wheeler Wilcox have always seemed inexpressible soiling of possible loveliness, forced to bow before the rich cadences with which Juan Maragall, Catalan, poet of the Mediterranean, celebrates the _familia_. And in Maragall's work it is always the Mediterranean that one feels, the Mediterranean and the men who sailed on it in black ships with bright pointed sails. Just as in Homer and Euripides and Pindar and Theocritus and in that tantalizing kaleidoscope, the Anthology, beyond the grammar and the footnotes and the desolation of German texts there is always the rhythm of sea waves and the smell of well-caulked ships drawn up on dazzling beaches, so in Maragall, beyond the graceful well-kept literary existence, beyond wife and children and pompous demonstrations in the cause of abstract freedom, there is the sea lashing the rocky shins of the Pyrenees,--actual, dangerous, wet. In this day when we Americans are plundering the earth far and near for flowers and seeds and ferments of literature in the hope, perhaps vain, of fallowing our thin soil with manure rich and diverse and promiscuous so that the somewhat sickly plants of our own culture may burst sappy and green through the steel and cement and inhibitions of our lives, we should not forget that northwest corner of the Mediterranean where the Langue d'Oc is as terse and salty as it was in the days of Pierre Vidal, whose rhythms of life, intrinsically Mediterranean, are finding new permanence--poetry richly ordered and lucid. To the Catalans of the last fifty years has fallen the heritage of the oar which the cunning sailor Odysseus dedicated to the Sea, the earth-shaker, on his last voyage. And the first of them is Maragall. _XIII: Talk by the Road_ On the top step Telemachus found a man sitting with his head in his hands moaning "_¡Ay de mí!_" over and over again. "I beg pardon," he said stiffly, trying to slip by. "Did you see the function this evening, sir?" asked the man looking up at Telemachus with tears streaming from his eyes. He had a yellow face with lean blue chin and jowls shaven close and a little waxed moustache that had lost all its swagger for the moment as he had the ends of it in his mouth. "What function?" "In the theatre.... I am an artist, an actor." He got to his feet and tried to twirl his ragged moustaches back into shape. Then he stuck out his chest, straightened his waistcoat so that the large watchchain clinked, and invited Telemachus to have a cup of coffee with him. They sat at the black oak table in front of the fire. The actor told how there had been only twelve people at his show. How was he to be expected to make his living if only twelve people came to see him? And the night before Carnival, too, when they usually got such a crowd. He'd learned a new song especially for the occasion, too good, too artistic for these pigs of provincials. "Here in Spain the stage is ruined, ruined!" he cried out finally. "How ruined?" asked Telemachus. "The _Zarzuela_ is dead. The days of the great writers of _zarzuela_ have gone never to return. O the music, the lightness, the jollity of the _zarzuelas_ of my father's time! My father was a great singer, a tenor whose voice was an enchantment.... I know the princely life of a great singer of _zarzuela_.... When a small boy I lived it.... And now look at me!" Telemachus thought how strangely out of place was the actor's anæmic wasplike figure in this huge kitchen where everything was dark, strong-smelling, massive. Black beams with here and there a trace of red daub on them held up the ceiling and bristled with square iron spikes from which hung hams and sausages and white strands of garlic. The table at which they sat was an oak slab, black from smoke and generations of spillings, firmly straddled on thick trestles. Over the fire hung a copper pot, sooty, with a glitter of grease on it where the soup had boiled over. When one leaned to put a bundle of sticks on the fire one could see up the chimney an oblong patch of blackness spangled with stars. On the edge of the hearth was the great hunched figure of the _padrón_, half asleep, a silk handkerchief round his head, watching the coffee-pot. "It was an elegant life, full of voyages," went on the actor. "South America, Naples, Sicily, and all over Spain. There were formal dinners, receptions, ceremonial dress.... Ladies of high society came to congratulate us.... I played all the child rôles.... When I was fourteen a duchess fell in love with me. And now, look at me, ragged, dying of hunger--not even able to fill a theatre in this hog of a village. In Spain they have lost all love of the art. All they want is foreign importations, Viennese musical comedies, smutty farces from Paris...." "With cognac or rum?" the _padrón_ roared out suddenly in his deep voice, swinging the coffee pot up out of the fire. "Cognac," said the actor. "What rotten coffee!" He gave little petulant sniffs as he poured sugar into his glass. The wail of a baby rose up suddenly out of the dark end of the kitchen. The actor took two handfuls of his hair and yanked at them. "_Ay_ my nerves!" he shrieked. The baby wailed louder in spasm after spasm of yelling. The actor jumped to his feet, "¡Dolóres, Dolóres, _ven acá_!" After he had called several times a girl came into the room padding softly on bare feet and stood before him tottering sleepily in the firelight. Her heavy lids hung over her eyes. A strand of black hair curled round her full throat and spread raggedly over her breasts. She had pulled a blanket over her shoulders but through a rent in her coarse nightgown the fire threw a patch of red glow curved like a rose petal about one brown thigh. "_¡Qué desvergonza'a!_... How shameless!" muttered the _padrón_. The actor was scolding her in a shrill endless whine. The girl stood still without answering, her teeth clenched to keep them from chattering. Then she turned without a word and brought the baby from the packing box in which he lay at the end of the room, and drawing the blanket about both her and the child crouched on her heels very close to the flame with her bare feet in the ashes. When the crying had ceased she turned to the actor with a full-lipped smile and said, "There's nothing the matter with him, Paco. He's not even hungry. You woke him up, the poor little angel, talking so loud." She got to her feet again, and with slow unspeakable dignity walked back and forth across the end of the room with the child at her breast. Each time she turned she swung the trailing blanket round with a sudden twist of her body from the hips. Telemachus watched her furtively, sniffing the hot aroma of coffee and cognac from his glass, and whenever she turned the muscles of his body drew into tight knots from joy. "_Es buena chica...._ She's a nice kid, from Malaga. I picked her up there. A little stupid.... But these days...." the actor was saying with much shrugging of the shoulders. "She dances well, but the public doesn't like her. _No tiene cara de parisiana._ She hasn't the Parisian air.... But these days, _vamos_, one can't be too fastidious. This taste for French plays, French women, French cuisine, it's ruined the Spanish theatre." The fire flared crackling. Telemachus sat sipping his coffee waiting for the unbearable delight of the swing of the girl's body as she turned to pace back towards him across the room. _XIV: Benavente's Madrid_ All the gravel paths of the Plaza Santa Ana were encumbered with wicker chairs. At one corner seven blind musicians all in a row, with violins, a cello, guitars and a mournful cornet, toodled and wheezed and twiddled through the "Blue Danube." At another a crumpled old man, with a monkey dressed in red silk drawers on his shoulder, ground out "_la Paloma_" from a hurdygurdy. In the middle of the green plot a fountain sparkled in the yellow light that streamed horizontally from the cafés fuming with tobacco smoke on two sides of the square, and ragged guttersnipes dipped their legs in the slimy basin round about it, splashing one another, rolling like little colts in the grass. From the cafés and the wicker chairs and tables, clink of glasses and dominoes, patter of voices, scuttle of waiters with laden trays, shouts of men selling shrimps, prawns, fried potatoes, watermelon, nuts in little cornucopias of red, green, or yellow paper. Light gleamed on the buff-colored disk of a table in front of me, on the rims of two beer-mugs, in the eyes of a bearded man with an aquiline nose very slender at the bridge who leaned towards me talking in a deep even voice, telling me in swift lisping Castilian stories of Madrid. First of the Madrid of Felipe Cuarto: _corridas_ in the Plaza Mayor, _auto da fé_, pictures by Velasquez on view under the arcade where now there is a doughnut and coffee shop, pompous coaches painted vermilion, cobalt, gilded, stuffed with ladies in vast bulge of damask and brocade, plumed cavaliers, pert ogling pages, lurching and swaying through the foot-deep stinking mud of the streets; plays of Calderon and Lope presented in gardens tinkling with jewels and sword-chains where ladies of the court flirted behind ostrich fans with stiff lean-faced lovers. Then Goya's Madrid: riots in the Puerta del Sol, _majas_ leaning from balconies, the fair of San Isidro by the river, scuttling of ragged guerrilla bands, brigands and patriots; tramp of the stiffnecked grenadiers of Napoleon; pompous little men in short-tailed wigs dying the _dos de Mayo_ with phrases from Mirabeau on their lips under the brick arch of the arsenal; frantic carnivals of the Burial of the Sardine; naked backs of flagellants dripping blood, lovers hiding under the hoop skirts of the queen. Then the romantic Madrid of the thirties, Larra, Becquer, Espronceda, Byronic gestures, vigils in graveyards, duels, struttings among the box-alleys of the Retiro, pale young men in white stocks shooting themselves in attics along the Calle Mayor. "And now," the voice became suddenly gruff with anger, "look at Madrid. They closed the Café Suizo, they are building a subway, the Castellana looks more like the Champs Elysées every day.... It's only on the stage that you get any remnant of the real Madrid. Benavente is the last _madrileño_. _Tiene el sentido de lo castizo._ He has the sense of the ..." all the end of the evening went to the discussion of the meaning of the famous word "_castizo_." The very existence of such a word in a language argues an acute sense of style, of the manner of doing things. Like all words of real import its meaning is a gamut, a section of a spectrum rather than something fixed and irrevocable. The first implication seems to be "according to Hoyle," following tradition: a neatly turned phrase, an essentially Castilian cadence, is _castizo_; a piece of pastry or a poem in the old tradition are _castizo_, or a compliment daintily turned, or a cloak of the proper fullness with the proper red velvet-bordered lining gracefully flung about the ears outside of a café. _Lo castizo_ is the essence of the local, of the regional, the last stronghold of Castilian arrogance, refers not to the empty shell of traditional observances but to the very core and gesture of them. Ultimately _lo castizo_ means all that is salty, savourous of the red and yellow hills and the bare plains and the deep _arroyos_ and the dust-colored towns full of palaces and belfries, and the beggars in snuff-colored cloaks and the mule-drivers with blankets over their shoulders, and the discursive lean-faced gentlemen grouped about tables at cafés and casinos, and the stout dowagers with mantillas over their gleaming black hair walking to church in the morning with missals clasped in fat hands, all that is acutely indigenous, Iberian, in the life of Castile. In the flood of industrialism that for the last twenty years has swelled to obliterate landmarks, to bring all the world to the same level of nickel-plated dullness, the theatre in Madrid has been the refuge of _lo castizo_. It has been a theatre of manners and local types and customs, of observation and natural history, where a rather specialized well-trained audience accustomed to satire as the tone of daily conversation was tickled by any portrayal of its quips and cranks. A tradition of character-acting grew up nearer that of the Yiddish theatre than of any other stage we know in America. Benavente and the brothers Quintero have been the playwrights who most typified the school that has been in vogue since the going out of the _drame passionel_ style of Echegaray. At present Benavente as director of the _Teatro Nacional_ is unquestionably the leading figure. Therefore it is very fitting that Benavente should be in life and works of all _madrileños_ the most _castizo_. Later, as we sat drinking milk in la Granja after a couple of hours of a shabby third-generation Viennese musical show at the Apollo, my friend discoursed to me of the manner of life of the _madrileño_ in general and of Don Jacinto Benavente in particular. Round eleven or twelve one got up, took a cup of thick chocolate, strolled on the Castellana under the chestnut trees or looked in at one's office in the theatre. At two one lunched. At three or so one sat a while drinking coffee or anis in the Gato Negro, where the waiters have the air of cabinet ministers and listen to every word of the rather languid discussions on art and letters that while away the afternoon hours. Then as it got towards five one drifted to a matinee, if there chanced to be a new play opening, or to tea somewhere out in the new Frenchified Barrio de Salamanca. Dinner came along round nine; from there one went straight to the theatre to see that all went well with the evening performance. At one the day culminated in a famous _tertulia_ at the Café de Lisboa, where all the world met and argued and quarreled and listened to disquisitions and epigrams at tables stacked with coffee glasses amid spiral reek of cigarette smoke. "But when were the plays written?" I asked. My friend laughed. "Oh between semicolons," he said, "and _en route_, and in bed, and while being shaved. Here in Madrid you write a comedy between biscuits at breakfast.... And now that the Metro's open, it's a great help. I know a young poet who tossed off a five-act tragedy, sex-psychology and all, between the Puerta del Sol and Cuatro Caminos!" "But Madrid's being spoiled," he went on sadly, "at least from the point of view of _lo castizo_. In the last generation all one saw of daylight were sunset and dawn, people used to go out to fight duels where the Residencia de Estudiantes is now, and they had real _tertulias_, _tertulias_ where conversation swaggered and parried and lunged, sparing nothing, laughing at everything, for all the world like our unique Spanish hero, Don Juan Tenorio. 'Yo a las cabañas baje, yo a los palacios subí, y los claustros escalé, y en todas partes dejé memorias amargas de mí.' "Talk ranged from peasant huts to the palaces of Carlist duchesses, and God knows the crows and the cloisters weren't let off scot free. And like good old absurd Tenorio they didn't care if laughter did leave bitter memories, and were willing to wait till their deathbeds to reconcile themselves with heaven and solemnity. But our generation, they all went solemn in their cradles.... Except for the theatre people, always except for the theatre people! We of the theatres will be _castizo_ to the death." As we left the café, I to go home to bed, my friend to go on to another _tertulia_, he stood for a moment looking back among the tables and glasses. "What the Agora was to the Athenians," he said, and finished the sentence with an expressive wave of the hand. It's hard for Anglo-Saxons, ante-social, as suspicious of neighbors as if they still lived in the boggy forests of Finland, city-dwellers for a paltry thirty generations, to understand the publicity, the communal quality of life in the region of the Mediterranean. The first thought when one gets up is to go out of doors to see what people are talking of, the last thing before going to bed is to chat with the neighbors about the events of the day. The home, cloistered off, exclusive, can hardly be said to exist. Instead of the nordic hearth there is the courtyard about which the women sit while the men are away at the marketplace. In Spain this social life centers in the café and the casino. The modern theatre is as directly the offshoot of the café as the old theatre was of the marketplace where people gathered in front of the church porch to see an interlude or mystery acted by travelling players in a wagon. The people who write the plays, the people who act them and the people who see them spend their spare time smoking about marbletop tables, drinking coffee, discussing. Those too poor to buy a drink stand outside in groups the sunny side of squares. Constant talk about everything that may happen or had happened or will happen manages to butter the bread of life pretty evenly with passion and thought and significance, but one loses the chunks of intensity. There is little chance for the burst dams that suddenly flood the dry watercourse of emotion among more inhibited, less civilized people. Generations upon generations of townsmen have made of life a well-dredged canal, easy-flowing, somewhat shallow. It follows that the theatre under such conditions shall be talkative, witty, full of neat swift caricaturing, improvised, unselfconscious; at its worst, glib. Boisterous action often, passionate strain almost never. In Echegaray there are hecatombs, half the characters habitually go insane in the last act; tremendous barking but no bite of real intensity. Benavente has recaptured some of Lope de Vega's marvellous quality of adventurous progression. The Quinteros write domestic comedies full of whim and sparkle and tenderness. But expression always seems too easy; there is never the unbearable tension, the utter self-forgetfulness of the greatest drama. The Spanish theatre plays on the nerves and intellect rather than on the great harpstrings of emotion in which all of life is drawn taut. At present in Madrid even café life is receding before the exigencies of business and the hardly excusable mania for imitating English and American manners. Spain is undergoing great changes in its relation to the rest of Europe, to Latin America, in its own internal structure. Notwithstanding Madrid's wartime growth and prosperity, the city is fast losing ground as the nucleus of the life and thought of Spanish-speaking people. The _madrileño_, lean, cynical, unscrupulous, nocturnal, explosive with a curious sort of febrile wit is becoming extinct. His theatre is beginning to pander to foreign tastes, to be ashamed of itself, to take on respectability and stodginess. Prices of seats, up to 1918 very low, rise continually; the artisans, apprentice boys, loafers, clerks, porters, who formed the backbone of the audiences can no longer afford the theatre and have taken to the movies instead. Managers spend money on scenery and costumes as a way of attracting fashionables. It has become quite proper for women to go to the theatre. Benavente's plays thus acquire double significance as the summing up and the chief expression of a movement that has reached its hey-day, from which the sap has already been cut off. It is, indeed, the thing to disparage them for their very finest quality, the vividness with which they express the texture of Madrid, the animated humorous mordant conversation about café tables: _lo castizo_. The first play of his I ever saw, "_Gente Conocida_," impressed me, I remember, at a time when I understood about one word in ten and had to content myself with following the general modulation of things, as carrying on to the stage, the moment the curtain rose, the very people, intonations, phrases, that were stirring in the seats about me. After the first act a broad-bosomed lady in black silk leaned back in the seat beside me sighing comfortably "_Qué castizo es este Benavente_," and then went into a volley of approving chirpings. The full import of her enthusiasm did not come to me until much later when I read the play in the comparative light of a surer knowledge of Castilian, and found that it was a most vitriolic dissecting of the manner of life of that very dowager's own circle, a showing up of the predatory spite of "people of consequence." Here was this society woman, who in any other country would have been indignant, enjoying the annihilation of her kind. On such willingness to play the game of wit, even of abuse, without too much rancor, which is the unction to ease of social intercourse, is founded all the popularity of Benavente's writing. Somewhere in Hugo's Spanish grammar (God save the mark!) is a proverb to the effect that the wind of Madrid is so subtle that it will kill a man without putting out a candle. The same, at their best, can be said of Benavente's satiric comedies: El viento de Madrid es tan sutil que mata a un hombre y no apaga un candil. From the opposite bank of the Manzanares, a slimy shrunken stream usually that flows almost hidden under clothes lines where billow the undergarments of all Madrid, in certain lights you can recapture almost entire the silhouette of the city as Goya has drawn it again and again; clots of peeling stucco houses huddling up a flattened hill towards the dome of San Francisco El Grande, then an undulating skyline with cupolas and baroque belfries jutting among the sudden lights and darks of the clouds. Then perhaps the sun will light up with a spreading shaft of light the electric-light factory, the sign on a biscuit manufacturer's warehouse, a row of white blocks of apartments along the edge of town to the north, and instead of odd grimy aboriginal Madrid, it will be a type city in Europe in the industrial era that shines in the sun beyond the blue shadows and creamy flashes of the clothes on the lines. So will it be in a few years with modernized Madrid, with the life of cafés and _paseos_ and theatres. There will be moments when in American automats, elegant smokeless tearooms, shiny restaurants built in copy of those of Buenos Aires, someone who has read his Benavente will be able to catch momentary glimpses of old intonations, of witty parries, of noisy bombastic harangues and feel for one pentecostal moment the full and by that time forgotten import of _lo castizo_. _XV: Talk by the Road_ The sun next morning was tingling warm. Telemachus strode along with a taste of a milky bowl of coffee and crisp _churros_ in his mouth and a fresh wind in his hair; his feet rasped pleasantly on the gravel of the road. Behind him the town sank into the dun emerald-striped plain, roofs clustering, huddling more and more under the shadow of the beetling church, and the tower becoming leaner and darker against the steamy clouds that oozed in billowing tiers over the mountains to the north. Crows flapped about the fields where here and there the dark figures of a man and a pair of mules moved up a long slope. On the telegraph wires at a bend in the road two magpies sat, the sunlight glinting, when they stirred, on the white patches on their wings. Telemachus felt well-rested and content with himself. "After all mother knows best," he was thinking. "That foolish Lyaeus will come dragging himself into Toledo a week from now." Before noon he came on the same Don Alonso he had seen the day before in Illescas. Don Alonso was stretched out under an olive tree, a long red sausage in his hand, a loaf of bread and a small leather bottle of wine on the sward in front of him. Hitched to the tree, at the bark of which he nibbled with long teeth, was the grey horse. "_Hola_, my friend," cried Don Alonso, "still bent on Toledo?" "How soon can I get there?" "Soon enough to see the castle of San Servando against the sunset. We will go together. You travel as fast as my old nag. But do me the honor of eating something, you must be hungry." Thereupon Don Alonso handed Telemachus the sausage and a knife to peel and slice it with. "How early you must have started." They sat together munching bread and sausage to which the sweet pepper mashed into it gave a bright red color, and occasionally, head thrown back, let a little wine squirt into their mouths from the bottle. Don Alonso waved discursively a bit of sausage held between bread by tips of long grey fingers. "You are now, my friend, in the heart of Castile. Look, nothing but live-oaks along the gulches and wheat-lands rolling up under a tremendous sky. Have you ever seen more sky? In Madrid there is not so much sky, is there? In your country there is not so much sky? Look at the huge volutes of those clouds. This is a setting for thoughts as mighty in contour as the white cumulus over the Sierra, such as come into the minds of men lean, wind-tanned, long-striding...." Don Alonso put a finger to his high yellow forehead. "There is in Castile a potential beauty, my friend, something humane, tolerant, vivid, robust.... I don't say it is in me. My only merit lies in recognizing it, formulating it, for I am no more than a thinker.... But the day will come when in this gruff land we shall have flower and fruit." Don Alonso was smiling with thin lips, head thrown back against the twisted trunk of the olive tree. Then all at once he got to his feet, and after rummaging a moment in the little knapsack that hung over his shoulder, produced absent-mindedly a handful of small white candies the shape of millstones which he stared at in a puzzled way for some seconds. "After all," he went on, "they make famous sweets in these old Castilian towns. These are _melindres_. Have one.... When people, d'you know, are kind to children, there are things to be expected." "Certainly children are indulgently treated in Spain," said Telemachus, his mouth full of almond paste. "They actually seem to like children!" A cart drawn by four mules tandem led by a very minute donkey with three strings of blue beads round his neck was jingling past along the road. As the canvas curtains of the cover were closed the only evidence of the driver was a sleepy song in monotone that trailed with the dust cloud after the cart. While they stood by the roadside watching the joggle of it away from them down the road, a flushed face was poked out from between the curtains and a voice cried "Hello, Tel!" "It's Lyaeus," cried Telemachus and ran after the cart bubbling with curiosity to hear his companion's adventures. With a angle of mulebells and a hoarse shout from the driver the cart stopped, and Lyaeus tumbled out. His hair was mussed and there were wisps of hay on his clothes. He immediately stuck his head back in through the curtains. By the time Telemachus reached him the cart was tinkling its way down the road again and Lyaeus stood grinning, blinking sleepy eyes in the middle of the road, in one hand a skin of wine, in the other a canvas bag. "What ho!" cried Telemachus. "Figs and wine," said Lyaeus. Then, as Don Alonso came up leading his grey horse, he added in an explanatory tone, "I was asleep in the cart." "Well?" said Telemachus. "O it's such a long story," said Lyaeus. Walking beside them, Don Alonso was reciting into his horse's ear: 'Sigue la vana sombra, el bien fingido. El hombre está entregado al sueño, de su suerte no cuidando, y con paso callado el cielo vueltas dando las horas del vivir le va hurtando.' "Whose is that?" said Lyaeus. "The revolving sky goes stealing his hours of life.... But I don't know," said Don Alonso, "perhaps like you, this Spain of ours makes ground sleeping as well as awake. What does a day matter? The driver snores but the good mules jog on down the appointed road." Then without another word he jumped on his horse and with a smile and a wave of the hand trotted off ahead of them. _XVI: A Funeral in Madrid_ _Doce días son pasados después que el Cid acabára aderézanse las gentes para salir a batalla con Búcar ese rey moro y contra la su canalla. Cuando fuera media noche el cuerpo así coma estaba le ponen sobre Babieca y al caballo lo ataban._ I And when the army sailed out of Valencia the Moors of King Bucar fled before the dead body of the Cid and ten thousand of them were drowned trying to scramble into their ships, among them twenty kings, and the Christians got so much booty of gold and silver among the tents that the poorest of them became a rich man. Then the army continued, the dead Cid riding each day's journey on his horse, across the dry mountains to Sant Pedro de Cardeña in Castile where the king Don Alfonso had come from Toledo, and he seeing the Cid's face still so beautiful and his beard so long and his eyes so flaming ordered that instead of closing the body in a coffin with gold nails they should set it upright in a chair beside the altar, with the sword Tizona in its hand. And there the Cid stayed more than ten years. Mandó que no se enterrase sino que el cuerpo arreado se ponga junto al altar y a Tizona en la su mano; así estuvo mucho tiempo que fueron más de diez años. In the pass above people were skiing. On the hard snow of the road there were orange-skins. A victoria had just driven by in which sat a bored inflated couple much swathed in furs. "Where on earth are they going?" "To the Puerta de Navecerrada," my friend answered. "But they look as if they'd be happier having tea at Molinero's than paddling about up there in the snow." "They would be, but it's the style ... winter sports ... and all because a lithe little brown man who died two years ago liked the mountains. Before him no _madrileño_ ever knew the Sierra existed." "Who was that?" "Don Francisco Giner." That afternoon when it was already getting dark we were scrambling wet, chilled, our faces lashed by the snow, down through drifts from a shoulder of Siete Picos with the mist all about us and nothing but the track of a flock of sheep for a guide. The light from a hut pushed a long gleaming orange finger up the mountainside. Once inside we pulled off our shoes and stockings and toasted our feet at a great fireplace round which were flushed faces, glint of teeth in laughter, schoolboys and people from the university shouting and declaiming, a smell of tea and wet woolens. Everybody was noisy with the rather hysterical excitement that warmth brings after exertion in cold mountain air. Cheeks were purple and tingling. A young man with fuzzy yellow hair told me a story in French about the Emperor of Morocco, and produced a tin of potted blackbirds which it came out were from the said personage's private stores. Unending fountains of tea seethed in two smoke-blackened pots on the hearth. In the back of the hut among leaping shadows were piles of skis and the door, which occasionally opened to let in a new wet snowy figure and shut again on skimming snow-gusts. Everyone was rocked with enormous jollity. Train time came suddenly and we ran and stumbled and slid the miles to the station through the dark, down the rocky path. In the third-class carriage people sang songs as the train jounced its way towards the plain and Madrid. The man who sat next to me asked me if I knew it was Don Francisco who had had that hut built for the children of the Institución Libre de Inseñanza. Little by little he told me the history of the Krausistas and Francisco Giner de los Ríos and the revolution of 1873, a story like enough to many others in the annals of the nineteenth century movement for education, but in its overtones so intimately Spanish and individual that it came as the explanation of many things I had been wondering about and gave me an inkling of some of the origins of a rather special mentality I had noticed in people I knew about Madrid. Somewhere in the forties a professor of the Universidad Central, Sanz del Río, was sent to Germany to study philosophy on a government scholarship. Spain was still in the intellectual coma that had followed the failure of the Cortes of Cadiz and the restoration of Fernando Septimo. A decade or more before, Larra, the last flame of romantic revolt, had shot himself for love in Madrid. In Germany, at Heidelberg, Sanz del Río found dying Krause, the first archpriest who stood interpreting between Kant and the world. When he returned to Spain he refused to take up his chair at the university saying he must have time to think out his problems, and retired to a tiny room--a room so dark that they say that to read he had to sit on a stepladder under the window in the town of Illescas, where was another student, Greco's San Ildefonso. There he lived several years in seclusion. When he did return to the university it was to refuse to make the profession of political and religious faith required by a certain prime minister named Orovio. He was dismissed and several of his disciples. At the same time Francisco Giner de los Ríos, then a young man who had just gained an appointment with great difficulty because of his liberal ideas, resigned out of solidarity with the rest. In 1868 came the liberal revolution which was the political expression of this whole movement, and all these professors were reinstated. Until the restoration of the Bourbons in '75 Spain was a hive of modernization, Europeanization. Returned to power Orovio lost no time in republishing his decrees of a profession of faith. Giner, Ascárate, Salmerón and several others were arrested and exiled to distant fortresses when they protested; their friends declared themselves in sympathy and lost their jobs, and many other professors resigned, so that the university was at one blow denuded of its best men. From this came the idea of founding a free university which should be supported entirely by private subscription. From that moment the life of Giner de los Ríos was completely entwined with the growth of the Institución Libre de Inseñanza, which developed in the course of a few years into a coeducational primary school. And directly or indirectly there is not a single outstanding figure in Spanish life to-day whose development was not largely influenced by this dark slender baldheaded old man with a white beard whose picture one finds on people's writing desks. ... Oh, sí, llevad, amigos, su cuerpo a la montaña a los azules montes del ancho Guadarrama, wrote his pupil, Antonio Machado--and I rather think Machado is the pupil whose name will live the longest--after Don Francisco's death in 1915. ... Yes, carry, friends his body to the hills to the blue peaks of the wide Guadarrama. There are deep gulches of green pines where the wind sings. There is rest for his spirit under a cold live oak in loam full of thyme, where play golden butterflies.... There the master one day dreamed new flowerings for Spain. These are fragments from an elegy by Juan Ramon Jiménez, another poet-pupil of Don Francisco: "Don Francisco.... It seemed that he summed up all that is tender and keen in life: flowers, flames, birds, peaks, children.... Now, stretched on his bed, like a frozen river that perhaps still flows under the ice, he is the clear path for endless recurrence.... He was like a living statue of himself, a statue of earth, of wind, of water, of fire. He had so freed himself from the husk of every day that talking to him we might have thought we were talking to his image. Yes. One would have said he wasn't going to die: that he had already passed, without anybody's knowing it, beyond death; that he was with us forever, like a spirit. * * * * * "In the little door of the bedroom one already feels well-being. A trail of the smell of thyme and violets that comes and goes with the breeze from the open window leads like a delicate hand towards where he lies.... Peace. All death has done has been to infuse the color of his skin with a deep violet veiling of ashes. "What a suave smell, and how excellent death is here! No rasping essences, none of the exterior of blackness and crêpe. All this is white and uncluttered, like a hut in the fields in Andalusia, like the whitewashed portal of some garden in the south. All just as it was. Only he who was there has gone. * * * * * "The day is fading, with a little wind that has a premonition of spring. In the window panes is a confused mirroring of rosy clouds. The blackbird, the blackbird that he must have heard for thirty years, that he'd have liked to have gone on hearing dead, has come to see if he's listening. Peace. The bedroom and the garden strive quietly light against light: the brightness of the bedroom is stronger and glows out into the afternoon. A sparrow flutters up into the sudden stain with which the sun splashes the top of a tree and sits there twittering. In the shadow below the blackbird whistles once more. Now and then one seems to hear the voice that is silenced forever. "How pleasant to be here! It's like sitting beside a spring, reading under a tree, like letting the stream of a lyric river carry one away.... And one feels like never moving: like plucking to infinity, as one might tear roses to pieces, these white full hours; like clinging forever to this clear teacher in the eternal twilight of this last lesson of austerity and beauty. * * * * * "'Municipal Cemetery' it says on the gate, so that one may know, opposite that other sign 'Catholic Cemetery,' so that one may also know. "He didn't want to be buried in that cemetery, so opposed to the smiling savourous poetry of his spirit. But it had to be. He'll still hear the blackbirds of the familiar garden. 'After all,' says Cossio, 'I don't think he'll be sorry to spend a little while with Don Julián....' "Careful hands have taken the dampness out of the earth with thyme; on the coffin they have thrown roses, narcissus, violets. There comes, lost, an aroma of last evening, a bit of the bedroom from which they took so much away.... "Silence. Faint sunlight. Great piles of cloud full of wind drag frozen shadows across us, and through them flying low, black grackles. In the distance Guadarrama, chaste beyond belief, lifts crystals of cubed white light. Some tiny bird trills for a second in the sown fields nearby that are already vaguely greenish, then lights on the creamy top of a tomb, then flies away.... "Neither impatience nor cares; slowness and forgetfulness.... Silence. In the silence, the voice of a child walking through the fields, the sound of a sob hidden among the tombstones, the wind, the broad wind of these days.... "I've seen occasionally a fire put out with earth. Innumerable little tongues spurted from every side. A pupil of his who was a mason made for this extinguished fire its palace of mud on a piece of earth two friends kept free. He has at the head a euonymus, young and strong, and at the foot, already full of sprouts with coming spring, an acacia...." Round El Pardo the evergreen oaks, encinas, are scattered sparsely, tight round heads of blue green, over hills that in summer are yellow like the haunches of lions. From Madrid to El Pardo was one of Don Francisco's favorite walks, out past the jail, where over the gate is written an echo of his teaching: "Abhor the crime but pity the criminal," past the palace of Moncloa with its stately abandoned gardens, and out along the Manzanares by a road through the royal domain where are gamekeepers with shotguns and signs of "Beware the mantraps," then up a low hill from which one sees the Sierra Guadarrama piled up against the sky to the north, greenish snow-peaks above long blue foothills and all the foreground rolling land full of clumps of encinas, and at last into the little village with its barracks and its dilapidated convent and its planetrees in front of the mansion Charles V built. It was under an encina that I sat all one long morning reading up in reviews and textbooks on the theory of law, the life and opinions of Don Francisco. In the moments when the sun shone the heat made the sticky cistus bushes with the glistening white flowers all about me reek with pungence. Then a cool whisp of wind would bring a chill of snow-slopes from the mountains and a passionless indefinite fragrance of distances. At intervals a church bell would toll in a peevish importunate manner from the boxlike convent on the hill opposite. I was reading an account of the philosophical concept of monism, cudgelling my brain with phrases. And his fervent love of nature made the master evoke occasionally in class this beautiful image of the great poet and philosopher Schelling: "Man is the eye with which the spirit of nature contemplates itself"; and then having qualified with a phrase Schelling's expression, he would turn on those who see in nature manifestation of the rough, the gross, the instinctive, and offer for meditation this saying of Michelet: "Cloth woven by a weaver is just as natural as that a spider weaves. All is in one Being, all is in the Idea and for the Idea, the latter being understood in the way Platonic substantialism has been interpreted...." In the grass under my book were bright fronds of moss, among which very small red ants performed prodigies of mountaineering, while along tramped tunnels long black ants scuttled darkly, glinting when the light struck them. The smell of cistus was intense, hot, full of spices as the narrow streets of an oriental town at night. In the distance the mountains piled up in zones olive green, Prussian blue, ultra-marine, white. A cold wind-gust turned the pages of the book. Thought and passion, reflection and instinct, affections, emotions, impulses collaborate in the rule of custom, which is revealed not in words declared and promulgated in view of future conduct, but in the act itself, tacit, taken for granted, or, according to the energetic expression of the Digest: _rebus et factis_. Over "factis," sat a little green and purple fly with the body curved under at the table. I wondered vaguely if it was a Mayfly. And then all of a sudden it was clear to me that these books, these dusty philosophical phrases, these mortuary articles by official personages were dimming the legend in my mind, taking the brilliance out of the indirect but extraordinarily personal impact of the man himself. They embalmed the Cid and set him up in the church with his sword in his hand, for all men to see. What sort of legend would a technical disquisition by the archbishop on his theory of the angle of machicolations have generated in men's minds? And what can a saint or a soldier or a founder of institutions leave behind him but a legend? Certainly it is not for the Franciscans that one remembers Francis of Assisi. And the curious thing about the legend of a personality is that it may reach the highest fervor without being formulated. It is something by itself that stands behind anecdotes, death-notices, elegies. In Madrid at the funeral of another of the great figures of nineteenth century Spain, Pérez Galdós, I stood on the curb beside a large-mouthed youth with a flattened toadlike face, who was balancing a great white-metal jar of milk on his shoulder. The plumed hearse and the carriages full of flowers had just passed. The street in front of us was a slow stream of people very silent, their feet shuffling, shuffling, feet in patent-leather shoes and spats, feet in square-toed shoes, pointed-toed shoes, _alpargatas_, canvas sandals; people along the sides seemed unable to resist the suction of it, joined in unostentatiously to follow if only a few moments the procession of the legend of Don Benito. The boy with the milk turned to me and said how lucky it was they were burying Galdós, he'd have an excuse for being late for the milk. Then suddenly he pulled his cap off and became enormously excited and began offering cigarettes to everyone round about. He scratched his head and said in the voice of a Saul stricken on the road to Damascus: "How many books he must have written, that gentleman! _¡Cáspita!_... It makes a fellow sorry when a gentleman like that dies," and shouldering his pail, his blue tunic fluttering in the wind, he joined the procession. Like the milk boy I found myself joining the procession of the legend of Giner de los Ríos. That morning under the encina I closed up the volumes on the theory of law and the bulletins with their death-notices and got to my feet and looked over the tawny hills of El Bardo and thought of the little lithe baldheaded man with a white beard like the beard in El Greco's portrait of Covarrubias, who had taught a generation to love the tremendous contours of their country, to climb mountains and bathe in cold torrents, who was the first, it almost seems, to feel the tragic beauty of Toledo, who in a lifetime of courageous unobtrusive work managed to stamp all the men and women whose lives remotely touched his with the seal of his personality. Born in Ronda in the wildest part of Andalusia of a family that came from Vélez-Málaga, a white town near the sea in the rich fringes of the Sierra Nevada, he had the mental agility and the sceptical tolerance and the uproarious good nature of the people of that region, the sobriety and sinewiness of a mountaineer. His puritanism became a definite part of the creed of the hopeful discontented generations that are gradually, for better or for worse, remoulding Spain. His nostalgia of the north, of fjords where fir trees hang over black tidal waters, of blonde people cheerfully orderly in rectangular blue-tiled towns, became the gospel of Europeanization, of wholesale destruction of all that was individual, savage, African in the Spanish tradition. _Rebus et factis._ And yet none of the things and acts do much to explain the peculiar radiance of his memory, the jovial tenderness with which people tell one about him. The immanence of the man is such that even an outsider, one who like the milk boy at the funeral of Galdós meets the procession accidentally with another errand in his head, is drawn in almost without knowing it. It's impossible to think of him buried in a box in unconsecrated ground in the Cementerio Civil. In Madrid, in the little garden of the Institución where he used to teach the children, in front of a certain open fire in a certain house at El Pardo where they say he loved to sit and talk, I used to half expect to meet him, that some friend would take me to see him as they took people to see Cid in San Pedro de Cardeña. Cara tiene de hermosura muy hermosa y colorada; los ojos igual abiertos muy apuesta la su barba Non parece que está muerto antes vivo semejaba. II Although Miguel de Unamuno was recently condemned to fifteen years' imprisonment for _lèse majesté_ for some remark made in an article published in a Valencia paper, no attempt has been made either to make him serve the term or to remove him from the chair of Greek at the University of Salamanca. Which proves something about the efficiency of the stand Giner de los Ríos and his friends made fifty years before. Furthermore, at the time of the revolutionary attempt of August, 1917, the removal of Bestiero from his chair caused so many of the faculty to resign and such universal protest that he was reinstated although an actual member of the revolutionary committee and at that time under sentence for life. In 1875 after the fall of the republic it had been in the face of universal popular reaction that the Krausistas founded their free university. The lump is leavened. But Unamuno. A Basque from the country of Loyola, living in Salamanca in the highest coldest part of the plateau of old Castile, in many senses the opposite of Giner de los Ríos, who was austere as a man on a long pleasant walk doesn't overeat or overdrink so that the walk may be longer and pleasanter, while Unamuno is austere religiously, mystically. Giner de los Ríos was the champion of life, Unamuno is the champion of death. Here is his creed, one of his creeds, from the preface of the _Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_: "There is no future: there is never a future. This thing they call the future is one of the greatest lies. To-day is the real future. What will we be to-morrow? There is no to-morrow. What about us to-day, now; that is the only question. "And as for to-day, all these nincompoops are thoroughly satisfied because they exist to-day, mere existence is enough for them. Existence, ordinary naked existence fills their whole soul. They feel nothing beyond existence. "But do they exist? Really exist? I think not, because if they did exist, if they really existed, existence would be suffering for them and they wouldn't content themselves with it. If they really and truly existed in time and space they would suffer not being of eternity and infinity. And this suffering, this passion, what is it but the passion of God in us? God who suffers in us from our temporariness and finitude, that divine suffering will burst all the puny bonds of logic with which they try to tie down their puny memories and their puny hopes, the illusion of their past and the illusion of their future. * * * * * "Your Quixotic madness has made you more than once speak to me of Quixotism as the new religion. And I tell you that this new religion you propose to me, if it hatched, would have two singular merits. One that its founder, its prophet, Don Quixote--not Cervantes--probably wasn't a real man of flesh and blood at all, indeed we suspect that he was pure fiction. And the other merit would be that this prophet was a ridiculous prophet, people's butt and laughing stock. "What we need most is the valor to face ridicule. Ridicule is the arm of all the miserable barbers, bachelors, parish priests, canons and dukes who keep hidden the sepulchre of the Knight of Madness, Knight who made all the world laugh but never cracked a joke. He had too great a soul to bring forth jokes. They laughed at his seriousness. "Begin then, friend, to do the Peter the Hermit and call people to join you, to join us, and let us all go win back the sepulchre even if we don't know where it is. The crusade itself will reveal to us the sacred place. * * * * * "Start marching! Where are you going? The star will tell you: to the sepulchre! What shall we do on the road while we march? What? Fight! Fight, and how? "How? If you find a man lying? Shout in his face: 'lie!' and forward! If you find a man stealing, shout: 'thief!' and forward! If you find a man babbling asininities, to whom the crowd listens open-mouthed, shout at them all: 'idiots!' and forward, always forward! * * * * * "To the march then! And throw out of the sacred squadron all those who begin to study the step and its length and its rhythm. Above everything, throw out all those who fuss about this business of rhythm. They'll turn the squadron into a quadrille and the march into a dance. Away with them! Let them go off somewhere else to sing the flesh. "Those who try to turn the squadron on the march into a dancing quadrille call themselves and each other poets. But they're not. They're something else. They only go to the sepulchre out of curiosity, to see what it's like, looking for a new sensation, and to amuse themselves along the road. Away with them! "It's these that with their indulgence of Bohemians contribute to maintain cowardice and lies and all the weaknesses that flood us. When they preach liberty they only think of one: that of disposing of their neighbor's wife. All is sensuality with them. They even fall in love sensually with ideas, with great ideas. They are incapable of marrying a great and pure idea and breeding a family with it; they only flirt with ideas. They want them as mistresses, sometimes just for the night. Away with them! "If a man wants to pluck some flower or other along the path that smiles from the fringe of grass, let him pluck it, but without breaking ranks, without dropping out of the squadron of which the leader must always keep his eyes on the flaming sonorous star. But if he put the little flower in the strap above his cuirass, not to look at it himself, but for others to look at, away with him! Let him go with his flower in his buttonhole and dance somewhere else. "Look, friend, if you want to accomplish your mission and serve your country you must make yourself unpleasant to the sensitive boys who only see the world through the eyes of their sweethearts. Or through something worse. Let your words be strident and rasping in their ears. "The squadron must only stop at night, near a wood or under the lee of a mountain. There they will pitch their tents and the crusaders will wash their feet, and sup off what their women have prepared, then they will beget a son on them and kiss them and go to sleep to begin the march again the following day. And when someone dies they will leave him on the edge of the road with his armor on him, at the mercy of the crows. Let the dead take the trouble to bury the dead." Instead of the rationalists and humanists of the North, Unamuno's idols are the mystics and saints and sensualists of Castile, hard stalwart men who walked with God, Loyola, Torquemada, Pizarro, Narváez, who governed with whips and thumbscrews and drank death down greedily like heady wine. He is excited by the amorous madness of the mysticism of Santa Teresa and San Juan de la Cruz. His religion is paradoxical, unreasonable, of faith alone, full of furious yearning other-worldliness. His style, it follows perforce, is headlong, gruff, redundant, full of tremendous pounding phrases. There is a vigorous angry insistence about his dogmas that makes his essays unforgettable, even if one objects as violently as I do to his asceticism and death-worship. There is an anarchic fury about his crying in the wilderness that will win many a man from the fleshpots and chain gangs. In the apse of the old cathedral of Salamanca is a fresco of the Last Judgment, perhaps by the Castilian painter Gallegos. Over the retablo on a black ground a tremendous figure of the avenging angel brandishes a sword while behind him unrolls the scroll of the _Dies Irae_ and huddled clusters of plump little naked people fall away into space from under his feet. There are moments in "_Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida_" and in the "_Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_" when in the rolling earthy Castilian phrases one can feel the brandishing of the sword of that very angel. Not for nothing does Unamuno live in the rust and saffron-colored town of Salamanca in the midst of bare red hills that bulge against an enormous flat sky in which the clouds look like piles of granite, like floating cathedrals, they are so solid, heavy, ominous. A country where barrenness and the sweep of cold wind and the lash of strong wine have made people's minds ingrow into the hereafter, where the clouds have been tramped by the angry feet of the destroying angel. A Patmos for a new Apocalypse. Unamuno is constantly attacking sturdily those who clamor for the modernization, Europeanization of Spanish life and Spanish thought: he is the counterpoise to the northward-yearning apostles of Giner de los Ríos. In an essay in one of the volumes published by the _Residencia de Estudiantes_ he wrote: "As can be seen I proceed by what they call arbitrary affirmations, without documentation, without proof, outside of a modern European logic, disdainful of its methods. "Perhaps. I want no other method than that of passion, and when my breast swells with disgust, repugnance, sympathy or disdain, I let the mouth speak the bitterness of the heart, and let the words come as they come. "We Spaniards are, they say, arbitrary charlatans, who fill up with rhetoric the gaps in logic, who subtilize with more or less ingenuity, but uselessly, who lack the sense of coherence, with scholastic souls, casuists and all that. "I've heard similar things said of Augustine, the great African, soul of fire that spilt itself in leaping waves of rhetoric, twistings of the phrase, antithesis, paradoxes and ingenuities. Saint Augustine was a Gongorine and a conceptualist at the same time, which makes me think that Gongorism and conceptualism are the most natural forms of passion and vehemence. "The great African, the great ancient African! Here is an expression--ancient African--that one can oppose to modern European, and that's worth as much at least. African and ancient were Saint Augustine and Tertullian. And why shouldn't we say: 'We must make ourselves ancient African-style' or else 'We must make ourselves African ancient-style.'" The typical tree of Castile is the encina, a kind of live-oak that grows low with dense bluish foliage and a ribbed, knotted and contorted trunk; it always grows singly and on dry hills. On the roads one meets lean men with knotted hands and brown sun-wizened faces that seem brothers to the encinas of their country. The thought of Unamuno, emphatic, lonely, contorted, hammered into homely violent phrases, oak-tough, oak-twisted, is brother to the men on the roads and to the encinas on the hills of Castile. This from the end of "_Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida_": "And in this critical century, Don Quixote has also contaminated himself with criticism, and he must charge against himself, victim of intellectualism and sentimentalism, who when he is most sincere appears most affected. The poor man wants to rationalize the irrational, and irrationalize the rational. And he falls victim of the inevitable despair of a rationalism century, of which the greatest victims were Tolstoy and Nietzsche. Out of despair he enters into the heroic fury of that Quixote of thought who broke out of the cloister, Giordano Bruno, and makes himself awakener of sleeping souls, '_dormitantium animorum excubitor_,' as the ex-Dominican says of himself, he who wrote: 'Heroic love is proper to superior natures called insane--_insane_, not because they do not know--_non sanno_--but because they know too much--_soprasanno_--.' "But Bruno believed in the triumph of his doctrines, or at least at the foot of his statue on the Campo dei Fiori, opposite the Vatican, they have put that it is offered by the century he had divined--'_il secolo da lui divinato_.' But our Don Quixote, the resurrected, internal Don Quixote, does not believe that his doctrines will triumph in the world, because they are not his. And it is better that they should not triumph. If they wanted to make Don Quixote king he would retire alone to the hilltop, fleeing the crowds of king-makers and king-killers, as did Christ when, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, they wanted to proclaim him king. He left the title of king to be put above the cross. "What is, then, the new mission of Don Quixote in this world? To cry, to cry in the wilderness. For the wilderness hears although men do not hear, and one day will turn into a sonorous wood, and that solitary voice that spreads in the desert like seed will sprout into a gigantic cedar that will sing with a hundred thousand tongues an eternal hosanna to the Lord of life and death." _XVII: Toledo_ "Lyaeus, you've found it." "Her, you mean." "No, the essence, the gesture." "I carry no butterfly net." The sun blazed in a halo of heat about their heads. Both sides of the straight road olive trees contorted gouty trunks as they walked past. On a bank beside a quietly grazing donkey a man was asleep wrapped in a brown blanket. Occasionally a little grey bird twittered encouragingly from the telegraph wires. When the wind came there was a chill of winter and wisps of cloud drifted across the sun and a shiver of silver ran along the olive groves. "Tel," cried Lyaeus after a pause, "maybe I have found it. Maybe you are right. You should have been with me last night." "What happened last night?" As a wave of bitter envy swept over him Telemachus saw for a moment the face of his mother Penelope, brows contracted with warning, white hand raised in admonition. For a fleeting second the memory of his quest brushed through the back of his mind. But Lyaeus was talking. "Nothing much happened. There were a few things.... O this is wonderful." He waved a clenched fist about his head. "The finest people, Tel! You never saw such people, Tel. They gave me a tambourine. Here it is; wait a minute." He placed the bag he carried on his shoulder on top of a milestone and untied its mouth. When he pulled the tambourine out it was full of figs. "Look, pocket these. I taught her to write her name on the back; see, 'Pilar,' She didn't know how to write." Telemachus involuntarily cleared his throat. "It was the finest dive ... Part house, part cave. We all roared in and there was the funniest little girl ... Lot of other people, fat women, but my eyes were in a highly selective state. She was very skinny with enormous black eyes, doe's eyes, timid as a dog's. She had a fat pink puppy in her lap." "But I meant something in line, movement, eternal, not that." "There are very few gestures," said Lyaeus. They walked along in silence. "I am tired," said Lyaeus; "at least let's stop in here. I see a bush over the door." "Why stop? We are nearly there." "Why go on?" "We want to get to Toledo, don't we?" "Why?" "Because we started for there." "No reason at all," said Lyaeus with a laugh as he went in the door of the wineshop. When they came out they found Don Alonso waiting for them, holding his horse by the bridle. "The Spartans," he said with a smile, "never drank wine on the march." "How far are we from Toledo?" asked Telemachus. "It was nice of you to wait for us." "About a league, five kilometers, nothing.... I wanted to see your faces when you first saw the town. I think you will appreciate it." "Let's walk fast," said Telemachus. "There are some things one doesn't want to wait for." "It will be sunset and the whole town will be on the _paseo_ in front of the hospital of San Juan Bautista.... This is Sunday of Carnival; people will be dressed up in masks and very noisy. It's a day on which they play tricks on strangers." "Here's the trick they played me at the last town," said Lyaeus agitating his bag of figs. "Let's eat some. I'm sure the Spartans ate figs on the road. Will Rosinante,--I mean will your horse eat them?" He put his hand with some figs on it under the horse's mouth. The horse sniffed noisily out of black nostrils dappled with pink and then reached for the figs. Lyaeus wiped his hand on the seat of his pants and they proceeded. "Toledo is symbolically the soul of Spain," began Don Alonso after a few moments of silent walking. "By that I mean that through the many Spains you have seen and will see is everywhere an undercurrent of fantastic tragedy, Greco on the one hand, Goya on the other, Moráles, Gallegos, a great flame of despair amid dust, rags, ulcers, human life rising in a sudden pæan out of desolate abandoned dun-colored spaces. To me, Toledo expresses the supreme beauty of that tragic farce.... And the apex, the victory, the deathlessness of it is in El Greco.... How strange it is that it should be that Cypriote who lived in such Venetian state in a great house near the abandoned synagogue, scandalizing us austere Spaniards by the sounds of revelry and unabashed music that came from it at meal-times, making pert sayings under the nose of humorless visitors like Pacheco, living solitary in a country where he remained to his death misunderstood and alien and where two centuries thought of him along with Don Quixote as a madman,--how strange that it should be he who should express most flamingly all that was imperturbable in Toledo.... I have often wondered whether that fiery vitality of spirit that we feel in El Greco, that we felt in my generation when I was young, that I see occasionally in the young men of your time, has become conscious only because it is about to be smothered in the great advancing waves of European banality. I was thinking the other day that perhaps states of life only became conscious once their intensity was waning." "But most of the intellectuals I met in Madrid," put in Telemachus, "seemed enormously anxious for subways and mechanical progress, seemed to think that existence could be made perfect by slot-machines." "They are anxious to hold stock in the subway and slot-machine enterprises that they may have more money to unSpanish themselves in Paris ... but let us not talk of that. From the next turn in the road, round that little hill, we shall see Toledo." Don Alonso jumped on his horse, and Lyaeus and Telemachus doubled the speed of their stride. First above the bulge of reddish saffron striped with dark of a plowed field they saw a weathercock, then under it the slate cap of a tower. "The Alcázar," said Don Alonso. The road turned away and olive trees hid the weathercock. At the next bend the towers were four, strongly buttressing a square building where on the western windows glinted reflections of sunset. As they walked more towers, dust colored, and domes and the spire of a cathedral, greenish, spiky like the tail of a pickerel, jutted to the right of the citadel. The road dipped again, passed some white houses where children sat in the doorways; from the inner rooms came a sound of frying oil and a pungence of cistus-twigs burning. Starting up the next rise that skirted a slope planted with almond trees they caught sight of a castle, rounded towers, built of rough grey stone, joined by crenellated walls that appeared occasionally behind the erratic lacework of angular twigs on which here and there a cluster of pink flowers had already come into bloom. At the summit was a wineshop with mules tethered against the walls, and below the Tagus and the great bridge, and Toledo. Against the grey and ochre-streaked theatre of the Cigarrales were piled masses of buttressed wall that caught the orange sunset light on many tall plane surfaces rising into crenellations and square towers and domes and slate-capped spires above a litter of yellowish tile roofs that fell away in terraces from the highest points and sloped outside the walls towards the river and the piers from which sprang the enormous arch of the bridge. The shadows were blue-green and violet. A pale cobalt haze of supperfires hung over the quarters near the river. As they started down the hill towards the heavy pile of San Juan Bautista, that stood under its broad tiled dome outside the nearest gate, a great volley of bell-ringing swung about their ears. A donkey brayed; there was a sound of shouting from the town. "Here we are, gentlemen, I'll look for you to-morrow at the _fonda_," shouted Don Alonso. He took off his hat and galloped towards the gate, leaving Telemachus and Lyaeus standing by the roadside looking out over the city. * * * * * Beyond the zinc bar was an irregular room with Nile-green walls into which light still filtered through three little round arches high up on one side. In a corner were some hogsheads of wine, in another small tables with three-legged stools. From outside came the distant braying of a brass band and racket of a street full of people, laughter, and the occasional shivering jangle of a tambourine. Lyaeus had dropped onto a stool and spread his feet out before him on the tiled floor. "Never walked so far in my life," he said, "my toes are pulverized, pulverized!" He leaned over and pulled off his shoes. There were holes in his socks. He pulled them off in turn, and started wiggling his toes meditatively. His ankles were grimed with dust. "Well...." began Telemachus. The _padrón_, a lean man with moustaches and a fancy yellow vest which he wore unbuttoned over a lavender shirt, brought two glasses of dense black wine. "You have walked a long way?" he asked, looking with interest at Lyaeus' feet. "From Madrid." "_¡Carai!_" "Not all in one day." "You are sailors going to rejoin your ship in Sevilla." The _padrón_ looked from one to another with a knowing expression, twisting his mouth so that one of the points of his moustache slanted towards the ceiling and the other towards the floor. "Not exactly...." Another man drew up his chair to their table, first taking off his wide cap and saying gravely: "_Con permiso de ustedes._" His broad, slightly flabby face was very pale; the eyes under his sparse blonde eyelashes were large and grey. He put his two hands on their shoulders so as to draw their heads together and said in a whisper: "You aren't deserters, are you?" "No." "I hoped you were. I might have helped you. I escaped from prison in Barcelona a week ago. I am a syndicalist." "Have a drink," cried Lyaeus. "Another glass.... And we can let you have some money if you need it, too, if you want to get out of the country." The _padrón_ brought the wine and retired discreetly to a chair beside the bar from which he beamed at them with almost religious approbation. "You are comrades?" "Of those who break out," said Lyaeus flushing. "What about the progress of events? When do you think the pot will boil over?" "Soon or never," said the syndicalist.... "That is never in our lifetime. We are being buried under industrialism like the rest of Europe. Our people, our comrades even, are fast getting the bourgeois mentality. There is danger that we shall lose everything we have fought for.... You see, if we could only have captured the means of production when the system was young and weak, we could have developed it slowly for our benefit, made the machine the slave of man. Every day we wait makes it more difficult. It is a race as to whether this peninsula will be captured by communism or capitalism. It is still neither one nor the other, in its soul." He thumped his clenched fist against his chest. "How long were you in prison?" "Only a month this time, but if they catch me it will be bad. They won't catch me." He spoke quietly without gestures, occasionally rolling an unlit cigarette between his brown fingers. "Hadn't we better go out before it gets quite dark?" said Telemachus. "When shall I see you again?" said Lyaeus to the syndicalist. "Oh, we'll meet if you stay in Toledo a few days...." Lyaeus got to his feet and took the man by the arm. "Look, let me give you some money; won't you be wanting to go to Portugal?" The man flushed and shook his head. "If our opinions coincided...." "I agree with all those who break out," said Lyaeus. "That's not the same, my friend." They shook hands and Telemachus and Lyaeus went out of the tavern. Two carriages hung with gaudily embroidered shawls, full of dominos and pierrots and harlequins who threw handfuls of confetti at people along the sidewalks, clattered into town through the dark arches of the gate. Telemachus got some confetti in his mouth. A crowd of little children danced about him jeering as he stood spluttering on the curbstone. Lyaeus took him by the arm and drew him along the street after the carriages, bent double with laughter. This irritated Telemachus who tore his arm away suddenly and made off with long strides up a dark street. * * * * * A half-waned moon shone through the perforations in a round terra-cotta chimney into the street's angular greenish shadow. From somewhere came the seethe of water over a dam. Telemachus was leaning against a damp wall, tired and exultant, looking vaguely at the oval of a woman's face half surmised behind the bars of an upper window, when he heard a clatter of unsteady feet on the cobbles and Lyaeus appeared, reeling a little, his lips moist, his eyebrows raised in an expression of drunken jollity. "Lyaeus, I am very happy," cried Telemachus stepping forward to meet his friend. "Walking about here in these empty zigzag streets I have suddenly felt familiar with it all, as if it were a part of me, as if I had soaked up some essence out of it." "Silly that about essences, gestures, Tel, silly.... Awake all you need." Lyaeus stood on a little worn stone that kept wheels off the corner of the house where the street turned and waved his arms. "Awake! _Dormitant animorum excubitor._... That's not right. Latin's no good. Means a fellow who says: 'wake up, you son of a gun.'" "Oh, you're drunk. It's much more important than that. It's like learning to swim. For a long time you flounder about, it's unpleasant and gets up your nose and you choke. Then all at once you are swimming like a duck. That's how I feel about all this.... The challenge was that woman in Madrid, dancing, dancing...." "Tel, there are things too good to talk about.... Look, I'm like St. Simeon Stylites." Lyaeus lifted one leg, then the other, waving his arms like a tight-rope walker. "When I left you I walked out over the other bridge, the bridge of St. Martin and climbed...." "Shut up, I think I hear a girl giggling up in the window there." Lyaeus stood up very straight on his column and threw a kiss up into the darkness. The giggling turned to a shrill laughter; a head craned out from a window opposite. Lyaeus beckoned with both hands. "Never mind about them.... Look out, somebody threw something.... Oh, it's an orange.... I want to tell you how I felt the gesture. I had climbed up on one of the hills of the Cigarrales and was looking at the silhouette of the town so black against the stormy marbled sky. The moon hadn't risen yet.... Let's move away from here." "_Ven, flor de mi corazón_," shouted Lyaeus towards the upper window. "A flock of goats was passing on the road below, and from somewhere came the tremendous lilt of...." "Heads!" cried Lyaeus throwing himself round an angle in the wall. Telemachus looked up, his mind full of his mother Penelope's voice saying reproachfully: "You might have been murdered in that dark alley." A girl was leaning from the window, shaken with laughter, taking aim with a bucket she swung with both hands. "Stop," cried Telemachus, "it's the other...." As he spoke a column of cold water struck his head, knocked his breath out, drenched him. "Speaking of gestures...." whispered Lyaeus breathlessly from the doorway where he was crouching, and the street was filled with uncontrollable shrieking laughter. 
18053	----	[Transcriber's note: Spelling mistakes have been left in the text to match the original, except for a few obvious typos.] OUR EUROPEAN NEIGHBOURS _French Life_ _German Life_ _Russian Life_ _Dutch Life_ _Swiss Life_ _Spanish Life_ _Italian Life_ _Danish Life_ _Austro-Hungarian Life_ _Turkish Life_ _Belgian Life_ _Swedish Life_ OUR EUROPEAN NEIGHBOURS EDITED BY WILLIAM HARBUTT DAWSON SPANISH LIFE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY [Illustration: "IN CHURCH." SHOWING THE MANTILLA AND VELO] SPANISH LIFE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY BY L. HIGGIN WITH CHAPTERS ON PORTUGUESE LIFE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY, BY EUGÈNE E. STREET * * * * * ILLUSTRATED G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK AND LONDON The Knickerbocker Press 1904 COPYRIGHT, 1902 BY G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS Published, May, 1902 Reprinted, February, 1903 May, 1904; September, 1904 The Knickerbocker Press, New York NOTE BY THE EDITOR It has been thought well to include Portugal in this volume, so as to embrace the entire Iberian Peninsula. Though geographically contiguous, and so closely associated in the popular mind, the Spanish and Portuguese nations offer in fact the most striking divergences alike in character and institutions, and separate treatment was essential in justice to each country. The preferential attention given to Spain is only in keeping with the more prominent part she has played, and may yet play, in the history of civilisation. * * * * * I am indebted for the chapters on Portugal to Mr. Eugène E. Street, whose long and intimate acquaintance with the land and its people renders him peculiarly fitted to draw their picture. L. HIGGIN. CONTENTS _SPANISH LIFE_ PAGE CHAPTER I LAND AND PEOPLE 1 CHAPTER II TYPES AND TRAITS 24 CHAPTER III NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS 38 CHAPTER IV SPANISH SOCIETY 55 CHAPTER V MODERN MADRID 77 CHAPTER VI THE COURT 97 CHAPTER VII POPULAR AMUSEMENTS 111 CHAPTER VIII THE PRESS AND ITS LEADERS 129 CHAPTER IX POLITICAL GOVERNMENT 142 CHAPTER X COMMERCE AND AGRICULTURE 156 CHAPTER XI THE ARMY AND NAVY 183 CHAPTER XII RELIGIOUS LIFE 198 CHAPTER XIII EDUCATION AND THE PRIESTHOOD 213 CHAPTER XIV PHILANTHROPY--POSITION OF WOMEN--MARRIAGE CUSTOMS 226 CHAPTER XV MUSIC, ART, AND THE DRAMA 236 CHAPTER XVI MODERN LITERATURE 246 CHAPTER XVII THE FUTURE OF SPAIN 260 _PORTUGUESE LIFE_ CHAPTER XVIII LAND AND PEOPLE 277 CHAPTER XIX PORTUGUESE INSTITUTIONS 298 INDEX 315 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE "IN CHURCH." SHOWING THE MANTILLA AND VELO _Frontispiece_ PEASANTS 2 A CORNER IN OLD MADRID 8 SEVILLE CIGARRERA 20 PEASANTS 20 VALENCIANOS 26 THE WATER TRIBUNAL IN VALENCIA. SHOWING VALENCIAN COSTUMES 34 PAST WORK 50 KNIFE-GRINDER 50 OUTSIDE THE PLAZA DE TOROS, MADRID 78 BUEYES RESTING 94 IN THE WOODS AT LA GRANJA 104 PLAZA DE TOROS. PICADOR CAUGHT BY THE BULL 120 PLAZA DE TOROS. THE PROCESSION 124 DRAGGING OUT THE DEAD BULL 126 THE ESCURIAL 140 A WEDDING PARTY IN ESTREMADURA 170 A COUNTRY CABIN IN GALICIA 292 SPANISH LIFE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY CHAPTER I LAND AND PEOPLE Only in comparatively late years has the Iberian Continent been added to the happy hunting-grounds of the ordinary British and American tourist, and somewhat of a check arose after the outbreak of the war with America. To the other wonderful legends which gather round this romantic country, and are spread abroad, unabashed and uncontradicted, was added one more, to the effect that so strong a feeling existed on the part of the populace against Americans, that it was unsafe for English-speaking visitors to travel there. Nothing is farther from the truth; there is no hatred of American or English, and, if there had been, they little know the innate courtesy of the Spanish people, who fear insult that is not due to the overbearing manners of the tourist himself. To-day, however, everyone is going to Spain, and as the number of travellers increases, so, perhaps, does the real ignorance of the country and of her people become more apparent, for, after a few days, or at most weeks, spent there, those who seem to imagine that they have discovered Spain, as Columbus discovered America, deliver their judgment upon her with all the audacity of ignorance, or, at best, with very imperfect information and capacity for forming an opinion. For many years, the foreign element in Spain was so small that all who made their home in the country were known and easily counted, while those who travelled were, for the most part, cultivated people--artists, or lovers of art, or persons interested in some way in the commercial or industrial progress of the nation. Even in those days, however, too many tourists spent their time amongst the dead cities, remnants of Spain's great past, and came back to add their quota to the sentimental notions current about the romantic land sung by Byron. Wrapped in a glamour for which their own enthusiasm was mainly responsible, they beheld all things coloured with the rich glow of a resplendent sunset; their descriptions of people and places raised expectations too often cruelly dispelled by facts, as presented to those of less exuberant imaginations. [Illustration: PEASANTS] [Illustration: PEASANTS] On the other hand, the mere British traveller, knowing nothing of art, almost nothing of history, and very little of anything beyond his own provincial parish, finds all that is not the commonplace of his own country, barbarous and utterly beneath contempt. His own manners, not generally of the best, set all that is proud and dignified in the lowest Spaniard in revolt; he imagines that he meets with discourtesy where, in fact, he has gone out to seek it, and his own ignorance is chiefly to blame for his failure to understand a people wholly unlike his own class associates at home. He, too, returns, shaking the dust off his feet, to draw a picture of the land he has left, as false and misleading as that of the dreamer who has overloaded his picture with colour that does not exist for the ordinary tourist. Thus it too often comes to pass that visitors to Spain experience keen disappointment during their short stay in the country. Whether they always acknowledge it or not, is another question. To hit the happy medium, and to draw from a tour in Spain, or from a more prolonged sojourn there, all the pleasure that may be derived from it, and to feel with those who, knowing the country and its people intimately, love it dearly, a remembrance of its past history and of its strange agglomeration of nationalities is absolutely necessary; nor can any true idea be formed of the country from a mere acquaintance with any one of its widely differing provinces. Galicia is, even to-day, more nearly allied to Portugal than to Spain, and it was only in 1668 that the independence of the former was acknowledged, and it became a separate kingdom. With all rights now equalised, the inhabitants of the remaining provinces of Spain differ as widely from one another as they do from the sister kingdom, while the folklore of Asturias and of the Basque Provinces is very closely allied with that of Portugal. To judge the Biscayan by the same standard as the Andaluz, is as sensible as it would be to compare the Irish squatter with Cornish fisher-folk, or the peasants of Wilts and Surrey with the Celtic races of the West Highlands of Scotland, or even with the people of Lancashire or Yorkshire. Nor is it possible to speak of Spain as a whole, and of what she is likely to make of the present impulse towards national growth and industrial prosperity, without remembering that her population counts, among its rapidly increasing numbers, the far-seeing and business-like, if somewhat selfish, Catalan, with a language of his own; the dreamy, pleasure-loving Andaluz; the vigorous Basque, whose distinctive language is not to be learned or understood by the people of any other part of Spain; the half-Moorish Valencian and the self-respecting Aragonese, who have always made their mark in the history of their country, and were looked upon as a foreign element in the days when their kingdom and that of Leon were united, under one crown, with Castile. It was only after Alfonso XII. had stamped out the last Carlist war that the ancient _fueros_, or special rights, of the Basque Provinces became a thing of the past, and their people liable to conscription, on a par with all the other parts of Spain. Every student of history knows that the era of Spain's greatness was that of _Los Reyes Católicos_, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, when the wonderful discovery and opening up of a new world made her people dizzy with excitement, and seemed to promise steadily increasing power and influence. Everyone knows that these dreams were never realised; that, so far from remaining the greatest nation of the Western World, Spain has gradually sunk back into a condition that leaves her to-day outside of international politics; and that, with the loss of her last colonies overseas, she appears to the superficial observer to be a dead or dying nation, no longer of any account among the peoples of Europe. But this is no fact; it is rather the baseless fancy of incompetent observers, to some extent acquiesced in, or at least not contradicted, by the proud Castilian, who cares not at all about the opinions of other nationalities, and who never takes the trouble to enlighten ignorance of the kind. True, there was an exhibition of something like popular indignation when the people fancied they discovered a reference to Spain in the utterances of two leading English statesmen, during the war with America, and the feeling of soreness against England still to some extent exists; in fact, strange as it may appear, there is far less anger against America, which deprived Spain of her colonies, than against England, which looked on complacently, and with obvious sympathy for the aggressor. But all this is past, or passing. The Spaniards are a generous people, and no one forgets or forgives more easily or more entirely. Those who knew Madrid in the days of Isabel II., would not have imagined it possible that the Queen, who had been banished with so much general rejoicing, could, under any circumstances, have received in the capital a warm greeting; in fact, it was for long thought inexpedient to allow her to risk a popular demonstration of quite another character. But when she came to visit her son, after the restoration of Alfonso XII., her sins, which were many, were forgiven her. It was, perhaps, remembered that in her youth she had been more sinned against than sinning; that she was _muy Española_, kind-hearted and gracious in manner, pitiful and courteous to all. Hence, so long as she did not remain, and did not in any way interfere in the government, the people were ready to receive her with acclamation, and were probably really glad to see her again without her _camarilla_, and with no power to injure the new order of things. No nation in the world is more innately democratic than Spain--none, perhaps, so attached to monarchy; but one lesson has been learned, probably alike by King and people--that absolutism is dead and buried beyond recall. The ruler of Spain, to-day and in the future, must represent the wishes of the people; and if at any time the two should once more come into sharp collision, it is not the united people of this once-divided country that would give way. For the rest, so long as the monarch reigns constitutionally, and respects the rights and the desires of his people, there is absolutely nothing to fear from pretender or republican. At a recent political meeting in Madrid, for the first time, were seen democrats, republicans, and monarchists united; amidst a goodly quantity of somewhat "tall" talk, two notable remarks were received with acclamation by all parties: one was that Italy had found freedom, and had made herself into a united nationality, under a constitutional monarch; and the other, that between the Government of England and a republic there was no difference except in name--that in all Europe there was no country so democratic or so absolutely free as England under her King, nor one in which the people so entirely governed themselves. Among the many mistaken ideas which obtain currency in England with regard to Spain, perhaps none is more common or more baseless than the fiction about Don Carlos and his chances of success. A certain small class of journalists from time to time write ridiculous articles in English papers and magazines about what they are pleased to call the "legitimatist" cause, and announce its coming triumph in the Peninsula. No Spaniard takes the trouble to notice these remarkable productions of the fertile journalistic brain of a foreigner. There are still, of course, people calling themselves Carlists--notably the Duke of Madrid and Don Jaime, but the cult, such as there is of it in Spain, is of the "Platonic" order only,--to use the Spanish description of it, "a little talk but no fight,"--and it may be classed with the vagaries of the amiable people in England who amuse themselves by wearing a white rose, and also call themselves "legitimatists," praying for the restoration of the Stuarts. The truth about the Carlist pretension is so little known in England that it may be well to state it. Spain has never been a land of the Salic Law; the story of her reigning queens--chief of all, Isabel la Católica, shows this. It was not until the time of Philip V., the first of the Bourbons, that this absolute monarch limited the succession to heirs male by "pragmatic sanction"; that is to say, by his own unsupported order. The Act in itself was irregular; it was never put before the Cortes, and the Council of Castile protested against it at the time. [Illustration: A CORNER IN OLD MADRID] This Act, such as it was, was revoked by Charles IV.; but the revocation was never published, the birth of sons making it immaterial. When, however, his son Ferdinand VII. was near his end, leaving only two daughters, he published his father's revocation of the Act of Philip V., and appointed his wife, Cristina, Regent during the minority of Isabel II., then only three years of age. At no time, then, in its history, has the Salic Law been in use in Spain: the irregular act of a despotic King was repudiated both by his grandson and his great-grandson. Nothing, therefore, can be more ridiculous than the pretension of legitimacy on the part of a pretender whose party simply attempts to make an illegal innovation, in defiance of the legitimate kings and of the Council of Castile, a fundamental law of the monarchy. Carlism, the party of the Church against the nation, came into existence when, during the first years of Cristina's Regency, Mendizábal, the patriotic merchant of Cadiz and London, then First Minister of the Crown, carried out the dismemberment of the religious orders, and the diversion of their enormous wealth to the use of the nation. Don Carlos, the brother of Ferdinand VII., thereupon declared himself the Defender of the Faith and the champion of the extreme clerical party. _Hinc illæ lachrymæ_, and two Carlist wars! The position of the Church, or rather what was called the "Apostolic party," is intelligible enough, and it is easy also to understand why Carlism has been preached as a crusade to English Roman Catholics, who have been induced in both Carlist wars to provide the main part of the funds which made them possible; but to call Don Carlos "the legitimate King" is an absurd misnomer. For the rest, as regards Spain herself and the wishes of her people, it is perhaps enough to remark that if, after the expulsion of the Bourbons in 1868, at the time of the Revolution known as "La Gloriosa," when Prim had refused to think of a republic and declared himself once and always in favour of a monarchy, and the Crown of proud Spain went a-begging among the Courts of Europe,--if, at that time of her national need, Don Carlos was unable to come forward in his celebrated character of "legitimate Sovereign of the Spanish people," or to raise even two or three voices in his favour, what chance is he likely to have with a settled constitutional Government and the really legitimate Monarch on the throne? The strongest chance he ever had of success was when the Basque Provinces were at one time disposed, it is said almost to a man, to take his side; but, in fact, the men of the mountain were fighting much more for the retention of their own _fueros_--for their immunity from conscription, among others--than for any love of Don Carlos himself. They would have liked a king and a little kingdom all of their own, and, above all, to have held their beloved rights against all the rest of Spain. All that, however, is over now. In all Spain no province has profited as have those of the North by the settled advance of the country. Bilbao, once a small trading town, twice devastated during the terrible civil wars, has forged ahead in a manner perhaps only equalled by Liverpool in the days of its first growth, and is now more important and more populous than Barcelona itself; with its charming outlet of Portugalete, it is the most flourishing of Spanish ports, and is able to compare with any in Europe for its commerce and its rapid growth. Viscaya and Asturias want no more civil war, and the Apostolic party may look in vain for any more Carlist risings. More to be feared now are labour troubles, or the contamination of foreign anarchist doctrines; but in this case, the Church and the nation would be on the same side--that of order and progress. In attempting to understand the extremely complex character of the Spaniard as we know him,--that is to say, the Castilian, or rather the Madrileño,--one has to take into account not only the divers races which go to make up the nationality as it is to-day, but something of the past history of this strangely interesting people. To go back to the days when Spain was a Roman province in a high state of civilisation: some of the greatest Romans known to fame were Spaniards--Quintilian, Martial, Lucan, and the two Senecas. Trajan was the first Spaniard named Emperor, and the only one whose ashes were allowed to rest within the city walls; but the Spanish freedman of Augustus, Gaius Julius Hyginus, had been made the chief keeper of the Palatine Library, and Ballus, another Spaniard, had reached the consulship, and had been accorded the honour of a public triumph. Hadrian, again, was a Spaniard, and Marcus Aurelius a son of Córdoba. No wonder that Spain is proud to remember that, of the "eighty perfect golden years" which Gibbon declares to have been the happiest epoch in mankind's history, no less than sixty were passed beneath the sceptre of her Cæsars. The conquered had become conquerors; the intermarriage of Roman soldiers and settlers with Spanish women modified the original race; the Iberians invaded the politics and the literature of their conquerors. St. Augustine mourned the _odiosa cantio_ of Spanish children learning Latin, but the language of Rome itself was altered by its Iberian emperors and literati; the races, in fact, amalgamated, and the Spaniard of to-day, to those who know him well, bears a strange resemblance to the Roman citizens with whom the letters of the Younger Pliny so charmingly make us familiar. The dismemberment of the Roman Empire left Spain exposed to the inroads of the Northern barbarians, and led indirectly to the subsequent Moorish inrush; for the Jews, harassed by a severe penal code, hailed the Arabs as a kindred race; and with their slaves made common cause with the conquering hordes. The Goths seem to have been little more than armed settlers in the country. Marriage between them and the Iberians was forbidden by their laws, and the traces of their occupation are singularly few: not a single inscription or book of Gothic origin remains, and it seems doubtful if any trace of the language can be found in Castilian or any of its dialects. It is strange, if this be true, that there should be so strong a belief in the influence of Gothic blood in the race. In all these wars and rumours of war the men of the hardy North remained practically unconquered. The last to submit to the Roman, the first to throw off the yoke of the Moor, the Basques and Asturians appear to be the representatives of the old inhabitants of Spain, who never settled down under the sway of the invader or acquiesced in foreign rule. Cicero mentions a Spanish tongue which was unintelligible to the Romans; was this Basque, which is equally so now to the rest of Spain, and which, if you believe the modern Castilian, the devil himself has never been able to master? The history of Spain is one to make the heart ache. Some evil influence, some malign destiny, seems ever to have brought disaster where her people looked for progress or happiness. Her golden age was just in the short epoch when Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon reigned and ruled over the united kingdoms: both were patriotic, both clever, and absolutely at one in their policy. It is almost impossible to us who can look back on the long records, almost always sad and disastrous, not to doubt whether in giving a new world "to Castile and Aragon," Cristobal Colon did not impose a burden on the country of his adoption which she was unable to bear, and which became, in the hands of the successors of her _muy Españoles y muy Católicos_ kings, a curse instead of a blessing. Certain it is that Spain was not sufficiently advanced in political economy to understand or cope with the enormous changes which this opening up of a new world brought about. The sudden increase of wealth without labour, of reward for mere adventure, slew in its infancy any impulse there might have been to carry on the splendid manufactures and enlightened agriculture of the Moors; trade became a disgrace, and the fallacious idea that bringing gold and silver into a country could make it rich and prosperous ate like a canker into the industrial heart of the people, and with absolute certainty threw them backward in the race of civilisation. Charles V. was the first evil genius of Spain; thinking far more of his German and Italian possessions than of the country of his mother, poor mad Juana, he exhausted the resources of Spain in his endless wars outside the country, and inaugurated her actual decline at a moment when, to the unthinking, she was at the height of her glory. The influence of the powerful nobility of the country had been completely broken by Isabella and Ferdinand, and the device of adopting the Burgundian fashion of keeping at the Court an immense crowd of nobles in so-called "waiting" on the Monarch flattered the national vanity, while it ensured the absolute inefficacy of the class when it might have been useful in stemming the baneful absolutism of such lunatics as Felipe II. and the following Austrian monarchs, each becoming more and more effete and more and more mad. The very doubtful "glory" of the reign of the Catholic Kings in having driven out the Moors after eight centuries of conflict and effort, proved, in fact, no advantage to the country; but twenty thousand Christian captives were freed, and every reader of history must, for the moment, sympathise with the people who effected this freeing of their country from a foreign yoke. Looking at the marvellous tracery of the church of San Juan de los Reyes at Toledo, picked out by the actual chains broken off the miserable Christian captives, and hanging there unrusted in the fine air and sunshine of the country for over four hundred years, one's heart beats in sympathy with the pride of the Spaniards in their Catholic Kings. But Toledo, alas! is dead; the centre of light and learning is mouldering in the very slough of ignorance, and Christianity compares badly enough with the rule of Arab and Jew. Nevertheless, it must be said that, had matters been left as Isabella and Ferdinand left them, Spain might have benefited by the example of her conquerors, as other countries have done, and as she herself did during the Roman occupation. Philip II. was too wise to expel the richest and most industrious of his subjects so long as they paid his taxes and, at least, professed to be Christians. It was not until the reign of Philip III. and his disgraceful favourite Lerma, himself the most bigoted of Valencian "Christians," that, by the advice of Ribera, the Archbishop of Valencia, these industrious, thrifty, and harmless people were ruthlessly driven out. They had turned Valencia into a prolific garden,--even to-day it is called the _huerta_,--their silk manufactures were known and valued throughout the world; their industry and frugality were, in fact, their worst crimes; they were able to draw wealth from the sterile lands which "Christians" found wholly unproductive. "Since it is impossible to kill them all," said Ribera, the representative of Christ, he again and again urged on the King their expulsion. The nobles and landowners protested in vain. September 22, 1609, is one of the blackest--perhaps, in fact, the blackest--of all days in the disastrous annals of Spain. The Marqués de Caracena, Viceroy of Valencia, issued the terrible edict of expulsion. Six of the oldest and "most Christian" Moriscos in each community of a hundred souls were to remain to teach their modes of cultivation and their industries, and only three days were allowed for the carrying out of this most wicked and suicidal law. In the following six months one hundred and fifty thousand Moors were hounded out of the land which their ancestors had possessed and enriched for centuries. Murcia, Andalucia, Aragon, Cataluña, Castile, La Mancha, and Estremadura were next taken in hand. In these latter provinces the cruel blunder was all the worse, since the Moors had intermarried with the Iberian inhabitants, and had really embraced the Christian religion, so called. Half a million souls, according to Father Bleda, in his _Defensio Fidei_, were thrust out, with every aggravation of cruelty and robbery. No nation can commit crimes like this without suffering more than its victims. Spain has never to this day recovered from the blow to her own prosperity, to her commerce, her manufactures, and her civilisation dealt by the narrow-minded and ignorant King, led by a despicable favourite, and the fanatical bigot, Ribera. With the Moors went almost all their arts and industries; immense tracts of country became arid wastes: Castile and La Mancha barely raise crops every second year where the Moriscos reaped their teeming harvest, and Estremadura from a smiling garden became a waste where wandering flocks of sheep and pigs now find a bare subsistence. Nor was this all. Science and learning were also driven out with the Arab and Jew; Córdoba, like Toledo, vanished, as the centre of intellectual life. In place of enlightened agriculture, irrigation of the dry land, and the planting of trees, the peasant was taught to take for his example San Isidro, the patron saint of the labourer, who spent his days in prayer, and left his fields to plough and sow themselves; the forests were cut down for fuel, until the shadeless wastes became less and less productive, and the whole land on the elevated plains, which the Moors had irrigated and planted, became little better than a desert. It was not only in the mother country that frightful acts of bigotry and lust for wealth were enacted. In Peru the Spaniards found a splendid civilisation among the strange races of the Incas, a condition of order which many modern states might envy, a religion absolutely free from fetish worship, and a standard of morality which has never been surpassed. But they ruthlessly destroyed it all, desecrated the temples where the sun was worshipped only as a visible representative of a God "of whom nothing could be known save by His works," as their tenet ran, and substituted the religion which they represented as having been taught by Jesus of Nazareth; a religion which looked for its chief power to the horrible Inquisition and its orgies called _Autos da fé!_ As regards the mysterious race of the Incas, who in comparison with the native Indians were almost white, and who possessed a high cultivation, it is curious to note that during the late troubles in China records came to light in the Palace of Pekin showing that Chinese missionaries landed on the coast subsequently known as Peru, in ages long antecedent to the discovery of the country by the Spaniards, and established temples and schools there. No one who reads the minute accounts of the Incas from Garcilaso de la Vega--himself of the royal race on his mother's side, his father having been one of the Spanish adventurers--can avoid the conclusion that the religion of the Incas, thus utterly destroyed by the Spaniards, was much more nearly that of Christ than the debased worship introduced in its place. The whole story of these "Children of the Sun," told by one of themselves afterwards in Córdoba, where he is always careful to keep on the right side of the Inquisition by pretending to be a "Christian after the manner of his father," is fascinatingly interesting as well as instructive. It is almost impossible to speak of the Spanish Inquisition and its baneful influence on the people without seeming to be carried away by prejudice or even bigotry, but it is equally impossible for the ordinary student of history to read, even in the pages of the "orthodox," the terrible repression of its iron hand on all that was advancing in the nation; its writers, its singers, its men of science, wherever they dared to raise their voices in ever so faint a cry, ground down to one dead level of unthinking acquiescence, or driven forth from their native land, without ceasing to wonder at all at Spain's decadence from the moment she had handed herself over, bound hand and foot, to the Church. Wondering, rather, at her enormous inherent vitality, which at last, after so many centuries of spasmodic effort, has shaken off the incubus and regained liberty, or for the first time established it in the realms of religion, science, and general instruction. It matters little or nothing whether the Inquisition, with its secret spies, its closed doors, its mockery of justice, and its terrible background of smouldering _Quemadero_, was the instrument of the Church or of the King for the moment. Whether a religious or a political tyranny, it was at all times opposed to the very essence of freedom, and it was deliberately used, and would be again to-day if it were possible to restore it, to keep the people in a gross state of ignorance and superstition. That it was admirable as an organisation only shows it in a more baneful light, since it was used to crush out all progress. Its effect is well expressed in the old proverb: "Between the King and the Inquisition we must not open our lips." "I would rather think I had ascended from an ape," said Huxley, in his celebrated answer to the Bishop of Oxford, "than that I had descended from a man who used great gifts to darken reason." It has been the object of the Inquisition to darken reason wherever it had the power, and it left the mass of the Spanish people, great and generous as they are by nature, for long a mere mob of inert animals, ready to amuse themselves when their country was at its hour of greatest agony, debased by the sight of wholesale and cruel murders carried out by the priests of their religion in the name of Christ. [Illustration: PEASANTS] [Illustration: SEVILLE CIGARRERA] Even to-day the Spaniard of the lower classes can scarcely understand that he can have any part or parcel in the government of his country. Long ages of misrule have made him hate all governments alike: he imagines that all the evils he finds in the world of his own experience are the work of whoever happens to be the ruler for the time being; that it is possible for him to have any say in the matter never enters his head, and he votes, if he votes at all, as he is ordered to vote. He has been taught for ages past to believe whatever he has been told. His reason has been "offered as a sacrifice to God," if indeed he is aware that he possesses any. The danger of the thorough awakening may be that which broke out so wildly during Castelar's short and disastrous attempt at a republic: that when once he breaks away from the binding power of his old religion, he may have nothing better than atheism and anarchism to fall back upon. The days of the absolute reign of ignorance and superstition are over; but the people are deeply religious. Will the Church of Spain adapt itself to the new state of things, or will it see its people drift away from its pale altogether, as other nations have done? This is the true clerical question which looms darkly before the Spain of to-day. To return, however. The Austrian kings of Spain had brought her only ruin. With the Bourbons it was hoped a better era had opened, but it was only exchanging one form of misrule for another. The kings existed for their own benefit and pleasure; the people existed to minister to them and find funds for their extravagance. Each succeeding monarch was ruled by some upstart favourite, until the climax was reached when Godoy, the disgraceful Minister of Charles IV., and the open lover of his Queen, sold the country to Napoleon. Then indeed awoke the great heart of the nation, and Spain has the everlasting glory of having risen as one man against the French despot, and, by the help of England, stopped his mad career. Even then, under the base and contemptible Ferdinand VII., she underwent the "Terror of 1824," the disastrous and unworthy regency of Cristina, and the still worse rule of her daughter, Isabel II., before she awoke politically as a nation, and, her innumerable parties forming as one, drove out the Queen, with her _camarilla_ of priests and bleeding nuns, and at last achieved her freedom. For, whatever may be said of the last hundred years of Spain's history, it has been an advance, a continuous struggle for life and liberty. There had been fluctuating periods of progress. Charles III., a truly wise and patriotic monarch, the first since Ferdinand and Isabella, made extraordinary changes during his too short life. The population of the country rose a million and a half in the twenty-seven years of his reign, and the public revenue in like proportions under his enlightened Minister, Florida Blanca. No phase of the public welfare was neglected: savings banks, hospitals, asylums, free schools, rose up on all sides; vagrancy and mendicancy were sternly repressed; while men of science and skilled craftsmen were brought from foreign countries, and it seemed as if Spain had fairly started on her upward course. But he died before his time in 1788, and was followed by a son and grandson, who, with their wives, ruled by base favourites, dragged the honour of Spain in the dust. Still, the impulse had been given; there had been a break in the long story of misrule and misery; Mendizábal and Espartero scarcely did more than lighten the black canopy of cloud overhanging the country for a time; but at last came freedom, halting somewhat, as must needs be, but no longer to be repressed or driven back by the baneful influence known as _palaciö_, intrigues arising in the immediate circle of the Court. CHAPTER II TYPES AND TRAITS It is the fashion to-day to minimise the influence of the Goths on the national characteristics of the Spaniard. We are told by some modern writers that their very existence is little more than a myth, and that the name of their last King, Roderick, is all that is really known about them. The castle of Wamba, or at least the hill on which it stood, is still pointed out to the visitor in Toledo, perched high above the red torrent of the rushing Tagus; but little seems to be certainly known of this hardy Northern race which, for some three hundred years, occupied the country after the Romans had withdrawn their protecting legions. On the approach of the all-conquering Moor, many of the inhabitants of Spain took refuge in the inaccessible mountains of the north, and were the ancestors of that invincible people known in Spain as "los Montañeses," from whom almost all that is best in literature, as well as in business capacity, has sprung in later years. How much of the Celt-Iberian, or original inhabitant of the Peninsula, and how much of Gothic or of Teuton blood runs in the veins of the people of the mountains, it is more than difficult now to determine. It had been impossible, despite laws and penalties, to prevent the intermingling of the races: all that we certainly know is that the inhabitants of Galicia, Asturias, Viscaya, Navarro, and Aragon have always exhibited the characteristics of a hardy, fighting, pushing race, as distinguished from the Andaluces, the Valencianos, the Murcianos, and people of Granada, in whom the languid blood of a Southern people and the more marked trace of Arabic heritage are apparent. The Catalans would appear, again, to be descendants of the old Provençals, at one time settled on both sides of the Pyrenees, though forming, at that time, part of Spain. Their language is almost pure Provençal, and they differ, as history shows in a hundred ways, from the inhabitants of the rest of Spain. The Castilians, occupying the centre of the country, are what we know as "Spaniards," and may be taken to hold a middle place among these widely differing nationalities, modified by their contact with all. Their language is that of cultivated Spain. No one dreams of asking if you speak Spanish; it is always: _Habla v Castellano?_ And it is certainly a remnant of the old Roman, which, as we know, its emperors spoke "with a difference," albeit there are many traces of Arabic about it. Even at the present day, when Spain is rapidly becoming homogeneous, the people of the different provinces are almost as well known by their trades as by their special characteristics. A _Gallego_--really a native of Galicia--means, in the common parlance, a porter, a water-carrier, almost a beast of burden, and the Galicians are as well known for this purpose in Portugal as in Spain, great numbers finding ready employment in the former country, where manual labour is looked upon as impossible for a native. The men of the lowest class emigrate to more favoured provinces, since their own is too poor to support them; they work hard, and return with their savings to their native hills. Their fellow-countrymen consider them boorish in manners, uneducated, and of a low class; but they are good-natured and docile, hard-working, temperate, and honest. "In your life," wrote the Duke of Wellington, "you never saw anything so bad as the Galicians; and yet they are the finest body of men and the best movers I have ever seen." There is a greater similarity between Galicia and Portugal than between the former and any other province of Spain. Although they lie so close together, Asturias differs widely from its sister province both in the character of its people and its scenery. The Romans took two hundred years to subdue it, and the Moors never obtained a footing there. The Asturians are a hardy, independent race, proud of giving the title to the heir-apparent of the Spanish throne. The people of this province, like their neighbours the Basques, are handsome and robust in appearance; they are always to be recognised in Madrid by their fresh appearance and excellent physique. For the most part they are to be found engaged in the fish trade, while their women, gorgeously dressed in their native costume by their employers, are the nurses of the upper classes. [Illustration: VALENCIANOS] The ladies of Madrid do not think it "good style" to bring up their own children, and the Asturian wet nurse is as much a part of the ordinary household as the coachman or _mayordomo_. They are singularly handsome, well-grown women, and become great favourites in the houses of their employers; but, like their menkind, they go back to spend their savings among their beloved hills. Many of these young women come to Madrid on the chance of finding situations, leaving their own babies behind to be fed by hand, or Heaven knows how; they bring with them a young puppy to act as substitute until the nurse-child is found, and may be seen in the registry offices waiting to be hired, with their little canine foster-children. It is said that the Asturian women never part from the puppies that they have fed from their own breasts. The Basque Provinces are, perhaps, the best known to English travellers, since they generally enter Spain by that route, and those staying in the south of France are fond of running across to have at least a look at Spain, and to be able to say they have been there. The people pride themselves on being "the oldest race in Europe," and are, no doubt, the direct descendants of the original and unconquered inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula. In Guipuzcoa, the Basque may still be seen living in his flat-roofed stone house, of which he is sure to be proprietor, using a mattock in place of plough, and leading his oxen--for _bueyes_ are never driven--attached to one of the heavy, solid-wheeled carts by an elaborately carved yoke, covered with a sheepskin. He clings tenaciously to his unintelligible language, and is quite certain that he is superior to the whole human race. The _fueros_, or special rights, already spoken of, for which the Basques have fought so passionately for five hundred years, might possibly have been theirs for some time longer if they had not unwisely thrown in their lot with the Carlist Pretender. They practically formed a republic within the monarchy; but in 1876, when the young Alfonso XII. finally conquered the provinces, all differences between them and the other parts of the kingdom were abolished, and they had to submit to the abhorred conscription. With all the burning indignation which still makes some of them say, "I am not a Spaniard; I am a Basque," the extraordinary advance made in this part of Spain seems to show that the hereditary energy and talent of the people are on the side of national progress. The distinctive dress of the Basques is now almost a thing of the past; the bright kerchiefs of the women and the dark-blue cap (_bóina_) of the men alone remain. The Viscayan _bóina_ has been lately introduced into the French army as the headgear of the Chasseurs and some other regiments. "Aragon is not ours; we ought to conquer it!" Isabel la Católica is said to have remarked to her husband; and, indeed, the history of this little province is wonderfully interesting and amusing. It alone seems to have had the good sense always to secure its rights before it would vote supplies for the Austrian kings; whereas the other provinces usually gave their money without any security, except the word of the King, which was usually broken. Among the provisions of the _fueros_ of the Aragonese was one that ran thus: _"Que siempre que el rey quebrantose sus fueros, pudiessen eligir otro rey encora que sea pagano"_ (If ever the King should infringe our _fueros_, we can elect another King, even though he might be a pagan), and the preamble of the election ran thus: "We, who are as good as you, and are more powerful than you (_podemos mas que vos_) elect you King in order that you may protect our rights and liberties, and also we elect one between us and you (_el justicia_), who has more power than you: _y si no, no!_" which may be taken to mean, "otherwise you are not our King." Somewhat of this spirit still abides in the Aragonese. The costume is one of the most picturesque in Spain. The men wear short black velvet breeches, open at the knees and slashed at the sides, adorned with rows of buttons, and showing white drawers underneath; _alpargatas_, or the plaited hempen sandals, which, with the stockings, are black; a black velvet jacket, with slashed and button-trimmed sleeves, and the gaily-coloured _faja_, or silk sash, worn over an elaborate shirt. In the old days, when one entered Spain by diligence from Bayonne to Pampeluna over the Pyrenees, one learned something of the beauty of the scenery and the healthy, hardy characteristics of the people, as one whirled along through the chestnut groves, over the leaping streams, always at full gallop, up hill and down dale, with a precipice on one side of the road and the overhanging mountains on the other. Below lay a fertile country with comfortable little homesteads and villages clustering round their church, and the like dotted the hillsides and the valleys wherever there seemed a foothold. As the diligence, with its team of ten or twelve mules, dashed through these villages or past the isolated farms, the people stood at their doors and shouted; it was evidently the event of the day. The mules were changed every hour, or rather more, according to the road, and as the ascent became steeper more were added to their number; sometimes six or eight starting from Bayonne where twelve or fourteen were needed for the top of the Pass. At least half the journey was always made at night, and if there were a moon the scenery became magically beautiful; but, in any case, the stars, in that clear atmosphere, made it almost as bright as day, while a ruddy light streamed from the lamp over the driver's seat, far above the coupé, along the string of hurrying mules, as they dashed round precipitous corners, dangerous enough in broad daylight. If one of the animals chanced to fall, it was dragged by its companions to the bottom of the gorge, where it would get up, shake itself, and prepare to tear up the next ascent as if nothing had happened. A good idea could be formed of these hardy mountaineers in passing through their village homes. They are tall and good-looking, and seem to be simply overflowing with animal spirits. If it chanced to be on a Sunday afternoon, the priest, with his _sotana_ tucked up round his waist, would be found playing the national game of _pelota_ with his flock, using the blank wall of the church as a court. One is apt to forget that Old Castile is one of the provinces having a northern seaboard. The inhabitants of this borderland are, to judge by appearance, superior to the people of the plains, who certainly strike the casual observer as being dirty and somewhat dull. The Castilian and Aragonese, however, may be said to constitute the heart of the nation. Leon and Estremadura form a part of the same raised plateau, but their people are very different. In speaking of the national characteristics, one must be taken to mean, not by any means the Madrileño, but the countrymen, whose homes are not to be judged by the _posadas_, or inns, which exist mainly for the muleteer and his animals, and are neither clean nor savoury. "All the forces of Europe would not be sufficient to subdue the Castiles--_with the people against it_," was Peterborough's remark, and our Iron Duke never despaired "while the country was with him." He bore with the generals and the _Juntas_ of the upper classes, in spite of his indignation against them, and, "cheered by the _people's support_," as Napier says, carried out his campaign of victory. The ancient qualities of which the Castilians are proud are _gravedad, lealtad, y amor de Dios_--"dignity, loyalty, and love of God." No wonder that when the nation arises, it carries a matter through. Estremadura, after the expulsion of the Moors, in whose days it was a fruitful garden, seems to have been forgotten by the rest of Spain; it became the pasturage for the wandering flocks of merino sheep, the direct descendants of the Bedouin herds, and of the pigs, which almost overrun it. Yet the remains of the Romans in Estremadura are the most interesting in Spain, and bear witness to the flourishing condition of the province in their day; moreover, Pizarro and Cortes owe their birth to this forgotten land. The inhabitants of the southern provinces of Spain differ wholly from those of Castile and the north--they have much more of the Eastern type; in fact, the Valenciano or the Murciano of the _huerta_, the well-watered soil which the Moors left in such a high state of cultivation, in manners and appearance are often little different from the Arab as we know him to-day. From the gay Andaluz we derive most of our ideas of the Spanish peasant; but he is a complete contrast to the dignified Castilian or the brusque Montañese. From this province, given over to song, dancing, and outdoor life, come--almost without exception--the bull-fighters, whose graceful carriage, full of power, and whose picturesque costume, make them remarkable wherever seen. Lively audacity is their special characteristic. _Sal_ (salt) is their ideal; we have no word which carries the same meaning. Smart repartee, grace, charm, all are expressed in the word _Salada_; and _Saléro_ (literally, salt-cellar) is an expression met with in every second song one hears. Olé Saléro! Sin vanidad, Soy muy bonita, Soy muy Sala! is the refrain of one of their most characteristic songs, _La moza é rumbo_, and may be taken as a sample:-- Listen, Saléro! without vanity, I am lovely--I am Salada! During the _Feria_ at Seville, the upper classes camp out in tents or huts, and the girls pass their time in singing and dancing, like the peasantry. The Valencians are very different, being slow, quiet, almost stupid to the eye of the stranger, extremely industrious, and wrapped up in their agricultural pursuits. They fully understand and appreciate the system of irrigation left by the Moors, which has made their province the most densely populated and the most prosperous in appearance of all Spain. A curious survival exists in Valencia in the _Tribunal de las Aguas_, which is presided over by three of the oldest men in the city; it is a direct inheritance from the Moors, and from its verdict there is no appeal. Every Thursday the old men take their seats on a bench outside one of the doors of the cathedral, and to them come all those who have disputes about irrigation, marshalled by two beadles in strange, Old-World uniforms. When both sides have been heard, the old men put their heads together under a cloak or _manta_, and agree upon their judgment. The covering is then withdrawn, and the decision is announced. On one occasion they decreed that a certain man whom they considered in fault was to pay a fine. The unwary litigant, thinking that his case had not been properly heard, began to try to address the judges in mitigation of the sentence. "But, Señores--" he began. [Illustration: THE WATER TRIBUNAL IN VALENCIA. SHOWING VALENCIAN COSTUMES] "Pay another peseta for speaking!" solemnly said the spokesman of the elders. "_Pero, Señores_--" "_Una peseta mas!_" solemnly returned the judge; and at last, finding that each time he opened his lips cost him one more peseta, he soon gave up and retired. The Valencian costume for men consists of wide white cotton drawers to the knees, looking almost like petticoats, sandals of hemp, with gaiters left open between the knee and the ankle, a red sash, or _faja_, a short velvet jacket, and a handkerchief twisted turban-fashion round the head. The _hidalgos_ wear the long cloak and wide sombrero common to all the country districts of Spain. In speaking of Spaniards and their characteristics, as I have already said, we have to take into account the presence of all these widely differing races under one crown, and to remember that to-day there is no hard-and-fast line among the cultivated classes: intermarriage has fused the conflicting elements, very much for the good of the country, and rapid intercommunication by rail and telegraph has brought all parts of the kingdom together, as they have never been before. Education is now placed within reach of all, and even long-forgotten Estremadura is brought to share in the impulse towards national life and commercial progress. Comte Paul Vasili, in his charming _Lettres inédites_ to a young diplomatist, first published in the pages of _La Nouvelle Revue_, gives such an exact picture of the Spanish people, of whom he had so wide an experience and such intimate knowledge, that I am tempted to quote it in full. "The famous phrase, _Á la disposition de V._, has no meaning in the upper ranks, is a fiction with the _bourgeoisie_, but is simple truth in the mouth of the people. The pure-blooded Spaniard is the most hospitable, the most ready giver in the world. He offers with his whole heart, and is hurt when one does not accept what he offers. He does not pretend to know anything beyond his own country ... he exaggerates the dignity of humanity in his own person.... Even in asking alms of you he says: _Hermanito, una limosna, por el amor de Dios._ He does not beg; no, he asks, demands; and, miserable and in rags as he may be, he treats you as a brother--he does you the honour of accepting you as his equal. The Spaniard who has a _novia_, a guitar, a _cigarillo_, and the knowledge that he has enough to pay for a seat at the bull-fight, possesses all that he can possibly need. He will eat a plateful of _gazpacho_ or _puchero_, a sardine, half a roll of bread, and drink clear water as often as wine. Food is always of secondary importance: he ranks it after his _novia_, after his _cigarillo_, after the bulls. Sleep? He can sleep anywhere, even on the ground. Dress? He has always his _capa_, and _la capa todo lo tapa_. The Spaniard is, above all things, _rumboso_; that is to say, he has a large, generous, and sound heart.... The masses in Spain are perfectly contented, believing themselves sincerely to be the most heroic of people. The Spaniard is naturally happy, because his wants are almost _nil_, and he has the fixed idea that kings--his own or those of other nations--are all, at least, his cousins." This is not the place to speak at large of the religion of the people; but one remark one cannot fail to make, and that is, the place which the Virgin holds in the life and affections of the masses. The name of the Deity is rarely heard, except as an exclamation, and the Christ is spoken of rather as a familiar friend than as the Second Person in the Trinity; but the deep-seated love for the Virgin, and absolute belief in her power to help in all the joys and sorrows of life is one of the strongest characteristics of this naturally religious people. The names given at baptism are almost all hers. Dolores, Amparo, Pilar, Trinidad, Carmen, Concepcion,--abbreviated into Concha,--are, in full, Maria de Dolores, del Pilar, and so forth, and are found among men almost as much as among women. The idea of the ever-constant sympathy of the divine Mother appeals perhaps even more strongly to the man, carrying with it his worship of perfect womanhood, and awakening the natural chivalry of his nature. Be this as it may, the influence of the Virgin, and the sincerity of her worship in every stage of life, in all its dangers and in all its woes, is a religion in itself. CHAPTER III NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS Certain strong characteristics of the Spanish people, with which the history of the world makes us well acquainted, are as marked in this hurrying age of railway and telegraph as ever they were in the past. One of the stupid remarks one constantly hears made by the unthinking tourist is: "Spain is a country where nothing ever changes." This is as true of some of the national traits of character as it is false in the sense in which the speaker means it. He has probably picked it out of some handbook. Chief among these traits is dignity. The most casual visitor is impressed by it, sometimes very much to his annoyance, whether he finds it among the unlettered muleteers of Castile, the labourers of Valencia, or the present proprietor of some little Old-World _pueblo_ off the ordinary route. The _mayoral_ of the diligence in the old times, the domestic servant of to-day, the señora who happens to sell you fish, or the señor who mends your boots, all strike the same note--an absolute incapacity for imagining that there can be any inequality between themselves and any other class, however far removed from them by the possession of wealth or education. Wealth, in fact, counts for nothing in the way of social rank; a poor _hidalgo_ is exactly as much respected as a rich one, and he treats his tenants, his servants, all with whom he comes in contact, as brothers of the same rank in the sight of God as himself. _Bajo el Rey ninguno_ is their proverb, and its signification, that "beneath the King all are equal," is one that is shown daily in a hundred ways. The formula with which you are expected to tell the beggars--with whom, unfortunately, Spain is once more overrun--that you have nothing for them, is a lesson in what someone has well called the "aristocratic democracy" of Spain: "Pardon me, for the love of God, my brother," or the simple _Perdone me usted_, using precisely the same address as you would to a duke. It is no uncommon thing to hear two little ragged urchins, whose heads would not reach to one's elbow, disputing vigorously in the street with a _Pero no, Señor, Pero si, Señor_, as they bandy their arguments. English travellers are sometimes found grumbling because the señor who keeps a wayside _posada_, or even a more pretentious inn in one of the towns, does not stand, hat in hand, bowing obsequiously to the wayfarer who deigns to use the accommodation provided. This is one of the things in which Spain, to her honour, _is_ unchanged. The courtesy of her people, high or low, is ingrained, and if foreign--perhaps especially English and American--travellers do not always find it so, the fault may oftenest be laid to their own ignorance of what is expected of them, and to what is looked upon as the absolute boorishness of their own manners. When a Spaniard goes into a shop where a woman is behind the counter, or even to a stall in the open market, he raises his hat in speaking to her as he would to the Duquesa de Tal y Fulano, and uses precisely the same form of address. The shopman lays himself at the feet of his lady customers--metaphorically only, fortunately, _Á los pies de V., Señora!_--with a bow worthy of royalty. She hopes that "God may remain with his worship" as she bids him the ordinary _Adios_ on going away, and he, with equal politeness, expresses a hope that she may "go in God's keeping," while he once more lays himself at the señora's feet. All these amenities do not prevent a little bargaining, the one asking more than he means to take, apparently for the purpose of appearing to give way perforce to the overmastering charms of his customer, who does not disdain to use either her fan or her eyes in the encounter. The old woman will bargain just as much, but always with the same politeness. When foreigners walk in and abruptly ask for what they want with an air of immense superiority, as is the custom in our country, they are not unnaturally looked upon as _muy bruto_, and at the best it is accounted for by their being rude heretics from abroad, and knowing no better. In Madrid and some of the large towns it is possible that the people have become accustomed to our apparent discourtesy, just as in some places--Granada especially--spoiled by long intimacy with tourists, the beggars have become importunate, and to some extent impudent; but in places a little removed from such a condition of modern "civilisation," the effect produced by many a well-meaning but ordinary Saxon priding himself on his superiority, and without any intention of being ill-bred or ill-mannered, is that of disgust and contemptuous annoyance. No Spaniard will put up with an overbearing or bullying manner, even though he may not understand the language in which it is expressed; it raises in him all the dormant pride and prejudice which sleep beneath his own innate courtesy, and he probably treats the offending traveller with the profound contempt he feels for him, if with nothing worse. A little smiling and good-natured chaff when things go wrong, as they so often do in travelling, or when the leisurely expenditure of time, which is as natural to the Spaniard as it is irritating to our notions of how things ought to move, will go infinitely farther to set things right than black looks and a scolding tongue, even in an unknown language. When English people come back from Spain complaining of discourtesy, or what they choose to call insult, I know very well on whose head to fit the accusing cap, and it is always those people whose super-excellent opinion of themselves, and of their infinite importance at home, makes them certain of meeting with some such experience among a people to whom the mere expression "a snob" is by no means to be understood. That railway travelling in Spain calls for a great exercise of patience from those accustomed to Flying Dutchmen and such-like expresses is quite true; though, by the way, many of the lines are in French hands, and served by French officials. It may safely be said, however, even at the present day, that those who are always in a hurry would do well to choose some other country for their holiday jaunt. A well-known English engineer, of French extraction, trying to get some business through in Madrid, once described himself as feeling "like a cat in hell, without claws." Perhaps the ignorance of the language, which constituted his clawless condition, was a fortunate circumstance for him. But that was a good while ago, and Madrid moves more quickly now. Another characteristic of the Spaniard which awakens the respect and admiration of those who know enough of his past and present history to be aware of it is his courage: not in the least resembling the excitement and rush of mere conflict, nor the theatrical display of what goes by the name of "glory" among some of his neighbours; but the cool courage, the invincible determination which holds honour as the ideal to be followed all the same whether or not any person beyond the actor will know of it, and an unquestioning obedience to discipline, which call forth the ungrudging admiration of Englishmen, proud as we are of such national stories as that of our own _Little Revenge, The Wreck of the "Birkenhead,"_ or of "plucky little Mafeking," amongst hundreds of others. Spaniards are rich in such inspiring memories, reaching from the earliest days of authentic history to the terrible episodes of the late war with America. The story of Cervera's fleet at Santiago de Cuba is one to make the heart of any nation throb with pride in the midst of inevitable tears. Again and again in reading Spanish history do we come upon evidences of this nobility of courage and disinterested patriotism. It was the Spaniard Pescara who brushed the French army of observation from the line of the Adda, and marched his own forces and the German troops to the relief of Pavía. All were unpaid, unclothed, unfed; yet when an appeal was made to the Spaniards, Hume tells us that they abandoned their own pay and offered their very shirts and cloaks to satisfy the Germans, and "the French were beaten before the great battle was fought." They did precisely the same in the days of Mendizábal. Again, in the height of Barbarossa's power, when Charles V., hoisting the crucifix at his masthead, led his crusading Spaniards against Goletta, and it fell, after a month's desperate siege, without pause or rest the troops, half dead with heat and thirst, pressed on to Tunis to liberate twenty thousand Christian captives. It was a splendid achievement, for the campaign was fought in the fierce heat of an African summer. Every barrel of biscuit, every butt of water, had to be brought by sea from Sicily, and as there were no draught animals, the soldiers themselves dragged their guns and all their provisions. It is, as we well know, no light task to find six weeks' supply for thirty thousand men with all our modern advantages; but these Spaniards did it when already exhausted, half fed, burnt up by the fierce African sun, and in face of an enemy well supplied with artillery and ammunition. In the miserable time of Philip II., a garrison of two hundred men held out for months against a Turkish army of twenty thousand men at Mers-el-Keber; and the same heroic story is repeated at Malta, when the enemy, after firing sixteen thousand cannon shots in one month against the Christian forts, abandoned the siege in despair. Meanwhile the unspeakable bigot, Philip, was wasting his time in processions, rogations, and fasts, for the relief of the town, while he stirred no finger to help it in any effective manner. These are stories by no means few and far between; the whole history of the race is full of such. We read of one town and garrison of eight thousand souls, abandoned by their king, starved, and without clothes or ammunition. Reduced at last to two thousand naked men, they stood in the breach to be slain to a man by the conquering Turk. Conqueror only in name, after all; for he who conquers is he who lives in history for a great action, and whose undaunted courage fires other souls long after he is at rest. "But all this is very ancient history, of the days of Spain's greatness; now she is a decadent nation," says the superficial observer. The column of the _Dos de Mayo_ on the Prado of Madrid, with its yearly memorial mass, shows whether that spirit is dead, or in danger of dying. The second of May is well called the "Day of Independence"; it was, in fact, the inauguration of the War of Independence, in which Spain gained enough honour to satisfy the proudest of her sons. The French had entered Madrid under pretence of being Spain's allies against Portugal, and Murat, once settled there to his own perfect satisfaction, made no secret of his master's intention to annex the whole peninsula. The imbecile King, Charles IV., had abdicated; his son, Ferdinand VII., was practically a captive in France. The country had, in fact, been sold to Napoleon, neither more nor less, by the infamous Godoy, favourite of the late King. A riot broke out among the people on discovering that the French were about to carry off the Spanish _Infantes_. The blood of some comparatively innocent Frenchmen was shed, and the base governor and magistrates of Madrid allowed Murat to make his own terms, which were nothing less, in fact, than the dispersion of the troops, who were ordered to clear out of their barracks, and hand them over to the French. The two artillery officers, Daoiz and Valarde, with one infantry officer named Ruiz, and a few of the populace, refused, and, all unaided, attempted to hold the barracks of Monteleon against the French army of invasion! The end was certain; but little recked these Spaniards of the old type. Daoiz and Valarde were killed, the former murdered by French bayonets after being wounded, on the cannon by which they had stood alone against the whole power of the French troops; Ruiz also was shot. On the following day, Murat led out some scores of the patriots who had dared to oppose him, and shot them on the spot of the Prado now sacred to their memory. Thus was the torch of the Peninsular War lighted. As one man the nation rose; the labourer armed himself with his agricultural implements, the workman with his tools; without leaders, nay, in defiance of those who should have led them, the people sprang to action, and, with England's help, the usurper was driven from the throne of France, and finally caged in St. Helena. But it is never forgotten that Spain--these two or three sons of hers preferring honour to life--has the glory of having been the first to oppose and check the man and the nation that aspired to tyrannise over Europe. It is not too much to say that the conduct of every individual in Cervera's fleet at Santiago de Cuba showed that the Spaniard's magnificent courage, his absolute devotion to duty, and his disregard of death are no whit less to-day than when those two thousand naked men stood in the breach to be slain in the name of their country's honour. The _Oquendo_, already a wreck, coming quietly out of her safe moorings in obedience to the insane orders of the Government in Madrid, steering her way with absolute coolness so as to clear the sunken _Diamante_, to face certain and hideous death, is a picture which can never fade from memory. It was said at the time by their enemies that there was not a man in the Spanish fleet that did not deserve the Victoria Cross; and this was all the more true because there was not even a forlorn hope: it was obedience to orders in the absolute certainty of death, and, what was harder still, with full knowledge of the utter uselessness of the sacrifice. It is difficult to imagine that anyone can read the record of this heroic passage in the history of the Spain of to-day without a throb of admiration and pity. No wonder that the generous enemy went out of their way to do honour to the melancholy remnant of heroes as they mounted the sides of the American ironclads, prisoners of war. Cervantes gave to the world a new adjective when he wrote his romance of _The Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha_--a world in which the filibusters are those of commerce, the pirates those of trade. When we English call an action "quixotic," we do not exactly mean disapproval, but neither, certainly, do we intend admiration; unless it be that of other-worldliness which it is well to affect, however far we may be from practising it ourselves. It is, at best, something quite unnecessary, if acknowledged to be admirable in the abstract. The quixotic are rarely successful, and success is the measure by which everything is judged to-day. Be that as it may, the more intimately one knows Spain, the more one becomes aware that what is with us an amiable quality of somewhat dubious value, is one of those which go to make up the Spaniard in every rank of life. His chivalry, his fine sense of honour, are nothing if not quixotic, as we understand the word; and just as in Scotland alone does one appreciate the characters in Sir Walter Scott's novels, so in Spain does one feel that, with due allowance for a spirit of kindly caricature, Don Quijote de la Mancha is not only possible, but it is a type of character as living to-day as it was when the genius of Cervantes distilled and preserved for all time that most quaint, lovable, inconsequent, and chivalrous combination of qualities which constitute a Spanish gentleman. Among her writers, her thinkers, her workers--nay, even now and then among her politicians--we come upon traits which remind us vividly of the ingenious gentleman and perfect knight of romance. But this estimate of the Spanish character differs a good deal from the pictures drawn of it by the casual tourist; and it is scarcely surprising that it should be so. It has been well said that "the contrast between the ideal of honour and the practice of pecuniary corruption has always been a peculiar feature of Spain and her settlements." If we hear one thing oftener than another said of Spain, it is fault-finding with her public men; the evils of bribery, corruption, and self-seeking amongst what should be her statesmen, and, above all, her Government employees, are pointed out, and by none more than by Spaniards themselves. There is a good deal of truth at the bottom of these charges; they are the melancholy legacy of the years of misrule and of the darkness through which the country has struggled on her difficult way. No one looks for the highest type of character in any country among its party politicians. The creed that good becomes evil if it is carried out under one _régime_, and evil good under another, is not calculated to raise the moral perception; and it is only when a politician has convictions and principles which are superior to any office-holding, and will break with his party a hundred times sooner than stultify his own conscience, that he earns the respect of onlookers. There are, and have been, many such men among the politicians of Spain whose names remain as watchwords with her people; but they have too often stood alone, and were not strong enough to leaven the mass and raise the whole standard of political integrity. Some of the highest and best men, moreover, have thrown down their tools and withdrawn from contact with a life which seemed to them tainted. But because Spain has done much in overthrowing her evil rulers and is struggling upwards towards the light, we expect wonders, and will not give time for what must always be a slow and difficult progress. In Spain, everyone is a politician. The schoolboy, who with us would be thinking of nothing more serious than football, aspires to sum up the situation and give his opinion of the public men as if he were an ex-prime minister at least. These orators of the _cafés_ and the street corners are delighted to find a foreigner on whom they can air their unfledged opinions, and the traveller who can speak or understand a few words of Spanish comes back with wonderful accounts of what "a Spaniard whom I met in the train told me." In any case, no one ever says as hard things of his countrymen as a Spaniard will say of those who do not belong to the particular little political clique which has the extreme honour of counting himself as one of its number. These cliques--for one cannot call them parties--are innumerable, called, for the most part, after one man, of whom no one has heard except his particular friends, _Un Señor muy conocido en su casa, sobre todo á la hora de comer_, as their saying is: "A gentleman very well known in his own house, especially at dinner-time." [Illustration: PAST WORK] [Illustration: KNIFE-GRINDER] Ford is answerable for many of the fixed ideas about Spain which it seems quite impossible to remove. Much that may have been true in the long ago, when he wrote his incomparable Guide Book, has now passed away with the all-conquering years; but still all that he ever said is repeated in each new book with unfailing certainty. Much as he really loved Spain, it must be confessed that he now and then wrote of her with a venom and bitterness quite at variance with his usual manner of judging things. It is in great part due to him that so much misunderstanding exists as to the Spanish custom of "offering" what is not intended to be accepted. If that peculiarity ever existed--for my part, I have never met with it at any time--it does so no longer. When a Spaniard speaks of his house as that of "your Grace" (_su casa de Usted_), it is simply a figure of speech, which has no more special meaning than our own "I am delighted to see you," addressed to some one whose existence you had forgotten, and will forget again; but nothing can exceed the generous hospitality often shown to perfect strangers in country districts where the accommodation for travellers is bad, when any real difficulty arises. It is customary, for instance, in travelling, when you open your luncheon-basket, to offer to share its contents with any strangers who may chance to be fellow-passengers. Naturally, it is merely a form of politeness, and, in an ordinary way, no one thinks of accepting it--everyone has his own provision, or is intending to lunch somewhere on the way; but it is by no means an empty form. If it should chance, by some accident, that you found yourself without--as has happened to me in a diligence journey which lasted twenty hours when it was intended only to occupy twelve--the Spanish fellow-travellers will certainly insist on your accepting their offer. Also, if they should be provided with fresh fruit--oranges, dates, or figs--and you are not, their offer to share is by no means made with the hope or expectation that you will say _Muchas gracias_, the equivalent of "No, thank you." What is really difficult and embarrassing sometimes is to avoid having pressed on your acceptance some article which you may have admired, in your ignorance of the custom, which makes it the merest commonplace of the Spaniard to "place it at your disposition," or to say: "It is already the property of your Grace." Continued refusal sometimes gives offence. The custom of never doing to-day what you can quite easily put off till to-morrow is, unfortunately, still a common trait of Spanish character; but as the Spaniard is rapidly becoming an alert man of business, it is not likely that that will long remain one of the national characteristics. Time in old days seemed of very little value in a country where trade was looked upon as a disgrace, or at least as unfitting any one to enter the charmed circle of the first _Grandeza_; but that is of the past now in Spain, as in most countries. To be sure, it has not there become fashionable for ladies to keep bonnet-shops or dress-making establishments, nor to open afternoon tea-rooms or _orchaterias_, still less to set up as so-called financiers, as it has with us. However, even that may come to pass in the struggle for "_el_ high life," of which some of the Spanish writers complain so bitterly. Imagination absolutely refuses, however, to see the Spanish woman of rank in such surroundings. For the rest, the Spanish woman, wherever you meet her, and in whatever rank of society, is devout, naturally kind-hearted and sympathetic, polite, and entirely unaffected; a good mother, sister, daughter; hard-working and frugal, if she be of the lower class; fond above all things of gossip, and of what passes for conversation; light-hearted, full of fun and harmless mischief; born a coquette, but only with that kind of coquetry which is inseparable from unspoiled sex, with no taint of sordidness about it; and, before all things, absolutely free from affectation. Their own expression, _muy simpática_, gives better than any other the charm of the Spanish woman, whether young or old, gentle or simple. It was the possession of all these qualities in a high degree by Doña Isabel II. that covered the multitude of her sins, and made all who came within her influence speak gently of her, and think more of excuses than of blame. It is these qualities which give so much popularity to her daughter, the Infanta Isabel, who, like her mother, is above all things _muy Española_. That the Spanish woman is passionate, goes without saying; one only has to watch the quick flash of her eye--"throwing out sparks," as their own expression may be translated--to be aware of that. While the eyes of the men are for the most part languid, only occasionally flashing forth, those of the women are rarely quiet for a moment; they sparkle, they languish, they flame--a whole gamut of expression in one moment of time; and it must be confessed that they look upon man as their natural prey. CHAPTER IV SPANISH SOCIETY There is something specially charming about Spanish society, its freedom from formality, the genuine pleasure and hospitality with which each guest is received, and the extreme simplicity of the entertainment. In speaking, however, of society in Madrid and other modern towns, it must be remembered that the old manners and customs are to a great extent being modified and assimilated with those of the other Continental cities. A great number of the Spanish nobility spend the season in Paris or in London as regularly as any of the fashionable people in France or England. There is no country life in Spain, as we understand the word; those of the upper ten thousand who have castles or great houses in the provinces rarely visit them, and still more rarely entertain there. A hunting or a shooting party at one of these is quite an event; so when the great people leave Madrid, it is generally to enter into London or Paris society, and, naturally, when they are at home they to a great extent retain cosmopolitan customs. At the foreign legations or ministries also, society loses much of its specially Spanish character. The word _tertulia_ simply means a circle or group in society; but it has come to signify a species of "At Home" much more informal than anything we have in the way of evening entertainment. The _tertulia_ of a particular lady means the group of friends who are in the habit of frequenting her drawing-room. The Salon del Prado is the general meeting-place of all who feel more inclined for _al fresco_ entertainment than for close rooms, and the different groups of friends meeting there draw their chairs together in small circles, and thus hold their _tertulia_. The old Countess of Montijo was so much given to open-handed hospitality, and it was so easy for any English person to obtain an introduction to her _tertulia_, that her daughter, the Empress Eugénie, used to call it the _Prado cubierto_--"only the Prado with a roof on." It is not customary for anything but the very lightest of refreshments to be offered at the ordinary _tertulia_, and this is one of its great charms, for little or no expense is incurred, and those who are not rich can still welcome their friends as often as they like without any of the terrific preparations for the entertainment which make it a burden and a bore, and without a rueful glance at the weekly bill afterwards. Occasionally, chocolate is handed round, and any amount of tumblers of cold water. The chocolate is served in small coffee-cups, and is of the consistency of oatmeal porridge; but it is delicious all the same, very light and well frothed up. It is "eaten" by dipping little finger-rusks or sponge-chips into the mixture, and you are extremely glad of the glass of cold water after it. This is, however, rather an exception; lemonade, _azucarillas_ and water, or tea served in a separate room about twelve o'clock, is more usual. The _azucarilla_ is a confection not unlike "Edinburgh rock," but more porous and of the nature of a meringue. You stir the water with it, when it instantly dissolves, flavouring the water with vanilla, lemon, or orange, as well as sugar. Sometimes you are offered meringues, which you eat first, and then drink the water. I have a very perfect recollection of my first _tertulia_ in Madrid, when I was a very young girl. We had been asked to go quite early, as we were the strangers of the evening. Between seventy and eighty guests dropped in, the ladies chiefly in morning dress, as we understand the word. A Spanish lady never rises to receive a gentleman; but when any ladies entered the large drawing-room where we were all seated, every one rose and stood while the new arrivals made the circuit of the room, shaking hands with their friends or kissing them on both cheeks, and giving a somewhat undignified little nod to those whom they did not know. The first time every one rose I thought we were going to sing a hymn, or take part in some ceremony; but as it had to be repeated each time a lady entered the room, I began to wish they would all come at once. As soon as the dancing began, however, this ceremony was discontinued. When you are introduced to a partner, the first thing he does is to inquire your Christian name; from that time forth he addresses you by it, as if he had known you from infancy, and in speaking to him you are expected to use his surname alone. If there be more than one brother, you address the younger one as "Arturo," "Ramon," or whatever his Christian name may be. The diminutives are, however, almost always used--Pacquita, Juanito, etc., in place of Francisca or Juan. Even the middle-aged and old ladies are always spoken to by their Christian names, and it is quite common to hear a child of six addressing a lady who is probably a grandmother as "Luisa" or "Mariquita." Between the dances the pauses were unusually long, but they were never spent by the ladies sitting in rows round the walls, while the men blocked up the doorways and looked bored. There were no "flirting corners," and sitting out on the stairs _à deux_ would have been a _compromiso_. The whole company broke up into little knots and circles, the chairs, which had been pushed into corners or an ante-room, were fetched out, and the men, without any sort of shyness, generally seated themselves in front of the ladies, and kept up a perfectly wild hubbub of conversation until the music for the next dance struck up. Dowagers and _dueñas_ were few; they sat in the same spot all the evening, and asked each other what rent they paid, how many _chimeneas_ (fireplaces) they had, whether they burned wood or coal, and lamented over the price of both. They reminded one irresistibly of the "two crumbly old women" in _Kavanagh_ "who talked about moths, and cheap furniture, and the best cure for rheumatism." The dances were the same as ours, with some small differences: the _rigodon_ is a variation of the quadrille, and the lancers are slightly curtailed. There was a decided fancy for the polka and a species of mazurka, which I remembered having learned from a dancing-master in the dawn of life, under some strange and forgotten name. Spaniards dance divinely--nothing less. They waltz as few other men do, a very poetry of motion, an abandonment of enjoyment, as if their soul were in it, especially if the music be somewhat languid. This is especially the case with the artillery officers, who are great favourites in society, and belong exclusively to the upper ranks. I have described this _tertulia_ at length because it was a typical one of many. The cotillon was a great favourite, and generally closed the evening. I always had an idea that one cause of its popularity was the extended opportunities it gave for a couple who found each other's company pleasant to enjoy it without much interference. It rather made up for the loss of the staircase and the window-seats, or balconies, dear to English dancers. The rooms are generally kept in a stifling state of heat, a thick curtain always hanging over the door, and never an open window or any kind of ventilation; this, however, does not inconvenience the Spaniard in the least. It is usual to smoke during the intervals of the dances--cigarettes as a rule; but I have often known a man to lay his cigar on the edge of a table, and give it a whiff between the rounds of a _valse_ to keep it going. This, however, is the Spanish _tertulia_. You are "offered the house" once and for always, and told the evenings on which your hostess "receives," generally once, sometimes many more times in the week; then you drop in, without further invitation, whenever you feel inclined; after the opera, or on the days when there is no opera, or on your way from the theatre, or at any hour. This sort of visiting puts an end to what we, by courtesy, call "morning calls." There is always conversation to any amount, generally cards, music, and, when there are sufficient young people, a dance. There is no exclusiveness and no caste about Spanish society; all the houses are open, and the guests are always welcome. There are, of course, the houses of the nobility, and there are many grades in this _Grandeza_, some being of very recent creation, others of the uncontaminated _sangre azul_; but there is no hard-and-fast line. The successful politician or the popular writer has the entrée anywhere, and there is no difficulty about going into the very best of the Court society, if one has friends in that _tertulia_. One guest asks permission to present his or her friend, the permission is courteously granted, and the thing is done. Poets and dramatists are in great request in Madrid society. It is the custom to ask them to recite their own compositions, and as almost every Spaniard is a poet, whatever else he may be, there is no lack of entertainment. All the popular authors--Campoamor, Nuñez de Arce, Pelayo, Valera, and many others--may thus be heard; but the paid performer (so common in London drawing-rooms) of music, light drama, or poetical recitation, is probably absolutely unknown in Madrid society. During the season balls are given occasionally at the Palace, and at the houses of the great nobility, the Fernan-Nuñez, the Romana, the Medinaceli, and others, whose names are as well known in Paris and London as in Madrid. Dinner-parties are also becoming much more common in private houses than they were before the Restoration, and as for public dinners, they are so frequent that they bid fair to become of the same importance as the like institution in England. Costume balls, dances, dinners, and evening entertainments among the _corps diplomatique_ abound. Everyone in Madrid has a box or stall at the Teatro Real, or opera-house, and many ladies make a practice of "receiving" in their _palcos_; and in the entrance-hall, after the performance is over, an hour may be spent, while ostensibly waiting for carriages, in conversation, gossip, mild flirtation, and generally making one's self agreeable among the groups all engaged in the same amusement. Almost everyone, also, whatever his means may be, has an _abono_ at one or other of the numerous theatres, sometimes at more than one; and if it be a box, the subscribers take friends with them, or receive visits there. It is a common thing, either in the opera-house or in the theatres, for a couple of friends to join in the _abono_; in this case it is arranged on which nights the whole box or the two or three stalls shall be the property of each in turn. Besides paying for the seats, there is always a separate charge each night made for the _entrada_--in the Teatro Real it is a peseta and a half, in the others one peseta. By this arrangement anyone can enter the theatre by paying the _entrada_, and take chance of finding friends there, frequently spending an hour or so going from one box to another. All this gives the theatre more the air of being an immense "At Home" than what we are accustomed to in England. The intervals between the acts are very long, and, as all the men smoke, somewhat trying. Spanish women are great dressers, and the costumes seen at the race-meetings at the Hippodrome, and in the Parque, are elaborately French, and sometimes startling. The upper middle class go to Santander, Biarritz, or one of the other fashionable watering-places, and it is said of the ladies that they only stop as many days as they can sport new costumes. If they go for a fortnight they must have fifteen absolutely new dresses, as they would never think of putting one on a second time. They take with them immense trunks, such as we generally associate with American travellers; these are called _mundos_ (worlds)--a name which one feels certain was given by the suffering man who is expected to look after them. There are many little details in Spanish life, even of the upper classes, which strike one as odd. One, for instance, is the perfect _sangfroid_ with which they pick their teeth in public; but so little is this considered, as with us, a breach of good manners, that the dinner-tables are supplied with dainty little ornaments filled with tooth-picks, and these are handed round to the guests by the waiters towards the close of the meal. Nor is it an unknown thing for a Spanish lady to spit. I have seen it done out of a carriage window in the fashionable drive without any hesitation. At the same time, as one of the great charms of a Spanish woman is the total absence in her of anything savouring of affectation, one would far sooner overlook customs that are unknown in polite society with us than have them lose their own characteristics in an attempt to imitate the social peculiarities of other nations that have incorporated the ominous word "snob" in their vocabularies. It has no equivalent in the language of Castile, and it is to be hoped will never be borrowed. Nevertheless, a recent Spanish writer laments the fact that in the race for "_el_ high life" his fellow-countrywomen "are not ashamed to drink whisky!" We have yet to learn that whisky-drinking among women is an element of good style in any class of English society. The idea that Spanish ladies were in the habit of smoking in past times is a mistake. If they do so now it is an instance of the race for "_el_ high life," of which the writer quoted above complains. In imitation of foreign customs, many of the ladies in Madrid and the more modern cities have established their "day" for afternoon visitors. After all, this is but the Spanish _tertulia_ at a different hour, but if it should ever supersede the real evening _tertulia_ it will be a thousand pities; it would be far more sensible if we were to adopt the Spanish custom, rather than that they should follow ours. In the evening, the hour varying, of course, with the time of year, all Madrid goes to drive, ride, or walk in the Buen Retiro, now called the Parque de Madrid. It is beautifully laid out, with wide, well-kept roads and well-cared-for gardens; it has quite superseded the Paseo de la Fuente Castellano, which used to be the "Ladies' Mile" of Madrid. Madrid is a city of which one hears the most contradictory accounts. The mere traveller not uncommonly pronounces it "disappointing, uninteresting, less foreign than most Continental capitals,"--"everything to be seen at best second-rate France," etc., etc. The Museo, of course, must be admired,--even the most ignorant know that to contemn that is to write themselves down as Philistines;--but for the rest, they confess themselves glad to escape, after two or three days spent in La Corte, to what they fancy will prove more interesting towns, or, at any rate, to something which they hope will be more characteristic. But those who settle in Madrid, or know it well, winter and summer, and have friends among its hospitable people, come to love it, one might almost say, strangely, because it is not the love that springs from habit or mere familiarity, but something much warmer and more personal. One charm it has, which is felt while there and pleasantly remembered in absence--its much-maligned climate. The position of Madrid at the apex of a high table-land, two thousand one hundred and sixty feet above the level of the sea, with its wide expanse of plain on every hand but that on which the Guadarramas break the horizon with their rugged, often snow-capped, peaks, naturally exposes it to rapid changes of temperature; that is to say, that if the snow is still lying on the Sierra, and the wind should chance to blow from that direction on Madrid, which is steeped in sunshine winter and summer for far the greater part of the year, there is nothing to break its course, and naturally, a Madrileño, crossing from the sheltered corner, where he has been "taking the sun," to the shady side of the street and the full force of the chilly blast, will be very likely to "catch an air," as the Spaniard expresses it. But that _tan sutil aire de Madrid_, which Ford seems to have discovered, and which every guide-book and slip-shod itinerary has ever since quoted, might very well now be allowed to find a place in the limbo of exploded myths; it has done far more than its duty in terrifying visitors quite needlessly. That _pulmonia fulminante_ (acute pneumonia) is a very common disease among the men of Madrid, there is no doubt, and in the days when Ford wrote, they were no doubt immediately bled, and so hastened on their way out of this troublesome world by the doctors; but one has not very far to seek for the cause of this scourge when one notices the habits of the Madrileño. In the first place he hates nothing quite so much as fresh air, and the cafés, clubs, taverns, and places where he resorts are kept in such a state of heated stuffiness that it seems scarcely an exaggeration to say that the air could be cut out in junks, like pieces of cake. If he travel by train, all windows must be kept closely shut, while he smokes all the time. When, at last, it is necessary to brave the outer air in order to reach home, he, carefully and before leaving the vitiated atmosphere he has been breathing, envelops himself in his cloak, throwing the heavy cape, generally lined with velvet or plush, across his mouth and nose, barely leaving his eyes visible; he thus has three or four folds of cloth and velvet as a respirator. It often happens that at the corner of some street the long arm of the icy "Guadarrama" reaches him; a sudden gust of wind plucks off his respirator, and the mischief is done. But should he reach the safe closeness of his own house, he has certainly done his level best to charge his lungs with unwholesome and contaminated air. You have only to see the women on the coldest day in winter with nothing over their heads but a silk or lace mantilla, or a mere _velo_ of net, and the working-women with nothing but their magnificent hair, or, at most, a kerchief, to be certain that it is not the "air" that is to blame. I have seen the women going about Madrid in winter, both by day and night, when the men were muffled to the eyes, with thicker dresses, of course, and perhaps a fur cape, but no sort of wrap about their head or throat; and _pulmonia_ is comparatively unknown among women. To English people, accustomed to plenty of fresh air and water, Madrid has never been an unhealthy place, and it is extremely probable that one of these days our doctors will be sending their consumptive patients there for the winter. They might easily do worse. One of the coldest winters I remember in Madrid, a young Englishman came out with a letter of introduction from friends. He looked as if he had not many weeks to live, and in truth he was condemned by his doctors, and his hours were numbered. He was a Yorkshireman by birth, but had some years past developed seeds of consumption. He had been sent year after year to Madeira and other of the old resorts, having been told that a winter in England would certainly finish him. Finally, he made his doctors tell him the truth: it was that he had not many months, perhaps not many weeks, to live. "Very well, then," he replied, "there is no use worrying any more about my health. I shall do my best to enjoy the little time I may have left." He threw all his medicines and remedies out of the window, he looked out for the most unhealthy place he could find, where he would be most certain of never meeting another consumptive patient; and in the course of the search he came across the well-worn chestnut about the air of Madrid. "That is the place for me," he exclaimed; "only strong and healthy people can live there. At any rate, so long as I do live, I shall be amongst sound lungs, and shall see no more fellow-sufferers. The _aire tan sutil_ will kill me, and that will be the end of the matter." So far from killing him, the fine champagne-like air of Madrid went as near curing him as was possible for a man with only one lung. He took no precautions, never wrapped up, went out at night as well as by day, and when he died, fourteen years later, it was not of consumption. He used to come to Madrid for the winter to escape the damp of England, and revelled in the warmth and freshness of that sun-steeped air. The climate of Madrid has sensibly altered since I have known it, and will continue to do so as vegetation increases and trees spring up and grow to perfection within and around it. In the old times, before the splendid service of water of the Lozoya Canal was in common use, the air was so dry as to make one's skin uncomfortable, and one's hair to break off into pieces like tinder under the brush; there was also a constant thickening in the throat, causing slight discomfort, and a penetrating, impalpable dust which nothing ever laid, and which formed a veritable cloud reaching far above the heads of the promenaders in the Salon del Prado. A very short time changed all this. Twice a day the streets were watered with far-reaching hose, a constant stream ran about the stems of the trees in the Prado, gardens were planted and constantly watered, and while the hitherto barren, dust-laden places began to blossom as the rose, the air itself became softer, less trying, and, perhaps, there is rather more uncertainty about the weather, or at any rate a greater rainfall. At one time there were but two rainy seasons--spring and autumn--and never a cloud in between. For about three days clouds would be gathering gradually in the sky, beginning with one literally "no bigger than a man's hand." Whenever there was a cloud, you might be certain of rain, past or to come. Then one day, when there was no longer any blue to be seen, the heavens opened and the rain came down. There could be no mistake about it. When it rains or thunders in Madrid, it tries to get it all over as quickly as possible. There is nothing like doing a thing well when you are about it, and Madrid thoroughly understands this matter of rain. It never ceases, never tempts people to go out and then drowns them. No, if you go out, it is with a thorough understanding of what you are undertaking; and if you are disposed to be critical about anything in the municipal management of La Corte now, try to imagine what it was when the water from the roofs was carried out in wide pipes a few feet from the edge, and allowed to pour on the heads of the defenceless foot-passengers, or almost to break in the roof of carriage or cab which had to pass under them. This is the time to learn why the bridges over the Manzanares are so wide and so strong; not one whit too much of either, if they are to withstand the mighty on-rush. We used to go off to the Casa de Campo the moment the rain was over, for the sake of seeing Madrid as one never sees it at other times--its magnificent Palace crowning the steep bluff, round which a mighty river is rushing to the sea. The rain lasts a week, a fortnight, or even more, and then the sky takes at least three days to clear, during which it resembles our English white-flecked blue, or its hurrying grey masses, and the cloud-shadows fly over the wide landscape, now all suddenly changed to verdure, and lie on the distant _sierra_, giving an unwonted charm to the scene. The Casa de Campo, the Florida, and all green spots become carpeted with wild flowers; the trees seem to have put on new leafage, so fresh are they and free from the over-loading of dust. And then, gradually, the Manzanares repents him of his anger and haste; no more foam is dashing against the piers of the bridges, no more crested waves are hurrying before the wind; he sinks gently and slowly back to his accustomed lounging pace, "taking the sun" with lazy ease once more; and the washerwomen come down and resume their labours under the plane trees; and there is no more thought of rain for many a week, perhaps month, to come; and that strangely deep, impenetrable vault of a blue unknown elsewhere spreads its canopy over a clean, rain-washed city. The Parque de Madrid, which lies high above the Prado, affords a striking view of the country on all sides. An Englishman of wide Continental experience, describing this prospect, says he was "more than recompensed by the sudden apparition, through an opening between the houses, of the exquisite _campagna_ that surrounds Madrid.... Compared with that of Rome, it seemed to me clearer, and more extensive, while the hue of the atmosphere that overspread it was of a rich purple." I have quoted these remarks because it is so rare for English visitors, accustomed to the lush green of our own meadows and woods, to find anything to admire in what is too often called the "mangy," or at best the "arid," surroundings of the capital of Spain. This, however, was written in September, and there had been heavy rains; after the crops are gathered and before the autumn rains come on, the prospect is scarcely so much to be admired. That the view is extensive, no one can deny; there is unbroken horizon, except where the rugged peaks of the Guadarramas pierce the sky, and the atmospheric effects are often marvellously beautiful, especially when the swift shadows of clouds pass over the wide landscape, or lie upon the "everlasting hills." For myself, this vast expanse, with the sense of immensity which we generally are only able to associate with the sea, has always had an extraordinary charm. I have seen it at all times of the year, early in the morning, and at, or just before, sundown--nay, even once or twice by moonlight, or with the marvellous blue vault overhead, that seems so much higher and greater there than elsewhere, studded with planet and star, luminous beyond all that we know in our little island, where the blue is so pale by comparison, and the atmosphere laden with moisture when we think it most clear. I do not remember elsewhere in Spain, or in any other country, such a depth of sky or such brilliancy of moon and star light as in Madrid, where it is as easy to read by night as by day on some occasions. Given plenty of water, and Madrid is an ideal place for flowers. Such carnations as those which are grown in the nursery gardens there are never seen elsewhere--they are a revelation in horticulture; nor are the roses any less wonderful. The bouquet with which a Spaniard, whether _hidalgo_ or one of your servants, greets your birthday is generally a pyramid almost as tall as yourself. It needs to be placed in a large earthenware jar on the floor, and if you should be happy enough to have a good many friends, there is scarcely room for anything else in your _gabinete_. The flowers one can raise in a balcony in Madrid merely by using plenty of water, syringing the dust off the leaves, and shading them occasionally from the worst heat, are more than equal to anything a hothouse in England can produce. An idea may be formed of the really marvellous fertility of the soil and climate by the rapidity with which seeds develop. I remember one summer, when some of the new gardens were being laid out in the Buen Retiro, a grand concert and evening _fête_ was to be given as the opening function. On the evening before this entertainment was to take place we happened to be near, and strolled in to see how the preparations were going on. The gravel walks were all there, the stands for the bands, the Chinese lanterns hanging from the trees, but where was the grass? Alas! wherever it ought to have been were to be seen brown, sad-looking patches of bare earth, not a blade springing anywhere; what was worse, an army of gardeners were, at that moment only, sowing the seed in some patches, while others were being rolled, and watered with hose. _Cosa de España!_ of course. It had been put off to _mañana_, until now there might be _fête_, but no gardens. The following evening, when in company with all Madrid we went to the concert, behold a transformation! Soft, green, velvety sward--not to be walked on, it is true, but lovely to behold--covered the patches so absolutely bald twenty-four hours ago. The seed we had seen sown had sprung up as thickly as finest cut velvet. _Cosa de España_, indeed! It is not always in Spain--the land of the unexpected--that _Mañana verémos_ is foolishness. Until after Christmas the winter in Madrid is charming, even if it be cold; the glorious sunshine from dawn to sunset, the fine exhilarating air, raise one's spirits unconsciously; but very often the old year is dead before any real cold comes on. I have sat out in the Buen Retiro many a day in December with book or work, and scarcely any more wrap than one wears in summer in England. After that there is generally a cold, and perhaps disagreeable, spell, when the wind comes howling across the plains straight from the snow and ice, and the Madrileño thinks it terrible; as a matter of fact, so long as the sky remains clear, there is always one side of the street where one can be warm. Sometimes, but not often, the cold weather or the bitter winds last pretty far into the spring, and it has certainly happened in the depth of the frost that one of the sentries on duty at the Palace, on the side facing the mountains, was found frozen to death when the relief came. After that the watch was made shorter, and the change of guard more frequent in winter. I have seen the Estanque Grande in the Retiro covered with ice several inches thick; but as all Madrid turned out to see the wonder and watch the foreigners skate, a thing that appeared never to have been seen before, it could not have been a very common occurrence. Riding early in the morning in winter outside Madrid, even with the sun shining brightly and a cloudless sky, the cold was often intense, especially in the dells and hollows. We have often had to put our hands under the saddle to keep them from freezing, so as to be able to feel the reins, and if I were riding with the sun on the off-side, my feet would become perfectly dead to feeling. But what an air it was! Something to be remembered, and long before we reached home we were in a delicious glow. The horses, English thoroughbreds, enjoyed it immensely, and went like the wind. I have been in Madrid in every part of the year, and never found it unbearably hot, though one does not generally wait for July or August; but here again the lightness and dryness of the air seem to make heat much easier to bear. Numbers of Madrid people think nothing of remaining there all the summer through. CHAPTER V MODERN MADRID Madrid has grown out of all knowledge in the last thirty years. No one who had not seen it since the time of Isabel II. would recognise it now, and even then much had been done since Ferdinand VII. had come back from his fawning and despicable captivity in France--where he had gloried in calling himself a "French prince"--to act the despot in his own country. The Liberal Ministers who, for short periods, had some semblance of power during the regency of Cristina had done a little to restore the civilisation and light established by Charles III., and wholly quenched in the time of his unworthy and contemptible successors. But even in 1865, the Alcalá Gate, standing where the Plaza de la Independencia is now, formed one boundary of Madrid, the Gate of Atocha was still standing at the end of the _paseo_ of that name, and the Gate of Sta. Barbara formed another of the limits of the city. The Museo was unfinished and only to be entered by a side door, encumbered with builders' rubbish and half-hewn blocks of stone. The Paseo of la Fuente Castellana ended the Prado, and not a house was to be seen beyond the Mint, or outside the Gate of Alcalá. All the town outside these barriers has arisen since; the magnificent viaduct across the Calle de Segovia, the Markets, the Parque de Madrid, the Hippodrome, the present Plaza de Toros, all are new. The old Bull Ring stood just outside the Alcalá Gate, and all beyond it was open country; no _casas palacias_ along the Fuente Castellana, no Barrio Salamanca. Madrid has, however, always been a cheerful, noisy, stirring city, full of life and the expression of animal spirits. In days not so very long past the streets were filled with picturesque costumes of the provinces, with gaily decorated mules and donkeys carrying immense loads of hay or straw, or huge nets filled with melons or pumpkins, almost hiding everything but the head and the feet of the animal; or a smart-looking "Jacket" man from the country districts would go whistling by, Asturians, Murcians, Gallegos, gypsies, _toreros_ in their brilliant _traje_ Andaluz--always to be recognised by their tiny pigtails of hair, and by their splendidly lithe and graceful carriage--all these jostling, singing, chaffing each other, while the jingling bells on innumerable horses, mules, donkeys, rang through the sunlit air, and made the Puerta de Sol and the streets branching from it a constant scene of life and gaiety. Now and then would come the deep clang of the huge bell of the draught oxen, drawing their Old-World carts, often with solid discs of wood for wheels, while the women of the lower class sported their brilliantly embroidered Manila shawls, chattered, and fluttered their gaily-coloured fans just like the other señoritas. Mantillas, even then, were only to be seen on old ladies; but the smart little _velo_ coquettishly fastened with a natural flower adorned all the young girls--French millinery, which never suits a Spanish face, being kept for the evening _paseo_. It is a pity these national costumes have gone out of fashion. A Spanish girl with _velo_ and fan is something quite superior to the same fascinating young person dressed after the style of Paris--with a difference; for there is always a difference. [Illustration: OUTSIDE THE PLAZA DE TOROS, MADRID] Madrid, in fact, is becoming cosmopolitan, and is little to be distinguished from other capitals, except in the _barrios bajos_ on the national _fiestas_, and wherever the country people, as distinguished from the Madrid work-people, congregate. These last are rapidly losing all picturesqueness, dressing just as the workers in any other capital dress. They are, perhaps, still no less _gatos_ (cats), those of them at least who have had the honour of being born in La Corte, this being the name given them by their fellow country-people. If it be meant as a term of reproach, the Madrileño has an excellent answer in giving the history of its origin. In the reign of Alfonso VI., during one of the many war-like operations of this King, he wished to take an important and difficult fortress, and had collected all his forces to attack it--the Madrileños alone were late; it was, in fact, only the day before the assault was to take place that they arrived upon the scene. The King was furious, and when their leader approached his Majesty to know where the troops were to bivouac for the night, he replied that there was no room in his camp for laggards; pointing to the enemy's fortress, he added: "_There_ will be found plenty of lodging for those who come too late for any other." Saluting his Majesty very courteously, the soldier withdrew, understanding thoroughly the indirect sneer at the valour of his troops; he went back to his regiment, summoned his officers and men, and repeated to them the King's word. One and all agreed that they would, in fact, seek their night's lodging just where the King had indicated. Impossible as the feat appeared, they instantly rushed to the attack of the formidable fortress with such irresistible dash that they succeeded in scaling the walls and entering it, pikes in rest. The King, who had run forward as soon as he heard of the attack, watched with delight his loyal Madrileños climbing up the face of the masonry with extraordinary skill, and not a little loss. "Look, look!" he cried to those near him. "See how they climb! They are cats!" The other forces at once came to their assistance, the fortress fell into the King's hands before nightfall, and those who had been in "no hurry" to join the army found their lodgings within it, as his Majesty had contemptuously recommended them to do. His anger was forgotten in admiration and praise; and, from that time, all those born in Madrid have the right to call themselves _gatos_. It is curious how the observation of those who know Spain intimately differs--one must suppose according to temperament. Thus Antonio Gallenga, the well-known correspondent of the _Times_, who really knew Spain well, has left it on record that the people are not musical, and that he never remembers to have heard any of them singing in the streets, or at their work. I do not know how this could have happened, unless our old friend did not recognise the singing he did hear as music, for which he might, perhaps, be forgiven. My own experience is that the people are always singing, more or less, if you agree to call it so. As the houses are almost all built in flats, many of the windows open into _patios_, or court-yards, large or small, as the case may be. You may reckon on always having two or three servants, male or female, at work in the _patio_, the women washing or scrubbing, the men probably cleaning their horses, carriages, or harness; but whatever else they may be doing, you may be quite certain they will all be singing, though it is equally certain that, by the greatest exercise of amiability, you could scarcely call the result a song; the words seem to be improvised as the performer goes on. There was a light-hearted groom in one of the _patios_ of our flat, in the Calle Lope de Vega, who would continue almost without a break the whole day. An old friend who used to amuse himself by listening to this remarkable performer declared that if he started his song in the early morning with a stick that was thick enough, he would go on till midnight telling the world in general all the people he had killed with it, and the other wonders of Hercules it had performed. The ditty always begins on a high note, and goes quavering irregularly downwards, with infinite twirls, shakes, and prolonged notes, these being sung to the exclamation "Ay!" Minor keys enter a good deal into this kind of performance, and the most remarkable part of it is that the singer, once having reached the bottom of the scale--for there is no end--is able to begin again on the same high note, and hit upon, more or less, the same variations a second time. If you have nothing better to do than to listen to some of these improvisatores, you will get a long, and more or less connected, history of some event; but it takes a long time--and, perhaps, is not often worth the expenditure. The songs which you hear to the accompaniment of the guitar are different from these, though the introduction of the "Ay!" and the frequent shakes and twirls are always there. The working Madrileño's ideal of happiness is to go a little way along one of the dusty _caminos reales_ (highways) to some little _venta_, or tavern, or to take refreshments out in baskets. They will sit quite contentedly in the dust by the side of the road, or in a field of stubble or burnt-up grass, to eat and drink, and then the guitar comes into play, and the dancing begins. It is always the _jota aragonesa_, which is not so much dancing as twirling about slowly, and, it would almost seem, sadly; but there is always a circle of admiring lookers-on, who beat time with stamping of feet and clapping of hands, and watch the performance as eagerly as if there were something quite fresh and new about it. Occasionally, these parties go out by omnibus or tram, as far as they can, and then start their picnic repast, to be followed by the inevitable dance and song, just wherever they happen to be. One of the most curious sights of Madrid is the great wash-tub of the Manzanares. As you descend the steep bluff on which the city stands, towards the river, you find the banks covered with laundresses, kneeling at short distances from one another, each scrubbing the clothes on one board, which slopes down into the water, while another board, fixed so as to stand out into the stream, or a little embankment made of sand, dams up the scanty supply of water she can obtain. As the Manzanares in summer is divided into a great number of small streams, this scene is repeated on the edge of each one, while the expanse of sand which occupies the centre of what ought to be the river-bed is one forest of clothes-props, with all the wash of Madrid hanging on the lines. On the banks the children, in the intervals of school, are playing bull-fights, or some of their innumerable dancing and singing games; the women are one and all performing the gradual descent of the gamut with variations called singing; and above all is the glorious sun, transfiguring all things, and throwing deep, purple shadows from the high plane-trees along the banks. The road which runs along the bank of the Manzanares, at the farther side from Madrid, is a revelation to those who only know the plains through which the railway from the north passes, and which for the greater part of the year, except when the crops are growing, are quite as arid as we are accustomed to suppose. On the left lies the Casa de Campo, an immense extent of park, containing, on the high ground, some splendid specimens of the Scotch fir, and, in more sheltered spots, groves of beech, avenues of plane, and masses of the dark-leaved ilex, which grows to great perfection in this climate. The "Florida," another of the royal properties, lies to the right, and a splendid road shaded by majestic trees, and with wide, grassy margins, stretches away to the village of El Pardillo, where Longfellow established his quarters, and which he describes in his _Outre Mer_, and from that on to the forest, or whatever you may call it, of El Pardo, where there is a royal residence now but seldom used, you may ride for many hours and still find yourself in this wild park, which many of the inhabitants of Madrid have never seen. Here one can realise a little how the city may have once been a hunting lodge of the Kings, as we are told. The Pardo may be reached through the Casa de Campo, a gate at the extreme end of the principal drive leading into the forest. Up on the high ground of the Casa de Campo there is a splendid view of Madrid, with the Palace crowning the steep bluff overhanging the Manzanares. It was in the "country house" itself, near the gate, that our "Baby Charles" is said to have climbed the high wall of the courtyard to get a glimpse of the Infanta whom he hoped to make his wife. When I knew the place intimately, on the very highest part of the Park was a large enclosure of the wild forest, railed in with high wooden palisading. Within this lived a flock of ostriches, belonging to the Crown. No one seemed to know anything about them, nor how long they had been there. What puzzled us much was how they were fed, or if they were left to cater for themselves. One thing I can answer for: they were very wild, and very ferocious; the moment they saw our horses coming up the hill they would run from all parts of the enclosure trying their best to get at us, striking with their feet and wings, and uttering gruesome shrieks. It was one of our amusements to race them, keeping outside their high fence while they strode over the ground, their necks stretched out, and their absurd wings flapping after the manner of a farmyard gander; but, with the best efforts, the horses were never able to keep up the pace for long; the birds invariably won, and we left them screeching and using language that did not appear to be parliamentary, when they found that the fence was the only thing that did not give in, as they craned their necks and stamped in their baffled rage. The horses, at first rather afraid of the birds, soon learned to enjoy the fun, and raced them for all they were worth. I do not know if this strange colony is still settled there. A curious feature of Spanish country life to us are the goatherds. Where the large flocks of goats about Madrid pasture, I know not; but I have often seen them coming home in the evening to be milked, or starting out in the morning. The goatherd, clad in his _manta_, and carrying a long wand of office over his shoulder, and I think also a horn, stalks majestically along with all the dignity of a royal marshal of processions, and the goats follow him, with a good deal of lagging behind for play, or nibbling, if they should chance to see anything green. Still, they scamper after their _generalissimo_ in the end, and meanwhile he is much too dignified to look back. Taking advantage of this, I have seen women come out of their cottages on the roadside and milk a goat or two as it passed; and from the way the animal made a full stop, and lent itself to the fraud--if such it were--it was evidently a daily occurrence. In times not long past, if indeed they do not still exist, the dust-heaps outside Madrid were the homes of packs of lean, hungry dogs, great brindled creatures of the breed to be seen in Velasquez pictures; these animals prowled about the streets of Madrid in the early morning, acting as scavengers. When they became too numerous, the civil guards laid poison about at night in the dust-heaps before the houses, and the very early riser might see four or five of these great creatures lying dead on the carts which collect the refuse of Madrid before the world in general is astir. These wild dogs were disagreeable customers to meet when riding outside the city, until we learned to avoid the localities where they spent their days, for they would give chase to the horses if they caught sight of them, and the only thing to be done was to remain perfectly quiet until they tired of barking and returned to the dust-hills to resume their search for food. The description of peasant life in Madrid would be incomplete if we left unmentioned the daily siesta in the sun of the Gallegos and lower-class working-men. On the benches in the Prado, on the pavement, in the full blaze of the sun, these men will stretch themselves and sleep for an hour or two after their midday meal. I have seen the Gallego porters make themselves a hammock with the rope they always carry with them--_mozos de cuerda_ they are called--literally slinging themselves to the _reja_ or iron bars of the window of some private house, and sleep soundly in a position that would surely kill any other human being. "Taking the sun" (_tomando el sol_) is, however, the custom of every Spaniard of whatever degree. The casual visitor to Madrid is always struck with the number of carriages to be seen in the _paseo_; but the fact is that everyone keeps a carriage, if it be at all possible, and it is no uncommon thing for two or three _pollos_ to join together in the expense of this luxury, and a sight almost unknown to us is common enough in Madrid--young men, the "curled darlings" of society, lazily lounging in a Victoria or Berlina in what is known as the "Ladies' Mile." The Madrid _pollo_ is not the most favourable specimen of a Spaniard; the word literally means a "chicken," but applied to a young man it is scarcely a complimentary expression, and has its counterpart with us in the slang terms which from time to time indicate the idle exquisite who thinks as much of his dress and his style as any woman does or more. The Madrid _pollo_ often is, or ought to be, a schoolboy, and the younger he is, naturally, the more conceited and impertinent he is. It is curious that with the feminine termination, this word (_polla_) loses all sense of banter or contempt; it simply means a young girl in the first charm of her spring-time. Riding in the Row has always been a favourite pastime in Madrid, but to English ideas the _pollo_ is more objectionable there than elsewhere, since his idea of riding is to show off the antics of a horse specially taught and made to prance about and curvet while he sits it, his legs sticking out in the position of the Colossus of Rhodes, his heels, armed with spurs, threatening catastrophe to the other riders. An old English master of foxhounds, who was a frequent visitor in Madrid, used to compare the Paseo of the Fuente Castellana at the fashionable hour to a "_chevaux de frise_ on horseback." These gentlemen must not, however, be supposed to represent Spanish horsemanship. Ladies ride a good deal in the Paseo, but one cannot call them good horsewomen. To get into the saddle from a chair, or a pair of stable steps, and let their steed walk up and down for an hour or so in the Row, is not exactly what we call riding. If you hire a carriage in Madrid you are so smart that your best friends would not recognise you. A grand barouche and pair dashes up to your door, probably with a ducal coronet on the panels. The coachman and footman wear cockades, and the moment you appear they both take off their hats and hold them in their hands until you are seated in the carriage. This ceremony is repeated every time you alight, the coachman reverently uncovering as you leave the carriage or return to it, as well as the footman who is opening the door for you. It is most comforting; royalty, I feel sure, is nothing to it! We will not look critically at the lining of the noble barouche, nor at the varnish on its panels, still less make disagreeable remarks about the liveries, which do not always fit their wearers--it is economical to have liveries made a good medium size, so that if the servants are changed the clothes are not;--one can always feel grateful for the polite and agreeable attendants. How oddly it must strike the Spaniards in England to notice the stolid indifference of "Jeames de la Plush," and the curt tap of his first finger on the brim of his hat as his lady enters her carriage or gives her directions! All the mules, and most of the horses, ponies, or donkeys ridden by the "Jacket" men or country people are trained to pace instead of to trot; it is said to be less fatiguing on a long journey. The motion as you ride is, to our notions, very unpleasant, being a kind of roll, which at first, at any rate, gives one the feeling of sea-sickness. The animal uses the fore and hind feet together alternately, as he literally runs over the ground. It does not appear to be a natural pace, but is carefully taught, and, once acquired, it is very difficult to break the animal of it; his idea of trotting has become quite lost; nor is it a pretty action, nor one suited to show off good qualities--it has always something of a shuffle about it. If it has its advantages, except that stirrups may be dispensed with, they are not very apparent to those accustomed to the usual paces of an English horse. Personally, I disliked it particularly. There have been many efforts to introduce racing, with its contingent improvement in the breed of horses, perhaps the earliest during the regency of Espartero; but these ended, as most things did in the old days when Spain was only beginning her long struggle for freedom, in failure and loss to the enterprising gentlemen--of whom the then Duque de Osuna was one--who spent large sums of money in the effort. The old race-course of that time lay somewhere in the low ground outside Madrid on the course of the Manzanares; many a good gallop I have had on it, though it was abandoned and forgotten long ago by the Madrileños. At the present time horse-racing may be said to have become naturalised in Spain under the _Sociedad del Fomento de la Cria Caballar_ (Society for the Encouragement of Horse-breeding), and all that concerns horsemanship is naturally improved and improving. A good idea of Spanish horses may be gained by a visit to the Royal Mews in Madrid. There are the cream-coloured horses from the royal stud at Aranjuez, _jacuitas_ from Andalucia, as well as the mountain ponies of Galicia. Those who have never seen the Spanish mule have no idea what the animal is--powerful, active, graceful, and almost impossible to injure. They are used in the royal stables and in those of the nobility, for night work, since they are so hardy as not to be injured by long waiting in the cold or wet. They are the correct thing in the carriages of the Papal Nuncio and all ecclesiastics, and are generally preferred to horses for long or difficult journeys. They are a great feature in the army; kept in splendid condition and of great size, they not only drag the heavy guns, but in the celebrated mountain artillery each mule carries a small gun on his back. A brigade of this arm would have been invaluable to the British in South Africa, having no doubt had its initiation in the guerilla warfare of Spain's frequent civil wars. The clipping of mules and donkeys, which are also very superior animals to anything we know by that name, is in the hands of the gypsies, who have a perfect genius for decorating their own animals and any others committed to their manipulation. Only the upper part is shaved, or clipped to the skin, the long winter coat being left on the legs and half-way up the body. Generally, on the shoulders and haunches a pattern is made by leaving some of the hair a little longer; the figure of the cross with rays is not uncommon, but it is wonderful how elaborate and beautiful some of these patterns are, looking as if embossed in velvet on the skin. One day, passing a _venta_ in a street in Madrid, we were attracted by a gaily-decked donkey standing outside. He had the words, _Viva mi Amo_ (Long live my Master!), finished with a beautiful and artistic scroll pattern, in rich velvet across his haunches. While we stood admiring this work of art, the master within laughingly warned us that the ass kicked if anyone came near him. Perhaps the elaborate decoration was a practical joke! The mules and donkeys which come in from the country are generally very picturesque, with a network of crimson silk tassels over their heads, and a bright-coloured _manta_ thrown across their sleek, glossy backs. These _mantas_ serve many purposes; they are made of two breadths of brightly striped and ornamented material of wool and silk, sewn up at one end, or sometimes for some distance at each end, like a purse; sometimes they are thrown across the mule to serve as saddle-bags, sometimes one end is used as a hood and is drawn over the master's head, while the remainder is thrown across his chest and mouth and over the left shoulder. The best of these _mantas_ are elaborately trimmed at both ends with a deep interlacing fringe, ending in a close row of balls, and have a thick ornamental cord sewn over the joining. These, which are intended for human wraps and not as saddle-bags, are only sewn up at one end, so as to form something very like the old monkish hood. All the horses, mules, donkeys, and oxen wear bells: the oxen have generally only one large bronze bell, which hangs under the head; the others have rows of small jingling silver or brass bells round their collars or bridles. These draught oxen are beautiful animals, mostly a deep cream in colour, with dark points, magnificent eyes, and a sphinx-like look of patience, as if biding their time for something much better to come. Their harness is not apparently irksome to them, and is not so heavy as one sees on the Portuguese oxen, for instance. They are coupled by a wooden bar across the head, and their driver, if such he can be called--rather, perhaps, the guide--walks in front with a long stick, possibly a wand of office, over his shoulder to show them the way. The dress of this functionary is picturesque: a wide-brimmed hat (_sombrero_), a shirt, short trousers to the knees, with gaiters of woven grass (_esparto_), a _faja_ round his waist, and _manta_ thrown over his shoulder if cold. He stalks majestically along, followed by his equally majestic _bueyes_, and one wonders of what all three are thinking as they trudge along the sun-smitten roads, regardless of dust or of anything else. The cars are rude enough, and the wheels sometimes solid discs of wood. Occasionally, a hood of bent pieces of wood covered with linen is fixed. Tame oxen, or _cabestros_, as they are called, play a very important part in the _ganaderos_ and the bull-rings. They appear to be held in some sort of superstitious reverence, or strange affection, by the poor beasts who only live to make sport for men. In driving the bulls from one pasture to another, or bringing them into the towns, the _cabestros_ are followed with unwavering faith by these otherwise dangerous animals; where the _cabestro_ goes, clanging his great bell, the bull follows, and while under the charge of his domesticated friend he is quite harmless. [Illustration: BUEYES RESTING] At one time, the bulls used to be driven to the bull-ring outside Madrid in specially made roads sunk some fifteen feet below the level of the fields, and paved. Along these the _pastor_, or shepherd, and _picadores_, armed with long lances, went with the _cabestros_ and the herd of bulls to be immolated. I have frequently met this procession when riding, either in the early morning or late evening, outside Madrid; but so long as the _cabestros_ are present, there is nothing to fear, for the bulls are perfectly quiet and harmless. Once, however, riding with a friend, I had a disagreeable and exciting adventure. We were quietly walking our horses along the Ronda de Alcalá, when we heard an immense amount of shouting, and suddenly became aware that we ourselves were the objects of the excitement, waving of hands, screaming, and gesticulating. Before we had time to do more than realise that we were being warned of some terrific danger in wait for us round the corner of the high wall, some little distance in advance, two _picadores_ on horseback, armed with their long pikes, galloped round the corner, also shouting wildly to us, and pointing across the fields as if telling us to fly, and almost at the same moment the whole drove of bulls, tearing along at a terrific rate, without _cabestros_, appeared, charging straight towards us. We did not need a second hint. At one side of the road was the old wall of Madrid, at the other a high bank with a wide ditch beyond it. Without a word, we put our horses at the bank,--they had realised the situation as quickly as we had,--jumped the ditch at a flying leap from the top of the bank, and were off across a field of young wheat. Once only I looked behind, and saw a magnificent black bull, with his tail in the air--a signal of attack--on the top of the bank over which I had just leaped, preparing to follow me. Long afterwards, as it seemed, when my horse slackened his pace, I found myself alone in a wide plain, neither bulls nor fellow-rider to be seen. His horse had bolted in another direction from mine, and we heard afterwards that the _picadores_ had galloped in between me and the sporting bull and turned him back. Eventually, the _cabestros_ appeared on the scene, and the poor misguided bulls were inveigled into the shambles for the _fiesta_ of the morrow. How they had ever managed to break away or gain the public road at all, we were never able to learn. CHAPTER VI THE COURT During the reign of Don Alfonso XII., except during the interval when the melancholy death of his first beloved Queen, Mercédes, plunged King, Court, and people into mourning, Madrid was gayer than perhaps it has ever been. No one loved amusement better than the young King, who was only seventeen when the military _pronunciamiento_ of Martinez Campo called him to the throne from which his mother had been driven seven years previously. He had taken his people, and indeed all the world, by storm, for from the first moment he had shown all the qualities which make a ruler popular, and Spain has never had a young monarch of so much promise. He had the royal gift of memory, and an extraordinary facility in speaking foreign languages; it was said that the Russian and the Turkish envoys were the only ones with whom he was unable to converse as freely in their languages as in his own. He was an excellent speaker, always knew the right thing to say, the best thing to do to gain the hearts of his people, and to make himself agreeable to all parties and all nationalities alike. He was the first King of Spain to address his people _de usted_ in place of _de tu_, a mark of respect which they were not slow to appreciate; he was a modern, in that he would go out alone, either on foot or riding, allowed applause in his presence at the theatres, unknown before, and himself would salute those he knew from his box. He gave audience to all who asked, was an early riser, devoted to business when it had to be performed, was an enthusiast in all military matters, and, perhaps better than all in the eyes of his people, he was devoted to the bull-ring. Extremely active, resolute, firm, fond of all kinds of active sports, such as hunting and shooting, equally fond of society, picnics, dances, and all kinds of entertainments, he seemed destined to become the idol of his people, and to lead his beloved country back to its place in Europe. His death, when only twenty-seven, changed all this. Queen Maria Cristina has been a model wife, widow, mother, and Regent. She was devoted to her husband, and though it was said at first to be a political marriage, contracted to please the people, it was undoubtedly a happy one. The Queen has scarcely taken more part in public life during her sad widowhood than Queen Victoria did. She has devoted herself to her public duties as Regent and to the education and care of her children. Alfonso XIII., born a king after his father's death, has always been rather a delicate boy; his mother has determined that his health and his education shall be the first and chief care of her life, and nothing turns her from this purpose. If she has never been exactly popular, she has at least the unbounded respect and admiration of the people. She does not love the "bulls," and, therefore, she is not _Española_ enough to awaken enthusiasm; she keeps the boy King too much out of sight, so that his people scarcely know him, even in Madrid; but this is the very utmost that anyone has to say against her, while all shades of politicians, even to declared Republicans, speak of her with respect and with real admiration of her qualities of heart and mind. All Court gaieties are, however, at an end. Once a year or so a ball at the palace, a formal dinner, or reception, when it cannot be avoided--that is all, and for the rest the Queen is rarely seen except at religious ceremonies or state functions, and the King, never. He is supposed to take his amusements and exercise in the Casa de Campo, and rarely crosses Madrid. Numerous stories used to be told of his precocity as a child, and of his smart sayings; sometimes of his generosity and sympathy with the poor and suffering. Now one is told he is somewhat of a pickle, but fables about royalty may always be received with more than a grain of salt. One of the stories told of him, which ought to be true, since it has the ring of childhood about it, is well known. When a small boy, his Austrian governess, of whom he was very fond, reproved him for using his knife in place of a fork. "Gentlemen never do so," she said. "But I am a King," he replied. "Kings, still less, eat with their knives," said the governess. "_This_ King does," was the composed reply of the child. The etiquette of the Spanish Court, although it was much modified by Alfonso XII., is still very formal. A perfectly infinite number of _mayordomos, caballerizos, gentiles hombres de casa y boca, ujieres, alabarderos, monteros_, aides-de-camp, _Grandes de España de servicio_, ladies-in-waiting, lackeys, servants, and attendants of every possible description abound. A man going to an audience with royalty uncovers as he enters the Palace. First, he will find the _alabardero de servicio_ placed at the entrance of the vestibule; farther on, more _alabarderos_. Whenever a Grande de España, a prelate, a grand cross, or a title of Castile passes, these guards strike the marble floor with their arms--a noise which may well cause the uninitiated to start. Three halls are used for grouping, according to their rank, those who are about to be presented: first, the _saleta_, where ordinary people--all the world, in fact--wait; next, the _cámara_, for those who have titles or wear the grand cross; third, the _antecámara_, reserved for the Grandes of Spain, and _gentiles hombres en ejercio_. The Grandes of Spain, chamberlains of the King, share between them the service of his Majesty. They are called in rotation, one day's notice being given before they are expected to attend in the Palace. In the ante-chamber of the King there is always the _Grande_ in waiting, the lady-in-waiting on the Queen, two aides-de-camp, and a _gentil hombre del interior_ (the last must not be confounded with the _gentiles hombres en ejercicio_, who have the right to enter the ante-chamber). There are, of course, equerries (_caballerizos_) who attend, as ours do, on horseback, when the King or Queen goes out; but the most essentially Spanish attendants are the Monteros de Espinosa, who have the exclusive right to watch while Royalty sleeps. These attendants must all be born in Espinosa; it is an hereditary honour, and the wives of the existing Monteros are careful to go to Espinosa when they expect an addition to their family, as no one not actually born there can hold the office. At the present time this guard is recruited from captains or lieutenants on the retired list. In the ante-chamber of each member of the Royal Family two of these take their place at eleven o'clock; they never speak, never sit down, but pass the whole night pacing the room, crossing each other as they go, until morning relieves them from what must be rather a trying watch. At eleven o'clock each evening there is a solemn procession of servants and officials in imposing uniforms down the grand staircase of the Palace; every door is closed and locked by a gentleman wearing an antique costume and a three-cornered hat, and having an enormous bunch of keys. From that time the Palace remains under the exclusive charge of the Monteros de Espinosa. Although this is the official programme, it is to be hoped the hour is not a fixed one. It would be a little cruel to put the Royal Family to bed so early, without regard to their feelings; especially as Madrid is essentially a city of late hours, and the various members of it would have to scamper away from opera, or in fact any entertainment, as if some malignant fairy were wanting to cast a spell at the witching hour of midnight. There are some curious superstitions, however, about being abroad when the clocks strike twelve, which we must suppose do not now affect the Madrileño. While the old church of Atocha was still standing, the Court, with a royal escort, or what is called _escadron de salut_, all the dignitaries of the Palace in attendance, guards, outriders, etc., in gorgeous array, drove in half state (_media gala_) across Madrid and the _paseos_ to hear the _salut "sa'nt"_ on Saturday. The Queen Regent and her daughters, but not often the King, now visit in turn some of the churches, but without the old state or regularity. Since the death of Alfonso XII., many of the purely Spanish customs of the Court have been modified or discontinued. Although the late King was credited with a desire to reduce the civil list, and to adopt more English customs, he was to some extent in the hands of the Conservatives, who had been the means of his restoration, and when he went forth to put an end to the Carlist insurrection and finish the civil war, which had laid desolate the Northern provinces and ruined commerce and industry for some seven years, it was at the head of a personal following of over five hundred people. Nor was the Court much, if any, less numerous when the Royal Family removed in the summer to the lovely Palace of St. Ildefonso at La Granja--that castle in the air, which has no equal in Europe, hanging, as it does, among gardens, forests, rivers, and lakes, three thousand eight hundred and forty feet above the level of the sea. The Queen is Austrian, and she has never gone out of her way to conciliate the people by making herself really Spanish. This she has left to the Infanta Isabel, the eldest sister of Alfonso XII. For many years before the birth of her brother, the Infanta Isabel was Princess of Asturias, as heiress apparent of the Crown. With the advent of a boy, she became, of course, only Infanta, losing the rank which she had held up to this time. Being but a child at the time, she perhaps knew or cared little for any difference it may have made in her surroundings. She shared in the flight of the Royal Family to France in 1868, and her education was completed in Paris. When the whirligig of Spanish politics called her brother Alfonso, who at the time was a military student at Sandhurst, to the throne from which his mother had been driven, Princess Isabel returned with him to Madrid, and was once more installed in the Palace, above the Manzanares, as Princess of Asturias. This rank remained hers during the short episode of her brother's marriage to his cousin Mercédes, and the melancholy death of the girl Queen at the moment when a direct heir to the throne was expected. Once more, when the daughter of Alfonso's second wife, the present Queen Regent, was born, the Infanta Isabel became her title, and she took again the lower rank. Nothing in history is more pathetic than this first marriage of Alfonso XII. and its unhappy termination. The children of Queen Isabel and those of her sister, the Duquesa de Montpensier, had been brought up together, and there was a boy-and-girl attachment between the Prince of Asturias and his cousin Mercédes. When Alfonso became King, almost as it seemed by accident, and it was thought necessary that he should marry, the boy gravely assured his Ministers that he was quite willing to do so, and in fact intended to marry his cousin. Nothing could be more inopportune, nothing more contrary to the welfare of the distracted country! From the time that the notorious "Spanish marriages" had become facts, the Duke of Montpensier had been an intriguer. The birth of heirs to the throne of Spain (it is useless to go back to those long-past scandals) had completely upset the machinations of Louis Philippe and his Ministers. So long as Don Francisco de Assis and the Spanish nation chose to acknowledge the children as legitimate, there was nothing to be done. The direct hope of seeing his sons Kings of Spain faded from the view of the French husband of the sister of Isabel II., but he never for one moment ceased to intrigue. Although loaded with benefits and kindness by the Queen, Montpensier took no small part in the revolution which drove her from the country. Topete, and Serrano--who had once been what the Spaniards called _Pollo Real_ himself--were bound in honour to uphold his candidature for the vacant throne; their promise had been given long before the _pronunciamiento_ at Cadiz had made successful revolution possible. Prim alone stood firm: "_Jamas, jamas!_" (Never, never!) he replied to every suggestion to bring Montpensier forward. In those words he signed his own death-warrant. His actual murderers were never brought to justice, ostensibly were never found; but there never was a Spaniard who doubted that the foul deed was the result of instigation. [Illustration: IN THE WOODS AT LA GRANJA] To have Mercédes as Queen Consort, was to bring her father once more within the limits of practical interference with national politics. To all remonstrance, however, the young King had one answer: "I have promised," and the nation, recognising that as a perfectly valid argument, acquiesced, though with many forebodings. The marriage took place, and within a few months the girl Queen was carried with her unborn child to the melancholy Pantéon de los Principes at the Escorial. The marriage of the Infanta Isabel with Count Girgenti, a Neapolitan Bourbon, was an unhappy one, and she obtained a legal separation from him after a very short matrimonial life. Spaniards have a perfect genius for giving apt nicknames. Scarcely was the arrangement for the marriage made known when the Count's name was changed to that of _Indecente_. He fought, however, for Isabel II. at Alcoléa, which was at any rate acting more decently than did Montpensier, who had furnished large sums of money to promote the rising against his confiding sister-in-law, and, in fact, never ceased his machinations against every person and every thing that stood in his way, until death fortunately removed him from the arena of Spanish politics, his one overmastering ambition unfulfilled. He had neither managed to ascend the throne himself, nor see any of his children seated there, except for the few months that Mercédes, "beloved of the King and of the nation," shared the throne of Alfonso XII. The Infanta Isabel, except for the episode of her exile in France, has always lived in the Royal Palace of Madrid, having her own quarters, and her little court about her. At times she has been the butt of much popular criticism, and even dislike, but she has outlived it all, and is now the most popular woman in Spain. It must have required no common qualities to have lived without discord--as a separated wife--with her brother and her younger sisters; then with Queen Mercédes, her cousin as well as sister-in-law; again, during the time of the King's widowhood and her own elevation to the rank of Princess of Asturias, and, finally, since the second marriage of her brother, and his untimely death, with Maria Cristina and her young nephew and nieces. One thing is to be said in favour of Isabel II. Deprived of all ordinary education herself, as a part of the evil policy of her mother, she was careful that her own children should not have to complain of the same neglect. One and all have been thoroughly educated: the Infanta Paz, now married to a Bavarian Archduke, has shown considerable talent as a poetess; and the Infanta Isabel is universally acknowledged to be a clever and a cultivated woman, inheriting much of her mother's charm of manner, and noted for ready wit and quick repartee. Her popularity, as I have said, is great, for she is careful to keep up all the Spanish customs. She is constantly to be seen in public, and, above and beyond all things, she never fails in attendance at the bull-fight, wearing the white mantilla. This alone would cover a multitude of sins, supposing the Infanta to be credited with them; but there has never been a breath of scandal connected with her. She is very devout, and never fails in the correct religious duties and public appearances. At the fair, and on _Noche buena_, she fills her carriage with the cheap toys and sweetmeats which mean so much to Spanish children, and she must be a veritable fairy godmother to those who come within her circle. She takes a close personal interest in many sisterhoods and societies for the help of the poor. In a word, she is _muy simpática_ and _muy Española_. What could one say more? A gala procession in Madrid is something to be remembered, if it be only for the wealth of magnificent embroideries and fabrics displayed. The royal carriages are drawn by eight horses, having immense plumes of ostrich feathers, of the royal colours, yellow and red, on their heads, and gorgeous hangings of velvet, with massive gold embroideries reaching almost to the ground; the whole of the harness and trappings glitter with gold and silk. The grooms, leading each horse, are equally magnificently attired, their dresses being also one mass of needlework of gold on velvet. Equerries, outriders, and military guards precede and surround the royal carriages, and the cavalcade is lengthened by having a _coche de respecto_, caparisoned with equal splendour, following each one in which a royal person is being conveyed. Behind come the carriages of the Grandes, according to rank, all drawn by at least six horses, with trappings little, if at all, inferior to those of the Court, and each with its enormous plume of gaily-coloured ostrich feathers, showing the livery of its owner. In addition to all this grandeur, the balconies of the great houses lining the route of the processions display priceless heirlooms of embroideries, hanging before each window from basement to roof. If these ancient decorations could speak, what a strange story they might tell of the processions they have seen pass! In honour of the victories over the Moors; of the heroes of the New World; of the miserable murders of the _Autos-da-fé_; of the entry of the _Rey absoluto_, to inaugurate the "Terror," on to the contemptible "galas" of Isabel II., supposed to keep the people quiet; and, almost the last, the entry of Alfonso XII., after he had put an end to the Carlist war! On the day of rejoicing for "La Gloriosa" there was no such display, although all Madrid was _en fête_. It was the triumph of the people, and their heirlooms do not take the form of priceless embroideries. In former days the receptions at the Palace were known as _besamanos_ (to kiss hand). On Holy Thursday the Royal Family and all the Court visit seven churches on foot--at least, that is the correct number, though sometimes not strictly adhered to. As no vehicular traffic is allowed on that day or on Good Friday, the streets where the royal procession pass are swept and laid with fresh sand. The ladies are in gala costume, and drag their trains behind them, all wearing the national mantilla. All Madrid also visits its seven or less number of churches, passing without obeisance before the high altars, on which there is no Host,--as the people will tell you _su Majestad_ is dead,--and after the _funcion_ is over there is a general parade in the Puerta del Sol and the Carrera de San Geronimo, to show off the smart costumes of the ladies, while the officers sit in chairs outside the Government offices and smoke, admiring the prospect. CHAPTER VII POPULAR AMUSEMENTS Nothing strikes one so much in studying the popular customs and pleasures of Spain as the antiquity of them all. Constantly one finds one's self back in prehistoric times, and to date only from the days when Spain was a Roman province is almost modernity. No one can travel through Spain, or spend any time there, without becoming aware that, however many other forms of recreation there may be, two are universal and all-absorbing in their hold on the widely differing provinces--dancing and the bull-ring. In the Basque Provinces, the national game of _pelota_, a species of tennis, played without rackets, is still kept up, and is jealously cultivated in the larger towns, such as Vitoria, San Sebastian, and Bilbao. In Madrid at the present time it is played in large courts built on purpose, and attracts many strangers. To view it, however, as a national sport, one should see it in some of the mountain villages, where it is still the great recreation for Sundays and religious _fiestas_. The working-classes also play at throwing the hammer or crowbar. This is more especially the case in the Northern provinces, where the workmen are a sound, healthy, and sober race, enjoying simple and healthy amusements, and affording an excellent example to those of countries considering themselves much more highly civilised. Pigeon-shooting, which was a great favourite with the late King Alfonso XII., and was made fashionable among the aristocracy in Madrid by him, is a very old sport--if it deserves the name--among the Valencians. Near La Pechina, at Valencia, where the great _tiro de las palomas_ takes place, was found, in 1759, an inscription: _Sodalicium vernarum colentes Isid_. This, Ford tells us, was an ancient _cofradiá_ to Isis, which paid for her _culto_. Cock-fighting is still practised in most of the Spanish towns, as well as in Valencia, the regular cock-pits being constantly frequented in Madrid; but it is looked upon as suited only to _barrio's bajos_, and is not much, if at all, patronised even by the middle classes. It is said by those who have seen it to be particularly brutal; but it was never a very humanising amusement when practised by the English nobility not such a very long time back. Whatever amusements, however, may be popular in the towns, or in particular provinces, the guitar and the dance are universal. So much has been written about the Spanish national dances that an absurd idea prevails in England that they are all very shocking and indecent. It is necessary, however, to go very much out of one's way, and to pay a good round sum, to witness those gypsy dances which have come down unchanged from the remotest ages. As Ford truly says, "Their character is completely Oriental, and analogous to the _ghawarsee_ of the Egyptians and the Hindoo _nautch_." "The well-known statue at Naples of the Venere Callipige is the undoubted representation of a Cadiz dancing-girl, probably of Telethusa herself." These dances have nothing whatever in common with the national dances as now to be seen on the Spanish stage. They are never performed except by gypsies, in their own quarter of Seville, and are now generally gotten up as a show for money. Men passing through Seville go to these performances, as an exhibition of what delighted Martial and Horace, but they do not generally discuss them afterwards with their lady friends, and to describe one of these more than doubtful dances as being performed by guests in a Madrid drawing-room, as an English lady journalist did a short time ago in the pages of a respectable paper, is one of those libels on Spain which obtain currency here out of sheer ignorance of the country and the people. Wherever two or three men and women of the lower classes are to be seen together in Spain during their play-time, there is a guitar, with singing and dancing. The verses sung are innumerable short stanzas by unknown authors; many, perhaps, improvised at the moment. The _jota_, the _malaguena_, and the _seguidilla_ are combinations of music, song, and dance; the last two bear distinct indications of Oriental origin; each form is linked to a traditional air, with variations. The _malaguena_ is Andalusian, and the _jota_ is Aragonese; but both are popular in Castile. All are love-songs, most of them of great grace and beauty. Some writers complain that some of these dance-songs are coarse and more or less indecent; others aver that they never degenerate into coarseness. _Quien sabe?_ Perhaps it is a case of _Honi soit qui mal y pense_. In any case, throughout the length and breadth of Spain, outside the wayside _venta_, or the barber's shop, in the _patios_ of inns, or wherever holiday-makers congregate, there is the musician twanging his guitar, there are the dancers twirling about in obvious enjoyment to the accompaniment of the stamping, clapping, and encouraging cries of the onlookers, and the graceful little verse, with its probably weird and plaintive cadence: Era tan dichoso antes De encontrarte en mi camino! Y, sin embargo, no siento El haberte conocido. I was so happy before I had met you on my way! And yet there is no regret That I have learned to know you. The _malaguena_ and the _seguidilla_, which is more complicated, are generally seen on the stage only in Madrid, where they must charm all who can appreciate the poetry of motion. The dance of the peasant in Castile is always the _jota Aragonesa_. The part the tambourine and the castanets play in these dances must be seen and heard to be understood: they punctuate not only the music, but also the movement, the sentiment, and the refrain. The Andaluces excel in playing on the castanets. These are, according to Ford, the "Baetican _crusmata_ and _crotola_ of the ancients": and _crotola_ is still a Spanish term for the tambourine. Little children may be seen snapping their fingers or clicking two bits of slate together, in imitation of the castanet player; but the continuous roll, or succession of quick taps, is an art to be learned only by practice. The castanets are made of ebony, and are generally decorated with bunches of smart ribbons, which play a great part in the dance. The popular instrument in the Basque and Northern provinces is the bagpipe, and the dances are quite different from those of the other parts of Spain. The _zortico zorisco_, or "evolution of eight," is danced to sound of tambourines, fifes, and a kind of flageolet--_el silbato_, resembling the rude instruments of the Roman Pifferari--probably of the same origin. Theatrical representations have always been a very popular form of recreation among the inhabitants of the Iberian continent, from the days when the plays were acted by itinerant performers, "carrying all their properties in a sack, the stage consisting of four wooden benches, covered with rough boards, a blanket suspended at the back, to afford a green-room, in which some musician sang, without accompaniment, old ballads to enliven the proceedings." This is Cervantes's description of the national stage in the time of his immediate predecessor, Lope de Rueda. The Spanish _zarzuela_ appears to have been the forerunner and origin of all musical farce and "opera comique," only naturalised in our country during the present generation. The theatres in all the provinces are always full, always popular; the pieces only run for short periods, a perpetual variety being aimed at by the managers--a thing easily to be understood when one remembers that the same audience, at any rate in the boxes and stalls, frequent them week in, week out. In Madrid, with a population of five hundred thousand inhabitants, there are nineteen theatres. With the exception of the first-class theatres, the people pay two _reales_ (_5 d._) for each small act or piece, and the audience changes many times during the evening, a constant stream coming and going. Long habit and familiarity with good models have made the lower class of playgoers critical; their judgment of a piece, or of an actor, is always good and worth having. The religious _fiestas_ must also count among the amusements of the people in Spain. Whether it be the Holy Week in Seville or Toledo, the _Romería_ of Santiago, the _Veladas_, or vigils, of the great festivals, or the day of Corpus Christi, which takes place on the first Thursday after Trinity Sunday--at all these the people turn out in thousands, dressed in their smartest finery, and combine thorough enjoyment with the performance of what they believe to be a religious duty. There is little or no drunkenness at these open-air festivities, but much gaiety, laughter, fluttering of fans, "throwing of sparks" from mischievous or languishing eyes--and at the end always a bull-fight. Here we touch the very soul of Spain. Take away the bull-rings, make an end of the _toreros_, and Spain is no longer Spain--perhaps a country counting more highly in the evolution of humanity as a whole, but it will need another name if that day ever comes, of which there does not now seem to be the remotest possibility. All that can be said is that to-day there is a party, or there are individuals, in the country who profess to abhor the bull-fight, and wish to see it ended; it is doubtful if up to this time any Spaniard ever entertained such an "outlandish" notion. The bull-fight is said to have been founded by the Moors of Spain, although bulls were probably fought with or killed in Roman amphitheatres. The principle on which they were founded was the display of horsemanship, use of the lance, courage, coolness, and dexterity--all accomplishments of the Arabs of the desert. It is undoubtedly the latter qualities which make the sport so fascinating to English _aficionados_, of whom there are many, and have caused the _fiestas de toros_ to live on in the affections of the whole Spanish people. In its earliest days, gentlemen, armed only with the _rejon_, the short spear of the original Iberian, about four feet long, fought in the arena with the bulls, and it was always a fair trial of skill and a display of good horsemanship. When the fatal race of the French Bourbons came to the throne, and the country was inundated with foreign favourites, the Court and the French hangers-on of the kings turned the fashion away from the national sport, and it gradually fell into the hands of the lower classes, professional bull-fighters taking the place of the courtly players of old, and these were drawn from the lowest and worst ranks of the masses; the sporting element, to a great extent, died out, and the whole spectacle became brutalised. _Pan y toros_ (bread and bulls) were all the people wanted, and, crushed out of all manliness by their rulers, and taught a thirst for cruelty and bloodshed by the example of their religious _autos-da-fé_, the bull-fight became the revolting spectacle which foreigners--especially the English--have been so ready to rail against as a disgrace to the Spanish nation, while they rarely let an opportunity escape them of assisting as interested spectators at what they condemned so loudly, and they quite forgot their own prize-ring, and other amusements equally brutal and disgraceful. If the _corrida de toros_ was ever as bad as it has been described by some, it has improved very much of late years, and most of its revolting features are eliminated. The pack of dogs, which used to be brought in when a bull was dangerous to the human fighters, has long been done away with. The _media luna_, which we are told was identical with the instrument mentioned in _Joshua_, is no longer tolerated to hamstring the unfortunate bull; and if a horse is gored in the fair fight, there are men especially in attendance to put him out of his misery at once. It is doubtful whether the animal suffers more than, or as much as, the unhappy favourites, that are sent alive, and in extremest torture, to Amsterdam and other foreign cities, to be manufactured into essence of meat and such-like dainties, after a life of cruelly hard work in our omnibuses and cabs has made them no longer of use as draught animals. The bull-fighter of to-day is by no means drawn from the dregs of the people; there is, at any rate, one instance of a man of good birth and education attaining celebrity as a professional _torero_. He risks his life at every point of the conflict, and it is his coolness, his courage, his dexterity in giving the _coup de grâce_ so as to cause no suffering, that raise the audience to such a pitch of frenzied excitement. I speak wholly from hearsay, for I have myself only witnessed a _corrida de novillos_--in which the bulls are never killed, and have cushions fixed on their horns--and a curious fight between a bull and an elephant, who might have been described as an "old campaigner," in which there was no bloodshed, and much amusement. My sympathies always went with the bull,--who, at least, was not consulted in the matter of the fight,--as I have seen the popular _espada_, with his own particular _chulo_, a mass of white satin and gold embroidery, driving out to the bull-ring on the afternoon of a _fiesta_, bowing with right royal grace and dignity to the plaudits of the people. I was even accused of having given the evil eye to one well-known favourite as he passed my balcony, when I wished, almost audibly, that the bull might have his turn for once in a way that afternoon. And he had; for the popular _espada_ was carried out of the ring apparently dead, the spectators came back looking white and sick, and I felt like a very murderess until I learned later that he was not dead. All Madrid, almost literally, called to inquire for him daily, filling books of signatures, as if he had been an emperor at least. Personally, I was more interested in his courage after the event and the devotion of his _chulo_, who never left his side, but held his hands while the injured leg was cut off, in three separate operations, without any anæsthetic. Eventually, he completely recovered, and was fitted with an admirable mechanical cork limb in place of the one removed in three detachments; and my sense of evil responsibility was quite removed when I heard that his young wife was delighted to think that he could never enter the bull-ring as a fighter again, and her anxieties were at an end. [Illustration: PLAZA DE TOROS. PICADOR CAUGHT BY THE BULL] It is quite impossible to over-estimate the popularity of the _toreros_ with the Spanish people. They are the friends and favourites of the aristocracy, the demi-gods of the populace. You never see one of them in the streets without an admiring circle of worshippers, who hang on every word and gesture of the great man; and this is no cult of the hour, it is unceasing. They are always known for their generosity, not only to injured comrades, but to any of the poor in need. Is there a disaster by which many are injured--flood, tempest, or railway accident? Immediately a bull-fight is arranged for the sufferers, and the whole _cuadrilla_ will give their earnings to the cause. Not only so, but the private charities of these popular favourites are immense, and quite unheard of by the public. They adopt orphans, pay regular incomes to widows, as mere parts of every-day work. They are, one and all, religious men; the last thing they do, before entering the arena with their life in their hands, is to confess and receive absolution in the little chapel in the Bull-Ring, spending some time in silent prayer before the altar, while the wife at home is burning candles to the Virgin, and offering her prayers for his safety during the whole time that the _corrida_ lasts. Extreme unction is always in readiness, in case of serious accident to the _torero_, the priest (_mufti_) slipping into the chapel before the public arrive on the scene. Rafael Molina Lagartijo, one of the veterans of the bull-fighters, and an extreme favourite with the people for many years, died recently, after living for some time in comparative retirement in his native Córdoba. Some idea of the important place which these men occupy in Spanish society may be gathered from the numerous notices which appeared in the newspapers of all shades of political opinion after his death. I quote from the article which appeared in the charming little illustrated _Blanco y Negro_, of Madrid, on the favourite of the Spanish public. In what, to us, seems somewhat inflated language, but which is, however, quite simple and natural to the Spaniard, the writer began his notice thus: "He who has heard the magic oratory of Castelar, has listened to the singing of Gayarre, the declamation of Cabro, has read Zorilla, and witnessed the _torear_ of Lagartijo, may say, without any kind of reservation, that there is nothing left for him to admire!" Having thus placed the popular bull-fighter on a level with orators, authors, and musicians of the first rank, the writer goes on to describe the beauties of Lagartijo's play in words which are too purely technical of the ring to make translation possible, and adds: "He who has not seen the great _torero_ of Córdoba in the plenitude of his power will assuredly not comprehend why the name of Lagartijo for more than twenty years filled _plazas_ and playbills, nor why the _aficionados_ of to-day recall, in speaking of his death, times which can never be surpassed.... The _toreo_ (play) of Lagartijo was always distinguished by its classic grace, its dignity and consummate art, the absence of affectation, or struggle for effect. In every part of the fight the figure of Rafael fell naturally into the most graceful attitudes; and for this reason he has always worn the rich dress of the _torero_ with the best effect. He was the perfect and characteristic type of a _torero_, such as Spanish fancy has always imagined it. Lagartijo died with his eyes fixed on the image of the Virgen de los Dolores, to whom he had always confidently committed his life of peril, and with the dignity and resignation of a good man." The article was illustrated with numerous portraits of Don Rafael: in full _torero_ dress in 1886; his very last photograph; views of him in the courtyard of his home in Córdoba, and outside the Venta San Rafael, where he took his coffee in the evening, and others. The notice concludes by saying that his life was completely dedicated to his property, which he managed himself, and he was looked upon as the guardian angel of the labourers on his farm. _Probre Rafael!_ "The lovers of the bull-fight are lamenting the death of the _torero_, but the poor of Córdoba mourn the loss of their 'Señor Rafael.'" [Illustration: PLAZA DE TOROS. THE PROCESSION] The wives of the _toreros_ are generally celebrated for their beauty, their wit, and their devotion to their husbands--indeed, the men have a large choice before them when choosing their helpmates for life. To their wives is due much of the making and all the keeping up of the elaborate and costly dress of the _torero_. They are, as someone has said, "ferociously virtuous," and share in the open-handed generosity of their husbands. The earnings of a successful _torero_ are very large. In some cases, they make as much as £4000 or £5000 a year of English money, during the height of their popularity, and retire to end their days in their native and beloved Andalucia. Whatever may be said by foreigners of the brutalising effect of the Spanish popular game, it certainly has no more effect on those who witness or practise it than fox-hunting has on Englishmen, and it is doubtful whether there is any more cruelty in one sport than in the other. The foxes are fostered and brought up for the sole purpose of being harried to death, without even a semblance of fair play being allowed to them, and if a fox-hunter risks his life it is only as a bad rider that he does so. There is no danger and certainly no dignity in the English sport, even if it indirectly keeps up the breed of horses. A curious incident is related by Count Vasili as having happened in the Bull-Ring in Madrid some years ago during a _corrida_ of Cúchares, the celebrated _espada_. It is usual during _fiestas_ of charity to enclose live sparrows in the _banderillas_ which it is part of the play to affix, at great risk to the _torero_, in the shoulders of the bull; the paper envelope bursts, and the birds are set at liberty. Crossing the arena, one of the men carelessly hit at a bird turning wildly about in its efforts to escape, and killed it. "In my life," says the Count, "I have never seen such a spectacle. Ten thousand spectators, standing up, wildly gesticulating, shouting for death on the 'cruel _torero_'; nay, some even threw themselves into the arena, ready to lynch the heartless creature!" Horse-racing may now be said to have been fairly established in Spain in most of the great centres, and the Hippodrome in Madrid is little behind one of England's popular race-courses in its crowds, the brilliant dresses of the ladies, and the enthusiasm evoked; but whether it will ever supersede the really national _fiesta_ is to be doubted. The upper classes also affect polo, tennis, and croquet, and go in a good deal for gymnastics, fencing, and fives. Cycling does not appear to commend itself greatly to the Spanish idea of recreation. Bicycles are, of course, to be seen in the large and more modern towns, but they are never very numerous, and as far as ladies are concerned, may be said to have made no way. I have referred to a curious spectacle several times presented in Madrid, chiefly in _fiestas_ for charitable purposes, where an elephant was introduced into the Bull-Ring to fight, in place of the usual _cuadrilla_ of men. This was an old elephant named Pizarro, a great favourite of many years' standing with the Madrileños. He was an enormous animal, but one of his tusks had been broken off about a third from the tip, so that he had only one to use in warfare or as protection. He was tethered in the centre of the arena, by one of his hind legs, to a stump about twelve inches high. Then the bulls were let out one at a time. Meanwhile, Pizarro was amusing himself by eating oranges which were showered on him by his admirers on the benches. With the greatest coolness he continued his repast, picking up orange after orange with his trunk, all that he was careful to do being to keep his face to the bull, turning slowly as his enemy galloped round the ring trying to take him in flank. At last the bull prepared to charge; Pizarro packed away his trunk between his tusks, and quietly waited the onslaught. The bull rushed at him furiously; but the huge animal, quite good-naturedly and a little with the air of pitying contempt, simply turned aside the attack with his one complete horn, and as soon as the bull withdrew, a little nonplussed, went on picking up and eating his oranges as before. Bull after bull gave up the contest as impossible, and contentedly went out between the _cabestros_ sent in to fetch them. At last one more persistent or courageous than the others came bounding in. Pizarro realised at once that for the moment he must pause in eating his dessert; but he became aware at the same time that in turning round to face the successive bulls, he had gradually wound himself up close to the stump, and had no room to back so as to receive the attack. The most interesting incident in the whole affray was to watch the elephant find out, by swinging his tethered leg, first in one direction and then in another, how to free himself. This he did, first by swinging his leg round and round over the stump, then by walking slowly round and round, always facing the bull, and drawing his cord farther and farther until he was perfectly free: then he was careful only to turn as on a pivot, keeping the rope at a stretch. Finally the bull charged at him with great fury; stepping slightly aside, Pizarro caught him up sideways on his tusks, and held him up in the air, perfectly impotent and mad with rage. When he considered the puny creature had been sufficiently shown his inferiority, he gently put him down, and the astonished and humbled bull declined further contest. The fighting bulls of Spain are wonderfully small in comparison with English animals, it should be said. [Illustration: DRAGGING OUT THE DEAD BULL] Every night, after his turn at the circus was over poor old Pizarro used to walk home alone under my balcony, open his stable door with his own latch-key, or at least his trunk, and put himself to bed like any Christian. One of the most fashionable amusements in Madrid is to attend on the morning of the bull-fight while the _espadas_ choose the particular bulls they wish to have as enemy, and affix their colours, the large rosette of ribbon which shows which of the _toreros_ the bull is to meet in deadly conflict. The bulls are then placed in their iron cages in the order in which they are to enter the arena. The fashionable ladies and other _aficionados_ of the sport then drive back to Madrid to luncheon and to prepare for the entertainment of the afternoon. CHAPTER VIII THE PRESS AND ITS LEADERS Perhaps there are few countries where the influence of the Press is greater than in Spain, and this is largely due to the fact that while the journals are read by everyone, for a great number of the people they form the only literature. The free library is not yet universal in the country, though, doubtless, in the near future it may become general. In the meantime, every imaginable shade of political opinion has its organ; even the Bull-Ring has at least two excellently illustrated newspapers: and the extra sheets, printed hastily and sold immediately after the _corrida_ has terminated, have an enormous sale. Deserving of mention is the curious little paper known as the "Night-cap of Madrid," because it is supposed to be impossible for anyone to go to rest until he has read the late edition, which comes out not long before midnight. It is said to have no politics, and only pretends to give all the news of the world. There are many illustrated papers, both comic and serious. The charmingly artistic little _Blanco y Negro_, beautifully gotten up, is at the head of all the more dignified illustrated journals of the country. There are no kiosks; the papers are sold by children or by old women in the streets, and the Madrid night is rent by the appalling cries of these itinerant vendors of literature. For the Spanish newspaper is always literature, which is a good deal more than can be said for some of the English halfpenny Press. Whatever may be the politics of the particular journal, its _Castellano_ is perfect; perhaps a little stilted or pompous, but always dignified and well-written. The journalists of Madrid have a special facility for saying with an air of extreme innocence what they, for various reasons, do not care to express quite openly. Allegories, little romances, stories of fact full of clever words of "double sense" make known to the initiated, or those who know how to read between the lines, much that might otherwise awaken the disagreeable notice of the censor, when there is one. There is an air of good-natured raillery which takes off the edge of political rancour, and keeps up the amenities and the dignity of the Spanish Press. Only the other day one of the leading English journals pointed out what a dignified part the Press of Madrid, of every shade of politics, had played in the recent effort made by some foreign newspapers--of a class which so far does not exist in Spain--to make mischief and awaken national jealousy between England and Spain on the subject of the works now being carried out by the English Government at Gibraltar. The Spanish newspapers, of all shades of opinion, have made it abundantly evident that their country entertains no unworthy suspicion of England's good faith, and has not the smallest intention of being led into strained or otherwise than perfectly friendly relations with their old allies of the Peninsular War, to gratify the rabid enmity of a section of a Press foreign to both countries. This is, perhaps, the more remarkable because a certain amount of misunderstanding of England exists among some elements of the Spanish Press. The Liberal party in Spain is, in fact, the party of progress, and the nation has at last awakened from its condition of slavery under unworthy rulers, and is practically united in its determination to return to its place among the nations of Europe. There are many shades of Liberalism, and even Republicanism, but, as will be seen in another place, the real welfare of the people, and not the success of a mere political party, is the underlying motive of all, however wild and unpractical may be some of the dreams for the carrying out of these ideas of universal progress. It is impossible for a Spaniard to conceive of maligning or belittling his own country for merely party purposes; and, therefore, when he finds an English newspaper calling itself "Liberal" he imagines the word to have the same signification it has in his own country. So it has come to pass that many of the worst misrepresentations--to use a very mild term--of a portion of the English Press have been reproduced in Spanish newspapers, and believed by their readers. Among the principal newspapers, in a crowd of less important ones, _La Época_, Conservative and dynastic ranks first; this is the journal of the aristocrats, of the "upper ten thousand," or those who aspire to be so, and it ranks as the _doyen_ of the whole Press. Its circulation is not so large as that of some of the other papers, but its clientèle is supposed to be of the best. _El Nacional_ is also Conservative, but belonging to the party of Romero Robledo. What the exact politics of that variation of Conservatism might be, it is difficult, I might almost say impossible, for a stranger to say. If you were told nothing about it, and took it up accidentally to read of current events, you would certainly suppose it to be independent, with a decidedly Liberal tendency. Still it calls itself Conservative. _El Correo_ is Liberal, of the special type of Sagasta, the present Prime Minister. _El Español_, which also gives one the impression of independence, is Liberal after the manner of Gemaro. _El Heraldo_, calling itself _Diario Independente_, is credited with being the Liberal organ of Canalijas. _El Liberal_ and _El Pais_ are Republican, and _El Correo Español_ is Carlist, or clerical. This paper appears to be looked upon a good deal in the nature of a joke by its colleagues, and quotations from it are always accompanied by notes of exclamation. _La Correspondéncia de España_ is a paper all by itself, an invention of Spanish journalism, and its unprecedented success is due to many of its quite unique peculiarities. Its originator, now a millionaire, is proud of relating that he arrived in Madrid with two dollars in his pocket. He it was who conceived the brilliant idea of founding a journal which should be the special organ of all. "_Diario politico independiente, y de noticias: Eco imparcial de la opinion y de la prensa_," he calls it, and the fourth page, devoted to advertisements, would make the fortune of ten others. His boast was that it had no editor, paid no writers, and employed no correspondents. It simply possessed a certain number of "caterers" for news, who thrust themselves everywhere, picking up morsels of news--good, bad, and indifferent, for the most part scribbled in pencil and thrown into a receptacle from which they are drawn in any order, or none, and handed to the printer as "copy"; coming out in short, detached paragraphs of uneven length, ranging from three lines to twenty. Extracts from foreign newspapers, official news, provincial reports, money matters, religious announcements, accidents, everything comes out pell-mell--absolutely all "the voices of the flying day," in Madrid and everywhere else, in one jumble, without order or sequence, one paragraph frequently being a direct contradiction to another in the same sheet. There are three editions during the day, but the "Night-cap," which sums up them all, appears about ten o'clock or later, and it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that it is bought by almost every householder in the city. The nature of the _Correspondéncia_ has changed very little since its earliest days. It is a little more dignified, condescends even to short articles on current subjects of interest, but it is the same universal provider of news and gossip as ever. It goes with the times; so far as it has any leanings at all, it is with the Government of the hour; but it is for the most part quite impersonal, and it makes itself agreeable to all parties alike. Santa Ana, the clever initiator of this new and highly successful adventure in journalism, has two other very prosperous commercial enterprises in his hands--the manufacture of paper for printing and the supply of natural flowers. He himself is an enormous and indefatigable worker, personally looks after his various businesses, especially the _Correspondéncia_, and, mindful of his own early difficulties, he has created benefit societies for his workmen. He who, being a foreigner, would attempt to understand Spanish politics, deserves to be classed with the bravest leaders of forlorn hopes. In the first place, it is doubtful whether Spaniards understand them themselves, although they talk, for the most part, of nothing else--except bulls. Whenever and wherever two or three men or boys are gathered together, you may be quite certain as to the subject of their conversation--that is, if they show signs of excitement and interest in the matter under discussion. Each man you meet gives you the whole matter in a nut-shell: he has studied politics ever since he was able to talk; all the other innumerable parties besides his own are _nada_! he can tell you exactly what is wrong with his country, and, what is more, exactly how it may all be made right. The only thing which puzzles one is that all the nut-shells are different, and, as there are an unlimited number of them, all that one carefully learns to-day has to be as carefully unlearned to-morrow, and a fresh adjustment made of one's political spectacles. After all, however, this is very much what would happen in any country if we were in turn to sit at the feet of successive teachers, and try to bring their doctrines into any kind of accord. The peculiarity in Spain lies rather in the multiplicity of private political opinions and the energy with which they are expressed, and in the fact that they are all honest. Emerson has somewhere said that "inconsistency is the bugbear of little minds." The Spanish politician has evidently not a little mind, for he has no fear whatever of inconsistency, nor, in fact, of making a _volte-face_ whenever he sees any reason for doing so. There are Conservatives, Liberals, Republicans, Radicals, Socialists, as in other countries, but there are, besides all these, an infinite number of shades and tones of each political belief, each represented, as we have seen, by a newspaper of its own, and, for the most part, bearing the name of one man. It would seem, then, that you have only to make yourself acquainted with the opinions, or rather with the political acts, of that one man, and there you are! Vain and fond fancy! He has been a rabid Republican, perhaps, or he has belonged, at least, to the party which put up in Madrid in conspicuous letters, "The bastard race of the Bourbons is for ever fallen. Fit punishment of their obstinacy!" but you will find him to-day lending all the force of his paper to the support of the Queen Regent, and at the same time allying himself with the various classes of Republicans, even to the followers of Zorilla, who have, at any rate till now, been consistent enemies and haters of the Bourbon. Señor Don Romero Robledo, one among the politicians of the day who possess the gift of perfect oratory, so common among his countrymen, is an example of this puzzling "open mind." He appeared first in the character of revolutionist in 1868; then he became the Minister of the Interior in Amadeo's short reign, held somewhat aloof from the wild experiment in a republic of Castelar, joined the party of Don Alfonso on the eve of its success, and supported Cánovas del Castillo in his somewhat retrograde policy in the restoration of the very Bourbon whom he had announced as "banished for ever," and, in fact, by his admirable genius for organising his party, enabled the Government of Cánovas to continue to exist. It is said of him that he "buys men as one would buy sheep," and that he will serve any cause so long as he has the management of it, or rather so long as he may pull the wires. Comte Vasili says of him: "In politics, especially Conservative politics, men like Romero Robledo are necessary, finding easily that 'the end justifies the means,' energetic, ambitious, always in the breach opposing their qualities to the invasions of the parties of extremes." This was written of him some fifteen years ago by one eminently qualified to judge. At the present moment we find Señor Romero Robledo refusing office, but consulted by the Queen Regent in every difficulty. In the late crisis, when the Conservative party under Silvela, called into office for the sake of carrying the extremely unpopular marriage of the Princess of Asturias with the Count of Caserta, had nearly managed to wreck the monarchy, or, at any rate, the regency, and to bring the always dangerous clerical question to an acute stage by suspending the constitutional guarantees over the whole of Spain, it was Romero Robledo who told the Queen quite plainly that before anything else could be done the guarantees must be restored, that the liberties of the people could not be interfered with, and that, in short, the Liberal party must be called into office. Then we find him holding meetings in which Conservatives, Republicans, even Zorillistas, all combined, enthusiastically declaring that they are on the side of order and progress, agreeing to hold up England, under her constitutional monarch, as the most really democratic and free of all nations, since in no other country, republican or otherwise, is the government, as a matter of fact, so entirely in the hands of the people; swearing eternal enmity against the interference of the clergy in government or in education, but counselling "quiet determination without rancour or bigotry in dealing with those of the clergy who openly, or through the confessional, attempt to usurp authority which it is intended they shall never again acquire in Spain." In fact, to read Señor Romero Robledo's discourses on these occasions, and the excellent articles in the newspaper which represents his views, _El Nacional_, one would imagine the Golden Age to have dawned for Spain. Liberty, honour, real religion, progress in science, art, manufactures, trade, the purification of politics, the ideal of good government--these are only a few of the things to which this amalgamation of parties is solemnly pledged. One thing, at least, is promising among so much that might be put down as "words, words": a general agreement as to the wisdom of making the best of the present situation, opposing a firm resistance to any attempt at a return to absolutism on the part of the monarchy, or domination in temporal matters by the Church; but no change, no more _pronunciamientos_, no more civil wars. Whenever the political parties of a country merge their differences of opinion in one common cause, the end may be foreseen. This was what happened in 1868; and if the party of Romero Robledo is what it represents itself to be and holds together, we may hope to see the reign of the young Alfonso XIII. open with good auguries this year (1902), as it seems to be certain that he is to attain his majority two years in advance of the usual time. The life, political career, and retirement of Emilio Castelar is one of the most pathetic pictures in history, and one altogether Spanish in character. It was after Amadeo had thrown down his crown, exclaiming, "A son of Savoy does not wear a crown on sufferance!" that the small party of Republicans--which Prim had said did not exist, and which had in fact only become a party at all during the disastrous period of uncertainty between the expulsion of Isabel II. and the election of the Italian prince--edged its way to the front, and Castelar became the head of something much worse than a paper constitution--a republic of visionaries. Don Quijote de la Mancha himself could scarcely have made a more pure-intentioned yet more unpractical President. Castelar, with his honest, unsophisticated opinions and theories, his unexampled oratory, which is said to have carried away crowds of men who did not understand or hear a word that he said, with the rhythm of his language, the simple majesty and beauty of his delivery, launched the nation into a government that might have been suited to the angels in heaven, or to what the denizens of this earth may become in far distant æons of evolution--a republic of dreams, headed by a dreamer. The awakening was rude, but it was efficient. When Castelar found that in place of establishing a millennium of peace and universal prosperity, he had let loose over the land all the elements of disorder and of evil, he had the greatness to acknowledge himself mistaken: his own reputation never troubled him, and he admitted that the Cortes, from which he had hoped so much, worked evil, not good. It is said that he himself called on General Pavía, the Captain-General of Madrid, to clear them out. The deputies--Castelar had withdrawn--sat firm: "Death rather than surrender," they cried. Pavía, however, ordered his men to fire once down the empty lobbies, and the hint was enough: the Cortes dispersed, and Pavía, had he so minded it, might have been military dictator of Spain. But he had no such ambition, though there were not wanting those who ascribed it to him. [Illustration: THE ESCURIAL] As for Castelar, when angrily charged with inconsistency, he said: "Charge me with inconsistency, if you please. I will not defend myself. Have I the right to prefer my own reputation to the safety of my country? Let my name perish, let posterity pronounce its anathema against me, let my contemporaries send me into exile! Little care I! I have lived long enough! But let not the Republic perish through my weaknesses, and, above all, let no one say that Spain has perished in our hands!" Castelar went back to his chair of philosophy, which he had never resigned, poor as he left it, to the modest home and the devoted sister whom he loved so well--and no one laughed! Is there really any other country than Spain where such things can happen? His enthusiasm, his high-mindedness, his failures, his brave acknowledgment that he had failed, were accepted by the country in the exact spirit in which he had offered himself to her service, and the memory of Castelar stands as high to-day as ever it did in the respectful admiration of his fellow-countrymen. CHAPTER IX POLITICAL GOVERNMENT The Government of Spain ever since the restoration of Don Alfonso XII. has been in reality what it was only in name before--a constitutional monarchy. During the first years of the young King's reign, Cánovas del Castillo being Prime Minister, there was a distinctly reactionary tendency from the Liberalism of Prim and the revolutionary party of 1868. It was almost impossible that it should be otherwise, considering the wild tumult of the varying opinions and the experiments in government that the country had passed through; and some of the difficulties of the situation to-day are no doubt due to the concessions made to the ultra-Conservative party in the re-introduction of the religious orders, which had been suppressed during the regency of Cristina, and had never been tolerated even during the reign of the _piadosa_, Isabel II. Prim had, from the first moment that the success of the Revolution was assured and the Queen and her _camarilla_ had crossed the frontier to seek asylum in France, declared for a constitutional monarchy. "How can you have a monarchy without a king?" he was asked by Castelar. "How can you have a republic without republicans!" was his reply. He might have made himself king or military dictator, but he wanted to be neither; nor would he hear of Montpensier, to whom Topete and Serrano had pledged themselves. The House of Savoy was the next heir to the Spanish throne, had the Bourbons become extinct, and to it the first glances of the Spanish king-maker were directed, but difficulties arose from the dislike of the Duke of Aosta himself to the scheme. A prince of some Liberal country was what was wanted: there was even some talk of offering the crown to the English Duke of Edinburgh, while one party dreamed of an Iberian amalgamation, and suggested Dom Luis of Portugal or his father Dom Ferdinand, the former regent. The candidature of Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, who was a Roman Catholic, was looked upon with a certain amount of favour, but at the eleventh hour Napoleon III. made this scheme a pretext for the quarrel with Prussia which led to the fateful war of 1870 and 1871. Eventually, almost two years after the outbreak of the Revolution, Amadeo of Savoy was chosen by the Cortes at Madrid by a majority of one hundred and five votes, only twenty-three being given for Montpensier and sixty-three for a republic. On the day that King Amadeo set foot on Spanish soil Prim was assassinated; it was perfectly well known at whose instigation, and the man whom the Spaniards themselves said was _demasiado honesto_ (too honourable) for the hotch-potch of political parties into which he was thrown without a friend or helper, began his vain effort to rule a foreign nation in a constitutional manner. After he had thrown up the thankless task in despair, the absurd Republic of Zorilla and Castelar made confusion worse confounded, and it was with a feeling of relief to all that the _pronunciamiento_ of Martinez Campos at Muviedro put an end to the Spanish Republic under Serrano, and proclaimed the son of Isabel II. as King. He was but a lad of seventeen, but he had been educated in England; he was known to be brave, dignified, and extremely liberal, so that he was acclaimed throughout Spain, and during his short life he fully justified the high opinion formed of him. But the Government of Cánovas was reactionary, and when the unexpected death of Alfonzo XII. left his young wife, the present Maria Cristina of Austria, a widow under exceptionally trying circumstances, Cánovas himself placed his resignation in her hands, knowing that the Liberals were the party of the nation, and promised to give his own best efforts to work with what had up to then been his Opposition, for the good of the country and of the expected child, who a few months later had the unusual experience of being "born a king." Whatever may be said about the present Regent,--though in truth little but good has been said or thought of her,--she has been most loyal to the constitution, holding herself absolutely aloof from all favouritism or even apparent predilection. She has devoted her life to the education of her son and to his physical well-being, for he was not a strong child in his early years, and she has done her best, possibly more than any but a woman could have done, to keep the ship of State not only afloat, but making headway during the minority of her son. Two things militate against good government in Spain, and will continue to do so until the whole system is changed: what is known in the country as _caciquismo_, and the pernicious custom of changing all the Government officials, down to the very porter at the doors, with every change of ministry. It is much, however, that the Government does go out in a constitutional manner instead of by a military _pronunciamiento_ on each occasion, as in the old days; also that a civilian and not a soldier is always at the head of it. In reality, there are two great parties in Madrid, and only two: the _Empleados_ and the _Cesantes_--in plain English, the "Ins" and the "Outs." Whatever ministry is in power has behind it an immense army of provincial governors, secretaries, clerks, down to the porters, and probably even the charwomen who clean out the Government offices. This state of things is repeated over the whole country, and there is naturally created and sustained an enormous amount of bribery and corruption, which is continually at work discrediting all governments and giving to Spanish affairs that "bad name" which, according to our old proverb, is as bad as hanging. The _Cesantes_ haunt certain _cafés_ and possess certain newspapers, and the _Empleados_ other _cafés_ and other papers. The "Outs" and the "Ins" meet at night to discuss their prospects, and wonderful are the stories invented at these reunions, some of which even find their way into English newspapers--if their correspondents are not up to the ways of Spain--for we read ludicrous accounts of things supposed to have been taking place, and are treated to solemn prophecies of events never likely to occur, even in first-class English journals. It is naturally the interest of these subordinate employees of a vicious system to hasten or retard the day that shall see their respective chiefs change position, and if a few plausible untruths can do it, be assured they will not be wanting. Both in the popular novels, _de costumbres_, and in actual life, it is the commonest thing to hear a man described as a _Cesante_, in the same way that we should speak of him as being an engineer or a doctor, as if being out of place were just as much an employment as any other. One thing that appears strange to a foreigner about these _Cesantes_ is that they never seem even to dream of seeking other employment; they simply sit down to wait until their particular patron is "in" again, and in the old days they were a constant force making for the _pronunciamiento_ which would sooner or later make a place for them. As they had no means of existence except when in receipt of Government pay, it is easy to understand that, according to their views, they had to prepare for the evil day which assuredly awaited them, by appropriating and exacting all the money that was possible during their short reign of power. Probably the only difference between the highest and the lowest official was in the actual amount he was able to acquire when he was "in." This system, subversive of all efficient service, and leading inevitably to the worst evils of misappropriation of the national funds, had perhaps its worst aspects in the colonies. A Government berth in Cuba was a recognised means of making a fortune, or of rehabilitating a man who had ruined himself by gambling at home. Appointments were made, not because the man was fitted for the post, but because he had influence--frequently that of some lady--with the person with whom the appointments lay, or because he was in need of an opportunity for making money easily. That there have always been statesmen and subordinate officials above all such self-seeking, men of punctilious honour and of absolutely clean hands, is known to all; but such men--as Espartero, for instance--too often threw up the sponge, and would have naught to do with governing nor with office of any description. Espartero, who is generally spoken of as the "Aristides of Spain," when living in his self-sought retirement at Logroño, even refused to be proclaimed as King during the days when the crown was going a-begging, though he would probably have been acclaimed as the saviour of his country by a large majority. Long years of foreign kings and their generally contemptible favourites and ministers, long years of tyranny and corruption in high places, leavened the whole mass of Spanish bureaucracy; but the heart of the nation remained sound, and those who would understand Spain must draw a distinct line between her professional place-hunters and her people. Caciqueism is a mere consequence or outcome from the state of affairs already described. While the deputies to the Cortes are supposed to be freely elected as representatives by the people, in reality they are simply nominees of the heads of the two political powers which have been see-sawing as ministers for the last sixteen years. Two men since the assassination of Cánovas have alternately occupied the post of First Minister of the Crown: Don Práxadis Mateo Sagasta, one of those mobile politicians who always fall on their feet whatever happens, and Francisco Silvela, who may be described as a Liberal-Conservative in contrast to Cánovas, who was a Tory of the old school, and aspired to be a despot. Toryism, though the word is unknown there, dies hard in Spain; but there are not wanting signs that the Conservatives of the new school have the progress and emancipation of the country quite as much at heart as any Liberal. It was the Conservative _Nacional_ that in a leading article of March 29th in 1901, under the head of "Vicious Customs," called attention to the crowds of place-hunters who invade the public offices after a change of ministry, and to the barefaced impudence of some of their claims for preferment. "The remedy is in the hands of the advisers of the Crown," it continued. "Let them shut the doors of their offices against influence and intrigue, keep _Empleados_ of acknowledged competence permanently in their posts, and not appoint new ones without the conviction that they have capacity and aptitude for the work they will have to do. By this means, if the problem be not entirely solved, it will at least be in train for a solution satisfactory at once for a good administration and for the highest interests of the State." The way in which the wire-pulling is done from Madrid, in case of an election, is through the _cacique_, or chief person in each constituency; hence the name of the process. This person may be the Civil Governor, the _Alcalde_, or merely a rich landowner or large employer of labour in touch with the Government: the pressure brought to bear may be of two sorts, taking the form of bribery or threat. The voters who hang on to the skirts of the _cacique_ may hope for Government employment, or they may fear a sudden call to pay up arrears of rent or of taxes; the hint is given from headquarters, or a Government candidate is sent down. It matters little how the thing is done so long as the desired end is accomplished. Speaking of the general election which took place last June, and in which it was well known beforehand that the Liberals were to be returned in a large majority, one of the Madrid newspapers wrote: "The people will vote, but assuredly the deputies sent up to the Cortes will not be _their_ representatives, nor their choice." We, who have for so many years enjoyed a settled government, forget how different all this is in a country like Spain, which has oftener had to be reproached for enduring bad government than for a readiness to effect violent changes, or to try new experiments; but the progress actually made since the Revolution of 1868 has really been extraordinary, and it has gone steadily forward. Spain has always been celebrated for the making of _convenios_--a word which is scarcely correctly translated by "arrangement." During the Carlist wars, the Government, and even generals in command, made _convenios_ with the insurgents to allow convoys to pass without interference, money value sometimes being a factor in the case; but one of the strangest of these out-of-sight agreements, and one which English people never understand, is that which has existed almost ever since the Restoration between the political parties in the Congress, or, at least, between their leaders. It is an arrangement, loyally carried out, by which each party is allowed in turn to come into power. The Cortes is elected to suit the party whose turn it is to be in office, and there is little reality in the apparent differences. Silvela and Sagasta go backwards and forwards with the regularity of a pendulum, and the country goes on its way improving its position daily and hourly, with small thanks to its Government. Perhaps it is as well! It gives assurance, at least, that no particularly wild schemes or subversive changes shall be made. When one administration has almost wrecked the ship, as in the Caserta marriage, the other comes in peacefully, and sets the public mind at rest; both parties wish for peace and quietness, and no more revolutions, and the political seesaw keeps the helm fairly straight in ordinary weather. To what extent the insane and disastrous policy which led to the war with America by its shilly-shally treatment of Cuba, now promising autonomy, now putting down the grinding heel of tyranny, and to what extent the suicidal action of the oscillating parties--for both share the responsibility--in their instructions to their generals and admirals, and the astounding unpreparedness for war of any kind, still less with a country like America, may be traced to this system of "arrangements," which allows one party to hand its responsibilities over to the other, one can only guess. It is to be hoped that when the two figureheads at present before the country go over to the majority, there may come to the front some earnest and truly patriotic ministers, who have been quietly training in the school of practical politics, and can take the helm with some hope of doing away with the crying evils of _empleomania_ and _caciquismo_. Until then there will be no political greatness for Spain. The advance which Spain has made, "in spite of her Governments, and not by their assistance," has been remarkable in past years. Since the beginning of the last century she has gone through a series of political upheavals and disasters which might well have destroyed any country; and, in fact, her division into so many differing nationalities has, perhaps, been her greatest safeguard. Even after the Revolution of 1868 the series of events through which she passed was enough to have paralysed her whole material prosperity; the actual loss in materials, and still more in the lives of her sons, during the fratricidal wars at home and in her colonies, is incalculable, and that she was not ruined, but, on the contrary, advanced steadily in industry and commerce during the whole time, shows her enormous inherent vitality. Since then she has undergone the lamentable war with America, has lost her chief colonies, and the Peninsula has been well-nigh swamped by the _repatriados_ from Cuba, returning to their native country penniless and, in many cases, worn out. And yet the state of Spain was never so promising, her steady progress never more assured. Looking back to the Revolution, it will be enough to name some of the measures secured for the benefit of the people. They include complete civil and religious liberty, with reforms in the administration of the laws and the condition of prisoners, liberty of education, and the spread of normal schools into every corner of the Peninsula, the establishment of savings banks for the poor, somewhat on the lines of England's Post Office Savings Bank; railways have received an enormous impulse; quays and breakwaters have been erected, so that every portion of the kingdom is now in immediate touch with Madrid; while the universities are sending forth daily young men thoroughly trained as engineers, electricians, doctors, and scientists of every variety to take the places which some years ago were almost necessarily filled by foreigners for want of trained native talent. Local government in the smaller towns of the Peninsula is generally said to be very good, and to work with great smoothness and efficiency hand-in-hand with centralised authority in Madrid. The fusion of the varying nationalities is gradually gaining ground, and the hard-and-fast line between the provinces is disappearing. There is more nationality now in matters of every-day life than there has ever been before. In old times it needed the touch of a foreign hand, the threat of foreign interference, to rouse the nation as one man. Commerce and industry and the national emulation between province and province are doing gradually what it once needed the avarice of a Napoleon to evoke. The paper constitutions of Spain have been many, beginning with that of 1812, which the Liberals tried to force on Ferdinand VII., to that of 1845, which the Conservatives look upon as the ideal, or that of 1869, embodying all that the Revolution had gained from absolutism, including manhood suffrage. In the first Cortes summoned after the Restoration, thanks to the good sense of Castelar, the Republican party, from being conspirators, became a parliamentary party in opposition. Zorilla alone, looking upon it as a sham, retired to France in disgust. By the new constitution of 1876, the power of making laws remained, as before, vested in the Cortes and the Crown: the Senate consists of three classes, Grandes, Bishops, and high officers of State sitting by right, with one hundred members nominated by the Crown, and one hundred and eighty elected by provincial Councils, universities, and other corporations. Half of the elected members go out every five years. The deputies to the Congress are elected by indirect vote on a residential manhood suffrage, and they number four hundred and thirty-one. A certain number of equal electoral districts of fifty thousand inhabitants elect one member each; and twenty-six large districts, having several representatives, send eighty-eight members to the Cortes. Every province has its provincial elective Council, managing its local affairs, and each commune its separate District Council, with control over local taxation. Yet, though ostensibly free, these local bodies are practically in the power of the political wire-puller, or _cacique_. CHAPTER X COMMERCE AND AGRICULTURE Commerce and industry had progressed by leaps and bounds even during the disastrous and troublous years between the expulsion of Isabel II. and the restoration of her son. The progress is now much more steady and more diffused over the whole country, but it is by no means less remarkable, especially taking into consideration the disaster of the war with America and the loss to Spain of her old colonies. Among her politicians in past times there were never wanting those who considered that the loss of Cuba would be a distinct gain to the mother country, and perhaps it may be safely said that since the colony had not only been for so many years the forcing-house of bureaucratic corruption, but had also drained the resources of Spain both of money and lives to the extreme limit of her possibility, she is more likely now to regain her old position among European nations, when left at peace to develop her enormous resources and set her house in order without the distraction of war, either at home or abroad. When one remembers that this happy condition has never obtained in the country since the death of Ferdinand VII. until the close of the Spanish-American War, and that the country is only now recovering from the disorganisation caused by the return of her troops and refugees from Cuba and Manila, it is not surprising to find that the activity manifested in her trade, her manufactures, and her industries is such as to give the greatest hopes for her future to her own people and to those who watch her from afar with friendly eyes. Whichever we may regard as cause or effect, the progress of the country has been very largely identified with the extension of her railway system. It must have been a great step towards liberal education when the country which, priding herself on her geographical position and her rich internal resources, had hitherto wrapped herself in her national _capa_, and considered that she was amply sufficient to herself, condescended to throw open her mountain barriers to immigrants. It was not until 1848 that the first Spanish railway was opened, and it was but seventeen miles in length; but in the next ten years five hundred miles had been constructed, and between 1858 and 1868 no fewer than two thousand eight hundred and five miles, the Pyrenees had been pierced, and direct communication with the rest of Europe accomplished. During the troublous years following the Revolution and the melancholy struggles of the second Carlist war, very little progress was made. Foreign capital, which had hitherto been invested in Spanish railways, was naturally frightened away, and the Northern Railway itself, the great artery to France, was constantly being torn up and damaged, and the lives of the passengers endangered, by the armed mobs which infested the country, and were supposed by some people to represent the cause of legitimacy, and which had, in fact, the sanction of the Church and of the Pope. It was not, in the majority of cases, that the people sympathised with Don Carlos, but it was easier and more amusing for the lazy and the ne'er-do-weels to receive pay and rations for carrying a gun, and taking pot-shots at any object that presented itself, human or other, than to work in the fields, the mines, or on the railways. Hence public enterprise was paralysed; again and again the workmen, with no desire of their own, were driven off by superior bands of these wandering shooters, who scarcely deserved even the name of guerillas, and public works were left deserted and decaying, while the commerce and industry of the province were wrecked, and apparently destroyed irrevocably. In the earlier stages of railway construction and management, French capital and French labour were employed. England held aloof, partly on account of the closing of the London Stock Exchange to Spanish enterprises, in consequence of the vexed question of the celebrated coupons, but also because the aid afforded by the State did not fall in with the ideas of English capitalists. They desired a guaranteed rate of interest, while the Spanish Government would have nothing but a subvention paid down in one lump sum, arguing that it would be impossible to tell when a line was making more than the guaranteed interest, "as the companies would so arrange their accounts as to show invariably an interest smaller than that guaranteed!" With this view of the honesty of their own officials, no one else could be expected to have a better opinion of them; and England allowed France and Belgium thenceforward to find all the capital and all the materials for Spanish railways. The total amount of subventions actually paid by Government up to December 31, 1882, was £24,529,148. "If," says the author of _Commercial and Industrial Spain_, "the money that we so candidly lent to the swarm of defaulting South American Republics had been properly invested in Spanish railways, a great deal of trouble might probably have been spared to the unfortunate investors." All that, however, is altered now: the State schools and universities are turning out daily well-equipped native engineers, both for railway and mining works, and Spaniards are finding their own capital for public works. The phrase "Spain for the Spaniards" is acquiring a new significance--perhaps the most hopeful of all the signs of progress the country is making. In 1899, there were working 12,916 kilómetros of railways, or 7.9 kilómetros for each 10,000 of the population. A kilómetro equals 1.609 English mile. There is no part of the country now isolated, either from the centre of government in Madrid, or from the coast, and communication with Portugal, and, through France, with the rest of Europe, is easy and constant. With this advance in means of transit, the trade of the country has received an immense impulse, and its raw and manufactured goods are now reaching all markets. The rich mineral wealth of the country and its wonderful climate only need enlightened enterprise to make Spain one of the richest and most important commercial factors in the world's trade. The list of minerals alone, raised from mines in working, amounts to twenty-two, ranging from gold and silver, copper, tin, zinc, quick-silver, salt, coal, etc., to cobalt and antimony; and 8,313,218 tons of minerals of all these twenty-two classes were raised in 1882 against 1,201,054 in 1862. The value of mines in 1880 was represented by one hundred and eleven millions of pesetas (francs), but in 1898 by three hundred and nineteen millions (pesetas). The value of imports in 1882 was 816,666,901 pesetas, and of exports 765,376,087 pesetas. In 1899, imports were 1,045,391,983, and exports 864,367,885. But this is taking exactly the period covered by the war with America; a fairer estimate of exports is that of 1897, which stood at 1,074,883,372. No statement has been published since 1899, but intermediate statistics show the trade of the country to be advancing rapidly. To return, however, to Spanish industries. In late years large smelting-works have been opened in Spain, with Spanish capital and management, while at Bilbao are large iron-works for the manufacture of steel rails. There are splendid deposits of iron in the country, and as the duty on foreign rails entering Spain is _£3 4s._ per ton, it is probable that the near future will see the country free from the necessity of importing manufactured iron, or, in fact, metal of any kind. A Catalan company has established important works for reducing the sulphur of the rich mines near Lorca, and confidently expects to produce some thirty thousand tons of sulphur per annum. The rich silver mines of the Sierra Almagrera are almost wholly in native hands, and have already yielded large fortunes to the owners. With the present improved transport and shipping facilities in every part of the country, it is probable that the valuable mines scattered all over the Peninsula will be thoroughly worked, to the advance of commercial and industrial interests over the entire country. While the seaboard provinces are rich in fisheries, as well as in mines, in the south the country is able to grow rice, sugar-cane, maize, raisins, as well as wheat, olives, oranges, grapes, dates, bananas, pine-apples, and almost all kinds of tropical fruits. The cultivation of all varieties of fruit and vegetables, and their careful gathering and packing have become the object of many large companies and private individuals. Dates, bananas, grapes, plums, tomatoes, melons, as well as asparagus and other early vegetables, are now being shipped to foreign markets as regular articles of trade, in a condition which insures a rapid and increasing sale. The exportation of fruit has doubled within the last few years. The production of cane sugar in 1899 was thirty-one thousand tons, or exactly three times the amount of that produced in 1889. The exportation of wine, which in 1894 was two millions of milelitros, was in 1898 nearly five millions, and it is daily increasing (one gallon English measure equals about four and one half litros). Spain has always had excellent wines unknown to other countries, besides that which is manufactured into what we know as "sherry"; but many of them were so carelessly made as to be unfit for transit abroad. The attention of wine-growers has, however, been steadily turned to this subject during the last twenty years; greater care has been taken in the production; the best methods have been ascertained and followed, and it is possible now to obtain undoctored Spanish wines which perfectly bear the carriage in cask without injury; and, to meet a direct sale to the customer, small barrels containing about twelve gallons are shipped from Tarragona and other ports to England. One of the most hopeful signs of the economic awakening of the country is the establishment of the _Boletin de la Cámara de Comercio de España en la Gran Bretáña_, published each month in London. In this little commercial circular a review is given of the commerce and industry of all nations during the month; all fluctuations are noted, extracts from foreign statistics or money articles given, suggestions made for the opening up of Spanish commerce, and the introduction of her manufactures into this and other countries. Speaking on the question of the introduction of pure Spanish wines into England, a recent writer in the _Boletin_ remarks that English workmen are thirsty animals, that they like a big drink, but they are not really desirous of becoming intoxicated by it. In fact, they would most of them prefer to be able to drink more without bad effects. The writer goes on to say that if the English workman could obtain pure wine that would cost no more than his customary beer, and would not make him intoxicated, and if Spanish light wines--which he says could be sold in England for less than good beer--were offered in tempting-looking taverns and under pleasant conditions, he believes that a really enormous trade would be the result, to the benefit of both nations. The suggestion is, at least, an interesting one, and though the scheme would certainly not benefit the habitual drunkard, who becomes enamoured of his own debauchery, it might be very welcome to many of the working people, who, as "our neighbour" quaintly remarks, like a big drink, but do not necessarily wish to become intoxicated. In this connection, it may be interesting to know that the small twelve-gallon casks of red wine, resembling Burgundy rather than claret, but less heavy than the Australian wines, and forming a delicious drink with water, are delivered at one's own door carriage free for a price which works out, including duty, at _8-1/2d._ the ordinary bottle, or _1s. 2d._ the flagon, such as the Australian wine is sold in. This is, in fact, cheaper than good stout or ale. Spain has always been celebrated for two special manufactures--her silk and woollen goods; but for very many years these have been almost unknown beyond her own boundaries. In the time of the Moors her silken goods had a world-wide fame; and the silk-worm has been cultivated there probably from the earliest days, when it was surreptitiously introduced into Europe. Groves of mulberry trees were grown especially for sericulture in the irrigated provinces of the South, the care of the insect being undertaken by the women, while the men were employed on tasks more suitable to their strength. Native-grown spun and woven silk forms such an important part in the national costumes of the people that it has attained to great perfection without attracting much foreign notice. The silk petticoats of the women, the velvet jackets and trunk hose of the men, the beautiful silk and woollen _mantas_, with their deep fringes of silken or woollen balls; the _madroños_, or silk tufts and balls, used as decorations for the Andalusian or the gypsy hats, not to mention the beautifully soft and pure silks of Barcelona, or the silk laces made in such perfection in many parts of the country,--all these are objects of merchandise only needing to be known, to occasion a large demand, especially in these days when the French invention of weighted dyes floods the English market with something that has the outward appearance of silk, but which does not even wait for wear to disclose its real nature, but rots into holes on the drapers' shelves, and would-be smart young women of slender purses walk about in what has been well called "tin attire," in the manufacture of which the silk-worm has had only the slenderest interest. The blankets and rugs of Palencia have been known to some few English people for many years, owing to their extreme lightness, great warmth, and literally unending wear; but it is only within the last very few years that they can be said to have had any market at all in England, and now they are called "Pyrenean" rather than Spanish goods. One of the suggestions of the little commercial circular already referred to is that Spaniards should open depots or special agencies all over England for the sale of their woollen goods, after the manner of the Jaeger Company. The flocks of merino sheep to be seen on the wooded slopes of the Pyrenees, and all over Estremadura, following their shepherd after the manner with which Old Testament history makes us familiar, are said to be direct descendants of the old Arabian flocks, and certainly the appearance of one of these impassive-looking shepherds leading his flock to "green pastures, and beside the still waters," takes one back in the world's history in a way that few other things do. The flock know the voice of their shepherd, and follow him unquestioningly wheresoever he goes; there is no driving, no hurrying; and the same may be said of the pigs, which form such an important item in the social economy of a Spanish peasant's home. Staying once at Castellon de la Plana, in Valencia, my delight was to watch the pig-herd and his troop. Early in the morning, at a fixed hour, he issued from his house in one of the small alleys, staff in hand, and with a curious kind of horn or whistle. This he blew as he walked along, from time to time, without turning his head, in that strange trance of passivity which distinguishes the Valencian peasant. Out from dark corners, narrow passages, mud hovels on all sides, came tearing along little pigs, big pigs, dark, light, fat, thin pigs,--pigs of every description,--and joined the procession headed by this sombre-looking herdsman, with his long stick and his blue-and-white striped _manta_ thrown over his shoulder. By the time he had reached the end of the village he had a large herd following him. Then the whole party slowly disappeared in the distance, under the groves of cork-trees or up the mountain paths. The evening performance was more amusing still. Just about sundown the stately herdsman again appeared with his motley following. He took no manner of notice of them. He stalked majestically towards his own particular hovel, and at each corner of a lane or group of cottages the pigs said "Good night" to each other by a kick-up of their heels and a whisk of their curly little tails, and scampered off home by themselves, until, at the end of the village, only one solitary pig was following his leader--probably they shared one home between them. It seemed a peaceful, if not an absolutely happy, life! One would expect a country with such a climate, or rather with so many climates, as Spain, to make a great feature of agriculture. It can at once produce wheat of the very finest quality, wine, oil, rice, sugar, and every kind of fruit and vegetable that is known; and it ought to be able to support a large agricultural population in comfort, and export largely. Taking into account, also, the rich mineral wealth, which should make her independent of imports of this nature, it is sad to see that in past years, even so late as 1882, wheat and flour, coal and coke, iron and tools figure amongst her imports--the first two in very large proportions. Although the vast plains of Estremadura and Castile produce the finest wheat known to commerce, the quantity, owing to the want of water, is so small in relation to the acreage under cultivation, that it does not suffice for home consumption, except in very favourable years; while the utilisation of the magnificent rivers, which now roll their waters uselessly to the sea, would make the land what it once was when the thrifty Moor held it--a thickly populated and flourishing grain-producing district. In place of the wandering flocks of sheep and pigs gaining a precarious existence on the herbage left alive by the blistering sun on an arid soil, there should be smiling homesteads and blooming gardens everywhere, trees and grateful shade where now the ground, between the rainy seasons, becomes all of one dusty, half-burnt colour, reminding one more of the "back of a mangy camel," as it has been described, than of a country that has once been fruitful and productive. The late General Concha, Marqués del Duero, was the originator of sugar-cane cultivation. He spent a large portion of his private fortune in establishing what bids fair to be one of the most productive industries of his country. But, like most pioneers of progress, he reaped no benefit himself. His fine estates near Malaga, with their productive cane-farms, passed into other hands before he had reaped the reward of his patriotic endeavours. For a long time the cheap, bounty-fed beet sugars of Germany, which never approach beyond being an imitation of real sugar--as every housewife can testify who has tried to make jam with them--were able to undersell the produce of the cane; but the latest statistics show that this industry is now making steady progress, the production of 1899 being thirty-one thousand tons, or exactly three times that of 1899. _À propos_ of the difference between cane and beet sugars for all domestic purposes, and the superior cheapness of the more costly article, it is satisfactory to note that in England the working classes, through their own co-operative societies, insist on being supplied with the former, knowing by experimental proof its immense superiority; and one may hope that their wisdom may spread into households where the servants pull the wires, and care nothing about economy. Looking at the ordinary map of Spain, it appears to be ridiculous to say that the greater part of the country is in want of water. Although it is intersected by three large ranges of mountains beyond the Pyrenees, and innumerable others of smaller dimensions, thus making a great proportion of the country impossible for agriculture, it is rich in magnificent rivers and in smaller ones, all of which are allowed to run to waste in many parts of the country, while even a small portion of their waters, artificially dammed and utilised for irrigation, if only of the lands lying on each side of them, would mean wealth and prosperity and an abounding population where now the "everlasting sun" pours its rays over barren wastes. Moreover, by the growth of the wood, which once covered the plains and has been cut down, little by little, until the whole surface of the land was changed, in process of time the climate would become less dry, and vegetation more rapid and easy. Ever since the expulsion of the Moors from Castile and Estremadura, the land has been allowed gradually to go almost out of cultivation for want of water, the wholesale devastation of forests, in combination with the lapse of all irrigation, acting as a constantly accelerating cause for the arid and unproductive condition of the once genial soil. Irrigation has been the crying want of Spain for generations past; but even now the Government scarcely seems to have awakened to its necessity. Perhaps, however, the Spaniard who goes on his way, never troubling to listen to the opinion or advice of his neighbour, has not, after all, been so wanting in common sense as some of the more energetic of his critics have thought. In spite of all the changes and disasters of successive Governments, a steady and rapid advance has been made in providing means of transport and shipping, by the construction of railways to every part of the country, the making and keeping in condition of admirable highways, and the building of breakwaters and quays in many of the seaports, so that now the output of the mines and produce of all kinds can find market within the country, or be shipped abroad freely. [Illustration: A WEDDING PARTY IN ESTREMADURA] If the money no longer being expended in railways and docks were now devoted to irrigation wherever it is needed, a rapid change would become apparent over the whole face of the country, and the population would increase in proportion as the land would bear it. Irrigation works have been more than once undertaken by the aid of foreign money, and under the charge of foreign engineers; but the people themselves--the landowners and peasant proprietors--were not ripe for it, and, alas! some of the canals which would have turned whole valleys into gardens have been allowed to go to ruin, or to become actually obliterated, while the scanty crops are raised once in two or three years from the same soil, which will yield three crops in one year by the help of water. Difficulties arose about the sale of the water--a prolific cause of dispute even in the old irrigated districts--and the people said: "What do we want with water, except what comes from heaven? If the Virgin thinks we want water, she sends it." Fitting result of the teaching of the Church for so many years, with the example ever held up for admiration of the patron saint, Isidro, who knelt all day at his prayers, and left the tilling of his fields to the angels! It would seem that these ministers of grace are not good husbandmen, since the land became the arid waste it now is, while successive Isidros have been engaged in religious duties, which they were taught were all that was necessary. As an example of what irrigation means in the sunlit fields of Spain, an acre of irrigable land in Valencia or Murcia sells for prices varying from £150 to £400, according to its quality or its situation, while land not irrigable only fetches sums varying from £7 to £20. In Castile, land would not in any case fetch so high a price as that which has been under irrigated cultivation for centuries past; but in any district the value of dry land is never more than a twelfth of what it is when irrigable. In truth, however, there is more than irrigation needed to bring the lands of Castile and Estremadura into profitable cultivation, and it cannot be done without the expenditure of large sums of money at the outset in manures, and good implements in place of the obsolete old implements with which the ground is now scratched rather than ploughed. Given good capital and intelligent farming, as in the irrigated districts, and two, and even three, crops a year can be raised in unceasing succession; lucern gives from ten to twelve cuttings in one year, fifteen days being sufficient for the growth of a new crop. I have pointed out what one day's sun can do in raising grass seed in Madrid, which stands on the highest point of the elevated table-land occupying the centre of Spain. Seeing that the principal item of the revenue is derived from the land tax, and that it is calculated on the value of the land, it would appear to be the first interest of an enlightened government to foster irrigation in every possible way, and encourage agriculture and the planting of trees. Although the people of Spain have hated their more immediate neighbours with an exceeding bitter hatred,--as, indeed, they had good cause to do in the past,--her public men have had a strange fancy for importing or imitating French customs. One that militates more than anything else against agricultural prosperity is the law of inheritance, copied from the French. By this the State divides an estate amongst the heirs without any reference to the wishes of the proprietor at his death. Not only are all large estates broken up and practically dissipated, so that it is to no one's interest to improve his property or spend money on it, but the small farms of the peasant proprietor are broken into smaller fragments in the same way; and it is no uncommon thing to see a field of a few acres divided into six or eight furrows, none of them enough to support one man. While he has to go off seeking work where he can get it, his strip of land clings to him like a curse, for he must lose his work if he would try to cultivate it, and at his death it will again be subdivided, until at last there is nothing left to share. Meanwhile, the land, which is not enough to be of any value to anyone, has been allowed to go almost out of cultivation; or if it bear anything at all, it is weeds. Until some remedy be found for this enervating system, it would seem as if Spanish agriculture is doomed to remain in its present unsatisfactory condition over a great part of the kingdom. The improvement of agriculture is practically a question of private enterprise, and under the existing law of inheritance neither enterprise nor interest can be expected of the small proprietor; nor indeed of the large landowner, who knows that, whatever he may do to improve his estate, it is doomed to be cut to pieces and divided amongst his next of kin until it is eventually extinguished. Whether, in some future time, an enlightened scheme of co-operation could work the arid lands into cultivation again, if the Government would give the necessary aid in the form of irrigation, remains among the unanswered riddles of the future. Prophecy in Spain is never possible; it is always the unexpected which happens in that country of sharp contradictions. All one can do is to note past progress and the drift of the present current, which, whatever government is at the nominal head of affairs, seems to be towards widespread--in fact, quite general--advance both in knowledge and industrial activity. The greatest hope for the future lies in the fact that it is no longer foreign money or foreign labour that is working for the good of the country; the impulse is from within, and every penny of capital that is sunk in public works, manufactures, or industrial enterprise, is so much invested in a settled state of affairs. When the individual has everything to lose by revolutionary changes, when the commerce of the country is becoming too important to be allowed to be upset easily, and it is everybody's interest to support and increase it, the main body of the people are ranged on the side of peace and progress. They have had enough of civil war, enough of tyranny; they have achieved freedom, and want nothing so much as to taste of it in quietness. To revert for a moment to the special manufactures of the country, it appears to be the wise policy of the powers that be in Spain to-day to encourage, by every possible means, native industries and the development of the rich resources of the country. If it be only in the superior education required of the workmen, and the drawing out of their natural talents, the movement is an immense gain to the people, so long purposely kept in a condition of slothful ignorance. Besides the woollen manufactures of Palencia, Lorca, Jerez, Barcelona, Valencia, and other places, are many cloth factories in Cataluña, as well as others for the production of silk fabrics, lace, and very high-class embroideries, for which last Spain has long been famous, but which have hitherto been little known beyond her own frontiers. In artistic crafts may be named the pottery works of Pickman, Mesaque, Gomez, and others in Seville, where magnificent reproductions of Moorish and Hespaño-Moresque tiles and pottery are being turned out; there are also factories for this class of goods in Valencia, Barcelona, Segovia, Talevera, and many other places. Ornamental iron and damascene work holds the high reputation which Spain has never lost, but the output is very largely increased. Gold and silver inlaid on iron, iron inlaid on copper and silver, are some of the forms of this beautiful work. That executed in Madrid differs from that of Toledo, Eibar, and other centres of the craft. The iron gate-work executed in Madrid and Barcelona is very hard to beat, and the casting of bronzes is carried out with every modern improvement. The wood-carvers of Spain have always been famous, and the craft appears to be in no danger of falling behind its old reputation, much beautiful decorative work of this description being produced for modern needs. The _Circulo de Artes_ holds an exhibition in Madrid every other year, and in the intervening years the Government has one, in the large permanent buildings erected for the purpose at the end of the Fuente Castellana. The manufacture of artistic furniture and other connected industries are encouraged also by a bi-yearly exhibition in Madrid, where prizes and commendations are given. The chief centres of artistic furniture-making are Madrid, Barcelona, Granada, and Zaragoza. Exhibitions of arts and crafts and of all kinds of industries and manufactures are also held, at intervals, in the principal towns all over the country. An interesting exhibition of Spanish and South American productions was held in 1901 in Bilbao with great success. Nor ought we to forget the industry for which Seville is famed. The manufacture of tobacco is almost wholly in the hands of women, and is a very important industry, thousands being employed in the large factories making up cigars, cigarettes, and preparing and packing the finer kinds of tobacco. The cigar-girl of Seville is a well-known type, almost as much dreaded by the authorities as admired by her own class. The women are mostly young, and often attractive, extremely pronounced both in dress and manners, and are quite a power to be reckoned with when they choose to assert themselves. On more than one occasion they have taken up some cause _en masse_, and have gathered in thousands, determined to have their way. When this happens, the powers that be are reduced to great straits. Neither the _Guardia Civile_ nor the military can be relied on to use force, and unless the army of irate women can be persuaded to retire from the contest it is probable that, relying with perfect confidence on the privileges of their sex, they will gain what they consider their rights--at all events their will. No country in the world is more suited for manufactures and exports than Spain. She has an unexampled seaboard, and many magnificent natural harbours, and now an easy approach through Portugal to the sea, even if her own ports should be insufficient. Common commercial interests are likely to bring that Iberian kingdom or commonwealth to pass which has been the dream of some of her politicians, and is still cherished in parts of both countries. The northern ports in the Atlantic are, perhaps, the most important; that of Bilbao, a most unpromising one by nature, has grown out of all recognition since the close of the Carlist war. The railway to the iron mines was already in course of construction when the war broke out; everything was stopped, the workmen carried off willy-nilly to join the marauding bands of the Pretender, the town--which boasts that it has never been taken, although twice almost demolished during the two insane civil wars--was wrecked and well-nigh ruined, its industries destroyed, its commerce at an end. With peace and quietness came one of the most extraordinary revivals of modern times: the population increased at a marvellous rate, the new town sprang into existence on the left bank of the Nerrion, the river was deepened, the bar, which used to block almost all entrance, practically removed, extensive dock-works carried out; so that in ten years the shipment of ore from the port sprang up from four hundred and twenty-five thousand tons to 3,737,176, and is increasing daily. Bilbao, with its five railway stations, its electric tramways, and its population of sixty-six thousand, has become the first and most important shipping outlet of Spain. Nor have the southern ports of Huelva and Seville been much behind it in their rapid progress; while on the Mediterranean coast are Malaga, Almería, Aguilas, Cartagena, Valencia, and Tarragona--all vying with the older, and once singular, centre of commercial and industrial activity, Barcelona. The northwest seaboard has been hitherto somewhat behind the movement, owing to a less complete railway communication with the rest of the country; now that this is no more a reproach, the fine natural harbours of Rivadeo, Vivero, Carril, Pontevedra, Vigo, and Coruña, are gradually following suit, some with more vigour than others. The little land-locked harbour of Pasages has for some years been rapidly rising to the rank of a first-class shipping port. It is satisfactory to note, from the latest statistics, that in 1899 Spain possessed a total of one thousand and thirty-five merchant ships, that in the same year she bought from England alone sixty-seven, and that 17,419 ships, carrying 11,857,674 tons of exports, left Spanish ports for foreign markets. Although no official information has been published since that year, the increase since the close of the war has been in very much greater ratio. From the same records we find that during the year 1899 no fewer than sixty-nine large companies were formed, of which twenty-three were for shipping, eight were new sugar factories, seven banks, seven mining, six electric, and ten others related either to manufacture or commerce, the total capital of these new enterprises representing one hundred and twenty-eight millions of pesetas. In contrast to Portugal, the _caminos reales_, or high-roads, of Spain have long been very good. It is true that where these State roads do not exist, the unadulterated _arroyo_ serves as a country road, or a mere track across the fields made by carts and foot-passengers, and when an obstruction occurs in the form of too deep a hole to be got through, the track takes a turn outside it, and returns to the direct line as soon as circumstances permit. An _arroyo_ is given in the dictionary as "a rivulet"; it is, in fact, generally a rushing torrent during the rains, eating its way through the land, and laying down a smooth, deep layer of sand, or even soil, between high banks. Immediately after the rainy season this affords a firm, good road for a time, but eventually it becomes ploughed into impassable ruts by the wheels of the carts, unless trampled hard by the feet of passing flocks. Government undertakes the cost and the super-intendence of the _caminos reales_, and does it well. The corps of engineers is modelled on French lines, and is a department of the Ministry of Public Works. The course of study is extremely severe, and the examinations are strict and searching. When a candidate passes, he is appointed assistant-engineer by the Ministry, and he rises in his profession solely by seniority. Every province has its engineer-in-chief, with his staff of assistants; the superintendents of harbours, railways, and other public works are specially appointed from qualified engineers. In addition to the care of the construction and repair of all highways and Government works in his district, the engineer-in-chief has the overlooking of all works which, although they may be the result of private enterprise and private capital, are authorised or carried out under Government concession. These concessions are only granted after the project has been submitted to, and approved by, the Ministry of Public Works, and it passes under the supervision of the engineer of the provinces. In old days, if not now, there was a good deal of "the itching palm" about the officials, not excluding the Minister himself, through whose hands the granting of concessions passed, even the wives coming in for handsome presents and "considerations," without which events had a knack of not moving; and when the army of _Empleados_ became _Cesantes_, this work, of course, began all over again. The railway engineers form a separate body, the country being mapped out into arbitrary divisions, each under the charge of one engineer-in-chief, with a large body of assistants. The telegraph system of Spain has now for many years been in a good condition. The construction of the lines dates from about 1862, when only five miles were in operation. There is now probably not a village in the whole country that does not possess its telegraph office, and in all the important towns this is kept open all night. A peseta for twenty words, including the address, is the uniform charge, every additional word being ten centimos. The telegraphs were established by the Government, and are under its control. All railway lines of public service, and those which receive a subvention, must provide two wires for Government use. Telephones are now in use in all large centres, and electric lighting and traction are far more widely used than in England. CHAPTER XI THE ARMY AND NAVY It is not necessary to say to anyone who has the smallest acquaintance with history that Spaniards are naturally brave and patriotic. The early history of the Peninsula is one of valour in battle, whether by land or sea. The standard of Castile has been borne by her sons triumphantly over the surface of the globe. Few of us now remember that Johnson wrote of the Spain of his day: Has Heaven reserved, in pity to the poor, No pathless waste, no undiscovered shore, No secret island on the trackless main, No peaceful desert, yet unclaimed by Spain? In the old days when Drake undertook to "singe the King of Spain's beard," and carried out his threat, our sailors and those of Philip II., some time "King of England," as the Spaniards still insist on calling him, met often in mortal combat, and learned to recognise and honour in each other the same dogged fighting-power, the same discipline and quiet courage. The picture of the Spaniards standing bareheaded in token of reverence and admiration of a worthy foe, as some small English ships went down with all their crew rather than surrender, in those old days of strife, touches a chord which still vibrates in memory of battles fought and won together by Englishmen and Spaniards under the Iron Duke. True, some battered and torn English flags hang as trophies in the armoury of Madrid, but one likes to remember that in the only battle where our colours were lost, the Spanish troops were commanded by an Englishman, James Stuart, Duke of Berwick, the direct ancestor of the present Duque de Berwick y Alva, and the English by one of French birth. In every case where foreign foes have invaded Spain, sooner or later they have been driven out. _Santiago! y Cierra España!_ was the war-cry which roused every child of Spain to close his beloved country to alien domination. Unfortunately, the yoke of the foreigner came in more invidious guise. From the death of Ferdinand and Isabella to the year 1800, the sons of Spain were immolated to serve causes which were of no account to her, to protect the interests of sovereigns who had nothing in common with her provinces, to add to the power of the Austrian Hapsburgs and the French Bourbons. We have seen how the people whom Napoleon had believed to be sunk in fanaticism, dead to all national aspiration, the mere slaves of a despicable King, and the sport of his debauched Queen and her lover, sprang to arms and drove the invader from their land. So would it be to-day if the country were even threatened by foreign invasion. "The dogs of Spain," as Granville called them, know well how to protect their soil. Within comparatively recent years the campaign in Morocco, and the expeditionary force sent to Cochin-China, showed that the Spanish army was not to be despised. It has been the misfortune of Spain that her soldiers have too often had the melancholy task of fighting against their own people, or those of their colonies, both of whom have been excited and aided in insurrection for years by foreign contributions of arms and money. In these unhappy fratricidal struggles the fighting has never been more than half-hearted, and during the numerous military _pronunciamientos_ it has often been necessary to keep the troops from meeting, as they could never be trusted not to fraternise; and after the first abortive attempt by Prim to effect the revolution which later freed the country, the curious spectacle was afforded of Prim and his soldiers marching quietly out of one end of a village, while the troops of the Queen, sent in pursuit, were being purposely kept back from marching too quickly in at the other. The army of Spain would seem to suffer from a plethora of officers, especially those of the highest rank. In the time of Alfonso XII., there were ten marshals, fifty-five generals, sixty-six _mariscales de campo_, and one hundred and ninety-seven brigadiers; adding those on the retired list liable for service, there were in all five hundred and twenty generals, four hundred and seventy-two colonels, eight hundred and ninety-four lieutenant-colonels, 2113 commandants, 5041 captains, 5880 lieutenants, and 4833 sous-lieutenants. With such an array of officers, it is scarcely to be wondered at that promotion in the ordinary way was looked on as impossible, and the juggle of military _pronunciamientos_ was regarded as almost the only means of rising in the army. It was no uncommon thing to promise a rise of one grade throughout a whole corps to compass one of these miniature revolutions. However, all that is happily past. General Weyler,--whose name indicates alien blood at some period of his family history,--the present Minister of War, has taken the thorough reform of the army in hand, though it is too soon to say if he will be as successful as is generally expected from his known energy and common sense, since the work is only now in progress. One of the most fertile sources of disturbance in the old days of Isabel II. was the presence of the _primo sargentos_. These petty officers, having risen from the ranks, and invested with an authority for which they were often quite unsuited, were always ready, for a consideration, to aid the cause of some aspiring politician, now on one side, now on another. They are now, fortunately, abolished. The Spanish artillery is a splendid body, and is officered from the best families in the country. In the only military insurrection in which the common soldiers shot some of the officers obnoxious to them--that of the Montaño Barracks, in 1866--the leader of the mutinists was a certain _hidalgo_. It was the promotion of this man that led indirectly to the abdication of Don Amadeo, who opposed the action. Indignant at the disgrace to the service, all of the artillery officers in Spain sent in their resignations. They were accepted, and the _primo sargentos_ raised to the rank of officers to fill their places. The result was unlimited mutiny among the rank and file and danger to the State. Some of the young officers who had retained their uniforms, though no longer attached to the corps, finding the troops in utter disorder and revolt, quietly donned their uniforms, went down to the barracks, and gave their orders. The men instantly fell into the ranks, and the situation was saved. The _primo sargentos_ were abolished, the officers reinstated. But Amadeo had had enough; he ceased to attempt to reign constitutionally in a country where the constitution meant only one more form of personal greed and excess. He was _demasiado honesto_ for the crew he had been called to command, and he left the country to tumble about in its so-called "republican" anarchy until another military _pronunciamiento_ set Alfonso XII. on the throne. And that has been, fortunately, the last performance of a kind once so common in Spain. All military men admire the effective corps of light mountain artillery. The small guns are carried on the backs of the splendid mules for which the Spanish army is famous, and can be taken up any mountain path which these singular animals can climb. Mules are also used to drag the heavier guns, and must be invaluable in a mountainous country. The animals are quite as large as ordinary horses, are lithe, active, and literally unhurtable. I have myself seen a mule, harnessed to a cart which was discharging stones over the edge of a deep pit, when levelling the ground at the end of the Fuente Castellana in Madrid, over-balanced by the weight behind him, fall over, turn a somersault in mid-air, cart and all, and, alighting thirty feet below, shake himself, ponder for a few seconds on the unexpected event in his day's labour, and then proceed to draw the cart, by this time satisfactorily emptied, out of the pit by the sloping track at the farther side, and continue his task absolutely unhurt and undisturbed. Until the final overthrow of the Carlists by Alfonso XII., the Basque Provinces, amongst their most cherished _fueros_, were exempted from the hated conscription; but the victorious King made short work of that and of all other special rights and privileges--which, in truth, had been abused--and now all the country is subject to conscription. Every man from nineteen to twenty years of age is liable to serve in the ranks, except those who are studying as officers. A payment of £60 frees them from service during peace; but if the country is at war there is no exemption. The conscripts are bound for twelve years--three with the colours, three in the first reserve, three in the second, and three in the third. Navy? Alas! Spain has none. Two battle-ships alone remain--_El Pelayo_ and _Carlos V._ (the former about nine thousand five hundred tons, the latter not more than seven thousand)--and some destroyers and torpedoes. How a nation that once ruled the sea, and whose sailors traversed and conquered the New World, has allowed her navy to become practically extinct at the moment when nations which have almost no seaboard are trying to bring theirs up within measurable distance of England's, it is impossible to say. Even before the outbreak of the war with America there were but a few battle-ships, and these were wanting in guns and in almost all that could make them effective--save and except the men, who behaved like heroes. It seems to be a consolation to Spaniards to remember that it was in the pages of an English journal that an Englishman, who had seen the whole of the disastrous war, wrote: "If Spain were served by her statesmen as she has been served by her navy, she would be one of the greatest nations of the world to-day." The history of the part borne by the Spanish navy in the late war with America, as written by one of Admiral Cervera's captains,[1] with the publication of the actual telegrams which passed between the Government and the fleet, and the military commanders in the colonies, is one of the most heartrending examples of the sacrifice, not only of brave men, but of a country's honour to political intrigue or the desire to retain office. This, at least, is the opinion of the writer of this painful history, and his statements are fully borne out by the original telegrams, since published. It is impossible to imagine that any definite policy at all was followed by the advisers of the Queen Regent in this matter, unless it were the incredible one ascribed to it by Captain Concas Palan of deliberately allowing the fleet, such as it was, to be destroyed--in fact, in the case of Admiral Cervera's squadron, sending it out to certain and foreseen annihilation--so as to make the disaster an excuse for suing for peace, without raising such a storm at home as might have upset the Ministry. With both fleets sunk, and those of their men not slain, prisoners of war, there was no alternative policy but peace. Captain Concas Palan claims for his chief and the comrades who fell in this futile and disastrous affair "a right to the legitimate defence which our country expects from us, though it is against the interested silence which those who were the cause of our misfortunes would fain impose on us," and says that "some day, and that probably much sooner than seems probable at present," the judgment of Spain on this episode will be that of the English _Review_, which he quotes as the heading of his chapter. He goes on: "War was accepted by Spain when the island of Cuba was already lost to her, and when the dispatch of a single soldier more from the Peninsula was infinitely more likely to have caused an insurrection than that of which our Ministers were afraid--at the moment, also, when our troops were in want of the merest necessaries, the arrears of pay being the chief cause of their debilitated condition, and when a great part of the Spanish residents in Cuba, under the name of 'Reformers,' 'Autonomists,' etc., had made common cause with the insurgents, while they were enriching themselves to a fabulous extent by contracts for supplies and transports. In these circumstances it was folly to accept a struggle with an immensely rich country, possessing a population four times that of ours, and but a pistol shot from the seat of action." The Government of Spain was perfectly aware that the troops in Cuba were already quite insufficient even to cope with the insurgents, that the people at home were already murmuring bitterly at the cost of the war, and that it was impossible to send out a contingent of any practical value. Sickness of all kinds, enteric, anæmia, and all the evils of under-fed and badly found troops, were rapidly consuming the forces in Cuba, "and yet the Government took no thought of who was to man the guns whose gunners were drifting daily into the hospital and the cemetery.... The national debt was increasing in a fabulous manner, and recourse was had to the mediæval remedy of debasing the currency, while even at that moment the troops had more than a year's pay in arrear, and absolute penury was augmenting their other sufferings." [1] _La Escuadra del Almirante Cervera_, por Victor M. Concas Palan. This was the moment which the responsible Ministers of the Crown thought propitious to throw down the gauntlet to the overwhelming power of America rather than to face what the writer terms the "cabbage-headed riff-raff of the Plaza de la Cevada" of Madrid. Again and again was the absolute inefficiency of the fleet pointed out to them. Even the few ships there were, all of them vastly inferior to those of the United States' navy, were without their proper armament; they might have been of some service in defence of the coast of Spain, but in aggressive warfare they were useless. Allowing somewhat for the natural indignation of one of those who was sacrificed, who saw his beloved commander and his comrades-in-arms sent like sheep to the slaughter, and all for an idea,--and that a perfectly stupid and useless one,--there is no gainsaying the facts which Captain Concas Palan relates, and the original telegrams verify every word of his story. Admiral Cervera was sent out with sealed orders; but he had done all that was in his power--even asking to be relieved of his command--to prevent the folly of sending away from the coasts of the mother country the only ships which could have protected her, while they were absolutely useless against the American navy in the Antilles. Left with no alternative but obedience, he managed to gain the safe harbour of Santiago de Cuba with his squadron intact. Secure from attack, he landed his men to assist in the defence of the town from the land side. And then came the incredible orders that he was to take out his four ships to be destroyed by the American navy waiting outside! Never in the world's history was a more magnificent piece of heroism displayed than in the obedience to discipline which caused Admiral Cervera to re-embark his marines and lead them forth to certain death, well knowing what they were to face, for he hid nothing from them. He called on them as sons of Spain, and they answered heroically, as Spaniards have ever done in history: "For honour!" Spain has suffered deeply and sorely in her pride; but she has never worn her heart on her sleeve--she suffers in silence. A quotation from the _Época_ of July 5th, two days after the destruction of Cervera's fleet, shows the spirit in which the country bore that terrible blow. It is headed "Hours of Agony." "Our grief to-day has nothing in it which was unexpected. The laws of logic are invincible; our four ships could not by any possibility have escaped the formidable American squadron. The one thing that Spain expected of her sons was that they should perish heroically. They have perished! They have faced their destiny; they have realised the sole end which Spain looked for, in this desperate conflict into which she has been drawn by God knows what blind fatality; they have fallen with honour." That is true; but how about the leaders whose long misrule of the colonies had helped to bring on the disaster which their predecessors for many years had courted? How about the political corruption which, when large sums were being spent on the colonies, had allowed immense private fortunes to be made while Manila was left without defences, and the absolutely unassailable bay of Santiago de Cuba had on the fort which commanded its entrance only useless old guns of a past century, more likely to cause the death of those who attempted to serve them than to injure an enemy? How about the Government that deliberately entered on a war of which the end was perfectly foreseen, and, while seated safely in office at home, thought the "honour of Spain" sufficiently vindicated by offering up its navy, already made useless by neglect and niggardliness, as a sacrifice? Captain Concas Palan points out that even after it was fully recognised that the retention of Cuba was impossible, the worst catastrophes might have been avoided. "In place of treating for peace while the squadron was intact at Santiago, which, as well as Manila, could have been defended for some time, the Ministers waited to sue for peace until everything was lost, while it was perfectly well known beforehand that that result was inevitable." During the whole time, _mañana veremos_ was the rule of action--a to-morrow that never was to dawn for those whose lives it was intended to sacrifice. Heaven works no miracles for those who fling themselves against the impossible! So long ago as 1823, Thomas Jefferson wrote to President Monroe: "The addition of the island of Cuba to our Confederacy is exactly what is wanted to round our power as a nation to the point of its utmost interest." John Quincy Adams went so far as to state that "Cuba gravitates to the United States as the apple yet hanging on its native trunk gravitates to the earth which sustains it"--a statement which has the more force when it is remembered that for over fifty years the Cuban insurgents had been liberally supplied with arms, ammunition, stores, and troops from the United States whenever they required them! And this, not because Cuba was mismanaged by Spain, but because America coveted her as "the most interesting addition that could be made to our system of States," to quote Jefferson once more. Nevertheless, the heroic sons of Spain were offered up as an expiation for the sins of her political jugglers for generations past. With the knowledge that America had at least for seventy years been seeking an excuse for "rounding her power as a nation" by the seizure of Cuba, no real effort was made to redress the grievances of her native population, nor to efficiently defend her coasts. The state of affairs in Manila was still worse. The culpable neglect of the Government had resulted in the so-called squadron not being possessed of one single ship of modern construction or armament; and when the unfortunate marines and their heroic commanders had been immolated by the overwhelming superiority in numbers and efficiency of the Americans, the noisy injustice and anger of a senseless crowd at home were allowed to compass the lasting disgrace of casting the blame for the foreseen disasters on Admiral Montojo, who was thrown as a victim to the jackals. To-day, we find Spain absolutely without a navy. Two second- or third-class ships--and they not even properly found or armed--are all she possesses. Men she has, however, with the traditions of a great past, while the officers of her navy are thoroughly alive to the class of ships and the armament which are needed to give their country the protection, and their foreign policy the dignity, which other countries of far less importance are able to sustain. No wonder that her writers are pointing out that instead of being satisfied with immense long-winded despatches and notes, couched in grandiloquent language, which Spanish Foreign Ministers seem to think amply sufficient, strong nations have a habit of sending an iron-clad, or two or three cruisers to back up their demands, and that no other European country but Spain thinks it safe or wise to leave her coasts and her commerce entirely without protection in case of a European war breaking out. Will the nation itself take the matter in hand, and in this, as in so many other matters, advance in spite of its Government? If it waits for the political seesaw by which both parties avoid responsibility, there will be small chance of a navy. The same ministry is in power to-day which landed the country in the Spanish-American War, and it would seem as if the nation considers it the best it can produce. _Mañana veremos?_ CHAPTER XII RELIGIOUS LIFE The natural bent of the Spanish mind is religious. Taking the nation as a whole, with all its marvellous variations in race and character, no portion of it has ever been reproached for insincerity in its religious beliefs. It has been often held up to reproach for bigotry and superstition; but the people have in past ages been penetrated by a sincere reverence for what they have believed to be religion, and perhaps no other nation has been more thoroughly imbued with an unwavering faith in the dogmas taught by its religious instructors. English Roman Catholics--especially those who have seceded from the Anglican Church--are fond of declaring that Spain is "a splendid Catholic country," "the home of true Catholicism," and so forth. To a certain extent this has been true of it in the past, and "dignity, loyalty, and the love of God" are still the ideals of the people at large, although in Spain, as in some other Continental nations, the practice of religious duties is now, to a great extent, left to the women of the family and to the peasantry. Young Spain, and the progressive party in it, can no longer be said to be under the domination of the Church, even in outward appearance. It will be well if the swing of the pendulum does not carry them very far from it, and into open revolt. The history of the Church in Spain and of its relations with Rome is a curious one. It can scarcely be said to have been much more amenable to the Papacy than that of the Church of England, though it has remained always within the pale of the Roman Catholic persuasion. In the old time the kings aspired to be the head of the Spanish Church, and were none too subservient to the Pope. The Inquisition and the Society of Jesus were distinctly Spanish, and not Roman, and were at times actually at variance with the Vatican. Probably from their long struggles with the barbarians, and later with the Moors, Spaniards have a habit of always speaking of themselves as Christians rather than Catholics, which strikes strangely on one's ears. The evils which have been wrought in Spain by the terrible incubus of the Inquisition, and by the domination of the Jesuits and other orders, who obtained possession of the teaching of youth, have been little less than disastrous, because their power has been deliberately used for ages past to keep the lower classes in a state of absolute ignorance, slaves of the grossest superstition, and mere puppets in the hands of the priesthood. Even well within the memory of living people it was thought a pity that women should be allowed to learn even to read and write,--safer to have them quite ignorant,--while the peasantry and the inferior classes believed anything they were told, and could be excited to any pitch of fanaticism by the preaching of their religious teachers. The Inquisition was often used as a political machine, and was sometimes only clothed with the semblance of religion; but by whomsoever it was directed, and for whatsoever purpose, it was a vile and soul-destroying institution. It deliberately ground down and destroyed every spark of intelligence, of liberty, of attempt at progress; it dominated the whole nation like the shadow of the upas tree, manufactured hypocrites, and led to the debasing of a naturally fine people of good instincts to an ignorant and fanatical mob, who, in the name of religion, were entertained with gigantic _autos-da-fé_, as the Roman populace were with the terrible spectacles of their gladiatorial shows and the immolation of Christian victims in the arena. It was the people themselves who rose against this hateful tyranny; it was their better instincts that put an end to the "Holy Office" and its enormous crimes. Shortly after the Revolution of 1868, when religious liberty had been established, and the people, for the first time in their long history of disaster, were breathing the air of freedom, certain improvements which were being made, in the shape of laying out new streets, pulling down old rookeries, and building better houses, led to a new road being cut through the raised ground outside the Santa Barbara Gate. The exact spot of the great _Quemadero_--the oven of the Inquisition--was not known, but it chanced that the workmen cut right through the very centre of it. A more ghastly sight, or an object-lesson of more potency, could scarcely be imagined. The Government of the day found it advisable to cover it up as quickly as possible; the excitement of the people was thought to be dangerous; and though those at the head of affairs were no friends to the priests or the Jesuits, there was no desire to reawaken the passions and let loose the vengeance which led the populace in 1834 to murder them wholesale. I happened to be returning from a ride with a companion when, quite accidentally, we came upon this excavation, and even passed down the new road before we realised where we were. The _Quemadero_ had evidently been in the shape of an immense basin. There in the banks at each side were the stratified layers of human ashes; between each _auto-da-fé_ it was evident that the remains had been covered with a thick layer of earth; finally, at the top of all these smaller bands of black, horrible ashes, came one huge deposit, which marked the awful scene of the last gigantic _auto_. This ghastly bonfire was sixty feet square, and seven feet high, as history records, when one hundred and five victims were slowly tortured to a frightful death in the name of Christ, while the King, Charles II., and his Court and the howling rabble of Madrid looked on with savage enjoyment. Nothing can ever obliterate the impression of that scene, nor make one forget the deadly clinging of those ghastly black ashes, which the wind scattered about, and which it was impossible to escape or to get rid of. The fell work of the "religious" authors of the holocaust had been well done--nothing was left but ashes; and the next day, by order of the Government, sand or soil had been thrown over all that could bear witness to this horrible episode in the history of the Church in Spain, while the people who inhabit the houses built over the spot probably know nothing of the records of human agony and brutal bigotry that still lie beneath their homes. We hear of these things and read of them in history, but one needs to have seen that awful memorial to realise what share the Inquisition has had in transforming a naturally heroic and kindly people into the inert masses which nothing, or almost nothing, would move so long as they had _pan y toros_ (bread and bulls). Thanks to the horrors of the Inquisition and the _Autos-da-fé_, the whole people have acquired a character which assuredly they do not deserve. The blind bigotry and cynical cruelty of Philip II. and his lunatic successors have been identified with the races over which, unfortunately for Spain, they ruled for so many years. When one remembers that this is the view taken of the Inquisition, and of the domination of the Church in effacing all kinds of culture, by the liberal and educated Spaniard of to-day, and that there is, even now, an extreme party which would fain see the "Holy Office" re-established, with all its old powers, it is easy to understand at what a critical point the clerical question has arrived in Spain; nor need one wonder at the feeling which in all parts of the kingdom has been aroused by the recrudescence of the religious orders, more especially of the determined struggle of the Jesuits to retain and even to reassert their power. The Madonna, who is always spoken of as "La Vírgen," never as "Santa María," is the great object of love and of reverence in Spain, while the words _Dios_ and _Jesus_ are used as common exclamations in a way that impresses English people rather unfavourably. It is a shock to hear all classes using the _Por Dios!_ which with us is a mark of the purest blackguardism, and the use as common names of that of Our Lord and of _Salvador_, or Saviour, always strikes a disagreeable note. There is in Madrid a "Calle Jesus," and the sacred name, used as a common expletive, is heard on all sides. One of the most charming of Yradier's Andalusian songs, addressed by a _contrabandista_ to his _novia_, runs thus: Pero tengo unas patillas. Que patillas puñála! Es lo mejor que se ha jecho En de Jesu Cristo acá![2] [2] "But I have such a stunning pair of whiskers! The best that have ever been seen since those of Jesus Christ!" And no one is offended; in fact, no irreverence is probably meant. But the innumerable "Vírgenes" which abound throughout the country, and all seem different, have the heartfelt devotion of all classes. To one or other of them the bull-fighter goes for protection and aid before he enters the arena; the mother whose child lies sick vows her magnificent hair to the Virgin of the Atocha, or of the Pillar, or some of the many others scattered about the country, if only she will grant what she asks; and you may see these marvellous locks, tied with coloured ribbons, hanging amongst the motley assemblage of votive offerings by the side of her altar, when the prayer has been answered. It is difficult for us, with the best intentions, not to let prejudice colour our judgment, and to understand what we are told--that these are really all the same "Mother of God"; for, if so, one would imagine that she would hear the devout prayers of her worshippers, to whichever of the wooden images--most of them said to have been carved by St. Luke, and black by age, if not by nature--they are addressed. But no, the Virgen del Cármen is only efficacious in certain circumstances; and in the time of Isabel II. she used to be taken down from her altar and placed in the Queen's bedroom whenever an addition to the Royal Family was imminent. Those in the other parts of Spain have each their specialty, and pilgrimages are necessary to their shrines before the prayers addressed to them can be listened to by the original. The various saints in their way are wooed with candles burnt before their images, or little altars set up to them at home; but they are sometimes treated with scant courtesy if they do not answer the expectations of their worshippers. On one occasion in Madrid, I remember, San Isidro, who is the patron of the labouring classes, had the bad taste, as his votaries considered, to send rain on his own _fiesta_--a thing unknown before. Lest he should err in this way again, the mob went to his church, at that time the principal one in Madrid, smashed the windows, and did all the damage they could compass before the Civil Guards came to the rescue. A servant-girl I knew, had for a long time been praying to San Antonio to send her a _novio_ (sweetheart), expending money in tapers, and otherwise trying to propitiate the saint. At last, finding him deaf to all entreaties, she took the little wooden image she had bought, tied a string round his neck, and hung him in the well, saying: "You shall stop there till you send me what I want." Some little time after, she actually found a _novio_, and hastened gratefully to take San Antonio out of his damp quarters, set him up on his altar again, and burn tapers for his edification. I had thought this an example of special ignorance and superstition; but the other day, in reading some of the papers of the _Spanish Folklore Library_, I found there is a widespread belief that if San Antonio, and probably some other saints, do not answer the prayers of their votaries who burn candles before them, it is a good thing to hang them in a well till they come to their senses! It is difficult for any unbiassed person to understand that this is not fetish worship, as it would certainly seem to be, but we are told that it is something quite different. The religious _fiestas_, as I have said, may be classed among the amusements of the people. During the warm season they invariably end with a bull-fight. In winter there are no bulls. Whether it be the _Romería_ of Santiago de Compostelo, the _Santa Semana_ in Toledo or Seville, _Noche-Buena_ and the _Day of the Nativity_ in Madrid or Barcelona, gaiety and enjoyment seem to be the order of the day. Even Lent is not so bad, for just before it comes the Carnival and the grotesque "Burial of the Sardine" by the _gente bajo_, and of the three great masked balls, one is given in mid-Lent, to prevent the Lenten ordeal being too trying, and Holy Thursday is always a _fiesta_ and day of enjoyment. On this day, in Madrid, takes place the washing of the feet of the poor in the Royal Palace--a function that savours a good deal of the ridiculous, but which was never omitted by the _piadosa_ Isabel II., and was revived by her son. For forty-eight hours the bells of all the churches remain silent, no vehicles are allowed in the streets, which are gravelled along the routes Royalty will take to visit on foot seven of the churches, where the Holy Sepulchres are displayed; and in the afternoon all Madrid resorts to the Plaza del Sol and the Carrera San Geronimo, to show off their gayest costumes in a regular gala promenade. Finally, on Saturday morning--why forty-eight hours only is allowed for the supposed entombment does not quite appear--the bells clang forth, noise and gaiety pervade the whole city, and the day ends with a cock-fight and the reopening of the theatres, and the first grand bull-fight of the season is held on Easter Sunday. Verily, the Church is mindful of the weakness of its vassals, and shows as much indulgence as is thought needful to keep the people amused and careless of all else. I remember, when I first noticed this wearing of the most gaudy colours on Maundy Thursday, a day one would naturally expect to be one of special mourning, I was told it was allowed by the Church because on that day Pilate put the purple robe on Our Lord! The processions and functions of Holy Week and other _fiestas_ have been so often and so fully described that there is no need to refer to them; but there are several curious survivals and religious customs in out-of-the-way places which seem to have escaped notice. I have not been able to find in any book on Spain a description of the strange dance which takes place in the cathedral of Seville on, I think, three days in the year, of which two are certainly the day of the Virgin and that of Corpus Christi. The origin of the dance seems to be lost, nor is its special connection with Seville known. All that one can hear of it is that one of the archbishops of Toledo objected to the dance as being irreverent and unusual, and ordered it to be stopped. The indignant people referred the matter to the Pope, but even the date of this appeal seems to be dubious, if not unknown. His Holiness replied that he could not judge of the matter unless he himself saw the dance. Accordingly, the boys who figure in this strange performance were taken to Rome, and they solemnly danced before the Pope. His verdict was that there was nothing irreverent about the dance, but he thought, as it was known only to Seville, it would be better eventually to discontinue it; but so long as the dress worn on the occasions when it is practised, lasted, the dance might continue. The dresses have lasted to the present day, and will always continue to last, say the Sevillanos, for as one part wears out it is renewed, but never a whole garment made. The dress is peculiar: it consists of short trousers to the knees, and a jacket which hangs from one shoulder, stockings and shoes with large buckles or bows, and a soft hat, somewhat of the shape of a Tam-o'-shanter, with one feather--that of an eagle, I think. The dress is red and white for the day of Corpus, and blue and white for the day of the Virgin, covered with the richest gold embroidery, for which Spain has always been famous. The boys, holding castanets in each hand, advance, dancing with much grace and dignity, until they reach the front of the High Altar; there they remain, striking their castanets and performing slow and very graceful evolutions for some time, gradually retiring again as they came in, dancing, down the nave. The boys are regularly instructed in the dance by the priests, and the number is kept up, so that neither dancers nor garments ever fail. The Pope's order is obeyed, while the Sevillanos retain their strange religious function. The fact of the performance taking place in the evening perhaps accounts for its being so little known, but it would seem also as if the authorities of the cathedral do not care to have attention drawn to it. The dance is called _los seises_, and even the origin of the name is unknown. In Holy Week and at Christmas are performed passion plays at some of the theatres, strangely realistic, and sometimes rousing the audience to wild indignation, especially against Judas Iscariot, who is hissed and hooted, and is often the recipient of missiles from the spectators, while interspersed with this genuine feeling one hears shouts of laughter when anything occurs to provoke it. On one occasion one of the Roman soldiers (always unpopular in the religious processions) appeared on the stage, dragging, by a cord round the neck, a miserable-looking man carrying a huge cross, so heavy that it caused him continually to fall. As the soldier kicked him up again, and continued to drag him along by the neck, the audience became ungovernable in their rage. "_Déjale! Déjale! Bruto! Bruto!_" they yelled; and, finally threatening to storm the stage and immolate the offending soldier, the play had to be stopped and the curtain rung down. In villages too poor to possess _pasos_--the beautifully modelled life-size figures which form the _tableaux_ in the rich churches and processions--human actors take their place. In Castellon de la Plana, where there is a yearly procession in honour of Santa María Magdalena, somewhat curious scenes take place. The Magdalen, in the days of her sin, is acted by a girl chosen for her beauty, but not for her character. She is gorgeously attired, and is allowed to retain her dress and ornaments after the performance. She is installed in state in a cart decorated with palms and flowers, and is surrounded by all the men of the village on foot, for it is part of the performance that they are allowed to say what they please to her. She acts the part to perfection apparently, and enjoys it, to boot. In another car comes the penitent Magdalen, dressed in pure white, and decorated with flowers. This part may be taken only by a young girl of unblemished character. It is thought the greatest honour that can be paid to her, and you are told by the people that she is always married within the year. This procession winds its way up the mountain to a small shrine of Santa María Magdalena, where it is said that her church once stood; but finding the climb up the hill was inconvenient to the lame and the aged, she very considerately, one night, moved the whole edifice down intact to Castellon de la Plana, where it now stands. Going by rail once, many years ago, to Toledo, to see the processions on Good Friday, the train was accidentally delayed for some time a little distance from one of the stations, and there, in a small garden by the roadside, was being enacted the scene of the Crucifixion by human actors. A full-size cross was erected, and on it, apparently, hung a man crowned with thorns, and with head bowed upon his breast. In reality he was kneeling on two ledges placed for the purpose at a convenient distance from the cross-bars. It was cold, and the actor was covered by an old brown tattered cloak, such as the peasants wear now, and which we see in Velasquez's pictures. His feet stuck out behind the cross, but his arms were tied in a position which must soon have become painful. Around lay a cock tied by his legs, a ladder, a sponge tied on a stick, a sword, a lantern, and all the usual emblems of the Passion. The holy women and the Roman soldiers with their spears were just coming out of the cottage near by to take up their positions in this strange and pathetic _tableau_. The face of that peasant in the tattered brown cloak, not less than the spectacle of the people kneeling around in evident sorrow and worship, haunted me for many a day. CHAPTER XIII EDUCATION AND THE PRIESTHOOD Education, especially that of the masses, has made great strides since the Revolution. At that time perfect liberty of religion and of instruction was established, and in this particular the somewhat retrograde movement at the Restoration, in allowing the return of the religious orders banished in the early years of the century, has only resulted in a greater number of private schools being established by the Jesuits and other teaching orders. With the public instruction they have never been allowed to interfere. Every town and village has now its municipal and free schools, kept up by the _Diputacion provincial_. In all the chief towns there are technical and arts and crafts schools, also free, the expenses being borne by the Ministry of Fomento. Besides these are many private schools, taught by Jesuits and other teaching orders. The Ministry of Fomento is at present trying to bring in a law making education compulsory, and bringing all schools under State control. There are numerous girls' schools, managed by committees of ladies, as well as the convent schools and other private establishments. There are also normal schools, maintained by the Ministry of Fomento, where women and girls, as well as men, can take degrees and gain certificates for teaching purposes. In every capital of Spain one of these schools is established. There are ten universities, of which the principal is that of Madrid. In some of these only medicine and law are studied, but others are open for every class of learning. In all these numerous schools and colleges great advance has been made in late years; in the department of science, electricity has taken a very noticeable step forward, and in applied electricity Spain probably compares favourably with any of the European nations. Even the small towns and some villages are lighted by electricity, having gone straight from petroleum to electric light. Most of the large towns have, besides the light, electric tramways, telephones, etc., the engineers and artisans employed in these works being of a very high class. Electrical engineers are not under Government control, as the civil and mechanical engineers are, and have therefore better chances of coming to the front and making a career for themselves. The Government engineers, however, are kept up to the mark of other countries, and an attempt has been made by the present Minister to alter the system by which civil and mechanical engineers are compulsorily a body appointed and controlled by Government. Medical science has made great strides during the last ten or twelve years. The hospitals are reformed, and all sanitary and antiseptical arrangements are now strictly attended to, and brought into line with the latest developments of science. A fine new hospital, San Juan de Dios, has been built in Madrid, on the plan of St. Thomas's in London, and this is only one of many improvements. The reorganisation of all scientific teaching is now engaging the attention of the Minister. An excellent sign of the present state of medical science in Spain--which only a few years ago was so far behind the age--is the fact that the International Congress of Medicine is fixed to meet in Madrid, for the first time, in 1902. Since the establishment of religious liberty, the Americans seem to have made themselves very busy in missionary work. Mrs. Gulick, the wife of the American missionary in San Sebastian, claims to have "proved the intellectual ability of Spanish girls," and has secured State examination and recognition of her pupils by the National Institution of San Sebastian, and a few have even obtained admission to the examinations of the Madrid University, where they maintained a high rank. One always has a feeling that missionaries might easily find a field for their zealous labours in their own country; but if an impulse was needed from a foreign people for the initiation of a higher education among the daughters of Spain, they will certainly be able to carry on the work themselves, with such women as Emelia Pardo Bazan to lead the way. Mrs. Gulick is said to project a college for women in Madrid without distinction of creed. The whole affair sounds a little condescending, as though America were coming to the aid of a nation of savages; but if the Spaniards themselves do not object, no one else has any right to do so. The Protestant movement has made but little progress in Spain. The religion is scarcely fitted to the genius of the people, and the Anglican Church has shown no desire to proselytise a nation which has as much right to its own religious opinions and form of worship as the English nation. The Americans and English Nonconformists are very busy, however, and talk somewhat largely of the results of their labours. In most of the large towns there are English chapels and schools, and a certain number among the lower classes of Spaniards have joined these communities. A private diary of a visit to Madrid so long ago as 1877 describes the English service there. The congregation numbered "quite five hundred." "They were of the poorer classes of both sexes, with a sprinkling of well-dressed men and women. They seemed to perform their devotions in a spirit of entire reverence and piety, not unlike a similar class in our churches at home. The clergyman delivered an impressive and forcible discourse, chiefly on the honour due to the name of God, and reprobated the profane use of the most sacred names, so common among the Spanish people.... Altogether I look upon the congregation at the Calle de Madera as a nucleus of genuine Protestantism in Spain." As this is the opinion of a perfectly unbiassed onlooker, and has nothing of the professional element about it, it may be taken as absolutely reliable. In the towns, such as Bilbao, where there is a large English colony, there are various churches and chapels, and considerable numbers of communicants and Sunday scholars. Looking back, as I am able to do, to the days when there was no toleration for an alien faith; when even Christian burial for the "heretic" was quite a new thing, and living people could tell of the indignities heaped on the corpse of any unlucky English man or woman who died in "Catholic" Spain; when to have omitted, or even hesitated about, any of the religious actions imposed by the Church would have exposed one to gross insult, and perhaps injury; the progress towards enlightened toleration of the opinions of others seems to have been remarkable. It is, perhaps, more significant that the members of the new congregations should be generally of the lower classes, because it is precisely these people who have always been mere unthinking puppets in the hands of their priests. Although there is at the present moment such a deep and widespread revolt against the Jesuits and some of the other orders, especially among the students and the better class of artisans and workmen, there is not, so far as a stranger may judge, a revolt against the Church itself, nor even against the parochial clergy. It would seem rather that there is a fixed determination that the priests shall keep to their business, that of the service of religion, and shall not be allowed to interfere in secular education, or, by use of the confessional, to dominate the family; and, above all, that the convents shall not be filled by force, undue persuasion, or cajolery. The state of the Roman Catholic religion and its priesthood in England is constantly being held up as the ideal of what the Church in Spain should be. Almost all the modern novelists of Spain show us characters of priests with whom every reader must feel sympathy. Valera, Galdós, Pardo Bazan, and others depict individual clerics who are simple, straightforward, pious, and in every way worthy men, the friend of the young and the helper of the sorrowful. Sometimes they are not very learned, and not at all worldly-wise, but they show that the type is largely represented amongst the priesthood of Spain, and there are not wanting some of distinctly liberal tendencies. There was a remarkable article in a Madrid paper of radical, if not socialistic, tendencies, the other day, by one who signed himself "A priest of the Spanish Catholic Church." Lamenting over the sentimentalism of modern religion, and the distance it had travelled from its old models, he says: "Instead of the Vírgen being held up to admiration as the Mother of Our Lord, and as an example of all feminine perfection, the ideal woman and mother, the people are called on to worship the idea of the Immaculate Conception, an abstract dogma of recent invention, and in place of showing us the perfect man in the Son of God, they are asked to worship a 'bleeding heart,' abstracted from the body, and held up as an object of reverence, apart from the living body of Jesus Christ." It is the reform of the national religion still ardently loved in spite of all the crimes that have been committed in her name, that the liberal-minded Spaniard wants, not the substitution of a foreign church; although no doubt the opportunity, now for the first time possible, of learning that there are people every whit as good and earnest as themselves, who yet hold religious opinions other than theirs, is bound to have a widening and softening effect on the narrowness of a creed which has hitherto been regarded as the only one. The extraordinary outbreak against the Jesuits and the religious orders of the last year had many causes, and had probably long been seething, and waiting for something to open the floodgates. That something came in the marriage of the Princess of Asturias, and the coincidence, accidental or otherwise, of the production of Galdós's play of _Electra_. The marriage was a love match; the two young sons of the Count of Caserta, who were nephews of the Infanta Isabel on her husband's side, had been constantly at the Palace in Madrid, companions of the boy King. An attachment sprang up between Don Carlos, the elder of the two, and the King's elder sister, the Princess of Asturias. In every way the projected marriage was obnoxious to the people. The Count of Caserta himself had been chief of the staff to the Pretender, Don Carlos, and though he and his sons had taken the oath of allegiance to the young King, Spaniards have learned to place little reliance on such oaths. Had not Montpensier sworn allegiance to his sister-in-law Isabel II.? and of how much was it worth when the time came that he thought he could successfully conspire against her? To allow the heiress to the Crown to marry a Carlist seemed the surest way to reopen civil war, and upset the dynasty once more. Moreover, the Jesuits were supposed to be behind it all. The Apostolic party was apparently scotched and Carlism dead, but was not this one more move of the hated Jesuits to resuscitate both? The Liberal Government refused to allow the marriage; the Queen Regent, actuated, it is said, solely by the desire to secure what she considered the happiness of her daughter, who refused to give up her lover, was obstinate; and rather than give in, Sagasta and his Ministers resigned. A Conservative Ministry was formed--the methods of manipulating elections must be borne in mind--and the marriage was carried out. Even before the wedding-day the storm broke, and things looked ugly enough. Riots and disturbances occurred all over the country, as well as in Madrid itself; attacks were made on the houses of the Jesuits, who were credited with being the authors of the situation; and then followed the Government's suicidal step of suspending the constitutional guarantees over the whole country. Absolutism had once more raised its head! The Conservative Ministers, or many of them, were accused of being mere tools in the hands of the Jesuits, and it was complained that the confessor of the young King was one of the hated order. For a time Spain seemed to be on the verge of one of her old convulsions. It appeared doubtful if the Queen Regent had not sacrificed the crown of one child to gratify the obstinacy of another. Fortunately, a catastrophe was averted. After vain efforts to retain the Conservative party in power, or to form a coalition, which all the best public men refused to join, Sagasta was once more recalled to power, the constitutional guarantees were restored, and the sharp crisis passed. But the attention of the nation had been attracted to what it considered the machinations of the Jesuits; order was indeed restored in Madrid and the provinces, but the "clerical question" had come to the front, and there was no possibility of allowing it to slumber again. It was discovered that not only had many of the religious orders, whose return had been allowed by convention after the Restoration, under certain limitations, largely increased their numbers beyond the limits allowed them, but that others had established themselves without any authorisation from the Government; also that considerable properties were being acquired in the country by the orders, though, of course, held under other names. The Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Madrid petitioned the Government to order an inquiry into the affairs of these religious bodies, pointing out that they were establishing manufactories of shoes, chocolate, fancy post-cards, and other objects of commerce, interfering with the ordinary trades, and underselling them, because, under the plea of being charitable institutions, they evaded duty. The heads of colleges and the Society of Public Teachers also asked for Government interference and the reassertion of the laws of 1881 and 1895, guaranteeing perfect liberty of instruction, because they affirmed that the Fathers, Jesuit and others, undermined the teaching of science in the schools by means of tracts distributed to the pupils, and also by using the power they obtained in the confessional to set aside the lessons in science given in the colleges. The action of the Government was prompt and judicious. Strict inquiries were at once made into the question of the manufacturing orders, and those not paying the duty were reminded of the immediate necessity of doing so, and of furnishing to the Ministry of Fomento full particulars of the trades carried on by them. Houses that were permitted by convention were warned to reduce their numbers to those allowed by law, and all unauthorised orders were warned at once to leave the country. The Press took a dignified and moderate position in the matter. It pointed out that perfect religious liberty existed, and that all that was needful was to see that the religious orders obeyed the law of the country as other people did; but that to inaugurate a system of persecution would be to return to the Dark Ages, and to follow the bad example set by the Church itself in former years. Meanwhile, a clear intimation had been given by the Government that public instruction was absolutely free, and that no interference would be allowed with the teaching of science in the public schools. After all, public opinion alone can deal with the question of the confessional and the occult influence of the priest, for the remedy lies in the hands of those who place themselves under the domination of the confessor. So far, well! The riots were at an end, and the more sensible and law-abiding people were satisfied that the ground stealthily gained by the Jesuits had been cut from under their feet as soon as the full light of day had been let in on their proceedings. Then came the extraordinary excitement caused by Galdós's play. To a stranger reading it, it is obvious that the public mind must have been in a strange condition of alarm and distrust to have had such an effect produced upon it by a drama which has no great literary worth, and which appears commonplace and harmless to an outsider. The story is simply that of a young orphan girl, who, according to Spanish ideas, is extremely unconventional, though nothing worse. There is nothing of the emancipated young woman about her as the type is known in England; in fact, she has a perfect genius for those domestic virtues which "advanced" English women regard with disdain. The villain of the piece, is a certain Don Salvador, who, though the fact is never mentioned, is obviously a Jesuit, and the interest of the play consists in the efforts made by this man, first by fair means and then by foul, to separate Electra from her _fiancé_, and immure her in a convent. He succeeds, to all appearance, by at last resorting to an infamous lie, which reduces the girl to a state of insanity, in which she flies to the convent from the lover whom she has been led to believe is her own brother. Finally, by the action of a nun who leaves the convent at the same time as Electra, the truth is made known, and the girl is rescued. "You fly from me, then?" exclaims Don Salvador. "It is not flight, it is resurrection!" replies the lover, in the last words of the play. This drama ran an unprecedented number of nights in Madrid, over fifteen thousand copies of the book were sold in a few weeks, and it is still running in the provinces. Some of the bishops and the superior clergy have had the folly to denounce the play and to forbid their congregations to witness or to read it. There is not an objectionable word or idea in it from first to last, except such as may be disagreeable to the Church--as that women should be educated so as to be the intellectual companions of their husbands, and should not be entrapped into convents by foul means and against their will. The action taken by the clergy in this matter has not only largely advertised the play, but has led to angry demonstrations against them, and has strengthened the temper of the people to resist all clerical domination in temporal matters. There have not been wanting from time to time signs, especially in the large manufacturing towns, of a spirit of revolt against all religion. Socialism, atheism, and even anarchism are all in the air, and if these are to be counteracted by religious teaching at all, it will certainly not be by the narrow dogmatism of the old school. There is a deep fund of religious feeling in the Spanish character which it would take a great deal to uproot, but it must be a wide-spirited and enlightened faith which will retain its hold over the people, who are everywhere breaking their old bonds and thinking for themselves. CHAPTER XIV PHILANTHROPY--POSITION OF WOMEN--MARRIAGE CUSTOMS Travellers complain somewhat bitterly of the increase in the numbers and the importunity of beggars in Spain; but wherever monks abound, beggars also abound, and the long-unaccustomed sight of the various religious habits naturally brings with it the hordes of miserable objects who afford opportunities for the faithful to exercise what they are taught to believe is charity--loved of God. This, however, is more especially the case in Granada, or those favoured spots affected by the rich tourist, who has not always the same opinion about indiscriminate charity as the native Spaniard. In old days, the wise policy of Charles III. had reduced very greatly the swarm of beggars. A certain number of terrible-looking objects--the fortunate possessors of withered limbs, sightless eyeballs, or other disqualifications for honest work--still ostentatiously displayed their badges of professional mendicancy, and lived, apparently quite comfortably, on the alms of the passers-by. But the enormous competition which has since sprung up in this "career" must interfere a good deal with its lucrativeness. There is no poor law as yet in Spain. Philanthropy is left to voluntary effort; but the list of charities is so great, and so widely spread over the whole country, that one would think wholesale beggary would be superfluous. Madrid is divided into thirty-three parishes, each having a board of _Beneficéncias_, the Government holding a fund which these boards administer. The Queen is the President of the whole. Each board has its president and vice-president--generally ladies of the aristocracy--a treasurer, vice-treasurer, secretary, and vice-secretary, and a body of visitors; accounts are rendered monthly to the governing board, whose vice-president presides in the name of the Queen. There are also the confraternities of St. Vincent and St. Paul, the members of which are gentlemen and ladies who work independently of each other. These, however, have no established funds, but depend on voluntary subscriptions and gifts. Both these associations visit the poor in their own homes. The Pardo and the San Bernadino are societies and homes for benefiting men, women, and children; they have been founded by ladies. For boys there is the School of the Sacred Heart, and the Christian Brothers. The School of San Ildefonso belongs to the _Ayuntamiento_, and has secular masters. There is a small asylum, with chaplaincy attached, for architects. Santa Rita is a reformatory for boys in Carabanchel, under a religious brotherhood. For girls there is the Horfino, the Mercédes Asylum--founded in memory of and kept up by the rents of Queen Mercédes--Santa Isabel and San Ildefonso, the French St. Vincent de Paul, San Blas, on the same lines as the Mercédes, Santa Cruz, the Inclusa, and the Spanish Vincent de Paul. For fallen girls there are the Adorers of the Blessed Sacrament, the Ladies of the Holy Trinity, and the Oblates of the Holy Redeemer. In all parts of the country branches of these or similar institutions abound. None are more liberal to the funds of these voluntary charities than the bull-fighters, who, if they make large fortunes, never forget the class from which they sprang, and are most generous in their donations. When occasion demands an extra effort, a _fiesta_ is given at the Plaza de Toros, and the whole of the profits go to the charity for which it has been held. No doubt these schemes have their faults in operation, and Galdós in some of his popular novels does not fail to hold up--not exactly for admiration--the fashionable ladies who think it "smart," as we should say, to join these boards and societies, and talk with much unction of their public good works and the statistics of their pet societies, while neglecting the poor and the needy at their own doors, or trying to send into "Homes" those who have no desire or need to go there if a little Christian charity were only shown them by their neighbours. Nevertheless, there is a large amount of organised philanthropy in Spain to-day, and it appears to be of a wise and efficient kind. One should not forget to mention also the workshops for the lowest orders, established by the Salerian Fathers, to which the attention of the Government has been called by late events. The general position of women in Spain and their influence in public life cannot be described as of an advanced order. As a rule, they take no leading part in politics, devoting themselves chiefly to charitable works, such as those already named. There is, as we have seen, a general movement for higher education and greater liberty of thought and action amongst women, and there is a certain limited number who frankly range themselves on the side of so-called "emancipation," who attend socialistic and other "meetings"--a word which has now been formally admitted into the Spanish language--and who aspire to be the comrades of men rather than their objects of worship or their playthings. But this movement is scarcely more than in its infancy. It must be remembered that even within the present generation the bedrooms allotted to girls were always approached through that of the parents, that no girl or unmarried woman could go unattended, and that to be left alone in the room with a man was to lose her reputation. Already these things seem to be dreams of the past; nor could one well believe, what is however a fact, that there were fathers of the upper classes in the first half of the last century who preferred that their daughters should not learn to read or write, especially the latter, as it only enabled them to read letters clandestinely received from lovers and to reply to them. The natural consequence of this was the custom, which so largely prevailed, of young men, absolutely unknown to the parents, establishing correspondence or meetings with the objects of their adoration by means of a complaisant _doncella_ with an open palm, or the pastime known as _pelando el pavo_ (literally plucking the turkey), which consisted of serenades of love-songs, amorous dialogues, or the passage of notes through the _reja_--the iron gratings which protect the lower windows of Spanish houses from the prowling human wolf--or from the balconies. Many a time have I seen these interesting little missives being let down past my balcony--how trustful the innocents were!--to the waiting gallant below, and his drawn up. Only once I saw a neighbour, in the balcony below, intercept the post, and I believe substitute some other letter. Cruel sport! Perhaps born of this necessity of making acquaintance by fair means or foul comes the custom, which appears to savour of such grossly bad manners to us, of a man making audible remarks on the appearance of a girl he has never seen before as she passes him in the street. _Ay! que buenos ojos! Que bonita eres! Que gracia tienes!_ and the like. Far from giving offence, the fair one goes on her way, perhaps vouchsafing one glance from those lovely eyes of hers, with only a sense that her charms have received their due tribute--not much elated, perhaps, but certainly by no means offended; nor, indeed, was offence intended. The fixed stare, which to us would mean mere ill-bred ignorance, is only another ordinary tribute to the passing fair one from the other sex. Marriage customs have changed much in the last few decades, and even civil marriages are now not wholly unknown. In old days, if the ceremony was performed in church, the bride and all the ladies must be attired in black, for which reason the fashionable world established marriages in the house, where more brilliant costumes might be displayed. These generally take place in the evening, and the newly married couple do not leave the house, unless the new home happens to be close by. In any case, honeymoon tours are, or were, unusual. The _velada_ is the ceremony in church, which must take place before the first child is born, to legalise the marriage, but it does not necessarily immediately follow the other ceremony. At it the ring is given. When the two ceremonies take place at the same time it must be in the morning, because the bride and bridegroom partake of the Holy Sacrament fasting. From the description of a _boda_ in Galicia, in one of Pardo Bazan's novels, it would seem that the bride there wears white, even at the church. The wedding is a portentous affair, lasting all day from early morning, and the bride and bridegroom remain in the house. Fernan Caballero devotes some pages in _Clemencia_ to showing how preferable is the Spanish custom of "remaining among friends" to that of the newly married couple, as she says, "exposing themselves to the jeers of postilions and stable-boys." Yet the English custom is in fact gaining ground, even in conservative Spain. Although marriages are often made up by the parents and guardians, as in France, without any freedom on the part of the bride at least, custom or law gives the Spanish woman much more power than even in England. A girl desiring to escape from a marriage repugnant to her can claim protection from a magistrate, who will even, if necessary, take her out of her father's custody until she is of age and her own mistress. More than that, if a girl determines to marry a man of whom her parents disapprove, she has only to place herself under the protection of a magistrate to set them at defiance, nor have they the power to deprive her of the share of the family property to which by Spanish law she is entitled. I do not know if these things are altered now,--one does not hear so much of them,--but I know of several cases where daughters have been married from the magistrate's house against the wishes of their parents. In one case, the first intimation a father received of his daughter's engagement was the notice from a neighbouring magistrate that she was about to be married, and in another, a daughter left her mother's house and was married from that of the magistrate to a man without any income and considerably below her in rank. In all these cases, the contracting parties were of the upper classes. While on this subject, I must mention what seems to us the barbarous manner in which infants are clothed and brought up, though the English fashions of baths, healthy clothing, and suitable food are now largely followed amongst the upper classes. When the King was still an infant a great deal of his clothing came from England, and he was brought up in the English method. This probably set the fashion, and the little ones playing in the Park now are much like those one is accustomed to see in London. But among the poor, and even some of the bourgeois class, the old insane customs prevail, and it is not surprising to hear that the death-rate among infants is extraordinarily high. From its birth the poor child is tightly wrapped in swaddling clothes, confining all its limbs, so that it presents the appearance of a mummy, swathed in coarse yellow flannel, only its head appearing. So stiffly are they rolled up that I have seen an infant only a few weeks old propped up on end against the wall, or in a corner, while the mother was busy. There is a superstition, too, about never washing a child's head from the day it is born. The result is really indescribable. When it is about two years old, a scab, which covers the whole head, comes off of its own accord, and after that the head may be cleansed without fear of evil consequences. Some English servants who have married in Spain set the example of keeping their infants clean, and, therefore, healthy, from the first, and, seeing the difference in the appearance of the children, a few Spanish women have followed suit; but it requires a good deal of courage to break away from old traditions and set one's face against the sacred superstitions of ages--and the mother-in-law! One wonders, not that Spanish men grow bald so early, and not bald only, but absolutely hairless, but that they ever have any hair at all; for after all the troubles of their infancy their heads are regularly shaved, or the hair cut off close to the skin all the summer. On the principle of cutting off the heads of dandelions as soon as they appear, as a way of exterminating them, the surprising thing is that the hair does not become too much discouraged even to try to sprout again. Funny little objects they look, with only a dark mark on the skin where the hair ought to grow in summer, and at most a growth about as long as velvet in the winter, until they are quite big boys! The girls generally wear their hair so tightly plaited, as soon as it is long enough to allow of plaiting at all, that they can scarcely close their eyes. Young Spanish women, however, have magnificent hair; though they, too, grow bald when they are old, in a way that is never seen in England. CHAPTER XV MUSIC, ART, AND THE DRAMA One is apt to forget how much the history of music owes to Spain. The country was for so long considered to be in a state of chronic political disturbance that few foreigners took up their abode there, except such as had business interests, and for the rest the mere traveller never became acquainted with the real life of the people, or entered into their intellectual amusements. It is quite a common thing to find the tourist entering in his valuable notes on a country which he has not the knowledge of the world to understand: "The Spaniards are not a musical people," and remaining quite satisfied with his own dictum. Yet Albert Soubies, in his _Histoire de la Musique_, says, in the volume devoted to Spain: "Spain is the country where, in modern times, musical art has been cultivated with the greatest distinction and originality. In particular, the school of religious music in Spain, thanks to Morales, Guerrero, and Victoria, will bear comparison with all that has been produced elsewhere of the highest and most cultivated description. The national genius has also shown itself in another direction, in works which, like the ancient _eglogas_--the contemporary _zarzuelas_ of Lope de Vega and Calderon--and the _torradillas_ of the last century shine brilliantly by the verve, the gaiety, the strength, and delicacy of their comic sentiment.... The works of this class are happily inspired by popular art, which in this country abounds in characteristic elements. One notes how much the rhythm and melody display native colour, charm, and energy. In many cases, along with vestiges of Basque or of Celtic origin, they show something of an Oriental character, due to the long sojourn of the Moors in this country." As regards this pre-eminence, it is enough to remember that Spain was anciently one of the regions most thoroughly penetrated by Roman civilisation. It is not too much to say that this art has never sunk into decadence in Spain. During the sixteenth century the archives of the Pontifical chapel show the important place occupied by Spanish composers in the musical history of the Vatican, and among the artists who gained celebrity away from their own country were Escoledo, Morales, Galvey, Tapia, and many others. To the end of the seventeenth century a galaxy of brilliant names carried on the national history of Spanish music, both on religious and secular lines; and though in the eighteenth and part of the nineteenth centuries there was a passing invasion of French and Italian fashion, the true and characteristic native music has never died out, and at the present time there is a notable musical renaissance in touch with the spirit and natural genius of the people. A Royal Academy of Music has, within recent times, been added to the other institutions of a like kind, and native talent is being developed on native lines, not in imitations from countries wholly differing from them in national characteristics. Spaniards are exacting critics, and the best musicians of other countries are as well known and appreciated as their own composers and executants. Wagner is now a household word among them, where once Rossini was the object of fashionable admiration. The national and characteristic songs of Spain have been already referred to. They are perfectly distinct from those of any other nation. There is about them a dainty grace and pathos, combined frequently with a certain suspicion of sadness, which is full of charm, while those which are frankly gay are full of life, audacity, and "go," that carry away the listeners, even when the language is imperfectly understood. The charming songs, with accompaniment for piano or guitar, of the Master Yradier, are mostly written in the soft dialect of Andalucia, which lends itself to the music, and is liquid as the notes of a bird. The songs of Galicia are, in fact, the songs of Portugal; just as the Galician language is Portuguese, or a dialect of that language, which has less impress of the ancient Celt-Iberian and more of French than its sister, Castilian, both being descendants of Latin, enriched with words borrowed from the different nations which have at one time or another inhabited or conquered their country. The guitar is, of course, the national instrument, and the songs never have the same charm with any other accompaniment; but the Spanish women of to-day are prouder of being able to play the piano or violin than of excelling in the instrument which suits them so much better. The Spaniard is nervously anxious not to appear, or to be, behind any other European nation in what we call "modernity," a word that signifies that to be "up-to-date" is of paramount importance, leaving wholly out of the question whether the change be for the better or infinitely towards the lower end of the scale. The records of Spain in art, as in literature, are so grand, so European, in fact, that it is much if the artists of to-day come within measurable distance of those who have made the glory of their country. Nevertheless, the modern painters and sculptors of Spain hold their own with those of any country. After the temporary eclipse which followed the death of Velasquez, Ribera, and Murillo--the eighteenth century produced no great Spanish painter, if we except Goya, who left no pupils--Don José Madrazo, who studied at the same time as Ingres in the studio of David, began the modern renaissance. He became Court painter, and left many fine portraits; but, perhaps, as Comte Vasili says, "La meilleure oeuvre de Don José fut son fils, Federico; de même que la meilleure de celui-ci est son fils Raimundo." Raimundo Madrazo and Fortuny the elder, who married Cecilia Madrazo, Raimundo's sister, have always painted in Paris, and have become known to Europe almost as French artists. Fortuny, by his _mariage Espagnol_, became the head of the Spanish renaissance. Unfortunately, he has been widely imitated by artists of all nations, who have not a tithe of his genius, if any. Pradilla, F. Domingo, Gallegos, the three Beulluire brothers, Bilbao, Gimenez, Aranda, Carbonero, are only a few of the artists whose names are known to all art collectors, and who work in Spain. Villegas has settled in Rome. The exhibition of modern Spanish paintings in the London Guildhall last year (1901) was a revelation to many English people, even to artists, of the work that is being done at the present day by Spanish painters, both at home and in Paris and Rome. In sculpture, also, Spain can boast many artists of the highest class. The drama in Spain has in all times occupied an important place. The traditions of the past names, such as Calderon, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Moreto, and others, cannot exactly be said to be kept up, for these are, most of them, of European fame; but in a country where the theatre is the beloved entertainment of all classes, and perhaps especially so of the poor or the working people, there are never wanting dramatists who satisfy the needs of their auditors, and whose works are sometimes translated into foreign languages, if not actually acted on an alien stage. It would be impossible and useless to give a mere list of the names of modern dramatists, but that of Ayala is perhaps best known abroad, and his work most nearly approaches to that of his great forerunners. His _Consuelo_, _El tejado de Vidrio_, and _Tanto por ciento_ show great power and extraordinary observation. His style, too, is perfect. Señor Tamago, who persistently hides his name under the pseudonym of "Joaquin Estebanez," may also be ranked amongst the leaders of the modern Spanish drama, and his _Drama Nuevo_ is a masterpiece. Echegaray belongs to the school of the old drama, whose characteristic is that virtue is always rewarded and vice punished. His plays are very popular because they touch an audience even to tears, and he has several followers or imitators. The comedies of manners and satirical plays are generally the work of Eusebio Blasco, Ramos Carrion, Echegaray the younger, Estremada, Alverez, though there are others whose names are legion. Echegaray is really a man of genius. A clever engineer and professor of mathematics, he was Minister of Finance during the early days of the Revolution. His first play took the world of Madrid by surprise and even by storm. _La Esposa del Vengador_ had an unprecedented success, and at least thirty subsequent dramas, in prose and in verse, have made this mathematician, engineer, and financier one of the most famous men of his day. His art and his methods are purely Spanish. I have already referred to the phenomenal success of Perez Galdós's _Electra_ within the last few months. It must, however, be ascribed chiefly to the moment of its presentation rather than to any superlative merit in the drama. It is well written, which is what may be said of almost all Spanish plays, for the language is in itself so dignified and so beautiful that, if it be only pure and not disfigured by foreign slang, it is always sonorous and charming. To the state of the popular temper, however, and the coincidence of the political events already referred to must be ascribed the fact that a piece like _Electra_ should cause the fall of a Government, and bring within dangerous distance the collapse of the monarchy itself. The excitement which it still produces, wherever played, is now in a great part due to the foolish action of some of the bishops and the fact that individual clerics use their pulpits to condemn it, and attempt to forbid its being read or seen. Spain is not particularly rich in great actors, although she has always a goodly number who come up to a fair standard of excellence. The great actors of the day in Madrid are María Guerrero and Fernando Diaz de Mendoza. They obtained a perfect ovation during the last season in the play, _El loco Dios_, of Echegaray--a work which gives every opportunity for the display of first-class talent in both actors, and which led to a fury of enthusiasm for the popular dramatist, which must have recalled to him the early days of his great successes. Since the beginning of the eighteenth century, Spain has had three great Academies, which, even in the troublous times of her history, have done good work in the domains of history, language, and the fine arts; but it is since the Revolution that they have become of real importance in the intellectual development of the nation, and other societies have been added for the encouragement of scientific research and music. The earliest of her academies was that of language, known as the Royal Spanish Academy. It is exactly on the lines of the Académie Française. Founded in 1713, its statutes were somewhat modified in 1847, and again in 1859. There are only thirty-six members, about eighty corresponding members in different provinces of Spain, and an unlimited, or at least undetermined, number of foreign and honorary correspondents. Besides the Central Society in Madrid, the Royal Spanish Academy has many corresponding branches in South America, such as the Columbian, the Equatorial, the Mexican, and those of Venezuela and San Salvador. The existence of academies of language in the South American States does not appear to effect much in the way of maintaining the purity of Castilian among them, for South American Spanish, as spoken at least, is not much more like the original language than the South American Spaniard is like the inhabitant of the mother country. The dictionary of the Royal Academy of Spain, like that of France, is not yet completed. Philip V. founded the Royal Academy of History in 1738. Under its auspices, especially of late years, much valuable work has been done in publishing the original records of the country, to be found at Simancas and other places; but the authentic history of Spain is still incomplete. Up to the time of his assassination, Don Antonio Cánovas del Castillo was its director, and Don Pedro de Madrazo its permanent secretary. The society, now known as the Real Academia de San Fernando, founded in 1752, under the title of Real Academia de las tres nobles Artes, has now had a fourth added to it--that of music. The functions of its separate sections are much the same as those of the English Academy of Painting and the sister arts. A permanent gallery of the works of its members exists in Madrid, and certificates, diplomas, honourable mention, etc., are distributed by the directors to successful competitors. Later societies are the Academies of Exact Science, Physical and Natural, of Moral and Political Science, of Jurisprudence and Legislation, and last, but by no means least, the Royal Academy of Medicine, under whose auspices medical science has of late years made immense strides, and is probably now in line with that of the most advanced of other countries. CHAPTER XVI MODERN LITERATURE The name of Pascual de Gayangos is known far beyond the confines of his own country as a scholar, historian, philologist, biographer, and critic. Although now a man of very advanced age, he is one of the most distinguished of modern Orientalists, and his _History of the Arabs in Spain_, _Vocabulary of the Arabic Words in Spanish_, and his _Catalogue of Spanish MSS. in the British Museum_ are known wherever the language is known or studied. He has published in Spanish an edition of Ticknor's great work on Spanish literature, and has edited several valuable works in the Spanish Old Text Society besides innumerable other historical and philological books and papers, which have given him a European reputation. His immense store of knowledge, his modesty, and his genuine kindness to all who seek his aid endear him as much for his personal qualities as for his learning. Next to Gayangos in the same class of work, Marcelino Menendez y Palayo may perhaps be mentioned. His _History of Æsthetic Ideas in Spain_ has been left unfinished so far, owing to the demands made on his time by his position in the political world as one of the Conservative leaders. Don Modesto Lafuente, though scarcely possessing the qualities of a great historian, is accurate and painstaking to a great degree; but in the field of history many workers are searching the archives and documents in which the country is so rich, and throwing light on particular periods. Cánovas del Castillo, in spite of his great political duties, was one of the most valuable of these; and the eminent jurist, Don Francisco de Cardenas, and the learned Jesuit, Fidel Fita, and other members of the Academy of History are constantly working in the rich mine at Simancas. New papers and books are continually being brought out under the auspices of this society, throwing light on the past history of the country. Fernan Caballero, a German by race, but married successively to three Spanish husbands, may be said to have inaugurated the modern Spanish novel _de costumbres_, and her books are perhaps better known in England than those of some of the later novelists. By far the greater writer of the day in Spain, however, in light literature, is Juan Valera, at once poet, critic, essayist, and novelist. His _Pepita Jimenez_ is a remarkable novel, full of delicate characterisation and exquisite style, second to none produced in any country--a novel full of fire, and yet irreproachable in taste, handling a difficult subject with the mastery of genius. It has been translated into English; but however well it may have been done, it must lose immensely in the transition, because the Spanish of Valera is the perfection of a perfectly beautiful language. In this novel we have the character of a priest, who, while we know him only through the letters addressed to him by the young student of theology, the extremely sympathetic hero of the story, lives in one's memory, showing us the best side of the Spanish priest. Other novels of Valera's, _Doña Luis_ and _El Comendador Mendoza_, a number of essays on all sorts of subjects, critical and other, and poems which show great grace and correctness of style, have given this writer a high place in the literature of the age. Perez Galdós is a writer of a wholly different class, although he enjoys a very wide reputation in his own country and wherever Spanish is read. His _Episodes Nacionales_, some fifty-six in number, attract by their close attention to detail, which gives an air of actuality to the most diffuse of his stories. They are careful and very accurate studies of different episodes of national life, in which the author introduces, among the fictitious characters round whom the story moves, the real actors on the stage of history of the time. Thus Mendizábal, Espartero, Serrano, Narvaez, the Queen of Ferdinand VII., Cristina, and many other persons appear in the books, giving one the impression that history is alive, and not the record of long-dead actors we are accustomed to find it. Galdós appears to despise any kind of plot; the events run on, as they did in fact run on, only there are one or two people who take part in them whom we may suppose to be creations of the author's brain. Certainly, one learns more contemporary history by reading these _Episodes_ of Perez Galdós, and realises all the scenes of it much more vividly than one would ever do by the reading of ordinary records of events. As the tendency and the sympathy of the writer is always Liberal, one fancies that Galdós has written with the determined intention to tempt a class of readers to become acquainted with the recent history of their country who would never do so under any less attractive form than that of the novel. His works must do good, since they are very widely read, and are extremely accurate as history. His play, _Electra_, which is just now giving him such wide celebrity, is of the actual time, and the scene is laid wholly in Madrid. The freedom that he advocates for women is merely that which Englishwomen have always enjoyed, or, at least, since mediæval times, and has nothing in common with the emancipation which our "new women" claim for themselves. Galdós, also, is fond of introducing the simple-minded and honest, if not very cultivated, priest. His style is pure, without any great pretention to brilliancy, or any of the straining after effect which so many of the English writers seem to think gives distinction. Pedro Alarcón is novelist first, and historian, poet, and critic afterwards. That is to say, his novels are his best-known and most widely read works. He has two distinct styles. His _Sombrero de Tres Picos_ is a fascinating sketch of quaint old village life, full of quiet grace, while _El Escándalo_ and _La Pródiga_ are of the sensational order. He writes, like Galdós, in series, such as _Historietas Nacionales_, _Narraciones Inverosímiles_, and _Viajes por España_. Parada is a native of Santander, and writes of his beloved countrymen. _Sotilezas_, his best-known, and perhaps best, novel, treats of life among the fisher-folk of Santander, before it became an industrial town. Writing in dialect makes many of his stories puzzling, if not impossible for foreign readers. The lady who writes under the pseudonym of "Emelia Pardo Bazan" may be said to be the leader or the pioneer of women's emancipation in the sense in which we use the words. She is a native of Galicia, and is imbued with that intense love of her native province which distinguishes the people of the mountains. Her novels are chiefly pictures of its scenery and the life of its people, though in at least one she does not hesitate to take her readers behind the scenes of student life in Madrid. It would not be fair to apply to this writer's work the standard by which we judge an English work, because in Spain there is a frankness, to call it by no other name, in discussing in mixed company subjects which it would not be thought good taste to mention under the same circumstances with us. _Una Cristiana_ and _La Prueba_, its sequel, are founded on the sex problem, and, probably without any intention of offence, Pardo Bazan has worked with a very full brush and a free hand, if I may borrow the terms from a sister art. Her articles on intellectual and social questions show an amount of education and a breadth of view which place her among the best writers of her nation. She is not in the least blinded by her patriotism to the faults of her country, especially to the hitherto narrow education of its women. She holds up an ideal of a higher type--a woman who shall be man's intellectual companion, and his helper in the battle of life. She is by no means the only woman writer in Spain at the present time; but she is the most talented, and occupies certainly the highest place. Her writings are somewhat difficult for anyone not conversant with Portuguese, or, rather, with the Galician variety of the Spanish language, for the number of words not to be found in the Spanish dictionary interfere with the pleasure experienced by a foreigner, and even some Castilians, in reading her novels. Pardo Bazan was an enthusiastic friend and admirer of Castelar, and belongs to his political party. A united Iberian republic, with Gibraltar restored to Spain, is, or was, its programme. _Hermana San Sulpicio_, by Armando Palacio Valdés, is one of the charming, purely Spanish novels which has made a name for its author beyond the confines of his own country; but since that was produced he has gone for his inspiration to the French naturalistic school, and, like some English writers, he thinks that repulsive and indecent incidents, powerfully drawn, add to the artistic value of his work. Padre Luis Coloma, a Jesuit, obtained a good deal of attention at one time by his _Pequeñeces_, studies, written in gall, of Madrid society. His stories are too narrowly bigoted in tone to have any lasting vogue, and his views of life too much coloured by his ultramontane tendencies to be even true. Nuñez de Arce is, like so many Spaniards of the last few decades, at once a poet and a politician. He played a stirring part from the time of the Revolution to the Restoration, always on the side of liberty, but never believing in the idea of a republic. His _Gritos del Combate_ were the agonised expression of a fighter in his country's battle for freedom and for light. Since the more settled state of affairs, Nuñez de Arce has written many charming idyls and short poems. In the _Idilio_ is a wonderful picture of the, to some of us, barren scenery of Castile, in which the eye of the artist sees, and makes his readers see, a beauty all the more striking because it is hidden from the ordinary gaze. Of José Zorilla as a poet there is little need to speak. His countrymen read his voluminous works, but they are not of any real value. Campoamor describes his _Dorloras_ as "poetic compositions combining lightness, sentiment, and brevity with philosophic importance." His earlier works were studied from Shakespeare and from Byron, who was the star of the age when Campoamor began to write. His most ambitious work, the _Universal Drama_, is "after Dante and Milton." He is a great favourite with his fellow-countrymen, both as poet and companion. He is a member of the Academy and a Senator. It is impossible, however, to do more than indicate a few of the writers who are leaders in the literature of Spain to-day. There has, in fact, been an immense impulse in the production of books of all classes within the last twenty or thirty years. In fiction, Spain once more aspires to have a characteristic literature of her own, in place of relying on translations from the French, as was the case for a brief time before her political renaissance began. A notable departure has been the foundation of the Folklore Society, and the publication up to the present time of eleven volumes under the name of _Biblioteca de las Tradiciones Populares Españolas_, under the direction of Señor Don Antonio Machado y Alvarez. In the introduction to the first volume, the Director tells us that, with the help of the editor of _El Folklore Andaluz_ and his friends, D. Alejandro Guichot y Sierra and D. Luis Montolo y Raustentrauch, he has undertaken this great work, which arose out of the _Bases del Folklore Español_, published in 1881, and the two societies established in 1882, the Folklore Andaluz and Folklore Extremeño. These societies have for object the gathering together, copying, and publishing of the popular beliefs, proverbs, songs, stories, poems, the old customs and superstitions of all parts of the Peninsula, including Portugal, as indispensable materials for the knowledge and scientific reconstruction of Spanish culture. In this patriotic and historical work many writers have joined, each bringing his quota of garnered treasure-trove, presenting thus, in a series of handy little volumes, a most interesting collection of the ancient customs, beliefs, and, in fact, the folklore of a country exceptionally rich in widely differing nationalities. Many of the tales, which it would seem even at the present time, especially in Portugal and Galicia, are told in the evening, and have rarely found their way into print, have the strong stamp of the legitimate Eastern fable, and bear a great family resemblance to those of the _Arabian Nights_. As, in fact, the _Thousand and One Nights_ was very early published in Spanish, it is probable that its marvellous histories were known verbally to the people of the Iberian continent for many centuries, and have coloured much of its folklore. _The Ingenious Student_ is certainly one of these. Barbers also play an important part in many of these tales. It is quite common for the Court barber to marry the King's daughter, and to succeed him as ruler; but the barber was, of course, surgeon or blood-letter as well as the principal news-agent--the forerunner of the daily newspaper of our times. The transmutation of human beings into mules, and _vice versa_, is a common fable, and we meet with wolf-children and the curious superstition that unbaptised people can penetrate into the domains of the enchanted Moors, and that these have no power to injure them. The story of the Black Slave, who eventually married the King's daughter and had a white mule for his Prime Minister, is very Eastern in character. "From so wise a King and so good a Queen the people derived great benefit; disputes never went beyond the ears of the Chief Minister, and, in the words of the immortal barber and poet of the city, 'the kingdom flourished under the guidance of a mule: which proves that there are qualities in the irrational beings which even wisest ministers would do well to imitate.'" _The Watchful Servant_ is, however, purely Spanish in character, and it closes with the proverb that "a jealous man on horseback is first cousin to a flash of lightning." _King Robin_, the story of how the beasts and birds revenged themselves on Sigli and his father, the chief of a band of robbers, recalls "Uncle Remus" and his animal tales; for the monkeys, at the suggestion of the fox, and with the delighted consent of the birds and the bees, made a figure wholly of birdlime to represent a sleeping beggar, being quite certain that Sigli would kick it the moment that he saw the intruder from the windows of his father's castle. In effect both father and son became fast to the birdlime figure, when they were stung to death by ten thousand bees. Then King Robin ordered the wolves to dig the grave, into which the monkeys rolled the man and the boy and the birdlime figure, and, after covering it up, all the beasts and birds and insects took possession of the robbers' castle, and lived there under the beneficent rule of King Robin. _Silver Bells_ is, again, a story of a wholly different type, and charmingly pretty it is, with its new development of the wicked step-mother--in this case a mother who had married again and hated her little girl by the first husband. _Elvira, the Sainted Princess_ tells how the daughter of King Wamba, who had become a Christian unknown to her father, by her prayers and tears caused his staff to blossom in one night, after he had determined that unless this miracle were worked by the God of the Christians she and her lover should be burned. One fault is to be found with these old stories as remembered and told by Mr. Sellers; that is, the introduction of modern ideas into the Old-World fables of a primitive race. Hits at the Jesuits, the Inquisition, and the government of recent kings take away much of the glamour of what is undoubtedly folklore. The story of the _Black Hand_ seems to have many varieties. It is somewhat like our stories of Jack and the Bean Stalk and Bluebeard, but differs, to the advantage of the Spanish ideal, in that the enchanted prince who is forced to play the part of the terrible Bluebeard during the day voluntarily enters upon a second term of a hundred years' enchantment, so as to free the wife whom he loves, and who goes off safely with her two sisters and numerous other decapitated beauties, restored to life by the self-immolation of the prince. The _White Dove_ is another curious and pretty fable which has many variations in different provinces--a story in which the King's promise cannot be broken, though it ties him to the hateful negress who has transformed his promised wife into a dove, and has usurped her place. Eventually, of course, the pet dove changes into a lovely girl again, when the King finds and draws out the pins which the negress has stuck into her head, and the usurper is "burnt" as punishment--an ending which savours of the _Quemadero_. The making of folklore is not, however, extinct in Spain, a country where poetry seems to be an inherent faculty. One is constantly reminded of the Spanish proverb, _De poetas y de locos, todos tenémos un poco_ (We have each of us somewhat of the poet and somewhat of the fool). No one can tell whence the rhymed _jeux d'esprit_ come; they seem to spring spontaneously from the heart and lips of the people. Children are constantly heard singing _coplas_ which are evidently of recent production, since they speak of recent events, and yet which have the air of old folklore ballads, of concentrated bits of history. Rey inocente--a weak king, Reina traidora--treacherous queen, Pueblo cobarde--a coward people, Grandes sin honra--nobles without honour, sums up and expresses in nine words the history of Goday's shameful bargain with Napoleon. En el Puente de Alcoléa La batalla ganó Prim, Y por eso la cantámos En las calles de Madrid. At the bridge of Alcoléa A great battle gained Prim, And for this we go a-singing In the streets of Madrid. Señor Don Eugenio de Olavarria-y Huarte, in citing this _copla_ (_Folklore de Madrid_), points out that it contains the very essence of folklore, since it gives a perfectly true account of the battle of Alcoléa. Although Prim was not present, he was the liberator, and without him the battle would never have been fought, nor the joy of liberty have been sung in the streets of the capital. There is seldom, if ever, any grossness in these spontaneous songs of the people--never indecency or double meaning. No sooner has an event happened than it finds its history recorded in some of these popular _coplas_, and sung by the children at their play. The Folklore Society has some interesting information to give about the innumerable rhymed games which Spanish children, like our own, are so fond of playing, many of them having an origin lost in prehistoric times. One finds, also, from some of the old stories, that the devils are much hurt in their feelings by having tails and horns ascribed to them. As a matter of fact, they have neither, and cannot understand where mortals picked up the idea! The question is an interesting one. Where did we obtain this notion? CHAPTER XVII THE FUTURE OF SPAIN An Englishman who, from over thirty years' residence in Spain and close connection with the country, numbered among her people some of his most valued friends, thus speaks of the national characteristics: "The Spanish and English characters are, indeed, in many points strangely alike. Spain ranks as one of the Latin nations, and the Republican orators of Spain are content to look to France for light and leading in all their political combinations; but a large mass of the nation, the bone and sinew of the country, the silent, toiling tillers of the soil, are not of this way of thinking.... There is a sturdy independence in the Spanish character, and an impatience of dictation that harmonises more nearly with the English character than with that of her Latin neighbours.... There is a gravity and reticence also in the Spaniard that is absent from his mercurial neighbour, and which is, indeed, much more akin to our cast of temper. "True it is that our insular manners form at first a bar to our intercourse with the Spaniard, who has been brought up in a school of deliberate and stately courtesy somewhat foreign to our business turn of mind; but how superficial this difference is may be seen by the strong attachment Englishmen form to the country and her people, when once the strangeness of first acquaintance has worn off; and those of us who know the country best will tell you that they have no truer or more faithful friends than those they have amongst her people." Speaking of her labouring classes, and as a very large employer of labour in every part of the Peninsula he had the best possible means of judging, this writer says: "The Spanish working man is really a most sober, hard-working being, not much given to dancing, and not at all to drinking. They are exceptionally clever and sharp, and learn any new trade with great facility. They are, as a rule, exceedingly honest--perfect gentlemen in their manners, and the lowest labourer has an _aplomb_ and ease of manner which many a person in a much higher rank in this country might envy. When in masses they are the quietest and most tractable workmen it is possible to have to deal with. The peasant and working man, the real bone and sinew of the country, are as fine a race as one might wish to meet with--not free from defects--what race is?--but possessed of excellent sterling qualities, which only require knowing to be appreciated. I cannot say as much for the Government employees and politicians. Connection with politics seems to have a corrupt and debasing effect, which, although perhaps exaggerated in Spain, is, unfortunately, not by any means confined to that country only."[3] [3] _Commercial and Industrial Spain_, by George Higgin, Mem. Inst. C. E., London, 1886. In Spain to-day everything is dated from "La Gloriosa," the Revolution of 1868, the "Day of Spanish Liberty," as it well deserves to be called, and there is every reason to look back with pride upon that time; because, after the battle of Alcoléa, when the cry raised in the Puerta del Sol, _Viva Prim!_ was answered by the troops shut up in the Government offices, and the people, swarming up the _rejas_ and the balconies, fraternised with their brothers-in-arms, who had been intended, could they have been trusted by their commanders, to shoot them down, Madrid was for some days wholly in the hands of King Mob, and of King Mob armed. The victorious troops were still at some distance, the Queen and her _camarilla_ had fled across the frontier, the Government had vanished, and the people were a law unto themselves. Yet not one single act of violence was committed; absolute peace and quietness, and perfect order prevailed. The ragged men in the street formed themselves into guards: just as they were, they took up their positions at the abandoned Palace, at the national buildings and institutions; the troops were drawn up outside Madrid and its people were its guardians. Committees of emergency were formed; everything went on as if nothing unusual had happened, and not a single thing was touched or destroyed in the Palace, left wholly at the mercy of the sovereign people. The excesses which took place in some of the towns, after the brutal assassination of Prim and the abdication of Amadeo, were rather the result of political intrigue and the working of interested demagogues on the passions of people misled and used as puppets. With the advance of commerce and industry, and the massing of workers in the towns, has come, as in other countries, the harvest of the demagogue. Strikes and labour riots now and then break out, and the Spanish anarchist is not unknown. But the investment of their money in industrial and commercial enterprises, so largely increasing, is giving the people the best possible interest in avoiding disturbances of this, or of any other, kind: and as knowledge of more enlightened finance is penetrating to the working people themselves, the number who are likely to range themselves on the side of law and order is daily increasing. The improved railway and steamer communication with parts of the country heretofore isolated, much of it only completed since this book was begun--in fact, within the last few months--is bringing the northern and western ports into prominence. Galicia now not only has an important industry in supplying fresh fish for Madrid, but has a good increasing trade with Europe and America. Pontevedra and Vigo, as well as Villagarcia, are improving daily since the railway reached them. Fresh fruit and vegetables find a ready market, and new uses for materials are coming daily to the front. Esparto, the coarse grass which grows almost everywhere in Spain, has long been an article of commerce, as well as the algaroba bean--said to be the locust bean, on which John the Baptist might have thriven--for it is the most fattening food for horses and cattle, and produces in them a singularly glossy and beautiful coat. This bean, which is as sweet as a dried date, is given, husk and all, to the mules and horses at all the little wayside _ventas_, and is now used in some of the patent foods for cattle widely known abroad. The stalk of the maize is used for making smokeless powder, and the husks for two kinds of glucose, two of cotton, three of gum, and two of oil. _Glucea dextrina_ paste is used as a substitute for india-rubber. These products of the maize, other than its grain, are employed in the preparation of preserves, syrup, beer, jams, sweets, and drugs, and in the manufacture of paper, cardboard, mucilage, oils and lubricants, paints, and many other things. The imitation india-rubber promises to be the basis of a most important industry. Mixed with equal portions of natural gum, it has all the qualities of india-rubber, and is twenty-four per cent. less in cost. A great deal has been said about the depreciation of the value of the peseta (franc) since the outbreak of the war with America, but this unsatisfactory state of affairs is gradually mending; and the attention of the Government is thoroughly awakened to it. The law of May 17, 1898, and the Royal decree of August 9 provide that if the notes in circulation of the Bank of Spain exceed fifteen hundred millions, gold must be guaranteed to the half of the excess of circulation between fifteen hundred and two thousand, not the half of all the notes in circulation. The metal guarantee, silver and gold, must cover half of the note circulation, when the latter is between fifteen hundred and two thousand millions, and two-thirds when the circulation exceeds two thousand. But the Bank has not kept this precept, and there has, in fact, been an illegal issue of notes to the value of 6,752,813 pesetas. So states the _Boletin de la Cámara de Comercio de España en la Gran Bretáña_ of April 15, 1901. The _Boletin_, after giving an account of the English custom of using cheques against banking accounts, instead of dealing in metal or paper currency only, as in Spain, strongly advocates the establishment of the English method. It is only in quite recent years that there has been any paper currency at all in Spain; the very notes of the Bank of Spain were not current outside the walls of Madrid, and had only a limited currency within. Barcelona has long been called the Manchester of Spain, and in the days before the "Gloriosa" it presented a great contrast to all the other towns in the Peninsula. Its flourishing factories, its shipping, its general air of a prosperous business-centre was unique in Spain. This is no longer the case. Although the capital of Cataluña has made enormous strides, and would scarcely now be recognised by those who knew it before the Revolution, it has many rivals. Bilbao is already ahead of it in some respects, and other ports, already mentioned, are running it very close. Still, Barcelona is a beautiful city; its situation, its climate, its charming suburbs full of delightful country houses, its wealth of flowers, and its air of bustling industry, give a wholly different idea of Spain to that so often carried away by visitors to the dead and dying cities of which Spain has, unfortunately, too many. It is becoming more common for young Spaniards to come to England to finish their education, or to acquire business habits, and the study of the English language is daily becoming more usual. In Spain, as already remarked, no one speaks of the language of the country as "Spanish"; it is always "Castellano," of which neither Valencian, Catalan, Galician, still less Basque, is a dialect--they are all more or less languages in themselves. But Castellano is spoken with a difference both by the _pueblo bajo_ of Madrid and also in the provinces. The principal peculiarities are the omission of the _d_--_prado_ becomes _praö_--in any case the pronunciation of _d_, except as an initial, is very soft, similar to our _th_ in _thee_, but less accentuated. The final _d_ is also omitted by illiterate speakers; _Usted_ is pronounced _Uste_, and even _de_ becomes _e_. _B_ and _v_ are interchangeable. One used to see, on the one-horsed omnibus which in old times represented the locomotion of Madrid, _Serbicio de omnibus_ quite as often as _Servicio_. Over the _venta_ of El Espirito Santo on the road to Alcalá--now an outskirt of Madrid--was written, _Aqui se veve bino y aguaardieñte_--meaning, _Aqui se bebe vino_, etc. (Here may be drunk wine). The two letters are, in fact, almost interchangeable in sound, but the educated Spaniard never, of course, makes the illiterate mistake of transposing them in writing. The sound of _b_ is much more liquid than in English, and to pronounce _Barcelona_ as a Castilian pronounces it, we should spell it _Varcelona_; the same with _Córdoba_, which to our ears sounds as if written _Córdova_, and so, in fact, we English spell it. Spaniards, as a rule, speak English with an excellent accent, having all the sounds that the English possess, taking the three kingdoms, England, Scotland, and Ireland, into account. Our _th_, which is unpronounceable to French, Italians, and Germans, however long they may have lived in England, comes naturally to the Spaniard, because in his own _d_, soft _c_, and _z_ he has the sounds of our _th_ in "_th_ee" and "_th_in." His _ch_ is identical with ours, and his _j_ and _x_ are the same as the Irish and Scotch pronunciation of _ch_ and _gh_. The Spanish language is not difficult to learn--at any rate to read and understand--because there are absolutely no unnecessary letters, if we except the initial _h_, which is, or appears to us, silent--and the pronunciation is invariable. What a mine of literary treasure is opened to the reader by a knowledge of Spanish, no one who is ignorant of that majestic and poetic language can imagine. With the single exception of Longfellow's beautiful rendering of the _Coplas de Manrique_, which is absolutely literal, while preserving all the grace and dignity of the original, I know of no translation from the Spanish which gives the reader any real idea of the beauty of Spanish literature in the past ages, nor even of such works of to-day as those of Juan Valera and some others. Picturesque and poetic ideas seem common to the Spaniard to-day, as ever. Only the other day, in discussing the monument to be erected to Alfonso XII. in Madrid, one of the newspapers reported the suggestion--finally adopted, I think--that it should be an equestrian statue of the young King, "with the look on his face with which he entered Madrid after ending the Carlist war." What a picture it summons to the imagination of the boy King--for he was no more--in the pride of his conquest of the elements of disorder and of civil war, which had so long distracted his beloved country--a successful soldier and a worthy King! Spain is a country of surprises and of contradictions; even her own people seem unable to predict what may happen on the morrow. Those who knew her best had come to despair of her emancipation at the very moment when Prim and Topete actually carried the Revolution to a successful issue. Again, after the miserable fiasco of the attempt at a republic, the world, even in Spain itself, was taken by surprise by the peaceful restoration of Alfonso XII. I can, perhaps, most fitly end this attempt at showing the causes of Spain's decay and portraying the present characteristics of this most interesting and romantic nation by a quotation from the pen of one of her sons. Don Antonio Ferrer del Rio, Librarian of the Ministry of Commerce, Instruction, and Public Works, and member of the Reales Academias de Buenas Letras of Seville and Barcelona, thus writes, in his preface to his _Decadencia de España_, published in Madrid in 1850: "It is my intention to point out the true origin of the decadence of Spain. The imagination of the ordinary Spaniard has always been captivated by, and none of them have failed to sing the praises of, those times in which the sun never set on the dominion of its kings." While professing not to presume to dispute this former glory, Señor Ferrer del Rio goes on to say that he only aspires to get at the truth of his country's subsequent decay. "There was one happy epoch in which Spain reached the summit of her greatness--that of the Reyes Católicos, Don Fernando V. and Doña Isabel I. Under their reign were united the sceptres of Castilla, Aragon, Navarra, and Granada; the feudal system disappeared--it had never extended far into the eastern limits of the kingdom--the abuses in the Church were in great measure reformed, the administration of the kingdom with the magnificent reign of justice began to be consolidated, in the Cortes the powerful voice of the people was heard; and almost at the same moment Christian Spain achieved the conquest of the Moors, against whom the different provinces had been struggling for eight centuries, and the immortal discovery of a new world. Up to this moment the prosperity of Spain was rising; from that hour her decadence began. With her liberty she lost everything, although for some time longer her military laurels covered from sight her real misfortunes." After referring to the defeat of the _Comuneros_, and the execution of Padilla and his companions, champions of the people's rights, he goes on to show that while the aristocracy had received a mortal blow in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella in the cause of consolidating the kingdom and of internal order, they had retained sufficient power to trample on the liberties of the people, while they were not strong enough to form a barrier against the encroachments of the absolute monarchs who succeeded, or to prevent the power eventually lapsing into the hands of the Church. "Consequently, theocracy gained the ascendency, formidably aided and strengthened by the odious tribunal whose installation shadowed even the glorious epoch of Isabel and Fernando, absorbing all jurisdiction, and interfering with all government. Religious wars led naturally to European conflicts, to the Spanish people being led to wage war against heresy everywhere, and the nation--exhausted by its foreign troubles, oppressed internally under the tyranny of the Inquisition, which, usurping the name of 'Holy,' had become the right hand of the policy of Charles V., and the supreme power in the Government of his grandson, Philip II.--lost all the precious gifts of enlightenment in a blind and frantic fanaticism. The people only awoke from lethargy, and showed any animation, to rush in crowds to the _Autos da fé_ in which the ministers of the altar turned Christian charity into a bleeding corpse, and reproduced the terrible scenes of the Roman amphitheatre. Where the patricians had cried 'Christians to the lions!' superstition shouted 'Heretics to the stake!' Humanity was not less outraged than in the spectacle of Golgotha. Spanish monarchs even authorised by their presence those sanguinary spectacles, while the nobles and great personages in the kingdom thought themselves honoured when they were made _alguiciles_, or familiars of the holy office. Theocratic power preponderated, and intellectual movement became paralysed, civilisation stagnated." This has ever been the result of priestly rule. One can understand the feeling of the liberal-minded Spaniard of to-day that, without wishing to interfere with the charitable works inaugurated by the clergy, nor desiring in any way to show disrespect to the Church, or the religion which is dear to the hearts of the people, a serious danger lies, as the Press is daily pointing out, in the religious orders, more especially the Jesuits, obtaining a pernicious influence over the young, undermining by a system of secret inquisition the teachings of science, gaining power over the minds of the officers in the army, and establishing a press agency which shall become a danger to the constitution. Spain's outlook seems brighter to-day than it has ever been since her Golden Age of Isabella and Ferdinand; and it is the people who have awakened, a people who have shown what power lies in them to raise their beloved country to the position which is her right among the nations of the world. But prophecy is vain in a country of which it has been said "that two and two never make four." This year, if all go well meantime, Alfonso XIII. will take the reins in his own hands--a mere boy, even younger than his father was when called to the throne; than whom, however, Spain has never had a more worthy ruler. But Alfonso XII. had been schooled by adversity--he had to some extent roughed it amongst Austrian and English boys. He came fresh from Sandhurst and from the study of countries other than his own. To a naturally clever mind he had added the invaluable lesson of a knowledge of the world as seen by one of the crowd, not from the close precincts of a court and the elevation of a throne. For his son it may be said that he has been born and carefully educated in a country where absolutism is dead, and by a mother who, as Regent, has scrupulously observed the laws of the constitution. He will come, as King, to a country which has known the precious boon of liberty too long to part with it lightly; to a kingdom now, for the first time in history, united as one people; where commerce and mutual interests have taken the place of internecine distrust and hatred. It is only at the present moment that this happy condition of things is spreading over the country; each month, each week, giving fresh evidence of new industries arising, of fresh capital invested in the development of the country. It is in the sums so invested by the mass of the people that those who believe in a bright future for Spain place their hopes; but we may all of us wish the young monarch for whom his country is longing, "God-speed." PORTUGUESE LIFE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY CHAPTER XVIII LAND AND PEOPLE It has been said, and it is often repeated, that if you strip a Spaniard of his virtues, the residuum will be a Portuguese. This cruel statement is rather the result of prejudice than arising from any foundation in fact. It has a superficial cleverness which attracts some people, and especially those who have but an imperfect knowledge of the true life and character of the people thus stigmatised. Lord Londonderry, in Chapter VI. of his _Narrative of the Peninsular War_, writes thus of the difference of character between the two nations: "Having halted at Elvas during the night, we marched next morning soon after dawn; and, passing through a plain of considerable extent, crossed the Guadiana at Badajoz, the capital of Estremadura. This movement introduced us at once into Spain; and the contrast, both in personal appearance and in manners, between the people of the two nations, which was instantly presented to us, I shall not readily forget. Generally speaking, the natives of frontier districts partake almost as much of the character of one nation as of another.... It is not so on the borders of Spain and Portugal. The peasant who cultivates his little field, or tends his flock on the right bank of the Guadiana, is, in all his habits and notions, a different being from the peasant who pursues similar occupations on its left bank; the first is a genuine Portuguese, the last is a genuine Spaniard.... They cordially detest one another; insomuch that their common wrongs and their common enmity to the French were not sufficient, even at this time, to eradicate the feeling. "It was not, however, by the striking diversity of private character alone which subsisted between them, that we were made sensible, as soon as we had passed the Guadiana, that a new nation was before us. The Spaniards received us with a degree of indifference to which we had not hitherto been accustomed. They were certainly not uncivil.... Whatever we required they gave us, in return for our money; but as to enthusiasm or a desire to anticipate our wants, there was not the shadow of an appearance of anything of the kind about them. How different all this from the poor Portuguese, who never failed to rend the air with their _vivats_, and were at all times full of promises and protestations, no matter how incapable they might be of fulfilling the one or authenticating the other! The truth is that the Spaniard is a proud, independent, and grave personage; possessing many excellent qualities, but quite conscious of their existence, and not unapt to overrate them.... Yet with all this, there was much about the air and manner of the Spaniards to deserve and command our regard. The Portuguese are a people that require rousing; they are indolent, lazy, and generally helpless. We may value these our faithful allies, and render them useful; but it is impossible highly to respect them. In the Spanish character, on the contrary, there is mixed up a great deal of haughtiness, a sort of manly independence of spirit, which you cannot but admire, even though aware that it will render them by many degrees less amenable to your wishes than their neighbours." With due allowance for time and circumstances, much in this passage might have been written to-day instead of nearly ninety years ago, and one cause of the difference in feeling is no doubt explained truly enough. Perhaps some shallow persons are affected by the fact that in good looks the Portuguese are as a race inferior to the Spaniards. But there is no such real difference in character as to justify an impartial observer in using a phrase so essentially galling to England's allies, of whom Napier said: "The bulk of the people were, however, staunch in their country's cause ... ready at the call of honour, and susceptible of discipline, without any loss of energy." Throughout the whole Iberian Peninsula the main axiom of life appears to be the same: "Never do to-day what you can put off to to-morrow." On the left bank of the Guadiana it is summarised by the word _mañana_; on the right bank the word used is _amanhã_. There is only a phonetic distinction between the Spanish and the Portuguese idea. It is necessary for the traveller in these countries to keep this axiom well in mind, for it affords a clue to character and conduct the value of which cannot be over-estimated, and not only to the character and conduct of individuals, but to the whole national life of the inhabitants. In Portugal it permeates all public and municipal life, and appears to affect most especially that portion of the population who do not earn their living by manual labour. The higher one goes up the scale, the greater becomes the evidence of the ingrained habits of dilatoriness and procrastination, and so any hard work on the part of the lower class of toilers cannot be properly directed, and the commerce and industry of the country either dwindle away together, or fall into the hands of more energetic and active foreigners, who naturally carry off the profits which should be properly applied to the welfare and prosperity of the Lusitanians. The mineral wealth and natural resources of the country are enormous, and it is really sad to contemplate the little use that is made of the one or of the other unless developed by alien energy and worked by alien capital. As regards this latter important factor, the administrative corruption and the unsound state of the national finances render it difficult to find foreign capitalists who are able and willing to embark in the industrial enterprises, the successful issue of which affords the only chance for this most interesting nation to recover something of its ancient prosperity and to once more take a position in the world worthy of the land of the hardy sailors and valiant captains who have left so imperishable a record over the earth's surface. The intellectual life of Portugal seems to have ceased with Camoens. It is rather pathetic the way in which the ordinary educated Portuguese refers back to the great poet and to the heroic period which he commemorated. No conversation of any length can be carried on without a reference to Camoens and to Vasco da Gama. All history and all progress appear to have culminated and stopped then. Apparently nothing worthy of note has happened since. Camoens returned to Lisbon in 1569, and his great epic poem saw the light in 1572. He died in a public hospital in Lisbon in 1579 or 1580. In the latter year began the "sixty years' captivity," when Portugal became merely a Spanish province; yet there is no recollection of this--except the ingrained hatred of Spaniards and of everything Spanish--or of the shaking off the yoke in 1640, and of the battle of Amexial in 1663, where the English contingent bore the brunt of the battle, and the "Portugueses," as they are called by the author of _An Account of the Court of Portugal_, published in 1700, claimed the principal part of the honour. The traces of the Peninsular War have faded away, and on the lines of Torres Vedras there is scarcely any tradition of the cause of their existence. In Lisbon, indeed, there is one incident of later date than Camoens, which is considered worthy of remembrance,--the great earthquake of 1755,--but this can scarcely be looked upon as a national achievement, or a matter of intellectual development. That Camoens is a fitting object for a nation's veneration cannot for a moment be doubted. The high encomium passed upon "the Student, the Soldier, the Traveller, the Patriot, the Poet, the mighty Man of Genius" by Burton, appears to be in no way exaggerated. The healthful influence of his life and writings has done and is still doing good in his beloved country. But though the man who in his lifetime was neglected, and who was allowed to die in the depths of poverty and misery, is now the most honoured of his countrymen, and his rank as one of the world's great poets is universally acknowledged, his labours have been to a certain extent in vain. Not only industry, but culture, literature, and art appear to be infested with the mildew of decay. There is a good university at Coimbra, where alone, it is said, the language is spoken correctly. There is an excellent system of elementary and secondary schools, but in practice it is incomplete and subject to many abuses, like most public institutions in the country. The irregularities of the language, without authoritative spelling or pronunciation, and the best dictionary of which is Brazilian, have a bad effect upon the literature of the country. The language, more purely Latin in its base than either of the other Latin tongues, with an admixture of Moorish, and strengthened by the admission of many words of foreign origin, introduced during the period of great commercial prosperity, possesses ample means for the expression of ideas and of shades of thought, and though it loses somewhat of the musical quality of the other languages in consequence of a rather large percentage of the nasal tones which are peculiar to it, yet it will hold its own well with the remaining members of the group. Whatever the cause, however, there is hardly any general literature; almost the only books (not professional or technical) which are published, appear to be translations of French novels--not of the highest class. Perhaps in the study of archæology and folklore is to be found the most cultured phase of Portuguese intelligence. The Archæological Society of Lisbon strives to do good work, and has a museum with interesting relics in the old church of the Carmo, itself one of the most interesting and graceful ruins left out of the havoc caused by the great earthquake. As might be expected under such circumstances, the newspapers are, with few exceptions, of the "rag" variety. Conducted for the most part by clever young fellows fresh from Coimbra, they are violent in their views and incorrect in their news, especially with regard to foreign intelligence. They have some influence, no doubt, but not so much as the same type of newspaper in France. The habitual want of veracity of the Portuguese character is naturally emphasised in the newspapers, and no one in his senses would believe any statement made in them. A sure sign of the decadence of intellectual life, as well as of commercial activity, is to be found in the postal service, with its antiquated methods and imperfect arrangements. It is administered in a happy-go-lucky manner, which amuses at the same time that it annoys. Truly, with the post-office, it is well constantly to repeat to one's self the phrase: "Patience! all will be well to-morrow!" Probably it won't be well; but none but a foolish Englishman or Frenchman or German will bother about such a little matter. A kindly, brave, docile, dishonest, patient, and courteous people, who, to quote Napier "retain a sense of injury or insult with incredible tenacity;" and a due observance of their customs and proper politeness are so readily met, and friendly advances are so freely proffered, that a sojourn amongst them is pleasant enough. I have wondered that the tourist has not found his way more into this smiling land, though, no doubt, his absence is a matter of congratulation to the traveller in these regions. The country has many beauties, the people and their costumes are picturesque, and the cost of living--even allowing for a considerable percentage of cheating--is not excessive. There is, I suppose, a want of the ordinary attractions for the pure tourist or globe-trotter. There are churches, monuments, and objects of interest in goodly numbers, and there is beautiful scenery in great variety; but the true attraction to a thoughtful visitor lies in the contemplation of the people themselves. The Portuguese, taken as a whole, are not a good-looking race. The women, who, as a rule, are very pretty as little girls, lose their good looks as they grow up, and are disappointing when compared with the Spaniards. Sometimes one comes across fish- or market-women of considerable comeliness, which, when conjoined to the graceful figure and poise induced by the habitual carriage of heavy weights on the head and the absence of shoes, makes a striking picture. The costume is attractive, and the wealth of golden ear-rings, charms, chains, and such like, in which these women invest their savings, does not somehow seem anomalous or incongruous, though shown on a background of dirty and ragged clothing. One unfortunate peculiarity that cannot help being noticed is the number of persons whose eyes are not on the same level. When this does not amount to an actual disfigurement, it is still a blemish which prevents many a young girl from being classed as a beauty. This and the peculiar notched or cleft teeth seem to point to an hereditary taint. Also unmistakable signs of a greater or lesser admixture of black blood are numerous. As a rule, the Portuguese are dark-complexioned, with large dark eyes and black hair; but, of course, one meets many exceptions. The men of the working class are fond of wearing enormous bushy whiskers, and women of all classes are accustomed to wear _moustachios_. The thin line of softest down which accentuates the ripe lips of the _senhorina_ of some seventeen summers becomes an unattractive incident in the broad countenance of the stout lady of advancing years; and when, as sometimes happens, the hirsute appendages take the form of a thin, straggling beard, with a tooth-brush moustache, it can only be described as an unmitigated horror. Society in Portugal is very mixed. There are the old _fidalgos_, haughty and unapproachable, and often very poor, the descendants of the nobles whose duplicity, ability in intrigue, and want of patriotism are so often alluded to in the pages of Napier. Then there are the new nobility, the "titled Brasileros," as Galenga calls them, who have come back from Brazil to their native land with large fortunes acquired somehow, and who practically buy titles, as well as lands and houses. Wealthy tradesmen, also, hold a special position in the mixed middle class. There is, too, a curious blending of old-fashioned courtesy with democratic sentiments. The tradesman welcomes his customers with effusive politeness--shakes hands as he invites them to sit down, and chats with these perhaps titled ladies without any affectation or assumption. After a while the parties turn to business. A sort of Oriental bargaining takes place, the seller asking twice as much as the object is worth and he intends to take. The purchaser meets this with an offer of about half what she intends to give. With the utmost politeness and civility the negotiations are conducted on either side. Each gives way little by little, and in the end a bargain is struck. The amounts involved appear to be enormous, as the _reis_ are computed by thousands and hundreds; but, then, the _real_ is only worth about the thousandth part of three shillings and twopence at the present rate of exchange, and the long and exciting transaction, in all its various phases, has resulted in one or other of the parties having scored or missed a small victory. Verily, even to the loser, the pleasure is cheap at the price. The Brazilian element is most conspicuous in Lisbon, and partly in consequence that city is only a little modern capital, somewhat feebly imitating Paris in certain ways, and, consequently, lacking the individuality and interest of Oporto. Yet Lisbon has a charm of its own; and the beauties of the Aveneida, the Roscio (known to the English as the "Rolling Motion Square," from its curious pattern of black and white pavement), the Black Horse Square, the broad and beautiful Tagus, the hills whereon the city is built, and the lovely gardens with their sub-tropical vegetation, will repay a stay of some weeks' duration. Outside the mercantile element, there is considerable difficulty for a stranger to formulate the boundaries of other social strata. It would appear that the professions are in an indifferent position. Lawyers, of course, as in most other countries, are looked upon as rogues. How far this is the effect of the general prejudice, or whether it has any special foundation in fact, it would be hard to say. No doubt there are upright men amongst them, as in every other walk of life. There is a general idea that the medical training is lax, and the doctors, as a rule, are not highly considered. It is admitted, however, that they are as devoted, and as ready to risk their own lives, as those of other countries, a fact which was fully proved by several of the doctors at Oporto and Lisbon on the occasion of the outbreak of the plague in 1899. The system of fees in general use tends to damage the position of both lawyers and doctors. In reply to the question as to his indebtedness, the client or the patient is told: "What you please." This sounds courteous, but is, in effect, embarrassing, as it is hard to estimate what is a fair fee under the circumstances, and generally one or the other of the parties is dissatisfied, and a sore feeling is left behind. There are several orders of knighthood, which are showered about on occasion. The reasons for giving them are various. For instance, a Court tradesman may receive a decoration in lieu of immediate payment of a long-standing bill. The ribbons and buttons are not worn so freely as elsewhere on the Continent. The polite style in addressing a stranger is in the third person, and such titles as Your Excellency, Your Lordship, and Your Worship, sometimes enlarged with the adjective _illustrissimo_ (most illustrious), are common enough. When an Englishman is first addressed as _Vossa Illustrissima Excellencia_ (Your Most Illustrious Excellency), he begins to feel as if he were playing a part in one of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas. He soon gets used to it, however, and accepts the superlatives without turning a hair. Of all classes it may be said that their manners are, on the whole, good, and their morals generally lax. Cleanliness has no special place assigned to it amongst the virtues. If it comes next to godliness, then the latter must be very low down the scale. It seems incredible, but verminous heads are to be found in the ranks of well-to-do tradespeople. Fleas and bugs abound, and happy is he whose skin is too tough, or whose flesh is too sour, to attract these ferocious insects. There is not much luxury and there is a fair amount of thrift, while frugality of living is common, especially among the populace. One great characteristic is the intense love of children which is exhibited by all classes, and there is no surer way to the good will of a native than a kindness, however slight, to a child in whom he or she is interested. As is natural under such circumstances, the children are shockingly indulged and spoilt, with all the resultant unpleasant and evil consequences. Cats, also, are great favourites with the Portuguese, and the thousands of shabby animals of Lisbon and Oporto show no sign of fear if a stranger stops to stroke them. They are accustomed to kind treatment, and look upon all human beings as friends. As a rule, a rather large number of servants are employed. They are poorly paid, and in many households indifferently fed and housed. Often they are dirty, lazy, dishonest sluts. They chatter shrilly with the master or mistress, answer and argue when told of any shortcoming, and are always ready to go off at a moment's notice. But they are often capable of devoted service, and of a sincere desire to be obliging, and may always be counted on to exhibit the utmost kindness to the children of the house. Their written references, as a rule, are frauds. If you ask for the _boas referencias_ (good references), so often mentioned in the advertisements of _criadas_ (female servants), you will probably find that, even if genuine, they are antiquated, and that they leave many gaps between the various periods of service which can only be filled up by conjecture. _Criadas_ are not, as a rule, of immaculate virtue, and give some trouble by their desire to go to _festas_ and to servants' balls. The male servants are, as a rule, better than the _criadas_. Servants are somewhat roughly treated, and are ordered about as if they were dogs. It is always said that they do not understand or appreciate milder or more civil treatment, and are inclined to despise a master or mistress who uses the Portuguese equivalent to "please," or who acknowledges a service with thanks. I am inclined to doubt this, both from my personal observation and from a casual remark made to me by the landlady of a hotel at Cintra, that her waiters and servants much preferred English to native visitors, because of the greater politeness and consideration shown to them by the former. Of course, as in all other countries, servants are described as one of the greatest plagues in life; but this must be taken for what it is worth. And what would the ladies do without such a subject to grumble about? Portugal is a poor country, despite its natural resources. The wealthy people are few, and consist mainly of returned Brazilians. It cannot be said, either, that the classes in the enjoyment of a competence constitute a fair average of the community. But the poor are very abundant. Wages are terribly low, even a foreman in an engineering shop getting only a milrei a day, averaging _3s. 2d._ in English money. On the other hand, it must be remembered that in such a climate the "living wage" is necessarily lower than in England. Many necessities in England are superfluities or even inconveniences under sunnier skies. The people, too, are very frugal, and even in towns, though rents be high, all other necessaries are moderate in price. The standard of life is not high, and the people are contented with a style of living which would be indignantly rejected by English labourers. The artisans are not good workmen, but plod on fairly well, and, with the exception of _festas_, require few holidays. They prefer to work on Sundays, and grumble at their English employers, who generally split the difference, by closing their shops for half a day. They look upon this as a grievance, however much they may be assured that it makes no difference in their wages. [Illustration: A COUNTRY CABIN IN GALICIA] A very hard-working class of men are the Gallegos, the natives of Galicia, who are nearly as numerous in Lisbon as they were when Napier wrote, and where, then as now, they act as porters, messengers, scavengers, and water-carriers, and are found in all sorts of lowly and laborious occupations. As porters and messengers, they have an excellent reputation for honesty, and for being most civil and obliging. Gallenga, a fairly shrewd observer, considers that the employment of these Spaniards has deplorable effects on the character of the Portuguese nation. I cannot go all the way with him in the gloomy view he takes of it, but it must be conceded that the existence of such a body of aliens (estimated at twelve thousand in Lisbon alone) working hard and well at occupations which the Portuguese will not do at all, or, if they attempt them, will do indifferently; herding together some ten or twelve in a small room, living on maize bread and a clove of garlic washed down with water; accepting thankfully a very attenuated hire, and yet contriving to send substantial savings back to Galicia,--must considerably affect the labour market and tend to keep wages low. They also close certain forms of labour to the native worker, and cause these industries to be looked on with contempt. In towns like Lisbon and Oporto a great number of persons are employed in the fish trade. The fish-girls, with their distinctive costumes, their bare feet, and the graceful poise of the heavy basket of fish on their heads, are a very characteristic feature of both towns. The costumes differ in the two cities, mainly in the head-gear, but they are both picturesque and dirty, and emit the same "ancient and fish-like smell." The men, too, with their bare legs and feet, balancing a long pole on the shoulder, with a basket of fish at each end, will cover a marvellous amount of ground in a day at the curious trotting pace which they affect. Miles inland these men will carry their finny wares, stopping at the public water-supplies to moisten the cloth which protects the fish from the sun and dust. These may or may not be fresh when the day's work is nearly done, but housewives purchasing a supply in the afternoon had better keep a very sharp look-out. Fish plays an important part in the domestic economy of dwellers within a reasonable distance of the sea, and forms a considerable item in the food-stuffs of the working classes. It is fairly cheap, and is cooked so as to get the full value of it. More important than the fresh fish is the salted cod (_bacalhao_). This, which Napier described as "the ordinary food of the Portuguese," is the backbone of the worker's _menu_. It is not fragrant, nor is it inviting in aspect in its raw state, but it is said to be highly nutritive, and it can certainly be cooked in ways which make it appetising. The midday meal, which the wife brings to her husband at his work, and shares with him as they sit in the shade, is often composed of a _caldo_ (soup) made of _bacalhao_, or of all sorts of oddments, thickened with beans and flavoured with garlic, accompanied by a bit of rye-bread or of _broa_, the bread made from maize. These soups and breads, accompanied by salads, onions, tomatoes, and other vegetables, washed down with draughts of a light red table-wine of little alcoholic strength, form the not unwholesome average diet of the worker with his hands. If he wants to get drunk, he can do so, with some difficulty, by imbibing sufficient wine, but the easiest method is to drink the fearful crude spirit _aguardente_. If he survives, he gets horribly, brutally drunk, and possibly does some mischief before he recovers. But it is only fair to say that he but rarely gets drunk, and that when he is thirsty he quenches his thirst with water, with a harmless decoction of herbs or lemonade, or with the almost innocuous wine. This sobriety is not the result of any temperance legislation or restrictions. No license is required for opening a shop for the sale of liquor. Only revenue dues and _octroi_ duties have to be paid, and, of course, there is a liability to police supervision, which provides the police with a means of increasing their very inadequate pay by bribes or blackmail. The amusements of the workman in the town are few enough, and mostly of a domestic character. He sits on his doorstep, or on a bench in the nearest gardens. He smokes the eternal cigarette, gossips with his neighbours, plays with his children, and pets the cat. His only real playtimes are the _festas_, when for some hours he indulges in revelry--if, indeed, it be worthy of such a title. He reads the newspaper but little,--if he can read at all,--which is, perhaps, a good thing for him, and he is generally a Republican. This Republicanism is mostly academic, but the "red" type is not wanting, and a fiery spirit might be roused at any time, with consequences that cannot be foreseen. Of course, the younger men tinkle the guitar, and make love more or less openly to the girls. When age overtakes a man or misfortune overpowers him, there is no poor law to take him in charge, but there are extensive and well-organised charities in every centre which are eager and willing to assist those who are temporarily afflicted, and to afford sustenance--a bare sustenance, perhaps--to those who are permanently disabled. The amusements of the town--the theatre, the concert, and the opera--do not affect the workman much; his budget does not allow of such indulgence, except on the occasion of a free performance. Though they are fairly musical and love the theatre, the Portuguese have no really æsthetic side to their character. There is a queer song and dance, topical and rather broad, the _chula_, the somewhat monotonous refrain of which is to be heard everywhere and at all hours, and from all manners of lips. The washerwomen kneeling by the brook bang the unfortunate clothes on the flat stones in rhythm with the tune, and beguile the time with the interminable song. It arises in unexpected places, and is a fairly sure item in the gathering of the younger folk, both in towns and villages, in the cool of the evening. Concerts and theatres are fairly patronised by the more moneyed classes, but the performances are not, as a rule, of a very high calibre. There is a subsidised theatre at Lisbon, but it does little to elevate the dramatic art elsewhere. CHAPTER XIX PORTUGUESE INSTITUTIONS The Portuguese army is raised by conscription, each parish, according to size, having to contribute an annual quota of young men between twenty and twenty-one years of age. These have to serve three consecutive years with the colours, and then pass into the reserve for another ten years. During the latter period no conscript can leave the country without a passport. In time of peace the army is supposed to number about thirty thousand men, and on the war footing should consist of about one hundred and twenty thousand men and two hundred and sixty-four guns. The men, who in summer wear brown holland clothes, look hardy enough, and, according to ordinary report, are worthy of the plucky _caçadores_ of the Peninsular War, who, according to Napier, made most excellent soldiers when properly led. It is still said of the Portuguese soldier that with three beans in his pocket he can march and fight for a week without making any further demands upon the commissariat department. This military service does not affect the nation much, either morally or physically, and the only economical effect is probably that it provides a fruitful source of plunder to corrupt officials. As any man can free himself of the three years' service with the colours by paying a sum of about £24, it may be imagined what an opening this affords for special peculation. The navy consists of about five thousand men, and of a few modern war-ships, and of some old boats whose seaworthiness is questionable. The best ship at present on the list is the cruiser _Dom Carlos_, which was sent to take part in the naval pageant which formed the first portion of the funeral of Queen Victoria. The sailors, who are much to be seen in Lisbon, where the great naval barracks are situated, look smart enough, and as the Portuguese have always been good sailors, it may safely be predicted that, in case of necessity, they will make the most of the limited means at their disposal, or of such of them as have not been utterly ruined by official indifference or worse. In the towns one meets men in various employments, such as the police, who have served in the army, and still retain some sort of soldierly appearance, but once get into the country, and it is vain to look for any evidence of military service amongst the rural population. The country-folk are a patient lot; most of them ruminants, like their own oxen. Sleepy always, and slow in their movements, they are often devoted to the farm, or _quinta_, on which they work, and are, perhaps, slightly more honest than their fellows in the towns. They are frugal enough, and enjoy their huge junks of dark bread, washed down with water, at their midday meal, and a sound sleep under the shade of an orange tree or a eucalyptus, or a bit of a wall, until it is necessary to begin work again. The peasant costumes are not inviting; they are simply squalid. Costumes in the towns are much better. Still, on festal days the village women deck themselves out with bright-hued shawls, and the men wind brighter scarfs round their waists to keep up their patchwork trousers, and thus relieve what would otherwise be the intolerable dinginess of the whole scene. The farmer himself, mounted on his mule, with high-peaked saddle and enormous wooden stirrups decorated with brass, his cloak, with the bright scarlet or blue lining folded outwards, strapped on in front, with his short jacket and broad-brimmed hat, offers a smart and typical figure. In town or country, the beautiful oxen are worthy of admiration. They are the most satisfactory of all the rural animals. Horses, shabby and attenuated, little sheep of a colour from black to dirty grey, showing affinity to goats, and having neither the grace of the latter nor the sleepy comeliness of our own sheep, black and white cows whose points would not be much thought of by judges at an agricultural show, goats of all sorts of breeds, and finally pigs of a most lanky and uninviting appearance, form the stock of the farms. Heaps of chickens of all sorts run about everywhere, and enjoy fine dust-baths by the side of the road. The aspect of the country varies much between north and south. In the former, one sees real grass and hedges, and the bright flowers that are common everywhere look all the better for their green background. The commonest hedge in the south, and occasionally in the north, is made of a few layers of stones loosely laid together with a row of aloe plants on the top. These grow formidable in time, with huge sharp-pointed leaves, and they present a curious appearance when at intervals in such a row plants send up their huge flowering stems from nine to twelve feet high, looking at a little distance like telegraph poles. Despite the squalid clothes of the peasants, there are many picturesque aspects of rural life. The driving of large herds of cattle by mounted men, armed with long goads, is an interesting as well as an artistic sight, and the same may be said of the primitive agricultural occupations. The crops are harvested with a sickle, and you may wake up some morning to see the field opposite your house invaded by some twenty to thirty reapers, men and women, boys and girls, patiently sawing their way through the wheat or barley, or whatever it is. The corn is threshed out with the flail, or trodden out by the oxen--all operations fair to look upon. Forms of cultivation interesting to watch are the very primitive ploughing, the hoeing of the maize, and all those connected with the culture of the vines and the orange and other fruit trees, and especially the irrigation, which is so important to these latter. In fact, one of the most charming of rural sights is the old water-wheel, groaning and creaking as it is turned by the patient ox or mule or pony, splashing the cool water from the well out of its earthen pots--each with a hole in the bottom--and discharging it into the trough leading to the irrigation channels or to the reservoir from which the water may afterwards be let off in the required direction. But agriculture is not always so backward and primitive. There are great landowners and large farmers who use the newest and best agricultural implements. The Government does what it can to encourage the use of artificial manures, and there are societies which render important services to agriculturists and to fruit-growers. Amid such labours live the quiet country-folk. They have no thought of anything; they have no special amusements beyond an occasional _festa_ and a dance. They sit round the village well in the evening, and when not talking scandal, tell stories about--"Once upon a time there was a poor widow with one or more daughters," or "There was once a king's son"--often a Moorish king. The old well-known tales reappear, modified to the Portuguese character and morality. The following is a story taken from Braga's excellent book: "There was, once upon a time, a poor widow that had only one daughter. This girl, going out to bathe in the river with her companions on St. John's eve, at the advice of one of her friends, placed her ear-rings on the top of a stone, lest she should lose them in the water. While she was playing about in the river an old man passed along, who, seeing the ear-rings, took them and placed them in a leather bag he was carrying. The poor child was much grieved at this, and ran after the old man, who consented to restore her belongings if she would search for them inside his sack. This the girl did, and forthwith the artful old man closed the mouth of the bag and carried her off therein. He subsequently told her that she must help him to gain a living, and that whenever he recited-- 'Sing, sack, Else thou wilt be beaten with a stick!' she was to sing lustily. Wherever they came he placed his sack on the ground, and addressed the above formula to it, when the poor girl sang as loud as she could: 'I am placed in this sack, Where my life I shall lose, For love of my ear-rings, Which I left in the stream.' The old man obtained much money from the audiences attracted by his singing leather bag. The authorities of one town, however, became suspicious, and, examining the sack while its owner was asleep, found and released the child. They filled up the bag with all the filth they could pick up, and left it where they had found it. The little girl was sent back to her mother. When the old man woke next morning, and took out the sack to earn his breakfast, the usual incantation had no effect, and when he applied the threatened stick the bag burst, and all the filth came out, which he was compelled to lick up by the enraged populace." At the close of the story the cigarettes glow, the white teeth gleam, the bushy whiskers wag, the old women chuckle, the girls giggle, and the youths snigger, and as the short twilight is now over, the group breaks up, and each vanishes into his or her own vermin-pasture to sleep until _amanhã_ has actually become to-day, and the sun shines on another exact repetition of yesterday. The Portuguese are superstitious, and are devout up to a certain point, and the clerics are exceedingly intolerant. In the morning one sees, as in all Roman Catholic countries, devout worshippers kneeling about in the churches before their favourite shrines, but, unlike the practice of most Roman Catholic countries, the churches are closed at or about noon for the most part, and are only open for special masses after that time. The procession of the Host is greeted with most extreme reverence, and whether it be in the fashionable Chiado at Lisbon or along a country lane, all uncover and make the sign of the cross, and many, even fashionably dressed ladies and gentlemen, kneel down and bow themselves humbly as the sacred wafer passes by, borne by the gorgeously vested priest; at least, in the cities the vestments are gorgeous, and a long train of acolytes and attendants makes the procession imposing, but in the country the vestments are often mildewed and decayed, and the one or two rustic attendants are not dignified in appearance. Still, the sacred symbol is the same, and the reverence and the devotion are the same. There is an excessive hierarchy for the size of the country, there being in Portugal proper three ecclesiastical provinces, ruled respectively by the Patriarch of Lisbon and by the Archbishops of Braga and Evora. Besides these, there is the colonial province which is ruled by the Archbishop of Goa, Archpriests and other dignitaries abound, so that a priest has something to look forward to in the way of promotion; and yet, as a rule, the priests perform their duties without zeal and in a slovenly manner. One often hears it said that their behaviour and their morality leave much to be desired. There are among them gentlemen of blameless life and even of ascetic practices, but it is commonly reported that, as a whole, they are of inferior birth and education. It is not easy for a stranger to form any opinion on these points, but it must be conceded that their appearance is generally suggestive of the truth of the statement, and it may be admitted that there is an undue proportion of ignoble and sensuous faces amongst them. Funerals are occasions of great pomp, and are often picturesque enough, while the masses for the dead at intervals after and on the anniversary are, no doubt, profitable to the Church. By attending these one has a good opportunity of testifying to the esteem in which the deceased was held, or to one's good will towards the family or representatives. These masses are generally advertised in the papers, with thanks to those friends who have attended funeral masses. As there is scarcely any intellectual activity in Portugal, there is practically no religious thought. A dull acquiescence in the dictates of the Church may be crossed by an occasional gleam of rebellion against sacerdotalism, roused by some temporary stirring up of the hatred felt against the Jesuits. But it in no way alters the habitual attitude of the people towards religion and its outward manifestations. One thing is certain, and that is that in town or country a man or a woman must be in the lowest depths of poverty and distress to refuse to throw a few _reis_ into the bags of the licensed mendicants who, bareheaded, and clad in scarlet or white gowns, go round soliciting alms for the support of the churches on whose behalf they are sent out. As is customary in most countries, the women are more amenable to religious influences than the men, and are more under the dominion of the priest. This is not likely to be altered yet awhile, for, under the present system of education and bringing up, the female portion of the community is not only not intellectual, but may even be described as being unintelligent. They are slovenly, and cannot be described as good housewives. They are pleasure-loving and garrulous, though this latter trait is not, I suppose, a specially national characteristic. They do much hard work, especially in the fields. In the classes above (if _above_ be the proper word) the hand-workers, the young girls are still kept very strictly, and are not allowed to go out alone. Their knowledge of life is limited to the view from the windows of their homes, where they may be seen looking out on the street scenes below whenever the shade allows them to stand at the window or on the balcony. No "new woman" movement of any importance has yet taken place, and though there are modifications in woman's position in the national life, it is probable that it will take one if not more generations before women in Portugal achieve the emancipation which their sisters have attained in more progressive countries. In one circumstance, however, woman does take her place by the side of man, and that is in the bull-ring--not, indeed, in the arena, but in every part of the amphitheatre, from the worst seats on the sunny side to the costly boxes in the shade. She takes as great an interest in the bull-fight as the man, and if she does not shout and swear, or fling her hat into the ring in her enthusiasm, she delights probably more than the man in the beauty of the spectacle, and appreciates almost as fully the feats of skill and daring which give such special attraction to the national pastime. This is a right royal sport, and as in Portugal the horrid cruelty which defaces it in Spain is absent, there is no overwhelming reason why the women should not sit and applaud the picturesque scene and the exhibitions of pluck and agility shown by the performers. The scene is really magnificent, and the enthusiasm of the audience must be witnessed in order to understand the underlying potentialities of the Portuguese character. The vile abuse of a bull who will not show fight is comical to listen to. Probably, in such a case, the bull has been through it all before, and he does not care to make wild rushes at cloaks which have nothing substantial behind them. So he paws up the sand and looks theatrical, but refuses to budge. Then a nimble _bandarilhero_ faces him, and fixes a pair of _bandarilhas_ in his neck--one on each side if he can manage it. This is unpleasant, no doubt, but the bull's former experience tells him that it is not serious, and not even very painful. It was irritating the first time, but no well-bred bull should condescend to be upset by such a trifle. Another pair of _bandarilhas_, and yet another, are fixed into his shoulders by their barbed points--or the attempt is made to fix them. Then the bull begins to play the game in a condescending sort of way. Then the great man, the _espada_ himself, comes on the scene, and arranges and waves his scarlet flag, and walks up to the obstinate animal, perhaps flicks him in the nostrils with his pocket-handkerchief and calls him _vacca_ (cow)! At last, seemingly out of good nature, the bull rushes at the red flag, has the highly decorated dart stuck between his shoulders, by the daring _espada_ who may perform some other feat, listens to the applause, and laughs to himself when he hears the bugle-call and sees the trained oxen rush in with their long bells and their attendant herdsmen, and with more or less of a frolicsome air he trots out of the arena in their company and, having had his sore shoulders attended to, and having had a good feed, chews the cud with a pleasant reminiscence of the afternoon's work. It is a mistake not to kill the bull, which is not cruel in itself, but which would prevent some rather tiresome interludes when a knowing old bull refuses to be coaxed into playing his part of the game. Far different, however, is the scene when a really spirited bull comes in with a rush and charges wildly at the brightly attired performers, and makes them skip over the barrier, often leaving their cloaks behind them. Sometimes the bull skips over too, and then there is a most amusing scene, as performers, attendants, and all vault back over the barrier into the ring itself. When the _espada_ finally performs his courageous feat under such conditions, he obtains such an ovation as his skill deserves. Hats of all sorts and shapes are cast to him in the arena, which he has to pick up and throw or hand back to the admirers who testify their satisfaction in this curious manner. Cigars, also, are thrown at the successful bull-fighter's feet, and these he keeps. The most famous _espadas_ are all Spaniards, and they all wear the traditional dress of their calling. If, on the one hand, there is not the thrill of the actual killing of the bull, on the other there are no miserable old horses to be ripped up, and no smell of blood. Next to the actual bull-fights come the selections of the young bulls from the herds, when the members of the Tauromachian Societies exhibit their skill, and where many a gay young fellow gets much knocked about in exhibiting his agility or the want of it. Other sports cannot be said to have any marked existence. Dancing is a national amusement, and a few of the Anglicised Portuguese go in for cricket and lawn-tennis. Cycling, though not unknown, is far from common, the roads being, as a rule, much too bad for comfortable or even for safe riding. Local and provincial government leaves much to be desired in Portugal. The keeping up of the roads is inconceivably bad. A royal road (_estrada real_) is generally the worst of all, and, with such an example before them, it is not to be wondered at that local authorities neglect their duties in this matter. "No capital city in Europe suffers so much as Lisbon from the want of good police regulations." This quotation from Napier might very well be written to-day, and extended to include all Portuguese towns. Perhaps it is fair to say that it is not so much the regulations that are at fault as the incompetence and indifference of each local authority, which irresistibly suggest that corruption alone can account for such a mass of evil. The administrative machine is elaborate, and ought to be more effective. First, there is the district, ruled by the Civil Governor, an officer somewhat resembling a French prefect, with its corporate body known as the District Commission. There are seventeen districts, which are subdivided into two hundred and sixty-two communes. The head of a commune is the Administrator, and the corporation is known as the Municipal Chamber. The last subdivision is that of the communes into parishes, of which there are three thousand seven hundred and thirty-five. Each of these has as its head an officer called a _regedor_, and occupies the attention of a _junta de parochia_, or parish council. The scavenging, sanitation, watering, paving, and all the other works which fall within the sphere of the municipality or local authority are defective and neglected. The one bright point, both in Oporto and Lisbon, is the care, skill, and attention with which the public gardens and squares are tended. The palms, tree-ferns, cacti, and other semi-tropical and sub-tropical plants are beautiful in themselves, and are arranged and intermingled with other trees and shrubs in a most artistic manner. The grass (upon which no one, of course, may walk) is kept green by constant watering, and affords a delightful contrast to the generally dry and dusty aspect of the city. Another organisation which is generally efficient and well conducted is that of the fire brigades. The municipal firemen--the _bombeiros_--are often stimulated by a healthy rivalry with the volunteer brigades, which are numerous, well found, and, as a rule, well managed. The latter are often centres of good charitable work outside their actual fire service, and they are valuable as offering a fair and worthy opportunity for the display of sound public spirit and good feeling. Though Portuguese laws are, as a rule, admirable in themselves, the administration thereof is bad in the extreme, and the judiciary have a reputation for turpitude remarkable even amongst the recognised corruption of all officials. In Portugal proper there are two judicial districts--that of Lisbon and that of Oporto. Each has a high court known as a _Relação_, and there are inferior courts of various styles and titles. Above all is the Supreme Tribunal of Justice at Lisbon, which is the final court of appeal, and the reputation of which is somewhat better than that of any other tribunal. The administration of criminal justice is naturally amongst the worst. According to common repute, the only consideration with the judges is how they are to get the costs paid--whether they are more likely to obtain them through an acquittal, which throws them on the prosecutor, or by a conviction. Also, it is generally said that the police themselves are recruited from amongst the very lowest classes. The prisons are described as being something awful, only to be equalled in Morocco and savage countries. In the market-place of beautiful Cintra stands the prison, against the barred windows of which crowd the prisoners, begging for money, cigarettes, and food, which are supplied to them through the prison bars by their friends and sympathisers, and by soft-hearted people. Those who are incarcerated in the upper story have baskets, which they lower by means of strings, so that they may be supplied in the same manner. This seems to have amused Miss Leck (_Iberian Sketches_, Chap. VI.), but it assumes a much more serious aspect when one considers that in those filthy dens all the prisoners are huddled together--old men and boys, the murderer and the petty thief, habitual criminals and unfortunate persons taken into custody on mere suspicion, or charged with an alleged breach of some police or even railway regulation; for it must be remembered that a station-master has nearly the same power as a policeman in taking a person into custody. "No one shall be put in prison," says the Portuguese code, "except under special circumstances"; but when the exceptions are considered, they are found to cover nearly every abuse of authority on the part of the pettiest official which can be conceived. Hence, all persons are obliged to submit to gross injustice and to a certain amount of blackmail if they wish to avoid the noisome experiences of a Portuguese gaol. The Portuguese must be undoubtedly "of a docile and orderly disposition," as Napier says, or the crying injustices to which they submit with such patience would lead them to revolt; and if this were to happen, who could attempt to predict what excesses would be left uncommitted by a violent southron mob whose passions had been roused to such a pitch of activity? Perhaps _paciencia_ and _amanhã_ have their utility, and enable the people to bear the ills they have. They can even joke and caricature themselves, and though the comic journals are neither brilliant nor artistic, they show, at least, that a sense of humour is still left in our Lusitanian friends. INDEX Academies, 238, 243 Actors, 242 Agriculture, 167 _et seq._ Alfonso XII., 28, 104, 144, 268, 273 Alfonso XIII., 98, 272 Amadeo, King, 143 American War, 192 _et seq._ Amusements, 111 _et seq._ Andaluces, 33 Andalucia, 33 Apostolic party, 9 Aragon, 29 Army, 183 _et seq._ Art, 236 _et seq._ Artillery, 187 Artistic furniture, 176 Arts and crafts, 175, 176 Asturian nurses, 27 Asturias, 26 Asturias, Princess of, 103, 219 Austrian kings, 15, 21, 22 _Autos-da-fé_, 18, 200, 201 Bank of Spain, 265 Barcelona, 266 Basque Provinces, 26, 27, 188 Basques, 28 Beggars, 226 Berwick y Alva, Duke of, 184 Bilbao, 11, 161, 177, 178, 266 _Boletin de la Cámara de Comercio_, 163, 265 _Bueyes_, 28 Bull-fighters, 126 _et seq._ Bulls, 95 _et seq._ Bureaucracy, 148, 156 _Cabestros_, 95 Caciqueism, 145, 148 _et seq._ Cæsars, Spanish, 11, 12 _Camarilla_, 6 Campoamor, 61 Cánovas del Castillo, 136 Capital, 174, 175 Carlos, Don, 7, 9, 10 Carriages, 88-90 Casa de Campo, 84, 85 Castelar, 139 _et seq._ _Castellano_, 266 Castile, 31 Castilians, 11, 25, 32 Catalans, 25 Cataluña, 17, 175, 266 Cats, 79 _et seq._ Cervantes, 47, 48 Cervera, Admiral, 47, 190, 193 _Cesantes_, 145-147 Characteristics, 38 _et seq._, 260 Charitable institutions, 227 Charles III., 22 Charles V., 14 Children, 233 Church, the, 9, 199 Cigar industry, 177 Clerical question, 21, 221, 272 Climate of Madrid, 65 _et seq._ Climates of Spain, 167, 170 Cock-fighting, 112 Colonies, 147 Commerce, 156 _et seq._ Concas Palan, 190 Confessional, 218, 222, 223 Conscription, 188 Constitution, 154 Consumption, 67, 68 Costume, national, 78, 79 Courage, 42 _et seq._ Court, 97 _et seq._ Cristina, Queen, 9, 98 Cuba, 147, 195 Dance and song, 113 _et seq._ Dances, modern, 58, 59 Dances, national, 112 _et seq._ Dances, religious, 208 Daoiz y Valarde, 46 Democratic feeling, 6, 39 Dignity, 38 Donkeys, 90, 92 _Dos de Mayo_, 45 Drama, modern, 209, 240 _et seq._ Dramas, religious, 209-212 Dress of Spanish women, 62 Echegaray, 241 Education, 159, 213 Electra, 219, 242 Electrical science, 214 Elephant and bull, 126 Emperors, Roman, 12 _Empleomania_, 145, 146, 152 Engineers, 214 Espinosa, Monteros de, 102 Estremadura, 32 Etiquette of Spanish Court, 100 _et seq._ Exports, 177 Factories, 175, 176, 266 Ferdinand and Isabella, 5, 13, 15 Ferdinand VII., 8, 22 _Feria_ of Seville, 34 Fertility of soil, 73 _Fiestas_, 116, 206 Flowers, 73 Folklore, 253 _et seq._ Ford, 51 French influence, 173 Fuente Castellana, 78 _Fueros_, 10, 28, 188 _Fueros_ of Aragon, 29 Gala procession, 108, 109 Galdós, 219, 248 Galicia, 25, 26 Gallegos, 26, 87 Games, national, 111 Gayangos, 246 Geographical features, 178 Gloriosa, La, 10, 262 Goths, 12, 24 Government, 142 _et seq._ Government, local, 153 Grandes of Spain, 100 Guitar, 113, 238 Hippodrome, 62 Horse-racing, 125 Horses, 91 _et seq._ Iberian rejon, 118 Iberian unity, 251 Incas, 18 Independence, War of, 45 Industries, 161, 263 _et seq._ Infantas, 54, 103, 106 Influence of the Press, 129 Inquisition, 19, 199, 200, 271 Irrigated land, 172 Irrigation, 171 _et seq._ Isabel II., 6, 53, 107, 207 Isabel la Católica, 5, 8, 15, 29, 270 Jaime, Don, 8 _Jota Aragonesa_, 114 Jesuits, 199, 213, 217, 218, 220 _et seq._, 272 Journalists, 130 King Alfonso XIII., 272, 273 Kings, Austrian, 21, 22 Kings, Bourbon, 8, 22, 118 Labour, 174 Lace, 165 Lagartijo, 122 _et seq._ Land and people, 1 Land laws, 173 Landscape round Madrid, 71, 72 Land value, 172 Language, 266 _et seq._ Literature, modern, 246 _et seq._ Madrazo, 239, 244 Madrid, modern, 77 Madrid, old, 77 _Mañana_, 52, 74, 195, 197 Manners, 40 Mantilla, 79 Manufactures, 164, 165, 175 _et seq._ Manzanares, 83 Marriage customs, 229 _et seq._ Medical science, 215 Meetings, political, 138 Mendizábal, 9, 23 Metal work, 176 Military system, 183 _et seq._ Mineral wealth, 160 _et seq._ Montpensier, Duke of, 104 _et seq._ Moors, 17 _et seq._ Mules, 90, 188, 255 Music, 81, 236 Narvaez, 249 National feeling, 184, 185, 193 National games, 31 Navy, 47, 189 _et seq._ Newspapers, 132 _et seq._ Nicknames, 106 _Noche Buena_, 108 Orders, religious, 203, 213, 219, 221, 272 Ostriches, 85 Outlook, 260 _et seq._ Oxen, draught, 94 Pacing horses, 90 Painters, 239 _et seq._ Palace Royal, 61 _Palaciö_, 23 Pardo Bazan, 251 Pardo, el, 85 Parque de Madrid, 71 _Pasos_, 210 Passion plays, 209, 212 Pavía, 140 _Pavo, pelando el_, 230 Peasants, 24 _et seq._ Pelayo, 61 _Pelota_, 31, 111 People, 38 _et seq._ Philip II., 16, 202, 271 Pigs, 166, 167 Poetry, 114, 268 Politeness, national, 39, 40, 51, 52 Political parties, 7, 134 _et seq._ Politicians, 50, 135 _Pollos_ and _pollas_, 88, 89 Ports and harbours, 178 Pottery, 175, 176 Poverty, 226 Press, 129 _et seq._ Priesthood, 199, 218 Prim, 142-144 Procrastination, 52 Productive land, 172 _Pronunciamientos_, 144, 145, 147, 186 Protestants, 216 Pyrenees, 25, 30 Queen Cristina, 97, 98, 103 Queen Mercédes, 97, 106 _Quemadero_, 20, 201 Quijote, Don, 48 Quixotic characteristics, 48 Race, 24 Railways, 157 _et seq._ Regent, 9, 98, 145 Religion, 37, 109, 198 _et seq._ Republic, 139, 141 Restoration, 144 Revolution, 10, 262 Rice, 161 Riding, 89 Roads, 180 Roman Spain, 11, 12 Romero Robledo, 136, 137 Sagasta, 151 _Sala_, 33 Salic Law, 8, 9 Schools, 159, 160 _Seises, los_, 208, 209 Sericulture, 164 Serrano, 105 Sheep, merino, 32, 166 Shipping, 178 Silk manufactures, 16, 164 Silvela, 151 Smoking, 36, 60 Society, 55 _et seq._ Songs, 33, 81, 82, 114, 238 Songs and dancing, 114 Spanish-American War, I, 192 _et seq._ Sugar industry, 168 Superstitions popular, 102, 205, 233 Teatro Real, 62 Telegraphic system, 181 Terror of 1824, 22 _Tertulia_, 56 _et seq._ Theatres, 62, 116 Tobacco, 177 Toledo, 15 Toothpicks, 63 _Toreros_, 121 _Tribunal de las Aguas_, 34 Universities, 159 _Usted, de_, 98 Valencia, 34 Valera, Juan, 61 _Velo_, 79 Verse-making, 257 Virgin, 37, 203 War of Independence, 45 _et seq._ War, Spanish-American, 1, 192 _et seq._ Wars, Carlist, 9 Water, want of, 169 Wellington, Duke of, 26 Weyler, General, 186 Wines, 162 _et seq._ Women, 53, 62, 229 _et seq._, 249 Wood-carving, 176 Woollen manufactures, 164 Working men, 21, 83, 241, 261 _Zarzuela_, 116 Zorilla, 122, 252 _Zortico zorisco_, 115 PORTUGUESE LIFE Agriculture, 301, 302 Aloes, 301 _Amanhã_, 280 Amusements, 296, 302 Army, 298 Artisan class, 292 _Bacalhao_, 294 Bargaining, love of, 287 Brazilian elements, 287-291 Bull-fighting, 307 _et seq._ Camoens, 281 Characteristics, 278 _et seq._, 284, 285 Charities, 296 _Chula_, 296 Cleanliness, 289 Coimbra, 283 Costumes, 285, 300 Customs, 285 Dances, 296 Decorations and forms of address, 289 Fish, 294 Fish-girls, 293 Funerals, 306 Gallegos, 292 Gallenga, 293 Government, local, 310 Insects, 290 Institutions, 298 Intellectual life, 281 Land and people, 277 Language, 283 Laws, 312 Lisbon, 281 Londonderry, Lord, 277 Manners and morality, 289 Medical training, 288 Military system, 298 Mineral wealth, 281 _Moustachios_, ladies', 286 National fare, 294 Navy, 299 Newspapers, 284 _Octroi_ duties, 295 Oporto, 293 Oxen, 300 Peninsular War, 277 Police, 311 Postal service, 284 Prisons, 313 Religion, 304, 305 _et seq._ Scenery, 285 Servants, 290 Society, 286 University, 283 Wages, 292 Wealth, 292 Wealth, mineral, 281 Women, 285, 287, 307 THE END Our European Neighbours Edited by WILLIAM HARBUTT DAWSON 12º. Illustrated. Each, net $1.20 By Mail. 1.30 =I.--FRENCH LIFE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY= By HANNAH LYNCH. "Miss Lynch's pages are thoroughly interesting and suggestive. Her style, too, is not common. It is marked by vivacity without any drawback of looseness, and resembles a stream that runs strongly and evenly between walls. It is at once distinguished and useful.... Her five-page description (not dramatization) of the grasping Paris landlady is a capital piece of work.... Such well finished portraits are frequent in Miss Lynch's book, which is small, inexpensive, and of a real excellence."--_The London Academy._ "Miss Lynch's book is particularly notable. It is the first of a series describing the home and social life of various European peoples--a series long needed and sure to receive a warm welcome. Her style is frank, vivacious, entertaining, captivating, just the kind for a book which is not at all statistical, political, or controversial. A special excellence of her book, reminding one of Mr. Whiteing's, lies in her continual contrast of the English and the French, and she thus sums up her praises: 'The English are admirable: the French are lovable.' "--_The Outlook_. =II.--GERMAN LIFE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY= By W. H. DAWSON, author of "Germany and the Germans," etc. "The book is as full of correct, impartial, well-digested, and well-presented information as an egg is of meat. One can only recommend it heartily and without reserve to all who wish to gain an insight into German life. It worthily presents a great nation, now the greatest and strongest in Europe."--_Commercial Advertiser_. =III.--RUSSIAN LIFE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY= By FRANCIS H. E. PALMER, sometime Secretary to H. H. Prince Droutskop-Loubetsky (Equerry to H. M. the Emperor of Russia). "We would recommend this above all other works of its character to those seeking a clear general understanding of Russian life, character, and conditions, but who have not the leisure or inclination to read more voluminous tomes.... It cannot be too highly recommended, for it conveys practically all that well-informed people should know of 'Our European Neighbours.'"--_Mail and Express._ =IV.--DUTCH LIFE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY= By P. M. HOUGH, B.A. "There is no other book which gives one so clear a picture of actual life in the Netherlands at the present date. For its accurate presentation of the Dutch situation in art, letters, learning, and politics as well as in the round of common life in town and city, this book deserves the heartiest praise."--_Evening Post._ "Holland is always interesting, in any line of study. In this work its charm is carefully preserved. The sturdy toil of the people, their quaint characteristics, their conservative retention of old dress and customs, their quiet abstention from taking part in the great affairs of the world are clearly reflected in this faithful mirror. The illustrations are of a high grade of photographic reproductions."--_Washington Post._ =V.--SWISS LIFE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY= By ALFRED T. STORY, author of the "Building of the British Empire," etc. "We do not know a single compact book on the same subject in which Swiss character in all its variety finds so sympathetic and yet thorough treatment; the reason of this being that the author has enjoyed privileges of unusual intimacy with all classes, which prevented his lumping the people as a whole without distinction of racial and cantonal feeling."--_Nation._ "There is no phase of the lives of these sturdy republicans, whether social or political, which Mr. Story does not touch upon; and an abundance of illustrations drawn from unhackneyed subjects adds to the value of the book."--_Chicago Dial._ =VI.-SPANISH LIFE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY= By L. HIGGIN. "Illuminating in all of its chapters. She writes in thorough sympathy, born of long and intimate acquaintance with Spanish people of to-day."--_St. Paul Press._ "The author knows her subject thoroughly and has written a most admirable volume. She writes with genuine love for the Spaniards, and with a sympathetic knowledge of their character and their method of life."--_Canada Methodist Review._ =VII.--ITALIAN LIFE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY= By LUIGI VILLARI. "A most interesting and instructive volume, which presents an intimate view of the social habits and manner of thought of the people of which it treats."--_Buffalo Express._ "A book full of information, comprehensive and accurate. Its numerous attractive illustrations add to its interest and value. We are glad to welcome such an addition to an excellent series."--_Syracuse Herald._ =VIII.--DANISH LIFE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY= By JESSIE H. BROCHNER. "Miss Brochner has written an interesting book on a fascinating subject, a book which should arouse an interest in Denmark in those who have not been there, and which can make those who know and are attracted by the country very homesick to return."--_Commercial Advertiser._ "She has sketched with loving art the simple, yet pure and elevated lives of her countrymen, and given the reader an excellent idea of the Danes from every point of view."--_Chicago Tribune._ =IX.--AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN LIFE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY= By FRANCIS H. E. PALMER, author of "Russian Life in Town and Country," etc. "No volume in this interesting series seems to us so notable or valuable as this on Austro-Hungarian life. Mr. Palmer's long residence in Europe and his intimate association with men of mark, especially in their home life, has given to him a richness of experience evident on every page of the book."--_The Outlook._ "This book cannot be too warmly recommended to those who have not the leisure or the spirit to read voluminous tomes of this subject, yet we wish a clear general understanding of Austro-Hungarian life."--_Hartford Times._ =X.--TURKISH LIFE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY= By L. M. J. GARNETT. Miss Garnett, while not altogether ignoring the dark side of life in the Empire, portrays more particularly the peaceable life of the people--the domestic, industrial, social, and religious life and customs, the occupations and recreations, of the numerous and various races within the Empire presided over by the Sultan. "The general tone of the book is that of a careful study, the style is flowing, and the matter is presented in a bright, taking way."--_St. Paul Press._ "To the average mind the Turk is a little better than a blood-thirsty individual with a plurality of wives and a paucity of virtues. To read this book is to be pleasantly disillusioned."--_Public Opinion._ =XI.--BELGIAN LIFE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY= By DEMETRIUS C. BOULGER. "Mr. Boulger has given a plain, straight-forward account of the several phases of Belgian Life, the government, the court, the manufacturing centers and enterprises, the literature and science, the army, education and religion, set forth informingly."--_The Detroit Free Press._ "The book is one of real value conscientiously written, and well illustrated by good photographs."--_The Outlook._ =XII.--SWEDISH LIFE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY= By G. VON HEIDENSTAM. 
27252	----	THE LAND OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN SKETCHES AND IMPRESSIONS IN ANDALUSIA BY WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM (WITH FRONTISPIECE) LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN MCMV _All rights reserved_ [Illustration] TO VIOLET HUNT Contents I. The Spirit of Andalusia II. The Churches of Ronda III. Ronda IV. The Swineherd V. Medinat Az-Zahra VI. The Mosque VII. The Court of Oranges VIII. Cordova IX. The Bridge of Calahorra X. Puerta del Puente XI. Seville XII. The Alcazar XIII. Calle de las Sierpes XIV. Characteristics XV. Don Juan Tenorio XVI. Women of Andalusia XVII. The Dance XVIII. A Feast Day XIX. The Giralda XX. The Cathedral of Seville XXI. The Hospital of Charity XXII. Gaol XXIII. Before the Bull-Fight XXIV. Corrida de Toros--I. XXV. Corrida de Toros--II XXVI. On Horseback XXVII. By the Road--I. XXVIII. By the Road--II. XXIX. Ecija XXX. Wind and Storm XXXI. Two Villages XXXII. Granada XXXIII. The Alhambra XXXIV. Boabdil the Unlucky XXXV. Los Pobres XXXVI. The Song XXXVII. Jerez XXXVIII. Cadiz XXXIX. El Genero Chico XL. Adios I [Sidenote: The Spirit of Andalusia] After one has left a country it is interesting to collect together the emotions it has given in an effort to define its particular character. And with Andalusia the attempt is especially fascinating, for it is a land of contrasts in which work upon one another, diversely, a hundred influences. In London now, as I write, the rain of an English April pours down; the sky is leaden and cold, the houses in front of me are almost terrible in their monotonous greyness, the slate roofs are shining with the wet. Now and again people pass: a woman of the slums in a dirty apron, her head wrapped in a grey shawl; two girls in waterproofs, trim and alert notwithstanding the inclement weather, one with a music-case under her arm. A train arrives at an underground station and a score of city folk cross my window, sheltered behind their umbrellas; and two or three groups of workmen, silently, smoking short pipes: they walk with a dull, heavy tramp, with the gait of strong men who are very tired. Still the rain pours down unceasing. And I think of Andalusia. My mind is suddenly ablaze with its sunshine, with its opulent colour, luminous and soft; I think of the cities, the white cities bathed in light; of the desolate wastes of sand, with their dwarf palms, the broom in flower. And in my ears I hear the twang of the guitar, the rhythmical clapping of hands and the castanets, as two girls dance in the sunlight on a holiday. I see the crowds going to the bull-fight, intensely living, many-coloured. And a thousand scents are wafted across my memory; I remember the cloudless nights, the silence of sleeping towns, and the silence of desert country; I remember old whitewashed taverns, and the perfumed wines of Malaga, of Jerez, and of Manzanilla. (The rain pours down without stay in oblique long lines, the light is quickly failing, the street is sad and very cheerless.) I feel on my shoulder the touch of dainty hands, of little hands with tapering fingers, and on my mouth the kisses of red lips, and I hear a joyous laugh. I remember the voice that bade me farewell that last night in Seville, and the gleam of dark eyes and dark hair at the foot of the stairs, as I looked back from the gate. '_Feliz viage, mi Inglesito._' It was not love I felt for you, Rosarito; I wish it had been; but now far away, in the rain, I fancy, (oh no, not that I am at last in love,) but perhaps that I am just faintly enamoured--of your recollection. * * * But these are all Spanish things, and more than half one's impressions of Andalusia are connected with the Moors. Not only did they make exquisite buildings, they moulded a whole people to their likeness; the Andalusian character is rich with Oriental traits; the houses, the mode of life, the very atmosphere is Moorish rather than Christian; to this day the peasant at his plough sings the same quavering lament that sang the Moor. And it is to the invaders that Spain as a country owes the magnificence of its golden age: it was contact with them that gave the Spaniards cultivation; it was the conflict of seven hundred years that made them the best soldiers in Europe, and masters of half the world. The long struggle caused that tension of spirit which led to the adventurous descent upon America, teaching recklessness of life and the fascination of unknown dangers; and it caused their downfall as it had caused their rise, for the religious element in the racial war occasioned the most cruel bigotry that has existed on the face of the earth, so that the victors suffered as terribly as the vanquished. The Moors, hounded out of Spain, took with them their arts and handicrafts--as the Huguenots from France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes--and though for a while the light of Spain burnt very brightly, the light borrowed from Moordom, the oil jar was broken and the lamp flickered out. * * * In most countries there is one person in particular who seems to typify the race, whose works are the synthesis, as it were, of an entire people. Bernini expressed in this manner a whole age of Italian society; and even now his spirit haunts you as you read the gorgeous sins of Roman noblemen in the pages of Gabriele d'Annunzio. And Murillo, though the expert not unjustly from their special point of view, see in him but a mediocre artist, in the same way is the very quintessence of Southern Spain. Wielders of the brush, occupied chiefly with technique, are apt to discern little in an old master, save the craftsman; yet art is no more than a link in the chain of life and cannot be sharply sundered from the civilisation of which it is an outcome: even Velasquez, sans peer, sans parallel, throws a curious light on the world of his day, and the cleverest painters would find their knowledge and understanding of that great genius the fuller if they were acquainted with the plays of Lope de la Vega and the satires of Quevedo. Notwithstanding Murillo's obvious faults, as you walk through the museum at Seville all Andalusia appears before you. Nothing could be more characteristic than the religious feeling of the many pictures, than the exuberant fancy and utter lack of idealisation: in the contrast between a Holy Family by Murillo and one by Perugino is all the difference between Spain and Italy. Murillo's Virgin is a peasant girl such as you may see in any village round Seville on a feast-day; her emotions are purely human, and in her face is nothing more than the intense love of a mother for her child. But the Italian shows a creature not of earth, an angelic maid with almond eyes, oval of face: she has a strange air of unrealness, for her body is not of human flesh and blood, and she is linked with mankind only by an infinite sadness; she seems to see already the Dolorous Way, and her eyes are heavy with countless unwept tears. One picture especially, that which the painter himself thought his best work, _Saint Thomas of Villanueva distributing Alms_, to my mind offers the entire impression of that full life of Andalusia. In the splendour of mitre and of pastoral staff, in the sober magnificence of architecture, is all the opulence of the Catholic Church; in the worn, patient, ascetic face of the saint is the mystic, fervid piety which distinguished so wonderfully the warlike and barbarous Spain of the sixteenth century; and lastly, in the beggars covered with sores, pale, starving, with their malodorous rags, you feel strangely the swarming poverty of the vast population, downtrodden and vivacious, which you read of in the picaresque novels of a later day. And these same characteristics, the deep religious feeling, the splendour, the poverty, the extreme sense of vigorous life, the discerning may find even now among the Andalusians for all the modern modes with which, as with coats of London and bonnets of Paris, they have sought to liken themselves to the rest of Europe. And the colours of Murillo's palette are the typical colours of Andalusia, rich, hot, and deep--again contrasting with the enamelled brilliance of the Umbrians. He seems to have charged his brush with the very light and atmosphere of Seville; the country bathed in the splendour of an August sun has just the luminous character, the haziness of contour, which characterise the paintings of Murillo's latest manner. They say he adopted the style termed _vaporoso_ for greater rapidity of execution, but he cannot have lived all his life in that radiant atmosphere without being impregnated with it. In Andalusia there is a quality of the air which gives all things a limpid, brilliant softness, the sea of gold poured out upon them voluptuously rounds away their outlines; and one can well imagine that the master deemed it the culmination of his art when he painted with the same aureate effulgence, when he put on canvas those gorgeous tints and that exquisite mellowness. II [Sidenote: The Churches of Ronda] That necessity of realism which is, perhaps, the most conspicuous of Spanish traits, shows itself nowhere more obviously than in matters religious. It is a very listless emotion that is satisfied with the shadow of the ideal; and the belief of the Andaluz is an intensely living thing, into which he throws himself with a vehemence that requires the nude and brutal fact. His saints must be fashioned after his own likeness, for he has small power of make-believe, and needs all manner of substantial accessories to establish his faith. But then he treats the images as living persons, and it never occurs to him to pray to the Saint in Paradise while kneeling before his presentment upon earth. The Spanish girl at the altar of _Mater Dolorosa_ prays to a veritable woman, able to speak if so she wills, able to descend from the golden shrine to comfort the devout worshipper. To her nothing is more real than these Madonnas, with their dark eyes and their abundant hair: _Maria del Pilar_, who is Mary of the Fountain, _Maria del Rosario_, who is Mary of the Rosary, _Maria de los Dolores_, _Maria del Carmen_, _Maria de los Angeles_. And they wear magnificent gowns of brocade and of cloth-of-gold, mantles heavily embroidered, shoes, rings on their fingers, rich jewels about their necks. In a little town like Ronda, so entirely apart from the world, poverty-stricken, this desire for realism makes a curiously strong impression. The churches, coated with whitewash, are squalid, cold and depressing; and at first sight the row of images looks nothing more than a somewhat vulgar exhibition of wax-work. But presently, as I lingered, the very poverty of it all touched me; and forgetting the grotesqueness, I perceived that some of the saints in their elaborate dresses were quite charming and graceful. In the church of _Santa Maria la Mayor_ was a Saint Catherine in rich habiliments of red brocade, with a white _mantilla_ arranged as only a Spanish woman could arrange it. She might have been a young gentlewoman of fifty years back when costume was gayer than nowadays, arrayed for a fashionable wedding or for a bull-fight. And in another church I saw a youthful Saint in priest's robes, a cassock of black silk and a short surplice of exquisite lace; he held a bunch of lilies in his hand and looked very gently, his lips almost trembling to a smile. One can imagine that not to them would come the suppliant with a heavy despair, they would be merely pained at their helplessness before the tears of the grief that kills and the woe of mothers sorrowing for their sons. But when the black-eyed maiden knelt before the priest, courtly and debonair, begging him to send a husband quickly, his lips surely would control themselves no longer, and his smile would set the damsel's cheek a-blushing. And if a youth knelt before Saint Catherine in her dainty _mantilla_, and vowed his heart was breaking because his love gave him stony glances, she would look very graciously upon him, so that his courage was restored, and he promised her a silver heart as lovers in Greece made votive offerings to Aphrodite. At the Church of the _Espirito Santo_, in a little chapel behind one of the transept altars, I saw, through a huge rococo frame of gilded wood, a _Maria de los Dolores_ that was almost terrifying in poignant realism. She wore a robe of black damask, which stood as if it were cast of bronze in heavy, austere folds, a velvet cloak decorated with the old lace known as _rose point d'Espagne_; and on her head a massive imperial diadem, and a golden aureole. Seven candles burned before her; and at vespers, when the church was nearly dark, they threw a cold, sharp light upon her countenance. Her eyes were in deep shadow, strangely mysterious, and they made the face, so small beneath the pompous crown, horribly life-like: you could not see the tears, but you felt they were eyes which would never cease from weeping. I suppose it was all tawdry and vulgar and common, but a woman knelt in front of the Mother of Sorrows, praying, a poor woman in a ragged shawl; I heard a sob, and saw that she was weeping; she sought to restrain herself and in the effort a tremor passed through her body, and she drew the shawl more closely round her. I walked away, and came presently to the most cruel of all these images. It was a _Pietà_. The Mother held on her knees the dead Son, looking in His face, and it was a ghastly contrast between her royal array and His naked body. She, too, wore the imperial crown, with its golden aureole, and her cloak was of damask embroidered with heavy gold. Her hair fell in curling abundance about her breast, and the sacristan told me it was the hair of a lady who had lost her husband and her only son. But the dead Christ was terrible, His face half hidden by the long straight hair, long as a woman's, and His body thin and all discoloured: from the wounds thick blood poured out, and their edges were swollen and red; the broken knees, the feet and hands, were purple and green with the beginning of putrefaction. III [Sidenote: Ronda] Ronda is set deep among the mountains between Algeciras and Seville; they hem it in on all sides, and it straggles up and down little hills, timidly, as though its presence were an affront to the wild rocks around it. The houses are huddled against the churches, which look like portly hens squatting with ruffled feathers, while their chicks, for warmth, press up against them. It is very cold in Ronda. I saw it first quite early: over the town hung a grey mist shining in the sunlight, and the mountains, opalescent in the morning glow, were so luminous that they seemed hardly solid; they looked as if one could walk through them. The people, covering their mouths in dread of a _pulmonia_, hastened by, closely muffled in long cloaks. As I passed the open doors I saw them standing round the _brasero_, warming themselves; for fireplaces are unknown to Andalusia, the only means of heat being the _copa_, a round brass dish in which is placed burning charcoal. The height and the cold give Ronda a character which reminds one of Northern Spain; the roofs are quite steep, the houses low and small, built for warmth rather than, as in the rest of Andalusia, for coolness. But the whitewash and the barred windows with their wooden lattice-work, remind you that you are in Moorish country, in the very heart of it; and Ronda, indeed, figures in chronicles and in old ballads as a stronghold of the invaders. The temperature affects the habits of the people, even their appearance: there is no lounging about the squares or at the doors of wine-shops, the streets are deserted and their great breadth makes the emptiness more apparent. The first setters out of the town had no need to make the ways narrow for the sake of shade, and they are, in fact, so broad that the houses on either side might be laid on their faces, and there would still be room for the rapid stream which hurries down the middle. The conformation of a Spanish town, even though it lack museums and fine buildings, gives it an interest beyond that of most European places. The Moorish design is always evident. That wise people laid out the streets as was most convenient, tortuous and narrow at Cordova or broad as a king's highway in Ronda. The Moors stayed their time, and their hour struck, and they went; the houses had fallen to decay and been more than once rebuilt. The Christians returned and Mahomet fled before the Saints; (it was no shame since they grossly out-numbered him;) the mosque was made a church, and the houses as they fell were built again, but on the same foundations and in the same way. The streets have remained as the Moors left them, the houses still are built round little courtyards--the _patio_--as the Moors built them; and the windows are barred and latticed as of old, the better to protect beauty whose dark eyes flash too meaningly at wandering strangers, whose red lips are over ready to break into a smile for the peace of an absent husband. * * * After the busy clamour of Gibraltar, that ant-nest of a hundred nationalities, Ronda impresses you by its peculiar silence. The lack of sound is the more noticeable in the frosty clearness of the atmosphere, and is only emphasised by an occasional cry that floats, from some vast distance, along the air. The coldness, too, has pinched the features of the people, and they seem to grow old even earlier than in the rest of Andalusia. Strapping fellows of thirty with slim figures and a youthful air have the faces of elderly men, and their skin is hard, stained and furrowed. The women, ageing as rapidly, have no gaiety. If Spanish girls have frequently a beautiful youth, their age too often is atrocious: it is inconceivable that a handsome woman should become so fearful a hag; the luxuriant hair is lost, and she takes no pains to conceal her grey baldness, the eye loses its light, the enchanting down of the upper lip turns to a bristly moustache; the features harden, grow coarse and vulgar; and the countenance assumes a rapacious expression, so that she appears a bird of prey; and her strident voice is like the shriek of vultures. It is easily comprehensible that the Spanish stage should have taken the old woman as one of its most constant, characteristic types. But in Ronda even the girls have a weary look, as though life were not so easy a matter as in warmer places, or as the good God intended; and they seem to suffer from the brevity of youth, which is no sooner come than gone. They walk inertly, clothed in sombre colours, their hair not elaborately arranged as would have it the poorest cigarette-girl, but merely knotted, without the flower which the Sevillan is popularly said to insist upon even at the cost of a dinner. And when they go out the grey shawls they wrap about their heads add to their unattractiveness. IV [Sidenote: The Swineherd] But if Ronda itself is a somewhat dull and unsympathetic place with nothing more for the edification of the visitor than a melodramatic chasm, the surrounding country is worthy the most extravagant epithets. The mountains have the gloomy barrenness, the slate-grey colour of volcanic ranges; they encircle the town in a gigantic amphitheatre, rugged and overbearing like Titans turned to stone. They seem, indeed, to wear a sombre insolence of demeanour as though the aspect of human kind moved them to lofty contempt. And in their magnificent desolation they offer a fit environment for the exploits of Byronic heroes. The handsome villain of romance, seductive by the complexity of his emotions, by the persistence of his mysterious grief, would find himself in that theatrical scene most thoroughly at home; nor did Prosper Mérimée fail to seize the opportunity, for the mountains of Ronda were the very hunting-ground of Don Josè, who lost his soul for Carmen. But as a matter of history they were likewise the haunts of brigands in flesh and blood--malefactors in the past had that sense of the picturesque which now is vested in the amateur photographer--and this particular district was as dangerous to the travelling merchant as any in Spain. The environs of Ronda are barren and unfertile, the olive groves bear little fruit. I wandered through the lonely country, towards the mountains; the day was overcast and the clouds hung sluggishly overhead. As I walked, suddenly I heard a melancholy voice singing a peasant song, a _malagueña_. I paused to listen, but the sadness was almost unendurable; and it went on interminably, wailing through the air with the insistent monotony of its Moorish origin. I struck into the olives to find the singer and met a swineherd, guarding a dozen brown pigs, a youth thin of face, with dark eyes, clothed in undressed sheep-skins; and the brown wool gave him a singular appearance of community with the earth about him. He stood among the trees like a wild creature, more beast than man, and the lank, busy pigs burrowed around him, running to and fro, with little squeals. He ceased his song when I approached and looked up timidly. I spoke to him but he made no answer, I offered a cigarette but he shook his head. I went my way, and at first the road was not quite solitary. Two men passed me on donkeys. '_Vaya Usted con Dios!_' they cried--'Go you with God': it is the commonest greeting in Spain, and the most charming; the roughest peasant calls it as you meet him. A dozen grey asses went towards Ronda, one after the other, their panniers filled with stones; they walked with hanging heads, resigned to all their pain. But when at last I came into the mountains the loneliness was terrible. Not even the olive grew on those dark masses of rock, windswept and sterile; there was not a hut nor a cottage to testify of man's existence, not even a path such as the wild things of the heights might use. All life, indeed, appeared incongruous with that overwhelming solitude. Daylight was waning as I returned, but when I passed the olive-grove, where many hours before I had heard the _malagueña_, the same monotonous song still moaned along the air, carrying back my thoughts to the swineherd. I wondered what he thought of while he sang, whether the sad words brought him some dim emotion. How curious was the life he led! I suppose he had never travelled further than his native town; he could neither write nor read. Madrid to him was a city where the streets were paved with silver and the King's palace was of fine gold. He was born and grew to manhood and tended his swine, and some day he would marry and beget children, and at length die and return to the Mother of all things. It seemed to me that nowadays, when civilisation has become the mainstay of our lives, it is only with such beings as these that it is possible to realise the closeness of the tie between mankind and nature. To the poor herdsman still clung the soil; he was no foreign element in the scene, but as much part of it as the stunted olives, belonging to the earth intimately as the trees among which he stood, as the beasts he tended. * * * When I came near the town the sun was setting. In the west, tempestuous clouds were massed upon one another, and the sun shone blood-red above them; but as it sank they were riven asunder, and I saw a great furnace that lit up the whole sky. The mountains were purple, unreal as the painted mountains of a picture. The light was gone from the east, and there everything was chill and grey; the barren rocks looked so desolate that one shuddered with horror of the cold. But the sun fell gold and red, and the rift in the clouds was a kingdom of gorgeous light; the earth and its petty inhabitants died away, and in the crimson flame I could almost see Lucifer standing in his glory, god-like and young; Lucifer in all majesty, surrounded by his court of archangels, Beelzebub, Belial, Moloch, Abaddon. * * * I had discovered in the morning, from the steeple of _Santa Maria_, a queer ruined church, and was oddly impressed by the bare façade, with the yawning apertures of empty windows. I went to it, but every entrance was bricked up save one, which had a door of rough boards fastened by a padlock; and in a neighbouring house I found an old man with a key. It was a spot of utter desolation; the roof had gone or had never been. The custodian could not tell whether the church was the wreck of an old building or a framework that had never been completed; the walls were falling to decay. Along the nave and in the chapels trees were growing, shrubs and rank weeds; it was curious the utter ruin in the midst of the populous town. Pigs ran hither and thither, feeding, with noisy grunts, as they burrowed about the crumbling altar. The old man inquired whether I wished to buy the absolute uselessness of the place fascinated me. I asked the price. He looked me up and down, and seeing I was foreign, suggested a ridiculous sum. And while I amused myself with bargaining, I wondered what on earth one could do with a ruined church in Ronda. Half a dozen fantastic notions passed through my mind, but they were really too melodramatic. And now when the sun had set I returned. Notwithstanding his suspicions, I induced the keeper to give me his key; he could not understand what I desired at such an hour in that solitary place, and asked if I wished to sleep there! But I calmed his fears with a _peseta_--money goes a long way in Spain--and went in alone. The pigs had been removed and all was silent. A few bats flitted to and fro quickly. The light fell away greyly, the cold descended on the ruin, and it became very strange and mysterious. Presently, the roofless chapels seemed to grow alive with weird invisible things, the rank weeds exhaled chill odours; and in the lonely silence a mass began. At the ruined altar ghostly priests officiated, passing quietly from side to side, with bows and genuflections. The bell tinkled as they raised an invisible host. Soon it became quite dark, and the moon shone through the great empty windows of the façade. V [Sidenote: Medinat Az-Zahra] In what you divine rather than in what you see lies half the charm of Andalusia, in the suggestion of all manner of delicate antique things, in the vivid memory of past grandeur. The Moors have gone, but still they inhabit the land in spirit and not seldom in a spectral way seem to regain their old dominion. Often towards evening, as I rode through the desolate country, I thought I saw an half-naked Moor ploughing his field, urging the lazy oxen with a long goad. Often the Spaniard on his horse vanished, and I saw a Muslim knight riding in pride and glory, his velvet cloak bespattered with the gold initial of his lady, and her favour fluttering from his lance. Once near Granada, standing on a hill, I watched the blood-red sun set tempestuously over the plain; and presently in the distance the gnarled olive-trees seemed living beings, and I saw contending hosts, two ghostly armies silently battling with one another; I saw the flash of scimitars, and the gleam of standards, the whiteness of the turbans. They fought with horrible carnage, and the land was crimson with their blood. Then the sun fell below the horizon, and all again was still and lifeless. And what can be more fascinating than that magic city of Az-Zahra, the wonder of its age, of which now not a stone remains? It was made to satisfy the whim of a concubine by a Sultan whose flamboyant passion moved him to displace mountains for the sake of his beloved; and the memory thereof is lost so completely that even its situation till lately was uncertain. Az-Zahra the Fairest said to Abd-er-Rahm[=a]n, her lord: 'Raise me a city that shall take my name and be mine.' The Khalif built at the foot of the mountain which is called the Hill of the Bride; but when at last the lady, from the great hall of the palace, gazed at the snow-white city contrasting with the dark mountain, she remarked: 'See, O Master! how beautiful this girl looks in the arms of yonder Ethiopian.' The jealous Khalif immediately commanded the removal of the offending hill; and when he was convinced the task was impossible, ordered that the oaks and other mountain trees which grew upon it should be uprooted, and fig-trees and almonds planted in their stead. Imagine the _Hall of the Khalif_, with walls of transparent and many-coloured marble, with roof of gold; on each side were eight doors fixed upon arches of ivory and ebony, ornamented with precious metals and with precious stones; and when the sun penetrated them, the reflection of its rays upon the roof and walls was sufficient to deprive the beholders of sight! In the centre was a great basin filled with quicksilver, and the Sultan, wishing to terrify a courtier, would cause the metal to be set in motion, whereupon the apartment would seem traversed by flashes of lightning, and all the company would fall a-trembling. The old author tells of running streams and of limpid water, of stately buildings for the household guards, and magnificent palaces for the reception of high functionaries of state; of the thronging soldiers, pages, eunuchs, slaves, of all nations and of all religions, in sumptuous habiliments of silk and of brocade; of judges, theologians, and poets, walking with becoming gravity in the ample courts.... Alas! that poets now should rush through Fleet Street with unseemly haste, attired uncouthly in bowler hats and in preposterous tweeds! * * * From the celebrated legend of Roderick the Goth to that last scene when Boabdil handed the keys of Granada to King Ferdinand, the history of the Moorish occupation reads far more like romance than like sober fact. It is rich with every kind of passionate incident; it has all the strange vicissitudes of oriental history. What career could be more wonderful than that of Almanzor, who began life as a professional letter-writer, (a calling which you may still see exercised in the public places of Madrid or Seville,) and ended it as absolute ruler of an Empire! His charm of manner, his skill in flattery, the military genius which he developed when occasion called, his generosity and sense of justice, his love of literature and art, make him a figure to be contemplated with admiration; and when you add his utter lack of scruple, his selfishness, his ingratitude, his perfidy, you have a character complex enough to satisfy the most exacting. Those who would read of these things may find an admirable account in Mr. Lane-Poole's _Moors in Spain_; but I cannot renounce the pleasure of giving one characteristic detail. After the death of Abd-er-Rahm[=a]n, the builder of that magnificent city of Az-Zahra, a paper was found in his own handwriting, upon which he had noted those days in his long reign which had been free from all sorrow: they numbered fourteen. Sovereign lord of a country than which there is on earth none more delightful, his life had been of uninterrupted prosperity; success in peace and war attended him always; he possessed everything that it was possible for man to have. These are the observations of Al Makkary, the Arabic historian, when he narrates the incident: _O man of understanding! Wonder and observe the small portion of real happiness the world affords even in the most enviable position. Praise be given to Him, the Lord of eternal glory and everlasting empire! There is no God but He the Almighty, the Giver of Empire to whomsoever He pleases._ VI [Sidenote: The Mosque] But Cordova, from which Az-Zahra was about four miles distant, has visible delights that can vie with its neighbour's vanished pomp. I know nothing that can give a more poignant emotion than the interior of the mosque at Cordova; and yet I remember well the splendour of barbaric and oriental magnificence which was my first sight of St. Mark's at Venice, as I came abruptly from the darkness of an alley into the golden light of the Piazza. But to me at least the famous things of Italy, known from childhood in picture and in description, afford more than anything a joyful sense of recognition, a feeling as it were of home-coming, such as may hope to experience the devout Christian on entering upon his heritage in the Kingdom of Heaven. The mosque of Cordova is oriental and barbaric too; but I had never seen nor imagined anything in the least resembling it; there was no disillusionment possible, as too often in Italy, for the accounts I had read prepared me not at all for that overwhelming impression. It was so weird and strange, I felt myself transported suddenly to another world. They were singing Vespers when I entered, and I heard the shrill voices of choristers crying the responses; it did not sound like Christian music. The mosque was dimly lit, the air heavy with incense; and I saw this forest of pillars, extending every way, as far as the eye could reach. It was mysterious and awe-inspiring as those enchanted forests of one's childhood in which huge trees grew in serried masses and where in cavernous darkness goblins and giants of the fairy-tales, wild beasts and monstrous shapes, lay in wait for the terrified traveller who had lost his way. I wandered, keeping the Christian chapels out of sight, trying to lose myself among the columns; and now and then gained views of horseshoe arches interlacing, decorated with Moorish tracery. At length I came to the _Mihrab_, which is the Holy of Holies, the most exquisite as well as the most sacred part of the mosque. It is approached by a vestibule of which the roof is a miracle of grace, with mosaics that glow like precious stones, ultramarine, scarlet, emerald, and gold. The arch between the chambers is ornamented with four pillars of coloured marble, and again with mosaic, the gold letters of an Arabic inscription forming on the deep sapphire of the background a decorative pattern. The _Mihrab_ itself, which contained the famous Koran of Othman, has seven sides of white marble, and the roof is a huge shell cut from a single block. I tried to picture to myself the mosque before the Christians laid their desecrating hands upon it. The floor was of coloured tiles, tiles such as may still be seen in the Alhambra of Granada and in the Alcazar at Seville. The columns are of marble, of porphyry and jasper; tradition says they came from Carthage, from pagan temples in France and Christian churches in Spain; they are slender and unadorned, they must have contrasted astonishingly with the roof of larch wood, all ablaze with gold and with vermilion. There were three hundred chandeliers; and eight thousand lamps--cast of Christian bells--hung from the roof. The Arab writer tells of gold shining from the ceiling like fire, blazing like lightning when it darts across the clouds. The pulpit, wherein was kept the Koran, was of ivory and of exquisite woods, of ebony and sandal, of plantain, citron and aloe, fastened together with gold and silver nails and encrusted with priceless gems. It needed six Khalifs and Almanzor, the great Vizier, to complete the mosque of which Arab writers, with somewhat prosaic enthusiasm, said that 'in all the lands of Islam there was none of equal size, none more admirable in its workmanship, in its construction and durability.' * * * Then the Christians conquered Cordova, and the charming civilisation of the Moors was driven out by monks and priests and soldiers. First they built only chapels in the outermost aisles; but in a little while, to make room for a choir, they destroyed six rows of columns; and at last, when Master Martin Luther had rekindled Catholic piety, they set up a great church in the very middle of the mosque. The story of this vandalism is somewhat quaint, and one detail at least affords a suggestion that might prove useful in the present time; for the Town Council of Cordova menaced with death all who should assist in the work: one imagines that a similar threat from the Lord Mayor of London might have a salutary effect upon the restorers of Westminster Abbey or the decorators of St. Paul's. How very much more entertaining must have been the world when absolutism was the fashion and the preposterous method of universal suffrage had never been considered! But the Chapter, as those in power always are, was bent upon restoring, and induced Charles V. to give the necessary authority. The king, however, had not understood what they wished to do, and when later he visited Cordova and saw what had happened, he turned to the dignitaries who were pointing out the improvements and said: 'You have built what you or others might have built anywhere, but you have destroyed something that was unique in the world.' The words show a fine scorn; but as a warning to later generations it would have been more to the purpose to cut off a dozen priestly heads. Yet oddly enough the Christian additions are not so utterly discordant as one would expect! Hernan Ruiz did the work well, even though it was work he might conveniently have been drawn and quartered for doing. Typically Spanish in its fine proportion, in its exuberance of fantastic decoration, his church is a masterpiece of plateresque architecture. Nor are the priests entirely out of harmony with the building wherein they worship. For an hour they had sung Vespers, and the deep voices of the canons, chaunting monotonously, rang weird and long among the columns; but they finished, and left the choir one by one, walking silently across the church to the sacristy. The black cassock and the scarlet hood made a fine contrast, while the short cambric surplice added to the costume a most delicate grace. One of them paused to speak with two ladies in _mantillas_, and the three made a picturesque group, suggesting all manner of old Spanish romance. VII [Sidenote: The Court of Oranges] I went into the cathedral from the side and issuing by another door, found myself in the Court of Oranges. The setting sun touched it with warm light and overhead the sky was wonderfully blue. In Moorish times the mosque was separated from the court by no dividing-wall, so that the arrangement of pillars within was continued by the even lines of orange-trees; these are of great age and size, laden with fruit, and in their copious foliage stand with a trim self-assurance that is quite imposing. In the centre, round a fountain into which poured water from jets at the four corners, stood a number of persons with jars of earthenware and bright copper cans. One girl held herself with the fine erectness of a Caryatid, while her jar, propped against the side, filled itself with the cold, sparkling water. A youth, some vessel in his hand, leaned over in an attitude of easy grace; and looking into her eyes, appeared to pay compliments, which she heard with superb indifference. A little boy ran up, and the girl held aside her jar while he put his mouth to the spout and drank. Then, as it overflowed, she lifted it with comely motion to her head and slowly walked away. By now the canons had unrobed, and several strolled about the court in the sun, smoking cigarettes. The acolytes with the removal of their scarlet cassocks, were become somewhat ragged urchins playing pitch and toss with much gesture and vociferation. Two of them quarrelled fiercely because one player would not yield the halfpenny he had certainly lost, and the altercation must have ended in blows if a corpulent, elderly cleric had not indignantly reproved them, and boxed their ears. A row of tattered beggars, very well contented in the sunshine, were seated on a step, likewise smoking cigarettes, and obviously they did not consider their walk of life unduly hard. And the thought impressed itself upon me while I lingered in that peaceful spot, that there was far more to be said for the simple pleasures of sense than northern folk would have us believe. The English have still much of that ancient puritanism which finds a vague sinfulness in the uncostly delights of sunshine, and colour, and ease of mind. It is well occasionally to leave the eager turmoil of great cities for such a place as this, where one may learn that there are other, more natural ways of living, that it is possible still to spend long days, undisturbed by restless passion, without regret or longing, content in the various show that nature offers, asking only that the sun should shine and the happy seasons run their course. An English engineer whom I had seen at the hotel, approaching me, expressed the idea in his own graphic manner. 'Down here there are a good sight more beer and skittles in life than up in Sheffield!' One canon especially interested me, a little thin man, bent and wrinkled, apparently of fabulous age, but still something of a dandy, for he wore his clothes with a certain air, as though half a century before, byronically, he had been quite a devil with the ladies. The silver buckle on his shoes was most elegant, and he protruded his foot as though the violet silk of his stocking gave him a discreet pleasure. To the very backbone he was an optimist, finding existence evidently so delightful that it did not even need rose-coloured spectacles. He was an amiable old man, perhaps a little narrow, but very indulgent to the follies of others. He had committed no sin himself--for many years: a suspicion of personal vanity is in itself proof of a pure and gentle mind; and as for the sins of others--they were probably not heinous, and at all events would gain forgiveness. The important thing, surely, was to be sound in dogma. The day wore on and the sun now shone only in a narrow space; and this the canon perambulated, smoking the end of a cigarette, the delectable frivolity of which contrasted pleasantly with his great age. He nodded affably to other priests as they passed, a pair of young men, and one obese old creature with white hair and an expression of comfortable self-esteem. He removed his hat with a great and courteous sweep when a lady of his acquaintance crossed his path. The priests basking in the warmth were like four great black cats. It was indeed a pleasant spot, and contentment oozed into one by every pore. The canon rolled himself another cigarette, smiling as he inhaled the first sweet whiffs; and one could not but think the sovereign herb must greatly ease the journey along the steep and narrow way which leads to Paradise. The smoke rose into the air lazily, and the old cleric paused now and again to look at it, the little smile of self-satisfaction breaking on his lips. Up in the North, under the cold grey sky, God Almighty may be a hard taskmaster, and the Kingdom of Heaven is attained only by much endeavour; but in Cordova these things come more easily. The aged priest walks in the sun and smokes his _cigarillo_. Heaven is not such an inaccessible place after all. Evidently he feels that he has done his duty--with the help of Havana tobacco--in that state of life wherein it has pleased a merciful providence to place him; and St. Peter would never be so churlish as to close the golden gates in the face of an ancient canon who sauntered to them jauntily, with the fag end of a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Let us cultivate our cabbages in the best of all possible worlds; and afterwards--_Dieu pardonnera; c'est son métier_. * * * Three months later in the _Porvenir_, under the heading, 'Suicide of a Priest,' I read that one of these very canons of the Cathedral at Cordova had shot himself. A report was heard, said the journal, and the Civil Guard arriving, found the man prostrate with blood pouring from his ear, a revolver by his side. He was transported to the hospital, the sacrament administered, and he died. In his pockets they found a letter, a pawn-ticket, a woman's bracelet, and some peppermint lozenges. He was thirty-five years old. The newspaper moralised as follows: 'When even the illustrious order to which the defunct belonged is tainted with such a crime, it is well to ask whither tends the incredulity of society which finds an end to its sufferings in the barrel of a revolver. Let moralists and philosophers combat with all their might this dreadful tendency; let them make even the despairing comprehend that death is not the highest good but the passage to an unknown world where, according to Christian belief, the ill deeds of this existence are punished and the virtuous rewarded.' VIII [Sidenote: Cordova] Ronda, owing its peculiarities to the surrounding mountains, was not really very characteristic of the country, and might equally well have been an highland townlet in any part of Southern Europe. But Cordova offers immediately the full sensation of Andalusia. It is absolutely a Moorish city, white and taciturn, so that you are astonished to meet people in European dress rather than Arabs, in shuffling yellow slippers. The streets are curiously silent; for the carriage, as in Tangiers, is done by mules and donkeys, which walk so quietly that you never hear them. Sometimes you are warned by a deep-voiced '_Cuidado_,' but more often a pannier brushing you against the wall brings the first knowledge of their presence. On looking up you are again surprised to see not a great shining negro in a burnouse, but a Spaniard in tight trousers, with a broad-brimmed hat. And Cordova has that sweet, exhilarating perfume of Andalusia than which nothing gives more vividly the complete feeling of the country. Those travellers must be obtuse of nostril who do not recognise different smells, grateful or offensive, in different places; no other peculiarity is more distinctive, so that an odour crossing by chance one's sense is able to recall suddenly all the complicated impressions of a strange land. When I return from England it is always that subtle fragrance which first strikes me, a mingling in warm sunlight of orange-blossom, incense, and cigarette smoke; and two whiffs of a certain brand of tobacco are sufficient to bring back to me Seville, the most enchanting of all my memories. I suppose that nowhere else are cigarettes consumed so incessantly; for in Andalusia it is not only certain classes who use them, but every one, without distinction of age or station--from the ragamuffin selling lottery-tickets in the street to the portly, solemn priest, to the burly countryman, the shop-keeper, the soldier. After all, no better means of killing time have ever been devised, and consequently to smoke them affords an occupation which most thoroughly suits the Spaniard. * * * I looked at Cordova from the bell-tower of the cathedral. The roofs, very lovely in their diversity of colour, were of rounded tiles, fading with every variety of delicate shade from russet and brown to yellow and the tenderest green. From the courtyards, here and there, rose a tall palm, or an orange-tree, like a dash of jade against the brilliant sun. The houses, plainly whitewashed, have from the outside so mean a look that it is surprising to find them handsome and spacious within. They are built, Moorish fashion, round a _patio_, which in Cordova at least is always gay with flowers. When you pass the iron gates and note the contrast between the snowy gleaming of the street and that southern greenery, the suggestion is inevitable of charming people who must rest there in the burning heat of summer. With those surroundings and in such a country passion grows surely like a poisonous plant. At night, in the starry darkness, how irresistible must be the flashing eyes of love, how eloquent the pleading of whispered sighs! But woe to the maid who admits the ardent lover among the orange-trees, her head reeling with the sweet intoxication of the blossom; for the Spanish gallant is fickle, quick to forget the vows he spoke so earnestly: he soon grows tired of kissing, and mounting his horse, rides fast away. The uniformity of lime-washed houses makes Cordova the most difficult place in the world wherein to find your way. The streets are exactly alike, so narrow that a carriage could hardly pass, paved with rough cobbles, and tortuous: their intricacy is amazing, labyrinthine; they wind in and out of one another, leading nowhither; they meander on for half a mile and stop suddenly, or turn back, so that you are forced to go in the direction you came. You may wander for hours, trying to find some point that from the steeple appeared quite close. Sometimes you think they are interminable. IX [Sidenote: The Bridge of Calahorra] The bridge that the Moors built over the Guadalquivir straggles across the water with easy arches. Somewhat dilapidated and very beautiful, it has not the strenuous look of such things in England, and the mere sight of it fills you with comfort. The clustered houses, with an added softness from the light burning mellow on their roofs and on their white walls, increase the happy impression that the world is not necessarily hurried and toilful. And the town, separated from the river by no formal embankment, lounges at the water's edge like a giant, prone on the grass and lazy, stretching his limbs after the mid-day sleep. There is no precipitation in such a place as Cordova; life is quite long enough for all that it is really needful to do; to him who waits come all things, and a little waiting more or less can be of no great consequence. Let everything be taken very leisurely, for there is ample time. Yet in other parts of Andalusia they say the Cordovese are the greatest liars and the biggest thieves in Spain, which points to considerable industry. The traveller, hearing this, will doubtless ask what business has the pot to call the kettle black; and it is true that the standard of veracity throughout the country is by no means high. But this can scarcely be termed a vice, for the Andalusians see in it nothing discreditable, and it can be proved as exactly as a proposition of Euclid that vice and virtue are solely matters of opinion. In Southern Spain bosom friends lie to one another with complete freedom; no man would take his wife's word, but would believe only what he thought true, and think no worse of her when he caught her fibbing. Mendacity is a thing so perfectly understood that no one is abashed by detection. In England most men equivocate and nearly all women, but they are ashamed to be discovered; they blush and stammer and hesitate, or fly into a passion; the wiser Spaniard laughs, shrugging his shoulders, and utters a dozen rapid falsehoods to make up for the first. It is always said that a good liar needs an excellent memory, but he wants more qualities than that--unblushing countenance, the readiest wit, a manner to beget confidence. In fact it is so difficult to lie systematically and well that the ardour of the Andalusians in that pursuit can be ascribed only to an innate characteristic. Their imaginations, indeed, are so exuberant that the bald fact is to them grotesque and painful. They are like writers in love with words for their own sake, who cannot make the plainest statement without a gay parade of epithet and metaphor. They embroider and decorate, they colour and enhance the trivial details of circumstance. They must see themselves perpetually in an attitude; they must never fail to be effective. They lie for art's sake, without reason or rhyme, from mere devilry, often when it can only harm them. Mendacity then becomes an intellectual exercise, such as the poet's sonneteering to an imaginary lady-love. But the Cordovan very naturally holds himself in no such unflattering estimation. The motto of his town avers that he is a warlike person and a wise one: Cordoba, casa de guerrera gente Y de sabiduria clara fuente! And the history thereof, with its University and its Khalifs, bears him out. Art and science flourished there when the rest of Europe was enveloped in mediæval darkness: when our Saxon ancestors lived in dirty hovels, barbaric brutes who knew only how to kill, to eat, and to propagate their species, the Moors of Cordova cultivated all the elegancies of life from verse-making to cleanliness. * * * I was standing on the bridge. The river flowed tortuously through the fertile plain, broad and shallow, and in it the blue sky and the white houses of the city were brightly mirrored. In the distance, like a vapour of amethyst, rose the mountains; while at my feet, in mid-stream, there were two mills which might have been untouched since Moorish days. There had been no rain for months, the water stood very low, and here and there were little islands of dry yellow sand, on which grew reeds and sedge. In such a spot might easily have wandered the half-naked fisherman of the oriental tale, bewailing in melodious verse the hardness of his lot; since to his net came no fish, seeking a broken pot or a piece of iron wherewith to buy himself a dinner. There might he find a ring half-buried in the sand, which, when he rubbed to see if it were silver, a smoke would surely rise from the water, increasing till the light of day was obscured; and half dead with fear, he would perceive at last a gigantic body towering above him, and a voice more terrible than the thunder of Allah, crying: 'What wishest thou from thy slave, O king? Know that I am of the Jin, and Suleyman, whose name be exalted, enslaved me to the ring that thou hast found.' In Cordova recollections of the _Arabian Nights_ haunt you till the commonest sights assume a fantastic character, and the frankly impossible becomes mere matter of fact. You wonder whether your life is real or whether you have somehow reverted to the days when Scheherazade, with her singular air of veracity, recited such enthralling stories to her lord as to save her own life and that of many other maidens. I looked along the river and saw three slender trees bending over it, reflecting in the placid water their leafless branches, and under them knelt three women washing clothes. Were they three beautiful princesses whose fathers had been killed, and they expelled from their kingdom and thus reduced to menial occupations? Who knows? Indeed, I thought it very probable, for so many royal persons have come down in the world of late; but I did not approach them, since king's daughters under these circumstances have often lost one eye, and their morals are nearly always of the worst description. X [Sidenote: Puerta del Puente] I went back to the old gate which led to the bridge. Close by, in the little place, was the hut of the _consumo_, the local custom-house, with officials lounging at the door or sitting straddle-legged on chairs, lazily smoking. Opposite was a tobacconist's, with the gaudy red and yellow sign, _Campañia arrendataria de tabacos_, and a dram-shop where three hardy Spaniards from the mountains stood drinking _aguardiente_. Than this, by the way, there is in the world no more insidious liquor, for at first you think its taste of aniseed and peppermint very disagreeable; but perseverance, here as in other human affairs, has its reward, and presently you develop for it a liking which time increases to enthusiasm. In Spain, the land of custom and usage, everything is done in a certain way; and there is a proper manner to drink _aguardiente_. To sip it would show a lamentable want of decorum. A Spaniard lifts the little glass to his lips, and with a comic, abrupt motion tosses the contents into his mouth, immediately afterwards drinking water, a tumbler of which is always given with the spirit. It is really the most epicurean of intoxicants because the charm lies in the after-taste. The water is so cool and refreshing after the fieriness; it gives, without the gasconnade, the emotion Keats experienced when he peppered his mouth with cayenne for the greater enjoyment of iced claret. But the men wiped their mouths with their hands and came out of the wine shop, mounting their horses which stood outside--shaggy, long-haired beasts with high saddles and great box-stirrups. They rode slowly through the gate one after the other, in the easy slouching way of men who have been used to the saddle all their lives and in the course of the week are accustomed to go a good many miles in an easy jog-trot to and from the town. It seems to me that the Spaniards resolve themselves into types more distinctly than is usual in northern countries, while between individuals there is less difference. These three, clean-shaven and uniformly dressed, of middle size, stout, with heavy strong features and small eyes, certainly resembled one another very strikingly. They were the typical inn-keepers of Goya's pictures but obviously could not all keep inns; doubtless they were farmers, horse-dealers, or forage-merchants, shrewd men of business, with keen eyes for the main chance. That class is the most trustworthy in Spain, kind, hospitable, and honest; they are old-fashioned people with many antique customs, and preserve much of the courteous dignity which made their fathers famous. A string of grey donkeys came along the bridge, their panniers earth-laden, poor miserable things that plodded slowly and painfully, with heads bent down, placing one foot before the other with the donkey's peculiar motion, patiently doing a thing they had patiently done ever since they could bear a load. They seemed to have a dull feeling that it was no use to make a fuss, or to complain; it would just go on till they dropped down dead and their carcases were sold for leather and glue. There was a Spanish note in the red trappings, braided and betasselled, but all worn, discoloured and stained. Inside the gate they stopped, waiting in a huddled group, with the same heavy patience, for the examination of the _consumo_. An officer of the custom-house went round with a long steel prong, which he ran into the baskets one by one, to see that there was nothing dutiable hidden in the earth. Then, sparing of his words, he made a sign to the driver and sat down again straddle-wise on his chair. '_Arre, burra!_' The first donkey walked slowly on, and as they heard the tinkling of the leader's bell the rest stepped forward in the long line, their heads hanging down, with that hopeless movement of the feet. * * * In the night, wandering at random through the streets, their silent whiteness filled me again with that intoxicating sensation of the _Arabian Nights_. I looked through the iron gateways as I passed, into the _patios_ with their dark foliage, and once I heard the melancholy twang of a guitar. I was sure that in one of those houses the three princesses had thrown off their disguise and sat radiant in queenly beauty, their raven tresses falling in a hundred plaits over their shoulders, their fingers stained with henna and their long eyelashes darkened with kohl. But alas! though I lost my way I found them not. Yet many an amorous Spaniard, too passionate to be admitted within his mistress' house, stood at her window. This method of philandering, surely most conducive to the ideal, is variously known as _comer hierro_, to eat iron, and _pelar la pava_, to pluck the turkey. One imagines that the cold air of a winter's night must render the most ardent lover platonic. It is a significant fact that in Spanish novels if the hero is left for two minutes alone with the heroine there are invariably asterisks and some hundred pages later a baby. So it is doubtless wise to separate true love by iron bars, and perchance beauty's eyes flash more darkly to the gallant standing without the gate; illusions, the magic flower of passion, arise more willingly. But in Spain the blood of youth is very hot, love laughs at most restraints and notwithstanding these precautions, often enough there is a catastrophe. The Spaniard, who will seduce any girl he can, is pitiless under like circumstances to his own womenkind; so there is much weeping, the girl is turned out of doors and falls readily into the hands of the procuress. In the brothels of Seville or of Madrid she finds at least a roof and bread to eat; and the fickle swain goes his way rejoicing. I found myself at last near the _Puerta del Puente_, and I stood again on the Moorish bridge. The town was still and mysterious in the night, and the moon shone down on the water with a hard and brilliant coldness. The three trees with their bare branches looked yet more slender, naked and alone, like pre-Raphaelite trees in a landscape of _Pélléas et Mélisande_; the broad river, almost stagnant, was extraordinarily calm and silent. I wondered what strange things the placid Guadalquivir had seen through the centuries; on its bosom many a body had been borne towards the sea. It recalled those mysterious waters of the Eastern tales which brought to the marble steps of palaces great chests in which lay a fair youth's headless corpse or a sleeping beautiful maid. XI [Sidenote: Seville] The impression left by strange towns and cities is often a matter of circumstance, depending upon events in the immediate past; or on the chance which, during his earliest visit, there befell the traveller. After a stormy passage across the Channel, Newhaven, from the mere fact of its situation on solid earth, may gain a fascination which closer acquaintance can never entirely destroy; and even Birmingham, first seen by a lurid sunset, may so affect the imagination as to appear for ever like some infernal, splendid city, restless with the hurried toil of gnomes and goblins. So to myself Seville means ten times more than it can mean to others. I came to it after weary years in London, heartsick with much hoping, my mind dull with drudgery; and it seemed a land of freedom. There I became at last conscious of my youth, and it seemed a belvedere upon a new life. How can I forget the delight of wandering in the Sierpes, released at length from all imprisoning ties, watching the various movement as though it were a stage-play, yet half afraid that the falling curtain would bring back reality! The songs, the dances, the happy idleness of orange-gardens, the gay turbulence of Seville by night; ah! there at least I seized life eagerly, with both hands, forgetting everything but that time was short and existence full of joy. I sat in the warm sunshine, inhaling the pleasant odours, reminding myself that I had no duty to do then, or the morrow, or the day after. I lay a-bed thinking how happy, effortless and free would be my day. Mounting my horse, I clattered through the narrow streets, over the cobbles, till I came to the country; the air was fresh and sweet, and Aguador loved the spring mornings. When he put his feet to the springy turf he gave a little shake of pleasure, and without a sign from me broke into a gallop. To the amazement of shepherds guarding their wild flocks, to the confusion of herds of brown pigs, scampering hastily as we approached, he and I excited by the wind singing in our ears, we pelted madly through the country. And the whole land laughed with the joy of living. But I love also the recollection of Seville in the grey days of December, when the falling rain offered a grateful contrast to the unvarying sunshine. Then new sights delighted the eye, new perfumes the nostril. In the decay of that long southern autumn a more sombre opulence was added to the gay colours; a different spirit filled the air, so that I realised suddenly that old romantic Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella. It lay a-dying still, gorgeous in corruption, sober yet flamboyant, rich and poverty-stricken, squalid, magnificent. The white streets, the dripping trees, the clouds gravid with rain, gave to all things an adorable melancholy, a sad, poetic charm. Looking back, I cannot dismiss the suspicion that my passionate emotions were somewhat ridiculous, but at twenty-three one can afford to lack a sense of humour. * * * But Seville at first is full of disillusion. It has offered abundant material to the idealist who, as might be expected, has drawn of it a picture which is at once common and pretentious. Your idealist can see no beauty in sober fact, but must array it in all the theatrical properties of a vulgar imagination; he must give to things more imposing proportions, he colours gaudily; Nature for him is ever posturing in the full glare of footlights. Really he stands on no higher level than the housemaid who sees in every woman a duchess in black velvet, an Aubrey Plantagenet in plain John Smith. So I, in common with many another traveller, expected to find in the Guadalquivir a river of transparent green, with orange-groves along its banks, where wandered ox-eyed youths and maidens beautiful. Palm-trees, I thought, rose towards heaven, like passionate souls longing for release from earthly bondage; Spanish women, full-breasted and sinuous, danced _boleros_, _fandangos_, while the air rang with the joyous sound of castanets, and toreadors in picturesque habiliments twanged the light guitar. Alas! the Guadalquivir is like yellow mud, and moored to the busy quays lie cargo-boats lading fruit or grain or mineral; there no perfume scents the heavy air. The nights, indeed, are calm and clear, and the stars shine brightly; but the river banks see no amours more romantic than those of stokers from Liverpool or Glasgow, and their lady-loves have neither youth nor beauty. Yet Seville has many a real charm to counter-balance these lost illusions. He that really knows it, like an ardent lover with his mistress' imperfections, would have no difference; even the Guadalquivir, so matter-of-fact, really so prosaic, has an unimagined attractiveness; the crowded shipping, the hurrying porters, add to that sensation of vivacity which is of Seville the most fascinating characteristic. And Seville is an epitome of Andalusia, with its life and death, with its colour and vivid contrasts, with its boyish gaiety. It is a city of delightful ease, of freedom and sunshine, of torrid heat. There it does not matter what you do, nor when, nor how you do it. There is none to hinder you, none to watch. Each takes his ease, and is content that his neighbour should do the like. Doubtless people are lazy in Seville, but good heavens! why should one be so terribly strenuous? Go into the Plaza Nueva, and you will see it filled with men of all ages, of all classes, 'taking the sun'; they promenade slowly, untroubled by any mental activity, or sit on benches between the palm-trees, smoking cigarettes; perhaps the more energetic read the bull-fighting news in the paper. They are not ambitious, and they do not greatly care to make their fortunes; so long as they have enough to eat and drink--food is very cheap--and cigarettes to smoke, they are quite happy. The Corporation provides seats, and the sun shines down for nothing--so let them sit in it and warm themselves. I daresay it is as good a way of getting through life as most others. A southern city never reveals its true charm till the summer, and few English know what Seville is under the burning sun of July. It was built for the great heat, and it is only then that the refreshing coolness of the _patio_ can be appreciated. In the streets the white glare is mitigated by awnings that stretch from house to house, and the half light in the Sierpes, the High Street, has a curious effect; the people in their summer garb walk noiselessly, as though the warmth made sound impossible. Towards evening the sail-cloths are withdrawn, and a breath of cold air sinks down; the population bestirs itself, and along the Sierpes the _cafés_ become suddenly crowded and noisy. Then, for it was too hot to ride earlier, I would mount my horse and cross the river. The Guadalquivir had lost its winter russet, and under the blue sky gained varied tints of liquid gold, of emerald and of sapphire. I lingered in Triana, the gipsy-quarter, watching the people. Beautiful girls stood at the windows, so that the whole way was lined with them, and their lips were not unwilling to break into charming smiles. One especially I remember who was used to sit on a balcony at a street-corner; her hair was irreproachable in its elaborate arrangement, and the red carnation in it gleamed like fire against the night. Her face was long, fairer-complexioned than is common, with regular and delicate features. She sat at her balcony, with a huge book open on her knee, which she read with studied disregard of the passers-by; but when I looked back sometimes I saw that she had lifted her eyes, lustrous and dark, and they met mine gravely. And in the country I passed through long fields of golden corn, which reached as far as I could see; I remembered the spring, when it had all been new, soft, fresh, green. And presently I turned round to look at Seville in the distance, bathed in brilliant light, glowing as though its walls were built of yellow flame. The Giralda arose in its wonderful grace like an arrow; so slim, so comely, it reminded one of an Arab youth, with long, thin limbs. With the setting sun, gradually the city turned rosy-red and seemed to lose all substantiality, till it became a many-shaped mist that was dissolved in the tenderness of the sky. Late in the night I stood at my window looking at the cloudless heaven. From the earth ascended, like incense, the mellow odours of summer-time; the belfry of the neighbouring church stood boldly outlined against the darkness, and the storks that had built their nest upon it were motionless, not stirring even as the bells rang out the hours. The city slept, and it seemed that I alone watched in the silence; the sky still was blue, and the stars shone in their countless millions. I thought of the city that never rested, of London with its unceasing roar, the endless streets, the greyness. And all around me was a quiet serenity, a tranquillity such as the Christian may hope shall reward him in Paradise for the troublous pilgrimage of life. But that is long ago and passed for ever. XII [Sidenote: The Alcazar] Arriving at Seville the recollection of Cordova took me quickly to the Alcazar; but I was a little disappointed. It has been ill and tawdrily restored, with crude pigments, with gold that is too bright and too clean; but even before that, Charles V. and his successors had made additions out of harmony with Moorish feeling. Of the palace where lived the Mussulman Kings nothing, indeed, remains; but Pedro the Cruel, with whom the edifice now standing is more especially connected, was no less oriental than his predecessors, and he employed Morisco architects to rebuild it. Parts are said to be exact reproductions of the older structure, while many of the beautiful tiles were taken from Moorish houses. The atmosphere, then, is but half Arabic; the rest belongs to that flaunting, multi-coloured barbarism which is characteristic of Northern Spain before the union of Arragon and Castile. Wandering in the deserted courts, looking through horseshoe windows of exquisite design at the wild garden, Pedro the Cruel and Maria de Padilla are the figures that occupy the mind. Seville teems with anecdotes of the monarch who, according to the point of view, has been called the Cruel and the Just. He was an amorist for whom platonic dalliance had no charm, and there are gruesome tales of ladies burned alive because they would not quench the flame of his desires, of others, fiercely virtuous, who poured boiling oil on face and bosom to make themselves unattractive in his sight. But the head that wears a crown apparently has fascinations which few women can resist, and legend tells more frequently of Pedro's conquests than of his rebuffs. He was an ardent lover to whom marriage vows were of no importance; that he committed bigamy is certain--and pardonable, but some historians are inclined to think that he had at one and the same time no less than three wives. He was oriental in his tastes. In imitation of the Paynim sovereigns Pedro loved to wander in the streets of Seville at night, alone and disguised, to seek adventure or to see for himself the humour of his subjects; and like them also it pleased him to administer justice seated in the porch of his palace. If he was often hard and proud towards the nobles, with the people he was always very gracious; to them he was the redressor of wrongs and a protector of the oppressed; his justice was that of the Mussulman rulers, rapid, terrible and passionate, often quaint. For instance: a rich priest had done some injury to a cobbler, who brought him before the ecclesiastical tribunals, where he was for a year suspended from his clerical functions. The tradesman thought the punishment inadequate, and taking the law into his own hands gave the priest a drubbing. He was promptly seized, tried, condemned to death. But he appealed to the king who, with a witty parody of the rival Court, changed the punishment to suspension from his trade, and ordered the cobbler for twelve months to make no boots. On the other hand, the Alcazar itself has been the scene of Pedro's vilest crimes, in the whole list of which is none more insolent, none more treacherous, than that whereby he secured the priceless ruby which graces still the royal crown of England. There is a school of historians which insists on finding a Baptist Minister in every hero--think what a poor-blooded creature they wish to make of the glorious Nelson--but no casuistry avails to cleanse the memory of Pedro of Castille: even for his own ruthless age he was a monster of cruelty and lust. Indeed the indignation with which his biographers have felt bound to charge their pens has somewhat obscured their judgment; they have so eagerly insisted on the censure with which themselves regard their hero's villainies, that they have found little opportunity to explain a complex character. Yet the story of his early life affords a simple key to his maturity. Till the age of fifteen he lived in prisons, suffering with his mother every insult and humiliation, while his father's mistress kept queenly state, and her children received the honours of royal princes. When he came to the throne he found himself a catspaw between his natural brothers and ambitious nobles. His nearest relatives were ever his bitterest enemies, and he was continually betrayed by those he trusted; even his mother delivered to the rebellious peers the strongholds and the treasures he had left in her charge and caused him to be taken prisoner. As a boy he had been violent and impetuous, yet always loyal: but before he was twenty he became suspicious and mistrustful; in his weakness he made craft and perfidy his weapons, practising to compose his face, to feign forgetfulness of injury till the moment of vengeance; he learned to dissemble so that none could tell his mind, and treated no courtiers with greater favour than those upon whose death he had already determined. Intermingled with this career of vice and perfidy and bloodshed is the love of Maria de Padilla, whom the king met when he was eighteen, and till her death loved passionately--with brief inconstancies, for fidelity has never been a royal virtue; and she figures with gentle pathos in that grim history like wild perfumed flowers on a storm-beaten coast. After the assassination of the unfortunate Blanche, the French Queen whom he loathed with an extraordinary physical repulsion, Pedro acknowledged a secret marriage with Maria de Padilla, which legitimised her children; but for ten years before she had been treated with royal rights. The historian says that she was very beautiful, but her especial charm seems to have been that voluptuous grace which is characteristic of Andalusian women. She was simple and pious, with a nature of great sweetness, and she never abused her power; her influence, as runs the hackneyed phrase, was always for good, and untiringly she did her utmost to incline her despot lover to mercy. She alone sheds a ray of light on Pedro's memory, only her love can save him from the execration of posterity. When she died rich and poor alike mourned her, and the king was inconsolable. He honoured her with pompous obsequies, and throughout the kingdom ordered masses to be sung for the rest of her soul. * * * The guardians of the Alcazar show you the chambers in which dwelt this gracious lady, and the garden-fountain wherein she bathed in summer. Moralists, anxious to prove that the way of righteousness is hard, say that beauty dies, but they err, for beauty is immortal. The habitations of a lovely woman never lose the enchantment she has cast over them, her comeliness lingers in their empty chambers like a subtle odour; and centuries after her very bones have crumbled to dust it is her presence alone that is felt, her footfall that is heard on the marble floors. Garish colours, alas! have driven the tender spirit of Maria de Padilla from the royal palace, but it has betaken itself to the old garden, and there wanders sadly. It is a charming place of rare plants and exotic odours; cypress and tall palm trees rise towards the blue sky with their irresistible melancholy, their far-away suggestion of burning deserts; and at their feet the ground is carpeted with violets. Yet to me the wild roses brought strangely recollections of England, of long summer days when the air was sweet and balmy; the birds sang heavenly songs, the same songs as they sing in June in the fat Kentish fields. The gorgeous palace had only suggested the long past days of history, and Seville the joy of life and the love of sunshine; but the old quiet garden took me far away from Spain, so that I longed to be again in England. In thought I wandered through a garden that I knew in years gone by, filled also with flowers, but with hollyhocks and jasmine; the breeze carried the sweet scent of the honeysuckle to my nostrils, and I looked at the green lawns, with the broad, straight lines of the grass-mower. The low of cattle reached my ears, and wandering to the fence I looked into the fields beyond; yellow cows grazed idly or lay still chewing the cud; they stared at me with listless, sleepy eyes. But I glanced up and saw a flock of wild geese flying northwards in long lines that met, making two sides of a huge triangle; they flew quickly in the cloudless sky, far above me, and presently were lost to view. About me was the tall box-wood of the southern garden, and tropical plants with rich flowers of yellow and red and purple. A dark fir-tree stood out, ragged and uneven, like a spirit of the North, erect as a life without reproach; but the foliage of the palms hung down with a sad, adorable grace. XIII [Sidenote: Calle de las Sierpes] In Seville the Andalusian character thrives in its finest flower; and nowhere can it be more conveniently studied than in the narrow, sinuous, crowded thoroughfare which is the oddest street in Europe. The Calle de las Sierpes is merely a pavement, hardly broader than that of Piccadilly, without a carriage-way. The houses on either side are very irregular; some are tall, four-storeyed, others quite tiny; some are well kept and freshly painted, others dilapidated. It is one of the curiosities of Seville that there is no particularly fashionable quarter; and, as though some moralising ruler had wished to place before his people a continual reminder of the uncertainty of human greatness, by the side of a magnificent palace you will find a hovel. At no hour of the day does the Calle de las Sierpes lack animation, but to see it at its best you must go towards evening, at seven o'clock, for then there is scarcely room to move. Fine gentlemen stand at the club doors or sit within, looking out of the huge windows; the merchants and the students, smoking cigarettes, saunter, wrapped magnificently in their capos. Cigarette-girls pass with roving eyes; they suffer from no false modesty and smile with pleasure when a compliment reaches their ears. Admirers do not speak in too low a tone and the fair Sevillan is never hard of hearing. Newspaper boys with shrill cries announce evening editions: '_Porvenir!_ _Noticiero!_' Vendors of lottery-tickets wander up and down, audaciously offering the first prize: '_Quien quiere el premio gardo?_' Beggars follow you with piteous tales of fasts improbably extended. But most striking is the _gente flamenca_, the bull-fighter, with his numerous hangers-on. The _toreros_--toreador is an unknown word, good for comic opera and persons who write novels of Spanish life and cannot be bothered to go to Spain--the _toreros_ sit in their especial cafe, the _Cerveceria National_, or stand in little groups talking to one another. They are distinguishable by the _coleta_, which is a little plait of hair used to attach the chignon of full-dress: it is the dearest ambition of the aspirant to the bull-ring to possess this ornament; he grows it as soon as he is full-fledged, and it is solemnly cut off when the weight of years and the responsibility of landed estates induce him to retire from the profession. The bull-fighter dresses peculiarly and the _gente flamenca_, imitates him so far as its means allow. A famous _matador_ is as well paid as in England a Cabinet Minister or a music-hall artiste. This is his costume: a broad-brimmed hat with a low crown, which is something like a topper absurdly flattened down, with brims preposterously broadened out. The front of his shirt is befrilled and embroidered, and his studs are the largest diamonds; not even financiers in England wear such important stones. He wears a low collar without a necktie, but ties a silk handkerchief round his neck like an English navvy; an Eton jacket, fitting very tightly, brown, black, or grey, with elaborate frogs and much braiding; the trousers, skin-tight above, loosen below, and show off the lower extremities when, like the heroes of feminine romance, the wearer has a fine leg. Indeed, it is a mode of dress which exhibits the figure to great advantage, and many of these young men have admirable forms. In their strong, picturesque way they are often very handsome. They have a careless grace of gesture, a manner of actors perfectly at ease in an effective part, a brutal healthiness; there is a flamboyance in their bearing, a melodramatic swagger, which is most diverting. And their faces, so contrasted are the colours, so strongly marked the features, are full of interest. Clean shaven, the beard shows violet through the olive skin; they have high cheek bones and thin, almost hollow cheeks, with eyes set far back in the sockets, dark and lustrous under heavy brows. The black hair, admirably attached to the head, is cut short; shaved on the temples and over the ears, brushed forward as in other countries is fashionable with gentlemen of the box: it fits the skull like a second, tighter skin. The lips are red and sensual, the teeth white, regular and well shaped. The bull-fighter is remarkable also for the diamond rings which decorate his fingers and the massive gold, the ponderous seals, of his watch-chain. Who can wonder then that maidens fair, their hearts turning to thoughts of love, should cast favourable glances upon this hero of a hundred fights? The conquests of tenors and grand-dukes and fiddlers are insignificant beside those of a bull-fighter; and the certainty of feminine smiles is another inducement for youth to exchange the drudgery of menial occupations for the varied excitement of the ring. * * * At night the Sierpes is different again. Little by little the people scatter to their various homes, the shops are closed, the clubs put out their lights, and by one the loiterers are few. The contrast is vivid between the noisy throng of day-time and this sudden stillness; the emptiness of the winding street seems almost unnatural. The houses, losing all variety, are intensely black; and above, the sinuous line of sky is brilliant with clustering stars. A drunken roysterer reels from a tavern-door, his footfall echoing noisily along the pavement, but quickly he sways round a corner; and the silence, more impressive for the interruption, returns. The night-watchman, huddled in a cloak of many folds, is sleeping in a doorway, dimly outlined by the yellow gleam of his lantern. Then I, a lover of late hours, returning, seek the _guardia_. Sevillan houses are locked at midnight by this individual, who keeps the latch-keys of a whole street, and is supposed to be on the look-out for tardy comers. I clap my hands, such being the Spanish way to attract attention, and shout; but he does not appear. He is a good-natured, round man, bibulous, with grey hair and a benevolent manner. I know his habits and resign myself to inquiring for him in the neighbouring dram-shops. I find him at last and assail him with all the abuse at my command; he is too tipsy to answer or to care, and follows me, jangling his keys. He fumbles with them at the door, blaspheming because they are so much alike, and finally lets me in. _'Buena noche. Descanse v bien.'_ XIV [Sidenote: Characteristics] It is a hazardous thing to attempt the analysis of national character, for after all, however careful the traveller may be in his inquiries, it is from the few individuals himself has known that his most definite impressions are drawn. Of course he can control his observations by asking the opinion of foreigners long resident in the country; but curiously enough in Andalusia precisely the opposite occurs from what elsewhere is usual. Aliens in England, France, or Italy, with increasing comprehension, acquire also affection and esteem for the people among whom they live; but I have seldom found in Southern Spain a foreigner--and there are many, merchants, engineers and the like, with intimate knowledge of the inhabitants--who had a good word to say for the Andalusians. But perhaps it is in the behaviour of crowds that the most accurate picture of national character can be obtained. Like composite photographs which give the appearance of a dozen people together, but a recognisable portrait of none, the multitude offers as it were a likeness in the rough, without precision of detail yet with certain marked features more obviously indicated. The crowd is an individual without responsibility, unoppressed by the usual ties of prudence and decorum, who betrays himself because he lacks entirely self-consciousness and the desire to pose. In Spain the crowd is above all things good-humoured, fond of a joke so long as it is none too subtle, excitable of course and prone to rodomontade, yet practical, eager to make the best of things and especially to get its money's worth. If below the surface there are a somewhat brutal savagery, a cruel fickleness, these are traits common with all human beings together assembled; they are merely evidence of man's close relationship to ape and tiger. From contemporary novels more or less the same picture appears, and also from the newspapers, though in these somewhat idealised; for the Press, bound to flatter for its living, represents its patrons, as do some portrait-painters, not as they are but as they would like to be. In the eyes of Andalusian journalists their compatriots are for ever making a magnificent gesture; and the condition would be absurd if a hornet's nest of comic papers, tempering vanity with a lively sense of the ridiculous, did not save the situation by abundantly coarse caricatures. It is vanity then which emerges as the most distinct of national traits, a vanity so egregious, so childish, so grotesque, that the onlooker is astounded. The Andalusians have a passion for gorgeous raiment and for jewellery. They must see themselves continually in the brightest light, standing for ever on some alpine eminence of vice or virtue, in full view of their fellow men. Like schoolboys they will make themselves out desperate sinners to arouse your horror, and if that does not impress you, accomplished actors ready to suit your every mood, they will pose as saints than whom none more truly pious have existed on the earth. They are the Gascons of Spain, but beside them the Bordelais is a truthful, unimaginative creature. Next comes laziness. There is in Europe no richer soil than that of Andalusia, and the Arabs, with an elaborate system of irrigation, obtained three crops a year; but now half the land lies uncultivated, and immense tracts are planted only with olives, which, comparatively, entail small labour. But the inhabitants of this fruitful country are happy in this, that boredom is unknown to them; content to lie in the sun for hours, neither talking, thinking, nor reading, they are never tired of idleness: two men will sit for half a day in a _cafe_, with a glass of water before them, not exchanging three remarks in an hour. I fancy it is this stolidness which has given travellers an impression of dignity; in their quieter moments they remind one of very placid sheep, for they have not half the energy of pigs, which in Spain at least are restless and spirited creatures. But a trifle will rouse them; and then, quite unable to restrain themselves, pallid with rage, they hurl abuse at their enemy--Spanish, they say, is richer in invective than any other European tongue--and quickly long knives are whipped out to avenge the affront. Universal opinion has given its verdict in an epithet: and just as many people speak of the volatile Frenchman, the stolid Dutchman, the amatory Italian, they talk of the proud Spaniard. But it is pride of a peculiar sort; a Sevillian with only the smallest claims to respectability would rather die than carry a parcel through the street; however poor, some one must perform for him so menial an office: and he would consider it vastly beneath his dignity to accept charity, though if he had the chance would not hesitate to swindle you out of sixpence. But in matters of honesty these good people show a certain discrimination. Your servants, for example, would hesitate to steal money, especially if liable to detection, but not to take wine and sugar and oil: which is proved by the freedom with which they discuss the theft among themselves and the calmness with which they acknowledge it when a wrathful master takes them in the act. The reasoning is, if you're such a fool as not to keep your things under lock and key you deserve to be robbed; and if dismissed for such a peccadillo they consider themselves very hardly used. Uncharitable persons, saying that a Spaniard will live for a week on bread and water duly to prepare himself for a meal at another's expense, accuse them of gluttony; but I have always found the Andalusians abstemious eaters, nor have I wondered at this, since Spanish food is abominable. But drunkards they often are. I should think as many people in proportion get drunk in Seville as in London, though it is only fair to add that their heads are not strong, and very little alcohol will produce in them an indecent exhilaration. But if the reader, because the Andalusians are slothful, truthless, but moderately honest, vain, concludes that they are an unattractive people he will grossly err. His reasoning, that moral qualities make pleasant companions, is quite false; on the contrary it is rigid principles and unbending character, strength of will and a decided sense of right and wrong, which make intercourse difficult. A sensitive conscience is no addition to the amenities of the dinner-table. But when a man is willing to counter a deadly sin with a shrug of the shoulders, when between white and black he can discover no insupportable contrast, the probabilities are that he will at least humour your whims and respect your prejudices. And so it is that the Andalusians make very agreeable acquaintance. They are free and amiable in their conversation, and will always say the thing that pleases rather than the brutal thing that is. They miss no opportunity to make compliments, which they do so well that at the moment you are assured these flattering remarks come from the bottom of their hearts. Very reasonably, they cannot understand why you should be disagreeable to a man merely because you rob him; to injury, unless their minds are clouded by passion, they have not the bad taste to add insult. Compare with these manners the British abhorrence of polite and complimentary speeches, especially if they happen to be true: the Englishman may hold you in the highest estimation, but wild horses will not drag from him an acknowledgment of the fact; whereby humanism and the general stock of self-esteem are notably diminished. Nothing can be more graceful than their mode of speech, for the very construction of the language conduces to courtesy. The Spaniards have also an oriental way of offering you things, placing themselves and their houses entirely at your disposal. If you remark on anything of theirs they beg you at once to take it. If you go into a pot-house where a peasant is dining on a plate of ham, a few olives, and a glass of wine, he will ask: '_Le gusta_,' 'Will you have some,' with a little motion of handing you his meal. Of course it would be an outrage to decorum to accept these generous offers, but that is beside the question; for good manners are not an affair of the heart, but a complicated game to be learned and played on either side with due attention to the rules. It may be argued that such details are not serious; but surely for the common round of life politeness is more necessary than any heroic qualities. We need our friends' self-sacrifice once in a blue moon, but their courtesy every day; and for my own part, I would choose the companions of my leisure rather for their good breeding than for the excellence of their dispositions. Beside this, however, the Andalusians are much attached to children, and it is pleasant to see the real fondness which exists between various members of a family. One singular point I have noted, that although the Spanish marry for love rather than from convenience, a wife puts kindred before husband, her affection remaining chiefly where it was before marriage. But if the moralist desires yet more solid virtues, he need only inquire of the first Sevillan he meets, who will give at shortest notice, in choice and fluent language, a far more impressive list than I could ever produce. XV [Sidenote: Don Juan Tenorio] On its own behalf each country seems to choose one man, historical or imaginary, to stand for the race, making as it were an incarnation of all the virtues and all the vices wherewith it is pleased to charge itself; and nothing really better explains the character of a people than their choice of a national hero. Fifty years ago John Bull was the typical Englishman. Stout, rubicund and healthy, with a loud voice and a somewhat aggressive manner, he belonged distinctly to the middle classes. He had a precise idea of his rights and a flattering opinion of his merits; he was peaceable, but ready enough to fight for commercial advantages, or if roused, for conscience sake. And when this took place he possessed always the comforting assurance that the Almighty was on his side; he put his faith without hesitation on the Bible and on the superiority of the English Nation. For foreigners he had a magnificent contempt and distinguished between them and monkeys only by a certain mental effort. Art he thought nasty, literature womanish; he was a Tory, middle-aged and well-to-do. But nowadays all that is changed; John Bull, having amassed great wealth, has been gathered to his fathers and now disports himself in an early Victorian paradise furnished with horse-hair sofas and mahogany sideboards. His son reigns in his stead; and though perhaps not officially recognised as England's archetype, his appearance in novel and in drama, in the illustrated papers, in countless advertisements, proves the reality of his sway. It is his image that rests in the heart of British maidens, his the example that British youths industriously follow. But John Bull, Junior, has added his mother's maiden name to his own, and remembers with pleasure that he belongs to a good old county family. He has changed his address from Bedford Square to South Kensington, and has been educated at a Public School and at a University. Young, tall and fair-haired, there is nothing to suggest that he will ever have that inelegant paunch which prevented the father, even in his loftiest moments of moral indignation, from being dignified. Of course he is a soldier, for the army is still the only profession for a gentleman, and England's hero is that above all things. His morals are unexceptional, since to the ten commandments of Moses he has added the decalogue of good form. His clothes, whether he wears a Norfolk jacket or a frock coat, fit to perfection. He is a good shot, a daring rider, a serviceable cricketer. His heart beats with simple emotions, he will ever cheer at the sight of the Union Jack, and the strains of _Rule Britannia_ bring patriotic tears to his eyes. Of late, (like myself,) he has become an Imperialist. His intentions are always strictly honourable, and he would not kiss the tip of a woman's fingers except Hymen gave him the strictest rights to do so. If he became enamoured of a lady with whom such tender sentiments should not be harboured, he would invariably remember his duty at the psychological moment, and with many moving expressions renounce her: in fact he is a devil at renouncing women. I wonder it flatters them. Contrast with this pattern of excellence, eminently praiseworthy if somewhat dull, Don Juan Tenorio, who stands in exactly the same relation to the Andalusians as does John Bull to the English. He is a worthless, heartless creature, given over to the pursuit of emotion. The main lines of the story are well known. The legend, so far as Seville is concerned, (industrious persons have found analogues throughout the world,) appears to be founded on fact. There actually lived a Comendador de Calatrava who was killed by Don Juan after the abduction of his daughter. The perfect amorist, according to the _Cronica de Sevilla_, was then inveigled into the church where lay his enemy and assassinated by the Franciscans, who spread the pious fiction that the image of his victim, descending from its pedestal, had itself exacted vengeance. It was an unfortunate invention, for the catastrophe has proved a stumbling-block to all that have dealt with the subject. The Spaniards of Molina's day may not have minded the clumsy _deus ex machina_, but later writers have been able to make nothing of it. In Molière's play, for instance, the grotesque statue is absurdly inapposite, for his Don Juan is a wit and a cynic, a courtier of Louis XIV., with whose sins avenging gods are out of all proportion. Love for him is an intellectual exercise and a pastime. 'Constancy,' he says, 'is only good for fools. We owe ourselves to pretty women in general, and the mere fact of having met one does not absolve us from our duty to others. The birth of passion has an inexplicable charm, and the pleasure of love is in variety.' And Zorilla, whose version is the most poetic of them all, has succeeded in giving only a ridiculous exhibition of waxworks. But the monk, Tirso de Molina, who was the first to apply literary form to the legend, alone gives the character in its primitive simplicity. He drew the men of his time; and his compatriots, recognising themselves, have made the work immortal. For Spain, at all events, the type has been irrevocably fixed. Don Juan Tenorio was indeed a Spaniard of his age, a man of turbulent instincts, with a love of adventure and a fine contempt for danger, of an overwhelming pride; careful of his own honour, and careless of that of others. He looked upon every woman as lawful prey and hesitated at neither perjury nor violence to gain his ends; despair and tears left him indifferent. Love for him was purely carnal, with nothing of the timid flame of pastoral romance, nor of the chivalrous and metaphysic passion of Provence; it was a fierce, consuming fire which quickly burnt itself out. He was a vulgar and unoriginal seducer who stole favours in the dark by pretending to be the lady's chosen lover, or induced guileless maids to trust him under promise of marriage, then rode away as fast as his horse could carry him. The monotony of his methods and their success are an outrage to the intelligence of the sex. But for all his scoffing he remained a true Catholic, devoutly believing that the day would come when he must account for his acts; and he proposed, when too old to commit more sins, to repent and make his peace with the Almighty. It is significant that the Andalusians have thus chosen Don Juan Tenorio, for he is an abstract, with the lines somewhat subdued by the advance of civilisation, of the national character. For them his vices, his treachery, his heartlessness, have nothing repellent; nor does his inconstancy rob him of feminine sympathy. He is, indeed, a far greater favourite with the ladies than John Bull. The Englishman they respect, they know he will make a good husband and a model father; but he is too monogamous to arouse enthusiasm. XVI [Sidenote: Women of Andalusia] It is meet and just that the traveller who desires a closer acquaintance with the country wherein he sojourns than is obtained by the Cockney tripper, should fall in love. The advantages of this proceeding are manifold and obvious. He will acquire the language with a more rapid facility; he will look upon the land with greater sympathy and hence with sharper insight; and little particularities of life will become known to him, which to the dreary creature who surveys a strange world from the portico of an expensive hotel, must necessarily lie hid. If I personally did not arrive at that delectable condition the fault is with the immortal gods rather than with myself; for in my eagerness to learn the gorgeous tongue of Calderon and of Cervantes, I placed myself purposely in circumstances where I thought the darts of young Cupid could never fail to miss me. But finally I was reduced to Ollendorf's Grammar. However, these are biographical details of interest to none but myself; they are merely to serve as preface for certain observations upon the women whom the traveller in the evening sees hurrying through the Sierpes on their way home. Human beauty is the most arbitrary of things, and the Englishman, accustomed to the classic type of his own countrywomen, will at first perhaps be somewhat disappointed with the excellence of Spain. It consists but seldom in any regularity of feature, for their appeal is to the amorist rather than to the sculptor in marble. Their red lips carry suggestions of burning kisses, so that his heart must be hard indeed who does not feel some flutterings at their aspect. The teeth are small, very white, regular. Face and body, indeed, are but the expression of a passionate nature. But when I write of Spanish women I think of you, Rosarito; I find suddenly that it is no impersonal creature that fills my mind, but you--you! When I state solemnly that their greatest beauty lies in their hair and eyes, it is of you I think; it is your dark eyes that were lustrous, soft as velvet, caressing sometimes, and sometimes sparkling with fiery glances. (Alas! that I can find but hackneyed phrases to describe those heart-disturbers!) And when I say that the eyebrows of a Spanish woman are not often so delicately pencilled as with many an English girl, I remember that yours were thick; and the luxuriance gave you a certain tropical and savage charm. And your hair was plentiful and curling, intensely black; I believe it was your greatest care in life. Don't you remember how often you explained to me that nothing was so harmful as to brush it, and how proud you were that it hung in glorious locks to your very knees? Hardly any girl in Seville is too poor to have a _peinadora_ to do her hair; and these women go from house to house, combing and arranging the coiffure for such infinitesimal sums as half a _real_, which is little more than a penny. Again I try to be impersonal. The complexion ranges through every quality from dark olive to pearly white; but yours, Rosarito, was like the very finest ivory, a perfect miracle of delicacy and brilliance; and the blood in the cheeks shone through with a rich, soft red. I used to think it was a colour by itself, not to be found on palettes, the carnation of your cheeks, Rosarito. And none could walk with such graceful dignity as you; it was a pleasure to watch your perfect ease, your self-command. Your feet, I think, were somewhat long; but your hands were wonderful, very small, admirably modelled, with little tapering fingers, and the most adorable filbert nails. Don't you remember how I used to look at them, and turn them over and discuss them point by point? And if ever I kissed their soft, warm palms, (I think it possible, though I have no vivid recollections,) remember that I was twenty-three; and it was certainly an appropriate gesture in the little comedy which to our mutual entertainment we played so gravely. Now, as I write, my heart goes pit-a-pat, thinking of you, Rosarito; and I'm sure that if we had over again that charming time, I should fall head over ears in love. Oh, you know we were both fibbing when we vowed we adored one another; I am a romancer by profession, and you by nature. We parted joyously, and you had the grace not to force a tear, and neither of our hearts was broken. Where are you now, I wonder; and do you ever think of me? * * * The whole chapter of Andalusian beauty is unfolded in the tobacco factory at Seville. Six thousand women work there, at little tables placed by the columns which uphold the roof; they are of all ages, of all types; plain, pretty, commonplace, beautiful; and ten, perhaps, are lovely. The gipsies are disappointing, not so comely as the pure Spaniards; and they attract only by the sphinx-like mystery of their copper-coloured skin, by their hard, unfathomable eyes. The Sevillans are perhaps inclined to stoutness, but that is a charm in their lover's sight, and often have a little down on the upper lip, than which, when it amounts to no more than a shadow, nothing can be more enchanting. They look with malicious eyes as you saunter through room after room in the factory; it is quite an experience to run the gauntlet of their numerous tongues, making uncomplimentary remarks about your person, sometimes to your embarrassment offering you the carnation from their hair, or other things. Their clothes are suspended to the pillars, and their costume in summer is more adapted for coolness than for the inspection of decorous foreigners. They may bring with them babies, and many a girl will have a cradle by her side, which she rocks with one foot as her fingers work nimbly at the cigarettes. They are very oriental, these women with voluptuous forms; they have no education, and with all their charm are unutterably stupid; they do not read, and find even newspapers tiresome! Those whose circumstances do not force them to work for their living, love nothing better than to lie for long hours on a sofa, neither talking nor thinking, in easy gowns, untrammelled by tight-fitting things. In the morning they put on a _mantilla_ and go to mass, and besides, except to pay a polite visit on a friend or to drive in the Paseo, hardly leave the house. They are content with the simplest life. They adore their children, and willingly devote themselves entirely to them; they seem never to be bored. For them the days must come and go without distinction. Their fleeting beauty leaves them imperceptibly; they grow fat, they grow thin, wrinkled, and gaunt; the years pass and their life proceeds without change. They do not think, they do not live: they merely exist, and they die, and that is the end of it. I suppose they are as happy as any one else. After all, taking it from one point of view, it matters very little what sort of life one leads, there are so many people in the world, such millions have come and gone, such millions will come and go. If an individual makes no use of his hour what does it signify? He is only one among countless hordes. In the existence of these handsome creatures, so passionate and yet so apathetic, there are no particular pleasures beside the simple joys of sense, but on the other hand, beyond the inevitable separations of death, there are no outstanding griefs. They propagate their species, and that, perhaps, is the only quite certain duty that human beings have. XVII [Sidenote: The Dance] Cervantes said that there was never born a Spanish woman but she was made to dance; and he might have added that in the South, at all events, most men share the enviable faculty. The dance is one of the most characteristic features of Andalusia, and as an amusement rivals in popularity even the bull-fight. The Sevillans dance on every possible occasion, and nothing pleases them more than the dexterity of professionals. Before a company has been assembled half an hour some one is bound to suggest that a couple should show their skill; room is quickly made, the table pushed against the wall, the chairs drawn back, and they begin. Even when men are alone in a tavern, drinking wine, two of them will often enough stand up to tread a _seguidilla_. On a rainy day it is the entertainment that naturally recommends itself. Riding through the villages round Seville on Sundays it delighted me to see little groups making a circle about the house doors, in the middle of which were dancing two girls in bright-coloured clothes, with roses in their hair. A man seated on a broken chair was twanging a guitar, the surrounders beat their hands in time and the dancers made music with their castanets. Sometimes on a feast-day I came across a little band, arrayed in all its best, that had come into the country for an afternoon's diversion, and sat on the grass in the shade of summer or in the wintry sun. Whenever Andalusians mean to make merry some one will certainly bring a guitar, or if not the girls have their castanets; and though even these are wanting and no one can be induced to sing, a rhythmical clapping of hands will be sufficient accompaniment, and the performers will snap their fingers in lieu of castanets. It is charming then to see the girls urge one another to dance; each vows with much dramatic gesture that she cannot, calling the Blessed Virgin to witness that she has strained her ankle and has a shocking cold. But some youth springs up and volunteers, inviting a particular damsel to join him. She is pushed forward, and the couple take their places. The man carefully puts down his cigarette, jams his broad-brimmed hat on his head, buttons his short coat and arches his back! The spectators cry: '_Ole!_' The girl passes an arranging hand over her hair. The measure begins. The pair stand opposite one another, a yard or so distant, and foot it in accordance with one another's motions. It is not a thing of complicated steps, but, as one might expect from its Moorish origin, of movements of the body. With much graceful swaying from side to side the executants approach and retire, and at the middle of the dance change positions. It finishes with a great clapping of hands, the maiden sinks down among her friends and begins violently to fan herself, while her partner, with a great affectation of nonchalance, takes a seat and relights his cigarette. And in the music-halls the national dances are, with the national songs, the principal attraction. Seville possesses but one of these establishments; it is a queer place, merely the _patio_ of a private house, with a stage at one end, in which chairs and tables have been placed. On holiday nights it is crammed with students, with countrymen and artisans, with the general riff-raff of the town, and with women of no particular reputation. Now and then appears a gang of soldiers, giving a peculiar note with the uniformity of their brown holland suits; and occasionally a couple of British sailors come sauntering in with fine self-assurance, their fair hair and red cheeks contrasting with the general swartness. You pay no entrance money, but your refreshment costs a _real_--which is twopence ha'penny; and for that you may enjoy not only a cup of coffee or a glass of manzanilla, but an evening's entertainment. As the night wears on the heat is oven-like, and the air is thick and grey with the smoke of countless cigarettes. The performance consists of three 'turns' only, and these are repeated every hour. The company boasts generally of a male singer, a female singer, and of the _corps de ballet_, which is made up of six persons. Spain is the stronghold of the out-of-date, and I suppose it alone preserves the stiff muslin ballet-skirts which delighted our fathers. To see half-a-dozen dancers thus attired in a remote Andalusian music-hall is so entirely unexpected that it quite takes the breath away. But by the time the traveller reaches Seville he must be used to disillusion, and he must be ingenuous indeed if he expects the Spaniards to have preserved their national costume for the most national of their pastimes. Yet the dances are still Spanish; and even if the pianoforte has ousted the guitar, the castanets give, notwithstanding, a characteristic note which the aggressive muslin and the pink, ill-fitting tights cannot entirely destroy. * * * But I remember one dancer who was really a great artist. She was ill-favoured, of middle age, thin; but every part of her was imbued with grace, expressive, from the tips of her toes to the tips of her fingers. The demands of the public sometimes forced upon her odious ballet-skirts, sometimes she wasted her talent on the futilities of skirt-dancing; but chiefly she loved the national measures, and her phenomenal leanness made her only comfortable in the national dress. She travelled from place to place in Spain with another woman whom she had taught to dance, and whose beauty she used cleverly as a foil to her own uncomeliness; and so wasted herself in these low resorts, earning hardly sufficient to keep body and soul together. I wish I could remember her name. When she began to dance you forgot her ugliness; her gaunt arms gained shape, her face was transfigured, her dark eyes flashed, and her mouth and smile said a thousand eloquent things. Even the nape of her neck, which in most women has no significance, with her was expressive. A consummate actress, she exhibited all her skill in the _bolero_, which represents a courtship; she threw aside the castanets and wrapped herself in a _mantilla_, while her companion, dressed as a man, was hidden in a _capa_. The two passed one another, he trying to see the lady's face, which she averted, but not too strenuously; he pursued, she fled, but not too rapidly. Dropping his cloak, the lover attacked with greater warmth, while alternately she repelled and lured him on. At last she too cast away the _mantilla_. They seized the castanets and danced round one another with all manner of graceful and complicated evolutions, making love, quarrelling, pouting, exhibiting every variety of emotion. The dance grew more passionate, the steps flew faster, till at last, with the music, both stopped suddenly dead still. This abrupt cessation is one of the points most appreciated by a Spanish audience. '_Ole!_' they cry,'_bien parado!_' But when, unhampered by a partner, this nameless, exquisite dancer gave full play to her imagination, there was no end to the wildness of her fancy, to the intricacy and elaboration of her measures, to the gay audacity of her movements. She performed a hundred feats, each more difficult than the other--and all impossible to describe. * * * Then, between Christmas and Lent, at midnight on Saturdays and Sundays, the tables and the chairs are cleared away for the masked ball; and you will see the latest mode of Spanish dance. The women are of the lowest possible class; some, with a kind of savage irony, disguised as nuns, others in grotesque dominos of their own devising; but most wear every-day clothes with great shawls draped about them. The men are of a corresponding station, and through the evening wear their broad-brimmed hats. On the stage is a brass band, which plays one single tune till day-break, and to that one single measure is danced--the _habanera_. In this alone may people take part as in any round dance. The couples hold one another in the very tightest embrace, the lady clasping her arms round her partner's neck, while he places both his about her waist. They go round the room very slowly, immediately behind one another; it is a kind of straight polka, with a peculiar, rhythmic swaying of the body; the feet are not lifted off the floor, and you do not turn at all. The highest gravity is preserved throughout, and the whole performance is--well, very oriental. XVIII [Sidenote: A Feast Day] I arrived in Seville on the Eve of the Immaculate Conception. All day people had been preparing to celebrate the feast, decorating their houses with great banners of blue and white; and at night the silent, narrow streets had a strange appearance, for in every window were lighted candles, throwing around them a white, unusual glare; they looked a little like the souls of infants dead. All day the bells of a hundred churches had been ringing, half drowned by the rolling peals of the Giralda. It had been announced that the archbishop would himself officiate at the High Mass in the Blessed Virgin's honour; and early in the morning the cathedral steps were crowded with black-robed women, making their way to the great sacristy where was to be held the service. I joined the throng, and entering through the darkness of the porch, was almost blinded by the brilliant altar, upon which stood a life-sized image of the Virgin, surrounded by a huge aureole, with great bishops, all of silver, on either side. It was ablaze with the light of many candles, so that the nave was thrown into deep shadow, and the kneeling women were scarcely visible. The canons in the choir listlessly droned their prayers. At last the organ burst forth, and a long procession slowly came into the chapel, priests in white and blue, the colours of the Virgin, four bishops in mitres, the archbishop with his golden crozier; and preceding them all, in odd contrast, the beadle in black, with a dark periwig, bearing a silver staff. From the choir in due order they returned to the altar, headed this time by three pairs of acolytes, bearing great silver candlesticks, and by incense-burners, that filled the church with rich perfume. When the Mass was finished, a young dark man in copious robes of violet ascended the pulpit and muttered a text. He waited an instant to collect himself, looking at the congregation; then turning to the altar began a passionate song of praise to the Blessed Virgin, unsoiled by original sin. He described her as in a hundred pictures the great painter of the Immaculate Conception has portrayed her--a young and graceful maid, clothed in a snowy gown of ample folds, with an azure cloak, a maid mysteriously pure; her hair, floating on the shoulders in luxurious ringlets, was an aureole more glorious than the silver rays which surrounded the great image; her dark eyes, with their languid lashes, her mouth, with the red lips, expressed a beautiful and immaculate virtue. It might have been some earthly woman of whom the priest spoke, one of those Andalusians that knelt below him, flashing quick glances at the gallant who negligently leaned against a pillar. The archbishop sat on his golden throne--a thin, small man with a wrinkled face, with dead and listless eyes; in his gorgeous vestments he looked hardly human, he seemed a puppet, sitting stilly. At the end of the sermon he went back to the altar, and in his low, broken voice read the prayers. And then turning towards the great congregation he gave the plenary absolution, for which the Pope's Bull had been read from the pulpit steps. * * * In the afternoon, when the sun was going down behind the Guadalquivir, over the plain, I went again to the cathedral. The canons in the choir still droned their chant in praise of the Blessed Virgin, and in the greater darkness the altar shone more magnificently. The same procession filed through the nave, some priests were in black, some in violet, some in the Virgin's colours; but this time the archbishop wore gorgeous robes of scarlet, and as he knelt at the altar his train spread to the chancel steps. From the side appeared ten boys and knelt before the altar, and stood in two lines facing one another. They were dressed like pages of the seventeenth century, with white stockings and breeches, and a doublet of blue and silver, holding in their hands hats with long feathers. The archbishop, kneeling in front of the throne, buried his face in his hands. A soft melody, played by violins and 'cellos, broke the silence, and presently the ten pages began to sing: _Los cielos y la tierra alaben al Señor_ _Con imnos de alabanza que inflamen al Señor._ It was a curious, old-fashioned music, reminding one a little of the quiet harmonies of Gluck. Then, putting on their hats, the pages danced, continuing their song; they wound in and out of one another, gravely footing it, swaying to and fro with the music very slowly. The measure was performed with the utmost reverence. Now and then the chorus came, and the fresh boys' voices, singing in unison, filled the church with delightful melody. And still the old archbishop prayed, his face buried in his hands. The boys ceased to sing, but continued the dance, marking the time now with castanets, and the mundane instrument contrasted strangely with the glittering altar and with the kneeling priests. I wondered of what the archbishop thought, kneeling so humbly--of the boys dancing before the altar, fresh and young? Was he thinking of their white souls darkening with the sins of the world, or of the troubles, the disillusionments of life, and the decrepitude? Or was it of himself--did he think of his own youth, so long past, so hopelessly gone, or did he think that he was old and worn, and of the dark journey before him, and of the light that seemed so distant? Did he regret his beautiful Seville with the blue sky, and the orange-trees bowed down with their golden fruit? He seemed so small and weak, overwhelmed in his gorgeous robes. Again the ten boys repeated their song and dance and their castanets, and with a rapid genuflection disappeared. The archbishop rose painfully from his knees and ascended to the altar. A priest held open a book before him, and another lighted the printed page with a candle; he read out a prayer. Then, kneeling down, he bent very low, as though he felt himself unworthy to behold the magnificence of the Queen of Heaven. The people fell to their knees, and a man's voice burst forth--_Ave Maria, gratia plena_; waves of passionate sound floated over the worshippers, upwards, towards heaven. And from the Giralda, the Moorish tower, the Christian bells rang joyfully. The archbishop turned towards the people; and when in his thin, broken voice he gave the benediction, one thought that no man in his heart felt such humility as the magnificent prince of the Church, Don Marcelo Spinola y Maestre, Archbishop of Seville. The people flocked out quickly, and soon only a few devout penitents remained. A priest came, waving censers before the altar, and thick volumes of perfume ascended to the Blessed Virgin. He disappeared, and one by one the candles were extinguished. The night crept silently along the church, and the silver image sank into the darkness; at last two candles only were left on the altar, high up, shining dimly. Outside the sky was still blue, bespattered with countless stars. NOTE.--I believe there is no definite explanation of this ceremony, and the legend told me by an ancient priest that it was invented during the Moorish dominion so that Christian services might be held under cover of a social gathering--intruding Muslims would be told merely that people were there assembled to see boys dance and to listen to their singing--is more picturesque than probable. Rather does it seem analogous with the leaping of David the King before the Ark of Jehovah, when he danced before the Lord with all his might, girt with a linen Ephod; and this, if I may hazard an opinion, was with a view to amuse a deity apt to be bored or languid, just as Nautch girls dance to this day before the idols of the Hindus, and tops are spun before Krishna to divert him. XIX [Sidenote: The Giralda] The Christian bells rang joyfully from the Moorish tower, the great old bells christened with holy oil, _el Cantor_ the Singer, _la Gorda_ the Great, _San Miguel_. I climbed the winding passage till I came to the terrace where stood the ringers, and as they pulled their ropes the bells swung round on their axles, completing a circle, with deafening clamour. The din was terrific, so that the solid masonry appeared to shake, and I felt the vibrations of the surrounding air. It was a strange sensation to shout as loud as possible and hear no sound issue from my mouth. The Giralda, with its Moorish base and its Christian belfry, is a symbol of Andalusia. There is in the Ayuntamiento an old picture of the Minaret built by Djâbir the Moor, nearly one hundred feet shorter than the completed tower, but surmounted by a battlemented platform on which are huge brazen balls and an iron standard. These were overthrown by an earthquake, and later, when the discoveries of Christopher Columbus had poured unmeasured riches into Seville, the Chapter commissioned Hernan Ruiz to add a belfry to the Moorish base. Hernan Ruiz nearly ruined the mosque at Cordova, but here he was entirely successful. Indeed it is extraordinary that the two parts should be joined in such admirable harmony. It is impossible to give in words an idea of the slender grace of the Giralda, it does not look a thing of bricks and mortar, it is so straight and light that it reminds one vaguely of some beautiful human thing. The great height is astonishing, there is no buttress or projection to break the very long straight line as it rises, with a kind of breathless speed, to the belfry platform. And then the renaissance building begins, ascending still more, a sort of filigree work, excessively rich, and elegant beyond all praise. It is surmounted by a female figure of bronze, representing Faith and veering with every breeze, and the artist has surrounded his work with the motto: _Nomen Domini Fortissima Turris_. But the older portion gains another charm from the Moorish windows that pierce it, one above the other, with horseshoe arches; and from the arabesque network with which the upper part is diapered, a brick trellis-work against the brick walls, of the most graceful and delicate intricacy. The Giralda is almost toylike in the daintiness of its decoration. Notwithstanding its great size it is a masterpiece of exquisite proportion. At night it stands out with strong lines against the bespangled sky, and the lights of the watchers give it a magic appearance of some lacelike tower of imagination; but on high festivals it is lit with countless lamps, and then, as Richard Ford puts it, hangs from the dark vault of heaven like a brilliant chandelier. I looked down at Seville from above. A Spanish town wears always its most picturesque appearance thus seen, but it is never different; the _patios_ glaring with whitewash, the roofs of brown and yellow tiles, and the narrow streets, winding in unexpected directions, narrower than ever from such a height and dark with shade, so that they seem black rivulets gliding stealthily through the whiteness. Looking at a northern city from a tall church tower all things are confused with one another, the slate roofs join together till it is like a huge uneven sea of grey; but in Seville the atmosphere is so limpid, the colour so brilliant, that every house is clearly separated from its neighbour, and sometimes there appears to be between them a preternatural distinctness. Each stands independently of any other; you might suppose yourself in a strange city of the _Arabian Nights_ where a great population lived in houses crowded together, but invisibly, so that each person fancied himself in isolation. Immediately below was the Cathedral and to remind you of Cordova, the Court of Oranges; but here was no sunny restfulness, nor old-world quiet. The Court is gloomy and dark, and the trim rows of orange-trees contrast oddly with the grey stone of the Cathedral, its huge porches, and the flamboyant exuberance of its decoration. The sun never shines in it and no fruit splash the dark foliage with gold. You do not think of the generations of priests who have wandered in it on the summer evenings, basking away their peaceful lives in the sunshine; but rather of the busy merchants who met there in the old days when it was still the exchange of Seville, before the Lonja was built, to discuss the war with England, or the fate of ships bringing gold from America. At one end of the court is an old stone pulpit from which preached St. Francis of Borga and St. Vincent Ferrer and many an unknown monk besides. Then it was thronged with multi-coloured crowds, with townsmen, soldiers and great noblemen, when the faith was living and strong; and the preacher, with all the gesture and the impassioned rhetoric of a Spaniard, poured out burning words of hate for Jew and Moor and Heretic, so that the listeners panted and a veil of blood passed before their eyes; or else uttered so eloquent a song in praise of the Blessed Virgin, immaculately conceived, that strong men burst into tears at the recital of her perfect beauty. XX [Sidenote: The Cathedral of Seville] Your first impression when you walk round the cathedral of Seville, noting with dismay the crushed cupolas and unsightly excrescences, the dinginess of colour, is not enthusiastic. It was built by German architects without a thought for the surrounding houses, brilliantly whitewashed, and the blue sky, and it proves the incongruity of northern art in a southern country; but even lowering clouds and mist could lend no charm to the late Gothic of _Santa Maria de la Sede_. The interior fortunately is very different. Notwithstanding the Gothic groining, as you enter from the splendid heat of noonday, (in the Plaza del Triunfo the sun beats down and the houses are more dazzling than snow,) the effect is thoroughly and delightfully Spanish. Light is very fatal to devotion and the Spaniards have been so wise as to make their churches extremely dark. At first you can see nothing. Incense floats heavily about you, filling the air, and the coolness is like a draught of fresh, perfumed water. But gradually the church detaches itself from the obscurity and you see great columns, immensely lofty. The spaces are large and simple, giving an impression of vast room; and the choir, walled up on three sides, in the middle of the nave as in all Spanish cathedrals, by obstructing the view gives an appearance of almost unlimited extent. To me it seems that in such a place it is easier to comprehend the majesty wherewith man has equipped himself. Science offers only thoughts of human insignificance; the vastness of the sea, the terror of the mountains, emphasise the fact that man is of no account, ephemeral as the leaves of summer. But in those bold aisles, by the pillars rising with such a confident pride towards heaven, it is almost impossible not to feel that man indeed is god-like, lord of the earth; and that the great array of nature is builded for his purpose. Typically Spanish also is the decoration, and very rich. The choir-stalls are of carved wood, florid and exuberant like the Spanish imagination; the altars gleam with gold; pictures of saints are framed by golden pillars carved with huge bunches of grapes and fruit and fantastic leaves. I was astounded at the opulence of the treasure; there were gorgeous altars of precious metal, great saints of silver, caskets of gold, monstrances studded with rare stones, crosses and crucifixes. The vestments were of unimaginable splendour: there were two hundred copes of all ages and of every variety, fifty of each colour, white for Christmas and Easter, red for Corpus Christi, blue for the Immaculate Conception, violet for Holy Week; there were the special copes of the Primate, copes for officiating bishops, copes for dignitaries from other countries and dioceses. They were of the richest velvet and satin, heavily embroidered with gold, many with saints worked in silk, so heavy that it seemed hardly possible for a man to bear them. In the Baptistery, filling it with warm light, is the _San Antonio_ of Murillo, than which no picture gives more intensely the religious emotion. The saint, tall and meagre, beautiful of face, looks at the Divine Child hovering in a golden mist with an ecstasy that is no longer human. It is interesting to consider whether an artist need feel the sentiment he desires to convey. Certainly many pictures have been painted under the influence of profound feeling which leave the spectator entirely cold, and it is probable enough that the early Italians felt few of the emotions which their pictures call forth. We know that the masterpieces of Perugino, so moving, so instinct with religious tenderness, were very much a matter of pounds, shillings and pence. But Luis de Vargas, on the other hand, daily humbled himself by scourging and by wearing a hair shirt, and Vicente Joanes prepared himself for a new picture by communion and confession; so that it is impossible to wonder at the rude and savage ardour of their work. And the impression that may be gathered of Murillo from his pictures is borne out by the study of his grave and simple life. He had not the turbulent piety of the other two, but a calm and sweet devotion, which led him to spend long hours in church, meditating. He, at any rate, felt all that he expressed. I do not know a church that gives the religious sentiment more completely than Seville Cathedral. The worship of the Spaniards is sombre, full-blooded, a thing of dark rich colours; it requires the heaviness of incense and that overloading of rococo decoration. It is curious that notwithstanding their extreme similarity to the Neapolitans, the Andalusians should in their faith differ so entirely. Of course, in Southern Italy religion is as full of superstition--an adoration of images in which all symbolism is lost and only the gross idol remains; but it is a gayer and a lighter thing than in Spain. Most characteristic of this is the difference between the churches; and with _Santa Maria de la Sede_ may well be contrasted the Neapolitan _Santa Chiara_, with its great windows, so airy and spacious, sparkling with white and gold. The paintings are almost frolicsome. It is like a ballroom, a typical place of worship for a generation that had no desire to pray, but strutted in gaudy silks and ogled over pretty fans, pretending to discuss the latest audacity of Monsieur Arouet de Voltaire. XXI [Sidenote: The Hospital of Charity] The Spaniards possess to the fullest degree the art of evoking devout emotions, and in their various churches may be experienced every phase of religious feeling. After the majestic size and the solemn mystery of the Cathedral, nothing can come as a greater contrast than the Church of the Hermandad de la Caredad. It was built by don Miguel de Mañara, who rests in the chancel, with the inscription over him: '_Aqui jacen los huesos y ceñizas del peor hombre que ha habido en el mundo; ruegan por el_'--'Here lie the bones and ashes of the worst man that has ever been in the world; pray for him.' But like all Andalusians he was a braggart; for a love of chocolate, which appears to have been his besetting sin, is insufficient foundation for such a vaunt: a vice of that order is adequately punished by the corpulence it must occasion. However, legend, representing don Miguel as the most dissolute of libertines, is more friendly. The grave sister who escorts the visitor relates that one day in church don Miguel saw a beautiful nun, and undaunted by her habit, made amorous proposals. She did not speak, but turned to look at him, whereupon he saw the side of her face which had been hidden from his gaze, and it was eaten away by a foul and loathsome disease, so that it seemed more horrible than the face of death. The gallant was so terrified that he fainted, and afterwards the face haunted him, the face of matchless beauty and of revolting decay, so that he turned from the world. He devoted his fortune to rebuilding the hospital and church of the Brotherhood of Charity, whose chief office it was to administer the sacraments to those condemned to death and provide for their burial, and was eventually received into their Order. It was in the seventeenth century that Mañara built his church, and consequently rococo holds sway with all its fantasies. It is small, without aisles or chapels, and the morbid opulence of the decoration gives it a peculiar character. The walls are lined with red damask, and the floor carpeted with a heavy crimson carpet; it gives the sensation of a hothouse, or, with its close odours, of a bedchamber transformed into a chapel for the administration of the last sacrament. The atmosphere is unhealthy: one pants for breath. At one end, taking up the entire wall, is a reredos by Pedro Roldan, of which the centrepiece is an elaborate 'Deposition in the Tomb,' with numerous figures coloured to the life. It is very fine in its mingling of soft, rich hues and flamboyant realism. The artist has revelled in the opportunity for anguish of expression that his subject afforded, but has treated it with such a passionate seriousness that, in his grim, fierce way, he does not fail to be impressive. The frame is of twisted golden pillars, supported by little naked angels, and decorated with grapes and vine-leaves. Above and at the sides are great saints in carved wood, and angels with floating drapery. Murillo was on terms of intimacy with don Miguel de Mañara, and like him a member of the Hermandad. For his friend he painted some of his most famous pictures, which by the subdued ardour of their colour, by their opulent tones, harmonise most exquisitely with the church. Marshal Soult, with a fine love of art that was profitable, carried off several of them, and their empty frames stare at one still. But before that, when they were all in place, the effect must have been of unique magnificence. It must be an extraordinary religion that flourishes in such a place, an artificial faith that needs heat like tropical plants, that desires unnatural vows. It breathes of neurotic emotions with its damask-covered walls, with its carpet that deadens the footfall, its sombre, gorgeous pictures. The sweet breeze of heaven never enters there, nor the sunlight; the air is languid with incense; one is oppressed by a strange, heavy silence. In such a church sins must be fostered for the morbid pleasure of confession. One can imagine that the worshippers in that overloaded atmosphere would see strange visions, voluptuous and mystical; the Blessed Mary and the Saints might gain visible and palpable flesh, and the devil would not be far off. There the gruesome imaginings of Valdes Leal are a fitting decoration. Every one knows that grim picture of a bishop in episcopal robes, eaten by worms, his flesh putrefying, which led Murillo to say: 'Leal, you make me hold my nose,' and the other answered: 'You have taken all the flesh and left me nought but the bones.' Elsewhere, by the same master, there is a painting that suggests, with greater poignancy to my mind because less brutally, the thoughts evoked by the more celebrated work, and since it seems to complete the ideas awakened by this curious chapel, I mention it here. It represents a priest at the altar, saying his mass, and the altar after the Spanish fashion is sumptuous with gilt and florid carving. He wears a magnificent cope and a surplice of exquisite lace, but he wears them as though their weight were more than he could bear; and in the meagre, trembling hands, and in the white, ashen face, in the dark hollowness of the eyes and in the sunken cheeks, there is a bodily corruption that is terrifying. The priest seems to hold together with difficulty the bonds of the flesh, but with no eager yearning of the soul to burst its prison, only with despair; it is as if the Lord Almighty had forsaken him, and the high heavens were empty of their solace. All the beauty of life appears forgotten, and there is nothing in the world but decay. A ghastly putrefaction has attacked already the living man; the worms of the grave, the piteous horror of mortality, and the darkness before him offer nought but fear, and what soul is there to rise again! Beyond, dark night is seen and a turbulent sea, the dark night of the soul of which the mystics write, and the troublous sea of life whereon there is no refuge for the weary and the sick at heart. * * * Then, if you would study yet another phase of the religious sentiment, go to the Museo, where are the fine pictures that Murillo painted for the Capuchin Monastery. You will see all the sombreness of Spanish piety, the savage faith, dissolved into ineffable love. Religion has become a wonderful tenderness, in which passionate human affection is inextricably mingled with god-like adoration. Murillo, these sensual forms quivering with life, brought the Eternal down to earth, and gave terrestrial ardour to the apathy of an impersonal devotion; that, perhaps, is why to women he has always been the most fascinating of painters. In the _Madonna de la Servilleta_--painted on a napkin for the cook of the monastery--the child is a simple, earthly infant, fresh and rosy, with wide-open, wondering eyes and not a trace of immortality. I myself saw a common woman of the streets stand before this picture with tears running down her cheeks. '_Corazon de mi alma!_' she said, 'Heart of my soul! I could cover his little body with kisses.' She smiled, but could hardly restrain her sobs. The engrossing love of a mother for her child seemed joined in miraculous union with the worship of a mortal for his God. Murillo had neither the power nor the desire to idealise his models. The saints of these great pictures, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Felix of Cantalicio, St. Thomas of Villanueva, are monks and beggars such as may to this day be seen in the streets of Seville. St. Felix is merely an old man with hollow cheeks and a grey, ragged beard; but yet as he clasps the child in his arms with eager tenderness, he is transfigured by a divine ecstasy: his face is radiant with the most touching emotion. And St. Antony of Padua, in another picture, worships the infant God with a mystic adoration, which, notwithstanding the realism of the presentment, lifts him far, far above the earth. XXII [Sidenote: Gaol] I was curious to see the prison in Seville. Gruesome tales had been told me of its filth and horror, and the wretched condition of the prisoners; I had even heard that from the street you might see them pressing against the barred windows with arms thrust through, begging the passer-by for money or bread. Mediæval stories recurred to my mind and the clank of chains trailed through my imagination. I arranged to be conducted by the prison doctor, and one morning soon after five set out to meet him. My guide informed me by a significant gesture that his tendencies were--bibulous, and our meeting-place was a tavern; but when we arrived they told us that don Felipe--such was his name--had been taken his morning dram and gone; however, if we went to another inn we should doubtless find him. But there we heard he had not yet arrived, he was not due till half-past five. To pass the time we drank a mouthful of _aguardiente_ and smoked a cigarette, and eventually the medico was espied in the distance. We went towards him--a round, fat person with a red face and a redder nose, somewhat shabbily dressed. He looked at me pointedly and said: 'I'm dry. _Vengo seco._' It was a hint not to be neglected, and we returned to the tavern where don Felipe had his nip. 'It's very good for the stomach,' he assured me. We sallied forth together, and as we walked he told me the number of prisoners, the sort of crimes for which they were detained--ranging from man-slaughter to petty larceny--and finally, details of his own career. He was an intelligent man, and when we came to the prison door insisted on drinking my health. The prison is an old convent, and it is a little startling to see the church façade, with a statue of the Madonna over the central porch. At the steps a number of women stood waiting with pots and jars and handkerchiefs full of food for their relatives within; and when the doctor appeared several rushed up to ask about a father or a son that lay sick. We went in and there was a melodramatic tinkling of keys and an unlocking of heavy doors. The male prisoners, the adults, were in the _patio_ of the convent, where in olden days the nuns had wandered on summer evenings, watering their roses. The iron door was opened and shut behind us; there was a movement of curiosity at the sight of a stranger, and many turned to look at me. Such as had illnesses came to the doctor, and he looked at their tongues and felt their pulse, giving directions to an assistant who stood beside him with a note-book. Don Felipe was on excellent terms with his patients, laughing and joking; a malingerer asked if he could not have a little wine because his throat was sore; the doctor jeered and the man began to laugh; they bandied repartees with one another. There were about two hundred in the _patio_, and really they did not seem to have so bad a time. There was one large group gathered round a man who read a newspaper aloud; it was Monday morning, and all listened intently to the account of a bull-fight on the previous day, bursting into a little cry of surprise and admiration on hearing that the _matador_ had been caught and tossed. Others lay by a pillar playing draughts for matches, while half a dozen more eagerly watched, giving unsolicited advice with much gesticulation. The draught-board consisted of little squares drawn on the pavement with chalk, and the pieces were scraps of white and yellow paper. One man sat cross-legged by a column busily rolling cigarettes; he had piles of them by his side arranged in packets, which he sold at one penny each; it was certainly an illegal offence, because the sale of tobacco is a government monopoly, but if you cannot break the laws in prison where can you break them? Others occupied themselves by making baskets or nets. But the majority did nothing at all, standing about, sitting when they could, with the eternal cigarette between their lips; and the more energetic watched the blue smoke curl into the air. Altogether a very happy family! Nor did they seem really very criminal, more especially as they wore no prison uniform, but their own clothes. I saw no difference between them and the people I met casually in the street. They were just very ordinary citizens, countrymen smelling of the soil, labouring men, artisans. Their misfortune had been only to make too free a use of their long curved knives or to be discovered taking something over which another had prior claims. But in Andalusia every one is potentially as criminal, which is the same as saying that these jail-birds were estimable persons whom an unkind fate and a mistaken idea of justice had separated for a little while from their wives and families. I saw two only whose aspect was distinctly vicious. One was a tall fellow with shifty eyes, a hard thin mouth, a cruel smile, and his face was really horrible. I asked the doctor why he was there. Don Felipe, without speaking, made the peculiar motion of the fingers which signifies robbery, and the man seeing him repeated it with a leer. I have seldom seen a face that was so utterly repellent, so depraved and wicked: I could not get it out of my head, and for a long time saw before me the crafty eyes and the grinning mouth. Obviously the man was a criminal born who would start thieving as soon as he was out of prison, hopelessly and utterly corrupt. But it was curious that his character should be marked so plainly on his face; it was a danger-signal to his fellows, and one would have thought the suspicion it aroused must necessarily keep him virtuous. It was a countenance that would make a man instinctively clap his hand to his pocket. The other was a Turk, a huge creature, with dark scowling face and prominent brows; he made a singular figure in his bright fez and baggy breeches, looking at his fellow prisoners with a frown of hate. But the doctor had finished seeing his patients and the iron door was opened for us to go out. We went upstairs to the hospital, a long bare ward, terribly cheerless. Six men, perhaps, lay in bed, guarded by two warders; one old fellow with rheumatism groaning in agony, two others dazed and very still, with high fever. We walked round quickly, don Felipe as before mechanically looking at their tongues and feeling their pulse, speaking a word to the assistant and moving on. The windows were shut and there was a horrid stench of illness and drugs and antiseptics. We went through long corridors to the female side, and meanwhile the assistant told the doctor that during the night a woman had been confined. Don Felipe sat down in an office to write a certificate. 'What a nuisance these women are!' he said. 'Why can't they wait till they get out of prison? How is it?' 'It was still-born.' '_Pero, hombre_,' said the doctor crossly. 'Why didn't you tell me that before? Now I shall have to write another certificate. This one's no good.' He tore it up and painfully made out a second with the slow laborious writing of a man unused to holding a pen. Then we marched on and came to another smaller _patio_ where the females were. They were comparatively few, not more than twenty or thirty; and when we entered a dark inner-room to see the woman who was ill they all trooped in after us--all but one. They stood round eagerly telling us of the occurrence. 'Don't make such a noise, _por Dios_! I can't hear myself speak,' said the doctor. The woman was lying on her back with flushed cheeks, her eyes staring glassily. The doctor asked a question, but she did not answer. She began to cry, sobbing from utter weakness in a silent, unrestrained way. On a table near her, hidden by a cloth, lay the dead child. We went out again into the _patio_. The sun was higher now and it was very warm, the blue sky shone above us without a cloud. The prisoners returned to their occupations. One old hag was doing a younger woman's hair; I noticed that even for Spain it was beautiful, very thick, curling, and black as night. The girl held a carnation in her hand to put in front of the comb when the operation was completed. Another woman suckled a baby, and several tiny children were playing about happily, while their mothers chatted to one another, knitting. But there was one, markedly different from the others, who sat alone taking no notice of the scene. It was she who remained in the _patio_ when the rest followed us into the sick room, a gipsy, tall and gaunt, with a skin of the darkest yellow. Her hair was not elaborately arranged as that of her companions, but plainly done, drawn back stiffly from the forehead. She sat there, erect and motionless, looking at the ground with an unnatural stare, silent. They told me she never spoke a word nor paid attention to the women in the court. She might have been entirely alone. She never altered her position, but sat there, sphinx-like, in that attitude of stony grief. She was a stranger among the rest, and her bronzed face, her silence gave a weird impression; she seemed to recall the burning deserts of the East and an endless past. At last we came out, and the heavy iron door was closed behind us. What a relief it was to be in the street again, to see the sun and the trees, and to breathe the free air! A cart went by with a great racket, drawn by three mules, and the cries of the driver as he cracked his whip were almost musical; a train of donkeys passed; a man trotted by on a brown shaggy cob, his huge panniers filled with glowing vegetables, green and red, and in a corner was a great bunch of roses. I took long breaths of the free air, I shook myself to get rid of those prison odours. I offered don Felipe refreshment and we repaired to a dram-shop immediately opposite. Two women were standing there. '_Ole!_' said the doctor to an old toothless hag with a vicious leer. 'What are you doing here? You've not been in for some time.' She laughed and explained that she was come to fetch her friend, a young woman, who had been released that morning. The doctor nodded to her, asking how long she had been in gaol. 'Two years and nine months,' she said. And she began to laugh hysterically with tears streaming down her cheeks. 'I don't know what I'm doing,' she cried. 'I can't understand it.' She looked into the street with wild, yearning eyes; everything seemed to her strange and new. 'I haven't seen a tree for nearly three years,' she sobbed. But the hag was pressing the doctor to drink with her; he accepted without much hesitation, and gallantly proposed her health. 'What are you going to do?' he said to the younger woman, she was hardly more than a girl. 'You'd better not hang about in Seville or you'll get into trouble again.' 'Oh no,' she said, 'I'm going to my village--_mi pueblo_--this afternoon. I want to see my husband and my child.' Don Felipe turned to me and asked what I thought of the Seville prison. I made some complimentary reply. 'Are English prisons like that?' he asked. I said I did not think so. 'Are they better?' I shrugged my shoulders. 'I'm told,' he said, 'that two years' hard labour in an English prison kills a man.' 'The English are a great nation,' I replied. 'And a humane one,' he added, with a bow and a smile. I bade him good-morning. XXIII [Sidenote: Before the Bull-fight] If all Andalusians are potential gaol-birds they are also potential bull-fighters. It is impossible for foreigners to realise how firmly the love of that pastime is engrained in all classes. In other countries the gift that children love best is a box of soldiers, but in Spain it is a miniature ring with tin bulls, _picadors_ on horseback and _toreros_. From their earliest youth boys play at bull-fighting, one of them taking the bull's part and charging with the movements peculiar to that animal, while the rest make passes with their coats or handkerchiefs. Often, to increase the excitement of the game, they have two horns fixed on a piece of wood. You will see them playing it at every street corner all day long, and no amusement can rival it; with the result that by the time a boy is fifteen he has acquired considerable skill in the exercise, and a favourite entertainment then is to hire a bull-calf for an afternoon and practise with it. Every urchin in Andalusia knows the names of the most prominent champions and can tell you their merits. The bull-fight is the national spectacle; it excites Spaniards as nothing else can, and the death of a famous _torero_ is more tragic than the loss of a colony. Seville looks upon itself as the very home and centre of the art. The good king Ferdinand VII.--as precious a rascal as ever graced a throne--founded in Seville the first academy for the cultivation of tauromachy, and bull-fighters swagger through the Sierpes in great numbers and the most faultless costume. There are only five great bull-fights in a year at Seville, namely, on Easter day, on the three days of the fair, and on Corpus Christi. But during the summer _novilladas_ are held every Sunday, with bulls of three years old and young fighters. Long before an important _corrida_ there is quite an excitement in the town. Gaudy bills are posted on the walls with the names of the performers and the proprietor of the bulls; crowds stand round reading them breathlessly, discussing with one another the chances of the fray; the papers give details and forecasts as in England they do for the better cause of horse-racing! And the journeyings of the _matador_ are announced as exactly as with us the doings of the nobility and gentry. The great _matador_, Mazzantini or Guerrita, arrives the day before the fight, and perhaps takes a walk in the Sierpes. People turn to look at him and acquaintances shake his hand, pleased that all the world may know how friendly they are with so great a man. The hero himself is calm and gracious. He feels himself a person of merit, and cannot be unconscious that he has a fortune of several million _pesetas_ bringing in a reasonable interest. He talks with ease and assurance, often condescends to joke, and elegantly waves his hand, sparkling with diamonds of great value. * * * Many persons have described a bull-fight, but generally their emotions have overwhelmed them so that they have seen only part of one performance, and consequently have been obliged to use an indignant imagination to help out a very faulty recollection. This is my excuse for giving one more account of an entertainment which can in no way be defended. It is doubtless vicious and degrading; but with the constant danger, the skill displayed, the courage, the hair-breadth escapes, the catastrophes, it is foolish to deny that any pastime can be more exciting. The English humanity to animals is one of the best traits of a great people, and they justly thank God they are not as others are. Can anything more horrid be imagined than to kill a horse in the bull-ring, and can any decent hack ask for a better end when he is broken down, than to be driven to death in London streets or to stand for hours on cab ranks in the rain and snow of an English winter? The Spaniards are certainly cruel to animals; on the other hand, they never beat their wives nor kick their children. From the dog's point of view I would ten times sooner be English, but from the woman's--I have my doubts. Some while ago certain papers, anxious perhaps to taste the comfortable joys of self-righteousness, turned their attention to the brutality of Spaniards, and a score of journalists wrote indignantly of bull-fights. At the same time, by a singular chance, a prize-fighter was killed in London, and the Spanish papers printed long tirades against the gross, barbaric English. The two sets of writers were equally vehement, inaccurate and flowery; but what seemed most remarkable was that each side evidently felt quite unaffected horror and disgust for the proceedings of the other. Like persons of doubtful character inveighing against the vices of the age, both were so carried away by moral enthusiasm as to forget that there was anything in their own histories which made this virtuous fury a little absurd. There is really a good deal in the point of view. XXIV [Sidenote: Corrida de Toros--I] On the day before a bull-fight all the world goes down to Tablada to see the bulls. Youth and beauty drive, for every one in Seville of the least pretension to gentility keeps a carriage; the Sevillans, characteristically, may live in houses void of every necessity and comfort, eating bread and water, but they will have a carriage to drive in the _paseo_. You see vehicles of all kinds, from the new landau with a pair of magnificent Andalusian horses, or the strange omnibus drawn by mules, typical of Southern Spain, to the shabby victoria, with a broken-down hack and a decrepit coachman. Tablada is a vast common without the town, running along the river side, and here all manner of cattle are kept throughout the year. But the fighting bulls are brought from their respective farms the morning before the day of battle, and each is put in an enclosure with its attendant oxen. The crowd looks eagerly, admiring the length of horn, forecasting the fight. The handsome brutes remain there till midnight, when they are brought to the ring and shut in little separate boxes till the morrow. The _encierro_, as it is called, is an interesting sight. The road has been palisaded and the bulls are driven along by oxen. It is very curious to wait in the darkness, in the silence, under the myriad stars of the southern night. Your ear is astrung to hear the distant tramp; the waiting seems endless. A sound is heard and every one runs to the side; but nothing follows, and the waiting continues. Suddenly the stillness is broken by tinkling bells, the oxen; and immediately there is a tramp of rushing hoofs. Three men on horseback gallop through the entrance, and on their heels the cattle; the riders turn sharply round, a door is swung to behind them, and the oxen, with the bulls in their midst, pound through the ring. * * * The doors are opened two hours before the performance. Through the morning the multitude has trooped to the Plaza San Fernando to buy tickets, and in the afternoon all Seville wends its way towards the ring. The road is thronged with people, they walk in dense crowds, pushing one another to get out of the way of broken-down shays that roll along filled with enthusiasts. The drivers crack their whips, shouting: '_Un real, un real a los Toros!_'{a} The sun beats down and the sky is intensely blue. It is very hot, already people are blowing and panting, boys sell fans at a halfpenny each. '_Abanicos a perra chica!_'{b} When you come near the ring the din is tremendous; the many vendors shout their wares, middlemen offer tickets at double the usual price, friends call to one another. Now and then is a quarrel, a quick exchange of abuse as one pushes or treads upon his neighbour; but as a rule all are astonishingly good-natured. A man, after a narrow escape from being run over, will shout a joke to the driver, who is always ready with a repartee. And they surge on towards the entrance. Every one is expectant and thrilled, the very air seems to give a sense of exhilaration. The people crowd in like ants. All things are gay and full of colour and life. A _picador_ passes on horseback in his uncouth clothes, and all turn to look at him. And in the ring itself the scene is marvellous. On one side the sun beats down with burning rays, and there, the seats being cheaper, notwithstanding the terrific heat people are closely packed. There is a perpetual irregular movement of thousands of women's fans fluttering to and fro. Opposite, in the shade, are nearly as many persons, but of better class. Above, in the boxes sit ladies in _mantillas_, and when a beautiful woman appears she is often greeted with a burst of applause, which she takes most unconcernedly. When at last the ring is full, tier above tier crammed so that not a place is vacant, it gives quite an extraordinary emotion. The serried masses cease then to be a collection of individuals, but gain somehow a corporate unity; you realise, with a kind of indeterminate fear, the many-headed beast of savage instincts and of ruthless might. No crowd is more picturesque than the Spanish, and the dark masculine costume vividly contrasts with the bright colours of the women, with flowers in their hair and _mantillas_ of white lace. But also the tremendous vitality of it all strikes you. Late arrivals walk along looking for room, gesticulating, laughing, bandying jokes; vendors of all sorts cry out their goods: the men who sell prawns, shrimps, and crabs' claws from Cadiz pass with large baskets: '_Bocas, bocas!_' The water sellers with huge jars: '_Agua, quien quiere agua? Agua!_'{c} The word sings along the interminable rows. A man demands a glass and hands down a halfpenny; a mug of sparkling water is sent up to him. It is deliciously cool. The sellers of lottery tickets, offering as usual the first prize: '_Premio gordo, quien quiere el premio gordo_';{d} or yelling the number of the ticket: 'Who wants number seventeen hundred and eighty-five for three _pesetas_?' And the newsboys add to the din: '_Noticiero! Porvenir!_' Later on arrives the Madrid paper: '_Heraldo! Heraldo!_' Lastly the men with stacks of old journals to use as seats: '_A perra chica, dos periodicos a perra chica!_'{e} Suddenly there is a great clapping of hands, and looking up you find the president has come; he is supported by two friends, and all three, with comic solemnity, wear tall hats and frock coats. They bow to the public. Bull-fighting is the only punctual thing in Spain, and the president arrives precisely as the clock strikes half-past four. He waves a handkerchief, the band strikes up, a door is opened, and the fighters enter. First come the three _matadors_, the eldest in the middle, the next on his right, and the youngest on the left; they are followed by their respective _cuadrillas_, the _banderilleros_, the _capeadors_, the _picadors_ on horseback, and finally the _chulos_, whose duty it is to unsaddle dead horses, attach the slaughtered bull to the team of mules, and perform other minor offices. They advance, gorgeous in their coloured satin and gold embroidery, bearing a cloak peculiarly folded over the arm; they walk with a kind of swinging motion, as ordained by the convention of a century. They bow to the president, very solemnly. The applause is renewed. They retire to the side, three _picadors_ take up their places at some distance from one another on the right of the door from which issues the bull. The _alguaciles_, in black velvet, with peaked and feathered hats, on horseback, come forward, and the key of the bull's den is thrown to them. They disappear. The fighters meanwhile exchange their satin cloaks for others of less value. There is another flourish of trumpets, the gates are opened for the bull. Then comes a moment of expectation, every one is trembling with excitement. There is perfect silence. All eyes are fixed on the open gate. Notes: {a} 'Twopence-halfpenny to the Bulls.' {b} "Fans, one halfpenny each!" {c} 'Water, who wants water? Water!' {d} 'The first prize, who wants the first prize?' {e} 'One halfpenny, two papers for one halfpenny.' XXV [Sidenote: Corrida de Toros--II] One or two shouts are heard, a murmur passes through the people, and the bull emerges--shining, black, with massive shoulders and fine horns. It advances a little, a splendid beast conscious of its strength, and suddenly stops dead, looking round. The _toreros_ wave their capes and the _picadors_ flourish their lances, long wooden spikes with an iron point. The bull catches sight of a horse, and lowering his head, bears down swiftly upon it. The _picador_ takes firmer hold of his lance, and when the brute reaches him plants the pointed end between its shoulders; at the same moment the senior _matador_ dashes forward and with his cloak distracts the bull's attention. It wheels round and charges; he makes a pass; it goes by almost under his arm, but quickly turns and again attacks. This time the skilful fighter receives it backwards, looking over his shoulder, and again it passes. There are shouts of enthusiasm from the public. The bull's glossy coat is stained with red. A second _picador_ comes forward, and the bull charges again, but furiously now, exerting its full might. The horse is thrown to the ground and the rider, by an evil chance, falls at the bull's very feet. It cannot help seeing him and lowers its head; the people catch their breath; many spring instinctively to their feet; here and there is a woman's frightened cry; but immediately a _matador_ draws the cape over its eyes and passionately the bull turns on him. Others spring forward and lift the _picador_: his trappings are so heavy that he cannot rise alone; he is dragged to safety and the steed brought back for him. One more horseman advances, and the bull with an angry snort bounds at him; the _picador_ does his best, but is no match for the giant strength. The bull digs its horns deep into the horse's side and lifts man and beast right off the ground; they fall with a heavy thud, and as the raging brute is drawn off, blood spurts from the horse's flank. The _chulos_ try to get it up; they drag on the reins with shouts and curses, and beat it with sticks. But the wretched creature, wounded to the death, helplessly lifts its head. They see it is useless and quickly remove saddle and bridle, a man comes with a short dagger called the _puntilla_, which he drives into its head, the horse falls on its side, a quiver passes through its body, and it is dead. The people are shouting with pleasure; the bull is a good one. The first _picador_ comes up again and the bull attacks for the fourth time, but it has lost much strength, and the man drives it off. It has made a horrible gash in the horse's belly, and the entrails protrude, dragging along the ground. The horse is taken out. The president waves his handkerchief, the trumpets sound, and the first act of the drama is over. The _picadors_ leave the ring and the _banderilleros_ take their darts, about three feet long, gay with decorations of coloured paper. While they make ready, others play with the bull, gradually tiring it: one throws aside his cape and awaits the charge with folded arms; the bull rushes at him, and the man without moving his feet twists his body away and the savage brute passes on. There is a great burst of applause for a daring feat well done. Each _matador_ has two _banderilleros_, and it is proper that three pairs of these darts should be placed. One of them steps to within speaking distance of the animal, and holding a _banderilla_ in each hand lifted above his head, stamps his foot and shouts insulting words. The bull does not know what this new thing is, but charges blindly; at the same moment the man runs forward, and passing, plants the two darts between the shoulders. If they are well placed there is plentiful hand-clapping; no audience is so liberal of applause for skill or courage, none so intolerant of cowardice or stupidity; and with equal readiness it will yell with delight or hiss and hoot and whistle. The second _banderillero_ comes forward to plant his pair; a third is inserted and the trumpets sound for the final scene. This is the great duel between the single man and the bull. The _matador_ advances, sword in hand, with the _muleta_, the red cloth for the passes, over his arm. Under the president's box he takes off his hat, and with fine gesture makes a grandiloquent speech, wherein he vows either to conquer or to die: the harangue is finished with a wheel round and a dramatic flinging of his hat to attendants on the other side of the barrier. He pensively walks forward. All eyes are upon him--and he knows it. He motions his companions to stand back and goes close to the bull. He is quite alone, with his life in his hands--a slender figure, very handsome in the gorgeous costume glittering with fine gold. He arranges the _muleta_ over a little stick, so that it hangs down like a flag and conceals his sword. Then quite solemnly he walks up to the bull, holding the red rag in his left hand. The bull watches suspiciously, suddenly charges, and the _muleta_ is passed over its head; the _matador_ does not move a muscle, the bull turns and stands quite motionless. Another charge, another pass. And so he continues, making seven or eight of various sorts, to the growing approbation of the public. At last it is time to kill. With great caution he withdraws the sword; the bull looks warily. He makes two or three passes more and walks round till he gets the animal into proper position: the forefeet must be set squarely on the ground. '_Ora! Ora!_' cry the people. 'Now! Now!' The bull is well placed. The _matador_ draws the sword back a little and takes careful aim. The bull rushes, and at the same moment the man makes one bound forward and buries the sword to the hilt between the brute's shoulders. It falls to its knees and rolls over. Then is a perfect storm of applause; and it is worth while to see fourteen thousand people wild with delight. The band bursts into joyous strains, and the mules come galloping in, gaily caparisoned; a rope is passed round the dead beast, and they drag it away. The _matador_ advances to the president's box and bows, while the shouting grows more frantic. He walks round, bowing and smiling, and the public in its enthusiasm throws down hats and cigars and sticks. But there are no intervals to a bull-fight, and the _picadors_ immediately reappear and take their places; the doors are flung open, and a second bull rushes forth. The _matador_ still goes round bowing to the applause, elaborately unmindful of the angry beast. Six animals are killed in an afternoon within two hours, and then the mighty audience troop out with flushed cheeks, the smell of blood strong in their nostrils. XXVI [Sidenote: On Horseback] I had a desire to see something of the very heart of Andalusia, of that part of the country which had preserved its antique character, where railway trains were not, and the horse, the mule, the donkey were still the only means of transit. After much scrutiny of local maps and conversation with horse-dealers and others, I determined from Seville to go circuitously to Ecija, and thence return by another route as best I could. The district I meant to traverse in olden times was notorious for its brigands; even thirty years ago the prosperous tradesman, voyaging on his mule from town to town, was liable to be seized by unromantic outlaws and detained till his friends forwarded ransom, while ears and fingers were playfully sent to prove identity. In Southern Spain brigandage necessarily flourished, for not only were the country-folk in collusion with the bandits, but the very magistrates united with them to share the profits of lawless undertakings. Drastic measures were needful to put down the evil, and in a truly Spanish way drastic measures were employed. The Civil Guard, whose duty it was to see to the safety of the country side, had no confidence in the justice of Madrid, whither captured highwaymen were sent for trial; once there, for a few hundred dollars, the most murderous ruffian could prove his babe-like innocence, forthwith return to the scene of his former exploits and begin again. So they hit upon an expedient. The Civil Guards set out for the capital with their prisoner handcuffed between them; but, curiously enough, in every single case the brigand had scarcely marched a couple of miles before he incautiously tried to escape, whereupon he was, of course, promptly shot through the back. People noticed two things: first, that the clothes of the dead man were often singed, as if he had not escaped very far before he was shot down; that only proved his guardians' zeal. But the other was stranger: the two Civil Guards, when after a couple of hours they returned to the town, as though by a mysterious premonition they had known the bandit would make some rash attempt, invariably had waiting for them an excellent hot dinner. The only robber of importance who avoided such violent death was the chief of a celebrated band who, when captured, signed a declaration that he had not the remotest idea of escaping, and insisted on taking with him to Madrid his solicitor and a witness. He reached the capital alive, and having settled his little affairs with benevolent judges, turned to a different means of livelihood, and eventually, it is said, occupied a responsible post in the Government. It is satisfactory to think that his felonious talents were not in after-life entirely wasted. * * * It was the beginning of March when I started. According to the old proverb, the dog was already seeking the shade: _En Marzo busca la sombra el perro_; the chilly Spaniard, loosening the folds of his _capa_, acknowledged that at mid-day in the sun it was almost warm. The winter rains appeared to have ceased; the sky over Seville was cloudless, not with the intense azure of midsummer, but with a blue that seemed mixed with silver. And in the sun the brown water of the Guadalquivir glittered like the scales on a fish's back, or like the burnished gold of old Moorish pottery. I set out in the morning early, with saddle-bags fixed on either side and poncho strapped to my pommel. A loaded revolver, though of course I never had a chance to use it, made me feel pleasantly adventurous. I walked cautiously over the slippery cobbles of the streets, disturbing the silence with the clatter of my horse's shoes. Now and then a mule or a donkey trotted by, with panniers full of vegetables, of charcoal or of bread, between which on the beast's neck sat perched a man in a short blouse. I came to the old rampart of the town, now a promenade; and at the gate groups of idlers, with cigarettes between their lips, stood talking. An hospitable friend had offered lodging for the night and food; after which, my ideas of the probable accommodation being vague, I expected to sleep upon straw, for victuals depending on the wayside inns. I arrived at the _Campo de la Cruz_, a tiny chapel which marks the same distance from the Cathedral as Jesus Christ walked to the Cross; it is the final boundary of Seville. Immediately afterwards I left the high-road, striking across country to Carmona. The land was already wild; on either side of the bridle-path were great wastes of sand covered only by palmetto. The air was cool and fresh, like the air of English country in June when it has rained through the night; and Aguador, snorting with pleasure, cantered over the uneven ground, nimbly avoiding holes and deep ruts with the sure-footedness of his Arab blood. An Andalusian horse cares nothing for the ground on which he goes, though it be hard and unyielding as iron; and he clambers up and down steep, rocky precipices as happily as he trots along a cinder-path. I passed a shepherd in a ragged cloak and a broad-brimmed hat, holding a crook. He stared at me, his flock of brown sheep clustered about him as I scampered by, and his dog rushed after, barking. '_Vaya Usted con Dios!_' I came to little woods of pine-trees, with long, thin trunks, and the foliage spreading umbrella-wise; round them circled innumerable hawks, whose nests I saw among the branches. Two ravens crossed my path, their wings heavily flapping. The great charm of the Andalusian country is that you seize romance, as it were, in the act. In northern lands it is only by a mental effort that you can realise the picturesque value of the life that surrounds you; and, for my part, I can perceive it only by putting it mentally in black and white, and reading it as though between the covers of a book. Once, I remember, in Brittany, in a distant corner of that rock-bound coast, I sat at midnight in a fisherman's cottage playing cards by the light of two tallow candles. Next door, with only a wall between us, a very old sailor lay dying in the great cupboard-bed which had belonged to his fathers before him; and he fought for life with the remains of that strenuous vigour with which in other years he had battled against the storms of the Atlantic. In the stillness of the night, the waves, with the murmur of a lullaby, washed gently upon the shingle, and the stars shone down from a clear sky. I looked at the yellow light on the faces of the players, gathered in that desolate spot from the four corners of the earth, and cried out: 'By Jove, this is romance!' I had never before caught that impression in the very making, and I was delighted with my good fortune. The answer came quickly from the American: 'Don't talk bosh! It's your deal.' But for all that it was romance, seized fugitively, and life at that moment threw itself into a decorative pattern fit to be remembered. It is the same effect which you get more constantly in Spain, so that the commonest things are transfigured into beauty. For in the cactus and the aloe and the broad fields of grain, in the mules with their wide panniers and the peasants, in the shepherds' huts and the straggling farm-houses, the romantic is there, needing no subtlety to be discovered; and the least imaginative may feel a certain thrill when he understands that the life he leads is not without its æsthetic meaning. * * * I rode for a long way in complete solitude, through many miles of this sandy desert. Then the country changed, and olive-groves in endless succession followed one another, the trees with curiously decorative effect were planted in long, even lines. The earth was a vivid red, contrasting with the blue sky and the sombre olives, gnarled and fantastically twisted, like evil spirits metamorphosed: in places they had sown corn, and the young green enhanced the shrill diversity of colour. With its clear, brilliant outlines and its lack of shadow, the scene reminded one of a prim pattern, such as in Jane Austen's day young gentlewomen worked in worsted. Sometimes I saw women among the trees, perched like monkeys on the branches, or standing below with large baskets; they were extraordinarily quaint in the trousers which modesty bade them wear for the concealment of their limbs when olive-picking. The costume was so masculine, their faces so red and weather-beaten, that the yellow handkerchief on their heads was really the only means of distinguishing their sex. But the path became more precipitous, hewn from the sandstone, and so polished by the numberless shoes of donkeys and of mules that I hardly dared walk upon it; and suddenly I saw Carmona in front of me--quite close. XXVII [Sidenote: By the Road--I] The approach to Carmona is a very broad, white street, much too wide for the cottages which line it, deserted; and the young trees planted on either side are too small to give shade. The sun beat down with a fierce glare and the dust rose in clouds as I passed. Presently I came to a great Moorish gateway, a dark mass of stone, battlemented, with a lofty horseshoe arch. People were gathered about it in many-coloured groups, I found it was a holiday in Carmona, and the animation was unwonted; in a corner stood the hut of the _Consumo_, and the men advanced to examine my saddle-bags. I passed through, into the town, looking right and left for a _parador_, an hostelry whereat to leave my horse. I bargained for the price of food and saw Aguador comfortably stalled; then made my way to the Nekropolis where lived my host. There are many churches in Carmona, and into one of these I entered; it had nothing of great interest, but to a certain degree it was rich, rich in its gilded woodwork and in the brocade that adorned the pillars; and I felt that these Spanish churches lent a certain dignity to life: for all the careless flippancy of Andalusia they still remained to strike a nobler note. I forgot willingly that the land was priest-ridden and superstitious, so that a Spaniard could tell me bitterly that there were but two professions open to his countrymen, the priesthood and the bull-ring. It was pleasant to rest in that cool and fragrant darkness. My host was an archæologist, and we ate surrounded by broken earthenware, fragmentary mosaics, and grinning skulls. It was curious afterwards to wander in the graveyard which, with indefatigable zeal, he had excavated, among the tombs of forgotten races, letting oneself down to explore the subterranean cells. The paths he had made in the giant cemetery were lined with a vast number of square sandstone boxes which had contained human ashes; and now, when the lid was lifted, a green lizard or a scorpion darted out. From the hill I saw stretched before me the great valley of the Guadalquivir: with the squares of olive and of ploughed field, and the various greens of the corn, it was like a vast, multi-coloured carpet. But later, with the sunset, black clouds arose, splendidly piled upon one another; and the twilight air was chill and grey. A certain sternness came over the olive-groves, and they might well have served as a reproach to the facile Andaluz; for their cold passionless green seemed to offer a warning to his folly. At night my host left me to sleep in the village, and I lay in bed alone in the little house among the tombs; it was very silent. The wind sprang up and blew about me, whistling through the windows, whistling weirdly; and I felt as though the multitudes that had been buried in that old cemetery filled the air with their serried numbers, a vast, silent congregation waiting motionless for they knew not what. I recalled a gruesome fact that my friend had told me: not far from there, in tombs that he had disinterred the skeletons lay huddled spasmodically, with broken skulls and a great stone by the side; for when a man, he said, lay sick unto death, his people took him, and placed him in his grave, and with the stone killed him. * * * In the morning I set out again. It was five-and-thirty miles to Ecija, but a new high road stretched from place to place and I expected easy riding. Carmona stands on the top of a precipitous hill, round which winds the beginning of the road; below, after many zigzags, I saw its continuation, a straight white line reaching as far as I could see. In Andalusia, till a few years ago, there were practically no high roads, and even now they are few and bad. The chief communication from town to town is usually an uneven track, which none attempts to keep up, with deep ruts, and palmetto growing on either side, and occasional pools of water. A day's rain makes it a quagmire, impassable for anything beside the sure-footed mule. I went on, meeting now and then a string of asses, their panniers filled with stones or with wood for Carmona; the drivers sat on the rump of the hindmost animal, for that is the only comfortable way to ride a donkey. A peasant trotted briskly by on his mule, his wife behind him with her arms about his waist. I saw a row of ploughs in a field; to each were attached two oxen, and they went along heavily, one behind the other in regular line. By the side of every pair a man walked bearing a long goad, and one of them sang a _Malagueña_, its monotonous notes rising and falling slowly. From time to time I passed a white farm, a little way from the road, invitingly cool in the heat; the sun began to beat down fiercely. The inevitable storks were perched on a chimney, by their big nest; and when they flew in front of me, with their broad white wings and their red legs against the blue sky, they gave a quaint impression of a Japanese screen. A farmhouse such as this seems to me always a type of the Spanish impenetrability. I have been over many of them, and know the manner of their rooms and the furniture, the round of duties there performed and how the day is portioned out; but the real life of the inhabitants escapes me. My knowledge is merely external. I am conscious that it is the same of the Andalusians generally, and am dismayed because I know practically nothing more after a good many years than I learnt in the first months of my acquaintance with them. Below the superficial similarity with the rest of Europe which of late they have acquired, there is a difference which makes it impossible to get at the bottom of their hearts. They have no openness as have the French and the Italians, with whom a good deal of intimacy is possible even to an Englishman, but on the contrary an Eastern reserve which continually baffles me. I cannot realise their thoughts nor their outlook. I feel always below the grace of their behaviour the instinctive, primeval hatred of the stranger. Gradually the cultivation ceased, and I saw no further sign of human beings. I returned to the desert of the previous day, but the land was more dreary. The little groves of pine-trees had disappeared, there were no olives, no cornfields, not even the aloe nor the wilder cactus; but on either side as far as the horizon, desert wastes, littered with stones and with rough boulders, grown over only by palmetto. For many miles I went, dismounting now and then to stretch my legs and sauntering a while with the reins over my shoulder. Towards mid-day I rested by the wayside and let Aguador eat what grass he could. Presently, continuing my journey, I caught sight of a little hovel where the fir-branch over the door told me wine was to be obtained. I fastened my horse to a ring in the wall, and, going in, found an aged crone who gave me a glass of that thin white wine, produce of the last year's vintage, which is called _Vino de la Hoja_, wine of the leaf; she looked at me incuriously as though she saw so many people and they were so much alike that none repaid particular scrutiny. I tried to talk with her, for it seemed a curious life that she must lead, alone in that hut many miles from the nearest hamlet, with never a house in sight; but she was taciturn and eyed me now with something like suspicion. I asked for food, but with a sullen frown she answered that she had none to spare. I inquired the distance to Luisiana, a village on the way to Ecija where I had proposed to lunch, and shrugging her shoulders, she replied: 'How should I know!' I was about to go when I heard a great clattering, and a horseman galloped up. He dismounted and walked in, a fine example of the Andalusian countryman, handsome and tall, well-shaved, with close-cropped hair. He wore elaborately decorated gaiters, the usual short, close-fitting jacket, and a broad-brimmed hat; in his belt were a knife and a revolver, and slung across his back a long gun. He would have made an admirable brigand of comic-opera; but was in point of fact a farmer riding, as he told me, to see his _novia_, or lady-love, at a neighbouring farm. I found him more communicative and in the politest fashion we discussed the weather and the crops. He had been to Seville. '_Che maravilla!_' he cried, waving his fine, strong hands. 'What a marvel! But I cannot bear the town-folk. What thieves and liars!' 'Town-folk should stick to the towns,' muttered the old woman, looking at me somewhat pointedly. The remark drew the farmer's attention more closely to me. 'And what are you doing here?' he asked. 'Riding to Ecija.' 'Ah, you're a commercial traveller,' he cried, with fine scorn. 'You foreigners bleed the country of all its money. You and the government!' 'Rogues and vagabonds!' muttered the old woman. Notwithstanding, the farmer with much condescension accepted one of my cigars, and made me drink with him a glass of _aguardiente_. We went off together. The mare he rode was really magnificent, rather large, holding her head beautifully, with a tail that almost swept the ground. She carried as if it were nothing the heavy Spanish saddle, covered with a white sheep-skin, its high triangular pommel of polished wood. Our ways, however, quickly diverged. I inquired again how far it was to the nearest village. 'Eh!' said the farmer, with a vague gesture. 'Two leagues. Three leagues. _Quien sabe?_ Who knows? _Adios!_' He put the spurs to his mare and galloped down a bridle-track. I, whom no fair maiden awaited, trotted on soberly. XXVIII [Sidenote: By the Road--II] The endless desert grew rocky and less sandy, the colours duller. Even the palmetto found scanty sustenance, and huge boulders, strewn as though some vast torrent had passed through the plain, alone broke the desolate flatness. The dusty road pursued its way, invariably straight, neither turning to one side nor to the other, but continually in front of me, a long white line. Finally in the distance I saw a group of white buildings and a cluster of trees. I thought it was Luisiana, but Luisiana, they had said, was a populous hamlet, and here were only two or three houses and not a soul. I rode up and found among the trees a tall white church, and a pool of murky water, further back a low, new edifice, which was evidently a monastery, and a _posada_. Presently a Franciscan monk in his brown cowl came out of the church, and he told me that Luisiana was a full league off, but that food could be obtained at the neighbouring inn. The _posada_ was merely a long barn, with an open roof of wood, on one side of which were half a dozen mangers and in a corner two mules. Against another wall were rough benches for travellers to sleep on. I dismounted and walked to the huge fireplace at one end, where I saw three very old women seated like witches round a _brasero_, the great brass dish of burning cinders. With true Spanish stolidity they did not rise as I approached, but waited for me to speak, looking at me indifferently. I asked whether I could have anything to eat. 'Fried eggs.' 'Anything else?' The hostess, a tall creature, haggard and grim, shrugged her shoulders. Her jaws were toothless, and when she spoke it was difficult to understand. I tied Aguador to a manger and took off his saddle. The old women stirred themselves at last, and one brought a portion of chopped straw and a little barley. Another with the bellows blew on the cinders, and the third, taking eggs from a basket, fried them on the _brasero_. Besides, they gave me coarse brown bread and red wine, which was coarser still; for dessert the hostess went to the door and from a neighbouring tree plucked oranges. When I had finished--it was not a very substantial meal--I drew my chair to the _brasero_ and handed round my cigarette-case. The old women helped themselves, and a smile of thanks made the face of my gaunt hostess somewhat less repellent. We smoked a while in silence. 'Are you all alone here?' I asked, at length. The hostess made a movement of her head towards the country. 'My son is out shooting,' she said, 'and two others are in Cuba, fighting the rebels.' 'God protect them!' muttered another. 'All our sons go to Cuba now,' said the first. 'Oh, I don't blame the Cubans, but the government.' An angry light filled her eyes, and she lifted her clenched hand, cursing the rulers at Madrid who took her children. 'They're robbers and fools. Why can't they let Cuba go? It isn't worth the money we pay in taxes.' She spoke so vehemently, mumbling the words between her toothless gums, that I could scarcely make them out. 'In Madrid they don't care if the country goes to rack and ruin so long as they fill their purses. Listen.' She put one hand on my arm. 'My boy came back with fever and dysentery. He was ill for months--at death's door--and I nursed him day and night. And almost before he could walk they sent him out again to that accursed country.' The tears rolled heavily down her wrinkled cheeks. * * * Luisiana is a curious place. It was a colony formed by Charles III. of Spain with Germans whom he brought to people the desolate land; and I fancied the Teuton ancestry was apparent in the smaller civility of the inhabitants. They looked sullenly as I passed, and none gave the friendly Andalusian greeting. I saw a woman hanging clothes on the line outside her house; she had blue eyes and flaxen hair, a healthy red face, and a solidity of build which proved the purity of her northern blood. The houses, too, had a certain exotic quaintness; notwithstanding the universal whitewash of the South, there was about them still a northern character. They were prim and regularly built, with little plots of garden; the fences and the shutters were bright green. I almost expected to see German words on the post-office and on the tobacco-shop, and the grandiloquent Spanish seemed out of place; I thought the Spanish clothes of the men sat upon them uneasily. The day was drawing to a close and I pushed on to reach Ecija before night, but Aguador was tired and I was obliged mostly to walk. Now the highway turned and twisted among little hills and it was a strange relief to leave the dead level of the plains: on each side the land was barren and desolate, and in the distance were dark mountains. The sky had clouded over, and the evening was grey and very cold; the solitude was awful. At last I overtook a pedlar plodding along by his donkey, the panniers filled to overflowing with china and glass, which he was taking to sell in Ecija. He wished to talk, but he was going too slowly, and I left him. I had hills to climb now, and at the top of each expected to see the town, but every time was disappointed. The traces of man surrounded me at last; again I rode among olive-groves and cornfields; the highway now was bordered with straggling aloes and with hedges of cactus. At last! I reached the brink of another hill, and then, absolutely at my feet, so that I could have thrown a stone on its roofs, lay Ecija with its numberless steeples. XXIX [Sidenote: Ecija] The central square, where are the government offices, the taverns, and a little inn, is a charming place, quiet and lackadaisical, its pale browns and greys very restful in the twilight, and harmonious. The houses with their queer windows and their balconies of wrought iron are built upon arcades which give a pleasant feeling of intimacy: in summer, cool and dark, they must be the promenade of all the gossips and the loungers. One can imagine the uneventful life, the monotonous round of existence; and yet the Andalusian blood runs in the people's veins. To my writer's fantasy Ecija seemed a fit background for some tragic story of passion or of crime. I dined, unromantically enough, with a pair of commercial travellers, a post-office clerk, and two stout, elderly men who appeared to be retired officers. Spanish victuals are terrible and strange; food is even more an affair of birth than religion, since a man may change his faith, but hardly his manner of eating: the stomach used to roast meat and Yorkshire pudding rebels against Eastern cookery, and a Christian may sooner become a Buddhist than a beef-eater a guzzler of _olla podrida_. The Spaniards without weariness eat the same dinner day after day, year in, year out: it is always the same white, thin, oily soup; a dish of haricot beans and maize swimming in a revolting sauce; a nameless _entrée_ fried in oil--Andalusians have a passion for other animals' insides; a thin steak, tough as leather and grilled to utter dryness; raisins and oranges. You rise from table feeling that you have been soaked in rancid oil. My table-companions were disposed to be sociable. The travellers desired to know whether I was there to sell anything, and one drew from his pocket, for my inspection, a case of watch-chains. The officers surmised that I had come from Gibraltar to spy the land, and to terrify me, spoke of the invincible strength of the Spanish forces. 'Are you aware,' said the elder, whose adiposity prevented his outward appearance from corresponding with his warlike heart, 'Are you aware that in the course of history our army has never once been defeated, and our fleet but twice?' He mentioned the catastrophes, but I had never heard of them; and Trafalgar was certainly not included. I hazarded a discreet inquiry, whereupon, with much emphasis, both explained how on that occasion the Spanish had soundly thrashed old Nelson, although he had discomfited the French. 'It is odd,' I observed, 'that British historians should be so inaccurate.' 'It is discreditable,' retorted my acquaintance, with a certain severity. 'How long did the English take to conquer the Soudan?' remarked the other, somewhat aggressively picking his teeth. 'Twenty years? We conquered Morocco in three months.' 'And the Moors are devils,' said the commercial traveller. 'I know, because I once went to Tangiers for my firm.' After dinner I wandered about the streets, past the great old houses of the nobles in the _Calle de los Caballeros_, empty now and dilapidated, for every gentleman that can put a penny in his pocket goes to Madrid to spend it; down to the river which flowed swiftly between high banks. Below the bridge two Moorish mills, irregular masses of blackness, stood finely against the night. Near at hand they were still working at a forge, and I watched the flying sparks as the smith hammered a horseshoe; the workers were like silhouettes in front of the leaping flames. At many windows, to my envy, couples were philandering; the night was cold and Corydon stood huddled in his cape. But the murmuring as I passed was like the flow of a rapid brook, and I imagined, I am sure, far more passionate and romantic speeches than ever the lovers made. I might have uttered them to the moon, but I should have felt ridiculous, and it was more practical to jot them down afterwards in a note-book. In some of the surrounding villages they have so far preserved the Moorish style as to have no windows within reach of the ground, and lovers then must take advantage of the aperture at the bottom of the door made for the domestic cat's particular convenience. Stretched full length on the ground, on opposite sides of the impenetrable barrier, they can still whisper amorous commonplaces to one another. But imagine the confusion of a polite Spaniard, on a dark night, stumbling over a recumbent swain: 'My dear sir, I beg your pardon. I had no idea....' In old days the disturbance would have been sufficient cause for a duel, but now manners are more peaceful: the gallant, turning a little, removes his hat and politely answers: 'It is of no consequence. _Vaya Usted con Dios!_' 'Good-night!' The intruder passes and the beau endeavours passionately to catch sight of his mistress' black eyes. * * * Next day was Sunday, and I walked by the river till I found a plot of grass sheltered from the wind by a bristly hedge of cactus. I lay down in the sun, lazily watching two oxen that ploughed a neighbouring field. I felt it my duty in the morning to buy a chap-book relating the adventures of the famous brigands who were called the Seven Children of Ecija; and this, somewhat sleepily, I began to read. It required a byronic stomach, for the very first chapter led me to a monastery where mass proceeded in memory of some victim of undiscovered crime. Seven handsome men appeared, most splendidly arrayed, but armed to the teeth; each one was every inch a brigand, pitiless yet great of heart, saturnine yet gentlemanly; and their peculiarity was that though six were killed one day seven would invariably be seen the next. The most gorgeously apparelled of them all, entering the sacristy, flung a purse of gold to the Superior, while a scalding tear coursed down his sunburnt cheek; and this he dried with a noble gesture and a richly embroidered handkerchief! In a whirlwind of romantic properties I read of a wicked miser who refused to support his brother's widow, of the widow herself, (brought at birth to a gardener in the dead of night by a mysterious mulatto,) and of this lady's lovely offspring. My own feelings can never be harrowed on behalf of a widow with a marriageable daughter, but I am aware that habitual readers of romance, like ostriches, will swallow anything. I was hurried to a subterranean chamber where the Seven Children, in still more elaborate garments, performed various dark deeds, smoked expensive Havanas, and seated on silken cushions, partook (like Freemasons) of a succulent cold collation. The sun shone down with comfortable warmth, and I stretched my legs. My pipe was out and I refilled it. A meditative snail crawled up and observed me with flattering interest. I grew somewhat confused. A stolen will was of course inevitable, and so were prison dungeons; but the characters had an irritating trick of revealing at critical moments that they were long-lost relatives. It must have been a tedious age when poor relations were never safely buried. However, youth and beauty were at last triumphant and villainy confounded, virtue was crowned with orange blossom and vice died a miserable death. Rejoicing in duty performed I went to sleep. XXX [Sidenote: Wind and Storm] But next morning the sky was dark with clouds; people looked up dubiously when I asked the way and distance to Marchena, prophesying rain. Fetching my horse, the owner of the stable robbed me with peculiar callousness, for he had bound my hands the day before, when I went to see how Aguador was treated, by giving me with most courteous ceremony a glass of _aguardiente_; and his urbanity was then so captivating that now I lacked assurance to protest. I paid the scandalous overcharge with a good grace, finding some solace in the reflection that he was at least a picturesque blackguard, tall and spare, grey-headed, with fine features sharpened by age to the strongest lines; for I am always grateful to the dishonest when they add a certain æsthetic charm to their crooked ways. There is a proverb which says that in Ecija every man is a thief and every woman--no better than she should be: I was not disinclined to believe it. I set out, guided by a sign-post, and the good road seemed to promise an easy day. They had told me that the distance was only six leagues, and I expected to arrive before luncheon. Aguador, fresh after his day's rest, broke into a canter when I put him on the green plot, which the old Spanish law orders to be left for cattle by the side of the highway. But after three miles, without warning, the road suddenly stopped. I found myself in an olive-grove, with only a narrow path in front of me. It looked doubtful, but there was no one in sight and I wandered on, trusting to luck. Presently, in a clearing, I caught sight of three men on donkeys, walking slowly one after the other, and I galloped after to ask my way. The beasts were laden with undressed skins which they were taking to Fuentes, and each man squatted cross-legged on the top of his load. The hindermost turned right round when I asked my question and sat unconcernedly with his back to the donkey's head. He looked about him vaguely as though expecting the information I sought to be written on the trunk of an olive-tree, and scratched his head. 'Well,' he said, 'I should think it was a matter of seven leagues, but it will rain before you get there.' 'This is the right way, isn't it?' 'It may be. If it doesn't lead to Marchena it must lead somewhere else.' There was a philosophic ring about the answer which made up for the uncertainty. The skinner was a fat, good-humoured creature, like all Spaniards intensely curious; and to prepare the way for inquiries, offered a cigarette. 'But why do you come to Ecija by so roundabout a way as Carmona, and why should you return to Seville by such a route as Marchena?' His opinion was evidently that the shortest way between two places was also the best. He received my explanation with incredulity and asked, more insistently, why I went to Ecija on horseback when I might go by train to Madrid. 'For pleasure,' said I. 'My good sir, you must have come on some errand.' 'Oh yes,' I answered, hoping to satisfy him, 'on the search for emotion.' At this he bellowed with laughter and turned round to tell his fellows. '_Usted es muy guason_,' he said at length, which may be translated: 'You're a mighty funny fellow.' I expressed my pleasure at having provided the skinners with amusement and bidding them farewell, trotted on. I went for a long time among the interminable olives, grey and sad beneath the sullen clouds, and at last the rain began to fall. I saw a farm not very far away and cantered up to ask for shelter. An old woman and a labourer came to the door and looked at me very doubtfully; they said it was not a _posada_, but my soft words turned their hearts and they allowed me to come in. The rain poured down in heavy, oblique lines. The labourer took Aguador to the stable and I went into the parlour, a long, low, airy chamber like the refectory of a monastery, with windows reaching to the ground. Two girls were sitting round the _brasero_, sewing; they offered me a chair by their side, and as the rain fell steadily we began to talk. The old woman discreetly remained away. They asked about my journey, and as is the Spanish mode, about my country, myself, and my belongings. It was a regular volley of questions I had to answer, but they sounded pleasanter in the mouth of a pretty girl than in that of an obese old skinner; and the rippling laughter which greeted my replies made me feel quite witty. When they smiled they showed the whitest teeth. Then came my turn for questioning. The girl on my right, prettier than her sister, was very Spanish, with black, expressive eyes, an olive skin, and a bunch of violets in her abundant hair. I asked whether she had a _novio_, or lover; and the question set her laughing immoderately. What was her name? 'Soledad--Solitude.' I looked somewhat anxiously at the weather, I feared the shower would cease, and in a minute, alas! the rain passed away; and I was forced to notice it, for the sun-rays came dancing through the window, importunately, making patterns of light upon the floor. I had no further excuse to stay, and said good-bye; but I begged for the bunch of violets in Soledad's dark hair and she gave it with a pretty smile. I plunged again into the endless olive-groves. It was a little strange, the momentary irruption into other people's lives, the friendly gossip with persons of a different tongue and country, whom I had never seen before, whom I should never see again; and were I not strictly truthful I might here lighten my narrative by the invention of a charming and romantic adventure. But if chance brings us often for a moment into other existences, it takes us out with equal suddenness so that we scarcely know whether they were real or mere imaginings of an idle hour: the Fates have a passion for the unfinished sketch and seldom trouble to unravel the threads which they have so laboriously entangled. The little scene brought another to my mind. When I was 'on accident duty' at St. Thomas's Hospital a man brought his son with a broken leg; it was hard luck on the little chap, for he was seated peacefully on the ground when another boy, climbing a wall, fell on him and did the damage. When I returned him, duly bandaged, to his father's arms, the child bent forward and put out his lips for a kiss, saying good-night with babyish pronunciation. The father and the attendant nurse laughed, and I, being young, was confused and blushed profusely. They went away and somehow or other I never saw them again. I wonder if the pretty child, (he must be eight or ten now,) remembers kissing a very weary medical student, who had not slept much for several days, and was dead tired. Probably he has quite forgotten that he ever broke his leg. And I suppose no recollection remains with the pretty girl in the farm of a foreigner riding mysteriously through the olive-groves, to whom she gave shelter and a bunch of violets. * * * I came at last to the end of the trees and found then that a mighty wind had risen, which blew straight in my teeth. It was hard work to ride against it, but I saw a white town in the distance, on a hill; and made for it, rejoicing in the prospect. Presently I met some men shooting, and to make sure, asked whether the houses I saw really were Marchena. 'Oh no,' said one. 'You've come quite out of the way. That is Fuentes. Marchena is over there, beyond the hill.' My heart sank, for I was growing very hungry, and I asked whether I could not get shelter at Fuentes. They shrugged their shoulders and advised me to go to Marchena, which had a small inn. I went on for several hours, battling against the wind, bent down in order to expose myself as little as possible, over a huge expanse of pasture land, a desert of green. I reached the crest of the hill, but there was no sign of Marchena, unless that was a tower which I saw very far away, its summit just rising above the horizon. I was ravenous. My saddle-bags contained spaces for a bottle and for food; and I cursed my folly in stuffing them with such useless refinements of civilisation as hair-brushes and soap. It is possible that one could allay the pangs of hunger with soap; but under no imaginable circumstances with hair-brushes. It was a tower in the distance, but it seemed to grow neither nearer nor larger; the wind blew without pity, and miserably Aguador tramped on. I no longer felt very hungry, but dreadfully bored. In that waste of greenery the only living things beside myself were a troop of swallows that had accompanied me for miles. They flew close to the ground, in front of me, circling round; and the wind was so high that they could scarcely advance against it. I remembered the skinner's question, why I rode through the country when I could go by train. I thought of the _Cheshire Cheese_ in Fleet Street, where persons more fortunate than I had that day eaten hearty luncheons. I imagined to myself a well-grilled steak with boiled potatoes, and a pint of old ale, Stilton! The smoke rose to my nostrils. But at last, the Saints be praised! I found a real bridle-path, signs of civilisation, ploughed fields; and I came in sight of Marchena perched on a hill-top, surrounded by its walls. When I arrived the sun was setting finely behind the town. XXXI [Sidenote: Two Villages] Marchena was all white, and on the cold windy evening I spent there, deserted of inhabitants. Quite rarely a man sidled past wrapped to the eyes in his cloak, or a woman with a black shawl over her head. I saw in the town nothing characteristic but the wicker-work frame in front of each window, so that people within could not possibly be seen; it was evidently a Moorish survival. At night men came into the eating-room of the inn, ate their dinner silently, and muffling themselves, quickly went out; the cold seemed to have killed all life in them. I slept in a little windowless cellar, on a straw bed which was somewhat verminous. But next morning, as I looked back, the view of Marchena was charming. It stood on the crest of a green hill, surrounded by old battlements, and the sun shone down upon it. The wind had fallen, and in the early hour the air was pleasant and balmy. There was no road whatever, not even a bridle-track this time, and I made straight for Seville. I proposed to rest my horse and lunch at Mairena. On one side was a great plain of young corn stretching to the horizon, and on the other, with the same mantle of green, little hills, round which I slowly wound. The sun gave all manner of varied tints to the verdure--sometimes it was all emerald and gold, and at others it was like dark green velvet. But the clouds in the direction of Seville were very black, and coming nearer I saw that it rained upon the hills. The water fell on the earth like a transparent sheet of grey. Soon I felt an occasional drop, and I put on my _poncho_. The rain began in earnest, no northern drizzle, but a streaming downpour that soaked me to the skin. The path became marsh-like, and Aguador splashed along at a walk; it was impossible to go faster. The rain pelted down, blinding me. Then, oddly enough, for the occasion hardly warranted such high-flown thoughts, I felt suddenly the utter helplessness of man: I had never before realised with such completeness his insignificance beside the might of Nature; alone, with not a soul in sight, I felt strangely powerless. The plain flaunted itself insolently in face of my distress, and the hills raised their heads with a scornful pride; they met the rain as equals, but me it crushed; I felt as though it would beat me down into the mire. I fell into a passion with the elements, and was seized with a desire to strike out. But the white sheet of water was senseless and impalpable, and I relieved myself by raging inwardly at the fools who complain of civilisation and of railway-trains; they have never walked for hours foot-deep in mud, terrified lest their horse should slip, with the rain falling as though it would never cease. The path led me to a river; there was a ford, but the water was very high, and rushed and foamed like a torrent. Ignorant of the depth and mistrustful, I trotted up-stream a little, seeking shallower parts; but none could be seen, and it was no use to look for a bridge. I was bound to cross, and I had to risk it; my only consolation was that even if Aguador could not stand, I was already so wet that I could hardly get wetter. The good horse required some persuasion before he would enter; the water rushed and bubbled and rapidly became deeper; he stopped and tried to turn back, but I urged him on. My feet went under water, and soon it was up to my knees; then, absurdly, it struck me as rather funny, and I began to laugh; I could not help thinking how foolish I should look and feel on arriving at the other side, if I had to swim for it. But immediately it grew shallower; all my adventures tailed off thus unheroically just when they began to grow exciting, and in a minute I was on comparatively dry land. I went on, still with no view of Mairena; but I was coming nearer. I met a group of women walking with their petticoats over their heads. I passed a labourer sheltered behind a hedge, while his oxen stood in a field, looking miserably at the rain. Still it fell, still it fell! And when I reached Mairena it was the most cheerless place I had come across on my journey, merely a poverty-stricken hamlet that did not even boast a bad inn. I was directed from place to place before I could find a stable; I was soaked to the skin, and there seemed no shelter. At last I discovered a wretched wine-shop; but the woman who kept it said there was no fire and no food. Then I grew very cross. I explained with heat that I had money; it is true I was bedraggled and disreputable, but when I showed some coins, to prove that I could pay for what I bought, she asked unwillingly what I required. I ordered a _brasero_, and dried my clothes as best I could by the burning cinders. I ate a scanty meal of eggs, and comforted myself with the thin wine of the leaf, sufficiently alcoholic to be exhilarating, and finally, with _aguardiente_ regained my equilibrium. But the elements were against me. The rain had ceased while I lunched, but no sooner had I left Mairena than it began again, and Seville was sixteen miles away. It poured steadily. I tramped up the hills, covered with nut-trees; I wound down into valleys; the way seemed interminable. I tramped on. At last from the brow of a hill I saw in the distance the Giralda and the clustering houses of Seville, but all grey in the wet; above it heavy clouds were lowering. On and on! The day was declining, and Seville now was almost hidden in the mist, but I reached a road. I came to the first tavern of the environs; after a while to the first houses, then the road gave way to slippery cobbles, and I was in Seville. The Saints be praised! XXXII [Sidenote: Granada] To go from Seville to Granada is like coming out of the sunshine into deep shadow. I arrived, my mind full of Moorish pictures, expecting to find a vivid, tumultuous life; and I was ready with a prodigal hand to dash on the colours of my admiration. But Granada is a sad town, grey and empty; its people meander, melancholy, through the streets, unoccupied. It is a tradeless place living on the monuments which attract strangers, and like many a city famous for stirring history, seems utterly exhausted. Granada gave me an impression that it wished merely to be left alone to drag out its remaining days in peace, away from the advance of civilisation and the fervid hurrying of progress: it seemed like a great adventuress retired from the world after a life of vicissitude, anxious only to be forgotten, and after so much storm and stress to be nothing more than pious. There must be many descendants of the Moors, but the present population is wan and lifeless. They are taciturn, sombre folk, with nothing in them of the chattering and vivacious creatures of Arab history. Indeed, as I wandered through the streets, it was not the Moors that engaged my mind, but rather Ferdinand of Arragon and Isabella of Castille. Their grim strength over-powered the more graceful shadows of Moordom; and it was only by an effort that I recalled Gazul and Musa, most gallant and amorous of Paynim knights, tilting in the square, displaying incredible valour in the slaughter of savage bulls. I thought of the Catholic Kings, in full armour, riding with clank of steel through the captured streets. And the snowy summits of the Sierra Nevada, dazzling sometimes under the sun and the blue sky, but more often veiled with mist and capped by heavy clouds, grim and terrifying, lent a sort of tragic interest to the scene; so that I felt those grey masses, with their cloak of white, (they seemed near enough to overwhelm one,) made it impossible for the town built at their very feet, to give itself over altogether to flippancy. And for a while I found little of interest in Granada but the Alhambra. The gipsy quarter, with neither beauty, colour, nor even a touch of barbarism, is a squalid, brutal place, consisting of little dens built in the rock of the mountain which stands opposite the Alhambra. Worse than hovels, they are the lairs of wild beasts, foetid and oppressive, inhabited by debased creatures, with the low forehead, the copper skin, and the shifty cruel look of the Spanish gipsy. They surround the visitor in their rags and tatters, clamouring for alms, and for exorbitant sums proposing to dance. Even in the slums of great cities I have not seen a life more bestial. I tried to imagine what sort of existence these people led. In the old days the rock-dwellings among the cactus served the gipsies for winter quarters only, and when the spring came they set off, scouring the country for something to earn or steal; but that is long ago. For two generations they have remained in these hovels--year in, year out--employed in shoeing horses, shearing, and the like menial occupations which the Spaniard thinks beneath his dignity. The women tell fortunes, or dance for the foreigner, or worse. It is a mere struggle for daily bread. I wondered whether in the spring-time the young men loved the maidens, or if they only coupled like the beasts. I saw one pair who seemed quite newly wed; for their scanty furniture was new and they were young. The man, short and squat, sat scowling, cross-legged on a chair, a cigarette between his lips. The woman was taller and not ill-made, a slattern; her hair fell dishevelled on her back and over her forehead; her dress was open, displaying the bosom; her apron was filthy. But when she smiled, asking for money, her teeth were white and regular, and her eyes flashed darkly. She was attractive in a heavy sensual fashion, attractive and at the same time horribly repellant: she was the sort of woman who might fetter a man to herself by some degrading, insuperable passion, the true Carmen of the famous story whom a man might at once love and hate; so that though she dragged him to hell in shame and in despair, he would never find the strength to free himself. But where among that bastard race was the splendid desire for freedom of their fathers, the love of the fresh air of heaven and the untrammeled life of the fields? At first glance also the cathedral seemed devoid of charm. I suppose travellers seek emotions in the things they see, and often the more beautiful objects do not give the most vivid sensations. Painters complain that men of letters have written chiefly of second-rate pictures, but the literary sentiment is different from the artistic; and a masterpiece of Perugino may excite it less than a mediocre work of Guido Reni. The cathedral of Granada is said by the excellent Fergusson to be the most noteworthy example in Europe of early Renaissance architecture; its proportions are evidently admirable, and it is designed and carried out according to all the canons of the art. 'Looking at its plan only,' he says, 'this is certainly one of the finest churches in Europe. It would be difficult to point out any other, in which the central aisle leads up to the dome, so well proportioned to its dimensions, and to the dignity of the high altar which stands under it.' But though I vaguely recognised these perfections, though the spacing appeared fine and simple, and the columns had a certain majesty, I was left more than a little cold. The whitewash with which the interior is coated gives an unsympathetic impression, and the abundant light destroys that mystery which the poorest, gaudiest Spanish church almost invariably possesses. In the _Capilla de los Reyes_ are the elaborate monuments of the Catholic Kings, of their daughter Joan the Mad, and of Philip her husband; below, in the crypt, are four simple coffins, in which after so much grandeur, so much joy and sorrow, they rest. Indeed, for the two poor women who loved without requite, it was a life of pain almost unrelieved: it is a pitiful story, for all its magnificence, of Joan with her fiery passion for the handsome, faithless, worthless husband, and her mad jealousy; and of Isabella, with patient strength bearing every cross, always devoted to the man who tired of her quickly, and repaid her deep affection with naught but coldness and distrust. Queen Isabella's sword and sceptre are shown in the sacristry, and in contrast with the implement of war a beautiful cope, worked with her royal hands. And her crown also may be seen, one of the few I have come across which might really become the wearer, of silver, a masterpiece of delicate craftsmanship. But presently, returning to the cathedral and sitting in front of the high altar, I became at last conscious of its airy, restful grace. The chancel is very lofty. The base is a huge arcade which gives an effect of great lightness; and above are two rows of pictures, and still higher two rows of painted windows. The coloured glass throws the softest lights upon the altar and on the marble floor, rendering even quieter the low tints of the pictures. These are a series of illustrations of the life of the Blessed Virgin, painted by Alonzo Cano, a native of Valladolid, who killed his wife and came to Granada, whereupon those in power made him a prebendary. In the obscurity I could not see the paintings, but divined soft and pleasant things after the style of Murillo, and doubtless that was better than actually to see them. The pulpits are gorgeously carved in wood, and from the walls fly great angels with fine turbulence of golden drapery. And in the contrast of the soft white stone with the gold, which not even the most critical taste could complain was too richly spread, there is a delicate, fascinating lightness: the chancel has almost an Italian gaiety, which comes upon one oddly in the gloomy town. Here the decoration, the gilded virgins, the elaborate carving, do not oppress as elsewhere; the effect is too debonair and too refreshing. It is one colour more, one more distinction, in the complexity of the religious sentiment. * * * But if what I have said of Granada seems cold, it is because I did not easily catch the spirit of the place. For when you merely observe and admire some view, and if industrious make a note of your impression, and then go home to luncheon, you are but a vulgar tripper, scum of the earth, deserving the ridicule with which the natives treat you. The romantic spirit is your only justification; when by the comeliness of your life or the beauty of your emotion you have attained that, (Shelley when he visited Paestum had it, but Théophile Gautier, flaunting his red waistcoat _tras los montes_, was perhaps no better than a Cook's tourist,) then you are no longer unworthy of the loveliness which it is your privilege to see. When the old red brick and the green trees say to you hidden things, and the _vega_ and the mountains are stretched before you with a new significance, when at last the white houses with their brown tiles, and the labouring donkey, and the peasant at his plough, appeal to you so as to make, as it were, an exquisite pattern on your soul, then you may begin to find excuses for yourself. But you may see places long and often before they are thus magically revealed to you, and for myself I caught the real emotion of Granada but once, when from the Generalife I looked over the valley, the Generalife in which are mingled perhaps more admirably than anywhere else in Andalusia all the charm of Arabic architecture, of running water, and of cypress trees, of purple flags and dark red roses. It is a spot, indeed, fit for the plaintive creatures of poets to sing their loves, for Paolo and Francesca, for Juliet and Romeo; and I am glad that there I enjoyed such an exquisite moment. XXXIII [Sidenote: The Alhambra] From the church of _San Nicolas_, on the other side of the valley, the Alhambra, like all Moorish buildings externally very plain, with its red walls and low, tiled roofs, looks like some old charter-house. Encircled by the fresh green of the spring-time, it lies along the summit of the hill with an infinite, most simple grace, dun and brown and deep red; and from the sultry wall on which I sat the elm-trees and the poplars seemed very cool. Thirstily, after the long drought, the Darro, the Arab stream which ran scarlet with the blood of Moorish strife, wound its way over its stony bed among the hills; and beyond, in strange contrast with all the fertility, was the grey and silent grandeur of the Sierra Nevada. Few places can be more charming than the green wood in which stands the stronghold of the Moorish kings; the wind sighs among the topmost branches and all about is the sweet sound of running water; in spring the ground is carpeted with violets, and the heavy foliage gives an enchanting coldness. A massive gateway, flanked by watch-towers, forms the approach; but the actual entrance, offering no hint of the incredible magnificence within, is an insignificant door. But then, then you are immediately transported to a magic palace, existing in some uncertain age of fancy, which does not seem the work of human hands, but rather of Jin, an enchanted dwelling of seven lovely damsels. It is barely conceivable that historical persons inhabited such a place. At the same time it explains the wonderful civilisation of the Moors in Spain, with their fantastic battles, their songs and strange histories; and it brings the _Arabian Nights_ into the bounds of sober reality: after he has seen the Alhambra none can doubt the literal truth of the stories of Sinbad the Sailor and of Hasan of Bassorah. * * * From the terrace that overlooks the city you enter the Court of Myrtles--a long pool of water with goldfish swimming to and fro, enclosed by myrtle hedges. At the ends are arcades, borne by marble columns with capitals of surpassing beauty. It is very quiet and very restful; the placid water gives an indescribable sensation of delight, and at the end mirrors the slender columns and the decorated arches so that in reflection you see the entrance to a second palace, which is filled with mysterious, beautiful things. But in the Alhambra the imagination finds itself at last out of its depth, it cannot conjure up chambers more beautiful than the reality presents. It serves only to recall the old inhabitants to the deserted halls. The Moors continually used inscriptions with great effect, and there is one in this court which surpasses all others in its oriental imagery, in praise of Mohammed V.: _Thou givest safety from the breeze to the blades of grass, and inspirest terror in the very stars of heaven. When the shining stars quiver, it is through dread of thee, and when the grass of the field bends down it is to give thee thanks._ But it is the Hall of the Ambassadors which shows most fully the unparalleled splendour of Moorish decoration. It is a square room, very lofty, with alcoves on three sides, at the bottom of which are windows; and the walls are covered, from the dado of tiles to the roof, with the richest and most varied ornamentation. The Moorish workmen did not spare themselves nor economise their exuberant invention. One pattern follows another with infinite diversity. Even the alcoves, and there are nine, are covered each with different designs, so that the mind is bewildered by their graceful ingenuity. All kinds of geometrical figures are used, enlacing with graceful intricacy, intersecting, combining and dissolving; conventional foliage and fruit, Arabic inscriptions. An industrious person has counted more than one hundred and fifty patterns in the Hall of the Ambassadors, impressed with iron moulds on the moist plaster of the walls. The roof is a low dome of larch wood, intricately carved and inlaid with ivory and with mother-of-pearl; it has been likened to the faceted surface of an elaborately cut gem. The effect is so gorgeous that you are oppressed; you long for some perfectly plain space whereon to rest the eye; but every inch is covered. Now the walls have preserved only delicate tints of red and blue, pale Wedgwood blues and faded terracottas, that make with the ivory of the plaster most exquisite harmonies; but to accord with the tiles, their brilliancy still undiminished, the colours must have been very bright. The complicated patterns and the gay hues reproduce the oriental carpets of the nomad's tent; for from the tent, it is said, (I know not with what justification,) all oriental architecture is derived. The fragile columns upon which rest masses of masonry are, therefore, direct imitations of tent-poles, and the stalactite borders of the arches represent the fringe of the woven hangings. The Moorish architect paid no attention to the rules of architecture, and it has been well said that if they existed for him at all it was only that he might elaborately disregard them. His columns generally support nothing; his arcades, so delicately worked that they seem like carved ivory, are of the lightest wood and plaster. And it is curious that there should be such durability in those dainty materials: they express well the fatalism of the luxurious Moor, to whom the past and future were as nothing, and the transient hour all in all; yet they have outlasted him and his conqueror. The Spaniard, inglorious and decayed, is now but the showman to this magnificence; time has seen his greatness come and go, as came and went the greatness of the Moor, but still, for all its fragility, the Alhambra stands hardly less beautiful. Travellers have always been astonished at the small size of the Alhambra, especially of the Court of Lions; for here, though the proportion is admirable the scale is tiny; and many have supposed that the Moors were of less imposing physique than modern Europeans. The Court is surrounded by exquisite little columns, singly, in twos, in threes, supporting horseshoe arches; and in the centre is that beautiful fountain, borne by twelve lions with bristly manes, standing very stiffly, whereon is the inscription: _O thou who beholdest these lions crouching, fear not. Life is wanting to enable them to show their fury._ Indeed, their surroundings have such a delicate and playful grace that it is hard to believe the Moors had any of our strenuous, latter-day passions. Life must have been to them a masque rather than a tragi-comedy; and whether they belong to sober history or no, those contests of which the curious may read in the lively pages of Gines Perez de Hita accord excellently with the fanciful environment. In the Alhambra nothing seems more reasonable than those never-ending duels in which, for a lady's favour, gallant knights gave one another such blows that the air rang with them, such wounds that the ground was red with blood; but at sunset they separated and bound up their wounds and returned to the palace. And the king, at the relation of the adventure, was filled with amazement and with great content. * * * Yet, notwithstanding, I find in the Alhambra something unsatisfying; for many an inferior piece of architecture has set my mind a-working so that I have dreamed charming dreams, or seen vividly the life of other times. But here, I know not why, my imagination helps me scarcely at all. The existence led within these gorgeous walls is too remote; there is but little to indicate the thoughts, the feelings, of these people, and one can take the Alhambra only as a thing of beauty, and despair to understand. I know that it is useless to attempt with words to give an idea of these numerous chambers and courts. A string of superlatives can do no more than tire the reader, an exact description can only confuse; nor is the painter able to give more than a suggestion of the bewildering charm. The effect is too emotional to be conveyed from man to man, and each must feel it for himself. Charles V. called him unhappy who had lost such treasure--_desgraciado el que tal perdio_--and showed his own appreciation by demolishing a part to build a Renaissance palace for himself! It appears that kings have not received from heaven with their right divine to govern wrong the inestimable gift of good taste; and for them possibly it is fortunate, since when, perchance, a sovereign has the artistic temperament, a discerning people--cuts off his head. XXXIV [Sidenote: Boabdil the Unlucky] He was indeed unhappy who lost such treasure. The plain of Granada smiles with luxuriant crops, a beautiful country, gay with a hundred colours, and in summer when the corn is ripe it burns with vivid gold. The sun shines with fiery rays from the blue sky, and from the snow-capped mountains cool breezes temper the heat. But from his cradle Boabdil was unfortunate; soothsayers prophesied that his reign would see the downfall of the Moorish power, and his every step tended to that end. Never in human existence was more evident the mysterious power of the three sisters, the daughters of Night; the Fates had spun his destiny, they placed the pitfalls before his feet and closed his eyes that he might not see; they hid from him the way of escape. _Allah Achbar!_ It was destiny. In no other way can be explained the madness which sped the victims of that tragedy to their ruin; for with the enemy at their very gates, the Muslims set up and displaced kings, plotted and counterplotted. Boabdil was twice deposed and twice regained the throne. Even when the Christian kingdoms had united to consume the remnant of Moorish sovereignty the Moors could not cease their quarrelling. Boabdil looked on with satisfaction while the territory of the rival claimant to his crown was wrested from him, and did not understand that his turn must inevitably follow. Verily, the gods, wishing to destroy him, had deranged his mind. It is a pitiful history of treachery and folly that was enacted while the Catholic Sovereigns devoured the pomegranate, seed by seed. To me history, with its hopes bound to be frustrated and its useless efforts, sometimes is so terrible that I can hardly read. I feel myself like one who lives, knowing the inevitable future, and yet is powerless to help. I see the acts of the poor human puppets, and know the disaster that must follow. I wonder if the Calvinists ever realised the agony of that dark God of theirs, omniscient and yet so strangely weak, to whom the eternal majesty of heaven was insufficient to save the predestined from everlasting death. * * * On March 22, 1491, began the last siege of Granada. Ferdinand marched his army into the plain and began to destroy the crops, taking one by one the surrounding towns. He made no attempt upon the city itself, and hostilities were confined to skirmishes beneath the walls and single combats between Christian knights and Muslim cavaliers, wherein on either side prodigies of valour were performed. Through the summer the Moors were able to get provisions from the Sierra Nevada, but when, with winter, the produce of the earth grew less and its conveyance more difficult, famine began to make itself felt. The Moors consoled themselves with the hope that the besieging army would retire with the cold weather, for such in those days was the rule of warfare; but Ferdinand was in earnest. When an accidental fire burned his camp, he built him a town of solid stone and mortar, which he named Santa Fè. It stands still, the only town in Spain wherein a Moorish foot has never trod. Then the Muslims understood at last that the Spaniard would never again leave that fruitful land. And presently they began to talk of surrender; Spanish gold worked its way with Boabdil's councillors, and before winter was out the capitulation was signed. On the second day of the new year the final scene of the tragedy was acted. Early in the morning, before break of day, Boabdil had sent his mother and his wife with the treasure to precede him to the Alpuxarras, in which district, by the conditions of the treaty, Ferdinand had assigned him a little kingdom. Himself had one more duty to perform, and at the prearranged hour he sallied forth with a wretched escort of fifty knights. On the Spanish side the night had been spent in joy and feasting; but how must Boabdil have spent his, thinking of the inevitable morrow? To him the hours must have sped like minutes. What must have been the agony of his last look at the Alhambra, that jewel of incalculable price? Mendoza, the cardinal, had been sent forward to occupy the palace, and Boabdil passed him on the hill. Soon he reached Ferdinand, who was stationed near a mosque surrounded by all the glory of his Court, pennons flying, and knights in their magnificent array. Boabdil would have thrown himself from his horse in sign of homage to kiss the hand of the king of Arragon, but Ferdinand prevented him. Then Boabdil delivered the keys of the Alhambra to the victor, saying: 'They are thine, O king, since Allah so decrees it; use thy success with clemency and moderation.' Moving on sadly he saluted Isabella, and passed to rejoin his family; the Christians processioned to the city with psalm-singing. But when Boabdil was crossing the mountains he turned to look at the city he had lost, and burst into tears. 'You do well,' said his mother, 'to weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man.' 'Alas!' he cried, 'when were woes ever equal to mine?' It was not to be expected that the pious Kings of Castille and Arragon would keep their word, and means were soon invented to hound the wretched Boabdil from the principality they had granted. He crossed to Africa, and settled in Fez, of which the Sultan was his kinsman. It is pathetic to learn that there he built himself a palace in imitation of the Alhambra. At last, after many years, he was killed in an obscure battle fighting against the Sultan's rebels, and the Arab historian finishes the account of him with these words: 'Wretched man! who could lose his life in another's cause, though he dared not die in his own! Such was the immutable decree of destiny. Blessed be Allah, who exalteth and abaseth the kings of the earth according to His divine will, in the fulfilment of which consists that eternal justice which regulates all human affairs.' In the day of El Makkary, the historian of the Moorish Empire, Boabdil's descendants had so fallen that they were nothing but common beggars, subsisting upon the charitable allowances made to the poor from the funds of the mosques. _One generation passeth away and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever._ XXXV [Sidenote: Los Pobres] People say that in Granada the beggars are more importunate than in any other Spanish town, but throughout Andalusia their pertinacity and number are amazing. They are licensed by the State, and the brass badge they wear makes them demand alms almost as a right. It is curious to find that the Spaniard, who is by no means a charitable being, gives very often to beggars--perhaps from superstitious motives, thinking their prayers will be of service, or fearing the evil eye, which may punish a refusal. Begging is quite an honourable profession in Spain; mendicants are charitably termed the poor, and not besmirched, as in England, with an opprobrious name. I have never seen so many beggars as in Andalusia; at every church door there will be a dozen, and they stand or sit at each street corner, halt, lame and blind. Every possible deformity is paraded to arouse charity. Some look as though their eyes had been torn out, and they glare at you with horrible bleeding sockets; most indeed are blind, and you seldom fail to hear their monotonous cry, sometimes naming the saint's day to attract particular persons: 'Alms for the love of God, for a poor blind man on this the day of St. John!' They stand from morning till night, motionless, with hand extended, repeating the words as the sound of footsteps tells them some one is approaching; and then, as a coin is put in their hands, say gracefully: '_Dios se lo pagara!_ God will repay you.' In Spain you do not pass silently when a beggar demands alms, but pray his mercy for God's love to excuse you: '_Perdone Usted por el amor de Dios!_' Or else you beseech God to protect him: '_Dios le ampare!_' And the mendicant, coming to your gate, sometimes invokes the Immaculate Virgin. '_Ave Maria purissima!_' he calls. And you, tired of giving, reply: '_Y por siempre!_ And for ever.' He passes on, satisfied with your answer, and rings at the next door. It is not only in Burgos that Théophile Gautier might have admired the beggar's divine rags; everywhere they wrap their cloaks about them in the same magnificent fashion. The _capa_, I suppose, is the most graceful of all the garments of civilised man, and never more so than when it barely holds together, a mass of rags and patches, stained by the rain and bleached by the sun and wind. It hangs straight from the neck in big simple lines, or else is flung over one shoulder with a pompous wealth of folds. There is a strange immobility about Andalusian beggars which recalls their Moorish ancestry. They remain for hours in the same attitude, without moving a muscle; and one I knew in Seville stood day after day, from early morning till midnight, with hand outstretched in the same rather crooked position, never saying a word, but merely trusting to the passer-by to notice. The variety is amazing, men and women and children; and Seville at fair-time, or when the foreigners are coming for Holy Week, is like an enormous hospital. Mendicants assail you on all sides, the legless dragging themselves on their hands, the halt running towards you with a crutch, the blind led by wife or child, the deaf and dumb, the idiotic. I remember a woman with dead eyes and a huge hydrocephalic head, who sat in a bath-chair by one of the cathedral doors, and whenever people passed, cried shrilly for money in a high, unnatural voice. Sometimes they protrude maimed limbs, feetless legs or arms without hands; they display loathsome wounds, horribly inflamed; every variety of disease is shown to extort a copper. And so much is it a recognised trade that they have their properties, as it were: one old man whose legs had been shot away, trotted through the narrow streets of Seville on a diminutive ass, driving it into the shop-doors to demand his mite. Then there are the children, the little boys and girls that Murillo painted, barely covered by filthy rags, cherubs with black hair and shining eyes, the most importunate of all the tribe. The refusal of a halfpenny is followed impudently by demands for a cigarette, and as a last resort for a match; they wander about with keen eyes for cigar-ends, and no shred of a smoked leaf is too diminutive for them to get no further use from it. And beside all these are the blind fiddlers, scraping out old-fashioned tunes that were popular thirty years ago; the guitarists, singing the _flamenco_ songs which have been sung in Spain ever since the Moorish days; the buffoons, who extract tunes from a broomstick; the owners of performing dogs. They are a picturesque lot, neither vicious nor ill-humoured. Begging is a fairly profitable trade, and not a very hard one; in winter _el pobre_ can always find a little sunshine, and in summer a little shade. It is no hardship for him to sit still all day; he would probably do little else if he were a millionaire. He looks upon life without bitterness; Fate has not been very kind, but it is certainly better to be a live beggar than a dead king, and things might have been ten thousand times worse. For instance, he might not have been born a Spaniard, and every man in his senses knows that Spain is the greatest nation on earth, while to be born a citizen of some other country is the most dreadful misfortune that can befall him. He has his licence from the State, and a charitable public sees that he does not absolutely starve; he has cigarettes to smoke--to say that a blind man cannot enjoy tobacco is evidently absurd--and therefore, all these things being so, why should he think life such a woeful matter? While it lasts the sun is there to shine equally on rich and poor, and afterwards will not a paternal government find a grave in the public cemetery? It is true that the beggar shares it with quite a number of worthy persons, doubtless most estimable corpses, and his coffin even is but a temporary convenience--but still, what does it matter? XXXVI [Sidenote: The Song] But the Moorish influence is nowhere more apparent than in the Spanish singing. There is nothing European in that quavering lament, in those long-drawn and monotonous notes, in those weird trills. The sounds are strange to the ear accustomed to less barbarous harmonies, and at first no melody is perceived; it is custom alone which teaches the sad and passionate charm of these things. A _malagueña_ is the particular complaint of the maid sorrowing for an absent lover, of the peasant who ploughs his field in the declining day. The long notes of such a song, floating across the silence of the night, are like a new melody on the great harpsichord of human sorrow. No emotion is more poignant than that given by the faint sad sounds of a Spanish song as one wanders through the deserted streets in the dead of night; or far in the country, with the sun setting red in the cloudless sky, when the stillness is broken only by the melancholy chanting of a shepherd among the olive-trees. An heritage of Moordom is the Spanish love for the improvisation of well-turned couplets; in olden days a skilful verse might procure the poet a dress of cloth-of-gold, and it did on one occasion actually raise a beggar-maid to a royal throne: even now it has power to secure the lover his lady's most tender smiles, or at the worst a glass of Manzanilla. The richness of the language helps him with his rhymes, and his southern imagination gives him manifold subjects. But, being the result of improvisation--no lady fair would consider the suit of a gallant who could not address her in couplets of his own devising--the Spanish song has a peculiar character. The various stanzas have no bearing upon one another; they consist of four or seven lines, but in either case each contains its definite sentiment; so that one verse may be a complete song, or the singer may continue as long as the muse prompts and his subject's charms occasion. The Spanish song is like a barbaric necklace in which all manner of different stones are strung upon a single cord, without thought for their mutual congruity. Naturally the vast majority of the innumerable couplets thus invented are forgotten as soon as sung, but now and then the fortuitous excellence of one impresses it on the maker's recollection, and it may be preserved. Here is an example which has been agreeably translated by Mr. J. W. Crombie; but neither original nor English rendering can give an adequate idea of the charm which depends on the oriental melancholy of the music: Dos besos tengo en el alma Que no se apartan de mí: El ultimo de mi madre, Y el primero que te di. _Deep in my soul two kisses rest,_ _Forgot they ne'er shall be:_ _The last my mother's lips impressed,_ _The first I stole from thee._ Here is another, the survival of which testifies to the Spanish extreme love of a compliment; and the somewhat hackneyed sentiment can only have made it more pleasant to the feminine ear: Salga el sol, si ha de salir, Y si no, que nunca salga; Que para alumbrarme á mí La luz de tus ojos basta. _If the sun care to rise, let him rise,_ _But if not, let him ever lie hid;_ _For the light from my lady-love's eyes_ _Shines forth as the sun never did._ It is a diverting spectacle to watch a professional improviser in the throes of inspiration. This is one of the stock 'turns' of the Spanish music-hall, and one of the most popular. I saw a woman in Granada, who was quite a celebrity; and the barbaric wildness of her performance, with its accompaniment of hand-clapping, discordant cries, and twanging of guitar, harmonised well with my impression of the sombre and mediæval city. She threaded her way to the stage among the crowded tables, through the auditorium, a sallow-faced creature, obese and large-boned, with coarse features and singularly ropy hair. She was accompanied by a fat small man with a guitar and a woman of mature age and ample proportions: it appeared that the cultivation of the muse, evidently more profitable than in England, conduced to adiposity. They stepped on the stage, taking chairs with them, for in Spain you do not stand to sing, and were greeted with plentiful applause. The little fat man began to play the long prelude to the couplet; the old woman clapped her hands and occasionally uttered a raucous cry. The poetess gazed into the air for inspiration. The guitarist twanged on, and in the audience there were scattered cries of _Ole!_ Her companions began to look at the singer anxiously, for the muse was somewhat slow; and she patted her knee and groaned; at last she gave a little start and smiled. _Ole! Ole!_ The inspiration had come. She gave a moan, which lengthened into the characteristic trill, and then began the couplet, beating time with her hands. Such an one as this: Suspires que de mí salgan, Y otros que de tí saldran, Si en el camino se encuentran Que de cosas se diran! _If all the sighs thy lips now shape_ _Could meet upon the way_ _With those that from mine own escape_ _What things they'd have to say!_ She finished, and all three rose from their chairs and withdrew them, but it was only a false exit; immediately the applause grew clamorous they sat down again, and the little fat man repeated his introduction. But this time there was no waiting. The singer had noticed a well-known bull-fighter and quickly rolled off a couplet in his praise. The subject beamed with delight, and the general enthusiasm knew no bounds. The people excitedly threw their hats on the stage, and these were followed by a shower of coppers, which the performers, more heedful to the compensation of Art than to its dignity, grovelled to picked up. * * * Here is a lover's praise of the whiteness of his lady's skin: La neve por tu cara Paso diciendo: En donde no hago falta No me detengo. _Before thy brow the snow-flakes_ _Hurry past and say:_ _'Where we are not needed,_ _Wherefore should we stay?'_ And this last, like the preceding translated by Mr. Crombie, shows once more how characteristic are Murillo's Holy Families of the popular sentiment: La Virgen lava la ropa, San José la esta tendiendo, Santa Ana entretiene el niño, Y el agua se va riendo. _The Virgin is washing the clothes at the brook._ _And Saint Joseph hangs them to dry._ _Saint Anna plays with the Holy Babe,_ _And the water flows smiling by._ XXXVII [Sidenote: Jerez] Jerez is the Andalusian sunshine again after the dark clouds of Granada. It is a little town in the middle of a fertile plain, clean and comfortable and spacious. It is one of the richest places in Spain; the houses have an opulent look, and without the help of Baedeker you may guess that they contain respectable persons with incomes, and carriages and horses, with frock-coats and gold watch-chains. I like the people of Jerez; their habitual expression suggests a consciousness that the Almighty is pleased with them, and they without doubt are well content with the Almighty. The main street, with its trim shops and its _cafés_, has the air of a French provincial town--an appearance of agreeable ease and dulness. Every building in Jerez is washed with lime, and in the sunlight the brilliancy is dazzling. You realise then that in Seville the houses are not white--although the general impression is of a white town--but, on the contrary, tinted with various colours from faintest pink to pale blue, pale green; they remind you of the summer dresses of women. The soft tones are all mingled with the sunlight and very restful. But Jerez is like a white banner floating under the cloudless sky, the pure white banner of Bacchus raised defiantly against the gaudy dyes of teetotalism and its shrieking trumpets. Jerez the White is, of course, the home of sherry, and the whole town is given over to the preparation of the grateful juice. The air is impregnated with a rich smell. The sun shines down on Jerez; and its cleanliness, its prosperity, are a rebuke to harsh-voiced contemners of the grape. You pass _bodega_ after _bodega_, cask-factories, bottle-factories. A bottle-factory is a curious, interesting place, an immense barn, sombre, so that the eye loses itself in the shadows of the roof; and the scanty light is red and lurid from the furnaces, which roar hoarsely and long. Against the glow the figures of men, half-naked, move silently, performing the actions of their craft with a monotonous regularity which is strange and solemn. They move to and fro, carrying an iron instrument on which is the molten mass of red-hot glass, and it gleams with an extraordinary warm brilliancy. It twists hither and thither in obedience to the artisan's deft movements; it coils and writhes into odd shapes, like a fire-snake curling in the torture of its own unearthly ardour. The men pass so regularly, with such a silent and exact precision, that it seems a weird and mystic measure they perform--a rhythmic dance of unimaginable intricacy, whose meaning you cannot gather and whose harmony escapes you. The flames leap and soar in a thousand savage forms, and their dull thunder fills your ears with a confusion of sound. Your eyes become accustomed to the dimness, and you discern more clearly the features of those swarthy men, bearded and gnome-like. But the molten mass has been put into the mould; you watch it withdrawn, the bottom indented, the mouth cut and shaped. And now it is complete, but still red-hot, and glowing with an infernal transparency, gem-like and wonderful; it is a bottle fit now for the juice of satanic vineyards, and the miraculous potions of eternal youth, for which men in the old days bartered their immortal souls. And the effect of a _bodega_ is picturesque, too, though in a different way. It is a bright and cheerful spot, a huge shed with whitewashed walls and an open roof supported by dark beams; great casks are piled up, impressing you in their vast rotundity with a sort of aldermanic stateliness. The whole place is fragrant with clean, vinous perfumes. Your guide carries a glass and a long filler. You taste wine after wine, in different shades of brown; light wines to drink with your dinner, older wines to drink before your coffee; wines more than a century old, of which the odour is more delicate than violets; new wines of the preceding year, strong and rough; Amontillados, with the softest flavour in the world; Manzanillas for the gouty; Marsalas, heavy and sweet; wines that smell of wild-flowers; cheap wines and expensive wines. Then the brandies--the distiller tells you proudly that Spanish brandy is made from wine, and contemptuously that French brandy is not--old brandies for which a toper would sell his soul; new brandies like fusel-oil; brandies mellow and mild and rich. It is a drunkard's paradise. And why should not the drinker have his paradise? The teetotallers have slapped their bosoms and vowed that liquor was the devil's own invention. (Note, by the way, that liquor is a noble word that should not be applied to those weak-kneed abominations that insolently flaunt their lack of alcohol. Let them be called liquids or fluids or beverages, or what you will. Liquor is a word for heroes, for the British tar who has built up British glory--Imperialism is quite the fashion now.) And for a hundred years none has dared lift his voice in refutation of these dyspeptic slanders. The toper did not care, he nursed his bottle and let the world say what it would; but the moderate drinker was abashed. Who will venture to say that a glass of beer gives savour to the humblest crust, and comforts Corydon, lamenting the inconstancy of Phyllis? Who will come forward and strike an attitude and prove the benefits of the grape? (The attitude is essential, for without it you cannot hope to impress your fellow men.) Rise up in your might, ye lovers of hop and grape and rye--rise up and slay the Egyptians. Be honest and thank your stars for the cup that cheers. Bacchus was not a pot-bellied old sot, but a beautiful youth with vine-leaves in his hair, Bacchus the lover of flowers; and Ariadne was charming. * * * The country about Jerez undulates in just such an easy comfortable fashion as you would expect. It is scenery of the gentlest and pleasantest type, sinuous; little hills rising with rounded lines and fertile valleys. The vines cover the whole land, creeping over the brown soil fantastically, black stumps, shrivelled and gnarled, tortured into uncouth shapes; they remind you of the creeping things in a naturalist's museum, of giant spiders and great dried centipedes and scorpions. But imagine the vineyards later, when the spring has stirred the earth with fecundity! The green shoots tenderly forth; at first it is all too delicate for a colour, it is but a mist of indescribable tenuity; and gradually the leaves burst out and trail along the ground with ever-increasing luxuriance; and then it is a rippling sea of passionate verdure. But I liked Jerez best towards evening, when the sun had set and the twilight glided through the tortuous alleys like a woman dressed in white. Then, as I walked in the silent streets, narrow and steep, with their cobble-paving, the white houses gained a new aspect. There seemed not a soul in the world, and the loneliness was more intoxicating than all their wines; the shining sun was gone, and the sky lost its blue richness, it became so pale that you felt it like a face of death--and the houses looked like long rows of tombs. We walked through the deserted streets, I and the woman dressed in white, side by side silently; our footsteps made no sound upon the stones. And Jerez was wrapped in a ghostly shroud. Ah, the beautiful things I have seen which other men have not! XXXVIII [Sidenote: Cadiz] I admire the strenuous tourist who sets out in the morning with his well-thumbed Baedeker to examine the curiosities of a foreign town, but I do not follow in his steps; his eagerness after knowledge, his devotion to duty, compel my respect, but excite me to no imitation. I prefer to wander in old streets at random without a guide-book, trusting that fortune will bring me across things worth seeing; and if occasionally I miss some monument that is world-famous, more often I discover some little dainty piece of architecture, some scrap of decoration, that repays me for all else I lose. And in this fashion the less pretentious beauties of a town delight me, which, if I sought under the guidance of the industrious German, would seem perhaps scarcely worth the trouble. Nor do I know that there is in Cadiz much to attract the traveller beyond the grace with which it lies along the blue sea and the unstudied charm of its gardens, streets, and market-place; the echo in the cathedral to which the gaping tripper listens with astonishment leaves me unmoved; and in the church of _Santa Catalina_, which contains the last work of Murillo, upon which he was engaged at his death, I am more interested in the tall stout priest, unctuous and astute, who shows me his treasure, than in the picture itself. I am relieved now and again to visit a place that has no obvious claims on my admiration; it throws me back on the peculiarities of the people, on the stray incidents of the street, on the contents of the shops. Cadiz is said to be the gayest town in Andalusia. Spaniards have always a certain gravity; they are not very talkative, and like the English, take their pleasures a little sadly. But here lightness of heart is thought to reign supreme, and the inhabitants have not even the apparent seriousness with which the Sevillan cloaks a somewhat vacant mind. They are great theatre-goers, and as dancers, of course, have been famous since the world began. But I doubt whether Cadiz deserves its reputation, for it always seems to me a little prim. The streets are well-kept and spacious, the houses, taller than is usual in Andalusia, have almost as cared-for an appearance as those in a prosperous suburb of London; and it is only quite occasionally, when you catch a glimpse of tawny rock and of white breakwater against the blue sea, that by a reminiscence of Naples you can persuade yourself it is as immoral as they say. For, not unlike the Syren City, Cadiz lies white and cool along the bay, with gardens at the water's edge; but it has not the magic colour of its rival, it is quieter, smaller, more restful; and on the whole lacks that agreeable air of wickedness which the Italian town possesses to perfection. It is impossible to be a day in Naples without discovering that it is the most depraved city in Europe; there is something in the atmosphere which relaxes the moral fibre, and the churchwarden who keeps guard in the bosom of every Englishman falls asleep, so that you feel capable of committing far more than the seven deadly sins. Of course, you don't, but still it is comfortable to have them within reach. * * * I came across, while examining the wares of a vendor of antiquities, a contemporary narrative from the Spanish side of the attack made on Cadiz by Sir Francis Drake when he set out to singe the beard of Philip II.; and this induced me afterwards to look into the English story. It is far from me to wish to inform the reader, but the account is not undiverting, and shows, besides, a frame of mind which the Anglo-Saxon has not ceased to cultivate. 'But the Almighty God,' says the historian, 'knowing and seeing his (the Spanish king's) wicked intent to punish, molest, and trouble His little flock, the children of Israel, hath raised up a faithful Moses for the defence of His chosen, and will not suffer His people utterly to fall into the hands of their enemies.' Drake set sail from Plymouth with four of her Majesty's ships, two pinnaces, and some twenty merchantmen. A vessel was sent after, charging him not to show hostilities, but the messenger, owing to contrary winds, could never come near the admiral, and vastly to the annoyance of the Virgin Queen, as she solemnly assured the ambassadors of foreign powers, had to sail home. Under the circumstances it was, perhaps, hardly discreet of her to take so large a share of the booty. Faithful Moses arrived in Cadiz, spreading horrid consternation, and the Spanish pamphlet shows very vividly the confusion of the enemy. It appears that, had he boldly landed, he might have sacked the town, but he imagined the preparations much greater than they were. However, he was not idle. 'The same night our general, having, by God's good favour and sufferance, opportunity to punish the enemy of God's true gospel and our daily adversary, and further willing to discharge his expected duty towards God, his peace and country, began to sink and fire divers of their ships.' The English fleet burned thirty sail of great burden, and captured vast quantities of the bread, wheat, wine and oil which had been prepared for the descent upon England. Sir Francis Drake himself remarks that 'the sight of the terrible fires were to us very pleasant, and mitigated the burden of our continual travail, wherein we were busied for two nights and one day, in discharging, firing, and lading of provisions.' * * * It is a curious thing to see entirely deserted a place of entertainment, where great numbers of people are in the habit of assembling. A theatre by day, without a soul in it, gives me always a sensation of the ridiculous futility of things; and a public garden towards evening offers the same emotion. On the morrow I was starting for Africa; I watched the sunset from the quays of Cadiz, the vapours of the twilight rise and envelop the ships in greyness, and I walked by the _alamadas_ that stretch along the bay till I came to the park. The light was rapidly failing and I found myself alone. It had quaint avenues of short palms, evidently not long planted, and between them rows of yellow iron chairs arranged with great neatness and precision. It was there that on Sunday I had seen the populace disport itself, and it was full of life then, gay and insouciant. The fair ladies drove in their carriages, and the fine gentlemen, proud of their English clothes, lounged idly. The chairs were taken by all the lesser fry, by stout mothers, dragons attendant on dark-eyed girls, and their lovers in broad hats, in all the gala array of the _flamenco_. There was a joyous clamour of speech and laughter; the voices of Spanish women are harsh and unrestrained; the park sparkled with colour, and the sun caught the fluttering of countless fans. For those blithe people it seemed that there was no morrow: the present was there to be enjoyed, divine and various, and the world was full of beauty and of sunshine; merely to live was happiness enough; if there was pain or sorrow it served but to enhance the gladness. The hurrying hours for a while had ceased their journey. Life was a cup of red wine, and they were willing to drink its very dregs, a brimming cup in which there was no bitterness, but a joy more thrilling than the gods could give in all their paradise. But now I walked alone between the even rows of chairs. The little palms were so precise, with their careful foliage, that they did not look like real trees; the flower-beds were very stiff and neat, and now and then a pine stood out, erect and formal as if it were a cardboard tree from a Noah's Ark. The scene was so artificial that it brought to my mind the setting of a pantomime. I stopped, almost expecting a thousand ballet-girls to appear from the wings, scantily clad, and go through a measure to the playing of some sudden band, and retire and come forward till the stage was filled and a great tableau formed. But the day grew quite dim, and the vast stage remained empty. The painted scene became still more unreal, and presently the park was filled with the ghostly shapes of all the light-hearted people who had lived their hour and exhibited their youth in the empty garden. I heard the whispered compliments, and the soft laughter of the ladies; there was a peculiar little snap as gaily they closed their fans. XXXIX [Sidenote: El Genero Chico] In the evening I wandered again along the quay, my thoughts part occupied with the novel things I expected from Morocco, part sorrowful because I must leave the scented land of Spain. I seemed never before to have enjoyed so intensely the exquisite softness of the air, and there was all about me a sense of spaciousness which gave a curious feeling of power. In the harbour, on the ships, the lights of the masts twinkled like the stars above; and looking over the stony parapet, I heard the waves lap against the granite like a long murmur of regret; I tried to pierce the darkness, straining my eyes to see some deeper obscurity which I might imagine to be the massive coasts of Africa. But at last I could bear the solitude no longer, and I dived into the labyrinth of streets. At first, in unfrequented ways, I passed people only one by one, some woman walking rapidly with averted face, or a pair of chattering students; but as I came near the centre of the town the passers-by grew more frequent, and suddenly I found myself in the midst of a thronging, noisy crowd. I looked up and saw that I was opposite a theatre; the people had just come from the second _funcion_. I had heard that the natives of Cadiz were eager theatre-goers, and was curious to see how they took this pleasure. I saw also that the next piece was _Las Borrachos_, a play of Seville life that I had often seen; and I felt that I could not spend my last evening better than in living again some of those scenes which pattered across my heart now like little sorrowful feet. * * * The theatre in Spain is the only thing that has developed further than in the rest of Europe--in fact, it has nearly developed clean away. The Spaniards were the first to confess that dramatic art bored them to death; and their habits rendered impossible the long play which took an evening to produce. Eating late, they did not wish to go to the theatre till past nine; being somewhat frivolous, they could not sit for more than an hour without going outside and talking to their friends; and they were poor. To satisfy their needs the _genero chico_, or little style, sprang into existence; and quickly every theatre in Spain was given over to the system of four houses a night. Each function is different, and the stall costs little more than sixpence. We English are idealists; and on the stage especially reality stinks in our nostrils. The poor are vulgar, and in our franker moments we confess our wish to have nothing to do with them. The middle classes are sordid; we have enough of them in real life, and no desire to observe their doings at the theatre, particularly when we wear our evening clothes. But when a dramatist presents duchesses to our admiring eyes, we feel at last in our element; we watch the acts of persons whom we would willingly meet at dinner, and our craving for the ideal is satisfied. But in Spain nobles are common and excite no overwhelming awe. The Spaniard, most democratic of Europeans, clamours for realism, and nothing pleases him more than a literal transcript of the life about him. The manners and customs of good society do not entertain him, and the _genero chico_ concerns itself almost exclusively with the lower classes. The bull-fighter is, of course, one of the most usual figures; and round him are gathered the lovers of the ring, inn-keepers, cobblers and carpenters, policemen, workmen, flower-sellers, street-singers, cigarette girls, country maidens. The little pieces are innumerable, and together form a compend of low life in Spain; the best are full of gaiety and high spirits, with a delicate feeling for character, and often enough are touched by a breath of poetry. Songs and dances are introduced, and these come in the more naturally since the action generally takes place on a holiday. The result is a musical comedy in one act; but with nothing in it of the entertainment which is a joy to the British public: an Andalusian audience would never stand that representation of an impossible and vulgar world in which the women are all trollops and the men, rips, nincompoops and bounders; they would never suffer the coarse humour and the shoddy patriotism. Unfortunately, these one-act plays have destroyed the legitimate drama. Whereas Maria Guerrero, that charming actress, will have a run of twenty nights in a new play by Echegaray, a popular _zarzuela_ will be acted hundreds of times in every town in Spain. But none can regret that the Spaniards have evolved these very national little pieces, and little has been lost in the non-existence of an indefinite number of imitations from the French. The _zarzuela_, I should add, lasts about an hour, and for the most part is divided into three scenes. Such a play as _Los Borrachos_ is nothing less than a _genre_ picture of Seville life. It reminds one of a painting by Teniers; and I should like to give some idea of it, since it is really one of the best examples of the class, witty, varied, and vivacious. But an obstacle presents itself in the fact that I can find no vestige of a plot. The authors set out to characterise the various lovers of the vine, (nowhere in Andalusia are the devotees of the yellow Manzanilla more numerous than in Seville,) and with telling strokes have drawn the good-natured tippler, the surly tippler, the religious tippler. To these they have added other types, which every Andalusian can recognise as old friends--the sharp-tongued harridan, the improviser of couplets with his ridiculous vanity, the flower-seller, and the 'prentice-boy of fifteen, who, notwithstanding his tender years, is afflicted with love for the dark-eyed heroine. The action takes place first in a street, then in a court-yard, lastly in a carpenter's shop. There are dainty love-scenes between Soledad, the distressed maiden, and Juanillo, the flower-seller; and one, very Spanish, where the witty and precocious apprentice offers her his diminutive hand and heart. Numerous people come and go, the drunkards drink and quarrel and make peace; the whole thing, if somewhat confused, is very life-like, and runs with admirable lightness and ease. It is true that the play has neither beginning nor end, but perhaps that only makes it seem the truer; and if the scenes have no obvious connection they are all amusing and characteristic. It is acted with extraordinary spirit. The players, indeed, are not acting, but living their ordinary lives, and it is pleasant to see the zest with which they throw themselves into the performance. When the hero presses the heroine in his arms, smiles and passionate glances pass between them, which suggest that even the love-making is not entirely make-believe. I wish I could translate the song which Juanillo sings when he passes his lady's window, bearing his basket of flowers: Carnations for pretty girls that are true, Musk-roses for pretty girls that are coy, Rosebuds as small as thy mouth, my dearest, And roses as fair as thy cheeks. I cannot, indeed, resist the temptation of giving one verse in that Andalusian dialect, from which all harsh consonants and unmusical sounds have been worn away--the most complete and perfect language in the world for lovers and the passion of love: _Sal, morena, á tu ventana,_ _Mira las flores que traigo;_ _Sal y di si son bastantes_ _Pa arfombrita de tu cuarto._ _Que yo te quiero_ _Y a ti te doy_ _Tos los tesoros der mundo entero,_ _To le que vargo, to lo que soy._ XL [Sidenote: Adios] And then the morrow was come. Getting up at five to catch my boat, I went down to the harbour; a grey mist hung over the sea, and the sun had barely risen, a pallid, yellow circle; the fishing-boats lolled on the smooth, dim water, and fishermen in little groups blew on their fingers. And from Cadiz I saw the shores of Spain sink into the sea; I saw my last of Andalusia. Who, when he leaves a place that he has loved, can help wondering when he will see it again? I asked the wind, and it sighed back the Spanish answer: '_Quien sabe?_ Who knows?' The traveller makes up his mind to return quickly, but all manner of things happen, and one accident or another prevents him; time passes till the desire is lost, and when at last he comes back, himself has altered or changes have occurred in the old places and all seems different. He looks quite coldly at what had given an intense emotion, and though he may see new things, the others hardly move him; it is not thus he imagined them in the years of waiting. And how can he tell what the future may have in store; perhaps, notwithstanding all his passionate desires, he will indeed never return. Of course the intention of this book is not to induce people to go to Spain: railway journeys are long and tedious, the trains crawl, and the hotels are bad. Experienced globe-trotters have told me that all mountains are very much alike, and that pictures, when you have seen a great many, offer no vast difference. It is much better to read books of travel than to travel oneself; he really enjoys foreign lands who never goes abroad; and the man who stays at home, preserving his illusions, has certainly the best of it. How delightful is the anticipation as he looks over time-tables and books of photographs, forming delightful images of future pleasure! But the reality is full of disappointment, and the more famous the monument the bitterer the disillusion. Has any one seen St. Peter's without asking himself: Is that all? And the truest enjoyment arises from things that come unexpectedly, that one had never heard of. Then, living in a strange land, one loses all impression of its strangeness; it is only afterwards, in England, that one realises the charm and longs to return; and a hundred pictures rise to fill the mind with delight. Why can one not be strong enough to leave it at that and never tempt the fates again? The wisest thing is to leave unvisited in every country some place that one wants very much to see. In Italy I have never been to Siena, and in Andalusia I have taken pains to avoid Malaga. The guide-books tell me there is nothing whatever to see there; and according to them it is merely a prosperous sea-port with a good climate. But to me, who have never seen it, Malaga is something very different; it is the very cream of Andalusia, where every trait and characteristic is refined to perfect expression. I imagine Malaga to be the most smiling town on the seaboard, and it lies along the shore ten times more charmingly than Cadiz. The houses are white, whiter than in Jerez; the patios are beautiful with oranges and palm-trees, and the dark green of the luxuriant foliage contrasts with the snowy walls. In Malaga the sky is always blue and the sun shines, but the narrow Arab streets are cool and shady. The passionate odours of Andalusia float in the air, the perfume of a myriad cigarettes and the fresh scent of fruit and flower. The blue sea lazily kisses the beach and fishing-boats bask on its bosom. In Malaga, for me, there are dark churches, with massive, tall pillars; the light falls softly through the painted glass, regilding the golden woodwork, the angels and the saints and the bishops in their mitres. The air is heavy with incense, and women in _mantillas_ kneel in the half-light, praying silently. Now and then I come across an old house with a fragment of Moorish work, reminding me that here again the Moors have left their mark. And in Malaga, for me, the women are more lovely than in Seville; for their dark eyes glitter marvellously, and their lips, so red and soft, are ever trembling with a half-formed smile. They are more graceful than the daffodils, their hands are lovers' sighs, and their voice is a caressing song. (What was your voice like, Rosarito? Alas! it is so long ago that I forget.) The men are tall and slender, with strong, clear features and shining eyes, deep sunken in their sockets. In Malaga, for me, life is a holiday in which there are no dullards and no bores; all the world is strong and young and full of health, and there is nothing to remind one of horrible things. Malaga, I know, is the most delightful place in Andalusia. Oh, how refreshing it is to get away from sober fact, but what a fool I should be ever to go there! * * * The steamer plods on against the wind slowly, and as the land sinks away, unsatisfied to leave the impressions hovering vaguely through my mind, I try to find the moral. The Englishman, ever somewhat sententiously inclined, asks what a place can teach him. The churchwarden in his bosom gives no constant, enduring peace; and after all, though he may be often ridiculous, it is the churchwarden who has made good part of England's greatness. And most obviously Andalusia suggests that it might not be ill to take things a little more easily: we English look upon life so very seriously, so much without humour. Is it worth while to be quite so strenuous? At the stations on the line between Jerez and Cadiz, I noticed again how calmly they took things; people lounged idly talking to one another; the officials of the railway smoked their cigarettes; no one was in a hurry, time was long, and whether the train arrived late or punctual could really matter much to no one. A beggar came to the window, a cigarette-end between his lips. '_Caballero!_ Alms for the love of God for a poor old man. God will repay you!' He passed slowly down the train. It waited for no reason; the passengers stared idly at the loungers on the platform, and they stared idly back. No one moved except to roll himself a cigarette. The sky was blue and the air warm and comforting. Life seemed good enough, and above all things easy. There was no particular cause to trouble. What is the use of hurrying to pile up money when one can live on so little? What is the use of reading these endless books? Why not let things slide a little, and just take what comes our way? It is only for a little while, and then the great antique mother receives us once more in her bosom. And there are so many people in the world. Think again of all the countless hordes who have come and gone, and who will come and go; the immense sea of Time covers them, and what matters the life they led? What odds is it that they ever existed at all? Let us do our best to be happy; the earth is good and sweet-smelling, there is sunshine and colour and youth and loveliness; and afterwards--well, let us shrug our shoulders and not think of it. And then in bitter irony, contradicting my moral, a train came in with a number of Cuban soldiers. There were above fifty of them, and they had to change at the junction. They reached out to open the carriage doors and crawled down to the platform. Some of them seemed at death's door; they could not walk, and chairs were brought that they might be carried; others leaned heavily on their companions. And they were dishevelled, with stubbly beards. But what struck me most was the deathly colour; for their faces were almost green, while round their sunken eyes were great white rings, and the white was ghastly, corpse-like. They trooped along in a dazed and listless fashion, wasted with fever, and now and then one stopped, shaken with a racking cough; he leaned against the wall, and put his hand to his heart as if the pain were unendurable. It was a pitiful sight. They were stunted and under-sized; they ceased to develop when they went to the cruel island, and they were puny creatures with hollow chests and thin powerless limbs; often, strangely enough, their faces had remained quite boyish. They were twenty or twenty-two, and they looked sixteen. And then, by the sight of those boys who had never known youth with its joyful flowers, doomed to a hopeless life, I was forced against my will to another moral. Perhaps some would recover, but the majority must drag on with ruined health, fever-stricken, dying one by one, falling like the unripe fruit of a rotten tree. They had no chance, poor wretches! They would return to their miserable homes; they could not work, and their people were too poor to keep them--so they must starve. Their lives were even shorter than those of the rest, and what pleasure had they had? And that is the result of the Spanish insouciance--death and corruption, loss of power and land and honour, the ruin of countless lives, and absolute decay. It is rather a bitter irony, isn't it? And now all they have left is their sunshine and the equanimity which nothing can disturb. Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. London & Edinburgh * * * * * CASTILIAN DAYS. By Hon. J. HAY. Illustrated by JOSEPH PENNELL. In one vol., pott 4to, price 10s. net. ITALIAN JOURNEYS. By W. D. HOWELLS. Illustrated by JOSEPH PENNELL. In one vol., pott 4to, price 10s. net. A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE. By HENRY JAMES. Illustrated by JOSEPH PENNELL. In one vol., pott 4to, 10s. net. THE COUNTRY OF JESUS. By MATILDE SERAO. In one vol. LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN 21 BEDFORD STREET. W.C. 
22337	----	HISTORY OF THE MOORS OF SPAIN TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH ORIGINAL OF M. FLORIAN. TO WHICH IS ADDED, A BRIEF NOTICE OF ISLAMISM NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, 329 & 331 PEARL STREET, FRANKLIN SQUARE [Transcriber's note: Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page breaks occurred in the original book, in accordance with Project Gutenberg's FAQ-V-99.] [Transcriber's note: This book contains a number of variations in the spelling of some words/names, e.g. Haccham/Hacchem, Gengis/Zengis (Khan), etc.] Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1840 by Harper & Brothers, In the Clerk's Office of the Southern District of New York {v} PUBLISHERS' ADVERTISEMENT. We are accustomed to look upon the followers of the Arabian Prophet as little better than barbarians, remarkable chiefly for ignorance, cruelty, and a blind and persecuting spirit of fanaticism. As it regards the character of the Mohammedans at the present day, and, indeed, their moral and intellectual condition for the last two centuries, there is no great error in this opinion. But they are a degenerated race. There has been a period of great brilliancy in their history, when they were distinguished for their love of knowledge, and the successful cultivation of science and the arts; nor is it too much to say, that to them Christian Europe is indebted for the generous impulse which led to the revival of learning in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Of the various nations of the great Moslem family, none were more {vi} renowned in arts, as well as arms, than the Moorish conquerors of Spain, whose history is contained in the following pages. The French original of this work has long enjoyed a deservedly high reputation; and the translation here offered is by an American lady, whose literary taste and acquirements well qualified her for the task. A sketch of Mohammedan history, &c., from Rev. S. Greene's Life of Mohammed, has been appended at the close of the volume, to present to the reader a comprehensive view of that very remarkable people, of whom the Moors of Spain formed so distinguished a branch. H. & B. New York, October, 1840. {vii} CONTENTS FIRST EPOCH PAGE The Origin of the Moors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 The Arabs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 The Birth of Mohammed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Religion of Mohammed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 The Progress of Islamism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Victories of the Mussulmans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 New Conquests of the Mohammedans . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 The Moors become Mussulmans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Condition of Spain under the Goths . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Conquest of Spain by the Moors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 The Viceroys of Spain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Insurrection of Prince Pelagius . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Abderamus attempts the Conquest of France . . . . . . . . 39 He penetrates as far as the Loire . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 The Battle of Tours . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Civil Wars distract Spain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 SECOND EPOCH. The Kings of Cordova become the Caliphs of the West . . . 45 The Asiatic Mussulmans divide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 The Dynasty of the Ommiades lose the Caliphate . . . . . . 48 Horrible Massacre of the Ommiades . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 An Ommiade Prince repairs to Spain . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Abderamus, the first Caliph of the West . . . . . . . . . 53 {viii} Reign of Abderamus I. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Religion and Fêtes of the Moors of Spain . . . . . . . . . 55 Civil Wars arise among the Moors . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 The Reigns of Hacchem I. and of Abdelazis . . . . . . . . 58 Reign of Abderamus II. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Condition of the Fine Arts at Cordova . . . . . . . . . . 60 Anecdote of Abderamus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Reigns of Mohammed, Almouzir, and Abdalla . . . . . . . . 62 Reign of Abderamus III. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Embassy from a Greek Emperor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Magnificence and Gallantry of the Moors . . . . . . . . . 64 Description of the City and Palace of Zahra . . . . . . . 65 Wealth of the Caliphs of Cordova . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 The Fine Arts cultivated at Cordova . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Reign of El Hacchem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Laws of the Moors, and their Mode of administering Justice 75 Authority possessed by Fathers and old Men . . . . . . . . 77 An Illustration of the Magnanimity of El Hakkam . . . . . 78 Reign of Hacchem III. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Successful Rule of Mohammed Almonzir as Hadjeb under the imbecile Hacchem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Disorders at Cordova . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 End of the Caliphate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 THIRD EPOCH. The principal Kingdoms erected from the Ruins of the Caliphate of the West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Condition of Christian Spain at this Juncture . . . . . . 88 The Kingdom of Toledo; its Termination . . . . . . . . 87, 88 Success of the Christians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 The Cid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 The Kingdom of Seville . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 The Dynasty of the Almoravides hold Supremacy in Africa . 92 {ix} Conquests of the Almoravides in Spain . . . . . . . . . . 93 French Princes repair to Spain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 Extinction of the Kingdom of Saragossa . . . . . . . . . . 95 Foundation of the Kingdom of Portugal . . . . . . . . . . 95 State of the Fine Arts among the Moors at this Period . . 97 Abenzoar and Averroes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Dissensions between the Moors and Christians . . . . . . . 98 The Africans, under Mohammed _the Green_, land in Spain . 100 Battle of Toloza . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102-104 Tactics of the Moors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 The discomfited Mohammed returns to Africa . . . . . . . . 109 Extent of the Territories still retained by the Moors in Spain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 St. Ferdinand and Jaques I. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Valencia is attacked by the Aragonians . . . . . . . . . . 113 Siege of Cordova . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 Surrender of Valencia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 FOURTH EPOCH. The Kings of Grenada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 The Condition of the Moors; their Despondency . . . . . . 118 Mohammed Alhamar; his Character and Influence with his Countrymen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 He founds the Kingdom of Grenada . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 Description of the City of Grenada and its _Vega_ . . . . 121 Extent and Resources of this Kingdom . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Reign of Mohammed Alhamar I. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 The Moorish Sovereign becomes the Vassal of the King of Castile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 Ferdinand III. besieges Seville . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 The Taking of Seville . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 Revenues of the Kings of Grenada . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Military Forces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Cavalry of the Moors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 {x} Disturbances in Castile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Reign of Mohammed II. El Fakik . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 He forms a League with the King of Morocco . . . . . . . . 134 Misfortunes of Alphonso of Castile . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 Interview between Alphonso and the Sovereign of Morocco . 134 State of Learning and the Fine Arts under Mohammed al Mumenim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 Description of the Alhambra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 The Court of Lions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 The Generalif . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Mohammed III. El Hama, or _the Blind_, ascends the Throne of Grenada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Troubles in Grenada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Reign of Mohammed IV. Abenazar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Reign of Ismael . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Reign of Mohammed V. and of Joseph I. . . . . . . . . . . 152 The Battle of Salado . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152 Successive Reigns of Mohammed VI. and Mohammed VII. . . . 154 Horrible Crime of Peter the Cruel of Castile . . . . . . . 150 Condition of Spain--of Europe in general . . . . . . 156, 157 Mohammed VI. reassumes the Crown . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 Reign of Mohammed VIII. Abouhadjad . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 Favourite Literary and Scientific Pursuits of the Moors under the munificent Rule of Abouhadjad . . . . . . . . 160 Universal prevalence of a Taste for Fiction among the Arabs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 Music and Gallantry of the Moors . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 The mixture of Refinement and Ferocity in the Character of the Moors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 Description of the Women of Grenada . . . . . . . . . . . 169 The national Costume of both Sexes . . . . . . . . . . . . 170 Moorish Customs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 Folly of the Grand-master of Alcantara . . . . . . . . . . 172 The Result of his Expedition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 Dreadful Death of Joseph II. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Mohammed IX. usurps the Throne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Singular Escape of a condemned Prince . . . . . . . . . . 176 {xi} Generous Disposition of Joseph III. . . . . . . . . . . . 176 Disturbed Condition of the Kingdom after his Death . . . . 177 A rapid Succession of Rulers . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177, 178 Reign of Ismael II. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178 The Miseries of War most severely felt by the Cultivator of the Soil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 Mulei-Hassem succeeds Ismael II. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 Marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella . . . . . . . . . . . . 180 The respective Characters of these Sovereigns . . . . . . 181 They declare War against the Grenadians . . . . . . . . . 182 Statesmen and Soldiers of the Spanish Court . . . . . . . 182 Stern Reply of the Grenadian King . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Alhama is Surprised . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184 Civil War is kindled in Grenada by the Feuds of the Royal Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184 Boabdil is proclaimed King . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 Cause of the ambitious hopes of Zagal . . . . . . . . . . 185 Boabdil is taken Prisoner by the Spaniards . . . . . . . . 186 The politic Spanish Rulers restore Boabdil to Liberty . . 187 The Moors become their own Destroyers . . . . . . . . . . 187 Death of Mulei-Hassem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Boabdil and his Uncle divide the Relics of Grenada between them . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 Baseness of Zagal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 Boabdil reigns alone at Grenada . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 Ferdinand lays Siege to the City of Grenada . . . . . . . 189 Condition of the City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 The Spanish Camp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Isabella repairs to the Camp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 She builds a City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192 Surrender of Grenada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194 Departure of Boabdil from the City . . . . . . . . . . . . 194 The entrance of the Spanish Conquerors into the City . . . 195 Summary of the Causes of the Ruin of the Moors . . . . . . 196 Characteristics of the Moors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 {xii} Anecdote illustrative of their Observance of the Laws of Hospitality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198 Christian Persecution of the Moors . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Revolts of the Moors, and their Results . . . . . . . . . 199 Final Expulsion of the Moors from Spain . . . . . . . . . 201 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 A Brief Account of the Rise and Decline of the Mohammedan Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 Chapter I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Chapter II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 Chapter III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266 {xiii} INTRODUCTION. The name of the Moors of Spain recalls recollections of gallantry and refinement, and of the triumphs of arts and arms. But, though thus celebrated, not much is generally known of the history of that remarkable people. The fragments of their annals, scattered among the writings of the Spanish and Arabian authors, furnish little else than accounts of murdered kings, national dissensions, civil wars, and unceasing contests with their neighbours. Yet, mingled with these melancholy recitals, individual instances of goodness, justice, and magnanimity occasionally present themselves. These traits, too, strike us more forcibly than those of a similar description with which we meet in perusing the histories of other nations; perhaps in {xiv} consequence of the peculiar colouring of originality lent them by their Oriental characteristics; or perhaps because, in contrast with numerous examples of barbarity, a noble action, an eloquent discourse, or a touching expression, acquire an unusual charm. It is not my intention to write the history of the Moors in minute detail, but merely to retrace their principal revolutions, and attempt a faithful sketch of their national character and manners. The Spanish historians, whom I have carefully consulted in aid of this design, have been of but little assistance to me in my efforts. Careful to give a very prominent place in their extremely complicated narratives to the various sovereigns of Asturia, Navarre, Aragon, and Castile, they advert to the Moors only when their wars with the Christians inseparably mingle the interests of the two nations; but they never allude to the government, customs, or laws of the enemies of their faith. {xv} The translations from the Arabian writers to which I have had recourse, throw little more light upon the subject of my researches than the productions of Spanish authors. Blinded by fanaticism and national pride, they expatiate with complacency on the warlike achievements of their countrymen, without even adverting to the reverses that attended their arms, and pass over whole dynasties without the slightest notice or comment. Some of our _savans_ have, in several very estimable works, united the information to be collected from these Spanish and Arabian histories, with such additional particulars as they were able to derive from their own personal observations. I have drawn materials from all these sources, and have, in addition, sought for descriptions of the manners of the Moors in the Spanish and ancient Castilian romances, and in manuscripts and memoirs obtained from Madrid. It is after these long and laborious researches {xvi} that I venture to offer a brief history of a people who bore so little resemblance to any other; who had their national vices and virtues, as well as their characteristic physiognomy; and who so long united the bravery, generosity, and chivalry of the Europeans, with the excitable temperament and strong passions of the Orientals. To render the order of time more intelligible, and the more clearly to elucidate facts, this historical sketch will be divided in four principal Epochs. The _first_ will extend from the commencement of the Conquests of the Arabs to the Establishment of the Dynasty of the Ommiade princes at Cordova: the _second_ will include the reigns of the Caliphs of the West: in the _third_ will be related all that can now be ascertained concerning the various small kingdoms erected from the ruins of the Caliphate of Cordova: and the _fourth_ will comprehend a narration of the prominent events in the lives of the successive sovereigns of the Kingdom of Grenada, until the {xvii} period of the final expulsion of the Mussulmans from that country. Care has been taken to compare the dates according to the Mohammedan method of computing time, with the periods fixed by the ordinary mode of arrangement. Some of the Spanish historians, Garabai for instance, do not agree with the Arabian chronologists in relation to the years of the Hegira. I have thought proper to follow the Arabian authorities, and have adopted, with occasional corrections, the chronological arrangements of M. Cardonne, whose personal assurance I possess, that he attaches high importance to his calculations on this subject. I have thus reason to hope that this little work will serve to elucidate many points hitherto doubtful in relation to this matter. The proper names of the Moors vary even more in the different authorities than their statements respecting the date of events, either in consequence of the difficulty of pronouncing them, or from ignorance of their proper {xviii} orthography. In instances of this character I have always given the preference to such as appeared to be most generally adopted, and were, at the same time, most harmonious in sound. {19} A HISTORY OF THE MOORS OF SPAIN. FIRST EPOCH. THE CONQUESTS OF THE ARABS OR MOORS. _Extending from the end of the Sixth Century to the middle of the Eighth._ The primitive Moors were the inhabitants of the vast portion of Africa bounded on the east by Egypt, on the north by the Mediterranean, on the west by the Atlantic, and on the south by the deserts of Barbary. The origin of the Moors, or Mauritanians, is, like that of most other ancient nations, obscure, and the information we possess concerning their early history confusedly mingled with fables. The fact, however, appears to be established, that Asiatic emigrations were, from the earliest times, made into Africa. In addition to this, the {20} historians of remote ages speak of a certain Meleck Yarfrick, king of Arabia Felix, who conducted a people called _Sabaei_[1] into Libya, made himself master of that country, established his followers there, and gave it the name of Africa. It is from these Sabians or _Sabaei_ that the principal Moorish tribes pretend to trace their descent. The derivation of the name Moors[2] is also supposed, in some degree, to confirm the impression that they came originally from Asia. But, without enlarging upon these ancient statements, let it suffice to say, that nearly certain ground exists for the belief that the original Moors were Arabians. In confirmation of this impression, we find that, during every period of the existence of their race, the descendants of the primitive inhabitants of Mauritania have, like the Arabs, been divided into distinct tribes, and, like them, have pursued a wild and wandering mode of existence. The Moors of Africa are known in ancient {21} history under the name of Nomades, Numidae or Numidians, Getulae, and Massyli. They were by turns the subjects, the enemies, or the allies of the Carthaginians, and with them they fell under the dominion of the Romans. After several unsuccessful revolts, to which they were instigated by their fiery, restless, and inconstant temper, the Moors were at length subjugated by the Vandals, A.D. 427. A century afterward these people were conquered by Belisarius: but the Greeks were in their turn subdued by the Arabs, who then proceeded to achieve the conquest of Mauritania. As, from the period when that event occurred, the Mauritanians or Moors, who were thus suddenly converted to Mohammedanism, have frequently been confounded with the _native Arabians_, it will be proper to say a few words concerning that extraordinary people: a people who, after occupying for so many centuries an insignificant place among the nations of the earth, rapidly rendered themselves masters of the greater part of the known world. The Arabs are, beyond question, one of the most ancient races of men in existence;[3] and {22} have, of all others, perhaps, best preserved their national independence, and their distinctive character and manners. Divided from the most remote times into tribes that either wandered in the desert or were collected together in cities, and obedient to chiefs who in the same person united the warrior and the magistrate, they have never been subjected to foreign domination. The Persians, the Romans, and the Macedonians vainly attempted to subdue them: they only shattered their weapons in fragments against the rocks of the Nabatheans.[4] Proud of an origin which he traced back even to the patriarchs of olden time, exulting in his successful defence of his liberty and his rights, the Arab, from the midst of his deserts, regarded the rest of mankind as consisting of mere bands of slaves, changing masters as chance or {23} convenience directed. Brave, temperate, and indefatigable, inured from infancy to the severest toil, fearing neither thirst, hunger, nor death itself--these were a people by whose assistance a leader suitably endowed could render himself master of the world. Mohammed appeared:[5] to him nature had accorded the requisite qualifications for executing such a design. Courageous, sagacious, eloquent, polished, possessed in an eminent degree of the powers which both awe and delight mankind, Mohammed would have been a great man had he belonged to the most enlightened age--among an ignorant and fanatical people he became a prophet. Until Mohammed arose among them, the Arab tribes, surrounded by Jews, Christians, and idolaters, had entertained a superstitious faith, compounded of the religious belief of their various neighbours and that of the ancient Sabaei. They fully credited the existence of genii, demons, and witchcraft, adored the stars, and offered idolatrous sacrifices. But Mohammed--after having devoted many years to profound and solitary meditation upon the new dogmas he designed to establish; after having either convinced {24} or won to his interests the principal individuals of his own family,[6] possessing pre-eminent consequence among their countrymen--suddenly began to preach a new religion, opposed to all those with which the Arabs were hitherto familiar, and whose principles were well-adapted to inflame the ardent temper of that excitable people. Children of Ishmael, said the Prophet to them, I bring you the faith that was professed by your father Abraham, by Noah, and by all the patriarchs. There is but one God, the Sovereign Ruler of all worlds: he is called THE MERCIFUL; worship Him alone. Be beneficent towards orphans, slaves, captives, and the poor: be just to all men--justice is the sister of piety. Pray and bestow alms. You will be rewarded in Heaven, by being permitted to dwell perpetually in delicious gardens, where limpid waters will for ever flow, and where each one of you will eternally enjoy the companionship of women who will be ever beautiful, ever youthful, ever devoted to you alone. Courageously combat both the unbelieving and the impious. Oppose them until they {25} embrace Islamism[7] or render you tribute. Every soldier who dies in battle will share the treasures of God; nor can the coward prolong his life; for the moment when he is destined to be smitten by the angel of death is written in the Book of the Eternal. Such precepts, announced in majestic and highly figurative language, embellished with the charms of verse, and presented by a warrior, prophet, poet, and legislator, professing to be the representative of an angel, to the most susceptible people in the world--to a people possessing a passion alike for the marvellous and the voluptuous, for heroism and for poetry--could scarcely fail to find disciples. Converts rapidly crowded around Mohammed, and their numbers were soon augmented by persecution. His enemies obliged the Prophet to fly from his native Mecca and take refuge in Medina. This flight was the epoch of his glory and of the Hegira of the Mussulmans. It occurred A.D. 622. From this moment Islamism spread like a torrent over the Arabias and Ethiopia. In vain did the Jewish and idolatrous tribes attempt to maintain their ancient faith; in vain did Mecca {26} arm her soldiers against the destroyers of her gods; Mohammed, sword in hand, dispersed their armies, seized upon their cities, and won the affections of the people whom he subdued, by his clemency, his genius, and his fascinating address. A legislator, a pontiff, the chief of all the Arab tribes, the commander of an invincible army, respected by the Asiatic sovereigns, adored by a powerful nation, and surrounded by captains who had become heroes in serving under him, Mohammed was on the point of marching against Heraclius, when his designs were for ever interrupted by the termination of his existence. This event took place at Medina, A.D. 632, Hegira 2, and was the effect of poison, which had, some time before, been administered to this extraordinary man by a Jewess of Rhaibar. The death of the Prophet arrested neither the progress of his religion nor the triumphs of the Moslem arms. Abubeker, the father-in-law of Mohammed, became his successor, and assumed the title of _Caliph_, which simply signifies _vicar_. During his reign the Saracens penetrated into Syria, dispersed the armies of Heraclius, and took the {27} city of Damascus, the siege of which will be for ever celebrated in consequence of the almost superhuman exploits of the famous Kaled, surnamed the _Sword of God_.[8] Notwithstanding these successive victories, and the enormous amount of booty thus taken from the enemy and committed to his keeping, Abubeker appropriated to his own particular use a sum scarcely equivalent to forty cents a day. Omar, the successor of Abubeker, commanded Kaled to march against Jerusalem. That city soon became the prize of the Arabs; Syria and Palestine were subdued; the Turks and the Persians demanded peace; Heraclius fled from Antioch; and all Asia trembled before Omar and the terrible Mussulmans. Modest, in spite of the triumphs that everywhere attended them, and attributing their success to God alone, these Moslems preserved unaltered their austere manners, their frugality, their severe discipline, and their reverence for poverty, though surrounded by the most corrupt of the nations of the earth, and exposed to the seductive influences of the delicious climates and the luxurious pleasures of some of the richest and most {28} beautiful countries in the world. During the sacking of a city, the most eager and impetuous soldier would be instantly arrested in the work of pillage by the word of his chief, and would, with the strictest fidelity, deliver up the booty he had obtained, that it might be deposited in the general treasury. Even the most independent and magnificent of the heroic chiefs would hasten, in accordance with the directions of the caliph, to take the command of an army, and would become successively generals, private soldiers, or ambassadors, in obedience to his slightest wish. In fine, Omar himself--Omar, the richest, the greatest, the most puissant of the monarchs of Asia, set forward upon a journey to Jerusalem; mounted upon a red camel, which bore a sack of barley, one of rice, a well-filled water-skin, and a wooden vase. Thus equipped, the caliph travelled through the midst of conquered nations, who crowded around his path at every step, entreating his blessing and praying him to adjudge their quarrels. At last he joined his army, and, inculcating precepts of simplicity, valour, and humility upon the soldiers, he made his entrance into the Holy City, liberated such of its former Christian possessors as had become {29} the captives of his people, and commanded the preservation of the churches. Then remounting his camel, the representative of the Prophet returned to Medina, to perform the duties of the high-priest of his religion. The Mussulmans now advanced towards Egypt. That country was soon subdued. Alexandrea was taken by Amrou, one of the most distinguished generals of Omar. It was then that the famous library was destroyed, whose loss still excites the profound regrets of the learned. The Arabians, though such enthusiastic admirers of their national poetry, despised the literature of all the rest of the world. Amrou caused the library of the Ptolemies to be burned, yet this same Amrou was nevertheless celebrated for his poetical effusions. He entertained the sincerest affection and respect for the celebrated John the Grammarian, to whom, but for the opposing order of the caliph, he would have given this valuable collection of books. It was Amrou, too, who caused the execution of a design worthy of the best age of Rome, that of connecting the Red Sea with the Mediterranean by means of a navigable canal, at a point where the waters of the Nile might be diverted from {30} their course for its supply. This canal, so useful to Egypt, and so important to the commerce of both Europe and Asia, was accomplished in a few months. The Turks, in more modern times, have suffered it to be destroyed. Amrou continued to advance into Africa, while the other Arabian commanders passed the Euphrates and conquered the Persians. But Omar was already no more, and Othman occupied his place. It was during the reign of this caliph that the Saracens, banishing for ever its enfeebled Greek masters, conquered Mauritania, or the country of the Moors of Africa, A.D. 647, Heg. 27. The invaders met with serious resistance only from the warlike tribes of the Bereberes.[9] That bold and pastoral people, the descendants of the ancient inhabitants of Numidia, and preserving, even to this day, a species of independence, intrenched as they are in the Atlas Mountains, long and successfully resisted the conquerors of the Moors. A Moslem general named Akba finally succeeded in subjugating them, and in compelling them to adopt the laws and faith of his country. {31} After that achievement Akba carried his arms to the extreme western point of Africa, the ocean alone resisting him in his progress. There, inspired by courage and devotion with feelings of the highest enthusiasm, he forced his horse into the waves, and, drawing his sabre, cried, "God of Mohammed, thou beholdest that, but for the element which arrests me, I would have proceeded in search of unknown nations, whom I would have forced to adore thy name!" Until this epoch, the Moors, under the successive dominion of the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Vandals, and the Greeks, had taken but little interest in the affairs of their different masters. Wandering in the deserts, they occupied themselves chiefly with the care of their flocks; paid the arbitrary imposts levied upon them, sometimes passively enduring the oppression of their rulers, and sometimes essaying to break their chains; taking refuge, after each defeat of their efforts, in the Atlas Mountains, or in the interior of their country. Their religion was a mixture of Christianity and idolatry; their manners those of the enslaved Nomades: rude, ignorant, and wretched, {32} their condition was the prototype of what it now is under the tyrants of Morocco. But the presence of the Arabs rapidly produced a great change among these people. A common origin with that of their new masters, together with similarity of language and temperament, contributed to bind the conquered to their conquerors. The announcement of a religion which had been preached by a descendant of Ishmael, whom the Moors regarded as their father; the rapid conquests of the Mussulmans, who were already masters of half of Asia and a large portion of Africa, and who threatened to enslave the world, aroused the excitable imaginations of the Moors, and restored to their national character all its passionate energy. They embraced the dogmas of Mohammed with transport; they united with the Arabs, volunteered to serve under the Moslem banners, and suddenly became simultaneously enamoured with Islamism and with glory. This reunion, which doubled the military strength of the two united nations, was disturbed for some time by the revolt of the Bereberes, who never yielded their liberty under any circumstances. {33} The reigning caliph, Valid the First, despatched into Egypt Moussa-ben-Nazir, a judicious and valiant commander, at the head of a hundred thousand men, A.D. 708, Heg. 89. Moussa defeated the Bereberes, restored quiet in Mauritania, and seized upon Tangier, which belonged to the Goths of Spain. Master of an immense region of country, of a redoubtable army, and of a people who considered his supremacy as essential to their well-being, the Saracen general from this period contemplated carrying his arms into Spain. That beautiful kingdom, after having been successively under the yoke of the Carthaginians and the Romans, had finally become the prey of the Barbarians. The Alains, the Suevi, and the Vandals had divided its provinces among them; but Euric, one of the Visigoths, who entered the country from the south of Gaul, had, towards the end of the fifth century, gained possession of the whole of Spain, and transmitted it to his descendants. The softness of the climate, together with the effects of wealth and luxury, gradually enfeebled these conquerors, creating vices from which they had been previously free, and depriving {34} them of the warlike qualities to which alone they had been indebted for their success. Of the kings who succeeded Euric, some were Arians and others Catholics, who abandoned their authority to the control of bishops, and occupied a throne shaken to its centre by internal disturbances. Roderick, the last of these Gothic sovereigns, polluted the throne by his vices; and both history and tradition accuse him of the basest crimes. Indeed, in the instance of nearly all these tyrants, their vices either directly occasioned, or were made the pretext of their final ruin. The fact is well established, that Count Julian and his brother Oppas, archbishop of Toledo, both of them distinguished and influential men, favoured the irruption of the Moors into Spain. Tarik, one of the most renowned captains of his time,[10] was sent into Spain by Moussa. He had at first but few troops; but he was not by this prevented from defeating the large army that, by command of Roderick, the last Gothic king, opposed his course. Subsequently, having received re-enforcements {35} from Africa, Tarik vanquished Roderick himself at the battle of Xeres, where that unfortunate monarch perished during the general flight in which the conflict terminated, A.D. 714, Heg. 96. After this battle, the Mohammedan general, profiting by his victory, penetrated into Estremadura, Andalusia, and the two Castiles, and took possession of the city of Toledo. Being soon after joined by Moussa, whose jealousy of the glory his lieutenant was so rapidly acquiring prompted him to hasten to his side, these two remarkable commanders, dividing their troops into several corps, achieved, in a few months, the conquest of the whole of Spain. It should be observed, that these Moors, whom several historians have represented as bloodthirsty barbarians, did not deprive the people whom they had subjugated either of their faith, their churches, or the administrators of their laws. They exacted from the Spaniards only the tribute they had been accustomed to pay their kings. One cannot but question the existence of the ferocity that is ascribed to them, when it is remembered that the greater part of the Spanish cities submitted to the invaders {36} without making the least attempt at resistance; that the Christians readily united themselves with the Moors; that the inhabitants of Toledo desired to assume the name of _Musarabs_; and that Queen Egilona, the widow of Roderick, the last of the Gothic sovereigns, publicly espoused, with the united consent of the two nations, Abdelazis the son of Moussa. Moussa, whom the success of Tarik had greatly exasperated, wishing to remove a lieutenant whose achievements eclipsed his own, preferred an accusation against him to the caliph. Valid recalled them both, but refused to adjudge their difference, and suffered them to die at court from chagrin at seeing themselves forgotten. Abdelazis, the husband of Egilona, became governor of Spain A.D. 718, Heg. 100, but did not long survive his elevation. Alahor, who succeeded him, carried his arms into Gaul, subdued the Warbonnais, and was preparing to push his conquests still farther, when he learned that Pelagius, a prince of the blood-royal of the Visigoths, had taken refuge in the mountains of Asturia with a handful of devoted followers; that with them he dared to brave the conquerors of Spain, and had formed the bold design of {37} attempting to rid himself of their yoke. Alahor sent some troops against him. Pelagius, intrenched with his little army in the mountain gorges, twice gave battle to the Mussulmans, seized upon several castles, and, reanimating the spirits of the Christians, whose courage had been almost extinguished by so long a succession of reverses, taught the astonished Spaniards that the Moors were not invincible. The insurrection of Pelagius occasioned the recall of Alahor by the Caliph Omar II. Elzemah, his successor, was of opinion that the most certain means of repressing revolts among a people is to render them prosperous and contented. He therefore devoted himself to the wise and humane government of Spain; to the regulation of imposts, until then quite arbitrary; and to quieting the discontents of the soldiery, and establishing their pay at a fixed rate. A lover of the fine arts, which the Arabs began from that time to cultivate, Elzemah embellished Cordova, which was his capital, and attracted thither the _savans_ of the age. He was himself the author of a book containing a description of the cities, rivers, provinces, and ports of Spain, of the metals, mines, and quarries it {38} possesses; and, in short, of almost every object of interest either in science or government. But little disturbed by the insurrectionary movements of Pelagius, whose power was confined to the possession of some inaccessible mountain fortresses, Elzemah did not attempt to force him from his strongholds, but, impelled by the ardent desire of extending the Moorish conquests into France, with which the governors of Spain were ever inflamed, he passed the Pyrenees, and perished in a battle fought against Eudes, duke of Aquitania, A.D. 722, Heg. 104. During the remainder of the Caliphate of Yezid II.,[11] several governors followed each other in rapid succession after the death of Elzemah.[12] None of their actions merit recital, but, during this period, the brave Pelagius aggrandized his petty state, advancing into the mountains of Leon, and, in addition, making himself master of several towns. This hero, whose invincible daring roused the Asturians and Cantabrians to struggle for liberty, laid the foundations of that powerful monarchy {39} whose warriors afterward pursued the Moors even to the rocks of the Atlas. The Moslems, who dreamed only of new conquests, made no considerable efforts against Pelagius: they were confident of checking his rebellion with the utmost ease when they should have accomplished the subjugation of the French dominions; and that desire alone fired the ardent soul of the new governor Abdalrahman, or, as he is commonly called, Abderamus. His love of glory, his valour, his genius, and, above all, his immeasurable ambition, made the Mussulman governor regard this conquest as one that could be easily effected; but he himself was destined to be the vanquished. Charles Martel, the son of Pepin d'Heristel, and the grandfather of Charlemagne, whose exploits effaced the recollection of those of his father, and whose fame was not eclipsed by that of his grandson, was at this time mayor of the palace, under the last princes of the first race; or, rather, Charles was the real monarch of the French and German nations. Eudes, duke of Aquitania, the possessor of Gascony and Guienne, had long maintained a quarrel with the French hero. Unable longer, {40} without assistance, to resist his foe, he sought an alliance with a Moor named Munuza, who was the governor of Catalonia and the secret enemy of Abderamus. These two powerful vassals, both discontented with their respective sovereigns, and inspired as much by fear as dislike, united themselves in the closest bonds, in despite of the difference in their religious faith. The Christian duke did not hesitate to give his daughter in marriage to his Mohammedan ally, and the Princess Numerance espoused the Moorish Munuza, as Queen Egilona had espoused the Moorish Abdelazis. Abderamus, when informed of this alliance, immediately divined the motives which had induced it. He soon assembled an army, penetrated with rapidity into Catalonia, and attacked Munuza, who was wounded in a fruitless endeavour to fly, and afterward perished by his own hand. His captive wife was conducted into the presence of the victorious governor Abderamus, struck with her beauty, sent the fair Numerance as a present to the Caliph Haccham, whose regard she elicited; and thus, by a singular chance, a princess of Gascony became an inmate of the seraglio of a sovereign of Damascus. {41} Not content with having so signally punished Munuza, Abderamus crossed the Pyrenees, traversed Navarre, entered Guienne, and besieged and took the City of Bordeaux. Eudes attempted, at the head of an army, to arrest his progress, but was repelled in a decisive engagement. Everything yielded to the Mussulman arms: Abderamus pursued his route, ravaged Perigord, Saintonge, and Poitou, appeared in triumph in Touraine, and paused only when within view of the streaming ensigns of Charles Martel. Charles came to this rencounter followed by the forces of France, Asturia, and Bourgogne, and attended by the veteran warriors whom he was accustomed to lead to victory. The Duke of Aquitania was also in the camp. Charles forgot his private injuries in the contemplation of the common danger: this danger was pressing: the fate of France and Germany--indeed, of the whole of Christendom, depended on the event of the approaching conflict. Abderamus was a rival worthy of the son of Pepin. Flushed, like him, with the proud recollection of numerous victories; at the head of an innumerable army; surrounded by experienced captains, who had been the frequent {42} witnesses of his martial triumphs; and long inspired with the warmest hopes of finally adding to the dominion of Islamism the only country belonging to the ancient Roman empire that still remained unsubdued by the Saracens, the Moorish leader met his brave foe, upon equal terms, on the battle-field of Tours, A.D. 733, Heg. 114. The action was long and bloody. Abderamus was slain; and this dispiriting loss, without doubt, decided the defeat of his army.[13] Historians assert that more than three hundred thousand men perished. This statement is probably exaggerated; but it is certainly true, that the Moors, who had thus penetrated into the midst of France, were relentlessly pursued after their defeat, and were many of them unable to escape from the army of the victors and the vengeance of the people. This memorable battle, of which we possess no details, saved France from the yoke of the Arabs, and effectually arrested their spreading dominion. Once again, subsequent to this reverse, the Moors attempted to penetrate into France, and {43} succeeded in seizing upon Avignon; but Charles Martel defeated them anew, retook the captured city, drove them from Narbonne, and deprived them forever of the hope with which they had so often flattered themselves. After the death of Abderamus, Spain was torn by dissensions between the two governors[14] named successively by the Caliph. A third pretender arrived from Africa. A fourth added himself to the list;[15] factions multiplied; the different parties often had recourse to arms; chiefs were assassinated, cities taken, and provinces ravaged. The details of these events are variously related by different historians, but possess little interest in the narrations of any. These civil wars lasted nearly twenty years. The Christians, who had retired into Asturia, profited by them to the utmost. Alphonso I., the son-in-law and successor of Pelagius, imitated the career of that hero. He seized upon a part of Galicia and Leon, repulsed the Mussulman troops who were sent to oppose him, and rendered himself master of several towns. The Moors, occupied by their domestic {44} quarrels, neglected to arrest the progress of Alphonso, and from that time the growth of a miniature kingdom commenced, whose interests were inimical to those of the Saracens in Spain. After many crimes and combats, a certain _Joseph_ had succeeded in triumphing over his different rivals, and was at last reigning supreme in Cordova, when there occurred a memorable event in the East, which was destined greatly to affect the condition of Spain. From that period, A.D. 749, Heg. 134, commences the second epoch of the empire of the Moors of Spain, which makes it necessary to revert briefly to the history of the Eastern caliphs. [1] The _Sabaei_, according to the best ancient authorities, were the inhabitants of the extensive Arabian kingdom of _Saba_.--_Translator_. [2] The term Moors, according to Bochart, comes from a Hebrew word, _Mahuran_, which signifies Western. [3] It is scarcely necessary to remind the reader that these _Children of the Desert_ are supposed to be the lineal descendants of Ishmael, the wandering, outcast son of the patriarch Abraham and the much-abused Hagar.--_Translator_. [4] The primitive name of the Arabs, from _Nabathaea_, an appellation for their country which is probably derived from _Nabath_, the son of Ishmael. The capital city of Nabathaea was that _Petra_, of whose present appearance and condition our eminent countryman, Stephens, has given his readers so graphic a sketch in his "Travels," &c.--_Translator_. [5] A.D. 569. [6] The Coheshirites, the guardians of the Temple of the Caaba at Mecca. [7] See Note A, page 203. [8] See Note B, page 206. [9] See note C, page 207. [10] See note D, page 208. [11] See Note E, page 308. [12] Ambeza, Azra, Jahiah, Osman, Hazifa, Hacchem, and Mohammed. [13] It was in this battle that Charles acquired the title of _Martel_, or the _Hammer_. [14] Abdoulmelek and Akbe. [15] Aboulattar and Tevaba. {45} SECOND EPOCH. THE KINGS OF CORDOVA BECOME THE CALIPHS OF THE WEST. _Extending from the middle of the Eighth to the commencement of the Eleventh Century._ We have seen that, under their first three caliphs, Abubeker, Omar, and Othman, the Arabian conquerors of Syria, Persia, and Africa preserved their ancient manners, their simplicity of character, their obedience to the successors of the Prophet, and their contempt for luxury and wealth: but what people could continue to withstand the influence of such an accumulation of prosperity? These resistless conquerors turned their weapons against each other: they forgot the virtues which had rendered them invincible, and assisted by their dissensions in dismembering the empire that their valour had created. The disastrous effects of the baneful spirit that had thus insidiously supplanted the original principles of union, moderation, and prudence, by which, as a nation, the Moslems had been {46} actuated, were first manifested in the assassination of the Caliph Othman. Ali, the friend, companion, and adopted son of the Prophet, whose courage, achievements, and relationship to Mohammed, as the husband of his only daughter, had rendered him so dear to the Mussulmans, was announced as the successor of Othman. But Moavias, the governor of Syria, refused to recognise the authority of Ali, and, under the guidance of the sagacious Amrou, the conqueror of Egypt, caused himself to be proclaimed Caliph of Damascus. Upon this, the Arabians divided: those of Medina sustaining Ali, and those of Syria Moavias. The first took the name of _Alides_, the others styled themselves _Ommiades_, deriving their denomination from the grandfather of Moavias. Such was the origin of the famous schism which still separates the Turks and Persians. Though Ali succeeded in vanquishing Moavias in the field, he did not avail himself judiciously of the advantage afforded him by his victory. He was soon after assassinated,[1] and the spirit and courage of his party vanished with the {47} occurrence of that event. The sons of Ali made efforts to reanimate the ardour of his partisans, but in vain. Thus, in the midst of broils, revolts, and civil wars, the Ommiades still remained in possession of the Caliphate of Damascus.[2] It was during the reign of one of these princes, Valid the First, that the Arabian conquests extended in the East to the banks of the Ganges, and in the West to the shores of the Atlantic. The Ommiades, however, were for the most part feeble, but they were sustained by able commanders, and the {48} ancient valour of the Moslem soldiers was not yet degenerated. After the Ommiades had maintained their empire for the space of ninety-three years, Mervan II.,[3] the last caliph of the race, was deprived of his throne and his life[4] through the instrumentality of Abdalla, a chief of the tribe of the Abbassides, who were, like the Ommiades, near relatives of Mohammed. Aboul-Abbas, the nephew of Abdalla, supplanted the former caliph. With him commenced the dynasty of the Abbassides, so celebrated in the East for their love of science and their connexion with the names of Haroun Al Raschid, Almamon, and the Bermasides.[5] The Abbassides retained the caliphate during five successive centuries.[6] At the termination of {49} that period, they were despoiled of their power by the Tartar posterity of Gengis Khan, after {50} having witnessed the establishment of a race of Egyptian caliphs named _Fatimites_, the pretended descendants of Fatima, the daughter of Mohammed. Thus was the Eastern empire of the Arabs eventually destroyed: the descendants of Ishmael returned to the country from which they had originally sprung, and gradually reverted to nearly the same condition as that in which they existed when the Prophet arose among them. {51} These events, from the founding of the dynasty of the Abbassides, have been anticipated in point of time in the relation, because henceforth the history of Spain is no longer intermingled with that of the East. After having dwelt briefly upon an event intimately connected as well with the establishment of the Abbassides upon the Moslem throne as with the history of Spain, we will enter continuously upon the main subject of our work. To return, then, for a moment, to the downfall of the Ommiade caliphs. When the cruel Abdalla had placed his nephew, Aboul-Abbas, on the throne of the Caliphs of Damascus, he formed the horrible design of exterminating the Ommiades. These princes were very numerous. With the Arabs, among whom polygamy is permitted, and where numerous offspring are regarded as the peculiar gift of Heaven, it is not unusual to find several thousand individuals belonging to the same family. Abdalla, despairing of effecting the destruction of the race of his enemies, dispersed as they were by terror, published a general amnesty to all the Ommiades who should present themselves before him on a certain day. Those ill-fated {52} people, confiding in the fulfilment of his solemn promises, hastened to seek safety at the feet of Abdalla. The monster, when they were all assembled, caused his soldiers to surround them, and then commanded them all to be butchered in his presence. After this frightful massacre, Abdalla ordered the bloody bodies to be ranged side by side in close order, and then to be covered with boards spread with Persian carpets. Upon this horrible table he caused a magnificent feast to be served to his officers. One shudders at the perusal of such details, but they serve to portray the character of this Oriental conqueror. A solitary Ommiade escaped the miserable fate of his brethren; a prince named Abderamus. A fugitive wanderer, he reached Egypt, and concealed himself in the solitary recesses of its inhospitable deserts. The Moors of Spain, faithful to the Ommiades, though their governor Joseph had recognised the authority of the Abbassides, had no sooner learned that there existed in Egypt a scion of the illustrious family to which they still retained their attachment, than they secretly sent deputies to offer him their crown. Abderamus foresaw the {53} obstacles with which he would be compelled to struggle, but, guided by the impulses of a soul whose native greatness had been strengthened and purified by adversity, he did not hesitate to accept the proposal of the Moors. The Ommiade prince arrived in the Peninsula A.D. 755, Heg. 138. He speedily gained the hearts of his new subjects, assembled an army, took possession of Seville, and, soon after, marched towards Cordova, the capital of Mussulman Spain. Joseph, in the name of the Abbassides, vainly attempted to oppose his progress. The governor was vanquished and Cordova taken, together with several other cities. Abderamus was now not only the acknowledged king of Spain, but was proclaimed _Caliph of the West_ A.D. 759, Heg. 142. During the supremacy of the Ommiades in the empire of the East, Spain had continued to be ruled by governors sent thither from Asia by those sovereigns; but it was now permanently separated from the great Arabian empire, and elevated into a powerful and independent state, acknowledging no farther allegiance to the Asiatic caliphs either in civil or religious matters. Thus was the control hitherto exercised over the {54} affairs of Spain by the Oriental caliphs forever wrested from them by the last surviving individual of that royal race whom Abdalla had endeavoured to exterminate. Abderamus the First established the seat of his new greatness at Cordova. He was not long allowed peacefully to enjoy it, however. Revolts instigated by the Abbassides, incursions into Catalonia by the French, and wars with the kings of Leon,[7] incessantly demanded his attention; but his courage and activity gained the ascendency even over such numerous enemies. He maintained his throne with honour, and merited his beautiful surname of _The Just_. Abderamus cultivated and cherished the fine arts, even in the midst of the difficulties and dangers by which he was surrounded. It was he who first established schools at Cordova for the study of astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and grammar. He was also a poet, and was considered the most eloquent man of his age. This first Caliph of the West adorned and fortified his capital, erected a superb palace, which he surrounded by beautiful gardens, and commenced the construction of a grand mosque, the {55} remains of which continue even at this day to excite the admiration of the traveller. This monument of magnificence was completed during the reign of Hacchem, the son and successor of Abderamus. It is thought that the Spaniards have not preserved more than one half of the original structure, yet it is now six hundred feet long and two hundred wide, and is supported by more than three hundred columns of alabaster, jasper, and marble. Formerly there were twenty-four doors of entrance, composed of bronze covered with sculptures of gold; and nearly five thousand lamps nightly served to illuminate this magnificent edifice. In this mosque the caliphs of Cordova each Friday conducted the worship of the people, that being the day consecrated to religion by the precepts of Mohammed. Thither all the Mussulmans of Spain made pilgrimages, as those of the East resorted to the temple at Mecca. There they celebrated, with great solemnity, the fête of the great and the lesser Beiram, which corresponds with the Passover of the Jews; that of the Newyear, and that of Miloud, or the anniversary of the birth of Mohammed. Each of these festivals lasted for eight days. During that time {56} all labour ceased, the people sent presents to each other, exchanged visits, and offered sacrifices. Disunited families, forgetting their differences, pledged themselves to future concord, and consummated their renewed amity by delivering themselves up to the enjoyment of every pleasure permitted by the laws of the Koran. At night the city was illuminated, the streets were festooned with flowers, and the promenades and public places resounded with the melody of various musical instruments. The more worthily to celebrate the occasion, alms were lavishly distributed by the wealthy, and the benedictions of the poor mingled with the songs of rejoicing that everywhere ascended around them. Abderamus, having imbibed with his Oriental education a fondness for these splendid fêtes, first introduced a taste for them into Spain. Uniting, in his character of caliph, the civil and the sacerdotal authority in his own person, he regulated the religious ceremonies on such occasions, and caused them to be celebrated with all the pomp and magnificence displayed under similar circumstances by the sovereigns of Damascus. Though the caliph of Cordova was the enemy {57} of the Christians, and numbered many of them among his subjects, he refrained from persecuting them, but deprived the bishoprics of their religious heads and the churches of their priests, and encouraged marriages between the Moors and Spaniards. By these means the sagacious Moslem inflicted more injury upon the true religion than could have been effected by the most rigorous severity. Under the reign of Abderamus, the successors of Pelagius, still retaining possession of Asturia, though weakened by the internal dissensions that already began to prevail among them, were forced to submit to the payment of the humiliating tribute of a hundred young females, Abderamus refusing to grant them peace except at this price. Master of entire Spain, from Catalonia to the two seas, the first caliph died A.D. 788, Heg. 172, after a glorious reign of thirty years, leaving the crown to his son Hacchem, the third of his eleven sons. After the death of Abderamus the empire was disturbed by revolts, and by wars between the new caliph and his brothers, his uncles, or other princes of the royal blood. These civil wars {58} were inevitable under a despotic government, where not even the order of succession to the throne was regulated by law. To be an aspirant to the supreme authority of the state, it was sufficient to belong to the royal race; and as each of the caliphs, almost without exception, left numerous sons, all these princes became the head of a faction, every one of them established himself in some city, and, declaring himself its sovereign, took up arms in opposition to the authority of the caliph. From this arose the innumerable petty states that were created, annihilated, and raised again with each change of sovereigns. Thus also originated the many instances of conquered, deposed, or murdered kings, that make the history of the Moors of Spain so difficult of methodical arrangement and so monotonous in the perusal. Hacchem, and, after him, his son Abdelazis-el-Hacchem retained possession of the caliphate notwithstanding these unceasing dissensions. The former finished the beautiful mosque commenced by his father, and carried his arms into France, in which kingdom his generals penetrated as far as Narbonne. The latter, Abdelazis-el-Hacchem less fortunate than his predecessor, did not {59} succeed in opposing the Spaniards and his refractory subjects with unvarying success. His existence terminated in the midst of national difficulties, and his son Abderamus became his successor. Abderamus II. was a great monarch, notwithstanding the fact that, during his reign, the power of the Christians began to balance that of the Moors. The Christians had taken advantage of the continual divisions which prevailed among their former conquerors. Alphonso the Chaste, king of Asturia, a valiant and politic monarch, had extended his dominions and refused to pay the tribute of the hundred young maidens. Ramir, the successor of Alphonso, maintained this independence, and several times defeated the Mussulmans. Navarre became a kingdom, and Aragon had its independent sovereigns, and was so fortunate as to possess a government that properly respected the rights of the people.[8] The governors of Catalonia, until then subjected to the kings of France, took advantage of the feebleness of Louis le Debonnaire to render themselves independent. In fine, all the north of Spain declared itself in opposition to the Moors, {60} and the south became a prey to the irruptions of the Normans. Abderamus defended himself against all these adversaries, and obtained, by his warlike talents, the surname of _Elmonzaffer_, which signifies _the Victorious_. And, though constantly occupied by the cares of government and of successive wars, this monarch afforded encouragement to the fine arts, embellished his capital by a new mosque, and caused to be erected a superb aqueduct, from which water was carried in leaden pipes throughout the city in the utmost abundance. Abderamus possessed a soul capable of enjoying the most refined and elevated pleasures. He attracted to his court poets and philosophers, with whose society he frequently delighted himself; thus cultivating in his own person the talents he encouraged in others. He invited from the East the famous musician Ali-Zeriab, who established himself in Spain through the beneficence of the caliph, and originated the celebrated school[9] whose pupils afterward afforded such delight to the Oriental world. The natural ferocity of the Moslems yielded to the influence of the chivalrous example of {61} the caliph, and Cordova became, under the dominion of Abderamus, the home of taste and pleasure, as well as the chosen abode of science and the arts. A single anecdote will serve to illustrate the tenderness and generosity that so strongly characterized this illustrious descendant of the Ommiades. One day a favourite female slave left her master's presence in high displeasure, and, retiring to her apartment, vowed that, sooner than open the door for the admittance of Abderamus, she would suffer it to be walled up. The chief eunuch, alarmed at this discourse, which he regarded as almost blasphemous, hastened to prostrate himself before the Prince of Believers, and to communicate to him the horrible purpose of the rebellious slave. Abderamus smiled at the resolution of the offended beauty, and commanded the eunuch to cause a wall composed of pieces of coin to be erected before the door of her retreat, and avowed his intention not to pass this barrier until the fair slave should have voluntarily demolished it, by possessing herself of the materials of which it was formed. The {62} historian[10] adds, that the same evening the caliph entered the apartments of the appeased favourite without opposition. This prince left forty-five sons and nearly as many daughters. Mohammed, the eldest of his sons, succeeded him, A.D. 852, Heg. 238. The reigns of Mohammed and his successors, Almanzor and Abdalla, offer to the historian nothing for a period of fifty years but details of an uninterrupted continuation of troubles, civil wars, and revolts, by which the governors of the principal cities sought to render themselves independent. Alphonso the Great, king of Asturia, profited by these dissensions the more effectually to confirm his own power. The Normans, from another side, ravaged Andalusia anew. Toledo, frequently punished, but ever rebellious, often possessed local sovereigns. Saragossa imitated the example of Toledo. The authority of the caliphs was weakened, and their empire, convulsed in every part, seemed on the point of dissolution, when Abderamus III., the nephew of Abdalla, ascended the throne of Cordova, and restored for some time its pristine splendour and power, A.D. 912, Heg. 300. {63} This monarch, whose name, so dear to the Moslems, seemed to be an auspicious omen, took the title of _Emir-al-Mumenin_, which signifies _Prince of true Believers_. Victory attended the commencement of his reign; the rebels, whom his predecessors had been unable to reduce to submission, were defeated; factions were dissipated, and peace and order re-established. Being attacked by the Christians soon after he had assumed the crown, Abderamus applied for assistance to the Moors of Africa. He maintained long wars against the kings of Leon and the counts of Castile, who wrested Madrid, then a place of comparative insignificance, from him, A.D. 931, Heg. 319. Often attacked and sometimes overcome, but always great and redoubtable notwithstanding occasional reverses, Abderamus knew how to repair his losses, and avail himself to the utmost of his good fortune. A profound statesman, and a brave and skilful commander, he fomented divisions among the Spanish princes, carried his arms frequently into the very centre of their states, and, having established a navy, seized, in addition, upon Ceuta and Seldjemessa on the African coast. {64} Notwithstanding the incessant wars which occupied him during the whole of his reign, the enormous expense to which he was subjected by the maintenance of his armies and his naval force, and the purchase of military assistance from Africa, Emir-al-Mumenim supported a luxury and splendour at his court, the details of which would seem to be the mere creations of the imagination, were they not attested by every historian of the time. The contemporary Greek emperor, Constantine XI., wishing to oppose an enemy capable of resisting their power, to the Abbassides of Bagdad, sent ambassadors to Cordova to form an alliance with Abderamus. The Caliph of the West, flattered that Christians should come from so distant a part of the world to request his support, signalized the occasion by the display of a gorgeous pomp which rivalled that of the most splendid Asiatic courts. He sent a suit of attendants to receive the ambassadors at Jean. Numerous corps of cavalry, magnificently mounted and attired, awaited their approach to Cordova, and a still more brilliant display of infantry lined the avenues to the palace. The courts were covered with the most {65} superb Persian and Egyptian carpets, and the walls hung with cloth of gold. The caliph, blazing with brilliants, and seated on a dazzling throne, surrounded by his family, his viziers, and a numerous train of courtiers, received the Greek envoys in a hall in which all his treasures were displayed. The _Hadjeb_, a dignitary whose office among the Moors corresponded to that of the ancient French _mayors of the palace_, introduced the ambassadors. They prostrated themselves before Abderamus in amazement at the splendour of this array, and presented to the Moorish sovereign the letter of Constantine, written on blue parchment and enclosed in a box of gold. The caliph signed the treaty, loaded the imperial messengers with presents, and ordered that a numerous suite should accompany them even to the walls of Constantinople. Abderamus III., though unceasingly occupied either by war or politics, was all his life enamoured of one of his wives named Zahra.[11] He built a city for her two miles distant from Cordova, which he named Zahra. This place is now destroyed. It was situated {66} at the base of a high mountain, from which flowed numerous perpetual streams, whose waters ran in all directions through the streets of the city, diffusing health and coolness in their course, and forming ever-flowing fountains in the centre of the public places. The houses, each built after the same model, were surmounted by terraces and surrounded by gardens adorned with groves of orange, laurel, and lime, and in which the myrtle, the rose, and the jasmine mingled in pleasing confusion with all the varied productions of that sunny and delicious clime. The statue of the beautiful Zahra[12] was conspicuously placed over the principal gate of this City of Love. But the attractions of the city were totally eclipsed by those of the fairy-like palace of the favourite. Abderamus, as the ally of their Imperial master, demanded the assistance of the most accomplished of the Greek architects; and the sovereign of Constantinople, which was at that time the chosen home of the fine arts, eagerly complied with his desires, and sent the caliph, in addition, forty columns of granite of the rarest and most beautiful workmanship. Independent {67} of these magnificent columns, there were employed in the construction of this palace more than twelve hundred others, formed of Spanish and Italian marble. The walls of the apartment named the _Saloon of the Caliphate_, were covered with ornaments of gold; and from the mouths of several animals, composed of the same metal, gushed jets of water that fell into an alabaster fountain, above which was suspended the famous pearl that the Emperor Leo had presented to the caliph as a treasure of inestimable value. In the pavilion where the mistress of this enchanting abode usually passed the evening with the royal Moor, the ceiling was composed of gold and burnished steel, incrusted with precious stones. And in the resplendent light reflected from these brilliant ornaments by a hundred crystal lustres, flashed the waters of a fountain, formed like a sheaf of grain, from polished silver, whose delicate spray was received again by the alabaster basin from whose centre it sprung. The reader might hesitate to believe these recitals; might suppose himself perusing Oriental tales, or that the author was indebted for his history to the _Thousand and One Nights_, were {68} not the facts here detailed attested by the Arabian writers, and corroborated by foreign authors of unquestionable veracity. It is true that the architectural magnificence, the splendid pageantry, the pomp of power that characterized the reign of this illustrious Saracenic king, resembled nothing with which we are now familiar; but the incredulous questioners of their former existence might be asked whether, had the pyramids of Egypt been destroyed by an earthquake, they would now credit historians who should give us the exact dimensions of those stupendous structures? The writers from whom are derived the details that have been given concerning the court of the Spanish Mussulmans, mention also the sums expended in the erection of the palace and city of Zahra. The cost amounted annually to three hundred thousand dinars of gold,[13] and twenty-five years hardly sufficed for the completion of this princely monument of chivalrous devotion. {69} To these enormous expenditures should be added the maintenance of a seraglio, in which the women, the slaves, and the black and white eunuchs amounted to the number of six thousand persons. The officers of the court, and the horses destined for their use, were in equally lavish proportion. The royal guard alone was composed of twelve thousand cavaliers. When it is remembered, that, from being continually at war with the Spanish princes, Abderamus was obliged to keep numerous armies incessantly on foot, to support a naval force, frequently to hire stipendiaries from Africa, and to fortify and preserve in a state of defence the ever-endangered fortresses on his frontiers, it is hardly possible to comprehend how his revenues sufficed for the supply of such immense and varied demands. But his resources were equally immense and varied; and the sovereign of Cordova was perhaps the richest and most powerful monarch then in Europe.[14] He held possession of Portugal, Andalusia, the Kingdom of Grenada, Mercia, Valencia, and the greater part of New-Castile, the most beautiful and fertile countries of Spain. {70} These provinces were at that time extremely populous, and the Moors had attained the highest perfection in agriculture. Historians assure us, that there existed on the shores of the Guadalquiver twelve thousand villages; and that a traveller could not proceed through the country without encountering some hamlet every quarter of an hour. There existed in the dominions of the caliph eighty great cities, three hundred of the second order, and an infinite number of smaller towns. Cordova, the capital of the kingdom, enclosed within its walls two hundred thousand houses and nine hundred public baths. All this prosperity was reversed by the expulsion of the Moors from the Peninsula. The reason is apparent: the Moorish conquerors of Spain did not persecute their vanquished foes; the Spaniards, when they had subdued the Moors, oppressed and banished them. The revenues of the caliphs of Cordova are represented to have amounted annually to twelve millions and forty-five thousand dinars of gold.[15] Independent of this income in money, many imposts were paid in the products of the soil; and among an industrious agricultural {71} population, possessed of the most fertile country in the world, this rural wealth was incalculable. The gold and silver mines, known in Spain from the earliest times, were another source of wealth. Commerce, too, enriched alike the sovereign and the people. The commerce of the Moors was carried on in many articles: silks, oils, sugar, cochineal, iron, wool (which was at that time extremely valuable), ambergris, yellow amber, loadstone, antimony, isinglass, rock-crystal, sulphur, saffron, ginger, the product of the coral-beds on the coast of Andalusia, of the pearl fisheries on that of Catalonia, and rubies, of which they had discovered two localities, one at Malaga and another at Beja. These valuable articles were, either before or after being wrought, transported to Egypt or other parts of Africa, and to the East. The emperors of Constantinople, always allied from necessity to the caliphs of Cordova, favoured these commercial enterprises, and, by their countenance, assisted in enlarging, to a vast extent, the field of their operations; while the neighbourhood of Africa, Italy, and France contributed also to their prosperity. The arts, which are the children of commerce, and support the existence of their parent, added {72} a new splendour to the brilliant reign of Abderamus. The superb palaces he erected, the delicious gardens he created, and the magnificent fêtes he instituted, drew to his court from all parts architects and artists of every description. Cordova was the home of industry and the asylum of the sciences. Celebrated schools of geometry, astronomy, chymistry, and medicine were established there--schools which, a century afterward, produced such men as Averroes and Abenzoar. So distinguished were the learned Moorish poets, philosophers, and physicians, that Alphonso the Great, king of Asturia, wishing to confide the care of his son Ordogno to teachers capable of conducting the education of a prince, appointed him two Arabian preceptors, notwithstanding the difference of religious faith, and the hatred entertained by the Christians towards the Mussulmans. And one of the successors of Alphonso, Sancho the Great, king of Leon, being attacked by a disease which it was supposed would prove fatal in its effects, went unhesitatingly to Cordova, claimed the hospitality of his national enemy, and placed himself under the care of the Mohammedan physicians, who eventually succeeded in curing the malady of the Christian king. {73} This singular fact does as much honour to the skill of the learned Saracens as to the magnanimity of the caliph and the trusting confidence of Sancho. Such was the condition of the caliphate of Cordova under the dominion of Abderamus III. He occupied the throne fifty years, and we have seen with what degree of honour to himself and benefit to his people. Perhaps nothing will better illustrate the superiority of this prince to monarchs generally than the following fragment, which was found, traced by his own hand, among his papers after his death. "Fifty years have passed away since I became caliph. Riches, honours, pleasures, I have enjoyed them all: I am satiated with them all. Rival kings respect me, fear, and envy me. All that the heart of man can desire. Heaven has lavishly bestowed on me. In this long period of seeming felicity I have estimated the number of days during which I have enjoyed _perfect happiness_: they amount to _fourteen_! Mortals, learn to appreciate greatness, the world, and human life!" The successor of this monarch was his eldest {74} son, Aboul-Abbas El Hakkam, who assumed, like his father, the title of _Emir-al-Mumenim_. The coronation of El Hakkam was celebrated with great pomp in the city of Zahra. The new caliph there received the oath of fidelity from the chiefs of the scythe guard, a numerous and redoubtable corps, composed of strangers, which Abderamus III. had formed. The brothers and relations of El Hakkam, the viziers and their chief, the _Hadjeb_, the white and black eunuchs, the archers and cuirassiers of the guard, all swore obedience to the monarch. These ceremonies were followed by the funeral honours of Abderamus, whose body was carried to Cordova, and there deposited in the tomb of his ancestors. Aboul-Abbas El Hakkam, equally wise with his father, but less warlike than he, enjoyed greater tranquillity during his reign. His was the dominion of justice and peace. The success and vigilance of Abderamus had extinguished, for a time, the spirit of revolt, and prepared the way for the continued possession of these great national blessings. Divided among themselves, the Christian kings entertained no designs of disturbing their infidel neighbours. {75} The truce that existed between the Mussulmans and Castile and Leon was broken but once during the life of El Hacchem. The caliph then commanded his army in person, and completed a glorious campaign, taking several cities from the Spaniards, and convincing them, by his achievements, of the policy of future adherence to the terms of their treaty with their Saracen opponents. During the remainder of his reign the Moorish sovereign applied himself wholly to promoting the happiness of his subjects, to the cultivation of science, to the collection of an extensive library, and, above all, to enforcing a strict observance of the laws. The laws of the Moors were few and simple. It does not appear that there existed among them any civil laws apart from those incorporated with their religious code. Jurisprudence was reduced to the application of the principles contained in the Koran. The caliph, as the supreme head of their religion, possessed the power of interpreting these principles; but even he would not have ventured to violate them. At least as often as once a week, he publicly gave audience to his subjects, listened to their {76} complaints, examined the guilty, and, without quitting the tribunal, caused punishment to be immediately inflicted. The governors placed by the sovereign over the different cities and provinces, commanded the military force belonging to each, collected the public revenues, superintended the administration of the police, and adjudged the offences committed within their respective governments. Public officers well versed in the laws discharged the functions of notaries, and gave a juridical form to records relating to the possession of property. When any lawsuits arose, magistrates called _cadis_, whose authority was respected both by the king and the people, could alone decide them. These suits were speedily determined; lawyers and attorneys were unknown, and there was no expense nor chicanery connected with them. Each party pleaded his cause in person, and the decrees of the cadi were immediately executed. Criminal jurisprudence was scarcely more complicated. The Moors almost invariably resorted to the _punishment of retaliation_ prescribed by the founder of their religion. In truth, the wealthy were permitted to exonerate themselves from the charge of bloodshed by the aid {77} of money; but it was necessary that the relations of the deceased should consent to this: the caliph himself would not have ventured to withhold the head of one of his own sons who had been guilty of homicide, if its delivery had been inexorably insisted upon. This simple code would not have sufficed had not the unlimited authority exercised by fathers over their children, and husbands over their wives, supplied the deficiencies of the laws. With regard to this implicit obedience on the part of a family to the will of its chief, the Moors preserved the ancient patriarchal customs of their ancestors. Every father possessed, under his own roof, rights nearly equal to those of the caliph. He decided, without appeal, the quarrels of his wives and those of his sons: he punished with severity the slightest faults, and even possessed the power of punishing certain crimes with death. Age alone conferred this supremacy. An old man was always an object of reverence. His presence arrested disorders: the most haughty young man cast down his eyes at meeting him, and listened patiently to his reproofs. In short, the possessor of a white beard {78} was everywhere invested with the authority of a magistrate. This authority, which was more powerful among the Moors than that of their laws, long subsisted unimpaired at Cordova. That the wise Hacchem did nothing to enfeeble it, may be judged from the following illustration. A poor woman of Zahra possessed a small field contiguous to the gardens of the caliph. El Hacchem, wishing to erect a pavilion there, directed that the owner should be requested to dispose of it to him. But the woman refused every remuneration that was offered her, and declared that she would never sell the heritage of her ancestry. The king was, doubtless, not informed of the obstinacy of this woman; but the superintendent of the palace gardens, a minister worthy of a despotic sovereign, forcibly seized upon the field, and the pavilion was built. The poor woman hastened in despair to Cordova, to relate the story of her misfortune to the Cadi Bechir, and to consult him respecting the course she should pursue. The cadi thought that the Prince of true Believers had no more right than any other man to possess himself by violence of the property of another; and he endeavoured to {79} discover some means of recalling to his recollection a truth which the best of rulers will sometimes forget. One day, as the Moorish sovereign was surrounded by his court in the beautiful pavilion built on the ground belonging to the poor woman, the Cadi Bechir presented himself before him, seated on an ass, and carrying in his hand a large sack. The astonished caliph demanded his errand. "Prince of the Faithful!" replied Bechir, "I come to ask permission of thee to fill this sack with the earth upon which thou standest." The caliph cheerfully consented to this desire, and the cadi filled his sack with the earth. He then left it standing, and, approaching his sovereign, entreated him to crown his goodness by aiding him in loading his ass with its burden. El Hacchem, amused by the request, yielded to it, and attempted to raise the sack. Scarcely able to move it, he let it fall again, and, laughing, complained of its enormous weight. "Prince of Believers!" said Bechir then, with impressive gravity, "this sack, which thou findest so heavy, contains, nevertheless, but a small portion of the field thou hast usurped from one of thy subjects; how wilt thou sustain the weight {80} of this entire field when thou shalt appear in the presence of the Great Judge charged with this iniquity?" The caliph, struck with this address, embraced the cadi, thanked him, acknowledged his fault, and immediately restored to the poor woman the field of which she had been despoiled, together with the pavilion and everything it contained. The praise due to a despotic sovereign capable of such an action, is inferior only to that which should be accorded to the cadi who induced him to perform it. After reigning twelve years, El Hakkam died, A.D. 976, Heg. 366. His son Hacchem succeeded him. This prince was an infant when he ascended the throne, and his intellectual immaturity continued through life. During and after his minority, a celebrated Moor named Mohammed Almanzor, being invested with the important office of _Hadjeb_, governed the state with wisdom and success. Almanzor united to the talents of a statesman the genius of a great commander. He was the most formidable and fatal enemy with whom the Christians had yet been obliged to contend. He {81} ruled the Moorish empire twenty-six years under the name of the indolent Hacchem. More than fifty different times he carried the terrors of war into Castile or Asturia: he took and sacked the cities of Barcelona and Leon, and advanced even to Compostella, destroying its famous church and carrying the spoils to Cordova. The genius and influence of Mohammed temporarily restored the Moors to their ancient strength and energy, and forced the whole Peninsula to respect the rights of his feeble master, who, like another Sardanapalus, dreamed away his life in the enjoyment of effeminate and debasing pleasures.[16] But this was the last ray of unclouded splendour that shone upon the empire of the Ommiades in Spain. The kings of Leon and Navarre, and the Count of Castile, united their forces for the purpose of opposing the redoubtable Almanzor. The opposing armies met near Medina-Celi. The conflict was long and sanguinary, and the victory doubtful. The Moors, after the termination of the combat, took to flight, terrified by the fearful loss they had sustained; and {82} Almanzor, whom fifty years of uninterrupted military success had persuaded that he was invincible, died of grief at this first mortifying reverse. With this great man expired the good fortune of the Saracens of Spain. From the period of his death, the Spaniards continued to increase their own prosperity by the gradual ruin of the Moors. The sons of the hadjeb Almanzor successively replaced their illustrious father; but, in inheriting his power, they did not inherit his talents. Factions were again created. One of the relations of the caliph took up arms against him, and possessed himself of the person of the monarch, A.D. 1005, Heg. 596; and, though the rebellious prince dared not sacrifice the life of Hacchem, he imprisoned him, and spread a report of his death. This news reaching Africa, an Ommiade prince hastened thence to Spain with an army, under pretext of avenging the death of Hacchem. The Count of Castile formed an alliance with this stranger, and civil war was kindled in Cordova. It soon spread throughout Spain, and the Christian princes availed themselves of its disastrous effects to repossess themselves of the cities of {83} which they had been deprived during the supremacy of Almanzor. The imbecile Hacchem, negotiating and trifling alike with all parties, was finally replaced on the throne, but was soon after forced again to renounce it to save his life. After this event a multitude of conspirators[17] were in turn proclaimed caliph, and in turn deposed, poisoned, or otherwise murdered. Almundir, the last lingering branch of the race of the Ommiades, was bold enough to claim the restoration of the rights of his family, even amid the tumult of conflicting parties. His friends represented to him the dangers he was about to encounter. "Should I reign but one day," replied lie, "and expire on the next, I would not murmur at my fate!" But the desire of the prince, even to this extent, was not gratified; he was assassinated without obtaining possession of the caliphate. Usurpers of momentary authority followed. Jalmar-ben-Mohammed was the last in order. His death terminated the empire of the Caliphs {84} of the West, which had been possessed by the dynasty of the Ommiades for the period of three centuries, A.D. 1027, Heg. 416. With the extinction of this line of princes vanished the power and the glory of Cordova. The governors of the different cities, who had hitherto been the vassals of the court of Cordova, profiting by the anarchy that prevailed, erected themselves into independent sovereigns--That city was therefore no longer the capital of a kingdom, though it still retained the religious supremacy which it derived from its mosque. Enfeebled by divisions and subjected to such diversity of rule, the Mussulmans were no longer able successfully to resist the encroachments of the Spaniards. The Third Epoch of their history, therefore, will present nothing but a narrative of their rapid decline. [1] See Note A, page 208. [2] The dynasty of the Ommiades, whose capital, as M. Florian informs us, was Damascus, is most familiarly known in history as that of the _Caliphs of Syria_; and the Abbassides, who succeeded them upon the throne of Islam, are usually designated as the _Caliphs of Bagdad_, which city they built, and there established the seat of their regal power and magnificence. It may be observed, in connexion with this subject, that though the authority of the Caliphs of Damascus continued to be disputed and resisted after the death of Ali, yet with that event terminated the temporary division of the civil and sacerdotal power which had been at first occasioned by their usurpation of sovereignty. The political supremacy of the party of Ali ceased with his existence, and the authority that had belonged to the immediate successors of Mohammed long continued to centre in the family of the Ommiade princes.--_Trans_. [3] See Note B, page 209. [4] A.D. 752, Heg. 134. [5] See Note C, page 209. [6] It was under the government of the Abbassides that the empire of the East possessed that superiority in wealth, magnificence, and learning for which it was once so celebrated. Under the sway of the Caliphs of Bagdad, the Mohammedans became as much renowned for their attainments in the higher branches of science as in the elegant and useful arts. To them the civilized world is indebted for the revival of the exact and physical sciences, and the discovery or restoration of most of the arts that afterward lent such beneficial aid to the progress of European literature and refinement. The far-famed capital of the Abbassides was adorned with every attraction that the most unbounded wealth could secure, or the most consummate art perfect. There taste and power had combined exquisite luxury with unparalleled splendour, and there all that imagination could suggest to fascinate the senses or enrapture the mind, was realized. These princes of Islam, by their unbounded liberality, attracted the learning and genius of other countries to their brilliant court, several of them were the ardent lovers of science as well as the munificent patrons of its devotees. Thus Bagdad became the favoured and genial home of letters and the arts; and luxury and the pursuit of pleasure were ennobled by a graceful union with the more elevated enjoyments of cultivated intellect and refined taste. Nor were these beneficent influences confined to the Mohammedan court, or to the period of time when they were so powerfully exercised. The Moslem sovereigns gave laws to a wide realm in arts as well as arms; and if the whole of Europe did not acknowledge their political superiority, in the world of science their supremacy was everywhere undisputed. That, like the gradually enlarging circles made by a pebble thrown into calm water, continued to spread farther and farther, until it reached the most distant shores, and communicated a generous impulse to nations long sunk in intellectual night. * * * * * * * * Such was the celebrated empire of the Abbassides in its halcyon days of undiminished power--such the beautiful City of Peace, the favoured home of imperial magnificence, ere the despoiling Tartar had profaned its loveliness and destroyed its grandeur. Yet, when we look beneath the brilliant exterior of these Oriental scenes and characters, we discover, under the splendour and elegance by which the eyes of the world were so long dazzled, the corruption and licentiousness of a government containing within itself the seeds of its own insecurity and ultimate destruction. We behold the absence of all fixed principles of legislation; we frequently find absolute monarchs guided solely by passion or caprice in the administration of arbitrary laws, and swaying the destinies of a people who, as a whole, were far from deriving any substantial advantage from the wealth and greatness of their despotic rulers. We are thus led to observe the evils that necessarily result from a want of those principles of vital religion, without which mere human learning is so inadequate to discipline the passions or direct the reason, and of those just and equal laws, the supremacy of which can alone secure the happiness of a people or the permanency of political institutions.--_Trans_. [7] See note D, page 212. [8] See note E, page 218. [9] See note F, page 313. [10] Cardonne, in his History of Spain. [11] This word signifies, in the Arabic, _Flower_, or _Ornament of the World_. [12] See Note G, page 213. [13] The _dinar_ is estimated by M. Florian to be equal to at least _ten livres_. According to that computation, the aggregate cost of the palace and city of Zahra would amount to considerably more than $14,000,000. _Trans_. [14] See note H, page 214. [15] About $22,500,000. [16] See Note I, page 214. [17] Mahadi, Suleiman, Ali, Abderamus IV., Casim, Jahiah, Hacchem III., Mohammed, Abderamus V., Jahiah II., Hacchem IV., and Jalmar-ben-Mohammed. {85} THIRD EPOCH. CONTAINING AN ACCOUNT OF THE PRINCIPAL KINGDOMS THAT SPRANG FROM THE RUINS OF THE CALIPHATE. _Extending from the Commencement of the Eleventh to the Middle of the Thirteenth Century._ At the commencement of the eleventh century, when the throne of Cordova was daily stained by the blood of some new usurper, the governors of the different cities, as has been already remarked, had assumed the title of kings. Toledo, Saragossa, Seville, Valencia, Lisbon, Huesca, and several other places of inferior importance, each possessed independent sovereigns. The history of these numerous kingdoms would be nearly as fatiguing to the reader as to the writer. It presents, for the space of two hundred years, nothing but accounts of repeated massacres, of fortresses taken and retaken, of pillages and seditions, of occasional instances of heroic conduct, but far more numerous crimes. Passing rapidly over two centuries of {86} misfortunes, let it suffice to contemplate the termination of these petty Moorish sovereignties. Christian Spain, in the mean time, presented nearly the same picture as that exhibited by the portion of the Peninsula still in possession of the Mohammedans. The kings of Leon, Navarre, Castile, and Aragon were almost always relatives, and sometimes brothers; but they were not, for that reason, the less sanguinary in their designs towards each other. Difference of religion did not prevent them from uniting with the Moors, the more effectually to oppress other Christians, or other Moors with whom they chanced to be at enmity. Thus, in a battle which occurred A.D. 1010 between two Mussulman leaders, there were found among the slain a count of Urgel and three bishops of Catalonia.[1] And the King of Leon, Alphonso V., gave his sister Theresa in marriage to Abdalla, the Moorish king of Toledo, to convert him into an ally against Castile. Among the Christians, as among the Moors, crimes were multiplied; civil wars of both a local and general nature at the same time distracted Spain, and the unhappy people expiated with {87} their property and their lives the iniquities of their rulers. While thus regarding a long succession of melancholy events, it is agreeable to find a king of Toledo called Almamon, and Benabad, the Mussulman king of Seville, affording an asylum at their courts, the one to Alphonso, the young king of Leon, and the other to the unfortunate Garcias, king of Galicia, both of whom had been driven from their kingdoms by their brother Sancho, of Castile, A.D. 1071 Heg. 465. Sancho pursued his brothers as though they had been his most implacable enemies; and the Moorish monarchs, the natural enemies of all the Christians, received these two fugitive princes as brothers. Almamon, especially, lavished the most affectionate attention upon the unfortunate Alphonso: he endeavoured to entertain him at Toledo with such varied pleasures as should banish regret for the loss of a throne: he gave him an income, and, in short, treated the prince as though he had been a near and beloved relative. When the death of the cruel Sancho (A.D. 1072, Heg. 466) had rendered Alphonso king of Leon and Castile, the generous Almamon, who now had the person of the king of his enemies in his {88} power, accompanied the prince to the frontiers of his kingdom, loaded him with presents and caresses, and, at parting, offered the free use of his troops and treasures to his late guest. While Almamon lived, Alphonso IV. never forgot his obligations to his benefactor. He maintained peace with him, aided him in his campaigns against the King of Seville, and even entered into a treaty with Hacchem, the son and successor of his ally. But, after a brief reign, Hacchem left the throne of Toledo to his youthful brother Jahiah. That prince oppressed the Christians, who were very numerous in his city; and they secretly implored Alphonso to make war upon Jahiah. The memory of Almamon long caused the Spanish monarch to hesitate in relation to this subject. Gratitude impelled him not to listen to the suggestions of ambition and the prayers of his countrymen; but the arguments of gratitude proved the least strong, and Alphonso encamped before Toledo. After a long and celebrated siege, to which several French and other foreign warriors eagerly hastened, Toledo finally capitulated, A.D. 1085, Heg. 478. The conqueror allowed the sons of Almamon {89} to go and reign at Valencia, and engaged by an oath to preserve the mosques from destruction. He could not, however, prevent the Christians from speedily violating this promise. Such was the end of the Moorish kingdom of Toledo. This ancient capital of the Goths had belonged to the Arabs three hundred and eighty-two years. Several other less important cities now submitted to the Christian yoke. The kings of Aragon and Navarre, and the Count of Barcelona, incessantly harassed and besieged the petty Mussulman princes who still remained in the north of Spain. The attacks of the kings of Castile and Leon afforded sufficient occupation for those of the south, effectually to prevent their rendering any assistance to their brethren. Above all, the Cid, the famous Cid, flew from one part of Spain to another, at the head of the invincible band with whom his fame had surrounded him, everywhere achieving victories for the Christians, and even lending the aid of his arms to the Moors when they were internally divided, but always securing success to the party he favoured. This hero, one of the most truly admirable of those whom history has celebrated, since in his {90} character were united the most exalted virtue and the highest qualities of the soldier; this simple Castilian cavalier, upon whom his reputation alone bestowed the control of armies, became master of several cities, assisted the King of Aragon to seize upon Huesca, and conquered the kingdom of Valencia without any other assistance than that of his men-at-arms. Equal in power with his sovereign, of whose treatment he frequently had reason to complain, and envied and persecuted by the jealous courtiers, the Cid never forgot for a moment that he was the subject of the King of Castile. Banished from court, and even exiled from his estates, he hastened, with his brave companions, to attack and conquer the Moors, and to send those of them whom he vanquished to render homage to the king who had deprived him of his rights. Being soon recalled to the presence of Alphonso, in consequence of the king's needing his military aid, the Cid left the scenes of his martial triumphs, and, without demanding reparation for the injuries he had sustained, returned to defend his persecutors; ever ready, while in disgrace, to forget everything in the performance of his duty to his king, and equally ready, when enjoying {91} the favour of the sovereign, to displease him, if it should be necessary to do so, by advocating the cause of truth and justice.[2] While the prowess of the Cid maintained the contest, the Christians had the advantage; but a few years after his death, which occurred in the year 1099 and the 492d of the Hegira, the Moors of Andalusia changed masters, and became, for a time, more formidable than ever to their Spanish foes. After the fall of Toledo, Seville had increased in power. The sovereigns of that city were also masters of ancient Cordova, and possessed, in addition, Estremadura and a part of Portugal. Benabad, king of Seville, one of the most estimable princes of his age, was now the only one of its enemies capable of disturbing the safety of Castile. Alphonso IV., desirous of allying himself with this powerful Moor, demanded his daughter in marriage. His proposal was acceded to, and the Castilian monarch received several towns as the dowry of the Moorish princess; but this extraordinary union, which seemed to ensure peace between the two nations, nevertheless soon became either the cause or the pretext of renewed contests. {92} Africa, after having been separated from the vast empire of the Caliphs of the East by the Fatimite caliphs, and being, during three centuries of civil war, the prey of a succession of conquerors more ferocious and sanguinary than the lions of their deserts,[3] was now subjected to the family of the _Almoravides_, a powerful tribe of Egyptian origin. Joseph-ben-Tessefin, the second prince of this dynasty, founded the kingdom and city of Morocco. Endowed with some warlike talents, proud of his power, and burning to augment it, Joseph regarded with a covetous eye the beautiful European provinces which had formerly been conquered by the Mussulmans of Africa. Some historians assert that the King of Castile, Alphonso IV., and his father-in-law Benabad, king of Seville, having formed the project of dividing Spain between them, committed the capital error of summoning the Moors of Africa to their assistance in this grand design. But others, founding their assertions upon more plausible reasoning, say that the petty Mussulman kings, who were the neighbours or tributaries of Benabad, justly alarmed at his alliance with a {93} Christian king, solicited the support of the Almoravide. But, be that as it may, the ambitious Joseph eagerly availed himself of the fortunate pretext presented by the invitation he had received, and crossed the Mediterranean at the head of an army. He hastened to attack Alphonso, and succeeded in overcoming him in a battle that took place between them, A.D. 1097, Heg. 490. Then turning his arms against Benabad, Joseph took Cordova, besieged Seville, and was preparing for the assault of that city, when the virtuous Benabad, sacrificing his crown and even his liberty to save his subjects from the horrors that threatened them, delivered himself up, together with his family of a hundred children, to the disposal of the Almoravide. The barbarous African, dreading the influence of a monarch whose virtues had rendered him so justly dear to his people, sent him to end his days in an African prison, where his daughters were obliged to support their father and brothers by the labour of their hands. The unfortunate Benabad lived six years after the commencement of his imprisonment, regretting his lost throne only for the sake of his {94} people, and beguiling the period of his protracted leisure by the composition of several poems which are still in existence. In them he attempts to console his daughters under their heavy afflictions, recalls the remembrance of his vanished greatness, and offers himself as a warning and example to kings who shall presume to trust too confidently to the unchanging continuance of the favours of fortune. Joseph-ben-Tessefin, after he had thus become master of Seville and Cordova, soon succeeded in subjugating the other petty Mussulman states; and the Moors, united under a single monarch as powerful as Joseph, threatened again to occupy the important position they had sustained during the supremacy of their caliphs. The Spanish princes, alarmed at this prospect, suspended their individual quarrels, and joined Alphonso in resisting the Africans. At this particular juncture, a fanatical love of religion and glory induced many European warriors to take up arms against the infidels. Raymond of Bourgogne, and his kinsman Henry, both French princes of the blood, Raymond of Saint-Gilles, count of Toulouse, with some other cavaliers from among their vassals, crossed the {95} Pyrenees with their retainers, and fought under the banners of the King of Castile. Thus assisted, that sovereign put the Egyptian commander to flight, and compelled him, soon afterward, to recross the Mediterranean. The grateful Alphonso gave his daughters as a recompense to the distinguished Frenchmen who had lent him the aid of their arms. The eldest, Urraca, espoused Raymond of Bourgogne, and their son afterward inherited the kingdom of Castile. Theresa became the wife of Henry, and brought him as a dowry all the land he had thus far conquered or should hereafter conquer in Portugal: from thence originated that kingdom. Elvira was given to Raymond, count of Toulouse, who carried her with him to the Holy Land, where he gained some possessions by his valour. Excited by these illustrious examples, other French cavaliers resorted soon after to the standard of the King of _Aragon_, Alphonso I., who made himself master of Saragossa, and for ever destroyed that ancient kingdom of the Moors, A.D. 1118, Heg. 512. The son of Henry of Bourgogne, Alphonso I. king of Portugal, a prince renowned for his {96} bravery, availed himself of the presence of a combined fleet of English, Flemings, and Germans, who had anchored in the harbour of that city on their way to the Holy Land, to lay siege to Lisbon. He carried that place by assault, in spite of its great strength, and made it the capital of his kingdom, A.D. 1147, Heg. 541. During this period the kings of Castile and Navarre were extending their conquests in Andalusia. The Moors were attacked on all sides, and their cities were everywhere compelled to surrender, now that they were no longer materially aided by the Almoravides. Those African princes were at this time sufficiently occupied at home in opposing some new sectaries, the principal of whom, under pretext of reinitiating the people in a knowledge of the pure doctrines of Mohammed, opened for themselves a path to the throne, and, after many struggles, ended by effectually driving the family of the Almoravides from its possession. The new conquerors, becoming by these means masters of Morocco and Fez, destroyed, according to the African custom, every individual of the supplanted race, and founded a new dynasty, which is known under {97} the name of the _Almohades_, A.D. 1149, Heg. 543. In the midst of these divisions, these wars and combats, the fine arts still continued to be cultivated at Cordova. And though they were no longer in the flourishing condition in which they were maintained during the reigns of the several caliphs who bore the cherished name of Abderamus, yet the schools of philosophy, poetry, and medicine had continued to exist. These schools produced, in the twelfth century, several distinguished men, among the most celebrated of whom were the learned Abenzoar and the famous Averroes. The former, equally profound in medicine, pharmacy, and surgery, lived, it is said, to the age of one hundred and thirty-five years. Some estimable works which he produced are still extant. Averroes was also a physician, but he was more of a philosopher, poet, lawyer, and commentator. He acquired a reputation so profound, that passing centuries have only served more firmly to establish it. The disposition made by this remarkable man of his time during the different periods of his existence, will illustrate his mental character. In his youth he was the passionate votary of {98} pleasure and poetry: in more mature age he burned the verses he had previously composed, studied the principles of legislation, and discharged the duties of a judicial officer: having advanced still farther in life, he abandoned these occupations for the pursuit of medicine, in which he attained very great eminence: at last philosophy alone supplied the place of every earlier taste, and wholly engrossed his attention for the remainder of his life. It was Averroes who first created among the Moors a taste for Greek literature. He translated the works of Aristotle into Arabic, and wrote commentaries upon them. He also published several other works upon philosophy and medicine, and possessed the united glory of having both enlightened and benefited mankind.[4] As Africa, distracted by the long war of the Almoravides and the Almohades, was unable to offer any opposition to the progress of the Christians in Spain, these last, availing themselves of this condition of affairs, continued to extend their conquests in Andalusia. If the Spanish princes had been less disunited, and had acted in concert against the infidels, they would have been able {99} at this period to deprive the Mussulmans of their entire dominions in the Peninsula. But these ever-contending princes had no sooner taken a Moorish city than they began to dispute among themselves about its possession. The newly-created kingdom of Portugal, established by the military powers of Alphonso, was soon at war with that of Leon.[5] Aragon and Castile, after many bloody quarrels, united in a league against Navarre. Sancho VIII., the sovereign of that little state, was forced to resort to Africa for assistance, and implore the aid of the Almohades. But they, being but recently established on the throne of Morocco, were still employed in exterminating the dismembered fragments of the party of the Almoravides, and could not, in spite of their eager desire to do so, establish any claim to their assumed rights in Spain. Nevertheless, two kings of the race of the Almohades, both named Joseph, passed the Mediterranean more than once with numerous armies. The one was successfully opposed by the Portuguese, and did not survive his final defeat; the other was more fortunate, and succeeded in vanquishing the Castilians, but {100} was soon after obliged to accept a truce and return in haste to Morocco, to which new disturbances recalled him, A.D. 1195, Heg. 591. But these useless victories, these ill-sustained efforts, did not permanently disable either the Mussulmans or the Christians. On both sides, the vanquished parties soon re-entered the field, in utter neglect of the treaties into which they might ever so recently have entered. The sovereigns of Morocco, though regarded as the kings of Andalusia, nevertheless possessed only a precarious authority in that country, which was always disputed when they were absent, and acknowledged only when necessity forced the Mussulman inhabitants to have recourse to their protection. At last Mohammed _El Nazir_, the fourth prince of the dynasty of the Almohades, to whom the Spaniards gave the name of the Green, from the colour of his turban, finding himself in quiet possession of the Moorish empire of Africa, resolved to assemble all his forces, to lead them into Spain, and to renew in that country the ancient conquests of Tarik and Moussa. A holy war was proclaimed, A.D. 1211, Heg. 608, and an innumerable army {101} crowded around the ensigns of Mohammed, left the shores of Africa under the guidance of that monarch, and safely arrived in Andalusia. There their numbers were nearly doubled by the Spanish Moors, whom hatred to the very name of Christian, arising from the vivid remembrance of accumulated injuries, induced to join the bands of El Nazir. The sanguine Mohammed promised an easy triumph to his followers, together with the certainty of rendering themselves masters of all that their ancestors had formerly possessed; and, burning to commence the contest, he immediately advanced towards Castile at the head of his formidable army, which, according to the reports of historians, amounted to more than six hundred thousand men. The king of Castile, Alphonso the Noble, informed of the warlike preparations of the King of Morocco, implored the assistance of the Christian princes of Europe. Pope Innocent III. proclaimed a crusade and granted indulgences most lavishly. Rodrique, archbishop of Toledo, made in person a voyage to Rome, to solicit the aid of the sovereign pontiff; and, returning homeward through France, preached to the people {102} on his route, and induced many cavaliers to proceed at the head of bands of recruits to Spain, and join the opponents of the Mussulmans. The general rendezvous was at Toledo, at which point there were soon collected more than sixty thousand crusaders from Italy and France, who united themselves with the soldiers of Castile. The King of Aragon, Peter II., the same who afterward perished in the war of the Albigense, led his valiant army to the place of meeting, and Sancho VIII., king of Navarre, was not backward in presenting himself at the head of his brave subjects. The Portuguese had recently lost their king, but they despatched their best warriors to Toledo. In short, all Spain flew to arms. There was general union for the promotion of mutual safety; for never, since the time of King Rodrique, had the Christians been placed in such imminent danger. It was at the foot of the Sierra Morena, at a place named _Las Navas de Toloza_, that the three Spanish princes encountered the Moors, A.D. 1212, Heg. 609. Mohammed El Nazir had taken possession of the mountain gorges through which it had been the intention of the Christians to approach {103} his camp. The adroit African thus designed, either to force his opponents to turn back, which would expose them to the danger of a failure of provisions, or to overwhelm them in the pass if they should attempt to enter it. Upon discovering this circumstance, a council was called by the embarrassed Christian leaders. Alphonso was desirous of attempting the passage, but the kings of Navarre and Aragon advised a retreat. In the midst of this dilemma, a shepherd presented himself before them, and offered to conduct them through a defile of the mountain, with which he was familiar. This proposal, which was the salvation of their army, was eagerly accepted, and the shepherd guided the Catholic sovereigns through difficult paths and across rocks and torrents, until, with their followers, they finally succeeded in attaining the summit of the mountain. There, suddenly presenting themselves before the eyes of the astonished Moors, they were engaged for the space of two days in preparing themselves for the conflict, by prayer, confession, and the solemn reception of the holy sacrament Their leaders set an example to the soldiers in this zealous devotion; and the prelates and {104} ecclesiastics, of whom there were a great number in the camp, after having absolved these devout warriors, prepared to accompany them into the midst of the conflict. Upon the third day, the sixteenth of July, in the year twelve hundred and twelve, the Christian army was drawn up in battle array. The troops were formed into three divisions, each commanded by a king. Alphonso was in the centre, at the head of his Castilians and the chevaliers of the newly-instituted orders of Saint James and Calatrava; Rodrique, archbishop of Toledo, the eyewitness and historian of this great battle, advanced by the side of Alphonso, preceded by a large cross, the principal ensign of the army; Sancho and his Navarrois formed the right, while Peter and his subjects occupied the left. The French crusaders, now reduced to a small number by the desertion of many of their companions, who had been unable to endure the scorching heat of the climate, marched in the van of the other troops, under the command of Arnault, archbishop of Narbonne. Thus disposed, the Christians descended towards the valley which separated them from their enemies. {105} The Moors, according to their ancient custom, everywhere displayed their innumerable soldiers, without order or arrangement. An admirable cavalry, to the number of a hundred thousand men, composed their principal strength: the rest of their army was made up of a crowd of ill-armed and imperfectly trained foot-soldiers. Mohammed, stationed on a height, from which he could command a view of his whole army, was encompassed by a defence made of chains of iron, guarded by the choicest of his cavaliers on foot. Standing in the midst of this enclosure, with the Koran in one hand and an unsheathed sabre in the other, the Saracen commander was visible to all his troops, of whom the bravest squadrons occupied the four sides of the hill. The Castilians directed their first efforts towards this elevation. At first they drove back the Moors, but, repulsed in their turn, they recoiled in disorder and began to retreat. Alphonso flew here and there, attempting to rally their broken ranks, "Archbishop," said he to the prelate who everywhere accompanied him, preceded by the grand standard of the Cross, "Archbishop, here are we destined to die!" "Not {106} so, sire," replied the ecclesiastic; "we are destined here to live and conquer!" At that moment the brave canon who carried the chief ensign threw himself with it into the midst of the infidels; the prelate and the king followed him, and the Castilian soldiers rushed forward to protect their sovereign and their sacred standard. The already victorious kings of Aragon and Navarre now advanced at the head of their wings to unite in the attack upon the height. The Moors were assaulted at all points: they bravely resisted their opponents; but the Christians crowded upon them--the Aragonais, the Navarrois, and the Castilians endeavouring mutually to surpass each other in courage and daring. The brave King of Navarre, making a path for himself through the midst of its defenders, reached the enclosure, and struck and broke the chains by which the Moorish commander was surrounded.[6] Mohammed took to flight on beholding this catastrophe; and his soldiers, no longer beholding their king, lost both hope and courage. They gave way in all directions, and fled before the Christians. Thousands of the Mussulmans fell beneath the {107} weapons of their pursuers, while the Archbishop of Toledo, with the other ecclesiastics, surrounding the victorious sovereigns, chanted a _Te Deum_ on the field of battle. Thus was gained the famous battle of Toloza, of which some details have been given in consequence of its great importance, and in illustration of the military tactics of the Moors. With them the arts of war consisted solely in mingling with the enemy, and fighting, each one for himself, until either the strongest or the bravest of the two parties remained masters of the field. The Spaniards possessed but little more military skill than their Moslem neighbours; but their infantry, at least, could attack and resist in mass, while the discipline of that of the Saracens amounted to scarcely anything. On the other hand, again, the cavalry of the Moors was admirably trained. The cavaliers who composed it belonged to the principal families in the kingdom, and possessed excellent horses, in the art of managing which they had been trained from childhood. Their mode of combat was to rush forward with the rapidity of light, strike with the sabre or the lance, fly away as quickly, and then wheel suddenly and return again to the {108} encounter. Thus they often succeeded in recalling victory to their standard when she seemed just about to desert them. The Christians, covered as they were with iron, had in some respects the advantage of these knights, whose persons were protected only by a breastplate and headpiece of steel. The Moorish foot-soldiers were nearly naked, and armed only with a wretched pike. It is easy to perceive that, when involved in the _mêlée_, and, above all, during a route, vast numbers of them must have perished. This, too, renders less incredible the seemingly extravagant accounts given by historians of their losses in the field. They assert, for example, that, at the battle of Toloza, the Christians killed two hundred thousand Moors, while they lost themselves but fifteen hundred soldiers. Even when these assertions are estimated at their true value, it remains certain that the infidels sustained an immense loss; and this important defeat, which is still celebrated yearly at Toledo by a solemn fête, long deprived the kings of Morocco of all hope of subjugating the Spaniards. The victory of Toloza was followed by more fatal consequences to the unfortunate Mohammed than to the Moors of Andalusia; for the {109} latter retired to their cities, defended them by means of the remains of the African army, and successfully resisted the Spanish princes, who succeeded in taking but few of their strong places, and, speedily dissolving their league, separated for their respective kingdoms. But Mohammed, despised by his subjects after his defeat, and assailed by the treachery of his nearest relations, lost all authority in Spain, and beheld the principal Moors, whom he had now no power to control, again forming little states, the independence of which they were prepared to assert by force of arms.[7] The discomfited El Nazir consequently returned to Africa, where he soon after died of chagrin. With Mohammed the Green vanished the good fortune of the Almohades. The princes of that house, who followed El Nazir in rapid succession, purchased their royal prerogatives at the expense of continual unhappiness and danger, and were finally driven from the throne. The empire of Morocco was then divided, and three new dynasties were established; that of Fez, of Tunis, and of Tremecen. These three powerful and rival sovereignties greatly multiplied the {110} conflicts, crimes, and atrocities, the narration of which alone constitutes the history of Africa. About this period some dissensions arose in Castile, which, together with the part assumed by the King of Aragon in the war of the Albigense in France, allowed the Moors time to breathe. The Moslems were still masters of the kingdoms of Valencia, Murcia, Grenada, and Andalusia, with part of Algarva and the Balearic Isles, which last, until that time, had continued to be but little known to the Christians of the Continent. These states were divided between several sovereigns, the principal of whom was Benhoud, a descendant of the ancient kings of Saragossa, a sagacious monarch and a great commander, who by his genius and courage had obtained dominion over all the southeastern part of Spain. Next to Benhoud in rank, the most important of these Mohammedan princes were the kings of Seville and Valentia. The barbarian who reigned at Majorca was a mere piratical chief, whose enmity was formidable only to the inhabitants of the neighbouring coast of Catalonia. Such was the condition of Moorish Spain, {111} when two young heroes seated themselves, nearly at the same time, on the thrones of the two principal Christian states; and, after having allayed the commotions created during the period of their minority, directed their concentrated efforts against the Mussulmans, A.D. 1224, Heg. 621. These princes, who were mutually desirous to emulate each other in fame, but were never rivals in interest, both consecrated their lives to the extirpation of the inflexible enemies of their native land. One of these sovereigns was Jacques I., king of Aragon (a son of the Peter of Aragon who distinguished himself on the field of Toloza), who united to the courage, grace, and energy of his father, a greater degree of genius and success than fell to the lot of that sovereign. The other was Ferdinand III., king of Castile and Leon, a discerning, courageous, and enterprising monarch, whom the Romish Church has numbered with its saints, and history ranks among its great men. This prince was the nephew of Blanche of Castile, queen of France, and cousin-german of St. Lewis,[8] whom he nearly resembled in his {112} piety, his bravery, and the wise laws he framed for the benefit of his subjects. Ferdinand carried his arms first into Andalusia. When he entered the territories of the infidels, he received the homage of several Moorish princes, who came to acknowledge themselves his vassals. As he proceeded, he seized upon a great number of places, and, among others, the town of Alhambra, whose frightened inhabitants retired to Grenada, and established themselves in a portion of that city, which thus obtained the name by which it was afterward so much celebrated. Jacques of Aragon, on his part, set sail with an army for the Balearic Isles. Though impeded in his progress by contrary winds, he succeeded at last in reaching Majorca, on the shore of which island he defeated the Moorish force that attempted to oppose his landing, and then marched towards their capital and laid siege to it. The chivalrous Jacques, who, when danger was to be encountered, always took precedence of even his bravest officers and most daring soldiers, was, as usual, the first to mount the walls in the assault upon this city. It was carried, {113} notwithstanding its great strength, the Mussulman king driven from the throne, and this new crown permanently incorporated with that of Aragon, A.D. 1229, Heg. 627. Jacques had long been meditating a most important conquest. Valencia, after the death of the Cid, had again fallen into the hands of the Moors. This beautiful and fertile province, where nature seemed to delight herself by covering anew with fruit and flowers the soil that man had so often deluged with blood, was now under the dominion of Zeith, a brother of Mohammed El Nazir, the African king who was vanquished at Toloza by the Christians. A powerful faction, inimical to the power of Zeith, wished to place upon the throne a prince named Zean. The two competitors appealed to arms to decide their respective claims. The King of Aragon espoused the cause of Zeith, and, under pretext of marching to his assistance, advanced into the kingdom of Valencia, several times defeated Zean, seized upon his strong places, and, with the active intrepidity that rendered him so formidable a foe, invested the capital of his enemy, A.D. 1234, Heg. 632. Thus pressed by the sovereign of Aragon, {114} Zean implored the aid of Benhoud, the most puissant of the kings of Andalusia. But Benhoud was at this time occupied in resisting the encroachments of Ferdinand. The Castilians, under the conduct of that valiant prince, had made new progress against the Moors. After possessing themselves of a great number of other cities, they had now laid siege to ancient Cordova. Benhoud had been often vanquished, but always retained the affections of a people who regarded him as their last support. He had again collected an army, and, though possessed with an equally earnest desire to relieve both Cordova and Valencia, was about to march towards the latter, from a belief that he was most likely to be there successful, when his life was treacherously terminated by one of his lieutenants. The Catholic kings were by this means delivered from the opposition of the only man who was capable of impeding the accomplishment of their wishes. The death of Benhoud deprived the inhabitants of Cordova of all courage and hope. Until then they had defended themselves with {115} equal courage and constancy; but they offered to capitulate upon receiving intelligence of this disastrous event.[9] The Christians made the most rigorous use of their victory, granting only life and liberty of departure to the unfortunate disciples of the Prophet. An innumerable host of these wretched people came forth from their former homes, weeping, and despoiled of all their possessions. Slowly they left the superb city which had been for more than five hundred and twenty years the principal seat of their national greatness, their luxurious magnificence, their cherished religion, and their favourite literature and fine arts. Often did these desolate exiles pause on their way, and turn their despairing eyes once again towards the towering palaces, the splendid temples, the beautiful gardens, that five centuries of lavish expense and toilsome effort had served to adorn and perfect, only to become the spoil of the enemies of their faith and their race. The Catholic soldiers who were now the occupants of these enchanting abodes, were so far from appreciating their loveliness and value, {116} that they preferred rather to destroy than inhabit them; and Ferdinand soon found himself the possessor of a deserted city. He was therefore compelled to attract inhabitants to Cordova from other parts of his dominions, by the offer of extraordinary immunities. But, notwithstanding the privileges thus accorded them, the Spaniards murmured at leaving their arid rocks and barren fields, to dwell in the palaces of caliphs and amid nature's most luxuriant scenes. The grand mosque of Abderamus was converted into a cathedral, and Cordova became the residence of a bishop and canons, but it was never restored to the faintest shadow of its former splendour. Not long after the fall of Cordova, Valencia also submitted to the Christian yoke. Zean, besides being assailed externally by the force of the intrepid Jacques, had, in addition, to oppose within his walls the faction of Zeith, whom he had dethroned. The king of Tunis, too, had been unsuccessful in an attempt to send a fleet to the relief of Valencia: it at once took to flight on the appearance of the vessels of Jacques. Abandoned by the whole world, disheartened by the fate of Cordova, and betrayed {117} by the party of his competitor, Zean offered to become the vassal of the crown of Aragon, and to pay a tribute in acknowledgment of his vassalage; but the Christian monarch was inflexible, and would accede to no terms that did not include a stipulation to surrender the city. Fifty thousand Moors, bearing their treasures with them, accompanied the departure of their sovereign from Valencia. Jacques had pledged his royal word to protect the rich booty which they so highly valued from the cupidity of his soldiers, and he faithfully performed his promise. After the destruction of the two powerful kingdoms of Andalusia and Valencia, there seemed to exist no Moorish power capable of arresting the progress of the Spanish arms. That of Seville, which alone remained, was already menaced by the victorious Ferdinand. But, just at this period, a new state rose suddenly into importance, which maintained a high degree of celebrity for two hundred years, and long prevented the final ruin of the Moors. [1] See note A, page 216. [2] See note B, page 216. [3] See note C, page 218. [4] See Note D, page 220. [5] A.D. 1178. [6] See Note E, page 221. [7] A.D. 1213, Heg. 610. [8] See Note F, page 231. [9] A.D. 1236, Heg. 634. {118} FOURTH EPOCH. THE KINGS OF GRENADA. _Extending from the middle of the Thirteenth Century to the period of the Total Expulsion of the Moors from Spain, A.D. 1493._ The unprecedented success of the Spaniards, and, above all, the loss of Cordova, spread consternation among the Moors. That ardent and superstitious people, who were ever equally ready to cherish delusive hopes, and to yield to despondency when those anticipations were disappointed, looked upon their empire as ruined the moment the Christian cross surmounted the pinnacle of their grand mosque, and the banner of Castile waved over the walls of their ancient capital--those walls on which the standards of the Caliphs of the West and of their Prophet had for centuries floated in triumph. Notwithstanding this national dejection, however, Seville, Grenada, Murcia, and the kingdom of Algarva still belonged to the Mussulmans. They possessed all the seaports, and the {119} whole maritime coast of the south of Spain. Their enormous population, and great national wealth and industry, also secured to them immense resources; but Cordova, the holy city, the rival of Mecca in the West--Cordova was in the possession of the Christians, and the Moors believed that all was lost. But the hopes of these despairing followers of Islam were rekindled by the almost magical influence of a single individual, a scion of the tribe of the _Alhamars_, named Mohammed Aboussaid, who came originally from the celebrated Arabian city of Couffa. Several historians, who speak of Mohammed under the title of _Mohammed Alhamar_, assure us that he commenced his career as a simple shepherd, and that, having afterward borne arms, he aspired to the attainment of royal power in consequence of his martial exploits. Such an incident is not extraordinary among the Arabs, where all who are not descended either from the family of the Prophet or from the royal race, possessing none of the privileges of birth, are esteemed solely according to their personal merits. But, be that as it may, Mohammed Aboussaid {120} possessed sufficient intellectual powers to reanimate the expiring courage of the vanquished Moslems. He assembled an army in the city of Arjona, and, well knowing the peculiar character of the nation that he wished to control, proceeded to gain over to his interests a _santon_, a species of religious character highly venerated among the Moors. This oracular individual publicly predicted to the people of Algarva that Mohammed Alhamar was destined speedily to become their king. Accordingly, he was soon proclaimed by the inhabitants, and several other cities followed the example thus set them. Mohammed now filled the place of Benhoud, to whom he possessed similar talents for government; and, feeling the necessity of selecting a city to replace Cordova in the affections of the Moors, to become the sacred asylum of their religion, and the centring point for their military strength, he founded a new kingdom, and made the city of Grenada its capital, A.D. 1236, Heg. 634. This city, powerful from the remotest times, and supposed to be the ancient Illiberis of the Romans, was built upon two hills, not far distant from the Sierra Nevada, a chain of {121} mountains whose summits are covered with perpetual snow. The town was traversed by the river Darra, and the waters of the Xenil bathed its walls. Each of the two hills was crowned by a fortress: on the one was that of the Alhambra, and on the other that of the Albayzin. These strongholds were either of them sufficient in extent to accommodate forty thousand men within their walls. The fugitives from the city of Alhambra, as has already been stated, had given the name of their former home to the new quarter that they peopled; and the Moors who had been driven from Baeca when Ferdinand III. became master of that place, had established themselves, in a similar manner, in the quarter of the Albayzin. This city had also received many exiles from Valencia, Cordova, and other places which the Mussulmans had deserted. With a population whose numbers were daily augmented, Grenada, at the period of which we now speak, was more than three leagues in circuit, surrounded by impregnable ramparts; defended by many strong towers, and by a brave and numerous people, whose military prowess seemed to ensure their safety and independence. {122} Various were the advantages that combined in giving to Grenada the supremacy she had assumed. Her location was one of the most agreeable and beautiful in the world, and rendered her mistress of a country on which nature had lavished her choicest gifts. The famous _vega_, or plain, by which the city was surrounded, was thirty leagues in length and eight in breadth. It was terminated on the north by the mountains of Elvira and the Sierra Nevada, and enclosed on the remaining sides by hills clothed with the verdure of the olive, the mulberry, the lemon, and the vine. This enchanting plain was watered by five small rivers[1] and an infinite number of gushing springs, whose streams wandered in graceful meanderings through meadows of perpetual verdure, through forests of oak and plantations of grain, flax, and sugar-cane, or burst forth in the midst of gardens, and orchards, and orange-groves. All the rich, and beautiful, and varied productions of the soil required but little attention in their culture. The earth was continually {123} covered with vegetation, in myriads of changing forms, and never knew the repose of winter. During the heat of summer, the mountain breezes spread a refreshing coolness through the air of this lovely vega, and preserved the early brilliancy and beauty of the flowers, that were ever mingled in delightful confusion with the varied fruits of a tropical region. On this celebrated plain, whose charms no description can embellish; on this enchanting vega, where nature seemed to have exhausted her efforts in lavishing all that the heart of man could desire or his imagination conceive, more blood has been shed than on any other spot in the world. There--where, during two centuries of unceasing warfare, whose baleful effects extended from generation to generation, from city to city, and from man to man--there does not exist a single isolated portion of earth where the trees have not been wantonly destroyed, the villages reduced to ashes, and the desolated fields strewn with the mingled corses of slaughtered Moors and Christians. Independent of this _vega_, which was of such inestimable value to Grenada, fourteen great cities and more than one hundred of smaller {124} size, together with a prodigious number of towns, were embraced within the boundaries of this fine kingdom. The extent of Grenada, from Gibraltar (which was not taken by the Christians until long after this period) to the city of Lorca, was more than eighty leagues. It was thirty leagues in breadth from Cambril to the Mediterranean. The mountain, by which the kingdom of Grenada was intersected, produced gold, silver, granite, amethysts, and various kinds of marble. Among these mountains, those of the Alpuxaries alone formed a province, and yielded the monarch of Grenada more precious treasures than their mines could furnish--active and athletic men, who became either hardy and industrious husbandmen, or faithful and indefatigable soldiers. In addition to all this, the ports of Almeria, Malaga, and Algeziras received into their harbours the vessels of both Europe and Africa, and became places of deposite for the commerce of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Such, at its birth, was the kingdom of Grenada, and such it long continued. Mohammed Alhamar, from the period of its establishment, {125} made useless efforts to unite all the remaining dominions of the Mussulmans of Spain under one sceptre, as the only means of successfully resisting the encroachments of the Christians. But the little kingdom of Murcia and that of Algarva were each governed by separate princes, who persisted in maintaining their independence. This was the cause of their ruin, for they thus became more readily the prey of the Spaniards. Alhamar signalized the commencement of his reign by military achievements. In the year 1242, Heg. 640, he gained some important advantages over the troops of Ferdinand. But repeated revolts in the capital and disturbances in other parts of his new empire, eventually compelled Mohammed to conclude a dishonourable peace with the King of Castile. He agreed to do homage for his crown to the Castilian sovereign, to put the strong place of Jaen into his hands, to pay him a tribute, and to furnish him with auxiliary troops for any wars in which he should engage. On these conditions Ferdinand acknowledged him King of Grenada, and even aided him in subduing his rebellious subjects. The sagacious Ferdinand thus established a {126} truce with Grenada, that he might the more effectually concentrate his forces against Seville, which he had long entertained hopes of conquering. The important city of Seville was no longer under the dominion of a king, but formed a kind of republic, governed by military magistrates. Its situation at no great distance from the mouth of the Guadalquivir, its commerce, its population, the mildness of the climate, and the fertility of the environs, rendered Seville one of the most flourishing cities of Spain. Ferdinand, foreseeing a long resistance, commenced the campaign by seizing upon all the neighbouring towns. Finally, he laid siege to Seville itself, and his fleet, stationed at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, closed the door to any assistance which might be sent from Africa in aid of the beleaguered city. The siege was long and bloody. The Sevillians were numerous and well skilled in the arts of war, and their ally, the King of Algarva, harassed the besiegers unceasingly. Notwithstanding the extreme bravery displayed by the Christians in their assaults, and the scarcity of {127} provisions which began to be felt within the walls, the city, after an investment of a whole year, still refused to surrender. Ferdinand then summoned the King of Grenada to come, in accordance with their treaty, and serve under his banners. Alhamar was forced to obey, and soon presented himself in the Christian camp at the head of a brilliant army. The inhabitants of Seville lost all hope after this occurrence, and surrendered to the Castilian monarch. The King of Grenada returned to his own dominions with the humiliating glory of having contributed, by his assistance, to the ruin of his countrymen. Ferdinand, with more piety than policy, banished the infidels from Seville. One hundred thousand of that unfortunate people left the city, to seek an exile's home in Africa or in the provinces of Grenada. The kingdom of Grenada now became the sole and last asylum of the Spanish Moslems. The little kingdom of Algarva was soon obliged to receive the yoke of Portugal, and Murcia, in consequence of its separation from Grenada, became the prey of the Castilians. {128} During the life of Ferdinand III., nothing occurred to interrupt the good understanding that existed between that monarch and Mohammed Alhamar. The King of Grenada wisely took advantage of this peaceful period more effectually to confirm himself in the possession of his crown, and to make preparations for a renewal of hostilities against the Christians, who would not, he foresaw, long remain his friends. Mohammed, by this means, ultimately found himself in a condition that would enable him long to defend his power and dominions. He was master of a country of great extent, and he possessed considerable revenues, the amount of which it is now difficult correctly to estimate, in consequence of the ignorance which prevails on the subject of the peculiar financial system of the Moors, and the different sources from which the public treasury was supplied. Every husbandman, for example, paid the seventh part of the produce of his fields to his sovereign; his flocks even were not exempted from this exaction. The royal domain comprised numerous valuable farms; and, as agriculture was carried to the highest degree of perfection, the revenues from {129} these, in so luxuriant a country, must have amounted to a very large sum. The annual income of the sovereign was augmented by various taxes levied on the sale, marking, and passage from one point to another of all kinds of cattle. The laws bestowed on the king the inheritance of such of his subjects as died childless, and gave him, in addition, a portion in the estates of other deceased persons. He also possessed, as has been already shown, mines of gold, silver, and precious stones; and though the Moors were but little skilled in the art of mining, still there was no country in Europe in which gold and silver were more common than among them. The commerce carried on in their beautiful silks, and in a great variety of other productions; their contiguity to the Mediterranean and Atlantic; their activity, industry, and astonishing population; their superior knowledge of the science of agriculture; the sobriety natural to all the inhabitants of Spain; and that peculiar property of a southern climate, by which much is produced from the soil, while very little suffices for the maintenance of its possessor; all these, united with their other national {130} advantages, will furnish some idea of the great power and resources of this singular people. Their standing military force--it can scarcely be said in times of peace, for they rarely knew the blessings of that state--amounted to nearly a hundred thousand men; and this army, in case of necessity, could easily be increased to double that number. The single city of Grenada could furnish fifty thousand soldiers. Indeed, every Moor would readily become a soldier to oppose the Christians. The difference of faith rendered these wars sacred in their eyes; and the mutual hatred entertained by these two almost equally superstitious nations never failed to arm, when necessary, every individual of both sides, even from children to old men. Independent of the numerous and brave, but ill-disciplined troops, who would assemble for a campaign, and afterward return to their homes without occasioning any expense to the state, the Moorish monarch maintained a considerable corps of cavaliers, who were dispersed along the frontiers, particularly in the directions of Murcia and Jaen, those parts of the country being most exposed to the repeated incursions of the Spaniards. Upon each of these cavaliers the king {131} bestowed for life a small habitation, with sufficient adjoining ground for his own maintenance, and that of his family and horse. This method of keeping soldiers in service, while it occasioned no expense to the public treasury, served to attach them more firmly to their country, by identifying their interests with hers; and it held out to them the strongest motives faithfully to defend their charge, inasmuch as their patrimony was always first exposed to the ravages of the enemy. At a time when the art of war had not reached the perfection it has now attained, and when large bodies of troops were not kept continually assembled and exercised, the system of stationing this peculiar guard along the frontiers was of admirable effect. The knights who composed this unrivalled cavalry were mounted on African or Andalusian chargers, whose merits in the field are so well-known, and were accustomed from infancy to their management; treating them with the tenderest care, and regarding them as their inseparable companions: by these means they acquired that remarkable superiority for which the Moorish cavalry is still so celebrated. {132} These redoubtable squadrons, whose velocity of movement was unequalled; who would, almost at the same moment, charge in mass, break into detached troops, scatter, rally, fly off, and again form in line; these cavaliers, whose voice, whose slightest gesture, whose very thoughts, so to speak, were intelligible to their docile and sagacious steeds, and who were able to recover a lance or sabre that had fallen to the earth while in full gallop, constituted the principal military force of the Moors. Their infantry was of little value; and their ill-fortified towns, surrounded only by walls and moats, and defended by this worthless infantry, could offer but an imperfect resistance to that of the Spaniards, which began already to deserve the reputation it afterward so well sustained in Italy, under Gonzalvo, the Great Captain. After the death of St. Ferdinand, his son Alphonso the Sage[2] mounted the throne, A.D. 1252, Heg. 650. The first care of Mohammed Alhamar after this event was to go in person to Toledo, followed by a brilliant retinue, to renew the treaty of alliance, or, rather, of dependance, by which he was united to Ferdinand. {133} The new king of Castile remitted on this occasion a part of the tribute to which the Moors had been subjected. But this peace was not of long continuance; and the two contending nations now recommenced the war with nearly equal advantages. An incident is related as having occurred during this war, which reflects equal honour on the humanity of the Moors and the courage of the Spaniards. It refers to Garcias Gomes, governor of the city of Xeres. He was besieged by the Grenadians, and his garrison nearly destroyed, but still he refused to surrender; and, standing on the ramparts covered with blood, and literally bristling with arrows, he sustained alone the onset of the assailants. The Moors, on seeing him in this situation, agreed, with one accord, to spare the life of so brave a man. Garcias then threw himself from the walls upon some iron hooks; but he was rescued alive in spite of his efforts to prevent it, treated with respect by his captors, and, after his wounds were healed, dismissed with presents. Alhamar could not prevent Alphonso from adding the kingdom of Murcia to his dominions; and the fortunes of war compelled him to obtain {134} peace by submitting anew to the payment of tribute to the Catholic sovereign, A.D. 1266, Heg. 665. But some dissensions which soon after arose between the Castilian monarch and some of the grandees of his kingdom, inspired the Grenadian king with the hope of repairing the loss he had sustained. The brother of Alphonso, together with several noblemen belonging to the principal Castilian families, retired to Grenada in open defiance of the authority of the Spanish monarch, and materially aided Mohammed Alhamar in repressing the insurrectionary movements of two of his rebellious subjects, who were countenanced in their attempts by the Christians. But, just at this juncture, the wise and politic King of Grenada died, leaving the throne that he had acquired and preserved by his talents to his son Mohammed II., El Fakik, A.D. 1273, Heg. 672. The new Mussulman king, who took the title of _Emir al Mumenim_, adopted in all respects the policy of his father. He took every advantage in his power of the discord which reigned at the Castilian court, and of the ineffectual voyages undertaken by Alphonso in the hope of {135} being elected emperor.[3] Finally, during the absence of his enemy, Mohammed formed an offensive league with Jacob, the king of Morocco, a prince of the race of the _Merines_, the conquerors and successors of the Almohades. The Grenadian sovereign ceded to his African ally the two important places of Tariffe and Algeziras, on condition of his crossing the Mediterranean to the Peninsula. Jacob, in accordance with this agreement, arrived in Spain, at the head of an army, in the year 1275 (the 675th of the Hegira); and the two Moorish leaders, by acting in concert, gained some important advantages. But the criminal revolt of Sancho, the Infant of Castile, against his father Alphonso the Sage, soon afterward divided these Mussulman monarchs. The King of Grenada took the part of the rebellious son, while Alphonso, reduced to extremity by the abandonment of his subjects, implored the assistance of the King of Morocco. Jacob recrossed the sea with his troops, and met Alphonso at Zara. At that celebrated interview, the unfortunate Castilian wished to concede the place of honour to the king, who was there as {136} his defender. "It belongs to you," said Jacob to him, "because you are unfortunate! I came here to avenge a cause which should be that of every father. I came here to aid you in punishing an ingrate, who, though he received life from you, would still deprive you of your crown. When I shall have fulfilled this duty, and you are again prosperous and happy, I will once more become your enemy, and contest every point of precedence with you." The soul of the Christian prince was not sufficiently noble, however, to prompt him to confide himself to the monarch who had uttered these sentiments, and he escaped from the camp. Alphonso died soon after this event, disinheriting his guilty son before he expired, A.D. 1284, Heg. 683. Sancho[4] reigned in his father's stead, however, notwithstanding this prohibition, and international troubles convulsed Castile anew. Mohammed seized this moment to enter Andalusia. He gained several battles, and took some important places in that kingdom, and thus victoriously terminated a long and glorious reign, A.D. 1302, Heg. 703. {137} This Mohammed _Emir al Mumenim_, the principal political events of whose life have now been briefly narrated, was a munificent patron of the fine arts. He added their charms to the attractions of a court which poets, philosophers, and astronomers alike contributed to render celebrated. As an illustration of the scientific superiority that the Moors still maintained over the Spaniards, the fact may be mentioned that Alphonso the Sage, king of Castile, availed himself, in the arrangement of his astronomical tables (still known as the _Alphonsine Tables_), of the assistance of some contemporary Moslem _savans_. Grenada began by this time to replace Cordova. Architecture, above all, made great advances. It was during the reign of Mohammed II. that the famous palace of the Alhambra was commenced, a part of which still remains to astonish travellers, whom its name alone suffices to attract to Grenada. To prove to what a height of perfection the Moors had succeeded in carrying the art, then so little known to Europeans, of uniting the magnificent and the luxurious, a few details may perhaps be pardoned concerning this {138} singular edifice, and as an illustration, also, of the particular manners and customs of the Moors. The Alhambra, as has been said, was at first only a vast fortress, standing upon one of the two hills enclosed within the city of Grenada. This hill, though environed on every side by the waters either of the Darra or the Xenil, was defended, in addition, by a double enclosure of walls. It was on the summit of this elevation, which overlooked the whole city, and from which one might behold the most beautiful prospect in the world, in the midst of an esplanade covered with trees and fountains, that Mohammed selected the site of his palace. Nothing with which we are familiar in architecture can give us a correct idea of that of the Moors. They piled up buildings without order, symmetry, or any attention to the external appearance they would present. All their cares were bestowed upon the interior of their structures. There they exhausted all the resources of taste and magnificence, to combine in their apartments the requisites for luxurious indulgence with the charms of nature in her most enchanting forms. There, in saloons adorned with the most beautiful marble, and paved with a {139} brilliant imitation of porcelain, couches, covered with stuffs of gold or silver, were arranged near _jets d'eau_, whose waters glanced upward towards the vaulted roof, and spread a delicious coolness through an atmosphere embalmed by the delicate odours arising from exquisite vases of precious perfumes, mingled with the fragrant breath of the myrtle, jasmine, orange, and other sweet-scented flowers that adorned the apartments. The beautiful palace of the Alhambra, as it now exists at Grenada,[5] presents no _façade_. It is approached through a charming avenue, which is constantly intersected by rivulets, whose streams wander in graceful curves amid groups of trees. The entrance is through a large square tower, which formerly bore the name of the _Hall of Judgment_. A religious inscription announces that it was there that the king administered justice after the ancient manner of the Hebrew and other Oriental nations. Several buildings, {140} which once adjoined this tower were destroyed in more recent times, to give place to a magnificent palace erected by Charles V., a description of which is not necessary to our subject. Upon penetrating on the northern side into the ancient palace of the Moorish kings, one feels as if suddenly transported to the regions of fairyland. The first court is an oblong square, surrounded on each side by a gallery in the form of an arcade, the walls and ceiling of which are covered with Mosaic work, festoons, arabesque paintings, gilding, and carving in stucco, of the most admirable workmanship. All the plain spaces between these various ornaments are filled with passages transcribed from the Alkoran, or by inscriptions of a similar character to the following, which will suffice to create some idea of the figurative style of Moorish composition. "Oh Nazir! thou wert born the master of a throne, and, like the star that announces the approach of day, thou art refulgent with a brilliancy that belongs to thee alone! Thine arm is the rampart of a nation; thy justice an all-pervading luminary. Thou canst, by thy valour, subdue those who have given companions to {141} God! Thy numerous people are thy children, and thou renderest them all happy by thy goodness. The bright stars of the firmament shine lovingly upon thee, and the glorious light of the sun beams upon thee with affection. The stately cedar, the proud monarch of the forest, bows his lofty head at thy approach, and is again uplifted by thy puissant hand!" In the midst of this court, which is paved with white marble, is a long basin always filled with running water of sufficient depth for bathing. It is bordered on each side by beds of flowers, and surrounded by walks lined with orange-trees. The place was called the _Mesuar_, and served as the common bathing-place of those who were attached to the service of the palace. From thence one passes into the celebrated _Court of Lions_. It is a hundred feet in length and fifty in breadth. A colonnade of white marble supports the gallery that runs around the whole. These columns, standing sometimes two and sometimes three together, are of slender proportions and fantastic design; but their lightness and grace afford pleasure to the eye of the wondering beholder. The walls, and, above all, the ceiling of the circular gallery, are covered {142} with embellishments of gold, azure, and stucco, wrought into arabesques, with an exquisite delicacy of execution that the most skilful modern workmen would find it difficult to rival. In the midst of these ornaments of ever-changing variety and beauty are inscribed passages from the Koran, such as the following, which all good Mussulmans are required frequently to repeat: _God is great: God alone is supreme: There is no god but God: Celestial enjoyment, gratifications of the heart, delights of the soul to all those who believe_. At either extremity of the Court of Lions are placed, within the interior space enclosed by the gallery, and, like it, supported by marble columns, two elegant cupolas of fifteen or sixteen feet in circumference. These graceful domes form a covering for beautiful _jets d'eau_. In the centre of the lengthened square, a superb alabaster vase, six feet in diameter, is supported in an elevated position in the midst of a vast basin by the forms of twelve lions sculptured from white marble. This vessel, which is believed to have been modelled after the design of the "molten sea" of the Temple of Solomon, is again surmounted by a smaller vase, from which shoot {143} forth innumerable tiny cascades, which together present the form of a great sheaf; and, falling again from one vase into another, and from these into the large basin beneath, create a perpetual flow, whose volume is increased by the floods of limpid water which gush in a continual stream from the mouth of each of the marble lions. This fountain, like each of the others, is adorned with inscriptions; for the Moors ever took pleasure in mingling the eloquence of poetry with the graces of sculpture. To us their conceptions appear singular and their expressions exaggerated; but our manners are so opposite to theirs; the period of their existence as a nation is so far removed, and we know so little of the genius of their language, that we have, perhaps, no right to judge the literature of the Moors by the severe rules of modern criticism. And, indeed, the specimens we possess of the French and Spanish poetry of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are, many of them, little superior to the verses engraven on the Fountain of Lions, of which the following, is a translation.[6] {144} "Oh thou who beholdest these lions! dost thou not perceive that they need only to breathe to possess the perfection of nature! Oh Mohammed! Oh potent sovereign! God originated and prolonged thy existence, that thou mightest be inspired with the genius to conceive and accomplish these novel and beautiful embellishments! Thy soul is adorned by the most ennobling qualities of humanity. This enchanting spot pictures thy admirable virtues. Like the lion, thou art terrible in combat; and nothing can be more justly compared to the bountiful and unceasing profusion of the limpid waters which gush from the bosom of this fountain, and fill the air with glittering and brilliant particles, than the liberal hand of Mohammed." We will not attempt a description in detail of such other portions of the palace of the Alhambra as still exist. Some of these served as halls of audience or of justice; others enclosed the baths of the king, the queen, and their children. Sleeping apartments still remain, where the couches were disposed either in alcoves, or upon platforms covered with the peculiar pavement {145} already alluded to; but always near a fountain, the unceasing murmur of whose dreamy voice might sooth the occupants to repose. In the music saloon of this once luxurious royal abode are four elevated galleries, which, ere the glory of the Alhambra had passed away, were often filled by Moorish musicians, the delightful strains of whose varied instruments enchanted the court of Grenada. Then the fair and the brave reclined in graceful groups in the centre of the apartment, upon rich Oriental carpets, surrounding the alabaster fountain, whose balmy breath diffused refreshing coolness, and whose softly gurgling sounds mingled with the gentle music which was ever the accompaniment of repose and enjoyment. In an apartment which was at the same time the oratory and dressing-room of the queen of this magnificent residence, there still exists a slab of marble, pierced with an infinite number of small apertures, to admit the exhalations of the perfumes that were incessantly burning beneath the lofty ceiling. From this part of the palace, too, the views are exquisitely beautiful. The windows and doors opening from it are so arranged, that the most agreeable prospects, the {146} mellowest and most pleasing effects of light, perpetually fall upon the delighted eyes of those within, while balmy breezes constantly renew the delicious coolness of the air that breathes through this enchanting retreat. Upon leaving the marble halls and lofty towers of the Alhambra, one discerns, on the side of a neighbouring mountain, the famous garden of the _Generalif_, which signifies, in the Moorish tongue, the _Home of Love_. In this garden was the palace to which the kings of Grenada repaired to pass the season of spring. It was built in a style similar to that of the Alhambra: the same gorgeous splendour, the same costly magnificence reigned there. The edifice is now destroyed; but the picturesque situation, the ever-varied and ever-charming landscape, the limpid fountains, the sparkling _jets d'eau_, and tumbling waterfalls of the _Generalif_, are still left to excite admiration. The terraces of this garden are in the form of an amphitheatre, and the lingering remains of their once beautiful Mosaic pavements are still to be seen. The walks are now darkly umbrageous, from the interwoven branches of gigantic cypresses and aged myrtles, beneath whose {147} grateful shades the kings and queens of Grenada have so often wandered. Then blooming groves and forests of fruit-trees were agreeably intermingled with graceful domes and marble pavilions: then the sweet perfume of the countless flowers that mingled their varied dyes in delightful confusion, floated in the soft air. Then the delicate tendrils of the vine clasped the supporting branches of the orange, and both together hung the mingled gold and purple of their clustering fruits over the bright waters that from marble founts "Gushed up to sun and air!" Then valour and beauty strayed side by side, beneath embowering branches, the fire of the one attempered to gentleness by the softer graces of the other, and the souls of both elevated and purified by nature's holy and resistless influences. But now the luxuriant vine lies prostrate, its climbing trunk and clinging tendrils rudely torn from their once firm support: even the voice of the fountain no longer warbles in the same gladsome tone as of yore; the mouldering fragments of the polished column and sculptured dome are now strewed on the earth; the sighing of the gentle breeze no longer awake: is the soft breath {148} of responding flowers; the loveliness and the glory of the _Home of Love_ are vanished away for ever; and the crumbling stones of the tesselated pavements echo naught but the lingering footfall of the solitary stranger, who wanders thither to enjoy those mournful charms of which the destroyer cannot divest a spot that must ever appeal so strongly to the vision and the heart, to the memory and the imagination. It is painful to quit the Alhambra and the Generalif, to return to the ravages, incursions, and sanguinary quarrels of the Moors and Christians. It was the fate of Mohammed III. (surnamed the Blind) to be obliged at the same time to repress the rebellious movements of his own subjects and repel the invasions of his Catholic neighbours. Compelled by the infirmity from which he derived his appellation to choose a prime minister, he bestowed that important post upon Farady, the husband of his sister, a judicious statesman and a brave soldier, who for some time prosperously continued the war against the Castilians, and finally concluded it by an honourable peace. But the courtiers, jealous of the glory and {149} envious of the good-fortune of the favourite, formed a conspiracy against his master, and instigated revolts among the people. To complete his calamities, foreign war again broke forth; the King of Castile, Ferdinand IV., surnamed _the Summoned_,[7] united with the King of Aragon in attacking the Grenadians.[8] Gibraltar was taken by the Castilians, and the conqueror expelled its Moorish inhabitants from its walls. Among the unfortunate exiles who departed from the city was an old man, who, perceiving Ferdinand, approached him, leaning on his staff: "King of Castile," he said to him, "what injury have I done to thee or thine? Thy great-grandfather Ferdinand drove me from my native Seville: I sought an asylum at Xeres; thy grandfather Alphonso banished me from thence: retiring within the walls of Tariffe,[9] thy father Sancho exiled me from that city. At last I came to find a grave at the extremity of Spain, on the shore of Gibraltar; but thy hatred hath pursued me even here: tell me now of one place on earth where I can die unmolested by the Christians!" {150} "Cross the sea!" replied the Spanish prince; and he caused the aged petitioner to be conveyed to Africa. Vanquished by the Aragonians, harassed by the Castilians, and alarmed by the seditious proceedings which the grandees of his court were encouraging among his own subjects, the King of Grenada and his prime minister were forced to conclude a shameful peace. The intestine storm, whose gathering had long disturbed the domestic security of the kingdom, soon after burst forth. Mohammed Abenazar, brother to Mohammed the Blind, and the head of the conspiracy, seized the unfortunate monarch, put him to death, and assumed his place, A.D. 1310, Heg. 710. But the usurper himself was soon driven from his throne by Farady, the ancient minister, who, not daring to appropriate the crown to himself, placed it on the head of his son Ismael, the nephew of Mohammed the Blind, through his mother, the sister of that monarch. This event took place A.D. 1313, Heg. 713. From that period the royal family of Grenada was divided into two branches, which were ever after at enmity with each other; the one, called {151} the _Alhamar_, included the descendants of the first king through the males of the line, and the other, named _Farady_, was that of such of his offspring as were the children of the female branches of the royal race. The Castilians, whose interests were always promoted by cherishing dissensions among their Moorish neighbours, lent their countenance to Abenazar, who had taken refuge in the city of Grenada. The Infant Don Pedro, uncle to the youthful King of Castile, Alphonso _the Avenger_, as he was surnamed, took the field against Ismael, and several times gave battle to the followers of the Crescent. Then joining his forces to those of another Infant named Don Juan, the two friends carried fire and sword to the very ramparts of Grenada. The infidel warriors did not venture to sally from their walls to repel the invaders; but when, loaded with booty, the Christians had commenced their return to Castile; Ismael followed on their route with his army, and, soon overtaking his ruthless foes, fell suddenly upon their rear. It was now the 26th of June,[10] and the time chosen by the Mussulmans for the attack was the hottest hour of a {152} burning day. The two Spanish princes made such violent efforts to reorganize their scattered bands and to recover their lost authority, that, exhausted at last by thirst and fatigue, they both fell dead without having received a wound. The dismayed and exhausted Spaniards could now no longer offer any resistance to their furious enemies. They betook themselves to flight, leaving their baggage, with the bodies of the two unfortunate Infants, on the field of battle. Ismael caused the remains of these princes to be conveyed to Grenada and deposited in coffins covered with cloth of gold: he then restored them to the Castilians, after having bestowed on them the most distinguished funeral honours.[11] This victory was rapidly followed by the conquest of several cities and the establishment of an honourable truce. But Ismael did not live to enjoy the fruits of his success: being enamoured of a young Spanish captive, who had fallen, in the division of the spoils, to the share of one of his officers, the king so far forgot the laws of justice and honour as to possess himself {153} by force of the beautiful slave. Such an insult among the followers of Islam can only be expiated by blood: the monarch was assassinated by his exasperated officer. His son Mohammed V. mounted the throne in his stead, A.D. 1322, Heg. 722. The reign of Mohammed V. and that of his successor Joseph I., both of whom perished in the same manner (being murdered in their palace), present nothing during thirty years but an unbroken series of ravages, seditions, and combats. At the request of the Grenadians, Abil-Hassan, king of Morocco, of the dynasty of the _Merinis_, landed in Spain at the head of innumerable troops, with whom he joined the army of Joseph. The kings of Castile and Portugal unitedly gave battle to this immense army on the shores of Salado, not far from the city of Tariffe. This encounter, equally celebrated with the victory of Toloza in the history of Spain, terminated in the defeat of the Moors. Abil-Hassan returned hastily to Morocco, to conceal within his own dominions his chagrin at its unexpected and disastrous issue. The strong place of Algeziras, the bulwark of {154} Grenada, and the magazine in which was deposited the necessary supplies received by that kingdom from Africa, was besieged by the Castilians A.D. 1342, Heg. 742. Several French, English, and Navarrois cavaliers resorted on this occasion to the camp of the beleaguering army. The Mussulmans availed themselves of the use of cannon in the defence of their city; and this is the first time that the employment of that description of ordnance is spoken of in history. We are told that it was used at the battle of Cressy by the English; but that event did not take place until four years after the date of the present siege. It is, then, to the Spanish Moors that we owe, not the discovery of gunpowder (for that is attributed by some to the Chinese, by others to a German monk named Schwartz, and by others again to Roger Bacon, an Englishman), but the terrible invention of artillery. It is at least certain, that the Moors planted the first cannon of which we have any account. But, in spite of the advantages it thus possessed, Algeziras was taken by the Christians, A.D. 1344, Heg. 745. About ten years after this event, the unfortunate Joseph, who had been so often attacked by {155} foreign enemies, met his death from the hands of his own subjects. It may have been remarked by the reader, that no established law regulated the regal succession among the Moors. Yet, notwithstanding the perpetual conspiracies and intrigues which rendered the possession of the crown so insecure and of such uncertain duration, a prince of the royal race always occupied the throne. We have seen Grenada divided, since the violent termination of the reign of Ismael, between the factions of the _Alhamar_ and the _Farady_, and the former deposed by the latter, who always regarded the Alhamars as usurpers. This unhappy contest was the source of numberless disorders, conspiracies, and assassinations. The monarch next in order to Joseph I. on the throne of Grenada was his uncle, a Farady prince named Mohammed VI., and called _the Old_, in consequence of his succeeding at a somewhat advanced period of life. Mohammed the Red, a scion of the Alhamar race, drove his cousin, Mohammed the Old, from the throne, A.D. 1360, Heg. 762, and retained it for some years, through the protection of the King of Aragon. {156} Peter the Cruel, then king of Castile, espoused the cause of the banished Farady, supported his claims by warlike arguments, and so closely pressed Mohammed the Alhamar, that he adopted the resolution of repairing to Seville, and abandoning himself to the magnanimity of his royal foe. Mohammed arrived at the court of Seville accompanied by a suite composed of his most faithful friends, and bearing with him vast treasures. He presented himself with noble confidence in the presence of the monarch. "King of Castile!" said he to Peter, "the blood alike of Christian and Moor has too long flowed in my contest with the Farady. You protect my rival; yet it is you whom I select to adjudge our quarrel. Examine my claims and those of my enemy, and pronounce who shall be the sovereign of Grenada. If you decide in favour of the Farady, I demand only to be conducted to Africa; if you accord the preference to me, receive the homage that I have come to render you for my crown!" The astonished Peter lavished honours upon the Mussulman king, and caused him to be seated at his side during the magnificent feast by {157} which he signalized the occasion. But, when the Alhamar retired from the entertainment, he was seized and thrown into prison. From thence he was afterward conducted through the streets of the city, seated, half naked, upon an ass, and led to a field termed the _Tablada_, where thirty-seven of his devoted followers were deprived of their heads in his presence. The execrable Peter, envying the executioner the pleasure of shedding his blood, then thrust through the unfortunate King of Grenada with his own lance. The dying sovereign uttered only these words as he expired, "Oh Peter, Peter, what a deed for a cavalier!" By a very extraordinary fatality, every throne in Spain was at this period occupied by princes whose characters were blackened by the most atrocious crimes. Peter the Cruel, the Nero of Castile, assassinated the kings who confided themselves to his protection, put to death his wife Blanche of Bourbon, and, in short, daily imbrued his hands in the blood of his relatives or friends. Peter IV. of Aragon, less violent than the Castilian, but equally unfeeling and even more perfidious, despoiled one of his brothers of his kingdom, commanded another to be {158} put to death, and delivered his ancient preceptor to the executioners. Peter I., king of Portugal, the lover of the celebrated Inez de Castro,[12] whose ferocity was doubtless excited and increased by the cruelty that had been exercised against his mistress, tore out the hearts of the murderers of Inez, and poisoned a sister with whom he was displeased. Finally, the contemporary King of Navarre was that Charles the Bad, whose name alone is sufficient still to cause a shudder. All Spain groaned beneath the iron rule of these monsters of cruelty, and was inundated by the blood of their victims. If it be remembered that, at the same time, France had become a prey to the horrors which followed the imprisonment of King John; that England witnessed the commencement of the troubled reign of Richard II.; that Italy was delivered up to the contentions of the rival factions of the Guelfs and Ghibelines, and beheld two occupants at the same time upon the papal throne; that two emperors disputed the right to the imperial crown of Germany; and that Timurlane ravaged Asia from the territories of the Usheks to the borders of India, it will not be disputed {159} that the history of the world records the annals of no more unhappy epoch in its affairs. Grenada was at last tranquil after the crime of Peter the Cruel. Mohammed the Old, or the Farady, being now freed from the rival claims of his competitor, remounted the throne without opposition. Mohammed was the only ally of the King of Castile who remained faithful to that inhuman monster up to the period of his death. Peter was at last the victim of a crime similar to those of which he had so often himself been guilty: his illegitimate brother, Henry de Transtamare, deprived him of his crown and his life, A.D. 1369, Heg. 771. The King of Grenada made peace with the new sovereign of Castile, maintained it for several years, and finally left his kingdom in a flourishing condition to his son Mohammed VIII., Abouhadjad, called by the Spanish historians Mohammed Gaudix. This prince commenced his reign A.D. 1379, Heg. 782. He was the best and wisest of the Spanish Mohammedan kings. Intent only upon promoting the happiness of his people, he was desirous of securing to them the enjoyment of {160} that foreign and domestic peace to which they had so long been almost utter strangers. The more effectually to ensure this, Abouhadjad commenced his reign with fortifying his towns, raising a strong army, and allying himself with the King of Tunis, whose daughter Cadiga he espoused. When well prepared for war, the Moorish sovereign sent ambassadors to the King of Castile, to solicit his friendship. Don Juan, the son and successor of Henry de Transtamare, being sufficiently occupied by his quarrels with Portugal and England, readily signed a treaty with the royal follower of the Crescent; and Abouhadjad, on his part, kept it unbroken. Secured from the inroads of the Christians, this wise monarch now occupied himself in promoting the increase of agriculture and commerce: he likewise diminished the rates of imposts, and soon found his income increased in consequence of this judicious measure. Beloved by a people whom he rendered happy, respected by foreign neighbours whom he had no reason to fear, and possessed of an amiable wife, who alone engaged his affections, this excellent Mussulman prince spent the wealth and leisure that he could with propriety devote to such objects, in {161} adorning his capital, in cherishing the fine arts, and in cultivating architecture and poetry. Several monuments of his munificence existed at Grenada, and at Gaudix, a city in favour of which he entertained strong predilections. His court was the favoured abode of genius and elegance. The Moors of Spain still possessed poets, physicians, painters, sculptors, academies, and universities. And these were all liberally encouraged and endowed by Mohammed Gaudix. Most of the productions of the Grenadian authors of this period perished at the final conquest of their country;[13] but some of them have been preserved, and still exist in the library of the Escurial. They chiefly treat of grammar, astrology (then greatly esteemed), and, above all, of theology, a study in which the Moors excelled. That people, naturally gifted with discriminating minds and ardent imaginations, produced many distinguished theologians, who may easily be supposed to have introduced into Europe the unfortunate scholastic taste for subtle questions and disputes, which once rendered so celebrated, men whose names and achievements have since sunk for ever into oblivion. The {162} pretended secrets of the cabal, of alchymy, of judicial astronomy, of the divining rod, and all the accounts, formerly so common, of sorcerers, magicians, and enchanters, are derived from these descendants of the Arabs. They were a superstitious race from the remotest times; and it is probable that to their residence in Spain, and their long intercourse with the Spaniards, is owing that love for the marvellous, and that well-deserved reputation for superstitious credulity, with which philosophy still reproaches a sprightly and intellectual nation, upon whom nature has bestowed the germes of the best qualities that adorn humanity. A kind of literature which was common among these Saracens, and for which the Spaniards were indebted to them, was that of novels or romances. The Arabs were ever, as they still are, passionate lovers of story-telling. As well in the tents of the wild Bedouin as in the palaces of the East, alike under the gilded domes and peasant roofs of Grenada, this taste prevailed. Everywhere they assembled nightly to listen to romantic narratives of love and valour. Everywhere they listened in silent attention, or wept from sympathetic interest in the fate {163} of those whose adventures formed the subject of the tale. The Grenadians joined with this passion for exciting incident, a taste for music and singing. Their poets imbodied in verse these favourite recitals of love and war. Musicians were employed in composing suitable airs for them, and they were thus sung by the youthful Moors with all the enthusiasm that passion, poetry, and dulcet harmony can unitedly inspire. From this national custom are derived the multitude of Spanish romances, translated or imitated from the Arabic, which, in a simple and sometimes touching style, recount the fierce combats of the Moors and Christians, the fatal quarrels of jealous and haughty rivals, or the tender conversation of lovers. They describe with great exactness everything relating to the peculiar manners and amusements of this interesting and extinguished nation: their fêtes, their games of the ring and of canes, and their bull-fights, the latter of which they adopted from the Spaniards, are all portrayed. Thus we learn that their war-like equipments consisted of a large cimeter, a slender lance, a short coat of mail, and a light leathern buckler. We have descriptions of superb horses, with their richly-jewelled and {164} embroidered housings sweeping the earth in ample folds, and of the devises emblazoned on the arms of the graceful Moorish cavaliers. These last consisted frequently of a heart pierced by an arrow, or perhaps of a star guiding a vessel, or of the first letter of the name of the fair recipients of their vows of love. We learn, too, that their colours each bore a peculiar signification: yellow and black expressed grief; green, hope; blue, jealousy; violet and flame colour, passionate love. The following abridged translation of one of these little compositions will produce a more correct idea of them in the mind of the reader than any description could convey.[14] GONZULO AND ZELINDA. A MOORISH ROMANCE. In a transport of jealousy and pride, Zelinda spurned her lover from her side! {165} His cruel doom Gonzulo heard With bosom wrung; and disappeared! But the fair maid soon deeply felt The torturing wound herself had dealt; As glides the snow from mountain crest, So fled resentment from her breast. They tell her that the Moor's proud heart Is pierced by grief's most poisoned dart, And that he'd doffed, when flying from her side, The tender colours that were once his pride; That green, of hope the cherished emblem gay, To sorrow's mournful hues had given way. A badge of crape his lance's point now wears, A blackened crown his shield as emblem bears! {166} To proffer gifts with different meaning fraught, Zelinda now her errant lover sought: The blue of jealousy she had united With all the hues most dear to lovers plighted; A violet gem, entwined with gold, Gleamed mid a broidered turban's fold, And every silken riband that she bore, Of lovely innocence the symbol wore. Zelinda reached the soft retreat Where Gonzulo his fate must meet! O'erwhelmed with doubt, the dark-eyed maid Reclined beneath a myrtle shade, And sent a faithful page to guide Her banished lover to her side. Gonzulo scarce the message would receive, For wo had taught his heart to disbelieve! {167} But soon he flew, on wing of love, To seek Zelinda's chosen grove. Then tearful glances of regret By words of tenderness were met; And ne'er did guardian nymphs record More ardent vows than there were poured! 'Twas thus triumphant love repaired The cruel wrongs that each had shared! The delicate and peculiar gallantry, which rendered the Moors of Grenada famous throughout Europe, formed a singular contrast to the ferocity that is so natural to all nations of African origin. These Islamites, whose chief glory it was dexterously to deprive their enemies of their heads, attach them to their saddle-bows, and afterward display them as trophies on the {168} battlements of their towers or at the entrance of their palaces; these restless and ungovernable warriors, who were ever ready to revolt against their rulers, to depose or to murder them, were the most tender, the most devoted, the most ardent of lovers. Their wives, though their domestic position was little superior to that of slaves, became, when they were beloved, the absolute sovereigns, the supreme divinities of those whose hearts they possessed. It was to please these idolized beings that the Moorish cavaliers sought distinction in the field; it was to shine in their eyes that they lavished their treasures and their lives--that they mutually endeavoured to eclipse each other in deeds of arms, in the splendour of their warlike exploits, and the Oriental magnificence of their fêtes. It cannot now be determined whether the Moors derived this extraordinary union of softness and cruelty, of delicacy and barbarity--this generous rivalry in courage and in constancy from the Spaniards, or whether the Spaniards acquired these characteristics from the Moors. But when it is remembered that they do not belong to the Asiatic Arabs, from whom these gallant knights originally sprang; that they are {169} found, even in a less degree, if possible, among these followers of Mohammed in that portion of Africa where their conquests have naturalized them; and, that after their departure from Spain, the Grenadians lost every trace of the peculiarly interesting and chivalrous qualities by which they had previously been so remarkably distinguished, there is some ground for the opinion that it was to the Spaniards that their Moslem neighbours were indebted for the existence of these national attributes. In truth, before the invasion of Spain by the Arabs, the courts of the Gothic kings had already offered knightly examples of a similar spirit. And after that event we find the cavaliers of Leon, Navarre, and Castile equally renowned for their achievements in war and their romantic devotion to the fair sex. The mere name of _the Cid_ awakens in the mind recollections alike of tenderness and bravery. It should be remembered, too, that, long after the expulsion of the Moors from the Peninsula, the Spaniards maintained a reputation for gallantry far superior to that of the French, some portion of the spirit of which, though extinct among every other European nation, still lingers in Spain. {170} But, be this point decided as it may, it is not to be disputed that the daughters of Grenada merited the devotion which they inspired: they were perhaps the most fascinating women in the world. We find in the narrative of a Moorish historian, who wrote at Grenada during the reign of Mohammed the Old, the following description of his countrywomen: "Their beauty is remarkable; but the loveliness which strikes the beholder at first sight afterward receives its principal charm from the grace and gentleness of their manners. In stature they are above the middle height, and of delicate and slender proportions. Their long black hair descends to the earth. Their teeth embellish with the whiteness of alabaster, vermillion lips, which perpetually smile with a bewitching air. The constant use which they make of the most exquisite perfumes, gives a freshness and brilliancy to their complexions possessed by no other Mohammedan women. Their walking, their dancing, their every movement, is distinguished by a graceful softness, an ease, a lightness, which surpasses all their other charms. Their conversation is lively and sensible, and their fine intellects are {171} constantly displayed in brilliant wit or judicious sentiments." The dress of these elegant females was composed, as that of the Turkish women still is, of a long tunic of linen confined by a cincture, of a _doliman_ or Turkish dress with close sleeves, of wide trousers and Morocco slippers. The materials of their clothing were of the finest fabric, and were usually woven in stripes: they were embroidered with gold and silver, and profusely spangled with jewels. Their waving tresses floated over their shoulders; and a small cap, adorned with the richest gems, supported an embroidered veil, which fell nearly to the feet. The men were clothed in a similar manner: with them were carried in the girdle the purse, the handkerchief, and the poniard: a white, and sometimes a coloured, turban covered the head; and over the Turkish doliman they wore in summer a wide and flowing white robe, and in winter the _albornos_ or African mantle. The only change made in their dress by the Moorish cavaliers when preparing for battle was the addition of a coat of mail, and an iron lining within their turbans. It was the custom of the Grenadians to repair {172} every year, during the autumn, to the charming villas by which the city was surrounded. There they yielded themselves up to the pursuit of pleasure. The chase and the dance, music and feasting, occupied every hour. The manners of those who participated in these national dances were in a high degree unreserved, as was the language of the songs and ballads in which they joined. Were it not for the contradictions in the human character, one might be surprised at this want of delicacy in a people who were capable of so much refinement of feeling. But, in general, nations of Oriental origin possess but little reserve in their manners: they have more of passion than sentiment, more of jealousy than delicacy in their haughty and excitable natures. In giving these details, we have perhaps trespassed too long on the period of calm repose enjoyed by the kingdom of Grenada during the reign of Abouhadjad. That excellent sovereign, after having filled the throne for thirteen years, left his flourishing dominions to his son Joseph, who succeeded him without opposition, A.D. 1392, Heg. 795. Joseph II. was desirous, in imitation of the {173} course pursued by his father, of maintaining the truce with the Christians. It was, however, soon disturbed by a fanatical hermit, who persuaded the Grand-master of Alcantara, Martin de Barbuda, a Portuguese, that he had been selected by Heaven as the chosen instrument for expelling the infidels from Spain. He promised the credulous Martin, in the name of God, that he should succeed in conquering the enemies of the Cross, and in carrying the city of Grenada by assault, without the loss of a single soldier. The infatuated grand-master, convinced of the certainty of the fulfilment of this promise, immediately sent ambassadors to Joseph, with orders to declare to that sovereign, in his name, that, since the religion of Mohammed was false and detestable, and that of Jesus Christ the only true and saving faith, he, Martin de Barbuda, defied the King of Grenada to a combat of two hundred Mussulmans against one hundred Christians, upon condition that the vanquished nation should instantly adopt the faith of the conquerors. The reception these ambassadors met with may be easily imagined. Joseph could scarcely restrain the indignation of his people. The {174} envoys, driven contemptuously away, returned to the presence of the grand-master, who, surprised at receiving no response to his proposal, soon assembled a thousand foot-soldiers and three hundred cavaliers, and hastened to the conquest of Grenada under the guidance of the prophetic hermit. The King of Castile, Henry III., who desired to preserve peace with the followers of the Prophet at the commencement of a reign during which his own dominions were but ill at rest, was no sooner informed of the enterprise of Barbuda, than he sent him positive orders not to cross the frontiers; but that dignitary replying that he ought to obey the commands of Jehovah rather than those of any earthly master, proceeded on his way. The governors of the different cities through which he passed on his route endeavoured, though vainly, to arrest his progress; but the people overwhelmed him with homage, and everywhere added to the number of his forces. The army of the grand-master amounted to six thousand men, when, in A.D. 1394, Heg. 798, he entered the country which his folly taught him to regard as already in his possession. In attacking the first castle at which he {175} arrived, three soldiers were killed and their fanatical commander himself wounded. Surprised beyond measure at beholding his own blood flow and three soldiers fall, he summoned the anchorite into his presence, and sedately demanded what this meant, after his express promise that not a single champion of the true faith should perish. The fanatic replied, that the word he had pledged extended only to regular battles. Barbuda complained no more, and presently perceived the approach of a Moorish army composed of fifty thousand men. The conflict soon commenced: the grand-master and his three hundred mounted followers perished in the field, after having performed prodigies of valour. The remainder of the Spanish army were either taken prisoners or put to flight; and the silence of historians respecting the hermit, leads to the opinion that he was not among the last to seek safety at a distance from the scene of action. This foolish enterprise did not interrupt the good understanding subsisting between the two nations. The King of Castile disavowed all approval of the conduct of Martin de Barbuda, and Joseph long continued to reign with honour and tranquillity. But he was at last poisoned, {176} it is said, by a magnificent robe which he received from his secret enemy, the King of Fez through the ambassadors of that sovereign. Historians assert that this garment was impregnated with a terrible poison, which caused the death of the unfortunate Joseph by the most horrible torments. The peculiar effects it produced was that of detaching the flesh from the bones, the misery of the wretched sufferer enduring for the protracted period of thirty days. Mohammed IX., the second son of this hapless monarch, who, even during the lifetime of his father, had excited commotions in the realm, usurped the crown that of right belonged to his elder brother Joseph, whom he caused to be confined in prison. Mohammed was courageous, and possessed some talents for war. Allied with the King of Tunis, who joined his fleet with that of Grenada, he broke the truce maintained with Castile during the two preceding reigns, and at first gained some advantages over his adversaries, but the Infant Don Ferdinand, the uncle and tutor of the young king John II., was not long in avenging the cause of Spain. Mohammed IX. died in the year 1408, {177} Heg. 811. When the expiring monarch became conscious that his end was rapidly approaching, desirous of securing the crown to his son, he sent one of his principal officers to the prison of his brother Joseph, with orders to cut off the head of the royal occupant. The officer found Joseph engaged in a game of chess with an iman:[15] he sorrowfully announced the mournful commission with which he was charged. The prince, without manifesting any emotion at the communication, only demanded time to conclude his game; and the officer could not refuse this slight favour. While the philosophical Mussulman continued to play, a second messenger arrived, bearing the news of the death of the usurper, and of the proclamation of Joseph as his successor to the throne. The people of Grenada were happy under the rule of the good King Joseph III. So far was he from avenging himself upon those who had aided his brother in depriving him of his rights, that he lavished favours and offices on them, and educated the son of Mohammed in the same manner as his own children. When his councillors blamed him for a degree of indulgence {178} which they regarded as hazardous, "Allow me," replied the sovereign, "to deprive my enemies of all excuse for having preferred my younger brother to me!" This excellent prince was often obliged to take arms against the Christians. He was so unfortunate as to lose some cities, but he preserved the respect and affection of his subjects, and died lamented by the whole kingdom, after a reign of fifteen years, A.D. 1423, Heg. 927. After the death of Joseph the state was distracted by civil wars. Mohammed X. Abenazar, or the _Left-handed_, the son and successor of that benevolent king, was banished from the throne by Mohammed XI. _El Zugair_, or the Little, who preserved his ill-gotten power but two years. The Abencerrages, a powerful tribe[16] at Grenada, re-established Mohammed the Left-handed in his former place, and his competitor perished on the scaffold. About four years after the death of Joseph, the Spaniards renewed their inroads into Grenada, and carried fire and sword to the very gates of the capital. All the neighbouring fields were devastated; the crops were burned and the {179} villages destroyed. John II., who then reigned in Castile, wishing to add to the miseries he had already occasioned these unhappy people the still greater misfortune of civil war, instigated the proclamation at Grenada of a certain Joseph Alliamar, a grandson of that Mohammed the Red so basely assassinated at Seville by Peter the Cruel. All the discontented spirits in the kingdom joined the faction of Joseph Alhamar; and the Zegris, a powerful tribe, who were at enmity with the Abencerrages, lent their aid to the usurper. Mohammed Abenazar was again driven from the capital, A.D. 1432, Heg. 836, and Joseph IV. Alhamar possessed his dominions six months. At the termination of that time he expired. Mohammed the Left-handed once more resumed his royal seat; but, after thirteen years of misfortune, this unhappy prince was again deposed for the third time, and imprisoned by one of his nephews, named Mohammed XII. the Osmin, who was himself afterward dethroned[17] by his own brother Ismael, and ended his days {180} in the same dungeon in which his uncle Mohammed Abenazar had languished. All these revolutions did not prevent the Christian and Moorish governors who commanded on their respective frontiers from making incessant irruptions into the enemy's country. Sometimes a little troop of cavalry or infantry surprised a village, massacred the inhabitants, pillaged their houses, and carried away their flocks. Sometimes an army suddenly appeared in a fertile plain, devastated the fields, uprooted the vines, felled the trees, besieged and took some town or fortress, and retired with their booty. This kind of warfare was ruinous, most of all, to the unfortunate cultivator of the soil. The Grenadian dominions suffered so much during the reign of Ismael II., that the king was compelled to cause immense forests to be cleared for the support of his capital, which then drew scarcely any supplies from the vast and fertile _vega_ which had been so often desolated by the Spaniards. Ismael II. left the crown to his son Mulei-Hassem, a young and highly courageous prince, who, profiting by the disastrous condition of Castile under the deplorable reign of Henry IV. the {181} Impotent, carried his arms into the centre of Andalusia. The success that marked the commencement of the reign of this sovereign, together with his talents and warlike ardour, tempted the Moors to believe that they might yet recover their former greatness. But the occurrence at this juncture of a great and unlooked-for event, arrested the victorious progress of Mulei-Hassam, and prepared the way for the total ruin of his kingdom. Isabella of Castile, the sister of Henry the Impotent, notwithstanding the opposition of her brother and the intervention of almost insurmountable obstacles, espoused Ferdinand the Catholic, the king of Sicily, and heir presumptive of the kingdom of Aragon.[18] This marriage, by uniting the two most powerful monarchs of Spain, gave a fatal blow to the prosperity of the Moors, which they had been able to maintain, even in the degree in which it now existed, only through the divisions which had hitherto perpetually prevailed among their Christian opponents. Either of the two enemies, now unitedly arrayed against them, had been singly sufficient {182} to overwhelm the Mussulmans. Ferdinand was alike politic, able, and adroit. He was pliant, and, at the same time, firm; cautious to a degree sometimes amounting to pusillanimity; cunning even to falsehood, and endowed in an extraordinary degree with the power of discerning at a single glance all the various means of attaining a particular end. Isabella was of a prouder and more noble nature; endowed with heroic courage and the most unyielding constancy of purpose, she was admirably qualified for the pursuit and accomplishment of any enterprise to which she might direct the energies of her powerful mind. The exalted endowments of one of these royal personages have been employed to ennoble the character of the other. Ferdinand often played the part of a weak, perfidious woman, negotiating only to deceive; whereas Isabella was always the high-souled sovereign, advancing openly to her purposes, and marching directly to honourable conflict and generous triumph. No sooner had these distinguished individuals secured possession of their respective kingdoms, suppressed all domestic disturbances, and effected peaceful arrangements with foreign powers, {183} than they mutually resolved to concentrate all their efforts for the annihilation of the Mohammedan dominion in Spain. This century seemed destined to be marked by the glory of the Spaniards. In addition to the immense advantages afforded them by the union of their forces, Ferdinand and Isabella were surrounded by the wisest and most experienced advisers. The celebrated Cardinal Ximenes, at one time a simple monk, was now at the head of their councils; and that able minister "_led_," as he himself averred, "_all Spain by his girdle!_" The civil wars with which the Peninsula had been so long disturbed, had created among the Christian powers a host of brave soldiers and excellent commanders. Among the latter were particularly distinguished the Count de Cabra, the Marquis of Cadiz, and the famous Gonzalvo of Cordova, whose just claim to the surname of _the Great Captain_, given him by his countrymen, the lapse of time has only served to confirm. The public treasury, which had been exhausted by the lavish prodigality of Henry, was soon replenished by the rigid economy of Isabella, aided by a bull from the pope, permitting the royal appropriation of the {184} ecclesiastical revenues. The troops were numerous and admirably disciplined, and the emulation which existed between the Castilians and Aragonians redoubled the valour of both. Everything, in short, prognosticated the downfall of the last remaining throne of the Moors. Its royal champion, Mulei-Hassem, was not dismayed, however, even by such an accumulation of danger. He was the first to break the truce, by taking forcible possession of the city of Zahra, A.D. 1481, Heg. 886. Ferdinand despatched ambassadors to the Moslem court to complain of this breach of faith; with orders, at the same time, to demand the ancient tribute which had been paid by the kings of Grenada to the sovereigns of Castile. "I know," replied Mulei-Hassem, when the envoys of the Spanish prince had delivered their message, "I know that some of my predecessors rendered you tribute in pieces of gold; but _this_ is the only metal now coined in the national mint of Grenada!" And, as he spoke, the stern and haughty monarch presented the head of his lance to the Spanish ambassadors. The army of Ferdinand first marched upon Alhamar, a very strong fortress in the {185} neighbourhood of Grenada, and particularly famous for the magnificent baths with which it had been embellished by the Moorish kings. The place was taken by surprise, and thus a war was lighted up that was destined to be extinguished only with the last expiring sigh of Grenada. Victory seemed at first to be equally poised between the two contending powers. The King of Grenada possessed ample resources in troops, artillery, and treasure. He might have long maintained the contest, but for an act of imprudence which precipitated him into an abyss of misfortune from which he was never afterward able to extricate himself. The wife of Mulei-Hassem, named Aixa, belonged, before her marriage with the king, to one of the most important of the Grenadian tribes. The offspring of this marriage was a son named Boabdil, whose right it was to succeed to his father's throne. But the reckless Mulei repudiated his wife at the instance of a Christian slave, of whom he became enamoured, and who governed the doting monarch at will. This act of cruelty and injustice was the signal for civil war. The injured Aixa, in concert with her son, excited her relatives and friends, {186} and a large number of the inhabitants of the capital, to throw off their allegiance to their sovereign. Mulei-Hassem was eventually driven from the city, and Boabdil assumed the title of king. Thus father and son were involved in a contest for the possession of a crown, of which Ferdinand was seeking to deprive them both. To add to the misfortunes which were already fast crushing this distracted and miserable country beneath their weight, another aspirant to the throne presented himself, in the person of a brother of Mulei-Hassem named Zagel. This prince, at the head of a band of Moorish adventurers, had succeeded in obtaining some important advantages over the Spaniards in the defiles of Malaga, A.D. 1483, Heg. 888. His achievements having won for him the hearts of his countrymen, Zagel now conceived the design of dethroning his brother and nephew, and of appropriating the dominions of both to himself. Thus a third faction arose to increase the dissensions of the state. Boabdil still held insecure possession of the capital; and, desirous of attempting some action, the brilliancy of which would reanimate the {187} hopes and confidence of a party that was ready to abandon him, he sallied forth at the head of a small force, with the intention of surprising Lucena, a city belonging to the Castilians. But the ill-fated Boabdil was made a prisoner in this expedition. He was the first Moorish king who had ever been a captive to the Spaniards. Ferdinand lavished on him the attentions due to misfortune, and caused him to be conducted to Cordova, attended by an escort. The old king, Mulei-Hassem, seized this opportunity to repossess himself of the crown of which his rebellious son had deprived him, and, in spite of the party of Zagel, he again became master of his capital. But the restored monarch could oppose but a feeble resistance to the progress of the Spaniards, who were rapidly reducing his cities and advancing nearer to his devoted capital. Within the walls of that city the wretched inhabitants were madly warring against one another, as if unconscious of the destruction that was fast approaching them from without. To increase the sanguinary feuds which already so surely presaged their destruction, the Catholic sovereigns had become the {188} allies of the captive Boabdil, engaging to assist him in his efforts against his father on condition that he should pay them a tribute of twelve thousand crowns of gold, acknowledge himself their vassal, and deliver certain strong places into their hands. The base Boabdil acceded to everything; and, aided by the politic Spanish princes, hastened again to take arms against his father. The kingdom of Grenada was now converted into one wide field of carnage, where Mulei-Hassem, Boabdil, and Zagel were furiously contending for the mournful relics of their country. The Spaniards, in the mean time, marched rapidly from one conquest to another, sometimes under pretext of sustaining their ally Boabdil, and often in open defiance of the treaty they had formed with that prince; but always carefully feeding the fire of discord, while they were despoiling each of the three rival parties, and leaving to the vanquished inhabitants their laws, their customs, and the free exercise of their religion. In the midst of these frightful scenes of calamity and crime, old Mulei-Hassem died, either worn out by grief and misfortune, or through {189} the agency of his ambitious brother. This event occurred A.D. 1485, Heg. 890. Ferdinand had now rendered himself master of all the western part of the kingdom of Grenada, and Boabdil agreed to divide with Zagel the remnant of this desolated state. The city of Grenada was retained by Boabdil, while Gaudix and Almeria fell to the share of Zagel. The war was not the less vigorously prosecuted in consequence of this arrangement; and the unprincipled Zagel, doubting his ability long to retain the cities in his possession, sold them to King Ferdinand in consideration of an annual pension. By virtue of this treaty, the Catholic sovereigns took possession of the purchased cities; and the traitor Zagel even lent the aid of his arms to the Christian army, the more speedily to overthrow the royal power of his nephew, and thereby terminate the existence of his expiring country. All that now remained to the Mussulmans was the single city of Grenada. There Boabdil still reigned; and, exasperated by misfortune, he vented his rage and despair in acts of barbarous cruelty towards its wretched inhabitants. {190} Ferdinand and Isabella, disregarding the conditions of their pretended alliance with this now powerless prince, summoned him to surrender his capital, in compliance, as they said, with the terms of a secret treaty, which they affirmed had been concluded between them. Boabdil protested against this perfidious conduct. But there was no time allowed for complaint: he must successfully defend himself, or cease to reign. The Moorish prince adopted, therefore, to say the least, the most heroic alternative; and resolved to defend to the last what remained to him of his once beautiful and flourishing country. The Spanish sovereign, at the head of an army of sixty thousand men, the flower and chivalry of the united kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, laid siege to Grenada on the 9th of May, 1491, and in the 897th year of the Hegira. This great city, as has been already mentioned, was defended by strong ramparts, flanked by a multitude of towers, and by numerous other fortifications, built one above the other. Notwithstanding the civil wars which had inundated it with blood, Grenada still enclosed within its walls more than two hundred thousand {191} inhabitants. Every brave Moorish cavalier who still remained true to his country, its religion, and its laws, had here taken refuge. Despair redoubled their strength in this last desperate struggle; and had these fierce and intrepid warriors been guided by a more worthy chief than Boabdil, their noble constancy might still have saved them; but this weak and ferocious monarch hesitated not, on the slightest suspicion, to consign his most faithful defenders to the axe of the executioner. Thus he became daily more and more an object of hatred and contempt to the Grenadians, by whom he was surnamed _Zogoybi_; that is to say, _the Little King_. The different tribes now grew dissatisfied and dispirited, especially the numerous and powerful tribe of the Abencerrages. The alfaquis and the imans, also, loudly predicted the approaching downfall of the Moorish empire; and nothing upheld the sinking courage of the people against the pressure of a foreign foe and the tyranny of their own rulers but their unconquerable horror of the Spanish yoke. The Catholic soldiers, on the other hand, elated by their past success, regarded themselves as invincible, and never for a moment doubted the {192} certainty of their triumph. They were commanded, also, by leaders to whom they were devotedly attached: Ponce de Leon, marquis of Cadiz, Henry de Guzman, duke of Medina, Mendoza, Aguillar, Villena, and Gonzalvo of Cordova, together with many other famous captains, accompanied their victorious king. Isabella, too, whose virtues excited the highest respect, and whose affability and grace won for her the affectionate regard of all, had repaired to the camp of her husband with the Infant and the Infantas, and attended by the most brilliant court in Europe. This politic princess, though naturally grave and serious, wisely accommodated herself to the existing circumstances. She mingled fêtes and amusements with warlike toil: jousts and tournaments delighted at intervals the war-worn soldiery; and dances, games, and illuminations filled up the delicious summer evenings. Queen Isabella was the animating genius that directed everything; a gracious word from her was a sufficient recompense for the most gallant achievement; and her look alone had power to transform the meanest soldier into a hero. Abundance reigned in the Christian camp; {193} while joy and hope animated every heart. But within the beleaguered city, mutual distrust, universal consternation, and the prospect of inevitable destruction, had damped the courage and almost annihilated the hopes of the wretched inhabitants. The siege, nevertheless, lasted for nine months. The cautious commander of the Christian army did not attempt to carry by assault a place so admirably fortified. After having laid waste the environs, therefore, he waited patiently until famine should deliver the city into his hands. Satisfied with battering the ramparts and repelling the frequent sorties of the Moors, he never engaged in any decisive action, but daily hemmed in more closely the chafed lion that could not now escape his toils. Accident one night set fire to the pavilion of Isabella, and the spreading conflagration consumed every tent in the camp. But Boabdil derived no advantage from this disaster. The queen directed that a city should supply the place of the ruined camp, to convince the enemies of the cross that the siege would never be raised until Grenada should come into possession of the conquering Spaniards. This great and {194} extraordinary design, so worthy the genius of Isabella, was executed in eighty days. The Christian camp thus became a walled city; and Santa Fe still exists as a monument of the piety and perseverance of the heroic Queen of Castile. At last, oppressed by famine, less frequently successful than at first in the partial engagements that were constantly taking place under the walls, and abandoned by Africa, from which there were no attempts made to relieve them, the Moors now felt the necessity of a surrender. Gonzalvo of Cordova was empowered by the conquerors to arrange the articles of capitulation. These provided that the people of Grenada should recognise Ferdinand and Isabella, and their royal successors, as their rightful sovereigns; that all their Christian captives should be released without ransom; that the Moors should continue to be governed by their own laws; should retain their national customs, their judges, half the number of their mosques, and the free exercise of their faith; that they should be permitted either to keep or sell their property, and to retire to Africa, or to any other country they might choose, while, at the same time, they should not be compelled to leave their {195} native land. It was also agreed that Boabdil should have assigned to him a rich and ample domain in the Alpuxares, of which he should possess the entire command. Such were the terms of capitulation, and but ill were they observed by the Spaniards. Boabdil fulfilled his part of the stipulations some days before the time specified, in consequence of being informed that his people, roused by the representations of the imans, wished to break off the negotiations, and to bury themselves beneath the ruins of the city rather than suffer their desolate and deserted homes to be profaned by the intruding foot of the spoiler. The wretched Moslem prince hastened therefore to deliver the keys of the city, and of the fortresses of the Albazin and the Alhambra, into the hands of Ferdinand. Entering no more, after this mournful ceremony, within the walls where he no longer retained any authority, Boabdil took his melancholy journey, accompanied by his family and a small number of followers, to the petty dominions which were now all that remained to him of the once powerful and extensive empire of his ancestors. {196} When the cavalcade reached an eminence from which the towers of Grenada might still be discerned, the wretched exile turned his last sad regards upon the distant city, amid ill-suppressed tears and groans. "_You do well_," said Aixa, his mother, "_to weep like a woman for the throne you could not defend like a man!_" But the now powerless Boabdil could not long endure existence as a subject in a country where he had reigned as a sovereign: he crossed the Mediterranean to Africa, and there he ended his days on the battle-field. Ferdinand and Isabella made their public entrance into Grenada on the 1st of January, 1492, through double ranks of soldiers, and amid the thunder of artillery. The city seemed deserted; the inhabitants fled from the presence of the conquerors, and concealed their tears and their despair within the innermost recesses of their habitations. The royal victors repaired first to the grand mosque, which was consecrated as a Christian church, and where they rendered thanks to God for the brilliant success that had crowned their arms. While the sovereigns fulfilled this pious duty, the Count de Tendilla, the new governor {197} of Grenada, elevated the triumphant cross, and the standards of Castile and St. James, on the highest towers of the Alhambra. Thus fell this famous city, and thus perished the power of the Moors of Spain, after an existence of seven hundred and eighty-two years from the first conquest of the country by Tarik. It may now be proper briefly to remark upon the principal causes of the extinction of the national independence of the kingdom of Grenada. The first of these arose from the peculiar character of the Moors: from that spirit of inconstancy, that love of novelty, and that unceasing inquietude, which prompted them to such frequent change of their rulers; which multiplied factions among them, and constantly convulsed the empire with internal discords, expending its strength and power in dissensions at home, and thus leaving it defenceless against foreign enemies. The Moors may also be reproached with an extravagant fondness for architectural magnificence, splendid fêtes, and other expensive entertainments, which aided in exhausting the national treasury at times when protracted warfare scarcely ever permitted this most fertile region of the earth to reproduce the {198} crops the Spaniards had destroyed. But, more than all, they were a people without an established code of laws, that only permanent basis of the prosperity of nations. And then, too, a despotic form of government, which deprives men of patriotism, induced each individual to regard his virtues and attainments merely as affording the means of personal consideration, and not, as they should be considered, the property of his country. These grave defects in the national character of the Moors were redeemed by many excellent qualities, which even the Spaniards admitted them to possess. In battle they were no less brave and prudent than their Christian antagonists, though inferior in skill and discipline. They excelled them, however, in the art of attack. Adversity never long overwhelmed them; they saw in misfortune the will of Heaven, and without a murmur submitted to it. Their favourite dogma of fatalism doubtless contributed to this result. Fervently devoted to the laws of Mohammed, they obeyed with great exactness his humane injunctions respecting almsgiving:[19] they bestowed on the poor not only food and {199} money, but a portion of their grain, fruit, and flocks, and of every kind of merchandise. In the towns and throughout the country, the indigent sick were collected, attended, and nursed with the most assiduous care. Hospitality, so sacred from the remotest time among the Arabs, was not less carefully observed among the people of Grenada, who seemed to take peculiar pleasure in its exercise. The following touching anecdote is told in illustration of the powerful influence of this principle. A stranger, bathed in blood, sought refuge from the officers of justice under the roof of an aged Moor. The old man concealed him in his house. But he had scarcely done so before a guard arrived to demand possession of the murderer, and, at the same time, to deliver to the horror-stricken Mussulman the dead body of his son, whom the stranger had just assassinated. Still the aged father would not give up his guest. When the guard, however, were gone, he entreated the assassin to leave him. "_Depart from me_," he cried, "_that I may be at liberty to pursue thee!_" These Moslems were but little known to the historians by whom they have been so often calumniated. Polished, enthusiastic, hospitable, {200} brave, and chivalrous, but haughty, passionate, inconstant, and vindictive, their unfortunate fate entitles them, at least, to compassion and sympathy, while their virtues may well excite respect and interest. After their final defeat, many of the followers of the Prophet retired to Africa. Those who remained in Grenada suffered greatly from the persecution and oppression to which they were subjected by their new masters. The article in their last treaty with the Spaniards, which formally ensured their religious freedom, was grossly violated by the Catholics, who compelled the Mussulmans to abjure their national faith by force, terror, and every other unworthy means. At last, outraged beyond endurance by this want of good faith, and wrought to desperation by the cruelties they were compelled to endure, in the year 1500 the Moors attempted to revolt against their oppressors. Their efforts were, however, unavailing: Ferdinand marched in person against them, repressed by force of arms the struggles of a people whom he designated as rebels, and, sword in hand, administered the rite of baptism to more than fifty thousand captive Moslems. {201} The successors of Ferdinand, Charles V. and especially Philip II., continued to harass the Moors.[20] The Inquisition was established in the city of Grenada, and all the terrors of that dreaded institution were added to gentler means for the conversion of the infidels to Christianity. Their children were taken from them to be educated in accordance with the precepts of that religion whose Adorable Founder enjoined peace, mercy, and forbearance upon his followers, and forbade the practice of injustice and cruelty in every form. Yielding to the promptings of despair, this crushed and wretched remnant of a once powerful and glorious nation again flew to arms in the year 1569, and executed the most terrible vengeance upon the Catholic priesthood. Mohammed-ben-Ommah, the new king whom they chose to direct their destinies, and who was {202} said to have sprung from the cherished race of the Ommiades, several times gave battle to his opponents in the mountains of the Alpuxares, where he sustained the cause of his injured countrymen for the space of two years. At the end of that time he was assassinated by his own people. His successor shared the same fate, and the Mussulmans were again compelled to submit to a yoke their revolt had rendered even more intolerable than before. Finally, King Philip III. totally banished the Moors from Spain. The depopulation thus produced inflicted a wound upon that kingdom, from the effects of which it has never since recovered. More than one hundred and fifty thousand of this persecuted race took refuge in France, where Henry IV. received them with great humanity. A small number also concealed themselves in the recesses of the Alpuxares; but the greatest part of the expatriated Islamites sought a home in Africa. There their descendants still drag out a miserable existence under the despotic rule of the sovereigns of Morocco, and unceasingly pray that they may be restored to their beloved Grenada. [1] The Darra, Xenil, Dilar, Vagro, and Monachil. [2] See note A, page 222. [3] See note B, page 222. [4] See note C, page 222. [5] It should be borne in mind, that the description given by M. Florian of the remains of the once gorgeous splendours of this palace was written nearly half a century ago; and that time, and the yet more ruthless destroyer man, may have wrought great changes since that period amid the ruins of the Alhambra.--_Trans._ [6] The translator has adopted the literal French version of this inscription, given in a note by M. Florian, from the impression that the spirit of the original would thus be better preserved than by attempting to render into rhyme his poetical interpretation. [7] See Note D, page 223. [8] See note E, page 224. [9] A.D. 1302, Heg. 703. [10] A.D. 1319, Heg. 719. [11] The mountains of Grenada, in the neighbourhood of which this action took place, have, ever since that event, borne the name of LA SIERRA DE LOS INFANTES. [12] See Note F, page 224. [13] See Note G, page 225. [14] The translator ventures to offer an imitation of M. Florian's French version of this Moorish ballad, and appends the Spanish original with which he presents his readers. GANZUL Y ZELINDA. ROMANCE MORO. En el tiempo que Zelinda Cerro ayrada la ventana A la disculpa a los zelos Que el Moro Ganzul le daya, Confusa y arrepentida De averse fingido ayrada, For verle y desagravialle, El corazon se le abraza; Que en el villano de amor Es mui cierta la mudanza, etc. Y como supo que el Moro Rompio furioso la lanca, etc. Y que la librea verde Avia trocado en leonada; Saco luego una marlota De tufetan roxo y plata, Un bizarro capellar De tela de oro morada, etc. Con une bonete cubierto De zaphires y esparaldas, Que publican zelos muertos, Y vivas las esperancos, Con una nevada toça; Que el color de la veleta Tambien publica bononça Informandose primero. A donde Ganzul estava, A una caza de plazer Aquella tarde le llama Y diziendole a Ganzul. Que Zelinda le aguardava, Al page le pregunto Tres vezes si so burlava; Que son malaas de creer Las nuevas mui desseadas, etc. Hollola en un jardin, Entre mosquetta y jasmine, etc. Viendose Moro con ella, A penas los ojos alça; Zelinda le asio la mano, Un poco roxa y turbada; Y al fin de infinitas guexas Que en tales passes se passan, Vistio se las ricas presas Con las manos de su dama, etc. [15] Mohammedan priest. [16] See Note H, page 225. [17] A.D. 1453, Heg. 857. [18] A.D. 1469, Heg. 874. [19] See Note I, page 226. [20] The edicts of Charles V., which were renewed and rendered more severe by Philip II., directed an entire change in the peculiar domestic habits and manners of the Moors, prescribed their adoption of the Spanish costume and language, forbade their women to wear veils, interdicted the use of the oath and the celebration of their national dances, and ordered that all their children from the age of five to fifteen should be registered, that they might be sent to Catholic Schools. {203} NOTES. FIRST EPOCH. A, page 25. _Until they embrace Islamism, &c._ The word _Islamism_ is derived from _islam_, which signifies _consecration to God_. The brief synopsis given in the text of the principles of the Mohammedan religion, is literally rendered by the author from several different chapters of the Koran. These precepts are there to be found almost lost amid a mass of absurdities, repetitions, and incoherent rhapsodies. Yet, throughout the entire work, there are occasionally bright gleams of fervid eloquence or pure morality. Mohammed never speaks on his own authority; he pretends always to be prompted by the angel Gabriel, who repeats to him the commands of the Most High: the Prophet does but listen and repeat them. The angelic messenger has taken care to enter into a multitude of details, not only in relation to religion, but also to legislation and government. And thus it happens that the Koran is regarded by the Mussulmans as their standard, no less for civil than for moral law. One half of this book is written in verse, and the remainder in poetical prose. Mohammed possessed great poetical talent; an endowment so highly esteemed by his countrymen, that they were in the habit of assembling at Mecca to pronounce judgment on the different poems affixed {204} by their respective authors to the walls of the temple of tie Caaba; and the individual in whose favour the popular voice decided was crowned with great solemnity. When the second chapter of the Koran, _Labia ebn rabia_, appeared on the walls, the most famous poet of the time, who had previously posted up a rival production of his own, tore it down, and acknowledged himself conquered by the Prophet. Mohammed was not altogether the monster of cruelty so many authors represent him to have been. He often displayed much humanity towards offenders who were in his power, and even forgave personal injuries. One of the most unrelenting of his enemies, named Caab, on whose head a price had been set, had the audacity suddenly to appear in the mosque at Medina while Mohammed was preaching to the multitude. Caab recited some verses which he had composed in honour of the Prophet. Mohammed listened to them with pleasure, embraced the poet, and invested him with his own mantle. This precious garment was afterward bought by one of the caliphs of the East, from the family of Caab, for the sum of twenty thousand drachms, and became the pride of those Asiatic sovereigns, who wore it only on the occasion of some solemn festival. The last moments of Mohammed would seem to prove that he was far from possessing an ignoble mind. Feeling his end approaching, he repaired to the mosque, supported by his friend Ali. Mounting the tribune, he made a prayer, and then, turning to the assembly, uttered these words: "Mussulmans, I am about to die. No one, therefore, need any longer fear me; if I have struck any one among you, here is my breast, let him strike me in return: if I have wrongfully taken the property of any one, here is my purse, let him remunerate himself: if I have humbled any one, let him now {205} spurn me: I surrender myself to the justice of my countrymen!" The people sobbed aloud: one individual alone demanded three drachms of the dying Prophet, who instantly discharged the debt with interest. After this he took an affectionate leave of the brave Medinians who had so faithfully defended him, gave liberty to his slaves, and ordered the arrangements for his funeral. His last interview with his wife and daughter, and Omar and Ali, his friends and disciples, was marked by much tenderness. Sorrow and lamentation were universal throughout Arabia on this occasion; and his daughter Fatima died of grief for his loss. The respect and veneration entertained by his followers for Mohammed is almost inconceivable. Their doctors have gravely asserted in their writings that the world was created for him; that the first thing made was light, and that that light became the substance of the soul of Mohammed, etc. Some of them have maintained that the Alcoran was uncreated, while others have adopted a contrary opinion; and out of these discordant views have arisen numerous sects, and even wars that have deluged Asia with blood. The life of Mohammed was terminated by poison, which had been administered to him some years before by a Jewess named Zainab, whose brother had been slain by Ali. This woman, to avenge the death of her brother, poisoned some roasted lamb which she served up for the Prophet. Scarcely had he put a morsel of it into his mouth, when, instantly rejecting it, he exclaimed that the meat was poisoned. Notwithstanding the prompt use of antidotes, the injurious consequences were so severe, that he suffered from them during the remainder of his life, and died four years after, in the sixty-third year of his age. {206} B, page 27. _Kaled, surnamed the Sword of God, &c._ The feats of arms ascribed by historians to Kaled resemble those of a hero of romance. He was at first the enemy of the great Arabian leader, and vanquished that commander in the conflict of _Aheh_, the only battle which Mohammed ever lost. Having afterward become a zealous Mussulman, he subjugated such parts of the Mohammedan dominions as had revolted after the death of the Prophet, opposed the armies of Heraclius, conquered Syria, Palestine, and a part of Persia, and came off victor in numerous single combats in which he was at different times engaged: always challenging to an encounter of this kind the general of the hostile army. The following anecdote will illustrate his character. Kaled besieged the city of Bostra. The Greek governor, named Romain, under pretence of making a sortie, passed the walls with his troops, and arranged them in order of battle in front of the Mussulman army. At the moment when he should have given the signal for the onset, the valiant Greek demanded an interview with Kaled. The two commanders, therefore, advanced into the centre of the space which separated the opposing armies. Romain declared to the Saracen general that he had determined not only to deliver the city to him, but to embrace the religion of the crescent; he at the same time expressed a fear that his soldiers, among whom he was by no means popular, intended to take his life, and intreated Kaled to protect him against their vengeance. "The best thing you can do," replied the Moslem leader, "is immediately to accept a challenge to a single combat with me. Such an exhibition of courage will gain for you the respect of your troops, and we can treat together afterward!" {207} At these words, without waiting for a reply from the governor, the champion of Islamism drew his cimeter and attacked the unfortunate Romain, who defended himself with a trembling hand. At each blow inflicted by the redoubtable follower of the Prophet, Remain cried out, "Do you then wish to kill me?" "No," replied the Mussulman; "my only object is, to load you with honour; the more you are beaten, the more esteem you will acquire!" At last, when he had nearly deprived the poor Greek of life, Kaled gave up the contest, and shortly after took possession of the city: when he next saw the pusillanimous governor, he politely inquired after his health. C, page 30. _The warlike tribes of the Bereberes, &c._ The name of the portion of Africa called _Barbary_ is derived from the Bereberes. This people regarded themselves, with much appearance of truth, as the descendants of those Arabs who originally came into the country with Malek Yarfric, and who are often confounded with the ancient Numidians. Their language, which differs from that of every other people, is, in the opinion of some authors, a corruption of the Punic or Carthaginian. Divided into tribes and wandering among the mountains, this peculiar race still exists in the kingdom of Morocco. The Bereberes were never allied with the Moors, for whom they always entertained a feeling of enmity. Though at present under the dominion of the kings of Morocco as their religious head, they brave his displeasure and authority at will. They are formidable in consequence of their numbers, courage, and indomitable spirit of independence; and still preserve unimpaired the peculiar simplicity of their ancient manners and habits. {208} D, page 34. _Tarik, one of the most renowned captains of his time, &c._ Tarik landed at the dot of the Calpe Mountain, and took the city of Herculia, to which the Arabs gave the name of _Djebel Tarik_, of which we have made Gibraltar. E, page 38. _During the remainder of the Caliphate of Yezid II., &c._ This caliph, the ninth of the Ommiades, ended his existence in a manner that at least merits pity. He was amusing himself one day with throwing grapes at his favourite female slave, who caught them in her mouth. This fruit, it must be remembered, is much larger in Syria than in Europe. Unfortunately, one of the grapes passed into the throat of the slave and instantly suffocated her. The despairing Yezid would not permit the interment of this dearest object of his affections, and watched incessantly beside the corpse for eight successive days. Being compelled at last, by the condition of the body, to separate himself from it, he died of grief, entreating, as he expired, that his remains might be interred in the same tomb with his beloved Hubabah. SECOND EPOCH. A, page 46. _He was soon after assassinated, &c._ Three Karagites (a name applied to a pre-eminently fanatical sect of Mussulmans), beholding the disorders created in the Arabian empire by the contentions of Ali, Moavias, and {209} Amrou, believed that they should perform a service that would be acceptable to God, and restore peace to their country, by simultaneously assassinating the three rivals. One of them repaired to Damascus, and wounded the usurper Moavias in the back; but the wound did not prove mortal. The confederate charged with the murder of Amrou, stabbed, by mistake, one of the friends of that rebel. The third, who had undertaken to despatch Ali, struck him as he was about to enter the mosque, and the virtuous caliph was the only one who fell a victim to the design of the assassins. B, page 48. _Mervan II., the last caliph of the race, &c._ This Ommiade was surnamed _Alhemar_, that is to say, _The Ass_: an appellation which, in the East, is considered highly honourable, from the singular regard there entertained for that patient and indefatigable animal. Ariosto derived his touching episode of Isabella of Gallicia from the history of this prince. Mervan, being at one time in Egypt, became enamoured of a religious recluse whom he chanced to see there, and endeavoured to persuade her to break her monastic vows. Effectually to relieve herself from his persecutions, the young devotee promised him an ointment which would render him invulnerable, and volunteered to prove its efficacy on her own person. After having anointed her neck with the mixture, she requested the caliph to test the keenness of his cimeter on it, which the barbarian did; and the result may be easily imagined. C, page 48. _The names of Haroun al Raschid, &c._ Haroun al Raschid (which signifies Haroun the Just) was {210} greatly renowned in the East. He undoubtedly, in part, owed his fame, as well as his surname, to the protection he afforded to men of letters. His military exploits and his love of science prove this caliph to have been no ordinary man; but then the glory of his achievements was tarnished by his cruelty to the Barmacides. These were a distinguished tribe or family, descended from the ancient kings of Persia. They had rendered the most signal services to the successive caliphs, and won the respect and affection of the whole empire. Giaffar Barmacide, who was considered the most virtuous of Mussulmans and the most eminent author of the age, was the vizier of Haroun. He entertained a passionate regard for Abassa, the beautiful and accomplished sister of the caliph, and the princess reciprocated his affection; but the sovereign made the most unreasonable opposition to the celebration of their nuptials. This they effected, however, without his knowledge; and for some time Haroun remained ignorant of the union of the lovers. But, at the end of some years, the caliph made a pilgrimage to Mecca, to which city, the more effectually to secure the inviolability of his secret, the Bermacide had sent his infant son to be reared. There the representative of the Prophet, through the instrumentality of a perfidious slave, became acquainted with all the circumstances of the deception that had been practised on him. It would be difficult to believe the account of what followed, but that the facts were so well authenticated throughout Asia. Haroun caused his sister to be thrown into a well, commanded that Giaffar should lose his head, and ordered every relative of the unfortunate Bermacide to be put to death. The father of the vizier, a venerable old man, respected throughout the empire, which he had long governed, met his fate with the most heroic firmness. Before he expired, he wrote these {211} words to the sanguinary despot: "_The accused departs first; the accuser will shortly follow. Both will appear in the presence of a Judge whom no arguments can deceive!_" The implacable Haroun carried his vengeance so far as to forbid that any one should mention the names of his hapless victims. One of his subjects, named Mundir, had the courage to brave this edict, and publicly to pronounce the eulogy of the beloved Bermacides. The tyrant commanded that the offending Mussulman should appear before him, and threatened him with punishment for what he had done. "You can silence me only by inflicting death upon me!" replied Mundir: "that you have the power of doing; but you cannot extinguish the gratitude entertained by the whole empire for those virtuous ministers: even the ruins you have made of the monuments which they erected, speak of their fame in spite of you!" It is said that the monarch was touched by the words of this fearless defender of the dead, and that he commanded a golden plate to be presented to him. Such was the famous caliph who bore the name of _the Just_. Almamon, his son, received no surname; but he deserved to be ranked with the wisest and the most virtuous of men. Some idea of his character may be formed from the following anecdote. It is recorded of him, that his viziers urged him to punish with death one of his relations who had taken arms against him, and caused himself to be proclaimed caliph. Almamon, however, rejected this sanguinary counsel, saying at the same time, "Alas! if they who have injured me, knew how much pleasure I experience in forgiving my enemies, they would hasten to appear before me to confess their faults!" This excellent prince was the munificent {212} patron of science and the arts, and his reign formed the most brilliant epoch of the glorious days of the Arabs. D, page 54. _Wars with the kings of Leon, and incursions into Catalonia, &c._ Historians do not agree concerning the precise period when Charlemagne entered Spain. It would appear, however, that it was during the reign of Abderamus that the emperor crossed the Pyrenees, took Pampeluna and Saragossa, and was attacked, during his retreat, in the defiles of Roncevaux, a place rendered famous in romantic literature by the death of Roland. E, page 59. _A government that properly respected the rights of the people, &c._ The ancient laws of Aragon, known under the name of _Fore de Sobarbe_, limited the power of the sovereign by creating a balance for it in that of the _ricos Hombres_, and of a magistrate who bore the name of Justice. F, page 60. _The celebrated school, &c._ The musical school, founded at Cordova by Ali-Zeriab, produced the famous Moussali, who was regarded by the Orientals as the greatest musician of his time. The music of the Moors did not consist, like ours, in the concord of different instruments, but simply in soft and tender airs, which the musicians sung to the accompaniment of the lute. Sometimes several voices and lutes executed the same air in unison. This simple style of music satisfied a people who were {213} such passionate lovers of poetry, that their first desire, when listening to a singer, was to hear the words he uttered. Moussali, who was the pupil of Ali-Zeriab at Cordova, became afterward, in consequence of his musical talents, the favourite of Haroun al Raschid, the celebrated caliph of the East. It is related that this prince, in consequence of a misunderstanding with one of his favourite wives, fell into such a slate of melancholy that fears were entertained for his life. Giaffar, the Bermacide, at that time the principal vizier of the caliph, entreated the poet Abbas-ben-Ahnaf to compose some verses on the subject of this quarrel. He did so, and they were sung in the presence of the prince by Moussali; and the royal lover was so softened by the sentiments of the poet and the melody of the musician, that he immediately flew to the feet of his fair enslaver, and a reconciliation took place between the disconsolate monarch and the offended beauty. The grateful slave sent twenty thousand drachms of gold to the poet and Moussali, and Haroun added forty thousand more to her gift. G, page 66. _The statue of the beautiful Zahra, &c._ Mohammed, to discourage idolatry, forbade his followers, in the Koran, to make images in any form; but this injunction was very imperfectly observed. The Oriental caliphs adopted the custom of stamping their coins with an impression of their own features, as is proved by specimens still existing in the collections of the curious. On one side of these was represented the head of the reigning caliph, and on the other appeared his name, with some passages from the Alcoran. In the palaces of Bagdad, Cordova and Grenada, figures of animals, and sculpture of various kinds, both in gold and marble, abounded. {214} H, page 69. _The richest and most powerful, &c._ Some conception of the opulence of the caliphs of the West, during the palmy days of their prosperity, may be formed from the value of the gifts presented to Abderamus III. by one of his subjects, Abdoumalek-ben-Chien, on the occasion of his being appointed to the dignity of chief vizier. The articles composing this present are thus enumerated: Four hundred pounds of virgin gold; four hundred and twenty thousand sequins, in the form of ingots of silver; four hundred and twenty pounds of the wood of aloes; five hundred ounces of ambergris; three hundred ounces of camphor; thirty pieces of silk and cloth of gold; ten robes of the sable fur of Korassan; one hundred others, of less valuable fur; forty-eight flowing housings for steeds; a thousand bucklers; a hundred thousand arrows; gold tissues, from Bagdad; four thousand pounds of silk; thirty Persian carpets; eight hundred suits of armour for war horses; fifteen Arabian coursers for the caliph; a hundred for the use of his officers; twenty mules, saddled and caparisoned; forty youths and twenty young maidens, of rare beauty. I, page 81. About this time occurred the famous adventure of the seven sons of Lara, so celebrated in Spanish history and romance, and of which, as in some degree connected with Moorish history, we may briefly narrate the particulars. These young warriors were brothers, the sons of Gonzalvo Gustos, a near relative of the first counts of Castile, and lords of Salas de Lara. Ruy Velasquez, brother-in-law of Gonzalvo Gustos, instigated by his wife, who pretended to {215} have some cause of offence against the youngest of the seven brothers, meditated the execution of a horrible scheme for their destruction. Ho commenced by sending their father Gonzalvo on an embassy to the court of Cordova, making him, at the same time, the bearer of letters, in which he prayed the caliph to put the envoy to death, as the enemy of the crescent and its followers. The Mussulman sovereign, being unwilling to commit so barbarous an act, contented himself with retaining Gonzalvo as a prisoner. In the mean time, the perfidious Velasquez, under pretence of conducting an attack against the Moors, led his nephews into the midst of an ambuscade, where, overpowered by numbers, they all perished, after a most heroic defence, accompanied by circumstances which render their end truly affecting. The barbarous uncle sent the gory heads of the murdered youths to the royal palace of Cordova, and caused them to be presented to the unhappy father, in a golden dish covered with a veil. No sooner did Gonzalvo behold the ghastly contents of the dish, than he fell to the earth, deprived of sense. The Caliph of the West, filled with indignation at the demoniac cruelty of Velasquez, restored his captive to liberty. But the foe of his race was too powerful to permit the childless Gonzalvo to avenge the murder of his offspring. He attempted, indeed, to do so; but old age had deprived him of his former strength and vigour. With his wife, therefore, he mourned in solitude over the untimely fate of his sons, and entreated Heaven to permit him to follow them to the tomb: but a champion of his cause unexpectedly arose in the person of an illegitimate son of Gonzalvo's at the Moorish court. When this boy had attained the age of twelve years, he was informed of his parentage by his mother, who was the sister of the sovereign of Cordova, and of the wrongs which his father had suffered. {216} The heroic youth, who bore the name of _Mendarra Gonzalvo_, resolved to become the avenger of his brothers. Hastening to execute his purpose, he left Cordova, challenged Valasquez, and slew him. Cutting off the head of his father's foe, he sought with his burden the presence of the old man, demanded to be acknowledged as his son, and admitted into the Christian church. The wife of Gonzalvo joyfully consented to receive the brave Mendarra as her son, and he was solemnly adopted by the venerable pair. The wife of Velasquez, who, it will be remembered, had instigated the ferocious uncle to his murderous deed, was stoned to death and afterward burned. It is from this valiant Mendarra Gonzalvo that the Mauriques de Lara, one of the most important Spanish families, seek to trace their descent. THIRD EPOCH. A, page 86. _Three bishops of Catalonia, &c._ These three bishops of Catalonia, who died fighting for the Mussulmans at the battle of Albakara, which took place in the year 1010, were Arnaulpha, bishop of Vic; Accia, bishop of Barcelona; and Othon, bishop of Girona. B, page 91. _And equally ready, when enjoying the favour of the sovereign, to displease him, if it should be necessary to do so, &c._ RODRIGUE DIAS DE BIVAR, surnamed _the Cid_, so well known by his affection for Chimena and his duel with the Count Gormas, has been the subject of many poems, novels {217} and romances in the Spanish tongue. Without crediting all the extraordinary adventures ascribed to this hero by his countrymen, it is proved by the testimony of reputable historians, that the Cid was not only the bravest and most dreaded warrior of his time, but one of the most virtuous and generous of men. De Bivar was already famed for his exploits while Castile was still under the dominion of Ferdinand I. When the successor of that monarch, Sancho II., endeavoured to despoil his sister Uraque of the city of Zamora, this champion of the oppressed, with noble firmness, represented to the king that he was about being guilty of an act of injustice, by which he would violate, at the same time, the laws of honour and the ties of blood. The offended Sancho exiled the Cid, but was soon after obliged by necessity to recall him. When the treacherous assassination of Sancho, while encamped before Zamora, entitled his brother Alphonso to the throne, the Castilians were anxious that their new sovereign should disavow, by a solemn oath, having had any agency in the murder of his brother. No one dared demand of the king to take this oath except the Cid, who constrained him to pronounce it aloud at the same altar where his coronation was celebrated; adding, at the same time, the most fearful maledictions against perjury. Alphonso never forgave the liberty thus taken with him, and soon after banished the Spanish hero from court, under pretence of his having trespassed on the territories of an ally of Castile, the King of Toledo, into whose dominions the Cid had inadvertently pursued some fugitives from justice. The period of his exile became the most glorious epoch in the history of the Chevalier de Bivar: it was then that he achieved so many triumphs over the Moors, aided solely by the brave companions in arms whom his reputation drew to his standard. After a time Alphonso recalled the Cid, and {218} received him into apparent favour; but Rodrigo was too candid long to enjoy the royal smiles. Banished from court anew, he hastened to accomplish the conquest of Valencia; and master of that strong city, with many others, and of a territory of great extent, to make the Cid a monarch it was only necessary that he himself should desire it. But the noble Spaniard never for a moment indulged the wish, and ever continued the faithful subject of the ungrateful and often-offending Alphonso. This celebrated hero died at Valencia A.D. 1099, crowned with years and honours. He had but one son, and of him he was early deprived by death. The two daughters of the Cid espoused princes of the house of Navarre; and, through a long succession of alliances, formed at length the root whence is derived the present royal race of Bourbons. C, page 92. _More ferocious and sanguinary than the lions of their deserts, &c._ The history of Africa, during the period referred to in the text, is but a narrative of one continued succession of the most atrocious murders. Were we to judge of humanity by these sanguinary annals, we should be tempted to believe, that, of all ferocious animals, man is the most bloodthirsty and cruel. Amid the multitude of these African tyrants, there was one, of the race of the _Aglhebites_, named _Abon Ishak_, who was particularly distinguished for the demoniac barbarity of his character. Having butchered eight of his brothers, he next indulged his horrid thirst for blood in the sacrifice of his own offspring. The mother of this monster succeeded with difficulty in preserving from his fury a part of his family. One {219} day, while dining with Ishak, upon his expressing some feeling of momentary regret that he had no more children, his mother tremblingly ventured to confess that she had preserved the lives of six of his daughters. The sanguinary wretch appeared softened, and expressed a desire to see them. When they were summoned to his presence, their youth and loveliness touched the ferocious father; and while Ishak lavished caresses upon his innocent children, his mother retired, with tears of joy, to render thanks to Heaven for this apparent change in the temper of her son. An hour afterward, a eunuch brought her, by order of the emperor, the heads of the young princesses. It would be easy to cite other parallel deeds, attested by historians, which were perpetrated by this execrable monster. Suffice it to say, he escaped the violent death due to such a life, and long maintained his hateful rule. Time has not softened the sanguinary ferocity, which seems like an inherent vice produced by the climate of Africa. Mulei-Abdalla, the father of Sidi Mohammed, the recent king of Morocco, renewed these scenes of horror. One day, while crossing a river, he was on the point of drowning, when one of his negroes succeeded in rescuing him from the waves. The slave expressed his delight at having had the good fortune to serve his master. His words were heard by Abdalla, who, drawing his cimeter, and crying, "Behold an infidel, who supposes that God required his assistance in preserving the life of an emperor," instantly struck off the head of his preserver. This same monarch had a confidential domestic who had been long in his service, and for whom the savage Abdalla appeared to entertain some affection. In a moment of good-nature he entreated this aged servant to accept two thousand ducats at his hand and leave his service, lest he should be {220} seized with an irrepressible desire to kill him, as he had so many others. The old man clung to the feet of the king, refused the two thousand ducats, and assured him that he preferred perishing by his hand rather than abandon so beloved a master. Mulei, with some hesitation, consented to retain his aged servant. Some days afterward, impelled by that thirst for blood whose impulses were sometimes uncontrollable, and without the slightest provocation to the deed, the fiendish despot struck the unfortunate man dead at his feet, saying, at the same moment, that he had been a fool not to accept his permission to leave him. It is painful to relate these shocking details; but they present a true picture of the character of these African sovereigns, while they inspire us with a horror of tyranny, and a veneration for the restraints of civilization and law, so indispensable to the well-being of every community. D, page 98. _And possessed the united glory of having both enlightened, &c._ Averroes belonged to one of the first families in Cordova. His version of the writings of Aristotle was translated into Latin, and was for a long time the only translation of the works of that author. The other productions of Averroes are still esteemed by the learned. He is justly regarded as the chief of the Arabic philosophers: a class of men not numerous in a nation abounding in prophets and conquerors. The principles he entertained exposed him to much persecution. His indifference to the religious creed of his countrymen excited the enmity of the imans or priests against him, and afforded a pretext for the animosity of all whom his genius inspired with envy. He was accused of heresy before the {221} Emperor of Morocco; and the punishment decreed against him was, that he should do homage at the door of the mosque, while every true Mussulman who came thither to pray for his conversion should spit in his face. He submitted patiently to the humiliating infliction, merely repeating the words _Moriatur anima mea morte philosophorum_ (_Let me die the death of a philosopher_). E, page 106. _And broke the chains, &c._ This King of Navarre was Sancho VIII., surnamed _the Strong_. It was in commemoration of the chains broken by him at the battle of Toloza that Sancho added the chains of gold to the arms of Navarre, which are still to be seen on the field of gules. F, page 111. _Cousin-german of St. Lewis, &c._ Blanche, the mother of St. Lewis, was the daughter of Alphonso the Noble of Castile. She had a sister named Beringira, who became the wife of the King of Leon, and the mother of Ferdinand III. Several historians, among others Mariana and Garibai, maintain that Blanche was older than Beringira. If it were so, St. Lewis was the rightful heir to the throne of Castile. France long asserted the pretensions thus created. It is surprising that historians have not settled this disputed point. One thing, however, is certain: the claims of Ferdinand, sustained as they were by the partiality of the Castilians, prevailed over those of his cousin. {222} FOURTH EPOCH. A, page 132. _Alphonso the Sage, &c._ Alphonso the Sage was a great astronomer: his _Alphonsine Tables_ prove that the happiness of his people occupied his attention as much, at least, as his literary pursuits. It is in this collection that this remarkable sentence occurs--remarkable when it is considered that it expresses the sentiments of a monarch of the thirteenth century: "_The despot uproots the tree: the wise sovereign prunes it._" B, page 135. _In the hope of being elected emperor, &c._ ALPHONSO THE SAGE was elected Emperor of Germany in the year twelve hundred and fifty-seven: but he was at too great a distance from that country, and too much occupied at home, to be able to support his claims to the imperial throne. Sixteen years afterward, however, he made a voyage to Lyons, where Pope Gregory X. then was, to advocate his rights before that dignitary. But the sovereign pontiff decided in favour of Rodolph of Hapsburg, a scion of the house of Austria. C, page 136. _Sancho reigned in his father's stead, &c._ This Sancho, surnamed _the Brave_, who took up arms against his father and afterward obtained his throne, was the second son of Alphonso the Sage. His elder brother, Ferdinand de la Cerda, a mild and virtuous prince, died in the {223} flower of his age, leaving two infant sons, the offspring of his marriage with Blanche, the daughter of St. Lewis of France. It was to deprive these children of their reversionary right to the crown of Castile that the ambitious Sancho made war upon his father. He succeeded in his criminal designs; but the princes of La Cerda, protected by France and Aragon, rallied around them all the malecontents of Castile, and the claims they were thus enabled to support long formed a pretext or occasion for the most bloody dissensions. D, page 149. _Ferdinand IV., surnamed the Summoned, &c._ Ferdinand IV., the son and successor of Sancho the Brave, was still in his infancy when he succeeded to the throne. His minority was overshadowed by impending clouds; but the power and influence of Queen Mary, his mother, enabled her eventually to dissipate the dangers which threatened the safety of her son. This prince obtained his appellation of _the Summoned_ from the following circumstance. Actuated by feelings of strong indignation, Ferdinand commanded that two brothers, named Carvajal, who had been accused, but not convicted, of the crime of assassination, should be precipitated from a rocky precipice. Both the supposed criminals, in their last moments, asserted their innocence of the crime alleged against them, appealed to Heaven and the laws to verify the truth of their protestations, and summoned the passionate Ferdinand to appear before the Great Judge of all men at the end of thirty days. At the precise time thus indicated, the Castilian king, who was marching against the Moors, retired for repose after dinner, and was found dead upon his couch. The Spaniards attributed this sudden death to the effects of Divine justice. It had been well if the {224} monarchs who succeeded Ferdinand, Peter the Cruel in particular, had been convinced of the truth of this sentiment. E, page 149. _Retiring within the walls of Tariffe, &c._ After Sancho the Brave became master of Tariffe, it was besieged by the Africans. It was during this siege that Alphonso de Guzman, the Spanish governor of the city, exhibited an example of invincible firmness and self-command, of which none but parents can form a just estimate. The son of De Guzman was taken prisoner during a sortie. The Africans conducted their captive to the walls, and threatened the governor with his immolation unless the city should be immediately surrendered. The undaunted Spaniard replied only by hurling a poniard at his enemies, and retired from the battlements. In a moment loud cries burst from the garrison. Hastily demanding the cause of this alarm, the unhappy father was told that the Africans had put to death his son. "God be praised," said he, "I thought that the city had been taken!" F, page 158. _The celebrated Inez de Castro, &c._ The passion of Peter the Cruel for Inez de Castro was carried to such excess as, perhaps, in some degree, to account for the atrocity of his revenge upon her murderers. These were three distinguished Portuguese lords, who themselves stabbed the unfortunate Inez in the arms of her women. Peter, who, at the time this barbarous deed was committed, had not yet attained regal power, seemed from that period to lose all command of himself: from being gentle and virtuous, he became ferocious and almost insane. He openly rebelled against his father, carried fire and sword into those {225} parts of the kingdom in which the domains of the assassins of Inez were situated, and, when he afterward came into possession of the crown, insisted that the King of Castile should deliver up Gonzales and Coello, two of the guilty noblemen, who had taken refuge at his court. Thus master of the persons of two of his victims (the third had fled into France, where he died), Peter subjected them to the most dreadful tortures. He caused their hearts to be torn out while they were yet living, and assisted himself at this horrible sacrifice. After thus glutting his vengeance, the inconsolable lover exhumed the body of his murdered mistress, clothed it in magnificent habiliments, and, placing his crown upon the livid and revolting brow, proclaimed Inez de Castro queen of Portugal; compelling, at the same time, the grandees of his court to do homage to the insensible remains which he had invested with the attributes of royalty. G, page 161. _Most of the productions of the Grenadian authors, &c._ After the surrender of Grenada, Cardinal Ximenes caused every copy of the Koran of which he could obtain possession to be burned. The ignorant and superstitious soldiery mistook for that work everything written in the Arabic language, and committed to the flames a multitude of compositions both in prose and verse. H, page 178. _The Abencerrages, &c._ The inhabitants of Grenada, and, indeed, the whole Moorish people, were divided into tribes, composed of the different branches of the same family. Some of these tribes were more numerous and important than others: but two distinct {226} races were never united together, nor was one of them ever divided. At the head of each of these tribes was a chief who was descended in a direct male line from the original founder of the family. In the city of Grenada there existed thirty-two considerable tribes. The most important of these were the Abencerrages, the Zegris, the Alcenabez, the Almorades, the Vanegas, the Gomeles, the Abidbars, the Gauzuls, the Abenamars, the Aliatars, the Reduans, the Aldoradins, etc. These separate races were, many of them, at enmity with each other; and their animosity being perpetuated from one generation to another, gave rise to the frequent civil wars which were attended with such disastrous consequences to the nation at large. I, page 198 _His humane injunctions respecting almsgiving, &c._ Almsgiving is one of the leading principles of the Mohammedan religion. It was enjoined upon the followers of the Prophet by a variety of allegories, among which is the following: "The sovereign Judge shall, at the last great day, entwine him who has not bestowed alms with a frightful serpent, whose envenomed sting shall for ever pierce the avaricious hand that never opened for the relief of the unfortunate!" {227} A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF THE RISE AND DECLINE OF THE MOHAMMEDAN EMPIRE; THE LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND RELIGION OF THE ARABS; AND THE PRESENT CONDITION OF MOHAMMEDANISM {229} A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF THE MOHAMMEDAN EMPIRE. CHAPTER I. Extent of the Arabian Empire.--Causes which led to that extent.--Continuance of Mohammedanism.--Decay of the Empire.--What led to it.--Spain revolts and sets up a separate Caliph.--Africa.--Egypt.--Bagdad.--Fall of the House of the Abbassides. The first battle in which the Arabs tried their power against the disciplined forces of the Roman empire was the battle of Muta. Though on that occasion they were successful, the most sanguine could not have ventured to predict that, before the close of a century, their empire would become more extensive than any that had ever before existed. Yet such was the fact. It overthrew the power of the Romans, and rendered the successors of the Prophet the mightiest and most absolute sovereigns on earth. Under the last monarch of the Ommiade race, {230} the Arabian empire, excepting only an obscure part of Africa, of little account, embraced a compact territory equal to six months' march of a caravan in length and four in breadth, with innumerable tributary and dependant states. In the exercise of their power, the caliphs were fettered neither by popular rights, the votes of a senate, nor constitutional laws: the Koran was, indeed, their professed rule of action; but, inasmuch as they alone were its interpreters, their will was in all cases law. The loss of Spain to the empire was more than made up by conquests in India, Tartary, and European Turkey. Samarcand and Timbuctoo studied with equal devotion the language and religion of the Koran, and at the temple of Mecca the Moor and the Indian met as brother pilgrims. Throughout the countries west of the Tigris, the language of Arabia became the vehicle of popular intercourse; and, although in Persia, Tartary, and Hindostan the native dialects continued in common use, the Arabic was also there the sacred tongue. We will advert to some of the causes which led to this astonishing success. The leading article of the Mohammedan faith, the unity of God, harmonized with what Jews and Christians universally believed. Mohammed propounded this doctrine, by excluding the Deity of Jesus Christ, so as {231} to fall in with the views of the greater number of the Christian sectaries. He moreover enjoined practices which, in the then corrupt state of religion, were beginning widely to prevail. To the untutored mind of the desert wanderer, his doctrine would thus possess all the attractiveness he might have heard ascribed to Christianity, while his being of the same country would secure for him the greater attention. Systems in which truth and error have been combined are by no means unwillingly received, especially by those who are already superstitious and fanatical, and such was pre-eminently the character of the Arabians. Mohammed's religious, moral, and juridical system was in general accordance with Asiatic opinions; it provided a paradise exactly suited to the imagination and taste of the Orientals; and, as the superstitious are always more powerfully influenced by that which awakens apprehension and appeals to fear than by what enkindles hope, his hell contributed even more than his heaven to multiply disciples. Still, had no resort been had to arms, the Mohammedan faith would in all probability have been confined to the deserts of Arabia. The whole of Asia was at that time in a state of unprecedented military inactivity, and opportunity was thus afforded for the success of his enterprise. Empires {232} were tottering and powerless; political wisdom had almost disappeared; and to military talents and courage the Arabs alone could make any pretensions. Previous contentions between the Persian and Byzantine empires had entirely destroyed what little remains of internal vigour those governments might otherwise have possessed. Civil revolts, tyranny, extortion, sensuality, and sloth, had annihilated the ambition of universal rule which the Greek and Roman governments had once cherished; and their provinces, neglected or oppressed, became an easy prey to the Moslem power. The nations were the more rapidly subdued, since to the indomitable ferocity of the desert wanderer the Saracens added those other features which complete a warlike character. They despised death, and were self-denying and energetic to a degree far beyond the soldiers of civilized countries, while they were scarcely less familiar with the military art. The lieutenants of the caliphs soon vied with the Roman generals in skill; and it is by no means difficult to explain their almost uniform superiority, when we bear in mind the character of the armies they respectively commanded. Terror, moreover, is epidemic; and a force already successful commonly finds its victorious progress greatly aided by the prevailing notion of its prowess. Thus we have witnessed, {233} in the wars of more disciplined troops, the tremendous effect of a name alone. It may be added, also, that the Saracen success is greatly attributable to that ardent and impetuous spirit of religious enthusiasm with which they fought. They deemed their cause the cause of God; heaven, they were persuaded, was engaged in their behalf; every one who fell in their wars was a martyr; and cowardice was tantamount to apostacy. The religious ardour of the Crusaders, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to exterminate Mohammedanism, did not exceed, if it even equalled, that of the Arab soldiers by whom that system had been originally propagated. Whatever secular principles and ambition influenced them, they took credit for fighting in the support of truth and virtue. The sword and the Koran were equally the companions and the instruments of their wars. "The circumstance," says Paley, in his admirable exhibition of the Evidences of Christianity,[1] "that Mohammed's conquests should carry his religion along with them, will excite little surprise when we know the conditions which he proposed to the vanquished: death or conversion was the only choice offered to idolaters. To the Jews and Christians was left the somewhat milder {234} alternative of subjection and tribute if they persisted in their own religion, or of an equal participation of the rights and liberties, the honours and privileges of the faithful if they embraced the religion of their conquerors." Literature, in the days of Mohammed, was as little regarded as was pure and practical Christianity. His followers everywhere met with an ignorant and easily deluded people. Both the monuments of science and the means of freedom had been abolished by the barbarians of the North. Philosophy and the liberal arts found no patrons among indolent and luxurious emperors and nobles. Superstition, therefore, naturally took possession of the minds of men, and, as neither fears nor hopes were moderated by knowledge, idle, preposterous, and unnecessary ceremonies easily obtained currency. Mohammed merely changed one set of ceremonies for another; and in this there was little difficulty, since, in the almost universal darkness of mankind, terror and credulity everywhere prevailed. The continuance of the religion of Mohammed in countries after the Arab dominion over them had ceased, may be also easily accounted for. "Everything in Asia is a matter of regulation; and freedom of opinion being but little permitted or encouraged in the despotic governments of the {235} East, Mohammedanism, when once received, became stationary. The human code is mingled with the divine, and the ideas of change and profanation are inseparable. As the unsettling of the political and social fabric might ensue from a change of modes of faith, all classes of men are interested in preserving the national religion." [2] Besides this, in their own nature religious doctrines are more permanent in their hold than forms of civil government: it may be questioned, for in stance, whether, whatever civil changes Scotland might undergo, Presbyterianism would ever cease to be the prevalent faith of its inhabitants. A people may, with the overthrow of usurped civil power, return to their ancient religion, whatever it is: but when once a religion has become, so to speak, indigenous, it is likely to be permanent. Such is the religion of the Koran both in Asia and Africa. The elements of political weakness and decay soon began to be developed in the chief seat of the Saracen empire. In the earliest days of the caliphate, after the accession of the Ommiade dynasty, the princes of Damascus were regarded as the heads of the Moslem faith; while the governors of Arabia successively obtained, as to civil rule, their independence. To this the widely-extended wars in which the caliphs were engaged no doubt {236} contributed. Other provinces followed the example; and, as the empire enlarged, the remoteness and degeneracy of the Syrian court encouraged the governors to assume to themselves everything except the name of king, and to render their dignities hereditary. All the provinces were nominally connected with the empire by the payment of tribute; but means were easily devised to withhold this, under pretence of prosecuting the wars of the caliph, though really to strengthen his rebellious deputies against him. If in this we discover a want of efficiency in the government, we need not be surprised: the systems of the Macedonian hero and of the Roman conquerors were equally defective; and perhaps we should attribute such deficiency to a wise and beneficent arrangement of Providence, which, that oppression may never become permanent and universal, permits not any empire for a very long time to hold dominion over countries dissimilar in their habits and character and independent of each other. To the establishment of these separate states, the luxury and effeminacy of the court at Damascus in no small degree contributed. In the early periods of the caliphate, simplicity and charity chiefly distinguished their rulers; but, as the wealth and power of the Saracens increased, they imitated the splendour and magnificence of the monarchs of Persia {237} and Greece. Abulfeda says of the court in the year 917: "The Caliph Moctadi's whole army, both horse and foot, were under arms, which together made a body of one hundred and sixty thousand men. His state officers stood near him in the most splendid apparel, their belts shining with gold and gems. Near them were seven thousand black and white eunuchs. The porters or doorkeepers were in number seven hundred. Barges and boats, with the most superb decorations, were swimming on the Tigris. Nor was the palace itself less splendid, in which were hung thirty-eight thousand pieces of tapestry, twelve thousand five hundred of which were of silk embroidered with gold. The carpets on the floor were twenty-two thousand. A hundred lions were brought out, with a keeper to each lion. Among the other spectacles of rare and stupendous luxury was a tree of gold and silver, which opened itself into eighteen larger branches, upon which and the other smaller branches sat birds of every sort, made also of gold and silver. The tree glittered with leaves of the same metals; and while its branches, through machinery, appeared to move of themselves, the several birds upon them warbled their natural notes." When, moreover, decline had once commenced, its progress was accelerated by the means taken {238} to arrest it. After the regular troops had been corrupted by faction, the caliphs, for the defence of their person and government, formed a militia; but the soldiers composing this force, not unfrequently foreigners, soon governed with a military despotism similar to that of the janizaries of Turkey, the Mamelukes of Egypt, or the praetorian guards of Rome; and, in addition to these causes of decay, a furious spirit of sectarianism tore asunder the very strength and heart of the empire. The colossal power of the successors of Mohammed, suddenly towering to its awful height, almost as suddenly fell, as if to yield more perfect confirmation of the truth, that all earthly things are destined to pass away, while the word of the living God abideth for ever. Spain, as has been seen, was the first distant province of the Arabian empire which succeeded in separating itself and setting up an independent caliph. As this country had been brought under the Moslem yoke by means chiefly furnished from the northern states of Africa, its independence was likely to produce a corresponding effect upon those states. They were governed in the name of the Bagdad caliphs; but for nearly a century they had been growing into independence, under rulers usually known, from the name of their progenitor, as the Aglabite dynasty. Early in the ninth century, {239} the throne of Mauritania, Massilia, and Carthage was seized by Obeidollah, whose successors assumed the title of Mihidi, or directors of the faithful. The districts of Fez and Tangiers, which had been already wrested from the princes of Bagdad by the real or pretended posterity of Ali, were soon brought under his dominion; and, before the end of the tenth century, all acknowledgment of the Abbassidan rule was obliterated by the suppression of public prayers for the princes of that race. A succession of changes distracted the country for some five centuries afterward; but, about the year 1516, the descendants of Mohammed were raised to the throne of Morocco, which has been transmitted, without interruption, in the same line, to its present possessors. Moez, the last of the African princes of the house of Obeidollah, who seems to have depended for his dominion more on his prowess than on his supposed descent from Mohammed,[3] transferred his court to Grand Cairo, a city which he had built in Egypt after his conquest of that country. Africa was to be held as a fief of this new empire. Large tracts of Syria and the whole of Palestine acknowledged the {240} supremacy of his descendants, commonly known as Fatimites, from their supposed relationship to Ali, and to Fatima, the Prophet's daughter. They possessed also the sovereignty of the Holy Land; against them, therefore, the crusades of Europe were chiefly directed. During these formidable wars the caliphs of Egypt sought assistance from those of Bagdad; and Noureddin, a prince of that empire, protected them against their Western assailants. The weakness of Egypt, however, came thus to be known to the crafty and powerful caliphs of Bagdad, and in a short time its Asiatic dominions were seized upon by Noureddin and Saladin. As Adhed, the last caliph of Egypt, was dying in the mosque of Cairo, these generals proclaimed Morthadi, the thirty-third caliph of Bagdad, as his successor. Saladin, whose name, from his activity, courage, and success against the crusaders, is better known to the readers of European history than that of almost any other Mohammedan prince, soon made himself master of Egypt; but his successors could not maintain the power he had acquired. The country is now governed by the celebrated Mohammed Ali, nominally as viceroy of the Turkish emperor, though he is in reality a sovereign and independent prince. The caliphs of the house of Abbas, having built the city of Bagdad soon after their accession to the {241} throne, transferred thither their court and the seat of power. For five centuries they reigned there with various degrees of authority; but foreign wars and domestic revolts gradually dissolved the empire, and their dominion at length passed away. Badhi, the twentieth caliph of the race, was "the last," says Abulfeda, "who harangued the people from the pulpit; who passed the cheerful hour of leisure with men of learning and taste; whose expenses, resources, and treasures, whose table and magnificence, had any resemblance to those of the ancient caliphs." "During the next three centuries," says a modern historian of the Arabian empire, "the successors of Mohammed swayed a feeble sceptre. Sometimes their state was so degraded that they were confined in their palaces like prisoners, and occasionally were almost reduced to the want of corporeal subsistence. The tragic scenes of fallen royalty at length were closed; for, towards the middle of the seventh century of the Hegira, the metropolis of Islamism fell into the hands of Houlagou Khan, the grandson of Zenghis Khan, and emperor of the Moguls and Tartars, who reigned at that period with absolute and unmixed despotism over every nation of the East. The caliph Mostasem, the thirty-seventh of his house, was murdered under circumstances of peculiar barbarity, and the caliphate of Bagdad {242} expired. Though the dignity and sovereignty of the caliphs were lost by this fatal event, and the soul which animated the form had fled, yet the name existed for three centuries longer in the eighteen descendants of Mostanser Billah, a son, or pretended son, of Daker, the last but one of this race of princes. "Mostanser Billah and his successors, to the number of eighteen, were called the second dynasty of the Abbassides, and were spiritual chiefs of the Mohammedan religion, but without the slightest vestige of temporal authority. When Selim, emperor of the Turks, conquered Egypt and destroyed the power of the Mamelukes, he carried the caliph, whom he found there a prisoner, to Constantinople, and accepted from him a renunciation of his ecclesiastical supremacy. On the death of the caliph, the family of the Abbassides, once so illustrious, and which had borne the title of caliph for almost eight hundred years, sunk with him from obscurity into oblivion." [4] [1] Vol. ii., Section 3. [2] Mills, p. 179. [3] When it was demanded of Moez from what branch of Mohammed's family he drew his title, "This," said he, showing his cimeter, "is my pedigree; and these," throwing gold among his soldiers, "are my children." [4] Mill's History, 160. {243} CHAPTER II. Literature and Science of the Arabs.--Their Facilities for Literary and Scientific Pursuits.--Patronage of Literature by the Princes of the House of Abbas.--Almamoun.--Arabian Schools.--Eloquence.--Poetry.--The Arabian Tales.--History.--Geography.--Speculative Sciences.--Astrology.--Mathematical Knowledge of the Arabs.--Astronomy.--Architecture.--The Fine Arts.--Agriculture.--Medicine.--Chymistry.--Our obligations to Arab Literature. The early followers of the Arabian prophet were only enthusiastic military adventurers, subduing in their wide and rapid progress most of the nations of the then known world. The lust of power, and successful military enterprise, are commonly unfavourable to the cultivation of the liberal arts, so that a conquering people usually exhibit but little taste for science or literature. The Goths and the Huns, for instance, were among the most implacable foes of knowledge. Nor did the early Arabs regard it with more favour. Mohammed found his countrymen sunk in the deepest barbarism: he was incapable of any direct effort to raise them; and, from the ruthless destruction of the Alexandrean library by Omar, one of his earliest successors, they appear not to have been in a much {244} better condition after the close than at the commencement of his eventful career. Their settlement in the countries they had subdued, the unlimited resources which their wide-spread conquests placed within their reach, and probably the leisure which their almost universal dominion afforded, speedily led to a change in their character in relation to literary pursuits, of which the more enlightened nations of the West are still reaping the advantage. It was about the middle of the seventh century that Omar committed the famous library of Alexandrea to the flames: before the end of the eighth, literature began to enjoy the munificent patronage of the caliphs of the Abbassidan race, who superinduced upon the stern fanaticism of the followers of the Prophet the softening influences of learning; and, by an anomaly in the history of mankind, the most valuable lessons in science and the arts have been received from a people who pursued with relentless hostility the religion and liberties of every other nation. The Greeks were the most distinguished patrons of literature and science. Among them philosophy found its earliest home, and the arts are commonly supposed to have sprung up chiefly under their fostering care, though modern researches have shown that much of their knowledge was derived from still more ancient sources. Their {245} philosophy, though greatly improved by them, was borrowed from the mysteries of the Egyptian priests and the Persian magi. Their system of the universe, which made the nearest approach to the more correct discoveries of modern times, was previously known to the learned Hindus; and it may admit of question whether their whole mythology, allowing for the additions which a chastened and vivid imagination would make to it, had not its prototype in some Asiatic religio-philosophical system. A learned writer on the erudition of the Asiatics says, that the whole of the theology of the Greeks, and part of the philosophy of modern scientific research, may be found in the Hindu Vedas. He adds, "That most subtile spirit which Newton suspected to pervade natural bodies, and to lie concealed in them so as to cause attraction and repulsion, the emission, reflection, and refraction of light, electricity, calefaction, sensation, and muscular motion, is described by the Hindus as a fifth element, endued with those very powers; and the Vedas abound with allusions to a force universally attractive, which they chiefly attribute to the sun." The extension, therefore, of the Arabian victories over the Eastern world, and their entire command, after the overthrow of the Greek empire, of the resources possessed by that people, {246} gave them access to all the literary stores then in existence. It has been said, and probably not without good reason, that Mohammed himself saw and felt the importance of literary distinction. Among the sayings attributed to him, the following has been considered as evincing his sense of the value of learning: "A mind without erudition is like a body without a soul. Glory consists not in wealth, but in knowledge;" and, as the Koran affords abundant proof, he was by no means unmindful of that mental cultivation, of which the means were within his reach. His immediate followers, occupied only with the ideas of conquest and conversion, despised equally the religion and learning of the nations they subdued; but when the age of rapine and violence yielded at length to comparative security and quiet, and the fair and splendid city of the Oriental caliphs arose, the Muses were courted from their ancient temples, and by the milder and more graceful achievements of literature and science, efforts were made to expiate the guilt of former conquest, and to shed a purer lustre over the Mohammedan name. Almansor, the second of the dynasty of the Abbassides, whose reign commenced A.D. 754, and lasted twenty-one years, was among the first of the Arab princes to foster learning and the arts. {247} Jurisprudence and astronomy were the principal subjects of his study, which, however, through the instruction of a Greek physician in his court, he extended to the art of healing, and probably to those kindred arts with which, in all ages and countries, medical science has been connected. What progress was made by himself or his subjects, we cannot now ascertain. His two immediate successors seem not to have trodden in his steps, though it is probable they did not undo what he had done; for the next caliph, Haroun al Raschid, is renowned as one of the most munificent patrons that literature ever enjoyed. He was fond of poetry and music: he is said to have constantly surrounded himself with a great number of learned men; and to him the Arabs were deeply indebted for the progress in knowledge which they were enabled to make. Every mosque in his dominions had a school attached to it by his order; and, as if his love of learning were superior even to his hereditary faith, he readily tolerated men of science who refused to yield to the bold pretensions of the Prophet. A Nestorian Christian presided over his schools, and directed the academical studies of his subjects. His successor imitated his wise and generous course; and thus knowledge extended from the capital to the most distant extremities of the empire. {248} But it was during the reign of Almamoun, the seventh of the Abbassidan princes, A.D. 813-833, that literature flourished most among the Arabs. Learned men, professors of the Christian faith, had multiplied at Bagdad under the tolerant reigns of his predecessors, and they were now liberally encouraged to unfold their ample stores of knowledge. The copious language of Arabia was employed to communicate whatever that of the Greeks had hitherto concealed, though, with a barbarism for which it is difficult to account, many of the original works were destroyed as soon as translations of them were made. Almamoun in his youth had associated with the most eminent scholars of Greece, Persia, and Chaldea; and he now invited them to his court. Bagdad was resorted to by poets, philosophers, and mathematicians, from every country and of every creed. Armenia, Syria, and Egypt were explored by his agents for literary treasures, which were amassed with infinite care, and presented at the foot of the throne as the richest and most acceptable tribute that conquered provinces could render. Camels, hitherto employed exclusively in traffic, were seen entering the royal city laden with Hebrew, Persian, and Grecian manuscripts. The court assumed the appearance rather of an academy than of a council guiding the affairs of a luxurious and warlike {249} government, and all classes were encouraged to apply themselves to the acquisition of knowledge with a zeal commensurate to the advantages thus afforded. "I chose," said Almamoun, when remonstrated with for appointing a learned Christian to an office of no small influence over the intellectual pursuits of his people, "I chose this learned man, not to be my guide in religious affairs, but to be my teacher of science; and it is well known that the wisest men are to be found among the Jews and Christians." [1] Under such favourable auspices, it is not to be wondered at that the Saracens became a literary people. The caliphs of the West and of Africa imitated their brethren of the East. "At one period, six thousand professors and pupils cultivated liberal studies in the college of Bagdad. Twenty schools made Grand Cairo a chief seat of letters; and the talents of the students were exercised in the perusal of the royal library, which consisted of one hundred thousand manuscripts. The African writers dwell with pride and satisfaction on the literary institutions which adorned the towns on the northern coast of their sandy plain. The sun of science arose even in Africa, and the manners of the Moorish savage were softened by philosophy. {250} Their brethren in Europe amassed numerous and magnificent collections; two hundred and eighty thousand volumes were in Cordova, and more than seventy libraries were open to public curiosity in the kingdom of Andalusia." We know but little of the internal government of the Arabian schools, or of the studies actually pursued. Aristotle, no doubt, was the great master to whom, in philosophy, all deference was paid. The Prophet had prescribed their religion. Their schools were of two kinds, or rather classes; the one comprehending the inferior institutions, in which elementary branches of instruction, such as reading, writing, and religious doctrine were chiefly attended to; the other, called _Madras_, mostly connected with the mosques, as were all the schools of the former class, included those institutions in which the higher departments of knowledge were explored. Here grammar, logic, theology, and jurisprudence were studied. The management of each school was confided to a principal of known ability, and not always, a Mohammedan. The professors lectured on the several sciences; and the pupils, if not in every department, of which there is some doubt, certainly in that of medicine, were publicly examined, and diplomas were given under the hand of the chief physician. Of elegant composition, the Koran was {251} universally esteemed the model. Hence it was studied with the most diligent care by all who sought to distinguish themselves in the art of eloquence, one of the leading acquirements of Arab scholars. Subordinate to this pre-eminent composition, their schools of oratory boasted of models scarcely inferior to the celebrated orators of antiquity. Malek and Sharaif, the one for pathos, the other for brilliancy, are the chief of these. Horaiai was esteemed as the compeer of Demosthenes and Cicero. Bedreddin, of Grenada, was their "torch of eloquence;" and Sekaki obtained the honourable designation of the Arabian Quinctilian. The ancient Arabs were much inclined to poetry. The wild, romantic scenery of the land they inhabited, the sacred recollections of their earliest history, the life they led, everything around them, contributed to poetic inspiration. After the revival of letters, this art was cultivated with enthusiasm. The heroic measures of Ferdousi, the didactic verses of Sadi, and the lyric strains of Hafiz, even through the medium of imperfect translations, discover animated descriptions, bold metaphors, and striking expressions, that at once delight and surprise us. In splendour, if not in strength, the poets of the courts of Haroun and Almamoun, or those of the Ommiades of Spain, have, perhaps, in no age been excelled. In this art, as among other {252} people, so among the Arabs, the fair sex have distinguished themselves. Valadata, Aysha, Labana, Safia, and others, have obtained the highest encomiums. So great is the number of Arabian poets, that Abul Abbas, a son of Motassem, who wrote an abridgment of their lives in the ninth century, numbers one hundred and thirty. Other authors have occupied twenty-four, thirty, and one no less than fifty volumes, in recording their history. The Arabs, however, are entirely without epic poetry, so important a department of the art; nor have they anything that may be properly ranked as dramatic composition. Sophocles, Euripides, Terence, and Seneca, the classic models of Greece and Rome, they despised as timid, constrained, and cold; and under whatever obligation to these ancient nations the Arabs may have been in other departments of literature, they owe them nothing, or next to nothing, in this. Their poetry was original and local; their figures and comparisons were strictly their own. To understand and properly appreciate them, we must have a knowledge of the productions of their country, and of the character, institutions, and manners of its inhabitants. The muse delights in illustrations and figures borrowed from pastoral life; that of Judea revels among the roses of Sharon, the verdant slopes of {253} Carmel, and the glory of Lebanon; while the Arab muse selects for her ornaments the pearls of Omar, the musk of Hadramaut, the groves and nightingales of Aden, and the spicy odours of Yemen. If these appear to us fantastic, it must be remembered they are borrowed from objects and scenes to which we are almost utter strangers. Who is not familiar with the Alif lita wa lilin, or the thousand and one tales, commonly known as the Arabian Nights' Entertainment? Some have questioned whether they are an original work, or a translation from the Indian or Persian, made in the Augustan age of Arab literature: a doubt certainly not warranted by any want of exactness in their description of Arabian life and manners. They seem to have been originally the legends of itinerant story-tellers, a class of persons still very numerous in every part of the Mohammedan world. The scenes they unfold, true to nature; the simplicity displayed in their characters, their beauty and their moral instruction, appeal irresistibly to the hearts of all; while the learned concede to them the merit of more perfectly describing the manners of the singular people from whom they sprung, than the works of any traveller, however accomplished and indefatigable. Of history the ancient Arabs were strangely negligent; but, by the more modern, this {254} department of knowledge has been cultivated with greater care and success. Annals, chronicles, and memoirs, almost numberless, are extant among them: kingdoms, provinces, and towns are described, and their history is narrated in volumes, a bare catalogue of which would extend to a wearisome length. They abound, however, more in the fanciful than in the substantial and correct. Of this, the titles of some of the most approved works of this kind may be taken as specimens: A Chronology of the Caliphs of Spain and Africa is denominated "A Silken Vest, embroidered with the Needle;" a History of Grenada, "A Specimen of the Full Moon;" Ibu Abbas and Abu Bakri are authors of historical collections, entitled respectively, "Mines of Silver," and "Pearls and picked-up Flowers." Yet some of their writers, as Ibn Katibi, are chiefly remarkable for the extent and accuracy of their historical knowledge; and some of their works are exceedingly voluminous. A full history of Spain occupied six authors in succession, and cost the labour of one hundred and fifteen years to complete. Their biography was not confined to men. Ibn Zaid and Abul Mondar wrote a genealogical history of distinguished horses; and Alasucco and Abdolmalec performed the same service for camels worthy of being had in remembrance. Encyclopaedias and gazetteers, {255} with dictionaries of the sciences and other similar works, occupied Arabian pens long before they came into vogue among more modern literati. Every species of composition, indeed, and almost every subject, in one age or another, have engaged the attention of learned Mohammedans. Geography they did not so well understand, their means of acquiring knowledge on this subject being exceedingly limited. Yet their public libraries could boast of globes, voyages, and itineraries, the productions of men who travelled to acquire geographical information. With statistics and political economy they had but an imperfect acquaintance; yet so early as the reign of Omar II. we find a work devoted to these subjects, giving an account of the provinces and cities of Spain, with its rivers, ports, and harbours; of the climate, soil, mountains, plants, and minerals of that country; with its imports, and the manner in which its several productions, natural and artificial, might be manufactured and applied to the best advantage. Money, weights, and measures, with whatever else political economy may be understood to include, were also subjects which employed their ingenious speculations, and, in some cases, their laborious research. The speculative sciences, scarcely less than polite literature, flourished among the Arabs. {256} Indeed, what superstitious, enthusiastic people has ever neglected these? Their ardour in the more dignified of these pursuits was badly regulated; subtleties were preferred to important practical truths; and, frequently, the more ingenious the sophism, constructed after the rules of Aristotle, the more welcome was it to men who rendered to that philosopher a homage almost idolatrous. The later Arabs, and the Turks of the present day, pay no little attention to astrology, though it is strongly prohibited by their Prophet. This science was universally employed by the idolaters, against whom his denunciations are scarcely less inveterate than are those of the inspired volume; and doubtless he apprehended that its prevalence would hazard the integrity, if not the very existence, of his own system of religion. For many ages, therefore, it was discountenanced; but, at length, the habit of consulting the stars on important public occasions became frequent, and was attended with as much anxiety and as many absurd ceremonies as disgraced the nations of antiquity. Among the modern Mohammedans, no dignity of state is conferred; no public edifice is founded, except at a time recommended by astrologers. These pretenders to knowledge are supported by persons of rank; and in vain do the more enlightened part of the community exclaim that astrology is a false {257} science. "Do not think," said a prime minister, who had been consulting a soothsayer as to the time of putting on a new dress, "that I am such a fool as to put faith in all this nonsense; but I must not make my family unhappy by refusing to comply with forms which some of them deem of consequence." After these references to the polite literature of the Arabs, it will be expected that they should have paid attention to the natural sciences. They were not, indeed, discoverers and inventors, but they considerably improved upon what they acquired in their extensive intercourse with other nations; and, as forming the link which unites ancient and modern letters, they are entitled to our respect and gratitude. We derive our mathematics from them; and to them, also, we owe much of our astronomical knowledge. Almamoun, by a liberal reward, sought to engage in his service a famous mathematician of Constantinople; and Ibn Korrah enriched the stores of his country in this department with translations of Archimedes and the conics of Apollonius. Some have said that, on the revival of European literature in the fifteenth century, mathematical science was found nearly in the state in which it had been left by Euclid; and the justly celebrated Brucker contends, that the Arabs made no progress whatever in this {258} most important branch of knowledge; later writers, however, and particularly Montucia, the author of the Histoire des Mathematiques, have done ample justice to their researches. Numerical characters, without which our study of the exact sciences were almost in vain, beyond all doubt came to us from the Arabs: not that they invented them--it is probable they were originally words, perhaps Hindu words, expressing the quantities they respectively represent, but abbreviated and brought to their present convenient form by the followers of the Prophet. Trigonometry and algebra are both indebted to their genius. The sines of the one of these sciences instead of the more ancient chord, and the representatives of quantities in the other, descend through the Arabs to us, if they did not at first invent them. Original works on spherical trigonometry are among the productions of Ibn Musa and Geber, the former of whom is accounted the inventor of the solution of equations of the second degree. The University of Leyden still retains a manuscript treatise on the algebra of cubic equations, by Omar ibn Ibrahim; and Casiri, who, preserved and classed 1851 manuscripts, even after a fire had destroyed the magnificent collection or the Escurial, informs us, that the principles and praises of algebraic science were sung in an elaborate poem by Alcassem, a native of Grenada. {259} These departments of knowledge were studied by the Arabs as early as the eighth and ninth centuries. Astronomy, the science of a pastoral people, and eminently so in regions with an almost cloudless sky, like the East, was studied with great eagerness by Arabian philosophers. Almamoun, who has been before mentioned, was ardently devoted to it: at his cost the necessary instruments of observation were provided, and a complete digest of the science was made. The land where, many ages before, this science had been successfully studied by the Chaldeans, was in his power, and upon its ample plains a degree of the earth's circle was repeatedly measured, so as to determine the whole circumference of the globe to be twenty-four thousand miles. The obliquity of the ecliptic they settled at twenty-three degrees and a half: the annual movement of the equinoxes and the duration of the tropical year were brought to within a very little of the exact observations of modern times, the slight error they admitted resulting from the preference they gave to the system of Ptolemy. Albathani, or, as his name has been Latinized, Albatenius, in the ninth century, after continuing his observations for forty years, drew up tables, known as the Sabean tables, which, though not now in very high repute because of more accurate calculations, {260} were for a long time justly esteemed. Other Arabian astronomers have rendered considerable service to this science. Mohammedanism did not, like ancient paganism, adore the stars; but its disciples studied them with a diligence, without which, perhaps, Newton, Flamstead, and Halley had observed and calculated almost in vain. Architecture was an art in which the Arabs greatly excelled; their wide extension gave them command of whatever was worthy of observation, and their vast revenues afforded the most abundant means of indulging a taste thus called into exercise. The history of Arabian architecture comprises a period of about eight centuries, including its rise, progress, and decay: their building materials were mostly obtained from the ruined structures and cities that fell into their hands; and if no one particular style was followed by them, it was because they successfully studied most of the styles then known. On their buildings but little external art was bestowed; all their pains were exhausted on the interior, where no expense wag spared that could promote luxurious ease and personal comfort. Their walls and ceilings were highly embellished, and the light was mostly admitted in such manner as, by excluding all external objects, to confine the admiration of the spectator to the beauties produced within. With the art {261} of preserving their structures from decay they must have had an adequate acquaintance. Their stucco composition may still be found as hard as stone, without a crack or flaw: the floors and ceilings of the Alhambra, the ancient palace of Grenada, have been comparatively uninjured by the neglect and dilapidation of nearly seven centuries; while their paint retains its colour so bright and rich as to be occasionally mistaken for mother-of-pearl. Sir Christopher Wren derives the Gothic architecture from the Mohammedans; and the crescent arch, a symbol of one of the deities anciently worshipped throughout the heathen world, was first adopted by the Arabs of Syria, and invariably used in all the edifices erected during the supremacy of the Ommiades. The succeeding dynasty declined following this model; but, during the reign of the house of Moawiyah, in Spain, it was imitated from the Atlantic to the Pyrenees. The fine arts, painting, and sculpture, were not so much cultivated among the early Mohammedans: they were thought to involve a breach of the divine law. In this particular they agreed with the Jews. Subsequently, however, these scruples were, by degrees, overcome; that style of embellishment denominated Arabesque, which rejects figures of men and animals, being first adopted, and afterward sculpture, more nearly resembling {262} that of modern times. The Alhambra, or palace of that suburb, had its lions, its ornamented tiles, and its paintings. Abdalrahman III. placed a statue of his favourite mistress over the palace he erected for her abode. Music was ardently cultivated. At first, in the desert, its strains were rude and simple; subsequently, the professors of the art were as much cherished, honoured, and rewarded, as were the poets in the courts of the Arab sovereigns. Many were celebrated for their skill in this art, especially Isaac Almouseli. Al Farabi has been denominated the Arabian Orpheus: by his astonishing command of the lute, he could produce laughter, or tears, or sleep in his auditors at pleasure. He wrote a considerable work on music, which is preserved in the Escurial. Abul Faragi is also a famous writer among the Mohammedans on this subject. To them we are indebted for the invention of the lute, which they accounted more perfect than any other instrument; the use, also, of many of our modern instruments, as the organ, flute, harp, tabor, and mandoline, was common among them. Some say that the national instrument of the Scottish highlander is taken from them. In many of the useful arts of modern days the Arabs were proficients; as agriculture, gardening, metallurgy, and the preparing of leather. The {263} names Morocco and Cordovan are still applied, in this latter art, to leather prepared after the Arabian method. They manufactured and dyed silk and cotton, made paper, were acquainted with the use of gunpowder, and have claims to the honour of inventing the mariner's compass. But perhaps there is no art in which their knowledge is so much a subject of curious inquiry as medicine. Their country was salubrious, their habits simple, and their indulgences few; so that large opportunities of practically studying the art, at least among the Arabs of earlier date, would not occur. Anatomy, except that of the brute creation, was shut up from their study by the prejudices of their creed; yet they excelled in medical skill. Hareth ibn Kaldar, an eminent practitioner settled at Mecca, was honoured with the conversation and applause of Mohammed. Honain was an eminent Arab physician in the middle of the sixth century; Messue, the celebrated preceptor of Almamoun, belonged to this profession; and a host of others adorn the early annals of the Saracens. Al Rhagi, or Ullages, as commonly called, and Abdallah ibn Sina, or Avicenna, are names to which, for centuries, deference was paid by professors of the healing art throughout Europe, though it would not be difficult to show that their doctrines and practice must have been beyond measure absurd. They {264} administered gold, and silver, and precious stones to purify the blood. Of chymistry, so far as it relates to medicine, the Arabs may be considered as the inventors; and botany, in the same connexion, they cultivated with great success. Geber, in the eighth century, is known as their principal chymical writer; he is said to have composed five hundred volumes, almost every one of which is lost. The early nomenclature of the science indicates how much it owes to this people. Alcohol, alembic, alkali, aludel, and other similar terms, are evidently of Arabic origin; nor should it be forgotten that the characters used for drugs, essences, extracts, and medicines, the import of which is now almost entirely unknown (and which are consequently invested, in vulgar estimation, with occult powers), are all to be traced to the same source. It may be impossible now to estimate accurately the extent of our obligations to Arabian literature. An empire so widely spread, by the encouragement it gave to letters, must have had a beneficial influence on almost every country. Europeans, whether subject to its sway or only contemplating it from a distance, copied or emulated the example. Gerbert, who subsequently occupied the papal chair as Silvester II., acquired the Arabic method of computation during his travels in Spain, {265} previously to his elevation. Leonardo, a Pisan merchant, obtained a knowledge of the same art in his intercourse with the Mohammedans on the coast of Africa; and by him it was introduced into his own native republic, from whence it was soon communicated to the Western World. In the city of Salernum, a port of Italy, Mussulmans and Christians so intermixed as to communicate insensibly the literature of the Saracens to the Italians, and in the schools of that city students were collected from every quarter of Europe. Arabic books, by command of Charlemagne, were translated into Latin for the use of learned men throughout his vast empire; and, without exaggerating the merits of the followers of the Prophet, it may be admitted that we are indebted to them for the revival of the exact and physical sciences, and for many of those useful arts and inventions that have totally changed the aspect of European literature, and are still contributing to the civilization, freedom, and best interests of man. [1] Abulferage, p. 160. {266} CHAPTER III. The present Condition of Mohammedanism.--In Turkey.--The Doctrines believed there.--Their Forms of Devotion.--Lustrations.--Prayer.--Mohammedan Sabbath.--Fast of Ramadan.--Meccan Pilgrimage.--Proselytism.--Mohammedan Hierarchy.--Islamism in Tartary.--In Hindustan.--In China.--In Persia.--In Africa.--In the Indian Archipelago.--The Sooffees.--The Wahabees. The present condition of the Mohammedan faith, with some account of the standing it maintains in the world, will not be deemed an inappropriate subject for the closing pages of this volume. Its votaries have long ceased to spread alarm through the nations by their victorious and devastating progress; the fire of its fanaticism is almost extinct; nevertheless, its doctrines prevail over a larger number of mankind than any other system of false religion: they are professed in nations and countries remote from each other, and having no other mutual resemblance than that involved in their common superstition. In Spain, indeed, Christianity has triumphed over Islamism; and in the inhospitable regions of Siberia, a part of the ancient Tartary, its advance has been somewhat checked; but in middle and lower Asia, and in Africa, the {267} number of Mohammed's followers has increased. We cannot state with accuracy the number either of Mohammedan or of nominal Christians; but, looking at religion geographically, while Christianity has almost entire dominion in Europe, in Asia Islamism is the dominant faith: in America the cross is rapidly becoming the symbol of faith throughout both its vast continents; but in Africa the crescent waves to the almost entire exclusion of every other emblem. It is in Turkey that Mohammedanism exists at the present day in its most perfect form. To this country, therefore, our attention shall be first directed. Constantinople, anciently called Byzantium, and the countries over which the Greek emperors residing in that city reigned, were subdued by the powerful caliphs of Bagdad, while those of Spain and the West were endeavouring to push their conquests over the fairest portions of Europe. The situation of Constantinople and the surrounding empire lay especially open to the Eastern Mohammedans, whose warlike incursions were incessant. Tartars from Asia overran the empire. Othman, in the early part of the thirteenth century, laid the foundation of Turkish greatness. Orchan, Amurathi and Bajazet, his successors, amid both foreign and domestic wars, greatly contributed to its {268} establishment and increase. The children of the last of these conquerors threw the empire into a frightful state of distraction by their unnatural quarrels, till, at last, the youngest of them, named after the Prophet, restored its integrity, and established something like domestic tranquillity. Under a grandson of his, Mohammed II., whom Bayle describes as one of the greatest men recorded in history, the Morea was subjugated, and the Greek empire, so long shaken by internal dissensions, and tottering to dissolution by its luxury, was trampled in the dust by the Moslem conquerors. Constantinople at last yielded to their power, and a palace for the victor was erected on the very spot which Constantine had chosen for his magnificent abode. From this time to that of Solyman the Magnificent, to whom the Turks owe their laws and police, the empire continued to prosper, but immediately afterward its decline commenced. Letters and science have made but little progress among that people, and their sultans have possessed none of the martial enterprise and energy of their early predecessors; still the faith of Mohammed has maintained, and down to this day continues to maintain, a hold which it enjoys in almost no other country. The Turks generally repose the most implicit faith in the two leading articles of the Mohammedan {269} creed, that there is but one God, and that Mohammed is his Prophet; and since, in the opinion of the Moslems, a simple assent to these doctrines comprises all that is valuable in religion, and will be surely followed by the possession of heaven, either immediately or remotely, it is readily conceivable that infidelity will be exceedingly rare. In religious matters, the heart opposes not so much what is to be believed as what is to be done. Minor points of their theology have been from time to time disputed, but these may be regarded as generally settled. Predestination is one of the chief dogmas on which the faith of the Turk is as firmly fixed as on the most momentous article in his creed. Fatalism was the great engine employed by Mohammed in establishing his religion; and among the Turks this doctrine is received as regulating their destiny, controlling all events, and determining the results of every individual's actions; thus unnerving the soul for generous and manly enterprise, and casting a lethargy on the whole nation. In everything the operations of reason are checked, and even made to wait for the imagined manifestations of Deity. According to the creed of the Turks, not only is everything foreknown to God, but everything is predetermined, and brought about by his direct and immediate agency. {270} The Turk is keen and wise in his ordinary transactions: in promoting his own interests, he knows how to exercise the powers of his mind, but, when difficulty or doubt overtakes him, he makes no effort. The thick cloud of his misfortunes is suffered to remain; his troubles are yielded to with sullen indifference; he considers it impious to oppose the determinations of the Most High. To all improvement, such a doctrine is a decided and invincible foe; in some circumstances, however, it appears to have its advantages. Does a Mohammedan suffer by calamity? Is he plundered or ruined? He does not fruitlessly bewail his lot. His answer to all murmuring suggestions is, "It was written;" and to the most unexpected transition from opulence to poverty, he submits without a sigh. The approach of death does not disturb his tranquillity; he makes his ablution, repeats his prayers, professes his belief in God and his Prophet, and in a last appeal to the aid of affection, he says to his child, "turn my head towards Mecca," and calmly expires. A people's religion is traced in their established and common forms of devotion, and none are more attentive to these than the Turks. To neglect any ceremony which their religion prescribes, is deemed a mark either of inferior understanding or of depraved character. Public decorum is {271} everywhere observed; and though both moral and religious precepts are violated with impunity and without remorse, they are always spoken of with great respect. A Mohammedan is never ashamed to defend his faith; and of his sincerity and firmness, the earnestness of his vindication may be taken as sufficient proof: he not unfrequently interrupts the progress of conversation by repeating his religious formula. In the Turkish towns, travellers are incessantly met with the cry of Allah Ackbar; and by Mussulmans, who would be esteemed pious, the divine name is as frequently repeated as if reverent and devout thoughts were habitually uppermost in their minds. Purifications are constantly, and with great strictness, performed by the Mussulmans of every country, but especially by those of Turkey. Their professed object is to render the body fit for the decorous performance of religious duties; no act being praiseworthy or acceptable, in their estimation, unless the person of the performer be in a condition of purity. Some have thought, but without sufficient grounds, that these external purifications are believed to supersede an inward cleansing of the heart. Fountains placed round their mosques, and numerous baths in every city, enable the devout to perform their five prayers daily, during which, if they chance to receive pollution {272} from anything accidentally coming in contact with them, their devotions are suspended till the offensive inconvenience is removed by water or other means. At the appointed hour, the Maazeens or criers, with their faces towards Mecca, their eyes closed, and their hands upraised, pace the little galleries of the minarets or towers of the mosques, and proclaim in Arabic, the Moslem language of devotion, that the season of prayer has arrived. Instantly, every one, whatever may be his rank or employment, gives himself up to it. Ministers of state suspend the most important affairs, and prostrate themselves on the floor; the tradesman forgets his dealings, and transforms his shop into a place of devotion; and the student lays aside his books, to go through his accustomed supplications. "Never to fail in his prayers" is the highest commendation a Turk can receive; and so prejudicial is the suspicion of irreligion, that even libertines dare not disregard the notices of the Maazeen. The mosques, like chapels in Catholic countries, are always open, and two or three times every day prayers are offered within their walls. It has often been remarked, that the devotions of Christians might acquire something valuable from the gravity, the decorum, and the apparently intense occupation of mind in Turkish worship. The Jews trod {273} their holy place barefoot: the Turks, on the contrary, keep on their boots and shoes. Christians uncover their heads in prayer; the Moslems seldom lay aside their turbans; but for hours they will remain prostrate, or standing in one position, as if absorbed in the most intense abstraction. They have neither altars, pictures, nor statues in their places of worship. Verses of the Koran, the names and personal descriptions of their Prophet, of Ali and his two sons, Hassan and Hosein, with other Moslem saints, are sometimes inscribed in letters of gold on their walls. All distinctions of rank and profession are forgotten when they pray. Persons of every class, on the first sound of the accustomed cry, cast themselves on the ground, and thus declare their belief in the equality of mankind, in the sight of the great Father of all. The Mohammedans of Turkey have a Sabbath, for which the Jewish or Christian may be supposed to have furnished the model. Friday is their day of rest, which commences on the preceding evening, when the illuminated minarets and colonnades of the mosques give to their cities the appearance of a festival. At noon, on Friday, all business is suspended, the mosques are filled, and prayers are read by the appointed officers, accompanied by the prostrations of the people. Discourses are likewise frequently delivered on {274} practical points in their theology; and sometimes, in the ardour of excitement, political corruption and courtly depravity are fiercely assailed. A voluptuous sultan has been known, under the effect of these discourses, to tear himself from the soft indulgences of his harem and court, to lead his martial subjects to war and victory on the plains of their enemies. As soon as the public religious services are concluded, all return to their ordinary pursuits; the day, however, is strictly observed by all classes in the manner prescribed by law, it being a received maxim that he who, without legitimate cause, absents himself from public devotion on three successive Fridays, abjures his religion. It is worthy of observation, that the prayers of the Turks consist chiefly of adoration, of confessions of the Divine attributes and the nothingness of man, and of homage and gratitude to the Supreme Being. A Turk must not pray for the frail and perishable blessings of this life; the health of the sultan, the prosperity of his country, and divisions and wars among the Christians alone excepted. The legitimate object of prayer they hold to be spiritual gifts, and happiness in a future state of being. No one of their religious institutions is more strictly observed by the Turks than the fast of Ramadan. He who violates it is reckoned either {275} an infidel or an apostate; and if two witnesses establish his offence, he is deemed to have incurred the severest penalty of the law. Abstinence from food, and even from the use of perfumes, from sunrise to sunset, is enjoined. The rich pass the hours in meditation and prayer, the grandees sleep away their time, but the labouring man, pursuing his daily toil, most heavily feels its rigour. "When the month of Ramadan happens in the extremities of the seasons, the prescribed abstinence is almost intolerable, and is more severe than the practice of any moral duty, even to the most vicious and depraved of mankind." During the day all traffic is suspended; but in the evening, and till late at night, it is actively carried on in the streets, shops, and bazars, most splendidly illuminated. From sunset to sunrise, revelry and excess are indulged in. Every night there is a feast among the great officers of the court: the reserve of the Turkish character is laid aside, and friends and relations cement their union by mutual intercourse. Sumptuous banquets and convivial hilarity are universal; and, were not women everywhere excluded from the tables of the men, the pleasure of the festivals would amply compensate the rigorous self-denial of their fasts. The pilgrimage to Mecca is with the Turks more a matter of form than of reality. Its {276} importance as a part of the Moslem ritual is admitted, and apparently felt, but the number of pilgrims annually decreases. The sultan, having dominion over the country through which the pilgrims must pass, preserves the public ways leading to the venerated city; the best soldiers of his empire are charged with the protection of the caravans, which are sometimes numerous; but of his own subjects, properly so called, few comparatively accompany them; they are made up of devotees from a greater distance. The sultan, no doubt, encourages the pilgrimage as much on commercial as on religious grounds. The Koran has determined it to be very proper to intermingle commerce and religion: "It shall be no crime in you," it says, "if ye seek an increase from your Lord by trading during the pilgrimage." Accordingly, articles of easy carriage and ready sale are brought by the pilgrims from every country. The productions and manufactures of India thus find their way into other parts of Asia and throughout Africa. The muslins and chintses of Bengal and the Deccan, the shawls of Cashmere, the pepper of Malabar, the diamonds of Golconda, the pearls of Kilkau, the cinnamon of Ceylon, and the spices of the Moluccas, are made to yield advantage to the Ottoman empire, and the luxury of its subjects is sustained by contributions from the most distant nations. {277} Mohammedans of the present day, at least those of Turkey, are less anxious to make proselytes than were those of a former age. Those of India and Africa may, to some extent, still retain the sentiment, that to convert infidels is an ordinance of God, and must be observed by the faithful in all ages; but in Turkey little desire of this kind is felt, chiefly because, by a refinement of uncharitableness, the conversion of the world is deemed unworthy of their endeavours. Now and then a devout Moslem, instigated by zeal or personal attachment, may offer up this prayer for a Jew or a Christian: "Great God, enlighten this infidel, and graciously dispose his heart to embrace thy holy religion;" and perhaps to a youth, esteemed for his talents or knowledge, the language of persuasion may occasionally be addressed with an air of gentleness and urbanity; but the zeal of the missionary is in such cases commonly subject to what are conceived to be the rules of good breeding, and a vague reply or silence is regarded as an indication that the subject is disagreeable, and should not be continued. A Mussulman may pray for the conversion of infidels, but, till they are converted, no blessing may be supplicated in their behalf. "Their death is eternal, why pray for them?" is the language of the Mohammedan creed: do not {278} "defile your feet by passing over the graves of men who are enemies of God and of his Prophet." Of the Mohammedan hierarchy, some idea may be obtained from the form it assumes in Turkey. The Koran is considered the treasure of all laws, divine and human, and the caliphs as the depositaries of this treasure; so that they are at once the pontiffs, legislators, and judges of the people, and their office combines all authority, whether sacerdotal, regal, or judicial. To the grand sultan titles are given, styling him the vicar, or the shadow of God. The several powers which pertain to him in this august capacity are delegated to a body of learned men, called the Oulema. In this body three descriptions of officers are included: the ministers of religion, called the Imams; the expounders of the law, called the Muftis; and the ministers of justice, called the Cadis. The ministers of religion are divided into chief and inferior, the former of whom only belong to the Oulema. Both classes are made up of Sheiks, or ordinary preachers; the Khatibs, readers or deacons; the Imams, a title comprising those who perform the service of the mosque on ordinary days, and those to whom pertain the ceremonies of circumcision, marriage, and burial; the Maazeens, or criers, who announce the hours of prayer; and the Cayuns, or common attendants of the mosque. The {279} idea of this classification was, perhaps, taken from the Mosaic priesthood; the Khatib being the Aaron, and the next four the several orders of the Levites, with their servants or helpers. The imperial temples have one Sheik, one Khatib, from two to four Imams, twelve Maazeens, and twenty Cayuns, among whom, except in a few of the chief mosques of Constantinople, the Khatibs have the pre-eminence. All these ministers are subject to the civil magistrate, who is looked upon as a sort of diocesan, and who may perform at any time all the sacerdotal functions. The ministers of religion are not distinguishable from other people; they mix in the same society, engage in similar pursuits, and affect no greater austerity than marks the behaviour of Mussulmans generally. Their influence depends entirely on their reputation for learning and talents, for gravity and correct moral conduct; their employment is, for the most part, very simple, as chanting aloud the public service, and performing such offices as every master of a family may discharge. As Mohammedanism acknowledges no sacrifices, it appoints no priests; the duties performed by the ministers of religion being seemingly devolved on them more as a matter of convenience than on account of any sacredness attaching to their order. The vast country to which the general name of {280} Tartary has been given, is that from whence Mohammedanism has gone forth to the East, the West, and the South. In Thibet, the Grand Lama and various national idols hold divided empire with the Prophet; and in the inhospitable regions of Siberia, the churches of Greece and Russia have successfully promulgated the Christian doctrines; while the Circassians, with some other Tartar races, are almost without religion. In the Crimea, the people are Mussulmans, as rigid and devoted as the Turks; and over the vast tract called by modern geographers Independent Tartary, the crescent triumphantly waves. From these regions sprung, in the earlier ages of Mohammedan conquest, those vast empires which, in the East, comprise so large a number of the professors of the faith of Islam. The first sovereign of this country, to whom the title of sultan was awarded early in the tenth century, conducted several expeditions into Hindustan, and secured the homage of many of the cities. The ancient Indian superstition was in a great measure overturned by his victorious arms. Long and fierce contests ensued: the princes of the subdued provinces, often throwing off their forced allegiance, endeavoured to regain their independence and re-establish their ancient faith, till, at length, the great Timurlane, having overrun the country with his legions, received at Agra the title {281} of Emperor of Hindustan. Scarcely, however, had two centuries and a half rolled away, when his successors fell in their turn under the Persian power; and the empire he established was weakened, and ultimately destroyed. As the result of these conquests, Mohammedanism prevailed to a great extent, but rather nominally than really, among the millions of India: it was the religion of the court and government; but, either from indifference or timidity in the Moslem conquerors, the ancient idols still held extensive influence, and were at length gradually restored. In the twelfth century, Benares, the ancient seat of Brahminical learning and of Hindu idolatry, fell into the hands of the conqueror, who destroyed its numerous objects of popular adoration. Yet, soon afterward, the religious character of the place was restored, and the demolished idols were replaced by others, that were as eagerly resorted to as had been their predecessors. To this consecrated metropolis, a pilgrimage was regarded by the millions of India as imperatively commanded, and as necessary as was a visit to Mecca by the Mohammedans; and the weakness or the policy of its Moslem conquerors did not long withhold from them this valued privilege; the government of the city was committed to the Hindus, and their conquerors, in the plenitude of their bigotry, pride, and power, never {282} thought of suffering their own magistrates to exercise authority within its walls. Thus Mohammedanism is the religion, not of the ancient inhabitants of India, but of the descendants of the millions of Tartars, Persians, and Arabians who, at various periods, have left their native seats to participate in the riches of these far-famed plains. The north and northwestern parts are filled with them, and from thence they have wandered over the whole of that vast country. Perhaps their numbers may now amount to nearly twenty millions, among whom, however, though they are mostly of foreign extraction, are many converts from Hinduism. They form separate communities, amalgamating in some parts of the country, and living as sociably with Hindus as the differences in their respective faiths will permit. Hindu princes have at times paid their devotions at Mohammedan shrines, and observed their feasts; while Mohammedans have relaxed somewhat the strictness of their observances, and manifested an inclination to conform, as far as possible, to their Hindu neighbours. Some five centuries ago, the Borahs, a people who once occupied the kingdom of Guzerat, were converted _en masse_ to Islamism. The Arab traders to the coasts of Malabar have always been exceedingly earnest in their endeavours to convert the natives, in which they have {283} been greatly aided by the facility with which they have been allowed to purchase the children of the poorer classes, to educate them in the principles of their faith, and also by the frequency with which the inhabitants of those districts lose caste. This badge of the Hindu faith is often forfeited by the people mixing with those of other countries, and when it is lost they easily become Moslems. It has been maintained that the native inhabitants of India are absolutely unchangeable in their sacred, domestic, and political institutions, and, at first sight, there would appear to be much to warrant such an opinion; but the history of many of them, and especially of the Sikhs, who inhabit the provinces of the Panjab, between the rivers Jumna and Indus, may be alleged as proofs to the contrary. Still, in the religion of the Sikhs, Mohammedan fable and Hindu absurdity are mixed; its founder wishing to unite both these prevalent systems in one. He had been educated in a part of the country where these two religions appeared to touch each other, if not commingle, and he was no stranger to the violent animosity existing between their respective professors; he sought, therefore, to blend the jarring elements of both in peaceful union. The Hindu was required to abandon his idols, and to worship the one Supreme Deity whom his religion acknowledged; while the Mohammedan {284} was to abstain from such practices (especially the killing of cows) as were offensive to the superstition of the Hindus. This plan so far prevailed, that, without acknowledging the Prophet, the Sikhs became more Mohammedans than Hindus; and though the institutions of Brahma are not admitted among them, they insult and persecute true Moslems more fiercely and cruelly than any other people. They compel them to eat that which is forbidden by their law; animals which they account unclean are frequently thrown into their places of public assembly, and they are prohibited from proclaiming the hour of prayer to the faithful. China is one of those countries to which Mohammedanism was carried by the hordes of Tartary. From the scrupulous jealousy with which this vast empire is guarded from observation, it is difficult to say to what extent the Mohammedan faith, or, indeed, any other, prevails among its numberless inhabitants; but, beyond question, it is tolerated. The irruption of the Saracens into China under Walid can scarcely be termed a conquest. Subsequently, the successors of Zenghis Khan seated themselves on the throne of Pekin, and opened the country to an intercourse with all nations. The commercial Arabs had visited the ports and cities in the south of China; and, now that access to the {285} capital was unrestrained, multitudes of them repaired thither. They acquired the language, and adopted the dress and manners of the people, to whom also they rendered valuable aid in adjusting their chronology, and making the necessary calculations for their calendar. Intercourse with the Chinese made the Mohammedans desirous of effecting their conversion, the means adopted for which were both wise and humane. Deserted children were taken under their protection, and educated in Islamism; while in other ways they sought to commend themselves to confidence, and their religion to respect, by alleviating the wretchedness induced by a cruel superstition. The Mohammedans of China seem to partake of the mild and quiet character of the inhabitants generally, and are therefore tolerated; though there have been some exceptions to this encomium. About sixty years ago they were instrumental in promoting an unsuccessful rebellion, and the Emperor Kien Long, after suppressing it, ordered one hundred thousand of them to be put to death. Persia, from an early period, has been almost entirely a Mohammedan country. On its conquest by the Saracens, the religion of Zoroaster, which had till then prevailed, was nearly abolished. Those who persevered in retaining it were obliged to flee to the mountains or to the western parts {286} of India, where their old forms of worship still linger. In the disputes which ensued on the death of Mohammed concerning the caliphate, the Persians espoused the cause of Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law, and to his memory they are still attached. "May this arrow go to the heart of Omar," is a frequent expression among them in drawing a bow; and not long since, when Mr. Malcolm, during his travels in Persia, was praising Omar, the antagonist of Ali, as the greatest of the caliphs, a Persian, overcome by the justice of his observations, yet still adhering to his rooted prejudices, replied, "This is all very true, but he was a dog after all." Here Mohammedanism exists in a less rigorous form than in Turkey. Its ceremonies are observed by those who are little disposed to practice its moral code: they say their prayers at the appointed season, and make a show of devotion to prevent their being suspected of irreligion; but the people generally are little concerned about the pilgrimage to Mecca, and other matters on which, in the Koran, much stress is laid. They choose rather to resort to the tomb of Ali, and to that of his son Hosein, whose name is reverenced among them with a feeling approaching to adoration. In Africa, Mohammedanism has very widely prevailed. Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, all the northern parts of this continent, acknowledge its sway. {287} From Arabia and Egypt it spread west and south nearly to the great rivers. It is the established religion of Morocco; and in Western Barbary and several kingdoms of the interior the Arabic language is spoken, the Koran believed, and the Prophet almost worshipped. The Senegal, up to the small Moorish state of Gedumah, is the line of division between the Mohammedans and the Negroes: from thence the line passes eastward of north, through Nigritia and Nubia to the Nile. As yet, however, it is but indistinctly marked, it being doubtful whether Timbuctoo is a Mohammedan or Negro town. The courts of Bornou and Cassina are Mohammedan, but a majority of their subjects are pagans. Islamism in these vast territories is in an exceedingly degenerate state when compared with either its first development in the Arabian desert, or with what now obtains in Turkey. It is said that but little more than its exclusive persecuting spirit remains: the Oriental lustrations are almost unknown, Mohammedan temperance is neglected, and the great doctrine of the unity of God is confounded with, or supplanted by, the polytheism of the native inhabitants. The Mussulman is more depraved than the pagan; so that, while travellers frequently mention the hospitality they received from the latter, by the former they were constantly insulted and annoyed on account of {288} their religion. In no quarter of the world does the faith of the Prophet wear so frightful an aspect as in Africa. The region from which Mohammedanism first sprung has not remained in all respects faithful to the precepts of the Prophet. In Mecca and Medina, indeed, his name and system are held in the profoundest veneration; and no wonder, since both these cities are mainly supported by the superstitious observances enjoined in the Koran; but the Bedouins are as licentious in their religion as in their policy and habits. On the Turkish frontiers they keep up an appearance of respect for the name of the Prophet and his doctrines; but, in answer to all reproaches for their unfaithfulness, they say in words worthy a better taught and more civilized race, "The religion of Mohammed could never have been intended for us. We have no water in the desert. How, then, can we make the prescribed ablutions? We have no money. How, then, can we give alms? The fast of Ramadan is a useless command to persons who fast all the year round; and, if God be everywhere, why should we go to Mecca to adore him?" From the southernmost part of Hindustan, Mohammedanism made its way to the Malayan peninsula; to Sumatra, Java, Borneo, the Manillas, and the Celebes: Goram, one of the Spice Islands, is {289} its eastern boundary. In the interior of these islands it prevails less than on the shores. To these remote regions Islamism has been carried more by the commercial than the military enterprise of its votaries. What is its present condition there, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, accurately to ascertain. In Java it was the established religion; but, when the Dutch settled that island early in the seventeenth century, many of the natives were converted. Little respect is paid by the Javans of the present day either to their ancient paganism, or to Mohammedanism which took its place; though some of the forms of the latter are still in force, and its institutions are said to be gaining ground. The reader of Mohammedan history will meet with the terms Sooffee and Wahabee, as designating certain divisions of the disciples of the religion of the Prophet. It will not, therefore, be inappropriate to close with a brief account of these respective sects. Sooffee is a term originating in Persia, meaning enthusiasts or mystics, or persons distinguished by extraordinary sanctity. The object of the Sooffee is to attain a divine beatitude, which he describes as consisting in absorption into the essence of Deity. The soul, according to his doctrine, is an emanation from God, partaking of his nature; just {290} as the rays of light are emanations from the sun, and of the same nature with the source, from whence they are derived. The creature and the Creator are of one substance. No one can become a Sooffee without strictly conforming to the established religion, and practising every social virtue; and when, by this means, he has gained a habit of devotion, he may exchange what they style practical for spiritual worship, and abandon the observance of all religious forms and ceremonies. He at length becomes inspired, arrives at truth, drops his corporeal veil, and mixes again with that glorious essence from which he has been partially and for a time separated. The life of the Sooffees of Persia, though generally austere, is not rendered miserable, like that of the visionary devotees of Hinduism, by the practice of dreadful severities, their most celebrated teachers have been famed for knowledge and devotion. The Persians are a poetic people, and the very genius of Sooffeeism is poetry. Its raptures are the raptures of inspiration; its hopes are those of a highly sensitive and excited imagination; its writers in the sweetest strains celebrate the Divine love, which pervades all nature: everything, from the very highest to the lowest, seeking and tending towards union with Deity as its object of supreme desire. They inculcate forbearance, abstemiousness, and {291} universal benevolence. They are unqualified predestinarians. The emanating principle, or the soul, proceeding from God, can do nothing, they say, without his will, nor refuse to do anything which he instigates. Some of them, consequently, deny the existence of evil; and the doctrine of rewards and punishments is superseded by their idea of re-absorption into the Divine essence. The free opinions of this class of enthusiasts subvert the doctrines of Islamism, yet they pay an outward respect to them; they unsettle the existing belief, without providing an intelligible substitute; they admit the divine mission of the Prophet, but explain away the dogmas he uttered; and while they affect to yield him honour as a person raised up by God, to induce moral order in the world, they boast their own direct and familiar intercourse with Deity, and claim, on that account, unqualified obedience in all that relates to spiritual interests. The similarity of Sooffeeism to the ancient Pythagorean and Platonic doctrines will occur to every one at all acquainted with the religion and philosophy of antiquity. It as closely resembles some of the distinguishing tenets of the Brahminical faith. In fact, it seems as if designed, in conjunction with the refined theology of ancient, and the sublime visions of modern idolaters, to teach us that, without Divine guidance, the loftiest human {292} conceptions on subjects connected with God and religion invariably err; the ignorant and the instructed are equally wrong; "the world by wisdom knows not God." The Wahabees are a modern sect of Mohammedan reformers, whose efforts have considerably changed the aspect of the religion of the Prophet. Perhaps to them may be owing much of that rigid adherence to Mohammedan doctrine and practice which prevails in those parts where their influence has been felt. They are the followers of Abdol Wahab, who commenced his career in the region where, during the lifetime of the Prophet, Moseilama had threatened a considerable division among his followers. Wahab was an ambitious fanatic, who aimed, nevertheless, at reforming the national religion. He was aided by powerful princes of the province of Nejed; and, within a short time, the tenets he maintained spread throughout the peninsula. His fundamental principle, like that of Mohammed, was the unity of God. The Koran he regarded as divine, rejecting all the glosses which ignorance and infatuation had put upon it, and holding in utter contempt all the traditions and tales concerning its author, which the devout of every generation had eagerly received. The reverence, approaching to adoration, which the Arabs were wont to pay to the name of Mohammed, all visits to his tomb, and all {293} regard to the tombs and relics of Arab saints, he denounced; and the costly ornaments with which a mistaken piety had enriched these sacred spots, he thought might be appropriated to ordinary purposes. Wahab would not suffer the common oath of, by Mohammed, or by Ali, to be used among his followers, on the very rational ground that an oath is an appeal to a witness of our secret thoughts, and who can know these but God? The title of Lord, generally given to the Prophet by his followers, Wahab rejected as impious. He was commonly mentioned by this zealous reformer and his adherents by his simple name, without the addition of "our Lord, the Prophet of God." All who deviated in any degree from the plain sense of the Koran, either in belief or practice, were infidels in their esteem; upon whom, therefore, according to its directions, war might be made. Thus was the martial spirit of the early Saracens again called into exercise; and with the ardour that characterized the days of the immediate successors of the Prophet, they were prepared at once to assail the consciences and the property of men not exactly of their own faith. At the call of their leader, they assembled first in the plain of Draaiya, some 400 miles east of Medina, armed and provided at their own expense for war. Bagdad and Mecca in vain attempted to {294} suppress them; the seraglio itself was filled with their formidable war-cry; the sultan trembled on his throne; and the caravans from Syria suspended their usual journeys. The imperial city suffered from their ravages in its usual supplies of coffee; and the terror of their name was widely spreading among devout Mohammedans of every country, for they had violated the shrines of saints, and levelled to the ground the chapels at Mecca, which devotion had consecrated to the memory of the Prophet and his family. At the commencement of the present century, however, Mecca was recovered from them by the Turkish arms, and the plague, with the smallpox, breaking out just at this time among the followers of Wahab, probably saved the mighty fabric of Islamism. These reverses did not quench, however, the ardour of the Wahabees. Their leader had been assassinated, but his son, already distinguished for his prudence and valour, succeeded him in the command. Medina fell beneath his power, and from thence to the Persian Gulf he seemed likely to reign lord paramount. In 1805 he was able to impose a heavy tax on the caravan of pilgrims from Damascus to the Holy City, and declared that thenceforth it should consist of pilgrims alone, without the pride and pomp of a religious procession. Soon afterward they again entered Mecca, and immediately threatened with destruction every {295} sacred relic; but they did not put their threats into execution. Various conflicts between them and the orthodox Mohammedans have since ensued, the general result of which has been to break the martial and fanatical spirit of the Wahabees, and to re-establish the power of the grand sultan in cities and districts where it had been placed in jeopardy. They are still, indeed, dreaded as plunderers, but no great national convulsion has resulted from their efforts. Some writers regret the suppression of this once powerful sect of Mohammedans, believing that, if continued, they would have been instrumental in overthrowing the Moslem faith, and making way for a purer religion; but for ourselves, we see little occasion for these regrets. The Wahabees must not be supposed more favourable to a pure faith than are those by whom they have been overthrown. If they must be regarded as reformers, they only attempted to correct a few absurd and scandalous practices: the impious and abominable dogmas of the Koran they left untouched; or, if they touched them, it was only to enforce their observance with greater rigour. Their creed was even more sanguinary and intolerant than that of the ancient Mohammedans, and probably the continuance of their power would have been nothing more than the continuance of injustice, cruelty, and {296} persecution. We do not look for the overthrow of Mohammedanism by such means. One system of error may sometimes destroy another, but the pure faith, which blesses a miserable world by directing men in the path of safety, knowledge, and happiness, will extend only as the sacred volume is diffused, and as that holy influence from God accompanies it by which the understanding is illuminated and the heart renewed. Fanaticism is no auxiliary of the religion of the Bible; it neither prepares its way nor accelerates its progress. Violence and war are utterly rejected by this divine system, as alien from its spirit and character. "My kingdom," says its founder, "is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight; but now is my kingdom not from hence." THE END. 
29197	----	[Transcriber's Note: Original spellings have been retained, including those that are inconsistent within the document. An error in the Table of Contents has been corrected from page 154 to page 156.] A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN BY MARY PLATT PARMELE ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1906 COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY MARY PLATT PARMELE COPYRIGHT, 1898, 1906, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS [Illustration: From the portrait by Titian. Charles V.] PREFACE. In presenting this book to the public the author can only reiterate what she has already said in works of a similar kind: that she has tried to exclude the mass of confusing details which often make the reading of history a dreary task; and to keep closely to those facts which are vital to the unfolding of the narrative. This is done under a strong conviction that the essential facts in history are those which reveal and explain the development of a nation, rather than the incidents, more or less entertaining, which have attended such development. And also under another conviction: that a little, thoroughly comprehended, is better than much imperfectly remembered and understood. M.P.P NEW YORK. _June 15, 1898._ CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. Ancient Iberia--The Basques--The Keltberians--The Phenicians--Cadiz Founded, 1 CHAPTER II. Struggle between Phenicians and Assyrians--Founding of Carthage--Decline of Phenicia--Rise of Roman Power--First Punic War, 9 CHAPTER III. Hamilcar--Hannibal--Siege and Fall of Saguntum--Rome Invades Spain--Scipio's Policy--Cadiz, (Gades) Surrendered to the Romans--By What Steps IBERIA Became SPAIN--Fall of Carthaginian Power--How Spain Became a Roman Province, 15 CHAPTER IV. Sertorius--Story of the White Hind--Rome Fights Her Own Battles on Spanish Soil--Battle of Munda--Cæsar Declared Dictator--The Ides of March--Octavius Augustus--Spain Latinized--Four Hundred Years of Peace, 24 CHAPTER V. Northern Races in the History of Civilization--Roman Empire Expiring--Ataulfus--Attila and the Huns--Theodoric--Evaric Completes Conquest of Spanish Peninsula--Europe Teutonized--Difference between Anglo-Saxon and Latin Races, 30 CHAPTER VI. Ulfilas--Arianism--The Spanish Language--Brunhilde--Leovigild--His Son's Apostasy--Arianism Ceases to be the Established Religion of Spain, 39 CHAPTER VII. Toledo--Church of Santa Maria--Wamba, 45 CHAPTER VIII. Decline of Visigoths--Roderick--Count Julian's Treachery--Mahommedanism--Tarif--Prophecy Found in the Enchanted Tower--Tarik--Roderick's Defeat and Death--Moslem Empire Established in Spain, 50 CHAPTER IX. Musa's Dream of European Conquest--Charles Martel--Characteristics of Mahommedan Rule--Mission of the Saracen in Europe--The Germ of a Christian Kingdom in the North of Spain, 58 CHAPTER X. Pelayo and the Cave of Covadonga--Alfonso I.--Berbers and Arabs at War on African Coast--War Extends to Spain--The Omeyyad Khalifs Superseded by the Abbasides--Abd-er-Rahman--Omeyyad Dynasty Established at Cordova--Ineffectual Attempt of the Abbasides to Overthrow Abd-er-Rahman--Character of This Conqueror, 64 CHAPTER XI. Charlemagne--Battle of Roncesvalles, 69 CHAPTER XII. Conditions after Death of Abd-er-Rahman--Abd-er-Rahman II.--Arab Refinements--Eulogius and the Christian Martyrs--Abd-er-Rahman III.--A Khalifate at Cordova--The Great Mosque--The City of "The Fairest"--Death of Abd-er-Rahman III., 72 CHAPTER XIII. Rough Cradle of a Spanish Nationality in the Asturias--Alfonso III. and His Hidalgos and Dons--Guerrilla Warfare with Moors--Jealousies and Strife between Christian Kingdoms--Civil War--Almanzor--Ruin of Christian State Seemed Imminent--Death of Almanzor--Berber Revolt--Anarchy in Moorish State--A Khalif Begging a Crust of Bread--Berbers Destroy Cordova--Library Burned--City of "The Fairest" a Ruin--Asturias--Leon and Castile United--Alfonso VI.--The Cid--Triumph of Christians--Moors Ask Aid of the Almoravides--Christians Driven Back--Death of the Cid--A Dynasty of the Almoravides--The Alhomades--The Great Mahdi--Moorish People Become Subject to Emperor of Morocco--His Designs upon Europe--The Pope Proclaims a Crusade--Alhomades Driven Out of Spain by Christians--Moorish Kingdom Reduced to Province of Granada, 78 CHAPTER XIV. European Conditions in Thirteenth Century--Visigoth Kings Recover Their Land--Its Changed Conditions--Effect of Arab Civilization upon Spanish Nation--Fernando III.--Spain Draws into Closer Companionship with European States--Alfonso X.--Spain Becoming Picturesque--The Bull-Fight--Beautiful Granada--The Alhambra, 87 CHAPTER XV. Perpetual Civil War between Spanish States--Castile and Aragon Absorb the Others and in Conflict for Supremacy--Pedro the Cruel--The "Black Prince" His Champion against Aragon--John of Gaunt--His Claim upon the Throne of Castile--His Final Compromise--Political Conditions Contrasted with Those of Other States, 94 CHAPTER XVI. Death of Juan II.--Enrique IV.--Isabella--Her Marriage with Ferdinand of Aragon--Isabella Crowned Queen of Castile--Ferdinand, King of Aragon--The Two Crowns United--Characteristics of the Two Sovereigns--The Inquisition Created--Jews Driven out of the Kingdom--Abdul-Hassan's Defiance--Zahara--Family Troubles at the Alhambra--Ayesha and Boabdil--Alhama Captured by Ferdinand--Boabdil Supplants His Father--Massacre of the Abencerrages--Granada Besieged--Its Capitulation--Moorish Rule Ended in Spain, 100 CHAPTER XVII. Columbus and Isabella--Isabella's Private Griefs--Her Death--Charles, King under a Regency--Charles Elected Emperor of Germany--Spain during His Reign--Cruelties in the East and in the West--Vain Struggle with Protestantism--Abdication and Death of Charles, 108 CHAPTER XVIII. Philip II.--Union of Spain and Portugal--The Duke of Alva in the Netherlands--War with England--Spanish Armada Destroyed--Death of Philip II.--Spain's Decline--Glory of the Name "Castilian," 117 CHAPTER XIX. Philip III.--Rebellion of the Moriscos--Last of the Moors Conveyed to African Coast--Don Quixote--Philip IV.--Louis XIV. Marries Spanish Infanta--A Diminishing Kingdom--Carlos II.--First Collision between Anglo-Saxon and Spaniard in America--Close of Hapsburg Dynasty in Spain, 125 CHAPTER XX. New European Conditions--Louis XIV.--War of the "Spanish Succession"--Marlborough Checks Louis at Blenheim--Archduke Abandons Sovereignty in Spain--Peace of Utrecht--Further Dismemberment of Spain--Gibraltar Passes to England--Bourbon Dynasty--Commences with Philip V.--Ferdinand VI.--Carlos III.--Expulsion of the Jesuits, 131 CHAPTER XXI. A Dismantled Kingdom--Spanish-American Colonies--England and France at War over American Boundaries--Spain the Ally of France--Loss of Some of Her West India Islands, and Capture of Havana and Manila by British--Florida Given in Exchange for Return of Conquered Territory--Growing Irritation against England--France Aids American Colonies in War with England--Spain's Satisfaction at Their Success--Its Effect in Peru--Revolution in France--Rapid Rise of Napoleon--Carlos IV. Removed and Joseph Bonaparte King--Spain Joins Napoleon in War against England--Trafalgar--Arthur Wellesley--Joseph Flees from His Kingdom, 137 CHAPTER XXII. Liberal Sentiment Developing--Constitution of 1812--Ferdinand VI. and Reactionary Measures--Revolt of all the Spanish-American Colonies--The Holy Alliance--The Monroe Doctrine--Revolution in Spain--Spain under the Protectorate of the Holy Alliance--Ferdinand Reinstated--Two Political Parties--Six Spanish-American Colonies Freed, 144 CHAPTER XXIII. The Salic Law and the Princess Isabella--The Carlists--Regency of Christine--Isabella II.--Her Expulsion from Spain--Amadeo--An Era of Republicanism--Castelar--Alfonso XII. Recalled--His Brief Reign and Death--Alfonso XIII., 150 CHAPTER XXIV. Birth of an Insurgent Party in Cuba--Ten Years' War--Impossible Reforms Promised--Revolution Started by José Marti, 1895--Attitude of the American Government--General Weyler's Methods--Effect upon Sentiment in America--Destruction of the Battle-Ship _Maine_--Verdict of Court of Inquiry--War Declared between Spain and America--Victories of Manila and in Cuba--Terms of Peace--Marriage of Alfonso XIII. and the Princess Ena, 154 ILLUSTRATIONS. Charles V. _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE Columbus at the Court of Ferdinand and Isabella 108 The Surrender of Breda 118 Philip IV. of Spain 126 Heroic Combat in the Pulpit of the Church of St. Augustine, Saragossa, 1809 144 The Duke de la Torre sworn in as Regent before the Cortes of 1869 152 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. CHAPTER I. No name is more fraught with picturesque and romantic interest than that of the "Spanish Peninsula." After finishing this rare bit of handiwork nature seems to have thrown up a great ragged wall, stretching from sea to sea, to protect it; and the Pyrenees have stood for ages a frowning barrier, descending toward France on the northern side from gradually decreasing heights--but on the Spanish side in wild disorder, plunging down through steep chasms, ravines, and precipices--with sharp cliffs towering thousands of feet skyward, which better than standing armies protect the sunny plains below. But the "Spanish Peninsula," at the time we are about to consider, was neither "Spanish" nor was it a "peninsula." At the dawn of history this sunny corner of Europe was known as _Iberia_, and its people as _Iberians_. Time has effaced all positive knowledge of this aboriginal race; but they are believed to have come from the south, and to have been allied to the Libyans, who inhabited the northern coast of Africa. In fact, _Iberi_ in the Libyan tongue meant _freeman_; and _Berber_, apparently derived from that word, was the term by which all of these western peoples were known to the Ancient Egyptians. But it is suspected that the Iberians found it an easy matter to flow into the land south of the Pyrenees, and that they needed no boats for the transit. There has always existed a tradition of the joining of the two continents, and now it is believed by geologists that an isthmus once really stretched across to the African coast at the narrowest point of the Straits, at a time when the waters of a Mediterranean gulf, and the waters flowing over the sands of Sahara, together found their outlet in the Indian Ocean. There is also a tradition that the adventurous Phenicians, who are known to have been in Iberia as early as 1300 B.C., cut a canal through the narrow strip of land, and then built a bridge across the canal. But a bridge was a frail link by which to hold the mighty continents together. The Atlantic, glad of such an entrance to the great gulf beyond, must have rushed impetuously through, gradually widening the opening, and (may have) thus permanently severed Europe and Africa; drained the Sahara dry; transformed the Mediterranean gulf into a Mediterranean Sea; and created a "Spanish Peninsula." How long this fair Peninsula was the undisturbed home of the Iberians no one knows. Behind the rocky ramparts of the Pyrenees they may have remained for centuries unconscious of the Aryan torrent which was flooding Western Europe as far as the British Isles. Nothing has been discovered by which we may reconstruct this prehistoric people and (perhaps) civilization. But their physical characteristics we are enabled to guess; for just as we find in Cornwall, England, lingering traces of the ancient Britons, so in the mountain fastnesses of northern Spain linger the _Basques_, who are by many supposed to be the last survivors of that mysterious primitive race. The language of the Basques bears no resemblance to any of the Indo-European, nor indeed to any known tongue. It is so difficult, so intricate in construction, that only those who learn it in infancy can ever master it. It is said that, in Basque, "you spell Solomon, and pronounce it Nebuchadnezzar." Its antiquity is so great that one legend calls it the "language of the angels," and another says that _Tubal_ brought it to Spain before the lingual disaster at Babel! And still another relates that the devil once tried to learn it, but that, after studying it for seven years and learning only three words, he gave it up in despair. A language which, without literature, can so resist change, can so persist unmodified by another tongue spoken all around and about it, must have great antiquity; and there is every reason to believe that the Basque is a survival of the tongue spoken by the primitive Iberians, before the Kelts began to flow over and around the Pyrennees; and also that the physical characteristics of this people are the same as those of their ancient progenitors; small-framed, dark, with a faint suggestion of the Semitic in their swarthy faces. We cannot say when it occurred, but at last the powerful, warlike Kelts had surmounted the barrier and were mingled with this non-Aryan people, and the resulting race thus formed was known to antiquity as the _Keltiberians_. It is probable that the rugged Kelt easily absorbed the race of more delicate type, and made it, in religion and customs, not unlike the Keltic Aryan in Gaul. But the physical characteristics of the other and primitive race are indelibly stamped upon the Spanish people; and it is probably to the Iberian strain in the blood that may be traced the small, dark type of men which largely prevails in Spain, and to some extent also in central and southern France. But the Keltiberians were Keltic in their religion. There are now in Spain the usual monuments found wherever Druid worship prevailed. Huge blocks of stone, especially in Cantabria and Lusitania (Portugal), standing alone or in circles, tell the story of Druidical rites, and of the worship of the ocean, the wind, and the thunder, and of the placating of the powers of nature by human sacrifices. The mingling of the Kelts and the Iberians in varying proportions in different parts of Spain, and in some places (as among the Basques) their mingling not at all, produced that diversity of traits which distinguished the _Asturians_ in the mountain gorges from their neighbors the _Cantabrians_, and both these from the _Catalonians_ in the northeast and the _Gallicians_ on the northwest coast, and from the _Lusitanians_, where now is Portugal; and still more distinguished the _Basques_, in the rocky ravines of the Pyrenees, from each and all of the others. And yet these unlike members of one family were collectively known as Keltiberians. While this race--hardy, temperate, brave, and superstitious--was leading its primitive life upon the Iberian peninsula, while they were shooting arrows at the sky to threaten the thunder, drawing their swords against the rising tide, and prizing iron more dearly than their abundant gold and silver, because they could hammer it into hooks, and swords, and spears--there had long existed in the East a group of wonderful civilizations: the Egyptian, hoary with age and steeped in wisdom and in wickedness; the _Chaldeans_, who, with "looks commercing with the skies," were the fathers of astronomy; the _Assyrians_ and _Babylonians_, with their wonderful cities of _Nineveh_ and _Babylon_, and the Phenicians, with their no less famous cities of _Sidon_ and _Tyre_. Sidon, which was the more ancient of these two, is said to have been founded by Sidon, the son of Canaan, who was the great-grandson of Noah. Of all these nations it was the Phenicians who were the most adventurous. They were a Semitic people, Syrian in blood, and their home was a narrow strip of coast on the east of the Mediterranean, where a group of free cities was joined into a confederacy held together by a strong national spirit. Of these cities Sidon was once the head, but in time Tyre eclipsed it in splendor, and writers, sacred and profane, have sung her glories. These Phenicians had a genius for commerce and trade. They scented a bargain from afar, and knew how to exchange "their broidered work, and fine linen, and coral, and agate" (I Kings xxvii. 16), their glassware and their wonderful cloths dyed in Tyrian scarlet and purple, for the spices and jewels of the East, and for the gold and silver and the ivory and the ebony of the south and west. Their ships were coursing the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf and bringing back treasures from India and searching every inlet in the Mediterranean, and finally, either through the canal they are said to have cut, or the straits it had made, they sailed as far as the British Isles and brought back tin. But the gold and silver of the Iberian Peninsula were more alluring than the spices of India or the tin of Britain. So upon the Spanish coast they made permanent settlements and built cities. As early as 1100 B.C. they had founded beyond the "Pillars of Hercules," the City of _Gades_ (Cadiz), a walled and fortified town, and had taught the Keltiberians how to open and work their gold and silver mines systematically; and in exchange they brought an old civilization, with new luxuries, new ideas and customs into the lives of the simple people. But they bestowed something far beyond this--something more enriching than silver and gold,--an alphabet,--and it is to the Phenicians that we are indebted for the alphabet now in use throughout the civilized world. CHAPTER II. Such an extension of power, and the acquisition of sources of wealth so boundless, excited the envy of other nations. The Greeks are said to have been in the Iberian peninsula long before the fall of Troy, where they came with a fleet from Zante, in the Ionian Sea, and in memory of that place, called the city they founded Zacynthus, which name in time became _Saguntum_. Now they sent more expeditions and founded more cities on the Spanish coast; and the Babylonians, and the Assyrians, and, at a later time, the Persians and the Greeks, all took up arms against these insatiate traders. Phenician supremacy was not easily maintained with so many jealous rivals in the field, and it was rudely shaken in 850 B.C., when "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold." and the Phenician power was partially broken at its source in the East. It is with thrilling interest that we read Isaiah's prophecy of the destruction of Tyre, which was written at this very time. For the Phenicians were the _Canaanites_ of Bible history, and "Hiram King of Tyre" was their king; and his "navy," which, together with Solomon's "came once in three years from _Tarshish_," was their navy; and _Tarshish_ was none other than _Tartessus_, their own province, just beyond Gibraltar on the Spanish coast. Nor is it at all improbable that Spanish gold was used to adorn the temple which the great Solomon was building. (I Kings ix., x.) Shakspere, who says all things better than anyone else, makes Othello find in the fatal handkerchief "confirmation strong as proofs from holy writ." Where can be found "confirmation" stronger than these "proofs from holy writ"? And where a more magnificent picture of the luxury, the sumptuous Oriental splendor of this nation at that period, than in Ezekiel, chapters xxvii., xxviii.? What an eloquent apostrophe to Tyre--"thou that art situate at the entry of the sea, a merchant of the people, for _many isles_."--"With thy wisdom and with thine understanding thou hast gotten thee riches," and, "by thy great wisdom and by thy _traffick_ hast thou increased, and thine heart is lifted up." And then follows the terrible arraignment--"because of the iniquity of thy _traffick_." And then the final prediction of ruin--"I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth"; "thou shalt be a terror, and _never_ shalt thou be any more." Where in any literature can we find such lurid splendor of description, and such a powerful appeal to the imagination of the reader! And where could the student of history find a more graphic and accurate picture of a vanished civilization! In 850 B.C., the same year in which the Assyrians partly subjugated the Phenicians in the East, the city of Carthage was founded upon the north coast of Africa, and there commenced a movement, with that city as its center, which drew together all their scattered possessions into a Punic confederacy. This was composed of the islands of Sardinia, Corsica, part of Sicily, the Balearic Isles, and the cities and colonies upon the Spanish Peninsula and African coast. As the power of this confederacy expands, the name Phenician passes away and that of _Carthaginian_ takes its place in history. Carthage became a mighty city, and controlled with a strong hand the scattered empire which had been planted by the Syrian tradesmen. Carthaginian merchants and miners were in Tartessus, and were planting cities and colonies throughout the peninsula, and a torrent of Carthaginian life was thus pouring into Spain for many hundred years, and the blood of the two races must have freely mingled. There are memorials of this time now existing, not only in Phenician coins, medals, and ruins, but in the names of the cities. _Barcelona_, named after the powerful family of Barca in Carthage, to which Hannibal belonged. _Carthagena_, a memorial of Carthage, which meant "the city"; and even _Cordova_ is traced to its primitive form,--Kartah-duba,--meaning "an important city." While _Isabella_, the name most famous in Spanish annals, has a still greater antiquity; and was none other than Jezebel--after the beautiful daughter of the King of Sidon (the "_Zidoneans_"), who married Ahab, and lured him to his downfall. And we are told that this wicked siren whose dreadful fate Elijah foretold, was cousin to Dido, she who Virgil tells us "wept in silence" for the faithless Æneas. With what a strange thrill do we find these threads of association between history sacred and profane, and both mingled with the modern history of Spain. But Phenicia, for the "iniquity of her traffick," was doomed. The roots of this old Asiatic tree had been slowly and surely perishing, while her branches in the West were expanding. In the year 332 B.C. the siege and destruction of Tyre, predicted five hundred years before by Isaiah, was accomplished by Alexander the Great, and the words of the prophet found their complete fulfillment--that the people of Tarshish should find no city, no port, no welcome, when they came back to Syria! But on the northern coast of the Mediterranean there was another power which was waxing, while the Carthaginian was waning. The occupation of the young Roman Republic was not trade, but conquest. A bitter enmity existed between the two nations. Rome was determined to break this grasping old Asiatic confederacy and to drive it out of Europe. The Spanish Peninsula she knew little about, but the rich islands near her own coast--they must be hers. When, after the first Punic war (264-241 B.C.), the Carthaginians saw Sardinia and Sicily torn from them, Hamilcar, their great general, determined upon a plan of vengeance which should make of Italy a Punic province. His people were strong upon the sea, but for this war of invasion they must have an army, too. So he conceived the idea of making Spain the basis of his military operations, and recruiting an immense army from the Iberian Peninsula. CHAPTER III. The Carthaginian occupation of Spain had not extended much beyond the coast, and had been rather in the nature of a commercial alliance with a few cities. Now Hamilcar determined, by placating, and by bribes, and if necessary by force, to take possession of the Peninsula for his own purposes, and to make of the people a Punic nation under the complete dominion of Carthage. So his first task was to win, or to subdue, the Keltiberians. He built the city of New Carthage (now Carthagena), he showed the people how to develop their immense resources, and by promises of increased prosperity won the confidence and sympathy of the nation, and soon had a population of millions from which to recruit its army. When his son Hannibal was nine years old, at his father's bidding he placed his hand upon the altar and swore eternal enmity to Rome. The fidelity of the boy to his oath made a great deal of history. He took up the task when his father laid it down, inaugurated the second Punic war (218-201 B.C.); and for forty years carried on one of the most desperate struggles the world has ever seen; the hoary East in struggle with the young West. Saguntum was that ancient city in Valencia which was said to have been founded by the Greeks long before Homer sang of Troy, or, indeed, before Helen brought ruin upon that city. At all events its antiquity was greater even than that of the Phenician cities in Spain, and after being long forgotten by the Greeks it had drifted under Roman protection. It was the only spot in Spain which acknowledged allegiance to Rome; and for that reason was marked for destruction as an act of defiance. The Saguntines sent an embassy to Rome. These men made a pitiful and passionate appeal in the Senate Chamber: "Romans, allies, friends! help! help! Hannibal is at the gates of our city. Hannibal, the sworn enemy of Rome. Hannibal the terrible. Hannibal who fears not the gods, neither keeps faith with men. ["Punic faith" was a byword.] O Romans, fathers, friends! help while there is yet time." But they found they had a "protector" who did not protect. The senators sent an embassy to treat with Hannibal, but no soldiers. So, with desperate courage, the Saguntines defended their beleaguered city for weeks, hurling javelins, thrusting their lances, and beating down the besiegers from the walls. They had no repeating rifles nor dynamite guns, but they had the terrible _falaric_, a shaft of fir with an iron head a yard long, at the point of which was a mass of burning tow, which had been dipped in pitch. When a breach was made in the walls, the inflowing army would be met by a rain of this deadly falaric, which was hurled with telling power and precision. Then, in the short interval of rest this gave them, men, women, and children swiftly repaired the broken walls before the next assault. But at last the resourceful Hannibal abandoned his battering rams, and with pickaxes undermined the wall, which fell with a crash. When asked to surrender, the chief men of the city kindled a great fire in the market-place, into which they then threw all the silver and gold in the treasury, their own gold and silver and garments and furniture, and then cast themselves headlong into the flames. This was their answer. Saguntum, which for more than a thousand years had looked from its elevation out upon the sea, was no more, and its destruction was one of the thrilling tragedies of ancient history. On its site there exists to-day a town called _Mur Viedro_ (old walls), and these old walls are the last vestige of ancient Saguntum. In order to understand the indifference of Rome to the Spanish Peninsula at this time, it must be remembered that Spain was then the uttermost verge of the known world, beyond which was only a dread waste of waters and of mystery. To the people of Tyre and of Greece, the twin "Pillars of Hercules" had marked the limit beyond which there was nothing; and those two columns, Gibraltar and Ceuta, with the legend _ne plus ultra_ entwined about them, still survive, as a symbol, in the arms of Spain and upon the Spanish coins; and what is still more interesting to Americans, in the familiar mark ($) which represents a dollar. (The English name for the Spanish _peso_ is _pillar-dollar_.) Now Rome was aroused from its apathy. It sent an army into Spain, led by Scipio the Elder, known as Scipio Africanus. When he fell, his son, only twenty-four years old, stood up in the Roman Forum and offered to fill the undesired post; and, in 210 B.C., Scipio "the Younger"--and the greater--took the command--as Livy eloquently says--"between the tombs of his father and his uncle", who had both perished in Spain within a month. The chief feature of Scipio's policy was, while he was defeating Hannibal in battles, to be undermining him with his native allies; and to make that people realize to what hard taskmasters they had bound themselves; and by his own manliness and courtesy and justice to win them to his side. He marched his army swiftly and unexpectedly upon New Carthage, the capital and center of the whole Carthaginian movement, sent his fleet to blockade the city, and planned his moves with such precision that the fleet for the blockade and the army for the siege arrived before the city on the same day. Taken entirely by surprise. New Carthage was captured without a siege. Not one of the inhabitants was spared, and spoil of fabulous amounts fell to the victors. It seems like a fairy tale--or like the story of Mexico and Peru 1800 years later--to read of 276 golden bowls which were brought to Scipio's tent, countless vessels of silver, and 18 tons of coined and wrought silver. But the richest part of the prize was the 750 Spanish hostages--high in rank of course--whom the various tribes had given in pledge of their fidelity to Carthage. Now Scipio held these pledges, and they were a menace and a promise. They were Roman slaves, but he could by kindness, and by holding out the hope of emancipation, placate and further bind to him the native people. By an exercise of tact and clemency Scipio gained such an ascendancy over the inhabitants, and so moved were they by this unexpected generosity and kindness, that many would gladly have made him their king. But he seems to have been the "noblest Roman of them all," and when saluted as king on one occasion he said: "Never call me king. Other nations may revere that name, but no Roman can endure it. My soldiers have given me a more honorable title--that of general." Such nobility, such a display of Roman virtue, was a revelation to these barbarians; and they felt the grandeur of the words, though they could not quite understand them. They were won to the cause of Rome, and formed loyal alliances with Scipio which they never broke. In the year 206 B.C. Gades (Cadiz), the last stronghold, was surrendered to the Romans, and the entire Spanish Peninsula had been wrenched from the Carthaginians. _Iberia_ was changed to _Hispania_, and fifteen years later the whole of the Peninsula was organized into a Roman province, thenceforth known in history, not as _Iberia_, nor yet _Hispania_; but _Spain_, and its people as _Spaniards_. At the end of the third Punic war (149-146 B.C.), the ruin of the Carthaginians was complete. Hannibal had died a fugitive and a suicide. His nation had not a single ship upon the seas, nor a foot of territory upon the earth, and the great city of Carthage was plowed and sowed with salt. Rome had been used by Fate to fulfill her stern decree--"_Delenda est Carthago_." It was really only a limited portion of the Peninsula; a fringe of provinces upon the south and east coast, which had been under Carthaginian and now acknowledged Roman dominion. Beyond these the Keltiberian tribes in the center formed a sort of confederation, and consented to certain alliances with the Romans; while beyond them, intrenched in their own impregnable mountain fastnesses, were brave, warlike, independent tribes, which had never known anything but freedom, whose names even, Rome had not yet heard. The stern virtue and nobility of Scipio proved a delusive promise. Rome had not an easy task, and other and brutal methods were to be employed in subduing stubborn tribes and making of the whole a Latin nation. In one of the defiles of the Pyrenees there may now be seen the ruins of fortifications built by Cato the Elder, not long after Scipio, which show how early those free people in the north were made to feel the iron heel of the master and to learn their lesson of submission. The century which followed Scipio's conquest was one of dire experience for Spain. A Roman army was trampling out every vestige of freedom in provinces which had known nothing else; and more than that, Roman diplomacy was making of their new possession a fighting ground for the civil war which was then raging at Rome; and partisans of Marius and of Sylla were using and slaughtering the native tribes in their own desperate struggle. Roman rule was arrogant and oppressive, Roman governors cruel, arbitrary, and rapacious, and the boasted "Roman virtue" seemed to have been left in Rome, when treaties were made only to be violated at pleasure. CHAPTER IV. As nature delights in adorning the crevices of crumbling ruins with mosses and graceful lichens, so literature has busied itself with these historic ruins; and Cervantes has made the siege of Numantia (134 B.C.)--more terrible even than that of Saguntum--the subject of a poem, in which he depicts the horrors of the famine. Lira, the heroine, answers her ardent lover Mirando in high-flown Spanish phrase, which, when summed up in plain English prose, means that she cannot listen to his wooing, because she is so hungry--which, in view of the fact that she has not tasted food for weeks, seems to us not surprising! Sertorius, whose story is told by Plutarch, affords another picturesque subject for Corneille in one of his most famous tragedies. This Roman was an adherent of Marius in the long struggle with Sylla, and while upholding his cause in Spain he won to his side the people of Lusitania (Portugal), who made him their ruler, and helped him to fight the great army of the opposing Roman faction, part of which was led by Pompey. Mithridates, in Asia Minor, was also in conflict with Sylla, and sent an embassy to Sertorius which led to a league between the two for mutual aid, and for the defense of the cause of Marius. But senators of his own party became jealous of the great elevation of Sertorius, and conspired to assassinate him at a feast to which he was invited. So ended (72 B.C.) one of the most picturesque characters and interesting episodes in the difficult march of barbarous Spain toward enlightenment and civilization. Sertorius seems to have been a great administrator as well as fighter, and must also be counted one of the civilizers of Spain. He founded a school at Osca,--now Huesca,--where he had Roman and Greek masters for the Spanish youth. And it is interesting to learn that there is to-day at that city a university which bears the title "University of Sertorius." But it is not the valor nor the sagacity of Sertorius which made him the favorite of poets; but the story of the White Hind, which he made to serve him so ingeniously in establishing his authority with the Lusitanians. A milk-white fawn, on account of its rarity, was given him by a peasant. He tamed her, and she became his constant companion, unaffrighted even in the tumult of battle. He saw that the people began to invest the little animal with supernatural qualities; so, finally, he confided to them that she was sent to him by the Goddess Diana, who spoke to him through her, and revealed important secrets. Such is the story which Corneille and writers in other lands have found so fascinating, and which an English author has made the subject of his poem "The White Hind of Sertorius." Another Roman civil war, more pregnant of great results, was to be fought out in Spain. Julius Cæsar's conspiracy against the Roman Republic, and his desperate fight with Pompey for the dictatorship, long drenched Spanish soil with blood, and had its final culmination (after Pompey's tragic death in Egypt) in Cæsar's victory over Pompey's sons at Munda, in Spain, 45 B.C. With this event, the military triumphs and the intrigues of Cæsar had accomplished his purpose. He was declared _Imperator_, perpetual Dictator of Rome, and religious sacrifices were decreed to him as if he were a god. Unconscious of the chasm which was yawning at his feet he haughtily accepted the honors and adulation of men who were at that very moment conspiring for his death. On the fatal "Ides of March" (44 B.C.) he was stricken in the Senate Chamber by the hands of his friends, and the great Cæsar lay dead at the feet of Pompey's statue. The world had reached a supreme crisis in its existence. Two events--the most momentous it has ever known--were at hand: the birth of a Roman Empire, which was to perish in a few centuries, after a life of amazing splendor; and the birth of a spiritual kingdom, which would never die! Cæsar's nephew, Octavius Augustus, by gradual approaches reached the goal toward which no doubt his greater uncle was moving. After defeating Brutus and Cassius at Philippi (42 B.C.) and then after destroying his only competitor, Antony, at Actium (31 B.C.) he assumed the imperial purple under the name of Augustus. The title sounded harmless, but its wearer had founded the "Roman Empire." At last there was peace. Spain was pacified, and only here and there did she struggle in the grasp of the Romans. Augustus, to make sure of the permanence of this pacification, himself went to the Peninsula. He built cities in the plains, where he compelled the stubborn mountaineers to reside, and established military colonies in the places they had occupied. Saragossa was one of these cities in the plains, and its name was "Cæsar Augusta," and many others have wandered quite as far from their original names, which may, however, still be traced. It is said that "the annals of the happy are brief." Let us hope that poor Spain, so long harried by fate, was happy in the next four hundred years, for her story can be briefly told. She seemed to have settled into a state of eternal peace. It was a period not of external events, but of a process--an internal process of assimilation. Spain, in every department of its life, was becoming Latinized. A people of rare intellectual activity had been united to the life of Rome at the moment of her greatest intellectual elevation. Was it strange that no Roman province ever produced so long a list of historians, poets, philosophers, as did Southern Spain after the Augustan conquest? When we read the list of great Roman authors who were born in Spain--the three Senecas, one of whom, the author and wit, opened his veins at the command of Nero (65 A.D.), and another, the Gallio of the book of Acts; also Lucan, Martial, and Quintilian, when we read these names native to Spain, it seems as if the source of inspiration had removed from the banks of the Tiber to the banks of the Guadalquivir. Nowhere can the student of Roman antiquities find a richer field than in Spain. And not only that, there is to-day in the manners and customs, and in the habits of the peasantry, a pervading atmosphere of the classic land which adopted them, which all that has occurred since has been powerless to efface, while the language of Spain is Latin to its core. Nor is this strange when we reflect that they were under this powerful influence for a period as long as from Christopher Columbus to the Spanish-American War! CHAPTER V. In the history of nations there is one fact which again and again with startling uniformity repeats itself. The rough, strong races from the north menace, and at last rudely dominate more highly civilized but less hardy races at the South, to the ultimate benefit of both, although with much present discomfort to the conquered race! In Greece it was first the rude Hellenes who overran the Pelasgians. And again, long after that, there was another descent of fierce northern barbarians,--the Dorians from Epirus,--who, when they took possession of the Peloponnesus and became the _Spartans_, infused that vigorous strain without which the history of Greece might have been a very tame affair. In the British Isles it was the Picts and Scots, who would have done the same thing with England, perhaps, if the Angles and Saxons had not come to the rescue, while Spain had her own Picts and Scots in the mountain tribes of the Pyrenees. But in the fifth century there was the most stupendous illustration of this tendency, when all of Southern Europe was at last inundated by that northern deluge, and the effete Roman Empire was effaced. The process had been a gradual one; had commenced, in fact, two centuries before the overthrow of the Roman Republic. But not until the fourth century, after the wicked old empire had espoused Christianity, did it become obvious that its foundations were undermined by this flood of barbarians. In 410 A.D., when the West-Goths, under Alaric, entered and sacked Rome, her power was broken. The roots no longer nourished the distant extremities in Britain and Gaul, and it was only a question of time when these, too, should succumb to the inflowing tide. The Ostro-Goths--or East-Goths--in Northern Italy, and the Visigoths--or West-Goths--in Gaul, were setting up kingdoms of their own, under a Roman protectorate. The long period of peace in Spain was broken. The Pyrenees, with their warlike tribes, defended her for a time; but the Suevi and the Vandals--the latter a companion tribe of the Goths--had found an easier entrance by the sea on the east. They flowed down toward the south, and from thence across to the northern coast of Africa, which they colonized, leaving a memorial in Spain, in the lovely province of Andalusia, which was named after them--_Vandalusia_. But before the sacking of Rome a wave of the Gothic invasion had overflowed the Pyrenees, and Northern Spain had become a part of the Gothic kingdom in Gaul, with the city of Toulouse as its head. A century of contact with Roman civilization had wrought great changes in this conquering race. They were untamed in strength, but realized the value of the civilities of life, and of intellectual superiority; and even strove to acquire some of the arts and accomplishments of the race they were invading. They were not yet acknowledged entire masters of Gaul and northern Spain. On condition of military service they had undisputed possession of their territory, with their own king, laws, and customs, but were nominally subjects of the Roman Emperor, Honorius. Their attitude toward the Romans at this period cannot better be told than in the words of Ataulf himself (or Ataulfus, or Adolphus), whose interesting story will be briefly related. He says: "It was my first wish to destroy the Roman name and erect in its place a Gothic Empire, taking to myself the place and the powers of Cæsar Augustus. But when experience taught me that the untamable barbarism of the Goths would not suffer them to live under the sway of law, and that the abolition of the institutions on which the state rested would involve the ruin of the state itself, I chose instead the glory of renewing and maintaining by Gothic strength the fame of Rome; preferring to go down to posterity as the restorer of that Roman power which it was beyond my power to replace." These are not the words of a barbarian; although by the corrupt and courtly nobles in Rome he was considered one; but no doubt he towered far above the barbarous host whom he helped to lead into Rome in the year 410 A.D. Ataulf was the brother-in-law of Alaric, and succeeded that great leader in authority after his death (410 A.D.). At the time of the sacking of Rome this Gothic prince fell in love with Placidia, the sister of the Emperor Honorius; and after the fashion of his people, carried her away as his captive; not an unwilling one, we suspect, for we learn of her great devotion to her brave, strong wooer, with blond hair and blue eyes. Ataulf took his fair prize to the city of Narbonne in southern France, and made her his Queen. But when Constantius, a disappointed Roman lover of Placidia's, instigated Honorius to send an army against him and his Goths, he withdrew into Spain, and established his court with its rude splendor in the ancient city of Barcelona. He seems to have had not an easy task between the desire to please his haughty Roman bride and, at the same time, to repel the charge of his people that he was becoming effeminate and Romanized; and, finally, so jealous did they become of her influence that Ataulf was assassinated in the presence of his wife, all his children butchered, and the proud Placidia compelled to walk barefoot through the streets of Barcelona. Constantius, the faithful Roman lover, came with an army and carried back to Rome the royal widow, who married him and became the mother of Valentinian III., who succeeded his uncle Honorius as Emperor of Rome in 425 A.D., under the regency of Placidia during his infancy. This romance, lying at the very root of a Gothic dynasty in Spain, marks the earliest beginnings of a line of Visigoth kings. Ataulf's successor removed his court to Toulouse in France, and Spain for many years remained only an outlying province of the Gothic kingdom; her turbulent northern tribes refusing to accept or to mingle with the strange intruders. When driven by the Romans from their mountain fastnesses the Basques, many of them, were at that time dispersed through southern and central France; which accounts for the presence of that race in France, before alluded to. In the second half of the fifth century Attila, "the Scourge of God," swept down upon Europe with his Huns,--mysterious, terrible, as a fire out of heaven, and more like an army of demons than men,--destroying city after city, and driving the people before them, until they came to Orléans. There they met the combined Roman and Gothic armies. Theodoric, the Visigoth king, was killed on the battlefield. But to him, and to the Roman general Ætius, belongs the glory of the defeat of the Huns (451 A.D.). It was Evaric, the son of this Theodoric, who finally completed the conquest of the Spanish Peninsula, and with him really commences the line of Visigoth kings in Spain, and the conversion of that country into a Gothic empire,[A] entirely independent of Rome. The German _Franks_, under Clovis, established their kingdom in Gaul 481 A.D. The _Angles_ and _Saxons_ in 446 A.D. did the same in Britain. The _Ostrogoths_ had their own kingdom in northern Italy and southern Gaul (Burgundy). So, with the _Visigoths_ ruling in Spain, the "northern deluge" had in the fifth century practically submerged the whole of Europe, and above its dark waters showed only the somber wreck of a Roman empire. From this fusing of Roman and Teutonic races there were to arise two types of civilization, utterly different in kind, the _Anglo-Saxon_ and the _Latin_. In one the prevailing element, after the fusing was complete, was to be the Teutonic; in the other, the Roman. Herein lies the difference between these two great divisions of the human family, and this is the germinal fact in the war raging to-day between Spain and the United States. It is a difference created not by the mastery of arms, but by the more efficient mastery of ideas. When the Angles and Saxons conquered Britain, after a Roman occupation of over three hundred years, they swept it clean of Roman laws, literature, and civilization. Untamed pagan barbarians though they were, they had fine instincts and simple ideals of society and government, and they cast out the corrupt old empire, root and branch. The Visigoths in Spain, more enlightened than they, already Christianized, and, perhaps, even superior in intelligence, were content in the words of Ataulf--"to renew and maintain by Gothic strength the fame of Rome." So they built upon the ruins of decaying institutions of a corrupt civilization, a kingdom which flourished with the enormous vitality drawn from the conquering race, which race was in turn conquered by Roman ideals. So, in the conflict now existing between Spain and the United States, we see the Spaniard, the child of the Romans; valorous, picturesque, cruel, versed in strategic arts, and with a savor of archaic wickedness which belongs to a corrupt old age. In the American we see the child of the simple Angles and Saxons, no less brave, but just, and with an enthusiasm and confiding integrity which seems to endow him with an imperishable youth. [Footnote A: The famous Gothic code established by him still linger in much of Spanish jurisprudence.] CHAPTER VI. The story of Ulfilas, who Christianized the pagan Goths in the last half of the fourth century, is really the first chapter not alone in the history of Gothic civilization but in that of the German and English literatures; which, with their vast riches, had their origin in the strange achievement of Ulfilas. He had, while a boy, been captured by some Goths off the coast of Asia Minor, and was called by them "_Wulf-ilas_" (little wolf). In his desire to translate the Bible to his captors Wulf-ilas reduced the Gothic language to writing. He had first to create an alphabet; taking twenty-two Roman letters, and inventing two more: the letter _w_, and still another for _th_. So while, after Constantine, the Christian religion was being adopted by the Roman Empire, and while its simple dogmas were being discussed and refined into a complicated and intricate system by men versed in Greek philosophy, and then formulated by minds trained in logic and rhetoric, the same religion was being spelled out in simple fashion by the Goths in central Europe from the book translated for them by Ulfilas. All they found was that Jesus Christ was the beloved son of God and the Saviour of the world; that he was the long-promised Messiah, and to believe in him and to follow his teachings was salvation. They knew nothing of the Trinity nor of any theologic subtleties, and this was the simple faith which the Goths carried with them into the lands they conquered. The Romans, who had spent three centuries in burning Christians and trying to obliterate the religion of Christ, were now its jealous guardians. They considered this "Arianism," as it was called, a blasphemous heresy, so shocking that they refused to call it Christianity at all. The history of the first century of the Gothic kingdom in Spain was therefore mainly that of the deadly strife between Arianism and Catholicism, or orthodoxy. The Goths could not discuss, for they were utterly unable to understand even the terms under discussion; but they could fight and lay down their lives for the faith which had done so much for them; and this they did freely and fiercely. So the simple Gothic people were bewildered by finding themselves in the presence of a Christianity incomprehensible to them; a complicated, highly organized social order, equally incomprehensible; and a science and a literature of which they knew nothing. They might struggle for a while against this tide of superiority, but one by one they entered the fascinating portals of learning and of art, accepted the dogmas of learned prelates, and a few generations were sufficient to make them meek disciples of the older civilization. The Spanish language fairly illustrates the result from this incongruous mingling of Roman and Gothic. It is said to be a language of Latin roots with a Teutonic grammar. The Goths laid rough hands on the speech they consented to use, and the smooth, sonorous Latin was strangely broken and mixed with Gothic words and idioms; yet it became one of the most copious, flexible, and picturesque of languages, with a literature marvelously rich and beautiful. In precisely the same way was the classic old ruin of a Roman state re-enforced with a rough Gothic framework, and after centuries have hidden the joints and the scars with mosses and verdure, we have a picturesque and beautiful Spain! But barbarous kings were fighting other things besides heresy. There were rebellions to put down; there were remnants of Sueves and of Roman power to drive out, and there were always the fierce mountain tribes who never mingled with any conquerors, nor had ever surrendered to anything but the Catholic faith. There were intermarriages between the three Gothic kingdoms, in Burgundy, Gaul, and Spain, and the history of some of these royal families shows what wild passions still raged among the Goths, and what atrocities were strangely mingled with ambitious projects and religion. Athanagild, one of the Visigoth kings, gave his daughter Brunhilde in marriage to the King of the Franks in Gaul. The story of this terrible Queen, stained with every crime, and accused of the death of no less than ten kings, comes to a fitting end when, we are told, that in her wicked old age she was tied to the tail of an unbroken horse and dragged over the stones of Paris (600 A.D.). At this time Leovigild (570-587), the Visigoth King, was ruling Spain with a strong hand. He had assumed more splendor than any of his predecessors. He had erected a magnificent throne in his palace at Toledo, and his head, wearing the royal diadem, was placed on Spanish coins, which may still be seen. A daughter of the terrible Brunhilde, the Princess Ingunda, came over from France to become the wife of Ermingild, the son of the great King Leovigild, and heir to his throne. All went smoothly until it was discovered that this fair Princess was a Catholic, and was artfully plotting to win her husband over to her faith from the faith of his fathers--Arianism. Although Catholicism had made great inroads among their people, never before had it invaded the royal household. And when his son declared his intention to desert their ancient creed there commenced a terrible conflict between father and son, which finally led to Ermingild's open rebellion, and at last to his being beheaded by his father's order. But this crime against nature was in vain. Arianism had reached the limit of its life in Spain. Upon the death of Leovigild, his second son, Recared (587-601), succeeded to the throne, and one of his first acts was to abjure the old faith of the Gothic people, and Catholicism became the established religion of Spain. CHAPTER VII. Toledo, the capital of the Visigoth Kings, is the city about which cluster the richest memories of Spain in her heroic age. When Leovigild removed his capital there from Seville in the sixth century, it was already an ancient Jewish city, about which tradition had long busied itself. To-day, as it sits on the summit of a barren hill, one looks in vain for traces of its ancient Gothic splendor. But the spot where now stands a beautiful cathedral is hallowed by a wonderful legend, which Murillo made the subject of one of his great paintings. It is said that the Apostle St. James founded on that very spot the Church of _Santa Maria_; and that the Virgin, in recognition of the dedication to her, descended from heaven to present its Bishop, Ildofonso, with a marvelous chasuble. In proof of this miracle, doubting visitors are still shown the marks of Mary's footprint upon a stair in the chapel! However this may be, it is on this very spot that King Recared formally abjured Arianism; and preserved in a cloister of the cathedral may still be seen the "Consecration Stone" which reads: that the Church of Santa Maria,--built probably on the foundation of the older church,--was consecrated under "King Recared the Catholic, 587 A.D." It also tells of the councils of the Spanish Church held there--at one of which councils was the famous canon which decreed that all future Kings must swear they would show no mercy to "that accursed people"--meaning the Jews. It was these very Jews who had brought commercial success and created the enormous wealth of the city, from which it was now the duty of the pious Visigoth Kings to harry and hunt them as if they were frightened deer. The Visigoth monarchy, although in many cases hereditary, was in fact elective. And the student of Spanish history will not find an orderly royal succession as in England and France. Disputes regarding the succession were not infrequent, and sometimes there will occur an interval with apparently no king at all, followed by another period when there are two--one ruling in the north and another in the south. "The King is dead--long live the King!" might do for France, but not for Spain. During one of these periods of uncertainty, in the latter half of the seventh century, it is said that Leo, a holy man (afterward Pope), was told in a dream that the man who must wear the crown was then a laborer, living in the west, and that his name was Wamba. They traveled in search of this man almost to the borders of Portugal, and there they found the future candidate for the throne plowing in the field. The messengers, bowing before the plowman, informed him that he had been selected as King of Spain. Wamba laughed, and said, "Yes, I shall be King of Spain when my pole puts forth leaves." Instantly the bare pole began to bud, and in a few moments was covered with verdure! In vain did Wamba protest. What could a poor man do in the face of such a miracle, and with a Spanish Duke pressing a poniard against his breast, and telling him to choose on the instant between a throne and a tomb! The unhappy Wamba suffered himself to be borne in triumph to Toledo, and there to be crowned. And a very wise and excellent King did he make. He seemed fully equal to the difficult demands of his new position. A rebellion, fomented by an ambitious Duke Paul, who gathered about his standard all the banished Jews, was a very formidable affair. But Wamba put it down with a firm hand, and then, when it was over, treated the conspirators and rebels with marvelous clemency. When his reign was concluded he left a record of wisdom and sagacity rare in those days, in any land. His taking off the stage was as remarkable as his coming on. He fell into a trance (October 14, 680), and after long insensibility it was concluded that the King was dying. According to a custom of the period Wamba's head was shaved, and he was clothed in the habit of a monk. The meaning of this was that if he died, he would, as was fitting, pass into the Divine presence in penitential garb. But if, peradventure, the patient survived, he was pledged to spend the rest of his life in that holy vocation, renouncing every worldly advantage. So when, after a few hours, Wamba, in perfect health, opened his eyes, he found that instead of a King he was transformed into a Monk! Whether this was a cunning device of this philosophic King to lay down the burdens which wearied him, and spend the rest of his days in tranquility; or whether it was the work of the Royal Prince, who joyfully assumed the diadem which he had so unwillingly worn, nobody knows. But Wamba passed the remainder of his days in a monastery near Burgos, and the ambitious Ervigius reigned as his successor. CHAPTER VIII. The Visigoth kingdom, which had stood for three centuries, had passed its meridian. It had created a magnificent background for historic Spain, and a heritage which would be the pride and glory of the proudest nation in Europe. The Goths had come as only rude intruders into that country; but to be descended from the Visigoth Kings was hereafter to be the proudest boast of the Spaniard. And the man who could make good such claim to distinction was a _Hidalgo_; or in its original form, _hijo-de-algo_--son of somebody. But many generations of peace had impaired the rugged strength and softened the sinews of the nation. It was the beginning of the end when, at the close of the seventh century, there were two rival claimants to the throne; and while the vicious and cruel Witiza reigned at Toledo, Roderick, the son of Theodofred, also reigned in Andalusia. There had been a long struggle, during which it is said that Theodofred's eyes had been put out by his victorious rival, and his son Roderick had obtained assistance from the Greek Emperor at Byzantium in asserting his own claims. He succeeded in driving Witiza out of the country; and in 709,--"the last of the Goths,"--was crowned at Toledo, King of all Spain. But the struggle was not over; and it was about to lead to a result which is one of the most momentous in the history, not alone of Spain,--nor yet of Europe,--but of _Christendom_. Witiza was dead, but his two sons, with a formidable following, were still trying to work the ruin of Roderick. A certain Count Julian, who, on account of his daughter Florinda, had his own wrongs to avenge, accepted the leadership of these rebels. The power of the Visigoths had extended across the narrow strait (cut by the Phenicians) over to the opposite shore, where Morocco seems to be reaching out in vain endeavor to touch the land from which she was long ago severed; and there, at Tangiers, this arch-traitor laid his plans and matured the scheme of revenge and treachery which had such tremendous results for Europe. With an appearance of perfect loyalty he parted from Roderick, who unsuspectingly asked him to bring him some hawks from Africa when he returned. Bowing, he said: "Sire, I will bring you such hawks as never were seen in Spain before." For one hundred years an unprecedented wave of conquest had been moving from Asia toward the west. Mahommedanism, which was destined to become the scourge of Christendom, had subjected Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and northern Africa, until it reached Ceuta--the companion Pillar to Gibraltar on the African coast. At this point the Goths had stood, as a protecting wall beyond which the Asiatic deluge could not flow. Count Julian was the trusted military commander of the Gothic garrisons in Morocco, as _Musa_, the oft-defeated Saracen leader, knew to his cost. As this Musa was one day looking with covetous eyes across at the Spanish Peninsula, he was suddenly surprised by a visit from Count Julian; and still more astonished when that commander offered to surrender to him the Gothic strongholds _Tangier_, _Arsilla_, and _Ceuta_ in return for the assistance of the Saracen army in the cause of Witiza's sons against Roderick. Amazed at such colossal treason, Musa referred Count Julian to his master the Khalif, at Damascus, who at once accepted his infamous proposition. In Spanish legend and history this man is always designated as _The Traitor_, as if standing alone and on a pinnacle among the men who have betrayed their countries. Musa, half doubting, sent a preliminary force of about five hundred Moors under a chief named _Tarif_, to the opposite coast; and the Moors found, as was promised, that they might range at their own will and pleasure in that earthly paradise of Andalusia. The name of this Mussulman chief, Tarif, was given to the spot first touched by the feet of the Mahommedan, which was called _Tarifa_; and as Tarifa was afterward the place where customs were collected, the word _tariff_ is an imperishable memorial of that event. In like manner Gibraltar was named _Gebel-al-Tarik_, (Mountain of Tarik) after the leader bearing that name, who was sent later by Musa with a larger force; which name has been gradually changed to its present form--Gibraltar. Poor King Roderick, while still fighting to maintain his own right to the crown he wore, learned with dismay that his country was invaded by a horde of people from the African coast. Theodemir wrote to him: "So strange is their appearance that we might take them for inhabitants of the sky. Send me all the troops you can collect, without delay." The hawks promised by Count Julian had arrived! The hour of doom had sounded for the last King of the Visigoths, and for his kingdom. There is a legend that a mysterious tower existed near Toledo, which was built by Hercules, soon after Adam, with the command that no king or lord of Spain should ever seek to know what it contained; instead of that it was the duty of each King to put a new lock upon its mysterious portal. It is said that Roderick, perhaps in his extremity, resolved to disobey the command, and to discover the secret hidden in the Enchanted Tower. In a jeweled shrine in the very heart of the structure he came at last to a coffer of silver, "right subtly wrought," and far inside of that he reached the final mystery,--only this,--a white cloth folded between two pieces of copper. With trembling eagerness Roderick opened and found painted thereon men with turbans, carrying banners, with swords strung around their necks, and bows behind them, slung at the saddle-bow. Over these figures was written: "When this cloth shall be opened, men appareled like these shall conquer Spain, and be the lords thereof." Such is the picturesque legend. Men with "turbans and banners and swords slung about their necks," were assuredly now in Andalusia, led by Tarik, who had literally burned his ships behind him, and then told his followers to choose between victory or death. The two armies faced each other at a spot near Cadiz. It is said that Roderick, the degenerate successor of Alaric, went into battle in a robe of white silk embroidered with gold, sitting on a car of ivory, drawn by white mules. Tarik's men, who were fighting for victory or Paradise, overwhelmed the Goths; Roderick, in his flight, was drowned in the Guadalquivir, and his diadem of pearls and his embroidered robe were sent to Damascus as trophies. Count Julian urged that the victory be immediately followed up by Musa before there was time for the Spaniards to rally. One after another the cities of Toledo, Cordova, and Granada capitulated, the persecuted Jews flocking to the new standard and aiding in the conquest of their oppressors. As well might one have held back the Atlantic from rushing through that canal upon the isthmus, as to have stayed the inflowing of the Saracens through the breach made by "the Traitor," Count Julian! In less than two years Spain was a conquered province, rendering allegiance to the Khalif at Damascus, and the _Moor_,--as the followers of the Prophet in Morocco were called,--reigned in Toledo. It was in the year 412 that Ataulfus, with his haughty bride Placidia, had established his Court at Barcelona, and Romanized Spain became Gothic Spain. In 711--just three centuries later--the Visigoth kingdom had disappeared as utterly beneath the Saracen flood as had its ill-fated King Roderick under the waters of the Guadalquivir; and fastened upon Christian Europe was a Mahommedan empire; an empire which all the combined powers of that continent have never since been able entirely to dislodge. From that ill-omened day in 709, when Tarif set foot on the Spanish coast, to this June of 1898, the Mahommedan has been in Europe; and remains to-day, a scourge and a blight in the territory upon which his cruel grasp still lingers. CHAPTER IX. Tarik and his twelve thousand Berbers,[A] or Moors, had at one stroke won the Spanish Peninsula. The banner of the Prophet waved over every one of the ancient and famous cities in Andalusia, and the turbaned army had marched through the stubborn north as far as the Spanish border. As Musa, intoxicated with success, stood at last upon the Pyrenees, he saw before him a vision of a subjugated Europe. The banner of the Prophet should wave from the Pyrenees to the Baltic! A mosque should stand where St. Peter's now stands in Rome! So, step by step, the Moslems pressed up into Gaul, and in 732 their army had reached Tours. It was a moment of supreme peril for Christendom. But, happily, the Franks had what the Goths had not--a great leader. Charles Martel,--then _Maire du Palais_, and virtually King of France, instead of the feeble Lothair,--led his Franks into what was to be one of the most decisive of the world's battles; a battle which would determine whether Europe should be Christian or Mahommedan. The tide of infidel invasion had reached its limits. The strong right arm of Charles dealt such ponderous blows that the Moslems broke in confusion, and this savior of Christendom was thenceforth known as Charles Martel: "Karl of the Hammer." After this crushing disaster at Tours the Moors realized that they were not invincible. Their vaulting ambition did not again try to overleap the Pyrenees; and they addressed themselves to settling affairs in their new territory. It has been wisely said that if the Mahommedan state had been confined within the borders of Arabia, it would speedily have collapsed. Islam became a world-wide religion when it clothed itself with armor, and became a church militant. It was _conquest_ which saved the faith of the Prophet. In its home in Asia the Empire of Mahommed was composed of hostile tribes and clans, and as it moved westward it gathered up Syrians, Egyptians, and the Berbers on the African coast, who, when Morocco was reached, were known as Moors. This strange, heterogeneous mass of humanity, all nourished from Arabia, was held together by two things: the _Koran_ and the _sword_. When conquest was exchanged for peaceful possession, all the internecine jealousies, the tribal feuds, and old hatreds burst forth, and the first fifty years of Moorish rule in Spain was a period of internal strife and disorder--Arabs and Moors were jealously trying to undermine each other; while the Arabs themselves were torn by factions representing rival clans in Damascus. But a singular clemency was shown toward the conquered Spaniards. They were permitted to retain their own law and judges, and their own governors administered the affairs of the districts and collected the taxes. The rule of the conquering race bore upon the people actually less heavily than had the old Gothic rule. Jews and Christians alike were free to worship whom or what they pleased; but, at the same time, great benefits were bestowed upon those who would accept the religion of the Prophet. The slave class, which was very large and had suffered terrible cruelties under its old masters, was treated with especial mildness and humanity. There was a simple road to freedom opened to every man. He had only to say, "There is one God, and Mahommed is his Prophet," and on the instant he became a freeman! Such gentle proselytizing as this speedily won converts, not alone among slaves but from all classes. The pacification of Spain by the Romans had required centuries; while only a few years sufficed to make of the vanquished in the southern provinces, a contented and almost happy people; not only reconciled, but even glad of the change of masters. Never was Andalusia so mildly, justly, and wisely governed as by her Arab conquerors. The most delicate of all problems is that of dealing with a conquered race in its own land. That this should have been so wisely and so skillfully handled would be incomprehensible if this had been really, what it is always called, a Moorish conquest. But to be accurate, it was a Moorish invasion and a Saracen conquest! The fierce Berber Moor contributed the brute force, which was wielded by Saracen intelligence. The Saracens were the leaven which penetrated the whole sodden mass of Mahommedanism. With a civilization which had been ripening for centuries under Oriental skies,--rich in wisdom, learning, culture, science, and in art,--they had come into Europe, infidels though they were, to build up and not to destroy. The Roman conquest of Spain had civilized a barbarous race. The Gothic conquest of Romanized Spain had converted an effete civilization into a strong semi-barbarism. Now again the Saracen had come from the East to convert a semi-barbarism into a civilization richer than any Spain had yet known, and, more than that, to hold up a torch of learning and enlightenment which should illumine Europe in the days of darkness which were at hand. Although this difference between Arab and Moor primarily existed, they became fused, and we shall speak of them only as Moors. But we should not lose sight of the fact that the superior intelligence which made the Moorish kingdom magnificent was from the land of the Prophet. The Saracen dealt gently with the conquered Spaniard, not because his heart was tender and kind, but because he was crafty and wise, and knew when not to use force, in order to accomplish his ends. For the same reason he refrained from trying to break the spirit of the independent northern provinces, where the descendants of the old Visigoths--the Hidalgos ("sons-of-somebody")--proudly intrenched themselves in an attitude of defiance, making in time a clearly defined Christian north and Moslem south, with a mountain range (the Sierra Guadarrama) and a river (the Ebro) as the natural boundary line of the two territories. The Moor was a child of the sun. If the stubborn Goth chose to sulk, up among the chilly heights and on the bleak plains of the north, he might do so, and it was little matter if one Alfonso called himself "King of the Asturians," in that mountain-defended and sea-girt province. The fertile plains of Andalusia, and the banks of the Tagus and Guadalquivir, were all of Spain the Moor wanted for the wonderful kingdom which was to be the marvel of the Middle Ages. [Footnote A: The old Phenician name for the North African tribes, derived from the word Iberi.] CHAPTER X. But, at the early period we are considering, the "Christian kingdom" was composed of a handful of men and women who had fled from the Moslems to the mountains of the Asturias. Its one stronghold was the cave of Covadonga, where Pelagius, or Pelayo, had gathered thirty men and ten women. Here, in the dark recesses of this cave,--which was approached through a long and narrow mountain pass, and entered by a ladder of ninety steps,--was the germ of the future kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, and also of the downfall of the Moor. An Arab historian said later: "Would to God the Moslems had extinguished that spark which was destined to consume the dominion of Islam in the north" and, he might have added, "_in Spain._" When Alfonso of Cantabria married the daughter of Pelayo in 751, the cave of Covadonga no longer held the insurgent band. He roused all the northern provinces against the Moors and gathered an army which drove them step by step further south, until he had pushed the Christian frontier as far as the great Sierra, so that the one-time Visigoth capital of Toledo marked the line of the Moslem border fortresses. Too scanty in numbers and too poor in purse to occupy the territory, Alfonso and his army then retreated to their mountains, there to enjoy the empty satisfaction of their conquest. But the Moors in Andalusia had too many troubles of their own at that time to give much heed to Alfonso I. and his rebellious band hiding in the mountains. The Berbers and the Arabs on the African coast were jealous and antagonistic; the one was devout, credulous, and emotional; the other cool, crafty, and diplomatic. Suddenly the long-slumbering hatred burst into open revolt, and the Khalif sent thirty thousand Syrians to put down a formidable revolution in his African dominions. In full sympathy with their kinsmen across the sea, the Moors in Spain began to realize that while that land had been won by twelve thousand Berbers, led by one Berber general, that the lion's share of the spoils had gone to the Arabs, who were carrying things with a high hand! There were signs of a general uprising, in concert with the revolution in Africa; and it looked as if the new territory was to be given up to anarchy; when suddenly all was changed. The Khalif, who was the head of all the Mahommedan empire, was supposed to be the supreme ruler in spiritual and temporal affairs. But as his empire extended to such vast dimensions, he was obliged to delegate much of his temporal authority to others; so gradually it had become somewhat like that of the Pope. He was the supreme spiritual head, and only nominally supreme in affairs of state. The family of _Omeyyad_ had given fourteen Khalifs to the Mahommedan empire from 661 to 750; at which time the then reigning Omeyyad was deposed, and the second dynasty of Khalifs commenced, called _Abbaside_, after Abbas, an uncle of the Prophet. Abd-er-Rahman was a Prince belonging to the deposed family of the Omeyyads. He was the only one of his family who escaped the exterminating fury of the Abbasides. There was no future for him in the east, so the thoughts of the ambitious youth turned to the west--to the newly won territory of Spain. The coming of this last survivor of the Omeyyads to Andalusia is one of the romances of history, and was not unlike the coming of another young Pretender to Scotland, one thousand years later. It aroused the same wild enthusiasm, and as if by magic an army gathered about him, to meet the army of the Governor, Yusuf, which would resist him. Victory declared itself for the Prince, and he entered Cordova in triumph. Before the year had expired the dynasty of the Omeyyads--which was to stand for three centuries--was finally established, and its first king--Abd-er-Rahman--reigned at Cordova. His hereditary enemies the Abbasides followed him to Spain, and found supporters among the disaffected. But it was in vain. The Abbaside army of invasion was utterly annihilated; and the qualities slumbering in this son of the Khalifs may be judged when we relate that the heads of the Abbaside leaders were put into a bag with descriptive labels attached to their ears, and sent to the reigning Khalif as a present. This little incident does not seem to have injured him in the estimation of Mansur, the new Khalif, who said of him: "Wonderful is this man! Such daring, wisdom, prudence! To throw himself into a distant land; to profit by the jealousies of the people; to turn their arms against one another instead of against himself; to win homage and obedience through such difficulties; and to rule supreme--lord of all! Of a truth there is not such another man!" Abd-er-Rahman (the Sultan, as he was called) merited this praise. He knew when to be cruel and when to show mercy; and how to hold scheming Arab chiefs, fierce, jealous Berbers, and vanquished Christians, and could placate or crucify as the conditions required. CHAPTER XI. Charlemagne was at this time building up his colossal empire. His Christian soul was mightily stirred by seeing an infidel kingdom set up in Andalusia; and when, in 777, the Saracen governor and two other Arab chiefs appealed to him for aid against the Omeyyad usurper, Abd-er-Rahman, he eagerly responded. His grandfather Charles Martel had driven these infidels back over the Pyrenees; now he would drive them out of Spain, and reclaim that land for Christianity! His army never reached farther than Saragossa. He was recalled to France by a revolt of the recently conquered Saxons, and the "Battle of Roncesvalles" is the historic monument of the ill-starred attempt. The battle in itself was insignificant. No action of such small importance has ever been invested with such a glamour of romance, nor the theme of so much legend and poetry. It has been called the Thermopylæ of the Pyrenees, because of the personal valor displayed, and the tragic death of the two great Paladins (as the twelve Peers of Charlemagne were called) Roland and Olivier. The _Chanson de Roland_ was one of the famous ballads in the early literature of Europe, and Roland and Olivier were to French and Spanish minstrelsy what the knights of King Arthur were to the English. The simple story about which so much has been written and sung is this: As the retreating army of Charlemagne was crossing the Pyrenees, the rear of the army under Roland and Olivier was ambuscaded in the narrow pass of Roncesvalles by the Basques and exterminated to a man. These Basques were the unconquerable mountain tribe of which we heard so much in the early history of Spain. They had been on guard for centuries, keeping the Franks back from the Pyrenees. They may have been acting under Saracenic influence when they exterminated the rear-guard of Charlemagne's army. But it was done, not because they loved the Saracen, but because they had a hereditary hatred for the Franks. Mediæval Europe never tired of hearing of the Great Charles' lament over his Roland: "O thou right arm of my kingdom,--defender of the Christians,--scourge of the Saracens! How can I behold thee dead, and not die myself! Thou art exalted to the heavenly kingdom,--and I am left alone, a poor miserable King!" CHAPTER XII. The tide which had flowed over southern Spain was a singular mixture of religious fervor, of brutish humanity, and refinements of wisdom and wickedness. No stranger and more composite elements were ever thrown together. Permanence and peace were impossible. Nothing but force could hold together elements so incongruous and antagonistic. As soon as the hand of Abd-er-Rahman I. was removed disintegration began. Clashing races, clans, and political parties had in a few years made such havoc that it seemed as if the Omeyyad dynasty was crumbling. It might have been an Arab who said "he cared not who made the laws of his country, so he could write its songs." Learning, literature, refinements of luxury and of art had taken possession of the land, which seemed given up to the muses. When in 822 Abd-er-Rahman II. reigned, he did not trouble himself about the laws of his crumbling empire. The one man in whom he delighted was _Ziryab_. What Petronius was to Nero,[A] and Beau Brummel to George IV., that was Ziryab to the Sultan Abd-er-Rahman II., the elegant arbiter in matters of taste. From the dishes which should be eaten to the clothes which should be worn, he was the supreme judge; while at the same time he knew by heart and could "like an angel sing" one thousand songs to his adoring Sultan. Even the Gothic Christians were seduced by these alluring refinements. They felt contempt for their old Latin speech and for their literature, with the tiresome asceticism it eternally preached. The Christian ideal had grown to be one of penance and mortification of the flesh, and to a few ardent souls these sensuous delights were an open highway to death eternal. _Eulogius_ became the leader of this band of zealots. In lamenting the decadence of his people, he wrote, "hardly one in a thousand can write a decent Latin letter, and yet they indite excellent Arabic verse!" Filled with despairing ardor this man aroused a few kindred spirits to join him in a desperate attempt to awaken the benumbed conscience of the Christians. They could not get the Moslems to persecute them, but they might attain martyrdom by cursing the Prophet; then the infidels, however reluctant, would be compelled to behead them. This they did, and one by one perished, to no purpose. The Gothic Christians were not conscience-stricken as Eulogius supposed they would be, and there was no general uprising for the Christian faith. In 912 the threatened ruin of the dynasty was arrested by the coming of another Abd-er-Rahman, third Sultan of that name. Rebellion was put down, and fifty years of wise and just administration gave solidity to the kingdom, which also then became a _Khalifate_. The Abbaside Khalifs, after the deposition of the Omeyyads, had removed the Khalifate from Damascus to Baghdad. But the empire had extended too far west to revolve about that distant pivot. Abd-er-Rahman--perhaps remembering the old feud between his family and the Abbasides--determined to assume the spiritual headship of the western part of the empire. And thereafter, the Mahommedan empire--like the Roman--had two heads, an Eastern Khalif at Baghdad, and a Western Khalif at Cordova. While thus extending his own power the Khalif was extinguishing every spark of rebellion in the south and driving the rebellious Christians back in the north, and at the same time he was clothing Cordova with a splendor which amazed and dazzled even the Eastern Princes who came to pay court to the great Khalif. His emissaries were everywhere collecting books for his library and treasure for his palaces. Cordova became the abode of learning, and the nursery for science, philosophy, and art, transplanted from Asia. The imagination and the pen of an arab poet could not have overdrawn this wonderful city on the Guadalquivir,--with its palaces, its gardens, and fountains,--its 50,000 houses of the aristocracy,--its 700 mosques,--and 900 public baths,--all adorned with color and carvings and tracery beautiful as a dream of Paradise. One hears with amazement of the great mosque, with its 19 arcades, its pavings of silver and rich mosaics, its 1293 clustered columns, inlaid with gold and lapis-lazuli, the clusters reaching up to the slender arches which supported the roof; the whole of this marvelous scene lighted by countless brazen lamps made from Christian bells, while hundreds of attendants swung censers, filling the air with perfume. After the ravages of a thousand years travelers stand amazed to-day before the forest of columns which open out in endless vistas in the splendid ruin, calling up visions of the vanished glories of Cordova and the Great Khalif. There is not time to tell of the city this Spanish Khalif built for his favorite wife, "The Fairest," and which he called "Hill of the Bride," upon which for fifteen years ten thousand men worked daily; nor of the four thousand columns which adorned its palaces, presents from emperors and potentates in Constantinople, Rome, and far-off Eastern states; nor of the ivory and ebony doors, studded with jewels, through which shone the sun, the light then falling on the lake of quick-silver, which sent back blinding, quivering flashes into dazzled eyes. And we are told of the thirteen thousand male servants who ministered in this palace of delight. All this, too, at a time when our Saxon ancestors were living in dwellings without chimneys, and casting the bones from the table at which they feasted into the foul straw which covered their floors; when a Gothic night had settled upon Europe, and blotted out civilization so completely that only in a part of Italy, and around Constantinople, did there remain a vestige of refinement! It is said that when the embassy from Constantinople came bearing a letter to the Khalif, the courtier whose duty it was to read it was so awed by all this splendor that he fainted! And yet the owner and creator of this fabulous luxury,--Sultan and Khalif of a dominion the greatest of his time, and with "The Fairest" for his adored wife,--when he came to die, left a paper upon which he had written that he could only recall fourteen days in which he had been happy. [Footnote A: See "Quo Vadis?"] CHAPTER XIII. In the north there was developing another and very different power. The descendants of the Visigoth Kings, making common cause with the rough mountaineers, had shared all their hardships and rigors in the mountains of the Asturias. Inured to privation and suffering, entirely unacquainted with luxury or even with the comforts of living, they had grown strong, and in a century after Alfonso I. had emerged from their mountain shelter and removed their court and capital from Oviedo to Leon, where Alfonso III. held sway over a group of barren kingdoms, poor, proud, but with _Hidalgos_ and _Dons_, who were keeping alive the sacred fires of patriotism and of religion. This was the rough cradle of a Spanish nationality. They had their own jealousies and fierce conflicts, but all united in a common hatred of the Moor. Though they did not yet dream of driving him out of their land, their brave leaders, Ramiro I. and Ordoño I. had been for years steadily defying and tormenting him with the kind of warfare to which they gave its name--_guerrilla_--meaning "little wars." While the Great Khalif was consolidating his Moorish kingdom and driving the Christians back into their mountains, the power of that people was being weakened by internal strifes existing between the three adjacent kingdoms--Leon, Castile, and Navarre. The headship of Leon was for years disputed by her ambitious neighbor Castile (so called because of the numerous fortified castles with which it was studded), under the leadership of one Fernando, Count of Castile. There had been the usual lapse into anarchy and weakness after the Great Khalif's death. Andalusia always needed a master, and this she found in _Almanzor_, who was Prime Minister to one of the Khalif's feeble descendants. It was a sad day for the struggling kingdom in the north when this all-subduing man took the reins in his own hands, and left his young master to amuse himself in collecting rare manuscripts and making Cordova more beautiful. This Almanzor, the mightiest of the soldiers of the Crescent since Tarik and Musa, proclaimed a war of faith against the Christians, who were obliged to forget their local dissensions and to try with their combined strength to save their kingdom from extermination. These were the darkest days to which they had yet been subjected. But for the death of Almanzor the ruin of the Christian state would have been complete. A monkish historian thus records this welcome event: "In 1002 died Almanzor, and was buried in hell." The death of Almanzor was the turning point in the fortunes of the two kingdoms--that of the Moors and of the Christians. The magnificence and the glory of the kingdom faded like the mist before the morning sun. Never again would Cordova be called the "Bride of Andalusia." Eight years after the death of Almanzor anarchy and ruin reigned in that city. The gentle, studious youth who was Khalif, was dragged with his only child to a dismal vault attached to the great mosque; and here, in darkness and cold and damp, sat the grandson of the first Great Khalif, his child clinging to his breast and begging in vain for food, his wretched father pathetically pleading with his jailers for just a crust of bread, and a candle to relieve the awful darkness. The brutal Berbers now had their turn. The priceless library, with its six hundred thousand volumes, was in ashes. They were in the "City of the Fairest." Palace after palace was ransacked, and in a few days all that remained of its exquisite treasures of art was a heap of blackened stones (1010). The Christians drew their broken state closer together, and gathered themselves for a more aggressive warfare than any yet undertaken. The time when the Moors were in the throes of civil war was favorable. The three kingdoms of Asturias, Leon, and Castile were in 1073 united into one "kingdom of Castile," under Alfonso VI., who had already made great inroads upon the Moslem territory and laid many cities under tribute. With this event, the name _Castilian_ comes into Spanish history, and from thenceforth that name represents all that is proudest, bravest, and most characteristic of the part of the race which traces a direct lineage from the ancient Visigoth Kings. Alfonso had not misjudged his opportunity. He had traversed Spain with his army, and bathed in the ocean in sight of the "Pillars of Hercules." His great general Rodrigo Diaz, known as "My Cid, the Challenger," had cut another path all the way to Valencia, where he reigned as a sort of uncrowned king; and he will forever reign as crowned king in the realm of romance and poetry; the perfect embodiment of the knightly idea--the "Challenger," who, in defense of the faith, would stand before great armies and defy them to single combat! Whether "My Cid" ever did such mighty deeds as are ascribed to him, no one knows. But he stands for the highest ideal of his time. He was the "King Arthur" of Spanish history; and so valiantly did he serve the Christian cause that the Moors were driven to a most disastrous step. With the Cid in Valencia, with Alfonso VI. marching a victorious army through the Moslem territory, and with Toledo, the city of the ancient Visigoth Kings, repossessed, it looked as if, after almost four hundred years, the Christians were about to recover their land. The Moors, thoroughly frightened, realizing how helpless they had grown, resolved upon a desperate measure. There was, on the opposite African coast, a sect of Berber fanatics, fierce and devout, known as "saints," but which the Moors called _Almoravides_. Fighting for the faith was their occupation. What more fitting than to use them as a means of driving the infidel Christians out of Moslem territory! They came, like a cloud of locusts, and settled upon the land. Yusuf, their general, led his men against Alfonso's Castilians October 23, 1086. Near Badajos the attack was made simultaneously in front and rear, crushing them utterly; Alfonso barely escaping with five hundred men. This was only the first of many other crushing defeats; the most disheartening of which was the one in 1099, when the Cid, fighting in alliance with Pedro, King of Aragon, was defeated near Gardia, on the seacoast. Then the great warrior's heart broke, and he died; and we are told he was clothed cap-à-pie in shining armor and placed upright on his good steed Bavieca, his trusty sword in his hand--and so he passed to his burial; his banner borne and guarded by five hundred knights. And we are also told the Moors wonderingly watched his departure with his knights, not suspecting that he was dead. The object of the Moors in inviting the odious Almoravides had been accomplished; the Christians had been driven out of Andalusia back into their own territory; but their African auxiliaries were too well pleased with their new abode to think of leaving it. One by one the Moorish Princes were subdued by the men whose aid they had invoked, until a dynasty of the Almoravides was fastened upon Spain. To the refined Spanish Arabs contact with these savages from the desert was a terrible scourge, and so far as they were able they withdrew into communities by themselves, leaving these African locusts to devour their substance and dim their glory. But luxury was not favorable to the invaders. In another generation their martial spirit was gone and they had become only ignorant, sodden voluptuaries; and when the Christians once more renewed their attacks, they failed to repel them as Yusuf had done thirty years before. There was another fanatical sect, beyond the Atlas range in Africa, which had long been looking for a coming Messiah, whom they called the _Mahdi_. They were known as the _Alhomades_. A son of a lamp-lighter in the Mosque of Cordova one day presented himself before the Alhomades, and announced that he was the great _Mahdi_, who was divinely appointed to lead them, and to bring happiness to all the earth. The path this _Mahdi_ desired to lead them was first to Morocco, there to subdue the Almoravides in their own land, and thence to Spain. In a short time this entire plan was realized. The Mahdi's successor was Emperor of Morocco, and by the year 1150 included in his dominion was all of Mahommedan Spain! The Spanish Arabs, when they were fighting Alfonso VI. and the "Cid," did not anticipate this disgraceful downfall from people of their own faith. They abhorred these Mahommedan savages, and drew together still closer for a century more in and about their chosen refuge of Granada. In the early part of the thirteenth century the Emperor of Morocco made such enormous preparations for the occupation of Spain that a larger design upon Europe became manifest. Once more Christendom was alarmed; not since Charles Martel had the danger appeared so great. The Pope proclaimed a Crusade, this time not into Palestine, but Spain. An army of volunteers from the kingdom of Portugal and from southern France re-enforced the great armies of the Kings of Castile, Aragon, and Navarre. The Crusaders, as they called themselves, assembled at Toledo July 12, 1212, under the command of Alfonso IX., King of Castile. The power of the Alhomades was broken, and they were driven out of Spain. The once great Mahommedan Empire in that country was reduced to the single province of Granada, where the Moors intrenched themselves in their last stronghold. For nearly three centuries the Crescent was yet to wave over the kingdom of Granada; but it was to shine in only the pale light of a waning crescent, until its final extinction in the full light of a Christian day. CHAPTER XIV. A great change had been wrought in Europe. The Crusades had opened a channel through which flowed from the East reviving streams of ancient knowledge and culture over the arid waste of mediævalism. France and England had awakened from their long mental torpor, Paris was become the center of an intellectual revival. In England, Roger Bacon, in his "Opus Majus," was systematizing all existing knowledge and laying a foundation for a more advanced science and philosophy for the people, who had only recently extorted from their wicked King John the great charter of their liberties. It was just at this period, when the door had suddenly opened ushering Europe into a new life, that the Christian cause in Spain triumphed; and, excepting in the little kingdom of Granada, the Cross waved from the Pyrenees to the sea. After more than four centuries of steadfast devotion to that object, the descendants of the Visigoth Kings had come once more into their inheritance. They found it enriched, and clothed with a beauty of which their ancestors could never have dreamed. These Spaniards had learned their lesson of valor in the north, and they had learned it well. Now in the land of the Moor, dwelling in the palaces they had built, and gazing upon masterpieces of Arabic art and architecture which they had left, they were to learn the subtle charm of form and color, and the fascination which music and poetry and beauty and knowledge may lend to life. As they drank from these Moorish fountains the rugged warriors found them very sweet; and they discovered that there were other pleasures in life beside fighting the Moors and nursing memories of the Cid and their vanished heroes. The territory of Fernando III., King of Castile (1230-52), extended now from the Bay of Biscay to the Guadalquivir. The ancient city of Seville was chosen as his capital. It was a far cry from the "Cave of Covadonga" to the Moorish palace of the "Alcazar," where dwelt the pious descendant of Pelayo! The first act of Fernando III. was to convert the Mosque at Seville into a cathedral, which still stands with its Moorish bell-tower, the beautiful "Giralda." There may also be seen to-day over one of its portals a stuffed crocodile, which was sent alive to King Ferdinand by the Sultan of Egypt. And within the cathedral, in a silver urn with glass sides, the traveler may also gaze to-day upon the remains of this "Saint Ferdinand" clothed in royal robes, and with a crown upon his head. Spain had begun to lift up her head among the other nations of Europe. To defeat the Crescent was the highest ideal of that chivalric age. Spain, longer than any other nation, had fought the Mahommedan. It had been her sole occupation for four centuries, and now she had vanquished him, and driven him into the mountains of one of her smallest provinces, there to hide from the Spaniards as they had once hidden from the Moors in the North. This was a passport to the honor and respect of other Christian nations. She was Spain "the Catholic"--the loved and favorite child of the Church--and great monarchs in England, France, and Germany bestowed their sons and daughters upon her kings and princes. Poor though she was in purse, and somewhat rude yet in manners, she held up her head high in proud consciousness of her aristocratic lineage, and her unmatched championship of Christianity. We realize how close had become the tie binding her to other nations when we learn that King Fernando III. was the grandson of Queen Eleanor of England (daughter of Henry II.), and that Louis IX. of France, that other royal saint, was his own cousin; and also that his wife Beatrix, whom he brought with him to Seville, was daughter of Frederick II., Emperor of Germany. The deep hold which Arabic life and thought had taken upon their conquerors was shown when Alfonso X., son of Ferdinand, came to the throne. So in love was he with learning and science that he let his kingdom fall into utter confusion while he busied himself with a set of astronomical tables upon which his heart was set and in holding up to ridicule the Ptolemaic theory. If he had given less thought to the stars, and more to the humble question as to who was to be his successor, it would have saved much strife and suffering to those who came after him. While the Moslems were building up their kingdom and making of their capital city a second and even more beautiful Cordova, there was a partial truce with the Moors in Granada. Moors and Christians were enemies still; the hereditary hatreds were only lulled into temporary repose. But Christian knights who were handsome and gallant might love and woo Moorish maidens who were beautiful; and, as a writer has intimated, love became the business and war the pastime of the Spaniard in Andalusia. Spain was unconsciously inbibing the soft, sensuous charm of the civilization she was exterminating; and the peculiar rhythm of Spanish music, and the subtle picturesqueness which makes the Spanish people unique among the other Latin nations of Europe, came, not from her Gothic, nor her Roman, nor her Phenician ancestry, but from the plains of Arabia; and the guitar and the dance and the castanet, and the charm and the coquetry of her women, are echoes from that far-off land of poetry and romance. Not so the bull-fight! Would you trace to its source that pleasant pastime, you must not go to the East; the Oriental was cruel to man, but not to beast. He would have abhorred such a form of amusement, for the origin of which we must look to the barbarous Kelt; or perhaps, as is more probable, to the mysterious Iberians, since among the Latin peoples of Europe bull-fighting is found in Spain alone. Well was it for Spain that her rough, untutored ancestors were kept hiding in the mountains for centuries, while that brilliant Oriental race planted their Peninsula thick with the germs of high thinking and beautiful living. As the spider, after his glistening habitation has been destroyed by some ruthless footstep, goes patiently to work to rebuild it, so the Moor in Granada, with his imperishable instinct for beauty, was making of his little kingdom the most beautiful spot in Europe. The city of Granada was lovelier than Cordova; its Alhambra more enchanting than had been the palaces in the "City of the Fairest." This citadel, which is fortress and palace in one, still stands like the Acropolis, looking out upon the plain from its lofty elevation. Volumes have been written about its labyrinthine halls and corridors and courts, and the amazing richness of decoration, which still survives--an inexhaustible mine for artists and a shrine for lovers of the beautiful. But Granada cultivated other things besides the art of beauty. Nowhere in Europe was there in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries such advanced thinking, and a knowledge so akin to our own to-day, as within the borders of that Moorish kingdom. CHAPTER XV. There were other reasons beside the growing peacefulness of the Spaniards why Granada was left to develop in comparative security for two centuries. It was impossible that adjacent ambitious kingdoms, such as Navarre, Castile, Aragon, Leon, and Portugal, with indefinite and disputed boundaries, and, on account of intermarriages between the kingdoms, with indefinite and disputed successions, should ever be at peace. In the perpetual strife and warfare which prevailed on account of royal European alliances, the fate of foreign princes and princesses were often involved, and hence European states stood ready to take a hand. Castile and Aragon had gradually absorbed the smaller states, excepting Portugal on the one side and Navarre on the other. The history of Spain at this time is a history of the struggles of these two states for supremacy. The most eventful as well as the most lurid period of this prolonged civil war was while Pedro the Cruel was king of Castile, 1350-69. This Spanish Nero, when sixteen years old, commenced his reign by the murder of his mother. A catalogue of his crimes is impossible. Enough to say that assassination was his remedy, and means of escape, from every entanglement in which his treacheries involved him. It was the unhappy fate of Blanche de Bourbon, sister of Charles V., King of France, to marry this King of Castile, and when he refused to live with her and had her removed from his palace the Alcazar to a fortress, and finally poisoned her, the French King determined to avenge the insult to his royal house. He allied himself with the King of Aragon to destroy Pedro, with whom the King of Aragon was of course at war. Edward, the "Black Prince," was then brilliantly invading France and extending the kingdom of his father Edward III. He was the kinsman of Pedro, and when appealed to by his cousin for aid in protecting his kingdom from the King of Aragon and his French allies, Edward gallantly consented to help him; and in the spring of 1367, for the second time, a splendid army advanced through the Pass at Roncesvalles, and a great battle, worthy of a better cause, was fought and won. So this most atrocious king--perhaps excepting Richard III. of England, whom he resembled--had for his champion the victor of Cressy and Poictiers. He was restored to his throne, which had been usurped by his brother Enrique (or Henry), but in a personal encounter with Enrique soon after (which was artfully brought about by the famous Breton knight, Bertrand du Guesclin), he met a deserved fate (1369). Constanza, the daughter of Pedro the Cruel, had been married to John of Gaunt (Duke of Lancester), brother of the Black Prince and son of Edward III. As Constanza was the great-grandmother of Isabella I. of Spain, so in the veins of that revered Queen there flowed the blood of the Plantagenets, as well as that of Pedro the Cruel! Because of the number of doubtful pretenders always existing in Spain, disputes about the royal succession also always existed. Such a dispute now led to a long war with Portugal, where King Fernando had really the most valid hereditary claim to the throne made vacant by Pedro's death. If his right had been acknowledged, Portugal and Spain would now be united; Isabella would have remained only a poor and devout princess, and would never have had the power to win a continent for the world. So impossible is it to remove one of the links forged by fate, that we dare not regret even so monstrous a reign as that of Pedro the Cruel! Enrique's right to the vacant throne of his brother had two disputants. Besides the King of Portugal, John of Gaunt, who had married the lady Constanza,--by virtue of her rights as daughter of Pedro,--claimed the crown of Castile. This Plantagenet was actually proclaimed King of Castile and Leon (1386). For twenty-five years he vainly strove to come into his kingdom as sovereign; but finally compromised by giving his young daughter Catherine to the boy "Prince of Asturias," the heir to the throne. He was obliged to content himself by thus securing to his child the long-coveted prize. And it was this Catherine, who at fourteen was betrothed to a boy of nine, who was the grandmother of Isabella, Queen of Castile. When such was the private history of those highest in the land we can only imagine what must have been that of the rest. Feudalism, which was a part of Spain's Gothic inheritance, had always made that country one of its strongholds, and chivalry had nowhere else found so congenial a soil. There was no great artisan class, as in France, creating a powerful "bourgeoisie"; no "guilds," or simple "burghers," as in Germany, stubbornly standing for their rights; no "boroughs" and "town meetings," where the people were sternly guarding their liberties, as in England. The history of other nations is that of the struggles of the common people against the tyranny of kings and rulers. If there were any "common people" in Spain, they were so effaced that history makes no mention of them. We hear only of kings and great barons and glorious knights; and their wonderful deeds and their valor and prowess--excepting in the wars with the Moors--were always over boundary-lines and successions, or personal quarrels more or less disgraceful, with never a single high purpose or a principle involved. It was all a gay, ambitious pageant, adorned by a mantle of chivalry, and made sacred by the banner of the Cross. In the history of no other European country do we see a great state develop under despotism so unredeemed by wholesome ideals, and so unmitigated and unrestrained by gentle human impulses. CHAPTER XVI. Juan II., the son of the young Catherine and the boy prince of the Asturias, died in 1454, and his son Enrique (or Henry) IV. was King of Castile. When, after some years, Henry was without children, and with health very infirm, his young sister Isabella unexpectedly found herself the acknowledged heir to the throne of Castile. She suddenly became a very important young person. The old King of Portugal was a suitor for her hand, and a brother of the King of England, and also a brother of the King of France, were striving for the same honor. But Isabella had very decided views of her own. Her hero was the young Ferdinand of Aragon, and heir to that throne. She resisted all her brother's efforts to coerce her, and finally took the matter into her own hands by sending an envoy to her handsome young lover to come to her at Valladolid, with a letter telling him they had better be married at once. Accompanied by a few knights disguised as merchants, Ferdinand, pretending to be their servant, during the entire journey waited on them at table and took care of their mules. He entered Valladolid, where he was received by the Archbishop of Toledo, who was in the conspiracy, and was by him conveyed to Isabella's apartments. We are told that when he entered someone exclaimed: _Ese-es, Ese-es_ (that is he); and the escutcheon of the descendants of that knight has ever since borne a double _S.S._, which sounds like this exclamation. The marriage was arranged to take place in four days. An embarrassment then occurred of which no one had before thought. Neither of them had any money. But someone was found who would lend them enough for the wedding expenses, and so on the 19th of October, 1469, the most important marriage ever yet consummated in Spain took place--a marriage which would forever set at rest the rivalries between Castile and Aragon, and bring honors undreamed of to a united Spain. Isabella was fair, intelligent, accomplished, and lovely. She was eighteen and her boy husband was a year younger. Of course her royal brother stormed and raged. But, of course, it did no good. In five years from that time (1474) he died, and Isabella, royally attired, and seated on a white palfrey, proceeded to the throne prepared for her, and was there proclaimed "Queen of Castile." At the end of another five years, Ferdinand came into his inheritance. His old father, Juan II., King of Aragon and Navarre, died in 1479, and Castile, Aragon, and Navarre--all of Spain except Portugal and Granada--had come under the double crown of Ferdinand and Isabella. The war with Portugal still existed, and their reign began in the midst of confusion and trouble, but it was brilliant from the outset. Ferdinand had great abilities and an ambition which matched his abilities. Isabella, no less ambitious than he, was more far-reaching in her plans, and always saw more clearly than Ferdinand what was for the true glory of Spain. With infinite tact she softened his asperities, and disarmed his jealousy, and ruled her "dear lord," by making him believe he ruled her. A joint sovereignty, with a man so grasping of power and so jealous of his own rights, required self-control and tact in no ordinary measure. It was agreed at last that in all public acts Ferdinand's name should precede hers; and although her sanction was necessary, his indignation at this was abated by her promise of submission to his will. The court of the new sovereigns was established at Seville, and they took up their abode in that palace so filled with associations both Moorish and Castilian--the Alcazar. From the very first Isabella's powerful mind grappled every public question, and she gave herself heart and soul to what she believed was her divine mission--the building up of a great Catholic state. Isabella's devout soul was sorely troubled by the prevalence of Judaism in her kingdom. She took counsel with her confessor, and also with the Pope, and by their advice a religious tribunal was established at Seville in 1483, the object of which was to inquire of heretics whether they were willing to renounce their faith and accept Christianity. The head of this tribunal, which was soon followed by others in all the large cites, was a Dominican friar called _Torquemada_. He was known as the "Inquisitor General." Inaccessible to pity, mild in manners, humble in demeanor, yet swayed only by a sense of duty, this strange being was so cruel that he seems like an incarnation of the evil principle. At the tribunal in Seville alone it is said that in thirty-six years four thousand victims were consigned to the flames, besides the thousands more who endured living deaths by torture, mutilation, and nameless sufferings. Humanity shudders at the recital! And yet this monstrous tribunal was the creation of one of the wisest and gentlest of women, who believed no rigors could be too great to save people from eternal death! And, in her misguided zeal, she emptied her kingdom of a people who had helped to create its prosperity, and drove the most valuable part of her population into France, Italy, and England, there to disseminate the seeds of a higher culture and intelligence which they had imbibed from contact with the Moors, who had treated them with such uniform tolerance and gentleness. The kingdom of Granada was now at the height of its splendor. Its capital city was larger and richer than any city in Spain. Its army was the best equipped of any in Europe. The Moorish king, a man of fiery temper, thought the time had come when he might defy his enemy by refusing to pay an annual tribute to which his father had ten years before consented. When Ferdinand's messenger, in 1476, came to demand the accustomed tribute, he said, "Go tell your master the kings who pay tribute in Granada are all dead. Our mints coin nothing but sword-blades now." The cool and crafty Ferdinand prepared his own answer to this challenge. The infatuated King Abdul-Hassan followed up his insult by capturing the Christian fortress of Zahara. His temper was not at the best at this time on account of a war raging in his own household. His wife Ayesha was fiercely jealous of a Christian captive whom he had also made his wife. She had become his favorite Sultana, and was conspiring to have her own son supplant Boabdil, the son of Ayesha, the heir to the throne. In his championship of Zoraya and her son, Abdul-Hassan imprisoned Ayesha and Boabdil, whom he threatened to disinherit. We are shown to-day the window in the Alhambra from which Ayesha lowered Boabdil in a basket, telling him to come back with an army and assert his rights. Suddenly, while absorbed by this smaller war, news came that Alhama, their most impregnable fortress, only six leagues from the city of Granada, had been captured by Ferdinand's army. It was the key to Granada. Despair was in every soul. The air was filled with wailing and lamentation. "Woe, woe is me, Alhama!" "Ay de mi, Alhama!" Indignant with their old king, who had brought destruction upon them, when Boabdil came with his army of followers, they flocked about him--"El Rey Chico!" (the boy king) as they called him. Abdul Hassan was forced to fly, and Boabdil reigned over the expiring kingdom. It was a brief and troubled reign. In the famous "Court of the Lions" in the Alhambra, visitors are shown to-day the blood-stains left by the celebrated massacre of the "Abencerrages." The Abencerrages had supported the claim of Ayesha's rival, Zoraya; and it is said that Boabdil invited the Princes of this clan, some thirty in number, to a friendly conference in the Alhambra, and there had them treacherously beheaded at the fountain. But whether this blood-stain upon his memory is as doubtful as those upon the stones at the fountain, seems an open question. [Illustration: From the painting by V. Brozik. Columbus at the Court of Ferdinand and Isabella.] So stubborn was the defense, it appeared sometimes as if the reduction of Granada would have to be abandoned. Isabella's courage and faith were sorely tried. But the brave Queen infused her own courage into the flagging spirits of her husband, and kept alive the enthusiasm of the people; and at last,--on the 2d of January, 1402,--the proud city capitulated. Boabdil surrendered the keys of the Alhambra to Ferdinand--the silver cross which had preceded the King throughout the war gleamed from a high tower; and from the loftiest pinnacle of the Alhambra waved the banners of Castile and Aragon. The conflict which had lasted for 781 years was over. The death of Roderick and the fall of the Goths was avenged, and Christendom, still weeping for the loss of Constantinople, was consoled and took heart again. CHAPTER XVII. The reduction of Granada had required eleven years, and had drained the kingdom of all its resources. It is not strange that Isabella should have had no time to listen seriously to a threadbare enthusiast asking for money and ships for a strange adventure! To have grown old and haggard in pressing an unsuccessful project is not a passport to the confidence of Princes. But the gracious Queen had promised to listen to him when the war with the Moors was concluded. So now Columbus sought her out at Granada; and it is a strange scene which the imagination pictures--a shabby old man pleading with a Queen in the halls of the Alhambra for permission to lift the veil from an unsuspected Hemisphere; artfully dwelling upon the glory of planting the Cross in the dominions of the Great Khan! The cool, unimaginative Ferdinand listened contemptuously; but Isabella, for once opposing the will of her "dear lord," arose and said, "The enterprise is mine. I undertake it for Castile." And on the 3d of August, 1492, the little fleet of caravels sailed from the mouth of the same river whence had once sailed the "ships of Tarshish," laden with treasure for King Solomon and "Hiram, King of Tyre." A union with Portugal--the land of the Lusitanians and of Sertorius--was all that was now required to make of the Spanish Peninsula one kingdom. This Isabella planned to accomplish by the marriage of her oldest daughter, Isabella, with the King of Portugal. Her son John, heir to the Spanish throne, had died suddenly just after his marriage with the daughter of Maximilian, Emperor of Germany. This terrible blow was swiftly followed by another, the death of her daughter Isabella, and also that of the infant which was expected to unite the kingdoms of Portugal and Spain. The succession of Castile and Aragon now passed to Joanna, her second daughter, who had married Philip, Archduke of Austria and son of Maximilian, an unfortunate child who seemed on the verge of madness. Isabella's youngest daughter, Catherine, became the wife of Henry VIII. of England. Happily the mother did not live to witness this child's unhappiness; but her heart-breaking losses and domestic griefs were greater than she could bear. The unbalanced condition of Joanna, upon whom rested all her hopes, was undermining her health. The results of the expedition of Columbus had exceeded the wildest dreams of romance. Gold was pouring in from the West enough to pay for the war with the Moors many times over, and for all wars to come. Spain, from being the poorest, had suddenly become the richest country in Europe; richest in wealth, in territory, and in the imperishable glory of its discovery. But Isabella,--who had been the instrument in this transformation,--who had built up a firm united kingdom and swept it clean of heretics, Jews, and Moors,--was still a sad and disappointed woman, thwarted in her dearest hopes; and on the 26th of November, 1504, she died leaving the fruits of her triumphs to a grandson six years old. This infant Charles was proclaimed King of Castile under the regency of his ambitious father, the Archduke of Austria, and his insane mother. The death of the Archduke and the incapacity of Joanna in a few years gave to Ferdinand the control of the two kingdoms for which he had contended and schemed, until his own death in 1516, when the crowns of Castile and Aragon passed to his grandson, who was proclaimed Charles I., King of Spain. A plain, sedate youth of sixteen was called from his home in Flanders to assume the crowns of Castile and Aragon. Silent, reserved, and speaking the Spanish language very imperfectly, the impression produced by the young King was very unpromising. No one suspected the designs which were maturing under that mask; nor that this boy was planning to grasp all the threads of diplomacy in Europe, and to be the master of kings. In 1517 Maximilian died, leaving a vacant throne in Germany to be contended for by the ambitious Francis I. of France and Maximilian's grandson, Charles. It was a question of supremacy in Europe. So the successful aspirant must win to himself Leo X., Henry VIII. and his great minister Wolsey, and after that the Electors of Germany. It required consummate skill. Francis I. was an able player. The astute Wolsey made the moves for his master Henry VIII., keeping a watchful eye on Charles, "that young man who looks so modest, and soars so high"; while Leo X., unconscious of the coming Reformation, was craftily aiding this side or that as benefit to the Church seemed to be promised. But that "modest young man" played the strongest game. Charles was, by the unanimous vote of the Electors, raised to the imperial throne; and the grandson of Isabella, as Charles I. of Spain and Charles V. of Germany, possessed more power than had been exercised by any one man since the reign of Augustus. The territory over which he had dominion in the New World was practically without limit. Mexico surrendered to Cortez (1521) and Peru to Pizarro (1532); Ponce de Leon was in Florida and de Soto on the banks of the Mississippi; while wealth, fabulous in amount, was pouring into Spain, and from thence into Flanders. The history of Charles belongs, in fact, more to Europe than to Spain. No slightest tenderness seems to have existed in his cold heart for the land of Isabella, which he seemed to regard simply as a treasury from which to draw money for the objects to which he was really devoted. So, in fact, Spain was governed by an absolute despot who was Emperor of Germany, where he resided, and she visibly declined from the strength and prosperity which had been created by the wise and personal administration of Ferdinand and Isabella. The Cortes, where the deputies had never been allowed the privilege of debate, had been at its best a very imperfect expression of popular sentiment; and now was reduced to a mere empty form. Abuses which had been corrected under the vigilant personal administration of two able and patriotic sovereigns returned in aggravated form. Misrule and disorder prevailed, while their King was absorbed in the larger field of European politics and diplomacy. The light in which Spain shines in this, which is always accounted her most glorious period, was that of Discovery and Conquest and the enormous wealth coming therefrom; all of which was bestowed by that shabby adventurer and suppliant at the Alhambra, in whom Isabella alone believed, and who, after enriching Spain beyond its wildest expectations, was permitted to die in poverty and neglect at Valladolid in 1506! History has written its verdict: imperishable renown to Columbus, Balboa, Magellan, and the navigators who dared such perils and won so much; and eternal infamy to the men who planted a bloodstained Cross in those distant lands. The history of the West Indies, of Mexico, and Peru is unmatched for cruelty in the annals of the world; and Isabella's is the only voice that was ever raised in defense of the gentle, helpless race which was found in those lands. The Reformation, which had commenced in Germany with the reign of Charles V., had assumed enormous proportions. Charles, who was a bigot with "heart as hard as hammered iron," was using with unsparing hand the Inquisition, that engine of cruelty created by his grandmother. And while his captains, the "conquistadors," were burning and torturing in the West, he was burning and torturing in the East. His entire reign was occupied in a struggle with his ambitious rival Francis I., and another and vain struggle with the followers of Luther. He had married Isabel, the daughter of the King of Portugal. Philip, his son and heir, was born in 1527. The desire of his heart was to secure for this son the succession to the imperial throne of Germany. To this the electors would not consent. He was defeated in the two objects dearest to his heart: the power to bequeath this imperial possession to Philip, and the destruction of Protestantism. So this most powerful sovereign since the day of Charlemagne felt himself ill-used by Fate. Weary and sick at heart, in the year 1556 he abdicated in favor of Philip. The Netherlands was his own to bestow upon his son, as that was an inheritance from his father, the Archduke of Austria. So the fate of Philip does not seem to us so very heart-breaking, as, upon the abdication of his father, he was King of Spain, of Naples, and of Sicily; Duke of Milan; Lord of the Netherlands and of the Indies, and of a vast portion of the American continent stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific! Such was the inheritance left to his son by the disappointed man who carried his sorrows to the monastery at St. Yuste, where the austerities and severities he practiced finally cost him his life (1558). But let no one suppose that these penances were on account of cruelties practiced upon his Protestant subjects! From his cloister he wrote to the inquisitors adjuring them to show no mercy; to deliver all to the flames, even if they should recant; and the only regret of the dying penitent was that he had not executed Luther! CHAPTER XVIII. Philip established his capital at Madrid, and commenced the Palace of the Escurial, nineteen miles distant, which stands to-day as his monument. His coronation was celebrated by an _auto-da-fé_ at Valladolid, which it is said "he attended with much devotion." One of the victims, an officer of distinction, while awaiting his turn said to him: "Sire, how can you witness such tortures?" "Were my own son in your place I should witness it," was the reply; which was a key to the character of the man. [Illustration: From the painting by Velasquez. The Surrender of Breda.] He asserted his claim through his mother, the Princess Isabel of Portugal, to the throne of that country, and after a stubborn contest with the Lusitanians, the long-desired union of Spain and Portugal was accomplished. This event was celebrated by Cervantes in a poem which extravagantly lauds his sovereign. Henry VIII. had been succeeded in England by Mary, daughter of his unhappy Queen, Catherine of Aragon, who, it will be remembered, was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. Mary had inherited the intense religious fervor and perhaps the cruel instincts of her mother's family, and she quickly set about restoring Protestant England to the Catholic faith. Philip saw in a union with Mary and a joint sovereignty over England, such as he hoped would follow, an immense opportunity for Spain. The marriage took place with great splendor, and in the desire to please her handsome husband, of whom she was very fond, she commenced the work which has given her the title, "Bloody Mary." In vain were human torches lighted to lure Philip from Spain, where he lingered. She did not win his love, nor did Philip reign conjointly with his royal consort in England. Mary died in 1558, and her Protestant sister Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn, was Queen of England. Philip had made up his mind that Protestantism should be exterminated in his kingdom of the Netherlands. He could not go there himself, so he looked about for a suitable instrument for his purpose. The Duke of Alva was the man chosen. He was appointed Viceroy, with full authority to carry out the pious design. Heresy must cease to exist in the Netherlands. The arrival of Alva, clothed with such despotic powers, and the atrocities committed by him, caused the greatest indignation in the Netherlands. The Prince of Orange, aided by the Counts Egmont and Horn, organized a party to resist him, and a revolution was commenced which lasted for forty years, affording one of the blackest chapters in the history of Europe. The name of Alva stands at the head of the list of men who have wrought desolation and suffering in the name of religion. The other European states protested, and Elizabeth, in hot indignation, gave aid to the persecuted states. Philip had contracted a marriage, after Mary's death, with the daughter of that terrible woman Catherine de Medici, widow of Henry II. of France, and there is much reason to believe that it was this Duke of Alva who planned the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. There were sinister conferences between Catherine, Philip, and Alva, and little doubt exists that the hideous tragedy which occurred in Paris on the night of August 24, 1572, was arranged in Madrid, and had its first inception in the cruel breast of Alva. There had not been much love existing before between Philip and Elizabeth, who it is said had refused the hand of her Spanish brother-in-law. But after her interference in the Netherlands, and when her ships were intercepting and waylaying Spanish ships returning with treasure from the West, and when at last the one was the accepted champion of the Protestant, and the other of the Catholic cause, they became avowed enemies. Philip resolved to prepare a mighty armament for the invasion of England. In 1587 Elizabeth sent Sir Francis Drake to reconnoiter and find out what Philip was doing. He appeared with twenty-five vessels before Cadiz. Having learned all he wanted, and burned a fleet of merchant vessels, he returned to his Queen. In May, 1588, a fleet of one hundred and thirty ships, some "the largest that ever plowed the deep," sailed from Lisbon for the English coast. We may form some idea to-day of what must have been the feeling in England when this Armada, unparalleled in size, appeared in the English Channel! If Sir Francis Drake's ships were fewer and smaller, he could match the Spaniards in audacity. He sent eight fireships right in among the close-lying vessels. Then, in the confusion which followed, while they were obstructed and entangled with their own fleet, he swiftly attacked them with such vigor that ten ships were sunk or disabled, and the entire fleet was demoralized. Then a storm overtook the fleeing vessels, and the winds and the waves completed the victory. As in the Spanish report of the disaster thirty-five is the number of ships acknowledged to be lost, we may imagine how great was the destruction. So ended Philip's invasion of England, and the great Spanish "Armada." Philip II. died, 1598, in the Palace of the Escurial which he had built, and with that event ends the story of Spain's greatness. The period of one hundred and twenty-five years, including the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella, of Charles V., and of Philip II., is, in a way, one of unmatched splendor. Spain had not like England by slow degrees expanded into great proportions, but through strange and perfectly fortuitous circumstances, she had, from a proud obscurity, suddenly leaped into a position of commanding power and magnificence. Fortune threw into her lap the greatest prize she ever had to bestow, and at the same time gave her two sovereigns of exceptional qualities and abilities. The story of this double reign is the romance, the fairy tale of history. Then came the magnificent reign of Charles V. with more gifts from fortune--the imperial crown, if not a substantial benefit to Spain, still bringing dignity and éclat. But under this glittering surface there had commenced even then a decline. Under Philip II. she was still magnificent, Europe was bowing down to her, but the decline was growing more manifest; and with the accession of his puny son, Philip III., there was little left but a brilliant past, which a proud and retrospective nation was going to feed upon for over three centuries. But it takes some time for such dazzling effulgence to disappear. The glamour of the Spanish name was going to last a long time and picturesquely veil her decay. The memory of such an ascendancy in Europe nourished the intense national pride of her people. The name Castilian took on a new significance. Nor can we wonder at their pride in the name "Castilian." Its glory was not the capricious gift of fortune, but won by a devotion, a constancy, and a fidelity of purpose which are unique in the history of the world. For seven hundred years the race for which that name stands had kept alive the national spirit, while their land was occupied by an alien civilization. These were centuries of privation and suffering and hardship; but never wavering in their purpose, and by brave deeds which have filled volumes, they reclaimed their land and drove out the Moors. This is what gives to the name "Castilian," its proud significance. But when degenerate Hidalgos and Grandees, debauched by wealth and luxury, gloried in the name; when by rapacity and cruelty they destroyed the lands their valor had won; and when the Inquisition became their pastime and the rack and the wheel their toys--then the name Castilian began to take on a sinister meaning. Spain's most glorious period was not when she was converting the Indies and Mexico and Peru into a hell, not when Charles V. was playing his great game of diplomacy in Europe, but in that pre-Columbian era when a brave and rugged people were keeping alive their national life in the mountains of the Asturias. Well may Spain do honor to that time by calling the heir to her throne the "Prince of the Asturias!" CHAPTER XIX. The history of the century after the death of Philip II. is one of rapid decline; with no longer a powerful master-mind to hold the state together. Every year saw the court at Madrid more splendid, and the people,--that insignificant factor,--more wretched, and sinking deeper and deeper into poverty. In fact, in spite of the fabulous wealth which fortune had poured upon her, Spain was becoming poor. But nowhere in Europe was royalty invested with such dignity and splendor of ceremonial, and the ambitious Marie de Medici, widow of Henry IV., was glad to form alliances for her children with those of Philip III. The "Prince of the Asturias," who was soon to become Philip IV., married her daughter, Isabella de Bourbon, and the Infanta, his sister, was at the same time married to the young Louis XIII., King of France. [Illustration: Philip IV. of Spain. From the portrait by Velasquez.] The remnant of the Moors who still lingered in the land were called _Moriscos_; and under a very thin surface of submission to Christian Spain, they nursed bitter memories and even hopes that some miracle would some day restore them to what was really the land of their fathers. A very severe edict, promulgated by Philip II., compelling conformity in all respects with Christian living, and--as if that were not a part of Christian living--forbidding _ablutions_, led to a serious revolt. And this again led to the forcible expulsion of every Morisco in Spain. In 1609, by order of Philip III., the last of the Moors were conveyed in galleys to the African coast whence they had come just nine hundred years before. In a narrative so drenched with tears, it is pleasant to hear of light-hearted laughter. We are told that when the young King Philip III. saw from his window a man striking his forehead and laughing immoderately he said: "That man is either mad, or he is reading 'Don Quixote'"--which latter was the case. But the story written by Cervantes did more than entertain. Chivalry had lingered in the congenial soil of Spain long after it had disappeared in every other part of Europe; but when in the person of Don Quixote it was made to appear so utterly ridiculous, it was heard of no more. Philip III., who died in 1621, was succeeded by his son Philip IV. As in the reign of his father worthless favorites ruled, while a profligate king squandered the money of the people in lavish entertainments and luxuries. Much has been written about the visit of Charles, Prince of Wales (afterward Charles I.), accompanied by the Duke of Buckingham, at his court; whither the young Prince had come disguised, to see the Infanta, Philip's sister, whom he thought of making his queen. Probably she did not please him, or perhaps the alliance with Protestant England was not acceptable to the pious Catholic family of Philip. At all events, Henrietta, sister of Louis XIII. of France, was his final choice; and shared his terrible misfortunes a few years later. A revolt of the Catalonians on the French frontier led to a difficulty with France, which was finally adjusted by the celebrated "treaty of the Pyrenees." In this treaty was included the marriage of the young King Louis XIV. and Maria Theresa, daughter of Philip IV., the King of Spain. The European Powers would only consent to this union upon condition that Louis should solemnly renounce all claim to the Spanish crown for himself and his heirs; which promise had later a somewhat eventful history. Seven of the United Provinces had achieved their independence during the reign of the third Philip, who had also driven out of his kingdom six hundred thousand Moriscos; by far the most skilled and industrious portion of the community. And now, at the close of the reign of Philip IV., the kingdom was further diminished by the loss of Portugal; which, in 1664, the Lusitanians recovered, and proclaimed the Duke of Braganza King. When we add to this the loss of much of the Netherlands, and of the island of Jamaica, and concessions here and there to France and to Italy, it will be obvious that a process of contraction had soon followed that of Spain's phenomenal expansion! During the reign of Carlos II., who succeeded his father (1665), Spain was still further diminished by the cession to Louis XIV., in 1678, of more provinces in the Low Countries and also of the region now known as Alsace and Lorraine; which, it will be remembered, have in our own time passed from the keeping of France to that of victorious Germany. In the year 1655 the island of Jamaica was captured by an expedition sent out by Cromwell. It was between the years 1670 and 1686 that the Spaniard and the Anglo-Saxon had their first collision in America. St. Augustine had been founded in 1565, and the old Spanish colony was much disturbed in 1663, when Charles II. of England planted an English colony in their near neighborhood (the Carolinas). During the war between Spain and England at the time above mentioned, feeling ran high between Florida and the Carolinas, and houses were burned and blood was shed. Spain had felt no concern about the little English colony planted on the bleak New England coast in 1620. Death by exposure and starvation promised speedily to remove that. But the settlement on the Carolinas was more serious, and at the same time the French were planting a colony of their own at the mouth of the Mississippi. The "lords of America" began to feel anxious about their control of the Gulf of Mexico. The cloud was a very small one, but it was not to be the last which would dim their skies in the West. The one thing which gives historic importance to the reign of Carlos II. is that it marks the close--the ignominious close--of the great Hapsburg dynasty in Spain. And if the death of Carlos, in 1700, was a melancholy event, it is because with it the scepter so magnificently wielded by Ferdinand and Isabella passed to the keeping of the House of Bourbon, whose Spanish descendants have, excepting for two brief intervals, ruled Spain ever since. CHAPTER XX. The last century had wrought great changes in European conditions. "The Holy Roman Empire," after a thirty-years' war with Protestantism, was shattered, and the Emperor of Germany was no longer the head of Europe. Protestant England had sternly executed Charles I., and then in the person of James II. had swept the last of the Catholic House of Stuart out of her kingdom. France, on the foundation laid by Richelieu, had developed into a powerful despotism, which her King, Louis XIV., was making magnificent at home and feared abroad. For Spain it had been a century of steady decline, with loss of territory, power, and prestige. No longer great in herself, she was regarded by her ambitious neighbor, Louis XIV., as only a make-weight in the supremacy in Europe upon which he was determined. He had been ravaging the enfeebled German Empire, and now a friendly fate opened a peaceful door through which he might make Spain contribute to his greatness. Carlos II. died (1700) without an heir. There was a vacant throne in Spain to which--on account of Louis' marriage, years before, with the Spanish Princess Maria Theresa--his grandson Philip had now the most valid claim. The other claimant, Archduke Karl, son of Leopold, Emperor of Germany, in addition to having a less direct hereditary descent, was unacceptable to the Spanish people, who had no desire to be ruled again by an occupant of the Imperial throne of Germany. So, as Louis wished it, and the Spanish people also wished it, there was only one obstacle to his design; that was a promise made at the time of his marriage that he would never claim that throne for himself or his heirs. But when the Pope, after "prayerful deliberation," absolved him from that promise the way was clear. This grandson, just seventeen years old, was proclaimed Philip V., King of Spain, and Louis in the fullness of his heart exclaimed, "The Pyrenees have ceased to exist!" Perhaps it would have been better for the King if he had not made that dramatic exclamation. A man who could remove mountains to make a path for his ambitions might also drain seas! England took warning. She had been quietly bearing his insults for a long time, and not till he had impertinently threatened to place upon her throne the Pretender, the exiled son of James II., had she joined the coalition against the French King. But now she sent more armies, and a great captain to re-enforce Prince Eugene, who was fighting this battle for the Archduke Karl and for Europe. But Louis had reached the summit. He was to go no higher than he had climbed when he uttered that vain boast. Philip V. was acknowledged King in 1702, and in 1704 _Blenheim_ had been fought and won by Marlborough, and the decline of the _Grand Monarque_ had commenced. The war against him by a combined Europe now became the war of the "Spanish Succession." England and Holland united with Emperor Leopold to curb his limitless ambition. The purpose of the war of the "Spanish Succession" was, ostensibly, to place the Austrian Archduke upon the throne of Spain; its real purpose was to check the alarming ascendancy of Louis XIV. in Europe. It lasted for years, the poor young King and Queen being driven from one city to another, while the Austrian Archduke was at Madrid striving to reign over a people who would not recognize him. Spain was being made the sport of three nations in pursuance of their own ambitious ends. Her land was being ravaged by foreign armies, recruited from three of her own disaffected provinces; while a young King with whom she was well satisfied was peremptorily ordered to make way for one Austria, England, and Holland preferred. It was a humiliating proof of the decline in national spirit, and the old Castilian pride must have sorely degenerated for such things to be possible. Finally, after Louis XIV. had once more given solemn oath that the crowns of France and Spain should never be united, the "Peace of Utrecht" was signed (1713). But the provisions of the treaty were momentous for Spain. She was at one stroke of the pen stripped of half her possessions in Europe. Philip V. was acknowledged King of Spain and the Indies. But Sicily, with its regal title, was ceded to the Duke of Savoy; Milan, Naples, Sardinia, and the Netherlands went to Karl, now Emperor Charles VI. of Germany; while Minorca and Gibraltar passed to the keeping of England. No one felt unmixed satisfaction, except perhaps England. The Archduke had failed to get his throne, and to wear the double crown like Charles V. Louis had carried his point. He had succeeded in keeping the kingdom for his grandson. But that kingdom was dismembered, and had shrunk to insignificant proportions in Europe, while England, most fortunate of all, had carried off the key to the Mediterranean. That little rocky promontory of Gibraltar was potentially of more value than all the rest! Such was the beginning of the dynasty of the Bourbon in Spain. Philip was succeeded, upon his death in 1746, by his son Ferdinand VI., who also died, in 1759, and was succeeded by his brother, Philip's second son, who was known as Carlos III. When we try to praise these princes of the wretched Bourbon line, it is by mention of the evil they have refrained from doing rather than the good they have done. So Carlos III. is said to have done less harm to Spain than his predecessors. He established libraries and academies of science and of arts, and ruled like a kind-hearted gentleman, without the vices of his recent predecessors. His severity toward the Jesuits and their forcible expulsion from Spain, in 1767, are said to have been caused by personal resentment on account of some slanderous rumors regarding his birth, which were traced to them. CHAPTER XXI. But the fate of Spain was not now in the hands of her Kings. Were they good or evil she was destined henceforth to drift in the currents of _circumstance_, that sternest of masters, to whom her Kings as well as her people would be obliged helplessly to bow. All that she now possessed outside the borders of her own kingdom was the West Indies, her colonies in America, North and South, and the Philippines, that archipelago of a thousand isles in the southern Pacific, where Magellan was slain by the savage inhabitants after he had discovered it (1520). Mexico and Peru had proved to be inexhaustible sources of wealth, and when the gold and silver diminished, the Viceroys in these and the other colonies could compel the people to wring rich products out of the soil, enough to supply Spain's necessities. The inhabitants of these colonies, composed of the aboriginal races with an admixture of Spanish, had been treated as slaves and drudges for so many centuries that they never dreamed of resistance, nor questioned the justice of a fate which condemned them always to toil for Spain. In the North the feeble colony planted in 1620 had expanded into thirteen vigorous English colonies. France, too, had been colonizing in America, and had drawn her frontier line from the mouth of the Mississippi to Canada. In 1755 a collision occurred between England and France over their American boundaries. By the year 1759, France had lost Quebec and every one of her strongholds, and she formed an alliance with Spain in a last effort to save her vanishing possessions in America. Spain's punishment for this interference was swift. England promptly dispatched ships to Havana and to the Philippines; and when we read of the Anglo-Saxon capturing Havana and the adjacent islands on one side of the globe, and the City of Manila and fourteen of the Philippines on the other, in the midsummer of 1762, it has a slightly familiar sound. And when the old record further says, the "conquest in the West Indies cost many precious lives, more of whom were destroyed by the climate than by the enemy," and still again, "the capture of Manila was conducted with marvelous celerity and judgment," we begin to wonder whether we are reading the dispatches of the Associated Press in 1898, or history! In the treaty which followed these victories, upon condition of England's returning Havana, and all the conquered territory excepting a portion of the West India Islands, Spain ceded to her the peninsula of Florida; while France, who was obliged to give to England all her territory east of the Mississippi, gave to Spain in return for her services the city of New Orleans, and all her territory west of the great river. This territory was retroceded to France by Spain in the year 1800, by the "Treaty of Madrid," and in 1803 was purchased by America from Napoleon, under the title of "Louisiana." There was a growing irritation in the Spanish heart against England. She was crowding Spain out of North America, had insinuated herself into the West India Islands, and she was mistress of Gibraltar. So it was with no little satisfaction that they saw her involved in a serious quarrel with her American colonies, at a time when a stubborn and incompetent Hanoverian King was doing his best to destroy her. The hour seemed auspicious for recovering Gibraltar, and also to drive England out of the West Indies. The alliance with France had become a permanent one, and was known as a _family compact_ between the Bourbon cousins Louis XV. and Carlos III. France had at this time rather distracting conditions at home; but she was thirsting for revenge at the loss of her rich American possessions, and besides, a sentimental interest in the brave people who had proclaimed their independence from the mother country, and were fighting to maintain it, began to manifest itself. It was fanned, no doubt, by a desire for England's humiliation; but it assumed a form too chivalric and too generous for Americans ever to discredit by unfriendly analysis of motive. Spain cared little for the cause of the colonies; but she was quite willing to help them by worrying and diverting the energies of England. So she invested Gibraltar. A garrison of only a handful of men astonished Europe by the bravery of its defense. Gibraltar was not taken by the Bourbon allies, neither were the English driven out of the West Indies. But it was a satisfaction to Spain to see her humbled by her victorious colonies! So Carlos III. had indirectly assisted in the establishment of a republic on the confines of his Mexican Empire; apparently unconscious of the contagion in the word _independence_. But he quickly learned this to his sorrow. The story of the revolted and freed colonies sped on the wings of the wind. And in Peru a brave descendant of the Incas arose as a Deliverer. He led sixty thousand men into a vain fight for liberty. Of course the effort failed, but a spirit had been awakened which might be smothered, but never extinguished. Carlos III. died in 1788 and was succeeded by his son Carlos IV. During the miserable reign of this miserable King, France caught the infection from the free institutions in America. The Republic she had helped to create was fatal to monarchy in her own land. A revolution accompanied by unparalleled horrors swept away the whole tyrannous system of centuries and left the country a trembling wreck--but free. The dream of a republic was brief. Napoleon gathered the imperfectly organized government into his own hands, then by successive and rapid steps arose to Imperial power. France was an Empire, and adoringly submitted to the man who swiftly made her great and feared in Europe. She had another Charlemagne, who was bringing to his feet Kings and Princes, and annexing half of Europe to his empire! Spain, all unconscious of his designs, and perhaps thinking this invincible man might help her to get back Gibraltar and to drive the English out of the West Indies, joined him in 1804 in a war against Great Britain; and the following year the combined fleets of France and Spain were annihilated by Lord Nelson off Cape Trafalgar. Family dissensions in the Spanish royal household at this time were opportune for Napoleon's designs. Carlos and his son Ferdinand were engaged in an unseemly quarrel. Carlos appealed to Napoleon regarding the treasonable conduct and threats of his son. Nothing could have better suited the purposes of the Emperor. The fox had been invited to be umpire! French troops poured into Spain. Carlos, under protest, resigned in favor of his son, who was proclaimed Ferdinand VII. (1807). The young King was then invited to meet the Emperor for consultation at Bayonne. He found himself a prisoner in France, and to Joseph Bonaparte, brother of the Emperor, was transferred the Crown of Spain. The nation seemed paralyzed by the swiftness and the audacity of these overturnings. But soon popular indignation found expression. Juntas were formed. The one at Seville, calling itself the Supreme Junta, proclaimed an alliance with Great Britain; its purpose being the expulsion of the French from their kingdom. Spain was in a state of chaos. Joseph was not without Spanish adherents, and there was no leader, no legitimate head to give constitutional stamp to the acts of the protesting people, who without the usual formalities convoked the Cortes. But while they were groping after reforms, and while Lord Wellington was driving back the French, Napoleon had met his reverse at Moscow, and a "War of Liberation" had commenced in Germany. The grasp upon the Spanish throne relaxed. The captive King had permission to return, and the reign of Joseph was ended by his ignominious flight from the kingdom, with one gold-piece in his pocket (1814). CHAPTER XXII. The decade between 1804 and 1814 had been very barren in external benefits to Spain, with her King held in "honorable captivity" in France, and the obscure Joseph abjectly striving to please not his subjects, but his august brother Napoleon. But in this time of chaos, when there was no Bourbon King, no long-established despotism to stifle popular sentiment, the unsuspected fact developed that Spain had caught the infection of freedom. [Illustration: From the painting by C. Alvarez Dumont. Heroic Combat in the Pulpit of the Church of St. Augustine, Saragossa, 1809.] When, as we have seen, the Cortes assumed all the functions of a government, that body (in 1812) drew up a new Constitution for Spain. So completely did this remodel the whole administration, that the most despotic monarchy in Europe was transformed into the one most severely limited. Great was the surprise of Ferdinand VII. when, in 1814, he came to the throne of his ejected father Carlos IV., to find himself called upon to reign under a Constitution which made Spain almost as free as a republic. He promulgated a decree declaring the Cortes illegal and rescinding all its acts, the Constitution of 1812 included. Then when he had re-established the Inquisition, which had been abolished by the Cortes, when he had publicly burned the impertinent Constitution, and quenched conspiracies here and there, he settled himself for a comfortable reign after the good old arbitrary fashion. The Napoleonic empire having been effaced by a combined Europe, Ferdinand's Bourbon cousins were in the same way restoring the excellent methods of their fathers in France. But there was a spirit in the air which was not favorable to the peace of Kings. On the American coast there stood "Liberty Enlightening the World!" A growing, prosperous republic was a shining example of what might be done by a brave resistance to oppression and a determined spirit of independence. The pestilential leaven of freedom had been at work while monarchies slept in security. Ferdinand discovered that not only was there a seditious sentiment in his own kingdom, but every one of his American colonies was in open rebellion, and some were even daring to set up free governments in imitation of the United States. Not only was Ferdinand's sovereignty threatened, but the very principle of monarchy itself was endangered. Russia, Austria, and Prussia formed themselves into a league for the preservation of what they were pleased to call "The Divine Right of Kings." It was the attack upon this sacred principle, which was the germ of all this mischievous talk about freedom. They called their league "The Holy Alliance," and what they proposed to do was to _stamp out free institutions in the germ_. In pursuance of this purpose, in 1819 there appeared at Cadiz a large fleet, assembled for the subjugation of Spanish America. But there was an Anglo-Saxon America, which had a preponderating influence in that land now; and there was also an Anglo-Saxon race in Europe which had its own views about the "Divine Right of Kings," and also concerning the mission of the "Holy Alliance." The right of three European Powers to restore to Spain her revolted colonies in America was denied by President Monroe; not upon the ground of Spain's inhumanity, and the inherent right of the colonies to an independence which they might achieve. Such was the nature of England's protest, through her Minister Canning. But President Monroe's contention rested on a much broader ground. In a message delivered in 1823 he uttered these words: "European Powers must not extend their political systems to any portion of the American continent." The meaning of this was that _America has been won for freedom_; and no European Power will be permitted to establish a monarchy, nor to coerce in any way, nor to suppress inclinations toward freedom, in any part of the Western Hemisphere. This is the "Monroe Doctrine"; a doctrine which, although so startling in 1832, had in 1896 become so firmly imbedded in the minds of the people, that Congress decided it to be a vital principle of American policy. But there was another and more serious obstacle in the way of the proposed plan for subjugating the Spanish-American colonies. The army assembled by the Holy Alliance at Cadiz was an offense to the people who had seen their Constitution burned and their hopes of a freer government destroyed. Officers and troops refused to embark, and joined a concourse of disaffected people at Cadiz. A smothered popular sentiment burst forth into a series of insurrections throughout Spain, and the astonished Ferdinand was compelled, in 1820, to acknowledge the Constitution of 1812. This was not upholding the principle of the "Divine Right of Kings"! So, under the direction of the Holy Alliance, a French army of one hundred thousand men moved into Spain, took possession of her capital, and for two years administered her affairs under a regency, and then reinstated Ferdinand, leaving a French army of occupation. In this contest two distinct political parties had developed--the Liberal party and the party of Absolutism. As Ferdinand VII. became the choice of the Liberals, and his brother Don Carlos of the party of Absolutism, we must infer either that it was a Liberalism of a very mild type, or that Ferdinand's views had been modified since the "Holy Alliance" took his kingdom into its own keeping. But his brother Carlos was the adored of the Absolutists, and a plot was made to compel Ferdinand to abdicate in his favor. This was the first of the Carlist plots, which, with little intermission, and always in the interest of despotism and bigotry, have menaced the safety and well-being of Spain ever since. From the year 1825 to 1898 there has been always a Don Carlos to trouble the political waters in that land. So the mission of the "Holy Alliance" had failed. Instead of rehabilitating the sacred principle of the "Divine Right of Kings," they saw a powerful liberal party established in a kingdom which was the very stronghold of despotism. And instead of stamping out free institutions, six Spanish-American colonies had been recognized as free and independent states (1826). Spain had for three centuries ruled the richest and the fairest land on the earth. She had shown herself utterly undeserving of the opportunity, and unfit for the responsibilities imposed by a great colonial empire. She had sown the wind and now she reaped the whirlwind. She did not own a foot of territory on the continent she had discovered! CHAPTER XXIII. In 1833 King Ferdinand VII. died, leaving one child, the Princess Isabella, who was three years old. Here was the opportunity for the adherents of Don Carlos. The "Salic law" had been one of the Gothic traditions of ancient Spain, and had with few exceptions been in force until 1789; when Carlos IV. issued a "Pragmatic Sanction," establishing the succession through the female as well as the male line; and on April 6, 1830, King Ferdinand confirmed this decree; so, when Isabella was born, October 10, 1830, she was heiress to the throne, _unless_ her ambitious uncle, Don Carlos, could set aside the decree abrogating the old Salic law, and reign as Carlos IV. In the three years before his brother's death he had laid his plans for the coming crisis. Isabella was proclaimed Queen under the regency of her depraved mother Christina. The extreme of the Catholic party, and of the reactionary or absolutist party, flocked about the Carlist standard; while the party of the infant Queen was the rallying point for the liberal and progressive sentiment in the kingdom; and her cause had the support of the new reform government of Louis Philippe in France, and of lovers of freedom elsewhere. The party of the Queen triumphed. But the Carlists survived; and, like the Bourbons in France, have ever since in times of political peril been a serious element to be reckoned with. During the infancy of the Queen, Spain was the prey of unceasing party dissensions; Don Carlos again and again trying to overthrow her government, and again and again being driven a fugitive over the Pyrenees; while the Queen Regent, who was secretly married to her Chamberlain, the son of a tobacconist in Madrid, was bringing disgrace and odium upon the Liberal party which she was supposed to lead. In 1843 the Cortes declared that the Queen had attained her majority. Her disgraced mother was driven out of the country and Isabella II. ascended her throne. Isabella had a younger sister, Maria Louisa, and in 1846 the double marriage of these two children was celebrated with great splendor at Madrid. The Queen was married to her cousin Don Francisco d'Assisi, and her sister to the Duke de Montpensier, fifth son of Louis Philippe. [Illustration: From the painting by J. Siguenza y Chavarrieta. The Duke de la Torre sworn in as Regent before the Cortes of 1869.] If, upon the birth of Liberalism in Spain, that kingdom could have been governed by a wise and competent sovereign, the concluding chapters of this narrative might have been very different. No time could have been less favorable for a radical change in policy than the period during which Isabella II. was Queen of Spain. Personally she was all that a woman and a Queen should not be. With apparently not an exalted desire or ambition for her country, this depraved daughter of a depraved mother pursued her downward course until 1868, when the nation would bear no more. A revolution broke out. Isabella, with her three children, fled to France and there was once more a vacant throne in Spain. The hopes of the Carlists ran high. But the Cortes came to an unexpected decision. They would have no Spanish Bourbon, be he Carlist or Liberal. The reigning dynasty in Italy was at this moment the adored of the Liberals in Europe. So they offered the Crown to Amadeo, second son of Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy. Three years were quite sufficient for this experiment. The young Amadeo was as glad to take off his crown and to leave his kingdom, as the people were to have him do so. He abdicated in 1873. The Liberal party had been regretting their loss of opportunity in 1870. France had passed through many political phases in the last few years, and the present French Republic had just come into existence. Again Spain caught the contagion from her neighbor, and Spanish Liberalism became _Spanish Republicanism_. When Castelar, that patriotic and sagacious statesman, friend of Garibaldi, of Mazzini, and of Kossuth, led this movement, many hopefully believed the political millennium was at hand, when Spain was about to join the brotherhood of Republics! But something more than a great leader is needed to create a Republic. The magic of Castelar's eloquence, the purity of his character, and the force of his convictions were powerless to hold in stable union the conflicting elements with which he had to deal. The Carlists were scheming, and the Cortes was driven to an immediate decision. The fugitive Queen Isabella had with her in exile a young son Alfonso, seventeen years of age. Alfonso was invited to return upon the sole condition that his mother should be excluded from his kingdom. An insurrection which was being fomented by Don Carlos II. led to this action of the Cortes, which was perhaps the wisest possible under the circumstances. The young Prince of the legitimate Bourbon line was proclaimed King Alfonso XII. in 1874. A romantic marriage with his cousin Mercedes, daughter of the Duke de Montpensier, to whom he was deeply attached, speedily took place. Only five months later Mercedes died and was laid in the gloomy Escurial. A marriage was then arranged with Christina, an Austrian Archduchess, who was brought to Madrid, and there was another marriage celebrated with much splendor. The infant daughter, who was born a few years later, was named Mercedes; a loving tribute to the adored young Queen he had lost, which did credit as much to Christina as to Alfonso. The hard school of exile had, no doubt, been an advantage to Alfonso; and at the outset of his reign he won the confidence of the Liberals by saying "he wished them to understand he was the first Republican in Europe; and when they were tired of him they had only to tell him so, and he would leave as quickly as Amadeo had done." There was not time to test the sincerity of these assurances. Alfonso XII. died in 1885, and joined Mercedes and his long line of predecessors in the Escurial. Five months later his son was born, and the throne which had been filled by the little Mercedes passed to the boy who was proclaimed Alfonso XIII. of Spain, under the Regency of his mother Queen Christina. CHAPTER XXIV. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the foreign dominions of Spain, although reduced, were still a vast and imperial possession. The colonial territory over which Alfonso XIII. was to have sovereignty at the close of that century, consisted of the Philippines, the richest of the East Indies; Cuba, the richest of the West Indies; Porto Rico, and a few outlying groups of islands of no great value. Nowhere had the Constitution of 1812 awakened more hope than in Cuba; and from the setting aside of that instrument by Ferdinand VI. dates the existence of an insurgent party in that beautiful but most unhappy island. Ages of spoliation and cruelty and wrong had done their work. The iron of oppression had entered into the soul of the Cuban. There was a deep exasperation which refused to be calmed. From thenceforth annexation to the United States, or else a "_Cuba Libre_," was the determined, and even desperate aim. After a ten-years' war, 1868-78, the people yielded to what proved a delusive promise of home-rule. How could Spain bestow upon her colony what she did not possess herself? When in 1881 she tried to pacify Cuba by permitting that island to send six Senators to sit in the Spanish Cortes, it was a phantom of a phantom. There was no outlet for the national will in Spain itself. Her Cortes was _not_ a national assembly, and its members were _not_ the choice of the people. How much less must they be so then in Cuba, where they were only men of straw selected by the home government, for the purpose of defeating--not expressing--the popular will? The emptiness of this gift was soon discovered. Then came a shorter conflict, which was only a prelude to the last. A handful of ragged revolutionists, ignorant of the arts of war, commenced the final struggle for liberty on February 24, 1895, under the leadership of José Marti. At the end of two years a poorly armed band of guerrilla soldiers had waged a successful contest against 235,000 well-equipped troops, supported by a militia and a navy, and maintained by supplies from Spain; had adopted a Constitution, and were asking for recognition as a free Republic. The Spanish commander Martinez Campos was superseded by General Weyler (1895), and a new and severer method was inaugurated in dealing with the stubborn revolutionists, but with no better success than before. In August, 1897, an insurrection broke out anew in the Philippines, and Spain was in despair. America calmly resisted all appeals for annexation or for intervention in Cuba. Sympathy for Cuban patriots was strong in the hearts of the people, but the American Government steadfastly maintained an attitude of strict neutrality and impartiality, and with unexampled patience saw a commerce amounting annually to one hundred millions of dollars wiped out of existence, her citizens reduced to want by the destruction of their property,--some of them lying in Spanish dungeons subjected to barbarities which were worthy of the Turkish Janizaries; our fleets used as a coastguard and a police, in the protection of Spanish interests, and more intolerable than all else, our hearts wrung by cries of anguish at our very doors! But when General Weyler inaugurated a system for the deliberate starvation of thirty thousand "Reconcentrados," an innocent peasantry driven from their homes and herded in cities, there to perish, the limit of patience was reached. It was this touch of human pity--this last and intolerable strain upon our sympathies--which turned the scale. While a profound feeling of indignation was prevailing on account of these revolting crimes against humanity, the battleship _Maine_ was, by request of Consul General Lee at that place, dispatched to the harbor of Havana to guard American citizens and interests. The sullen reception of the _Maine_ was followed on February 15, 1898, by a tragedy which shocked the world. Whether the destruction of that ship and the death of 266 brave men was from internal or external causes was a very critical question. It was submitted to a court of inquiry which, after long deliberation, rendered the decision that the cause was--_external_. It looked dark for lovers of peace! President McKinley exhausted all the resources of diplomacy before he abandoned hope of a peaceful adjustment which would at the same time compel justice to the Cuban people. But on April 25, 1898, it was declared that war existed between Spain and America. Less than a week after this declaration, in the early morning of May 1, a victory over the Spanish fleet at Manila was achieved by Commodore Dewey, which made him virtual master of the Philippines; and just two months later, July 1 and 2 were made memorable by two engagements in the West Indies, resulting, the one in the defeat of the Spanish land forces at San Juan, and the other in the complete annihilation of Admiral Cervera's fleet in the Bay of Santiago de Cuba--misfortunes so overwhelming that overtures for peace were quickly received at Washington from Madrid; and the Spanish-American War was over. The colonial empire of Spain was at an end. The kingdom over which Alfonso XIII. was soon to reign had at a stroke lost the Spanish Indies in the West, and the Philippines in the far East. To America was confided the destiny of these widely separated possessions, Porto Rico being permanently ceded to the United States; while, according to the avowed purpose at the outset of the war, Cuba and the islands in the Pacific, as soon as fitted for self-government, were to be given into their own keeping; a promise which in the case of Cuba has already been redeemed, all possible haste being made to prepare the Philippines for a similar responsibility and destiny. The quickness with which cordial relations have been re-established between Spain and the United States is most gratifying; and too much praise cannot be bestowed upon that proud, high-spirited people, who have accepted the results of the war in a spirit so admirable. In the loss of her American colonies, Spain has been paying a debt contracted in the days of her dazzling splendor--the time of the great Charles and of Philip II.,--a kind of indebtedness which in the case of nations is never forgiven, but must be paid to the uttermost farthing. If history teaches anything, it is that the nations which have been cruel and unjust sooner or later must "drink the cup of the Lord's fury," just as surely as did the Assyrians of old. Another thing which is quite as obvious is that the nations of the earth to-day must accept the ideals of the advancing tide of modern civilization, or perish! A people whose national festival is a bull-fight, has still something to learn. Much of mediævalism still lingers in the methods and ideals of Spain. In the time of her opulence and splendor these methods and ideals were hers. So she believes in them and clings to them still. She has been the victim of a vicious political system, to which an intensely proud, patriotic, and brave people have believed they must be loyal. In no other land--as we have seen--is the national spirit so strong. Certainly nowhere else has it ever been subjected to such strain and survived. And this intense loyalty, this overwhelming pride of race, this magnificent valor, have all been summoned to uphold a poor, perishing, vicious political system. But the _Zeitgeist_ is contagious. And at no time has its influence in this conservative kingdom been so apparent as since the Spanish-American War; soon after this was over, Alfonso ascended the throne of his fathers. The important question of his marriage after long consideration was decided by himself, when he selected an English Princess, niece of Edward VII., for his future Queen. The Princess Ena is the daughter of Princess Beatrice,--youngest child of Queen Victoria,--and Prince Henry of Battenberg, who was killed some years ago during one of the Kaffir wars in South Africa. A royal marriage uniting Protestant England and Catholic Spain would at one time have cost a throne and perhaps a head; and the cordiality, and even enthusiasm, with which this union has been greeted in England shows what seas of prejudice have been sailed through and what continents of sectarian differences have been left behind; proving that the _Zeitgeist_ has been busy in England as well as in Spain. The royal marriage of these two children--(the King having just passed his twentieth birthday)--attended by the traditional formalities, and a revival of almost mediæval splendor, took place at Madrid, June 1, 1906. The many romantic features attending the courtship of the boy King and his English girl-bride invested the occasion with a picturesque interest for the whole world. And yet--impossible as it would have seemed--there existed some one degenerate enough to convert it into a ghastly tragedy. While returning to the royal palace over flower-strewn streets, after the conclusion of the marriage ceremony, a bomb concealed in a bouquet was thrown from an upper window, hitting the royal coach at which it was directly aimed. The young King and Queen escaped as if by a miracle from the wreck; and the destruction intended for them bore death and mutilation to scores of innocent people in no wise connected with the Government; and Madrid, at the moment of her supreme rejoicing, was converted into a blood-stained, mourning city. Never did anarchistic methods seem so utterly divorced from intelligence as in this last attempt at regicide. If it had succeeded, an infant-nephew would have been King of Spain, with a long regency, perhaps, of some well-seasoned Castilian of the old school! There was an incident in connection with this marriage which deeply touches the American heart. The special envoy, bearing a letter of congratulation to the King from President Roosevelt, was received with a warmth and consideration far exceeding what was required by diplomatic usage, and the stars and stripes helping to adorn Madrid for the great festival gave assurance that Spain and the United States are really friends again. LIST OF VISIGOTH KINGS. A.D. Ataulfus, 411-415 Wallia, 415-420 Theodored, 420-451 Thorismund, 451-452 Theodoric I. (Defeated Attila), 452-466 Evaric (Completed Gothic Conquest in Spain), 466-483 Alaric, 483-506 Gesaleic, 506-511 Theodoric II., 511-522 Amalaric, 522-531 Theudis, 531-548 Theudisel, 548-549 Agilan, 549-554 Athanagild I., 554-567 Liuva I., 567-570 Leovigild, 570-587 Recared I., 587-601 Liuva II., 601-603 Witteric, 603-610 Gundemar, 610-612 Sisebert, 612-621 Recared II. (3 months). Swintila, 621-631 Sisenand, 631-636 Chintila, 636-640 Tulga, 640-642 Chindaswind, 642-649 Receswind, 649-672 Wamba, 672-680 Ervigius, 680-687 Egica (son of Wamba), 687-701 Witiza, 701-709 Roderick, 700-711 Theodomir, } Kings without a kingdom { 711-743 Athanagild II.,} { 743-755 KINGS OF THE ASTURIAS AND LEON. A.D. Pelayo (of Royal Gothic birth), 718 Favila (son of above), 737 Alfonso I. (son-in-law of Pelayo), 739 Fruela I. (son of Alfonso), 757 Aurelio, 768 Mauregato, 774 Bermudo I., 788 Alfonso II., 791 Ramiro I., 842 Ordoño I., 850 Alfonso III., 866 Garcia, 910 Ordoño II., 914 Fruela II., 923 Alfonso IV., 925 Ramiro II., 930 Ordoño III., 950 Sancho I., 955 Ramiro III., 967 Bermudo II., 982 Alfonso V., 999 Bermudo III., 1027 Fernando I. (also King of Castile), 1037 Alfonso VI., 1065 Urraca, 1109 Alfonso VII. (also King of Castile), 1126 Fernando II., 1157 Alfonso IX. (Aided Conquest of Moors), 1188 Fernando III., 1230 LEON AND CASTILE UNITED. Alfonso X. (_el sabio_), 1252 Sancho IV., 1284 Fernando IV., 1295 Alfonso XI., 1312 Pedro I. (_el cruel_), 1350 Enrique II., 1369 Juan I., 1379 Enrique IV., 1454 Isabel I. (married to Fernando II. of Aragon), 1474 CASTILE AND ARAGON UNITED. Carlos I. (Charles I. Elected Charles V. of Germany, 1519), 1516 Philip II., 1556 Philip III., 1593 Philip IV., 1621 Carlos II., 1665 HOUSE OF BOURBON. Philip V., 1700 Fernando VI., 1746 Carlos III., 1759 Carlos IV., 1788 Ferdinand VII., 1799 Joseph Bonaparte, 1806 Ferdinand VII. (reinstated), 1814 Isabella II. (dethroned, 1868), 1843 Alfonso XII., 1874 Alfonso XIII., 1885 INDEX Abbasides, 66, 67 Abd-el-Rahman I, 66, 67, 68, 69, 72 Abd-el-Rahman II, 72, 73, 74 Abd-el-Rahman III, 74 Abdul Hassan, 105, 106 Acropolis, 92 Actium, 27 Æneas, 12 Ætius, 36 Ahab, 12 Alaric, 31 Alcázar, 89 Alexander, 13 Alfonso I, 63, 64, 65, 78 Alfonso III, 78 Alfonso VI, 81, 82 Alfonso IX, 86 Alfonso X, 90 Alfonso XII, 154, 155, 156, 160 Alfonso XIII, 144, 148, 150, 155, 162 Alhambra, 92, 106, 107 Alhama, 106 Almanzor, 79, 80, 86 Almoravides, 83, 84 Alsace, 129 Andalusian, 32, 61, 67, 79, 80 Antony, 27 Arabia, 91 Aragon, 64 Arianism, 40, 46 Armada, 121 Arthur, 70, 82 Assyrian, 7 Asturias, 6, 63, 64, 78, 81, 125 Ataulf, 32 Austria, Archduke of, 110 Ayasha, 105 Babel, 4 Babylonian, 7 Bacon, Roger, 87 Badajos, 83 Baghdad, 74, 75 Balboa, 114 Balearic, 11 Barcelona, 12 Basques, 36, 70 Battenberg, 162 Beatrice, 162 Berber, 2, 58, 65, 81, 83 Bertrand du Guesclin, 96 Black Prince, 95 Blanche de Bourbon, 95 Blenheim, 133 Boabdil, 105, 106, 107 Bourbon, 130 Braganza, Duke de, 128 Brummel, 73 Brunhilde, 42 Brutus, 27 Cadiz, 8, 21, 55, 120 Cæsar, 26, 27 Canaan, 7 Canada, 138, 139 Canning, 147 Cantabrian, 56, 64, 127 Carlists, 149 Carlos II, 128, 130, 131, 132 Carlos III, 135, 136, 141 Carlos IV, 142 Carolinas, 129 Carthage, 10, 12 Carthagena, 15 Castelar, 153 Castile, 64, 79, 81, 94, 100, 101, 109 Castilian, 81, 123 Catalonian, 6 Catherine, 109, 118 Catherine de' Medici, 119 Cato, the Elder, 22 Cervantes, 24, 126 Cervera, 160 Ceuta, 18 Chaldean Civilization, 6 Chanson de Roland, 70 Charlemagne, 69, 70, 142 Charles Martel, 58, 69, 86 Charles I, 131 Charles II, 129 Charles V, 95, 110, 112, 122, 123 Chivalry, 126 Christina, 150 Christina, Hapsburg, 154 Cid, 82, 83, 85, 88 Clovis, 36 Columbus, 29, 109, 114 Constantinople, 107 Constantius, 34 Constanza, 96 Constitution, 144, 145, 148, 149 Corneille, 24, 26 Cortes, 112, 113, 144, 145, 147 Cortez, 112 Count Julian, 52-56 Court of the Lions, 106 Covadonga, 64, 88 Crusade, 86, 87 Damascus, 60, 74 Delenda est Carthago, 21 De Soto, 112 Dictator, 27 Dido, 12 Don Quixote, 126 Don Carlos, 159 Drake, Sir Francis, 120 Edward III, 96 Egmont, 119 Egyptian Civilization, 6 Eleanor, Queen, 90 Elizabeth, 120 Ena, Princess, 162 Enrique III, 96, 97 Enrique IV, 97 Errigius, 73, 74 Escurial, 117, 121, 154, 155 Eugene, Prince, 133 Eulogius, 73, 74 Evaric, 36 Ezekiel, 10 Ferdinand I, 100, 101, 105, 107, 111, 130 Ferdinand VI, 135 Ferdinand VII, 142 Fernando I, 79 Flanders, 112 Florida, 121, 129 Francis I, 111, 114 Francis d'Assisi, 152 Frederick II, 90 Gallicians, 6 Garibaldi, 153 George IV, 73 Gibraltar, 18, 135, 139, 141, 142 Granada, 85, 86, 92, 100, 101, 104 Guadalquivir, 73 Hamilcar, 14, 15 Hannibal, 12 Hapsburg, 130 Havana, 138 Henrietta, 127 Henry II, 119 Henry VIII, 109, 111, 117 Hidalgo, 50, 63, 78, 123 Hiram, 10, 109 Hispania, 21 Holy Alliance, 146, 147, 148, 149 Honorius, 34 Horn, 119 Huesca, 25 Huns, 36 Iberia, 2, 6 Ides of March, 27 Ionian, 9 Isabella I, 12, 96, 100, 102, 108, 109, 110, 130 Isabella II, 150, 151, 152 Isabella de Bourbon, 125 Isabel of Portugal, 114 Isaiah, 13 Islam, 59, 64 Jamaica, 128, 129 James II, 131, 132 Janizaries, 158 Jesuits, 136 Jezebel, 12 Joanna, 109, 110 John of Gaunt, 96, 97 José Marti, 157 Joseph Bonaparte, 143 Juan II, 100, 102 Juntas, 143 Karl, Archduke of Austria, 132, 133 Kelts, 4 Keltiberians, 5, 15, 22 Khalif, 65, 66, 75-77 Koran, 60 Kossuth, 151 Lee, 159 Leo X, 111 Leon, 79, 81, 94 Leopold, 132 Leovigild, 43 Lira, 24 Lorraine, 129 Louis IX, 90 Louis XIII, 125 Louis XIV, 127, 128, 131, 132, 133, 134 Louis XV, 140 Louisiana, 139 Lucan, 29 Luther, 114, 116 Madrid, Treaty of, 139 Magellan, 114 Mahdi, 85 Maine, 159 Manila, 138, 160 Maria Theresa, 127, 132 Marie de' Medici, 125 Marius, 23, 24 Marlborough, 133 Martian, 29 Martinez Campos, 158 Mary Tudor, 117, 118 Maximilian, 109, 111 Mazzini, 153 Mercedes, 154 Mexico, 20, 112, 137 Milan, 135 Minorca, 135 Mississippi, 138 Mithridates, 25 Monroe, 147 Moor, 56 Moriscos, 126, 128 Moscow, 143 Montpensier, Duke de, 152, 154 Munda, 26 Murillo, 52 Mur-Viedo, 16 Musa, 52 Naples, 135 Napoleon, 139, 142 Navarre, 79, 94 Nelson, 142 Ne plus ultra, 18 Nero, 29, 73 Netherlands, 115, 119, 120, 128, 135 New Orleans, 139 Nineveh, 7 Noah, 7 Numantia, 24 Octavius Augustus, 23 Olivier, 70 Omeyads, 66, 67, 72, 74 Opus Majus, 87 Ordoño I, 79 Osca, 25 Ostrogoths, 36 Paladins, 70 Pedro, 83, 95 Pelagius, 64 Pelasgians, 30, 88 Peru, 20, 112, 137 Petronius, 73 Phenicia, 91 Philip II, 161 Philip III, 125, 126, 127 Philip IV, 127, 128 Philip V, 33, 134, 133 Philippi, 27 Philippines, 137, 138, 156, 158, 160 Pillars of Hercules, 18, 82 Pizzarro, 112 Placidia, 33 Plutarch, 24 Pompey, 25, 26 Ponce de Leon, 112 Portugal, 94, 102, 109 Pragmatic Sanction, 151 Pretender, 132 Protestantism, 115, 118, 119 Punic, 11, 14, 16 Quebec, 138 Quintilian, 29 Ramiro I, 79 Recared, 46 Reconcentrados, 159 Reformation, 114 Richelieu, 131 Roderick, 51, 54, 56, 107 Roland, 70, 71 Rome, 13 Roncesvalles, 13 Saguntum, 9, 16 Sahara, 2 Salic Law, 150 Saracen, 61, 62, 63 Santiago de Cuba, 160 Sardinia, 11, 14, 135 Scipio, 19, 22 Seneca, 29 Seville, 88, 89 Sidon, 7, 12 Spanish Succession, War of, 33 Spartans, 30 St. Augustine, 129 St. Bartholomew, 119 Stuart, House of, 131 Suevi, 31 Sylla, 23, 24 Syrian, 7 Tarif, 53 Tarshish, 10, 13 Toledo, 45, 65 Torquemada, 103 Trafalgar, 142 Troy, 9 Tubal, 4 Tyre, 7, 13 Ulfilas, 39 Utrecht, Peace of, 134 Valladolid, 100, 101, 104, 117 Vandals, 30 Visigoths, 36 Wamba, 47 Wellington, 143 Weyler, 158 White Hind, 26 Witiza, 50, 51 Yusuf, 67 Zante, 9 Zarynthus, 9 Zeitgeist, 162, 163 Ziryab, 73 
18764	----	LIFE IN MOROCCO BY THE SAME AUTHOR In uniform style. Demy 8vo, 15s. each. THE MOORS: an Account of People and Customs. With 132 Illustrations. CONTENTS:--"The Madding Crowd"--Within the Gates--Where the Moors Live--How the Moors Dress--Moorish Courtesy and Etiquette--What the Moors Eat and Drink--Everyday Life--Slavery and Servitude--Country Life--Trade--Arts and Manufactures--Matters Medical. Some Moorish Characteristics--The Mohammedan Year (Feasts and Fasts)--Places of Worship--Alms, Hospitality, and Pilgrimage--Education--Saints and Superstitions--Marriage--Funeral Rites. The Morocco Berbers--The Jews of Morocco--The Jewish Year. THE LAND OF THE MOORS: A Comprehensive Description. With a New Map and 83 Illustrations. CONTENTS:--Physical Features--Natural Resources--Vegetable Products--Animal Life. Descriptions and Histories of Tangier, Tetuan, Laraiche, Salli-Rabat, Dar el Baida, Mazagan, Saffi and Mogador; Azîla, Fedála, Mehedia, Mansûrîya, Azammûr and Waladîya; Fez, Mequinez and Marrákesh; Zarhôn, Wazzán and Shesháwan; El Kasar, Sifrû, Tadla, Damnát, Táza, Dibdû and Oojda; Ceuta, Velez, Alhucemas, Melilla and the Zaffarines; Sûs, the Draa, Tafilált, Fîgîg, and Tûát. Reminiscences of Travel--In the Guise of a Moor--To Marrákesh on a Bicycle--In Search of Miltsin. THE MOORISH EMPIRE: A Historical Epitome. With Maps, 118 Illustrations, and a unique Chronological, Geographical, and Genealogical Chart. CONTENTS:--Mauretania--The Mohammedan Invasion--Foundation of Empire--Consolidation of Empire--Extension of Empire--Contraction of Empire--Stagnation of Empire--Personification of Empire--The Reigning Shareefs--The Moorish Government--Present Administration. Europeans in the Moorish Service--The Salli Rovers--Record of the Christian Slaves--Christian Influences in Morocco--Foreign Relations--Moorish Diplomatic Usages--Foreign Rights and Privileges--Commercial Intercourse--The Fate of the Empire. Works on Morocco reviewed (213 vols. in 11 languages)--The Place of Morocco in Fiction--Journalism in Morocco--Works Recommended--Classical Authorities on Morocco. LONDON: SWAN SONNENSCHEIN, LTD. * * * * * AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ARABIC OF MOROCCO: VOCABULARY, GRAMMAR NOTES, ETC., IN ROMAN CHARACTERS. Specially prepared for Visitors and Beginners on a new and eminently practical system. Crown 8vo, Cloth, Round Corners for Pocket, _6s._ Also, Uniform with this, in English or Spanish, Price _4s._ _IN ARABIC CHARACTERS_ MOROCCO-ARABIC DIALOGUES, OR DIÁLOGOS EN ARABE MAROQUÍ. By C.W. BALDWIN. * * * * * LONDON: BERNARD QUARITCH, PICCADILLY. TANGIER: BRITISH AND FOREIGN BIBLE SOCIETY'S DEPÔT. [Illustration: _Photograph by Edward Lee, Esq., Saffi._ A MOORISH THOROUGHFARE.] * * * * * =LIFE IN MOROCCO= AND GLIMPSES BEYOND BY BUDGETT MEAKIN AUTHOR OF "THE MOORS," "THE LAND OF THE MOORS," "THE MOORISH EMPIRE," "MODEL FACTORIES AND VILLAGES," ETC. [Illustration] WITH TWENTY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS LONDON CHATTO & WINDUS 1905 PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES. =FOREWORD= Which of us has yet forgotten that first day when we set foot in Barbary? Those first impressions, as the gorgeous East with all its countless sounds and colours, forms and odours, burst upon us; mingled pleasures and disgusts, all new, undreamed-of, or our wildest dreams enhanced! Those yelling, struggling crowds of boatmen, porters, donkey-boys; guides, thieves, and busy-bodies; clad in mingled finery and tatters; European, native, nondescript; a weird, incongruous medley--such as is always produced when East meets West--how they did astonish and amuse us! How we laughed (some trembling inwardly) and then, what letters we wrote home! One-and-twenty years have passed since that experience entranced the present writer, and although he has repeated it as far as possible in practically every other oriental country, each fresh visit to Morocco brings back somewhat of the glamour of that maiden plunge, and somewhat of that youthful ardour, as the old associations are renewed. Nothing he has seen elsewhere excels Morocco in point of life and colour save Bokhára; and only in certain parts of India or in China is it rivalled. Algeria, Tunisia and Tripoli have lost much of that charm under Turkish or western rule; Egypt still more markedly so, while Palestine is of a population altogether mixed and heterogeneous. The bazaars of Damascus, even, and Constantinople, have given way to plate-glass, and nothing remains in the nearer East to rival Morocco. Notwithstanding the disturbed condition of much of the country, nothing has occurred to interfere with the pleasure certain to be afforded by a visit to Morocco at any time, and all who can do so are strongly recommended to include it in an early holiday. The best months are from September to May, though the heat on the coast is never too great for an enjoyable trip. The simplest way of accomplishing this is by one of Messrs. Forwood's regular steamers from London, calling at most of the Morocco ports and returning by the Canaries, the tour occupying about a month, though it may be broken and resumed at any point. Tangier may be reached direct from Liverpool by the Papayanni Line, or indirectly _viâ_ Gibraltar, subsequent movements being decided by weather and local sailings. British consular officials, missionaries, and merchants will be found at the various ports, who always welcome considerate strangers. Comparatively few, even of the ever-increasing number of visitors who year after year bring this only remaining independent Barbary State within the scope of their pilgrimage, are aware of the interest with which it teems for the scientist, the explorer, the historian, and students of human nature in general. One needs to dive beneath the surface, to live on the spot in touch with the people, to fathom the real Morocco, and in this it is doubtful whether any foreigners not connected by ties of creed or marriage ever completely succeed. What can be done short of this the writer attempted to do, mingling with the people as one of themselves whenever this was possible. Inspired by the example of Lane in his description of the "Modern Egyptians," he essayed to do as much for the Moors, and during eighteen years he laboured to that end. The present volume gathers together from many quarters sketches drawn under those circumstances, supplemented by a _resumé_ of recent events and the political outlook, together with three chapters--viii., xi., and xiv.--contributed by his wife, whose assistance throughout its preparation he has once more to acknowledge with pleasure. To many correspondents in Morocco he is also indebted for much valuable up-to-date information on current affairs, but as most for various reasons prefer to remain unmentioned, it would be invidious to name any. For most of the illustrations, too, he desires to express his hearty thanks to the gentlemen who have permitted him to reproduce their photographs. Much of the material used has already appeared in more fugitive form in the _Times of Morocco_, the _London Quarterly Review_, the _Forum_, the _Westminster Review_, _Harper's Magazine_, the _Humanitarian_, the _Gentleman's Magazine_, the _Independent_ (New York), the _Modern Church_, the _Jewish Chronicle_, _Good Health_, the _Medical Missionary_, the _Pall Mall Gazette_, the _Westminster Gazette_, the _Outlook_, etc., while Chapters ix., xix., and xxv. to xxix. have been extracted from a still unpublished picture of Moorish country life, "Sons of Ishmael." B.M. HAMPSTEAD, _November 1905._ CONTENTS PART I CHAPTER PAGE I. RETROSPECTIVE 1 II. THE PRESENT DAY 14 III. BEHIND THE SCENES 36 IV. THE BERBER RACE 47 V. THE WANDERING ARAB 57 VI. CITY LIFE 63 VII. THE WOMEN-FOLK 71 VIII. SOCIAL VISITS 82 IX. A COUNTRY WEDDING 88 X. THE BAIRNS 94 XI. "DINING OUT" 102 XII. DOMESTIC ECONOMY 107 XIII. THE NATIVE "MERCHANT" 113 XIV. SHOPPING 118 XV. A SUNDAY MARKET 125 XVI. PLAY-TIME 133 XVII. THE STORY-TELLER 138 XVIII. SNAKE-CHARMING 151 XIX. IN A MOORISH CAFÉ 159 XX. THE MEDICINE-MAN 166 XXI. THE HUMAN MART 179 XXII. A SLAVE-GIRL'S STORY 185 XXIII. THE PILGRIM CAMP 191 XXIV. RETURNING HOME 201 PART II XXV. DIPLOMACY IN MOROCCO 205 XXVI. PRISONERS AND CAPTIVES 233 XXVII. THE PROTECTION SYSTEM 242 XXVIII. JUSTICE FOR THE JEW 252 XXIX. CIVIL WAR IN MOROCCO 261 XXX. THE POLITICAL SITUATION 267 XXXI. FRANCE IN MOROCCO 292 PART III XXXII. ALGERIA VIEWED FROM MOROCCO 307 XXXIII. TUNISIA VIEWED FROM MOROCCO 318 XXXIV. TRIPOLI VIEWED FROM MOROCCO 326 XXXV. FOOT-PRINTS OF THE MOORS IN SPAIN 332 APPENDIX "MOROCCO NEWS" 381 INDEX 395 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS TO FACE PAGE A MOORISH THOROUGHFARE _Frontispiece_ GATE OF THE SEVEN VIRGINS, SALLI 1 CROSSING A MOROCCO RIVER 26 A BERBER VILLAGE IN THE ATLAS 47 AN ARAB TENT IN MOROCCO 57 ROOFS OF TANGIER FROM THE BRITISH CONSULATE 71 A MOORISH CARAVAN 91 FRUIT-SELLERS 107 A TUNISIAN SHOPKEEPER 118 THE SUNDAY MARKET, TANGIER 128 GROUP AROUND PERFORMERS, MARRÁKESH 141 A MOROCCO FANDAK (CARAVANSARAI) 159 RABHAH, NARRATOR OF THE SLAVE-GIRL'S STORY 185 WAITING FOR THE STEAMER 201 A CITY GATEWAY IN MOROCCO 211 CENTRAL MOROCCO HOMESTEAD 242 JEWESSES OF THE ATLAS 256 A MOORISH KAÏD AND ATTENDANTS 275 TUNISIA UNDER THE FRENCH--AN EXECUTION 299 TENT OF AN ALGERIAN SHEÏKH 313 A TUNISIAN JEWESS IN STREET DRESS 325 OUTSIDE TRIPOLI 330 A SHRINE IN CORDOVA MOSQUE 340 THE MARKET-PLACE, TETUAN 375 NOTE.--_The system of transliterating Arabic adopted by the Author in his previous works has here been followed only so far as it is likely to be adopted by others than specialists, all signs being omitted which are not essential to approximate pronunciation._ =LIFE IN MOROCCO= PART I I RETROSPECTIVE "The firmament turns, and times are changing." _Moorish Proverb._ By the western gate of the Mediterranean, where the narrowed sea has so often tempted invaders, the decrepit Moorish Empire has become itself a bait for those who once feared it. Yet so far Morocco remains untouched, save where a fringe of Europeans on the coast purvey the luxuries from other lands that Moorish tastes demand, and in exchange take produce that would otherwise be hardly worth the raising. Even here the foreign influence is purely superficial, failing to affect the lives of the people; while the towns in which Europeans reside are so few in number that whatever influence they do possess is limited in area. Moreover, Morocco has never known foreign dominion, not even that of the Turks, who have left their impress on the neighbouring Algeria and Tunisia. None but the Arabs have succeeded in obtaining a foothold among its Berbers, and they, restricted to the plains, have long become part of the nation. Thus Morocco, of all the North African kingdoms, has always maintained its independence, and in spite of changes all round, continues to live its own picturesque life. Picturesque it certainly is, with its flowing costumes and primitive homes, both of which vary in style from district to district, but all of which seem as though they must have been unchanged for thousands of years. Without security for life or property, the mountaineers go armed, they dwell in fortresses or walled-in villages, and are at constant war with one another. On the plains, except in the vicinity of towns, the country people group their huts around the fortress of their governor, within which they can shelter themselves and their possessions in time of war. No other permanent erection is to be seen on the plains, unless it be some wayside shrine which has outlived the ruin fallen on the settlement to which it once belonged, and is respected by the conquerors as holy ground. Here and there gaunt ruins rise, vast crumbling walls of concrete which have once been fortresses, lending an air of desolation to the scene, but offering no attraction to historian or antiquary. No one even knows their names, and they contain no monuments. If ever more solid remains are encountered, they are invariably set down as the work of the Romans. [Illustration: _Cavilla, Photo., Tangier._ GATE OF THE SEVEN VIRGINS, SALLI.] Yet Morocco has a history, an interesting history indeed, one linked with ours in many curious ways, as is recorded in scores of little-known volumes. It has a literature amazingly voluminous, but there were days when the relations with other lands were much closer, if less cordial, the days of the crusades and the Barbary pirates, the days of European tribute to the Moors, and the days of Christian slavery in Morocco. Constantly appearing brochures in many tongues made Europe of those days acquainted with the horrors of that dreadful land. All these only served to augment the fear in which its people were held, and to deter the victimized nations from taking action which would speedily have put an end to it all, by demonstrating the inherent weakness of the Moorish Empire. But for those whose study is only the Moors as they exist to-day, the story of Morocco stretches back only a thousand years, as until then its scattered tribes of Berber mountaineers had acknowledged no head, and knew no common interests; they were not a nation. War was their pastime; it is so now to a great extent. Every man for himself, every tribe for itself. Idolatry, of which abundant traces still remain, had in places been tinged with the name and some of the forms of Christianity, but to what extent it is now impossible to discover. In the Roman Church there still exist titular bishops of North Africa, one, in particular, derives his title from the district of Morocco of which Fez is now the capital, Mauretania Tingitana. It was among these tribes that a pioneer mission of Islám penetrated in the eighth of our centuries. Arabs were then greater strangers in Barbary than we are now, but they were by no means the first strange faces seen there. Ph[oe]nicians, Romans and Vandals had preceded them, but none had stayed, none had succeeded in amalgamating with the Berbers, among whom those individuals who did remain were absorbed. These hardy clansmen, exhibiting the characteristics of hill-folk the world round, still inhabited the uplands and retained their independence. In this they have indeed succeeded to a great extent until the present day, but between that time and this they have given of their life-blood to build up by their side a less pure nation of the plains, whose language as well as its creed is that of Arabia. To imagine that Morocco was invaded by a Muslim host who carried all before them is a great mistake, although a common one. Mulai Idrees--"My Lord Enoch" in English--a direct descendant of Mohammed, was among the first of the Arabian missionaries to arrive, with one or two faithful adherents, exiles fleeing from the Khalîfa of Mekka. So soon as he had induced one tribe to accept his doctrines, he assisted them with his advice and prestige in their combats with hereditary enemies, to whom, however, the novel terms were offered of fraternal union with the victors, if they would accept the creed of which they had become the champions. Thus a new element was introduced into the Berber polity, the element of combination, for the lack of which they had always been weak before. Each additional ally meant an augmentation of the strength of the new party out of all proportion to the losses from occasional defeats. In course of time the Mohammedan coalition became so strong that it was in a position to dictate terms and to impose governors upon the most obstinate of its neighbours. The effect of this was to divide the allies into two important sections, the older of which founded Fez in the days of the son of Idrees, accounted the second ameer of that name, who there lies buried in the most important mosque of the Empire, the very approaches of which are closed to the Jew and the Nazarene. The only spot which excels it in sanctity is that at Zarhôn, a day's journey off, in which the first Idrees lies buried. There the whole town is forbidden to the foreigner, and an attempt made by the writer to gain admittance in disguise was frustrated by discovery at the very gate, though later on he visited the shrine in Fez. The dynasty thus formed, the Shurfà Idreeseeïn, is represented to-day by the Shareef of Wazzán. In southern Morocco, with its capital at Aghmát, on the Atlas slopes, was formed what later grew to be the kingdom of Marrákesh, the city of that name being founded in the middle of the eleventh century. Towards the close of the thirteenth, the kingdoms of Fez and Marrákesh became united under one ruler, whose successor, after numerous dynastic changes, is the Sultan of Morocco now.[1] [1: For a complete outline of Moorish history, see the writer's "Moorish Empire."] But from the time that the united Berbers had become a nation, to prevent them falling out among themselves again it was necessary to find some one else to fight, to occupy the martial instinct nursed in fighting one another. So long as there were ancient scores to be wiped out at home, so long as under cover of a missionary zeal they could continue intertribal feuds, things went well for the victors; but as soon as excuses for this grew scarce, it was needful to fare afield. The pretty story--told, by the way, of other warriors as well--of the Arab leader charging the Atlantic surf, and weeping that the world should end there, and his conquests too, may be but fiction, but it illustrates a fact. Had Europe lain further off, the very causes which had conspired to raise a central power in Morocco would have sufficed to split it up again. This, however, was not to be. In full view of the most northern strip of Morocco, from Ceuta to Cape Spartel, the north-west corner of Africa, stretches the coast of sunny Spain. Between El K'sar es-Sagheer, "The Little Castle," and Tarifa Point is only a distance of nine or ten miles, and in that southern atmosphere the glinting houses may be seen across the straits. History has it that internal dissensions at the Court of Spain led to the Moors being actually invited over; but that inducement was hardly needed. Here was a country of infidels yet to be conquered; here was indeed a land of promise. Soon the Berbers swarmed across, and in spite of reverses, carried all before them. Spain was then almost as much divided into petty states as their land had been till the Arabs taught them better, and little by little they made their way in a country destined to be theirs for five hundred years. Córdova, Sevílle, Granáda, each in turn became their capital, and rivalled Fez across the sea. The successes they achieved attracted from the East adventurers and merchants, while by wise administration literature and science were encouraged, till the Berber Empire of Spain and Morocco took a foremost rank among the nations of the day. Judged from the standpoint of their time, they seem to us a prodigy; judged from our standpoint, they were but little in advance of their descendants of the twentieth century, who, after all, have by no means retrograded, as they are supposed to have done, though they certainly came to a standstill, and have suffered all the evils of four centuries of torpor and stagnation. Civilization wrought on them the effects that it too often produces, and with refinement came weakness. The sole remaining state of those which the invaders, finding independent, conquered one by one, is the little Pyrenean Republic of Andorra, still enjoying privileges granted to it for its brave defence against the Moors, which made it the high-water mark of their dominion. As peace once more split up the Berbers, the subjected Spaniards became strong by union, till at length the death-knell of Moorish rule in Europe sounded at the nuptials of the famous Ferdinand and Isabella, linking Aragon with proud Castile. Expelled from Spain, the Moor long cherished plans for the recovery of what had been lost, preparing fleets and armies for the purpose, but in vain. Though nominally still united, his people lacked that zeal in a common cause which had carried them across the straits before, and by degrees the attempts to recover a kingdom dwindled into continued attacks upon shipping and coast towns. Thus arose that piracy which was for several centuries the scourge of Christendom. Further east a distinct race of pirates flourished, including Turks and Greeks and ruffians from every shore, but they were not Moors, of whom the Salli rover was the type. Many thousands of Europeans were carried off by Moorish corsairs into slavery, including not a few from England. Those who renounced their own religion and nationality, accepting those of their captors, became all but free, only being prevented from leaving the country, and often rose to important positions. Those who had the courage of their convictions suffered much, being treated like cattle, or worse, but they could be ransomed when their price was forthcoming--a privilege abandoned by the renegades--so that the principal object of every European embassy in those days was the redemption of captives. Now and then escapes would be accomplished, but such strict watch was kept when foreign merchantmen were in port, or when foreign ambassadors came and went, that few attempts succeeded, though many were made. Sympathies are stirred by pictures of the martyrdom of Englishmen and Irishmen, Franciscan missionaries to the Moors; and side by side with them the foreign mercenaries in the native service, Englishmen among them, who would fight in any cause for pay and plunder, even though their masters held their countrymen in thrall. And thrall it was, as that of Israel in Egypt, when our sailors were chained to galley seats beneath the lash of a Moor, or when they toiled beneath a broiling sun erecting the grim palace walls of concrete which still stand as witnesses of those fell days. Bought and sold in the market like cattle, Europeans were more despised than Negroes, who at least acknowledged Mohammed as their prophet, and accepted their lot without attempt to escape. Dark days were those for the honour of Europe, when the Moors inspired terror from the Balearics to the Scilly Isles, and when their rovers swept the seas with such effect that all the powers of Christendom were fain to pay them tribute. Large sums of money, too, collected at church doors and by the sale of indulgences, were conveyed by the hands of intrepid friars, noble men who risked all to relieve those slaves who had maintained their faith, having scorned to accept a measure of freedom as the reward of apostasy. Thousands of English and other European slaves were liberated through the assistance of friendly letters from Royal hands, as when the proud Queen Bess addressed Ahmad II., surnamed "the Golden," as "Our Brother after the Law of Crown and Sceptre," or when Queen Anne exchanged compliments with the bloodthirsty Ismáïl, who ventured to ask for the hand of a daughter of Louis XIV. In the midst of it all, when that wonderful man, with a household exceeding Solomon's, and several hundred children, had reigned forty-three of his fifty-five years, the English, in 1684, ceded to him their possession of Tangier. For twenty-two years the "Castle in the streights' mouth," as General Monk had described it, had been the scene of as disastrous an attempt at colonization as we have ever known: misunderstanding of the circumstances and mismanagement throughout; oppression, peculation and terror within as well as without; a constant warfare with incompetent or corrupt officials within as with besieging Moors without; till at last the place had to be abandoned in disgust, and the expensive mole and fortifications were destroyed lest others might seize what we could not hold. Such events could only lower the prestige of Europeans, if, indeed, they possessed any, in the eyes of the Moors, and the slaves up country received worse treatment than before. Even the ambassadors and consuls of friendly powers were treated with indignities beyond belief. Some were imprisoned on the flimsiest pretexts, all had to appear before the monarch in the most abject manner, and many were constrained to bribe the favourite wives of the ameers to secure their requests. It is still the custom for the state reception to take place in an open courtyard, the ambassador standing bareheaded before the mounted Sultan under his Imperial parasol. As late as 1790 the brutal Sultan El Yazeed, who emulated Ismáïl the Bloodthirsty, did not hesitate to declare war on all Christendom except England, agreeing to terms of peace on the basis of tribute. Cooperation between the Powers was not then thought of, and one by one they struck their bargains as they are doing again to-day. Yet even at the most violent period of Moorish misrule it is a remarkable fact that Europeans were allowed to settle and trade in the Empire, in all probability as little molested there as they would have been had they remained at home, by varying religious tests and changing governments. It is almost impossible to conceive, without a perusal of the literature of the period, the incongruity of the position. Foreign slaves would be employed in gangs outside the dwellings of free fellow-countrymen with whom they were forbidden to communicate, while every returning pirate captain added to the number of the captives, sometimes bringing friends and relatives of those who lived in freedom as the Sultan's "guests," though he considered himself "at war" with their Governments. So little did the Moors understand the position of things abroad, that at one time they made war upon Gibraltar, while expressing the warmest friendship for England, who then possessed it. This was done by Mulai Abd Allah V., in 1756, because, he said, the Governor had helped his rebel uncle at Arzîla, so that the English, his so-called friends, did more harm than his enemies--the Portuguese and Spaniards. "My father and I believe," wrote his son, Sidi Mohammed, to Admiral Pawkers, "that the king your master has no knowledge of the behaviour towards us of the Governor of Gibraltar, ... so Gibraltar shall be excluded from the peace to which I am willing to consent between England and us, and with the aid of the Almighty God, I will know how to avenge myself as I may on the English of Gibraltar." Previously Spain and Portugal had held the principal Moroccan seaports, the twin towns of Rabat and Salli alone remaining always Moorish, but these two in their turn set up a sort of independent republic, nourished from the Berber tribes in the mountains to the south of them. No Europeans live in Salli yet, for here the old fanaticism slumbers still. So long as a port remained in foreign hands it was completely cut off from the surrounding country, and played no part in Moorish history, save as a base for periodical incursions. One by one most of them fell again into the hands of their rightful owners, till they had recovered all their Atlantic sea-board. On the Mediterranean, Ceuta, which had belonged to Portugal, came under the rule of Spain when those countries were united, and the Spaniards hold it still, as they do less important positions further east. The piracy days of the Moors have long passed, but they only ceased at the last moment they could do so with grace, before the introduction of steamships. There was not, at the best of times, much of the noble or heroic in their raids, which generally took the nature of lying in wait with well-armed, many-oared vessels, for unarmed, unwieldy merchantmen which were becalmed, or were outpaced by sail and oar together. Early in the nineteenth century Algiers was forced to abandon piracy before Lord Exmouth's guns, and soon after the Moors were given to understand that it could no longer be permitted to them either, since the Moorish "fleets"--if worthy the name--had grown so weak, and those of the Nazarenes so strong, that the tables were turned. Yet for many years more the nations of Europe continued the tribute wherewith the rapacity of the Moors was appeased, and to the United States belongs the honour of first refusing this disgraceful payment. The manner in which the rovers of Salli and other ports were permitted to flourish so long can be explained in no other way than by the supposition that they were regarded as a sort of necessary nuisance, just a hornet's-nest by the wayside, which it would be hopeless to destroy, as they would merely swarm elsewhere. And then we must remember that the Moors were not the only pirates of those days, and that Europeans have to answer for the most terrible deeds of the Mediterranean corsairs. News did not travel then as it does now. Though students of Morocco history are amazed at the frequent captures and the thousands of Christian slaves so imported, abroad it was only here and there that one was heard of at a time. To-day the plunder of an Italian sailing vessel aground on their shore, or the fate of too-confident Spanish smugglers running close in with arms, is heard of the world round. And in the majority of cases there is at least a question: What were the victims doing there? Not that this in any way excuses the so-called "piracy," but it must not be forgotten in considering the question. Almost all these tribes in the troublous districts carry European arms, instead of the more picturesque native flint-lock: and as not a single gun is legally permitted to pass the customs, there must be a considerable inlet somewhere, for prices are not high. II THE PRESENT DAY "What has passed has gone, and what is to come is distant; Thou hast only the hour in which thou art." _Moorish Proverb._ Far from being, as Hood described them, "poor rejected Moors who raised our childish fears," the people of Morocco consist of fine, open races, capable of anything, but literally rotting in one of the finest countries of the world. The Moorish remains in Spain, as well as the pages of history, testify to the manner in which they once flourished, but to-day their appearance is that of a nation asleep. Yet great strides towards reform have been made during the past century, and each decade sees steps taken more important than the last. For the present decade is promised complete transformation. But how little do we know of this people! The very name "Moor" is a European invention, unknown in Morocco, where no more precise definition of the inhabitants can be given than that of "Westerners"--Maghribîn, while the land itself is known as "The Further West"--El Moghreb el Aksa. The name we give to the country is but a corruption of that of the southern capital, Marrákesh ("Morocco City") through the Spanish version, Marueccos. The genuine Moroccans are the Berbers among whom the Arabs introduced Islám and its civilization, later bringing Negroes from their raids across the Atlas to the Sudán and Guinea. The remaining important section of the people are Jews of two classes--those settled in the country from prehistoric times, and those driven to it when expelled from Spain. With the exception of the Arabs and the Blacks, none of these pull together, and in that case it is only because the latter are either subservient to the former, or incorporated with them. First in importance come the earliest known possessors of the land, the Berbers. These are not confined to Morocco, but still hold the rocky fastnesses which stretch from the Atlantic, opposite the Canaries, to the borders of Egypt; from the sands of the Mediterranean to those of the Sáhara, that vast extent of territory to which we have given their name, Barbary. Of these but a small proportion really amalgamated with their Muslim victors, and it is only to this mixed race which occupies the cities of Morocco that the name "Moor" is strictly applicable. On the plains are to be found the Arabs, their tents scattered in every direction. From the Atlantic to the Atlas, from Tangier to Mogador, and then away through the fertile province of Sûs, one of the chief features of Morocco is the series of wide alluvial treeless plains, often apparently as flat as a table, but here and there cut up by winding rivers and crossed by low ridges. The fertility of these districts is remarkable; but owing to the misgovernment of the country, which renders native property so insecure, only a small portion is cultivated. The untilled slopes which border the plains are generally selected by the Arabs for their encampments, circles or ovals of low goat-hair tents, each covering a large area in proportion to the number of its inhabitants. The third section of the people of Morocco--by no means the least important--has still to be glanced at; these are the ubiquitous, persecuted and persecuting Jews. Everywhere that money changes hands and there is business to be done they are to be found. In the towns and among the thatched huts of the plains, even in the Berber villages on the slopes of the Atlas, they have their colonies. With the exception of a few ports wherein European rule in past centuries has destroyed the boundaries, they are obliged to live in their own restricted quarters, and in most instances are only permitted to cross the town barefooted and on foot, never to ride a horse. In the Atlas they live in separate villages adjoining or close to those belonging to the Berbers, and sometimes even larger than they. Always clad in black or dark-coloured cloaks, with hideous black skull-caps or white-spotted blue kerchiefs on their heads, they are conspicuous everywhere. They address the Moors with a villainous, cringing look which makes the sons of Ishmael savage, for they know it is only feigned. In return they are treated like dogs, and cordial hatred exists on both sides. So they live, together yet divided; the Jew despised but indispensable, bullied but thriving. He only wins at law when richer than his opponent; against a Muslim he can bear no testimony; there is scant pretence at justice. He dares not lift his hand to strike a Moor, however ill-treated, but he finds revenge in sucking his life's blood by usury. Receiving no mercy, he shows none, and once in his clutches, his prey is fortunate to escape with his life. The happy influence of more enlightened European Jews is, however, making itself felt in the chief towns, through excellent schools supported from London and Paris, which are turning out a class of highly respectable citizens. While the Moors fear the tide of advancing westernization, the town Jews court it, and in them centres one of the chief prospects of the country's welfare. Into their hands has already been gathered much of the trade of Morocco, and there can be little doubt that, by the end of the thirty years' grace afforded to other merchants than the French, they will have practically absorbed it all, even the Frenchmen trading through them. They have at least the intimate knowledge of the people and local conditions to which so few foreigners ever attain. When the Moorish Empire comes to be pacifically penetrated and systematically explored, it will probably be found that little more is known of it than of China, notwithstanding its proximity, and its comparatively insignificant size. A map honestly drawn, from observations only, would astonish most people by its vast blank spaces.[2] It would be noted that the limit of European exploration--with the exception of the work of two or three hardy travellers in disguise--is less than two hundred miles from the coast, and that this limit is reached at two points only--south of Fez and Marrákesh respectively,--which form the apices of two well-known triangular districts, the contiguous bases of which form part of the Atlantic coast line, under four hundred miles in length. Beyond these limits all is practically unknown, the language, customs and beliefs of the people providing abundant ground for speculation, and permitting theorists free play. So much is this the case, that a few years ago an enthusiastic "savant" was able to imagine that he had discovered a hidden race of dwarfs beyond the Atlas, and to obtain credence for his "find" among the best-informed students of Europe. [2: An approximation to this is given in the writer's "Land of the Moors."] But there is also another point of view from which Morocco is unknown, that of native thought and feeling, penetrated by extremely few Europeans, even when they mingle freely with the people, and converse with them in Arabic. The real Moor is little known by foreigners, a very small number of whom mix with the better classes. Some, as officials, meet officials, but get little below the official exterior. Those who know most seldom speak, their positions or their occupations preventing the expression of their opinions. Sweeping statements about Morocco may therefore be received with reserve, and dogmatic assertions with caution. This Empire is in no worse condition now than it has been for centuries; indeed, it is much better off than ever since its palmy days, and there is no occasion whatever to fear its collapse. Few facts are more striking in the study of Morocco than the absolute stagnation of its people, except in so far as they have been to a very limited extent affected by outside influences. Of what European--or even oriental--land could descriptions of life and manners written in the sixteenth century apply as fully in the twentieth as do those of Morocco by Leo Africanus? Or even to come later, compare the transitions England has undergone since Höst and Jackson wrote a hundred years ago, with the changes discoverable in Morocco since that time. The people of Morocco remain the same, and their more primitive customs are those of far earlier ages, of the time when their ancestors lived upon the plain of Palestine and North Arabia, and when "in the loins of Abraham" the now unfriendly Jew and Arab were yet one. It is the position of Europeans among them which has changed. In the time of Höst and Jackson piracy was dying hard, restrained by tribute from all the Powers of Europe. The foreign merchant was not only tolerated, but was at times supplied with capital by the Moorish sultans, to whom he was allowed to go deeply in debt for custom's dues, and half a century later the British Consul at Mogador was not permitted to embark to escape a bombardment of the town, because of his debt to the Sultan. Many of the restrictions complained of to-day are the outcome of the almost enslaved condition of the merchants of those times in consequence of such customs. Indeed, the position of the European in Morocco is still a series of anomalies, and so it is likely to continue until it passes under foreign rule. The same old spirit of independence reigns in the Berber breast to-day as when he conquered Spain, and though he has forgotten his past and cares naught for his future, he still considers himself a superior being, and feels that no country can rival his home. In his eyes the embassies from Europe and America come only to pay the tribute which is the price of peace with his lord, and when he sees a foreign minister in all his black and gold stand in the sun bareheaded to address the mounted Sultan beneath his parasol, he feels more proud than ever of his greatness, and is more decided to be pleasant to the stranger, but to keep him out. Instead of increased relations between Moors and foreigners tending to friendship, the average foreign settler or tourist is far too bigoted and narrow-minded to see any good in the native, much less to acknowledge his superiority on certain points. Wherever the Sultan's authority is recognized the European is free to travel and live, though past experience has led officials not to welcome him. At the same time, he remains entirely under the jurisdiction of his own authorities, except in cases of murder or grave crime, when he must be at once handed over to the nearest consul of his country. Not only are he and his household thus protected, but also his native employees, and, to a certain extent, his commercial and agricultural agents. Thus foreigners in Morocco enjoy within the limits of the central power the security of their own lands, and the justice of their own laws. They do not even find in Morocco that immunity from justice which some ignorant writers of fiction have supposed; for unless a foreigner abandons his own nationality and creed, and buries himself in the interior under a native name, he cannot escape the writs of foreign courts. In any case, the Moorish authorities will arrest him on demand, and hand him over to his consul to be dealt with according to law. The colony of refugees which has been pictured by imaginative raconteurs is therefore non-existent. Instead there are growing colonies of business men, officials, missionaries, and a few retired residents, quite above the average of such colonies in the Levant, for instance. For many years past, though the actual business done has shown a fairly steady increase, the commercial outlook in Morocco has gone from bad to worse. Yet more of its products are now exported, and there are more European articles in demand, than were thought of twenty years ago. This anomalous and almost paradoxical condition is due to the increase of competition and the increasing weakness of the Government. Men who had hope a few years ago, now struggle on because they have staked too much to be able to leave for more promising fields. This has been especially the case since the late Sultan's death. The disturbances which followed that event impoverished many tribes, and left behind a sense of uncertainty and dread. No European Bourse is more readily or lastingly affected by local political troubles than the general trade of a land like Morocco, in which men live so much from hand to mouth. It is a noteworthy feature of Moorish diplomatic history that to the Moors' love of foreign trade we owe almost every step that has led to our present relations with the Empire. Even while their rovers were the terror of our merchantmen, as has been pointed out, foreign traders were permitted to reside in their ports, the facilities granted to them forming the basis of all subsequent negotiations. Now that concession after concession has been wrung from their unwilling Government, and in spite of freedom of residence, travel, and trade in the most important parts of the Empire, it is disheartening to see the foreign merchant in a worse condition than ever. The previous generation, fewer in number, enjoying far less privileges, and subjected to restrictions and indignities that would not be suffered to-day, were able to make their fortunes and retire, while their successors find it hard to hold their own. The "hundred tonners" who, in the palmy days of Mogador, were wont to boast that they shipped no smaller quantities at once, are a dream of the past. The ostrich feathers and elephants' tusks no longer find their way out by that port, and little gold now passes in or out. Merchant princes will never be seen here again; commercial travellers from Germany are found in the interior, and quality, as well as price, has been reduced to its lowest ebb. A crowd of petty trading agents has arisen with no capital to speak of, yet claiming and abusing credit, of which a most ruinous system prevails, and that in a land in which the collection of debts is proverbially difficult, and oftentimes impossible. The native Jews, who were interpreters and brokers years ago, have now learned the business and entered the lists. These new competitors content themselves with infinitesimal profits, or none at all in cases where the desideratum is cash to lend out at so many hundreds per cent. per annum. Indeed, it is no uncommon practice for goods bought on long credit to be sold below cost price for this purpose. Against such methods who can compete? Yet this is a rich, undeveloped land--not exactly an El Dorado, though certainly as full of promise as any so styled has proved to be when reached--favoured physically and geographically, but politically stagnant, cursed with an effete administration, fettered by a decrepit creed. In view of this situation, it is no wonder that from time to time specious schemes appear and disappear with clockwork regularity. Now it is in England, now in France, that a gambling public is found to hazard the cost of proving the impossibility of opening the country with a rush, and the worthlessness of so-called concessions and monopolies granted by sheïkhs in the south, who, however they may chafe under existing rule which forbids them ports of their own, possess none of the powers required to treat with foreigners. As normal trade has waned in Morocco, busy minds have not been slow in devising illicit, or at least unusual, methods of making money, even, one regrets to say, of making false money. Among the drawbacks suffered by the commerce which pines under the shade of the shareefian umbrella, one--and that far from the least--is the unsatisfactory coinage, which till a few years ago was almost entirely foreign. To have to depend in so important a matter on any mint abroad is bad enough, but for that mint to be Spanish means much. Centuries ago the Moors coined more, but with the exception of a horrible token of infinitesimal value called "floos," the products of their extinct mints are only to be found in the hands of collectors, in buried hoards, or among the jewellery displayed at home by Mooresses and Jewesses, whose fortunes, so invested, may not be seized for debt. Some of the older issues are thin and square, with well-preserved inscriptions, and of these a fine collection--mostly gold--may be seen at the British Museum; but the majority, closely resembling those of India and Persia, are rudely stamped and unmilled, not even round, but thick, and of fairly good metal. The "floos" referred to (_sing._ "fils") are of three sizes, coarsely struck in zinc rendered hard and yellow by the addition of a little copper. The smallest, now rarely met with, runs about 19,500 to £1 when this is worth 32-1/2 Spanish pesetas; the other two, still the only small change of the country, are respectively double and quadruple its value. The next coin in general circulation is worth 2_d._, so the inconvenience is great. A few years ago, however, Europeans resident in Tangier resolutely introduced among themselves the Spanish ten and five céntimo pieces, corresponding to our 1_d._ and 1/2_d._, which are now in free local use, but are not accepted up-country. What passes as Moorish money to-day has been coined in France for many years, more recently also in Germany; the former is especially neat, but the latter lacks style. The denominations coincide with those of Spain, whose fluctuations in value they closely follow at a respectful distance. This autumn the "Hasáni" coin--that of Mulai el Hasan, the late Sultan--has fallen to fifty per cent. discount on Spanish. With the usual perversity also, the common standard "peseta," in which small bargains are struck on the coast, was omitted, the nearest coin, the quarter-dollar, being nominally worth ptas. 1.25. It was only after a decade, too, that the Government put in circulation the dollars struck in France, which had hitherto been laid up in the treasury as a reserve. And side by side with the German issue came abundant counterfeit coins, against which Government warnings were published, to the serious disadvantage of the legal issue. Even the Spanish copper has its rival, and a Frenchman was once detected trying to bring in a nominal four hundred dollars' worth of an imitation, which he promptly threw overboard when the port guards raised objections to its quality. The increasing need of silver currency inland, owing to its free use in the manufacture of trinkets, necessitates a constant importation, and till recently all sorts of coins, discarded elsewhere, were in circulation. This was the case especially with French, Swiss, Belgian, Italian, Greek, Roumanian, and other pieces of the value of twenty céntimos, known here by the Turkish name "gursh," which were accepted freely in Central Morocco, but not in the north. Twenty years ago Spanish Carolus, Isabella and Philippine shillings and kindred coins were in use all over the country, and when they were withdrawn from circulation in Spain they were freely shipped here, till the country was flooded with them. When the merchants and customs at last refused them, their astute importers took them back at a discount, putting them into circulation later at what they could, only to repeat the transaction. In Morocco everything a man can be induced to take is legal tender, and for bribes and religious offerings all things pass, this practice being an easier matter than at first sight appears; so in the course of a few years one saw a whole series of coins in vogue, one after the other, the main transactions taking place on the coast with country Moors, than whom, though none more suspicious, none are more easily gulled. A much more serious obstacle to inland trade is the periodically disturbed state of the country, not so much the local struggles and uprisings which serve to free superfluous energy, as the regular administrative expeditions of the Moorish Court, or of considerable bodies of troops. These used to take place in some direction every year, "the time when kings go forth to war" being early summer, just when agricultural operations are in full swing, and every man is needed on his fields. In one district the ranks of the workers are depleted by a form of conscription or "harka," and in another these unfortunates are employed preventing others doing what they should be doing at home. Thus all suffer, and those who are not themselves engaged in the campaign are forced to contribute cash, if only to find substitutes to take their places in the ranks. The movement of the Moorish Court means the transportation of a numerous host at tremendous expense, which has eventually to be recouped in the shape of regular contributions, arrears of taxes and fines, collected _en route_, so the pace is abnormally slow. Not only is there an absolute absence of roads, and, with one or two exceptions, of bridges, but the Sultan himself, with all his army, cannot take the direct route between his most important inland cities without fighting his way. The configuration of the empire explains its previous sub-division into the kingdoms of Fez, Marrákesh, Tafilált and Sûs, and the Reef, for between the plains of each run mountain ranges which have never known absolute "foreign" rulers. [Illustration: CROSSING A MOROCCO RIVER. _Molinari, Photo., Tangier._] To European engineers the passes through these closed districts would offer no great obstacles in the construction of roads such as thread the Himalayas, but the Moors do not wish for the roads; for, while what the Government fears to promote thereby is combination, the actual occupants of the mountains, the native Berbers, desire not to see the Arab tax-gatherers, only tolerating their presence as long as they cannot help it, and then rising against them. Often a tribe will be left for several years to enjoy independence, while the slip-shod army of the Sultan is engaged elsewhere. When its turn comes it holds out for terms, since it has no hope of successfully confronting such an overwhelming force as is sooner or later brought against it. The usual custom is to send small detachments of soldiers to the support of the over-grasping functionaries, and when they have been worsted, to send down an army to "eat up" the province, burning villages, deporting cattle, ill-treating the women, and often carrying home children as slaves. The men of the district probably flee and leave their homes to be ransacked. They content themselves with hiding behind crags which seem to the plainsmen inaccessible, whence they can in safety harass the troops on the march. After more or less protracted skirmishing, the country having been devastated by the troops, who care only for the booty, women will be sent into the camp to make terms, or one of the shareefs or religious nobles who accompany the army is sent out to treat with the rebels. The terms are usually hard--so much arrears of tribute in cash and kind, so much as a fine for expenses, so many hostages. Then hostages and prisoners are driven to the capital in chains, and pickled heads are exposed on the gateways, imperial letters being read in the chief mosques throughout the country, telling of a glorious victory, and calling for rejoicings. To any other people the short spell of freedom would have been too dearly bought for the experiment to be repeated, but as soon as they begin to chafe again beneath the lawless rule of Moorish officials, the Berbers rebel once more. It has been going on thus for hundreds of years, and will continue till put an end to by France. In Morocco each official preys upon the one below him, and on all others within his reach, till the poor oppressed and helpless villager lives in terror of them all, not daring to display signs of prosperity for fear of tempting plunder. Merit is no key to positions of trust and authority, and few have such sufficient salary attached to render them attractive to honest men. The holders are expected in most cases to make a living out of the pickings, and are allowed an unquestioned run of office till they are presumed to have amassed enough to make it worth while treating them as they have treated others, when they are called to account and relentlessly "squeezed." The only means of staving off the fatal day is by frequent presents to those above them, wrung from those below. A large proportion of Moorish officials end their days in disgrace, if not in dungeons, and some meet their end by being invited to corrosive sublimate tea, a favourite beverage in Morocco--for others. Yet there is always a demand for office, and large prices are paid for posts affording opportunities for plunder. The Moorish financial system is of a piece with this method. When the budget is made out, each tribe or district is assessed at the utmost it is believed capable of yielding, and the candidate for its governorship who undertakes to get most out of it probably has the task allotted to him. His first duty is to repeat on a small scale the operation of the Government, informing himself minutely as to the resources under his jurisdiction, and assessing the sub-divisions so as to bring in enough for himself, and to provide against contingencies, in addition to the sum for which he is responsible. The local sheïkhs or head-men similarly apportion their demands among the individuals entrusted to their tender mercy. A fool is said to have once presented the Sultan with a bowl of skimmed and watered milk, and on being remonstrated with, to have declared that His Majesty received no more from any one, as his wazeers and governors ate half the revenue cream each, and the sheïkhs drank half the revenue milk. The fool was right. The richer a man is, the less proportion he will have to pay, for he can make it so agreeable--or disagreeable--for those entrusted with a little brief authority. It is the struggling poor who have to pay or go to prison, even if to pay they have to sell their means of subsistence. Three courses lie before this final victim--to obtain the protection of some influential name, native or foreign, to buy a "friend at court," or to enter Nazarene service. But native friends are uncertain and hard to find, and, above all, they may be alienated by a higher bid from a rival or from a rapacious official. Such affairs are of common occurrence, and harrowing tales might be told of homes broken up in this way, of tortures inflicted, and of lives spent in dungeons because display has been indulged in, or because an independent position has been assumed under cover of a protection that has failed. But what can one expect with such a standard of honour? Foreigners, on the other hand, seldom betray their _protégés_--although, to their shame be it mentioned, some in high places have done so,--wherefore their protection is in greater demand; besides which it is more effectual, as coming from outside, while no Moor, however well placed, is absolutely secure in his own position. Thus it is that the down-trodden natives desire and are willing to pay for protection in proportion to their means; and it is this power of dispensing protection which, though often abused, does more than anything else to raise the prestige of the foreigner, and in turn to protect him. The claims most frequently made against Moors by foreign countries are for debt, claims which afford the greatest scope for controversy and the widest loophole for abuse. Although, unfortunately, for the greater part usurious, a fair proportion are for goods delivered, but to evade the laws even loan receipts are made out as for goods to be delivered, a form in which discrimination is extremely difficult. The condition of the country, in which every man is liable to be arrested, thrashed, imprisoned, if not tortured, to extort from him his wealth, is such as furnishes the usurer with crowding clients; and the condition of things among the Indian cultivators, bad as it is, since they can at least turn to a fair-handed Government, is not to be compared to that of the down-trodden Moorish farmer. The assumption by the Government of responsibility for the debts of its subjects, or at all events its undertaking to see that they pay, is part of the patriarchal system in force, by which the family is made responsible for individuals, the tribe for families, and so on. No other system would bring offenders to justice without police; but it transforms each man into his brother's keeper. This, however, does not apply only to debts the collection of which is urged upon the Government, for whom it is sufficient to produce the debtor and let him prove absolute poverty for him to be released, with the claim cancelled. This in theory: but in practice, to appease these claims, however just, innocent men are often thrown into prison, and untold horrors are suffered, in spite of all the efforts of foreign ministers to counteract the injustice. A mere recital of tales which have come under my own observation would but harrow my readers' feelings to no purpose, and many would appear incredible. With the harpies of the Government at their heels, men borrow wildly for a month or two at cent. per cent., and as the Moorish law prohibits interest, a document is sworn to before notaries by which the borrower declares that he has that day taken in hard cash the full amount to be repaid, the value of certain crops or produce of which he undertakes delivery upon a certain date. Very seldom, indeed, does it happen that by that date the money can be repaid, and generally the only terms offered for an extension of time for another three or six months are the addition of another fifty or one hundred per cent. to the debt, always fully secured on property, or by the bonds of property holders. Were not this thing of everyday occurrence in Morocco, and had I not examined scores of such papers, the way in which the ignorant Moors fall into such traps would seem incredible. It is usual to blame the Jews for it all, and though the business lies mostly in their hands, it must not be overlooked that many foreigners engage in it, and, though indirectly, some Moors also. But besides such claims, there is a large proportion of just business debts which need to be enforced. It does not matter how fair a claim may be, or how legitimate, it is very rarely that trouble is not experienced in pressing it. The Moorish Courts are so venal, so degraded, that it is more often the unscrupulous usurer who wins his case and applies the screw, than the honest trader. Here lies the rub. Another class of claims is for damage done, loss suffered, or compensation for imaginary wrongs. All these together mount up, and a newly appointed minister or consul-general is aghast at the list which awaits him. He probably contents himself at first with asking for the appointment of a commission to examine and report on the legality of all these claims, and for the immediate settlement of those approved. But he asks and is promised in vain, till at last he obtains the moral support of war-ships, in view of which the Moorish Government most likely pays much more than it would have got off with at first, and then proceeds to victimize the debtors. It is with expressed threats of bombardment that the ships come, but experience has taught the Moorish Government that it is well not to let things go that length, and they now invariably settle amicably. To our western notions it may seem strange that whatever questions have to be attended to should not be put out of hand without requiring such a demonstration; but while there is sleep there is hope for an Oriental, and the rulers of Morocco would hardly be Moors if they resisted the temptation to procrastinate, for who knows what may happen while they delay? And then there is always the chance of driving a bargain, so dear to the Moorish heart, for the wazeer knows full well that although the Nazarene may be prepared to bombard, as he has done from time to time, he is no more desirous than the Sultan that such an extreme measure should be necessary. So, even when things come to the pinch, and the exasperated representative of Christendom talks hotly of withdrawing, hauling down his flag and giving hostile orders, there is time at least to make an offer, or to promise everything in words. And when all is over, claims paid, ships gone, compliments and presents passed, nothing really serious has happened, just the everyday scene on the market applied to the nation, while the Moorish Government has once more given proof of worldly wisdom, and endorsed the proverb that discretion is the better part of valour. An illustration of the high-handed way in which things are done in Morocco has but recently been afforded by the action of France regarding an alleged Algerian subject arrested by the Moorish authorities for conspiracy. The man, Boo Zîan Miliáni by name, was the son of one of those Algerians who, when their country was conquered by the French, preferred exile to submission, and migrated to Morocco, where they became naturalized. He was charged with supporting the so-called "pretender" in the Reef province, where he was arrested with two others early in August last. His particular offence appears to have been the reading of the "Rogi's" proclamations to the public, and inciting them to rebel against the Sultan. But when brought a prisoner to Tangier, and thence despatched to Fez, he claimed French citizenship, and the Minister of France, then at Court, demanded his release. This being refused, a peremptory note followed, with a threat to break off diplomatic negotiations if the demand were not forthwith complied with. The usual _communiqués_ were made to the Press, whereby a chorus was produced setting forth the insult to France, the imminence of war, and the general gravity of the situation. Many alarming head-lines were provided for the evening papers, and extra copies were doubtless sold. In Morocco, however, not only the English and Spanish papers, but also the French one, admitted that the action of France was wrong, though the ultimate issue was never in doubt, and the man's release was a foregone conclusion. Elsewhere the rights of the matter would have been sifted, and submitted at least to the law-courts, if not to arbitration. While the infliction of this indignity was stirring up northern Morocco, the south was greatly exercised by the presence on the coast of a French vessel, _L'Aigle_, officers from which proceeded ostentatiously to survey the fortifications of Mogador and its island, and then effected a landing on the latter by night. Naturally the coastguards fired at them, fortunately without causing damage, but had any been killed, Europe would have rung with the "outrage." From Mogador the vessel proceeded after a stay of a month to Agadir, the first port of Sûs, closed to Europeans. Here its landing-party was met on the beach by some hundreds of armed men, whose commander resolutely forbade them to land, so they had to retire. Had they not done so, who would answer for the consequences? As it was, the natives, eager to attack the "invaders," were with difficulty kept in hand, and one false step would undoubtedly have led to serious bloodshed. Of course this was a dreadful rebuff for "pacific penetration," but the matter was kept quiet as a little premature, since in Europe the coast is not quite clear enough yet for retributory measures. The effect, however, on the Moors, among whom the affair grew more grave each time it was recited, was out of all proportion to the real importance of the incident, which otherwise might have passed unnoticed. III BEHIND THE SCENES "He knows of every vice an ounce." _Moorish Proverb._ Though most eastern lands may be described as slip-shod, with reference both to the feet of their inhabitants and to the way in which things are done, there can be no country in the world more aptly described by that epithet than Morocco. One of the first things which strikes the visitor to this country is the universality of the slipper as foot-gear, at least, so far as the Moors are concerned. In the majority of cases the men wear the heels of their slippers folded down under the feet, only putting them up when necessity compels them to run, which they take care shall not be too often, as they much prefer a sort of ambling gait, best compared to that of their mules, or to that of an English tramp. Nothing delights them better as a means of agreeably spending an hour or two, than squatting on their heels in the streets or on some door-stoop, gazing at the passers-by, exchanging compliments with their acquaintances. Native "swells" consequently promenade with a piece of felt under their arms on which to sit when they wish, in addition to its doing duty as a carpet for prayer. The most public places, and usually the cool of the afternoon, are preferred for this pastime. The ladies of their Jewish neighbours also like to sit at their doors in groups at the same hour, or in the doorways of main thoroughfares on moonlight evenings, while the gentlemen, who prefer to do their gossiping afoot, roam up and down. But this is somewhat apart from the point of the lazy tendencies of the Moors. With them--since they have no trains to catch, and disdain punctuality--all hurry is undignified, and one could as easily imagine an elegantly dressed Moorish scribe literally flying as running, even on the most urgent errand. "Why run," they ask, "when you might just as well walk? Why walk, when standing would do? Why stand, when sitting is so much less fatiguing? Why sit, when lying down gives so much more rest? And why, lying down, keep your eyes open?" In truth, this is a country in which things are left pretty much to look after themselves. Nothing is done that can be left undone, and everything is postponed until "to-morrow." Slipper-slapper go the people, and slipper-slapper goes their policy. If you can get through a duty by only half doing it, by all means do so, is the generally accepted rule of life. In anything you have done for you by a Moor, you are almost sure to discover that he has "scamped" some part; perhaps the most important. This, of course, means doing a good deal yourself, if you like things done well, a maxim holding good everywhere, indeed, but especially here. The Moorish Government's way of doing things--or rather, of not doing them if it can find an excuse--is eminently slip-shod. The only point in which they show themselves astute is in seeing that their Rubicon has a safe bridge by which they may retreat, if that suits their plans after crossing it. To deceive the enemy they hide this as best they can, for the most part successfully, causing the greatest consternation in the opposite camp, which, at the moment when it thinks it has driven them into a corner, sees their ranks gradually thinning from behind, dribbling away by an outlet hitherto invisible. Thus, in accepting a Moor's promise, one must always consider the conditions or rider annexed. This can be well illustrated by the reluctant permission to transport grain from one Moorish port to another, granted from time to time, but so hampered by restrictions as to be only available to a few, the Moorish Government itself deriving the greatest advantage from it. Then, too, there is the property clause in the Convention of Madrid, which has been described as the sop by means of which the Powers were induced to accept other less favourable stipulations. Instead of being the step in advance which it appeared to be, it was, in reality, a backward step, the conditions attached making matters worse than before. In this way only do the Moors shine as politicians, unless prevarication and procrastination be included, Machiavellian arts in which they easily excel. Otherwise they are content to jog along in the same slip-shod manner as their fathers did centuries ago, as soon as prosperity had removed the incentive to exert the energy they once possessed. The same carelessness marks their conduct in everything, and the same unsatisfactory results inevitably follow. But to get at the root of the matter it is necessary to go a step further. The absolute lack of morals among the people is the real cause of the trouble. Morocco is so deeply sunk in the degradation of vice, and so given up to lust, that it is impossible to lay bare its deplorable condition. In most countries, with a fair proportion of the pure and virtuous, some attempt is made to gloss over and conceal one's failings; but in this country the only vice which public opinion seriously condemns is drunkenness, and it is only before foreigners that any sense of shame or desire for secrecy about others is observable. The Moors have not yet attained to that state of hypocritical sanctimoniousness in which modern society in civilized lands delights to parade itself. The taste for strong drink, though still indulged comparatively in secret, is steadily increasing, the practice spreading from force of example among the Moors themselves, as a result of the strenuous efforts of foreigners to inculcate this vice. European consular reports not infrequently note with congratulation the growing imports of wines and liqueurs into Morocco, nominally for the sole use of foreigners, although manifestly far in excess of their requirements. As yet, it is chiefly among the higher and lower classes that the victims are found, the former indulging in the privacy of their own homes, and the latter at the low drinking-dens kept by the scum of foreign settlers in the open ports. Among the country people of the plains and lower hills there are hardly any who would touch intoxicating liquor, though among the mountaineers the use of alcohol has ever been more common. Tobacco smoking is very general on the coast, owing to contact with Europeans, but still comparatively rare in the interior, although the native preparations of hemp (keef), and also to some extent opium, have a large army of devotees, more or less victims. The latter, however, being an expensive import, is less known in the interior. Snuff-taking is fairly general among men and women, chiefly the elderly. What they take is very strong, being a composition of tobacco, walnut shells, and charcoal ash. The writer once saw a young Englishman, who thought he could stand a good pinch of snuff, fairly "knocked over" by a quarter as much as the owner of the nut from which it came took with the utmost complacency. The feeling of the Moorish Government about smoking has long been so strong that in every treaty with Europe is inserted a clause reserving the right of prohibiting the importation of all narcotics, or articles used in their manufacture or consumption. Till a few years ago the right to deal in these was granted yearly as a monopoly; but in 1887 the late Sultan, Mulai el Hasan, and his aoláma, or councillors, decided to abolish the business altogether, so, purchasing the existing stocks at a valuation, they had the whole burned. But first the foreign officials and then private foreigners demanded the right to import whatever they needed "for their own consumption," and the abuse of this courtesy has enabled several tobacco factories to spring up in the country. The position with regard to the liquor traffic is almost the same. If the Moors were free to legislate as they wished, they would at once prohibit the importation of intoxicants. Of late years, however, a great change has come over the Moors of the ports, more especially so in Tangier, where the number of taverns and _cafés_ has increased most rapidly. During many years' residence there the cases of drunkenness met with could be counted on the fingers, and were then confined to guides or servants of foreigners; on the last visit paid to the country more were observed in a month than then in years. In those days to be seen with a cigarette was almost a crime, and those who indulged in a whiff at home took care to deodorize their mouths with powdered coffee; now Moors sit with Europeans, smoking and drinking, unabashed, at tables in the streets, but not those of the better sort. Thus Morocco is becoming civilized! However ashamed a Moor may be of drunkenness, no one thinks of making a pretence of being chaste or moral. On the contrary, no worse is thought of a man who is wholly given up to the pleasures of the flesh than of one who is addicted to the most innocent amusements. If a Moor is remonstrated with, he declares he is not half so bad as the "Nazarenes" he has come across, who, in addition to practising most of his vices, indulge in drunkenness. It is not surprising, therefore, that the diseases which come as a penalty for these vices are fearfully prevalent in Morocco. Everywhere one comes across the ravages of such plagues, and is sickened at the sight of their victims. Without going further into details, it will suffice to mention that one out of every five patients (mostly males) who attend at the dispensary of the North Africa Mission at Tangier are direct, or indirect, sufferers from these complaints. The Moors believe in "sowing wild oats" when young, till their energy is extinguished, leaving them incapable of accomplishing anything. Then they think the pardon of God worth invoking, if only in the vain hope of having their youth renewed as the eagle's. Yet if this could happen, they would be quite ready to commence a fresh series of follies more outrageous than before. This is a sad picture, but nevertheless true, and, far from being exaggerated, does not even hint at much that exists in Morocco to-day. The words of the Korán about such matters are never considered, though nominally the sole guide for life. The fact that God is "the Pitying, the Pitiful, King of the Day of Judgement," is considered sufficient warrant for the devotees of Islám to lightly indulge in breaches of laws which they hold to be His, confident that if they only perform enough "vain repetitions," fast at the appointed times, and give alms, visiting Mekka, if possible, or if not, making pilgrimages to shrines of lesser note nearer home, God, in His infinite mercy, will overlook all. An anonymous writer has aptly remarked--"Every good Mohammedan has a perpetual free pass over that line, which not only secures to him personally a safe transportation to Paradise, but provides for him upon his arrival there so luxuriously that he can leave all the cumbersome baggage of his earthly harem behind him, and begin his celestial house-keeping with an entirely new outfit." Here lies the whole secret of Morocco's backward state. Her people, having outstepped even the ample limits of licentiousness laid down in the Korán, and having long ceased to be even true Mohammedans, by the time they arrive at manhood have no energy left to promote her welfare, and sink into an indolent, procrastinating race, capable of little in the way of progress till a radical change takes place in their morals. Nothing betrays their moral condition more clearly than their unrestrained conversation, a reeking vapour arising from a mass of corruption. The foul ejaculations of an angry Moor are unreproducible, only serving to show extreme familiarity with vice of every sort. The tales to which they delight to listen, the monotonous chants rehearsed by hired musicians at public feasts or private entertainments, and the voluptuous dances they delight to have performed before them as they lie sipping forbidden liquors, are all of one class, recounting and suggesting evil deeds to hearers or observers. The constant use made of the name of God, mostly in stock phrases uttered without a thought as to their real meaning, is counterbalanced in some measure by cursing of a most elaborate kind, and the frequent mention of the "Father of Lies," called by them "The Liar" _par excellence_. The term "elaborate" is the only one wherewith to describe a curse so carefully worded that, if executed, it would leave no hope of Paradise either for the unfortunate addressee or his ancestors for several generations. On the slightest provocation, or without that excuse, the Moor can roll forth the most intricate genealogical objurgations, or rap out an oath. In ordinary cases of displeasure he is satisfied with showering expletives on the parents and grand-parents of the object of his wrath, with derogatory allusions to the morals of those worthies' "better halves." "May God have mercy on thy relatives, O my Lord," is a common way of addressing a stranger respectfully, and the contrary expression is used to produce a reverse effect. I am often asked, "What would a Moor think of this?" Probably some great invention will be referred to, or some manifest improvement in our eyes over Moorish methods or manufactures. If it was something he could see, unless above the average, he would look at it as a cow looks at a new gate, without intelligence, realizing only the change, not the cause or effect. By this time the Moors are becoming familiar, at least by exaggerated descriptions, with most of the foreigner's freaks, and are beginning to refuse to believe that the Devil assists us, as they used to, taking it for granted that we should be more ingenious, and they more wise! The few who think are apt to pity the rush of our lives, and write us down, from what they have themselves observed in Europe as in Morocco, as grossly immoral beside even their acknowledged failings. The faults of our civilization they quickly detect, the advantages are mostly beyond their comprehension. Some years ago a friend of mine showed two Moors some of the sights of London. When they saw St. Paul's they told of the glories of the Karûeeïn mosque at Fez; with the towers of Westminster before them they sang the praises of the Kûtûbîya at Marrákesh. Whatever they saw had its match in Morocco. But at last, as a huge dray-horse passed along the highway with its heavy load, one grasped the other's arm convulsively, exclaiming, "M'bark Allah! Aoûd hadhá!"--"Blessed be God! That's a horse!" Here at least was something that did appeal to the heart of the Arab. For once he saw a creature he could understand, the like of which was never bred in Barbary, and his wonder knew no bounds. An equally good story is told of an Englishman who endeavoured to convince a Moor at home of the size of these horses. With his stick he drew on the ground one of their full-sized shoes. "But we have horses beyond the mountains with shoes _this_ size," was the ready reply, as the native drew another twice as big. Annoyed at not being able to convince him, the Englishman sent home for a specimen shoe. When he showed it to the Moor, the only remark he elicited was that a native smith could make one twice the size. Exasperated now, and not to be outdone, the Englishman sent home for a cart-horse skull. "Now you've beaten me!" at last acknowledged the Moor. "You Christians can make anything, but _we can't make bones!_" Bigoted and fanatical as the Moors may show themselves at times, they are generally willing enough to be friends with those who show themselves friendly. And notwithstanding the way in which the strong oppress the weak, as a nation they are by no means treacherous or cruel; on the contrary, the average Moor is genial and hospitable, does not forget a kindness, and is a man whom one can respect. Yet it is strange how soon a little power, and the need for satisfying the demands of his superiors, will corrupt the mildest of them; and the worst are to be found among families which have inherited office. The best officials are those chosen from among retired merchants whose palms no longer itch, and who, by intercourse with Europeans, have had their ideas of life broadened. The greatest obstacle to progress in Morocco is the blind prejudice of ignorance. It is hard for the Moors to realize that their presumed hereditary foes can wish them well, and it is suspicion, rather than hostility, which induces them to crawl within their shell and ask to be left alone. Too often subsequent events have shown what good ground they have had for suspicion. It is a pleasure for me to be able to state that during all the years that I have lived among them, often in the closest intercourse, I have never received the least insult, but have been well repaid in my own coin. What more could be wished? [Illustration: _Photograph by Dr. Rudduck._ A BERBER VILLAGE IN THE ATLAS] IV THE BERBER RACE "Every lion in his own forest roars." _Moorish Proverb._ Few who glibly use the word "Barbarian" pause to consider whether the present meaning attached to the name is justified or not, or whether the people of Barbary are indeed the uncivilized, uncouth, incapable lot their name would seem to imply to-day. In fact, the popular ignorance regarding the nearest point of Africa is even greater than of the actually less known central portions, where the white man penetrates with every risk. To declare that the inhabitants of the four Barbary States--Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripoli--are not "Blackamoors" at all, but white like ourselves, is to astonish most folk at the outset. Of course in lands where the enslavement of neighbouring negro races has been an institution for a thousand years or more, there is a goodly proportion of mulattoes; and among those whose lives have been spent for generations in field work there are many whose skins are bronzed and darkened, but they are white by nature, nevertheless, and town life soon restores the original hue. The student class of Fez, drawn from all sections of the population of Morocco, actually makes a boast of the pale and pasty complexions attained by life amid the shaded cloisters and covered streets of the intellectual capital. Then again those who are sunburned and bronzed are more of the Arab stock than of the Berber. These Berbers, the original Barbarians, known to the Romans and Greeks as such before the Arab was heard of outside Arabia, are at once the greatest and the most interesting nation, or rather race, of the whole of Africa. Had such a coalition as "the United States of North Africa" been possible, Europe would long ago have learned to fear and respect the title "Barbarian" too much to put it to its present use. But the weak point of the Berber race has been its lack of homogeneity; it has ever been split up into independent states and tribes, constantly indulging in internecine warfare. This is a principle which has its origin in the relations of the units whereof they are composed, of whom it may be said as of the sons of Ishmael, that every man's hand is against his neighbour. The vendetta, a result of the _lex talionis_ of "eye for eye and tooth for tooth," flourishes still. No youth is supposed to have attained full manhood until he has slain his man, and excuses are seldom lacking. The greatest insult that can be offered to an enemy is to tell him that his father died in bed--even greater than the imputation of evil character to his maternal relatives. Some years ago I had in my service a lad of about thirteen, one of several Reefians whom I had about me for the practice of their language. Two or three years later, on returning to Morocco, I met him one day on the market. "I am so glad to see you," he said; "I want you to help me buy some guns." "What for?" "Well, my father's dead; may God have mercy on him!" "How did he die?" "God knows." "But what has that to do with the gun?" "You see, we must kill my three uncles, I and my two brothers, and we want three guns." "What! Did they kill your father?" "God knows." "May He deliver you from such a deed. Come round to the house for some food." "But I've got married since you saw me, and expect an heir, yet they chaff me and call me a boy because I have never yet killed a man." I asked an old servant who had been to England, and seemed "almost a Christian," to try and dissuade him, but only to meet with an appreciative, "Well done! I always thought there was something in that lad." So I tried a second, but with worse results, for he patted the boy on the back with an assurance that he could not dissuade him from so sacred a duty; and at last I had to do what I could myself. I extorted a promise that he would try and arrange to take blood-money, but as he left the door his eye fell on a broken walking-stick. "Oh, do give me that! It's no use to you, and it _would_ make such a nice prop for my gun, as I am a very bad shot, and we mean to wait outside for them in the dark." The sequel I have never heard. Up in those mountains every one lives in fortified dwellings--big men in citadels, others in wall-girt villages, all from time to time at war with one another, or with the dwellers in some neighbouring valley. Fighting is their element; as soon as "the powder speaks" there are plenty to answer, for every one carries his gun, and it is wonderful how soon upon these barren hills an armed crowd can muster. Their life is a hard fight with Nature; all they ask is to be left alone to fight it out among themselves. Even on the plains among the Arabs and the mixed tribes described as Moors, things are not much better, for there, too, vendettas and cattle lifting keep them at loggerheads, and there is nothing the clansmen like so well as a raid on the Governor's kasbah or castle. These kasbahs are great walled strongholds dotted about the country; in times of peace surrounded by groups of huts and tents, whose inhabitants take refuge inside when their neighbours appear. The high walls and towers are built of mud concrete, often red like the Alhambra, the surface of which stands the weather ill, but which, when kept in repair, lasts for centuries. The Reefian Berbers are among the finest men in Morocco--warlike and fierce, it is true, from long habit and training; but they have many excellent qualities, in addition to stalwart frames. "If you don't want to be robbed," say they, "don't come our way. We only care to see men who can fight, with whom we may try our luck." They will come and work for Europeans, forming friendships among them, and if it were not for the suspicion of those who have not done so, who always fear political agents and spies, they would often be willing to take Europeans through their land. I have more than once been invited to go as a Moor. But the ideas they get of Europeans in Tangier do not predispose to friendship, and they will not allow them to enter their territories if they can help it. Only those who are in subjection to the Sultan permit them to do so freely. The men are a hardy, sturdy race, wiry and lithe, inured to toil and cold, fonder far of the gun and sword than of the ploughshare, and steady riders of an equally wiry race of mountain ponies. Their dwellings are of stone and mud, often of two floors, flat-topped, with rugged, projecting eaves, the roofs being made of poles covered with the same material as the walls, stamped and smoothed. These houses are seldom whitewashed, and present a ruinous appearance. Their ovens are domes about three feet or less in height outside; they are heated by a fire inside, then emptied, and the bread put in. Similar ovens are employed in camp to bake for the Court. Instead of that forced seclusion and concealment of the features to which the followers of Islám elsewhere doom their women, in these mountain homes they enjoy almost as perfect liberty as their sisters in Europe. I have been greatly struck with their intelligence and generally superior appearance to such Arab women as I have by chance been able to see. Once, when supping with the son of a powerful governor from above Fez, his mother, wife, and wife's sister sat composedly to eat with us, which could never have occurred in the dwelling of a Moor. No attempt at covering their faces was made, though male attendants were present at times, but the little daughter shrieked at the sight of a Nazarene. The grandmother, a fine, buxom dame, could read and write--which would be an astonishing accomplishment for a Moorish woman--and she could converse better than many men who would in this country pass for educated. The Berber dress has either borrowed from or lent much to the Moor, but a few articles stamp it wherever worn. One of these is a large black cloak of goat's-hair, impervious to rain, made of one piece, with no arm-holes. At the point of the cowl hangs a black tassel, and right across the back, about the level of the knees, runs an assagai-shaped patch, often with a centre of red. It has been opined that this remarkable feature represents the All-seeing Eye, so often used as a charm, but from the scanty information I could gather from the people themselves, I believe that they have lost sight of the original idea, though some have told me that variations in the pattern mark clan distinctions. I have ridden--when in the guise of a native--for days together in one of these cloaks, during pelting rain which never penetrated it. In more remote districts, seldom visited by Europeans, the garments are ruder far, entirely of undyed wool, and unsewn, mere blankets with slits cut in the centre for the head. This is, however, in every respect, a great difference between the various districts. The turban is little used by these people, skull-caps being preferred, while their red cloth gun-cases are commonly twisted turban-wise as head-gear, though often a camel's-hair cord is deemed sufficient protection for the head. Every successive ruler of North Africa has had to do with the problem of subduing the Berbers and has failed. In the wars between Rome and Carthage it was among her sturdy Berber soldiers that the southern rival of the great queen city of the world found actual sinews enough to hold the Roman legions so long at bay, and often to overcome her vaunted cohorts and carry the war across into Europe. Where else did Rome find so near a match, and what wars cost her more than did those of Africa? Carthage indeed has fallen, and from her once famed Byrsa the writer has been able to count on his fingers the local remains of her greatness, yet the people who made her what she was remain--the Berbers of Tunisia. The Ph[oe]nician settlers, though bringing with them wealth and learning and arts, could never have done alone what they did without the hardy fighting men supplied by the hills around. When Rome herself had fallen, and the fames of Carthage and Utica were forgotten, there came across North Africa a very different race from those who had preceded them, the desert Arabs, introducing the creed of Islám. In the course of a century or two, North Africa became Mohammedan, pagan and Christian institutions being swept away before that onward wave. It is not probable that at any time Christianity had any real hold upon the Berbers themselves, and Islám itself sits lightly on their easy consciences. The Arabs had for the moment solved the Berber problem. They were the amalgam which, by coalescing with the scattered factions of their race, had bound them up together and had formed for once a nation of them. Thus it was that the Muslim armies obtained force to carry all before them, and thus was provided the new blood and the active temper to which alone are due the conquest of Spain, and subsequent achievements there. The popular description of the Mohammedan rulers of Spain as "Saracens"--Easterners--is as erroneous as the supposition that they were Arabs. The people who conquered Spain were Berbers, although their leaders often adopted Arabic names with an Arab religion and Arab culture. The Arabic language, although official, was by no means general, nor is it otherwise to-day. The men who fought and the men who ruled were Berbers out and out, though the latter were often the sons of Arab fathers or mothers, and the great religious chiefs were purely Arab on the father's side at least, the majority claiming descent from Mohammed himself, and as such forming a class apart of shareefs or nobles. Though nominal Mohammedans, and in Morocco acknowledging the religious supremacy of the reigning shareefian family, the Moorish Berbers still retain a semi-independence. The mountains of the Atlas chain have always been their home and refuge, where the plainsmen find it difficult and dangerous to follow them. The history of the conquest of Algeria and Tunisia by the French has shown that they are no mean opponents even to modern weapons and modern warfare. The Kabyles,[3] as they are erroneously styled in those countries, have still to be kept in check by the fear of arms, and their prowess no one disputes. These are the people the French propose to subdue by "pacific penetration." The awe with which these mountaineers have inspired the plainsmen and townsfolk is remarkable; as good an illustration of it as I know was the effect produced on a Moor by my explanation that a Highland friend to whom I had introduced him was not an Englishman, but what I might call a "British Berber." The man was absolutely awe-struck. [3: _I.e._ "Provincials," so misnamed from Kabîlah (_pl._ Kabáïl), a province.] Separated from the Arab as well as from the European by a totally distinct, unwritten language, with numerous dialects, these people still exist as a mine of raw material, full of possibilities. In habits and style of life they may be considered uncivilized even in contrast to the mingled dwellers on the lowlands; but they are far from being savages. Their stalwart frames and sturdy independence fit them for anything, although the latter quality keeps them aloof, and has so far prevented intercourse with the outside world. Many have their own pet theories as to the origin of the Berbers and their language, not a few believing them to have once been altogether Christians, while others, following native authors, attribute to them Canaanitish ancestors, and ethnologists dispute as to the branch of Noah's family in which to class them. It is more than probable that they are one with the ancient Egyptians, who, at least, were no barbarians, if Berbers. But all are agreed that some of the finest stocks of southern and western Europe are of kindred origin, if not identical with them, and even if this be uncertain, enough has been said to show that they have played no unimportant part in European history, though it has ever been their lot to play behind the scenes--scene-shifters rather than actors. [Illustration: _Photograph by Dr. Rudduck._ AN ARAB TENT IN MOROCCO.] V THE WANDERING ARAB "I am loving, not lustful." _Moorish Proverb._ Some strange fascination attaches itself to the simple nomad life of the Arab, in whatever country he be found, and here, in the far west of his peregrinations, he is encountered living almost in the same style as on the other side of Suez; his only roof a cloth, his country the wide world. Sometimes the tents are arranged as many as thirty or more in a circle, and at other times they are grouped hap-hazard, intermingled with round huts of thatch, and oblong ones of sun-dried bricks, thatched also; but in the latter cases the occupants are unlikely to be pure Arabs, for that race seldom so nearly approaches to settling anywhere. When the tents are arranged in a circle, the animals are generally picketed in the centre, but more often some are to be found sharing the homes of their owners. The tent itself is of an oval shape, with a wooden ridge on two poles across the middle third of the centre, from front to back, with a couple of strong bands of the same material as the tent fixed on either side, whence cords lead to pegs in the ground, passing over two low stakes leaning outwards. A rude camel's hair canvas is stretched over this frame, being kept up at the edges by more leaning stakes, and fastened by cords to pegs all round. The door space is left on the side which faces the centre of the encampment, and the walls or "curtains" are formed of high thistles lashed together in sheaves. Surrounding the tent is a yard, a simple bog in winter, the boundary of which is a ring formed by bundles of prickly branches, which compose a really formidable barrier, being too much for a jump, and too tenacious to one another and to visitors for penetration. The break left for an entrance is stopped at night by another bundle which makes the circle complete. The interior of the tent is often more or less divided by the pole supporting the roof, and by a pile of household goods, such as they are. Sometimes a rude loom is fastened to the poles, and at it a woman sits working on the floor. The framework--made of canes--is kept in place by rigging to pegs in the ground. The woman's hand is her only shuttle, and she threads the wool through with her fingers, a span at a time, afterwards knocking it down tightly into place with a heavy wrought-iron comb about two inches wide, with a dozen prongs. She seems but half-dressed, and makes no effort to conceal either face or breast, as a filthy child lies feeding in her lap. Her seat is a piece of matting, but the principal covering for the floor of trodden mud is a layer of palmetto leaves. Round the "walls" are several hens with chicks nestling under their wings, and on one side a donkey is tethered, while a calf sports at large. The furniture of this humble dwelling consists of two or three large, upright, mud-plastered, split-cane baskets, containing corn, partially sunk in the ground, and a few dirty bags. On one side is the mill, a couple of stones about eighteen inches across, the upper one convex, with a handle at one side. Three stones above a small hole in the ground serve as a cooking-range, while the fuel is abundant in the form of sun-dried thistles and other weeds, or palmetto leaves and sticks. Fire is obtained by borrowing from one another, but should it happen that no one in the encampment had any, the laborious operation of lighting dry straw from the flash in the pan of a flint-lock would have to be performed. To light the rude lamp--merely a bit of cotton protruding from anything with olive-oil in it--it is necessary to blow some smoking straw or weed till it bursts into a flame. Little else except the omnipresent dirt is to be found in the average Arab tent. A tin or two for cooking operations, a large earthen water-jar, and a pan or two to match, in which the butter-milk is kept, a sieve for the flour, and a few rough baskets, usually complete the list, and all are remarkable only for the prevailing grime. Making a virtue of necessity, the Arab prefers sour milk to fresh, for with this almost total lack of cleanliness, no milk would long keep sweet. Their food is of the simplest, chiefly the flour of wheat, barley, or Indian millet prepared in various ways, for the most part made up into flat, heavy cakes of bread, or as kesk'soo. Milk, from which butter is made direct by tossing it in a goat-skin turned inside out, eggs and fowls form the chief animal food, butcher's meat being but seldom indulged in. Vegetables do not enter into their diet, as they have no gardens, and beyond possessing flocks and herds, those Arabs met with in Barbary are wretchedly poor and miserably squalid. The patriarchal display of Arabia is here unknown. Of children and dogs there is no lack. Both abound, and wallow in the mud together. Often the latter seem to have the better time of it. Two families by one father will sometimes share one tent between them, but generally each "household" is distinct, though all sleep together in the one apartment of their abode. As one approaches a dûár, or encampment, an early warning is given by the hungry dogs, and soon the half-clad children rush out to see who comes, followed leisurely by their elders. Hospitality has ever been an Arab trait, and these poor creatures, in their humble way, sustain the best traditions of their race. A native visitor of their own class is entertained and fed by the first he comes across, while the foreign traveller or native of means with his own tent is accommodated on the rubbish in the midst of the encampment, and can purchase all he wishes--all that they have--for a trifle, though sometimes they turn disagreeable and "pile it on." A present of milk and eggs, perhaps fowls, may be brought, for which, however, a _quid pro quo_ is expected. Luxuries they have not. Whatever they need to do in the way of shopping, is done at the nearest market once a week, and nothing but the produce already mentioned is to be obtained from them. In the evenings they stuff themselves to repletion, if they can afford it, with a wholesome dish of prepared barley or wheat meal, sometimes crowned with beans; then, after a gossip round the crackling fire, or, on state occasions, three cups of syrupy green tea apiece, they roll themselves in their long blankets and sleep on the ground. The first blush of dawn sees them stirring, and soon all is life and excitement. The men go off to their various labours, as do many of the stronger women, while the remainder attend to their scanty household duties, later on basking in the sun. But the moment the stranger arrives the scene changes, and the incessant din of dogs, hags and babies commences, to which the visitor is doomed till late at night, with the addition then of neighs and brays and occasional cock-crowing. It never seemed to me that these poor folk enjoyed life, but rather that they took things sadly. How could it be otherwise? No security of life and property tempts them to make a show of wealth; on the contrary, they bury what little they may save, if any, and lead lives of misery for fear of tempting the authorities. Their work is hard; their comforts are few. The wild wind howls through their humble dwellings, and the rain splashes in at the door. In sickness, for lack of medical skill, they lie and perish. In health their only pleasures are animal. Their women, once they are past the prime of life, which means soon after thirty with this desert race, go unveiled, and work often harder than the men, carrying burdens, binding sheaves, or even perhaps helping a donkey to haul a plough. Female features are never so jealously guarded here as in the towns. Yet they are a jolly, good-tempered, simple folk. Often have I spent a merry evening round the fire with them, squatted on a bit of matting, telling of the wonders of "That Country," the name which alternates in their vocabulary with "Nazarene Land," as descriptive of all the world but Morocco and such portions of North Africa or Arabia as they may have heard of. Many an honest laugh have we enjoyed over their wordy tales, or perchance some witty sally; but in my heart I have pitied these down-trodden people in their ignorance and want. Home they do not know. When the pasture in Shechem is short, they remove to Dothan; next month they may be somewhere else. But they are always ready to share their scanty portion with the wayfarer, wherever they are. When the time comes for changing quarters these wanderers find the move but little trouble. Their few belongings are soon collected and packed, and the tent itself made ready for transportation. Their animals are got together, and ere long the cavalcade is on the road. Often one poor beast will carry a fair proportion of the family--the mother and a child or two, for instance--in addition to a load of household goods, and bundles of fowls slung by their feet. At the side men and boys drive the flocks and herds, while as often as not the elder women-folk take a full share in the porterage of their property. To meet such a caravan is to feel one's self transported to Bible times, and to fancy Jacob going home from Padan Aram. VI CITY LIFE "Seek the neighbour before the house, And the companion before the road." _Moorish Proverb._ Few countries afford a better insight into typical Mohammedan life, or boast a more primitive civilization, than Morocco, preserved as it has been so long from western contamination. The patriarchal system, rendered more or less familiar to us by our Bibles, still exists in the homes of its people, especially those of the country-side; but Moorish city life is no less interesting or instructive. If an Englishman's house is his castle, the Mohammedan's house is a prison--not for himself, but for his women. Here is the radical difference between their life and ours. No one who has not mixed intimately with the people as one of themselves, lodging in their houses and holding constant intercourse with them, can form an adequate idea of the lack of home feeling, even in the happiest families. The moment you enter a town, however, the main facts are brought vividly before you on every hand. You pass along a narrow thoroughfare--maybe six, maybe sixteen feet in width--bounded by almost blank walls, in some towns whitewashed, in others bare mud, in which are no windows, lest their inmates might see or be seen. Even above the roofs of the majority of two-storied houses (for very many in the East consist but of ground floor), the wall is continued to form a parapet round the terrace. If you meet a woman in the street, she is enveloped from head to ankle in close disguise, with only a peep-hole for one or both eyes, unless too ugly and withered for such precautions to be needful. You arrive at the door of your friend's abode, a huge massive barrier painted brown or green--if not left entirely uncoloured--and studded all over with nails. A very prison entrance it appears, for the only other breaks in the wall above are slits for ventilation, all placed so high in the room as to be out of reach. In the warmer parts of the country you would see latticed boxes protruding from the walls--meshrabîyahs or drinking-places--shelves on which porous earthen jars may be placed to catch the slightest breeze, that the God-sent beverage to which Mohammedans are wisely restricted may be at all times cool. You are terrified, if a stranger, by the resonance of this great door, as you let the huge iron ring which serves as knocker fall on the miniature anvil beneath it. Presently your scattered thoughts are recalled by a chirping voice from within-- "Who's that?" You recognize the tones as those of a tiny negress slave, mayhap a dozen years of age, and as you give your name you hear a patter of bare feet on the tiles within, but if you are a male, you are left standing out in the street. In a few moments the latch of the inner door is sedately lifted, and with measured tread you hear the slippers of your friend advancing. "Is that So-and-so?" he asks, pausing on the other side of the door. "It is, my Lord." "Welcome, then." The heavy bolt is drawn, and the door swings on its hinges during a volley and counter-volley of inquiries, congratulations, and thanks to God, accompanied by the most graceful bows, the mutual touching and kissing of finger-tips, and the placing of hands on hearts. As these exercises slacken, your host advances to the inner door, and possibly disappears through it, closing it carefully behind him. You hear his stentorian voice commanding, "_Amel trek!_"--"Make way!"--and this is followed by a scuffle of feet which tells you he is being obeyed. Not a female form will be in sight by the time your host returns to lead you in by the hand with a thousand welcomes, entreating you to make yourself at home. The passage is constructed with a double turn, so that you could not look, if you would, from the roadway into the courtyard which you now enter. If one of the better-class houses, the floor will be paved with marble or glazed mosaics, and in the centre will stand a bubbling fountain. Round the sides is a colonnade supporting the first-floor landing, reached by a narrow stairway in the corner. Above is the deep-blue sky, obscured, perhaps, by the grateful shade of fig or orange boughs, or a vine on a trellis, under which the people live. The walls, if not tiled, are whitewashed, and often beautifully decorated in plaster mauresques. In the centre of three of the four sides are huge horseshoe-arched doorways, two of which will probably be closed by cotton curtains. These suffice to ensure the strictest privacy within, as no one would dream of approaching within a couple of yards of a room with the curtain down, till leave had been asked and obtained. You are led into the remaining room, the guest-chamber, and the curtain over the entrance is lowered. You may not now venture to rise from your seat on the mattress facing the door till the women whom you hear emerging from their retreats have been admonished to withdraw again. The long, narrow apartment, some eight feet by twenty, in which you find yourself has a double bed at each end, for it is sleeping-room and sitting-room combined, as in Barbary no distinction is known between the two. However long you may remain, you see no female face but that of the cheery slave-girl, who kisses your hand so demurely as she enters with refreshments. Thus the husband receives his friends--perforce all males unless he be "on the spree,"--in apartments from which all women-folk are banished. Likewise the ladies of the establishment hold their festive gatherings apart. Most Moors, however, are too strict to allow much visiting among their women, especially if they be wealthy and have a good complexion, when they are very closely confined, except when allowed to visit the bath at certain hours set apart for the fair sex, or on Fridays to lay myrtle branches on the tombs of saints and departed relatives. Most of the ladies' calls are roof-to-roof visitations, and very nimble they are in getting over the low partition walls, even dragging a ladder up and down with them if there are high ones to be crossed. The reason is that the roofs, or rather terraces, are especially reserved for women-folk, and men are not even allowed to go up except to do repairs, when the neighbouring houses are duly warned; it is illegal to have a window overlooking another's roof. David's temptation doubtless arose from his exercise of a Royal exemption from this all-prevailing custom. But for their exceedingly substantial build, the Moorish women in the streets might pass for ghosts, for with the exception of their red Morocco slippers, their costume is white--wool-white. A long and heavy blanket of coarse homespun effectually conceals all features but the eyes, which are touched up with antimony on the lids, and are sufficiently expressive. Sometimes a wide-brimmed straw hat is jauntily clapped on; but here ends the plate of Moorish out-door fashions. In-doors all is colour, light and glitter. In matters of colour and flowing robes the men are not far behind, and they make up abroad for what they lack at home. No garment is more artistic, and no drapery more graceful, than that in which the wealthy Moor takes his daily airing, either on foot or on mule back. Beneath a gauze-like woollen toga--relic of ancient art--glimpses of luscious hue are caught--crimson and purple; deep greens and "afternoon sun colour" (the native name for a rich orange); salmons, and pale, clear blues. A dark-blue cloak, when it is cold, negligently but gracefully thrown across the shoulders, or a blue-green prayer-carpet folded beneath the arm, helps to set off the whole. _Chez lui_ our friend of the flowing garments is a king, with slaves to wait upon him, wives to obey him, and servants to fear his wrath. But his everyday reception-room is the lobby of his stables, where he sits behind the door in rather shabby garments attending to business matters, unless he is a merchant or shopkeeper, when his store serves as office instead. If all that the Teuton considers essential to home-life is really a _sine quâ non_, then Orientals have no home-life. That is our way of looking upon it, judging in the most natural way, by our own standards. The Eastern, from his point of view, forms an equally poor idea of the customs which familiarity has rendered most dear to us. It is as difficult for us to set aside prejudice and to consider his systems impartially, as for him to do so with regard to our peculiar style. There are but two criteria by which the various forms of civilization so far developed by man may be fairly judged. The first is the suitability of any given form to the surroundings and exterior conditions of life of the nation adopting it, and the second is the moral or social effect on the community at large. Under the first head the unbiassed student of mankind will approve in the main of most systems adopted by peoples who have attained that artificiality which we call civilization. An exchange among Westerners of their time-honoured habits for those of the East would not be less beneficial or more incongruous than a corresponding exchange on the part of orientals. Those who are ignorant of life towards the sunrise commonly suppose that they can confer no greater benefit upon the natives of these climes than chairs, top-hats, and so on. Hardly could they be more mistaken. The Easterner despises the man who cannot eat his dinner without a fork or other implement, and who cannot tuck his legs beneath him, infinitely more than ill-informed Westerners despise petticoated men and shrouded women. Under the second head, however, a very different issue is reached, and one which involves not only social, but religious life, and consequently the creed on which this last is based. It is in this that Moorish civilization fails. * * * * * But list! what is that weird, low sound which strikes upon our ear and interrupts our musings? It is the call to prayer. For the fifth time to-day that cry is sounding--a warning to the faithful that the hour for evening devotions has come. See! yonder Moor has heard it too, and is already spreading his felt on the ground for the performance of his nightly orisons. Standing Mekka-wards, and bowing to the ground, he goes through the set forms used throughout the Mohammedan world. The majority satisfy their consciences by working off the whole five sets at once. But that cry! I hear it still; as one voice fails another carries on the strain in ever varying cadence, each repeating it to the four quarters of the heavens. It was yet early in the morning when the first call of the day burst on the stilly air; the sun had not then risen o'er the hill tops, nor had his first, soft rays dispelled the shadows of the night. Only the rustling of the wind was heard as it died among the tree tops--that wind which was a gale last night. The hurried tread of the night guard going on his last--perhaps his only--round before returning home, had awakened me from dreaming slumbers, and I was about to doze away into that sweetest of sleeps, the morning nap, when the distant cry broke forth. Pitched in a high, clear key, the Muslim confession of faith was heard; "Lá iláha il' Al-lah; wa Mohammed er-rasool Al-l-a-h!" Could ever bell send thrill like that? I wot not. [Illustration: _Cavilla, Photo., Tangier._ ROOFS OF TANGIER FROM THE BRITISH CONSULATE, SHOWING FLAGSTAFFS OF FOREIGN LEGATIONS.] VII THE WOMEN-FOLK "Teach not thy daughter letters; let her not live on the roof." _Moorish Proverb._ Of no country in the world can it more truly be said than of the Moorish Empire that the social condition of the people may be measured by that of its women. Holding its women in absolute subjection, the Moorish nation is itself held in subjection, morally, politically, socially. The proverb heading this chapter, implying that women should not enjoy the least education or liberty, expresses the universal treatment of the weaker sex among Mohammedans. It is the subservient position of women which strikes the visitor from Europe more than all the oriental strangeness of the local customs or the local art and colour. Advocates of the restriction of the rights of women in our own land, and of the retention of disabilities unknown to men, who fail to recognize the justice and invariability of the principle of absolute equality in rights and liberty between the sexes, should investigate the state of things existing in Morocco, where the natural results of a fallacious principle have had free course. No welcome awaits the infant daughter, and few care to bear the evil news to the father, who will sometimes be left uninformed as to the sex of his child till the time comes to name her. It is rarely that girls are taught to read, or even to understand the rudiments of their religious system. Here and there a father who ranks in Morocco as scholarly, takes the trouble to teach his children at home, including his daughters in the class, but this is very seldom the case. Only those women succeed in obtaining even an average education in whom a thirst for knowledge is combined with opportunities in every way exceptional. In the country considerably more liberty is permitted than in the towns, and the condition of the Berber women has already been noted. Nevertheless, in certain circumstances, women attain a power quite abnormal under such conditions, usually the result of natural astuteness, combined--at the outset, at least--with a reasonable share of good looks, for when a woman is fairly astute she is a match for a man anywhere. A Mohammedan woman's place in life depends entirely on her personal attractions. If she lacks good looks, or is thin--which in Barbary, as in other Muslim countries, amounts to much the same thing--her future is practically hopeless. The chances being less--almost _nil_--of getting her easily off their hands by marriage, the parents feel they must make the best they can of her by setting her to work about the house, and she becomes a general drudge. If the home is a wealthy one, she may be relieved from this lot, and steadily ply her needle at minutely fine silk embroidery, or deck and paint herself in style, but, despised by her more fortunate sisters, she is even then hardly better off. If, on the other hand, a daughter is the beauty of the family, every one pays court to her in some degree, for there is no telling to what she may arrive. Perhaps, in Morocco, she is even thought good enough for the Sultan--plump, clear-skinned, bright-eyed. Could she but get a place in the Royal hareem, it would be in the hands of God to make her the mother of the coming sultan. But good looks alone will not suffice to take her there. Influence--a word translatable in the Orient by a shorter one, cash--must be brought to bear. The interest of a wazeer or two must be secured, and finally an interview must take place with one of the "wise women" who are in charge of the Imperial ladies. She, too, must be convinced by the eloquence of dollars, that His Majesty could not find another so graceful a creature in all his dominions. When permission is given to send her to Court, what joy there is, what bedecking, what congratulation! At last she is taken away with a palpitating heart, as she thinks of the possibilities before her, bundled up in her blanket and mounted on an ambling mule under strictest guard. On arrival at her new home her very beauty will make enemies, especially among those who have been there longest, and who feel their chances grow less as each new-comer appears. Perhaps one Friday the Sultan notices her as he walks in his grounds in the afternoon, and taking a fancy to her, decides to make her his wife. At once all jealousies are hidden, and each vies with the other to render her service, and assist the preparations for the coming event. For a while she will remain supreme--a very queen indeed--but only till her place is taken by another. If she has sons her chances are better; but unless she maintains her influence over her husband till her offspring are old enough to find a lasting place in his affections, she will probably one day be despatched to Tafilált, beyond the Atlas by the Sáharah, whence come those luscious dates. There every other man is a direct descendant of some Moorish king, as for centuries it has served as a sort of overflow for the prolific Royal house. As Islám knows no right of primogeniture, each sultan appoints his heir; so each wife strives to obtain this favour for her son, and often enough the story of Ishmael and Isaac repeats itself among these reputed descendants of Hagar. The usual way is for the pet son to be placed in some command, even before really able to discharge the duties of the post, which shall secure him supreme control on his father's death. The treasury and the army are the two great means to this end. Those possible rivals who have not been sent away to Tafilált are as often as not imprisoned or put to death on some slight charge, as used to be the custom in England a few hundred years ago. This method of bequeathing rights which do not come under the strict scale for the division of property contained in the Korán is not confined to Royalty. It applies also to religious sanctity. An instance is that of the late Shareef, or Noble, of Wazzán, a feudal "saint" of great influence. His father, on his deathbed, appointed as successor to his title, his holiness, and the estates connected therewith, the son who should be found playing with a certain stick, a common toy of his favourite. But a black woman by whom he had a son was present, and ran out to place the stick in the hands of her own child, who thus inherited his father's honours. Some of the queens of Morocco have arrived at such power through their influence over their husbands that they have virtually ruled the Empire. Supposing, however, that the damsel who has at last found admittance to the hareem does not, after all, prove attractive to her lord, she will in all probability be sent away to make room for some one else. She will be bestowed upon some country governor when he comes to Court. Sometimes it is an especially astute one who is thus transferred, that she may thereafter serve as a spy on his actions. Though those before whom lies such a career as has been described will be comparatively few, none who can be considered beautiful are without their chances, however poor. Many well-to-do men prefer a poor wife to a rich one, because they can divorce her when tired of her without incurring the enmity of powerful relatives. Marriage is enjoined upon every Muslim as a religious duty, and, if able to afford it, he usually takes to himself his first wife before he is out of his teens. He is relieved of the choice of a partner which troubles some of us so much, for the ladies of his family undertake this for him: if they do not happen to know of a likely individual they employ a professional go-between, a woman who follows also the callings of pedlar and scandal-monger. It is the duty of this personage, on receipt of a present from his friends, to sing his praises and those of his family in the house of some beautiful girl, whose friends are thereby induced to give her a present to go and do likewise on their behalf in the house of so promising a youth. Personal negotiations will then probably take place between the lady friends, and all things proving satisfactory, the fathers or brothers of the might-be pair discuss the dowry and marriage-settlement from a strictly business point of view. At this stage the bride-elect will perhaps be thought not fat enough, and will have to submit to a course of stuffing. This consists in swallowing after each full meal a few small sausage-shaped boluses of flour, honey and butter, flavoured with anise-seed or something similar. A few months of this treatment give a marvellous rotundity to the figure, thus greatly increasing her charms in the native eye. But of these the bridegroom will see nothing, if not surreptitiously, till after the wedding, when she is brought to his house. By that time formal documents of marriage will have been drawn up, and signed by notaries before the kádi or judge, setting forth the contract--with nothing in it about love or honour,--detailing every article which the wife brings with her, including in many instances a considerable portion of the household utensils. Notwithstanding all this, she may be divorced by her husband simply saying, "I divorce thee!" and though she may claim the return of all she brought, she has no option but to go home again. He may repent and take her back a first and a second time, but after he has put her away three times he may not marry her again till after she has been wedded to some one else and divorced. Theoretically she may get a divorce from him, but practically this is a matter of great difficulty. The legal expression employed for the nuptial tie is one which conveys the idea of purchasing a field, to be put to what use the owner will, according him complete control. This idea is borne out to the full, and henceforward the woman lives for her lord, with no thought of independence or self-assertion. If he is poor, all work too hard for him that is not considered unwomanly falls to her share, hewing of wood and drawing of water, grinding of corn and making of bread, weaving and washing; but, strange to us, little sewing. When decidedly _passée_, she saves him a donkey in carrying wood and charcoal and grass to market, often bent nearly double under a load which she cannot lift, which has to be bound on her back. Her feet are bare, but her sturdy legs are at times encased in leather to ward off the wayside thorns. No longer jealously covered, she and her unmarried daughters trudge for many weary miles at dawn, her decidedly better-off half and a son or two riding the family mule. From this it is but a short step to helping the cow or donkey draw the plough, and this step is sometimes taken. Until a woman's good looks have quite disappeared, which generally occurs about the time they become grandmothers--say thirty,--intercourse of any sort with men other than her relatives of the first degree is strictly prohibited, and no one dare salute a woman in the street, even if her attendant or mount shows her to be a privileged relative. The slightest recognition of a man out-of-doors--or indeed anywhere--would be to proclaim herself one of that degraded outcaste class as common in Moorish towns as in Europe. Of companionship in wedlock the Moor has no conception, and his ideas of love are those of lust. Though matrimony is considered by the Muslim doctors as "half of Islám," its value in their eyes is purely as a legalization of license by the substitution of polygamy for polyandry. Slavishly bound to the observance of wearisome customs, immured in a windowless house with only the roof for a promenade, seldom permitted outside the door, and then most carefully wrapped in a blanket till quite unrecognizable, the life of a Moorish woman, from the time she has first been caught admiring herself in a mirror, is that of a bird encaged. Lest she might grow content with such a lot, she has before her eyes from infancy the jealousies and rivalries of her father's wives and concubines, and is early initiated into the disgusting and unutterable practices employed to gain the favour of their lord. Her one thought from childhood is man, and distance lends enchantment. A word, the interchange of a look, with a man is sought for by the Moorish maiden more than are the sighs and glances of a coy brunette by a Spaniard. Nothing short of the unexpurgated Arabian Nights' Entertainments can convey an adequate idea of what goes on within those whited sepulchres, the broad, blank walls of Moorish towns. A word with the mason who comes to repair the roof, or even a peep at the men at work on the building over the way, on whose account the roof promenade is forbidden, is eagerly related and expatiated on. In short, all the training a Moorish woman receives is sensual, a training which of itself necessitates most rigorous, though often unavailing, seclusion. Both in town and country intrigues are common, but intrigues which have not even the excuse of the blindness of love, whose only motive is animal passion. The husband who, on returning home, finds a pair of red slippers before the door of his wife's apartment, is bound to understand thereby that somebody else's wife or daughter is within, and he dare not approach. If he has suspicions, all he can do is to bide his time and follow the visitor home, should the route lie through the streets, or despatch a faithful slave-girl or jealous concubine on a like errand, should the way selected be over the roof-tops. In the country, under a very different set of conventionalities, much the same takes place. In a land where woman holds the degraded position which she does under Islám, such family circles as the Briton loves can never exist. The foundation of the home system is love, which seldom links the members of these families, most seldom of all man and wife. Anything else is not to be expected when they meet for the first time on their wedding night. To begin with, no one's pleasure is studied save that of the despotic master of the house. All the inmates, from the poor imprisoned wives down to the lively slave-girl who opens the door, all are there to serve his pleasure, and woe betide those who fail. The first wife may have a fairly happy time of it for a season, if her looks are good, and her ways pleasing, but when a second usurps her place, she is generally cast aside as a useless piece of furniture, unless set to do servile work. Although four legal wives are allowed by the Korán, it is only among the rich that so many are found, on account of the expense of their maintenance in appropriate style. The facility of divorce renders it much cheaper to change from time to time, and slaves are more economical. To the number of such women that a man may keep no limit is set; he may have "as many as his right hand can possess." Then, too, these do the work of the house, and if they bear their master no children, they may be sold like any other chattels. The consequence of such a system is that she reigns who for the time stands highest in her lord's favour, so that the strife and jealousies which disturb the peace of the household are continual. This rivalry is naturally inherited by the children, who side with their several mothers, which is especially the case with the boys. Very often the legal wife has no children, or only daughters, while quite a little troop of step-children play about her house. In these cases it is not uncommon for at least the best-looking of these youngsters to be taught to call her "mother," and their real parent "Dadda M'barkah," or whatever her name may be. The offspring of wives and bondwomen stand on an equal footing before the law, in which Islám is still ahead of us. Such is the sad lot of women in Morocco. Religion itself being all but denied them in practice, whatever precept provides, it is with blank astonishment that the majority of them hear the message of those noble foreign sisters of theirs who have devoted their lives to showing them a better way. The greatest difficulty is experienced in arousing in them any sense of individuality, any feeling of personal responsibility, or any aspiration after good. They are so accustomed to be treated as cattle, that their higher powers are altogether dormant, all possibilities of character repressed. The welfare of their souls is supposed to be assured by union with a Muslim, and few know even how to pray. Instead of religion, their minds are saturated with the grossest superstition. If this be the condition of the free woman, how much worse that of the slave! The present socially degraded state in which the people live, and their apparent, though not real, incapacity for progress and development, is to a great extent the curse entailed by this brutalization of women. No race can ever rise above the level of its weaker sex, and till Morocco learns this lesson it will never rise. The boy may be the father of the man, but the woman is the mother of the boy, and so controls the destiny of the nation. Nothing can indeed be hoped for in this country in the way of social progress till the minds of the men have been raised, and their estimation of women entirely changed. Though Turkey was so long much in the position in which Morocco remains to-day, it is a noteworthy fact that as she steadily progresses in the way of civilization, one of the most apparent features of this progress is the growing respect for women, and the increasing liberty which is allowed them, both in public and private. VIII SOCIAL VISITS[4] [4: Contributed by my wife.--B. M.] "Every country its customs." _Moorish Proverb._ "Calling" is not the common, every-day event in Barbary which it has grown to be in European society. The narrowed-in life of the Moorish woman of the higher classes, and the strict watch which is kept lest some other man than her husband should see her, makes a regular interchange of visits practically impossible. No doubt the Moorish woman would find them quite as great a burden as her western sister, and in this particular her ignorance may be greater bliss than her knowledge. In spite of the paucity of the "calls" she receives or pays, she is by no means ignorant of the life and character of her neighbours, thanks to certain old women (amongst them the professional match-makers) who go about as veritable gossip-mongers, and preserve their more cloistered sisters at least from dying of inanition. Thus the veriest trifles of house arrangement or management are thoroughly canvassed. Nor is it a privilege commonly extended to European women to be received into the hareems of the high-class and wealthy Moors, although lady missionaries have abundant opportunities for making the acquaintance of the women of the poorer classes, especially when medical knowledge and skill afford a key. But the wives of the rich are shut away to themselves, and if you are fortunate enough to be invited to call upon them, do not neglect your opportunity. You will find that the time named for calling is not limited to the afternoon. Thus it may be when the morning air is blowing fresh from the sea, and the sun is mounting in the heavens, that you are ushered, perhaps by the master of the house, through winding passages to the quarters of the women. If there is a garden, this is frequently reserved for their use, and jealously protected from view, and as in all cases they are supposed to have the monopoly of the flat roof, the courteous male foreigner will keep his gaze from wandering thither too frequently, or resting there too long. Do not be surprised if you are ushered into an apparently empty room, furnished after the Moorish manner with a strip of richly coloured carpet down the centre, and mattresses round the edge. If there is a musical box in the room, it will doubtless be set going as a pleasant accompaniment to conversation, and the same applies to striking or chiming clocks, for which the Moors have a strong predilection as _objets d'art_, rather than to mark the march of time. Of course you will not have forgotten to remove your shoes at the door, and will be sitting cross-legged and quite at ease on one of the immaculate mattresses, when the ladies begin to arrive from their retreats. As they step forward to greet you, you may notice their henna-stained feet, a means of decoration which is repeated on their hands, where it is sometimes used in conjunction with harkos, a black pigment with which is applied a delicate tracery giving the effect of black silk mittens. The dark eyes are made to appear more lustrous and almond-shaped by the application of antimony, and the brows are extended till they meet in a black line above the nose. The hair is arranged under a head-dress frequently composed of two bright-coloured, short-fringed silk handkerchiefs, knotted together above the ears, sometimes with the addition of an artificial flower: heavy ear-rings are worn, and from some of them there are suspended large silver hands, charms against the "evil eye." But undoubtedly the main feature of the whole costume is the kaftán or tunic of lustrous satin or silk, embroidered richly in gold and silver, of a colour showing to advantage beneath a white lace garment of similar shape. The women themselves realize that such fine feathers must be guarded from spot or stain, for they are in many cases family heir-looms, so after they have greeted you with a slight pressure of their finger tips laid upon yours, and taken their seats, tailor fashion, you will notice that each sedulously protects her knees with a rough Turkish towel, quite possibly the worse for wear. In spite of her love for personal decoration, evidenced by the strings of pearls with which her neck is entwined, and the heavy silver armlets, the well-bred Moorish woman evinces no more curiosity than her European sister about the small adornments of her visitor, and this is the more remarkable when you remember how destitute of higher interests is her life. She will make kindly and very interested inquiries about your relatives, and even about your life, though naturally, in spite of your explanations, it remains a sealed book to her. The average Moorish woman, however, shows herself as inquisitive as the Chinese. It is quite possible that you may see some of the children, fascinating, dark-eyed, soft-skinned morsels of humanity, with henna-dyed hair, which may be plaited in a pig-tail, the length of which is augmented by a strange device of coloured wool with which the ends of the hair are interwoven. But children of the better class in Morocco are accustomed to keep in the background, and unless invited, do not venture farther than the door of the reception room, and then with a becoming modesty. If any of the slave-wives enter, you will have an opportunity of noticing their somewhat quaint greeting of those whom they desire to honour, a kiss bestowed on each hand, which they raise to meet their lips, and upon each shoulder, before they, too, take their seats upon the mattresses. Probably you will not have long to wait before a slave-girl enters with the preparations for tea, orange-flower water, incense, a well-filled tray, a samovar, and two or three dishes piled high with cakes. If you are wise, you will most assuredly try the "gazelle's hoofs," so-called from their shape, for they are a most delicious compound of almond paste, with a spiciness so skilfully blended as to be almost elusive. If you have a sweet tooth, the honey cakes will be eminently satisfactory, but if your taste is plainer, you will enjoy the f'kákis, or dry biscuit. Three cups of their most fragrant tea is the orthodox allowance, but a Moorish host or hostess is not slow to perceive any disinclination, however slight, and will sometimes of his or her own accord pave your way to a courteous refusal, by appearing not over anxious either for the last cup. If you have already had an experience of dining in Morocco, the whole process of the tea-making will be familiar; if not, you will be interested to notice how the tea ("gunpowder") is measured in the hand, then emptied into the pot, washed, thoroughly sweetened, made with boiling water from the samovar, and flavoured with mint or verbena. If the master of the house is present, he is apt to keep the tea-making in his own hands, although he may delegate it to one of his wives, who thus becomes the hostess of the occasion. After general inquiries as to the purpose of your visit to Morocco, you may be asked if you are a tabeebah or lady doctor, the one profession which they know, by hearsay at least, is open to women. If you can claim ever so little knowledge, you will probably be asked for a prescription to promote an increase of adipose tissue, which they consider their greatest charm; perhaps a still harder riddle may be propounded, with the hope that its satisfactory solution may secure to them the wavering affection of their lord, and prevent alienation and, perhaps, divorce. Yet all you can say is, "In shá Allah" (If God will!) When you bid them farewell it will be with a keen realization of their narrow, cramped lives, and an appreciation of your own opportunities. Did you but know it, they too are full of sympathy for that poor, over-strained Nazarene woman, who is obliged to leave the shelter of her four walls, and face the world unveiled, unprotected, unabashed. And thus our proverb is proved true. IX A COUNTRY WEDDING "Silence is at the door of consent." _Moorish Proverb._ Thursday was chosen as auspicious for the wedding, but the ceremonies commenced on the Sunday before. The first item on an extensive programme was the visit of the bride with her immediate female relatives and friends to the steam bath at the kasbah, a rarity in country villages, in this case used only by special favour. At the close of an afternoon of fun and frolic in the bath-house, Zóharah, the bride, was escorted to her home closely muffled, to keep her bed till the following day. Next morning it was the duty of Mokhtar, the bridegroom, to send his betrothed a bullock, with oil, butter and onions; pepper, salt and spices; charcoal and wood; figs, raisins, dates and almonds; candles and henna, wherewith to prepare the marriage feast. He had already, according to the custom of the country, presented the members of her family with slippers and ornaments. As soon as the bullock arrived it was killed amid great rejoicings and plenty of "tom-tom," especially as in the villages a sheep is usually considered sufficient provision. On this day Mokhtar's male friends enjoyed a feast in the afternoon, while in the evening the bride had to undergo the process of re-staining with henna to the accompaniment of music. The usual effect of this was somewhat counteracted, however, by the wails of those who had lost relatives during the year. On each successive night, when the drumming began, the same sad scene was repeated--a strange alloy in all the merriment of the wedding. On the Tuesday Zóharah received her maiden friends, children attending the reception in the afternoon, till the none too roomy hut was crowded to suffocation, and the bride exhausted, although custom prescribed that she should lie all day on the bed, closely wrapped up, and seen by none of her guests, from whom she was separated by a curtain. Every visitor had brought with her some little gift, such as handkerchiefs, candles, sugar, tea, spices and dried fruits, the inspection of which, when all were gone, was her only diversion that day. Throughout that afternoon and the next the neighbouring villages rivalled one another in peaceful sport and ear-splitting ululation, as though, within the memory of man, no other state of things had ever existed between them. Meanwhile Mokhtar had a more enlivening time with his bachelor friends, who, after feasting with him in the evening, escorted him, wrapped in a háïk or shawl, to the house of his betrothed, outside which they danced and played for three or four hours by the light of lanterns. On returning home, much fun ensued round the supper-basin on the floor, while the palms of the whole company were stained with henna. Then their exuberant spirits found relief in dancing round with basins on their heads, till one of them dropped his basin, and snatching off Mokhtar's cloak as if for protection, was immediately chased by the others till supper was ready. After supper all lay back to sleep. For four days the bridegroom's family had thus to feast and amuse his male friends, while the ladies were entertained by that of the bride. On Wednesday came the turn of the married women visitors, whose bulky forms crowded the hut, if possible more closely than had their children. Gossip and scandal were now retailed with a zest and minuteness of detail not permissible in England, while rival belles waged wordy war in shouts which sounded like whispers amid the din. The walls of the hut were hung with the brightest coloured garments that could be borrowed, and the gorgeous finery of the guests made up a scene of dazzling colour. Green tea and cakes were first passed round, and then a tray for offerings for the musicians, which, when collected, were placed on the floor beneath a rich silk handkerchief. Presents were also made by all to the bride's mother, on behalf of her daughter, who sat in weary state on the bed at one end of the room. As each coin was put down for the players, or for the hostess, a portly female who acted as crier announced the sum contributed, with a prayer for blessing in return, which was in due course echoed by the chief musician. At the bridegroom's house a similar entertainment was held, the party promenading the lanes at dusk with torches and lanterns, after which they received from the bridegroom the powder for next day's play. [Illustration: A MOORISH CARAVAN.] Thursday opened with much-needed rest for Zóharah and her mother till the time came for the final decking; but Mokhtar had to go to the bath with his bachelor friends, and on returning to his newly prepared dwelling, to present many of them with small coins, receiving in return cotton handkerchiefs and towels, big candles and matches. Then all sat down to a modest repast, for which he had provided raisins and other dried fruits, some additional fun being provided by a number of the married neighbours, who tried in vain to gain admission, and in revenge made off with other people's shoes, ultimately returning them full of dried fruits and nuts. Then Mokhtar's head was shaved to the accompaniment of music, and the barber was feasted, while the box in which the bride was to be fetched was brought in, and decked with muslin curtains, surmounted by a woman's head-gear, handkerchiefs, and a sash. The box was about two and a half feet square, and somewhat more in height, including its pointed top. After three drummings to assemble the friends, a procession was formed about a couple of hours after sunset, lit by torches, lanterns and candles, led by the powder-players, followed by the mounted bridegroom, and behind him the bridal box lashed on the back of a horse; surrounded by more excited powder-players, and closed by the musicians. As they proceeded by a circuitous route the women shrieked, the powder spoke, till all were roused to a fitting pitch of fervour, and so reached the house of the bride. "Behold, the bridegroom cometh!" Presently the "litter" was deposited at the door, Mokhtar remaining a short distance off, while the huge old negress, who had officiated so far as mistress of the ceremonies, lifted Zóharah bodily off the bed, and placed her, crying, in the cage. In this a loaf of bread, a candle, some sugar and salt had been laid by way of securing good luck in her new establishment. Her valuables, packed in another box, were entrusted to the negress, who was to walk by her side, while strong arms mounted her, and lashed the "amariah" in its place. As soon as the procession had reformed, the music ceased, and a Fátihah[5] was solemnly recited. Then they started slowly, as they had come, Mokhtar leaving his bride as she was ushered, closely veiled, from her box into her new home, contenting himself with standing by the side and letting her pass beneath his arm in token of submission. The door was then closed, and the bridegroom took a turn with his friends while the bride should compose herself, and all things be made ready by the negress. Later on he returned, and being admitted, the newly married couple met at last. [5: The beautiful opening prayer of the Korán.] Next day they were afforded a respite, but on Saturday the bride had once more to hold a reception, and on the succeeding Thursday came the ceremony of donning the belt, a long, stiff band of embroidered silk, folded to some six inches in width, wound many times round. Standing over a dish containing almonds, raisins, figs, dates, and a couple of eggs, in the presence of a gathering of married women, one of whom assisted in the winding, two small boys adjusted the sash with all due state, after which a procession was formed round the house, and the actual wedding was over. Thus commenced a year's imprisonment for the bride, as it was not till she was herself a mother that she was permitted to revisit her old home. X THE BAIRNS "Every monkey is a gazelle to its mother." _Moorish Proverb._ If there is one point in the character of the Moor which commends itself above others to the mind of the European it is his love for his children. But when it is observed that in too many cases this love is unequally divided, and that the father prefers his sons to his daughters, our admiration is apt to wane. Though by no means an invariable rule, this is the most common outcome of the pride felt in being the father of a son who may be a credit to the house, and the feeling that a daughter who has to be provided for is an added responsibility. All is well when the two tiny children play together on the floor, and quarrel on equal terms, but it is another thing when little Hamed goes daily to school, and as soon as he has learned to read is brought home in triumph on a gaily dressed horse, heading a procession of shouting schoolfellows, while his pretty sister Fátimah is fast developing into a maid-of-all-work whom nobody thinks of noticing. And the distinction widens when Hamed rides in the "powder-play," or is trusted to keep shop by himself, while Fátimah is closely veiled and kept a prisoner indoors, body and mind unexercised, distinguishable by colour and dress alone from Habîbah, the ebony slave-girl, who was sold like a calf from her mother's side. Yes, indeed, far different paths lie before the two play-mates, but while they are treated alike, let us take a peep at them in their innocent sweetness. Their mother, Ayeshah, went out as usual one morning to glean in the fields, and in the evening returned with two bundles upon her back; the upper one was to replace crowing Hamed in his primitive cradle: it was Fátimah. Next day, as Ayeshah set off to work again, she left her son kicking up his heels on a pile of blankets, howling till he should become acquainted with his new surroundings, and a little skinny mite lay peacefully sleeping where he had hitherto lived. No mechanical bassinette ever swung more evenly, and no soft draperies made a better cot than the sheet tied up by the corners to a couple of ropes, and swung across the room like a hammock. The beauty of it was that, roll as he would, even active Hamed had been safe in it, and all his energies only served to rock him off to sleep again, for the sides almost met at the top. Yet he was by no means dull, for through a hole opposite his eye he could watch the cows and goats and sheep as they wandered about the yard, not to speak of the cocks and hens that roamed all over the place. At last the time came when both the wee ones could toddle, and Ayeshah carried them no more to the fields astride her hips or slung over her shoulders in a towel. They were then left to disport themselves as they pleased--which, of course, meant rolling about on the ground,--their garments tied up under their arms, leaving them bare from the waist. No wonder that sitting on cold and wet stones had threatened to shrivel up their thin legs, which looked wonderfully shaky at best. It seems to be a maxim among the Moors that neither head, arms nor legs suffer in any way from exposure to cold or heat, and the mothers of the poorer classes think nothing of carrying their children slung across their backs with their little bare pates exposed to the sun and rain, or of allowing their lower limbs to become numbed with cold as just described. The sole recommendation of such a system is that only the fittest--in a certain sense--survive. Of the attention supposed to be bestowed in a greater or less degree upon all babes in our own land they get little. One result, however, is satisfactory, for they early give up yelling, as an amusement which does not pay, and no one is troubled to march them up and down for hours when teething. Yet it is hardly surprising that under such conditions infant mortality is very great, and, indeed, all through life in this doctorless land astonishing numbers are carried off by diseases we should hardly consider dangerous. Beyond the much-enjoyed dandle on Father's knee, or the cuddle with Mother, delights are few in Moorish child-life, and of toys such as we have they know nothing, whatever they may find to take their place. But when a boy is old enough to amuse himself, there is no end to the mischief and fun he will contrive, and the lads of Barbary are as fond of their games as we of ours. You may see them racing about after school hours at a species of "catch-as-catch-can," or playing football with their heels, or spinning tops, sometimes of European make. Or, dearest sport of all, racing a donkey while seated on its far hind quarters, with all the noise and enjoyment we threw into such pastimes a few years ago. To look at the merry faces of these lively youths, and to hear their cheery voices, is sufficient to convince anyone of their inherent capabilities, which might make them easily a match for English lads if they had their chances. But what chances have they? At the age of four or five they are drafted off to school, not to be educated, but to be taught to read by rote, and to repeat long chapters of the Korán, if not the whole volume, by heart, hardly understanding what they read. Beyond this little is taught but the four great rules of arithmetic in the figures which we have borrowed from them, but worked out in the most primitive style. In "long" multiplication, for instance, they write every figure down, and "carry" nothing, so that a much more formidable addition than need be has to conclude the calculation. But they have a quaint system of learning their multiplication tables by mnemonics, in which every number is represented by a letter, and these being made up into words, are committed to memory in place of the figures. A Moorish school is a simple affair. No forms, no desks, few books. A number of boards about the size of foolscap, painted white on both sides, on which the various lessons--from the alphabet to portions of the Korán--are plainly written in large black letters; a switch or two, a pen and ink and a book, complete the furnishings. The dominie, squatted tailor-fashion on the ground, like his pupils, who may number from ten to thirty, repeats the lesson in a sonorous sing-song voice, and is imitated by the little urchins, who accompany their voices by a rocking to and fro, which occasionally enables them to keep time. A sharp application of the switch is wonderfully effectual in re-calling wandering attention. Lazy boys are speedily expelled. On the admission of a pupil the parents pay some small sum, varying according to their means, and every Wednesday, which is a half-holiday, a payment is made from a farthing to twopence. New moons and feasts are made occasions for larger payments, and count as holidays, which last ten days on the occasion of the greater festivals. Thursday is a whole holiday, and no work is done on Friday morning, that being the Mohammedan Sabbath, or at least "meeting day," as it is called. At each successive stage of the scholastic career the schoolmaster parades the pupils one by one, if at all well-to-do, in the style already alluded to, collecting gifts from the grateful parents to supplement the few coppers the boys bring to school week by week. If they intend to become notaries or judges, they go on to study at Fez, where they purchase the key of a room at one of the colleges, and read to little purpose for several years. In everything the Korán is the standard work. The chapters therein being arranged without any idea of sequence, only according to length,--with the exception of the Fátihah,--the longest at the beginning and the shortest at the end, after the first the last is learned, and so backwards to the second. Most of the lads are expected to do something to earn their bread at quite an early age, in one way or another, even if not called on to assist their parents in something which requires an old head on young shoulders. Such youths being so early independent, at least in a measure, mix with older lads, who soon teach them all the vices they have not already learned, in which they speedily become as adept as their parents. Those intended for a mercantile career are put into the shop at twelve or fourteen, and after some experience in weighing-out and bargaining by the side of a father or elder brother, they are left entirely to themselves, being supplied with goods from the main shop as they need them. It is by this means that the multitudinous little box-shops which are a feature of the towns are enabled to pay their way, this being rendered possible by an expensive minutely retail trade. The average English tradesman is a wholesale dealer compared to these petty retailers, and very many middle-class English households take in sufficient supplies at a time to stock one of their shops. One reason for this is the hand-to-mouth manner in which the bulk of the people live, with no notion of thrift. They earn their day's wage, and if anything remains above the expense of living, it is invested in gay clothing or jimcracks. Another reason is that those who could afford it have seldom any member of their household whom they can trust as housekeeper, of which more anon. It seems ridiculous to send for sugar, tea, etc., by the ounce or less; candles, boxes of matches, etc., one by one; needles, thread, silk, in like proportion, even when cash is available, but such is the practice here, and there is as much haggling over the price of one candle as over that of an expensive article of clothing. Often quite little children, who elsewhere would be considered babes, are sent out to do the shopping, and these cheapen and bargain like the sharpest old folk, with what seems an inherent talent. Very little care is taken of even the children of the rich, and they get no careful training. The little sons and daughters of quite important personages are allowed to run about as neglected and dirty as those of the very poor. Hence the practice of shaving the head cannot be too highly praised in a country where so much filth abounds, and where cutaneous diseases of the worst type are so frequent. It is, however, noteworthy that while the Moors do not seem to consider it any disgrace to be scarred and covered with disgusting sores, the result of their own sins and those of their fathers, they are greatly ashamed of any ordinary skin disease on the head. But though the shaven skulls are the distinguishing feature of the boys in the house, where their dress closely resembles that of their sisters, the girls may be recognized by their ample locks, often dyed to a fashionable red with henna; yet they, too, are often partially shaved, sometimes in a fantastic style. It may be the hair in front is cut to a fringe an inch long over the forehead, and a strip a quarter of an inch wide is shaved just where the visible part of a child's comb would come, while behind this the natural frizzy or straight hair is left, cut short, while the head is shaved again round the ears and at the back of the neck. To perform these operations a barber is called in, who attends the family regularly. Little boys of certain tribes have long tufts left hanging behind their ears, and occasionally they also have their heads shaved in strange devices. Since no attempt is made to bring the children up as useful members of the community at the age when they are most susceptible, they are allowed to run wild. Thus, bright and tractable as they are naturally, no sooner do the lads approach the end of their 'teens, than a marked change comes over them, a change which even the most casual observer cannot fail to notice. The hitherto agreeable youths appear washed-out and worthless. All their energy has disappeared, and from this time till a second change takes place for the worse, large numbers drag out a weary existence, victims of vices which hold them in their grip, till as if burned up by a fierce but short-lived fire, they ultimately become seared and shattered wrecks. From this time every effort is made to fan the flickering or extinguished flame, till death relieves the weary mortal of the burden of his life. XI "DINING OUT"[6] [6: Contributed by my wife.--B. M.] "A good supper is known by its odour." _Moorish Proverb._ There are no more important qualifications for the diner-out in Morocco than an open mind and a teachable spirit. Then start with a determination to forget European table manners, except in so far as they are based upon consideration for the feelings of others, setting yourself to do in Morocco as the Moors do, and you cannot fail to gain profit and pleasure from your experience. One slight difficulty arises from the fact that it is somewhat hard to be sure at any time that you have been definitely invited to partake of a Moorish meal. A request that you would call at three o'clock in the afternoon, mid-way between luncheon and dinner, would seem an unusual hour for a heavy repast, yet that is no guarantee that you may not be expected to partake freely of an elaborate feast. If you are a member of the frail, fair sex, the absence of all other women will speedily arouse you to the fact that you are in an oriental country, for in Morocco the sons and chief servants, though they eat after the master of the house, take precedence of the wives and women-folk, who eat what remains of the various dishes, or have specially prepared meals in their own apartments. For the same reason you need not be surprised if you are waited upon after the men of the party, though this order is sometimes reversed where the host is familiar with European etiquette with regard to women. If a man, perhaps a son will wait upon you. The well-bred Moor is quite as great a stickler for the proprieties as the most conservative Anglo-Saxon, and you will do well if you show consideration at the outset by removing your shoes at the door of the room, turning a deaf ear to his assurance that such a proceeding is quite unnecessary on your part. A glance round the room will make it clear that your courtesy will be appreciated, for the carpet on the floor is bright and unmarked by muddy or dusty shoes (in spite of the condition of the streets outside), and the mattresses upon which you are invited to sit are immaculate in their whiteness. Having made yourself comfortable, you will admire the arrangements for the first item upon the programme. The slave-girl appears with a handsome tray, brass or silver, upon which there are a goodly number of cups or tiny glass tumblers, frequently both, of delicate pattern and artistic colouring, a silver tea-pot, a caddy of green tea, a silver or glass bowl filled with large, uneven lumps of sugar, which have been previously broken off from the loaf, and a glass containing sprigs of mint and verbena. The brass samovar comes next, and having measured the tea in the palm of his right hand, and put it into the pot, the host proceeds to pour a small amount of boiling water upon it, which he straightway pours off, a precaution lest the Nazarenes should have mingled some colouring matter therewith. He then adds enough sugar to ensure a semi-syrupy result, with some sprigs of peppermint, and fills the pot from the samovar. A few minutes later he pours out a little, which he tastes himself, frequently returning the remainder to the pot, although the more Europeanized consume the whole draught. If the test has been satisfactory, he proceeds to fill the cups or glasses, passing them in turn to the guests in order of distinction. To make a perceptible noise in drawing it from the glass to the mouth is esteemed a delicate token of appreciation. The tray is then removed; the slave in attendance brings a chased brass basin and ewer of water, and before the serious portion of the meal begins you are expected to hold out your right hand just to cleanse it from any impurities which may have been contracted in coming. Orange-flower water in a silver sprinkler is then brought in, followed by a brass incense burner filled with live charcoal, on which a small quantity of sandal-wood or other incense is placed, and the result is a delicious fragrance which you are invited to waft by a circular motion of your hands into your hair, your ribbons and your laces, while your Moorish host finds the folds of his loose garments invaluable for the retention of the spicy perfume. A circular table about eight inches high is then placed in the centre of the guests; on this is placed a tray with the first course of the dinner, frequently puffs of delicate pastry fried in butter over a charcoal fire, and containing sometimes meat, sometimes a delicious compound of almond paste and cinnamon. This, being removed, is followed by a succession of savoury stews with rich, well-flavoured gravies, each with its own distinctive spiciness, but all excellently cooked. The host first dips a fragment of bread into the gravy, saying as he does so, "B'ísm Illah!" ("In the name of God!"), which the guests repeat, as each follows suit with a sop from the dish. There is abundant scope for elegance of gesture in the eating of the stews, but still greater opportunity when the _pièce de résistance_ of a Moorish dinner, the dish of kesk'soo, is brought on. This kesk'soo is a small round granule prepared from semolina, which, having been steamed, is served like rice beneath and round an excellent stew, which is heaped up in the centre of the dish. With the thumb and two first fingers of the right hand you are expected to secure some succulent morsel from the stew,--meat, raisins, onions, or vegetable marrow,--and with it a small quantity of the kesk'soo. By a skilful motion of the palm the whole is formed into a round ball, which is thrown with a graceful curve of hand and wrist into the mouth. Woe betide you if your host is possessed by the hospitable desire to make one of these boluses for you, for he is apt to measure the cubic content of your mouth by that of his own, and for a moment your feelings will be too deep for words; but this is only a brief discomfort, and you will find the dish an excellent one, for Moorish cooks never serve tough meat. If your fingers have suffered from contact with the kesk'soo, it is permitted to you to apply your tongue to each digit in turn in the following order; fourth (or little finger), second, thumb, third, first; but a few moments later the slave appears, and after bearing away the table with the remains of the feast gives the opportunity for a most satisfactory ablution. In this case you are expected to use soap, and to wash both hands, over which water is poured three times. If you are at all acquainted with Moorish ways, you will not fail at the same time to apply soap and water to your mouth both outwardly and inwardly, being careful to rinse it three times with plenty of noise, ejecting the water behind your hand into the basin which is held before you. Orange-flower water and incense now again appear, and you may be required to drink three more glasses of refreshing tea, though this is sometimes omitted at the close of a repast. Of course "the feast of reason and the flow of soul" have not been lacking, and you have been repeatedly assured of your welcome, and invited to partake beyond the limit of human possibility, for the Moor believes you can pay no higher compliment to the dainties he has provided than by their consumption. For a while you linger, reclining upon the mattress as gracefully as may be possible for a tyro, with your arm upon a pile of many-coloured cushions of embroidered leather or cloth. Then, after a thousand mutual thanks and blessings, accompanied by graceful bowings and bendings, you say farewell and step to the door, where your slippers await you, and usher yourself out, not ill-satisfied with your initiation into the art of dining-out in Barbary. [Illustration: _Photograph by Dr. Rudduck._ FRUIT-SELLERS.] XII DOMESTIC ECONOMY "Manage with bread and butter till God sends the jam." _Moorish Proverb._ If the ordinary regulations of social life among the Moors differ materially from those in force among ourselves, how much more so must the minor details of the housekeeping when, to begin with, the husband does the marketing and keeps the keys! And the consequential Moor does, indeed, keep the keys, not only of the stores, but also often of the house. What would an English lady think of being coolly locked in a windowless house while her husband went for a journey, the provisions for the family being meanwhile handed in each morning through a loophole by a trusty slave left as gaoler? That no surprise whatever would be elicited in Barbary by such an arrangement speaks volumes. Woman has no voice under Mohammed's creed. Early in the morning let us take a stroll into the market, and see how things are managed there. Round the inside of a high-walled enclosure is a row of the rudest of booths. Over portions of the pathway, stretching across to other booths in the centre--if the market is a wide one--are pieces of cloth, vines on trellis, or canes interwoven with brushwood. As the sun gains strength these afford a most grateful shade, and during the heat of the day there is no more pleasant place for a stroll, and none more full of characteristic life. In the wider parts, on the ground, lie heaps two or three feet high of mint, verbena and lemon thyme, the much-esteemed flavourings for the national drink--green-tea syrup--exhaling a most delicious fragrance. It is early summer: the luscious oranges are not yet over, and in tempting piles they lie upon the stalls made of old packing-cases, many with still legible familiar English and French inscriptions. Apricots are selling at a halfpenny or less the pound, and plums and damsons, not to speak of greengages, keep good pace with them in price and sales. The bright tints of the lettuces and other fresh green vegetables serve to set off the rich colours of the God-made delicacies, but the prevailing hue of the scene is a restful earth-brown, an autumnal leaf-tint; the trodden ground, the sun-dried brush-wood of the booths and awnings, and the wet-stained wood-work. No glamour of paint or gleam of glass destroys the harmony of the surroundings. But with all the feeling of cool and repose, rest there is not, or idleness, for there is not a brisker scene in an oriental town than its market-place. Thronging those narrow pathways come the rich and poor--the portly merchant in his morning cloak, a spotless white wool jelláb, with a turban and girth which bespeak easy circumstances; the labourer in just such a cloak with the hood up, but one which was always brown, and is now much mended; the slave in shirt and drawers, with a string round his shaven pate; the keen little Jew boy pushing and bargaining as no other could; the bearded son of Israel, with piercing eyes, and his daughter with streaming hair; lastly, the widow or time-worn wife of the poor Mohammedan, who must needs market for herself. Her wrinkled face and care-worn look tell a different tale from the pompous self-content of the merchant by her side, who drives as hard a bargain as she does. In his hand he carries a palmetto-leaf basket, already half full, as with slippered feet he carefully picks his way among puddles and garbage. "Good morning, O my master; God bless thee!" exclaims the stall-keeper as his customer comes in sight. Sáïd el Faráji has to buy cloth of the merchant time and time again, so makes a point of pleasing one who can return a kindness. "No ill, praise God; and thyself, O Sáïd?" comes the cheery reply; then, after five minutes' mutual inquiry after one another's household, horses and other interests, health and general welfare, friend Sáïd points out the daintiest articles on his stall, and in the most persuasive of tones names his "lowest price." All the while he is sitting cross-legged on an old box, with his scales before him. "What? Now, come, I'll give you _so_ much," says the merchant, naming a price slightly less than that asked. "Make it _so_ much," exclaims Sáïd, even more persuasively than before, as he "splits the difference." "Well, I'll give you _so_ much," offering just a little less than this sum. "I can't go above that, you know." "All right, but you always get the better of me, you know. That is just what I paid. Anyhow, don't forget that when I want a new cloak," and he proceeds to measure out the purchases, using as weights two or three bits of old iron, a small cannon-ball, some bullets, screws, coins, etc. "Go with prosperity, my friend; and may God bless thee!" "And may God increase thy prosperity, and grant to thee a blessing!" rejoins the successful man, as he proceeds to another stall. By the time he reaches home his basket will contain meat, fish, vegetables, fruit and herbs, besides, perhaps, a loaf of sugar, and a quarter of a pound of tea, with supplies of spices and some candles. Bread they make at home. The absurdly minute quantities of what we should call "stores," which a man will purchase who could well afford to lay in a supply, seem very strange to the foreigner; but it is part of his domestic economy--or lack of that quality. He will not trust his wife with more than one day's supply at a time, and to weigh things out himself each morning would be trouble not to be dreamed of; besides which it would deprive him of the pleasure of all that bargaining, not to speak of the appetite-promoting stroll, and the opportunities for gossip with acquaintances which it affords. In consequence, wives and slaves are generally kept on short allowances, if these are granted at all. An amusing incident which came under my notice in Tangier shows how little the English idea of the community of interest of husband and wife is appreciated here. A Moorish woman who used to furnish milk to an English family being met by the lady of the house one morning, when she had brought short measure, said, pointing to the husband in the distance, "_You_ be my friend; take this" (slipping a few coppers worth half a farthing into her hand), "don't tell _him_ anything about it. I'll share the profit with you!" She probably knew from experience that the veriest trifle would suffice to buy over the wife of a Moor. Instructions having been given to his wife or wives as to what is to be prepared, and how--he probably pretends to know more of the art culinary than he does--the husband will start off to attend to his shop till lunch, which will be about noon. Then a few more hours in the shop, and before the sun sets a ride out to his garden by the river, returning in time for dinner at seven, after which come talk, prayers, and bed, completing what is more or less his daily round. His wives will probably be assisted in the house-work--or perhaps entirely relieved of it--by a slave-girl or two, and the water required will be brought in on the shoulders of a stalwart negro in skins or barrels filled from some fountain of good repute, but of certain contamination. In cooking the Moorish women excel, as their first-rate productions afford testimony. It is the custom of some Europeans to systematically disparage native preparations, but such judges have been the victims either of their own indiscretion in eating too many rich things without the large proportion of bread or other digestible nutriment which should have accompanied them, or of the essays of their own servants, usually men without any more knowledge of how their mothers prepare the dishes they attempt to imitate than an ordinary English working man would have of similar matters. Of course there are certain flavourings which to many are really objectionable, but none can be worse to us than any preparation of pig would be to a Moor. Prominent among such is the ancient butter which forms the basis of much of their spicings, butter made from milk, which has been preserved--usually buried a year or two--till it has acquired the taste, and somewhat the appearance, of ripe Gorgonzola. Those who commence by trying a very slight flavour of this will find the fancy grow upon them, and there is no smell so absolutely appetizing as the faintest whiff of anything being cooked in this butter, called "smin." Another point, much misunderstood, which enables them to cook the toughest old rooster or plough-ox joint till it can be eaten readily with the fingers, is the stewing in oil or butter. When the oil itself is pure and fresh, it imparts no more taste to anything cooked in it than does the fresh butter used by the rich. Articles plunged into either at their high boiling point are immediately browned and enclosed in a kind of case, with a result which can be achieved in no other manner than by rolling in paste or clay, and cooking amid embers. Moorish pastry thus cooked in oil is excellent, flaky and light. XIII THE NATIVE "MERCHANT" "A turban without a beard shows lack of modesty." _Moorish Proverb._ Háj Mohammed Et-Tájir, a grey-bearded worthy, who looks like a prince when he walks abroad, and dwells in a magnificent house, sits during business hours on a diminutive tick and wool mattress, on the floor of a cob-webbed room on one side of an ill-paved, uncovered, dirty court-yard. Light and air are admitted by the door in front of which he sits, while the long side behind him, the two ends, and much of the floor, are packed with valuable cloths, Manchester goods, silk, etc. Two other sides of the court-yard consist of similar stores, one occupied by a couple of Jews, and the other by another fine-looking Háj, his partner. Enters a Moor, in common clothing, market basket in hand. He advances to the entrance of the store, and salutes the owner respectfully--"Peace be with thee, Uncle Pilgrim!" "With thee be peace, O my master," is the reply, and the new-comer is handed a cushion, and motioned to sit on it at the door. "How doest thou?" "How fares thy house?" "How dost thou find thyself this morning?" "Is nothing wrong with thee?" These and similar inquiries are showered by each on the other, and an equal abundance is returned of such replies as, "Nothing wrong;" "Praise be to God;" "All is well." When both cease for lack of breath, after a brief pause the new arrival asks, "Have you any of that 'Merican?" (unbleached calico). The dealer puts on an indignant air, as if astonished at being asked such a question. "_Have_ I? There is no counting what I have of it," and he commences to tell his beads, trying to appear indifferent as to whether his visitor buys or not. Presently the latter, also anxious not to appear too eager, exclaims, "Let's look at it." A piece is leisurely handed down, and the customer inquires in a disparaging tone, "How much?" "Six and a half," and the speaker again appears absorbed in meditation. "Give thee six," says the customer, rising as if to go. "Wait, thou art very dear to us; to thee alone will I give a special price, six and a quarter." "No, no," replies the customer, shaking his finger before his face, as though to emphasize his refusal of even such special terms. "Al-l-láh!" piously breathes the dealer, as he gazes abstractedly out of the door, presently adding in the same devout tone, "There is no god but God! God curse the infidels!" "Come, I'll give thee six and an okea"--of which latter six and a half go to the 'quarter' peseta or franc of which six were offered. "No, six and five is the lowest I can take." The might-be purchaser made his last offer in a half-rising posture, and is now nearly erect as he says, "Then I can't buy; give it me for six and three," sitting down as though the bargain were struck. "No, I never sell that quality for less than six and four, and it's a thing I make no profit on; you know that." The customer doesn't look as though he did, and rising, turns to go. "Send a man to carry it away," says the dealer. "At six and three!" "No, at six and four!" and the customer goes away. "Send the man, it is thine," is hastily called after him, and in a few moments he returns with a Jewish porter, and pays his "six and three." So our worthy trader does business all day, and seems to thrive on it. Occasionally a friend drops in to chat and not to buy, and now and then there is a beggar; here is one. An aged crone she is, of most forbidding countenance, swathed in rags, it is a wonder she can keep together. She leans on a formidable staff, and in a piteous voice, "For the face of the Lord," and "In the name of my Lord Slave-of-the-Able" (Mulai Abd el Káder, a favourite saint), she begs something "For God." One copper suffices to induce her to call down untold blessings on the head of the donor, and she trudges away in the mud, barefooted, repeating her entreaties till they sound almost a wail, as she turns the next corner. But beggars who can be so easily disposed of at the rate of a hundred and ninety-five for a shilling can hardly be considered troublesome. A respectable-looking man next walks in with measured tread, and leaning towards us, says almost in a whisper-- "O Friend of the Prophet, is there anything to-day?" "Nothing, O my master," is the courteously toned reply, for the beggar appears to be a shareef or noble, and with a "God bless thee," disappears. A miserable wretch now turns up, and halfway across the yard begins to utter a whine which is speedily cut short by a curt "God help thee!" whereat the visitor turns on his heel and is gone. With a confident bearing an untidy looking figure enters a moment later, and after due salaams inquires for a special kind of cloth. "Call to-morrow morning," he is told, for he has not the air of a purchaser, and he takes his departure meekly. A creaky voice here breaks in from round the corner-- "Hast thou not a copper for the sake of the Lord?" "No, O my brother." After a few minutes another female comes on the scene, exhibiting enough of her face to show that it is a mass of sores. "Only a trifle, in the name of my lord Idrees," she cries, and turns away on being told, "God bring it!" Then comes a policeman, a makházni, who seats himself amid a shower of salutations-- "Hast thou any more of those selháms" (hooded cloaks)? "Come on the morrow, and thou shalt see." The explanation of this answer given by the "merchant" is that he sees such folk only mean to bother him for nothing. And this appears to be the daily routine of "business," though a good bargain must surely be made some time to have enabled our friend to acquire all the property he has, but so far as an outsider can judge, it must be a slow process. Anyhow, it has heartily tired the writer, who has whiled away the morning penning this account on a cushion on one side of the shop described. Yet it is a fair specimen of what has been observed by him on many a morning in this sleepy land. XIV SHOPPING[7] [7: Contributed by my wife.--B. M.] "Debt destroys religion." _Moorish Proverb._ If any should imagine that time is money in Morocco, let them undertake a shopping expedition in Tangier, the town on which, if anywhere in Morocco, occidental energy has set its seal. Not that one such excursion will suffice, unless, indeed, the purchaser be of the class who have more money than wit, or who are absolutely at the mercy of the guide and interpreter who pockets a commission upon every bargain he brings about. For the ordinary mortal, who wants to spread his dollars as far as it is possible for dollars to go, a tour of inspection, if not two or three, will be necessary before such a feat can be accomplished. To be sure, there is always the risk that between one visit and another some coveted article may find its way into the hands of a more reckless, or at least less thrifty, purchaser, but that risk may be safely taken. [Illustration: _Albert, Photo., Tunis._ A TUNISIAN SHOPKEEPER.] There is something very attractive in the small cupboard-like shops of the main street. Their owners sit cross-legged ready for a chat, looking wonderfully picturesque in cream-coloured jelláb, or in semi-transparent white farrajîyah, or tunic, allowing at the throat a glimpse of saffron, cerise, or green from the garment beneath. The white turban, beneath which shows a line of red Fez cap, serves as a foil to the clear olive complexion and the dark eyes and brows, while the faces are in general goodly to look upon, except where the lines have grown coarse and sensuous. So strong is the impression of elegant leisure, that it is difficult to imagine that these men expect to make a living from their trade, but they are more than willing to display their goods, and will doubtless invite you to a seat upon the shop ledge--where your feet dangle gracefully above a rough cobble-stone pavement--and sometimes even to a cup of tea. One after another, in quick succession, carpets of different dimensions (but all oblong, for Moorish rooms are narrow in comparison with their length) are spread out in the street, and the shop-owners' satellite, by reiterated cries of "Bálak! Bálak!" (Mind out! Mind out!) accompanied by persuasive pushes, keeps off the passing donkeys. A miniature crowd of interested spectators will doubtless gather round you, making remarks upon you and your purchases. Charmed by the artistic colourings, rich but never garish, you ask the price, and if you are wise you will immediately offer just half of that named. It is quite probable that the carpets will be folded up and returned to their places upon the shelf at the back of the shop, but it is equally probable that by slow and tactful yielding upon either side, interspersed with curses upon your ancestors and upon yourself, the bargain will be struck about halfway between the two extremes. The same method must be adopted with every article bought, and if you purpose making many purchases in the same shop, you will be wise to obtain and write down the price quoted in each case as "the _very_ lowest," and make your bid for the whole at once, lest, made cunning by one experience of your tactics, the shopman should put on a wider marginal profit in every other instance to circumvent you. It is also well for the purchaser to express ardent admiration in tones of calm indifference, for the Moor has quick perceptions, and though he may not understand English, when enthusiasm is apparent, he has the key to the situation, and refuses to lower his prices. Nevertheless, it is sometimes difficult to avoid a warm expression of admiration at the handsome brass trays, the Morocco leather bags into which such charming designs of contrasting colours are skilfully introduced, or the graceful utensils of copper and brass with which a closer acquaintance was made when you were the guest at a Moorish dinner. Many and interesting are the curious trifles which may be purchased, but they will be found in the greatest profusion in the bazaars established for the convenience of Nazarene tourists, where prices will frequently be named in English money, for an English "yellow-boy" is nowhere better appreciated than in Tangier. In the shops in the sôk, or market-place, prices are sometimes more moderate, and there you may discover some of the more distinctively Moorish articles, which are brought in from the country; nor can there be purchased a more interesting memento than a flint-lock, a pistol, or a carved dagger, all more or less elaborately decorated, such as are carried by town or country Moor, the former satisfied with a dagger in its chased sheath, except at the time of "powder-play," when flint-locks are in evidence everywhere. But in the market-place there are exposed for sale the more perishable things of Moorish living. Some of the small cupboards are grocers' shops, where semolina for the preparation of kesk'soo, the national dish, may be purchased, as well as candles for burning at the saints' shrines, and a multitude of small necessaries for the Moorish housewives. In the centre of the market sit the bread-sellers, for the most part women whose faces are supposed to be religiously kept veiled from the gaze of man, but who are apt to let their háïks fall back quite carelessly when only Europeans are near. An occasional glimpse may sometimes be thus obtained of a really pretty face of some lass on the verge of womanhood. Look at that girl in front of us, stooping over the stall of a vendor of what some one has dubbed "sticky nastinesses," her háïk lightly thrown back; her bent form and the tiny hand protruding at her side show that she is not alone, her little baby brother proving almost as much as she can carry. Her teeth are pearly white; her hair and eyebrows are jet black; her nut-brown cheeks bear a pleasant smile, and as she stretches out one hand to give the "confectioner" a few coppers, with the other clutching at her escaping garment, and moves on amongst the crowd, we come to the conclusion that if not fair, she is at least comely. The country women seated on the ground with their wares form a nucleus for a dense crowd. They have carried in upon their backs heavy loads of grass for provender, or firewood and charcoal which they sell in wholesale quantities to the smaller shopkeepers, who purchase from other countryfolk donkey loads of ripe melons and luscious black figs. There is a glorious inconsequence in the arrangement of the wares. Here you may see a pile of women's garments exposed for sale, and not far away are sweet-sellers with honey-cakes and other unattractive but toothsome delicacies. If you can catch a glimpse of the native brass-workers busily beating out artistic designs upon trays of different sizes and shapes, do not fail to seize the opportunity of watching them. You may form one in the ring gathered round the snake-charmer, or join the circle which listens open-mouthed and with breathless attention to that story-teller, who breaks off at a most critical juncture in his narrative to shake his tambourine, declaring that so close-fisted an audience does not deserve to hear another word, much less the conclusion of his fascinating tale. But before you join either party, indeed before you mingle at all freely in the crowd upon a Moorish market-place, it is well to remember that the flea is a common domestic insect, impartial in the distribution of his favours to Moor, Jew and Nazarene, and is in fact not averse to "fresh fields and pastures new." If you are clad in perishable garments, beware of the water-carrier with his goat-skin, his tinkling bell, his brass cup, and his strange cry. Beware, too, of the strings of donkeys with heavily laden packs, and do not scruple to give them a forcible push out of your way. If you are mounted upon a donkey yourself, so much the better; by watching the methods of your donkey-boy to ensure a clear passage for his beast, you will realize that dwellers in Barbary are not strangers to the spirit of the saying, "Each man for himself, and the de'il take the hindmost." Yet they are a pleasant crowd to be amongst, in spite of insect-life, water-carriers, and bulky pack-saddles, and there is an exhaustless store of interest, not alone in the wares they have for sale, and in the trades they ply, but more than all in the faces, so often keen and alert, and still more often bright and smiling. One typical example of Moorish methods of shopping, and I have done. Among those who make their money by trade, you may find a man who spends his time in bringing the would-be purchaser into intimate relations with the article he desires to obtain. He has no shop of his own, but may often be recognized as an interested spectator of some uncompleted bargain. Having discovered your dwelling-place, he proceeds to "bring the mountain to Mohammed," and you will doubtless be confronted in the court-yard of your hotel by the very article for which you have been seeking in vain. Of course he expects a good price which shall ensure him a profit of at least fifty per cent. upon his expenditure, but he too is open to a bargain, and a little skilful pointing out of flaws in the article which he has brought for purchase, in a tone of calm and supreme indifference, is apt to ensure a very satisfactory reduction of price in favour of the shopper in Barbary. XV A SUNDAY MARKET "A climb with a friend is a descent." _Moorish Proverb._ One of the sights of Tangier is its market. Sundays and Thursdays, when the weather is fine, see the disused portion of the Mohammedan graveyard outside _Báb el Fahs_ (called by the English Port St. Catherine, and now known commonly as the Sôk Gate) crowded with buyers and sellers of most quaint appearance to the foreign eye, not to mention camels, horses, mules, and donkeys, or the goods they have brought. Hither come the sellers from long distances, trudging all the way on foot, laden or not, according to means, all eager to exchange their goods for European manufacturers, or to carry home a few more dollars to be buried with their store. Sunday is no Sabbath for the sons of Israel, so the money-changers are doing a brisk trade from baskets of filthy native bronze coin, the smallest of which go five hundred to the shilling, and the largest three hundred and thirty-three! Hard by a venerable rabbi is leisurely cutting the throats of fowls brought to him for the purpose by the servants or children of Jews, after the careful inspection enjoined by the Mosaic law. The old gentleman has the coolest way of doing it imaginable; he might be only peeling an orange for the little girl who stands waiting. After apparently all but turning the victim inside out, he twists back its head under its wings, folding these across its breast as a handle, and with his free hand removing his razor-like knife from his mouth, nearly severs its neck and hands it to the child, who can scarcely restrain its struggles except by putting her foot on it, while he mechanically wipes his blade and prepares to despatch another. Eggs and milk are being sold a few yards off by country women squatted on the ground, the former in baskets or heaps on the stones, the latter in uninviting red jars, with a round of prickly-pear leaf for a stopper, and a bit of palmetto rope for a handle. By this time we are in the midst of a perfect Babel--a human maëlstrom. In a European crowd one is but crushed by human beings; here all sorts of heavily laden quadrupeds, with packs often four feet across, come jostling past, sometimes with the most unsavoury loads. We have just time to observe that more country women are selling walnuts, vegetables, and fruits, on our left, at the door of what used to be the tobacco and hemp fandak, and that native sweets, German knick-knacks and Spanish fruit are being sold on our right, as amid the din of forges on either side we find ourselves in the midst of the crush to get through the narrow gate. Here an exciting scene ensues. Continuous streams of people and beasts of burden are pushing both ways; a drove of donkeys laden with rough bundles of cork-wood for the ovens approaches, the projecting ends prodding the passers-by; another drove laden with stones tries to pass them, while half a dozen mules and horses vainly endeavour to pass out. A European horseman trots up and makes the people fly, but not so the beasts, till he gets wedged in the midst, and must bide his time after all. Meanwhile one is almost deafened by the noise of shouting, most of it good-humoured. "Zeed! Arrah!" vociferates the donkey-driver. "Bálak!" shouts the horseman. "Bálak! Guarda!" (pronounced warda) in a louder key comes from a man who is trying to pilot a Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary through the gate, with Her Excellency on his arm. At last we seize a favourable opportunity and are through. Now we can breathe. In front of us, underneath an arch said to have been built to shelter the English guard two hundred years ago (which is very unlikely, since the English destroyed the fortifications of this gate), we see the native shoeing-smiths hacking at the hoofs of horses, mules, and donkeys, in a manner most extraordinary to us, and nailing on triangular plates with holes in the centre--though most keep a stock of English imported shoes and nails for the fastidious Nazarenes. Spanish and Jewish butchers are driving a roaring trade at movable stalls made of old boxes, and the din is here worse than ever. Now we turn aside into the vegetable market, as it is called, though as we enter we are almost sickened by the sight of more butchers' stalls, and further on by putrid fish. This market is typical. Low thatched booths of branches and canes are the only shops but those of the butchers, the arcade which surrounds the interior of the building being chiefly used for stores. Here and there a filthy rag is stretched across the crowded way to keep the sun off, and anon we have to stop to avoid some drooping branch. Fruit and vegetables of all descriptions in season are sold amid the most good-humoured haggling. Emerging from this interesting scene by a gate leading to the outer sôk, we come to one quite different in character. A large open space is packed with country people, their beasts and their goods, and towns-people come out to purchase. Women seem to far outnumber the men, doubtless on account of their size and their conspicuous head-dress. They are almost entirely enveloped in white háïks, over the majority of which are thrown huge native sun-hats made of palmetto, with four coloured cords by way of rigging to keep the brim extended. When the sun goes down these are to be seen slung across the shoulders instead. Very many of the women have children slung on their backs, or squatting on their hips if big enough. This causes them to stoop, especially if some other burden is carried on their shoulders as well. [Illustration: THE SUNDAY MARKET, TANGIER. _Cavilla, Photo., Tangier._] On our right are typical Moorish shops,--grocers', if you please,--in which are exposed to view an assortment of dried fruits, such as nuts, raisins, figs, etc., with olive and argan oil, candles, tea, sugar, and native soap and butter. Certainly of all the goods that butter is the least inviting; the soap, though the purest of "soft," looks a horribly repulsive mass, but the butter which, like it, is streaked all over with finger marks, is in addition full of hairs. Similar shops are perched on our left, where old English biscuit-boxes are conspicuous. Beyond these come slipper- and clothes-menders. The former are at work on native slippers of such age that they would long ago have been thrown away in any less poverty-stricken land, transforming them into wearable if unsightly articles, after well soaking them in earthen pans. Just here a native "medicine man" dispenses nostrums of doubtful efficacy, and in front a quantity of red Moorish pottery is exposed for sale. This consists chiefly of braziers for charcoal and kesk'soo steamers for stewing meat and vegetables as well. A native _café_ here attracts our attention. Under the shade of a covered way the káhwajî has a brazier on which he keeps a large kettle of water boiling. A few steps further on we light upon the sellers of native salt. This is in very large crystals, heaped in mule panniers, from which the dealers mete it out in wooden measures. It comes from along the beach near Old Tangier, where the heaps can be seen from the town, glistening in the sunlight. Ponds are dug along the shore, in which sea water is enclosed by miniature dykes, and on evaporating leaves the salt. Pressing on with difficulty through a crowd of horses, mules and donkeys, mostly tethered by their forefeet, we reach some huts in front of which are the most gorgeous native waistcoats exposed for sale, together with Manchester goods, by fat, ugly old women of a forbidding aspect. Further on we come upon "confectioners." A remarkable peculiarity of the tables on which the sweets are being sold in front of us is the total absence of flies, though bees abound, in spite of the lazy whisking of the sweet-seller. The sweets themselves consist of red, yellow and white sticks of what Cousin Jonathan calls "candy;" almond and gingelly rock, all frizzling in the sun. A small basin, whose contents resemble a dark plum-pudding full of seeds, contains a paste of the much-lauded hasheesh, the opiate of Morocco, which, though contraband, and strictly prohibited by Imperial decrees, is being freely purchased in small doses. On the opposite side of the way some old Spaniards are selling a kind of coiled-up fritter by the yard, swimming in oil. Then we come to a native restaurant. Trade does not appear very brisk, so we shall not interrupt it by pausing for a few moments to watch the cooking. In a tiny lean-to of sticks and thatch two men are at work. One is cutting up liver and what would be flead if the Moors ate pigs, into pieces about the size of a filbert. These the other threads on skewers in alternate layers, three or four of each. Having rolled them in a basin of pepper and salt, they are laid across an earthen pot resembling a log scooped out, like some primæval boat. In the bottom of the hollow is a charcoal fire, which causes the khotbán, as they are called, to give forth a most appetizing odour--the only thing tempting about them after seeing them made. Half loaves of native bread lie ready to hand, and the hungry passer-by is invited to take an _al fresco_ meal for the veriest trifle. Another sort of kabáb--for such is the name of the preparation--is being made from a large wash-basin full of ready seasoned minced meat, small handfuls of which the jovial _chef_ adroitly plasters on more skewers, cooking them like the others. Squatted on the ground by the side of this "bar" is a retailer of ripened native butter, "warranted five years old." This one can readily smell without stooping; it is in an earthenware pan, and looks very dirty, but is weighed out by the ounce as very precious after being kept so long underground. Opposite is the spot where the camels from and for the interior load and unload. Some forty of these ungainly but useful animals are here congregated in groups. At feeding-time a cloth is spread on the ground, on which a quantity of barley is poured in a heap. Each animal lies with its legs doubled up beneath it in a manner only possible to camels, with its head over the food, munching contentedly. In one of the groups we notice the driver beating his beast to make it kneel down preparatory to the removal of its pack, some two hundred-weight and a half. After sundry unpleasant sounds, and tramping backwards and forwards to find a comfortable spot, the gawky creature settles down in a stately fashion, packing up his stilt-like legs in regular order, limb after limb, till he attains the desired position. A short distance off one of them is making hideous noises by way of protest against the weight of the load being piled upon him, threatening to lose his temper, and throw a little red bladder out of his mouth, which, hanging there as he breathes excitedly, makes a most unpleasing sound. Here one of the many water-carriers who have crossed our path does so again, tinkling his little bell of European manufacture, and we turn to watch him as he gives a poor lad to drink. Slung across his back is the "bottle" of the East--a goat-skin with the legs sewn up. A long metal spout is tied into the neck, and on this he holds his left thumb, which he uses as a tap by removing it to aim a long stream of water into the tin mug in his right hand. Two bright brass cups cast and engraved in Fez hang from a chain round his neck, but these are reserved for purchasers, the urchin who is now enjoying a drink receiving it as charity. Tinkle, tinkle, goes the bell again, as the weary man moves on with his ever-lightening burden, till he is confronted by another wayfarer who turns to him to quench his thirst. As these skins are filled indiscriminately from wells and tanks, and cleaned inside with pitch, the taste must not be expected to satisfy all palates; but if hunger is the best sauce for food, thirst is an equal recommendation for drink. A few minutes' walk across a cattle-market brings us at last to the English church, a tasteful modern construction in pure Moorish style, and banishing the thoughts of our stroll, we join the approaching group of fellow-worshippers, for after all it is Sunday. XVI PLAY-TIME "According to thy shawl stretch thy leg." _Moorish Proverb._ Few of us realize to what an extent our amusements, pastimes, and recreations enter into the formation of our individual, and consequently of our national, character. It is therefore well worth our while to take a glance at the Moor at play, or as near play as he ever gets. The stately father of a family must content himself, as his years and flesh increase, with such amusements as shall not entail exertion. By way of house game, since cards and all amusements involving chance are strictly forbidden, chess reigns supreme, and even draughts--with which the denizens of the coffee-house, where he would not be seen, disport themselves--are despised by him. In Shiráz, however, the Sheïkh ul Islám, or chief religious authority, declared himself shocked when I told him how often I had played this game with Moorish theologians, whereupon ensued a warm discussion as to whether it was a game of chance. At last I brought this to a satisfactory close by remarking that as his reverence was ignorant even of the rules of the game,--and therefore no judge, since he had imagined it to be based on hazard,--he at least was manifestly innocent of it. The connection between chess and Arabdom should not be forgotten, especially as the very word with which it culminates, "checkmate," is but a corruption of the Arabic "sheïkh mát"--"chief dead." The king of games is, however, rare on the whole, requiring too much concentration for a weary or lazy official, or a merchant after a busy day. Their method of playing does not materially differ from ours, but they play draughts with very much more excitement and fun. The jocular vituperation which follows a successful sally, and the almost unintelligible rapidity with which the moves are made, are as novel to the European as appreciated by the natives. Gossip, the effervescence of an idle brain, is the prevailing pastime, and at no afternoon tea-table in Great Britain is more aimless talk indulged in than while the cup goes round among the Moors. The ladies, with a more limited scope, are not far behind their lords in this respect. Otherwise their spare time is devoted to minutely fine embroidery. This is done in silk on a piece of calico or linen tightly stretched on a frame, and is the same on both sides; in this way are ornamented curtains, pillow-cases, mattress-covers, etc. It is, nevertheless, considered so far a superfluity that few who have not abundant time to spare trouble about it, and the material decorated is seldom worth the labour bestowed thereon. The fact is that in these southern latitudes as little time as possible is passed within doors, and for this reason we must seek the real amusements of the people outside. When at home they seem to think it sufficient to loll about all the day long if not at work, especially if they have an enclosed flower-garden, beautifully wild and full of green and flowers, with trickling, splashing water. I exclude, of course, all feasts and times when the musicians come, but I must not omit mention of dancing. Easterns think their western friends mad to dance themselves, when they can so easily get others to do it for them, so they hire a number of women to go through all manner of quaint--too often indecent--posings and wrigglings before them, to the tune of a nasal chant, which, aided by fiddles, banjos, and tambourines, is being drawled out by the musicians. Some of these seemingly inharmonious productions are really enjoyable when one gets into the spirit of the thing. At times the Moors are themselves full of life and vigour, especially in the enjoyment of what may be called the national sport of "powder-play," not to speak of boar-hunting, hawking, rabbit-chasing, and kindred pastimes. Just as in the days of yore their forefathers excelled in the use of the spear, brandishing and twirling it as easily as an Indian club or singlestick, so they excel to-day in the exercise of their five-foot flint-locks, performing the most dexterous feats on horseback at full gallop. Here is such a display about to commence. It is the feast of Mohammed's birthday, and the market-place outside the gate, so changed since yesterday, is crowded with spectators; men and boys in gay, but still harmonious, colours, decked out for the day, and women shrouded in their blankets, plain wool-white. An open space is left right through the centre, up a gentle slope, and a dozen horsemen are spurring and holding in their prancing steeds at yonder lower end. At some unnoticed signal they have started towards us. They gallop wildly, the beat of their horses' hoofs sounding as iron hail on the stony way. A cloud of dust flies upward, and before we are aware of it they are abreast of us--a waving, indistinguishable mass of flowing robes, of brandished muskets, and of straining, foaming steeds. We can just see them tossing their guns in the air, and then a rider, bolder than the rest, stands on his saddle, whirling round his firearm aloft without stopping, while another swings his long weapon underneath his horse, and seizes it upon the other side. But now they are in line again, and every gun is pointed over the right, behind the back, the butt grasped by the twisted left arm, and the lock by the right under the left armpit. In this constrained position they fire at an imaginary foe who is supposed to have appeared from ambush as they pass. Immediately the reins--which have hitherto been held in the mouth, the steed guided by the feet against his gory flanks--are pulled up tight, throwing the animal upon his haunches, and wheeling him round for a sober walk back. This is, in truth, a practice or drill for war, for such is the method of fighting in these parts. A sortie is made to seek the hidden foe, who may start up anywhere from the ravines or boulders, and who must be aimed at instanter, before he regains his cover, while those who have observed him must as quickly as possible get beyond his range to reload and procure reinforcements. The only other active sports of moment, apart from occasional horse races, are football and fencing, indulged in by boys. The former is played with a stuffed leather ball some six or eight inches across, which is kicked into the air with the back of the heel, and caught in the hands, the object being to drive it as high as possible. The fencing is only remarkable for its free and easy style, and the absence of hilts and guards. Yet there are milder pastimes in equal favour, and far more in accordance with the fancy of southerners in warm weather, such as watching a group of jugglers or snake-charmers, or listening to a story-teller. These are to be met with in the market-place towards the close of hot and busy days, when the wearied bargainers gather in groups to rest before commencing the homeward trudge. The jugglers are usually poor, the production of fire from the mouth, of water from an empty jar, and so on, forming stock items. But often fearful realities are to be seen--men who in a frenzied state catch cannon balls upon their heads, blood spurting out on every side; or, who stick skewers through their legs. These are religious devotees who live by such performances. From the public _raconteur_ the Moor derives the excitement the European finds in his novel, or the tale "to be continued in our next," and it probably does him less harm. XVII THE STORY-TELLER "Gentleman without reading, dog without scent." _Moorish Proverb._ The story-teller is, _par excellence_, the prince of Moorish performers. Even to the stranger unacquainted with the language the sight of the Arab bard and his attentive audience on some erstwhile bustling market at the ebbing day is full of interest--to the student of human nature a continual attraction. After a long trudge from home, commenced before dawn, and a weary haggling over the most worthless of "coppers" during the heat of the day, the poor folk are quite ready for a quiet resting-time, with something to distract their minds and fill them with thoughts for the homeward way. Here have been fanned and fed the great religious and political movements which from time to time have convulsed the Empire, and here the pulse of the nation throbs. In the cities men lead a different life, and though the townsfolk appreciate tales as well as any, it is on these market-places that the wandering troubadour gathers the largest crowds. Like public performers everywhere, a story-teller of note always goes about with regular assistants, who act as summoners to his entertainment, and as chorus to his songs. They consist usually of a player on the native fiddle, another who keeps time on a tambourine, and a third who beats a kind of earthenware drum with his fingers. Less pretentious "professors" are content with themselves manipulating a round or square tambourine or a two-stringed fiddle, and to many this style has a peculiar charm of its own. Each pause, however slight, is marked by two or three sharp beats on the tightly stretched skin, or twangs with a palmetto leaf plectrum, loud or soft, according to the subject of the discourse at that point. The dress of this class--the one most frequently met with--is usually of the plainest, if not of the scantiest; a tattered brown jelláb (a hooded woollen cloak) and a camel's-hair cord round the tanned and shaven skull are the garments which strike the eye. Waving bare arms and sinewy legs, with a wild, keen-featured face, lit up by flashing eyes, complete the picture. This is the man from whom to learn of love and fighting, of beautiful women and hairbreadth escapes, the whole on the model of the "Thousand Nights and a Night," of which versions more or less recognizable may now and again be heard from his lips. Commencing with plenty of tambourine, and a few suggestive hints of what is to follow, he gathers around him a motley audience, the first comers squatting in a circle, and later arrivals standing behind. Gradually their excitement is aroused, and as their interest grows, the realistic semi-acting and the earnest mien of the performer rivet every eye upon him. Suddenly his wild gesticulations cease at the entrancing point. One step more for liberty, one blow, and the charming prize would be in the possession of her adorer. Now is the time to "cash up." With a pious reference to "our lord Mohammed--the prayer of God be on him, and peace,"--and an invocation of a local patron saint or other equally revered defunct, an appeal is made to the pockets of the Faithful "for the sake of Mulai Abd el Káder"--"Lord Slave-of-the-Able." Arousing as from a trance, the eager listeners instinctively commence to feel in their pockets for the balance from the day's bargaining; and as every blessing from the legion of saints who would fill the Mohammedan calendar if there were one is invoked on the cheerful giver, one by one throws down his hard-earned coppers--one or two--and as if realizing what he has parted with, turns away with a long-drawn breath to untether his beasts, and set off home. But exciting as are these acknowledged fictions, specimens are so familiar to most readers from the pages of the collection referred to that much more interest will be felt in an attempt to reproduce one of a higher type, pseudo-historical, and alleged to be true. Such narratives exhibit much of native character, and shades of thought unencountered save in daily intercourse with the people. Let us, therefore, seize the opportunity of a visit from a noted _raconteur_ and reputed poet to hear his story. Tame, indeed, would be the result of an endeavour to transfer to black and white the animated tones and gestures of the narrator, which the imagination of the reader must supply. [Illustration: _Photograph by A. Lennox, Esq._ GROUP AROUND PERFORMERS, MARRÁKESH.] The initial "voluntary" by the "orchestra" has ended; every eye is directed towards the central figure, this time arrayed in ample turban, white jelláb and yellow slippers, with a face betokening a lucrative profession. After a moment's silence he commences the history of-- "MULAI ABD EL KÁDER AND THE MONK OF MONKS." "The thrones of the Nazarenes were once in number sixty, but the star of the Prophet of God--the prayer of God be on him, and peace--was in the ascendant, and the religion of Resignation [Islám] was everywhere victorious. Many of the occupiers of those thrones had either submitted to the Lieutenant ['Caliph'] of our Lord, and become Muslimeen, or had been vanquished by force of arms. The others were terrified, and a general assembly was convoked to see what was to be done. As the rulers saw they were helpless against the decree of God, they called for their monks to advise them. The result of the conference was that it was decided to invite the Resigned Ones (Muslimeen) to a discussion on their religious differences, on the understanding that whichever was victorious should be thenceforth supreme. "The Leader of the Faithful having summoned his wise men, their opinion was asked. 'O victorious of God,' they with one voice replied, 'since God, the High and Blessed, is our King, what have we to fear? Having on our side the truth revealed in the "Book to be Read" [the Korán] by the hand of the Messenger of God--the prayer of God be on him, and peace--we _must_ prevail. Let us willingly accept their proposal.' An early day was accordingly fixed for the decisive contest, and each party marshalled its forces. At the appointed time they met, a great crowd on either side, and it was asked which should begin. Knowing that victory was on his side, the Lieutenant of the Prophet--the prayer of God be on him, and peace--replied, 'Since ye have desired this meeting, open ye the discussion.' "Then the chief of the Nazarene kings made answer, 'But we are here so many gathered together, that if we commence to dispute all round we shall not finish by the Judgement Day. Let each party therefore choose its wisest man, and let the two debate before us, the remainder judging the result.' "'Well hast thou spoken,' said the Leader of the Faithful; 'be it even so.' Then the learned among the Resigned selected our lord Abd el Káder of Baghdad,[8] a man renowned the world over for piety and for the depth of his learning. Now a prayer [Fátihah] for Mulai Abd el Káder!" [8: So called because buried near that city. For an account of his life, and view of his mausoleum, see "The Moors," pp. 337-339.] Here the speaker, extending his open palms side by side before him, as if to receive a blessing thereon, is copied by the by-standers.[9] "In the name of God, the Pitying, the Pitiful!" All draw their hands down their faces, and, if they boast beards, end by stroking them out. [9: "The hands are raised in order to catch a blessing in them, and are afterwards drawn over the face to transfer it to every part of the body."--HUGHES, "Dictionary of Islám."] [10: A term applied by Mohammedans to Christians on account of a mistaken conception of the doctrine of the Trinity.] "Then the polytheists[10] likewise chose their man, one held among them in the highest esteem, well read and wise, a monk of monks. Between these two, then, the controversy commenced. As already agreed, the Nazarene was the first to question: "'How far is it from the Earth to the first heaven?' "'Five hundred years.' "'And thence to the second heaven?' "'Five hundred years.' "'Thence to the third?' "'Five hundred years.' "'Thence to the fourth?' "'Five hundred years.' "'Thence to the fifth?' "'Five hundred years.' "'Thence to the sixth?' "'Five hundred years.' "'Thence to the seventh?' "'Five hundred years.' "'And from Mekka to Jerusalem?' "'Forty days.' "'Add up the whole.' "'Three thousand, five hundred years, and forty days.' "'In his famous ride on El Borak [Lightning] where did Mohammed go?' "'From the Sacred Temple [of Mekka] to the Further Temple [of Jerusalem], and from the Holy House [Jerusalem] to the seventh heaven, and the presence of God.'[11] [11: This was the occasion on which Mohammed visited the seven heavens under the care of Gabriel, riding on an ass so restive that he had to be bribed with a promise of Paradise.] "'How long did this take?' "'The tenth of one night.' "'Did he find his bed still warm on his return?' "'Yes.' "'Dost thou think such a thing possible; to travel three thousand five hundred years and back, and find one's bed still warm on returning?' "'Canst thou play chess?' then asked Mulai Abd el Káder. "'Of course I can,' said the monk, surprised. "'Then, wilt thou play with me?' "'Certainly not,' replied the monk, indignantly. 'Dost thou think me a fool, to come here to discuss the science of religion, and to be put off with a game of chess?' "'Then thou acknowledgest thyself beaten; thou hast said thou couldst play chess, yet thou darest not measure thy skill at it with me. Thy refusal proves thy lie.' "'Nay, then, since thou takest it that way, I will consent to a match, but under protest.' "So the board was brought, and the players seated themselves. Move, move, move, went the pieces; kings and queens, elephants, rooks, and knights, with the soldiers everywhere. One by one they disappeared, as the fight grew fast and furious. But Mulai Abd el Káder had another object in view than the routing of his antagonist at a game of chess. By the exercise of his superhuman power he transported the monk to 'the empty third' [of the world], while his image remained before him at the board, to all appearances still absorbed in the contest. "Meanwhile the monk could not tell where he was, but being oppressed with a sense of severe thirst, rose from where he sat, and made for a rising ground near by, whence he hoped to be able to descry some signs of vegetation, which should denote the presence of water. Giddy and tired out, he approached the top, when what was his joy to see a city surrounded by palms but a short way off! With a cry of delight he quickened his steps and approached the gate. As he did so, a party of seven men in gorgeous apparel of wool and silk came out of the gate, each with a staff in his hand. "On meeting him they offered him the salutation of the Faithful, but he did not return it. 'Who mayest _thou_ be,' they asked, 'who dost not wish peace to the Resigned?' [Muslimeen]. 'My Lords,' he made answer, 'I am a monk of the Nazarenes, I merely seek water to quench my thirst.' "'But he who comes here must resign himself [to Mohammedanism] or suffer the consequences. Testify that 'There is no god but God, and Mohammed is His Messenger!' 'Never,' he replied; and immediately they threw him on the ground and flogged him with their staves till he cried for mercy. 'Stop!' he implored. 'I will testify.' No sooner had he done so than they ceased their blows, and raising him up gave him water to drink. Then, tearing his monkish robe to shreds, each deprived himself of a garment to dress him becomingly. Having re-entered the city they repaired to the judge. "'My Lord,' they said, 'we bring before thee a brother Resigned, once a monk of the monks, now a follower of the Prophet, our lord--the prayer of God be on him, and peace. We pray thee to accept his testimony and record it in due form.' "'Welcome to thee; testify!' exclaimed the kádi, turning to the convert. Then, holding up his forefinger, the quondam monk witnessed to the truth of the Unity [of God]. 'Call for a barber!' cried the kádi; and a barber was brought. Seven Believers of repute stood round while the deed was done, and the convert rose a circumcised Muslim--blessed be God. "Then came forward a notable man of that town, pious, worthy, and rich, respected of all, who said, addressing the kádi: 'My Lord--may God bless thy days,--thou knowest, all these worthy ones know, who and what I am. In the interests of religion and to the honour of God, I ask leave to adopt this brother newly resigned. What is mine shall be his to share with my own sons, and the care I bestow on them and their education shall be bestowed equally on him. God is witness.' 'Well said; so be it,' replied the learned judge; 'henceforth he is a member of thy family.' "So to the hospitable roof of this pious one went the convert. A tutor was obtained for him, and he commenced to taste the riches of the wisdom of the Arab. Day after day he sat and studied, toiling faithfully, till teacher after teacher had to be procured, as he exhausted the stores of each in succession. So he read: first the Book 'To be Read' [the Korán], till he could repeat it faultlessly, then the works of the poets, Kálûn, el Mikki, el Bisri, and Sîdi Hamzah; then the 'Lesser' and 'Greater Ten.'[12] Then he commenced at Sîdi íbnu Ashîr, following on through the Ajrûmiyah,[13] and the Alfîyah,[14] to the commentaries of Sîdi Khalîl, of the Sheïkh el Bokhári, and of Ibnu Asîm, till there was nothing left to learn. [12: Grammarians and commentators of the Korán.] [13: A preliminary work on rhetoric.] [14: The "Thousand Verses" of grammar.] "Thus he continued growing in wisdom and honour, the first year, the second year, the third year, even to the twentieth year, till no one could compete with him. Then the Judge of Judges of that country died, and a successor was sought for, but all allowed that no one's claims equalled those of the erstwhile monk. So he was summoned to fill the post, but was disqualified as unmarried. When they inquired if he was willing to do his duty in this respect, and he replied that he was, the father of the most beautiful girl in the city bestowed her on him, and that she might not be portionless, the chief men of the place vied one with another in heaping riches upon him. So he became Judge of Judges, rich, happy, revered. "And there was born unto him one son, then a second son, and even a third son. And there was born unto him a daughter, then a second daughter, and even a third daughter. So he prospered and increased. And to his sons were born sons, one, two, three, and four, and daughters withal. And his daughters were given in marriage to the elders of that country, and with them it was likewise. "Now there came a day, a great feast day, when all his descendants came before him with their compliments and offerings, some small, some great, each receiving tenfold in return, garments of fine spun wool and silk, and other articles of value. "When the ceremony was over he went outside the town to walk alone, and approached the spot whence he had first descried what had so long since been his home. As he sat again upon that well-remembered spot, and glanced back at the many years which had elapsed since last he was there, a party of the Faithful drew near. He offered the customary salute of 'Peace be on you,' but they simply stared in return. Presently one of them brusquely asked what he was doing there, and he explained who he was. But they laughed incredulously, and then he noticed that once again he was clad in robe and cowl, with a cord round his waist. They taunted him as a liar, but he re-affirmed his statements, and related his history. He counted up the years since he had resigned himself, telling of his children and children's children. "'Wouldst thou know them if you sawst them?' asked the strangers. 'Indeed I would,' was the reply, 'but they would know me first.' "'And you are really circumcised? We'll see!' was their next exclamation. Just then a caravan appeared, wending its way across the plain, and the travellers hailed it. As he looked up at the shout, he saw Mulai Abd el Káder still sitting opposite him at the chess-board, reminding him that it was his move. He had been recounting his experiences for the last half century to Mulai Abd el Káder himself, and to the wise ones of both creeds who surrounded them! "Indeed it was too true, and he had to acknowledge that the events of a life-time had been crowded into a period undefinably minute, by the God-sent power of my lord Slave-of-the-Able [Mulai Abd el Káder]. "Now, where is the good man and true who reveres the name of this holy one? Who will say a prayer to Mulai Abd el Káder?" Here the narrator extends his palms as before, and all follow him in the motion of drawing them down his face. "In the name of the Pitying and Pitiful! Now another!" The performance is repeated. "Who is willing to yield himself wholly and entirely to Mulai Abd el Káder? Who will dedicate himself from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head? Another prayer!" Another repetition of the performance. "Now let those devoted men earn the effectual prayers of that holy one by offering their silver in his name. Nothing less than a peseta[15] will do. That's right," as one of the bystanders throws down the coin specified. [15: About eightpence, a labourer's daily wage in Tangier.] "Now let us implore the blessing of God and Mulai Abd el Káder on the head of this liberal Believer." The palm performance is once more gone through. The earnestness with which he does it this time induces more to follow suit, and blessings on them also are besought in the same fashion. "Now, my friends, which among you will do business with the palms of all these faithful ones? Pay a peseta and buy the prayers of them all. Now then, deal them out, and purchase happiness." So the appeal goes wearisomely on. As no more pesetas are seen to be forthcoming, a shift is made with reals--nominally 2-1/2_d._ pieces--the story-teller asking those who cannot afford more to make up first one dollar and then another, turning naïvely to his assistant to ask if they haven't obtained enough yet, as though it were all for them. As they reply that more is needed, he redoubles his appeals and prayers, threading his way in and out among the crowd, making direct for each well-dressed individual with a confidence which renders flight or refusal a shame. Meanwhile the "orchestra" has struck up, and only pauses when the "professor" returns to the centre of the circle to call on all present to unite in prayers for the givers. A few coppers which have been tossed to his feet are distributed scornfully amongst half a dozen beggars, in various stages of filthy wretchedness and deformity, who have collected on the ground at one side. Here a water-carrier makes his appearance, with his goat-skin "bottle" and tinkling bell--a swarthy Soudanese in most tattered garb. The players and many listeners having been duly refreshed for the veriest trifle, the performance continues. A prayer is even said for the solitary European among the crowd, on his being successfully solicited for his quota, and another for his father at the request of some of the crowd, who style him the "Friend of the Moors." At last a resort is made to coppers, and when the story-teller condescendingly consents to receive even such trifles in return for prayers, from those who cannot afford more, quite a pattering shower falls at his feet, which is supplemented by a further hand-to-hand collection. In all, between four and five dollars must have been received--not a bad remuneration for an hour's work! Already the ring has been thinning; now there is a general uprising, and in a few moments the scene is completely changed, the entertainer lost among the entertained, for the sun has disappeared below yon hill, and in a few moments night will fall. XVIII SNAKE-CHARMING "Whom a snake has bitten starts from a rope." _Moorish Proverb._ Descriptions of this art remembered in a book for boys read years before had prepared me for the most wonderful scenes, and when I first watched the performance with snakes which delights the Moors I was disappointed. Yet often as I might look on, there was nothing else to see, save in the faces and gestures of the crowd, who with child-like simplicity followed every step as though for the first time. These have for me a never-ending fascination. Thus it is that the familiar sounds of rapid and spasmodic beating on a tambourine, which tell that the charmer is collecting an audience, still prove an irresistible attraction for me as well. The ring in which I find myself is just a reproduction of that surrounding the story-teller of yester-e'en, but where his musicians sat there is a wilder group, more striking still in their appearance. This time, also, the instruments are of another class, two or three of the plainest sheep-skin tambourines with two gut strings across the centre under the parchment, which gives them a peculiar twanging sound; and a couple of reeds, mere canes pierced with holes, each provided with a mouthpiece made of half an inch of flattened reed. Nothing is needed to add to the discord as all three are vigorously plied with cheek and palm. The principal actor has an appearance of studied weirdness as he gesticulates wildly and calls on God to protect him against the venom of his pets. Contrary to the general custom of the country, he has let his black hair grow till it streams over his shoulders in matted locks. His garb is of the simplest, a dirty white shirt over drawers of similar hue completing his outfit. Selecting a convenient stone as a seat, notebook in hand, I make up my mind to see the thing through. The "music" having continued five or ten minutes with the desired result of attracting a circle of passers-by, the actual performance is now to commence. On the ground in the centre lies a spare tambourine, and on one side are the two cloth-covered bottle-shaped baskets containing the snakes. The chief charmer now advances, commencing to step round the ring with occasional beats on his tambourine, rolling his eyes and looking demented. Presently, having reached a climax of rapid beating and pacing, he suddenly stops in the centre with an extra "bang!" "Now, every man who believes in our lord Mohammed ben Aïsa,[16] say with me a Fátihah." [16: For the history of this man and his snake-charming followers see "The Moors," p. 331.] Each of the onlookers extending his palms side by side before his face, they repeat the prayer in a sing-song voice, and as it concludes with a loud "Ameen," the charmer gives an agonized cry, as though deeply wrought upon. "Ah Rijál el Blád" ("Oh Saints of the Town!"), he shouts, as he recommences his tambourining, this time even with increased vigour, beating the ground with his feet, and working his body up and down in a most extraordinary manner. The two others are also playing, and the noise is deafening. The chief figure appears to be raving mad; his starting eyes, his lithe and supple figure, and his streaming hair, give him the air of one possessed. His face is a study, a combination of fierceness and madness, yet of good-nature. At last he sinks down exhausted, but after a moment rises and advances to the centre of the circle, picking up a tambourine. "Now, Sîdi Aïsa"--turning to one of the musicians, whom he motions to cease their din--"what do you think happens to the man who puts a coin in there? Why, the holy saint, our lord Mohammed ben Aïsa, puts a ring round him like that," drawing a ring round a stone on the ground. "Is it not so?" "It is, Ameen," from Sidi Aïsa. "And what happens to him in the day time?" "He is in the hands of God, and his people too." "And in the night time?" "He is in the hands of God, and his people too." "And when at home?" "He is in the hands of God, and his people too." "And when abroad?" "He is in the hands of God, and his people too." At this a copper coin is thrown into the ring, and the charmer replies, "Now he who is master of sea and land, my lord Abd el Káder el Jîláni,[17] bless the giver of that coin! Now, for the love of God and of His blessed prophet, I offer a prayer for that generous one." Here the operation of passing their hands down their faces is performed by all. [17: The surname of the Baghdád saint.] "Now, there's another,"--as a coin falls--"and from a child, too! God bless thee now, my son. May my lord Ben Aïsa, my lord Abd es-Slám, and my lord Abd el Káder, protect and keep thee!" Then, as more coppers fall, similar blessings are invoked upon the donors, interspersed with catechising of the musicians with a view to making known the advantages to be reaped by giving something. At last, as nothing more seems to be forthcoming, the performance proper is proceeded with, and the charmer commences to dance on one leg, to a terrible din from the tambourines. Then he pauses, and summons a little boy from the audience, seating him in the midst, adjuring him to behave himself, to do as he is bid, and to have faith in "our lord Ben Aïsa." Then, seating himself behind the boy, he places his lips against his skull, and blows repeatedly, coming round to the front to look at the lad, to see if he is sufficiently affected, and returning to puff again. Finally he bites off a piece of the boy's cloak, and chews it. Now he wets his finger in his mouth, and after putting it into the dust makes lines across his legs and arms, all the time calling on his patron saint; next holding the piece of cloth in his hands and walking round the ring for all to see it. "Come hither," he says to a bystander; "search my mouth and see if there be anything there." The search is conducted as a farmer would examine a horse's mouth, with the result that it is declared empty. "Now I call on the prophet to witness that there is no deception," as he once more restores the piece of cloth to his mouth, and pokes his fingers into his neck, drawing them now up his face. "Enough!" The voices of the musicians, who have for the latter part of the time been giving forth a drawling chorus, cease, but the din of the tambourines continues, while the performer dances wildly, till he stops before the lad on the ground, and takes from his mouth first one date and then another, which the lad is told to eat, and does so, the on-lookers fully convinced that they were transformed from the rag. Now it is the turn of one of the musicians to come forward, his place being taken by the retiring performer, after he has made another collection in the manner already described. "He who believes in God and in the power of our lord Mohammed ben Aïsa, say with me a Fátihah," cries the new man, extending his palms turned upwards before him to receive the blessings he asks, and then brings one of the snake-baskets forward, plunging his hand into its sack-like mouth, and sharply drawing it out a time or two, as if afraid of being bitten. Finally he pulls the head of one of the reptiles through, and leaves it there, darting out its fangs, while he snatches up and wildly beats the tambourine by his side. He now seizes the snake by the neck, and pulls it right out, the people starting back as it coils round in the ring, or uncoils and makes a plunge towards someone. Now he pulls out another, and hangs it round his neck, saying, "I take refuge with the saint who was dead and is alive, with our lord Mohammed son of Aïsa, and with the most holy Abd el Káder el Jîláni, king of land and sea. Now, let every one who believes bear witness with me and say a Fátihah!" "Say a Fátihah!" echoes one of the still noisy musicians, by way of chorus. "Now may our lord Abd el Káder see the man who makes a contribution with his eyes." _Chorus:_ "With his eyes!" "And may his heart find rest, and our lord Abd er-Rahmán protect him!" _Chorus:_ "Protect him!" "Now, I call you to witness, I bargain with our lord Abd el Káder for a forfeit!" _Chorus:_ "For a forfeit!" A copper is thrown into the ring, and as he picks it up and hands it to the musician, the performer exclaims-- "Take this, see, and at the last day may the giver of it see our lord Abd el Káder before him!" _Chorus:_ "Before him!" "May he ever be blessed, whether present or absent!" _Chorus:_ "Present or absent!" "Who wishes to have a good conscience and a clean heart? Oh, ye beloved of the Lord! See, take from that dear one" (who has thrown down a copper). The contributions now apparently sufficing for the present, the performance proceeds, but the crowd having edged a little too close, it is first necessary to increase the space in the centre by swinging one of the reptiles round by the tail, whereat all start back. "Ah! you may well be afraid!" exclaims the charmer. "Their fangs mean death, if you only knew it, but for the mercies of my lord, the son of Aïsa." "Ameen!" responds the chorus. Hereupon he proceeds to direct the head of the snake to his mouth, and caressingly invites it to enter. Darting from side to side, it finally makes a plunge down his throat, whereon the strangers shudder, and the _habitués_ look with triumphant awe. Wildly he spins on one foot that all may see, still holding the creature by the neck with one hand, and by the tail with the other. At length, having allowed the greater part of its length to disappear in this uncanny manner, he proceeds to withdraw it, the head emerging with the sound of a cork from a bottle. The sight has not been pleasant, but the audience, transfixed, gives a sigh of relief as the tambourines strike up again, and the reed chimes in deafeningly. "Who says they are harmless? Who says their fangs are extracted?" challenges the performer. "Look here!" The seemingly angry snake has now fastened on his arm, and is permitted to draw blood, as though in reward for its recent treatment. "Is any incredulous here? Shall I try it on thee?" The individual addressed, a poverty-stricken youth whose place was doubtless required for some more promising customer behind, flees in terror, as the gaping jaws approach him. One and another having been similarly dismissed from points of vantage, and a redistribution of front seats effected, the incredulous are once more tauntingly addressed and challenged. This time the challenge is accepted by a foreigner, who hands in a chicken held by its wings. "So? Blessed be God! Its doom is sealed if it comes within reach of the snake. See here!" All eagerly press forward, many rising to their feet, and it is difficult to see over their shoulders the next gruesome act. The reptile, held by the neck in the performer's right hand, is shown the chicken in the other, and annoyed by having it poked in its face, too frightened to perceive what is happening. In a moment the fangs are shot out, and a wound inflicted in the exposed part under the wing. Blood appears, and the bird is thrown down, being held in place by the performer's foot till in a few minutes its struggles cease. Then, picking the victim up, he holds it aloft by one wing to show its condition, and exultingly calls for a Fátihah. It is enough: my patience is exhausted, and I rise to make off with stiff knees, content at last with what I have seen and heard of the "charming" of snakes in Morocco. [Illustration: _Cavilla, Photo., Tangier._ A MOROCCO FANDAK (CARAVANSARAI).] XIX IN A MOORISH CAFÉ "A little from a friend is much." _Moorish Proverb._ To the passer-by, least of all to the European, there is nothing in its external appearance to recommend old Hashmi's _café_. From the street, indeed, it is hardly visible, for it lies within the threshold of a caravansarai or fandak, in which beasts are tethered, goods accumulated and travellers housed, and of which the general appearance is that of a neglected farm-yard. Round an open court a colonnade supports the balcony by which rooms on the upper story are approached, a narrow staircase in the corner leading right up to the terraced roof. In the daytime the sole occupants of the rooms are women whose partners for the time being have securely locked them in before going to work. Beside the lofty archway forming the gate of this strange hostelry, is Hashmi's stall, at which green tea or a sweet, pea-soupy preparation of coffee may be had at all hours of the day, but the _café_ proper, gloomy by daylight, lies through the door behind. Here, of an evening, the candles lit, his regular customers gather with tiny pipes, indulging in flowing talk. Each has before him his harmless glass, as he squats or reclines on the rush-matted floor. Nothing of importance occurs in the city but is within a little made known here with as much certainty as if the proprietor subscribed to an evening paper. Any man who has something fresh to tell, who can interest or amuse the company, and by his frequent visits give the house a name, is always welcome, and will find a glass awaiting him whenever he chooses to come. Old Hashmi knows his business, and if the evening that I was there may be taken as a sample, he deserves success. That night he was in the best of humours. His house was full and trade brisk. Fattah, a negro, was keeping the house merry, so in view of coming demands, he brewed a fresh pot of real "Mekkan." The surroundings were grimy, and outside the rain came down in torrents: but that was a decided advantage, since it not only drove men indoors, but helped to keep them there. Mesaôd, the one-eyed, had finished an elaborate tuning of his two-stringed banjo, his ginbri--a home-made instrument--and was proceeding to arrive at a convenient pitch of voice for his song. With a strong nasal accent he commenced reciting the loves of Si Marzak and his fair Azîzah: how he addressed her in the fondest of language, and how she replied by caresses. When he came to the chorus they all chimed in, for the most part to their own tune and time, as they rocked to and fro, some clapping, some beating their thighs, and all applauding at the end. The whole ballad would not bear translation--for English ears,--and the scanty portion which may be given has lost its rhythm and cadence by the change, for Arabic is very soft and beautiful to those who understand it. The time has come when Azîzah, having quarrelled with Si Marzak in a fit of perhaps too well-founded jealousy, desires to "make it up again," and thus addresses her beloved-- "Oh, how I have followed thy attractiveness, And halted between give and take! Oh, how I'd from evil have protected thee By my advice, hadst thou but heeded it! Yet to-day taste, O my master, Of the love that thou hast taught to me! "Oh, how I have longed for the pleasure of thy visits, And poured out bitter tears for thee; Until at last the sad truth dawned on me That of thy choice thou didst put me aside! Yet to-day taste, O my master, Of the love that thou hast taught to me! "Thou wast sweeter than honey to me, But thou hast become more bitter than gall. Is it thus thou beginnest the world? Beware lest thou make me thy foe! Yet to-day taste, O my master, Of the love that thou hast taught to me! "I have hitherto been but a name to thee, And thou took'st to thy bosom a snake, But to-day I perceive thou'st a fancy for me: O God, I will not be deceived! Yes, to-day taste, O my master, Of the love that thou hast taught to me! "Thou know'st my complaint and my only cure: Why, then, wilt thou heal me not? Thou canst do so to-day, O my master, And save me from all further woe. Yes, to-day taste, O my master, Of the love that thou hast taught to me!" To which the hard-pressed swain replies-- "Of a truth thine eyes have bewitched me, For Death itself is in fear of them: And thine eyebrows, like two logs of wood, Have battered me each in its turn. So if thou sayest die, I'll die; And for God shall my sacrifice be! "I have neither yet died nor abandoned hope, Though slumber at night I ne'er know. With the staff of deliverance still afar off, So that all the world knows of my woe. And if thou sayest die, I'll die, But for God shall my sacrifice be!" While the singing was proceeding Sáïd and Drees had been indulging in a game of draughts, and as it ceased their voices could be heard in eager play. "Call thyself a Mallem (master). There, thy father was bewitched by a hyena; there, and there again!" shouted Sáïd, as he swept a first, a second and a third of his opponent's pieces from the board. But Drees was equal with him in another move. "So, verily, thou art my master! Let us, then, praise God for thy wisdom: thou art like indeed unto him who verily shot the fox, but who killed his own cow with the second shot! See, thus I teach thee to boast before thy betters: ha, I laugh at thee, I ride the donkey on thy head. I shave that beard of thine!" he ejaculated, taking one piece after another from his adversary, as the result of an incautious move. The board had the appearance of a well-kicked footstool, and the "men"--called "dogs" in Barbary--were more like baseless chess pawns. The play was as unlike that of Europeans as possible; the moves from "room" to "room" were of lightning swiftness, and accompanied by a running fire of slang ejaculations, chiefly sarcastic, but, on the whole, enlivened with a vein of playful humour not to be Englished politely. Just as the onlookers would become interested in the progress of one or the other, a too rapid advance by either would result in an incomprehensible wholesale clearing of the board by his opponent's sleeve. Yet without a stop the pieces would be replaced in order, and a new game commenced, the vanquished too proud to acknowledge that he did not quite see how the victor had won. Then Fattah, whose _forte_ was mimicry, attracted the attention of the company by a representation of a fat wazeer at prayers. Amid roars of laughter he succeeded in rising to his feet with the help of those beside him, who had still to lend occasional support, as his knees threatened to give way under his apparently ponderous carcase. Before and behind, his shirt was well stuffed with cushions, and the sides were not forgotten. His cheeks were puffed out to the utmost, and his eyes rolled superbly. At last the moment came for him to go on his knees, when he had to be let gently down by those near him, but his efforts to bow his head, now top-heavy with a couple of shirts for a turban, were most ludicrous, as he fell on one side in apparently vain endeavours. The spectators roared with laughter till the tears coursed down their cheeks; but that black and solemn face remained unmoved, and at the end of the prescribed motions the pseudo-great man apparently fell into slumber as heavy as himself, and snored in a style that a prize pig might have envied. "Áfuk! Áfuk!" the deafening bravos resounded, for Fattah had excelled himself, and was amply rewarded by the collection which followed. A tale was next demanded from a jovial man of Fez, who, nothing loth, began at once-- "Evening was falling as across the plain of Háhá trudged a weary traveller. The cold wind whistled through his tattered garments. The path grew dim before his eyes. The stars came out one by one, but no star of hope shone for him. He was faint and hungry. His feet were sore. His head ached. He shivered. "'May God have pity on me!' he muttered. "God heard him. A few minutes later he descried an earthly star--a solitary light was twinkling on the distant hillside. Thitherward he turned his steps. "Hope rose within him. His step grew brisk. The way seemed clear. Onward he pushed. "Presently he could make out the huts of a village. "'Thank God!' he cried; but still he had no supper. "His empty stomach clamoured. His purse was empty also. The fiendish dogs of the village yelped at him. He paused discomfited. He called. "Widow Záïdah stood before her light. "'Who's there?' "'A God-guest' "'In God's name, then, welcome! Silence there, curs!' "Abd el Hakk approached. "'God bless thee, my mother, and repay thee a thousand-fold!' "But Záïdah herself was poor. Her property consisted only of a hut and some fowls. She set before him eggs--two, hard-boiled,--bread also. He thanked God. He ate. "'Yes, God will repay,' she said. "Next day Abd el Hakk passed on to Marrákesh. There God blessed him. Years passed on; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Abd el Hakk was rich. Melûdi the lawyer disliked him. Said he to Widow Záïdah-- "'Abd el Hakk, whom once thou succouredst, is rich. The two eggs were never yet paid for. Hadst thou not given them to him they would have become two chickens. These would each have laid hundreds. Those hundreds, when hatched, would have laid their thousands. In seven years, think to what amount Abd el Hakk is indebted to thee. Sue him.' "Widow Záïdah listened. What is more, she acted. Abd el Hakk failed to appear to rebut the claim. He was worth no more. "'Why is the defendant not here?' asked the judge. "'My lord,' said his attorney, 'he is gone to sow boiled beans.' "'Boiled beans!' "'Boiled beans, my lord.' "'Is he mad?' "'He is very wise, my lord.' "'Thou mockest.' "'My lord, if boiled eggs can be hatched, sure boiled beans will grow!' "'Dismissed with costs!' "The tree that bends with every wind that blows will seldom stand upright." * * * * * A round of applause greeted the clever tale, of which the speaker's gestures had told even more than his words. But the merriment of the company only began there, for forthwith a babel of tongues was occupied in the discussion of all the points of the case, in imagining every impossible or humorous alternative, and laughter resounded on every side, as the glasses were quickly refilled with an innocent drink. XX THE MEDICINE-MAN "Wine is a key to all evil." _Moorish Proverb._ Under the glare of an African sun, its rays, however, tempered by a fresh Atlantic breeze; no roof to his consulting-room save the sky, no walls surrounding him to keep off idle starers like ourselves; by the roadside sits a native doctor of repute. His costume is that of half the crowd around, outwardly consisting of a well-worn brown woollen cloak with a hood pulled over his head, from beneath the skirts of which protrude his muddy feet. By his side lies the basket containing his supplies and less delicate instruments; the finer ones we see him draw from a capacious wallet of leather beneath his cloak. Though personally somewhat gaunt, he is nevertheless a jolly-looking character, totally free from that would-be professional air assumed by some of our medical students to hide lack of experience; for he, empiric though he be, has no idea of any of his own shortcomings, and greets us with an easy smile. He is seated on the ground, hugging his knees till his attention is drawn to us, when, observing our gaze at his lancets on the ground, he picks one up to show it. Both are of rude construction, merely pieces of flat steel filed to double-edged points, and protected by two flaps slightly bigger, in the one case of bone, in the other of brass. A loose rivet holding all together at one end completes the instrument. The brass one he says was made by a Jew in Fez out of an old clock; the other by a Jew in Marrákesh. For the purpose of making scratches for cupping he has a piece of flat steel about half an inch wide, sharpened across the end chisel-fashion. Then he has a piece of an old razor-blade tied to a stick with a string. That this is sharp he soon demonstrates by skilfully shaving an old man's head, after only damping the eighth of an inch stub with which it is covered. A stone and a bit of leather, supplemented by the calves of his legs, or his biceps, serve to keep the edges in condition. From a finger-shaped leather bag in his satchel he produces an antiquated pair of tooth extractors, a small pair of forceps for pulling out thorns, and a stiletto. The first-named article, he informs us, came from France to Tafilált, his home, _viâ_ Tlemçen; it is of the design known as "Fox's claw," and he explains to us that the difference between the French and the English article is that the one has no spring to keep the jaws open, while the other has. A far more formidable instrument is the genuine native contrivance, a sort of exaggerated corkscrew without a point. But here comes a patient to be treated. He troubles the doctor with no diagnosis, asking only to be bled. He is a youth of medium height, bronzed by the sun. Telling him to sit down and bare his right arm, the operator feels it well up and down, and then places the tips of the patient's fingers on the ground, bidding him not to move. Pouring out a little water into a metal dish, he washes the arm on the inside of the elbow, drying it with his cloak. Next he ties a piece of list round the upper arm as tightly as he can, and selecting one of the lancets, makes an incision into the vein which the washing has rendered visible. A bright stream issues, squirting into the air some fifteen inches; it is soon, however, directed into a tin soup-plate holding fourteen ounces, as we ascertained by measurement. The operator washes and dries his lancet, wraps the two in a white rag, and puts them into a piece of cane which forms an excellent case. Meanwhile the plate has filled, and he turns his attention once more to the patient. One or two passers-by have stopped, like ourselves, to look on. "I knew a man," says one, "who was being bled like that, and kept on saying, 'take a little more,' till he fell back dead in our arms." "Yes," chimes in another, "I have heard of such cases; it is very dangerous." Although the patient is evidently growing very nervous, our surgical friend affects supreme indifference to all this tittle-tattle, and after a while removes the bandage, bending the forearm inward, with the effect of somewhat checking the flow of blood. When he has bound up with list the cane that holds the lancets, he closes the forearm back entirely, so that the flow is stopped. Opening it again a little, he wipes a sponge over the aperture a few times, and closes it with his thumb. Then he binds a bit of filthy rag round the arm, twisting it above and below the elbow alternately, and crossing over the incision each time. When this is done, he sends the patient to throw away the blood and wash the plate, receiving for the whole operation the sum of three half-pence. Another patient is waiting his turn, an old man desiring to be bled behind the ears for headache. After shaving two patches for the purpose, the "bleeder," as he is justly called, makes eighteen scratches close together, about half an inch long. Over these he places a brass cup of the shape of a high Italian hat without the brim. From near the edge of this protrudes a long brass tube with a piece of leather round and over the end. This the operator sucks to create a vacuum, the moistened leather closing like a valve, which leaves the cup hanging _in situ_. Repeating this on the other side, he empties the first cup of the blood which has by this time accumulated in it, and so on alternately, till he has drawn off what appears to him to be sufficient. All that remains to be done is to wipe the wounds and receive the fee. Some years ago such a worthy as this earned quite a reputation for exorcising devils in Southern Morocco. His mode of procedure was brief, but as a rule effective. The patient was laid on the ground before the wise man's tent, face downward, and after reading certain mystic and unintelligible passages, selected from one of the ponderous tomes which form a prominent part of the "doctor's" stock-in-trade, he solemnly ordered two or three men to hold the sufferer down while two more thrashed him till they were tired. If, when released, the patient showed the least sign of returning violence, or complained that the whole affair was a fraud, it was taken as a sure sign that he had not had enough, and he was forthwith seized again and the dose repeated till he had learned that discretion was the better part of valour, and slunk off, perhaps a wiser, certainly a sadder man. It is said, and I do not doubt it--though it is more than most medical men can say of their patients--that no one was ever known to return in quest of further treatment. All this, however, is nothing compared with the Moor's love of fire as a universal panacea. Not only for his mules and his horses, but also for himself and his family, cauterization is in high repute, especially as he estimates the value of a remedy as much by its immediate and visible action as by its ultimate effects. The "fire-doctor" is therefore even a greater character in his way than the "bleeder," whom we have just visited. His outfit includes a collection of queer-shaped irons designed to cauterize different parts of the body, a portable brazier, and bellows made from a goat-skin with a piece of board at one side wherewith to press and expel the air through a tube on the other side. He, too, sits by the roadside, and disposes of his groaning though wonderfully enduring "patients" much as did his rival of the lancet. Rohlfs, a German doctor who explored parts of Morocco in the garb of a native, exercising what he could of his profession for a livelihood, tells how he earned a considerable reputation by the introduction of "cold fire" (lunar caustic) as a rival to the original style; and Pellow, an English slave who made his escape in 1735, found cayenne pepper of great assistance in ingratiating himself with the Moors in this way, and even in delaying a pursuer suffering from ophthalmia by blowing a little into his eyes before his identity was discovered. In extenuation of this trick, however, it must be borne in mind that cayenne pepper is an accredited Moorish remedy for ophthalmia, being placed on the eyelids, though it is only a mixture of canary seed and sugar that is blown in. Every European traveller in Morocco is supposed to know something about medicine, and many have been my own amusing experiences in this direction. Nothing that I used gave me greater fame than a bottle of oil of cantharides, the contents of which I applied freely behind the ears or upon the temples of such victims of ophthalmia as submitted themselves to my tender mercies. Only I found that when my first patient began to dance with the joy and pain of the noble blister which shortly arose, so many people fancied they needed like treatment that I was obliged to restrict the use of so popular a cure to special cases. One branch of Moroccan medicine consists in exorcising devils, of which a most amusing instance once came under my notice. An English gentleman gave one of his servants who complained of being troubled with these unwelcome guests two good-sized doses of tartaric acid and carbonate of soda a second apart. The immediate exit of the devil was so apparent that the fame of the prescriber as a medical man was made at once. But many of the cases which the amateur is called upon to treat are much more difficult to satisfy than this. Superstition is so strongly mingled with the native ideas of disease,--of being possessed,--that the two can hardly be separated. During an epidemic of cholera, for instance, the people keep as close as possible to walls, and avoid sand-hills, for fear of "catching devils." All disease is indeed more or less ascribed to satanic agency, and in Morocco that practitioner is most in repute who claims to attack this cause of the malady rather than its effect. Although the Moors have a certain rudimentary acquaintance with simple medicinal agents--and how rudimentary that acquaintance is, will better appear from what is to follow,--in all their pharmacop[oe]ia no remedy is so often recommended or so implicitly relied on as the "writing" of a man of reputed sanctity. Such a writing may consist merely of a piece of paper scribbled over with the name of God, or with some sentence from the Korán, such as, "And only God is the Healer," repeated many times, or in special cases it may contain a whole series of pious expressions and meaningless incantations. For an ordinary external complaint, such as general debility arising from the evil eye of a neighbour or a jealous wife, or as a preventative against bewitchment, or as a love philtre, it is usually considered sufficient to wear this in a leather bag around the neck or forehead; but in case of unfathomable internal disease, such as indigestion, the "writing" is prescribed to be divided into so many equal portions, and taken in a little water night and morning. The author of these potent documents is sometimes a hereditary saint descended from Mohammed, sometimes a saint whose sanctity arises from real or assumed insanity--for to be mad in Barbary is to have one's thoughts so occupied with things of heaven as to have no time left for things of earth,--and often they are written by ordinary public scribes, or schoolmasters, for among the Moors reading and religion are almost synonymous terms. There are, however, a few professional gentlemen who dispense these writings among their drugs. Such alone of all their quacks aspire to the title of "doctor." Most of these spend their time wandering about the country from fair to fair, setting up their tents wherever there are patients to be found in sufficient numbers. Attired as natives, let us visit one. Arrived at the tent door, we salute the learned occupant with the prescribed "Salám oo alaïkum" ("To you be peace"), to which, on noting our superior costumes, he replies with a volley of complimentary inquiries and welcomes. These we acknowledge with dignity, and with as sedate an air as possible. We leisurely seat ourselves on the ground in orthodox style, like tailors. As it would not be good form to mention our business at once, we defer professional consultation till we have inquired successfully after his health, his travels, and the latest news at home and from abroad. In the course of conversation he gives us to understand that he is one of the Sultan's uncles, which is by no means impossible in a country where it has not been an unknown thing for an imperial father to lose count of his numerous progeny. Feeling at last that we have broken the ice, we turn the conversation to the subject of our supposed ailments. My own complaint is a general internal disorder resulting in occasional feverishness, griping pains, and loss of sleep. After asking a number of really sensible questions, such as would seem to place him above the ordinary rank of native practitioners, he gravely announces that he has "the very thing" in the form of a powder, which, from its high virtues, and the exceeding number of its ingredients, some of them costly, is rather expensive. We remember the deference with which our costumes were noted, and understand. But, after all, the price of a supply is announced to be only seven-pence halfpenny. The contents of some of the canisters he shows us include respectively, according to his account, from twenty to fifty drugs. For our own part, we strongly suspect that all are spices to be procured from any Moorish grocer. Together with the prescription I receive instructions to drink the soup from a fat chicken in the morning, and to eat its flesh in the evening; to eat hot bread and drink sweet tea, and to do as little work as possible, the powder to be taken daily for a fortnight in a little honey. Whatever else he may not know, it is evident that our doctor knows full well how to humour his patients. The next case is even more easy of treatment than mine, a "writing" only being required. On a piece of very common paper two or three inches square, the doctor writes something of which the only legible part is the first line: "In the name of God, the Pitying, the Pitiful," followed, we subsequently learn, by repetitions of "Only God is the Healer." For this the patient is to get his wife to make a felt bag sewed with coloured silk, into which the charm is to be put, along with a little salt and a few parings of garlic, after which it is to be worn round his neck for ever. Sometimes, in wandering through Morocco, one comes across much more curious remedies than these, for the worthy we have just visited is but a commonplace type in this country. A medical friend once met a professional brother in the interior who had a truly original method of proving his skill. By pressing his finger on the side of his nose close to his eye, he could send a jet of liquid right into his interlocutor's face, a proceeding sufficient to satisfy all doubts as to his alleged marvellous powers. On examination it was found that he had a small orifice near the corner of the eye, through which the pressure forced the lachrymal fluid, pure tears, in fact. This is just an instance of the way in which any natural defect or peculiarity is made the most of by these wandering empirics, to impose on their ignorant and credulous victims. Even such of them as do give any variety of remedies are hardly more to be trusted. Whatever they give, their patients like big doses, and are not content without corresponding visible effects. Epsom salts, which are in great repute, are never given to a man in less quantities than two tablespoonfuls. On one occasion a poor woman came to me suffering from ague, and looking very dejected. I mixed this quantity of salts in a tumblerful of water, with a good dose of quinine, bidding her drink two-thirds of it, and give the remainder to her daughter, who evidently needed it as much as she did. Her share was soon disposed of with hardly more than a grimace, to the infinite enjoyment of a fat, black slave-girl who was standing by, and who knew from personal experience what a tumblerful meant. But to induce the child to take hers was quite another matter. "What! not drink it?" the mother cried, as she held the potion to her lips. "The devil take thee, thou cursed offspring of an abandoned woman! May God burn thy ancestors!" But though the child, accustomed to such mild and motherly invectives, budged not, it had proved altogether too much for the jovial slave, who was by this time convulsed with laughter, and so, I may as well confess, was I. At last the woman's powers of persuasion were exhausted, and she drained the glass herself. When in Fez some years ago, a dog I had with me needed dosing, so I got three drops of croton oil on sugar made ready for him. Mine host, a man of fifty or more, came in meanwhile, and having ascertained the action of the drug from my servant, thought it might possibly do him good, and forthwith swallowed it. Of this the first intimation I had was from the agonizing screams of the old man, who loudly proclaimed that his last hour was come, and from the terrified wails of the females of his household, who thought so too. When I saw him he was rolling on the tiles of the courtyard, his heels in the air, bellowing frantically. I need hardly dilate upon the relief I felt when at last we succeeded in alleviating his pain, and knew that he was out of danger. Among the favourite remedies of Morocco, hyena's head powder ranks high as a purge, and the dried bones and flesh may often be seen in the native spice-shops, coated with dust as they hang. Some of the prescriptions given are too filthy to repeat, almost to be believed. As a specimen, by no means the worst, I may mention a recipe at one time in favour among the Jewesses of Mogador, according to one writer. This was to drink seven draughts from the town drain where it entered the sea, beaten up with seven eggs. For diseases of the "heart," by which they mean the stomach and liver, and of eyes, joints, etc., a stone, which is found in an animal called the horreh, the size of a small walnut, and valued as high as twelve dollars, is ground up and swallowed, the patient thereafter remaining indoors a week. Ants, prepared in various ways, are recommended for lethargy, and lion's flesh for cowardice. Privet or mallow leaves, fresh honey, and chameleons split open alive, are considered good for wounds and sores, while the fumes from the burning of the dried body of this animal are often inhaled. Among more ordinary remedies are saraparilla, senna, and a number of other well-known herbs and roots, whose action is more or less understood. Roasted pomegranate rind in powder is found really effectual in dysentery and diarrh[oe]a. Men and women continually apply for philtres, and women for means to prevent their husbands from liking rival wives, or for poison to put them out of the way. As arsenic, corrosive sublimate, and other poisons are sold freely to children in every spice-shop, the number of unaccounted-for deaths is extremely large, but inquiry is seldom or never made. When it is openly averred that So-and-so died from "a cup of tea," the only mental comment seems to be that she was very foolish not to be more careful what she drank, and to see that whoever prepared it took the first sip according to custom. The highest recommendation of any particular dish or spice is that it is "heating." Great faith is also placed in certain sacred rocks, tree-stumps, etc., which are visited in the hope of obtaining relief from all sorts of ailments. Visitors often leave rags torn from their garments by which to be remembered by the guardian of the place. Others repair to the famous sulphur springs of Zarhôn, supposed to derive their benefit from the interment close by of a certain St. Jacob--and dance in the waters, yelling without intermission, "Cold and hot, O my lord Yakoob! Cold and hot!" fearful lest any cessation of the cry might permit the temperature to be increased or diminished beyond the bearable point. XXI THE HUMAN MART "Who digs a pit for his brother will fall into it." _Moorish Proverb._ The slave-market differs in no respect from any other in Morocco, save in the nature of the "goods" exposed. In most cases the same place is used for other things at other times, and the same auctioneers are employed to sell cattle. The buyers seat themselves round an open courtyard, in the closed pens of which are the slaves for sale. These are brought out singly or in lots, inspected precisely as cattle would be, and expatiated upon in much the same manner. For instance, here comes a middle-aged man, led slowly round by the salesman, who is describing his "points" and noting bids. He has first-class muscles, although he is somewhat thin. He is made to lift a weight to prove his strength. His thighs are patted, and his lips are turned to show the gums, which at merrier moments would have been visible without such a performance. With a shame-faced, hang-dog air he trudges round, wondering what will be his lot, though a sad one it is already. At last he is knocked down for so many score of dollars, and after a good deal of further bargaining he changes hands. The next brought forward are three little girls--a "job lot," maybe ten, thirteen, and sixteen years of age--two of them evidently sisters. They are declared to be already proficient in Arabic, and ready for anything. Their muscles are felt, their mouths examined, and their bodies scrutinized in general, while the little one begins to cry, and the others look as though they would like to keep her company. Round and round again they are marched, but the bids do not rise high enough to effect a sale, and they are locked up again for a future occasion. It is indeed a sad, sad sight. The sources of supply for the slave-market are various, but the chief is direct from Guinea and the Sáhara, where the raids of the traders are too well understood to need description. Usually some inter-tribal jealousy is fostered and fanned into a flame, and the one which loses is plundered of men and goods. Able-bodied lads and young girls are in most demand, and fetch high prices when brought to the north. The unfortunate prisoners are marched with great hardship and privation to depôts over the Atlas, where they pick up Arabic and are initiated into Mohammedanism. To a missionary who once asked one of the dealers how they found their way across the desert, the terribly significant reply was, "There are many bones along the way!" After a while the survivors are either exposed for sale in the markets of Marrákesh or Fez, or hawked round from door to door in the coast towns, where public auctions are prohibited. Some have even found their way to Egypt and Constantinople, having been transported in British vessels, and landed at Gibraltar as members of the dealer's family! Another source of supply is the constant series of quarrels between the tribes of Morocco itself, during which many children are carried off who are white or nearly so. In this case the victims are almost all girls, for whom good prices are to be obtained. This opens a door for illegal supplies, children born of slaves and others kidnapped being thus disposed of for hareems. For this purpose the demand for white girls is much in excess of that for black, so that great temptation is offered. I knew a man who had seventeen such in his house, and of nearly a dozen whom I saw there, none were too dark to have passed for English brunettes. Though nothing whatever can be said in defence of this practice of tearing our fellow-men from their homes, and selling them as slaves, our natural feelings of horror abate considerably when we become acquainted with its results under the rule of Islám. Instead of the fearful state of things which occurred under English or American rule, it is a pleasure to find that, whatever may be the shortcomings of the Moors, in this case, at any rate, they have set us a good example. Even their barbarous treatment of Christian slaves till within a century was certainly no worse than our treatment of black slaves. To begin with, Mohammedans make no distinction in civil or religious rights between a black skin and a white. So long as a man avows belief in no god but God, and in Mohammed as the prophet of God, complying with certain outward forms of his religion, he is held to be as good a Muslim as anyone else; and as the whole social and civil fabrics are built upon religion and the teachings of the Korán, the social position of every well-behaved Mohammedan is practically equal. The possession of authority of any kind will naturally command a certain amount of respectful attention, and he who has any reason for seeking a favour from another is sure to adopt a more subservient mien; but beyond this, few such class distinctions are known as those common in Europe. The slave who, away from home, can behave as a gentleman, will be received as such, irrespective of his colour, and when freed he may aspire to any position under the Sultan. There are, indeed, many instances of black men having been ministers, governors, and even ambassadors to Europe, and such appointments are too common to excite astonishment. They have even, in the past, assisted in giving rise to the misconception that the people of Morocco were "Black-a-Moors." In many households the slave becomes the trusted steward of his owner, and receives a sufficient allowance to live in comfort. He will possess a paper giving him his freedom on his master's death, and altogether he will have a very good time of it. The liberation of slaves is enjoined upon those who follow Mohammed as a most praiseworthy act, and as one which cannot fail to bring its own reward. But, like too many in our own land, they more often prefer to make use of what they possess till they start on that journey on which they can take nothing with them, and then affect generosity by bestowing upon others that over which they lose control. One poor fellow whom I knew very well, who had been liberated on the death of his master, having lost his papers, was re-kidnapped and sold again to a man who was subsequently imprisoned for fraud, when he got free and worked for some years as porter; but he was eventually denounced and put in irons in a dungeon as part of the property of his _soi-disant_ master. The ordinary place of the slave is much that of the average servant, but receiving only board, lodging, and scanty clothing, without pay, and being unable to change masters. Sometimes, however, they are permitted to beg or work for money to buy their own freedom, when they become, as it were, their own masters. On the whole, a jollier, harder-working, or better-tempered lot than these Negroes it would be hard to desire, and they are as light-hearted, fortunately, as true-hearted, even in the midst of cruel adversities. The condition of a woman slave--to which, also, most of what has been said refers--is as much behind that of a man-slave as is that of a free-woman behind that of her lord. If she becomes her master's wife, the mother of a child, she is thereby freed, though she must remain in his service until his death, and she is only treated as an animal, not as a human being. After all, there is a dark side--one sufficiently dark to need no intensifying. The fact of one man being the possessor of another, just as much as he could be of a horse or cow, places him in the same position with regard to his "chattel" as to such a four-footed animal. "The merciful man is merciful to his beast," but "the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel," and just as one man will ill-treat his beast, while another treats his well, so will one man persecute his slave. Instances of this are quite common enough, and here and there cases could be brought forward of revolting brutality, as in the story which follows, but the great thing is that agricultural slavery is practically unknown, and that what exists is chiefly domestic. "Know the slave," says an Arab proverb, "and you know the master." [Illustration: _Freyonne, Photo., Gibraltar._ RABBAH, NARRATOR OF THE SLAVE-GIRL'S STORY.] XXII A SLAVE-GIRL'S STORY "After many adversities, joy." _Moorish Proverb._ Outside the walls of Mazagan an English traveller had pitched his camp. Night had fallen when one of his men, returning from the town, besought admission to the tent. "Well, how now?" "Sir, I have a woman here, by thy leave, yes, a woman, a slave, whom I found at the door of thy consulate, where she had taken refuge, but the police guard drove her away, so I brought her to thee for justice. Have pity on her, and God will reward thee! See, here! Rabhah!" At this bidding there approached a truly pitiable object, a dark-skinned woman, not quite black, though of decidedly negroid appearance--whose tattered garments scarcely served to hide a half-starved form. Throwing herself on the ground before the foreigner, she begged his pity, his assistance, for the sake of the Pitiful God. "Oh, Bashador," she pleaded, addressing him as though a foreign envoy, "I take refuge with God and with thee! I have no one else. I have fled from my master, who has cruelly used me. See my back!" Suiting action to word, she slipped aside the coverings from her shoulder and revealed the weals of many a stripe, tears streaming down her face the while. Her tones were such as none but a heart of stone could ignore. "I bore it ten days, sir, till I could do so no longer, and then I escaped. It was all to make me give false witness--from which God deliver me--for that I will never do. My present master is the Sheïkh bin Záharah, Lieutenant Kaïd of the Boo Azeezi, but I was once the slave-wife of the English agent, who sold me again, though they said that he dare not, because of his English protection. That was why I fled for justice to the English consul, and now come to thee. For God's sake, succour me!" With a sob her head fell forward on her breast, as again she crouched at the foreigner's feet, till made to rise and told to relate her whole story quietly. When she was calmer, aided by questions, she unfolded a tale which could, alas! be often paralleled in Morocco. "My home? How can I tell thee where that was, when I was brought away so early? All I know is that it was in the Sûdán" (_i.e._ Land of the Blacks), "and that I came to Mogador on my mother's back. In my country the slave-dealers lie in wait outside the villages to catch the children when they play. They put them in bags like those used for grain, with their heads left outside the necks for air. So they are carried off, and travel all the way to this country slung on mules, being set down from time to time to be fed. But I, though born free, was brought by my mother, who had been carried off as a slave. The lines cut on my cheek show that, for every free-born child in our country is marked so by its mother. That is our sultan's order. In Mogador my mother's master sold me to a man who took me from her, and brought me to Dár el Baïda. They took away my mother first; they dragged her off crying, and I never saw or heard of her again. When she was gone I cried for her, and could not eat till they gave me sugar and sweet dates. At Dár el Baïda I was sold in the market auction to a shareefa named Lálla Moïna, wife of the mountain scribe who taught the kádi's children. With her I was very happy, for she treated me well, and when she went to Mekka on the pilgrimage she let me go out to work on my own account, promising to make me free if God brought her back safely. She was good to me, Bashador, but though she returned safely she always put off making me free; but I had laid by fifteen dollars, and had bought a boxful of clothes as well. And that was where my trouble began. For God's sake succour me! "One day the agent saw me in the street, and eyed me so that I was frightened of him. He followed me home, and then sent a letter offering to buy me, but my mistress refused. Then the agent often came to the house, and I had to wait upon him. He told me that he wanted to buy me, and that if he did I should be better off than if I were free, but I refused to listen. When the agent was away his man Sarghîni used to come and try to buy me, but in vain; and when the agent returned he threatened to bring my mistress into trouble if she refused. At last she had to yield, and I cried when I had to go. 'Thou art sold to that man,' she said; 'but as thou art a daughter to me, he has promised to take care of thee and bring thee back whenever I wish.' "Sarghîni took me out by one gate with the servants of the agent, who took care to go out with a big fat Jew by another, that the English consul should not see him go out with a woman. We rode on mules, and I wore a white cloak; I had not then begun to fast" (_i.e._ was not yet twelve years of age). "After two days on the road the agent asked for the key of my box, in which he found my fifteen dollars, tied up in a rag, and took them, but gave me back my clothes. We were five days travelling to Marrákesh, staying each night with a kaïd who treated us very well. So I came to the agent's house. "There I found many other slave girls, besides men slaves in the garden. These were Ruby, bought in Saffi, by whom the agent had a daughter; and Star, a white girl stolen from her home in Sûs, who had no children; Jessamine the Less, another white girl bought in Marrákesh, mother of one daughter; Jessamine the Greater, whose daughter was her father's favourite, loaded with jewels; and others who cooked or served, not having children, though one had a son who died. There were thirteen of us under an older slave who clothed and fed us. "When the bashador came to the house the agent shut all but five or six of us in a room, the others waiting on him. I used to have to cook for the bashador, for whom they had great receptions with music and dancing-women. Next door there was a larger house, a fandak, where the agent kept public women and boys, and men at the door took money from the Muslims and Nazarenes who went there. The missionaries who lived close by know the truth of what I say. "A few days after I arrived I was bathed and dressed in fresh clothes, and taken to my master's room, as he used to call for one or another according to fancy. But I had no child, because he struck me, and I was sick. When one girl, named Amber, refused to go to him because she was ill, he dragged her off to another part of the house. Presently we heard the report of a pistol, and he came back to say she was dead. He had a pistol in his hand as long as my forearm. We found the girl in a pool of blood in agonies, and tried to flee, but had nowhere to go. So when she was quite dead he made us wash her. Then he brought in four men to dig a pit, in which he said he would bury butter. When they had gone we buried her there, and I can show you the spot. "One day he took two men slaves and me on a journey. One of them ran away, the other was sold by the way. I was sold at the Tuesday market of Sîdi bin Nûr to a dealer in slaves, whom I heard promise my master to keep me close for three months, and not to sell me in that place lest the Nazarenes should get word of it. Some time after I was bought by a tax-collector, with whom I remained till he died, and then lived in the house of his son. This man sold me to my present master, who has ill-treated me as I told thee. Oh, Bashador, when I fled from him, I came to the English consul because I was told that the agent had had no right to hold or sell me, since he had English protection. Thou knowest what has happened since. Here I am, at thy feet, imploring assistance. I beseech thee, turn me not away. I speak truth before God." No one could hear such a tale unmoved, and after due inquiry the Englishman thus appealed to secured her liberty on depositing at the British Consulate the $140 paid for her by her owner, who claimed her or the money. Rabhah's story, taken down by independent persons at different times, was afterwards told by her without variation in a British Court of Law. Subsequently a pronouncement as to her freedom having been made by the British Legation at Tangier, the $140 was refunded, and she lives free to-day. The last time the writer saw her, in the service of a European in Morocco, he was somewhat taken aback to find her arms about his neck, and to have kisses showered on his shoulders for the unimportant part that he had played in securing her freedom. XXIII THE PILGRIM CAMP "Work for the children is better than pilgrimage or holy war." _Moorish Proverb._ Year by year the month succeeding the fast of Ramadán sees a motley assemblage of pilgrims bound for Mekka, gathered at most of the North African ports from all parts of Barbary and even beyond, awaiting vessels bound for Alexandria or Jedda. This comparatively easy means of covering the distance, which includes the whole length of the Mediterranean when the pilgrims from Morocco are concerned--not to mention some two-thirds of the Red Sea,--has almost entirely superseded the original method of travelling all the way by land, in the once imposing caravans. These historic institutions owed their importance no less to the facilities they offered for trade, than to the opportunity they afforded for accomplishing the pilgrimage which is enjoined on every follower of Mohammed. Although caravans still cross the deserts of North Africa in considerable force from west to east, as well as from south to north, to carry on the trade of the countries to the south of the Barbary States, the former are steadily dwindling down to mere local affairs, and the number of travellers who select the modern route by steamer is yearly increasing, as its advantages become better known. For the accommodation of the large number of passengers special vessels are chartered by speculators, and are fitted up for the occasion. Only some £3 are charged for the whole journey from Tangier, a thousand pilgrims being crowded on a medium-sized merchant vessel, making the horrors of the voyage indescribable. But the troubles of the pilgrims do not begin here. Before they could even reach the sea some of them will have travelled on foot for a month from remote parts of the interior, and at the coast they may have to endure a wearisome time of waiting for a steamer. It is while they are thus learning a lesson of patience at one of the Moorish ports that I will invite you for a stroll round their encampment on the market-place. This consists of scores of low, makeshift tents, with here and there a better-class round one dotted amongst them. The prevailing shape of the majority is a modified edition of the dwelling of the nomad Arab, to which class doubtless belongs a fair proportion of their occupants. Across the top of two poles about five feet high, before and behind, a ridge-piece is placed, and over this is stretched to the ground on either side a long piece of palmetto or goat-hair cloth, or perhaps one of the long woollen blankets worn by men and women alike, called haïks, which will again be used for its original purpose on board the vessel. The back is formed of another piece of some sort of cloth stretched out at the bottom to form a semi-circle, and so give more room inside. Those who have a bit of rug or a light mattress, spread it on the floor, and pile their various other belongings around its edge. The straits to which many of these poor people are put to get a covering of any kind to shelter them from sun, rain, and wind, are often very severe, to judge from some of the specimens of tents--if they deserve the name--constructed of all sorts of odds and ends, almost anything, it would seem, that will cover a few square inches. There is one such to be seen on this busy market which deserves special attention as a remarkable example of this style of architecture. Let us examine it. The materials of which it is composed include hair-cloth, woollen-cloth, a cotton shirt, a woollen cloak, and some sacking; goat skin, sheep's fleece, straw, and palmetto cord; rush mats, a palmetto mat, split-cane baskets and wicker baskets; bits of wood, a piece of cork, bark and sticks; petroleum tins flattened out, sheet iron, zinc, and jam and other tins; an earthenware dish and a stone bottle, with bits of crockery, stones, and a cow's horn to weight some of the other items down. Now, if any one can make anything of this, which is an exact inventory of such of the materials as are visible on the outside, he must be a born architect. Yet here this extraordinary construction stands, as it has stood for several months, and its occupant looks the jolliest fellow out. Let us pay him a visit. Stooping down to look under the flap which serves as a door, and raising it with my stick, I greet him with the customary salutation of "Peace be with you." "With you be peace," is the cheery reply, to which is added, "Welcome to thee; make thyself at home." Although invited to enter, I feel quite enough at home on the outside of his dwelling, so reply that I have no time to stay, as I only "looked in" to have the pleasure of making his acquaintance and examining his "palace." At the last word one or two bystanders who have gathered round indulge in a little chuckle to themselves, overhearing which I turn round and make the most flattering remarks I can think of as to its beauty, elegance, comfort, and admirable system of ventilation, which sets the whole company, tenant included, into a roar of laughter. Mine host is busy cleaning fish, and now presses us to stay and share his evening meal with him, but our appetites are not quite equal to _that_ yet, though it is beyond doubt that the morsel he would offer us would be as savoury and well cooked as could be supplied by any restaurant in Piccadilly. Inquiries elicit the fact that our friend is hoping to leave for Mekka by the first steamer, and that meanwhile he supports himself as a water-carrier, proudly showing us his goat-skin "bottle" lying on the floor, with the leather flap he wears between it and his side to protect him from the damp. Here, too, are his chain and bell, with the bright brass and tin cups. In fact, he is quite a "swell" in his way, and, in spite of his uncouth-looking surroundings, manages to enjoy life by looking on the bright side of things. "What will you do with your palace when you leave it?" we ask, seeing that it could not be moved unless the whole were jumbled up in a sack, when it would be impossible to reconstruct it. "Oh, I'd let it to some one else." "For how much?" "Well, that I'd leave to God." A glance round the interior of this strange abode shows that there are still many materials employed in its construction which might have been enumerated. One or two bundles, a box and a basket round the sides, serve to support the roof, and from the ridge-pole hangs a bundle which we are informed contains semolina. I once saw such a bundle suspended from a beam in a village mosque in which I had passed the night in the guise of a pious Muslim, and, observing its dusty condition, inquired how it came there. "A traveller left it there about a year and a half ago, and has not yet come for it," was the reply; to judge from which it might remain till Doomsday--a fact which spoke well for the honesty of the country folk in that respect at least, although I learned that they were notorious highwaymen. Though the roof admits daylight every few inches, the occupier remarks that it keeps the sun and rain off fairly well, and seems to think none the worse of it for its transparent faults. A sick woman lying in a native hut with a thatched roof hardly in better condition than this one, remarked when a visitor observed a big hole just above her pallet bed-- "Oh, it's so nice in the summer time; it lets the breeze in so delightfully!" It was then the depth of winter, and she had had to shift her position once or twice to avoid the rain which came through that hole. What a lesson in making the best of things did not that ignorant invalid teach! Having bid the amiable water-carrier "à Dieu,"--literally as well as figuratively--we turn towards a group of tents further up, whence a white-robed form has been beckoning us. After the usual salutations have been exchanged, the eager inquiry is made, "Is there a steamer yet?" "No; I've nothing to do with steamers--but there's sure to be one soon." A man who evidently disbelieves me calls out, "I've got my money for the passage, and I'll hire a place with you, only bring the ship quickly." Since their arrival in Tangier they have learnt to call a steamer, which they have never seen before,--or even the sea,--a "bábor," a corruption of the Spanish "vapor," for Arabic knows neither "v" nor "p." Another now comes forward to know if there is an eye-doctor in the place, for there is a mist before his eyes, as he is well-advanced in the decline of life. The sound of the word "doctor" brings up a few more of the bystanders, who ask if I am one, and as I reply in the negative, they ask who can cure their ears, legs, stomachs, and what not. I explain where they may find an excellent doctor, who will be glad to do all he can for them gratis--whereat they open their eyes incredulously,--and that for God's sake, in the name of Seyïdná Aïsa ("Our Lord Jesus"), which they appreciate at once with murmurs of satisfaction, though they are not quite satisfied until they have ascertained by further questioning that he receives no support from his own or any other government. Hearing the name of Seyïdná Aïsa, one of the group breaks out into "El hamdu l'Illah, el hamdu l'Illah" ("Praise be to God"), a snatch of a missionary hymn to a "Moody and Sankey" tune, barely recognizable as he renders it. He has only been here a fortnight, and disclaims all further knowledge of the hymn or where he heard it. Before another tent hard by sits a native barber, bleeding a youth from a vein in the arm, for which the fee is about five farthings. As one or two come round to look on, he remarks, in an off-hand way--probably with a view to increasing his practice--that "all the pilgrims are having this done; it's good for the internals." As we turn round to pass between two of the tents to the row beyond, our progress is stayed by a cord from the ridge of one to that of another, on which are strung strips of what appear at first sight to be leather, but on a closer inspection are found to be pieces of meat, tripe, and apparently chitterlings, hung out to dry in a sun temperature of from 90° to 100° Fahrenheit. Thus is prepared a staple article of diet for winter consumption when fresh meat is dear, or for use on journeys, and this is all the meat these pilgrims will taste till they reach Mekka, or perhaps till they return. Big jars of it, with the interstices filled up with butter, are stowed away in the tents "among the stuff." It is called "khalia," and is much esteemed for its tasty and reputed aphrodisiac qualities--two ideals in Morocco cookery,--so that it commands a relatively good price in the market. The inmates of the next tent we look into are a woman and two men, lying down curled up asleep in their blankets, while a couple more of the latter squat at the door. Having noticed our curious glances at their khalia, they, with the expressive motion of the closed fist which in native gesture-parlance signifies first-rate, endeavour to impress us with a sense of its excellence, which we do not feel inclined to dispute after all we have eaten on former occasions. This brings us to inquire what else these wanderers provide for the journey of thirteen or fourteen days one way. As bread is not to be obtained on board, at the door of the tent a tray-full of pieces are being converted into sun-dried rusks. Others are provided with a kind of very hard doughnut called "fikáks." These are flavoured with anise and carraway seeds, and are very acceptable to a hungry traveller when bread is scarce, though fearfully searching to hollow teeth. Then there is a goodly supply of the national food, kesk'soo or siksoo, better known by its Spanish name of couscoussoo. This forms an appetizing and lordly dish, provocative of abundant eructations--a sign of good breeding in these parts, wound up with a long-drawn "Praise be to God"--at the close of a regular "tuck in" with Nature's spoon, the fist. A similar preparation is hand-rolled vermicelli, cooked in broth or milk, if obtainable. A bag of semolina and another of zummeetah--parched flour--which only needs enough moisture to form it into a paste to prepare it for consumption, are two other well-patronized items. A quaint story comes to mind _à propos_ of the latter, which formed part of our stock of provisions during a journey through the province of Dukkála when the incident in question occurred. A tin of insect powder was also among our goods, and by an odd coincidence both were relegated to the pail hanging from one of our packs. Under a spreading fig-tree near the village of Smeerah, at lunch, some travelling companions offered us a cup of tea, and among other dainties placed at their disposal in return was the bag of zummeetah, of which one of them made a good meal. Later on in the day, as we rested again, he complained of fearful internal gripings, which were easily explained by the discovery of the fact that the lid of the "flea's zummeetah," as one of our men styled it, had been left open, and a hole in the sack of "man's zummeetah" had allowed the two to mix in the bottom of the pail in nearly equal proportions. When this had been explained, no one entered more heartily into the joke than its victim, which spoke very well for his good temper, considering how seriously he had been affected. But this is rather a digression from our catalogue of the pilgrim's stock of provisions. Rancid butter melted down in pots, honey, dates, figs, raisins, and one or two similar items form the remainder. Water is carried in goat-skins or in pots made of the dried rind of a gourd, by far the most convenient for a journey, owing to their light weight and the absence of the prevailing taste of pitch imparted by the leather contrivances. Several of these latter are to be seen before the tents hanging on tripods. One of the Moors informs us that for the first day on board they have to provide their own water, after which it is found for them, but everything else they take with them. An ebony-hued son of Ham, seated by a neighbouring tent, replies to our query as to what he is providing, "I take nothing," pointing heavenward to indicate his reliance on Divine providence. And so they travel. The group before us has come from the Sáhara, a month's long journey overland, on foot! Yet their travels have only commenced. Can they have realized what it all means? [Illustration: _Cavilla, Photo., Tangier._ WAITING FOR THE STEAMER.] XXIV RETURNING HOME "He lengthened absence, and returned unwelcomed." _Moorish Proverb._ Evening is about to fall--for fall it does in these south latitudes, with hardly any twilight--and the setting sun has lit the sky with a refulgent glow that must be gazed at to be understood--the arc of heaven overspread with glorious colour, in its turn reflected by the heaving sea. One sound alone is heard as I wend my way along the sandy shore; it is the heavy thud and aftersplash of each gigantic wave, as it breaks on the beach, and hurls itself on its retreating predecessor, each climbing one step higher than the last. There, in the distance, stands a motley group--men, women, children--straining wearied eyes to recognize the forms which crowd a cargo lighter slowly nearing land. Away in the direction of their looks I dimly see the outline of the pilgrim ship, a Cardiff coaler, which has brought close on a thousand Hájes from Port Saïd or Alexandria--men chiefly, but among them wives and children--who have paid that toilsome pilgrimage to Mekka. The last rays of the sun alone remain as the boat strikes the shore, and as the darkness falls apace a score of dusky forms make a wild rush into the surging waters, while an equal number rise up eager in the boat to greet their friends. So soon as they are near enough to be distinguished one from another, each watcher on the beach shouts the name of the friend he is awaiting, proud to affix, for the first time, the title Háj--Pilgrim--to his name. As only some twenty or thirty have yet landed from among so many hundreds, the number of disappointed ones who have to turn back and bide their time is proportionately large. "Háj Mohammed! Háj Abd es-Slám! Háj el Arbi! Háj boo Sháïb! Ah, Háj Drees!" and many such ejaculations burst from their lips, together with inquiries as to whether So-and-so may be on board. One by one the weary travellers once more step upon the land which is their home, and with assistance from their friends unload their luggage. Now a touching scene ensues. Strong men fall on one another's necks like girls, kissing and embracing with true joy, each uttering a perfect volley of inquiries, compliments, congratulations, or condolence. Then, with child-like simplicity, the stayer-at-home leads his welcome relative or friend by the hand to the spot where his luggage has been deposited, and seating themselves thereon they soon get deep into a conversation which renders them oblivious to all around, as the one relates the wonders of his journeyings, the other the news of home. Poor creatures! Some months ago they started, full of hope, on an especially trying voyage of several weeks, cramped more closely than emigrants, exposed both to sun and rain, with hardly a change of clothing, and only the food they had brought with them. Arrived at their destination, a weary march across country began, and was repeated after they had visited the various points, and performed the various rites prescribed by the Korán or custom, finally returning as they went, but not all, as the sorrow-stricken faces of some among the waiters on the beach had told, and the muttered exclamation, "It is written--_Mektoob_." Meanwhile the night has come. The Creator's loving Hand has caused a myriad stars to shine forth from the darkness, in some measure to replace the light of day, while as each new boat-load is set down the same scenes are enacted, and the crowd grows greater and greater, the din of voices keeping pace therewith. Donkey-men having appeared on the scene with their patient beasts, they clamour for employment, and those who can afford it avail themselves of their services to get their goods transported to the city. What goods they are, too! All sorts of products of the East done up in boxes of the most varied forms and colours, bundles, rolls, and bales. The owners are apparently mere bundles of rags themselves, but they seem no less happy for that. Seated on an eminence at one side are several customs officers who have been delegated to inspect these goods; their flowing garments and generally superior attire afford a striking contrast to the state of the returning pilgrims, or even to that of the friends come to meet them. These officials have their guards marching up and down between and round about the groups, to see that nothing is carried off without inspection. Little by little the crowd disperses; those whose friends have landed escort them to their homes, leaving those who will have to continue their journey overland alone, making hasty preparations for their evening meal. The better class speedily have tents erected, but the majority will have to spend the night in the open air, probably in the rain, for it is beginning to spatter already. Fires are lit in all directions, throwing a lurid light upon the interesting picture, and I turn my horse's head towards home with a feeling of sadness, but at the same time one of thankfulness that my lot was not cast where theirs is. PART II XXV DIPLOMACY IN MOROCCO "The Beheaded was abusing the Flayed: One with her throat cut passed by, and exclaimed, 'God deliver us from such folk!'" _Moorish Proverb._ Instead of residing at the Court of the Sultan, as might be expected, the ministers accredited to the ruler of Morocco take up their abode in Tangier, where they are more in touch with Europe, and where there is greater freedom for pig-sticking. The reason for this is that the Court is not permanently settled anywhere, wintering successively at one of the three capitals, Fez, Marrákesh, or Mequinez. Every few years, when anything of note arises; when there is an accumulation of matters to be discussed with the Emperor, or when a new representative has been appointed, an embassy to Court is undertaken, usually in spring or autumn, the best times to travel in this roadless land. What happens on these embassies has often enough been related from the point of view of the performers, but seldom from that of residents in the country who know what happens, and the following peep behind the scenes, though fortunately not typical of all, is not exaggerated. Even more might have been told under some heads. As strictly applicable to no Power at present represented in Morocco, the record is that of an imaginary embassy from Greece some sixty or more years ago. To prevent misconception, it may be as well to add that it was written previous to the failure of the mission of Sir Charles Euan Smith. I. THE RECEPTION In a sloop-of-war sent all the way from the Ægean, the Ambassador and his suite sailed from Tangier to Saffi, where His Excellency was received on landing by a Royal salute from the crumbling batteries. The local governor and the Greek vice-consul awaited him on leaving the surf boat, with an escort which sadly upset the operations of women washing wool by the water-port. Outside the land-gate, beside the ancient palace, was pitched a Moorish camp awaiting his arrival, and European additions were soon erected beside it. At daybreak next morning a luncheon-party rode forward, whose duty it was to prepare the midday meal for the embassy, and to pitch the awning under which they should partake of it. Arrived at the spot selected, Drees, the "native agent," found the village sheïkh awaiting him with ample supplies, enough for every one for a couple of days. This he carefully packed on his mules, and by the time the embassy came up, having started some time later than he, after a good breakfast, he was ready to go on again with the remainder of the muleteers and the camel-drivers to prepare the evening meal and pitch for the night a camp over which waved the flag of Greece. Here the offerings of provisions or money were made with equal profusion. There were bushels of kesk'soo; there were several live sheep, which were speedily despatched and put into pots to cook; there were jars of honey, of oil, and of butter; there were camel-loads of barley for the beasts of burden, and trusses of hay for their dessert; there were packets of candles by the dozen, and loaves of sugar and pounds of tea; not to speak of fowls, of charcoal, of sweet herbs, of fruits, and of minor odds and ends. By the time the Europeans arrived, their French _chef_ had prepared an excellent dinner, the native escort and servants squatting in groups round steaming dishes provided ready cooked by half-starved villagers. When the feasting was over, and all seemed quiet, a busy scene was in reality being enacted in the background. At a little distance from the camp, Háj Marti, the right-hand man of the agent, was holding a veritable market with the surplus mona of the day, re-selling to the miserable country folk what had been wrung from them by the authorities. The Moorish Government declared that what they paid thus in kind would be deducted from their taxes, and this was what the Minister assured his questioning wife, for though he knew better, he found it best to wink at the proceedings of his unpaid henchman. As they proceeded inland, on the border of each local jurisdiction the escort was changed with an exhibition of "powder-play," the old one retiring as the new one advanced with the governor at its head. Thus they journeyed for about a week, till they reached the crumbling walls of palm-begirt Marrákesh. The official _personnel_ of the embassy consisted of the Minister and his secretary Nikolaki Glymenopoulos, with Ayush ben Lezrá, the interpreter. The secretary was a self-confident dandy with a head like a pumpkin and a scrawl like the footprints of a wandering hen; reputed a judge of ladies and horse-flesh; supercilious, condescending to inferiors, and the plague of his tailor. The consul, Paolo Komnenos, a man of middle age with a kindly heart, yet without force of character to withstand the evils around him, had been left in Tangier as _Chargé d'Affaires_, to the great satisfaction of his wife and family, who considered themselves of the _crême de la crême_ of Tangier society, such as it was, because, however much the wife of the Minister despised the bumptiousness of Madame Komnenos, she could not omit her from her invitations, unless of the most private nature, on account of her husband's official position. Now, as Madame Mavrogordato accompanied her husband with her little son and a lady friend, the consul's wife reigned supreme. Then there were the official _attachés_ for the occasion, the representative of the army, a colonel of Roman nose, and eyes which required but one glass between them, a man to whom death would have been preferable to going one morning unshaved, or to failing one jot in military etiquette; and the representative of the navy, in cocked hat and gold-striped pantaloons, who found it more difficult to avoid tripping over his sword than most landsmen do to keep from stumbling over coils of rope on ship-board; beyond his costume there was little of note about him; his genial character made it easy to say "Ay, ay," to any one, but the yarns he could spin round the camp-fire made him a general favourite. The least consequential of the party was the doctor, an army man of honest parts, who wished well to all the world. Undoubtedly he was the hardest worked of the lot, for no one else did anything but enjoy himself. Finally there were the "officious" _attachés_. Every dabbler in politics abroad knows the fine distinctions between "official" and "officious" action, and how subtle are the changes which can be rung upon the two, but there was nothing of that description here. The officious _attachés_ were simply a party of the Minister's personal friends, and two or three strangers whose influence might in after times be useful to him. One was of course a journalist, to supply the special correspondence of the _Acropolis_ and the _Hellenike Salpinx_. These would afterwards be worked up into a handy illustrated volume of experiences and impressions calculated to further deceive the public with regard to Morocco and the Moors, and to secure for the Minister his patron, the longed-for promotion to a European Court. Another was necessarily the artist of the party, while the remainder engaged in sport of one kind or another. Si Drees, the "native agent," was employed as master of horse, and superintended the native arrangements generally. With him rested every detail of camping out, and the supply of food and labour. Right and left he was the indispensable factotum, shouting himself hoarse from before dawn till after sunset, when he joined the gay blades of the Embassy in private pulls at forbidden liquors. No one worked as hard as he, and he seemed omnipresent. The foreigners were justly thankful to have such a man, for without him all felt at sea. He appeared to know everything and to be available for every one's assistance. The only draw-back was his ignorance of Greek, or of any language but his own, yet being sharp-witted he made himself wonderfully understood by signs and a few words of the strange coast jargon, a mixture of half a dozen tongues. The early morning was fixed for the solemn entry of the Embassy into the city, yet the road had to be lined on both sides with soldiers to keep back the thronging crowds. Amid the din of multitudes, the clashing of barbarous music, and shrill ululations of delight from native women; surrounded by an eastern blaze of sun and blended colours, rode incongruous the Envoy from Greece. His stiff, grim figure, the embodiment of officialism, in full Court dress, was supported on either hand by his secretary and interpreter, almost as resplendent as himself. Behind His Excellency rode the _attachés_ and other officials, then the ladies; newspaper correspondents, artists, and other non-official guests, bringing up the rear. In this order the party crossed the red-flowing Tansift by its low bridge of many arches, and drew near to the gate of Marrákesh called that of the Thursday [market], Báb el Khamees. [Illustration: _Molinari, Photo., Tangier._ A CITY GATEWAY IN MOROCCO.] At last they commenced to thread the narrow winding streets, their bordering roofs close packed with shrouded figures only showing an eye, who greeted them after their fashion with a piercing, long-drawn, "Yoo-yoo, yoo-yoo; yoo-yoo, yoo-yoo; yoo-yoo, yoo-yoo--oo," so novel to the strangers, and so typical. Then they crossed the wide-open space before the Kûtûbîyah on their way to the garden which had been prepared for them, the Mamûnîyah, with its handsome residence and shady walks. Three days had to elapse from the time of their arrival before they could see the Sultan, for they were now under native etiquette, but they had much to occupy them, much to see and think about, though supposed to remain at home and rest till the audience. On the morning of the fourth day all was bustle. Each had to array himself in such official garb as he could muster, with every decoration he could borrow, for the imposing ceremony of the presentation to the Emperor. What a business it was! what a coming and going; what noise and what excitement! It was like living in the thick of a whirling pantomime. At length they were under way, and making towards the kasbah gate in a style surpassing that of their entry, the populace still more excited at the sight of the gold lace and cocked hats which showed what great men had come to pay their homage to their lord the Sultan. On arrival at the inmost courtyard with whitewashed, battlemented walls, and green-tiled roofs beyond, they found it thickly lined with soldiers, a clear space being left for them in the centre. Here they were all ranged on foot, the presents from King Otho placed on one side, and covered with rich silk cloths. Presently a blast of trumpets silenced the hum of voices, and the soldiers made a show of "attention" in their undrilled way, for the Sultan approached. In a moment the great doors on the other side flew open, and a number of gaily dressed natives in peaked red caps--the Royal body-guard--emerged, followed by five prancing steeds, magnificent barbs of different colours, richly caparisoned, led by gold-worked bridles. Then came the Master of the Ceremonies in his flowing robes and monster turban, a giant in becoming dress, and--as they soon discovered--of stentorian voice. Behind him rode the Emperor himself in stately majesty, clothed in pure white, wool-white, distinct amid the mass of colours worn by those surrounding him, his ministers. The gorgeous trappings of his white steed glittered as the proud beast arched his neck and champed his gilded bit, or tried in vain to prance. Over his head was held by a slave at his side the only sign of Royalty, a huge red-silk umbrella with a fringe to match, and a golden knob on the point, while others of the household servants flicked the flies away, or held the spurs, the cushion, the carpet, and other things which might be called for by their lord. On his appearance deafening shouts broke forth, "God bless our Lord, and give him victory!" The rows of soldiers bowed their heads and repeated the cry with still an increase of vigour, "God bless our Lord, and give him victory!" At a motion from the Master of the Ceremonies the members of the Embassy took off their hats or helmets, and the representative of modern Greece stood there bareheaded in a broiling sun before the figure-head of ancient Barbary. As the Sultan approached the place where he stood, he drew near and offered a few stereotyped words in explanation of his errand, learned by heart, to which the Emperor replied by bidding him welcome. The Minister then handed to him an engrossed address in a silk embroided case, which an attendant was motioned to take, the Sultan acknowledging it graciously. One by one the Minister next introduced the members of his suite, their names and qualities being shouted in awful tones by the Master of the Ceremonies, and after once more bidding them welcome, but with a scowl at the sight of Drees, His Majesty turned his horse's head, leaving them to re-mount as their steeds were brought to them. Again the music struck up with a deafening din, and the state reception was over. But this was not to be the only interview between the Ambassador and the Sultan, for several so-called private conferences followed, at which an attendant or two and the interpreter Ayush were present. Kyrios Mavrogordato's stock of polite workable Arabic had been exhausted at the public function, and for business matters he had to rely implicitly on the services of his handy Jew. Such other notions of the language as he boasted could only be addressed to inferiors, and that but to convey the most simple of crude instructions or curses. At the first private audience there were many matters of importance to be brought before the Sultan's notice, afterwards to be relegated to the consideration of his wazeers. This time no fuss was made, and the affair again came off in the early morning, for His Majesty rose at three, and after devotions and study transacted official business from five to nine, then breakfasting and reserving the rest of the day for recreation and further religious study. II. THE INTERVIEW At the appointed time an escort waited on the Ambassador[18] to convey him to the palace, arrived at which he was led into one of the many gardens in the interior, full of luxuriant semi-wild vegetation. In a room opening on to one side of the garden sat the Emperor, tailor-fashion, on a European sofa, elevated by a sort of daïs opposite the door. With the exception of an armchair on the lower level, to which the Ambassador was motioned after the usual formal obeisances and expressions of respect, the chamber was absolutely bare of furniture, though not lacking in beauty of decoration. The floor was of plain cut but elegant tiles, and the dado was a more intricate pattern of the same in shades of blue, green, and yellow, interspersed with black, but relieved by an abundance of greeny white. Above this, to the stalactite cornice, the walls were decorated with intricate Mauresque designs in carved white plaster, while the rich stalactite roofing of deep-red tone, just tipped with purple and gilt, made a perfect whole, and gave a feeling of repose to the design. Through the huge open horse-shoe arch of the door the light streamed between the branches of graceful creepers waving in the breeze, adding to the impression of coolness caused by the bubbling fountain outside. [18: Strictly speaking, only "Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary."] "May God bless our Lord, and prolong his days!" said Ayush, bowing profoundly towards the Sultan, as the Minister concluded the repetition of his stock phrases, and seated himself. "May it please Your Majesty," began the Minister, in Greek, "I cannot express the honour I feel in again being commissioned to approach Your Majesty in the capacity of Ambassador from my Sovereign, King Otho of Greece." This little speech was rendered into Arabic by Ayush to this effect-- "May God pour blessings on our Lord. The Ambassador rejoices greatly, and is honoured above measure in being sent once more by his king to approach the presence of our Lord, the high and mighty Sovereign: yes, my Lord." "He is welcome," answered the Sultan, graciously; "we love no nation better than the Greeks. They have always been our friends." _Interpreter._ "His Majesty is delighted to see Your Excellency, whom he loves from his heart, as also your mighty nation, than which none is more dear to him, and whose friendship he is ready to maintain at any cost." _Minister._ "It pleases me greatly to hear Your Majesty's noble sentiments, which I, and I am sure my Government, reciprocate." _Interpreter._ "The Minister is highly complimented by the gracious words of our Lord, and declares that the Greeks love no other nation on earth beside the Moors: yes, my Lord." _Sultan._ "Is there anything I can do for such good friends?" _Interpreter._ "His Majesty says he is ready to do anything for so good a friend as Your Excellency." _Minister._ "I am deeply grateful to His Majesty. Yes, there are one or two matters which my Government would like to have settled." _Interpreter._ "The Minister is simply overwhelmed at the thought of the consideration of our Lord, and he has some trifling matters for which perhaps he may beg our Lord's attention: yes, my Lord." _Sultan._ "He has only to make them known." _Interpreter._ "His Majesty will do all Your Excellency desires." _Minister._ "First then, Your Majesty, there is the little affair of the Greek who was murdered last year at Azîla. I am sure that I can rely on an indemnity for his widow." _Interpreter._ "The Minister speaks of the Greek who was murdered--by your leave, yes, my Lord--at Azîla last year: yes, my Lord. The Ambassador wishes him to be paid for." _Sultan._ "How much does he ask?" This being duly interpreted, the Minister replied-- "Thirty thousand dollars." _Sultan._ "Half that sum would do, but we will see. What next?" _Interpreter._ "His Majesty thinks that too much, but as Your Excellency says, so be it." _Minister._ "I thank His Majesty, and beg to bring to his notice the imprisonment of a Greek _protégé_, Mesaûd bin Aûdah, at Mazagan some months ago, and to ask for his liberation and for damages. This is a most important case." _Interpreter._ "The Minister wants that thief Mesaûd bin Aûdah, whom the Báshá of Mazagan has in gaol, to be let out, and he asks also for damages: yes, my Lord." _Sultan._ "The man was no lawful _protégé_. I can do nothing in the case. Bin Aûdah is a criminal, and cannot be protected." _Interpreter._ "His Majesty fears that this is a matter in which he cannot oblige Your Excellency, much as he would like to, since the man in question is a thief. It is no use saying anything further about this." _Minister._ "Then ask about that Jew Botbol, who was thrashed. Though not a _protégé_, His Majesty might be able to do something." _Interpreter._ "His Excellency brings before our Lord a most serious matter indeed; yes, my Lord. It is absolutely necessary that redress should be granted to Maimon Botbol, the eminent merchant of Mogador whom the kaïd of that place most brutally treated last year: yes, my Lord. And this is most important, for Botbol is a great friend of His Excellency, who has taken the treatment that the poor man received very much to heart. He is sure that our Lord will not hesitate to order the payment of the damages demanded, only fifty thousand dollars." _Sultan._ "In consideration of the stress the Minister lays upon this case, he shall have ten thousand dollars." _Interpreter._ "His Majesty will pay Your Excellency ten thousand dollars damages." _Minister._ "As that is more than I had even hoped to ask, you will duly thank His Majesty most heartily for this spontaneous generosity." _Interpreter._ "The Minister says that is not sufficient from our Lord, but he will not oppose his will: yes, my Lord." _Sultan._ "I cannot do more." _Interpreter._ "His Majesty says it gives him great pleasure to pay it." _Minister._ "Now there is the question of slavery. I have here a petition from a great society at Athens requesting His Majesty to consider whether he cannot abolish the system throughout his realm," handing the Sultan an elaborate Arabic scroll in Syrian characters hard to be deciphered even by the secretary to whom it is consigned for perusal; the Sultan, though an Arabic scholar, not taking sufficient interest in the matter to think of it again. _Interpreter._ "There are some fanatics in the land of Greece, yes, my Lord, who want to see slavery abolished here, by thy leave, yes, my Lord, but I will explain to the Bashador that this is impossible." _Sultan._ "Certainly. It is an unalterable institution. Those who think otherwise are fools. Besides, your agent Drees deals in slaves!" _Interpreter._ "His Majesty will give the petition his best attention, and if possible grant it with pleasure." _Minister._ "You will thank His Majesty very much. It will rejoice my fellow-countrymen to hear it. Next, a Greek firm has offered to construct the much-needed port at Tangier, if His Majesty will grant us the concession till the work be paid for by the tolls. Such a measure would tend to greatly increase the Moorish revenues." _Interpreter._ "The Minister wishes to build a port at Tangier, yes, my Lord, and to hold it till the tolls have paid for it." _Sultan._ "Which may not be till Doomsday. Nevertheless, I will consent to any one making the port whom all the European representatives shall agree to appoint"--a very safe promise to make, since the Emperor knew that this agreement was not likely to be brought about till the said Domesday. _Interpreter._ "Your Excellency's request is granted. You have only to obtain the approval of your colleagues." _Minister._ "His Majesty is exceedingly gracious, and I am correspondingly obliged to him. Inform His Majesty that the same firm is willing to build him bridges over his rivers, and to make roads between the provinces, which would increase friendly communications, and consequently tend to reduce inter-tribal feuds." _Interpreter._ "The Minister thanks our Lord, and wants also to build bridges and roads in the interior to make the tribes friendly by intercourse." _Sultan._ "That would never do. The more I keep the tribes apart the better for me. If I did not shake up my rats in the sack pretty often, they would gnaw their way out. Besides, where my people could travel more easily, so could foreign invaders. No, I cannot think of such a thing. God created the world without bridges." _Interpreter._ "His Majesty is full of regret that in this matter he is unable to please Your Excellency, but he thinks his country better as it is." _Minister._ "Although I beg to differ from His Majesty, so be it. Next there is the question of our commerce with Morocco. This is greatly hampered by the present lack of a fixed customs tariff. There are several articles of which the exportation is now prohibited, which it would be really very much in the interest of his people to allow us to purchase." _Interpreter._ "The Minister requests of our Lord a new customs tariff, and the right to export wheat and barley." _Sultan._ "The tariff he may discuss with the Wazeer of the Interior; I will give instructions. As for the cereals, the bread of the Faithful cannot be given to infidels." _Interpreter._ "His Majesty accedes to your Excellency's request. You have only to make known the details to the Minister for Internal Affairs." _Minister._ "Again I humbly render thanks to his Majesty. Since he is so particularly good to me, perhaps he would add one kindness more, in abandoning to me the old house and garden on the Marshan at Tangier, in which the Foreign Minister used to live. It is good for nothing, and would be useful to me." _Interpreter._ "The Minister asks our Lord for a couple of houses in Tangier. Yes, my Lord, the one formerly occupied by the Foreign Minister on the Marshan at Tangier for himself; and the other adjoining the New Mosque in town, just an old tumble-down place for stores, to be bestowed upon me; yes, my Lord." _Sultan._ "What sort of place is that on the Marshan?" _Interpreter._ "I will not lie unto my lord. It is a fine big house in a large garden, with wells and fruit trees: yes, my Lord. But the other is a mere nothing: yes, my Lord." _Sultan._ "I will do as he wishes--if it please God." (The latter expression showing the reverse of an intention to carry out the former.) _Interpreter._ "His Majesty gives you the house." _Minister._ "His Majesty is indeed too kind to me. I therefore regret exceedingly having to bring forward a number of claims which have been pending for a long time, but with the details of which I will not of course trouble His Majesty personally. I merely desire his instructions to the Treasury to discharge them on their being admitted by the competent authorities." _Interpreter._ "The Minister brings before our Lord a number of claims, on the settlement of which he insists: yes, my Lord. He feels it a disgrace that they should have remained unpaid so long: yes, my Lord. And he asks for orders to be given to discharge them at once." _Sultan._ "There is neither force nor power save in God, the High, the Mighty. Glory to Him! There is no telling what these Nazarenes won't demand next. I will pay all just claims, of course, but many of these are usurers' frauds, with which I will have nothing to do." _Interpreter._ "His Majesty will give the necessary instructions; but the claims will have to be examined, as Your Excellency has already suggested. His Majesty makes the sign of the conclusion of our interview." _Minister._ "Assure His Majesty how deeply indebted I am to him for these favours he has shown me, but allow me to in some measure acknowledge them by giving information of importance. I am entirely _au courant_, through private channels, with the unworthy tactics of the British Minister, as also those of his two-faced colleagues, the representatives of France and Spain, and can disclose them to His Majesty whenever he desires." _Interpreter._ "His Excellency does not know how to express his gratitude to our Lord for his undeserved and unprecedented condescension, and feels himself bound the slave of our Lord, willing to do all our Lord requires of his hands; yes, my lord. But he trusts that our Lord will not forget the houses--and the one in town is only a little one,--or the payment of the indemnity to Maimon Botbol, yes, my Lord, or the discharging of the claims. God bless our Lord, and give him victory! And also, pardon me, my Lord, the Minister says that all the other ministers are rogues, and he knows all about them that our Lord may wish to learn: yes, my Lord." "God is omniscient. He can talk of those matters to the Foreign Minister to-morrow. In peace!" Once more a few of his stock phrases were man[oe]uvred by Kyrios Mavrogordato, as with the most profound of rear-steering bows the representatives of civilization retreated, and the potentate of Barbary turned with an air of relief to give instructions to his secretary. III. THE RESULT A few weeks after this interview the _Hellenike Salpinx_, a leading journal of Athens, contained an article of which the following is a translation:-- "OUR INTERESTS IN MOROCCO "(_From our Special Correspondent_) "Marrákesh, October 20. "The success of our Embassy to Morocco is already assured, and that in a remarkable degree. The Sultan has once more shown most unequivocally his strong partiality for the Greek nation, and especially for their distinguished representative, Kyrios Dimitri Mavrogordato, whose personal tact and influence have so largely contributed to this most thankworthy result. It is very many years since such a number of requests have been granted by the Emperor of Morocco to one ambassador, and it is probable that under the most favourable circumstances no other Power could have hoped for such an exhibition of favour. "The importance of the concessions is sufficient to mark this embassy in the history of European relations with Morocco, independently of the amount of ordinary business transacted, and the way in which the Sultan has promised to satisfy our outstanding claims. Among other favours, permission has been granted to a Greek firm to construct a port at Tangier, the chief seat of foreign trade in the Empire, which is a matter of national importance, and there is every likelihood of equally valuable concessions for the building of roads and bridges being made to the same company. "Our merchants will be rejoiced to learn that at last the vexatious customs regulations, or rather the absence of them, will be replaced by a regular tariff, which our minister has practically only to draw up for it to be sanctioned by the Moorish Government. The question of slavery, too, is under the consideration of the Sultan with a view to its restriction, if not to its abolition, a distinct and unexpected triumph for the friends of universal freedom. There can be no question that, under its present enlightened ruler, Morocco is at last on the high-road to civilization. "Only those who have had experience in dealing with procrastinating politicians of the eastern school can appreciate in any degree the consummate skill and patience which is requisite to overcome the sinuosities of oriental minds, and it is only such a signal victory as has just been won for Greece and for progress in Morocco, as can enable us to realize the value to the State of such diplomatists as His Excellency, Kyrios Mavrogordato." This article had not appeared in print before affairs on the spot wore a very different complexion. At the interview with the Minister for the Interior a most elaborate customs tariff had been presented and discussed, some trifling alterations being made, and the whole being left to be submitted to the Sultan for his final approval, with the assurance that this was only a matter of form. The Minister of Finance had promised most blandly the payment of the damages demanded for the murder of the Greek and for the thrashing of the Jew. It was true that as yet no written document had been handed to the Greek Ambassador, but then he had the word of the Ministers themselves, and promises from the Sultan's lips as well. The only _fait accompli_ was the despatch of a courier to Tangier with orders to deliver up the keys of two specified properties to the Ambassador and his interpreter respectively, a matter which, strange to say, found no place in the messages to the Press, and in which the spontaneous present to the interpreter struck His Excellency as a most generous act on the part of the Sultan. Quite a number of state banquets had been given, in which the members of the Embassy had obtained an insight into stylish native cooking, writing home that half the dishes were prepared with pomatum and the other half with rancid oil and butter. The _littérateur_ of the party had nearly completed his work on Morocco, and was seriously thinking of a second volume. The young _attachés_ could swear right roundly in Arabic, and were becoming perfect connoisseurs of native beauty. In the palatial residence of Drees, as well as in a private residence which that worthy had placed at their disposal, they had enjoyed a selection of native female society, and had such good times under the wing of that "rare old cock," as they dubbed him, that one or two began to feel as though they had lighted among the lotus eaters, and had little desire to return. But to Kyrios Mavrogordato and Glymenopoulos his secretary, the delay at Court began to grow irksome, and they heartily wished themselves back in Tangier. Notwithstanding the useful "tips" which he had given to the Foreign Minister regarding the base designs of his various colleagues accredited to that Court, his own affairs seemed to hang fire. He had shown how France was determined to make war upon Morocco sooner or later, with a view to adding its fair plains to those it was acquiring in Algeria, and had warned him that if the Sultan lent assistance to the Ameer Abd el Káder he would certainly bring this trouble upon himself. He had also shown how England pretended friendship because at any cost she must maintain at least the neutrality of that part of his country bordering on the Straits of Gibraltar, and that with all her professions of esteem, she really cared not a straw for the Moors. He had shown too that puny Spain held it as an article of faith that Morocco should one day become hers in return for the rule of the Moors upon her own soil. He had, in fact, shown that Greece alone cared for the real interests of the Sultan. IV. DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND Yet things did not move. The treaty of commerce remained unsigned, and slaves were still bought and sold. The numerous claims which he had to enforce had only been passed in part, and the Moorish authorities seemed inclined to dispute the others stoutly. At last, at a private conference with the Wazeer el Kiddáb, the Ambassador broached a proposal to cut the Gordian knot. He would abandon all disputed claims for a lump sum paid privately to himself, and asked what the Moorish Government might feel inclined to offer. The Wazeer el Kiddáb received this proposal with great complacency. He was accustomed to such overtures. Every day of his life that style of bargain was part of his business. But this was the first time that a European ambassador had made such a suggestion in its nakedness, and he was somewhat taken aback, though his studied indifference of manner did not allow the foreigner to suspect such a thing for a moment. The usual style had been for him to offer present after present to the ambassadors till he had reached their price, and then, when his master had overloaded them with personal favours--many of which existed but in promise--they had been unable to press too hard the claims they had come to enforce, for fear of possible disclosures. So this was a novel proceeding, though quite comprehensible on the part of a man who had been bribed on a less extensive scale on each previous visit to Court. Once, however, such a proposition had been made, it was evident that his Government could not be much in earnest regarding demands which he could so easily afford to set aside. As soon, therefore, as Kyrios Mavrogordato had left, the Wazeer ordered his mule, that he might wait upon His Majesty before the hours of business were over. His errand being stated as urgent and private, he was admitted without delay to his sovereign's presence. "May God prolong the days of our Lord! I come to say that the way to rid ourselves of the importunity of this ambassador from Greece is plain. He has made it so himself by offering to abandon all disputed claims for a round sum down for his own use. What is the pleasure of my Lord?" "God is great!" exclaimed the Sultan, "that is well. You may inform the Minister from me that a positive refusal is given to every demand not already allowed in writing. What _he_ can afford to abandon, _I_ can't afford to pay." "The will of our Lord shall be done." "But stay! I have had my eye upon that Greek ambassador this long while, and am getting tired of him. The abuses he commits are atrocious, and his man Drees is a devil. Háj Taïb el Ghassál writes that the number of his _protégés_ is legion, and that by far the greater number of them are illegal. Inform him when you see him that henceforth the provisions of our treaties shall be strictly adhered to, and moreover that no protection certificates shall be valid unless countersigned by our Foreign Commissioner El Ghassál. If I rule here, I will put an end to this man's doings." "On my head and eyes be the words of my Lord." "And remind him further that the permits for the free passage of goods at the customs are granted only for his personal use, for the necessities of his household, and that the way Háj Taïb writes he has been selling them is a disgrace. The man is a regular swindler, and the less we have to do with him the better. As for his pretended information about his colleagues, there may be a good deal of truth in it, but I have the word of the English minister, who is about as honest as any of them, that this Mavrogordato is a born villain, and that if his Government is not greedy for my country on its own account, it wants to sell me to some more powerful neighbour in exchange for its protection. Greece is only a miserable fag-end of Europe." "Our Lord knows: may God give him victory," and the Wazeer bowed himself out to consider how best he might obey his instructions, not exactly liking the task. On returning home he despatched a messenger to the quarters of the Embassy, appointing an hour on the morrow for a conference, and when this came the Ambassador found himself in for a stormy interview. The Wazeer, with his snuff-box in constant use, sat cool and collected on his mattress on the floor, the Ambassador sitting uneasily on a chair before him. Though the language used was considerably modified in filtering through the brain of the interpreter, the increasing violence of tone and gesture could not be concealed, and were all but sufficiently comprehensible in themselves. The Ambassador protested that if the remainder of the demands were to be refused, he was entitled to at least as much as the French representative had had to shut his mouth last time he came to Court, and affected overwhelming indignation at the treatment he had received. "Besides," he added, "I have the promise of His Majesty the Sultan himself that certain of them should be paid in full, and I cannot abandon those. I have informed my Government of the Sultan's words." "Dost suppose that my master is a dog of a Nazarene, that he should keep his word to thee? Nothing thou may'st say can alter his decision. The claims that have been allowed in writing shall be paid by the Customs Administrators on thy return to Tangier. Here are orders for the money." "I absolutely refuse to accept a portion of what my Government demands. I will either receive the whole, or I will return empty-handed, and report on the treacherous way in which I have been treated. I am thoroughly sick of the procrastinating and prevaricating ways of this country--a disgrace to the age." "And we are infinitely more sick of thy behaviour and thine abuse of the favours we have granted thee. Our lord has expressly instructed me to tell thee that in future no excess of the rights guaranteed to foreigners by treaty will be permitted on any account. Thy protection certificates to be valid must be endorsed by our Foreign Commissioner, and the nature of the goods thou importest free of duty as for thyself shall be strictly examined, as we have the right to do, that no more defrauding of our revenue be permitted." "Your words are an insult to my nation," exclaimed the Ambassador, rising, "and shall be duly reported to my Government. I cannot sit here and listen to vile impeachments like these; you know them to be false!" "That is no affair of mine; I have delivered the decision of our lord, and have no more to say. The claims we refuse are all of them unjust, the demands of usurers, on whom be the curse of God; and demands for money which has never been stolen, or has already been paid; every one of them is a shameful fraud, God knows. Leeches are only fit to be trodden on when they have done their work; we want none of them." "Your language is disgraceful, such as was never addressed to me in my life before; if I do not receive an apology by noon to-morrow, I will at once set out for Tangier, if not for Greece, and warn you of the possible consequences." * * * * * The excitement in certain circles in Athens on the receipt of the intelligence that the Embassy to Morocco had failed, after all the flourish of trumpets with which its presumed successes had been hailed, was great indeed. One might have thought that once more the brave Hellenes were thirsting for the conquest of another Sicily, to read the columns of the _Palingenesia_, some of the milder paragraphs of which, translated, ran thus:-- "A solemn duty has been imposed upon our nation by the studied indignities heaped upon our representative at the Court of Morocco. Greece has been challenged, Europe defied, and the whole civilized world insulted. The duty now before us is none other than to wipe from the earth that nest of erstwhile pirates flattered by the name of the Moorish Government.... "As though it were insufficient to have refused the just demands presented by Kyrios Mavrogordato for the payment of business debts due to Greek merchants, and for damages acknowledged to be due to others for property stolen by lawless bandits, His Excellency has been practically dismissed from the Court in a manner which has disgraced our flag in the eyes of all Morocco. "Here are two counts which need no exaggeration. Unless the payment of just business debts is duly enforced by the Moorish Government, as it would be in any other country, and unless the native agents of our merchants are protected fully by the local authorities, it is hopeless to think of maintaining commercial relations with such a nation, so that insistence on these demands is of vital necessity to our trade, and a duty to our growing manufactories. "The second count is of the simplest: such treatment as has been meted out to our Minister Plenipotentiary in Morocco, especially after the bland way in which he was met at first with empty promises and smiles, is worthy only of savages or of a people intent on war." The _Hellenike Salpinx_ was hardly less vehement in the language in which it chronicled the course of events in Morocco:-- "Notwithstanding the unprecedented manner in which the requests of His Excellency, Kyrios Dimitri Mavrogordato, our Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary at the Court of Morocco, were acceded to on the recent Embassy to Mulai Abd er-Rahmán, the Moors have shown their true colours at last by equally marked, but less astonishing, insults. "The unrivalled diplomatic talents of our ambassador proved, in fact, too much for the Moorish Government, and though the discovery of the way in which a Nazarene was obtaining his desires from the Sultan may have aroused the inherent obstinacy of the wazeers, and thus produced the recoil which we have described, it is far more likely that this was brought about by the officious interference of one or two other foreign representatives at Tangier. It has been for some time notorious that the Sardinian consul-general--who at the same time represents Portugal--loses no opportunity of undermining Grecian influence in Morocco, and in this certain of his colleagues have undoubtedly not been far behind him. "Nevertheless, whatever causes may have been at work in bringing about this crisis, it is one which cannot be tided over, but which must be fairly faced. Greece has but one course before her." XXVI PRISONERS AND CAPTIVES "Misfortune is misfortune's heir." _Moorish Proverb._ Externally the gaol of Tangier does not differ greatly in appearance from an ordinary Moorish house, and even internally it is of the plan which prevails throughout the native buildings from fandaks to palaces. A door-way in a blank wall, once whitewashed, gives access to a kind of lobby, such as might precede the entrance to some grandee's house, but instead of being neat and clean, it is filthy and dank, and an unwholesome odour pervades the air. On a low bench at the far end lie a guard or two in dirty garments, fitting ornaments for such a place. By them is the low-barred entrance to the prison, with a hole in the centre the size of such a face as often fills it, wan and hopeless. A clanking of chains, a confused din of voices, and an occasional moan are borne through the opening on the stench-laden atmosphere. "All hope abandon, ye who enter here!" could never have been written on portal more appropriate than this, unless he who entered had friends and money. Here are forgotten good and bad, the tried and the untried, just and unjust together, sunk in a night of blank despair, a living grave. Around an open courtyard, protected by an iron grating at the top, is a row of dirty columns, and behind them a kind of arcade, on to which open a number of doorless chambers. Filth is apparent everywhere, and to the stifling odour of that unwashed horde is added that caused by insanitary drainage. To some of the pillars are chained poor wretches little more than skeletons, while a cable of considerable length secures others. It is locked at one end to a staple outside the door under which it passes, and is threaded through rings on the iron collars of half a dozen prisoners who have been brought in as rebels from a distant province. For thirteen days they have tramped thus, carrying that chain, holding it up by their hands to save their shoulders, and two empty rings still threaded on show that when they started they numbered eight. Since the end rings are riveted to the chain, it has been impossible to remove them, so when two fell sick by the way the drivers cut off their heads to effect the release of their bodies, and to prove, by presenting those ghastly trophies at their journey's end, that none had escaped. Many of the prisoners are busy about the floor, where they squat in groups, plaiting baskets and satchels of palmetto leaves, while many appear too weak and disheartened even to earn a subsistence in this way. One poor fellow, who has been a courier, was employed one day twenty-five years since to carry a despatch to Court, complaining of the misdeeds of a governor. That official himself intercepted the letter, and promptly despatched the bearer to Tangier as a Sultan's prisoner. He then arrested the writer of the letter, who, on paying a heavy fine, regained his liberty, but the courier remained unasked for. In course of time the kaïd was called to his account, and his son, who succeeded him in office, having died too, a stranger ruled in their stead. The forgotten courier had by this time lost his reason, fancying himself once more in his goat-hair tent on the southern plains, and with unconscious irony he still gives every new arrival the Arab greeting, "Welcome to thee, a thousand welcomes! Make thyself at home and comfortable. All before thee is thine, and what thou seest not, be sure we don't possess." Some few, in better garments, hold themselves aloof from the others, and converse together with all the nonchalance of gossip in the streets, for they are well-to-do, arrested on some trivial charge which a few dollars apiece will soon dispose of, but they are exceptions. A quieter group occupies one corner, members of a party of no less than sixty-two brought in together from Fez, on claims made against them by a European Power. A sympathetic inquiry soon elicits their histories.[19] The first man to speak is hoary and bent with years; he was arrested several years ago, on the death of a brother who had owed some $50 to a European. The second had borrowed $900 in exchange for a bond for twice that amount; he had paid off half of this, and having been unable to do more, had been arrested eighteen months before. The third had similarly received $80 for a promise to pay $160; he had been in prison five years and three months. Another had borrowed $100, and knew not the sum which stood yet against him. Another had been in prison five years for a debt alleged to have been contracted by an uncle long dead. Another had borrowed $50 on a bond for $100. Another had languished eighteen months in gaol on a claim for $120; the amount originally advanced to him was about $30, but the acknowledgment was for $60, which had been renewed for $120 on its falling due and being dishonoured. Another had borrowed $15 on agreeing to refund $30, which was afterwards increased to $60 and then to $105. He has been imprisoned three years. The debt of another, originally $16 for a loan of half that amount, has since been doubled twice, and now stands at $64, less $17 paid on account, while for forty-two measures of wheat delivered on account he can get no allowance, though that was three years ago, and four months afterwards he was sent to prison. Another had paid off the $50 he owed for an advance of $25, but on some claim for expenses the creditor had withheld the bond, and is now suing for the whole amount again. He has been in prison two years and six months. Another has paid twenty measures of barley on account of a bond for $100, for which he has received $50, and he was imprisoned at the same time as the last speaker, his debt being due to the same man. Another had borrowed $90 on the usual terms, and has paid the whole in cash or wheat, but cannot get back the bond. He has previously been imprisoned for a year, but two years after his release he was re-arrested, fourteen months ago. Another has been two months in gaol on a claim for $25 for a loan of $12. The last one has a bitter tale to tell, if any could be worse than the wearisome similarity of those who have preceded him. [19: All these statements were taken down from the lips of the victims at the prison door, and most, if not all of them, were supported by documentary evidence.] "Some years ago," he says, "I and my two brothers, Drees and Ali, borrowed $200 from a Jew of Mequinez, for which we gave him a notarial bond for $400. We paid him a small sum on account every month, as we could get it--a few dollars at a time--besides presents of butter, fowls, and eggs. At the end of the first year he threatened to imprison us, and made us change the bond for one for $800, and year by year he raised the debt this way till it reached $3000, even after allowing for what we had paid off. I saw no hope of ever meeting his claim, so I ran away, and my brother Drees was imprisoned for six years. He died last winter, leaving a wife and three children, the youngest, a daughter, being born a few months after her father was taken away. He never saw her. By strenuous efforts our family paid off the $3000, selling all their land, and borrowing small sums. But the Jew would not give up the bond. He died about two years ago, and we do not know who is claiming now, but we are told that the sum demanded is $560. We have nothing now left to sell, and, being in prison, we cannot work. When my brother Drees died, I and my brother Ali were seized to take his place. My kaïd was very sorry for me, and became surety that I would not escape, so that my irons were removed; but my brother remains still in fetters, as poor Drees did all through the six years. We have no hope of our friends raising any money, so we must wait for death to release us." Here he covers his face with his hands, and several of his companions, in spite of their own dire troubles, have to draw their shrivelled arms across their eyes, as silence falls upon the group. As we turn away heartsick a more horrible sight than any confronts us before the lieutenant-governor's court. A man is suspended by the arms and legs, face downwards, by a party of police, who grasp his writhing limbs. With leather thongs a stalwart policeman on either side is striking his bare back in turn. Already blood is flowing freely, but the victim does not shriek. He only winces and groans, or gives an almost involuntary cry as the cruel blows fall on some previously harrowed spot. He is already unable to move his limbs, but the blows fall thick and fast. Will they never cease? By the side stands a young European counting them one by one, and when the strikers slow down from exhaustion he orders them to stop, that others may relieve them. The victim is by this time swooning, so the European directs that he shall be put on the ground and deluged with water till he revives. When sufficiently restored the count begins again. Presently the European stays them a second time; the man is once again insensible, yet he has only received six hundred lashes of the thousand which have been ordered. "Well," he exclaims, "it's no use going on with him to-day. Put him in the gaol now, and I'll come and see him have the rest to-morrow." "God bless thee, but surely he has had enough!" exclaims the lieutenant-governor, in sympathetic tones. "Enough? He deserves double! The consul has only ordered a thousand, and I am here to see that he has every one. We'll teach these villains to rob our houses!" "There is neither force nor power save in God, the High, the Mighty! As thou sayest; it is written," and the powerless official turns away disgusted. "God burn these Nazarenes, their wives and families, and all their ancestors! They were never fit for aught but hell!" he may be heard muttering as he enters his house, and well may he feel as he does. The policemen carry the victim off to the gaol hard by, depositing him on the ground, after once more restoring him with cold water. "God burn their fathers and their grandfathers, and the whole cursed race of them!" they murmur, for their thoughts still run upon the consul and the clerk. Leaving him sorrowfully, they return to the yard, where we still wait to obtain some information as to the cause of such treatment. "Why, that dog of a Nazarene, the Greek consul, says that his house was robbed a month ago, though we don't believe him, for it wasn't worth it. The sinner says that a thousand dollars were stolen, and he has sent in a claim for it to the Sultan. The minister's now at court for the money, the Satan! God rid our country of them all!" "But how does this poor fellow come in for it?" "He! He never touched the money! Only he had some quarrel with the clerk, so they accused him of the theft, as he was the native living nearest to the house, just over the fence. He's nothing but a poor donkey-man, and an honest one at that. The consul sent his clerk up here to say he was the thief, and that he must receive a thousand lashes. The governor refused till the man should be tried and convicted, but the Greek wouldn't hear of it, and said that if he wasn't punished at once he would send a courier to his minister at Marrákesh, and have a complaint made to the Sultan. The governor knew that if he escaped it would most likely cost him his post to fight the consul, so he gave instructions for the order to be carried out, and went indoors so as not to be present." "God is supreme!" ejaculates a bystander. "But these infidels of Nazarenes know nothing of Him. His curse be on them!" answers the policeman. "They made us ride the poor man round the town on a bare-backed donkey, with his face to the tail, and all the way two of us had to thrash him, crying, 'Thus shall be done to the man who robs a consul!' He was ready to faint before we got him up here. God knows _we_ don't want to lash him again!" * * * * * Next day as we pass the gaol we stop to inquire after the prisoner, but the poor fellow is still too weak to receive the balance due, and so it is for several days. Then they tell us that he has been freed from them by God, who has summoned his spirit, though meanwhile the kindly attentions of a doctor have been secured, and everything possible under the circumstances has been done to relieve his sufferings. After all, he was "only a Moor!" * * * * * The Greek consul reported that the condition of the Moorish prisons was a disgrace to the age, and that he had himself known prisoners who had succumbed to their evil state after receiving a few strokes from the lash. A statement of claim for a thousand dollars, alleged to have been robbed from his house, was forwarded by courier to his chief, then at Court, and was promptly added to the demands that it was part of His Excellency's errand to enforce. XXVII THE PROTECTION SYSTEM "My heart burns, but my lips will not give utterance." _Moorish Proverb._ I. THE NEED Crouched at the foreigner's feet lay what appeared but a bundle of rags, in reality a suppliant Moor, once a man of wealth and position. Hugging a pot of butter brought as an offering, clutching convulsively at the leg of the chair, his furrowed face bespoke past suffering and present earnestness. "God bless thee, Bashador, and all the Christians, and give me grace in thy sight!" "Oh, indeed, so you like the Christians?" "Yes, Bashador, I must love the Christians; they have justice, we have none. I wish they had rule over the country." "Then you are not a good Muslim!" "Oh yes, I am, I am a háj (pilgrim to Mekka), and I love my own religion, certainly I do, but none of our officials follow our religion nowadays: they have no religion. They forget God and worship money; their delight is in plunder and oppression." "You appear to have known better days. What is your trouble?" "Trouble enough," replies the Moor, with a sigh. "I am Hamed Zirári. I was rich once, and powerful in my tribe, but now I have only this sheep and two goats. I and my wife live alone with our children in a nuállah (hut), but after all we are happier now when they leave us alone, than when we were rich. I have plenty of land left, it is true, but we dare not for our lives cultivate more than a small patch around our nuállah, lest we should be pounced upon again." [Illustration: _Photograph by Dr. Rudduck._ A CENTRAL MOROCCO HOMESTEAD (NUÁLLAS).] "How did you lose your property?" "I will tell you, Bashador, and then you will see whether I am justified in speaking of our Government as I do. It is a sad story, but I will tell you all.[20] A few years ago I possessed more than six hundred cows and bullocks, more than twelve hundred sheep, a hundred good camels, fifty mules, twenty horses, and twenty-four mares. I had also four wives and many slaves. I had plenty of guns and abundance of grain in my stores; in fact, I was rich and powerful among my people, by whom I was held in great honour; but alas! alas! our new kaïd is worse than the old one; he is insatiable, a pit without a bottom! There is no possibility of satisfying his greed! [20: This story is reproduced from notes taken of the man's narrative by my father.--B. M.] "I felt that although by continually making him valuable presents I succeeded in keeping on friendly terms with him, he was always coveting my wealth. We have in our district two markets a week, and at last I had to present him with from $50 to $80 every market-day. I was nevertheless in constant dread of his eyes--they are such greedy eyes--and I saw that it would be necessary to look out for protection. I was too loyal a subject of the Sultan then, and too good a Muslim, to think of Nazarene protection, so I applied for help to Si Mohammed boo Aálam, commander-in-chief of our lord (whom may God send victorious), and to enter the Sultan's service. "We prepared a grand present with which to approach him, and when it was ready I started with it, accompanied by two of my cousins. We took four splendid horses, four mares with their foals, four she-camels with their young, four picked cows, two pairs of our best bullocks, four fine young male slaves, each with a silver-mounted gun, and four well-dressed female slaves, each carrying a new bucket in her hand, many jars containing fresh and salted butter and honey, beside other things, and a thousand dollars in cash. It was a fine present, was it not, Bashador? "Well, on arrival at Si Mohammed's place, we slaughtered two bullocks at his door, and humbly begged his gracious acceptance of our offering, which we told him we regretted was not greater, but that as we were his brethren, we trusted to find favour in his sight. We said we wished to honour him, and to become his fortunate slaves, whose chief delight it would be to do his bidding. We reminded him that although he was so rich and powerful he was still our brother, and that we desired nothing better than to live in continual friendship with him. "He received and feasted us very kindly, and gave us appointments as mounted guards to the marshal of the Sultan, as which we served happily for seven months. We were already thinking about sending for some of our family to come and relieve us, that we might return home ourselves, when one day Si Mohammed sent for us to say that he was going away for a time, having received commands from the Sultan to visit a distant tribe with the effects of Royal displeasure. After mutual compliments and blessings he set off with his soldiers. "Five days later a party of soldiers came to our house. To our utter astonishment and dismay, without a word of explanation, they put chains on our necks and wrists, and placing us on mules, bore us away. Remonstrance and resistance were equally vain. We were in Mequinez. It was already night, and though the gates were shut, and are never opened again except in obedience to high authority, they were silently opened for us to pass through. Once outside, our eyes were bandaged, and we were lashed to our uncomfortable seats. Thus we travelled on as rapidly as possible, in silence all night long. It was a long night, that, indeed, Bashador, a weary night, but we felt sure some worse fate awaited us; what, we could not imagine, for we had committed no crime. Finally, after three days we halted, and the bandages were removed from our eyes. We found ourselves in a market-place in Rahámna, within the jurisdiction of our cursëd kaïd. All around us were our flocks and herds, camels, and horses, all our movable property, which we soon learnt had been brought there for public sale. A great gathering was there to purchase. "The kaïd was there, and when he saw us he exclaimed, 'There you are, are you? You can't escape from me now, you children of dogs!' Then he turned to a brutal policeman, crying, 'Put the bastards on the ground, and give them a thousand lashes.' Those words ring in my ears still. I felt as in a dream. I was too utterly in his power to think of answering, and after a very few strokes the power of doing so was taken from me, for I lost consciousness. How many blows we received I know not, but we must have been very nearly killed. When I revived we were in a filthy matmorah, where we existed for seven months in misery, being kept alive on a scanty supply of barley loaves and water. At last I pretended to have lost my reason, as I should have done in truth had I stayed there much longer. When they told the kaïd this, he gave permission for me to be let out. I found my wife and children still living, thank God, though they had had very hard times. What has become of my cousins I do not know, and do not dare to ask, but thou couldst, O Bashador, if once I were under thy protection. "All I know is that, after receiving our present, Si Mohammed sold us to the kaïd for twelve hundred dollars. He was a fool, Bashador, a great fool; had he demanded of us we would have given him twelve hundred dollars to save ourselves what we have had to suffer. "Wonderest thou still, O Bashador, that I prefer the Nazarenes, and wish there were more of them in the country? I respect the dust off their shoes more than a whole nation of miscalled Muslims who could treat me as I have been treated; but God is just, and 'there is neither force nor power save in God,' yes, 'all is written.' He gives to men according to their hearts. We had bad hearts, and he gave us a Government like them." II. THE SEARCH The day was already far spent when at last Abd Allah led his animal into one of the caravansarais outside the gate of Mazagan, so, after saying his evening prayers and eating his evening meal, he lay down to rest on a heap of straw in one of the little rooms of the fandak, undisturbed either by anxious dreams, or by the multitude of lively creatures about him. Ere the sun had risen the voice of the muédhdhin awoke him with the call to early prayer. Shrill and clear the notes rang out on the calm morning air in that perfect silence-- "G-o-d is gr-ea--t! G-o-d is gr-ea--t! G-o-d is grea--t! I witness that there is no God but God, and Mohammed is the messenger of God. Come to prayer! Come to prayer! Come to prayer! Prayer is better than sleep! Come to prayer!" Quickly rising, Abd Allah repaired to the water-tap, and seating himself on the stone seat before it, rapidly performed the prescribed religious ablutions, this member three times, then the other as often, and so on, all in order, right first, left to follow as less honourable, finishing up with the pious ejaculation, "God greatest!" Thence to the mosque was but a step, and in a few minutes he stood barefooted in those dimly-lighted, vaulted aisles, in which the glimmering oil lamps and the early streaks of daylight struggled for the mastery. His shoes were on the ground before him at the foot of the pillar behind which he had placed himself, and his hands were raised before his face in the attitude of prayer. Then, at the long-drawn cry of the leader, in company with his fellow-worshippers, he bowed himself, and again with them rose once more, in a moment to kneel down and bow his forehead to the earth in humble adoration. Having performed the usual series of prayers, he was ready for coffee and bread. This he took at the door of the fandak, seated on the ground by the coffee-stall, inquiring meanwhile the prospects of protection in Mazagan. There was Tájir[21] Pépé, always ready to appoint a new agent for a consideration, but then he bore almost as bad a name for tyrannizing over his _protégés_ as did the kaïds themselves. There was Tájir Yûsef the Jew, but then he asked such tremendous prices, because he was a vice-consul. There was Tájir Juan, but then he was not on good enough terms with his consul to protect efficiently those whom he appointed, so he could not be thought of either. But there was Tájir Vecchio, a new man from Gibraltar, fast friends with his minister, and who must therefore be strong, yet a man who did not name too high a figure. To him, therefore, Abd Allah determined to apply, and when his store was opened presented himself. [21: "Merchant," used much as "Mr." is with us.] Under his cloak he carried three pots of butter in one hand, and as many of honey in the other, while a ragged urchin tramped behind with half a dozen fowls tied in a bunch by the legs, and a basket of eggs. The first thing was to get a word with the head-man at the store; so, slipping a few of the eggs into his hands, Abd Allah requested an interview with the Tájir, with whom he had come to make friends. This being promised, he squatted on his heels by the door, where he was left to wait an hour or two, remarking to himself at intervals that God was great, till summoned by one of the servants to enter. The merchant was seated behind his desk, and Abd Allah, having deposited his burden on the floor, was making round the table to throw himself at his feet, when he was stopped and allowed but to kiss his hand. "Well, what dost thou want?" "I have come to make friends, O Merchant." "Who art thou?" "I am Abd Allah bin Boo Shaïb es-Sálih, O Merchant, of Aïn Haloo in Rahámna. I have a family there, and cattle, and very much land. I wish to place all in thy hands, and to become thy friend," again endeavouring to throw himself at the feet of the European. "All right, all right, that will do. I will see about it; come to me again to-morrow." "May God bless thee, O Merchant, and fill thee with prosperity, and may He prolong thy days in peace!" As Tájir Vecchio went on with his writing, Abd Allah made off with a hopeful heart to spend the next twenty-four anxious hours in the fandak, while his offerings were carried away to the private house by a servant. Next morning saw him there again, when much the same scene was repeated. This time, however, they got to business. "How can I befriend you?" asked the European, after yesterday's conversation had been practically repeated. "Thou canst very greatly befriend me by making me thy agent in Aïn Haloo. I will work for thee, and bring thee of the produce of my land as others do, if I may only enjoy thy protection. May God have mercy on thee, O Merchant. I take refuge with thee." "I can't be always appointing agents and protecting people for nothing. What can you give me?" "Whatever is just, O Merchant, but the Lord knows that I am not rich, though He has bestowed sufficient on me to live, praise be to Him." "Well, I should want two hundred dollars down, and something when the certificate is renewed next year, besides which you would of course report yourself each quarter, and not come empty-handed. Animals and corn I can do best with, but I don't want any of your poultry." "God bless thee, Merchant, and make thee prosperous, but two hundred dollars is a heavy sum for me, and this last harvest has not been so plentiful as the one before, as thou knowest. Grant me this protection for one hundred and fifty dollars, and I can manage it, but do not make it an impossibility." "I can't go any lower: there are scores of Moors who would give me that price. Do as you like. Good morning." "Thou knowest, O Merchant, I could not give more than I have offered," replied Abd Allah as he rose and left the place. But as no one else could be found in the town to protect him on better terms, he had at last to return, and in exchange for the sum demanded received a paper inscribed on one side in Arabic, and on the other in English, as follows:-- "VICE-CONSULATE FOR GREAT BRITAIN, "MAZAGAN, _Oct. 5, 1838_. "_This is to certify that Abd Allah bin Boo Shaïb es-Sálih, resident at Aïn Haloo in the province of Rahámna, has been duly appointed agent of Edward Vecchio, a British subject, residing in Mazagan: all authorities will respect him according to existing treaties, not molesting him without proper notice to this Vice-Consulate._[22] "_Gratis_ Seal. [Signed] "JOHN SMITH. "_H.B.M.'s Vice-Consul, Mazagan._" [22: A genuine "patent of protection," as prescribed by treaty, supposed to be granted only to wholesale traders, whereas every beggar can obtain "certificates of partnership." The native in question has then only to appear before the notaries and state that he has in his possession so much grain, or so many oxen or cattle, belonging to a certain European, who takes them as his remuneration for presenting the notarial document at his Legation, and obtaining the desired certificate. Moreover, he receives half the produce of the property thus made over to him. This is popularly known as "farming in Morocco."] XXVIII JUSTICE FOR THE JEW "Sleep on anger, and thou wilt not rise repentant." _Moorish Proverb._ The kaïd sat in his seat of office, or one might rather say reclined, for Moorish officials have a habit of lying in two ways at once when they are supposed to be doing justice. Strictly speaking, his position was a sort of halfway one, his back being raised by a pile of cushions, with his right leg drawn up before him, as he leant on his left elbow. His judgement seat was a veritable wool-sack, or rather mattress, placed across the left end of a long narrow room, some eight feet by twenty, with a big door in the centre of one side. The only other apertures in the whitewashed but dirty walls were a number of ventilating loop-holes, splayed on the inside, ten feet out of the twelve above the floor. This was of worn octagonal tiles, in parts covered with a yellow rush mat in an advanced state of consumption. Notwithstanding the fact that the ceiling was of some dark colour, hard to be defined at its present age, the audience-chamber was amply lighted from the lofty horse-shoe archway of the entrance, for sunshine is reflection in Morocco to a degree unknown in northern climes. On the wall above the head of the kaïd hung a couple of huge and antiquated horse-pistols, while on a small round table at his feet, some six inches high, lay a collection of cartridges and gunsmith's tools. Behind him, on a rack, were half a dozen long flint-lock muskets, and on the wall by his feet a number of Moorish daggers and swords. In his hand the governor fondled a European revolver, poking out and replacing the charges occasionally, just to show that it was loaded. His personal attire, though rich in quality, ill became his gawky figure, and there was that about his badly folded turban which bespoke the parvenu. Like the muzzle of some wolf, his pock-marked visage glowered on a couple of prostrated litigants before him, as they fiercely strove to prove each other wrong. Near his feet was squatted his private secretary, and at the door stood policemen awaiting instructions to imprison one or both of the contending parties. The dispute was over the straying of some cattle, a paltry claim for damages. The plaintiff having presented the kaïd with a loaf of sugar and a pound of candles, was in a fair way to win his case, when a suggestive sign on the part of the defendant, comprehended by the judge as a promise of a greater bribe, somewhat upset his calculations, for he was summarily fined a couple of dollars, and ordered to pay another half dollar costs for having allowed the gate of his garden to stand open, thereby inviting his neighbour's cattle to enter. Without a word he was carried off to gaol pending payment, while the defendant settled with the judge and left the court. Into the midst of this scene came another policeman, gripping by the arm a poor Jewish seamstress named Mesaôdah, who had had the temerity to use insulting language to her captor when that functionary was upbraiding her for not having completed some garment when ordered, though he insisted on paying only half-price, declaring that it was for the governor. The Jewess had hardly spoken when she lay sprawling on the ground from a blow which she dare not, under any provocation, return, but her temper had so far gained the mastery over her, that as she rose she cursed her tormentor roundly. That was enough; without more ado the man had laid his powerful arm upon her, and was dragging her to his master's presence, knowing how welcome any such case would be, even though it was not one out of which he might hope to make money. Reckless of the governor's well-known character, Mesaôdah at once opened her mouth to complain against Mahmood, pitching her voice in the terrible key of her kind. "My Lord, may God bless thee and lengthen...." A fierce shake from her captor interrupted the sentence, but did not keep her quiet, for immediately she continued, in pleading tones, as best she could, struggling the while to keep her mouth free from the wretch's hand. "Protect me, I pray thee, from this cruel man; he has struck me: yes, my Lord." "Strike her again if she doesn't stop that noise," cried the kaïd, and as the man raised his hand to threaten her she saw there was no hope, and her legs giving way beneath her, she sank to the ground in tears. "For God's sake, yes, my Lord, have mercy on thine handmaid." It was pitiful to hear the altered tones, and it needed the heart of a brute to reply as did the governor, unmoved, by harshly asking what she had been up to. "She's a thief, my Lord, a liar, like all her people; God burn their religion; I gave her a waistcoat to make a week ago, and I purposed it for a present to thee, my Lord, but she has made away with the stuff, and when I went for it she abused me, and, by thy leave, thee also, my Lord; here she is to be punished." "It's a lie, my Lord; the stuff is in my hut, and the waistcoat's half done, but I knew I should never get paid for it, so had to get some other work done to keep my children from starving, for I am a widow. Have mercy on me!" "God curse the liar! I have spoken the truth," broke in the policeman. "Fetch a basket for her!" ordered the kaïd, and in another moment a second attendant was assisting Mahmood to force the struggling woman to sit in a large and pliable basket of palmetto, the handles of which were quickly lashed across her stomach. She was then thrown shrieking on her back, her bare legs lifted high, and tied to a short piece of pole just in front of the ankles; one man seized each end of this, a third awaiting the governor's orders to strike the soles. In his hand he had a short-handled lash made of twisted thongs from Tafilált, well soaked in water. The efforts of the victim to attack the men on either side becoming violent, a delay was caused by having to tie her hands together, her loud shrieks rending the air the while. "Give her a hundred," said the kaïd, beginning to count as the blows descended, giving fresh edge to the piercing yells, interspersed with piteous cries for mercy, and ribbing the skin in long red lines, which were soon lost in one raw mass of bleeding flesh. As the arm of one wearied, another took his place, and a bucket of cold water was thrown over the victim's legs. At first her face had been ashy pale, it was now livid from the blood descending to it, as her legs grew white all but the soles, which were already turning purple under the cruel lash. Then merciful unconsciousness stepped in, and silence supervened. "That will do," said the governor, having counted eighty-nine. "Take her away; she'll know better next time!" and he proceeded with the cases before him, fining this one, imprisoning that, and bastinadoing a third, with as little concern as an English registrar would sign an order to pay a guinea fine. Indeed, why should he do otherwise. This was his regular morning's work. It was a month before Mesaôdah could touch the ground with her feet, and more than three before she could totter along with two sticks. Her children were kept alive by her neighbours till she could sit up and "stitch, stitch, stitch," but there was no one to hear her bitter complaint, and no one to dry her tears. One day his faithful henchman dragged before the kaïd a Jewish broker, whose crime of having bid against that functionary on the market, when purchasing supplies for his master, had to be expiated by a fine of twenty dollars, or a hundred lashes. The misguided wretch chose the latter, loving his coins too well; but after the first half-dozen had descended on his naked soles, he cried for mercy and agreed to pay. [Illustration: _Photograph by Dr. Rudduck._ JEWESSES OF THE ATLAS.] Another day it was a more wealthy member of the community who was summoned on a serious charge. The kaïd produced a letter addressed to the prisoner, which he said had been intercepted, couched in the woefully corrupted Arabic of the Moorish Jews, but in the cursive Hebrew character. "Canst read, O Moses?" asked the kaïd, in a surly tone. "Certainly, yes, my Lord, may God protect thee, when the writing is in the sacred script." "Read that aloud, then," handing him the missive. Moses commenced by rapidly glancing his eye down the page, and as he did so his face grew pale, his hand shook, and he muttered something in the Hebrew tongue as the kaïd sharply ordered him to proceed. "My Lord, yes, my Lord; it is false, it is a fraud," he stammered. "The Devil take thee, thou son of a dog; read what is set before thee, and let us have none of thy impudence. The gaol is handy." With a trembling voice Moses the usurer read the letter, purporting to have been written by an intimate friend in Mogador, and implying by its contents that Moses had, when in that town some years ago, embraced the faith of Islám, from which he was therefore now a pervert, and consequently under pain of death. He was already crouched upon the ground, as is the custom before a great man, but as he spelled out slowly the damnatory words, he had to stretch forth his hands to keep from falling over. He knew that there was nothing to be gained by denial, by assurances that the letter was a forgery; the kaïd's manner indicated plainly enough that _he_ meant to be satisfied with it, and there was no appeal. "Moses," said the kaïd, in a mock confidential tone, as he took back the letter, "thou'rt in my power. All that thou hast is mine. With such evidence against thee as this thy very head is in my hands. If thou art wise, and wilt share thy fortune with me, all shall go well; if not, thou knowest what to expect. I am to-day in need of a hundred dollars. Now go!" An hour had not elapsed before, with a heart still heavier than the bag he carried, Moses crossed the courtyard again, and deposited the sum required in the hands of the kaïd, with fresh assurances of his innocence, imploring the destruction of that fatal document, which was readily promised, though with no intention of complying with the request, notwithstanding that to procure another as that had been procured would cost but a trifle. These are only instances which could be multiplied of how the Jews of Morocco suffer at the hands of brutal officials. As metal which attracts the electricity from a thunder-cloud, so they invariably suffer first when a newly appointed, conscienceless governor comes to rule. With all his faults the previous kaïd had recognized how closely bound up with that of the Moors under his jurisdiction was the welfare of Jews similarly situated, so that, favoured by his wise administration, their numbers and their wealth had increased till, though in outward appearance beggarly, they formed an important section of the community. The new kaïd, however, saw in them but a possible mine, a goose that laid golden eggs, so, like the fool of the story, he set about destroying it when the supply of eggs fell off, for there was of necessity a limit to the repeated offerings which, on one pretext or another, he extorted from these luckless "tributaries," as they are described in Moorish legal documents. When he found that ordinary means of persuasion failed, he had resort to more drastic measures. He could not imagine fresh feasts and public occasions, auspicious or otherwise, on which to collect "presents" from them, so he satisfied himself by bringing specious charges against the more wealthy Jews and fining them, as well as by encouraging Moors to accuse them in various ways. Many of the payments to the governor being in small and mutilated coin, every Friday he sent to the Jews what he had received during the week, demanding a round sum in Spanish dollars, far more than their fair value. Then when he had forced upon them a considerable quantity of this depreciated stuff, he would send a crier round notifying the public that it was out of circulation and no longer legal tender, moreover giving warning that the "Jew's money" was not to be trusted, as it was known that they had counterfeit coins in their possession. It was then time to offer them half price for it, which they had no option but to accept, though some while later he would re-issue it at its full value, and having permitted its circulation, would force it upon them again. The repairs which it was found necessary to effect in the kasbah, the equipment of troops, the contributions to the expenses of the Sultan's expeditions, or the payment of indemnities to foreign nations, were constantly recurring pretexts for levying fresh sums from the Jews as well as from the Moors, and these were the legal ones. The illegal were too harrowing for description. Young children and old men were brutally thrashed and then imprisoned till they or their friends paid heavy ransoms, and even the women occasionally suffered in this way. On Sabbaths and fast days orders would be issued to the Jews, irrespective of age or rank, to perform heavy work for the governor, perhaps to drag some heavy load or block of stone. Those who could buy themselves off were fortunate: those who could not do so were harnessed and driven like cattle under the lashes of yard-long whips, being compelled when their work was done to pay their taskmasters. Indeed, it was Egypt over again, but there was no Moses. Men or women found with shoes on were bastinadoed and heavily fined, and on more than one occasion the sons of the best-off Israelites were arrested in school on the charge of having used disrespectful language regarding the Sultan, and thrown into prison chained head and feet, in such a manner that it was impossible to stretch their bodies. Thus they were left for days without food, all but dead, in spite of the desire of their relatives to support them, till ransoms of two hundred dollars apiece could be raised to obtain their release, in some cases three months after their incarceration. XXIX CIVIL WAR IN MOROCCO "Wound of speech is worse than wound of sword." _Moorish Proverb._ Spies were already afield when the sun rose this morning, and while their return with the required information was eagerly expected, those of Asni who would be warriors took a hasty breakfast and looked to their horses and guns. Directly intelligence as to the whereabouts of the Aït Mîzán arrived, the cavalcade set forth, perforce in Indian file, on account of the narrow single track, but wherever it was possible those behind pressed forward and passed their comrades in their eagerness to reach the scene of action. No idea of order or military display crossed their minds, and but for the skirmishers who scoured the country round as they advanced, it would have been easy for a concealed foe to have picked them off one by one. Nevertheless they made a gallant show in the morning sun, which glinted on their ornamented stirrups and their flint-locks, held like lances, with the butts upon the pummels before them. The varied colours of their trappings, though old and worn, looked gay by the side of the red cloth-covered saddles and the gun-cases of similar material used by many as turbans. But for the serious expression on the faces of the majority, and the eager scanning of each knoll and shrub, the party might have been intent on powder-play instead of powder-business. For a mile or two no sign of human being was seen, and the ride was already growing wearisome when a sudden report on their right was followed by the heavy fall of one of their number, his well-trained horse standing still for him to re-mount, though he would never more do so. Nothing but a puff of smoke showed whence the shot had come, some way up the face of a hill. The first impulse was to make a charge in that direction, and to fire a volley; but the experience of the leader reminded him that if there were only one man there it would not be worth while, and if there were more they might fall into an ambush. So their file passed on while the scouts rode towards the hill slope. A few moments later one of these had his horse shot under him, and then a volley was fired which took little effect on the advancing horsemen, still too far away for successful aim. They had been carefully skirting a wooded patch which might give shelter to their foes, whom they soon discovered to be lying in trenches behind the first hill-crests. Unless they were dislodged, it would be almost impossible to proceed, so, making a rapid flank movement, the Asni party spurred their horses and galloped round to gain the hills above the hidden enemy. As they did so random shots were discharged, and when they approached the level of the trenches, they commenced a series of rushes forward, till they came within range. In doing so they followed zig-zag routes to baffle aim, firing directly they made out the whereabouts of their assailants, and beating a hasty retreat. What success they were achieving they could not tell, but their own losses were not heavy. Soon, as their firing increased, that from the trenches which they were gradually approaching grew less, and fresh shots from behind awoke them to the fact that the enemy was making a rear attack. By this time they were in great disorder, scattered over a wide area; the majority had gained the slight cover of the brushwood to their rear, and a wide space separated them from the new arrivals, who were performing towards them the same wild rushes that they themselves had made towards the trenches. They were therefore divided roughly into two divisions, the footmen in the shelter of the shrubs, the horsemen engaging the mounted enemy. Among the brushwood hardly was the figure of friend or foe discernible, for all lay down behind any available shelter, crawling from point to point like so many caterpillars, but firing quickly enough when an enemy was sighted. This style of warfare has its advantages, for it greatly diminishes losses on either side. For the horsemen, deprived of such shelter, safety lay in rapid movements and unexpected evolutions, each man acting for himself, and keeping as far away from his comrades as possible. So easily were captures made that it almost seemed as if many preferred surrender and safety to the chances of war, for they knew that they were sure of honourable treatment on both sides. The prisoners were not even bound, but merely disarmed and marched to the rear, to be conveyed at night in a peaceful manner to their captors' tents and huts, there to be treated as guests till peace should result in exchange. By this time the combatants were scattered over a square mile or so, and though the horsemen of Asni had driven the Aït Mîzán from the foremost trenches by the bold rushes described, and their footmen had engaged them, no further advantage seemed likely to accrue, while they were terribly harassed by those who still remained under cover. The signal was therefore given for a preconcerted retreat, which at once began. Loud shouts of an expected victory now arose from the Aït Mîzán, who were gradually drawn from their hiding-places by their desire to secure nearer shots at the men of Asni as they slowly descended the hill. At length the Aït Mîzán began to draw somewhat to one side, as they discovered that they were being led too far into the open, but this movement was outwitted by the Asni horsemen, who were now pouring down on the scene. The wildest confusion supervened; many fell on every hand. Victory was now assured to Asni, which the enemy were quick to recognize, and as the sun was by this time at blazing noon, and energy grew slack on both sides, none was loth to call a conference. This resulted in an agreement by the vanquished to return the stolen cattle which had formed the _casus belli_, for indeed they were no longer able to protect them from their real owners. As many more were forfeited by way of damages, and messages were despatched to the women left in charge to hand them over to a party of the victors. Prisoners were meantime exchanged, while through the medium of the local "holy man" a peace was formally ratified, after which each party returned to its dead, who were quickly consigned to their shallow graves. Such of the Asni men as were not mourners, now assembled in the open space of their village to be feasted by their women as victors. Basins, some two feet across, were placed on the ground filled with steaming kesk'soo. Round each of these portions sat cross-legged some eight or ten of the men, and a metal bowl of water was handed from one to the other to rinse the fingers of the right hand. They sat upon rude blankets spread on mats, the scene lit by Roman-like olive-oil lamps, and a few French candles round the board of the sheïkh and allied leaders. A striking picture, indeed, they presented, there in the still night air, thousands of heaven-lights gleaming from the dark blue vault above, outrivalling the flicker of those simple earth-flames on their lined and sun-burnt faces. The women who waited on them, all of middle age, alone remained erect, as they glided about on their bare feet, carrying bowl and towel from man to man. From the huts and the tents around came many strange sounds of bird, beast, and baby, for the cocks were already crowing, as it was growing late,[23] while the dogs bayed at the shadow of the cactus and the weird shriek of the night-bird. [23: A way they have in Barbary.] "B'ism Illah!" exclaimed the host at each basin ("In the Name of God!")--as he would ask a blessing--when he finished breaking bread for his circle, and plunged his first sop in the gravy. "B'ism Illah!" they all replied, and followed suit in a startlingly sudden silence wherein naught but the stowing away of food could be heard, till one of them burnt his fingers by an injudiciously deep dive into the centre after a toothsome morsel. In the midst of a sea of broth rose mountains of steamed and buttered kesk'soo, in the craters of which had been placed the contents of the stew-pot, the disjointed bones of chickens with onions and abundant broad beans. The gravy was eaten daintily with sops of bread, conveyed to the mouth in a masterly manner without spilling a drop, while the kesk'soo was moulded in the palm of the right hand into convenient sized balls and shot into the mouth by the thumb. The meat was divided with the thumb and fingers of the right hand alone, since the left may touch no food. At last one by one sat back, his greasy hand outstretched, and after taking a sip of cold water from the common jug with his left, and licking his right to prevent the waste of one precious grain, each washed his hands, rinsed his mouth thrice, polished his teeth with his right forefinger, and felt ready to begin again, all agreeing that "he who is not first at the powder, should not be last at the dish." XXX THE POLITICAL SITUATION "A guess of the informed is better than the assurance of the ignorant." _Moorish Proverb._ Ever since the accession of the present Sultan, Mulai Abd el Azîz IV., on his attaining the age of twenty in 1900, Morocco has been more than ever the focus of foreign designs, both public and private, which have brought about a much more disturbed condition than under his father, or even under the subsequent Wazeer Regent. The manifest friendlessness of the youth, his lack of training for so important a part, and the venality of his entourage, at once attracted birds of prey, and they have worked their will. Since the death of El Hasan III., in 1894, the administration had been controlled by the former Lord High Chamberlain, or "Curtain" of the shareefian throne, whose rule was severe, though good, and it seemed doubtful whether he would relinquish the reins of authority. The other wazeers whom his former master had left in office had been imprisoned on various charges, and he stood supreme. He was, however, old and enfeebled by illness, so when in 1900 his end came instead of his resignation, few were surprised. What they were not quite prepared for, however, was the clearing of the board within a week or two by the death of his two brothers and a cousin, whom he had promoted to be respectively Commander-in-chief, Chamberlain, and Master of the Ceremonies--all of them, it was declared, by influenza. Another brother had died but a short while before, and the commissioner sent to Tangier to arrange matters with the French was found dead in his room--from asphyxia caused by burning charcoal. Thus was the Cabinet dissolved, and the only remaining member resigned. There then rose suddenly to power a hitherto unheard of Arab of the South, El Menébhi, who essayed too much in acting as Ambassador to London while still Minister of War, and returned to find his position undermined; he has since emigrated to Egypt. It was freely asserted that the depletion of the Moorish exchequer was due to his peculation, resulting in his shipping a large fortune to England in specie, with the assistance of British officials who were supposed to have received a handsome "consideration" in addition to an enormous price paid for British protection. Thus, amid a typically Moorish cloud, he left the scene. From that time the Court has been the centre of kaleidoscopic intrigues, which have seriously hampered administration, but which were not in themselves sufficient to disturb the country. What was of infinitely greater moment was the eagerness with which the young ruler, urged by his Circassian mother, sought advice and counsel from Europe, and endeavoured to act up to it. One disinterested and trusted friend at that juncture would have meant the regeneration of the Empire, provided that interference from outside were stayed. But this was not to be. The few impartial individuals who had access to the Sultan were outnumbered by the horde of politicians, diplomats, adventurers, and schemers who surrounded him, the latter at least freely bribing wazeers to obtain their ends. In spite of an unquestionable desire to do what was best for his country, and to act upon the good among the proffered advice, wild extravagance resulted both in action and expenditure. Thus Mulai Abd el Azîz became the laughing-stock of Europe, and the butt of his people's scorn. His heart was with the foreigners--with dancing women and photographers,--he had been seen in trousers, even on a bicycle! What might he not do next? A man so implicated with unbelievers could hardly be a faithful Muslim, said the discontented. No more efficacious text could have been found to rouse fanaticism and create dissatisfaction throughout his dominions. Black looks accompanied the mention of his name, and it was whispered that the Leader of the Faithful was selling himself and his Empire, if not to the Devil, at least to the Nazarenes, which was just as bad. Any other country would have been ripe for rebellion, as Europe supposed that Morocco was, but scattered and conflicting interests defeated all attempts to induce a general rising. One of the wisest measures of the new reign was the attempt to reorganize finances in accordance with English advice, by the systematic levy of taxes hitherto imposed in the arbitrary fashion described in Chapter II. This was hailed with delight, and had it been maintained by a strong Government, would have worked wonders in restoring prosperity. But foreign _protégés_ refused to pay, and objections of all sorts were raised, till at last the "terteeb," as it was called, became impossible of collection without recourse to arms. Fearing this, the money in hand to pay the tax was expended on guns and cartridges, which the increasing demand led foreigners to smuggle in by the thousand. It is estimated that some millions of fire-arms--a large proportion of them repeating rifles with a large supply of ammunition--are now in the hands of the people, while the Government has never been worse supplied than at present. Ship-load after ship-load has been landed on the coast in defiance of all authority, and large consignments have been introduced over the Algerian frontier, the state of which has in consequence become more than ever unsettled. In short, the benign intentions of Mulai Abd el Azîz have been interpreted as weakness, and once again the Nazarenes are accused--to quote a recent remark of an Atlas scribe--of having "spoiled the Sultan," and of being about to "spoil the country." Active among the promoters of dissatisfaction have been throughout the Idreesi Shareefs, representatives of the original Muslim dynasty in Morocco; venerated for their ancestry and adherence to all that is retrogressive or bigoted, and on principle opposed to the reigning dynasty. These leaders of discontent find able allies in the Algerians in Morocco, some of whom settled there years ago because sharing their feelings and determined not to submit to the French; but of whom others, while expressing equal devotion to the old order, can from personal experience recommend the advantages of French administration, to which even their exiled brethren or their descendants no longer feel equal objection. The summary punishment inflicted a few years ago on the murderer of an Englishman in the streets of Fez was, like everything else, persistently misinterpreted through the country. In the distant provinces the story--as reported by natives therefrom--ran that the Nazarene had been shot by a saint while attempting to enter and desecrate the sacred shrine of Mulai Idrees, and that by executing him the Sultan showed himself an Unbeliever. When British engineers were employed to survey the route for a railway between Fez and Mequinez this was reported as indicating an absolute sale of the country, and the people were again stirred up, though not to actual strife. Only in the semi-independent district of the Ghaïáta Berbers between Fez and Táza, which had never been entirely subjugated, did a flame break out. A successful writer of amulets, hitherto unknown, one Jelálli Zarhôni, who had acquired a great local reputation, began to denounce the Sultan's behaviour with religious fervour. Calling on the neighbouring tribesmen to refuse allegiance to so unworthy a monarch, he ultimately raised the standard of revolt in the name of the Sultan's imprisoned elder brother, M'hammed. Finally, the rumour ran that this prince had escaped and joined Jelálli, who, from his habitual prophet's mount, is better known throughout the country as Boo Hamára--"Father of the She-ass." According to the official statement, Jelálli Zarhôni was originally a policeman (makházni), whose bitterness and subsequent sedition arose from ill-treatment then received. Although exalted in newspaper reports to the dignity of a "pretender," in Morocco he is best known as the "Rogi" or "Common One." Fez clamoured to see M'hammed, that the story might be disproved, and after much delay, during which he was supposed to be conveyed from Mequinez, a veiled and guarded rider arrived, preceded by criers who proclaimed him to be the Sultan's brother. But as no one could be sure if this were the case or not, each party believed what it wished, and Jelálli's hands were strengthened. Boldly announcing the presence with him of Mulai M'hammed, in his name he sought and obtained the allegiance of tribe after tribe. Although the Sultan effected a reconciliation with his presumed brother--whose movements, however, still remain restricted--serious men believe him to be in the rebel camp, and few know the truth. At first success attended the rebellion, but it never spread beyond the unsettled eastern provinces, and after three years it ineffectually smoulders on, the leader cooped up by the Sultan's forces near the coast, though the Sultan is not strong enough to stamp it out. By those whose knowledge of the country is limited to newspaper news a much more serious state of affairs is supposed to exist, a "pretender" collecting his forces for a final coup, etc. Something of truth there may be in this, but the situation is grossly exaggerated. The local rising of a few tribes in eastern Morocco never affected the rest of the Empire, save by that feeling of unrest which, in the absence of complete information, jumps at all tales. Even the so-called "rout" of an "imperial army" three years ago was only a stampede without fighting, brought about by a clever ruse, and there has never been a serious conflict throughout the affair, though the "Rogi" is well supplied with arms from Algeria, and his "forces" are led by a Frenchman, M. Delbrel. Meanwhile comparative order reigns in the disaffected district, though in the north, usually the most peaceful portion of the Empire, all is disturbed. There a leader has arisen, Raïsûli by name, who obtained redress for the wrongs of tribes south of Tangier, and his own appointment as their kaïd, by the astute device of carrying off as hostages an American and an Englishman, so that the pressure certain to be brought to bear by their Governments would compel the Sultan to grant his demands. All turned out as he had hoped, and the condign punishment which he deserves is yet far off, though a local struggle continues between him and a small imperial force, complicated by feuds between his sometime supporters, who, however, fight half-heartedly, for fear of killing relatives pressed into service on the other side. Those who once looked to Raïsûli as a champion have found his little finger thicker than the Sultan's loins, and the country round Tangier is ruined by taxation, so that every one is discontented, and the district is unsafe, a species of civil war raging. The full name of this redoubtable leader is Mulai Ahmad bin Mohammed bin Abd Allah er-Raïsûli, and he is a shareef of Beni Arôs, connected therefore with the Wazzán shareefs; but his prestige as such is low, both on account of his past career, and because of his acceptance of a civil post. His mother belonged to Anjera, near Tangier, where he was born about thirty-six years ago at the village of Zeenát, being well educated, as education goes in Morocco, with the Beni M'sawah. But falling into bad company, he first took to cattle-lifting, afterwards turning highwayman, as which he was eventually caught by the Abd es-Sadok family--various members of which were kaïds from Ceuta to Azîla--and consigned to prison in Mogador. After three or four years his release was obtained by Háj Torres, the Foreign Commissioner in Tangier, but when he found that the Abd es-Sadoks had sequestrated his property, he vowed not to cut his hair till he had secured their disgrace. Hence, with locks that many a woman might envy, he has plotted and harassed till his present position has been achieved. But as this is only a means to an end, who can tell what that may be? Raïsûli is allowed on all hands to be a peculiarly able and well-bred man, full of resource and determination. Though his foes have succeeded in kidnapping even his mother, it will certainly be a miracle if he is taken alive. Should all fail him, he is prepared to blow his brains out, or make use of a small phial of poison always to hand. It is interesting to remember that just such a character, Abd Allah Ghaïlán, held a similar position in this district when Tangier was occupied by the English, who knew him as "Guyland," and paid him tribute. The more recent imitation of Raïsûli's tactics by a native free-booter of the Ceuta frontier, in arresting two English officers as hostages wherewith to secure the release of his brother and others from prison, has proved equally successful, but as matters stand at present, it is more than doubtful whether the Moorish Government is in a position to bring either of these offenders to book, and the outlook in the north is decidedly stormy. It is, indeed, quite in accordance with the traditions of Moorish history, throughout which these periods of local disorganization have been of constant recurrence without danger to the State. [Illustration: _Photograph by Dr. Rudduck._ THE KAÏD. A MOORISH KAÏD AND ATTENDANTS.] In the south things are quiet, though a spirit of unrest pervades the people, especially since it has been seen that the Sultan no longer either collects the regular taxes or maintains the regular army. There the immediate result of the failure to collect the taxes for a year or two was that the people had more to spend on cattle and other stock, which rapidly rose in price, no one needing to sell unless he wished. Within the last two years, however, the kaïds have recommenced their oppressive treatment, under the pretext of a levy to put down the rising in the eastern provinces. Men and money were several times furnished, but though now more difficult to raise, the demands continue. The wonder is that the people remain so quiet, but they are of a more peaceable nature than the Berbers of the north. Three of the Sultan's brothers have been for some time camped in as many centres, engaged in collecting funds, but tribe after tribe has refused to pay, declaring that they have been exempted by their lord, and until he returns they will submit to no kaïd and pay no dues. It is only in certain districts that some of the funds demanded have been forthcoming, and the kaïds have full authority, but these are officials of long standing and great repute, whose jurisdiction has been much extended in consequence. Changes among the less important kaïds have been continual of late. One man would buy the office and struggle to establish himself, only to find a new man installed over his head before he was settled, which has frequently led to local disorders, fighting and plundering. In this way the Government has quite lost prestige, and a strong hand is awaited. The Moors would have preferred another Ismáïl the Bloodthirsty, who could compel his will, and awe all other rascals in his dominions, to the mild and well-intentioned youth now at the helm. Some would even welcome any change that would put an end to present insecurity, but only the French _protégés_ desire to see that change effected by France, and only those under the German flag already would hail that with joy. The Jews alone would welcome any, as they have good cause to do. Such was already the condition of things when the long-threatening clouds burst, and the Anglo-French Agreement was published in April, 1904. Rumours of negotiations for the sale of British interests in Morocco to France had for some time filled the air, but in face of official denials, and the great esteem in which England was held by the Moors, few gave credence to them. Mulai Abd el Azîz had relied especially on Great Britain, and had confidently looked to it for protection against the French; the announcement of the bargain between them broke him down. It may have been inevitable; and since an agreement among all the Powers concerned was so remote a possibility, an understanding between the three most interested may have been the wisest course, in view of pending internal troubles which would certainly afford excuses for interference. It was undoubtedly good policy on their part to decide who should inherit the vineyard, and on what terms, that conflict between them might be avoided. But on the unconsulted victim it came a cruel blow, unexpected and indefensible. It is important not to forget this. But the one absorbing thought of all for nearly a year past has been the drought and consequent famine. Between November, 1904, and October, 1905, there was practically no rainfall over a large portion of the country, and agriculture being interfered with, grain rose to five times its normal price. Although relief has now come, it will be months before the cattle are in proper condition again, and not till after next year's harvest in May and June, should it prove a good one, will contentment be restored. Under such conditions, though more ready than ever to grumble, the people have had no heart to fight, which has, to some degree, assisted in keeping them quiet. The famine has, however, tried them sore, and only increased their exasperation. Added to this, the general feeling of dissatisfaction regarding the Sultan's foreign predilections, and the slumbering fanaticism of the "learned" class, there is now a chronic lack of funds. The money which should have been raised by taxation has been borrowed abroad and ruthlessly scattered. Fortunes have been made by foreigners and natives alike, but the Sultan is all but bankrupt. Yet never was his entourage so rich, though many who to-day hold houses and lands were a few years ago penniless. As for the future, for many years the only answer possible to tediously frequent inquiries as to what was going to happen in Morocco has been that the future of the Shareefian Empire depended entirely on what might happen in Europe, not to any degree on its own internal condition. The only way in which this could affect the issue was by affording an excuse for outside interference, as in the present case. Corrupt as the native administration may be, it is but the expression of a corrupt population, and no native government, even in Europe, is ever far in advance of those over whom it rules. In spite, too, of the pressure of injustice on the individual here and there, the victim of to-day becomes the oppressor of to-morrow, and such opportunities are not to be surrendered without a protest. The vast majority is, therefore, always in favour of present conditions, and would rather the chances of internecine strife than an exotic peace. No foreign ruler, however benign, would be welcome, and no "penetration," however "pacific," but will be endured and resented as a hostile wound. Even the announcement of the Anglo-French Agreement was sufficient to gravely accentuate the disorders of the country, and threaten immediate complications with Europe, by provoking attacks on Europeans who had hitherto been safe from interference save under exceptional circumstances. A good deal of the present unrest is attributable to this cause alone. It is, therefore, a matter of deep regret that the one possible remedy--joint action of the Powers in policing the Moors, as it were, by demanding essential reforms in return for a united guarantee of territorial integrity--was rendered impossible by the rivalries between those Powers, especially on the part of France. Great Britain's step aside has made possible the only alternative, the surrender of the coveted task to one of their number, in return for such _quid pro quo_ as each could obtain. Had the second-class Powers been bargained with first, not only would they have secured substantial terms, which now it is no use their asking, but the leading Powers could have held out for terms yet undreamed of. France did well to begin with Great Britain, but it was an egregious diplomatic error to overlook Germany, which was thereby promoted to the hitherto unhoped-for position of "next friend" and trusted adviser of Morocco. Up to that point Germany had played a waiting game so patiently that France fell into the trap, and gave her all she wanted. It is inconceivable how the astute politicians of the Quai d'Orsay committed such a blunder, save on the assumption that they were so carried away by the ease with which they had settled with Great Britain, that they forgot all other precautions--unless it was that they feared to jeopardize the conclusion of the main bargain by delay in discussing any subsidiary point. When the Agreement was made known, the writer pointed out in the _Westminster Review_, that, "Portugal, Italy and Austria have but to acquiesce and rest assured of the 'most favoured nation' treatment, as will all the other Powers save one. That one, of course, is Germany, _whose sole interest in Morocco is the possibility of placing a drag on France_. She will have to be dealt with. Having disposed of England, which had real interests at stake, in the command of the straits and the maintenance of Gibraltar, France should be able to accomplish this as well. Five and twenty years ago Germany had not even a commercial interest in Morocco. Great Britain did three-fourths of the trade, or more, France about a tenth, Spain and others dividing the crumbs between them. But an active commercial policy--by the encouragement and support of young firms in a way that made Britishers envious, and abusive of their own Foreign Office--has secured for Germany a growing share of the trade, till now she stands next to Great Britain, whose share is reduced to one-half."[24] [24: It is curious, indeed, how little the German Empire or its component States figure in the history of diplomatic relations with Morocco. One has to go back to the time of Rudolf II., in 1604, to find an active policy in force with regard to Moroccan affairs, when that remarkable adventurer or international diplomatist, Sir Anthony Sherley, was accredited to Abd el Azîz III., the last of the Moorish rulers to bear the same name as the present one. This intrepid soldier, a man after the Kaiser's own heart, had been accredited to Germany by the great Shah of Persia, Abbás, whose confidence he had won to a marvellous degree, and he appears to have made as great an impression on Rudolf, who sent him as his envoy to Morocco. Arrived there, he astonished the natives by coolly riding into the court of audience--a privilege still reserved to the Sultan alone. But the Ameer, as he was called in those days, was too politic or too polite to raise the question, only taking care that the next time the "dog of a Christian" should find a chain stretched across the gateway. This Sir Anthony could not brook, so rode back threatening to break off negotiations, and it affords a striking lesson as to the right way of dealing with orientals, that even in those days the Moors should have yielded and imprisoned the porter, permitting Sir Anthony's entrance on horseback thereafter. The treaty he came to negotiate was concluded, and relations with the Germans were established on a right footing, but they have been little in evidence till recent years.] After all, the interests of Germany in Morocco were but a trifling consideration, meaning much less to her than ours do to us, and it was evident that whatever position she might assume, however she might bluster, she, too, had her price. This not being perceived by the ill-informed Press of this country, the prey of political journalists in Paris, Cologne and Madrid--more recently even of Washington, whence the delusive reports are now re-echoed with alarming reverberations--there was heated talk of war, and everything that newspapers could do to bring it about was done. Even a private visit of the Kaiser to Tangier, the only important feature of which was the stir made about it, was utilized to fan the flame. However theatrical some of the political actions of Wilhelm II. may have been, here was a case in which, directly he perceived the capital being made of his visit, he curtailed it to express his disapprobation. It was in Tangier Bay that he received the newspaper cuttings on the subject, and although the visit was to have extended in any case but to a few hours, he at once decided not to land. It was only when it was urged upon him what disappointment this would cause to its thirty thousand inhabitants and visitors for the occasion, that he consented to pay one short visit to his Legation, abandoning the more important part of the programme, which included a climb to the citadel and an interchange of visits with a kinsman of the Sultan. Nothing more could have been done to emphasize the private nature of the visit, in reality of no greater moment than that of King Edward to Algeria almost at the same time. Neither such a personal visit, nor any other action should have been required to remind Great Britain and France that they and Spain alone were affected by their agreements, and that not even official notification to Morocco or the other Powers could restrict their perfect liberty of action. When, therefore, the distracted Sultan turned to Germany as the most influential Power still faithful to its undertakings, the response of Germany was perfectly correct, as was his own action. But Germany, although prepared to meet him with a smile, and not averse to receiving crumbs in the form of concessions, had no more intention of embroiling herself on his behalf than Great Britain. Extraordinary rumours, however, pervaded the country, and the idea of German intervention was hailed with delight; now general disappointment is felt, and Germany is classed with England among the traitors. Mulai Abd el Azîz had but one resource, to propose another conference of the Powers, assured that France and Germany would never come to an understanding, and that this would at least ward off the fatal day indefinitely. Yet now that France and Germany have agreed, it is probable that this step is regretted, and that, since the two have acted in concert, the Moorish Court has been at its wits' ends; it would now regard as a God-send anything which might prevent the conference from being held, lest it should strengthen the accord among its enemies, and weaken its own position. The diplomatic negotiations between Fez, Berlin, and Paris have been of a character normal under the circumstances; and as the bickerings and insinuations which accompanied them were foreign to Morocco, the Sultan's invitation only serving as an opportunity for arriving at an understanding, they need not be dwelt on here. It is the French Press which has stirred up the commotion, and has misled the British Public into the belief that there has been some "Morocco Tangle." The facts are simply these: since 1880, the date of the Madrid Convention regarding the vexed question of foreign rights of protecting natives and holding property in Morocco, all nations concerned have been placed on an equal footing in their dealings with that country. The "most favoured nation" clause has secured for all the advantages gained by any in its special treaties. Nothing has since occurred to destroy this situation. In asking his "friends" to meet again in conference now, the Sultan acted wisely and within his rights. The fact that any two or three of them may have agreed to give one of their number a "free hand," should it suit her purposes to upset the _status quo_, does not theoretically affect the position, though it has suggested the advisability of further discussion. It is only in virtue of their combined might that the Powers in question are enabled to assume the position they do. Spain, the only power with interests in Morocco other than commercial, had been settled with by a subsequent agreement in October, 1904, for she had been consulted in time. Special clauses dealing with her claims to consideration had even been inserted in the Anglo-French Agreement-- Art. VII. "This arrangement does not apply to the points now occupied by Spain on the Moorish shore of the Mediterranean. Art. VIII. "The two Governments, animated by their sincerely friendly sentiments for Spain, take into particular consideration the interests she possesses, owing to her geographical position and to her territorial possessions on the Moorish shore of the Mediterranean, in regard to which the French Government will make some arrangement with the Spanish Government ... (which) will be communicated to the Government of His Britannic Majesty." These Articles apply to Ceuta, which Spain withheld from the Portuguese after the brief union of the crowns in the sixteenth century; to Veléz, an absolutely worthless rock, captured in 1564 by Garcia de Toledo with fifteen thousand men, the abandonment of which has more than once been seriously urged in Spain; to Alhucemas, a small island occupied in 1673; to Melilla, a huge rock peninsula captured, on his own account, by Medina Sidonia in 1497; and to the Zaffarine (or Saffron) Islands, only one of which is used, in the seizure of which the French were cleverly forestalled in 1848. All are convict stations; unless heavily fortified in a manner that at present they are not, they would not be of sufficient value to tempt even a foe of Spain. Ceuta and Melilla alone are worthy of consideration, and the former is the only one it might ever pay to fortify. So far have matters gone. The conference asked for by Morocco--the flesh thrown to the wolves--is to form the next Act. To this conference the unfortunate Sultan would like to appeal for protection against the now "free hand" of France, but in consenting to discuss matters at all, she and her ally have, of course, stipulated that what has been done without reference to treaty shall not be treated of, if they are to take part, and as an act of courtesy to us, the United States has followed suit. Other matters of importance which Mulai Abd el Azîz desired to discuss have also been ruled out beforehand, so that only minor questions are to be dealt with, hardly worth the trouble of meeting. Foremost among these is the replenishing of the Moorish exchequer by further loans, which might more easily have been arranged without a conference. Indeed, there are so many money-lenders anxious to finance Morocco on satisfactory terms, that the competition among them has almost degenerated into a scramble. But all want some direct guarantee through their Governments, which introduces the political element, as in return for such guarantee each Power desires to increase its interests or privileges. Thus, while each financier holds out his gold-bags temptingly before the Sultan, elbowing aside his rival, each demands as surety the endorsement of his Government, the price of which the Sultan is hardly prepared to pay. He probably hopes that by appealing to them all in conference, he will obtain a joint guarantee on less onerous terms, without affording any one of them a foothold in his country, should he be unable to discharge his obligations. He is wise, and but for the difficulties caused by the defection of England and France from the political circle, this request for money might alone have sufficed to introduce a reformed _régime_ under the joint auspices of all. As it is, attempts to raise funds elsewhere, even to discharge the current interest, having failed, his French creditors, who do possess the support of their Government, have obligingly added interest to capital, and with official sanction continue to roll the snowball destined one day to overwhelm the State. In the eyes of the Moors this is nothing less than a bill-of-sale on the Empire. A second point named by the Sultan for submission to the conference is the urgency of submitting all inhabitants of the country without distinction to the reformed taxation; a reasonable demand if the taxes were reasonable and justly assessed, but who can say at present that they are either? The exchequer is undoubtedly defrauded of large sums by the exemptions enjoyed by foreigners and their _protégés_, on account of the way in which these privileges are abused, while, to begin with, the system itself is unfair to the native. Here again is an excellent lever for securing reforms by co-operation. Let the Sultan understand that the sole condition on which such a privilege can be abandoned is the reform of his whole fiscal and judicial systems, and that this effected to the satisfaction of the Powers, these privileges will be abandoned. Nothing could do more to promote the internal peace and welfare of Morocco than this point rightly handled. A third demand, the abolition of foreign postal services in his country, may appear to many curious and insignificant, but the circumstances are peculiar. Twenty years ago, when I first knew Morocco, there were no means of transmitting correspondence up country save by intermittent couriers despatched by merchants, whom one had to hunt up at the _cafés_ in which they reposed. On arrival the bundle of letters was carried round to likely recipients for them to select their own in the most hap-hazard way. Things were hardly more formal at the ports at which eagerly awaited letters and papers arrived by sea. These were carried free from Gibraltar, and delivered on application at the various consular offices. At one time the Moorish Government maintained unsatisfactory courier services between two or three of the towns, but issued no stamps, the receipt for the courier's payment being of the nature of a postmark, stamped at the office, which, though little known to collectors, is the only genuine and really valuable Moorish postage stamp obtainable. All other so-called Morocco stamps were issued by private individuals, who later on ran couriers between some two Moorish towns, their income being chiefly derived from the sale of stamps to collectors. Some were either entirely bogus services, or only a few couriers were run to save appearances. Stamps of all kinds were sold at face value, postmarked or not to order, and as the issues were from time to time changed, the profits were steady and good. The case was in some ways analogous to that of the Yangtse and other treaty ports of China, where I found every consul's wife engaged in designing local issues, sometimes of not inconsiderable merit. In Morocco quite a circle of stamp-dealers sprang up, mostly sharp Jewish lads--though not a few foreign officials contracted the fever, and some time ago a stamp journal began to be issued in Tangier to promote the sale of issues which otherwise would not have been heard of. Now all is changed; Great Britain, France, Spain and Germany maintain head postal offices in Tangier, the British being subject to that of Gibraltar, whose stamps are used. All have courier services down the coast, as well as despatching by steamer, and some maintain inland mails conveyed by runners. The distance from Tangier to Fez, some hundred and fifty miles, is covered by one man on foot in about three days and a half, and the forty miles' run from Tangier to Tetuan is done in a night for a dollar, now less than three shillings. But a more enlightened Sultan sees the advantage it would be to him, if not to all parties, to control the distribution of the growing correspondence of both Europeans and natives, the latter of whom prefer to register their letters, having very little faith in their despatch without a receipt. And as Mulai Abd el Azîz is willing to join the Postal Union, provided that the service is placed in efficient European hands there is no reason why it should not be united in one office, and facilities thereby increased. France, however, in joining the conference, has quite another end in view than helping others to bolster up the present administration, and that is to obtain a formal recognition by all concerned, including Morocco, of the new position created by her agreement with Great Britain. That is to say, without permitting her action to be questioned in any way, she hopes to secure some show of right to what at present she possesses only by the might of herself and her friends. She has already agreed with Germany to recognize her special claim for permission to "police" the Morocco-Algerian frontier, and those who recall the appropriation of Tunisia will remember that it originated in "policing" the Khomaïr--known to the French as "Kroumirs"--on the Tunisian frontier of Algeria. It is, indeed, a curious spectacle, a group of butchers around the unfortunate victim, talking philanthropy, practising guile: two of the strongest have at last agreed between themselves which is to have the carcase, but preparations for the "pacific" death-thrust are delayed by frantic appeals for further consultation, and by the refusal of one of their number who had been ignored to recognize the bargain. Consultation is only agreed to on conditions which must defeat its object, and terms are arranged with the intervener. Everything, therefore, is clear for the operation; the tender-hearted are soothed by promises that though the "penetration" cannot but be painful, it shall at least not be hostile; while in order that the contumacious may hereafter hold their peace, the consultation is to result in a formal but carefully worded death-warrant. Meanwhile it is worth while recalling the essential features of the Madrid Convention of 1880, mainly due to French claims for special privileges in protecting natives, or in giving them the rights of French citizens. This was summoned by Spain at the suggestion of Great Britain, with the concurrence of Morocco. Holland, Sweden and Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, France, Germany, the United States, Italy, Brazil, and Austria-Hungary accepted the invitation in the order named, but Brazil was ultimately unrepresented. Russia was also invited as an after-thought, but did not consider it worth while accepting. The scope of the conference was limited to the subject of foreign protection, though the question of property was by mutual consent included. The representatives of the conferring Powers accredited to the Spanish Court were nominated as members--the English Plenipotentiary acting for Denmark--as it was felt that those accredited to Morocco already held too decided views of the matter. The Moorish Foreign Minister attended on behalf of Morocco, and Señor Canovas, President of the Council, represented Spain. Seventeen meetings were held, under the presidency of Señor Canovas, between May 19 and July 3, the last being purely formal. The Convention then signed contained little that was new, but it re-stated clearly and harmonized with satisfactory results rights previously granted to one and another. In several particulars, however, its provisions are faulty, and experience of their working has long led to demands for revision, but conflicting interests, and fears of opening up larger issues, have caused this to be postponed. Now that the time has arrived for a re-definition of the whole position and rights of foreigners and their Governments in Morocco, it is earnestly to be hoped that the opportunity may not be lost. The great fault of the Madrid Convention is that while it recognizes the right of foreigners to acquire land in Morocco, it stipulates for the previous consent of the native authorities, which is only to be obtained, if at all, by liberal "presents." But the most pressing need is the establishment of an international tribunal for the trial of cases involving more than one nationality, to replace the present anarchy, resulting from the conflict in one case of any of the thirteen independent jurisdictions at present in force in Morocco. Such a measure would be an outcome of more value than all possible agreements to respect the independence and integrity of Morocco till it suited the purpose of one party or another to encroach thereon. In lands knowing but one jurisdiction it is hard to conceive the abuses and defeats of justice which result from the confusion reigning in Morocco, or those which existed in Egypt previous to the establishment of international tribunals there. For instance, plaintiff, of nationality A., sues defendants, of nationalities B., C., and D., for the return of goods which they have forcibly carried off, on the ground that they were pledged to them by a party of nationality E., who disputes their claim, and declares the goods sold to original plaintiff. Here are five jurisdictions involved, each with a different set of laws, so that during the three separate actions necessitated, although the three defendants have all acted alike and together, the judgment in the case of each may be different, _e.g._ case under law B. dismissed, that under law C. won by plaintiff, while law D. might recognize the defendants' claim, but condemn his action. Needless to follow such intricacies further, though this is by no means an extreme case, for disputes are constantly occurring--to say nothing of criminal actions--involving the several consular courts, for the most part presided over by men unequipped by legal training, in which it is a practical impossibility for justice to be done to all, and time and money are needlessly wasted. XXXI FRANCE IN MOROCCO "Who stands long enough at the door is sure to enter at last." _Moorish Proverb._ In a previous work on this country, "The Land of the Moors," published in 1901, the present writer concluded with this passage: "France alone is to be feared in the Land of the Moors, which, as things trend to-day, must in time form part of her colony. There is no use disguising the fact, and, as England certainly would not be prepared to go to war with her neighbour to prevent her repeating in Morocco what she has done in Tunis, it were better not to grumble at her action. All England cares about is the mouth of the Mediterranean, and if this were secured to her, or even guaranteed neutral--were that possible--she could have no cause to object to the French extension. Our Moorish friends will not listen to our advice; they keep their country closed, as far as they can, refusing administrative reforms which would prevent excuses for annexation. Why should we trouble them? It were better far to come to an agreement with France, and acknowledge what will prove itself one day--that France is the normal heir to Morocco whenever the present Empire breaks up." Unpopular as this opinion was among the British and other foreign subjects in the country, and especially among the Moors, so that it had at first no other advocate, it has since been adopted in Downing Street, and what is of more moment, acted upon. Nay more, Great Britain has, in return for the mere recognition of a _fait accompli_ in Egypt, agreed to stand aside in Morocco, and to grant France a free hand in any attempt to create there a similar state of things. Though the principle was good, the bargain was bad, for the positions of the two contracting Powers, in Egypt and Morocco respectively, were by no means analogous. France could never have driven us out of Egypt save with her sword at our throat; England had but to unite with other Powers in blocking the way of France in Morocco to stultify all her plans. Had England stood out for terms, whether as regarding her commercial interests in Morocco, which have been disgracefully sacrificed, or in the form of concessions elsewhere, a very much more equal-handed bargain might have been secured. The main provisions of the agreement between the two countries, concluded April 8, 1904, are-- Art. II. "The British Government recognizes that it appertains to France, more especially as being the Power in contiguity with Morocco, to control the peace of the country, and to lend its assistance in all administrative, economical, financial, and military reforms. The British Government declares that it will not interfere with the action of France in this regard, provided that this action will leave intact the rights which, in virtue of treaties, conventions, and usages, Great Britain enjoys in Morocco, including the right of coasting between the Morocco ports, of which English vessels have had the benefit since 1901." Art. VII. "In order to secure the free passage of the Straits of Gibraltar, both Governments agree not to allow fortifications or any strategic works to be erected on that part of the Moorish coast between Melilla and the heights which dominate the right bank of the Sebu exclusively." France has secured all that she wanted, or rather that her aggressive colonial party wanted, for opinions on that point are by no means identical, even in France, and the Agreement at once called forth the condemnation of the more moderate party. What appears to be permissive means much more. Now that Great Britain has drawn back--the Power to which the late Sir John Drummond Hay taught the Moors to look with an implicit confidence to champion them against all foes, as it did in the case of the wars with France and Spain, vetoing the retention of a foot of Moorish soil--Morocco lies at the feet of France. France, indeed, has become responsible for carrying out a task its eager spirits have been boiling over for a chance of undertaking. Morocco has been made the ward of the hand that gripped it, which but recently filched two outlying provinces, Figig and Tûát. Englishmen who know and care little about Morocco are quite incapable of understanding the hold that France already had upon this land. Separated from it only by an unprotected boundary, much better defined on paper than in fact, over which there is always a "rectification" dispute in pickle, her province of Algeria affords a prospective base already furnished with lines of rail from her ports of Oran and Algiers. From Oojda, an insignificant town across the border from Lalla Maghnîa (Marnia), there runs a valley route which lays Fez in her power, with Táza by the way to fortify and keep the mountaineers in check. At any time the frontier forays in which the tribes on both sides indulge may be fomented or exaggerated, as in the case of Tunis, to afford a like excuse for a similar occupation, which beyond a doubt would be a good thing for Morocco. Fez captured, and the seaports kept in awe or bombarded by the navy, Mequinez would fall, and an army landed in Mazagan would seize Marrákesh. All this could be accomplished with a minimum of loss, for only the lowlands would have to be crossed, and the mountaineers have no army. But their "pacification" would be the lingering task in which lives, time, and money would be lost beyond all recompense. Against a European army that of the Sultan need not be feared; only a few battalions drilled by European officers might give trouble, but they would see former instructors among the foe, and without them they would soon become demoralized. It would be the tribal skirmishers, of whom half would fall before the others yielded to the Nazarenes, who would give the trouble. The military mission which France has for many years imposed on the Sultan at his expense, though under her control, which follows him in his expeditions and spies out the land, has afforded a training-ground for a series of future invading leaders. Her Algerian Mohammedan agents are able to pass and repass where foreigners never go, and besides collecting topographical and other information, they have lost no opportunity of making known the privileges and advantages of French rule. In case it may be found advisable to set up a dummy sultan under a protectorate, the French have an able and powerful man to hand in the young Idreesi Shareef of Wazzán, whom the English refused to protect, and who, with his brother, received a French education. But while we, as a nation, have been unable to comprehend the French determination to possess Morocco, they have been unable to comprehend our calm indifference, and by the way in which they betray their suspicions of us, they betray their own methods. Protestant missionaries in Algeria and Tunisia, of whatever nationality, are supposed to be the emissaries of the British Government, and in consequence are harassed and maligned, while tourists outside the regular beat are watched. When visiting Oojda some years ago, I myself was twice arrested in Algeria, at Tlemçen and Lalla Maghnîa, because mingling with natives, and it was with difficulty that I could persuade the _juges d'instruction_ of my peaceful motives. Determined and successful efforts to become acquainted with the remotest provinces of Morocco, the distribution of its population, and whatever could be of use to an invading or "pacifying" force have long been made by France, but the most valuable portion of this knowledge remains pigeon-holed, or circulates only in strictly official _mémoires_. Many of the officials engaged here, however, have amused themselves and the public by publishing pretty books of the average class, telling little new, while one even took the trouble to write his in English, in order to put us off the scent! If ever means could justify an end, France deserves to enjoy the fruit of her labours. No longer need she foment strife on the Algerian frontier, or wink at arms being smuggled across it; no longer need the mis-named "pretender" be supplied with French gold, or intrigues be carried on at Court. Abd el Azîz must take the advice and "assistance" of France, whether he will or no, and curse the British to whom he formerly looked. This need not necessarily involve such drastic changes as would rouse the people to rebellion, and precipitate a costly conquest. There are many reforms urgently required in the interests of the people themselves, and these can now be gradually enforced. Such reforms had been set on foot already by the young Sultan, mainly under British advice; but to his chagrin, his advisers did not render the financial and moral support he needed to carry them out. France is now free to do this, and to strengthen his position, so that all wise reforms may be possible. These will naturally commence with civil and judicial functions, but must soon embrace the more pressing public works, such as roads, bridges, and port improvements. Railways are likely to be the first roads in most parts, and Mulai Abd el Azîz will welcome their introduction. The western ideas which he has imbibed during the last few years are scoffed at only by those who know little of him. What France will have to be prepared for is Court intrigue, and she will have to give the Moors plainly to understand that "Whatsoever king shall reign, she'll still be 'boss of the show,' sir." As one of the first steps needed, but one requiring the co-operation of all other Powers on treaty terms with the Moors, the establishment of tribunals to which all should be amenable, has already been touched upon. These must necessarily be presided over by specially qualified Europeans in receipt of sufficient salary to remove them from temptation. A clear distinction should then be made between a civil code administered by such tribunals and the jurisdiction of the Muslim law in matters of religion and all dependent upon it. But of even more pressing importance is the reform of the currency, and the admission of Morocco to the Latin Union. This could well be insisted on when the financial question is discussed at the Algeciras Conference, as well as the equally important establishment in competent hands of a State Bank. This and the reform of the whole fiscal system must precede every other measure, as they form the ground-work of the whole. Whatever public works may be eventually undertaken, the first should be, as far as possible, such as the Moors themselves can execute under European direction, and as they can appreciate. Irrigation would command enthusiasm where railways would only provoke opposition, and the French could find no surer way of winning the hearts of the people than by coping at once with the agricultural water supply, in order to provide against such years of famine as the present, and worse that are well remembered. That would be a form of "pacific penetration," to which none could object. Education, too, when attempted, should be gradually introduced as a means of personal advancement, the requirements of the public service being raised year by year, as the younger generation has had opportunities of better qualifying themselves. Above all, every post should be in theory at least thrown open to the native, and in practice as soon as the right man turned up. Better retain or instal more of the able Moors of to-day as figureheads with European advisers, than attempt a new set to start with. But a clean sweep should be made of the foreigners at present in the Moorish service, all of whom should be adequately pensioned off, that with the new order might come new men, adequately paid and independent of "commissions." It is essential that the people learn to feel that they are not being exploited, but that their true welfare is sought. Every reform should be carried out along native lines, and in conformity with native thought. [Illustration: _Albert, Photo., Tunis._ TUNISIA UNDER THE FRENCH--AN EXECUTION.] The costly lesson of Algeria, where native rights and interests were overthrown, and a complete detested foreign rule set up, has taught the French the folly of such a system, however glorious it may appear on paper. They have been wiser in Tunisia, where a nominally native government is directed by Frenchmen, whom it pays, and sooner or later Morocco is almost certain to become a second Tunisia. This will not only prove the best working system, but it will enable opposition to be dealt with by Moorish forces, instead of by an invading army, which would unite the Berber tribes under the Moorish flag. This was what prolonged the conquest of Algeria for so many years, and the Berbers of Morocco are more independent and better armed than were those of Algeria seventy years ago. What France will gain by the change beyond openings for Frenchmen and the glory of an extended colonial empire, it is hard to imagine, but empty glory seems to satisfy most countries greedy of conquest. So far the only outward evidences of the new position are the over-running of the ports, especially of Tangier, by Frenchmen of an undesirable class, and by an attempt to establish a French colony at the closed port of Mehedîya by doubtful means, to say nothing of the increased smuggling of arms. How the welfare of the Moors will be affected by the change is a much more important question, though one often held quite unworthy of consideration, the accepted axiom being that, whether they like it or not, what is good for us is good for them. Needless to say that most of the reforms required will be objected to, and that serious obstacles will be opposed to some; the mere fact that the foreigner, contemptuously called a "Nazarene," is their author, is sufficient to prejudice them in native eyes, and the more prominent the part played by him, the more difficult to follow his advice. But if the Sultan and his new advisers will consent to a wise course of quiet co-operation, much may be effected without causing trouble. It is astonishing how readily the Moors submit to the most radical changes when unostentatiously but forcibly carried out. Never was there a greater call for the _suaviter in modo, fortiter in re_. Power which makes itself felt by unwavering action has always had their respect, and if the Sultan is prepared not to act till with gold in his coffers, disciplined troops at his command, and loyal officials to do his behest, he can do so with unquestioned finality, all will go well. Then will the prosperity of the people revive--indeed, achieve a condition hitherto unknown save in two or three reigns of the distant past, perhaps not then. The poor will not fear to sow their barren fields, or the rich to display their wealth; hidden treasure will come to light, and the groan of the oppressed will cease. Individual cases of gross injustice will doubtless arise; but they will be as nothing compared with what occurs in Morocco to-day, even with that wrought by Europeans who avail themselves of existing evils. So that if France is wise, and restrains her hot-heads, she may perform a magnificent work for the Moors, as the British have done in Egypt; at least, it is to be hoped she may do as well in Morocco as in Tunisia. But it would be idle to ignore the deep dissatisfaction with which the Anglo-French Agreement has been received by others than the Moors.[25] Most British residents in Morocco, probably every tourist who has been conducted along the coast, or sniffed at the capital cities; those firms of ours who share the bulk of the Moorish trade, and others who yearned to open up possible mines, and undertake the public works so urgently needed; ay, and the concession-prospectors and company-mongers who see the prey eluding their grasp; even the would-be heroes across the straits who have dreamed in vain of great deeds to be done on those hills before them; all unite in deploring what appears to them a gross blunder. After all, this is but natural. So few of us can see beyond our own domains, so many hunger after anything--in their particular line--that belongs to a weaker neighbour, that it is well we have disinterested statesmen who take a wider view. Else had we long since attempted to possess ourselves of the whole earth, like the conquering hordes of Asia, and in consequence we should have been dispossessed ourselves. [25: See Appendix.] Even to have been driven to undertake in Morocco a task such as we were in Egypt, would have been a calamity, for our hands are too full already of similar tasks. It is all very well in these times of peace, but in the case of war, when we might be attacked by more than one antagonist, we should have all our work cut out to hold what we have. The policy of "grab," and dabbing the world with red, may be satisfactory up to a certain point, but it will be well for us as a nation when we realize that we have had enough. In Morocco, what is easy for France with her contiguous province, with her plans for trans-Sáharan traffic, and her thirst to copy our colonial expansion--though without men to spare--would have been for us costly and unremunerative. We are well quit of the temptation. Moreover, we have freed ourselves of a possible, almost certain, cause of friction with France, of itself a most important gain. Just as France would never have acquiesced in our establishing a protectorate in Morocco without something more than words, so the rag-fed British public, always capable of being goaded to madness by the newspapers, would have bitterly objected to French action, if overt, while powerless to prevent the insidious grasp from closing on Morocco by degrees. The first war engaging at once British attention and forces was like to see France installed in Morocco without our leave. The early reverses of the Transvaal War induced her to appropriate Tûát and Figig, and had the fortune of war been against us, Morocco would have been French already. These facts must not be overlooked in discussing what was our wisest course. We were unprepared to do what France was straining to do: we occupied the manger to no one's good--practically the position later assumed by Germany. Surely we were wiser to come to terms while we could, not as in the case of Tunisia, when too late. But among the objecting critics one class has a right to be heard, those who have invested life and fortune in the Morocco trade; the men who have toiled for years against the discouraging odds involved, who have wondered whether Moorish corruption or British apathy were their worst foe, in whom such feeling is not only natural but excusable. Only those who have experienced it know what it means to be defrauded by complacent Orientals, and to be refused the redress they see officials of other nations obtaining for rivals. Yet now they find all capped by the instructions given to our consuls not to act without conferring with the local representatives of France, which leads to the taunt that Great Britain has not only sold her interests in Morocco to the French, but also her subjects! The British policy has all along been to maintain the _status quo_ in spite of individual interests, deprecating interference which might seem high-handed, or create a precedent from which retraction would be difficult. In the collection of debts, in enforcing the performance of contracts, or in securing justice of any kind where the policy is to promise all and evade all till pressure is brought to bear, British subjects in Morocco have therefore always found themselves at a disadvantage in competition with others whose Governments openly supported them. The hope that buoyed them up was that one day the tide might turn, and that Great Britain might feel it incumbent on her to "protect" Morocco against all comers. Now hope has fled. What avails it that grace of a generation's span is allowed them, that they may not individually suffer from the change? It is the dream of years that lies shattered. Here are the provisions for their protection: Art. IV. "The two Governments, equally attached to the principle of commercial liberty, both in Egypt and Morocco, declare that they will not lend themselves to any inequality either in the establishment of customs rights or other taxes, or in the establishment of tariffs for transport on the railways.... This mutual agreement is valid for a period of thirty years" (subject to extensions of five years). Art. V. secures the maintenance in their posts of British officials in the Moorish service, but while it is specially stipulated that French missionaries and schools in Egypt shall not be molested, British missionaries in Morocco are committed to the tender mercies of the French. Thus there can be no immediate exhibition of favouritism beyond the inevitable placing of all concessions in French hands, and there is really not much ground of complaint, while there is a hope of cause for thankfulness. Released from its former bugbears, no longer open to suspicion of secret designs, our Foreign Office can afford to impart a little more backbone into its dealings with Moorish officials; a much more acceptable policy should, therefore, be forthwith inaugurated, that the Morocco traders may see that what they have lost in possibilities they have gained in actualities. Still more! the French, now that their hands are free, are in a position to "advise" reforms which will benefit all. Thus out of the ashes of one hope another rises. PART III XXXII ALGERIA VIEWED FROM MOROCCO "One does not become a horseman till one has fallen." _Moorish Proverb._ A journey through Algeria shows what a stable and enlightened Government has been able to do in a land by no means so highly favoured by Nature as Morocco, and peopled by races on the whole inferior. The far greater proportion of land there under cultivation emphasizes the backward state of Morocco, although much of it still remains untouched; while the superior quality of the produce, especially of the fruits, shows what might be accomplished in the adjoining country were its condition improved. The hillsides of Algeria are in many districts clothed with vines which prosper exceedingly, often almost superseding cereals as objects of cultivation by Europeans. The European colonists are of all nationalities, and the proportion which is not French is astonishingly large, but every inducement is held out for naturalization as Algerians, and all legitimate obstacles are thrown in the way of those who maintain fidelity to their fatherlands. Every effort is made to render Algeria virtually part of France, as politically it is already considered to be. It is the case of the old days of slavery revived under a new form, when the renegade was received with open arms, and the man who remained steadfast was seldom released from slavery. Of course, in these days there is nothing approaching such treatment, and it is only the natives who suffer to any extent. These are despised, if not hated, and despise and hate in return. The conquerors have repeated in Algeria the old mistake which has brought about such dire results in other lands, of always retaining the position of conquerors, and never unbending to the conquered, or encouraging friendship with them. This attitude nullifies whatever good may result from the mixed schools in which Muslim, Jew, and European are brought in contact, in the hope of turning out a sort of social amalgam. Most of the French settlers are too conceited and too ignorant to learn Arabic, though this is by no means the fault of the Government, which provides free public classes for instruction in that language in the chief towns of Algeria and Tunisia. The result is that the natives who meet most with foreigners have, without the most ordinary facilities enjoyed by the Europeans, to pick up a jargon which often does much more credit to them than the usual light acquaintance of the foreigner with Arabic does to him. Those who make any pretence at it, usually speak it with an accent, a pronunciation and a nonchalance which show that they have taken no pains whatever to acquire it. Evidently it pays better to spend money educating natives in French than Frenchmen in Arabic. It is an amusing fact that most of the teachers have produced their own text-books, few of which possess special merit. As a colony Algeria has proved a failure. Foreign settlers hold most of the desirable land, and till it with native labour. The native may have safety and justice now, but he has suffered terribly in the past, as the reports of the Bureau Arabe, established for his protection, abundantly prove, and bitterly he resents his fate. No love is lost between French and natives in Tunisia, but there is actual hatred in Algeria, fostered by the foreigner far more than by the smouldering bigotry of Islám. They do not seem to intermingle even as oil and water, but to follow each a separate, independent course. Among the foreign colonists it is a noteworthy fact that the most successful are not the French, who want too much comfort, but almost any of the nationalities settled there, chiefly Spaniards and Italians. The former are to be found principally in the neighbourhood of Óran, and the latter further east; they abound in Tunisia. Englishmen and others of more independent nature have not been made welcome in either country, and year by year their interests have dwindled. Even in Tunisia, under a different system, the same result has been achieved, and every restriction reconcilable with paper rights has been placed on other than French imports. There may be an "open door," but it is too closely guarded for us. The English houses that once existed have disappeared, and what business is done with this country has had to take refuge with agents, for the most part Jews. In studying the life of Algerian towns, the almost entire absence of well-to-do Arabs or Berbers is striking. I never came across one who might be judged from his appearance to be a man of means or position, unless in military or official garb, though there are doubtless many independent natives among the Berber and Arab tribes. The few whom I encountered making any pretence of dressing well were evidently of no social rank, and the complaint on every hand is that the natives are being gradually ousted from what little is left to them. As for European law, they consider this to have no connection with justice, and think themselves very heavily taxed to support innovations with which they have no concern, and which they would rather dispense with. One can, indeed, feel for them, though there is no doubt much to be said on both sides, especially when it is the other side which boasts the power, if not the superior intelligence. The Jews, however, thrive, and in many ways have the upper hand, especially so since the wise move which accorded them the rights of French citizenship. It is remarkable, however, how much less conspicuous they are in the groups about the streets than in Morocco, notwithstanding that their dress is quite as distinctive as there, though different. The new-comer who arrives at the fine port of Algiers finds it as greatly transformed as its name has been from the town which originally bore it, El Jazîrah. The fine appearance of the rising tiers of houses gives an impression of a still larger city than it really is, for very little is hidden from view except the suburbs. From a short way out to sea the panorama is grand, but it cannot be as chaste as when the native city clustered in the hollow with its whitewashed houses and its many minarets, completely surrounded by green which has long since disappeared under the advancing tide of bricks and mortar. One can hardly realize that this fine French city has replaced the den of pirates of such fearful histories. Yet there is the original light-house, the depôt for European slaves, and away on the top of yonder hill are remains of the ancient citadel. It was there, indeed, that those dreadful cruelties were perpetrated, where so many Christians suffered martyrdom. Yes, this is where once stood the "famous and war-like city, El Jazîrah," which was in its time "the scourge of Christendom." Whether the visitor be pleased or disappointed with the modern city depends entirely on what he seeks. If he seeks Europe in Africa, with perhaps just a dash of something oriental, he will be amply satisfied with Algiers, which is no longer a native city at all. It is as French as if it had risen from the soil entirely under French hands, and only the slums of the Arab town remain. The seeker after native life will therefore meet with complete disappointment, unless he comes straight from Europe, with no idea what he ought to expect. All the best parts of the town, the commercial and the residential quarters, have long since been replaced by European substitutes, leaving hardly a trace of the picturesque originals, while every day sees a further encroachment on the erstwhile African portion, the interest of which is almost entirely removed by the presence of crowds of poor Europeans and European-dressed Jews. The visitor to Algiers would therefore do well to avoid everything native, unless he has some opportunity of also seeing something genuine elsewhere. The only specimens he meets in the towns are miserable half-caste fellows--by habit, if not by birth,--for their dress, their speech, their manners, their homes, their customs, their religion--or rather their lack of religion,--have all suffered from contact with Europeans. But even before the Frenchmen came, it is notorious how the Algerines had sunk under the bane of Turkish rule, as is well illustrated by their own saying, that where the foot of the Turk had trod, grass refused to grow. Of all the Barbary States, perhaps none has suffered more from successive outside influences than the people of Algeria. The porter who seizes one's luggage does not know when he is using French words or Arabic, or when he introduces Italian, Turkish, or Spanish, and cannot be induced to make an attempt at Arabic to a European unless the latter absolutely refuses to reply to his jargon. Then comes a hideous corruption of his mother tongue, in which the foreign expressions are adorned with native inflexions in the most comical way. His dress is barbarous, an ancient and badly fitting pair of trousers, and stockingless feet in untidy boots, on the heels of which he stamps along the streets with a most unpleasant noise. The collection of garments which complete his attire are mostly European, though the "Fez" cap remains the distinctive feature of the Muslim's dress, and a selhám--that cloak of cloaks, there called a "bûrnûs"--is slung across his shoulder. Some few countrymen are to be seen who still retain the more graceful native costume, with the typical camel-hair or cotton cord bound round the head-dress, but the old inhabitants are being steadily driven out of town. [Illustration: TENT OF AN ALGERIAN SHEÏKH.] The characteristic feature of Algerian costumes is the head-cord referred to, which pervades a great part of Arabdom, in Syria and Arabia being composed of two twists of black camel hair perhaps an inch thick. In Algeria it is about an eighth of an inch thick, and brown. The slippers are also characteristic, but ugly, being of black leather, excellently made, and cut very far open, till it becomes an art to keep them on, and the heels have to be worn up. The use of the white selhám is almost universal, unhemmed at the edges, as in Tunis also; and over it is loosely tied a short haïk fastened on the head by the cord. There is, however, even in Algiers itself, one class of men who remain unaffected by their European surroundings, passive amid much change, a model for their neighbours. These are the Beni M'záb, a tribe of Mohammedan Protestants from southern Algeria, where they settled long ago, as the Puritans did in New England, that they might there worship God in freedom. They were the Abadîya, gathered from many districts, who have taken their modern name from the tribe whose country they now inhabit. They speak a dialect of Berber, and dress in a manner which is as distinctive as their short stature, small, dark, oily features, jet-black twinkling eyes, and scanty beard. They come to the towns to make money, and return home to spend it, after a few years of busy shop-keeping. A butcher whom I met said that he and a friend had the business year and year about, so as not to be too long away from home at a time. They are very hard-working, and have a great reputation for honesty; they keep their shops open from about five in the morning till nine at night. As the Beni M'záb do not bring their wives with them, they usually live together in a large house, and have their own mosque, where they worship alone, resenting the visits of all outsiders, even of other Muslims. Admission to their mosque is therefore practically refused to Europeans, but in Moorish dress I was made welcome as some distinguished visitor from saintly Fez, and found it very plain, more like the kûbbah of a saint-house than an ordinary mosque. There are also many Moors in Algeria, especially towards the west. These, being better workmen than the Algerines, find ready employment as labourers on the railways. Great numbers also annually visit Óran and the neighbourhood to assist at harvest time. Those Moors who live there usually disport themselves in trousers, strange to stay, and, when they can afford it, carry umbrellas. They still adhere to the turban, however, instead of adopting the head cord. At Blidah I found that all the sellers of sfinges--yeast fritters--were Moors, and those whom I came across were enthusiastic to find one who knew and liked their country. The Algerines affect to despise them and their home, which they declare is too poor to support them, thus accounting for their coming over to work. The specimens of native architecture to be met with in Algeria are seldom, if ever, pure in style, and are generally extremely corrupt. The country never knew prosperity as an independent kingdom, such as Morocco did, and it is only in Tlemçen, on the borders of that Empire, that real architectural wealth is found, but then this was once the capital of an independent kingdom. The palace at Constantine is not Moorish at all, except in plan, being adorned with a hap-hazard collection of odds and ends from all parts. It is worse than even the Bardo at Tunis, where there is some good plaster carving--naksh el hadeed--done by Moorish or Andalucian workmen. In the palaces of the Governor and the Archbishop of Algiers, which are also very composite, though not without taste, there is more of this work, some of it very fine, though much of it is merely modern moulded imitation. Of more than a hundred mosques and shrines found in Algiers when it was taken by the French, only four of the former and a small number of the latter remain, the rest having been ruthlessly turned into churches. The Mosque of Hasan, built just over a century ago, is now the cathedral, though for this transformation it has been considerably distorted, and a mock-Moorish façade erected in the very worst taste. Inside things are better, having been less interfered with, but what is now a church was never a good specimen of a mosque, having been originally partly European in design, the work of renegades. The same may be said of the Mosque of the Fisheries, a couple of centuries old, built in the form of a Greek cross! One can well understand how the Dey, according to the story, had the architect put to death on discovering this anomaly. These incongruities mar all that is supposed in Algeria to be Arabesque. The Great Mosque, nevertheless, is more ancient and in better style, more simple, more chaste, and more awe-inspiring. The Zawîah of Sîdi Abd er-Rahmán, outside the walls, is as well worth a visit as anything in Algiers, being purely and typically native. It is for the opportunities given for such peeps as this that one is glad to wander in Algeria after tasting the real thing in Morocco, where places of worship and baths are closed to Europeans. These latter I found all along North Africa to be much what they are in Morocco, excepting only the presence of the foreigners. The tile work of Algeria is ugly, but many of the older Italian and other foreign specimens are exceptionally good, both in design and colour. Some of the Tunisian tiles are also noteworthy, but it is probable that none of any real artistic value were ever produced in what is now conveniently called Algeria. There is nothing whatever in either country to compare with the exquisite Fez work found in the Alhambra, hardly to rival the inferior productions of Tetuan. A curious custom in Algeria is to use all descriptions of patterns together "higgledy-piggledy," upside down or side-ways, as though the idea were to cover so much surface with tiling, irrespective of design. Of course this is comparatively modern, and marks a period since what art Algeria ever knew had died out. It is noticeable, too, how poor the native manufacturers are compared with those of Morocco, themselves of small account beside those of the East. The wave of civilization which swept over North Africa in the Middle Ages failed to produce much effect till it recoiled upon itself in the far, far west, and then turned northward into Spain. Notwithstanding all this, Algeria affords an ample field for study for the scientist, especially the mountain regions to the south, where Berber clans and desert tribes may be reached in a manner impossible yet in Morocco, but the student of oriental life should not visit them till he has learnt to distinguish true from false among the still behind-hand Moors. XXXIII TUNISIA VIEWED FROM MOROCCO "The slave toils, but the Lord completes." _Moorish Proverb._ Fortunately for the French, the lesson learned in Algeria was not neglected when the time came for their "pacific penetration" of Tunisia. Their first experience had been as conquerors of anything but pacific intent, and for a generation they waged war with the Berber tribes. Everywhere, even on the plains, where conquest was easy, the native was dispossessed. The land was allotted to Frenchmen or to natives who took the oath of allegiance to France, and became French subjects. Those who fought for their fatherland were driven off, the villages depopulated, and the country laid waste. In the cities the mosques were desecrated or appropriated to what the native considered idolatrous worship. They have never been restored to their owners. Those Algerines only have flourished who entered the French army or Government service, and affected manners which all but cut them off from their fellow-countrymen. In Tunisia the French succeeded, under cover of specious assurances to the contrary, in overthrowing the Turkish beys, rehabilitating them in name as their puppets, with hardly more opposition than the British met with in Burma. The result is a nominally native administration which takes the blame for failures, and French direction which takes the credit for successes. All that was best in Algeria has been repeated, but native rights have been respected, and the cities, with their mosques and shrines, left undisturbed as far as possible. The desecration of the sacred mosque of Kaïrwán as a stable was a notable exception. The difference between the administration of Algeria and that of Tunisia makes itself felt at every step. In the one country it is the ruling of a conquered people for the good of the conquerors alone, and in the other it is the ruling of an unconquered people by bolstering up and improving their own institutions under the pretence of seeking their welfare. The immense advantage of the Tunisian system is apparent on all sides. The expense is less, the excuses for irregularities are greater, and the natives still remain a nominal power in the land, instead of being considered as near serfs as is permissible in this twentieth century. The results of the French occupation were summed up to me by a Tunisian as the making of roads, the introduction of more money and much drunkenness, and the institution of laws which no native could ever hope to understand. But France has done more than that in Tunis, even for the native. He has the benefit of protection for life and property, with means of education and facilities for travel, and an outlet for his produce. He might do well--and there are many instances of commercial success--but while he is jibbing against the foreign yoke, the expatriated Jews, whom he treated so badly when he had the upper hand, are outstripping him every day. The net result of the foreigners' presence is good for him, but it would be much better had he the sense to take advantage of his chances as the Jew does. Many of the younger generation, indeed, learn French, and enter the great army of functionaries, but they are rigidly restricted to the lowest posts, and here again the Jew stands first. In business or agriculture there is sure to come a time when cash is needed, so that French and Jewish money-lenders flourish, and when the Tunisian cannot pay, the merciless hand of foreign law irresistibly sells him up. In the courts the complicated procedure, the intricate code, and the swarm of lawyers, bewilder him, and he sighs for the time when a bribe would have settled the question, and one did at least know beforehand which would win--the one with the longer purse. Now, who knows? But the Tunisian's principal occasions for discontent are the compulsory military service, and the multiplication and weight of the taxes. From the former only those are exempt who can pass certain examinations in French, and stiff ones at that, so that Arabic studies are elbowed out; the unremitted military duties during the Ramadán fast are regarded as a peculiar hardship. To the taxes there seems no end, and from them no way of escape. Even the milkman complains, for example, that though his goats themselves are taxed, he cannot bring their food into town from his garden without an additional charge being paid! With the superficial differences to be accounted for by this new state of things, there still remains much more in Tunisia to remind one of Morocco than in Algeria. What deeper distinctions there are result in both countries from Turkish influence, and Turkish blood introduced in the past, but even these do not go very deep. Beneath it all there are the foundations of race and creed common to all, and the untouched countryman of Tunisia is closely akin to his fellow of Morocco. Even in the towns the underlying likeness is strong. The old city of Tunis is wonderfully like that of Fez; the streets, the shops, the paving, being identical; but in the former a picturesque feature is sometimes introduced, stone columns forming arcades in front of the shops, painted in spiral bands of green and red, separated by a band of white. The various trades are grouped there as further west, and the streets are named after them. The Mellah, or Jewish Quarter, has lost its boundary, as at Tangier, and the gates dividing the various wards have disappeared too. Hardly anything remains of the city walls, new ones having arisen to enclose the one European and two native suburbs. But under a modern arcade in the main street, the Avenue de France, there is between the shops the barred gate leading to a mosque behind, which does not look as if it were often opened. Tramways run round the line of the old walls, and it is strange to see the natives jumping on and off without stopping the car, in the most approved western style. There, as in the trains, European and African sit side by side, though it is to be observed that as a rule, should another seat be free, neither gets in where the other is. As for hopes of encouraging any degree of amalgamation, these are vain indeed. A mechanical mixture is all that can be hoped for: nothing more is possible. A few French people have embraced Islám for worldly aims, and it is popularly believed by the natives that in England thousands are accepting Mohammed. The mosques of Tunis are less numerous than those of Fez, but do not differ greatly from them except in the inferior quality of the tile-work, and in the greater use of stone for the arches and towers. The latter are of the Moorish square shape, but some, if not all, are ascended by steps, instead of by inclined planes. The mosques, with the exception of that at Kaïrwán--the most holy, strange to say--are as strictly forbidden to Europeans and Jews as in Morocco, and screens are put up before the doors as in Tangier. The Moors are very well known in Tunis, so many of them, passing through from Mekka on the Hajj, have been prevented from getting home by quarantine or lack of funds. Clad as a Moor myself, I was everywhere recognized as from that country, and was treated with every respect, being addressed as "Amm el Háj" ("Uncle Pilgrim"), having my shoulders and hands kissed in orthodox fashion. There are several _cafés_ where Morocco men are to be met with by the score. One feature of this cosmopolitan city is that there are distinct _cafés_ for almost every nation represented here except the English. The Arabs of Morocco are looked upon as great thieves, but the Sûsis have the highest reputation for honesty. Not only are all the gate-keepers of the city from that distant province, but also those of the most important stores and houses, as well as of the railway-stations, and many are residents in the town. The chief snake-charmers and story-tellers also hail from Sûs. The veneration for Mulai Táïb of Wazzán, from whom the shareefs of that place are descended, is great, and the Aïsáwa, hailing from Mequinez, are to be met with all along this coast; they are especially strong at Kaïrwán. In Tunis, as also in Algeria and Tripoli, the comparative absence of any objection to having pictures taken of human beings, which is an almost insurmountable hindrance in Morocco, again allowed me to use my kodak frequently, but I found that the Jews had a strong prejudice against portraits. The points in which the domestic usages of Tunisia differ from those of Morocco are the more striking on account of the remarkably minute resemblance, if not absolute identity, of so very many others, and as the novelty of the innovations wears off, it is hard to realize that one is not still in the "Far West." In a native household of which I found myself temporarily a member, it was the wholesale assimilation of comparatively trivial foreign matters which struck me. Thus, for instance, as one of the sons of my host remarked--though he was dressed in a manner which to most travellers would have appeared exclusively oriental--there was not a thing upon him which was not French. Doubtless a closer examination of his costume would have shown that some of the articles only reached him through French hands, but the broad fact remained that they were all foreign. It is in this way that the more civilized countries show a strong and increasing tendency to develop into nations of manufacturers, with their gigantic workshops forcing the more backward, _nolens volens_, to relapse to the more primitive condition of producers of raw material only. There was, of course, a time when every garment such a man would have worn would have been of native manufacture, without having been in any feature less complete, less convenient, or less artistic than his present dress. In many points, indeed, there is a distinct loss in the more modern style, especially in the blending of colours, while it is certain that in no point has improvement been made. My friend, for instance, had the addition, common there, of a pair of striped merino socks, thrust into a pair of rubber-soled tennis shoes. Underneath he wore a second pair of socks, and said that in winter he added a third. Above them was not much bare leg, for the pantaloons are cut there so as often to reach right down to the ankles. This is necessitated by the custom of raising the mattresses used for seats on divans, and by sitting at table on European chairs with the legs dangling in the cold. The turban has nothing of the gracefulness of its Moorish counterpart, being often of a dirty-green silk twisted into a rope, and then bound round the head in the most inelegant fashion, sometimes showing the head between the coils; they are not folds. Heads are by no means kept so carefully shaved as in Morocco, and I have seen hair which looked as though only treated with scissors, and that rarely. The fashion for all connected with the Government to wear European dress, supplemented by the "Fez" (fortunately not the Turkish style), brings about most absurd anomalies. This is especially observable in the case of the many very stout individuals who waddle about like ducks in their ungainly breeches. I was glad to find on visiting the brother of the late Bey that he retained the correct costume, though the younger members of his family and all his attendants were in foreign guise. The Bey himself received me in the frock-coat with pleated skirt, favoured by his countrymen the Turks. [Illustration: _Albert, Photo., Tunis._ A TUNISIAN JEWESS IN STREET DRESS.] The Mohammedan women seen in the streets generally wear an elegant fine silk and wool haïk over a costume culminating in a peaked cap, the face being covered--all but the eyes--by two black handkerchiefs, awful to behold, like the mask of a stage villain. More stylish women wear a larger veil, which they stretch out on either side in front of them with their hands. They seem to think nothing of sitting in a railway carriage opposite a man and chatting gaily with him. I learn from an English lady resident in Tunis that the indoor costume of the women is much that of the Jewesses out of doors--extraordinary indeed. It is not every day that one meets ladies in the street in long white drawers, often tight, and short jackets, black or white, but this is the actual walking dress of the Jewish ladies of Tunis. XXXIV TRIPOLI VIEWED FROM MOROCCO "Every sheep hangs by her own legs." _Moorish Proverb._ When, after an absence of twenty months, I found myself in Tripoli, although far enough from Morocco, I was still amid familiar sights and sounds which made it hard to realize that I was not in some hitherto unvisited town of that Empire. The petty differences sank to naught amid the wonderful resemblances. It was the Turkish element alone which was novel, and that seemed altogether out of place, foreign as it is to Africa. There was something quite incongruous in the sight of those ungainly figures in their badly fitting, quasi-European black coats and breeches, crowned with tall and still more ungainly red caps. The Turks are such an inferior race to the Berbers and Arabs that it is no wonder that they are despised by the natives. They appear much more out of place than do the Europeans, who remain, as in Morocco, a class by themselves. To see a Turk side by side with a white-robed native at prayer in a mosque is too ridiculous, and to see him eating like a wild man of the woods! Even the governor, a benign old gentleman, looked very undignified in his shabby European surroundings, after the important appearance of the Moorish functionaries in their flowing robes. The sentinels at the door seemed to have been taught to imitate the wooden salute of the Germans, which removes any particle of grace which might have remained in spite of their clumsy dress. It is a strange sight to see them selling their rations of uninviting bread in the market to buy something more stimulating. They squat behind a sack on the ground as the old women do in Tangier. These are the little things reminding one that Tripoli is but a Turkish dependency. We may complain of the Moorish customs arrangements, but from my own experience, and from what others tell me, I should say that here is worse still. Not only were our things carefully overhauled, but the books had to be examined, as a result of which process Arabic works are often confiscated, either going in or out. The confusing lack of a monetary system equals anything even in southern Morocco, between which and this place the poor despised "gursh" turns up as a familiar link, not to be met with between Casablanca and Tripoli. Perhaps the best idea of the town for those readers acquainted with Morocco will be to call it a large edition of Casablanca. The country round is flat, the streets are on the whole fairly regular, and wider than the average in this part of the world. Indeed, carriages are possible, though not throughout the town. A great many more flying arches are thrown across the streets than we are accustomed to further west, but upper storeys are rare. The paving is of the orthodox Barbary style. The Tripolitan mosques are of a very different style from those of Morocco, the people belonging to a different sect--the Hánafis--Moors, Algerines and Tunisians being of the more rigorous Málikis. Instead of the open courtyard surrounded by a colonnade, here they have a perfectly closed interior roofed with little domes, and lighted by barred windows. The walls are adorned with inferior tiles, mostly European, and the floors are carpeted. Round the walls hang cheap glazed texts from the Korán, and there is a general appearance of tawdry display which is disappointing after the chaste adornment of the finer Moorish mosques, or even the rude simplicity of the poorer ones. Orders may be obtained to view these buildings, of which it is hardly necessary to say I availed myself, in one case ascending also the minaret. These minarets are much less substantial than those of Morocco, being octangular, with protruding stone balconies in something of the Florentine style, reached by winding stairs. The exteriors are whitewashed, the balconies being tiled, and the cupolas painted green. Lamps are hung out at certain feasts. As for the voice of the muédhdhin, it must be fairly faint, since during the week I was there I never heard it. In Morocco this would have been an impossibility. The language, though differing in many minor details from that employed in Morocco, presents no difficulty to conversation, but it was sometimes necessary to try a second word to explain myself. The differences are chiefly in the names of common things in daily use, and in common adjectives. The music was identical with what we know in the "Far West." Religious strictness is much less than in Morocco, the use of intoxicants being fairly general in the town, the hours of prayer less strictly kept, and the objection to portraits having vanished. There seemed fewer women in the streets than in Morocco, but those who did appear were for the most part less covered up; there was nothing new in the way the native women were veiled, only one eye being shown--I do not now take the foreign Turks into account. In the streets the absence of the better-class natives is most noticeable; one sees at once that Tripoli is not an aristocratic town like Fez, Tetuan, or Rabat. The differences which exist between the costumes observed and those of Morocco are almost entirely confined to the upper classes. The poor and the country people would be undistinguishable in a Moorish crowd. Among the townsfolk stockings and European shoes are common, but there are no native slippers to equal those of Morocco, and yellow ones are rare. I saw no natives riding in the town; though in the country it must be more common. The scarcity of four-footed beasts of burden is noticeable after the crowded Moorish thoroughfares. On the whole there is a great lack of the picturesque in the Tripoli streets, and also of noise. The street cries are poor, being chiefly those of vegetable hawkers, and one misses the striking figure of the water-seller, with his tinkling bell and his cry. The houses and shops are much like those of Morocco, so far as exteriors go, and so are the interiors of houses occupied by Europeans. The only native house to which I was able to gain access was furnished in the worst possible mixture of European and native styles to be found in many Jewish houses in Morocco, but from what I gleaned from others this was no exception to the rule. Unfortunately the number of grog-shops is unduly large, with all their attendant evils. The wheeled vehicles being foreign, claim no description, though the quaintness of the public ones is great. Palmetto being unknown, the all-pervading halfah fibre takes its place for baskets, ropes, etc. The public ovens are very numerous, and do not differ greatly from the Moorish, except in being more open to the street. The bread is much less tempting; baked in small round cakes, varnished, made yellow with saffron, and sprinkled with gingelly seed. Most of the beef going alive to Malta, mutton is the staple animal food; vegetables are much the same as in Morocco. The great drawback to Tripoli is its proximity to the desert, which, after walking through a belt of palms on the land side of the town--itself built on a peninsula--one may see rolling away to the horizon. The gardens and palm groves are watered by a peculiar system, the precious liquid being drawn up from the wells by ropes over pulleys, in huge leather funnels of which the lower orifice is slung on a level with the upper, thus forming a bag. The discharge is ingeniously accomplished automatically by a second rope over a lower pulley, the two being pulled by a bullock walking down an incline. The lower lip being drawn over the lower pulley, releases the water when the funnel reaches the top. The weekly market, Sôk et-Thláthah, held on the sands, is much as it would be in the Gharb el Jawáni, as Morocco is called in Tripoli. The greater number of Blacks is only natural, especially when it is noted that hard by they have a large settlement. [Illustration: _Photograph by G. Michell, Esq._ OUTSIDE TRIPOLI.] It would, of course, be possible to enter into a much more minute comparison, but sufficient has been said to give a general idea of Tripoli to those who know something of Morocco, without having entered upon a general description of the place. From what I saw of the country people, I have no doubt that further afield the similarity between them and the people of central and southern Morocco, to whom they are most akin, would even be increased. XXXV FOOT-PRINTS OF THE MOORS IN SPAIN "Every one buries his mother as he likes." _Moorish Proverb._ I. FIRST IMPRESSIONS. Much as I had been prepared by the accounts of others to observe the prevalence of Moorish remains in the Peninsula, I was still forcibly struck at every turn by traces of their influence upon the country, especially in what was their chief home there, Andalucia. Though unconnected with these traces, an important item in strengthening this impression is the remarkable similarity between the natural features of the two countries. The general contour of the surface is the same on either side of the straits for a couple of hundred miles; the same broad plains, separated by low ranges of hills, and crossed by sluggish, winding streams, fed from distant snow-capped mountains, and subject to sudden floods. The very colours of the earth are the same in several regions, the soil being of that peculiar red which gives its name to the Blád Hamrá ("Red Country") near Marrákesh. This is especially observable in the vicinity of Jeréz, and again at Granáda, where one feels almost in Morocco again. Even the colour of the rugged hills and rocks is the same, but more of the soil is cultivated than in any save the grain districts of Morocco. The vegetation is strikingly similar, the aloe and the prickly pear, the olive and the myrtle abounding, while from the slight glimpses I was able to obtain of the flora, the identity seems also to be continued there. Yet all this, though interesting to the observer, is not to be wondered at. It is our habit of considering the two lands as if far apart, because belonging to separate continents, which leads us to expect a difference between countries divided only by a narrow gap of fourteen miles or less, but one from whose formation have resulted most important factors in the world's history. The first striking reminders of the Moorish dominion are the names of Arabic origin. Some of the most noteworthy are Granáda (Gharnátah), Alcazar (El Kasar), Arjona (R'honah), Gibraltar (Gibel Tárik), Trafalgár (Tarf el Gharb, "West Point"), Medinah (Madînah, "Town"), Algeciras (El Jazîrah, "The Island"), Guadalquivir (Wád el Kebeer--so pronounced in Spain--"The Great River"), Mulahacen (Mulai el Hasan), Alhama (El Hama, "The Hot Springs"), and numberless others which might be mentioned, including almost every name beginning with "Al." The rendering of these old Arabic words into Spanish presents a curious proof of the changes which the pronunciation of the Spanish alphabet has undergone during the last four centuries. To obtain anything like the Arabic sound it is necessary to give the letters precisely the same value as in English, with the exception of pronouncing "x" as "sh." Thus the word "alhaja," in everyday use--though unrecognizable as heard from the lips of the modern Castilian, "aláha,"--is nothing but the Arabic "el hájah," with practically the same meaning in the plural, "things" or "goods." To cite more is unnecessary. The genuine pronunciation is still often met with among Jews of Morocco who have come little in contact with Spaniards, and retain the language of their ancestors when expelled from the Peninsula, as also in Spanish America. The Spanish language is saturated with corrupted Arabic, at all events so far as nouns are concerned. The names of families also are frequently of Arabic origin, as, for instance, Alarcos (Er-Rakkás--"the courier"), Alhama, etc., most of which are to be met with more in the country than in the towns, while very many others, little suspected as such, are Jewish. Although when the most remarkable of nations was persecuted and finally expelled from Spain, a far larger proportion nobly sacrificed their all rather than accept the bauble religion offered them by "The Catholic Kings" (King and Queen), they also have left their mark, and many a noble family could, if it would, trace its descent from the Jews. Some of their synagogues are yet standing, notably at Toledo--whence the many Toledános,--built by Samuel Levy, who was secretary to Don Pedro the Cruel. This was in 1336, a century and a half before the Moors were even conquered, much less expelled, and if the sons of Ishmael have left their mark upon that sunny land, so have the sons of Israel, though in a far different manner. Morocco has ever since been the home of the descendants of a large proportion of the exiles. The Spanish physiognomy, not so much of the lower as of the upper classes, is strikingly similar to that of the mountaineers of Morocco, and these include some of the finest specimens. The Moors of to-day are of too mingled a descent to present any one distinct type of countenance, and it is the same with the Spaniards. So much of the blood of each flows in the veins of the other, that comparison is rendered more difficult. It is a well-known fact that several of the most ancient families in the kingdom can trace their descent from Mohammedans. A leading instance of this is the house of Mondéjar, lords of Granáda from the time of its conquest, as the then head of the house, Sidi Yahia, otherwise Don Pedro de Granáda, had become a Christian. In the Generalife at that town, still in the custody of the same family, is a genealogical tree tracing its origin right back to the Goths![26] [26: Andalucia is but a corruption of Vandalucia.] Next to physiognomy come habits and customs, and of these there are many which have been borrowed, or rather retained, from the Moors, especially in the country. The ploughs, the water-mills, the water-wheels, the irrigation, the treading out of the corn, the weaving of coarse cloth, and many other daily sights, from their almost complete similarity, remind one of Morocco. The bread-shops they call "tahônas," unaware that this is the Arabic for a flour-mill; their water-wheels they still call by their Arabic name, "naôrahs," and it is the same with their pack-saddles, "albardas" (bardah). The list might be extended indefinitely, even from such common names as these. The salutations of the people seem literal translations of those imported from the Orient, such as I am not aware of among other Europeans. What, for instance, is "Dios guarda Vd." ("God keep you"), said at parting, but the "Allah îhannak" of Morocco, or "se lo passe bien," but "B'is-salámah" ("in peace!"). More might be cited, but to those unacquainted with Arabic they would be of little interest. Then, again, the singing of the country-folk in southern Spain has little to distinguish it from that indulged in by most Orientals. The same sing-song drawl with numerous variations is noticeable throughout. Once a more civilized tune gets among these people for a few months, its very composer would be unlikely to recognize its prolongations and lazy twists. The narrow, tortuous streets of the old towns once occupied by the invaders take one back across the straits, and the whole country is covered with spots which, apart from any remains of note, are associated by record or legend with anecdotes from that page of Spanish history. Here it is the "Sigh of the Moor," the spot from which the last Ameer of Andalucia gazed in sorrow on the capital that he had lost; there it is a cave (at Criptana) where the Moors found refuge when their power in Castile was broken; elsewhere are the chains (in Toledo) with which the devotees of Islám chained their Christian captives. In addition to this, the hills of a great part of Spain are dotted with fortresses of "tabia" (rammed earth concrete) precisely such as are occupied still by the country kaïds of Morocco; and by the wayside are traces of the skill exercised in bringing water underground from the hills beyond Marrákesh. How many church towers in Spain were built for the call of the muédhdhin, and how many houses had their foundations laid for hareems! In the south especially such are conspicuous from their design. To crown all stand the palaces and mosques of Córdova, Sevílle, and Granáda, not to mention minor specimens. When we talk of the Moors in Spain, we often forget how nearly we were enabled to speak also of the Moors in France. Their brave attempts to pass that natural barrier, the Pyrenees, find a suitable monument in the perpetual independence of the wee republic of Andorra, whose inhabitants so successfully stemmed the tide of invasion. The story of Charles Martel, too, the "Hammer" who broke the Muslim power in that direction, is one of the most important in the history of Europe. What if the people who were already levying taxes in the districts of Narbonne and Nîmes had found as easy a victory over the vineyards of southern France, as they had over those of Spain? Where would they have stopped? Would they ever have been driven out, or would St. Paul's have been a second Kûtûbîya, and Westminster a Karûeeïn? God knows! II. CÓRDOVA The earliest notable monument of Moorish dominion in Andalucia still existing is the famous mosque of Córdova, now deformed into a cathedral. Its erection occupied the period from 786 to 796 of the Christian era, and it is said that it stands on the site of a Gothic church erected on the ruins of a still earlier temple dedicated to Janus. Portions, however, have been added since that date, as inscriptions on the walls record, and the European additions date from 1521, when, notwithstanding the protests of the people of Córdova, the bishops obtained permission from Charles V. to rear the present quasi-Gothic structure in its central court. The disgust and anger which the lover of Moorish architecture--or art of any sort--feels for the name of "_Carlos quinto_," as at point after point hideous additions to the Moorish remains are ascribed to that conceited monarch, are somewhat tempered for once by the record that even he repented when he saw the result of his permission in this instance. "You have built here," he said, "what you might have built anywhere, and in doing so you have spoiled what was unique in the world!" In each of the three great centres of Moorish rule, Sevílle, Granáda and Córdova, the same hand is responsible for outrageous modern erections in the midst of hoary monuments of eastern art, carefully inscribed with their author's name, as "Cæsar the Emperor, Charles the Fifth." The Córdova Mosque, antedated only by those of Old Cairo and Kaïrwán, is a forest of marble pillars, with a fine court to the west, surrounded by an arcade, and planted with orange trees and palms, interspersed with fountains. Nothing in Morocco can compare with it save the Karûeeïn mosque at Fez, built a century later, but that building is too low, and the pillars are for the most part mere brick erections, too short to afford the elegance which here delights. This is grand in its simplicity; nineteen aisles of slightly tapering columns of beautiful marbles, jasper or porphyry, about nine feet in height, supporting long vistas of flying horse-shoe arches, of which the stones are now coloured alternately yellow and red, though probably intended to be all pure white. Other still more elegant scolloped arches, exquisitely decorated by carving the plaster, spring between alternate pillars, and from arch to arch, presumably more modern work. The aisles are rather over twenty feet in width, and the thirty-three cross vaultings about half as much, while the height of the roof is from thirty to forty feet. In all, the pillars number about 500, though frequently stated to total 850 out of an original 1419, but it is difficult to say where all these can be, since the sum of 33 by 19 is only 627, and a deduction has to be made for the central court, in which stands the church or choir. Since these notes were first published, in 1890, I have seen it disputed between modern impressionist writers which of them first described the wonderful scene as a palm grove, a comparison of which I had never heard when I wrote, but the wonder to me would be if any one could attempt to picture the scene without making use of it. Who but a nation of nomads, accustomed to obey the call to prayer beneath the waving branches of African and Arabian palm-groves, would have dreamed of raising such a House of God? Unless for the purpose of supporting a wide and solid roof, or of dividing the centre into the form of a cross, what other ecclesiastical architects would have conceived the idea of filling a place of worship with pillars or columns? No one who has walked in a palm-grove can fail to be struck by the resemblance to it of this remarkable mosque. The very tufted heads with their out-curving leaves are here reproduced in the interlacing arches, and with the light originally admitted by the central court and the great doors, the present somewhat gloomy area would have been bright and pleasant as a real grove, with its bubbling fountains, and the soothing sound of trickling streams. I take the present skylights to be of modern construction, as I never saw such a device in a Moorish building. Most of the marble columns are the remains of earlier erections, chiefly Roman, like the bridge over the Guadalquivir close by, restored by the builder of the mosque. Some, indeed, came from Constantinople, and others were brought from the south of France. They are neither uniform in height nor girth--some having been pieced at the bottom, and others partly buried;--so also with the capitals, certain of which are evidently from the same source as the pillars, while the remainder are but rude imitations, mostly Corinthian in style. The original expenses of the building were furnished by a fifth of the booty taken from the Spaniards, with the subsidies raised in Catalonia and Narbonne. The Moors supplied voluntary, and European captives forced labour. [Illustration: A SHRINE IN CORDOVA MOSQUE.] On Fridays, when the Faithful met in thousands for the noon-day prayer, what a sight and what a melody! The deep, rich tones of the organ may add impressiveness to a service of worship, but there is nothing in the world so grand, so awe-inspiring as the human voice. When a vast body of males repeats the formulæ of praise, together, but just slightly out of time, the effect once heard is never forgotten. I have heard it often, and as I walk these aisles I hear it ringing in my ears, and can picture to myself a close-packed row of white-robed figures between each pillar, and rows from end to end between, all standing, stooping, or forehead on earth, as they follow the motions of the leader before them. A grand sight it is, whatever may be one's opinion of their religion. In the manner they sit on the matted floors of their mosques there would be room here for thirteen thousand without using the Orange Court, and there is little doubt that on days when the Court attended it used to be filled to its utmost. To the south end of the cathedral the floor of two wide aisles is raised on arches, exactly opposite the niche which marks the direction of Mekka, and the space above is more richly decorated than any other portion of the edifice except the niche itself. This doubtless formed the spot reserved for the Ameer and his Court, screened off on three sides to prevent the curiosity of the worshippers overcoming their devotion, as is still arranged in the mosques which the Sultan of Morocco attends in his capitals. Until a few years ago this rich work in arabesque and tiles was hidden by plaster. The kiblah niche is a gem of its kind. It consists of a horse-shoe arch, the face of which is ornamented with gilded glass mosaic, forming the entrance to a semi-circular recess beautifully adorned with arabesques and inscriptions, the top of the dome being a large white marble slab hollowed out in the form of a pecten shell. The wall over the entrance is covered with texts from the Korán, forming an elegant design, and on either side are niches of lesser merit, but serving to set off the central one which formed the kiblah. Eleven centuries have elapsed since the hands of the workmen left it, and still it stands a witness of the pitch of art attained by the Berbers in Spain. It is said that here was deposited a copy of the Korán written by Othmán himself, and stained with his blood, of such a size that two men could hardly lift it. When, for a brief period, the town fell into the hands of Alfonso VII., his soldiers used the mosque as a stable, and tore up this valuable manuscript. When a Moorish Embassy was sent to Madrid some years ago, the members paid a visit to this relic of the greatness of their forefathers, and to the astonishment of the custodians, having returned to the court-yard to perform the required ablutions, re-entered, slippers in hand, to go through the acts of worship as naturally as if at home. What a strange sight for a Christian cathedral! Right in front of the niche is a plain marble tomb with no sign but a plain bar dexter. Evidently supposing this to be the resting-place of some saint of their own persuasion, they made the customary number of revolutions around it. It would be interesting to learn from their lips what their impressions were. Of the tower which once added to the imposing appearance of the building, it is recorded that it had no rival in height known to the builders. It was of stone, and, like one still standing in Baghdád from the days of Harûn el Rasheed, had two ways to the top, winding one above the other, so that those who ascended by the one never met those descending by the other. According to custom it was crowned by three gilded balls, and it had fourteen windows. This was of considerably later date than the mosque itself, but has long been a thing of the past. The European additions to the Córdova mosque are the choir, high altar, etc., which by themselves would make a fine church, occupying what must have been originally a charming court, paved with white marble and enlivened by fountains; the tower, built over the main entrance, opening into the Court of Oranges; and a score or two of shrines with iron railings in front round the sides, containing altars, images, and other fantastic baubles to awe the ignorant. An inscription in the tower records that it was nearly destroyed by the earth-quake of 1755, and though it is the least objectionable addition, it is a pity that it did not fall on that or some subsequent occasion. It was raised on the ruins of its Moorish predecessor in 1593. The chief entrance, like that of Sevílle, is a curious attempt to blend Roman architecture with Mauresque, having been restored in 1377, but the result is not bad. Recent "restorations" are observable in some parts of the mosque, hideous with colour, but a few of the original beams are still visible. I am inclined to consider the greater part of the roof modern, but could not inspect it closely enough to be certain. Though vaulted inside, it is tiled in ridges in the usual Moorish style, but very few green tiles are to be seen. From the tower the view reminds one strongly of Morocco. The hills to the north and south, with the river winding close to the town across the fertile plain, give the scene a striking resemblance to that from the tower of the Spanish consulate at Tetuan. All around are the still tortuous streets of a Moorish town, though the roofs of the houses are tiled in ridges of Moorish pattern, as those of Tangier were when occupied by the English two hundred years ago, and as those of El K'sar are now. The otherwise Moorish-looking building at one's feet is marred by the unsightly erection in the centre, and its court-yard seems to have degenerated into a play-ground, where the neighbours saunter or fill pitchers from the fountains. After enduring the apparently unceasing din of the bells in those erstwhile stations of the muédhdhin, one ceases to wonder that the lazy Moors have such a detestation for them, and make use instead of the stirring tones of the human voice. Rest and quiet seem impossible in their vicinity, for their jarring is simply head-splitting. And as if they were not excruciating enough, during "Holy Week" they conspire against the ear-drums of their victims by revolving a sort of infernal machine made of wood in the form of a hollow cross, with four swinging hammers on each arm which strike against iron plates as the thing goes round. The keeper's remark that the noise was awful was superfluous. The history of the town of Córdova has been as chequered as that of most Andalucian cities. Its foundation is shrouded in obscurity. The Romans and Vandals had in turn been its masters before the Moors wrested it from the Spaniards in the year 710 A.D. Though the Spaniards regained possession of it in 1075, it was not for long, as it soon fell into the hands of the invaders once more. The Spanish victors only left a Moorish viceroy in charge, who proved too true a Berber to serve against his countrymen, so he betrayed his trust. In 1236 it was finally recovered by the Spaniards, after five hundred and twenty-four years of Moorish rule. Since that time the traces of that epoch of its history have been gradually disappearing, till there only remain the mutilated mosque, and portions of the ancient palace, or of saint-houses (as the side-chapel of the Church of St. Miguel), and of a few dwellings. Since the first train steamed to this ancient city, in 1859, the railway has probably brought as many pilgrims to the mosque as ever visited it from other motives in its greatest days. The industry founded here by the Moors--that of tanning--which has given its name to a trade in several countries,[27] seems to have gone with them to Morocco, for though many of the old tan-pits still exist by the river side, no leather of any repute is now produced here. The Moorish water-mills are yet at work though, having been repaired and renewed on the original model. These, as at Granáda and other places, are horizontal wheels worked from a small spout above, directly under the mill-stone, such as is met with in Fez and Tetuan. [27: Sp. _cordován_, Fr. _cordonnier_, Eng. _cordwainer_, etc.] III. SEVÍLLE In the Girálda tower of Sevílle I expected to find a veritable Moorish trophy in the best state of preservation, open to that minute inspection which was impossible in the only complete specimen of such a tower, the Kutûbîya, part of a mosque still in use. Imagine, then, my regret on arriving at the foot of that venerable monument, to find it "spick and span," as if just completed, looking new and tawdry by the side of the cathedral which has replaced the mosque it once adorned. Instead of the hoary antiquity to which the rich deep colour of the stone of the sister towers in Morocco bears witness in their weather-beaten glory, this one, built, above the first few stone courses, of inch pan-tiles, separated by a like thickness of mortar, has the appearance of having been newly pointed and rubbed down, while faded frescoes on the walls testify to the barbarity of the conquerors of the "barbarians." The delicate tracery in hewn stone which adds so greatly to the beauty of the Morocco and Tlemçen examples, is almost entirely lacking, while the once tasteful horse-shoe windows are now pricked out in red and yellow, with a hideous modern balcony of white stone before each. The quasi-Moorish belfry is the most pardonable addition, but to crown all is an exhibition of incongruity which has no excuse. The original tile-faced turret of the Moors, with its gilded balls, has actually been replaced by a structure of several storeys, the first of which is Doric, the second Ionic, and the third Corinthian. Imagine this crowning the comely severity of the solid Moorish structure without a projecting ornament! But this is not all. Swinging in gaunt uneasiness over the whole, stands a huge revolving statue, supposed to represent Faith, holding out in one hand a shield which catches the wind, and causes it to act as a weather-vane. Such is the Girálda of the twentieth century, and the guide-books are full of praises for the restorer, who doubtless deserves great credit for his skill in repairing the tower after it had suffered severely from lightning, but who might have done more towards restoring the original design, at all events in the original portion. We read in "Raôd el Kártás" that the mosque was finished and the tower commenced in 1197, during the reign of Mulai Yakûb el Mansûr, who commenced its sisters at Marrákesh and Rabat in the same year. One architect is recorded to have designed all three--indeed, they have little uncommon in their design, and have been once almost alike. Some assert that this man was a Christian, but there is nothing in the style of building to favour such a supposition. The plan is that of all the mosque towers of Morocco, and the only tower of a mosque in actual use which I have ascended in that country--one at Mogador--was just a miniature of this. It is, therefore, in little else than point of size that these three are remarkable. The similarity between these and the recently fallen tower of St. Mark's at Venice is most striking, both in design and in the method of ascent by an inclined plane; while around the Italian lakes are to be seen others of less size, but strongly resembling these. All three are square, and consist of six to eight storeys in the centre, with thick walls and vaulted roof, surrounded by an inclined plane from base to summit, at an angle which makes it easy walking, and horses have been ridden up. The unfinished Hassan Tower at Rabat having at one time become a place of evil resort, the reigning ameer ordered the way up to be destroyed, but it was found so hard that only the first round was cut away, and the door bricked up. Each ramp of the Girálda, if I remember rightly, has its window, but in the Hassan many are without light, though at least every alternate one has a window, some of these being placed at the corner to serve for two, while here they are always in the centre. The Girálda proper contains seven of these storeys, with thirty-five ramps. To the top of the eighth storey, which is the first addition, dating from the sixteenth century, now used as a belfry, the height is about 220 feet. The present total height is a little over 300 feet. The original turret of the Girálda, similar to that at Marrákesh, was destroyed in 1396 by a hurricane. The additions were finished in 1598. An old view, still in existence, and dating from the thirteenth century, shows it in its pristine glory, and there is another--Moorish--as old as the tower itself. After all that I had read and heard of the palace at Sevílle, I was more disappointed than even in the case of the Girálda. Not only does it present nothing imposing in the way of Moorish architecture, but it has evidently been so much altered by subsequent occupants as to have lost much of its original charm. To begin with the outside, instead of wearing the fine crumbling appearance of the palaces of Morocco or Granáda, this also had been all newly plastered till it looks like a work of yesterday, and coloured a not unbecoming red. Even the main entrance has a Gothic inscription half way up, and though its general aspect is that of Moorish work, on a closer inspection, the lower part at least is seen to be an imitation, as in many ways the unwritten laws of that style have been widely departed from. The Gothic inscription states that Don Pedro I. built it in 1364. Inside, the general ground plan remains much as built, but connecting doorways have been opened where Moors never put them, and with the exception of the big raised tank in the corner, there is nothing African about the garden. Even the plan has been in places destroyed to obtain rooms of a more suitable width for the conveniences of European life. The property is a portion of the Royal patrimony, and is from time to time occupied by the reigning sovereign when visiting Sevílle. A marble tablet in one of these rooms tells of a queen having been born there during the last century. Much of the ornamentation on the walls is of course original, as well as some of the ceilings and doors, but the "restorations" effected at various epochs have greatly altered the face of things. Gaudy colours show up both walls and ceilings, but at the same time greatly detract from their value, besides which there are coarse imitations of the genuine tile-work, made in squares, with lines in relief to represent the joints, as well as patterns painted on the plaster to fill up gaps in the designs. Then, too, the most prominent parts of the ornamentation have been disfigured by the interposition of Spanish shields and coats-of-arms on tiles. The border round the top of the dado is alternated with these all the way round some of the rooms. To crown all, certain of the fine old doors, resembling a wooden patchwork, have been "restored" with plaster-of-Paris. Some of the arabesques which now figure on these walls were actually pillaged from the Alhambra. Many of the Arabic inscriptions have been pieced so as to render them illegible, and some have been replaced upside down, while others tell their own tale, for they ascribe glory and might to a Spanish sovereign, Don Pedro the Cruel, instead of to a "Leader of the Faithful." A reference to the history of the country tells us that this ruler "reconstructed" the palace of the Moors, while later it was repaired by Don Juan II., before Ferdinand and Isabella built their oratories within its precincts, or Charles V., with his mania for "improving" these monuments of a foreign dominion, doubled it in size. For six centuries this work, literally of spoliation, has been proceeding in the hands of successive owners; what other result than that arrived at, could be hoped for? When this is realized, the greater portion of the historic value of this palace vanishes, and its original character as a Moorish palace is seen to have almost disappeared. There still, however, remains the indisputable fact, apparent from what does remain of the work of its builders, that it was always a work of art and a trophy of the skill of its designers, those who have interfered with it subsequently having far from improved it. According to Arab historians, the foundations of this palace were laid in 1171 A.D. and it was reconstructed between 1353 and 1364. In 1762 a fire did considerable damage, which was not repaired till 1805. The inscriptions are of no great historical interest. "Wa lá ghálib ílá Allah"--"there is none victorious but God"--abounds here, as at the Alhambra, and there are some very neat specimens of the Kufic character. Of Moorish Sevílle, apart from the Girálda and the Palace--El Kasar, corrupted into Alcazar--the only remains of importance are the Torre del Oro--Borj ed-Daheb--built in 1220 at the riverside, close to where the Moors had their bridge of boats, and the towers of the churches of SS. Marcos and Marina. Others there are, built in imitation of the older erections, often by Moorish architects, as those of the churches of Omnium Sanctorum, San Nicolas, Ermita de la Virgen, and Santa Catalina. Many private houses contain arches, pillars, and other portions of Moorish buildings which have preceded them, such as are also to be found in almost every town of southern Spain. As late as 1565 the town had thirteen gates more or less of Moorish origin, but these have all long since disappeared. Sevílle was one of the first cities to surrender to the Moors after the battle of Guadalete, A.D. 711, and remained in their hands till taken by St. Ferdinand after fifteen months' siege in 1248, six years after its inhabitants had thrown off their allegiance to the Emperor of Morocco, and formed themselves into a sort of republic, and ten years after the Moorish Kingdom of Granáda was founded. It then became the capital of Spain till Charles V. removed the Court to Valladolid. IV. GRANÁDA "O Palace Red! From distant lands I have come to see thee, believing thee to be a garden in spring, but I have found thee as a tree in autumn. I thought to see thee with my heart full of joy, but instead my eyes have filled with tears." So wrote in the visitors' album of the Alhambra, in 1876, an Arab poet in his native tongue, and another inscription in the same volume, written by a Moor some years before, remarks, "Peace be on thee, O Granáda! We have seen thee and admired thee, and have said, 'Praised be he who constructed thee, and may they who destroyed thee receive mercy.'" As the sentiments of members of the race of its builders, these expressions are especially interesting; but they can hardly fail to be shared to some extent by visitors from eastern lands, of whatever nationality. Although the loveliest monument of Moorish art in Spain, and a specimen of their highest architectural skill, destructions, mutilations, and restorations have wrought so much damage to it that it now stands, indeed, "as a tree in autumn." It was not those who conquered the Moors on whom mercy was implored by the writer quoted--for they, Ferdinand and Isabella, did their best to preserve their trophy--but on such of their successors as Charles V., who actually planted a still unfinished palace right among the buildings of this venerable spot, adjoining the remains of the Alhambra, part of which it has doubtless replaced. This unartistic Austrian styled these remains "the ugly abominations of the Moors," and forthwith proceeded to erect really ugly structures. But the most unpardonable destroyers of all that the Moors left beautiful were, perhaps, the French, who in 1810 entered Granáda with hardly a blow, and under Sebastian practically desolated the palace. They turned it into barracks and storehouses, as inscriptions on its walls still testify--notably on the sills of the "Miranda de la Reina." Ere they left in 1812, they even went so far as to blow up eight of the towers, the remainder only escaping through the negligence of an employee, and the fuses were put out by an old Spanish soldier. The Spaniards having thus regained possession, the commissioners appointed to look after it "sold everything for themselves, and then, like good patriots, reported that the invaders had left nothing." After a brief respite in the care of an old woman, who exhibited more sense in the matter than all the generals who had perpetrated such outrages upon it, the Alhambra was again desecrated by a new Governor, who used it as a store of salt fish for the galley slaves. While the old woman--Washington Irving's "Tia Antonia"--was in possession, that famous writer did more than any one to restore the ancient fame of the palace by coming to stay there, and writing his well-known account of his visit. Mr. Forde, and his friend Mr. Addington, the British Ambassador, helped to remind people of its existence, and saved what was left. Subsequent civil wars have, however, afforded fresh opportunities of injury to its hoary walls, and to-day it stands a mere wreck of what it once was. The name by which these buildings are now known is but the adjective by which the Arabs described it, "El Hamra," meaning "The Red," because of its colour outside. When occupied it was known only as either "The Palace of Granáda," or "The Red Palace." The colour of the earth here is precisely that of the plains of Dukála and Marrákesh, and the buildings, being all constructed of tabia, are naturally of that colour. In no part of Spain could one so readily imagine one's self in Morocco; indeed, it is hard to realize that one is not there till the new European streets are reached. In the palace grounds, apart from the fine carriage-drive, with its seats and lamp-posts, when out of sight of the big hotels and other modern erections, the delusion is complete. Even in the town the running water and the wayside fountains take one back to Fez; and the channels underneath the pavements with their plugs at intervals are only Moorish ones repaired. On walking the crooked streets of the part which formed the town of four centuries ago, on every hand the names are Moorish. Here is the Kaisarîya, restored after a fire in 1843; there is the street of the grain fandaks, and beyond is a hammám, now a dwelling-house. The site of the chief mosque is now the cathedral, in the chief chapel of which are buried the conquerors of Granáda. There lie Ferdinand and Isabella in plain iron-bound leaden coffins--far from the least interesting sights of the place--in a spot full of memories of that contest which they considered the event of their lives, and which was indeed of such vital importance to the country. The inscription on their marble tomb in the church above tells how that the Moors having been conquered and heresy stamped out (?), that worthy couple took their rest. The very atmosphere of the place seems charged with reminiscences of the Moors and their successful foes, and here the spirits of Prescott and Gayangos, the historians, seem to linger still. On either side of the high altar are extremely interesting painted carvings. On one is figured the delivering up of the Alhambra. Ferdinand, Isabella and Mendoza ride in a line, and the latter receives the key in his gloved hand as the conquered king offers him the ring end, followed by a long row of captives. Behind the victors ride their knights and dames. On the other the Moors and Mooresses are seen being christened wholesale by the monks, their dresses being in some respects remarkably correct in detail, but with glaring defects in others, just what might be expected from one whose acquaintance with them was recent but brief. Before these carvings kneel real likenesses of the royal couple in wood, and on the massive square tomb in front they repose in alabaster. A fellow-tomb by their side has been raised to the memory of their immediate successors. In the sacristry are to be seen the very robes of Cardinal Mendoza, and his missal, with the sceptre and jewel-case of Isabella, and the sword of Ferdinand, while that of the conquered Bû Abd Allah is on view elsewhere. Here, too, are the standards unfurled on the day of the recapture, January 2, 1492, and a picture full of interest, recording the adieux of "Boabdil" and Ferdinand, who, after their bitter contest, have shaken hands and are here falling on each other's necks. As a model of Moorish art, the palace of Granáda, commenced in 1248, is a monument of its latest and most refined period. The heavy and comparatively simple styles of Córdova and Sevílle are here amplified and refined, the result being the acme of elegance and oriental taste. This I say from personal acquaintance with the temples of the far East, although those present a much more gorgeous appearance, and are much more costly erections, evincing a degree of architectural ability and the possession of hoards of wealth beside which what the builders of the Alhambra could boast of was insignificant; nor do I attempt to compare these interesting relics with the equally familiar immensity of ancient masonry, or with the magnificent work of the Middle Ages still existing in Europe. These monuments hold a place of their own, unique and unassailable. They are the mementoes of an era in the history of Europe, not only of the Peninsula, and the interest which attaches itself to them even on this score alone is very great. As relics on a foreign soil, they have stood the storms of five centuries under the most trying circumstances, and the simplicity of their components lends an additional charm to the fabric. They are to a great extent composed of what are apparently the weakest materials--mud, gypsum, and wood; the marble and tiles are but adornments. From without the appearance of the palace has been well described as that of "reddish cork models rising out of a girdle of trees." On a closer inspection the "cork" appears like red sandstone, and one wonders how it has stood even one good storm. There is none of that facing of stone which gives most other styles of architecture an appearance of durability, and whatever facing of plaster it may once have possessed has long since disappeared. But inside all is different. Instead of crumbling red walls, the courts and apartments are highly ornamented with what we now call plaster-of-Paris, but which the Moors have long prepared by roasting the gypsum in rude kilns, calling it "gibs." A full description of each room or court-yard would better become a guide-book, and to those who have the opportunity of visiting the spot, I would recommend Ford's incomparable "Handbook to Spain," published by Murray, the older the edition the better. To those who can read Spanish, the "Estudio descriptivo de los Monumentos arabes," by the late Sr. Contreras (Government restorer of the Moorish remains in Spain), to be obtained in Granáda, is well worth reading. Such information as a visitor would need to correct the mistaken impressions of these and other writers ignorant of Moorish usages as to the original purpose of the various apartments, I have embodied in Macmillan's "Guide to the Western Mediterranean." Certain points, however, either for their architectural merit or historic interest, cannot be passed over. Such is the Court of the Lions, of part of which a model disfigured by garish painting may be seen at the Crystal Palace. In some points it is resembled by the chief court of the mosque of the Karûeeïn at Fez. In the centre is that strange departure from the injunctions of the Korán which has given its name to the spot, the alabaster fountain resting on the loins of twelve beasts, called, by courtesy, "lions." They remind one rather of cats. "Their faces barbecued, and their manes cut like the scales of a griffin, and the legs like bed-posts; a water-pipe stuck in their mouths does not add to their dignity." In the inscription round the basin above, among flowery phrases belauding the fountain, and suggesting that the work is so fine that it is difficult to distinguish the water from the alabaster, the spectator is comforted with the assurance that they cannot bite! The court is surrounded by the usual tiled verandah, supported by one hundred and twenty-two light and elegant white marble pillars, the arches between which show some eleven different forms. At each end is a portico jutting out from the verandahs, and four cupolas add to the appearance of the roofs. The length of the court is twice its width, which is sixty feet, and on each side lies a beautiful decorated apartment with the unusual additions of jets of water from the floor in the centre of each, as also before each of the three doors apiece of the long narrow Moorish rooms, and under the two porticoes. The overflows, instead of being hidden pipes, are channels in the marble pavement, for the Moors were too great lovers of rippling water to lose the opportunity as we cold-blooded northerners would. To fully realize the delights of such a place one must imagine it carpeted with the products of Rabat, surrounded by soft mattresses piled with cushions, and with its walls hung with a dado of dark-coloured felt cloths of various colours, interworked to represent pillars and arches such as surround the gallery, and showing up the beautiful white of the marble by contrast. Thus furnished--in true Moorish style--the place should be visited on a hot summer's day, after a wearisome toil up the hill from the town. Then, lolling among the cushions, and listening to the splashing water, if strong sympathy is not felt with the builders of the palace, who thought it a paradise, the visitor ought never to have left his armchair by the fire-side at home. If, instead of wasting money on re-plastering the walls until they look ready for papering, and then scratching geometrical designs upon them in a style no Moor ever dreamed of, the Spanish Government would entrust a Moor of taste to decorate it in his own native style, without the modern European additions, they would do far better and spend less. One step further, and the introduction of Moorish guides and caretakers who spoke Spanish--easy to obtain--would add fifty per cent. to the interest of the place. Then fancy the Christian and Muslim knights meeting in single combat on the plains beneath those walls. People once more the knolls and pastures with the turban and the helm, fill in the colours of robe and plume; oh, what a picture it would make! Doubtless similar apartments for the hareem exist in the recesses of the palaces of Fez, Mequinez, Marrákesh and Rabat. Some very fine work is to be seen in the comparatively public parts, in many respects equalling this, and certainly better than that of the palace of Sevílle. Various alterations and "restorations" have been effected from time to time in this as in other parts of the palace, notably in the fountain, the top part of which is modern. It is probable that originally there was only one basin, resting immediately on the "lions" below. Its date is given as 1477 A.D. The room known for disputed reasons as the Hall of the Two Sisters was originally a bedroom. The entrance is one of the most elaborate in the palace, and its wooden ceiling, pieced to resemble stalactites, is a charming piece of work, as also are those of the other important rooms of the palace. Another apartment opening out of the Court of Lions, known as the Hall of Justice--most likely in error--contains one of the most curious remains in the palace, another departure from the precepts of the religion professed by its builders. This is no less than a series of pictures painted on skins sewn together, glued and fastened to the wooden dome with tinned tacks, and covered with a fine coating of gypsum, the gilt parts being in relief. Though the date of their execution must have been in the fourteenth century, the colours are still clear and fresh. The picture in the centre of the three domes is supposed by some to represent ten Moorish kings of Granáda, though it is more likely meant for ten wise men in council. On the other two ceilings are pictures, one of a lady holding a chained lion, on the point of being delivered from a man in skins by a European, who is afterwards slain by a mounted Moor. The other is of a boar-hunt and people drinking at a fountain, with a man up a tree in a dress which looks remarkably like that of the eighteenth century in England, wig and all. This work must have been that of some Christian renegade, though considerable discussion has taken place over the authorship. It is most likely that the lions are of similar origin, sculptured by some one who had but a remote idea of the king of the forest. After the group of apartments surrounding the Court of the Lions, the most valuable specimen of Moorish architecture is that known as the Hall of the Ambassadors, probably once devoted to official interviews, as its name denotes. This is the largest room in the palace, occupying the upper floor in one of the massive towers which defended the citadel, overlooking the Vega and the remains of the camp-town of Santa Fé, built during the siege by the "Catholic Kings." The thickness of its walls is therefore immense, and the windows look like little tunnels; under it are dungeons. The hall is thirty-seven feet square, and no less than seventy-five feet high in the centre of the roof, which is not the original one. Some of the finest stucco wall decoration in the place is to be seen here, with elegant Arabic inscriptions, in the ancient style of ornamental writing known as Kufic, most of the instances of the latter meaning, "O God, to Thee be endless praise, and thanks ascending." Over the windows are lines in cursive Arabic, ascribing victory and glory to the "leader of the resigned, our lord the father of the pilgrims" (Yûsef I.), with a prayer for his welfare, while everywhere is to be seen here, as in other parts, the motto, "and there is none victorious but God." Between the two blocks already described lie the baths, the undressing-room of which has been very creditably restored by the late Sr. Contreras, and looks splendid. It is, in fact, a covered patio with the gallery of the next floor running round, and as no cloth hangings or carpets could be used here, the walls and floor are fully decorated with stucco and tiles. The inner rooms are now in fair condition, and are fitted with marble, though the boiler and pipes were sold long ago by a former "keeper" of the palace. The general arrangement is just the same as that of the baths in Morocco. One room of the palace was fitted up by Ferdinand and Isabella as a chapel, the gilt ornaments of which look very gaudy by the side of the original Moorish work. Opening out of this is a little gem of a mosque, doubtless intended for the royal devotions alone, as it is too small for a company. Surrounding the palace proper are several other buildings forming part of the Alhambra, which must not be overlooked. Among them are the two towers of the Princesses and the Captives, both of which have been ably repaired. In the latter are to be seen tiles of a peculiar rosy tint, not met with elsewhere. In the Dar Aïshah ("Gabinete de Lindaraxa"--"x" pronounced as "sh") are excellent specimens of those with a metallic hue, resembling the colours on the surface of tar-water. Ford points out that it was only in these tiles that the Moors employed any but the primary colours, with gold for yellow. This is evident, and holds good to the present day. Both these towers give a perfect idea of a Moorish house of the better class in miniature. Outside the walls are of the rough red of the mud concrete, while inside they are nearly all white, and beautifully decorated. The thickness of the walls keeps them delightfully cool, and the crooked passages render the courts in the centre quite private. Of the other towers and gates, the only notable one is that of Justice, a genuine Moorish erection with a turning under it to stay the onrush of an enemy, and render it easier of defence. The hand carved on the outer arch and the key on the inner one have given rise to many explanations, but their only significance was probably that this gate was the key of the castle, while the hand was to protect the key from the effects of the evil eye. This superstition is still popular, and its practice is to be seen to-day on thousands of doors in Morocco, in rudely painted hands on the doorposts. The Watch Tower (de la Vela) is chiefly noteworthy as one of the points from which the Spanish flag was unfurled on the memorable day of the entry into Granáda. The anniversary of that date, January 2nd, is a high time for the young ladies, who flock here to toll the bell in the hopes of being provided with a husband during the new-begun year. At a short distance from the Alhambra itself is a group known as the Torres Bermejas (Vermilion Towers), probably the most ancient of the Moorish reign, if part did not exist before their settlement here, but they present no remarkable architectural features. Across a little valley is the Generalife, a charming summer residence built about 1320, styled by its builder the "Paradise of the Wise,"--Jinah el Arîf--which the Spaniards have corrupted to its present designation, pronouncing it Kheneraliffy. Truly this is a spot after the Moor's own heart: a luxuriant garden with plenty of dark greens against white walls and pale-blue trellis-work, harmonious at every turn with the rippling and splashing of nature's choicest liquid. Of architectural beauty the buildings in this garden have but little, yet as specimens of Moorish style--though they have suffered with the rest--they form a complement to the Alhambra. That is the typical fortress-palace, the abode of a martial Court; this is the pleasant resting-place, the cool retreat for love and luxury. Nature is here predominant, and Art has but a secondary place, for once retaining her true position as great Nature's handmaid. Light arched porticoes and rooms behind serve but as shelter from the noonday glare, while roomy turrets treat the occupier to delightful views. Superfluous ornament within is not allowed to interfere with the contemplation of beauty without. Between the lower and upper terrace is a remarkable arrangement of steps, a Moorish ideal, for at equal distances from top to bottom, between each flight, are fountains playing in the centre, round which one must walk, while a stream runs down the top of each side wall in a channel made of tiles. What a pleasant sight and sound to those to whom stair climbing in a broiling sun is too much exercise! The cypresses in the garden are very fine, but they give none too much shade. The present owner's agent has Bû Abd Allah's sword on view at his house in the town, and this is a gem worth asking to see when a ticket is obtained for the Generalife. It is of a totally different pattern and style of ornament from the modern Moorish weapons, being inlaid in a very clever and tasteful manner. To the antiquary the most interesting part of Granáda is the Albaycin, the quarter lying highest up the valley of the Darro, originally peopled by refugees from the town of Baeza--away to the north, beyond Jaen--the Baïseeïn. As the last stronghold of Moorish rule in the Peninsula, when one by one the other cities, once its rivals, fell into the hands of the Christians again, Granáda became a centre of refuge from all parts, and to this owed much of its ultimate importance. Unfortunately no attempt has been made to preserve the many relics of that time which still exist in this quarter, probably the worst in the town. Many owners of property in the neighbourhood can still display the original Arabic title deeds, their estates having been purchased by Spanish grandees from the expelled Moors, or later from the expelled Jews. A morning's tour will reveal much of interest in back alleys and ruined courts. One visitor alone is hardly safe among the wild half-gipsy lot who dwell there now, but a few copper coins are all the keys needed to gain admission to some fine old patios with marble columns, crumbling fandaks, and ruined baths. By the roadside may be seen the identical style of water-mill still used in Morocco, and the presence of the Spaniard seems a dream. V. HITHER AND THITHER Having now made pilgrimages to the more famous homes of the Moor in Europe, let us in fancy take an aërial flight over sunny Spain, and glance here and there at the scattered traces of Muslim rule in less noted quarters. Everything we cannot hope to spy, but we may still surprise ourselves and others by the number of our finds. Even this task accomplished, a volume on the subject might well be written by a second Borrow or a Ford, whose residence among the modern Moors had sharpened his scent for relics of that ilk.[28] Let not the reader think that with these wayside jottings all has been disclosed, for the Moor yet lives in Spain, and there is far more truth in the saying that "Barbary begins at the Pyrenees" than is generally imagined. [28: To the latter I am indebted for particulars regarding the many places mentioned in this final survey which it was impossible for me to visit.] We will start from Tarifa, perhaps the most ancient town of Andalucia. The Moors named this ancient Punic city after T'arîf ibn Málek ("The Wise, son of King"), a Berber chief. They beleaguered it about 1292, and it is still enclosed by Moorish walls. The citadel, a genuine Moorish castle, lies just within these walls, and was not so long ago the abode of galley-slaves. Close to Sevílle, where the river Guadalquivir branches off, it forms two islands--Islas Mayor y Menor. The former was the Kaptal of the Moors. At Coria the river winds under the Moorish "Castle of the Cleft" (El Faraj), now called St. Juan de Alfarache, and passes near the Torre del Oro, a monument of the invader already referred to. Old Xeres, of sherry fame, is a straggling, ill-built, ill-drained Moorish city. It was taken from the Moors in 1264. Part of the original walls and gates remain in the old town. The Moorish citadel is well preserved, and offers a good specimen of those turreted and walled palatial fortresses. But it is not till we reach Sevílle that we come to a museum of Moorish antiquities. Here we see Arabesque ceilings, marqueterie woodwork, stucco panelling, and the elegant horse-shoe arches. There are beautiful specimens in the citadel, in Calle Pajaritos No. 15, in the Casa Prieto and elsewhere. The Moors possessed the city for five hundred years, during which time they entirely rebuilt it, using the Roman buildings as materials. Many Moorish houses still exist, the windows of which are barricaded with iron gratings. On each side of the patios, or courts, are corridors supported by marble pillars, whilst a fountain plays in the centre. These houses are rich in Moorish porcelain tilings, called azulejos--from the Arabic ez-zulaïj--but the best of these are in the patio of the citadel. Carmona is not far off, with its oriental walls and castle, famous as ever for its grateful springs. The tower of San Pedro transports us again to Tangier, as do the massy walls and arched gate. Some eight leagues on the way to Badajos from Sevílle rises a Moorish tower, giving to the adjoining village the name of Castillo de las Guardias. Five leagues beyond are the mines of the "Inky River"--Rio Tinto--a name sufficiently expressive and appropriate, for it issues from the mountain-side impregnated with copper, and is consequently corrosive. The Moors seem to have followed the Romans in their workings on the north side of the hill. Further on are more mines, still proclaiming the use the Moors made of them by their present name Almádin--"the Mine"--a name which has almost become Spanish; it is still so generally used. Five leagues from Rio Tinto, at Aracena, is another Moorish castle, commanding a fine panorama, and the belfry of the church hard by is Arabesque. Many more of these ruined kasbahs are to be seen upon the heights of Andalucia, and even much further north; but the majority must go unmentioned. One, in an equally fine position, is to be seen eleven leagues along the road from Sevílle to Badajos, above Santa Olalla--a name essentially Moorish, denoting the resting-place of some female Mohammedan saint, whose name has been lost sight of. (Lallah, or "Lady," is the term always prefixed to the names of canonized ladies in Morocco.) Three leagues from Sevílle on the Granáda road, at Gandul, lies another of these castles, picturesquely situated amid palms and orange groves; four leagues beyond, the name Arahal (er-rahálah--"the day's journey") reminds the Arabicist that it is time to encamp; a dozen leagues further on the name of Roda recalls its origin, raôdah, "the cemetery." Riding into Jaen on the top of the diligence from Granáda, I was struck with the familiar appearance of two brown tabia fortresses above the town, giving the hillside the appearance of one of the lower slopes of the Atlas. This was a place after the Moors' own heart, for abundant springs gush everywhere from the rocks. In their days it was for a time the capital of an independent kingdom. At Ronda, a town originally built by the Moors--for Old Ronda is two leagues away to the north,--their once extensive remains have been all but destroyed. Its tortuous streets and small houses, however, testify as to its origin, and its Moorish castle still appears to guard the narrow ascent by which alone it can be reached from the land, for it crowns a river-girt rock. Down below, this river, the Guadalvin, still turns the same rude class of corn-mills that we have seen at Fez and Granáda. Other remnants are another Moorish tower in the Calle del Puente Viejo, and the "House of the Moorish King" in Calle San Pedro, dating from about 1042. Descending to the river's edge by a flight of stairs cut in the solid rock, there is a grotto dug by Christian slaves three centuries later. Some five leagues on the road thence to Granáda are the remains of the ancient Teba, at the siege of which in 1328, when it was taken from the Moors, Lord James Douglas fought in obedience to the dying wish of the Bruce his master, whose heart he wore in a silver case hung from his neck, throwing it among the enemy as he rushed in and fell. On the way from Ronda to Gibraltar are a number of villages whose Arab names are startling even in this land of Ishmaelitish memories. Among these are Atajate, Gaucin, Benahali, Benarraba, Benadalid, Benalaurin. At Gaucin an excellent view of Gibraltar and Jibel Mûsa is obtainable from its Moorish citadel. This brings us to old "Gib," whose relics of Tárîk and his successors are much better known to travellers than most of those minor remains. An inscription over the gate of the castle, now a prison, tells of its erection over eleven centuries ago, for this was naturally one of the early captures of the invaders. Yet the mud-concrete walls stand firm and sound, though scarred by many a shot. Algeciras--El Jazîrah--"the Island" has passed through too many vicissitudes to have much more than the name left. Malaga, though seldom heard of in connection with the history of Mohammedan rule in the Peninsula, played a considerable part in that drama. It and Cadiz date far back to the time of the Carthaginians, so that, after all, their origin is African. If its name is not of an earlier origin, it may be from Málekah, "the Queen." Every year on August 18, at 3 p.m. the great bell of the cathedral is struck thrice, for that is the anniversary of its recovery from the Aliens in 1487. The flag of Ferdinand then hoisted is (or was recently) still to be seen, together with a Moorish one, probably that of the vanquished city, over the tomb of the Conde de Buena Vista in the convent of La Victoria. Though odd bits of Moorish architecture may still be met with in places, the only remains of note are the castle, built in 1279, with its fine horse-shoe gate--sadly disfigured by modern barbarism--and what was the dockyard of the Moors, now left high and dry by the receding sea. The name Alhama, met with in several parts of Spain, merely denotes "the hot," alluding to springs of that character which are in most instances still active. This is the case at the Alhama between Malaga and Granáda, where the baths are worth a visit. The Moorish bath is called the strong one, being nearer the spring. At Antequera the castle is Moorish, though built on Roman foundations, and it is only of recent years that the mosque has disappeared under the "protection" of an impecunious governor. Leaving the much-sung Andalûs, the first name striking us in Murcia is that of Guadíx (pronounced Wadish), a corruption of Wád Aïsh, "River of Life." Its Moorish castle still stands. Some ten leagues further on, at Cullar de Baza is another Moorish ruin, and the next of note, a fine specimen, is fifteen leagues away at Lorca, whose streets are in the genuine intricate style. The city of Murcia, though founded by the Moors, contains little calling them to remembrance. In the post-office and prison, however, and in the public granary, mementoes are to be found. Orihuela, on the road from Carthagena to Alicante, still looks oriental with its palm-trees, square towers and domes, and Elche is just another such, with flat roofs and the orthodox kasbah, now a prison. The enormous number of palms which surround the town recall Marrákesh, but they are sadly neglected. Monte Alegre is a small place with a ruined Moorish castle, about fifteen leagues from Elche on the road to Madrid. Between Alicante and Xativa is the Moorish castle of Tibi, close to a large reservoir, and there is a square Moorish tower at Concentaina. Xativa has a hermitage, San Felin, adorned with horse-shoe arches, having a Moorish cistern hard by. Valencia the Moors considered a Paradise, and their skill in irrigation has been retained, so that of the Guadalaviar (Wad el Abîad--"River of the Whites") the fullest use is made in agriculture, and the familiar water-wheels and conduits go by the corruptions of their Arabic names, naôrahs and sakkáïahs. The city itself is very Moorish in appearance, with its narrow tortuous streets and gloomy buildings, but I know of no remarkable legacy of the Moors there. There are the remains of a Moorish aqueduct at Chestalgár--a very Arabic sounding name, of which the last two syllables are corrupted from El Ghárb ("the West") as in the case of Trafalgár (Terf el Ghárb--"West Point"). All this district was inhabited by the Moriscos or Christianized Moors as late as the beginning of the seventeenth century, and there must their descendants live still, although no longer distinguished from true sons of the soil. Whatever may remain of the ancient Saguntum, what is visible is mostly Moorish, as, for instance, cisterns on the site of a Roman temple. Not far from Valencia is Burjasot, where are yet to be seen specimens of matmôrahs or underground granaries. Morella is a scrambling town with Moorish walls and towers, coroneted by a castle. Entering Catalonia, Tortosa, at the mouth of the Ebro, is reached, once a stronghold of the Moors, and a nest of pirates till recovered by Templars, Pisans and Genoese together. It was only withheld from the Moors next year by the valour of the women besieged. The tower of the cathedral still bears the title of Almudena, a reminder of the muédhdhin who once summoned Muslims to prayer from its summit. Here, too, are sundry remnants of Moorish masonry, and some ancient matmôrahs. Tarragona and Barcelona, if containing no Moorish ruins of note, have all, in common with other neighbouring places, retained the Arabic name Rambla (rimlah, "sand") for the quondam sandy river beds which of late years have been transformed into fashionable promenades. In the cathedral of Tarragona an elegant Moorish arch is noticeable, with a Kufic inscription giving the date as 960 A.D. For four centuries after this city was destroyed by Tarîf it remained unoccupied, so that much cannot be expected to call to mind his dynasty. Of a bridge at Martorell over the Llobregat, Ford says it is "attributed to Hannibal by the learned, and to the devil, as usual, by the vulgar. The pointed centre arch, which is very steep and narrow to pass, is 133 feet wide in the span, and is unquestionably a work of the Moors." Not far away is a place whose name, Mequineza, is strongly suggestive of Moorish origin, but I know nothing further about it. Now let us retrace our flight, and wing our way once more to the north of Sevílle, to the inland province of Estremadura. Here we start from Mérida, where the Roman-Moorish "alcazar" towers proudly yet. The Moors repaired the old Roman bridge over the Guadiana, and the gateway near the river has a marble tablet with an Arabic inscription. The Muslims observed towards the people of this place good faith such as was never shown to them in return, inasmuch as they allowed them to retain their temples, creed, and bishops. They built the citadel in 835, and the city dates its decline from the time that Alonzo el Sabio took it from them in 1229. Zámora is another ancient place. It was taken from the Moors in 939, when 40,000 of them are said to have been killed. The Moorish designs in the remarkable circular arches of La Magdalena are worthy of note. In Toledo the church of Santo Tomé has a brick tower of Moorish character; near it is the Moorish bridge of San Martin, and in the neighbourhood, by a stream leading to the Tagus, Moorish mills and the ruins of a villa with Moorish arches, now a farm hovel, may still be seen. The ceiling of the chapel of the church of San Juan de la Penetencia is in the Moorish style, much dilapidated (1511 A.D.). The Toledan Moors were first-rate hydraulists. One of their kings had a lake in his palace, and in the middle a kiosk, whence water descended on each side, thus enclosing him in the coolest of summer-houses. It was in Toledo that Ez-Zarkal made water-clocks for astronomical calculations, but now this city obtains its water only by the primitive machinery of donkeys, which are driven up and down by water-carriers as in Barbary itself. The citadel was once the kasbah of the Moors. The Cathedral of Toledo is one of the most remarkable in Spain. The arches of the transept are semi-Moorish, Xamete, who wrought it in Arcos stone in 1546-50, having been a Moor. The very ancient manufactory of arms for which Toledo has a world-wide fame dates from the time of the Goths; into this the Moors introduced their Damascene system of ornamenting and tempering, and as early as 852 this identical "fabrica" was at work under Abd er-Rahman ibn El Hákim. The Moors treasured and named their swords like children. These were the weapons which Othello, the Moor, "kept in his chamber." [Illustration: _Cavilla, Photo., Tangier._ THE MARKET-PLACE, TETUAN.] At Alcazar de San Juan, in La Mancha, I found a few remnants of the Moorish town, as in the church tower, but the name is now almost the only Moorish thing about it. Hence we pass to Alarcon, a truly Moorish city, built like a miniature Toledo, on a craggy peninsula hemmed in by the river Jucar. The land approach is still guarded by Moorish towers and citadel. In Zocodovar--which takes its name from the word sôk, "market-place"--we find a very Moorish "plaza," with its irregular windows and balconies, and in San Eugenio are some remains of an old mosque with Kufic inscriptions, as well as an arch and tomb of elaborate design. In the Calle de las Tornarías there used to be a dilapidated Moorish house with one still handsome room, but it is doubtful whether this now survives the wreck of time. It was called El Taller del Moro, because Ambron, the Moorish governor of Huesca, is said to have invited four hundred of the refractory chiefs of Toledo to dine here, and to have cut off the head of each as he arrived. There is a curious mosque in the Calle del Cristo de la Luz, the roof is supported by four low square pillars, each having a different capital, from which spring double arches like those at Córdova. The ceiling is divided into nine compartments with domes. Madrid has passed through such various fortunes, and has been so much re-built, that it now contains few traces of the Moors. The only relic which I saw in 1890 was a large piece of tabia, forming a substantial wall near to the new cathedral, which might have belonged to the city wall or only to a fortress. The Museum of the Capital contains a good collection of Moorish coins. In the Armoury are Moorish guns, swords, saddles, and leather shields, the last named made of two hides cemented with a mortar composed of herbs and camel-hair. In Old Castile the footprints grow rare and faint, although the name of Valladolid--Blád Walîd, "Town of Walîd," a Moorish ameer--sufficiently proclaims its origin, but I am not aware of any Moorish remains there. In Burgos one old gate near the triumphal arch, erected by Philip II., still retains its Moorish opening, and on the opposite hill stands the castle in which was celebrated the bridal of our Edward I. with Eleanor of Castile. It was then a true Moorish kasar, but part has since been destroyed by fire. On the road from Burgos to Vittoria we pass between the mountains of Oca and the Pyrenean spurs, in which narrow defile the old Spaniards defied the advancing Moors. Moorish caverns or cisterns are still to be seen. Turning southward again, we come to Medinaceli, or "the city of Selim," once the strong frontier hold of a Moor of that name, the scene of many conflicts among the Moors themselves, and against the Christians. Here, on August 7, 1002, died the celebrated El Mansûr--"The Victorious"--the "Cid" (Seyyid) of the Moors, and the most terrible enemy of the Christians. He was born in 938 near Algeciras, and by a series of intrigues, treacheries and murders, rose in importance till he became in reality master of the puppet ameer. He proclaimed a holy crusade against the Christians each year, and was buried in the dust of fifty campaigns, for after every battle he used to shake off the soil from his garments into a chest which he carried about with him for that purpose. In Aragon the situation of Daroca, in the fertile basin of the Jiloca, is very picturesque. The little town lies in a hill-girt valley around which rise eminences defended by Moorish walls and towers, which, following the irregular declivities, command charming views from above. The palace of the Mendozas at Guadalajara, in the same district, boasts of an elegant row of Moorish windows, though these appear to have been constructed after Guadalajara was reconquered from the Moors by the Spaniards. Near this place is a Moorish brick building, turned into a battery by the invaders, and afterwards used as a prison. Before leaving this town it will be worth while to visit San Miguel, once a mosque, with its colonnaded entrance, horse-shoe arches, machiolations, and herring-bone patterns under the roof. Calatayud, the second town of Aragon, is of Moorish origin. Its Moorish name means the "Castle of Ayûb"--or Job--the nephew of Mûsa, who used the ancient Bilbilis as a quarry whence to obtain stones for its construction. The Dominican convent of Calatayud has a glorious patio with three galleries rising one above another, and a portion of the exterior is enriched with pseudo-Moorish work like the prisons at Guadalajara. Saragossa gave me more the impression of Moorish origin than any town I saw in Spain, except Sevílle and Córdova. The streets of the original settlement are just those of Mequinez on a small scale. The only object of genuinely Moorish origin that I could find, however, was the Aljaferia, once a palace-citadel, now a barrack, so named after Jáfer, a Muslim king of this province. Since his times Ferdinand and Isabella used it, and then handed it over to the Inquisition. Some of the rooms still retain Moorish decorations, but most of the latter are of the period of their conquerors. On one ceiling is pointed out the first gold brought from the New World. The only genuine Moorish remnant is the private mosque, with beautiful inscriptions. The building has been incorporated in a huge fort-like modern brick structure, which would lead no one to seek inside for Arab traces. Passing from Saragossa northwards, we arrive at Jaca, the railway terminus, which to this day quarters on her shield the heads of four sheïkhs who were left behind when their fellow-countrymen fled from the city in 795, after a desperate battle in which the Spanish women fought like men. The site of the battle, called Las Tiendas, is still visited on the first Friday in May, when the daughters of these Amazons go gloriously "a-shopping." The municipal charter of Jaca dates from the Moorish expulsion, and is reckoned among the earliest in Spain. Gerona, almost within sight of France, played an important part, too, in those days, siding alternately with that country and with Spain when in the possession of the Moors. The Ameer Sulaïmán, in 759 A.D., entered into an alliance with Pepin, and in 785 Charlemagne took the town, which the Moors re-captured ten years later. It became their headquarters for raids upon Narbonne and Nîsmes. Castellon de Ampurias, once on the coast, which has receded, was strong enough to resist the Moors for a time, but after they had dismantled it, the Normans appeared and finally destroyed it. Now it is but a hamlet. We are now in the extreme north-west of the Peninsula, where the relics we seek grow scanty, and, in consequence, of more importance. Instead of buildings in stone or concrete, we find here a monument of independence, perhaps more interesting in its way than any other. When the Pyrenees and their hardy mountaineers checked the onward rush of Islám, several independent states arose, recognized by both France and Spain on account of their bravery in opposing a common foe. The only one of these retaining a semi-independence is the republic of Andorra, a name corrupted from the Arabic el (al) darra, "a plenteous rainfall," showing how the Moors appreciated this feature of so well wooded and hilly a district after the arid plains of the south. The old Moorish castle of the chief town bears the name of Carol, derived from that of Charlemagne, who granted it the privileges it still enjoys, so that it is a memento of the meeting of Arab and Teuton. At Planes is a church said to be of Moorish origin, and earlier than Charlemagne; it certainly dates from no later than the tenth century. These "foot-prints" show that the Moor got a fairly good footing here, before he was driven back, and his progress stayed. APPENDIX "MOROCCO NEWS" "A lie is not worth the lying, nor is truth worth repeating." _Moorish Proverb._ So unanimous have been the uninformed reiteration of the Press in contravention of much that has been stated in the foregoing pages, that it will not be out of place to quote a few extracts from men on the spot who do know the facts. The first three are from leaders in _Al-moghreb Al-aksa_, the present English paper in Morocco, which accurately voices the opinion of the British Colony in that country, opinions shared by most disinterested residents of other nationalities. "However we look upon the situation as it stands to-day, and wherever our sympathies may lie, it is impossible to over-estimate the danger attending the unfortunate Anglo-French Agreement. We have always--as our readers will acknowledge--advocated the simple doctrine of the _status quo_, and in this have received the support of every disinterested person in and out of Morocco. Our policy has at times thrown us into antagonism with the exponents of the French colonial schemes; but we at least have the satisfaction of knowing that, however we may have fallen short of our duty, it has been one which we have persevered in, prompted by earnest conviction, by love of the country and its people, and by admiration for its Sultan. The simplicity of our aim has helped us in our uphill fight, and will, no doubt, continue to do so in the future. "Needless to say we look forward with no little anxiety to the result of the conference. This needs no explanation. In the discussion of such a question it is absolutely imperative that the individual members of the conference should be selected from those who know their Morocco, and who are acquainted with the causes which led up to the present dead-lock. Only the keenest, shrewdest men should be selected, for it must be borne in mind that France will spare no pains to uphold the recent Anglo-French Convention. Her most astute diplomats will figure largely, for her dignity is at stake. Indeed, her very position, diplomatic and political, is in effect challenged. Taking this into consideration, it is more than necessary to see that the representatives of Great Britain are not chosen for their family influence or for the perfection they may have attained in the French language. "The task is hard and perilous. England is waking to the fact that she has blundered, and, as usual, she is unwilling to admit the fact. Circumstances, however, will sooner or later force her to modify her terms. Germany, Spain, the United States, and other nations, to say nothing of Morocco, must point out the absurdity of the situation. If the agreement is inoperative with regard to Morocco, it may as well be openly admitted to be useless. This is not all. Should English statesmanship direct that this injudicious arrangement be adhered to, France and Great Britain will stand as self-confessed violators of the Convention of Madrid. "Fortunately the Moorish cause has some excellent champions. For many years she has been dumb. Now, however, that she is assailed, we find a small but influential band of writers coming forward with their pens to do battle for her. "This is the great consolation we have. Moorish interests will no longer be the sport of European political expediency. These men will, no doubt, protest against the land-grabbing propensities of the French colonial party, and they may find time to point out that after a thousand years of not ignoble independence, the Moorish race deserves a little more consideration than has hitherto been granted. "Even those people who are responsible for this deplorable state of affairs must now stand more or less amazed at their handiwork. No diplomatic subterfuge can efface the humiliation that underlies the situation; and no one can possibly exaggerate the danger that lies ahead of us." * * * * * "Two centuries ago Great Britain abandoned Tangier, and it is only the present generation that has realized the huge mistake. A maudlin sentimentalism, to avoid displeasing the French King, prevented us from handing the city back to Portugal; an act which would have been wise, either strategically, commercially, or with a view to the suppression of the famous Salee rovers, who were for long a scourge to ships entering the Straits. A Commission of experts was appointed to consider the question of the abandonment, one of them being Mr. Pepys.... "Whatever the opinion may have been of the experts consulted by the Government on the present agreement with France, we are strongly disposed to believe that if they have been endowed with greater sense than those of 1683, there is probably more, as we must hope there is, in favour of British interests, than appears to the public eye. Time alone will tell what reservation, mental or otherwise, may be locked up in the British Foreign Office. It is difficult to believe that any British statesman would wantonly give away any national interest, but too lofty a policy has often been wanting in practical sense which, had that policy descended from principles to facts, would have saved the nation thousands of lives, millions of money, and sacrifices of its best interests." * * * * * "The events that have been fully before the eyes of British subjects in Morocco in the abnormal condition of the country during the past two years, seem to have been ignored by our Foreign Office. In short, it fully appears that our Foreign Office policy has been designed to lead the Sultan to political destruction, and to sacrifice every British interest. "About two years ago our Foreign Office began well in starting the Sultan on the path of progress: in carrying out its aims it has done nothing but blunders. Had it but acted with a little firmness, the opening up of this country would have already begun, and there would have been no 'Declaration' which will assuredly give future Foreign Secretaries matter for some anxiety. The declaration is only a display of political fireworks that will dazzle the eyes of the British public for a while, delighting our Little Englanders, but only making the future hazy and possibly more dangerous to deal with. It seems only a way of putting off the real settlement, which may not wait for thirty years to be dealt with, on the points still at issue, and for which a splendid opportunity has been thrown away at Downing Street, and could have been availed of to maintain British interests, prestige, and influence in this country. Briefly, we fear that the attainment of the end in view may yet cost millions to the British nation. "That Morocco will progress under French guidance there can be no question, and France may be congratulated on her superior diplomacy and the working of her Foreign Office system." With regard to the Moorish position, a contributor observes in a later issue-- "The attitude of the Sultan and his Cabinet may be summed up in a few words. 'You nations have made your agreements about our country without consulting us. We owe you nothing that we are unable to pay on the conditions arranged between us. We did not ask your subjects to reside and trade on Moorish soil. In fact, we have invariably discouraged their so doing. Troubles exist in Morocco, it is true, but we are far greater sufferers than you--our unbidden guests. And but for the wholesale smuggling of repeating rifles by _your_ people, our tribes would not be able to cause the disorders of which you complain. As to your intention to intervene in our affairs, we agree to no interference. If you are resolved to try force, we believe that the Faith of the Prophet will conquer. We still believe there is a God stronger than man. And should the fight go against us, we believe that it is better to earn Paradise in a holy war for the defence of our soil, than to submit tamely to Christian rule.' "The position, however lamentable, is intelligible; but on the other hand it is incredible that France--her mind made up long ago that she is to inherit the Promised Land of Sunset--will sit down meekly and allow herself to be flouted by the monarch and people of a crumbling power like Morocco. And this is what she has to face. Not indeed a nation, as we understand the term, but a gathering of units differing widely in character and race--Arabs, Berbers, mulattoes, and negroes--unable to agree together on any subject under the sun but one, and that one the defence of Islám from foreign intervention. Under the standard of the invincible Prophet they will join shoulder to shoulder. And hopeless and pathetic as it may seem, they will defy the disciplined ranks and magazine guns of Europe. Thus, wherever our sympathies may lie, the possibilities of a peaceful settlement of the Morocco question appear to be dwindling day by day. The anarchy paramount in three-quarters of the sultanate is not only an ever-increasing peril to European lives and property, but a direct encouragement to intervention. Of one thing we in Morocco have no kind of doubt. The landing of foreign troops, even for protective service, in any one part of the coast would infallibly be the signal for a general rising in every part of the Empire. No sea-port would be safe for foreigners or for friendly natives until protected by a strong European force. And, once begun, the task of 'pacifying' the interior must entail an expenditure of lives and treasure which will amply satisfy French demands for colonial extension for many a year to come." One more quotation from an editorial-- "And so it would appear, that, with the smiling approval of the world's Press, the wolf is to take over the affairs of the lamb. We use the phrase advisedly. We have never hesitated to criticize the action, and to condemn the errors, of the Makhzen where such a course has been needful in the public interest. We can, therefore, with all the more justice, call attention to the real issues of the compact embodied in the Morocco clauses of the Anglo-French Agreement of April, 1904. How long the leading journals of England may continue to ignore the facts of the case it is impossible to say; but that there will come a startling awakening seems inevitable. Every merely casual observer on this side of the Mediterranean knows only too well that the most trifling pretext may be at any hour seized for the next move in the development of French intervention. Evidence is piling up to show that the forward party in France, and still more in Algeria, is burning to strike while yet the frantic enthusiasm of the Entente lasts, and while they can rely upon the support--we had almost written, the moral support--of Great Britain. Can we shut our eyes to the deliberate provocations they are giving the Makhzen in almost every part of the sultanate? "These things are not reported to Europe, naturally. In spite of all our comfortable cant about justice to less powerful races, who in England cares about justice to Morocco and her Sultan? We owe it to Germany that the thing was not rushed through a few months ago. Who has heard, who wants to hear, the Moorish side of the question? Morocco is mute. The Sultan pulls no journalistic wires. He has no advocate in the Press, or in Parliament, or in Society. Hardly a public man opens his mouth in England to refer to Morocco, without talking absolute twaddle. The only member of either House of Parliament who has shown a real grasp of the tremendous issues of the question is Lord Rosebery, in the memorable words-- "'No more one-sided agreement was ever concluded between two Powers at peace with each other. I hope and trust, but I hope and trust rather than believe, that the Power which holds Gibraltar may never have cause to regret having handed Morocco over to a great military Power.' "Had that true statesman, and true Englishman, been in power eighteen months ago, England would never have been pledged to sacrifice her commercial interests in Morocco, to abandon her wholesome, traditional policy in the Mediterranean, and to revoke her solemn engagement to uphold the integrity of the Sultan's dominions." An excellent idea of the discrepancies between the alarmist reports with which the Press is from time to time deluged, and the facts as known on the spot, is afforded by the following extracts from _Al-moghreb Al-aksa_ of January 7, 1905, when the London papers had been almost daily victimized by their correspondents regarding Morocco:-- "The dismissal of the military _attachés_ at the Moorish Court threatened to raise a terrible conflagration in Europe, and great indignation among foreign residents in this country--according to certain Press reports. This fiery disposition of some offered a remarkable contrast with the coolness of the others. For instance, the British took almost no interest in the matter, for the simple reason that there has never been any British official military mission in the Moorish Court. It is true there are a few British subjects in Moorish military service, but they are privately employed by the Sultan's Government, and their service is simply voluntary. Even personally, they actually show no great concern in remaining here or not. "The Italian military mission is composed of very few persons. The chief, Col. Ferrara, is on leave in Italy, and the Mission is now represented by Captain Campini, who lives at Fez with his family. They report having received all kind attentions from the Sultan quite recently, and that they know nothing about the dismissal which has so noisily sounded in Europe. According to the same Press reports, great fears were entertained of a general rising against the foreign residents in Fez and other places in the interior, and while it is reported that the military _attachés_, consular officers and residents of all nations were notified to leave Fez and come to Tangier or the coast ports as a matter of precaution, we find that nobody moves from the Court, because, they say, they have seen nothing to induce them to leave that residence. And what has Mulai Abd El Azîz replied to French complaints and demands respecting the now historical dismissal of the military _attachés_? A very simple thing--that H.S.M. did not think that the dismissal could resent any of the civilized nations, because it was decided as an economic measure, there being no money to pay even other more pressing liabilities. However, the Sultan, wishing to be on friendly terms with France and all other nations, immediately withdrew the dismissal and promised to pay the _attachés_ as long as it is possible to do so. The missions, consuls, etc., have now no need to leave Fez, and everything remains stationary as before. The only thing steadily progressing is the insecurity of life and property in the outskirts and district of Tangier, where murders and robberies proceed unabated, and this state of affairs has caused the British and German residents in this town to send petitions to their respective Governments, through their legations, soliciting that some measure may be adopted to do away with the present state of insecurity which has already paralysed all overland traffic between this city and the neighbouring towns. "The contrasts of the situation are as remarkable as they are comic, and while the whole country is perfectly quiet, those places more in contact with the civilized world, like Tangier and the Algerian frontier, are the only spots which are seriously troubled with disturbances." So much for northern Morocco. The same issue contains the following report from its Mogador correspondent regarding the "disturbed state" of southern Morocco. "It would puzzle even the trained imagination of certain journalists we wot of to evolve anything alarmist out of the condition of the great tribes between Mogador and the Atlas. During the recent tribal differences not one single highway robbery, even of a native, was, I believe, committed. The roads are open everywhere; the rival chieftains have, figuratively, exchanged the kiss of peace, and the tribes have confessed that it was a mistake to leave their farms and farm-work simply to please an ambitious and utterly thankless governor. "As for Europeans, they have been rambling all over the country with their wonted freedom from interference. A Frenchman, travelling almost alone, has just returned from Imintanoot. Another has twice crossed the Atlas. Needless to say the route to Marrákesh is almost as devoid of other than pleasurable novelty as a stroll on the Embankment or down the shady side of Pall Mall. When, indeed, will folks at home grasp the fact that the Berber clans of southern Morocco belong to a race differing utterly in character and largely in customs from the ruffians infesting the northern half of the sultanate? "'Nothing but the unpleasant prospect of being held up by brigands,' writes a friend, 'prevents me from revisiting your beautiful country.' How convince such people that brigandage is an art unknown south of the Oom Rabya? That the prayer of the Shluh, when a Nazarene visits their land, is that nothing may happen to bring trouble on the clan? They may inwardly hate the _Rûmi_, or they may regard him merely as an uncouth blot on the scenery; but should actual unpleasantness arise, he will, in almost every case, have himself to thank for it. (London papers please copy!)" This letter was dated two days after the Paris correspondent of the _Times_ had telegraphed-- "Events would seem likely to be coming to a head in consequence of the anarchy prevailing in the Shereefian Empire. The Pretender is just now concentrating his troops in the plain of Angad, and is preparing to take an energetic offensive against Ujda. The camp of the Pretender is imposing in its warlike display. All the caids and the sons of Bu Amema surround Mulai Mahomed. The men are armed with French _chassepots_, and are well dressed in new uniforms supplied by an Oran firm. All the war material was embarked on board the French yacht _Zut_, which landed it last month on the shores of Rastenga between Cape Eau and Melilla under the direction of the Pretender's troops." Towards Christmas, 1902, circumstantial reports began to appear in the newspapers of an overwhelming defeat of the imperial army by rebels who were marching on Fez, who had besieged it, and had cut off the aqueduct bringing its water, the Sultan retreating to the palace, Europeans being ordered to the coast, etc., etc. These statements I promptly and categorically denied in an interview for the London _Echo_; there was no real "pretender," only a religious fanatic supported by two disaffected tribes, the imperial army had not been defeated, as only a small body had been despatched to quell the disturbance; the "rebels" were not besieging Fez, as they had no army, and only the guns captured by the clever midnight surprise of sleeping troops, of which the "battle"--really a panic--consisted; they had not cut the "aqueduct," as Fez is built on the banks of a river from which it drinks; the Sultan's palace was his normal abode; the Europeans had not fled, seeing no danger, but that _on account of the alarming telegrams from Europe_, their Ministers in Tangier had advised them to withdraw, much against their will. So sweeping a contradiction of statements receiving daily confirmation from Tangier, heightened colour from Oran, and intensification from Madrid, must have been regarded as the ravings of a madman, for the interview was held over for a week for confirmation. Had not thirty-four correspondents descended on Tangier alone, each with expenses to meet? Something had to be said, though the correspondent nearest to the scene, in Fez, was two days' journey from it, and six from Tangier, the nearest telegraph station. It is true that some years ago an American boldly did the journey "From Fez to Fleet Street in Eight Days," by forgetting most of the journey to Tangier, but this was quite out-done now. Meanwhile every rumour was remodelled in Oran or Madrid, and served up afresh with confirmatory _sauce piquante_, _à la française_ or _à l'espagnol_, as the case might be. It was not till Reuter had obtained an independent, common-sense report, that the interview was published, my statements having been all confirmed, but by that time interest had flagged, and the British public still believes that a tremendous upheaval took place in Morocco just then. Yet, notwithstanding the detailed accounts of battles and reverses--a collation of which shows the "Father of the She-ass" fighting in several places at once, captured or slain to-day and fighting to-morrow, and so on--the Government of Morocco was never in real danger from the "Rogi's" rising, and the ultimate issue was never in doubt. The late Sultan, El Hasan, more than once suffered in person at the hands of the same tribes, defeats more serious than those experienced by the inadequate forces sent by his son. The moral of all this is that any news from Morocco, save that concerning Europeans or events on the coast, must be received with caution, and confirmation awaited. The most reliable accounts at present available are those of the _Times_ correspondent at Tangier, while the _Manchester Guardian_ is well informed from Mogador. Whatever emanates from Paris or Algeria, not referring directly to frontier events; or from Madrid, not referring to events near the Spanish "presidios," should be refused altogether, as at best it is second-hand, more often fabricated. How the London Press can seriously publish telegrams about Morocco from New York and Washington passes comprehension. The low ebb reached by American journals with one or two notable exceptions in their competitive sensationalism would of itself suffice to discredit much that appears, even were the countries in touch with each other. The fact is that very few men in Morocco itself are in a position to form adequate judgements on current affairs, or even to collect reliable news from all parts. So few have direct relations with the authorities, native and foreign; so many can only rely on and amplify rumour or information from interested sources. So many, too, of the latter _must_ make money somehow! The soundest judgements are to be formed by those who, being well-informed as to the conditions and persons concerned, and Moorish affairs in general, are best acquainted with the origin of the reports collected by others, and can therefore rightly appraise them. INDEX A Abbas, Shah of Persia, 280 _note_ Abd Allah bin Boo Shaïb es-Sálih, story of: protection system, 247-251 Abd Allah Ghaïlán, former rebel leader, 274 Abd el Hakk and the Widow Záïdah, story of the, 164, 165 Addington, Mr., British Ambassador at Granáda, 354 Aghmát, capital of Southern Morocco, 5 Ahmad II., "the Golden," addressed by Queen Elizabeth, 9 Algeria, 281; the French in, 294-296, 299; viewed from Morocco, 307-317; under French rule, 308-315; failure as a colony, 309; Arabs in, 313; Moors in, 314; mosques, 315; tilework, 316; field for scientist, 317 Algiers (El Jazîrah), the city and people, 310-316 Alhambra, the, at Granáda (_q.v._) _Al-moghreb Al-aksa_ on the political situation, 381-394 Andorra, the Pyrenean republic of, 7, 337, 379; its privileges granted by Charlemagne, 379 Anglo-French Agreement, 276, 279, 301, 304, 381; clauses in, 283, 293 Anne, Queen, 9 Arabs, the wandering, 57-62; tent-life, 57-62; food, 59; hospitality, 60; in Algeria, 313; in Tunisia, 322 B Beggars, native, 115, 116 Berber race, 3, 6, 47-56; pirates, 3; men brave and warlike, 48, 49; Reefian, 48, 50; women often very intelligent, 51; they, not Saracens or Arabs, real conquerors of Spain, 6, 54; origin still a problem, 55; Ghaïátà Berbers in revolt, 271-273 Boabdil, 356, 365 Boo Ziaro Miliáni, arrest and release of, 34 C Café, Moorish, 159-165 Carthage, 53; Christian and Mohammedan, 53 Charlemagne, 379 Charles Martel, the "Hammer," 337 Charles V., "improver" of Spanish monuments of Moorish art, 338, 350, 353 Chess, 133, 144; an Arab game, 134 Child-life, Moorish, 94-101; infancy, 95; school days, 97; youth, 99; early vices, 101 "Cid," the, El Mansûr, 376 City life in Morocco, 63-70 Civil war in Morocco: Asni and the Aït Mîzán, 261-266 Coinage, Moorish, 23-25, 125 Córdova, 337, 338-346, 375; its famous mosque (cathedral), 338-345; aisles, columns, arches, 339, 340; the kiblah niche, 342; Moorish worshippers in, 342; European additions to, 343-345; history of the town, 345 Corrosive sublimate tea--for disgraced officials, 28 D Debts in Morocco, how settled, 30-34 Delbrel, M., leader of the "Rogi's" forces, 273 Dining out in Morocco, 102-106 Diplomacy in Morocco. _See_ Embassy Draughts, game of, 162 E Edward I. and Eleanor of Castile, 376 Edward VII. in Algeria, 281 Elizabeth, Queen, 9 El K'sar es-Sagheer, 6 El Menébhi, ambassador to London and Minister of War, 268 El Moghreb el Aksa, native name of Morocco, 14 El Yazeed, Sultan in 1790, declares war on all Christendom, 10 Embassy to court of Sultan, a typical, 206-232; requisitioning provisions, 206, 207; _personnel_ and _attachés_, 208, 209; native agent, 209; arrival at Marrákesh, 210; reception, 212, 213; the diplomatic interview: ambassador, interpreter, and Sultan, 214-222; the result: as it appeared in the Press, 223; as it was in reality, 224, 225; diamond cut diamond, 226-230; failure, and its causes, 227-230 England and Morocco, 276, 293, 294, 381-394; British trade, 280; British policy in, 301-304; Anglo-French Agreement (_q.v._); "Morocco news," 381-394 F Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, 3, 334, 350, 353, 362, 378; their nuptials the death-knell of Moorish rule in Europe, 7; tomb of, 355 Fez, founded by son of Mulai Idrees, 5; Karûeeïn mosque at, 44, 337, 339, 358 Football, Moorish, 97, 137 Ford's "Handbook to Spain," 357, 366, 373 France in Morocco, 288, 292-305; "policing" the frontier, 288; her rule inevitable and desirable, 294-300; hope for the Moors, 301, 305, 385; Anglo-French Agreement (_q.v._); in Algeria, 308-315; in Tunisia, 318-320; _see_ Political situation, the, and Appendix, 381-394 G German interests in Morocco, 279-282 Gerona: Sulaïmán, Pepin, and Charlemagne, 378, 379 Gibraltar, Moorish castle, 370 Granáda, 337, 352-365; the Alhambra Palace, loveliest monument of Moorish art in Spain, 352-354, 356-362; despoiled by Charles V. and the French, 353; "Tia Antonia," 353, 354; Morocco-like surroundings, 354; mosques, 355; tomb of Ferdinand and Isabella, 355; remains of Cardinal Mendoza, 356, 377; Bu Abd Allah's sword, 356, 365; courts and halls of the Alhambra, 358-362; other Moorish remains, 362-365 H Hamed Zirári, story of: protection system, 242-246 Hareems, royal, 73-75; and other, 82-87 Hasheesh, opium of Morocco, 130 Hay, Sir John Drummond, 294 Herbs, fragrant, use of, 86, 108, 122 I Infant mortality in Morocco high, 96 Irving, Washington, at Granáda, 354; his "Tia Antonia," 354 Ismaïl the Bloodthirsty exchanges compliments with Queen Anne, 9 J Jaca, site of desperate battle between Spaniards and Moors, 378 Jelálli Zarhôni, the "Rogi," head of the revolt of the Ghaïátà Berbers, 271-273 Jewish interpreter, astute, 214-222 Jews in Morocco, 16-17; justice for, 252-260; in Spain, traces of, 334 K Kabyles, 54 Kaïd, the, and his court, 252-259 Kesk'soo, the national dish, 59, 105, 121, 198, 266 Khalia, staple article of winter diet, 197 Korán, the, at schools, 97; the standard work at colleges, 98 Kufic inscriptions, 351, 361, 373, 375 L _L'Aigle_ at Mogador and Agadir, 35 "Land of the Moors, The," 292 _Lex talionis_, 48 M Machiavellian arts, Moors excel in, 38 Madrid Convention of 1880 ... 282, 382; essential features of, 289, 290 Madrid, Moorish remains in, 376 Malaga, Moorish dockyard, 370 Market-place, Moorish, 107-110, 121-123, 125-132; and marketing, 109, 113-115, 118-124 Marrákesh, founded in the middle of the 11th century, 5; kingdom of, 5, 14; the Kûtûbîya at, 44, 337, 346 Marriage in Morocco, 75, 77; country wedding, 88-93; feastings, presents, and rejoicings, 88-91 Mauretania Tingitana, titular North African bishopric still, 3 Mavrogordato, Kyrios Dimitri: typical embassy, 206-232 Medicine-men, 166-178; cupping, 167-169, 197; exorcising, 169, 171; cauterizing, 170; charms, 172; curious remedies, 174-177; philtres and poisons, 177 Mekka, pilgrimage to. _See_ Pilgrimage Mendoza, Cardinal, 355, 356; remains of the Mendozas, 377 Merchants, Moorish, 109, 113-115 Mérida, Muslim toleration at, 373 Mokhtar and Zóharah, wedding of, 88-93 Monk, General, 9 Moors in Spain, traces of. _See_ Spain Morals, Moorish, lax, 39-44, 101 Morocco: retrospect, 1-13; of present day, 14-65; races: Berbers, Arabs, Moors, 15-17, 47-62; life of the people--society, business, pastime, religion, 63-204; diplomacy (_q.v._); law and justice, 233-260; the political situation (_q.v._); her neighbours, 307-331; Moors in Spain (_q.v._); "Morocco news," _Al-moghreb Al-aksa_, 381-394 Morocco-Algerian frontier, France "policing" the, 288 Mosques, French treatment of, 315, 319 Mulai Abd Allah V., 1756, makes war upon Gibraltar, 11 Mulai Abd el Azîz IV., present Sultan, 267-291 Mulai Abd el Káder, a favourite saint, 115 Mulai el Hasan III., late Sultan, 24, 40, 267 Mulai Idrees, direct descendant of Mohammed, and early Arabian missionary to Morocco, 4; founded the Shurfà Idreeseeïn dynasty, 5 Mulai Yakûb el Mansûr, builder of mosque towers at Sevílle, Marrákesh, and Rabat, 347 Musical instruments, 135, 139, 151, 160 O Official rapacity, 28, 242-251, 252-260 Orihuela, palms at, 371 P Pawkers, Admiral, 11 Pepys, Samuel, once on a Moorish Commission, 383 Pilgrims to Mekka, 191-204; sea-route preferred to-day, 191; camp at Tangier, 192-200; comforts and discomforts, 192-200; a novel tent, 193-195; food, 197-199; returning home, 201-204 Piracy of Moors, 7-9; tribute extorted from European Powers, 9, 10, 12; abandoned by Algiers, 12; not wholly unknown to-day, 13 Political situation, the, 267-291; the Sultan and reforms, 268-270; unsettled state of the empire, 270-275; a change welcome, 276; agreement among the three great Powers remote, 276; Anglo-French Agreement (_q.v._); famine and unrest, 277; German interests, 280; Spanish interests, 283; conference proposed, 282, 284; points for discussion, 285-288; "Morocco news" must be received with caution, 381-394 Postal reform needed, 286 Powder play, 91, 94, 121, 135 Prayer, Moslem, 69, 142, 152; call to, 69, 70 Prisons and prisoners, miserable, 233-241; long terms, 234-237; the lash, 238, 246; the bastinado, 255; Jews in, 260 Protection system, the, 29, 242-251; the need: story of Hamed Zirári, 242-246; the search: story of Abd Allah bin Boo Shaïb es-Sálih, 247-251; patent of, 251; "farming," 251 _note_ R Rabat, Hassan tower at, 347, 348 Railways would be welcomed by the Sultan, 297 Raïsûli, rebel leader in the disaffected north, 273-275 Rio Tinto copper-mines, 368 Ronda, corn-mills at, 369 Rosebery, Lord, on Morocco, 387 Rudolf II., 1604: his active policy respecting Moroccan affairs, 280 _note_ S Saragossa, the Aljaferia at, 378 School, Moorish, 97, 98 Sevílle, 337, 346-352, 367; Girálda tower, 346-348; palace, El Kasar, 349-351; royal "improvers" of Moorish work, 350; capital of Charles V., 352; Moorish remains at, 367 Sherley, Sir Anthony, 1604, adventurer and diplomatist, 280 _note_ Shurfà Idreeseeïn dynasty founded by Mulai Idrees, 5 Sidi Mohammed, son of Mulai Abd Allah V., 11 Si Marzak and his fair Azîzah, the loves of, 160-162 Slave-markets, Marrákesh and Fez, 179-181 Slavery in Morocco, 8, 17, _et passim_, 179-190; sources of supply, 180; girls for hareems, 181; treatment fairly kind, 181, 182; men have risen to high positions, 182; use chiefly domestic, 183; a slave-girl's cruel story, 185-190 Smeerah, quaint incident at, 198 Smin, use of, 112, 131 Smith, Sir Chas. Euan, 206 Snake-charming, 137, 151-158 Social life, Moorish, 82-87 Spain, Moorish empire in, founded by Berbers, 6, 54; footprints of Moors in, 332-379; place-names and words of Arabic origin, 333, 369; physiognomy of the people, 335; habits and customs, 335; salutations, 336; narrow streets, 336; forts and mosques (churches), 337; the mosque at Córdova (_q.v._); Girálda and El Kasar at Sevílle (_q.v._); the Alhambra at Granáda (_q.v._); other Moorish towns, villages, castles, and remains, 366-379; women of, at the battle of Jaca, 378 Sports and pastimes, Moorish: active, 96, 133-137; passive, 138-150, 151-158, 159-165 Stamps and stamp-dealers, 287 Story-teller, the, 122, 137, 138-150; Mulai Abd el Káder and the Monk of Monks, 141-148 T Tafilált, home for discarded Sultanas, 73 Tangier, English cede possession of, 9, 383; drunkenness and vice, 41; North African Mission, 42; shopping in, 118-124; market-place, 121-123; Sunday market, 125-132; salt-pans, 129; English Church at, 132; starting-place for Mekka pilgrims, 192, 196; residence of ambassadors, 205; gaol at, 233; many Frenchmen at, 300 Tarifa, Moorish remains at, 366 Tarragona, cathedral of, 373 Tea, making, 86, 103 Tilework of Algeria, 316 Toledo, 336, 373; Moorish hydraulists, 374; Ez-Zarkal's water-clocks, 374; cathedral, 374; sword-manufacture, 375 Tortosa, ancient pirate stronghold, 372 Tripoli, city and people, 326-331; the Turkish element in, 326; viewed from Morocco, 326-331; mosques, 328; irrigation, 330 Tunis, city, 321, 322 Tunisia, 299, 308; viewed from Morocco, 318-325; under French rule, 318-320; Jews in, 319; Arabs in, 322; Moors in, 322; women in, 325 V Valencia, ancient Moorish paradise, 372 W Water-carriers, Moorish, 132, 149 Water-clocks, Ez-Zarkal's, 374 Wazzân, Shareef of, present representative of Shurfá Idreeseeïn dynasty, 5, 296 Wilhelm II. in Tangier Bay, 281 Women of Morocco, occupations, 58, 62, 77, 111, 134; seclusion, 64, 77, 83, 103, 107; subservient position, 71-81, 107; possibilities of influence, 73; marriages, 75, 77, 88-93; divorce, 76; social visits, 82-87; wearing apparel, 84; excellent cooks, 85, 105, 111, 112; slaves, 181, 183, 185, 190; women in Tunisia, 325; in Tripoli, 329 X Xeres, Old, Moorish citadel, 367 Z Zarhôn, most sacred town, 5 Zawîah of Sîdi Abd er-Rahmán, 316 Zummeetah, "mixed," quaint story of, 198 THE END PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES. Transcriber's Note: Page 6: Missing accent added to Seville (Sevílle). Page 36: corrected mis-matched quotes. Page 44: restored missing ^ accent to Karûeeïn Page 104: 'whch' corrected to 'which'. Page 128: 'beats' changed to 'beasts', to fit context. Page 130: 'flead' [sic] Page 153: corrected mis-matched quotes. ("And when at home? ') Page 185: 'Rabhah' is spelled 'Rabbah' in previous illustration. Page 198: sic: carraway/caraway Page 263: changed comma for period at sentence end. (sighted, This) Page 273: 'through' changed to 'though', to fit context. Page 274: 'accetpance' changed to 'acceptance'. Page 284: 'territoral' changed to 'territorial'. Page 289: carcase/carcass, both are correct: Oxford Dictionary. Page 299: sic: instal/install. Page 346: added missing accent to III SEVILLE (SEVÍLLE), for conformity. (II CÓRDOVA is accented). Page 349: added missing accent to Giralda (Girálda), for conformity. Page 353: corrected 'architectual' to 'architectural'. Page 372: comma corrected to period. (a Moorish cistern hard by.) Page 296: colon corrected to semicolon. (Moorish worshippers in, 342;). Page 296: added comma (Debts in Morocco, how settled, 30-34). Page 377: added closing quote to "Castle of Ayûb. Page 395: 'Bobadil' changed to 'Boabdil'. Page 395: removed extraneous '378' reference for Charlemagne. Page 396: removed extraneous '3' reference for Ferdinand and Isabella. Page 397: removed extraneous entry (368) for 'kufic inscriptions'; changed '575' to '375'. Page 398,399: Missing accent added to Seville (Sevílle). Page 399: missing accent added to Cordova (Córdova). Page 399: comma added after 'remains' (other Moorish towns, villages, castles, and remains, 366-379;). Page 400: comma added after 'occupations' (Women of Morocco, occupations, 58, 62, 77, 111, 134;). oe ligatures are indicated with [oe] I also removed the partial square brackets before or after the photographer's names accompanying Illustration titles. 
31532	----	produced from images generously made available by the Digital & Multimedia Center, Michigan State University Libraries.) ROMANTIC SPAIN: _A RECORD OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCES._ ROMANTIC SPAIN: A Record of Personal Experiences. BY JOHN AUGUSTUS O'SHEA, AUTHOR OF "LEAVES FROM THE LIFE OF A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT," "AN IRON-BOUND CITY," ETC. "Oh, lovely Spain! renowned, romantic land!" CHILDE HAROLD. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. II. LONDON: WARD AND DOWNEY, 12, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C. 1887. [_All Rights Reserved._] CONTENTS OF VOL. II. CHAPTER I. Page A Tidy City--A Sacred Corpse--Remarkable Features of Puerto--A Calesa--Lady Blanche's Castle--A Typical English Engineer--British Enterprise--"Success to the Cadiz Waterworks!"--Visit to a Bodega--Wine and Women--The Coming Man--A Strike 1-18 CHAPTER II. The Charms of Cadiz--Seville-by-the-Sea--Cervantes--Daughters of Eve--The Ladies who Prayed and the Women who Didn't--Fasting Monks--Notice to Quit on the Nuns--The Rival Processions--Gutting a Church--A Disorganized Garrison--Taking it Easy--The Mysterious "Mr. Crabapple"--The Steamer _Murillo_--An Unsentimental Navvy--Bandaged Justice--Tricky Ship-Owning--Painting Black White 19-41 CHAPTER III. Expansion of Carlism--A Pseudo-Democracy--Historic Land and Water Marks--An Impudent Stowaway--Spanish Respect for Providence--A Fatal Signal--Playing with Fire--Across the Bay--Farewell to Andalusia--British Spain 42-50 CHAPTER IV. Gabriel Tar--A Hard Nut to Crack--In the Cemetery--An Old Tipperary Soldier--Marks of the Broad Arrow--The "Scorpions"--The Jaunting-Cars--Amusements on the Rock--Mrs. Damages' Complaint--The Bay, the Alameda, and Tarifa--How to Learn Spanish--Types of the British Officer--The Wily Ben Solomon--A Word for the Subaltern--Sunset Gun--The Sameness of Sutlersville 51-75 CHAPTER V. From Pillar to Pillar--Historic Souvenirs--Off to Africa--The Sweetly Pretty Albert--Gibraltar by Moonlight--The Chain-Gang--Across the Strait--A Difficult Landing--Albert is Hurt--"Fat Mahomet"--The Calendar of the Centuries Put Back--Tangier: the People, the Streets, the Bazaar--Our Hotel--A Coloured Gentleman--Seeing the Sights--Local Memoranda--Jewish Disabilities--Peep at a Photographic Album--The Writer's Notions on Harem Life 76-102 CHAPTER VI. A Pattern Despotism--Some Moorish Peculiarities--A Hell upon Earth--Fighting for Bread--An Air-Bath--Surprises of Tangier--On Slavery--The Writer's Idea of a Moorish Squire--The Ladder of Knowledge--Gulping Forbidden Liquor--Division of Time--Singular Customs--The Shereef of Wazan--The Christian who Captivated the Moor--The Interview--Moslem Patronage of Spain--A Slap for England--A Vision of Beauty--An English Desdemona: Her Plaint--One for the Newspaper Men--The Ladies' Battle--Farewell--The English Lady's Maid--Albert is Indisposed--The Writer Sums up on Morocco 103-135 CHAPTER VII. Back to Gibraltar--The Parting with Albert--The Tongue of Scandal--Voyage to Malaga--"No Police, no Anything"--Federalism Triumphant--Madrid _in Statu Quo_--Orense--Progress of the Royalists--On the Road Home--In the Insurgent Country--Stopped by the Carlists--An Angry Passenger is Silenced 136-151 CHAPTER VIII. On the Wing--Ordered to the Carlist Headquarters--Another _Petit Paris_--Carlists from Cork--How Leader was Wounded--Beating-up for an Anglo-Irish Legion--Pontifical Zouaves--A Bad Lot--Oddities of Carlism--Santa Cruz Again--Running a Cargo--On Board a Carlist Privateer--A Descendant of Kings--"Oh, for an Armstrong Twenty-Four Pounder!"--Crossing the Border--A Remarkable Guide--Mountain Scenery--In Navarre--Challenged at Vera--Our Billet with the Parish Priest--The Sad Story of an Irish Volunteer--Dialogue with Don Carlos--The Happy Valley--Bugle-Blasts--The Writer in a Quandary--The Fifth Battalion of Navarre--The Distribution of Arms--The Bleeding Heart--Enthusiasm of the Chicos 152-187 CHAPTER IX. The Cura of Vera--Fueros of the Basques--Carlist Discipline--Fate of the _San Margarita_--The Squadron of Vigilance--How a Capture was Effected--The Sea-Rovers in the Dungeon--Visit to the Prisoners--San Sebastian--A Dead Season--The Defences of a Threatened City--Souvenirs of War--The Miqueletes--In a Fix--A German Doctor's Warning 188-210 CHAPTER X. Belcha's Brigands--Pale-Red Republicans--The Hyena--More about the _San Margarita_--Arrival of a Republican Column--The Jaunt to Los Pasages--A Sweet Surprise--"The Prettiest Girl in Spain"--A Madrid Acquaintance--A Costly Pull--The Diligence at Last--Renteria and its Defences--A Furious Ride--In France Again--Unearthing Santa Cruz--The Outlaw in his Lair--Interviewed at Last--The Truth about the Endarlasa Massacre--A Death-Warrant--The Buried Gun--Fanaticism of the Partisan-Priest 211-238 CHAPTER XI. An Audible Battle--"Great Cry and Little Wool"--A Carlist Court Newsman--The Religious War--The Siege of Oyarzun--Madrid Rebels--"The Money of Judas"--A Manifesto from Don Carlos--An Ideal Monarch--Necessity of Social and Political Reconstruction Proclaimed--A Free Church--A Broad Policy--The King for the People--The Theological Question--Austerity in Alava--Clerical and Non-Clerical Carlists--Disavowal of Bigotry--A Republican Editor on the Carlist Creed--Character of the Basques--Drill and Discipline--Guerilleros _versus_ Regulars 239-268 CHAPTER XII. Barbarossa--Royalist-Republicans--Squaring a Girl--At Irun--"Your Papers?"--The Barber's Shop--A Carlist Spy--An Old Chum--The Alarm--A Breach of Neutrality--Under Fire--Caught in the Toils--The Heroic Thomas--We Slope--A Colleague Advises Me--"A Horse! a Horse!"--State of Bilbao--Don Carlos at Estella--Sanchez Bregua Recalled--Tolosa Invites--Republican Ineptitude--Do not Spur a Free Horse--Very Ancient Boys--Meditations in Bed--A Biscay Storm 269-299 CHAPTER XIII. Nearing the End--Firing on the Red Cross--Perpetuity of War--Artistic Hypocrites--The Jubilee Year--The Conflicts of a Peaceful Reign--Major Russell--Quick Promotion--The Foreign Legion--The Aspiring Adventurer--A Leader's Career--A Piratical Proposal--The "Ojaladeros" of Biarritz--A Friend in Need--Buying a Horse--Gilpin Outdone--"Fred Burnaby" 300-317 FOOTNOTES NOTES OF THE TRANSCRIBER ROMANTIC SPAIN. CHAPTER I. A Tidy City--A Sacred Corpse--Remarkable Features of Puerto--A Calesa--Lady Blanche's Castle--A Typical English Engineer--British Enterprise--"Success to the Cadiz Waterworks!"--Visit to a Bodega--Wine and Women--The Coming Man--A Strike. PUERTO de Santa Maria has the name of being the neatest and tidiest city in Spain, and neatness and tidiness are such dear homely virtues, I thought I could not do better than hie me thither to see if the tale were true. With a wrench I tore myself from the soft capital of Andalusia, delightful but demoralizing. I was growing lazier every day I spent there; I felt energy oozing out of every pore of my body; and in the end I began to get afraid that if I stopped much longer I should only be fit to sing the song of the sluggard:--"You have waked me too soon, let me slumber again." Seville is a dangerous place; it is worse than Capua; it would enervate Cromwell's Ironsides. Happily for me the mosquitoes found out my bedroom, and pricked me into activity, or I might not have summoned the courage to leave it for weeks, the more especially as I had a sort of excuse for staying. The Cardinal Archbishop had promised a friend of mine to let him inspect the body of St. Fernando, and my friend had promised to take me with him. Now, this was a great favour. St. Fernando is one of the patrons of Seville; he has been dead a long time, but his corpse refuses to putrefy, like those of ordinary mortals; it is a sacred corpse, and in a beatific state of preservation. Three times a year the remains of the holy man are uncovered, and the faithful are admitted to gaze on his incorruptible features. This was not one of the regular occasions; the Cardinal Archbishop had made an exception in compliment to my friend, who is a rising young diplomat, so that the favour was really a favour. I declined it with thanks--very much obliged, indeed--pressure of business called me elsewhere--the cut-and-dry form of excuse; but I never mentioned a word about the mosquitoes. I told my friend to thank the prelate for his graciousness; the prelate expressed his sorrow that my engagements did not permit me to wait, and begged that I would oblige him by letting the British public know the shameful way he and his priests were treated by the Government They had not drawn a penny of salary for three years. This was a fact; and very discreditable it was to the Government, and a good explanation of the disloyalty of their reverences. If a contract is made it should be kept; the State contracted to support the Church, but since Queen Isabella decamped the State had forgotten its engagement. Puerto de Santa Maria deserves the name it has got. It is a clean and shapely collection of houses, regularly built. People in England are apt to associate the idea of filth with Spain; this, at least in Andalusia, is a mistake. The cleanliness is Flemish. Soap and the scrubbing-brush are not spared; linen is plentiful and spotless, and water is used for other purposes than correcting the strength of wine. Walking down the long main street with its paved causeways and pebbly roadway, with its straight lines of symmetric houses, coquettish in their marble balconies and brightly-painted shutters and railings, one might fancy himself in Brock or Delft but that the roofs are flat, that the gables are not turned to the street, and that the sky is a cloudless blue. I am speaking now of fine days; but there are days when the sky is cloudy and the wind blows, and the waters in the Bay of Cadiz below surge up sullen and yeasty, and there are days when the rain comes down quick, thick, and heavy as from a waterspout, and the streets are turned for the moment into rivulets. But the effects of the rain do not last long; Spain is what washerwomen would call a good drying country. Beyond its neatness and tidiness, Puerto has other features to recommend it to the traveller. It has a bookseller's shop, where the works of Eugène Sue and Paul de Kock can be had in choice Spanish, side by side with the Carlist Almanack, "by eminent monarchical writers," and the calendar of the Saragossan prophet (the Spanish Old Moore); but it is not to that I refer--half a hundred Andalusian towns can boast the same. It has its demolished convent, but since the revolution of '68 that is no more a novelty than the Alameda, or sand-strewn, poplar-planted promenade, which one meets in every Spanish hamlet. It has the Atlantic waves rolling in at its feet, and a pretty sight it is to mark the feluccas, with single mast crossed by single yard, like an unstrung bow, moored by the wharf or with outspread sail bellying before the breeze on their way to Cadiz beyond, where she sits throned on the other side of the bay, "like a silver cup" glistening in the sunshine, when sunshine there is. The silver cup to which the Gaditanos are fond of comparing their city looked more like dirty pewter as I approached it by water from Puerto; but I was in a tub of a steamer, there was a heavy sea on and a heavy mist out, and perhaps I was qualmish. Not for its booksellers' shops, for its demolished convent, or for its vulgar Atlantic did this Puerto, which the guide-books pass curtly by as "uninteresting," impress me as interesting, but for two features that no seasoned traveller could, would, or should overlook; its female population is the most attractive in Andalusia, and it is the seat of an agreeable English colony. I happened on the latter in a manner that is curious, so curious as to merit relation. I had intended to proceed to Cadiz from Seville after I had taken a peep at Puerto, but that little American gentleman whom I met at Córdoba was with me, and persuaded me to stop by the story of a wonderful castle prison, a sort of _Tour de Nesle_, which was to be seen in the vicinity, where the _bonne amie_ of a King of Spain had been built up in the good old times when monarchs raised favourites from the gutter one day, and sometimes ordered their weazands to be slit the next. This show-place is about a league from Puerto, in the valley of Sidonia, and is called El Castillo de Doña Blanca. We took a calesa to go there. My companion objected to travelling on horseback; he could not stomach the peculiar Moorish saddle with its high-peaked cantle and crupper, and its catch-and-carry stirrups. We took a calesa, as I have said. To my dying day I shall not forget that vehicle of torture. But it may be necessary to tell what is a calesa. Procure a broken-down hansom, knock off the driver's seat, paint the body and wheels the colour of a roulette-table at a racecourse, stud the hood with brass nails of the pattern of those employed to beautify genteel coffins, remove the cushions, and replace them with a wisp of straw, smash the springs, and put swing-leathers underneath instead, cover the whole article with a coating of liquid mud, leave it to dry in a mouldy place where the rats shall have free access to the leather for gnawing practice, return in seven years, and you will find a tolerably correct imitation of that decayed machine, the Andalusian calesa. It is more picturesque than the Neapolitan _corricolo_; it is all ribs and bones, and is much given to inward groaning as it jerks and jolts along. Such a trap we took; the driver lazily clambered on the shafts, and away hobbled our lean steed. The road to Lady Blanche's Castle is like that to Jordan in the nigger songs; it is "a hard road to travel"--a road full of holes and quagmires and jutting rocks; and yet the driver told me it had once been a good road, but that was in the reign of Queen Isabella. Everything seems to have been allowed to go to dilapidation since. On the outskirts of Puerto we passed an English cemetery; I am glad to say it is almost uninhabited. If there is an English dead settlement there ought to be a live one, I reasoned, unless those who are buried here date from Peninsular battles. The first part of the road to Blanche's Castle is level, and bordered with thick growths of prickly pear; there is a view of the sea, and of the Guadalate, spanned by a metal bridge--a Menai on a small scale. Farther on, as we get to a district called La Piedad, the country is diversified by swampy flats at one side and sandy hills at the other. Blanche's Castle was a commonplace ruin, a complete "sell," and we turned our horse's head rather savagely. As we were coming back, the little American shortening the way by Sandford and Merton observations of this nature--"Prickly pear makes a capital hedge; no cattle will face it; the spikes of the plant are as tenacious as fish-hooks. The fibres of the aloe are unusually strong; they make better cordage than hemp, but will not bear the wet so well"--a sight caught my eyes which caused me to stare. A tall young fellow, with his trousers tucked up, was wading knee-deep in the bottoms beside the road. He wore a suit of Oxford mixture. "Who or what is that gentleman?" I asked the driver. "An English engineer," was the answer. I stopped the calesa, hailed him, and inquired was he fond of rheumatic fever. He laughed, and pronounced the single word, "Duty." A little word, but one that means much. A Spanish engineer would never have done this; they are great in offices and at draughting on paper, but they seldom tuck up their sleeves, much less their trousers, to labour out of doors as the young Englishman was doing. I made his acquaintance, and he willingly consented to show me over the works in which he was engaged, which were intended to supply Cadiz with water. In England water is to be had too easily to be estimated at its proper value. At Cadiz it is a marketable commodity. Even the parrots there squeak "agua." Every drop of rain that falls is carefully gathered in cisterns, and the conveyance of water in boatloads from Puerto across the Bay is a regular trade. An English company had been formed to supply the parched seaport and the ships that call there with fresh water, and its reservoirs were situated at La Piedad. In the bowels of the flats below, where the snipe-shooting ought to be good, our countryman told me the water was to be sought. Galleries had been sunk in every direction in land which the company had purchased, and pumps and engines are soon to be erected that will raise the liquid collected there up to the reservoirs which have been hewn out of the hills above. These reservoirs, approached by passages excavated out of the rough sandstone, are stout and solid specimens of the mason's craft directed by the engineer's skill. Here we met a second gentleman superintending the labours of the men, but he was surely a Spaniard; he spoke the language with the readiness of one born on the soil; still, he had a matter-of-fact, resolute quickness about him that was hardly Spanish. Doubts as to his nationality were soon dispelled; the engineer we had surprised in the swamp presented us to his colleague Forrest, engineer to Messrs. Barnett and Gale, of Westminster, the contractors, as thoroughbred an Englishman as ever came out of the busy town of Blackburn. Mr. Forrest at once stood to cross-examination by the American, who had all the inquisitiveness of his race. "We employ a couple of hundred men, on an average, here," he said, "all of whom, with but two exceptions, are Spaniards, and very fair hard-working fellows they are; in the town below we have a small colony of English, and if you don't take it amiss I shall be happy to present you to our society." I know little of the technicalities of engineering, but I saw enough of this work to be certain that it was well and truly done, and I heard enough of the scarcity of water in Cadiz to be convinced it will be a great boon when finished. The reservoirs are constructed in colonnades, supported by ashlar pillars and roofed with rubble; for the water must be shaded from the sun in this hot climate; the pillars are buttered over with cement, and there is over a foot of cement concrete on the flooring, to guard against filtration. As we paced about the sombre aisles, echo multiplied every syllable we uttered; the repetition of sound is as distinct as in the whispering gallery of St. Paul's, and I could not help remarking, "What a splendid robber's cave this would make!" "Too tell-tale," said the practical American; "make a better cave of harmony." "The only pipes that are ever likely to blow here are water-pipes," smilingly put in the engineer; "we intend to lay them from this to Cadiz, some twenty-eight miles distant. Roughly speaking, we are about ninety feet above the level of the place, so that the highest building there can be supplied with ease." The Romans were benefactors to many portions of this dry land of Spain; they built up aqueducts which are still in use, but they neglected Cadiz. The town has been dependent on these springs of La Piedad for its water supply, except such as dropped from heaven, for three hundred years, and attempts to obtain water from wells or borings in the neighbourhood have invariably failed. The water which is found in this basin, held by capillary attraction in the permeable strata through which it soaks till the hard impermeable stratum is met--retained, in short, in a natural reservoir--is excellent in quality, limpid and sparkling. Puerto has been supplied from the place for time out of mind, and Puerto has been so well supplied that it could afford to sell panting Cadiz its surplus. With English capital and enterprise putting new life into those old hills, and cajoling the precious beverage out of their bosom, which unskilled engineers let go to waste, Cadiz should shortly have reason to bless the foreign company that relieves its thirst. Clear virgin water, such as will course down the tunnels to bubble up in the Gaditanian fountains, is the greatest luxury of life here; "Agua fresca, cool as snow," is the most welcome of cries in the summer, and temperate Spain is as devoted to the colourless liquid that the temperance lecturer Gough and his compeers call Adam's ale, as ever London drayman was to Barclay's Entire. Success, then, to the Cadiz Waterworks Company: we drank the toast on the hill-side of "Piety" they were making fruitful of good, drank it in tipple of their and nature's brewing, but had latent hopes that Forrest or his colleague would help us to a bumper of the generous grape-juice for which the district is famed, when we got down to the pleasant companionship of the English colony below. Nor were our hopes disappointed. There are innumerable bodegas, or wine-vaults, in the town, in which bottles and barrels of wine are neatly caged in labelled array, according to age, quality, and kind. Very clean and roomy these stores of vinous treasure are, with an indescribable semi-medicinal odour languidly pervading them. We visited a bodega belonging to an Englishman, who ranks as a grandee of the first-class, the Duke of Ciudad Rodrigo and eke of Vitoria, but who is better known as the Duke of Wellington. The natural wine of this district is too thin for insular palates. They crave something fiery, and, by my word, they get it. Like that Irish car-driver who rejected my choicest, oily, mellow "John Jameson," but thanked me after gulping a hell-glass of new spirit, violent assault liquefied, they want a drink that will catch them by the throat and assert its prerogative going down. What a beamy old imposition is that rich brown sherry of city banquets, over which the idiot of a connoisseur cunningly smacks his lips and rolls his moist eyes. If he were only told how much of it was real and how much artificial, would he not gasp and crimson! It would be unmerciful to inform him that his pet cordial is charged with sulphuric acid gas, that it is sweetened with cane-sugar, that it is flavoured with "garnacha dulce," that it is coloured with plastered _must_ and fortified with brandy, before it is shipped. Let us leave him in blissful ignorance. We tasted many samples before we left, but I own I have no liking for sherries, simple or doctored. Among Spanish wines I far prefer the full-bodied astringent sub-acidity of the common Val de Peñas, beloved of Cervantes. But the Queen of wines is sound Bordeaux. To that Queen, however, a delicate etherous Amontillado might be admitted as Spanish maid-of-honour, preceding the royal footsteps, while the syrupy Malaga from the Doradillo grape might follow as attendant in her train. From wine to women is an easy transition. Both are benedictions from on high, and I have no patience with the foul churl who cannot enjoy the one with proper continence, and rise the better and more chivalrous from the society of the other. Wine well used is a good familiar creature--kindles, soothes, and inspirits: the cup of wine warmed by the smile of woman gives courage to the soldier and genius to the minstrel. With Burns--and he was no ordinary seer--I hold that the sweetest hours that e'er we spend are spent among the lasses. I will go farther and say the most profitable hours. And some sweet and profitable hours 'twas mine to spend among the fawn-orbed lasses of Puerto, with their childlike gaiety, their desire to please, and their fetching freedom from affectation. Would that the wines exported from the district were half as unsophisticated! These lasses were not learned in the "ologies" or the "isms," but they were sincere; and their locks flowed long and free, and when they laughed the coral sluices flying open gave scope to a full silvery music cascading between pales of gleaming pearl. An admixture of this strain with the fair-skinned men of the North should produce a magnificent race; and, indeed, if we paid half the attention to the improvement of the human animal which we do to that of the equine or the porcine, the experiment would not have been left untried so long. In-and-in breeding is a mistake, and can only commend itself, and that for selfish reasons, to the Aztec in physique and the imbecile in mind. The families which take most pride in their purity are the most degenerate; the stock which is the most robust and handsome is that which has in it a liberal infusion of foreign bloods. In my opinion, the coming man, the highest form of well-balanced qualities--moral, intellectual, and masculine--the nearest approach to perfection, must ultimately be developed in the United States. Puerto has a wide-spread reputation as the nursery-ground for bull-fighters. To the arena it is what Newmarket is to the British turf. Everybody there walks about armed, but murder is not more rife in proportion than in London. As it happened, a fellow was shot while I was there, but that would not justify one in coming to the conclusion that homicide was a flourishing indigenous product. Still, the natives did not escape the contagion of unrest of their countrymen. For example, the last news I heard before leaving my English friends was that the men in the vineyards had struck work. These lazy scoundrels had the impudence to demand that they should have half an hour after arrival on the ground, and before beginning work, to smoke cigarettes, the same grace after the breakfast hour, two hours for a siesta in the middle of the day, another interval for a bout of smoking in the afternoon, and finally that each should be entitled to an arroba (more than three and a half gallons English) of wine per acre at the end of the season. They go on the same basis as some trades' unions we are acquainted with--reduction of hours of labour and increase of wages. "Will you give in to them?" I asked of an English settler, in the wine trade. "Give in------" but it is unnecessary to repeat the expletive; "I'll quietly shut up my bodega." CHAPTER II. The Charms of Cadiz--Seville-by-the-Sea--Cervantes-Daughters of Eve--The Ladies who Prayed and the Women who Didn't--Fasting Monks--Notice to Quit on the Nuns--The Rival Processions--Gutting a Church--A Disorganized Garrison--Taking it Easy--The Mysterious "Mr. Crabapple"--The Steamer _Murillo_--An Unsentimental Navvy--Bandaged Justice--Tricky Ship-Owning--Painting Black White. THE man who pitched on Cadiz as the site of a city knew what he was about. Without exception it is the most charmingly-located place I ever set foot in. Its white terraces, crowded with white pinnacles, belvederes, and turrets, glistening ninety-nine days out of the hundred in clear sunlight, rise gently out of a green sea necked with foam; the harbour is busy with commerce, crowded with steamers and sailing ships coming and going from the Mediterranean shores, from France, from England, or from the distant countries beyond the Atlantic; the waters around (for Cadiz is built on a peninsula, and peeps of water make the horizon of almost every street) are dotted with fishing craft or scudding curlews; the public squares are everlastingly verdant with the tall fern-palm, the feathery mimosa, the myrtle, and the silvery ash, which only recalls the summer the better for its suggestive appearance of having been recently blown over with dust; the gaze inland is repaid with the sight of hills brown by distance, of sheets of pasture, and pyramidal salt-mounds of creamy grey; and the gaze upwards--to lend a glow to the ravishing picture--is delighted by such a cope of dreamy blue, deep and pure, and unstained by a single cloudlet, as one seldom has the happiness of looking upon in England outside the doors of an exhibition of paintings. The climate is dry and genial, and not so hot as Seville. The Sevillanos know that, and come to Cadiz when the heats make residence in their own city insupportable. Winter is unknown; skating has never been witnessed by Gaditanos, except when exhibited by foreign professors, clad in furs, who glide on rollers over polished floors; and small British boys who are fond of snowballing when they come out here are obliged to pelt each other with oranges to keep their hands in. One enthusiastic traveller compares it to a pearl set in sapphires and emeralds, but adds--lest we should all be running to hug the jewel--there is little art here and less society. "Letters of exchange are the only belles-lettres." Indeed. Now this is one of those wiseacres who are _in_ a community, but not _of_ it, who materially are present, but can never mentally, so to speak, get themselves inside the skins of the inhabitants. That city cannot be said to be without letters which has its poetic brotherhood, limited though it be, and which reveres the memory of Cervantes, as the memory of Shakespeare is revered in no English seaport. Wiseacre should hie him to Cadiz on the 23rd of April, when the birth of Cervantes is celebrated, for in spite of intestine broils, Spaniards are true to the worship of the author of "Don Quixote," and his no less immortal attendant, whom Gandalin, friend to Amadis of Gaul, affectionately apostrophizes thus: "Salve! Sancho with the paunch, Thou most famous squire, Fortune smiled as Escudero she did dub thee Tho' Fate insisted 'gainst the world to rub thee. Fortune gave wit and common-sense, Philosophy, ambition to aspire; While Chivalry thy wallet stored, And led thee harmless through the fire." With the respect he deserves for this wandering critic and no more, I will take the liberty of saying that there is art, and a great deal of art, in the site of the clean town; and that there is society, and good society, in that forest of spars in the roadstead, and in the fishing and shooting in the neighbourhood. When the Tauchnitz editions have been exhausted, and when the stranger has mastered Cervantes and Lope de Vega, Espronceda, Larra, and Rivas, there is always that book which Dr. Johnson loved, the street, or that lighter literature which Moore sings, "woman's looks," to fall back upon. I am afraid some prudes may be misjudging my character on account of the frequency of my allusions to the sex lately; but I beg them to recollect that this is Andalusia, and that woman is a very important element in the population of Cadiz. She rules the roost, and the courtly Spaniard of the south forgets that there was ever such an undutiful person as Eve. Woman played a remarkable part in the events of the couple of months after the Royal crown was punched out of the middle of the national flag. She is political here, and is not shy of declaring her opinions. Ladies of the better classes of Cadiz are attentive to the duties of their religion; kneeling figures gracefully draped in black may be seen at all hours of the day in the churches during this Lenten season, telling their beads or turning over their missals. Those ladies are Carlist to a man, as Paddy would say; they naturally exert an influence over their husbands, though the influence falls short of making their husbands accompany them to church except on great festivals such as Easter Sunday, or on what may be called occasions of social rendezvous, such as a Requiem service for a deceased friend. The men seem to be of one mind with the French freethinker, who abjured religion himself, or put off thoughts of it till his dying day, but pronounced it necessary for peasants and wholesome for women and children. But _les femmes du peuple_, the fishwives, the labourers' daughters, the bouncing young fruit-sellers, and the like, are not religious in Cadiz. They have been bitten with the revolutionary mania; they are staunch Red Republicans, and have the bump of veneration as flat as the furies that went in procession to Versailles at the period of the Great Revolution, or their great granddaughters who fought on the barricades of the Commune. The nymphs of the pavement sympathize strongly with the Republic likewise; but their ideal of a Republic is not that of Señores Castelar and Figueras. They want bull-fights and distribution of property, and object to all religious confraternities unless based on the principles of "the Monks of the Screw," whose charter-song, written by that wit in wig and gown, Philpot Curran, was of the least ascetic: "My children, be chaste--till you're tempted; While sober, be wise and discreet, And humble your bodies with--fasting, Whene'er you have nothing to eat." So long ago as 1834 a sequestration of convents was ordered in Spain, but the Gaditanos never had the courage to enforce the decree till after the revolution that sent Queen Isabella into exile. A few years ago the convent of Barefooted Carmelites on the Plaza de los Descalzados was pulled down; the decree that legalized the act provided an indemnity, but the unfortunate monks who were turned bag and baggage out of their house never got a penny. They have had to humble their bodies with fasting since. For those amongst them who were old or infirm that was a grievance; but for the lusty young fellows who could handle a spade there need not be much pity, for Spain had more of their sort than was good for her. Even at that date the revolutionists of Cadiz had some respect left for the nunneries. But they progressed; the example of Paris was not lost upon them. The ayuntamiento which came into power with the Republic was Federal. Barcelona and Malaga were stirring; the ayuntamiento made up its mind that Cadiz should be as good as its neighbours and show vigour too. The cheapest way to show vigour was to make war on the weak and defenceless, and that was what this enlightened and courageous municipality did. The nuns in the convent of the Candelaria were told that their house and the church adjoining were in a bad state, that they must clear out, and that both should be razed in the interests of public safety. It was not that the presence of ladies devoted to God after their own wishes and the traditions of their creed was offensive to the Republic; no, not by any means. The nuns protested that if their convent and church were in a dangerous condition the proper measure to take was to prop them up, not pull them down. But the blustering heroes of the municipality would not listen to this reasoning; they were too careful of the lives of the citizens, the nuns included; down the edifices must come. The Commune of Paris over again. The ladies of Cadiz, those who pass to and fro, prayer-book in hand, in the streets, and startle the flashing sunshine with their solemn mantillas, were wroth with the municipality. They saw through its designs, and they resolved to defeat them. To the number of some five hundred they formed a procession, and marched four deep to the Town-house to beg of their worships, the civic tyrants, to revoke their order. If the convent and church were in ruins, the ladies were prepared to pay out of their own pockets the expense of all repairs. That procession was a sight to see; there was the beauty, the rank, the fashion, and the worth of the city, in "linked sweetness long drawn out," coiling through the thoroughfares on pious errand. The fair petitioners were dressed as for a _fete_; diamonds sparkled in their hair, and the potent fan, never deserted by the Andalusians, was agitated by five hundred of the smallest of hands in the softest of gloves. But the civic tyrants were more severe than Coriolanus. They were not to be mollified by woman's entreaties, but rightly fearing her charms they fled. When the procession arrived at the Town-house, there was but a solitary intrepid bailie to receive it. They told him their tale. He paid them the usual compliments, kissed their feet in the grand Oriental way individually and collectively, said he would lay their wishes before his colleagues, but that he could give no promise to recall the mandate of the municipality--it was more than he dare undertake to do, and so forth. The long and short of it was, he politely sent them about their business. They came away, working the fans more pettishly than ever, and liquid voices were heard to hiss scornfully that the Republic, which proclaimed respect for all religions and rights, was a lie, for its first thought was to trample on the national religion, and to dispossess an inoffensive corporation of cloistered ladies of their right to then property. Here the first act of the drama ended. The second was, if anything, more sensational, though infinitely less attractive. The Federals bit their thumbs, and cried: "Ah, this is the work of the priests!" So it was; not a doubt of that. The Federals meditated, and this was the fruit of their meditations: "Let us organize a counter-procession!" That counter-procession was a sight to see, too; the feature of elegance was conspicuous by its absence, but there was more colour in it. Harridans of seventy crawled after hussies of seventeen; bare arms and bandannas were more noticeable than black veils and fans; the _improbæ Gaditanæ_, known of old to certain lively satirists, Martial and Juvenal by name, turned out in force. Mayhap it is prejudice, but Republican females, methinks, are rather muscular than good-looking. Still they have influence sometimes, and when they said their say at the Town-house the ladies plainly betrayed how much they dreaded that influence. They wrote to Madrid praying that the municipality should be arrested in its course. Señor Castelar did send a remonstrance; some say he ordered the local authorities not to touch the church or convent, but they laughed at his letter, and contented themselves by reflecting that he was not in possession of the facts--that is, if they reflected at all, which is doubtful. Act the third was in representation during my stay. I passed the Candelaria one morning. Scaffolding poles were erected in the street alongside in preparation for the demolition of the building, and a party of workmen in the pay of the municipality were engaged gutting the church of its contents, and carting them off to a place of deposit, where they were to be sold by public auction. These workmen looked cheerful over their sacrilege. A waggon was outside the door laden with ornaments ripped from the walls, gilt picture-frames, fragments of altar-rails, and the head of a cherub. Half a dozen rough fellows in guernseys had their shoulders under a block of painted wood-carving. As far as I could make out, it was the effigy of one of the Evangelists. I was refused admittance to the building, but I was told the sacramental plate had been removed with the same indifference. The nuns escaped without insult, thanks to the good offices of some friends outside, who brought up carriages at midnight to the doors of the convent and conveyed them to secret places of safety put at their disposal by the bishop. The people who committed this mean piece of desecration were all Federal Republicans. They disobeyed orders from Madrid, and would disobey them again. They were as deaf to the commands of Señor Castelar as to the prayers and entreaties of the wives and daughters of respectable fellow-citizens. And all this time that the central authority were defied, artillerymen and linesmen were loitering about the streets of Cadiz. Eventually it was plain they would be disarmed, as they were disarmed at Malaga; and they would not offer serious opposition to the process. Their officers were barely tolerated by them. The Guardia Civil were true to duty, but when the crisis came, what could they do any more than their comrades at Malaga? They were but as a drop of water in a well. Disarmament is not liked by the old soldiers who have money to their credit, but there is a large proportion of mere conscripts in the ranks, and they are glad to jump at the chance of returning home. Troubles worse than any may yet be in store; meanwhile the sun shines, and Cadiz, like Seville, takes it easy. But there is a bad spirit abroad, and it is growing. A pack of ruffians forcibly entered a mansion at San Lucar, and annexed what was in it in the name of Republican freedom; the "volunteers of liberty" have taken the liberty of breaking into the houses of the consuls at Malaga in search for arms; an excited mob attacked the printing-office of _El Oriente_ at Seville after I left, smashed the type, and threatened to strangle the editor if he brought out the paper again; and the precious municipality of Cadiz has nothing better to do than order that no mourners shall be allowed in future to use religious exercises or emblems, to sing litanies or carry crosses, at the open graves of relatives in the cemeteries. In the merchants' club (of which I was made free) they were saddened at the disrupted state of society, but took it as kismet, and seemed to think that all would come right in the end, by the interposition of some _Deus ex machinâ_. But who that God was they could not tell: he was hidden in the womb of Fate. As Cadiz accepted its destiny with equanimity, I accommodated myself to the situation, and did as the natives did. I helped to fly kites from the flat housetops--a favourite pastime of mature manhood here; I opened mild flirtations with the damsels in cigar-shops, and discovered that they were not slow to meet advances; I expended hours every day cheapening a treatise on the mystery of bull-fighting, with accompanying engravings, in vain--its price was above rubies. But my great distraction was a strange character I met at dinner at the house of the British Consul. I did not catch his name at our introduction, so I mentally named him Mr. Crabapple. He was short and stout, had a round wizened face freckled to the fuscous tint of a russedon apple, and was endowed with a voice which had all the husky sonority of a greengrocer's. He was beardless and sandy-haired, and one of those persons whose age is a puzzle to define; he might have been anything between fifteen and five-and-thirty. As he talked of Harrow as if he had left it but yesterday, I was disposed to set him down as a queer public-school boy on vacation, until I was astounded by some self-possessed remark on Jamaica dyewoods. We stopped in the same hotel. One morning he descended the stairs, a sort of dressing-case in hand, and yelled to an urchin at the door: "Here, you son of a sea-calf, take this down to the waterside for me!" "Will he understand you?" I said. "Bound to," Mr. Crabapple replied; "never talk to them any other way, anyhow. 'Tis their business to understand. Ta, ta--deuce of a hurry." "Where are you going, may I ask?" "Read the Church Service--rather a bore--Sunday, you know." The nondescript, then, was a chaplain. The same evening he returned to the hotel, and on the following morning I saw him again descending the stairs, the same dressing-case in hand. He nodded salute, slung his luggage to the same urchin with the cry, "Hook it, you lubber!" and, turning to me, said, "Ta, ta, sheering off again." "Where to now?" "Mediterranean." "There's no boat to-day." "There is, though--there's mine;" and he was off. The supposed chaplain was a stray-away from a novel by Marryat, commanded her Majesty's gunboat _Catapult_, and was at Cadiz on the duty of protecting British interests. At the moment his mission was to carry important despatches to Gibraltar. My mission to Cadiz was, partly, to ascertain the progress of the inquiry into the case of the _Murillo_ steamer, more than suspected of having run down the _Northfleet_, a vessel laden with railway-iron and navvies, off Dungeness, on the night of the 22nd of January previous. Three hundred lives had been lost on the occasion. I knew something of that wreck, for I had seen and spoken with the survivors in the Sailors' Home at Dover on the following evening. A dazed, stupid lot they were, of an exceedingly low standard of intelligence. The sense of their own rescue had overcome the poignancy of grief. I envied them their stolidity, which I explained to my own mind by the rush of the engulfing waters still swirling and singing knell of sudden doom in their ears. "Guv'nor," said one clown to me, "I seed my ole 'ooman go down afore my eyes, and I felt that grieved a'most as if I was agoin' down myself, and I chewed a bit o' baccer." I saw the _Murillo_ lying quietly a little distance off the land--a handsome, shapely craft, fine in the lines, with a sharp stem fashioned like that of a ram. She was painted black, with the exception of a band of pink above the water-line, where she was coated with Peacock's mixture. The British Consul informed me that he understood the inquiry into the guilt of the master was to be carried on _secretly_. He would not be allowed to attend it. Copies of the depositions of the accused, and permission to see them, had also been denied to the agents of the British Government, who applied for them for the purposes of the Board of Trade inquiry. Though Spaniards, in private conversation, own that the _Murillo_ is the criminal ship, they seem, for some unaccountable reason, to be anxious that she should escape the penalty of her wickedness, as if the national honour were concerned, and the national honour would be served by cloaking an offence cruel and mean in itself, and awful in its consequences. There is a sentence in the Comminations which would keep running in my mind every time I thought of that emigrant ship sent to the bottom off Dungeness--"Cursed is he who smiteth his enemy secretly." But if he who smites his enemy secretly is accursed, what is he who smites his neighbour and then flees away like a coward in the dark? Is he not twice and thrice wicked, and to be branded with malediction deeper still? Such a thing the _Murillo_ steamer did--there could be no manner of doubt about it; every seafaring man and every Spaniard admits her blood-guiltiness; yet there she lies off Puntales, near the Trocadero, calmly expecting soon to be under weigh again with her criminal master and crew on board, with no punishment registered against her or them. The Consul-General of Spain in London wrote to the papers after the loss of the _Northfleet_, saying if this man was the wrongdoer he would be punished, and sent to Ceuta or Tetuan. But he is the wrongdoer, and he will never be sent to Ceuta or Tetuan. The master of the _Murillo_ and the sailors of the watch on the fatal night are in prison, but they will never be brought to serious account. The figure of Justice in these latitudes is true to the sculptor's ideal in one sense: the eyes are bandaged, not that Justice shall be impartial, but that she may not see. This instance of the _Murillo_ is but one of many, and as it illustrates an artifice of tricky ship-owning, it will be well to state why the _Murillo_ will go scot-free, and may audaciously turn up again in British waters disguised by a few coats of paint, exhibiting a fresh figure-head, and bearing a new name in gilt lettering on her stern. In the first place, the _Murillo_ belonged not to Spanish so much as English owners. The line of steamers of which she was one was the property of a company of shareholders. The company was anxious that their vessels should fly the Spanish flag, so they made one Don Miguel Styles the nominal head of the firm. This individual was a mere clerk in their office, a man of straw, and at the date of the catastrophe Don Miguel Styles had no more substantial existence than our old friend John Styles: he was dead, and in his grave. Nextly, Mr. Daniel Macpherson, one of the most eminent merchants in the port of Cadiz and Lloyd's agent, had been served with an instrument claiming damages to the amount of 50,000 pesetas (£2,000), because that he had calumniated the good ship _Murillo_, and caused her prejudice and injury by detaining her a couple of months in the waters of Cadiz. The persons who instituted this action forget that the Spanish courts have no jurisdiction in the matter of libels published in England. And as for the prejudice caused to the vessel, it is incredible that the British Government should be so weak as to wait for letters from Lloyd's agent before opening an inquiry into the deaths of some three hundred of its subjects and the identity of the dastardly scoundrel who was the cause of their deaths, who disabled the ship that held them, and then slunk off, leaving them to the mercy of the midnight sea. That the _Murillo_ was that vessel, even those who maintain that she cannot be proved legally guilty do not attempt to deny. It is true, as they say, that moral certainty is one thing, legal certainty another. But there was seldom a clearer chain of circumstantial evidence pointing to the perpetrator of any crime than that which convicted the _Murillo_ of being the misdemeanant. She was off Dungeness at the hour of the disaster, and she was in contact with a ship; this the imprisoned master admitted in his log. But he alleged that the ship could not have been the _Northfleet_. He said he came into collision with a vessel; that he stood by her for half an hour; that one of her boats put off with some persons on board carrying a lantern; that they went round her examining whether there was anything wrong; and that no call having been made to him for assistance he steamed away. But there was a discrepancy between the entry in his log and that in the log of the engineer. The latter, an Englishman, stated that the engines of the _Murillo_ were backed before the collision, that she went astern afterwards, and then went on ahead. The delay altogether was only for a few minutes. No mention of the half-hour. The engineer had no object in telling a lie. The master of the _Murillo_ had. No other ship was in collision off Dungeness that night. Besides, what meant the order to the _Murillo_ to come on at once to Cadiz if she had been in collision, and not stop at Lisbon, whither she was bound as port of call, if not to get her into limits where justice is notoriously blind and halt? Argument is unnecessary and childish; it was the _Murillo_ which cut down the _Northfleet_. But Spain will never exact retribution for the destruction of the property and the sacrifice of the lives of aliens. Cosas de España. CHAPTER III. Expansion of Carlism--A Pseudo-Democracy--Historic Land and Water Marks--An Impudent Stowaway--Spanish Respect for Providence--A Fatal Signal--Playing with Fire--Across the Bay--Farewell to Andalusia--British Spain. TOWARDS the close of February, a grave official report was published in the _Gaceta_ of Madrid, announcing that an engagement had been fought with the Carlists and a victory scored, _one_ of the enemy having been killed. We were now in April, some six weeks later, and Carlism still showed lively signs of existence, notwithstanding the death of that solitary combatant. The statement of the troops employed against it will be the best measure of its importance. These consisted of a battalion and two companies of Engineers, four companies of Foot Artillery, a battery of Horse and five batteries of Mountain Artillery; eight squadrons of Cuirassiers, seven of Lancers, four of Hussars, a section of Mounted Chasseurs (Tiradores), and eighteen battalions of Infantry of the line, with five of Cazadores, or light infantry. Behind this force of regulars were the Francos or Free-shooters of Navarre (who were about as good as their prototypes, the _francs-tireurs_ of France--no better), some mobilized Volunteers, and the Carabineros, or revenue police. There were some who imagined that the hosts of Don Carlos might crown the hills of Vallecas, and present themselves before the gate of Atocha to the consternation of Madrid, as did those of his predecessor in the September of 1837. But the Federals of the south did not mind. What did not touch them, they cared not a jot for. They were of the pseudo-democracy which wants to live without working, consume without producing, obtain posts without being trained for them, and arrive at honours without desert--the selfish and purblind pseudo-democracy of incapacity and cheek. As I had no pecuniary interest in salt, wine, phosphate of soda, hides, or cork--the chief exports of Cadiz--I left the much-bombarded port on the _Vinuesa_, one of the boats of the Alcoy line plying to Malaga. My immediate destination was the Hock, but we went no nearer than Algeciras, the town on the opposite side of the bay, off which Saumarez gave such a stern account of the Spanish and French combined on the 12th of July, 1801. The sea was without a ripple. The bright coasts of two Continents were in view. On such a day as this the first adventurers must have crossed from Africa to Europe. Hero might almost have swum across. Even Mr. Brownsmith of Eastchepe might rig a craft out of an empty sugar hogshead, set up his walking-stick for mast, tie his pocket-handkerchief to it for sail, and trust to the waves in safety--that is, if Mr. Brownsmith of Eastchepe had in him the heart of Raleigh, not of Bumble. Some men are born to be drivers of tram-cars, some to be captains of corsairs. The pioneer of navigation must have been cut out by nature to be a High-Admiral of bold buccaneers. We were only five passengers on the steamer, and we amused ourselves comparing notes. One told of a voyage from Barcelona to Alicante which he had once undertaken. The first night out they lost a sailor; he was seized with a fit and died; and then came the poser. When they would arrive at Alicante and muster the crew for the inspection of the health officers one would be wanting; suspicions would be aroused that he had fallen a victim to contagious disease, and they ran the hazard of being stuck into quarantine unless they could succeed in buying themselves off with an exorbitant bribe. While they were in a quandary, a white head popped above a gangway forward and a voice sang out: "I'll get you out of the hole for a consideration." "Who the deuce are you? Where did you spring from?" cried the skipper. "A stowaway,--a flour-barrel. I'll parade as the dead man's substitute for ten dollars and a square meal." In the end they were glad to accept the impudent proposal; the corpse was flung overboard, and the stowaway entered the port of Alicante an honest British tar, looking the whole world in the face like Longfellow's village blacksmith, and jingling ten dollars in his pocket. We passed by Barrosa, where Graham gave the French such a thrashing in 1811, and the 87th Irish Fusiliers earned their glorious surname of the "Eagle-takers;" and over the waves of Trafalgar where Nelson did his duty, and was smitten with a bullet in the spine; and passing into the Straits and rounding the point by Tarifa, stood in for the Bay of Gibraltar. A spacious swelling spread of live water it is, and safe, except, as one of my fellow-passengers informed me, for a rock off the Punta del Carnero, or Mutton Point. The rock is covered when the tide is high (for there is a tide here), but rears its tortoise-like back over the surface for some hours at the ebb. The Channel squadron was coming out of Gib some years before when an ironclad grounded on this rock, but was got off without more damage than a scraping. As the danger to the navigation was outside the limits of the fortress, the British authorities applied to the Spanish for permission to clear away the obstruction. It was easily to be accomplished. A party of sappers could set a caisson round it, bore a gallery, insert a charge, and blast the rock into smithereens with safety and despatch. But the Spaniards would not consent to such an interference with the designs of Providence; the poor fishermen on the coast were often dependent for their livelihood on what they could pick up from wrecks, and if this rock were removed Nature would be sacrilegiously altered, and the interesting wreckers deprived of many an honest coin. I tell the tale as it was told to me. I wonder should it be dedicated to the amphibious corps. Another story bearing on the successful revolution inaugurated by Prim is worth relating, as it deals with an episode of Spanish politics which is repeated almost every other year with slender variations. The play is the same; the scene and the _dramatis personæ_ are merely shifted. One of the stereotyped military risings was to be initiated at Algeciras on the arrival of Prim from England. The intimation that he was at hand was to be made by the firing of two rockets from the ship which carried him. On a certain night at the close of August, 1868, two rockets blazed in the sky, and were noticed by the impatient conspirators at Algeciras, who flew to arms to cries of "Down with the Queen," and "Live Prim and Liberty." But no Prim landed. The alarm was premature, the rising a flash in the pan. What they had taken for the bright herald of the advent of "El Paladino" was the signal of a Peninsular and Oriental steamer which had arrived on her passage to Port Said. For the sake of appearances, a number of unfortunate fools were set up against a wall and had their brains blown out in tribute to law and order. But the fruit was ripening. Within little more than a fortnight came the insurrection of the fleet at Cadiz, upon the appearance in that port of the popular hero, and before the end of the month Queen Isabella had fled over the French frontier, never to return to Spain as a sovereign. Prim's plot was attended with a fortune in excess of his most sanguine hopes; he entered Madrid in triumph in October, and was created a Marshal in November. All was joy and enthusiasm, but the hapless tools of ambition who had helped to prepare the way for him below in Algeciras were not of the jubilee. At first sight the rock looms up large like a frowning inhospitable islet, the stretch of the Neutral Ground being so low that one cannot detect it above the sea-level until almost right upon it. We left the _Vinuesa_ and entered a boat with a couple of sturdy rowers, who offered to pull us across the Bay for five dollars. As I dipped a hand in the brine one of them raised a cry of "Take care!" there were "mala pesca" there. Mr. Shark, who is an ugly customer, had been cruising in the neighbourhood, and had taken a morsel out of an American swimmer a little time before. There were three masts protruding over the water at one spot, the relics of some gallant ship, and index to one of those godsends which the Spanish Government is solicitous to guarantee to the distressed and deserving local fishermen. What a pity it was not the _Murillo_! That would have been poetic retribution. No matter: with all thy faults I like thee, Spain, and especially that brown dusty province of Andalusia, with its oranges and pomegranates; its dancing fountains splashed with sunshine; its winsome damozels with such lisping languors of voice; its philosophic waiters upon the morrow, happy in a cigarette, a melon and a guitar; its muleteers crooning snatches of lazy song; its peasants with hair tied in beribboned pigtail; its tawny boys in Manola colours; aye, and its artistic beggars. "Ah! now you see the Neutral Ground; that village to the left is Lineas, where you can get a glass of Manzanilla cheap," exclaimed a companion. I do not set exceeding store by your pale thin Manzanilla, nor do I care to load my mouth with the flavour of a drug store. "There are the sheds we put up the time Prim was expected; they are on the Neutral Ground, ha, ha! where the soil is supposed to be inviolate; but we have forgotten to take them down since. We were too many for them." And now we are by the landing-stairs, and the Customs' officer demands our passport in English. We answer him cheerily that we need none, and to his smiling welcome we step on the soil of British Spain; but it would be unpardonable to begin describing it at the tail of a chapter. CHAPTER IV. Gabriel Tar--A Hard Nut to Crack--In the Cemetery--An Old Tipperary Soldier--Marks of the Broad Arrow--The "Scorpions"--The Jaunting-Cars--Amusements on the Bock--Mrs. Damages' Complaint--The Bay, the Alameda, and Tarifa--How to Learn Spanish--Types of the British Officer--The Wily Ben Solomon--A Word for the Subaltern--Sunset Gun--The Sameness of Sutlersville. WHERE I went to school, we had a droll lad, whose humour developed itself in mispronunciation. In my nonage I considered that unique. Now I know it is a rather common order of quaintness. Hugh used to call Sierra Leone, "Sarah Alone;" Cambodia, "Gamboge;" Stromboli, "Storm-boiler;" and Gibraltar, "Gabriel Tar." How we used to wrinkle with laughter at his sallies, launched with an artistically unconscious air, until the swooping cane came swishing down on our backs! And here I was in Gabriel Tar. I vow the first inclination I felt was to write to Hugh with the date engraved on the note-paper, and indeed so I should have done, but that I had not seen him for nigh twenty years, and when last I heard of him he was married, and had learned to be serious and to speak with precision. The fun had been driven out of him by responsibility. Propriety had come with prosperity. Call it by what name you will, Gabriel Tar, or Gibraltar, that infinitesimal scrap of territory over which the Union Jack floats, is supremely unpalatable and insolently insulting to the Spaniard. It is a bitter pill to swallow, an adamantine nut to crack. I suppose he is welcome to take it--when he can; but he knows better than to try. It is the gate of the Mediterranean. Logically, it is an injustice that a stranger should sit in the porter's lodge and swing the key at his girdle; but it is as well that the porter is one who is too surly to barter his trust for gold. So Gabriel Tar will remain intact, until the porter grows feeble or falls asleep. British Spain, or "the Rock," or Gib, as it is indifferently termed, or Sutlersville, as I prefer to name it, can be converted into an island at the will of its defenders. The sandy spit of Neutral Ground at one side of which Tommy Atkins, fresh-faced, does his sentry-go in brick-red tunic and white pith-helmet, and at the other side of which swarthy Sancho Panza y Toro, in projecting cap and long blue coat, fondles a rifle in the bend of his arm, can readily be flooded; and the bare, sheer, lofty north front, with scores of cannon of the deadliest modern pattern lying in wait behind the irregular embrasures that grimly pit its surface, hardly invites attack. It frowns a calm but determined defiance; and even the Cid himself might be excused if he turned on his heel and puffed a meditative cigarette after he had surveyed it. British Spain is small, being but one and seven-eighth square miles English in area; but it is mighty strong. The population, comprising the garrison, is less than fifteen thousand; but behind that slender cipher of souls are the millions of the broadest and biggest of empires. I do not know what the population of the cemetery is, but it receives rapid and numerous accessions at each periodical outbreak of cholera. I paid a visit to it--I have a fondness for sauntering in God's acre--and arrived in time to witness a funeral. When the coffin was laid in the grave, a young man, probably the husband of the deceased, threw himself prone on the turf beside the open burial-trench, and burst into such a passionate tempest of heart-rending sobs and moans and wailings, that I had to move away. These Southerners are more demonstrative in their grief than the men of the North. I question if their sorrows spring from deeper depths, or are so lasting. The caretaker of the cemetery, an elderly Tipperary soldier, with a short _dudheen_ in his mouth, was seated smoking on a head-stone by a goat-willow. We got into conversation. "There were worse places than Gib--singing-birds were raysonable here, and some of them had rayl beautiful plumage." My countryman, like the Duke of Argyll, had a weakness for ornithology. "That spread of land beyant was where the races were held, and small-arm parties from the fleet sometimes kem ashore and practised there. They used to play cricket there, too. The symmetry wasn't a gay place, but there were worse. There were some beautiful tombs--now _there_ was a parable ov wan; 'twas put up by their frinds to some officers who were dhrownded while they were crossing a flooded sthrame on their way back from a shooting excursion. The car-drivers, who were dhrownded wid them, had no monument. 'Twas a quare world; a poor man had the chance of dying wid a rich man, but was not to be berrid in his company. Well, he supposed it was for the best," and here he hammered the heel-tap out of his pipe on the side of his shoe; "when the last bugle sounded a field-officer would feel uncomfortable like if he had to be looking for his bones in the same plot wid a lance-corporal." Truly, a queer world. Death with impartial summons knocks at the cabin of the poor and the palace of the wealthy; but in the undertaker's interest the equality of the grave must not be conceded. The plebeian who commits _felo de se_ is served properly if he is hidden at the cross-roads by night and a stake driven through his body. The lunatic King who drowns himself, and drags his doctor to the same fate--who is a suicide duplicated with the suspicion of murder--is embalmed and laid to rest in consecrated ground amid incense and music, lights and flowers, the tolling of bells, and the chanting of dirges. The funeral was over; they were just finishing the _De Profundis_. My countryman had to quit me. "_Oyeh!_ that fellow who was making such a lamentation might be married agin in a twelvemonth. The army plan was the best; after the 'Dead March' in _Saul_ came 'Tow-row-row.'--another so'jer was to be had for a shilling. He did not drink; he thanked me all the same--had taken the pledge from Father Mathew whin he was a boy, and meant to stick by it; but he would accept the price of a singing-bird he had set his mind upon, since it was pressed upon him." Gibraltar is but a huge garrison. In the moat by the gate, as I re-entered, a big drummer and a tiny mannikin-soldier with cymbals were practising how to lead off a marching-past tune. The "Fortune of War" tavern elbows "Horse-Barrack Lane;" a print of "The Siege of Kars" is side by side in a shop-window with Dr. Bennett's "Songs for Soldiers." The Plazas and Calles of the mainland of Spain have been parted with. The names of streets, hostelries, and stores are English. Instead of tiendas and almacenes and fondas, you have fancy repositories, regimental shoe-shops, and porter-houses. There, for example, is the celebrated "Cock and Bottle," and farther on "The Calfs Head Hotel." If you traverse Cathedral Square, no larger than an ordinary-sized skittle-alley, you arrive by Sunnyside Steps to the Europa Pass. Notices are posted by the roadside cautioning against plucking flowers or treading on the beds under pain of prosecution. But the bazaar bewilders you with its alien figures, its confusion of tongues, and its eccentric contrasts of dress. In five minutes you meet Spanish officers; nuns in broad-leaved white bonnets; a bearded sergeant nursing a baby; bare-legged, sun-burnished Moors; pink-and-white cheeked ladies'-maids from Kent; local mashers in such outrageously garish tweeds; stiff brass-buttoned turnkeys; Jews in skull-cap and Moslems in fez; and while you are lost in admiration of a burly negro, turbaned and in grass-green robe, with face black and shiny as a newly-polished stove, you are hustled by a sailor on cordial terms with himself who is vigorously attempting to whistle "Garry Owen." But above and before all, the sights and sounds are military. Sappers and linesmen and artillerists pullulate at every corner; fatigue-parties are confronted at every turn; the bayonet of the sentinel flashes in every angle of the fortress from the minute the sun, bursting into instantaneous radiance from behind the great barrier of craggy hill, lights up the town and bastions and moles, until the boom of the sunset-gun gives signal for the gates to be closed. Every tavern looks like a canteen; the gossip is of things martial; the music is that of the reveille or tattoo--the blare of brass, the rub-a-dub of parchment, or the shrill sound-revel of Highland pipes (for there is usually a Scotch regiment here). The ladies one meets all have husbands, or fathers, or uncles in the Service; even the children--those of English parents well understood--keep step as they walk, and the boys amongst them compliment any well-dressed stranger with a home face by rendering him the regulation salute. This is highly gratifying to the civilian sojourning in the place; for he insensibly succumbs to the _genius loci_, squares his shoulders, expands his chest, and feels that if he is not an officer he ought to be one. Except the enterprising gentry who devote themselves to cheating the Spanish excise by smuggling cigars and English goods across the border, the Scorpions live by and on the garrison, and therefore do I name their habitat Sutlersville. "Scorpion," I should add, for the benefit of the uninitiated, is the _sobriquet_ conferred by Tommy Atkins on the natives of the Rock, as that of "Smiches" is merrily applied by him to the Maltese, and of "Yamplants" to the denizens of St. Helena. There is a tolerable infusion of English blood among the Scorpions, but it is hardly of the healthiest or most respectable. Gib is familiar to thousands of Englishmen, but it must be unfamiliar to many thousands more. This is my excuse for exhuming some notes of my stay there. Don't be afraid, I am not going to pester you with guide-book erudition. Let others take you to the galleries and caves, lead you up the ascent to the Moorish tower, inform you that the one spot in Europe where there is an indigenous colony of monkeys (the patriarch of which is styled the "town major") is here, and enlighten you as to the interesting fact that this is the only locality out of Ireland where the Irish jaunting-car is to be objurgated. Mine be a humbler task. Society in Gib is select, but limited. It is uniform, like the clothes of the influential portion of the inhabitants. Gib is the wrong place to bring out a young lady, though Major Dalrymple's daughters, immortalized in Lever's novel, could not well have found a better hunting-ground. But then Major Dalrymple's daughters were regular garrison hacks--so the irreverent subs of the Rovers used to call them--and never stood a chance beside the daughters of the county families. There are racing and chasing at the station, and theatricals and balls. I arrived at the wrong season. The three days' local racing, for horses of every breed but English, was over, and most of the men were going to Cadiz by special boat next day, _en route_ for the Jerez races, which are the best--indeed, I might almost say the solitary--meeting in Spain. "There are only two things in this land worth talking about," said an English merchant to me at Cadiz; "the steamers of Lopez and the races of Jerez." The hunting (thanks to brave old Admiral Fleming for having started that diversion) was over too. The meets have to come off, naturally, outside the frontier of British Spain. The sport is pretty good--one cannot quite expect the Melton country, of course--the riding hard, and the horses invariably Spanish; no English horses would do, for no English horse would be equal to climbing up a perpendicular bank with sixteen stone on his back, and that is a feat the native steeds, bestridden by British warriors in pink who follow the Calpe pack, have sometimes to accomplish. There is a Spanish lyrical and theatrical troop in the town; but it is Holy Week, and lyricals and theatricals are under taboo. Occasionally charity concerts are given by amateurs, and plays are even performed in Lent Champagne, of the Fizzers, has won a reputation by his success on the boards when he dons the habiliments of lovely woman beyond a certain age. But, as I told you before, I arrived at the wrong season. There are no balls at the Convent, which is the Governor's residence; and, touching these balls, I have a grievance to ventilate, at the request of Mrs. Quartermaster Damages. She specially imported frilled petticoats from England to display in the mazy dance, and she assured me they were turning sere and yellow in her boxes. She never gets a chance of bringing them out except once in the twelvemonth, when she is asked to the "Quartermasters' Ball." But there is a reason for everything, and Mrs. Quartermaster Damages is fat and forty, and not fair, and--tell it not out of mess--they say she has a tongue. At this particular time, you perceive, this fortified fragment of the empire was dull; but usually it is gay, and the officer quartered there has always an excellent opportunity of learning his trade and acquiring skill in the gentlemanly game of billiards. He can make maps and surveys of the neutral ground, and watch the guard mounting on the Alameda, or read the account of the siege in Drinkwater's days; and when he tires of the green cloth and its distractions, and of his own noble profession, he can throw a sail to the breeze in the unequalled Bay, or take a flying trip to Tarifa to sketch the beautiful from the living model, or go to Ceuta to see the Spanish galley-slaves and disciplinary regiments, forgetful of our own chain-gangs; or steam across to Tangier to riot in Nature and a day's pig-sticking. The Bay, the Alameda, and Tarifa--these are the three delights of Gibraltar. You have heard of the Bay of Naples, and the Bay of Dublin, which equals it in Paddy Murphy's estimation. I know both; and Gibraltar, the little-spoken-of, leaves them nowhere. The sky, and the undulating mirror below that reflects it, are such a blue; the rocks are such an ashen-grey; the Spanish sierras such a leonine brown, with summits wrapped in clouds like rolling smoke; and the sun goes down to his bath in the west 'mid such a vaporous glow of yellowing purple and rosy gold! The Alameda is a bower of Venus cinctured by Mars. Here is a gravelled expanse bounded by hill and sea, with cosy benches under the shade of palmitos--the civilization of the West in alliance with the rich vegetation of the East. Sometimes, in the morning, five hundred men or more--garrison artillery, engineers, and infantry--muster there, previous to marching to their posts; there is a banging of drums, a blowing of bugles, a bobbing vision of cocked-hats, and a roar of hoarse words of command--all the pomp and pride and circumstance of glorious war before the fighting begins. Sometimes, in the evening, a band plays, and the Alameda is the resort of fashion and of nursery-maids. Tarifa, shining in the sunset across the water, is a tempting morsel for the landscape-painter, and the dwellers in Tarifa are the best teachers of Spanish. A British subaltern bent on improving his mind could encounter an infinitely better preceptor there than "Jingling Johnny," the self-appointed professor to the garrison, who hires himself on Monday, makes you a present of a guitar-tutor on Tuesday, and asks you to favour him with six months' payment in advance on Wednesday. To be sure, the Spanish those Tarifans speak is slightly Arabified; but their tones of voice are persuasive, and their methods of teaching agreeable. The professor taken by the British subaltern is invariably a female, and the females of Tarifa are not the ugliest in the world. They still retain many customs peculiar to their Moorish ancestors. They wear a manta, not a mantilla--a sort of large-hooded mantle, with which they hide the light of their countenance, except an eye--but that is a piercer, ye gods I and they keep it open for business. When a stranger passes, especially if he looks like a sucking lieutenant from the fortress beyond, the manta falls, disclosing the soft loveliness beneath, and the wearer affects a pretty confusion, and hastens with judicious slowness to re-adjust its folds. The British subaltern reels to his quarters seriously wounded, and may be seen the following morning, with his hair blown back, spouting poetry to the zephyrs on Europa Point. Oh no!--that only occurs in romances; but he may be seen drinking brandy-and-soda moderately in the Club-House. Poor British subaltern! How Sutlersville does exploit him! He is a sheep, and bears his fleecing without a kick. Watch those lazy, lounging, able-bodied, smoking, and salivating loons who prop up every street-corner, and monopolize the narrow pathways--these all live by him; they eat up his substance, and fatten thereupon. These are the touting and speculating sons of the Rock, the veritable Scorpions, who are ever ready to find the "cap'n" a dog or a horse or a boat, or something not so harmless, to help him on the road to ruin, and whisper in his ear what a fine fellow he is--"As ver fine a fellow--real gemman--as Lord Tomnoddy, who give me such a many dollars when he go away." The first word these loons pronounce after coming into the world must be _baksheesh_. They are born with beggary in their mouths, and the British subaltern acts as if he were born to be their victim. There he is below, of every type, lolling outside the hotel-door that looks on that Commercial Square which is so thorough a barrack-square, with its romping children, its dogs, its dust, its guard-house with chatting soldiers on a form in front, and the important sentinel pacing to and fro, regular and rigid as a pendulum, keeping vigilant watch and ward over nothing in particular. We have a rare company to-day; besides the engineers and bombardiers, and the linesmen of the 24th, 31st, 71st, and 81st, the four infantry regiments on the station, we have men on leave from Malta. They came up to the races, and are waiting for the P. and O. steamer to take them back. That fat little customer is your sporting sub. I only wonder he is not in cords, tops, and spurs. What a hearty voice he talks in! He asks for the _Field_ as if he were giving a view-halloo. Then there is the moist-eyed, mottle-cheeked, puffy, convivial sub, who is knowing on the condition of ale, and is too friendly with Saccone's sherry. The convivial sub, I am happy to say, is dying out. Then there is the prig, who is "going in" for his profession. I call him a prig, because when people are going in for anything they should have the good sense not to blow about it. To hear Mr. Shells and his prattle about Hamley and Brialmont and Jomini, _kriegspiel_ and the new drill, you would imagine he was bound to put the extinguisher on Marlborough, Wellington, Wolseley, and the rest of them; and yet the chances are, if you meet him twenty years hence, he will be a captain on the recruiting service, with no forces to marshal but six growing children. Then there is the sentimental sub, the perfect ladies' man, who plays croquet and the flute, pleads guilty to having cultivated the Nine, and affects a simpering pooh-pooh when he is impeached with having inspired that wicked but so witty bit of scandal in the local paper. By singularity of pairing, his fast friend is the muscular sub, who walks against time, and can write his initials with a hundredweight hanging from his index-finger. Happy dogs in the heyday of life, all of them; how I envy them their buoyant spirits, their rollicking enjoyment of to-day, and their contempt for the morrow! But the morrow will come nevertheless, and with it Black Care will come often. Gib is a haunt of the Hebrews; they or their myrmidons beset the subaltern at genial hours, after luncheon or after mess, pester him with vamped-up knick-knacks for sale, appeal to him to patronize a poor man by buying articles he does not and never by any means can want--"pay me when you likes, Cap'n, one yearsh, two yearsh." The "cap'n," who may have left Sandhurst but six months, may be weakly good-natured, and ignore the fact that his income is not elastic; some day that he thinks of taking a run to England Ben Solomon, who seems to be able to read the books in the Adjutant-General's Office through the walls, pounces upon him with his little bill, and he is arrested if he cannot satisfy his Jewish benefactor. Loans are advanced at a high rate "per shent" by the harpies, and enable him to stave off the temporary embarrassment; the "cap'n" is happy for the moment, but the reckoning is only deferred that it may grow. The arrival of Black Care is adjourned, not averted. The plain truth of it is, Gibraltar is a den of thieves, and has been the burial-pit of many a promising young fellow's hopes. There are two tariffs for everything--one for natives, the other for the British subaltern and the British tourist; and the British subaltern and the British tourist are foolish enough to submit to the extortion in most cases. With some half-dozen honourable exceptions, the traders are what is popularly known as "Jews" in their mode of dealing. They cozen on principle, sell articles that will not last, and charge preposterous prices for them; they impose upon the young officer's softness or delicate gentlemanly feeling, and consider themselves smart for so doing. In this manner Gibraltar, with all its discomforts, is dearer than the most expensive and luxurious quarter in the British Isles. But we have other specimens of the genus officer in the lounging slaughterers by profession, who are so busy killing time. The lean bronzed aristocratic major, whose temper long years in India have not soured; the squat pursy paymaster (why are paymasters so fearfully inclined to fat?); the raw-boned young surgeon with the Aberdeen accent; "the ranker," erect and grizzled, and looking ever so little not quite at his ease, you know, for the languid lad with fawn-coloured moustache straddling on the chair beside him is an Honourable; the jovial portly Yorkshireman, who is in the Highland Light Infantry, naturally; and the lively loud-voiced Irishman, laughing consumedly at his own jokes--all are here, conversing, smoking, mildly chaffing each other, and exchanging "tips" as to the next Derby. They make a book in a quiet way, and occasionally invest in a dozen tickets in a Spanish lottery. What will you? One cannot perpetually play shop, and the British officer has a rooted objection to it, although he does his duty like a man when the tug of war arises. Better that he should join in a regimental sweepstakes, or lose what he can afford to lose to a comrade, than give way to the blues. He does not gamble or curse, like his Spanish _confrère_; his potations are not deep, nor is he quick to quarrel. Then let him race on the Neutral Ground; let him hunt with the Calpe pack; and let him back his fancy for the big event at Epsom. Those are his chief excitements at Gib, and help to give a fillip to life in that circumscribed microcosm, pending the anxiously expected morn when the route will come, or, mayhap, the call to active service, in one of those petty wars which are constantly breaking the monotony of this so-called pacific reign. "Guard, turn out!" cries the Highland Light Infantry sentinel under my window, and the smart soldier laddies fall in for the inspection of the officer of the day. What a thoroughly military town it is! By-and-by the evening gun booms from the heights above, where Sergeant Munro, taking time from his sun-dial and the town major, notifies the official sunset. Bang go the gates. We are imprisoned. Anon the streets are traversed by patrols in Indian file to warn loiterers to return to barracks, the pipers of the 71st skirl a few wild tunes on Commercial Square, the buglers sound the last post, the second gun-fire is heard, and a hush falls over the town, broken only by the challenges of sentries or their regular echoing footfalls on their weary beats. The thunder of artillery wakes you in the morning anew, and if you venture out for a walk before breakfast you thread your way through waggons of the army train or fatigue-parties in white jackets. You stumble across cannon and symmetric pyramids of shot where you least expect them; the line of sea-wall is intersected by figures in brick-red tunic, moving back and forward on ledges of masonry; the morning air is alive with drum-beats and bugle and trumpet-calls; everything is of the barrack most barrack-like; the broad arrow is indented in large deep character on the Rock. It is impossible to shake off the Ordnance atmosphere. The Irish jaunting-cars are all driven by the sons of soldiers' wives; the clergy-men are all military chaplains; those goats are going up to be milked for the major's delicate daughter; that lady practising horse exercise in a ring in her garden is wife to Pillicoddy of the Control Department, and is merely correcting the neglected education of her youth; the very monkeys--diminishing sadly, it grieves me to say--recall associations of the mess-room, for you never fail to hear of that terrible sportsman, "one of Cardwell's gents," who thought it excellent fun to shoot one some time ago. Luckily, the rules of the service did not permit him to be tried by court-martial, or the wretched boy might have been ordered out for instant execution, so great was the indignation. But if he was not shot he was roasted as fearfully as ever St. Laurence was; he was reminded a thousand times if once that fratricide is a fearful crime, and if ever Nemesis visits his pillow it will be in the shape of a monkey without a tail. One wearies of the same scenes of beauty, and would fain barter the Cork Woods for the chestnuts in Bushy Park; the bright Bay and the watchet sky pall on the senses, and a dull river and drab clouds would be welcomed for change. The day rises when the conversation of the same set, the stories repeated as often as that famous one of grouse in the gun-room, and the stale jokes anent the Sheeref of Wazan and the rival innkeepers of Tangier, black Martin and "Lord James," cloy like treacle; the fiction palmed upon the latest novice that he must go and have a few shots at the monkeys, if he wishes to curry favour at headquarters, misses fire; the calls of the P. and O. steamers, and the thought that their passengers within a week either have seen, or will see, the little village works its effect; even bull-fighting is adjudged a bore, and one sighs for Regent Street and the "Rag and Famish," flaxen ringlets, and roast bee£ A twelvemonth might pass pleasantly on the Rock; but after that the "damnable iteration" of existence must jar on the nerves like the note of a cuckoo. Still, as my philosopher of the cemetery remarked, there are worse places--far worse, Assouan and Aden, for example; so let not the gallant gentleman repine whom Fate has assigned to a round of duty in Sutlersville. For Tommy Atkins of the rank and file, it is wearisome when he is young; he should not be asked to stay there longer than a twelvemonth while he is at the age which yearns for novelty, and during that twelvemonth he should be drilled as at the depôt. For the old soldier it is a good station, and should be made a haven of rest. CHAPTER V. From Pillar to Pillar--Historic Souvenirs--Off to Africa--The Sweetly Pretty Albert--Gibraltar by Moonlight--The Chain-Gang--Across the Strait--A Difficult Landing--Albert is Hurt--"Fat Mahomet"--The Calendar of the Centuries Put Back--Tangier: the People, the Streets, the Bazaar--Our Hotel--A Coloured Gentleman--Seeing the Sights--Local Memoranda--Jewish Disabilities--Peep at a Photographic Album--The Writer's Notions on Harem Life. I WAS gradually getting into the mood of Pistol, and cried a foutra for the world of business and worldlings base. My soul was longing for "Africa and golden joys." Here I was at the elbow, so to speak, of the mysterious Continent, where the geographers set down elephants for want of towns. Why should I not visit it? I might never have such a chance again. I stood in the shadow of one Pillar of Hercules. Why not make pilgrimage to the other? Having notched Calpe on my staff, I resolved to add Abyla to the record. I was the more inclined to this, as I had recollection that Tangier had been part of the British dominions for one-and-twenty years. In 1662 Catharine of Braganza, the "olivader-complexioned queen of low stature, but prettily shaped," whose teeth wronged her mouth by sticking a little too far out, brought it as portion of her dowry to Charles II. The 2nd, or Queen's Own Regiment, was raised to garrison the post, and sported its sea-green facings, the favourite colour of her Majesty, for long in the teeth of the threatening Moors. The 1st Dragoons still bear the nickname of "the Tangier Horse," and were originally formed from some troops of cuirassiers who assisted in the defence of the African stronghold for seventeen years; and the 1st Foot Regiment owes its title of "Royal" to the distinction it gained by capturing a flag from the Moors in 1680. That was the year when old John Evelyn noted in his diary that Lord Ossorie was deeply touched at having been appointed Governor and General of the Forces, "to regaine the losses we had lately sustain'd from the Moors, when Inchqueene was Governor." His lordship relished the commission so little--indeed, it was a forlorn errand--that he took a malignant fever after a supper at Fishmongers' Hall, went home, and died. In 1683 the Merry Monarch caused the works of Tangier to be blown up, and abandoned the place, declaring it was not worth the cost of keeping. The Merry Monarch was not prescient. A century afterwards Gibraltar was indebted for a large proportion of its supplies, during the great siege, to the dismantled and deserted British-African fortress. For many reasons Tangier was not to be missed. By a happy coincidence a party of three in the Club-House Hotel--a retired army captain, his wife, and a lady companion--were anxious to take a trip to Africa. We agreed to go together, and had scarcely made up our minds, when another retired captain, who habitually resided in Tangier, gratified us by the information that he was returning there, and would be happy to give us every assistance in his power. Retired Captain No. 1 was a jolly fellow, fond of good living and not overburdened with æstheticism--a capital specimen of a hearty Yorkshireman. He looked after the provand. His wife, portly and short of temper, was as good-natured as he. She insisted on discharging the bills. The lady-companion was thin, accomplished, and melancholy. She kept us in sentiment. Retired Captain No. 2 was a fellow-countryman of mine, bright-brained and waggish. He was the walking guide-book, with philosophy and friendship combined. I was nigh forgetting one, and not by any means the least important, member of the party--Albert. Mrs. Captain introduced him to me as a sweetly pretty creature. At her request I looked after him. Tastes vary as to what constitutes beauty, but I candidly think a broad thick head, crop ears, a flattish nose, and heavy jowls could not be called sweetly pretty without straining a point; and all these Albert possessed. He was a bull-dog (I believe his real name was Bill, and that he had been brought up in Whitechapel). As a bull-dog he had excellent points, and might be esteemed a model of symmetry and breeding by the fancy, or even pronounced a beauty and exquisitely proportioned by connoisseurs; but sweetly pretty--never! I could not stomach that, especially when Albert growled and laid bare his ruthless set of sound white teeth. Before leaving Gibraltar I had two novel sensations, nocturnal and matutinal. The first was a view of the Bay by moonlight, the white crescent shining clearly down on a portion of the inner waters brinded by shipping, and on the outer spread of sleepy, cadenced wavelets rippling phosphorescently under the pallid rays. By the Mole were visible the outlines of barques, steamers, coal-brigs, and xebecs; away to the left were the _Catapult_ and a few of her mosquito companions; and far out rode at anchor a stately frigate of the United States' fleet. The twinkling lamps of the city afloat sending out reddish lines, and the fuller, clearer, luminous pencillings of the gas-lamps of the city ashore, made a not ungrateful contrast to the quivering chart of poetic moonbeams. Bending over their edge were the deep shadows of the massive Rock; and bounding them, at the other side, the barren foot-hills of Algeciras mellowed into a phantom softness by distance and the night. Next morning, as I strolled by the sea-wall towards the Ragged Staff Battery, I saw a sight that took away my appetite for breakfast. Pacing slowly to their work to the music of clanking chains was a column of wretched convicts.[A] What haggard faces, with low foreheads, sunken eyes, and dogged moody expression or utter blankness of expression! Purely animal the most of that legion of despair and desperation looked, and sallow and sickly of complexion. They were a blot on the fresh sunshine. How hideous their coarse garb of pied jackets branded with the broad arrow, their knickerbockers and clumsy shoes! Wistfully they moved along, hardly daring to glance at me, through fear of the turnkeys with loaded rifles marching at their sides. I almost felt that, if I had the power, I would demand their release, as did the Knight of La Mancha that of the criminals on their way to the galleys, although they might have been as ungrateful as Gines de Passamonte; but those hang-dog countenances banished impulses of chivalry. The little steamer, the _Spahi_, which conveyed us across the Strait, was seaworthy for all her cranky appearance, and made the passage of thirty-two miles quickly and comfortably for all her roughness of accommodation. She was a cargo-boat, but her skipper was English, and did his best to make the ladies feel at home. Besides, Captain No. 1 had brought a select basket of provisions and a case of dry, undoctored champagne. One of our first experiences as we cleared Algeciras, with turrets like our martello-towers sentinelling the hills, and the three-masted wreck--"Been twenty-one days there," said the skipper, "and not an effort has been made to raise it yet, and not even a warning light is hung over it at night"--was to sight a bottle-nosed whale puffing and spewing its predatory course. "What are those ruins upon the Spanish shore for?" asked the accomplished lady. When she was informed that they were the beacons raised in the days of old, when the Moorish corsairs haunted that coast, and that the moment the pirate sail was descried in the offing (I hope this is correctly nautical) the warning fire blazed by night, or the warning plume of smoke went up by day, to summon Spain's chivalry to the rescue, she was enchanted, and recited a passage from Macaulay's "Armada." We made the transit in a little over three hours, and, rounding the Punta de Malabata, cut into the Bay of Tangier, and eased off steam at some distance from the Atlantic-washed shore. There is no pier, but a swell and discoloration, projecting in straight line seawards, marks where a mole had once stood. That was a piece of British handiwork; but the Moor, who is no more tormented by the demon of progress than the Turk, had literally let it slide, until it sank under the waters. The Sultana of Moorish cities Tangier is sometimes called, and truly she does wear a regal, sultana-like air as seen from afar, cushioned in state on the hillside, her white flat roofs rising one above another like the steps of a marble staircase, the tall minarets of the mosques piercing the air, and the multitudinous many-coloured flags of all nations fluttering above the various consulates. But in this, as in so many other instances, it is distance which lends enchantment to the view. We went as near to the shore as we could in small boats, and when we grounded, a fellowship of clamouring, unkempt, half-naked Barbary Jews, skull-capped, with their shirts tied at their waists and short cotton drawers, rushed forward to meet us, and carry us pickaback to dry land. The ladies were borne in chairs, slung over the shoulders of two of these amphibious porters, or on an improvised seat made by their linked hands, but to preserve their equilibrium the dear creatures had to clasp their arms tightly round the necks of the natives. This would not look well in a picture, above all if the lady were a professional beauty. But there was nothing wrong in it, any more than in Amaryllis clinging to the embrace of Strephon in the whirling of a waltz. Custom reconciles to everything. On stepping into the small boat I had my first difficulty with Albert. I trod on his tail. The dog looked reproachfully, but did not moan. His mistress scowled, and warned me to take care what I was about for an awkward fool. Her husband, with a pained look on his face, mutely apologized for her, and I humbly excused myself and vowed amendment. I am not revengeful, but I did enjoy it when one of the porters, tottering under the weight of the fat lady, made a false step and nearly gave her a sousing. I clambered on my particular Berber's back, dear Albert in my arms, and we splashed merrily along; but Captain No. 1, who turned the scales at seventeen stone two pounds, had not so uneventful a landing. Twice his bearer halted, and the warrior, abandoning himself to his fate, swore he would make the Berber's nose probe the sand if he stumbled. As I was discharged on the beach, I was confronted by a majestic Moor. His grave brown face was fringed with a closely-trimmed jet-black beard, and his upper lip was shaded with a jet-black moustache. He wore a white turban and a wide-sleeved ample garment of snowy white, flowing in graceful folds below his knees; and on his feet were loose yellow slippers, peaked and turned up at the toes. This was Mahomet Lamarty, better known as "Fat Mahomet," who had acted as interpreter to the British troops in the Crimea, and who, at this period, was making an income by supplying subalterns from Gib with masquerade suits to take home and horses to ride. Mahomet in his sphere was a great man. He was none of your loquacious _valets de place_, no courier of the Transcendental school. He had made the pilgrimage to Mecca and was a Hadji; he was a chieftain of a tribe in the vicinity, and had fought in the war against the Spanish infidels; he could borrow his purest and finest Arab from the Kadi; he was free to the sacred garden of the Shereef, or Pope-Sultan, one of the descendants of the Prophet, Allah be praised! Mahomet, who was known to both the Captains, passed our small impedimenta through the custom-house--there is an orthodox custom-house, though there is no proper accommodation for shipping--and we trailed at his heels up the close, crowded, rough alleys which did duty as streets. It would be hard to imagine a more thorough-going change than our scurry across the waves had effected. We were in another world completely. We had been transported as on the carpet of the magician. It was as if the calendar had been put back for centuries, and the half-forgotten personages of the "Thousand-and-One Nights" were revivified and had their being around us. Tangier is a walled and fortified town; but Vauban had no hand in the fortifications, and it is my private opinion the walls would go down before a peremptory horn-blast quicker than those of Jericho. It swarms with a motley population much addicted to differences in shades of complexion. The Tangerines exhaust the primitive colours and most of the others in their features. There are lime-white Tangerines, copper and canary-countenanced Tangerines, olive and beetroot-hued Tangerines, Tangerines of the tint of the bottom of pots, Tangerines of every--no, I beg to recall that, there are no well-defined blue or green Tangerines; at least, none that came under my ken. The town is as old as the hills and courageously uncivilized. There is no gasholder, no railway-station, no theatre, no cab-stand, no daily paper, and no drainage board to go into controversy over. It is unconsciously backward, near as it is to Europe--a rifle-shot off the track of ships plying from the West to the ports of the Mediterranean. It preserves its Eastern aroma with a fine Moslem conservatism. Its ramparts of crumbling masonry are ornamented with ancient cannon useless for offence, useless for defence. There is said to be a saluting-battery; but the legend runs that the gunners require a week's clear notice before firing a salute.[B] There is no locomotion save in boxes and on the backs of quadrupeds; and quadrupeds of the inferior order are usually, when overtaken by death, thrown in the streets to decompose. But if the irregularity of the town would galvanize the late Monsieur Haussmann in his grave, its situation would satisfy the most exacting Yankee engineer. It is huddled in a sheltered nest on the fringe of a land of milk and honey; it has the advantage of a spread of level beach, and rejoices in the balmiest of climes. The streets are so narrow that you could light a cigar from your neighbour's window on the opposite side; but there is no window, neither at this side nor the other. A hole with a grating is the only window that is visible. Moors are jealous, and to be able to appreciate their household comforts you must first succeed in turning their houses inside out. Those who have dived into the recesses say the fruit is as savoury as the husk is repulsive. The windowless houses with their backs grudgingly turned to the thoroughfares are low for the most part, and the thoroughfares are--oh! so crooked--zigzag, up and down, staggering in a drunken way over hard cobble-stones and leading nowhere. There are mosques and stores entered by horse-shoe arches, a bazaar dotted over with squatting women, cowled with dirty blankets, selling warm griddle-cakes; moving here and there are the same spectral figures, similar dirty blankets veiling them from head to foot; over the way are cylinders of mat, with nets caging the apertures at each end, to hold the cocks and hens, rabbits and pigeons, brought for sale by Riffians, descendants of the corsairs of that ilk, stalwart, brown, and bare-legged, with heads shaven but for the twisted scalp-lock left for the convenience of Asrael when he is dragging them up to Paradise. Hebrews have their standings around, and deal in strips of cotton, brass dishes, and slippers, or change money, or are ready for anything in the shape of barter. Seated in the shade of that small niche in the wall, as on a tailor's shop-board, is an adool, or public notary, selling advice to a client; in the alcove next him is a worker in beads and filigree; from a dusty forge beyond comes the clang of anvils, where half-naked smiths are hammering out bits or fashioning horse-shoes. Mules with Bedouins perched, chin on shin, amid the bales of merchandise on their backs, cross the bazaar at every moment; or files of donkeys, stooping under bundles of faggots, pick their careful way. By-and-by--but this is not a frequent sight--a Moslem swell ambles past on a barb, gorgeous in caparisons, the enormous peaked saddle held in its place by girths round the beast's breast and quarters, and covered with scarlet hammer-cloth. If we move about and examine the stalls, we see lumps of candied sweetmeats here; charms, snuff-boxes made of young cocoanuts and beads there; and jars of milk or baskets of dates elsewhere. At the fountain yonder, contrived in the wall, mud approached by rugged, sloppy steps, water-carriers, wide-mouthed negro slaves, male and female, with brass curtain-rings in their ears, and skins blacker than the moonless midnight, come and go the whole day long, and gossip or wrangle with loafers in coarse mantles and burnous of stuff striped like leopard-skin. Beside the silent, gliding, ghost-like Mahometan women and the Hottentot Venus, you have Rebecca in gaudy kerchief and Doña Dolores in silken skirt and lace mantilla from neighbouring Spain. In the mingling crowd all is novelty, all is noise, all is queer and shifting and diversified. The hotel where we put up was owned by Bruzeaud, formerly a messman of a British regiment. It was approached by a filthy lane, and commanded a prospect of a square not much larger than a billiard-table. In the middle of this square was the limp body of a deceased mongoose. At the opposite side of it was a Mahometan school, where the children were instructed in the Koran, and their treble voices as they recited the inspired verses in unison kept up drone for hours. The build and surroundings of the hostelry left much opening for improvement, but we had no valid ground for complaint. The beds were clean, Bruzeaud was a good cook, the waiter was attentive and smiled perpetually, which made up for his stupidity; we had a single agreeable fellow-guest in a Frenchman, who spoke Arabic, and had lived in the city of Morocco as a pretended follower of the Prophet; and, besides, there was that dry undoctored champagne, which it is permissible to drink at all meals in Africa. There was another hotel in Tangier, a more pretentious establishment, owned by one Martin--surname unknown. Martin was a character. He was an unmitigated coloured gentleman, blubber-lipped and black as the ace of spades, with saffron-red streaks at the corners of his optics. He was a native of one of the West India Islands, I believe, but I will not be positive. Mahomet Lamarty pressed me to tell him in what English county Englishmen were born black, and when I said in none, he gravely ejaculated that in that case Martin was a liar, and habitually ate dirt. To avert possible complications into which I might have been drawn, I had to hasten to explain that Martin might possibly have been born in a part of England known as the Black Country. He had served in the steward's department on the ship of war where the Duke of Edinburgh, then Prince Alfred and a middy, was picking up seamanship. Hence his Jove-like hauteur. He had rubbed-skirts with Royalty, and to his fetter-shadowed soul some of the divinity which hedges kings and their relatives had adhered to him. I never met a darkey who could put on such fearful and wonderful airs. Where he did not order he condescended. He showed me an Irish constabulary revolver which he had received from "his old friend, Lord Francis Conyngham--'pon honour, he was delighted to meet him. It was good for sore eyes--who'd a-thought of his turning up there!" Splendidly inflated Martin was when he spoke of "his servants." This thing was entertaining until he grew presumptuous. If you are polite to some people they are familiar, and want to take an ell for every inch you have conceded. And then you have to tell them to keep their place. But Martin, with the instincts of his race, saw in time when it was coming to that. What a misery it must be for a coloured gentleman of ambition that the tell-tale _odor stirpis_ cannot be eliminated! Martin spent extraordinary amounts of money on the purchase of essences, but to no effect; he could not escape from himself; the scent of the nigger, _che puzzo!_ would hang round him still. He was a great coward with all his magniloquence, and when cholera attacked Tangier, left it in craven terror, and sequestered himself in a country house a few miles off. The two captains and I "did" Tangier conscientiously, with the zest of Bismarck over a yellow-covered novel, and the thoroughness of a Cook's tourist on his first invasion of Paris. We crawled into a stifling crib of a dark coffee-house, and sucked thick brown sediment out of liliputian cups; we smoked hemp from small-bowled pipes until we fell off into a state of visionary stupor known as "kiff;" we paid our respects to the Kadi, exchanged our boots for slippers, and settled down cross-legged on mats as if we were the three tailors of Tooley Street; we almost consented to have ourselves bled by a Moorish barber--Mahomet Lamarty's particular, who lanced him in the nape of the neck every spring--for the Moorish barber still practises the art of Sangrado, and also extracts teeth. But in my note-taking I was sorely handicapped by my ignorance of the language. Arabic is spoken in the stretch extending from Tetuan to Mogador by the coast, and for some distance in the interior; Chleuh is the dialect of the inhabitants of the Atlas range, and Guinea of the negroes. Spanish is slightly understood in Tangier and its vicinity, and is well understood by the Jews. The houses are generally built of chalk and flint (_tabia_) on the ground-floor, and of bricks on the upper story. Moorish bricks are good, but rough and crooked in make. The houses inhabited by Jews are obliged to be coated with a yellow wash, those of natives are white, those of Christians may be of any colour. The Jews are made to feel that they are a despised stock, and yet with Jewish subtlety and perseverance they have managed to get and keep the trade of the place in their hands. That fact may be plainly gathered from the absence of business movement in the bazaars and public resorts of Tangier on the Jewish Sabbath. Your Hebrew does not poignantly feel or bitterly resent being reviled and spat upon, provided he hears the broad gold pieces rattling in the courier-bag slung over his shoulder. He nurses his vengeance, but he has the common sense to perceive that the readiest and fullest manner of exacting it is by cozening his neighbour. At this semi-European edge of Africa he enjoys comparative license, although he is forced to appear in skull-cap and a long narrow robe of a dark colour something like a priest's soutane. But the son of Israel when he has a taste for finery (and which of them has not?) compensates for the gloom of his outer garment by wearing an embroidered vest, a girdle of some bright hue, and white drawers. The daughters of Israel--but my conscience charges me with want of gallantry towards them in a previous chapter, and now I can honestly relieve it and win back their favour. They are the only beautiful women who mollify the horizon of Tangier: the Mahometan ladies are not visible, those of Spanish descent are coarse, and of English are washed-out; while their lips are against the negresses. I have a batch of photographs of females in an album--aye, of believers in the Prophet amongst them, for it is a folly to imagine you cannot obtain that which is forbidden. Hercules, I fancy, must have overcome with a golden sword the dragon that watched the gardens of the Hesperides--which, by the way, were in the neighbourhood of Tangier, if Apollodorus is to be credited. On looking over that album, the majority of the faces are distinctly those of Aaronites, and most favourable specimens of the family, too There are melting black orbs curtained with pensive lashes, luxuriant black hair, regular features, and straight, delicately chiselled noses. These Jewesses generally wear handkerchiefs disposed in curving folds over their heads, and are as fond of loudly-tinted raiment and the gauds of trinketry as their sisters who parade the sands at Ramsgate during the season. There is a photograph before me, as I write, of a Jewish matron, fat, dull, double-chinned, and sleepy-eyed, who must have been a belle before she fell into flesh. She wears massy filigree ear-rings, two strings of precious stones as necklaces, ponderous bracelets, edgings of pearls on her bodice, and rings on all her fingers. Her shoulders are covered with costly lace, and the front of her skirt is like an altar-cloth heavy with embroidery. I dare say, if one might peep under it, she has gold bangles on her ankles. It would surprise me if she had an idea in her head beyond the decoration of her person. As we turn the leaf, there is a full-blooded negress with a striped napkin twisted gracefully turban-wise round her hair, and coils of beads, large and small, sinuously dangling on her breast, like the chains over the Debtor's Door at Newgate. A very fine animal indeed, this negress, with power in her strong shiny features; a nose of courage, thin in the nostrils, and cheek-bones high, but not so high as those of a Red Indian. If she were white, she might pass for a Caucasian, but for that gibbous under-lip. She lacks the wide mouth and the hinted intelligent archness of the Two-Headed Nightingale, and has not the moody expression and semi-sensuous, semi-ferocious development of the muscular widows of Cetewayo; but for a negress she is handsome and well-built, and would fetch a very good price in the market. The slave-trade still flourishes in Morocco. On the next page we meet two types of young Moorish females: one a peasant, taken surreptitiously as she stood in a horse-shoe archway; the other a lady of the harem, taken--no matter by what artifice. The peasant, swathed from tip to heel in white like a ghost in a penny booth, and shading her face with a cart-wheel of a palm-leaf hat looped from brim to crown, and with one extremity of its great margins curled, is a prematurely worn, weather-stained, common-looking wench, with a small nose and screwed-up mouth. She is a free woman, but I would not exchange the dusky bondswoman for five of her class. Centuries of bad food, much baby-nursing, and field-labour sink their imprint into a race. The harem lady, whose likeness was filched as she leaned an elbow against a low table, is in a state of repose. She squats tailor-fashion, her fingers are twined one in another in her lap, her eyes are closed, and her expression is one of drowsy, listless voluptuousness. She is fair, and her dress (for she is not arrayed for the reception of visitors) is simple--a peignoir, and a sash, and a fold of silk binding her long rich tresses. A soft die-away face, with no sentiment more strongly defined than the abandonment to pleasure and its consequent weariness. By no means an attractive piece of flesh and blood, and yet a good sample of the class that go to upholster a seraglio. I have never had the slightest anxiety to penetrate the secrets of the Moslem household, and I consider the man who would wish to poke his nose into its seclusion no better than Peeping Tom of Coventry--an insolent, lecherous cad. I would not traverse the street to-morrow to inspect the champion wives of the Sultan of Turkey and Shah of Persia amalgamated; and I deserve no credit for it, for I know that they are puppets, and that more engaging women are to be seen any afternoon shopping in Regent Street or pirouetting in the ballets of half-a-dozen theatres. Your lady of the harem is an insipid, pasty-complexioned doll, nine times out of ten, and would be vastly improved in looks and temperament if she were subjected to a course of shower-baths, and compelled to take horse-exercise regularly and earn her bread before she ate it. How do I know this? it may be asked. Who dares to deny it? is my answer. But here is a digression from our theme of the condition of the Jews at Tangier, and all on account of a few poor photographs! In one sentence, that condition is shameful. It is a reproach to the so-called civilized Powers that they do not interfere to influence the Emir-al-Mumenin to behave with more of the spirit of justice towards his Jewish subjects. In Fez and other cities they have to dwell in a quarter to themselves--"El Melah" (the dirty spot) it is called in Morocco city; and when they leave the Melah they have to go bare-footed. They are not permitted to ride on mules, nor yet to walk on the same side of the street as Arabs. The late Sir Moses Montefiore, a very exemplary old man in some respects, visited Morocco in his eightieth year to intercede on behalf of his co-religionists, and promises of better treatment were made; but promises are not always kept. CHAPTER VI. A Pattern Despotism--Some Moorish Peculiarities--A Hell upon Earth--Fighting for Bread--An Air-Bath--Surprises of Tangier--On Slavery--The Writer's Idea of a Moorish Squire--The Ladder of Knowledge--Gulping Forbidden Liquor--Division of Time--Singular Customs--The Shereef of Wazan--The Christian who Captivated the Moor--The Interview--Moslem Patronage of Spain--A Slap for England--A Vision of Beauty--An English Desdemona: Her Plaint--One for the Newspaper Men--The Ladies' Battle--Farewell--The English Lady's Maid--Albert is Indisposed--The Writer Sums up on Morocco. THE Government in Morocco would satisfy the most ardent admirer of force. It is an unbridled despotism. The Sultan is head of the Church as of the State, and master of the lives and property of his subjects. He dispenses with ministers, and deliberates only with favourites. When favourites displease him, he can order their heads to be taken off. Favourites are careful not to displease him. The land is a _terra incognita_ to Europeans, and is rich in beans, maize, and wool, which are exported, and in wheat and barley, which are not always permitted to be exported. Altogether the form of administration is very primitive and simple. It is a rare privilege for a European to be admitted into the Imperial presence, and indeed the only occasions, one might say, when Europeans have the privilege are those furnished by the visits of foreign Missions to submit credentials and presents. It is advisable for a private traveller not to go to the chief city unless attached to one of these official caravans; but by those who have money a journey to Fez may be compassed with an escort. This escort consists of the Sultan's very irregular soldiers, who are armed with very long and very rusty matchlocks, of a pattern common nowadays in museums and curiosity shops. Ostensibly the escort is intended to protect the traveller from the regularly organized bands of robbers which infest the interior; but the experience of the traveller is that when the robbers swoop down he has to protect the escort. Christians are looked upon as dogs by all the self-satisfied natives, and treated so by some of them when they can be saucy with impunity. It was my lot to be called a dog by a small fanatic, who hissed at me with the asperity and industry of a disturbed gander, and pelted me with stones. But two can play at that game, and that boy will think twice before he lapidates a full-grown Christian again. But he will hate him for evermore, and when he has reached man's estate will teach his son to repeat the doggerel: "The Christian to the hook, the Jew to the spit, and the Moslem to see the sight." The Sultan collects his revenue (estimated at half a million pounds sterling a year, great part of which is derived from the Government monopoly of the sale of opium) by the aid of his army; but as he never nears the greater portion of his dominions, there must be some nice pickings off that revenue by minor satraps before it reaches his sacred hands. There is quite a phalanx of under-strappers of State in this despotism. For instance, at Tangier there is a Bacha or Governor, a Caliph or Vice-Governor, a Nadheer or Administrator of the Mosques, a Mohtasseb or Administrator of the Markets, and a Moul-el-Dhoor or Chief of the Night Police. There is a leaven of the guild system, too, as in more advanced countries. Each trade has its Amin, each quarter its Mokaderrin. There is a Kadi, or Minister of Worship and Justice, to whom we paid our respects. Justice is quick in its action, and stern in the penalties it inflicts. The legs and hands are cut off pilferers, heads are cut off sometimes and preserved in salt and camphor, and the bastinado is an ordinary punishment for lesser crimes. But the Moors must be thick in the soles, nor is it astonishing, as the practice is to chastise children by beating them on the feet. Mahomet Lamarty volunteered to procure a criminal who would submit to the bastinado for a peseta. In the market-place I compassionated an unfortunate thief minus his right hand and left leg. We took a walk to the prison, which is on the summit of the hill, Captain No. 1 thoughtfully providing himself with a basket of bread. What a hell upon earth was that sordid, stifling, noisome, gloomy keep, with its crowds of starving sore-covered inmates. In filth it was a pig-sty, in smell a monkey-house, in ventilation another Black-hole of Calcutta. Turn to the next page, reader mine, if you are squeamish. Heaven be my witness, I have no desire to minister to morbid tastes; but I have an object in describing this dreadful _oubliette_, for it still exists--exists within thirty-two miles of British territory, and it is a scandal that some effort is not made to mitigate its horrors. Through the bars of a padlocked door, from which spurt blasts of mephitic heat, we can descry amid the steam of foul exhalations, as soon as our eyes become accustomed to the dimness, a mob of seething, sweating, sweltering captives, like in aspect as a whole to so many gaunt wild beasts. Some are gibbering like fiends, others jabbering like idiots. They are there young and old; a few--the maniacs those--are chained; all are crawled over by vermin, most are crusted with excretions. The sight made me feel faint at the time, the very recollection of it to this day makes my flesh creep. We were fascinated by this peep at the Inferno. The moment these caged wretches caught a glimpse of us they rushed to the door, and on bended knees, or with hands uplifted, or with pinched cheeks pressed against the bars, raised a clamour of entreaty. We drew back as the rancid plague-current smote our faces, and questioned Mahomet by our looks as to what all this meant. "They want food," he explained. These prisoners are allowed two loaves a day out of the revenues of the Mosques; but two loaves, even if scrupulously given, which I doubt, are but irritating pittance. They may make cushions or baskets, but their remuneration is uncertain and slender. Those who are lucky get sustenance from relatives in the town, but the majority are half-starving, and are dependent for a full meal on the bounty of chance visitors. We poked a loaf through the bars. It was ravenously snapped at, torn into little bits, and devoured amid the howls of those who were disappointed. Then a loaf was cast over the door. What a savage scramble! The bread was caught, tossed in the air, jumped at, and finally the emaciated rivals fell upon one another as in a football scrimmage, and there was a moving huddle of limbs and a diabolical chorus of shrieks and yells. That could not be done again; it was too painful in result Mahomet undertook to distribute the remainder of our stock through an inlet in the wall, and we drew away sick in head and heart from that den of repulsive degradation, greed, brutality, cruelty, selfishness, and all infuriate and debased passion--that damnable magazine of disease physical and moral. It is undeniable that there were many there whose faces were passport to the Court of Lucifer--murderers, and dire malefactors; but better to have decapitated them than to have committed them to the slow torture of this citadel of woe. There were inmates who had been immured for years--inmates for debt whose hair had whitened in the fetid imprisonment, whose laugh had in it a harsh hollow-sounding jangle, and whose brows had fixed themselves into the puckers of a sullen, hopeless, apathetic submission to fate. Their lack of intelligence was a blessing. Had they been more sensitive they would have been goaded into raging lunacy. Let us to the outer freshness and make bold endeavour to fling off this weight of nightmare which oppresses us. Passing by the ruinous gate yonder with its wild-looking sentry, we reach the open space where crouching hill-men are reposing on the stunted grass, and ungainly camels, kneeling in a circle, are chewing the cud in patience, or venting that uncanny half-whine, half-bellow, which is their only attempt at conversation. Let us take a long look at the country beyond with its gardens teeming with fruit and musical with bird-voices; walk up to the crown of that slant and survey the valleys, the plateaux, the brushwood, the flower-patches, spreading away to the hills that swell afar until the peaks of the Atlas, cool with everlasting snow, close the view. One is tempted to linger there lovingly, though darkness is falling. There is a gift of blandness and briskness in the very breathing of the air. When you have had your fill of the beauties on the land side, turn to the sea, meet the evening breeze that comes floating up with a flavour of iodine upon it, range round the sweeping vista, from giant Calpe away over the Strait flecked with sails on to Trafalgar, smiling peacefully as if it had never been a bay of blood, and finish by the vision of the great globe of fire descending into the Atlantic billows. Our stay in Tangier was most gratifying because of its variety and unending surprises. Existence there was out of the beaten track, and kept curiosity on the constant alert. It was a treat to pretend to be Legree, and to negotiate for a strong likely growing nigger-boy. I discovered I could have bought one for ten pounds sterling, a perfect bargain, warranted free from vice or blemish; but as I was not prepared to stop in Africa just then, I did not close with the offer. It may be a shocking admission to make, but if I were to settle down in Morocco, I confess, I should most certainly keep slaves. There is a deal of sentimental drivel spouted about the condition of slaves. Those I have seen seemed very happy. In Morocco they are well treated; and if desirous to change masters the law empowers them to make a demand to that effect. It is true that a slave's oath is not deemed valid, but Cuffy bears the slight with praiseworthy equanimity. I am sure if Cuffy were in my service he would never ask to leave it, and I would teach him to appraise his word as much as any other man's oath (except his master's), by my patented plan for negro-training, based on Mr. Rarey's theories. As the land about Tangier was rated at prairie value--an acre could be had for a dollar--I might have been induced to invest in a holding of a couple of hundred thousands of acres, but that my ship had not yet come within hail of the port. What a healthy, free, aristocratic life, combining feudal dignity with educated zest, a wise man could lead there--if he had an establishment of, say, three hundred slaves, a private band, a bevy of dancing girls, Bruzeaud for _chef_, an extensive library, sixteen saddle-horses, and relays of jolly fellows from Gibraltar to help him chase the wild boar and tame bores, eat couscoussu, and drink green-tea well sweetened. He should Moorify himself, but he need not change his religion, and if he went about it rightly, I am sure, like the village pastor, he could make himself to all the country dear. Take the educational question, for example. If he were diplomatic he would pay the school-fees of the urchins of Tangier. These are not extravagant--a few heads of barley daily, equivalent to the sod of turf formerly carried by the pupils to the hedge academies in dear Ireland, and a halfpenny on Friday. He should affect an interest in the Koran, and make it a point of applauding the Koran-learned boy when he is promenaded on horseback and named a bachelor. He might--indeed he should--follow the career of his _protégé_ at the Mhersa, where he studies the principles of arithmetic, the rudiments of history, the elements of geometry, and the theology of Sidi-Khalil, until he emerges in a few years a Thaleb, or lettered man. Perhaps the Thaleb may go farther, and become an Adoul or notary, a Fekky or doctor, nay--who knows?--an Alem or sage. Ah! how pleasant that Moorish squire might be by his own ruddy fire of rushes, palm branches, and sun-dried leaves; and what a profit he might make by judicious speculation in jackal-skins, oil, pottery, carpets, and leather stained with the pomegranate bark! He would have his mills turned by water or by horses; he would eat his bread with its liberal admixture of bran; he would rear his storks and rams. The professors who charm snakes and munch live-coals would all be hangers-on of his house; and he would have periodical concerts by those five musicians who played such desert lullabies for us--conspicuously one patriarch whose double-bass was made from an orange-tree--and would not forget to supplement their honorarium of five dollars with jorums of white wine. Sly special pleaders! They argue with the German play-wright: "_Mahomet verbot den Wein, doch vom Champagner sprach er nicht._" From the Frenchman at the hotel, whose knowledge of Morocco was "extensive and peculiar," I acquired much of my information on the manners and customs of the people. Watches are only worn and looked at for amusement. Instead of by hours, time is thus noted: El Adhen, an hour before sunrise; Fetour (repast) el Hassoua, or sunrise; Dah el Aly, ten in the morning; El Only, a quarter past twelve; El Dhoor, half-past one; El Asser, from a quarter past three to a quarter to four; El Moghreb, sunset; El Achâ, half-an-hour after sunset; and El Hameir, gun-shot. Meals are taken at Dah el Aly, El Asser, and El Moghreb. The houses are built with elevated lateral chambers, but there is a narrow staircase leading to the Doeria, a reception-room, where visitors can be welcomed without passing the ground-floor. The walls are plastered, and covered with arabesques or verses of the Koran incrusted in colours. The wells inside the houses are only used for cleansing linen; water for drinking purposes is sought outside. Among many singular customs--singular to us--I noted that a popular remedy for illness is to play music and to recite prayers to scare away the devil. An enlightened Moor might think the practices of the Peculiar People quite as strange, and question the infallibility of cure-all pills at thirteen-pence-halfpenny the box. The dead in Morocco are hurried to their graves at a hand-gallop. That, I submit, is no more unreasonable than many English funeral usages, such as incurring debt for the pomp of mourning. At Moorish weddings the bride is carried in procession in a palanquin to her husband's house amid a _fantasia_ of gunpowder--the reckless rejoicing discharges of ancient muskets in the streets. Well, white favours, gala coaches, and _feux de joie_ at marriages of the great are not entirely unknown among us. Nobody sees the Moorish wife for a year, not even her mother-in-law, which I consider a not wholly unkind dispensation. The Moorish wife paints her toe-nails, which, after all, is a harmless vanity, and less obtrusive than that of the ladies who impart artificial redness to their lips. And, lastly, the Moorish wife waits on her husband. Personally, I fail to discover anything blamable in that act, though I must concede that it is eccentric, very eccentric. These allusions to the Moorish wife in general lead up naturally to one in particular in whom I took a professional interest, for she was as remarkable in her way as Lady Ellenborough or Lady Hester Stanhope, or that strong-minded Irishwoman who married the Moslem, Prince Izid Aly, and whose son reigned after his father's death. The Shereef has been mentioned. He is the great man of the district, with an authority only second to that of the Sultan himself. Claiming to be a lineal descendant of Mahomet, he is entitled to wear the green turban. His name at full length is long, but not so long as that of most Spanish Infantes--Abd-es-Selam ben Hach el Arbi. He is a saint and a miracle-worker. He has been seen simultaneously at Morocco, Wazan, and Tangier, according to the belief of his co-religionists, wherein he beats the record of Sir Boyle Roche's bird, which was only in two places at once. Like Jacob, he has wrestled with angels. He is head of the Muley-Taib society, a powerful secret organization, which has its ramifications throughout the Islamitic world. He draws fees from the mosques, and has gifts bestowed upon him in profusion by his admirers, who feel honoured when he accepts them. Exalted and wide-spreading is his repute where the Moslem holds sway, and unassailable is his orthodoxy, yet he has had the temerity to take to himself a Christian wife. This lady had been a governess in an American family at Tangier. There the Shereef made her acquaintance, wooed and won her. They were married at the residence of the British Minister Plenipotentiary; the officers of a British man-of-war were present at the ceremony, and slippers and a shower of rice, as at home, followed the bride on leaving the building. The Shereef and, if possible, the Shereefa were personages to be seen, and Mahomet Lamarty was the very man to help us to the favour. His Highness lived four miles away, and we formed a cavalcade one afternoon and set off for his garden, the ladies accompanying us. We passed through cultivated fields of barley and _dra_ (a kind of millet), crossed the river Wadliahoodi, and ascended a road which faced abruptly towards the hills. An agreeable road it was, and not lonesome; we had the carol of birds and the piping of bull-frogs to lighten the way, and leafy branches made reverence overhead. There were abundance of fruit and such beautiful shrubs that I rail at myself for not being botanist enough to be able to enlarge upon them. There were orange-groves, yellow broom, dog-rose, and apples, pears, peaches, apricots, plums, pomegranates, figs, and vines. It was such an oasis as a very young Etonian in the warmth of a midsummer vacation might have likened to Heaven. The range of hills of El Jebel rose left and right, and at parts presented a steep cliff to the ocean. This ridge is about twelve miles in width, and its fertile slopes amply merit to be lauded as the best fruit-producers in the empire, "as bounteous as Paradise itself." Mahomet Lamarty, who was our guide, entered the Shereef's grounds to prepare for our introduction; and now the ladies, who had insisted on coming with us, rebelled, and said point-blank they would not salute the Shereefa as "Your Highness." They were impatient to see her, but they declined to give countenance to a Christian who had demeaned herself by wedding a heathen. "The visit was of your own seeking, ladies," I said; "if you are not willing to treat Her Highness with deference, better stay outside." They were not equal to that sacrifice after riding four miles. "Who'll start the conversation?" said Captain No. 1. "You start it" (to me) "like a good fellow, and I'll take up the running." Captain No. 2 said he would hang about for us outside. Mahomet beckoned to us and we ventured into the garden. Coming down a pathway we saw an austere, swarthy, obese man of the middle height. He was white-gloved, and wore a red fez, a sort of Zouave upper garment of blue, with burnous, baggy trousers, white stockings, and Turkish slippers. It was the Shereef. I had agreed to open the interview, but when it came to the trial my Arabic (I had been only studying it for two hours) abandoned me. Mahomet did the needful. I thanked His Highness for his kindness in admitting us to his demesne, and he smiled a modest, solemn smile, and looked greeting from his small eyes. When he discovered that I had been travelling in Spain, he asked me--always through Mahomet--what they were doing there. On having my reply--that they were tasting the miseries of civil war--translated to him, he shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and slowly ejaculated: "Unhappy Spain! Silly, unfortunate people! That is the way with them always. They are at perpetual strife one with another." And then Mahomet interposed with a parenthesis of his own depreciatory of the Spaniards, whom he loathed and despised. He had fought against them in the war of 1839-1860, and the Shereef had also headed his countrymen, and had shown great courage and coolness in action. His presence had infused a high spirit of enthusiasm into the undisciplined troops. "Bismillah!" grunted Mahomet. "The Spaniard is beneath contempt. He was almost licked in one battle. He was four months here, and how far did he get into the interior?" Mahomet conveniently forgot the defeat of Guad-el-ras, the occupation of Tetuan, and the indemnity of four hundred millions of reals which was exacted as the price of peace; but he was literally correct, the victorious O'Donnell did not flaunt his flag beyond a very exiguous strip of the territory of Sidi-Muley-Mahomet. We were walking as we talked, and by this time had reached the brow of a wooded rise which commanded an uninterrupted prospect of the ocean. The flowery cistus flourished on the eminence, and cork-trees, chestnuts, and willows shielded us from the fierceness of the sun. Behind and around were a succession of richly-planted gardens. We halted, and the Shereef, scanning the horizon in the direction of the Rock, suddenly put a question to me which almost took my breath away: "Do they buy commissions over the way still?" "No; that system has been abolished." "It is well," he remarked, with a scarcely suppressed sneer. "It was incredible that a great nation and a fighting nation should make a traffic of the command of men, as if a clump of spears were a kintal of maize," and as he relapsed into silence a soldierly fire gleamed in his irides, his frame seemed to straighten and swell, and the nature of the prophet retired before that of the warrior. From where we stood we could ferret out a house with a veranda in front, built on a terrace and begirt with trees. That was the residence of His Highness; but we turned our eyes in another direction, lest we should be suspected of rude curiosity by this courteous African. I was trying to divine the tally of years our host had numbered. No Arab knows his own age, and here it may be useful to tell the reader wherein the distinction lies between the Moor and the Arab. Virtually they are the same; but the name of Moor is given to those who dwell in cities, of Arab to those who roam the plains. Mahomet came to my aid. His Highness had whiskers when Tangier was bombarded by Prince de Joinville. That was in August, 1844, a good nine-and-twenty years before, so that Abd-es-Salam must have long doubled the cape of forty, which would leave him considerably the senior of his Frankish wife. We turned at a noise--the creak of a rustic wooden gate on its hinges; a figure approached. And then it was given to me to gaze upon Her Highness the Shereefa of Wazan. She was not called Zuleika, but Emily--her maiden name had been Keene, and she came not from the rose-bordered bowers of Bendemeer's stream, nightingale-haunted, but from the prosaic levels of South London, where her father was governor of a gaol. Truly she was a vision of gratefulness in that paynim tract--a rich brunette, with large black eyes, long black ringletted tresses, and a well-filled shape with goodly bust. Her attire was neat and graceful and not Oriental. She was clad in a riding-habit of ruby brocaded velvet, with jacket to match, had a cloud of lace round her throat, and an Alpine hat with cock's feather poised on her well-set head. She might serve as the model for a Spanish Ann Chute. Bracelets on her plump wrists and rings on her taper fingers caught the sunshine as she occasionally twirled her cutting-whip. Her voice was bell-like and melodious, with the faintest accent of decision, and her manner, after an opening flush of embarrassment, was cordial and debonair. The embarrassment was because of her inability to extend to us the hospitality she desired. She explained that she had to receive us in the garden as the house was undergoing repairs. After the customary commonplaces, she freely entered into conversation, and took opportunity at once to deny that she was a renegade; she wore European costume, as we saw, and attended the rites of the English Church, for it was one of the stipulations of the marriage contract that she should have perfect liberty to follow her own faith. "I wish every English girl were as happily married as I," she said, "and had as loving a husband." It was gratifying, therefore, to note that she found herself as women wish to be who love their lords. She had been married on the 27th of January, and as the Shereef had entered into his present residence but recently, they were still at sixes and sevens. It was his habit to spend the winter in the country and the summer in town. She had been but two years in Morocco, and had not yet mastered Arabic. "His Highness understands English?" She shook her head, and quickly interpreting a lifting of my eyelids, she smilingly added, "Spanish was the medium of our courtship." And then, as we promenaded the garden path, she became communicative, and dwelt with pardonable expansion on the virtues of her lord and master, who followed behind side by side with the portly Yorkshireman. His charity, she said, was unbounded. Slaves were frequently sent to him as presents, but he kept none. He was modest on his own merits, and yet he was the most enlightened of Moors. He had visited Marseilles, a war-ship having been put at his disposal by the French Government, and was most anxious to take a tour to Paris and Vienna, and above all to England. It was his desire that railways should be constructed in Morocco, and he was glad when he was told that there was some likelihood of a telegraph cable being laid to Tangier. "Then," interrupted I, "with your Highness's influence on the tribes around, exercised through your husband, there should be a fair prospect of pushing civilization here." "Ah, yes!" she exclaimed, with a glow on her cheeks, "that is one of my dearest hopes, that is my great ambition. I believe that my marriage, which has been cruelly commented upon in England, may effect good both for these poor misunderstood Moors and my own country people." "Is the Shereef on friendly terms with the Sultan?" "No, I am sorry to say there is a feud between them at the moment. The Sultan objects to my husband for using an English saddle." "Hum!" (to myself mentally) "if the august Muley cannot brook an English saddle, what must he think of an English wife? Or do these Moslems, like some Christians I know, strain at a gnat and swallow a camel? Mayhap it is even so. The pigeon-prompted camel-driver, who built up his creed with plentiful blood-cement, saw fit to add a new chapter to the Koran, when he fell in love with the Coptic maiden, Mary." The Shereefa told me that her father and mother had come out to see her. They were averse to the alliance at first, but were satisfied that she had done the right thing when she told them how content she was, and with what high-bred consideration for her wishes in the matter of religion her husband had behaved. Their intention was to stop for four days, but they extended their visit to fourteen. "And now," she continued, "I can use to my lord the words of Ruth to Naomi, 'Whither thou goest I will go; and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people'"--a pause--"yes, and 'thy God my God,' for there is but one"--archly--"the matter of the Prophet we shall leave aside." I admired the lady's pluck, and if I were that Moorish squire I have tried to sketch, I should esteem it an honour to have her on my visiting list. But I am a theological oddity, and my wallet of prejudices, it is to be feared, is sadly unfurnished. I never could rise to that sublimated self-sufficiency of intellect that I could consign any fellow-creature to everlasting pains for the audacity of differing in dogma with myself. I have met good and bad of every creed, Mahometans I could respect--whose word was their bond--and so-called Christians and Christian ministers with a most uncharitable spiritual pride, whom I could not respect. The liver of the persecutor was denied me. Were the fires of Smithfield to be rekindled, my prayers would be sent up for the floods of Heaven to quench them, and for the lightnings of Heaven to annihilate the fiends who had piled the faggots. "By-the-bye," said the Shereefa, "do you know any of those people who write for the papers in London?" I admitted that I had that misfortune. "Some of them are fools as well as cowards," she went on. "They have written articles about me full of ignorance and malice. Have they no consideration for the feelings of others?" "I am afraid, your Highness, some of them are more brilliant than conscientious; they would rather point an epigram than sacrifice style to truth or good-nature." "One of them in particular," she said, and there was an irritated ring in her voice, "has singled me out for attack, and given me in derision a name which he believes to be Mahometan, but which is really Jewish." And with her cutting-whip she viciously snapped off the heads of some poppies. The episode of Tarquin's answer to the emissary of Sextus occurred to me, and I felt that if my colleague, Horace St. J----, were there, he would have passed a very bad quarter of an hour. The females of our party joined us, and I formally presented them, taking a malicious pleasure in emphasizing the "your Highness." The Shereefa received them right graciously, but it was easy to notice that a chill came over the conversation. They were careful never to use the title to their English sister. In fact, it was a tacit ladies' battle. It was time to leave, and the Shereefa presented her visitors with two nosegays, gathered by her own hands. The act had in it something very royal, with the smallest trace of sly condescension. The Shereef accompanied us to the outer gate. On the way I motioned to Captain No. 1 to offer him a cigar. He did; his Highness accepted it, bowed, and gravely put it in his pocket. As we stood on the road at parting, a peasant was passing with a load of twigs on his shoulders. He cast them off, threw himself on his knees, kissed the hem of the holy man's garments, and the back of his proffered hand. We were descending the hill when a rustle in the bushes attracted me, and a white face peeped out and a voice besought me in English to stop. It was the Shereefa's London lady's-maid. She could not resist the temptation of enjoying a few sentences with one of her own race. From her I learned that there were twenty-seven Moorish women in her master's household; that there was a tank at Wazan large enough to float a ship; that her master had been married before, and had two sons and a lovely Mahometan child, a daughter, to whom the Shereefa was teaching English and the piano; "but remember, please," and here she grew important, and had all the dignity of a retainer, with a great sense of what was due to her caste and the proprieties, "that my mistress's children, if she have any, will be Europeans!" As we got back to our hotel the muezzins were summoning the faithful to their vesper orisons, and Albert was moaning ruefully under the sideboard. Mrs. Captain had out her sweetly pretty pet at once, and covered him with caresses and endearments. "Somebody has given him something that has disagreed with him. Was it you?" she said to me, and there was that in her tone which made me quake in my shoes. Meekly and truthfully I protested that I had not; I had fed him in the morning in her own presence; the darling was in his usual health and spirits when we left, but--intercede for me, Puck, and you aerial imps of mischief, for no other spirit will--I could not help murmuring in audible soliloquy, "The carcase of that mongoose, which was on the square outside this morning, is no longer there." The scene that followed, to borrow the hackneyed phrase, beggars description. The house was turned upside down; to my mental vision arose sal volatile and burnt feathers, swoons and hysterics. Mahomet's dove alone can tell how all might have ended had not the Frenchman suggested a bolus. Captain No. 1 and I were commissioned to inquire into the mystery of the disappearance of that baleful mongoose. When we got out of earshot of the hotel there was the popping of a cork, and we emptied effervescing beakers to the speedy recovery of Albert the Beloved. Certes, that bull-dog had a very bad fit of dyspepsia; but the bolus did him a world of good, and before we retired to rest we had the felicity to hear him crunching a bone. Peace spread its wings over our pillows. The next day we took a trip to the lighthouse on Cape Spartel, the women labouring in the field making curious inspection of the cavalcade as it wended by, but quickly turning away their faces as we males tried to snatch a look at them. The road was no better than a rugged track on a stony plateau. There was a spacious view from the Phare, which was an iron and stone building put up at the cost of three or four of the European Powers (I forget which now), the keepers being chosen from each of the contributory nations. The Sultan had given the site, but refused to hand over a blankeel towards the expenses, arguing that as he had no fleet, he had no personal object in making provision against wrecks. We were well mounted, but these Barbary cattle have a nasty trick of lashing out, so that it is prudent to give a wide range to their hind-hoofs. Mahomet, riding with very short stirrups, led the party. My saddle was an ancient, rude, and rotten contrivance, and as I loitered on the road home, giving myself up to idle fantasy, my friends got on far ahead. Waking from my day-dream I gave the nag the heel, and as it sprang forward at a canter the girth turned completely round, and I was pitched over in unpleasant nearness to a hedge of cactus. The ground was soft, and I was not much bruised; but when I rose the nag had disappeared round a corner, and I was left alone in the African twilight. Presently a sinewy fiery-eyed Moor came with panther-step in sight leading me back the nag. He had a basket of oranges on his back, and gave me one with a respectful salaam as I vaulted on my Arab steed and galloped Tangier-ward bareback. Judging from the scanty rags upon him, this man was of the poorest, yet he asked for nothing; there were sympathy, innate politeness and independence withal in his bearing. To him I abandoned the saddle; it was the least he might have for his friendly act. Talking over this incident with the Frenchman at Bruzeaud's, who knew the country, he told me that the Moor was intelligent, honest, faithful to his engagements, and had a go in him that, under advantageous circumstances, would enable him to spring again to his former height of power and riches. But he struck me as happy, although some of his social customs recalled the feudal age, and he lived under the always-present contingency of decapitation. May it be long before speculation rears the horrid front of a joint-stock hotel in Tangier, or the prospectors go divining for copper, coal, iron, silver and gold. I could wish the Moorish women, however, would wash their children's heads occasionally, and not take them up by the ankles when they spank them. After a sojourn in every way pleasurable--pshaw! Albert's illness was a trifle, and we soon resigned ourselves to the miseries of the prisoners on the hill--we ate our last morsel of the Jewish pasch-bread of flour and juice of orange, cracked our last bottle of champagne, and took our leave of the Dark Continent with lightsome heart. The impression this little by-journey left upon me was so agreeable that I could not avoid the enticement to communicate it to the reader. If I have wandered from romantic Spain, it was only to take him to a land more romantic still. CHAPTER VII. Back to Gibraltar--The Parting with Albert--The Tongue of Scandal--Voyage to Malaga--"No Police, no Anything"--Federalism Triumphant--Madrid _in Statu Quo_--Orense--Progress of the Royalists--On the Road Home--In the Insurgent Country--Stopped by the Carlists--An Angry Passenger is Silenced. "How like a boulder tossed by Titans at play!" said the sentimental lady, as we approached Gibraltar on our return. "More like a big-sized molar tooth," broke in Mrs. Captain. And, indeed, this latter simile, if less poetic, gave a better idea of the conformation of the fortified hill, with the gum-coloured outline of all that was left of a Moorish wall skirting its side. The tooth is hollow, but the hollow is plugged with the best Woolwich stuffing, and potentially it can bite and grind and macerate, for all the peaceful gardens and frescades of the Alameda that circle its base like a belt of faded embroidery. At Gibraltar our party separated, the Yorkshire Captain and his friends taking the P. and O. boat to Southampton, my countryman going back to Tangier after having made some purchases, and I electing to voyage to Malaga by one of Hall's packets, which was lying at the mercantile Mole discharging the two hundred tons of Government material which it is obliged to carry by contract on each fortnightly voyage. When Albert and I parted no tears were shed; we resigned ourselves to the decree of destiny with equanimity. But I humbly submit that Mrs. Captain, when thanking me for my good intentions towards him, might have spared me the ironical advice not to volunteer for duties in future which I was not qualified to fulfil. "Volunteer," ye gods! when she had absolutely entreated me to take him in charge. Before leaving the Club-House, I was pressed to relate our adventures in Africa. I had no pig-sticking exploits to make boast over; but I turned the deaf side of my head to certain whispers about holy men who imported wine in casks labelled "Petroleum," who affected to be delivering the incoherent messages of inspiration when they were merely trying to pronounce "The scenery is truly rural" in choice Arabic, and who accounted for the black eye contracted by collision with the kerb by a highly-coloured narrative of an engagement in mid-air with an emissary of Sheitan. Neither did I accord any pleased attention to anecdotes of a "lella," or Arab lady, who tempted the Scorpions to charge ten times its value for everything she bought by telling them to send them to a personage whose title was exalted. Gib is a very small place, and, like most diminutive communities, is a veritable school for scandal. I took my last walk over the Rock, past the "Esmeralda Confectionery," which still had up the notice that hot-cross buns were to be had from seven to ten a.m. on Good Friday, and paced to the light-house on the nose of the promontory, where the meteor flag, ringed by a bracelet of cannon, flies in the breeze. And then I meandered back, and began to ask myself, had Marryat aught to do with the sponsorship of this outpost of the British Empire? Shingle Point, Blackstrap Bay, the Devil's Tower, O'Hara's Folly, Bayside Barrier, and Jumper's Bastion--the names were all redolent of the Portsmouth Hard; and I almost anticipated a familiar hail at every moment from the open door of "The Nut," and an inquiry as to what cheer from the fog-Babylon. The trip to Malaga on one of the Hall steamers which trade regularly between London and that port, calling at Cadiz and Gibraltar, was very agreeable, and the change to such dietary as liver and bacon was a treat. We were but three passengers--a steeple-chasing sub of the 71st, Señor Heredia, of Malaga, and myself. And now I have to make an open confession. I am unable to decipher the log of that passage. I have a distinct recollection of the liver and bacon, but more important events have worn away from my mind. There are the traces of pencil-marks before me; I dare say they were full of meaning when I scrawled them down, but now I have lost the key. "Jolly captain--left his wife--forty years--electric light deceives on a low beach--fourteen children--El Cano--break in the head of wine-casks": there is a literal copy of the contents of a page, which may mean nothing or anything, frivolity or a thesaurus of serious information. Memory, what a treacherous jade thou art! It may be said, why did I not take copious notes in short-hand? I would have done so were I a stenographer; but I am not. I tried to acquire the accomplishment once, and ignobly failed. I could write short-hand slightly quicker than long-hand, but when written, I could not transcribe my jottings. Flanking a beautiful coast, mostly hill-fringed--with hills, too, of such metallic richness that lead and iron were positively to be quarried out of their bosoms--we steamed into the harbour of Malaga, and landed at the Custom-House quay. But there were no Customs' officers to trouble us with inquiry. A red-bearded, flat-capped, dirty fellow in bare feet, holding a bayoneted rifle with a jaunty clumsiness, accosted Señor Heredia with a laughing voice. He was a sentinel of the provisional government established in Malaga. The nature of that government may be judged from his frank avowal: "We've no police--no anything." There were French and German war-vessels at anchor, which was some guarantee of protection for strangers. A novel tricolour of red, white, and a washed-out purple had replaced the national flag. The Federal Republic existed there, and yet the city was quiet; and official bulletins were extant, recommending the citizens to preserve order. But this quietude was not to be relied on over-much. One of the magnificoes under the new _régime_ was a dancing-house keeper, and his principal claim to administrative ability lay in the ownership of a Phrygian cap. Another, who styled himself President of the Republic of Alhaurin de la Torre, a territory more limited than the kingdom of Kippen, had stabbed a lady at a masked ball a few months previously, for a consideration of sixty-five duros. Still, it would be unfair to infer from that example that every Malagueño was a mercenary ruffian, Señor Heredia related to me an anecdote of a poor man who had found a purse with value in it to the amount of thirty thousand reals, and had given it up without mention of recompense. But a city where the wine-shops had nine doors, and potato-gin was dispensed at a peseta the bottle, and there were "no police--no anything," was not a desirable residence; and, as I had no call there, and weeks might elapse before another revolution might be sprung, I gladly took train to the capital. Madrid was tranquil, but with no more confidence in the duration of tranquillity than when I left it. The army was still in a state akin to disruption, with this difference--the rascals who had rifled the pockets of the dead Ibarreta a few weeks before, would sell the bodies of their slain officers now, if there was any resurrectionist near to make a bid. Worse; I was given to understand that there were suspicions that the gallant staff-colonel had been shot by his own men. The dismissed gunners were still wearily beating the pavements, and a subscription organized on their behalf among the officers of the other branches of the service by the _Correo Militar_ was open. What were these gentlemen to do? There was a rumour that they had been invited to enter the French service, to which they would have been an undoubted acquisition, bringing with them skill, scientific knowledge, and experience. But they were Spaniards, not soldiers of fortune, and would decline to transfer their allegiance, even if France were disposed to bid for it. Still, what were they to do? In Spain as in Austria-- "Le militaire n'est pas riche, Chacun salt ça." But the _militaire_ must live. Othello's occupation being gone, the artillery officers had no alternative but to do what Othello would have done had he been a Spaniard--conspire. The usual manoeuvring and manipulations were going on as preparation for the election of the Constituent Cortes, and the extreme Republicans were full of faith in their approaching triumph all along the line. They were awaiting Señor Orense, but if he did not hasten it was thought events so important would eclipse his arrival that, when he did come, the Madrileños would pay as small heed to him as the Parisians did to Hugo when he surveyed the boulevards anew after years of exile. They would honour him with a procession, and no more. The venerable Republican, by the way, is a nobleman, Marquis of Albaida. But he is not equal to the democratic pride of Mirabeau, marquis, who took a shop and painted on the signboard, "_Mirabeau, marchand de draps._" "If you are a true Republican, why don't you renounce your title?" somebody asked once of Orense. "If it were only myself was concerned I would willingly," responded the Spaniard; "but I have a son!" Rousseau was a freethinker, but Rousseau had his daughters baptized all the same. Meanwhile the Carlists were making headway. The Vascongadas, Navarre, and Logroño, with the exception of the larger towns and isolated fortified posts, were now in their power. Antonio Dorregaray, who was in supreme command, was reported to have 3,200 men regularly organized, well clad, and equipped with Remingtons. The Remington had been selected so that the Royalists might be able to use the ammunition they reckoned upon helping themselves with from the pouches of the Nationalists. In addition to this force of 3,200, which might be regarded as the regular army of Carlism, there were formidable guerrilla bands scattered over the provinces. Our old acquaintance, Santa Cruz, had 900 followers in Guipúzcoa. The other cabecillas in that region were Francisco, Macazaga, Garmendia, Iturbe, and Culetrina, all men with local popularity and intimate knowledge of the mountains. In Biscay, the commander was Valesco, and his lieutenants were Belaustegui, del Campo, and the Marquis de Valdespina, son of the chieftain who raised the standard of revolution at Vitoria in 1833. Their factions were estimated at 2,500. After Dorregaray, the most dangerous opponent to the Government troops was Ollo, an old ex-army officer, who was licking the volunteers into shape; and after Santa Cruz, the most noted and dreaded chief of irregulars was Rada, who was also operating in "the kingdom," as their province is proudly called by the daring Navarrese. The elements in which the Royalists were wanting were cavalry and artillery; but they had some money, foreign friends were active, the French frontier was not too strictly watched nor the Cantabrian coast inaccessible, and Don Carlos--Pretender or King, as the reader chooses to call him--was biding his time in a villa not a hundred miles from Bayonne. When the hour was considered favourable, he was ready to cross the border and take the field, or rather the hills; and his presence, it was calculated, would be worth a _corps d'armée_ in the fillip it would give to the enthusiasm of his adherents. And yet the "only court" held its tertulias, and the doñas talked millinery, and bald politicians sighed for a snug post in the Philippines, and the gambling-tables and the bull-ring retained their spell upon the community. It was the old story: Rome was on the verge of ruin, and the senate of Tiberius discussed a new sauce for turbot. As I saw no immediate prospect of the outburst of those important events, which were cloud-gathering over Madrid, and nearly all my colleagues had departed, I resolved to pursue my journey to London. I had _carte blanche_ to return when I deemed there was no further scope for my pen; but there was an obstacle in the way. Miranda was the terminus of the rail to the north; the track thence to the Bidassoa had been closed by order of the lieutenants of his Majesty _in nubibus_, King Charles VII. In other words, 179 kilometres of the main iron line, the great artery of communication with France, were held by the insurgents. Obstacles are made to be met, and, if steadily met, to be overcome. Surely, I reasoned, there must be some intercourse carried on in these districts. I passed through territory occupied by Carlists before. Why not again? Besides, I had nothing to fear from the Carlists, the tramp carols in the presence of the footpad (which, I submit, is a neat paraphrase of a classic saw); and if I did chance to meet them, there would be that dear touch of romance for which the lady-reader has been looking out so long in vain. I started. The journey to Miranda I pass by. One is not qualified to write an essay on a country from inspection through the windows of a railway-carriage in motion, more particularly at night. As well attempt to describe a veiled panorama, unrolling itself at a hand-gallop. At Miranda, which was crowded with soldiers, there was a diligence that plied to San Sebastian by tacit arrangement with the knights of the road--that is, the adherents of Don Carlos. As the fares were very expensive, I suspect the speculator who ran the coach was heavily taxed for the privilege, and recouped himself by shifting the imposition to the shoulders of passengers. The day was fine, the roads were good, the vehicle was well-horsed, and we got away from the boundary of republican civilization at a rattling pace. My fellow-voyagers were mostly French, some of them of the gentle sex, and chattered like pies until they fell asleep. I believe it is admitted by those who know me best that I can do my own share of sleep. On the slightest provocation--yea, on what might be condemned as no reasonable provocation--I can drop my head upon my breast and go off into oblivion. Nor am I particular where I sit or if I sit at all. Any ordinary person can fall asleep on a sofa or at a sermon, but it requires a practitioner with an inborn faculty for the art to achieve the triumphs of somnolence which stand to my credit. I have taken a nap on horseback; I have marched for miles, a musket on my shoulder, in complete slumberous unconsciousness; I have nodded while Phelps was acting, snoozed while Mario was singing, and played the marmot while Remenyi was fiddling; awful confession, I have dozed through an important debate in the House of Commons! I am yawning at present. It is to be hoped the reader is not. And so I burned daylight the while we drove through a country reputed to be pregnant with surprises of scenery until, at long last, the diligence drew up in the straggling street of Tolosa. We halted here for dinner, and resumed our journey with a fresh team at an enlivening speed, until about two miles outside the town we came to an abrupt stop. "An accident, driver?" "No, señor, but the Carlists." Some of my fellow-passengers turned pale, the ladies did not know whether to scream or consult their smelling-bottles; and before they could decide, a tall, slight, gentlemanly-looking man of some four-and-twenty years, with a sword by his side, a revolver in his belt, an opera-glass slung across his shoulder, and a silver tassel depending from a scarlet boina, the cap of the country, appeared at the hinder door of the diligence, bowed, and asked for our papers. He glanced at them much as a railway-guard would at a set of tickets, inquired if we were carrying any arms or contraband despatches, and being answered in the negative, gave us a polite "Go you with God," and motioned to the driver that he might pass on. As we galloped off, all eyes were turned in the direction of the stranger; he leisurely walked over a field towards a hill, two peasants equipped with rifles and side-arms following at his heels. They were young and strong, and wore no nearer approach to uniform than their officer. "This is abominable," cried a French commercial traveller (so I took him to be), as soon as we had got out of hearing of the trio. "The notion of these three miscreants stopping a whole coachful of travellers in broad daylight is atrocious!" "They did not detain us long," said I. "They did us no harm," said another. "And that officer, I am sure, was very polite, and looked quite a D'Artagnan--so chivalrous and handsome," added one of the ladies. "They are no better than bandits," said the commercial traveller. "Driver, why did you not resist?" For reply, the driver pointed with his whip to a wall, under the lee of which a party of at least fifty armed men, portion of the main body from which the outpost of three had been detached, were smoking, chatting, or sleeping. The commercial traveller relapsed into silence. We met with no further adventure in our ride to the frontier, but experienced much fatigue. CHAPTER VIII. On the Wing--Ordered to the Carlist Headquarters--Another _Petit Paris_--Carlists from Cork--How Leader was Wounded--Beating-up for an Anglo-Irish Legion--Pontifical Zouaves--A Bad Lot--Oddities of Carlism--Santa Cruz Again--Running a Cargo--On Board a Carlist Privateer--A Descendant of Kings--"Oh, for an Armstrong Twenty-Four Pounder!"--Crossing the Border--A Remarkable Guide--Mountain Scenery--In Navarre--Challenged at Vera--Our Billet with the Parish Priest--The Sad Story of an Irish Volunteer--Dialogue with Don Carlos--The Happy Valley--Bugle-Blasts--The Writer in a Quandary--The Fifth Battalion of Navarre--The Distribution of Arms--The Bleeding Heart--Enthusiasm of the Chicos. AFTER a short stay in London I was despatched to Stockholm, to attend the coronation of Oscar II of Sweden and his spouse, which took place in the Storkyrkan, on the 12th of May. At the Hotel Rydberg I met my Madrid acquaintance, Mr. Russell Young, who was a bird of passage like myself, and had just arrived from Vienna, where he had been detailing the ceremonial at the opening of the International Exhibition in the Prater. While enjoying myself at a ball at the Norwegian Minister's, I received a telegraphic message, ordering me at once to the Austrian capital. I was very sorry to leave, for I was delighted with peaceful airy Stockholm and the free-hearted Swedes--it was such a change after Spain; but I had neither license nor leisure to grumble, and flitted to Vienna as fast as steam could carry me. The Weltausstellung did not prove to be a lodestone, although in justice it must be admitted it was one of the finest shows ever planned, and was fixed in one of the most agreeable of sites. It was too far away, however, to attract the British public, and there were rumours of cholera lurking in the Kaiserstadt; so I was recalled, but to be sent to Spain once more. My mission was to penetrate, if possible, to the headquarters of the Carlists, with the view of giving a fair and full report of the strength, peculiarities, and prospects of their movement. At the London office of the sympathizers with the cause I was furnished with the address of certain Carlists in confidential positions in France, and letters were sent on in advance, so as to secure me a favourable reception. Armed with a sheet of flimsy stamped in blue with the escutcheon of Charles VII., and the legend "Secretaria Militar de Lóndres," and with, what was more potent, a big credit on a banking-house, I started afresh on the now familiar route. Before undertaking the journey into the territory in revolt I halted at Bayonne to procure the necessary passes. These were obtained with ease from the Junta sitting in the Rue des Ecoles, the members of which professed that they desired nothing so much as the presence of the representatives of impartial foreign journals, so that the truth about the struggle should be made known to the rest of Europe. From Bayonne I proceeded to Biarritz, where I had a conference with the Duke de La Union de Cuba, a warm Carlist partisan, to whom I had an introduction, and thence I went to St. Jean de Luz, a drowsy, quaint, world-forgotten nook. A _petit Paris_ it was called in a vaunting quatrain by some minstrel of yore. But Brussels may be comforted. It is nothing of the kind, but something infinitely better. The breezes from the main and the mountains, from the Bay of Biscay and the Pyrenees, conspire to supply it with ozone. There is music in the boom of the surf as it pulsates regularly on the velvet sands of a semicircular inlet, where dogs frisk and youngsters gambol in the sunshine. In a hotel on the edge of that inlet, the Fonda de la Playa, where I put up, a young Irish gentleman named Leader was recuperating from a severe wound in the leg. He had received it in the service of Don Carlos, in a skirmish near Azpeitia, where he was the only man hit. He was out with a party of the guerrilleros, and came across a company of the Madrid troops. To encourage his own people, or rather the people with whom he had cast in his fortunes, he went well to the front, and mounting on a bank of earth, hurled defiance at the enemy. He was picked down by a stray shot, and if he had been taken prisoner it is probable that he would have paid for his temerity with his life. The Spaniards were not clement towards foreigners who interposed in their domestic quarrel. Leader was carried off by his companions and secreted in a peasant's hut. The troops, swearing vengeance, searched the hut next to it, but, by some accident, failed to continue the quest to the refuge of the wounded man. He bled profusely, but the hæmorrhage was finally arrested by some rude bandaging, and at night he was helped astride a donkey, and conveyed across the frontier into France. He told me he had suffered excruciating torments at every jolt of the jog-trotting animal on that mountain journey. Had the bullet struck him an inch higher he would have had to suffer amputation; but his luck stood to him, and at the time we met he was getting on fairly towards recovery, thanks to youth, a good constitution, and the healthy air of St. Jean de Luz. I could not understand the ardour of Leader's partisanship for the Carlists. He spoke the merest smattering of Spanish, and had no profound intimacy with the vexed question of Spanish politics or the rights of the rival Spanish houses. The ill-natured whispered that he was crying "Viva la República" when he was knocked over. It is possible, for he had fought for the French Republic with Bourbaki's army, and may, in his excitement, have forgotten under what flag he was serving. I take it he was a soldier by instinct, and ranged himself on the side of Don Carlos more from the love of adventure than from any other motive. He was a fine athletic young fellow, with a handsome determined cast of features. He had been an ensign in the 30th Foot, and had resigned his commission to enjoy a spell of active service when the Franco-German war was proclaimed. That he had behaved bravely in the campaign which led to internment in Switzerland was evidenced by the ribbon of the Legion of Honour which he wore. Leader was very anxious that an Anglo-Irish legion in aid of Don Carlos should be organized. I felt it my duty to warn those to whom he appealed to think twice before they embarked on such a crusade. He was very wroth with me for having thrown cold water on the project, but that did not affect me. I had more experience of such follies than he, and my conscience approved me. A man may be justified in playing with his own life, but he should be slow in playing with the lives of others. He prepares a vexing responsibility for himself if he is sensitive. In the next room to Leader was a fellow-enthusiast, Mr. Smith Sheehan, an ex-officer of Pontifical Zouaves, and son of a popular and eccentric town-councillor of Cork. He was an agile stripling, skilled in all gymnastic exercises. He had also done some fighting with the Carlists, and was in France on furlough, which the soldiers in the Royalist force appeared to have no insuperable difficulty in getting. He told me there was a large infusion of his old regiment amongst the guerrilleros, and that they helped to bind the partisan levies in the withes of discipline. Most of them had smelt gunpowder at Mentana and Patay. The famous cabecilla, Saballs, had been a captain at Rome, and Captain Wills, a Dutchman, who had been killed in a brush at Igualada, had been sergeant-major in Sheehan's company. There was another ex-British officer of short service, who had a remarkably imposing and well-cultivated growth of moustache. He was a violent doctrinaire Carlist, but suffered from a chronic malady which prevented him from taking the field; still there was none who could plot with a more tremendous air of mystery. He was a Carlist because it was "the correct thing" to be one in the fashionable ring at St. Jean de Luz, where he had settled, and because he inherited a name associated with chivalric insurrection. For the sake of his family I shall call him Barbarossa. He was no honour to his house, for he was an inveterate gambler, and was not careful in discharging the obligations he wantonly contracted. He is dead. His death was no loss to society. In fact, if the whole host of gamblers, lock, stock and barrel, were swept by a fairy-blast to the regions of thick-ribbed ice, the world would be the gainer. When I left Spain, Carlism was to be put down in a fortnight--in Madrid. Now it threatened to last as long as a Chinese play. The Royalists--I suppose they had earned the title to be so named by their perseverance--had achieved numerous small successes which had raised their _morale_, and they were being supplied with arms of precision from abroad, and trained to their use. They had even taken some mountain-guns from their enemy. Leader made me laugh with his accounts of Lizarraga shouting "Artillería al frente!" and a couple of mules, with one wretched little piece, moving forward; and of the intimidating clatter made by three shrunk cavaliers in cuirasses a world too wide for them, and alpargatas, trotting up a village street. The alpargata is the mountain-shoe of canvas, with a hempen sole, worn by the Basque peasants. The association of surcoats of mail and rope slippers is incongruous; but what does that reck? Those cuirasses were _spolia opima_. And Santa Cruz? The honest gentleman had retired into private life. His excesses had raised such a storm of opprobrium against the Carlists that they had to request him to desist. Lizarraga summoned him to render himself up a prisoner. "Come and take me," replied Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz had near two thousand followers; Lizarraga a few hundred. Lizarraga declined the invitation. But the priest caused seven-and-twenty Carabineros, taken prisoners at the bridge of Endarlasa, near Irun, to be shot, and this filled the cup to overflowing. The Carlists averred they would slay him; the Republicans vowed they would garrote him for a Madrid holiday; the French Government declared its intention of putting him under lock and key if it caught him within its jurisdiction. His band was disarmed "by order of the King," and dispersed, and the Cura himself nebulously vanished--whither we may see anon. There was a large accretion to the population of St. Jean de Luz in Iberian refugees, and as they sat and conversed under the foliage of the public promenade, frequent sighs might be overheard, and remarks that if this sort of thing were to go on, "Spain would soon be in as bad a condition as France." At all hours there came to the beach poor exiles of Spain, who turned their eyes sadly to the line where sky met ocean. Of what were their thoughts--of home and friends, of the flutters of the casino or the ecstasies of the bull-ring? If they were looking for the Spanish fleet they did not see it, for a reason as old as the "Critic." It was not in sight. They came down in numbers in front of my hotel at nine o'clock on the morning of Monday, July 28th, a few days after my arrival, when a strange yellow funnel turned the point, and a long low Red-Roverish three-masted schooner-yacht steamed into Socoa, the roadstead of St. Jean de Luz. If the exiles were correctly informed, that was the Spanish fleet in a sense--the notorious Carlist privateer, the _San Margarita_, which had recently landed arms and ammunition for the Royalists at Lequeieto and elsewhere. She had been doing a stroke of business in the same line that morning. In the grey dawn she had dropped into the embouchure of the Bidassoa, at a few hundred yards from the town of Fontarabia. The work was well and quickly done. Boats requisitioned by friends on land put off to her, and returned laden with bales of merchandise. These artless bales were packages of breechloaders, with bayonets to match, wrapped in sail-cloth. As soon as they were received on shore they were distributed amongst some thousands of Carlists in waiting, who at once proceeded to fix bayonets, fall into ranks, and with shouts of exultation march off in good order. Meanwhile, the "volunteers of liberty," as the Basque Republicans called themselves, ensconced their persons out of range in a sort of castle beside the church of Fontarabia's "wooded height," and amused themselves taking pot-shots at the rising sun. But they did not venture from their shelter; they knew a large body of armed Royalists were watching their movements from the summit of Cape Higuer, and only awaited the provoke to pounce down upon and swallow them. A detachment of Frenchmen from the frontier hamlet of Hendaye quietly took up ground on the strand to see that there was no breach of neutrality, and had an uninterrupted view of the whole operation. As soon as the daring little privateer had done her work she innocently steamed to Socoa; the Carlists on the hills waved adieu and disappeared; the French soldiers returned to their quarters; and the Fontarabian "volunteers of liberty "--well, most probably they swore terribly, and effected a masterly retrograde movement on the nearest posada. I had a call to board the _San Margarita_. Not a boat could be had in St. Jean de Luz for love or money; the passage from the sea into the harbour is narrow, and the fishermen, though hardy navigators, are shy of facing the current when the sea is rough. Leader and myself walked by the goat-path on the crags leading to the southern side of the harbour so as to avoid the bar, and succeeded in chartering a skiff at Socoa. A quarter of an hour's pull brought us alongside the yacht, and on sending up our cards we were at once invited on board by the owner. To my surprise I discovered that the entire crew was British, as reckless a set of dare-devils as ever cut out a craft from under an enemy's guns. The skipper, Mr. Travers, was a Cork man, an ex-officer of the Indian Navy, who had lost a finger during the Mutiny; but the life and soul of the enterprise was an ex-officer of the Austrian and Mexican armies, Charles-Edward Stuart, Count d'Albanie, great-grandson of "the Young Pretender." His uncle, John Sobieski Stuart, had resigned his claim to the throne of England on his behalf,[C] so that I actually shook the hand of the man who under other circumstances might be wielding the sceptre of that empire on which the sun never sets. Instead of a crown he wore the genuine old Highland bonnet--not that modern innovation, the military feather-bonnet. In face this descendant of royalty was an unmistakable Stuart, with the characteristic aquiline nose, and a proud dignity of expression. He might have sat for the portrait of Charles the Martyr-King, by Vandyck, in Windsor. He was a convinced and earnest supporter of the claims of Cárlos Séptimo, whom he regarded as a cousin, and a sort of modern counterpart of the young Chevalier, the "darling Charlie" of Jacobite minstrelsy. He received us with the hospitality of his nation, and we had a long chat as we paced the deck briskly, the Count discussing the prospects of the rising, and then verging off into gay anecdotes of his military career in Austria, and inquiries after mutual acquaintances in London. By-and-by Captain Travers made his appearance, a tall weather-beaten navigator in orthodox naval dress, with a glass in his eye. He bowed severely to the Stuart, who as coldly returned his salute. It was easy to perceive that there was a restraint in the demeanour of the men on both sides; but there was a tacit armistice for the occasion. I heard afterwards that they did not talk to each other, except on strict matters of duty, and when taking their short walks on deck, one confined himself religiously to the larboard, the other to the starboard. Travers took me in tow, while the alert Count with his quick manner strode to and fro with Leader, and kept up a jerky fire of conversation nearly all to himself, occasionally twirling his peaked beard. Travers and I lolled over the bulwarks, and laughed and sampled the contents of an aqua-vitæ bottle, "Special Jury" whisky from Ireland, and I learned that this ill-assorted pair had been sharing some close hazards on their audacious cruiser. A few days previously they had been chased by _El Aspirante_, a Spanish gun-boat, which gave them eight shots. One caught them on the port quarter, and shivered some timbers, but effected no more serious damage. "I wish we had only an Armstrong twenty-four pounder close handy," said the mate, "and we'd have saved them 'ere dons the price of a coffin, I'd take my davy!" From what I saw of the seamen, I think this was no empty boast. Some of them had served with one Captain Semmes on a certain craft called the _Alabama_, and had been picked up after the fight with the _Keasarge_, off Cherbourg, by Mr. John Lancaster's yacht, the _Deerhound_. There is no need for concealment now, so that I may freely admit that the _Deerhound_ and the _San Margarita_ were one and the same. Travers, who was in love with the yacht, told me if he had another blade to the screw he could give leg-bail to the fastest ship in the Spanish navy. At leaving, I was asked to take a trip with them; they were about to visit their floating arsenal in the Bay of Biscay, load, and try to run another cargo. I respectfully declined--fortunately for myself; my orders were to get to the Carlist headquarters, not to go playing Paul Jones. Leader and Smith Sheehan were about to cross the border, and readily acceded to my request to form one of the party. We rose at daybreak next morning and looked out of window for the _San Margarita_. The roadstead of Socoa was a blank. She had steamed away during the night. After the customary chocolate we started blithely, in a light basket-carriage with a pair of fast-trotting ponies, that whisked us in less than two hours to the foot of the Pyrenees. Here we had to alight, the road up the mountain being impracticable for vehicles. A boy guide was in waiting to show us over the border by the smuggler's path--a wild short-cut through a labyrinth of brushwood. The guide was a remarkable youth in his way; he understood not a syllable of French or Spanish, and spoke only Basque which none of us comprehended, so that our parley with him was somewhat uninteresting. Yet I was anxious to elicit the opinions of that guide. A lad who could strike the path up the mountain with such truth might, by some instinct, have seen his way through Spanish politics. Our walk was a trial of endurance. I had traversed the Pyrenees in snow, and that was fatiguing enough in all conscience; but now the sun was beating cruelly on the parched herbage, and plodding up the ascent was like treading burning marl. I had to cry halt half-a-dozen times before we reached the summit; and yet that marvellous guide, with the baggage of all three on his head, kept on with a springy step and serene smile, like the youth in "Excelsior." It was an alternation of wheezing and stumbling with me, with a continuous ooze of perspiration, till I arrived heaving and panting on the crown of the ridge, and flung myself on the turf beside a pile of planking fresh from the woodcutter's axe. There was no further need to be wary, for this was Spain. We were over the border, and now my companions could breathe freely in every sense. Before they had passed the imaginary line they were liable to be arrested by the gendarmes, conducted back and interned, for they had that about their persons which betrayed that they were no innocent travellers. At every noise ahead, a scud was made to the cover of the tall ferns and brambles by the wayside, and an advance party of one was thrown out to reconnoitre. The precautions were superfluous, if we knew but all. From the 15th of July, the French patrols had got the hint to be blind. So lax was the cordon on the day we crossed, that a brigade of Carlists, each man with a repeating rifle on his shoulder and two revolvers in his belt, might have gone into Spain and never have had their sight offended by a solitary French uniform. The view from the comb of the hills, as grasped on a sunny day, repays all the toil and trouble of the ascent; and looking round, one begins to realize the fascination of mountain-climbing. On one side extend the plains of France, washed by the greenish-blue waves of the Bay of Biscay, and studded as with pearls by the coast-towns of Fontarabia, St. Jean de Luz, Biarritz, Bayonne, and so on northwards till the vision fails. On the other side rise in convoluting swells the mountains of Navarre and Guipúzcoa, their slopes dyed in every shade of green from grass and lichen, shrub and tree, except where the naked rocks, bursting with ore, expose themselves. Iron, lead, silver, are all to be found in the bosom of the earth in this richest and most beautiful of lands. Nature has been lavish beyond measure, and man, instead of using her gifts, has ungratefully diverted them for generations to the purposes of guerrilla warfare and cheating the Custom-House officers. But this high moral tone hardly sits well on a man who was aiding and abetting the entry of a couple of foreign free-lances, on homicidal thoughts intent, and perhaps doing a stroke of contraband on his own account. We suffered no molestation; but others might not have escaped unpleasantness. The agent of a Hatton Garden jeweller might have had to pay toll, if the story were true that a few of the dispersed "Black Legion" had got off with their rifles and started a joint-stock company in the bush-whacking line, and were doing a pretty fair business. The descent on the Spanish side was almost precipitous, and had to be effected with exceeding care. At times we ran down the track, rugged with sharp crags, almost head foremost, and only saved ourselves from falling by clinging to the nearest sapling. But there is an end to everything, and at last we came on the road that dips into the village of Echalar, in the district of Pampeluna, province of Navarre. Here we dismissed our guide, and here I encountered, for the first time, a regularly organized Carlist company, detached from the fifth battalion of Navarre, which was in garrison at Vera, some eight miles distant; but as I shall have opportunity to speak of the entire battalion soon, I defer comment on its appearance. My companions were desirous of pushing forward, and the provisional alcalde of the village gave us a trap to take us on. There is an excellent road by the mountain-side, until a tunnel to the right is reached, when we entered a most picturesque, well-wooded defile, through which the Bidassoa pours its waters. We dashed along gaily until we came in sight of the steeple of the church of Vera at twilight. A cry of "Who goes there?" from the gloom arrested us at the entrance of the town. Leader sung out, "España." Again came the sentinel's cry, "What people?" and cheerily ran the answer, "Voluntarios de Carlos Séptimo!" "Pass," was the reply; and we took the street at a trot, and pulled up at the door of the parish priest's dwelling, where the Irish soldiers of fortune promised me a billet for the night. The kindly pastor was equal to expectations; we had a cordial welcome, a good dinner, and beds with clean sheets. Sad tidings met my companions--those of the death of a young friend, Mr. John Scannel Taylor, a native of Cork, in the service of Don Carlos. A few months previously he had been a promising law student in the Queen's University of Ireland, with every prospect of a bright career before him. He arrived from England in the middle of June, and attached Himself to the partida of General Lizarraga in order to be near his fellow-countryman, Smith Sheehan. Previous to Mr. Sheehan's returning to Bayonne with despatches, he tossed up a coin to decide whether he or Taylor should have the choice of the duty. Poor Taylor won, and elected to remain with Lizarraga, as there was likelihood of fighting at hand. The very next day Yvero, where the Republicans held a strongly-intrenched position, was attacked, and the young Irish volunteer made himself conspicuous in the onset. While advancing in the open, setting a pattern of bravery to all by the steady way he delivered his fire, the gallant fellow was struck by a bullet in the leg. He kept on limping until he was touched a second time in the arm, but still he persevered with a dogged courage, when a third bullet struck him in the forehead, and he dropped with outspread arms, raising a little cloud of dust. He must have been stone-dead before he reached the ground. His conduct was "muy valiente," so said his Spanish comrades. He was picked up after the affair, and decently interred side by side with two officers who met their deaths in his company. This was the first time he was under fire, as it was the last; but there is a fatality in those things. This young Irishman, Taylor, was luckier than some of his fellows in one respect. Short as he had been in the service, he had attracted the notice of Don Carlos. His comrade Sheehan and he were pointed out to "the King" by Lizarraga as two modest deserving young soldiers who had offered to fight in the ranks--a trait of unselfishness that must have astonished the Carlist leaders, as most of the volunteers they had from France came out with the full intention of commanding brigades, when divisions were not to be had. "I wish I had a thousand like them," said Lizarraga, who was a genuine soldier, and one of the few Spaniards not unjust to foreigners. Don Carlos shook hands with Mr. Taylor and thanked him. His Majesty spoke some few minutes in French with Mr. Sheehan, and, as the conversation gives some insight into Carlism, I may venture to repeat it. Don Carlos.--"You have served before?" Irish Soldier.--"Yes, sire, in the Pontifical Zouaves." Don Carlos.--"Ha! good. In the same company with my brother, perhaps?" Irish Soldier.--"No; but I had the privilege of knowing Don Alfonso." Don Carlos.--"He is in Catalonia now, and has many of your old companions in arms with him. You are serving the same cause here as in Rome--the cause of religion and of order and of legitimate right." Irish Soldier (bowing).--"I should not be here if I did not feel that, your Majesty." Don Carlos (smiling).--"I thank you sincerely. General Lizarraga tells me you are Irish." Irish Soldier.--"I come from the south of Ireland, sire." Don Carlos.--"A country I feel much sympathy for. She has been very unhappy, has she not? Are things better now?" Irish Soldier.--"For some years Ireland has been, improving, sire." Don Carlos.--"That is well. She deserves better fortune, for she has a noble, faithful people." Don Carlos drew back a pace and made a stiff military nod; the Irishman brought his rifle to the "present arms," turned on his heel, and marched back to the ranks, and thus the interview terminated. The valley in which the little town of Vera nestles might have been that where Rasselas was brought up, so secluded, smiling, and peaceful it looks. The Bidassoa, famous in tales of the Peninsular War, flows through it, no doubt; but the Bidassoa here is a trout stream winding through meadows and fields of maize, and thoughts of bloodshed are the last that would occur to anyone contemplating its mild current. The mountains walling in the vale are lined with growths of heather, fern, and blossoming furze to their very crests, and the verdurous picture they hem is one of poetic calm and plenty. Labourers are digging away in the fields below, the tinkle of cow-bells is heard from the pastures, and anon blends with their Arcadian music the soft chiming of church-bells summoning to prayer; there is a mill with its clacking wheel, and a foundry with a tuft of smoke curling from its chimney; orchards and vineyards lie side by side with patches of corn, and along the high-road peasants pass and repass, shortening their way with song and laughter, and strings of mules or droves of swine scamper by. Another Sweet Auburn of Goldsmith, in another Happy Valley of Johnson, this cosy Vera with its river and trees would seem to any English tourist ignorant of its history; but how the English tourist would be misled! Though the peasants laugh and sing, and the labourers dig, and there are outer tokens of peace, there is no peace in the valley or town; there are sights and sounds there of war, and that of the worst kind--civil war. The mill is grinding corn for the commissariat stores, the foundry turns out shot instead of ploughshares, the boxes on the mules' backs are packed with ammunition. If you listen, you will hear the roll of drums and the shrill blowing of bugles more often than the soothing bells; if you watch, you will notice that not one man in ten is unprovided with a firearm, for this quiet-looking place is the very hotbed of Carlism; the insurrectionary headquarters for the province of Navarre; the arsenal and recruiting depôt for all the provinces in revolt. The disciples of the rod have fled from it, and those of the musket have come in their stead. At half-past four on the morning after our arrival in the mountains, I was roused from a profound sleep by the sound of the bugle. A solitary performer was blowing spiritedly into his instrument; what piece of music he was trying to execute I could not make out, but that his primary object was to "murder sleep" was evident, and he succeeded. Losing all note of time and place, I thought for a moment I was in London, and that this was a visit from the Christmas waits. But there was a liveliness in the tones incompatible with the season when the clarionet, trombone, and cornet-à-piston form a syndicate of noise, and parade the streets for halfpence. The bugle was in a jocular mood. Judge of my astonishment when I learned that this merry melody was the Carlist's reveille! The insurgents had got so far with their military organization that they had actually buglers and bugle-calls. Nay, more, they had drummers and a brass band! Now I think of it, there is an inadvisability in my calling them insurgents while in their power; but what phrase am I to employ? In the pass in my pocket I am recommended to "the Chiefs of the Royal Army of his Catholic Majesty Charles VII.," as an inoffensive "corresponsal particular," to whom aid and protection may be safely extended. But then there are the Republicans, and if they catch me giving premature recognition in pen-and-ink to the Royalist cause, they may rightly complain that a British subject is flying in the face of the great British policy of non-intervention. I think I have discovered an escape from the dilemma. The Carlists speak of themselves as the Chicos, "the bhoys," so Chicos let them be for the future, and their opponents the troops--not that it is by any means intended to be conveyed that the troops so called are much more martial than the Chicos. Well, the boys have got buglers who bugle with a will. They blow a blast to rouse us, another for distribution of rations; they have the assembly, the retreat, the "lights out," and all the rest, as regular as the Diddlesex Militia. I got up in the Cora's house, looked at the Cura's pictures--which were more meritorious as works of piety than as works of art--and hastened to the Plaza, where I was told there was about to be a muster of the Chicos, and I would have a leisurely opportunity of passing them under inspection. The Plaza is a flagged space enclosed on two sides by houses, some of which are over a couple of centuries old, with armorial bearings sculptured over the doors; on the third by the Municipality; and on the fourth by a grey church, lofty and large, seated on an eminence and approached by a flight of stone steps. The Municipality is a massive building, level with the street, with a colonnaded portico, and a front over which some artist in distemper had passed his brush. This façade is eloquent with mural painting, if one could only understand it all. There are symbolic figures of heroic size, coveys of cherubs, hatchments, masonic-looking emblems, and inscriptions. A Carlist sentry, dandling a naked bayonet in the hollow of his arm, was pacing to and fro in the portico, and the remaining warriors of the post were lounging about, cigarette in mouth, much as our own fellows do outside the guard-house on Commercial Square, at Gibraltar. I was curious to see the Carlist uniform. Assuredly the uniform does not make the soldier, but it goes a great way towards it. Uniformity was the least striking feature in the dress of the men before me. They were clad in the ordinary garb of the mountain-peasants. Short coarse jackets and loose trousers, confined at the waist by a faja, or girdle of bright-coloured woollen stuff, were worn by some; blouses of serge, knee-breeches, and stockings or gaiters, by others; but all, without exception, had the boina, or pancake-shaped woollen cap of the Basque provinces, and the alpargatas, or flat-soled canvas shoes. By-and-by was heard a bugle-blast and the quick, regular tread of marching men, and the head of a company came in sight. In perfect time the company paced, four deep, into the Plaza, halted, and fell into line in two ranks. Thus, in succession, seven other companies arrived, forming the fifth, battalion of Navarre, a vigorous, wiry set of men, impressing the experienced eye as excellent raw material for soldiers, albeit got up in costume very much resembling that of brigands of the Comic Opera. Physically, the natives of the hilly northern provinces are the pick of Spain. The battalion had its flag, white between two stripes of scarlet, on which was inscribed the name of the corps, and the legend, "The country for ever, but always in honour." This was, of course, written in Basque, of which my rendering is rather free, but it gives exactly the sense of the sentiment. It was soon palpable to anybody, who knows anything of such matters, that the Chicos were weak in officers of the proper stamp, and still more so in under-officers. Smoking was common in the ranks, and when the men stood at ease, they stood very much at ease indeed. The officers, in some cases, were distinguished in dress from the privates solely by gold or silver tassels dependent from their boinas, and their boinas were of blue, white, brown, or even Republican red, according to the fancy of the wearer. All the officers had revolvers and swords. The men were armed somewhat indiscriminately, one company with Chassepots, another with Remingtons; there were carbines, and percussion rifles, and smooth-bores, and even a few flint-locks; but I failed to discern a single specimen of the trabuco, the bell-mouthed blunderbuss we are accustomed to associate with the Spanish knight of the road. Ammunition was carried in a waist-belt, with a surrounding row of leather tubes lined with tin, each of which held a cartridge--in fact, the Circassian cartouch-case. There were many grizzled weather-stained veterans in the ranks who had fought with Zumalacárregui and Mina in the Seven Years' War; but as a rule the Chicos were literally boys in age, and here and there a child of twelve or fourteen might be seen measuring himself beside a patriotic musket. In relief to the peasant dresses were to be noticed frequent attempts at more soldierly costume in the shape of worn tunics of the French National Guards or Moblots, and some half-dozen uniforms of the Spanish Line, with the glazed képi exchanged for the boina. On the top of many of the boinas, fastening the tassel, was a huge brass button, with the monogram of the "King," and the inscription, "Voluntarios, Dios, Patria, y Rey." Another sign particular of this irregular force that impressed me much was a bleeding heart embroidered on a small scrap of cloth, and sewn on the left breasts of nearly all on the ground. This appeared to be worn as a charm against bullets; and with a strong notion that it would protect them in the hour of danger, I am convinced nine out of ten of those peasants carried it. It may be as well to add that inside that embroidered patch were written, in Spanish, the words, "Stop; the heart of Jesus is here; defend me, Jesus." Many others of the Carlists carried scapulars, rosary beads, and blessed medals as pious reminders. The habit of wearing this representation of the heart of the Saviour over the region of the human heart dates so far back as the Vendean War, and had been introduced in the present instance by M. Cathelineau, grandson of the celebrated French Royalist loader. The battalion had assembled on the Plaza to give up their old arms, and to receive a portion of those which had been landed from the _San Margarita_. They deposited those they had with them by sections in the Municipality, and emerged with the others, bright, brand-new Berdan breechloaders. They seemed proud of their weapons; some went so far as to kiss them; and, if looks were any criterion of feelings, their glowing faces said, as emphatically as it could be said, "Now that we have good tools, we shall show what good work we can do." Boxes of metallic ball-cartridges, centre-primed, were piled on the Plaza, and were quickly and quietly opened and distributed. Not an accident occurred in the process. Many a less wonderful phenomenon has been advertised as a miracle. I fully expected to have my coat spattered with some warrior's brains every other moment, with such a reckless rashness were the rifle-muzzles poked about. One shot did go off, while a high private was trying if his cartridge fitted to the chamber; the charge singed the hair of a captain, and the bullet lodged in the middle of the word "Prudencia" on the façade of the Municipality. The captain would have it that he was killed, spun round on his own centre like a humming-top, and finally, coming to himself, shook out his clothes in search of the lead. There was a roar of laughter, and the careless soldier who had endangered the life of his officer was allowed to pass without rebuke. That was the worst point in Carlist discipline I had seen yet. There was too much familiarity towards superiors; the rank and file lacked that fear and respect for the officers which are the strongest cement of the military fabric. This was to be explained partly because the officers were not above the men in social position, and partly because any enterprising gentleman who bought gold braid and tassels, sported a sword, and appraised himself an officer, was accepted at his own valuation. CHAPTER IX. The Cura of Vera--Fueros of the Basques--Carlist Discipline--Fate of the _San Margarita_--The Squadron of Vigilance--How a Capture was Effected--The Sea-Rovers in the Dungeon--Visit to the Prisoners--San Sebastian--A Dead Season--The Defences of a Threatened City--Souvenirs of War--The Miqueletes--In a Fix--A German Doctor's Warning. THESE horrible and bloodthirsty Carlists turned out to be amiable individuals on acquaintance. I suppose they could put on a frown for their enemies, but for my companions and myself they had nothing but open smiles and hearty hand-grips. One great recommendation was our being billeted on the parish priest. His reverence had none of the Santa Cruz in him; he was a gentle, zealous, studious clergyman, yet was filled with the purest enthusiasm for the cause of what he regarded as legitimacy. The Don Carlos who raised the standard in 1833, he maintained, was the rightful heir to the throne of Spain. The law by which the succession had been changed was an _ex post facto_ law, passed after his birth, and not promulgated until Ferdinand VII. had a female child. In May, 1845, that Don Carlos, really Charles V., resigned in favour of his son, Charles VI., and in September, 1868, he, in his turn, relinquished his rights to the present claimant to the throne, Charles VII., whom might God preserve. The Cura was unusually civil towards us because we were Irish, and as Irish were presumably of clean lineage--that is to say, free from kinship with Jews or infidels. As reputed descendants of settlers from Bilbao, we were entitled to a full share in all the privileges of the province of Biscay. This was as well to know. It was a consolation to us to learn that it was an advantage to be Irish somewhere under the sun. The King of Spain is but Lord of Biscay, and has to swear under the oak-tree of Guernica to respect the fueros or customs of the province. Don Carlos had so done; he was in Spain, it was true, but where he was at the moment the Cura was unable to say; his court was perambulatory. The fueros were abolished by the Cortes in 1841 and but partially restored in 1844, so that in inscribing them as one of the watchwords on their banner, the Basques were fighting for something more solid than glory. They cling to their rights as Britons do to Magna Charta, only with this difference--they have a clearer conception of what they are. I had been trying to arrive at some knowledge of the fueros, and obtained much information from a volume by the late Earl of Carnarvon.[D] Guipúzcoa, Alava, and Biscay, though an integral part of the Spanish monarchy, for ages enjoyed their own laws, and a recapitulation of some which were in force in Biscay will be a fair sample of all. Biscay was governed by its own national assemblies, arranged its own taxation, yielded contributions to the Sovereign as a free gift, had no militia laws, was exempt from naval impressment, provided for its own police in peace and its own defence in war. No monopoly, public or private, could be established there. Only Biscayans by birth could be nominated to ecclesiastical appointments; every Biscayan was noble, and his house was inviolable; there was perfect equality of civil rights. In short, those Basques flourished under the amplest measure of Home Rule, and had all the benefits of the Habeas Corpus Act under another name long before that Bill was legalized by the Parliament of Charles II. The liberty-loving Basques were tolerant as well as independent. The Inquisition was never vouchsafed breathing-room in their midst. When Protestants escaped from France after the massacre of St. Bartholomew, they were treated to asylum amongst them.[E] We moved about among the guerrilleros. They were mostly light-limbed and stalwart men, and were none the worse for the sprinkling of seniors of sixty and lads of sixteen. Many had the bow-legs of the mountaineer, built like the hinder pair of artillery-horses--the legs that tell of muscularity and lasting stamina. Their drill was very loose, and skill in musketry left much to be desired. They had no perception of distance-judging, and some were so grossly ignorant of the mechanism of their weapons that they knocked off the back-sights of their rifles, alleging that they hindered them from taking correct aim. The Marquis de la Hormazas--a meagre, tall, elderly man--was commandant of the battalion, and was stern in the exaction of discipline. During the stay of the Navarrese at Vera, a captain was degraded to the ranks for having entered the lists of illicit love. The Frenchwoman who was the partner of his amour was politely shown over the mountain and warned not to return. The battalion left for the interior of the province. Leader was still too weak to enter on a campaign; Sheehan had to look after the belongings of his comrade Taylor, and break the news of his death to his mother; and I saw plainly that it was out of the question attempting to catch up the flitting headquarters of Don Carlos without a horse. Besides, I had to complete arrangements for the transmission of letters and telegraphic messages when I had any to send, and for the reception of money; in sum, to open up communication with a base. So we returned to France as we came. On arriving at St. Jean de Luz, a startling rumour awaited us. The steel-built Carlist privateer had been captured at the mouth of the Adour; she had been taken a prize to San Sebastian; Stuart and Travers were in close custody; and there were alarmists who whispered that they would be tried by drum-head as pirates, and hung up in chains in the cause of humanity. It was well for me I did not accept the invitation to that water-party. I ran over to Bayonne to ascertain what particulars I could, saw the Carlist Junta, the British and Spanish Vice-Consuls, and from their combined and conflicting narratives was able to sift some grains of the authentic. But the sudden first report was undeniable. The weasel had been caught asleep. The _San Margarita_ was a serious loss to the cause. She had cost £3,500. She was very fast, being capable of a speed of between ten and eleven knots an hour, and should be equal to fourteen knots if her lifting screw had another blade. A three-bladed screw had been provided, and was to have been fitted to her stern on her return from the ill-fated expedition which put an end to her roving career. It was true that the descendant of kings was under bolts and bars. The French journals described him as a "Monsieur Stuart, a Scotch colonel, entrusted by the English Catholics with collections for the Carlist cause." They had never heard of his royal lineage, of his connection with the Austrian cavalry, or of his exploits by the side of the unhappy Maximilian in Mexico. He assumed the responsibility of ownership of the vessel. The hue-and-cry description of him was "a man of forty to forty-five years of age, over middle height, figure spare, features thin, and resolute in expression." The burly bronzed Corkonian was also in durance, and with the pair of officers were a picked crew of thirteen Englishmen, including engineers, steward, stokers, and able-bodied seamen, and one Spanish cabin-boy. A Basque pilot, an old smuggler, familiar with every nook and crevice of the Bay of Biscay, had escaped. If reports were credible, the _San Margarita_ had already landed two millions of cartridges, and an immense quantity of arms. Much vexation was caused to the officers of the Spanish navy in those quarters by the stories of the daring feats she had achieved, absolutely discharging a cargo once on the very wharf of Lequeieto, as if she were a peaceful merchantman, and on another occasion sending off rifles and ammunition by small boats in the dead of night, a man-of-war lying sleepily oblivious of what was going on just outside her. It was felt that her continued impunity was a reproach, and three small vessels of the Spanish navy were commissioned to cruise between Bilbao and Bayonne on the look-out for her. This little squadron of vigilance consisted of _El Aspirante_ and _El Capricho_, gun-boats, and the _Buenaventura_, a three-gun steam-brig. On Tuesday, August 12th, the _Buenaventura_, flying a George's Jack at her peak, was off Fontarabia for a portion of the day, close in shore. At nightfall she disappeared--it is now supposed into the sheltered and almost invisible inlet of Los Pasages, between Fontarabia and San Sebastian. Before daybreak on Wednesday, the Carlists under Dorregaray swarmed down from the hills covering Cape Higuer. The _San Margarita_ came in sight, and began landing arms in the same spot where the undisturbed landing of the 28th July had been effected. Not more than three hundred stand had been put on shore, and about one hundred thousand cartridges in boxes, labelled in English "metallic rolled cartridges, centre-primed," when she had to get away, as the daylight began to play the informer. She dropped down towards Bayonne, and appears to have reached a point some four miles from the French shore (the exact distance is a moot question), where she laid to and allowed her furnaces to cool The men were "dead tired out" after their night's work, and the captain considered that he was within the protection of French waters. But there is a very ancient proverb about a pitcher and a veil, and the period of its realization had been reached at last Whilst the _San Margarita_ was effecting the landing, a coastguard's boat had slipped from under the heights of Fontarabia, and given notice of what was going on to the _Buenaventura_ in Los Pasages, and the brig steamed out, still with the British colours at her peak Whilst the Carlist privateer was motionless in fancied security--there was some want of prudence or vigilance there, surely--the gun-brig crept down and overhauled her before alarm could be given, and the rakish schooner-yacht, the skimmer of the seas, had the humiliation of falling a prey to a wretched slow boat that she could laugh at with steam up in the open sea. The arrest was made in the usual manner, and the captors behaved with the customary naval courtesy. They were over-joyed at their good fortune, and gave their prisoners to eat and to drink--champagne to the officers and chacoli to the men. They towed their prize into the bay of St. Sebastian, and there was triumph. The yellow and scarlet flag of Spain was over the wee _San Margarita_ as she entered, and Colonel Stuart and Captain Travers and their companions must have felt sore, for all the good cheer and generous wine. Still there was quite a courtly scene on board--hand-shakings and reciprocal compliments--as they were marched off to the dungeon of the Castillo de la Mota on a hill in the city, where they were incarcerated. There they did not fall on such pleasant lines as afloat. The Republicans lost no time in unloading the vessel. They took off her, with a hurry that betrayed apprehension, 1,545 carbines and six Berdan breech-loaders, with a number of armourer's tools. It was remarked that the rifles supplied to the regular troops from Madrid were sighted to eight hundred metres, but that the range of those seized from the Carlists did not exceed five hundred. I went over to San Sebastian by tug from Socoa on the 16th of August, and sent up my card to M. de Brunet, the British Vice-Consul. He said he had called on the prisoners, and that the sailors murmured at their treatment. If I went to the citadel, after three--as it was Saturday afternoon, and visiting hours commenced then--I could see them without difficulty. I did clamber up the hill, and found this was not the case. On owning that I had no pass from the military governor, I was denied admittance. Happening to meet the commandant, I represented what I wanted, and he very civilly granted me leave to visit the prisoners "para un momento." As the gates were thrown open Stuart advanced and met me, grasping my hand cordially, and slipping a letter up the sleeve of my coat. He had caught sight of me labouring up the hill, and had immediately hastened to scribble a few lines which he trusted to my sympathy with misfortune to smuggle to their destination for him. He was not mistaken, and in so doing I had no qualm of conscience. I accompanied him to his cell, and he told me the story of the capture of the _San Margarita_. It was substantially as I have related; they thought they were in a _mare clausum_, at all events they had drifted out of it on the tide of fate; but there was a nice question of international law. The _ruse_ of hoisting the British flag was legitimate if the _Buenaventura_ substituted her own flag before proceeding to board them. The _San Margarita_ had the flags of more than one nation in her lockers; but the gun-brig had no power to act the policeman in neutral waters. There was the point. Travers was in a separate lodging; they had been accommodated at first in the one cell, but they could not agree--ashore as afloat the old feud existed. However, both assented to a truce in order to have a talk with me. They were cheerful, had cigars _ad libitum_ (at their own expense, of course), and were permitted to get their rations from the Hôtel de Londres in the city. The cells they occupied were bare, white-washed, low-ceiled rooms, some eight paces by six. They were not so clean or well-ventilated as Newgate cells, and the beds were spread on the floor. The captives had access to newspapers and writing materials, and it is but the due of the officers in charge to testify that they were extremely affable and disposed to make their prisoners as comfortable as possible. Still, in the close, stifling weather, to be locked up within the narrow circuit of a dungeon was limbo. The pair wore their own clothes, Travers still retaining a navy-jacket with brass buttons engraved with the initials of some yacht club, and did not complain of having been subjected to indignities. While I was with them the shadow of a face darkened the window; it was a Carlist prisoner who had hoisted himself up on the shoulders of a comrade from a yard below; he had a letter in his mouth. I took it, and slipped him a bundle of cigars for distribution among his fellow cage-birds. From this it may be deduced that the gaol regulations were not very stringent. The Carlists were treated as forfeit of war, not felons, and had no honest chance of illuminating their brows with the martyr halo of Baron von Trenck or Silvio Pellico. San Sebastian is the most modern town in the Peninsula, having been re-built in 1816, three years after its destruction by the incensed allied troops. It is a great summer resort of wealthy Spanish idlers--a sort of Madrid-super-Mare. The attractions of the capital are to be had there, with the supplementary advantages of pure air, mountain scenery, and luxurious sea-bathing on a level sandy beach. There is a public casino, and a score of clandestine hells where a fortune can be lost in a night at monté--in short, every infernal facility for Satanic gambling. Cigarettes are cheap, and so are knives. There is an Alameda, where the band plays, and a passable imitation, of the Puerta del Sol, less the fountain, in the broad arcaded Plaza de la Constitution. There is a small theatre, a spacious bull-ring, and several commodious churches, where Pepita can talk the language of fans to her heart's content. Every attraction of Madrid which could reasonably be expected is to be had, I repeat, and hidalgos and sloe-eyed senoras speckle the promenades in the gloaming, and impart a mingled aroma of garlic and gentility, pomade and pretentiousness, to the chief town of Guipúzcoa. San Sebastian would be for Madrileños what Paris is for Bostonians, if a few of the attractions of the "only court," which could not reasonably be expected, were not lacking--say an occasional walk round of the Intransigentes, to show their political muscles; a grandiloquent, frothy word-tempest in the Congress, and the Sunday cock-fight. I am speaking, be it understood, of San Sebastian in ordinary summers. A short twelvemonth before my visit, a pair of pouting English lips told me it was "awfully jolly." At the date with which I am concerned, it was anything but "awfully jolly." The fifteen thousand rich visitors who were wont to flock into the city during the season had gone elsewhere to recruit their health on the sands and lose their money at the gaming-tables. They had been frightened to the coasts of France by the apparition of Carlism, and San Sebastian was plaintive. Her streets and her coffers were empty. The campamento of bathing-huts was ranged as usual on the velvet rim of the ear-like bay, but no bathers were there. There were more domestics than guests in the hotels; and at the _table d'hôte_ three sat down in a saloon designed for a hundred to breakfast in; and we had no butter. The peasants in the country round were afraid to bring in the produce of their dairies and barn-yards. The bull-ring was to let; conscientious barbers shaved each other or dressed the hair on the wax busts in their windows, in order to keep alive the traditions of their craft; the fiddlers in the concert-room of the casino scraped lamentations to imaginary listeners. A Sahara of dust had settled on the curtain of the theatre, and fleet-footed spiders made forages athwart it from one cobwebby stronghold to another. The once festive resort had lost its spirits completely, and all on account of this civil war. It was summer, but the city was in a state of hibernation. No business was done in the shops, the cafés were empty, most of the resident population who could afford it had emigrated, and the public squares were as vacant as if there were a perpetual siesta. There was no sign of animation, as we understand it in England. There were but three vessels in the west bay--the _Buenaventura_, a merchant steamer, and the _San Margarita_, pinioned at last, her yellow funnel cold. Sojourn in the place was insupportable. I knew not how to kill the tedious hours. I climbed again to the Castle of the Mota, inspected some English tombs on the slope of the acclivity, and noticed that if the citadel is still a position of strength, nature deserves much of the credit. The defences recently thrown up had been devised and executed carefully, and if the defenders were only true to themselves, the Carlists, with no better artillery than they possessed, might as well think of taking the moon as of entering San Sebastian. They would have a formidable fire from well-planted cannon to face; stockades, and strong earthworks, and more than one blockhouse cunningly pierced with loopholes, to carry. Even if San Sebastian was entered, the configuration of the streets was such as to give every aid to disciplined men as opposed to mere guerrilleros. The city is built in blocks, on the American system; the wide thoroughfares cross each other at right-angles, and all of them could be swept as with a besom by a few guns _en barbette_ behind a breastwork at either end. In this sort of work, accuracy of aim is not called for, as in that warfare up in the mountains. If it were, not much reliance could be placed on the Republican artillery. General Hidalgo had well-nigh nullified that arm of the service. A Carlist leader, in whose information and whose word confidence could be reposed, assured me that not a single Carlist had yet been killed or wounded by the Republican gunners. The estimated lists of the enemy's casualties given by both parties during the struggle, I may remark _en passant_, were grossly exaggerated. The butcher's bill was very small in proportion to the expenditure of gunpowder. Returning to the question of the defence of San Sebastian--even on the supposition that the main works and town were to fall into the hands of the Carlists, the citadel still remained, where a determined leader could hold out till relief came, as long as his provisions lasted. This lofty citadel is almost impregnable. It was hither the French retired in 1813, and it took General Graham all that he knew to dislodge them. If I were asked what were the prospects of the Carlists getting into the place, I should say there was but one--by crossing over a golden bridge. But that implied the possession of money, and money was precisely what the Carlists declared they needed most. There was always the remote hazard of a Carlist rising in San Sebastian, for there were in the city the children of settlers from the rural districts who bit their thumbs at the sight of the muzzled _San Margarita_, and prayed that Charles VII. might have "his ain again." But they were in the minority. The Miqueletes, a soldierly body of men in scarlet Basque scones very like to the Carlist head-gear, and a blue capote with cape attached, garrisoned the citadel. They were brave and loyal to the Republic, and the object of deep grudge to the Chicos, for they were Basques of the towns. Many of these provincial militiamen had come in from the small pueblos in the neighbourhood, where they ran the risk of being eaten up by "the bhoys;" and this was the only accession to the population which redeemed the dismal, tradeless port from the appearance of having been stricken by plague and abandoned, and lent it at intervals an artificial bustle. I sickened of San Sebastian, with its angular propriety; its high, haughty houses, holding up their heads in architectural primness; its wide geometrical streets, where there is no shade in the sun, no shelter in the wind. I began to hate it for its rectilinearity, and dub it a priggish, stuck-up, arrogant upstart among cities. What business had it to be so straight and clean and airy? Fain would I shake the dust off my feet in testimony against it; but here was the trouble. How to get away--that was a knotty problem. The railway had been torn up for months, and the armour-vested locomotives were rusting on the sidings at Hendaye. The dirty hot little tug, the _Alcorta_, that plies between the quay and Socoa, had left; and I grieved not, for the thought of a passage by her was nausea. Three more torturing hours never dragged their slow length along for me than those I spent on board her coming over. Try and call up to yourself three hours in a low-class cook-shop, coated an inch thick with filth, and fitted over the boiler of a penny steamer dancing a marine break-down on the Thames, opposite the outlet of the main-drainage pipes. That, intensified by strange oaths and slop-basins, was the passage by the _Alcorta_. But dreary, lonely San Sebastian was not to be endured. Those poor fellows above, accustomed to the wild freshness and freedom of the sea, how they must mourn and repine! By some means or other I must get back to the world that is not petrified. No diligences dare to affront the dangers of the short journey to the Irun railway-station, since three were stopped some days before, the traces cut, the horses stolen, the windows shattered, the woodwork burned, and the charred wreck left on the roadside, a terror to those who neglect to obey the commands of the Royalist leaders. "Royalist prigants, serr!" shouted a corpulent German doctor, connected with mines in the neighbourhood, who retained fierce recollections of having been robbed of a "boney, capitalest of boneys for crossing a mountain." I told the doctor I was about to trust to luck, and set out on foot if I could persuade nobody to provide me with a vehicle. "Serr, you air mad, foolish mad," said the doctor. "Those horrid beebles, I tell you, are worse than prigants; if you hayff money, they will dake it; if you hayff not money, they will stroke your pack fifty times, pecause you hayff it not. They will cut your ears off; they will cut your nose off; they are plack tevils!" I determined to trust to luck all the same. The black devils might not be all out so black as they were painted. CHAPTER X. Belcha's Brigands--Pale-Red Republicans--The Hyena--More about the _San Margarita_--Arrival of a Republican Column--The Jaunt to Los Pasages--A Sweet Surprise--"The Prettiest Girl in Spain"--A Madrid Acquaintance--A Costly Pull--The Diligence at Last--Renteria and its Defences--A Furious Ride--In France Again--Unearthing Santa Cruz--The Outlaw in his Lair--Interviewed at Last--The Truth about the Endarlasa Massacre--A Death-Warrant--The Buried Gun--Fanaticism of the Partisan-Priest. THERE is fine scope for exaggeration in civil war; but he who wants the truth about the Montagues does not consult the Capulets. There must be bad characters amongst the Carlists, I reflected; and when they are on outpost duty at a distance from officers, and have taken a drop of aguardiente too much, they may sometimes fail to appreciate the nice distinction between _meum_ and _tuum_. The band of one Belcha, which was hovering in the neighbourhood of San Sebastian, had a shady reputation. It would be unjust to tempt these simple-minded guerrilleros with the sight of a Derringer, a hunting-watch, a tobacco-pouch, or a reconnoitring-glass. All these articles are useful on the hills. But even Belcha's looters had some conscience; they drew the line at money and wedding-rings. Besides, in cases of robbery restitution was invariably made when the chiefs of the revolt were appealed to in proper form, so that on the whole the Carlists did not deserve the name the German doctor had given them. Regular soldiers do not always carry the Decalogue in their kit; there was marauding in the Peninsula, notwithstanding the iron discipline of the Iron Duke; the Summer Palace at Pekin was despoiled of its treasures by gentlemen in epaulettes, and the Franco-German War was not entirely unconnected with stories about vanishing clocks. So I would not be diverted from my purpose. Before leaving San Sebastian I tried to obtain permission for a second visit to the citadel-prison in order to see the crew of the _San Margarita_, but without avail. Yet the officers in charge (all of the regular army), and indeed the privates of the local militia, were anything but truculent gaolers; they seemed willing to strain a point to oblige. The Republicanism of the officers was of a very pale red; but there was one hirsute Volunteer of Liberty who acted as chief warder, and took a delight in the occupation. He rattled his bunch of keys as if their metallic dissonance were music, grumbled at the urbanity of his superiors, and bore himself altogether as if their politics were suspicious; and he, a pure of the pure, were there as warder over that too. I nicknamed him the hyena in my own mind; but I could not conceive him laughing anywhere save in front of a garrote with a Royalist neck in the rundel, and then his laugh at best would be but the inward chuckle of a Modoc. Stuart took the hyena coolly, regarding him as an amusing phenomenon; Travers surveyed him as he would the portrait of the Nabob on London hoardings, and pronounced him a whimsical illustration of Republican sauce. Stuart, I should have stated, was anxious that it should be known that he had caused the name of the whilom _Deerhound_ to be erased from the list of yachts, when he chartered her as a merchant-steamer, renamed her, and went into the contraband-of-war line. It was contrary to his wish to compromise any club. The confiscated cargo was the last he had intended delivering, but he told me with a smile that ten thousand stand of rifles had already found their way to Vera. There was no legitimate explanation of the capture of the hare by the tortoise, although Travers was prepared to swear he was in French waters--he thought he was, no doubt--but he was just on the wrong side of the limit. There was one comfort. On the way to Bayonne a boat-load of men had been landed at Socoa on leave, amongst them the Basque pilot, who might otherwise have been helped to a short shrift, and the dog's death from a yard-arm. Carlist sympathizers endeavoured to procure me a conveyance to Irun, but nobody cared to affront the loss of horses, for Belcha's band requisitioned the cattle even of those identical in political feeling--the good of the cause was their plea--so at last I was forced to say I should be glad of a trap to Los Pasages, a few miles off, whence I might be able to go forward on foot. While I was waiting for the arrival of the vehicle, and reading _El Diario_, the local daily paper--a sheet the size of the palm of one's hand--until I had the contents by rote, an incident occurred to beguile suspense. The vanguard of the corps of Sanchez Bregua, the commander of the Republican Army of the North, rode into the city. They had come from Zarauz, a seaside village four leagues away--a section of mounted Chasseurs in a uniform like to that of the old British Light Dragoons. The troopers were in campaign order, with rifled carbines slung over their backs, pugarees hanging from their shakoes over their necks, and were dust-covered and sunburnt, but soldierly. They were horsed unevenly, and for light cavalry carried too great a burden. But that is not a fault peculiar to Spanish light cavalry. The average weight of the British Hussar equipped is eighteen stone. A quarter of an hour later the main body came in sight, a long column of infantry marching by fours. It was headed by a party of Civil Guards, acting as guides. As the column reached the open space by the quay, it deployed into line of companies, a movement capitally executed. The men were bigger and tougher than those of the French Line. Their uniform was similar, except that they had wings to their capotes instead of worsted epaulettes. All wore mountain-shoes, but were not hampered with tenting equipage on their knapsacks. Each battalion was led by a staff-officer, who was splendidly, or wretchedly, mounted, as his luck had served him. The company officers carried alpenstocks, and their orderlies had officers' cast foraging-caps on top of their glazed shakoes. I noticed a battalion of Cazadores, distinguished by the emblematic brass horn of chase wrought on their collars, and two companies of Engineers in uniforms entirely blue, with towers on their collars. These latter were robust, sinewy young fellows. After the infantry came a company of the 2nd Regiment of Mountain Artillery with four small pieces, each drawn by a single mule, and behind them a squadron of Mounted Chasseurs, and a long cavalcade of pack-horses and mules. After a deal of exploration a driver was dug up, and after a deal of negotiation he consented to take me to Los Pasages. Thanks to Republican vigilance, but principally it may have been to the nature of the ground, the road thither was clear. We started at six o'clock in the evening, and after a lively spin through sylvan scenery drew up in less than an hour at the outskirts of a village on the edge of a quiet pool, which we had bordered for nigh a mile. No papers had been asked for, on leaving, at the bridge over the Urumea, where a post of volunteers kept guard by an antique and stumpy bronze howitzer, mounted on a siege-carriage, and furnished with the dolphin-handles to be seen on some of the last-century guns in the Tower Arsenal. No papers were asked for either at the Customs' station, some hundred yards farther on; but the Carabineros looked upon me as a lunatic, and significantly sibilated. None were asked for at the approach to the village. Scarcely had I alighted when a fishwife ran out of a cabin and addressed me in Basque. I could not understand her, and motioned her away, when a winsome lassie of some eighteen summers, tripping up the road, came to my aid, and began speaking in French as if she were anticipating my arrival. "Monsieur wants a shallop to go to France?" I was taken aback, but answered, "Yes." "Monsieur will follow me." And she gave me a meaning sign--half a wink, half a monition. I followed, and examined my volunteer guide more attentively. What a prize of a girl! Hair black as night, but with a glossy blackness, was parted on her smooth forehead, and retained behind, after the fashion of the country, by a coloured snood, but two thick Gretchen plaits escaped, and hung down to her waist, making one wish that she had let her whole wealth of tresses wander free. Eyes blue-black, full by turns of soft love and sparkling mischief; Creole complexion, with blood rich as marriage-wine coursing in the dimpled cheeks; teeth white as the fox's; lips of clove-pink. And what a shape had she--ripe, firm, and piquant! Do you wonder that I followed her with joy? Do you wonder that I began weaving a romance? If you do, I pity you. Did I want a shallop? Of course I did; but alas! might I not have echoed Burger's lament: "The shallop of my peace is wrecked On Beauty's shore." She was a Carlist, I was sure of that. All the comely maidens were Carlists. In the service of the King the most successful crimps were "dashing white sergeants" in garter and girdle. And she took me for an interesting Carlist fugitive, and she was determined to aid in my escape. How ravishing! She was a Flora Macdonald, and I--would be a Pretender. I had fully wound myself up to that as we entered Los Pasages. Los Pasages consists of rows of houses built on either side of a basin of the sea, entered by a narrow chasm in the high rocky coast. Sailing by it, one would never imagine that that cleft in the shore-line was a gate to a natural harbour, locked against every wind, and large enough to accommodate fleets, and whose waters are generally placid as a lake. This secure haven, _statio benefida carinis_, is hidden away in the lap of the timbered hills, and is approached by a passage (from which its name is borrowed) which can be traversed in fifteen minutes. The change from the boisterous Bay of Biscay, with its "white horses capering without, to this Venetian expanse of water in a Swiss valley, dotted with chalets and cottages, must have the effect of a magic transformation on the emotional tar who has never been here before, and whose chance it was to lie below when his ship entered. The refuge is not unknown to English seamen, for there is a stirring trade in minerals with Cardiff, in more tranquil times. But now Los Pasages is deserted from the bar down to the uttermost point of its long river-like stretch inland, except by the smacks and small boats of the native fishers, a tiny tug, and a large steamer from Seville which is lying by the wharf. There is no noise of traffic; the one narrow street echoes to our tramping feet as I follow my charming cicerone, who has started up for me like some good spirit of a fairy-tale. She leads me to an inn, bids me enter, and flies in search of the owner of the shallop. The landlord comes to greet me, and I recognise in him an acquaintance--Maurice, a former waiter in the Fonda de Paris, in Madrid. I questioned Maurice as to my chances of getting across to Irun by land that night; but he assured me it was too late, and really dangerous; that the road was infested by gangs of desperadoes; and that it would be safer for me to travel, even in the day-time, without money or valuables. The owner of the shallop came, but as he had the audacity to ask eighty francs for transporting me round to Fontarabia, and as I had found Maurice, I resolved to stop in Los Pasages for the night. "You have only to cross the water to-morrow morning," said Maurice, "and you are in Kenteria, where you will be sure to get a vehicle." The backs of the houses all overlook the port, and all are balconied and furnished with flowered terraces, from which one can fish, look at his reflection, or take a header into the water at pleasure. A glorious nook for a reading-party's holiday, Los Pasages. Not if fair mysteries like my friend crop up there; but where is she, by-the-way? She does not re-appear; but Maurice will help me to discover who and what she is. "Maurice, are there any pretty girls here?" Maurice looks at me reproachfully. "Señor, you have been conducted to my house by one who is acknowledged to be the prettiest in all Spain." That night I dreamt of Eugenia, the baker's daughter, the pride of Los Pasages, who was waiting for a husband, but would have none but one who helps Charles VII. to the throne. I recorded that dream for the bachelors of Britain, and conjured them to make haste to propose for her--not that the Carlist war was hurrying to a close; but I have remarked that girls inclined to be plump at eighteen sometimes develop excessive embonpoint about eight-and-twenty. On inquiry, I found a key to the enigma which had filled me with sweet excitement. Eugenia, who had been to the citadel-prison to carry provisions to a friend in trouble, had seen me speaking to Colonel Stuart, and was anxious to serve me because of my supposed Carlist tincture. My supposed Carlist tincture did not prevent a lusty Basque boatman from charging five francs next morning for the five minutes' pull across the water to the road to Renteria, where I caught a huge yellow diligence, which had ventured to leave San Sebastian at last with the detained mails of a week. The machine was horsed in the usual manner--that is, with three mules and two nags--but how different from usual was the way-bill! With the exception of the driver and his aide, a youngster who jumped down from the box every hundred yards, and belaboured the beasts with a wattle, there was not one passenger fit to carry arms. We had a load of women and babies, a decrepit patriarch, and two boys under the fighting age. We halted at Renteria, harnessed a fresh team to our conveniency, and sent on a messenger to ascertain if the Carlists had been seen on the road. Everybody in Renteria carried a musket. All the approaches were defended by loopholed works, roofed with turf, and a perfect fortress was constructed in the centre of the town by a series of communications which had been established between the church and a block of houses in front by _caponnières_. The church windows were built up and loopholed, and a semicircular _tambour_, banked with earth to protect it from artillery, was thrown up against the houses in the middle of the street, so as to enfilade it at either side in case of attack. There were troops of the line in Renteria, but no artillerymen, nor was there artillery to be served. Without artillery, however, the place, if properly provisioned, could not be taken, if the defending force was worth its salt. The messenger having returned with word that all was right, we went ahead at a fearful pace on a very good road, lined with poplars, and running through a neat park-like country. Over to the right we could see the church-spire of Oyarzun, and the smoke curling from the chimneys; a little farther on we passed the debris of a diligence on the wayside; the telegraph wires along the route were broken down, and the poles taken away for firewood; we dived under a railway bridge, but never a Carlist saw we during the continuous brief mad progress over the eight miles from Renteria to the rise into Irun. We clattered up to the rail way-station at a hand-gallop, the people rushing to the doors of the houses, and beaming welcome from smiling countenances. There was a faint attempt to cheer us. At the station a number of officials, a couple of Carabineros, and a knot of idlers were gathered. The driver descended with the gait of a conquering hero, and turned his glances in the direction of a cottage close by. An old man on crutches, a blooming matron with rosary beads at her waist, and a nut-brown maid with laughing eyes stood under the porch, embowered in tamarisk and laurel-rose. The driver strode over to them, crying out triumphantly: "El primero! Lo! I am the first." "How valiant you are, Pedro!" said the nut-brown maid, advancing to meet him. "How lucky you are!" said the matron, with a grave shake of the head. "How rash you are!" mumbled the grandfather; "you were always so." I envied that driver, for the nut-brown maid kissed him, as she had the right to do, for she was his affianced, and had not seen him for five days. From the Irun station to Hendaye was free from danger. I walked down through a field of maize to the Bidassoa, crossed by a ferry-boat to the other side, where a post of the 49th of the French Line were peacefully playing cards for buttons in the shade of a chestnut, and a few minutes afterwards was seated in front of a bottle of Dublin stout with the countryman who forwarded my letters and telegrams from over the border. Naturally I had a desire to ascertain the whereabouts of Santa Cruz. The man had almost grown mythical with me. I had heard at San Sebastian that ten thousand crowns had been offered for his scalp at Tolosa, and the fondest yearning--the one satisfying aspiration of the hyena--was to tear him into shreds, chop him into sausage-meat, gouge out his eyes, or roast him before a slow fire. Which form of torment he would prefer, he had not quite settled. A sort of intuitive faculty, which has seldom led me astray, said to me that Santa Cruz was somewhere near. I revolved the matter in my mind, and fixed upon the man under whose roof he was most likely to be concealed. I went to that man and requested him bluntly to take me to the outlawed priest--I wished very much to speak to him. He smiled and answered, "He is not here." "The bird is flown," I said, "but the nest is warm. He is not far away." "True," he said, "come with me." We drove some miles--I will not say how many--and drew up at an enclosed villa, which may have been in France, but was not of it. To be plain, it was neutral territory, and my host, who knew me thoroughly, disappeared for a few moments, and said Santa Cruz was sleeping, but that he had roused him, and that he would be with us presently. I was sitting on a garden-seat in front of the house where he was stopping, when he presented himself on the threshold, bareheaded, and in his shirt-sleeves. The outlaw priest was no slave to the conventionalities of society. He did not adjust his necktie before receiving visitors. I am not sure that he wore a necktie at all. Let me try and draw his portrait as he stood there in the doorway, in questioning attitude. A thick, burly man under thirty years of age, some five feet five in height, with broad sallow face, brawny bull-neck, and wide square-set shoulders--a squat Hercules; dark-brown hair, cut short, lies close to his head; he is bearded, and has a dark-brown pointed moustache; shaggy brows overhang his small steel-gray eyes; his nose is coarse and devoid of character; but his jaws are massive, his lips firm, and his chin determined. He is dressed like the better class of peasant, wears sandals, canvas trousers, a light brownish-gray waistcoat, and has a large leathern belt, like a horse's girth, round his waist. His expression is severe, as of one immersed in thought; with an occasional frown, as if the thought were disagreeable. His brows knit, and a shadow passes over his features when anything is mentioned that displeases him; but I was told when he smiled, the smile was of the sweetest and most amiable. I cannot say I saw him in smiling mood, but I saw him frown, and never did anyone so truly translate to me the figure of speech of "looking black." He advanced with self-possession, returned my salute without coldness or _empressement_, as if it were a mere matter of form, and sat down beside me. We had a long chat. Santa Cruz did not take much active part in it, but listened as his host spoke, punctuating what was said with nods of assent, and now and again dropping a guttural sentence. His maxim was that deeds were of more value than words, and he adhered to it. His host, I may interpose, was the most devoted of Carlists, and had given largely of his means to aid the cause. He had great faith in Santa Cruz, and told me in his presence (but in French, which the Cura understood but slightly) that while Santa Cruz was in the northern provinces, the King had half-a-man in his service, and that if he would now call on Cabrera he would have a man and a half, for that Santa Cruz would act with Cabrera. "If Don Carlos does not consent to that," said my host, "you will see that he will have to return into France, and live in ignominy for the rest of his days!" This Cura, represented in the Madrid play-house as half-drunk and dancing lewdly, was the most abstemious and chastest of men, and neither smoked nor drank wine. His fame went on increasing, as did the number of his followers. He effected prodigies with the means at his command. His friends in France supplied him with two cannon, which were smuggled across the border. He turned the foundry at Vera into a munition factory; employed women to make uniforms for his men; and insisted that the intervals between his expeditions should be given up to drill. He was dreaded, respected, admired by his band; he was strong and hardy; faced perils and privations in common with the lowest, but used no weapon but his walking-stick The priest, the anointed of God, may not shed blood. The affair of Endarlasa was the coping-stone of his career. Various accounts were related of that event; it is only fair to let Santa Cruz himself speak. This is what he told me: At three one morning he opened fire on the guard-house occupied by the Carabineros, at the bridge over the Bidassoa, between Vera and Irun. A white flag was hoisted on the guard-house. He ordered the fire to cease, and advanced to negotiate the conditions of surrender. The enemy, who had invited him to approach, by the white flag, fired and wounded one of his men. He issued directions to take the place, and spare nobody. The place was taken, and nobody was spared. Twenty-seven dead bodies littered the Vera road that morning. "Is it true that you pardoned two?" I asked the priest. "No, ninguno! Porqué?" he answered with astonishment. "Not one. Why should I?" The reason I had asked was that I had been told that a couple of the Carabineros had plunged into the Bidassoa and tried to swim to the other side; but the Cura, on his own avowal, with Rhadamanthine justice had commanded them to be shot as they breasted the current, and they were shot. He was no believer in half-measures. A lady partisan of his, who had dined with him the day before, told me he never breathed a syllable of the attack he meditated, to her or any of his band. An English gentleman, who visited the ground while the corpses were still upon it, assured me that the sight was horrifying, and, such was the panic in Irun, that he verily believed Santa Cruz might have taken the town the same afternoon, had he appeared before it with four men. To pursue the story of the redoubtable Cura. The bruit of his exploits had gone abroad, and among certain Carlists it seemed to be the opinion, as one of them remarked to me, that "_Il a fait de grandes choses, mais de grandes bêtises aussi._" He was making war altogether too seriously for their tastes. Antonio Lizarraga was appointed Commandant-General of Guipúzcoa about that period, and ordered Santa Cruz to report to him. Santa Cruz, who was in the field before him, and had five times as many men under his control, paid no heed to his orders. Lizarraga then sent him a death-warrant, which is so curious a document that I make no apology for appending it in full: TRANSLATION. (A seal on which is inscribed "Royal Army of the North, General Command of Guipúzcoa.") "The sixteenth day of the present month, I gave orders to all the forces under my command, that they should proceed to capture you, and that immediately after you had received the benefit of clergy they should execute you. "This sentence I pronounced on account of your insubordination towards me, you having disobeyed me several times, and having taken no notice of the repeated commands I sent you to present yourself before me to declare what you had to say in your own defence in the inquiry instituted against you by my directions. "For the last time I ask of you to present yourself to me, the instant this communication is received; in default of which I notify to you that every means will be used to effect your arrest; that your disobedience and the unqualifiable acts laid to your charge will be published in all the newspapers; and that the condign punishment they deserve will be duly exacted. "God grant you many years. "The Brigadier-General Commanding. (Signed) "ANTONIO LIZARRAGA. "Campo Del Honor, 28th of March, 1873. "Señor Don Manuel Santa Cruz." "Note.--Have the goodness to acknowledge this, my communication." This missive was received by Santa Cruz, but he never acknowledged it. His host permitted me to read and copy the original. "Is not that arbitrary?" he said to me in English; "very much like what you call Jedburgh justice; hanging a man first and trying him afterwards. Lizarraga says, 'This sentence I pronounced'--all is finished apparently there; and yet he cites the man whom he has ordered to be immediately executed to appear before him to declare what he has to say!" Another phrase in this death-warrant, which escaped the host, impressed me with its naïveté: "_God grant you many years._" But Lizarraga, in this politeness of custom, meant no more, it is to be presumed, than did the Irish hangman who expostulated with his client in the condemned cell: "Long life to ye, Mr. Hinery! and make haste, the people are getting onpatient." Santa Cruz bit his way out of the toils, however, but not so his band. They were surrounded at Vera, caught, with a few exceptions, disarmed, assembled and addressed in Spanish by the Marquis de Valdespina, whose remarks were translated to them into Basque by the Cura of Ollo. They cried "Viva el Rey!" Their arms were subsequently restored to them, and the men were distributed among other battalions. But they still regret their old leader, and Santa Cruz is popular by the firesides of the mountaineers of Guipúzcoa. One of his mountain guns fell into the hands of Lizarraga, but the other was buried in some spot only known to himself and a few trusted companions. During my interview I made it my business to study the priest attentively, and this is what I honestly thought of him. He was a fanatic, a sullen self-willed man with but one idea--the success of the cause; and but one ambition--that it should be said of him that it was he, Santa Cruz, who put Don Carlos on the throne of his ancestors. The globe for him was bounded by the Pyrenees and the sea; he had but one antipathy after the heretics (all who did not worship God as he did) and the Liberals, and that was Lizarraga. I considered it a mistake that Lizarraga was not the Cura of Hernialde, and Santa Cruz the Commandant-General of Guipúzcoa. The priest had a natural military instinct--I would almost go so far as to say a spice of military genius; and had he had a knowledge of the profession of arms would probably have developed into a great general of the Cossack type. His hatred to Lizarraga led him into littleness and injustice. He chuckled at the idea of Lizarraga not being able to find the buried gun, as if that were any great triumph over him; and he sneered at the idea of Lizarraga, who was not able to take Oyarzun, meditating an attempt on Tolosa. I could thoroughly understand that the Carlist priest bore malice to the officer who supplanted him and condemned him to death. But what Lizarraga did was done in compliance with the King's will. At the same time there could be no doubt that Santa Cruz was treated with scant courtesy after all he had accomplished, and had a right to feel himself ill-used, and the victim of jealous rivalry. He said that he was prepared, any day the King permitted him, to traverse the four provinces, and hold his enemies _in terrorem_ with five hundred men. And he was the very worthy to do it. He complained bitterly that three of his followers had been shot by Lizarraga. One story relates that they stole into Guipúzcoa to levy blackmail, another that they merely went to dig up some money that was interred when the legion was disbanded. In any case they appeared in arms in a forbidden district, and incurred the capital penalty. Santa Cruz went to Bordeaux to beg for their lives at the feet of Doña Margarita. She received him most graciously, and promised to send a special courier to her husband to intercede in their behalf. Before the King's reprieve could possibly have arrived the three were executed. As we were about to leave, a colleague who was with me asked the Cura if he would permit him to visit his camp, if it came to pass that he took up arms again in Spain. "We shall see," said Santa Cruz; "wait till I am there." My own conviction is that the priest held correspondents in abhorrence, and that his first impulse would have been to tie a zealous one up to a tree, and have thirty-nine blows given him with a stick. Perhaps I did him wrong, but if ever he did take up arms again, it was my firm intention to be south when he was north, for he was about the last person in creation to whose tender mercies I should care to entrust myself. CHAPTER XI. An Audible Battle--"Great Cry and Little Wool"--A Carlist Court Newsman--A Religious War--The Siege of Oyarzun--Madrid Rebels--"The Money of Judas"--A Manifesto from Don Carlos--An Ideal Monarch--Necessity of Social and Political Reconstruction Proclaimed--A Free Church--A Broad Policy--The King for the People--The Theological Question--Austerity in Alava--Clerical and Non-Clerical Carlists--Disavowal of Bigotry--A Republican Editor on the Carlist Creed--Character of the Basques--Drill and Discipline--Guerilleros _versus_ Regulars. WHEN a man's office is to chronicle war and he is within hearing of the echoes of battle, but cannot reach a spot from which the scene of action might be commanded, it is annoying in the extreme. Such was my strait on the 21st of August, a few days after my arrival from San Sebastian. I was at Hendaye, the border-town of France. From the Spanish frontier the report of heavy firing was audible for hours, apparently coming from a point between Oyarzun and Renteria. First one could distinguish the faint spatter of musketry, and afterwards the undeniable muffled roar of artillery. Then came a succession of sustained rolls as of volley-firing. About noon the action must have been at its height. The distant din was subsequently to be caught only at long intervals, as if changes of position were in course of being effected; but at three o'clock it regained force, and raged with fury until five, when it suddenly died away. I was burning with impatience, and made several unavailing attempts to cross the Bidassoa. The ferryman, acting under instructions from the gendarmes, refused to take passengers. By the evening train a delegate from the Paris Society for the Succour of the Wounded arrived from Bayonne with a box of medicine and surgical appliances. He, too, was unable to pass into Spain. Meantime, rumour ran riot. Stories were current that there had been fearful losses. "At eleven o'clock men were falling like flies," said one eye-witness, who succeeded in running away from the field before he fell. Not a single medical man would leave France in response to the call of the Paris delegate for volunteers to accompany him. Were they all Republicans? Did they fear that Belcha might take a fancy to their probes and forcipes? Or did they look upon the big battles and tremendous lists of casualties in this most uncivil of civil wars as illustrations of a great cry and little wool? If the latter was their notion, they were right. Three days after this serious engagement, I learned the particulars of what had taken place. General Loma, a brigadier under Sanchez Bregua, with a column of 1,500 men, came out from San Sebastian to cover a working-party while they were endeavouring to throw up a redoubt for his guns on an eminence between Irun and Oyarzun, so as to put an end to the tussle over the possession of the latter hamlet, which was a perpetual bone of contention. The Carlists fired upon him from behind the rocks in a gorge to which he had committed himself, but were outnumbered. Word was sent to the cabecilla, Martinez, at Lesaca, and he arrived with reinforcements at the double, and encompassed Loma with such a cloud of sulphurous smoke that the Republicans had to fall back upon San Sebastian. The casualties in this Homeric combat were not appalling; there was more gunpowder than blood expended. The losses on the Republican side were one killed and fifteen wounded. On the Carlist side they were less, for the Carlists kept under cover of the fern and furze. But then it must be considered that the firing only lasted nine hours! Don Carlos was not slow in calling the printing-press to his aid. One of his first acts after his entry into his dominions was to start an official gazette, _El Cuartel Real_, the first number of which is before me as I write. I have seen queer papers in my travels, from the _Bugler_, a regimental record brought out by the 68th Light Infantry in Burmah, to the _Fiji Times_, and the _Epitaph_, the leading organ of Tombstone City, in the territory of Arizona; but this assuredly was the queerest. It was published by Cristóbal Perez, on the summit of Peña de la Plata, a Pyrenean peak. There might be less acceptable reading than a _résumé_ of its contents. _El Cuartel Real_ does not impose by its magnitude. It is about one-eighth the size of a London daily journal; but if it is not great by quantity it is by quality. Over the three columns of the opening page figure the three watchwords of the Royal cause, "God, Country, King." The paragraph which has the post of honour is headed "Oficial," and has in it a flavour of the _Court Newsman_. Here it is as it appears in the original, boldly imprinted in black type: "S. M. el Rey (q.D.g.) continúa sin novedad al frente de su leal y valiente ejército. "S. M. la Reina y sus augustos hijos continúan tambien sin novedad en su importante salud." As it is not vouchsafed to everyone to understand Castilian, I may as well give a rough translation, which read herewith: "His Majesty the King (whom God guard) continues without change at the front of his loyal and valiant army. "Her Majesty the Queen and her august children also continue without alteration in their precious health." Then _El Cuartel Real_ appends what takes the place of its leading article--a reproduction of a letter from Don Carlos to his "august brother," Don Alfonso, setting forth the principles on which he appeals for Spanish support. This document is so important that I must return to it anon. Then comes a circular from the "Real Junta Gubernativa del Reino de Navarra," in session at Vera. The purport of this, epitomized in a sentence, is to raise money. Next, we arrive at the "Seccion Oficial," the most important paragraph of which announces that the Chief, Merendon, has inaugurated a Carlist movement in Toledo, with a well-armed force, exceeding 280 men--to wit, 150 horsemen and 130 infantry--and that he hopes shortly to gather numerous recruits. The "Seccion de Noticias" makes up the body of the paper, and is richer in information. We are told that the most excellent and illustrious Bishop of Urgel, accompanied by several sacerdotal and other dignitaries, arrived in the town of Urdaniz, at half-past seven on the previous Wednesday evening. His Lordship rested a night in the house of the Vicar, and left the following morning, escorted by his friend and host, the said Vicar, Brigadier Gamundi, and Colonel D. Fermin Irribarren, veterans of the Carlist army, for Elisondo. From that the prelate was reported to have started to headquarters, "to salute the King of Spain, august representative of the Christian monarchy, which is the only plank of safety in the shipwreck of the country." The _Cuartel Real_ warmly congratulates the Bishop on the fact of his having come to the conviction that "the present war is a religious war, and on that account eminently social"--(social in Spanish must have some peculiar shade of meaning unknown to strangers, for otherwise there is no sequence here)--and proceeds to speak with an eloquence that recalls that wretched Republican, Castelar, of the standard of faith in which resides Spanish honour and--here come two words that puzzle me, _la hidalguia y la caballerosidad_; but I suppose they mean nobility and chivalry, and everything of that kind. The next notice in the royal gazette is purely military, and makes known that the siege of the important town of Oyarzun has begun. "On the 20th the batteries opened fire, and, according to report, the enemy had one hundred men _hors de combat_." The batteries! There is a touch of genius in that phrase. Reading it, one would imagine that the Royalists had a royal regiment of artillery, and that eight pieces of cannon, at the very least, played upon the unfortunate Oyarzun. A jennet with a 4-pounder at its heels would be a more correct representation of the strength of the Carlist ordnance. To resume the story of the siege of Oyarzun. "On the 21st," adds _El Cuartel Real_, "there was talk of a capitulation, and it is possible that the place has surrendered at this hour." The paragraph that succeeds it is a gem: "Of the 1,010 armed rebels in Eibar (Guipúzcoa), 210 betook themselves to San Sebastian, when they suspected the approach of the Royal forces, and the 800 remaining gave up to General Lizarraga their rifles, all of the Remington system." There is no quibble about the latter statement. The Carlists had easier ways of procuring arms than by running cargoes from England. But is there not something inimitable in the epithet "rebels"? There can be no question but that everyone is a rebel in romantic Spain--in the opinion of somebody else. The only question is, Who are the constituted authorities? Until that is settled the editor of _El Cuartel Real_ is perfectly justified in treating the volunteers of liberty, in those districts where Charles VII. virtually reigns, as armed rebels. Although this town of Eibar had frequently risen up against the legitimate authorities named by his Majesty, it is pleasant to learn that General Lizarraga did not impose the slightest chastisement on the population, thus giving a lesson of forbearance to the "factious generals." Next we are informed that on the day the Royal forces entered Vergara, the ignominious monument erected by the Liberals in record of the greatest of treasons (the treaty between the treacherous Maroto and Espartero in 1839) was destroyed amidst enthusiasm, and the parchment in the municipal archives commemorating its erection was taken out and burned in the public square. I may add (but this I had from private sources) that the coin dug up from under the monument was cast to the wind as the money of Judas. Navarre, continues _El Cuartel Real_, is dominated by our valiant soldiers under the skilful direction of his Majesty; Lizarraga has occupied in a few days Mondragon, Eibar, Plasencia, Azpeitia, Vergara, and other important places in Guipúzcoa, and obtained "considerable booty of war;" the standard of legitimacy is waving triumphantly in Biscay, and Bilbao is blockaded. There the tale of victory ends; but we arrive at matters not less gratifying in another sense. The distinguished engineer, Don Mariano Lana y Sarto, has been appointed to look after the repair of the bridges destroyed by Nouvilas. Don Matias Schaso Gomez, a member of the press militant, has been promoted to be a commandant for his valour at Astigarraga, and is nominated for the laurelled cross of San Fernando; and the illustrious doctor, Señor Don Alejandro Rodriguez Hidalgo, has been named chief of the sanitary staff, and entrusted with the establishment of military hospitals. The last paragraph in this curious little gazette, printed up amid the clouds on the summit of the Silver Hill, states that the Royal quarters were at Abarzuzu on the 17th instant, and that Estella, close by, was stubbornly resisting, but would soon be in the power of the Royalists. A column which had attempted to relieve the garrison was energetically driven back towards Lerin by two battalions commanded by his Majesty in person. But by the time _El Cuartel Real_ came under my notice Estella had fallen, and the Carlists had put to their credit a genuine success. As the question of Carlism is still one of prominent interest--is, indeed, what the French term an "actuality," and may crop up again any day, the letter of the claimant to the throne to Don Alfonso (alluded to some sentences above) is worth translating. It is the authoritative exposition of the aims of the would-be monarch, and of the line of policy he intended to pursue should he ever take up his residence in that coveted palace at Madrid. Its date is August 23rd, 1873, and the contents are these: * * * * * "MY DEAR BROTHER, "Spain has already had opportunities enough to ascertain my ideas and sentiments as man and King in various periodicals and newspapers. Yielding, nevertheless, to a general and anxiously expressed desire which has reached me from all parts of the Peninsula, I write this letter, in which I address myself, not merely to the brother of my heart, but without exception to all Spaniards, for they are my brothers as well. "I cannot, my dear Alfonso, present myself to Spain as a Pretender to the Crown. It is my duty to believe, and I do believe, that the Crown of Spain is already placed on my forehead by the consecrated hand of the law. With this right I was born, a right which has grown, now that the fitting time has come, to a sacred obligation; but I desire that the right shall be confirmed to me by the love of my people. My business, henceforth, is to devote to the service of that people all my thoughts and powers--to die for it, or save it. "To say that I aspire to be King of Spain, and not of a party, is superfluous, for what man worthy to be a king would be satisfied to reign over a party? In such a case he would degrade himself in his own person, descending from the high and serene region where majesty dwells, and which is beyond the reach of mean and pitiful triflings. "I ought not to be, and I do not desire to be, King, except of all Spaniards; I exclude nobody, not even those who call themselves my enemies, for a king can have no enemies. I appeal affectionately to all, in the name of the country, even to those who appear the most estranged; and if I do not need the help of all to arrive at the throne of my ancestors, I do perhaps need their help to establish on solid and immovable bases the government of the State, and to give prosperous peace and true liberty to my beloved Spain. "When I reflect how weighty a task it is to compass those great ends, the magnitude of the undertaking almost oppresses me with fear. True, I am filled with the most fervent desire to begin, and the resolute will to carry out, the enterprise; but I cannot hide from myself that the difficulties are immense, and that they can only be overcome by the co-operation of the men of notability, the most impartial and honest in the kingdom; and, above all, by the co-operation of the kingdom itself, gathered together in the Cortes which would truly represent the living forces and Conservative elements of Spain. "I am prepared with such Cortes to give to Spain, as I said in my letter to the Sovereigns of Europe, a fundamental code which would prove, I trust, definitive and Spanish. "Side by side, my brother, we have studied modern history, meditating over those great catastrophes which are at once lessons to rulers and a warning to the people. Side by side, we have also thought over and formed a common judgment that every century ought to have, and actually has, its legitimate necessities and natural aspirations. "Old Spain stood in need of great reforms; in modern Spain we have had simply immense convulsions of overthrow. Much has been destroyed; little has been reformed. Ancient institutions, some of which cannot be revivified, have died out. An attempt has been made to create others in their place, but scarcely had they seen the light when symptoms of death set in. So much has been done, and no more. I have before me a stupendous labour, an immense social and political reconstruction. I have to set myself to building up, in this desolated country, on bases whose solidity is guaranteed by experience, a grand edifice, where every legitimate interest and every reasonable personality can find admittance. "I do not deceive myself, my brother, when I feel confident that Spain is hungry and thirsty for justice; that she feels the urgent and imperious necessity of a government, worthy and energetic, severe and respected; and that she anxiously wishes that the law to which we all, great and small, should be subject, should reign with undisputed sway. "Spain is not willing that outrage or offence should be offered to the faith of her fathers, believing that in Catholicity reposes the truth she understands, and that to accomplish to the full its divine mission, the Church must be free. "Whilst knowing and not forgetting that the nineteenth century is not the sixteenth, Spain is resolved to preserve from every danger Catholic unity--the symbol of our glories, the essence of our laws, and the holy bond of concord between all Spaniards. "The Spanish people, taught by a painful experience, desires the truth in everything, and that the King should be a king in reality, and not the shadow of a king; and that its Cortes should be the regularly appointed and peaceful gathering of the independent and incorruptible elect of the constituencies, and not tumultuous and barren assemblies of office-holders and office-seekers, servile majorities and seditious minorities. "The Spanish people is favourable to decentralisation, and will always be so; and you know well, my dear Alfonso, that should my desires be carried out, instead of assimilating the Basque provinces to the rest of Spain, which the revolutionary spirit would fain bring to pass, the rest of Spain would be lifted to an equality in internal administration with those fortunate and noble provinces. "It is my wish that the municipality should retain its separate existence, and the provinces likewise, proper precautions being employed to prevent possible abuses. "My cherished thought as constant desire is to give to Spain exactly that which she does not possess, in spite of the lying clamour of some deluded people--that liberty which she only knows by name; liberty, which is the daughter of the gospel, not liberalism, which is the son of disbelief (_de la protesta_); liberty, in fine, which is the supremacy of the laws when the laws are just--that is to say, conformable to the designs of nature and of God. "We, descendants of kings, admit that the people should not exist for the King so much as the King for the people; that a king should be the most honoured man amongst his people, as he is the first caballero; and that a king for the future should glory in the special title of 'father of the poor' and 'guardian of the weak.' "At present, my dear brother, there is a very formidable question in our Spain, that of the finances. The Spanish debt is something frightful to think of; the productive forces of the country are not enough to cover it--bankruptcy is imminent. I do not know if I can save Spain from that calamity; but, if it be possible, a legitimate sovereign alone can do it. An unshakable will works wonders. If the country is poor, let all live frugally, even to the ministers; nay, even to the King himself, who should be one in feeling with Don Enrique El Doliente. If the King is foremost in setting the example, all will be easy. Let ministries be suppressed, provincial governments be reduced, offices be diminished, and the administration economized at the same time that agriculture is encouraged, industry protected, and commerce assisted. To put the finances and credit of Spain on a proper footing is a Titanic enterprise to which all governments and peoples should lend aid." * * * * * Here follow a repudiation of free trade as applied to Spain, and a few well-turned periods dealing in the usual Spanish manner with the duties of the ruler, laying down, among other axioms, that "virtue and knowledge are the chiefest nobility," and that the person of the mendicant should be as sacred as that of the patrician. At the close there is a very sensible sentence, affirming that one Christian monarch in Spain would be better than three hundred petty kings disputing in a noisy assembly. "The chiefs of parties," continues the letter, "naturally yearn for honours or riches or place; but what in the world can a Christian king desire but the good of his people? What could he want to be happy but the love of his people?" The letter winds up by the affirmation that Don Carlos is faithful to the good traditions of the old and glorious Spanish monarchy, and that he believed he would be found to act also as "a man of the present age." The last sentence is a prayer to his brother, "who had the enviable privilege of serving in the Papal army," to ask their spiritual king at Rome for his apostolic benediction for Spain and the writer. If this document was written _propriâ manu_, by Don Carlos, he must be endowed with higher intellectual faculties than most Kings or Pretenders possess. It is undeniably clever, and is more progressive than one would expect from an upholder of the doctrine of Divine right. It may be, as Tennyson sings, that the thoughts of men (even when they are Bourbons) are widened with the process of the suns. But I protest that there is such a masterly mistiness in it here and there, such a careful elusion of rocks and ruggednesses political, and such a fine wind-beating flourish of the banner of glittering generality, that I think there were more heads than one engaged in the concoction of the manifesto. I have studiously refrained from the introduction of the religious topic as far as I could in this work--it is outside my sphere; but I should be unjust to the reader did I not give him some information (not from the controversial standpoint) on a subject which will obtrude itself in any discussion on the merits of the conflict which has twice distracted Spain and may divide the country again. It is unfortunately indisputable that religion was poked into the quarrel. The struggle was described in _El Cuartel Real_ as a religious war; the theological allegiance of the partisans of Don Carlos was appealed to, and their ardent attachment to the Papacy was worked upon, as in the concluding sentence of the proclamation of Don Carlos. In those portions of the north where Carlism was all-powerful, the authorities were emphatically showing that those who served under them must be practical Roman Catholics _nolentes volentes_. An austere placard, signed by Barona, member of the Carlist war committee, was posted in the province of Alava, and ordained among other articles: Firstly, that the town councillors of every municipality should assist in a body at High Mass; secondly, that the mayors should interdict, under the most severe penalties, all games and public diversions, and the opening of all public establishments during Divine service; and thirdly, that all blasphemers, and all who worked on a holiday, who gave scandal, or who danced indecently, should be _scourged_. The first of these articles is lawful enough in a country which is almost exclusively Roman Catholic. In England nothing can be said against it, seeing that British soldiers of all denominations are compelled to attend Church parade, and the prisoners in all gaols have to register themselves as belonging to some religion. There is just this theoretical objection, however--the article implies that municipal honours are to be limited to members of one creed, which is intolerant. That which underlay the antipathy of numerous Conservatives outside Spain to the Royalist cause, was the belief entertained that the success of Don Carlos would lead to the re-assertion of clerical preponderance, would destroy liberty of conscience as understood in most European nations, and would set up a political priesthood. The manifesto of Don Carlos does not deal with those points in the full and categorical manner desirable. I was told there were two parties in the Carlist camp, the clerical and--for want of a better name, let it be called--the non-clerical The former, the Basques, and those who gave Carlism its great primary impulsion, were as zealously Roman Catholic as ever Manuel Santa Cruz was. They looked forward to the re-acquisition of the ecclesiastical domains and the re-establishment of the Catholic Church in all its ancient supremacy of wealth and power. The non-clericals knew that the Basques, even assuming them all to be Carlists, were but 660,000 in number, a small minority of the population, and that the existence of a State unduly influenced by a Church--things temporal controlled by personages bound to things spiritual--was antagonistic to the feelings of the majority of Spaniards. Having met a nobleman distinguished for his services to Carlism, I put it to him bluntly, "Would Don Carlos on the throne mean a relapse into religious bigotry?" He answered me with candour, "I am a Roman Catholic, and if I thought so I should be the last man to lend a penny to his cause." "But," I urged, "that is the general impression in England, where he is trying to negotiate a loan, and if it is left uncorrected it does him injury. Why does he not repel the impeachment?" "The truth is," he said, "Don Carlos has made too many public explanations." I returned to the charge, challenging my acquaintance to deny that many of the supporters of Don Carlos would fall away if they had not the thorough belief that his cause was as much identified with the triumph of Roman Catholicism as with that of legitimacy. His reply was not a denial, but an admission of the fact, with the addition that in war one must not be too particular as to the means of enlisting aid, and stimulating the enthusiasm of supporters, which is an argument as true as it is old. Don Carlos, in his manifesto, goes on the assumption that the Republicans are all atheists, or something very like it. It is only fair to let the Republicans speak for themselves, and explain what is the Republican estimate of the Carlist religion. The San Sebastian newspaper, _El Diario_, may be assumed to be a fair exponent of the sentiments of the anti-Carlists, and thus emphatically, and not without a spice of antithesis, it delivers itself: "The religion which has the commandment, 'Thou shalt not kill,' forbids murder. "The religion which has the commandment, 'Thou shalt not steal,' forbids robbery. "The religion which is peace, obedience, and love, is no friend of war, rebellion, and massacre. "Resigned and joyous in other days, its martyrs went to death in the amphitheatre of Rome, and on the plains of Saragossa, pardon in their souls and prayer on their lips; to-day pardon is exchanged for wrath, and prayer for reproach. Instead of the martyr's palm, we have the Berdan breech-loader and the flash of petroleum. "Anointed of the Lord, ministers of Him who died invoking blessings on His enemies, kindle the fires of fratricidal strife, which they call a sacred war, and lead on and inflame their dupes by the pretence that the gates of Paradise are to be forced open by gunshot. "Meanwhile the bishops are silent, Rome is dumb, the moral law sleeps, the canon law is forgotten; and these pastors, transforming their flocks into packs of wolves, scour the plains, blessing murder and sanctifying conflagration. "'King by Divine right,' they cry, like the legists of the Lower Empire; 'Die or believe,' like the sons of the Prophet. Apostles without knowing it, they seek to achieve the triumph of a Pagan principle by a Saracenic process. "They say that religion is lost, because it is shorn of the honour and power their kings gave it; that the portals of heaven are barred, because they have forfeited their tithes and first-fruits, their rents and fat benefices; and they try to convince us by discharges of musketry that our whole future life depends, on the one hand, on a question of vanity, and on the other, on a question of stomach. "Holy Apostles, disciples of Him who had not a stone whereon to lay His head, you who conquered the earth with no arms but those of word and example, oh! would you not say if you returned here below, 'Those who preach by the voice of platoons; those who evangelize from the mouth of cannon; those are not, cannot be, our disciples and successors, for they are not fishers of souls, but fishers of snug posts under government'? "And you, glorious martyrs of the Roman circus and Saragossan fields, oh! would you not say, 'No, this Christianity, which goes about sowing battle; desolation, tears, and blood wherever it passes, is not ours--no, this Christianity at the bottom of the slaughter of Endarlasa, of the hecatomb of Cirauqui, of the sack of Igualada, and of a hundred other cruelties, is not ours. Our religion says "Kill not," and this murders; says "Steal not," and this robs. No, this is not the Christian, but the Carlist religion'?" That is a good specimen of the rhetorical school of writing popular in Spanish newspapers; but all that is written is not gospel. From personal observation it was evident to me that these Republicans of the Spanish towns of the north were not so scrupulous in the outward observances of religion as the tone of this indignant Christian leading article would convey; neither were the Carlists the "packs of wolves" they were represented to be. Let us see how this inflamed sense of so-called religion affected the rank and file among the adherents of Don Carlos. Indubitably the Royalists, with a very few exceptions, were more than moral--they were sincerely pious, and esteemed it a grateful incense to the Most High to kill as many of their Republican countrymen as they could without over-exertion. They bowed their heads and repeated prayers with the chaplains who accompanied them; as the echoes of the Angelus bell were heard they were marched to Divine worship every evening, when they were in the neighbourhood of a church; they were palpably impressed with deep devotional convictions, and yet they were not sour-faced like the grim Covenanters of Argyle, nor puritanically uncharitable like the stern propounders of the Blue Laws of Connecticut. Their beads returned to the pocket or the prayers finished, they laughed and jested, were frolicsome as schoolboys in their playhour, and the slightest tinkle of music set them dancing. Hospitable and fanatic, faithful and ignorant, temperate and dirty--such are some prominent traits in the character of the brave Basque people of the rural districts who wished to govern Spain, but who were Spaniards neither by race, nor language, nor temperament, nor feeling. Taken all in all, they are a right manly breed, and, with education to correct inevitable prejudices, would be capable of great things. But before they could become efficient soldiers, they needed a severe course of training. In the flat country, south of the Ebro, it would be cruel and foolish to oppose them to regular troops. As guerrilleros, they were without parallel, being content with short commons, and ever ready to play ball after the longest march; but they were ignorant of soldiering as technically understood. In the copses and crags of their own provinces they were invincible, and could carry on the struggle while there was a cartridge or an onion left in the land. But where the tactics of the "contrabandista" no longer availed, where surprises were impossible and mysterious disappearances not easy, and where the bulk of the people were not willing spies, the aspect of affairs was different. They were mediocre marksmen with long-range arms of precision, and had no proper conception of allowances for wind or sun. Target-practice was not encouraged, and yet it was not through thrift of ammunition, for the waste of powder in every skirmish was extravagant, and one could not rest a night in a village held by the Carlists without being disturbed by frequent careless discharges. With the bayonet, as far as I could learn, they were impetuous in the onset, and stubborn, especially the Navarrese. But bayonet-charges cannot carry stone walls or mud-banks; and in the face of the almost incessant peppering of breech-loaders, rushes of the kind have become slightly old-fashioned. To the Carlists, in any case, was due the credit of readiness to have recourse to the steel whenever there was a rift for hand-to-hand fighting. Their military education unfortunately confined itself to the rudiments of the drill-book. They fell in, dressed up, formed fours by the right, extended into sections on column of march and went through the like movements very well--so well that it was a pity they had not an opportunity of adding to their stock of knowledge. They had an instinctive aptitude for skirmishing, and were expert at forming square, the utility of which, by the way, is as questionable nowadays as that of charging. More attention was paid to discipline than to drill. Pickets patrolled the towns into which they entered, and repressed all disorder after nightfall; outpost duty was strictly enforced; "larking" was not tolerated, and punishments were always inflicted for known and grave breaches of order. CHAPTER XII. Barbarossa--Royalist-Republicans--Squaring a Girl--At Iron--"Your Papers?"--The Barber's Shop--A Carlist Spy--An Old Chum--The Alarm--A Breach of Neutrality--Under Fire--Caught in the Toils--The Heroic Tomas--We Slope--A Colleague Advises Me--"A Horse! a Horse!"--State of Bilbao--Don Carlos at Estella--Sanchez Bregua Recalled--Tolosa Invites--Republican Ineptitude--Do not Spur a Free Horse--Very Ancient Boys--Meditations in Bed--A Biscay Storm. BARBAROSSA, who had never been over the border, suggested to me that I should take a trip to Irun, which was held by the anti-Carlists. It would be incorrect to write them down as Republicans; they were sprung from the Cristinos of the previous generation, and as such were opposed to any scion of the house against which their fathers had fought for years. All of them were _de facto_ Republicans, and had more knowledge and enjoyment of Republican freedom than those who prattled and raved of Republicanism in Madrid and the south; but they did not take kindly to the name. As my friend the late J. A. MacGahan wittily said of them--"They were the Royalist-Republicans of Spain." They were as fond of their fueros as any Carlist in the crowd, but they stood up for Madrid less that they cared for the policy or personages of the central government, than that they had a deep-seated hereditary hatred of their neighbours of the rural districts. At heart they were in favour of a restoration of the throne, and on that throne they would fain seat the young Prince of the Asturias. In those latitudes the lines of John Byrom a century before would well apply: "God bless the King, I mean the faith's defender; God bless--no harm in blessing--the Pretender; But who Pretender is, or who is King, God bless us all--that's quite another thing!" "If you go to Irun," said Barbarossa, stroking his moustache, "I am game to go with you." "I am satisfied," said I; "but recollect, you undertake the job at your own risk. You are known as an associate of Carlists, and suspected to be a Carlist agent. I am a stranger and comparatively safe." He had weighed all that, and was ready to face possible perils. But he was not fit to undergo probable fatigues. He could sit at a green table in an ill-ventilated atmosphere the night long, but he could not walk three miles at a stretch. Neither could he (on account of his illness) venture on horseback. To effect a crossing by the railway bridge from Hendaye to Irun was out of the question; it was barrier impenetrable. The Frenchman would not allow you to pass in your own interest; the Spaniard declined to admit you in his so-considered interest. To take the mountain-route was tedious, and in the case of Barbarossa not to be thought of; the bridge of Endarlasa was broken--a most contorted specimen of artistic dilapidation. To be sure, one could manage to creep to the other side by the submerged coping of the parapet, if endowed with the balancing powers of a rope-walker and the lustihood of the navvy. But Barbarossa was not a Blondin, and had not a physical constitution proof against a wetting. I had got across that bridge once, holding on by my teeth and nails, and retained recollection of it in a fit of the cold shivers; but I did not care to repeat the operation. In our dilemma, Barbarossa, who was a plucky knave, hit upon the plan which ought to have commended itself to us at first. "Let us stray up the river-bank a few hundred yards," he said, "seize a boat, and row ourselves across." No sooner was the proposition made than it was adopted; but we were saved from the ephemeral disgrace of posing as petty amphibious pirates, degenerate Schinderhannes of the Bidassoa. We saw a boat; a girl was near. The boat was her father's; she engaged to take us over for a consideration--I am certain she had set her heart on a string of straw-coloured ribbons and a sky-blue feather in a shop-window in Hendaye--and to await our return at nightfall. We arranged the signal, and stealthily stole across, drifting diagonally most of the way; and I entrusted the speculative French damsel with my revolver and my Carlist pass, and paid her a farewell compliment on her face and figure as I stepped ashore. Giving her the revolver and pass enlisted her confidence. We strolled along with apparent carelessness, entered a posada on the road by the waterside and had refreshments. I said I should feel much obliged if they could let us have a trap to Irun and back, as we had business there, and my friend was tired and not much of a pedestrian. An open carriage was provided, and off we drove by the skirt of the hill of St. Marcial, where the Spaniards gave Soult such a dressing in 1813, passed a series of outer defences with their covering and working parties, and entered one of the gates of the town, and never a question was asked. Ditches had been dug round the place and earthworks thrown up; but the principal reliance of the garrison seemed to be in loophooled breastworks made of sand-bags superimposed. Here and there were walls of loose stones--more of a danger than a protection--rude shelter-trenches, and mud-built, wattle-knitted refuges, round-topped, and disguised with branches. They had made the position strong; but they should have gone in for more spade and less stones, more mole and less beaver. We trotted over the narrow paved street, with its flagged sidepaths, and drew up on the Plaza, overlooked by the solid square-stone mansion of the Ayuntamiento. The windows were screened with planks, and armed groups lounged in front; there were barrels of water and heaps of gravel at intervals upon the ground; memories of Paris rose to my mind--Irun was preparing for bombardment. If the Carlists had no serious artillery in fact, they had a powerful ordnance in the apprehensions of their adversaries. Perhaps this was the explanation of the rhodomontade about the batteries in _El Cuartel Real_. We were congratulating ourselves on the ease with which we had run the blockade, when an officer of the Miqueletes approached our carriage and demanded our papers. I showed my Foreign Office passport, with the visa of the Spanish Consulate at London upon it. He gave a cursory look at it, bowed, and returned it to me. Then came the turn of Barbarossa, and there was a flash of shrewd spitefulness in his eyes. "Your papers, señor?" "I have none. I didn't think any were required." "Ah! doubtless you thought Irun was in Carlist occupation. You are wrong." "No; I knew it was not in Carlist occupation. What has that to do with me? I am an Englishman," producing a packet of letters. "I don't want to see them. I know you. What do you want here?" "To see a friend." "Who is your friend?" Barbarossa was not in the least nonplussed. He said he had heard a fellow-countryman, a comrade of his, was in the town. "You will have to turn back the way you came, and thank your stars you are permitted." "But I am hungry." "And the horse wants a feed," interposed the driver, who no doubt had his own object to serve. "Well, you may stay here for refreshment, but you must get outside our gates before dark." We drove to the principal inn, where we alighted and ordered dinner. Barbarossa sat down, and I went out to look at the place and search for a barber's shop, for I sorely needed a shave. Irun is a well-constructed town on the shelving slope of a smaller rise between Mounts Jaizquivel and Aya, not far from the coast. It has a population of some 5,000, and in ordinary years does a good trade in tiles and bricks, tanned leather, and smith's work, besides sending wood to Los Pasages for the purposes of the boat-builders. The Bidassoa at its base branches, and thus forms the islet of Faisanes, off which the prosperous fisherman can fill his basket with trout, salmon, and mullet, aye, and lumpish eels, if his predilections so tend. But I have no intention to describe Irun. Théophile Gautier has done that before me, and I am not sacrilegious. There was another customer in the barber's shop. As I left after the shave he followed, and accosted me on the flagway confidentially. "How are you, captain?" "You are in error," I answered. "I am no captain." "What! Did I not see you take a boat for the _San Margarita_ at Socoa?" "That may be; but I only boarded her through curiosity." "Do not be afraid," he whispered. "How is Don Guillermo?" "What Don Guillermo?" "Señor Leader. I was with him when he was wounded; I am a Carlist. I am here on the same mission as yourself; to spy what the vermin are doing." "Ha! good; ramble on, and don't notice me. It is dangerous." He sauntered along the causeway, hands in pockets and whistling, and presently popped into a tavern, and I re-entered the fonda. Hardly had I set foot over the threshold when I was stupefied by a welcome in a familiar voice, none other than that of Mr. William O'Donovan, who had been my comrade and amanuensis throughout the irksome beleaguerment of Paris.[F] We did not throw our arms round our respective necks, hug and kiss each other--I reserve my kisses for pretty girls, newly-washed babes, and dead male friends, and then kiss only the brow--but we did join hands cordially and long. In answer to my query as to what had brought him to this queer corner at the back of God-speed, he explained that he was acting as correspondent of a Dublin paper; for, it appeared, the people of Ireland were consumed with anxiety as to the progress of the Carlist rising--details of which, of course, they could not obtain in the mere London papers--and were particularly desirous to have record of the doings of the Foreign Legion, a great majority of whom were sons of the Emerald Isle. His younger brother, a medical student, was likely to come out to join that Legion, and as for Kaspar (a name by which we knew his brother Edmond, afterwards triumvir at Merv), he was sure to turn up. Mother Carey's chicken hovers near when the elements are at strife. He was immensely satisfied with his diggings, he said, liked the natives, and considered this a splendid chance for improving his Spanish. He was reading "Don Quixote" in the vernacular. In a sense, I looked upon his presence as a perfect godsend to us, as he came in most appropriately as a _Deus ex machinâ_ to create the character of Barbarossa's invented friend. O'Donovan was in good standing with the Republicans of the town, as he was a staunch Republican himself, and could spin yarns of the Republics of antiquity, and of the greatness of Paris, and the glories of the United States. He was getting on famously with Castilian, and was charmed with the redundancy of its vocabulary of vituperation, which was only to be equalled by the Irish, of which his father had been such a master. I made Barbarossa and my old chum known to one another, and we dined together, pledging the past in a cup of wine tempered with the living waters which bubbled up in the sacristy of the parish church, and were distributed in bronze conduits through Irun. After the meal and the meditative smoke of custom, O'Donovan sat down to write a letter, which I guaranteed to post for him in France, and Barbarossa and I sallied forth for a walk. We were lounging about the Calle Mayor gazing at the escutcheons over every hall-door--your bellows-mender and cobbler in this democratic town were invariably of the seed of Noah in right line--when the alarm was raised that fifty horses had been carried off by the Carlists almost at the gates, and that two shots had been heard. The bugler sounded the call "To arms," and forthwith a little company consisting of thirty-two men, the bugler aforesaid, and a captain, set out at a quick step for a high ground beside a signal-tower at one end of the town. We hurried forward with them, and passed out through one of the four gates, on the side next the mountains. The soldiers took a position on the slope of a hill a couple of hundred yards from the gate, and Barbarossa and I sheltered ourselves behind an orchard-wall, from which there was an uninterrupted view of the billowy tract of meadow and pasture land beneath, cut into patches by thick hedges. Quick on our heels emerged from the town some half-dozen intrepid "volunteers of liberty," and the inevitable small boy, a red cap stuck jauntily on three hairs of his head and a large cigarette in his mouth. One of the volunteers--he who had demanded our papers on the Plaza--looked viciously at Barbarossa, who assumed a most artistic pretence of stolidity. "Come here, señor, and you will have a better vision of your friends," he said with mock suavity. Barbarossa smiled, thanked him, and walked quietly to the place indicated, an exposed opening beside the wall. "I can see nothing," he said. I adjusted my long-distance glass, and ranged over the wide stretch of landscape, but could see nothing either. As I shut it up and returned it to the case, a sergeant advanced from the party of soldiers on the slope and marched directly towards me. I was puzzled and, I own, a trifle unnerved. "Señor," he said to me, "I carry the compliments of my captain, and his request that you would lend him your glass, as he has forgotten his own." "With pleasure," I answered readily, much relieved. "I will take it to him myself, as it is London-made, and he may not understand how it is sighted." This may have been a breach of neutrality, but what was I to do? If I refused, the glass would have been taken from me, and I should have been compromised. I handed it to the officer with my best bow, explained its mechanism to him; he bowed to me, and from that moment I felt that I was under his wing. I may be wrong, but I have a notion that in a skirmish it is much better to be near regulars than volunteers, and I stood in a line with the military a few paces away. Suddenly there was a spark and a report away down in a field of maize, some six hundred yards below us, and the whizz of a bullet was heard. "Steady, men!" said the captain; "don't discharge your rifles." The sight was very pretty as they stood in a group on the green hillside in attitude of suspense, their weapons held at the ready, and all eyes fixed on the front, from which the smoke was rising. It was very like to the celebrated picture by Protais, familiar in every cabaret in France, "_Avant le Combat;_" but even more picturesque than that, for these soldiers were dressed most irregularly--some in tattered capote, others in shirt-sleeves, some in shako, others in _bonnet de police_. A few civilians had crept out of the town by this time, and the chief of the Miqueletes roared peremptorily to have that gate shut. This was not an agreeable position for Barbarossa and myself. Our retreat was cut off. We were unarmed. If one of those amateur warriors were killed, we ran the imminent hazard of being massacred by his comrades. On the other hand, there was the liability of being ourselves shot by the Carlists. How were they to distinguish a neutral or a sympathizer from their foes? I confess I could not help smiling as the thought occurred to me what a piece of irony in action it would be if Barbarossa were to be helped to a morsel of lead by his friends, the enemy. With a cheerful equanimity I contemplated the prospect of his receiving a very slight contusion from a spent bullet on a soft part of his frame. Ping, ping, came a few reports, but evidently out of range. Each smoke-wreath was in a different direction. "This may get hot," I said to myself; "the Carlists may not be sharpshooters, but this clump of uniforms in relief on the grass must present a blur that will be an enticing target for them. I dare not go back to the wall, but it might be discreet to lie down. There is no disgrace in offering them a small elevation of corpus." I stretched myself on the sward, acted nonchalance, and lit a cigar. The volunteers could no longer be held in control. They opened action on their own account, one fellow distinguishing himself by the rapidity of his fire, and the intensity with which he aimed at something--or nothing. "Ah, that's Tomas!" said a portly civilian connoisseur, with his hands in his pockets. "We know him, he is making music; he wants to get himself remarked." The soldiers did not deliver a shot, but the volunteers kept cracking away, and the invisible Carlists replied. Nobody was hit, though bullets could be heard whizzing overhead for twenty minutes, and one did actually knock a chip off a wall. That was the sole damage done to the Republican position; the damage to the Carlist must have been less. Two of the Miqueletes ventured stealthily down a road leading towards the point from which the nearest jets of smoke curled, following the ditch by the side, stooping and peering through the bushes. There was a volley from afar. They hesitated and stood, as if undecided whether to advance. "Sound the retire for those men," said the captain; and as the call rang out they returned. That volley was the last sign the Carlists gave; and after waiting ten minutes, the captain shut up my glass, returned it to me, and remarked that the attack was a feint, and had no object beyond worrying his men. He gave the order "March," the gate was opened, Barbarossa rejoined me, and we returned to Irun, taking care to keep as near the regulars as we could. "Nada--nothing," cried the captain to an inquiring lady on a balcony, and the town-gates were closed after the volunteers had returned and tramped to the Plaza with the proud bearing of citizens who had done their duty. How that heroic Tomas did strut! A fighter he of the choicest brand, one not to stop at trifles; there was martial ire in his flaming glance; defiance breathed from his nostrils; triumph sat on his lips; he swung his arms like destructive flails; and as he entered a tavern one could only fancy him calling in a voice of Stentor for a jug of rum and blood plentifully besprinkled with gunpowder and cayenne pepper to assuage the thirst of combat. O'Donovan gave me his letter. Barbarossa hinted that it was our best course to slope, and slope we did, as soon as the horse was harnessed. As we passed down the street a grinning face saluted me from a doorway. It was that of my acquaintance from the barber's shop. He gave me a meaning wink. The artful Carlists had evidently succeeded in their object, whatever it might have been. On the river-bank our fair and faithful ferry-maid awaited us. We were conveyed over in safety, and at the hotel of Hendaye soon forgot the perils we had encountered. Barbarossa was dead-beat, and threw himself on a sofa, where he sank back heavy-eyed and exhausted; and I, almost feared that he would drop into a coma, as the penalty of overstraining nature, until the sight of a pack of cards restored him as if by a spell to his normal wakefulness. Even in a disturbed region it is needful to have a change of linen, so we got back next morning to St. Jean de Luz, where I had left my baggage. There I met M. Thieblin, a colleague, whom I had seen last at Metz, previous to the siege of that fortress in the Franco-German war. He was now representing the _New York Herald_, and had just returned from Estella, at the taking of which place, the most important the Carlists had yet seized, he had the luck to be present. He assured me that it was utter fatuity to dream of following the Carlists, except I had at least one horse--but that it would be sensible to take two if I could manage to procure them. It was more than an ordinary man was qualified to cope with, to make his observations, write his letters, and look after their transmission, without having to attend to his nag, and do an odd turn of cooking at a pinch. The riddle was how to get the horse--a sound hardy animal that would not call for elaborate grooming, or refuse a feed of barley. Horse-flesh was at a premium, but he thought I might be able to have what I wanted at Bayonne, on payment of an extravagant price. A requisition for forage and corn could be had through the Junta; and I should have no trouble in getting an orderly on applying with my credentials to the chief of staff of any of the Carlist columns to which I might attach myself. We had a long conversation, and Thieblin frankly informed me that in his opinion the Carlists had not the ghost of a chance outside their own territory. There they were cocks of the walk. What the end might be he could not pretend to vaticinate, but "El Pretendiente" would never reign in Madrid. The conflict might last for months--might last for years; but the Carlists owed the vitality they had as much to the divisions and inefficiency of their adversaries as to their own strength. There would be no important engagements--to dignify them by the epithet--until the organization of the insurrectionary forces was regularized, and they had a stronger artillery and an adequate cavalry. M. Thieblin did not stray far from the bull's-eye in his prophecy. I went to bed in the mood of Crookback on Bosworth Field, and felt that my dream-talk would shape itself into the cry, "A horse! a horse!" Until that coveted steed had been lassoed, stolen, or bought, I must only endeavour to justify my existence--that is to say, render value for the money expended on me by picking up "copy" anywhere and everywhere. I was advised to go to Bilbao by sea, but the advice came too late. The last steamer from Bayonne had ventured there four-and-twenty hours before I sought my passage, and even on that last steamer the few voyagers were unable to insure their lives with the Accidental Company, although they consented to promise that they would descend into the hold the instant they heard a shot. It was almost as full of jeopardy to travel to Bilbao by sea as to sail down the Mississippi with a racing captain and a lading of rye-whisky on board. One Monsieur Gueno, master of the barque _Numa_, of Vannes, made moan that he was seriously knocked about while he lay in the Nervion, off the Luchana bridge, during a skirmish between the Carlists and the troops. They both fought vigorously, but they gave him most of the blows. One of his crew, in a punt behind, was killed, and twenty-five bullets were embedded in a single mast. He had the tricolour flying all the time. A fellow-countryman of his, Monsieur Jarmet, of the ship _Pierre-Alcide_, of Nantes, sent in a claim for an indemnity of £160 for damages sustained by his vessel much in the like manner. A Spanish war-craft, moored behind him, began pelting the Carlists with shot; the Carlists replied, and the _Pierre-Alcide_ came in for the bulk of the favours distributed. Three bullets penetrated the captain's cabin, and four rent holes in the French flag. Neither pilots nor tugs were for hire at Bilbao, and captains of sailing vessels had only to whistle for a favouring wind and rely on their own good fortune and skill. Bilbao had to be dismissed on the merits. Taking it for granted that I had that evasive horse, I reasoned, as I tossed on my bed, to the restless whimper of the Bay of Biscay, over which a storm was brewing, that "el Cuartel Real," the headquarters of the King, was the natural goal. There first information was to be had, and it was felt that it was about the safest place to be; but the King seldom stopped under the same roof two nights successively, and no one could tell where he would be two days beforehand. If he was at Estella when one started, he might be at Vera or Durango, or goodness knows where, when one got to Estella. So far his progress had been a success; he was present at the taking of Estella, and exercised his Royal clemency by releasing the captured prisoners. It would have been more politic to have demanded an exchange, for there were partisans of his own in Republican dungeons (Englishmen amongst them); but then prisoners have to be fed and guarded, so on the whole it was as well they were set free. It was very much the case of the man who won the elephant at a raffle. If the stories, spread assiduously by the Republicans, of the massacre and maltreatment of captives by the Carlists were correct, here was the opportunity for the exercise of wholesale cruelty; but there was not a particle of truth in such charges, which, by the way, one hears in every civil war. Where Don Carlos might advance next, or where severe fighting--not such brushes as that I witnessed at Irun--might take place, was a mystery. The movements of the Republican leaders were inexplicable, and conducted in contravention of all known principles of the art of war. They harassed their men by long and objectless marches. They ordered towns to be put in a state of defence at first, and then withdrew the garrisons. They engaged whole columns in defiles, where a company of invisible guerrilleros could tease them. They acted, in most instances, as if they had no information or wrong information. The latter, I believe, was nearer the truth. Their system of espionage was inefficient, as the information they got was untrustworthy, and always would be, in the northern provinces, for the feeling of the masses of the people was against them. Instead of making headway they were losing ground every day, and would so continue until they received reinforcements with fibre, and were commanded by officers who really meant to win, and had the knowledge or the instinct to conceive a proper plan of campaign. The generals could hardly be censured, for their hands were tied; they were forbidden to be severe; they dared not squelch insubordination. Capital punishment, even in the army, and at such a crisis as this, was abolished. There had been, I heard, something suspiciously resembling a mutiny in the column of Sanchez Bregua. A certain Colonel Castañon was put under arrest on a charge of Alfonsist proclivities; but the Cazadores and Engineers threatened to rebel unless he was liberated; and Sanchez Bregua, instead of decimating the Cazadores and Engineers, as Lord Strathnairn would have done, liberated the Colonel. But to that question of my route. Peradventure the presence to my dozing vision of the General commanding the Republican troops of the north that had been might help me towards a solution. "That had been" is written advisedly, for Sanchez Bregua had been recalled to Madrid, not a day too soon. He was one of those generals whose spine had been curved by lengthened bending over a desk. Loma, who was active and dashing, and had the rare gift of confidence in himself, had taken his stand at Tolosa, and was awaiting the advent of Lizarraga. All his men, and every able-bodied male in the town, were diligently excavating ditches and making entrenchments. Until Tolosa was captured by the Carlists, no serious attack on Pampeluna was probable; and that attack was likely to assume the form of an investment. Estella was to the south of Pampeluna, and all the country round, from which provisions could be drawn, was in the occupation of the Carlists. Tolosa was the objective point of the moment, and to Tolosa I determined to go. An attempt on San Sebastian could not enter into the calculations of the Carlist leaders at this stage of their revolt. The stronghold was almost inaccessible on the land side, and men, munitions, and provisions could be easily thrown into it by water. Irun, Fontarabia, and even Renteria (were artillery available) could be seized whenever the comparatively small sacrifice of lives involved would be advisable. But the game was not worth the candle yet. Were Irun or Fontarabia in the hands of the Carlists, there was the always-present danger of shells being pitched into them from a gunboat in the Bidassoa; and Renteria, outside of which the Republican troops only stirred on sufferance, was to all intents as serviceable to the Carlists as if it were tenanted by a Carlist garrison, which would thereby be condemned to idleness. That whirlwind ride from Renteria to Irun would come before me as the storm battalions mustered outside, and the waves began lashing themselves into violence of temper. What if I had to go to Madrid while such weather as this was brooding? To get to the capital one is obliged to embark at Bayonne for Santander, and proceed thence by rail--so long as no Carlist partidas meddle with the track. Romantic Spain! But are not those Republicans who affect that they know how to govern a country primarily and principally to blame? Only consider the continued interruption of that short piece of road between San Sebastian and Irun. Is it not disgraceful to them? One of our old Indian officers, I dare venture to believe, with eighteen horsemen and a couple of companies of foot, could hold it open in spite of the Carlists. But such a simple idea as the establishment of cavalry patrols of three, keeping vigil backwards and forwards along the line of eighteen miles, with stout infantry posts always on the alert in blockhouses at intervals, seems never to have entered into the obtuse heads of those officers lately promoted from the ranks. Seeing that the intercourse of different towns with each other and with the coast and abroad has been so long broken up, I cannot fathom the secret of how the population lives. The troops arrive in a village one day and levy contributions, the guerrilleros arrive the next and do the same; the fields must be neglected, trade must droop, yet nobody apparently wants food. True, the land is wonderfully fat; but some day the cry of famine will be heard. No land could bear this perpetual drain on its resources. And then I thought of Carlists whom I met in France, who had given of their goods to support the cause. With them I talked on this very subject. They were respectable and respected men; they prayed for success to Don Carlos with sincere heart; but they had left Spain, and they complained that this condition of disturbance was lasting too long. "You ask me why I did not remain," said one to me; "wait, and you shall see." He opened a door and pointed to three lovely little girls at play, and continued, "These are my reasons; I have made more sacrifices than I was able for the Royal cause, and they asked me at last for another contribution, which would have ruined me. I love my King; but for no King, señor, could I afford to make those darlings paupers." Had these Carlists any glimmer of the sunshine of a victorious issue to their uprising? (egad, that was a strong blast, and the waves do swish as if they were enraged at last!). Thieblin thinks not. And yet they are active, and, like the storm outside, they are gaining strength. Those of them under arms are four times as numerous as the Republicans in the northern provinces. Leader swears to me that everyone who can shoulder a musket is a Carlist. There are no more Chicos to be had, unless the volunteers of liberty come over, rifles, accoutrements and all, to Prince Charlie--a liberty they are volunteering to take somewhat freely. I was rash in saying there were no more Chicos. Did not a company of "bhoys" trudge over to Lesaca to offer their services recently? But they were very ancient boys. The youngest of them was sixty-five. They were veterans of the Seven Years' War, and mostly colonels. Their fidelity was thankfully acknowledged, but their services were not gratefully accepted. The aged and ferocious fire-eaters were sent back to their arrowroot and easy-chairs. At all events, they had more of the timber of heroism in them than those diplomatic Carlists of the _gandin_ order, who are Carlists because it makes them interesting in the sight of the ladies, but whose campaigning is confined to an occasional three days' incursion on Spanish territory, with a cook and a valet, saddle-bags full of potted lobster and _pâté de foie gras_, and a dressing-case newly packed with _au Botot_ and essence of Jockey Club. There are personages of this class not unknown to society at Biarritz and Bayonne, who have been going to the front for the last three months, and have not got there yet. One would think their game of chivalry ought to be pretty well "played out;" but to the folly of the vain man, as to the appetite of the lean pig, there is no limit. By Jove! There is a clatter; the casement is blown open, and the light is blown out, and through the gap whistles the cool, briny breath of the Atlantic, and I can almost feel the wash of the white spray in my hair. Better a stable cell in the Castle of the Mota to-night than a tumbling berth in the _San Margarita_. This was the close of my interview with myself, and I turned over on my pillow and fell precipitately into a profound dreamless sleep. CHAPTER XIII. Nearing the End--Firing on the Red Cross--Perpetuity of War--Artistic Hypocrites--The Jubilee Year--The Conflicts of a Peaceful Reign--Major Russell--Quick Promotion--The Foreign Legion--An Aspiring Adventurer--Leader's Career--A Piratical Proposal--The "Ojaladeros" of Biarritz--A Friend in Need--Buying a Horse--Gilpin Outdone--"Fred Burnaby." AND now I take up the last chapter of this book, and I have not half finished with the subject I had set before myself at starting. By the figures at the head of the last page I perceive that I have almost reached the orthodox length of a volume, and perforce must stop. For some weeks past I have been looking and longing for the end, for I have been ill, weary and worried, and my labour has become a task. Slowly toiling day by day, I knew I must be nearing the goal; yet, like the strenuous Webb on his swim from Dover to Calais, the horizon seemed to come no closer. The land in sight grew no plainer, although each breast-stroke--the pleasure of a while agone, but oh! such a tax now--must have lessened the distance. Even to that excursion there came an hour of accomplishment and repose; but to this, of pen over paper, I cannot flatter myself that the hour is yet. I have to abandon the work incomplete. As it has happened to me before, the theme has expanded under my hands, and I shall have to rise from my desk before I penetrate to the Carlist headquarters, of which I had to say much, or have experiences of that strangest of Communes in Murcia, with its sea and land skirmishes and its motley rabble of mutineers, convicts, and nondescripts, of which I had to say much likewise. Whether I shall have the privilege of recounting my adventures at the court and camp of Don Carlos, and by the side of the General directing the siege of Cartagena, who admitted me as a sort of supernumerary on his staff, will depend on the reception of this, the first instalment of my experiences in Spain. An act of unjustifiable barbarism or stupidity, or both--for barbarism is but another form of stupidity--was perpetrated by some Carlists outside Irun while I was negotiating for that indispensable horse. An ambulance-waggon, displaying the Red Cross of Geneva, had sallied from the town, and was fired upon. The Paris delegate I had met at Hendaye was in charge of it, and averred that it was wantonly and wilfully attacked. I thought it, singular that nobody was hurt, and reasoned that the man was excitable, and got into range unconsciously. The duty of the Geneva Society properly begins after, and not during a combat; and when gentlemen are busy at the game of professional manslaughter, no philanthropic outsider has any right to distract them from their occupation by indiscreet obstruction. The Parisian did not view it in that light, and downfaced me that these rustics, to whose aid he was actually going, tried to murder him of malice prepense. It was useless to represent to him that these rustics may have never heard of the modern benevolent institution for the softening of strife, and may have regarded the huge Red Cross as a defiant symbol of Red Republicanism, and perhaps a parody of what is sacred. So in the estimation of that citizen of the most enlightened capital in the universe, these Basques were ruthless boobies with an insatiable passion for lapping blood. But mistakes and exaggerations will occur in every war. The only way to obviate them is to put an end to war altogether--_which will never be done_! When Christ came into the world, peace was proclaimed; when He left it, peace was bequeathed. War has been the usual condition of mankind since, as it had been before; and Christians cut each other's throats with as much alacrity and expertness as Pagans, often in the name of the religion of peace. I heard two eminent war-correspondents lecture recently, and I noticed that those passages where fights were described were applauded to the echo. The more ferocious the combat the more vigorous the cheers. The faces of small boys flushed, and their hands clinched at the vivid recital. The nature of the savage, which has not been extirpated by School Boards, was betraying itself in them. Yet these two war-correspondents thought it an acquittal of conscience after their kindling periods to dwell on the immorality of war. The one spoke of the beauty of Bible precepts, the other disburdened himself on the cruelty and wickedness of a battle. What artistic hypocrisy! It was as if one were to strike up the "Faerie Voices" waltz, and tell a girl to keep her feet still; as if one were to lend "Robinson Crusoe" to a boy, and warn him not to think of running away to sea. Still, I must even add my voice to the orthodox chorus, and affirm that warfare is bad, brutal, fraudful, a thing of meretricious gauds, a clay idol, fetish of humbug and havoc, whose feet are soaking in muddy gore and salt tears; yet in the privacy of my own study I might sadly admit that the Millennium is remote, that the Parliament of Nations exists but in the dreams of the poet, and that Longfellow's forecast of the days down through the dark future when the holy melodies of love shall oust the clangours of conflict is a pretty conceit--and no more. War is inexcusable, and is foolish and ugly; but, like the poor and the ailing, we shall have it always with us. It is criminal, except as protest against intolerable persecution, or in maintenance of national honour or defence of national territory; and even in these cases it should be undertaken only when all devices of conciliation have been tried in vain. Next to the vanquished, it does most harm to the victor. Yet about it, as about high play, there is a fascination, and I have to plead guilty to the weak feeling that I would not look with overwhelming aversion on an order, should it come to me to-morrow, to prepare to chronicle a new campaign and face the chronicler's risks; and they are real. But I should not go into it with a light heart, like M. Emile Ollivier. I might be, in a quiet way, happy as Queen Victoria was (according to Count Vitzthum) for she danced much the night before the declaration of hostilities against Russia, but spoke of what was coming with amiable candour and great regret. We are on the eve of a Jubilee Year, when the halcyon shall plume his wing, and we shall hear much oratorical trash and hebetude about the peacefulness of this happy reign. Does the reader reflect how many wars we have had in the pacific half-century which is lapsing? The tale will astonish him, and should silence the thoughtless word-spinners of the platforms. The door of the temple of Janus has been seldom closed for long. Our campaigns, great and small, and military enterprises of the lesser sort, could not be counted on the fingers of both hands. We have had fighting with Afghans and Burmese (twice); Scinde, Gwalior, and Sikh wars; hostilities with Kaffirs, Russians, Persians, Chinese, and Maoris (twice), Abyssinians, Ashantis, Zulus, Boers, and Soudanese, not to mention the repression of the most stupendous of mutinies, a martial promenade in Egypt, and expeditions against Jowakis, Bhootanese, Looshais, Red River rebels, and such pitiful minor fry. In St. Jean de Luz, the nearest point to the disputed ground and the best place from which to transmit information, there was a small and select British colony, mostly consisting of retired naval and military officers. A dear friend of mine amongst them was Major Russell, who had spent a lengthened span of years in the East--an admirable type of the calm, firm, courteous Anglo-Indian--who had never soured his temper and spoiled his liver with excessive "pegs," who understood and respected the natives, who had shown administrative ability, and who, like many another honest, dutiful officer, had not shaken much fruit off the pagoda-tree, or even secured the C.B. which is so often given to tarry-at-home nonentities. Russell used to pay me a regular visit to the Fonda de la Playa. One morning as we were chatting, Leader strode into the coffee-room, a vision of splendour. He had got on his uniform as Commandant of the Foreign Legion--a uniform which did much credit to his fancy, for he had designed it himself. He wore a white boina with gold tassel, a blue tunic with black braid, red trousers, and brown gaiters. He had donned the gala-costume with the object of getting himself photographed. Commandant is the equivalent of Major in the British service, so we agreed to dub the young Irishman henceforth and for ever, until he became colonel or captain-general, Major Leader. "Promotion is quick in this army," murmured Russell. "I served all my active life under the suns of India, and here I am only a major at the close. Leader joined the Carlists less than three months ago, and he is already my equal in rank." "The fortune of war, Russell," said I; "don't be jealous. I was offered command of a brigade under the Commune, but I declined the tribute to my merit, or I would not be here to-day. I met a man in Bayonne yesterday, and he was ready to assume control of the entire insurrectionary forces." "Who? Cabrera?" "No," I answered; "catch Cabrera coming here. He is too much afraid of a ruler who is no pretender. The renowned Commander-in-Chief of Aragon and Valencia, Don Ramon the Rough and Ready, is Conde Something-or-other now, a willing slave to petticoat government. He is to be seen any day pottering about Windsor." "And who is this speculator in bloodshed?" "A foreign adventurer," I explained, "who does not know a word of Spanish, much less Basque, is unacquainted with the topography of the country, and has not the faintest inkling of the idiosyncrasies of the lieutenants who would serve under him, or of the mode of humouring the prejudices of the people of the different provinces in revolt." "What answer did they give to his application for employment?" "A polite negative. They told him they could not appoint him a leader without offending the susceptibilities of adherents with claims upon them men of local influence, and so forth. Behind his back, they laughed at his entertaining temerity." That Foreign Legion never came to maturity. Leader showed me a commission authorizing him to organize it. Lesaca was to be the depôt, French the language of command, and Smith Sheehan the adjutant. It might have developed into a very fine Foreign Legion, but no volunteers presented themselves to join it but two young Englishmen, one of whom was sick when he was not drunk, and the other of whom felt it to be a grievance on a campaign that a cup of tea could not be got at regular hours. How Sheehan did chaff this amiable amateur! "You will have nothing to do but draw your pay, my lad," he said. "The cookery is hardly A 1, but 'twill pass. Think of the beds, pillows of hops under your head; and every regiment has its own set of billiard-markers and a select string-band, every performer an artist." After an arduous service of one day and a half that gentleman returned to the maternal apron-strings, laden to the ground with the most harrowing legends of the horrors of war. Leader was not a warrior of this stamp--far from it; he had vindicated his manliness at Ladon outside Orleans, where Ogilvie, of the British Royal Artillery, had met his fate by his side, and there was something soldierly in the way he bore himself in his vanity of dress. Not that I think the dandies are the best soldiers--that is merest popular paradox. To me it is as ridiculous for a man to array himself in fine clothes when he is going to kill or be killed, as it would be for him to put on gewgaws when he was going to be hanged. As Leader disappears from my account of Carlist doings after this--we were associated with different columns--it may be of interest to tell of his subsequent career. He served in a cavalry squadron on the staff of the King, and when the cause collapsed came to London. His uncle tried to induce him to settle down to some steady employment in the City. Leader expressed himself satisfied to make an experiment at desk-work. "It was useless," said Leader with a hearty crow as he related the story to me. "The friend who had promised to create a vacancy for me in his office ordered his chief clerk to lock the safe and send for the police when he heard of my antecedents. He invited me to dinner, but candidly told me that a rifle was more in my line than a quill." And yet it was in the service of the quill the young soldier ended his days. He got an appointment as an auxiliary correspondent to a great London daily paper during the Russo-Turkish war. He was elate; the road to fame and fortune now lay open before him. The next I heard of him was that he had succumbed to typhoid fever at Philippopolis. A Scotch _spadassin_ arrived in our midst about this period. He was most anxious to draw a blade for Don Carlos, but he had a decided objection to serve in any capacity but that of command. He did not appreciate the fun of losing the number of his mess as an obscure hero of the rank and file, though he would not mind sacrificing an arm, I do think, at the head of a charging column, provided that he had a showy uniform on, and that the fact of his valour was properly advertised in the despatches. He had an idea that would commend itself to Belcha's bushwhackers, but it was not entertained. It was to take passage with a few trusty men on the tug for San Sebastian when she was reported to be conveying specie for the payment of the Spanish Republican troops, to drive the voyagers down the hold, throttle the skipper, intimidate the crew, take the wheel and turn her head to the coast, seize and land the money under Carlist protection, and then scuttle her. The least recompense, he calculated, which could be awarded to him for that exploit by his Majesty Charles VII. was the Order of the Golden Fleece; and a very appropriate order too. There was a set of Carlist sympathizers known to the fighting-men as "ojaladeros," or warriors with much decoration in the shape of polished buttons. Their depôt was at Biarritz, an aristocratic watering-place born under the second French Empire, and not ignorant of some of the vices of the Byzantine Empire. There are healthful breezes there, but they do not quite sweep away the scent of frangipani. Warlike, with a proviso, the Scot might have been designated, but he was not to be compared with these ojaladeros; he would fight if he had a lime-lit stage to posture upon; they would not fight at all, but they moved about mysteriously, as if their bosoms were big with the fate of dynasties, held hugger-mugger caucus, and were the oracles of boudoirs. At Bayonne there was a better class of Carlist sympathizers; such of them as were of the fighting age were there in the intervals of duty. To a job-master's in the city by the Adour I was recommended as the most likely place to procure a steed. At the Hôtel St. Etienne, where I stopped, I was gratified by an unexpected encounter with the genial captain[G] (Ronald Campbell), who had brought a juicy leg of mutton at his saddle-skirts to the relief of my household after the siege of Paris. He went with me to the job-master's--it is as well to have a friend with you when you do a horse-deal. I had no choice but Hobson's. The job-master was desolated, but he had sold three animals the day before to an English milord, a very big gentleman, and his party. He had just one horse, but it was a beauty. The horse was trotted out. It was well groomed--they always are, and arsenic does impart a nice gloss to the hide--and looked imposing, a tall three-quarter-bred bay gelding. "You'll have to take it," said the captain, "though I fear it will not be a great catch for mountain-work. Seems to me that it stumbles--that lie-back of the ears is vicious--ha! rears too--and by Jove! it has been fired. No matter. Where needs must, you know, there's no alternative. Buy it by all means." I closed with the bargain, got a loan of a saddle, bought a pair of jack-boots, and ordered my purchase to be brought round to the door of the hotel within half-an-hour. I am no rough-rider, and I had not counted on the high mettle of this, which was literally a "fiery, untamed steed." It had been fed for the market, and had had no exercise for two days previous. I meant to try its paces to St. Jean de Luz, and show off before the damsels of Biarritz; but, lack-a-day! what a declension was in store for me. It had best be given in the words of a letter to my kindly compatriot, written while defeat was fresh in my mind. Thus the epistle runs: * * * * * "DEAR CAMPBELL, "My first essay on my eight hundred francs' worth of horse-power was a sight to see. "_Imprimis_, the stirrup-leathers were long enough for you. "_En suite_, I gave the dear gelding his head because he took it, and he incontinently faced a post of the French army at the Porte d'Espagne. The sentry came to the charge and cried, _On ne passe pas ici._ The blood-horse went at him, the sentry funked, and then, as if satisfied with his demonstration, the blood-horse--the bit always in his mouth--made a _demi-tour_, and faced a post of douaniers. This also was sacred ground, it appears, but the douaniers let the blood-horse pass, not even making the feint to prod his inside for contraband. The scene now changes to the Place de la Comédie (there's something in a name), where by virtue of vigorous tugging at curb and snaffle I just succeeded in keeping my gallant gelding off the cobble-stones. He went a burster over the bridge by a short turn down a street and to the door of his stable, and there he positively stopped, and I swear I felt his sides shaking with laughter. I called the groom; said I thought it would rain; besides, I did not know the road. On the whole, I had reconsidered the matter, and would go to St. Jean de Luz by train. The groom was awfully polite, pretended to believe me, and provided a man to take forward my eight--oh, hang it! we shan't think of the price. "Humiliation! you will say. Yes, sir, and I feel it; but that horse will feel it too. When I get him somewhere that none can see, and where sentries, douaniers, and stables of refuge don't abound, I shall ask him to try how long he can keep up a gallop; but, by the body of the Claimant, I shall have sixteen stone on his back. "Yours with knees unwearied and soul unsubdued." * * * * * At St. Jean de Luz I learned at the principal hotel that the English milord was Captain Frederick Burnaby of "the Queen of England's Blue Guards." He was supposed to have some secret official mission to Don Carlos, to whose headquarters he had directed his steps, and I at once took measures to follow in his tracks. THE END. * * * * * BILLING & SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD. _BY THE AUTHOR OF "ROMANTIC SPAIN."_ AN IRON-BOUND CITY; or, Five Months of Peril and Privation. 2 vols. 21s. "A story of peril, adventure, privation, Is told, in two vols., to your great delectation, With shrewd common sense and uncommon sensation! Here's the painful account of Parisians defeated: And Paris besieged is most 'specially' treated: Like a trusty Tapleyan, bright, hopeful, and witty, O'Shea tells the tale of 'AN IRON-BOUND CITY.'"--_Punch._ "We can listen with unjaded interest to the oft-told tale of the fall of Paris when it is told by so genial and sunny-minded an historian."--_Saturday Review._ LEAVES PROM THE LIFE OF A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT. 2 vols. 21s. "The great charm of his pages is the entire absence of dulness, and the evidence they afford of a delicate sense of humour, considerable powers of observation, a store of apposite and racy anecdote, and a keen enjoyment of life."--_Standard._ "Redolent of stories throughout, told with such a cheery spirit, in so genial a manner, that even those they sometimes hit hard cannot, when they read, refrain from laughing, for Mr. O'Shea is a modern Democritus; and yet there runs a vein of sadness, as if, like Figaro, he made haste to laugh lest he should have to weep."--_Society._ "Delightful reading.... A most enjoyable book.... It is kinder to readers to leave them to find out the good things for themselves. They will find material for amusement and instruction on every page; and if the lesson is sometimes in its way as melancholy as the moral of Firmin Maillard's 'Les Derniers Bohemes,' it is conveyed after a fashion that recalls the light-hearted gaiety of Paul de Kock's 'Damoiselle du Cinquième' and the varied pathos and humour of Henri Murger."--_Whitehall Review._ WARD AND DOWNEY, PUBLISHERS, LONDON. FOOTNOTES: [A] Gibraltar is no longer a penal settlement. [B] That has all been changed since. There are serviceable rifled guns at Tangier now, and the Sultan has some approach to a regular army, organized by an ex-English soldier. [C] Stuart married Lady Alice Hay, grand-daughter of William IV., in London, in 1874, and is now dead. He left no heir, so that the House of Hanover may rest easy. The story that the Cardinal of York ("Henry IX."), who died in 1807, was the last of the Stuart line, is all bosh. Charles-Edward had a son by the daughter of Prince Sobieski. [D] Review of the social and political state of the Basque Provinces, at the end of a book on "Portugal and Galicia," published in 1848 by John Murray. [E] It should be noted that in July, 1876, directly after the war was over, the fueros were entirely done away with by a special law. [F] See my last book, "An Iron-Bound City." Poor Willie died in New York of a complication of diseases on last Easter Sunday--an anniversary of hopefulness. His path of existence here was thorny. Unsurfeiting happiness be his portion in the meads of asphodel! [G] Now Colonel the Baron Craignish, Equerry to his Royal Highness the Grand Duke of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. * * * * * NOTES OF THE TRANSCRIBER OF THIS ETEXT. The following typographical errors in the book have been corrected in making this etext: Abd-es-Salem changed to Abd-es-Salam Dorregarray changed to Dorregaray Ojoladeros changed to Ojaladeros Enderlasa changed to Endarlasa Enderlaza changed to Endarlasa I deserve no creditor changed to I deserve no credit for 
32255	----	by Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the 60 lovely original illustrations in color. See 32255-h.htm or 32255-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32255/32255-h/32255-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32255/32255-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See http://www.archive.org/details/cathedralcitieso00colluoft CATHEDRAL CITIES OF SPAIN 60 reproductions from original water colours by W. W. Collins. R. I. William Wiehe Collins * * * * * Five Portfolios of Colour Plates These make good studies and are full of suggestions for everyone doing water colour work. All uniform in size. 5-1/4 x 9. like sample. Each portfolio done by a different artist Sent prepaid on receipt of price NEW SERIES Spanish Cathedrals. $2.00 60 reproductions from original water colours by W. W. Collins. R. I. English Cathedrals. $2.00 60 reproductions from original water colours by W. W. Collins, R. I. French Cathedral. $2.00 60 reproductions from original water colours by Herbert Marshall. R. W. S. Versailles and the Trianons. $2.00 56 reproductions from original water colours by Renei Binet. Cairo, Jerusalem and Damascus. $2.00 58 reproductions from original water colours and paintings by W. S. S. Tyrwhitt, R. B. A. and Reginald Barratt, A. R. W. S. The five portfolios will be sent, express paid on receipt of $9.00 They are all interesting J. H. JANSEN SUCCESSOR TO M. A. VINSON Publisher, Importer and Dealer Books on Architecture, Decoration and Illustration 205-206 Caxton Building Cleveland, O. _Portion of review from "American Architect," page 16, issue of July 8, 1908._ "Probably the most interesting moments of the trip abroad by the architectural students are those spent in sketching bits of interest in water color. And it is equally true, we believe, that nothing is so helpful, so reminiscent as these same notes of color when viewed in alter years. We have been prompted to these remarks by the receipt of five portfolios of color plates, being copies of original water color drawings by English and French water colorists." * * * * * List of Plates [Illustration: BARCELONA. _In the Cathedral._] [Illustration: ASTORGA.] [Illustration: MALAGA. _The Market._] [Illustration: TORTOSA.] [Illustration: TOLEDO. _The Cathedral._] [Illustration: GERONA. _The Cattle Market._] [Illustration: GERONA. _The Cathedral._] [Illustration: SEGOVIA. _Plaza Mayor._] [Illustration: TOLEDO. _The Alcántara Bridge._] [Illustration: GRANADA. _The Alhambra, Court of Lions._] [Illustration: VALENCIA. _San Pablo._] [Illustration: LEON. _San Marcos._] [Illustration: SANTIAGO. _The Cathedral._] [Illustration: CORDOBA. _Interior of the Mesquita._] [Illustration: SARAGOSSA. _La Seo._] [Illustration: BURGOS. _The Cathedral._] [Illustration: CADIZ. _The Cathedral._] [Illustration: CORDOBA. _The Campanario Tower._] [Illustration: OVIEDO. _The Cloisters._] [Illustration: SALAMANCA. _The old Cathedral._] [Illustration: SEGOVIA. _The Aqueduct._] [Illustration: BURGOS. _Arch of Santa Maria._] [Illustration: BURGOS. _The Capilla Mayor._] [Illustration: LEON. _The West Porch of the Cathedral._] [Illustration: SEVILLE. _In the Alcazar._] [Illustration: SEVILLE. _View over the Town._] [Illustration: SANTIAGO. _South Door of the Cathedral._] [Illustration: VALENCIA. _Door of the Cathedral._] [Illustration: VALLADOLID. _San Pablo._] [Illustration: ORENSE. _In the Cathedral._] [Illustration: TUY.] [Illustration: SEVILLE. _The Giralda Tower._] [Illustration: SEVILLE. _In the Cathedral._] [Illustration: TARRAGONA.] [Illustration: VALENCIA. _Religious Procession._] [Illustration: TARRAGONA. _The Cloisters._] [Illustration: TARRAGONA. _The Archbishop's Tower._] [Illustration: SALAMANCA.] [Illustration: SALAMANCA. _An old Street._] [Illustration: AVILA.] [Illustration: TOLEDO. _The South Transept._] [Illustration: MALAGA. _View from the Harbour._] OVIEDO. _In the Cathedral._ [Illustration: ZAMORA. _The Cathedral._] [Illustration: GRANADA. _Calle del Darro._] [Illustration: SANTIAGO. _Interior of the Cathedral._] [Illustration: TOLEDO. _The Zócodover._] [Illustration: GATEWAY AT AVILA. _Puerta de San Vicente._] [Illustration: CADIZ. _The Market Place._] [Illustration: GRANADA. _The Alhambra._] [Illustration: GRANADA. _Exterior of the Cathedral._] 
34875	----	[Illustration: SPAIN Edwd Weller] London, Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington.] SPAIN BY THE REV. WENTWORTH WEBSTER, M.A. OXON. WITH A CHAPTER BY AN ASSOCIATE OF THE SCHOOL OF MINES. _WITH ILLUSTRATIONS._ London: SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE, & RIVINGTON, CROWN BUILDINGS, 188, FLEET STREET. 1882. [_All rights reserved._] LONDON: PRINTED BY GILBERT AND RIVINGTON, LIMITED, ST. JOHN'S SQUARE. [etext transcriber's note: No attempt has been made to correct, normalize or de-anglicize the spelling of Spanish names or words. For example: Calayatud/Calatayud, Alfonso/Alfonzo, Cacéres/Caceres/Cáceres, Cardénas/Cárdenas, Guipúzcoa/Guipuzcoa all appear] PREFACE. There is a difficulty in writing a book of this character on Spain, which does not exist, we think, to the same extent with any other European country. In most European nations the official returns and government reports may be accepted as trustworthy, and the compiler has little more to do than to copy them; but in Spain this is far from being always the case. In some instances, from nonchalance and habitual inexactitude, in others, and especially in all matters of finance and taxation, from designed misstatement, all such reports have to be received with caution and scrupulously examined. The reader must remember also that in Spain smuggling and contraband dealing in various forms is carried on to such a vast extent as seriously to vitiate all trade returns. Thus it is that Spanish statistics can be considered only as approximate truths. Another difficulty arises from the very varied character of the Spanish provinces. Hardly any statement can be made of one province which is not untrue of another. The ordinary descriptions of Spain present only one, or at most two, types, the Castling and Andalusian, and utterly neglect all the rest. The provinces of Spain have been well described as divided into "five Irelands" whose habits and modes of thought, political aspirations, and commercial interests and aptitudes, are often utterly opposed to those of the capital. A brief survey of the whole of Spain is attempted in the following pages. In a work of this kind one other obvious difficulty is to know what to omit. Some well-worn topics will be found to be absent from these pages. No references are made to the great Peninsular War. This can be easily studied in the admirable pages of Sir W. Napier in English, and of Toreno in Spanish, or in compendiums of these, which again are filtered down in every guide-book. For a like reason Prescott's brilliant works are not alluded to. For the chapter on Geology and Mining the reader is indebted to one of the most distinguished Associates of the School of Mines, who has been recently engaged in practical geological survey and mapping in Spain. Much also of the present work is due to private information most kindly furnished by Spanish friends of high position in the literary and political world, and with whom some of the subjects treated have been frequently discussed. To these the author offers his warmest and most grateful thanks. ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. THE GEOGRAPHY OF SPAIN. PAGE Boundaries of the Peninsula 1 Area and Coast-line 2 Six divisions of Spain _ib._ _Mountain chains_: Pyrenees 3 Cantabrian, Asturian, and Galician mountains 4 Leon _ib._ Oca, Sierra Moncayo, and Idubeda chains 5 Central Plateau and its passes _ib._ Culminating water-shed of the Peninsula 6 Guadarrama range _ib._ Toledan range 7 Sierra Morena and passes _ib._ Central ranges and river basins 8 Sierra Nevada and offshoots _ib._ Minor ranges 9 _Rivers, river basins, and rainfall_: Five great rivers 10 Rivers of Galicia and Asturias 11 Basque Provinces 12 Ebro and its tributaries and canals 12 Catalonia, streams of 14 Douro and its tributaries 15 Tagus " " 17 Guadiana " " and lakes 19 Guadalquiver, its tributaries, islands, and marismas 22 Segura and its irrigation 24 Jucar " " 25 Guadalaviar or Turia _ib._ Lakes and Albuferas 26 Water toponymy 27 Comparative table of principal rivers 28 Mineral springs and Salinas _ib._ CHAPTER II. CLIMATE AND PRODUCTIONS. Five climates of Spain 30 Temperature and rainfall of: Galicia and the Asturias 31 Santander and the Basque Provinces 32 Aragon _ib._ Catalonia _ib._ Valencia 34 Alicante _ib._ Murcia 35 Cartagena to Almeria _ib._ Malaga, Motril, Seville, and Cordova _ib._ Granada 36 Cadiz, Gibraltar, &c _ib._ Elevation of Central Plateau _ib._ Temperature and rainfall of Madrid, Salamanca, and Soria 38 Agricultural products of: Galicia and the Asturias 39 Basque Provinces and basin of the Ebro 40 Moorish agriculture and exotic flora of Southern Spain 41 Products of Valencia and Murcia 43 Palms at Elche 44 Aromatic mountain shrubs 45 Products and wines of Andalusia 46 Products of the Central Plateau _ib._ Estremadura and law of the Mesta 47 Locusts 48 Corn-lands of Castile and Sierras de Campos 50 Comparative Flora of Spain 52 _Fauna_: Monkeys of Gibraltar _ib._ Beasts and birds of prey _ib._ Game birds and African visitants _ib._ Noxious and useful insects _ib._ Merino sheep 54 Horses, cattle, and beasts of burden 55 Fisheries 56 Estimated total production of Spain 57 CHAPTER III. GEOLOGY AND MINES. Peculiar interest of Spanish geology 58 Granite and Silurian rocks _ib._ Carboniferous formation 59 Secondary formations _ib._ Upper Cretaceous _ib._ Eocene tertiary 60 Miocene fresh-water _ib._ Pliocene _ib._ Influence of geology on populations _ib._ Statistics of Spanish geology 61 Volcanoes, recent _ib._ _Minerals of_: Gneiss and crystalline schists 62 Metamorphic rocks _ib._ Cambrian formation _ib._ Silurian slates _ib._ Devonian sandstones _ib._ Carboniferous series _ib._ Permian 63 Triassic conglomerates _ib._ Jurassic limestones and marl _ib._ Cretaceous formation _ib._ Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene _ib._ Production and export of six chief minerals _ib._ Of argentiferous ore, cobalt, silver _ib._ Coal 65 Iron of the Bilbao district _ib._ Locality of principal mines 66 Mining laws 67 CHAPTER IV. ETHNOLOGY, LANGUAGE, AND POPULATION. Pyrenees, no true boundary of 69 Population of Spain, mixed 70 Iberi, Kelt-Iberi, Basques, and Kelts _ib._ Foreign races in Spain 73 Visigoths, Arabs, and Moors 75 Toponymy of Spain 76 Language of Spanish Jews 77 Existing dialects _ib._ Statistics of the Spanish language 78 Characteristics of " " 79 Population of Spain 80 Density of _ib._ Occupations of 81 Manufacturing and mining Provinces 82 Clergy _ib._ Distribution of property, great changes in 83 Abolition of Mesta and of feudal privileges _ib._ Sale of Crown and Church property 84 Actual distribution _ib._ Characteristics of the various populations 85 Galicians, Asturians, Basques, and Aragonese 86 Catalans, Valencians, and Murcians 86, 87 Andalusians 87 Manchegans, and Castilians 89 Gipsies, Maragatos, Passiegos, Hurdes, Sayagos, &c. 90 Contrabandistas _ib._ CHAPTER V. DESCRIPTION OF PROVINCES. Division of Kingdoms and Provinces 91 Galicia and its provinces, Corunna, Lugo, Pontevedra, and Orense 92 Asturias 94 Santander _ib._ Basque Provinces, Biscay, Guipuzcoa, Alava 95 Navarre 96 Aragon and its provinces, Huesca, Saragossa, Teruel 97 Catalonia " Gerona, Barcelona, Tarragona, Lerida 100 Valencia " Castellon de la Plana, Valencia, Alicante 103 Murcia " Murcia and Albacete 107 Andalusia, Mediterranean Provinces, Almeria, Granada, Malaga 109 Atlantic: Cadiz, Huelva 117, 122 Inland: Seville, Cordova, Jaen 120, 123, 125 Estremadura, Badajoz, Cacéres _ib._ New Castile and La Mancha, Provinces--Ciud ad Real, Toledo, Madrid, Cuenca, Guadalajara 127 Old Castile--Avila, Segovia, Soria, Logrono, Burgos 133 Leon--Salamanca, Valladolid, Zamora, Palencia, Leon 137 Balearic Isles 141 CHAPTER VI. HISTORY AND POLITICAL CONSTITUTION. Early liberties, _behetria_, _fueros_ 145 Capitulations of Moors and Jews 147 Conquest of the South and its results 149 The _Santa Hermandad_ _ib._ The Austrian Dynasty 151 The Bourbon Dynasty 152 Modern Constitutional Spain 153 Cortés of Cadiz _ib._ Reign of Ferdinand VII., and loss of American colonies_ib._ " Isabella II. 154 First Carlist War _ib._ Ministry of Narvaez 156 " O'Donnell 157 Expulsion of Isabella II., and provisional government _ib._ Amadeo I. 158 Republic _ib._ Second Carlist War 159 Cantonalist insurrection _ib._ Alphonso XII. 160 Ministry of Cánovas del Castillo 161 _Present Constitution and Administration of Spain_ 162 Cortés, Senate, Congress 163 Provincial administration 164 Municipal " _ib._ Religion 165 Rights of persons, natives and foreigners _ib._ _Military Administration_ 166 Army 167 Quality of Spanish soldiery, _pronunciamientos_, &c. 168 _Naval Administration_ 169 Royal Navy _ib._ Mercantile Navy _ib._ _Judicial Administration_ 169 Legal Procedure 170 Prisons _ib._ Hospitals and lunatic asylums 171 Railways 172 Telegraphs _ib._ Letters and post _ib._ _Finances of Spain._ Public debt 174 Increase of, since 1868 175 Deficit of budgets _ib._ Sources of revenue 176 Expenditure _ib._ Imports and exports 177 Foreign tariffs _ib._ Protection and free trade 178 Empleomania and its results 179 CHAPTER VII. EDUCATION AND RELIGION. Universities, number of students, salaries of professors 181 Theological seminaries 182 Course of university study 183 Provincial and special institutes _ib._ Secondary instruction, institutes and colleges 184 Number of students, and salary of masters 185 Course of instruction 186 University degrees _ib._ Primary education 187 _Church and Religion._ Early Church Councils 188 Roman and Mazarabic liturgy _ib._ Inquisition _ib._ Philip II., the Jesuits, and the Reformation 189 Expulsion of the Jesuits 191 Concordat of 1851 _ib._ Archbishops, bishops, and clergy _ib._ Mode of appointment of bishops 192 Spanish Protestants _ib._ CHAPTER VIII. LITERATURE AND THE ARTS. Præhistoric art and architecture 194 Roman and Visigothic _ib._ Arabic 195 Three periods of 196 Mudejar 201 Christian _ib._ Renaissance 202 Churrigueresque 203 Domestic architecture _ib._ Church furniture and minor arts 204 _Painting._ Characteristics of Spanish painting 205 Local schools 206 Murillo 208 Painters of Valencian school 209 " " Castilian " _ib._ " " Andalusian " _ib._ Modern painters 210 Industrial arts, goldsmith's work, iron, porcelain, glass, wood, lace 212 Music _ib._ _Literature._ Early Romances 213 " Prose works 214 La Celistina and the _picaresque_ novels 215 Drama and _Autors_ 216 Lope de Vega _ib._ Calderon de la Barca 217 Cervantes _ib._ Quevedo 219 Historical writings 220 Poetry _ib._ Mystic writers 222 Classical and romantic schools _ib._ Modern writers: Poets--Espronceda, Zorilla, Becquer, &c. 224 Novelists--Fernan Caballero, J. Valera, &c. _ib._ Dramatists--Hartzenbusch, Breton de los Herreros, &c. 225 Nunez de Arce 226 Historians--Condé Gayangos, De la Fuente, &c. _ib._ Geographers--Fernandez Guerra, Coello, Bowles _ib._ Geologists--Macpherson, &c. _ib._ Economists--Cárdenas, Colmeiro, De Azcárate 227 Theologians--Balmés, Donoso Cortez, C. Gonzalez, &c. _ib._ Philologists--F. Fita, &c. _ib._ Orators 228 Provincial literature 229 CHAPTER IX. EPILOGUE. Spain not a worn-out country 231 Two hindrances to development _ib._ Protection and free trade 233 Cruelty and charities of Spain 234 Appendix I.--Census of Provinces 237 " II.--Chief historical events 239 " III.--Chief books used 241 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE Caballeros 86 Dominique, the Espada 88 Gipsies at Granada 90 Leaning Tower of Saragossa 98 General View of Granada, with the Alhambra 110 Alhambra Tower by Moonlight 114 Fountain of the Four Seasons, Madrid 130 Port of Cadiz 153 Vespers 190 Giralda of Seville 197 Moorish Ornamentation 199 [Illustration: PHYSICAL MAP of SPAIN Edwd Weller London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington.] SPAIN. CHAPTER I. THE GEOGRAPHY OF SPAIN. Spain, with the neighbouring kingdom of Portugal, constitutes the most westerly of the three southern peninsulas of Europe, and in Cape Tarifa, latitude 36° 1', it attains the most southerly point of the whole continent. Separated from France and from the rest of Europe by the chain of the Pyrenees, and surrounded on all other sides by either the Mediterranean or the Atlantic, it presents at first sight the appearance of an exceedingly compact and homogeneous surface. It seems strange that this well-defined peninsula should contain two separate kingdoms, with peoples who speak languages allied, yet so distinct as to be mutually unintelligible to the uneducated classes. The peninsula lies between latitude 43° 45' and 36° 1' N., and between 3° 20' E. and 9° 32' W. longitude. In shape it is thus nearly a square; a diagonal line from the N.E. Cape Creuz to the S.W. Cape St. Vincent measures 650 miles, while from Cape Ortegal, N.W., to Cape Gata, S.E., would be 525 miles. The whole area of the peninsula contains 219,200 square miles, of which 36,500 on the west belong to Portugal, and 182,700 to Spain. The peninsular form of the country would lead us to expect that it would partake of all the characteristics of a maritime climate; but such is not the case. From the comparative evenness of the coast-line, unbroken and unindented by any deep inlets except on the extreme north-west, in Galicia, the coast-line bears a less proportion to the whole surface than that of many lands less surrounded by the sea. It counts only 1300 miles, 700 of which are washed by the Mediterranean, and 600 by the Atlantic; that is, 1 mile of coast-line to 134 square miles of area; while Italy contains 1 to 75, and Greece 1 to 7. From the configuration of the coast, and from the character of the great central plateau, a large part of Spain has really an extreme continental climate. For while it is distinctly separated from the rest of Europe by the line of the Pyrenees, Spain is no less distinctly divided into different districts in the interior--districts which differ most widely in climate and elevation and products. Six of these are usually named: (1) The N.W. Atlantic coast, comprising Galicia, the coast of which presents a continuation of the Fiord system of Norway, and of the Firths of Scotland and Ireland; (2), the northern slope of the Cantabrian Mountains, and the narrow slip of land contained between them and the Bay of Biscay, comprising the Asturias, Santander, and the Basque Provinces; (3) the Valley of the Ebro, with Navarre, Aragon, and Catalonia; (4) the great Central Plateau--Leon, Old and New Castile, Estremadura, and La Mancha; (5) the Mediterranean Provinces, including Valencia, Murcia, and the parts of Andalusia between the Sierra Nevada and the Mediterranean; (6) the rest of Andalusia sloping towards the Atlantic. We will treat of these in order. _Mountain Chains._ But first we must speak of the various mountain systems and river basins of Spain, without which it is impossible to understand either the physical conditions of the country, or the social and political state of the various populations which has resulted from them. First, on the north is the chain of the Pyrenees, a continuation of the great Alpine system of Central Europe, stretching from Cape Creuz, 3° 19' E., to the Bay of Biscay, 2° 12' W., a distance of 320 miles, and prolonging itself westward in lower chains of different denominations until it finally sinks into the Atlantic at Cape Finisterre. The culminating points of the Pyrenees are towards the centre of the chain, in Mounts Maladetta, 11,150 feet, and the Pic de Posets and the Mount Perdu, each about 11,000 feet, whence the heights gradually descend, on the east to the Mediterranean and on the west to the Bay of Biscay. With the exception of the little Bidassoa, which in the lower part of its course forms the boundary between France and Spain, at the bottom of the Bay of Biscay, all the other waters of the Spanish side of the Pyrenees belong to the Ebro and to the Mediterranean. Parallel to the coast of the Bay of Biscay the Pyrenees are prolonged, first, by the Cantabrian Mountains, which run through the Basque Provinces, and the Province of Santandar; thence by the Picos de Europa, 8300 feet--from the south-eastern spurs of which the Ebro and Pisuerga take their rise--and the Asturian Mountains, to the Sierra de Penamarella, at the junction of the three Provinces of Leon, Asturias, and Galicia. The chain here attains its greatest elevation, 9450 (?) feet, then descends to a plateau of about 4000 feet, whence it sinks rapidly to the Atlantic, forming the headlands of Ortegal, the extreme north-western, and of Finisterre, the extreme western, point of Northern Spain. The mountains of Leon form the western watershed, between the waters of the Ebro and those which fall into the Atlantic. The line is continued eastward by the Oca Mountains, the Sierra de Moncayo, and the Idubeda Mountains. These mountain chains divide the basin of the Ebro from that of the Douro. They also form the northern buttress of the great plateau of Central Spain, which attains an elevation of from 2000 to 4000 feet. The rise to the plateau from the Bay of Biscay is very abrupt. Within fifty miles of leaving the coast the railways from the north attain a height of 2000 feet, and reach the Central Plateau, at Quintanapalla, at an elevation of 3000 feet; while La Cañada, the highest point on the line to Madrid, is nearly 4460 feet, or about sixty feet higher than the tunnel of the Mount Cenis. From the eastern side the rise is less abrupt, and the plateau is entered at the lower elevation of 2330 feet, on the line from Alicante to Madrid. The famous Pass of Somosierra, on the old northern coach-road from Madrid, is about 4700 feet above the level of the sea. From these figures it is easy to perceive how very different is the aspect of these buttress chains when seen from the plateau, and when looked at from the plain from which they rise. Thus the Sierra de Moncayo, 7700 feet, stands out with boldness from the Valley of the Ebro, but viewed from the plateau of Castile it is scarcely noticeable. From its summit, however, the finest view of the whole range of the Pyrenees to be found anywhere on the Spanish side of the chain, is to be obtained. Turning thence towards the south and south-east, these mountain chains--under the various names of the Sierras de Cuenca, de Molina, and Albarracin--divide the river basins of the Mediterranean from the far larger ones of the Atlantic. They have their culminating point in the Muela de San Juan and the Cerro de San Felipe, nearly 6000 feet, at the junction of the three provinces of Teruel, Cuenca, and Guadalaxara. From the sides of these mountains the waters fall with rapid course, on the north to join the Ebro, on the east and south to the Mediterranean; while with gentler slope, but in far greater volume, the Douro, the Tagus, and the Guadiana roll their waters to the Atlantic. From these Sierras the plateau tilts gradually westward and southward, but is intersected by mountain chains, peaks of which towards the west attain a higher elevation than those which form the real culmination of this part of the peninsula. The bare and bleak granite range of the Guadarrama, which divides the basin of the Douro from that of the Tagus, and from whose summits steals the icy wind so fatal to Madrid, attains in its highest summit, Peña Lara, 7800 feet, near Segovia; while in its western prolongation, the Sierras de Credos and de Gata, the Plaza del Moro reaches 8700 feet. The chains which divide the valley of the Tagus from that of the Guadiana are not nearly so well marked as are those more to the north, and rise to a much less elevation above the plateau. Beginning with a south-westerly prolongation of the Cerro de San Felipe, under the successive titles of Montes de Toledo, Sierras de Guadaloupe, Montanchez, and San Mamed, about 2000 feet, they reach the Portuguese frontier near Portalegre. The highest point seems to be in the mountains of Toledo at Villuercas, where a height of a little over 5000 feet is attained. The mountains which separate the basins of the Guadiana and the Guadalquiver, under the names of the Sierras de Alcaroz, Morena, de Cordova, Guadacanal, and Aroche, and which form the southern buttress of the central plateau, present a still greater difference than those of the northern buttress when viewed from the plateau and from the plains of Andalusia. From the former they appear only rolling undulations, and the traveller scarcely notices the rise till he finds himself descending one of the steep and savage gorges, like that of the Pass of Despeña-Perroz, on the road and rail between La Mancha and Andalusia. The Col of Despeña-Perroz is nearly 2500 feet above the sea, and but few summits along the ranges of the Sierra Morena and its prolongations attain a greater elevation, the general range being about 2000 feet, except towards the west and north of Seville, where the Sierra de Aracena reaches 5550 feet. Eastward of the Guadalquiver the ranges which divide its waters from those of the Segura, the Sierras de Segura, and Sagra, attain a greater height, the former 6500 feet, the latter to 7800 feet. Thus as supports to the great plateau, or on it, we have the following successive ranges as we proceed from north to south. First, the Sierra de Moncayo and the Idubeda mountains, dividing the basin of the Ebro from that of the Douro; next the Guadarrama chain, with the Sierras de Credos and de Gata, separating the Douro from the Tagus; then the Mountains of Toledo, and the Sierra de San Mamed, between the Tagus and the Guadiana; and lastly, the southern buttress, the Sierra Morena, dividing the Guadiana from the Guadalquiver. But it is south of the last stream that the culminating points of the whole peninsula are to be found--in the mighty Sierra Nevada, which separates the lovely valley of Granada from the Mediterranean, shielding it from the scorching winds of Africa, and giving it its eternal freshness and verdure. The highest of its summits are Muley Hacen and Velate, lying to the south-east of Granada, the former attaining nearly 11,670 feet, and the latter 11,400. The altitudes diminish rapidly east and west. Towards the east, outlying ranges, such as those of the Sierras de Filabrés and of Gador, attain heights of 6000 and 7000 feet respectively; while in the westward prolongations, the Mesa de Ronda is only 5000; and the chain gradually drops till it reaches the sea at Cape Trafalgar, and the rock of Gibraltar, 1400 feet. But besides these greater chains of mountains Spain is traversed by numerous offshoots and lateral ranges, and a great portion of her territory is more or less of a mountainous character. In districts where rain is unfrequent these hills are absolutely bare of verdure for a great part of the year, and remain untenanted and uncultivated. Among the more elevated of these lesser chains are those of Monseni, Monserrat, and Montagut, in Catalonia, which attain respectively 5500, 4000, and 3000 feet in height. On the borders of Leon and Galicia, and in the latter province, there are numerous mountains and smaller ranges, which vary from 3000 to 5000 feet. The whole frontier of Portugal is covered by lower ranges, connecting the great chains of which we have already spoken with hills of from 2000 to 3000 feet. From the great eastern buttress two spurs, or rolling plateaux, run down to the Mediterranean, and terminate in the different headlands--such as Cape Gata in the south-east, Cape Palos near Carthagena, Capes de la Nao and San Antonio near Denia, Peniscola, and others. Some of these smaller ranges are exceedingly rich in minerals, and as they approach the sea form sites of picturesque and enchanting beauty, such as can be surpassed only by the better-known and historic glories of the coasts of Italy or of Greece. _Rivers of Spain._ Of the five great rivers of Spain only one, the Ebro, pours its waters into the Mediterranean; the other four, the Douro, Tagus, Guadiana, and Guadalquiver, discharge theirs into the Atlantic; but of these last the Guadalquiver alone is wholly a Spanish stream. In the lower and more valuable part of their course the Douro, Tagus, and Gaudiana, belong to Portugal--a fact which must always be remembered when treating of the internal commerce of Spain. But besides these larger streams there are several of slightly smaller dimensions, of which we will treat in order. Few countries present within so short a distance so great a difference in rainfall and moisture as does Spain. In some parts of the Asturias and Galicia the rainfall is probably as heavy as that of any part of Europe--as much as 147-1/2 inches are said to have been measured in a single year; and the average fall on the northern slopes of the Cantabrian mountains is said to be sixty inches annually. Yet the average of the whole basin of the Ebro--which rises from the southern slopes of the Picos de Europa, one of the most rainy of the rainy districts--is only eighteen inches annually, the last 300 miles of its course being through almost barren districts, where rain seldom falls. The principal river of Galicia is the Minho, with its tributary the Sil. Each of these rises, though at some distance apart, from the southern side of the Cantabrian mountains, much nearer to the waters of the Bay of Biscay than to those of the Atlantic, into which they flow. They take thence a southerly and south-westerly course, until they unite a few miles above Orense. The lower part of the united course, which bears the name of the Minho, forms from Melgaco to the sea the frontier between the kingdoms of Portugal and Spain. The remaining rivers of Galicia are numerous but of little importance: the Tambre is the largest of those which fall into the Atlantic on the west; while on the north the sources of the Eo and the Navia overlap those of the Minho, and take their rise from the mountains which border on Leon. The whole country is exceedingly well watered. Both in its agricultural character as a grazing country, and in its flora and fauna, it resembles the milder portions of southern Ireland and of Devonshire, but with occasional products of a warmer zone. The rivers of the Asturias, Santander, and of the Basque provinces, all partake of the same general character. In the upper part of their courses they are mere mountain torrents, their course is rapid but short, and they are of but little use for navigation, though occasionally small but insecure harbours are formed at their mouth. The only great exception to this is the Nervion, on which Bilbao is situated, and which is navigable for eight miles from its mouth. The waters of the Bidassoa, the Deva, and others, are, however, utilized for the transport of ore from the mines and ironworks along the course. The Bidassoa, for some ten miles before it enters the Bay of Biscay at Cape Figueras forms the boundary between France and Spain; about four miles from its issue, between Irun and Behobie, is the celebrated Isle des Faisans, where, in 1659, the marriage was arranged between Louis XIV. and the Infanta, which eventually placed the Bourbons on the throne of Spain. The Bidassoa is the last of the northern rivers of Spain which falls into the Atlantic. The Ebro has its rise from the source, Fontibre, in the province of Santander, and takes a south-easterly course of 466 miles, through the provinces of Santander, Burgos, Navarre, and Aragon, almost parallel with the Pyrenees, till it falls into the Mediterranean, through a sandy delta stretching some fifteen miles into the sea below Amposta. The descent for the first 200 miles of its course is exceedingly rapid, but after that the fall is gradual till it reaches the sea. In its course it receives the waters of many tributaries, both on the left from the Pyrenees, and on the right from the Idubeda mountains and the sierras of Southern Aragon. Were it not for these tributaries little of its waters would reach the Mediterranean, so dry and arid are the Bardenas of Navarre, and the Dehesas of Aragon, through which it flows. The Spaniards have a proverb that it is the Navarrese and Aragonese streams--the Arga, the Ega, and the Aragon--which make a man of the Ebro. Farther down, the Gallego runs in near Saragossa; while the united waters of the Cinca and the Segre at Mequinenza pour a far larger volume of water into the parent bed than it contains itself. From the right, the principal streams are the Xalon, with its tributary the Xiloca, which joins the Ebro between Tudela and Saragossa, the Marten, and the Guadalope near Caspe. The Ebro, notwithstanding its length, the number of its tributaries, and the extent of its basin, 25,000 square miles, is of little use for navigation. A magnificent canal--first projected and commenced by the Emperor Charles V. (I. of Spain) then after a lapse of more than two centuries taken in hand by Charles III., in 1770--runs from Tudela to Saragossa; thence to the sea it still remains in project only. The part already finished is falling into decay; and it is only the excellent quality of the masonry, and of the cement or mortar employed, that retards its utter ruin. The traffic is very small; and even as a means of irrigation its waters are allowed greatly to run to waste. At the apex of the delta from Amposta to San Carlos de la Rapita a canal of eight miles has been cut for purposes of navigation; but the formation of a bar, and the silting up of the bay, have rendered it almost useless. The other rivers which flow into the Mediterranean, between the lower course of the Ebro and the Pyrenees are the Fluvia, which flows into the gulf of Rosas, the Ter, which passes by Gerona, and the Llobregat near Barcelona. All are torrential streams, unfit for navigation; but their waters, if all utilized for irrigation like those of the Llobregat, would be sources of immense wealth to the country. From the fact that the lower part of the course of the great rivers of the plateau--the Douro, the Tagus, and the Guadiana--flow through Portugal, their streams are hardly at all available as a means of communication or of navigation for Spain; and from the nature of the deeply cut beds which the waters have worn through the soil, flowing, especially as they approach the frontiers of Portugal, through gorges approaching in length and depth the cañons of North America, the rivers are little available for irrigation, although far more use might be made of them for this purpose than is actually done. Owing to the prejudices of the Spanish husbandman, and to his reluctance to accept any change, however profitable, in his ancient routine, neither the little that has been done in the present century, nor the remains of a wiser agriculture in former times are used by the peasantry. In the province of Zamora, for instance, both the ancient "acequias" and the modern canal of the Esla are equally neglected. The rich results that have followed the employment of the waters in the few cases in which they have been intelligently directed, stirs no one up to follow the example. It is one of the many contrasts between different parts of Spain, that the value of irrigation should be so well understood in some parts and so utterly neglected and under-valued in others. But we shall have more to say of this when we treat of the eastern and southern streams: at present let us return to the Douro, and to the other rivers of the plateau. The Douro takes its rise in the Lago Negro, or Black Lake, on the southern flanks of the Mount Urbion, in the north-western angle of the province of Soria. It first runs eastward to the city of that name, the ancient Numantia, then turns almost directly south as far as Almazan, whence it runs westward to Portugal, receiving meanwhile the waters of the Esla, below Zamora; at the frontier, again it turns south, through deep gorges which form the boundary between Spain and Portugal, until it receives the waters of the Agueda, where it finally enters Portugal, and after a westerly course thence of about 100 miles, falls into the Atlantic below Oporto. The basin drained by the Douro is the most extensive of all those of the rivers in Spain. Including the portion in Portugal, it comprises 35,000 square miles; the length of the river is about 500 miles; the average rainfall is stated at twenty inches. The chief affluents of the Douro descend from the north from the mountains of Burgos and the Cantabrian range. The largest are the Pisuerga, which rises not far from the sources of the Ebro among the Picos de Europa, and flows almost directly south by Palencia and Valladolid until it joins the Douro, some miles above Tordesilla; the Esla, which also rises from the western flanks of the same chain, not far from Covadonga, takes a somewhat more westerly direction, and after receiving several smaller streams unites with the Douro below Zamora. These two rivers supply water for two of the most successful canals in Spain, especially that along the Pisuerga, for over ninety miles from Alar del Rey to Valladolid. There is a considerable traffic on it, especially for passengers. It was planned in 1753 by Ensenada, but completed only in 1832. The canal of the Esla, for purposes of irrigation, begun by English engineers in 1864, and finished in 1869, has hardly been so successful. The latest report (June, 1880) states that the peasant proprietors, notwithstanding examples of the great utility of irrigation, obstinately refuse to use it. The principal affluents of the Douro on the west and south are the Tormes, which flows by Salamanca, and joins it about midway in its course as a frontier of Portugal; and the Agueda, which runs in just where it takes its final departure for the west. The Tagus, the central river of Spain, and which divides its territory into two nearly equal portions, rises from a fountain called the Fuente Garcia, or Pié, on the south side of the Muela de San Juan, between the Sierras de Molina, Albaracin, and San Felipe, the knot of mountains which, as we have indicated above, form the great watershed of the peninsula, whence the waters flow northwards to the Ebro, east and southwards to the Mediterranean, and westwards, in the Tagus and its tributaries, to the Atlantic. Were the whole peninsula of Spain and Portugal one kingdom, the Tagus would be perhaps the most important of its rivers; but in the divided state it is of far more value to Portugal than to Spain. Its swift and turbid current, flowing between steep banks, and in a bed broken into rapids and encumbered by rocks, is scarcely navigable above Abrantes. The basin of the Tagus contains an area of nearly 30,000 square miles, and its length is estimated at about 550. The rainfall is less than that of the Douro, being only sixteen inches annually. The river, moreover, runs by no means in the centre of its basin, but far to the southwards of a central dividing line, and consequently the tributaries which it receives from the north or left bank are of much greater importance than those which come from the south or right. After flowing a few miles in a north-westerly direction, the river gradually bends, first westerly, and then in a slightly south-westerly direction, in a deep channel, through a bare rolling country, where everything takes the prevailing colour of red dusty uplands, until it arrives at Aranjuez, situated at the confluence of the Jarama and the Tagus, a royal residence whose abundance of water and of shade make it a true oasis in a desert. The Jarama, which rises in the Guadarama, brings in also the waters of the Henares, and those of the Manzanares, on which Madrid is situated. These streams have been the subjects of many projects and attempts at canalization, either for irrigation or for supplying the metropolis with water. Most of these have failed, but a canal from Porcal to Aranjuez, of seventeen miles and a half, is in working order. The canal of Cabarrus brings the waters of the Lozoya to Madrid. But the great enterprise of the canal of irrigation from the Henares, constructed by the same English company which made the canal of the Esla, and which was to have been twenty-eight miles in length, and to have irrigated 30,000 acres, is suspended by lawsuits as to the ownership of the waters. The Alberche, which rises to the north of the Sierra de Gredos, enters the Tagus near Talavera de la Reyna. The Tietjar, and the Alagon, which joins the main stream just above Alcantara, beside the frontier stream, the Heyas, are the only Spanish waters of importance from the north before the Tagus enters Portugal; and from the south the Salor and the del Monte, both of which have their rise and course in the same province of Caceres alone need mention. In the upper part of its course, however, the smaller tributaries of both the Tagus and the Guadiana often overlap, and but a very few miles separate the Tagus itself from the waters which flow into the Guadiana. The exact source of the Guadiana has been a subject of much debate and of many fables. Its true origin seems to be in a series of lakes at the junction of the provinces of Ciudad Real and Albacete, near Montiel, in La Mancha. A picturesque stream, the Ruidosa, with many cascades and broken water, connects these lakes; but after running a few miles in a north-westerly direction, it disappears underground near Tomesillo, and is believed to rise to the surface after about twenty miles, in the Ojos (eyes) of the Guadiana, near Damiel. Very soon it receives from the right the united waters of the Zancara and the Giguela, streams whose contributions are much more scanty, especially in summer, than the length of their course on the map would lead one to suppose; thence the river flows in a westerly direction, passing near Ciudad Real, below which the Javalon enters from the left, coming from the Campo de Montiel; near Don Benito the Zuja, from the Sierra Morena, joins it, and some miles lower down the Matachet. Flowing past Medellin, five miles below Badajoz the river crosses the frontier of Portugal, changes its course from westerly to south-west, and afterwards south and south-east, till it again joins the frontier near San Lucar, and dividing the two countries till its mouth, falls into the Gulf of Cadiz at Ayamonte. In the lower part of its course the river, which before has been wide and shallow, and often almost dry in summer, narrows its course, and rushes with impetuosity through the rapids called the Salto del Lobo (the wolf's leap), near Serpa, in Portugal. The whole length of the Guadiana is estimated at 550 miles, and the area of its bed at 24,000 square miles. The rainfall is about fourteen inches. To the south of the rivers of the plateau the only considerable stream is the Guadalquiver, with its tributaries. The character of this river is entirely different to that of the former streams. Like the Ebro, it forms a true valley, instead of merely cutting its way through rocks, cañons, and defiles. Its bed is on an average about 1200 feet below that of the Guadiana in the greater part of its course. It is also the only river in Spain of any utility for navigation; the tide is felt beyond Seville, and vessels of 200 to 300 tons ascend to that city. There are also several lines of steamboats trading thence directly with London, Marseilles, Bilbao, Cadiz, and Gibraltar. The Guadalquiver takes its rise from two sources--one, in the streams Guadalimar and Guadarmeno, rises in the Sierra Alcaraz, and not very far from the sources of the Guadiana; the other, which bears the name of the Guadalquiver, in the south-west of the Sierra Sagra; this latter branch is soon joined by the Guadiana Menor, coming down from the Sierra Nevada. The basin of the Guadalquiver presents this peculiarity, that its boundary is not formed by the line of the highest summits; on the contrary, many of its tributaries take their rise on the farther side of the Sierra Morena on the north, and of the Sierras de Granada and Nevada on the south, and have cut their way through these higher grounds to join the Guadalquiver in the plains of Andalusia. The upper part of its course is very rapid, and the junction of the two rivers Guadalimar and Guadalquiver, in the plains of Baeza, is about 5000 feet below the Punta de Almenara; but from thence to the sea the fall is very slight. After the junction the river passes by Andujar, Montoro, and Cordova, receiving on both banks the waters of many streams of but little importance; but between Cordova and Seville it is joined by its largest tributary, the Xenil, which rises in the Sierra Nevada, and flowing through the celebrated Vega of Granada, bursts through the Antequera mountains to enter the great plain of Andalusia, and loses itself in the Guadalquiver. From Seville downward the character of the stream is greatly changed; it wanders in large meanderings through low and marshy grounds for two or three leagues on each bank, mostly uninhabited, and used only for pasturing cattle. These low lands, which are called _Marismas_, in dry weather are covered with clouds of black dust, and in wet are an almost impassable slough of mud; mid these the river divides, and its winding beds form two islands--Isle Mayor and Menor, the former of which is wholly given to cattle, while the latter is inhabited and well cultivated; The river finally enters the Gulf of Cadiz, at San Lucar de Barameda, forcing its way with difficulty through low hills of sand, like those of the Landes in France. The marshes near the mouth are utilized as _Salinas_, for making excellent salt; and on the hills which overlook the _Marismas_ some of the most renowned wines and fruits of Spain are produced. The whole course of the Guadalquiver is about 340 miles and the area of its basin 21,000: the rainfall is estimated at nineteen inches. The other streams which fall into the Gulf of Cadiz--the Rio Tinto, which runs into the Huelva basin, and the Guadalete at Cadiz--are of no utility for navigation. The little port of Palos, whence Columbus sailed to discover a new world, is almost entirely blocked up by sands brought down by the former torrent. The remaining rivers of Spain--those which, descending from the great plateau, flow eastward to the Mediterranean--though all useless for navigation, are among the most productive of all its streams. Flowing through a country whose temperature exceeds that of the opposite coast of Africa; where the rainfall is either scanty, or disastrous in quantity from rare but terrible storms; and through districts in which no rain falls for years together--the waters of these rivers, skilfully applied to irrigation, have rendered what would otherwise be a barren land one of fertility unparalleled in Europe. Unlike the peasants of Castile, the cultivators of Murcia and Valencia have learnt to value the use of water in agriculture; although even there, works which were first constructed by the Moors have been allowed to fall into ruin, and are yearly becoming of less utility. Of this we shall speak more at length below. The three great rivers we have yet to notice are the Murcian Segura, and the Jucar and Guadalaviar, in Valencia. The river Segura takes its rise in the Sierra de Segura, between the Sierras of Alcaraz and Sagra. The upper part of its course is that of a mountain torrent, leaping from terrace to terrace of the mountains as it descends, until after the junction of the Mundo, which rises from a cirque in the Sierra Alcaras, like the cirque of Gavarnie in the Pyrenees, and flows through a deep ravine from the north-east. Its waters are dammed up, cut into numberless channels, and almost wholly utilized for irrigation, so that only about ten per cent of them reaches the sea; the rest are dissipated in the huertas of Murcia, Orihuela, and part of Elche. Its tributary the Sangonera loses almost all its waters in the plains of Lorca. With the little Vinalapo, almost 15,000 acres are rendered productive by the waters of these streams in one of the driest districts of Spain. The wheat of Orihuela is some of the finest in Spain; and so certain is the crop as to give rise to the proverb, "Rain or no rain, there is always wheat in Orihuela." The Segura has a course of about 217 miles, and an area of about 850 square miles; the average rainfall is estimated at about twelve inches, but the difference is very great in different years, as the district is liable to rare but most heavy and destructive floods. The Jucar takes its rise not far from the sources of the Tagus, on the south side of the Muela de San Juan, which we have before mentioned as the culminating watershed of the peninsula. It flows first in a south-westerly direction as far as Cuenca, whence it gradually turns south and south-east, and at Jorquera, to the north-east of Albacete, strikes eastwards for the Mediterranean, which it finally enters at Cullera. Like the Segura and Guadalaviar, its waters are drained off for irrigation; but its basin is narrower, and it can boast of no fertility equal to the huertas of Murcia or Valencia. Its course is about 317 miles, the area of its bed 580, and the rainfall some twelve and a half inches; the irrigated land is over 30,000 acres. The Guadalaviar, or Turia, rises on the north side of the Muela de San Juan, and descending rapidly, flows eastward past Albarracin and Teruel; at which latter town it turns abruptly southwards till it enters the province of Valencia, where it again takes a more easterly course, flowing with ever-diminished stream through the rich garden of Valencia, at which city it falls into the Mediterranean, with water which, except in time of flood, scarcely rises above the ankle. The length of its course is about 187 miles, the area of its basin 320 square miles; it irrigates over 25,000 acres near Valencia. Besides these larger rivers, there are on the Mediterranean slope innumerable smaller streams, whose waters, though of little geographical importance, are of the greatest utility to agriculture. In summer scarcely a drop of their waters reaches the sea; all is either employed for irrigation, or dissipated by evaporation; often they are dammed up to form reservoirs or _pantanos_, sometimes employed for rice culture. But small as these streams are, it is to them that this burning coast owes its beauty and fertility, its almost tropical vegetation and its rich products. The fair gardens of Castellon, of Gandia, of Murviedro would be barren and valueless without these waters. Still farther to the north the waters of the Llobregat, and the canal of Urgel in Catalonia, are used for the same purpose. The lakes of Spain are neither large nor numerous, but some are curious from a geographical point of view. On the high plateaux whence the Guadiana, the Guadalimar, the Segura, and the Jucar take their rise, either a dam or a trench would suffice to turn the waters either to the Atlantic or the Mediterranean; and here alone in Western Europe are found temporary lakes with no outlet, and consequently salt from excess of evaporation. For the same reason salt springs and brackish streams abound in these highlands. All around the coast, both on the Atlantic and Mediterranean, salinas, or salt-works for making salt, either from the sea or from the brackish water of lagoons and tidal marshes, abound; those of Cadiz, and of the coast between Cartagena and Alicante are celebrated for the excellence of their salt. Besides these are the five Albuferas, or lagoons, of Valencia, Alicante, Elche, Auna, and Oropesa. Of these that of Valencia is far the largest, and feeds enormous quantities of fish and of aquatic fowl of all kinds. The interior lakes, as that of Sanabria in Zamora, Gallocanta in Aragon, and those from which many of the rivers take their source, are noted only for their picturesque beauty. We can hardly show the value of water in Spain better than by directing the reader's attention to the number of places which take their name from water of some kind: thus there are forty-four villages or towns whose names are compounded of _Aguas_, waters; 238 into which the word _Fuente_, fountain, enters; 144 _Rios_, rivers; 54 _Arroyos_, brooks; 44 _Pozos_, wells; 30 _Salinas_, salt waters; 9 _Rio Secos_, dry rivers; and about 600 _Molinos_ or water-mills. The multiplicity of these last dates perhaps from the time when every seigneur had his own mill, and obliged his vassals to grind their corn there; but assuredly in a moister climate water would not have played so great a part in the nomenclature, or toponymy, of the country. We add the following table, deduced from Reclus' "Nouvelle Géographie Universelle," 6° Serie, p. 886, compared with an article in "La Revista Contemporanea," December 30th, 1880:-- Area of Length of Mean Outfall compared Rivers. basin. course. rainfall. with rainfall. Sq. miles. Miles. Inches. Per cent. Northern {Minho&Sil 10,000 190 47-1/2 50 Rivers. {Ebro 25,000 466 18 20 Rivers of {Douro 35,000 506 20 40 the {Tagus 30,000 556 16 33 Central {Guardiana & Plateau. {Zancara 24,000 553 14 20 Andulasia Guadalquiver 21,000 340 19 30 Mediterranean {Segura 8500 217 12 10 Rivers. {Jucar 5800 317 12-1/2 15 E. & S.E. {Guadalaviar 3200 187 -- 12 The mineral springs of Spain are very numerous, as might be expected in a mountainous country, at the junction of different strata in the metamorphic fissures, and in the neighbourhood of extinct volcanoes. Many of them were known and used by the Romans, and possibly by other races before their time. The Moors made use of many, more especially in the south. The majority of these springs are much neglected, and the bathing establishments in their roughness are a striking contrast to those of Germany and of France; there is, however, no reason to suppose that the waters themselves are less efficacious. The best known springs lie along the line of the Pyrenees, in Catalonia, Navarre, and especially in the Basque provinces and Santander. Another noted group are in the neighbourhood of Granada, and on the northern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Those in the Guadarrama range are more frequented, from their vicinity to Madrid. Many of the Salados and Salinas in the higher parts of the eastern range, as well as the springs in the neighbourhood of Valencia, might be utilized with advantage. In this, as in many other things, Spain has not yet recovered the threads of a lost civilization, and in many points of material comfort and well-being is behind the Spain of Roman and of Moorish times. CHAPTER II. CLIMATE AND PRODUCTIONS. Spain may be roughly divided into five climates: (1) that of the north and of the Pyrenees, where rain is abundant; (2) the west or Atlantic climate, including Portugal; (3) the north-east or Mediterranean; (4) the east and south, or African climate; and (5) lastly, the climate of the great Central Plateau, or the Continental. All these are well marked, and differ greatly in their temperature, in elevation, in exposure, in rainfall, and in prevailing winds. To speak of an average temperature, or of an average rainfall in Spain, is only to mislead. The temperature of the south and south-east is higher than that of the opposite coast of Africa, while the winters in Castile recall those of Scandinavia in their bitterness. In some of the Asturian valleys there is, perhaps, the heaviest rainfall in Europe; while the lower valley of the Ebro is almost a desert, from want of rain; and in parts of Valencia and Murcia, and even in Andalusia, not a drop will fall for years; yet at times these provinces, and their driest portions, are visited--as in 1802, 1879, and 1881--by overwhelming and destructive floods. To strike an average, then, even for the same spot, through several years, is often merely deceptive. We have remarked above on the similarity of the conformation of the western coasts of Galicia to those of Norway, Scotland, and Ireland. They partake also of the same Atlantic character in their climate and productions. Galicia and the Asturias are essentially grazing countries; and from the Galician ports, up to 1878, about 20,000 head of fatted cattle were annually sent to England. Except in the more sheltered valleys, where the productions of a warmer clime will flourish, the native flora is not unlike that of the milder parts of Ireland and of Devonshire. The average temperature of Santiago is about 55° Fahr., with a maximum of 95°, and a minimum of 28°; Oviedo is given as 54° average, maximum 80°, and minimum 24°; while the rainfall of the former is from 58 to 68 inches, and that of the latter varies from 38 to 50 in ordinary years, but in 1858 it attained 80 inches. Proceeding eastward we meet the northern or Pyrenean climate, where the rainfall is not so great, and, except in the immediate vicinity of the highest mountains, lessens gradually as we either go eastward or descend into the plains. The moisture is condensed and wrung out of the clouds brought by the watery western winds, and precipitated on the mountains of the west and north. From the Picos de Europa, in the province of Santander, which may be considered as the meeting-point of the two climates, the waters descend on the one side by the Ebro to the Mediterranean, by the Pisuerga to the Douro and the Atlantic, and by the shorter northern streams to the Bay of Biscay. In the valley of the Cabuervega (Santander) the rainfall is 57-1/2 inches. Passing eastward we find Bilbao and San Sebastian, with an average temperature of 56° and 55°, a maximum of 93°, and minimum 23°, while the rainfall has diminished from 55 to 48 inches. At Vergara, more inland, it is 52. At Huesca, in Aragon, notwithstanding its proximity to the mountains, the rainfall is only 25 inches; at Balaguer, in Catalonia, only 15-1/2. At Saragossa the climate becomes more extreme; the average is 60°, the maximum 96°, and the minimum 20°, while the rainfall descends to 14 inches. The equalizing influence of the neighbourhood of the sea is felt in the Mediterranean climate at Barcelona; for while the average is 63°, the maximum is only 88°, and the minimum 32°, and the rainfall ascends to 24 inches. The difference is still more marked if we compare the extreme oscillation between the maximum and minimum temperatures. At Saragossa this is from 120° to 130°; at Barcelona from 90° to 100° Fahr. The productions of this northern zone vary greatly according to elevation and exposition. Those of the Basque Provinces still belong to the north temperate zone climate--cattle, corn, and cider, as well as wine. The olive, and the mulberry for silk, are almost unknown; but maize is largely grown. As we approach Catalonia these products give way to those of the Mediterranean region of Provence and of the Riviera--the olive, the grape, the mulberry. A powerful red wine is made on the lower southern spurs of the Pyrenees and of the Cantabrian Mountains, in the Riojas, in Navarre, and in Aragon. Much of it would be excellent if more attention were paid to the preparation, and especially to the conditions of transport. Great quantities are at present exported to France by sea from Bilbao and San Sebastian, and also by rail, for the purpose of mixing with the thinner and poorer clarets of Bordeaux, to fit them for the taste and market of England. In Catalonia the wine improves, and is less used for mixing. The chief kinds are a red wine, like Rousillon, and sweet, luscious wines, Rancio, somewhat like Muscat or Malaga. Of late the manufacture of effervescing wines like champagne has been carried on with considerable success. The wine made in Catalonia amounts to one-fifth of the whole produce of Spain. Already the orange and the palm appear. Proceeding southwards from Catalonia, we gradually advance into the south-eastern and southern climate of Spain, a climate which is rather African than European in its character, and both whose products and dryness have more relation to the African continent than to that of the rest of Europe. It is here that the date-palm ripens--which it does not on the opposite coast of Algeria--and the camel breeds, and can be used as a beast of burden equally as in Egypt and the East. Sheltered by the mountain ranges to the east and north from the cold winds which sweep the plateau of Castile, exposed by the slope of the country to the full influence of the southern sun and its powerful evaporation, the characteristics of the climate are warmth and dryness, while the vicinity of the Mediterranean partly tempers the extreme range of heat and cold which might be found in lands more remote from the sea. Thus the average temperature of Valencia is 65°, its maximum 102°, its minimum 41°, and extreme range 100°. Alicante, still further south, has an average of 66°, a maximum of 100°, and a minimum of 35°. The average rainfall at Valencia is stated at 17, and that of Alicante at 18 inches; but, as remarked above, in this south-eastern district of Spain averages of rainfall are quite deceptive. In some years the quantity marked is only a very few inches, 3 or 6, over the whole district, and there are considerable portions where rain does not fall for years. The country is rendered fertile and productive, not by its rains, but by irrigation from the rivers, fed by the winter snows on the mountains which border the great plateau. At times, however, as in 1802 and 1879, storms of rain descend on the high lands of Murcia and the eastern sierras, and floods rush down, sweeping away dams which have stood for centuries, washing away towns and villages, and spreading destruction far and wide. To compute the rainfall of such floods into an average is only to play with figures. Murcia has an average temperature of 64°, maximum 112°, minimum 24°, and an extreme range of 120°. The rainfall averages about 12-1/2 inches on the coast, but varies greatly; at Albacete it is said to average 13 inches. The directly southern coast, from the Cabo de Gata to Gibraltar, has a milder and more equable climate than that of the south-eastern coast; but in the inland valley of the Guadalquiver the range is more extreme, both for heat and cold. The dryness in the eastern district still continues from Cartagena to Almeria; the rainfall is said to be only 12 inches. At Malaga, while the average temperature is 66°, about the same as that at Valencia and Alicante, the maximum is said to be only 78°, and the minimum 53°. At Motril, between Malaga and Almeria, the maximum is 77°, and the minimum 52°. In Seville on the other hand, the average is 68°, with a maximum Of 118°, and a minimum of 30°. Cordova, somewhat colder, has a maximum of 93°, and a minimum of 27°. The rainfall is also more moderate at Malaga, 15-1/2 inches, and 23 at Seville. Granada, in its upland but sheltered valley, at an elevation of 2681 feet, defended from the east and south by the snowy range of the Sierra Nevada, and by the mountains of Granada to the north, has still an average of 65°, with a maximum of 97°, and a minimum of 42°. The rainfall varies considerably in different years, and various geographers give its average as 23-1/2 33-1/2, and the latest (Reclus) 48-1/2. Cadiz has an Atlantic climate, which in temperature and greater rainfall, 37 inches, closely approximates to that of Madeira. Moving westward it decreases, at Gibraltar, 34-1/2, San Fernando, 27; while at Huelva and Tarifa, where the moisture of the north-west gales is intercepted by the Portuguese mountains, it descends to 24-1/2. We have now only to treat of the climate of the great central elevation, the plateau, which ranges at an average height of some 2000 feet above the sea. Thus, Madrid is 2148, Segovia 2299, Burgos 2873, Soria 3504, and the Escorial, 3683 feet above the sea-level. But even these altitudes do not wholly account for the rigour of the climate in the latitude of Naples, Rome, and Constantinople. We have seen how excellent is the climate of Granada at a nearly equal elevation, only three degrees further south. The extremes of heat and cold felt at Valladolid and Madrid are due more to the uncovered mountain ranges to the north, the treeless, waterless plains, over which the wind sweeps unchecked, than to mere elevation. The want of rain is greatly owing to the ranges of mountains parallel to the frontier and to the Atlantic in Portugal, which condense and wring all the moisture from the rain-clouds of the Atlantic, and distribute it almost wholly on the western slope. Thus at Lisbon the fall is 29, at Coimbra 35, at Oporto 63, in the mountains of Beira and Tras os Montes from 68 to 100 inches; while on the eastern slope, at Salamanca it is 9, Valladolid 12, at Badajoz 12-1/2, Ciudad Real 14. From the bare granite range of the Guadarrama steals down the treacherous icy wind so fatal in Madrid--not sufficiently strong to extinguish a candle, but quite enough to destroy human life. It is the dislike of the Castilian peasant to trees, which would overshadow so much of his small property, the destruction of the mountain forests, and the want of good agriculture, which has embittered the climate of these plateaux. Were the hill-sides clothed with wood, the country dotted with farms, the wide and bare plains covered throughout the year with varied agricultural produce, the climate would soon be modified and become sensibly warmer, and no longer, as it at present is, an obstacle to civilization and to improvement. In spite of all neglect these plains grow some of the finest wheat in Europe, and the lower mountain ranges supply pasture in the summer for the immense flocks which return to winter in the plains of Estremadura. The average temperature of Madrid is 59°, its maximum 104° to 107°, and its minimum only 7°. That of Salamanca is said to be 57°, with a maximum of 97°, and a minimum of 12°. The average rainfall of Madrid is only from 9 to 14 inches, that of Salamanca 9, while Soria, nearer to the mountains, in some years reaches 25 inches. From the above sketch of the climate the reader will expect to find the productions vary greatly in the different districts. The north and north-west are the lands of cattle and of pasture. In Galicia and in the Asturias the products are almost like those of the warmer parts of the south-west of England and of Ireland, save that in the more sheltered valleys the orange, citron, and pomegranate flourish; a palm is even now and then to be seen; and the wine, especially on the confines of Portugal, is excellent, and needs only more care in preparation to be a rival to the famous Port of the neighbouring country. In the eighteenth century, that of Ribadavia was considered to be the finest wine in all Spain. Maize, too, is freely grown; but on account of their extreme poverty, rye and spelt often replace both it and wheat as food for the peasantry. The upland plateaux afford excellent pasture, especially for cattle and horses; the hardy and sure-footed hacks of Galicia and the Asturias are celebrated. The mountains here are often clothed with wood; oaks of various kinds, and the edible chestnut, and the hazel-nut--of which over 1000 tons, value 23,000_l._, are annually exported from Gijon--grow on the lower spurs, giving food to herds of swine; beech, and pine, and fir appear as we approach the tops. In the lower woods the arbutus especially flourishes, and the young wild boars in autumn are said to become half stupefied with its narcotic berries. As we proceed eastward from Galicia to the Asturias the climate becomes sensibly colder--the valleys face the north instead of the west; the orange is less known, the mulberry will not flourish sufficiently well to pay for silk cultivation, the olive will not grow, and the cork does not pay for cultivation; the wines lose somewhat of their strength and lusciousness; and cider, made from the excellent apples of the country, rivals the juice of the grape in popularity. The mountains are covered with heath, and fern, and furze, but the aromatic plants are fewer than in Galicia. This description applies to the northern slope of the Cantabrian chain and to the rolling hills and plateaux of the Basque provinces; but the southern slopes of the chain, towards the Ebro, are again a land of vine and olive, and of maize, which is everywhere the staple. In the Basque provinces the plough is replaced by the ancient "laya," an instrument as old, at least, as Roman times. It is a heavy two-pronged steel or iron fork, with prongs one and a half to two feet long. A strong man will work two of them at once, one in each hand, driving them into the ground to their full depth, then with a backward strain turning up the deep soil. Usually, four or five men work together, and raise their arms, plunge the fork downwards, and heave, in perfect time. The cultivation thus effected is excellent, but the expenditure of labour is immense The productions do not vary greatly along the slopes of the Pyrenees from those above described until we reach Catalonia; but in the lower valley of the Ebro, where rain is rare, in the Bardeñas reales of Navarre, and in the monegros, or despoblados of Aragon, we meet with a phenomenon only too frequent in Spain--tracts of almost utter barrenness. The Bardeñas reales are low spurs of the Pyrenees, with table-lands, bluffs, and deep gorges, and these could scarcely be brought under cultivation; but the "despoblados" (dispeopled lands) of Aragon might be irrigated, either by the Ebro or by its tributaries, if the water of the canal of Charles V. were but economically applied. The sterility of some parts seems to have been the slow result of an oppressive land tenure; for as Don Vicente de la Fuente has remarked, the lands which belonged to the ancient señors (the feudal lords) lie barren, while the lands of the comunidades, the free districts, are still fertile. In treating, of the cultivation and the products of eastern and southern Spain two facts become evident at once--how many of the products are exotic, and how much of the cultivation is still Arabian. We shall see in another chapter how deep a mark the Moor or Arab has left on the population and toponymy of Spain; and the agriculture of the greater part of central and southern Spain is still Arabian. The methods of the Spanish peasant are almost all Arabian; often he uses the Arabian hoe in preference to the Roman plough. The _noria_, or water-wheel; the _sha'doof_, or swipe, the pole and bucket for lifting water; the huge dams and reservoirs, the canals and ditches (_acequias_), the regulations for the fair distribution of the water,--all these, and even the very superstitions as to times of sowing, the rotation of crops, the treatment of his animals--for all these the Spanish peasant of the South is indebted to the Moors. The treatise of Abu Zaccaria, with its traditions of Nabathean agriculture, is still one of the manuals of agriculture in Spain. It is the Moors, too, who first made the winter gardens in the sands near San Lucarde Barameda, at the mouth of the Guadalquiver, and which supply Cadiz and Seville with the earliest and latest vegetables. The Roman, with his lofty aqueducts, brought water to the towns; but it was the Moor who gave that blessing to the thirsty soil of the country districts of Spain. And not only the methods of agriculture, but many of its fruits and products were introduced by the Arab from the East, and some of these are now the very staple of Spanish produce. It is they who brought into Spain the cotton plant, rice, and the sugar-cane; mulberries, both for fruit and for silk culture; sesame, the caper, the locust bean, the castor-oil plant, alfalfa (lucerne), the pomegranate, almond, the walnut and filbert, the chestnut and the ever-green oak, the wild olive, the jujube, the pistacchio nut, the palm, several kinds of roses, the wall-flower, with many another garden herb or flower. It was they who improved the Andalusian steed into one of the most excellent in Europe for riding, and the strain may still be traced even in the ponies of the north. But the cultivated vegetation of the south which meets the stranger's eye is perhaps still more indebted to the Americas.[1] It needs an effort now to picture what Spanish agriculture and what Spanish life was before the time of Columbus, when maize, and the potato, and sweet potato, were unknown; when not a cigar was smoked or cigarette made, or leaf of tobacco grown in Spain; when only garlic was known, and those indispensable condiments of every dish, the tomato, and the pimentos had not yet entered a Spanish kitchen, and chocolate had not yet been sipped by Spanish ladies; when the hedges were bare of aloes, and the prickly pear gave the beggar no fruit. And besides these common gifts, there are the more luxurious ones of pine apples, grenadines (the fruit of the passion-flower), abocado pears, chirimoyas, guavas, earth-nuts, bananas, and many others, while the gardens are enriched with magnolias and passion-flowers, and a wealth of creepers of all kinds. The Australian eucalypti, also, are highly valued in Spain, both as a febrifuge and for their prophylactic qualities in prevention of malaria in marshy ground; and a decoction from their leaves has quite passed into the popular pharmacopeia. [1] For the converse of this, the plants and fruits introduced by the Spaniards into America, see Markham's "Peru," in this series, p. 120. The most common plant on the sun-dried hills of Valencia and Murcia, the esparto-grass (_Stipe tenacissima_), after having been long used in various native manufactures, has since 1856 become an article of exportation, and an important addition to the wealth of Spain; but the cultivation of the barilla plant for soda has much decreased. It is from Valencia that the oranges come which are such favourites in Paris. The tree is so valuable, both for fruit and flowers, that an acre will sometimes give 600_l._ worth of produce. The dried raisins and almonds so familiar in England, so eagerly looked for at Christmas time, and the green preserved grapes, come from the districts of which we are now speaking, the coast-lands from Valencia to Almeira and Malaga. The wines are equally celebrated, from the strong red wines of Benicarlo, near the frontiers of Catalonia, to the sweet wines of Alicante and of Malaga, which are preferred by Continental taste to the drier and more fiery sherries, wines of the Guadalquiver valley, which please the English palate. Near the coast on the lower grounds, wherever there is sufficient water, rice is grown; but, on account of the unhealthy character of the cultivation, its culture is forbidden in the neighbourhood of towns. Sugar-cane is extending on the southern coast. In Andalusia alone more than 7000 acres are devoted to this culture, and the total yield of the sugar-cane in Spain is estimated at nearly 20,000 tons. Palms are grown as an ornament and garden-tree from Barcelona to Malaga, but in Murcia, and especially at Elche, they are planted for production. Though the number seems declining, there are still some 40,000 palms together in the neighbourhood of Elche; in the last century they are said to have numbered from 50,000 to 70,000. It is not for the fruit alone, the date, but for the leaves (the so-called palm-branches) that the trees are grown. In the winter these are tied into a close bundle to exclude the rays of the sun, in order that they may become white, and they are then exported to Rome and Italy, for use in the Easter ceremonies of Palm Sunday. Oils and essences, extracted from many plants and flowers, are also products of this region. The liquorice-root, and many another flower, or fruit, or root of medicinal value grows wild on the hills. The slopes of the eastern mountains are covered with aromatic herbs, thyme, myrtle, box, rosemary, southern-wood, mint, lavender, marjoram, nearly all the sweet-scented herbs which were once carefully cultivated in the gardens of our ancestors, are natives of these hills; and the flocks of goats returning from their pastures bring the sweet odours into the tainted towns and villages, and the first draught of milk from them is highly flavoured thereby. On these treeless hills, and the warmer parts of the higher plateaux, these aromatic herbs are often the only fuel which the peasant can employ. The wealth of this portion of the Spanish soil, the variety and beauty of its products, can be best seen in a visit to a fruit or flower market in any of the towns of the south and east. The richness of colour, the size and beauty of form, are amazing to the stranger; but the quantity and the cheapness, the way in which these fruits and exotic vegetables enter into the diet of the poor, is that which most astonishes those from less generous climes. We have not space to enumerate in detail a tithe of these productions; this must be sought in more special treatises. Almost equal in agricultural and garden wealth to that of the coast-line, and superior to it as regards the culture of the vine, is the valley of the Guadalquiver. The oranges of Seville (the civil oranges of our forefathers, the main ingredient of marmalade), sack, and sherry, are known in every English home of the middle and upper classes. It is in the valley of the Guadalquiver, from San Lucar de Barameda to above Cordova, that the finest sherries are produced. From San Lucar comes the pleasant Manzanilla, the lightest and most wholesome of all the sherries, but with a peculiar bitter taste and bouquet, like that of the wild camomile-flower. In the neighbourhood of Jerez de la Frontera the best sherries are produced, both brown and golden; the Amontillado, the nutty-flavoured wine so much sought after, comes from Montilla, to the south of Cordova. Several other kinds are manufactured, and have a great local reputation. Comparatively very little of these strong and fiery wines is consumed in Spain. Spaniards take them only as a liqueur, not as the usual accompaniment of a meal or desert. Sherry, though grown in Spain, is the foreigner's, and especially the Englishman's wine. The red Valdepeñas, from the northern slope of the Sierra Morena, replaces it at the Spaniard's table. For the modes of preparation of the various sherries, we must refer our readers to special treatises; of its statistics as an article of commerce we shall speak in another chapter. The first palm-tree introduced into Spain is said to have been planted near Cordova. The olives of this district are considered the finest in Spain. Comparatively little of the oil is exported, but the home consumption is enormous. The cork forests, too, are abundant; their bark forms an important article of commerce. We have now only to speak of the great central plateau, the Continental climate of Spain, and its productions. This is peculiarly the corn-growing district of Spain, the land of wheat and maize, especially in the Castiles. Estremadura and Léon are rather pastoral districts. It is in these provinces that the laws of the _Mesta_, for the protection of the celebrated merino sheep, ruled supreme, and which, though modified at the close of the last century, and some of their worst abuses done away with, were finally repealed only in 1835. By these laws the sheep and cattle which fed in the winter in the plains of Estremadura, and in the summer on the mountains of Léon, were privileged to enter almost any property on their line of march, to feed or to pass the night there. A space of ninety yards wide was reserved on each side of the highways for their accommodation; no land, especially no corn-field, was allowed to be enclosed; and right of forcible entrance was given to all orchards and vineyards where pasturage might be found. Wherever the flocks had once fed, the land could not be sold or alienated to any other purpose. The shepherds who tended these flocks became almost as savage and ignorant as the beasts they looked after; their privileges produced in them a contempt and hatred of all kinds of fixed property, and they were ever trying to extend their oppressive right at the expense of the more settled and agricultural portion of the community. Under the influence of these laws Estremadura, which, in the time of the Romans and Moors had been one of the richest provinces of Spain, became under their Christian conquerors not only one of the poorest and most thinly peopled districts, but also a curse and source of destruction to the rest. Not only were all the evils of the old Roman "latifundia" reproduced in this mediæval system, but the locust, which never breeds in cultivated lands, or where the plough passes, was enabled to make its home in the wilds and pastures of Estremadura, whence it periodically sallied out to devastate the fairest and richest portions of the land. In the years 1754 to 1757 it desolated the whole of the provinces between Estremadura and the Mediterranean. In 1686 and the following year it reached the principality of Barcelona, and, in spite of exorcisms, ravaged the country till there was nothing more to destroy. The provinces nearer to Estremadura are much more frequent sufferers, and in recent years (in 1876 the crops in Ciudad Real were utterly destroyed) a division of the army has been more than once employed to destroy or to check them on their march. The only plant they spare is the tomata, which they will not touch. Besides flocks, Estremadura maintains huge herds of swine, which feed on the sweet acorns and chestnuts of its woods, and whose flesh is renowned through Spain. Owing to its situation on the borders of Andalusia, in which province the Moors retained their powers long after they had lost the rest of Spain, Estremadura was exposed to their frequent incursions; every flock and herd was liable to be carried off, every fruit-tree to be cut down, the farms burnt and crops destroyed; and in their retaliation the Christian knights were almost as fatal as the Arab horsemen. The country was never thoroughly peopled after the reconquest, and the sense of insecurity remained long after the cause of it had been removed. The laws of the Mesta and the emigration to the Americas (both Cortes and Pizarro were Extrameños) finished the work of depopulation, and left the province, as it has since remained, naturally one of the richest, actually one of the poorest in Spain. The products, besides those above mentioned, are cork, oak-bark and acorns for tanning, honey, nuts, and chestnuts. The bare plains of the Castiles are now the great corn-producing country of Spain. But they have little or nothing of the beauty and variety of cultivated land in other countries. There is no succession of crops, no mixed husbandry, no scattered farm-houses, neither tree nor fence to break the bare monotony. The hill-sides and mountains are given up to pasture, the plains to wheat and maize. The husbandmen live in villages, and ride out on donkeys in early morn to their distant fields, and return home at night. A sense of insecurity seems still to brood over the land, as if the peasant dared not trust himself outside the walls of village or town. Only at harvest-time, in the warm summer and autumn nights, he camps out among his crops, to thresh them on the spot, and bring the produce home, a habit which often produces fever and ague. Year after year the process is repeated; no improvement is ever made; if rain falls the harvest is plentiful--so plentiful sometimes that the lazy peasant will not reap his most distant fields, or procure new skins or barrels for the over-abundant wine, though with the extension of railways this evil is fast disappearing. There is hardly a greater contrast than between the habits of the Castilian peasants and those of the peasant-proprietors in the Basque provinces and in those of north and north-west. In the Basque provinces the farms are scattered all over the country, and travellers from other districts of Spain speak of the whole district as if it were one city. The farm-house stands in the midst of its grounds, with orchard, garden, trees and fences, meadow and corn-land round it. To Englishmen this description is almost a matter of course, and one must read the narrative of travellers from Castile fully to appreciate the force of the contrast. There is, moreover, no natural impediment whatever to a similar course of life in many districts of the Castiles. Barren and dreary as they look, the plains called the "Sierras de Campos," and some others, are watered by a kind of natural capillary attraction; dry as the surface appears, water is always to be found at a few inches below the surface, and the roots of the wheat and other cereal crops penetrate to it. It is only the mixture of pride and laziness and ignorance of the Castilian peasant, his senseless disdain of all improvement, his want of ambition for anything better, that prevents progress in this part of Spain. He refused to make use of the machinery invented for him in the last century, nor will he avail himself of the means of irrigation and the still better machines provided for him now. Yet there is no agricultural country in which machinery could be introduced to greater advantage. Perhaps no better idea can be given of the productions of Spain, and of the diversity of its climates and fruits, than by comparing those of Murcia with those of the north-west and the centre. In January the bean is in flower in Murcia, in April in Madrid; the vine and the wheat flower in April in Murcia, but not till May or June in the province of Madrid. The climate of Galicia, with its almost continual rain, and Murcia with its droughts, are perhaps the most opposite climates of Spain. The one is a land of pasture and of flax cultivation; its fruits are the apple, the pear, the peach, strawberries, currants, and nuts of all kinds; the predominant plant on the hill-sides is the furze, in Murcia it is the Esparto grass. The fruits there cultivated in the gardens are exotic, and have almost wholly replaced the indigenous flora; the "huertas," the gardens or cultivated plains, are there almost like oases in a desert. The fauna of Spain--except in one particular, the monkeys (_Macacus Innuus_) which inhabit the rock of Gibraltar, and which are the only animals of their kind wild in Europe--does not greatly differ from that of the rest of Southern Europe. In the highest part of the Pyrenees, in the Sierra de Credos, and in the Sierra Nevada, the izard or chamois still exists in considerable numbers. Whether the bouquetin is really extinct, or still survives in the Spanish Pyrenees, is a disputed point. In the forests which clothe the lower spurs, roe and fallow deer, wild goats and wild boars, and in some districts red deer, are still to be found. The beasts of prey are the bear, the wolf, the lynx, the fox, wild cat, marten, ferret, weasel, &c.; and these are assisted by the no less rapacious birds of prey--the vultures, eagles, hawks, falcons, kites, harriers, pies, and jays. The game birds and animals are the pheasant, now very rare, partridges of both kinds, bustards, both large and small, sand-grouse, quails, which come in immense quantities to the vineyards and maize-fields in the summer and autumn, woodcock, snipe; wild duck, geese, all kinds of water-birds and waders, visit the marshes of the rivers and the lagoons of the coast in winter; and on the southern shores meet the flamingoes, pelicans, spoonbills, and other birds from the African coast. From the same quarter come numerous and brighter-plumaged birds of passage; orioles, bee-eaters, hoopoes, and other natives of a warmer zone, are brought over by the hot south wind so irritating to the nerves and temper of a southern Spaniard. It is then that the shores of the Mediterranean are lined with sportsmen, when the moon is near full, to take heavy toll of these winged travellers. The entomology of Spain is probably very rich. We have spoken of the locusts of Estremadura; and in the wilds where they breed--mere solitudes in summer, when the flocks are absent in their northern pastures--many a rare species of butterfly, cicada, and insect is doubtless to be found. The insects of Spain, however, are not all noxious or without value. Silk-worms are largely bred in the coast provinces of the east and south, not only for their silk, but also for the gut so precious to all trout and salmon fishermen. The cochineal insect, which feeds on the leaves of the prickly pear, is cultivated for its brilliant dye. Of useful and domesticated animals, the sheep of Spain have always been celebrated; the very name, "merinos," has been given to the softest kind of wool or woolly tissue. It is said that the breed attained its excellence through a present of English South Down rams by Edward I. to the father of his Castilian bride, and that the wool has improved under climatic influences. However this may be, the superiority has hardly been maintained, and careless shepherding has sadly deteriorated the breed; still the half-bred Spanish merinos are the favourite flocks throughout the north of Spain and Southern France, and they are slowly superseding the coarser native and local breeds. The Spanish cattle from Galicia are well known in the English market, but they are not the choicest of their kind. The bulls that are bred for the bull-fights are reared chiefly along the marshy banks of the Guadalquiver, which, like the delta of the Rhone, supports herds of half-wild cattle and buffaloes. Cow's milk is little known or used in many districts of Spain, and butter still less. Sheep or goat's milk supplies the place of the former, and the olive-oil, excellent were it not too often kept till rancid, that of the latter. Cheese and various kinds of curdled milk or whey are also made from the milk of sheep. Since the advent of the Arabs the Andalusian steed has been much celebrated. It is now scarcely equal to its former fame, but, like many a horse of warmer climes, its performances are better than its looks; hardy, sure-footed, swift, and docile, if not over-weighted it will do more than one of many a finer-looking but less enduring breed. The horse, however, is not the true beast of burden in Spain; he is the charger, or the luxury of the rich. The real work of the country is done by the humble mule or ass, or, in some districts, by the ox. The fine Spanish mules are now seldom bred in the country, but are procured from Poitou, or from the south of France, where great attention is paid to their production, and where the average price of a mule of six months old is higher than that of a horse of the same age. For long journeys, and for carrying produce over the mountain paths, or along the bad roads of the interior, the mule and pack-saddle is still generally used. In fact, in some districts no other mode of conveyance is possible; but the loss to commerce from want of better communications is immense. It is this mode of carriage which necessitates and continues the use of the tarred wine-skin, by which so much excellent wine is rendered unsalable and almost undrinkable. It is hard to recognize the delicious wine when tasted at the vineyard, in the pitch-flavoured, half-fermented liquor which has travelled for days in a skin exposed to the sun's heat by day, and the closeness and fetid odours of the inns by night. Besides these, the camel, buffalo, and llama, and vicunâ have been introduced successfully as an experiment for breeding, but not in sufficient numbers to affect the means of transport in the peninsula. The fisheries in Galicia and along the north-west Atlantic coast, and also at Huelva and at Cadiz, are very valuable. Not only are they an abundant means of support to the inhabitants of the coast and of Léon and Northern Castile, but the fishermen engaged in them furnish the best sailors to the Spanish navy. The chief kinds of fish are sardines and pilchards, of which great numbers are preserved in oil, the tunny, and the sea-bream, of which enormous quantities are annually taken. The rivers, from the Minho to the Bidassoa, furnish trout and salmon. In the Mediterranean, tunny, and the anchovies which replace the sardines, are the chief fisheries, but many Spaniards are also engaged in the coral-fishing off the coasts of Catalonia, of Algiers, and of Tunis. The total production of Spain has been approximately valued at Agriculture £80,000,000 Mines 6,271,000 Manufactures 63,480,000 CHAPTER III. GEOLOGY AND MINES. Even in geological features Spain is a land apart. Divided from the rest of Europe by the regular Palæozoic band of the Pyrenees, the rocks of the Peninsula are only susceptible of separate study. Hence no consistent geological history can be deduced from the fragmentary and superficial observations that as yet form the basis of the geological map of Spain. A few striking features and geological statistics may however be presented; and the recently-published map of Botella, as well as the mass of valuable matter already collected by the _Comision del Mapa geologico de España_, are an earnest that Spanish geology will soon occupy a place corresponding to its peculiar interest. A mass of Granitic, Cambrian, and Silurian rocks forms the central plateau of Spain, extending in a south-easterly direction from Galicia to the valley of the Guadalquiver, and spreading to the north-east, as shown by the chains of the Guadarrama and the mountains of Toledo, to terminate in the Celtiberian range, running nearly parallel to the Ebro by Soria and the Moncayo. In this mass the main folds of the strata appear to run in a south-easterly, the main fractures in a north-easterly, direction; whence the gridiron arrangement of the mountain chains and river valleys, directed by these leading features of the rocky structure. Great buttresses of the Carboniferous formation occupy the corners of the central mass, to the north and south-west, and occasional patches of its upper and coal-bearing beds are scattered over the interior. The whole valley of the Ebro occupies a trough of Secondary rocks, which extend in a south-easterly direction from the Bay of Biscay to the Mediterranean, forming a wide boundary to the older central mass, and running along the north coast towards Oviedo. The Secondary formations of the Ebro sweep over the chain of the Moncayo on to the central plateau by Burgos, Soria, and Calatayud; and their latest member--the Upper Cretaceous--advances in two long tongues on to the granite of the Guadarrama, and far to the east of Madrid, it being probable that at least this member formerly extended over the central plateau. Another wide band of Secondary rocks, running in a north-easterly direction, forms the long strip of Andalusia south of the Guadalquiver; and by Valencia and Cuenca this band is widely prolonged to the Ebro basin; otherwise, a narrow and interrupted strip along the south coast, and a bay-like expanse from the Atlantic, between Lisbon and Oporto, are the only Secondary tracts of the Peninsula. These Secondary rocks are however in great part concealed by Eocene Tertiary beds, formed in marine gulfs in the valley of the Ebro and the Guadalquiver, and overlaid by Eocene and Miocene fresh-water deposits; the latter being also represented by vast lacustrine sheets, which contemporaneously accumulated, and conceal the crystalline and palæozoic formations in the elevated river basins of the central primary plateau. Patches of Pliocene sands and clays along the Mediterranean coast, sheets of diluvial gravels below the mountains, and alluvial sands along the larger rivers represent the local and most recent effects of water and ice. The consequences of this general structure are apparent on every hand. The population of Galicia is in many respects similar to that of the Portuguese mountaineers, who occupy the same band of naked granitic and primary rocks. The inhabitants of the varied and fertile Secondary band of Andalusia and Valencia have many traits in common. The Biscayans are a race apart, like the labyrinth of Cretaceous precipices and green rainy valleys which they inhabit. All are distinct from the Castilians, whose monotonous and isolated existence on the vast treeless steppes of crumbling Tertiary sands and marls that carpet the primary plateau 2000 feet above the sea has deeply influenced their character. Finally, the inhabitants of the Ebro basin, a region where the dry Tertiary soil of Castile is combined with many characteristics of the Secondary tracts, afford a curious mixture of Castilian with Basque or Valencian traits. The inhabitants of the greater Spanish cities are of course products of civilization, not of the soil. Of the visible surface of Spain 37 per cent. is occupied by Crystalline and Palæozoic rocks, 34 per cent. by Tertiary, 19 per cent. by Secondary, and 10 per cent. by Quaternary deposits. The Palæozoic rocks are greatly contorted and fractured, the Secondary scarcely less so, the older Tertiary are crumpled up against the flanks of the mountain chains, and even upturned Pliocene deposits testify in some places to the late continuance of the movements that have contributed to the production of the peculiar elevated character of the Peninsula. The remains of undoubted volcanoes are confined to the insignificant groups of Olot, Cabo de Gata, and Ciudad Real, but innumerable dykes and bosses of igneous rock are scattered over the primitive plateau where unconcealed by Tertiary sheets, and are also frequent in the Secondary tracts. This abundance of igneous injections is intimately connected with the exceptionally metalliferous character of Spain, while the fractured and contorted condition of even the latest rocky formations has contributed to a general diffusion of mineral wealth. The granite and other igneous rocks form rounded bosses or prominent pinnacles, according as they are more or less subject to atmospheric decomposition; the pine and the Spanish chestnut flourish on their slopes; iron, lead, copper, tin, graphite, phosphorite, kaolin, steatite, and serpentine are among the products of these crystalline masses. The gneiss and crystalline schists that in part probably represent the Laurentian formation, contain silver, bismuth, molybdenum, and tin; while metamorphic rocks of unknown age are amongst the richest in mines, affording iron, lead, silver, copper, zinc, mercury, manganese, and graphite. The Cambrian formation, a mass of lustrous fissile slate, traversed by white quartz veins, furnishes lead, silver, phosphorite, and gold. The Silurian slates and quartzites yield iron, lead, silver, copper, mercury, manganese, antimony, cobalt, nickel, anthracite, and gold. A few limited patches of Devonian sandstones, quartzites, slates, marls, and limestones, afford iron, zinc, phosphorite, cobalt, and nickel. The Carboniferous series, occupying two per cent. of the surface, includes valuable coal-fields, the immense masses of iron and copper pyrites of the Rio Tinto, Tharsis, and other mines in the province of Huelva, besides iron, zinc, mercury, manganese, antimony, cobalt, nickel, and phosphorite in other districts. The silver-bearing metamorphic rocks of Cartagena, and a portion of the slopes of the Sierra Nevada are classed in the Permian formation. The Triassic conglomerates, sandstones, and variegated marls, which form the usual base of the Secondary rocks, are rich in salt, gypsum, and iron, and afford some copper and zinc. The Jurassic limestones and marls contain asphalte and bituminous slate. The Cretaceous--mainly Neocomian in the south, the Upper Cretaceous predominating in the north--contains the immense iron deposits of Bilbao; valuable beds of lignite resembling coal; lead, zinc, and asphalte mines in the northern provinces, and gold in Granada. In the Eocene formation, which includes the Nummulitic limestone that forms some of the highest summits of the Pyrenees, the celebrated salt-mine of Cardona, in Catalonia, is usually classed. The Miocene beds contain valuable sulphur deposits along the southern coast, and great accumulations of sulphate of soda on the arid steppes of Madrid and other provinces; while gypsum, in which Spain is probably richer than the whole remainder of Europe, is abundant in this formation. Lastly, some native silver is found in the Pliocene deposits of Almeria, and in the Tertiary clays of Guadalajara, while the later gravels of Galicia afford stream tin and gold, the last similarly occurring in Leon and Caceres. The quantity of mineral contained in the rocks of Spain is no less remarkable than the exceptional variety of its distribution; but owing to a series of adverse circumstances, the industrial production affords a most inadequate idea of the capabilities of the mines, if developed by a fair amount of capital and skill. The following figures, showing the production in 1875, are derived from the last official reports issued by the Spanish Government, and are certainly below the truth:-- Tons of ore Tons of metal exported. produced in Spain. Iron 336,000 37,000 Lead 10,000 119,000 Copper 362,000 6,620 Zinc 43,000 3,820 Manganese 14,000 Mercury 1,425 These figures do not include the bar iron produced directly from ore in Spain, nor 160 tons of argentiferous copper ore, 89 tons of cobalt ore, and 440 tons of nickel ore. The silver extracted in Spain amounted to more than 16,000 lbs. troy, while four times that amount was contained in exported argentiferous lead. The coal extracted amounted to 666,000 tons, lignite above 27,000, sulphur above 3000, and phosphorite above 12,000 tons. The year 1875 was, however, peculiarly unfavourable to Spanish mining, and the working of the Bilbao mines, which now produce nearly 2,000,000 tons yearly of excellent iron ore, was then practically suspended by the Carlist war. All disadvantages cannot, however, arrest the steady increase of mineral production in Spain, although under more normal political circumstances the above figures would have been greatly exceeded. The chief coal district is that of Oviedo, Palencia, Leon, and Santander. The coal-field of Oviedo, occupying an extent of 230 square miles, and including a large number of workable beds, is of excellent quality, but as yet little developed, owing to high railway tariffs, bad condition of ports, traditional prejudices, want of skill and capital, and of a local market for inferior qualities. These obstacles will probably soon be overcome, and the development of the associated iron ores afford an important field of enterprise. The coal-field of Palencia, a continuation of that of Oviedo, is in course of development by the Northern Railway Company. Smaller coal-fields of great local importance exist in the provinces of Cordova, Seville, Gerona, Burgos, Cuenca, Guadalajara, and Ciudad Real; that of Gerona, although of small extent and very friable quality, has already occasioned the construction of a railway of considerable length. Iron is mainly obtained from Biscay, Oviedo, Murcia, and Almeria, but is abundant in other provinces. Lead is worked chiefly in Murcia, Jaen, Almeria, Badajoz, and Ciudad Real; the presence of antimony or of a predominating admixture of blende is very common, but Spain is on the whole the most important lead-producing country in Europe. Copper is obtained mainly from the Rio Tinto mines and others in Huelva; also from Seville, Palencia, Almeria, and Santander; but many other districts contain veins yielding more or less of copper ore. Zinc has been chiefly procured from superficial pockets of calamine in Santander and the neighbouring districts; but in the form of blende it is widely distributed in association with lead. Silver ores are worked in Almeria and Guadalajara. The immense impregnation of cinnabar of Almaden, in Ciudad Real, affords nearly all the mercury, but a little is obtained from other mines in the same province and in Oviedo, Granada, and Almeria. Manganese is obtained from Huelva, Oviedo, Teruel, Almeria, Murcia, and Zamora. Nickel ore is worked in Malaga; cobalt in Oviedo and Castellon. Tin occurs in a number of small veins in Galicia; and in the rocks of Salamanca, Murcia, and Almeria, as well as in diluvial gravels. The Spanish side of the Pyrenees contains numerous veins of argentiferous lead, many of copper, and some of cobalt, nickel, argentiferous copper, pyrolusite, &c., few of which are worked. The lead-mines on the border between Catalonia and Aragon supplied the Carlists with ammunition during the late civil war. The fact that more than 12,000 concessions of mines already exist in Spain, while a large number of lapsed concessions may be found, affords a better idea of the mineral wealth of the country than the enumeration of the mines actually worked. That such enormous mineral resources should have as yet yielded no greater results is easily explained. The Roman and Moorish workings, although traditionally of fabulous yield, are of small depth, owing to insufficient machinery for pumping. Till the present century, the working of mines was forbidden by the Spanish Government, with the object of favouring the development of the American colonies. The mining laws of 1825 and 1849, suddenly placing the acquirement of mines within the reach of every substantial peasant, produced a fever of speculation, and a recklessness in the application of unskilled labour, which naturally conduced to the discouragement of mining enterprise, while the recurring civil wars excluded foreign capital and skill. Spaniards have a mania for erecting smelting-works on the mines, a practice occasionally justified by difficulties of transport, but which has caused much loss of capital through inherent difficulties and want of metallurgical skill. Endless litigation, arising from the defects of the first mining laws, and the inexperience of the surveying engineers, contributed to ruin the small capitalists who had attempted to work the mines. Foreign capital is now the chief requirement. The existing mining law, greatly improved since 1868, is the simplest in Europe; the expense of a concession is almost nominal, and the royalties on ore are extremely moderate. Large mining adventures in Spain rapidly develope industrial conditions and profoundly affect the habits of the population. Even in times of civil war a _modus vivendi_ between the conflicting parties can be more easily secured than might be expected. The development of means of transport, already considerable before the last Carlist war, is being seriously resumed under the present Government. The Spanish peasantry, when suitably treated, will be found a fair-dealing, intelligent, and industrious class. It must, however, be remembered that in the peculiar physical, political, municipal, and fiscal conditions of Spain, no mining enterprise can safely be undertaken without thorough investigation of all the external circumstances, claims, and prospects concerned; since more mining speculations have failed from inattention to such matters than from any disappointment as regards the quality or quantity of ore. P. W. S. M. CHAPTER IV. ETHNOLOGY, LANGUAGE, AND POPULATION. On the first glance at a map of Spain and Portugal we are apt to think that few countries could have so well-defined a frontier as that formed by the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. In so compact a country, and one so distinct and so shut off from the rest of Europe, we should expect to find a more unmixed and a more homogeneous population than in any of those states whose frontiers are more open and conventional. But such is very far from being the case. Even at the present time the Pyrenees are no boundary throughout their whole course, either as to race or language. The Basque overlaps them at one end, and the Provençal at the other. Moreover, they have been a political boundary throughout their whole length only since the middle of the seventeenth century. Navarre was united to the Spanish crown in 1515, and Rousillon to France only in 1659. Ecclesiastically, both the dioceses of Bayonne and of Narbonne advanced far into Spain. So far from the population of Spain being unmixed and pure, the contrary is far nearer the truth. As Senor Tubino has well observed, from its position at the south-western angle of Europe, and the most westerly of Mediterranean lands, beyond which lay only the impassable ocean, it must early have become a very eddy of nations, where all the tribes and races who have successively held command of the Mediterranean must necessarily have halted, over which and in which all invaders who have crossed the Pyrenees from Northern Europe, or have passed the Straits of Gibraltar from Africa, must have surged in almost ceaseless conflict. To think of Spain as ever having been at any given time occupied solely by any single race or people is to lose the clue to her whole history. Of this not only the social and political condition of the country, but the toponymy and nomenclature of her map afford decisive proof. We first hear of Spain in history about the sixth century before Christ, as then inhabited by the "Iberi" and "Kelt-Iberi," with here and there colonies of more unmingled Kelts. It is more than probable that both of these races succeeded anterior ones, the existence of which we trace only through the remains of præhistoric archæology, in the flint, stone, and bronze instruments, similar to those found elsewhere in Europe; these were also probably followed by races whose remains we find in the sculptors of the so-called "Toros" (bulls) of Guisando, and in the builders of the Megalithic monuments, the dolmens, menhirs, and circles which are found from Algeria to the Orkneys. For all purposes of history we must take the "Iberi" and the "Kelts," with their mixed tribes, as our starting-point. These we find scattered in much confusion throughout the Peninsula. Either the tribes were constantly shifting their ground, owing to petty wars and tribal dissensions or to unknown economic conditions, or the successive Greek and Latin writers from whom we get our information have not themselves been clear as to the distinction of these races. Speaking loosely, we may say that the more purely Keltic tribes held their ground in the north-west and west, in Galicia and Portugal, with a few scattered colonies further south. Andalusia, parts of the centre, the north and north-east were inhabited by the "Iberi;" while the Kelt-Iberian tribes lay chiefly in the centre and on the eastward slope. Both of these great races have left clear traces on the maps of ancient Spain. There can be no reasonable doubt that the "Illiberris" which we find in classical maps is a transcription of the Basque "Iriberri," which we still find in the French Basque country and in Navarre, meaning "New-Town," or more exactly, "Town-new;" that when the Romans called a town which they built in Galicia "Iria-Flavia," in honour of their then empress, they really used the Basque word "Iri," a town or city, just as the colonists of the United States and Canada used the French "ville" or English "town," and named a new city Louisville, Charleston, Georgetown, in the North American colonies. So, too, any one who compares the name "Peña," given to mountains and mountain-chains on the map of Spain, together with the river names, "Tamaris," "Deva," and the town and district of "Britonia" or "Britannia" in the north-west, can hardly doubt that these names were given by the same Keltic race who have left us so many "Pens" and "Bens" in Northern Britain, who gave the names "Tamar" and "Dee" to Devonshire and Cheshire streams, and called our own island Britannia, and themselves Britons. Which of these races is the older? the Iberi, i.e. Basque, or the Keltic? How can we decide this? Language is a deceitful tool as regards race. A people may utterly forget their original language, and adopt that of their conquerors or of some superior race with whom they have come in contact. Of this we have not only numerous examples in the past, as in the Latin and romance tongues superseding many a more ancient idiom, but we can see the same change actually going on in our colonies and dependencies in our own day. Still there is a certain rough chronology in language. A monosyllabic language we may presume, in default of evidence to the contrary, to have preceded one whose characteristic is agglutination; and again, a language which agglutinates or incorporates its members is presumably prior to an inflexional or analytic one. Now the Basque, the modern form of some one of those tongues which the Greeks and Romans called Iberian, belongs to the second of these classes, and the Keltic to the third. Another mode of investigating the antiquity of a language is to study the original names of the most necessary objects of daily life, and see if they can reveal to us anything about the state of civilization of those who used them before the language took a literary shape or any books were written in it. A language in which we find all the words expressing articles of greater civilization to be borrowed from other tongues we may presumably deem older than the languages from which it has borrowed them. Now in the Basque, Escuara, the undoubtedly native words for cutting instruments seem all to have their root from words signifying stone, or rock, and all such words which imply the use of metal seem to be borrowed. The language as it were represents the "stone" age, before the use of metals was known. It is also singularly poor in collective and general terms; thus, while many of the names for separate kinds of trees are native, the most common collective term _arbola_, "the tree," is clearly borrowed from the Latin. Although the arguments from anthropology, the form of the skull, &c., as compared with other races, are of still more dubious value than those derived from language, yet they all tend to the same conclusion. We may then hold from these convergent lines of reasoning, at least as a provisional hypothesis, that the Iberian or Basque race is older in Spain than the Keltic, and consequently that in the representatives of the former we have the remains of the oldest historical people of which we have any record in the country. We said above that, from its geographical position, the Peninsula would necessarily be the final-halting-place in ancient times of all the masters of the Mediterranean as they pushed westward. There we should find their farthest outposts. Thus in Spain we have, at first dimly seen, successive colonies of Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Greeks. There it was that Carthaginians and Romans met to dispute the supremacy of the Mediterranean and of the civilized world. When, after a long occupation, during which it Latinized Spain more completely than any other country except Italy, the Roman Empire fell, successive waves of barbarian destroyers swept across the land, Sueves, Alans, Vandals, Visigoths, in wild confusion and internecine strife, wrecked the civilization which they could neither appreciate nor understand. The last of these races, the Visigoths, who ruled the longest, strove hard to found an empire from 450 to 710, but without success. The real power which held society together then, and which wrought what little order and law still existed, was the Church, and not the State. The Councils of the Church were the true legislative assemblies, and the real representatives of the people in those times. Yet, with all the power of the Church to uphold it, the Visigothic Empire remained so weak that it fell at the first shock of the Mohammedan Arabs. The Moors or Arabs landed in Spain in the year 711. In ten years they had conquered all of the Peninsula that they cared to hold; in eleven years more, 732, they had been defeated at Poictiers by Charles Martel, and had withdrawn for ever from France, except from the district of Narbonne. This rich province they held for many years, and it would seem to them to be more than an equivalent for the bare and humid mountains of Galicia and the Asturias, or the higher Pyrenees, which alone in the Peninsula were exempt from their sway. The Arabs and the Moors of Barbary are the last great race that has occupied Spain. Jews and a few Gipsies are the only peoples that have entered since. A few remnants of Berber tribes, isolated from their countrymen by the rapid advance of the Christian army in the tenth and eleventh centuries, like the Maragatos of Astorga, have remained in North-Western Spain, and doubtful remains of other peoples are found here and there, but none of these are in sufficient numbers to influence the nation as a whole. No country was more completely Romanized than Spain. In fact, after the Augustan age we might almost say that the best Latin writers were Spaniards born; Seneca, Quintilian, Lucian, and Martial were all natives of Spain. Hosius, the champion of Latin Christianity in the early part of the fourth century, was a Spaniard. The names of many of the towns are still Roman. Yet the Arabs have left almost a deeper mark upon the toponymy of the country. Look at the map of Spain, and we see, even up to the Pyrenees, how many Arabic names there are, especially of rivers and mountains, upon the map of Spain. Only in Galicia and the Asturias the Keltic and the Latin, in the Basque Provinces the Basque, and in Catalonia the Romance names have held their own. In all the rest the Roman names would have probably died away, but that the language of the Church was Latin, and preserved the Roman names of cities, monasteries, and shrines. Down even to the twelfth century it might seem doubtful which language would prevail, so many Arabs wrote in Spanish, and Spaniards in Arabic, or wrote Spanish in Arabic characters. The struggle was decided by the sword; the expulsion of the Arabs was also the expulsion of their tongue. Yet the Arabs have left far more traces on Spanish than Spanish has done on Arabic. The Spanish Jews, however, had forgotten their Semitic tongue, and to this day the sacred language of the Jews of the Balkan Peninsula, and of many of the Syrian Jews, even of those at Jerusalem, is not Hebrew but Spanish; their liturgical works are written in that tongue, and they use it always in the synagogue. In spite, however, of all this mixture of races and of languages, Spain and the Spanish language has perhaps fewer dialects than any other European speech. From the Central Pyrenees to the Straits of Gibraltar only one dialect is used, the Spanish or Castilian, the purest and noblest of those which sprang from the decaying Latin. At the inner angle of the Bay of Biscay Basque is still spoken by a population of about 400,000 souls. The Galician dialect is far more closely allied to the Portuguese than to the Spanish, and should be considered as belonging to the former tongue. Between Galicia and the Basque Provinces are the many Patois, or Bables, of Asturia, which alone of the Romance tongues in the Peninsula have kept the three distinct genders, the masculine, feminine, and neuter terminations of the Latin adjective. The speech of Leon, too, may be classed as a separate dialect. In Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Isles a Provençal or Romance dialect is spoken, the _Lemosin_ as it was called in mediæval times, and which stretched from the Loire to the frontiers of Murcia, and from the western coast of the Bay of Biscay, with few interruptions, almost to the Black Sea. In the thirteenth century the Catalan dialect more resembled that of the Gascon Béarnais, or the Western Languedocian, than of the neighbouring Provence, but centuries of intercourse have since modified it, and the three dialects of Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Isles must now be classed as a Provençal speech. The tongues of all these successive occupiers of the soil have doubtless left traces in the noble Spanish language, but in very unequal proportions. A very few words belong to the old Iberian speech, but it is to that, perhaps, that Spanish owes the purity and the paucity of its vowel sounds, as from the Arabic it has gained the gutturals which have prevented its sinking to the effeminate softness of the Italian, and it still preserves the lofty sonority of the Latin. Some few of the elements of its vocabulary may be traced to the Keltic, less to the Teutonic languages. From Arabic it has taken more, and those words of more important character. But the bulk of the language still remains Latin. It is essentially one of the Romance dialects which sprang from the "lingua rustica," the country speech of the decaying Roman Empire. It has been calculated that six-tenths of its words are Latin, a tenth Gothic or Teutonic, one-tenth liturgical and Greek, one-tenth American or modern borrowings, and one-tenth Arabic. But as to this last, we must not forget that the different parts of the vocabulary of a language have a very different value. Some could be well dispensed with, some are of first necessity. There are words which we only see in print, and seldom or never hear spoken; there are words which belong only to science or to pedantry; but there are others which are in daily and hourly use, and whose employment is many times more frequent than the whole number of words in all the rest of the language put together. It is thus that the contribution of Arabic to Spanish vocabulary is of far more importance than is apparent by its numerical proportion; many of the most common terms, especially of those used in the south of Spain, are of Arabic origin. Thus has been formed the noble Spanish tongue, the richest and most dignified of all that have sprung from the decay of Latin. Marvellously adapted to oratory and to verse, most incisive and mordant in the tongues of the lowest class, stately and sonorous almost to a fault, it is yet unequalled in grace and tenderness in the old romances and in the mouths of women and of children. Italian is its only rival. While reading its stately sentences, and marking the majestic rhythm of Scio's grand translation of the Bible and of its other religious literature, we can well understand why Spain's greatest emperor, the lord of many lands and of many tongues, spoke Spanish only to his God. It is rare to find a foreigner who has mastered Spanish, who does not ever afterwards delight in its use above all other tongues except his own. The population of Spain, according to the census of 1877, is 16,625,000, including the Balearic and Canary Islands, and the North African possessions. The number of inhabitants in Spain has fluctuated much at different periods, according as war, emigration, or bad government have affected the condition of the people. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the population, according to the only estimates procurable, was about 9,000,000; in 1621, at the close of Philip III.'s reign, it had sunk to 6,000,000, the lowest point on record; it gradually rose from 7,500,000 at the end of the seventeenth century to 10,500,000 at the close of the eighteenth. The wars of Napoleon then lowered it by 500,000, but in 1821 it had recovered, and reached 11,600,000. A more rapid increase then took place till 1832, when the population numbered 14,600,000. The Carlist and civil wars which marked the beginning of the reign of Isabella II. reduced it by more than 2,000,000, if the returns are exact. In 1837 and in 1846 it stood at 12,200,000. In 1857 at 15,500,000, whence it mounted rapidly to 16,800,000 in 1870, a total which the late Carlist war and that in Cuba has reduced by some 200,000; and at the last census, 1877, as said above, the returns were 16,625,000. The number of inhabitants to the square mile is 90, just half that of France, about a third that of Great Britain, and a fifth that of Belgium. This comparative scarcity is easily accounted for when we consider that nearly one-half (46 per cent.) of the territory still remains uncultivated; and although a considerable portion of this consists of mountain or of naturally sterile soil, a still larger portion of it is susceptible of some kind of cultivation, and even the portion under cultivation would under good husbandry, support a much larger population than it actually does. More than two-thirds (66.75 per cent.) of the whole working population of Spain are engaged in agriculture, and the total produce, including cereals and cattle of all kinds, wine and fruits, cork, woods, esparto grass, &c., after supplying the demand for home consumption, leaves a surplus of agricultural produce for exportation of the value of 14,000,000_l_. sterling. Those engaged in manufacturing industry and in commerce are reckoned at 10-1/2 per cent, of the working population; but in Spain, as elsewhere, the relative numbers are slowly changing, following the conditions of modern European life; a greater proportionate number are annually withdrawn from agriculture, and are being added to the population of the great towns, and to the manufacturing industries. Thus, until the last census the highest population of Spain per square kilometre was to be found, not in the manufacturing provinces of Barcelona and Valencia, nor in the great mining provinces, but in the fishing and agricultural province of Pontevedra, in Galicia. In 1870 Pontevedra numbered 107, Barcelona 98 inhabitants to the square kilometre. In 1877 it is Barcelona that numbers 108, and Pontevedra 100 only. Next after these provinces come the two Basque ones of Guipuzcoa 88, and Biscay 87. The one almost wholly agricultural, the other mining and agricultural. The nearest after them is the province of Madrid, with only 77 per square kilometre, and Corunna and Alicante with 75. These figures will, we think, sufficiently indicate the character of Spanish industry. The chief centres of manufacturing industry are Catalonia and Valencia, in which provinces nearly all the textile goods of Spain are produced. The chief mining districts are those round Carthagena in Alicante, Linares in Jaen, the Rio Tinto in Huelva, Somorrostro in Biscay, and of quicksilver at Almaden in the province of Ciudad Rodrigo; but valuable mines, as detailed in a former chapter, are found in many other provinces of Spain. In fact, there is scarcely one without a mine of more or less importance. Those engaged in professions of all kinds--lawyers, doctors, artists, journalists--are only about 10-1/2 per cent. of the whole working population. The clergy, who once numbered, it is said, one-third of the whole population, have greatly diminished during the present century, and are still gradually declining. Including religious orders of all kinds, inquisitors, and the secular clergy, they still numbered, at the close of the last century, nearly 250,000, out of a population of 10,500,000. In 1826 they had sunk to about 60,000, in 1858 to 44,000, in 1862 to 40,000, and their present numbers are probably about 35,000. Immense changes have taken place in recent times, and more particularly in the present century, with regard to the distribution of land in Spain. The large amount of property held by the Crown, the religious orders, the clergy, and various municipal bodies, and the restrictions imposed by the laws of the Mesta on the enclosure of land, rendered the number of private proprietors formerly very few. Even in 1800 their number was only 273,760. In 1764 it was estimated that the clergy possessed one-sixth of the real property, and one-third of the movable property of all Spain, and the property of the Church paid scarcely any taxes, or none at all. From the beginning of the sixteenth century protests were continually being made against abuses of Church property, but only towards the end of the eighteenth century were measures of reform seriously undertaken. Little, however, was really effected till the Cortes of Cadiz in 1812-13, when the feudal dues on land, of whatever nature, regal, ecclesiastical, or seignorial, were abolished. The religious orders were also suppressed. In 1820 a law was passed forbidding the Church to acquire any more real property. Tithes, of which the clergy possessed 60 per cent, and the laity 40, were diminished by half in 1821, and wholly suppressed in 1837. In 1836 the possessions of the clergy were declared to be national property, and the sale of them was begun. This, with various interruptions, according as a liberal or reactionary Government has been in power, has been continued to the present time. The Crown and municipal property had been sold at an earlier period, from 1813 to 1855. The Mesta was totally abolished in 1837 as to its privileged rights on property, and in 1851 became merely an agricultural association for the improvement of the breed of cattle. The serfs in Galicia were declared to have become proprietors of their land by prescription in 1763. The result of these successive measures, and of these immense sales of territorial property, has been to throw the land into the hands of a much greater number of small landed proprietors, who now number 3,426,083, so that, in spite of some large estates still existing, especially in Andalusia, the average quantity of land held in Spain by each proprietor would seem to be only about some 30 acres. Yet in Galicia alone does there seem to have been any suffering caused by a too great subdivision of land, and this perhaps was caused more by the perpetuation of habits acquired while the land was burdened with seignorial dues, when the occupier could neither quit his land nor sell it. In this district the people are still miserably poor, their food and houses are equally wretched, and nothing but the large emigration that has taken and is now taking place will restore the province to any real prosperity. From what has been said in the preceding pages as to their ethnology, the reader will not be surprised to learn that the different populations of Spain have very different characteristics. The Galicians and Asturians are the hewers of wood and drawers of water in Spain. They are often fine, stalwart men, brave, and make excellent sailors. It is they who reap the harvests for the more lazy Castilians and gather the vintage of Oporto; it is they who do nearly all the hard work in all the chief towns, not of Spain only, but also of Portugal. They are proverbially honest and trustworthy as servants, though slow and somewhat lacking in intelligence. Abroad, and as emigrants, they are trusted as men of no other race are: in the countries of La Plata in South America, the town-house, during the summer absence of the proprietor and his family, is given over to a Gallego, as it stands, to be taken care of, and rarely indeed is an article missing. The Asturian partakes of the same general characteristics as the Galician, though in a less marked degree. In the Montaneses, the inhabitants of the province of Santander, we have the favourite nurses and female servants of Madrid. The Asturias and Santander are remarkable for the number of statesmen and economists they have produced in proportion to the population. In the Basque Provinces we find an entirely different race, not perhaps of so muscular a build, but active, and capable of great endurance. Intelligent and proud of their ancient race and liberties, they almost always retain their self-respect, and are for the most part free from that cruelty towards animals which is so disfiguring a trait in the character of other Spaniards. The Basques are generally found among the upper and more trusted servants in civil life, in the army and navy they make excellent petty officers; as seamen they are among the best of Spain; as soldiers they are brave, enduring, capital marchers, and as light infantry second to none of any nation. The Aragonese, like the Galicians, count among the hard workers of Spain; generally of shorter build, and very thick-set, but somewhat dull and very obstinate, they are employed in the heaviest work. In literature they are known as jurisconsults and historians. In Catalonia and Valencia we have the bright Provençal race. A race apt for commerce and for manufacturing industries; pushing, energetic, they gather to themselves the greater part of the commerce, manufactures, and shopkeeping of all kinds, as far as these are done by Spaniards, throughout the kingdom. Fiery in temper, and not to be implicitly trusted, especially in Valencia, their weapon is the knife, which they use sometimes on slight provocation; the hired assassins and bandits of Spain have always been recruited thence. Socialists and Federalists in politics, they have ever been disaffected towards the central government. In Catalonia this may be the result of memories of former independence; but it is curious to remark that Barcelona and the cities of the Mediterranean, as compared with Cadiz and Ferrol on the Atlantic, have played analogous parts in Spanish history to those of Marseilles and Bordeaux in French; the Mediterranean in each case being the home of the ultra-democrat and the man of the "Montagne," and the Atlantic of the constitutionalists and the Girondins. More to the south we find undoubtedly a greater mixture of Moorish blood. The Andalusian is almost oriental in character, he is fond of song and dance and colour, yet lazy withal, and disliking sustained labour. He delights to deck himself with finery, and his women with flowers; and his taste though glowing is never utterly debasing. Excelling in wit and repartee, the Andalusian _gamin_ is the most amusing rogue in Europe. He has a wild, fierce, momentary energy, and is courteous and gracious in speech; his proverbs and songs are innumerable, and sparkle with a peculiar wit and charm; but he altogether lacks the more solid qualities of the men of the north. Philosophers, orators, and poets rather than men of industry and science are the product of these provinces. The Andalusian barely keeps up the works which the more highly civilized Moors had done for him in agriculture and in vineyard, but he does not improve upon them; and both in mining and in wine cultivation, in manufactures, and in coasting shipping, he allows nearly the whole of the trade and commerce of the south to pass into the hands of foreigners or of Catalans. The men of central Spain, except in the towns, the men of Leon, of the Castiles, and of La Mancha, and in a less degree the men of Estremadura, have changed but little for the last few centuries. They are Spaniards of the type generally conceived by foreigners as applying to the whole nation. Grave and slow of speech, exceedingly courteous unless their prejudices are offended, fond of formality and proud of it; they are bigoted (but less so than formerly), prejudiced, ignorant to an extreme, each thinking his own town or village the _élite_ of the universe; content with few comforts and preferring semi-starvation to exertion, the Castilian is half ashamed of honest labour, but by no means averse to corruption in any shape, and sees no disgrace in beggary. Cruel in the extreme, when his passions are aroused, it is one of the misfortunes of Spain that from the advantage of their elevated central physical position, the Castilians, as warriors and statesmen, at all times among the least civilized of her people, have been able to rule and control the more civilized and more advanced (especially in political freedom and administration) communities of the sea-board. It is a want of discernment of this fact which makes so many of the picturesque histories of Spain utterly fail in explaining the origin and the progressive causes of her present condition. There are a few other tribes in Spain which it may be worth while to notice, such as the Gipsies, who seem still to keep themselves tolerably distinct in Andalusia and in the south, but who in more than one instance have completely coalesced with the Basques in the north. The Maragatos, the trusted _Arrieros_ or muleteers of Leon, a remnant apparently of a wild Berber tribe, left behind when the more civilized Moors retreated southwards before the advance of the Christian conquerors; the Passiegos near Bilbao, the men of the Sayago, the Hurdes of the Batuecas, the Chuetas of Majorca, these and several minor tribes, remnants, perhaps, of older populations whose ethnic affinities have never been made out, are too few in numbers to affect the general population; but are of interest to the ethnologist from the survivals of ancient laws and customs which are still observed among them. One class, not a tribe, the wretched commercial policy of Spain has developed to a greater extent than in any other country, that of the smuggler or contrabandista. He differs greatly in different districts, and even on the same line of frontier. In some parts contrabandista is almost synonymous with bandit, in others he is honest in his illegal trade, and more to be trusted with immense sums than the officials who arrest him. In a small way he is a type of the many contradictions of Spanish character and of "the things of Spain." [Illustration: CABALLEROS. _Page 86._] [Illustration: DOMINIQUE, THE ESPADA.] [Illustration: GIPSIES AT GRANADA. _Page 90._] CHAPTER V. DESCRIPTION OF PROVINCES. Spain was formerly divided into some fourteen separate provinces or kingdoms, once ruled by distinct and independent sovereigns, and under very different political conditions. It was not until the taking of Granada, in 1492, that the whole nation became, even nominally, subject to the joint sovereigns Ferdinand and Isabella; and for long afterwards Aragon and Catalonia preserved a semi-independence, while, even to our own day, the Basque Provinces and Navarre were really an independent republic united to the Spanish crown. Since 1841, however, the whole country has been divided for administrative purposes into forty-eight provinces, including the Balearic Isles. We shall now hastily sketch the chief features of the old kingdoms, with the modern provinces included in each. Beginning from the north-west, we have the kingdom of GALICIA, with its four provinces, _Corunna_, _Lugo_, _Pontevedra_, and _Orense_. We have before remarked on the Frith or Fiord-like character of the western coast of Galicia, a conformation which gives it by far the finest harbours of the whole Spanish coast. Thus, in the province of Corunna there are the harbour and city (33,000 inhabitants) of the same name, so well known by our forefathers under the title of "the Groyne," and the scene of many a gallant fight both by land and sea from the days of Queen Elizabeth to the fall of Sir J. Moore, but now the chief port of the cattle-trade with England. Its port is frequented by about 130,000 tons of British shipping annually; and about 20,000 bullocks are exported annually, mostly in small schooners. It has also a tobacco factory. A little to the north-east Ferrol (23,000) has a still better harbour, and is one of the principal naval establishments of Spain. It is capacious enough to almost contain the united fleets of Europe; and its only drawback, a singular one in so humid a climate, is the want of good water. But the most famous city in the province, and indeed, in all Galicia, the pilgrim-town of Santiago (St. James) de Compostella (24,000) owes its magnitude to devotion rather than to commerce. The legend of the voyage of St. James to Spain, the finding his body at Compostella, and his subsequent appearances in battle as the champion of Spain, made this the most celebrated shrine in Europe. Roads led to it from every land, and one of the popular names of the "Milky Way" was "The road to Compostella." The wealth both of the military order of Compostella and of the cathedral and chapter was immense. Even now, after all its spoiling, the cathedral is rich in precious goldsmiths' work, in architectural, and in literary treasures. Pontevedra (8000) is the capital of the thickly-populated province of the same name, whose inhabitants reap a harvest both from sea and land. Vigo (6000) has an excellent harbour and roadstead, but its commerce has greatly fallen off in comparison with that of Corunna. It was formerly the port at which the galleons disembarked their treasures for Northern Spain. The total tonnage of the harbour in 1878 was 208,000. _Orense_, an inland province east of Pontevedra, has a capital of the same name (11,000) on the banks of the Minho. It is the head of an agricultural and pastoral district, and in it are produced some wines which were considered in the eighteenth century the finest of all Spain. Here, too, is one of the grand bridges of Western Spain, possibly of Roman construction. _Lugo_, with its city (8000), faces north instead of west, and has its harbours, Vivero and Rivadeo, on the Bay of Biscay; but the near neighbourhood of Ferrol and of Corunna deprive them of all but coasting trade. The ASTURIAS, the home of the Spanish monarchy, and the only ancient kingdom of which no part was subdued by the Moors (though they raided once to Oviedo), contains but one province, called after its chief town _Oviedo_ (34,000), with a cathedral, university, and a most pleasant situation. In this province is Covadonga, where the Visigoth Pelayo, in 719, repulsed the Moors, and thus took the first step towards the recovery of Spain. The whole country slopes rapidly from its southern frontier, the summit of the Cantabrian Mountains, towards the Bay of Biscay. Cangas de Tineo (22,000) is the centre of a mining district. Owing to the great development of mining operations in this province within the last ten years the small towns of Siero, Tineo, Grado, and Villaviciosa have suddenly sprung into importance, and each now contains over 20,000 inhabitants. The chief port is Gijon (30,000), of which the chief trade is in hazel-nuts for England, of which over 1000 tons are annually exported, to the value of 23,000 _l._ Here is one of the seven government tobacco manufactories, and also important glass-works, conducted chiefly by Swiss and French artisans; but it is far outstripped in commercial importance by SANTANDER (41,000), the capital of the neighbouring province, and the great port of outlet for the agricultural riches of Leon and of the Castiles. Santander has also a great trade with Cuba and Porto Rico, and possesses almost a monopoly of the supply of cereals to those islands. A port of equal natural excellence is Santoña, which the first Napoleon would have made the Gibraltar of Northern Spain, but which is now frequented only as a bathing-place by the inhabitants of the interior. The mountain scenery of these two provinces is most picturesque, both along the sea-board and in the interior, where the snow sometimes lies on the Picos de Europa until July or August. The coal-mines of the Asturias are rapidly assuming importance. The output was, in 1878, 400,000 tons, at a cost on board ship of 13_s._ per ton. The extent of the bed is estimated at 667,200 acres. The BASQUE PROVINCES (Las Provincias Vascongadas) are _Biscay_, _Guipuzcoa_, and _Alava_. The union of the three is often represented by a symbol like the heraldic bearings of the Isle of Man; and they are, with Navarre and the French Pays Basque, the home of the Basque race, but only one province, Guipuzcoa, is _wholly_ inhabited by them. _Biscay_ has for its chief town the busy mining city of Bilbao (32,000) on the Nervion, with a commerce of over 2,000,000_l._ annual value, notwithstanding an inferior harbour, exceeding that of Santander. The chief mines, iron, are in the Somorrostro district, a few miles to the east of the city, and they are worked mainly by English, French, or German companies. In 1879 the exports from Bilbao amounted to 1,160,248 tons of iron minerals, while the imports included 72,196 tons of English coke and coal, chiefly for the use of the mines. In this province is the Oak of Guernica, where the Spanish sovereigns swore to observe the constitutional privileges or _fueros_ of the Basques. The chief city of _Guipuzcoa_ is San Sebastian (21,000), a sea-port with a strong citadel. Of less commercial importance than Bilbao, it is much frequented in summer as a city of pleasure; the town has been almost wholly rebuilt since the siege of 1813. The province, though almost wholly agricultural, and famous for its cider and apple orchards, contains also some mines, and a few manufactures grouped round its old capital, Tolosa (8000). Eibar and Plasencia, two small manufacturing towns on the Deva, have preserved the art of inlaying iron with gold and silver, and are noted for their manufacture of fire-arms. _Alava_ has but one town of importance, Vitoria (25,000), a picturesque city at the foot of the Cantabrian Mountains and the head of the fertile plains of the Upper Rioja. These two districts, the Riojas, divided by the Ebro, are noted for their wines, which need only more careful preparation to become an important article of commerce; at present they are chiefly exported to Bordeaux, for mixing with inferior French wines, to be re-exported as claret to England. NAVARRE, the only other province where Basque is spoken, once formed part of a petty kingdom which stretched on both sides of the Pyrenees, and of which the Spanish portion was definitely secured to Spain by the Duke of Alva in the reign of Ferdinand the Catholic, in 1512, has Pampeluna (25,000), a fortified city of Roman origin, for its capital. The upper part of Navarre is extremely mountainous, but it contains some useful iron-mines, and a Government foundry at Orbaiceta. The southern parts, along the banks of the Arga, and in the valley of the Ebro, are extremely fertile; but at the south-eastern corner in the Bardeñas Reales, we encounter a series of bare, stony hills, scored with deep ravines, and on which nothing will grow, the first of the desert tracks so common in Spain. Tudela (9000) on the opposite side of the Ebro, is united to the rest of the province by a fine bridge; it is here the traveller first sees in operation the _norias_ or water-wheels of the East. The kingdom of ARAGON contains three provinces, _Huesca_, _Saragossa_, and _Teruel_. The kingdom is almost bisected by the Ebro, towards which it slopes on both sides, from the highest summits of the Central Pyrenees on the north, and from the Idubeda Mountains and the Molina de Aragon on the south. Aragon divides with the Asturias the honour of having been one of the cradles of the Spanish monarchy. In 795 Don Asnar defeated the Moors near Jaca, in the province of Huesca. But the progress of the reconquest was very slow; from 714 to 1118 the Moors held possession of the town and kingdom of Saragossa, and it is from this occupation of four centuries that the traveller first meets here distinct remains of Moorish architecture. A still more lasting note of their sway is found in the nomenclature of the country. The rivers Guaticalema, Alcanadre, Guadalope, the names of the sierras, Alcubiere, and of many of the lesser towns and villages, sufficiently attest the former presence of the race who gave those names. _Huesca_ (10,000), the capital of the province of the same name, is an episcopal and university town, the bishop's palace being on the site of an old mosque. The upper part of this province is exceedingly mountainous, and is entered from France by the Central Pyrenean road, that of Somport, originally constructed by the Romans. The only other towns are Barbastro (7000), Monzon (4000), and Jaca (3500), nearer the mountains. _Saragossa_ (84,000), on the Ebro, formerly the Cæsar Augusta of the Romans, then for four centuries the capital of a Moorish kingdom, rivals Santiago de Compostella as a place of pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgen del Pilar. The worship has, however, much declined of late years, and her devotees are not now a tithe of those who frequent the more recent shrine of Notre Dame de Lourdes on the other side of the Pyrenees. The art treasures of the cathedral were sold in 1870, when many fine examples of jewellery and art were acquired for the Kensington Museum. Saragossa, though now fallen as a place of commerce, must again become important if the railway project is carried into effect, which will place it on the most direct line between Paris and Madrid. The Ebro, from its shallowness, is of no service for navigation; and, from neglect, the canals of Charles V. and of Tauste do not render the services they might, either for transport or for irrigation. Hence the despoblados and desiertos in the valley of the Ebro, both above and below the town. _Calayatud_ (12,000) was one of the four _comunidades_ of Aragon, and is in the midst of a mineral district, the wealth of which seems at present almost wholly undeveloped. _Teruel_ (7000) is the capital of a very mountainous province which slopes towards the north-west from the Sierras de Molina and Albarracin, the mountain ranges which form the eastern boundary of the great watershed of the peninsula. Excepting the mines in these sierras, the province is almost wholly agricultural, but with no towns of importance. The historian Don Vicente de la Fuente has remarked that while the lands of the _comunidades_, the four free towns of Aragon, Calayatud, Teruel, Daroca, and Albarracin, have remained fertile under their more liberal government, the lands of the Seigneurs in the valley of the Ebro, where, almost alone in Spain, feudalism received its full development, have been for centuries barren and _despoblados_. [Illustration: LEANING TOWER OF SARAGOSSA. _Page 98._] CATALONIA.--The ancient principality of Catalonia is now separated into four provinces, named after their chief towns, _Gerona_, _Barcelona_, _Tarragona_, and _Lerida_. The first three lie along the shores of the Mediterranean--the last, inland, and stretches from the Ebro to the Pyrenees. To the north of Lerida, and buried in the mountains, is the so-called republic of Andorra, which owes its practical independence to the singular fact of a double _seigneurie_. Both the Counts of Foix, in France, and the Prince-Bishops of Urgel, in Spain, were supreme Lords of Andorra. On paper its constitution is by no means so free as that of several other Pyrenean communities; but by skilfully playing off the jealousies and rivalries of its two lords, and preventing either from getting absolute power, this little state of twenty-eight miles by twenty has remained unsubdued, and unattached to either nationality. The chief trade of the republic may be said to be smuggling. _Lerida_, except in the valley of the Segre, is extremely mountainous, and like all the hill country of Catalonia is rich in minerals, especially in salt, near Solsona. The rest of its products are chiefly agricultural. The province is but thinly peopled; its chief town contains 20,000 inhabitants. Balaguer (5000), Urgel (3000), Solsona (2500), are the most populous of the remaining. With _Gerona_ we enter the Mediterranean or Provençal region and climate, and come in contact not only with picturesque and glowing scenery, with a gorgeous variety of natural productions, but also with traditions and remains of the great works of all the races that have dominated this inland sea. From the Pyrenees to Carthagena the names of the chief towns recall classic reminiscences, and bring before us the struggles of ancient nations, contending on her soil for a far mightier empire than that of Spain. The province of Gerona contains Cape Creuz, the extreme north-easterly point of the peninsula, not far from the old Greek cities of Rosas and Emporium (Ampurias). Of its towns, Gerona, on the Ter, and Figueras have each 8000, but are surpassed by Olot, 10,000, around which town are grouped the most recently extinct volcanoes in Spain. Coal is found in San Juan de las Abadesas. Here the Spanish gravity is mingled with the fire and dash of the Provençals, and the inhabitants both of Gerona and Barcelona, are more Provençal than Spanish, in language, political character, and in commercial and industrial aptitudes. The natural productions, and the flora too, are almost identical with those of the more sheltered parts of Provence and of the Riviera. Palm trees are seen as common ornaments in gardens and public squares, oranges and olives flourish, the mulberry is cultivated and silkworms are reared, and all announces a warmer zone than any that we have hitherto traversed. _Barcelona_ (250,000) the first industrial and commercial city of Spain, and the second in point of population, is also the capital of the most thickly inhabited province. The greater part of the trade and navigation of the whole Spanish sea-board from Catalonia to Cadiz, or even to Seville, is in the hands of its merchants. The cotton industry of Catalonia employed in 1870 a capital of 6,000,000_l._, and 104,000 workmen, distributed in 700 factories. The chief of the other manufacturing towns are Gracia (33,000), and St. Martin de Provensals (24,000). The annual commercial movement of Barcelona is estimated at about 11,000,000_l._ sterling. The British imports, chiefly of coal and iron, amount to nearly 1,000,000_l._ sterling; but the exports are a mere trifle, 10,000_l._, most of the ships returning in ballast; while on the contrary, the exports of Tarragona, Palamos, Mataro, and Villamena, and the smaller ports amount to nearly 1,000,000_l._, chiefly in wine, and the imports are only half that amount. Irrigation is successfully carried on in the valley of the Llobregat. _Tarragona_ (23,000) is rich in Roman remains, in the picturesque beauty of its site, in its Gothic architecture, in the mildness of its climate, and in the goodness of its wines; but it is surpassed both in wealth and population by the neighbouring manufacturing city of Reus (27,000), and also by Tortosa (24,000) on the Ebro, to which town all the river transport converges. The Ebro below Tortosa forms a sandy delta, and its channels are continually silting up. The canal of San Carlos, to connect Amposta with the sea by the port of Alfaques, has had but little success. VALENCIA includes the three provinces of _Castellon de la Plana_, _Valencia_, and _Alicante_, all three lying along the Mediterranean, and facing east and southwards from the mighty buttress sierras which form the eastern wall of the great central plateau. It is in these provinces that we gradually pass from the Mediterranean climate to the "_Tierra caliente_," the warm lands and African products of south-eastern Spain. Here too we meet with the finest Roman remains; and Moorish architecture begins to form a prominent feature in the characteristics of each city. The speech is still a dialect of the Provençal, and the fiery Provençal nature is still apparent in the political history of the cities of Valencia. The hill-sides, bare of trees, are covered either with the esparto grass or with strongly aromatic herbs and shrubs. The rainfall gradually lessens; the streams all assume a torrential character, nearly dry in summer, swollen with rapid floods in winter; but they are greatly utilized for irrigation. By this means are formed the "_huertas_," gardens, and "_vegas_," plains, oases of beauty and fertility lying in the bosom of the barren hills, which serve as frames to pictures as valuable for their productiveness as they are enchanting in their beauty. The chief towns in the province of _Castellon_ are Castellon de la Plana (23,000), Vinaroz (9000), Villareal (8000), both near the Mediterranean; Segorbe on the Palancia, and numerous smaller towns in the interior. Benicarlo and Vinaroz, on the coast to the north of the province, are noted for their excellent red wines, quantities of which are exported to France for mixing with inferior French vintages, whence they find their way to England as Rousillon or Bordeaux. _Valencia_, a city of 143,000 inhabitants, and with a fine artificial harbour called the "_grao_," is the third city in population in Spain; but its commerce is little more than that of Santander and Bilbao, cities only one fourth of its size. The value of British imports, chiefly of coal, cod-fish, guano, and petroleum, in 1878, was 136,450_l_., and of exports, chiefly of fruits to Britain, 524,984_l_. The "_huerta_" of Valencia, with its canals for irrigation, its "_acequias_," "_norias_," and other devices to draw the waters of the Guadalaviar, is one of the most successful examples in Spain of regulated application of water to agriculture. The quantity of water allotted to each property, the hour of opening or closing the sluices, are regulated according to laws and customs descended from Moorish times. So great is the drain upon the streams that the waters of some of the smaller rivers are entirely absorbed in the summer, and even of the Guadalaviar but little then reaches the sea. It is from the _huerta_ of Valencia that the oranges come which form the delight of the population of Paris at the new year; hence are the raisins and the almonds and candied fruits equally dear to the British housekeeper. Rice is successfully cultivated on some of the lower grounds near the coast, and fruits and vegetables of every kind abound; but the Spaniards complain that they lack the richness and lusciousness of flavour belonging to those grown in other parts. "In Valencia," say they, "grass is like water, meat like grass, men like women, and the women worth nothing." The district was formerly noted for its silk-growing and stuffs of silk; also for the fine pottery known as Majolica ware from its carriers to the Italian ports, the sailors of Majorca and the Balearic Isles. It was also the earliest place of printing in Spain, and celebrated as a school of poetry and the arts; but nearly all this ancient fame is lost. To the south of Valencia is the large lake or lagoon of Albufera, the most extensive of the many lagoons along the Mediterranean coast, about nine miles long and twenty-seven miles round; it is full of fish, and frequented by wild fowls, and its varied inhabitants recall those of the Nile rather than those of any part of Europe. In the north of the province is Murviedro (7000), the ancient Saguntum, with its port almost entirely blocked up. Considerable remains of the older city still exist, with inscriptions in idioms yet unknown, and are a treasure to archæologists. The largest of the other cities are Alcira (13,000) on the Jucar, and Jativa (14,000). The southern coasts of Valencia and the neighbouring districts of Alicante abound in sites of picturesque beauty, and the position of many of the ruined monasteries, built generally on the hills with a distant prospect of the sea, can hardly be excelled. _Alicante_, whose _huertas_ and _vegas_ with their appliances for irrigation rival those of Valencia, has but 34,000 inhabitants. Orihuela, in its rich wheat-growing district of never-failing harvest, has 21,000, and Alcoy 32,000. The smaller towns are numerous, and from the little ports in the north of the province, round Cape Nao, a good deal of coasting trade is done with the neighbouring Balearic Isles. From Denia, Tabea, and Altea, nearly 100,000 tons of raisins are shipped every year, chiefly for Great Britain. At Elche (20,000) is the celebrated forest of palms of which we have before spoken, and the leaves of which are sent to Rome for the ceremonies of Easter week. The number of the trees is gradually declining, as the produce hardly repays the great amount of labour required. In the church at Elche religious plays or mysteries are occasionally performed, with an enthusiasm and solemnity both of actors and spectators equal to that of the Passionspiel of Ober-Ammergau. MURCIA contains the two provinces, _Murcia_ and _Albacete_. The first faces the Mediterranean; the second, besides comprising the Sierras of Alcazar and Segura, climbs those boundary mountains, and advances far into the plateau of La Mancha, and thus contains within its limits the sources of the Guadiana as well as those of the Mundo and the Segura. _Murcia_, in its higher parts, is very thinly peopled, and in spite of the fertile plains in the lower course of the Segura and the Sangonera, and the rich mining district round Cartagena, has only two-thirds as many inhabitants to the square mile as Valencia. Murcia is perhaps the driest province of Spain, and the one in which the want of water is the most generally felt, yet it is in this province that the floods are the most pernicious and destructive. Year by year the irrigation works become less effective. Ancient dams broken down by the floods are not restored. Since 1856, however, a new source of wealth has been opened to this province by the export of the esparto grass, which grows on all the low hills, and which, in addition to its use in the country for numerous native fabrics, is now largely exported for paper-making. The export began only in 1856. In 1873 it had reached 67,000 tons for England alone; in 1875 the money value of the whole export was 400,000_l._, but it declined to 30,000_l._ in 1877, and 284,000_l._ in 1878, since which date it has gradually lessened. Murcia, the chief city, is an irrigated plain on the Segura, has a population of 91,000. It is one of the chief seats of silk cultivation in Spain. Lorca (52,000), on the Sangonera, offers another example of the extreme fertility that can be obtained by irrigation in a suitable climate. Cartagena (75,000), with its grand harbour and docks, is one of the three naval arsenals in Spain; but has greatly fallen from its ancient wealth and importance. Like Barcelona and Valencia it has distinguished itself by its extreme democratic and cantonalist opinions, and has revolted against the republic equally as against the monarchy. In its neighbourhood are some of the richest lead and silver mines in Spain, and which have been worked since Carthaginian and Roman times. The coal imported from England for smelting purposes amounts to 80,000 tons yearly. The tonnage of British vessels employed was over 200,000 in 1877. Along the coast are various lagoons and salt-lakes (salinas), where salt is made on a considerable scale; it is exported chiefly to the Baltic. The Barilla plant, for making soda, is also cultivated along the coast; and, of the plants in the salinas, it is computed that at least one-sixth of the species are African. _Albacete_ (16,000), situated at the junction both of road and railway from Murcia and Valencia to Madrid, is chiefly celebrated for its trade in common cutlery. It is here that the large stabbing knives (navajas) are made, and for the use of which both Valencians and Murcians have an unenviable notoriety. On the plateau of this province (Albacete) are found (Salinas) salt-lakes formed by evaporation, the only examples of this kind in Western Europe. The only other town of any importance in the province is Almanza (9000), on the edge of the plateau before making the descent into Valencia. The numerous names compounded of "pozo," well, and "fuente," fountain, in this province, attest its arid character, where fresh water is scarce enough to make its presence a distinguishing mark to any spot. ANDALUSIA embraces the whole of southern Spain from Murcia to the frontier of Portugal. Its seaboard includes both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. In Cabo de Gata, 2°10' W., it has the extreme south-easterly point of Spain; and in Cabo de Tarifa, 36°2' N., the extreme southerly point, not only of Spain, but of Europe. One chain of its mountains, the Sierra de Nevada, contains the highest summits of the peninsula; and its river, the Guadalquiver, from Seville to the ocean is the only stream of real service for navigation in the whole of Spain. Its wines and olives, its grapes and oranges, and fruits of all kinds, are the finest, its horses and its cattle are the best, its bulls are the fiercest, of all Spain. The sites of its cities rival in their entrancing beauty those of any other European land; while, wanting though they may be in deeper qualities, its sons and daughters yield not in wit or attractive grace or beauty to those of any other race. The Moor has left a deeper mark here than elsewhere, even as he kept his favourite realm of Granada for centuries after he had lost the rest of Spain. And when the sun of Moorish glory set, it was from Andalusia that the vision of the New World rose upon astonished Europe. The year of the conquest of Granada (1492) was also that of the discovery of America. All things take an air of unwonted beauty and of picturesque grace in this land of sun and light; even the gipsy race, avoided and abhorred in other countries of Europe, at Granada, as at Moscow, becomes one of the attractions of the tourist. The province is not entirely of one type. It unites many kinds of beauty; even in Andalusia are "_despoblados_" and "_destierros_," dispeopled and deserted wastes, under Christian hands, but once fertile and inhabited under Moorish rule. Savage wildness and barrenness reign in its lofty mountain chains as much as softer beauty does in the "_huertas_" and "_vegas_." But from the minerals the one district is equally valuable as the other. The province possesses the richest mines, as well as the richest fruits and wines, of the whole of Spain. ANDALUSIA, is divided into the provinces of _Almeria_, _Granada_, _Malaga_, on the Mediterranean; _Cadiz_, _Seville_, _Huelva_, on the Atlantic coast; and _Cordova_ and _Jaen_ inland, along the upper waters of the Guadalquiver. [Illustration: GENERAL VIEW OF GRANADA, WITH THE ALHAMBRA. _Page 110._] In _Almeria_ (40,000) the flat-roofed houses are built round a central court, the "_patio_," wherein is often a fountain, and palm and vine for shade; while oranges, myrtles, passion-flowers, and other gay or odoriferous shrubs or flowers, add their colour and perfume. The type and the manners of the inhabitants tell us that we are already in the land of the Moors. Almeria has declined from what it was when one of the chief ports of transit between the Moors of Africa and their brethren of south-eastern Spain; but from the growing importance of the Spanish colony in Oran, its trade is now fast reviving. The exports are lead and silver ore from the mines of the neighbourhood, fruits of all kinds, and a little wine. The tonnage of British shipping employed at Almeria was, in 1875, 117,123 tons; 1876, 85,840 tons; 1877, 89,988 tons. The chief exports in 1877 were about 10,000 tons of esparto grass, 280,000 barrels of grapes, 10,000 tons of minerals, and nearly 10,000 of calamine. The sugar-cane is also grown here. The whole province is mountainous, covered with the spurs and offshoots of the mighty Sierra Nevada, the Sierras de Gador, de Filabres, de Cabrera, de Aljamilla, all which have their terminations in headlands which run into the Mediterranean. The basins of the rivers of the region are often cleft by these smaller ranges, and thus they receive their waters from both the northern and southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. The only other towns of importance are Cuevas de Vera (20,000), and Velez-Rubio (13,000), in the north of the province on the road between Murcia and Granada, where some lead-mines have been lately opened. The ports, except Almeria, are all small; Dalias, on the confines of Granada, is noted for the magnificent grapes and raisins shipped there. _Granada_ (76,000) is one of the most celebrated spots of Europe, a city of enchantment and of romance. It is one of the few places of renown, the sight of which does not disappoint the traveller. The natural advantages of its position would be sufficient to mark it as a city of unusual beauty, were there no masterpieces of art and of architecture, or storied memories, connected with it. It is situated in an upland valley, at an elevation of 2200 feet above the sea level--sufficiently high in that climate to prevent the summer's heat from being oppressively exhausting, and not too high to hinder the choicest semi-tropical fruits and flowers from growing in the open air--surrounded, yet not too closely, by mountain ranges, of which those to the east are the very highest in Spain--Mulhacen (11,700), Alcazaba (11,600), and Veleta (11,400). The ice and snow on their summits not only cool the hot winds which blow over them from Africa, but provide the means of making the iced water which is the Spaniard's greatest luxury. Its climate is second in its equable range only to that of its coast towns, Motril and Malaga. It is watered by the united streams of the Darro and the Jenil, which meet within the city, both hurrying from their mountain home to join the Guadalquiver between Cordova and Seville; and with their fertilizing waters dispersed in irrigation they make the "Vega," or plain, of Granada one of the noted gardens of the world. Granada is worth all the praise that has been sung or written of it. On an isolated hill to the east, cut off from the town and from the Generalife by the ravine through which the Darro flows, and enclosed with a wall flanked by twelve towers, stands the celebrated group of buildings known by the name of the Alhambra, perhaps the fairest palace and fortress at once ever inhabited by a Moslem monarch. Almost unrivalled in the beauty of its site, it outstrips all rivals in the beauty of its Arab architecture. The mosque of Cordova is grander, and the tombs of the Caliphs at Cairo may be in a purer style, but they lack the variety and richness of these diverse buildings. The Alhambra hill is to Arabic what the Acropolis of Athens was to Hellenic art; only to the attractions of the plastic arts were added in the case of the Alhambra the triumphs of the gardener's skill. Shrubs and flowers delighted the eyes with colour, or gratified the sense of smell with sweetest odours, while water, skilfully conducted from the neighbouring hills, purled among the beds, or leaped in fountains, or filled the baths with purest streams. Thus every sense and taste was gratified, and Granada was indeed an earthly paradise to the Moor. Even in its decay, and seen in fragments only, it is one of the world's wonders, a treasure and delight to pilgrims of art from every land. But we must not waste our space in detailing the beauties of Granada; its trade, sadly diminished from what it was formerly, is chiefly in fruits and silk and leather stuffs. Next to Granada, the chief city in the province is Loja (15,000), near the Jenil, and the little port of Motril (13,500), sheltered under the highest summits of the Sierra Nevada, is said to possess the most equable climate of the Spanish Mediterranean ports. It is here, in the extensive alluvial plain stretching from Motril to the sea, that the sugar-cane is most extensively cultivated, producing in 1877, 113,636 tons of cane. Far inland, and separated from Motril by the mountain mass, is Baza (13,500). The mineral riches of the Sierra Nevada have never been adequately explored; from specimens used in the construction of Granada, it must possess marbles of rare beauty; metals, too, abound, but few of its mines are worked. In picturesque beauty, when seen near at hand, these mountains are not nearly equal to the Pyrenees and to many minor chains; with rounded summits, they are bare and denuded of wood, and are entirely without the glacier forms, and the lakes and rushing streams, which delight us in the Alps. [Illustration: ALHAMBRA TOWER BY MOONLIGHT.] _Malaga._--The greater part of this province lies in an amphitheatre of mountains, stretching from the Sierra de Almijarras on the east to those of De la Nieve and of Ronda to the west. It faces the full southern sun, but is watered and irrigated by torrential streams from the mountains, at times almost dry, at others, as in December, 1880, rushing down in most destructive floods. The city, with over 110,000 inhabitants, boasts not only the finest climate in Spain, on which account it is greatly frequented by invalids in the winter, but its commerce is second in value to that of Barcelona. Its wealth and exports are almost wholly agricultural, consisting of luscious wines--which, however, have a greater reputation on the continent than in England--oil, fruits, and especially dried raisins; oranges, olives, figs, sugar, and sweet potatoes. Bananas, and all other tropical and semi-tropical products of Spain are here found in perfection. Upwards of 2,000,000 boxes of raisins, 3,000,000 gallons of oil, and 1,100,100 gallons of wine, besides other fruits, esparto grass, and minerals (chiefly lead), are annually exported. The tonnage of British vessels in 1878 was about 158,000 tons. It has been a city and port from great antiquity; but though a favourite residence of the Moors, they have left fewer remains here than at Granada, Seville, Cordova, Toledo, and many a place of lesser note. Antequerra (25,000), on the Guadaljorce, on the northern slope of the sierras, guards the defile leading to Malaga, and was formerly of great military importance. The Cueva del Menjal, in the neighbourhood, is a fine dolmen. Ronda (20,000), the chief town of the sierra of the same name, is remarkable for its position on both sides of an enormous fissure (el Tajo) from 300 to 600 feet deep, and which is spanned by a magnificent bridge, constructed by the architect Archidone, in 1761. Velez Malaga (24,000) is a small sheltered port to the east of Malaga, with a trade in fruits and wines. _Cadiz_, the most southerly province of Spain, includes the capes of Trafalgar and Tarifa, and the Punta de Europa, or the English Rock of Gibraltar. This province is also the principal seat of the great sherry trade. The town (65,000) and port have greatly fallen from their former importance, when Spain possessed nearly all the Americas south of California, and but for the Transatlantic steamers to Cuba and the West Indies, and to the Philippine Islands in the East Indies, would probably decline still more. The application of steam, allowing ocean vessels to ascend the Guadalquiver rapidly to Seville, has arrested there a great deal of the produce which formerly came to Cadiz, but which is now shipped at the former town. The total tonnage of the port is now about 800,000; the imports over 2,000,000_l._, of which about one-sixth is British; but of the exports, which are about the same in value, fully two-thirds go to Great Britain. Cadiz itself is undoubtedly one of the oldest ports of Western Europe, and is situated on a narrow promontory, formed into an island by the channel of San Pedro. Unlike most of the southern cities of Spain, its houses are of great height and of several stories, the contracted space of its site having occasioned this architectural modification. The city is excellently supplied with fish; the market is noted both for the quantity and the variety of its supply, which amounts to nearly 900 tons annually. Round the Bay of Cadiz are situated towns and harbours of considerable size, whose united commerce is almost equal to that of Cadiz itself. Of these, Puerto de St. Maria (22,000), on the northern side of the bay, is the great harbour for the shipment of sherry wines. Immense quantities of salt are made, chiefly for exportation, in the Salinas between Puerto Real and San Fernando (26,000), and Chiclana (20,000), on the San Pedro canal, which cuts off the Isle of Leon from the mainland. The export of wine from the whole Bay was, in Gallons. Butts. 1858 3,600,000, or 33,028 1862 5,600,000, " 51,376 1871 8,300,000, " 77,064 1876 " 61,609 1877 " 68,246 Xeres de la Frontera (64,000), situated about thirty miles from Cadiz, surrounded by vineyards, is a city of Bodegas, or wine-cellars, the principal of which, as well as of the vineyards, are in the hands of foreigners. It is one of the busiest of Spanish commercial towns, and, like Barcelona, is on that account less peculiarly Spanish than many others. The exportation of sherry wines from the district, and those shipped at Port St. Mary, amounted, in 1873, to 98,924 butts; 1874, 65,365 butts; from Jerez alone, in 1875, 43,727 butts; 1876, 42,272 butts; 1877, 41,660 butts; 87 per cent, of which goes to Great Britain and her colonies. The decrease in later years is probably caused by the greater amount of lighter French wines now consumed in England. San Lucar de Barrameda (22,000), at the mouth of the Guadalquiver, is noted for its winter-gardens, which are said to date from Moorish times, and which supply Cadiz and Seville with their earliest fruits and vegetables. From its vineyards, too, comes the stomachic Manzanilla sherry, flavoured with the wild camomile, which grows abundantly in its vineyards. Arcos (12,000), on the Guadalete, is the only other Spanish town of importance in the province; but to the south lies the isolated rock and fortress of Gibraltar (25,000), captured by the Earl of Peterborough in 1704. Though held only as an English garrison (5000), and made almost impregnable as a fortress, it is yet of considerable commerce from its position as a port of call for vessels passing the Straits of Gibraltar, and also from its contraband trade with Spain, which is a source of constant irritation between the two nations. In natural history, it is remarkable for its apes (_macacus inuus_), as the only spot in Europe where any species of monkey lives, and it is doubtful whether even these would survive without the aid of occasional importations from Morocco. _Seville_ is the typical province of Andalusia, and its city of 133,000 ranks fourth in population of the cities of Spain. The Moors have left deeper outward traces at Granada, but here they have fused more thoroughly with the population, and have given it the Oriental grace and culture which is lacking in the former place; their wit belongs to themselves. Seville is peculiarly the home of Spanish art; the greatest of her painters, Murillo and Velasquez, were born there, and Zurbaran painted his best pieces to adorn her walls. Her writers are scarcely less noted. The most celebrated novelist of modern Spain, Cecilia Bohl de Faber (Fernan Caballero), had her home there. There Amador de los Rios composed his chief works. The Becquers--both the painter and the novelist--were born there. It is a city of predilection for all of artistic tastes. The Giralda, a tower of Moorish architecture, rivals, if it does not surpass, in its exquisite proportions the _campanille_ of Italian art. The Alcazar is a home of beauty. The _patios_, or inner courts, of many of the houses have remains of Moorish decoration. The Cathedral shows that Christian lags not far behind Moslem architecture. But Seville, on the Guadalquiver, is not a mere city of pleasure. Like Paris, its gay exterior contains a great deal of real work and commerce within. Since the invention of steam, allowing sea-going vessels to breast with ease the current of the Guadalquiver, it has drawn to itself a great deal of the traffic which formerly passed through the harbours of the Bay of Cadiz. The tonnage of its shipping amounts to about 120,000 tons, and the value of its imports to over 2,000,000_l_., and of its exports to 1,750,000_l_., one-half of which belongs to Great Britain. Among its manufactories, one of porcelain, carried on by a British company, but employing Spanish methods, is celebrated; and its tobacco manufactory, with its 1000 women workers, is the largest government establishment of the kind in Spain. The city long enjoyed almost a monopoly of West Indian and of Manilla productions; the wealth brought by the galleons was deposited here, and here are still preserved the "Archivos de las Indias." It possesses both a university and a mint. The lower part of the Guadalquiver runs through marshy lands, which in places present almost impenetrable jungles. In these are bred the bulls which supply the bull-fights with their victims, and which make Seville the great school of _tauromachia_ in Spain. The finest Andalusian horses are also produced in this province, and the wines, though not equal to those of the neighbouring provinces of Cadiz and Cordova, are still highly esteemed. Besides Seville, the chief towns are Ecija (24,000) on the Jenil, a place of large trade; Carmona (18,000); Ossuna (16,000). Utrera, Lebriga, and Marchena would be considerable towns in other provinces, but we can only indicate them here. From the absence of mountains Seville has not the mineral wealth of some other provinces, but coal is worked at Villanueva del Rio, and the copper-mines at Arnalcollar yield 20,000 tons of ore; other outlying deposits of the Huelva beds are found in this province, and a great part of the lead from the Linares mines is shipped here. _Huelva_, the last maritime province of Spain, conterminous with Portugal on the west and with Seville on the east, with its capital of 10,000, is one of the richest mining districts in Europe. Worked in prehistoric times, and in the mythical dawn of history, by Iberians, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Romans, the mines of Tharsis and of the Rio Tinto were strangely neglected by the Spaniards until purchased by an Anglo-German company in 1873 for 3,850,000_l_., but with the certainty of a rich return. There are now over 7000 men employed by this company, and 906,600 tons of copper ore were extracted in 1879 from the south lode only; about 10,000 tons of hematite iron were also sold. The mines contain sulphur, copper, iron, and silver. In fact, the mountains round the source of the Tinto seem to be almost one mass of mineral ore. From the working of these mines the development of the riches of this province has been most rapid of late years, and the tonnage of shipping from the port of Huelva will probably soon rival, if not surpass, that of Cadiz: in 1873 the foreign shipping was 180,000 tons; this had ascended to over 300,000 tons in 1877. The imports were valued in 1873 at 168,000_l_., of which 112,000_l_. were British; and in 1877 to over 300,000, of which not quite one-half was British. The exports are of far greater importance, ranging from 750,000_l_. in 1873, of which 667,000_l_. were British, to 1,236,243_l_. in 1877, of which 1,132,782_l_. went to Great Britain. Except in minerals, the province is not rich; but a trade which will probably increase, has lately sprung up in wines, fruits, and cork. The frontier stream the Guadiana is of little use to Spain, and the little port of Palos, whence Columbus set out to give a new world to Spain, is now completely silted up. _Cordova._--The interior provinces of Andalusia are _Cordova_ and _Jaen_, both on the Guadalquiver, the latter embracing the sources and upper part of the course, the former the central portion before it enters the province of Seville. The northern part of the province of Cordova is covered by parallel ranges of low mountains running east and west--the Sierras de Cordova and de Pedroches within the province, and the Sierras de Almaden and Morena, which form the boundary of Castile. _Cordova_, the capital, contains now but 49,000 inhabitants in place of the 1,000,000 who dwelt there when it was the seat of the western khalifat. Its mosque, almost the sole remnant of its former splendour, with its 1200 columns, is to Islam what the temple of Karnac at Thebes, and that of Karnac in Brittany, with their 100 pillars, are to the religions of Egypt and of prehistoric Europe. It is perhaps the grandest building for worship ever raised by Moslem hands; its materials were pillaged without scruple from shrines of older civilizations, but were wrought into new and fairer forms of beauty by the magic of Arabian art. As a Christian city, Cordova is of only second rank. It is chiefly noted for its leather work, and for its commerce in wines and fruits. It is to Cordova that the Amontillada sherry--the most prized of Spanish wines--comes, from the vineyards round Montilla (15,000). The only other town of importance in the province is Lucena (16,000), to the south. _Jaen_, like Huelva, at the opposite extremity of Andalusia, is a mining province, and like those of Huelva its mines are chiefly in the hands of Englishmen and of foreigners. Linares (36,000), north of the Guadalquiver, is the centre of the mining district, and is far the most populous town in the province. Nearly 11,000 men, women, and boys were employed in the lead-mines in 1877, and the ore raised amounted to 70,000 tons. It has been calculated that the production of the world is about 300,000 tons of lead, of which Spain furnishes 100,000 tons and the United Kingdom 100,000 tons. The capital, Jaen, south of the great river, has only 24,000 inhabitants; Ubeda and Baza, close together, a little south of Jaen, have each 15,000. Andujar (11,000), with its old bridge over the Guadalquiver, is noted for its porous pottery, the cooling water-jars used throughout the whole of Southern Spain. In the north of this province is the celebrated Pass of Despeña-perros, through the Sierra Morena, one of the wildest gorges through which the traveller passes in any part of Europe; a few miles to the south of it is Las Navas de Tolosa, the field of the battle in 1212 which first proved how fast the power of the Moors was waning in Southern Spain. ESTREMADURA, conterminous on the west with Portugal and on the south with Huelva, is the wildest and least peopled of all the provinces of Spain, and has been almost sufficiently described in a former chapter. It is divided into the two modern provinces of _Badajoz_ and _Caceres_, through which run respectively the two rivers, the Guadiana and the Tagus. Desolate as it is now, the numerous Roman remains at Merida (6000) and Trajan's mighty bridge at Alcantara tell what it was in Roman times; but in Moorish days it suffered more from war than any other province, and the curse, the "_mesta_," the only means the Christian conquerors had of utilizing their vast and thinly-peopled properties, has ever since rested upon it. Besides its flocks and herds its chief wealth consists in acorns and bark for tanning, and cork for other purposes. The rivers run in deep gorges, almost cañons, and are useless for either navigation or for irrigation. Badajoz (22,000), on the Guadiana, one of the frontier fortresses of Spain towards Portugal, is by far the largest city. Higher up the river are Merida and Medellin, but Don Benito (15,000) is of greater commercial importance than either. _Caceres_, a province still more thinly peopled than Badajoz, having only fifteen inhabitants instead of nineteen to the square kilometre, has 12,000 for its chief town; Plasencia, on the Xerte, an affluent of the Alagon, has only half that number. In the north-east of this province, on the southern spurs of the lofty Sierra de Gredos, stands the monastery San Juste, to which the Emperor Charles V. retired on his resignation of his many crowns. The shepherds of Estremadura, notwithstanding the scanty population, gave numbers of emigrants to the New World; Cortez and Pizarro were swineherds, the one of Medellin, the other of Truxillo. The town of Alcantara gives its name to one of the three great military orders of Spain. NEW CASTILE and LA MANCHA comprise the five modern provinces of _Ciudad Real_, _Toledo_, _Madrid_, _Cuenca_, and _Guadalajara_, which all take their names from their chief towns. The province of _Ciudad Real_, which lies between the Sierra de Morena and the mountains of Toledo, is traversed by the Guadiana. It is the most thinly populated of all the provinces of Spain, having only thirteen inhabitants to the square kilometre; but it is by no means the least wealthy. It contains within it the quicksilver-mines of Almaden (9000), the richest deposit in the world before the late discoveries in California. They were a source of revenue to the Spanish crown for centuries, with an annual rent of over a quarter of a million. They were however mortgaged by the Government for thirty years in order to raise a loan of 2,318,000_l._ at five per cent., to be extinguished in 1900. The average annual extract is estimated at 12,000 tons of mercury. The vineyards round Valdepeñas (11,000) supply the red wine which is the favourite beverage of the Spaniards throughout the centre and the south, and the home consumption of which is far beyond that of the sherries. Almagro (14,000) is known for its lace manufacture; but Ciudad-Real, the capital (12,000), is fallen from its ancient importance. Damiel (13,000) and Manzanares (9000) are the only other towns that need mention. _Toledo_ (21,000), watered by the Tagus, was for centuries the most important city of Spain. It is here that the great councils which really regulated the civil as well as the ecclesiastical administration of Spain, from the fourth to the eighth centuries were held. Here too was one of the centres of Arabic civilization: the waterworks, clocks, and observatory of Toledo were among the wonders of the world from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, and even after its capture by the Christians, in 1085, the conqueror seemed for a while to have fallen under the same spell. The court of Alfonso X., the Wise, was a semi-Moorish court, and his tolerance excited the indignant wonder of travellers from other parts of Europe. Moorish and Christian architecture is still most strangely blended in many of its buildings, and Moorish architects were long employed to keep in repair not only the structures which their ancestors had raised, but even the Christian churches. The skill of its ironworkers and the temper of its sword-blades were renowned throughout Europe. The superiority of its steel was said to be due to some peculiar virtue of the water of the Tagus used in tempering; but the best of the iron was taken from the mines of Mondragon, in Guipuzcoa. The manufactory has greatly fallen from its ancient splendour, but some good weapons are still made, though they cannot compete in price with British or foreign goods. The insurrection of its inhabitants under the "Comuneros" in 1520, in defence of the ancient constitutional liberties of Castille probably determined the selection of the more obsequious town of Madrid as the capital of Spain by the Emperor Charles V. Toledo, with its narrow streets and semi-Moorish houses, is emphatically the city of Old Spain; the purest Spanish is said still to be spoken there, and for native poets and romancers it seems to have an attraction beyond that of any of the cities of Andalusia. The only other town of importance in the province is Talavera, with its fifteenth-century bridge of nearly a quarter of a mile in length. _Madrid._--The province of Madrid lies between the Sierra de Guadarrama on the north and the Tagus on the south. The city, which now contains almost 400,000 inhabitants, was a third or fourth-rate town until Charles V., and after him Philip II., chose it for the capital of Spain, in place of either Toledo or Valladolid. Its recommendations seem to have been its central position, and the absence of any strong traditions of ancient constitutional liberties, such as might hamper the sovereign in developing his new despotism. A city which owed its creation entirely to the sovereign, and its riches to to the presence of his court, would be certain to be obedient to its rulers. If Charles V. and Philip II. did not make it the centre of a free and constitutional government, they at least enriched it with all the treasures of art which the rulers of the greater part of Europe could collect from the various parts of their vast dominions. It is at the museum of Madrid, which owes its existence to Ferdinand VII., that not only Spanish, but also many of the Flemish and some of the Italian painters can be best studied; and by a happy chance the royal palace, built in the eighteenth century, is one of the least faulty and most impressive structures of that age. At the west end of the city, on the banks of the Manzanares, are the royal gardens; at the opposite extremity the promenades of the Prado and the gardens of the Buen Retiro. These artificial parks and walks in some way compensate for the dreary and almost desert aspect of the country round Madrid; for there are "_despoblados_" and "_destierros_" almost within sight of the greatest city of Spain. It is now approached by rail from all sides, and the convergence of these iron roads and of the highways will probably secure its future position as the capital of the nation; but until the present century, contrary to that of most European capitals, the approach to Madrid seemed to be an approach from civilization to barbarism. As the traveller neared the capital, whether from the north or from the east and south, the inns grew worse, the roads more impassable, and the difficulty of procuring food greater in the neighbourhood of the capital than elsewhere; the contrast of magnificence and meanness, of dirt and discomfort and formal etiquette in the city itself, until the time of Charles III., is the theme of every visitor. Of late its character has much changed; the increase of its population has not been caused by the natural growth of its inhabitants, but by the migration thither of Catalans, Gallegos, Asturians, Basques, and especially of Andalusians; and thus the Puerta del Sol, the heart of Madrid, has become, as it were, the heart of Spain, and almost every political and social movement which stirs the nation has its origin there. Though not quite to the extent with which Paris absorbs France, still Madrid collects to itself the greater part of the intellectual and literary life of the nation. It is Madrid that supplies most of the daily journals, the scientific periodicals, reviews, and literature to the rest of Spain. Here is the seat of the learned academies and of the chief literary, educational, and scientific institutions. The universities, the national and the free, the Ateneo, the great public libraries of Madrid, are the best in Spain. It is here that Cortés meets, here that the elections are arranged, all the lines of Spanish administration converge hither, and it is here that the intrigues for place or power are principally conducted, and unhappily we must add it is thus that Madrid is also the focus and example of administrative corruption for the rest of Spain. [Illustration: FOUNTAIN OF THE FOUR SEASONS, MADRID. _Page 130._] Besides Madrid, the province contains two other royal residencies, Aranjuez to the south, at the junction of the Tagus with the Jarama, and the Escorial to the north, at the foot of the Guadarrama. The chief attractions of the former consist in its abundant supply of water, in its fountains and running streams, and in the avenues and groves of lofty trees, whose roots are fed by these waters. The Escorial is of an entirely opposite character. This vast and extraordinary structure was raised by Philip II., in pursuance of a vow made at the battle of St. Quentin, August 10 (St. Lawrence's Day), 1557; the ground-plan is that of a mighty gridiron, to recall that on which the martyr suffered. The central piece of architecture is a chapel, impressive from its grand simplicity; and however faulty the general design of the vast edifice, several details, and especially the frescoes of the ceilings and some of the paintings, are of great beauty. The whole fabric, in its severe and sombre majesty, harmonizes well with the bare and wind-swept granite mountains near which it is placed. Like most of the other treasure-houses of Spain, it suffered severely from pillage during the French invasion. _Acala de Henares_ (8000) was celebrated in the sixteenth century as a university under the patronage of the Cardinal Ximenes, and here the celebrated Complutensian Polyglot Bible was printed. It was also the birthplace of Cervantes. The canal of Henares is described above, pp. 18, 19. _Cuenca_, one of the most thinly populated as well as one of the most mountainous provinces of Spain, stretches on two sides of the chief watershed, and the waters of the streams which rise in this province from different slopes of the Cerro de San Felipe flow to the Atlantic and to the Mediterranean. Cuenca (7000), the capital, is still untouched by railway routes, and slumbers on its lofty cliff, and emerged into temporary notoriety by its capture and sack by Alphonso, the brother of Don Carlos, in 1874. _Guadalajara_ (6500), on the Henares, though on the line of railway between Saragossa and Madrid, is scarcely more lively than Cuenca, but it contains the school for military engineers, the most distinguished corps in the Spanish army, and which has never stained its character by political intrigue. The province supports a slightly higher population than that of Cuenca. OLD CASTILE was with Leon for several centuries the chief of the rising kingdoms of Spain, and the one into which all the rest gradually merged. It now contains five provinces, _Avila_, _Segovia_, _Soria_, _Logroño_, and _Burgos_. Avila (7000), still surrounded by its mediæval walls in excellent preservation, is one of the most picturesque cities in Spain, at an altitude of nearly 3500 feet above the sea-level. The province is remarkable as the one in which the rudely-sculptured stone monuments of boars and bulls, the "Toros de Guisando," are chiefly found. They are the art remains of a population whose name, age, and ethnic affinities are totally unknown. The southern half of this province is traversed by the lofty Sierra de Gredos, and hiding in its secluded valleys are some of the most primitive peoples of Spain. There are no other large towns in the province. _Segovia_ (7000), another of the picturesque cities of Spain, contains fine specimens of Roman, Moorish, and Christian mediæval architecture in its wondrous aqueduct, cathedral, the Alcazar, and castle. It was formerly a place of great commercial as well as of political importance, and was the centre of a trade in woollen goods which employed 34,000 workmen, and made the cloth of Segovia celebrated throughout Europe. This commerce has now utterly departed, both from it and from the other cities, such as Avila, Medina del Campo, which shared its reputation. It is now visited by the lover of the picturesque, whose taste will be here abundantly gratified. Not far from Segovia, under the Peñalarra (7800 feet), on the northern slope of the Guadarrama range, are La Granja and San Ildefonso. At a height of 4000 feet above the level of the sea, this is the most agreeable of all the inland royal residences of Spain. Built in French taste by Philip V., it is redeemed from banality by its pleasant surroundings. But retired and peaceful as it looks, La Granja has been the scene of some of the most important political events in the modern history of Spain. The celebrated passes of Somosierra (4700 feet), and that of the Col de Guadarrama (5000), lead from this province to Madrid; the railway, too, attains at La Cañada a height of 4457 feet above the level of the sea. _Soria_, on the north-eastern edge of the great plateau, is one of the poorest provinces of Spain. Leaning on the Sierra de Moncayo, the whole of the northern and central part of the province slopes gradually to the west, and is watered by the Douro, which takes its rise in the Sierra de Moncayo. The southern angle of the province contains also the sources of the Jalon, which, flowing through a break in the Idubeda range, finds its way to the Ebro, and thence to the Mediterranean, the upper courses of the two rivers completely overlapping. In spite of these two river-valleys the province is very unproductive. Soria, near the site of the Keltiberean Numantia, which held out for twenty-nine years against the Romans, contains but 6000 inhabitants. Osma, on the Douro, has barely 1000, and Agreda (4000) is celebrated only for the visions of a nun in the sixteenth century. The province of _Burgos_ overlaps the plateau, and in its northern and southern extremities embraces the valleys both of the Ebro and the Douro, with their respective towns, Miranda del Ebro and Aranda del Douro. The basins of these two rivers are separated by the Oca or Idubeda mountains, which cross the centre of the province. The difference of the elevation of the two valleys may be seen in the fact that while Miranda del Ebro is 1600 feet above the sea-level, Burgos is more than 2800. Burgos (29,000) and Aranda del Douro were formerly towns of considerable commerce, and the former had at one time a claim to be considered the chief city of Northern Spain. It has now greatly fallen, but will always be visited for the noble remains of Gothic architecture in the city and its suburbs. Miranda del Ebro (3000), when the river formed the customs line for all commerce passing from the Basque Provinces into Spain, was of great consequence, and is now the point of junction for the northern lines of railway from Bilbao and from Irun. In this province, too, is the pass of Pancorbo, through which both road and railway wind; for savage wildness it is inferior only to that of the above-mentioned Despeña-perros in the Sierra Morena. The whole province of _Logroño_ lies in the southern half of the valley of the Ebro, and leans against the mountains which form the supports of the great plateau. The Ebro forms its northern boundary, and its chief towns, Logroño (12,000) and Calahorra (7000), are both on the river. Here the traveller from the north first sees the Noria or Moorish water-wheel at work. The province is noted chiefly for its strong, rough wines, and for its agricultural products. Navarete is known in English history as the spot where the Black Prince and Bertrand du Guesclin fought out their mightiest duel, the one as the partisan of Pedro the Cruel, and the other of Henry of Trastamare. The kingdom of LEON is divided into five provinces, _Salamanca_, _Valladolid_, _Zamora_, _Palencia_, _Leon_. _Salamanca_ lies along the Portuguese frontier, which is here formed by the Rivers Douro and Agueda. The city (15,000) was famous throughout the early part of the Middle Ages for its university and for its Arabic and Hebrew learning. It thus became in popular estimation the home of magic and of the black arts, and as such its name is found in the folk-lore tales of many parts of Europe; its students, poor, riotous, and witty, made it the birthplace of the peculiar, picaresque romance literature of Spain, from Lazarillo de Tormes to Gil Blas. Like all the Spanish provincial universities, it is but the shadow of its former self, nor does the city preserve any of the older features which still make Toledo a delight to the tourist. Its old bridge over the Tormes is said to date from Roman times. Bejar (8000) does a fair trade as a manufactory of cloth. Ciudad Rodrigo (5000) is one of the strongest fortresses of Spain, and guards, with Badajoz, the frontier against Portugal. The provinces of Salamanca and Zamora contain some of the most peculiar and picturesque peasantry yet remaining in Spain; even around Salamanca the festal dresses of the Charros and Charras are rich with gold and silver ornaments of Moorish type. In the valley of the Batuecas, amid the Sierra de Gata, the Hurdes, and to the west of Zamora, the Sayagos, and again, the Maragatos, to the north-west of the province, in the mountains of Leon, are all remnants of ancient races, preserving habits and tribal customs and laws, differing from their neighbours, and well worthy of the study, as survivals, of the comparative ethnologist. The contrabandistas of the province are among the boldest in Spain; they cross the Douro and its deep ravine, sometimes on rafts or on inflated skins; at others, when the river is in flood, in baskets suspended from ropes flung across the whole ravine. _Zamora_ (10,000), formerly a strong walled city on the Douro, in a rich country, notwithstanding the rail which unites it to the Medina del Campo, still remains one of the decaying towns of Spain. Toro (9000), higher up the stream, is a busier town. A great impulse will probably be given to all this district, now one of the most behindhand in Spain, by the completion of the Portuguese lines of Beira-alta, connecting Lisbon and Oporto with Paris by the North Spanish lines. Benavente (5000), on the Esla, is the only other town we have to notice. _Leon_, which gave its name to one of the old kingdoms of Spain before the re-conquest of the Castiles, is full of towns which recall the glories of the past, but which are of little importance in modern times. The capital (9000) is noted for its cathedral and churches, which are perhaps the purest specimens of Gothic, unmixed with Arabian art, to be found in Spain. The province is generally mountainous, especially to the north and west, and the higher lands afford excellent summer pasture for flocks from the plains, and even from Estremadura. The valley of the Esla is extremely fertile. Astorga (5000) may be considered as the Capital of the Maragatos, of whom we have spoken above; like Sahagun (3000), it is a town of ancient consequence now dwindling to insignificance. The "_fuero_" or charter of Sahagun, 1085, was the model of the "_fueros_" or constitutional privileges of the Castiles, which were eventually lost in the war of the _comuneros_ in the time of Charles V. _Palencia._--Through this province passes the canal of Castile from Alar del Rey to Valladolid, borrowing its waters from the Pisuerga, and is the most useful for transport of all the canals of Spain. This waterway is less needed now, owing to the railway of the north from Valladolid to Santander, to Bilbao, and to San Sebastian, which runs parallel to it; but it will be always available for local traffic. The capital is a walled city on the banks of the Carrion, a little above its junction with the Pisuerga, an affluent of the Douro; its cathedral is remarkable for its size and simplicity, but is otherwise inferior to Leon. The valleys, watered by these rivers are very rich in cereals, which find their outlet for exportation at Santander. The great coal-field of the Asturias extends into the north of this province, and at Barruelo de Santillana is largely worked by the Northern Railway Company, and supplies Madrid with a yearly increasing quantity of coal. The villages near the mines are fast becoming populous towns. _Valladolid_ (52,000) was till the middle of the sixteenth century the capital of Spain, and is likely to become of great importance in the near future as the point of junction of all the Spanish and Portuguese railways of the north and west. The Douro flows through the centre of the province, and the plains of Valladolid are perhaps the most fertile of all those in North-western Spain. It is a great centre for the corn-trade of the Castiles, and the smoke from its tall chimneys tells also of manufacturing industry. There are here two colleges for Scotch and Irish students for the Roman Catholic priesthood. They were established at the time of the persecutions in England, but are much less frequented now than formerly. Medina del Campo (4500) an ancient commercial city, was ruined in the wars of the _comuneros_, but may recover somewhat of its former traffic as a junction of railways. A town of similar name and standing, Medina de Rio Seco (4500), is in the north of the province; both are situated in rich corn-growing plains. Tordesillas (3500), on the Douro, owes its existence to the junction of roads which cross the river by its noble bridge. In this province is the Castle of Simancas, wherein are deposited the archives of Spain, as those of the Indies are at Seville. Long closed to the world, they are now open to the researches of scholars, and guides and inventories in aid are being published during the present year. _The Balearic Isles._ These islands are geologically a submarine continuation of the Valencian mountains which sink into the sea at Cape Nao. They are divided into two groups: (1) Minorca, Majorca, Cabrera, and a few islets; the nearest point of which to the mainland is Soller on Majorca, ninety-three miles distant; (2) Iviza and Formentera, with some smaller satellites, are within sixty miles of the Spanish coast. The whole superficies of the islands is nearly two thousand square miles. The inhabitants number about 290,000. The climate is equable but exceedingly variable within somewhat narrow limits; the average both for Minorca and Majorca being sixty-four, the highest temperature ninety, and the lowest forty-four. The average rainfall is nearly twenty inches. Majorca, the largest of the islands is about sixty miles from east to west, and fifty from north to south. The surface is very broken, but with a few fertile plains; the greatest elevation is 5000 feet. Minorca, twenty and a half miles to the east of Majorca, is twenty miles long by six broad. Iviza, the largest island of the western group is only four miles by four. The highest points of these two islands are about 1000 feet; but Iviza retains traces of volcanic action which seem to connect it geologically with the extinct Catalan volcanoes, by way of the Columbretes rocks, and the Point de la Baña at the mouth of the Ebro. Majorca and Minorca are remarkable for erections called "Talayots," similar to the "Nuraghies" of Sardinia; they are the work of one of the many prehistoric, or at least unrecorded races whose blood mingles in the veins of the present inhabitants, and the origin of them has given rise to almost as many theories as those of the round towers of Ireland and Scotland. In the west of Majorca is the remarkable and extensive cavern of Arta. The language of the islanders is one of the purest dialects of the Provençal speech. The only separate race now in the islands is that of the "_Chuetas_" or converted Jews, who still keep apart notwithstanding their nominal Christianity. The population is mostly engaged in agriculture, and the islands export fruits, oil, leather, and a few cattle, to an annual value altogether of 350,000_l>_, while the imports amount to 210,000_l>_. The land is cultivated mostly by peasant proprietors and metayers in small holdings, and by reason of steady emigration those who remain are fairly prosperous. The people show strong aesthetic tastes, and the art school of Palma is one of the most flourishing of the whole of Spain. The chief towns on Majorca are Palma, on the east coast, of 58,000 inhabitants; Manacor, in the centre, of 12,500; Felanitz, 10,000; and Llummayor, Soller, Inca, and Pollensa, of about 8000 each. Minorca has only two towns of importance, Port Mahon, 22,000, and Ciudella, 7000, at opposite extremities of the island. Port Mahon is perhaps the finest harbour in the Mediterranean, and is also one of its strongest fortresses; during the English occupation the town attained great prosperity. Iviza has only one town, of the same name as the island, containing 5500 inhabitants. We have noticed before that the majolica ware was not made in these islands, but at Valencia, and that it acquired the name from Balearic vessels being used for its export to Italy. CHAPTER VI. HISTORY AND POLITICAL CONSTITUTION. In order to understand the present constitution, the political condition, and the aspirations of the Spanish nation, it is absolutely necessary to have some slight acquaintance with its previous history. This we propose to give as briefly as possible. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries there is no doubt that the inhabitants of Northern Spain, under some of the petty kings, enjoyed more constitutional liberty than any other people in Europe; that their institutions generally, and especially their municipal privileges, were more in accordance with the ideas of modern freedom and self-government than those of any other nation at that date. The feudal system never attained in Northern Spain, except in parts of Catalonia, the systematic development, and the organized oppression of the lower classes, which it reached in many other parts of Europe. The peculiar institution of "_behetria_," which prevailed in Leon and the Castiles, and by which a serf was free to go whither he would "from sea to sea," with all his goods, and to put himself under any lord he chose, was of itself an almost sufficient check to excessive tyranny by the nobles. The old Roman municipal organization, of the towns had been preserved by tradition throughout the whole of the Visigothic times down to 711, nor had the practical working completely died out at the epoch of the early reconquest of the north. Hence many of the charters or "_fueros_" granted to the towns and cities by the kings are evidently founded on a recollection of former institutions, modified according to the necessities of the times. Thus the charter of Leon (1020) expressly allows exemption from all arbitrary exactions, and grants the free election of the _Alcalde_, and of the municipal council, with only the appointment of the judges by the king. By the _fuero_ of Arganzon (1191) it is expressly stated that if these royal officers overpassed their duties, it would be lawful to kill them without incurring any responsibility. Similar but still more strongly-worded clauses are found in all the Basque _fueros_, and in the coronation oath of Aragon. The representatives of the burgesses, "el estado llano," the low estate in the "Cortés" or parliaments, began much earlier in Spain than in other countries. Burgesses sat in the Cortés at Leon certainly in 1188, if not in that of Burgos in 1169. In Aragon they were present still earlier, in 1134, in Navarre in 1194, in Catalonia, where feudalism was more developed than elsewhere, in 1218. These dates are simply those of the first mention of the fact, not necessarily that of its first institution; the records rather imply their presence at former sessions. We find also early protests against judicial and administrative abuses which prevailed long afterwards in other parts of Europe. In the _fuero_ of Arganzon (1191) the inhabitants claim exemption from the ordeal of iron, hot-water, or battle. In 1152, the _fuero_ of Molina demands that justice be done to all, and truth spoken without favour or bribery of any kind whatever. The original capitulations granted to the Moors and Mudejares of Castile, and especially to those of Aragon, breathe the same liberal spirit. They are granted full liberty in the exercise of their own religion, and to live under their own laws in their own quarters, subject only to some fixed tribute and service. The spirit of bigotry and of hatred between the two races commenced with the foreign monks, with the semi-religious military orders, and with the legal classes; afterwards it spread to the common people through envy at the better use which the Jews, Mudejares, and Moriscos made of the privileges granted to them, and the consequent superiority of their condition compared with that of the serfs and lower classes of the Christians. It is this fact which explains the rising of the population at Saragossa in favour of the inquisition against the Mudejares and Jews. Travellers in Spain, even to the middle of the fifteenth century, were scandalized at the toleration of the Moors by the king and the court. Theologians, lawyers (except the royal judges), medical men, and traders were they who called for oppression of the Moors; the two last classes evidently through jealousy of the superior skill and industry of Moors and Jews as doctors and merchants; the literary class, the poets, nobles, and kings were in favour of toleration. Afterwards indeed, in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, the ravages of the pirate ships of Algiers and Tunis roused an indignation and excited a far more intense abhorrence than had existed in earlier times, when Christian and Moslem knights met in fair and equal warfare. The development of these early liberties, and the progress of the cause of toleration and of true civilization in Spain, were checked by circumstances which would assuredly have acted in a similar way in any other nation. The establishment of the military orders, the conquest of the south, especially the last campaign against Granada, put forces into the hand of the king greater than those possessed at that time by any other monarch. The richest half of Spain, the newly-conquered Mussulman provinces, had not only no liberties of their own except those granted in their respective capitulations, and which were speedily revoked, but had neither knowledge of, nor any interest in the liberties of the north. They were entirely at the mercy of their conquerors, Ferdinand and Isabella, who had the control of the finest army of Christendom. The mastership of all the great semi-monastic military orders, which had hitherto been elective, was now granted to Ferdinand by Pope Innocent VIII. (1492), and they were incorporated with the crown by a bull of Adrian VI. (1523). An almost equally powerful engine in the royal hands was the secret police of the Santa Hermandad (1476), founded to restrain the excesses of the nobles and the practice of private war. The success of this institution in the cause of order explains both the institution and the popularity of the inquisition. It is easy to see what a leverage was thus put into the royal hands to destroy the liberties of the north of Spain. Add to this that the separate kingdoms, Navarre, Aragon, Valencia, the Castiles, and the Basque Provinces had not yet been united under a single head, nor had learned to work together, except in war, for a single purpose. Catalonia and Aragon had indeed some sympathy with each other, but they had none with Leon and Castile; their peculiar language and habits isolated the Basque Provinces and Navarre from any of the rest. A century of free representation and debate in a national Cortés might have changed all this, but the opportunity was not given. The discovery and the conquest of America, and the subsequent emigration of the bolder spirits, turned men's thoughts away from internal reform and the home constitution. Next the fatal election to the empire of Charles V. threw into his hands fitting agents, in his foreign and ecclesiastical ministers and governors, wherewith to crush any rising of the people. Cardinal Ximenes was the only minister in Europe who at that date could have pointed to a standing army with the proud words, "With these I govern Castile; and with these I will govern it, until the king, your master and mine, takes possession of his kingdom." Yet even to the end of the seventeenth century the king swore to preserve the ancient privileges of Aragon and Catalonia. The "_fueros_" of Navarre were intact until 1840, and those of the Basque Provinces till 1874. The wonder is, not that the Spanish liberties were crushed, but that the memory of them should have continued so long, and after so many ages of repression should yet be a living force with which every statesman and ruler of Spain has still to make his account. The suppression of Spanish liberty had already begun under the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, but the death of Francis I. and the retreat of Charles V. into the cloister of San Juste definitely closes both the period of chivalry and of such liberties as existed through the Middle Ages in Europe. With Philip II. begins the era of statesmanship and of bureaucratic centralization, when nations were really ruled from the closet and with the pen, not with the sovereign's sword or by his presence in the field. It is difficult for an Englishman to sympathize with the view, but the period of Philip II. is still looked upon by the majority of Spaniards as the golden era of the external position of Spain. His absolutism, and his concentration in his own person of all civil and religious rights, are condoned in their eyes by the glory of his having made Spain the arbiter of Europe and the champion of Catholicism. But with his successor set in that strange and progressive decadence of intellectual power in the sovereigns of the Austrian dynasty in Spain, which ended in the almost idiotcy of the childless Charles II. Spain, which in the reign of Philip II. had all but imposed the sovereign of her choice in France, in the reign of Charles II. was ruled according to the intrigues and caprice of the court of Versailles. Philip V., the grandson of Louis XIV., though vastly superior to the late Austrian sovereigns, could never thoroughly emancipate himself from the tutelage of the country to whose armies he owed his crown; and the family degeneracy, which had shown itself in the Austrian sovereigns, again appeared in the Bourbon family, and communicated itself to the whole nation. The military and naval greatness of Spain disappeared, the very wish for constitutional liberty died out, commerce and literature were almost extinct, the population was declining in numbers and increasing in misery, the country was daily growing poorer, and its wealth was ebbing slowly away to other lands. The noble aristocracy of Spain, once so full of loyal self-respect in the age of the Cid, grovelled at the sovereign's feet, jealous only for precedence in matters of court etiquette, or clamorous for posts in the colonies as a means of corruption, and of enriching themselves by the plunder of the provinces they administered. The only king who showed some royal talent, and who intelligently endeavoured to effect the improvement of Spain, was Charles III. (1759--1788). Unfortunately both he and his able ministers, instead of basing their reforms on the native liberties and constitutions of Spain, imitated almost wholly the spurious liberalism of the encyclopædists and doctrinaires of France. Hence few of their reforms took root. Those that were not immediately done away with did not grow or develope. The successors of Charles III. were still more feeble than his immediate predecessors, and the condition of the royal family was such that Napoleon had no difficulty in forcing them to abdicate, and to crown his brother Joseph king of Spain; but the nation, unlike the royal family, refused to acquiesce in this usurpation of their rights, and rose as one man to avenge the burning wrong. [Illustration: PORT OF CADIZ. _Page 153._] The modern history of Spain begins naturally with that of the War of Liberation, May 2nd, 1808, and politically with the Cortés of Cadiz, 1812, and with the constitution then promulgated. This declares: That the Spanish nation is not the patrimony of any family or person; that the sovereignty resides essentially in the nation, which is the conservator of its own liberties and rights. The sole religion is and shall always be the Apostolic Roman. The legislative power resides in the Cortés with the king. The suffrage was universal, and one deputy was to be elected for every 70,000 souls. Entails and feudal privileges had been abolished by a law of August 6th, 1811, the liberty of the press was voted, and in 1813 the inquisition was suppressed. The French had been expelled, chiefly through the assistance of England, and the king had returned from captivity; all looked well for the new era. But in 1814 Ferdinand VII. violated the oath which he had sworn to observe the constitution; the inquisition was re-established; the feudal exactions on real property were restored; and the fatal policy of violent reaction and of ruthless vengeance on political opponents was inaugurated which has wrought such deadly harm to the cause of progress in Spain. After an absolute government of six years, Riego raised the standard of revolt at Cadiz, and again Ferdinand swore to observe the constitution of 1812: further reforms were established. In 1820, tithes were partially suppressed, and the Church was forbidden to acquire any more real property. A law of May 3rd, 1823, affirmed in stronger terms the law of 1813 on the abolition of entail: the religious orders were done away with. But in the same year, with the assistance of a French army under the Duc d'Angoulême, Ferdinand conquered the liberals and again violated his oath to observe the constitution. Every act of the Cortés for the last four years was annulled. Riego, with other chiefs of the liberal party, was put to death under circumstances of atrocious cruelty, others were banished, and a crafty and tenacious system of persecution was directed against every liberal for the rest of the reign. During this reign, too, through denial of all reform or suppression of any abuse, the whole of the vast colonial empire of Spain on the continent of the Americas was totally lost. On the death of Ferdinand VII., June 29, 1833, another element of discord was introduced. The first Bourbon king, Philip V., in defiance of ancient Spanish precedents to the contrary, had introduced the Salic law from France, and had procured its solemn promulgation by Cortés. Ferdinand VII., with the consent of Cortés, abrogated this law, and left the crown to his only child, Isabella II., an infant of less than three years old, with her mother, Christina of Naples, as regent. His brother, Don Carlos, who, since the king's last marriage, had been intriguing against him with the ultra-conservative party, claimed the throne under the law of Philip V. Henceforth a dynastic question was added to the standing constitutional one. The Carlists declared themselves the champions of legitimacy, the divine right, and of absolutism; and thus forced the party of Isabella, the Christinos, to appeal for support to the liberal and constitutional party, though they had no more real attachment to the cause, and no more intelligent appreciation of its benefits than had their opponents. A blunder of the liberal party in hesitating to confirm the "_fueros_" of the Basques, the last vestige still intact of the ancient constitutional and municipal liberties of Spain, greatly strengthened their opponents, who at once seized the opportunity and loudly confirmed them. A war of seven years followed, in which the older liberal generals lost all their former military prestige against Zumalacarregui in the Basque Provinces, and against Cabrera in Aragon. But the assistance of England, and still more the incapacity of Don Carlos, at length enabled Espartero to finish the war by the convention of Vergara, August 30, 1839, by which _fueros_ were confirmed to the Basques on their laying down arms. Cabrera continued the war in Aragon and Catalonia, but two years afterwards was forced with his followers to take refuge in France. During this period constitutional liberty had apparently made great progress in Spain, and several useful reforms had been set on foot. But its course had been marred by deeds of atrocious violence, such as the massacre of the monks and the destruction of the convents in 1835, when valuable treasures, both in art and literature, which had been spared in the great Peninsular War, were finally lost. All ecclesiastical and church property had been declared national, and the sale of it had been commenced, tithes were wholly suppressed, the _mesta_ was abolished--with results as to the division of property detailed in a former chapter. From the regency of Christina dates, in a great degree, the shameless corruption, the selfish intrigues, the abuses of all kinds among the upper _employés_, which with rare exceptions have marked every subsequent government of Spain. A reaction set in in 1843, with Narvaez as its real chief. To his stern administration, however, are due the establishment of the normal and technical schools, the foundation of the present educational system in Spain, and the institution of the _guardias civiles_, a kind of police after the model of the French gendarmerie or the Irish constabulary, and which has proved itself the most trustworthy body in Spain in defence of law and order under all changes of government. It would be a weariness to the reader to recount all the changes from liberalism to absolutism which followed during the reign of Isabella II. No administration succeeded in impressing on the bulk of the nation the fact that it was honest and capable; none won respect abroad. Perhaps that of O'Donnell (1858-63), during which occurred the successful campaign in Morocco, was the least corrupt and inefficient; but the indignation of the country at the shame and corruption of both court and government broke forth at last, and a movement, headed by Admiral Topete and the fleet at Cadiz, in 1868 overthrew the Government, forced Isabella to fly, and declared the Bourbons incapable of ruling in Spain. On the abdication of Isabella II. in favour of her son, and her retirement into France, a provisional government was formed with Serrano, Topete, and Prim as chief members, to hold the reins of power until Cortés should elect a new sovereign. The choice proved far more difficult than was expected. Topete and others favoured the claims of the Duc de Montpensier, the brother-in-law of the late queen, but the objection to any of the Bourbon family was at that time too strong; others desired to seize the opportunity of uniting Spain and Portugal under one head by electing a member of the Portuguese royal family; but this was rejected by the princes of Portugal. Two years were spent in these debates, but at last the choice of Prim prevailed, and Amadeo, the second son of Victor Emmanuel II. of Italy, was elected sovereign, 16th November, 1870. The murder of his chief supporter, Prim, before he reached Madrid, deprived him of the only support which might have consolidated his dynasty. Had it not been for the deeply-rooted dislike of all Spaniards to a foreign ruler, Amadeo would have proved by far the best sovereign that had sat upon the throne for many generations. He honestly respected the constitution. His court was pure and incorrupt. He was intelligently devoted to the best interests of Spain; but he found all his efforts at improvement and reform utterly thwarted by the intrigues of the nobility and of the upper _employés_ of every kind, and after a trial of two years he resigned a post which he could no longer maintain with true dignity and self-respect, and retired to Portugal, February 11th, 1873. Thereupon a republic was proclaimed by Cortés, with Figueras, Castelar, and Pi y Margall as chief ministers. But the events of the last few years, the weakening of the central authority, the attention which the Carlist rising in the north had drawn to the ancient "_fueros_" or constitutional privileges of Spain, on the one side, and the incidents of the war with the Paris Commune in France, together with the influence of those of the communists who had found refuge in the industrial cities of the east and south, on the other, produced constant revolts in favour of a federal or cantonalist government of the separate provinces. On July 15th, 1873, Don Carlos (Carlos VII.) the grandson of the Don Carlos (Carlos V.) of the seven years' war, although both his uncles and his father had solemnly renounced their rights to the throne, re-entered the Basque Provinces, from which he had been quickly driven by General Moriones at Oroquieta in a former attempt, and raised the standard of legitimacy and divine right. On the other hand, one after the other, Alcoy, Malaga, Seville, Cadiz, and, a few months later, Cartagena and Valencia, revolted in a communistic or cantonalist conspiracy which threatened the dismemberment of Spain, and the destruction of her armaments. It was only after severe fighting, which strained the resources of the Government to the utmost, that these cities were subdued. Meanwhile Don Carlos had established himself firmly in the Basque Provinces, and his brother Alfonso headed considerable forces in Aragon and Catalonia. Fortunately Barcelona held aloof from the cantonalist and _intransigente_ movement of Cartagena and Valencia. These events, however, had shown the necessity of tightening the reins of discipline in the army. Salmeron, who was now at the head of the ministry, exerted himself to restore order, and endeavoured to work the republic in a conservative sense. A year or two after, at the instigation of Castelar, the penalty of death for mutiny was again enforced. After Moriones and Serrano in the north had both failed in their attempts to raise the seige of Bilbao, Concha at last succeeded, May 2, 1874; and Martinez Campos, who had crushed the insurrection in Valencia, was making way against the Carlists in Aragon and Catalonia. Between these generals, with Pavia and others, a conspiracy was formed to restore the Bourbon monarchy under Alfonso XII., son of Isabella. Serrano offered only a doubtful resistance, and Castelar, opposed by the _intransigente_ party, found himself almost alone in upholding a conservative republic. The death of Concha, before Estella, in Navarre, June 27, 1874, delayed for some months the proclamation of Alphonso, but at length it took place, on December 30, 1874, and the republic fell without a struggle. Alphonso XII. landed at Barcelona in the first days of 1875, and entered Madrid on January 14th. In spite of some checks, caused by the incapacity of his generals, his power was quickly augmented. Many who, through hatred of the republic and of the cantonalist excesses, had joined the Carlist ranks, abandoned the cause when monarchy was restored. Don Carlos had proved to be as incapable as his grandfather had been, and much less reputable in his private life. By the end of August, Martinez Campos had taken Urgel, in Catalonia, and by the close of the year he was free to assist Quesada in the Basque Provinces. The united armies were successful, and on February 28, 1876, Don Carlos entered France, leaving his followers and the Basque Provinces entirely at the mercy of the conquerors. The consequence to them has been the partial loss of their _fueros_, the incorporation of the Basque conscripts with the rest of the army, and the annexation of the provinces for the first time to the crown of Spain. With Alphonso XII. entered Spain, as his chief adviser, Cánovas del Castillo. Whether nominally prime minister, or out of office, he has really held the reins of power--with the exception of the nine months' ministry of Martinez Campos in 1879--from 1875 to February, 1881. On the whole his exertions have been beneficial to Spain. By an arrangement dated January 1, 1877, and by lowering the rate of interest, he saved the public credit, which was on the verge of utter bankruptcy. Insensibly he has detached himself from the progressive liberal movement, and his rule has become more and more conservative. The decree for toleration of religion, passed in the first months of the republic of 1868, has been greatly modified, and interpreted in a sense more and more unfavourable to religious freedom: But he has not succeeded in breaking down the many abuses of the administration, or in putting an end to the corruption of the upper _employés_, or in insuring freedom and purity of parliamentary election; and until this is effected the future of Spain must still be doubtful. _Present Constitution and Administration of Spain._ It would be tedious and little instructive to our readers to detail the various constitutions under which Spain has been governed since 1812. We will give a sketch, as far as we are able, of the last only. By a comparison of this with the constitution of Cadiz, it will be seen that, in spite of all reactions, Spain has really progressed in the way of freedom and good government. The constitution of the Spanish monarchy, June 30, 1876, declares Alphonso XII. de Bourbon to be the legitimate King of Spain. His person is inviolable, but his ministers are responsible, and all his orders must be countersigned by a minister. The legislative power resides in the Cortés with the king. The Cortés is composed of two legislative bodies, equal in power--the Senate and the Congress of Deputies. The Senate is composed (1) of senators by their own right, who are--sons of the kings, grandees of Spain with 3000_l._ yearly income, the Captain-General of the Forces, the Admiral-in-Chief, the Patriarch of the Indies, the Archbishops, the Presidents of the Council of State, of the Supreme Tribunal, of the National Accounts, of the Council of War, and of Marine, after two years' service; (2) of life senators, named by the crown; (3) of senators elected by the corporations of the State, or the richest citizens--half of these must be renewed every five years. All senators must be thirty-five years of age, and the number of classes (1) and (2) together must not exceed that of the elected senators, which is fixed at 180. The Congress of Deputies is returned by the electoral Juntas, one deputy being elected for every 50,000 souls. Deputies are elected by universal suffrage, and for a period of five years. The Congress meets every year at the summons of the king, who has power to suspend or close the session; but in the latter case, a new Congress must meet within three months. The president and vice-presidents of the Senate are nominated by the king, those of the Congress are elected from its own body. The initiation of the laws belongs to the king, and to both legislative bodies; but the budget, and all financial matters, must be first presented every year to the Congress of Deputies. No one can be compelled to pay any tax not voted by Congress, or by the legally appointed corporations. The sittings are public, and the person of deputies is inviolable. Ministers may be impeached by the deputies, but are judged by the Senate. Justice is administered in the king's name, and judges and magistrates are immovable. The provinces are administered (1) by a governor, who, with his immediate subordinates, is nominated by the Government; (2) by a Provincial Deputation, elected by the householders of the province. All members must be natives of, or residents in, the province; their number varies according to the population. (3) Five members elected from the Provincial Deputation form a Provincial Commission to conduct business when the deputation is not sitting. These authorities and bodies answer nearly to the prefects and general councils of the French departments. They are of much greater political importance in those provinces which have preserved some of their ancient rights than in others. Below the provincial are the municipal authorities, the Alcaldes (mayors), Ayuntamientos (municipal councils), and the Juntas Municipales. The internal administration of every parish is entrusted to an Ayuntamiento or municipal council, elected by the residents, and composed of the Alcalde or mayor, the Tenientes or assistants, the Regidores or councillors. The Junta Municipal is composed of all the councillors of the Ayuntamiento, and an assembly of three times their number, and by them the municipal accounts are to be audited and revised. The number of the Ayuntamiento varies according to the population; one Alcalde, one Teniente, six Regidores, for 1000; and one Alcalde, ten Tenientes, thirty-three Regidores, for 100,000. The real independence and free action of these bodies varies much in different provinces and in different circumstances. The smaller bodies are quite under the thumb of the central government; the larger ones in the great towns and in the more independent provinces are much less easily influenced. The Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman is declared to be the religion of the State, and the nation is bound to maintain its worship and its ministers. "But no one shall be molested on Spanish ground for his religious opinions, nor for the exercise of his respective worship, except it be against Christian morals. Nevertheless, no other ceremonies or public manifestations shall be permitted than those of the religion of the State." These last two articles are evidently equivocal, and subject to great diversity of interpretation and of application. All foreigners are free to settle in Spanish territory, and to exercise therein their respective trades and professions, with the exception of those which require special titles. The expression of opinion, the press, the right of public meeting, of association, and of petition, except from armed bodies, are respectively free. No Spaniard or foreigner can be arrested or detained illegally. He must either be set at liberty or be brought before a judge within twenty-four hours of his arrest. No Spaniard can be arrested without a judge's warrant, and the case must then be heard within seventy-two hours after his arrest; otherwise he must be set at liberty on his own petition or on that of any other Spaniard. Domicile is inviolable. Such are the principal articles of the present Spanish Constitution. In spite of the excess of some republican governments and the reaction of others, real progress has been made, excepting only in the equivocal law on religion, and that on marriages between Catholics and Protestants. _Administrative Spain._ For military purposes, Spain is mapped out into five "capitanias generales," conferring the rank of field-marshal on the possessors of that office. The number of marshals, generals, and superior officers of the special corps in active service is over 500. The number of the army on a peace footing is fixed at 90,000, the infantry numbering 60,000, the cavalry 16,000, artillery 10,000, and engineers 4000. Universal conscription is nominally obligatory, but with the power of purchasing a substitute for a fixed sum of 80_l._ The time of service is eight years, four of which are spent in the active army and four in the reserve. In the colonies the time is four years only, the whole of which must be spent in active service. Besides the regular army in Spain are the corps and garrisons in the Philippine Islands, in Porto Rico, and in Cuba, where the mortality is so great that the troops need constant renewal. In addition to the above must be reckoned the militia of the Canary Islands, the "guardias civiles," a kind of constabulary like that of Ireland or the gendarmerie of France. These are about 15,000 men, and are some of the best and most trustworthy troops in Spain; the carabineros or custom-house officers, who guard the frontiers, form another corps of about 12,000. Towards the close of the late Carlist and Cuban wars the actual army was far above these numbers, and it is probable that 150,000 men were under arms on the side of the Government in the Basque Provinces alone. The Spanish soldier is one of the best in Europe, if properly commanded. He is sober, and has great powers of endurance; is an excellent marcher, and a trustworthy sentinel; persistent both in attack and defence, he still retains the steadiness of the old Spanish "tercios," which were once the terror and admiration of Europe. The Basques under Zumalacarrégui in the first Carlist war, and the Catalans under Martinez Campos in the last, earned high praise from all foreign officers who saw them. But too often these fine qualities of the private have been rendered of no avail, owing to the utter want of skill and competency in the officers and commanders, and still more by reckless corruption and mismanagement in all things relating to the commissariat and supplies. Another element of deterioration has been the use of the soldiery as mere tools of political intrigue in the frequent revolts and _pronunciamientos_ of ambitious generals. The scientific corps, however, the artillery and engineers, have always stood aloof from sedition. It was an attempt to corrupt the former and to assimilate it in this respect to the rest of the army, which led to the abdication of King Amadeo. The generals who have achieved the greatest reputation in the Spanish army are Quesada and Martinez Campos. Moriones, who distinguished himself in the Basque Provinces during the last Carlist war, has lately died. Blanco and Jovellar acquired distinction in Cuba, and Loma as a good brigadier in the Carlist war. Serrano, Pavia, and others are better known in the field of politics than in that of military action. For naval purposes the coast of Spain is divided into three departments--Ferrol, Cadiz, and Cartagena, at each of which ports is a naval arsenal. The jurisdiction of the marine extends as far as the tide and seventy feet beyond. The three departments, are divided into _tercios navales_, _partidos maritimos_, and districts. The Spanish navy consists of 121 ships, five of which are armoured vessels of the first class, and eleven unarmoured; eighteen belong to the second class, and fifty-six to the third, some of which are monitors and armoured gunboats. There are also thirty-one smaller vessels, and a few ships employed for training and for harbour services. The whole fleet mounts 525 guns, and is over 20,000 horse-power. The sailors number 14,000, with 504 officers of all ranks, and the marine infantry 7000, with 374 officers. The old fame of Spanish ship-building, except for small vessels, has almost entirely passed away. In the great war at the beginning of the century, the finest vessels of our navy were prizes taken from Spain. Spanish navigators, too, have long lost their old renown, though the Basques are still esteemed as mariners. The ironclad frigates and monitors of modern Spain have been almost all constructed in foreign dockyards. The armoured gunboats, however, built in Spain are a good and useful model. The merchant marine consists of 226 ocean-going steamers and 1578 ocean sailing-vessels measuring altogether 460,000 tons. Smaller vessels make up a total of 3000 merchant-ships, less than one-fifth of the number of those of Great Britain. For the administration of justice the country is divided into Audiencias Territoriales, Provincias, and Partidos Judiciales. The Audiencias, or courts of appeal, are fifteen, with 373 judges or procureurs. There are also 500 judges of first instance, and there is also a justice of peace or alcalde in each town or municipality. All pleadings are still conducted in writing in Spain; there is no verbal examination or cross-examination in public. Suits both civil and criminal are thus dragged out to an inordinate length. Judges are still suspected of being open to bribery, and confidence in the just administration of the law is as a consequence severely shaken. It is not uncommon for witnesses to be summoned to testify to facts which happened many years before, and it not unfrequently happens that either the principal witnesses or the criminal himself is dead before the case is decided. As a conspicuous instance, we may remind our readers that General Prim was assassinated in open day in Madrid in 1870, and the case has not yet been adjudged. The discipline of the prisons is in general extremely lax, and many crimes, especially forgeries, are there concocted with impunity. There is, however, a great difference in the treatment of the prisoners in different prisons. Up to 1840 the office of Alcaide, or governor of a prison, was sold by the Government to the highest bidder, and the purchasers made the most they could out of the wretched prisoners by starving them or by accepting bribes for illicit indulgences, and for furnishing what they were bound to provide, so that it was commonly said "that the _bagnios_ of Algiers were less terrible than the prisons of Spain." Perhaps the worst of them all, up to the year 1833, was the old prison of the city of Madrid, one dark dungeon of which was termed "El Infierno"--Hell. Almost as bad was the Prison de Corté and the famous Saladero. There was no classification, no cleanliness, and in some of the cells neither light nor ventilation. In some of the country prisons the cells were like the dens of a menagerie, and the starving prisoners thrust their hands through the bars to beg food of passers-by. At last has arisen an ardent band of philanthropists, of whom Senors Lastres and Vilalva are at the head, and the first stone of a new prison in Madrid, arranged on modern principles, was laid by the king in February, 1877. Hospitals, lunatic asylums, and asylums for the sick and aged poor, and other charitable establishments are of very varied descriptions in Spain. Some of them, like the famous establishments of Cadiz, Seville, Madrid, Cartagena, Valencia, and Cordova, are admirably managed, and yield in practical benefit to none of other lands. The first lunatic asylum ever founded was that at Valencia by Padre Jofre Gilanext, in 1409; three others, at Saragossa, Toledo, and Seville were founded in the fifteenth century. That of Barcelona is said to be now the best public lunatic asylum in Spain. Many others are nearly as good, while one or two of the private asylums near Madrid are excellent; but in some provinces these establishments, both public and private, are still in a very wretched state. Since 1848 there have been a little over 4000 miles of railway laid down in Spain. The principal lines are the two which run from the extreme ends of the French Pyrenees to the capital, connecting Spain with the great European communications. Next in importance are those from the Mediterranean ports Valencia, Alicante, Cartagena, to Madrid; Malaga and Granada are connected with the metropolis by the line from Cadiz. A rather circuitous route by Badajoz, Ciudad Real, and Toledo is the only line at present open to Lisbon, but a more direct one is in course of construction. The communications with the extreme north-west are not yet completed, but the branch of the Great Northern Company from Santander, which brings the products of the Asturian coal-fields to Madrid, is of great importance. Other valuable lines are those of the valley of the Ebro, from Miranda del Ebro by Saragossa to Barcelona. Should any of the schemes projected for a direct route from Paris to Madrid, by any of the central passes of the Pyrenees, through Saragossa, be carried into effect, the line from the latter place to Madrid will be one of considerable traffic. The coast-line from Barcelona to Valencia is of great value to one of the richest wine and fruit districts of Spain. Shorter lines, which may have a considerable influence on the welfare of the country, are those which connect the great mineral fields with the chief lines of transport or with the nearest port. It has been remarked that hitherto, with some exceptions, Spanish railways have had less influence in developing local traffic than those of any other European country. The Great Northern lines, too, have suffered seriously from interruptions caused by civil war, by floods, and other accidents since 1868. The total length of the telegraph lines is nearly 10,000 miles. The number of public offices is 324, of private, 12; the telegrams despatched amounted in 1877 to 2,023,579, of which about half were private despatches for the interior. The expenses of working were 165,076_l._, and the receipts 156,950_l._, leaving a deficit of 8126_l._ The number of post-offices in 1877 was 2530, of letters 78,446,000; postal cards, 1,040,000; newspapers, 38,479,000; books and samples, 5,767,000. To Great Britain were despatched, in 1879: Letters and postal cards, 1,083,000; books, &c., 317,900; total, 1,400,900. From Great Britain: Letters and postal cards, 931,100; books, &c., 646,100; total, 1,577,200. The receipts from the post-office in 1877 were 361,704_l._, while the expenditure was 297,412_l._, leaving a surplus of 64,292_l._ _The Finances of Spain._ The most prominent circumstance in the financial condition of Spain is the startling increase of the public debt since the revolution of 1868. The capital of the debt was then 212,443,600_l._, the interest of which was 5,580,000_l._ The funds, three per cents, were then at 33. In 1880 the capital of the debt amounted to 515,000,000_l._ Since 1870, by abuse of credit, the interest of the debt had been paid from the capital; then one-third of the interest was paid in paper, with a promise to pay the remaining two-thirds in coin; this engagement was soon broken, but the paper was punctually paid until 1874, when the interest of the debt was erased from the budget. In face of the evident bankruptcy of the country, an arrangement was made in 1876 between the Government and the principal foreign fund-holders, by which, from January 1, 1877, to June 30, 1881, inclusive, the interest to be paid on the three per cents was reduced to one per cent., and that on the six per cents to two per cent. From June 30, 1881, to June 30, 1882, one and a quarter per cent. will be paid, and arrangements as to future payments are to be made before the last-mentioned date, and a return to a full interest of three and six per cent. is to follow at fixed periods. The success of the scheme is shown by the fact that in 1876 the three per cents, still nominally paying three per cent. interest, were at 11-1/2; in January, 1881, paying only one per cent. interest, they were quoted at 22; and the six per cents, paying only two per cent. interest, were at 42. From the above statement we may gather some idea of what the civil wars of the republic, the cantonal, Carlist, and Cuban insurrections, joined to the expensive experiments of well-intentioned but inexperienced financiers, in remitting taxes while the public burdens were increasing, have cost the nation. A calm observer, Mr. Phipps, in his official report to the British Government, calculates that from 1868 to 1876 the addition to the debt from these causes amounted to at least 260,000,000_l._, considerably more than the total debt of Spain in 1868. Notwithstanding the plausible balance-sheets annually submitted to Congress, the revenue and expenditure of Spain are still far from being in a satisfactory condition. The writer above quoted states that "enormous deficits in the budgets (however nominally balanced) have been the invariable rule in Spain during a long course of years, under every sort of _régime_ and under all circumstances." In the last budget, 1879-80, the revenue is stated at 32,494,552_l._, and the expenditure at 33,129,484_l._ Supposing these figures to be correct, the deficit, 634,932_l._, would be far less than for many years past. The principal sources of Spanish revenue are, in round numbers:-- Direct Taxes £10,500,000 Indirect ditto 5,500,000 Customs 4,500,000 Stamps and Government Monopolies 9,000,000 National Property 1,750,000 Miscellaneous. 1,000,000 ---------- £32,250,000 Of these the items most foreign to an Englishman's notion of taxation are the produce of the seven great tobacco factories, Seville, Madrid, Santander, Gijon, Corunna, Valencia, and Alicante, of which the net revenue is over 2,500,000_l._, the lotteries, which bring in 5000,000_l._ net, the consumo tax, a kind of octroi, and the territorial tax, which together furnish the largest contribution to the revenue. The national property comprises the Almaden quicksilver-mines, valued at over 250,000_l._ per annum, the Linares mines, leased at 20,000_l._, and other sources about 30,000_l._ annually. The heaviest item in the expenditure is the interest on the national debt, over 11,500,000_l._; the ministry of war and the navy exceeds 6,000,000_l._, while pensions absorb 1,750,000_l._, public works over 3,000,000_l._, finance over 5,000,000_l._, administration of justice more than 2,000,000_l._; the ministry of the interior, Cortés, the civil list, &c., make up the remainder. The total imports and exports of Spain were:-- Imports. Exports. In 1877, £16,340,672 £18,175,140 In 1878, 15,910,016 17,172,596 In 1879, 17,730,756 20,155,964 But of this increased prosperity far more than her share has fallen to France, owing chiefly to its being put in the same category with Germany, Italy, Belgium, and Austria, as _most favoured_ nations, who import their goods under the customs tariff of July 17, 1877, while England and the United States continue-under the old tariff, as _favoured_ nations only. This disproportion will probably be still more marked, owing to the immense importation of Spanish wines into France required to make up for losses by the phylloxera disease; while the exportation of sherry to England has been gradually lessening for some years, and now we take only some 4 per cent, of the quantity, and 12 per cent in value, of the wine exported from Spain. One of our chief imports into Spain, coal, is likely also to diminish, owing to the development of the native coal-fields in the Asturias and in Andalusia. Our other chief exports from Spain in fruits and minerals largely increase. The present wine tariff of England, by which she virtually refuses to purchase the bulk of Spanish wines in their natural state, while importing them largely when mixed with inferior French white wines, and treated as clarets, &c., is felt by Spaniards to be so unfair that, until this system is modified there is little hope of obtaining a better tariff for English manufactures; while the making Gibraltar an immense depôt for a contraband trade is a wrong that rankles in the mind of all southern Spaniards. The decline of the English import trade into Spain would be much more marked but for the immense amount of English capital employed in the larger mining and industrial enterprises. The battle between protection and free trade is not yet fought out in Spain. The manufacturing districts of Catalonia and the east coast clamour loudly for protection, while the mining and agricultural and wine-growing interests demand free trade. It is impossible to say on which side the balance may turn. A conservative Government would probably favour the former, while a liberal ministry might venture upon the latter system. Heavy as the public debt of Spain undoubtedly is, and serious as are the charges imposed upon her by the still unsettled political condition of the country and of its principal colony--Cuba, she might more than pay the interest of her debts at the present rate of interest, and balance the expenditure, but for the administrative corruption and utter want of political morality, the fruit of long years of financial abuses, and which has become almost a fixed habit amongst all classes of the inhabitants. The Government seems to be a mark for fraud to every class, from millionaire bankers and the largest landed proprietors down to the ill-paid _employé_ who ekes out his scanty salary by accepting petty bribes, and the labourer or fisherman on the frontier who never misses the occasion of smuggling. It is easy to prove the truth of these assertions. In 1877, in an official report, Mr. Phipps writes: "A few English, French, and Spanish bankers advance money to Spain, with safe security, on conditions as disastrous to the treasury as they are discreditable to themselves." The territorial tax, which forms one-fourth of the whole internal revenue is notoriously levied on only 54 per cent, of the whole area of the country. In some provinces not two-thirds of the whole is returned at all, and much land that is productive is returned as uncultivated. From the extent of the contraband trade and the corruption of the custom-house officers, the amount levied on imports and exports can hardly be above two-thirds of their proper value. In fact, what Spain needs above everything at present is an honest and impartial administration. The causes of her poverty lie not so much in bad laws or a faulty constitution, but in a corrupt and negligent administration. The system of empleomania, whereby nearly every ill-paid _employé_ is almost forced to pillage, the preference of this ill-paid idleness and of professional poverty to honest toil in trade or agriculture--these are the true foes to the prosperity of Spain. For party and political purposes, taxes are relaxed for those who should bear their equal share of the burden, only to fall with crushing weight on the honest workers, unconnected with, or who refuse to bribe the administration. CHAPTER VII. EDUCATION AND RELIGION. The fame of the Spanish universities has greatly fallen from what it was in the early Middle Ages, when Salamanca ranked with Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, as one of the four great universities in Europe; when its halls were thronged with thousands of eager though needy scholars, and it was the centre whence Semitic learning and civilization spread to the rest of Europe. Even in a later day, in the sixteenth century, under the patronage of Cardinal Ximenes, the university of Alcala de Henares (Complutum) flashed into sudden fame as one of the great offshoots of the Renaissance, with its 7800 students, and its noble production of the first great Polyglot Bible since primitive times. In the eighteenth century, however, this learning had all but disappeared from Spain, and the education given in its universities was all but worthless. Little was effected towards any true revival or improvement until 1845, though something had been attempted before this in secondary education by the successive reforms of 1771, 1807, and especially of 1824 and 1836. The universities of Spain are now ten: Madrid, with 6672 students; Barcelona with 2459; Valencia, 2118; Seville, 1382; Granada, 1225; Valladolid, 880; Santiago de Compostella, 779; Saragossa, 771; Salamanca, 372; and Oviedo with 216: making a total of 16,874 university students. The number of regular professors is 415, with 240 supernumeraries and assistants, making a total of 655; that is, one professor to every 26 students. The salary of the professors varies from 120_l._ to 260_l._ per annum, except in Madrid, where it is from 160_l._ to 300_l._ The budget of the whole universities is a little over 1,000,000_l._, and the expenditure slightly in excess, leaving a deficit in 1879 of 4600_l._. The average cost of each student to the university is a little over 6_l._. Though the above institutions are all classed as universities by the State, yet the course of instruction is by no means the same in all. At Madrid alone the whole programme of university education is followed out. This comprises the faculties of civil, canon, and administrative law, of philosophy and literature, of science, of medicine, and of pharmacy. Since 1868 theology is no longer studied in the universities, but in the seminaries, of which there is one in each diocese, under the direction of the bishop. The total number of pupils studying in these institutions is 8562. At Valladolid are two theological colleges for English, Scotch, and Irish students, established, one at the close of the sixteenth, the other by the Jesuits at the close of the eighteenth century. Law is studied in all the Spanish universities, and medicine in all but one--Oviedo; Madrid, Barcelona, Granada, and Compostella have faculties of pharmacy, under which head a certain amount of natural science is taught; of the exact sciences there are chairs only at Madrid, Barcelona, and Salamanca; philosophy and literature are studied in Madrid, Barcelona, Granada, Salamanca, Seville, and Saragossa. In Oviedo, Santiago, Valencia, Valladolid, only the first year's or preparatory course of law is read, this consists of Latin, general literature, and universal history. Besides these State universities, there are several institutions supported by the provincial deputations; for instance, there is a faculty of medicine in Seville supported by the province, another in Salamanca at the joint expense of the province and of the municipality. In addition to these there are technical schools for the study of special branches of industry or of administration, such as those of roads, canals, and harbours, of mines, and of forests, in Madrid and Villa Viciosa. A school of industrial engineering, and of the application of chemistry and mechanics, is working at Barcelona. There are technical schools of commerce at Madrid and at Barcelona. Schools or colleges of veterinary science are to be found in Madrid, Saragossa, Cordova, and Leon. Naval schools are established in Santa Cruz (Teneriffe), in Palma (Majorca), in Masnou (Barcelona), in San Sebastian, supported by the funds of the provinces; there is also one at Gijon, in the Asturias, founded by Jovellanos; two other private foundations also exist at Lequeito and Santurce in Biscay. In Madrid there is a special school of architecture, and also one of painting, sculpture, and engraving. Excellent schools of the fine arts exist in Barcelona, Cadiz, Corunna, Granada, Malaga, Oviedo, Seville, Valencia, Valladolid, Saragossa, and at Palma in the Balearic Isles; this last is remarkable for the number of its pupils and its generally flourishing condition. In each of the forty-nine provinces of Spain are institutions of superior or secondary education. With the exception of the institutes of Cardinal Cisneros and of San Isidro at Madrid, which depend on the Government, and which hold the first and third rank as to the number of their pupils, these institutions are supported by the funds of the provinces or municipalities, but the professors are nominated by the Government; besides those in the capital of each province, there are also 11 others in various large towns in Spain. There are also 356 colleges of secondary education affiliated to the institutes, 58 of which are under religious corporations, making a total of 417 establishments of secondary education, with 2730 professors who have all taken degrees in science or literature. The institutes give instruction to 14,872 pupils, and the colleges to almost the same number, 14,290; home or private education absorbs 4476; making a total in 1880 of 33,638; more than three times the number in 1848, and, including the episcopal seminaries, giving one pupil to every 398 inhabitants. All these pupils are admitted to the official examinations, and take their degrees equally on passing them. It is found that 13 per cent of the candidates are rejected at the examinations, 43.8 per cent. simply pass, and 43.1 gain honours of various kinds; while 9 per cent. take the degree of Bachelor from the colleges, and 37.2 proceed to take it from the universities. The salary of the masters is from 120_l._ to 180_l._ (except in Madrid where it is from 160_l._ to 220_l._), with a right to a portion of the fees for matriculation and degrees. The supernumerary masters receive 60_l._ in Madrid and 40_l._ in the provinces; auxiliary masters are unpaid. Pensions of 20_l._ are sometimes given to poor but distinguished pupils. The cost of all the institutes is 118,935_l._, the income, 44,818_l._, leaving a deficit of 74,117_l._ to be supplied either by the State, the provinces, or the municipalities. The course of instruction is two-fold, general and special. The general comprises: Spanish and Latin grammar, two courses; rhetoric and poetry, geography, history of Spain, universal history, psychology, logic and ethics, arithmetic and algebra, geometry and trigonometry, physics and the elements of chemistry, natural history, physiology and hygiene, and elementary agriculture. The special courses are those of agriculture, the fine arts, manufactures and commerce. Of public schools of primary instruction there are about 23,000 of all grades and classes, 1308 are infant schools and 1400 are for male and 100 for female adults. The great drawback in the higher education of Spain is the disproportionate number of students in law, medicine, or pharmacy, in comparison with the few who cultivate the special branches of agriculture, industrial or commercial science. Hence the former professions are overstocked, with results productive of far-reaching evils to the country and to the administration. Notwithstanding its far inferior population the number of students in Spain who take their degrees in law and medicine is almost treble that of France and of Germany, while the total of degrees conferred in all the faculties of Spain is equal to that of France, which has double the population. Nothing more plainly shows the character of the people, and the mischief of "_empleomania_" than such a fact in a country whose natural riches in agriculture and mining are so great and so little developed, where there is so large a field for industrial enterprises of many kinds, and where the fruits of all these are at present almost wholly reaped by foreigners. The primary education of Spain, though nominally everywhere alike, is really so very varied as to defy any average description. A few of her infant schools are equal to the best of those of other countries. Where the provincial deputations or the municipalities take an interest in education the primary schools are very fair, but in other parts the education is little more than nominal, and the schoolmaster's appointment is well-nigh a sinecure both in pay and labour; and probably at the present moment, notwithstanding the great improvements of late years, two-thirds of the people can still neither read nor write. _Church and Religion._ From the time of the OEcumenical Council of Nicea, A.D. 325, with the brief exception of the reigns of the Arian Visigoth kings, Spain has been the champion of orthodoxy in religion. From early times too the demarcation between Church and State has been less marked, or rather the influence of the former over the latter has been more constant and more powerful, than in perhaps any other European kingdom. The great councils of Toledo were scarcely more ecclesiastical than civil assemblies. The recognition of the sovereign, the order of succession, the validity of the laws, were either settled or sanctioned therein. Later, in the great struggle with the Moors, through the antagonism of exclusive beliefs, the war assumed the character of a religious crusade. The semi-monastic Spanish military orders, the preaching of the monks, the sanction and the bulls of the Popes--auxiliaries which the kings of Spain were forced to summon to their aid--gave a complexion to the conquest and to the national character quite different to what might have been the case had the contest been fought out by the sovereign, the lay warriors, and the civil power alone. Thus the triumph of the Christian over the Moor became in some sort also the triumph of the Roman over the national Spanish Church. The Mozarabic liturgy gave way to that of Rome. The peculiar institution of the inquisition, following on that of the Santa Hermandad in civil matters, developed in Spain a degree of power to which it never attained in other lands. The certainty and the secrecy of its proceedings, the mingled pomp and horror of its "autos de fe," the whispers and the shudder with which men told of the tortures of its hidden processes, deeply impressed and captivated the imagination of a people singularly greedy of, and susceptible to, strong and vivid emotions. The chivalrous respect for women, heightened by the reserve and half-seclusion which the Spanish knights had learned from the Moors, was transformed in the sphere of religion into an almost ardent passion of devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Centuries before the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was proclaimed by Pius IX. the cry of the Spanish beggar heard at every door throughout her vast dominions was, "Ave Maria purisima, sin pecádo concebida." Spain had been the champion of Christendom against the Jews and against the Moors; she had without remorse violated every compact she had sworn with the latter, and she became equally the champion of Roman Catholicism against the Reformation. Though Philip II. failed in his great armed struggle with the northern powers, and wasted and destroyed therein all the real resources of Spain, yet Spanish theologians were among the most eloquent and the most learned in the Council of Trent; and it was the Jesuits of Spain who headed the reaction of the seventeenth century, and who won back all but the Teutonic and Scandinavian races to the allegiance of Rome. This glory of Catholicism is never absent from the heart of a Spaniard. His whole literature is steeped in it; it inspires Spain's greatest painters. It is this deep but unconscious feeling that Protestanism is un-Spanish which is the real stronghold of Catholicism in Spain, and which, in spite of spoliation and political subjection, still gives the clerical party there a greater power than they possess in other countries. Yet the few Spaniards who embraced the reformed doctrines in the sixteenth century were not inferior to those of other lands in earnestness, in learning, in eloquence, or in high position, both in Church and State. There was just a moment when the court of Charles V. hovered on the verge of protest against Rome. When, as before related, the liberties of Spain fell beneath the iron rule of the Austrian sovereigns, it was the Church, by the hand of one of its greatest ornaments, Cardinal Ximenes, which became the willing instrument of despotism. In return for the servility of the court, and the presence and the sanction of the sovereign at the "autos," the inquisition lent its aid to the monarchy, and its assistance was called in to suppress the trade in horses, so senselessly forbidden, on the northern frontier. In the seventeenth century, however, the Spanish court fell under the influence of the French encyclopædists. The Jesuits were banished in 1767. We need not detail again the various vicissitudes of the abolition and re-establishment of the inquisition, of the suppression of tithes, of the sale of Church property, the destruction of the monasteries, and the exile of the monks, the effects of which have been sufficiently indicated above. [Illustration: VESPERS.] Since the Concordat of 1851, Spain is ruled ecclesiastically by nine archbishops; those of Toledo (the primate of all Spain), Burgos, Saragossa, Tarragona, Valencia, Granada, Seville, Valladolid, and Compostella, under whom are forty-six bishops, with their chapters, and about 35,000 clergy. The mode of episcopal appointment is this: the king presents three names to the Pope, of which his Holiness selects one, who is forthwith nominated to the vacant see. Since 1868, theological education is entirely under the hands of the bishops, who have a seminary in each diocese. The clergy are paid by the State; but the stipends of the country priests are said to be frequently in arrear. In some parts of Spain, as in the manufacturing towns of Barcelona, religion has to a great extent lost its hold upon the people; in other parts, as in the Basque Provinces, the majority are still devout. Since 1871 a reaction from extremes of scepticism and advanced socialistic views is manifest in many of the most popular writers. A small but increasing body of Protestants has been established since 1868; but the vicissitudes of revolution and reaction, and the present ambiguous state of the law have acted unfavourably on the movement. The pastors have honourably distinguished themselves by their zeal for the education of the classes utterly neglected by the dominant Church. On the whole, the clerical party in Spain, considered as a political body, seems gradually sinking into a like condition to that of France. It is powerful enough to thwart and check the policy of its opponents, but impotent to carry out its own measures. The extreme Ultramontane party, for whom the Comte de Chambord is too liberal and Pope Leo XIII. too comprehensive, has lately adopted the banner of the Carlists. Whatever the future of Spain may be, it is not probable that the Church will ever attain again the political influence and the exclusive control of education which it possessed in the past, in spite of the undoubted talents and virtues of many of its upholders. CHAPTER VIII. LITERATURE AND THE ARTS. Though one of the most interesting countries of Europe with regard to architecture, Spain can lay claim to no style peculiar to itself, or that originated wholly within the Peninsula. It contains, however, noble specimens of art and architecture of very varied epochs and character, from the work of the unknown sculptors who carved the so-called "toros" of Guisando and erected the huge dolmens and other megalithic monuments so thickly strewed over its soil, to the architects and artists of the present day. Almost all the races which have trodden the land have left monuments upon it--the Carthaginians, perhaps, the fewest. Scarcely anywhere else does the solid, practical character of Roman architecture appear more fully than in the amphitheatres, aqueducts, and especially in the bridges of Spain. The amphitheatres, temples, and walls of Murviedro (Saguntum), Tarragona, Toledo, Coria, Plasencia; the aqueducts of Merida, Seville, and Segovia; the bridges of Tuy over the Minho, of Zamora over the Douro, Salamanca over the Tormes, of Alcantara, Garrovillas de Alconetar, and Puente del Arzobispo over the Tagus, of Merida and Medellin over the Guadiana, of Seville, Cordova, and Ubeda over the Guadalquiver, and of Lerida over the Segre, are noble relics of Roman work. Of the period when Roman art was gradually modified under Christian influences, and the basilica was transformed into the Christian church, very few remains exist. To the Vandal and Gothic conquerors belong part of the walls of Toledo, and a few chapels and small churches in the north and north-west may belong in part to this date (417-717); but the most peculiar artistic remains of this period are the jewellers' and goldsmiths' work, preserved in the metal crowns and treasure of Guarrazar (624-672), of a style which, though probably derived from the East through Byzantium, continued to influence Spanish goldsmiths' work down to the eleventh century. [Illustration: GIRALDA OF SEVILLE. _Page 197._] The architecture and art of the race that succeeded to the Visigoths is of much more notable character. The civil and religious architecture of the Spanish Arabs is well worthy of most careful study, and is a grand example of the artistic talent of a race which, though debarred by its religious faith from the reproduction of human, or even of animal form, and delighting neither in the scenes of the theatre or the circus, has yet left masterpieces of architectural beauty in lands so wide apart as Spain, Egypt, Persia, and Hindostan. The architecture of the Arabs in Spain may be roughly divided into three periods: The first, from the eighth to the tenth century, tells most clearly of its origin as an imitation or modification of the Byzantine style; its masterpiece is the Mosque of Cordova. The second period, from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, shows the architects seeking their real style--it is a period of transition; its finest erection is the Giralda of Seville. The third period is when the Moorish style acquired its fullest development in the glorious Alhambra, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Contemporary with the last period is the Mudejar style, the modification which Arabic art underwent in the hands of the Christian conquerors. To this belong the Alcazar of Seville, 1353; the Mudejar gates of Toledo and Saragossa, and the Chapel of St. James in Alcala de Henares. In their domestic architecture the Arabs alone have almost solved the problem how to unite ventilation and ornament by means of currents of air of different temperatures. The pendulous stucco fretwork by which they conceal the angles of their apartments serves not only for ornament but to equalize the temperature and to admit of concealed openings whereby air can penetrate without draught or chill. The sense of true harmony of colour seems to be an intuitional gift of Oriental races, and is practically understood by them as it never has been by any other. The Mosaics of Greece and Rome, and those of mediæval Italy, in their storied designs, appeal more to the intellect; but those of Arabic art rest and charm the eye by the purity and harmonious blending of tone as do none other. In spite of some apparent exceptions, and those of the earliest date, as the Mosque of Cordova (788), and the cloisters of Tayloon at Cairo (879), Arabic architecture, like Grecian, depended for its effect more on the exquisite symmetry and exact proportion of all details to a consummate whole, than to impressions of awe derived from vast size or immense solidity. It is thus that the massive Roman arch became moulded into the light horse-shoe shape, peculiar to the Spanish Arabs from the eighth to the tenth centuries. The originality of this architecture is not, however, so great as appears at first sight. The influence of Byzantine architecture and of that of the Christian churches with which the Arabs had become acquainted during their conquests, and of constant accessions from Oriental art, can be clearly traced therein. But in Spain there is perhaps a juster proportion, a greater variety and richness of ornamentation and colour than is to be found elsewhere. The grandest of Moorish buildings in Spain is undoubtedly one of the earliest, the great Mosque of Cordova, with its forest of 1200 columns, its fifty-seven naves, nineteen gates, and upwards of 4000 lamps, recalling the impression produced by the Egyptian hall of Karnac at Thebes,--an impression so vivid that even the iconoclast emperor, Charles V., whose own palace mars the beauty of the Alhambra, rebuked the Archbishop of Cordova for destroying what he never could replace, when he cut away some of the columns to make room for a Christian chapel. Not less beautiful in their graceful proportions than the Campanile of Italy are the minarets and towers of Arabian art in Spain, as the Giralda of Seville and others; even the quaintness of the leaning tower of Pisa finds its counterpart in the leaning tower of Saragossa. The Moorish gates of Toledo, of Seville, and the Alcazar of Segovia show how castellated strength may be wedded to artistic elegance; but the most perfect union at once of fortress and of palace is to be found in the noble group of buildings known as the Alhambra, on the hill of Granada. Though trembling on the verge of debasement when the severer forms of Arabian art were beginning to admit the representation of animal shapes, whose rude sculpture forms a contrast to the exquisite correctness of the alphabetic and geometrical designs which ornament the walls, these buildings may yet be regarded as marking the culmination of Moorish art. The fertility of decorative design, the exquisite use made of Arabic lettering, and the simple yet subtle forms of geometrical interlacing--apparently most fantastic, yet really ever subordinated to a just proportion with the whole--these are a theme of wondering admiration to every student. A whole grammar of ornament might be illustrated by examples taken from these buildings alone. The architecture of the houses of the Moorish aristocracy which still remain in Seville, Granada, Toledo, and Saragossa is wonderfully adapted both to the necessities of the climate and to domestic ornament. In the more northern examples the open galleries, in the more southern the flat roof, of the apartments surrounding the inner quadrangle make a delightful resort in the cool of the day; while the court or _patio_ itself, with its fountains and shade, its flowers and creepers and odoriferous shrubs, its mingled play of light and colour, through which the delicate grace of ornament is seen uninjured by the dust and contact with the outside traffic, appears to the northern tourist almost like one of the fairy homes of which his ancestors dreamed, and which have been described to him in many a legend, as a thing too lovely to be gazed upon by mortal eyes unless unsealed. [Illustration: MOORISH ORNAMENTATION.] The influence and the impress of Arabian art was not confined in Spain to mosques or to buildings consecrated to the use of Mohammedans alone. Some of the most beautiful specimens of this architecture were erected for Christians or for Jews. Arabic inscriptions used as ornaments are still to be seen on the altar of the Cathedral of Gerona, in the Shrine of San Isidore at Leon; Arabic architecture is seen in the palace of the archbishops of Toledo, in a chapel in Alcala de Henares, and in more than one synagogue of the Jews. Christian bishops used as episcopal seals rings on which were engraved the praises of Allah. Long after the conquest of the great cities of the centre and of the south, Moorish and Mudejar architects were retained in the pay of Christian monarchs to keep in repair the cathedrals and palaces, the beauty of whose architecture the Christians could appreciate but could not imitate, much less surpass. It is this fact, and the mingling of style and ideas consequent thereon, which gives its sole peculiar characteristic to Spanish art. Meanwhile, contemporaneously with the flourishing period of Arabian art in the south, a Christian architecture, strikingly in contrast from its poverty of style and of invention, was slowly being reconstructed in the north. Of the eighth century we have the crypt of the Church of Santa Cruz, at Cangas in the Asturias, and some remains in parts of the churches of Oviedo. To the tenth century belong parts of the Church of San Pablo at Barcelona, and other Catalan churches, with here and there a chapel in the Western Pyrenees. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries the more important churches of Northern Spain were almost reproductions of those of Southern France; the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostella is almost a copy of the Church of St. Sernin at Toulouse; but the Romanesque (semi-Byzantine) style lingered somewhat longer in Spain than in the neighbouring country, and especially in North-eastern Spain. In the twelfth century edifices of real beauty are beginning to be built; such are the cloisters of Tarragona and the cathedrals of Lerida and of Tudela. The cathedrals of Avila and Siguenza are of more native Spanish character; while those of Toledo, Burgos, and Leon show the influence of French artists in their general plan, but with an added ornamentation derived from the richer and more florid fancy of the south. Of these perhaps Leon is the noblest and Burgos the richest example in Spain. Segovia, Salamanca, and Seville, of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, are the latest of the great Gothic churches of Spain, before the rise of the Renaissance. Nowhere had the classical revival in architecture more influence than in Spain. The almost exclusive type of church which, both in Spain and in her vast colonies, is pointed out as the Spanish church, is that either of the Renaissance or of the styles which have sprung from it. This soon became fashionable, but its semi-pagan additions frequently harmonize but ill with the deeper religious feeling of the preceding styles. Still it has many fine examples; the works of Berruguete and Herrera are well worthy of study. The Escorial, the work of the latter, is redeemed from ugliness or meanness by the noble proportions of its central chapel and pantheon. But to this semi-classical style succeeded, in the eighteenth century, the Churrigueresque, the most debased of all styles, wherein plaster took the place of sculpture, sham that of reality, and masses of gilding and an incongruous medley of meaningless ornament concealed the blunders in proportion and poverty of idea. The adoption of this style by the Jesuits procured its prevalence in many districts of Spain and of her colonies; occasionally the size of the buildings constructed gives a certain grandeur and hides the debasement of the methods. The domestic, palatial, and castellated architecture of Spain has little peculiar beyond what has been already indicated. The royal palace at Madrid, however, is one of the most successful architectural efforts of the eighteenth century. The sculptured coats of arms on mean dwellings are perhaps the most notable distinction of Spanish houses. Traces of the influence of Moorish traditions may not unfrequently be observed. In the north, the cottages and farms of the Basques, with overhanging roofs and wooden galleries, recall in some degree those of Switzerland; in the south the iron bars or rails (rejas) before the lower windows, and the lattices (celosias) in the upper stories tell of insecurity and of habits of almost Oriental seclusion of women. Finer even than the architecture and the exterior of the buildings is the church furniture in Spain. It is unsurpassed for beauty and interest. The carved and sculptured wood-work in some of the cathedrals is finer than even that of the Netherlands and of Germany. The storied screens and choir stalls at Toledo; the retablos of Gerona and Salamanca, of Avila and Seville; the choir fittings of Santiago, Zamora, and of Burgos; the lecterns and pulpits both of brass and wood; and the rails and gates and screens of noblest metal-work are often of simply grand proportion; nay, even the polychrome wooden statues in the churches will often be found to be of rarest beauty. The monuments erected to the memory of the dead are equal to anything which affection and piety have raised elsewhere, from that of Archbishop Maurice at Burgos, in the thirteenth century--of the tombs of the constable and of those of Juan II. and Isabel of Portugal, in the Cartuja de Miraflores, of the fifteenth century; and that of Prince Juan, the only son of Ferdinand and Isabella, at Avila, erected in 1497--down to the noble mausoleum of inlaid metal-work by Zuloaga, lately placed in the Church of the Atocha to the memory of Prim. In these and many more, Spain can show a sequence able to vie with that of any other land. Hardly less beautiful are the minor accessories of Catholic worship; the gold and silver smiths' work of the chandeliers, the jewelled work of crosses, custodias or shrines, and sacred vessels is often worthy of admiration. In all such works of art, before the pillage of the French in the war of liberation, and the destruction of the convents, Spain was probably one of the richest of Christian lands. If we seem to insist too much on ecclesiastical art in Spain, it is because, as we shall see still more clearly in the case of painting, art has here concentrated its choicest effort on religious subjects, and in them has won its greatest triumphs. Except, perhaps, in arms and in porcelain, in portrait-painting and in furniture, all the masterpieces of Spanish art are in some sense ecclesiastical. Take away religion from her art, how poor would be the residue, for even Arabian and Moslem art in Spain were essentially religious. _Painting._ Though Spain cannot rival some other countries, Italy for example, in the number of her great painters; though she has founded no great technical school; yet is she worthy of greatest admiration; in one or two of her artists she has attained the very highest rank. As a religious painter, especially in expressing in form and colour the heights of mystic ecstasy, Murillo stands unrivalled. As a portrait-painter of courtly grace and distinction, Velazquez has few equals. It is not in landscape, or as interpreters of the ever-varying beauty of external nature, that Spanish painters excel, but in the delineation of the human form, and especially in the rendering of those religious emotions which lead through asceticism to ecstasy. Not the glorification of merely sensuous beauty, but the triumphs of the spirit over the flesh are the conquests which they prefer to delineate. Spanish painters may be divided among three great provinces: the Valencian, Andalusian, and Castilian schools. Of these the Andalusian, and especially the school of Seville, has produced by far the greatest artists. The earliest specimens of Spanish painting are of the decorative kind, and are employed in subordination to architecture, to add colour to form, and to heighten and make more evident the details of sculpture in churches or convents. Much of this phase of art, in which they stand very high, they probably learned from the Moors. From these labours in churches and convents art in Spain received a religious imprint and direction which it has never lost, and from which it is only now turning in the present generation. Goya and Fortuny are perhaps the only considerable painters of Spain in whose works religious subjects do not preponderate. Spanish art reflects in a peculiar degree the characteristic of Spanish theology. The mystic grace, the transport of love which seems almost too human and tender when fixed on the Divine, which moves us in the writings of St. Teresa, St. Juan de la Cruz, Xavier, and others, touches us no less in the pictures of Murillo. Stern and sombre, as these are lovely, are the paintings which remind us that we are in the land of the inquisition. Figures of martyrs serene in tortures, whose horrors are laid bare as by no other artists, figures of saints of primitive, mediæval, or of later times, who have carried asceticism to excess, portraits of men who were as severe to themselves as they were pitiless to others; such are the subjects which are faithfully rendered by the pencils of Ribalta, Ribera, Zurbaran, and many others. Later on, when the old constitutional liberties of Spain had almost utterly fallen, and when the worship of the king had begun almost to rival that of the Blessed Virgin, Velazquez and others give us portraits of the royal family of Spain. The fun and wit which really existed in Spanish life, and which her novelists have depicted with such relish in innumerable novels, is but poorly represented in Spanish art by any of her great masters. Murillo's beggar-boys are almost the only pictures which answer to the "picaresque" side of Spanish literature till the advent of Goya and of Fortuny. The expressions of the plastic arts of Spain are neither so idealized as the Italian, nor so intellectual as the German, nor so sensuous as the Flemish, nor so realistic as those of the Dutch school; but they are far more powerful in colouring and truer and deeper in feeling than are those of the French school. The Spaniard painted the types and characters of his native land, but he delighted to throw around them the magic lights that never were on sea or land; through the intense darkness of his asceticism ever peers a ray of heavenly light; but the type of the figure is ever Spanish; never, in the best days of art, was inspiration sought from a reproduction of the forms of pagan classical ism, or from a mere eclecticism of beauty. Though the drawing is correct, we feel that it has not been learned from a mere study of ancient statuary or from anatomical preparations, but from the living type and figure. Here and there we find painters like Juande Joannes (Vicente Macip) and Domenico Theotocopuli (El Greco), who might have lived on Italian soil; but generally the tone of Spanish painters is local and unmistakable. Through all his styles--the _frio_ (cold), _calido_ (warm), and the _vaporoso_ (mystic)--Murillo remained faithful to Spanish, nay, to Andalusian models; none can mistake his saints and virgins, his boys and beggars, as belonging to any other race. He does not tell the wondrous story of the Incarnation with so grand an appeal to the intellect as do the Italian painters. The "woman blessed throughout all generations" does not look out to us from his canvas from the serene heights of perfect woman-hood which has found its crown in the mystery of the Motherhood of the Son of God, but in younger and more girlish forms he paints for us the maiden rapt in adoring ecstasy as she experiences the wonders of love divine, bathed in the golden light of a rapture which none but the very purest can ever feel, and which the very angels are represented as reverencing. Space forbids our giving even an approximate catalogue of Spanish painters; we can merely single out for mention the two or three of highest rank in their respective provinces. In Valencia we have Ribalta (1551-1628), Juan de Joames (Vicente Macip) (1523-79), and the great but gloomy Ribera (1588-1609). To this school also belong the artists of Catalonia and of the Balearic Isles. In Castile are Navarette (El Mudo) (1526-79), Morales (1509-86), Theotocopuli (El Greco) (died 1578), and the younger Herrera (died 1686). But the greatest painters are from Andalusia and from Seville. The well-known names of Herrera the Elder (1576-1656), Zurbaran (1598-1662), Murillo (1618-82), Velazquez (1623-60), suffice to show its pre-eminence. The eighteenth century, in art as well as in literature, was a time of utter decadence; Goya (1746-1820), the caricaturist, is the only artist we need mention; but, like its literature, Spanish art is now at length rising from its long sleep. Fortuny (1838-74), has made himself a European reputation; though, through his early death, the pictures he has left give promise only of what his future might have been. Rosales (1840-73), though less known by foreigners, is of equal, if not of greater merit; like Fortuny, he died in his early prime. Madrazo, Jimenez, Fradilla, and others, though not of more than national reputation, yet prove that art is not extinct in Spain. In what have been called the industrial arts Spain was formerly very rich, and, but for the wretched economical policy and administration of the Government since the seventeenth century, would probably have held her own against other countries. The gold and silver ornaments still worn by the peasantry in a few districts perpetuate designs and methods of workmanship originally derived from the Moors, and much of the church work is still of great excellence. No less beautiful is the iron-work, in which a grand effect is often produced by simply noble proportions in the gates, _rejas_, and screens of her cathedrals and churches; and in another sphere, in the manufacture of arms, and of inlaying steel or iron with arabesque patterns of gold and silver, an art which has been lately revived with great success in Biscay and the Basque Provinces. In porcelain and pottery the majolica ware, made at Valencia, was renowned throughout Europe; and the Moorish glazed and lustred ware, the manufacture of which remained a secret till the present century, is greatly sought after by amateurs. The wine-jars (_tinajas_ and _alpujarras_), the porous pottery (_bucaros_), the _azulejos_ or decorated tiles, continue traditions originally derived through the Arabs from the East, but which had almost expired when the manufacture was faintly revived under royal patronage in the times of Charles III., to start again on a stronger life with the aid of English capital in our own times. Spanish glass is sometimes curious, and much of the stained and painted windows in the cathedrals is excellent, especially that of Toledo and of Leon; but this art was undoubtedly learned from foreign workmen, and only became naturalized in Spain. Of carvings in wood and marble and ivory we have already sufficiently spoken. In textile fabrics and embroidery, especially in lace, Spain was formerly very rich. The mantillas of the ladies, the dresses of the sacred images, the copes of the clergy, gave full opportunity for the production of this fabric; but the chief effort is now directed to the manufacture of the best foreign laces, all of which are most successfully imitated by hand-workers in Valencia and Murcia, where they can be produced at a lower cost than is possible in colder and more northern climes. Everything in Spain, even the common use of colour and of flowers by the Andalusian peasants, shows a natural feeling for art; and its production is hindered more by indolence, and by the mischievous economical conditions of almost all Spanish industry, than by any want of talent in the native workman or artisan. Though, perhaps, there is no country in Europe in which music is more appreciated or practised than in Spain, it is singular that she has produced no really great master. She has many composers of "zarzuelas," a species of lighter opera; her traditional dance and ballad tunes are some of the most inspiriting possible; and her guitar playing is renowned, but more for the romantic sentiment of the words and the occasion on which it is used than for the music itself. Well-nigh the only name for which even Spaniards claim equality with the great European masters in serious music is that of Don Manuel Doyague, of Salamanca (1755-1842). His _Miserere_, _Te Deum_, and various _Masses_ are said to equal those of any master of his time. _Literature._ It is not necessary to repeat here what has been said above on the Spanish authors who wrote during the silver age of Latin literature, or to trace again the origin of the Spanish language. It is evident that all we can do is to give a very brief sketch of Spanish literature. This literature is, perhaps, the richest in Europe in ballads and romances, and these, which make one of its chief glories, are among its earliest monuments. While the "Chanson de Roland" and other "Chansons de Gestes" were being written in Northern France in the form of continuous epic poems, Spain was celebrating her hero--the Cid--in a series of ballads. These, if united, would tell almost the whole story of his life; but each could be sung or recited alone as a separate and complete poem. This form of verse continued for many ages to be the favourite literature of the common people, and attained a development in Spain beyond that which it did in any other land. For spontaneity, for movement, for grace of expression, for sudden turns from martial ardour to the most pathetic tenderness, the Spanish ballad is unrivalled. It embraces and handles with almost equal success the most varied subjects: war and chivalry and love, patriotism, wit, amusement, and religion, have all been treated of in these romances, and the collections of each kind would fill many volumes. The first prose works in the Spanish language seem to have been a translation of the Bible, under Alphonse X., and of two codes of law, the "Fuero Juzgo" and "Las Siete Partidas," in the middle of the thirteenth century. It seems to have been almost by accident that Alfonzo wrote in the dialect of Leon and Castile in preference to that of Galicia and Portugal. Had he chosen the latter, probably Portuguese would have become the language of the whole Peninsula. Under his reign, too, may have been commenced the first history written in Spanish, "La Gran Conquista de Ultramar," telling the story of the Crusades, with many romantic episodes. The next production that calls for remark is the epic of Alexander the Great, by J. L. Segura, of the latter part of the same century. This poem gives the name "Alexandrine" to all European verse written in the same metre. In the early part of the fourteenth century we have a collection of tales, with morals attached, called "El Conde Lucanor," by Don Juan Manuel, nephew of Alphonse X. (1282-1347); and Alfonso XI. continues the list of royal authors with a "Libro de la Monteria,", or treatise on hunting. The arch-priest of Hita, Juan Ruiz (1330-43), about the same time took up the strain of love and war in a romance of mingled prose and verse, entitled "Guerras Civiles de Granada." In the latter half of the fifteenth century we meet with a remarkable production, the tragi-comedy of Celestina, which, in its two-fold character of novel and of drama, has been the parent of a double offspring, both of the comedy and of the _picaresque_ novel of Spain. The Spanish rogue, at least in fiction, has been said to be the only amusing rogue in Europe. The chief representations of him in literature are in the novel of "Lazarillo de Tormes" (1554), by Hurtado de Mendoza; "Guzman de Alfarache" (1599), by Mateo Aleman; and "La Picara Justina" (1605), by the Dominican monk, Andreas Perez. The whole series of these works culminated in a masterpiece, "Gil Blas," written, not by a Spaniard, but by the Frenchman Lesage, in 1668; perhaps the most graphic description of the manners of another nation ever written by a foreigner. The serious drama in Spain arose, probably, like that of other European nations, from the mysteries and moralities of the Middle Ages, such as are still continued to be performed occasionally at Elche and in other districts. In the "Autos" of Calderon and others it bore clear marks of this origin to a later date than any other contemporary drama. The first plays of any consequence we hear of are those of Lope de Rueda (1544-67), who, both as actor and as author, was greatly admired by Cervantes. From him the Spanish drama, like the almost contemporary Elizabethan drama in England, sprang at once to its full height. Cervantes, in his tragedies "Los Baños de Argel," and in "El trato de Argel" in which he described incidents in his own captivity, and in the "Numancia," telling the story of the siege by the Romans, imitated and surpassed his friend. In lighter pieces, comedies and _entremeses_, he was less successful. Almost coeval with Cervantes is Lope de Vega (1562-1635), perhaps the most prolific dramatic writer of any value that ever lived. His pieces are numbered at from 1500 to 2000, and the best of these are equal, if not superior, to those of Calderon in delineation of character and in plot, and are inferior only in poetical merit. We can only mention Tirso de Molina (1588-1648), Montahran (1602-38), and Ruiz de Alarcon (died 1639) as dramatists of merit, whose best pieces, especially those of the latter, approach very nearly to those of Lope and of Calderon. Calderon de la Barca (1600-81), with the German, Göthe, is the only dramatist of modern Europe who has been seriously put forward as a rival, or even superior, to Shakspere. This we think to be a mistake; in rich poetical imagery, in gorgeousness of fancy, in harmony of verse, in stately dignity, in depth of religions feeling, in knowledge of stage effect--in all these things he may be compared to our English master; but he is very far inferior to him in width of sympathy, in wit and rollicking fun, or in thoughtful humour; his comedy will not bear comparison with that of Shakspere; but he falls most short in his delineation of individual character. In comparison with Shakspere's, his figures are but well-dressed puppets compared to living men and women; not one of them lingers in the memory like a person whom we have known. We remember Calderon's verses, we revel in his splendid poetry, but we utterly forget who it is that utters these dazzling strains. Calderon's dramas and comedies are reckoned at 120, and his Autos, religious or sacramental pieces, generally performed by religious or civil corporations in the open air, are numbered at about seventy. In these plays abstract qualities take the place of living personages, and it is perhaps the greatest proof of Calderon's genius that he has by his brilliant poetry and serene religious feeling made some of even these acceptable to a modern reader. But while the drama and comedy and the picaresque novel had been thus developing themselves, a whole literature of quite a different kind had sprung up into favour, flourished, and died away. This consisted of the prose books of chivalry, and of the pastoral romances both in prose and verse. They are remembered now chiefly through mention of them in the pages of the immortal work, the "Don Quixote," of Cervantes, which crushed them for ever. The most celebrated of them was the "Amadis de Gaul," written probably at the end of the fourteenth century. The imitations of it were innumerable, each more wild, extravagant, more insipid, and in worse taste than the last. Of the pastoral romances the only one we need to note is the "Diana Enamorada," of Montemayor (1520-61), and perhaps the most successful after this is the "Galatea," of Cervantes himself, who could never entirely shake off the influence of the writings he delighted to satirize, and of which he was the literary executioner. The one Spanish book which has become really European, in a degree which has been attained by no other purely secular work, is the "Don Quixote" of this author (1547-1616). Into this extraordinary production, under the guise of the adventures of his hero, the last of the knights-errant, with his squire, Sancho Panza--a story full of mirth, incident, and humour--Cervantes has put all the wisdom which, by his observation on mankind and literature, he had collected during a singularly varied life as writer, soldier, seaman, Algerine slave, poet, and man of business. Though hardly belonging to the school of the classical Renaissance, yet we see in Cervantes a specimen of the marked and distinguishing excellence of the men at that time--the width of their sympathies; so that each more eminent man seemed to contain in himself an epitome of the experience of mankind. It is, perhaps, to this many-sidedness of his experience, and of his culture, that is owing the genial character, the pathetic humour, and the total absence of bitterness in this masterly satire. Thus Cervantes, while laughing down and extinguishing for ever the absurdities of the chivalrous and pastoral romances, yet retains his sympathy for all that was really noble, though exaggerated, in them. His "Don Quixote," though moving irrepressible laughter, will for ever remain one of the choicest representations of a brave, pure-minded, honourable gentleman, and tears of pity for him are not far distant from our smiles at his quaint insanities. Since the days of Cervantes one kind only of the chivalrous romances has really survived in literature, and that is the historical romance, of which the "Guerras Civiles de Granada" of the arch-priest Hita, mentioned above, is so good an example. Another satirist, less known than Cervantes, to whom his life bears some resemblance, Quevedo y Villegas (1580-1645), is even a more versatile writer. In prose and verse his writings are very numerous, but his style, learned and obscure, often laboured in the extreme, though pregnant with thought and wit, contrasts unfavourably with the clearness of Cervantes; he holds now in Spanish literature a place nearly analogous to that of Swift among British writers. But we must hurry on. With the downfall of Granada, the discovery of America, the consolidation of the kingdoms of the Peninsula into one nation, real historical study began in Spain. Thus we have in quick succession many works of considerable merit, such as the "Annals of Aragon," by Zurita (1512-80); the "Comunidades of Castille," by Mejia (1549); the great "History of Spain," by the Jesuit Mariana (1536-1632); Herrera's "General History of the Indies" (1549-1625); the "Commentaries on Peru," by the Inca, Garcilasso de la Vega (1540-1616); the monographs of Hurtado de Mendoza on the "Wars of Granada" (1610); the "Expedition of the Catalans," by Moncada (1623); the "Wars of Catalonia," by Melo (1645); and, in literary form superior to all these, the "Conquest of Mexico," by Solis (1685). Of poetry, apart from the stage and from the romances, there is not much of real value to engage our attention. The grandest verses of early Spain are undoubtedly the "Coplas" of Manrique (1476), which have been often translated into English, and which form one of the finest elegies extant in any language. After Garcilassa de la Vega (1503-36), Spanish poets fell into an unworthy imitation of the Italian; and subsequently Gongora (1561-1627) set the example of a still more debased and stilted style, full of affected conceits and mistaken classicalism. The only tolerable epic poem which Spain has yet produced is the "Araucana" of Ercilla, which tells the story of the wars with Indians of that name in Chili, and in which the author had personally taken part. From the close of the seventeenth and through the greater part of the eighteenth century, literature partook of the progressive decadence of all things in Spain. It withered and declined under the double censure and oppression of the king and of the inquisition. The theatre, which had striven hard in Spain to become the ally, or even the handmaid, of the Church, was contemptuously thrust aside by the latter, and within a century of Calderon's death, not even an Infanta could procure permission from the inquisition for a comedy in time of carnaval. No history of any value could be written under such conditions; the only outlet for literary skill lay in religious and mystic writings, which are of singular beauty. The classical and grammatical movement of the Renaissance which had begun so well under the patronage of Juan de Cisneros, Cardinal Ximenes, the great minister of Charles V., and the chief monument of which is the Complutensian Polyglot Bible of 1514-17, and its greatest scholar, Antonio de Nebrija, soon died away, and the Spanish universities, which for a while had been the admiration, became, in the eighteenth century, the laughing-stock of Europe. Of the earlier period we may mention among the religious writers Luis de Granada (1505-68), Santa Teresa (1515-82), the Jesuit, Ribadeneyra (1527-1611), Juan de la Cruz (1542-91); but even this literature degenerated into casuistry and mere technical scholasticism. Spanish religious poetry is, however, far more copious and of greater excellence than is generally supposed. It has been studied and collected in our own day by the opposite schools of the Spanish Protestants, and by the champion of orthodoxy, Menendez Pelayo. There is little to notice in Spanish literature from this time until the rise of the doctrinaire and economical writers of the reign of Carlos III., who for the most part closely followed the contemporary school of French publicists and encyclopædists. Among these are Padre Benito Feyjoo, who was the first to protest against the absence of science and true learning in Spain; the Padre Isla (1703-81), decidedly one of the wittiest of Spanish writers and satirists; Jovellanos (1744-1811), the best statesman and political writer of his time, and in the purer walks of literature the two Moratins (1737-1828). One or two philological works, far in advance of their age, made now their appearance, such as the tracts of Padre Sarmiento (1692-1770) on the Spanish language; the works of the Jesuits Larramendi (1728-45) on the Basque, and of Hervas (1735-1805) on general philology. To this period also belongs the magnificent collection entitled, "La España Sagrada," commenced by Florez (1754-1801), and, after many interruptions, completed only in 1880. Towards the close of the eighteenth century, however, a reaction set in against the French and so-called classical school, and the attention of Spanish writers was recalled to the masterpieces of their own earlier literature. The movement was accelerated by the course of political events, and the successes of the war of independence against the French. One of the earliest defenders of the romantic against the classical school was Bohl de Faber, a Hamburg merchant settled in Cadiz. He published in 1820-3, in his native town, selections from works of the early poets and dramatists of Spain; and his daughter, Cecilia, under the name of Fernan Caballero, has attained the highest rank among the lady novelists of Spain. The admission of Bohl de Faber into the ranks of the Spanish Academy, under Martinez de la Rosa, marks the definite triumph of the national school. At first it seemed as if the movement would produce simply a change of French for English and German models. Fiction became a stiff imitation of Sir Walter Scott. In poetry the influence of Byron reigned supreme. Espronceda (1810-42) has equalled his master in his cynical odes. "The Beggar," "The Executioner," "The last day of the Condemned," and "The Pirate," might almost have been penned by Byron; and "El Mundo Diablo" will long live in Spanish literature. Zorilla, born in 1817, still living, has been more successful in his dramas than Espronceda, especially in "Don Juan Tenorio," but his poems are inferior in force, though rich in colouring and in the melody of his verse. Gustavo Becquer (1836-70) is another poet who fed his genius with the legends of the past, but his models were Edgar Poe and Hoffmann; some of his weird fantastic tales and poems are excellent examples of their kind. Of an opposite character are the realistic novels of Fernan Caballero above mentioned (1797-1877). These are exquisite rose-tinted photographs of Spanish life and character taken by one who sees everything Spanish with a favourable eye. Her writings are distinguished by a delicate aristocratic grace and tenderness which she throws over all subjects which she handles, whether of high or lowly life. As an artist her plots are inferior to those of many worse novelists; her descriptions of scenery are beautiful and exact; as a delineator of individual character she fails, but as a painter of type and class she is unrivalled. Her sketches abound in humour and in gentle melancholy; a deep and true religious feeling pervades every line, but she fails in strength and passion. Thus she can be classed only in the second rank of female novelists, and does not approach the genius of Georges Sand or of George Elliot. Trueba, in the north, essays to imitate her, but he often sinks into puerility, nor are his studies marked by the conscientious regard for fact which distinguishes those of the lady writer. Pereda, who delineates the peasants of Santander, is a less prolific writer but of higher literary merit. Of living novelists we should place in the first rank Juan Valera with his powerful novels, "Pepita Jimenez," "El Doctor Faustino," and "Doña Luz." Next to him is, perhaps, Perez Galdos, who, in the series entitled "Episodios Nacionales," rivals the national romances of Erckmann-Chatrian in French. Pedro Alarcon has a greater fund of wit and humour, and his "Sombrero de tres picos" is a most mirth-provoking tale. Fernandez y Gonzalez, in the number, if not in the quality of his works, may almost compete with the elder Alexandre Dumas, whose semi-historical style he repeats. Feliz Pizcueta, a Valencian writer, has also written many novels, whose scenes are laid in his native province. Among dramatists now living, or lately dead, we may mention Hartzenbusch (1806-80), whose "Amantes de Teruel" is one of the most successful tragedies of the romantic school; Breton de los Herreros (1800-70); Gertrudis de Avellaneda, the first Spanish female dramatist, born in Cuba in 1816; Gutierrez, who, born in 1813, sought refuge, like Zorilla, in Spanish America; Lopez de Ayala; and lastly, J. Estebanez, whose best work is entitled "Un Drama Nuevo," and who reaches a high level of dramatic art. Of more extravagant style, inferior to these, and already marking a decadence, is José Echegaray, a man of most versatile and opposite talents, and one of the first mathematicians of Spain, the best of whose plays is "Locura o Santidad." Of lyric poets we may mention Campoamor, an original but languid and graceful writer of minor verse, and Selgas, whose grace is seasoned with wit and satire, but whose prose is much superior to his verse. But by far the greatest of living Spanish poets, though like Tennyson he has failed comparatively on the stage, is Gaspar Nuñez de Arce. His "Gritos del Combate," and "La Ultima Lamentacion de Lord Byron," contain some noble verses. He writes in the spirit of purest patriotism, with a stern morality, and with severe and chastened art. But more important than in the movement of fiction and poetry has been the influence of the romantic school in history. The attention of Spaniards has been at length turned to the study of their original records, and especially to that of the early Arabic writers. The first to attempt this, but with insufficient means, was J. A. Condé (1757-1820) in his "Historia de la Dominacion de los Arabes en España." This has since been superseded by the exacter learning of Don Pascual Gayangos, in the "Mohammedan Dynasties of Spain," by many foreign writers, and by the labours of Fernandez y Gonzalez in "Los Mudejares de Castilla" (1866) and others. The labours of Don Modeste and Don Vicente Lafuente, the one in ecclesiastical, the other in civil history, must be mentioned with approval, and the works of Amador de los Rios, on the literature of Spain and on the history of the Jews in Spain, do honour to his country. Among other historians, we may mention F. Castro and Sales y Ferrer, whose works are the popular manuals in education. Fernandez Guerra in the ancient, and Coello in the modern, Geography of Spain, are authors of the highest class; nor must we omit the Englishman Bowles, who wrote on the Natural History of Spain in 1775. In Geology another English name, Macpherson, attains the highest rank, together with the surveyors employed on the "Comision de la Mapa Geologica" of Spain. On the history of property in Spain and Europe, are two remarkable essays by Cárdenas and de Azcárate. In theology, on the Roman Catholic side, are the writings of Balmés (1810-48); of Doñoso Cortes (1809-53), of the present Bishop of Cordova, Ceferino Gonzalez; and, still publishing, the remarkable production of Menendez Pelayo, "Historia de los Heterodoxos in España;" while in the Protestant theology, Usoz, assisted by B. Wiffen in England and Boehmer in Germany, has rescued from oblivion the works of the Spanish reformers. In philology the Jesuit, Padre Fita y Colomé, worthily continues the traditions of Larramendi and of Hervas. Fernandez Guerra, and F. Tubino, and the Barcelona school pursue archæological studies with success. The influence of outside European thought is every day more evident in Spain. Ardent disciples of the school of Comte, of Darwin, and of Schopenhauer, are to be found among her publicists. In political economy Figuerola, G. Rodriguez, Colmeiro, Azcárate, and others, follow keenly the teaching of the English liberal school. Face to face in parliamentary eloquence and in politics stand Cánovas del Castello and Emilio Castelar; the latter distinguished by a florid oratory which is unsurpassed in Europe, but whose style is far more effective when spoken than when read; the former, with greater learning and a more cultivated taste, would undoubtedly be known as a writer but for his devotion to political life. The periodical and daily press of Spain, though not to compare with that of England, or of the United States, is almost on a par with that of most continental countries; the scientific and literary reviews and magazines are yearly increasing both in numbers and in value. This sketch, however brief, would be incomplete without a glance at what may be called the provincial literature of Spain. The publishers of Barcelona, especially in illustrated works, vie with those of Madrid. It is not in the Castilian tongue alone that the awakening is apparent. In Catalonia and in Valencia the study of the native idiom and of their ancient authors has been taken up with zeal, and with happiest results in history and philology. Victor Balaguer, the Catalan poet and dramatist is equal to all contemporary Spanish poets save Nuñez de Arce. The dramas of Pablo Soler (Serafi Petarra) are received with an enthusiasm unknown to audiences in Madrid. Mila y Fontanals, Bofarull, and Sanpére y Miquel are investigating with success the language, history, and archæology of their country. A like, though necessarily a less important, movement is taking place in Andalusia, in the Basque Provinces, in the Asturias, and in Galicia; everywhere what is worth preserving in these dialects is being sought out, edited, and given to the press. The archives of Simancas are at length thrown open to the world, and guides and catalogues are being industriously prepared. Sevillian scholars are also studying the archives of the Indies, and the treasures of Hebrew and Arabian lore. Thus, if Spain can at present boast no writer whom we can place undoubtedly and unreservedly in the very first rank, she shows an intellectual movement which, though confined at present to a comparatively small portion of her inhabitants, may, if it spread and continue, place her again in her proud position of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as one of the first of European nations, not perhaps in arms and power, but in literature, if not in science. CHAPTER IX. EPILOGUE. A few words in conclusion. Spain is far from being a worn-out country. On the contrary, both in the character and capacities of its varied populations, in the mineral riches of its soil, in its agricultural wealth, in industrial resources, and in the artistic taste of its workmen, it is capable of vast development. Two things hinder this, and will probably hinder it for some time. These are the political separation of Spain and Portugal, so ill-adapted to the geographical conformation of the Peninsula. The great rivers of Spain run westward, but the benefit of these fluvial highways is entirely lost to the country through the intercalation of Portugal into the western sea-board, thus making useless to Spain her natural system of river transport, and cutting her off from her best and most direct Atlantic ports. It is Lisbon, and not Madrid, which should be the capital of the whole Peninsula. Scarcely less an evil to Spain is the possession of Gibraltar by the English, which, besides the expense of watching the fortress, and the loss to Spain of the advantage of the possession of the great port of call for the whole maritime traffic of the East, is a school of smuggling and contraband, and a focus of corruption for the whole of South-western Spain. Were the whole Atlantic and Mediterranean sea-board in sole possession of one nation, the expenses of the custom-house would be greatly lessened, while the smuggling on the Portuguese and British frontiers would wholly disappear. In no point was the effect of the narrow and jealous policy of Philip II. more disastrous, than in his failure even to attempt to attach the Portuguese to his rule when the kingdoms were temporarily united under his crown. The second evil, and one of still graver proportions, is that of the exceedingly corrupt administration of the central government, and of almost every branch of public employment. It is difficult to exaggerate this mischief. It is not bad external political government, it is not a faulty constitution, but it is an administration in which corruption has become a tradition and the rule, that is the real evil in Spain. It is this which baffles every ministry that tries to do real good. Only a ministry, or succession of ministries, composed of men of thorough honesty, of iron will, and of competence in financial administration, supported by strong majorities, can hope to deal with this gigantic growth. Even then it must be a work of time. With an honest administration, and prudent and sagacious development of her resources, Spain would soon regain financial soundness and recover her place among the nations. The contest between the opposite commercial systems of protection and free trade is not yet concluded, nor is likely to be, in Spain. As long as England, which has the greatest interest of any foreign power in the establishment of the latter system, maintains a tariff which unduly favours the wines of France in comparison with those of Spain free trade is not likely to be popular. From the varied character of her products, Spain is of all European countries naturally the most self-sufficing. Her north-western provinces furnish her with cattle in abundance; no finer wheat is grown than that on the central plateau, and it could easily be produced in quantity more than sufficient for her wants; wine, oil, and fruits she possesses in superfluity; even sugar is not wanting in the south; cotton, indeed, she has not; but wool of excellent quality is the produce of her numerous flocks, and it needs only the establishment of efficient manufactories for Spanish cloth and woollen stuffs to regain their ancient renown. All the most useful minerals abound, and are of the finest quality, especially the iron, and the development of the working of the Asturian and Andalusian coal-fields renders Spain yearly more and more independent of England in this respect. True it is that foreign capital is, and will for some time be necessary to assist in extracting this hidden wealth; but if the ordinary Spaniard of the educated classes, instead of seeking a bare, and too often a base, subsistence in petty government employment or in ill-paid professions--instead of seeking the barren honour of a university degree--would apply himself to scientific, industrial, or agricultural enterprise, he might soon obtain his legitimate share of the profits which now go mainly into the hands of foreign speculators and shareholders. Spaniards are commonly said to be cruel and bloodthirsty, with little regard for the sufferings of others or respect for human life; and undoubtedly there is some truth in this charge, but it does not apply to the whole Peninsula. Many of Spain's best writers deplore it, and inveigh strongly against it and against the bull-fights, which, in their present form, are not more than a century old. As a national sport, the modern bull-ring, with its professional torreadors and its hideous horse-slaughtering, differs from the pastime in which Charles V. and his nobles used to take part as much as a prizefight from a tournament. The appeals of Fernan Caballero to the clergy, the efforts of Tubino, Lastre, and others to arouse the public against this wanton cruelty have hitherto been of no avail. We can only hope in the future. On the other hand, it is unjust to shut our eyes to the noble charities of Spain. She was the first to care for lunatics. Many of her hospitals and asylums for the aged were conducted with a tenderness and consideration unknown in other lands. Even a beggar is treated with respect, and is relieved without contumely. The treatment of her prisoners and the condition of her prisons, which was long so foul a blot, is now being efficiently removed; she is at least making an earnest effort to attain the level of European civilization in this respect. Intellectually, in science, and especially in literature, Spain is advancing rapidly. The historical treasures long buried in the archives of Simancas, and those of the Indies at Seville, are now thrown open to the world, and are eagerly consulted by native historians. Her literary and scientific men, though comparatively few in number, are full of zeal and intelligence. There needs only a larger and more appreciative audience to encourage them in their labours in order to bring the literature of Spain to a level with that of any European country of equal population. APPENDIX I. PROVINCES OF SPAIN AND THEIR POPULATION IN 1877. Per square Provinces. Inhabitants. Kilometer. Alava 93,191 30 Albacéte 219,122 14 Alicante 408,154 75 Alméria 349,854 41 Avila 180,457 23 Badajoz 432,809 19 Barcelona 835,306 108 Burgos 332,461 23 Cacéres 306,594 15 Cadiz 430,158 59 Castellon 283,961 45 Ciudad-Real 260,641 13 Cordova 385,582 28 Corunna 595,585 75 Cuenca 237,497 14 Gerona 299,002 51 Granada 477,719 37 Guadalajara 201,288 16 Guipúzcoa 167,207 88 Huelva 210,641 20 Huesca 252,165 17 Jaën 422,972 32 Leon 350,210 22 Lerida 285,297 23 Logroño 174,425 34 Lugo 410,387 42 Madrid 593,775 77 Malaga 500,231 68 Murcia 451,611 39 Navarre 304,184 29 Orense 388,835 55 Oviedo 576,352 54 Palencia 180,785 22 Pontevedra 451,946 100 Salamanca 285,500 23 Santander 235,299 44 Saragossa 400,266 23 Segovia 149,961 21 Seville 505,291 36 Soria 153,654 15 Tarragona 330,105 52 Teruel 242,296 17 Toledo 334,744 23 Valencia 679,030 60 Valladolid 247,453 31 Vizcaya 189,954 86 Zamora 250,004 23 ---------- -- 16,053,961 32 Balearic Isles 289,035 60 Canaries 280,388 37 ---------- -- 16,623,384 33 ---------- -- In area of surface Spain ranks the 5th of European States. In number of population 7th " In density of population to the square mile 14th " In extent of colonies 5th " Rates of women to men, 1044 to 1000. The infantile mortality is said to be 24-1/2 per cent. in first year. Expectation of life at 2 years old is said to be 49 years; the average 41. APPENDIX II. PRINCIPAL EVENTS OF SPANISH HISTORY. A.D. Visigoth kings rule from 414 to 711 Entry of Moors, battle of Guadelete, death of last Visigothic king 31 July, 711 Reconquest begun by Pelayo at Covadonga in the Asturias 719 Toledo captured by Alphonso VI. 1085 Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa 1212 Final union of Leon and Castile 1230 Alphonso X. (Law Codes: The Fuero Real and Las Siete Partidas) 1252 Union of Aragon with Castile under Ferdinand and Isabella 1474 Inquisition established (first Auto de Fé, 1488) 1484 Conquest of Granada 1492 Discovery of America 1492 Expulsion of Moors from Castile, 1501; from Granada 1502 Conquest of Naples and Sicily 1504 _Austrian Dynasty_:--Philip I. and Joanna 1504 Charles I. (Emperor of Germany, Charles V.) 1516 War of Comunidades of Castile, Battle of Villalar 1521 Battle of Pavia, Francis I. prisoner 1525 Capture of Tunis 1535 Abdication of Charles I. 1556 Philip II.:--Greatest extension of Spanish monarchy, comprising Spain, Portugal, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, Milan, Roussillon, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Franche-Comté, Tunis, Oran, the Canaries, Fernando Po, St. Helena, The Americas, Philippine Isles, &c. Insurrection of Low Countries 1566 First rebellion and expulsion of Moriscos 1568 Battle of Lepanto 1571 League of Provinces and independence of Holland, 25 Jan., 1579 Conquest of Portugal (1580-1640) 1580 Defeat of Armada 1588 Death of Philip II. 1598 Final expulsion of Moriscos 1609 Insurrection of Catalonia 1640 Loss of Portugal 1640 Battle of Rocroy 1643 Peace of the Pyrenees and marriage of Louis XIV. 1659 Death of Charles II., last of Austrian dynasty 29 Oct., 1700 _Bourbon Dynasty_:--War of Succession between Archduke Charles and Philip V., 1701-13 Loss of Gibraltar 1704 Treaty of Utrecht 1713 Salic Law voted in Cortes 1713 Abolition of Constitution of Catalonia 1716 Charles III. 1759 Family Pact 1761 Expulsion of Jesuits 1767 Siege of Gibraltar 1782 Charles IV. 1788 Godoy, Prince of Peace 1795 Battle of Trafalgar 1805 Abdication of Charles IV. 1808 Ferdinand VII., Renunciation at Bayonne 1808 Joseph Bonaparte, King (1808-14) Uprising of Spain 2 May, 1808 Peninsular War, 1808-14 Expulsion of French 1814 Cortés of Cadiz, suppression of Inquisition, of Feudal Rights, and establishment of Constitution 1812 Return of Ferdinand VII., Inquisition re-established, and Constitution abolished 1814 Insurrection of Riego, new Constitution (1820-23) 1820 Invasion of French, violation of Constitution 1823 Loss of American colonies. Buenos Ayres 1811 Chili 1818 Columbia 1819 Mexico 1821 Peru 1824 Absolutism till death of Ferdinand VII. (1823-33). Birth of Isabella II., abolition of Salic Law, expulsion of Don Carlos 1830 Death of Ferdinand VII. 1833 Regency of Christina, the queen-mother, 1833; expelled 1840 1833 First Carlist War, 1833-39. Majority of Isabella II. 1844 War with Morocco 1860 Insurrection and expulsion of Isabella 1868 Provisional Government, 1868-70 1868 Amadeo I., November, 1870, to February, 1873 1870 Republic, Cantonalist insurrections 1873 Second Carlist War, 1873-76. Alphonso XII. Dec., 1874 Don Carlos entered France, February, 1876 1876 Abolition of Basque Fueros 1876 Downfall of Cánovas del Castillo 1881 APPENDIX III. LIST OF BOOKS CHIEFLY MADE USE OF IN THE FOREGOING PAGES. _Geography_:-- La Nouvelle Géographie Universelle, par Elisée Reclus, series 5 and 6. Hachette, Paris, 1876. Spanien und die Balearen. Willkomm, Berlin, 1879. The Balearic Isles, by T. Bidwell. London. Boletin de la Sociedad Geográfica de Madrid, various years. Introduccion à la Historia Natural y à la Geográfica Fisica de España, por Don Guillermo Bowles. Madrid, 1775. Espagne, Algerie, et Tunisie, par P. de Tchikatchef. Paris, 1880. Libro de Agricultura, por Abu Zaccaria. Spanish translation Seville, 1878. _Meteorology_:-- Reports of the Meteorological Society of Madrid, various years. Revista Contemporanea, tomo xxx. 4. December, 1880. _Philology_:-- Grammaire des Langues Romaines, par F. Diez, 2nd German edition. French translation, Paris. Études sur les Idiomes Pyrénéenes, par A. Luchaire. Paris, 1879. Various articles in Spanish Literary and Provincial Journals. _History, General_:-- Dunham's History of Spain and Portugal, 5 vols. Lardner's Cabinet Encyclopaedia. Resúmen de Historia de España, por F. de Castro, 12th edition. Madrid, 1878. Compendio Razonado de História General, por Sales y Ferré, last edition, 4 vols. Madrid, 1880. History of Civilization, by Buckle, 3 vols. London. _Particular Histories_:-- Investigaciones sobre la História de España, por Dozy, Spanish translation, 2 vols. Seville, 1877. Los Mudejares de Castillo, por Fernandez Gonzalez. Madrid, 1866. Vida de la Princesa Eboli, by G. Muro, with introductory letter by Cánovas del Castillo. Madrid, 1877. Text of various Fueros, and of the Constitutions since 1812. Espagne Contemporaine, par F. Garrido. Bruxelles, 1865. _Ecclesiastical History_:-- Die Kirchengeschichte von Spanien, von P. B. Gams, 5 vols. Berlin, 1879. Historia de los Heterodoxos Españoles, por M. Menendez Pelayo, tomos i. and ii. (Tomo iii. not yet published.) Madrid, 1880. _History of Property, &c._:-- Ensayo sobre la História del derecho de Propiedad y su Estado actual en Europa, por G. de Azcárate. Tomos i. and ii. (Tomo iii. not yet published.) Madrid, 1879-80. Estudios filosóficos y politicos, por G. de Azcárate. Madrid, 1877. La Constitucion Inglesa y la politica del Continente, por G. de Azcárate. Madrid, 1878. Ensayo sobre la Propiedad Territorial en España, per Cardénas, 2 vols. Madrid, 1875. _Art_:-- Street's Gothic Architecture in Spain. Murray, 1865. The Industrial Arts of Spain, by Juan F. Riaño. London 1879. Discurso de Recepcion, by Juan F. Riaño. Madrid, 1880. Numerous articles in Spanish Periodicals. _Literature_:-- Ticknor's History of Spanish Literature, 4 vols. London, 1845. Sismondi's Literature of the South of Europe. Bohn, London, 1846. Hubbard's Littérature Contemporaine en Espagne. Paris, 1876. _Guide-Books_:-- Ford's last edition, and O'Shea's Guide to Spain, with numerous Spanish general and local guides, and particular descriptions of towns, provinces, &c. Tourist Books in Spanish, German, French, and English. The only ones needing mention, as going out of the common round are-- Untrodden Spain, by J. H. Rose. Bentley, 1875. Among the Spanish People, by J. H. Rose. Bentley, 1877. Government and Consular reports too numerous to specify; but we must except Phipps' masterly Report on Spanish Finance to the close of 1876. INDEX. AGRICULTURE, 41. Alhambra, 113, 198. Alphonso XII., 160. Amadeo I., 138, 168. Andorra, republic of, 100. Arabs, 75. Architecture, Roman, 194; Arab, 195; Mudejar, 200; Renaissance, 202; Churrigueresque, 203. Army, 167. Art, Visigothic, 195; Arabic, 196; Christian, 205; industrial, 210. BALEARIC ISLES, 141. Bardeñas Reales, 13, 97. Basque language, 71, 77, 78. Behetria, 145. Bidassoa, 12, 56. Budgets, 175. Bulls and bull-fighting, 121, 234. CABALLERO, Fernan, 223. Calderon, 216. Camel breeds in Spain, 34, 65. Cañada, La, pass of, 5, 135. Canals, 13, 16, 18, 133. Cánovas del Castillo, 161, 228. Carlists, 155, 159. Castelar, 158, 159, 228. Cerro de San Felipe, 6, 133. Cervantes, 215, 217. Charles I., 13, 150. Charles III., 13, 152. Chuetas of Balearic Isles, 90, 143. Church, councils of, 75, 187; furniture and art, 205. Clergy, 82, 191. Coal-mines, 65, 94, 101, 122, 234. Colleges, British, 141, 183. Comunidades of Aragon, 40, 99. Congress of deputies, 162. Constitutions of Spain, 153, 162. Contrabandistas, 90. Cortés, 146, 162. Cordova, mosque of, 124, 196, 198. DEBT, public, 174. Despeña-Perros, pass of, 3, 125. Despoblados and Destierros, 7, 111, 130. Douro, 15, 139. EBRO, 12, 97, 99. Escorial, 36, 132, 203. Esparto grass, 43, 107, 111. Exports and imports, 177. FAUNA, 52. Ferdinand VII., 153. Finance, 174. Fiords or Friths in Galicia, 3, 31, 92. Fisheries, 56, 93, 118. Flora, greatly exotic, 41, 42; herbaceous aromatic, 45; African, 108. Fueros, 146, 147, 150, 158, 161. Funds, 175. GATA, Cabo de, 2, 9, 109. Gibraltar, 9, 119. Guadalaviar and irrigation, 24, 104. Guadalquiver and affluents, 20, 109. Guadarrama, range of, 6, 129, 135. Guadiana and affluents, 19. Guardias civiles, 156. Guisando, Toros de, 71, 134, 194. HISTORICAL school in Spain, 220, 226. Hospitals, 171. Hurdes, 90, 138. IBERI, 70. Imports and exports, 177. Inquisition, 149, 188. Irrigation of Llobregat, 26; Esla, 17; Henares, 18, 19, 193; in Valencia and Murcia, 24, 25, 104, 106, 107. Isabella II., 154. JEWS of Balearic Isles, 77, 143. Justice, administration of, 169. KELT and Keltiberi, 70, 76. LACE, 211. Lakes, 19, 26, 105, 108. Laya, Basque tool, 40. Lead-mines, 64, 125. Lemosin dialects, 77. Locusts, 48, 53. Lunatic asylums, 171, 235. MAJOLICA ware, 105, 144, 211. Manufactures, cotton, 81, 82, 102. Maragatos, 105, 144, 211. Marismas of Guadalquiver, 22, 121. Merino sheep, 54. Mesta, 47, 83, 84, 156. Mineral springs, 28. Minho, 11, 93. Mining districts, 64, 94, 95, 102, 107, 110, 111, 122, 125, 140. Monkeys at Gibraltar, 52, 120. Mudejar art, 201. Municipal administration, 164. Mules, 55. Murillo, 120, 206, 207, 209. NAVY, 168. Nevada, Sierra, 8, 109, 115. OLIVES, 33, 47, 59, 101, 109, 116. Orange cultivation, 39, 43, 46, 105, 109. PAINTING, schools of, 206, 209. Palms, 33, 44, 106. Passiegos of Bilbao, 90. Philip II., 132, 232. Population, census of, 80, 82; diverse of Spain, 69, 85; occupations of, 81. Post and letters, 172. Pottery and porcelain, 105, 144, 211. Prisons, 170, 234. Professors, salary of, 182. Property, distribution of, 83, 153; Church, sale of, 83, 154, 191. Provinces, administration of, 164. Provincial literature, 228. RAILWAYS, 172. Rainfall, 10, 28, 31. Republic of Andora, 100. Rice cultivation, 42, 44, 105. Rivers, comparative table of, 28. Romans in Spain, 17, 41, 76, 93, 102, 108, 194. SALINAS, 22, 26, 29, 108, 109, 118. Salt-mine, 63, 100. Schools and schoolmasters, 184. Sea-board of Spain, 2. Seguro, sierra and rivers, 8, 24, 107. Silk, 17. Sugar, 42, 44, 115. TAGUS and its affluents, 17. Taxes, 176. Telegraphs, 173. Tobacco factories, 121, 176. Toleration, early religious, 147, 165, 188. UNIVERSITIES, 182. VISIGOTHS, 74, 187, 195. WATER, names connected with, 27. Wines of Galicia, 38, 93; Riojas, 33, 96; Navarre and Aragon, 33; Catalonia, 33, 102; Valencia, 104; La Mancha, 127; Malaga 116; Andalusia sherries, 118, 119, 124. LONDON: PRINTED BY GILBERT AND RIVINGTON, LIMITED, ST. JOHN'S SQUARE. 
40356	----	CATHEDRAL CITIES OF SPAIN _UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME_ CATHEDRAL CITIES OF ENGLAND. By GEORGE GILBERT. With 60 reproductions from water-colours by W.W. COLLINS, R.I. Demy 8vo, 16s. net. CATHEDRAL CITIES OF FRANCE. By HERBERT and HESTER MARSHALL. With 60 reproductions from water-colours by HERBERT MARSHALL, R.W.S. Demy 8vo, 16s. net. Also large paper edition, £2 2s. net. _BOOKS ILLUSTRATED BY JOSEPH PENNELL_ ITALIAN HOURS. By HENRY JAMES. With 32 plates in colour and numerous illustrations in black and white by JOSEPH PENNELL. Large crown 4to. Price 20s. net. A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE. By HENRY JAMES. With 94 illustrations by JOSEPH PENNELL. Pott 4to. Price 10s. net. ENGLISH HOURS. By HENRY JAMES. With 94 illustrations by JOSEPH PENNELL. Pott 4to. Price 10s. net. ITALIAN JOURNEYS. By W.D. HOWELLS. With 103 illustrations by JOSEPH PENNELL. Pott 4to. Price 10s. net. CASTILIAN DAYS. By the Hon. JOHN HAY. With 111 illustrations by JOSEPH PENNELL. Pott 4to. Price 10s. net. London: WILLIAM HEINEMANN 21 Bedford Street, W.C. [Illustration] [Illustration: BURGOS. THE CATHEDRAL] CATHEDRAL CITIES OF SPAIN WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY W. W. COLLINS, R.I. [Illustration: colophon] LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN NEW YORK: DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1909 _All rights reserved_ _Copyright, London, 1909, by William Heinemann and Washington, U.S.A., by Dodd, Mead & Co_ PREFACE Spain, the country of contrasts, of races differing from one another in habits, customs, and language, has one great thing that welds it into a homogeneous nation, and this is its Religion. Wherever one's footsteps wander, be it in the progressive provinces of the north, the mediævalism of the Great Plain, or in that still eastern portion of the south, Andalusia, this one thing is ever omnipresent and stamps itself on the memory as the great living force throughout the Peninsula. In her Cathedrals and Churches, her ruined Monasteries and Convents, there is more than abundant evidence of the vitality of her Faith; and we can see how, after the expulsion of the Moor, the wealth of the nation poured into the coffers of the Church and there centralised the life of the nation. In the mountain fastnesses of Asturias the churches of Santa Maria de Naranco and San Miguel de Lino, dating from the ninth century and contemporary with San Pablo and Santa Cristina, in Barcelona, are the earliest Christian buildings in Spain. As the Moor was pushed further south, a new style followed his retreating steps; and the Romanesque, introduced from over the Pyrenees, became the adopted form of architecture in the more or less settled parts of the country. Creeping south through Leon, where San Isidoro is well worth mention, we find the finest examples of the period in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, at Segovia, Avila, and the grand Catedral Vieja of Salamanca. Spain sought help from France to expel the Moor, and it is but natural that the more advanced nation should leave her mark somewhere and in some way in the country she pacifically invaded. Before the spread of this influence became general, we find at least one great monument of native genius rise up at Tarragona. The Transition Cathedral there can lay claim to be entirely Spanish. It is the epitome and outcome of a yearning for the display of Spain's own talent, and is one of the most interesting and beautiful in the whole country. Toledo, Leon, and Burgos are the three Cathedrals known as the "French" Cathedrals of Spain. They are Gothic and the first named is the finest of all. Spanish Gothic is best exemplified in the Cathedral of Barcelona. For late-Gothic, we must go to the huge structures of Salamanca, Segovia, and the Cathedral at Seville which almost overwhelms in the grandeur of its scale. After the close of the fifteenth century Italian or Renaissance influence began to be felt, and the decoration of the Plateresque style became the vogue. San Marcos at Leon, the University of Salamanca, and the Casa de Ayuntamiento at Seville are among the best examples of this. The influence of Churriguera, who evolved the Churrigueresque style, is to be met with in almost every Cathedral in the country. He it is who was responsible for those great gilded altars with their enormous twisted pillars so familiar to travellers in Spain; and which, though no doubt a tribute to the glory of God, one feels are more a vulgar display of wealth than a tasteful or artistic addition to her architecture. The finest of the Renaissance Cathedrals is that of Granada, and the most obtrusive piece of Churrigueresque is the Cartuja in the same city. Taking the Cathedrals as a whole the two most unfamiliar and notable features are the Coros or Choirs, and the Retablos. These latter--gorgeous backings to the High Altar, generally ill-lit, with a superabundance of carving sometimes coloured and gilded, sometimes of plain stone--are of Low-country or Flemish origin. The former, with one exception at Oviedo, are placed in the nave west of the crossing, and enclose, as a rule, two or more bays in this direction. Every Cathedral is a museum of art, and these two features are the most worth study. NOTE.--_Since the revolution in Catalonia of July-August 1909, the King has decreed that no one can secure exemption from military service by the payment of a sum of money._ CONTENTS PAGE CADIZ 1 SEVILLE 7 CORDOVA 23 GRANADA 31 MALAGA 57 VALENCIA 65 TORTOSA 77 TARRAGONA 83 BARCELONA 91 GERONA 101 TOLEDO 107 SALAMANCA 121 AVILA 137 SEGOVIA 145 SARAGOSSA 159 SANTIAGO 174 TUY 183 ORENSE 187 ASTORGA 193 ZAMORA 199 LEON 205 OVIEDO 217 VALLADOLID 225 BURGOS 233 INDEX 249 ILLUSTRATIONS _To face page_ Burgos. The Cathedral _Frontispiece_ Cadiz. The Cathedral 2 Cadiz. The Market Place 4 Seville. In the Cathedral 8 Seville. The Giralda Tower 12 Seville. In the Alcázar, the Patio de las Doncellas 14 Seville. View over the Town 18 Cordova. Interior of the Mesquita 24 Cordova. The Campanario Tower 26 Cordova. The Bridge 28 Cordova. Fountain in the Court of Oranges 30 Granada. Carrera de Darro 32 Granada. Exterior of the Cathedral 38 Granada. The Alhambra 46 Granada. The Alhambra, Court of Lions 50 Granada. Generalife 54 Malaga. View from the Harbour 58 Malaga. The Market 62 Valencia. San Pablo 66 Valencia. Door of the Cathedral 68 Valencia. Religious Procession 72 Tortosa 80 Tarragona 84 Tarragona. The Archbishop's Tower 86 Tarragona. The Cloisters 88 Barcelona. The Cathedral 92 Barcelona. The Rambla 96 Gerona. The Cattle Market 102 Gerona. The Cathedral 104 Toledo. The Cathedral 108 Toledo. The South Transept 110 Toledo. The Zócodover 114 Toledo. The Alcántara Bridge 116 Salamanca 122 Salamanca. The Old Cathedral 124 Salamanca. An Old Street 128 Avila 138 Avila. Puerta de San Vicente 142 Segovia at Sunset 146 Segovia. The Aqueduct 148 Segovia. Plaza Mayor 152 Saragossa. La Seo 160 Saragossa. In the Old Cathedral 164 Saragossa. Easter Procession 166 Santiago. The Cathedral 172 Santiago. South Door of the Cathedral 174 Santiago. Interior of the Cathedral 178 Tuy 184 Orense. In the Cathedral 188 Astorga 194 Zamora. The Cathedral 202 Leon. The Cathedral 208 Leon. The West Porch of the Cathedral 210 Leon. San Marcos 214 Oviedo. In the Cathedral 218 Oviedo. The Cloisters 222 Valladolid.Santa Maria la Antigua 226 Valladolid.San Pablo 228 Burgos. The Capilla Mayor 236 Burgos. Arch of Santa Maria 242 CADIZ At one time the greatest port in the world--"Where are thy glories now, oh, Cadiz?" She is still a White City lying embosomed on a sea of emerald and topaz. Her streets are still full of the colour of the East, but alas! Seville has robbed her of her trade, and in the hustle of modern life she is too far from the busy centre, too much on the outskirts of everything, to be anything more than a port of call for American tourists and a point from whence the emigrant leaves his native country. This isolation is one of her great charms, and the recollections I have carried away of her quiet clean streets, her white or pink washed houses with their flat roofs and _miradores_, her brilliant sun and blue sea, can never be effaced by Time's subtle hand. Landing from a coasting-boat from Gibraltar, I began my travels through Spain at Cadiz; and it was with intense regret, so pleasant was the change from the grey skies and cold winds of England, that I took my final stroll along the broad Alameda bordered with palms of all sorts, and lined with other exotic growth--that I bid good-bye to the Parque de Genoves where many a pleasant hour had been spent in the grateful shade of its trees. I shall probably never again lean idly over the sea-washed walls and watch the graceful barques with their cargoes of salt, spread their sails to the breeze and glide away on the long voyage to South America. Looking out eastwards over the marshes I was at first much puzzled to know what were the white pyramids that stood in rows like the tents of an invading host. Then I was told. Shallow pans are dug out in the marsh and the sea let in. After evaporation this is repeated again and again, until the saline deposit is thick enough to be scraped and by degrees grows into a pyramid. Every pan is named after a saint from whom good luck is implored. No, I doubt if ever my eyes will wander again over the blue waters to the marsh lands of San Fernando. [Illustration: CADIZ. THE CATHEDRAL] Life is short and I can hardly hope that Fate will carry me back to those sea walls and once more permit me as the sun goes down to speculate on the catch of the fishing-fleet as each boat makes for its haven in the short twilight of a southern clime. I cannot but regret that all this is of the past, but I shall never regret that at Cadiz, the most enchanting of Spain's seaports, began my acquaintance with her many glorious cities. In ancient times Cadiz was the chief mart for the tin of the Cassiterides and the amber of the Baltic. Founded by the Tyrians as far back as 1100 B.C., it was the Gadir (fortress) of the Phoenicians. Later on Hamilcar and Hannibal equipped their armies and built their fleets here. The Romans named the city Gades, and it became second only to Padua and Rome. After the discovery of America, Cadiz became once more a busy port, the great silver fleets discharged their precious cargoes in its harbour and from the estuary sailed many a man whose descendants have created the great Spain over the water. The loss of the Spanish colonies ruined Cadiz and it has never regained the place in the world it once held. Huge quays are about to be constructed and the present King has just laid the first stone of these, in the hopes that trade may once more be brought to a city that sleeps. There are two Cathedrals in Cadiz. The Catedral Nueva is a modern structure commenced in 1722 and finished in 1838 by the bishop whose statue faces the rather imposing west façade. Built of limestone and Jérez sandstone, it is white--dazzling white, and rich ochre brown. There is very little of interest in the interior. The _silleria del coro_ (choir stalls) were given by Queen Isabel, and came originally from a suppressed Carthusian Convent near Seville. The exterior can claim a certain grandeur, especially when seen from the sea. The drum of the _cimborio_ with the great yellow dome above, and the towers of the west façade give it from a distance somewhat the appearance of a mosque. The Catedral Vieja, built in the thirteenth century, was originally Gothic, but being almost entirely destroyed during Lord Essex's siege in 1596, was rebuilt in its present unpretentious Renaissance form. Cadiz possesses an Académia de Bellas Artes where Zurbaran, Murillo and Alfonso Cano are represented by second-rate paintings. To the suppressed convent of San Francisco is attached the melancholy interest of Murillo's fatal fall from the scaffolding while at work on the _Marriage of St. Catherine_. The picture was finished by his apt pupil Meneses Osorio. Another work by the master, a _San Francisco_, quite in his best style also hangs here. [Illustration: CADIZ. THE MARKET PLACE] The churches of Cadiz contain nothing to attract one, indeed if it were not for the fine setting of the city surrounded by water, and the semi-eastern atmosphere that pervades the place, there is but little to hold the ordinary tourist. The Mercado, or market-place, is a busy scene and full of colour; the Fish Market, too, abounds in varieties of finny inhabitants of the deep and compares favourably in this respect with that of Bergen in far away Norway. The sole attraction in this City of the Past--in fact, I might say in the Past of Spain as far as it concerns Cadiz--lies on the stretch of water into which the rivers Guadalete and San Pedro empty themselves. From the very earliest days down to the time when Columbus sailed on his voyage which altered the face of the then known globe, and so on to our own day, it is in the Bahia de Cadiz that her history has been written. SEVILLE Seville, the "Sephela" of the Phoenicians, "Hispalis" of the Romans, and "Ishbilyah" of the Moors, is by far the largest and most interesting city of Southern Spain. In Visigothic times Seville was the capital of the Silingi until Leovigild moved his court to Toledo. It was captured by Julius Cæsar in 45 B.C., but during the Roman occupation was overshadowed by Italica, the birthplace of the Emperors Trajan, Adrian, and Theodosius, and the greatest of Rome's cities in Hispania. This once magnificent place is now a desolate ruin, plundered of its glories and the haunt of gipsies. Under the Moors, who ruled it for five hundred and thirty-six years, Seville was second only to Cordova, to which city it became subject when Abdurrhaman established the Western Kalifate there in the year 756. San Ferdinand, King of Leon and Castile, pushed his conquests far south and Seville succumbed to the force of his arms in 1248. Seville is the most fascinating city in Spain. It is still Moorish in a way. Its houses are built on the Eastern plan with _patios_, their roofs are flat and many have that charming accessory, the _miradore_. Its streets are narrow and winding, pushed out from a common centre with no particular plan. It is Andalusian and behind the times. Triana, the gipsy suburb, is full of interest. The Cathedral, though of late and therefore not particularly good Gothic, is, on account of its great size, the most impressive in the whole country. The Alcázar, once more a royal residence, vies with Granada's Alhambra in beauty; and as a mercantile port, sixty miles from the estuary, Seville ranks second to none in Southern Spain. The Cathedral stands third in point of size if the ground space is alone considered, after St. Peter's at Rome and the Mesquita at Cordova. The proportions of the lofty nave, one hundred feet in height, are so good that it appears really much higher. The columns of the double aisles break up the two hundred and sixty feet of its width and add much to the solemn dignity of the vast interior, enhanced greatly by the height of the vaulting above the spectator. Standing anywhere in the Cathedral I felt that there was a roof above my head, but it seemed lost in space. And this is the great characteristic of Seville's Cathedral, _i.e._, space. [Illustration: SEVILLE. IN THE CATHEDRAL] The _coro_ is railed off from the crossing by a simple iron-gilt _reja_. The _silleria_, by Sanchez, Dancart, and Guillier are very fine and took seventy years to execute. Between the _coro_ and Capilla Mayor, in Holy Week the great bronze candlestick, twenty-five feet high, a fine specimen of sixteenth-century work, is placed alight. When the _Misere_ is chanted during service, twelve of its thirteen candles are put out, one by one, indicating the desertion of Christ by his apostles. The thirteenth left burning symbolises the Virgin, faithful to the end. From this single light all the other candles in the Cathedral are lit. The _reja_ of the Capilla Mayor is a grand example of an iron-gilt screen, and with those to the north and south, is due to the talent of the Dominican, Francisco de Salamanca. The fine Gothic _retablo_ of the High Altar surpasses all others in Spain in size and elaboration of detail. It was designed by Dancart and many artists were employed in its execution. When the sun finds his way through the magnificent coloured glass of the windows between noon and three o'clock, and glints across it, few "interior" subjects surpass the beautiful effect on this fine piece of work. In front of the High Altar at the feast of Corpus Christi and on three other occasions, the _Seises's_ dance takes place. This strange ceremony is performed by chorister boys who dance a sort of minuet with castanets. Their costume is of the time of Philip III., _i.e._, 1630, and they wear plumed hats. Of the numerous chapels the most interesting is the Capilla Real. It possesses a staff of clergy all to itself. Begun in 1514 by Martin de Gainza, it was finished fifty years later. Over the High Altar is the almost life-size figure of the Virgin de los Reyes, given by St. Louis of France to San Ferdinand. Its hair is of spun gold and its numerous vestments are marvellous examples of early embroidery. The throne on which the Virgin is seated is a thirteenth-century piece of silver work, with the arms of Castile and Leon, San Ferdinand's two kingdoms. Before it lies the King himself in a silver shrine. Three times a year, in May, August and November, a great military Mass takes place before this royal shrine, when the garrison of Seville marches through the chapel and colours are lowered in front of the altar. In the vault beneath are the coffins of Pedro the Cruel and Maria Padilla his mistress, the only living being who was humanly treated by this scourge of Spain. Their three sons rest close to them. On the north and south sides of this remarkable chapel, within arched recesses, are the sarcophagi of Beatrice of Swabia and Alfonso the Learned. They are covered with cloth of gold emblazoned with coats-of-arms. A crown and sceptre rest on the cushion which lies on each tomb. In the dim light, high above and beyond mortal reach rest these two--it is very impressive. Each of the remaining twenty-nine chapels contains something of interest. In the Capilla de Santiago is a beautiful painted window of the conversion of St. Paul. The _retablo_ in the Capilla de San Pedro contains pictures by Zurbaran. In the north transept in a small chapel is a good Virgin and Child by Alonso Cano; in the south is the Altar de la Gamba, over which hangs the celebrated _La Generacion_ of Louis de Vargas, known as _La Gamba_ from the well-drawn leg of Adam. On the other side of this transept is the Altar de la Santa Cruz and between these two altars is the monument to Christopher Columbus. Erected in Havana it was brought to Spain after the late war and put up here. Murillo's work outshines all other's in the Cathedral. The grand _San Antonio de Padua_, in the second chapel west of the north aisle, is difficult to see. The window which lights it is covered by a curtain, which, however, the silver key will pull aside. Over the Altar of Nuestra Señora del Consuelo is a beautiful Guardian Angel from the same brush. Close by is another, _Santa Dorotea_, a very choice little picture. In the Sacristy are two more, _S.S. Isidore_ and _Leander_. In the Sala Capitular a _Conception_ and a _Mater Dolorosa_ in the small sacristy attached to the Capilla Real complete the list. Besides these fine pictures there are others which one can include in the same category by Cano, Zurbaran, Morales, Vargas, Pedro Campaña and the Flemish painter Sturm, a veritable gallery! And when I went into the Treasury and saw the priceless relics which belong to Seville's Cathedral, priceless in value and interest, and priceless from my own art point of view, "Surely," thought I, "not only is it a picture gallery, it is a museum as well." The original mosque of Abu Yusuf Yakub was used as a Cathedral until 1401, when it was pulled down, the present building, which took its place, being finished in 1506. The dome of this collapsed five years later and was re-erected by Juan Gil de Hontañon. Earthquake shocks and "jerry-building" were responsible for a second collapse in the August of 1888. The restoration has since been completed in a most satisfactory manner--let us hope it will last. [Illustration: SEVILLE. THE GIRALDA TOWER] The exterior of the Cathedral is a very irregular mass of towers, domes, pinnacles and flying buttresses, which give no clue to the almost over-powering solemnity within the walls. Three doorways occupy the west façade, which is of modern construction, and there are three also on the north side of the Cathedral, one of which opens into the _Segrario_, another into the Patio de los Naranjos and the third into the arcade of the same patio. This last retains the horse-shoe arch of the old mosque. In the porch hangs the stuffed crocodile which was sent by the Sultan of Egypt to Alfonso el Sabio with a request for the hand of his daughter. On the south is one huge door seldom opened. On the east there are two more, that of La Puerta de los Palos being under the shadow of the great Giralda Tower. This magnificent relic of the Moslem's rule rears its height far above everything else in Seville. Erected at the close of the twelfth century by order of Abu Yusuf Yakub, it belongs to the second and best period of Moorish architecture. On its summit at the four corners rested four brazen balls of enormous size overthrown by one of the numerous earthquakes which have shaken Seville in days gone by. The belfry above the Moorish portion of the tower, which ends where the _solid_ walls stop, was put up in 1568, and has a second rectangular stage of smaller dimensions above. Both these are in keeping with the Moorish work below and in no way detract from its beauty. On top of the small cupola which caps the whole is the world-famed figure of Faith. Cast in bronze, with the banner of Constantine spread out to the winds of heaven, this, the _Giraldilla_, or weather-cock, moves to the slightest breeze. It is thirteen feet high, and weighs one and a quarter tons. Over three hundred feet above the ground, the wonder is--how did it get there? and how has it preserved its equipoise these last three hundred years? It is difficult to find a point from which one can see the Giralda Tower, in fact the only street from which it is visible from base to summit is the one in which I made my sketch. Even this view does not really convey its marvellous elegance and beauty. Next to the Cathedral the Alcázar is the most famous building in Seville. It is now a royal residence in the early part of the year, and when the King and Queen are there, no stranger under any pretext whatever is admitted. Its courtyards and gardens are its glory. The scent of orange blossom perfumes the air, the fountains splash and play, all is still within these fascinating courts save the tinkle of the water and cooing of doves. Of its orange trees, one was pointed out to me which Pedro the Cruel planted! and many others are known to be over two hundred years old. [Illustration: SEVILLE. IN THE ALCÁZAR, THE PATIO DE LAS DONCELLAS] Of all its courts, the Patio de las Doncellas is the most perfect. Fifty-two marble columns support the closed gallery and rooms above, and the walls of the arcade are rich with glazed tiles. Of all its chambers, the Hall of Ambassadors is the finest and is certainly the architectural gem of the Alcázar. Its dome is a marvel of Media Naranja form, and the frieze of window-shaped niches but adds to its beauty. Very little remains of the first Alcázar, which, by the way, is a derivation of Al-Kasr or house of Cæsar, and the present building as it now stands was due to Pedro the Cruel, Henry II., Charles V. and Philip V. The first named employed Moorish workmen from Granada, who emulated, under his directions, the newly finished Palace of the Alhambra. Many a treacherous deed has taken place within these walls, and none more loathsome than those credited to Pedro the Cruel. However, one thing can be put to his credit and that is this fairy Palace, this flower from the East, by the possession of which Seville is the gainer. To the east of the Alcázar is the old Jewish quarter, the most puzzling in plan, if plan it has, and the oldest part of Seville. The balconies of the houses opposite one another almost touch; there certainly, in some cases, would be no difficulty in getting across the street by using them as steps, and if a laden donkey essayed the passage below I doubt if he could get through. Poking about in these narrow alley-ways one day, I fell into conversation with a _guardia municipal_ who entertained me greatly with his own version of Seville's history, which ended, as he melodramatically pointed down the lane in which we were standing--"And here, señor, one man with a sword could keep an army at bay, and"--this in confidence, whispered--"I should not like to be the first man of the army"! In almost every quarter of the city fine old houses are to be found amidst most squalid and dirty surroundings. You may wander down some mean _calle_, where children in dozens are playing on the uneven pavement, their mothers sit about in the doorways shouting to one another across the street. Suddenly a wall, windowless save for a row of small openings under the roof, is met. A huge portal, above which is a sculptured coat-of-arms, with some old knight's helmet betokening a noble owner, is let into this, look inside, as you pass by--behind the iron grille is a deliciously cool _patio_, full of palms and shrubs. A Moorish arcade runs round supporting the glazed galleries of the first floor. A man in livery sits in a rocking chair dosing with the eternal cigarette between his lips. Beyond the first _patio_ you can see another, a bigger one, which the sun is lighting up. The life in this house is as different to the life of its next door neighbours as Park Lane is to Shoreditch. One of these great houses--owned by the Duke of Medinaceli--the Casa del Pilatos, has a large Moorish court, very similar to those of the Alcázar. They will tell you in Seville, that Pilate was a Spaniard, a lawyer, and failing to win the case for Christ, left the Holy Land, where he had a good practice, and returned to Spain to assist Ferdinand to drive out the Moors. "Yes, señor, he settled here and built this fine house about five hundred years ago." As a rule, in the better-class houses a porch opens into the street. On the inner side of this there is always a strong iron gate with a grille around to prevent any entry. These gates served a purpose in the days of the Inquisition, when none knew if the Holy Office might not suddenly descend upon and raid the house. Seville suffered terribly from the horrors of those dark times; even now--when a ring at the bell calls forth: "Who is there?" from the servant in the balcony above, before she pulls the handle which connects with the catch that releases the lock of the gate--the answer often is: "People of Peace." Some houses have interior walls six feet thick and more, which being hollow contain hiding-places with access from the roof by a rope. In the heat of summer--and Seville is called the "frying-pan of Europe"--when the temperature in the shade of the streets rises to over 115° Fahr. family life is spent below in the cool _patio_. A real house moving takes place as the heat comes on. The upper rooms, which are always inhabited in the winter, the kitchen, servants' rooms and all are deserted, every one migrates with the furniture to the lower floors. The upper windows are closed, shutters put up and a great awning drawn across the top of the courtyard. Despite the great heat, summer is a perfectly healthy period. No one dreams of going out in the daytime, and all Seville begins life towards five o'clock in the afternoon; 2 A.M. to 4 A.M. being the time to retire for the night! Seville can be very gay, and _Sevillanos_ worship the _Torrero_ or bull-fighter (_Toreador_ is a word unknown to the Spaniard). If a favourite _Torrero_, who has done well in the ring during the afternoon, enters the dining-room of a hotel or goes into a café it is not unusual for every one at table to rise and salute him. [Illustration: SEVILLE. VIEW OVER THE TOWN] There is another life in Seville, the life of the roofs. In early spring before the great heat comes, and in autumn before the cold winds arrive, the life of the roofs fascinated me. Up on the roofs in the dry atmosphere, Seville's washing hangs out to air, and up on the roofs, in the warm sun, with the hum of the streets far below, you will hear the quaint song--so Arabian in character--of the _lavandera_, as she pegs out the damp linen in rows. In the evening the click-a-click-click of the castanets and the sound of the guitar, broken by merry laughter, tells one that perhaps the _Sevillano_ has fathomed the mystery of knowing how best to live. And as sundown approaches what lovely colour effects creep o'er this city in the air! The light below fades from housetop and _miradore_, pinnacle and dome, until the last rays of the departing majesty touch the vane of the Giralda, that superb symbol of Faith,--and all is steely grey. Over the Guadalquiver lies Triana, and as I crossed the bridge for the first time the remains of an old tower were pointed out to me on the river bank. The subterranean passage through which the victims of the Inquisition found their exit to another world in the dark waters below is exposed to view, the walls having fallen away. It was therefore with something akin to relief I reached the gipsy quarter in this quaint, dirty suburb and feasted my eyes on the colours worn by its dark-skinned people. The potteries of Triana are world-renowned, and still bear traces in their output of Moorish tradition and design. Seville's quays are the busiest part of the city, and the constant dredging of the river permits of vessels of four thousand tons making this a port of call. Next to the Prado in Madrid, the Museum of Seville is more full of interest than any other. It is here that Murillo is seen at his best. The building was at one time the Convento de la Mercede founded by San Ferdinand. The exhibits in the archæological portion nearly all come from that ruin, the wonderful city of Italica. Among the best of Murillo's work are _St. Thomas de Villa Nueva Distributing Alms_, _Saint Felix of Cantalicio_ and a _Saint Anthony of Padua_. A large collection of Zurbaran's works also hangs in the gallery, but his big composition of the _Apotheosis of Saint Anthony_, is not so good as his single-figure subjects, and none of these approach in quality the fine _Monk_ in the possession of the Bankes family at Kingston Lacy in Dorset. Seville is the home of bull-fights. The first ever recorded took place in 1405, in the Plaza del Triunfo, in honour of the birth of a son to Henry II. of Castile. The world of Fashion takes the air every evening in the beautiful Paseo de las Delicias. The humbler members of society throng the walks watching their wealthier sisters drive down its fine avenues--this daily drive being the only exercise the ladies of Seville permit themselves to take. It is a pretty sight to watch the carriages coming home as twilight begins, and the last rays of the sun light up the Torre del Oro. Built by the Almohades this Moorish octagon stood at the river extremity of Moslem Seville. The golden yellow of the stone no doubt gave it the name of "Borju-d-dahab," "the tower of gold," which has stuck to it under Christian rule. But "how are the mighty fallen," and one of the glories of the Moor debased. It is now an office used by clerks of the Port, and, instead of the dignified tread of the sentinel, resounds to the scribble of pens. CORDOVA It is hard to realise that the Cordova of to-day was, under the rule of the Moor, a city famous all the world over and second only to the great Damascus. Long before the Moor's beneficent advent, in the far-off days of Carthage, Cordova was known as "the gem of the south." Its position on the mighty Guadalquiver, backed by mountains on the north, always seems to have attracted the best of those who conquered. In the time of the Romans, Marcellus peopled it with poor Patricians from Rome, and Cordova became Colonia Patricia, the capital of Hispania Ulterior. But it was left to the Infidel to make it what is now so difficult to realise--the first city in Western Europe. The zenith of its fame was reached during the tenth century, when the mighty Abderrhaman III., ruler of the Omayyades reigned, and did not begin to decrease until the death of Almanzor at the beginning of the next century. If we are to believe the historian Almakkari, Cordova contained at one time a million inhabitants, for whose worship were provided three hundred Mosques, and for whose ablutions nine hundred baths were no more than was necessary. (The arch-destroyer of all things Infidel, Philip II., demolished these.) It was the centre of art and literature, students from all parts flocked hither, its wealth increased and its fame spread, riches and their concomitant luxury made it the most famous place in Western Europe. Nothing could exceed the grace and elegance of its life, the courtly manners of its people, nor the magnificence of its buildings. From the years 711 to 1295, when Ferdinand drove him out, the cultivated Moslem reigned in this his second Mecca. And now?--under Christian rule it has dwindled down to what one finds it to-day--a quiet, partly ruinous town. Of all its great buildings nothing remains to remind one of the past but the ruins of the Alcázar--now a prison, a portion of its walls, and the much mutilated Mesquita--the Cathedral. [Illustration: CORDOVA. INTERIOR OF THE MESQUITA] I could not at first entry grasp the size of this the second largest church of any in existence. Coming suddenly into the cool shade of its many pillared avenues, I felt as if transplanted into the silent depths of a great forest. In every direction I looked the trunks of huge trees apparently rose upwards in ordered array. The light here and there filtered through gaps on to the red-tiled floor, which only made the deception greater by its resemblance to the needles of a pine-wood or the dead leaves of autumn. Then the organ boomed out a note and the deep bass of a priest in the _coro_ shattered the illusion. The first Mosque built on the site of Leovigild's Visigothic Cathedral, occupied one-fifth of the present Mesquita. It was "Ceca" or House of Purification, and a pilgrimage to it was equivalent to a visit to Mecca. It contained ten rows of columns, and is that portion which occupies the north-west corner ending at the south-east extremity where the present _coro_ begins. This space soon became insufficient for the population, and the Mosque was extended as far as the present Capilla de Nuestra Señora de Villavicosia. Subsequent additions were made by different rulers. The Caliph Al-Hakim II., who followed Abderrhaman III., expanded its size by building southwards as far as the inclination of the sloping ground would allow. To him is due the third Mihrâb, or Holy of Holies, the pavement of which is worn by the knees of the devout who went thus round the Mihrâb seven times. This Mihrâb is the most beautiful chamber I came across in all Spain. The Byzantine Mosaics which adorn it are among the most superb that exist, the domed ceiling of the recess is hewn out of a solid block of marble, and its walls, which Leo the Emperor of Constantinople sent a Greek artist and skilled workmen to put up, are chiselled in marble arabesques and moulded in stucco. The entrance archway to this gem of the East, an intricate and well-proportioned feature, rests on two green and two dark coloured columns. Close by is the private door of the Sultan which led from the Alcázar to the Mesquita. The last addition of all nearly doubled the size of the Mosque. Building to the south was impracticable on account of the fall in the land towards the river. Eastwards was the only way out of the difficulty unless the beautiful Court of the Oranges was to be enclosed. Eastwards, therefore, did Almanzor extend his building, and the whole space in this direction from the transepts or _Crucero_ of the present church, in a line north and south, was due to his initiative. [Illustration: CORDOVA. THE CAMPANARIO TOWER] The Mesquita at one time contained twelve hundred and ninety columns. Sixty eight were removed to make room for the _Coro_, _Crucero_ and _Capilla Major_, which is the portion reserved for service now. In the _coro_, the extremely fine _silleria_, are some of the best in Spain. The Lectern is very good Flemish work in brass of the sixteenth century. The choir books are beautifully illuminated missals, especially those of the "Crucifixion" and the "Calling of the Apostles." All this does not, however, compensate for the partial destruction of the Mosque. So thought the people of Cordova, who petitioned Charles V. in vain against the alterations which have destroyed the harmony of the wonderful building. When passing through the city at a later date and viewing the mischief that had been done, the King rebuked the chapter thus: "You have built here what you, or any one, might have built anywhere else; but you have destroyed what was unique in the world." Eight hundred and fifty columns now remain out of the above number. The odd four hundred and forty occupied the place where now stand the rows of orange trees in the courtyard, one time covered in, which is known as the Patio de los Naranjos, or Court of the Oranges. The fountain used for the ablutions of the Holy still runs with a crystal stream of pure water, and is to-day the meeting place of all the gossips in Cordova. Of the five gates to this enchanting court, that of the Puerta del Perdon, over which rises the great Tower, el Campanario, is the most important. It is only opened on state occasions. Erected in 1377 by Henry II. it is an imitation of Moorish design. The immense doors are plated with copper arabesques. The exterior of the Mesquita is still Moorish despite the great church which has been thrust through the centre and rises high above the flat roof of the remainder of the Mosque. A massive terraced wall with flame-shaped battlements encircles the whole, the view of which from the bridge over the river is more Eastern than anything else I saw in Spain. This fine bridge, erected by the Infidel on Roman foundations, is approached at the city end by a Doric gateway, built by Herrera in the reign of Philip II., that Philip who married Mary of England. It consists of sixteen arches and is guarded at its southern extremity by the _Calahorra_ or Moorish Tower, round which the road passes instead of through a gateway, thus giving additional security to the defence. The mills of the Moslem's day still work, both above and below bridge, and the patient angler sits in the sun with his bamboo rod, while the wheels of these relics groan and hum as they did in days gone by. More cunning is Isaac Walton's disciple who fishes from the bridge itself. A dozen rods with heavily weighted lines, for the Guadalquiver runs swift beneath the arches, and a small bell attached to the end of each rod is his armament. And when the unwary fish impales himself on the hook and the bell gives warning of a bite, the excitement is great. Greater still when a peal begins as three or four rods bend! [Illustration: CORDOVA. THE BRIDGE] The beggars of Cordova were the most importunate that fate sent across my path in the whole of Spain. I found it impossible to sit in the streets where I would gladly have planted my easel, and it was only by standing with my back to the wall that I was able to make my sketch of the Campanario. These streets are tortuous and narrow, and the houses, built on the Moorish plan with a beautiful _patio_ inside, are low. At many a corner I came across marble columns, some with Roman inscriptions, probably from Italica, placed against the house to prevent undue wear and tear. In the narrowest ways I noticed how the load borne by the patient ass had scooped out a regular track on either wall about three or four feet from the ground. Wherever I went, to the oldest quarters of the town in the south-east corner or the modern in the north-west, I could never rid myself of the feeling that Cordova was a city of the past. Her life is more Eastern than that of Seville, and her people bear more traces of the Moor. Decay and ruin are apparent at every turn, but how picturesque it all is!--the rags, the squalor, and the ruin. How I anathematised those beggars with no legs, or minus arms, when I tried to begin a street sketch! The patience of Job would not have helped me, it was the loathsomeness of these cripples that drove me away. Begging is prohibited in Seville and Madrid and in one or two other towns, would that it were so in Cordova. Away up in the southern slopes of the Sierra de Cordoba stands the Convento de San Jerónimo, now a lunatic asylum. Built out of the ruins of the once magnificent Medînat-az-zahrâ, the Palace that Abderrhaman III. erected, its situation is perfect. In the old days this palace surpassed all others in the wonders of its art and luxury. The plough still turns up ornaments of rare workmanship, but like so many things in Spain its glories have departed. Yes, Cordova has seen its grandest days, the birthplace of Seneca, Lucan, Averroes, Juan de Mena--the Spanish Chaucer--Morales, and many another who became famous, can now boast at best with regard to human celebrities as being the Government establishment for breaking in horses for the cavalry. Certainly the men employed in this are fine dashing specimens of humanity, and they wear a very picturesque dress. But Cordova like her world-famed sons, sleeps--and who can say that it would be better now if her sleep were broken? [Illustration: CORDOVA. FOUNTAIN IN THE COURT OF ORANGES] GRANADA Spread out on the edge of a fertile plain at the base of the Sierra Nevada, Granada basks in the sun; and though the wind blows cold with an icy nip from the snows of the highest peaks in Spain, I cannot but think that this, the last stronghold of the Moors, is the most ideal situation of any place I have been in. The city is divided into three distinct districts, each with its own peculiar characteristics. The Albaicin, Antequeruela, and Alhambra. The first named covers the low ground and the hills on the bank of the Darro, a gold-bearing stream which rushes below the Alhambra hill on the north. The second occupies the lower portion of the city which slopes on to the plain, and the Alhambra rises above both, a well-nigh demolished citadel, brooding over past glories of the civilised Moor, the most fascinating spot in all Spain. The Albaicin district is practically the rebuilt Moorish town, where the aristocrats of Seville and Cordova settled when driven out of those cities by St. Ferdinand in the thirteenth century. Many traces remain to remind one of their occupation in the tortuous streets which wind up the steep hill sides, and the wall which they built for greater security is still the boundary of the city on the north. The Albaicin is a grand place to wander in and lose oneself hunting for relics and little bits of architecture. At every turn of the intricate maze I came across something of interest, either Moorish or Mediæval. A mean looking house with a fine coat-of-arms over the door had evidently been built by a knight with the collector's craze. He had specialised in millstones; a round dozen or more were utilised in the lower portions of the wall and looked strange with stones set in the plaster between them. A delicious _patio_, now given over to pigs and fowls, with a broken-down fountain in the centre of its ruined arcaded court, recalled the luxuries of the Infidel. The terraced gardens standing behind and above many a blank wall carried me back to those days of old when the opulence of the East pervaded every dwelling in this Mayfair of Granada. Of all these the Casa del Chapiz, though degraded into a low-class dwelling, is with its beautiful garden the most perfect remnant of the exotic Moor. [Illustration: GRANADA. CARRERA DE DARRO] In the Carrera de Darro, just opposite the spot where once a handsome Moorish arch spanned the stream, stands a house wherein is a Moorish bath surrounded by horseshoe arcades. The bath is 18 ft. square, and in the vaulted recess beyond is one of smaller dimensions commanding more privacy for the cleanly Eastern whose day was never complete without many ablutions. Not far away up the hillside, in cave-dwellings amidst an almost impenetrable thicket of prickly pears, live the _gitanos_. I fear they now exist on the charity of the tourist, and make a peseta or two by fortune-telling or in the exercise of a more reprehensible cleverness, a light-fingered dexterity which is generally only discovered by those who "must go to the gipsy quarter" on their return to the hotel. These gipsies no longer wander in the summer months and lie up for the winter as they did of yore. They are not the Romanies of old times, and a nomadic life holds no charm for them now. They make enough out of the tourist to eke out a lazy existence throughout the year, and are fast losing all the character of a wandering tribe and the lively splendour of their race. Higher up, the banks of the Darro are lined with more cave-dwellings, a great many of which, to judge by their present inaccessibility, are undoubtedly of prehistoric origin. Those that I took to be of later date have a sort of level platform in front of the entrance, from which the approach of a stranger could be seen and due warning taken by those inside of any hostile intent. The Antequeruela quarter, called thus from the remnant of Moorish refugees who driven from Antequera found here a home, extends from the base of Monte Mauro to some distance below the confluence of the Darro and Genil, Granada's other river. It is the most modern quarter and busiest part of the city. The life of an ordinary Spanish town passes in front of me as I sit in the sun sharing a seat with an old man wrapped closely in a _capa_. It is April. We are in the Alameda, a broad promenade which leads to the gardens of the Paseo de Salòn and de la Bomba. On either side are many coloured houses with green shutters. They are very French, and to this day I try to recall the town in France where I had seen them before. How often this happens when we travel abroad!--a face, a scent, a sound. Memory racks the tortuous channels of half-forgotten things stored away somewhere in the brain, and for days with an irritating restlessness we wander fruitlessly amid the paths of long ago. I turned to my companion on the seat, he looked chilled despite the warmth of an April sun. "Tell me, sir, to whom does all the fine country of the Vega belong?" "Absent landlords, señor; they take their rents and they live in Madrid, and the poor man has no one to care for him." "But surely he begs and does not wish to work or to be cared for. The beggars in Granada are more numerous than in any place I know." "That is true, señor," and with a shake he relapsed into silence, drawing his _capa_ closer around him. The turn the conversation had taken was not worth pursuing. New buildings are superseding the old in Antequeruela, and poverty and squalor pushed further out of the sight of El Caballero, his Highness the tourist. Æsthetically we appreciate the picturesque side of poverty, the tumble-down houses, the rags, the graceful attitudes of the patient poor for ever shifting in the patches of sunlight as the great life-giver moves round. Dinner will be ready for us at 7 o'clock in the hotel, there would be no call to leave home if every town we came to was clean and its people prosperous. "But what about _Los Pobres_, the beggars?" you ask. "Are they really deserving of charity, or only lazy scoundrels?" I cannot answer you. I can only tell you that I have never seen such terrible emaciated bundles of rags as those I saw in Granada. In Seville, though it is forbidden to beg, it was the one-eyed that predominated; in Cordova he of no legs, who having marked down his prey, displayed great agility as he scuttled across the street with the help of little wooden hand-rests; but here not only were both combined, but various horrors of crippled and disfigured humanity with open sores and loathsome disease thrust themselves before me wherever I went. It was disgusting--but oh! how picturesque! If only, my good _Pobres_, you would not come so close to me! They say Spain is the one unspoilt country in Europe. Personally I think she is the one country that wants regenerating. Her girls are women at sixteen, old at thirty, and aged ten years later. Her men take life as it comes with very little initiative to better themselves. Very few display any energy. Their chief thoughts are woman, and how to pass the day at ease. Luckily for the country, at the age when good food and clean living helps to make men, her youth is invigorated by army service. True it is not popular. In the late war they died like flies through fever and ill-feeding, and many were the sad tales I heard of José and Pedro returning from the front with health ruined for life. It was a sad blow to Spain, that war. Her navy demolished and her colonies lost. It may be the regeneration of the nation, her well-wishers hope so, but it is a difficult thing to change the leopard's spots. The beggar being hungry begs, and well-nigh starves, his children follow his example and probably his great grandchildren will be in the same line of business a hundred years hence--_Quien sabe?_ who knows? I still sit in the sun rolling cigarettes; it is extraordinary how soon the custom becomes a habit, and think of all this. A string of donkeys passes with baskets stuffed tight with half a dozen large long-funnelled water cans. They have come in with fresh drinking water from the spring up the Darro under the Alhambra hill, and a little later the water-sellers will be offering glasses of the refreshingly cool contents of their cans. Granada is a city running with water, but the pollution from the drains and the never-ending ranks of women on their knees wrinsing clothes in its two streams, into which, by the way, all dead refuse is thrown, makes that which is fit to drink a purchasable quantity only. I watch the peasants from the Vega, who come in with empty panniers slung across their donkeys, scraping up the dirt of the streets which they take away to fertilise their cottage gardens. Herds of goats go by muzzled until milking is over. They make for that bit of blank wall opposite, and stand licking the saline moisture which oozes from the plaster in the shade. The goats of Granada are reckoned the finest in Spain, and, as is the custom throughout Andalusia, graze in the early spring on the tender shoots of the young corn. This not only keeps them in food, but improves the quality of that part of the crop which reaches maturity. I could sit all day here if only the sun stood still. My companion removed himself half an hour ago and it is getting chilly in the shade, so up and on to the Cathedral. What a huge Renaissance pile it is. Built on the Gothic plans of Diego de Siloe it is undoubtedly the most imposing edifice of this style in Spain. Fergusson considers its plan makes it one of the finest churches in Europe. The western façade was erected by Alonso Cano and José Granados, and does not follow Siloe's original design. The name of the sculptor-painter is writ in big letters throughout the building. To him are due the colossal heads of Adam and Eve, let into recesses above the High Altar, and the seven pictures of the _Annunciation_, _Conception_, _Presentation in the Temple_, _Visitation_, _Purification_ and _Assumption_ in the Capilla Mayor. The two very fine colossal figures, bronze gilt, which stand above the over-elaborated pulpits; a couple of beautiful miniatures on copper in the Capilla de la Trinidad; a fine Christ bearing the Cross and a head of S. Pedro over the altar of Jesus Nazareno, are also by Cano. Many other examples from his carving tools and brush are to be found in the Cathedral, of which he was made a "Racione" or minor Canon, after fleeing from Valladolid when accused of the murder of his wife. The little room he used as a workshop in the Great Tower may still be visited and his remains lie tranquilly beneath the floor of the _coro_. [Illustration: GRANADA. EXTERIOR OF THE CATHEDRAL] In the Capilla de la Antigua there is that curious little image which, found in a cave, served Ferdinand as a battle banner; and also contemporary (?) portraits of the King and his Queen. To me the thing of surpassing interest, which ought to be the most revered building in all Spain, was the Capilla Real and its contents. The _reja_, which separates the choir from the rest of the chapel, is a magnificent piece of work, coloured and gilded, by Bartolomé. As the verger unlocked the great gate he drew my attention to the box containing the lock with its three beautifully wrought little iron figures and intricate pattern. We passed in, the gate swung to with a click, the lock was as good as if it had but recently been placed there. These _rejas_ throughout the country are all in splendid condition. A dry climate no doubt preserves them as it has preserved everything else, and I very seldom detected rust on any iron work. The humidity of the winter atmosphere is insufficient, I suppose, to set up much decay in metal, and certainly the only decay in Spain is where inferior material has been used in construction, or the negligence of man has left things to rot. With the gate locked behind me I stood in front of the two marble monuments, the one of the recumbent figures of Ferdinand and Isabella, the other of Philip and Juana la Loca--crazy Jane. Beyond rose the steps up to the High Altar, close at my side those--a short flight--that led to the crypt where the coffins of these four rest. I felt surrounded by the Great of this Earth, and certainly a feeling of awe took hold of me as their deeds passed through my mind and I realised that here lay the remains of those who had turned out the Moor, bidden God-speed to Columbus, and instituted the Inquisition. They are wonderful tombs these two. Ferdinand wears the order of St. George, the ribbon of the Garter, Isabella that of the Cross of Santiago, Philip and his wife the Insignia of the order of the Golden Fleece. Four doctors of the church occupy the corners of the first tomb, with the twelve Apostles at the sides. The other has figures of SS. Michael, Andrew, and John the Baptist, and the Evangelist. Both tombs are elaborately carved, the medallions in _alto-relievo_ being of very delicate work. Next to that magnificent tomb in the Cartuja de Miraflores at Burgos, these are the finest monuments in all Spain. Above the High Altar is a florid _Retablo_ with not much artistic merit. My interest was entirely centred in the two portrait figures of Ferdinand and Isabella. They each kneel at a Prie-Dieu facing one another on either side of the altar--the King to the north, the Queen to the south. Below them in double sections are four wooden panels in bas-relief, to which I turned after a long examination of these authentic and contemporary portraits. These panels are unsurpassed as records of the costume of the day and a faithful representation of their subject. On the left is the mournful figure of Boabdil giving up the key of the Alhambra to Cardinal Mendoza, who seated on his mule between the King and Queen, alone wears gloves. Surrounding them are knights, courtiers and the victorious soldiery. In the background are the towers of the Alhambra. To the right is seen the wholesale conversion by Baptism of the Infidel, the principal figures being monks who are very busy over their work, inducing the reluctant Moor to enter an alien Faith. There is something very impressive about these panels, they render so well and in such a naïve manner the history they record. The surrender of the Moor after 750 years' rule, the end of his dreams, the final triumph of the King and Queen, who devoted the first portion of their reign to driving him out of the country, and the great church receiving the token of submission at the end of last act, they are all here.--The verger touched my arm, my reverie of those stirring times was broken, he had other things to show and noon was fast approaching. Pointing to three iron plates let into the floor of the chapel, he inquired if I would like to see the spot where rest the coffins of these great makers of history. Certainly; I could not leave the Cathedral without a silent homage to those who placed Spain first among the nations. He lifted the plates, and lighting a small taper which he thrust into the end of a long pole, disappeared down the steps, with a warning to mind my head for the entry was very low. I followed, stooping. At the bottom of the steps was a small opening heavily barred. The verger pushed his lighted taper and pole through the bars, and beckoned to me to look. I peered into the dark chamber, there resting on a marble slab were the rough iron-bound coffins of the "Catholic Kings." The taper flickered and cast long shadows in the gloom, discovering the coffins of Philip and Juana. It was all very eerie, a fitting climax in its simplicity to the magnificent monuments above and to the history writ on the walls of the Capilla Real. I shall never forget it. In the sacristy I was shown the identical banner which floated from the Torre de la Vela when the Alhambra had surrendered. Isabella herself had worked this for the very object to which it was put. Next to it hangs Ferdinand's sword, with a remarkably small handle. I had thought, from the kneeling effigy in the Capilla Real, that both he and Isabella must have been small-made and this verified my guess. Many other personal relics of the two were shown me. The Queen's own missal, a beautiful embroidered chasuble from her industrious fingers, an exquisitely enamelled viril, &c. Time was short, my verger wanted his dinner, and I had seen enough for one morning. He let me out through the closed door into the Placeta de la Lonja and in a sort of dream I carried away all I had seen. The next morning I returned to the Placeta and stood in the doorway of the old Royal Palace, now used as a drapery warehouse, and commenced the drawing figured in the illustration. The rich late Gothic ornament of the exterior of the Capilla Real is well balanced by the Lonja which backs on to the sacristy. Here Pradas's work has been much mutilated and the lower stage of the arcading built up. The twisted columns of the gallery and its original wooden roof remain to tell us what this fine façade once was. There is a great deal of interest in this huge Cathedral, which to the tourist is quite overshadowed by the Alhambra. In the north-west corner of the Segrario which adjoins the building on the south, is the Capilla de Pulgar. Herman Perez del Pulgar was a knight serving under Ferdinand's banner. Filled with holy zeal, he entered Granada one stormy night in December 1490 by the Darro conduit, and making his way to the Mosque which then stood where the Segrario now is, pinned a scroll bearing the words Ave Maria to its principal door with his dagger. This daring deed was not discovered until the next morning, by which time the intrepid knight was safe back in camp. His courage was rewarded by a seat in the _coro_ of the Cathedral, and at his death his body was interred in the chapel which bears his name. Nearly all the churches of Granada occupy the sites of Mosques. Santa Anna, like San Nicolás, has a most beautiful wooden roof. San Juan de los Reyes contains portraits of Ferdinand and Isabella; its tower is the minaret of what was once a Mosque. The Cathedral itself is so crowded in by other buildings, that no comprehensive view of the fabric is possible. Unfortunately this is the case, with one or two notable exceptions, throughout the country. Its fine proportions are thus lost, and it is only the interior with its great length and breath, its lofty arches and fine Corinthian pilasters that serve to dignify this House of God. Taking a morning off, I walked out to the Cartuja Convent. The Gran Capitan, Gonzalo de Cordoba, at one time granted an estate to the Carthusians and on it they erected the convent to which I turned my steps. The Order about this time was immensely wealthy and they spent money with reckless lavishness on the interior of their church. Mother-of-pearl, tortoiseshell, ebony and cedar-wood entered largely into their decorations, as well as ivory and silver. But perhaps the marbles in the church are the most remarkable part of their scheme. These were chosen for the wonderful patterns of the sections, and with a little stretch of the imagination I could trace well-composed landscapes, human and animal forms in a great many of the slabs. The overdone chirrugueresque work, to which add these fantastic wall decorations, makes this interior positively scream. It is nothing more nor less than a vulgar display of wealth. The cloisters of the convent also attest the bad taste of the Carthusians, they contain a series of pictures which represent the most repugnant and bloodthirsty scenes of persecutions and martyrdoms of the Order. In another convent, San Gerónimo, was buried the Gran Capitan. A slab marks the spot, but his poor bones were exhumed and carried off to Madrid in 1868 to form the nucleus of a Spanish Pantheon. Needless to say, like so many other great ideas in Spain, nothing further was done, and Gonzalo's remains still await a last resting-place. One more fact before I reach the Alhambra. In the church of San Juan de Dios you may see the cage in which the founder, Juan de Robles, was shut up as a lunatic. What do you think his lunacy was? Having the infirm and the poor always before him, this tender-hearted man went about preaching the necessity of hospitals to alleviate their distress. Aye, he was a hundred years and more before his time, so they shut him up in a cage and there let him rot and die. Those that came after in more enlightened days valued the good man's crusade at its proper price, and he was eventually canonised, and his supposed remains now rest in an _urna_. Up a toilsome approach, splashing through the mud, I drove on the night I reached Granada. As the horses slowed up, I put my head out of the carriage window, we were passing under an archway and I knew that at last one of the dreams of my life was realised. I was in the Alhambra. I became conscious of rows and rows of tall trees swaying in the wind. I smelt the delicious scent of damp earth, and could just distinguish, as the carriage crawled up the steep ascent, in the lulls of the storm, the sound of running water. It was fairyland, it was peace. After that long, tedious journey and the glare of the electric lit streets I had just passed through, I sank back on the cushions and felt my reward had come. [Illustration: GRANADA. THE ALHAMBRA] How is it possible to describe the Alhambra? It has been done so often and so well. Every one has read Washington Irving, and most of us know Victor Hugo's eulogy. I had better begin at the beginning, which is the gateway erected by Charles V. under which I passed with such a happy consciousness. Further up the hill, through which only pedestrians can go, is the Gate of Judgment, the first gateway into the Moorish fortress. Above it is the Torre de Justicia erected by Yusuf I. in 1348. On the external keystone is cut a hand, on the inner a key. Much controversy rages round these two signs and I leave it to others to find a solution. In old days the Kadi sat in this gateway dispensing justice. The massive doors still turn on their vertical pivots, the spear rests of the Moorish guard are still attached to the wall, and you must enter, as the Moors did, by the three turns in the dark passage beyond the gate. A narrow lane leads to the Plaza de las Algibes, under the level of which are the old Moorish cisterns. To the right is the Torre del Vino, and on the left the Acazaba. Come with me up the short flight of steps into the little strip of garden. Let us lean over the wall and look out on to the Vega. Is there anywhere so grand and varied an outline of plain and mountain? Do you wonder at the tears that suffused the eyes of Boabdil as he turned for a last look at this incomparable spot? The brown roofs of Granada lie at our feet. Far away through the levels of the green plain, the Vega, I can see the winding of many silver streams. Beyond those rugged peaks to the south lies the Alpujarras district, the last abiding place of the conquered Moor. Further on the mass of the Sierra Aburijara bounds the horizon, west of it is the town of Loja, thirty miles away, buried in the dip towards Antequerra. To the north is Mount Parapanda, the barometer of the Vega, always covered with mist when rain is at hand. Nearer in is the Sierra de Elvira, spread out below which are the dark woods of the Duke of Wellington's property--he is known in Spain as Duque de Ciudad Rodriguez. It is clear enough for us to see the blue haze of the mountains round Jaen, and the rocky defile of Mochin. The Torre de la Vela shuts out the rest of the view. There is a bell hanging in this tower which can be heard as far away as Loja. Now turn and look behind. Right up into the blue sky rise the snow peaks of the Sierra Nevada. Mulhacen, the highest point in all Spain, is not visible, but we can see Veleta which is but a few feet lower. The whole range glistens in the afternoon sun, but it is the evening hour that brings such wonderful changes of colour over these great snowfields, and, after the sun is down, such a pale mother-of-pearl grey silhouetted against the purple sky. The entrance into what we call the Alhambra is hidden away behind the unfinished Palace of Charles V. The low door admits us directly in the Patio de los Arrayanes, or court of the Myrtles. Running north and south it gets more sun than any other court of the Alhambra. What a revelation it is! In the centre is an oblong tank full of golden carp. The neatly kept myrtle hedges encircle this, reflected in the clear water they add refreshing charm to a first impression of the Moorish Palace. On the north rises the Torre de Comares, the approach to which is through a beautifully proportioned chamber, the roof of which was unfortunately destroyed by fire in 1890. The whole of the ground-floor of this tower is known as the Hall of the Ambassadors. The monarch's throne occupied a space opposite the entrance and it was here that the last meeting to consider the surrender was held by Boabdil. The elaborate domed roof of this magnificent chamber is of larch wood, but the semi-darkness prevents one realising to the full extent its beauties. From the windows, which almost form small rooms, so thick are the walls of the Tower of Comares, fine views over the roofs of the city and the Albaicin hill are obtained. The Court of the Lions, so called from the central fountain upheld by marble representations of the kingly beast, is surrounded by a beautiful arcade. At either end this is thrown out, forming a couple of extremely elegant pavilions. Fairy columns support a massive roof, the woodwork of which is carved with the pomegranate of Granada. Intricate fret-work is arranged to break the monotony of strong sunlight on a flat surface. Arabesques and inscriptions, stamped with an iron mould on the wet clay, repeat themselves all round the frieze. Orange trees at one time adorned the court and cast gracious shade on its surface. The fountain threw up jets of splashing water, the musical sound harmonising with the wonderful arrangement of light and shade. I tried to picture all this as I sat making my sketch, but even in April, though hot in the sun, I required an overcoat in the shadow, and I must own that the ever-present tourist with his kodak sadly disturbed all mental attempts at the reconstruction of Moorish life. [Illustration: GRANADA. THE ALHAMBRA, COURT OF LIONS] On the south side of the court is the hall of the Abencerrages, named after that noble family. The massive wooden doors, which shut it off from the arcade, are of most beautiful design. The hall is rectangular and has a fine star-shaped stalactite dome. The _azulejos_, or tiles, are the oldest that remain in the Alhambra. A passage leads to what was once the Royal Sepulchral Chamber. On the east side is the so-called Sala de la Justicia divided into several recesses and running the whole length of this portion of the court. The central recess was used by Ferdinand and Isabella when they held the first Mass after the surrender of the Moors. The chief interest of the Sala I found to be in a study of the paintings on the semicircular domed roofs. They portray the Moor of the period. The middle one, that in the chapel-recess, no doubt contains portraits of Granada's rulers in council. The other two represent hunting scenes and deeds of chivalry. It is supposed that the Koran forbids the delineation of any living thing. The Moor got over this difficulty by portraying animal life in as grotesque a manner as possible, or by employing foreign captives to do this for him. One theory of the origin of the Lion Fountain is that a captive Christian carved the lions and gave his best--or his worst--as the price of his liberation. Personally I think they are of Phoenician origin. Animals and birds in decoration reached the Moor from Persia, where from unknown ages they had always been employed in this way; and the Môsil style of hammered metal work is replete with this feature. On the north side of the court lies the Room of the Two Sisters, with others opening out from it, which seems to point to the probability that this was the suite occupied by the Sultana herself. Moorish art has here reached its highest phase. The honeycomb roof contains nearly five thousand cells, all are different, yet all combine to form a marvellously symmetrical whole. Fancy ran free with the architect who piled one tiny cell upon another and on these supported a third. Pendant pyramids cluster everywhere and hang suspended apparently from nothing. In the fertility of his imagination the designer surpassed anything of the kind that went before or has since been attempted. Truly the verses of a poem copied on to the _azulejos_ are well set. "Look well at my elegance, and reap the benefit of a commentary on decoration. Here are columns ornamented with every perfection, the beauty of which has become proverbial." Beyond this entrancing suite of rooms is the Miradoro de Daraxa with three tall windows overlooking that little gem of a garden the Patio de Daraxa. It was here that Washington Irving lodged when dreaming away those delicious days in the Alhambra. The old Council Chamber of the Moors, the Meshwâr, is reached through the Patio de Mexuar. Charles V. turned this chamber into a chapel, and the hideous decorations he put up are still extant. An underground passage, which leads to the baths, ran from the _patio_ and gave access to the battlements and galleries of the fortress as well as forming a connecting link between each tower. The baths are most interesting, but to me were pervaded by a deadly chill. I felt sorry for the guardian who spends his days down in such damp, icy quarters. A remark I made to him inquiring how long his duty kept him in so cold a spot, called forth so terrible a fit of coughing that I got no reply. I was told afterwards that he was only placed there as he was too ill for other duty, and it was expected he would not live much longer! There are two baths of full size and one for children. The _azulejos_ in them are very beautiful, as they also are in the disrobing room and chamber for rest. An open corridor leads from the Hall of the Ambassadors to the Torre del Peinador which Yusuf I. built. The small Tocador de la Reina, or Queen's dressing-room, with its quaint frescoes, was modernised by Charles V. Let into the floor is a marble slab drilled with holes, through which perfumes found their way from a room below while the Queen was dressing. The glamour of the East clings to every corner of the Alhambra, and the wonder of it all increased as I began to grow familiar with its courtyards and halls, the slender columns of its arcades, with their tracery and oft-repeated verses forming ornament and decoration, and the well thought-out balance of light and shade. What must it all have been like when the sedate Moor glided noiselessly through the cool corridors, or the clang of arms resounded through the now silent halls! It is difficult to imagine. The inner chambers were then lined with matchless carpets and rugs and the walls were covered with subtly coloured _azulejos_. Many are the changes since those days of the Infidel who cultivated the art of living as it has never been cultivated since. Restoration is judiciously but slowly going on, and every courtesy is shown to the visitor. A small charge might be levied, however, to assist the Government, even in a slight degree, with restoration, and I am sure no one would grudge paying for the privilege of sauntering through the most interesting remains of the Moorish days of Spain. The unfinished Palace of Charles V. occupies a large space, to clear which a great deal of the Moorish Palace was demolished. The interior is extremely graceful. The double arcades, the lower of which is Doric and the upper Ionic, run round a circular court which for good proportion it would be hard to beat. [Illustration: GRANADA. GENERALIFE] On the Corre de Sol, a little way out of the Alhambra and situated above it, is the Generalife. It belongs to the Pallavicini family of Genoa, but on the death of the present representative becomes the property of the Spanish Government. A stately cypress avenue leads to the entrance doorway, through which one enters an oblong court full of exotic growth and even in April a blaze of colour. Through a tank down the centre runs a delicious stream of clear water. At the further end of this captivating court are a series of rooms, one of which contains badly painted portraits of the Spanish Sovereigns since the days of Ferdinand and Isabella. Up some steps is another garden court with another tank, shaded by more cypress trees. One huge patriarch is over six hundred years old, and it is supposed that under it Boabdil's wife clandestinely met Hamet the Abencerrage. Space will not permit me to tell of the many entrancing excursions I made to the foot-hills of the Sierra Nevada and up the two rivers. I can only add that the valleys disclosed to the pedestrian are a wealth of rare botanical specimens, and if time permits will well repay a lengthened sojourn in the last stronghold of the Moors in Spain. MALAGA Malaga disputes with Cadiz the honour of being the oldest seaport in the country. In early days the Phoenicians had a settlement here, and in after times both the Carthagenians and Romans utilised "Malacca" as their principal port on the Mediterranean littoral of Spain. In 571 the Goths under their redoubtable King, Leovigild, wrested the town from the Byzantines. Once more it was captured, by Tarik, in the year 710 and remained a Moorish stronghold until Ferdinand took it after a long siege in 1487. It is said that gunpowder was first used in Spain at this siege, when the "seven sisters of Ximenes," guns planted in the Gibralfaro, belched forth fire and smoke. In the year 709 the Berber Tarif entered into an alliance with Julian, Governor of Ceuta, who held that place for Witiza the Gothic King of Spain. With four ships and five hundred men he crossed the narrow and dangerous straits to reconnoitre the European coast, having secretly in view an independent kingdom for himself on the Iberian peninsula. He landed at Cape Tarifa. This expedition was so far successful that in two years' time another Berber, of a name almost similar, Tarík to wit, was sent over with twelve thousand men and landed near the rock which received the name of Jabal-Tarík, or mountain of Tarík, the present Gibraltar. Witiza in the meantime died and was succeeded by Roderic, who, hearing of the invasion of this Moorish host, hastened south from Toledo and met his death in the first decisive battle between Christian and Infidel on the banks of the Guadalete near Cadiz. Tarík then commenced his victorious march, which ended in less than three years with the subjugation of the whole country as far as the foot of the Pyrenees--Pelayo, in his cave at Covadonga near Oviedo, alone holding out with a mere remnant against the all-conquering Moor. [Illustration: MALAGA. VIEW FROM THE HARBOUR] If you ask me, "What is Malaga to-day?" I can reply with truth, "The noisiest town in Spain." Like all places in the south it is a babel of street-cries, only a little more so than any of the others. The _seranos_, or night-watchmen, disturb one's rest as they call out the hour of the night, or whistle at the street corners to their comrades. A breeze makes hideous the hours of darkness by the banging to and fro of unsecured shutters. The early arrival of herds of goats with tinkling bells heralds the dawn, which is soon followed by the discordant clatter of all those, cracked and otherwise, which hang in the church belfries. The noisiest town I visited, most certainly, but for all that a very enchanting place. In a way not unlike Naples, for the Malagueno is the Spanish prototype of the Neapolitan. Lazy, lighthearted, good-natured, but quick to take affront, he gets through the day doing nothing in a manner that won my sincere admiration. "Why work, señor, when you have the sun? I do not know why the English travellers are always in such a hurry. And the North American, he is far worse. I earned two pesetas yesterday. To-day I have no wants, I do not work. To-morrow? Yes, perhaps to-morrow I work, but to-day I sit here in the sun, I smoke my cigarette, I am content to watch others, that is life!"--and who can say that the Malagueno is far wrong? Not I. Malaga's Cathedral, an imposing building of a very mixed Corinthian character, occupies the site of a Moorish mosque which was converted into a church. Of this early church of the Incarnation, the Gothic portal of the _Segragrio_ is the only portion remaining. The present edifice was begun in 1538 from the plans of that great architect Diego de Siloe, but being partially destroyed by an earthquake in 1680, was not completed until 1719. It cannot be called complete even now, and the long period over which its construction has been spread accounts for the very many inconsistencies in a building which is full of architectural defects. The west façade is flanked by two Towers, only one of which has been finished; this is drawn out in three stages like the tower of La Seo at Saragossa, and has a dome with lantern above. The doors of the north and south Transepts are also flanked by towers, but they do not rise beyond the cornice line. The interior, reminding one of Granada's Cathedral, is seemingly immense. The proportions are massive and decidedly good. It was in his proportions that Siloe excelled. The length of this is three hundred and seventy-five feet, the width two hundred and forty, and the height one hundred and thirty feet. The columns which support the heavy roof consist of two rows of pillars one above the other. The vaulting is of round arches. A picture by Alonso Cano in the chapel of Our Lady of the Rosary, and one of a _Virgin and Child_, in that of San Francisco, by Morales, were the only two objects that I could say interested me, besides the magnificently carved _silleria del coro_, the work of many hands, but chiefly those of Pedro de Mena, a pupil of Cano. With all its architectural incongruities it is an impressive fabric, and rises high above the surrounding roofs, like a great Liner with a crowd of smaller boats lying around her. So it struck me as I sat on the quayside of the Malagueta making my sketch, sadly interfered with by an unpleasant throng of idling loafers. Beyond Malagueta lies Caleta, and on the hill above them is the Castilla de Gibralfaro, from which when the sky is clear the African mountains near Ceuta can be seen. Below the Gibralfaro and between it and the Cathedral, lies the most ancient part of the city, the Alcazába, the glorious castle and town of Moorish days. And now?--like so many of Spain's departed glories, it is not much more than a ruined conglomeration of huts and houses of a low and very insanitary order. At the other end of Malaga is the Mercado, and close by is the old Moorish sea gateway, the Puerta del Mar, washed by the waters of the blue Mediterranean in their day, but at the present time well away from the sea and surrounded by houses. The everyday market is held in the dry bed of the treacherous Guadelmedina, a stream which rose in the fatal October of 1907 and swept away all the bridges, swamping the lower quarters of the city. Many lives were lost in this disastrous flood and many bodies picked up by fishing-boats far out at sea. However, when I made my sketch there was no chance of such a visitation, and I found the market folk more polite than the loafers on the quay. The country lying at the back of the city and at the base of the sun-baked and scarred mountains by which it is surrounded, produces almost everything that grows. From this--the Vega--come grapes, raisins, figs, oranges, lemons, water and sweet melons, quinces, pomegranates, medlars, plantains, custard-apples, guava, olives and sugar-cane--a veritable paradise for the fruit grower. Up the hill slopes, where the olive luxuriates, fine woods of sweet acorn and cork trees are passed, and any day you may see large herds of swine feeding on the acorns that have fallen, and routing out other delicacies that their sensitive noses tell them lie hidden beneath the surface. The pork of Estremadura is reckoned the best in Spain, and that from these oak woods a good second. The pig in Spain is a clean feeder, and you can eat him with perfect safety anywhere. Such a thing as the offensive pig-sty, the disgrace of rural England, is absolutely unknown here. [Illustration: MALAGA. THE MARKET] Malaga's climate is delightful, despite the fierce winds and the dust they raise. Though rain seldom falls the cool sea breezes in summer bring a refreshing tonic to the dweller up country; and many Spaniards at this season come here for bathing, and obtain a maximum of sunshine without the intense heat of the interior. VALENCIA Valencia del Cid is inseparably connected with the hero of Spanish romance, Rodrigo Diaz of Bivar, to give him his real name, "Cid" being a corruption of the Moorish _Seyyid_, and first appearing in historical documents of the year 1064. Rising to great power, Alfonso of Leon appointed him to the command of his army, but through jealousy banished him in 1081. From that date the Cid became a true knight-errant. Barred from the kingdom of Leon, he was ever ready to sell his services to the highest bidder; and after many wanderings found himself with a goodly following of knights, only too eager in those days, when might was right, to be in the train of so redoubtable a champion, _en route_ to Saragossa. The Moorish ruler of that city being at logger-heads with the Count of Barcelona accepted the Cid's proffered services, and the result was a battle in which the Catalans were badly beaten. With no prospects of further service in Aragon, the Cid turned his face south and marched on Valencia, whose Moorish King Yahya was only too pleased to request his protection in advance, instead of succumbing to his conquering arm. Thus began Rodrigo's connection with the city, which with one or two intervals ended only at his death. It was from the top of the Miguelete Tower, which is pictured in my illustration of the Cathedral, that he showed his wife Ximena and their daughters the fair land he had conquered. This was in 1095, when after having rejoined Alfonso and left him again, he had returned and recaptured the city after a siege of twenty months. Four years later died the man whose name was a terror to the Infidel, and his widow Ximena, following the traditions of her warrior husband, held Valencia against overwhelming hordes of Moors. The story of the bitter end, how she placed his body on his favourite war-horse and drove it through the ranks of the enemy, has always been a theme for the balladmonger of Spain. It was in 140 B.C. that Junius Brutus founded a small Roman colony on the banks of the river Turia. Pompey destroyed this settlement and rebuilt it. In 413 the Goths took possession. The Emir of Cordova captured it in 714 and Valencia remained a vassal state until the fall of the Omayeh dynasty. Like other provinces, it became merged under the single banner that floated over the greater part of the Peninsula at the union of Aragon and Castile. Being a coast town and savouring of the south, it was not until the time of the bigoted Philip III. that the industrious and unfortunate Moriscoe was finally expelled from the shelter of Valencia's walls. [Illustration: VALENCIA. SAN PABLO] Souchet sacked the place in the Napoleonic wars and received the title of Duke of Albufera from his master. Rather an empty honour, Albufera being the large and malarious tract of marshland along the coast a few miles to the south of El Grao, and worth but very little. El Grao is Valencia's Port, and is three miles distant from the city. The road which connects the two is about the busiest high road I saw in Spain. From sunrise till long after sunset two streams of vehicles pass to and fro. Strings of laden donkeys, waggonettes crammed with good-humoured laughing fisher and country folk pass along, an electric tram carries those who can afford the extra _centimos_, and the carriages of Valencia's well-to-do citizens take them to the harbour for a breath of sea air out on the breakwaters. Everything seems alive, and though there is that balmy feeling in the air which one gets in Andalusia, there is none of the indolence and seductive _dolce far niente_ of that enchanting province. No! quite the other way in Valencia. The peasants are extremely industrious. The soil of the _Huerta_ bears them three crops during the year. The system of irrigation, the old Moorish system by-the-way, is perfect, and though the product of a soil which is forced to bear more than it naturally can, is reinforced at sowing time, in the case of corn, by Russian grain, it cannot be said that Valencia depends on any outside help for her prosperity. The swamps bordering the coast grow the finest rice in the world. The wines of the province are good and cheap, held in much esteem by French merchants to fortify the lighter produce of their own country. So cheap are they in fact, that in some parts of the province it costs more to get a drink of water than a glass of wine. Yet drunkenness is unknown. If a Valencian took a drop too much, he would be promptly boycotted by his neighbours, and for ever after looked upon as a disgusting and outlandish boor, a disgrace to his village and a man to be shunned. The peasant is very illiterate and scrupulously honest--the one follows the other. Like the Andalusian, he is absolutely trustworthy in all his dealings, which are conducted by word of mouth. In buying and selling no signatures to documents pass between the contracting parties. If any paper is ever signed, it is confirmed by certain scratches or marks known to belong to so and so--the signee. His word is his bond, it is generally all he can give, but it is enough and is worth more than signatures sometimes are. Further north, where modern ways of life are more in vogue, and where all is more "advanced," there are ten lawyers to the one in Valencia and the south. [Illustration: VALENCIA. DOOR OF THE CATHEDRAL] The Cathedral was originally a Gothic structure, but one fashion following another, has been at different times so altered and robbed of all architectural beauty that there remains but little of interest in the building. It was founded in 1262 and finished two hundred years later. El Miguelete, the celebrated Bell Tower, is so named because the bells were first hung on St. Michael's Day. Like the Torre de Vela of the Alhambra, a bell is here struck which regulates the irrigation of the _Huerta_. In this connection, and as an exemplification of the peasant's trustworthiness, once a month, on a Thursday, the Tribunal de Aguas sits in the Plaza de la Seo outside the Puerto de los Apóstoles or north door of the Cathedral. Its presiding members are chosen by their fellow peasants for their integrity and general standing in the community. They exercise absolute control over the seven different irrigation districts. The Government has once or twice interfered with this, but unsuccessfully. Plaintiffs and defendants appear before this primitive tribunal seated in a public square. The case is stated, _pros_ and _cons_ weighed, and judgment given fairly on its merits. Any one passing can stop and hear the arguments of both sides. As a proof of the shrewdness the peasants possess and the confidence they have in their dealings with one another, no appeal is ever made from the judgment of their elders. This north door has good sculptured figures in the jambs and archivolt. Above is a fine rose window. These are among the remains of the first building. Another relic of the early structure is the octagonal _cimborio_ erected about the same time as the doorway, _i.e._, 1350. The lancet windows over the Puerta del Paláu, which is surmounted by a round arch with carvings in the jambs, are all of the same period. The third doorway, the Puerta del Miguelete, is florid and overdone, and dates from the eighteenth century. Its bronze doors however are extremely fine. The best features of the much-spoilt interior are the octagon and the very beautiful Corinthian _silleria del coro_. The original _retablo_ over the High Altar was set on fire by the lighted cotton attached to a pigeon let loose at a religious ceremony in 1469. The side panels alone were saved from the results of the terrified bird's erratic flight. Close by on a pillar is hung the armour of James I. of Aragon. Over the sacristy door is a good painting by Ribalta of _Christ Bearing the Cross_, and in the ante-room an _Adoration_ by Ribera, besides five good examples of Juanes' brush. Among the treasures of the Cathedral is an extraordinary piece of goldsmith's work, a Calix, showing four different periods of this art, _i.e._, Roman, IXth, XVth and XVIth centuries. It figures in the picture of the _Last Supper_ by Juanes, which is now in the Prado at Madrid. An interesting trophy also belongs to the Cathedral in the shape of the chain which at one time closed the old Port of Marseilles. The many different varieties of marble used in the decoration of the building form a very pleasing series, and go some way towards compensating the disappointment one experiences with the much-altered style of what ought to be a grand interior. I saw a good procession one evening wending its way through the crowds which lined the narrow street near the church of Santa Catalina. The balconies were filled with occupants who showered rose leaves down as the effigy of St. John passed by. The light from the torches carried by some boys flickered upwards and caught the faces of those peering over from their vantage posts above. The crowd knelt as the saint passed, and once more the vitality of the Church, which I could not but feel wherever I went in Spain is _the_ thing that lives, was again in evidence. Over the door of the church of San Martin is a good equestrian group in bronze. San Domingo has some very beautiful cloisters of late Gothic date, and San Salvador possesses Valencia's miraculous image. Nicodemus is reputed to have made this, the Christ of Beyrout. The marvellous relic navigated itself from Syria across the waters of the Mediterranean and reached Valencia against the river's stream. A monument on the bank marks the spot where the wonderful voyage ended by the safe landing of the Christ. It is much visited by the devout. In the chapel attached to the Colegio del Patriarca hangs Ribalta's fine _Last Supper_. Every Friday morning at ten o'clock the _Miserere_ is celebrated here. The impressive ceremony commences with the slow lowering of this picture from its place above the High Altar. The void is filled by a dark cloth, which, as the service proceeds, is gently drawn aside disclosing a second cloth, this is again repeated, followed by another, and when this, the fourth cloth, is parted asunder a fine painting of _Christ Crucified_ is revealed. Meanwhile chants appropriate to the solemn service have been filling the church and increasing the tension of the congregation. The whole ceremony is a very good piece of stage management and certainly most thrilling and inspiring. The black _mantilla_ for ladies is _de rigeur_. [Illustration: VALENCIA. RELIGIOUS PROCESSION] Valencia's walls, erected in 1356, were demolished in 1871 to give work to the unemployed, and the spacious _Paseo_ made in their stead. The trees planted along this carriage drive have added materially to the health of the city. Of the two remaining gates, the Torres de Serranos is much the better. Built in the second half of the fourteenth century on Roman foundations, its massive construction and great height are very grand. It is one of the best gates I know. The archway itself is rather low. The double floors above have fine Gothic vaulting and are approached by a flight of steps. The gallery is supported on heavy corbels, and the cornice has deep machicolations. The whole rises in isolated grandeur and may perhaps gain, from the painter's point of view, by the absence of flanking walls. The Torre de Cuarto is another enormous gateway with two huge round towers on either side. It still bears the marks of Souchet's artillery--whose round shot did apparently no damage whatever. Not far from this gate lies the Mercado situated in the middle of the old quarters of the city. Valencia is quite a modern town, it is rapidly losing everything of any age, and changing its narrow insanitary streets for spacious well-built thoroughfares. The Mercado is by far the largest and most attractive market in Spain. Fruit and vegetables, wicker goods of all sorts, baskets, chairs, toys, leather-work and harness, brightly coloured mule trappings, every description of wood and metal-work, the usual assortment of old iron, lamps antique and modern, oleographs and chromos, saints and virgins jostling the latest cheap reproduction of a famous _Torrero_ or _Bailarina_, furniture, worn-out field implements and new cutlery, lace, everything, in fact, including smells, the variety of which I found unequalled anywhere. Strong garlic assaulted my nostrils--in three more steps I was in the midst of roses and carnations, half a dozen more and a horribly rank cheese made the air vibrate; and so it continued from one end to the other of this most fascinating kaleidoscopic throng, to study which I returned every day of my sojourn in Valencia. On one side of this wonderful market-place stands the Lonja de la Seda. It dates from 1482 and occupies the site of the Moorish Alcázar. Perhaps of all the examples of Gothic civil architecture in Europe, the Lonja de la Seda can claim the first place. The west façade, facing the Mercado, has a double row of square-topped Gothic windows, above which is a traceried gallery running round the entire building with gargoyles and a frieze of heads below the embattled parapet. In the centre is a Tower with a couple of Gothic windows. There are two separate buildings in this "Silk Exchange," one of which has a beautiful court. The whole of the other is occupied by the Exchange Hall. The rich star vaulting of the interior is borne by two rows of spiral columns without capitals; they branch out to the roof like the leaves of a palm tree and it is very evident that this beautiful treatment was suggested by the growth of the tree. Valencia has always been celebrated for a certain style or school of painting, and in the Museum, which occupies the buildings of the old Convento del Carmen, Ribalta, Espinosa and Juanes are seen at their best. The school is noted for the peculiar deep red undertone of the shadows, which is very markedly apparent in the works hanging on these walls. There are also some beautiful examples of native faience and pottery, for Valencia is still the home of Spanish lustre ware. The Valencians are great bird fanciers, and very keen pigeon shots. Numerous lofts built on the roofs for these birds cut the sky-line in the old quarters of the city. Sunday sees the dry bed of the Turia full of competitors in shooting matches, when toll is taken of the feathered inhabitants of these airy dwellings. If it were not for the rather bad drinking water and the malarious marshes, the breeding-ground of a most particularly venomous mosquito, Valencia would be as pleasant and lively a spot for residence as any in Spain. The climate is good and it is near the sea. It stands on the edge of a veritable fruit garden, and its people are pleasant and friendly. TORTOSA Journeying to Valencia from the north one is carried along a grand bit of coast with glimpses of the blue Mediterranean rolling in on stretches of yellow sand, and breaking into spray on the rocks above which the train runs. The _rapido_ stops for lunch at Tortosa, and I got out intending to stay if there was anything in the famous old city or its Cathedral which might bear illustrating in this book. I reached the best _fonda_ in the place, and was heartily welcomed by its lively little landlord, who immediately handed me one of his cards, whereon was set out, amongst many superlatives, the news that an interpreter was attached to the house. "Gone away for the day, señor," was the reply when I asked for an interview. He was always away I fear; however, I did not need his services and my host and I became fast friends. So friendly indeed that I only just avoided an embrace at parting on the day I left. He took great interest in my doings, and on his side gave me much information. He explained to me how the mighty Ebro, on which Tortosa is situated, and to which it owes its existence, had risen in flood during the disastrous October of 1907. "Right up to here, señor"--this while I was having lunch--and he pointed to a spot a couple of inches off the floor of the _comedor_, which was on the first floor of the house--"A terrible flood that?"--"Yes, señor, the streets were for weeks full of mud and all sorts of things. Hundreds of poor people lost everything and many were swept out to sea." Another day I remarked on the gas that lit the _fonda_ and asked my host why he had not put in electric light. "It is too expensive, señor; some people have it, and the Market Hall is lit by it; but you must understand that Tortosa long ago did away with oil lamps and was one of the first places in Spain to use gas. And now?--well it is enough for us, and the electric light is too expensive." Elsewhere in Spain I have been told with pride that the country is still in the foremost rank of civilisation--whatever the Progressive Press says--and the almost universal use of electricity has been pointed out to verify the boast. But Tortosa, which led the van when gas was a novelty, is the only place of any importance that I know which is still lit by this means. Local tradition has it, that the city dates back to the time of St. Paul who, I was told, settled here and built himself a nice little house. Whatever the saint did it is on record that before his day the town was an important Iberian port of the Ilercaones tribe, and in later years under the Romans, possessed a mint of its own, being then known as Julia Augusta Dertosa. Strategically the key of the great river, Tortosa was subject to repeated attempts at capture by those not in occupation. During the time when it was held by the Moors, Charlemagne's son Louis, after an unsuccessful attempt, gained possession, only to be driven out in the year 810. It was not until 1148 that the Infidel's reign was finally terminated by Ramon Bereuguer, Count of Barcelona. In the following year a desperate attempt was made by the Moors to retake their stronghold, and the inhabitants, reduced to the last stage of despair, contemplated the sacrifice of their women and children, and then a final sortie to end their own lives. The women, however, showed a true militant spirit, they courted death, but not in this mean manner. Mounting the hardly defensible walls with every and any weapon they could lay hands on, the men were directed to sally forth. The gates were opened, and cheered on by their wives and daughters, the sterner sex rushed out. So determined was the onslaught that the Moorish host was beaten back and fled leaving all the plunder in his camp behind. Ramon, to show his appreciation of the heroism displayed by the fair ones, invested them with the Order of the Axe (La Hacha) and decorated them with the red military scarf. Also decreeing that at their marriage they should precede mankind, and to this added the privilege of duty-free dress materials. What more could woman want? The Cathedral occupies the site of a mosque erected in 914 by Abderrhaman. A Cufic inscription in the wall at the back of the sacristy relates this with the date. Bishop Lanfredo dedicated the building to the Virgin in 1158, but the present structure dates from 1347. It is extremely good Gothic, with a heavy baroque west façade, ugly and ill-proportioned. Of the exterior but little is visible, and my sketch simply includes the upper part of the façade, visible over the roofs of the quaint old town, with the river flowing in front. The interior is very simple and dignified. The slender columns of the nave rise to a great height; the light that filters through the few clerestory windows that are not blocked subdues the garishness of a bad _trascoro_, and finds its way amongst the tracery of the arches of the double apse. In Avila Cathedral this same feature prevails. A double aisled apse with open-work tracery between the arches and below the vaulting of the aisles. [Illustration: TORTOSA] The _silleria_ of the _coro_ were carved by Cristóbal de Salamanca in 1588, and are really beautiful. The two pulpits are covered with interesting iron bas-reliefs, and the High Altar encased in a mass of plateresque silver work. The _retablo_ is a good specimen of early Gothic work, and I could not help thinking how much better such an one is than the many overdone chirrugueresque atrocities met with in more famous places. Tortosa is the centre of a district the mountains of which yield many different kinds of marble, and the Cathedral is especially rich in these. Perhaps the chapel of Cinta contains the best; the most used is the _broccatello di spagna_ a purple colour with tiny marine molluscs embedded in the hard clay. The Cathedral is adorned at certain festivals with a series of splendid tapestries, and amongst many relics overlooked and left by the French is a fine Moorish casket of ivory. Pope Adrian IV., the Englishman, was at one time Bishop of Tortosa, a fact which added interest to this beautiful little Cathedral. The cloisters are early pointed Gothic, now much dilapidated and uncared for. On the encircling walls are many highly interesting mural tablets, a few of which have recumbent figures cut in low relief with their backs to the wall, as is the case in the earliest Gothic effigies of this sort. TARRAGONA My recollections of Tarragona can be summed up in three words--blue sea, sunshine, and peace. Some fifteen or twenty years ago the quays of its fine harbour were full of life and bustle, ships entered the port and ships went out. The trade with France in light wines was good, and with England and America in those of heavier quality, better still. Nowadays it is cheaper to send wines by rail. Reus, a railway centre a few miles inland, has captured a great deal of Tarragona's trade, and modern history repeats itself once more. Cheap and quick delivery are the watchwords. Hurry and hustle are leaving the old trading towns behind. Barcelona is not far away. Centralisation is everything, and thus it happened that I found very few places in Spain so reposeful as Tarragona. And I might add so beautifully situated as this old city which climbs and crowns a hill that rises from the very edge of the blue Mediterranean. Very few cities in Spain can boast of prehistoric walls still extant. Tarragona can do so. The huge uneven blocks of granite, which may be seen in my sketch of the Archbishop's Tower, occupy the lower portion of the old Roman walls. On the north side of the city they are even more visible than in the sketch. Some of the blocks measure thirteen by seven by five feet. Three of the ancient portals, the stone of which is faced inside, still exist, but apparently no records do, to tell us who placed these Cyclopean defences where they stand to-day. Many remains of Roman days may be seen built into the houses of the old and higher town, tablets, mural inscriptions, bits of columns, &c. The Cathedral possesses numerous plinths and pillars of marble from the quarries at Tortosa, built into its walls, and the Font in the Baptistery is an old Roman basin. What a glorious city it must have been when the Emperor Augustus made it his capital! and the overland trade met the sea-going in the harbour below. Twenty miles away at Gayá the Romans tapped a continuous supply of fresh water, and their aqueduct, a good deal of which remains, ranks next to that of Segovia in size, and stands as an example of how the Romans built. Roman villas with incomparable views out to sea, dotted the hillsides; temples to every god and goddess rose in the city, which contained a million inhabitants. It possessed a mint of its own, and, favoured by nature and art, became known as "Colonia victrix togata turrita." [Illustration: TARRAGONA] The Moslem sacked Tarragona, and for four centuries one of the glories of Colonial Rome lay a heap of ruins. In 1089, at the commencement of the building of the Cathedral, the see, much to the disgust of Toledo, was raised to metropolitan dignity. Thenceforth, between the two cities, endless disputes have arisen as to the Primacy of Spain. Though begun at the above date, most of the Cathedral is of twelfth and early thirteenth-century work. It is not known who designed this magnificent church, the finest example of Transition in Spain. The interior is very simple and very dignified. The roof is borne by grand piers, thirty-five feet in circumference. Their bases are broken by four seats, one in each corner, placed thus to enhance the line of the composition, and break the otherwise too great severity of the foundations. There is no triforium; but an early pointed clerestory of large bays, and a superb rose window in the west, of date 1131, admit a flood of light. Nothing could well be simpler than the pairs of massive columns which carry the centre arches of the vaulting, nor finer than the delicate single attendant at their sides from which spring the transverse sections. All these are capped with square Romanesque capitals. The chancel is pure Romanesque and very beautiful. The semicircular end of the Capilla Mayor and the two small apses are the oldest part of this noble building. The _retablo_ of the High Altar is alabaster, and carved with reliefs of the martyrdom of Santa Tecla, Tarragona's patroness. The delicate tapering finials and the figures under canopies below, are carved in wood. Behind the High Altar is a very interesting urn which contains the ashes of Cyprian, a Gothic archbishop. The fine _cimborio_ which rises above the crossing has eight windows of three and four lights alternately, which contain fragments of very brilliant coloured glass. In the transepts are two magnificent wheel windows full of good glass, indeed I know of no better scheme of colour than that which adorns this window on the south side. The _silleria del coro_ are the work of Francisco Gomar and date from 1478. The body of James I. of Aragon lies in a tomb at the west end of the _trascoro_, having been brought here from the ruined Monastery of Poblet--the Escorial of Aragon. A ruin where still lie under their much despoiled and mutilated tombs some of the rulers of that kingdom. [Illustration: TARRAGONA. THE ARCHBISHOP'S TOWER] This grand Cathedral is not dependent on gloom or subdued light for its great impressiveness. On the contrary it is the best lit of any of Spain's Cathedrals, and it is on its excellent proportions and scale alone that its reputation for solemnity will always rest, and its majesty be ever remembered. The west façade, commenced in 1248, is constructed of a light-coloured stone, which time has improved into a very beautiful sienna brown. The upper portion is unfinished. In the centre is a fine and deeply recessed Gothic portal, flanked by two massive buttresses. Under Gothic canopies stand statues of the Apostles and Prophets, the lintel of the doorway is supported by a Virgin and Child, above which is the Saviour, and a row of figures rising out of their tombs on the Judgment Day. Above all is the already-mentioned rose window. So well does the mass of the building rise above the adjacent roofs that this window is visible from the breakwater of the harbour. The two doorways on either side of the façade are pure Romanesque. Each is surmounted by a small wheel window. The iron work which covers the doors is of a very intricate design; and the huge iron knockers with grotesque heads, the hinges of the doors, and the copper work as well, gave me many pleasant moments in marvelling at the skill of the smiths of days gone by. It was in the cloisters however that I found the greatest charm of the whole Cathedral. The court is a veritable garden, where date palms, fig trees and oleanders crowd one another in the neatly arranged beds behind box hedges. I spent many pleasant hours in this delightful spot, my solitude broken by occasional visits from the Sacristan, who, in his faded and patched purple cassock, came in at odd times for a chat. Very proud of his Cathedral was this quiet custodian, and I shall never forget his soft voice and winning smile, nor the great interest he evinced in my sketch. The swifts rushed screaming past, the bees hummed from flower to flower, the scent of the plants was delicious, the warm sun and the splash of the fountain--turned on for my benefit--all went to help the welcome repose and forgetfulness of the outer world that overcame me as long as I was at work in this little Paradise. The double doorway in the north transept through which one enters the cloisters from the Cathedral, is the finest of all. The capitals of its detached shafts are wonderfully carved. They represent the Awaking of the Three Kings by an Angel, the Nativity and the Journey of the Magi. The arcading of the cloisters consists of six bays on all four sides, these bays are subdivided into three round arches, with a couple of circular openings above and enclosed within the arch. Some of these openings contain very beautifully carved tracery. [Illustration: TARRAGONA. THE CLOISTERS] The capitals of the columns are a museum of quaint fancy and good carving. In one set, all the incidents of a sea voyage are cut, in another, mice are seen carrying a cat to his grave, who, shamming death, turns and devours some of them before his obsequies are complete. There is a Descent from the Cross, where one of the Faithful wields a pair of pincers much longer than his own arms, so determined is he to pull out the nails that cruelly wound Christ's hands. Many fragments of Roman sculpture are let into the walls; and a lovely little Moorish arch, with a Cufic inscription and date 960, reminds one of the Infidel's rule over the city. To reach times nearer our own, there are two inscriptions telling of the occupation by British troops, which run--_5th Company_ and further on _6th Company_--obviously pointing to the fact that these lovely cloisters sheltered some of our own troops during the Peninsular War. Like many other Cathedrals, Tarragona's possesses a grand series of tapestries, which are hung round the columns and walls during certain festivals. They are mostly Flemish and not in any way ecclesiastical. One indeed that I saw was anything but this. Cupid was leading a lady, who was in _déshabille_, into her chamber, wherein, by a four-post bed, stood a gentleman with a lighted taper in his hand! It was pleasant in the evening to stroll down to the harbour and out along the mole, to watch the deep-sea fishing fleet race home with the long sweeps out in every boat as the wind dropped and the sea became an oily calm. I must own it was with great regret I left this now peaceful spot--a city that once boasted of a million inhabitants, and prior to that was a great Phoenician port! Of all the Cathedral Cities of Spain I would rather return to Tarragona than any other, hold converse with my friend the Sacristan, who knows and loves his Cathedral so well, and end the day as the sun goes down watching the boats return from long hours of toil. BARCELONA Barcelona the Progressive, the finest port of Spain, with its large harbour, its wide boulevards, splendid suburbs, good hotels, huge factories and modern prosperity has well earned the title of first city of the New Spain. Amilcar Barca in 225 B.C. founded the Carthagenian city which occupied the Taber hill on which the Cathedral now stands, and twenty years later it became a colony of Rome. Remnants of the old walls can still be traced in the narrow streets which centre round the Holy Fabric. Under the Goths, Barcino, as it was then called, rose to some importance, money coined here bears the legend "Barcinona." The Moors were in possession of the sea-washed fortress for about one hundred years, and then the reign of the Counts of Barcelona, independent sovereigns, began. Count Ramon Berenguer I., who ruled from 1025 to 1077, instituted the famous "Códego de los Usatjes de Cataluña," an admirable code of laws, to which was added in the thirteenth century the "Consulado del mar de Barcelona." This latter code obtained in the commercial world of Europe the same authority as the old "Leges Rhodiæ" of the ancients. When at the height of its prosperity, Barcelona, the centre of commerce, received a severe blow by the union of Cataluña with Aragon, on the occasion of the marriage of Count Ramon Berenguer IV. to Petronila daughter of Ramiro II. King of Aragon. When Aragon and Castile were united Barcelona became subject to the "Catholic Kings," and ever since, in language, in habits and enterprise has shown her dislike for and her struggle against the ways of Castile. To-day Barcelona is far in advance of any other city of Spain. I felt I was once more in Europe when the comfortable hotel 'bus rattled along through the well-lit streets. Perhaps I was getting tired of life in the Middle Ages, and was obsessed with Mediæval Cities! At any rate, a clean bed in a modern hotel was a luxury I thoroughly appreciated, and I started the next morning to explore, with a mind at ease and a consciousness that there would be no irritating little pin-pricks, no _mañana_ for a couple of weeks at least. [Illustration: BARCELONA. IN THE CATHEDRAL] The Cathedral stands on the site of a Pagan Church converted by the Moors into a Mosque. The present edifice replaced the Christian Church which superseded this Mosque, and was begun in 1298. The crypt was finished in 1339 and the cloisters in 1388. The west façade was covered with scaffolding while I was there, and so may perhaps be completed in another thirty years. The interior of this splendid Gothic church is very dark. The pointed windows are all filled with magnificent fifteenth-century glass. At the sunset hour, when the rays of light strike low and filter through the many colours of these windows, the effect in the gloom of this solemn building is most beautiful. As the orb of day sinks lower and lower the light lingers on column after column right up the lofty nave to the High Altar until he suddenly disappears, and all within is wrapt in deep twilight. The nave is very narrow and very high. The clustered columns seem to disappear into space, and the vaulting is almost lost in the darkness. There are deep galleries over the side chapels in the aisles, which have a rather curious arrangement of vaulting. From the roof of the aisles at each bay depend massive circular lamps which catch the light and heighten the effect of mystery which is omnipresent throughout the Cathedral. A flight of steps in front of the High Altar--an almost unique feature--leads down to the crypt, where rests the body of Santa Eulalia, Barcelona's patron saint. Her alabaster shrine is adorned with reliefs of different incidents in her life. The _retablo_ of the High Altar is richly ornate with tapering Gothic finials of the fifteenth century; below it is a sarcophagus containing the remains of St. Severus. Above the Gothic _silleria del coro_ hang the coats-of-arms of the Knights of the Golden Fleece. Among them are those of Henry VIII. of England. The only installation of the Order was held here by Charles V. The side chapels contain very little of interest, but the cloisters are otherwise. Entered either from the street or the south door of the Cathedral their beauty is very striking. In the centre palms and orange trees rear their heads, and the splash of the fountains, in one of which the sacred geese are kept, is refreshingly cool after the bustle of streets outside. San Pablo del Campo, now a barrack, is the most interesting of Barcelona's ecclesiastical remains. This church, built by Wilfred II. in 913, is more like the ancient churches of Galicia than those of Catalonia. Very small and cruciform, a solid dome rises from the centre. Its cloisters are perfect, the arcading is composed of double shafts with well-cut figures on the capitals. The peculiarity of Catalonia's churches is well illustrated in the aisleless Santa Maria del Mar, San Just, and Santa Maria del Pi. The first named has some magnificent glass and four good pictures by Viladomát, and in the crypt beneath the High Altar a curious wooden figure of San Alajo. San Just has the belfry common to the churches of Catalonia, an open iron-work screen, from which depend the bells, and Santa Maria del Pi contains a fine wheel window and more magnificent glass. A relic of Loyola, the sword that he offered on the Altar of the Virgin at Montserrat, is still preserved in the old Jesuit Church of Nuestra Señora de Belen. Among the many notable buildings in Barcelona is the Casa Consistorial, or Town Hall. It was built in 1378, and has a very original Gothic front. A beautiful _patio_ with slender arches and twisted columns adds to the interest of the interior. The Casa de la Diputacion opposite contains the picture on which Fortuny was at work when he died. The _patio_ here is perhaps better than that in the Casa Consistorial. It is in three stages, from the topmost of which huge gargoyles of all sorts of devils and monsters rear their ugly heads. In the old quarters of the city, where the five-and six-storied houses almost touch, the streets are very tortuous and not considered safe at night. In this respect, however, Barcelona does not stand alone. Any one who ventures into the low parts of a Mediterranean seaport after dusk generally does so at his own risk. Very few brawls commence among the hot-blooded lower orders of the south without the finale of the knife. By far the most interesting suburb of the city is Barceloneta. This self-contained town is entirely given up to the fisherfolk and seafaring portion of Barcelona's inhabitants. Philip V., when planning his citadel, now demolished, turned out the people who dwelt where he afterwards erected it. To compensate them for loss of home and property, he built this well-planned and well-paved suburb out along the coast to the north-east. With the breeze coming in every afternoon off the sea my favourite walk was through the park to Barceloneta. Of all the seaports I know, Naples not excepted, though the Sta. Lucia of five-and-twenty years ago might have beaten it, the harbour front of Barceloneta is without an equal. Here one may watch the boat-builders at work under the oddest roofs imaginable, carpenters busy with the shaping of masts and oars, and ship's painters putting the finishing touches to boat accessories. I used to stand awhile admiring the inventive turn displayed on the exterior embellishments of the marine-dealers' stores. Wonderful pictures, of ships that could never float, from brushes wielded by very local talent in glaring vermilion and green. I watched the holiday-makers sitting in ramshackle booths, rapidly putting away all sorts of curiosities of the shell-fish order, and I wondered if they would survive the day. Perhaps the copious draughts of wine they took was an antidote, at any rate their laughter and good humour gave point to my unspoken thought--"let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." [Illustration: BARCELONA. THE RAMBLA] Going on, I often spent some time comparing the drill of artillery recruits, whose instructors marched them up and down on a quiet bit of the roadway, with those at home, and I generally finished my walk and sat me down on the glorious stretch of sand that runs away north as far as eye can follow. The evening would then draw in, and the twinkling lights on the ships in the harbour warn me it was time to return. While twilight lasted I retraced my steps homewards along the quay-side, invigorated by an afternoon of sea breeze and salt spray. The focus of Barcelona's life is the celebrated Rambla. The derivation of this word is Arabic--"Raml-sand"--a river bed, for a small stream at one time meandered down to the sea where now is the liveliest street in the north of Spain. On either side of the central promenade, under the shade of stately plane trees, are the carriage drives. The broad walk itself is thronged, especially in the morning when marketing is done, with an ever-changing crowd. Boys distribute hand-bills, dog-fanciers stroll about bargaining with dealers, itinerant merchants cry their wares. A family of father, mother, and children cross the stream of promenaders, followed by a pet lamb. Acquaintances meet and gossip away a good ten minutes. At the top end of the Rambla are situated the stalls of the bird-sellers, who also deal in mice, a great place this for mama and her small daughters. Lower down, the flower-sellers congregate under their red-striped umbrellas. It was here that I made my sketch, in which luckily, for a bit of colour, I was able to include the blue-bloused porters in their red caps who wait about for a job with the rope of their calling slung over their shoulders. Here too all the odd job men stand awaiting hire. House painters in white blouses with insignia of their trade--a whitewash brush on the end of a pole--held high, and others--an endless variety. Barcelona, being a business town, is democratic to the core, it is also to the core, Catalan. The names of streets are displayed in Catalan as well as Spanish. The animals in the Zoological Gardens also are known by their Catalan, and Castilian as well as Latin names! Barcelona will have no dealings with Castile, its people speak their own language and address the foreigner in French. Barcelona is go-ahead. In the houses of the new suburbs l'art nouveau screams at one, and everything is up-to-date! The Spaniard is well-known to be lazy, not so the Catalan. I have never seen a Spaniard running, but I have seen a Catalan walking fast! GERONA The siege of Gerona is as celebrated in the Spanish history of the Napoleonic wars as that of Saragossa. Both exemplify the bravery and tenacity of the Spaniard of the north. In the first siege in 1808, three hundred men of the Ulster Regiment, under their gallant leader O'Daly, helped to garrison the place against two ferocious attacks by Duchesne and his French soldiery. The first failed and the second ended in the utter rout of the besiegers with the loss of all the artillery and baggage train. In the following year three French generals with an army of thirty thousand men invested the city. Alvarez, the Spanish Governor, was almost without any means of defence, and the women of Gerona enrolled themselves under the banner of Santa Barbara, the patron saint of Spain's artillery, and took their places on the ramparts side by side with their husbands and sweethearts. Alvarez, ably seconded by a few English under Marshall, held out until he was struck down by disease and death. The city then, without a leader, its inhabitants starving, at length surrendered. So ancient is Gerona that its early history is lost in the mist of ages. Charlemagne drove the Moors out when they were in possession, but it soon passed back into their hands again. The Counts of Barcelona ruled over the place until the union of Catalonia and Aragon, an event which gave birth to the Crown Prince's title of Principe de Gerona. Hence we know that in the twelfth century it was a city of great importance. In consequence of its adhesion, at the end of the War of Succession, to the house of Hapsburg, Gerona was deprived of its privileges and university, since which time it has steadily gone down hill. Down hill it may have proceeded, but I found it a very pleasant, quaint old-world city set in the midst of verdant hills and running waters. Shady walks are taking the place of now useless fortifications; and have not I sat in one of the most delightful rose gardens you could wish to rest in, and heard the note of the nightingale trilling on the perfumed air? Most of Spain has gone down hill, and most of Spain is nothing but enchanting. [Illustration: GERONA. THE CATTLE MARKET] Gerona is bisected by the river Oñar, and from its waters which wash them, the houses rise tier above tier up the hill side. In the summer when the river is running low, and if it happens to be a Saturday, you will see one of the most remarkable sights that Spain can boast of. Under and around the arches of the old bridge are congregated hundreds of brown and fawn-coloured cattle. The background of ancient houses, yellow, grey, white, brown--every tone, rises up above this throng. Coloured garments, the week's washing, flutter in the breeze, green shutters and blinds hang from the creeper-clad balconies. It is market day. The lowing of oxen, mingled with the hum of bargaining humanity in red caps and Prussian-blue blouses, surges up like the sound of breakers on a distant shore. You who enter Spain by the east route, go to Gerona at the end of the week--you will never regret its Saturday market. The Cathedral stands well. The west façade, a Renaissance addition, is approached from the Plaza below by a grand flight of ninety steps in three tiers. In the unfinished jambs of the south door are a series of interesting terra-cotta figures dating from 1458. There is nothing else in the exterior worthy of note, but directly I entered I stopped in amazement at the daring of an architect who could build so enormous a span as that under which I found myself. This span is seventy-three feet, the clear width of the nave, and unsupported by any pillars. No flying buttresses outside give additional strength to the thrust of the roof. The stonework is perfect and the vaulting inside simple. So bold and hazardous were the plans of Guillermo Boffy that the chapter at first refused to sanction them. Being in doubts as to his sanity, they sought the opinion of twelve other architects, who were examined separately. As they all approved and passed Boffy's plans, the construction of this marvel was commenced, and the first stone laid in 1416. The apsidal chancel had been begun a century earlier and finished in 1346, pretty much on the same lines as this part of Barcelona's Cathedral. Unfortunately--how often does one have to acknowledge this!--the _coro_, with its hideous _respaldos_, painted to imitate Gothic arches in perspective, almost ruins this splendid and solemn interior. Among the seats of the _silleria del coro_ there are still preserved some that date from the fourteenth century. Early carved work of the same period is found in the elaborate _retablo_ over the High Altar, which is surmounted by three fine processional crosses. The _baldaquino_, also of wood, is covered like the _retablo_ with plates of silver. It is a mass of precious metal, enamelled coats-of-arms and gems, and is an extremely interesting relic of that century. [Illustration: GERONA. THE CATHEDRAL] Over the sacristy door are the tombs of Count Ramon Berenguer II. and his wife Ermensendis, who died in 1058, predeceasing her husband by twenty-four years. The sacristy itself contains a remarkable piece of twelfth-century crewel work, said to be the earliest known specimen in existence. It is covered with figures of a type similar to those of contemporary MSS. The Romanesque cloisters form an irregular trapezium. The columns are doubled and about a foot apart, not unlike those of Tarragona. The finest Romanesque example that Gerona possesses is the church of San Pedro de los Galligans. The apse, little damaged during the siege, forms a tower in the town wall. There is no doubt of the great antiquity of this building, which dates probably from the early part of the tenth century. The east end is mostly constructed of black volcanic scoriæ. The nave and aisles, the bays of which are very simply built, are almost prehistoric in their roughness. In the cloisters attached to the church is the Museo Provincial. Many relics of Gerona's heroic defence can here be seen, as well as some early Christian and Hebrew remains. TOLEDO Standing high above the yellow Tagus, which, confined in a deep gorge, rushes and swirls far below between precipitous granite cliffs, Toledo was always an ideal position for a fortress before modern firearms rendered Nature's defences of little avail. Its name is associated with the great Cardinals of the Rodrigo, Tenorio, and Foncesca families, as well as scions of the houses of Ximenes, Mendoza, Tavera, and Lorenzana. The wealth of these Prelates was immense, and their power, Ecclesiastical and Temporal, proportionate. They practically had no rivals, they certainly feared none, they ruled kings as well as countries, and their allegiance to Rome was purely nominal. They made wars and fought in them. For their patronage of art and literature future generations have had good cause to be grateful. They built schools and improved the means of communication throughout the land. Under their influence the Church was omnipotent, and they have written their names deep in the pages of Spanish history. In fact, so great was the power of Toledo's clergy that it grew to be the cause of the foundation of the Capital at Madrid. Philip II., who removed the Court from Valladolid to Toledo, found it better, after a short residence here, to take himself and his Court to a town where he no longer encountered the arrogance of Ecclesiastical rule. Under the Romans, who captured it in 193 B.C., "Toletum" became the capital of Hispania. Leovigild removed hither from Seville, and his successor, Reccared, who embraced the orthodox form of Christianity, made it the ecclesiastical as well as political capital of his dominions. For nearly four centuries, from 712, when the Moors took Toledo, it was under their rule; but divided counsels and the treachery of the down-trodden Hebrew enabled Alfonso VI. to enter in triumph with the Cid. The King then styled himself Emperor, and promoted the Archbishop to the Primacy of Spain. Under Alfonso's rule the city grew rapidly in every way. Churches and convents were built, defences strengthened, and Toledo knew no rival. With far-seeing wisdom, Moor and Christian were allowed to intermarry, and lived together in peace for wellnigh one hundred and fifty years. The advent in 1227 of that ecclesiastical firebrand, St. Ferdinand, however, altered this. One of his first acts was to pull down the Mosque, wherein the Moors of the city, by Alfonso's royal prerogative, had been allowed to worship, and commence the building on its site of the great Cathedral. [Illustration: TOLEDO. THE CATHEDRAL] For two hundred years and more did the architects who followed Pedro Perez add bit by bit, leaving their mark on its stones. Partly constructed of granite it is immensely strong. A softer stone has been used with great discretion in the decorative portions of the building. No comprehensive view of the Cathedral is obtainable, so closely do the houses surround it on the south and east, and creep up the hill on which it is built, on the north. The west front is best seen from the Plaza Ayuntamiento, a pleasant little garden which the Town Hall bounds on one side. I managed a sketch from the narrow street below this garden. Only one of the two towers of the west façade is finished as originally intended. The other is capped by a dome, designed by El Greco, that painter of the weird, and under which is the chapel wherein the Mozárabic ritual is celebrated daily at 9 A.M. The great west door, La Puerta del Perdon, is enriched with embossed bronze work. Flanking on it either side are the doors of Las Palmas, and de los Escribanos. The arches of all three have figures in the jambs, which are continued round each arch in the very best Gothic of the fifteenth century. Above the doors the façade is adorned with a sculptured Last Supper and colossal figures in niches. In the centre is a splendid rose window twenty-eight feet in diameter. The north transept is entered from the steep Calle de la Chapineria by La Puerta del Reloj, the oldest doorway of the Cathedral. Its bronze doors, of later date than the doorway, were cast to match those of La Puerta de los Leones in the south transept. This doorway's name is derived from the Lions, which holding shields, occupy positions on its pillars. Another entrance is through La Puerta de la Presentacion which opens on the cloisters. The effect produced by the magnificent interior is much enhanced by the beauty of the glass which fills most of the windows. The earliest are on the north side of the nave, and form a series which was commenced in 1418 and finished one hundred and fifty years later. The glass in the rose window over the west door is superb, and the same may be said for that in the north transept and the wheel window over La Puerta de los Leones. There is no triforium, and the transepts do not project beyond the nave. The arches of the very beautiful chancel serve as niches for figures. Here in each bay is a rose window forming a clerestory, and the colours in the glass of these shine like jewels in a crown. [Illustration: TOLEDO. THE SOUTH TRANSEPT] There are in all twenty chapels, every one of which contains something worth study. The lofty _retablo_ in the Capilla Mayor is of the richest Gothic. Above is a colossal Calvary of later workmanship. Cardinal Ximenes built this chapel, among the many monuments of which are the tombs of Spain's earliest kings. Separating it from the _crucero_ is a magnificent Plateresque _reja_, on either side of which stands a gilded pulpit. Behind the _retablo_ is the _transparente_, much admired by Toledans, but the one jarring note in the finest of Spain's Cathedrals. This theatrical mass of marble figures, in the midst of which the Archangel Rafael kicks his feet high in the air and squeezes a gold fish in one hand! is lit from a window let into the roof of the apse. The Capilla de Reyes Nuevos contains the tombs of the kings descended from Henry II. His tomb and that of his wife, as well as the spouse of Henry III., a daughter of John of Gaunt Duke of Lancaster, are among the many that crowd the walls. The Capilla de San Ildefonso is an extremely beautiful example of early Gothic work. The much-mutilated tomb in the centre of Cardinal Albornoz is a masterpiece of the same style. Many other great Ecclesiastics rest in this elegant octagon, notably Inigo de Mendoza, Viceroy of Sardinia, who was killed at the siege of Granada. The Capilla de Santiago was erected in 1435 by Alvaro de Luna, the man who saved Spain for Juan II. by repressing the turbulent nobles, and who for his fidelity was rewarded by disgrace and execution in the Plaza Mayor at Valladolid. The scallop shells which decorate the walls represent de Luna's office of Grand Master of the Order of Santiago. Cardinal Ximenes re-established the Mozárabic Ritual, which is celebrated in the Capilla Mozárabe, as a reminder to the Pope that Spain did not owe implicit allegiance to Rome. The small detached Capilla de la Descension de Nuestra Señora stands against the second pier in the north aisle. It marks the spot where the Virgin came down and presented San Ildefonso with the _casulla_ or chausable. The Salle Capitular is a grand example of early sixteenth-century work, with a Plateresque frieze and gilt _artesonado_ ceiling by Francisco de Lara. It contains a series of portraits of the Cardinal Archbishops of Toledo, and frescoes by Juan de Borgoña. The work of this painter is to be met with throughout the Cathedral. The _coro_ occupies two bays of the nave and is a veritable museum of carving and sculpture. Its _silleria_ are in two rows. The lower is of walnut and enriched with scenes representing the campaigns of Ferdinand and Isabella. The upper of the same wood is a perfect classical contrast and is inlaid not carved. Berruguete, whose work may be best studied in Valladolid, executed the seats on the south side, and Vigarney those on the north. A small figure of the Virgin in blackened stone looks really ancient. It stands in the middle of the _coro_ on a pedestal. Nicolas de Vergara was responsible for the two reading desks, which are masterpieces of gilded metal work. The Gothic cloisters enclose a delightful garden, and have an upper cloister reached by a door in the Archbishop's Palace. From this pleasant _claustro alto_ a very good idea of the size of the Cathedral is obtained. Space does not permit me to enlarge on the manifold works of art which this noble building contains. The pictures, the iron work--though I must just mention a beautifully fanciful knocker of two nude nymphs hanging downwards from the head of a satyr whose hands clasped together form the handle, which adorns La Puerta de la Presentacion--the sculpture, notably that on the _respaldo_, or outer wall of the _coro_, and the many relics in the Treasury, would all occupy more than I can afford. Suffice it to say that nowhere in Spain is there a Gothic building of such well-proportioned dimensions, such simplicity in its leading features, such a fine idea in the interior of the spacing out of light and shade, as in this magnificent Cathedral--the grandest of the three due to French influence. And Toledo's churches? There are nearly sixty still remaining, every street seems to contain one! And Toledo's convents? There are almost as many. Of the former, San Juan de los Reyes, on the high ground above the bridge of Saint Martin, the last remnant left of a once wealthy Franciscan convent, was built by Cardinal Ximenes in commemoration of the "Catholic Kings" victory of Toro. On its outer walls still hang the manacles and chains of the captive Christians who were set free at the conquest of Granada, and the interior is embellished with the arms of Ferdinand and Isabella, and covered with sculptured heraldry. [Illustration: TOLEDO. THE ZÓCODOVER] Santa Maria la Blanca, originally a Jewish synagogue, is in the _Mudéjar_ style, and has some charming arabesques, with a fine cedar ceiling said to be of wood from the trees at Lebanon. Almost opposite--we are in the Juderia, or Jews' quarter, to the south-east of San Juan de los Reyes--is another synagogue, el Transito. Built in 1366 by Samuel Levi, Pedro the Cruel's treasurer, in the Moorish style, it is almost a better piece of architecture than Santa Maria la Blanca. Levi lived next door, in the house known now as La Casa del Greco, that painter having occupied it during his residence in Toledo. The house and synagogue are connected by a secret passage from the vaults of the former. These are of immense size and strength, and in Levi's day held an enormous amount of treasure--too much for the poor man's good. His royal master, when sufficient was accumulated, put him to death and appropriated all he could find. El Cristo de la Luz, one of the most interesting churches in Toledo, was originally a tiny mosque. It is divided into nine different compartments by four columns, from the capitals of which spring sixteen arches. It was here that Alfonso VI. attended the first Mass after the city was captured. Close by is the Convent of San Domingo el Real, where a glimpse may be had of picturesque nuns while at their devotions during early service. As the station 'bus rattled up the steep winding ascent to the Despacho Central we dashed through the Zocodovér, the square celebrated for numerous _auto de fés_ and other executions. All day long it is crowded with sauntering folk, who walk up and down, quietly enough now, on the scene of much former cruelty, bloodshed, and many bull-fights. On its eastern side a fine Moorish arch leads down the hill by a footpath to the Bridge of Alcántara. Immediately the arch is passed on the left lies the old Hospital de Santa Cruz. It is one of the best examples of the Transition to Renaissance in Spain. The portal is deeply undercut and elaborately carved in soft "white rose" stone and marble. The inner gate is plateresque and only surpassed by San Marcos at Leon and the gateway of the university at Salamanca. Cardinal Mendoza's arms adorn the beautiful _patio_, which has a double arcade of great elegance, and the stone work on the balustrade of the staircase leading out of this is very fine. Opposite, on the other side of this steep descent, are the Military Governor's quarters which are dominated by the huge Alcázar, now the Military Academy for Infantry Cadets. Destroyed by fire in 1886, the present edifice, rebuilt soon after, is seen in the illustration of the Alcántara Bridge rising a great square mass on the top of the hill. It was the fortress and palace of Moorish days. Alvaro de Luna had a share in its alteration and Herrera completed it to the present size by additions executed for Philip II. Many a time has it been sacked by the conquerors of Toledo and many a prisoner of note passed his last hours within its gloomy walls, before being led out to death in the Zocodovér. [Illustration: TOLEDO. THE ALCÁNTARA BRIDGE] Both Toledo's bridges are magnificent. The Alcántara, crossed on the way from the station, has but a couple of arches which span the mighty river at a great height. It is defended by a gateway at either end, that on the inner side being the Moorish Tower in my sketch. The Bridge of Saint Martin has one arch of enormous span with four smaller, which carry it over the rushing Tagus. Between these two bridges from the opposite bank of the river one gets the best idea of Toledo's strength. Nothing in Spain surpasses the grim majesty of the city, which rises above the sun-baked and wind-blistered crags that form the gorge below through which the river has cut its way. No spot could have been better chosen for defence than the hill enclosed in this "horseshoe" of mad waters. Small wonder that within its encircling walls grew up a race of Prelates whose rule spread far beyond the borders of Castile, and whose powerful hand was felt in countries of an alien tongue. Of the eight city gates the most interesting is the Puerta del Sol, a Moorish structure with two towers on either side of a horseshoe arch. It is close to the little church of el Cristo de la Luz, and from either of the towers a very good idea is obtained of Toledo's defences. Near the Puerta del Cambon, another of the gates, is the site of the old palace of the last of the Spanish Goths, Roderic, who lost his life on the banks of the Guadalete near Cadiz when giving battle to Tarik and his Berbers. My whole impression of Toledo was that of a city of gloom. Its larger houses were forbidding in the extreme. In these a huge portal, with armorial bearings and massive pillars, defended by a stout iron-bound door, opens into a dark porch, from which one enters the _patio_ through an equally strong entrance. The windows that look on to the street are heavily barred and none are within reach of the pedestrian. Its streets, too narrow and steep for vehicular traffic, are as silent as the grave (most Spaniards wear shoes made of esparto grass or soft leather), save when a young cadet from the Alcázar passes along rattling his sword, and attracts the attention of the señoritas who sit high up in those inaccessible balconies. Built on the Moorish plan, these tortuous thoroughfares twist and turn like a maze, and it seemed to me that the sun never entered them. Houses and streets, walls and towers, still remain as they were in the great Cardinal's days, and stand, even now, as symbols of the iron rule of the Church. The Cardinal's hat is to be found graved in stone over many a door, and the "Sheaf of Arrows," the arms of the "Catholic Kings," is still to be seen over the entrance of what was once the palace of Pedro the Cruel. Toledo blades are still made and proved in the ugly factory a mile outside the city. Toledo ware (made in Germany) is sold by most of the shops. The growing trade in liquorice is a modern industry, but if it were not for another recent innovation, the Military Academy, it would take no stretch of the imagination to carry one back again into the Middle Ages and to sink one's individuality and become a human atom under the rule of the great Church. SALAMANCA Before I ever thought that Fate would take me to Spain, I had formed in my mind, as one is apt to do, a Spain of my own, a Spain of glorious romance. I had been in many cities throughout the country, but it was not until I reached Salamanca that, "Surely," thought I, "the Spain of my imagination is now realised." Here in the middle of the plain, with which one's thoughts are somehow familiar, rises the great Cathedral, its towers are landmarks for miles round. Here is a beautiful river winding through valleys deep cut in the ochre-coloured soil, its banks are clad with verdure and it is spanned by an ancient bridge. Away over the plain, just visible in the haze, are the blue mountains of the south. In the midst of all, the dull mud and yellow walls of the city, the many-hued roofs of red and brown, with deep shadows under their eaves, rise tier above tier to the Cathedral above. And this, the prototype of Spain's greatness, her Church, the ever-present reminder that in days gone by its princes led her armies to victory and placed her in the van of nations. I am standing on the noble bridge, half of which is even now as it was in the days of the Roman occupation. Those massive walls up there of monasteries and convents always formed part of the picture of my imagination. They bake under a September sun, just as all Spain ought to do. A long string of heavily laden mules trots past, their bells jingling merrily, their drivers shouting and cracking their whips. A well set-up peasant with his head in a handkerchief and broad-brimmed hat, cut-away tunic, red sash and tight knee breeches, canters by seated on a high peaked saddle. His well-bred horse shows a good deal of the Arab strain, across its quarters are a couple of rugs and its rider carries an umbrella. A beggar stops before me, and prays that, for the love of the Holy Mary, I will give him a _perro chico_. Two wizened old cronies go by chattering about Manuelo's wife. One carries a couple of fowls tied together by their legs, the poor birds are doing their best to hold their heads in a natural position. Some little urchins are throwing stones at the washerwomen by the riverside below. An old man seated on a donkey's rump ambles past. Yes, this is what I imagined Spain to be. I turn my steps towards the city. I wander by the Cathedral and reach the great university of the middle ages. What would Salamanca have been without its university! I pass many fine houses, with coats-of-arms emblazoned over their portals. I gaze at their high walls and windows barred to keep the intruder from the fair sex. Most of them seem falling into decay, but this only adds to the romance. At length I reach an arcaded square. The columns of the arcades are wooden, they are at all sorts of angles, but the houses above still stand. The sun blazes down on scores of picturesque market folk, who sell almost everything from peaches and fowls to little tinsel images and double-pronged hoes. Dogs are sniffing about picking up stray scraps. Children run in and out, fall down and get up laughing. Every one is busy. The animation of this little square, as I suddenly come upon it out of a deeply shaded and aristocratic street, is just the Spain I had always thought of--a Spain of contrasts. Brilliant sun and grateful shade. Seclusion behind high walls, and a strange medley of noisy folk, for ever bargaining, buying and selling. Certainly in Salamanca it is all here. I hear the click of the castanets and the sound of the guitar in the evening, I see the ardent lover standing at those iron bars whispering soft raptures to his mistress, and the picture is complete. [Illustration: SALAMANCA] Salamanca is a sleepy old city which the world seems to have left behind. In the summer it is a veritable furnace, in the winter it is swept by icy blasts. Before the Christian era it was known as Salmantica. Hannibal came and captured it in B.C. 247 and under the Romans it was the ninth military station on the great road which they built connecting Cadiz and Merida with Astorga and Gijón. Alfonso IX. of Leon founded the university, which reached its zenith as a seat of learning during the sixteenth century. Philip II., having transferred his Court from Valladolid to Toledo, made Salamanca's bishop suffragan to that city's, since when it seems to have been left out in the cold and slowly but surely proceeded down hill. This is the reason, I think, why it attracted me so much. It is essentially a city with a Past and of the Past. The French under Thiébaut pulled it to pieces and used the material from its demolished buildings to fortify the place. This was in 1811. The following year saw Marmont's troops utterly routed by Wellington, three miles south of the fortifications. It was this victory that gained him his Marquisate and a grant from Parliament of £100,000. Like Saragossa, Salamanca possesses two Cathedrals. The older intensely interesting in every way, the later, a huge late Gothic pile begun in 1513 and finished in 1733. This immense structure affords a good study of the changes of architectural taste spread over the years which intervened between these two dates. [Illustration: SALAMANCA. THE OLD CATHEDRAL] The west façade is a marvel of intricate sculpture in the richly-coloured soft stone that has been used as if it were plaster or wax. Late Gothic predominates amidst a deal of Plateresque and Barroque ornament. Despite its incongruities it is extremely fine, but would look even better if some of the numerous niches had not lost their statues, and if little boys did not find a pastime in lodging stones amongst those that are left, greatly I fear to their detriment. Over the double doorway are high reliefs of the Nativity and Adoration of the Magi, a negro prince being an especially good figure in the latter subject. Above is a Crucifixion. The north porch is also very fine and gains in effect, as indeed does the whole of this side of the Cathedral, by the raised piazza on which it is built. The approach is up some dozen steps, the whole of the piazza being surrounded by pillars as at Leon and Seville. Juan Gil de Hontañon, who designed this and the sister Cathedral at Segovia, surpassed himself with the Great Tower and its finely-proportioned dome, the top of which is 360 feet high. The crocketed pinnacles, the flying buttresses, the dome over the crossing, and the wonderful deep yellow of this huge church, whatever may be one's opinion about the architecture, make it one of the most impressive of Spain's Cathedrals. I was disappointed with the interior on first acquaintance, but it has only to be known to be appreciated. The imposing proportions, it is 340 feet long, 158 feet wide and close on 100 feet high, gradually asserted themselves, and before I left Salamanca I was much in love with Hontañon's masterpiece. A pierced balustrade takes the place of a triforium, flamboyant Renaissance in the aisles and classical in nave. It runs round the whole church and in the transepts and choir these two occur together. Medallions in the spandrils of the arches add to the rich effect. Many details in this interior I found to be worth a second and third visit. The Chapel of Dorado, a veritable museum, contains the tomb of the builder, Fransico de Palenzuela. Its walls are covered with a profusion of coloured saints on gilt pedestals. There is a very curious old organ, standing at the back of an also curious old minstrel's gallery. A sad-looking skeleton, with "Memento Mori" cut on a slab at his feet, occupies a dark hole in one of the walls. Fine _azulejos_ decorate the chapel, and many other antiquities too, which I cannot enumerate. In the Capilla del Carmen rest the remains of Gerómino, the Cid's bishop and confessor. An ancient wooden crucifix stands over the altar, it is the identical one carried by the bishop in the wars of the Cid. Another relic of the great Campeador is to be seen in the Relicario. A small Byzantine bronze, "el Crucifijo de las Batallas," studded with chequer work--a fine specimen of early Limoges enamel. All this interested me muchly, but the "Catedral Vieja," a grand example of late Romanesque style, interested me more. Fortis Salmantica, as it was called, on account of the thickness of its walls, has not been used for service since its huge neighbour was erected. I made a drawing of the only view which can be obtained of the exterior from the Plazuela chica. The central lantern is surmounted by the emblem of nobility, a cock, and is formed by an octagonal tower with a stone dome. The tower is arcaded and has four domed turrets and dormers at the corners similar to those at Zamora. Street considers that he has "never seen any central lantern more thoroughly good and effective from every point of view than this is." To reach the interior one has to retrace one's steps to the "Catedral Nueva" and from its south aisle pass through a doorway into the other building. This was erected on a lower level than its big neighbour and with the attendant verger I descended ten steps and found myself in a very beautiful mellow-coloured church. The arches of the nave and aisles are pointed, but the windows and arcading are round. The capitals of the columns are a museum of carved fantasies, imps, animals, birds, &c. On the wall of the north aisle, which was partly demolished when the "Catedral Nueva" was built, are some very curious frescoes; the church has a clerestory of single lights but no triforium. There is a wonderful _retablo_ in the Capilla Mayor by an Italian, Nicolas Florentino. It is still in perfect preservation, and the fifty-five frescoes set in white and gold of which it is composed have a beautiful effect in the semi-gloom of the dark chapel. The Mozárabic Ritual is celebrated six times a year in another chapel, La Capilla de Talavera. The groining of its roof is the only one of the sort I have seen, it is composed of parallel ribs which cross one another. In the Capilla de San Bartolomé lies Bishop Diego de Anaya. His tomb is surrounded by one of the finest examples of wrought and hammered iron work in the whole of Spain. Some other members of this family are also interred in the chapel, which contains a mediæval organ covered by a screen of coloured Moorish arabesques. [Illustration: SALAMANCA. AN OLD STREET.] The cloisters were built in 1170, but have been partly modernised and totally disfigured by a coat of whitewash. An uncared-for garden filled with rubbish occupies the centre. Surely some one might be found to tend this little secluded patch of quietness and make it a place for delightful repose instead of the disgrace it now is! Before the French occupation Salamanca was a city of churches and monastic buildings. To build their fortifications they destroyed thirteen convents and twenty colleges besides many churches. The south-west corner of the city is still an empty desert full of rubble and stone strewn about everywhere, the remains of the now dismantled fortress which overlooked the valley of the Tormes. Among the churches left, that attached to the now suppressed Dominican Convent of San Estéban is by far the finest. It is a miniature Cathedral in itself. The Gothic exterior is extremely good. The great west façade is highly enriched with Plateresque ornament. An elliptical arch of great dimensions roofs the porch. Below it is a realistic group illustrating the martyrdom of St. Stephen, with the date 1610 cut upon a stone which one of the figures is picking up to hurl at the saint. The _coro_ is over the west end, and for once the whole of the interior is visible. This is very lofty, and the view up to the immense High Altar, executed by Chirriguera himself, superb. There are two more altars in the church by the same hand, and although his flamboyant style is not to my liking, I could not help admiring the way in which he had evidently allowed himself all the licence he was capable of in their sumptuous design. To the south of the little _plaza_ in which San Estéban stands are the cloisters of the convent, in the upper storey of which is Salamanca's museum. Unfortunately it contains nothing of interest. Columbus was lodged by the Dominicans in this convent, and propounded those schemes to the monks, which the learned members of the university had pronounced worthless and crack-brained. He found in Fray Diego de Deza and the other brothers warm supporters. The once magnificent Convent of las Agustinas Recoletas, founded by the Count of Monterey, has a beautiful church in the shape of a Latin Cross. Over the High Altar is one of Ribera's masterpieces--_The Immaculate Conception_. Monterey was known as "the good slow man" and was Viceroy of Naples in Philip IV.'s reign. He accumulated great wealth during his Viceroyalty and built himself the fine palace which stands close to the convent. There is an anecdote current in Salamanca that when a peasant woman craved an audience of the King, which he granted, she prayed "God might make him also Viceroy of Naples." The University which made Salamanca famous was united with that of Palencia by Ferdinand, and very soon took the foremost rank as a seat of learning in Europe, though at the Council of Constance in the year 1414, Oxford was given precedence, a ruling which much disgusted the patriotic Spaniard. The building was entirely altered by the "Catholic Kings," who erected the marvellous west façade, one of the best examples of Plateresque work in the country. Like that of the Cathedral and San Estèban, it is a wonderful example of what can be done with soft stone, and how well the most delicate modelling has survived in this dry climate. Some of the Moorish ceilings of the interior have been restored. The grand staircase leading to the upper floors and cloister is especially well carved with dancers and foliage. Over the door of each _aula_, or lecture room, is a tablet denoting the science taught within. The fine library is rich in theological lore and early editions of Aristotle, &c. The little square on to which the west façade opens also leads through a good doorway into the Grammar School, with a delicious cloister and shady garden. The four sides of the square and the walls of the Cathedral are covered with numerous hieroglyphics and names in Roman characters. They are the initials, signs, and names of the numerous scholars who have distinguished themselves in different walks of life. A custom now followed in all our own schools on boards of honour. The Collegio Mayor de Santiago Apostol is a seminary for Irish priests. The number in training is generally about twenty. This building, originally founded in 1592 by Philip II. and dedicated to St. Patrick, is a very good example of cinquecento architecture. Among the many fine houses still left after French depredations, that of La Casa de las Conchas is the most celebrated. It dates from 1512, and is so named on account of the scallop shells which decorate the exterior walls. The window grilles are exceptionally fine. The Spanish proverb "La mujer y el vidrio siempre estan en peligro"--"a woman and glass are always in danger," evidently held good when these intricate and beautiful guards were let into the stone. The house has a lovely _patio_ and a very fine staircase. La Casa de Sal is another house with a good court, the gallery above being supported by life-size figures. La Casa de las Duendes, or Ghosts, built by Archbishop Fonseca, was supposed to be haunted, hence the name. The Torre del Clavero is a good specimen of the Castilian keep. It was built in 1488 by a Sotomayer who was Clavero or Key-bearer to the Alcántara Order, and is still in the possession of this noble family. Throughout the churches, in these houses, and the convents which remain unsuppressed are many fine pictures, and except for Seville, I found here more of interest than in any other city of Spain. In the convents of course mortal man is forbidden entrance, and I could only look at their lofty walls and wish myself a nearer acquaintance with the artistic treasures which I was told lay buried behind them. Perhaps the best example of a square in the whole of the country is the Plaza Mayor. A lofty colonnade runs around the four sides and every evening the beauties and others of Salamanca make it their promenade. The men stroll round in one direction and the women in the opposite. The social life of a Spanish town passed in view before me, with all its fan and language of the eyes, as I sat at one of the small tables of a café and got this cheap and harmless entertainment for one _real_. The square dates from 1720; the houses are four storeys high and on the north and south sides bear medallions of kings and celebrated men. The Ayuntamiento, with its chirrigueresque façade, occupies the centre of the north side and adds greatly to the appearance of this fine Plaza where up to fifty years ago bull fights took place. My work over, I nearly always found myself wandering on to the desert created by the French at the south-west angle of the city, and with my pipe spending half an hour or so meditating on the Salamanca of the Past and its contrast with the Present. The rock stands high here over the road and river below, and there is a drop of 100 feet or more down on to the former. It is but a narrow lane hedged in by a high wall and this forbidding-looking rock. When walking along this lane one day I noticed many crosses cut in the wall and chalked red. On inquiry I was told that each cross represented a suicide. From the height above, those tired of life or disappointed in love hurl themselves down and it is the unwritten law or prerogative of him who finds the mutilated body to carve a little cross on the wall at the spot where the unhappy mortal has ended his days. But it was not to prevent suicides that I wandered there and sat smoking my afternoon pipe. No, I fear it was something inglorious, it was to get away from the stenches and filth of the town and breathe the fresh air of the plain. I do not think that anywhere, unless it be in Tarragona, were my olfactory nerves so insulted as in Salamanca. Flies in thousands settled on my colour box and paper wherever I sat sketching. I can now appreciate fully the torture of the Egyptians during the plague. Add to the flies beggars innumerable, with horrible sores, offal and filth in the streets and some of the romance vanishes. Yet Salamanca still remains the Spain of my imagination, for was not all this part and parcel of my dream? AVILA Avila is one of the most perfectly preserved towns in Spain. It gave me the impression of having been dropped from the sky,--complete as it is--so desolate and barren is the boulder-strewn waste that surrounds it. A sort of suburb pushes its mean houses straggling beyond the walls, but Avila itself lies snugly within them. They are perfect--these walls that entirely encircle the old portion of the town. Forty feet high, twelve thick, with eighty-six defensive towers and bastions, and ten gates, they are constructed of slabs of granite set end upwards, and were always a hard nut for invaders to crack. The Roman Avela afterwards fell into the hands of the Moors, who for long held it as a fortress of the first class. Alfonso VI., the conqueror of Toledo, drove them out after a lengthy siege, and Avila was rebuilt by his son Ramon of Burgundy. It was then that the present walls were built, being erected under the supervision of two foreigners, a Frenchman and an Italian, Florian de Pituenga and Cassandro. Since their day Avila has played an important _rôle_ in the history of the country and witnessed many strange events. In 1465 an extraordinary scene took place on the plain outside the city. That unpopular king, Enrique IV., was reigning at the time, and the hatred of the people towards him reached its height when his effigy was dragged from the city and set upon a throne which had been prepared for the ceremony of degradation. The Archbishop of Toledo having recounted the people's grievances, removed the crown from the effigy's head, others high in the land insulted it and at length pushed it off the throne, the people then kicked it about and a game of "socker" ensued. Prince Alfonso, a mere boy, was raised to the unoccupied seat, and hailed King by the Archbishop, nobles and people, amidst a blare of trumpets and general rejoicing. Avila is an intensely cold place, frosts often occur here in May, but the summer months are delightful. Every street, every house almost is of interest, and in the old days of its importance there could have been few strongholds in the country so safe as this. The Cathedral is almost a fort in itself. The east end forms part of the city walls, the apse abutting in line with the next two towers on either side forms part of the defensive works. [Illustration: AVILA] Commenced at the end of the eleventh century by Alva Garcia, a native of Navarre, this early Gothic building is still unfinished. Not much is, however, of this early date, for the general style of the building is of the end of the next century, and many alterations have followed this in later years. The west front has but one tower, the north--the other, the south, does not rise above the roof. The favourite ball decoration of late Gothic Spain is in evidence, and guarding the doorway are a couple of uncouth mace-bearers. Very terrible are these hairy granite men, but not so dangerous looking as the two lions which stand on pedestals and are chained to the Cathedral walls. Always on guard, these four strange figures have no doubt many a time struck a holy terror into the hearts of would-be evil-doers as they entered the church, and I daresay kept the thoughts of others in the straight line. The north door is early pointed and carries figures in each jamb, the tympanum is decorated with reliefs of the Betrayal and Last Supper, but all the figures are sadly mutilated. The third entrance is at the south-east corner of the Cathedral, and is a later addition, opening outside the walls of the city on to the Calle de S. Segundo. The interior of the Cathedral is very simple and massive, partaking more of strength than elegance. It is a fitting inside to the severity of the fortress-like exterior. The nave is narrow and lofty, and so are the aisles. The large clerestory windows have their tracery above blocked up, and the lower lights have been treated in the same way, thus giving a certain resemblance to a triforium, a feature the church does not possess. The aisles in the apse are double, like those at Tortosa, and although the single columns in the centre are very beautiful, these aisles have not the elegance of those in the other Cathedral. The apse is very dark, the stone work at one time was painted red and the little that remains of this colour adds to the religious gloom of its double aisles. The columns throughout the Cathedral were built to bear great weight, their capitals are simple and their bases the same. The little light that glimmers through the windows adds greatly to the sombre strength of this fine building, which, more than any other of its size, reflects the life of the Spain of those days in which it was erected. Street thinks it less influenced by outside art than any other building in the country, and instances the unique method of laying the stone of the root as supporting this opinion. The transepts contain some good glass, as also do the windows in the chancel. There are many good early tombs throughout the Cathedral. Judging from their style Avila was left alone when Chirriguera was erecting monstrosities elsewhere, and to me it is the most homogeneous of Spain's Cathedrals. The _retablo_ over the High Altar rises in three stages and contains pictures by Berruguete, Santos Cruz and Juan de Borgoña. On this account my last remark might be criticised, for the whole piece is a jumble of styles. The chancel is, however, too narrow for a view of this medley from the body of the church, and wherever one roams in the building nothing attracts the eye or disturbs the mind by being too flagrantly incongruous. So dark is the apse that the Renaissance _trassegrario_ does not obtrude in the early Gothic of its surroundings. The very fine tomb of Bishop Alfonso de Madrigal, the Solomon of his day, is fortunately illumined by a little light, and I could see the effigy of this wise Prelate seated at his desk busily engaged with his pen and scroll, while above him the Magi and Shepherds are adoring in a good relief. There are some early paintings in most of the chapels, the _retablo_ in that of San Pedro being perhaps the best. The work of Cornielis, a Flemish sculptor, _circa_ 1537-47, is admirably displayed in the very beautiful carving of the _silleria de coro_, and there is no better example of Spanish metal work of the fifteenth century to be found than in the two iron-gilt pulpits. The sacristy contains a splendid silver monstrance by Arfe, and an Italian enamelled chalice of the fourteenth century by Petrucci Orto of Siena. The cloisters are disappointing, having been much mutilated and the fourteenth-century tracery of the arches blocked up. Avila, like its neighbour Segovia, contains some of the best examples of Romanesque work, and its many churches are archæologically as interesting as the Cathedral. Sheltering from the keen north wind under the arcade of San Vicente I made a sketch of the gateway of that name. The church was founded in 1307 and dedicated to three martyrs who were put to death on the rock which may still be seen in the crypt below. The west façade has two incomplete towers, between which is a most elaborately carved Romanesque doorway, standing in a deeply recessed arch. [Illustration: AVILA. PUERTA DE SAN VICENTE] The pure Romanesque nave has both triforium and clerestory and the unusual feature of pointed vaulting. The proportions of this noble church are very fine, but the interest of the non-architectural visitor will be centred in the Tomb of San Vicente and his two sisters SS. Sabina and Cristeta. A metal work canopy resting on twisted columns surmounts the tomb which is a sarcophagus of the thirteenth century. The legend tells how, after the martyrdom of these three, the body of the first-named was cast out to the dogs, and that a serpent came out of the hole in the rock (still visible) and watched over it. A Jew who mocked was smitten unto death by the reptile and lies buried in the south transept. The transept choir and three semicircular apses are Transitional, and carry a barrel vaulting. Outside the city wall, a little way down the hillside and beyond the dirty suburb that intervenes, is the late Gothic church of San Tomás. It possesses a fine _retablo_ of the patron St. Thomas Aquinas. The High Altar is placed in a gallery above a low elliptical arch, this feature being repeated at the west end with the _coro_ above. At the crossing of the transepts is the beautiful but greatly mutilated tomb of Prince Juan, the only son of Ferdinand and Isabella, by whose untimely death the crown of Spain passed to Austria. Two other tombs of great interest are those of Juan de Avila and Juana Velasquez. Messer Dominco, the Florentine, executed them both. San Pedro, standing at the east side of the Mercado Grande, is another Romanesque church of great beauty. Over the west door is a fine wheel window. The interior is pure Romanesque and rich in ornament, and the north portal is replete with the same. Santa Teresa was born of noble parents in Avila. In her early youth her heart hungered for saintly adventures in the broiling sun of Africa and her mind was set upon martyrdom at the hands of the Moors. Fate, however, decreed otherwise. At twenty years of age she took the veil and within a few years had founded seventeen convents of bare-footed Carmelite nuns. A favourite saint of Spain, the date of her death, August 27, is kept all over the Peninsula and her festival celebrated with great honour in Avila on October 15. SEGOVIA Dirty, dilapidated and sleepy, but the most enchanting town in Spain. What a treat it was to find myself once more in the Middle Ages after the bustle and noise of Madrid! The springs of a Spanish 'bus are good. I never entered one without great misgivings as to how long I was fated to remain in this world. To drive into a town such as Segovia is a grand test for the nerves. Crack goes the whip, off start the sorry-looking horses with a jerk. I am flung violently against my neighbour. I hasten to apologise. A disconcerting jolt knocks the hat over my eyes, before it is adjusted I find myself in an attitude of prayer with my head buried in the lap of the stout lady who pants opposite, another bump and she is embracing me, we disentangle ourselves, we apologise, every one in the 'bus is doing the same. The Jehu on the box fears no obstacles, a rock or a rut, they are all the same to him, he takes them all with utter disregard to everything in his way. We fly along, and somehow we land safely. We always do. Yes, the steel of those spiderlike springs must be good, or the saints are watching our venture. Perhaps both. The scenery on the journey from Madrid is very fine after the train leaves the junction at Villalba. Slowly we crawled up the incline winding round and doubling on our course. Merry little snow-fed streams eager to join with their fellows below sped along in a race to the sea. The summer villas of the Madrileños dot the hill slopes on the ground above the withy beds. We went up and up until the highest point on the line was reached under the road along which, marching north, Napoleon's troops toiled in the face of a fearful blizzard. Before entering the tunnel at the top of the pass a glorious panorama is spread out to the south. Away in the distance are the mountains of Toledo and the spires of far-off Madrid. On leaving this point the descent became rapid, and we whirled through a magnificent valley amidst true Alpine scenery. The rugged tops of the Sierra rose above thick forests of pine, brawling torrents dashed headlong down through green pastures, grand cattle were browsing on every side, it was indeed more Swiss than Spanish. [Illustration: SEGOVIA AT SUNSET] One often hears the question asked--why are there no trees in Spain? A French writer answers, that the Moors are responsible for the lack of shade in a Spanish landscape. He tells us they cut down all the trees they found, because trees harbour birds, and birds destroy all fruit and grain!--a truly ingenious theory, quite worthy of the fertile brains of the French, but surely a most ridiculous solution. The Moor brought the orange and the lemon to Europe; he was a lover of shade, he was also a great gardener. No, the reason why Spain has apparently no trees, is that very few have been planted for hundreds of years. Wood is necessary for fires in a country where there is practically no coal. The peasant has always been poor, he has always taken anything that came to hand. He helped himself to the wood of the forests around him. His betters did the same. All the trees near Madrid are known to have been ruthlessly cut down and sold to defray the expenses of Philip II.'s Court; and it is only of recent years that any replanting has been taken in hand. When the present King was a boy of four years old, a ceremony, now repeated every year at the Fiesta del Arbol, was inaugurated. The Queen Mother took him to Guindebra outside Madrid, where he planted several trees. At every anniversary the day is devoted by school children all over the country to this same object. As many as 10,000 saplings have been put into the ground in a single day, thus laying by a store of wealth for future generations. Segovia is surrounded by trees. Hidden from the great plain in which the town lies, they cover the banks of the two streams which join issue below the city, thus forming the mass of rock on which it stands. These valleys, eaten out by the running water, are among the great charms of this romantic place. Nothing can exceed the beauty of early spring. Fruit trees in full blossom, tall poplars bending their graceful heads in the breeze and chestnuts bursting into leaf. The air is filled with the twitterings of nesting birds, the sloping banks covered with the tender green of young grass; all nature is alive, the sun is warm and the sound of rushing waters brings peace to the soul. Perched high up, hanging apparently on mighty rocks, the Alcázar broods grimly over the gorge below. Still further up and beyond, rises the mass of the Cathedral, towers, domes and pinnacles. Three hundred and thirty feet high, the great tower rears itself like a sentinel, a landmark for many miles. Round the base cluster the houses of the town like chickens seeking shelter under the wings of a mother hen. No place in all Spain appealed to me so much. No town was so replete with subjects for my brush, and nowhere else did I feel the romance of this marvellous country as in Segovia. [Illustration: SEGOVIA. THE AQUEDUCT] A town of Iberian origin and name, under the Roman rule it was of some importance. The great aqueduct, which spans the valley that divides Segovia in the Plaza del Azoquéjo, brought pure water from a mountain torrent, the Rio Frio, ten miles away. It does the same to-day. Constructed of granite blocks, laid Cyclopean fashion without mortar or cement, it commences near San Gabriel. To break the force of the rushing stream the conduit has many angles. Without doubt it is the most important Roman remain in Spain, for this alone Segovia would be famous. Once upon a time his Satanic Majesty fell desperately in love with a beautiful Segovian. To further his suit, an offer was made to do anything she might require. Her home was on a hill; her work, to fetch water from the stream below. Finding the continual tramp down and up rather irksome, this daughter of Eve bethought herself of a request to mitigate her toil. "Done," said the Evil One, and the aqueduct was built in one night! In terror she fled to the church, and the church discovered that one stone had been left out, also that the aqueduct was extremely useful. The contract was declared void and the maiden freed from the rash promise she had playfully given his majesty. The country folk still know it by the name of the Puento del Diabolo. During the siege of Segovia, the Moors destroyed thirty-five of the arches, but these were cleverly rebuilt in 1493 by Juan Escovedo, a monk of El Parral, who received the scaffolding in payment for his work. More recently, extensive repairs in the same way have been successfully carried out. The most imposing view is in the Plaza del Azoquéjo, from which it towers upwards in a double line of arches one above the other, and its length is best grasped from El Calvario, a hill to the south of the town. The Cathedral is a late Gothic pile, built of a warm yellow stone, and looks particularly impressive from the shady walk among the rocks on the left bank of the Clamores, the stream which cuts off Segovia from the southern plateau. It was begun in 1525 by the builder of Salamanca's Cathedral which it greatly resembles, Juan Gil de Hontañon, and continued at his death by his son. The weak point in the exterior, which masses very grandly, is the western façade. The interior is very striking. The wide span of the arches, the richness of the admirable vaulting, the splendid late Gothic windows and the feeling of light and space are fine examples of the last stage of Gothic work, just before the influence of the oncoming Renaissance took hold of the architects of that day. The floor is beautifully laid with red, blue and white diamond-shaped slabs of marble; and the very necessary notice--"No escupir, la religiosidad y higiene la prohibur"--keeps it clean and decent. In the _coro_, which occupies nearly the whole of the centre of the nave, there is a _retablo_ by Sabatini. The _silleria_ are very fine. They were rescued from the old Cathedral, which was destroyed in Charles V.'s time by the Comunéros, who started business by pulling down churches, appropriating all they could lay hands on, plundering the wealthy and generally behaving as a mob that has the upper hand always does. The outer walls of the _coro_ are stucco, painted to represent different species of marble; described, by the way, in a reputable guide book--"beautifully coloured marbles"! Most of the _rejas_ which shut off the side chapels are good gilded iron work. In that of la Piedad there is a good _retablo_ with life-sized figures by Juan de Juni, 1571; and in the chapel of the Segragrio a wooden figure of Christ by Alonso Cano. Through a fine Gothic portal in the Capilla del Cristo del Consuelo I entered the cloisters in company with a verger, who took great pride in his Cathedral. These cloisters are surpassingly beautiful; a very good example of flamboyant Gothic. In vain did I search for a corner from which to make a sketch. The courtyard was overgrown with shrubs, tall cypresses and vines climbing at random shut out everything. The garden itself was a mass of rubbish and old timber. The well in the centre, overgrown with creepers and weeds; while in the cloisters themselves preparations were afoot for the coming Easter processions, and all available space taken up by carpenters and painters at work on the Pasos. In the little dark chapel of Santa Catalina on the west side, is the tiny tomb of the unfortunate Infante Pedro, the three-year-old son of Henry II. The poor little child was dropped by his nurse from a window in the Alcazar, and ended his young life on the rocks below. 'Tis a pitiful object this pathetic tomb, alone, here in this damp spot where daylight only enters when the door is opened. In the sacristy there is a Custodia in the form of a temple, six feet high, silver and exquisitely chased. The vestments possessed by the clergy are most rarely worked and of great value. Segovia was once rich in churches. Like the rest of the city, a great many have alas! fallen into decay, and those not in this state are rapidly approaching it. They are mostly small and retain the apse. Several are cloistered and every one of them is architecturally of great interest. Here again is another charm of this romantic old city, evidence of past glories and ecclesiastical power, the history of Spain written in its stones. [Illustration: SEGOVIA. PLAZA MAYOR] San Millan, a Romanesque structure of the twelfth century, is the best preserved church in Segovia. The exquisite arcades on the north and south sides have coupled columns with elaborately carved capitals. Like most of the buildings of this period solidity rather than grace was the effect aimed at by their architects. It possesses a triple apse; the piers supporting the roof are very massive, the capitals to the columns are formed of semi-grotesque figures of man and beast. The two doorways are good. In the church of San Martin there is a carved wooden Passion. Four life-sized figures take the place of shafts in the great doorway, and again a cloister forms the exterior of the south and west walls. In the Dominican convent of Santa Cruz, founded by Ferdinand and Isabella, is still to be seen a sepulchral urn of one of the original companions of St. Dominic. "Tanto monta" the motto of the King and Queen is cut both inside and out on the walls. Over the west portal are good reliefs of the Crucifixion and the Pietà. La Vera Cruz, a church built by the Templars in 1204, is difficult of access. I procured the key after much trouble, and found the twelve-sided nave forming a sort of ambulatory round the central walled-in chamber. It is an imitation of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. The Templars were suppressed in 1312, so this gem had but a short existence as their house of prayer. Nestling amidst a grove of acacia trees, hidden away under the rock, is the Santuario de Fuencisla. Built to commemorate the miraculous rescue of Maria del Salto, a beautiful Jewess, this little sanctuary is much affected by pilgrims. The rock which overshadows it is known as La Peña Grajera, or "Crow's Cliff," taking this name from the multitude of carnivorous birds who always assembled here for a meal after a victim had been hurled down to expiate his crime in a death below. Maria, accused of adultery, was led to the top and pushed off the edge to find the fate of so many before her. With great presence of mind she called loudly on the Virgin, who hearing, came to her assistance; and so retarded her downward flight that she alighted gently, escaping unhurt. Here in days long gone by lived a hermit, whose good life and deeds are still a much-reverenced legend among Segovians. The monastery of El Parral, once a wealthy and powerful house of the brotherhood of San Gerónimo, contains a very good _retablo_ by Diego de Urbina. It was founded by a member of the great Pacheco family, who fought three antagonists one after another and came off successful. He vowed to build a church on the spot where his skill and prowess gave him so splendid a victory, and to endow it as well. It is now a convent of Franciscan nuns. Next in importance to the Cathedral is the comparatively new building of the Alcázar. Standing high up on the crags, below which the Eresma and Clamores meet, it occupies an unrivalled position. A fine view of this truly Castilian fortress is obtained from the beautiful walk which encircles the city on the further bank of each stream. Above the tall poplars and thick scrub rise its turrets and spires. The massive walls go sheer up from the rock on which their foundations rest. The huge embattled tower and drawbridge assist the feeling of strength; and it only requires the weathering of years, adding broken colour to the somewhat new-looking exterior, to make this a perfect specimen of mediæval architecture. The building was originally Moorish, but the many vicissitudes of troublous times saw it in a bad state when Henry IV., "el Impotente," repaired and made it his residence. Within its walls Isabella was proclaimed Queen of Castile in 1474. Cabrera, the husband of her greatest friend, Beatrice of Boabdilla, held the fortress and its treasure, and it was mainly through his valour that Isabella succeeded to the throne. During the Comunéros insurrection the Alcázar held out for Charles V. At the quelling of the revolt Charles did all in his power to thoroughly restore the building and furnish it with great splendour. His son Philip added much that the father's death had left unfinished. Our own King, Charles I., was here entertained, and Gil Blas confined a prisoner. The great fire, originated by some of the students of the military college, almost entirely destroyed the whole castle in 1862. The present edifice dates from shortly after that year and is now used as a storehouse for military archives and an academy for artillery officers. A very good gateway spans the road that leads out past the Santuario de Fuencisla along the right bank of the Eresma. The river here is an ideal looking trout stream, but alas! fish are not as plentiful now as when Charles I. was entertained and fed on "fatte troute" in the Alcázar. Follow the path over the bridge to the left, it soon narrows into a mere goat track as it skirts the rock; a few steps farther on and the wonderful position of the fortress-castle bursts into view. How fascinating it looked as I saw it one night in the moonlight with the silver beams glinting on its spires. All was very still as I entered the wood of stunted pines beyond. Across the ravine rose the mighty Cathedral silhouetted against a dark star-laden sky. A light here and there shone from a window in the houses beneath. I heard the distant cry of the watchman on his rounds. A faint scent from the heavy dew rose to my nostrils, a scent of mother earth. It was with unwilling steps I crossed the stream and sought my bed that night. Such moments are rare. On the left bank of the Eresma, almost hidden in the trees, stands a building which once was the mint of Spain. Up till the year 1730 all Spain's money was coined here, the proximity to the impregnable Alcázar, which was used as the Treasury, affording security against untimely raids. The old mint is now a flour mill, but still bears the royal arms over its gateway. At one time Segovia was the great Castilian mart for wool. The church, and monasteries of El Parral, El Paular, and the Escorial owning immense flocks. These were driven to the pure waters of the Eresma, to be cleansed before being shorn. After the sheep-washing, the animals were put into the sweating house, and their legs tied together. The shearer then commenced operations, and as each sheep passed out of his hands it was branded; the shepherds standing by made a selection of the older animals for the butcher, the remainder being taken away to their mountain pastures. Even now there are many flocks in the country around, particularly on the lower hills near La Granja, where I noticed a large number not at all unlike the Kentish breed of Romney Marsh. Seven miles from Segovia the summer Royal Palace of La Granja lies in the midst of beautiful woods and clear streams. At the foot of the Sierra, the highest peak of which, La Peñalara, raises its crest a few miles off, this elysium is a beautiful spot for those who have earned a holiday from the cares of State. The gardens are most charmingly arranged, and the fountains with a never ending supply of water, better than those at Versailles. Built by Philip V., whose tastes and inclinations were thoroughly French, La Granja has been the scene of important events in the history of the country. The treaty which handed Spain over to France in 1796 was here signed by Godoy. In 1832 Ferdinand VII. revoked the decree by which he had abolished the Salic law, and summoned Don Carlos to the palace as heir to the throne, a call which plunged his unhappy country into civil war. Four years later the Queen Regent was compelled within its walls, by the leader of the revolutionary soldiery, to accept the constitution of Cadiz. Every corner of Spain holds history, but none can compare with Segovia and its surroundings in romance and old-world charm. SARAGOSSA Saragossa lies midway on the railway between Madrid and Barcelona, and, having about it a touch of both these, can qualify as one of Spain's progressive cities. The unsightly factory chimney is beginning to sprout up in the suburbs; old and narrow streets are making way for broader and better; and insanitary quarters giving place to modern hygiene. Aragon is the poorest portion of this fair land, and Saragossa is its capital. In every age this little kingdom has been torn by war and has suffered heavily, but its people have never wavered in their faith, and are still among the most pious and superstitious of the many different races that people the Iberian Peninsula. They possess that strong attachment for their sterile plains and barren mountains so common to those who wring from Nature a bare existence. The Emperor Augustus, in the year 25 B.C., vastly improved "Salduba," and gave it the title of Cæsarea Augusta. When in the occupation of Rome it was a free city and had a coinage of its own. The first place in Spain to renounce Paganism, Saragossa has always been a city of great holiness. When besieged by the French under Childebert in 540, the inhabitants carried the stole of San Vicente round the walls--and the invader fled. The Infidel, however, proved less susceptible to a Christian relic, and the city fell to the weight of his arms in the eighth century. Being a Berber Infidel he recognised no Kalif of Cordova, and between the two there soon began one of those internecine conflicts that in the end led to the termination of Moorish rule. It was in this connection that Charlemagne was implored to assist the Northern Moor against the Andalusian and crossed the Pyrenees with an eye, no doubt, in the long run, to the acquisition of new territory. No sooner had he reached the plains of Aragon than he was recalled to quell a rising in his own dominions. His back turned, and he being presumably in retreat, the ungrateful people, eager for plunder, followed and inflicted on his rearguard a terrible defeat in the most famous Pyrenean Pass, the Pass of Roncesvalles, a disaster in which Roland, that hero of romance, lost his life. Thence onward, as the centuries went by, Saragossa was the scene of many a fight. Alfonso I. in 1118 recovered it from the Moor after a long siege, and Moslem rule was ended. [Illustration: SARAGOSSA. LA SEO] Saragossa is best known in the annals of its warfare for the heroic defence, immortalised by Byron, in the war with France. In the month of May 1808, the invader was close at hand, and the citizens organised themselves for defence. A young aristocrat, José Palafox, was chosen as the nominal leader, and had at his right hand the redoubtable peasant, Tio Jorge Ibort--Gaffer George. His two lieutenants were Mariano Cerezo and Tio Marin, while the courageous priest Santiago Sas assisted greatly, through his influence with the populace, to keep things together and prevent petty squabbles. One hundred _duros_ supplied the sinews of war! Sixteen cannon, a few old muskets and two hundred and twenty fighting men were all that the leaders could count upon to repel the army of Lefebvre. The siege began in June and was abandoned in August, in consequence of the disaster to Dupont at Bailén. In the following December four Marshals of France, Junot, Lannes, Mortier and Moncey, with eighteen thousand men, invested the city, but it was not until February of the next year that, having driven the defenders out of the Jesuit convent across the river, the French were able to establish a foothold in the outskirts of the city itself. Every one knows how the Maid of Saragossa took the place of her dead artillery lover who was killed at his gun; an episode that has since become a theme to instil the young with heroic ideals. Such was the spirit that gained for the city the proud title of _siempre heróica_. Her citizens fought from house to house, every street had barricades, and it was only that when decimated by pestilence and famine, with half the place a smoking ruin, one of the most celebrated sieges of history came to end. As in Cadiz and Salamanca, there are two Cathedrals in Saragossa, La Seo and El Pilar. The former occupies the site of a church which stood here before the Moors took possession of the place and turned it into a mosque. A year after the advent of Alfonso I., Bishop Pedro de Lebrana reconsecrated La Seo, and its walls have witnessed many historical events in the life of Aragon before the kingdom became merged into one with Castile. It was before the High Altar that her Kings were crowned, and at the font many a royal babe baptized. La Seo is constructed almost entirely of the dull brown brick with which the older part of the city is also built; the interior piers and vaulting alone being of stone. On the north-east wall, which faces the gloomy palace of the archbishop, there is still extant the most elaborate arrangement of brick work, inlaid with coloured glazed tiles, blue, green, red, white and yellow, forming a very harmonious and attractive scheme. From the centre of the north-west façade, which is extremely ugly, rises a well-proportioned tower arranged in four stages, with Corinthian columns, the top of which is surmounted by a red tiled cupola and spire. The colour of this took my fancy, it "sang out" so much against the blue of the sky--a contrast I thought worthy of an illustration. Entering the building by the door in the façade, I was immediately nonplussed as to the orientation of the Cathedral. To add to the puzzle, for the structure is almost square, four rows of columns seemed mixed up in endless confusion, and the dim light admitted from the few windows only accentuated the mystery. Very beautiful, however, is this Gothic interior which runs north-east and south-west, and I soon found a spot from whence to make a sketch. The columns rise from marble bases of a rich crimson; the vaulting above was lost in gloom, the light coming in from the south-west window struck vividly on portions of the Renaissance _respaldos_, the niches of which are filled with saints and archbishops, and the pattern of the marble floor served but to heighten the general effect. In the picture may be seen a tabernacle with twisted black marble columns, this marks the spot where the Virgin suddenly appeared and held converse with Canónigo Fuenes. Besides the archbishop's throne, the _coro_, which is not particularly interesting, contains a huge reading desk. There is a great deal of alabaster throughout the Cathedral, notably the very fine Gothic _retablo_ of the High Altar by Dalman de Mur, around which are many tombs of the Kings of Aragon. Close by, a black slab marks the place where rests the heart of Don Baltazar Carlos, the son of Philip IV., who was immortalised by the brush of Velasquez, and who died in Saragossa at the early age of seventeen. Among the chapels, that used as the _segrario_, or parish church, has a magnificent Moorish ceiling, and the fine alabaster tomb of Bernardo de Aragon. The Cathedral is rich in splendid tapestries and ecclesiastical vestments. Among the former is certainly the best I have ever set eyes upon. It is a very early piece and has a wonderful blue sky. In it are woven the Last Supper, Christ bearing the Cross, the Agony in the Garden and the Crucifixion, while in the lower right-hand corner our Saviour is assisting with a long pole to stir up devils who are roasting in Hades. Among the vestments is an extremely beautiful chasuble brought here at the time of the Reformation from Old St. Paul's in London. I wondered, when I looked at it, whether Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII.'s consort, had been instrumental in its removal from England. [Illustration: SARAGOSSA. IN THE OLD CATHEDRAL] The Cathedral of El Pilar is thus named as it possesses the identical pillar on which the Virgin descended from Heaven and appeared to St. James. At first a modest chapel, it has grown by the addition of cloisters and subsidiary chapels to the present stupendous building. The length is close on five hundred feet and the breadth two hundred. The possession of this miraculous pillar has brought untold wealth to the Cathedral. Votive offerings on the anniversary of the festival at the shrine often amount to many thousands of pounds. Jewelry, gems and costly objects of every description are given; these are now sold by auction, the large sum of £20,000 being realised a few years ago. To these sales we owe a fine rock crystal and gold medallion, given to the Virgin of El Pilar by Henry IV. of France, and now in South Kensington Museum. Many examples of old Spanish goldsmith's work have also been acquired for the same collection in this way. The towers and pinnacles of El Pilar pile up grandly, and are best seen from the fine bridge which spans the yellow flood of the river Ebro. Silhouetted against the evening sky, with the smooth running waters below, it seemed to me a worthy example in brick and stone of the church's magnificence. The interior is an immense temple, the frescoes of which are from the brush of that extraordinary genius, Goya, who turned his talent to any job that was productive of the cash he spent so freely. The _retablo_ of the High Altar is a fine piece of work from the alabaster quarries at Escatron. Composed of three good Gothic canopies with tapering finials, it has seven smaller divisions below. Damian Forment was the artist who designed and carried out this, one of the most beautiful _retablos_ in the country. The _reja_ which stands in front of _coro_ is superb, and considered to be Juan Celma's masterpiece. Behind the High Altar is the celebrated chapel of the Virgin. The figure itself is of very old blackened wood, evidently a specimen of early Christian work. On October 12, the anniversary of her descent, thousands of pilgrims flock hither to kiss her foot through a hole in the wall at the back of the chapel. The city is then full of visitors and it is next to impossible to find quarters or a room of any sort. [Illustration: SARAGOSSA. EASTER PROCESSION] I happened to be in Saragossa for _Semana Santa_. and watched the processions of groups of heavy wooden figures, illustrative of our Lord's life-history, proceed through crowded streets. My sketch shows the last _paso_ of the Crucifixion, with a figure of the Virgin bringing up the rear, as they passed the intensely devout throngs on Good Friday. Masked members of different religious brother and sisterhoods, walk along keeping the route clear. The whole procession was led by soldiery, and "Romans," men attired in the garb of ancient Rome, while an infantry band followed the Virgin. The _pasos_ are deposited in the Church of Santiago built on the spot where St. James passed a night. In the belfry of this church is an old Gothic bell of which the inhabitants are justly proud. San Pablo is a very interesting fabric, dating from the year 1259. The floor of the church is a dozen steps below the street. The _retablo_ is another fine example of Damian Forment's art. The aisles are cut off from the nave by a flat wall with square pillars and ill-proportioned pointed arches. The _coro_ is at the west end, from whence also issue the notes of a very beautifully toned organ. The extraordinary octagonal brick steeple might pass as of Russian or Tartar origin. Of all the gateways to the city, there remains but one, the Puerta del Carmen. It has been left as it stood after the French bombardment, and retains many marks of shot and soft-nosed bullets. The site of the historic Puerta del Portillo, where the Maid of Saragossa won immortal fame, is in the square of the same name. Outside it stands the Castillo de la Aljaferia, the Palace of the Sheikhs of Saragossa, and the residence of the Kings of Aragon. Ferdinand gave it to the Holy Office, and from out its portals issued many terrible orders for the suppression of the wretched heretic. There still remains a small octagonal mosque, and many of the rooms have their original _artesonado_ ceilings. In it also is the "Torreta," the dungeon in _Il Trovatore_; while from the tower can be seen the Castillo de Castlejar, mentioned in the drama by Garcia Gaturrio, from which the libretto of the opera was taken. This one-time fine palace is now a barrack, and I used to watch the recruits drilling and exercising outside. When the recruiting season commences, the numbers are drawn among those liable to serve--the lucky ones being those who are not compelled to take any part in the military service of their country. There exist societies in Spain to which a sum of 750 pesetas can be paid, that undertake to pay another 750 pesetas to the State, if the payee's name is drawn for service, 1500 pesetas being the sum which enables any one to forego his military career. If his number is not drawn, he loses his deposit, if it is, the society pays the full sum. In the old days the nobles of Aragon safe-guarded their privileges by the Fuéros de Sobrarbe, a code something like our Magna Charta, which reduced the King's authority to almost vanishing point. Pedro IV. got rid of the Fuéros by cutting to pieces the parchment incorporating the union or confederacy, whose members, if the King was thought to have exceeded his prerogative, were absolved from allegiance. They were a hard-headed race, these Aragonese, and are still like those of the other northern provinces, very independent and jealous of Castile's rule. Among other things handed down from time immemorial is a national dance, and the Jota Aragonesa, the national air, known beyond the limits of Spain. Very few of these old airs still exist. As a fact, the old songs of Spain and their music are better known in the Jewish colony of Salonika than in the country of their origin. The upper classes of this colony still speak the pure Castilian of Cervantes' time, and being the descendants of Spanish refugees hounded out of the country by the Inquisition, still observe the customs, songs and language of their immigrant forefathers. The Aragonese also have a national game, Tirando a la Barra, which consists in passing an iron bar from one hand to the other, thereby gaining impetus for the final swing which sends it hurtling through the air towards a mark on the ground, like a javelin. One or two good old houses still remain in Saragossa to testify to its former greatness, notably that of the great Luna family. Two gigantic uncouth figures with clubs stand on either side of the doorway which is the centre of a simple but good façade. The cornice above is very heavy and the eaves project far out, a feature that I noticed was very characteristic of the old quarters of the city. It was in this house that the besieged, during the French war, held their councils. The Casa Zaporta can boast of a very fine staircase and beautiful _patio_ with elegant fluted columns and reliefs and medallions breaking the spandrils. A few other good houses still exist, but as they are in the old quarters of the city, and as these are rapidly disappearing, I fear that Saragossa will not contain for long anything beyond her Cathedrals that is of tangible interest. SANTIAGO The evening train from Pontevedra deposited me sometime about midnight at Cernes, the hamlet outside Santiago where the line ends. The full moon during the latter portion of the journey had been a source of endless delight. My face was glued to the window watching the ever-changing hills and valleys through which the train crept, shrouded in that mystery which obliterates detail and suggests so much in great masses of subdued light and deep shade. I reached the hotel, procured a room, threw open the window, and stood on the balcony listening to the intense stillness of a wonderful night. Suddenly a dull rumbling down some side street disturbed my reverie of the Santiago of days gone by. The only thing to be expected at this time of night was the station 'bus, but I heard no clattering hoofs and was lost in surmise, when out of the dark shadow of a narrow lane into the moonlight swung a yoke of oxen drawing a long cart with slow majestic pace. But what a cart! a low sort of wooden box balanced between two solid wooden wheels. The rumbling was explained. It was primitive and the most mediæval thing I had yet seen in a country which is barely European. The peasant owner, a few steps in advance, never turned his head, but guided his beasts with a long stick which he waved from side to side over his back. There was no shout, no cry of command. The _mise en scène_ was beautifully arranged, it was complete. There was the background of ancient grey houses, beyond them, tapering into the starry sky, the slender pinnacles of the great Cathedral. A row of stunted trees occupied places down one side of the little square which filled my stage. The subdued colour and silence of the moonlit night, and the slow passage of the ox-cart as it passed out of sight, bettered Irving's best effects at the Lyceum. A clock in a neighbouring tower struck the quarters, the moment had arrived for the anti-climax! I expected every minute to see a door open, a light stream across the square, a cloaked figure steal furtively out, and disappear down into the shadow of the lane. It was perfect, nothing could have been arranged better as an introduction to Santiago de Compostela. [Illustration: SANTIAGO. THE CATHEDRAL] The body of St. James landed itself at Padron on the coast not far from Santiago, and his bones were brought to the spot where now stands the Cathedral. In the course of time their whereabouts was forgotten and it remained for Bishop Theodomir to rediscover the sacred spot in 829, guided thither by a star. Hence the Campus Stellæ--or Compostela. The shrine of the saint is still visited by innumerable pilgrims, and perhaps more arrive in Santiago than any other city of Spain. In olden days so great was the number that "El Camino de Santiago"--"The road to Santiago," gave rise to the Spanish term for the "milky way." I have watched them in the Cathedral, peasants, men and women, come from afar, to judge by their dress. They each carried a staff decorated with tufts of herbs and little star-shaped pieces of bread tied on with gay ribbons. I have seen women making the round of the altars in the different chapels with great bundles of clothes, through which were thrust umbrellas, balanced on their heads. They never lost the poise of their burden as they knelt and rose again. But of all the pilgrims I saw, one who might have stepped out of Chaucer's pages carried me back to the days of long ago. She wore a short skirt of thick brown material, sandals protected her stockinged feet, from her girdle hung rosary, scallop shells and a stoneware pilgrim's bottle, a hooked staff lent support to her bent, travelled-stained figure. Her leather wallet was stuffed with bread, and covering her short cropped hair was a grey felt hat, mushroom shaped. A little black dog entered the Cathedral with her, and squatted silently by his mistress's side as she knelt praying in the dim light of a grey day. Chaucer's "Wyt of Bath" had made a pilgrimage to "Seynt Jame," and my pilgrim with her little lame companion might very well have been with him too. The Cathedral, founded in 1078, was built on the site of one destroyed by Almanzor in 997. The legend of the destruction of the first church, which had been standing for just one hundred years, was thus--Almanzor, after sacking Leon and Astorga, swept all the country westwards with his Moorish hosts until he reached Santiago. So great was his fame and in such terror was his name held that no one had the courage to face him and fight for saint and city. Riding through its deserted streets he came to the church, and to his surprise at last espied a solitary Christian, a monk, praying alone at the shrine of the saint. "What dost thou here?" inquired the haughty Moor. "I am at my prayers," curtly answered the holy man, continuing his devotions. This reply and the courage of the single enemy so called forth the admiration of Almanzor, that his life was spared and an infidel guard set over the tomb. [Illustration: SANTIAGO. SOUTH DOOR OF THE CATHEDRAL] The west façade, a Renaissance outer covering, so to speak, of the older façade, would not look so imposing as it does if granite had not been used in its construction. The grey tones of the lichen-covered stone redeem the somewhat overdone florid design, and it stands well above a double flight of steps on the east side of the huge Plaza Mayor. The south door, or Puerta de las Platerias, takes this name from the silversmiths whose workshops are still under the arcades around the Plaza on to which it opens. It is the oldest portion of the Cathedral and dates from the foundation. The shafts contain tiers of figures in carved niches, and the tympanum has rows of smaller ones. The north door fronts on to the Plaza Fuente San Juan, and faces the convent of San Martin Pinario, which was founded in 912 by Ordoño II. In the days before this Plaza was officially given its present name, it was known as Azabacheria, _azabache_ is jet, and it was here that vast quantities of rosaries made of this were sold to pilgrims. In the south-east angle of the Cathedral is the Puerta Santa, bearing the inscription "Hace est domus Dei et porta coeli." It is only opened in the Jubilee year and then by the archbishop himself. The entrance to it is from the Plaza de los Literarios. It will be seen from this that the Cathedral is practically set in four great Plazas, el Mayor, de las Platerías, la Fuente San Juan, and de los Literarios, and for this reason, although the roof towers high above, it is one of the few Cathedrals the size of which can be appreciated by an exterior view. The early Romanesque interior is superb, and not unlike our own Ely Cathedral. The finest thing in it of archæological interest is the "Portico de la Gloria," which Street calls "one of the greatest glories of Christian Art." This Portico, situated at the west end of the nave, formed at one time the façade. The idea of the whole doorway is Christ at the Last Judgment. His figure, twice life-size, occupies the centre. Below Him is seated St. James, while around them are angels worshipping. Four and twenty elders are arranged in the circumference of the archivolt; each one holds a musical instrument, most of which are shaped like violas and guitars. A most beautifully sculptured marble column supports this in the centre, resting on a base of devils, with the portrait of Maestro Matio, who executed the whole from his own designs, facing the nave. An inscription under this doorway states that the work was finished in 1188. To the right and left are smaller arches, portraying in well-cut granite good souls on their way to Paradise and wicked ones in the clutches of devils on their way to Hell. Nothing can exceed the primitive religious feeling pervading this work. Mateo must have given his whole soul with fervour to his labours; and the almost obliterated traces of painting and gilding enhance their result by giving a touch of warmth to the cold colour of the stone. West of the portico, above which are the remains of a fine wheel window, has been built the present Renaissance façade known as El Obradorio, the two being connected by quadripartite vaulting. The nave itself has a walled-in triforium, but no clerestory and the vaulting of the roof is barrel. The saint's shrine is in the crypt beneath the Capilla Mayor. The extra extravagant _retablo_ above the High Altar is chirrigueresque, and hardly redeemed by the lavish employment of jasper, alabaster and silver with which it is decorated. A jewelled figure of St. James is seated in a niche above the mass of precious metal in which the altar is encased. It is all very gorgeous and must impress the pious pilgrim who has journeyed hither from afar, but I could not help wishing it were simpler. However, the one living vital thing in Spain is her religion, and her Church knows so well how to conduct its business that my feelings of regret are purely æsthetic. The _cimborio_ is a fine creation, under which swings on certain _fiestas_ the huge silver _incensario_, a lamp wellnigh six feet high. The two bronze pulpits are real masterpieces of cinquecento art and are adorned by subjects from the Old Testament by Juan Bantista Celma. In one of the side chapels, known as the Relicario, are recumbent figures on the tombs of Don Ramon, the husband of Urraca, Berenguela 1187, Fernando II. 1226, Alfonso XII. of Leon 1268, and that faithful, pitiable figure Juan de Castro, wife of Pedro the Cruel. Even now, after the spoliation by Soult, who carried away ten hundredweight of precious metal in sacred vessels, the Relicario is a perfect museum. All the other chapels contain good tombs, especially that of Espiritu Santo in the north transept; and among other beautiful objects with which the Cathedral is replete are two ancient _limosneras_ or alms-boxes, two very ancient gilt pyxes, a carved wooden cross, similar to the much-revered cross of los Angeles at Oviedo, given by Don Alfonso and Doña Jimena in 874. The large cloisters to the south-west of the Cathedral were built by Archbishop Fonseca in 1521. They are bad Gothic enriched with Renaissance details. The centre court is paved with granite and gives an impression of bareness which is not redeemed by the architecture. It was in this Cathedral that John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, was crowned King of Spain. [Illustration: SANTIAGO. INTERIOR OF THE CATHEDRAL] Santiago possesses a much frequented university, which is extremely well provided with books. In the church of Santa Maria de la Sar may be seen relics of the Holy Office which held its sittings in the adjoining monastery. The president's chair, marked with a palm, a cross and a red sword is perhaps the most notable. This monastic church, at one time owned by Templars, is situated outside the city boundary on the Orense road. Like all the others, in fact like the whole of Santiago, it is built of granite. It possesses a triple apse; the nave is of five bays without a triforium or clerestory, and the interior, in consequence, is very dark, heavy and gloomy. In it is the tomb of Archbishop Bernardo, 1242. The cloister at one time must have been exceptionally fine, but alas! only nine arches now remain; and the whole edifice is of the fast-crumbling away type not uncommon in the country. The fine Plaza Mayor, or Plaza Alfonso Doce, is bounded on the north by the huge Hospice erected by Enrique de Egas for Ferdinand and Isabella for the use of poor pilgrims. The royal coat-of-arms is in evidence over the entrance portal, enriched, in addition, with figures of saints and pilgrims. The massive cornice has a course of heavy chain work and the ball decoration so common in Toledo. This huge pile of buildings is now used as a hospital. It is divided into four courts with fountains and is admirably adapted for its present use. The small chapel is one of the gems of Santiago. The roof springs from four arches with Gothic statues and niches clustered round a central column. On the west side of the Plaza stands the great Seminario founded in 1777 for the education of young priests. The ground floor is now occupied as the Ayuntamiento of Santiago. To the south is the Collegio de San Gerónimo, with a remarkable early doorway. The college was known as _Pan y Sardina_ from the poverty of its accommodation. Sardines, the staple industry of Vigo and other coast towns of the district, are the cheapest food obtainable, hence the appellation. Santiago is delightfully situated amidst heather-clad hills, the lower slopes of which are well wooded with oak, fir, and eucalyptus. Great boulders of granite stand out like the monoliths of prehistoric ages. Many a pleasant walk through the purple heather revealed to me a landscape such as one sees in parts of Cornwall and Scotland. The grey city with its red-tiled roofs, its huge deserted monastic buildings, the many spires and domes of the Cathedral and other churches, all set in patches of brilliant green meadows and maize fields look particularly beautiful from Monte Pedroso, a fine vantage point surmounted by a huge Calvary. The climate is comparatively moist, ferns of all sorts grow in the shade of garden walls, and bracken is thick in the oak woods. The Galician is well favoured by Nature, and being a patient, hard-working man of not much mental capacity, very pious and an ardent advocate of small holdings, gets through life with a contented spirit. He is very close and knows the value of a peseta. Unfortunately he is looked down upon by the Castilian, and the term "Gallego" is rather one of abuse than respect. Driven to emigration by the subdivision of land which cannot support more than those who own and work it now, he goes south in great numbers and is the trusted _concierge_ in many a large house and hotel in Madrid and elsewhere. The Panama Canal too attracts him from his native hills, in fact the Gallego is to be met with wherever Spanish is the spoken language. TUY The train deposited me one morning at this little frontier town. It was very hot, and it was Sunday. The only porter in the station volunteered to carry my bag to the Fonda, so we joined a long file of peasants and tramped up the dusty road to the old Gothic capital which stands splendidly situated above the river Minho. From a distance the Cathedral rises like a fort, capping the white houses and brown roofs which are terraced below. At one time in the far away past Tuy was a town of great importance. Greek remains have been dug up here, but history does not go further back than Ætolian Diomede, the son of Tydeus, who founded what became under King Witiza the Gothic capital. This was in the year 700. Ordoño I. rebuilt it two hundred years later, and I did not find it difficult to trace the massive granite walls which sheltered the inhabitants, and preserved it as the most important city of these parts. Truly a crown to the fortress, the castellated walls of the Cathedral give it a martial air. The nave of five bays is early pointed, with a blind triforium and blocked up clerestory. So narrow and dark are the aisles and so massive the columns which support the fine vaulting of the roof, that I could never get rid of the feeling that I was in some great hall of an ancient castle. It only wanted a few halberdiers or men-at-arms, instead of the black-garbed peasant women kneeling at the different altars, to make the illusion perfect. The transepts, which have aisles, are Romanesque with an early pointed triforium. After the great earthquake at Lisbon many strengthening additions were made to the interior, blocking out most of the light. In the case of the aisles arches were run up at different intervals with no sense of proportion, quite hap-hazard, and creating a very much askew appearance in this part of the building. Transoms were built across the nave to add to the disfigurement of one of the most perfect little Cathedrals in Spain. The west doorway is very fine, with four detached columns on either side, thus forming a narrow porch. The upper half of these columns each consists of a good figure of a saint whose feet rest on a devil. In the tympanum are good reliefs and a well-cut Adoration of the Magi. The archivolt is seven-fold and is an excellent piece of rich carving. All is granite, and all is solemn, quite in keeping with this hard material. [Illustration: TUY] The Cloister Court, round which runs a most beautiful arcade of early pointed work with detached shafts, has unfortunately fallen into decay. But the charming little garden in the centre somewhat compensates for this. When I strolled in the silence was only broken by the cooing of doves and the hum of bees. The sun seemed to find his way into every nook and cranny, and here, thought I, is peace. Away beyond the outer wall, a wall which is part of the old defence of Ordoño's day, is the road to Portugal. Passing through vineyards it reaches the river a mile distant and crosses the water by a very fine bridge. It was from this road that I made my sketch of the quaint old-world town. Down by the river at the end of the one broad street that Tuy possesses is the old Convent of Santo Domingo. Now a barrack, it still keeps its grand Transitional church. The chancel is extremely fine and among its many tombs a knight in armour with his lady at his side I thought the best. On the grassy platform in front of the church I spent one or two pleasant evenings. The river flows below and the mountains of Portugal rise sublimely from the opposite bank. I was decidedly pleased with my short sojourn in this typical Spanish town, the wonderful position of which, right on the frontier overlooking another land, makes it one of Spain's most unique Cathedral cities. ORENSE "In the gold district," such is the meaning of Orense. In Roman days it was the headquarters for working the gold in which the district abounded. Three warm springs, situated close to the road which leads out of the town to the south-west, also brought fame to Orense, though they possessed, apparently, no medicinal properties. Nowadays the poorer classes use the water for domestic purposes, thereby saving fires. In Visigothic times Orense was the capital of the Suevi, and was the scene of the renunciation of Paganism by this tribe. Besides its warm springs the town boasts of two other wonders, its bridge and its Cathedral. The former is certainly a grand piece of work. The centre arch rises one hundred and thirty-five feet above the river Minho, with a magnificent span of one hundred and forty feet. Of the six remaining arches some are pointed and some are round. The Cathedral is a most interesting structure, more's the pity it is so little known. Built on an artificial platform to throw it out from the hillside, it rises well above the neighbouring roofs. Silversmiths and metal workers ply their trades in the dark shops between the buttresses which hold up this platform on three sides. There is nothing much to attract one in the exterior of the Cathedral except the Gothic north and south doors. They both have rounded arches with good figures in the jambs and archivolts. The south is the better of the two, as the north bears traces of alteration, the case in the whole appearance of the exterior. A third door opens in the second bay west of the north aisle, and is approached from the street below by steps leading up between two shops. The massive north-west tower is adjoining and stands over perhaps half a dozen small rooms where all day long the musical tap of the metal workers' hammers are heard. The side chapels of the interior are all recessed, and standing in the south-west corner of the Cathedral I obtained an uninterrupted view for my sketch along the south aisle into the apse. There is no triforium in the nave, but a beautiful lancet clerestory enhances both this and the aisles. I thought the octagon at the crossing extremely good. Two rows of lights, one above the other, have an interior gallery with an unobtrusive balustrade round each. The supporting corbels are well-cut bosses. The spandrils between the arches are recessed with well-carved figures of angels and archangels playing on musical instruments. Of course this octagon bears no comparison with that at Burgos, it is much simpler and much smaller, but has a tentative beauty of its own. [Illustration: ORENSE. IN THE CATHEDRAL] The transepts are of earlier date, and have been altered, though not injudiciously. The _coro_ is small, very dark and solemn, and in this respect bears favourable comparison with many another which may be far finer. Its _reja_, like that of the Capilla Mayor, is a very good example of wrought and hammered iron-work, and does credit to the skill of those who no doubt sat in the little shops below giving their life-work to the adornment of the church above. The High Altar is a mass of silver with a background of glittering carving which forms the gilded _retablo_. The warm yellow of the Cathedral stone and the time-worn colour of the figures which decorate this _retablo_ have a very pleasing effect to the eye. The ashes of Santa Eufemia, Orense's patroness, rest beneath her effigy which stands to the south of the High Altar, and those of SS. Facundo and Primivo under theirs on the north side. Santa Eufemia's body was found by a poor shepherdess lying out on the mountain slopes of the Portuguese border, and was brought here to rest. The Cathedral is full of fine tombs, among which that of Cardinal Quintata in Carrara marble is the best. It is placed on the north side of the chancel facing a much earlier Gothic tomb with a well-carved canopy which stands on the south side. The present edifice was founded in 1220 by Bishop Lorenzo, displacing the older church erected in 550 and dedicated to Saint Martin. Wandering at random up the narrow streets which covered the hill I found myself outside the Convent of San Francisco. Like so many institutions of a kindred nature it is now a barrack, and difficult of access. However, I managed to get in and found the chief interest centred in the cloisters. They are beautiful relics of the thirteenth century. Sixty arches complete the arcade, with coupled shafts standing free. The capitals are well carved and the dog-tooth moulding above them has not suffered much from the ravages of time. Here, as in other towns where money in late mediæval days was scarce, it is pleasant to find untouched remains of an earlier past. The streets are mostly arcaded and very tortuous and quaint. The market is held on the Plaza of the Cathedral, and fruit vendors sit in the sun on the steps which lead into the Holy Fane. The _Alamedas_ are thronged at night with a crowd which, for Spain, seemed to take life seriously. I had finished my usual after-dinner stroll one evening, and returned to my hotel. It was a balmy night and I pulled my chair out on to the balcony. The lights in the cottages on the hill opposite went out one by one, and away down below, amongst the dark foliage of a vineyard, I heard the sound of a guitar. A voice breathed out a love song, and once more I felt the romance of the South--that indescribable feeling which comes over one when nerves are attune to enchanting surroundings. ASTORGA "No, you won't find much for your brush to do in Astorga, señor"--was the answer to a query addressed to a fellow passenger in the train. I fear he was not far wrong, though I knew with the Cathedral I should not be disappointed. It was a wet evening, and I landed at the station in the dark; gave my traps to a porter, and found myself after a tramp through the mud at the only Fonda in the place. My baggage was deposited in a sort of glorified cupboard containing a bed. The small window had no glass, and I discovered the next day that it opened on to the stables. I objected to these quarters, and later on in the evening my belongings were moved into a room just vacated by some one who had gone on to Madrid in _el rapido_. The next morning I made my way to the Cathedral. It stands well and quite isolated, except for the "New Art" Bishop's Palace which is in course of erection. The Cathedral is late Gothic, built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on the site of a former church. The interior is lofty and very beautiful, though spoilt by a bad _trascoro_ in execrable taste and quite out of keeping with the elegant columns of the nave. This consists of seven bays. The bases of the piers run up ten feet or more, and resemble the later additions to Leon Cathedral and those at Oviedo. The intersecting mouldings on them are the very last style of Gothic work and exemplify the beginning of a more florid taste. There is no triforium. The clerestory windows are of unusual height, as at Leon, and are filled with very fine glass. The aisles are also very lofty. The chapels attached to that on the north have their vaulting carried up to the height of the aisle, a very unusual feature. All the windows on this side, with one exception, are blocked. In the south aisle the vaulting of the lateral chapels is low. The windows are glazed and contain good glass; and in the first chapel from the west is a very fine early German _retablo_. The transepts are of one bay only. The south has perhaps the best glass in a Cathedral which is specially rich in this. [Illustration: ASTORGA] There is much good iron work in the different _rejas_, and the walnut _silleria_ in the _coro_ are exceptionally well carved. But the gem of the Cathedral is undoubtedly the magnificent _retablo_ over the High Altar. Its author, Gaspar Becerra, was a native of Baeza, and studied in Italy under Michael Angelo. It is his masterpiece, and well merits this title. Of the fourteen panels, _The Disputation_ and _Ascension_ are the best. The exterior of this lofty church is much enhanced by its flying buttresses. The west façade is good Renaissance work, with flanking towers, only one of which is, however, finished. A flying buttress connects them with the centre of the façade as at Leon, in fact I could not help drawing comparison, when I knew them both, between these two Cathedrals. The warm red stone of which this at Astorga is built has weathered most beautifully, and contrasts with the grey balustrade composed of figures holding hands--a very quaint device, by the way--which adorns the ridge above the clerestory. At the south-east corner, instead of the usual pinnacle, a huge weathercock stands. It is a wooden statue of Pedro Mato, a celebrated Maragato, in the dress of his tribe. La Maragateria is a territory of small extent in the middle of which Astorga is situated. The inhabitants, the Maragatos, mix with no one. They live exclusively to themselves, preserve their costume and their customs, and never marry out of their own clan. The men hire themselves out as carriers, the women stay at home and work. It is supposed that as they have many Arabic words still in use, they are a remnant of the Moorish occupation left behind when Christian armies finally swept the Infidel back into the south. This may be so, for the Moors are past masters at caravan work, and the Maragatos are the great carriers of Spain. When on the road their strings of mules take precedence, and everything clears out of their way. The men dress in loose baggy knickers and the women attire themselves in short red or canary-coloured skirts with green or light blue lining, one pleat remains open and shows either of these colours. They wear white stockings, black shoes, and very gaily-coloured handkerchiefs cover their heads. On a Sunday they swarm into the town, going off in the evening at sundown to their different villages in picturesque chattering throngs. Twice a year the whole tribe assembles at the feasts of Corpus Christi and the Ascension, when they dance for an hour, el Cañizo, a dance which if an outsider dare join in is immediately stopped. I had heard a great deal of the dignity of the Spaniard, before I went to Spain, and had failed to find that this reputation was at all justified, except in the case of the _Guardia Civil_, until I came across the Maragatos. I found them to be among the most self-respecting and courteous folk that one could meet anywhere; they certainly are amongst the most interesting of the many distinct tribes that people the Peninsula. Astorga, the Asturia Augusta of the Romans, is described by Pliny as a "magnificent city." It was once the capital of southern Asturia and was always an important outpost fortress. As indicative of its strength I may mention that Astorga bears for arms a branch of oak. Like Leon, the importance of its position as a base, both for those who lived in the mountains to the north and west, as well as for those who came from the plain, was always appreciated, and was for ever a bone of contention between the inhabitants of these districts. The Bishopric was founded in 747 by Alfonso el Catolico, but no man of note has ever been appointed to the See as far as I could discover. Indeed, Astorga is another of those old Spanish cities which are passed by in the train, with the remark--"How nice the old walls look, I do wish we had time to stop here." A saunter round the walls I must own is very disappointing. It is so evident that but little veneration is felt, or respect shown, for any antiquities or historical associations. In many places they have been pulled about for the sake of the building materials they yielded. They are the rubble heaps of Astorga and have fallen into sad decay. One portion is, however, preserved. In the south corner, where a pretty little _paseo_ garden affords shade and a pleasant promenade, a splendid view is obtained "over the hills and far away." Here, at any rate, restoration has been undertaken for the sake of the common ground where men and women walk, as custom dictates, every evening. At the spot where the Cathedral stands a great deal of demolition has taken place, and even to-day the huge new château-like palace of the bishop, now in process of erection, closes in a fine space and detracts from the little antiquity which is left in this corner of Astorga. Such is modern taste in Spain. Besides its walls, Astorga is celebrated for its _mantecadas_, small square sponge-cakes, neatly folded in pieces of greased paper, which find their way all over this part of the country; but the farther off you find them the less do they resemble the originals, and these are very good. ZAMORA Travelling through the great plain of Leon by train is apt to become intensely monotonous, especially when, as in the case of reaching Zamora, fate decreed that I should sit baking for hours in the slowest of all, the undesirable _mercantilo_. Very few villages enlivened the yellow landscape, which bare of vegetation lay blistering under the midday sun; those that were visible were all _tapia_ built with unglazed lights, and seemed to have grown outwards from the little brown-walled churches in their midst. On rising ground beyond the limits of these sad-looking hamlets, I could see the dwellings of the poorest of the poor. Dug out of the bank-sides, they resemble rabbit holes more than anything else. A door gives light, ventilation and access to the interior, a tiny chimney sticking out of the ground above carries off the extra fumes of smoke. Life inside must be nearer that of the beasts than that of any other race in Europe; and as the slow _mercantilo_ crawled along I had plenty of time to note the stunted growth and wearied mien of those whose day of toil ends in these burrows under the earth. In many places, the year's vintage is stored in these subterranean holes. At last the train crept into the station and I read the name of my destination on its wall. Zamora adds another to the list of those very interesting old cities of Spain which still have a remnant of their ancient walls left standing. Known at one time as Ocellum Duri, "The eye of the Douro," from its strategical position on that barrier river, it still bears many traces of a glorious past. Of old, an outpost for defence against the Infidel of the south, with its natural barrier, Zamora nevertheless changed hands many times. The veracious chronicler records how in 939 Ramiro II. came to the city's relief and slew forty thousand Moors--their whole force, in fact, to a man!--only to be revenged a few years later by the all-conquering Almanzor. Ferdinand I. in 1065 rebuilt the defences which this redoubtable warrior had levelled and presented the city to his daughter Urraca, whose son, Alfonso VI., was the first King of united Leon and Castile. Zamora figures, too, in the Cid's meteoric life. He appointed Geronimo, his confessor, who lies buried in Salamanca, to the Bishopric, and when Sancho besieged the place, it being then held by Urraca, the defence was so excellent that "no se tomó Zamora en una hora" (Zamora was not taken in one hour) became a proverb. It was at this siege that five Moorish sheiks brought the Cid tribute and saluted him as "Campeador." There are more tangible remains of the quaint old city's importance to be found in its Cathedral and streets than its proverbs and anecdotes. Here is the house of Urraca, with an almost obliterated inscription over the gateway--"Afuera! Afuera! Rodrigo el soberbio Castellano"--culled from the ballad of the Cid, and referring to his exclusion from the place. In the church of San Pedro y Ildefonso are a couple of fine bronze-gilt shrines containing the remains of SS. Ildefonso and Atilano. The Romanesque church of the Templars, La Magdalena, dates from the twelfth century. Its rose window is formed with small columns like the Temple Church in London; and within are some beautiful tombs. The Hospital is a good building with an overhanging porch, very effectively coloured and having the appearance of glazed tiles. Many old houses of the nobility now slumber tranquilly in slow decay, and Zamora, like so many other Spanish towns of its class, seems left behind in the modern hurry of life; and this is one of its greatest charms, the charm that is so typical of old Spain. The Cathedral abuts on to the city wall and is almost surrounded by a bare piece of ground, where the remains of dismantled fortifications give a deserted and forlorn air to the very unecclesiastical aspect of the exterior. I made a sketch among these ruins and could not help feeling the result looked more like an Eastern farm enclosure than a really fine Cathedral. There was the huge unfinished square tower, baked a brilliant yellow, the _cimborio_ and dome, with its eight curious little domes, all roofed in cement, and a copy of, if not contemporary with, the same in the old Cathedral of Salamanca; the low mud walls and almost flat roofs; a party of peasants in a sort of nomad encampment, innumerable fowls pecking at the dust--what more could you have to remind one of the East. The sun was broiling, and nothing disturbed this "bit" of the Spain of long ago. The exterior of the Cathedral has been much marred by the poor Renaissance north façade, not visible in my drawing, and a tower with a slate roof. The south porch is, however, intact, and from it, for the building stands high above the Douro, the view must have been grand before the Bishop's Palace was built and obliterated the whole prospect. A dozen steps, narrowing as they approach the portal, lead up to the door which is surrounded by four good round arches with scroll mouldings of simple design. Inside this I found myself in the south transept. [Illustration: ZAMORA. THE CATHEDRAL] The interior, with the exception of that portion east of the crossing, which is poor Renaissance with perpendicular vaulting, is exceedingly massive. The nave is but twenty-five feet in width, the columns which support the bays are ten feet through; the aisles are very narrow, but so good are the proportions of all these that this miniature Cathedral is one of the finest Romanesque churches in the country. The _cimborio_ is round in plan with sixteen windows from which the ribs of the vaulting spring. Unfortunately the columns have been decorated with a spiral pattern of a chocolate colour, quite destroying the beauty and simple grandeur of a feature which for simplicity ranks next to that of the Catedral Vieja at Salamanca. In the Capilla del Cardenal at the west end of the nave is a very fine _retablo_ divided into six panels painted by Gallegos, whose signature is on the central one. I was examining this one morning when an old priest passed through into the adjoining sacristy. He stopped and explained the subjects to me, taking particular interest in this when he learnt I was a painter and what my mission to Zamora was. I cannot forget his courtesy and pride while showing me some of the treasures the Cathedral possesses, and shared his regret that the wonderful tapestries were only on view at certain festivals. In this chapel are some good tombs of the great Romero family, others too of interest are in the Capilla de San Miguel, and the finest of all that of Canon Juan de Grado has the genealogy of the Virgin sculptured above the effigy of the Canon. I was very grateful for the seats which here are available for a rest and quiet examination of the church. In Burgos is the only other Cathedral where it is possible to sit and gaze. LEON Situated on the edge of the great plain which stretches away south to the Sierra de Gredos and beyond to Toledo, Leon served as a sort of buffer town between the Highlanders of the north and the dwellers on the Castilian uplands. The headquarters of the seventh Roman Legion, from which the name is derived, it may be described as a great fortress of bygone days. Astorga, some thirty miles westwards, being an outpost in that direction no doubt helped to preserve Leon from the ravages of the Galician Visigoths. The Romans held their fortress for five hundred years until Leovigild in 586 captured it after a long and strenuous siege. So highly was the position and strength of these two towns appreciated, that when Witiza, the King of the Goths, issued a decree levelling all defensive works to the ground, they were exempted and their fortifications preserved. The Moors held Leon for a very short spell, and then only as a defence against northern invasion. When Ordoño I. descended from his mountain fastnesses and drove them out, Leon changed front with its new occupants, and became a stronghold to be held at all costs against invaders from the south. The great Almanzor, in his victorious march north with the soldiery of Cordova, swept away all opposition and this buffer town was sacked. However, after his defeat at Calatanavor and subsequent death, the banner of Christ was once more unfurled to the breeze from what little was left of its walls. These were almost entirely rebuilt of _tapia_ and cob-stones by Alfonso V., since whose time they have remained or slowly fallen away. Leon stands in a verdant pasture valley intersected by many streams and shady roads lined with tall poplars. The fields on either side are divided from one another by hedges and willow trees, thick scrub follows the streams and grows down to the water edge, and walking in these pleasant places it was not difficult to imagine myself back in England. The city itself is really little better than a big village, and considering the important part it has played in the history Spain, seems sadly neglected and left out in the cold. This, too, despite the fact that it is an important junction and railway centre. There are no buildings of any present importance, and those that once could lay claim to this are in a state of decay. It is only on Sundays and market days, when the peasants in picturesque costume and gay colours come in, that Leon can boast of the smallest animation. I remember one Sabbath evening as I stood on my balcony, that vantage ground from which one sees all the life of the place pass by in the street below, watching the folk parade up and down. A military band discoursed "brassy" music, the crowd was packed as tight as sardines in a tin, when suddenly the "toot, toot" of a motor horn was heard above the clash of cymbals and boom of the drum. A large car came down a by-street opposite, turned sharply and charged the crowd. The Spaniard is of an excitable temperament, loud cries of disapproval, and screams from the gentler sex drowned all else. The chauffeur discovered his mistake none too soon and attempted to turn the car. At this the uproar grew louder and he brought it to a standstill. Youths climbed the steps, boys hung on behind, "Toot, toot" went the horn; the bandmaster, with an eye to the situation, waved his _bâton_ more energetically than ever, the big drum boomed, the trombones blurted out for all they were worth, but the hooting and whistling drowned everything. At last the car began to back and became disengaged, the chauffeur adroitly turned, and started down the street followed by the noisier elements of the crowd eventually pulling up at a café, just out of the parade zone. In Leon as elsewhere, fashion dictates a limit to the walk in either direction and the chauffeur had stopped beyond this. The two occupants of the car got out in a very unconcerned manner, sat down at a table and ordered a drink. For at least a quarter of an hour, while these two were taking their coffee, the crowd stood round booing, whistling and shouting. I do not think I have ever seen anything cooler than the way in which, their thirst satisfied, and the account settled, they got up and walked slowly after the car which long ago had disappeared out of danger. By this time, despite the presence of a couple of the _Guardia Civil_, the crowd was excited. A cart full of peasant folk next essayed the perils of the thoroughfare, they however got through safely after much badinage and fun. No sooner had they gone, the band meantime had vanished, when out from a wine shop came some peasants with castanets a little light-headed for once. There were four of them, two men and two women. They immediately began a dance on the pavement. A ring was formed and a storm of hand-clapping encouraged them, for ten minutes they footed it admirably. More castanets appeared from somewhere and soon half Leon was dancing in the middle of the Calle. The feeble-looking policemen, who had been terribly worried over the motor-car incident, thrust out their chests, or tried to, and beamed all over. The scene had changed from what had first looked very much like an ugly row, to one of pure enjoyment, they were safe, every one else was out of danger, and Leon too was saved. [Illustration: LEON. THE CATHEDRAL] The night I arrived in Leon, having finished dinner, I left the hotel and taking the first turn hap-hazard wandered up the street. The electric lights were soon behind me and I found myself in what seemed to be a huge deserted square. The dark night was lit by milliards of twinkling stars, and gazing upwards at them my eye followed the line of what appeared to be immensely tall poplar trees. I looked again, I had never seen trees that colour, then it slowly dawned on me that I was in front of the great Cathedral. Slowly, slowly as my eye became accustomed to the dark I made out tapering spires that met the very stars themselves embedded in the purple-blue sky, an infinitude of pinnacles, with a wonderful building beneath. The mystery of a beautiful night conjures up all that is best in this country. Squalor and dirt are hidden; one's thoughts take flight and wander back to the Spain of old, the glorious Spain of bygone days. At moments like this I certainly would never have been surprised to hear the clatter of hoofs and see a band of knights with pennons flying and armour glinting appear suddenly in the semi-darkness. Well, the days of chivalry have gone but the romance of a starry night will never die. The next morning I returned eager to discover what my impressions would unfold. Much to my delight I found the restoration of the Cathedral, which I knew was in progress, so far finished that not a single scaffold pole, nor any rubbish heaps of old stones were anywhere to be seen. Extremely well have the designs of Señor Don Juan Madrazo been carried out, and the Cathedral to-day stands a magnificent church and grand monument of Christianity. Santa Maria de Regla is the third Cathedral which has existed in Leon. The site of the first is supposed to have been outside the city walls. The second was built where once stood the Palace of Ordoño II., and this had been raised on ground occupied by Roman baths. The present edifice was founded in 1190 by Bishop Manrique de Lara, a scion of a great family which was always in revolt, but was not completed until the early part of the fourteenth century. With Toledo and Burgos, Leon's Cathedral forms the group of three great churches that are distinctly French, and closely resemble Amiens and Rheims. It would be difficult to find another building the interior of which exceeded the colour elegance and grace of this airy structure. [Illustration: LEON. THE WEST PORCH OF THE CATHEDRAL] The west porch is the finest Gothic specimen of its kind which exists in Spain and recalls those of Notre Dame de Paris and the Cathedral at Chartres. Three archways are supported by cloistered columns to which are attached figures under beautiful canopies. The archivolts and tympanum are covered with sculpture representing the Reward of the Just and Unjust, the Nativity, Adoration, Flight in Egypt, and Massacre of the Innocents. All are extremely interesting, many of the figures being in contemporary costume. Two grand towers flank the west façade, of which the north is the older and some thirty feet less in height than its neighbour. Both are surmounted by spires, that of the south being an excellent example of open filigree work, rivalling those at Burgos and very much better than that of Oviedo. Between these towers and above the porch is a pediment with spires and a glorious wheel window, underneath which is a row of windows that corresponds to the triforium. This portion is part of the late restoration. The south porch also has three arches, which have been well renovated. The centre one alone has a door to admit into the interior, it is double and surrounded by figures in the archivolt with reliefs in the tympanum. On the centre column is a figure of San Froilan, at one time Bishop of Leon. A beautiful balustrade follows the sky-line of the whole Cathedral. This is broken by many pinnacles, some of which are spiral, with others on the façades and finishing the supports of the flying buttresses, give the exterior a resemblance to a forest of small spires. The interior is a marvel of beauty and lightness. The nave and aisles consist of six bays, no lateral chapels disfigure the latter with chirrigueresque atrocities. The triforium runs round the whole Cathedral. So cleverly has the spacing here been arranged, that with the clerestory it makes one magnificent panel of gorgeous light. The windows of this, forty feet high, were at one time blocked up for safety. They now contain stained glass, and soar upwards to the vaulting of the roof. Every window in the Cathedral is coloured and the effect as the sun streams through can well be imagined. No flamboyant _retablo_ spoils the simplicity of the east end, the place of what might have been a jarring note amidst the Gothic work being taken by good paintings in flat gilded frames. It was Señor Madrazo's idea to remove the _coro_ from the centre of the nave, and had this been done Santa Maria de Regla would have gained immensely. The carved stalls are good, and the _trascoro_ sculptured in white marble, which age has toned, and picked out in gold, is decidedly a fine work. Among the chapels in the apse that of La Nuestra Señora del Dado contains a miraculous Virgin and Child. Tradition tells that a gambler who had lost heavily threw his dice at her and smote her on the nose. This forthwith bled copiously, hence the miracle and the name of "Dado" or "die." Another chapel contains the tomb of a great benefactress of the Cathedral, the Condesa Sancha. An expectant nephew, seeing her property slowly dwindling in the cause of the Faith, put an end to his aunt, and thereby met his own death by being pulled asunder by horses to which he was tied. However, the chapels are not very interesting, but the tombs in the Cathedral are. Of all these that of Ordoño II., behind the chancel, is certainly the finest. The king lies at full length with a herald at his head and a monk at his feet holding a scroll inscribed "aspice." He wears his crown and carries the royal emblems. This tomb was erected five hundred years after the king's death, and is guarded by a quaint iron grille. The cloisters, entered from a door in the north transept, are a jumble of Gothic and Renaissance, with a Romanesque arcade and a good deal of plateresque work as well. Some of the earliest frescoes in Spain are fast disappearing from the walls. They illustrate events in the Life of Christ, and are in an early Italian style that places their origin in doubt. From the western spires to the angular exterior of the chevet, a good idea is obtained of the beauty of the Cathedral as one stands in these cloisters, and when they, too, are restored the great work begun in 1860 will be finished. Next to the Cathedral, and perhaps in a way more interesting, is the convent of San Isidoro el Real. This, the Escorial of Leon and Castile, is a building which Soult's soldiers desecrated in a most abominable manner; next to the lower or Roman portion of the city walls it is the most ancient building in Leon. The body of San Isidoro was brought hither in the reign of Ferdinand I. who obtained it from the Emir of Seville, and the present church was erected to receive it. This was in 1063, the original convent being a hundred years older. San Isidoro was declared by the Council of Toledo to be the Egregious Doctor of Spain, and in his capacity of titular saint fought with cross and sword at the battle of Baeza against the Moors. The church is Romanesque and dark with a lofty clerestory but no triforium. The High Altar shares with that at Lugo in Galicia the privilege of having the host always _manifestado_. [Illustration: LEON. SAN MARCOS] In the Panteon, a small low chapel at the west end, lie buried the Kings and Queens and other royalties of Leon. The columns are very massive with heavy capitals; the ceiling is adorned with early frescoes which happily escaped the depredations of the French, they are crude, but the colour adds to the impressiveness of this gloomy abode of the Dead. Representing scenes from the Lives of our Lord and His Apostles, with signs of the Zodiac and months of the year, they date from 1180. The whole convent is replete with mural paintings, and before Soult sacked it contained many extremely interesting and rare missals of the seventh and eighth centuries. Unique is another convent, that of San Marcos, which stands on the river bank outside the city on the road to Astorga. Founded as a chapel in 1168 for the knights of Santiago, it was rebuilt in 1514-49 by Juan de Badajos, and is certainly his masterpiece. It would be difficult to find a façade of greater beauty than this marvel of plateresque work. The remarkable pink and golden colour of the stone, intensified against the background of a deep blue sky, the delicacy of the carving in which angels and cherubs, griffons and monsters intermingle with floral wreaths and branches of fruit in orderly confusion, the elegant pillars and pilasters, all so truly Spanish under the blazing sun, fascinated me immensely as time after time I returned to wonder and admire. Here again I could conjure up the past, the romance of Spain's greatest Order; well housed were those knights of old in their glorious Hospice, and now--the river still runs under the walls of what afterwards became a convent, its banks are lined with tall poplars, far away rise the mountains of the north in rugged outline just as they did of yore--and San Marcos? Alas! half is a museum and the rest a barrack. A forlorn air pervades the place, the old garden wants tending, and despite the life of the military, I could not help sighing once again, as I have so often sighed in Spain--"How are the mighty fallen!" OVIEDO Oviedo, seldom visited by the foreigner, lies well situated on rising ground in a fine open valley. Grand mountains surround and hem it in on the east, south and west, to the north the country undulates until it reaches the Biscay coast twenty odd miles away. These natural barriers gather the clouds and the climate is humid; on an average there are but sixty cloudless days in the year. While I was in Oviedo it rained almost incessantly, and the "clang of the wooden shoon" kept the streets lively with a clattering "click-clack." All the poorer classes wear sabots in wet weather, sabots that are pegged on the soles, difficult to walk in, but kept well out of the mud and puddles by these pegs. This particular make is common to Asturias, just as the ordinary French shape is to Galicia. Oviedo is one of Spain's university cities, and I happened to strike the week when the festivities in celebration of its tercentenary were in progress. Wet weather and pouring rain never damp the ardour of the Spaniard during a _fiesta_, and despite the rain, powder was kept dry somehow or other, and enthusiasm vented itself regularly up to eleven o'clock every night by terrific explosions. Functions of some sort seemed to be going on all day long. Societies from the country paraded the streets, led by music, in most cases bagpipes and a drum, and Oviedo was evidently "doing itself proud." I happened on a ceremony in the Cathedral one morning. The bishop was preaching to an immense crowd when I entered. Seated in the nave were the Professors of the University, Doctors of Law and Medicine, the Military Governor and his Staff, the Alcalde and Town Councillors, besides representatives from the universities of every European country, except, strangely enough, Germany, and one from Harvard, the first to attend a function of this sort since the war. It was a really wonderful sight, for the Cathedral is not marred by a _coro_ in the nave. The hues of the many-coloured robes, from canary yellow and scarlet to cerulean blue and black, the vast throng literally filling every available bit of space, even on to the pulpit steps, gave me a subject for my brush, and I surreptitiously made a hasty sketch, to be finished afterwards in my room. [Illustration: OVIEDO. IN THE CATHEDRAL] The Cathedral was founded by Fruela in 781, and enlarged in 802 by Alfonso the Chaste, who made Oviedo the capital of Asturias, and with his Court resided here. He created the See in 810. The present edifice was begun by Bishop Gutierrez of Toledo in 1388, and the tower added by Cardinal Mendoza in 1528. Hedged in, although fronting on to a little _plaza_, the grand west façade with its beautiful porch can hardly be said to be visible. This lofty portico of richly ornamented Gothic, under the shelter of which the gossips parade to and fro, leads into the Cathedral and stands thrust out and between the two towers. Only one of these towers is completed, and it is surmounted by a good open-work spire the top of which rises two hundred and seventy feet from the ground. I wandered about hopelessly trying to gain some idea of the exterior of the Cathedral and found that it was only by walking outside the city that anything at all can be seen of it, and then the towers and roof of the nave, with the flying buttresses attached, were the only features that came into view. The entrance by the south door leads through a dark passage, in which many votive offerings hang over a tiny shrine where burnt a little flickering lamp; going in I found myself at the spot from which I had made my sketch the previous day. What a relief it was to find no _coro_ blocking up the nave! The eye could wander over the whole of this lofty interior--could follow the beautiful open work of the triforium and rest on the stained glass of the clerestory windows. The aisles are very shadowy, all the light being concentrated in the nave and the crossing, and the vision, with a great sense of good effect, is led up to the white tabernacle on the High Altar and the immense _retablo_ beyond. A little theatrical if you like, but it is business, and the Church understands this so well. Among the chapels, good, bad and indifferent, is one containing a gorgeous silver-gilt shrine wherein rests the body of Santa Eulalia, Oviedo's patroness. In another, tucked away behind the north transept, the Capilla del Rey Casto, lies buried Alfonso the Chaste who did so much for the city. Six niches in the walls contain stone coffins, which are supposed to hold the remains of Fruela I., Urraca, wife of Ramiro I., Alfonso el Católico, Ramiro, and Ordoño I. The bodies of these royalties at one time lay here, and a modern inscription on a mural tablet relates how they were removed, but not how their tombs were destroyed. Many other kings and princes we are told by this tablet also lie here, and as there are but half a dozen coffins their bones must be _bien mélange_. There are the usual overdone chirrigueresque altars which do their best to mar this imposing church, though I am glad to say they hardly succeed. From them, however, it was a relief to be taken by a very intelligent verger up the winding stairs which led to the Cámara Santa. This is by far the most interesting portion of the Cathedral. Built by Alfonso in 802 to hold the sacred relics brought hither from Toledo at the time of the Moorish invasion, it stands above a vaulted basement; the reason for this arrangement evidently being the damp climate, and the wish to keep so holy a charge free from moisture. The chapel is divided into two parts. The inner, of very small dimensions, has a low barrel vaulting borne by arches with primitive twelfth-century figures. The _sanctum sanctorum_ is slightly raised, and from this inmost Holy of Holies the relics are shown to the devout who kneel in front of a low railing every day at 8.30 A.M. and 3.30 P.M. The cedar wood _arca_ in which they are kept is of Byzantine workmanship. The relics include some of Mary Magdalene's hair, and crumbs left over from the feeding of the five thousand. The outer chamber of the chapel has a finely-groined roof, attached to the columns supporting which are statues of the twelve apostles. The richly-tesselated pavement resembles the Norman-Byzantine work of Sicily, and was not uncommon in Spain prior to the thirteenth century. A bell tower, in which at one time hung "Wamba," the great bell of the church cast in 1219, stands partly on the roof and at the south-east corner of the Cámara Santa. It was erected by Alfonso VI., and to judge by its present state will not long survive, most decidedly "Wamba" could not swing there now. The Cathedral possesses three remarkable crosses, La Cruz de los Angeles, Maltese in shape, is studded with uncut gems. It dates from 808, and like the cross at Santiago is 1200 years old. La Cruz de la Victoria, the cross of Pelayo, is encased in beautiful filigree work, and is the identical one borne aloft before Pelayo at his glorious victory over the Moor at the Cave of Covadonga. The third is a crucifix on an ivory diptych, absolutely identical with the Cristo de las Batallas of the Cid at Salamanca. Many other relics of great archæological interest belong to the Cathedral, and make it well worth the journey to see. This journey from Leon is long and trying, but the line, which climbs to an altitude of 4110 feet, is one of the finest pieces of engineering skill in Spain. [Illustration: OVIEDO. THE CLOISTERS] The dark entry of the south door leads not only into the Cathedral and up to the Cámara Santa, but also through a side door opens on to the fourteenth-century cloisters. They are well kept and the little garden court a paradise in comparison with some of those I know. The capitals of the columns are well carved with prophets and saints under canopies, angels and angels' heads, grotesques and good floral cutting; while into the walls beneath them and round the arcades are let many tombs and gravestones brought here from different ruined or desecrated churches. I went off one morning to see the earliest Christian church in the country. Braving the rain I tramped through mud ankle-deep for an hour up the hill slopes westward. It was a case of two steps forward and one back, but the spirit of the tourist was on me. I could not leave Oviedo and acknowledge I had not been to Naranco. I was desperate and I got there. What a charming out-of-the-way spot it is! Hidden behind a grove of ancient chestnut trees, under the brow of the mountain, stands Santa Maria. A triple arched porch at the top of a dozen steps gives entrance on the north side to this minute and primitive place of worship. I entered and found myself in a barrel-vaulted parallelogram, with a curious arcade running round the walls. The west end is raised three steps above the nave, from which it is cut off by three arches ten feet high at the centre. The east end also has this feature, but the floor is level with the nave. All the columns in the church are of twisted cable design with shield capitals containing figures in low relief. The arcades, which are walled up, have depending from the plain groining bands slabs of cut stone with plaques below, something like a ribbon and medal in the way they hang. The interior is but thirty-five feet in length and fifteen feet across. Beneath the church is a semicircular stone crypt, similar to that beneath the Cámara Santa; it is entered from the cottage in which at one time lived the officiating priest. The caretaker inhabits this cottage, which is built on to the church, and I had come at her dinner hour. Alas! she could not leave me in peace, and I must own to a defeat. I was practically driven away, for the meal was spoiling and required her undivided attention, but I had seen Santa Maria de Naranco; I had grasped how in the early days, when the Infidel was overrunning the land, this little building on the lone hillside was a centre of the Faith, and how from the surrounding mountain fastnesses worshippers had gathered here and gone away strengthened by prayer, and how from this little seed of the Church sown on the forest-clad hill Spain's mightiness had grown. VALLADOLID For nearly one hundred and fifty years, from the reign of Juan II., 1454, to Philip II., 1598, Valladolid was a royal city and the capital of Castile. It lies on the plain through which the river Pisuerga meanders, just touching the outskirts of the city on the western side. In the Moorish days Valladolid was known as Belad al Wali, "The Town of the Governor," and flourished as a great agricultural centre. It is still the focus of the corn trade of Old Castile. It was here that Prince Ferdinand, despite attempts on the part of his father Juan II. to frustrate it, was introduced to Isabella the reigning Queen of Castile and Leon. Many suitors had proposed themselves and paid their addresses to this paragon among women, but possessing a will of her own she made her choice and selected the Prince whom she married on October 19, 1469. Valladolid suffered more severely at the hands of the French than any other city of Spain. They demolished most of the good houses and despoiled the churches; among those that are left, however, I found plenty to interest me and to make a stay, after I had discovered them, well worth the while. I made a sketch of Santa Maria la Antigua, which is the most interesting edifice in the place. The fine Romanesque tower is surmounted by a tiled steeple which recalls Lombardy, and although many additions have been made to the original fabric the whole building piles up very well, the early Gothic east end being particularly beautiful. This church dates from the twelfth century, but the greater part of it is pure Gothic. The roof is richly groined; there are three parallel apses, and the _coro_ is at the west end--an always welcome place to find it. The _retablo_ by Juan de Juni, whose work is scattered throughout the churches of Valladolid, is fine though over-elaborate. Another good church is San Pablo, partly rebuilt by the great Cardinal Torquemada, whose name will for ever be associated with the terrors of the Inquisition. I found another subject for my brush in its very intricate late Gothic west façade. The upper part of this contains the arms of the Catholic Kings, below which on either side are those of the Duque de Lerma. The niches are luckily all filled with their original figures, and the wonderful tracery of the round window is also in good preservation. The grey finials are weather-worn and contrast well with the rich yellow and pink of the rest of the front, a façade which is absolutely crammed with intricate design. Two hideous towers of later date and of the same stone as that with which the Cathedral is built, flank this and detract unfortunately from one of the best examples of late Gothic work in the country. [Illustration: VALLADOLID. SANTA MARIA LA ANTIGUA] Hard by, up the street pictured in my sketch, stands the Colegiata de San Gregorio, with an equally fine façade, though being an earlier Gothic it is more severe in type. The doorway of this is surmounted by a genealogical tree and the arms of Ferdinand and Isabella. Some of the figures of rough hairy men with cudgels are very primitive. San Gregorio was a foundation of Cardinal Ximenes, it is now used as municipal offices. Passing through the doorway I entered a beautiful little court, rather dark, but with sufficient light to enable me to appreciate the good artesonade ceiling of its cloisters. The second court is a blaze of light. Spiral fluted columns form the cloister, the ceiling of which is picked out in a cerulean blue and white; they support a recently restored gallery, a mixture of Moorish, Romanesque and plateresque work, into which the sheaves and yoke of the Catholic Kings is introduced as at Granada and Santiago, making a very effective whole. A fine old stone stairway leads from this court up to what in the old collegiate days was a library. Of the Cathedral I fear I can write but little. It is a huge gloomy edifice without a single redeeming feature, and of all those I saw the most incomplete and disappointing. The exterior north and south walls are still unfinished, the stone work is not even faced! The east are built of brick, and the west façade, altered by Chirriguera himself from the original plan of Herrara, is extremely bald and ugly. This enormous building is four hundred feet in length and over two hundred wide, yet these proportions give it no grandeur. The interior is absolutely devoid of ornament, and if it were not for the _silleria_ in the _coro_, which were originally intended for San Pablo and are good, there would be nothing to warrant a visit to this cold and depressing church. By the way, the sacristy contains a silver _custodia_ in the shape of an open temple, a good example of the work of Juan de Arfe. There is a third-rate French air about Valladolid, at least so it struck me, and it was only after a visit to the old Colegio de Santa Cruz, wherein is the museum, that my first disappointment wore off and I felt that I was still in Spain. [Illustration: VALLADOLID. SAN PABLO] The contents of the museum are mostly objects which the French plundered from the churches and monasteries of Castile, and were recovered after their disastrous defeat at Vitoria. The styles of Berruguete, Hernandez and Juan de Juni can be examined here at leisure. Some of the life-size carved wooden figures of the last named, formerly used on the processional cars which parade the streets at certain festivals, are remarkable more from the extravagant attitudes of the figures than from their artistic merit. The custodian who accompanied me was a pleasant fellow, and evinced surprise that a _pintor_ could not see the beauties he pointed out. I fear he thought little of my artistic discrimination; especially when in the Sala de Juntas he invited me to ascend a pulpit over which hung a large crucifix, and with fervour solicited my admiration of the face of Christ, on which was a most agonised look, "cheap" and quite according to academic rules. "No, no, it is bad." "But, señor, He suffers." I could not make him understand that acute suffering need not be so painfully apparent. In this Sala are placed the whole of the _silleria de coro_ from the church of San Benito. Arranged on either side of the room they give it a superb effect. At the far end are the red velvet-covered chairs of Spanish Chippendale used by the Council of the Academy of Arts at their meetings. Beyond them, on a raised platform, are the two bronze-gilt kneeling figures of the Duke and Duchess de Lerma. A few pictures hang on the walls and other treasures and relics help to make this fine Sala an ideal council chamber for the academicians. Of the hundreds of carved figures in other rooms those by Berruguete, very Greek in type, flat brow and straight nose, are artistically by far the best, though the "Death of our Lord," a life-size composition by Hernandez, follows not far behind. Just as Madrid contains the finest armoury in the world, I doubt if any other museum can compete with Valladolid's for figures and compositions of carved wood. The University holds at present a high rank, most of its professors being progressive. The building itself is a chirrigueresque concern of the seventeenth century with a very extravagant façade. It possesses a good library which is get-at-able, and not like others belonging to the church which are very difficult of access. À propos of this one of the professors here told me the following hardly credible experience of a friend of his, whom I will call A. There is a movement at present in Spain to catalogue some at least of the many thousands of priceless historical Arabic documents and MSS. which, hidden away in Cathedral and other libraries, would throw invaluable light on the history of early times if they could be examined. A. is engaged in trying to compile this catalogue, and, hearing that in a certain Cathedral city--not Valladolid--the Cathedral library contained some treasures of Arabic lore, procured an introduction to the bishop, and requested permission to search the archives of the diocese. Explaining that he was unable to help in the matter, the bishop sent A. to the chapter authorities. The basis of their refusal was that any MS. if taken down from its shelf might be injured, and if once taken down might not be replaced in the same position! "Yes, they certainly possessed many supposed Arabic documents, but as none had been disturbed in living memory, why take the trouble to make a catalogue? Surely this would be superfluous, the books were there no doubt, A. could see them in their shelves, the librarian would be happy to show them, but no, they could not be taken down." In the library of the Escorial the books are all placed with their titles against the wall and their edges turned towards the spectator, so that no vulgar touch could defame them by reading. Small wonder that the Progressists of Spain shrug their shoulders sometimes at the many petty obstacles encountered in their attempts to better their country, and regard it as an almost hopeless task. Two foreign colleges are situated in Valladolid, the Scotch and the English. The first named was founded by Colonel Semple in Madrid and removed hither in 1771, the second by Sir Francis Englefield, who came to Spain after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. They are both seminaries for the education of young priests and with the Irish College in Salamanca complete the trio. The focus of the city's life is in the Plaza Mayor, a fine square where the first _auto da fé_, which Philip II. and his court witnessed, took place in October 1559. It was here also that Alvaro de Luna was executed, after faithfully serving his King, Juan II., for thirty years. Spain thereby lost the strong will and the arm which enforced it, and which out of chaos had brought the country into a semblance of order by quelling the turbulent nobles. Such has been in the past the fickleness of Spain's rulers that not one of the great men who have served their country, with perhaps the exception of General Prim, and he died a disappointed man, has ever ended his life in peace and quiet. They have nearly all died at the stake, on the scaffold, or been foully murdered. The much dilapidated house in a narrow street where Columbus died is fast falling into ruin, but that in the Calle de Rastro, where Cervantes lived and wrote the first part of Don Quixote, is in better condition. BURGOS Unlike most folk who enter the country from the north, I left Burgos for the end of my last visit to Spain, and found it in a way not unlike Cadiz, the first place I arrived at. They are both clean cities--for Spain; the streets in both are narrow, and the houses tall with double-glazed balconies. There is but little traffic in either, the squares in both are numerous, but the resemblance stops at this. The streets of Burgos run east and west in lines more or less parallel with the river Arlanzón. They are draughty and cold. The city stands 2785 feet above sea level and the winds sweep down from the distant sierra in bitter blasts. The life of Burgos is eminently ecclesiastical with a large sprinkling of the military element, for here all three branches of the service are quartered. It is a quiet place and I worked in peace unmolested. What a pity the builders of the great Cathedral could not find another site whereon to erect their wonderful church. How much better it would have looked if placed on the flat ground near the river than on the spot where a summer palace of Gonzalez once stood. However, one cannot move mountains and I was perforce obliged to plant my easel on the slope of the hill and paint the stock view from in front of the west façade. In 1075 Alfonso VI. moved the Archiepiscopal See from Oca to Burgos and gave the site of the royal palace for its erection. The present edifice was founded in 1221 by Ferdinand el Santo on the occasion of his marriage with Beatrice of Swabia, who in her train brought the Englishman, Bishop Maurice. Employing a French architect, Maurice was more or less responsible for the present building, though another foreigner, John of Cologne, added the beautiful open work spires with their parapets to the towers of the west end. It is curious that this, the most richly ornate Cathedral in the country, should be the outcome of patronage of the foreigner, though at the same time it is the most Spanish of the three "foreign" Cathedrals. So rich is this magnificent Church in every style of architectural decoration that it would take a lifetime to know it thoroughly. John of Cologne's beautiful spires are better than those at Leon and Oviedo, and rise with the towers that support them to a height close on 300 ft. The gorgeous central lantern, with its twelve traceried pinnacles, the grace of those that surmount the Constable's Chapel, the many, many others that break the skyline and adorn this glorious fabric, all go to make it a building that, despite the different styles employed, will be a wonder and a joy as long as man's handiwork lasts. The lower portion of the west front was renewed in 1790. The Puerta Principal in the centre is flanked by two small doors, with reliefs of the Conception and Crowning of the Virgin, while the chief door has four statues of Ferdinand el Santo, Alfonso VI., and Bishops Oca and Maurice. Large Gothic windows occupy the third stage of the front, their bases being filled with statues. The central stage, which has a single arch, contains a splendid rose window. The upper portion of the two towers is occupied by very beautiful perforated double windows in which crochet decoration is profusely used. It is altogether a wonderful façade which I greatly wished could be seen from the level. The chief entrance on the north is closed. It is on the street, and through it the descent into the north transept is by the well-known Escalada Dorada. The early Gothic portal--Puerta alta--is adorned by statues and with the whole of this façade is one of the earliest portions of the Cathedral. The door, which on this side leads into the Cathedral, is the Puerta de la Pellejeria and opens on to the north-east angle of the transept below the Golden Staircase. On the south the Puerta del Sarmental is approached from the street by three tiers of steps, it is also part of the original Gothic and is decorated with statues and coats-of-arms. Above it rises a similar façade to that of the north transept. The arcading in both these façades is most beautiful and from some points, where the roof-line can be seen cutting the sky, they look like two towers surmounted by an elegant balustrade. Very probably the pitch of the roofs was intended to be higher, and the building of the central lantern has interfered with the original design. The nave of pure early Gothic is lofty but sadly spoilt by the height of the _coro_. The aisles are low, but very beautiful. The _cimborio_ runs up in double stages with windows in each and balustrades, it is a perfect maze of intricate design and fine carving. The walls are covered with the royal arms of Charles V. and the City of Burgos; there are figures of patriarchs and prophets standing in the niches, seraphim and angels occupy the recesses of the spandrils, and the beautiful groining of this superb octagon is quite unmatched anywhere in Spain. It all looks as if just finished, the stone is white and in perfect preservation. How my neck used to ache when looking aloft, unweaving the intricacies of that splendid interior! To strengthen the Cathedral and support the weight of this addition, the original piers were altered at the crossing, and the huge cylindrical columns, which are richly chased with Renaissance decoration, substituted. One can hardly say that Juan de Vallejo has spoilt the church by this octagon, for his work here would grace any building, but all the same I think the Gothic of the interior has suffered by the introduction of his designs, and I would sooner have seen the crossing in its original state. [Illustration: BURGOS. THE CAPILLA MAYOR] The triforium is composed of wide bays with an uneven number of closed lights in each. A single arch, the mouldings of which are surmounted by carved heads, spans each group. The clerestory contains a little modern glass, most of the old having been destroyed by a powder explosion in the fort on the hill above. In the _coro_ the _silleria_ are exquisitely carved; the main panels represent subjects from the New Testament, the lower, which are divided by pilasters with arabesques, represent scenes of martyrdom. Philip Vigarni, who was responsible for this fine _coro_, surpassed himself in some of its decoration, which adds one more item to all that ought to be thoroughly studied in the great Cathedral. On the north side of the High Altar, in front or which hangs a magnificent silver lamp, are the tombs of three of the Infantes of Castile. Behind this, the _trassagrario_ is covered with well-executed reliefs in white stone, some of this is very soft and has crumbled away a good deal. Every morning a deposit of dust is swept up and it will soon be necessary to thoroughly restore these fine panels or the designs will be lost for ever. They represent the Agony in the Garden, our Lord bearing the Cross, the Crucifixion, the Descent, the Resurrection and the Ascension. The three centre are by Vigarni, and the others by Alfonso de los Rios. Nearly all the chapels are replete with interest, be it architecture, tombs, pictures or relics, but of them all the Capilla del Condestable is the grandest. Built in 1487 by John of Cologne for the Hereditary Constable of Castile, Don Pedro Fernandez de Velasco, it is the private property of the Duque de Frias. The _reja_, the masterpiece of Cristobal Andino, bears date MDXXIII. and is certainly the finest in the Cathedral. It is a worthy entrance to this magnificent octagon, which, viewed from outside, rises detached from the main building with eight elaborate pinnacles pointing heavenwards. The tracery of the pierced ceiling of the Lantern with its gilded bosses, vies in intricacy with that of the Cathedral itself. There is a double clerestory with sculptured knights at the bases of the columns holding coloured metal banners. The undercutting of the mouldings in the arches is very marvellous, the lowest course is formed of detached figures hanging downwards and from a little distance off looks like a piece of lacework. In front of the _retablo_ and High Altar are the superbly sculptured tombs of the Constable and his wife. He is in full armour, she lies by his side on a richly embroidered cushion with her little lap-dog nestling comfortably in the folds of her robe near her feet. The chapel teems with interest; the wealth of red marble from the quarries of Atapuerca and the very effective chequer arrangement of black and white steps leading to the High Altar give it just the note of colour its whiteness otherwise would lack. Attached to the chapel is a small vestry entered through a diminutive plateresque doorway of exquisite design. Amongst other priceless relics the vestry contains a fine gold chalice studded with precious stones and a good Madonna by Luini. Another fine picture, a _Virgin and Child_ by Sebastian del Piombo, hangs over the altar in the Capilla de La Presentacion. In the Capilla del Santissimo Cristo is a very ancient crucifix of life-sized proportions. Tradition and the vergers say that it came from the East and was carved by Nicodemus. The figure is flexible and very attenuated, it is covered with a buff-coloured leather to represent dried flesh and is very gruesome. In San Juan de Sahagun are six panels of the fifteenth century; good specimens of the early Spanish school, they represent the Nativity, Adoration and four scenes from the Passion. The great Bishop Alfonso de Cartagena lies interred in the Capilla de San Enrique, and his tomb is remarkably fine. Others in this chapel and in the cloisters are cut in slate and have been worked with great cleverness considering the way in which a blow splinters this material so easily. The Chapel of Santa Ana, unfortunately restored recently, belongs to the Duque de Abrantes, and contains the best _retablo_ in the Cathedral. On it are displayed incidents in the Life of Christ which spring from and are enclosed by the branches of a genealogical tree. It is a quaint idea very well carried out. It is a difficult task to try and give an idea of the contents and admirable style of all these chapels in the space of a short chapter, suffice it to say that they are, one and all, worthy pendants to the rest of the great church, and exemplify in their contents the glorious age of the ruling bishops and nobility of Old Castile. In the south transept is a wonderful low doorway in front of which I had often stood examining the well-carved wooden panels on the doors themselves. It leads into the cloisters, but it was not until I had become thoroughly acquainted with the groups representing the Entry into Jerusalem and the Descent into Hades which grace this portal, that I passed through. The door dates from the early fifteenth century and considering the many thousands of times it has swung open and shut is in most excellent preservation. The cloisters are fourteenth-century work and form an upper storey to a basement cloister of low arches surrounding a courtyard which at the time of my visit was undergoing extensive repair. In the centre is a huge cross; the flagstones of the court were all up, and the bones from many disturbed graves were being thrown into a pit. The beautiful cloisters proper are filled with modern opaque glass--"Muy frio" answered the verger to my question, "Por que?"--and no doubt it is in the winter months. But the charm about a cloister is the vista through the arches; this Burgos has lost for the sake of the well-being of her priests; the pity is that funds would not allow of better glass when the utilitarian aspect demanded the shutting out of the cold winds. The sacristy on the east side of the cloisters is a very beautiful early fifteenth-century room with a fine groined roof, the peculiarity of which is that it has no supporting columns. The half-piers end in corbels of hunting scenes and I daresay have often recalled to many a priest days of his early boyhood. The Chapter House, with an artesonade ceiling, contains some good pictures and is reached through the Capilla del Corpus Christi. High up on the wall of this chapel, and fixed to it with iron clamps, is the Cofre del Cid, a wooden coffer which the Campeador filled with sand, and telling the Jews it was full of gold, raised six hundred marks. He redeemed the pledge later on and paid up the sum he had borrowed. The tomb of Enrique III.'s head cook, who is lying in armour with a sword, occupies a space on the floor. He was not a bad-looking man and I daresay took his turn at the enemy and used his sword when occasion offered. Street writes of these cloisters--"I know none more interesting and more varied"--but I left them and the many fine tombs and statues they contain wishing that priests were not mortal nor liable to chills. [Illustration: BURGOS. ARCH OF SANTA MARIA] The capital of Old Castile is a quiet little place and I felt I was in a northern clime far away from the charm of Andalusia and the south. The name Burgos is of Iberian origin, "Briga" signifying "a fortified hill." Founded as long ago as 884 by Diego de Porcelos, it was for many generations the capital of Castile. At the marriage of Ferdinand I. in 1067 Castile and Leon became one and ten years later the seat of Government was removed by Alfonso VI. to Toledo. Serious troubles ensued between the inhabitants of the two cities. Old Castile could not brook the interference of the great archbishops of New Castile and the loss of prestige attached to royalty and its court. In Charles V.'s reign Burgos joined the Comunéros, the opponents of centralised government, but was wisely pardoned with other towns by the King, who held a court in state for this purpose in the Plaza Mayor at Valladolid. As a result of this forgiveness the inhabitants erected the fine entrance gateway of Santa Maria of which I made a sketch. Since that day, except for Wellington's futile sieges, Burgos has slept the sleep of the just and being an eminently ecclesiastical city will continue in this happy state. Much of interest lies tucked away in the narrow streets. There is the Casa del Cordon, at one time the palace of the Velasco family, and a royal residence. Within its walls the Catholic Kings received Columbus on his return from the New World, and here was signed the incorporation of Navarre with Castile. This fine example of a town house is flanked by two square towers, with a rope from which it takes its name carved over the portal. The Casa de Miranda, with a noble courtyard and well-proportioned fluted columns, near which is the Casa de Angulo a strong fortress-like building. The façade of the old Collegio de San Nicolas is replete with fine workmanship and the church of this name with tombs. The richly-carved stone _retablo_, illustrating events of the saint's life, is also a work of real art. Under the wall of the cemetery stood the house wherein the Cid was born, and in the Castle on the hill, now a ruin, he was married. The nuptials of Edward I. of England with Eleanor of Castile were celebrated in this fortress, which can also claim the birth of Pedro the Cruel. For a provincial town Burgos possesses a most interesting museum. Among the many relics I saw was a bronze altar font with coloured enamels of saints and a Moorish ivory casket, both from the monastery of San Domingo de Silos. The fine kneeling figure in alabaster of Juan de Padilla, who lost his life at an early age during one of the sieges of Granada, is almost as beautiful as that of the Infante Alfonso in the Cartuja. Roman and mediæval remains, found at different times and taken from disestablished convents, added to the interest of a short visit. There is so much to see in Burgos and its surroundings, and the seeing of it all is so pleasant, so undisturbed, and so different to the south, where for ever I was annoyed by touting loafers and irrepressible boys, that when I left it was with feelings of great regret. [Illustration] Across the river, about an hour's walk one morning brought me to the Convent of Las Huelgas, which is still inhabited by shy nuns. Founded in 1187 by Alfonso VIII. it has always loomed large in the history of Castile. Many of her kings have kept vigil before the High Altar, when receiving knighthood, our own Edward I. among them. Many royal pairs have been wedded within the church, and many sleep their long sleep within its quiet precincts. The Abbess was mitred, she possessed powers of life and death, she ranked as a Princess-palatine next to the Queen, and she was styled "Por la gracia de Dios." Her nuns were, and still are, daughters of noble houses, and some even of royal birth. In the chapel of Santiago hangs a copy of the embroidered banner captured at the great fight of Las Navas de Tolosa, a victory which crippled and drove out the Infidel from the north. The original hangs in the nun's choir, a fitting pendant to the splendid tapestries which cover the walls. I was told of other treasures invisible to the eye of man and once again wished I could have changed my sex for a short time. Being mere man, I heard the gate shut as I left the convent with a rather crestfallen feeling, so walked another half-mile on to the Hospital del Rey. Alfonso VIII. built this Hospice for pilgrims _en route_ to Santiago. But little remains of the original building, though the Renaissance façade and thirteenth-century doorway, with curious figures of Adam and Eve, repaid me for my extra trudge and I returned to my hotel with the imagined slight dissipated and my _amour propre_ restored. My last pilgrimage in Spain happened one cold afternoon when I went out to the Cartuja de Miraflores. The clouds hung low over the hills and the damp smell of autumn was in the air. The road thither passes through avenues of great poplars. The leaves had begun to fall and it was wet under foot. A slight drizzle was imperceptibly saturating everything and I thought the time of my departure from sunny Spain not ill-chosen. Despite all this, and the depressing day, I can always recall with pleasure the road that my companion and I traversed before we passed under the arch that marks the monastic boundary. Beggars accosted us at the door of the monastery, for once I gave them alms and received a blessing. We passed in, and found ourselves in a pretty little courtyard filled with dahlias and other autumnal flowers. The bright colours cheered us a bit, the church lay on our left, we entered it under a Gothic arch. A monk in the stalls was at prayer, he also kept an observant eye on the two visitors. Our footsteps seemed to sound intensely loud on the stone pavement, and we spoke in very low whispers. The cold white-washed walls and this solitary figure droning out his prayers were depressing. We furtively admired the finely-carved stalls, the grand _retablo_ over the High Altar with its terribly life-like crucifix, all the time with a feeling on my part of that vigilant eye boring a hole in my back like a gimlet. We next examined the alabaster tomb the masterpiece of Gil de Siloe, executed to the order of Isabella the Catholic, which stands in front of the altar. Juan II. and his wife Isabella of Portugal lie side by side clothed in their robes of state. At his feet are two Lions, at hers a Lion and a Dog. I forgot the solitary monk and the gimlet stopped its work as I became lost in admiration while following the intricacies of Gil de Siloe's greatest production. At the eight corners of this magnificent tomb, most undoubtedly the finest I have ever seen, and by some considered unsurpassed in Europe, sixteen lions support the royal arms, above them along the cornice beautiful little statuettes stand under canopies which are a marvel of delicate tracery. The embroidery on the robes of the royal pair is exquisite and the imitation of the lace work unsurpassed. For a long time we stood discussing and admiring the marvellous cleverness of the designer of a monument which is worthy of the great and pious woman who erected it to the memory of her parents. Hard by in the west wall of the church is the tomb of the Infante Alfonso, whose death at the early age of sixteen left the accession vacant for Isabella and so changed the history of Castile. It is likewise a wonderful piece of work by the same skilful hand. The young Prince kneels alone in an attitude of prayer which gains dignity from the half-shadow thrown by the recess in which the monument is placed. The arch above is decorated with a twining vine, while men-at-arms support the tomb. We turned from the contemplation of these two memorials and the monotone of the old monk's prayer filled the church. I think we both shared a feeling of relief when we found ourselves once more outside under the grey sky, though I shall ever remember the impression of that aisleless church with its magnificent tombs, that white robed monk with his droning voice, the chill of the autumn air and those long lines of stately poplars under which I passed in my last pilgrimage in Spain. INDEX Abderrhaman, mosque of, 80 Adrian IV., Pope, 81 Albornoz, Cardinal, tomb of, 111 Alfonso VI., 234, 235 Alfonso VIII., 245 Alfonso de Cartagena, Bishop, 240 Alfonso el Catolico, 197; coffin of, 220 Alfonso the Chaste, 218, 220 Alfonso the Learned, sarcophagus of, 10 Alfonso de los Rios, 238 Alhambra, 31, 46, _sqq._ Court of Lions, 50 Almakkari, historian, 23 Almanzor, 200 Alva Garcia, 138 Alvaro de Luna, 232 Antequerra, 48 Arabic documents, 230 Aragon, union of, with Castile, 67 Arfe, silver monstrance by, 142 Arfe, Juan de, 228 Arlanzón, river, 233 Astorga, 193-198 Cathedral, 193, _sqq._ Historical sketch, 197 Augustus, Emperor, 84 Averroes, 30 Avila, 137-144 Cathedral, 81, 138 Avila, Historical sketch, 137 Avila, tomb of, 143 Badajos, Juan de, 215 Baeza, 195 Barcelona, 83, 91-99 Cathedral, 92, _sqq._ Church of San Pablo del Campo, 94 Church of Santa Marica del Mar, 95 Church of Santa Marica del Pi, 95 Historical sketch, 91, _sqq._ Rambla, 97 Barceloneta, suburb of Barcelona, 96 Bartolomé, and the Capilla Real, Granada, 39 Beatrice of Swabia, sarcophagus of, 10 Becerra, Gaspar, 195 Beggars, at Cordova, 29, 30; at Seville, 30, 35; at Madrid, 30 Bernardo de Aragon, tomb of, 164 Berruguete, carvings by, 113, 141, 228 Boabdil, figure of, at Granada, 41 Brutus, Junius, founds colony on the Turia, 66 Bull-fights, at Seville, 20 Burgos, 233-248 Capilla del Condestable, 238 Capilla del Corpus Christi, 242 Capilla de la Presentacion, 239 Capilla de San Enrique, 240 Capilla del Santissimo Cristo, 239 Cathedral, 233, _sqq._ Chapel of Santa Anna, 240 Church of San Domingo de Silos, 244 Church of San Juan de Sahagun, 240 Convent of las Huelgas, 245 Collegio de San Nicolas, 244 Historical sketch, 234, _sqq._ Museum, 244 Cadiz, 1-5 Académia de Bellas Artes, 4 Cathedral, 3, 4 Historical sketch, 3 Mercado, 4 Cæsar, Julius, captures Seville, 7 Calix at Valencia, 71 Campaña, Pedro, pictures at Seville, 12 Cano, Alonso, pictures by, at Cadiz, 4; at Seville, 11, 12; builds façade of Cathedral at Granada, 38; pictures by, 38; pictures by, at Malaga, 60; figure by at Segovia, 151 Cartuja de Miraflores, 246 Casa Consistorial, Barcelona, 95 Casa del Cordon, Burgos, 243 Cataluña, union with Aragon, 92 Cervantes, house of, 232 Charles V., palace of, 54; arms of, 236 Chartres Cathedral, 211 Chirriguera, High Altar by, 129, 141, 228 Cid, the, 65, 201 Cofre del Cid, 242 Columbus, monument at Seville, 11; house of, 232 Comunéros, 243 Cordova, 23-30 Capilla de Nuestra Señorade Villavicosia, 25 Cathedral, 24, _sqq._ Convent de San Jeronimo, 30 Historical sketch, 23, 24 Mosques, 24, 25 Cornielis, work of, 141 Corre de Sol, Granada, 55 Cristóbal, carving by, at Tortosa, 81 Dalman de Mur, High Altar by, 164 Damian Forment, retablo, 166, 167 Darro, river at Granada, 31, 33, 34, 37 De Gainza, Martin, 10 Diego de Porcelos, 242 Diego de Siloe, plans Cathedral at Granada, 38; at Malaga, 59 Duque de Lerma, 226 Edward I., marriage of, 244, 245 El Calvario, 150 El Campanario, tower at Cordova, 27 El Cristo de la Luz, Toledo, 115 El Grao, port of Valencia, 67 El Parral, Segovia, 154 El Transito, Toledo, 114 Englefield, Sir Francis, 232 Escovedo, Juan, 150 Essex, siege of Cadiz by Lord, 4 Ferdinand I., 200, marriage of, 243 Ferdinand and Isabella, monument at Granada, 40; portraits, 41, 44, 225; arms of, 227 Ferdinand el Santos, 234, 235 Francisco de Lara, ceiling by, 112 Francisco de Palenzuela, tomb of, 126 Fruela I., coffin of, 220 Gallegos, panels by, 203 Gayá, 84 Genil, river at Granada, 34 Geromino, tomb of, 126 Geronimo, 200 Gerona, 101-10 Cathedral, 103, _sqq._ Church of San Pedro de los Gallegans, 105 Historical sketch, 101, _sqq._ Gibraltar, 58 Gil de Siloe, 247 Giralda Tower, Seville, 13, 14 Gomar, Francisco, work at Tarragona, 86 Gonzalo de Cordoba, 45 Grado, Canon Juan de, tomb of, 204 Granada, 31-35 Albaicin, 31 Alhambra, 31, _sqq._ Antequeruela, 31 Capilla de la Antigue, 39 Capilla de Pulgar, 44 Capilla Real, 42 Capilla de Trinidad, 38 Cathedral, 38, 44 Church of San Juan de los Reyes, 44 Church of San Nicólas, 44 Church of Santa Anna, 44 Convent of Cartuja, 45 Convent of San Geronimo, 45 Greek remains, Tuy, 183 Guadalete, river at Cadiz, 5; battle on banks of, 58 Guadalquiver, position of Cordova on, 23 Guadelmedina, the, 61 Guillermo Boffy, 104 Gutierrez, Bishop, 219 Hernandez, 229, 230 Hontañon, rebuilt dome of Seville Cathedral, 12; Salamanca Cathedral, 125; Segovia, 150 Hospital de Santa Cruz, Toledo, 116 Infante Alfonso, tomb of, 248 Inigo de Mendoz, tomb of, 112 James I., of Aragon, armour of at Valencia, 70; tomb of, 86 Jews at Seville, 15 John of Cologne, 234, 238 John of Gaunt, 178 José Granados, builds western facade of Cathedral, Granada, 38 Juan II., 24 Juan Bantista Celma, 178 Juan, Prince, tomb of, 142 Juan de Borgoña, frescoes by, 112, 141 Juan de Castro, 178 Juan de Juni, 228 Juan de Mena, 30 Juan de Padilla, figure of, 244 Juan de Vallejo, 237 Juanes, _Last Supper_ by, 71 La Magdena, Zamora, 201 Lanfredo, Bishop, 80 La Peña Gajera, 154 La Peñarala, 158 Las Navas de Tolosa, 245 Leon, 205-216 Cathedral, 209 Chapel of La Nuestra Señora del Dado, 213 Convent of San Isidoro el Real, 214 Convent of San Marcos, 215 Historical sketch, 205, _sqq._ Leovigild, 205 Loja, 48 Loyola, relic of, 95 Lucan, 30 Madrazo, designs by, 210 Maestro Matio, portrait of, 176 Malaga, 57-63 Alcazába, 61 Cathedral, 59 Historical sketch, 57, _sqq._ Mercado, 61 Malagueta, river, 61 Manrique de Lara, Bishop, 210 Maragatos, the, 195 Marcellus peoples Cordova, 23 Maria Padilla, mistress of Pedro the Cruel, coffin of, 10 Maurice, Bishop, 234, 235 Mena, Pedro de, pupil of Cano, 60 Mendoza, Cardinal, 219 Meshwâr, 53 Miguelete Tower, 66 Minho, river, 183 Monte Mauro, 34 Morales, 30 Mulhacen, 48 Murillo, pictures at Cadiz, 4; _San Antonio de Padua_ at Seville, 11; in Seville Museum, 20 Museum, Seville, 20 Napoleonic Wars, 67 Naranco, 223 Church of Santa Maria, 223, 224 Nicodemus, 239 Nicolas Florentino, retablo by, 128 Nicolas de Vergara, carving by, 113 Notre Dame de Paris, 211 Oca, Bishop, 235 Oñar, river, 102 Ordoño I., coffin of, 220 Ordoño II., 213 Orense, 187-191 Cathedral, 187, _sqq._ Convent of San Francisco, 190 Historical sketch, 187 Oviedo, 217-224 Capilla del Rey Casto, 220 Cathedral, 218 Historical sketch, 218, _sqq._ Panteon, Leon, 215 Parapanda, Mount, 48 Pedro the Cruel, coffin of, 10; trees planted by, 14 Pedro Mato, statue of, 195 Pelayo, 222 Petrucci Orto, chalice by, 142 Philip II. destroys mosques at Cordova, 24 Philip Vigarni, 237, 238 Philip and Juana la Loca, tomb of, at Granada, 40; coffins of, 42 Pisuerga, river, 225 Pliny quoted, 197 Pradas, work of, at Granada, 43 Quintata, Cardinal, tomb of, 190 Ramiro II., 200 Ramiro, coffin of, 220 Ramon Berenguer I., Count, 91 Ramon Berenguer II., and Emensendis, tombs of, 104 Reus, 83 Ribalta, painting by, at Valencia, 71 Ribera, _Adoration_ by, 71 Roman remains, at Tarragona, 84; at Segovia, 149 Roman Sculpture at Tarragona, 89 Salamanca, 121-135 Capilla del Carmen, 126 Capilla Mayor, 128 Capilla de San Bartolomé, 128 Capilla de Talavera, 128 Cathedrals, 121, 124, _sqq._, 127 Church of San Pedro, 143 Collegio Mayor de Santiago Apostol, 132 Convent of las Agustinas Recoletas, 130 Grammar School, 131 Historical sketch, 123, _sqq._ University, 131 San Pedro, river at Cadiz, 5 Santa Eulalia, body of, 93, 220 Santiago, 171-181 Cathedral, 173, _sqq._ Collegio de San Gerónimo, 180 Historical sketch, 172 Santos Cruz, pictures by, 141 Saragossa, 101, 159-170 Church of San Pablo, 167 Cathedrals, 162, _sqq._ El Pilar, 165 Historical sketch, 159, _sqq._ La Seo, 162, _sqq._ Sebastian del Piombo, 239 Segovia, 145-158 Capilla del Cristo del Consuelo, 152 Cathedral, 150, _sqq._ Chapel of Santa Cantalina, 152 Church of San Martin, 153 Church of San Millan, 153 Church of la Vera Cruz, 153 Convent of Santa Cruz, 153 Historical sketch, 149, _sqq._ Semple, Colonel, 232 Seneca, 30 Seville, 7-21 Capilla de San Pedro, 11 Capilla de Santiago, 11 Cathedral, 8, _sqq._ Historical sketch, 7 Jewish quarter, 15 Sierra de Elvira, 48 Sierra Nevada, 48, 55 Souchet, sacks Valencia, 67 Tarragona, 83-90 Cathedral, 84, _sqq._ Historical sketch, 83, _sqq._ Toledo, 107-119 Bridges, 116, 117 Cathedral, 109 Capilla de la Descension de Nuestra Señora, 112 Capilla de Reyes Nuevo, 111 Capilla de San Ildefonso, 111 Capilla de Santiago, 112 Church of San Juan de los Reyes, 114 Church of Santa Maria la Blanca, 114 Convent of San Domingo el Real, 115 Historical sketch, 107, _sqq._ Jews' quarter, 114 Torquemada, Cardinal, 226 Tortosa, 77-82 Carving at, by Cristobal, 81 Cathedral 80, _sqq._ Historical sketch, 78, _sqq._ Triana, 19 Tribunal de Aguas, 69 Tuy, 183-185 Cathedral, 183, _sqq._ Convent of Santa Domingo, 185 Historical sketch, 183, _sqq._ Urraca, 200; coffin of, 220 Valencia, 65-76 Cathedral, 69 Church of San Martin, 72 Church of Santa Catalina, 71 Convent del Carmen, 75 Convent Espinose, 75 Convent Juanes, 75 Convent Ribalta, 75 Historical sketch, 65, _sqq._ Mercado, 73, 74 Valladolid, 225-232 Church of Santa Maria la Antigua, 226 Colegiata de San Gregorio, 227 Collegio de Santa Cruz, 228 Historical sketch, 225 Scotch and English Colleges, 232 University, 230 Vargas, Louis de, _La Gamba_ at Seville, 11, 12 Vega, the, 62 Velasquez, tomb of, 142 Vigarney, carvings by, 113 Viladomát, pictures by, at Barcelona, 95 "Wamba," great bell, Oviedo, 222 Wellington, Duke of, 48 Ximenes, 112, 227 Yahya, Moorish King, 65 Zamora , 199-204 Capilla del Cardinal, 203 Capilla de San Miguel, 204 Cathedral, 201, _sqq._ Church of la Magdalena, 201 Church of San Pedro of Ildefonso, 201 Historical sketch, 200 Hospital, 201 Zurbaran, pictures at Cadiz, 4; at Seville, 11, 12 Printed by BALLANTYNE & CO. LIMITED Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, London * * * * * Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber. matyrdoms of the Order=>martyrdoms of the Order Witiza in the meantime died and was suceeded=>Witiza in the meantime died and was succeeded The whole rises in isolated grandeur and and may perhaps gain=>The whole rises in isolated grandeur and may perhaps gain and if it happen to be a=>and if it happens to be a the arches of the the old bridge=>the arches of the old bridge so named on acount of the scallop shells=>so named on account of the scallop shells she is embracing me, we disentagle ourselves=>she is embracing me, we disentangle ourselves but a short exsistence as their house of prayer=>but a short existence as their house of prayer who fought three antagonists one ofter another and came off successful=>who fought three antagonists one after another and came off successful I was immediatley nonplussed=>I was immediately nonplussed Bernardo de Arragon, tomb of, 164=>Bernardo de Aragon, tomb of, 164 
39246	----	HEROIC SPAIN [Illustration: A SPANISH HIDALGO, BY EL GRECO] HEROIC SPAIN BY E. BOYLE O'REILLY [Illustration] NEW YORK DUFFIELD AND COMPANY 1910 COPYRIGHT, 1910 BY DUFFIELD AND COMPANY CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION: PRACTICAL HINTS 1 ESPAÑA LA HEROICA: VERSES 12 IN THE BASQUE COUNTRY: LOYOLA 13 BURGOS AND THE CID 33 VALLADOLID 55 OVIEDO IN THE ASTURIAS 79 THE SLEEPING CITIES OF LEON 104 GALICIA 121 SALAMANCA 142 SEGOVIA 159 SAINT TERESA AND AVILA 183 EVENING IN AVILA: VERSES 212 MADRID AND THE ESCORIAL 213 TOLEDO 229 CORDOVA AND GRANADA 258 VIGNETTES OF SEVILLE 274 A CHURCH FEAST IN SEVILLE 293 HOLY WEEK IN SEVILLE 302 CADIZ 316 A FEW MODERN NOVELS 326 ESTREMADURA 351 ARAGON 369 MINOR CITIES OF CATALONIA 385 BARCELONA 395 GERONA AND FAREWELL TO SPAIN 420 ILLUSTRATIONS Page A Spanish Hidalgo, by El Greco Frontispiece Burgos Cathedral from the Castle Hill 36 The Façade of San Gregorio, Valladolid 58 The Cathedral of León 108 View of Salamanca from the Roman Bridge 142 Façade of the University Library, Salamanca 154 The Alcázar of Segovia 182 House of the Duque de la Roca, Avila 196 Isabella of Portugal, by Titian 223 Prado Gallery, Madrid Tomb of Bishop San Segundo, by Berruguete, Avila 256 Los Seises, Cathedral of Seville 299 St. Francis of Assisi 327 A wood-carving by Carmona, Museum of León A Roadside Scene in Spain 354 The Cathedral of Sigüenza 374 Cloisters of San Pablo del Campo, Barcelona 403 A Street Stairway, Gerona 420 _HEROIC SPAIN_ "_Let nothing disturb thee,_ _Nothing affright thee,_ _All things are passing,_ _God never changeth._ _Patient endurance_ _Attaineth to all things,_ _Who God possesseth_ _In nothing is wanting,_ _Alone God sufficeth._" MAXIMS OF SAINT TERESA "All national criticism in bulk is misleading and foolish, and I look on the belief of Spaniards that Spain ought to be great and strong as the most promising agency of her future regeneration." JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL _As Minister to Spain, in a letter Oct. 20, 1877_ INTRODUCTION PRACTICAL HINTS Travel in Spain to-day is attended with little hardship and no danger whatever. Even if one barely knows a word of the language, it is not foolhardy to explore the distant provinces. Commit a few simple sentences to the memory and have courage in using them, for Spanish is pronounced just as it is spelled, with a few exceptions soon observed. The merest beginner is understood. When a trip into Spain is planned it would be well to send for information about the kilometric ticket to the _Chemins de Fer Espagnols_, 20 Rue Chauchat, Paris. They will mail you, gratis, a pamphlet with a map of the country, where is marked the number of kilometers between the cities; from this it is easy to calculate how large a ticket to buy. The more kilometers taken at one time, the cheaper it is. Thus a ticket of 2,000 k. costs 165 pesetas; one of 5,000 k. costs 385 p., and so on. We got a 10,000 kilometric ticket for two people, first class, good for ten months, paying for it 682 pesetas. If the ticket is bought outside of Spain you pay for it in francs, whereas if bought in Spain, you pay in pesetas, which are about fifteen per cent less than francs. Provide yourself with your photograph, and at the first Spanish town--Irún, if you come from Paris, and Port-Bou if from Marseilles--as there is always a pause of some hours on the frontier for the customs, it is a simple matter to buy your _carnet kilométrique_ in the station. It is only on one or two short local lines that these tickets are not accepted. Unfortunately the new rail from Gibraltar up to Bobadilla, by way of which many tourists enter Spain, is one of these disobliging minor lines. In fact many who start their trip from the south have found difficulty in procuring a kilometric ticket till they reached Seville or Granada; this confuses the traveler, and makes him decide the ticket is too complicated for practical use. If he comes to visit merely the southern province of Andalusia, which is what most people see of Spain, with a run up to Madrid for the pictures, then, unless several are traveling as one family, there is little gained by the _carnet_, since a few hundred unused miles are sometimes wasted. But for the complete tour of Spain the kilometric ticket is the most satisfactory arrangement. Besides the reduction it makes in the fare, it saves the confusion of changing money in the stations. You go to the ticket office before boarding a train, have the coupons to be used torn off, and are given a complementary ticket to hand to the conductor on the train. It is well to buy the official railway guide as it saves asking questions, for Spanish trains, though they crawl at a snail's pace, start at the hour announced, and arrive on the minute set down in the time-table. Thirty kilos, about sixty-six pounds, are allowed free in the luggage van, but for an extensive tour it is better to send trunks ahead by some agency, and travel with only the valises taken with you in the carriage. These the _mozo_, or porter, carries directly from the train to the hotel omnibus, which--another good custom of the country--is always in waiting, no matter at what hour the arrival. First class travel in Spain is about the same as second class elsewhere; second class is like third class in France, except on the express route from Paris to Madrid, and in Catalonia, where second class is comfortable. A hasty sketch of our tour may help later travelers. We entered from the north, by Biarritz, a far better way of seeing the country in its natural sequence than the usual landing at Gibraltar. One feels that the north of Spain, in the truest degree national, untouched by the Moor, has never had justice done it. If a transatlantic liner touched at one of the northern ports, such as Vigo, Santander, Bilbao, it would open up an untrodden Switzerland with fertile valleys and noble hills. No pleasanter summer tour, on bicycle or afoot, could be made than through the Basque provinces, Asturias, the national cradle of Spain, or in beautiful Galicia with its trout rivers. In summer the climate is cool and pleasant, and the most isolated valleys are so safe that any two women could travel alone with security. Our first stop was at Loyola in the Basque country; then a week in Burgos; a short stay at Valladolid and Palencia; over the Asturian Mountains to Oviedo; back to León City, and from there across other hills to Galicia, seeing Lugo, Coruña, and Santiago in that province; from Coruña to Santiago by diligence, as no rail yet connects the two cities. We returned to León province from Galicia, skirting the Miño River which divides Spain and Portugal; stopped a night at Astorga, some days in Salamanca, and made a short pause in Zamora. Time must not be a consideration in touring these unfrequented cities of middle Spain, for their local trains are few and far between. Only twice a week is there direct communication between Salamanca and Medina del Campo, the junction station on the express route. But if you accept once for all the slowness of the trains, the occasional odd hour of arrival or starting, the inconvenience of a distantly-set station, you cease to fret and scold as do most hurried travelers. We ended by finding the long railway journeys rather restful than otherwise. Usually we had the _Reservado para Señoras_ carriage to ourselves, except on the express line from Paris to Madrid, and we soon learned how to make ourselves comfortable for a whole day's journey, seizing the chance of taking exercise during the long pauses in the stations, and enjoying the human-hearted scenes there witnessed; for a Spaniard greets and bids farewell with the same unconsciousness, the same absence of mauvaise honte as when he prays or makes love. Also I found the topography of the country of endless interest during the long train trips; to climb up to the great truncated mountain which is central Spain, to see how the still higher ranges of mountains crossed it, how the famous rivers flowed, the setting of the historic cities,--I never tired of looking out on it all. Somehow I have got tucked away a distinct picture of Spain's physical geography, no doubt due to the leisurely railway journeys, which are not so slow that the proportion of the whole is lost, as foot or horse travel would be, nor yet so fast as to jumble the picture, as with the express trips in some countries. Spain is not beautiful like Italy, nor of the orderly finished type of England or France; she has few of Germany's grand forests. There is no denying she is a gaunt, denuded, tragic land; the desolation of the vast high steppes of Castile is terrible. Only the fringing coasts along the Atlantic and the Mediterranean are fertile. Nevertheless, unbeautiful as is the landscape, it possesses an unaccountable magnificence that grips the mind; we never took a night trip unless forced to it, so strangely interesting were the hours spent in looking from the car window. After Salamanca we went to Segovia, then across the Guadarramas to the Escorial, and slightly back north by the same mountains to Avila. Segovia and Avila are true old mediæval cities of the inmost heart of the race, _España la heróica_ incarnate. Again passing through the hills, whose cold blue atmosphere Velasquez has made immortally real, we went to Madrid. From there, south, we struck the beaten tourist track with pestering guides and higher prices in the hotels. Up to this we had driven, on arrival in a town, to the first or second hotel mentioned in Baedeker, and the average charge had been seven pesetas a day, all included. The provincial hotels gave a surprisingly good table; excellent soups, fresh fish, the meats fair, and all presented in a savory way; the fact that many men of the town use the hotel as a restaurant has much to do with the generous menu. The rooms were cold and bare, but clean, for not one night of distress did we spend during the eight months' tour. Of course certain modern comforts were completely lacking, but we were grateful enough for clean beds and wholesome food. The taking of money for hospitality is thought degrading by this chivalrous people, so the traveler should not judge them by the innkeeper class with whom he comes in contact. I found courtesy as a rule and honesty even in the inns; having valises that could not lock, I yet lost nothing. From Toledo on, we began to go, not to the best hotel mentioned in the guide book, for that now had an average charge of twenty-five francs a day, but we chose some minor inn, such as the Fonda da Lino, in Toledo, once the first hostelry in the city before the "Palace" variety was started for the American tourist. We had spent October and November in seeing the northern provinces whose piercing cold made us only too glad to settle for the four winter months in Andalusia; a day at Cordova, a fortnight in Granada, a trip to Cadiz, and the bulk of the time in Seville, the best city in Spain for a prolonged stay, though Barcelona also can offer good winter quarters. In April we went north into Estremadura to see the Roman remains, then returned to Madrid for another sight of its unrivaled gallery, and also because all routes focus from the capital like the spokes of a wheel. We continued east to Guadalajara and Sigüenza, stopped some days at Saragossa, then descended by Poblet to the warm fertile coast again, to tropical Tarragona and that industrial anomaly in an hidalgo land, Barcelona. After spending some weeks there, in the beginning of June we left Spain by the Port-Bou frontier, stopping at Gerona on the way out. Thus we had seen some twenty-five Spanish cities--some twenty-five glorious cathedrals!--in a leisurely journey of eight months. Any spot along the southern fringe is suitable for the winter, any spot along the northern coast for the summer, but in high cold middle-Spain travel for pleasure must be limited to early autumn or late spring: we froze to death in Burgos and Salamanca during October, and again shivered and chattered with the April cold of Guadalajara and Sigüenza. As to guide books, Baedeker is as good as any, though the Baedeker for Spain is not equal to that firm's guides for the rest of Europe. Murray's "Hand-book" is more entertaining, but is rather to be kept as amusing literature than used as a guide book, much of it being the personal opinions and prejudices of Richard Ford, and bristling all over with slurs at Spain's religion. It does not seem reasonable for English-speaking travelers to see this original country through the eyes of a clever but crochety Englishman who wandered over it on horseback eighty years ago: we should not like a European to judge America by Dickens' notebook dating back to the forties. There are two bits of advice I would give to those who would thoroughly enjoy traveling in the Peninsula. Pick up as soon as possible something of the tongue or you miss shadings that give depth and strength to the impression. If one knows Latin or French or Italian, it is easy to read Spanish. And I would beg every unhurried traveler to carry in his pocket the "Romancero del Cid," Spain's epic, and "Don Quixote," her great novel, the truest-hearted book ever written. I defy a man to while away a winter in Spain with _el ingenioso hidalgo_ his daily companion, or sit reading the "Cid" above the Tajus gorge at Toledo, and not learn to love this virile, ascetic, realistic, exalted, and passionate land, where a peasant is instinctively a gentleman, where a grandee is in practice a democrat, where certain small meanesses, such as snobbishness, close-fisted love of money, are unknown. The second advice is to bring to Spain some smattering of architectural knowledge, or half the charm of lingering in her old cities is lost,--also is lessened one's chance to catch unaware the soul of this mystic, profoundly religious race. Here I should end, as I head these lines of introduction with the words: _Practical hints_. And yet, just as it is well nigh impossible in Spain to dissociate the churches themselves from the religious scenes daily witnessed under their Romanesque or Gothic arches, so I cannot help begging the traveler, along with his smattering of architecture to bring a little liberality toward a faith different perhaps from his own, a little openness of mind. To one who goes to Spain in the holier-than-thou attitude, she is dumb and repellent,--she who can be so eloquent! In each of her cities is a cathedral built when faith was gloriously generous and untamable, and in them one feels, unless blinded by prejudices of early environment or birth, that here indeed man is bowed in the humble self-abasement of worship, here is not only æsthetic beauty but a burning soul; the incense, the lights, the inherited lavish wealth speak with the spirituality of symbols, of ritual, that utterance of the soul older than hymns or voiced prayer. This record of the journey through Spain will be called too partial, and yet I started without the slightest intention of liking or praising her. A month before going to Spain, on reading in the Bodleian Library certain accounts of St. Teresa, about whom I had but vague ideas, I exclaimed in distress, "What a morbid mind!" I went far from sympathetic, but bit by bit my prejudices dropped away. With the cant and smug self-conceit of northern superiority, I expected among other jars a shock to my religious belief. And after eight months I left Spain with the conviction that magnificently faulty though she is with her bull-fights, a venal government, and city loafers, she can give us lessons in mystic spirituality, in an unpretentious charity, in heroic endurance, in a very practical not theoretic democracy. ESPAÑA LA HEROICA Deep learned are the poor in many ways, Their hearts are mellowed by sweet human pain, And she has learned the lesson of the waifs, This sadly-ravaged, stern, soul-moving Spain! Rugged and wild, wind-swept, and bleak, and drear, She has a ruined splendor all her own, It seizes even while you ask in fear The reason man should choose this waste for home. Her cities rise, ascetic, lofty, proud, Forever haunted by high souls that dare, And from her wondrous churches rings aloud A heaven-storming radiance of prayer; With psalm, with dance, with ecstasy's white thrill, Her mystics dared to lose themselves in God, Theirs was unflinching faith, fierce, _varonil_, A force as true to nature as the sod. Reward must come: perhaps from her to-day May spring the needed saint, to think, to feel, To grope triumphantly, to point the way To altars where both Faith and Science kneel. Upon her ashy mountain height she stands, Eager to step into the forward strife, Her eyes are wide with hope, outstretched her hands To meet the promise of new coursing life: Steadfast her cities to the desert face, Snow mountains loom across the silent plain: Take courage, O exalted tragic race! Courage! Christ's always faithful grand old Spain! Castile, 1908. IN THE BASQUE COUNTRY: LOYOLA "The only happy people in the world are the good man, the sage, and the saint; but the saint is happier than either of the others, so much is man by his nature formed for sanctity."--JOUBERT. "Whoever has been in the land of the Basques wishes to return to it; it is a blessed land."--VICTOR HUGO. The Basque is still one of the sturdy untouched peoples of the earth; they make still the unmixed aborigines of Spain. Their difficult dialect remains a perplexity to the etymologist, some believe it to be of Tartar origin. They themselves claim to be the oldest race in Europe and that their language came to Spain before the confusion of tongues at Babel. They derive their name from a Basque phrase meaning "We are enough," that fittingly describes their character of self-sufficiency; the mere fact of being born in the province confers nobility. Life for centuries in the isolated valleys that never were conquered by Moor or foreign invader has bred in the Basque a passionate independence. He would never join with the neighboring kingdoms of Navarre and León until his special privileges were ratified; and though these privileges were the important ones of exemption from taxes and military service, he succeeded in keeping them intact until his sympathies with the Pretenders in the Carlist wars lost him his ancient rights. To-day the Basques must pay taxes and serve in the army like the rest of Spain, but their soldiers are usually employed in the customs, or as aids to the local police. Their red cap, like the French béret, and brilliant red trousers are a familiar sight among the valleys. Of the three Basque provinces with their 600,000 people, the smallest, Guipúzcoa, is a good epitome of national characteristics. The sinuous valleys now serve as the passageway for the rushing mountain river, now spread out into a plain where the villages are set. Each town has its shady _alameda_, its plaza, and a court for playing _pelota_, a kind of tennis, the game of the province. There are frequent _casas solares_,[1] or family manor houses; one of these I remember wedged in with its neighbors, in Azcoitia, unnoticed by the guide book, only by chance we looked up and found it looming above the narrow pavement; blackened with age and scarred as if crashed with blows of warring times, it was a speaking record of old Basque life. In any other country but Spain, the carelessly rich and unrecorded, such a fortress-house would be a lion in the district,--from this very unexpectedness Spanish travel is of unflagging charm. The strong primitive Guipúzcoans cling to their patriarchal customs. The men and boys sit before their doors making the cord soles used in peasants' shoes; the women in groups of twenty or more, wash clothes in the public trough or down by the river. The industry of all is unflagging. The roads are among the best built in Spain, along them go creaking carts, each wheel made of a solid block of wood bound in iron and emitting a prolonged agonizing squeak. The cream-colored oxen that drag them have their yokes covered with sheepskin, another century-old custom. The carts sometimes carry pigskins filled with wine, three legs in the air, and the unique casks are mended with a kind of pitch that lends a disagreeable flavor to the wine, but these highlanders will not yield an old usage. No sooner did we cross the _Puente Internacional_ that connects France with its neighbors over the Bidassoa River--scene of historic meetings--than we found ourselves in the wooded Basque provinces of the northern Pyrenees. The country was fertile, the small farms cultivated with activity; on the hills were heavily-laden chestnut trees, in the valleys, orchards: we often passed trainloads of red apples carried unpacked in the open cars like coal. Not far from the frontier the train skirted what appeared to be an inland lake surrounded by hills, when suddenly I noticed an ocean steamer and some fishing smacks lying at anchor, and looking closer I saw that a narrow passage led through the hills to the ocean breaking outside,--another of Spain's unheralded effects. This was the beautiful inland Bay of Pasajes, the port from which young Lafayette sailed for America. At San Sebastián, the most fashionable summer resort in Spain, and still gay with Madrid people, for the season holds till October, we saw the first bull-ring, a circular building of red and yellow brick in the Moorish style. To find a _plaza de toros_ here in the north was disconcerting. Spain's national game has withstood the will of kings, Papal bulls, the dislike of a large proportion of the Spanish people who petitioned the Cortes in 1878 for its abolishment, and the odium of foreign races. Until this debased _cosa de España_ is done away with it will remain a stumbling block to even the most sympathetic of travelers. At Irún, the frontier town behind us, we had taken our tickets for Zumárraga, two hours away. There we were to leave the railway and drive into the valleys to Loyola, where in an old castle the hidalgo vizcaíno, Don Iñigo de Loyola, was born. Our guide book gave but the slightest information. It was raining drearily. With trepidation and sinking hearts we looked out at Zumárraga as the train drew near. Would this, the first night in Spain, cold and wet, be spent in some miserable tavern in a town of a thousand inhabitants, and perhaps the next morning would a rickety diligence take us up the valley? We stepped from the train reluctantly; at the last minute we were tempted to turn back. But a porter had seized our valises, and muttering something incomprehensible about Loyola and an automobile hurried us through the station. And there, beyond, stood the wonderful thing, sign manual of modern comfort--a great red automobile with a gallant chauffeur! We sat down on our luggage and burst into a hearty laugh. It began to dawn on us that perhaps the tour of Spain was not going to be the series of hardships and privations we anticipated. For the sum of three pesetas each (fifty-four cents) we were whirled up the winding valley. The mountains rose precipitously from the road and its accompanying river, reminding me of the valley in the Pistoiese Apennines that leads down to the Bagni di Lucca. In the motor diligence with us were a few courteous Basques; an elderly architect, with the finely-chiseled features of the country, pointed out a sight here and there, among others the birthplace and statue of Legazpi, conqueror of the Philippines. I think he took us for countrywomen of his young queen, and, trying to emulate his politeness, we were silent as to our nationality; later we discovered that this was quite unnecessary, for there is not the slightest prejudice in Spain against the United States. We passed a building by the river and were told it was an electric power-house; almost every part of the country is now lighted by electricity. "You are very up-to-date!" we exclaimed. He replied by a shrug of delighted self-depreciation, a proud smile of conscious superiority aping the humble, not out of place in a Basque whose mysterious language Adam spoke, so ancient and difficult a tongue that the devil who once tried to learn it, they say, had to give up in despair. Our opposite neighbors in the diligence, countrymen whose loss of teeth made them appear aged, sought also to show some courtesy. Each wayside shrine was named with glistening eyes,--St. Anthony; the hermitage on the hill above, St. Augustine; here, St. John. One began to understand religion was no mere Sunday morning service with this people. After six miles the valley opened out and we came to Azcoitia, a town of some five thousand inhabitants where is manufactured the _bóina_, the typical cap of the province. The automobile went slowly through the narrow cobbled streets, under the high houses and the cliff-like church, then sped over two miles of a beautiful valley, with mountain rising behind mountain in the evening light, and at length we reached Loyola. Here one of the great discoverers of new strength, of untried powers in the human soul, one of the holiest men of Christendom, saw the light in 1491, the year before the discovery of America: in the life of St. Ignatius are several coincidental dates to give us pause. Surely it was to these peaceful Basque hills that his thoughts turned when, a knight in the worldly court that surrounded Ferdinand and his second wife Germaine de Foix, Ignatius in gazing at the stars would feel with sudden potency the pettiness of man's grandeur, and during his religious life, when he craved at the sunset hour to be alone to meditate, he must have recalled this lovely valley of his birth. With emotion I saw in the distance the huge quadrangle of the convent that now surrounds the _Santa Casa_: the thought of what this spot has given to the world, of the thousands of chosen souls linked to-day by one will to work for good in every land, can well make Loyola a place to stir the heart. At a little past six we left the automobile which was to run farther up the valley, and a porter from the inn led us through the park the Jesuits have planted for the people. The _Hospedería de Loyola_ was a large building with a porticoed entrance at right angles to the convent, more like a monastery than a hotel, with polished staircase and corridors, neat bare rooms, and a long white refectory. The table was excellent, one course followed another at the one o'clock luncheon and the eight o'clock dinner. There was fresh fish from San Sebastián (to which daily another motor diligence ran), there were home-made preserves, and we had our first taste of the universal _garbanzos_[2] of Spain, a chickpea shaped like a ram's head. The waitress, the first of many Carmens and Dolores, was a wonderful old woman who grew so intent on teaching us her language that she would insistently repeat the name of each dish she passed. She managed to convey to us by pantomime, for our Spanish as yet was of the meagerest, that there were eight ladies from Madrid in the hotel, living upstairs in retirement as they were making a Retreat. They had come last Saturday;--talk, talk, talk,--and the animated little woman gesticulated to show. Then the Retreat began,--did we know what "the Exercises" were? Off she walked with bowed head and downcast eyes. So it would be all week. The next Monday we should see them, they would come to table with us, and it would be talk, talk, talk again. During the week we occasionally saw a lady in black, her head covered with a veil, cross from the hotel to the _Santa Casa_ where the meditations were held. In the convent the Jesuits were conducting another Retreat attended by fifty men from different Spanish cities: these lived in the seminary with the priests. At table with us were some Spanish people of a kind the tourist does not usually meet. One of them, a deeply religious man from Barcelona, on his first visit to the _Santa Casa_, following the example of St. Francis Borgia, knelt to kiss the floor of the room in which the patron of the Basques was born. Another, an elderly woman fond of lace and jewels, and probably longing for the gayeties of San Sebastián, was waiting in this quiet spot while her daughter made the Retreat. When the eight days were ended we met this daughter, a beautiful girl with the charm of manner and quickness of intelligence that we found as a rule among Spanish women. The afternoon the two Retreats closed was a pleasant sight. The valley was fragrant from the rain, on the mountains the chalets stood out strangely near in the clear air. Carriages and touring-cars rolled up, pretty wives to fetch their husbands to claim their wives. All were happy and natural, but one felt around one the atmosphere of the higher things of life, an exaltation that only religion can give. Religion is ineradicably woven into the every-day life of this race: a Spaniard is half mystic by inheritance. The power to understand the spiritual is not the gift of a few but of all. It gives to the peasant woman, to the uncouth lad serving Mass, an intelligence above themselves.[3] Before the late dinner that last evening in Loyola, a tall Spanish woman with her four daughters automobiled over from San Sebastián; she came to join her husband who had been following the "Exercises." He now sat with us at table, a man of the grave dignity and fine presence we were later to meet frequently. That night when passing through the corridors we heard the sounds of prayer in their rooms, the wife and children making the responses to the man's deeper voice. The convent of Loyola is the center of civilization for the countryside. All day there is a ceaseless come and go to the church, or to the _Santa Casa_ for silent prayer. At one each day troops of children go to the door of the convent with baskets and tins, and food is given them to carry to the aged and decrepit of the town. An hour later some dozens of lads in blue smock and _bóina_, playing their ceaseless _pelota_, flock into the building for a half hour of _doctrina_. Then at three the young novices come out gayly for their ramble over the mountains and as they pass before the church each instantly removes his hat as walking they repeat together a prayer. Happy those whose formative years are passed in hardy discipline among these uncontaminated Basque hills! The peasants of the valley, when the bell sounds the hours, pause to remove their caps in salutation. Every morning they cross the fields from Azpeitia on the raised path beside the river, or they come from Azcoitia, two miles down the valley, to attend the morning services. No one who has not seen a Spanish priest's attitude of devotion can understand its appealing beauty. These Jesuits and their attendant young novices (there are about two hundred students in the seminary) approach the altar with solemn reverence, without a trace of self-consciousness, and slowly and beautifully say the Mass. "The Jesuit seems to love God from pure inclination, out of admiration, gratitude, tenderness, for the pleasure of loving Him," wrote that subtle critic, Joubert: "In their books of devotion you find joy because with them nature and religion go hand in hand." A Basque congregation is worthy of such ministers. All kneel without bench or chair, the men on folded handkerchiefs, the women on the circular straw mats scattered over the pavement. We were fortunate enough to attend a late Benediction, not a customary service in Spain as we found later. The thrilled exaltation of the singing in which all joined, the aged as well as children, is impossible to describe. It was a triumphant full-hearted adoration trying to voice the inexpressible; the organ ran riot, strained to its utmost, to accompany the ecstatic singing. Every Sunday the peasants drive in from the mountains to attend the afternoon service, and after it they stand to chat for a placid hour on the wide steps of the church. Arm in arm the young girls stroll up and down in the park before the convent. I looked on at this scene of contentment that told of frugal, upright living, with the sad thought of France deprived of such wholesome beauty, of the peasants round the Grande-Chartreuse, poverty-stricken and desolate since the industrial monastery was closed. Happily for the future of Spain, she has at hand a neighbor to give her the lesson in time. The convent of Loyola was built by the Austrian wife of Philip IV to enclose and preserve the _Santa Casa_, and it was by her presented to the Jesuits. The church whose dome overtops the convent is in imitation of the Pantheon. Unfortunately, as are most Jesuit churches in Europe, it was erected in a bad period, and overloaded with ornament. The Company of Jesus was not founded until the golden age of architecture was well past; Churriguera, archmaster of bad taste, was in vogue when they built. But at Loyola if the twisted pillars of decorated marble are hideous, the ample flowing staircase that leads to the church is a beautiful feature, reminiscent of Italian villas. The soul of the valley is naturally the _Santa Casa_ itself, the _casa solar_ of the saint's fore-fathers. The lower story is of rough-hewn stone, and once the whole building was the same, but a jealous king leveled the fortress-houses of the Basque nobles and the upper stories were rebuilt in ancient brick. Above the entrance door the arms of the family are carved, two wolves and a pot. The tradition is that the knights of Loyola were so generous to their retainers that even the wolves came to share their hospitality. In many of the rooms daily Masses are said; the four stories have been inlaid with mosaic, carved wood, and gold leaf, the gifts of devotees of the Basque patron. One room is pointed out as the saint's before his conversion, another as the one in which St. Francis Borgia said his first Mass, giving up a brilliant career, as viceroy, admiral, Duke of Gandía by inheritance, favorite of Charles V, to consecrate himself to the service of the altar. At this memorable Mass he gave communion to one of his sons, married to an inheritor of the _Santa Casa_, a niece of St. Ignatius. So many were the communicants another day that the Mass lasted from nine to three. Such rare instances of Christian perfection make the ancient house a chosen spot. The story of St. Ignatius' life is told throughout his _casa solar_. On the staircase is a window showing him as a courtier. He was skilled in knightly exercises, fond of the saddle and equally fond of rich attire: good-looking, high-spirited, truthful, and brave, he was a favorite with his soldiers. The scene of his wounding at the siege of Pamplona is given; he lies on the ground with his leg shattered. A long year of convalescence followed, and we see him reading the books that wrought his marvelous change of heart. He sought the monastery of Montserrat, above Barcelona, to beg counsel of a learned man concerning the vocation he felt within him. His military training made him dream of forming a spiritual knighthood to battle for the salvation of souls: "Company of Jesus" is a military term. At Montserrat he performed the vigil of the armor, like a true knight watching till dawn before the altar; then exchanging his fine robes with a beggar he went forth, "_el pobre ignoto peregrin_." In a cave of Manresa he lived in seclusion and prayer, verifying on himself in agony of spirit the knowledge which was later to guide the troubled souls of others who sought light. "His experience in this solitude was an epitome of the psychology of the saints; and it smote him all the more intimately because he was utterly without foreknowledge of the spiritual life, and fought out his fight alone, like the first Fathers of the Desert." In the cave of Manresa was forged his Excalibur (to use again the vivid phrase of Francis Thompson, own brother to Crashaw in his flashes of celestial intuition), there originated the "Spiritual Exercises," the work used to-day in the Retreats. "It has converted more souls to God," wrote St. Francis de Sales, "than it contains letters." Eighteen years were to pass before St. Ignatius founded his Order. They were years filled with wanderings in Spain and Europe, a student at universities, a humble but joyous pilgrim to Jerusalem. One day while he was reading the eighteenth chapter of St. Luke the words, "And they understood none of these things" brought before him with sudden force the realization of his own untrained mind, the fact that he must be educated himself before he could help others. So at thirty this remarkable man began his scholastic studies in Barcelona, in Cardinal Ximenez's famous university of Alcalá, in Salamanca. One day, in the streets of Alcalá, as he was led to prison on a false accusation, the proud young grandee of Gandía passed him. This was the first sight Francis Borgia had of the man who later was to lead his life. Then followed some years of study in Paris. 1530 found him in London at the time of the agitation of Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon, again a coincidence in Ignatius' life that he should visit at this critical moment the land soon to desert a church for which he was destined to raise so powerful a defense. There was another notable Spaniard in England then, not a humble summer student begging his way like the Basque hidalgo, but a scholar of Corpus Christi College, distinguished and lauded, to attend whose lectures the King and Queen used sometimes to spend a few days in Oxford. This was Juan Luis de Vives, born in the great year 1492, the precursor of Bacon and Descartes, a man of such vast erudition and impartial judgment that he has been called with Erasmus and the French prodigy, Budé, the intellect of his century. Vives stood forth courageously as defender of his country-woman when the divorce question arose; he was imprisoned for a short time, forfeited his position and pension, and finally left England altogether. Loyola now took his degree as Master of Arts in Paris, and gathering round him some young men of earnest life--among them the future apostle and martyr in the East, St. Francis Xavier from Navarre--the memorable band of seven students made the vows of poverty and chastity in the crypt of a church on Montmartre on the Feast of the Assumption, 1534. Thirty years later the remembrance of that hour made one of the seven, Rodríguez, feel his heart swell with ineffable consolation. Literally these ardent souls fulfilled the letter of the Gospel for the way of perfection: "If thou wilt be perfect go sell what thou hast, and give to the poor." "If any man will come after me let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me." "Ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake." Their founder with superhuman perspicacity prayed it might be so. The world's hate is their alembic of purification. Ignatius returned to Spain to arrange with Xavier's family--he also was of the northern mountain race of Spain--and with the kindred of three others of his followers. He crossed the Pyrenees by footpaths, and descending to his own valley of Loyola preached down by the river in Azpeitia. Later in Italy the band of Montmartre met again, working in hospitals, preaching, and converting souls to God. It was in Venice, many years after his wounding at Pamplona, that Ignatius Loyola was at length ordained priest, and in Rome, in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore said his first Mass. When the projects of the small band were submitted to the Pope, he had the inspired wisdom to discern in humble beginnings a future great movement and exclaimed: "_Digitus Dei est hic!_"--truly the finger of God. The new Order approved, Loyola was elected its general; like a military company, the first law was the unhesitating obedience of the soldier to his leader, the unbreakable power that lies in many working as one. The _Compañía_ spread over the world, reforming monasteries, giving help to the poor, persuading the rich to purer lives, reconciling husbands and wives. Within a few years Francis Borgia gave up his dukedom to join them, and his accession brought to the Order many Spaniards of high rank. The founder continued to live in Italy between Rome at the Gesù and Tivoli: he died in Rome in 1556. In the _Santa Casa_ we followed this remarkable life in scene after scene. There is a touching picture of the grown man at school among lads half his age, of the crypt of Montmartre, and of the final scene in Rome. His face was said by St. Philip Neri to have shone with compelling personality. In speech he was grave and admirable, a never-tiring student of the Bible; that, and the "Imitation of Christ" were the only books he much valued. "To see Father Ignatius was like reading a chapter of the 'Imitation,'" they used to say of him. We lingered for some days in the beautiful Basque valley, following the winding paths among the mountains, loitering in the two little towns near by in the pleasant discovery of rare old windows and portals. Most of the houses had a picture of the Saviour on the entrance door. Each new-born child is brought to the parish church of Azpeitia where St. Ignatius was baptized, and each boy is called by his name, though only the eldest in a family has the privilege of using it. The saint's hymn is the national hymn of the Basques. It was a raw autumn morning when we left Loyola. The light was just filling the valleys as we passed the sweeping steps of the church up which the peasants were mounting to beg a blessing on their working hours. The influence of their loved patron is as vivid as if he had lived but yesterday, so truly can one human mind, touched by divine grace, with no thought of self, in sublime earnestness, rouse mankind to shake off its apathy, to aspire to the highest. If only another such knight might arise to-day to fight the modern battle of Christianity! BURGOS AND THE CID "The epochs in which faith prevails are the marked epochs of human history, full of heart-stirring memories and of substantial gains for all after times. The epochs in which unbelief prevails, even when for the moment they put on the semblance of glory and success, inevitably sink into insignificance in the eyes of posterity which will not waste its thoughts on things barren and unfruitful."--GOETHE. Passing through the fertile Basque valleys, the train mounts the Pyrenees by a series of skillfully-engineered tunnels. This natural barrier between France and Spain, is far from being the straight rampart of school geographies. It is a wide expanse of ramifying hills and intricate valleys, a jumble of mountains that explains why Spain remained isolated from northern Europe until the days of the railway. When we reached the crest of this watershed between the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean, we had a noble view of the villages far beneath. Around us was a strange outcrop of white rock, and the descent to Vitoria was barren too: with every mile the scene grew bleaker till the rustling woods of the Basque valleys behind seemed a dream. Beyond Miranda, the first town of old Castile, the desolate scene appeared in its full awfulness. The plain lay like brown dunes of sand, "as for the grass, it grew as scant as hair in leprosy." It was indeed the haunting landscape of "Childe Roland." Passing over this wide stretch, the train again mounted, this time not to cross another range of hills, but to climb to the great truncated mountain which forms the center of Spain. Three-fourths of the area of this imagined orange-laden land is this tragic central plateau, comprising Old and New Castile, León, and Estremadura. Most of the historic cities are on this bleak upland, almost 3,000 feet above the sea, wind-swept, wintry, and made still colder by the snow mountains that cross it from east to west. Riding for days through the monotonous scene you begin to wonder not that Spain should be poor, but rather that she, an agricultural land, should have made so good a fight against such heavy odds. The guide books that so harshly criticise, saying hers is a land where Nature has lavished her prodigalities of soil and climate yet shiftless man has refused her bounty, seem to forget that only one-fourth of the country is the traditional rich south. The fruitful provinces form but the fringe of the Peninsula. It was early October when we mounted the Pass of Pancorbo. A fierce wind was blowing. It suddenly blew open the door of our compartment, and flung it back, smashing the glass. It was impossible to draw it to in the fierce gale, and this little incident added to the desolation round us. We looked down through the open door on the white road of the Pass, over which Napoleon's armies poured a hundred years before to plunder Spain with ruthless cruelty, and yet, so hidden is the guidance of things, that seeming disaster waked the country from its long abasement. Having reached the great central steppes, the same melancholy scene continued. The land was scorched and calcined. Everything was a dull brown. Villages were undistinguishable from the plain, and the churches from the villages; man, his ass, and his dog, were all the same dull tone. Even the brown deserts of Egypt failed to give me as powerful a sensation of the forsaken. The plateau was treeless, except for an occasional wind-threshed poplar, and an isolated moth-eaten poplar can be the final touch of desolation. At times, miles from any village, a solitary figure guided his oxen and plow in a stony field, or silhouetted against the sky a tandem of five or six mules slowly crawled along. Since the villages are far apart, each worker must leave his home long before dawn to reach his distant field, and after sunset plod back patiently to the _aldea_. Forlorn as it all appeared one saw that every inch of the soil was under cultivation. The peasants are as attached to their cheerless tract, which has its one hour of green bloom in the spring, as are the Basques to their beautiful valleys. The fields are passed from father to son, and are acquired with the same zest as are teeming English farms; a stern soil and still sterner climate has made a peasantry full of grit and courage. Hardy and undepressed they gathered round the train with pleasant greetings, for the long pauses in the stations are moments of sociability from one end of Spain to another. The sad landscape continued up to Burgos, one might say to its very gates if it were not that the townspeople have planted avenues of trees near the city. As we approached we had a splendid view of the Cathedral towers dominating the town. There was something magnificent in the souls of the old builders who made a temple such as this in the midst of a desert, as if they defied the arid desolation to conquer their soaring faith. The great structure rose doubly impressive from the juxtaposition of richness and sterility, of the spirit's triumph over the material that makes Burgos as impressive in its way as Toledo with its more imposing setting. [Illustration: _Copyright, 1910 by Underwood & Underwood_ BURGOS CATHEDRAL FROM THE CASTLE HILL] "_Nuestro país es el país de las anomalías_" says the critic De Larra, and the first step in Spain strikes this note. She is a land of violent contrasts; level plain and broken sierra, elysian garden of Andalusia and tractless wastes of Castile, frosty Burgos and sunny Seville. She is the home of the hidalgo and home of the strongest existing democracy between man and man, only equaled by early Rome. It was in Burgos we first noticed what we later saw frequently, the _labrador_ who drove his master's carriage, enter the inn with him and sit at the same table to eat, master and man alike in their dignity. She has a peasantry beyond praise for its virile industry, and she has a class of city loafers the idlest that ever encumbered a plaza. Cradle of exalted mystics and mother of realistic painters, this land of racy personalities never allows one's interest to flag. We spent a week in Burgos, and not once did the sun shine. The cold was piercing. At the corner of every street a biting wind seized and buffeted one about; besides being on a mountain, there are still higher mountains near, and snow has been known to fall in June. Wind and cold, however, were soon forgotten once inside the Cathedral. Our first visit was within the hour of arrival, at dusk when details were hidden. The great temple rose around us mysterious and awe inspiring. Though almost with the first breath of wonder came a sense of bewilderment,--what was this heavy wall rising some thirty feet in the center of the church, that hid the altar and blocked up the nave so that only an encircling aisle was left free? So confusing was it I could not at first tell by what door we had entered, where was the east, where was the west end? Books of travel all tell of this placing of the choir, or _coro_, in the nave of Spanish cathedrals, but one can read them and imagine nothing like the reality. I had pictured an open platform running down the center of the church, whereas high walls are built round the _coro_ as well as round the _capilla mayor_, thus making a smaller church within a larger one. Wherever the inner church opens on the other, they have placed a towering metal screen called a _reja_. A narrow passageway, fenced by an open rail, usually runs from the altar enclosure to the _coro_, and the people gather close to this, under the transept-crossing tower; thus, practically, the priest at the altar and the canons chanting in the choir are separated by the congregation. It is hard to make the picture clear. I feel that no explanation can prevent this arrangement of Spanish cathedrals coming as a surprise to the traveler. The evening of our first visit, we wandered round in the dusk bewildered by the blocking _coro_, and at length entered the chapel of St. Anne, where a service was going on. The side chapels of Burgos are churches in themselves, they often belong to private individuals, this of St. Anne being, for instance, the property of the Duke of Abrantes. It was now crowded with people of all kinds,--officers in uniform, a few ladies in hats but the bulk of the women in black veils. From a small balcony on one side the litany was sung. Before the altar was what appeared to be a black covered bier, so I thought we must have stumbled on some special service for the dead. This would account for so large a gathering on a weekday, for at first one fails to grasp the every-day religious attitude of the Spaniard. Looking closer at the bier before the lighted altar a human figure was outlined under the dark pall. How displeasing, I thought, not to use a coffin! Suddenly the head of this recumbent figure unmistakably moved. With a shiver I looked round me. No one appeared to notice what was to me so terrifying, yet they were gazing over the bier at the altar. Strange visions floated through my imagination, made up of memories of Charles V's funeral before his death, and of contorted accounts of Spain and her ways. Perhaps it was not an unusual custom here, thus morbidly to sample beforehand one's own funeral service. Then, as the litanies continued, now the solo from the choir, now the full-voiced responses of the people, I realized these sweet evening melodies could hardly be the dirges of a burial. The supposition of a living corpse was too bizarre in the midst of this composed crowd. I fastened my eyes on the round head of the bier, and again it moved, but this time so thoroughly moved that the mystery was solved. With a breath of relief I knew this was indeed a quiet evening service and what had seemed a bier was merely one of the many marble tombs before the altars of old churches, covered over with a dark mantle as they sometimes are. What I had imagined the round head of a corpse, or future corpse, was the veil-draped head of a living woman, seated on a higher chair than usual between the tomb and the lighted altar. So ended my first and only romantic episode in Spain. I mention it as showing with what vague notions of terror the average English-speaking tourist enters this harmless land. He comes full of the prejudices inherited from the days of the Invincible Armada, when a Spaniard was to an Englishman his satanic majesty incarnate, and this in an age of which Froude himself, the enthusiastic chronicler of Drake, says: "Perhaps nowhere on earth was there a finer average of distinguished and cultivated society than in the provincial Castilian cities." Strange how tenaciously we cling to disproved ideas, I thought, as the next day we examined the beautiful tomb of Bishop Acuña which had caused my fright. Spain is as safe to-day as any civilized country. Yet we met two Californian ladies traveling with pistols, about as needed here as firearms in the lanes of Surrey or the brigand-infested hills of Massachusetts. Little by little the traveler who keeps an open mind learns that the cruel and morbid Spaniard of the popular fancy has no existence except in his imagination. Unfortunately there will always be some travelers here who see the heads on death biers move and carry away the gruesome tale to swell the old prejudices, who will not wait long enough nor look deep enough to find their living corpse a noble old bishop in alabaster who has lain in peace some hundred years. Every day of our week in Burgos found us several times in the Cathedral. I used to arrive for the High Mass at nine, though before daybreak until nine there had been many services in the side chapels; it is still the custom with most Spaniards to kneel in recollection every morning. Strangely enough, I soon grew reconciled to the clumsy _coro_. It enabled the people to approach close to the altar in a peaceful secluded spot. Here at Burgos one can kneel on the altar's very steps, beside the big sanctuary lamp and the silver candlesticks that rise higher than a man. The onlooking tourist, who often spoils Italian churches for those who go to pray not to sightsee, in Spain is not permitted his ill-timed liberty. He can wander freely through the outer cathedral, but during the Mass, he cannot enter this inner temple unless he conforms to the accustomed usages. All must kneel at the moment of the Elevation or else leave. The lesson was taught us soon, for when the first morning in Burgos a lady near by in the chancel inadvertently began to read in her guide book, a verger in red plush cloak, bearing an authoritative silver staff, approached, and kindly but firmly showed her out. The richness of Spanish cathedrals at first is overpowering, that they are too rich and overloaded is a criticism which is quite justified, but it is the profusion of strength, not the cluttering of details to hide a weak understructure; it is a profusion that speaks the nation's character, her burning faith, her oriental generosity. In antique silver, jewels, vestments, wood carvings, tombs, they are veritable museums of art. A Spaniard has given generously to the church in all ages. Though even when prosperous he is content to live with a frugal simplicity hardly understood by our luxury-loving time, it is a law of his nature that his ideas of grandeur and of beauty should find their free expression in the House of God. I often had the sensation that the beggar kneeling in these truly royal churches felt himself a part of them; his own poor home was but one side of the picture, he could claim this other home as well. It was at Burgos we first met in the churches minor features that are essentially Spanish. The organ pipes flare out like trumpets; the reredos, or _retablo_, made up of carved wood panels, rises sometimes to a hundred feet behind the altar; and there is the metal-work of the great screens or _rejas_. This last was an art _de propia España_, and her churches would lack half their sublimity without the massive fretwork of iron or brass that shuts in the richly-decked altars. At Burgos we especially noticed the _reja_ of the Condestable chapel, with graceful wind-blown figures at the top. In the choir, round the lectern were piled ancient psalm books, some of them three feet high, their calfskin covers strengthened with metal claspings. The naturalness with which these priceless books are treated shows how happily bound to preceding generations, with no break of revolution and destruction, is this old land. This thought of the antiquity of her usages is a very potent one to every Spaniard, and the stranger too finds the purple robed canons chanting in their choir-stalls more impressive because for six hundred years in this same Cathedral they have intoned daily these same psalms. Another national talent is her carving in wood. The choir-stalls here were a revelation. The masters of this art, Berruguete, Vigarni, Montañés, may not be known to the rest of Europe, but they are locally very famous. Their intense realism appeals to the popular mind, and though in later centuries this realism degenerated into the bad taste of hanging the statues with robes, enough of earlier art remains to make one overlook these lapses. Should not a poet be judged by his best lines? Why must an image in wig and jewels blind one to the remarkable carved statues found side by side with it? The wood carvers of Spain speak the same language of sincerity as the mystic writers, and a knowledge of Luis de León, St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa, makes one better appreciate the sculptors. Not that they too are mystical. They do not soar so high. It is only a few chosen souls here and there through the centuries who can walk that perilous path, and probably they can express themselves only through the more intangible medium of speech. But these wood carvings are the fruit of men who understood the mystics and who worked in a like spirit of intense faith. I should say it was not in her paintings that the religious essence of this race was to be found, not in the somewhat posing monks of Zurbaran, nor in the gentle religiosity of Murillo's madonnas. Though a master of color, Murillo is too often akin in spirit to Carlo Dolce and Sassoferrato. It is the fashion to call these typically religious painters. But in the carved biblical scenes of _retablo_ and _sillería_ is shown more truly the inner spiritual intelligence of the serious Spaniard. Velasquez spoke for the reality of his time, its chivalry, its material force; and these masters of wood carving in more halting speech expressed the religious aspirations of the people. They worked with a realism that is often painful, yet the intensity with which they felt the scenes they depicted links them with the mystics. The wood carvings have not had justice done them, perhaps because they are for the most part painted, which certainly detracts from them. Fortunately choir-stalls were left in the natural wood, those at Burgos being a rich dark walnut with the polish that time only can give. We spent many happy hours studying this twelve years' work of the sculptor Vigarni. The seats are carved with grotesque, fantastic creatures, half man, half beast, the arm of the chair now made by an acrobat bent double backward, now by a monster with a tail in his mouth, or some bat-like demon. There is a frieze of Old Testament scenes too high to be well seen, but below them the New Testament story is told from the Annunciation to the Doubting Thomas after the Resurrection. Though the simpleness of earlier times is shown in the miniature devil that passes from the possessed man's lips, and in Mary Magdalene's dropped jaw of surprise when she meets her risen Lord, these carvings are not merely curious, they are soul-touching and beautiful. The type of face is the high-boned one the Spaniard prefers, with well-cut brows and aquiline nose. Notice the solemn beauty of Christ's face in the _qui ci ne pecato_. In the panel, the blind cured, seldom has the expression of absolute faith been better rendered than in the raised face of the old blind man. Do not pass by the Garden of Gethsemane with the three Apostles lying heavily asleep, the human shrug of the shoulder and outstretched hand of the Master: "Could ye not watch with me one hour?" While the Cathedral of Burgos shows much florid later work, especially the central tower and that of the Condestable chapel, under the too ornate additions the ancient purer church is plainly perceptible. It belonged to the Gothic of the Northern-France type, for pilgrims to her shrines and to fight in her crusades, brought foreign ideas to Spain at so early a date that it is useless to speculate about what a native architecture might have been. Some of the smaller churches of the town are worth visiting, such as San Nicolás, with a stone _retablo_ which is a tour de force of handicraft; San Lermes, and facing it the hospital of San Juan, where we first met the escutcheoned doorways of Spain, which, if kept within bounds, are arrogantly effective and national. Throughout the city are good examples of domestic architecture, such as the Casa del Cordón, built by the Constable of Castile, Don Pedro Fernández de Velasco, whose sumptuous tomb lies in the center of the Condestable Chapel, and whose pride as a Castilian speaks in the family proverb: "_Antes que Dios fuese Dios,_ _O que el sol iluminaba los peñascos,_ _Ya era noble la casa de los Vélascos._" "Before God was God, or the sun shone upon the rocks, already was the house of Velasco noble."[4] Above the entrance to his house the girdle of St. Francis connects his arms with those of his wife, as proud as he, for she was a Mendoza. One rainy afternoon we spent in the _Museo_ over the Gateway of Santa María, and there, step by step, traced Spain's art history,--statues from the former Roman city of Clunia in this province, a remarkable enameled altar-front of the Byzantine period, Romanesque and Gothic relics from the monasteries out on the plains, a Moorish arch found _in situ_, and tombs of that transition time from Gothic to Renaissance which in Spain was so flourishing a phase of art. Much as there is to hold one in the town, the bleak uplands outside have a desolate fascination that calls one out to them. There is an excursion to be made not far away to the Monastery of Miraflores, where Isabella built for her parents "the most perfectly glorious tomb in the world." Personally I prefer the quieter art of a Mino da Fiesole to this work of Gil de Siloe, rich though it is. The tomb is white marble, octagonal in shape, with sixteen lions supporting it. The weak Juan II lies by the side of his queen, who is turned slightly from him to read in her Book of Hours, in a natural attitude, as if she said pleasantly, "Now do be silent, I must read in peace for a few minutes." At Miraflores is a wooden statue of St. Bruno, with a keen and subtle face of the same ascetic type as that of the young monk we watched praying quite oblivious of the gaping tourists. It is of this statue that Philip IV remarked: "It does not speak, but only because he is a Carthusian monk." The indifference to strangers in the mystic young penitent before the altar was our second meeting with a trait found in the average Spaniard. He does not care an iota what the stranger thinks of him. He is not like the Italian, inclined to put his best foot forward. He will not change his ways because they are criticised; you can admire or you can dislike, it makes little difference to him; and this quiet poise, in peasant as well as grandee, is not fatuous, for its root lies in an innate self-respect. He feels he is loyal to his God, to his King, and to himself,--what better standards can you have? Avenues of trees lead out to another house of the Benedictine rule, a convent for nuns founded by the sister of Richard C[oe]ur de Lion. Many ladies of the royal line have retired to Las Huelgas, the nuns brought their dowries, and the mitered abbess held the rank of Princess-Palatine, with the power of capital punishment. The church has outside cloisters for the laity; the cloisters within the convent are never seen except on the rare occasions of a king's visit, when all who are able crowd in at the moment he enters. We were standing before the chancel where so many knights had performed the vigil of the armor--among others Edward I of England was knighted here--when a nun entered the _coro_, and in her trailing white robes bowed toward the altar--rather it was the slow courtesy of a court lady. We shrank away with the feeling that we had intruded uninvited on a ceremony, that the days of the abbess, Princess-Palatine, were the reality and we, inquisitive guide-book tourists, the anacronism, a sensation not uncommon in Spain. Burgos is the birthplace of the national hero, the Cid Campeador, "God's scourge upon the Moor." This contemporary of William the Conqueror, whom the erudites of the eighteenth century tried in vain to prove a mythical character,[5] may be said to dominate Spanish literature. Spain's epic, the "Romancero del Cid," has made its hero the historic Cid for all time, just as Shakespeare's genius vitalized a Henry V. Don Roderick Díaz de Bivar was born under the castle hill of Burgos in 1026, some small monuments standing on the site of his _casa solar_. He was a champion of popular rights, generous, chivalrous, faithful ever to his wife Jimena, a true guerrilla warrior, like the men of his age, sometimes crafty and cruel. The Cid was every inch a man, as his fellow countrymen are eminently _varonil_, his hold on the heart of the people is secure. There are no poems in the world whose lines ring and clang more valiantly than the "Romancero." Here is untamed red blood and courage: "With bucklers braced before their breasts, with lances pointing low, With stooping crests and heads bent down above the saddle-bow, All firm of hand and high of heart, they roll upon the foe. And he that in a good hour was born, his clarion voice rings out, And clear above the clang of arms is heard his battle-shout, 'Among them, gentlemen! Strike home for love of charity! The Champion of Bivar is here--Ruy Díaz--I am he!' Then bearing where Bermúez still maintains unequal fight Three hundred lances down they come, their pennons flickering white; Down go three hundred Moors to earth, a man to every blow; And when they wheel, three hundred more, as charging back they go. It was a sight to see the lances rise and fall that day; The shivered shields and riven mail, to see how thick they lay; The pennons that went in snow-white came out a gory red; The horses running riderless, the riders lying dead; While Moors called on Mohammed, and 'St. James' the Christians cry."[6] Wandering minstrels sang these _chansons de gestes_ for centuries, till they were a very part of the nation. The wooing of Jimena is strong with the unconscious vigor of those times. The Cid had slain her father in combat: "But when the fair Jimena came forth to plight her hand, Rodrigo gazing on her, his face could not command; He stood and blushed before her; then at the last said he, 'I slew thy sire, Jimena, but not in villany: In no disguise I slew him, man against man I stood, There was some wrong between us, and I did shed his blood. I slew a man, I owe a man; fair lady, by God's grace, An honored husband thou shalt have in thy dead father's place.'" And to the end the free-lance warrior proved a gallant husband. The ballad of their wedding feast was often in my mind in the silent streets of Burgos. "Within his hall of Burgos the king prepares the feast, He makes his preparation for many a noble guest, It is a joyful city, it is a gallant day, 'Tis the Campeador's wedding, and who will bide away? They have scattered olive branches and rushes on the street, And the ladies flung down garlands at the Campeador's feet, With tapestry and broidery their balconies between, To do his bridal honor, their walls the burghers screen. They lead the bulls before them all covered o'er with trappings, The little boys pursue them with hootings and with clappings, The fool with cap and bladder upon his ass goes prancing Amid troops of captive maidens with bells and cymbals dancing."[7] The old poet must have written with his eye straight on his subject; those eleventh century urchins baiting the bulls are startlingly realistic. When the Cid died, at Valencia, in 1099, still called on the maps Valencia del Cid, he was placed in full armor on his battle horse, Bavieca, and brought to San Pedro de Cardeña, eight miles from Burgos. Thither Jimena retired, and on her death was laid with her husband. The faithful horse, famous in the "Romancero" as Jimena herself, was buried under a tree of the convent near his master. For the Cid had left word, "When you bury Bavieca, dig deep. For shameful thing were it that he should be eaten by curs who hath trod down so much currish flesh of Moors." To-day Bavieca's master does not lie in the quiet dignity of San Pedro. After various vicissitudes his remains are kept in a chest in the city hall of Burgos, not the most appropriate of sepulchers for a national hero. On the last day of our stay in the old Gothic city, we climbed the hill from which it doubtless got its name, Burg, a fortified eminence. The castle where the Cid was married is a complete ruin, for when the French evacuated the fort in 1813 they blew it up. On every side stretched the level melancholy plain, and silhouetted against it was the elaborate stone lace-work of the Cathedral. For long I looked out on the remarkable landscape, so far from beautiful yet so thought arousing. Little by little I was learning how a race can be ascetic to its inmost core yet express itself in grandiose architecture; exalted in soul yet the most realistic people in Europe; serious and dignified, yet childlike in their zest of life. Here was man in his unsubtle vigor, not so liberal that he had no creed left, not so polished that he had lost the power of first wonder and emotion. Life was lived here, not analyzed and missed. VALLADOLID "They have no song the sedges dry And still they sing, It is within my heart they sing as I pass by, Within my heart they touch a spring, They wake a sigh, There is but sound of sedges dry In me they sing." GEORGE MEREDITH. From Burgos to Valladolid the monotonous Castile plain continued, unbroken by any hill and hardly a tree. Yet evening on the level steppes has a charm of its own. Like sunset at sea, nature has a free sweep of canvas on which to paint her pageant; details eliminated, the essential remains. One carries away many such memories from the silent plateau, till little by little the affection of the grave Castilian for his home is understood. On leaving Burgos there had occurred an amusing station scene. The man at the ticket office told us we could not start till the following day, as the train, on the point of arriving, was already full. So in discouragement we turned back to the distant hotel. Half way there a messenger from the station overtook us to say they had telegraphed ahead that there would be a few seats in the second class. We returned in time to board the packed train, and since it was the express to Madrid the second class carriages were excellent. As was the custom all over Spain, the hotel bus at Valladolid was waiting, and drove us immediately to the inn, where we had the usual bare but clean rooms, and the usual well-cooked generous dinner: if the trains were to pick us up as they chose, at any rate we were not going to starve or be eaten alive. It is well to have the first view of Valladolid by night as we did, under an early moon, for in the daytime it is modern, flat, and unpicturesque, a sharp contrast to Burgos. The moonlight soon tempted us out to explore the town. In the Plaza Mayor all was animation, an unbroken promenade of people under the arcades before the gay shops, officers in bright uniforms, and ladies in Parisian hats; it might have been any provincial city in Europe. Apart from this active lung of the town, the quiet streets were so deserted that our footsteps roused a startling echo. We passed under the huge fragment of the Cathedral, a nave only; the transepts stand roofless, and a new ruin is as depressing a thing as there is in life. The architect of the Escorial who designed this, Herrera, gave his name to the pseudo-classic style, "art made tongue-tied by authority," that followed the Plateresque abuse of ornament, just as his in turn was succeeded by the fantastic prancing art of Churriguera, again a reaction. An example of this last, the University, stood in the square near the Cathedral, and even the kindly moonlight could not soften the overladen meaningless mass; the cold severe lines of Herrera were dignified and regrettable in comparison. For me a Churrigueresque building is the ne plus ultra of bad taste in architecture, and Spain has a wealth of them. That man can raise a Santiago and a León, and some four hundred years later a San Isidro of Madrid, that the same race can carve a Pórtico de la Gloria and the Transparente of Toledo, show interesting possibilities of retrogression! Alas! we thought, after the strong old Gothic of Burgos, is Valladolid going to be just barren like its Cathedral and chaotic like its University? We went on in the moonlight and came to a white gleaming plaza where a church of the thirteenth century stood isolated, Santa María la Antigua, with a beautiful Lombard tower, and also that feature peculiar to Romanesque art in Spain, an outside cloister for the laity. This was decidedly better. The next morning when we came to explore the town, though we found no Gothic, we had our first introduction to a phase of architecture which is confined to the Peninsula. It coincided with Isabella's reign, and was a characteristic outburst of its new wealth and conquests, appropriately efflorescent and grandiose, though if carried one step beyond it would be decadent. This short period is called Plateresque, from _platero_, silversmith, for its elaborate surface decoration of scrolls, medallions, and heraldic ornament is sublimated smith's work. It occurred during the transition from Gothic to Renaissance, so it combined itself with either one or the other of these styles. It may be dull to give these pedagogical details and yet, as I hinted, if one is to understand Spain, one must have some smattering of architecture. Valladolid is worth stopping to see on one's entrance to Spain, if it were only for the clear-cut summary it gives of the different schools, always excepting Gothic. As it and Salamanca were the two places where the silversmith's art flourished, so they are the two centers for the best Plateresque buildings. They happen to be, unfortunately, the two cities that suffered most from the French invasion. Their churches and colleges were pillaged and battered, and though in modern times they have been restored, the first touch of perfection, "the first fine careless rapture" can never be recaught. [Illustration: THE FAÇADE OF SAN GREGORIO, VALLADOLID] Valladolid has three notable examples of Plateresque, San Pablo, San Gregorio, and the Colegio de Santa Cruz. If you have a weakness for the art of the builder this introduction to the rich and admirable expression of Spain at the zenith of her material power is an occasion. There is an excitement in coming on something original which has not been hackneyed by photograph. Thus, when I first entered the square where San Pablo's façade rises, I stood still in astonishment; I had never seen anything like this, and at first I could not tell if I liked it or not. Tier on tier soared the carved shields and crests, bizarre but nevertheless stately. Close by was the even stranger façade of San Gregorio, one vast crest with elaborate arabesques and statues. Being founded by the great primate of Toledo, Cardinal Ximenez, it was appropriate to meet here in the courtyard with some Mudéjar work, Christian and Moorish elements combined. It was in this convent that the Dominican, Bartolomé Las Casas, "Apostle of the Indians," spent the last twenty years of his energetic, troubled life, writing his history of the Colonies. He died at the advanced age of ninety-two, "A man who would have been remarkable in any age of the world," says Ticknor, "and who does not seem yet to have gathered in the full harvest of his honours." The third of the Plateresque buildings, well within Renaissance lines this last, the College of the Holy Cross founded by Cardinal Mendoza, now contains a grammar school, a library of some thousand volumes open to the public, and the Museum of the city. On no account should the _Museo_ be missed, for it holds a wonderful collection of wood carvings, an art which is to Spain what Italy's frescoes are to her: these statues were gathered chiefly from convents sacked by the French. Valladolid was personally associated with this national development, for most of the master-carvers lived at one time or another in the city. Spain's best sculptor, Berruguete, worked for years for the monks of San Benito, the _retablo_ of whose church is now in detached statues in the museum. He had studied under Michael Angelo, and though he had a distinct personality of his own, he plainly showed Italian influence. His pupil, Esteban Jordán, lived here, also the exaggerated Juan de Juní, and a more famous master, Alonzo Cano, painter and architect too. Cano, who died a canon in Granada Cathedral, is said to have fled the town--his house is still pointed out--when accused of the murder of his wife, though later investigations have thrown doubt on the whole story. This irascible master, one of the warmest hearted of men underneath, taught drawing to the Don Baltasar Carlos whom Velasquez painted, and I fear the infante found him very cross at times. Velasquez and Cano were friends and must have talked over that charming little prince. Cano was indeed a character. When a corporation demurred at the price of a statue he had made for them he shattered the image with a blow; and on his death bed he could not bring himself to kiss an inartistic crucifix, saying, "Give me a plain cross that I may venerate _Jesucristo_ as he is pictured in my own mind." The room of coarsely-carved statues, formerly used in the Holy Week processions, should be passed with a glance, but the collection of smaller works deserves long study. The most beautiful group I thought was the Baptism in the Jordan by a later carver, Gregorio Hernández, of Galicia, who died in Valladolid in 1636. His art is not classic, indeed most Spanish sculptors cared little for the ideal perfection of the human body, their strength lay in the individual portrait, not in rendering a type. Hernández softened the crudity or the realist school to which he belonged by depicting nobility of face and bearing. The scene of the Jordan is a panel with the two chief figures life-sized in full relief. The Baptist, his well-modeled limbs strong from life in the desert, leans forward to pour the river water on the head of his Lord, with an expression of such vivid rapture and awe that it holds you spellbound. There is little in art that can surpass this in emotional sincerity. The story of the Gospel is told to its fullest possibility. What the sculptor felt in every fiber he has succeeded in making others feel, and though an expression so poignant may not be highest art, it justifies itself by its direct appeal to the human heart. It is told of Hernández that he never undertook a work till he had first prayed. He has here also a statue of St. Teresa, spoiled by the heavy paint, and a bust of St. Anne, successfully colored. Even if you are prepared to find the wood carvings painted it frets you; it almost spoils the statues, but it was the custom and must be accepted. "_Es la costumbre_" is a closing argument in a country whose link with the past has never been rudely broken. If her remarkable wood carvings come as a surprise, so will some of the practical developments of this small progressive city. The hospital that looks out on the leafy park of the Magdalena is run in approved modern fashion. A brisk young doctor who spoke English, having learned from a friend in the English College here, showed us over the wards with legitimate pride. They radiated from a big central rotunda; on both sides of each ward were large windows and at the end of each a pretty altar. There were five hundred public beds, and private rooms were to be had for the sum of two dollars a week! The greeting between doctor and patients was a pleasant thing to see,--he chatted and joked with the children, and, as we left, stopped at the door to lift with real kindness an ill man who had just arrived in a gayly-painted country cart. The newcomer was a gentle-faced Castilian, whose sons had brought him in from the plains; as the stalwart boys carried the trembling old man I thought of another touching hospital scene. Perhaps Rab and his friends came to my mind because bounding round us on our visit to the hospital was a beautiful Scotch collie. "Laddie" was an unfamiliar sight on a Spanish street; he belonged to the English College and is a great pet of the seminarians. In Valladolid are two foreign institutions: the Scotch college, founded by a Colonel Semple in 1627; and the English, which continues the foundation of St. Albans, and has relics of its name-saint of the third century. It was endowed in Spain by Sir Francis Englefield, who retired here after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Some forty English students are educated for the priesthood and return on their ordination for work in their native land. Naturally the great hour of this college was during the religious persecutions under Elizabeth, when it was death to be a priest in England. Twenty-seven from this one small group were executed. Their portraits hang along the cloisters: Cadwallader, Stark, Bell, Walpole, Weston, Sutheron,--each of the heroic band started from these quiet halls to meet a martyr's death. Controversy is out of date, I hope, to-day. But there is such a thing as fair-mindedness, and a visit to Spain at every step shows she has not had her share of it from English-speaking peoples. With every chapter of our guide book railing at the Inquisition, I could not help feeling that these martyred Englishmen should not be so completely forgotten. Not that the _tu quoque_ argument excuses persecution on either side. But an age should be judged by its own ethics or true views of history are impossible. The New Englanders who, two hundred years later than Isabella's institution, hanged a few Quakers on Boston Common were none the less moral men; and General Robert E. Lee fighting for slavery in the nineteenth century is a man we have a right to admire. The mere fact of the Inquisition being founded by that magnanimous woman called by Bacon "an honor to her sex and the cornerstone of the greatness of Spain" should tell us its motives were sincere. Her age had not yet learned the lesson, which we have acquired slowly, bit by bit through experience, that political or religious existence is possible with divided factions, not only possible but that a nation is more vigorous because of them. As Bishop Creighton wisely says: "The modern conception of free discussion and free thought is not so much the result of a firmer gasp of moral principles as it is the result of the discovery that uniformity is not necessary for the maintenance of political unity." Isabella's age agreed that persecution was necessary to preserve Christianity. And since only Spain was in immediate contact with Islam, and centuries of crusade against the invading infidel had the natural result of making the Spaniard sternly orthodox, it was there that the Inquisition flourished. It dragged on for over three centuries, and from 1481 to 1812, 35,000 people were burned,[8] these numbers being Richard Ford's, to whom the Inquisition was as a red rag to a bull. The German scholar Schack acknowledges that all the Moors and heretics burned in Spain by the Holy Office do not equal the women witches burned alive in Germany during the seventeenth century alone. In France, in the one night of St. Bartholomew, almost as many victims fell as during the whole three hundred years of the Inquisition. Of England the publishing of recent investigations makes it needless to speak; blood flowed in torrents there. Besides those well known ones who met death under Mary Tudor, the Catholic martyrdoms give such details as the "Scavenger's Daughter," that cramping circle of iron; "Little Ease," where a prisoner, could not sit or stand or lie down; needles thrust under the nails; the rack-master of the Tower boasting he had made Alexander Briant longer by a foot than God had made him; the general custom of cutting down the victim from the gallows while still alive to tear out his heart and quarter him,--accounts that put the _Autos da Fé_ in the shade. In the annals of Spain is not a scene that equals the blood curdling horror of the martyrdom in Dorchester, England, of Hugh Green in the year 1642.[9] Yet an Englishman, a Frenchman, a German, if fanaticism or cruelty are mentioned, makes his inevitable trite reference to the Spanish Inquisition. It has been made the scape-goat of all religious persecution. Abuse has so fixed the idea that it was a barbarous machine controlled by contorted natures to whom bloodshed was a revelry that any effort to place it in a truer light is sure to be called retrogression. I am far from attempting a defense of this painful aberration of the Christian mind, but what I hold is, if a student went to the records of Alcalá and Simancas, open free to all, not to search out the hundred mistaken cases from the ten thousand proven ones, the method up to this, but, following the first law of intellectual work, investigation without preconceived bias, if he tried to understand this phase of man's slow development _per errorem ad veritatem_, then the thin-lipped, gleaming-eyed, bloodthirsty Inquisitor of the popular fancy would be taken from the pillory where he has been pelted these centuries past, and his mistaken sincerity stand justified by the conditions of his time. The records prove that the Holy Office was used seldom against scholars but against relapsed Mohammedans and Jews, false _beati_, sorcerers, and witches. "_Ningún hombre de mérito científico fué quemado por la Inquisición_," is the clear statement of one of the greatest of living scholars, Menéndez y Pelayo, and he who would cross swords with that erudite champion must be sure indeed of his assertions. Not one Spanish thinker or statesman, such as Bishop Fisher, Sir Thomas More, the Carthusian priors, Houghton, Webster, and Laurence, the poet Robert Southwell, the scholarly Edmund Campion, and a host of others,[10] graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, executed for their faith during the hundred and fifty years of religious persecution in England, not one man of like standing was put to death in Spain. Had he been, some righteous hater of the "ferocious Inquisitors," would ere this have produced his name and works. Archbishop Talavera was accused but was finally justified; if the poet Luis de León was imprisoned, he was set free on examination. It was not his own countrymen but Calvin in Geneva, who had the Spanish scholar, the Unitarian, Miguel Servet burned alive, and it was the mild Melanchthon who wrote to the reformer saying: "The Church owes thee gratitude. I maintain that the tribunal has acted in accordance with justice in having put to death a blasphemer." In Germany at that period the civil courts inflicted capital punishment on sorcery, blasphemy, and church robbery; had the same law held in Spain the number of the Inquisition executions would be appreciably lowered. Lord Bacon, who was a just and humane man, mentions as a matter of course that in his time the English civil courts used torture: the Peninsula was not ahead of its time in this respect. As for that debated subject the effect on the Spanish character of the _Santo Oficio_, prejudices have built up so twisted a labyrinth that the best way out for one who would keep his level-headed balance is to hold fast to the thread of internal evidence. Unconscious of writing history for the future, hence his unassailable veracity, Cervantes tells in detail of the life in court and tavern, in the town and on the desolate highways after the Inquisition had flourished for more than a century. Does he portray a degraded race, finger on lips whispering, "Hush, or you will be overheard"? If the Spaniard was ground down in fear and deceit why is it that to-day, of all the peoples of the continent, he is the most independent in character? It has been said that a burgher of Amsterdam does not differ more from a Neapolitan, than a Basque from an Andalusian, yet in this trait of sturdy independence all Spaniards are alike; the historian Ticknor wrote during his stay in Spain, "The lower class is, I think, the finest _material_ I have met in Europe to make a great and generous people." If under the Inquisition "every intellectual impulse was repressed,"[11] how dared theologians and philosophers, such as Vives, Isla, and Feijóo boldly attack with their pens superstitions and degenerated religious customs? Is the poetry of Juan de la Cruz, Luis de León and the prose of Teresa, the work of souls who feared to adore their God freely? And is it not undeniable that the two golden centuries of Spanish art and literature flourished under this bugbear horror, this "_coco de niños y espantajo de bobos_," as Menéndez y Pelayo calls it? Used chiefly against Judaism and Islamism, occasionally the Inquisition became the tool of a tyrannic king for private vengeance. Indeed, there are some historians such as von Ranke, Lenormant, de Maistre, who hold it to have been more a royal than an ecclesiastic instrument, fostered by the Hapsburgs to augment their autocratic rule.[12] Certainly all confiscated property went to the Crown. Man's slow development _per errorem ad veritatem_, slow indeed one may say, in the face of certain realities of our own time. Happily the generations of cant and holier-than-thou are passing, and we are looking history more honestly in the face. It is dawning on us that religious persecution in 1492 is no more frightful than slavery in 1860 or an Opium War in 1843. Modern Spain realizes the wrong of persecution, the farce of a religion of love using the sword, as thoroughly as does every other civilized country. Outside the church of St. Philip Neri in Cadiz is a tablet proudly commemorating the abolition of the Inquisition within its walls in 1812. To return to less nettlesome themes. The little English College, so interesting a memorial of past history, a forgotten haven of refuge in Old Spain, must be a peaceful memory to look back on by priests whose later lives are spent in Birmingham or London slums. The pleasant sitting-room of each inmate, the recreation hall with its theater, the library, with the latest English books jostling old Spanish tomes,--all spoke of contented full days. We turned the parchment leaves where the college records for its three hundred years in Spain have been kept, where each student is mentioned, from the troubled first days down to the group of ten who had arrived from England a week before our visit, among them a young Reginald Vaughan, nephew of the Cardinal. With up-to-date hospital and busy manufactures, Valladolid does not seem like an ancient capital of the Spanish court. We would read in our guide book that the miserable Juan II had his favorite of a lifetime, Álvaro de Luna, beheaded in the big square; that here Juan's noble daughter married Ferdinand of Aragon; and that, seated on a throne in the Plaza Mayor, Charles V pardoned the remaining Comuneros, the rebels who had dared assert the federal principle against his centralization of government, Spain's last outcry before she sank under the blighting tyranny of her Hapsburg and Bourbon rulers. Such past happenings were interesting, but they would have the same meaning if read of in London or Boston. However, there were two memories of Valladolid that were vivid enough to haunt one as one walked about its hum-drum streets: they are associated with the saddest hours of two supreme men. No. 7 Calle de Cristóbal Colón is the insignificant house where Isabella's High Admiral died in 1506, in obscurity and neglect, his patroness dead, and Ferdinand ungrateful. A hundred years later, in another small house, now owned by the government, Cervantes lived in poverty. Unknown and undivined he walked these streets, looking at the passers-by with his wise, tolerant eyes. Fresh, perhaps, from writing the monologue on the Golden Age, delivered by the Don over a few brown acorns of inspiration, Cervantes in threadbare cape went to his humble scrivener's work, the golden time of justice and kindness existing only in his own gallant heart. It was in Valladolid that the ladies of his household, widowed sisters, niece, his daughter and wife, sewed to gain their daily bread, and as if penury were not enough, here they were thrown into prison because a young noble, wounded in a street brawl, was carried into their house to die. Cervantes' life reads like one of the romantic tales he loves to digress with in his great novel, when grandee, barber and priest, court lady, Eastern damsel, and _labrador's_ daughter, gather round the inn table--the servants a natural part of the group--in the easy meeting of the classes which is still a reality in Spain. Born at Alcalá, Cervantes' first bent was toward literature, but having gone to Rome in the suite of a cardinal, in Italy he joined the army against the infidel. He fought at Lepanto, where his bravery drew on him the notice of Don John of Austria, that alluring young leader of whom one of his state council wrote, "Nature had endowed him with a cast of countenance so gay and pleasing that there was hardly anyone whose good-will and love he did not immediately win." It makes a pleasant picture, the visit of this high-spirited young hero to his wounded soldier in the hospital of Messina. Later, Cervantes fought at Naples, at Tunis, in Lombardy, making part of his century's stirring history, and all the while storing his mind with the culture of Italy. It was when returning to Spain that some Algerian pirates took him prisoner. His five years' captivity in Africa stand an unsurpassed exhibition of grandeur of character, proving that the highest gifts of mind and heart go together in perfect accord. Loaded with chains, twice brought to be hanged with a rope around his neck, his knightly spirit rose above all misery. There were twenty-five thousand wretched Christians then in bondage in Algiers. Cervantes waited on the sick, shared his food with the more destitute, encouraged the despairing,--a Christian in the fullest sense of the word is the testimony of a Fray Juan Gil, who, belonging to a brotherhood for the redemption of prisoners, worked for his release. In this harsh school "_donde aprendió a tener paciencia en las adversidades_"--the adversities that were to follow him all his life--was chastened to self-effacement and a sublime patience an ardent spirit that by nature chafed against wrong. What wonder that the late flowering of this man's soul, the book written when past middle age, should be of chivalry all compact, a nobility of sentiment exposed half seriously, half in jest! What wonder that in the midst of laughter the voice breaks with tenderness for the lovable _caballero andante_! His Quixote is Cervantes' own unquenchable spirit. A bitter experience of life never deadened his faith in man nor dulled his heroic gayety. With exquisite humor he realized the alien aspect of such trust and love and faith in the disillusioning realities of life, so he veiled it all under the kindly cloak of a cracked-brained knight. The wandering adventures of a fool make the wisest, most human-hearted book ever written. Toward the end of his slavery, when Cervantes passed into the hands of the viceroy of Algiers, Hassan Pasha, his force of character gained influence over the tyrant. But he asked too high a ransom for the captive's family to pay. The priest who had watched the young soldier on his deeds of mercy, worked indefatigably for his release. A letter was sent to Philip II to beg aid for a soldier of Lepanto. At length three hundred ducats were raised. Hassan Pasha asked a thousand. Already was Cervantes chained to the oar of a galley, bound for Constantinople, when at the last hour Father Gil, helped by some Christian merchants, succeeded in raising five hundred ducats, which ransom the Viceroy accepted. At thirty-four years of age, Cervantes again stepped on Spanish soil. But the world was then much as it is now; years had passed since Lepanto,--he was forgotten. His patron Don John of Austria had died in Flanders two years before his release. He joined the army once more and fought in the expedition against the Azores; then seeing there was no chance of advancement, he returned to his first career, that of letters. His plays and poems had small success: a pathetic phrase in the scene where the _cura_ burns Quixote's books and comes on an epic by one, Cervantes, "better versed in poverty and misfortunes than in verses," has deeper meaning when his checkered career is known. Twenty-five years of obscurity and abject poverty succeeded each other, his lot so lowly it is hard to trace his steps. Whole years remain a blank. The brave heart never flagged, no bitterness tinged his kindly tolerance. This Castilian hidalgo of ripe culture earned his bread in the humblest ways. 1588 found him in Seville as commissary victualer for the Great Armada. Tradition says he visited La Mancha, the desert he was to immortalize, to collect tithes for a priory of St. John, and that the villagers in anger cast him into prison, where he conceived the idea of his novel. This child of his wit he hints to us was born in a jail. The sad years in Valladolid followed, and there in 1605, at fifty-eight years of age, he published the first part of "Don Quixote." Its success was immediate. The grace of the style, the inimitable humor, and the underflowing current of mellow wisdom, made it from the start, what Sainte-Beuve called it, "the book of humanity." However, its publication did not much better Cervantes' fortunes. He retired to Madrid, where he lived on a small pension from the Archbishop of Toledo. A French noble visiting Spain asked for the famous author, and was told, "He who had made all the world rich was poor and infirm though a soldier and a gentleman." In 1613 appeared his "Novelas Exemplares," a remarkable collection of tales which gave Scott the idea of the Waverley novels. The second part of "Don Quixote," equal to the first in vigor and charm, appeared when Cervantes was sixty; "his foot already in the stirrup," he gives us in a preface, the moving description of himself. In the latter part of his life, according to a custom of the time, he became a tertiary of the Franciscan Order, and on his death in 1616 they buried him humbly in the convent of nuns in Madrid, where his daughter was a religious. Ill fortune still pursued him, for to-day there is no trace of his last resting-place. It is with thoughts of this heroic life--this man lovable as his own Don, with a gentle stammer in his speech, and the kindly wise look in his eyes, his left hand maimed from Lepanto, his shoulders bowed and his chestnut hair turned to silver by the ceaseless calamities of life--it is with such memories one looks down from the high-road on the small house where he wrote his masterpiece. Columbus on his deathbed, and Cervantes in poverty writing "Quixote"--two such associations make a visit to Valladolid memorable. OVIEDO IN THE ASTURIAS "It is perfectly ridiculous to pretend that, because they dress the Madonna and saints in rich robes, the Spaniards are ignorant that a statue is but a symbol. They sing their faith, we whisper ours, but the words have the same meaning, and the same thought is in the mind ... Draw a bias line enclosing the Basque provinces,--Navarre, Castile, Aragon, Catalonia, and you have there old religious Spain as she appears in history, with a vivid and practical faith, an irreproachable clergy, a piety of the heart reflected in the manners."--RENÉ BAZIN. We left Valladolid toward evening, in order to stop over a night in Palencia, before going north to Asturias. The cathedral of Palencia is well worth the pause, even though the visit may be limited to a night in the Continental Inn and a hasty daybreak visit to the church; the small cities of central Spain are of so individual a character that each stamps itself separately and indelibly on the memory. The dawn was just breaking on a raw, rainy morning when we walked through the silent streets of the town. In spite of the early hour, near each of the water fountains stood a long row of antique-shaped jars, some of red clay, some like old silver. For each housewife places her jar in line, and when the drinking water is turned on, each fills her crock in turn, according as it was put in the row. At the biblical wells of Palestine the Syrian women to-day use ugly, square Rockefeller oil cans, but happily conservative Spain is not partial to innovations. It was on this early morning walk that I first noticed the white palm leaves, some six feet in length, fastened to the balconies or above a window. One finds them all over the country. They are from the palm forests of Elche in the south, and each Easter new ones are blessed and hung out on the houses, some say to guard against lightning. Later, in Madrid, we saw one decorating the King's palace. The Cathedral of Palencia is of the same tawny yellow as the plains about it. The east end is early Gothic, the western part of a later, weaker period. Like Salisbury it has the uncommon feature of two sets of transepts; the clearstory is carried round the church, unbroken by rose windows at the west or transept ends. The interior in the dim light of a rainy October morning was picturesque past description. There are times when the chances of travel bring one to a spot at just its perfect hour. Thus we saw this church in a moment of such exquisite half light and quietude that its memory is a possession for life. Behind the High Altar rose an isolated chapel, set detached in the midst of the ambulatory, and through its iron _rejas_ were seen the blurred glimmer of candles, the veiled kneeling figures of the people, an aged white-haired priest at the Altar; high upon the wall the coffin of the ancient Queen Urraca. The effect was indescribable,--austere, ascetic, yet with a passionate glamour essentially Spanish. A masterpiece could an artist make of this detached chapel, lighted for divine service each day at dawn with such unconscious naturalness. Architects may say that Spanish cathedrals are exaggerated and overloaded, that they lack the restraint and purity of line of Chartres, Amiens, and the Isle de France churches which are the world's best Gothic. All this may well be true, yet Spain can smile securely at criticism. She has a soul in her places of worship, a soaring exaltation of the imagination that imparts the assurance of a living faith. Firmly and ardently she believes in Jesus Christ, her Redeemer, and with all her lofty intensity she prostrates herself in worship. We wandered round the dusky aisles, deciphering tombs, some of whose effigies held their arms raised in prayer,--only a Spaniard could endure to look even at such a tiring attitude! But the time for loitering was limited. The transept clock, a knight, a Moor, and a lion, sounded the warning we must heed if we were to catch the early train for the North. The thoughtful innkeeper had saved us some precious minutes by sending the hotel omnibus to wait outside the Cathedral, and we rattled--in its literal sense--to the distant station. The city was at last fully awake, and each water jar had now an owner; one by one they followed each other at the pump, with pleasant greetings and chatter. Then again stretched the tawny plains. The fields of León were tractless wastes of mud from the rain of the past weeks. Seen from the car window, each village on the truncated mountain was the exact copy of its neighbor, the same monotonous note of color in adobe wall and denuded steppe. It was in vain to look for some distinction to mark one group of mud houses, called Paredes de Nava, birthplace of Spain's best sculptor Berruguete, from a similar mud-emblocked place called Cisneros, feudal home of Cardinal Ximenez's family; the imagination had to supply the difference. Every one must come prepared for Spanish trains to go at a leisurely pace--about fifteen miles an hour is the average of the express route. From Palencia to Oviedo was a twelve-hour trip, and the distance covered was a hundred and sixty miles. Of course one crossed the Cantabrian mountains, the continuation of the Pyrenees along the northern coast, and they are no slight barrier since they sometimes rise to a height of 8,000 feet. We passed the city of León toward noon, when there came a respite from the dull treeless plain, for, beyond the town stretched a thinly-wooded district which gave the first reminder since leaving the Basque valleys that the season still was autumn. After central Spain, the bleak hills that now began seemed positively beautiful,--so many pleasures are relative. Slowly the train climbed the mountain wall that from earliest times has protected the Asturian principality from the invader. Near the summit, emerging from a tunnel several miles long, we looked out over a glorious panorama, the beauty not being relative this time, but as truly magnificent as some of Switzerland's show views. The storm had covered the peaks with freshest snow, the sky was a frosty dark blue, mountain rose behind mountain for miles, the white road was flung a sinuous ribbon round the folds of the hills; below lay fertile valleys of greenest grass with greenest trees and happy nestling farms. The secure mountain wall gave the Asturian courage to build a home wherever his whim chose. He was not forced like the Castilian by centuries of Moorish inroads to herd in a compact town. As the puffing train waited for breathing space on the crest of the pass, a group of peasants boarded it. They wore the white wooden clogs of the province that differ from ordinary clogs by having stilts, a couple of inches high, to lift them above the mud; and they brought with them, on a sledge, as wheels are of no use up these steep hills, an antique curiosity of a trunk. We began to hope that old costumes and customs still held in this isolated corner of the world, though the engineering of the road in the descent was disturbingly up-to-date,--a series of loops, cuts, and sharp turns; sometimes three parallel lines of rail over which we were to pass lay one below the other, sometimes directly across the valley we saw our trail; a distance of twenty-six miles is covered where a crow would fly seven. The principality of Asturias has given its name to the heir apparent of the Spanish crown since the 14th century, when a daughter of the Duke of Lancaster married the Spanish king's eldest son, and her father claimed for her a title equal to that of Prince of Wales to the English throne. The connection by marriage between Spain and England has been a frequent one. It began in the 12th century, when Henry II's daughter married Alfonso VIII of Castile; later the Plantagenet Edward I had for wife a Spanish infanta. From the two daughters of Pedro the Cruel, who married into the English royal family, on one side descended Henry VIII, from the other, by a marriage back again in Spain, sprang Isabella the Catholic. After the ill-fated union of Isabella's daughter with Henry VIII and that of Mary Tudor and Philip II, connection by marriage between Spain and England ceased for centuries. To-day, as all the world knows, the young queen of Spain, Doña Victoria, with the same blonde hair as Isabella, is an Englishwoman, and a rosy little prince bears the title of these distant mountains. It is a fitting title for the heir to the throne, since this province is the cradle of Spanish nationality, and never was vassal to Roman or Moor. The people are a mixture of the aboriginal Iberians and the Visigoths who were here finally merged in one people and here reconstructed the Spanish monarchy. So proud is an Asturian of his origin that he thinks, like the Basques, that his mere birth confers nobility; every native of the province is an hidalgo. Did not the Asturian lady, the duenna of the Duchess, remark to Don Quixote that her husband was _hidalgo como el Rey porque era montañés_? When in 711 the last of the Gothic kings, Roderick, was defeated by the Moors who had lately crossed from Africa, a remnant of the Christian army took refuge in these northern mountains. At Cavadonga, an historic defeat was inflicted on the Moslem army in 718, by Pelayo, Spain's first king, chosen leader because he was the bravest of the people. The Moorish chronicle, too close to the struggle to see its vital issues, speaks of "one Belay, a contemptible barbarian who roused the people of Asturish." Without Cavadonga the face of Europe had been changed. Had not the Mussulmans from Africa met this repulse, they had pushed on beyond the Pyrenees before the Franks were strong enough to withstand them. Often rose this thought when reading the sentimental regrets for the Moors in Spain found in guide books and histories. Had Spain not warred for eight hundred years against the invader, had she not endured with such Spartan courage the insecurity of life and property caused by ceaseless forays from the south, European civilization had been put back for centuries. Like most virile nations, she has the defect of her qualities, and when the final victory was hers she went too far. But this should not blind us to the nobility of the _Reconquista_. Within reach of Cavadonga, sacred to every Spaniard as the cradle of his race and religion, I could not help asking the cause of the ceaseless regret for the Moor. A lover of the picturesque, like Washington Irving, has a right to gloss over the days of the Alhambra, but it seems strange for serious history to hold up the Mohammedan in Spain as a model of cleanliness, industry, and tolerance in contrast to the Christian, in face of the centuries of piracy by sea, the barbarity of African prisons where thousands of Spaniards languished in chains, and also--a thought that often came to me when walking through the filthy, narrow streets in Moslem countries--if the Moor in Spain is to be so regretted, why are not the northern cities of Africa models for modern Christians to emulate? The Moor came from them, and many of his race left Spain to return to them. I would not belittle the Arab civilization in the Peninsula, for under the Ommiade dynasty, Cordova reached a distinguished height of culture, but what I object to is the partisan spirit that places Moors on one side to be praised and extenuated, and Spanish Christians on the other to be condemned. Facts are so distorted that many think the re-conquest of Andalusia meant the substitution of backward ignorance for an enlightened rule, whereas the Moors themselves, long before the coming of their northern conquerors, had destroyed their own higher civilization. The flower of their culture (always an exotic, for Islamism as hitherto interpreted is incapable of strengthening it) was withered before Alfonzo VI and the Cid had set foot further south than Toledo. Under the Ommiade caliphs, for about five generations, life probably resembled the golden picture drawn for us as typical of Moorish sway. A few able rulers disguised the fact that the government was never anything else but a despotism. This _siglo de oro_ was well over by 1030. Some barbarous warrior tribes, from Africa, the Almoravides, swept away the feeble remains of Ommiade rule, to be in their turn routed by other African invaders, the fanatic Almohades. These last persecuted Averroës as holding views too liberal for a true Mohammedan, and the scholar died in misery and exile, just as in the same century the remarkable Spanish-Jew, Maimonides, was accused of teaching atheism by his fellow Israelites. Rejected by his own people, the fame of Averroës came later through his study by European Schoolmen. His teachings, like most of what is of value in Arab learning, was of Greek origin, and had reached him by way of Persia, which never wholly conformed to the set tenets of Islam. Why do the anti-Spanish historians never mention that in the same era in which Averroës, the philosopher, was persecuted by his fellow-believers, a college of translators under the patronage of the Archbishop Raimundo of Toledo, from 1130 to 1150, put into Latin the most scientific works of the Moors? Mohammedan civilization in Spain, from decay within, was completely disintegrated by 1275. The caliphs of Granada led the lives of weak voluptuaries, artistic but decadent; no rose-colored romancing can veil their essential decline. Isabella's court, traveling with its university, with the learned Peter Martyr instructing the young nobles in Renaissance lore, so that a son of the Duke of Alva, and a cousin of the King are to be found among the lecturers of Salamanca, presents a noble contrast. When the _Reconquista_ was achieved, and after three thousand seven hundred battles, the Spaniard was again master in his own land, grievous mistakes were made, until finally, in 1609, in a panic of fear that the corsairs of Africa were uniting with their co-religionists along the Spanish coasts, the Moriscos were expelled. Spain inflicted this blow on herself at an ill moment, since already from the enormous emigration to the New World, her crying need was population. But this act of bad government whereby she threw away over half a million of her inhabitants (always remember, however, far more Moorish blood remained than was lost, for nine centuries of occupation had well infiltered it through the southern provinces) did not drive out the intellectual and moral backbone of the land as we are given to understand. The Moors of Isabella's day were not the liberal-minded, cultivated people they had been under the Ommiade caliphs four centuries earlier, and the persecuted Moriscos of Philip III's time were far lower in standing. Also it cannot be questioned that Valencia, the province that expelled them, whose rich soil to-day supports a crowded population, quickly filled up, and soon showed with its irrigation the same industry that seemed peculiar to the Moors. It was central Spain, eminently "old Christian," that when its people flocked as adventurers to America, could offer neither fertile soil nor inviting climate to lure new settlers. The quotations usually cited to prove that Valencia was irremediably devastated by the Expulsion are taken from men who wrote within a few years of the disaster; it would be an easy matter, following the same sophistry to quote aspects of our South a generation ago that could make the Civil War appear an irremediable blight. Seeking for the cause of the tendency to overrate the Moor at the expense of his hereditary enemy, it seems to me it is to be traced to that period of rancor, the Invincible Armada, when religious and political passions ran so high that it was forgotten that the hated Spaniard was before all else a Christian, and on his heroic struggle for the Cross had hung the civilization of Europe. The capital of the Asturian province is Oviedo. Alfonso II, the eighth king that followed Pelayo, made it his chief city, but in spite of its antiquity it is a disappointing town. I had pictured an unspoiled bit of the past, locked in as it is by mountains whose valleys reach to the city gates, with curiously-named saints still serving as titulars, with the oldest remains of Christian architecture in the Peninsula. But the reality is a smug, commonplace, successful little city of slight local color. The mansions are Renaissance, not mediæval; if you stumble on an ancient street it soon brings you to a straight new boulevard. Children in English clothes and ladies dressed like Parisians walk in the park facing a line of pretentious apartment houses. I asked in the shops for pictures of the _Cámera Santa_. They could only give me postcards of the model prison and the model insane asylum. Sleepy little Palencia, with its rows of classic water jars waiting--time no consideration--till the water was turned on in the fountains, it seemed hardly possible we had left it only that morning. The remote old world may be found in central Spain, but as this is the land of anomalies, the mountain provinces of the north are busy to-day with mines and commerce. It remains but a question of time for Bilbao, Santander, Gijón, Coruña, and Vigo, the northern harbors, to become commercial centers. They are awake at last and keen to enter the struggle. This industrial tendency is what we agree in calling progress, and Spain has been censured for her backwardness in entering the world's competition, so it is not justifiable to regret the unambitious past. But who can be consistent in the home of _el ingenioso hidalgo_! From the moment of entering Spain till we left I leaned now to one side, now to the other, glad and proud one day to see her new industries, a model hospital or asylum, and scoffing the next, at a hideous new boulevard that had relieved a congested district. This land of racy types and vigorous humanity may be doomed to have factory chimneys belching smoke, to have lawless mobs of socialists and pitiful slums in cities where now is frugal poverty, where a beggar lives contentedly next door to a prince, because he feels the prince recognizes him as his fellow countryman and fellow Christian: progress and wealth are bought with a price. Oviedo, just entering the competition, and fast sweeping away its picturesque past, made me glad to be in time to see something of the old ways of Spain. The lion of the city, the Cathedral, adds to this inconsistent feeling of disappointment. It is the only cathedral of the twenty and more we were to see that has removed the choir from the nave and placed pews down the center of the church. At Burgos the heavy blocking mass of the _coro_ in the nave had startled and bewildered me, but soon I grew so accustomed to this Spanish usage that a church without it seemed incomplete. Oviedo has modernized its side chapels, recklessly sweeping away carvings and sarcophagi. It thought the tombs of Pelayo's successors, the early kings, were cluttering rubbish, so a good plain stone, easy to decipher, has been put up in place of the ancient memorials! The Cathedral is perpendicular Gothic of the 14th century. The west façade has a spacious portico, whose effect, however, is lessened by the church being set so that you descend to it from the street. On one side of the portico rises the tower, bold and graceful, showing from its base to its open-lace stone turret an easy gradation of styles. This is the tower that runs like an echo through a powerful modern novel set in Oviedo, "La Regenta," by Leopoldo Alas. "_Poema romántica de piedra_," he calls it, "_delicado himno de dulces líneas de belleza muda_." Out of the south transept open cloisters that made, the first day of our visit, a charming picture in the sunshine after the weeks of cold rain; the red pendants of the fuschia bushes caught the long-absent warmth with palpable enjoyment. The shafts of the pillars here were oval shaped, not a wholly successful change, as in profile view they appeared unsymmetrical. Out of this south transept also opens the gem of the church, the _Cámera Santa_, which has escaped the general renovation as being too closely bound to the historical and religious past of Spain to be tampered with. Alfonso _el Casto_ in 802 built this shrine, raised twenty feet from the church pavement to preserve it from damp. A small room with apostle-figures serving as caryatids leads to the sanctum sanctorum where the famous relics are kept. They were brought here in a Byzantine chest from Toledo when the Moors conquered that city, and probably there are few collections of old jewelers' work equal to them. Here is kept the cross Pelayo carried as a standard at the battle of Cavadonga more than eleven hundred years before. Few can help feeling in Spain the charm of continuous tradition. Never were her treasures scattered by revolution; that this was Pelayo's very cross is not problematic but a fact assured by unbroken record. A printed sheet describing the sacred objects in the _Cámera Santa_ is given to each visitor. It would be easy to turn many of these relics of a more naïve, less logical age, into ridicule. To one, however, who tries to see a new land with comprehending sympathy, to which alone it will reveal itself, these relics, brought back from the Holy Land by crusading knight or warrior bishop, are tender memorials of a great hour of Christian enthusiasm. One of the strongest traits of Spanish character is reverence for all links that bind it to its past, especially its religious past, and happy it is for such old treasures that they find shelter in a land where a _Cámera Santa_ is still a shrine, not a museum. "_¡Triste de la nación que deja caer en el olvido las ideas y concepciones de sus majores!_" If Oviedo itself is disappointing to those who seek the antiquely picturesque, the countryside that encircles it is doubly lovely. On a bright Sunday morning we walked out a few miles to see the church of Santa María de Naranco, built by Ramiro I back in 850. It was a steep scramble up the mountain side, for the road was like a torrent bed. Peasants on donkeys passed, on their way into the town for their day of rest, some with brightly decorated bagpipes groaning out their merriment. To avoid the sea of mud in the high road, we took short-cuts up the hills, following a peasant who, seated sideways on her donkey, balanced on her head a huge loaf of bread. And her bread, round and flattened in the center, was the exact shape of the loaves chiseled, centuries before, in the Bible scenes of Burgos choir-stalls. The old woman smiled and nodded as she smoked her cigarettes, watching us pick our way with difficulty where the tiny hoofs of her ass trod lightly. What cares a Spanish peasant whether the road is good or bad when he has a sure-footed donkey to carry him! At length we reached the small church built by the third king after Pelayo. It is a room thirty-six by fifteen feet, with a chamber at the east and another at the west end. Along the north and south walls are pillars from which spring the arcades, and these pillars and arches make the support of the building; the walls merely fill in. This is the earliest example in Spain of the separation into active and passive members; whether the idea came from Lombardy or was of native birth is not known. We climbed still higher up the red sandstone hill, among gnarled old chestnut trees, to where the ancient church of San Miguel de Lino stands. The oriental windows, being in Spain, would naturally be thought of Moorish origin, but their Eastern source antedates the Moor. They came from the Byzantine East, by way of the Bosphorus, not the Straits of Gibraltar. They are reminiscent of the time when the Goths, before their invasion of Spain, lived around the Danube. On July 25th the scene near these two churches is a striking one. The village of Naranco is emptied of its folk that pious morn, as the peasants, in the same tranquil beauty as in old Greece, lead their garlanded oxen and heifers up to San Miguel. So unchanging are Spain's customs that the festival is paid for out of the spoils taken at the battle of Clavigo (in 846), where tradition says the loved patron of the Peninsula, the Apostle St. James, "_él de España_," came to fight in person. We were not so fortunate as to see this feast of Sant Jago, but we stumbled on a beautiful minor scene. As we returned by Santa María de Naranco, a group of peasants stood round the priest on the raised porch of the church, the center of interest being a baby three days old. Few women can resist a baptism, that solemn first step in a Christian life, so we drew near. The father was a superb-looking youth of about twenty, in a black velvet jacket; his crisp curly hair, his glow of color, and the proud outline of his features made him fit subject for the artist. The godmother, his sister it seemed from the resemblance, was a buxom girl in Sunday finery; the godfather was a younger brother of fourteen, who awkwardly held the precious burden. The old priest wore the wooden clogs of the people and made a terrible racket with every step. From the porch he led the way into the church, and after pausing half way to read prayers,--a scuffling old sexton held aslant a dripping candle,--they came to the baptismal font in the raised chamber at the west end. The young father went forward to the altar steps to kneel alone, and the godfather, with great earnestness, gave the responses. Then the _cura_ poured the blessed water on the tiny head, and to prevent cold wiped it gently. The ceremony over, his wooden shoes clattered into the sacristy, the sexton blew out the candle, and the agile godmother claimed her woman's prerogative and tossed and crooned to the young Christian as she tied ribbons and cap-strings. The two strangers who had witnessed this moving little scene under the primitive carving of the Visigothic church wished to leave a good-luck piece for the small Manuela. But when they put the coin into the hand of the young parent who still knelt before the altar, he returned it with a beautiful, flashing smile. In halting Spanish they explained their good-luck wishes, and in that spirit the gift was accepted. Seen from Naranco, the red-tiled roofs of Oviedo encircled by far-stretching mountains made a romantic enough scene. Seated on the trunk of a chestnut tree we watched the sun set over the exquisite valley. Immediately round us on the hillside had once stood the city of King Ramiro, obliterated as completely as the earlier Ph[oe]nician and Roman settlements in Spain. The dead city where we sat, the town below, distant from the bustle of the world yet fast approaching it, the glow and sweep of the sunset,--it is at moments such as these that the mind enlarges to a swift comprehension, untranslatable in speech, of the passing breath the ages are. The mountains change, the rivers capriciously leave their beds,--especially in Spain, where bridges stand lost in green meadows and are left undisturbed, for does not a proverb say, "Rivers return to forsaken beds after a thousand years?" And Spain has patience to wait! Whether it was the new-born child, the forgotten city, the up-to-date town below, or just the sun setting over that illimitable expanse of mountains, Santa María Naranco gave one an hour of the higher philosophy. In the after-glow we walked back to Oviedo. Along the way the returning country people greeted us with ease and dignity: "_Vaya Usted con Dios_," the beautiful salutation, "Go thou with God," heard from one end of the land to the other. The beggar gives you thanks with it, the shop man dismisses you, the friend takes farewell, but its pleasantest sound is in the country, heard from the lips of clear-eyed peasants passing in the evening light. This peasantry is by instinct well-bred, proud of a pure descent, by nature a gentleman, a _caballero_. A traveler's life and pocket are absolutely secure in these unfrequented northern provinces of "dark and scowling Spain." For a century those who have turned aside from the beaten track have brought back the same tale of courtesy and hospitality. There is much of Arcadian gentleness among these unlettered people. The Spanish _labrador_ may not read or write, but he cannot be called ignorant; statistics here do not guide one to a true knowledge. The country people hand down in the primitive way, from one generation to the other, a ripe store of human wisdom, that often gives them a wider outlook on life and a deeper strength of character than that of the educated man who shallowly criticises them. They are unspoiled and very human, the women essentially feminine, the men essentially manly; daily this note of virility strikes one,--one grows to love their expressive, beautiful word, _varonil_. "The man in the saloon steamer has seen all the races of men, and he is thinking of the things that divide men,--diet, dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in Africa, or in the ears as in Europe. The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all; but he is thinking of the things that unite men,--hunger, and babies, and the beauty of women, and the promise or menace of the sky." When one can say a thing like that, one is born to appreciate Spain. Will not Mr. Gilbert Chesterton go there and study some day her untamable grand old qualities and describe her as she should be described? If such a country population had had good government during the past three hundred years instead of the worst of tyrannies, where would it stand to-day? Though such a surmise is foolish, for perhaps it is because of its isolation that the Spanish peasantry is racy and vigorous. Knowing the hopelessness of battling against corruption in high places in Madrid, it lived out of touch with modern life, elevated by its intense faith, the hard-won inheritance from the _Reconquista_,--and a peasant's faith is his form of poetry and ideality, which when taken from him makes him lose in refinement and charm. Back in the Basque provinces the new idea had dawned on us that this was not a spent, degenerate race, but a young unspoiled one, and every excursion in the country parts of Spain made deeper the assurance of red blood coursing in her veins. Corrupt government has deeply tainted the city classes, has made loafers, and men who open their trusts to the silver key, but the heart of the people is sound. It has been tragically wounded by rulers to whom, an heroic trait, it has ever been loyal. If a country after centuries of misrule had the same power to govern herself as a nation that had had enlightened government for the same length of time, would not one of the best arguments for good government be lost? It may be a long time before Spain learns the restraint of self-rule. But go among the vigorous mountaineers of the north, talk with the patient, sober Castilian _labrador_, watch the Catalan men of industry and you will see the possibility of her future. A noble esprit de corps controls the Guardia Civil who are the keepers of law and security in Spain, to whom a bribe is an insult. Let the same spirit extend to the other departments,--to the post, to the railway, the civil government; let the judge sit on an impregnable height; let the priest of Andalusia have as solemn a realization of his office as the priest of Navarre, of Aragon, of old Castile; let the women be given a wider education (though may nothing ever change their present qualities as wives and mothers), and Spain is on the right road. Cavadonga was merely a two days' trip from Oviedo, yet we had to forego it. The weather was too abominable; while Málaga on the southern coast of Spain has an average of but fifty-two rainy days in the year, this city on the northern coast has only fifty-two cloudless days. The thought of a rickety diligence over miles of muddy roads kept enthusiasm within bounds. After a short pause in the Asturian capital we took the train back to León. The valleys were a veritable paradise; now we skirted a wide river flowing under heavily-wooded hills, now we crossed fields covered with the autumn crocus, and saw from the balconies of the farmhouses yellow tapestries of corn cobs hung out to dry. Some day, not so far distant as an ideal government in Spain, the lover of independence and untouched nature will come to these northern provinces instead of going to hotel-infested Switzerland. The temperate climate, the trout and salmon rivers, the courtesy of the people, make these valleys between the mountains and the sea an ideal tramping and camping ground for the summer. THE SLEEPING CITIES OF LEÓN "I stood before the triple northern porch Where dedicated shapes of saints and kings, Stern faces bleared with immemorial watch, Looked down benignly grave and seemed to say: 'Ye come and go incessant; we remain Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past; Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot Of faith so nobly realized as this.'" JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. There have been many efforts to divide Spain into right-angled departments similar to those of her neighbor France. The individual land throws off such efforts to bring her into geometric proportion: never can her thirteen immemorial divisions, her thirteen historic provinces be wiped out. Each is an entity with ineradicable characteristics and customs. Their boundaries may seem confused on a paper map, but they are reasonable in the flesh and blood geography of mountains and river valleys, or the psychological geography of early affiliation and conquest. No Alfonso or Ferdinand will ever be King of Spain, but King of the Spains, _Rey de las Españas_. _Mi paisano_, the term which stands for the closest bond of fellowship, is used by an Aragonese of an Aragonese, by a Catalan of a Catalan, never by an Aragonese of an Andalusian, or a Catalan of a Castilian. The independent Basque provinces, (where the monarch is merely a lord) the free mountain towns of Navarre, stiff-necked Aragon, these never will merge themselves in Old Castile. Nor can Catalonia, self-centered, humming with manufactures and seething with anarchy, understand pleasure-loving Andalusia, that basks under fragrant orange trees as it smiles its ceaseless _mañana_. Valencia and Murcia, where crop follows crop in prodigal fruitfulness are the antithesis of desolate Estremadura, and of that immortal desert of Don Quixote the denuded steppes of New Castile, to their north. And the mountain provinces of Galicia and the Asturias, of idyllic hill and dale, yet with seaports fast awakening to commercial life, look with little sympathy on the sluggish province of León that borders them. Industrial advancement is on its gradual way in Spain, but there is not a hint of its movement in this oldest of the separate kingdoms. Zamora, Astorga, León, Salamanca, the romantic cities of the earlier days of chivalry, lie asleep; the whistle of the railways has failed to rouse them. You must lay aside all theories of modern comfort here, and make the tour in the spirit of a pilgrim lover of the antique and picturesque. What else could be expected in a province where the peasantry still embroider their coarse linen sheets with castles and heraldic lions, in a land where even the blazonry of a city rings with a psalm, _Ego autem ad Deum clamavi_. The centuries of forays have bequeathed a hardy endurance to the people, but they are the cause at the same time of the scanty population of the plains, the tragic evil of central Spain. We got to the city of León the day of a horse fair. Fresh from wide-awake Oviedo, it was like stepping back into an older world; here was old Spain much as it was in the time of Guzmán[13] the Good, the defender of Tarifa in 1294, whose _casa solar_ faced the plaza where the fair was held. The peasants who bargained in groups, wore toga-draped capes and wide-brimmed felt hats edged with an inch of velvet; every horse in Spain must have been gathered there, and an equal number of kind-eyed woolly little donkeys, essential factors of a Spanish scene. "The Castilian donkey has a philosophic, deliberate air," wrote Théophile Gautier on his sympathetic tour in the Peninsula seventy years ago, "he understands very well they can't do without him; he is one of the family, he has read 'Don Quixote,' and he flatters himself he descends in direct line from the famous ass of Sancho Panza." A step beyond the horse fair brought us to massive Roman walls with frequent semi-circular towers; León's name comes from Augustus' 7th Legion who fortified it against the highlanders of the north. Built into the walls is the remarkable church of San Isidoro encrusted with later work, but with the strong Romanesque lines still prominent. The pilgrims who flocked from Europe to Santiago Compostella in the Middle Ages were partly the means of bringing this style into Spain; thus San Isidoro is of Burgundian origin, just as Santiago Cathedral resembles Saint-Sernin in Toulouse, and the Catalan churches show Lombard features. Though the Spaniard adapted the style to his own character, adding the original feature of outside cloisters for the laity, its importation nipped in the bud a just beginning national architecture, whose loss cannot but be regretted. San Isidoro has a privilege seldom given, the Blessed Sacrament being exposed every day of the year, and always before its lighted altar one sees veiled figures kneeling. It served as the pantheon for the kings who followed Ordoño II--twelfth in descent from Pelayo--who removed his capital from Oviedo here, and the ancient burial chamber still has ceilings painted in the stiff Byzantine manner with obscure color, hard lines, and lack of perspective, probably the oldest paintings in Spain. The "Romancero" tells how Jimena, the gallant, golden-haired wife of the Cid, came here after the birth of her child to attend Mass. She wore the velvet robes given her by the king on the day of her marriage, a richly jeweled hair-net, gift of the Infanta Urraca, her rival; around her neck painted medals of San Lázaro and San Pedro, _santos de su devoción_, and so beautiful was she that the sun stood still in his course to see her better. At the church door the king met her and escorted her in honor, for was not her husband away fighting the infidel for his monarch? There is so true a ring to the old ballads that Jimena lives a real personage. "_Oviedo la sacra, Toledo la rica, Sevilla la grande, Salamanca la fuerte, León la bella_" runs an old verse on Spanish Cathedrals. And the Cathedral of León merits its name. It is harmoniously beautiful, pure French-Gothic, graceful and elegant, classic if the word is permissible for the unrestrained individualism of Gothic art. Built in one age without intermission, in 1303 the Bishop announced that no further contributions were needed, and the centuries since have left the church untouched. Here no cold Herrera portal usurps some lovely pointed work and Churrigueresque extravagancies are not prominent: the late restorations have followed the first plans. [Illustration: _Copyright, 1910, by Underwood & Underwood_ THE CATHEDRAL OF LEÓN] Always excepting the _Pórtico de la Gloria_ in Santiago, the west doorways of León Cathedrals stand for the best in Spanish sculpture. The statue of the _Virgen Blanca_ in the center is famous. Around her the saints and apostles are grouped in appealing attitudes;--out of proportion though they may be as to hands and feet, their sincerity covers all flaws: here, a homely face with care-worn wrinkles of goodness; there, one beaming in satisfaction to be standing in such a chosen band. The lunette over the central door is delightful. On one side, in Heaven, a clerk plays the organ, while a boy blows the bellows, and groups stand chatting near, for a Spaniard's idea of bliss, in those days also, took the form of ease and desultory talk. Hell, on the opposite side, not to be outdone, has two urchins blowing bellows as well, not to make music but to quicken a fiery caldron into which devils are thrusting the sinners. The enjoyment of the old sculptor in his Heaven and Hell was too keen to be confined in the lunette and he has spread himself over the curving of the arches; in spite of time and retouching these three doorways show exquisite detail chiseling. "About their shoulders sparrows had built nests And fluttered, chirping, from gray perch to perch, Now on a miter poising, now a crown, Irreverently happy." Within León Cathedral all is quiet and solemn, a true beauty of holiness. There is no clutter of side chapels in the nave but a sheer sweep of windows filled with the jeweled glass of Flemish masters.[14] These windows come as a surprise in a land where churches are guarded from the sun, and often the open triforium and clearstory, as at Avila, are walled up later to darken the interior. The chancel and choir are worth detail study. The _coro_ seats have panels carved with single figures,--saints with their emblems, warriors with raised visors, placid-faced nuns, thoughtful bishops, gallant pages with their crossed feet gracefully poised,--all of a noble type, with high brow and aquiline nose. Spain has comparatively nothing to show in the way of frescoes, she had no early Masaccio, no Giotto, no Filippo Lippi, to paint the costumes and features of his generation, but wood carvings are her substitute; in them, and in her unrivaled tombs can be read the contemporary history of warrior, bishop, and page. The _retablo_ of the High Altar is of the same simple elegance as the rest of the church. The usual towering one of carved scenes would have been singularly out of place, it is appropriate for the big dark interior of Seville Cathedral, but here are grace and restraint instead of grandeur and mystery, and most suitable are the ancient paintings of varying sizes, gathered from scattered churches and framed together. Radiating round the chancel are chapels that give to the exterior view of the apse a truly French-Gothic air, flying buttresses supporting the cap of the _capilla mayor_. Romanesque, Gothic, and Plateresque are each well represented in León City. In the last style is the noticeable convent of San Marcos that stands isolated outside the town beside the swift blue-green river. The Knights of Santiago built a resting-place on their pilgrimage route back in the 12th century, but the present building is of Isabella's day, and the architect has given free rein to his silversmith's arabesques and medallions, and scattered pilgrim shells all over the façade of the church. We tried to get into the Museum, now in the convent, as it contains some good wood carvings, but an aged beggar at the door explained "_Mañana_," the easy "to-morrow," as prevalent in León as in Andalusia,--then rising to the occasion as only an Italian or Spanish beggar can, he swept open his toga-draped cape, smiling as he pointed to the entrance door: "To-morrow, after your morning chocolate, it will be open for you." It was sunset as we turned away. The long mass of San Marcos stood boldly against the red glow of the sky. The horizon was outlined by the blue mountains of Asturias. With our imagination filled with the old days when pilgrims flocked here from England, from the forests of Germany, from the Po and the Danube, suddenly over the ancient bridge rode a troop of cavaliers on prancing steeds, in cloaks and plumed hats. The kindly blessed illusion hid the fact that our pilgrim-knights were sturdy peasants in the national _capa_, riding their long-haired horses back from the city fair. "Sin el vivo calor, sin el fecundo Rayo de la ilusión consoladora ¿Que fuera de la vida y del mundo?" asks one of Spain's poets of the 19th century, Núñez de Arce, and in his native country it takes but little effort of the imagination to repeople the solemn churches, the narrow city streets, or the treeless plain with the romantic figures of the past. The following day at dawn, after a miserable night in rooms like icy death, a true pilgrim night of endurance, we took the train for the west. As we entered the railway carriage _Reservado para Señoras_ a sleepy railway-guard stumbled out of the further door; all through the journey in the north, we roused these cozily-ensconced railway-officials, for so rare are ladies alone on this route, that the conductors have fallen into the habit of sleeping in the carriage reserved for them. When our tickets were collected we were given many a severe look for daring to upset a _cosa de España_. On the way from León to Astorga, little over thirty miles, the realization of the old pilgrim route is vivid. Before reaching Astorga comes the paladin's bridge,[15] of Órbigo, where in the reign of Isabella's father ten _caballeros andantes_ challenged every passing pilgrim to a bout of arms; if a lady came without a cavalier to fight for her, she forfeited her glove, if any knight declined to fight he lost his sword and spur. The age of knight errantry which Cervantes has haloed with a deathless charm, breathes in this historic Pass of Honour. The leader, Suero de Quiñones, came of the great Guzmán family, to which St. Dominic belonged, and of which the Empress Eugénie was a scion. To show his captivity to his lady, every Thursday he wore an iron chain round his neck, but when victor in this tourney, it was removed with solemnity by the heralds. Suero's sword is to be seen to-day in the Madrid Armory where in an hour more of Spain's real history is learned than in years of reading. The Roman walls of Astorga, seen from the railway present an imposing appearance: here, as at León and Lugo, the frequent half-circular towers do not rise above the crest of the walls. Astorga must have looked just like this when the pilgrims rode by to the shrine of St. James. A closer inspection spoils the illusion however, for the proud city that once ranked as a grandee of Spain is to-day a very tattered and worn hidalgo, and there is a sad air of desolation about its plaza and crumbling walls. Whether or not it was because our ramble was by early morning before the inhabitants were astir, at any rate I brought away a picture of a depopulated town. There were but a few silent worshipers under the clustered piers of the late-Gothic Cathedral, whose reddish tower is the important feature of the distant view. What had tempted us to pause a night in Astorga was the wood-carved _retablo_ by Becerra in the Cathedral, but we found it by no means equal to the work of the carvers in Valladolid. Becerra had studied under Vasari in Rome, and the influence is shown too plainly. There is a curious weather cock on the church, a wooden statue called Pedro Mata, dressed in the costume of a singular tribe that lives in some thirty villages near by. The origin of the Maragatos is involved in mystery; some say they are the descendants of Moors taken in battle, some of Goths who sided with the Moors. During all these centuries they have kept separate from the people about them, like gypsies they marry only with themselves. They should not be confounded with _gitanos_, however, for the Maragatos are honest and industrious; they are the carriers of the countryside, with the privilege of taking precedence on the road. Here and there in Spain one stumbles on a strange, isolated relic of the past such as this. Astorga was still sleeping, in the literal as well as figurative sense, when we left; a walk on top of the walls looking out over the León plain, a regret that we could not sketch the artistic church of San Julián, with its faded green door and crumbling portal, and we turned south. On the train I discovered that a five franc piece given me in change by the innkeeper, was nothing but a bit of silver-washed brass advertising the cakes of one Casimiro in Salamanca, and I, seeing the king's effigy, had thought it a genuine Spanish dollar,--it is easy to be caught napping in León. Zamora is not many miles from Astorga and like the other sleepy towns of the province, it too seems to feel it has a right to a long pause in obscurity after its heroic centuries of Moorish warfare. The great hour of the city was the time of the Cid; the "Romancero" should be in one's pocket here. One of its stirring incidents is the death of King Ferdinand I, in 1065, and its sequel of battles and sieges. The king lies on his deathbed, holding a candle, great prelates at his head and his four sons on his right hand. With the fatal propensity of Spanish rulers to bequeath discord, he divides his kingdom among his sons; to Don Sancho, Castile; León to Alfonso; the Basque provinces to García; the fourth son already was of enough importance, "_Arzobispo de Toledo, Maestre de Santiago, Abad en Zaragoza, de las Españas, Primado_." The king's daughter Urraca, she who had given the Cid's wife, Jimena, her jeweled hair-net, now complains bitterly that she is left out of the inheritance, so her dying father gives her the fortress-city of Zamora, "_muy preciada, fuerte es á maravilla_," and "who takes it from you let my curse fall on him." In spite of which threat her wicked brother Sancho, besieges the city,--a Spanish proverb for patience runs: "_No se ganó Zamora en una hora._" With Sancho comes his chief warrior Roderick Díaz de Bivar, given the title of Cid Campeador, Lord Champion, by the Moorish envoys who here met him. The Cid had wellnigh fought an entrance into the city when the intrepid Urraca ascends a tower--to-day called the Afuera Tower--and delivers her famous scolding. "¡Afuera! Afuera! Rodrigo, El sóberbio Castellano!" "Out! Out! Rodrigo, proud Castilian! Remember the past! When you were knighted before the altar of Santiago, and my father, your sponsor, gave you your armor, my mother gave you your steed, and I laced on your spurs! For I thought to be your bride, but you, proud Castilian, set aside a king's daughter to wed that of a mere Count!" And the ballad tells how the Cid, hearing her upbraiding with emotion, retired with his men. The only present attraction of the decayed town is its Cathedral, set high above the Duero on the edge of the bluff along which Zamora stretches. It was built by the Cid's confessor, Bishop Gerónimo, the dome above the transept crossing being an original feature which the bishop was to elaborate later in the old Cathedral of Salamanca; as Trinity Church, Boston, is copied from this last, Zamora has a special interest for the visitor from New England. We had a four hours' pause there, ample time to see the city. It was raining so dismally that my fellow traveler decided not to face a certain drenching, as the long-drawn-out town had to be traversed before reaching the Cathedral. In an unfortunate moment I started out alone for what I supposed would be a leisurely exploring of a venerable city. Fleeing in distress would better describe the reality, for every hooting boy and girl in Zamora followed at my heels. Whether it was a white ulster or an automobile veil tied over my hat as the wind was high, or just the unaccustomed figure of a stranger in those narrow streets, an excited crowd pursued me the whole length of the town. In front, walking backward, open-mouthed, went a dozen urchins, and behind came a long brigade I hardly dared look back on, it so increased with every step. Men hastened to their shop doors to wonder at the crowd, and the passers-by stood still in astonishment; a feeling of horror came over me at such publicity. In vain I fled into churches in the hope of escaping the relentless little pests; when I emerged they greeted me with howls of pleasure. I angrily shook my umbrella at them, but that only added to the glorious excitement. Here and there a kind woman came to the bothered stranger's help, and scattered the crowd. The children merely scampered down side streets to meet me again in still greater numbers at the next corner. It is easy to laugh now that it is over, but at the time there is small amusement in fleeing through a foreign city pursued by forty hooting youngsters, to have them press round you in a stifling circle when you pause to look in your book, to have them gaze long and seriously at you, then burst into uncontrollable laughter so that in desperation you begin to feel if you have two noses or six eyes. We had decided that in most of the unfrequented towns of Spain, the children were a nuisance; in Zamora they were positive vampires. A visitor in the future had best wear black, a black veil on the head, a black prayer-book in the hand, as if on the way to church, then resembling other people, the children may let her pass. But a white ulster and a red guide book are magic pipes of Hamelin to lure every idle child in Zamora. In spite of wind and rain, and a lengthy disappearance within the Cathedral, it was only on reëntering the station, several hours after they had first seized on their prey, that the unsolicited escort left me, and even then they hung round the door till the shriek of the engine told them the escaped lunatic who had given them so splendid an afternoon's entertainment was out of reach. GALICIA "Blessed the natures shored on every side With landmarks of hereditary thought! Thrice happy they that wander not lifelong Beyond near succour of the household faith, The guarded fold that shelters, not confines! Their steps find patience in familiar paths Printed with hope by loved feet gone before Of parent, child or lover, glorified By simple magic of dividing Time." JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago,--perhaps this claims too much for the Spanish pilgrimage shrine? It would not in the Middle Ages, when the Christians of all Europe flocked there to pray beside the tomb of St. James the Elder, the patron of Spain invoked in the battle cry of her chivalry for a thousand years, "_¡Santiago y cierra España!_"--"St. James and close Spain!" A Latin certificate used to be given to every pilgrim, and it was kept among family records, for there were properties that could only be inherited if one had gone to Santiago Compostella. To-day Spaniards are the only devotees, though as I write I see that a band of English pilgrims with the Archbishop of Westminster at its head is visiting the far-off corner of Galicia. Though few travelers turn out of their way there, it is one of the most characteristic spots to be seen in Spain, a solemn old granite city, with arcaded streets and vast half-empty caravansaries darkened with humidity and age. It takes over fifteen hours to go from León to Santiago, but the journey is a beautiful one, with mountains and fertile valleys, and rivers such as the Sill and that gem of the province, the Miño. At Monforte the railway branches, one line goes to Túy and Santiago, and the other turns up to Lugo and Coruña. We took this last, tempted by accounts of Lugo. It is indeed a unique little city, walled around without a break by Roman battlements forty feet high, on the top of which is the fashionable promenade of the town. With its walls and the view from them, it closely resembles Lucca. Lugo was a surprise in various ways. It had a hotel, the "Fernán Núñez," so up-to-date that it boasted a tiled bathroom with hot water and a shower bath. Not only the comfortable inn but the streets of the town were a model of propriety. As always, our steps turned first to the Cathedral, spoiled outside, as is unfortunately the way in Spain, by those two disastrous centuries, the seventeenth and eighteenth, but within being of the lovely transition period, Romanesque as it merged into Gothic, with the arches just slightly pointed. The irrepressible Churriguera has worked himself into the inside of the church too; his canopy over the High Altar is abominable, though it would take more than that to detract from the simple solemnity of such a church. Lugo is one of the holiest spots in the Peninsula, like San Isidoro in León, it claims the privilege of perpetual exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, only more privileged than León, exposed night as well as day. So proud is the province of this ancient custom that the Host is represented on the shield of Galicia. No matter at what hour you enter the Cathedral, there are worshipers; two priests always kneel before the tabernacle, and they never kneel alone. The scenes of humble piety drew me back to the church again and again with compelling attraction. To me a Spaniard praying unconsciously before the altar is unequaled by any act of worship I have witnessed; not even the touching Russian pilgrims in Jerusalem kissing the pavement in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, nor the Arab at sunset kneeling alone in the desert, can impress more powerfully. It seemed as if this tranquil shrine of Lugo spread an influence of uplifting thought through the whole contented little town; in the quiet afternoon a withered grandmother knelt with her hands on the head of a little tot of six who repeated the prayers that fell from the old lips, or three young women of the upper class sought a retired corner of the church to repeat together their daily chaplet; now in a side chapel, a peasant thinking herself unobserved, in a glow of devotion, encircled the altar on her knees. On leaving the west door of the Cathedral, we ascended the inclined path that leads to the promenade on top of the walls. It was sunset, an exquisite hour to look out on the well-wooded countryside, through which meandered the trout-filled Miño. In the distance were mountains. No wonder the Romans, who ferreted out most of the choice spots of Europe, used to come to this city for the thermal baths. The handsome modern Lugonians strolled around the ramparts, pausing to chat here and there in the semicircles made by the numerous towers of the wall. Now a white-haired matron draped in the national mantilla, loitered leisurely by, with some of the higher ecclesiastics of the Cathedral; now a mother and two grave, pretty daughters passed, watched discreetly by the young beaux. Evidently far-off little Lugo, tucked away in the unknown northwestern corner of Spain, had a social life that sufficed for itself, with no envy of Madrid and San Sebastián. The local contentment found everywhere in the country struck me as admirable. Will "progress" unsettle it? We could have stayed a month in Lugo. To fish in the Miño, to ramble over the fertile country, to feel about one peaceful, contented human beings, would make a summer there a happy experience. When we went on to Coruña, a commercial town that, like seaports the world over, has a rough populace, we were glad to have first seen Doña Emilia Pardo Bazán's loved province at pretty Lugo. In travel there must always be, I suppose, some places that one slights; one knows if one stayed long enough they might show a pleasanter side. We treated Coruña in this way. Sir John Moore, buried at midnight during the Peninsula War, was our association with the town before going there, and for all we saw of it Sir John will remain the chief association of the future. We only saw the flat, commercial district that skirts the bay, not the headland where the old town lies. Slatternly beggars pestered us, bold, bare-legged girls stood mocking at the unaccustomed sight of foreign women traveling; it was with relief we took the diligence that started at noon for Santiago. I shall never cease regretting that we did not wait till the following day, when an electric diligence makes the journey, for that eight hours' trip over the hills to the capital was for us the only horrible experience of our tour in Spain. I wish I might blot out its memory, but as I am setting down frankly everything that occurred, this scene of cruelty must be told of, too. In the omnibus with us were but two other people, and there were five horses; there seemed no reason to foresee trouble. For the first relay of twelve miles all went well, and we enjoyed looking back from the hills on the blue Atlantic where the headland of Coruña jutted boldly out. Our drivers treated the horses with consideration and dismounted at every ascent. But, alas, for the second relay, we changed men and changed animals. Two young vagabonds were now on the box, driving four such miserable, bony nags that it tore the heart to see the sores the rope harness had made. We protested at the use of such horses, but in vain. Twelve miles lay behind, twenty-four were ahead, there were no inns, so we hesitated to desert the diligence, but had we realized the two hours of purgatory we were to face, we had dismounted and walked back to Coruña. One young wretch drove with loud cries and slashing blows; the other alighted to beat the quivering animals up the hills. They guided so recklessly that we were once dashed down the bank into the gutter, and soon after run into a hay-cart and the wheels unlocked with difficulty. When at length they began to strike the spent beasts over the eyes our anger burst all bounds. In a heat of fury never before experienced, and I hope never again, we attacked those two brutal boys. I do not think they will soon forget that scene. At first they replied with impudence and went on lashing the horses. But impudence soon ceased. When two women are in earnest and are fearless of consequences, and have stout umbrellas, they win the day. The twelve miles of their escort over, and new horses harnessed to the diligence--those four pitiful, bleeding victims led away!--the two scoundrels slunk off, sore on arms and shoulders as well as shamed in spirit, for the country people who gathered round supported our protest. The remaining miles to Santiago finished well, with good drivers and stout horses. But never will the horror of those two hours leave me. In fairness I must add that this was the only scene of cruelty I saw during the eight months in Spain, and again and again I noticed plump happy donkeys who were treated as members of the family. It is far-fetched to account for this unfortunate instance by the bull-fight, since in countries that have no such spectacles, veritable skeletons are made to haul cabs, and poor jades are used for drag horses. But I cannot help seizing on this opening for a little tirade against the national game of Spain, which Fernán Caballero, who loved her home with passionate affection called, "inhuman, immoral, an anachronism in this century." The sports of other lands are open to harsh criticism. I do not think a Spaniard is more cruel by nature than an Englishman; in both nations is a certain proportion of coarsened characters,--the northern country may keep them better out of sight in the slums. Northern Europe is to-day more humane to animals than southern Europe, because the women of the north have had greater freedom and have entered into philanthropic interests such as this. Kindness to animals is a modern movement everywhere (may the shade of St. Francis of Assisi forgive this half statement!) Spain need not be too discouraged by being behindhand. The bony exhausted horses used within my own remembrance on our American street-car lines, to drag cars laden each evening to twice the beasts' strength, would not be tolerated to-day, and this change has been wrought by societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, the membership made up chiefly of women and children. Would that Spanish ladies could be pricked to action by the statement of a living French novelist, made in ignorance of late conditions in America and England, that kindness to animals is a Protestant virtue. It is neither Protestant nor Catholic, but common to all human societies where women are allowed to aid with their gentler instincts in the public welfare of their country. The bull and the man are sport and skill, that part I can understand. It is the agony of the horses that is a disgrace to these shows, worn-out nags who can make no resistance are used, and when the bull gores them, their entrails are thrust back and the dying beasts pricked on to the fray. Herein lies the great difference between bull-fights to-day, which are debased money-making spectacles only taken part in by professionals, and the more chivalrous sport of earlier times when the hidalgo was _toreador_, and proper steeds that could defend themselves were used. The bull-fight is found in Spain so early that its origin from the Roman period in the Peninsula, or from the first Mohammedan conquerors, is disputed. The Cid took part in a game, and games celebrated the marriage of Alfonso VII's daughter Urraca to the king of Navarre. During the reign of Isabella's father, Juan II, the _corrida de toros_ was much in vogue. Queen Isabella herself disliked the sport, and in one of her letters she vows never to witness it. On the birth of Philip II in Valladolid, Charles V killed a bull in the arena. The _fiestas_ continued under the Hapsburg Philips, until the advent of the French Philip V, in 1700. He so slighted this national sport that gentlemen ceased to take part in it, and it sank to its present level. It is now so well paying an affair that the only way to reform it would be through concerted action on the part of Spanish women. It is a crusade worthy of them. A night of rest in the hotel at Santiago and the painful scene of the day before was somewhat dimmed. Early in the morning I started out to explore the old pilgrim city. It has a distinct character of its own, seldom have I felt so decided a place-influence. It is very solemn, very gray, very stately and aloof. On many of the houses the pilgrim shell is carved; the streets are paved with granite and the vast hospices are of the same severe stone, moss-grown and damp; grass also grows between the big granite slabs of the silent, imposing squares. Santiago does not belong to our age. Modern towns do not name their streets after twelfth-century prelates, "Street of Gelmúrez, 1st Archbishop of Compostella," makes a novel sign. Here, as all over the land, the Cathedral was the magnet. I walked along the dark, arcaded streets in a Scotch drizzle, passed under Cardinal Fonseca's college and came out in the plaza before the west entrance. The west front is a baroque mass which those who can endure that style say is most successful. I cannot endure that style. It seemed to me doubly a pity that this late front should mask the chief treasure of Galicia, the _Pórtico de la Gloria_, which stands as an open portico to the church, fifteen feet within this west door. Enthusiastic description had led us to expect much of what may be called the supreme work of Romanesque sculpture, in fact, it was this portico that had decided us for the long trip to Galicia. We were not disappointed. "_Es la oración más sublime que ha elevado al cielo el arte español._" Neither photograph nor words can describe it; it is one of those matchless works that body forth the best of an age. The model of South Kensington does not give its nobility, for it is the setting before the lofty dim Romanesque nave that makes it a unique thing. When later, in Constantinople, I saw Alexander's sarcophagus, the thought of Santiago sprang instantly to my mind. Both bring a feeling of sadness;--one, simple flowing Greek of the best period, the other, crabbed, original, mediæval,--they are alike in the absolute sincerity with which each embodied the highest then attainable. Over the carvings of both are faded traces of color that give the finishing touch of the exquisite. The Archbishop, Don Pedro Suárez, in 1180 gave the commission for this portico to a sculptor named Mateo, whether Spanish or foreign is not known; he lived in Santiago till 1217. He must have been a close student of the Bible, for his symbolism is profound and harmonious. Above the central arch is a solemn Christ, of heroic size, at his side the four Evangelists, figures of youthful beauty: the lion and the bull have settled themselves cozily in their patron's lap. Large angels on either side carry the instruments of the Passion. Very fine statues of the Apostles stand against the pillars of the central doorway. In the tympanum are small figures typifying the Holy City of Isaiah, and on its arch are seated, on a rounding bench, the twenty-four ancients of the Apocalypse, with musical instruments and vases of perfume. This is perhaps the most beautiful part of the portico. For hours one can study it. Some of the heads are thrown back in revery, some turned together in conversation. "The four and twenty ancients fell down before the Lamb having everyone of them harps and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of the saints" (St. John, Rev. V, 8). The carvings of that age were somewhat grotesque, but here the types are ideal, as beautiful in their way as Mino da Fiesole or Rossellino. When Master Mateo had finished his work, he made a statue of himself below the central column of the portico, kneeling toward the altar and humbly beating his breast; on this figure was written "architectus." Humility and a consummate profession of faith such as this went hand in hand. It is anticlimax, after the _Pórtico de la Gloria_, to speak of the other sights of Santiago. On the plaza before the west end of the Cathedral stands the dignified Hospital Real, founded by Isabella and Ferdinand as a pilgrim inn. Two of the four patios are quaintly carved, and probably amuse the convalescents of the modern hospital lodged now in the building. It was a joy to find so many of Isabella's good deeds still bearing fruit. The nuns took us down to the big kitchen, white-tiled and spotless, where we saw the four hundred fresh eggs that arrive daily from the country; the tidy patients on the verandas showed clearly that no one suffered privations here. As we were leaving, the old chaplain of the institution ran after us to beg us to return to see something of which he was evidently vastly proud. When he ushered us into a tiled bathing room and turned on the water that dashed up and down and round about from every kind of new contrivance, he looked at us with a self-complacency that was adorable, as if he said: "There, you water-loving English, we're just as fond of it as you!" The excellently managed institution reminds one that this province produced Doña Concepción Arenal, sociologist and political economist, and withal a most tender-hearted Christian, whose books on prison organization and reform have been widely translated, and are quoted as authorities by the leading criminologists of Europe. For thirty years this admirable woman was inspector of prisons. She died at Vigo in 1893, and Spain has since erected statues in her honor. In Galicia, as in Catalonia, there has been a revival of dialect literature. The Gallego tongue was the first in the Peninsula to reach literary culture, and in the Middle Ages two ideal troubadours wrote in it. Had not Alfonso _el Sabio_ written chiefly in Castilian, thereby fixing that as the leading tongue, as Dante did the Tuscan in Italy, it is probable that the dialect of Galicia had prevailed. Portuguese and Gallego were the same language up to the fifteenth century, hence it is that the great critic Menéndez y Pelayo always includes Portuguese writers in his studies of Spanish literature. Galicia is fortunate in having an able living exponent, the Señora Emilia Pardo Bazán, whose novels are full of the charmed melancholy of the province. The Gallego is derided in other parts of Spain, his name is synonymous with boor, for he is judged by the clumsy _mozo_ who seeks work in the south. "The more unfortunate a country the greater is the love of its sons for it. Greece, Poland, Hungary, Ireland, prove this, and the nostalgia is strongest in those of Celtic origin. Ask the rude Gallegos of South America what is their ambition--'To return to the _terriña_ and there die' is the answer." In a collection of essays "De mi Tierra," Madam Pardo Bazán has told of the learned Benedictine, Padre Feijóo, the Bacon of Spain, whose caustic pen did away with so many of the superstitions of his age. It may be a bit pedantic for me to give biographies in these slight sketches, but it seems as if a truer idea of the race is conveyed in such lives than could be given in any other way. This native of Galicia, Padre Feijóo, had few equals in the Europe of his time in liberality of view. He was born of hidalgo parents near Orense, where his _casa solar_ stands, still lived in by a Feijóo of to-day. He entered the Benedictine Order and in their cloisters passed most of his long life of eighty years, for half a century living in their Oviedo house. His unflagging industry, his clear intellect, and simple uprightness, won the admiration of all who knew him. "After fifteen years' intimate acquaintance with Feijóo," wrote a scientist of the day, "never have I met, inside religion or out, a man more sincere, more candid, more declared enemy of fraud and deceit." Not till he was fifty did Feijóo commence to write. In 1731 appeared the beginning of his "Teatro Crítico," essays that have been called the first step of Spanish journalism, written as they eminently were to communicate ideas to others. He had the passion to know why, a never-tiring love of investigation. Adopting the Baconian experimental method, he attacked the superstitions and pseudo-miracles around him. _¡Ay! de mí Inquisición_! Were you asleep that you did not clap this independent thinker into your capacious dungeons? So strong was Feijóo's influence that Benedict XIV curtailed the number of feast days on his mere suggestion. This learned Benedictine monk was ahead of his age in many ideas. Are the stars not inhabited? he asked. Before Washington, he maintained that the Machiavellian theory of government, intrigue and diplomacy, which was then universally accepted in Europe, was inferior to friendly loyalty and honor. He preached compassion to animals generations before the age of our modern, humanitarian theories. With the painful remembrance of the diligence ride in Galicia, I was glad to find one of her sons advocating this. Feijóo stands out more prominently because of the intellectual desert around him. "The eighteenth century was an erudite, negative, fatigued." The Bourbons brought formality and sterility to spontaneous Spain. A dry soulless learning killed the creative power, and in every branch, art, music, and literature, the artificial rococo flourished. The two exceptions of vitality were Feijóo and the painter Goya. Had Padre Feijóo lived in our age, he might have been that great man hailed by De Maistre: "Attendez que l'affinité naturelle de la science et de la religion les ait réunies l'une et l'autre dans la tête d'un homme de génie! Celui-là sera fameux et mettra fin au dix-huitième siècle qui dure encore." How much longer are we to wait for him,--this great man! If the only harrowing scene of the tour in Spain is to be associated with Galicia, so is one of the happiest, a day of such kindly chivalry that we felt the spirit of Isabella's time still endured. It was the chance of railway travel that introduced a modern knight to us. The journey back to Castile from Galicia is a most trying one. Some day perhaps an enterprising ocean line will put in at Vigo and run an express directly across country to Madrid; we were too early for such ease. From Santiago we had to take an afternoon train to Pontevedra, and there spend the night. At 5 A.M. (oh, those unforgettable, dark, cold railway stations of Spain!) we again took the train. It was dawn before Redondela was reached, and exquisite as a dream seemed the _rías_, the fiords of Galicia, with wooded mountains sloping to their shores. It is not hard to prophesy that this will be a great summer resort of the future. At Redondela we changed trains, getting into the express for Monforte, the only other occupant of the carriage being an elderly man, blue-eyed, very tall and erect, with the air of distinction so frequently found among Don Quixote's countrymen. We had noticed him the night before in the Pontevedra hotel, and had thought him an Englishman, till in offering some service about our luggage he spoke in Spanish. As we were to spend fifteen hours in the same railway carriage, we soon entered into conversation. He came from Madrid each summer with a family of sons and daughters to spend some months in a castle among the mountains of Galicia. Evidently he was a lover of sport and of country life, for as we ran alongside the Miño River, with Portugal just across on the opposite bank, for hours he sat gazing out in enjoyment, and drew each beautiful thing to our notice. At noon we reached Monforte, where we had dinner in the station buffet. When we called for our account, to our astonishment the waiter told us it was settled already. We could not understand what had been done, till the proprietor himself came to explain. It seems it is a custom all over this generous land, for a man when he is with a lady or has spoken to her, to pay for everything she orders; tea, luncheon, even her shopping purchases. He does this with no offensive ostentation, but so quietly that he often slips away unnoticed and unthanked. Several travelers have since told me that they too met this hospitality; it had at first embarrassed them, but as there was not the slightest impertinence nor even the personal about it, as it was merely an act of chivalrous respect, done with superb detachment, when the confusion of being paid for by a stranger was over, they remembered only the charming courtesy. The attentions of our kind host, for he seemed to look on two strangers in his land as his guests, did not stop at noontime, at tea he brought us platefuls of hot chestnuts. He tried to while away the hours pleasantly, playing games on paper in French and English; with all his dignified gravity the Spaniard is not blasé. Our struggles to learn his tongue rousing sympathy, it was from him we first heard of the pretty high-flown phrases still in daily use, how you bid farewell with, _Beso à V. la mano_ (I kiss your hand), or _A los pies de V._ (I am at your feet); that the _Usted_, shortened to _V._, with which you address high or low, is a corruption of "Your Majesty." Somehow there seems nothing absurd in addressing a Spanish peasant as "Your Majesty." The love of abbreviations is a curious trait in a people with such leisurely ways; thus, a row of cabalistic letters ends a letter: _S. S. S. Q. B. S. M._, which means that your correspondent kisses your hand--_su seguro servidor que besa su mano_. Then the interest which we evinced in the institutions and progress of Spain made him put his cultivated intelligence at our service, and we learned more in a day than in all the previous weeks. When I inquired into the vexed religious question he was able to explain much. As a rule, republicanism in Spain means avowed atheism and socialism; it has been well said that the republicanism of all Latin countries turns to social revolution. The socialists are a small, but well-organized band, international in character since their movements are directed from centers like Paris. They are chiefly in industrial cities such as Barcelona, Valencia, and Bilbao, where secret societies of anarchists abound, disguised as clubs for scientific study. The majority being of the rabble, repudiating all authority, ("civilization, that is the enemy!") their disorders would be called mob uprisings did they occur in Chicago, but deceived by the term "republicanism," the journals of England and America gave them too lenient a consideration. By no means devout himself, he assured us that what we saw on every side was for the most part very genuine religion, not sentiment with no result; for in those places where observance had slackened there was a marked difference in moral restraint, so potent a factor for morality was religion still in Spain. That there were faults none denied, but he had traveled enough to know the flaws of other countries too well to be despairing of his own. He wrote for us a card of introduction to the big hospital of Madrid; he sought out a friend in another carriage, the son of the Admiral in Ferrol, who was rather up in statistics. Had we seen the asylum near Santiago where the insane are treated with such success that noted cures had been obtained? Had we met the archæologist of the province, a canon in the Cathedral? In short, from the questions and suggestions we realized that the average tourist goes through this reserved country half blind. Glad were we for this chance of insight. When in the dusk of evening it came time to descend at Astorga, our stopping-place for the night, and our fellow-traveler stood there shaking hands, with warm friendliness in his blue eyes, we felt there was no more thoroughbred specimen of manhood than a Spanish hidalgo. SALAMANCA "L'homme n'est produit que pour l'infini." "Il y a des raisons qui passent notre raison." "Se moquer de la philosophie c'est vraiment philosopher." PASCAL. Salamanca is in León province, and in comparison with the hour of its prime, as it is to-day it too is very like a sleeping city. It is hard to realize that this dull, small town was a _grandeza de España_, ranking with Oxford, Paris, and Bologna, that once 10,000 students flocked here from all over Europe, and every young Spaniard turned here as naturally as a modern Englishman to Oxford or Cambridge; Cervantes' "Novelas Exemplares" give the picture. To-day there are barely a thousand students, chiefly from its own province; among the ten universities of Spain the former leader takes a very lowly place. Madrid, the continuation of Cardinal Ximenez' University of Alcalá, may be called the modern Salamanca in intellectual leadership. [Illustration: _Copyright, 1910, by Underwood & Underwood_ VIEW OF SALAMANCA FROM THE ROMAN BRIDGE] In the Spanish Oxford one looks in vain for the numerous colleges of the city on the Isis. Alas! Salamanca is half a ruin. The French, in the Napoleonic invasion, destroyed the whole northwest quarter of the town to make fortifications, undoing in a few brutal hours the work of centuries of culture and piety. In his despatches of 1812 the Duke of Wellington wrote: "The French among other acts of violence have destroyed thirteen out of twenty convents and twenty out of the twenty-five colleges which existed in this seat of learning." Twenty out of twenty-five colleges! The thought of Oxford's tranquil, age-crowned buildings makes one grasp the tragic wreck of the Spanish university; never while in Salamanca could I forget the desolate tract to the west, lying still a heap of ruins, untenanted save by wandering goats, those nomad creatures that give the culminating note of squalor to deserted districts. Our train approached the city across the plains from Zamora, through plantations of isolated trees and past droves of black sheep whose guardian stood patiently under the rain. For some time in the distance we saw the prominent church towers. Salamanca lay on the old Roman road, the Via Lata, that connected Cadiz with the north, but the Roman associations here are slight. As in Zamora, the Cid and his feats dwarf other interests, so here it is the picturesque days of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that fill the mind. Go down to the Roman bridge over the Tormes and while away an hour watching the passers-by, and the old times seem to live again. Below in the river bed women wash and chatter from morning till night, spreading the gayly-colored clothes, red, yellow, and purple, over the stones to dry. If it is Sunday, into the city pour the hardy peasants for their one day of rest from the ungrateful work of the fields: girls in pale blue woolen stockings and smart, black pumps sit sideways behind their cavaliers on the long-haired nags whose backs are often shaved into a pattern; now out of the city jogs a brisk old woman on her donkey, laden with a month's purchases, an unpainted rush-bottom chair topping the pile; she nods to the strangers, _franceses_, she thinks, for a Spaniard takes all foreigners for his neighbors over the frontier: now a cart passes, whose shape and hue seem taken out of a romantic watercolor; then a young peasant in wide-brimmed sombrero, leather gaiters, silver buttons as big as dollars on his vest, clear-eyed and proud of carriage: then, salt to the picture, rides a burly _cura_, sitting well back on his tiny ass, a ridiculous figure were it not for his sublime unconsciousness, his innate self-respect. Ever the unspoiled, the vigorous, the untamed! Just so they came into Salamanca in the past when students with swords and velvet capes walked the streets, and so I hope they may do some hundred years from now, for such lives of frugal contentment are unequaled. Localism and provinciality have been forced on Spain by nature, and it is this very provincialism which is her charm for the traveler. Fresh from a prosperous, new world, he may often long for certain changes here, for more widely diffused education, for free libraries, a more secure self-government; but such material prosperity is bought with a price. Remember that not in the length or breadth of this land are to be found the degraded human beings, vicious in soul and brutalized in shape of skull and feature, such as exist by the thousands in the slums of industrial countries. If the Spanish peasant must lose his hardy independence, if his frugal contentment, his heroic patience must pass with the old order of things (that lets a heap of ruins in the heart of a city lie untouched during a hundred years!) I cannot help wondering whether the price is not too high to pay. I am repeating myself, but the words come to one each day--it is beyond human nature to be consistent in Spain; she has the faculty, despite her glaring faults, of battering down one's Philistine certainty of northern superiority. The bridge, the plaza, and the cathedral; study your types there and you begin to know the real Spaniard. Not soon shall I forget, at Mérida, in wild Estremadura, as I loitered on the bridge, a countryman stepping forward with the dignified, proud look of his class: "_¿Es más bonita que París?_" he asked, the interrogatory note added only in courtesy, so sure was he of my affirmative. Sleepy little Mérida, all a ruin, Knights Templars' castle as well as Roman theater and aqueduct, to the fellow _paisano_ of Pizarro and Cortés, was finer than Paris. It is glimpses like this that make the prejudiced stranger judge the so-called backwardness of the country in kinder fashion. Where else could one see stately-moving cream-colored oxen pass unnoticed through the chief thoroughfare of a capital, a common sight in the Puerta del Sol of Madrid, where else will the customs officer of a big town stand to count with a pointing finger the skipping sheep driven past him, as on the Alcántara bridge at Toledo, where else will groups of goats be milked from door to door in a great commercial city like Barcelona? Salamanca, being the center of an agricultural district and off the express route, presents daily, scenes from the Georgics. Architecturally the old university city, despite her disasters, is of first importance. She has two Cathedrals, the smaller more perfect one of 1100, finding shelter by the side of its huge successor, to whom it yielded its rights as metropolitan in 1560. The exterior of the new Cathedral is over-rich and meaningless, it promises little for what it holds within, where the lofty Gothic piers and arches have so impressive an air of majesty that architectural flaws are forgotten. It proves how much longer Gothic lasted in Spain than elsewhere in Europe. The triforium here is replaced by an elaborately-carved balcony that runs round the church, and high up are medallions colored with gold and Eastern hues, an enamel-like decoration which has been beautifully and sparingly used; the inner circle of the clearstory window and the round windows of the west end, have jeweled chains of color that modern churches could well imitate. As usual, the side chapels are full of treasures, and the sacristy boasts the very crucifix the Cid carried in battle. There is one bad defect: its apse has not the dim, mysterious curve of a cathedral, the east end being square, like a cold secular hall. Nestling under this gigantic pile is the loveliest thing in all Salamanca, the _catedral vieja_, its title in the old Latin proverb "fortis Salmantina." It is a small, Romanesque-transition church, unused, but in good repair, left unchanged by a sensible bishop when the services were removed to its more pretentious rival. The carvings of the capitals are boldly massive, there is a noticeably good, painted _retablo_, and among the numerous tombs--a Gregorovius could make a fascinating volume of Spain's alabaster knights and bishops!--there is one that is specially appealing. It is in a chapel opening off the cloisters; a warrior in armor lies on his sarcophagus, beside him his wife, with a child's innocence of face, dressed in the nun's robe worn while her lord was fighting the Moors, with high pattens on her feet, a dainty little Castilian gentlewoman, mother of the prelate whose stately tomb fills the center of the chapel. The old Cathedral is so tucked in among buildings, that only one view of the exterior can be got, from a terrace leading from the south door of the later church, a view that a New Englander will return to often with a homesick feeling, for just such a scaly-tiled tower, window for window, line for line alike, rises in Copley Square, Boston. This cupola shows Byzantine influences since Spanish Romanesque was orientalized through Mediterranean trading. Of all the memories of a journey in Spain the happiest are the hours spent in her cathedrals, the starting out expectant, often with no map or book, for there are frequent glimpses of the church towers to guide; the first entering the noble structure which man's living enthusiasm raised, the first passing from one chapel to another in astonishment at the treasures they guard. Pierre Loti has a sketch on Burgos Cathedral, seen once only on a late afternoon, just as the verger was closing it, and he describes how unhappily he was affected by the lavish material wealth. Pure artist that he is in his theory of seizing on a swift impression, the test may be successful for Philae or for the Parthenon, but it will not do for a Spanish cathedral, which is too complex, and can well hide its soul from the hasty tourist. May M. Loti forgive me for saying it, but certainly the way in which he saw Burgos differs little from the lightning-flash method of the Yankee tourist he despises. I think he must have had a cross indigestion that late afternoon, or perhaps it was his Huguenot blood rising in protest. Another of his countrymen, equally sensitive, "le délicat Joubert," gives a less on-the-surface judgment: "The pomp and magnificence with which the Church is reproached are in truth the result and proof of her incomparable excellence. From whence, let me ask, have come this power of hers and these excessive riches except from the enchantment into which she threw all the world? She had the talent of making herself loved, and the talent of making men happy ... it is from thence she drew her power." Spain is richer than all other lands in church furniture: except for the uprising of 1835 against the monasteries, a movement more political than religious, there has been no terrible iconoclastic mania, such as in France and England; the cities which were looted, like Valladolid and Salamanca, during the French invasion, suffered in a different way. Then, too, Spanish cathedrals do not part with their art treasures; the gifts of personal and inappropriate jewels when they have accumulated too needlessly are sometimes sold for the benefit of the church, but the art treasures made for the service of the Altar are not parted with. In Valencia it is told that Rothschild's agent tried in vain to buy Benvenuto Cellini's silver pax there: $10,000 $15,000, $20,000, he offered: "_Las cosas de la catedral no se venden_," was the answer. "$50,000," said the agent. The Cathedral was poor and needed repairs. "It is useless," was the firm answer of the Chapter, "We do not sell the things of the Altar." In Salamanca the verger told us that an Englishman had offered an immense sum for the iron screen round the tomb of Bishop Anaya (his mother the dainty little lady in pattens) and though the screen was in an unused chapel of the _catedral vieja_, it was refused. These unsullied temples of the Holy Spirit, where stately ceremonials are still an every-day occurrence, differ in every city, the carven wealth of Burgos, the soaring grace of León, the solid grandeur of Santiago, Toledo, a dream of His House, Seville, rising imposing past expectation, the small, dark symmetry of Barcelona, the solemn space of prayer before Avila's high altar, Sigüenza's tomb-filled chapels, Saragossa, draped with priceless Flemish tapestries for the feast, Palencia dim and holy at daybreak, worship-bowed Lugo,--indelible memories of beauty and exaltation, the cathedrals of Spain are not mere artistic memorials of the past, their soul is not fled. Such churches cannot but have an influence on the people among whom they rise. If on one of different race they impress themselves with the actuality of a living experience, what must they mean to those whose childhood and old age have known them in solemn moments. I came across an autobiographical bit by the novelist Alacón, describing the influence on him of one of these great churches of the past. He grew up in the small Andalusian city of Gaudix, like many Spanish towns its great day being well over; the only grandeur left, the only palace inhabited, was the _iglesia mayor_: "From the Cathedral I first learned the revealing power of architecture, there first heard music and first grew to admire pictures; there also in solemn feasts, mid incense, lights, and the swell of the organ, I dreamed of poetry and divined a world different from what surrounded me. Thus faith and beauty, religion and inspiration, ambition and piety were born united in my soul." On the way to the Cathedrals each day we passed through the arcaded plaza, which at the noon and evening hours was thronged with an animated crowd; we noticed once more the democratic relation between the classes, smart officers in pale blue uniforms strolled up and down chatting with plain countrymen whose capes, tossed over the shoulder, let the gaudy red and green velvet facing be seen. The daily walk brought us past the House of the Shells, whose walls are studded with the pilgrim emblem, and one day as I paused to look into the lovely inner court, the owner came out, prayer-book in hand, on her way to church, and with the grave courtesy of her race, she invited the stranger in to examine her romantic dwelling. Most of the buildings in the city are a light brown sandstone that suits the gorgeous surface decoration of Isabella's period, here seen in its full glory. There is no pure early-Gothic in the city; Romanesque-transition is found in the old Cathedral, and late florid-Gothic in the new Cathedral, later still some baroque extravagances, since Salamanca claims a doubtful honor as the birthplace of that exponent of bad taste, José Churriguera. But the style that is supreme here is the Plateresque, the silversmith period when late-Gothic and Renaissance met: the façades seem as if molded in clay, so lavish is their work. In one respect Salamanca has been more fortunate than its rival Oxford, in having used a stone soft in appearance, but so durable that the chiseling is almost as finished to-day as when first cut. Everywhere in the town this Plateresque work is found; at times more Renaissance than Gothic, as in Espíritu Santo, a convent like Las Huelgas for noble ladies, or as in the beautiful patio of the Irish College; the Dominican church of San Esteban is more Gothic than Plateresque. Like the Jesuits, the second of the monastic orders whose cradle is Spain, may well be proud of the record in its native land. The society of Ignatius can boast besides its saints, scholars like Ripalda, Lainez, Salmerón, Isla, Suárez, Mariana, the great historian, and Hervás y Panduro, "the father of philology," who has been credited by Professor Max Müller with "one of the most brilliant discoveries in the history of the science of language." And the Dominicans can claim a de Soto, a Melchor Cano, Luis de Granada, Las Casas, defender of the Indians, and, fame of this special monastery of Santo Domingo, a Diego de Deza, the protector of Columbus. With this learned man, tutor to Isabella's only son, lodged the discoverer years before his memorable voyage, and it was in a room called De Profundis, leading from the cloisters, that he first explained his theories to the community who espoused his cause with perseverance, in opposition to the stupid savants of the University. They, appointed by the Queen to investigate his claims, found them "vain and unpractical," not worthy of serious notice. On the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery, a memorial statue was put up in the square near the mediæval tower of Clavero: on the pedestal are reliefs of his two patrons, Isabella, and Fray Diego de Deza, "_gloria de la orden de Santo Domingo, protector constante de Cristóbal Colón_." Imposing as is San Esteban, the triumph of the Catholic Kings' heraldic style of architecture is the façade of the University Library, as autobiographic of its age as is Santiago's _Pórtico de la Gloria_ of an earlier century. It is one mass of delicate carving, badges, medalions, and scrolls, increasing in size as it rises, so that an effect of uniformity is obtained. There is the true ring of that chivalrous generation in the inscription, "The Kings to the University, and this to the Kings," you raise your head proudly with a flash of the eye, feeling for a moment that you are almost a Spaniard yourself. [Illustration: FAÇADE OF THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, SALAMANCA] Opposite the library's façade is a statue of one of the University's noted men, that attractive personality, Fray Luis de León. Tall, stalwart, for he came of a warrior race of Spanish grandees, ascetic, with intellectual forehead, a man capable of sainthood, of the type noble, he faces the school where he studied as a youth and passed a later life in research and teaching. In Luis de León is found an equilibrium of character, a magnanimity united with genius, which often distinguished the men born in the _siglo de oro_. This Augustinian monk was a deep theologian, ahead of his times, as most deep thinkers are; he made a translation of the Songs of Songs too advanced for the age, and his enemies accused his orthodoxy to the Inquisition. For five years he lived in confinement, and it was during this semi-imprisonment that he wrote his great mystic book, "Los Nombres de Cristo," and also some of his lyrics. The University remained loyal to him by refusing to place another lecturer in his seat; then when he had justified himself before the Holy Office, he was set at liberty, and a host of friends accompanied him back to his post. He entered the lecture hall quietly, after his five years of absence, and opened the discourse with rare tact, a generous, high-minded overlooking of personal rancour: "Gentlemen, as we were saying the other day." This famous mot of Luis de León, "_como decíamos ayer_," shows a quality unexpected in Spain, but characteristic often of her sons, that of amenity, a kindly tolerance of the world's foibles, found in Cervantes, and to show it has not died out, this same amenity was a predominating trait of the late distinguished novelist, Don Juan Valera. Luis de León, true follower of his patron Augustine, knew that there is no sin that one man commits that all men are not capable of, if not helped by God. "Even while he aspires, man errs." Had the erudite monk been merely a scholar, he had been a personality in his own day, but would not be alive for us; but he can claim an enduring fame. Professor Menéndez y Pelayo calls him the most exalted of Spanish lyric poets, and names his "Ascensión," "Al Apartamiento," "A Salinas," "A Felipe Ruiz," "Alma Región Lucient," "La Noche Serena," as the six most beautiful of Spanish lyrics. Learn them by heart, he says, and they will astonish you with each repetition. Luis de León had the Wordsworthian note of simple living and high thinking, of a personal love of nature, long before the Lake School: the "Ode to Retirement" might have been penned at Grasmere. Everything led his soul to God; he fed on the mystics and rose to their height and serenity of thought. From his love of the classics came his sobriety of form and purity of phrase; he is a true Horacian, penetrated as well by the spirit of the great Hebrew writers, with the _espíritu cristiano_ added, yet though drawing his culture from many sources he is personal and modern. Such praise from the great critic sends one to an enthusiastic study of Fray Luis, and a knowledge of his poems makes the visit to his tomb in Salamanca more than one of mere curiosity. Like most of the cities and villages of León province, this one too lies asleep, resting on its former honors, though there are hints, such as the new hospital, that she is rousing herself to life. She feels a confidence in her own future, as is subtly shown in the decoration of the plaza, where empty spaces are left for the names of coming great men. It is with this city of the past that the most homelike memory of our tour in Spain is associated, the happy hour round an English tea-table eating bread and butter, and chatting at last, oh so eagerly, in one's native tongue. It was the rector of the Irish college who gave us this delightful taste of home, and fresh from six weeks of freezing, stone-paved rooms, of cinnamon-flavored chocolate, how we appreciated his hospitality! The school of young seminarians is housed in one of the five remaining of the University buildings, but only moved here when the original college, founded by Philip II and dedicated to St. Patrick, was demolished by Ney and Marmont's soldiery. We found our host in his library poring over a Greek book with a professor from the University, and we were welcomed with the heart-warming kindness of his native land. The professor obviously hoped the invading Americans would not tarry long, but he little knew that a Celtic host in the heart of Spain and a cozy tea-table at the critical hour of a raw, bleak day made a combination not to be resisted; we lingered into the late afternoon and left reluctantly indeed. I would wish for all travelers a friendly visit to the _Colegio de Nobles Irlandeses_, that they might see the tall, northern-looking lads pacing up and down the sculptured sixteenth-century courtyard, might pause in the Chapel, and look out from the library windows over the city, with a genial cicerone to name the churches and colleges; then Salamanca would not seem a dead city, but a peaceful, contented survival of the past. SEGOVIA. "No hay un pueblo esclavo Si no lo quiere ser: ¡Cantad, españoles! Cantad! Cantad!" (Hymn sung May, 1908, for the centenary of _Dos de Mayo_.) We reached Segovia at five o'clock in the early morning of November first after an indescribably fatiguing day and night of travel, the one confusion of our tour in Spain, and partly owing to a mistake in the usually reliable guide book. It may be of help to other travelers if I describe this misadventure. On returning from Galicia, we had left the express route at Astorga, and pausing there a night, took the local line south to Zamora and Salamanca. After a stay of some days in the old university city, we were lured out to a small town, fifteen miles away, Alba de Tormes, where St. Teresa died. It seemed unnecessary to return to Salamanca in order to go on to Avila, since a diligence ran to Avila from a town not far from Alba de Tormes. Our book gave the distance of this ride as fourteen miles, whereas fourteen leagues, more than three times fourteen miles, would be nearer the truth. For, on reaching Alba we found it was a diligence journey of over ten hours; with the roads in a frightful condition after a month's rain, the trip was out of the question. So spending the night at Alba de Tormes, we went back to Salamanca, there to find it was not the special day for the train that connects directly with the express route south. Whereupon it seemed best, rather than to wait a couple of days for this train, to take the long trip round by Zamora and Toro to the junction Medina del Campo, whence the express route to Madrid branches, one line passing by Avila, another by Segovia. It happened to be eight minutes before the starting of the train, when I went to the ticket office at Salamanca with my _carnet kilométrique_, yet nevertheless the agent refused me the tickets, saying that his office closed five minutes before the starting of each train. "But there are yet eight minutes," I exclaimed. His personal watch said five; so we were obliged to start without the usual complementary tickets. We decided to descend at the first stop and there have our kilometrics torn off, but before reaching this station the conductor came to collect tickets, and by his face, false and mobile, we knew we were in for a struggle. We explained our dilemma and offered the one peseta, ninety centimes, which was marked in his book and our own, as the full first class tariff for twelve kilometers. He contemptuously refused and demanded eight pesetas each for that short ride of eight miles. We did not hesitate to refuse; whereupon when we reached the stopping station he tried by confused explanations to prevent the agent there from giving us the necessary complementary tickets. But fortunately in the hurry to procure them during the few minutes of our pause, I had stumbled in stepping from the carriage and slightly cut my hand on the pebbles. This roused the Spanish sense of chivalry and the agent moved aside the conductor and gave me what I asked. We again offered this latter the lawful fare for the eight miles we had ridden without tickets, and again he demanded eight pesetas. On reaching Zamora, he boldly brought up the Chief of that station, a trickster in league with him, and both demanded the unjust fare. A Spanish gentleman was passing, and seeing two ladies in trouble, stopped to ask if he could be of assistance. When we explained the case, he asked us to give him the lawful fare and turning to the station-master and the conductor, presented it to them with a scathing rebuke: like beaten dogs they slunk away. Several times gentlemen came to our aid in this way, as if it hurt their pride to have their race so misrepresented. It is this petty thieving among a class that should be above it, such as postal clerks and railway officials, that rouses the traveler's harsh criticisms of Spain and makes him so unjust to her. The radical cure lies in the men being better paid, for their salaries are such pittances that many of them look on extortion as their right. The tourist can do something toward lessening the abuse, by firmly refusing to be cheated. Our experience was that firmness always won the battle; if one is of a fiery temperament there is a scene, if one is phlegmatic, one sits immovable as a rock and lets the other storm. If one yields finally one has the scene as well as the putting of oneself in the wrong. To continue our day of ill-luck. From Zamora, we crawled along the dull, local line to the junction Medina del Campo, which we reached at eleven at night. We then changed our plans and got tickets for Segovia, deciding to leave Avila till later. At Medina we spent six weary hours in the waiting room, strolling up and down the windy platform, entering the buffet now and then to drink coffee, trying to rouse imaginative interest by thinking this was the spot where Isabella the Queen had died. But in vain, it was too dismal. How we abused Baedeker! And how we abused Spain and her railway system! Trains came and went, men muffled in their cloaks entered and left the dark waiting room, we the only impatient ones. A Spaniard accepts such things in full piety. Whoever heard of going faster than twenty miles an hour and what more natural than to wait in a station between trains half a night? At two o'clock that raw windy morning we boarded the express to Segovia and finding the ladies' compartment full, for we were now on the direct route from Paris, we had to force ourselves into the carriage with two furiously cross, sleepy Frenchmen. High, cold Segovia, almost 3,000 feet above the sea! A wind, _de todos los demonios_, was blowing that bleak first of November, and to give the final small touch of ill-luck, it lifted and bore away to the mysterious darkness outside, a treasured veil that the sun had at length toned to a rare tint. We stumbled into the ill-lighted station-buffet for more hot coffee, sending the luggage ahead to the sleeping hotel; for the faithful hotel-omnibus had been there waiting as usual. Strange memories remain of Spain's station restaurants,--the flitting waiters filling the bowls of coffee for the silent travelers, (no man is more silent than a traveling Spaniard);--frugal enduring scenes, not a touch of comfort, one eats to live indeed. "The French taste, the Germans devour, the Italians feast, the Spaniards _se alimentan_!" As the dawn was breaking we left the station and walked, buffeted by the gale, through the mournful streets that lead to the town, passing on the way the Artillery Academy, where the country's crack regiments are trained. As we descended to the market place below the steep hill on which Segovia is built, a sight greeted us that repaid a thousand fold for the dreary day and night of unnecessary travel, for guide-book blunders, personal stupidity, dishonest officials, collarless, cross Frenchmen and even lost automobile veils. For there, rising one hundred and fifty feet in noble dignity and proportion, its boulders held together by their own weight, without cement or clamping, stood the giant Roman aqueduct that Trajan left his native land, and framed by its arches were hills, villages, and churches, under a sky of delicate rose. Never was there a lovelier sunrise, fragile, shell-like, dewy. We climbed the steps that mount to the city beside the aqueduct, pausing again and again to look at the stupendous thing. Then we passed through quiet streets, with Romanesque doorways at every step (Segovia with Avila has the best portals in Spain) till we reached the hotel. Though, later, the night in Medina del Campo station revenged itself in a twenty hours' sleep, we were now too deeply fatigued to rest, and so soon were afoot again. A stone's throw brought us to the central square of Segovia, on one side of which is prominent the apse of the late-Gothic Cathedral. We pushed beyond it, here and there pausing to study some ancient doorway or to enter a carved courtyard, till at length the street ended in the big open space before the superbly set Alcázar, and we looked out on that memorable view. With the towering Roman aqueduct on one side of the town and this Castle at the other, Segovia may claim to be one of the most picturesquely set cities in the world. The view from the Plaza de la Reina Victoria before the Alcázar is one of the unforgettable sights of the Peninsula, of the inmost fiber of Castile. On the horizon lies one of Spain's sad, isolated villages. A winding road leads to it, along which plod the familiar carriers of the land, brothers of Sancho's patient Rucio; the rocky hills stretch away, dotted with ancient churches. Close to the city lie oases of trees and gardens such as the monastery enclosure of La Parral, with its noticeable stone pines. The Alcázar with its bartizan towers is built on a lofty crag that rises like the prow of a giant ship above the meeting of two bosky little streams, the Eresma which yielded the "trout of exceeding greatness" whereon Charles I of England supped in this castle, and the peaceful brook, Clamores. Thus in one landscape are united hardy uplands, leafy parks, a mediæval town with church towers and fortified castle, making a scene whose individuality is beyond beauty, whose profound charm never palls. Here one communes with the silent, inner soul of Spain, the land of Isabella, of Garcilaso, of Teresa, of Cervantes, not a trace of whose spirit is found in Madrid, but in such spots as Toledo and Avila and this. Segovia merits a prolonged stay. There were two Englishwomen in our hotel, who had passed months painting in the unfrequented city and found it a treasure house for the artist. It is full of Romanesque churches of the 11th and 12th centuries; so many are there that some are unused and falling into decay. The two best are San Martín and San Millán; the first, in the center of the town, surrounded by noticeable houses, has outside cloisters, that serve as a sunny lounging place for the people. From San Martín you can descend to San Millán by the steps beside the Plaza Isabel II. Apart from the church itself, with colossal animals carved on its capitols, the view from its porch is a most beautiful one, including the aqueduct, the Cathedral, and climbing houses, part of whose foundations it is plain to see are the apses of ancient churches. Segovia's Cathedral is not Romanesque like most of her churches, but late-Gothic, designed by the same architect who did Salamanca's new Cathedral, and like it, though a poor thing exteriorly, the inside is dignified and effective: it is more fortunate than its sister church in having a curved east end, not Salamanca's cold hall-like apse. The cloisters of Segovia belonged to the earlier Cathedral; they were taken down and skillfully reset here; the pillars being elliptical in shape like Oviedo, are not thoroughly pleasing. In a chapel opening out of the cloisters is the touching, small tomb of the prince whose nurse dropped him by accident from a window of the Alcázar, back in the 14th century; and a good example of the countless rare tombs of Spain is the bishop, with an exquisite ascetic face of chiseled marble, who lies in the passage leading to the cloisters. As we were in Segovia on All Saints' Day, we went to the celebration in the Cathedral, saw the prelate--the train of his red robe held by bearers--met at the church door by the canons and conducted in state to his throne. The vergers were very gorgeous; the leader carried a silver staff and wore a white wig and a white robe, his two assistants also in white wigs but with red velvet robes. The following day, All Souls', these vergers were dressed in mourning, and in the center of the black-draped church was placed, with true Spanish realism, a covered bier. On All Saints' Day there was really good music on the organ whose pipes flared out over aisles and choir; also an excellent sermon to which all listened in rapt attention, officers, peasants, and grave faced hidalgos standing in a characteristic group around the pulpit. The best way to learn Spanish and to learn more than the lip language of this race, is to listen to the sermons. Their eloquence is natural and contagious, and the peroration, delivered with _brio_, is often an artistic treat. Attend the sermons and frequent the early morning services, and you stumble on scenes of unobtrusive piety that tell you, despite some Spanish pessimists, that the soul of religion still lives in this land of the latest crusaders. As Sunday was the day we had set for the trip to La Granja, I went early to the Cathedral, and at Mass in a dark chapel of the apse, I watched long two gallant little lads of twelve and fourteen, smart in their artillery uniforms, swords, and white gloves. They went to Communion with their mother, who, like most Spanish women in church, was dressed in black with a draped veil, a fashion that lends an air of distinction to the plainest. This group of three remained to pray after the others had left the chapel, remained as a pleasure really to pray, the serious, high-browed, little faces bent over their books of devotion as they read the After-Communion devotions by the light of a tall candle placed on the floor beside them; then their blue eyes closed in such sweet, unconscious piety that it touched the heart strangely. And when, their prayers over, they left the Cathedral, each seized the mother's arm with a gay scamper of delight--she probably on a visit to them--and now for a whole day of vacation and enjoyment! In the same uniform as the small Communicants of Segovia Cathedral, other embryo artillery officers fill the city. At our hotel was a table where a number of the older students dined each day. They were well-bred lads with inborn sedateness, never boorish nor loud-voiced; noblesse oblige still is a reality in spite of the dissipated, smart set in Madrid by which we too often generalize. I shall not soon forget the look of pained displeasure with which they watched the over familiar treatment of the waiter by a foreign lady. It does not seem to me too harsh a statement to make that Spain's neighbor across the Pyrenees, has little of this chivalrous idealism among her boys. There are exceptions of course; the manly carriage of the _brancardiers_ of Lourdes, those bands of young men who voluntarily serve as bearers of the crippled and stricken, show that a remnant still exists of the race of the Rochejacqueleins, of the Montalemberts, of those who can serve, unpaid, an ideal. Frenchmen themselves will not maintain that such are the average. Whereas the average Spanish, like the average English lad, has a strong dash of the Quixote and is capable of disinterested enthusiasm. Proof of this radical difference is that first important step in manhood, marriage. In Spain there is not the pernicious system of dowries; as a rule it is personal attraction that wins a husband. French people will assure you, that though one may be hump-backed and villainously ill-tempered, if there is a dot one is married; one may be grace and intelligence incarnate, without the dot one goes unwedded to the grave; the shrewd, interested love of money is in young as well as old. Spanish young people are romantic. Midnight serenades and evening hours of chatting by the _reja_ are signs that hint marriage here is more than material settlement, love more than an impulse of nature; Spain's novels tell of this idealism. In many vital points the Spanish people are more akin to the English than to their Latin brothers. The Sunday morning that we took the diligence for our country excursion started cloudless. La Granja lies seven miles outside Segovia, on the Guadarrama Mountains, and is the residence of the Court for part of each summer. The diligence rattled down the precipitous streets of Segovia, passed under the towering aqueduct, "the devil's bridge" the peasantry call it, then mounted the swelling hills to the palace at San Ildefonso. It had formerly been a farm belonging to the monks of La Parral; Philip V turned it into an artificial French pleasure ground, and built a formal chateau, a Bourbon creation that is strangely out of place on the rugged hills. The park is well-wooded but all rural charm is spoiled by the neo-classic fountains, some of them like monstrous dreams. Before we reached the leafy avenues of San Ildefonso, the sky became overcast and a heavy rain began. Five minutes after leaving the diligence we were so drenched that it seemed as sensible to explore the palace grounds as to pause chilled and wet in a miserable hotel. Then when we found the diligence did not return to Segovia till the evening and that no carriage would start in the storm, in an ill moment we decided to walk back to the city. A wind that cut like a knife made it a feat beyond our strength, and some miles along that bleak way, when a cart passed, we abjectly begged a passage. Yet, standing patiently under the drenching rain, oblivous to the tearing wind, the contented young shepherd girls watched their flocks. If this poor imitation of Versailles has little in itself to charm the tourist, La Granja has been the scene of so many striking events in modern Spanish history that it merits a visit. It was there that Godoy, favorite of Charles IV's wife, signed away Spain to Napoleon, the criminal act that led to such glorious consequences. For then Spain, the country which had lain downtrodden under three centuries of misrule, shedding her blood in wars for her wretched kings' personal ambitions and giving her treasure for their extravagance, awoke suddenly to life when she found the king had outraged her. Two young heroes, Daoiz and Velarde, artillery officers, turned the cannon on the French invaders in Madrid, that memorable _Dos de Mayo_, 1808, and the War of Independence began, the starting point of regeneration, the second Cavadonga. That outburst of national vigor has never had justice done it. We know the Peninsula War from the English point of view, a ceaseless disparagement of Spain's part in it.[16] It is true that without the English armies the war would have dragged on in disorderly, guerrilla fashion, for misrule had robbed the people of skill in self-government and organization. But remember the glorious year 1808, whose centenary all Spain was celebrating during the months of our visit, was before the arrival of Wellington's troops. The _Dos de Mayo_, the Battle of Bailén, where a Spanish general with Spanish troops brought about the surrender of twenty thousand of Napoleon's trained soldiers, and the sieges of Saragossa and Gerona, unmatched in all modern history for heroism, were in 1808-1809. It is just to remember that when Germany, Austria, Italy, and Russia yielded in part to the invader, Spain stood firm against him, and the nation that Europe thought unnerved and debased "presented a fulcrum upon which a lever was rested that moved the civilized world." La Granja has witnessed later historic scenes. When Charles IV betrayed his people, the nation chose as their king his son, the miserable Ferdinand VII, who ungratefully repaid their loyalty. Poor Spain, she has had kings who would have wrecked a less vigorous race. At La Granja, in 1832, Ferdinand VII changed his will and made his infant daughter, Isabel II, his heir, instead of his brother, Don Carlos, whom he had previously acknowledged, thus leaving behind him an inheritance of civil war. From the days of Urraca and Isabella the Catholic, women could inherit the throne in Spain, just as they can in England. But in the 18th century under the Bourbon kings, who loved all things French, the Salic Law was introduced and continued in force till Ferdinand VII changed it at La Granja. The king had a full right to revert to the earlier custom, as the Salic Law was an innovation in Spain, and the grandson of Ferdinand's daughter, Isabel II, the present young Alfonso XIII, is in truth the legitimate king of the Spains. Don Carlos, on Ferdinand's death, rose in rebellion, and for seven years a frightful, fraticidal struggle ravaged the country. This civil war, stamped out in 1840, again burst into flames during the disorders of 1872. To-day, however, the Carlist faction claims but scattered adherents, chiefly in the northern provinces. The peaceful termination of these troubles has been solidified by that noble and truly wise woman, the present queen dowager, María Cristina, whose strength of character and sincerity of aim may be said to have safeguarded her son's inheritance during his long minority. Another scene took place at La Granja in the early years of Isabel II' reign, while her mother was regent, a far different regent from the later Cristina. Though the Constitutional factions had rallied round Isabel, as the Absolutists had gathered about Don Carlos, it was only through force, inch by inch, that the Spanish Crown yielded to the people's demand for a constitutional monarchy. Thus, at La Granja in 1836, the queen mother was intimidated by the army into affirming again the Constitution of 1812. This last century in Spain has been a period of such ceaseless insurrection, such rapid, ill-considered changes of ministries, that it seems, on hasty survey, to be a hundred years of political chaos. Perhaps a slight sketch of the events may help to a better understanding, for running through the century, a thread to the labyrinth, is the nation's slow, stumbling, but ever forward advance to constitutional rule. With each disorderly, seemingly unconnected insurrection, a step ahead was taken, so that to-day an absolute monarchy is an impossibility in Spain. She may have taken longer than many European powers to shake off the incubus of the divine right of kings, but on the other hand, she has achieved her comparative independence without a king's execution or a terrible, bloody cataclysm. There has never been in Spain the bitter separation of nobles and people; together they both worked for their freedom, keeping a fraternal relationship that is uncommon in history. The Spanish temperament, like the English, has an intense loyalty and love of tradition; it finds its happiest condition under a monarchy, but the history of the 19th century shows it must be a constitutional monarchy; a modern king rules for the good of the people since he rules by will of the people. To give a hasty sketch of political progress. Godoy, Charles IV's unscrupulous minister, brought Napoleon's armies into Spain under the pretext that they were on their way to conquer Portugal. When some seventy thousand French troops were on Spanish soil and the people found their king a slave to the so-called visitors, they suddenly awoke to the truth, the tocsin of alarm sounded in Madrid, and from one end of the land to the other they took up arms. Then followed the Guerra de la Independenzia, 1808 to 1814, that proved to Europe Spain was alive and vigorous, again in the arena of the world's struggle. During the war a representative body met at Cadiz, thus renewing the Cortes that had flourished before the Hapsburg dynasty stamped it out. At Cadiz, in an outburst of patriotism, the Constitution of 1812 was drawn up: for the invader, war to the knife; Ferdinand VII to be their lawful king; abuses such as the Inquisition abolished; the sovereignty of the people upheld; "_religión y rey, patria é independencia_," truly Spanish watchwords. When in 1814 Napoleon was forced to accept Ferdinand VII as King of Spain, that ungrateful king came back to his loyal people, and his first act was to restore the absolute monarchy of his ancestors, to declare the Constitution of 1812 null and void, to try to galvanize the Inquisition into life. It was not long before the disorders of his government led some of the colonies in America to declare their independence, and finally Spain too uprose. The Riego insurrection of 1820, proclaiming again the Constitution of 1812, was the first of the frequent _pronunciamientos_ (the uprising of the army against absolute monarchy) that continued down to 1870. Louis Philippe declared this insubordination of the army a menace to other thrones of Europe, and took this pretext to send French troops into Spain to uphold Ferdinand's absolutism: the Trocadero defense was during this second invasion of the French. Always ceaselessly agitating, despite temporary defeat, went on the people's struggle for a constitution. While Ferdinand VII lived there was little hope for modern ideas, but when he died, the Constitutionalists espoused the cause of his infant daughter, Isabel II. All advance was retarded by the Carlist War that followed Isabel's accession, during which war occurred what a Spanish quaker has called the "_pecado de sangre_," the brutal massacre of the monks and destruction of such unrivaled centers of art as Poblet in Catalonia, more a political act than a religious, as the monks were Carlists. This war so confused and embittered the issues at stake that it is difficult to follow with consistency the political parties. The government was consistent only in its instability, having now a Queen Regent, now an Espartero, banishments, executions, riots, barricades, revolts,--it seemed indeed as if Spain were sown with Cadmus teeth. Still through the darkness one can follow a light. The Constitution of 1837 asserted boldly the sovereignty of the people. Though the Constitution of the forties was lenient to absolute power, the Cortes was now included in the government, a marked advance since Ferdinand VII's day. The Constitution of the fifties was a further advance toward national independence. In the midst of political rancors, the war with Africa, 1860, came as a noble interval when feuds were put aside and all fought together against a common enemy. As in the old days, poets and novelists enrolled themselves in the army, and the young grandees served as common soldiers, in fidelity to the vow of their ancestors, knights of Santiago, of Calatrava, and of Alcántara, that when Spain was threatened by the Saracen, their descendants would serve _in the ranks, on foot, and in person_. Then, this brilliant war over, the old strifes returned in force, Prim, O'Donnell,[17] and twenty minor parties. Queen Isabel II was banished in 1868, and the first interregnum since Spain was a monarchy occurred. Then followed the short-lived rule of Amadeus I, Duke of Aosta and son of Victor Emmanuel, called by invitation to rule in Spain. His chief upholder, Prim, was assassinated before Amadeus reached Madrid, and the new king found himself in so equivocal a position, that after two unhappy years he resigned gladly. Under the influence of Castelar, most brilliant of orators and a man who sincerely loved his country, a Republic of two years' duration followed. Spain was never intended for a republic; discontent continued general, the ministry changed eight times in this short period, and at length all warring factions agreed that the only hope for stable government lay in the restoration of Spain's lawful king, Isabel II's eldest son. Isabel in Paris abdicated in his favor, and in 1875 Alfonso XII returned to his native land. He came not in the same spirit as had Ferdinand VII in 1814. The sixty years of disorders had led to a solid result, Alfonso XII came back as a constitutional king. The Constitution of 1876 was a reconciliation of monarchical principles and those of a democracy. The new king died before he had reached the age of thirty, and his son Alfonso XIII, born after his father's death, was represented by his mother till his majority. To María Cristina of Austria, Spain owes an unending debt of gratitude. Under her wise rule the country had some years of the peace she so needed; and even what is termed disaster, the recent loss of colonies, is a blessing in disguise. Spain to-day needs all her strength for herself. As the abuses of centuries are not reformed in a year and as nothing on earth can be perfect, there is much to be desired still in Spain's political life. Her constitution is an excellent one in theory, but in practice it is crippled by the dishonest elections. Political power is left in the hands of an unscrupulous minority who work for personal, not national aggrandizement, and the distrust such elections have engendered keeps the better element of the people aloof from the government. Only fifteen per cent of the Spanish people vote. The king has, like England's ruler, the right of absolute veto. If Spain is now so blessed as to have for her king a worthy descendant of Isabella the Catholic, the remedy for the political dishonesty may be close at hand. Young Alfonso XIII has an intelligence of the first order; he has been trained under a high-minded and truly Christian woman; he has married the daughter of a race that well understands constitutional rule; personally he is loved by his people with an affection not hard to understand, for despite his thin, plain face, the young king is eminently distinguished and _simpático_. Often in Seville, seeing him galloping back from polo, or returning from a week's hunt in the wilds of the sierras, our intense hopes went out to him. In his hands, it is slight exaggeration to say, lies Spain's future. If Alfonso XIII gives his intelligence and life-blood to his people, who can foresee to what heights this strong, uncontaminated race may climb? The past century's outburst in literature and art hint the possibility of a second _siglo de oro_. La Granja has led me far afield. It does not stand for Spain's best, an artificial, foreign creation where passed hours of the nation's abasement. Segovia is the real Spain. Descend from the Alcázar to the river, cross the bridge, mount to the ten-sided chapel of the Knights Templars, and sitting on the steps of the granite cross, look back on the stretching city. There lies the Spain whose fiber is capable of regeneration: generous, patient, indomitable, faulty, but with manly faults, untouched by taint of luxury and greed, with blood in her veins, and ideals in her soul. Wander down by the Eresma past the hermitage, and encircle the town by the footpath beside the tree-hidden Clamores. High above, its yellow stones gleaming in the sunset light, rises the fortress which stood firm for Isabella in her critical hour, and from whence she started in state to claim her heritage. Will the young king of Spain to-day show the world that Isabella's heritage is worth the claiming? [Illustration: THE ALCÁZAR OF SEGOVIA] SAINT TERESA AND AVILA "All great artists are mystics, for they do but body forth what they have intuitively discerned: all philosophers as far as they are truly original are mystics, because their greatest thoughts are not the result of laborious efforts but have been apprehended by the lightening flash of genius, and because their essential theme is connected with the one feeling, only to be mystically apprehended, the relation of the individual to the Absolute. Every great religion has originated in mysticism and by mysticism it lives, for mysticism is what John Wesley called 'heart religion.' When this dies out of any creed, that creed inevitably falls into mere formalism." W. S. LILLY. Mysticism is St. Teresa's highest glory. To write of her with admiration and even enthusiasm, leaving untouched this acme of her genius, as certain of her biographers have done, is to describe the shape, the hue, the grace of a rose and omit to tell of its scent. On all sides her character was notable; in strength of will, in that most uncommon of qualities, common sense,[18] in vigorous administration, in sincerity of purpose. Carmelite nun and restorer of the strictest order of Carmelites, she was not in the least a withered ascetic but a well-bred Castilian lady of winning manners and pleasing appearance, who in courtesy, dignity, and simplicity, embodied in herself the best of Castile. From every word she wrote breathes a generous character. Her robust virility of mind, her complete absence of sophistry or of self-consciousness, help us to understand the love she roused among her nuns, and the respect she gained from the foremost men of her time. "We cannot stir ourselves to great things unless our thoughts are high," wrote this soul of heroism. Yet, with all her supremacy of intellect, Teresa was so delicately witty, so gay--peals of laughter were often heard in her cloisters--so shrewd, that never in her was found the least trace of the pretentious. Anecdotes are told of her practical good sense. The first night of the foundation in Salamanca, in the solitary garret when the frightened little nun, her companion, exclaimed, "I was thinking, dear Mother, what would become of you, if I were to die," "Pish," said Teresa, who disliked the exalté, "it will be time to think of that when it happens. Let us go to sleep." Then her vehement protest to those who thought prayer alone sufficient for salvation: "No, sisters, no: our Lord desires works!" Her swift sweeping aside of the aristocratic spirit in her convents; let there be no talk of precedence, "which is nothing more than to dispute whether the earth be good for bricks or for mortar. O my God, what an insignificant subject!" "I have always been friendly with learned men," she wrote, and pleasant milestones in her burdened life are her interviews with some remarkable minds of the time. "Knowledge and learning are very necessary for everything, alas!"--This last exclamation made in naïve apology that she could only translate in halting language her inner life of the spirit, she whose witchery of style makes her read to-day even by the scoffer. The human personality of the saint lives in her writing, where is found the fragrance of her own special soul. "I cannot see anyone who pleases me but I must instantly desire that he might give himself entirely to God, and I wish it so ardently that sometimes I can hardly contain myself." "Humility alone is that which does everything, when you comprehend in a flash to the depth of your being, you are a mere nothing and that God is all." "Oh, Lord of my soul! Oh my true Lord, how wonderful is Thy greatness! Yet here we live, like so many silly swains, imagining we have attained some knowledge of Thee; and yet it is indeed as nothing, for even in ourselves there are great secrets which we do not understand." "Do you know what it is to be truly spiritual? It is to be the slaves of God; those who are signed with His mark which is that of the Cross." And that supreme cry of the saints in all ages: "_¡Señor! ¡O morir ó padecer!_ My God! either to suffer or to die!" It is inevitable sacrilege for anyone in this generation, which has traveled so far from the days of faith, to touch on Teresa's raptures and locutions, for in sheer ignorance we profane what is holy. The saint herself foresaw our difficulty. "I know that whoever shall have arrived at these raptures will understand me well; but he who has had no experience therein, will consider what I say to be foolish.... However much I desire to speak clearly concerning what relates to prayer, it will be obscure for him who has no experience therein.... Some may say these things seem impossible, and that it is good not to scandalize the weak.... I consider it certain that whoever shall receive any harm by believing it possible for God in this land of exile to bestow such favors, stands in great need of humility; such a person keeps the gate shut against receiving any favors himself." So unparalleled was her life of ecstasy that at first the saint doubted if it were heaven sent or not; she submitted herself humbly to the tests of that inquisition age till at length her own good judgment told her that this "joy surpassing all the joys of the world, all its delights, all its pleasures," was from God, because of its after-effects, an added peace, a deeper humility, a more ardent and practical love of souls. But her clear brain and transcendent honesty made her see the risk for weaker minds: "The highest perfection," she warns, "does not consist in raptures nor in visions, nor in the gift of prophecy, but in making our will so conformable with the will of God that we shall receive what is bitter as joyfully as what is sweet and pleasant." Mysticism skirts indeed perilous precipices, but St. Teresa walked the narrow path securely, her eyes uplifted, oblivious of the dangers below. I dare not touch on her marvelous life of the spirit.[19] All I can say is, go to her own works, read them in their pure, native Castilian, do not be content with the few extreme quotations given perhaps by those who would discredit her; read her in various moods, as you do the "Imitation," and I doubt if she fails to convince you that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our negative philosophy, that a few rare souls have risen to supreme heights because they were really humble and really holy, that religion has preserved from total loss the subtlest faculty of man, and faith stood up bravely through centuries of intellectual contempt to battle for it. Recently I came across a review of some works on psychology by that able young English novelist, Robert Hugh Benson; it ended with these suggestive words: "In Psychology, science and religion are very near to one another, for its subject is nothing else than the soul of man. Science in her winding explorations has been for centuries drawing nearer to this center of the maze: she has traversed physical nature, the direct work of God, and philosophy, the direct product of man.... Is it too much to hope that when science has advanced yet a few steps more she may have come to Faith with the human soul newly discovered in her hands: 'Here is a precious and holy thing that I have found in man, a thing which for years I have denied or questioned. Now I hand it over to the proper authority. It has powers of which I know little or nothing, strange intuitions into the unseen, faculties for communication which do not find their adequate object in this world ... a force of habit which is meaningless if it ends with time; an affinity with some element that cannot rise from matter as its origin. Take it from my hands for you alone understand its needs and capacities. Enliven it with the atmosphere it must have for its proper development, feed it, cleanse it, heal its hurts, train it to use and control its own powers, and prepare it for Eternity.'" Let the reader before he opens the "Way of Perfection" know the saint's "Life"[20] which she wrote, by the advice of her superior, when forty-six years of age; it is an autobiography worthy to rank with Augustine's "Confessions." Read also the few hundred racy letters written after the press of the day while the convent slept. Chief of all, let the reader, if he is practical, know that inimitable book of her fifty-eighth year, the "Foundations," with its Cervantes-like pictures of the people and customs of the time. Perhaps only those who have traveled on Spanish country-roads, those tracts of mud or rocks, can appreciate the hardships endured by this aged woman as she went from city to city to found her houses; in heavy snows to Salamanca; to Seville in a covered cart turned to purgatory by the direct rays of the Andalusian sun, with fever and only hot water to drink; rivers overflowed by heavy rains; boats upset in the rivers. The last foundation was at Burgos, barely four months before her death, the jolting cart in which she rode from Palencia having to be pulled out of the ruts and she entered the coldest city in the Peninsula on a raw January day in a heavy rain, there to find further troubles. Familiar with Teresa's physical endurance, her cool-headed business ability, her candid hatred of shams and pretence, then approach her loftier self and read the "Camino de Perfección." The treatise on prayer in the "Life," (Chap. XI to XXII) prepares one for this second book, which she wrote for her sisters and daughters of "St. Joseph's" in Avila, "those pure and holy souls whose only care was to serve and praise Our Lord, so disengaged from the things of the world, solitude is their delight." Through the "Way of Perfection" runs her beautiful exposition of the Pater Noster, with digressions to right and left as her thoughts arose. She tells of the intangible land of worship in magic-laden words that draw the cold heart to the far realm of contemplation wherein lay the source of her strength. The "Camino" leads one to her last book, the "Interior Castle," a glorious pæan to God, a courageous exploring of the untrodden realms of the soul that is truly one of the triumphs of the spirit, and when we consider it was written by a woman of sixty-two, worn out with labors and penance, living in a poor little convent, it is an incredible feat of genius. In all literature is found nothing loftier nor more ethereal: "Oh, 'tis not Spanish but 'tis Heaven she speaks!" Teresa belonged to the race of the true mystics because she was a great saint. It has been said that sainthood, the divine hunger of the soul to do or to suffer _pro causa Dei_ is as difficult to define to the imagination as genius. The materialist may scoff at it, but it remains a primitive part of human nature against which argument beats itself in vain. Its form may change with the times, the Eastern anchorite and the mediæval ascetic may give way to the administrative bishop needed in his age; to a knightly paladin such as that "Raleigh among the Saints" who led his Free Lances to the fight for the salvation of souls; to a large-hearted philanthropist like Vincent de Paul, with his unresting Sisters of Charity; to a scholar of the schools, a Newman; to the reformer in our ugly modern cities; under varying vestures the spirit is the same. In the compelling power of her saints lies the force of the Church; to the saints of the Catholic Reformation, to Philip Neri, Charles Borromeo, Francis Borgia, Francis de Sales, Francis Xavier, Ignatius Loyola, the Church owes her rehabilitation. These great souls rose in every land to purify abuses, to drive the money changers from the temple: they were the leaven in the hundred measures of meal. Macaulay noted the fact that since the middle of the sixteenth century Protestantism has not gained one inch of ground, and this is due to these saints of the Catholic Reformation; for deep in man's heart lies a reverence for simple goodness that overrides all disputes, and when such saints arose in the church that was called a sink of iniquity, men paused; those who had passed from her ranks did not return, but none after followed them. Had Luther been gifted with more of this personal sainthood, the fatal division that bequeathed centuries of hate and warfare might have been avoided, and the simpler method of example, of holiness of life, have sufficed for reforming Renaissance Rome intoxicated with the revival of pagan culture. Such regrets are futile, a mere weighing the weight of the fire, a measuring the blast of the wind; and they are ungrateful, too, since the spirit of that troubled time roused among other great souls, a Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada. The writings of this remarkable woman have the same allurements for us to-day as when they flowed almost unconsciously from her pen, for besides her mysticism and her sainthood, she was a poet, of the race of those whose thoughts make rich the blood of the world. Her little nuns tell that when she wrote her hand moved so rapidly, it seemed hardly possible it could form human words, while in her face was an expression of exaltation. "She ranks as a miracle of genius, as perhaps the greatest woman who ever handled pen, the single one of all her sex who stands beside the world's most perfect masters," is the testimony of the ablest English critic of Spanish literature. She wrote with her eye direct on her soul's experience, with the glorious courage to give the naked truth regardless of consequences, and she will be read as long as sincerity of soul-expression is the poet's best gift and while the conflict of faith and unbelief remains the highest of human themes. Mystic, saint, and poet, she can claim yet another title, that of philosopher. By the road of self-study, she reached that sublime height of metaphysics, the intellectual vision of the Absolute. The further Psychology advances, the more wonderful is found her knowledge of the soul and its moods and powers. "The highest, most generous philosophy that ever man imagined," wrote the scholar, Luis de León. "Sainte Térèse a exploré plus à fond que tout autre les régions inconnues de l'âme, ... elle explique savamment, clairement, le mécanisme de l'âme évoluant dès que Dieu la touche ... une sainte qui a vérifié sur elle-même les phases sur-naturelles qu'elle a décrites, une femme dont la lucidité fut plus qu'humaine" is the appreciation of Huysmans. Not only orthodox believers yield her this preëminence: Leibnitz read and deeply admired her; a recent French critic of the skeptic school compares her to Descartes. Hyperbole is inevitable in speaking of this "sweet incendiary," and all who know her books feel the same enthusiasm. "A woman for angelical height of speculation, for masculine courage of performance, more than a woman," wrote the old English poet, Richard Crashaw, whose "Flaming Heart" is touched with her own potency: "Oh thou undaunted daughter of desires! By all thy dower of lights and fires; By all the eagle in thee, all the dove; And by thy lives and deaths of love, By thy large draughts of intellectual day; And by thy thirsts of love more large than they;... By all the Heav'n thou hast in Him, (Fair sister of the seraphim!) By all of Him we have in thee; Leave nothing of myself in me, Let me so read thy life that I Unto all life of mine may die." Spain may claim the glory of having appreciated this her greatest daughter. She is a colonel of artillery; she is a doctor in Salamanca; the manuscript of her "Life" was placed in the Escorial and the King carried the key; at country inns they tell of the night she rested there, as if it had been yesterday; her devotees to-day sign their letters "_su amigo teresiano_." It was reserved for later generations of different race to explain what they could not understand by calling it hysteria and epilepsy. Richard Ford's account of the saint is so wide of the original that Froude, no lover of Catholic Spain, says it is not even a caricature; the article on her in the Encyclopedia Brittanica is a disgrace to intellectual thought. Spain stands indifferent to such criticism. She knows herself secure in her mystics who seem to have left the race an intuitive understanding of the life of the soul. This inherited intuition has, of course, its dangers, for all intelligences are not those of a Teresa de Jesús. It needs indeed "large draughts of intellectual day" to be a mystic. Valdés' novel, "Marta y María" shows this mistaken insisting in the nineteenth century on conditions of life suitable to the sixteenth. But because smaller minds have imitated her disastrously, their neo-mysticism need not be considered a serious menace in modern Spain, since following a saint, even haltingly, is not by any means an easy life to choose. St. Teresa and Avila: her name evokes that of her native city as instantly as St. Francis' that of Assisi; every stone in Avila breathes of the heroic woman. Our first visit was to the small plaza under the city walls, where the _casa solar_ of the Cepeda family stood. Teresa came of the untitled gentry of Castile, _de sangre muy limpia_, and a Spaniard's pride in his blood, untouched by Moorish taint, by crime, or illegitimacy, is as strong to-day as then: perhaps it is this pride, in peasant as well as noble, that makes the democratic relation of the classes in the Peninsula. At right angles to the mediocre church built in commemoration, on the site of the Cepeda house, stands the mansion of the Duque de la Roca, which gives a good idea of the solid escutcheoned homes of the hidalgo. Many such dignified houses are scattered over Avila, making a stroll in her streets full of the charm of surprise; their chief adornments are the doorways, truly splendid old portals with coping stones sometimes nine feet deep radiating round the entrance. In one of these solid Romanesque houses Teresa was born in 1515. Through a city gate before her house, I looked out on just the same scene she had known during the first eighteen years of her life; the rocky plain, through which the river wound, stretched to a spur of the Guadarrama mountains, capped already with the winter's snow. Leaving the venerable little plaza, I descended the steep street that led to the river bridge, in the spirit of pilgrimage still, for the child Teresa and a small brother wandered here alone one day on their way to seek martyrdom among the infidels. Met by an uncle beyond the bridge, the runaways were brought home. Truly in the saint's life, the child was father to the man, her days bound each to each in natural piety, despite that short period which her too tender conscience ever regretted when, as a pretty girl, love of fine clothes and flattery allured her. It is told of these remarkable children, that, hearing the word "Forever," they clasped their little hands and gazed wide-eyed in each other's faces, overcome by its stupendous meaning. [Illustration: HOUSE OF THE DUQUE DE LA ROCA, AVILA] When Teresa was eighteen she went to visit a married sister who lived at a distance, and on her return stopped to see an uncle who had just taken the resolution of entering a monastery. The religious feeling in her partly awoke, and she too desired the life of the cloister, but her parents not finding strength to part with her, one morning she and a brother slipped away from home, and after he had conducted her to the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation outside the walls, he went on himself to beg admittance at the Dominican Convent of St. Thomas. For over twenty-five years Teresa lived in the _Encarnación_: during the first twenty years she was miserable in bodily health and as miserable in spirit, for the saint had not yet found her vocation, and the laxity of the rule allowed the nuns to see much of the world, to receive visitors and hear the gossip of the town. "I was tossed about in a wretched condition, for if I had small content in the world, in God I had no pleasure. At prayer time I watched for the clock to strike the end of the hour." Strange words for this future great genius of prayer! Her conversion, the change of heart that sooner or later, disregarded or welcomed, comes to all who live with any depth, came to Teresa as she was approaching her fortieth year. She had been roused to more serious thoughts by her father's death, and one day in the oratory she suddenly seemed to realize in a figure of her crucified Saviour the unspeakable wonder of his sacrifice: "Thy hands to give Thou can'st not lift. Yet will Thy hand still giving be, It gives, but O, itself's the gift, It gives tho' bound, tho' bound 'tis free." "Love touch't her heart, and lo! it beats High, and burns with such brave heats Such thirst to die, as dares drink up A thousand cold deaths in one cup." With the inflowing of true religion, Teresa longed for a stricter life, for the original rule of Mount Carmel as conferred by Innocent IV in 1248. She was misunderstood by those around her, her locutions and visions doubted; as a natural result of the false _beata_ of that day, she was considered a woman who for the sake of notoriety pretended to sainthood. Only after years of semi-persecution did the ring of truth and the ethical fervor of Teresa's words convince the learned men who examined her, and she was allowed to leave the _Encarnación_ to found the convent of St. Joseph, her first house of the barefoot or _descalzos_ Carmelites. Associated so closely as is the _Encarnación_ with the saint, it is with emotion one looks down from the city on the pleasant oasis it makes in the rocky plain. Teresa had there the memorable interviews with St. Francis Borgia, just returned from a visit to his friend and former lord, Charles V at Yuste; with the mystic poet, St. John of the Cross (whom Coventry Patmore has followed in his "Unknown Eros"); with St. Peter of Alcántara, who too held that "the cornerstone and chief foundation of all is humility." These devout men confirmed Teresa in her belief in the divine origin of her prayer: "There is no pleasure or comfort which can be equal to meeting with another person to whom God has given some beginnings of the same dispositions," she wrote, harrassed by the petty suspicions around her. A tenderer association than the _Encarnación_ is that of _San José_, her first foundation. The convent lies outside the Puerta del Alcázar, Gate of the Castle, past the plaza where the townspeople stroll under the arcades, and peasant women sell fragrant celery from the big saddle-baskets they lift from their donkeys' backs to the pavement. The visitor is shown treasured relics by the nuns, the quaint musical instrument their mother played on, her drinking jug, and wooden pillow, a letter in her strong, clear hand-writing. During the later strenuous years of her life the saint ever looked back lovingly here. "I lived for five years in the monastery of St. Joseph at Avila, and those now seem to me to be the most peaceful part of my life, the want of which repose my soul often feels." From the age of fifty-two to her death at sixty-six (1582) this wonderful woman traveled over Spain, founding her reformed order, sixteen convents for women and fourteen monasteries for men. While on a visit of inspection at Alba de Tormes the end came; with her favorite words of the Psalmist, "A contrite and humbled heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise," she passed, as she had written in her "Way of Perfection," "not to a strange country, but to her native land." Avila is worthy of her saint, Avila of the Knights, Avila the Loyal, the King's Avila. It is one of the most perfect examples existing of the fortified towns of chivalry. Built on an eminence, it is completely encircled by grand old walls, forty feet high, whose sameness is broken by some eighty-six towers; two of these here and there are placed close together and arched, so as to make a gateway. Below the town on every side stretches a plain, so strewn with shattered rocks that it is easy to picture it the scene of some battle of giants. The Cathedral may be called part of the city ramparts, since its apse forms one of the eighty encircling towers; the walls are so thick that the radiating chapels round the chancel are not seen in the exterior view, being quite lost in the depth of stone and mortar. Our inn, the _Fonda Ingles_, looked out on the square before the Cathedral, a windy spot, where the gusts from the mountains seized and tossed the men's long capes. Like Burgos and Salamanca, Avila is on the truncated mountain of central Spain, and one is reminded of its 3,500 feet of altitude by the bitter cold. Nothing can pierce so sharply as the wind of the Castile plains. Each day we crossed the gusty plaza to the church and so grew to know it with the heart-affection Spanish cathedrals win. The large windows have been walled up to darken the interior, for Spain, the hardy, the all-enduring, ignores the frosts of eight months of the year to provide against the summer heats. The details of Avila Cathedral are truly lovely; a double-aisled ambulatory round the warm space of the High Altar, a _retablo_ of ancient pictures, isolated marble shrines between chancel and choir near which kneel groups of black-veiled worshipers, gleaming brass _rejas_, a carved _coro_ where the canons chant and where are massive illuminated hymnals on the lectern, all make up one's ideal of a house of God. Do not miss the sacristy, one's ideal too of what a sacristy should be, with antique silver wrought by the De Arfe family, with painted and gilded cabinets, and alabaster altars cut like ivory. St. Teresa's city is small: one can encircle its walls several times in a constitutional, yet every walk discovers new treasures. We were constantly stumbling on yet other of the imposing portals that exist in their perfection only here and at Segovia, and in the sleepy squares or courtyards we found some of the roughly-hewn stone animals, the primitive god of Druid days, used later by the Romans as milestones. From these comes another title for Avila, _Cantos y Santos_. An easy afternoon walk can be taken to Son Soles, a hermitage on the lower slope of the mountains, whither the saint must have gone in the summer evenings when the sunset glorified the plain and hills, for the customs of Avila to-day are those of Avila in the sixteenth century. A path led us across the aromatic fields, and country men in wide-brimmed velvet hats gazed at us with clear, fearless eyes, grave yet courteous, like true Castilians. In the meadows we met a gentleman of the town pacing slowly, book in hand; one would have time in the home of the mystic for such fruitful hours of pause, such sessions of sweet silent thought. On the way to Son Soles, just on the outskirts of the town, stands Santo Tomás, the Dominican monastery that long supplied missionaries to the Philippines. Before the High Altar is a white marble mausoleum of Isabella's period, worthy to rank with that of her parents at Miraflores,--the truly touching tomb of her only son. He lies with calm upturned face, a crown on his thick locks, his gauntlets thrown beside him. The royal prince was educated with ten young nobles in a former palace near this church. Generous, handsome, a scholar and musician, with the fair future stretching before him of the first king to rule the _Españas_ rich and united, he died suddenly at Salamanca in 1497, turning all the conquests, all the discoveries of his parents' reign to dust and ashes. The Queen bowed her head in submission, saying "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, Blessed be his name": but it is told that she often came to sit in her special stall of the raised choir here, to gaze with broken heart on the white tomb of her son. Had he lived would Spain's evil day have been averted? One can almost believe so; for tyrannic government came in with the Austrian, who ruled here because of Don Juan's death. Charles V, Isabella's grandson, was not a Spaniard; he could little understand the system of individual city rights that prevailed in the country he came to govern. Spain can boast she was one of the earliest of European nations to teach the municipal doctrine that the state has freedom if the town is free. We too completely forget that it was nearly a century before the celebrated Leicester Parliament that Burgos in 1169 had popular representation. When the Austrian arrived, with his autocratic idea that all power should be concentrated, the Castilian cities rose in the Comuneros rebellion, but they were ruthlessly put down and for three hundred years the land's vigor and wealth were exploited for the benefit of one family. I am sure that as she sat pondering in the choir stall of Santo Tomás Isabella foresaw what a tragic loss to her cherished land was the death of her only son. Avila can link the names of Isabella la Católica and Teresa de Jesús, the two most incomparable women in whom the sex has culminated, both born on the bleak invigorating steppes of Castile, in the same province, within the same hundred years, both making an indelible impression on their race, both leaving a deathless heritage of aspiration and onspurring pride. Is there any wonder that a people who can claim two such heroines look at one with fearless eyes? Avila is rich in tombs. There is a second lovely one in Santo Tomás, that of Prince John's attendants, and down by the river bridge, the picturesque chapel of San Segundo holds a most beautiful work by Spain's best sculptor, Berruguete. The kneeling bishop has so gentle an expression that it is hard to believe he could hurl a Moslem chief from the city walls above this hermitage. In the Cathedral, behind the High Altar, is another Berruguete tomb, Bishop Tostado, whose industry has passed into a proverb; he is here represented with speaking, alert expression, leaning forward, this tireless pen suspended in his hand. The tomb of St. Teresa is not found in her native city, for she was buried where she died, at Alba de Tormes, some miles from Salamanca. Not long after her death Avila stole the saint's body--strange to our modern notions are those old disputes over relics--but through the influence of the Duke of Alva it was restored to his town. Admiration for St. Teresa tempted me to Alba de Tormes, but to those who would go thither I must say, resist the temptation. Unfortunately, the spirit of religiosity, which is to religion what sentimentality is to sentiment, has taken possession of her burial place. If you do go to Alba, however, make it a day's excursion from Salamanca. The evening was over before we reached the town, and we drove in darkness from the station, bumping over the ruts of an awful road. Railway and villages seem often at enmity in Spain; though we had passed directly by the gleaming lights of Alba, we ran on some miles further before stopping in its station, hence the necessity of a drive of several kilometers back to the town. The inn was most primitive, being merely the poor house of a country woman, our waiter at table her ten-year old son dressed in corduroys. A friendly pig met us in the front hall, coming out from the kitchen to look at the unaccustomed foreigners; nevertheless, the house was clean and the landlady got out fragrant linen for the bedrooms. On our admiring a picture of their great patroness, the kindly woman, after dusting it, presented it with the customary polite phrase of "this your picture," which was no mere formality, since the next morning when she found it secretly restored to its former place, she rushed out to thrust it again on us as we were stepping into the diligence. This generous landlady, our grave little garçon, the night watchman the _sereno_, calling the hours, a daybreak view from the plaza of the vivid green meadows along the river, these are the pleasant reminiscences of Alba. Opposite the inn stood the church where the saint is buried, but willingly would I blot out its memory. An excitable monk was our guide. He turned on the electric light with a spectacular air, as if that, not the great relic, was the boast of the church; he showed the saint's silver tomb, her heart hung round with votive gifts, archbishop's rings and diamond coronets, then he led us to the revolving door of the convent, whence personal mementoes were passed us for inspection. Lowering the lights, he bade us look through a grating at the back of the church, and suddenly the electricity was turned on in an interior room, and there on the cot lay the image of a Carmelite nun asleep. The whole thing was in the worst possible taste, on a level with the bad Churrigueresque architecture of the same period. A spot worthy of silent pilgrimage, where one of God's greatest saints breathed her last prayer, "Cor contritum et humiliatum, Deus, non despicies," this solemn cell of her death-bed has been turned to a vulgar show. How Teresa's intelligent simplicity would sweep aside such ill-judged honors! In silent protest at the tawdriness surrounding them, lie the patrons of this Alba foundation, Don Francisco Velasquez and his wife Doña Teresa, distinguished, superb effigies in stone, _hidalgo como el Rey_. Doña Teresa, in the delightful way of Spanish ladies on tombs, is reading tranquilly in her book of devotions. With this example before us of the pass to which religious extravagance can be carried, it may be time to touch on a tendency in Spain that is a distress to the northern Catholic who is less childlike in his inward life. Of course, since there is every kind of temperament, there must be every kind of taste; perhaps I am too much guided by personal likes or dislikes. However, I feel that those who crave the appropriate and simple will agree with me that making allowance for an emotional people, a coquettish shepherdess under a glass case on a church altar, (such as I saw in Cadiz,) is misunderstood religion. One of Spain's wisest sons, the philosopher Vives, agitated against the dressing of statues, and the Council of Trent later prohibited the bad usage. Why is not their advice followed? I do not mean to criticise the little country shrines whose inartistic decoration is often most heart-moving; in a remote village certain things are touching which elsewhere are displeasing. It should be the effort of the Spanish clergy to discourage the extreme devotion to special altars and statues. Artificial and roccoco in sentiment and expression, it is a menace to religion in the Peninsula. Spain has the vital Christian faith, she is unspoiled by the tinsel, beneath the symbol is a soul; but, if she insists on clinging to what the modern mind finds ugly and insincere, she may lose many to whom the inner religion of a St. Teresa would appeal. People seldom will see both sides justly; to rid themselves of an irritating detail, some will throw away the whole. There are not a few whose antipathy to religion has been caused by this blind clinging to the non-essential: the novelist Pérez Galdós, I should say was such a case. Though his stories prove that he has never grasped what interior religion means, has never gone to the fountain head and drank of the pure, mystic waters, but has tasted only the contaminated streams of the valley, yet it cannot be denied that some of the religiosity he depicts is a phase that exists only too truly. The evil is the result of ignorance, not of malice. For this reason it would die a natural death were the Spanish clergy given a wholly rounded education. I do not refer here to the learned canons or monastic orders, but to the parochial clergy. Spain watches her neighbor France too closely, let her look further afield and she will lose her fear that education and skepticism go hand in hand; in England and America the priesthood is with the advancing tide, not against it: knowledge never yet harmed religion, but ignorance cripples her. Science should have no silly terrors for priests whose church is the greatest proof of evolution through the ages, advancing relentlessly so that what is worth retaining of man's increasing knowledge finds its inevitable place in her body, but advancing slowly, (impatient abuse cannot hurry her magnificent conservatism); a complete organism, a living entity ever changing, yet ever the same.[21] We can hardly expect the clergy of a land where tradition is a sacred thing, to be in the vanguard of modern thought, but they at least should not forget their own noted men of learning. Ximenez, Luis de León, Feijóo, Isla, Suárez, Balmes,--the names come crowding--all of them churchmen, who, the more they knew, the deeper grew their faith. After this vexatious visit to Alba de Tormes, it was with trepidation that I came to Avila, there to find Teresa's vigorous, truly-spiritual personality the living presence of the proud, high-minded little Castilian city. And a happy coincidence the night of our arrival gave proof that her generous enthusiasm, her unresting love of souls, were not things of the past. Having spent the day at the Escorial, at ten in the evening we took the express to Avila. In the carriage _Reservado para Señoras_, we found ourselves with three religious of the Sacred-Heart; a touch of home for me were their familiar fluted caps, buttoned capes, and silver crosses. The few hours of the journey fled all too swiftly in delightful talk; like nuns the world over, they were gay and happy as children, with the serene youth of the convent life in their faces. One of them was so distinguished a woman that it was a fascination to look at her. These fragile nuns were to travel through the cold night--and a raw November gale was blowing over the uplands of Castile--to take a steamer at Bordeaux, for they were pioneers, on their way to found a house in a distant part of South America, where education was backward. Three weeks of winter sea, then some tropical days on horseback, before they reached their desolate new home! Truly the heroic spirit of St. Teresa is alive to-day, and fair sisters of the seraphim still walk among us. EVENING IN AVILA Around about the town stand eighty gray stone towers, That make a fitter crown, a hardier show than flowers For what is high and brave--the tawny Castile plain-- So patient and so grave, incarnate soul of Spain. You have made sweet the ways of penury and care With dawn and sunset praise and white still hours of prayer, Old town of mystic saint! Secure you ask: Does peace, Or restless seeking plaint come with your wealth's increase? An answering sound of bells across the upland goes, To each field-toiler tells a message of repose, And mounting to the sky's slow-darkening, tranquil dome The heart-calm echoes rise of peasants lingering home. MADRID AND THE ESCORIAL "They who wrought wonders by the Nile of old, Bequeathing their immortal part to us, Cast their own spirit first into the mould, And were themselves the rock they fashioned thus." GEORGE SANTAYANA. These two spots, products of men of small idea and nature, are happily so close together that they can fall under the same abuse. Coming from the north, to stop at the Escorial either from Avila with its grand walls of the eighty towers, or from the crag-set castle of Segovia, is such an abrupt transition from heroic times to the doctrinaire centuries that followed them that it is but too easy to be unfair to Philip II's huge pile. A better way is to go out to it from Madrid; then, somewhat accustomed to cold commonplace, the Escorial gives less of a jar. We descended to it from Segovia. Knowing Herrera's lifeless architecture--"a syllogism in stone" it has wittily been called--on that side I did not expect much, but accounts of the setting of the Escorial, of its grand solitary position in the mountains, made me hope for some kind of effect. People see things in such different ways. I could discover no grandeur whatever in the position of the rectangular ashy-colored building. The lower slopes of the Guadarramas rise behind it, but at a little distance, and the town comes between it and the sierras. It was not solitary, it was not imposing. At close range, after we had walked up the leafy avenue from the station, even the appearance of unity was lost, and it seemed nothing but a big block of good town houses like many that fill the square between four city streets. Window after window, alike inadequately small and unadorned; just like any monotonous line of town houses. We stood aghast at the pretentious, ineffectual mass which they call the eighth wonder of Spain. For us to-day there is little wonder in spending fifty millions in one lifetime to put up myriads of doors, stair-cases, and courtyards, to use two thousand pounds of iron to make the door-keys; we are accustomed to the feat. The pity is that every tourist in Spain comes here, and one in a thousand goes to Poblet or León, those other pantheons that are proper burial places for sturdy old kings. I am not sure that the Hapsburgs in Spain merit anything worthier than an Escorial. At first we thought it might be the side which we approached that gave so poor an effect, so we proceeded to encircle the building; on all four sides passing by window after window we saw not one inch of stone carved worthily, and to our astonishment we found it faced the mountains. Fancy a blank, rocky wall, a quarter of a mile away and fancy such a stupidity as choosing this to open on, instead of the wide horizon of the opposite side. Does this not give the key to the Escorial? It and its builder had no imagination. Since we were here we had to see it all, so we let ourselves be guided hither and thither, through courtyard after courtyard, down one dull corridor after another, in and out of rooms where little interested,--a dreary waste of a place. In the picture gallery overlooking the gardens we got our first introduction to that eccentric genius, El Greco, at his worst here, with sick color and elongated figures; we thought him quite mad. Nevertheless, the picture gallery was a respite; it was good to meet again Tintoret's rich visions of Venice, the full superb shoulders of his women, the gold brown of the robes. Ranged in cases there were also some embroidered vestments that were noticeable. The church of the Escorial is so coldly formal and pretentious that it lay like a load on our spirits. There is something frightening in the way man unconsciously expresses his own nature in the material work of his hand; he may think himself very big, unless he really is he is certain to betray himself, if he paints or writes or builds. This correct, somber church exactly represents the religious ideal of a Philip II. Heaven, so close to one under the soul-feeding Romanesque vault of Santiago, in Seville or Toledo's Gothic aspiration, is very far away under this limited dome; the propriety here is that of a bigot, who would see heresy in the soar of Gothic, and backwardness in the bare solemnity of Romanesque. We were shown the usual tourist-sights, the seat in the choir where Philip sat when news was brought of the Battle of Lepanto, which broke another inroad of the Mohammedan on Europe; also the life-size marble crucifix (spoiled by too long an upper lip) which Benvenuto Cellini made, and which was carried on men's backs from Barcelona to Madrid. Statues of Philip and his father, with the ladies of their households, kneel on either side of the altar, rich bronze-gilt work, but hardly in character with a church. Then we descended to that acme of dreariness and morbid misanthropy, the sunken chamber where are buried the royal family of Spain since Charles V; one somber coffin rose above another in the dark place. And art can make death so beautiful, art like the tombs at Miraflores and Avila! Happy beings to have escaped this dreadful hole of burial, we exclaimed. Could only a century separate Isabella in her Castle of Segovia, or in the white marble peace of her sepulcher at Granada, from her descendants' costly ideal of a palace and a mausoleum? As we stood shivering with the formality and melancholy of it all, with sympathy for the present happy young King and Queen who must lie here some day, a little touch of sentiment took away some of the oppression. We saw on the tomb of Alfonso XII a fresh wreath of chrysanthemums. Then, feeling that any more subterranean darkness was insupportable, we hurried up the steep staircase from the Pantheon, through the heavy-bound church, and out in the courtyard--dreary enough, too!--breathed the fresh air with relief. In the library of the Escorial was the first place where I had seen the gilt edges of books, not their leather backs, presented to the reader, a rich, strange effect which later in the Seraglio at Stamboul I noticed again. We stopped long to examine the portraits that stand between the book-cases. Philip II was pale-eyed, anæmic and white-visaged, with drooping, hypochondrical corners to his mouth. And I had pictured him scowling and black and forceful! The Escorial should have told me that not a forceful personality could have built it but rather a stubborn ability and dogged patience, a narrow consistency, all in character with his pale eyes. The swift degeneration of the Hapsburg line is easily to be read in these portraits. Charles V (in Spain Charles I), keen of face and energetic, has a great-great-grandson, Charles II, last of the line, so rickety and idiotic that no caricature of used-up royal blood could go further. Weary of sight-seeing where so little roused the imagination, we descended to the gardens, stiffly restrained too, but pleasant to loiter in. So close was the monotonous mass of gray stone above us, one did not have to look at it, but could gaze out on the wide view toward Madrid. Then at sunset we went back to the church for an evening service, that hour of prayer, restful and beautiful all over Spain. The Pater Noster was recited, a litany was chanted, a meditation was read slowly with pauses while the people listened with bowed heads and closed eyes. Then followed the primitive, centuries-old Latin hymns, the glory of the church, in which is incorporated for all time the piercing piety of the Middle Ages. I too closed my eyes to shut out the formal church, and for some forgetful moments I could dream that those quavering voices of old and young, so simple, so sincere, were in some unspoiled mountain village, perhaps in that most soul-satisfying temple of all the world, the Lower Church of St. Francis:--Assisi and the Escorial,--the human mind is capable of wide deviations, from the religion of humble love to this haughty contortion of it. The most fatal effect of the Escorial was to fix the capital in Madrid, a spot, as Ford observed, that had been passed over in contempt by Iberian, Roman, Goth, and Moor. Up to the building of the Escorial the choice of a capital had wavered, at times, in Valladolid, in Toledo, or in Seville. Philip's mountain palace caused to be the chief city one of the worst situated towns in Spain, on a waterless river, with no commercial prospects, roasting in summer, swept by icy winds the rest of the year. It too, like the Escorial, lacks all soul for the traveler. Not a church worth looking at, all of them seventeenth and eighteenth century abominations with fat cupids, prancing angels, and posing, self-glorifying saints, not a cathedral in the capital of a country which has the largest number and most heart-satisfying cathedrals of the world. I daresay if one lived in Madrid and had a full active or social life one might like it; there must be some cause for the proverb "From Madrid to heaven, and in heaven a peep-hole to look down on Madrid." As a city it can never be anything but second-rate; the new residential part near the parks is like the good districts of any average town. The famous Puerta del Sol is filled at every hour of the day and night with such a rabble of loafers and vociferating peddlers that it takes courage to push one's way through. As the Court was absent we missed seeing the brilliant morning hour of guard mounting before the Royal Palace. Occasionally some local sight would remind us we still were in Spain, the original and untamed. Ladies in mantillas would pass on their way to the late Mass at midday, a brougham drawn by handsome mules would go by, or, if it were a holiday, a few girls of the people wore embroidered shawls. But taken as a whole, for the sightseer Madrid is just a weariness of the spirit. Except, of course, the pictures, and I must add, the Armory. We hurried off to the Prado, up the steps past the bust of the vigorous saturnine Goya, along the far-stretching hall, with hardly a glance for the white monks of Zubaran, or El Greco's strange canvases, till midway, we turned to the left into the large hall that holds the Velasquez masterpieces. It is a sensation in one's life, this first meeting with Velasquez at the height of his powers. The wonderful Doria Pope in Rome, the few pictures in London and Vienna whet the appetite for the supreme feast in Madrid. It is an unprecedented collection of one master that no glow of enthusiasm can exaggerate. Canvas follows canvas, all the work of secure, triumphant genius, with brush handling so free that it seems impossible he painted more than two hundred years ago. Don Carlos stands dangling a glove in an absolutely natural moment of nonchalance, Philip IV and the pompous Duke of Olivares ride their proud steeds out of magnificent skies, the gallant little Don Baltasar Carlos dashes at us on his pot-bellied pony, or stands a baby hunter in the Guadarramas. Velasquez painted him later, a grave, dignified lad of about fourteen, always with a fearless, straight look, and he also painted his piquant Bourbon mother, Philip IV's first wife; his second a wooden-faced Austrian, mother of the doll-like, big-skirted infantas. Had Don Baltasar Carlos lived, surely the race had not ended in a Charles II. You walk about the Velasquez room bewildered, sorry for the copyists who have set up their easels before work that tells so unflinchingly each slip of a talent what it is to be a master. Portraits and genre studies; the lovely bent neck of the weaving girl, the breathing livingness of the Maids of Honor, the displeasing dwarfs,--each canvas is an achieved success. At the end of the hall hangs what swiftly became my favorite of all pictures seen, the "Surrender of Breda," called "Las Lanzas," from the soldiers' spears ranged against the sky. It is a canvas about the size of the "Night Watch" in Amsterdam. The two armies fill the background under a sky that is a glorious harmony of cold blue and rose. In the foreground the Fleming, Justin of Nassau, advances to surrender the keys of Breda to its conqueror, the Marquis Spínola, general of the Spanish forces, though by birth a Genoese. Spínola has dismounted, and bends to meet his enemy, vanquished now, hence in his knightly creed, his friend. With a subtle, delicate shrinking he has placed his hand on his opponent's shoulder, and in his face is an expression of such high chivalry, of such generous effacement of self, of all that is best in man of courtesy and noble-mindedness, that the tears spring to the eyes. You return to it again and again and come away refreshed and ennobled. Only a man loyal himself to the core could render such an emotion, only a technical genius of the first rank could fix so fleeting an instant; this truly is thinking in paint, and it places Velasquez side by side with Leonardo da Vinci as a master of the intellect. I think it is very pleasant to learn that Velasquez knew the General he has immortalized, and you feel he must have known, too, the superb Spanish hidalgos who stand in the group behind the Marquis. On his first trip to Italy, the painter sailed in the same vessel to Genoa with Spínola, and probably sketched him then. I like to imagine the meeting of two such spirits of chivalry. [Illustration: ISABELLA OF PORTUGAL, BY TITIAN. PRADO GALLERY, MADRID] Were the Prado only Velasquez and the Spanish artists, it would be among the first of galleries, but it is astonishingly rich in Italian masters as well. It has the best equestrian portrait in the world, Charles V at the Battle of Mühlberg, a picture to be studied long and often. The Emperor has risen from illness, he has had to be lifted upon his horse, but he has pluckily girded himself to take command. The Venetian red of his plumes and scarf is splendid. Titian has another of the Emperor, standing with his Irish hound, near it a gem of woman portraiture, Charles' lovely wife, Isabella of Portugal. It seems a strange irony for such an exquisite creature to have been the mother of a Philip II. Philip was fortunate in his daughters, too, demure, formal little maidens, who stand with the sedate propriety of Spanish infantas, and in his sisters, whose long, aristocratic faces Antonio Moro has left us. Charles V sent Moro to England to paint Queen Mary for her young bridegroom, and here she sits in her rich crimson leather chair, erect and stiff and insignificant, her auburn hair and homely face not one to charm her future husband still in his twenties, she not far from the fatal forty. A deeply pathetic portrait this. Good woman she was personally, despite having been made the scape-goat for a system, yet one can read in the pinched shrewdness of her mouth that she lacked her grandmother's height of brain, nor was she capable of her mother's dignity of sorrow, whose grand insulted womanhood Shakespeare has rendered so magnificently.[22] There are many other notable portraits in the Prado; a stately matron and her three sons by Parmigianino; a rich pigment of color, Rembrandt's wife; Raphael's Cardinal,--the acute, keen, Italian face so different from the Spanish type; a striking Count de Berg by Van Dyke. Mantegna has a small canvas, the "Tránsito de la Virgen," with the apostles gathered round the couch, a graphic glimpse through the window behind of Mantua. Mantegna put thought into his work, and he compels thought from others; this "Tránsito" drew me to it in the same browsing study as that small triptych in the Uffizi. Then upstairs are more Italians. The facile Veronese has here, curiously enough, a really impressive scene, Christ and the Centurion. There are many Rubens, and some peaceful Claude Lorraine sunsets and sunrises, offering the needed siesta of quiet in a full collection. And downstairs in the basement are the primitives, Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, Memling, mystical enough to refresh the soul of a Huysmans. The gilded backgrounds of these celestial annunciations, these interiors of so intense and breathless a reverence, have always seemed to me a pure symbol of the uncomplicated perfection of their faith, the unquestioning mental background of the age. After Velasquez it is not easy to feel much enthusiasm for the other Spanish painters. Murillo can only be really known in Seville, in whose gallery he predominates as does Velasquez here. It is a coincidence that both of Spain's first painters should have been born in the same Andalusian city, within twenty years of each other, and that the ashes of both should have been scattered to the wind in the French invasion. Zurbaran's white-robed monks,--he painted Carthusians as Murillo did Franciscans, and Roelas the Jesuits,--are always effective, but they miss being taken seriously by a dash of pose in them. As for Ribera's martyrdoms, (his portraits are very fine,) if chance led us into his room, one glance and we fled; it is not pleasant to see people disemboweled. The same shuddering horror you feel before some of Goya's, as for instance that awful but tremendously moving blood-red _Dos de Mayo_. Goya is almost too crabbedly individual to be liked unreservedly. He is in a way the Hogarth of the South, with a gruesome, fantastic imagination, quite pitiless to the vices or follies of his generation; witness the portrait of the Infanta María Josefa, or the appalling group surrounding Charles IV, "a grocer's family who have won the big lottery prize," Gautier cleverly said of it. At times you think Goya had no elevation of soul, then you come on a portrait that shows he could see something besides the weakness of human nature. He was a true Aragonese, stubborn, energetic, analytic. And it should never be forgotten that he painted in that desert of art, the eighteenth century, and swept aside the weak methods of generations to return to Velasquez's vigor of technique. No visitor in Madrid can possibly miss the Prado gallery, but it is not difficult to omit the Armory; for, discouraged by going to see sights not worth the effort, you may think the _Armería_ just the usual dull collection found in capitals, of interest only to the specialist. No greater mistake could be made. This Madrid museum is like nothing of its kind in Europe, it is an unrivaled show, one hour there and you learn volumes of Spanish history. It consists of a large hall, down whose center is massed a splendid array of horsemen, caparisoned in historic armor. The manikins have been fitted out thoroughly. Their gauntleted hands hold the polished spears, and ostrich plumes wave from their helmets; they give an astonishing effect of life. Among the thirty-odd suits worn by Charles V, here is the identical one Titian painted in the equestrian portrait, decked with the similar doge-red scarf and plumes. There is the gallant little Baltasar Carlos' suit of mail; the armor of that Bayard of Spain, Garcilaso de la Vega; of the hero of Lepanto, Don John of Austria, and some of the banners and ship-prows of his victory; the suit of Charles' general, the Marquis of Pescara, Vittoria Colonna's husband; the tent of Francis I at the battle of Pavia; the arms of Juan de Padilla, who led the uprising of the independent cities against Charles. History is followed from earliest times in raw gold Visigothic crowns, the sword of Pelayo at Cavadonga, the sword of the great slayer of Moors, King Ferdinand _el Santo_ of Castile, and the winged-dragon helmet of as mighty a battle leader, King Jaime _el Conquistador_ of Aragon, down to the last stage of the seven hundred years' crusade, in Isabella's armor; that of the Gran Capitán; Boabdil's engraved with Moorish letters; and, finally, the surrendered keys of Granada. Spain's majestic hour lives again here. As we left the Armoury, a present-day scene presented itself and it struck me as very characteristic of a country where the grandee, shopkeeper, and peasant live side by side in friendliness. Before us lay the big courtyard of the Royal Palace, the King's very doorstep as it were, and it overflowed with hundreds of children, nursemaids, families, and soldiers; the crowd being chiefly of a popular character. They tell of strict Spanish etiquette, but it appears to me as if the people here get nearer to their king than elsewhere. Rough boys and men were pouring into the Armoury to wander with pride among the plumed knights, and by their glance they showed they felt themselves part of the stirring past. Each knew himself a _cristiano viejo_[23] whose forebears had struck a blow for the _Reconquista_. TOLEDO "But changeless and complete Rise unperturbed and vast Above our din and heat The turrets of the Past, Mute as that city asleep Lulled with enchantments deep Far in Arabian dreamland built where all things last." WILLIAM WATSON Toledo has been compared to Durham, but it is the similarity between a splendid lean old leopard and a beautiful domestic cat. The largest river of Spain, the Tagus, without a touch of England's lovely verdure to soften it, sweeps impetuously round the Spanish ecclesiastic city, through a wild gorge from which it derives its name (_tajo_, cut) and above the river-cliffs rise sun-whitened houses, innumerable monasteries, and church towers, in a compact, imposing mass. Across the river is a barren wilderness, solitary as if never trod by foot of man, and this, close to an historic city. Stern and a bit fanatic,--for she has lived for generations, with sword in hand to guard her altars,--Toledo represents ascetic, exalted Castile as completely as palm-crowned Seville, stretching out in the meadows by the winding Guadalquivir sums up the ease-loving character of Andalusia. The thought of the Moor is never long absent in the fertile southern province, but here, though for a time he ruled as conqueror, every stone of the city tells of crusading Christian ideals. Most travelers run down to Toledo from Madrid for merely a day, whereas it is eminently a spot for a pause of several days. Not only once but a second and a third time should you cross the Alcántara bridge and climb the silent hills beyond it. From there Toledo stands up in haunting majesty, one of the imperial things in the world. Wild footpaths lead along the hills, so you can follow the immense loop of the river and return to the city by St. Martin's bridge. The desolate Tagus is as unchanged by the centuries as the hills confining it. Toledo's first mayor, the Cid, looked on much the same scene that we know, nor could it have been very different when, earlier, the last of the Gothic kings, Roderick, saw the fair Florinda bathing by St. Martin's bridge,--which untimely spying the legend says brought the African invasion on Spain; the same as when King Wamba ruled here, and his name is synonymous with "as old as the hills"; the same as when the city's patron, Leocadia, was hurled down from the cliffs in Dacian's persecution. Once inside the Puerta del Sol (a real gateway, not a plaza where a gate once stood, like its Madrid namesake), we found ourselves in a fretwork of narrow streets where we got lost at every turning. These twisting passages were so built that if the city walls were captured, the people could still offer a stiff resistance. Zig-zag up and down the lanes go, every few yards coming to a small triangle, out of which lead three narrow ways,--which to choose is ever the bewildering question. Push on boldly, the tortuous streets are worth exploring at random, and if you wander long enough you are sure to find yourself before the Cathedral or in the famous Zocodover Square. Morning and afternoon we were out exploring, with a good map to guide us, yet up to the very last day, we lost the way half a dozen times. The constant uncertainty was fascinating; only in such unhurried rambles does the _genius loci_ reveal itself. Now we stumbled on San Cristo de la Luz, in whose diminutive chamber are Visigothic capitals, Moorish arches, and a Christian _retablo_; it was here Alfonso VI heard his first Mass in the conquered city, the Cid Campeador at his side. Now we stopped to see the empty church of El Tránsito, in the Mudéjar style, built originally as a synagogue, and we found there an astonishingly beautiful arabesque frieze. This Mudéjar style (Moorish and Christian architecture mixed) has here what I think is its most perfect example, Santa María la Blanca, also a former synagogue, then a church, and at present national property. As usual, our first visit after arrival, was to the Cathedral, not so easy to find as in most places, since it is not set on the highest part of the city, and is shut in with cluttering houses. As usual, too, like most Spanish churches, the exterior is meaningless; but the interior is a vigorous, pure Gothic, which is called the most national expression of this style in Spain. Like Seville, the ground plan is a _sala_, or hall; though the aisles here lessen in height so rapidly that they give a far different effect from Seville's lofty nave. The double-aisled ambulatory as at Avila is unique and beautiful in its effect. Spanish Gothic may be less artistically faultless than that of France, but certainly its massive grandeur and even its very extravagance render it many times more picturesque. The primate of Spanish cathedrals is the richest in tombs, paintings, _rejas_, carvings, vestments, and jewels, even after the French carried away some hundred weight of silver treasure. Unfortunately, it was here we began to feel like tourists and to experience the jaded weariness of the personally conducted. We had wandered freely over the churches of the north, for a slight fee the verger had unlocked the choir and separate chapels, and then had gone off to let us examine them undisturbed. Here the flocking tourist has brought about the pest of tickets for each separate part of the church, and the guide, when one pauses to loiter, impatiently rattles his keys. And one longs to loiter in the most perfect _coro_ of Spain, where Maestro Rodrigo, and Berruguete, and Vignani carved; in the _sala capitular_, or the Alvaro de Luna chapel of florid Gothic, where the beheaded Grand-Constable lies guarded by four stone knights of Santiago. Since Spanish cathedrals were gradual growths, here is to be found, in a mass of violent sculpture called the _Transparente_, the bad taste of the eighteenth century. The bishop who erected the _Transparente_ lies buried near by, covered by a mammoth slab of brass, on which, in bold letters, you read, "Here lies dust, ashes, nothing," an epitaph whose ironic, fatigued simplicity does not ring true; very different from that genuinely humble epitaph in Worcester Cathedral, that one impressive word "Miserrimus." _Transparente_ and tombstone are subtly allied, not inappropriate memorials of one who was instrumental in bringing the academic Bourbons to the Spanish throne in 1700. In the sacristy is a beautiful picture, the _Expolio_, "Stripping Our Lord before the Crucifixion," by El Greco, the strange Byzantine Greek who drifted to Toledo and in his forty years there because more Spanish than the Spaniards. In his case the accident of birth was nothing; though born in Crete of Greek parents, refugees from Constantinople, El Greco was a true Castilian soul. He had known Venice in the days of Tintoret and Titian, but it was only when he came to Toledo that he found the atmosphere, mystic and chivalrous, in which his genius could develop. His was the spiritualized mysticism of a Teresa or a John of the Cross, with little of the conventional piety of Murillo. And he has rendered the Spanish hidalgo as has none other, on his canvas "they live an inner life, indifferent to the world; sad with the nostalgia for a higher existence, their melancholy eyes look at you with memories of a fairer past age that will not return. They are the dignified images of the last warrior ascetics."[24] There is no denying that some of El Greco's pictures are aberrations; when I first saw him in the Escorial gallery, I thought him eccentric to madness. Thanks to Professor Raphael Domenech of the Prado School of Art, I looked a second time and learned to appreciate him. "What he did ill, no one did worse, but what he did well, no one did better." Toledo has many of his masterpieces. In the Church of Santo Domingo is his "Ascension" and the two Saint Johns; in Santo Tomé, his splendid "Burial of Count Orgaz." The chapel of San José and the churches of San Vicente and San Nicolás have some good examples of his, and the Provincial Museum has a remarkable series of the apostles with a truly noble representation of their Master. El Greco--by the way, his real name was Domenikos Theotokopoulos--lived with princely magnificence, his friendship sought by the cultivated society round him, and on his death he was buried in San Bartolomé, regretted by the whole city. His sumptuous way of life was continued by his son, who built the cupola that covers the Mozarabic Chapel of the Cathedral. This brings us to perhaps the most interesting survival of the past that exists in Spain, the Mozarabic Mass, said every morning in the western end of Toledo Cathedral. Mozarabic means Mixt-Arab, and is the name applied to the Christians who were under Moorish rule. Living isolated from their fellow-believers they kept to the old Gothic ritual. In the eleventh century the Christian conqueror of Toledo, Alfonso VI, after an artless trial by fire of the rival books, introduced the Gregorian liturgy, used by the rest of Europe. The learned Archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Ximenez, thought the Gothic ritual too interesting a national memorial to be lost, so he endowed a chapel with its own chapter of canons. The morning after our arrival, I hastened down to the Cathedral to hear a Mozarabic Mass. It puzzles me how Ford, the traveler, could have written of it as he did, as if its simplicity put to shame the later rite, for a Catholic could to-day attend the Mozarabic service with no striking feeling of difference. In some respects it is simpler than the Gregorian Mass, in others more elaborate; thus, for instance, the Host is divided into nine parts, to represent the Incarnation, Epiphany, Nativity, Circumcision, Passion, Death, Redemption, Ascension, and Eternal Kingdom. The kiss of peace is given before the Consecration; the Credo is recited after the offertory. In my eagerness to be in time, I arrived half an hour too early, so I whiled away the minutes watching the altar boys prepare for the ceremony. It was easy to read, in their air of proprietorship that their duties were an achieved ambition, the reward of good conduct. One of the lads climbed up on the big brass eagle of the lectern and gave it an affectionate polish; then, having partly illuminated the altar,--during the ceremony more candles were lighted,--they whipped out their smart red cassocks, and stood side by side in severe precision, to salute the eight canons, "_Buenos Días!_" altar boys and dignitaries bowed with leisurely Spanish courtesy. In their preparations the small acolytes had found the supply of altar wine somewhat short, so more was sent for. During the solemn moments of the Mass, a messenger arrived with an offensive flask. With rustling dignity in his trailing red gown, the majordomo of ten swept across the chapel to thrust out the tactless blunderer, and the look of apologetic confusion on his cherub face, as he returned to his post of honor, was adorable. Some German tourists noisily came into the chapel, and refusing to kneel at the moment of the elevation, the verger, in a spirit the founder would have applauded, pointed with his silver wand, a silent but inflexible dismissal. This first morning of my visit, too, a group of hardy countrymen came to the Mozarabic Mass; with cap in hand and cloak flung toga-like over their muscular shoulders, they knelt on one knee, as instinctively graceful as the shepherds in Murillo's "Nativity." When the service was over, in respectful quiet despite their arrogant carriage, these unlettered men rose and passed out to loiter in the Cathedral for a half hour. "The rank is but the guinea's stamp, the man's the gold for a' that," rings often in the ear in Castile. Cardinal Ximenez, founder of the Chapel, was Castilian to the core, and Toledo for him, just as for El Greco, was fittest home. He was born in 1436 in the province of Madrid of an old family that had fallen in his day on moderate circumstances. In Spain, Ximenez is often called Cisneros, for there two surnames are used; the first following the Christian name is the patronymic name of the father, the second that of the mother. Sometimes a man uses his paternal surname alone, more seldom his mother's family name alone, as in the case of Velasquez, whose father was a de Silva. A studious disposition early destined Ximenez to the priesthood, and following a few years' study in Alcalá, which he was to raise to a world-known university, he went to Salamanca. After a long stay in Rome, on his return to Spain he wasted some precious years in an unfortunate ecclesiastic dispute. His true worth was not discovered till he went, when over forty, to serve in the Cathedral of Sigüenza, where Cardinal Mendoza, the future "Rex Tertius," was then bishop. Recognizing the new chaplain's remarkable powers, he made him his vicar-general. But Ximenez, in the face of every chance of rapid advancement in the Church, felt within him a longing for the retired life of prayer. He chose the strictest order of his day, and entered the Franciscan monastery of San Juan de los Reyes at Toledo. All who know Toledo will remember it, built in the bizarre, flamboyant, often overladen but always grandiose style of Isabella and Ferdinand. On its outer walls hang iron chains, the votive offerings of Christian captives ransomed from the Moors in Africa, and one cannot help thinking that the concentrated mind of the new novice received an indelible impression from these souvenirs of Moslem barbarity, a bias that found later expression in his stern treatment of the Moors of Granada and his crusading siege of Oran. Ximenez had sought a life of prayer in San Juan de los Reyes, but a personality such as his could not help but rise in acknowledged supremacy above those around him. The fame of his intellect and holiness soon drew to his confessional the leading minds of Toledo, and he found himself, to his distress, again in touch with the world. He retired to a more isolated Franciscan monastery, and gave himself up to years of study and prayer. Men seemed then to find time for the long spaces of tranquil thought that solidify character; holding the highest posts that ambition could achieve, they seemed to know themselves as dust before the wind. The key-note of to-day is breadth not intensity, and it sometimes seems as if our scattered knowledge leads to a more superficial outlook on the elemental and eternal verities, that universal education tends to universal mediocrity. Why have so few to-day the old-time spaciousness of vision? Is it because education then meant the development of the soul as well as of the intellect, because in acknowledging that there are an infinite number of things beyond reason they attained what Pascal calls the highest point of reason? "Ever learning and never attaining to the knowledge of the truth" we seem indeed. Wholly-rounded opportunities were given in that age. Poets and novelists then were soldiers in the roving wars of Europe,[25]--Garcilaso, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón, these last two priests as well, and Garcilaso making a holy end helped by a grandee who was a saint, and Cervantes dying in the habit of the Assisian. But I suppose this carping comparison is just the never-ending tendency to look on a previous day as better than one's own. Jorge Manrique felt the same way: "á nuestro parecer Cualquiera tiempo pasado Fué mejor" and he wrote his immortal "Coplas" in the golden age of Isabella herself. To return to Ximenez. After a long period of retirement he was made, against his will, confessor to the Queen at Valladolid. There exists an account by a witness of the sensation his thin, ascetic face caused in the court, as if an early Syrian anchorite had wandered thither. Three years later, on the death of Mendoza, the Queen's influence in Rome had Ximenez named his successor in Toledo. So angry was her confessor that he left the court. Isabella, gallant woman of heart and brain, who so enthusiastically perceived greatness in others, appealed to the Pope to order Cisneros to accept his see. Up to this the Archbishops of Toledo had been men of great lineage who lived with splendor. And a striking succession of master minds they make, lying ready for an historian to group in a remarkable record; scholars, statesmen, founders of hospitals and schools, now a prelate of saintly life, now a leader of armies like Archbishop Rodrigo, who having borne the standard of the Cross in the thick of the fight at Las Navas de Tolosa, chanted the Te Deum of victory on that memorable field, the first Christian foothold in Andalusia. Of all the primates of Toledo, Mendoza, "Tertius Rex," had been highest in rank and power. The monk who succeeded this prince of the church dropped all pomp and lived like a humble Franciscan. Again the undaunted Isabella appealed to her friend the Pope to advise the new Archbishop to keep up the dignity of his see before the people. Cisneros yielded outwardly, but under the veneer of display he led the ascetic life. The Queen's insight into character had judged right. Mystic contemplator though he was, Ximenez was a born ruler: prudent, courageous, and firm. He straightened difficulties and reformed abuses. As his own moral character was stainless and his disinterestedness well proven, there was happily no inconsistency in his preaching. Gomez tells that the moral tone of society, lay and ecclesiastic, was so improved by the energetic bishop that "men seemed to have been born again." As to Ximenez' much criticised attitude toward the Moors, it was at one with its age. To reproach him with it is as unreasonable as to condemn Marcus Aurelius for having persecuted the Christians, or George Washington for having silently accepted negro slavery. A man, no matter how great his character, is limited somewhere by the standards of his period. The fifteenth century was far from being radical in the privileges it extended to free opinion. Even some generations later we find, in the Palatinate, when the Elector Frederick III turned from Lutheranism to Calvinism, in 1563, he forced all his subjects under pain of banishment, to turn with him. Within a few years his son changed them back to Lutheranism, only to have them, under the next ruler, constrained with severe punishments to again accept the Heidelberg catechism. The religious history of most of the states of Europe prove that the same theory was held: "cujus regio, ejus religio." Ximenez can plead more excuse for his attitude since in Spain was the problem of the more radical difference of Christianity and Islam. He felt, and the constant later revolts somewhat justified the idea, that a newly conquered people is not likely to remain loyal, when they are bound together against their ruler in an antagonistic creed. So he went to Granada in 1499 to labor for the conversion of the people. At first he used much the same methods that prevail to-day in some of our cities, what we may call the soup-kitchen missionary system to evangelize the emigrant. Ximenez instructed the Mohammedan in doctrine, and he also gave presents to impress the oriental mind. So effectively did the method work that immense numbers of citizens embraced the faith. On one day four thousand were baptized. So far the treaty of the Conquest was not violated, since the conversions were voluntary. When, however, there was a revolt of those Moors who were angered by seeing the rapid spread of Christianity, harsher methods than persuasion were resorted to. The letter of the treaty was kept but its spirit, that reflected Isabella's magnanimous tolerance, was stretched indeed. The first uprising turned to open rebellion, and when this was put down, the majority of the citizens let themselves be baptized to avoid exile and confiscation. Though the two great prelates, the gentle Talavera and the indomitable Ximenez, burning with zeal, went about the city catechising and instructing the poorest, there were many thousands of Mohammedans who hated the religion to which outwardly they conformed. A child to-day can understand the futility of such conversions. No one denies that Ximenez was stern. He who loved learning with the passionate devotion of a Bede or an Erasmus, (we all know the remark of Francis I when confined at Alcalá, "one Spanish monk has done what it would take a line of kings in France to accomplish"), this same humanist scholar burned in public bonfire the Moslem books, only reserving the medical ones for Alcalá: surely this is proof of his grim sincerity. When Isabella died, Ximenez took Ferdinand's side against his impertinent Austrian son-in-law. Philip I did not live long enough to involve Spain in an internecine war, her curse for ages; and it was the great statesman's hold on the government, at the time of the young king's sudden death, that saved the country from a revolution. Ferdinand had the man to whom he owed Castile, created a Cardinal, and he also appointed him Grand-Inquisitor. Many hold the erroneous opinion that Ximenez was one of the founders of the Holy Office in Spain. It was established ten years before he came to court as Isabella's confessor, and it was only now, in his sixty-first year that he had control in it. True to his reforming character he set about changing what abuses had crept in. He fostered the better religious instruction of the newly converted; and he prosecuted the inquisitor Lucero, who had been guilty of injustice. The great Cardinal-Archbishop was over threescore and ten when he undertook the expedition to Northern Africa. He had long burned to plant the Church again where it had flourished under St. Cyprian and St. Augustine. As the pirates of Oran were a terror in the Mediterranean, it was against that city he set out in the year 1509. His address to the troops before the battle, encouraging them against an enemy who had ravaged their coasts, dragged their children into slavery, and insulted the Christian name, roused the men to an heroic charge up the hill of Oran with Spain's battle cry _Santiago!_ on their lips. Of the vast treasure found in the city, Ximenez who had spent a fortune to fit out the expedition, only reserved the Moslem books for his University of Alcalá. For it must not be forgotten that in the midst of state questions, this remarkable man was carrying on the building and endowing of an University to whose halls the learned minds of Spain and Europe were invited. He was printing at his own expense the well-known Polyglot Bible, the first edition in their original texts of the Christian Scriptures. From his early years a close student of the Bible, he had learned Chaldaic and Hebrew for its better study; every day on his knees he read a chapter of the Holy Word. Besides these interests he found time to build various hospitals, libraries, and churches, to organize summer retreats for the health of his professors, to print and distribute free works on agriculture, to give dowries to distressed women, to visit the sick in person, and to feed daily thirty poor in his palace. Ferdinand, a good ruler, but suspicious and ungrateful, never had much love for the Cardinal. Yet on his deathbed he left him Regent of Castile, saying that a better leader on account of his virtues and love of justice could not be found to reëstablish order and morality, and only wishing he were a little more pliable. Some idea of Ximenez' genius may be gathered from a hasty review of his Regency, which covered the last two years of his life. It stands an astonishing feat of noble activity. He brought order into the finances and paid the crown debts. He introduced the militia system into the army, proving that men fight better when they defend their own homes. He strengthened the navy to help break the Moorish pirate Barbarossa who controlled the sea. He restored the dockyards of Seville. He crushed a French invasion in Navarre, and put down local disorders in Málaga and other places, for the nobles took this opportunity to again assert themselves. He adjusted troubles with both the ex-queens, Juana la Loca and Germaine de Foix. It was just four months before his death that the Polyglot Bible was finished. When the young son of the printer, dressed in his best attire, ran with the last sheets to the Cardinal, Ximenez exclaimed fervently: "I thank thee, O most high God, that thou hast brought this work to its longed-for end!" To-day the more scientific methods of philology have put the Complutensian Polyglot in the shade, but none deny that for its period it was a notable work. Another of Ximenez' reforms, little known, was his advocacy of Las Casas in the crusade against Indian slavery in the American colonies. As early as 1511, a Dominican preacher named Montesino gave a sermon in the Cathedral of Santo Domingo, before the governor Diego Columbus, in which he thundered against the ill-treatment of the natives. The monks were threatened with expulsion by the rich settlers unless Montesino retracted, whereupon on the following Sunday, the brave reformer not only repeated his previous attack but added fresh proofs. Against fierce opposition the Dominicans refused the sacraments to every one who owned an Indian slave. But they could not end the evil, so the passionate Las Casas, whose whole life may be said to have burned with fury for this cause, returned to Spain to plead for the Indians. The Regent took up the question with interest, and the commission which he organized and sent out to the Colonies is a model of reforming government worthy of study. Just as it was about to start, fourteen pious Franciscans came down to Spain to offer themselves for the good work. Among them was a brother of the King of Scotland,--a rather delightful episode of the cosmopolitanism of religion. Ximenez also issued a proclamation forbidding the importation of negro slaves, for the colonists had already learned that one negro did the work of four Indians. Should not this act of farseeing wisdom, be set against his stern treatment of the Moors? Ximenez ruled as Regent of Castile from the time of Ferdinand's death to the coming of Charles V to his distant possessions. The Cardinal-Archbishop, alert in mind and body though over eighty, was on his way to meet the young Emperor on his landing in the north, when he died suddenly at Roa, in the province of Burgos. He was buried in his loved Alcalá, and his tomb still rests in the dismantled town whose University has been removed to Madrid. Just thirty years after the Cardinal's death, one of the world's supreme geniuses was born under the shadow of his University, as if a compensating Providence would reward the Franciscan friar's unresting love of letters. Ximenez has received scant justice, but if the atmosphere of culture which he created at Alcalá, had aught to do with making Cervantes what he was, the stern educator did not live in vain. In Toledo it takes no effort of the imagination to people the streets with the figures of the past; it is every-day life that drops away, and the surprise is that one does not meet some intellectual-faced cardinal, some hidalgo in velvet cloak or chased armor. The stone effigies on the tombs of Spanish churches make it easy to picture a certain very splendid presence that once walked, in youth's proud livery, these silent streets. Garcilaso de la Vega is a pure type of the grandee, Spain's Philip Sidney, a courtier, a soldier, a poet whose gift of song made him the idol of the nation, he is one of the alluring figures of history. By writing in Virgilian classic verse, he changed the rhythm of Spanish poetry from that of the "Cid," of Juan de Mena and Manrique. "In our Spain, Garcilaso stands first beyond compare," wrote a contemporary poet, a judgment held later by Cervantes and Lope de Vega. This lovable hero was born in Toledo while Ximenez was still its active if aged Archbishop. He came of distinguished stock, the first Garcia Laso de la Vega was the favorite of Alfonso XI in 1328. This later namesake had for father a knight of Santiago, lord of many towns, ambassador to Rome, and one of Isabella and Ferdinand's councilors of state; on his mother's side his lineage was still more illustrious, she was a Guzmán, another of Spain's families whose prominence continued for centuries. Garcilaso, who early showed his love for the liberal arts, received a finished education. At fifteen he became guardsman to Charles V, and his qualities of heart and brain soon won him the affectionate admiration of the court. "Comely in action, noble in speech, gentle in sentiment, vehement in friendship, nature had made his body a fitting temple for his soul." And Spain can show this harmony in many of her sons. Some untranslatable words describe Garcilaso, _hermosamente varonil_, the superb manhood of beauty. During the Emperor's wars in Italy he fought bravely, and at the Battle of Pavia, where Pescara's lions of Spain carried all before them, he won distinction. He was not merely a soldier in Italy, his richly-endowed nature avidly seized on her art and learning. Cardinal Bembo calls him "best loved and most welcome of all the Spaniards that ever come to us." Like Sir Philip Sidney, the young poet was not destined to reach middle age; a short thirty-three years is his record. At a siege near Fréjus, in the south of France, he fell wounded into the arms of his dearest friend, the Marquis de Lombay, and in spite of Charles V sending his skilled physician and coming in person to visit the wounded knight, he died. He was buried among his ancestors in the church of San Pedro Mártir, in Toledo, "where every stone in the city is his monument," wrote the euphuistic Góngora. Truly that age was past rivalry in the appealingly noble characters it produced, fine spirits of heroism, fit inheritors of Isabella's period that had prepared the soil for such a flowering. A Garcilaso de la Vega is the bosom friend of a Francis Borgia, a Francis Borgia communes with a Teresa de Jesús with the intense pleasure of feeling souls akin, an Ignatius Loyola serves as guide to a Francis Xavier, and so on, these noted lives touch and overlap. What an array the first fifty years of the sixteenth century can show! 1503 Garcilaso was born, also Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, the noted diplomat and patron of letters; 1504 Luis de Granada, the religious writer; 1506 St. Francis Xavier of Navarre, who died the great missionary of the East; 1510 St. Francis Borgia; 1515 St. Teresa, "fair sister of the seraphim"; 1529 Luis de León, Spain's best lyric poet; 1534 Fernando de Herrera, another poet; 1542, St. John of the Cross, that mystic flame of Divine love; 1545, the dashing hero of Lepanto, Don John of Austria; and final glory of this half century, and of all centuries, 1547, Miguel de Cervantes. The opening of the next century was fecund in men of creative genius: 1599, Velasquez; 1616, Calderón; 1617, Murillo, but to one who loves _España la heróica_, the earlier age is dearer. The gray city on the Tagus is worthy of such citizens, "fit compeer for such high company." So many are her associations that one turns aside in irresistible digressions. In a palace near Santo Tomé, Isabella of Portugal, Charles V's wife, died: to those who know Titian's portrait of her in the Prado, she is a beautiful, living presence. Francis Borgia who in early youth had married one of her ladies in waiting, was the equerry appointed to escort her dead body to Granada, where it was to be laid in the Chapel Royal. When the coffin was opened to verify the Empress, she who had been all loveliness so short a time before was changed to so horrible a sight that the Marquis de Lombay is said to have exclaimed, "Never more will I serve a master who can die!" The Hound of Heaven was in pursuit of grand quarry here. A few years before, the death of Garcilaso his friend had sobered Francis. Now came the loss of his cherished wife, with whom he had lived in truly holy wedlock: in Catalonia where he was the Emperor's viceroy, a lady asked the Marquesa one day why she of such high standing and beauty dressed so plainly, and she answered how could she do otherwise when her husband wore a hair-shirt beneath his velvet. Lombay succeeded to his father's estates and the title of Duke of Gandía, his children--who eventually rose to distinction--were a natural temptation to stifle the higher call of which he was conscious: "For, though I knew His love who followed, Yet was I sore adread Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside." It was a tremendous decision to make, completely to relinquish a future of international influence; relentlessly the heavenly Feet pursued: "I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter. Up vistaed hopes I sped; And shot, precipitated Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears, From those strong Feet that followed, followed after. But with unhurried chase, And unperturbèd pace, Deliberate speed, Majestic instancy, They beat--and a Voice beat More instant than the Feet-- 'All things betray thee who betrayest Me.'"[26] The compelling Voice won. Having settled his children, the Duke of Gandía gave up titles and estates to enter the Company of Jesus, of which he has been called the second founder, so fruitful were the years of his generalship. The death of Isabella of Portugal is connected with another foremost member of the _Compañía_. The Pope sent Cardinal Farnese to carry his condolences to the Emperor, and the papal suite lodged in a house of Toledo near that of a widow named Ribadeneyra. Her willful, high-spirited and captivating boy Pedro attached himself voluntarily to the embassy, and so won the notice of the Cardinal that he was taken back to Rome, where, by another hap-hazard in his life, he fell under the influence of St. Ignatius Loyola, became his loved pupil and future biographer. The books of this delightful Pedro, telling the early history of the Jesuit Order make as solidly interesting a bout of reading as can while away a month. He was not only the confidant of the first General, but of his two successors, Lainez and Borgia, he helped St. Charles Borromeo in his reforms at Milan, and lived long enough to rejoice on the day of his great master's beatification, 1609. In Toledo many a time Cervantes strolled, here he has set several of the interesting "Novelas Exemplares"; St. Teresa founded one of her houses here, described in her "Libro de las Fundaciones," a companion book to the "Novelas"; that prodigy of improvization, Lope de Vega, also placed some dramas in these dark winding streets; and in the Jesuit house the historian Mariana, a friend of Ribadeneyra, browsed over his work, called by Ticknor "the most remarkable union of picturesque chronicling with sober fact that the world has ever seen." Our days in Toledo sped all too fast. For me it is one of those few fascinating cities of the world that rouses a recurrent longing to return. The impressive, solitary walk above the Tagus gorge at the hour of sunset is an unforgettable memory. Another walk leads to San Cristo-in-the-fields, the legend of whose crucifix, with one arm hanging pendant, has been told by Bécquer; beyond this church, across the _vega_, where the Tagus spreads out in relief from the confining gorge behind, is the _Fábrica de Armas_, where good Toledan blades are made, so elastic that they are packed in boxes curled up like the mainspring of a watch. Within the town the rambles are endless, now down the step-cut hill, past the Plateresque façade of Santa Cruz hospital, founded by Cardinal Mendoza; now out by the one sloping side of the city to another hospital, where the sculptor Berruguete died, and lies buried near his last work, the marble tomb of the founder, Cardinal Tavera. One day in the narrow street, hearing the sound of singing, I entered a monastery church, to listen for an enchanted hour to a choir of male voices admirably trained.[27] There is about this town an atmosphere that makes you sure that real peace and holiness lie within the looming convent walls under which you pass. The wise Chinese statesman, Kang Yu Wei, who has toured the world studying its religions, said he found in a monastery of Toledo an impressive spirit of devout silence. [Illustration: TOMB OF BISHOP SAN SEGUNDO, BY BERRUGUETE, AVILA] We carried away a beautiful last picture of the "Crown of Spain," as her loyal son Padilla called her. We were to catch the night train to Andalusia, at Castillejo on the express route. It was a night with an early moon. So white and romantic lay the city streets that we sent the luggage by the diligence and went on foot to the distant station. When we crossed the Alcántara bridge, we turned to look back at the climbing mass of houses and churches. With a feeling of sadness we gazed at the old mediæval city, so far from the fret of modern life. This was to be, we thought, our last impression of the Castiles. Andalusia, enticing, warm in the sun, facile, impudent, lay ahead. Farewell to the grave, courteous Castilian! Farewell to the valorous stoic-heart of Spain! CORDOVA AND GRANADA "The art of the Alhambra is eminently decorative, light, and smiling; it expresses the well being, the repose, the riches of life; its grace lay almost entirely in its youth. Not having the severe lines that rest the eye, these works paled when their first freshness faded. Theirs was a delicate beauty that has suffered more than others from the deterioration of its details." RENÉ BAZIN. In his "Terre d' Espagne," M. René Bazin speaks of the faded city of Cordova, and the term is singularly exact. It is a tranquil, faded ghost, not a nightmare ghost, but an aloof, melancholy specter. I have been haunted by it often since the day and night spent there. Dull and unimportant as it now is, hard to be imagined as the Athens of the West with almost a million inhabitants and an enlightened dynasty of Caliphs, yet, like a true ghost, vague in feature, Cordova succeeds in making itself unforgettable. The past covers it like a mist. It gave me more the sensation of the Moslem than any other spot in Spain: Allah, not Christ, is its brooding spirit. We strolled hither and thither through its preternaturally quiet streets which are lined with two-storied white or pinkish houses. Every few minutes we stopped with exclamations of delight to gaze through the iron grilles at the tiled and marble patios, here seen for the first time. "A patio! How shall I describe a patio!" exclaimed De Amicis, when he first came into Andalusia. "It is not a garden, it is not a room, it is not a courtyard, it is the three in one,--small, graceful, and mysterious." They are so spotless a king could eat off their paving-stones. Isolated from the stir of the world, they breathe that intimate quiet of the spirit felt in the pictures of the Primitives. To wander for the first time over a city filled with these oases, gives that exhilaration of novelty which as a rule the traveler has long since lost with his first journeys. I should not say our very vivid impression of Cordova depended on chance details,--the hour of arrival, a personal mood, the weather. Of course the strangeness was heightened by our coming from the north, through a cold night of travel on the train that made the transition from the central plateau of the Castiles to the semi-tropical coast belt of Andalusia, an abrupt one. Toledo, the last seen Castilian town, had been so distinctly Christian in spite of Moorish remains, and our night-flitting over the level sea of La Mancha was so possessed by that _español neto_, the adventuresome Don, that suddenly to awake among palm trees and oranges gave the sensation of another race and climate. It was this province with its astonishing fertility that had been the land of Elysium of the ancients. Having grown familiar with the orderly streets of Cordova by day, it was quite without fear that we took a night ramble. Not a soul was astir. What were they doing, these cloistered people? It was as deserted as Stamboul at night, more lonely even, for here was not a single yellow cur to bay the moon, nor the iron beat of the watchman's staff; and though like the Orient in some aspects, these streets were far too orderly and the houses too spotless. Perhaps there lay the source of the indefinable fascination; this was neither East nor West, but a place stranded in time, made by circumstances that never will be repeated. The Oriental influenced the Spaniard deeply, a psychological as well as a racial influence. I often felt that the dignified gravity which so distinguishes a Spaniard from his fellow Latins is a trait acquired unconsciously from his Arab neighbors: nothing like it is found except among races whose ancestors dwelt in the desert. Also the excessive generosity and hospitality of the Spaniard are oriental virtues, just as the Andalusian procrastination and acceptance of fate are oriental failings. We too often forget that there were generations when, religious hatred quieting down, the two peoples lived side by side in friendly consideration. If the Christian gained from the Moslem, the Moor in Spain was influenced no less potently by the standards of the European. He became a very different being from his brother in northern Africa. He learned to gather libraries, to express himself in buildings where he translated his nomad carpet into colored stucco; much of his traditional jealousy was laid aside and Moorish ladies appeared at the tournaments to applaud their Moorish cavaliers who tilted with the same rules of romantic chivalry as the Christian knights. Moslem civilization could even boast some femmes savantes. The stimulus of the two opposing races gave Spain just the impetus she needed, and the conqueror lost with his very victory. When all men think the same way without the spur of competition, inaction and ill-health are sure to follow. Perhaps the upholders of law and order need not worry too much to-day over the anarchists and socialists in the commercial districts of Spain: is not the health of a nation quickened by struggle? The soul of a Spanish city is always the Cathedral, and Cordova has what it called one, but it is no more a Christian church than the Caaba at Mecca. The canons in Charles V's time tore out the center of the Mosque and built a Plateresque-Gothic _capilla mayor_ and _coro_. It was an ignorant thing to do, and when the Emperor saw their work he exclaimed in disgust, "You have built here what anyone might have built elsewhere, but you have destroyed what was unique in the world!" Nevertheless, those old canons had some excuse. They felt that they could not pray in a proper Christian manner under the low, oppressing roof of Islam. Instead of "Christe Eleison," it was "Allah illal allah, ve Mahommed recoul" that came to their lips in abominable heresy, so in desperation they put up the incongruous enclosure and tried to shut Islam out. A building every one of whose stones has been laid in earnest faith, seems to have a spirit that will never desert it, let the ritual change as it may. Santa Sophia is Christian in spite of eight thousand Mussulmans prostrated there on the 27th of Ramazan: the Gregorian chant still echoes in Westminster Abbey. So here the canons' efforts were in vain, the Mezquita makes heretics of us all, we turn to the Mihrab as the holy of holies, not to the High Altar. The Mihrab is a dream of art, the mosaics are richer and softer in hue than an eastern rug. Leo, the Christian Emperor on the Bosphorus, sent Byzantine workmen to teach the Caliph this art. The enclosing carvings have the distinction of being in marble, not in the customary plaster, also a Christian innovation. "Let us rear a mosque which shall surpass that of Bagdad, of Damascus, and of Jerusalem, a mosque which shall become the Mecca of the West," said the founders in the eighth century; and there is a tradition that the Caliph himself worked an hour a day with the builders. It is truly "unique in the world," for nothing was ever like these myriad aisles, forty in one direction crossed by twenty in another, with nine hundred short pillars of every kind of marble--green, red, gray, brown, fluted white--holding up the roof. These pillars are baseless and only thirteen feet in height; and arches of an ugly red and yellow spring in two tiers from column to column. The effect is incredibly original and eccentric,--a veritable forest of pillars. The fatalist spirit of Mohammed, the acceptance of life's limitation, is insistent here, the desert Arab's attitude of adoration, forehead prone to earth, is forced on you: to kneel with upraised face is impossible under so low a roof; were there the usual hanging balls and roc's eggs, even the Inquistor-General himself would have genuflected toward Mecca! As I wandered about the Mezquita, the two creeds seemed to formulate themselves more distinctly for me: one, soaring and idealistic, channel for the loftiest aspirations of the soul, the other a magnificent step forward from the lower forms of worship about it in the East, nevertheless limited, so far and not beyond, not cleaving to the impossible, to the unattainable. "Be perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect" was not taught by Mohammed. Islamism is a very noble average, and perhaps because men in general are the average, it may seem better to satisfy them. Christianity is a religion for the chosen souls of humanity, only by aiming at the impossible can the best in man develop. The majority of us are not chosen souls, hence we have the bitter inconsistencies between the theory and the practice of our faith to-day; and yet, once the vision of the unspeakable soul-paradise of the mystic has been conceived of, to rest satisfied with an average religion is impossible. Islam makes men happy with a dreaming bliss that veils the sun, Christianity bids you look up at the sun whether it blinds you or not, and here and there arise souls that can bear the vision and help weak eyes to see. When we left the Mosque, the obsession of the East still continued in the courtyard, where about the fountain sat groups of idlers only wanting the fez and turban for completion. Once the Mezquita opened on this court, there was no dividing wall, the trees planted in symmetrical lines carried on the rows of columns within, and an absolutely enchanting sight it must have been to look from this orange grove far into the dim interior of the Mosque, lighted every evening with some five thousand hanging lamps. All tourists in Spain go to Granada, so they know the confusing station of Bobadilla where trains from north, south, east, and west, meet and exchange passengers; the journey from there on to Granada gives a beautiful glimpse of Andalusia; picturesquely set towns, scattered white villas, olive groves, even in winter the grass as green as spring. As apples, in the Basque provinces, and carrots at Toledo, so here oranges were piled up in masses. The last thirty miles of the journey were through the historic _vega_, a veritable garden of Eden in fertility. Before we reached Granada it was dark and above the city was rising an early moon as big as one in a Japanese print. The proprietor of the Pension-Villa Carmona in the Alhambra grounds was there to meet us, and we soon rattled off for the long drive up to the Moorish citadel. A night arrival at Granada enhances the romantic effect. It is mysterious to turn in from the noisy streets of the town at the Carlo Quinto gate and under the heavy foliage of elm trees slowly to mount the Alhambra hill; there is a gurgle and rush of running water on every side, one has the feeling of being in a thick Alpine forest. The horses mount slowly, wind and turn, pass through various gates and at length you are in the small village of the citadel, and in three minutes can walk right into the Caliph's palace. Spain cannot show many such beautiful northern parks, with a growth of ivy and a shimmer of arrow-headed leaves under the elm trees where nightingales sing in season. It was Ford I think who started the statement which most guide books have gone on repeating that the Duke of Wellington planted these elms ("the Duke" occupies more space in Murray's Hand-book than _los Reyes Católicos_ themselves!) He may have planted some, but a certain old book of travels, yellow with age, tell us that just these same elm trees were growing and just the same kind of songster singing in 1789. "The ascent toward the Alhambra," wrote the Rev. Joseph Townsend in that year, "is through a shady and well watered grove of elms abounding with nightingales whose melodious warbling is not confined to the midnight hour; here, incessant, it is equally the delight of noon." This part of Granada is charming. But the city below is so dirty and ill-conditioned that it would spoil the Alhambra for a long stay. Even in the darkness on the night of our arrival it was easy to discern what a different aspect it had from most Spanish towns, which, while they are often poor, are frugally clean and self-respecting. In Granada the people appeared ill-tempered, if you paused anywhere, diseased children gathered in a persistent begging circle, and the fierce copper-colored gypsies were so diabolically bold in glance and act that they made a walk in any of the suburbs too dangerous to be repeated. We had often turned off the beaten track in the Asturias, in Galicia, and Castile, without the least fear, but Granada will remain for me the one thoroughly disagreeable, frightening spot in Spain. Described as the Alhambra has been, it would be fatuous to try it again. I can only give superficial personal impressions. There is no use in disguising that this style of architecture disappointed me enormously. I could admire its extreme elegance, the details of the _artesonado_ ceilings, the _ajimez_ windows, I could acknowledge it was fairy-like, a charming caprice, exquisite jewel-box work: as a whole it left me quite cold. It was too small, it lacked height, there was no grandeur about it,--and all so newly done up with restorations! The first visit gave me an effect of trumpery, and even after I had seen it daily for two weeks, I could not forget that these mathematically correct designs, one yard very like the next, were imprinted by an iron mold on wet plaster. This was skilled artisan's work, not the intellectual thought of the architect; here was no cutting of enduring, masculine stone with the individual freedom of genius. Decorations of Cufic mottoes are effective, but they can never compete with a Parthenon frieze, with a Chartres or Santiago portal. Fantasy was here, not imagination; again I felt the bound limit of Islam. Enough for the negative side. For praise, if the Alhambra itself is disappointing, its setting is imperial. The view on which you look out from its romantic _ajimez_ windows has few equals in the world, and accounts easily for the supremacy of this spot in man's thought. You look down on the ravine of the Darro, the white Generalife near by, across the river, the piled-up houses of Granada backed by near hills covered with cactus. From the Torre de la Vela is a grander view. The _vega_ with towns and historic battlefields lies below, and you try to pick out Santa Fé, which sprang up in eighty days to house the Christian troops, or Zubia, where Isabella was almost captured, or Puente de Pinos, which the discouraged Columbus had reached when the Queen's messenger brought him back to arrange for the great voyage. On this tower, after seven and a half centuries of Moorish rule, the first Christian standard was hoisted by Cardinal Mendoza, on January 2d, 1492, festival still of the countryside, when the fountains play again in the Alhambra, and down in the Royal Chapel the Queen's illuminated missal is used on the altar. All Christian Europe rejoiced with Spain, and Henry VII in England had a special _Te Deum_ chanted in gratitude. While on one side is this tropical _vega_ on the other is the glorious Sierra Nevada, clothed in perpetual snow. So close are the mountains that on certain days it seemed as if a short hour's walk could reach them, closer than the Jungfrau to Mürren. It is the most untarnished expanse of snow I have seen on any mountains. We often climbed the tower for the sunset, and one evening a genuine Alpine glow made the Sierras magnificent past description. "Ill-fated the man who lost all this!" Charles V exclaimed. There was a lesser view we grew attached to, that from the strip of garden called the _Adarves_, warm in the sun under the vine-covered bastions. It was laid out by the Emperor, and it fronts the snow range looming above the green mass of park trees. Almost every day we would bring books and sewing there--December, with mountains 12,000 feet high beside us!--and the gardener would set chairs for us at the stone table. Work and books would be dropped for long minutes to look out on those astonishingly noble mountains. If only the city below were well-ordered and clean like Avila or Segovia or Seville, this would be the spot of all Spain for a long stay. We had to descend at times to the repulsive town for sightseeing. We hunted up the Church of San Gerónimo, where the Gran Capitán, that true Castilian knight alike renowned as general and diplomatist, Gonsalvo de Cordova, was buried. Once around his tomb seven hundred captured banners were ranged, but the church since it was sacked in the French invasion has been unused. It was appropriate that the Great Captain found burial in Granada, since it was here he trained the famous legions he was to lead to victory in Italy. Isabella on her deathbed listened with thrilled interest to the news of Gonsalvo's exploits at Naples. Another day, to see the view of the Sierras from the Church of San Nicolás, we climbed the Albaicín quarter, so squalid and poverty-stricken that the very sheets hung out to dry were a fretwork of patches, and the smells of goats and pigs were awful. A swarm of deformed beggars gathered round us, and I must confess to driving them off indignantly. Then as we descended the hill, down the twisting oriental passages, I was reproached by a little episode that showed a charity wider than mine--not good utilitarian ethics perhaps, but good early Christianity--a woman, poorest of the poor, at a turning of the lane was giving her mite to one more stricken in misery. Is it any wonder Spain can win affection with her good and her evil lying close beside each other in a grand primitive way? Whenever I joined her detractors and abused her, within the hour she would offer some silent rebuke. Still another walk was the beautiful one along the Darro, then up the steep hill between the Generalife and the Alhambra. In that deserted lane one morning as I was passing alone, suddenly the gypsy king stepped out, a startling image of brutal, manly beauty, with his blue-black hair topped by a peaked hat. He approached insolently, with a glance of contemptuous, piercing boldness, struck an attitude, and holding out a package, commanded: "Buy my photograph." With beating heart I hurried by, to turn into the safe Alhambra enclosure with a tremor of relief. The Cathedral of Granada is a pretentious Greco-Roman building, good of its kind, but I do not like that kind. Out of it leads the Royal Chapel, where "_los muy altos, católicos, y muy poderosos Señores Don Ferdinando y Doña Isabel_" lie buried with their unfortunate daughter, Juana la Loca, and her Hapsburg husband. These two elaborate Renaissance tombs, the wood carved _retablo_ and a notably fine _reja_, make this _Capilla Real_ a unique spot. Isabella the queen left a last testament that breathes the fine sincerity of her whole life: "I order that my body be interred in the Alhambra of Granada in a tomb which will lie on the ground and can be brushed with feet, that my name be cut on a single simple stone. But if the king, my lord, choose a sepulchre in any other part of our kingdom, I wish my body to be exhumed and buried by his side, so that the union of our bodies in the tomb, may signify the union of our hearts in life, as I hope that God in his infinite mercy may permit that our souls be united in heaven." It seems as if a king whose life-long mate had been an Isabella of Castile might have had more dignity of soul than to give her a trivial successor. When Ximenez heard of her death, sternly-repressed man of intellect though he was, he burst into lamentation. "Never," he exclaimed, "will the world again behold a queen, with such greatness of soul, such purity of heart, with such ardent piety and such zeal for justice!" And the Cardinal had known her in the undisguised intimacy of the Confessional and stood side by side with her through years of difficult state guidance. The astute Italian scholar, Peter Martyr, who lived at her court, said that at the end of the fifteenth century Isabella had made Spain the most orderly country in Europe, and another foreign scholar, Erasmus, tells us that under her, letters and liberal studies had reached so high a state that Spain served as a model to the cultivated nations. From one end of her land to the other this incomparable woman has left her mark; at Valladolid the remembrance of her marriage; Segovia whence she started out to claim her kingdom; at Burgos the tomb of her parents; Salamanca where her son was educated, and whose library façade is in her grandiose style; Avila where this only son lies buried; Santiago where her hospice still harbors the needy; Seville where she gave audience in the Alcázar; her refuge for the insane here in Granada;--hardly a city that she did not visit and endow: "If thy rare qualities, sweet gentleness, Thy meekness saint-like, wife-like government Obeying in commanding, and thy parts Sovereign and pious, else could speak thee out The Queen of earthly queens." VIGNETTES OF SEVILLE "Mi vida está pendiente Solo en un hilo, Y el hilo está en tu mano, dueño querido. Mira y repara, Que si el hilo se rompe Mi vida acaba." CANTAR ANDALUZ. "El secreto de la vida consiste en nacer todas las mañanas."--RAMÓN CAMPOAMOR. The outburst of spring in Seville is something unforgettable. With roses in bloom during December and January, the winter was like the summer of some places, and so we realized with surprise during February that a genuine spring was beginning. The bushes and hedges put on fresh coats of green, and barely a month after the trees had been stripped of their myriad oranges, the same trees were covered with white blossoms. To sit beside the lake in the park on a sunny March morning seemed like being in an ideal scene of the theater; hard, white pathways wound in every direction between miles of rose hedges; an avenue of vivid Judas trees led to a blue and white tiled Laiterie, where society came each morning to drink a hygienic glass of milk, and the graceful girls played _diavolo_ with young officers; the groves of orange trees filled the air with an almost overpowering scent; children threw crumbs to the ducks in the pond; high up in the palm trees they were doing the parks' spring cleaning by cutting away the spent leaves. With such a winter climate it is strange that Seville was deserted by foreigners till the Easter rush. During the four months of our stay we had no need of fires, and sometimes there were days so warm that we did not start for the customary constitutional till toward evening. Every single day of the winter we took a walk in the same direction,--to the _Delicias_ parks. Such monotony at first seemed a very limited pleasure, but before the winter ended we had grown to be such true Sevillians that we liked the placid regularity, and whenever we went further afield the roads were so abominably kept that we were glad to return to the shady fragrance of the park. We gradually learned to sit on the benches with the contented indolence of the southerner, watching the carriages roll by, family coaches a bit antiquated, the women well-dressed but not with the Madrileña's elegance. As the same people passed day after day, we soon had favorites among them. One young girl, like a rose in her bloom of quick blushes, was having the golden hour of her life; all winter we watched her in the _Delicias_, at the theater, in church, and she never appeared without her cavalier somewhere in sight: a man in love here, like a man at his prayers, has no false pride to disguise his devotion. His carriage openly pursued hers in the park, the coachman an eager abettor of the romance. They would often alight, and while her mother and small sister loitered far behind, the happy _novios_ were allowed to ramble side by side through the lovely paths. It seemed to us that we were no sooner settled in some retired nook of the pleasure grounds than these two sympathetic young people would come strolling past, and her sudden blush in recognition of the two strangers whose interest she felt, was very charming to see,--so too thought the young man at her side, for he always paced with his head bent irresistibly to hers. Life can offer worse fates than to be in love in the springtime, under Seville's flowering trees. This happy starting with romance has much to do with the contented marriages of the race: here, as I said before, is little of the pernicious "dot" system of France and Italy; good looks and attractive personal qualities win a husband. Spanish women make excellent wives, their first fire and passion turning to self-abnegation. They are spared the ignoble competition that luxury brings; except in Madrid and among a small set in a couple more of the big cities, most Spanish ladies dress with extreme simplicity in black; the mantilla having more or less equalized conditions. It is still the custom for a mother and her daughters to go to church before eight every morning; often I saw them returning as I sat drinking my coffee on the hotel balcony. For church they wear the black veil that so much better becomes them than the big hats donned for the afternoon drive. Strangers are inclined to take for granted the idleness of women's lives in a city like Seville. I had slight opportunity of judging for myself. From a friend, however, who happened to have letters of introduction to a Sevillian whom she thought a mere social butterfly after seeing her drive by idly every afternoon, I learned that being taken into the intimacy of this pretty, fashionable woman, it appeared that she rose before seven every day and had never once missed giving each of her four children his morning bath. When we occasionally lingered late in the _Delicias_ at noon, we would see the _cigarreras_ from the great tobacco factory come out to spend their siesta. The proverbial beauty of these girls is much exaggerated, but the fresh flower in the hair worn by every woman of the people, old and young alike, gives a decided charm. Sometimes they would dance together under the trees, just for the mere pleasure of motion, and sing the passionate _coplas_ of the province, of the very essence of a people, impossible to translate: "Nor with you nor without you My sorrows have end, For with you, you kill me, And without you, I die." Or this other, a _majo_ to his chosen one: "Take, little one, this orange From my orchard grove apart, Be careful lest you use a knife For inside is my heart." The _majo_ of Andalusia is the peasant dandy of Spain, and truly he is superb. As he gallops in from the country on his proud-necked stocky Andalusian horse--by instinct he knows how to sit a horse--or when he walks by jauntily in his short bolero jacket, with the springing gait of youth and dominating manhood, a duchess must look at him with admiration. The city loafer of Seville is a miserable specimen, and his insolence on the street is a constant outrage, but the country _labrador_ does much to redeem him. One day we walked back across the fields from Italica, and passed many of these self-respecting peasants who gave us the proud, courteous salute of the north, but no sooner were we within the city limits than began the bold staring, the jostling and remarks peculiar to Seville alone. All classes and conditions are met with in the park. Once a week the black soutanes and red shoulder scarfs of the seminarists of San Telmo give an added note of color. One of the lads, happening to know a Spanish acquaintance of ours, often stopped to chat. He told us details of their life, that at Easter and for the summer each returned in secular dress to his family, and if, during his years of preparation, he found he was not suited to the priesthood, he was free to leave at any time. Thus this lad had entered with ten others, of whom only three remained. "Soon only two, I fear," he added, with his clever mundain smile. "They tell me I'm too fond of society." Yet I have seen English ladies, true to their Invincible Armada traditions, shake their heads in pity when the seminarists passed, and sigh: "Poor young prisoners!" We made other acquaintances in the placid Seville parks; the venders of peanut candy, of the delicious sugar wafers for which you gamble on a revolving machine, above all our _Agua! Agua!_ friend. This last would polish the glass with an agile turn of the wrist, then bend slightly and from his shoulder pour down the crystal stream with undeviating aim. No people on earth drink water like the Spanish; it is a national love. A tot of four will stand spellbound before the fat dolphin of a park fountain, calling in beatific ecstasy, "_Hay agua!_" Though the _Delicias_ is the favorite haunt, one can while away an afternoon in the garden of the Alcázar, on its pretty tiled seats. When we went through the Moorish palace, its restorations seemed so gaudily done that again I felt the sensation that this was trumpery. As at the Alhambra the fact of its medium being plaster, not enduring stone, spoils Moorish art for me. Some evenings for the sunset we climbed the Giralda, the only height from which a view over the fertile country can be got, for Seville's great drawback is its flatness; there is not one high spot for loitering at the close of day as in most Italian towns. From this cathedral tower, the view down on the white roofs of the city holds one spellbound; groves of palms show the parks, neat terrace gardens on the tops of the houses, and not a vestige of a street. No wonder, for the passages called streets are barely wide enough for three to walk abreast, and they twist and bend in true oriental fashion. We used to turn in behind the Alcázar, and wander hap-hazard, past Murillo's house, round and about north of that chief thoroughfare, the _Sierpes_. For surprises and romance this town has no equal. Tucked away in the narrow lanes is patio after patio, not, like those of Cordova, merely spotless and tranquil, but imposing with white marble columns and pavements, for Italica, nearby, an obliterated city that lays claim to three of Rome's emperors, Trajan, Hadrian, and Theodosius, was stripped to adorn the younger Seville. The exterior of the houses is insignificant, just two or three stories of plain plaster walls, all beauty being kept for the inside, for the patio, with its central fountain and walls of colored tiles. We used often to pause at the open grille to gaze in with delight, agreeing with the old German proverb, "Whom God loves has a house in Seville." They say that in summer-time the family moves down from the upper story to live around the patio, over which an awning is stretched, and every evening animated _tertulias_ are held there. A June walk at night in these lanes must be paradise: "_Quien no ha visto á Sevilla, no ha visto á maravilla_." All over the city are small churches that antedate the Cathedral, with noticeable twelfth century portals, timber roofs, and often a Moorish tower. The best are Omnium Sanctorum and San Marcos: and a lovely bit to sketch is the façade of Santa Paula with its Italian faience decoration. The peaceful patio of the chief Hospital--a church in the center--must be a nook of repose loved by the convalescent. I could not see that the ill or aged suffered in Spain, despite the general abuse of her institutions. What is it about Spanish ways that makes most Englishmen so pessimistic over her? It seems to me that an Englishman should be sympathetic here, for so many of his traits he has in common with the Spaniard, such as sincerity, independence, loyalty to national ideals, to their rulers and creed. A prominent London publisher, in a new series of travel books, has lately reprinted Richard Ford's "Wanderings in Spain," thereby perpetrating a grave injustice, for in this book is gathered, with no sense of proportion, the abuse expurgated (chiefly because of its length) from his "Murray's Hand-book of Spain." Ford visited Spain when she was torn by the disorders of civil war, after three centuries of ill-government. A sad picture of England could be made by the foreign visitors who happened to witness the Lord George Gordon riots or the industrial agitations of the Midlands, or who visited the poorhouses, schools, and prisons described by Dickens and Charles Reade, yet who would maintain that such a picture was true as a whole, or print such a book to represent England to-day? Why must a different justice be meted out to Spain? Ford could be enthusiastic over the Castilian peasants' manhood, over the security of life and purse throughout the northern provinces, and the gentle kindness of the country women, the hospitality of whose kitchens he sought, but when it comes to the national religion he fills his pages with false statements. "One never pelts a tree unless it has fruit on it," a Spaniard will say as he shrugs his shoulders. There is no doubt that the travelers in Spain then as well as the travelers of to-day see many things that have cause to distress them, but it should never be forgotten that in cities like Seville, the disease and vice which are kept out of sight in a distant slum in northern towns, are here right in the open eye. The poorest here live in the same block with the rich, a juxtaposition that may lead the outsider to see only the evil of a place, but for the native has the happier result of a more human primitive relationship between the classes than in most countries: poverty has never been looked on as pitiable in Spain: haughtiness and snobbishness are almost unknown here.[28] I must also add, to be quite honest, that, often, the impudence of the Sevillian street loafer and the exasperating pursuance of the beggar children, made me break out in Invincible Armada abuse myself; then some slight episode would occur to reprove me. One day we paused to watch a very ugly little girl of five nurse her wounded dog. She was pity incarnate, she had rolled it in her poor shawl and rocked it backward and forward. When she gently touched the bandaged paw tears came to her eyes. We often passed her during the winter, and feeling our sympathy, unconscious of its first cause, the little tot would wait shyly till we had gone by, then dash after us to thrust into our hands two tiny bunches of orange blossoms or violets, and then tear away in confusion, refusing to be thanked. That she so ugly and poor had won two friends intoxicated her warm little heart, and she regularly prepared her offerings of answering affection, to have ready when the strangers passed: every characteristic of this untrained child of the street was admirable. Another time a stationer sent his young apprentice of fourteen to show us the way to a book-binder's. We offered the boy the usual fee, when he flung back his head proudly with a flush; his name was Emilio Teruel y Nobile, and the high-minded young descendant of Aragonese or Castilian blood bore it worthily. Having shown us the shop we sought, and realizing that we now recognized him as an equal, he made his farewell with a poise and reserved grace that were splendid. Later we occasionally passed Emilio, and the equality of the greetings exchanged, not the slightest presumption on his part, is a thing only to be found in _caballero_ Spain. To follow the church feasts that so diversify and brighten the year for these southern countries, also helps one to see them more justly. On the 19th of March, St. Joseph's Day, a large crowd filled the Cathedral to listen to a sermon, almost the best I have ever heard, wherein the sanctity of the family and the dignity of labor were held up as needed models in the world to-day. Before the lighted altar of St. Joseph I noticed a magnificent looking hidalgo, _muy hijo de algo y de limpia sangre_, with three equally grandly built young sons beside him. Such men had never been raised amid city temptations. The line of the four profiles was so similar it was striking. When they rose from prayer, the self-forgetful prayer of the Spaniard with bowed head and closed eyes, the lads pressed about the father they revered, they laid their hands lovingly on his shoulder, the youngest stroked his back as he talked to him; two of the group were probably named José, and the father had come in from a country town to pass his saint's day with his boys at the University. All over the city, cakes and presents were carried openly, for everyone named Joseph (and the Pepes are legion) was keeping open house, and his friends were pouring in to offer congratulations. In Spain moving scenes are witnessed when the Viaticum is brought to the dying: the inmates of the house go to the church to escort the priest back in procession, the sacristan gives each a lighted candle, then at the door on their return, the servants kneel to receive "_el Señor, su Majestad_." Sir William Stirling-Maxwell has told of a duchess in Madrid, returning from a ball past midnight, that when a priest passed carrying the sacrament to the dying, she resigned her carriage to him and returned home on foot. It is said that if in a theater the tinkle of a passing bell is heard, actors and audience fall on their knees. In Seville, in spite of there being none of the mild festivities the foreigner finds in Rome or Florence--not a single tea party!--we never had time to be bored. No sooner were the celebrations for December 8th over than the Christmas _fiestas_ began. Flocks of turkeys were driven through the streets and sold from door to door, and it was comical to see one of the awkward creatures step stiffly into the corridor leading to a patio, gravely crane his neck about to observe the romantic white-marble propriety within the gate, and his stupefaction when the iron _reja_ opened to him with too warm a welcome, alas! In the shop windows were exposed all sorts of useful gifts, silver-necked flagons full of yellow oil, and ornate boxes of cakes. The Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve was very solemn under the lofty piers of the Cathedral. The people gathered there seemed to be meditating on the mystery they commemorated, and at the words of the Gospel, "Et Verbum caro factum est," all fell spontaneously to their knees. Not long after the New Year, the King and Queen, to escape the icy winds of Madrid, came to pass a month in the sun-warmed Alcázar. It was Doña Victoria's first visit to Seville, so the city made it an occasion; triumphal arches were put up across the streets, the fences of the parks were painted crimson and gold, there was a great clipping of trees and repairing of roads,--a bit late this last (but truly Andalusian) for the royal carriages had to grind down the scattered stones,--also, the private houses put on new coats of whitewash. Platforms for seats were built along the route from the station to the Alcázar. We hired chairs on the steps of the Lonja opposite the Cathedral, as it did not seem likely that the old custom of going direct to the church to sing a _Te Deum_ of thanksgiving would be set aside. We were in place early and watched the animated crowds passing,--there was no pushing or crowding. Deputaries in gold lace and medals dashed by; the balconies on all sides, hung with the national colors, were filled with pretty women. The clamor of the Giralda bells told the waiting people the train had arrived; then, as the royal carriage passed, Doña Victoria was given an enthusiastic reception: her bright golden hair and brilliant complexion won cries of "_Bonita_!" "_Simpática_!" "_Guapa_!" Before the cigar factory, where its five thousand employees were grouped, a band of the handsomest _cigarreras_, in red and yellow silk shawls, stepped forward to present the Queen with a fan made of flowers, on whose floating ribbon was painted a genuine Andalusian welcome: "Tienes el mismo nombre "Thou hast the same name Que la Patrona,[29] As our patroness,[29] Tienes 'ange' en la cara, Thou hast the face of an angel, Tienes corona, Thou art a queen, Dios te bendiga! May God bless thee, Eres la más hermosa The fairest that has come Que entró en Sevilla." to Seville!" The loud exclamations of delight in the robust health of the little Prince of Asturias pleased the Queen, and as she passed through the cheering mass of people, she made very gracefully the foreign gesture of greeting, the fingers bent back rapidly on the palm. As the night journey had tired her, the doctors ordered her immediate entrance into the Alcázar, postponing the _Te Deum_ till the afternoon; and Seville, who clings tenaciouly to old customs, was distinctly displeased. The group that stood on the Cathedral steps later in the day was superb. There was the Archbishop in cope and miter, with his silver crozier, the canons in purple robes, the acolytes bearing the historic crosses carried on festivals, and all the chief citizens of the town. For just this occasion the huge western doors were thrown open, giving a new aspect to the nave; through this door the King is the only one privileged to pass, but on this her _first_ entrance, the Queen too. The Archbishop on first coming to his church and when carried out to his burial passes under this portal. The King and Queen, led by the Archbishop, now walked up the nave, chanting _Te Deum laudamus_, and before leaving they went to kneel in the Royal Chapel where, before the High Altar, lies King Ferdinand the Saint who conquered Seville in 1248, after five hundred years of Moorish rule. Here on November 23d, anniversary of his entrance to the city, a Military Mass is said, and the colors are lowered as the garrison files past. To a Sevillian that day of 1248 is as alive as the Battle of Lexington to a New Englander. This being a first visit, some brisk sightseeing was done. They automobiled out to Italica to see the Roman amphitheater there; and the day after her arrival Doña Victoria redeemed the good-will of the Sevillians by driving, in black mantilla, to visit a church in a poor part of the city where is an altar to Our Lady of Hope, dear to expectant mothers. In the Lonja, where the Indian archives are kept, Don Alfonso pored over the maps of Mexico and the autographs of Cortés and Pizarro; in the _Museo_, the Queen again touched the sentiment of the Spanish women by preferring Murillo's realistic "Adoration of the Shepherds." The Duke of Medinaceli got up some splendid provincial dances and tableaux in his Mudéjar _Casa de Pilatos_, one of the show places of the town. We happened to meet the pretty peasant girls who had taken part returning home, singing and waving to the crowd, like birds of paradise, in their rose and lemon silk shawls. There seemed to be a congenial companionship between the young royal people. They were at ease together. The King, extremely fragile-looking, has a thin Hapsburg face so eminently sympathetic that sometimes when he would give an affectionate grin at his applauding subjects he made one rather wish to be a Spaniard one's self. With the irresistible impulses of youth he would sally out from the Alcázar to explore the city on foot, like any other happy, free mortal, but sooner or later the cry "_El Rey!_" would gather a crowd and force him back to his state. One day he had to jump into a fiacre to escape the crush, and it was very jolly to see the descendant of the severe Philip II, of the inflated, pompous Bourbons, dashing through Seville, laughing at the good sport. We often met him riding back from Toblada in the late afternoon from polo, and it certainly appeared as if the affection of his countrymen went with him. I should say few kings are loved as is young Alfonso XIII, and Seville especially prides herself on being _muy leal_. Did not Alfonso _el Sabio_ (tenth of the name, as this Alfonso is the thirteenth) give the city the famous _nodo_, seen everywhere as the town crest, for just this trait of loyalty six centuries ago? So several times a day an eager crowd gathered to watch the King pass, or to cheer for the rosy little Prince of Asturias who drove out with his titled governess and two nurses,--one of severe English propriety, the other a romantic Spanish peasant--behind four big mules decked with Andalusian red trappings and bells. A whole series of fêtes were preparing when the tragic assassination of the King of Portugal and his eldest son at Lisbon put a stop to the rejoicing. The sensation in Seville was enormous, as the Portuguese Queen had brought her two sons the year before to follow the services of Holy Week here, and her mother, the Countess of Paris, lives in an estate near the city. Don Alfonso had just gone for a week's big-game hunting to the Granada mountains, when he hurried back to take part in the funeral service held in Madrid at the same hour as that in Lisbon. On his return to Seville his changed appearance showed what a shock the tragedy had been; not relationship alone but friendship united him to Portugal. Before the Royal visit ended there was a grand review of the troops in the park, where Don Alfonso wore a new uniform, that of the Hussars of Pavia, in commemoration of the great victory of Charles V in Italy four centuries before. Audience was given the envoys from the new King of Sweden in the Ambassador's hall of the Alcázar, which it was said had not been so used since Isabella's day. A mild form of carnival was followed by Ash Wednesday, when the King and Queen and court attended the services in the _Capilla Real_ of the Cathedral, before St. Ferdinand's silver tomb. As they passed out between the dense mass of people, my heart sprang to my mouth when I saw a man struggling to reach the King,--fortunately only a humble petitioner, but the Lisbon assassinations had filled everyone with terror. The royal visit over, came Holy Week, but that and the dancing of the _seises_ merit some pages to themselves. A CHURCH FEAST IN SEVILLE "I have loved, O Lord, the beauty of thy house; and the place where thy glory dwelleth."--PSALMS XXV, 8. "When after many conquerors came Christ The only conqueror of Spain indeed, Not Bethlehem nor Golgotha sufficed To show him forth, but every shrine must bleed, And every shepherd in his watches heed The angels' matins sung at heaven's gate. Nor seemed the Virgin Mary wholly freed From taint of ill if born in frail estate, But shone the seraph's queen and soar'd immaculate." GEORGE SANTAYANA. The eighth of December is a great day in Spain, but more especially in Seville where they look on the Immaculate Conception as their special feast, symbolized, hundreds of years before the dogma was defined, by their fellow townsman Murillo, in the seraphic purity of his _Concepción_. The celebration began on the day preceding the eighth with an early-morning peal of bells that lasted half an hour, and was frequently repeated during the day. Nothing can express the mad, exultant peal of Spanish bells: one strong metallic dong backward and forward,--or rather over and over, for the bells are balanced with weights and make the complete circle when in motion,--with a running carillon of more musical minor notes. We mounted to a roof terrace to watch the ringers in the Giralda, who in reckless enjoyment, let the rope of the revolving bell toss them aloft, a perilous feat that has led to fatal accidents, but high up in that Moorish tower, above the palm and orange-growing city, a triumphant tumult filling the air, it must be easy to lose one's balance of common-sense. Toward evening of the _Víspera de la Pureza_, every one placed lights along the balconies, which were draped with blue and white, those of the Archbishop's palace, under the Giralda, being hung in red and yellow, the national colors. A military band played in one of the smaller plazas, and the Seville girls flocked out in full enjoyment, each with the customary rose or bright ribbon in her hair. The people of the upper classes entertained their friends in open booths around the square. Then on the eighth itself, the bells fairly out-did themselves in tumultuous clamor, calling all to the Cathedral, that haunting soul of the city, _La Grandeza_, the noble, the solemn, its special title. Sevillians love to boast that it is bigger than St. Peters in Rome and cite its 15,642 square meters of ground area to St. Peter's 15,160. It is truly one of the most imposing churches in the world; vast and dim, the lofty Gothic piers make double aisles as they rise in springing arches to the roof. I have seen tourists enter laughing and chatting, but before they take ten steps instinctively their voices are lowered and they walk reverently with half-bowed heads. This serious temple to God is worthy of the men of big ideas who decided "to construct a church such and so good it never should have its equal," to accomplish which vow the canons sacrificed their personal revenues, and for a century the Cathedral Chapter ate in common.[30] December eighth I was in place early, in time to see each lady carry in her own folding chair and set it up in the matted space between the altar and choir: surely it is in church that the Spanish woman is at her best, in her severe black gown, with her veil draped over a high hair comb and gathered gracefully about the shoulders and waist. When she kneels she makes a sign of the cross, which has national additions. After the usual sign from forehead to breast, left shoulder to right, she carries her thumb crossed over her first finger to her lips. I am told this is a token of fidelity to the faith of the cross, and is often a way by which Spaniards recognize their countrymen in foreign countries. And since Seville out-does Spain in most customs, here are still other additions. They precede the sign of the cross by making a small cross on the forehead, lips, and breast; and there are many who even precede _this_ by a first regular sign of the cross, thus making two signs of the cross with the gospel symbol between. All this is done so rapidly that it takes several days of close observation to decipher it. Gradually the church filled for the great feast, until a solid mass of people knelt or stood in the transepts, covering every foot from which the High Altar could be seen; there was no crowding or impatience, for this was not for them a show, but their daily place of prayer. The onlooking tourist too often forgets this vital difference. In most cases he is ignorant of the meaning of church ritual; mental prayer, meditation on the feast celebrated, the unspeakable spirituality of the Mass are undivined by him; it is curiosity or æsthetic pleasure that usually brings him there. As I thought later during the Holy Week, it must be a soul weariness to sit during long hours, through ceremonies one cannot follow intelligently. On this festival, first there was a procession round the church to bless the various altars dedicated to the Blessed Virgin ("For behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. For He that is mighty hath done to me great things." St. Luke i, 48-49). Over the first altar visited hung Luis de Vargas' celebrated picture of Adam and Eve, the _Generación_, painted in the sixteen century to symbolize to-day's doctrine. Before the procession walked officers in uniform, then groups of acolytes, bearing antique silver crosses and the six-foot silver poles that end in handsome candle shrines. Seville gentlemen in dress suits followed, and then the Archbishop in cope and miter, with canons, beneficiaries, and choristers in vestments rich in gold and embroidery. The long imposing train passed slowly round the outer aisle. To those who remained before the altar, the chanting of the procession came but faintly, so colossal is the church, though like all well-proportioned things it is only from effects such as this that one realizes its size. The solemn High Mass proceeded, now the deep magnificently male voice of the organs, now the delicate stringed instruments, with human voices, for the Spaniard fearlessly follows his impulses of worship and presses every talent into the service of the altar. Twenty laymen were grouped in the _coro_ about a priest who led with his baton, and beside them stood the chorister lads who were to dance that afternoon before the tabernacle, as David once danced before the Ark of the Covenant. Their mediæval dress, a singularly pleasing Russian blouse of blue and white, with white breeches and slippers, was worn with so unconscious a grace that they were a charming sight as they sang in clear childish treble. The altar, one blaze of light, was approached by twelve steps, up and down which the bishop and canons swept in their gorgeous robes. Below the steps stood twelve silver candlesticks higher than a man, and close by were displayed the priceless flagons and trays used on high feasts. Every accessory of Seville's Cathedral is on a vast scale; the _retablo_ of carved scenes towers to a hundred feet; the gilded _rejas_, wrought by the monk of Salamanca in the same disregard for man's limitations in which the whole Cathedral was built, and whose dark fretwork enhances the brilliant scenes they enclose, all tell of an age of ardent faith when men gave of their best. [Illustration: LOS SEISES, CATHEDRAL OF SEVILLE] The service over, the Archbishop passed to the sacristy which for this day was thrown open to the people, and they thronged in to kiss the episcopal ring, and to gaze at the Murillos and other masters. Then his vestments laid aside, the prelate, accompanied by a dense crowd, crossed the square to his palace, but before leaving the church, he paused by the chapel of Gonsalvo Núñez de Sepúlveda, who in 1654 left a fortune to the Cathedral that this Octave of the Immaculate Conception should be fitly celebrated. Even after the three-hour service some people lingered in the side chapels, and the choristers, in their picturesque costume, gathered in the _capilla mayor_ of the partly deserted church to continue their songs of praise: not for outer effect alone had these hymns been taught them, but to glorify One unseen but all-seeing. The spirit of inner worship was not lost in its outward symbolization. During the Octave, the Blessed Sacrament was exposed, and unceasing were the offices of praise and song. In the late afternoon of each day came the dance of _los seises_ before the Altar, perhaps one of the most poetic customs remaining in Christendom. The Archbishop, in red robes, again entered the chancel surrounded by the canons, and they all knelt, some here, some there, in unconsciously artistic groups,--the strong firm profiles like those of the donors in Italian pictures. Some knelt in meditation, others affectionately watched the dance of the lads; they too, as boys, may have been choristers. It is more a quiet rhythmic stepping to music than a dance, and all the while they sing in their clear, high voices. Twice the music stopped, and for a few seconds the lads moved slowly to the sound of their own castanets. This unique custom commemorates the Christian's entry into the conquered Moslem town more than six hundred years ago, when the children are said to have danced and sung for joy. These twentieth century Christian lads, their part now over, passed up the steps of the altar into a small sacristy behind it; and the musicians continued a lovely concert of sacred music, a last half hour of peace and prayer that seemed like the benediction of the great darkened church on the bowed groups of worshipers. I came away from the Cathedral every evening with the feeling that there are many and various ways of praising God. Yet so much criticism has this Seville custom roused, that, a few hundred years ago, the Pope ordered its discontinuance, allowing the dance to go on only as long as the costumes then in use should last, but the people, who love their old usages, succeeded in evading the decision by successive patching of the suits. This is the story. Certainly the graceful costumes to-day show no tatters, and they are worn so carelessly that they make no suggestion of masquerade. For the many who crave a quieter form of worship, the grave cathedral services of Northern Spain may be more congenial, but when as many desire magnificence and display, why should not they too be satisfied? The church allows for all tastes and temperaments, knowing man is not cast in one mold. The Puritan in her midst does not have to turn Dissenter; she has her Salvation Army--so I call the pilgrimage-going crowds; the ascetic fulfils the hard law of his nature side by side with the enjoyer of human affections and graces. Seville's feast, rich with old traditions, is appropriate in this southern city. To linger each evening in the vast church lighted only by solitary candles against each pier, to wander behind the kneeling groups listening to the soaring voices of man and violin, to pause beside a certain tomb in the south transept where four mammoth figures of bronze, ungainly on close view but in a half light majestic, bear on their shoulders a bier which holds the remains of Cristóbal Colón,--such hours of loitering quicken the imagination and leave behind them memories of beauty. HOLY WEEK IN SEVILLE "A time to weep, and a time to laugh. A time to mourn, and a time to dance." ECCLES. iii, 4. An overcrowded picture rises with the thought of Seville's _Semana Santa_,--glittering lights, statues laden with jewels, weird masked figures in _nazareno_ costume marching to the sound of funeral dirges, cries of street vendors and children,--all is noise, movement, color, a true Andalusian scene. Spectacular effect is the first impression of the week, a gorgeous pageantry that suits the Sevillian's temperament but is not so congenial perhaps to the northerner, who would have the commemoration of his religion's solemn hour a more tranquil time of prayer. Happily there are other memories carried away as well as this chief one of noisy confusion. Never to be forgotten was the Cathedral echoing at midnight to the sound of Eslava's "Miserere" sung by hundreds of trained voices. Every inch of the vast church was packed. Men and women stood in silence, with upraised faces, as they listened to the music of the old canon who once sat in this choir. The lightest mocker would be awed to silence under those soaring arches. For majesty, for a contagious religious emotion, the Cathedral of Seville at the time of its feasts is only to be rivaled by Santa Sophia during Ramazan, on that memorable Night of Power when eight thousand Mussulmans kneel prostrate under the floating circles of lamps. These two stand supreme; so different in the setting,--the one rich with color, an open blaze of light beneath the wide Byzantine dome, the other dim, mysterious Gothic,--they are alike in the genuine thrill of worship they give the onlooker of every creed. Familiar with her Cathedral in its every-day aspect, having seen the celebrations of December 8th, the Christmas Midnight Mass, Epiphany, Ash Wednesday, it was cruel to find its grand tranquillity violated during the Holy Week. It is the processions, called the _pasos_, that are the cause of the disorder. A _paso_ is a huge platform, on which are placed carved statues representing scenes of the Passion. Each float is carried by some thirty men, and its weight must be enormous, for besides the statues there are silver candelabra, gold and silver vases, and usually a canopy of embroidered velvet upheld by silver poles. Could one but look on them as mere spectacular shows, they would be most picturesque pageants, but to dissociate them from religion is impossible. The custom is an ancient one and is still prevalent in many towns of Spain, through happily, in the smaller places, its original purpose to edify and rouse the people to rememberance of the holy season, has not been lost sight of in extravagant display as at Seville. Each of Seville's numerous parishes has one or two of these _pasos_, and an unworthy rivalry exists between them as to which will make the best show. They are supposed to be scenes of the Passion, such as the Flagellation, Christ before Pilate, the Descent from the Cross, but for the most part they consist of single figures--a Crucifixion followed by a _Nuestra Señora de Dolores_, another Crucifixion followed by another single representation of Our Lady, and so on in monotonous sequence, a repetition that makes the spectator fix his attention, not on the scene represented but on details such as the embroidery of the robes, the display of rare jewels, the elaborate canopy. The _pasos_ struck me as the result of that regrettable tendency in Spain, the accentuated devotion to a special shrine or statue. No doubt it arose in reaction against the Moorish enemy's hatred of images, but the patriotic tendency has been carried too far. It will ever misrepresent the Spaniard's innate Christian belief. As these processions blocked the city streets, one heard on every side, not alone from those of differing creed, exclamations of "Pomp! Show! Childishness!" And the criticism was almost justified. Many strangers leave Seville confirmed in the wrong idea that its religion is an affair of tinsel and lights. Spain cares little what outsiders think of her, but here is a case in which she should consider the discredit that a degenerated custom brings on her religion; she should sacrifice an old tradition. Like the processions of Havana, the _pasos_ should go. The northern Spaniard agrees with the stranger in his dislike of the noisy spectacles that so incongruously commemorate the saddest death-scene of the ages, and there are many Andalusians, too, who wish for their abolition. In fact, it is the rabble and the innkeepers who agitate in their favor; these last keep petitions for their foreign guests to sign, begging that the processions be continued. Seville need not fear she will lose prestige should she drop them, that the tourists will no longer flock to her each spring; she is only beginning to be known for having a winter climate surpassing that of Rome and Naples; _pasos_ or not, visitors will inevitably increase. The objectionable processions began to march late in the afternoon of Palm Sunday, and it is hardly much of an exaggeration to say they went on marching night and day throughout the following week. They were so long that they took five or six hours to pass a given spot. Starting back in the narrow streets of the town, they passed down the _Sierpes_ which was lined with spectators' chairs, defiled before the City Hall, where the Mayor rose to salute each _paso_ in turn, then went on to the Cathedral,--entering by a west door, crossing before the altar, and leaving by the door near the Archbishop's palace. With each _paso_ marched the religious confraternity of its parish, a secular brotherhood of men belonging to all ranks, who are banded together for charitable work. The King belongs to one of these fraternities and when in Seville marches in line, but the year of our visit he was represented by the military governor of the province. The officers of the army also marched. Most of these brotherhoods wore Nazarene costume, in white, purple, or black, with the high-peaked head gear through which only the eyes showed. Some walked devoutly, others in disorder. Membership in religious brotherhoods is often hereditary, and it was touching to see a little child of four, in full regalia, marching with the grown men, planting his silver staff at each slow pace with the gravity of a majordomo. A band of music went with each fraternity, and the blare of brass instruments, the torches, the masked faces, make indeed a confused, wearying spectacle. Most of the onlookers hired chairs for the week along the streets, on balconies, or in that most chosen spot, the square by the City Hall; the populace thronged to the Cathedral, where the procession could be seen free, and there the crowd was dense to suffocation, chiefly made up of the disorderly element from Triana. The chatter and movement made me ask, could this be a Spanish church, where irreverence is unknown? Everyone seemed oblivious of the Tenebræ in the _coro_. They buzzed and moved about in an unseemly scramble for seats, so that only faintest echoes of Jeremiah's gloriously intoned Lamentations could be heard. The sexton rose now and then from the noisy groups on the choir steps to extinguish one by one the candles on the big triangular candlestick, a noble object of bronze used only at this season. And I had looked forward for months to hearing, in this grand Gothic Cathedral, my favorite service of the church year, the solitary service that haunts one with its subtle beauty from one's childhood. The disappointment was keen, it gave just the final touch to my dislike of the _pasos_. There were times when I tried to be just. Seeing the men lift their hats respectfully as each group went by, the women cross themselves with tears in their eyes, the babies look on in awed wonder, I tried to drop prejudice and to see the spectacle as does a southern Spaniard: the noisy scene is so associated with his earliest, tenderest memories that he cannot but look at it in a different way. One evening near me, a handsome young countryman,--moved out of all self-consciousness by the _Virgen santísima_ he so loved, in her wonderful robe and jewels, under a canopy richer than any earthly queen's,--this gallant young _majo_ stood forward suddenly from the crowd and, with his eyes fastened on the glittering mass, sang a _copla_ of praise with the heart-piercing note of the folk-song. So faultlessly artistic a moment made me look leniently on the _pasos_ for a time, warning me, "Lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them." But to be consistent in this home of untamed personalities is impossible! For soon a float of extravagant bad taste would go by; horses with tails of real hair; clumsy velvet robes hiding the excellent carving of the statues (and some of them are the work of the best sculptor of Seville, Montañés, whose portrait by Velasquez hangs in the Prado); worst of all the _Mater Dolorosa_, covered with inappropriate jewels, some willed her by former generations, others lent by rich Sevillian ladies of to-day, in her hand the lace handkerchief of a coquette: criticism would leap to full life again. That the _pasos_ violated the quiet of the Cathedral, that they reeked of the baroque period of bad art, these are not the only complaints against them. They turn all Seville into a picnic week. We began to ask ourselves if this noisy excitement commemorated a solemn time, what would the following week of the Fair be like? The Andalusian can hold revelry with zest and vigor for fourteen unbroken days. Easter week was to open with the Italian opera and the first bull-fight of the year; there were to be three days of horse and cattle show, followed by three days of the grand _Feria_, when the whole province pours into Seville, and the nights are one glare of fireworks; _maja_ and _majo_ are then out in all their finery, and the families of the upper classes live in open booths on the fair grounds, where they pay visits and dance the national dances in public with the easy democracy of true Spaniards. Much as we hoped to see this typical feast, it began to dawn on us early in the week that there were limits to endurance. The hurrying crowds, the blocking of the streets, the noise of vendors, of clashing music, made the fatigue indescribable. Sleep at night was out of the question, noisy Triana roamed the streets; brass bands would sound, and in nervous excitement one would spring to the balcony. The hotels were packed to an uncomfortable extent. By Good Friday all desire to stay over for the Fair week was extinguished; we were very close to physical collapse. So, taking a night train, we slipped away from the turmoil to have a peaceful Easter Sunday in unspoiled Estremadura. There also they were having _pasos_, but _pasos_ of such simple devotion, humble, and primitive, that one knelt with the crowd in prayer as they passed. Before this final, hasty desertion, however, I had dragged myself, worn out with a sleepless night, to the lengthy services in the Cathedral each morning. There, happily, was nothing to criticise. The Holy Week ceremonies customary to all Catholic Christendom, were carried through with dignity; only, since this was irrepressible Spain, there were some local additions, and most beautiful ones. Such was the waving of a huge flag, black, with a large red cross, like the banner of some military order, before the High Altar, while some special prayers were read; love of country and love of God seem so inextricably interwoven here. On Palm Sunday the Cathedral was filled with the stately white leaves, six and ten feet long, from the palm forest of Elche; each canon carried one and each verger; the priests and acolytes who served the Mass bore each his palm, and they waved and swayed around the altar in lovely symbolization of the Entry into Jerusalem twenty centuries before. Pictures like that never fade. A year later in Palestine, it rose vividly before me, while driving out to Bethany, when we passed some hundreds of humble Russian pilgrims tramping back from the Dead Sea, each of whom bore a palm. For in very reality they were following the route of entry into the Holy City. Seville Cathedral on Palm Sunday morning was not unworthy to be grouped with that moving scene. The excessively long Gospel was chanted in the customary different keys by three canons, one standing in the Epistle pulpit, one in the Gospel, and the third on a rostrum erected between the two. Near me several Spaniards of the artisan class followed in Latin every word of the lengthy chanting. The tourists present who knew not what was read, fretted and moved incessantly. No intelligent person should attend a Holy Week in either Seville or Rome without a special book, picked up anywhere for a couple of francs, in which the services are given in Latin and English, or Latin and French. Without the liturgy to voice these ceremonies, they must be weary hours indeed. And yet of the hundreds of visitors on this Palm Sunday, literally, not one followed with a book, and many perhaps held themselves competent to criticise what they had seen. Expectant of the sensational, the tourists filled the great church on Holy Thursday morning, when the white veil was withdrawn: it was done so swiftly, at the opportune words of the Gospel, that there was nothing spectacular about it. Two days later, at the moment in the Mass when every bell in the city bursts out in joyous acclamation of the Resurrection, the black veil was rent; that we missed seeing. Some days before Holy Week a towering temple of wood, white and gilt, a hundred feet high, had been erected in the nave over the tomb of Columbus' son. This pseudo-classic temple, completely out of touch with the Gothic church, was to serve as the repository of the Blessed Sacrament on Holy Thursday, and it was for the center of such shrines that the old silversmiths of Spain, the de Arfe family, made their priceless silver _monumentos_. Such repositories are customary in all Catholic lands on Thursday of Holy Week, for in the midst of sorrow, the Church celebrates the foundation of the Sacrament that has brought joy and solace to mankind. She commemorates the events of the week chronologically. Before the altars are dismantled for Good Friday, she typifies by lights and flowers, her gratitude for that passover supper in the upper room. It is a general Catholic custom to visit a number of these lighted shrines on Holy Thursday, and in Seville this usage leads to one of the charming things of the week, like an oasis of peace in the midst of the arid _pasos_. Everyone pays these visits on foot. During two days not a carriage is allowed in the city, the King himself must walk. Their silk mantillas, black or white, draped high over their combs, wearing jewels and carrying flowers, the ladies of Seville went from church to church, to kneel in graceful groups around the exposed Host, and the men in frock coats and high hats stood in the rear, in simple attitudes of prayer: the Spaniard and the Mussulman are alike in their unconsciousness at their devotions. The next day all would wear deep mourning, but to-day is a feast of rejoicing. Each one goes in quiet composure, as if her mind dwelt on the hours of peace her communions had brought her. Again I felt the same impression that the Christmas midnight Mass had given me; that the imagination of this people was busy with the past event they were celebrating. Does not lack of comprehension of old usages often mean lack of the shaping power of the imagination? From one parish church to another I followed these fascinating women. Here was true Seville, not seen in the Cathedral's tourist crowd, nor under Parisian hats on the _Paseo_. Wandering through the network of streets north of the _Sierpes_, I paused to look into the spotless patios distant as they ever seem from the fret of life. A touch of summer was in the air; the marble courtyards were decked with flowers, and one heard the notes of singing birds. Two dark-eyed ladies came out from a tranquil patio; they wore white mantillas in honor of their visits to the Blessed Sacrament. They set me dreaming of Seville in its summer aspect, when the skies are blue in the fragrant night. Nowhere on earth are women more alluring and essentially feminine, nowhere has man fashioned his house so fitly for charm and romance. By chance, on Holy Thursday, I stumbled on another local usage, full of the same racial flavor. Returning from the Cathedral, where, amid a throng of sight seers, the Archbishop had carried the Host to the lighted _monumento_, I happened to drop into the Church of the Magdalena. It was filled with its own parishioners, since most Spaniards leave the Cathedral services of this crowded week to the visitors. Near the door were seated three separate groups of ladies and young girls, belonging unmistakably to the aristocracy; each wore a black mantilla,[31] and in their tight-fitting black gowns and long white gloves, they were indescribably elegant. They were the ladies in waiting of the various altars, their duties to tend them, and like the men's brotherhoods, to help in the charitable work of the parish. The Magdalena Church is dark, so on the table before these daughters of Eve stood a pair of high candlesticks, between which lay an open tray soliciting contributions for their special shrines or charities. Young beaux entered the church and as they passed the table, dropped a _duro_ or a paper bill in the different trays, according as they felt devotion to such and such an altar, or to judge by the glances that passed between the givers and receivers, as they felt devotion to its fair caretaker. Unexpected scenes like this, unmentioned in the guide books, give to this city its allurement, enhanced doubly because the actors are so unconscious of their picturesqueness. And as unpleasant things fade away, leaving only the happier memories, two scenes stand out unforgettable in Seville's Holy Week: Eslava's "Miserere," echoing at midnight through the Cathedral whose name is fittingly the _Grandeza_, and that other picture, enchantingly Andalusian, the ladies in mantillas paying their silent visits to the Blessed Sacrament on Holy Thursday. The _pasos_ fade to a blurred background of pomp and glitter. CADIZ "Para que yo te olvidará Era menester que hubiera Otro mundo, y otro cielo, Y otro Dios que dispusiera." CANTAR ANDALUZ. --"The sea tides tossing free, And Spanish sailors with bearded lips, And the witchery and beauty of the ships, And the magic of the sea." H. W. LONGFELLOW. In the midst of the warm Seville winter the thought of sea breezes tempted us to Cadiz for a week. The hundred miles' run down there was through a charming corner of Andalusia, with orange groves, olive plantations, woods of stone pines, hedges of cactus, in the meadows herds of most royal bulls. It was the eighteenth of January, yet the fruit trees were in blossom, and over the streams floated a lovely white-flowering verdure. We passed Jerez, source of English sherry, where on our return to Seville we stopped some hours to see the bodegas and sample the native wine. As we neared the coast big pyramids of salt covered the marshes, telling of another industry; in fact, every part of Andalusia which I saw was well cultivated, despite the guide book laments over its backwardness. Soon came whiffs of the sea air. The first view of Cadiz, set right out to sea, is very striking. Only a narrow strip of sand, eight miles long, connects it with the mainland, and as we skirted the coast, past San Fernando,--where there is a naval station and an astronomical observatory,--the compact, sturdy little city out in the Atlantic made a stunning picture; the sea so very blue, the town so dazzlingly white. And inside the treble line of walls and moats that defend its one land-entrance, the "silver dish," as its citizens love to call it, has as individual a character as its distant prospect. It is miraculously clean, its streets seem swept and scrubbed like a Dutch village. Down these narrow lanes you catch the gleam of the sea to east, to north, to west. When it rains, Seville turns into a muddy distress, but well-drained Cadiz grows more proper still in wet weather. The patio of the rest of Andalusia is not found here, for being confined to its ledge of shells, the town could not spread itself about, but had to build itself up in the air. On top of the high houses, whose vivid green balconies add to the general air of trig neatness, are _miradores_, small towers formerly built by the merchants as look-outs from which they could spy their returning galleons. The view of Cadiz from a _mirador_ is like nothing else ever seen: the clean whiteness of hundreds of roof terraces, the church towers of colored tiles and a host of other _miradores_, made it seem like a second city in itself, suggestive of the Orient; a strange city set in the blinding blue circle of the ocean. The town is almost surrounded by high sea walls, four miles of them, and on the Atlantic side the surf breaks in thundering eternity, throwing up spray twenty feet high. There is something splendidly plucky about Cadiz. One of the few spots in Europe forced to battle for her existence, with a devouring enemy at her door, she thrives and continues century after century. She is the oldest town in Spain, founded by Ph[oe]nician mariners more than a thousand years before the Christian Era. "Ah when the crafty Tyrian came to Spain To barter for her gold his motley wares, Treading her beaches he forgot his gain, The Semite became noble unawares." Spain has influenced them all, all the strangers, the heterogeneous throng, that have gone to the making of the Spanish race. Ph[oe]nician, Roman, Iberian, Goth, Jew, and Moor, she has imprinted on them all her own distinguishing mark, has breathed into them her own intense soul. For this psychological reason it is true to say that Seneca was a Spaniard, that the wonderful Jew Maimonides and the Moor Averroës, and the Gothic bishop, Isidoro, Doctor of the Church were all of them Spaniards. The Catalan, Ramón Lull rang out the national note with no uncertain sound, mystic hermit and active missionary. And with the centuries "christened in blood and schooled in sacrifice," the spirit grew more convincingly apparent: Domingo de Guzmán, Francisco Ximenez, Gonsalvo de Córdova, Luis de León, Iñigo de Loyola are very brothers with a like high fealty that tells what majestic mother nurtured them on her battlefield of ages. Cadiz, the oldest spot in Spain, has known each of the conquering races in turn. She was four hundred years old when Rome was founded. She has had tremendous ups and downs of fortune; at her height during the age of the Cæsars, who saw her importance as key to Andalusia, then with the fall of Rome dropped into insignificance, her name almost forgotten. She rose again with the discovery of the New World, whose ships of treasure anchored off her ramparts. A strange outlook on the passing of power lies in the statement that in 1770 this town was a wealthier place than London. With the loss of the Colonies, Cadiz has sunk back to be a mediocre city in the world, but she is contented and self-respecting. Though so remotely ancient, there is nothing of old architecture here. The ramparts have been turned into esplanades, where it is a joy to walk, for the views are beautiful past description; now across the bay to the mainland and the mountains of Ronda, and down on the quay of the town itself with its bay full of fishing boats; then to the north the eye seeks farther along the coast toward Palos whence three caravels, the Pinta, the Niña and the Santa María turned westward on a memorable third of August, 1492. On the other side of Cadiz is the ocean itself and I hope the enterprising town will some day carry the park along this western wall, where the rollers break so magnificently. Just past the public gardens, a narrow causeway leads to the lighthouse of San Sebastián, set well out to sea, a favorite walk for us at sunset time to watch the fishing boats with their high prows come sailing back to the harbor each evening. The sunsets we saw in Cadiz were flaming pink and gold and red like those of the world on the other side of the Atlantic; also we saw a sunrise exquisite as a dream. It was here the ancients first met the suggestive wonder of the open ocean, and their philosophers pondered over the phenomenon of the tides. They thought that subterranean animals or winds sucked them in; and the sun, they said, when it had sunk in the western ocean, returned to the east by subterranean passages,--guesses about as wise as some that we are making to-day on phenomena of the soul. I do not know if it was just chance good fortune, but Cadiz will always be an exhilarating memory. Its air was so bracing, balmy yet full of vitality. The moral atmosphere seemed joyous and contented; a hurdy-gurdy would strike up below in the street with the bang of a tambourine, and from all the windows near, pennies would gayly rattle down. The people were courteous without second thought. A working man walked out of his way for ten minutes to direct us through the complicated streets, and then ran off with a laugh to avoid the fee; a shopman straightened eye-glasses and genuinely refused to be paid for so small a service; wonder of wonders when our luggage got carried in the wrong hotel diligence, the landlord refused to let us pay. Three such episodes of disinterestedness in one morning give one a pleasant impression of a place; and this town has presented itself to other travelers as happily. Byron, to whom this "renowned romantic land" as he called her, was eminently sympathetic, wrote to his mother, in 1809, "Cadiz, sweet Cadiz! it is the first spot in the creation. The beauty of its streets and mansions are only excelled by the loveliness of its inhabitants, the finest women in Spain." Cadiz is enough of a place, with a bishopric and a garrison, to have the air of a capital; we noticed many men of the best hidalgo type, like those who stand behind Spínola in the "Surrender of Breda." In the park was an outdoor theater; children played _diavolo_; and nice little Spanish girls walked up and down with their English governesses. One could write or sew outdoors without exciting a glance of surprise. We used to spend hours under the palm trees of the _Alameda_ sewing and reading and watching the groups about us, for in spite of its being mid-winter, the air was warm enough for spending the day out-of-doors. Cleanliness and godliness: Cadiz can boast of excellent public institutions. The new hospital that faces the Atlantic breezes, and where only a fraction of a franc is paid daily, could well be envied by the rich of new world cities. Its poor house is noted, and it has a host of minor charities; a _Casa de Viudas_ for widows, a _Casa de Hermanos_, a _Casa de Locos_ for the insane, tended, as are the others, by alert, willing nuns. It is a public-spirited little city, with a school of music and art, an _Instituto_ whose physical laboratory is the best in Spain, two Public Libraries, for that of the Bishop is also open free to the people. The tourist sights here are soon seen; the Capuchin church where Murillo painted his last picture, and where he fell from the scaffold, soon after dying in Seville from the accident. There are two Cathedrals, one so sacked by English bucaneers that there is little to be seen, and the other a quite dreadful eighteenth century affair. The dull _Museo_ has some good modern works, a bishop's head in profile by García y Ramos that is first rate art; and there is a triptych by a very early painter, Gallegos, the Spanish Primitive, which to my mind is more religious than the Murillos and the Zurbarans. It is a _Pietà_, and the eyes of the mourners are naïvely red from weeping, like Francia's _Pietàs_ in Parma. Almost impregnable walls and moats shut off the isthmus that leads to the mainland, and their strength explains how Cadiz could have defied the French for two years during the War of Liberation, without suffering the horrors of the Gerona siege. The blockade began in 1808, soon after the heroic _Dos de Mayo_ in Madrid. Quintana's poem rang like a trumpet call over the land: "_¡Antes la muerte que consentir jamás ningún tirano!_" No idle boast! Spain was celebrating the centenary of the second of May during our visit, and the scenes were moving and patriotic. You realized Lord Peterborough's remark, that this was an unconquerable land if her people resisted the invader. Statues and tablets for the war heroes were unveiled, and songs and marches composed for the anniversary. The artillery officers organized a splendid parade of children that marched under the arch of Montleón, where Ruiz, and Velarde, and Daoiz fought, and there the King, holding the baby Prince of Asturias in his arms, showed him how to kiss his country's flag. Memorial Mass was said in the street outside the house where Velarde died, and toward evening one of the Madrid parishes marched out, its priests leading, to the cemetery where the _Dos de Mayo_ victims were buried, and deposited wreaths in patriotic reverence. Cadiz' old church, St. Philip Neri, is where the permanent endurance of the first outburst of patriotism in 1808 was made possible. Here the Cortes met again after three hundred years' suppression under the Hapsburgs and Bourbons, here they abolished the Inquisition, and here they drew up the Constitution of 1812, which was to be tossed backward and forward during the next half century of disorders, to emerge finally with victory. An eloquent priest was the first speaker to open the historic meeting, and as he laid down the program, the sovereignty of the nation to lie in the Cortes, and the King to exist for the people, not the people for the King as heretofore, Spain again had her foot on the ladder of progress. No wonder that the national military air of Spain is the _Marcha de Cádiz_. The clean, smokeless, plucky little city has right to a proud stand out in the Atlantic. Her age-long enemy, the ocean, had trained her well to strike a first blow for freedom. A FEW MODERN NOVELS "Don Quixote is not, as Montesquieu pretended, the only good Spanish book, which in reaction against the national spirit, ridiculed the others. It is rather the epitome of our national spirit, war-like and religious, full of sane realism and none the less enthusiastic for all that is great and beautiful."--DON JUAN VALERA. It was the German philosopher Hegel who called the "Romancero del Cid" the most nobly beautiful poem, ideal and real at the same time, that the Epic Muse had inspired since Homer. _Ideal and real at the same time_, herein lies the first characteristic of Spanish literature, of to-day as well as of the past. No keener realistic pictures of a nation were ever drawn than in "Quixote," yet no book was ever more idealistic; and the path plowed so deeply by Cervantes, has been followed by the modern novelists of Spain. Their feet are well planted on the ground, but they do not think it necessary to prove they walk the earth by wallowing in its mud. These modern Spanish romances tell of the passions and sorrows of virile men and women, and at the same time they can boast that they are free from the moral evil so rampart in French novels. "Quixote" is not exactly a prude's book, yet the "jeune fille" can read it unharmed and Cervantes has served in this point as a standard.[32] [Illustration: ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI A wood-carving by Carmona, Museum of León] Few realize the delightful field of modern fiction that lies ready to be explored once enough Spanish has been mastered for reading. After three months' study only we found we could take up and enjoy "Don Quixote," for contrary to the popular idea, its language is no more archaic than is the English of Hamlet or Henry IV; a great genius fixes the tongue in which he writes. The best of the novelists of this last half century, when the revival came about, are Valera and Pereda. Some would make a triology by placing Pérez Galdós side by side with them. For instance the historian Altamira, being in sympathy with the frankly revolutionary theories which Galdós advocates, calls him the first, the Balzac of Spain, but the Balzac of a people is never against the traditions of his race as Galdós often is. "_Toda comparación es odiosa_" the dear Don warns us. Personally I give the first place to Valera and Pereda, in whose work is found the note of literature; Pereda the strength of the northern mountains, Valera the allurement of the south. Happily for their permanence and their value as human documents, the Spanish writers are local. Each describes his own province, his own _paisanos_. Doña Emilia Pardo Bazán paints her Galicia; Alacón his Andalusia; Valdés and Pérez Galdós are more cosmopolitan and I should say lose by it; Blasco Ibáñez writes of Valencia, Leopoldo Alas has vivified the Asturias. The revival of the _novela de costumbres_, which suits the Spanish temperament, just as the romantic or fantastic tale suits the German, may be said to have been started by that talented Sevillian authoress who wrote under the name of Fernán Caballero. She had not the gift of a good style, and most of her books are already of the past, but in "La Gaviota," published in 1849, her passionate love for Spain and its ways has made a novel that is likely to endure. The tale tells of many old customs: how on the night of November 2d, the Brotherhood of the Rosary of the Dawn rises to pray for the souls in Purgatory, how one of the sodality goes from house to house to rouse the others, striking a bell and singing: "I am at your door with a bell; I do not call you; it does not call you; 'T is your mother, 't is your father who call you, And they beg you to pray for them to God." And each member rises and follows the fraternity. A land does not lose that has such customs among its peasantry, that weaves in its religious belief with the inextricable souvenirs of home and childhood. A Spanish child is brought up on songs of the Passion and the Virgin as naturally as we on Mother Goose. When he sees a chimney-sweep he exclaims "_El Rey Melchor!_" for the visit of the Three Kings of the East is real to him. He knows the owl was present at the Crucifixion, whence his terror-stricken cry of "_Crux! Crux!_" that the kindly swallows relieved the Saviour of the thorns, and the gold-finches of the three agonizing nails: "En el monte Calvario En el monte Calvario Las golondrinas Los jilgueritos Le quitaron á Cristo Le quitaron á Cristo Las cinco espinas. Los tres clavitos." The serpent according to Spanish lore, went proudly erect after his success with Eve, until down in Egypt one day, he tried to bite the little Infant Jesus, whereupon St. Joseph indignantly rebuked him and ordered him never to rise again. The rosemary is loved and given away as presents because when formerly a common plant, once the Blessed Virgin hung out on it to dry the clothes of her divine Infant, and it became forever green and fragrant. The children at play sing these legends and folk-songs; on Christmas eve they dance their "Alegría! Alegría! Alegría!" A suggestive young writer of Granada, Angel Ganivet, says that in Spain Christian philosophy did not remain hidden in books, but worked its way into the very life of the people, where it is found in the popular songs and customs: "_Nuestra_ 'Summa' _teológica y filosófica está en nuestro 'Romancero_.'" Fernán Caballero started the revival of the novel and its flowering soon followed. Don Juan Valera, though always interested in literature, had been prevented by his active life from himself writing till middle age. When in 1874 "Pepita Jiménez" appeared, it took his countrymen by storm, and this first novel, written by chance, was soon followed by others; a true creative artist had tardily discovered his genius. I cannot speak of Don Juan Valera without an admiration which to those who do not know his works may seem extreme. From his books his personality stands out as clearly as that of Cervantes, equable, high-minded, with that mellow wisdom which has gleaned the best from a life full of opportunities. In his "Discursos Academicos," two volumes that make enchanting reading--enchanting and academical do not often go together--he disclaims the title of thinker, yet he was a profound observer. His satire is of that kindly quality that leaves no sting. He has charm, that salt of the writer; he is never exaggerated nor embittered. This quality of amenity he shares too with his master, whom he can write of with an absolute comprehension just as Cervantes himself could make a Quixote because he was akin. It was a happy chance that the last words of the modern novelist (over eighty and blind, yet alert in mental interests) should have been the unfinished paper for the Royal Academy, to celebrate in 1904 the three hundredth anniversary of "Don Quixote." His Spanish blood let Valera understand the heights of mysticism, skeptic though he was by force of circumstances; he could write with enthusiasm of St. Teresa. On woman he held advanced ideas, he advocated her highest education, especially the cultivation of letters, for he said that if man alone wrote half the knowledge of the human soul would be lost; civilizations where women are not given education and knowledge never arrive at their full flowering; it is as if the collective soul of the nation had clipped one of its wings. His own culture was an all-round one. He had the intimate knowledge that residence in foreign lands gives: English thought, German, Italian, Austrian, American north and south, the Orient and its religions, in every country his literary interests had been alert. Thus he had a curiously minute knowledge of the North American poets. Of his own race essentially, he yet was cosmopolitan in the higher meaning of the word. All that went to make up dislike and division between nations he deplored as ignorance of man's higher destiny of brotherhood. It is not hard to read between the lines sometimes of his sensitive shrinking in his travels under the uncomprehending criticism of his native land; the world, especially the English-speaking world, has but a veiled contempt for things Spanish. He has righted his country in his books without a touch of aggressive impatience, by simply describing things as they are. Valera has set his romances in the Andalusia he knew best. He was born at Cabra in the province of Cordova in 1824, the son of a naval officer and the Marquesa de Paniega. He received the best of educations and when twenty-two accompanied the Spanish ambassador, the poet-duke de Rivas to Naples. Then followed half a life-time of diplomatic posts: Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Dresden, St. Petersburg, as Minister Plenipotentiary to Washington in 1883 and later to Brussels, finally as Ambassador to Vienna. He was also a member of the Cortes, a Councilor of State, and was one of the embassy sent to Florence to offer the Crown to Amadeus I. During the two years of the Republic he retired, but returned to active life on the advent of Alfonso XII. Although a man of the world Valera was a born artist. Only in his first romance did he show the hand of the novice. His literary style is a simple and limpid medium that leaves behind unfading pictures of country and town; he has done what Balzac calls adding new beings _à l'état civil_. "Pepita Jiménez" came out in 1874, "Doña Luz" in 1879, two vignettes of Andalusian women immortalizing two very different types; Pepita of grace, passion, charm, compact, of the very heart of femininity, adorable despite her failings, achieving her own happiness against all odds; Doña Luz, idealistic, dignified in mind and manner, of the type of a Vittoria Colonna, proudly bearing the heart-outrage fate sent her, since her soul, for her the essential, had found its mystic way out. I do not think that in any fiction there is a more subtly given relationship than that of this noble creature Luz and the Dominican missionary from the Philippines, Padre Enrique, scholar and dumb poet. What with a Zola had been revolting, with Valera is humanly heart-breaking and spiritually ennobling, it could shock no piety; only a man of elevated character and the most sensitive discernment could so touch on undefined emotions. The friendship of Doña Luz and the doctor's captivating daughter is a warm-hearted relationship of two young and pretty women declared impossible by many novelists. This tale of beautiful and tragic sincerity had been preceded by another, also set in one of the smaller Andalusian towns, and written with the lightness of manner and seriousness of matter that show the master hand: "El Comendador Mendoza," I cannot help feeling veils much of the author's own self. These stories show the soundness of the simple people. Swift marriages are looked on with disapproval; how, they ask, can esteem or true knowledge of character be gained in a few months.[33] So in Spain the opportunities allowed the _novios_, the young people who choose each other from mutual attraction, are unheard of in France or Italy. High-born or lowly, a Spanish girl can savor the romance of life, without disrepute, by talking at the _reja_ during the midnight hours; before marriage she is allowed a freedom of speech, a _sal_, a self-development, denied her sisters in other Latin countries. It is not possible to touch on all of Valera's stories, for his vein once discovered, proved a rich one. His longest novel has a poorly-chosen name, "Las Ilusiones del Doctor Faustino" and is not very well constructed, not enough is eliminated for art; but always there is the charm of the south, the midnight talking at the _reja_--those happy _novios_ of Spain!--the drowsiness of the noontime siesta, the vivacity of the evening _tertulia_, that innocent way of diverting themselves every night from nine to twelve, the same group of friends meeting year after year. Constantly, as I read Spanish novels, I say a people that get so much out of so little are a lovable people, wholesome and of vigorous promise. It was indeed with very different eyes that I looked out on the distant towns as we passed in the train, they were peopled now with living people, a Pepita, a high-minded Luz, a philosophic Don Fresco, a kindly Doña Araceli, I felt that I was not quite a stranger here, now that Don Juan Valera had lifted from me the curtain of ignorance and prejudice that hides the everyday life of Spain. The same year that saw the appearance of "Pepita Jiménez" brought to light another tale that will last as long, it does not seem too much to say, as the "Quixote" itself. In "El Sombrero de Tres Picos," Alacón has achieved a masterpiece. It is a slight tale of a few hundred pages, in the genre style, a picture of the old régime before the French invasion of 1808 broke down the Chinese wall of the Pyrenees. No description can do justice to its crisp, sparkling charm, to Frasquita, beautiful as a goddess, Eve herself, with a laugh like the _repique de Sábado de Gloria_; to her ugly, ironical, adorably malicious and sympathetic husband Lucas, the vibrant note of whose voice won all hearts, to whom his Frasquita was _más bueno que el pan_. Lucas and his wife are Shakespearean creations. Then there is that pompous vanity, the Corregidor, Don Eugenio de Zúñigo y Ponce de León, in his red cape, gold shoe buckles, and hat of three peaks. What a scene is that of the Bishop's visit to the miller's garden! And in what country but democratic Spain would a bishop stroll out with canons and grandees to while away a friendly hour with a miller? Inimitable tale, Spanish to the core, it is this that make a nation's glory, a "Don Quixote," a "Sotileza," a "Doña Luz," a "Sombrero de Tres Picos." Don Pedro Antonio de Alacón belonged, like Valera, to an old family of Andalusia, but not in the elder novelist's fortunate circumstances; one of ten sons, he had more or less to place himself in life. He was born in Gaudix in 1833; studied law at the University of Granada; and naturally gravitated toward Madrid, the center of political and literary interests. He flung himself headlong into the republican anti-clerical ideas of that troubled time, but in later life his theories toned down so that he ended as a believer and a liberal conservative. Throughout a long political career Alacón kept his honor unstained; although often with friends in power, it was only after twenty-one years of politics that he accepted a post, on the advent of Alfonso XII, whose return he had advocated long before it came about. He had begun writing when very young, thus "El Clavo," a powerful sketch, was done when barely twenty. Like many of Spain's authors, he turned soldier when the call came, and served in the 1860 campaign in Africa of which he has left a vivid chronicle, "Diario de un Testigo de la Guerra en Africa." "El Sombrero" was followed by "El Escándalo," a novel widely discussed in Spain. The story opens strongly, but it scatters toward the end; Alacón is better in the tale than in sustained work. He can snap his fingers at our criticism, his Corregidor and his Molinera have made him one of the immortals. To another modern novelist, to Pérez Galdós, I feel I am not fair, but I find so much of his work antipathetic that, as he has not a good style and often offends good taste, I cannot force a liking. Brunetière speaks of the intolerance of the naturalist school of novelists, the intolerance of the free-thinker. Those who advocate the extreme republican, anti-clerical theories in Spain have this intolerance to a marked degree. Pérez Galdós is so biassed that he distorts his characters from their natural evolution by making them voice his own ideas. The "roman à thèse" may win a greater fame for the first hour, but it is sure to pass with the changing questions of the time. The much-praised "Doña Perfecta" struck me as absurdly untrue to human nature. The heroine is presented as a not uncommon type of religious development, naturally where there is intense religious feeling there is a bigot here and there, but this Lady Perfection is not a consistent human being, but a monster. While anxious for her nephew to leave she yet urges him to stay, no reason why; she could easily have rid herself of him yet she brings about his death. Her character of the beginning does not match with her character of the end (the novelist offends several times in this way). The thin-visaged, oily priest-villain gives an aside over the footlights: "I have tried tricks, but there is no sin in tricks. My conscience is clear": evidently old-fashioned melodramatics are not yet extinct. It is quite impossible for a well-bred Spaniard to have insulted his kind hosts, as does Pepe, by telling them crudely that their Christian belief is a fable as past as paganism, "all the absurdities, falsities, illusions, dreams, are over," to-day there is no more multiplication of bread and fishes, but the rule of industry and machines. I think most people will feel that the characters of this book can intrigue and murder and throw in realistic asides as much as they will, we do not hate them because they fail to convince us that they ever really existed. They are just mouthpieces for their author's theories. In another novel, "Gloria," a beautiful passionate girl of sixteen is incapable of being the pedantic prig Galdós makes her in the opening chapters. Happily for the romance and for the weary reader, once the novelist warms to his story, religious discussions go to the wall and he presents a moving tragedy. Would that he could have kept up to the level of parts of this novel, that which presents Gloria's uncles, for instance, but he is very unequal. After scenes so true to life that they are a joy, he will indulge in the pseudo-giantesque of some of Hugo's purple patches, and only high genius can take such liberties. Thus in a tempest a church lamp falls; it breaks the glass of the urn in which lies the Dead Christ, it slaps St. Joseph in the face, it knocks the sword from the hand of St. Michael, and finishes its zig-zag career by crashing into a confessional. Lamps of anti-clerics only seem to act in this all-round, satisfying way; realists, like Pereda and Valera, are incapable of such exaggeration. Some critics hold "Angel Guerra" and "Fortuna y Jacinta" to be the best of Galdós. His "Episodios Nacionales" are a series of novels on the events of the past century in Spain. In spite of vivid scenes, they seemed to me long-winded and confusing; one must be Spanish, they say, to appreciate them. Benito Pérez Galdós was born in 1845 in the Canary Islands. He has been an artist, a lawyer, a politician, and a journalist; in twenty years he has produced forty-two volumes, a record which makes his inequalities easy to understand. Personally he is a sincere and upright character. Although an avowed free-thinker he sits in reverence at the feet of his fellow novelist, Pereda, an ardent believer, and it was to be near him that he fixed his home in Santander: "Our master," he calls him, "a great poet in prose, the most classic and at the same time the greatest innovator of our writers." Far below Pérez Galdós, who, if not the first, is a distinguished and talented novelist, is Blasco Ibáñez, of the same school of anti-clerics and extreme republicanism. His stories are vigorous, crude studies of Valencia, that province which the proverb says is "a paradise inhabited by demons," and because so local, the books are valuable; personally I lay down such a tale as "Flor de Mayo" or "Arroz y Tartana" depressed and sick at heart. Ibáñez lacks ideality and elevation of sentiment; he pictures ignoble lives in monotonous detail, all is labored description, for the characters never speak themselves, the author _describes_ their conversation. One sentence of Sancho, one sentence of the Don and you know who speaks! It is to this minor novelist that a recent French book, "Les Maîtres du Roman Espagnol Contemporain," by a Monsieur F. Vézinet, devotes a fourth of its pages, while dismissing Pereda contemptuously, and not even mentioning "Sotileza," his great sea-masterpiece. Under the guise of literary criticism, the French writer veils a polemic against religion: "For Christians actually do find solace in a belief in a future life," is one of his remarks. On meeting in Spanish fiction a dignified reserve in scenes of passion, this teacher of young men--he is professor in the Lycée of Lyons--supplies the pepper lacking by telling how a French naturalist would have described the same scenes. Another Spanish writer of the free-thinking school, but of good literary quality, is Leopoldo Alas, author of "La Regenta," and a caustic, intelligent critic who under the name of _Clarín_ did much to prick Spain awake to intellectual interest. Though born in Zamora (1852) he so associated himself with Oviedo, where he studied and later was professor in the University, that he may be called a son of the Asturias. "La Regenta" is a powerful psychological novel, set in Oviedo, somewhat long drawn out, for the minute following of Ana Ozores in her downfall too closely approaches pathology. Ana, who resembles a little her namesake of Russia, (Alas has treated the real issue with the same uncompromising morality as Tolstoi) is a brilliant, lovable woman, capable of the highest, a girl who at sixteen can read St. Augustine with emotion; but she is fatally doomed by the limitations of a woman's life in her station. The acute Alas here puts his finger on a real evil in his country, the lack of wide interests for the women of the upper classes if no family duties are given them. They seem to have forgotten Isabella's day when Doña Lucía de Medrano lectured on the Latin classics in the University of Salamanca, and Doña Francesca de Lebrija filled the chair of rhetoric in the University of Alcalá, when the Queen read her New Testament in Greek, and her youngest daughter, the unfortunate wife of Henry VIII, won the admiration of Erasmus by her solid acquirements. To-day the idleness enforced by fashion leads often to morbid religiosity or to moral disaster. Toward the end, "La Regenta" like "El Escándalo" flags, especially is the canon De Pas a failure. Such a man would have been either a great saint or a great sinner, never could he have steered the mean middle course he did. In this book, unlike the average romance, is much of the trail of the serpent of Zola's school, more the result of a too warm partisanship of the French novelist than innate in Alas. The talented Padre Coloma, author of "Pequeñeces," may be called, like the professor of Oviedo, a man of one novel. Born in Andalusia (1851), a literary protégé of Fernán Caballero, he led the life of a man of the world till about twenty-five, when a violent change of heart caused him to enter the Jesuit Order. There he has passed uneventful, useful years of study and teaching. His book, which is a harsh satire on the vices of the smart set of Madrid, made an immediate sensation. I cannot say I find the Padre Coloma a great writer by any means, he is too unequal; whole chapters drag heavily. But some of his scenes deserve the highest praise, such as the presentation of the heroine Currita Albornoz, or that truly noble description of one of Spain's proud usages, the twelve grandees of the first rank presenting themselves before their new monarch, the young Alfonso XII, on his return in 1875, a picture that rings with the heroic spirit of the past. We turn next to a novelist with so long a list of books to her credit that it is impossible to enumerate them, the Señora Emilia Pardo Bazán who has been called the most notable woman of letters in Europe. Her salon in Madrid is one of the best known in the capital, but she has so deeply associated herself with her native province (born in Coruña in 1851) that she is the boast of every Gallego. Mountain lands are noted for the loyalty they rouse in their sons, but few such enthusiasms equal that of Doña Emilia. She has told of the lonely hills, the chestnut forests, the never-failing streams of the Norway of Spain, and made alive the ancient usages, and the crabbed originality of the peasantry. "Los Pazos de Ulloa" (_pazos_ is dialect for palace) and its sequel, "La Madre Naturaleza," have in them the very breath of outdoor life,--the last is an idyll in prose. She describes the untrained young _cura_ leaving Santiago to step into the unhappy coil of events in the ruined manor house, his vain efforts to help the pathetic young wife and her brutalized husband. The tragedy is carried on to the second generation, and we see the two children growing up in solitude and desertion, roaming the countryside day and night, Perucho, blue-eyed, handsome as a Greek statue, the girl Manolita slender and dark; then the heart-breaking misery of the end. Work such as this is exquisite and sure to last. Madam Pardo Bazán edits one of the best reviews in Madrid, and she has written many stories that treat of life in the capital, but, like the novels of Valdés, they might have been written elsewhere, in Paris or St. Petersburg. It is in the novels of her loved _paisanos_ she will live. English-speaking people probably know Palacio Valdés better than any other Spanish writer, for his novels, of the regulation Parisian type, have been repeatedly translated. I care not at all for the Madrid novels, but sometimes in a dashing local romance he carries all before him: such is "La Hermana de San Sulpicio," _sal salada_, that untranslatable phrase of Andalusia where sparkle and verve are considered as highly as beauty in women. The story is facile, witty, light both in manner and matter, full of laughter following swift on tears, like its sprightly chatterbox of a heroine, an alluring creature who is sincere underneath the sparkle. Seville and the brilliant summer life of its patios, the sky raining stars, lovers talking all night at the _reja_ in the scented air,--no one would tell on an _enamorado_, the very men drinking in a tavern send out a glass to the patient lover to wish him good luck. The friendly equality of the different classes is shown again here, and other traits not so praiseworthy, such as the intensity of local antipathies, the Andalusian's contempt for the Gallego, the Catalan's for the Andalusian. A Barcelona business man grumbles all day in Seville: "A glass of cognac 30 c. one day and 35 c. the next in the same café. Is that business?" Two men from the northern mountains meet: "You too are from Asturias?" asks one. "No, from Galicia." "Then you are not _mi paisano_," and the first turns away in disdain. While the mundain, easy stories of Palacio Valdés are translated and widely read, one of the first of Spanish novelists is scarcely known outside his own country. Don José María de Pereda was born in 1835 and died in 1906, the year following Don Juan Valera's death. He is a true son of the _Montaña_, the coast country round Santander, whose Picos de Europa rise to a height of 9000 feet, and he has described his home with beautiful realism in some robust and primitive tales: "Escenas Montañesas; "El Sabor de la Tierruca"; "Sotileza," called his best, a very strong picture of fisher folk; "De tal Palo tal Astillo," which, like Galdós' "Gloria," is greatly spoiled by being a "roman à thèse"; "Peñas Arriba," and many others. Pereda is a champion against skepticism and the weakening luxury of cities: he is so partial to his _patria chica_ that he often abuses the patience of readers by his too free use of its dialect. With him, plot and action are of slight account, for his interest lies in the eternal human characters and in the countryside that molded them. A realist more exact than Flaubert, he yet fulfills the prophecy of Huysmans as to the best type of novel for the future: "The truth of the document, the precision of detail, the condensed, nervous language of realism must be kept, but it must be clarified with soul, and mystery must no longer be explained by _maladies of the senses_. The romance should divide itself into two parts, welded or interbound as they are in life, that of the soul and that of body, and it should treat of their reaction, of their conflicts, of their mutual understandings." M. René Bazin has described a visit to Pereda at Polanco, his beautiful estate near Santander, where he led a life of cultured retirement, proving the theory which his books preach, that one's native home is the best paradise. To the French visitor, with his nation's swiftness to discern high distinction, it seemed as if it were Quixote himself, the man who came forward to meet him, of the pure hidalgo type, long face and aquiline nose, with that noble gesture of the hand that said, "My house is yours." Of Pereda's books, my favorite is "Peñas Arriba," which does for the mountain folk what "Sotileza" does for the coast life of the _Montaña_. It was while writing this that there fell on him the heart-rending blow of his young son's suicide, and a cross and date long stood in the rough draft of the novel to mark the separation of the past from his saddened later life: only by force of will could he continue. Much of himself shows in the tale, which would entice a Parisian himself to live contentedly on a mountain side. There is a scene, the death of the squire of Tablanca, which indeed proclaims a master hand. Spain's best critic, Don Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (himself from Santander, born 1856) writes of Pereda: "For me and all born _de peñas al mar_, these books are felt before judged, they are something of our mountain land like the breezes of the coast, one loves the author as one does one's family." Perhaps it is not fair to speak of a writer who is not a romancist, when good minor talents among the novelists have to be passed over, but I cannot resist ending with the name of this famous scholar, Menéndez y Pelayo,[34] who may be said to be discovering Spain to herself after her long discouragement. His books are on the history of philosophy and literature: "Historía de las Ideas Estéticas en España"; "Horacio en España," being graphic pages on the lyric poets; "Crítica Literaria"; "Ciencia Española," "Calderón y su Teatro," and others. Faithful to the best traditions of his race, he is boldly asserting her past, her poets, her scientists, her mystics,--they have been ignored too long; he holds that the peoples of the _mediodía_ are the civilizing races par excellence. All the warring factions of Spain agree that here is a man of stupendous talent. "Every time I meet him, I find him with a new language. Never have I met a student of such prodigious erudition," wrote the skeptic Alas. Menéndez y Pelayo may be called a literary phenomenon. Before twenty-five he had ransacked the libraries of Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, and Belgium, and was given a professorship in the University of Madrid. To-day his reputation is European among scholars. His profound knowledge of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew literatures, helps a swift, unerring sense to perceive the best. His work is not only that of a scholar, for it has in it the life-giving touch of imagination, which is wisdom, and makes a writer a classic. An anecdote that has the ring of the simplicity of a Cervantes or a Valera, the self-effacing of a Luis de León, is told of the young scholar of twenty-two. When spending an evening with some celebrated men where wit and learning flowed fast and copious, he poured out quotations so erudite and spontaneous that in modest embarrassment he took a paper from his pocket as if quoting from it. At the end of the evening a friend seized on the magic bit of paper, to find it a washerwoman's bill. Praise cannot hurt such a man. When a race can produce in a short fifty years a Pereda, a Valera, a Menéndez y Pelayo, have we the right to call it spent and out of the running? ESTREMADURA "I have always felt that the two most precious things in life are faith and love. As I grow older I think so more and more. Ambition and achievement are out of the running; the disappointments are many and the prizes few, and by the time they are attained seem small. The whole thing is vanity and vexation of spirit without faith and love. I have come to see that cleverness, success, attainment, count for little; that goodness, 'character,' is the important factor in life." GEORGE J. ROMANES. Literally worn out with the noise of Seville's Holy Week, we took the night train, that chill, rainy Good Friday, and left the Andalusian excitement behind. As carriages are forbidden in the city on both Holy Thursday and Good Friday, we had expected to walk to the station--they told us that the King, the year before, had walked to his train--but the regulation ceased at sunset on Friday and we were able to drive. As usual we had the _Reservado para Señoras_ compartment to ourselves, and so exhausted were we that we slept heavily with only an occasional waking to look out on the cold hills we were crossing. There was a moon which hurrying black clouds obscured fitfully. Under the somber sky the desolate hills seemed like the fantastic sepia drawing of a Turner: swift unforgettable memories one carries away from night journeys in Spain. We left the train at Mérida, now a poor place with some few thousand inhabitants, but up to the fourth century a splendid Roman city, the capital of Lusitania. The castle built by Romans, Moors, Knights of Santiago, and bishops; the theater, the aqueduct, the bridge, the triumphal arch, and the baths show what it once was. We could not have visited this solitary province at a happier hour. Field flowers made the countryside as beautiful for the moment as Umbria or Devonshire; the wheat fields, always so articulate and lovely, had their own charm even after the magnificent outburst of roses and orange blossoms a month earlier in Seville. Mérida is small,--frugal and neat, as are the larger number of Spanish towns. As we explored it, the people greeted us with kindly "_Vayan Ustedes con Dios_"; we had left behind the tourist-infested south with its insolent city loafers. It seemed too good to believe that we had come again among the grave, dignified Spaniards of the north. In order not to miss the Holy Saturday services, I hastened to the Cathedral. There was a cracked old organ and the singing was little better, but devout, heart-moving peasants rose and knelt, up and down, during the long Flectamus Genua! Levate! ceremony of that day, and the bells burst into the riotous clamor they seem to achieve so individually all over Spain. It may have been ungrateful, but it was without the slightest regret that I thought of the display going on at the same hour in Seville. We had taken the trip into Estremadura to see the Roman remains, the best in the Peninsula. The ruins are more fortunate in their setting here than in many places, for there are none of the bustling cafés nor electric cars of Nîmes or Verona. Paestum is more poetic, Baalbec a hundred times more grandiose, but Mérida on a showery, sunshiny day in spring is an ideal spot for musing and rambling. In the city itself are some ancient remains, such as a temple of Mars, and the fluted columns of a temple of Diana built into a mediæval house, which, by the way, has a lovely Plateresque window, but most of the ruins lie completely outside the present town. The amphitheatre, when we saw it, had a comfortable troop of goats asleep in the warm shelter of its oval, and the remarkable theatre, known as _Las Siete Sillas_, from the seven divisions of its upper seats that crown it like a coronet, was gay with poppies and buttercups,--the national colors gleamed everywhere. Swallows in cool, metallic, blue-black coats, dipped and swept in their swift, graceful way. Looking out on the view which embraced Mérida on one side and a line of rugged hills on the other, we lingered for hours in that Theatre of the Seven Seats. Children, like gentle fawns, one by one crept out from the town suburbs and gathered in a smiling, lovable circle round the strangers. We talked to them tranquilly, our map of their city seemed a fascinating wonder to them. They came and went smiling; now one returned to the town to fetch his mother, now a shy little girl laid an armful of poppies beside us, with no thought of pennies, but just out of primitive human kindliness. The dear Don's age of gold seemed a reality. And a day before we had angrily scattered those diabolical little pests, the street children of Seville! Could these enchanting little people belong to the same race, and live only a hundred and fifty miles away? Journeys in unfrequented parts of Spain give one a truer picture than is possible for the hurried tourist on the beaten track; every time we turned aside into the unspoiled country we met the people and ways which Cervantes has described. Never were gentler human beings than those little girls of Mérida, those young mothers, those big half-awkward lads, whose gazelle eyes would gaze at us inquiringly, then turn to look at the scene we so obviously admired, then back to us with pleasure at our appreciation of what they too held most beautiful. We are told that peasants get no æsthetic pleasure from landscape, but I am sure romantic Roman ruins and perfect spring-time weather had much to do with giving those children faces of such pure outline. [Illustration: _Copyright, 1910, by Underwood & Underwood_ A ROADSIDE SCENE IN SPAIN] Perhaps later, when the sun scorches the first freshness, Mérida may be a desolate enough spot; we probably knew her best hour, the lovely April of her prime. We were loath to tear ourselves away; we read to our interested audience accounts of their city's past, when Emperors' armies marched along the Roman road that led from Cadiz north, and alert to catch the meaning, they listened with that vividness of the eye that shows the imagination is roused. Then from the daily paper we read to them that in Madrid on Holy Thursday, two days before, the King had washed the feet of a dozen poor men, kissed them in humility, then waited on them at table, assisted by the grandees of Spain; that on Good Friday he had set free some criminals. When the bishop's words rang through the church: "Señor, human laws condemn these men to death," Don Alfonso answered with moved voice: "I pardon them, and may God pardon me!" And somehow, Alfonso XIII is not jarring or theatric among such ancient usages of Spanish Christianity. Very modern with his automobile, his polo, his careless ease, this charming king is one with his people in a radical sympathy with ways that symbolize soul and heart emotions. Mérida has a bridge built by the Emperor Trajan. And it has ruins of a very stately aqueduct standing in wheat and poppy fields. This is built of stone and brick ranged in regular lines, and though only about a hundred feet high, is truly majestic, the entrancing touch being given by the hundreds of storks who have built nests on the top of the arches. Some of our little friends had accompanied us through the fields to the aqueduct, and when we took a final ramble through the town, many were the smiling greetings, "_Buenas Tardes_." Mérida is too small to have visitors pass a day there without making friends among its courteous people. We took an evening train on to Cáceres ten miles away, for its hotels sounded inviting; and a second happy day, a holy and tranquil _Domingo de Resurrección_, gave us another memory of Estremadura. Cáceres is an unspoiled mediæval town climbing up a crag, just such a place as Albrecht Dürer loved to paint. It is very individual. From the plaza with its acacia trees we mounted the steep grass-grown streets, past one baronial mansion after another, with old escutcheoned doorways blazoned with plumed helmet and shield. In one of them, the house of the Golfines, _los Reyes Católicos_ stayed on a visit. Nowhere in the world save in Spain could such a bit of the Middle Ages stand untouched and unnoticed, giving one that thrilling sensation of the traveler, the meeting unheralded with a very rare thing. The views caught between the granite mansions were lovely, for Cáceres lies in the most cultivated district of the county. Across the river rose another steep crag, turned into a Way of Calvary, with a picturesque church crowning it. The town has some excellent hotels, and we were well-fed and slept well for five pesetas a day in one of them. Easter Sunday morning I awoke to the sound of bleating animals, and looking out, there at every doorway was tied a tiny white or black lamb, with a bunch of soft greens to nibble on. It is the custom for each family to have this symbol of peace and innocence on the Christian Passover. All day long the children played with them, and toward evening when the toy-like legs trembled with fatigue, the little boys carried the lambs across their shoulders as shepherds do. In the midst of patriarchal ways, we kept congratulating ourselves that we had escaped the noisy city to the south, whose Easter crowds were pouring in eager excitement to the first bull-fight of the year; it was the thought of the scene being enacted in Seville that made us a little unjust to the city where so happy a winter had been passed. After Mass in a gray old church on the hill, a procession formed to carry the _pasos_ of Cáceres. Each house was hung with the national colors, and on the balconies tall men of the hidalgo type and proud Spanish ladies (Madrid has not drained the provincial places of their leading families) knelt respectfully as the cortège passed. The statues were simple and poor, they were borne by pious peasants, and the silent crowd dropped to its knees on the pavement with a prayer. Not a tourist was there, save two who felt so in sympathy with old Spain that they disclaimed the title. To think that the gorgeous materialistic _pasos_ of Seville had once begun in this way! Easter afternoon made as pastoral a memory as the hours in Mérida. We walked out with the people to the hill of the Stations of the Cross. Life seemed a happy and normal thing when all, old and young, grandee and peasant, gave courteous greeting to those who passed; also it was a joy to hear pure Castilian after the somewhat slovenly Andalusian dialect. However, the week in Estremadura was not to end on an idyllic note. We attempted an excursion beyond our strength and got well punished; the moral is, avoid all diligence journeys in Spain, they are only for those who have the nerves of oxen. The real reason why we had come into this little-visited province was because that old emperor born in Italica near Seville, Trajan, the bridge builder, had in the year A.D. 105 put up one of his bridges at Alcántara, a town now on the Portuguese frontier. Such a reason sounds slightly absurd, but many who read certain descriptions of the bridge must feel the same impulse to hunt it up. Richard Ford calls it one of the wonders of Spain, "the work of men when there were giants on the earth," worth going five hundred miles out of one's way to see as it rises in lonely grandeur two hundred feet above the Tagus River. So it no doubt appeared to the English traveler who stumbled on it eighty years ago, for it was then an unrestored, picturesque ruin, probably unused since one of its arches had been blown up by the English in the Peninsula War. At any rate, it was such glowing words that enticed us into the wilderness of Estremadura. It is strange in Spain how little they know of districts that lie at no appreciable distance. At the inn at Cáceres we asked for information about Alcántara, and they could give none. The landlord himself came over to our table to look at us in astonishment. "But there is nothing to see there!" he assured us, too polite to ask the question that showed in his voice,--why were two ladies seeking a dismal spot such as Alcántara? I positively blushed as I answered there was a bridge. "A bridge!" He beat a hasty retreat to his wife in the office, where their merriment burst out. The next day he told us, that having inquired, he found we could take the train to Arroyo, an hour away, whence a diligence ran in a short time to Alcántara. We left the train at Arroyo, and on the other side of the station found the smallest diligence ever seen, so packed already with big countrymen that we could just force our unwilling selves in. When we were well started, we found to our consternation that we did not reach Alcántara before ten hours, the distance being about thirty miles. _Una legua una hora_ runs the saying, and this part of the world is ruled by its wise old proverbs. Too late to turn back, we tried to make the best of it. When in each of the desolate villages long pauses were made, we got out to visit the market or church. In the first village the altar was dressed with coarsest but freshest linen. Artistic pewter, unconscious of its charm, held the water and wine, and a score of sturdy young peasants came in from selling in the plaza outside, knelt on the very steps of the altar, then having made their serious preparation, each bashfully approached a white-haired priest who sat there all market day in readiness to hear confessions. The dismallest corner of Spain has compensations. The first ten miles of the journey reminded me of New England, with its stone walls and semi-cultivated land. The next ten miles were indeed the proverbial desolation of Estremadura; hardly an inhabitant was to be found on those bleak hills. We had stumbled on one of the three days of the yearly fair of Brozas, so we passed flocks of sheep, cattle with a royal spread of horns, and dozens of the nervous Andalusian horses. Even automobiles went by, and one Portuguese noble drove abreast three truly glorious cream-white mules. Seeing them, one could understand how a mule here can cost more than a horse. The fair was held in meadows outside the town, and it looked so animated that we should have liked to stop, but no time was given us. A mile outside Brozas we found we had to change from the tiny diligence, a primitive enough way of travel, and to continue the remaining miles to Alcántara in the mail cart, which consisted of a board laid across two wheels, and that one seat had to be shared with the driver. Fuming did no good, not another vehicle would take us. The cold wind howled across the treeless upland, our umbrellas could not break its biting force, and we were far too thinly clad from the warm Seville winter; I could feel the chill seize on me that was to lead to a month's bad illness. The final touch was when the young scamp who drove the mail cart found it impossible to forego his eternal cigarette, which, despite remonstrance, he smoked continuously. That evening (we had left Cáceres in the pitch dark at 5 A.M.) we were set down at an inn whose spacious rooms and staircase told of former prosperity, but so shrunken was its hospitality that it could offer nothing fit to eat; yet, curiously enough, the old landlady made the best coffee I have tasted in Europe. We kept her busy grinding and boiling it. Alcántara is one of the most God-forsaken places in the world. Pigs walk the ill-kept streets, and the vast buildings of the monkish-knights who formerly guarded the frontier pass are crumbling into such universal ruin that the lanes are a mass of broken rubbish. They are not romantic ruins, but depressing and almost terrifying. When we climbed down the precipitous hill that led to the bridge, our shoes were cut to pieces by the flinty stones. And the bridge, that lode-star of our pilgrimage, worth going five hundred miles to see! We thought with exasperation of the sixty we were wasting on it. No doubt Trajan did build it eighteen centuries ago, but they have chipped off the beautiful gray toning of ages, filled in with mortar the boulders after they had stood unaided till our time, and made a modern boulevard from Portugal. All solitude and sublimity are well eliminated from the scene. We sat on the benches of that banal little park and glared at the disappointing thing. The Tagus, Lope de Vega's _hidalgo Tajo_, was here a low stream, yellow with mud, flowing beneath bleak, unimposing hills. The bridge, in spite of its two hundred feet of height, did not appear as high as the aqueduct at Mérida, an effect due probably to the arches standing on stilts. And it may sound blatant, but a memory of once passing under that superb thing the Brooklyn Bridge, at dawn, made this ancient monument suffer in comparison. The ludicrousness of our having traveled out of our way to see this sight struck us at last, and when we recalled the Cáceres landlord's astonishment, and that of Brazilian friends at Seville who had tried to persuade us our Estremadura plan was quite mad, we too burst into a hearty laugh, soon sobered at the prospect of the next day's weary return to Arroyo. We climbed back to the inn and dined on _glasses_ of coffee. The following morning, after some more glasses of our only modus vivendi, we explored the decayed town. In it is a pearl of architecture built by the Benedictine knights in 1506, the now ruined church of San Benito, with lofty slender piers, one of the most gracefully proportioned of semi-Renaissance things. Truly was the transition from Gothic to Renaissance a most harmonious moment in Spanish architecture. This interesting discovery could not do away with the fever and cold of the awful drive back to Arroyo. Such petty miseries are best passed over. More dead than alive, late the second night we reached again the comfortable hotel at Cáceres, where we were glad to pause a few days to pick up strength to push on. Our plans had been to go to Trujillo, the birthplace of Pizarro. It was Estremadura that produced many of the rude, energetic _conquistadores_ of Peru and Mexico, and the province never has recovered from that drain on its population. Just as the number of Jewish and Moorish exiles and the loss to their country's vitality has been exaggerated for partisan reasons, so there has been an underestimation of the more serious drain which Spain suffered when hoards of sturdy adventurers set out for the New World. The emigration was untimely; it came a century too early. The country had just been brought from political chaos to law and order by Isabella's great reign; but before the fruit of her planting could ripen (by peace and its natural sequence of settled trade) it was plucked from the bough. I have never been able to see that the expulsion of two hundred thousand Jews, the execution of thirty-five thousand heretics, and the exile of under a million Moriscoes, are sufficient causes to explain Spain's decay. Other countries of Europe, prosperous to-day, suffered from evils quite as bad. Why did Segovia, with an "old Christian" population independent of Moorish banishment, have thirty-five thousand weavers of cloth in the beginning of the seventeenth century and but a few hundred in the next generation? A score of questions similar to this can be asked to which the hackneyed explanation of the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Moors gives no answer. The causes of Spain's decay must be sought farther afield than in single acts of bad government which crippled the country for a time but were not irremediable. Through emigration, just when with the ending of the seven hundred years' crusade the nation should have turned to peaceful industries, she lost her agriculturists and her possible traders. And following swift on this, for emigration does not permanently weaken a strong race, Spain was bled of her best blood by Charles V's senseless European wars. She profited nothing by them, in fact they lowered her to the position of a mere province in the Empire. The treasure that poured in from the New World was poured out over Europe, it merely passed through Spain. American gold was a curse for her; it undermined the national character; the spirit of adventure, not of patient work, was fostered. The policy of the Emperor was continued by his descendants, and for two hundred years more Spain was at war. Anæmia of the whole race followed: so true is it that the nation of fighters to-day runs the risk of being the nation of weaklings to-morrow. Good government might have helped the ill, but Charles V pursued in that line a policy as fatal as his continental wars. He tried to force on these subjects whom he never understood an iron autocratic rule, ruthlessly crushing their tenacious spirit of independence. The death of Ximenez and the execution of the Comuneros leaders may be said to mark the ending of the sensible old régime of self-centering her resources, exclusive and provincial perhaps, but it had been Spain's salvation. To meet the expenses of ceaseless wars in Europe, when the first influx of colonial gold ceased, the Peninsula was heavily taxed: a fourteen per cent tariff on all commodities will soon kill trade. For the same reason, to pay for wars, the currency was debased under Philip III; and the Crown held monopolies on spirits, tobacco, pottery, glass, cloth, and other necessities, a system always bad for commerce. The agrarian laws were neglected, too much land was in pasturage, which tends to lower the census, and too vast tracts were held by single nobles. The loss of population went on; in 1649 an epidemic carried off two hundred thousand people. The economic discouragement was aggravated by a host of minor reasons, such as the insecurity of property along the coast from African pirates; a too generous allowance of holidays; the prejudice against trading inherited from crusading ancestors; and there being no alien element--for this Moor or Jew would have served--to give the spur of competition which keeps a nation in health. Hapsburg and Bourbon misgovernment and wars blighted Spain for three centuries. But to-day new life is stirring in her. She is returning to Ximenez's wise rule of not scattering but of concentrating her powers. Happily those unhealthy growths, the colonies, are lopped off at last: "Passed into peace the heavy pride of Spain. Back to her castled hills and windy moors!" In the mountains, not far from Trujillo, lay Yuste, the solitary monastery to which retired that dominating figure of his age, Charles V, who was so decidedly interesting as a man, but so pernicious as a ruler. When he came to this distant inheritance he could scarcely speak the Castilian tongue; he did all in his power to stifle the indomitable character of the race,--and alas! he succeeded but too well in starting her downward course. Yet the magical something in the soul of Spain vanquished even him, as it had impermeated the conquering Roman, the Goth, the Israelite, and the Arab. With all Europe from which to choose, Charles came back voluntarily to the Peninsula, to its most untamed province, to spend the last days of his jaded life. Reading at home accounts of Yuste, it had been easy to plan a trip there, and to Guadalupe, the famous monastery which also lay among these hills; but one diligence drive can quench all further foolhardy adventuring. With a feeling that illness was threatening, and it was wiser to get away from this "extrema ora," we again took the local line to Arroyo, and there gladly boarded the express that passed through from Lisbon to Madrid. ARAGON "O World thou chooseth not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart Save one that faith deciphered in the skies, To trust the soul's invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art. Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine That lights the pathway but one step ahead Across a void of mystery and dread. Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine, By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine." GEORGE SANTAYANA. If it is one of the coveted sensations of a traveler to stumble unexpectedly on some rare spot that is overlooked and unheralded, as was our experience at Cáceres, there is a second emotion that is close to it,--the return to a favorite picture gallery, especially if in the meantime one has gone further afield, has learned to know other schools, and adjusted ideas by comparison. A return to the Prado can give this coveted sensation. The winter in the south had familiarized us with the Spanish painters; Murillo now seemed more than a sentimentalist, had he painted for different patrons he had been a decided realist; Toledo had showed that El Greco was to be taken seriously. No sooner were we back in Madrid than I hurried off to the Museum, and, looking neither to the right nor left, to give freshness to the impression, walked straight to the Velasquez room. In the autumn the last look had been for the "Surrender of Breda," and to that unforgettable, soul-stirring picture I paid my first return homage. It impressed me even more powerfully than before. Never was there a more sensitively-rendered expression of a high-minded soul than that of the Marquis Spínola[35] as he bends to meet his enemy. It is intangible and supreme, only equalled by some of Leonardo da Vinci's expressions. For those who hold enshrined a height to which man can rise, the face of this Italian general will ever be a stimulus; he would appeal to the English sense of honor, the chivalry of a Nelson; the heart-history of such a man could be told only by a novelist of true distinction, such as Feuillet; there is something in Spínola's reserved tenderness that Loti might seize in words. Velasquez shows us a man of the world, but he has conveyed as only genius could how this warrior for _España la heróica_ kept himself unspotted from the world, and this the painter could convey, because he himself was nobly idealistic, realist of the realists though he was. Not only in her mystics and novelists but in her painters and sculptors, Spain shows this union of the real with the ideal. Hours in the Velasquez room slip by unnoticed. The portrait of the sculptor Montañés was of more interest now that we had seen his polychrome statues in Seville, those especially memorable ones of St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Francis Borgia in the University Church. The hidalgo heads by El Greco, the flesh tints, alas, turned to a deathly green, called up Professor Domenech's words on the grave Spanish gentlemen in their ruffs--"sad with the nostalgia for a higher world, the light in their eyes holds memories of a fairer age that will not return; images of the last warrior ascetics." This eccentric artist has in the Prado a striking study of St. Paul, an intensity in his face on the verge of fanaticism, a true Israelite, such as only a semi-oriental like El Greco could seize. Another picture that struck me with even profounder admiration than before was Titian's Charles V on horseback. And again I studied long the portraits of the pale Philip II, of his dainty little daughters, his sisters, his most lovely mother, and that pathetic English wife of his. Probably no northerner can see fairly both sides of Philip's strange character, just as I suppose no Spaniard can judge Elizabeth Tudor as does an Englishman. Nevertheless, there is a trait in Philip that all can admire--his filial loyalty. We could have lingered in Madrid for weeks just for this gallery, but we had to tear ourselves away. A journey south to Murcia and Valencia had been planned, but the necessity of passing a cold night on the train made us decide now against it. Those two provinces, with Navarre, are the gaps of our tour in Spain: health and weather will change the firmest of plans. We left Madrid for Aragon, pausing in a couple of the Castilian cities to the east. In the capital the parks had been bursting into leaf, but it was still chill winter outside on the plains. Treeless and verdureless Alcalá, the city of Ximenez and birthplace of Cervantes, looked far from inviting. When we left the train at Guadalajara, the landscape was so depressing that its Arab name, "river of stones," seemed dismally appropriate. Again, as at Segovia in the autumn, a wind _de todos los demonios_ was blowing over the land,--raging would be the more exact word. The town was melancholy, so was the weather, and we had a distressing personal experience. When the diligence set us down at the inn, we were told there was not a bed to be had that night in all Guadalajara, for it was the election, and even the hotel corridors would be used; we would have to go on to Sigüenza by the night train. The wind and the cold made the prospect a dismal one; early spring travel in northern Spain is not a bed of roses. We went out to explore Guadalajara and its chief lion, the Mendoza palace, built by the Mæcenas family of the Peninsula whose history has been called the history of Spain for four hundred years, so prominent were they as statesmen, clerics, and writers. The palace is in the Mudéjar style, the exterior studded with projecting knobs; the inner courtyard is coarsely carved with lions and scrolls, capriciously extravagant and yet within bounds enough to be effective. The Duke del Infantado entertained Francis I here, and surely the French king with memories of Blois and the chaster styles which his race follows, must have examined with curiosity this very different architecture of his neighbor, the intense individuality of whose conceptions could almost silence criticism. The Mendoza palace is now a school for the orphans of officers, and when the little nun, happy and fond of laughter as the cloistered usually are, showed us about, we saw pleasant circles of young girls sewing under the forgotten gorgeousness of the _artesonado_ ceilings. Then at midnight, wind howling and rain pelting, we crossed the muddy square that lay between the Sigüenza station and the town's most primitive inn. There they did the best they were able for us, but nothing could lessen the glacial damp of those linen sheets: the illness begun at Alcántara went on increasing. With chattering teeth and beating our frozen hands together to put some sensation into them, we realized we were back again on the truncated mountain which is central Spain, thousands of feet above the roses and oranges of Seville. The following day was Sunday, with a sacred concert of stringed instruments in the Cathedral, a good Gothic church, noticeably rich in sepulchers. In one chapel especially, that dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury by an English bishop who accompanied Queen Eleanor to Spain, when you stand among the tombs of those warriors, bishops, and knights of Santiago, you feel the thrill of the past. Cardinal Mendoza, "Tertius Rex," was at one time bishop of this Cathedral, having for vicar-general the priest Ximenez: Don Quixote's friend, the delightful _cura_, was "_hombre docto graduado en Sigüenza_." [Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL OF SINGÜENZA] The chill, little city was far from stimulating; at another time it may appear differently, impressions are so dependent on weather and health. The peasants wrapped in their blankets had a beggarly aspect after the dandy _majo_ of Andalusia. I daresay were Seville three thousand feet above the sea, the bolero would be worn less jauntily. The Cathedral visited, there was little to detain us, so we bade a ready farewell to glacial sheets and ice-crusted water pitchers to continue the route to Aragon, west past Medinaceli, where a Roman arch stood boldly on the edge of its hill. The semi-royal family of Cerda, Dukes of Medinaceli, has possessions all over the country: forests near Avila, the _Casa de Pilatos_ in Seville, lands near Cordova, a castle at Zafra, and vast tracts in Catalonia. It descends from Alfonso _el Sabio_, whose eldest son, called _la Cerda_, from a tuft of hair on his face, was married to a daughter of St. Louis of France, and left two infant sons, who were dispossessed by their uncle, Sancho _el Bravo_. For generations they continued to put forward their claims on every fresh coronation. After entering Aragon the climate grew warmer. We were descending gradually, and soon fruit trees in blossom, and vineyards, appeared among the broken, irregular hills. Calatayud, birthplace of the Roman poet Martial, was extremely picturesque, with castle and steeples. The long hours of the journey were whiled away watching the Sunday crowds in the stations, many of the men and women in the astonishingly original costume of the province. By the time we had reached Saragossa we had descended to about five hundred feet altitude, and it was pleasantly warm. The capital of Aragon is commonplace in appearance, flat, modern, and prosperous. The noisy electric cars and the bustling streets made it an abrupt change from the small Castilian cities just left. As always, our first walk was to the Cathedral--Saragossa has two, and the chapter lives for six months in each alternately. The _Seo_ is an ancient and beautiful structure, the _Pilar_ is a tawdry, cold-hearted object, such as the eighteenth century knew how to produce, a mixture of the styles of Herrera and Churriguera. It is a pity that one of the most revered shrines in Spain should be housed in such vulgarity. Outside, seen from the bridge over the Ebro, the many domes of different sizes, covered with glazed tiles of green, yellow, and white, are not bad, but within is a soul-distressing mass of plaster walls, and ceilings of Sassoferrato-blue. The High Altar, however, has a treasure, the celebrated alabaster _retablo_ of Damián Forment, one of the best of national sculptors, who worked between the Gothic and Renaissance periods, and who was helped to ease of expression by Berruguete, lately returned from Italy. The holy of holies of this new Cathedral is, of course, the chapel of the _Pilar_, and about it are always gathered devotional crowds. To a Spaniard it is naturally a sacred spot, associated as it is with his earliest memories; there is not a hut in all Aragon that has not an image of the _Pilar_ Madonna; but to the Catholic of another land, who never heard of this cult till coming to Spain, it is impossible to feel the same devotion, especially when it is surrounded with such bad taste. I tried to arouse imagination by recalling what the _Pilar_ had meant for this city in its hours of danger, how during the siege of 1808 they kept up courage by exclaiming, "The holy _Virgen del Pilar_ is still with us!": one of the witticisms of the siege was: "La Virgen del Pilar dice, Que no quiere ser francesa." Just as in Andalusia the chief ejaculation is "_Ave María Purísima!_" and in the mountains of the north, "_Nuestra Señora de Nieve!_" so in Aragon, "_Virgen Mia del Pilar!_" springs to the lips in time of joy or trouble. However, emotion cannot be summoned on command, and I left Saragossa unmoved by her special shrine of devotion. Had it been in the solemn old Cathedral, sympathy had come more readily. The _Seo_, like most Spanish churches, is spoiled outside by restoration, but within it is not unworthy of the coronations and councils held there. Ferdinand _el Católico_ was baptized at its font; and near the altar is buried the heart of Velasquez's handsome little Don Baltazar Carlos, who died of the plague at seventeen. The church is high and square, like a hall; it is rich in mediæval tombs, Moorish ceilings, pictures, and jewels. Some truly glorious fourteenth century tapestries were still hanging in place after the Easter festivals, on the day of our visit; and as a council was to be held in the church on the following day, a row of gold busts of saints, Gothic relic holders, stood on the altar. The sacristy was a treasure house, from its floor of Valencian tiles to its vestments heavy with real pearls. The enthusiasm of the priest who showed us the Cathedral told of the personal pride most of his countrymen feel in the house of God; again, as at Burgos, I felt that these people considered their churches as much their abode as their own simple homes, that one supplemented the other, and hence much of the contentment of their frugal lives.[36] We were stupid enough to go hunting for the leaning tower of Saragossa, not knowing that it had come down in 1893, and the search led us through the narrow streets of the older town, where the mansions of dull, small bricks, as a rule, have been turned into stables and warehouses, like the former palaces of Barcelona. Outside the city, flat on the plain, stands what was once the Moorish, later the Christian, palace, the Aljuferia, now serving as barracks, in which are embedded a few good remains, such as a small mosque and a noble hall of Isabella's time, with that suggestive date, 1492,--Granada and America. On our first arrival at the hotel in Saragossa, they had informed us we could stay but a few days, as the centenary celebration of May 2d, 1808, was approaching, and every hotel room was engaged. The town so hum-drum to-day has a stirring history to look back on. In modern times she has stood a siege as heroic as any in the Netherlands, but Spain has lacked a Motley to make her popular. I can only repeat, justice has never been done to the outburst of patriotism which began in Madrid with the _Dos de Mayo_, 1808. Murat's savage slaughter on that May day made the whole of Spain rise in almost simultaneous defense, to the astonishment and admiration of Europe. Saragossa chose for her leader against the invader the young Count Palafox, assisted by the priest Santiago Sas, and by Tío Jorge ("Uncle George") with two peasant lieutenants. The French closed in round the city, but the victory of Bailén in the south raised this first siege. Then in December of 1808 four French marshals with twenty thousand men again surrounded Saragossa, and it must not be overlooked that, built on the plain, she had slight natural means of defense. "War to the knife" was the historic answer of the town when called on to surrender, and the bones of over forty thousand citizens at the end of the siege bore testimony to the boast. To embarrass the enemy they cut down the olive plantations around the city, thus destroying with unselfish courage the revenue of a generation, for it takes some twenty years for the olive tree to bear fruit. They sacrificed all personal rights to private property by breaking down the partitions from house to house till every block was turned into a well-defended fortress. Organized by the intelligent Countess of Burita, the women enrolled themselves in companies to serve in the hospitals and to carry food and ammunition to the fighters; a girl of the people, Ajustina of Aragon, whom Byron immortalized as the Maid of Saragossa, worked the gun of an artillery-man through a fiery assault. Ajustina lived for fifty years after her famous day, always showing the same vigorous equilibrium of character; though Ferdinand VII rewarded her with the commission of an officer, she seldom made use of the uniform of her rank nor let adulation change the humble course of her life. The siege lasted up to the end of February. In the beginning of that month the daily deaths were five hundred, the living were not able to bury the dead, and a pest soon bred; the atmosphere was such that the slightest wound gangrened. Sir John Carr, who visited Spain the year of the siege, heard detailed accounts from officers who had taken part in it: "The smoke of gunpowder kept the city in twilight darkness, horribly illumined by the fire that issued from the cannon of the enemy. In the intervals which succeeded these discharges, women and children were beheld in the street writhing in the agonies of death, yet scarcely a sigh or moan was heard. Priests were seen, as they were rushing to meet the foe, to kneel by the side of the dying, and dropping their sabers, to take the cross from their bosoms and administer the consolations of their religion, during which they exhibited the same calmness usually displayed in the chambers of sickness." Even after the French had forced an entrance into the city, there continued for weeks a room to room struggle: "Each house has to be taken separately," Marshall Lannes wrote to Napoleon, "it is a war that horrifies." "At length the city demolished, the inhabitants worn out by disease, fighting and famine, the besieged were obliged with broken hearts to surrender, February 21, 1809, after having covered themselves with glory during one of the most memorable sieges in the annals of war, which lasted sixty-three days." (_Travels in Spain_, Sir John Carr K.C.). Truly can the _testarudo aragonés_ of Iberian blood boast of the title of his capital, _siempre heróica_! The Aragonese is manly, enduring, and stubborn; the special laws of this independent province, the _Fueros_, are worth close study from those interested in the gradual steps of man's self-government; under an ostensible monarchy they gave republican institutions. This is an address to the King: "We, who count for as much as you and have more power than you, we elect you king in order that you may guard our privileges and liberties; and not otherwise." Nice language for a Hapsburg or a Bourbon to hear! Aragon was united early, by a royal marriage, to Catalonia, and a few centuries later Ferdinand's union with Isabella bound both provinces to Castile, Ferdinand also conquering Navarre; it was under the first of the Bourbon kings, Philip V, that Aragon lost her treasured _Fueros_. We saw nothing of the neighboring Navarre, and I cannot say we saw much of sturdy Aragon, since Saragossa was the only stopping-place, but a long day on the train going south gave us a fair idea of its general character. And constantly through the day rose the remembrance that it was here in this kingdom happened the delightful Duchess adventure. Never has the scene been equaled,--that witty, high-bred lady and _hermano Sancho_ of the adorable platitudes and proverbs--("_Sesenta mil satanases te lleven á ti y á tus refranes_"! even the patient Don exclaimed)--brother Sancho quite unembarrassed--was he not a _cristiano viejo_?--stooping to kiss her dainty hand. The landscape of the province was rather desolate, though relieved from monotony by the snow-covered wall of the Pyrenees that continued unbroken in the distance to our left. The Spanish side of the great range of mountains is abrupt in comparison with the French slopes, which are gay with fashionable spas, and fertile with slow, winding rivers, such as the Garonne. In Spain the rivers descend with such rapidity that they pour away their life-giving waters in prodigal spring floods, and during the rest of the year the land suffers from drought; there is a saying here that it is easier to mix mortar with wine than with water. It happened that on our train was a band of young soldiers returning to their homes after their military service, as irrepressible as escaped young colts. Such songs and merriment! Such family scenes at each station! Mothers and little sisters, blushing cousins and neighbors had flocked down from the villages on the Pyrenees slopes to welcome them. A touch of nature makes the world akin; we found ourselves waving, too, as the train drew away, leaving the returned lad in the midst of his rejoicing family. At the fortress-crowned town of Monzón we saw the last of our happy fellow travelers. There a young soldier led his comrades to be presented to a majestic old man with a plaid shawl flung over his shoulder like a toga, and the son's expression of pride in the noble patriarch was a thing not soon forgotten. In Spain few journeys lack a primary human interest, something to give food to heart or soul. MINOR CITIES OF CATALONIA Romanesque is the Trappist of architecture, ... on its knees in the dust, singing with lowered head in a plaintive voice the psalms of penitence.... This mystic Romanesque suggests the idea of a robust faith, a manly patience, a piety as secure as its walls. It is the true architecture of the cloister.... There is fear of sin in these massive vaults and fear of a God whose rigours never slackened till the coming of the Son. Gothic on the contrary is less fearful, the lowered eyes are lifted, the sepulchral voices grow angelic.... Romanesque allegorizes the Old Testament, and Gothic the New.--J.-K. HUYSMANS. In his valuable book on Spanish churches, Street is justly enthusiastic over the form that Gothic architecture took in the province of Catalonia, and especially over the now unused Cathedral of Lérida, which he calls the finest and purest early-pointed church in Europe. It was such praise that induced us to stop over in the dull, little city, crowned by the hill where the ancient Cathedral stands. Its history of ten sieges, and Velasquez's "Philip IV on horseback entering Lérida in triumph," somehow had suggested a grandiose impression that is far from lived up to by the modern town. A pause of three hours between trains seemed to give ample time to see the Cathedral, but the scramble into which the visit to Lérida degenerated was proof that no limited period is ample time in this country of leisurely ease. Could we have gone direct to the citadel, all had been well, but as the hill is now a fort, with the old church turned into a dormitory for soldiers, much red tape was required to visit it. We hurried along the interminable crowded street that stretches beside the river, asking right and left for the office of the military governor. Wrongly directed, we burst into the somnolent quarters of the city authorities and made our request for a permit. With a slow dignity that no flurried haste could move, the provincial governor sent us to the private house of the military big-wig. There a precious half hour went by in the drawing-room with his handsome wife, who did not seem sorry to break the monotony of her exile by the strangers' visit. In came the genial governor waving the permit backward and forward for the ink to dry, and another half hour of social chatting went by, the very ink of Spain being gifted with dignified slowness. A soldier was put at our disposal to serve as guide, a young man as tranquil as his superior, for we climbed the hill at a snail's pace, and once inside the fort were stopped here and there by sentries who, letter by letter, it seemed to our impatience, spelled out the written paper. When finally we stood before the Cathedral, the soldier escort told us we must pause there while he went to seek the commandant of the fort. Precious minute after minute went by, till at last, the clock telling us we must soon be starting back to the station, we took the bull by the horns and entered the church without further delay. A strange spectacle presented itself. In every direction were ranged cots, clothes hung about and washing troughs added to the confusion. The beautiful old church had been floored half way up its piers and down these improvised rooms we could see other rows of narrow beds. It was so cluttered that I could hardly get oriented; where was the nave? which were the transepts? We could see that the capitols of the pillars were grandly carved, that here was the beautiful clearness of form, the noble solidity of early Gothic, but the confusion of the soldiers' dormitory made it impossible to study the church with any satisfaction. Except for the architect, Lérida to-day hardly repays a visit. The soldiers stood round in astonishment at such unexpected visitors, so we were soon glad to confine our examination to the exterior portals and the tower. Just as we were on the point of leaving, the commandant appeared, shook us warmly by the hand and prepared to take us over the fort. Like the military governor and his wife, he beamed with the interest of something new; the cordiality of all was perfect, but nothing, nothing, could hurry them. We explained that we had come to see the church alone, that our time unfortunately was limited, and we must now leave to catch the train for Poblet. He took a disappointed and bewildered farewell; up on his citadel in the land of pause and leisure such new-world notions of speed were disconcerting. With a hasty look at the noblest early-pointed church in Europe, a grateful handshake to the colonel, we hurried down the precipitous hill and jumped on the train just as it was moving out, our valises being flung in to us desperately at the final moment. Soon the broken, fertile hills of the province of Catalonia closed in around us, and the country grew so charming that we were glad to have planned to pass a night near Poblet. From the train we saw the prominent brown mass of the monastery buildings, but, of course, we ran on some miles before stopping in a station. There we found a Catalan cart, two-wheeled with a barrel vaulted awning, and drove to the primitive hotel at Espluga. The landlord offered us his cart to drive out to Poblet, two miles away, but the bumps and ruts of the road from the station made us prefer to walk. The ill-kept roads and the not wholly cultivated fields told clearly that the industrial monks were no longer masters of the valley. Poblet stood for monastic pride, only nobles entered as monks, the mitered abbot was a count-palatine and ruled the peasantry as their feudal lord; the revenues were enormous, but as Benedictines are invariably cultivated men, they were spent on ancient manuscripts, and in the ceaseless energy of building. When the mob came from the neighboring towns in 1835 to sack the convent, they shattered the very treasure they sought. In their blind ignorance they did not know that chiseled alabaster, wrought doors and windows, and carven cloisters, represented the hidden gold they were seeking. This uprising in Spain against the monasteries, the "_pecado de sangre_," was a political more than a religious affair; in the first Carlist war, the countryside here was Constitutional, while the monks of Poblet were firm for the Pretender Don Carlos. The havoc the mob wrought is heart-rending; and yet though empty and partly destroyed, Poblet is still one of the finest things in the Peninsula. On our way out to it we happened to take a wrong turning, which fortunately led us to encircle the walled-in mass of buildings before entering, and gave us some idea of their great extent. It was a veritable town; there were hospices for visitors, hospitals, a king's palace, an abbot's palace, a village of workshops for the artisans, since in every age the monks had been builders. Every style was represented, each stage of Romanesque and Gothic; Poblet is indeed to-day one of the best places in Europe to study architecture, and the guardian told us that students from every country flock here in the summer time. Artists too are a familiar sight sketching the beautiful vistas, the arched library, the pillared _sala capitular_ where effigies of the abbots lie so haughtily that one can almost understand the fury of the rabble, the imposing length and strength of the novices' dormitory where swallows now flit, the pure early Gothic of King Martin's palace, the odd little _glorieta_ of the chief cloister. Pleasant quarters can be found in the caretaker's house, which is more convenient than living at Espluga down the valley. We wandered for hours through courtyards and cloisters that show the subtly simple proportions of Catalan art. The church of the monastery was built during that rare moment when Romanesque turned to pointed work; it is very narrow and severe and impressive. The once superb alabaster _retablo_ is mutilated, and the tombs of the Aragonese kings are scattered. The bones of Jaime _el Conquistador_ are now in Tarragona Cathedral. Poblet served as the Escorial of the rulers of Aragon and Catalonia, and is many times more worth visiting than Philip II's rigid pile in Castile. I strongly urge everyone who goes to Spain to turn aside from the beaten path to see this unrivaled Cistercian monastery, which it is no exaggeration to say is one of the most artistic groups of buildings in the world. The evening of our visit the sunset glorified the pretty rural valley whose brooks bounded merrily down the hillside. "Laugh of the mountain, lyre of bird and tree," Lope de Vega calls the gurgling, clear waters. We took a long hour to loiter back to Espluga, accompanied by a racy old character, Sabina, and her tourist donkey. The peasants returning from cutting wood up in the mountains above us gave a new greeting, "_Santas Noches_," reminiscent, no doubt, of the former masters of the valley. Then the following day we took the train south of Tarragona, to the "Little Rome" that is the reputed birthplace of Pontius Pilate, of which Martial sang, and where Augustus Cæsar wintered. The landscape was a delight, showing the most unrivaled cultivation of soil I have ever seen, flowering orchards, fields of wheat and poppies, the very vineyards that Pliny has described; the sensation of the earth's lavish bounty, of the fecundity of the sun and the intoxication of growing things was overwhelming. And a week before we had been freezing in Sigüenza! On the train was an amusing company. Some dozen people came to one of the stations en route to escort an alert, keen-eyed little bishop, who mounted nimbly among us. Everyone bent to kiss his episcopal ring, and even when some shrewd business men entered the carriage later, and saw that a bishop was its occupant, they too knelt to kiss his hand in salutation, republican Catalans though they were. I could not take my eyes off the delightful little prelate, so happily unconscious of his purple satin skull cap with its St. Patrick's green rosette on top, and his equally vivid green woolen gloves. Then when we reached Tarragona, down he stepped briskly, and instead of entering an episcopal carriage as we expected, he got into a public diligence and drove off like a true democratic Spaniard. The Mediterranean at Tarragona was brilliantly, startlingly blue. As it burst on us in its sun dazzling wonder it seemed as if the bleak high table-land of the country behind was a nightmare of the imagination. Surely a whole continent must separate such luxury and such aridness. We wandered about the white, glaring city, glad to bask in warm sun and drink in the salt air, happy too to be back again by the inland sea that has known the great nations of the earth, to be part again of the marvelous belt of ancient civilization that encircles its blue water. Tarragona was surrounded by cyclopean walls, the huge boulders of Rome below, and the smaller mediæval stones above. The blinding sun made the Cathedral so dark that it was long before we could see our way about. It is solemn and very earnest, with a fortress-like apse, and with cloisters the most perfect in the country. The doorways and capitols are so curiously carved that they merit detail study. The Roman urns, a Moorish prayer niche, and so on, down through the centuries, showed again how clearly architecture in Spain tells her history. The chief _retablo_ is of extreme beauty, with large statues and smaller scenes combined harmoniously; in it the restraint that distinguishes the Catalan school is very apparent. On leaving Tarragona, the railway followed the coast for some time, then to our disappointment branched inland to loop round to Barcelona. When we realized that we could have taken the line that runs the whole way by the sea, we were annoyed at our mistake, though later we were grateful to it, for the inland route gave a noble view of Montserrat, that astonishing serrated ridge of gray rock, a cragged comb of stone, geologically a puzzle of formation, which abruptly rises out of the plain. For an hour the train drew nearer and nearer to it, so we got an admirable view. Our proposed ascent of the mountain was never to take place, and this was to be our only glimpse of the shrine to which thousands of pilgrims flock each year, where St. Ignatius Loyola sought counsel and made his vigil of the armor. When Barcelona was reached the illness which had been fastening itself closer since the unfortunate drive to Alcántara declared itself unmistakably, and many proposed excursions, such as Montserrat, Manresa, Ripoll, with its unique portal, had to be foregone. To leave a country with some of its best things unvisited is an open invitation to return,--which theory may be good philosophy, but is not wholly adequate in stifling regrets. BARCELONA "He who loves not, lives not." RAMÓN LULL. "Solemn the lift of high-embowered roof, The clustered stems that spread in boughs disleaved, Through which the organ blew a dream of storm That shut the heart up in tranquillity." JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. I wonder if, to the reader, when hearing the name Barcelona there rises one sovereign picture,--Isabella and Ferdinand's reception of Columbus on his return from the New World. It may have been some print seen in childhood that impressed itself indelibly on my imagination, but always with the name Barcelona I seemed to see _los Reyes Católicos_ seated on their throne listening to the man whose genius was so well bodied forth in his face and bearing. Around stood gentle-eyed natives of the Antilles, with their ornaments of pearls and gold, lures that were to rouse the rapacity which exterminated those Arcadian peoples, and to break the heart of their great discoverer. Heart-break and defeat lay in the future, this was an hour of enthusiastic hope. When Columbus had finished his peroration, the Queen and the court fell on their knees in a spontaneous burst of exaltation, and together intoned that king's hymn of victory, the _Te Deum_. It was the unknown Barcelona that called up this scene of Spain's heroic hour; the city as it is to-day has blurred and dimmed the picture. There is a striking statue of Columbus on a column that faces the harbor, but it is not of him nor of his patrons that you think here. The Castle of Segovia, the walls of Avila or Toledo, the Alhambra hill, Seville's Alcázar, these are romantic spots that make "the high past appear Affably real and near, For all its grandiose air caught from the mien of kings"; but I defy the imaginative lover of old times to call up the romantic in the modern capital of Catalonia; seething with industrial life, with revolutionary new ideas, she is too aggressive and prosperous for sentimental regrets. Barcelona's position as an industrial force cannot be called unexpected. She has ever been in the stir of big events, Italy's rival in commerce through the Middle Ages, when she served as the port of entry and exit for the armies and fleets. In all times she has enjoyed a climate that may well be the despair of commercial cities of the north; the summer heats are tempered by sea-breezes, the winters are warmer than at Naples. Hearing reports of roses in bloom there in January, we had dreaded the heat of a May in the city, but during the five weeks of our stay, the bracing spring air was like that of New England. Her natural setting, too, is good; the harbor guarded by the lofty fort of Monjuich, while behind stretch mountains which lay far from the mediæval town, but to-day, when Barcelona covers an area twelve times as large, they are immediate suburbs and their names are familiar signs on the tramcars. The province of Catalonia is perhaps the most individual of the thirteen strikingly different provinces of the Peninsula. The Catalan is more Spanish than French certainly, but he is always more Catalan than Spanish. Independent, self-interested, intractable, strong-headed as an Aragonese, industrious, successful, in him is found slight trace of the hidalgo of Castile. It is hard to believe that this hive of born business men is in a land whose ideal of happiness is to do nothing. The idleness, the high-bred courtesy of the Castilian, are as unfamiliar here as in the Stock Exchange of New York; indeed Barcelona, with her streets filled with well-dressed, briskly-moving crowds, each intent on his own business, is more allied to the new world than to the old. Adieu, indeed, to the toga-like capes, to mantillas, to midnight serenades. A Catalan has no time to waste chatting by alluring _rejas_. Catalonia has been called the Lancashire of Spain, and Barcelona its Manchester. If the comparison is fit in regard to commercial success, it is inappropriate in one respect, for, built by a Latin race, to whom is natural a sense of beauty, Barcelona, though as keen after money as the English town, has cared better for her interests. The sunlight is not darkened by the miles of factory chimneys that so oppress the heart in the black country. There are hundreds of belching chimneys, but they are kept out of sight in the valleys behind, where each factory stands isolated in the fields, often in a planted enclosure: this leaves the city proper free of traffic, smoke, and the whirr of machinery. The gay Rambla is edged with shops, and handsome apartment houses line the tree-planted avenues. Few towns have the force of will and continued patience to build themselves symmetrically; they are generally the result of hap-hazard, and only when too late the possibility of some river or sea front is discerned. Barcelona realized some fifty years ago that she was to be one of the conglomerations that modern cities tend to become, so she called on her engineers for plans, and from one of those submitted she chose an able design; _Ensanche_, extension, is the name for the new districts. Of course if a whole city consisted of these wide, regular streets, it would be monotonous, but here was already enough of narrow-lane picturesqueness to satisfy the artist. The walls that encircle the congested older town were pulled down, the opened space was turned into an esplanade, and radiating from this nucleus, streets two hundred feet wide were laid and were immediately planted with double rows of plane trees. To-day the vistas down these far-stretching avenues, the sunlight filtering through the leaves on groups of nurses and children, the rapidly-moving crowds, the smart two-wheeled Catalan carts, the whirling automobiles, give the city an air of joyous prosperity. Behind the big apartment houses, the law requires a planted space to be kept open, so that people of very mediocre income live in houses and in districts that only the rich of other towns can command. The material success of the people has found an outlet in their architecture: Poblet, school for the builder, is not far away. Since some of the houses were put up during the exaggerated phase of _l'art nouveau_, they are overloaded with whirling ornament, quite as bad as Karlsruhe, but the majority are in dignified good taste: take, for instance, the new University buildings, or that brown stone block near the beginning of the beautiful Paseo Garcia, Nos. 2 and 4, if I remember rightly. The sculptors too have inherited the skill of the early masters of Catalonia. Most of the modern churches (not Señor Gaudi's curious experiment, the Church of the Holy Family!) are built consistently in one style, the walls carved _in situ_ as in old times; the effect is such that one prays the days of painted plaster may never return. It was good to notice, too, that the new churches discarded the tinsel-decked altars of the eighteenth century, the bane of Peninsula shrines. Barcelona builds as a rule in the Catalan manner; the early architects of the province, though influenced by Lombard and French masters, may be said to have achieved a national style. It is worthy of enthusiasm with its singular purity of line, a proportion that is hardly Spanish. Like Chartres, it has "the distinguished slenderness of an eternal adolescence." In nothing is it akin to Isabella's efflorescent Plateresque-Gothic. Its clustered piers, and arches carried high aloft, have been used as successfully in civil as in religious architecture, witness the Lonja, or Exchange. The new town, with its prosperous homes and shady avenues, tended to make us overlook old Barcelona, yet we only had to step aside from the thronged Rambla and we found ourselves in dark, narrow streets, that at dusk especially made us shiver with apprehension. Forcibly they warned us that this was one of the most turbulent cities in Europe, where lawless socialists gather and plot, where some recent bomb-throwing outrages were the reason for groups of the _Guardias Civiles_ on every corner. The red _gorro_, the Phrygian cap worn by the city porters, seemed too realistic when met in dark lanes, where the men pushed rudely by, your sex here no prerogative. With Philistine relief we used to return to the sanitary, orderly avenues of the _Ensanche_, patrolled by placid policemen in crimson broadcloth coats. A word of praise must be given to some of the municipal institutions of Barcelona, such as the corps of city porters, each with a small district in which to render help. The _hospicio_, or work-house, is considered one of the best organized in Europe. As long ago as 1786 an English traveler, the Rev. Joseph Townsend, wrote of another of Barcelona's institutions: "No hospital that I have seen upon the continent is so well administered as the general hospital of this city. It is peculiar in its attention to convalescents, for whom a separate habitation is provided, that after they are dismissed from the sick wards they may have time to recover their strength." Also her excellent city police are worthy of praise. The rest of Spain could emulate them, for it was our experience that the local police were an incompetent set; we soon learned never to apply to them in case of difficulty, but to wait till an alert Civil Guard[37] passed, when we were sure of intelligent help. [Illustration: CLOISTERS OF SAN PABLO DEL CAMPO, BARCELONA] It is the old town, congested and gloomy though it is, that, set side by side with the new, makes Barcelona unique. There are to be found primitive churches, such as Santa Ana, or San Pablo del Campo,[38] once, like St. Martin-in-the-Fields, placed among meadows; dim old churches similar in design, Byzantine cross form with a low dome over the center and with cloisters that make solemn oases of repose in the busy city. A later period built churches whose somber walls tower high above the crowded houses; such are Santa María del Pino and Santa María del Mar, characterized by wide hall-like naves. In the width of their nave lay the triumph of the Catalan masters. It was in the last named church that a pious woman of the town noticed one day a gray, emaciated man resting, among a group of children, on the steps of the altar, in his face a light of convincing holiness. Fresh from the spiritual battle in the Cave of Manresa, a grand self-mastery the reward of his struggle, no wonder the face of Ignatius compelled the reverence of the passer by. The Cathedral of Barcelona is a typically Catalan-Gothic church. For an _eglesia mayor_ it is small, but so true are its proportions and so skillfully is it lighted that it gives the effect of grandeur. As the clearstory windows are mere circles, on first entering one is in complete darkness, but gradually out of the gloom looms that loveliest feature of the building, the chancel, lighted by rare old glass, with slender piers and lofty stilted arches rising from pavement to vaulting in an unforgettable beauty of symmetry. The _retablo_ of the High Altar is in character, articulate and graceful, unlike the usual, overladen reredos of Spain. Incense, prayer, soaring aspiration, the symbolization of this presbytery is a perfect thing: again vividly came the conviction that temples such as these have had and ever will have a vital influence on a race. Barcelona may be a shrewd commercial center, that in its material pride, in order not to be classed with the improvident, brutally repudiates most of the _cosas de España_; she may print books whose every word is an insult to government and religion; she is still deeply Spanish in the earnest piety of the larger proportion of her citizens. A Catalan may tell you, especially if you belong to a northern race and a different creed, that what you see is all form, lip-religion, that the men here, like intelligent men the world over, are free-thinkers. It is an easy matter for the prejudiced visitor to get all his misconceptions confirmed by a native, no one is more bitter in abuse of his country than a Catalan. Fortunately, one has one's own eyes wherewith to see. But first I must quote from a recent letter to the _London Times_ from the Rev. James R. Youlden, in answer to a pessimist on the religious condition of Spain: "In the city of Barcelona, the largest, most modern and most industrial of Spanish cities, the good attendance at Mass, not only of women and children but of the men, is most remarkable, as is also the number of communicants. I have myself often given Holy Communion on a Sunday morning in the church of San Pedro to such large numbers, fully one-third of them men, that my arms have ached in conveying the sacred particles. Masses are celebrated every hour, and in some churches every half hour from 5 A.M. to 12 midday in all the twenty-four parish churches of the city (to say nothing of numerous convent chapels) in the presence of large and often crowded congregations. A visit to the church at any time from 8 till 12 on any Sunday morning would dispel some of the illusions of your Madrid correspondent." A good test of the sincerity of religious conviction is what it costs the purse; new churches, like those of Barcelona, are not built by lip-religion. I spent several Sunday mornings sitting on one of the side benches of the Cathedral, learning that the Catalan, disunited from his mother land on many points, is ineradicably national in his creed. This was Spain, with the grave reverence of the smallest child, where the church is a loved home, a frequented refuge for meditation and strengthening prayer. Now a handsome and satisfied matron enters, followed by five or six children, the boys dressed as English sailors, little Battenbergs, the girls with hats like flower gardens; they cluster round their mother at the door, and she passes each the blessed water with which to sign themselves. Behind this group come some alert young artisans; each instantly drops on both knees to make his salutation to the Altar--lip-religion does not care to disarray its Sunday suit like this--and each blesses himself in the swift national way, with the final carrying to the lips of the thumb and first finger crossed, a symbol of fidelity to his faith. May this custom never die out in Spain! From the first hour of her eight hundred years' crusade, from Cavadonga to Granada, her religion has been her glory, interwoven with her nationality, like that of the Jews of old, and if she understands her enduring interests, this Christian faith to which she has clung so loyally will be her aspiration in the future. When her men pass the High Altar without salute, when the street children cease to run in daily to kneel before a shrine, throwing their scanty skirts over their heads if a handkerchief is lacking, when politics and religion are synonymous, that day Spain may be called degenerate, but not now, while lamps of sincere conviction burn before her altars. Ascension Thursday fell on a perfect day in late May, the warm sunshine tempered by a sea breeze; everyone was out gallantly in new summer suits. The houses were hung with the national flag, but the fairest decoration of the city were the hundreds of First Communicants who thronged the streets, accompanied by proud mothers and relatives. Each little girl in her quaint, long, white skirt, tulle veil and wreath of flowers, carried a new pearl chaplet or prayer book, and each boy wore a bow of white satin on his left arm. Few things are more appealing than an innocent-eyed child on this solemn day, and in after years, for those who have known such hours of purity, few memories are more indelible. As I passed through the old city, its dark streets lightened by these groups, I could not help exclaiming, "Why, when she can present a scene of such loveliness and hope, must Barcelona so blindly envy her neighbor across the Pyrenees!" Not long after leaving Spain, I stopped in a village in the mountains of Dauphiny, half Catholic, half Huguenot. Both churches were practically empty. The children of the town, except those of a few stanch families, walked in a public procession to honor the mayor, behind a banner bearing the inscription, "Ni Dieu, ni maître." One cannot deny there are many in Barcelona whose aspiration would be satisfied with a similar procession in her streets, but the majority still prefer an Ascension Thursday of First Communicants. Before the west door of the Cathedral are remains of ancient houses which, like Italy, bear the signs of guilds, for this city always differed from the rest of Spain in looking on trade as an honorable career. A street behind the Cathedral leads to other specimens of domestic architecture. Be sure not to be discouraged by the cold Herrara front of the House of the Deputation. It masks a Gothic building which, if properly restored, as well as the Casa Consistorial, or Town Hall, which stands opposite to it, would make of this formal plaza one of the most interesting squares in Europe. The city's renewed pride in the Gothic of its province, her skillful architects, her wealth, should tempt her to the task. Be sure to go into both these buildings. In the Town Hall are some lovely _ajimez_ windows that show the restraint of the Catalan style: they attenuated the features as far as strength would allow, but they knew just where to stop. The result is grace, lightness, a subtle something of proportion. In the Deputation House hangs the Catalan painter Fortuny's "Battle of Tetuán," unfinished, with a dashing rainbow-hued charge of horsemen that stirs the memory of Spain's grand forays into Africa. In exploring Barcelona one notices unfamiliar names on the shops, here are no longer Alvarez, González, Pérez, García, but strange Catalan names, such as Bosch, Cla, Puig, Catafalch, Llordachs, Petz. On every side, in shops, in the tramcars, one hears the dialect spoken, rather rough sounding and wholly unintelligible to the traveler who knows only Castilian. In no other of Spain's provinces is so much made of local differences. The names of the streets are written twice on the street corners, in Catalan and in Castilian, a ridiculous arrangement, for in these proper names the differences are slight; as _Calle de Cortes_, and _Correr de les Corts_. To appease his thirst for self-assertion, the practical Catalan has marked his streets in a less adequate way than the rest of the Peninsula he looks down on: the clearness of the street directions, each tile generally holding one bold letter, had been a satisfaction all over Spain. This brings me into hot water at once, the vexed ever palpitating Catalan question. Is this province, Spain's richest and most progressive, to continue under the Spanish crown, to ally herself with France, or to be independent? She tells us in anger, she pays more than her share of the taxes, that she is an isolated commercial and industrial force in a nation that is preëminently agricultural, whose laws are made to foster the farmer at the expense of the trader: the loss of the colonies was an advantage for the rest of the country whose crying need is population, but for Barcelona it was a severe blow. Spain has hard problems to solve, with thirteen inhabitants to the square mile in some provinces and one hundred and eight to the mile here in Catalonia. Books of open sedition are freely published, one picks them up in the waiting-room of a doctor's office, in the bank, on the stalls. This is no new phase. From early times Catalonia has only considered her own interests, now joining with France against Spain, now changing sides, as she thought to benefit herself; for her the nation is a secondary consideration. History proves she has been ineradicably selfish; hence her success, a sophist may say, but there is something higher than self-aggrandizement, the success of giving her strength to reforming the abuses she proclaims. No one denies there is crying need for political and financial reform at Madrid, though it is not to be brought about by such a book as Señor Pompeo Gener's "Cosas de España," which but widens the breach. One discerns it in the ignoble jealousy of the Castilian, which rankles in the Catalan mind; for instance in speaking of Castilian literature of the nineteenth century he stops short at Fernán Caballero and makes no mention of the distinguished modern novelists. A writer who holds up Herbert Spencer as the ne plus ultra of philosophy (Spanish free-thinkers are a generation behind in certain phases of thought) need not be taken too seriously, but the "Cosas de España" voices what is serious. "Ah Castillo Castillano! why have we ever known you!" exclaims the Catalan poet Briz, in his celebrated poem, "Cuatro pals de Sanch," the blazon of the province, its four red bars. "If to us remains only one of our four bars of blood, to you we owe the loss, thou kingdom of the castles and the hungry lions. But, O Castillo Castillano, alas for you, if you break our last _pals de sanch_!" This bitter spirit of revolt makes this grand old province that should be Spain's bulwark, Spain's weakness instead. Would Catalonia gain by any of the changes she dreams of? Surely under the formalism of France, her self-willed independence would chafe and break loose, for independence is a characteristic of all Spaniards, in all ages, now and always; one cannot exaggerate it. Also the heart of the province is too deeply religious to live under the "Liberté" of her neighbor. In the United States religious liberty is little talked of, but is a solid fact, wherein the new world gives a needed lesson to the old, with its narrow horizons and petty disputes. In France, where this liberty is vaunted, it is a farce: no Catalan could long tolerate such freedom. Again, if this small state were independent, where would she stand? A thought that strikes one forcibly after a tour of the province, whose towns, Gerona, Lérida, Tarragona, are of mediocre importance. Catalonia independent would be practically one city, Barcelona, whose trade the central government could cripple by prohibitory tariffs. Her pride would suffer more as one of the smallest, weakest states in Europe, than it now suffers under its lawful king, part of an old race that once led the world, and which if only this discontented daughter would generously help, has red blood enough to again play a prominent part. Spain needs just such help as the Catalan can give, she needs his grit, his industry, his progressiveness. Could he now bear the overweighted burden in a better spirit, before many years it would be lightened. The north is awakening to industrial life; Bilbao, Santander, Gijón, Coruña, Vigo, will soon be strong trading centers, and the older commercial city can gather supporters to work for fiscal autonomy, since the chief grievance is the centralized system of government in Madrid. Let her agitate in a constitutional way for a system like the separate state arrangement of our union. The opposition of two vigorous sides is a sign of life in a nation. Discussion means change and advancement. For full vigor both sides are needed, the conservative to serve as brake on the democrat's too swiftly-turning wheels. An important cause of Spain's decay,[39] according to Don Juan Valera, came from all classes thinking the same way; drunk with pride on the ending of the centuries of crusade against their Moorish invader, with the discovery of a new continent the people lay back in slothful inertia, without the prick of dispute to rouse them. Opposition and struggle are essential to vigor, but disloyalty saps a nation's strength. Let them strike straight-front blows from the shoulder, for Madrid needs rousing, but let them not stab in the back. Often when wandering among the old tombs of Spain, those effigies of the grand-masters of Santiago, Calatrava and Alcántara, the plumed and helmeted knights of the noble brows, I recalled some ringing lines of Newbolt's. Every boy of Barcelona should know them by heart, they are not so needed in Castile: "To set the cause above renown, To love the game above the prize, To honour while you strike him down The foe that comes with fearless eyes. To count the life of battle good, And dear the land that gave you birth, And dearer yet the brotherhood That binds the brave of all the earth." Her intense local patriotism has a more sympathetic side than double-naming her streets and bearing a jealous grudge against her central government. This is the revival of her provincial literature. The interest in dialects and folk lore is a tendency common to many countries to-day, but in Catalonia the movement is on a grand scale. There newspapers and magazines in dialect are circulated, poems and novels are printed not for the literary alone but for the populace. Men of undeniable genius have written in the local tongue, one of the first to use it being that strangely interesting character of the thirteenth century, Ramón Lull, seneschal of Majorca, troubadour, mystic hermit, philosopher, missionary, and his final glory, martyr for the Faith; he is honored in the Church as _el beato_ Raimundo Lulio. By less than ten years he missed being the contemporary of the gentle Assisian, the habit of whose tertiaries he wore; he wandered through Italy while Dante was writing his visions, in that wonderful century called dark, that can claim a Thomas Aquinas, a Bonaventura, an Abertus Magnus, an Elizabeth of Hungary, a Dominic, an Anthony of Padua, and that scattered over Europe such witnesses of its upleap of aspiration as Amiens, Chartres, Westminster, Salisbury, Cologne, Strasburg, León, Toledo, Siena. Lull was born in the capital of the Balearic Islands, which lie a day's sail from Barcelona, and having passed an apprenticeship at court under Jaime _el Conquistador_ of Aragon, he led in Palma a life of pleasure and dissipation till his romantic conversion at thirty-two. Núñez de Arce has enshrined the legend in verse: so violent was the seneschal's pursuit of a fair lady of the city that he once on horseback followed her into church to the scandal of the people. The poet gives the final scene that cured his passion, when she who was so exquisite without, to repell his advances, exposed to him a hidden cancer. The shock changed the worldling to a saint. Distributing his goods to the poor, he retired to a mountain, and spent some years in prayer. Later in his energetic career he returned to this hermitage to pass again periods in meditation for his spiritual strengthening, being the first to show that special faculty of the Spanish mystic, the double life of solitary ecstasy and active charity. The desire to convert the Mohammedan took such possession of his soul that at forty he put himself to school, like the great Basque patron of a later day, and in Paris he studied logic and Arabic in preparation for his future career. Lull attained fourscore years, the latter half of his life being dominated by his burning purpose to convert Islam. One pope after another as he mounted the chair of Peter was beseiged by this astonishing man, and he wandered from court to court urging the universities to teach the oriental languages, that missionaries for the East might be fittingly prepared. Little success crowned his efforts for popes and kings had troubles nearer home. The Catalan enthusiast came at an inopportune moment; the last two Crusades under St. Louis of France had left discouragement behind. However, before his death he had the satisfaction of seeing chairs of Hebrew and Arabic founded by a pope, by a French king, and in Spain and England. The indefatigable man visited Austria, Poland, and Greece; he advocated the protection of the Greeks against Moslem incursions, a result only achieved in our own day; he stopped in Cypress, traversed Armenia, Palestine, and Egypt, zealously expounding the Gospel. His first visit as an apostle to Northern Africa was a failure. There is something touching about this old missionary of six hundred years ago being driven out of Tunis--he and his loved library--and embarked with harsh orders never to return. Not in any spirit of patronage did he labor for the conversion of souls, but wiser than many to-day he carried with him true knowledge and respect for the Mohammedans. His liberal intelligence assimulated much that was of value in their ideas, especially from those heretics of Islam, the Persian Sufis, or mystics. A second time when over seventy Lull ventured across to Africa, and again he--and the books--were violently expelled. I fear our blessed Raimundo was a bit of a visionary, he thought to convince by intellectual debate. The king of England learning of the old scholar's chemical studies, with the curiosity of the period in regard to the philosopher's stone, invited him to London, and lodged him with the monks of Westminster Abbey. Chemistry was merely a side issue in the life of the great missionary. Just short of his eightieth year, with untiring courage and magnificent faith, he set forth once more on his final apostleship to the Mohammedan, and once more preached in Egypt, Jerusalem, and Tunis. At Bugia he was stoned by the furious populace, who left him for dead on the beach, and some Genoese merchants carried away his almost lifeless body. Before they reached the harbor of Palma the martyr had died, and his townsmen buried him with honors in the church of his master, St. Francis. Lull's books, the "Ars Magna" and the "Arbor Scientiæ," are filled with the curious system he evolved for reducing discords. He tried to co-ordinate and facilitate the operations of the mind, to simplify all sciences by showing them to be branches of one trunk. Much of his theory may be fanciful and impractical, but it was a truly suggestive idea based on the profound truth of the unity of knowledge. He explored many branches of the human mind, and left works on medicine, theology, politics, jurisprudence, mathematics and chemistry. The accusation of alchemy is untenable, for he made his experiments in scientific good faith, and wrote against astrology. For three centuries, down to the time of Descartes, Lull was considered a leader of the intellect, and his books were recommended by the universities of Europe. The Catalan dialect has been used by men of marked talent in our own time. The whole of Spain should be as proud of Padre Jacinto Verdaguer, as all France is of their Provençal, Mistral. Verdaguer's "Atlantada," called the best epic of the century, was crowned in 1855 at the Floral Games, festivals which are held in Barcelona each year, for competitions in verse and prose, and to revive the national dances. This intellectual movement rouses the stranger's enthusiasm, and if it keeps itself dissociated from politics,--those abominable politics that sink every noble thing they fasten on, patriotism, education, religion, art,--the revival may prove more than a passing phase. Alert in literature, in music, in the sciences, in municipal progress, and commercial success, what need has this city to be jealous of the capital; they are too different for comparison. Madrid lacks much that Barcelona can claim; a Catalan could emulate some Castilian qualities. Each vitally needs the other. GERONA AND FAREWELL TO SPAIN "I count him wise Who loves so well man's noble memories He needs must love man's nobler hopes yet more!" WILLIAM WATSON. "Una restauración de la vida entera de España no puede tener otro punto de arranque que la concentración de todas nuestras energías dentro de nuestro territorio. Hay que cerrar con cerrojos, llaves, y candados todas las puertas por donde el espíritu español se escapó de España para derramarse por los cuatro puntos del horizonte, y por donde hoy espera que ha de venir la salvación; y en cada una de esas puertas no pondremos un rótulo dantesco que diga: "Lasciate ogni speranza," sino este otro más consolador, más humano, muy profundamente humano, imitado de San Ajustín: "Noli foras ire; in interiore Híspaniæ habitat veritas." ANGEL GANIVET: "_Idearium Español_." The day drew near for our leaving Spain. Eight months had passed since we entered from the north of the Pyrenees isthmus, and now we found ourselves at its southern exit. They had been months filled with an absorbing and unexpected interest; we had come into Spain for a mere autumn tour, and she had forced us to linger. And I must repeat that I came with the average pessimistic idea that she was a spent and more or less worthless country, till what I saw about me daily changed me to a partisan. It was a hard farewell to take now. When Spain is allowed to show herself as she is, she wins a regard that is like an intense personal affection. [Illustration: A STREET STAIRWAY, GERONA] At dawn on the early day in June set for our departure we left Barcelona; before night we would be in France, but the leave-taking was to be broken by some hours in Gerona. As usual it was the fact of its possessing a first-rate church that determined us to stop. This was to be the last of the grand cathedrals which more than those of any land, even of France with their purer art, had realized my ideal of worship and reverence. As Gerona was in Catalonia, good architecture was to be expected, but this was better than good. The Cathedral which dominates the town was worthy of its stirring memories. An imposing flight of eighty steps, like that of the Ara C[oe]li in Rome, ascends to its west portal. At the head of this staircase we paused to look out on the panorama of the Pyrenees--mountain rose behind mountain, the foreground hills well-wooded, those beyond covered with snow. Here was no stupid Escorial facing in to a blank wall. The old masters with vivifying imaginations had brought the glories of nature to worship with them, had hung as it were in their porch, this lovely landscape. Within the Cathedral the first impression is its spaciousness. The width is astonishing; indeed the hall-like nave of Gerona is the widest Gothic vault in Christendom, and were it longer by two bays, no cathedral of Europe could have surpassed the effect. The wide nave of Catalan churches is a national feature that here reaches its acme. The choir of Gerona is on a smaller scale, and the meeting of the two makes a curious feature, not bad inside, but in the exterior view extremely ugly. Probably in time the choir would have been enlarged to fit its monstrous nave. The men in those days started undertakings as if they could never die, but later generations have lacked their enthusiastic ambition. By happy chance we were in time to assist at a last High Mass in a Spanish cathedral. It is no exaggeration to say one's heart felt heavy in listening to the solemn chanting, watching the reverence of priests, acolytes, and congregation, to realize that this was for the last time. The last time we should see the kiss of peace carried symbolically from the priest at the altar to the canons in the choir, the last time we should hear the clamor of the wheel of bells. I looked up to where they hung on the wall and nodded them a little personal farewell, so often had they charmed me. Farewell to sedate Spanish piety, to the devotional unconsciousness of individual prayer. Over the frontier, during the coming summer at Luchon, I was soon to hear wooden signals clapped during Mass to guide the wandering attention of the people, to see the children scamper out in obvious relief. The chancel of Gerona is a gem. The iron _reja_ that shuts in the _capilla mayor_ is of the plainest, like a wall of stacked spears guarding the holy of holies. There is no towering _retablo_, which would be out of character with slender Catalan piers; instead, behind the altar is a marvelous reredos of silver carved in scenes, and surmounted by three Byzantine processional crosses,--all ancient and priceless enough to be the treasure of a national museum. The altar and the canopy over it are also of silver, _retablo_ and altar being placed where they now stand in 1346. The effect of iron _reja_ and precious shrine is faultlessly artistic; we sigh here for a beauty as completely lost for our copying as is the tranquil perfection of these gravestones, the sculptured stelæ of Athens. The service over, we proceeded to examine the church. The cloisters are oddly irregular in shape, and look out on the snow-topped Pyrenees. So beautiful was the prospect that I added this cloister setting to the dream-cathedral Spain tempts one to build. It would have the cloisters of Tarragona with this outlook of Gerona's; also Gerona's altar and _retablo_, though the reredos of Avila and that of Tarragona are worthy rivals. There would be the grand staircase of this Cathedral, and it would ascend to a western portal like León's, with Santiago's _Pórtico de la Gloria_ within; the north and south doors would be Plateresque from Salamanca and Valladolid. The cathedral would be set on Lérida's crag, with the city of Toledo climbing to it and the Tagus churning below. The nave would be Seville's, and Seville's windows would light it and her organ thunder there. The choir would be Toledo's, carved by Rodrigo, Berruguete, and Vigarni, the chancel Barcelona's stilted arches. How they could be combined is hard to solve, but round this _capilla mayor_ would run the double ambulatory of Toledo, and the apse outside have León's flying buttresses,--the apse which the old mystics held as symbolic of the crown of thorns about the head of Christ (the Altar). _Rejas_ from Burgos, Granada, Seville, would guard the chapels, and tombs of knights and bishops from Sigüenza, from Zamora--from every town of Spain in fact--would line the walls: tapestries and treasures from Saragossa; a _via crucis_ by Hernández and portrait statues by Montañés; a sacristy like that of Avila; a _sala capitular_ copied from the Renaissance grace of San Benito in Alcántara; and a wealth of side chapels,--a Condestable chapel, a San Isidoro, a Cámera Santa, a San Millán, a Santa María la Blanca, and an isolated shrine like Palencia's, standing in the ambulatory. And always beneath the vault of this cathedral would be found far-off little Lugo's solemn adoration, and there would be processions as imposing as Andalusia, with the piety of Estremadura, or the Basque. The Giralda, built in the warm red stone of Astorga tower, would stand close by, and not far away, a monastery, line for line, like Poblet. Sitting in a Spanish cloister looking out on the Pyrenees, one drifts into dream-pictures of the ideal cathedral. Gerona has a few other churches worth examining, that of San Feliu, with two Roman sarcophagi and several early Christian ones with wave-like lines. We rambled about the plaza where a fair was in progress, and at every turning kept bidding farewell to familiar scenes of Spanish life; we were not again to hear the peace-bringing "_Vaya Usted con Dios!_" not again to assent to the cordial "_Hasta luego!_" The city is massively built, but it has a battered look, and no wonder. During the French invasion, Gerona stood a siege as terrific as any in history, yet who of us has heard of it? In May, 1809, a French army surrounded the city where there were only three thousand soldiers for the defense, yet for seven months the town defied the invaders, and that with half a dozen breaches in the walls. The women shouldered guns and drilled in a battalion formed by Doña Lucía Fitzgerald; old men and children piled up the earth of the ramparts; cloistered nuns, at a higher call, left their convents to nurse the wounded to whom they gave up their cells, so many priests fell fighting on the walls that no services were held in the churches, there was only the burning of candles; no one bought or sold, for every shopman was a soldier. When a gallant English volunteer died on the ramparts, he exclaimed that he lost his life gladly in a cause so just for a nation so heroic. The French drew closer and closer, and slowly the city starved. The hardships endured were incredible. They ate rats and mice, yet no thought came of surrender. A hot August dragged by, in September the French attacked fiercely and on both sides the men fell like flies. Who was the soul of this indomitable fortitude? The order and subordination told of a master mind, and Gerona had one, Don Mariano Alvarez de Castro, the inflexible governor. He it was who enrolled the women and children in the defense; his lofty spirit never wavered, and his force of character gave him so accepted an authority that he was able to direct a hopeless defense without recourse to cruelty. The siege of Gerona was not stained by any brutal act. The blockade drew closer. By October literally all food was gone, and the people began to fall in the streets to a foe more terrible than bullets. Governor Alvarez stood like a rock of courage. When he passed up the Cathedral steps where the heart-rending groups of the dying lay, his very presence gave hope: if there was a faint-hearted citizen in Gerona, he was more afraid of that iron man than of the French. Never would the governor have yielded, but toward the close of the year he fell ill in the infested air, and as he lay in delirium the city capitulated. With hundreds of dead bodies lying unburied in the streets, there was nothing else to be done. Then followed a scene which did honor to the invader; it rings with the same chivalry that Velasquez painted in the "Surrender of Breda," where Spínola bends to meet the conquered Nassau, the same spirit that made those Frenchmen of an earlier day carry a certain wounded knight, their prisoner, on a litter from Pamplona across the mountains to his castle of Loyola. The foreign troops marched into Gerona in a dead silence, with not a gesture of triumph, moved to awe by the corpses that covered the pavements and to reverence by the few hollow-eyed, living skeletons that met them. The moral victory lay with the conquered. When food was offered the starved people, even that was at first refused. Don Mariano Alvarez, taken prisoner on his bed, died mysteriously, poisoned, some say, in the fortress of Figueras not long after. And all this horror and heroism was only a hundred years ago!--we too walked the streets of Gerona in silent reverence. Then once again on the train; more volcanic hills, more dry rivers that showed what the spring torrents must be like, and in a few hours Port-Bou, the Spanish frontier town, was reached. We stood at the car window looking out sadly on the last of Spain as the train swept round the blue inlets of the Mediterranean. Farewell to this great Christian democracy where the simple title of Don is borne by king and people alike, to the "nation least material of Europe," farewell to a grave, contented race, whose leaders left noble works as noble as their lives, whose writers were soldiers and heroes, where artists prepared for religious scenes by fasting and prayers, where mystics were not negative and inert, but emerged from their union with God with more power for practical life, whose women have by instinct the dignity of womanhood, untainted yet by luxury, a land that can boast the two first women of all ages and countries, an Isabella of Castile, and a St. Teresa. Some may think I carry admiration too far. Carping criticism of Spain has been pushed to such an extent that it is time to swing to the other side: where there can be no joy, no admiration, there can be no stimulus. I like to take M. René Bazin's words as if addressed to me: "Vous avez raison de croire à la vitalité de l'Espagne. Elle n'a jamais été une nation déchue, elle a été une nation blessée." A wounded nation but not one stricken to death. She is recovering. Let her but be patient and aspire slowly; disciplined, tried in the fire and purified, by living without the ceaseless upheavals of the past century, by industry, by commerce, with no encumbering colonies to drain her blood, with the Catalans calling the Castilians "_paisanos_," she will get back her former strength and _brio_. Her literature, her art, are lifting their heads. My prayer for Spain in her rehabilitation is, that she may not diverge from her national spirit and traditions, may modern ideas not change her unworldliness and her stoical endurance, "_su esencia inmortal y su propio carácter_." May she guard her faith, her glory in the past and her aspiration for the future, the faith of the Cross that has struck deeper root here than in any spot on earth, but remembering always that her own greatest saint warns her: "In the spiritual life not to advance is to go back." May she never lose the virile independence of character that so distinguishes her people, the pride of simple manhood that looks out of the eyes of her honorable peasantry and makes their innate courtesy. No nation was ever formed so completely by the chivalry of the Middle Ages as Spain. May she always be _España la heróica_! INDEX Acuña, tomb of Bishop, 40, 41 Africa, 74, 86, 87, 178, 230, 245, 246, 337, 409, 416, 417 Ajustina of Aragon ("Maid of Saragossa"), 381 Alacón, Pedro Antonio de, 151, 328, 335, 336, 337 Alas, Leopoldo, 93, 328, 341, 342, 349 Alba de Tormes, 159, 160, 200, 205-210 Albertus Magnus, 414 Alcalá de Henares, 28, 67, 73, 142, 238, 244, 246, 249, 342, 372 Alcántara, 359-364, 394 Alcántara, St. Peter of, 199 Alfonso II, _el Casto_, 90, 94 Alfonso VI, 87, 116, 129, 231, 236 Alfonso VIII, _él de las Navas_, 50, 84 Alfonso X, _el sabio_, 134, 291, 375 Alfonso XI, 250 Alfonso XII, 179, 180, 217, 333, 337, 343 Alfonso XIII, 50, 174, 180, 181, 182, 217, 287, 289, 290, 291, 292, 351, 355 Alhambra, the, 86, 258, 265-272, 280, 396 Almohades, the, 88 Almoravides, the, 88 Altamira y Crevea, Sr. Rafael, 327 Alva, Duke of, 65, 205 Alvarez de Castro, Mariano, 426, 427, 428 Amadeus I (Duke of Aosta), 179, 333 America, the U. S. of, 9, 16, 18, 41, 64, 128, 140, 209, 332, 370, 397, 411 America, South, 90, 177, 211, 248, 290, 319, 332, 364, 365, 366, 395, 397 Amicis, Edmondo de, 259 Amiens, cathedral of, 81, 415 Andalusia, 2, 37, 87, 102, 105, 112, 151, 178, 189, 225, 230, 242, 257 259, 316, 317, 319, 333, 336, 343 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 187, 414 Aragon, 79, 105, 226, 372, 375-384, 391 Architecture, 9, 36, 42, 43, 48, 54, 81, 91, 147, 151, 232, 295, 385, 393, 400, 403, 421. _See_ Gothic, Romanesque, Plateresque Arenal, Doña Concepción, 133 Arfe family, the de, 202, 312 Armory, Madrid, the Royal, 114, 220, 226, 227, 228 Arroyo, 360, 363, 368 Astorga, 4, 105, 113-116, 141, 159 Asturias, 4, 79-103, 105, 112, 267, 341, 346 Asturias, Prince of, 84, 85, 288, 291, 324 Athens, 149, 268, 423 Augustine, St., 18, 155, 156, 189, 246, 342 Augustus Cæsar, 107, 392 Averroës, 88, 319 Avila, 6, 159, 160, 162, 164, 166, 195-212, 213, 216, 269, 273, 396 Azcoitia, 14, 18, 23 Azpeitia, 23, 30, 31 Baalbec, ruins of, 353 Bacon, Lord, 28, 64, 69, 135 Bailén, battle of, 172, 380 Balearic Islands, 415 Balmes y Uspia, Jaime, 210 Baltazar Carlos, infante, Don, 60, 221, 227, 378 Balzac, Honoré de, 327, 333 Barcelona, 7, 8, 26, 28, 140, 146, 216, 345, 379, 394, 395-419, 421 Basque Provinces, 4, 13-32, 36, 79, 83, 101, 105 Bazán, Doña Emilia Pardo, _see_ Pardo Bazán Bazin, M. René, 79, 258, 347, 429 Becerra, Gaspar, 115 Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo, 256 Bembo, Pietro, Cardinal, 251 Benedict XIV, 136 Benedictine rule, the, 48, 49, 135, 136, 225, 364, 389 Benson, Rev. Robert Hugh, 188 Berruguete, Alonso de, 44, 60, 82, 205, 233, _illustration_ 256, 377, 424 Bidassoa, river, 15 Bilbao, 4, 91, 140, 412 Blasco Ibáñez, Vicente, 328, 340, 341 Boabdil, 227 Bobadilla, 2, 265 Bonaventura, St., 187, 414 Borgia, St. Francis (de Borja), 21, 26, 28, 30, 191, 199, 240, 251, 252, 253, 254, 371 Borromeo, St. Charles, 191, 255 Borrow, George, _quoted_, 283 Boston, U. S. A., 64, 118, 148, 224 Bourbon kings in Spain, the, 72, 136, 171, 173, 234, 324, 367 Briz, Francisco Pelayo, 411 Browning, Robert, 34 Brunetière, Ferdinand, 337 Budé, Guillaume, 28 Byron, Lord, 321, 381 Byzantine Influences in Spanish Art, 48, 94, 96, 108, 148, 262, 403, 423 Bull-fight, the, 11, 16, 127, 128, 129, 309, 358 Burgos, 4, 33-54, 55, 56, 57, 92, 95, 148, 189, 201, 204, 273, 424 Caballero, Fernán, _pseud_ (Doña Cecelia B. von F. de Arrom), 127, 328, 329, 330, 343, 411 Cáceres, 356, 357, 358, 359, 362, 364, 369 Cadiz, 7, 71, 143, 176, 178, 316-325 Calatyud, 376 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 240, 253, 327 Calvin, John, 68 Campion, Edmund, 68 Campoamor, Ramón de, 179, 274 Cano, Alonzo, 60, 61 Cano, Melchor, 153 Cantabrian mountains, 82, 83, 84, 102, 112, 122, 124, 347, 348 Carmelite Order, the, 183, 189, 198, 199, 200 Carmona, Salvador, _see_ _illustration_ 327 Carr, Sir John, 381, 382 Castelar y Ripoll, Emilio, 179 Castile, 6, 12, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 54, 55, 79, 83, 101, 105, 165, 184, 196, 201, 204, 211, 212, 228, 229, 238, 245, 247, 257, 259, 267, 282, 397, 411, 429 Catalan language, 409, 414, 418 Catalan question, 409-414 Catalonia, 3, 79, 101, 105, 134, 253, 383, 385, 388, 391, 392, 396, 397, 400, 404, 405, 409, 410, 411, 412, 414, 419, 421, 429 Cathedrals, Spanish, 38, 42, 43, 108, 149, 150, 151, 202, 219, 233, 261, 404, 421, 422, 423, 424. _Avila_, 110, 150, 201, 205, 232, 425. _Astorga_, 115, 425. _Barcelona_, 150, 403, 404, 424. _Burgos_, 36-48, 54, 148, 150, 424. _Cadiz_, 323. _Cordova_, 261-265. _Gerona_, 421-424. _Grenada_, 271, 424. _León_, 47, 57, 108-111, 150, 415, 424. _Lérida_, 385, 387, 388, 424. _Lugo_, 122, 123, 124, 425. _Oviedo_, 92, 93, 94, 108. _Palencia_, 80, 151, 425. _Santiago_, 57, 107. 130-133. _Salamanca_, 108, 146-148, 152. _Saragossa_, 151, 376, 377, 378, 424. _Seville_, 111, 150, 216, 232, 285, 287, 289, 292, 293-315, 424. _Segovia_, 165, 166, 167, 168. _Sigüenza_, 150, 374, 424. _Tarragona_, 393, 424. _Toledo_, 150, 216, 232-238, 415, 424. _Valladolid_, 56, 57. _Zamora_, 117, 118, 424 Catherine of Aragon, 28, 224, 342 Cavadonga, 85, 86, 94, 102, 172, 227, 406 Cellini, Benvenuto, 150, 216 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 69, 72-78, 142, 155, 166, 189, 228, 240, 249, 250, 253, 255, 326, 349 Charles I of England, 165 Charles V (Charles I of Spain), Emperor, 26, 39, 72, 129, 199, 204, 216, 218, 223, 227, 249, 251, 253, 261, 265, 269, 292, 365, 366, 367, 368 Charles II, 218, 221 Charles IV, 171, 175, 226 Chartres, Cathedral of, 81, 268, 400, 415 Chartreuse, La Grande, 24 Chesterton, Mr. Gilbert K., 100 Churches, Spanish: _Alcántara_; S. Benito, 364, 424. _Asturias_; S. M. de Naranco, 95, 96, 97, 403. S. Miguel de Lino, 96, 403. _Avila_; Encarnación, convent of, 197, 199. S. José, convent of, 190, 199, 200. S. Segundo, 205. Son soles, hermitage of, 202, 203. S. Tomás, 197, 203, 204, 205. _Barcelona_; S. Ana, 403. S. M. del Mar, 403. S. M. del Pino, 403. S. Pablo del Campo, 403. _Burgos_; Las Huelgas, convent of, 49, 50. Miraflores, convent of, 48. S. Lermes, 47. S. Nicolás, 46. _Cadiz_; S. Felipe Neri, 71, 324. Capuchin church, 323. _Gerona_; S. Feliu, 425. _Granada_; S. Gerónimo, 270. _Madrid_; S. Isidro, 57. _León_; S. Isidoro, 107, 108, 123, 214, 425. S. Marcos, 111. _Salamanca_; S. Esteban, 153, 154. Espíritu Santo, 153. _Seville_; S. Magdalena, 314. Omnium Sanctorum, 281. S. Paula, 281. S. Marcos, 281. University Church, 371. _Segovia_; S. Martín, 166. S. Millán, 166, 425. _Toledo_; S. Bartolomé, 235. S. Cristo de la Luz, 231. S. Cristo de la Vega, 256. S. Domingo, 235. S. M. la Blanca, 231, 425. S. Juan de los Reyes, 239. S. Pedro Mártir, 252. S. Tomé, 235, 253. El Tránsito, 231. _Valladolid_; S. Cruz, 59. S. M. la Antigua, 57. S. Gregorio, 59. S. Pablo, 59 Churriguera, José de, 25, 123, 152 Churrigueresque Architecture, 25, 57, 123, 152, 207, 219, 376 Cid Campeador, the, 50-54, 87, 108, 116, 117, 129, 147, 230, 231 Clavijo, battle of, 47, 96 Coloma, Padre Luis, 343 Colonna, Vittoria, 227, 333 Columbus, Christopher (Cristóbal Colón), 72, 78, 153, 154, 268, 301, 395, 396 Comuneros, uprising of the, 72, 204, 227, 366 Constantinople, 75, 131, 217, 234, 260, 262, 303 Constitutions of Spain, 174, 176-180, 204, 324, 382, 383 Cordova, 7, 87, 258-265, 281, 332 Córdova, Gonsalvo de, _Gran Capitán_, 227, 270, 319 Cortés, Hernán, 113, 146, 290 Coruña, 4, 91, 122, 125, 126, 344, 412 Cranmer, Thomas, Archbishop, 68 Crashaw, Richard, 27, 191, 194, 198 Creighton, Mandell, Bishop, 64 Cromwell, Oliver, 65 Dante Alighieri, 134, 414 Daoiz, Luis, 172, 324 Darro, river, 268, 271 Democracy, Spanish, 37, 49, 73, 92, 99, 100, 112, 144, 152, 168, 202, 204, 228, 238, 284, 309, 336, 345, 355, 358, 382, 392, 428 Descartes, René, 28, 194, 418 Deza, Diego de, 153, 154 Dickens, Charles, 9, 282 Domenech, Sr. Rafael, 234, 371 Dominic, St. (de Guzmán), 114, 319, 414 Dominican Order, the, 59, 153, 197, 203, 248 "Don Quixote," 9, 75, 76, 77, 85, 92, 105, 107, 138, 170, 259, 326, 327, 328, 331, 335, 341, 347, 354, 374, 383 _Dos de Mayo_ (May 2, 1808), 159, 172, 176, 225, 323, 324, 379, 380 Douro, river, 117 Dupanloup, Félix Antoine, Mgr., 189 Dürer, Albrecht, 356 Durham, 229 Ebro, river, 376 Edward I, of England, 49, 84 Edward VI, of England, 68 Egypt, 35, 417 Elche, 80, 310 Eleanor Plantagenet, Queen of Spain, 49, 50, 374 El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), 215, 220, 234, 235, 238, 370, 371 Elizabeth of England (Tudor), 63, 372 Ellis, Mr. Henry Havelock, _quoted_, 314, 379 Emmet, Dr. Thos. Addis, 66 England, the English, 6, 9, 40, 63, 64, 66, 84, 112, 121, 140, 149, 170, 172, 175, 180, 209, 282, 316, 332, 352, 359, 370, 398, 405, 406, 417 English College, Valladolid, 62, 63, 71, 72 Erasmus, Desiderius, 28, 244, 272, 342 Escorial, the, 56, 194, 211, 213-219, 234, 421 Eslava, Miguel Hilarión, 302, 315 Espartero, General, 178 Espluga, 389, 390 Estremadura, 7, 34, 105, 145, 351-368, 425 Eugénie, Empress, 114 Eyck, Jan van, 224 Ferdinand I, _el Magno_, 116 Ferdinand III, _el Santo_, 50, 227, 289, 292 Ferdinand V, _el Católico_, 19, 72, 245, 247, 249, 272, 378 Ferdinand VII, 173, 174, 176, 177, 179, 381 Feijóo y Montenegro, Benito Gerónimo, 70, 135, 136, 210 Fernán Caballero, _see_ Caballero Feuillet, Octave, 371 Figueras, 428 Fisher, John, Bishop, 68 Fitzmaurice-Kelley, Mr. James, _quoted_, 193 Flaubert, Gustave, 346 Ford, Richard, 8, 65, 195, 219, 236, 266, 282, 359 Fortuny, Mariano, 408 Forment Damián, 377 France, the French, 6, 24, 33, 46, 66, 104, 108, 144, 149, 163, 169, 189, 251, 276, 347, 349, 371, 383, 397, 400, 407, 410, 421, 423, 427 Francia, Francisco Raibolini, _called_, 323 Francis of Assisi, St. 47, 128, 195, 218, _illustration_ 327 Franciscan Order, the, 77, 225, 239, 240, 249, 414, 417 Francis Borgia, St., _see_ Borgia Francis I, of France, 244, 227, 373 Francis de Sales, St., _see_ Sales Francis Xavier, St., _see_ Xavier French Invasion, the, 35, 54, 58, 65, 142, 150, 157, 172, 176, 177, 232, 270, 323, 335, 380, 382, 425, 426, 427 Froude, James Anthony, 40, 195 Galdós, Benito Pérez, _see_ Pérez Galdós Galicia, 4, 61, 105, 121-141, 159, 344, 345 Gallegos, Fernando, 323 Gandía, Duke of, _see_ Borgia, St. Francis Ganivet, Angel, 22, 330, 420 Garcilaso de la Vega, 166, 227, 240, 250-252, 253 Gardner Collection, Boston, Mrs. J. L., 224 Gaudix, 151, 336 Gautier, Théophile, 20, 107, 226, 295 Gener, Sr. Pompeo, 410 Germaine de Foix, Queen of Aragon, 19, 247, 272 Germany, 6, 66, 112, 173, 237, 328 Gerona, 8, 173, 179, 323, 379, 412, 420-428 Gibraltar, 2, 3, 96 Gijón, 91, 412 Godoy, Manuel, Prince of the Peace, 65, 171, 175 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von, _quoted_, 33 Gomez de Castro, Alvaro, 242 Góngora y Argote, Luis de, 252 Gothic Architecture, 46, 57, 80, 81, 93, 108, 111, 115, 123, 147, 153, 165, 167, 201, 216, 232, 233, 261, 303, 307, 364, 374, 385, 387, 391, 393, 403, 422 Goths, in Spain, the, 85, 96, 98, 115, 219, 227, 230, 231, 235, 318, 319, 368, 378 Goya, Francisco, 136, 220, 225, 226 Granada, 7, 60, 88, 217, 227, 239, 243, 244, 253, 265-273, 336, 406, 424 Granada, Luis de, 153, 252 Gregorovius, Ferdinand, 147 Greece, 96, 134, 234, 416, 423 Guadalajara, 8, 372, 373 Guadaloupe, 368 Guadalquivir, river, 230 Guadarrama Mountains, 6, 170, 214, 221 _Guardia Civil_, the, 101, 401, 402 Guipúzcoa, 14, 15 Guizot, François-Pierre-Guillaume, 70 Guzmán _el bueno_, 106 Guzmán family, the, 106, 114, 251 Guzmán, Domingo de, _see_ Dominic, St. Gypsies, Spanish, 115, 267, 271 Hadrian, Emperor, 281 Hapsburg Kings, in Spain, 70, 72, 129, 204, 214, 324, 367 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrick, 326 Henry II of England, 84 Henry VII of England, 269 Henry VIII of England, 28, 85 Hernández, Gregorio, 61, 62, 424 Herrera, Fernando de, poet, 252 Herrera, Juan de, architect, 56, 57, 213, 376, 408 Hervás y Panduro, Lorenzo, 153 Hobson, Lieut. Richmond Pearson, 370 Hogarth, William, 225 Holy Week in Seville, 302-315 Hugo, Victor, 13, 339 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 183, 187, 193, 225, 347, 385 Ignatius, St., _see_ Loyola Infantado, Duke del, 373 Inquisition, the, 64-71, 136, 155, 176, 245, 324, 365 Invincible Armada, the, 40, 76, 90, 279, 283 Ireland, 66, 134, 178, 179 Irish College, Salamanca, 153, 157, 158 Irún, 2, 16 Irving, Washington, 86 Isabella I, the Catholic, 48, 64, 72, 85, 89, 129, 133, 137, 154, 162, 166, 173, 180, 182, 203, 204, 217, 227, 241, 242, 244, 245, 252, 268, 272, 273, 292, 342, 379, 402, 429 Isabella II, 166, 173, 174, 177, 179 Isabella of Portugal, Empress, 223, _illustration_ 253, 255 Isidoro, San, 107, 319 Isla, José Francisco de la, 70, 153, 210 Islamism, 65, 87, 88, 243, 262, 263, 264, 268, 417 Italica, 278, 281, 289, 359 Italy, the Italians, 5, 30, 60, 74, 96, 107, 173, 223, 224, 251, 270, 272, 276, 280, 281, 334, 349, 352, 370, 377, 408 Jaime I, _el Conquistador_, 106, 227, 391, 415 James, St., apostle, _él de España_, 97, 114, 121, 246 Jerez de la Frontera, 316 Jerusalem, 27, 121, 123, 263, 310, 311, 417 Jesuit Order, the, 20-32, 153, 225, 255, 343 Jews in Spain, the, 67, 70, 88, 318, 319, 332, 364, 365, 367, 368 Jimena, wife of the Cid, 50, 52, 53, 108, 116 Jimenez de Cisneros, _see_ Ximenez John of Austria, Don, 73, 76, 227, 252 John of the Cross, St. (Juan de Yepes), 44, 70, 199, 234, 252 Jordán, Esteban, 60 Joubert, Joseph, 13, 24, 149 Juana _la loca_, 247, 271 Juan II, 48, 72, 113, 129 Juan de la Cruz, San, _see_ John of the Cross Juní, Juan de, 60 Lafayette, General de, 16 La Granja, 168, 170, 171, 173, 174, 181 Lainez, Diego, 153, 255 Lancaster, John of Gaunt, Duke of, 84 Lannes, Jean, Marshall, 382 Larra, Mariano José de, 36 Las Huelgas, convent of, 49, 50, 153 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 59, 153, 248 Lea, Henry Charles, 70 Lebrija, Doña Francisca de, 342 Lee, Robert E., General, 64 Legazpi, Miguel Lopez de, 18 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 194 Lenormant, Charles, 70 León, city of, 4, 83, 105, 106-113, 114, 122, 214, 424, 425 León, province of, 4, 14, 34, 82, 104-120, 142, 157 León, Luis de, 44, 68, 70, 154-157, 193, 210, 252, 319, 349 Leonado da Vinci, 222, 370 Lepanto, Battle of, 73, 75, 216, 227 Lérida, 335-388, 412, 424 Lilly, Mr. W. S., _quoted_, 183 Llorente, Juan Antonio, 65 Lockhart, James Gibson, 52, 53 Lombardy, 57, 74, 96, 107, 400 London, 28, 220, 319, 417 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, _quoted_, 316 Lorraine, Claude Gelée, _called_ Claude, 224 Loti, M. Pierre, 148, 149, 371 Louis IX of France, St., 50, 375, 416 Louis Philippe of France, 177 Lowell, James Russell, _quoted_, 104, 110, 121, 395 Loyola, 4, 16, 19-32 Loyola, St. Ignatius, 17, 19-32, 153, 191, 252, 255, 319, 371, 394, 403, 415, 427 Lucca, 17, 122 Lucero, Diego Rodríguez de, inquisitor, 245 Lugo, 4, 114, 122-125, 425 Lull, Ramón (Raimundo Lulio), 319, 395, 414-418 Luna, Alvaro de, 72, 233 Lusitania, 352 Luther, Martin, 192 Macaulay, Thomas Babbington, 191 Madrid, 2, 6, 7, 77, 80, 101, 114, 141, 142, 146, 160, 166, 169, 172, 176, 179, 213, 216, 219-228, 231, 277, 286, 287, 292, 336, 344, 349, 355, 369-372, 410, 412, 419 Maimonides, Moses, 88, 319 Maistre, Joseph de, 70, 136 Málaga, 102, 247 Mallock, Mr. W. H., _quoted_, 210 Manresa, 27, 394, 403 Manrique, Jorge, 241, 250 Mantegna, Andrea, 224 Maragatos, the, 115 Marcus Aurelius, 242 Mariana, Juan de, 153, 256 Maria Cristina of Austria, Queen-Dowager, Doña, 174, 180 Martial, 376, 392 Martyr, Peter, 89, 272 Mary I of England (Tudor), 66, 68, 85, 223, 224, 372 Masaccio, Tommaso Guidi, _called_, 110 Mateo, Maestro, 131, 132 Mecca, 261, 263 Medinaceli, family of, 290, 375 Medina del Campo, 4, 160, 162, 164 Medrano, Doña Lucía de, 342 Melanchthon, Philipp, 68 Memling, Hans, 224 Mena, Juan de, 250 Mendoza, family of, 47, 242, 252, 373 Mendoza, Diego Hurtado de, 252 Mendoza, Pedro Gonzales, Cardinal, 60, 238, 241, 242, 256, 268, 374 Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino, 67, 70, 134, 156, 348-350 Meredith, George, _quoted_, 55 Mérida, 145, 352-356, 363 Messina, 74 Michelangelo Buonarroti, 60 Mino da Fiesole, 48, 132 Miño, river, 4, 122, 124, 125, 138 Miraflores, Monastery of, 48, 203, 216 Mistral, Federi, 418 Monforte, 122, 137, 138 Montañés, Juan Martinez, 44, 308, 371, 424 Montesquieu, Charles, 326 Montserrat, 26, 27, 394 Monzón, 384 Moore, Sir John, 125 Moors, the, 3, 13, 50, 51, 53, 67, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 94, 96, 115, 116, 117, 129, 148, 178, 196, 205, 216, 219, 227, 230, 235, 239, 243, 244, 249, 258-270, 289, 300, 304, 313, 318, 352, 364, 365, 367, 369, 393, 415, 417 Moorish Art, 258, 267, 268, 280, 281, 294, 379 Moriscos, Expulsion of the, 86, 89, 90, 365 More, Sir Thomas, 68 Moro, Antonio, 223, 224 Motley, John Lothrop, 224, 380 Mozarabic Mass, the, 235-238 Mudéjar Architecture, 59, 231, 232, 280, 290, 373 Müller, Prof. Friederich Max, 153 Murat, Joachim, Marshall, 380 Murcia, 105, 372 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban, 44, 225, 234, 237, 253, 280, 293, 298, 323, 370 Mystics, Spanish, 10, 11, 12, 22, 27, 183, 186, 187, 191, 193, 195, 198, 212, 242, 319, 331, 371, 414, 415, 428 Napier, Sir Wm. F. P., 172 Naples, 74, 270, 332, 397 Napoleon I, 35, 172, 173, 176, 382 Navarre, 14, 29, 50, 79, 105, 247, 372, 383 Navas de Tolosa, battle of, Las, 50, 242 Nelson, Horatio, Admiral, 370 Neri, St. Philip, 31, 191 Newbolt, Mr. Henry, _quoted_, 413 New England, 64, 118, 148, 289, 361, 397 Novels, Modern Spanish, 93, 134, 170, 195, 326-350 Núñez de Arce, Gaspar, 112, 415 O'Donnell y Jorris, General Leopoldo, 178 Olivares, Conde Duque de, 221 Ommiade dynasty, the, 87, 88, 89 Oran, siege of, 239, 246 Ordoño II of León, 108 O'Reilly, Count Alexander, 178 Ormsby, John, 51 Osuna, Duke of, 47 Oviedo, 4, 79, 90-103, 106, 108, 135, 341, 342 Oxford, 28, 68, 342, 143, 152 Padilla, Juan de, 227, 257 Paestum, ruins of, 353 Palafox, Count José, 380 Palatinate, the, 243 Palencia, 4, 79, 80, 91, 190 Palestine, 80, 94, 311, 416 Palma, 415, 417 Palos, 320 Pamplona, 26, 30, 427 Pancorbo, Pass of, 34, 35 Pardo Bazán, Doña Emilia, 125, 134, 135, 328, 343-345 Paris, 1, 28, 29, 142, 146, 415 Parma, 323 Parmigianino, Mazzuoli of Parma, _called_, 224 Parthenon, the, 149, 268 Pasajes, 16 Pascal, Blaise, 142, 240 Patmore, Coventry, 199 Pavia, battle of, 227, 251, 292 Pedro I, _el Cruel_, 84 Pelayo, King, 85, 90, 93, 94, 95, 108, 227 Pereda, José María de, 327, 328, 336, 339, 340, 341, 346, 347, 350 Pérez Galdós, Sr. Benito, 209, 327, 328, 337-340, 346 Persia, 88, 417 Pescara, Fernando Francisco d'Avalos, Marquis of, 227, 251 Philip I, _el Hermoso_ (Archduke), 245, 271 Philip II, 75, 85, 129, 157, 213, 216, 217, 219, 223, 291, 372 Philip III, 90, 366 Philip IV, 4, 48, 221, 385 Philip V, 129, 171, 383 Philippines, the, 18, 203, 333 Ph[oe]nicians in Spain, the, 98, 318 Pirates, Moorish, 87, 89, 239, 246, 247, 367 Pizarro, Francisco, 146, 364 Plateresque Architecture, 57, 58, 59, 111, 152, 153, 154, 256, 261, 353, 400 Pliny, 392 Poblet, Monastery of, 8, 106, 177, 214, 388-391, 399, 425 Polyglot Bible, the, 246, 247 Pontevedra, 137, 138 Pontius Pilate, 391 Port-Bou, 2, 8, 428 _Pórtico de la Gloria_, 57, 109, 130, 154, 268, 424 Portugal, 4, 134, 138, 176, 291, 292, 349, 359, 361, 363 Prado Gallery,--Madrid, the, 220-226, 369-372 Prescott, W. H., 113 Prim, Juan, General, 178, 179 Proverbs, Spanish, 108, 117, 156, 219, 228, 240, 257, 281, 283, 328, 334, 360, 383, 413 Pyrenees, the, 15, 29, 33, 86, 383, 384, 420, 421, 422, 425 Quiñones, Suero de, 114 Quintana, Manuel José, 323 Ramiro I of Asturias, 95, 98 Ranke, Leopold von, 65, 70 Raphael Sanzio, 224 _Reconquista_, the, 86, 89, 101, 227, 228, 268, 269, 319 Redondela, 137 Rembrandt van Rijn, 221, 224 Renaissance Art in Spain, 48, 58, 59, 91, 115, 152, 153, 154, 158, 203, 205, 239, 256, 271, 364, 377, 425 _Reyes Católicos, los_, 133, 154, 239, 266, 271, 357, 383, 395 Ribadeneyra, Pedro de, 255, 256 Ribera, José de, _Lo Spagnoletto_, 225 Ripalda, Gerónimo de Martinez de, 153 Ripoll, Abbey of, 394 Rivas, Angel de Sáavedra, Duque de, 332 Roderick, last of the Gothic kings, 85, 230 Roelas, Juan de las, 225 "Romancero del Cid," 9, 50, 51, 52, 53, 108, 116, 250, 326 Romanesque Architecture in Spain, 48, 57, 94, 107, 111, 118, 121, 131, 132, 147, 148, 152, 164, 166, 196, 216, 385, 391, 393, 403 Romanes, George J., _quoted_, 351 Roman remains in Spain, 7, 47, 107, 114, 122, 143, 146, 164, 165, 202, 352-356, 359, 362, 375, 393, 425 Rome, 30, 73, 115, 192, 220, 238, 241, 250, 255, 281, 294, 305, 311, 319 Ruiz de Alarcon, Juan, 327 Ruiz y Mendoza, Lieut. Jacinto, 324 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustus de, 77 Saints, Spanish, _see headings_, Alcántara, Borgia, Dominic, Ferdinand III, John of the Cross, Loyola, Xavier, Teresa Salamanca, 4, 28, 58, 89, 105, 142-158, 160, 167, 184, 189, 194, 203, 205, 273, 298, 342, 424 Sales, St. Francis de, 27, 191 Salic Law, the, 173, 174 Salisbury, cathedral of, 80, 415 Salmerón, Alfonso, 153 _Sancho Panza_, 107, 165, 228, 334, 341, 383 Sancho II, _el Fuerte_, 116 Sancho IV, _el Bravo_, 375 San Sebastián, 16, 20, 21, 22, 124 Santander, 4, 91, 340, 346, 347, 348, 412 Santayana, Prof. George, _quoted_, 213, 293, 318, 367, 369 Santiago, Compostella, 4, 107, 109, 121, 122, 125, 130-134, 141, 273, 344, 424 Santiago, knights of, 111, 178, 250, 352, 374, 413 Saragossa, 8, 173, 376-382 Sassoferrato, Giovanni Battista Salvi, _of_, 45, 376 Schack, Adolf Fred. von, 65 Scott, Sir Walter, 77 Segovia, 6, 159-182, 213, 217, 269, 273, 365, 396 _Seises_, dancing of, _los_, 12, 297, 298, 299, 300 Seneca, 319 Servet, Miguel, 68 Seville, 7, 37, 76, 181, 189, 219, 225, 230, 247, 270, 273, 274-315, 323, 327, 345, 351, 371, 374 Shakespeare, William, 50, 224, 273, 327, 336 Sidney, Sir Philip, 250, 251 Siege of Gerona, 173, 425-428 Siege of Saragossa, 173, 380-382 Sierra Nevada, the, 269, 292 Sigüenza, 8, 238, 373, 374, 375, 392 Siloe, Gil de, 48 Simancas, Archives of, 67 Soldiers in Spanish literature, 73, 240, 250, 252, 337, 414 Soto, Domingo de, 153 Southwell, Robert, 68 Spencer, Herbert, 210, 411 Spínola, Marquis, 222, 322, 370, 427 Stirling-Maxwell, Sir William, 286 Street, George E., 110, 385 Suárez, Francisco, 153, 210 Switzerland, 83, 103, 269 Tagus, river, 9, 229, 230, 256, 359, 363, 424 Talavera, Fernando de, Bishop, 68, 244 Tannenberg, M. Boris de, 348 Tarifa, Siege of, 106 Tarragona, 8, 391, 392, 393, 412, 424 Teresa, Saint, 10, 44, 62, 70, 159, 166, 183-212, 234, 252, 331, 429 Theodosius, Emperor, 281 Theotokopaulos, Domenikos, _see_ El Greco Thompson, Francis, 27, 254 Ticknor, George, 59, 69, 256 Tintoretto, Jocopo Robusti, _called_, 215, 234 Tirso de Molina (Gabriel Téllez), 327 Titian, Tiziano Vecelli, _called_, 223, 227, 234, 253, 372 Toledo, 7, 9, 36, 57, 87, 88, 94, 108, 146, 219, 229-257, 396, 424 Toledo, Archbishops of, 77, 88, 116, 241, 242 Tolstoi, Count Lyoff, 342 Tormes, river, 143, 206 Tostado, Bishop Alfonso de Madrigal, el, 205 Toulouse, 107 Townsend, Rev. Joseph, 266, 401 Trajan, Emperor, 164, 281, 356, 359, 362 Trujillo, 364, 367 Urraca, of Zamora, Doña, 108, 117 Valdés, Sr. Armando Palacio, 195, 345, 346 Valencia, 53, 90, 105, 140, 150, 340, 372 Valera y Alcalá Galiano, Juan, 155, 326, 327, 328, 330-336, 339, 346, 350, 413 Valladolid, 4, 55-78, 129, 149, 219, 241 Van Dyke, Sir Anthony, 224 Vargas, Luis de, 297 Vasari, Giorgio, 115 Vega, Garcelaso de la, _see_ Garcilaso Vega Carpio, Lope Felix de, 240, 250, 256, 327, 363, 391 Velarde, Pedro, 172, 324 Velasco, Pedro Fernández, Constable, 47 Velasquez, Diego de Silva y, 6, 45, 60, 220, 221, 222, 238, 370, 371, 385, 427 Venice, 30, 215, 234 Verdaguer, Jacinto, 418 Veronese, Paolo Caliari, _called_, 224 Vézinet, Monsieur F., 341 Victoria-Eugenia, Queen of Spain, Doña, 18, 85, 165, 181, 287, 288, 289, 290 Vigarni, Felipe de, 44, 45, 233, 424 Vigo, 4, 91, 134, 137 Villena, Marqués de, 47 Vives, Juan Luis, 28, 70, 208 Vincent de Paul, Saint, 191 Wamba, King, 230 Wars, Carlist, 14, 173, 174, 177, 282, 389, 381 War, Peninsula, 125, 172, 323, 359, 379-382, 425-428 War, Spanish-American, 18, 370 Washington, George, 136, 242 Watson, Mr. William, _quoted_, 229, 396, 420 Wellington, Duke of, 143, 172, 266 Westminster Abbey, 262, 415, 417 Wesley, John, 183 Weyden, Rogier van der, 224 Women, Spanish, 21, 100, 102, 117, 130, 133, 184, 204, 206, 272, 276, 277, 290, 295, 313, 314, 328, 333, 334, 342, 354, 381, 426, 428, 429 Wood Carvings, Spanish, 43, 44, 45, 46, 60, 61, 62, _illustration_ 327 Worcester, cathedral, 233 Wordsworth, William, 156, 379 Xavier, St. Francis, 29, 191, 252 Xerez, _see_ Jerez de la Frontera Ximena, _see_ Jimena Ximenez de Cisneros, Francisco, Cardinal, 28, 59, 82, 142, 210, 236-250, 272, 319, 366, 374 Yuste, Convent of, 199, 367, 368 Zamora, 4, 105, 116-120, 143, 159, 160, 161, 162, 341, 424 Zaragoza, _see_ Saragossa Zola, Emile, 333, 343 Zumárraga, 16, 17 Zurbaran, Francisco, 44, 220, 225 * * * * * The following typographical errors have been corrected by the etext transcriber: husbands, husbands to claim their wives.=>husbands to claim their wives. folded handerchiefs=>folded handkerchiefs masssive Roman walls=>massive Roman walls Leôn Cathedral>León Cathedral direct rout from Paris=>direct route from Paris Philip V turned into an artificial French pleasure ground=>Philip V turned it into an artificial French pleasure ground You walk about the Valasquez room bewildered>=You walk about the Velasquez room bewildered one throughly disagreeable=>one thoroughly disagreeable Chrismas fiestas began=>Christmas fiestas began á l'état civil=>à l'état civil a politican, and a journalist=>a politician, and a journalist good literary quailty=>good literary quality sense to preceive the best=>sense to perceive the best and to that unforgetable=>and to that unforgettable hotel corrridors would be=>hotel corridors would be where Agustus Cæsar=>where Augustus Cæsar she is too agressive=>she is too aggressive Murray's "Handbook"=>Murray's "Hand-book" Calderon=>Calderón Portico=>Pórtico Alba de Tormés=>Alba de Tormes Oviedo la sacra, Toledo la rica, Sevilla la grande, Salamanaca la fuerte, León la bella=>Oviedo la sacra, Toledo la rica, Sevilla la grande, Salamanca la fuerte, León la bella Parmegianino, Mazzuoli of Parma=>Parmigianino, Mazzuoli of Parma El Greco (Domenikos Theotocopoulos)=>El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) * * * * * FOOTNOTES: [1] From the Latin word _solum_, ground. [2] "C'est un pois qui a l'ambition d'être un haricot et qui réussit trop bien." THÉOPHILE GAUTIER "Voyage en Espagne." [3] "Las inteligencias más humildas comprenden las ideas más elevadas; y los que economizan la verdad y la publican sólo cuando están seguros de ser comprendidos viven en grandisimo error, porque la verdad, aunque no sea comprendida, ejerce misteriosas influencias y conduce por cáminos ocultos a las sublimidades más puras, alas que brotan incomprensibles y espontáneas de las almas vulgares." Angel Ganivet: "Idearium Español." [4] When the Duke of Osuna, the Spanish Ambassador to England in Elizabeth's reign, dropped some pearls of price from his embroidered cloak, he disdained to pick them up. A nobler form of Castilian haughtiness was that of the Marqués de Villena who, refusing to live in his palace after a traitor (the Constable de Bourbon) had been lodged there, set fire to it. There is something that appeals to the imagination in many of the privileges of Spanish nobles. Thus the Marqués de Astorga to-day, is hereditary canon in León Cathedral, because one of the Osorios fought in the battle of Clavijo, in 846. [5] The blood of the Cid flows to-day in the veins of Alfonso XIII through his descent both from the French Bourbons and from Spain's earlier royal house. A daughter of the Campeador married an infante of Navarre, whose granddaughter married Sancho III of Castile. The son of this king was the good and great Alfonso VIII _él de las Navas_, who, married to Eleanor of England (they both lie buried in Las Huelgas), was grandfather alike of St. Ferdinand III of Castile and St. Louis IX of France. [6] Translated by Ormsby. [7] "Ancient Spanish Ballads," translated by Lockhart. [8] Llorente, a bitter assailant of the Inquisition, gives the number of victims as 31,900. Llorente was traitor to his country during the invasion of the French and fled ignominiously on their defeat, pensioned during his later years by the freemasons of Paris; he falsified Basque history to win the corrupt Godoy's favour (von Ranke's statement); an ex-priest he assisted in church robbery. Would Benedict Arnold be accepted as an authority on the American Revolution? The Encyclopedia Brittanica, even in its ninth edition, has in its sketch on Spain, the following curious assertion--"bigotry and fanaticism which led to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of victims at the hands of the Inquisition." Even the political victims in the Netherlands under the inexorable Alba, who did to death some 18,000 people, cannot swell the number to a fraction of this statement. And if the Netherlands' victims are to be laid to the door of religious persecution, then must the massacres in Ireland of the inexorable Cromwell come under the same heading: as an Englishman judges Cromwell apart from his crimes, so a Spaniard sees more in Alva than his felonies. History presented to us in parallel columns would do much toward giving us fairer views. [9] Described by an eyewitness, the brave gentlewoman, Mrs. Willoughby. See: "English Martyrs," Vol. I and II of the C. T. S. Publications: 22 Paternoster Row: London. Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet in "Ireland under English Rule" (Putnam's Sons, N. Y. 1903) gives occurrences equally terrible. [10] I do not mention in this list Archbishop Cranmer and his fellow prelates, Latimer and Ridley, since having been persecutors themselves they may be said to have reaped under Mary Tudor what they had sowed under Edward VI. They were condemned and executed by the laws which they had made and put in force against Unitarians and Anabaptists. [11] H. C. Lea, whose ill-digested mass of facts torn from their proper context are as representative of Spain as the accounts of a foreigner who had studied only the police reports of America, would be of us. [12] "L'Inquisition fût, d'abord, plus politique que religieuse, et destinée à maintenir l'Ordre plutôt qu'à défendre la foi," says the Protestant historian Guizot (Hist. Mod. Lect. II). [13] Every Spanish child knows the story of Guzmán _el bueno_ at Tarifa. The rebel infante threatened to kill Guzmán's son, were the city not surrendered, whereupon the hero flung his own knife down from the walls; rather the death of him he loved best than disloyalty to his trust and king. The boy was killed under his father's eyes. When the tomb of this national hero was opened in 1570, the skeleton discovered was nine feet long, just as Jaime I _el Conquistador_, a contemporary of Guzmán, was found to be of gigantic proportions when the pantheon of the Aragonese kings in Poblet was sacked in 1835. [14] "León Cathedral is indeed in almost every respect worthy to be ranked among the noblest churches in Europe. Its detail is rich and beautiful throughout, the plan very excellent, the sculptures with which it is adorned quite equal in quality and character to that of any church of the age, and the stained glass with which its windows are filled some of the best in Europe." G. E. STREET: "Gothic Architecture in Spain." [15] "Libro del Paso Honroso" written by an eye witness, Pero Rodríguez de Lena. Prescott says that no country has been more fruitful in the field of historical composition than Spain. The chronicles date from the twelfth century, every great family, every town and every city had its chronicler. Compare the minute details we have of Cortés in Mexico about 1517, with the meager accounts we find of the North American settlers some generations later. [16] It is amusing to find Napier, whose "History of the Peninsula War" is one of the most one-sided of chronicles, laying down the law in this fashion: "The English are a people very subject to receive and to cherish false impressions, proud of their credulity, as if it were a virtue, the majority will adopt any fallacy, and cling to it with a tenacity proportioned to its grossness." [17] Frequently in Spain one comes on Irish names among the leading families. The O'Donnells, Dukes of Tetuán, have had several generations of distinguished men. In the 18th century Count Alexander O'Reilly led the Spanish armies in the New World and the Old, and when Governor of Andalusia, he so reformed economic conditions in Cadiz that a beggar was unknown on the streets. He too was followed by an able son. Reading Spanish books the traces of Irish exiles are many: thus a Doña Lucía Fitzgerald organized and drilled a woman's regiment during the siege of Gerona in 1808; and the beautiful wife of the poet Campoamor was a Doña Guillermina O'Gorman. "We're all over Austria, France, and Spain, Said Kelly, and Burke, and Shea." [18] "L'un des signes distinctifs des mystiques c'est justement l'équilibre absolu, l'entier bon sens." J.-K. Huysmans: "_En Route_." [19] "La Mystique est une science absolument exacte. Elle peut annoncer d'avance la plupart des phénomènes qui se produisent dans une âme que le Seigneur destine à la vie parfaite; elle suit aussi nettement les opérations spirituelles que la physiologie observe les états différents du corps. De siècles en siècles, elle a divulgué la marche de la Grâce et ses effets tantôt impétueux et tantôt lents; elle a même précisé les modifications des organes matériels qui se transforment quand l'âme tout entière se fond en Dieu. Saint Denys l'Aréopagite, saint Bonaventure, Hugues et Richard de Saint Victor, saint Thomas d'Aquin, saint Bernard, Ruysbroeck, Angèle de Foligno, les deux Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, Denys le chartreux, sainte Hildegarde, sainte Catherine de Gênes, sainte Catherine de Sienne, sainte Madeleine de Pazzi, sainte Gertrude, d'autres encore ont magistralement exposé les principes et les théories de la Mystique." J.-K. Huysmans: "_En Route_." [20] It has been said that there never was a spiritually minded man, who, knowing Saint Teresa's works, was not devoted to them. In his "Journal Intime," that most distinguished prelate of modern France, Mgr. Dupanloup, wrote: "La vie de Sainte Térèse m'y a charmé.... J'ai rarement reçu, dans ma vie, une bénédiction, une impression de grâce plus simple et plus profonde." [21] "Just as the Church of Rome has absorbed Platonism in the doctrine of the Logos and of the Trinity, and has absorbed Aristotelianism in the doctrine of Christ's real presence in the Eucharist, so we may naturally expect that in its doctrine of its own nature, it will some day absorb formally, having long done so informally, the main ideas of that evolutionary philosophy, which many people regard as destined to complete its downfall; and that it will find in this philosophy--in the philosophy of the Darwins, the Spencers, and the Huxleys--a scientific explanation of its own teaching authority, like that which is found in Aristotle for its doctrine of Transubstantiation.... It may be said that the Roman Church itself developed without being conscious of its own scientific character, just as men were for ages unconscious of the circulation of their own blood.... Like an animal seeking nutriment it put forth its feelers or tentacles on all sides, seizing, tasting, and testing all forms of human thought, all human opinions, and all alleged discoveries. It absorbs some of these into itself, and extracts their nutritive principles; it immediately rejects some as poisonous or indigestible; and gradually expels from its system others, condemned as heresies, which it has accidentally or experimentally swallowed." W. H. Mallock: "Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption." 1900. [22] Moro made a replica of this portrait (or perhaps the Prado picture is the replica) which Mary gave to her Master of Horse. It now fortunately is in America, in Mrs. J. L. Gardner's notable collection in _Fenway Court_, Boston. It is hard to recognize in the Mary of the Flemish Master the queen of whom Motley wrote in his "Dutch Republic": "tyrant, bigot, and murderess ... small, lean and sickly, painfully nearsighted yet with an eye of fierceness and fire, her face wrinkled by lines of care and evil passions." [23] "Io cristiano viejo soy, y para ser Conde esto me basta"--old Spanish proverb, quoted by Sancho Panza. Proverbs, which Cervantes called "short sentences drawn from long experience," often show the qualities of a race. In many of the popular sayings of Castile is found the strong feeling of manhood's equality: "Cuando Dios amanece, para todos amanece." "Mientras que duermen todos son iguales." "No ocupo más pies de tierra el cuerpo del Papa que el del sacristan." [24] See the frontispiece: Portrait of an Hidalgo, by El Greco. [25] "Nunca la lanza embotó la pluma, ni la pluma la lanza,"--old Spanish proverb. [26] "The Hound of Heaven": Francis Thompson. [27] "Donde hay música, no puede haber cosa mala."--Spanish proverb. [28] "Spain is one of the few countries in Europe where poverty is not treated with contempt, and I may add, where the wealthy are not blindly idolized."--George Borrow: "The Bible in Spain." [29] Our Lady of Victory is the patroness of the _cigarreras_. [30] "O trois fois saints chanoines! dormez doucement sous votre dalle, â l'ombre de votre cathédrale chérie, tandis que votre âme se prelasse au paradis dans une stalle probablement moins bien sculptée que celle de votre ch[oe]ur!" THÉOPHILE GAUTIER: "Voyage en Espagne." [31] "One of the commonest types among the Greek figurines, certainly representing the average Greek lady, might be supposed to represent a Spanish lady, so closely does the face, the dress, the mantilla-like covering of the head, the erect and dignified carriage, recall modern Spain." "The Soul of Spain."--HAVELOCK-ELLIS. [32] The same trait is shown in the astonishingly fecund theater of Spain, where is found for one golden century the indelible mark of the race. First came Lope de Vega with his dashing picaresque comedies _de capa y espada_, that more induce to laughter than to vice, the vigorous and supple Lope, whom all nations have "found good to steal from." Then followed the powerful Tirso de Molina, a dramatist of vision and passion, and Ruiz de Alacón with his high ethical aim and equal execution, and finally Calderón, who in the midst of his plays shows himself an exquisite lyric poet. In Seville we used to see what would here be a dime-museum crowd pouring into an hour's bit of frolic, such as Benevente's "Intereses Creados," of the true cape-and-sword type. Those plays which we personally saw proved to us Valera's words, that erotic literature rises in sadness and pessimism, not in the hearty bravura and zest of life of the Spanish theater. [33] "Es menester mucho tiempo para venir á conocer las personas," is one of Sancho Panza's wise saws. [34] See "L'Espagne Littéraire" by Boris de Tannenberg (Paris, 1903). [35] "Surely chivalry is not dead!" exclaimed Lieut. R. P. Hobson when describing the courteous treatment he, as prisoner, had received from the Spanish officers: "The history of warfare probably contains no instance of chivalry on the part of captors greater than that of those who fired on the 'Merrimac.'" The gallant American's account of his feat in Santiago harbor proves that Spínola's spirit survives on both sides of the Atlantic. [36] "In Gerona Cathedral there was a cat who would stroll about in front of the _capilla mayor_ during the progress of Mass, receiving the caresses of the passers-by. It would be a serious mistake to see here any indifference to religion, on the contrary, this easy familiarity with sacred things is simply the attitude of those who in Wordsworth's phrase, "lie in Abraham's bosom all the year," and do not, as often among ourselves, enter a church once a week to prove how severely respectable, for the example of others, we can show ourselves." "The Soul of Spain"--HAVELOCK ELLIS (1908). [37] An idea of Spain's romance of soul can be gathered from the rules and regulations of her national police, the Civil Guard, who may be called the descendants of Isabella's _Santa Hermandad_. "1. Honour must be the chief motive for the Civil Guard, to be preserved intact and without a flaw. Once gone, honour can never be regained. " ... 3. The force must be an example to the country of neatness, order, bearing, good morals and spotless honour.... "8. The Civil Guard ought to be regarded as the protector of the afflicted, inspiring confidence when seen approaching.... For the Civil Guard must freely give his life for the good of any sufferer. " ... 9. Whenever a member of the Civil Guard has the good fortune to render a service to anyone, he must never accept, if offered, a reward, bearing in mind that he has done nothing but his simple duty. " ... 27. The Civil Guard will refrain with the greatest scrupulousness from drawing near to listen to any knot of people in street, shop, or private house, for this would be an act of espionage, altogether outside the office and beneath the dignity of any member of the force." That such rules have molded her exemplary constabulary, no one will deny who has traveled much in Spain. They are loved and respected by the people; witness this popular song: "Atenta á la vida humana Siempre la Guardia Civil ... Y por eso en todas partes Benediciones la acompañan, Por eso Dios la protege Cuando al peligro se lanza, Por eso la canto yo Con el corazón y el alma: Viva la Guardia Civil Porque es la gloria de España!" [38] This most beautiful church, dating before the Crusades, one of the most ancient, with the Asturian churches, Santa María de Naranco and San Miguel de Lino, in all the Peninsula, was totally destroyed by the socialist mob, in the riots of July, 1909. [39] "El principio de la salud está en conocer la enfermedad."--Old Spanish proverb. 
40528	----	[Illustration: A MANDURRA SOLO.] SPANISH VISTAS BY GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP _ILLUSTRATED_ BY CHARLES S. REINHART NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 1883 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1883, by HARPER & BROTHERS, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. * * * * * _All rights reserved._ TO FRANCES M. LATHROP WHOSE TASTE FOR TRAVEL AND OBSERVATION EARLY PROMPTED HIS OWN These Sketches are Dedicated BY HER SON THE AUTHOR PREFACE. The two great Mediterranean peninsulas which, in opposite quarters, jut southward where--as George Eliot says, in her "Spanish Gypsy"-- "Europe spreads her lands Like fretted leaflets, breathing on the deep," may not inaptly be likened to a brother and sister, instead of taking their places under the usual similitude of "sister countries." They have points of marked resemblance, in their picturesqueness, their treasures of art, their associations of history and romance; but, just as the physical aspect of Spain and its shape upon the map are broader, more thick-set and rugged than the slender form and flowing curves of Italy, so the Spanish language--with its Arabic gutturals interspersed among melodious linguals and vowel sounds--has been called the masculine development of that Southern speech of which the Italian presents the feminine side. The people of both countries exhibit a similar excitable, ardent quality in their characters; but the national temperament of the Spaniards is, perhaps, somewhat hardier, more virile, and sturdier in its passionateness. It seems to be true that, while the Greek spirit transferred itself to Italy in the days of Augustus, renewing its influence at the period of the Renaissance, and leaving upon people and manners an impress never since quite effaced--an influence tending toward a certain feminine refinement--the spirit of Rome also transferred itself to the subject country, Hispania, and imbued that region with the strong, austere, or wilful characteristics of purely Latin civilization, which are still traceable there. But, however we may account for the phenomena, it is likely that the mingled contrasts and resemblances of Italy and Spain will more and more induce travellers to visit the Iberian Peninsula. Italy has now been so thoroughly depicted in all its larger phases, from the foreigner's point of view, that investigation must hereafter chiefly be concerned with the study of special and local features. Spain, on the other hand, offers itself to the general observer and to the tourist as a field scarcely more explored than Italy was forty or fifty years ago; and the evidence is abundant that the current of travel is setting vigorously in this direction. With the extension of a railroad system and the incursion of sight-seeing strangers in larger number, we must of course expect that many of the most interesting peculiarities of the people will undergo modification and at length disappear. This, however, cannot be helped; and the following chapters, at the same time that they may encourage and aid those who are destined to bring about such changes, may also serve to arrest and preserve for future reference the actual appearance of Spain to-day. Much might be written, with the certainty of an eager audience, concerning the present political condition of the country, by any one who had had opportunities for examining it; and Mr. John Hay, a few years ago, gave some glimpses of it in his charming volume, "Castilian Days." My own brief sojourn afforded no adequate opportunity for such observation. But it may be not inadmissible to record here one of the casual remarks which came to my notice in this connection. On a Mediterranean steamer I met with an exceedingly bright and healthy man of the middle class, fairly well educated--one of those specimens of solid, temperate, active manhood fortunately very common in Spain, on whom the future of the country really depends--and, noticing from my lame speech that I was not a native, he asked me, guardedly, if I was an Englishman. "No," I said; "I am an American of the North, of the United States." His manner changed at once; he thawed: more than that, his face lighted with hope, as if he had found a powerful friend, and he gazed at me with a certain delighted awe, attributing to my humble person a glory for which I was in no way responsible. "You are a republican, then!" he exclaimed. "Yes." He gave me another long, silent look, and then confessed that he, too, was a firm believer in republicanism. "Are there many Spaniards now of that party?" I inquired. His reply showed that he appreciated the difficulties of the national problem. "Party!" he cried. "Listen: in Spain there is a separate political party for every man." After a slight pause he added, bitterly, "Sometimes, _two_!" It may still be said with a good deal of accuracy, though not of course with the literalness and the sweeping application that Paul de Saint Victor gave the words, in speaking of the French Charles II.'s reign, that "Spain no more changes than the arid zone that encircles a volcano. Kings pass, dynasties are renewed, events succeed each other, but the foundation remains immobile, and Philip II. still rules." I have not attempted to review political matters; and neither have I tried to give an exhaustive account of the country in any other respect. The pictures which I have given I have endeavored to make vivid and faithful; and, if I have succeeded, they will present the essential characteristics of Spain. What has thus been the object of the text has certainly been attained in the drawings by Mr. Reinhart, which supply much the greater part of the illustrations in this volume. Made after sketches from life, which were prepared with unflagging zeal, and often under great difficulties, they frequently tell more than language can convey. Their graphic touch, their variety and humor, their technical merit, give them the best of recommendations; but a word of distinct recognition is due here to the artist for the fidelity and spirit with which he has reproduced so many scenes peculiar to the country. It is hoped that the concluding chapter of "Hints to Travellers" will prove useful, as supplying certain information not always accessible in guide-books, and also as condensing the practical particulars of the subject in a convenient form. THE WAYSIDE, _Concord_, _April 1, 1883._ CONTENTS. PAGE _FROM BURGOS TO THE GATE OF THE SUN_ 1 _THE LOST CITY_ 34 _CORDOVAN PILGRIMS_ 70 _ANDALUSIA AND THE ALHAMBRA_ 103 _MEDITERRANEAN PORTS AND GARDENS_ 152 _HINTS TO TRAVELLERS_ 186 ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE A MANDURRA SOLO _Frontispiece_ INITIAL LETTER 1 TWO ASSASSINS IN LONG CLOAKS 2 THE NIGHT-WATCH 4 DANCING BOYS 6 THE ARCH OF ST. MARY 8 PEASANTS IN THE MARKET-PLACE 11 IN THE MIRADOR 13 LANDSCAPE BETWEEN BURGOS AND MADRID 17 THE PLAZA MAYOR 21 WATER-DEALER 23 OLD ARTILLERY PARK 24 THE ESCORIAL 25 ON THE ROAD TO THE BULL-FIGHT 27 PLAN OF THE BULL-RING 28 A STREET SCENE 32 TAIL-PIECE 33 INITIAL LETTER 34 ENTRANCE TO TOLEDO 35 THE NARROW WAY 36 SPANISH PEASANT (from a Drawing By William M. Chase) 37 SINGING GIRL 41 CLOISTER OF ST. JOHN OF THE KINGS 42 A BIT OF CHARACTER 43 SPANISH SOLDIERS PLAYING DOMINOS 44 A NARROW STREET 45 WOMAN WITH BUNDLE 46 THE SERENADERS 47 A PLENTIFUL SUPPLY OF PLATES 50 THE TOILET--A SUNDAY SCENE 51 A TOLEDO PRIEST 53 TOLEDO SERVITORS AT THE FOUNTAIN 55 A PROFESSIONAL BEGGAR 57 A GROUP OF MENDICANTS 58 A PATIO IN TOLEDO 59 THE HOME OF "SOLITUDE" 61 "MEN AND BOYS SLUMBER OUT-OF-DOORS EVEN IN THE HOT SUN"67 A STRANGE FUNERAL 68 TAIL-PIECE 69 INITIAL LETTER 70 WHETSTONE 71 COFFEE AT CASTILLEJO 72 PRIMITIVE THRASHING 74 WHILE THE WOMEN ARE AT MASS 75 WATER-STAND IN CORDOVA 77 THE GAY COSTER-MONGERS OF ANDALUSIA 79 THE MEZQUITA 80 RELIC PEDDLERS 81 THE GARDEN OF THE ALCAZAR 83 PRIEST AND PURVEYOR 85 FLOWERS FOR THE MARKET 85 TRAVELLERS TO CORDOVA 87 "ARRÉ, BURR-R-RICO!" 89 THE FRUIT OF THE DESIERTA 94 MEMENTO MORI 97 DIFFICULT FOR FOREIGNERS 101 THE JASMINE GIRL 101 INITIAL LETTER 103 MAIN ENTRANCE TO THE CATHEDRAL, SEVILLA (from a Photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid) 105 THE GIRALDA TOWER (from a Photograph By J. Laurent & Co., Madrid) 107 THE "UNDERGROUND" MAIL 109 A STREET CORNER 115 FIGARO 118 "STONE WALLS DO NOT A PRISON MAKE" 121 IN "THE SERPENT" 123 "ALL THE DAY I AM HAPPY" 127 GRANADA UNDERTAKER 130 THE MOORISH GATE, SEVILLA 131 A WATER-CARRIER 133 BIT OF ARCH IN A COURT OF THE ALHAMBRA (from a Photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid) 137 THE TOILET TOWER (from a Photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid) 139 BOUDOIR OF LINDARAXA 141 GYPSIES 150 INITIAL LETTER 152 GYPSY DANCE 154 A SPANISH MONK 158 TRANSPORTATION OF POTTERY 160 GARLIC VENDER 161 DIVING FOR COPPERS 164 A MODERN SANCHO PANZA 167 STREET BARBER 168 BIBLES _VERSUS_ MELONS 169 CUSTOMS OFFICERS 171 POST INN, ALICANTE 172 ALICANTE FRUIT-SELLER 173 METHOD OF IRRIGATION NEAR VALENCIA 175 CHURCH OF SANTA CATALINA, VALENCIA 176 A VALENCIA CAB 178 BARCELONA FISHERMEN 180 TAIL-PIECE 185 INITIAL LETTER 186 ST. JOHN AT BURGOS--CHERUBS IN ADORATION 210 SPANISH VISTAS. _FROM BURGOS TO THE GATE OF THE SUN._ I. [Illustration: W] We took our places, for the performance was about to begin. The scene represented a street in Burgos, the long-dead capital of old Castile. Time: night. Ancient houses on either side the stage narrow back to an archway in the centre, opening through to a pillared walk and a dimly moonlit space beyond. Muffled figures occasionally pass the aperture. Suddenly enters Don Ramiro--or Alvar Nuñez, I really don't know which--and advances toward the front. To our surprise he does not open the play with a set speech or any explanation, but continues to advance until he disappears somewhere under our private box, as if he were going from this street of the play into some other adjoining street, just as in actual life. A singular freak of realism! He is closely pursued, however, by two assassins in long cloaks, who, like all the other figures we have seen, move noiselessly in soft shoes or canvas sandals. Presently a shriek resounds from the quarter toward which Don Ramiro betook himself. Have they succeeded in catching him, and is that the sound of his mortal agony? We have just concluded that this is the meaning of the clamor, when, after a second or two, the shriek resolves itself into laughter. Then we begin to recall that we didn't pay anything on entering; and, as we glance up toward the folded curtain above the scene, discover that its place is occupied by the starry sky. The houses, too, have a singularly solid look, and do not appear to be painted. While all this has been dawning upon us, we become conscious that the mixed sound of agony or mirth just heard was merely the signal of amusement caused to certain wandering Spaniards by some convulsingly funny episode; and the next moment their party comes upon the scene at about the point where the foot-lights ought to be. They exchange a good-night; some go off, and others thunder at sundry doors with ancient knockers, awaking mediæval echoes in the dingy thoroughfares, without causing any great surprise to the neighborhood. [Illustration: TWO ASSASSINS IN LONG CLOAKS.] In truth, we had simply been looking from the window of an inn at which we had just arrived; but everything had grouped itself in such a way that it was hard to comprehend that we were not at the theatre. That day we had been hurled over the Pyrenees, and landed in the dark at our first Peninsular station; then, facing a crowd of fierce, uncouth faces at the depôt door, we had somehow got conveyed to the Inn of the North through narrow, cavernous streets, brightened only by the feeble light of a few lost lanterns, and so found ourselves staring out upon our first picturesque night in Spain. The street or plazuela below us, though now deserted, went on conducting itself in a most melodramatic manner. Big white curtains hung in front of the iron balconies, flapping voluminously, or were drawn back to admit the cool night air. Crickets chirped loudly from hidden crevices of masonry, and a well-contrived bat sailed blindly over the roofs in the penumbral air, through which the moon was slowly rising. Lights went in and out; some one was seen cooking a late supper in one dwelling; windows were opened and shut, and a general appearance of haunting ghosts was kept up. Now and then a woman came to the balcony and chatted with unseen neighbors across the way about the festival of the morrow. By-and-by one side of the street blew its lamps out and prepared for bed; but the wakeful side insisted on talking to the sleepy one for some time longer, until warned by the cry of the night-watch that midnight had come. Anything more desolate and peculiar than this cry I have never heard. It was a long-drawn, melancholy sounding of the hour, with a final "All's well!" terminating in a minor cadence which seemed to drop the voice back at once into the Middle Ages. This same chant may have resounded from the days of Lain Calvo and the old judges of Castile unaltered, and for a time it made me fancy that the little Gothic town had returned to its musty youth. We were walled into a sleepy feudal stronghold once more, and perhaps at that very moment the Cid was celebrating his nuptials with Ximena, daughter of the count he had murdered for an insult, in the old ruined citadel up there on the hill, above the cathedral spires. But the watchman came and went, and the present resumed its sway. He passed with slow step, in a big cloak and queer cap, carrying a long bladed staff, and a lantern which cast swaying squares of light around his feet; silent as a black ghost, and seeming to have been called into life only with the lighting of his lamp-wick. But, after he had disappeared, the lonely quaver of his cry returned to us from farther and farther away, penetrating into the comfortless apartment to which we now retired for sleep. [Illustration: THE NIGHT-WATCH.] The Inn of the North was dirty and unkempt; a frightful odor from the donkey-stable and other sources streamed up into our window between shutters heavy as church doors; and the descant of the watch, relieved by violent cock-crows, disturbed us all night. Nevertheless, we awoke with a good deal of eagerness when the alert young woman with dark pink cheeks and snapping eyes who served us came to the door with chocolate and bread, water and _azucarillos_, betimes next morning. It was the festival of Corpus Christi; but although every one was going to see the procession, no one could tell us anything about it. Unless he be extraordinarily shrewd, a foreigner can hardly help arriving in Spain on some kind of a feast-day. When the people cannot get up a whole holiday, they will have a fractional one. You go about the streets cheerfully, thinking you will buy something at leisure in the afternoon; but when you approach the shop commerce has vanished, and is out taking a walk, or drinking barley-water in honor of some obscure saint. You engage a guide and carriage to visit some public building, and both guide and carriage are silent as to the religious character of the day until you arrive and find the place shut, when full price, or at least half, is confidently demanded. Church feasts are a matter of course, but you are expected to know about them, and questions are considered out of place. In this case we had kept Corpus Christi in mind, and as Burgos is a small place, the "function" could not by any possibility escape us. The garrison turned out, and military music played in the procession, but otherwise it was a quaint reproduction of the antique. The quiet streets, innocent of traffic, were filled with peasants whose garments, odoriferous with age and dirt, made a dazzle of color, especially the bright yellow flannel skirts of the women, and the gay handkerchief which men and women alike employ here. Sometimes it is worn around the shoulders, sometimes around the head, and sometimes both: but everywhere and always handkerchiefs are brought into play as essentials. From almost every balcony, too, hung bedquilts, or sheets scalloped with red and blue, in emulation of the tapestries and banners that once graced these occasions. Amid a tumultuous tumbling of bells up amid the carven gray stone-work of the cathedral, the candles and images and tonsured priests, clad in resplendent copes, moved forth, attended by civil functionaries in swallow-tailed coats or old crimson robes of the twelfth century. But the prettiest sight, and a much more striking one than the gilt effigies of St. Lawrence and St. Stephen and the rest, under toy canopies and wreathed with false flowers, was that of two little boys, nude except for the snowy lamb-skins they wore, who personated Christ and St. John. The Christ rode on a lamb, and kept his head very steady under a big curled wig made after the old masters. We saw him afterward in his father's arms, still holding his hands prayerfully, as he had been drilled, with a look of sweet, childish awe in his face. [Illustration: DANCING BOYS.] When the procession was about to return, we were amazed, in gazing at the small street from which it should emerge, to behold eight huge figures, looking half as high as the houses, in long robes, and with placidly unreal expressions on their gigantic faces, advancing with that peculiar unconscious gait due to human leg-power when concealed under papier-maché monsters. It took but a glance, as they filed out and aligned themselves on the small sunny square, to recognize in them the Kings of the Earth, come in person to do homage before the Christ. One bore a crown and ermine as insignia of the Castilian line; others were Moors; and even China was represented. After them danced a dozen boys, in pink tunics and bell-crowned hats of drab felt quaintly beribboned, throwing themselves about fantastically, with snapping fingers and castanets. They formed in two ranks, just under the grand shadowy entrance arch, to receive the pageant. A drummer and two _flautistas_ in festive attire accompanied them; and whenever a monstrance or holy image was borne past, the flutes mingled with the drum eccentric bagpipe discords, at which the boys broke into a prancing jig and rattled their castanets to express their devout joy. Two other men in harlequin dress, wearing tall, pointed hats, stood on the edge of the eager crowd, and belabored those who pressed too close with horse-hair switches attached by a long cord to slender sticks. This part of the performance was conducted with great energy and seriousness, and seemed to be received with due reverence by the thick heads which got hit. A more heathenish rite than this jig at the sanctuary gate could hardly be imagined. "Are these things possible, and is this the nineteenth century?" exclaimed my friend and companion, who, however, had been guilty of an indigestion that day. I confess that for myself I enjoyed the dance, and could not help being struck by the contrast of this boyish gayety with the heavy gorgeousness of the priests and the immobile frown of the sculptured figures on the massive ogee arch.[1] Then when the Host was carried by in the _custodia_, and the motley crowd kneeled and bared their heads, we sunk to the pavement with them, our knees being assisted possibly by the statement we had heard that, a few years since, blows or knives were the prompt reward of non-conformity. Afterward, when secular amusements ensued, our boys went about, stopping now and then in open places to execute strange dances, with hoops and ribbons and wooden swords, for the general enjoyment. A gleeful sight they made against backgrounds of old archways, or perhaps the mighty Arch of Santa Maria, one of the local glories, peopled with statues of ancient counts and knights and rulers. [Illustration: THE ARCH OF ST. MARY.] No Spanish town is without its paseo--its public promenade; and in Burgos this is supplied by The Spur--a broad esplanade skirting the shrunken river, with borders of chubby shade trees and shrubbery. On Corpus Christi the citizens also turned out in the arcades of the Main Plaza. Here, and later in the dusty dusk of The Spur, they crowded and chatted, in accordance with native ideas of enjoyment; and except that their mantillas and shoulder-veils[2] made a difference, the señoras and señoritas might have passed for Americans, so delicate were their features, so trim their daintily-attired figures, though perhaps they hadn't a coin in their pockets. The men had the universal Iberian habit of carrying their light overcoats folded over the left shoulder; but their quick nervous expression and spare faces would have been quite in place on Wall Street. Spanish ladies are allowed far more liberty than the French or English in public; but though they walked without male escort, they showed remarkable skill in avoiding any direct look at men from their own lustrous eyes. During the accredited hours of the paseo, however, gallants and friends are suffered to walk close behind them--so close that the entire procession often comes to a stand-still--and to whisper complimentary speeches into their ears; no one, not even relatives of the damsels, resenting this freedom. At Las Huelgas, a famous convent near the town, much resorted to by nuns of aristocratic family (even the Empress Eugénie it was thought would retire thither after her son's death), the fête was renewed next day; and it was here that we saw beggars in perfection. A huge stork's nest was perched high on one end of the chapel, as on many churches of Spain. Bombs were fired above the crowd from the high square tower that rose into the hot air not far from the inner shrine; and in the chapel below the nuns were at their devotions, caged behind heavy iron lattices that barely disclosed their picturesque head-dress. Meanwhile peasants and burghers wandered aimlessly about, looking at pictures, relics, and inscriptions in an outer arcade; after which the holiday of the people began. Holiday here means either walking or sleeping. In a sultry, dusty little square by the convent, covered with trees, the people went to sleep, or sat talking, and occasionally eating or drinking with much frugality. The first object that had greeted us by daylight in Burgos was a marvellous mendicant clad in an immense cloak, one mass of patches--in fact, a monument of indigence--carrying on his head a mangy fur cap, with a wallet at his waist to contain alms. The beggars assembled at Las Huelgas were quite as bad, except that they mostly had the good taste to remain asleep. In any attitude, face down or up, on stone benches or on the grass, they dozed at a moment's notice, reposing piously. One sat for a long time torpid near us, but finally mustered energy to come and entreat us. He received a copper, whereupon he kissed the coin, murmured a blessing, and again retreated to his shadow. Another, having acquired something from some other source, halted near us to find his pocket. He searched long among his rags, and plunged fiercely into a big cavity which exposed his dirty linen; but this proved to be only a tear in his trousers, and he was at last obliged to tie his treasure to a voluminous string around his waist, letting it hang down thence into some interior vacancy of rags. It may not be generally known that beggars are licensed in Spain. Veteran soldiers, instead of receiving a pension, are generously endowed with official permission to seek charity; the Church gives doles to the poor, and citizens consider it a virtue to relieve the miserable objects who petition for pence at every turn. As we came from Las Huelgas we saw the maimed and blind and certain more robust paupers creeping up to the door of a church, where priests were giving out food. A little farther on an emaciated crone at a bridge-head, with eyes shut fast in sleep, lifted her hand mechanically and repeated her formula. We were convinced that, since she could do this in her slumbers, she must have been satisfied with merely dreaming of that charity we did not bestow. It was a favorable season for the beggars, and many of them sunned their bodies, warped and scarred by hereditary disease, on the cathedral steps. But professional enterprise with them was constantly hindered by the tendency to nap. One old fellow I saw who, feeling a brotherhood between himself and the broken-nosed statues, had mounted into a beautiful niche there and coiled himself in sleep, first hauling his wooden leg up after him like a drawbridge. Meanwhile the peasants kept on swarming into the town, decorating it with their blue and red and yellow kerchiefs and kirtles, as with a mass of small moving banners. The men wore vivid sashes, leather leggings, and laced sandals. It was partly for enjoyment they came, and partly to sell produce. All alike were to be met with at noon, squatting down in any sheltered coigne of street or square, every group with a bowl in its midst containing the common dinner. There were also little eating-houses, in which they regaled themselves on bread and sardines, with a special cupful of oil thrown in, or on salt meat. A lively trade in various small articles was carried on in the Main Plaza; among them loaves of tasteless white bread, hard as tiles, and delicious cherries, recalling the farms of New York. Another product was offered, the presence of which in large quantity was like a sarcasm. This was Castile soap. It must have taken an immense effort of imagination on the part of these people to think of manufacturing an article for which they have so little use. I am bound to add that I did not see an ounce of it sold; and I have my suspicions that the business is merely a traditional one--the same big cheese-like chunks being probably brought out at every fair and fête, as a time-honored symbol of Castilian prosperity. But, after all, so devout a community must be convinced that it possesses godliness; and having that, what do they need of the proximate virtue? This is the region where the inhabitants refer to themselves as "old and rancid Castilians;" and the expression is appropriate. [Illustration: PEASANTS IN THE MARKET-PLACE.] The most intolerable odor pervaded the whole place. It was a singular mixture, arising from the trustful local habit of allowing every kind of garbage and ordure to disperse itself without drainage, and complicated with fumes of oil, garlic, general mustiness, and a whiff or two of old incense. The potency of olive-oil, especially when somewhat rank, none can know who have not been in Spain. That first steak--how tempting it looked among its potatoes, but how abominably it tasted! We never approached meat with the same courage afterward, until our senses were subdued to the level of fried oil. Combine this with the odor of corruption, and you have the insinuating quality which we soon noticed even in the wine--perhaps from the custom of transporting it in badly dressed pig-skins, which impart an animal flavor. This astonishing local atmosphere saluted us everywhere; it was in our food and drink; we breathed it and dreamed of it. Yet the Burgalese flourished in calm unconsciousness thereof. The splendidly blooming peasant women showed their perfect teeth at us; and the men, in broad-brimmed, pointed caps and embroidered jackets, whose feet were brown and earthy as tree-roots, laughed outright, strong in the knowledge of their traditionary soap, at our ignorant foreign clothes and over-washed hands! Among the humbler class were some who were prepared to sell labor--an article not much in demand--and they were even more calmly squalid than the beggars. They sat in ranks on the curb-stones of the plaza, a matchless array of tatters; and if they could have been conveyed without alteration to Paris or New York, there would have been sharp competition for them between the artists and paper-makers. So my companion, the artist, assured me--whom, by-the-way, in order to give him local color, I had rechristened Velazquez. But as he shrank from the large implication of this name, I softened him down to Velveteen. We had been twenty-four hours in Burgos before we saw a carriage, excepting only the hotel coach, which stood most of the time without horses in front of the door, and was used by the porter as a private gambling den and loafing place for himself and his friends. When wheels did roll along the pavements they awoke a roar as of musketry. Perhaps the most important event which took place during our stay--it was certainly regarded with a more feverish interest by the inhabitants than the Corpus Christi ceremonies--was the bold act of our landlady, who went out to drive in a barouche, while her less daring spouse hung out of the window weakly staring at her. The house-fronts were filled with well-dressed feminine heads, witnessing the departure; a grave old gentleman opposite left his book and glared out intently. When the wheels could no longer even be heard, he turned to gaze wistfully in the opposite direction, dimly hoping that life might vouchsafe him a carriage. [Illustration: IN THE MIRADOR.] Although, as I have said, women avoid meeting male glances when on the sidewalk, they enjoy full license to stand at their high windows, which are called _miradores_, or "lookers," and contemplate with entire freedom all things or persons that pass; which, in view of the complete listlessness of their lives, is a fortunate dispensation. Existence in Burgos is essentially life from the window point of view. It proceeds idly, and as a sort of accidental spectacle. Yet there is for strangers a dull fascination in wandering about the narrow, silent streets, and contemplating ancient buildings, the chiselled ornaments and armorial bearings of which recall the wealth and nobility that once inhabited them during the great days of the town. Where have all the dominant families gone? Are they keeping store, or tending the railroad station? Their descendants are sometimes only too happy if they can get some petty government office at five hundred dollars a year. I strolled one afternoon into the Calle de la Calera, and through a shabby archway penetrated to a stately old ruined court, around which ran an inscription in stone, declaring this palace to have been reared by an abbot of aristocratic line a century or two since. It is used now as an oil factory. A pretty girl was looking out over a flower-pot in an upper window, and, as I strayed up the noble staircase, I met a sad-looking gentleman coming down, who I afterward learned was a widower, formerly resident in Paris, but now returned with his daughter to this strange domicile in his native place. Some of the lower rooms, again, were devoted to plebeians and donkeys. The humble ass, by-the-way, begins to thrust himself meekly upon you as soon as you set foot in the Peninsula, and you must look sharp if you wish to keep out of his way. His cheap labor has ruined and driven out the haughtier equine stock of Arabia that once pawed this devoted soil. Even the Cid, however, did not boast a barb of the desert in the earlier days of his prowess; for when King Alfonso bade him quit the land, "then the Cid clapped spurs to the mule upon which he rode, and vaulted into a piece of ground which was his own inheritance, and answered, 'Sire, I am not in your land, but in my own.'" This little incident occurred near Burgos, and the drowsy city still keeps some dim memory of that great Warrior Lord the Cid Campeador, Rodrigo de Bivar, whose quaint story, full of hardihood, robbery, and cruelty, gallant deeds and grim pathos, trails along the track of his adventures through half of Spain. But there is a curious cheapness and indifference in the memorials of him preserved. In the Town-hall, for the sum of ten cents, you are admitted to view the modern walnut receptacle wherein all that is left of him is economically stored. Those puissant bones, which went through so many hard fights against the Moors, are seen lying here, dusty and loose, with those of Ximena, under the glass cover. Among them reposes a portly corked bottle, in which minor fragments of the warrior lord were placed after the moving of his remains from the Convent of San Pedro in chains, where for many years he occupied a more seemly tomb. Imagine George Washington, partially bottled and wholly disjointed, on exhibition under glass! The Spaniards, in no way disconcerted by the incongruity, have graven on the brass plate of the case a high-sounding inscription; but a tribute as genuine and not less valuable, though humbler, was the big, spruce-looking modern wagon I saw in the market-place one day, driven by an energetic farmer, and bearing on its side the title _El Cid_. One would look to see the conqueror's dust richly inurned within the cathedral--a noble outgrowth of the thirteenth century, enriched by accretions of later work until its whitish stone and wrought marble connect the Early Pointed style with that of the Renaissance in its flower. But perhaps this temple has enough without the Cid. Strangely placed on the side of a hill, with houses attached to one corner, as if it had sprung from the homes and hearts of the people, it seems to hold down the swelling ground with its massive weight; yet the spires, through the open-work of which the stars may be seen at night, rise with such lightness you would think the heavy bells might make them tremble and fall. I passed an hour of peace and fresh air above the fetid streets, looking down from the citadel hill on these pinnacles, while around and below them lay the town--an irregular mass of gray and mauve pierced with deep shadows--in the midst of bare, rolling uplands. Before the fair high altar hangs the victorious banner of Ferdinand VII., recalling to the people the great battle of Tolosa Plains. And when one sees peasants--rough spots of color in the sombre choir--studying the dark, fruit-like wood-carvings through which the Bible story wreathes itself in panel after panel, one feels the teaching power of these old churches for the unlettered. In one of the corner chapels appears another less favorable phase of such teaching, in the shape of a miracle-working Christ, amid deep shadows and dim lantern-light, stretched on the cross, and draped with a satin crinoline. This doubtful reverence of putting a short skirt on the figure of the Saviour, often practiced in Spain, may perhaps mark an influence unconsciously received from the Moorish dislike for nudity. The cathedral bells were continually clanging the summons to mass or vespers, and their loud voices, though cracked and inharmonious, seemed still to assert the supremacy of ecclesiastical power. But while a priest occasionally darkened the sidewalks, many others, on account of the growing prejudice against them, went about in frock-coats and ordinary tall hats. And under all its crowning beauty the old minster, motionless in the centre of the stagnant town--its chief entrance walled up, and a notice painted on its Late Roman façade warning boys not to play ball against the tempting masonry--wore the look of some neglected and half-blind thing, once glorious, symbol of a power abruptly stayed in its prodigious career. Meanwhile the daily history of Burgos went on its wonted way, sleepy but picturesque--a sort of illuminated prose. Women chaffered in the blue-tiled fish-market; the _bourgeoisie_ patronized the sweetmeat shops, of which there were ten on the limited chief square; the tambourine-maker varied this ornamental industry with the construction of the more practical sieve; a peasant passed with a bundle of purple-flowering vetches on his head for fodder, and another drove six milch goats through the streets, seeking a purchaser. To this last one the proprietor of the principal book-store came running out to see if he could strike a bargain. One morning I met an uncouth countryman and his stout wife on the red-tiled landing of the inn stairs (they bowed and courtesied to me) with chickens and eggs for sale. In this simple manner our hotel was supplied. All the bread was got, a few pieces at a time, from a small bakery across the plazuela, in a dark cellar just under the niche of a neglected stone saint--a new arrival causing our maid to run hurriedly thither for a couple of rolls; and the water also came from some neighbor's well in earthen jars. The barber even exercises his primitive function in Burgos: he is called a "bleeder," and announces on his shop sign that "teeth and molars" are extracted there. Democratic and provincial the atmosphere was, and not unpleasantly so; yet during our stay Italian opera from Madrid was performing in the theatre, and large yellow posters promised "Bulls in Burgos" at an early date. II. To pass from this ancient city to Madrid is to experience one of those astonishing contrasts in which the country abounds. We dropped asleep in the rough, time-worn regions of Old Castile, and in the morning found ourselves amid the glare and bustle of reconstructed Spain, as it displays itself on the great square called the Gate of the Sun--a spot with no hint of poetry about it other than its name. Madrid adopts largely the Parisian style of street architecture, and has in portions a resemblance to Boston. The sense of remoteness aroused in the north here suddenly fades, though the traits that mark a foreign land soon re-assemble and take shape in a new framework. Perhaps, too, our first rather flat impression was due to an exhausting night journey and some accompanying incidents. [Illustration: LANDSCAPE BETWEEN BURGOS AND MADRID.] "The Spaniards are a nation of robbers!" a cheerful French gentleman of Bordeaux had told us;[3] and he threw out warnings of certain little coin tricks in which they were adepts. When two Civil Guards, armed with swords and guns, inspected our train at the frontier, we recalled his statement. These guards persistently popped up at every succeeding station. No matter how fast the train went, there they were always waiting; always two of them, always with the same mustached faces, and the same white havelocks fluttering on their bunchy cocked hats of the French Revolution, and making their swarthy cheeks and black eyes fiercer by contrast. In fact, they were obviously the same men. Every time they marched up and down the platform, scanning the cars in a determined manner, and scowling at our compartment in a way that fully persuaded us some one must be guilty. Indeed, before long we became convinced that we ourselves were suspicious; but it would have been a relief if they had taken us in hand at once. Why should they go on glaring at us and swinging their guns, as if it were a good deal easier to shoot us than not, unless it was that we were too rich a "find" to be disposed of immediately--squandered, as it were? Perhaps the torture of suspense suited the enormity of our case, but it was certainly cruel. There was some satisfaction, however, in finding that when we left the depôt they allowed us a restricted liberty, and kept out of our way. If it had been otherwise, I don't know what they would have done to us at Burgos, for it was there that the landlady forced upon us a gold piece that would not pass, in exchange for a good one which we had given her. This very simple device was one of which the French gentleman had told us. But we were too confiding. The money to pay the bill was sent away by a servant, and once out of sight was easily replaced with inferior coin. Disturbed by this episode, we went to our train, which started with the watchman's first hail at eleven, and stumbled hastily into an empty compartment, which we soon converted into a sleeping-carriage by making our bundles pillows, drawing curtains, and pulling the silk screen over the lamp. Our nap was broken only by a halt at the next station. There was a long, drowsy pause, during which the train seemed to be pretending it hadn't been asleep. It was nearly time to go on, when feminine voices drew near our carriage; the door was thrown open, and two ladies quickly entered. There was no time for retreat; the usual fish-horn and dinner-bell accompaniment announced our departure, and the wheels moved. Then it was that one of the new-comers uttered a half scream, and we saw that she was a nun! Had it been a cooler night our blood might have frozen; but as it failed us, we did what we could by feeling greatly embarrassed. The nun and her travelling companion had been speaking Spanish as they approached, and we tried in that language to impress on them our harmless devotion to their convenience. "But he said it was reserved for ladies," murmured the sister, in good English. The terrible truth was now clear. My eye caught, at the same instant, a card in the window which proved beyond question that we had got into the carriage for señoras. The result of this adventure was that we found the nun to be an English Catholic, employed in teaching at a religious establishment, and her friend another Englishwoman protecting her on her journey. Pleasant conversation ensued, and we had almost forgotten that we were criminals, when the speed of the engine slackened again, and the thought of the Civil Guards returned to haunt us. We did not dare remain, yet we were sure that our military pursuers would confront us again on the platform. There indeed they were, when we tumbled out into the obscurity, with their white-hooded heads looming above their muskets in startling disconnectedness. Telling Velazquez, with all the firmness I possessed, to bare his breast to the avenging sword, I hastened to get into a coupé, preferring to die comfortably. He, however, ignominiously followed me. It is true, we were not molested; but the shock of that narrow escape kept us wakeful. Not even our own prairies, I think, could present so dreary and monotonous an outlook as the wide, endless, treeless Castilian plains while morning slowly felt its way across them. Brown and cold they were, skirted by white roads, and all shorn of their barley crops, though it was but middle June. Now and then a village was seen huddled against some low slope--a church lifting its tall, square campanario above the humble roofs against the pearling sky. Interior Spain is a desolate land, but the Church thrives there and draws its tax from the poverty-stricken inhabitants--a crowned beggar ruling over beggars. If the first man were now to be created from the clay of this region, he would doubtless turn out the very type of a lean hidalgo. The human product of such soil must perforce be meagre and melancholy; and the pensiveness which we see in most Spanish faces seems a reflection of the landscape which surrounds them. The Madrileños offer not a flat, but rather an extremely round contradiction to this general and accepted idea of the national appearance. Slenderness is the exception with them. Their city is a forced flower in the midst of mountain lands, and the men themselves rejoice in a rotund and puffy look of success, which also partakes of the hot-house character. They are people of leisure, and, after their manner, of pleasure. How they swarm in the cafés in the Gate of the Sun--where they keep up the Moorish custom of calling waiters by two claps of the hands--or on the one great thoroughfare, Calle de Alcalá, or in the bull-ring of a Sunday! They are never at rest, yet never altogether active. They never sleep, or, if they do, others take their places in the public resorts. The clamor of the streets, and even the snarling cry of the news-venders--"_La Correspondencia_," or "_El Demó-crata-a_"--is kept up until the small hours; and at five or six the restless stir begins again with the silver tinkling of fleet mule-bells. There are no night-howling watchmen in Madrid; but the custom of street-hawking is rampant in Spain; and here, in addition to the newsmen, we have the wail of the water-criers, ministering to an unquenchable popular thirst, the lottery-ticket sellers, the wax-match peddlers, and a dozen others. The favorite bird of the country is a kind of lark called _alondra_, much hung in cages outside the windows, whence they utter--with that monotonous recurrence which seems a fixed principle of all things Spanish--a hard, piercing triple note impossible to ignore. This loud, persistent "twit, twit-twit," resembling at a distance the click of castanets, begins with daybreak, and gives a most discouraging notion of the Spanish musical ear. But the watchmen are merciful. They are called, as elsewhere, _serenos_, which may mean either "quiet," or "night-dews," but their function in Madrid is peculiar. Early in the evening they come out by squads, with staves of office, and at their girdles bright lanterns and an immense bunch of keys. These are the night-keys of all the houses on each man's beat, the residents not being allowed to have any. When a person returns home late--and who does not, in Madrid--he is obliged to find his sereno, and if that officer is not in sight, calls him by name--"Frascuelo," or "Pepino." Whereupon Frascuelo, or Pepino, or Santiago, if he hears, will come along and unlock the door. This curious system should at least encourage good habits; for, unless a man be sober, his watchman may have unpleasant tales to tell of him. The feline race being too often homeless, and having a proverbial taste for nocturnal wanderings, the average male citizen of the capital feelingly nicknames himself a "Madrid cat." This shows a frankness of self-characterization, to say the least, unusual. Of course there is home life, and there is family affection, in Madrid, but the stranger naturally does not see a great deal of these; and then it may be doubted whether they really exist to the same extent as in most other civilized capitals. It becomes wearisome to make sallies upon the town, and day after day find so much of the population trying to divert itself, or killing time in the cafés and clubs. The feeling deepens that they resort to these for want of a sufficiently close interest in their homes. More than that, they do not seem really to be amused. Even their language fails to express the amusement idea; the most that anything can be for them, in the vernacular, is "entertaining." Still the choice of light diversion is varied enough. Opera flourishes in winter; in spring and summer the bull-fight; theatres are always in blast; cocking-mains are kept up. Hitherto gambling has been another favorite pastime until checked by the authorities. Not content with all this, the Madrileños seek in lottery shops that excitement which Americans derive from drinking-saloons. The brightly lighted lottery agency occurs as frequently as that other indication of disease, the apothecary's window, or the stock-market "ticker," in American cities. People of all classes hover about them both by day and by night. Posters confront you with announcements of the Child Jesus Lottery, the lottery to aid the Asylum of Our Lady of the Assumption, or the National, which is drawn thrice a month, with a chief prize of thirty-two thousand dollars, and some four hundred other premiums. There are many small drawings besides constantly going on: not a day passes, in fact, without your being solicited by wandering dealers in these alluring chances at least half a dozen times. [Illustration: THE PLAZA MAYOR.] Altogether, looking from my balcony upon the characteristic crowd in the great square, leading this life so busy yet so apathetic, as if in a slow fever, Madrid struck me as only one more great human ant-hill, where the ants were trying to believe themselves in Paris. The Parisian resemblance, however, is confined to strips through the middle and on the edges of the city, and as soon as one's steps are bent away from those, the narrow ways and older architecture of Spain re-appear. Only a few rods from the Puerta del Sol lies the Plaza Mayor, which once enjoyed all the honors of bull-fights and heretic burnings--occasions on which householders were obliged by their leases to give up all the front rooms and balconies to be used as boxes for the audience. From the Plaza Mayor again an arch leads into Toledo Street--old meandering mart full of mantles and sashes, blankets and guitars, flannel dyed in the national colors of red and yellow, basket-work and wood-work, including the carved sticks known as _molinillos_ (little mills), with which chocolate is mixed by a dexterous spinning motion. The donkey feels himself at home once more in these narrow thoroughfares; the evil sewage smell, which oozes through even the most pretentious edifices in the new quarters, diffuses itself again in full vigor, and the cafés become dingy and unconventional. On the Alcalá, or San Geronimo, the carefully-dressed men sip beer and cordials, or possibly indulge in sparkling sherry--a new and expensive wine like dry champagne; but here the rougher element is satisfied with _aguardiente_ (the liquor distilled from anise-seed), and quite as often confines itself to water. The lower orders are temperate. Peasants and porters and petty traders will sit down contentedly for a whole evening to a glass of water in which is dissolved a long meringue (called _asucarillo_, literally "sugarette"), or to a snow lemonade. Another esteemed cooling beverage is the _horchata de chufas_, a kind of cream made from pounded cypress root and then half frozen. The height of luxury is to order with this, at an added cost of some two cents, a few tubular wafers, fancifully named _barquillos_ (or little boats), through which the semi-liquid may be sucked. This barquillo is considered so desirable that boys carry it on the street in large metal cylinders, the top of which is a disk inscribed with numbers. You pay a fee, and he revolves on the disk a pivotal needle, the number at which it stops deciding how many wafers fall to your lot. In this way the excruciating pleasure of barquillos to eat is combined with the national delight in gaming. European costume has fallen on the Madrid people like a pall, blotting out picturesqueness; but peasants of all provinces are still seen, and now and then a turbaned figure from Barbary moves across the street. Nor is the fascinating mantilla quite extinct among women, in spite of their more than Parisian grace and splendor of modern robing. There are humble old women squatted on the sidewalk at street corners, who sell water and liquors and shrub from bottles kept in a singular little stand with brass knobs like an exaggerated pair of casters; and when one sees the varied types of peasant, soldier, citizen, or priest, with perhaps a veiled woman of the middle class, gathered around one of these, the Spanish quality of the town re-asserts itself distinctly. So it does, too, when a carriage containing the princesses of the royal household rattles down the Prado Park, drawn by mules in barbaric red-tasselled harness, and preceded by a courier who wears a sort of gold-braided nightcap. [Illustration: WATER-DEALER.] [Illustration: OLD ARTILLERY PARK.] There is no cathedral at Madrid, but the churches, smeared as usual with gold and stucco and paint in tasteless extravagance, are numerous enough; and on many a balcony I saw withered straw-like plumes, long as a man, hung up in commemoration of the last Palm-Sunday. The morning papers have a "religious bulletin" in the amusement column, giving the saints and services of the day; besides which special masses for the souls of departed capitalists are constantly announced, with a request that friends shall attend. These paid rites doubtless offer a pleasant exception to the routine of commonplace church-going. Thus, while the men are absorbed by their cafés and politics, their countless cigarettes and lottery tickets, with a minimum of business and a maximum of dominoes, the women fill up their time with matins and vespers, confessions and intrigues. It would be merely repeating the frank assertion of the Spanish men themselves to say that feminine morals here are in a lamentable state; but at least appearances are always carefully guarded, and if judged by externals only, Madrid is far more virtuous than London or Paris. As for local society, it exists so much on appearances that the substance suffers. It is true, the ladies are beautiful and of noble stature; and their costumes, governed by the happiest taste, surpass in luxury those seen in public in almost any other city. The cavaliers are, without exception, the best-dressed gentlemen in the world; and the mass of sumptuous equipages, with polished grooms and surpassingly fine horses, which crowds the broad Castilian Fountain drive, or the Park road on the east of the Buen Retiro gardens, during fashionable hours, is amazing. Great wealth is gathered in the hands of a few nobles, who often draw heavy salaries from government for long-obsolete services; but the most of this costuming and grooming is attained by semi-starvation at home. By consequence, dinners and dancing-parties are rarely given even in the season, and royalty itself provides no more than a couple of balls, with two or three state dinners, a year. [Illustration: THE ESCORIAL.] To be sure, no capital is better provided with sundry of the higher means to cultivation, as its Royal Armory, its Archæological Museum, and its glorious Picture-gallery--in some respects the noblest of Europe--remind one. Moreover, in the neighboring Escorial, that dark jewel in the head of Philip II., travellers find a rich monument of art, albeit to many eyes unseen inscriptions perhaps record there more than enough of Spain's misfortunes. In the Madrid gallery the stately, severe, and robust royal portraits by Velazquez, or his magnificently healthy "Drunkards," reveal in their way, as do the Virgins of Murillo, floating divinely in translucent air, that deep and deathless power of Spanish temperament and genius over which slumber has reigned so long. The pictures of Ribera, hanging together, are like loose pages torn from Spanish ecclesiastical history and legend: a collection of monks, ascetics, martyrs--scenes of torture depicted with relentless and savage vigor. Goya, again, scarcely known out of Spain, left at the beginning of this century portraits of wonderful vitality and finish, fresh glimpses of popular life, and wild figure compositions marked by the fierce, half insane energy of a Latinized William Blake. His imagination and manner were both original. Though falling short, like all other Spanish painters, in ideality, he had that faculty of fertile improvisation so refreshing in Murillo's naturalistic "Madonna of the Birdling," or in his "St. Elizabeth," and "Roman Patrician's Dream," at the Academy of Fine Arts. But it is not with these past splendors, still full of hopes for new futures, that the Castilian gentlemen and ladies of our varnished period concern themselves. The opera, the circus, and the _Corrida de Toros_--the irrepressible bull-fight--are to them of far more consequence. In every crowd and café you see the tall, shapely, dark-faced, silent men, with a cool, professionally murderous look like that of our border desperadoes, whose enormously wide black hats, short jackets, tight trousers, and pigtails of braided hair proclaim them _chulos_, or members of the noble ring. Intrepid, with muscles of steel, and finely formed, they are very illiterate: we saw one of them gently taking his brandy at the Café de Paris after a hard combat, while his friend read from an evening paper a report of the games in which he had just fought--the man's own education not enabling him to decipher print. But the higher class of these professionals are the idols, the demi-gods, of the people. Songs are made about them, their deeds are painted on fans, and popular chromos illustrate their loves and woes; people crowd around to see them in hotels or on the street as if they were heroes or star tragedians. Pet dogs are named for the well-known ones; and it was even rumored that one of the chief swordsmen had secured the affections of a patrician lady, and would have married her but for the interference of her friends. Certain it is that a whole class of young bucks of the lower order--"'Arrys" is the British term--get themselves up in the closest allowable imitation of bull-fighters, down to the tuft of hair left growing in front of the ear. The _espadas_ or _matadores_ (killers), who give the mortal blow, hire each one his _cuadrilla_--a corps of assistants, including _picadores_, _banderilleros_, and _punterillo_. For every fight they receive five hundred dollars, and sometimes they lay up large fortunes. To see the sport well from a seat in the shade, one must pay well. Tickets are monopolized by speculators, who, no less than the fighters, have their "ring," and gore buyers as the bull does horses. We gave two dollars apiece for places. The route to the Place of Bulls is lined for a mile with omnibuses, tartanas, broken-down diligences, and wheezy cabs, to convey intending spectators to the fight on Sunday afternoons. A stream of pedestrians file in the same direction, and the showy turnouts of the rich add dignity to what soon becomes a wild rush for the scene of action. The mule-bells ring like a rain of metal, whips crack, the drivers shout wildly, and at full gallop we dash by windows full of on-lookers, by the foaming fountains of the Prado, and up the road to the grim Colosseum of stone and brick, in the midst of scorched and arid fields, with the faint peaks of the snow-capped Guadarrama range seen, miles to the north, through dazzling white sunshine. [Illustration: ON THE ROAD TO THE BULL-FIGHT.] [Illustration: PLAN OF THE BULL-RING.] Within is the wide ring, sunk in a circular pit of terraced granite crowned by galleries. The whole great round, peopled by at least ten thousand beings, is divided exactly by the sun and the shadow--_sol y sombra_; and from our cool place we look at the vivid orange sand of the half arena in sunlight, and the tiers of seats beyond, where swarms of paper fans (red, yellow, purple, and green) are wielded to shelter the eyes of those in the cheaper section, or bring air to their lungs. No connected account of a bull tourney can impart the vividness, the rapid changes, the suspense, the skill, the picturesqueness, or horror of the actual thing. All occurs in rapid glimpses, in fierce, dramatic, brilliant, and often ghastly pictures, which fade and re-form in new phases on the instant. The music is sounding, the fans are fluttering, amateurs strolling between the wooden barriers of the ring and the lowest seats, hatless men are hawking fruit and aguardiente, when trumpets announce the grand entry. It is a superb sight: the picadores with gorgeous jackets and long lances on horseback, in wide Mexican hats, their armor-cased legs in buckskin trousers; the swordsmen and others on foot, shining with gold and silver embroidery on scarlet and blue, bright green, saffron, or puce-colored garments, carrying cloaks of crimson, violet, and canary. At the head is the mounted _alguazil_ in ominous black, who carries the key of the bull-gate. Everything is punctual, orderly, ceremonious. Then the white handkerchief, as signal, from the president of the games in his box; the trumpet-blare again; and the bull rushing from his lair! There is a wild moment when, if he be of good breed, he launches himself impetuous as the ball from a thousand-ton gun directly upon his foes, and sweeping around half the circle, puts them to flight over the barrier or into mid-ring, leaving a horse or two felled in his track. I have seen one fierce Andalusian bull within ten minutes kill five horses while making two circuits of the ring. The first onset against a horse is horrible to witness. The poor steed, usually lean and decrepit, is halted until the bull will charge him, when instantly the picador in the saddle aims a well-poised blow with his lance, driving the point into the bull's back only about an inch, as an irritant. You hear the horns tear through the horse's hide; you _feel_ them go through _yourself_. Ribs crack; there's a clatter of hoofs, harness, and the rider's armor; a sudden heave and fall--disaster!--and then the bull rushes away in pursuit of a yellow mantle flourished to distract him. The banderilleros come, each holding two ornamental barbed sticks, which he waves to attract the bull. At the brute's advance he runs to meet him, and in the moment when the huge head is lowered for a lunge, he plants them deftly, one on each shoulder, and springs aside. Perhaps, getting too near, he fails, and turns to fly; the bull after, within a few inches. He flees to the barrier, drops his cloak on the sand, and vaults over; the bull springs over too into the narrow alley; whereupon the fighter, being close pressed, leaps back into the ring light as a bird, but saved by a mere hair's-breadth from a tossing or a trampling to death. The crowd follow every turn with shouts and loud comments and cheers: "Go, bad little bull!" "Let the picadores charge!" "More horses! more horses!" "Well done, Gallito!" "Time for the death!--the matadores!" and so on. Humor mingles with some of their remarks, and there is generally one volunteer buffoon who, choosing a lull in the combat, shrieks out rude witticisms that bring the laugh from a thousand throats. But if the management of the sport be not to their liking, then the multitude grow instantly stormy: rising on the benches, they bellow their opinions to the president, whistle, stamp, scream, gesticulate. It is the tumult of a mob, appeasable only by speedier bloodshed. And what bloodshed they get! A horse or two, say, lies lifeless and crumpled on the earth; the others, with bandaged eyes, and sides hideously pierced and red-splashed, are spurred and whacked with long sticks to make them go. But it is time for the banderilleros, and after that for the swordsman. He advances, glittering, with a proud, athletic step, the traditional chignon fastened to his pigtail, and holding out his bare sword, makes a brief speech to the president: "I go to slay this bull for the honor of the people of Madrid and the most excellent president of this tourney." Then throwing his hat away, he proceeds to his task of skill and danger. It is here that the chief gallantry of the sport begins. With a scarlet cloak in one hand he attracts the bull, waves him to one side or the other, baffles him, re-invites him--in fine, plays with and controls him as if he were a kitten, though always with eye alert and often in peril. At last, having got him "in position," he lifts the blade, aims, and with a forward spring plunges it to the hilt at a point near the top of the spine. Perhaps the bull recoils, reels, and dies with that thrust; but more often he is infuriated, and several strokes are required to finish him. Always, however, the blood gushes freely, the sand is stained with it, and the serried crowd, intoxicated by it, roar savagely. Still, the "many-headed beast" is fastidious. If the bull be struck in such a way as to make him spout his life out at the nostrils, becoming a trifle _too_ sanguinary, marks of disapproval are freely bestowed. One bull done for, the music recommences, and mules in showy trappings are driven in. They are harnessed to the carcasses, and the dead bulks of the victims are hauled bravely off at a gallop, furrowing the dirt. The grooms run at topmost speed, snapping their long whips; the dust rises in a cloud, enveloping the strange cavalcade. They disappear through the gate flying, and you wake from a dream of ancient Rome and her barbarous games come true again. But soon the trumpets flourish; another bull comes; the same finished science and sure death ensue, varied by ever-new chances and escapes, until afternoon wanes, the sun becomes shadow, and ten thousand satisfied people--mostly men in felt sombreros, with some women, fewer ladies, and a sprinkling of children and babies--throng homeward. What impresses is the cold blood of the thing. People bring their goat-skins of wine, called "little drunkards," and pass them around to friends, between bulls; others pop off lemonade bottles, and nearly all smoke. Even a combatant sometimes lights a cigar while the bull is occupied at the other side of the ring. During the hottest encounters grooms come in to strip the harness from dying horses or stab an incapacitated one; to carry off baskets of entrails, and rake fresh sand over the blood-pools, quite calmly, at the risk of sharp interruption from the vagarious horned enemy. In the midst of a dangerous flurry, while performers are escaping, an orange-vender in the lane outside the barrier pitches some fruit to a buyer half-way up the _gradas_, counting aloud, "One, two, three," to twenty-four. All are caught, and he neatly catches his money in return. Afterward, when a bull leaps the barrier, this intrepid merchant has to fly for life, leaving his basket on the ground, where the bewildered animal upsets it, rolling the contents everywhere in golden confusion. Another time we saw a horse and rider lifted bodily on the horns, and so tossed that the horseman flew out of his saddle, hurtled through the air directly over the bull, and landed solidly on his back, senseless. Six grooms bore him off, white and rigid. But the populace never heeded him; they were madly cheering the bull's prowess. A surgeon, by-the-way, always attends in an anteroom; prayers are said before the fight; and a priest is in readiness with the consecrated wafer to give the last sacrament in case of any fatal accident. The utter simple-mindedness with which Spaniards regard the brutalities of the sport may be judged from the fact that a bull-fight was once given to benefit the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals! On occasion, the drawing of a charitable lottery is held at the _Corrida de Toros_, and then there are gala features. The Queen and various high-born ladies present magnificent rosettes of silk or satin and gold and silver tinsel, with long streamers, to be attached by little barbs to the bulls before their entrance, each having his colors indicated in this way; and these ornaments are displayed in shop windows for days before the event. The language of the ring is another peculiarity. There are many fine points of merit, distinguished by as many canting terms. There is the "pair regular," the "relance," the "cuartos," and the darts are playfully termed "shuttlecocks;" the swordsman deals in "pinches" and "thrusts," and so on--all of which is recorded in press reports, amusing enough in their airy and supercilious half-literary treatment. These are among the most polished products of Spanish journalism. Fines are imposed on the performers for any achievement not "regular;" and, on the other hand, good strokes are rewarded by the public with cigars, or, as the dainty reporters say, they "merit palms." The three chief swordsmen are Lagartijo, Frascuelo, and Currito; "Broad Face," "Little Fatty," and the like, being lesser lights. Frascuelo is so renowned for hardihood that I once saw him receive, in obedience to popular will, the ear of the bull he had just slain--a supreme mark of favor.[4] [Illustration: A STREET SCENE.] Madrid is now the head-quarters of the national game, as it is of everything else. It is outwardly flourishing, it is adorned with statues, its parks are green, and its fountains spout gayly. Nevertheless, the impression it makes is melancholy. Beggary is importunate on its public ways. Palaces and poverty, great wealth and wretched penury, are huddled close together. Its assumption of splendor is in startling contrast with the desolate and uncared-for districts that surround it from the very edge of the city outward. The natural result of extremes in the distribution of property, with a country impoverished, is public bankruptcy; and public bankruptcy stares surely enough through the city's gay mask. There is another unhappy result from the undue concentration of resources at this artificial capital. Madrid prides itself on being the spot at which all the avenues of the land converge equally, the exact centre of Spain being close beyond the city's confines, and marked--how appropriately--by a church! But Madrid is, notwithstanding, a national centre only in name. It enjoys a false luxury, while too many outlying provinces sustain a starveling existence. And, seeing the alien, imitative manners adopted here, one feels sharply the difficult contrasts that exist between the metropolis and the provinces: no hearty bond of national unity appears. We looked back over the ground we had traversed, and thought of the gray bones of Burgos cathedral, lying like some stranded mammoth of another age, far in the north. Oh, bells of Burgos, mumbling in your towers, what message have you for these sophisticated ears? And what intelligible response does the heart of the country send back to you? "Come," said I to Velveteen. "It is useless to resist longer. Let's surrender to these two white-capped guards who have dogged us so, and be carried away." [Illustration] THE LOST CITY. I. [Illustration: I] It was of Spain's past and present that we were speaking, and "What," I asked, "have we given her in return for her discovery of our New World?" "The sleeping-car and the street tramway," answered Velveteen, with justifiable pride. He was right; for we had seen the first on the railroad, and the second skimming the streets of Madrid. Still, the reward did not appear great, measured by the much that Spain's ventures in the Western hemisphere had cost her, and by the comparative desolation of her present. The devoted labors of Irving and Prescott, which Spaniards warmly appreciate, are more in the nature of an adequate return. "It strikes me, also," I ventured to add, "that we are rendering a service in kind. She discovered us, and now we are discovering her." If one reflects how some of the once great and powerful places of the Peninsula, such as Toledo and Cordova, have sunk out of sight and perished to the modern world, this fancy applies with some truth to every sympathetic explorer of them. It had been all very well to imagine ourselves conversant with the country when we were in Madrid, and even an occasional slip in the language did not disturb that supposition. When I accidentally asked the chamber-maid to swallow a cup of chocolate instead of "bringing" it, owing to an unnecessary resemblance of two distinct words, and when my comrade, in attending to details of the laundry, was led by an imperfect dictionary to describe one article of wear as a _pintura de noche_, or "night scene," our confidence suffered only a momentary shock. But, after all, it was not until we reached Toledo that we really passed into a kind of forgotten existence, and knew what it was to be far beyond reach of any familiar word. [Illustration: ENTRANCE TO TOLEDO.] With the first plunge southward from the capital the reign of ruin begins--ruin and flies. The heat becomes intense; the air itself seems to be cooked through and through; the flies rejoice with a malicious joy, and the dry sandy hills, bearing nothing but tufts of blackened weeds, resemble large mounds of pepper and salt. Here and there in the valley is the skeleton of a stone or brick farm-house withering away, and perhaps near by a small round defensive hut, recalling times of disorder. Between the hills, however, are fields still prolific in rye, though wholly destitute of trees. Verdure re-asserts itself wherever there is the smallest water-course; and a curve of the river Tagus is sure to infold fruit orchards and melon vines, while the parched soil briefly revives and puts forth delightful shade-trees. But although the river-fed lands around Toledo are rich in vegetation, the ancient city itself, with the Tagus slung around its base like a loop, rises on a sterile rock, and amid hills of bronze. So much are the brown and sun-imbued houses and the old fortified walls in keeping with the massy natural foundation that all seem reared together, the huge form of the Alcazar, or castle--where the Spanish national military academy is housed--towering like a second cliff in one corner of the round, irregularly clustered city. Our omnibus scaled the height by a road perfectly adapted for conducting to some dragon stronghold of misty fable, and landed us in the Zocodover, the sole open space of any magnitude in that tangle of thread-like streetlets, along which the houses range themselves with a semblance of order purely superficial. Most of Toledo is traversable only for pedestrians and donkeys. These latter carry immense double baskets across their backs, in which are transported provisions, bricks, coal, fowls, water, bread, crockery--everything, in short, down to the dirt occasionally scraped from the thoroughfares. I saw one peasant, rather advanced in years, helping himself up the steep rise of a street on the hill-side by means of a stout cane in one hand and the tail of his heavy-laden donkey grasped in the other. To make room for these useful beasts and their broad panniers, some of the houses are hollowed out at the corners; in one case the side wall being actually grooved a foot deep for a number of yards along an anxious turning. Otherwise the panniers would touch both sides of the way, and cause a blockade as obstinate as the animal itself. [Illustration: THE NARROW WAY.] [Illustration: SPANISH PEASANT. From a Drawing by William M. Chase.] Coming from the outer world into so strange a labyrinth, where there is no echo of rolling wheels, no rumble of traffic or manufacture, you find yourself in a city which may be said to be without a voice. Through a hush like this, history and tradition speak all the more powerfully. Toledo has been a favorite with the novelists. The Zocodover was the haunt of that typical rogue Lazarillo de Tormes; and Cervantes, oddly as it happens, connects the scene of _La ilustre Fregonde_ with a shattered castle across the river, which by a coincidence has had its original name of San Servando corrupted into San Cervantes. Never shall I forget our walk around the city walls that first afternoon in Toledo. A broad thoroughfare skirts the disused defences on the south and west, running at first along the sheer descent to the river, and a beetling height against which houses, shops, and churches are crammed confusedly. I noticed one smithy with a wide dark mouth revealing the naked rock on which walls and roof abutted, and other houses into the faces of which had been wrought large granite projections of the hill. After this the way led through a gate of peculiar strength and shapeliness, carrying up arches of granite and red brick to a considerable height--a stout relic of the proud Moorish dominion so long maintained here; and then, when we had rambled about a church of Santiago lower down, passing through some streets irregular as foot-paths, where over a neglected door stood a unique announcement of the owner's name--"I am Don Sanchez. 1792"--we came to the Visagra, the country gate. This menacing, double-towered portal is mediæval; so that a few steps had carried us from Mohammedan Alimaymon to the Emperor Charles V. Just outside of it again is the Alameda, the modern garden promenade, where the beauty and idleness of Toledo congregate on Sunday evenings to the soft compulsion of strains from the military academical band. Thin runnels of water murmur along through the hedges and embowered trees, explaining by their presence how this refreshing pleasure-ground was conjured into being; for on the slope, a few feet below the green hedges, you still see the sun-parched soil just as it once spread over the whole area. The contrast suggests Eden blossoming on a crater-side. At the open-air soirées of the Alameda may be seen excellent examples of Spanish beauty. The national type of woman appears here in good preservation, and not too much hampered by foreign airs. Doubtless one finds it too in Burgos and Madrid, and in fact everywhere; and the grace of the women in other places is rather fonder of setting itself off by a fan used for parasol purposes in the street than in Toledo. But on the _pasco_ and _alameda_ all Spanish ladies carry fans, and it is something marvellous to see how they manage them. Not for a moment is the subtle instrument at rest: it flutters, wavers idly, is opened and shut in the space of a second, falls to the side, and again rises to take its part in the conversation almost like a third person--all without effort--with merely a turn of the supple fingers or wrist, and contributing an added charm to the bearer. The type of face which beams with more or less similarity above every fan in Spain is difficult to describe, and at first difficult even to apprehend. One has heard so much about its beauty that in the beginning it seems to fall short; but gradually its spell seizes on the mind, becoming stronger and stronger. The tint varies from tawny rose or olive to white: ladies of higher caste, from their night life and rare exposure to the sun, acquire a deathly pallor, which is unfortunately too often imitated with powder. Chestnut or lighter hair is seen a good deal in the south and east, but deep black is the prevalent hue. And the eyes!--it is impossible to more than suggest the luminous, dreamy medium in which they swim, so large, dark, and vivid. But, above all, there is combined with a certain child-like frankness a freedom and force, a quick mobility in the lines of the face, equalled only in American women. To these elements you must add a strong arching eyebrow and a pervading richness and fire of nature in the features, which it would be hard to parallel at all, especially when the whole is framed in the seductive folds of the black mantilla, like a drifting night-cloud enhancing the sparkle of a star. As we continued along the Camin de Marchan we looked down on one side over the fertile plain. The pale tones of the ripe harvest and dense green of trees contrasted with the rich brown and gray of the city, and dashes of red clay here and there. In a long field rose detached fragments of masonry, showing at different points the vast ground-plan of the Roman Circus Maximus, with a burst of bright ochre sand in the midst of the stubble, while on the left hand we had an old Arab gate pierced with slits for arrows, and on the crest above that a nunnery--St. Sunday the Royal--followed by a line of palaces and convents half ruined in the Napoleonic campaign of 1812. Out in the plain was the roof of the sword factory where "Toledo blades" are still forged and tempered for the Spanish army; although in the finer details of damascening and design nothing is produced beyond a small stock of show weapons and tiny ornamental trinkets for sale to tourists. Nor was this all; for a little farther on, at the edge of the river, close to the Bridge of St. Martin and the Gate of Twelve Stones, the broken remains of an old Gothic palace sprawled the steep, lying open to heaven and vacant as the dull eye-socket in some unsepulchred skull. Our stroll of a mile had carried us back to the second century before Christ, the path being strewn with relics of the Roman conquest, the Visigothic inroad, the Moorish ascendency, and the returning tide of Christian power. But the Jews, seeking refuge after the fall of Jerusalem, preceded all these, making a still deeper substratum in the marvellous chronicles of Toledo; and some of their later synagogues, exquisitely wrought in the Moorish manner, still stand in the Jewish quarter for the wonderment of pilgrim connoisseurs. [Illustration: SINGING GIRL.] It was from a terrace of this old Gothic palace near the bridge that, according to legend, Don Roderick, the last of the Goths in Spain, saw Florinda, daughter of one Count Julian, bathing in the yellow Tagus under a four-arched tower which still invades the flood, and goes by the name of the Bath of Florinda. From his passion for her, and their mutual error, the popular tale, with vigorous disregard of chronology, deduces the fall of Spain before the Berber armies; and as most old stories here receive an ecclesiastical tinge, this one relates how Florinda's sinful ghost continued to haunt the spot where we now stood, until laid by a good friar with cross and benediction. The sharp fall of the bank at first glance looked to consist of ordinary earth and stones, but on closer scrutiny turned out to contain quantities of brick bits from the old forts and towers which one generation after another had built on the heights, and which had slowly mouldered into nullity. Even so the firm lines of history have fallen away and crumbled into romance, which sifts through the crannies of the whole withered old city. As a lady of my acquaintance graphically said, it seems as if ashes had been thrown over this ancient capital, covering it with a film of oblivion. The rocks, towers, churches, ruins, are just so much corporeal mythology--object, lessons in fable. A little girl, becomingly neckerchiefed, wandered by us while we leaned dreaming above the river; and she was singing one of the wild little songs of the country, full of melancholy melody: "Fair Malaga, adios! Ah, land where I was born, Thou hadst mother-love for all, But for me step-mother's scorn!" [Illustration: CLOISTER OF ST. JOHN OF THE KINGS.] All unconscious of the monuments around her, she stopped when she saw that we had turned and were listening. Then we resumed our way, passing, I may literally say, as if in a trance up into the town again, where we presently found ourselves in front of St. John of the Kings, a venerable church, formerly connected with a Franciscan monastery which the French burnt. On the outer wall high up hangs a stern fringe of chains, placed there as votive tokens by released Christian captives from Granada, in 1492; and there they have remained since America was discovered! To this church is attached a most beautiful cloister, calm with the solitude of nearly four hundred years. Around three sides the rich clustered columns, each with its figures of holy men supported under pointed canopies, mark the delicate Gothic arches, through which the sunlight slants upon the pavement, falling between the leaves of aspiring vines that twine upward from the garden in the middle. There the rose-laurel blooms, and a rude fountain perpetually gurgles, hidden in thick greenery; and on the fourth side the wall is dismantled as the French bombardment left it. Seventy years have passed, and though the sculptured blocks for restoration have been got together, the vines grow over them, and no work has been done. We mounted the bell-tower part way with the custodian, and gained a gallery looking into the chapel, strangely adorned with regal shields and huge eagles in stone. On our way, under one part of the tower roof, we found a hen calmly strutting with her brood. "It was meant for celibacy," said the custodian, "but times change, and you see that family life has established itself here after all." [Illustration: A BIT OF CHARACTER.] I don't know whether there is anything particularly sacred about the hens of this district, but after seeing this one in the church-tower I began to think there might be, especially as on the way home we discovered another imprisoned fowl disconsolately looking down at us from the topmost window of a venerable patrician residence. II. [Illustration: SPANISH SOLDIERS PLAYING DOMINOS.] Its antiquities are not the queerest thing about Toledo. The sights of the day, the isolated existence of the inhabitants, are things peculiar. The very sports of the children reflect the prevailing influences. A favorite diversion with them is to parade in some dark hall-way with slow step and droning chants, in imitation of church festivals; and in the street we found boys playing at _toros_. Some took off their coats to wave as mantles before the bull, who hid around the corner until the proper time for his entry. The bull in this game, I noticed, had a nice sense of fair play, and would stop to argue points with his antagonists--something I should have been glad to see in the real arena. Once the old rock town accommodated two hundred thousand residents. Its contingent has now shrunk to twenty thousand, yet it swarms with citizens, cadets, loafers, and beggars. Its tortuous wynds are full of wine-shops, vegetables, and children, all mixed up together. Superb old palaces, nevertheless, open off from them, frequently with spacious courts inside, shaded by trellised vines, and with pillars at the entrance topped by heavy stone balls, or doors studded with nails and moulded in rectangular patterns like inlay-work. One day we wandered through a sculptured gate-way and entered a paved opening with a carved wood gallery running around the walls above. Orange-trees in tubs stood about, and a brewery was established in these palatial quarters. We ordered a bottle, but I noticed that the brewer stood regarding us anxiously. At last he drew nearer, and asked, "Do you come from Madrid?" "Yes." "Ah, then," said he, in a disheartened tone, "you won't like our beer." [Illustration: A NARROW STREET.] We encouraged him, however, and at last he disappeared, sending us the beverage diplomatically by another hand. He was too faint-spirited to witness the trial himself. Though called "The Delicious," the thin, sweet, gaseous liquid was certainly detestable; but in deference to the brewer's delicate conscientiousness we drank as much as possible, and then left with his wife some money and a weakly complimentary remark about the beer, which evidently came just in time to convince her that we were, after all, discriminating judges. [Illustration: WOMAN WITH BUNDLE.] The people generally were very simple and good-natured, and in particular a young commercial traveller from Barcelona whom we met exerted himself to entertain us. The chief street was lined with awnings reaching to the curb-stone in front of the shops, and every public door-way was screened by a striped curtain. Pushing aside one of these, our new acquaintance introduced us to what seemed a dingy bar, but, by a series of turnings, opened out into a spacious concealed café--that of the Two Brothers--where we frequently repaired with him to sip chiccory and cognac or play dominos. On these occasions he kept the tally in pencil on the marble table, marking the side of himself and a friend with their initials, and heading ours "The Strangers." All travellers in Spain are described by natives as "Strangers" or "French," and the reputation for a pure Parisian accent which we acquired under these circumstances, though brief, was glorious. To the Two Brothers resorted many soldiers, shop-keepers, and well-to-do housewives during fixed hours of the afternoon and evening, but at other times it was as forsaken as Don Roderick's palace. Another place of amusement was the Grand Summer Theatre, lodged within the ragged walls of a large building which had been half torn down. Here we sat under the stars, luxuriating in the most expensive seats (at eight cents per head), surrounded by a full audience of exceedingly good aspect, including some Toledan ladies of great beauty, and listened to a _zarzuela_, or popular comic opera, in which the prompter took an almost too energetic part. The ticket collector came in among the chairs to receive everybody's coupons with very much the air of being one of the family; for while performing his stern duty he smoked a short brier pipe, giving to the act an indescribable dignity which threw the whole business of the tickets into a proper subordination. In returning to our inn about midnight we were attracted by the free cool sound of a guitar duet issuing from a dark street that rambled off somewhere like a worm track in old wood, and, pursuing the sound, we discovered by the aid of a match lighted for a cigarette two men standing in the obscure alley, and serenading a couple of ladies in a balcony, who positively laughed with pride at the attention. The men, it proved, had been hired by some admirer, and so our friend engaged them to perform for us at the hotel the following night. [Illustration: THE SERENADERS.] The skill these thrummers of the guitar display is delicious, especially in the treble part, which is executed on a smaller species of the instrument, called a _mandura_. Our treble-player was blind in one eye, and with the carelessness of genius allowed his mouth to stay open, but managed always to keep a cigarette miraculously hanging in it; while his comrade, with a disconsolate expression, disdained to look at the strings on which his proud Castilian fingers were condemned to play a mere accompaniment. For two or three hours they rippled out those peculiar native airs which go so well with the muffled vibrations and mournful Oriental monotony of the guitar; but the bagman varied the concert by executing operatic pieces on a hair-comb covered with thin paper--a contrivance in which he took unfeigned delight. Some remonstrance against this uproar being made by other inmates of the hotel, our host silenced the complainants by cordially inviting them in. One large black-bearded guest, the exact reproduction of a stately ancient Roman, accepted the hospitality, and listened to that ridiculous piping of the comb with profound gravity and unmoved muscles, expressing neither approval nor dissatisfaction. But the white-aproned waiter, who, though unasked, hung spellbound on the threshold, was, beyond question, deeply impressed. The relations of servants with employers are on a very democratic footing in Spain. We had an admirable butler at Madrid who used to join in the conversation at table whenever it interested him, and was always answered with good grace by the conversationists, who admitted him to their intellectual repast at the same moment that he was proffering them physical nutriment. These Toledan servitors of the Fonda de Lino were still more informal. They used to take naps regularly twice a day in the hall, and could not get through serving dinner without an occasional cigarette between the courses. To save labor, they would place a pile of plates in front of each person, enough to hold the entire list of viands. That last phrase is a euphemism, however, for the meal each day consisted of the same meat served in three separate relays without vegetables, followed by fowl, an allowance of beans, and dessert. Even this they were not particular to give us on the hour. Famished beyond endurance, one evening at eight o'clock, we went down-stairs and found that not the first movement toward dinner had been made. The _mozos_ (waiters) were smoking and gossiping in the street, and rather frowned upon our vulgar desire for food, but we finally persuaded them to yield to it. After we had bought some tomatoes, and made a salad at dinner, the management was put on its mettle, and improved slightly. Fish in this country is always brought on somewhere in the middle of dinner, like the German pudding, and our landlord astonished us by following the three courses of stewed veal with sardines, fried in oil and ambuscaded in a mass of boiled green peppers. After that we forbore to stimulate his ambition any farther. [Illustration: A PLENTIFUL SUPPLY OF PLATES.] The hotel guest, however, is on the whole regarded as a necessary evil--a nuisance tolerated only because some few of the finest race in the world can make money out of him. The landlord lived with his family on the ground-floor, and furnished little domestic tableaux as we passed in and out; but he never paid any attention to us, and even looked rather hurt at the intrusion of so many strangers into his hostelry. Nor did the high-born sewing-women who sat on the public stairs, and left only a narrow space for other people to ascend or descend by, consider it necessary to stir in the least for our convenience. The fonda had more of the old tavern or posada style about it than most hotels patronized by foreigners. The entrance door led immediately into a double court, where two or three yellow equipages stood; and from this the kitchen, storerooms, and stable all branched off in some clandestine way. Above, at the eaves, these courts were covered with canvas awnings wrinkled in regular folds on iron rods--sheltering covers which remained drawn from the first flood of the morning sun until after five in the afternoon. Early and late I used to look down into the inner court, observing the men and women of the household as they dressed fish and silently wrung the necks of chickens, or sat talking a running stream of nothingness by the hour, for love of their own glib but uncouth voices. People of this province intone rather than talk: their sentences are set to distinct drawling tunes, such as I never before encountered in ordinary speech, and their thick lisping of all sibilants, combined with the usual contralto of their voices, gives the language a sonorous burr, for which one soon acquires a liking. Sunday is the great hair-combing day in Toledo, if I may judge from the manner in which women carried on that soothing operation in their door-ways and _patios_; and in this inner court below my window one of the servants, sitting on a stone slab, enjoyed the double profit of sewing and of letting a companion manipulate her yard-long locks of jet, while others sat near, fanning themselves and chattering. Another time a little girl, dark as an Indian, came there in the morning to wash a kerchief at the stone tank, always brimming with dirty water; after which she executed, unsuspicious of my gaze, a singularly weird _pas seul_, a sort of shadow dance, on the pavement, and then vanished. [Illustration: THE TOILET--A SUNDAY SCENE.] All the houses are roofed with heavy curved tiles, which fit together so as to let the air circulate under their hollow grooves; and a species of many-seeded grass sprouts out of these baked earth coverings, out of the ledges of old towers and belfries, and from the crevices of the great cathedral itself, like the downy hair on an old woman's cheek. The view along almost any one of the ancient streets, which are always tilted by the hilly site, is wonderfully quaint in its irregularities. Every window is heavily grated with iron, from the top to the bottom story, even the openings high up in the cathedral spire being similarly guarded, until the whole place looks like a metropolis of prisons. In the stout doors, too, there are small openings or peep-holes, such as we had seen still in actual use at Madrid--the relics of an epoch when even to open to an unknown visitor might be dangerous. White, white, white the sunshine!--and the walls of pink or yellow-brown, of pale green and blue, are sown with deep shadows and broken by big archways, often surmounted by rich knightly escutcheons. Balconies with tiled floors turning their colors down toward the sidewalk stud the fronts, and long curtains stream over them like cloaks fluttering in the breeze. At one point a peak-roofed tower rises above the rest of its house with sides open to the air and cool shadow within, where perhaps a woman sits and works behind a row of bright flowering plants. Doves inhabited the fonda roof unmolested by the spiritless cats that, flat as paper, slept in the undulations of the tiles; for the Toledan cats and dogs are the most wretched of their kind. They get even less to eat than their human neighbors, which is saying a great deal. And beyond the territory of the doves my view extended to a slender bell-spire at the end of the cathedral, poised in the bright air like a flower-stalk, with one bell seen through an interstice as if it were a blossom. At another point the main spire rose out of what might be called a rich thicket of Gothic work. Its tall thin shaft is encircled near the point with sharp radiating spikes of iron, doubtless intended to recall the crown of thorns: in this sign of the Passion, held forever aloft, three hundred feet above the ground, there is a penetrating pathos, a solemn beauty. III. The cathedral of Toledo, long the seat of the Spanish primate, stands in the first rank of cathedrals, and is invested with a ponderous gloom that has something almost savage about it. For six centuries art, ecclesiasticism, and royal power lavished their resources upon it; and its dusky chapels are loaded with precious gems and metals, tawdry though the style of their ornamentation often is. The huge pillars that divide its five naves rise with a peculiar inward curve, which gives them an elastic look of growth. They are the giant roots from which the rest has spread. Under the golden gratings and jasper steps of the high altar Cardinal Mendoza lies buried, with a number of the older kings of Spain, in a grewsome sunless vault; but at the back of the altar there is contrived with theatrical effect a burst of white light from a window in the arched ceiling, around the pale radiance of which are assembled painted figures, gradually giving place to others in veritable relief--all sprawling, flying, falling down the wall enclosing the altar, as if one were suddenly permitted to see a swarm of saints and angels careering in a beam of real supernatural illumination. A private covered gallery leads above the street from the archbishop's palace into one side of the mighty edifice; and this, with the rambling, varied aspect of the exterior, in portions resembling a fortress, with a stone sentry-box on the roof, recalls the days of prelates who put themselves at the head of armies, leading in war as in everything else. A spacious adjoining cloister, full of climbing ivy and figs, Spanish cypress, the smooth-trunked laurel-tree, and many other growths, all bathed in opulent sunshine, marks the site of an old Jewish market, which Archbishop Tenorio in 1389 incited a mob to burn in order that he might have room for this sacred garden. But the voices of children now ring out from the upper rooms of the cloister building, where the widows and orphans of cathedral servants are given free homes. Through this "cloister of the great church" it was that Cervantes says he hurried with the MS. of Cid Hamete Benengeli, containing Don Quixote's history, after he had bought it for half a real--just two cents and a half. [Illustration: A TOLEDO PRIEST.] A temple of the barbaric and the barbarous, the cathedral dates from the thirteenth century: but it was preceded by one which was built to the Virgin in her lifetime, tradition says, and she came down from heaven to visit her shrine. The identical slab on which she alighted is still preserved in one of the chapels. A former inscription said to believers, "Use yourselves to kiss it for your much consolation," and their obedient lips have in time greatly worn down the stone. Later on, the church was used as a mosque by the infidel conquerors, and when they were driven out it was pulled down to be replaced by the present huge and solemn structure. But, by a compromise with the subjugated Moors, a Muzarabic mass (a seeming mixture of Mohammedan ritual with Christian worship) was ordained to be said in a particular chapel; and there it is recited still, every morning in the year. I attended this weird, half-Eastern ceremony, which was conducted with an extraordinary incessant babble of rapid prayer from the priests in the stalls, precisely like the inarticulate hum one imagines in a mosque. On the floor below and in front of the altar-steps was placed a richly-draped chest, perhaps meant to represent the tomb of Mohammed in the Caaba, and around it stood lighted candles. During the long and involved mass one of the younger priests, in appearance almost an imbecile, had the prayer he was to read pointed out for him by an altar-boy with what looked like a long knife-blade, used for the purpose. Soon after an incense-bearing acolyte nudged him energetically to let him know that his turn had now come. This was the only evidence I could discover of any progress in knowledge or goodness resulting from the Muzarabic mass. At one time Toledo had, besides the cathedral, a hundred and ten churches. Traces of many of them are still seen in small arches rising from the midst of house-tops, with a bell swung in the opening; but the most have fallen into disuse, and the greatest era of the hierarchy has passed. The great priests have also passed, and those who now dwell here offer to the most unprejudiced eye a dreary succession of bloated bodies and brutish faces. Sermons are never read in the gorgeous cathedral pulpits, and the Church, as even an ardent Catholic assured me, seems, at least locally, dead. The priests and the prosperous shop-keepers are almost the only beings in Toledo who look portly; the rest are thin, brown, wiry, and tall, with fine creases in their hard faces that appear to have been drilled there by the sand-blast process. The women, however, even in the humbler class, preserve a fine, fresh animal health, which makes you wonder how they ever grow old, until you see some tottering creature who is little more than a mass of sinews and wrinkles held together by a skirt and a neckerchief--the _pañuclo_ universal with her sex. At noon and evening the serving-women came out to the fountains, distributed here and there under groups of miniature locust-trees, to fetch water for their houses. They carried huge earthen jars, or _cantarones_, which they would lug off easily under one arm, in attitudes of inimitable grace. [Illustration: TOLEDO SERVITORS AT THE FOUNTAIN.] [Illustration: A PROFESSIONAL BEGGAR.] If religious sway over temporal things has declined, Toledo still impresses one as little more than a big church founded on the rock, with room made for the money-changers' benches, and an unimaginable jumble of palaces once thronged with powerful courtiers and abundant in wealth, but at this day chiefly inhabited by persons of humble quality. Nightly there glows in the second story of a building on the Zocodover, where _autos-da-fé_ used to be held, a large arched shrine of the Virgin hung with mellow lamps, so that not even with departing daylight shall religious duty be put aside by the commonplace crowd shuffling through the plaza beneath. Everywhere in angles and turnings and archways one comes upon images and pictures fixed to the wall under a pointed roof made with two short boards, to draw a passing genuflection or incidental _ave_ from any one who may be going by on an errand of business or--as more often occurs--laziness. Feast-days, too, are still ardently observed. With all this, somehow, the fact connects itself that the populace are instinctive, free-born, insatiable beggars. The magnificently chased door-ways of the cathedral festered with revolting specimens of human disease and degeneration, appealing for alms. Other more prosperous mendicants were regularly on hand for business every day at the "old stand" in some particular thoroughfare. I remember one, especially, whose whole capital was invested in a superior article of nervous complaint, which enabled him to balance himself between the wall and a crutch, and there oscillate spasmodically by the hour. In this he was entirely beyond competition, and cast into the shade those merely routine professionals who took the common line of bad eyes or uninterestingly motionless deformities. It used to depress them when he came on to the ground. Bright little children, even, in perfect health, would desist from their amusements and assail us, struck with the happy thought that they might possibly wheedle the "strangers" into some untimely generosity. There was one pretty girl of about ten years, who laughed outright at the thought of her own impudence, but stopped none the less for half an hour on her way to market (carrying a basket on her arm) in order to pester poor Velveteen while he was sketching, and begged him for money, first to get bread, and then shoes, and then anything she could think of. [Illustration: A GROUP OF MENDICANTS.] A hand opened to receive money would be a highly suitable device for the municipal coat of arms. [Illustration: A PATIO IN TOLEDO.] My friend's irrepressible pencil, by-the-way, made him the centre of a crowd wherever he went. Grave business men came out of their shops to see what he was drawing; loungers made long and ingenious detours in order to obtain a good view of his labors; ragamuffins elbowed him, undismayed by energetic remarks in several languages, until finally he was moved to get up and display the contents of his pockets, inviting them even to read some letters he had with him. To this gentle satire they would sometimes yield. We fell a prey, however, to one silent youth of whom we once unguardedly asked a question. After that he considered himself permanently engaged to pilot us about. He would linger for hours near the fonda dinnerless, and, what was even more terrible, sleepless, so that he might fasten upon us the moment we should emerge. If he discovered our destination, he would stride off mutely in advance, to impress on us the fact that we were under obligation to him; and when we found the place we wanted, he waited patiently until we had rewarded him with a half-cent. If we gratified him by asking him the way, he responded by silently stretching forth his arm and one long forefinger with a lordly gesture, still striding on; and he had a very superior Castilian sneering smile, which he put on when he looked around to see if we were following. He gradually became for us a sort of symbolic shadow of the town's vanished greatness; and from his mysterious way of coming into sight, and haunting us in the most unexpected places, we gave him the name of "Ghost." Nevertheless, we baffled him at last. In the Street of the Christ of Light there is a small but exceedingly curious mosque, now converted into a church, so ancient in origin that some of the capitals in it are thought to show Visigothic work, so that it must have been a Christian church even before the Moorish invasion. Close by this we chanced upon a charming old _patio_, or court-yard, entered through a wooden gate, and by dexterously gliding in here and shutting the gate we exorcised "Ghost" for some time. The broad red tiles of this _patio_ contrasted well with its white-washed arcade pillars, on which were embossed the royal arms of Castile; and the jutting roof of the house was supported on elaborate beams of old Spanish cedar cracked with age. It was sadly neglected. Flowers bloomed in the centre, but a pile of lumber littered one side; and the house was occupied by an old woman who was washing in the arcade, her tub being the half of a big terra-cotta jar laid on its side. She spread her linen out on the hot pavement to dry; and a sprightly neighbor coming in with a basket of clothes and a "Health to thee!" was invited to dry _her_ wash on a low tile roof adjoining. "Solitude" served at once as her name and to describe her surroundings. We made friends with her, the more easily because she was much interested in the sketch momently growing under my companion's touch. "And _you_ don't draw?" she inquired of me. I answered, apologetically, "No." Having seen me glancing over a book, she added, as if to console me, and with emphasis, "But you can read!" To her mind that was a sister art and an equal one. She went on to tell how her granddaughter had spent ten years in school, and at the end of that time was able to read. "But now she is forgetting it all. She goes out and plays too much with the _muchachas_" (young girls). [Illustration: THE HOME OF "SOLITUDE."] This amiable grandmother also took us in to see her domicile, which proved to be a part of the old city wall, and had a fine view from its iron-barred window. She declared vaguely that "a count" had formerly lived there; but it had more probably been the gate-captain's house, for close by was one of the fortified ports of the inner defences. A store-room, in fact, which she kept full of pigeons and incredibly miscellaneous old iron, stood directly over the arched entrance, and there we saw the heavy beam and windlass which in by-gone ages had hoisted or let fall the spiked portcullis. I induced "Solitude" to tell me a legend about one of the churches; for there is generally some story to every square rod of ground hereabout, and indeed a little basilica below the town sustains four different narratives all explaining a single miracle. Serving as an appropriate foundation for local wonder-mongering, a great cave in the rock underlies some portion of the city, and is said to have been hollowed out by Hercules, who, in addition to his other labors, has received the credit of founding Toledo. I am convinced that no muscles but his could ever have stood the strain of first climbing its site. The cave I refer to has been for the most part of the last two hundred years closed and walled up. About thirty years since it was timidly explored by a society formed for the purpose, and some Roman remains were found in it; but after that, terror fell upon the explorers, and the cavern was again closed, remaining even yet a reservoir of mystery. There are equally mysterious things above ground, however, as will shortly be demonstrated by the tale of the "Christ of Compassion." Let me, before giving that, recall here a more poetic tradition, preserved by Señor Eugenio Olavarria, a young author of Madrid. We saw just outside the mosque-church of the Christ of Light an old Moorish well, of a kind common in Spain, with a low thick wall surrounding the deep sunken shaft, to rest the bucket-chain on when it is let down and drawn up by sheer muscular force. The edges were worn into one continuous pattern of grooves by the incessant chafing of the chains for ages, and we conjured up a dozen romances about the people who of old slaked their thirst there. It is about another water-source of the same kind, on a small street still called Descent to the Bitter Well, that the story here outlined is told: THE WELL OF BITTERNESS. "In the time of one of the Moorish kings there lived at Toledo, under the mild toleration of that epoch, a rich Jew, strictly and passionately devoted to the laws of his religion and to one only other object: that one was his daughter Raquel, motherless, but able to solace his widowed heart with her devoted affection. Sixteen Aprils had wrought their beautiful changes into her exquisite form and lovely mind, till at last, of all things which they had waked to life, she appeared the fairest. "Reuben had gradually made her the chief end of his existence, and she certainly merited this absolute concentration of her father's love. But, notwithstanding that at this time Jews and Christians dwelt together unmolested by the Mohammedan rule, the inborn hostility between these two orders underwent no abatement. Intercourse between them was sedulously avoided by each, and the springing up of any shy flower of love between man and maid of such hostile races was sure to be followed by deadly blight and ruin. Nevertheless--and how it happened who can say?--Raquel, already ripened by the rich sun of her native land into a perfected womanhood, fell in love with a young Christian cavalier, who had himself surrendered to her silent and distant beauty as it shone upon him, while passing, from her grated window in Reuben's stately mansion. He learned her name, and spoke it to her from the street--'Raquel!'--at twilight. So trembling and brimming with mutual love were they, that this one word, like the last o'erflowing drop of precious liquid from a vase, was enough to reveal to her what filled his heart. As she heard it she blushed as though it had been a kiss that he had reverently impressed upon her cheek; and this was answer enough--their secret and perilous courtship had begun. Thereafter they met often at night in the great garden attached to the house, making their rendezvous at the low-walled well that stood in a thicket of fragrant greenery. At last, through the prying of an aged friend, his daughter's passion came to the knowledge of old Reuben, who had never till then even conceived of such disgrace as her being enamoured of a Christian. His course was prompt and terrible. Concealing himself one evening behind a tree-trunk close to the well, he awaited the coming of the daring cavalier, sprung upon him, and after a short, noiseless struggle bore him down with a poniard in his breast! "The stealthy opening of a door into the garden warned him of Raquel's approach. He hastened again into concealment. She arrived, saw her fallen lover, dropped at his side in agonies of terror, and sought to revive him. Then she saw and by the moonlight recognized her father's dagger in the breathless bosom of the young man, and knew what had happened. Moved by sudden remorse, Reuben came out with words of consolation ready. But she knew him not, she heard him not; from that instant madness was in her eyes and brain. Many months she haunted the spot at night, calm but hopelessly insane, and weeping silently at the margin of the well, into whose waters her salt tears descended. At length there came a night when she did not return to the house. She had thrown herself into the well and was found there--dead! "Never again could any one drink its waters, which had been famous for their quality. Raquel's tears of sorrow had turned them bitter." The other legend is still more marvellous: "In the reign of Enrique IV. of Spain there was fierce rivalry between two Toledan families, the Silvas and the Ayalas, which in 1467 led to open warfare. The Silvas threw themselves into the castle, and the Ayalas held the cathedral--the blood shed in their combats staining the very feet of its altars. During this struggle of hatred there was also a struggle of love going on between two younger members of the embroiled families. Diego de Ayala, setting at naught the pride of his house, had given his heart to Isabel, the daughter of a poor hidalgo; but it so happened that his enemy, Don Lope de Silva, had resolved to win the same maiden, though receiving no encouragement from her. One night when the combatants were resting on their arms, and the whole city was in disorder, Don Lope succeeded in entering Isabel's house with several of his followers and carried her off--trusting to the general confusion to prevent interruption. As they were bearing her away across a little square in front of the Church of San Justo, Don Diego, on his way to see Isabel, encountered them. "'Leave that woman, ye cowards, and go your way!' he commanded, with drawn sword. And at that instant, by the light of the lamp which burned before the pictured Christ of Compassion on the church wall, he recognized Isabel and Don Lope. "Making a bold dash, he succeeded in freeing Isabel and getting her into the shelter of an angle in the wall, just below the holy figure. But being there hemmed in by his adversaries, he felt himself, after a sharp fight in which he dealt numerous wounds, fainting from the severe thrusts he had himself received. Fearing that he was mortally hurt, he raised his eyes to the shrine and prayed: 'O God, not for me, but for her, manifest thy pity! I am willing to die, but save her!' "Then a marvellous brilliance streamed out from the thorn-crowned head, and instantly, propelled by some unseen force, Diego found himself and Isabel pushed through the solid wall behind them, which opened to receive them into the sanctuary, and closed again to keep out the assassins. Don Lope rushed forward in pursuit, and in his rage hacked the stones with his sword as if to cut his way through. The marks made in the stone by his weapon are still to be seen there." The compassionate face still looks down from the shrine, and little sign-boards announce indulgences to those who pray there: "Señor Don Luis Maria de Borbon, most Illustrious Señor Bishop of Carista, grants forty days' indulgence to all who with grief for their sins say, 'Lord have mercy on me!' or make the acts of Faith, Charity, and Hope before this image, praying for the necessities of the Church." Altogether I computed that a good Catholic could by a half-hour's industry secure immunity for two hundred and twenty days, or nearly two-thirds of a year. It is to be feared that the Toledans are too lazy to profit even by this splendid chance. The majority of people here who can command a daily income of ten cents will do no work. Numbers of the inhabitants are always standing or leaning around drowsily, like animals who have been hired to personate men, and are getting tired of the job. Every act approaching labor must be done with long-drawn leisure. Men and boys slumber out-of-doors even in the hot sun, like dogs; after sitting meditatively against a wall for a while, one of them will tumble over on his nose--as if he were a statue undermined by time--and remain in motionless repose wherever he happens to strike. Business with the trading class itself is an incident, and resting is the essence of the mundane career. Nevertheless, the place has fits of activity. When the mid-day siesta is over there is a sudden show of doing something. Men begin to trot about with a springy, cat-like motion, acquired from always walking up and down hill, which, taken with their short loose blouses, dark skins, and roomy canvas slippers, gives them an astonishing likeness to Chinamen.[5] The slip and scramble of mule hoofs and donkey hoofs are heard on the steep pavements, and two or three loud-voiced, lusty men, with bare arms, carrying a capacious tin can and a dipper, go roaring through the torrid streets, "Hor-cha-ta!" Then the cathedral begins wildly pounding its bells, all out of tune, for vespers. The energy which has broken loose for a couple of hours is discovered to be a mistake, and another interval of relaxation sets in, lasting through the night, and until the glare of fiery daybreak, greeted by the shrill whistling of the remorseless pet quail, sets the insect-like stir going again for a short time in the forenoon. Because of such apathy, and of a more than the usual Latin disregard for public decency, the streets and houses are allowed to become pestilential, and drainage is unknown. Enervating luxury of that sort did well enough for the Romans and Moors, but is literally below the level of Castilian ideas. In the midst of the most sublime emotion aroused by the associations or grim beauty of Toledo, you are sure to be stopped short by some intolerable odor. [Illustration: "MEN AND BOYS SLUMBER OUT-OF-DOORS EVEN IN THE HOT SUN."] The primate city was endowed with enough of color and quaintness almost to compensate for this. We never tired of the graceful women walking the streets vestured in garments of barbaric tint and endlessly varied ornamentation, nor of the men in short breeches split at the bottom, who seemed to have splashed pots of vari-colored paint at hap-hazard over their clothes, and insisted upon balancing on their heads broad-brimmed, pointed hats, like a combination of sieve and inverted funnel. There was a spark of excitement, again, in the random entry of a "guard of the country," mounted on his emblazoned donkey-saddle, with a small arsenal in his waist sash, and a couple of guns slung behind on the beast's flanks, ready for marauders. Even now in remembrance the blots on Toledo fade, and I see its walls and towers throned grandly amid those hills that were mingled of white powder and fire at noon-tide, but near evening cooled themselves down to olive and russet citron, with burning rosy shadows resting in the depressions. [Illustration: A STRANGE FUNERAL.] One of the first spectacles that presented itself to us will remain also one of the latest recollections. Between San Juan de los Reyes and the palace of Roderick we met unexpectedly a crowd of boys and girls, followed by a few men, all carrying lighted candles that glowed spectrally, for the sun was still half an hour high in the west. A stout priest, with white hair and a vinous complexion, had just gone down the street, and this motley group was following the same direction. Somewhat in advance walked a boy with a small black and white coffin, held in place on his head by his upraised arm, as if it were a toy; and in the midst of the candle-bearers moved a light bier like a basket-cradle, carried by girls, and containing the small waxen form of a dead child three or four years old, on whose impassive, colorless face the orange glow of approaching sunset fell, producing an effect natural yet incongruous. A scampering dog accompanied the mourners, if one may call them such, for they gave no token of being more impressed, more touched by emotion, than he. The cradle-bier swayed from side to side as if with a futile rockaby motion, until the bearers noticed how carelessly they were conveying it down the paved slope; and the members of the procession talked to each other with a singular indifference, or looked at anything which caught their random attention. As the little rabble disappeared through the Puerta del Cambron, with their long candles dimly flaming, and the solemn, childish face in their midst, followed by the poor unconscious dog, it seemed to me that I beheld in allegory the departure from Toledo of that spirit of youth whose absence leaves it so old and worn. [Illustration] _CORDOVAN PILGRIMS._ I. [Illustration: T] The House of Purification, as the great mosque at Cordova was called, used to be a goal of pilgrimage for the Moors in Spain, as Mecca was for Mohammedans elsewhere. Their shoes no longer repose at its doors, but other less devout pilgrims now come in a straggling procession from all quarters of the globe to rest a while within its fair demesne--hallowed, perhaps, as much by the unique flowering of a whole people's genius in shapes of singular loveliness as by the more direct religious service to which it has been dedicated and re-dedicated under conflicting beliefs. It was with peculiar eagerness, therefore, that we set out on our way. An American who was following the same route had joined us--a man with ruddy, bronzed cheeks and iron-gray hair, whom I at first should have taken for the great-grandson of a Spanish Inquisitor, if such a thing were possible. His iron persistence and the intensity of his prejudices were in keeping with that character--the only trouble being that the prejudices were all on the wrong side. Whetstone (as he was called) shared our eagerness in respect of Cordova, though from different motives. He hailed each new point in his journey with satisfaction, because it would get him so much nearer the end; for the reason he had come to Spain was, apparently, to get out of it again. "I don't see what I came to Spain for," Whetstone would observe to us, dismally; and, for that matter, we could not see either. "If there ever _was_ a God-forsaken country--Why, look at the way a whole parcel of these men at the dinner-table get out their cigarettes and smoke right there, without ever asking a lady's leave! I'd like to see 'em try it on at home! Wouldn't they be just snaked out of that room pretty quick?" He had under his care a young lady of great sensibility, a relative by marriage, accompanied by her maid; and the maid was a colored woman of the most pronounced pattern. Altogether our pilgrim party embraced a good deal of variety. The young American girl, being a Catholic, was really a palmer faring from shrine to shrine. Rarely a convent or a chapel escaped her; she sipped them all as if they had been flower-cups and she a humming-bird, and managed to extract some unknown honey of comfort from their bitterness. It was like having a novice with us. [Illustration: WHETSTONE.] The night journeys by rail, so much in vogue in Spain, have their advantages and their drawbacks. At Castillejo, a junction on the way to Cordova, we had to wait four hours in the evening at a distance of twenty miles from the nearest restaurant. The country around was absolutely desolate except for tufts of the _retamé_--a sort of broom with slim green and silvered leaves, which grows wild, and, after drying, is used by the peasants as a substitute for rye or wheat flour. Only two or three houses were in sight. The tracks with cars standing on them, and the unfinished look of the whole place, made us feel as if we had by mistake been carried off to some insignificant railroad station in Illinois or Missouri. The only resource available for dinner was a _cantineria_, or drinking-room, where a few blocks of tough bread lent respectability to a lot of loaferish wine-bottles, and some uninviting sausages were hung in gloomy festoons, with a suspicious air of being a permanent architectural fixture intended as a perch for flies. The Spaniards invent little rhymed proverbs about many of their villages, and of one insignificant Andalusian hamlet, Brenes, the saying is, "If to Brenes thou goest, Take with thee thy roast." But Castillejo seems to be an equally good subject for this warning. We recalled how lavishly, on the way to Toledo, we had presented bread, meat, and strawberries to some country folk who were not in the habit of eating, and how ardently they had thanked us. As we passed their house in returning it was closed and lifeless, and we were convinced that they had died of a surfeit. How willingly would we now have undone that deed! However, after making some purchases from an extremely deaf old woman who presided over such poor supplies as the place afforded, we asked her if she could have coffee prepared. "If there is enough in the house," she replied to our interrogatory shrieks. Accordingly, we carried a table out under some trees on the gravel platform, to eat _al fresco_. [Illustration: COFFEE AT CASTILLEJO.] When we found ourselves in this way for the first time thrown back on the Spanish sausage, we resisted that unsympathetic substance with all the vigor of despair. But, aided by some bad wine, an interesting conversation with the Novice, and the glow of a sunset sky that looked as if strewn with fading peony petals, we recovered from the shock caused in the beginning by a mingled flavor of garlic, raisins, and pork. In truth, there was something enjoyable about this wild supper around which our quartette gathered in the dry, dewless twilight. An ancient female, resembling a broken-down Medea, came out and kindled a fire of brushwood beyond the track, swung a kettle there, and cooked our coffee, bending over the flame-light the while with her scattered gray tresses, and wailing out doleful _peteneras_, the popular songs of Spain. The songs, the fire, the wine, the strange scene, were so stimulating that we were surprised to find all at once the dark vault overhead full of stars, the comet staring at us in its flight above the hills, and our ten-o'clock train nearly due. The next morning we were in a region totally unlike anything we had seen before, excepting for the ever-present mountain ranges wild as the Pyrenees or Guadaramas. The light of dawn on these barren Spanish mountain-sides, drawn up into peaks as sharp as the points of a looped-up curtain, produces effects indescribable except on canvas and by a subtle colorist. The bare surfaces of rock or dry grass and moss, and the newly reaped harvest fields lower down, blend the tints of air and earth in a velvet-smooth succession of madder and faint yellow, olive and rose and gray, fading off into a reddish-violet at greater distances. These eminences are a part of the Sierra Morena, where Don Quixote achieved some of his most noteworthy feats--the liberation of the galley-slaves, the descent into the Cave of Montesinos, the capture of Mambrino's helmet, and the famous penance. So weird is the aspect of these desolate hills, enclosing silent valleys in which narrow tracts of woods are harbored, that I suspected it would be easy to breed a few Don Quixotes of reality there. Craziness would become a necessary diversion to relieve the monotony of existence. [Illustration: PRIMITIVE THRASHING.] A winding river-bed near by was bordered by tufted copses of oleander in full flower, and hedges of huge serrated aloe guarded the roads. On the hill-sides a round corral for herds would occasionally be seen. In the fields the time-honored method of threshing out grain by driving a sort of heavy board sledge in a circle over the cut crop, and of winnowing by tossing up shovelfuls of the grain-dust into the breezy air, was in active operation. By-and-by the olive orchards began. As far as we could see they stretched on either side their ranks of round dusty green tree-heads. Thousands of acres of them--one grove after another: we travelled through fifty miles of almost unbroken olive plantations, until we fancied we could even smell the fruit on the boughs, and our eyes were sick and weary with the sameness of the sight. Then the river, which from time to time had shown its muddy current in curves and sweeps, moving through the land at the bottom of what might have been an enormous drain, turned out to be the famous Guadalquivir, which, as Ford vividly puts it, "eats its dull way through loamy banks." At last Cordova, seated in an ample plain--Cordova, in vanished ages the home of Seneca, Lucan, Averroës, and the poet Juan de Mena--Cordova, white in the dry and gritty sun-dazzled air, with square, unshadowed two-story houses, overlooked by the bell-tower of its incomparable Mezquita Cathedral: a cheerful Southern city, maintaining large gardens, abounding in palms and myrtles and orange and lemon trees; possessing, moreover, clean streets of perceptible width. [Illustration: WHILE THE WOMEN ARE AT MASS.] After the "interpreter," or hotel guide, the beggar: such is the order in these Spanish towns, and not seldom the guide is merely a bolder kind of beggar. Two or three of the most frantically miserable and loathsome charity-seekers I ever saw surrounded our omnibus as we awaited our baggage, and stuffed their hideous heads in at the windows and door, concentrating on us their fire of appeals. Velveteen had heard that the sovereign remedy for these pests was to treat them with consummate politeness and piety. "Pardon me, brother, for God's sake!" was the deprecatory formula which had been recommended, and he now proceeded to recite this, book in hand. Unfortunately it took him about five minutes to get it launched in good style and pure Spanish, during which time the beggars had an opportunity entirely to miss the sense. A few grains of tobacco dropped into the hat of one of them were more efficacious, for they had the result of mystifying him and hopelessly paralyzing his analytical powers. Finally the guide, coming with the baggage, recognized his rivals, and drove them off. At several places on the way we had seen our twin military persecutors waiting for us, sometimes with white havelocks, and again in glazed hat-covers and capes. "Are they disguising themselves, so as to fall upon us unawares?" I asked my friend. We determined not to be deceived, however, by the subtle device. These Spanish police-soldiers go through more metamorphoses in the linen and water-proof line than any troops I know. It must be excessively inconvenient to run home and make the change every time a slight shower threatens; and invariably, as soon as they get on their storm-cover, the sun begins to shine again. On our arrival they seemed to have made up their minds to arrest us at once; they came striding along toward us in duplicate, one the fac-simile of the other, and we gave ourselves up for lost. But just as they were within a few paces, their unaccountable policy of delay caused them to deviate suddenly, and march on as if they hadn't seen us. "One more escape!" sighed Velveteen, fervently. Strangely enough, the languor which we had left in the middle of the kingdom, at Toledo, was replaced in this more tropical latitude by great activity. The shop streets presented a series of rooms entirely open to the view, where men and women were busily engaged in all sorts of small manufacture--shoes, garments, tin-work, carpentering. They were happy and diligent, as if they had been animated writing-book maxims, and sung or whistled at their tasks in a most exemplary manner. [Illustration: WATER-STAND IN CORDOVA.] "Cordovan leather" still holds it own, on a petty scale, and the small cups hammered out of old silver dollars constitute, with filigree silver-work, a characteristic local product. The faces of the people betrayed their gypsy blood oftentimes, and there was one street chiefly occupied by the Romany folk. Traces of blond or light chestnut hair showed that the Moorish stock had likewise left some offshoots that do not die out. The whole aspect of Cordova presents at once a reflex of the refined and enlightened spirit of the ancient caliphate. Everybody, including most of the beggars, has a fresh and cleanly appearance; the very priests undergo a change, being frequently more refined in feature and of a more tolerant expression than those of the North. The women set off their rosy brown complexions and black hair with clusters of rayed jasmine blossoms, flattened and ingeniously fixed in rosette form on long pins. The men, discarding those hot felt hats so obstinately worn in the central provinces, make a comfortable and festive appearance in their curling Panamas. On the Street of the Great Captain--the chief open-air resort, commemorating Gonsalvo of Cordova, who led so ably in the triumphant Christian campaigns--the people laugh and chat as if they really enjoyed life. There is a great deal of wealth in the place, and the lingering atmosphere of its past greatness is not depressing, as that of Toledo is, for it was never the home of bigotry and ignorance. Its prosperous epoch under Abdur-rahman and his Ommeyad successors was one of brilliant civilization. It was then a nursery of science and the arts; its inhabitants numbered a million. It had mosques by the hundred, and nearly a thousand baths--for the Spanish Moors well knew the civilizing virtue of water, and kept life-giving streams of it running at the roots of their institutions. The houses of the modern city are very plain on the exterior, and their common coat of whitewash imparts to them a democratic equality, though aristocracy is still a living thing there, instead of having sunk into pitfalls of squalor and idleness, as in the sombre city by the Tagus. "But now the Cross is sparkling on the mosque, And bells make Catholic the trembling air." [Illustration: THE GAY COSTER-MONGERS OF ANDALUSIA.] Gloomy little churches crop out in every quarter, and a few convents of nuns remain, where you may hear the faint, sad litany of the unseen sisters murmured behind the grating, while a priest chants service for them in the lonely chapel. The bells of these churches and of the mosque-cathedral are hardly ever silent; the brazen jargon of their tongues echoes over the roofs at all hours, and the hollow, metallic tinkle of mule-bells from the otherwise silent streets at times strikes one as making response to them. The beauty of the cathedral--still called the Mezquita (mosque)--lies almost solely in the preservation of its original Moorish architecture. [Illustration: THE MEZQUITA.] The site was first occupied as a place of worship by the Roman Temple of Janus, and this in turn became a basilica of the Gothic Christians. Abdur-rahman, after the Christians had long been allowed by the caliphs to continue their worship in one half of the basilica, reared the supremely wonderful House of Purification as it now stands; and then, after the conquest by Ferdinand and Isabella, in the reign of Charles V., the cumbrous high altar and choir, which choke up so much of the interior, transformed it once more into a stronghold of Christian ceremonial. But when you enter at the Gate of Pardon the long, wide Court of Oranges, you find yourself transported instantly to Mohammedan surroundings; you are under the dominion of the Ommeyades. [Illustration: RELIC PEDDLERS.] High walls hem in this open-air vestibule, where rows of orange-trees rustle their dense foliage in the warm wind. Their trunks are corpulent with age, for some of them date back to the last Moorish dynasty, and at one end stands the tank where followers of the Prophet washed themselves before entering in to pray. The Gate of Pardon, under the high-spired bell-tower, takes its name from the custom which obtained of giving criminals refuge by its portal. The murderer who could fly hither and gain the central aisle of the temple, directly opposite the gate across the court, was safe for shelter by the Mihrab, or inner shrine, at the farther end of the aisle. All the nineteen aisles formerly opened from the fragrant garden, though Catholic rule gives access by only three; but inside one sees at a glance the vast consecrated space which was so freely open to the Mussulmans--an interior covering several acres, not very lofty, yet imposing from its exquisite proportions. A wilderness, a cool, dark labyrinth of pillars from which light horseshoe arches rise, broken midway for the curve of another arch surmounting each of these, spreads itself out under the roof on every hand--grove of stone in a cave of stone stretching so far that the eye cannot follow its intricate regularity, its rare harmony of confusion. The rash Christian renovators who, overruling the protest of the city, undertook to remodel so exceptional a monument, covered the arches with whitewash; but many of them have been restored to the natural hues of their red and white marble. Imagine below them the pillars, smooth-shafted and with fretted capitals. Of old there were _twelve hundred_ of them supporting the gilded beams and incorruptible larch of the roof, and a thousand still stand. Each is shaped from a single block, and many quarries contributed them. Jasper and porphyry, black, white, and red, emerald and rose marble, are all represented among them; though with their diversity they have this in common, that from the pavement up to about the average human height they have been worn dark, and even smoother than the workmen left them, by the constant touching and rubbing and leaning of generations who have loitered and worshipped in the solemn twilight that broods around them. A large number were appropriated from the old Roman temple which stood on the spot; others were plundered from temples at ancient Carthage; still others were brought entire from Constantinople. They typify the different powers that have been concerned in the making and unmaking of Spain, and one could almost imagine that in every column is concealed some petrified warrior of those conflicting races, waiting for the spell that shall bring him to life again. [Illustration: THE GARDEN OF THE ALCAZAR.] On the surface of one of these marble cylinders is scratched a rude and feeble image of Christ on the cross, hardly noticeable until pointed out. It is said to have been traced there by the finger-nail of a Christian captive who was chained to the pillar when it formed part of a dungeon somewhere else. He had ten years for the work, and enjoyed the advantage of a tool that would renew itself without expense whenever it began to wear out. I must say that we were touched by this dim record of the dead-and-gone prisoner's silent suffering and faith. The shock of doubt struck us only when, in another part of the mosque, we came upon another pillar against the wall, bearing an exact reproduction of the finger-nail sculpture, and furthermore provided with a holy-water basin and a lamp burning under the effigy of the captive, who appears to have been canonized. "How is this?" I asked the guide. "Here is the same thing over again!" He scrutinized me carefully, taking an exact measure of my credulousness, before he replied, "Ah, but the other is the real one!" It all seems to depend on which pillar gets the start. [Illustration: PRIEST AND PURVEYOR.] [Illustration: FLOWERS FOR THE MARKET.] But there is no deception whatever connected with the inner Mihrab, where there is a marvellous alcove marking the direction of Mecca, on the east. Its ceiling, in the shape of a quarter-globe, is cut from a single great piece of marble, which is grooved like a shell. And when the light from candles is thrown into this Arab chapel it glances upon elaborate enamelling on the surface, the vitreous glaze of minute and almost miraculous mosaic making it flash and sparkle with rays of the ruby, the emerald, the topaz, and diamond. There in the dusk the glittering splendor scintillates as brilliantly as it did eight hundred years ago, and shoots its beams upon the unwary eye as if it were a cimeter of the defeated race suddenly unsheathed for vengeance. In this place was kept the wondrous Koran stand of Al-Hakem II., which cost a sum equal now to about five million dollars. It disappeared a while ago--mislaid, it should seem, by some sacristan of orderly habits who was clearing up the rubbish, for no one appears to know where it went to. The sacred book within it was incased in gold tissue embroidered with pearls and rubies, and around the spot where it was enshrined the solid white marble floor is unevenly worn into a circular hollow, where the servants of the Prophet used to crawl seven times in succession on their hands and knees. This homage was paid by the brother of the Emperor of Morocco only a few years since, when he visited Spain, and indulged the luxurious woe of weeping over the fair empire his people had lost. The bewildering arabesques, the lines of which pursue and lose each other so mysteriously about the shrine, managing to form pious inscriptions in their intricate convolutions--by an exception to all other Hispano-Arabic decoration, which employs only stucco--are wrought in marble, frigid and stern as death, but embossed into a living grace as of vine tendrils. Whetstone had been remarkably silent after entering the Mezquita. I fancied that he did not wholly approve of it. But after we had looked long at this epitome of the beautiful which I have just tried to sketch, he observed, impartially, in turning away, "I tell you, those fellows knew how to chisel some!" He had merely been trying to reduce the facts to their lowest terms. Priests and boys were marching with crucifixes from the choir as we came away: the incense rolled up against the lofty smoke-dimmed altar; and the mild-faced celibate who played the organ sent harmonies of unusually rich music (performed at our guide's special request) reverberating among the thousand-columned maze of low arches. But my fancy went back to the time when gold and silver lamps had shed from their perfumed oils the only illumination there, and when the jewelled walls, smouldering in the faint light, had looked down upon the prostrate forms of robed and turbaned zealots. Then we passed out through the Court of Oranges into the street, with those forty towers of the cathedral wall again seen standing guard around it, and found ourselves once more in modern Cordova. [Illustration: TRAVELLERS TO CORDOVA.] The breath of the South, the meridional aroma, welcomed us. The scent of the air in the neighboring Alcazar garden would of itself have been enough to tell us, in the dark, that we had entered Andalusia. That was beyond question a most delectable spot. A sort of fortress-prison bordered it, and immediately on the other side of the prison-wall blossomed the garden, where lemons and oranges and bergamot clambered rankly against the bricks, perfuming the whole atmosphere, and overblown roses dropped from their vines on to the paths. There were hedges of rosemary, and trees of pimento, and angular ribs of prickly cactus, carefully trained. From a balustraded terrace higher up descended a stone flight of steps, the massive stone guard of which on each side was scooped out so as to make a mossy bed for two streams of water perpetually flowing down and losing themselves in the secret courses that ministered to little scattered fountains, or laved the roots of the verdant tangle. Now and again a lizard darted from point to point, like an evil thought surprised in the heart of so much sweetness and freshness. Everywhere there was a cool gush and ripple of water, and some wide-spreading fig-trees made a pleasant bower in a bastion of the low garden-wall overlooking the famous river. From this post of vantage one can see the thick brown current slowly oozing by, and the ancient bridge which spans it, fortified at both ends, connecting the Cordova of to-day with the opposite bank, where the ancient city extended for two or three miles. With its great arched gate, Roman made and finely sculptured, this mellow light brown structure forms an effective link in the landscape, and below its piers stand several Moorish mills, disused, but as yet unbroken by age or floods. We drove across the venerable viaduct afterward, and found that by an extraordinary dispensation some very fresh and shining silver coins of ancient Rome had lately been dug up from one of the shoals in the river (a peculiar place, by-the-way, to bury them in), and that our guide had some in his pocket. We forbore to deprive him of such treasures, however, even at the very trifling price which he put upon them, and contented ourselves with being swindled by him in a subsequent purchase of some other articles. II. FROM Cordova may be made, by those who are especially favored, one of the most interesting expeditions possible to the Hermitage, or, as the Church authorities name it, the _Desierta_ (desert) of solitary monks, genuine anchorites, a few miles distant in the Sierra Morena. There are obstacles more formidable than the purely physical ones in the way of this excursion, the bishop of the diocese being averse to granting permission for the visit to any one who is not a good Catholic. Two Englishmen who came before us, relying on the potent gold piece, had made the toilsome ascent only to find that their sterling sovereigns were of no avail. I think the presence of the Novice helped our party; but it would be unwise to reveal the stratagem by which we all gained admittance. Let it be enough to say that we went to the bishop's palace after the usual hours of business, and by humble apologies obtained an audience with the secretary. While we were waiting we sat down under a frivolously gorgeous rococo ceiling, on a great double staircase of marble leading up from the _patio_, which was well planted with shrubs, and had walks paved with smooth round stones of various hue, set edgewise in extensive patterns. The vaulted ceiling resounded powerfully with every remark we made, which had the result of subduing our conversation to whispers, for an attendant soon came to warn us that the bishop was asleep, and that we must not speak loud on account of the echo. Profiting by the great man's siesta, we extracted the desired permission from his severe-faced but courteous secretary, who marked the document "Especial." [Illustration: "ARRÉ, BURR-R-RICO!"] Our brief cavalcade of donkeys started the next morning at five, after we had taken a preternaturally early cup of chocolate. The donkeys appeared to know just where we were going, and would not obey the rein: the driver, walking behind, governed them by a system of negatives, informing them with a casual exclamation when they showed signs of turning where he didn't want them to. "Advance there, Baker!" he would cry. "Don't you know better than that? What a wretched little beast! Do as I tell you." The animal in question was named Bread-dealer, or Baker, and the one that I rode rejoiced in the eccentric though eminently literary appellation of "College." "To the right, College!" our muleteer would shout, exercising a despotic power over my four-footed institution of learning. "Get up, little mule. _Arré burr-r-rico!_" Firing off a volley of _r_'s with a tremendous rising and falling intonation, which invariably moved the brute to take one or two rapid steps before dropping back into his customary slow walk. As the heat increased, and the way grew steeper, he sighed out his "arré"--gee up--in a long, melancholy drawl, which seemed to express profound despair concerning the mulish race generally. Muleteers in Spain are termed generically, from this surviving Arabic word, _arrieros_, or, as we may translate it, "gee-uppers." In this manner we made our way along the dusty road among olive orchards, and a sort of oak called _japarros_, until we began to mount by a rough, stony path which sometimes divided itself like the branches of a torrent, though we more than once succeeded in prodding the donkeys into a lively canter. The white façades of villas--_quintas_ or _carmens_ they are denominated hereabout--twinkled out from nooks of the hills; but at that early hour everything was very still. We could almost _see_ the silence around us. Higher up, unknown birds began to sing in the sparse boscage that clothed the mountain flank or clustered in its narrow dells. Midway of the ascent, furthermore, Baker, on whom Velveteen was seated in solemn stride, with a blanket in place of saddle, paused ominously, and then began a nasal performance which shook our very souls. Why a donkey should bray in such a place it is hard to determine, but _how_ he did it will forever remain impressed on our tympana. There was something peculiarly terrible and unnerving in the sound; and just as it ceased, our guide, Manuel, observed that this had once been a great place for robbers. "A few years ago," said he, "no one would have dared to come up along this road as we are doing." He added that the marauders used to conceal themselves in the numerous caves in the region, and pointed out one fissure in the rocks which his liberal imagination converted into the entrance of a subterranean retreat running for several miles into the heart of the mountains. At the same instant, looking down across a gorge below our track, I saw a man with a gun moving through a patch of steep olives, as if to head us off at a point farther along; and on a jutting rock-rib above us a memorial cross rose warningly. Crosses were formerly put up in the most impossible places among these hills, to mark the spot where anybody fell a victim to bandits or assassins; a fact of which the elder Dumas makes telling use in one of his short stories.[6] Brigands were themselves punctilious in setting up these reminders, which were held to exert an expiatory influence. If any one would understand how hopelessly the Spanish mind at one time perverted the relations of crime and religion, he may read Calderon's "Devotion of the Cross," wherein the hero, Eusebio, a terrible renegade who murders right and left, born at the foot of one of these way-side crosses, is saved by his reverence for the holy symbol. He is enabled, by virtue of this pious sentiment, to rise up after he is dead, walk about, and confess his sins to a friar; after which he is caught up into heaven! The whole conjunction was somewhat alarming, but Manuel explained away our man with a gun by saying that he was merely one of the armed watchmen usually attached to country estates to protect crops and stock from depreciation. As for the bandits, they had now been quite dispersed, he declared, by the Civil Guard. That name, it is true, called up new fears for Velveteen and myself as we thought of the two relentless men who were on our trail: but we knew that for the moment, at least, we were beyond their reach. At last we gained the very summit, and drew up under a porch at the walled gate of the Desert, while a shower began to fall in large scattered drops, like the lingering contents of some gigantic watering-pot, but soon spent itself. Our second pull at the mournful-sounding bell was answered by a sad young monk, who opened a square loop-hole in the wall, and asked our errand in a voice enfeebled by voluntary privations. After inspecting our pass, he told us, with a wan but friendly smile, that we must wait a little. It was Friday, and we had to wait rather long, for the hermits were just at that time undergoing the weekly flagellation to which they subject themselves. But finally we were let in--donkeys, guide, _arriero_, and the colored maid "Fan" sharing the hospitality. An avenue of tall, sombre, cypresses opened before us, leading to the main building and offices. The Desert, in fact, was green enough; well supplied with olives and pomegranates; and hedges of the prickly-pear, with its thick, stiff leaves shaped like a fire-shovel, and heavy as wax-work, cinctured the isolated huts in which the brothers dwell each by himself. Precisely as we came to a triangular plot in front of the entrance we were confronted by a skull set up prominently in a sort of pyramidal monument, giving force by its dusty grin to an inscription in Spanish, which read: "AS THOU LOOKEST, SO ONCE LOOKED I: AS I LOOK NOW, SO WILT THOU APPEAR HEREAFTER. PONDER UPON THIS, AND SIN NOT." Shortly beyond stood a catacomb above-ground, in which a number of defunct hermits had been sealed up. It also bore a legend, but in Latin: "THE DAY OF DEATH IS BETTER THAN THAT OF BIRTH." In the vestibule of the house these drastic reminders of mortality were supplemented by two allegorical pictures--hanging among some portraits of evanished worthies who had ended their penitential days there--two crude paintings which exhibited "The Soul Tortured by Doubt," and "The Soul Blessed by Faith." It was not altogether in keeping with the unworldly and ascetic atmosphere of this spiritual refuge, that a tablet in the wall should record, with fulsome abasement of phrase, how her most Gracious Majesty Isabella II. had, some few years ago, deigned to visit the Desert, and how this stone had been placed there as a humble monument of her condescension. Certainly, considering the ex-Queen's character (if it may claim consideration), it is hard to see what honor the anchorites should find in her visiting their abode. A gray-haired brother, robed in the coarse and weighty brown serge which he is obliged to wear in winter and summer alike, received us kindly and showed us the expensively adorned plateresque chapel. He knelt and bowed nearly to the threshold before unlocking the door, crossed himself, and knelt again on the pavement within; then, advancing farther, he dropped down once more on both knees, and bent over as if he had some intention of using his good-natured, simple old head as a mop to polish the black and white marble squares, but ended by another cross, and moving his lips in noiseless prayer. The national manner of making the cross is peculiar: after the usual touching of forehead and breast, the Spanish Catholic concludes by suddenly attempting to swallow his thumb, and then as hastily pulling it out of his mouth again, to save it up for some other time. This movement, I suppose, emblemizes the eating of the consecrated wafer, but it makes a grotesque impression that is anything but solemn. At times you will also see him execute a unique triple cross, with strange passes and dabs in the air which might easily be mistaken for preliminary strategy directed against some erring mosquito engaged in guerilla warfare on his eyebrow. We were obliged, in conformity, to do as our Catholic companions did--receiving the holy-water and making a simple cross--an act which, without being of their faith, one may perform with unsectarian reverence. Brother Esteban was on the watch to see that proper devotion was shown in this peculiarly sacred chapel, and in the midst of his adoration he turned quickly upon Manuel, asking, "Why don't you go down on _both_ your knees in the accustomed manner?" [Illustration: THE FRUIT OF THE DESIERTA.] Manuel, being a master of ready deception, answered, without an instant's delay, "Ah, that is my misfortune! I lately had an accident to that leg" (indicating the one which had not sunk far enough), "and that is why it is not easy to get down on both knees." However, he spread his handkerchief wider, and painfully brought the offending member into place. Esteban frankly apologized, and then the praying went on again. When we got out into the corridor, and our monkish friend was well in advance, black Fan's repressed heresy broke into a startling reaction. She dipped her hand again and again into the basin of holy-water, wastefully dropping some of it on the floor, and began outlining unlimited crosses from her sable forehead downward--covering her breast with an imaginary armor of them--enough to keep her supplied for a month, and proof against every possible misfortune. Her broad grin of delight, exposing her vermilion lips and white teeth like a slice of unripe watermelon, added to the horror of the situation, and I protested against such uncouth profanity. "Might's well keep goin' now I begun," she chuckled in reply. "I's 'fraid I'll forgit how!" She was making another plunge for the font, when our pale, gentle-featured Novice stopped her in mid-career. Fortunately good Esteban had not observed this small orgy going on. He was as pleasant as ever when we went with him into a little room to buy rosaries and deposit some silver pieces for charity; and there he made farther and profuse apologies to Manuel. "Of course you see it was impossible I should know there was anything the matter with your leg," he said, quite plaintively. And Manuel accepted his contrition with double pleasure because he knew it to be wholly undeserved. The hermits, as I have said, have their separate cottages scattered about the grounds, each with a small patch of land to be cultivated. There they raise fruit, which their rules forbid them to eat, and so it is carried down as a present to some wealthy Cordovan families who support the hermitage by their largesses. Every day poor folk toil up from the plain, some five miles, to this airy perch, and are fed by the monks; but they themselves eat little, abstaining from meat, wine, coffee, tea--everything, indeed, except some few ounces of daily bread, a pint of _garbanzos_ (the tasteless, round yellow bean which is the universal food of the poor in Spain), and a soup made of bread, water, oil, and garlic. They live on nothing and prayer. They rise at three in the morning, and thrice a week they fast from that hour until noon. Their step is slow, and their voices have a strange, inert, sickly sound; but they appeared cheerful enough, and joked with each other. I asked Esteban the name of a tiny yellow flower growing by the path, and he couldn't tell me; but he plucked it tenderly, and began discoursing to Manuel on its beauty. "_Tan chiquita_," he said, in his poor soft voice. "So _little, little_, and yet so precious and so finely made!" Another brother was deeply absorbed in snipping off bits of coiled brass wire with a pair of pincers. "These are for the 'Our Fathers,'" he explained, meaning the large beads in the rosary, separated from the smaller "Ave Maria" ones by links of wire. The cottages or huts, surrounded by an outer wall, contain a cell, sometimes cut out of a bowlder lying on the spot, where there is a rude cot, a shelf for holy books and the crucifix, and a grated window, across which waves, perhaps, the broad-leaved bough of a fig-tree. An anteroom, provided with a few utensils and the disciplinary scourge hanging mildly against the wall, completes the strange interior. The lives of the hermits of the Sierra are reduced to the ghastly simplicity of a skeleton; a part of their time is spent in contemplating skulls, and they have a habit of digging their own graves, in order to keep more plainly before their minds the end of all earthly careers. Mistaken as all this seems to many of us, there was a peacefulness about the Hermitage for which many a storm-tossed soul sighs in vain; and I am glad that some few creatures can find here the repose they desire while waiting for death. Some of the hermits are men of rank, who have retired hither disheartened with the world; others are low-born--men afflicted by some form of misfortune or misdemeanor of their own, who wish to hide from life; but all assemble in a pure democracy of sorrow and penitential piety, apparently contented. We breakfasted at ten in a room hospitably put at our disposal, the windows of which admitted a delicious breeze and opened upon a magnificent view of the plain far below, where the distant city rested like a white mist--an impalpable thing. Brother José brought some olives, to add to the refection which our sumpter-mule had carried to this height. They had a ripe, acid, oily flavor, which made one think of homely things and of patient housewives in remote American hills, who lead lives as monotonous, as self-denying and unnoticed as those which pass on this ridge of the Sierra in Andalusia. Our Novice thought the olives had "a holy flavor;" and I could understand her feeling. Find me a site more fitted for meditation on the volatility of mundane things than this eyry on the mountain-head overlooking the historic valley! There lies Cordova, a mere spot in the reach of soft citron and straw-tinted fields; and the Guadalquivir, winding like a neglected skein of tawny silk thrown down on the mapped landscape. The plain is calm as oblivion. It is oblivion's self; for there the earth has absorbed Cordova the Old, so that not a vestige remains where compressed masses of human dwellings once stood. They are crumbled to an indistinguishable powder. That soft autumnal soil has swallowed up the bones of unnumbered generations, and no trace of them is left. We imagined the glittering legions of Cæsar as they moved slowly through the country, flashing the sun from their compact steel, at that time when they put to the sword twenty-five thousand inhabitants of the city, which had sided with Pompey. We saw the Moors once more envelop it with arms and banners and the fluttering of snowy garments. But all these vanished again like a moving cloud, or a smoke from burning stubble; and the sun still pours its uninterrupted flood of splendor over the land, bringing life and bringing death, with impartial ray. [Illustration: MEMENTO MORI.] The Spanish word for "crowded" or "populated" is still used to signify "dense" in any ordinary connection, as the phrase _barba poblada_, for a thick beard, testifies. The implication is that, when there is any population at all, it must be crowded; a direct transmission, apparently, from periods when inhabitants clustered in immense numbers around the centres of civil power for safety. And the word holds good to-day; for one finds, in the present shrunken human force of the Peninsula, closely packed assemblages of people in the towns and cities, with wide domains of comparatively untenanted country around. When night closed above us again in the city; when mellow lamps glowed, and a tropical fragrance flowed in from the gardens; when in the long dusky pauses of warm nocturnal silence the watchman's weary and pathetic cry resounded, or hollow-toned church-bells rung the hour, the romance of Cordova seemed to concentrate itself, and fell upon me, as I listened, in chords that took this form: FLOWER OF SPAIN. Like a throb of the heart of midnight I hear a guitar faintly humming, And through the Alcazar garden A wandering footstep coming. A shape by the orange bower's shadow-- Whose shape? Is it mine in a dream? For my senses are lost in the perfumes That out of the dark thicket stream. 'Mid the tinkle of Moorish waters, And the rush of the Guadalquivir, The rosemary breathes to the jasmine, That trembles with joyous fear. And their breath goes silently upward, Far up to the white burning stars, With a message of sweetness, half sorrow, Unknown but to souls that bear scars. Here, midway between stars and flowers, I know not which draw me the most: Shall my years yield earthly sweetness? Shall I shine from the sky like a ghost? A spirit I cannot quiet Bids me bow to the unseen rod; I dream of a lily transplanted, To bloom in the garden of God. Yet the footsteps come nearer and nearer; Still moans the soft-troubled strain Of the strings in the dusk. Well I know it: 'Twas called for me "Flower of Spain." Ah, yes! my lover he made it, And called it by my pet name: I hear it, and--I'm but a woman-- It sweeps through my heart like a flame. The night's heart and mine flow together; The music is beating for each. The moon's gone, the nightingale silent; Light and song are both in his speech. As the musky shadows that mingle, As star-shine and flower-scent made one, Our spirits in gladness and anguish Have met: their waiting is done. But over the leaves and the waters What echoes the strange clanging bells Send afloat from the dim-arched Mezquita! How mournful the cadence that swells From the lonely roof of the convent Where pale nuns rest! On the hill, Far off, the hermits in vigil Are bowed at the crucifix still; And the brown plain slumbers around us.... O land of remembrance and grief, If I am truly the flower, How withered are you, the leaf! [Illustration: DIFFICULT FOR FOREIGNERS.] [Illustration: THE JASMINE GIRL.] There was a good deal of discussion among our group of pilgrims as to the propriety of a foundation like the Hermitage of the Sierra continuing to exist in an age like the present one. Whetstone, who had declined to visit it, was of opinion that men who led such idle lives should be suppressed by law, and even went so far as to talk about hanging them. So singular a theory, emanating from a citizen of a free republic, met with some opposition; but this was not pushed too far, because we understood that Whetstone kept a hotel at home, and dreaded lest some day we should be at his mercy. As for the rest of us, it was not easy to pronounce that we were of much more value than the hermits; and assuredly those earnest ascetics compared favorably with our mule-driver, who was remarkable only for an expression of incipient humor that was never able to attain the height of actual expression. I was sure that, as he sighed out his final "Arré" in this world, he would pass into the next with that vacant smile on his face, and the joke which he might have perpetrated under fortunate circumstances still unuttered. Nor did the average life of Cordova strike us as signally indispensable to the world's progress. It was doubtless a very pleasant, lazy life so far as it went, and we did not decide to hang the inhabitants! They have a charming fashion there of building houses with pleasant interior courts, in which the _sclinda_, a vine with pale lavender clusters of blossoms suggesting the wistaria, droops amid matted foliage, and lends its grace alike to crumbling architecture or modern masonry. In these courts, separated from the street by gates of iron grating beautifully designed, you will see pleasant little domestic groups, and possibly a whole dinner-party going on in the fresh air. It was likewise agreeable to repair to a certain restaurant--restored in the Moorish manner--and there, while clapping hands echoed through the light arcades, drink iced beer and lemon--a refreshing beverage, which might reasonably take the place of fiery punches (in America) for hot weather. "Neither will I deny," said Velveteen, "that it is a wonderful sensation to stray into the Plaza de Geron Paez and come up suddenly against that glorious old Roman gate--growing up as naturally as the trees in front of it, but so much more wonderful than they--with its fine crumbling yellow traceries. How nicely it would tell in a sketch, eh, with some of the royal grooms--the _remontistas_--walking through the foreground in their quaint costumes!" The men to whom he referred wear, in the best sense, a thoroughly theatrical garb of scarlet and black, finished off by boots of Cordovan leather in the style of sixteenth-century Spain, turned down at the top, laced, tasselled, and slashed open by a curve that runs from the side down to the back of the heel. This shows the white stocking under short trousers, giving to the masculine calf and ankle a grace for which they are usually denied all credit. For the rest, dwellers in modern Cordova attend mass and vespers, stroll around to the confectioners' of an afternoon to eat sweetmeats, especially sugared _higochumbos_ (the unripe prickly-pear boiled in syrup), or the famed and fragrant preserve of budding orange-blossoms known as _dulces de alzahar_; and the remainder of the time they while away pleasantly in loitering on the Street of the Great Captain, or in peering from their windows at whatever passes beneath. Throughout the kingdom, it should be said, a most extraordinary persistence will be observed in dawdling, strolling, and general contemplation. The Spaniard appears to be born with his legs in a walking position, and with loaded eyes that compel him to look out of the window whether he wants to or not. One of the more remarkable observations, finally, that I collected in Cordova came from Manuel. It was his reflection as he gazed down from the Desierta into the plain: "Ah, that was where John Dove (Juan Palom) did such splendid things!" he sighed. "You don't know about John Dove? Well, he was one of the _very greatest_ men Spain ever had; he was a robber--and oh, what a beautiful robber!" _ANDALUSIA AND THE ALHAMBRA._ I. [Illustration: S] Seville--why should we not keep the proper and more euphonious form, Sevilla?--the home of that Don Juan on whom Byron and Mozart have shed a lustre more enviable than his reputation, has been made familiar to every one by melodious Figaro as well; and more lately Mérimée's Carmen, veiled in the music of Bizet, has brought it into the foreign consciousness again. To me it is memorable as the place where I saw the jars in which the Forty Thieves were smothered. Worried by a painfully profuse odor that filled the whole street, one day I sought the cause, and found it in an olive-oil merchant's _tienda_, where there were some terra-cotta jars of the exact form given in the story-books, and afflicted with elephantiasis to such a degree that one or two men could easily have hidden in each. I am sure they were the same into which Morgiana poured the boiling oil, though why it should have been heated is inexplicable: the smell alone ought to have been fatal. A prouder distinction is that Sevilla is the capital of Andalusia, that gayest and most diversified province of Spain; the native ground of the bull-fight and breeder of the best bulls; a region abounding in racy customs and characteristics. The sea-going Phoenicians, who bear down on us from so many points of the historical compass, found in Andalusia an important trading field. Its mountains are still stored with silver, copper, gold, lead, which have yielded steady tribute for thousands of years. In its breadths of sun-bathed plain and orange-mantled slope the ancients placed their Elysian Fields. Goth and Roman, Moor and Spaniard, struggled for the mastery of so rich a possession; and meanwhile Sevilla, the favorite of Cæsar--his "little Rome"--lay at the core of the fruitful land, herself careless in the main as to everything except an easy life, with plenty of singing and love-making. From climate and history, nevertheless, from art and the mingling of antipodal races, Sevilla received those influences which have shaped her into the bizarre and eminently Spanish creation that she is--a visible memory of the past, and a sparkling embodiment of the present. Society, amusement, and religious awe are the controlling aims of the people, blended with revolutionary politics, and great liveliness in their increasing commerce. The songs of Andalusia pervade the whole kingdom; its dances--_cidarillos_, _manchegas_, _boleros_, the _cachuca_, and the wildly graceful _Sevillanas_--enjoy an equal renown. To accept Sevilla without disappointment, however, a robust appreciation is needed. Its squalors and splendors are impartially distributed. Luxurious mansions are dropped down indiscriminately among mean abodes and the homes of dirt. Poverty and showiness, supreme beauty and grotesque ugliness, jostle each other at close quarters. It is a sort of _olla podrida_ among cities; but the total result is exceedingly curious, and piques the observation. [Illustration: MAIN ENTRANCE TO THE CATHEDRAL, SEVILLA From a photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid.] [Illustration: THE GIRALDA TOWER. From a photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid.] The first of it that met our eyes was the Giralda tower of the cathedral, rising in unique majesty above the unseen town, and as if inspired with a fresher grace by its own fame. If the bronze female figure of Faith on the summit could have spoken, it might have said: "In all the range of view from this pinnacle there is nothing so fair as Sevilla." The very next object of notice was a woman in the street, who began begging from below the instant we set foot on the balcony for a general survey. She gave us our money's worth of misery, but the supply afterward proved too great for our demand. The mendicants of Sevilla are much more daring and pertinacious than their craft elsewhere. They call your attention with a sharp "tst, tst," as if you were hired to go through life casually, stopping the instant they summon you. There was in particular one energetic man who never failed to pounce upon us from his lair, and place some few inches in front of us the red and twisted stump from which his hand had been severed. He had seemingly persuaded himself that our journey of several thousand miles was undertaken principally to inspect this anatomical specimen. The amount of execution he did with that mutilated member was enough to shame any able-bodied, self-supporting person. With a single wave of it he could put us to flight. The effect would not have been more instantaneous if he had suddenly unmasked a mitrailleuse a yard from our noses. To assume unconsciousness was futile, for, whichever way we turned, he was always (it would hardly be correct to say "on hand," but) on time with his fingerless deformity--he always placed it, with the instinct of a finished artist, in the best light and most effective pose--getting it adroitly between us and anything we pretended to look at. I imagined the noble cathedral might afford a refuge from such attacks, but every door was guarded by a squad of the decrepit army, so that entrance there became a horror. These sanctuary beggars serve a double purpose, however. The black-garbed Sevillan ladies, who are perpetually stealing in and out noiselessly under cover of their archly draped lace veils--losing themselves in the dark, incense-laden interior, or emerging from confession into the daylight glare again--are careful to drop some slight conscience-money into the palms that wait. Occasionally, by pre-arrangement, one of these beggars will convey into the hand that passes him a silver piece a tightly-folded note from some clandestine lover. It is a convenient underground mail, and I am afraid the venerable church innocently shelters a good many little transactions of this kind. [Illustration: THE "UNDERGROUND" MAIL.] Nothing can surpass in grandeur, in solemn and restful beauty, the hollow mountain of embellished stone which constitutes this cathedral. It does not present the usual cross shape, but is based upon the oblong form of an old mosque, originally formed somewhat like that at Cordova, but now wholly gone, excepting for the unequalled Giralda, and a few other minor muezzin towers. The Court of Oranges is another relic of the mosque-builders, where clumps of polished leafage contrast their own vivid strength with the energetic lines of flying-buttresses in the background--a florid yet melancholy height of trellised stone. The enclosing walls of the Orange Court, made of firmly cohering mud, or _tapia_, are tipped with flame-pointed battlements. At their eastern end rises the tall, square Giralda, with a serenity in its simple lines expressing, like Greek temples, the satisfied senses controlled by an elevated mind. The lower portion bears other impress of its Moorish origin in variously patterned courses of sunken brick; but the whole tower terminates in a filigree Christian spire of the sixteenth century, with a row of queer rusty iron ornaments, imitating vases filled with flowers, placed on the ledge above the belfry at the spire's base. Then, as you continue the circuit on the east, you arrive opposite the apse curve marking the chancel of the Chapel Royal; and here the wall is moulded to the taste of Charles V.'s time, which affected Roman simplicity and weight, adding to it a trace of feudal pomp in high-relief coats of arms. On the third and south side a crumbling frieze of deer's heads and flower garlands skirts the cornice above a long plain front, the straight-ness of which our friend Whetstone, clambering up on a low coping so as to squint along the side, and see if the lines were perfectly true, admired more than anything else. Afterward one reaches a corner where the work remains unfinished, and the blackened trunks of incomplete pinnacles in graded ranks suggest the charred fragments of a faith once all afire, now darkened and cold. There is no all-dominating dome; but there are two or three bulbous upheavals in the roof, some spindling turrets on the north, and a square elevation in the middle revealing the form of the transept. The whole top is ribbed with stone, serrated with ornate crockets, crowded with bosses and small spires, or edged with a double balustrade mimicking in its flame-points a thousand altar lights. Petrified rosettes and spiral wreathings project from the sides in unchangeable efflorescence, and great arches, furrowed around by concentric ripples of carving, and sometimes overpeered by quaint terra-cotta heads, give entrance to the interior of the gigantic marvel. And over all towers the Giralda to a height of three hundred and fifty feet, surmounted by the Giraldillo vane--a woman's form, which turns its twenty-five hundred-weight of bronze from point to point at the slightest veering of the wind. But the consummate wonder of this great fabric, under which prostrate ages seem to crouch while lifting it to heaven, is the union of diverse styles and spirits in its construction. The different schools conglomerated in such an exterior give the cathedral a great and mysterious power of variety; yet, decided though their contrasts are, the effect is not harsh. It bears witness to the truth that the spirit of man when attuned to the mood of sincere worship, however unlike its expression may be at different epochs and through different races, will always make a certain grand inclusive harmony with itself. The coolness of the lofty and umbrageous aisles within is not penetrated by the fiercest summer heats; but their religious twilight, though inciting to a devout and prayerful sentiment, wraps in obscurity the crowded works of art, the emblazoned _retablos_, the paintings of Murillo, Campaña, and Morales, and the costly ornaments bestowed upon the high altar, as well as those of some thirty side-chapels. In the central nave, before a shrine at the choir-back, lies the tomb of Ferdinand, son of Christopher Columbus. The colossal form of another Christopher, the saint, lifts itself up the wall to a height of thirty-two feet, near the Gate of the Exchange. Whoever looks upon St. Christopher, to him no harm shall come during that day; hence this worthy is a common object in Spanish cathedrals, and always painted so large that no one who diligently attends mass can possibly miss seeing him. A curious relic on the Chapel Royal altar is the Battle Virgin, a small ivory image which King Ferdinand the Sainted always carried in war firmly fixed on his saddle-bow. There, too, the King himself, embalmed, is preserved in a chiselled silver case, to be uncovered and shown three times a year with great pomp of military music. A life-size Virgin with movable joints and spun-gold hair watches over him, but did not prevent his crown from being stolen a few years ago. Not far away Murillo's San Antonio hangs, the chief figure in which was also stolen, being cut out in 1874, as many who read this will remember, and carried to New York, where it was recovered. Innumerable other works and wonders there are, and the sacristies contain great value of goldsmiths' products; but, unless it be made a subject of long artistic study, the fundamental charm of the cathedral consists in its general aspects, its mysterious perspectives, its proportions so simple and grandiose; the isolated pictures formed at almost any point by jewelled and candle-lit chapels sparkling dimly through a permanent dusk, rainbowed here and there by the light from old stained windows. From the Giralda, which is mounted by inclined planes in place of stairs, one looks down upon the glorious building as if it were something belonging to a lower and different world. All around, beyond, the mazy city flattens itself out in a confusion of white walls and tiled roofs, that look like the armored backs of scaly monsters huddled sluggishly in the powerful sunshine, with impossible streets among them reduced to mere thin lines of shadow. The tawny river touches it; palaces and gardens and abandoned monasteries fringe it. Quite near you see the Tower of Gold--a surviving outwork of the Moorish defences--which was formerly coated with orange-colored tiles on the outside, while the inside furnished a repository for treasure brought from the New World. A crenellated Moorish fortification rises up dreamily at one point, but finding itself out of date, abruptly subsides again. Farther out are the seven suburbs, including the gypsy and sailor quarter, the Triana; and then the plains stretch into an immense area of olive, gold, and white, reaching to mountains on the north and east. A multitude of doves inhabit the spire, and there is almost always a hawk sailing above it, higher than anything else under the cloudless sky. At the base lives the bell-ringer, through whose stone-paved dining-room and nursery, filled with his family, we had to pass in order to ascend. Once, as we stood toward sunset in the high gallery where the bells are hung in rectangular or arched apertures, we heard the _repique_ sounding the Angelus. It was a furious explosion of metallic resonance. Twenty bells on swinging beams, that throw the echoing mouths outward through the openings, and two fixed in place within, of which Santa Maria--profanely called The Fat One--is the largest: such is the battery at command. They are not all used at once, however, for the Angelus. The ringer and his two sons were satisfied with touching up Santa Catalina (of a tone peculiarly deep and acceptable), St. John the Baptist, San José, and one or two others. The whole brazen family have been duly baptized, among them being San Laureano and San Isidoro, named after the special patrons of Sevilla. One after another their tongues rolled forth a deafening roar, in a systematic disorder of thunderous tones, while the chief ringer went about unconcernedly with a smouldering cigarette in his lips. One of his sons, after uncoiling the twisted rope around the beam of San Laureano, thus getting it into violent motion, watched his chance, sprung on to the beam, agile as a cat, and stood there while it rocked, the bell under him swinging out at each turn, over the open square below. It was three hundred feet, down to the pavement, and the least slip would have sent him down to it like a handful of dirt. His conception of what would please us, nevertheless, led him thoroughly to unnerve us by repeating the performance several times. "Why don't the high-priest, or whatever he is, go on and finish up this church?" asked Whetstone of the guide. "Seems to me it's about time." "The priest? He don't want to," was Vincent's answer, given with a movement of the fingers meant to imply the receiving of money. "It make too good excuse." Our conductor, who I am sure was a sceptic, went on to declare that within the last ten years ninety thousand dollars had been left by will for carrying on the unfinished portion of the cathedral, but as yet no movement to begin the work had been made. "Where all that money go?" he asked, innocent curiosity overspreading his features, while his eye gleamed with hidden intelligence. "What do the people think of the priests?" one of us asked. "The chimneys[7] will find out some time," he replied; adding, in the proverbial strain common with Spaniards: "When the river comes down from the mountains, it brings stones." "By the river, you mean revolution? But you've had that before." The conclusive answer to this was a maxim borrowed from the ring: "The fifth bull is never a bad one" (meaning, "Success comes to those who wait"). Our guide's English was put to a severe strain in the Alcazar, a palace largely Oriental, with interiors that outshine the Alhambra in resplendent color and gilding. There is, in particular, one round-domed ceiling constructed with an intricacy of interdependent supports, cones, truncations, dropping cusps, which is counterpoint made plastic; and in its inverted cup-like cysts the burnished gold glows like clotted honey. But, for all that, it does not equal the matchless Alhambra in arrangement, variety, or poetic surroundings. The memory of King Pedro the Cruel is closely connected with this Alcazar. From it he used to make night sallies into the town, by means of what Vincent termed a "soup-tureen passage," which brought him up through a trap-door somewhere in the thick of his subjects. Pedro, who lived in the fourteenth century, was a monarch of a severely playful disposition. He used to have the heads of people that were obnoxious to him cut off, and hung up over the lintel of his dressing-room door, where he could look at them while he was putting in his shirt-studs, or whenever he felt bored. In the extensive gardens, half Eastern and half mediæval, behind the palace, among the box and myrtle planted in forms of heraldic devices, among the palms and terraces and fountains, there run long paths, secretly perforated in places for fine jets of water. These are the traces of a still more ingenious amusement invented by Pedro. From a place of concealment he would watch until the ladies of the court, when promenading, had got directly over one of his underground--I mean "soup-tureen"--fountains, then he would turn a faucet, and drench them with a shower-bath from below. There are other palaces in Sevilla, of which the Duke of Montpensier's San Telmo is the chief, and a model of uninteresting magnificence, aside from the valuable collection of old Spanish masters which it contains. These pictures were sent to Boston for a loan exhibition during the last revolution in Spain, in 1874; and although their aggregate worth is easily surpassed by the pictures preserved at the public gallery of Sevilla and at the Caridad Hospital, the Duke of Montpensier's possessions embrace a masterly portrait of Velazquez, by himself (repeated in the Museo at Valencia), and a charming "Madonna of the Swaddling Clothes," by Murillo. San Telmo was formerly a nautical college, having been founded by the son of Christopher Columbus. [Illustration: A STREET CORNER.] But the long succession of apartments through which the visitor is ushered suggests no association with the former maritime prowess of Spain; it is haunted rather by the failures and disappointments of its owner, who, missing the throne on which his foot had almost rested, lived to see his daughter, Queen Mercedes, die, and another daughter mysteriously follow Mercedes into the grave after being plighted to the reigning King. The grounds attached to the palace are very large, and filled with palms, orange-trees, and other less tropical growths; and they may be inspected, under the guidance of a forester armed with an innocuous gun, by anybody who, after getting permission, is willing to pay a small fee and tire himself out by an aimless ramble. Sevilla, where Murillo was born and spent so many years of artistic activity in the height of his powers, is the next best place after Madrid for a study of the sweetest among Spanish painters. His house still stands in the Jews' Quarter, and a few of his best works are kept in the picture-gallery; among them the one which he was wont to call "my picture"--"St. Thomas of Villanueva Giving Alms." Like the "Saint Elizabeth" at Madrid, it is a grand study of beggary--vagabondism as you may see it to-day throughout Spain, but here elevated by excellent design, charming sympathy with nature, and the resources of a delightful colorist, into something possessing dignity and permanent interest--qualities which the original phenomenon lacks. Murillo is pure, sincere, simple, but never profound; though to this he perhaps approaches more nearly in his "St. Francis Embracing the Crucified Saviour" than in any other of his productions. Like others of his pictures in Sevilla, however, it is painted in his latest style, called "vaporoso," which, to my thinking, marks by its meretricious softness of hazy atmosphere, and its too free coloring, a distinct decadence. In the church connected with the Caridad are hung two colossal canvases, one depicting the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the other, Moses striking the rock. This last is better known by its popular title, "The Thirst," which pays tribute to its masterly portrayal of that animal desire. In the suffering revealed by the faces of the Israelites, as well as the eager joy of the crowd (and even of their beasts of burden) on receiving relief, there is a dramatic contention of pain and pleasure, for the rendering of which the naturalistic genius of the artist was eminently suited--and he has made the most of his opportunity. The representation is terribly true; and its range of observation culminates in the figure of the mother drinking first, though her babe begs for water; for this is exactly what one would expect in Spanish mothers of her class, whose faces are lined with a sombre harshness, a want of human kindness singularly repellent. Such a picture is hardly agreeable; and it must be owned that, excepting in his gentle, honest "Conceptions," and a few other pieces, Murillo shares the earthiness of his national school, the effect of which, despite much magnificence in treatment, is on the whole depressing. [Illustration: FIGARO.] The House of Pilate, owned by the Duke of Medina Celi, is quite another sort of thing from San Telmo; a roomy, irregular edifice, dating from the sixteenth century, but almost wholly Saracenic. The walls are _repoussés_ in fine arabesques, and sheathed at the base with old color-veined tiles that throw back the light in flashes from their surface. These also enamel the grand staircase, which makes a square turn beneath a roof described as a _media naranja_--natural Spanish music for our plain "half-orange"--the vault of which is fretted cedar cased in stucco. At the top landing is posted a cock in effigy, representing the one that crowed witness to Peter's denial. Again, a balcony is shown which stands for that at which Pilate washed his hands before the people; and in fine, the whole place is net-worked with fancies of this kind, identifying it with the scene of Christ's trial. For it was the whim of the lordly founder to make his house the starting-point for a Via Crucis, marking the path of Jesus on his way to crucifixion, and these devices were adopted to heighten the verisimilitude of the scene. In Passion-week pilgrims come to pray at the several "stations" along the route to the figurative Calvary at the end of the Via. Into the Duke of Montpensier's garden stare the plebeian, commercial--let us hope unenvious--windows of the government tobacco factory; an enormous building, guarded like a fort to prevent the smuggling out of tobacco. Indeed, every one of the three thousand women employed is carefully watched for the same purpose as she passes forth at the general evening dismissal. Mounting the broad stairs of stone, I heard a peculiar medley of light sounds in the distance. If a lot of steam-looms were endowed with the faculty of throwing out falsetto and soprano notes instead of their usual inhuman click, the effect could not be more uninterrupted than this subdued merry buzzing. It was the chatter of the working-girls in the cigarette room. As we stepped over the threshold these sounds continued with _crescendo_ effect, ourselves being taken for the theme. At least one hundred girls fixed their attention on us, delivering a volley of salutations, jokes, and general remarks. "What do you seek, little señor? You will get no _papelitos_ here!" exclaimed one, pretty enough to venture on sauciness. "French, French! don't you see?" another said; and her companions, in airy tones, begged us to disburse a few _cuartos_, which are cent-and-a-quarter pieces. There was one young person of a satirical turn who affected to approve a very small beard which one of us had raised incidentally in travelling. She stroked her own smooth cheek, and carolled out, "What a pretty barbule!" They certainly were not enslaved to conventionality, though they may be to necessity. They seemed to enjoy themselves, too. Their eyes flashed; they broke into laughter; they bent their heads to give effect to the regulation flat curls on their temples, and all the time their nimble fingers never stopped filling cigarettes, rolling the papers, whisking them into bundles, and seizing fresh pinches of tobacco. In all there were three or four hundred of them, and some of them had a spendthrift, common sort of beauty, which, owing to their Southern vivacity and fine physique, had the air of being more than it really was. At first glance there appeared to be a couple of hundred other girls hung up against the walls and pillars; but these turned out to be only the skirts and boots of the workers, which are kept carefully away from the smouch of the cigarette trays, so as to maintain the proverbially neat appearance of their wearers on the street. Some of the women, however, were scornful and morose, and others pale and sad. It was easy to guess why, when we saw their babies lying in improvised box-cradles or staggering about naked, as if intoxicated with extreme youth and premature misery, or as if blindly beginning a search for their fathers--something none of them will ever find. We laid a few coppers in the cradles, and went on to the cigar-room. It was much the same, excepting that the soberness of experience there partially took the place of the giddiness rampant among the cigarette girls. There were some appalling old crones among the thousand individuals who rolled, chopped, gummed, and tied cigars at the low tables distributed through a heavily groined stone hall choked with thick pillars, and some six hundred or seven hundred yards in length. Others, on the contrary, looked blooming and coquettish. Many were in startling deshabille, resorted to on account of the intense July heat, and hastened to draw pretty _pañuelos_ of variegated dye over their bare shoulders when they saw us coming. Here, too, there was a large nursery business being carried on, with a very damaged article of child, smeary, sprawling, and crying. Nor was it altogether cheering to observe now and then a woman who, having dissipated too late the night before, sat fast asleep with her head in the cigar dust of the table. "_Ojala!_ May God do her work!" cried one of her friends. If he did not, it was not because there was any lack of shrines in the factory. They were erected here and there against the wall, with gilt images and candles arrayed in front of a white sheet, and occasionally the older women knelt at their devotions before them. I don't object to the shrines, but it struck me that a good _crèche_ system for the children might not come amiss. As to the factory-girls smoking cigarettes in public, it is an operatic fiction: no such practice is common in Spain. And the beauty of these Carmens has certainly been exaggerated. It may be remarked here that, as an offset to occasional disappointment arising from such exaggerations, all Spanish women walk with astonishing gracefulness, a natural and elastic step; and that is their chief advantage over women of other nations. Even the chamber-maids of Sevilla were modelled on a heroic, ancient-history plan, with big, supple necks, and showed such easy power in their movements that we half feared they might, in tidying the rooms, pick us up by mistake and throw us away somewhere to perish miserably in a dust-heap. Why there should be so much inborn ease and freedom expressed in the manner of women who are guarded with Oriental precautions, I don't know. Andalusian fathers have, no doubt, the utmost confidence in their daughters, but at the same time they save them the trouble of taking care of themselves by putting iron gratings on the windows. The _reja_, the domestic gittern, is very common in Sevilla. The betrothed suitor, if he is quite correct, must hold his tender interviews with his mistress through its forbidding bars. My companion actually saw a handsome young fellow standing on the sidewalk, and conducting one of these peculiar _tête-à-têtes_. [Illustration: "Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage."] Every house is, furthermore, provided with a _patio_. The façades, as a rule, are monotonous and unspeakably plain, but the poorest dwelling always has its airy court set with shrubs, and perhaps provided with water. They are tiled, as most rooms are in Spain--a good precaution against vermin, which unluckily is not infallible as regards fleas, which search the traveller in Spain even more rigorously than the customs officers or the Civil Guards. The flea is still and small, like the voice of conscience, but that is the only moral thing about him. In the Peninsula I found him peculiarly unregenerate. As to these patios, the well-to-do protect them from the open vestibule leading to the street by gates of ornamental open iron, letting the air-currents play through the unroofed court, and sometimes with movable screens behind the gate. Chess-tables and coffee are carried out there in the evening, and the music-room gives conveniently upon the cool central space. In Sevilla, if you hear a shrill little bell tinkling in the street, do not imagine that a bicycle is coming. One day a slight tintinnabulation announced the approach of a funeral procession, headed by two gentlemen wearing round caps and blue gowns, on which were sewed flaming red hearts. One bore a small alms-basket; the other rung the bell to attract contributions. It appears that this is the manner appointed for sundry brothers who maintain the Caridad, a hospital for indigent old men. The members, though pursuing their ordinary mode of life, are banded for the support of the institution. Necessarily rich and aristocrats, it matters not: when one of them dies, he must be buried by means of offerings collected on the way to his grave. This Caridad, let me add, was founded by Don Miguel de Manera, a friend of Don Juan, and a reformed rake. His epitaph reads: "Here lie the ashes of the worst man that ever was." I suspect a lingering vanity in that assertion, but at any rate the tombstone tries hard _not_ to lie. Fashionable society, after recovering from its mid-day siesta, and before going to the theatre or ball, turns itself out for an airing on Las Delicias--"The Delights"--an arbored road running two or three miles along the river-side. Nowhere can you see more magnificent horses than there. Their race was formerly crossed with the finest mettle of Barbary studs, and their blood, carried into Kentucky through Mexico, may have had its share in the victories of Parole, Iroquois, and Foxhall. A more strictly popular resort is the New Plaza, where citizens attend a concert and fireworks twice a week in summer, and keep their distressed babies up till midnight to see the fun. They are less demonstrative than one would expect. An American reserve hangs over them. Perfect informality reigns; they saunter, chat, and laugh without constraint, yet their enjoyment is taken in a languid, half-pensive way. In the various foot-streets where carriages do not appear--the most notable of which is the winding one called simply Sierpes, "The Serpents"--the same quietude prevails. Lined with attractive bazar-like shops, and overhung by "sails" drawn from roof to roof, which make them look like telescopic booths, these streets form shady avenues down which figures glide unobtrusively: sometimes a cigarette girl in a pale geranium skirt, with a crimson shawl; sometimes a lady in black, with lace-draped head; and perhaps an erroneous man in a heavy blue cloak, saving up warmth for next winter; or a peasant re-arranging his scarlet waist-cloth by tucking one end into his trousers, then turning round and round till he is wound up like a watch-spring, and finally putting his needle-pointed knife into the folds, ready for the next quarrel. [Illustration: IN "THE SERPENT."] Once we caught sight of two belted forms with carbines stealing across the alley, far down, as if for a flank movement against us. Oh, horror! they were the Civil Guards, who were always blighting us at the happiest moment. As they did not succeed in capturing us, we believed they must have lost themselves in one of the _calles_ that squirm through the houses with no visible intention of ever coming out anywhere. Velveteen wanted to go and look for their bones, thinking they had perished of starvation, but I opportunely reflected that we might ourselves be lost in the attempt. No wonder assassination has been frequent in these narrow windings! Once astray in them, that would be the easiest way out. Shall we go to the Thursday-morning fair, which begins, in order to avoid the great heats, at 6 A.M.? Come, then; and if we are up early, we may pass on the way through the low-walled market, gay with fruits, flowers, vegetables, where bread from Alcalá in the exact pattern of buttercup blossoms is sold, and where, at a particularly bloody and ferocious stall, butchers are dispensing the meat of bulls slaughtered at the fights. The fair is held in Fair Street. A frantic miscellany of old iron, of clothing, crockery, mat baskets, and large green pine-cones full of plump seeds, which, when ripened, taste like butternuts, is set forth. Full on the pavement is spread an array of second-hand shoes--the proverbial dead men's, perhaps--temptingly blacked. Pale cinereous earthen vessels, all becurled with raised patterns like intelligent wax-drippings, but exceedingly well shaped, likewise monopolize the thoroughfare, put in peril only by random dogs, which, having quarrelled over the offal freely thrown into the street for them, sometimes race disreputably through the brittle ware. At apt corners old women have set up their frying-pans under Bedouin tents, and are cooking _calentitos_--long coils of dough browned in hot olive oil--which are much sought as a relish for the matutinal chocolate. Omnipresent, of course, are those water stalls that, in Sevilla especially, acquire eminent dignity by their row of stout jars, and their complicated cordage rigged across from one house-top to another, so as to sustain shadowing canvas canopies. There is a great crowd, but even the fair is comparatively quiet, like the other phases of local life. The absence of wagon-traffic in the town creates, notwithstanding its reposeful character, a new relative scale of noises, and there is consequently good store of fretting attacks on the hearing in Sevilla. With very early morning begins the deep clank of bells, under the chins of asses that go the rounds to deliver domestic milk from their own udders. There is no end of noise. Even in the elegant dining-room where we ate, lottery-dealers would howl at us through the barred windows, or a donkey outside would rasp our ears with his intolerable braying. Then the street cries are incessant. At night the crowds chafe and jabber till the latest hours, and after eleven the watchmen begin their drawl of unearthly sadness, alternating with the occult and remorseless industry of the mosquito; until, somewhere about dawn, you drop perspiring into an oppressively tropical dream-land, with the _sereno's_ last cry ringing in your ears: "Hail, Mary, most pure! Three o'clock has struck." This is the weird tune to which he chants it: [Illustration: Musical notation: _A--ve Ma--ri--a pur--is--si--ma! Las tré--es han toc--ca--do._] II. An English lady, conversing with a Sevillan gentleman who had been making some rather tall statements, asked him: "Are you telling me the truth?" "Madam," he replied, gravely, but with a twinkle in his eye, "I am an Andalusian!" At which the surrounding listeners, his fellow-countrymen, broke into an appreciative laugh. So proverbial is the want of veracity, or, to put it more genially, the imagination, of these Southerners. Their imagination will explain also the vogue of their brief, sometimes pathetic, yet never more than half-expressed, scraps of song, which are sung with so much feeling throughout the kingdom to crude barbaric airs, and loved alike by gentle and simple. I mean the _Peteneras_ and _Malagueñas_. There are others of the same general kind, sung to a variety of dances; but the ruling tunes are alike--usually pitched in a minor key, and interspersed with passionate trills, long quavers, unexpected ups and downs, which it requires no little skill to render. I have seen gypsy singers grow apoplectic with the long breath and volume of sound which they threw into these eccentric melodies amid thunders of applause. It is not a high nor a cultivated order of music, but there lurks in it something consonant with the broad, stimulating shine of the sun, the deep red earth, the thick, strange-flavored wine of the Peninsula; its constellated nights, and clear daylight gleamed with flying gold from the winnowing-field. The quirks of the melody are not unlike those of very old English ballads, and some native composer with originality should be able to expand their deep, bold, primitive ululations into richer, lasting forms. The fantastic picking of the _mandurra_ accompaniment reminds me of Chinese music with which I have been familiar. Endless preludes and interminable windings-up enclose the minute kernel of actual song; but to both words and music is lent a repressed touching power and suggestiveness by repeating, as is always done, the opening bars and first words at the end, and then breaking off in mid-strain. For instance: "All the day I am happy, But at evening orison Like a millstone grows my heart. All the day I am happy." [_Limitless Guitar Solo._] It is like the never-ended strain of Schumann's "Warum?" The words are always simple and few--often bald. One of the most popular pieces amounts simply to this: "Both Lagartijo and Frascuelo Swordsmen are of quality, Since when they the bulls are slaying-- O damsel of my heart! They do it with serenity. Both Lagartijo and Frascuelo Swordsmen are of quality." But such evident ardor of feeling and such wealth of voice are breathed into these fragments that they become sufficient. The people supply from their imagination what is barely hinted in the lines. Under their impassive exteriors they preserve memories, associations, emotions of burning intensity, which throng to aid their enjoyment, as soon as the muffled strings begin to vibrate and syllables of love or sorrow are chanted. I recalled to a young and pretty Spanish lady one line, "Pajarito, tu que vuelas." She flushed, fire came to her eyes, and with clasped hands she murmured, "Oh, what a beautiful song it is!" Yet it contains only four lines. Here is a translation: "Bird, little bird that wheelest Through God's fair worlds in the sky, [Illustration: "ALL THE DAY I AM HAPPY."] Say if thou anywhere seest A being more sad than I. Bird, little bird that wheelest." Some of these little compositions are roughly humorous, and others very grotesque, appearing to foreigners empty and ridiculous. The following one has something of the odd imagery and clever inconsequence of our negro improvisations: "As I was gathering pine-cones In the sweet pine woods of love, My heart was cracked by a splinter That flew from the tree above. I'm dead: pray for me, sweethearts!" There was one evening in Granada when we sat in a company of some two dozen people, and one after another of the ladies took her turn in singing to the guitar of a little girl, a musical prodigy. But they were all outdone by Cándida, the brisk, naïve, handsome serving-girl, who was invited in, but preferred to stand outside the grated window, near the lemon-trees and pomegranates, looking in, with a flower in her hair, and pouring into the room her warm contralto--that voice so common among Spanish peasant-women--which seemed to have absorbed the clear dark of Andalusian nights when the stars glitter like lance-points aimed at the earth. Through the twanging of the strings we could hear the rush of water that gurgles all about the Alhambra; and, just above the trees that stirred in the perfumed air without, we knew the unsentinelled walls of the ancient fortress were frowning. The most elaborate piece was one meant to accompany a dance called the _Zapateado_, or "kick-dance." It begins: "Tie me, with my fiery charger, To your window's iron lattice. Though _he_ break loose, my fiery charger, Me he cannot tear away;" and then passes into rhyme: "Much I ask of San Francisco, Much St. Thomas I implore; But of thee, my little brown girl, Ah, of thee I ask much more!" The singing went on: "In Triana there are rogues, And there are stars in heaven. Four and one rods away There lives, there lives a woman. Flowers there are in gardens, And beautiful girls in Sevilla." Nevertheless, we had been glad to leave Sevilla, especially since during our stay an epidemic was in progress, graphically called "the minute," from its supposed characteristic of finishing off a victim ready for the undertaker in exactly sixty seconds after attacking him. The inhabitants of Granada likewise seemed to be a good deal occupied in burying themselves--a habit which became confirmed, no doubt, during the wars and insurrections of their ancestors, and is aided to-day by bad sanitary arrangements. We saw a dead man being carried in the old Moorish way, with his forehead bared to the sky, a green wreath on his head, his cold hands emerging from the shroud in their last prayer-clasp, and quite indifferent to the pitiless sun that beat down on them. But, perched as we were on the Alhambra Hill, high above the baking city, such spectacles were transient specks in the world of fascination that infolded us. [Illustration: GRANADA UNDERTAKER.] [Illustration: THE MOORISH GATE, SEVILLA.] Granada rests in what might pass for the Happy Valley of Rasselas, a deep stretch of thirty miles, called simply the Vega, and tilled from end to end on a system of irrigation established by the Moslem conquerors. Rugged mountains, bastions of a more than Cyclopean earthwork, girdle and defend it. To penetrate them you must leave the hot rolling lands of the west, and confront steep heights niched here and there for creamy-hued villages or deserted castles, and sentried by small Moorish watch-towers rising like chessmen on the highest crests. The olive-trees spread on wide slopes of tanned earth were like thick dots of black connected in one design, and seemed to suggest the possible origin of Spanish lace. The shapes of the mountains, too, were extravagant. One of the most singular, the _Peñon de los Enamorados_, near Antequera, showed us by accident at a distance the exact profile of George Washington, with every detail after Stuart, hewn out in mountain size and looking directly up into the heavens from a position of supine rigidity. Our first intimation of a near approach to Granada was a long stretch of blanched folds showing through evening mistiness in the southern sky, like the drapings of some celestial tabernacle, so high up that they might have been clouds but for a certain persistent, awful immobility that controlled them. Their spectral whiteness, detached from the earth, hung, it is true, ten thousand feet above the sea-level; but they were not clouds. They were the summits of the Sierra Nevada, the great Snowy Range. Twenty miles to the north of these frosty heights stands the Alhambra Hill, shrouded in dark trees, and dominated by the Mountain of the Sun. The names are significant--Snowy Range and Mountain of the Sun--for the landscape that unrolls itself between these ridges is a mixture of torrid glow and Alpine coldness. I stood in a hanging garden delicious with aromatic growths, on the ramparts beside the great Lookout Tower, the city lying like a calcareous deposit packed in the gorge of the Darro's stream below. Across the Vega I beheld that sandy pass of the hills through which Boabdil withdrew after his surrender--the Last Sigh of the Moor. Fierce sunlight smote upon me, spattering the leaves like metal in flux; but the snow-fields mantling the blue wall of the Sierra loomed over the landscape so distinct as to seem within easy hail, and I felt their breath in a sweet coolness that drifted by from time to time. The other mountains were bare and golden brown. But in their midst the mild Vega, inlaid with curves of the River Genil, receded in breadths of alternate green orchard and mellow rye, where distant villages are scattered "like white antelopes at pasture," says Señor Don Contreras, the accomplished curator of the Alhambra. It was not like a dream, for dreams are imitative; nor like reality, for that is too unstable. It was blended of both these, with a purely ideal strand. As I looked at the rusty red walls and abraded towers palisading the hill, the surroundings became like some miraculous web, and these ruins, concentring the threads, were the shattered cocoon from which it had been spun. The Alhambra was originally a village on the height, perhaps the first local settlement, surrounded by a wall for defensive purposes. [Illustration: A WATER-CARRIER.] The wall, which once united a system of thirty-seven towers, fringes the irregular edges of the hill-top plateau, describing an enclosure like a rude crescent lying east and west. At the west end the hill contracts to an anvil point, and on this are grouped the works of the citadel Alcazaba, governed by the huge square Lookout Tower. On a ridge close to the south stand the Vermilion Towers, suspected of having been mixed up with the Phoenicians at an early epoch, but not yet fully convicted by the antiquarians. The intervening glade receives a steep road from the city, and is arcaded with elms and cherries of prodigious size, sent over as saplings by the Duke of Wellington half a century ago. There the nightingales sing in spring-time, and in summer the boughs give perch to other songsters. Ramps lead up to the top of the hill, and on the northern edge of its crescent, at the brink of the Darro Valley, the Alhambra Palace proper is lodged. We shall go in by the Gate of Justice, through a door-way running up two-thirds of its tower's height, and culminating in a little horseshoe arch, whereon a rude hand is incised--a favorite Mohammedan symbol of doctrine. We pass a poor pictured oratory of the Virgin, and some lance-rests of Ferdinand V., to worm our way through the grim passage that cautiously turns twice before emerging through an arch of pointed brick with enamellings on argil, into the open gravelled Place of the Reservoirs. This is undermined by a fettered lake, generally attributed to the Moors, but more probably made after Isabella's conquest. On the right side, behind hedges and low trees, is reared that gray rectangular Græco-Roman pile which Charles V. had the audacity to begin. His palace is deservedly unfinished, yet its intrusion is effective. It makes you think of the terror-striking helmet of unearthly size in the Castle of Otranto, and looks indeed like a piece of mediæval armor flung down here to challenge vainly the wise Arabian beauty of the older edifice. To the Place of Reservoirs come in uninterrupted course all day the tinkling and tasselled mules that carry back to the city jars of fresh water, kept cool in baskets filled with leaves. And hither walk toward sunset the _majos_ and _majas_--dandies and coquettes--to stroll and gossip for an hour, even as we saw them when we were lingering at the northern parapet one evening and looking off through the clear air, in which a million rose-leaves seemed to have dipped and left their faint color. III. The veritable entrance to the Alhambra is now buried within some later buildings added to the original. But it never, though Irving naturally supposed the contrary, had a grand portal in the middle. Gorgeous and showy means of ingress would not have suited the Oriental mind. The exterior of the palace and all the towers is dull, blank, uncommunicative. Their coating of muddy or ferruginous cement, marked here and there by slim upright oblongs of black window spaces, was not meant to reveal the luxury of loveliness concealed within. The Moslem idea was to secrete the abodes of earthly bliss, nor even to hint at them by outward signs of ostentation. So the petty modern door cut for convenience is not wholly out of keeping. It ushers one with a sudden surprise into the presence of those marvels which have been for years a distant enticing vision. You find yourself, in fact, wandering into the Alhambra courts as if by accident. The first one--the Court of the Pond, or of the Myrtles--arrays before us beauty enough and to spare. But it is only the beginning. A long tank occupies the centre, brimmed with water from a rill that gurgles, by day and night forever, with a low, half-laughing sob. Around it level plates of white marble are riveted to the ground, and two hedges of clipped myrtle border the placid surface. At the nearest end a double gallery closes the court, imposed on seven arches so evenly rounded as to emulate the Roman, but upheld by columns of amazing slenderness; and in the spandrels are translucent arabesques inlaced with fillets, radiating leaf-points, and loose knots. Above these blink some square windows, shut as with frozen gauze by minute stone lattice-work, over fifteen hundred twisted or cubed pieces being combined in each. From there the women of the harem used to witness pageantries and ceremonies that took place in the court; and over the veiled windows is a roofed balcony repeating the lower arches, which would serve for spectators not under ban of invisibility. [Illustration: BIT OF ARCH IN A COURT OF THE ALHAMBRA. From a photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid.] Various low doors lead from this Court of the Pond, giving sealed intimation of what may lie beyond, but disclosing little. One turns naturally, however, to the Hall of Ambassadors at the other end, in the mighty Tower of Comares. The transverse arcade at the entrance is roofed with shining vitreous-faced tiles of blue and white that also carry their stripes over the little cupola, to which many similar ones doubtless formerly surrounded the court, and in the cloister underneath the inmates reclined on divans glinting with rippled gold-thread and embroidered with colored silks. Then comes the anteroom, the Chamber of Benediction (usually called of the Boat, on account of its long, scooped ceiling), which is like the hollow of a capsized boat suspended over us, and darkened with deep lapis lazuli. There are some low doors in the wall, meant for the humble approach of slaves when serving their masters, or leading to lost inner corridors and stairways now fallen into dust. But the large central arch conducts at once into the Hall of the Ambassadors, after we have passed some niches in which of old were set encarmined water-jars of sweet-scented clay. Beside these may have stood the carven racks for weapons of jewelled hilt and tempered blade. In the Chamber of Benediction begin those multitudinous arabesques by which the Alhambra is most widely known. In the hall beyond they flow out with unimpeded grace and variety over the walls of an immensely high and nobly spacious apartment, pierced on three sides at the floor level with arched _ajimez_[8] windows halved by a thin, flower-headed column, in the embrasures of which, enchased with cement, are mouldings that overrun the groundwork in bands, curves, diamonds, scrolls, delicate as the ribs of leaves or as vine tendrils. Within these soft convolved lines, arranged to make the most florid detail tributary to the general effect, Arabic characters twisted into the design contain outbursts of poetry celebrating the edifice, the room itself. "As if I were the arc of the rainbow," says one inscription in the hooped door-way, "and the sun were Lord Abul Hachach." The windows look forth upon the sheer northern fall of the hill; the waving tree-tops scarcely rising to the balcony under the sills. They look upon old Granada dozing below in the unmitigated sunlight, with here and there the sculptured columns of a _patio_ visible among the houses on the opposite slope; and farther away the Sesame doors of gypsy habitations cut into the solid mountain above the Darro. One of the most beautiful of glimpses about the Alhambra is that through the east window, looking along the parapet gallery to the Toilet Tower. Precipitous masonry plunges down among trees that shoot incredibly high, as if incited by the lines of the building; and on the Mountain of the Sun the irregular lint-white buildings of the Generalife--an old retreat of Moorish sovereigns and nobles--are lodged among cypresses and orange thickets. Within the hall itself all is cool, subdued, and breezy, and the smooth vault of the larch-wood ceiling, still dimly rich with azure and gold, spans the area high overhead like a solemn twilight sky at night. It was in this Tower of Comares that the last King of Granada, Boabdil, was imprisoned with his mother, Ayeshah, by his stormy and fatuous father, Muley Abul Hassan, owing to the rival influence of the Morning Star, Zoraya, Hassan's favorite wife. Boabdil escaped, being let down to the ground by the scarfs of his mother and her female attendants. Years after, when he had succeeded to the throne for a brief and hapless reign, _El Rey Chico_ (The Little King), as the Spaniards called him, was led by his mother into the Hall of Ambassadors after he had capitulated to Ferdinand and Isabella. Silently she made its circuit with him, and then, overcome with the bitterness of loss, she cried: "Behold what thou art giving up, and remember that all thy forefathers died kings of Granada, but in thee the kingdom dies!" [Illustration: THE TOILET TOWER. From a photograph by J. Laurent & Co., Madrid.] The Hall of Ambassadors is assigned to the epoch of the caliphate. Certainly the Court of Lions is invested with a somewhat different character. Its arches are more pointed, more nearly Gothic, and are hung upon a maze of exquisitely slight columns, presenting, as you look in, an opulent confusion of crinkled curves and wavering ellipses, bordered with dropping points and brief undulations that look like festoons of heavy petrified lace: as lace, heavy; but as architecture, light. There is incalculable diversity in the proportions, unevenness in the grouping of the pillars, irregularity in the cupolas; yet through all persists an unsurpassable harmony, a sensitive equilibrium. The Hall of Justice, which opens from it, and contains--contrary to Mohammedan principles--some mysterious early Italian frescoes depicting Moorish and Christian combats, is a grotto of stalactites. All this part of the palace, one would say, might have sprung from the spray of those hidden canals which brought the snow-water hither, spouting up, then falling and crystallizing in shapes of arrested motion; so perfect is the geometrical balance, so suave are the flowing lines. The un-Moorish lions sustaining the central basin are meagre and crude, and the size of the court is disappointing; but it is a miniature labyrinth of beauty. From one side you may pass into the Hall of the Abencerages, under the fine star-shaped roof of which a number of those purely Arab-blooded knights are said to have been, at the instigation of their half-Christian rivals, the Zegris, assembled at a banquet and then murdered. An invitation to dinner in those days was a doubtful compliment, which a gentleman had to think twice about before accepting. On the other side lies the access to the Chamber of the Two Sisters, a lovely apartment, having a grooved bed in the marble floor for a current of water to course through and run out under the zigzag-carven cedar door. Everything is exactly as you would have it, and you seem to be straying through embodied reveries of Bagdad and Damascus. But it would be futile to describe the myriad traceries of these rooms; the bevelled entablatures, the elastic ceilings, displaying an order and multiplicity of tiny relief as systematic as the cells and tissues in a cut pomegranate; or the dadoes of colored tiles, still dimly glistening with glaze, and chameleonizing the base of the partitions. The culmination of microscopic refinement comes, with a sigh of relief from such an overplus of sensuous delight, in the boudoir of Lindaraxa, which overlooks from a superb embayed window a little oasis of fountained court, blooming with citrons and lemons, and bedded with violets. That small garden, green and laughing, and interspersed with dark flower-mould, lies clasped in the branching wings of masonry, as simple and refreshing as a dew-drop. It is shut in on the other side by some mediæval rooms fitted up in heavy oak panelling for Philip V. and his second bride, Elisabetta, when with rare judgment they chose this Islamitic spot for their honey-moon--a crescent, I suppose. It was in one of these rooms--the Room of the Fruits--that, to quote Señor Contreras again, "the celebrated poet Washington Irving harbored, composing there his best works." From which it will be inferred that the gallant Spaniard has not probed deeply the "Knickerbocker History of New York," the "Sketch-book," and the "Life of Washington."[9] [Illustration: BOUDOIR OF LINDARAXA] One may prolong one's explorations to the Queen's Toilet Tower--who "the queen" was remains decidedly vague--poised like a lofty palm on the verge commanding the Darro gorge. In one corner of its engirdling colonnade are some round punctures, through which perfume was wafted to saturate the queen's garments while she was dressing. Or one may descend to the Baths, vaulted in below the general level. Their antechamber is the only portion which has been completely restored to its pristine magnificence of blue and gold, vermilion-flecked and overspreading the polygonal facets of stucco-work. I could imagine the Sultan coming there with stately step to be robed for the bath by female slaves, then passing on wooden clogs into the inner chamber of heated marble, and at a due interval emerging to take his place on one of the inclined slabs in an outer alcove, enveloped in a _tcherchef_--his head bound with a soft silk muffler--there to devote himself to rest, sweetmeats, and lazy conversation. The Alhambra Palace is remarkable as being more Persian than Turkish, and reproducing many features that crop up in the architecture of India, Syria, Arabia, and Turkey, yet incorporating them in an independent total. The horseshoe arch is not the prevailing one, though it occurs often enough to renew and deepen the impression of its unique effect. What makes this arch so adroitly significant of the East? Possibly the fact that it suggests a bow bent to the extremest convexity. It is easy to imagine stretched between the opposite sides a bow-string--that handy implement of conjugal strangulation which no Sultan's family should be without. Part of the populous ancient settlement on the hill still exists in a single street outside of the palace, now inhabited by a more respectable population than that riffraff of silk-weavers, vagabonds, potters, smugglers, and broken-down soldiers who flourished there half a century since. A church stands among the dwellings. Strolling up the street one moonlit night, we bought some blue and white wine-pitchers of Granada-ware at a little drinking-shop, and saw farther on a big circle of some twenty people sitting together in the open air--one of those informal social clubs called _tertulias_, common among neighbors and intimate friends in all ranks of Spanish society. At another spot a man was sleeping in the moonlight on a cot beside the parapet, with his two little Indian-looking boys dreaming on a sheet laid over the ground. Mateo Ximenes, the son of Irving's "Son of the Alhambra," lives in this quarter, officiating as a guide. Thanks to "Geoffrey Crayon" he is prosperous, and has accordingly built a new square house which is the acme of commonplace. Beyond the street, across some open ground where figs and prickly-pears are growing, stands the Tower of the Captive, where Isabella de Solis, a Christian princess, being captured, was imprisoned, and became the wife of Abul Hassan. She was, in fact, the Zoraya who became Ayeshah's rival. Dense ivy mats the wall between this and the Tower of the Princesses--a structure utilized by Irving in one of his prettiest tales. Both towers are incrusted interiorly with a perfection rivalling the palace chambers, and perhaps even more enchanting, but no vestige of coloring is left in them. To me this wan aspect of the walls is more poetic than any restoration of the original emblazonments. The pale white-brown surface seems compounded of historic ashes, and is imbued with a pathos, "Like a picture when the pride Of its coloring hath died," which one would be loath to lose. The sunlit and vine-clad decrepitude that sits so lightly on this magic stronghold--this "fortress and mansion of joy," as one of the mural mottoes calls it--is among its main charms. The most bitter opponent of any Moorish return to power in Granada would, I think, be the modern æsthetic tourist. I rambled frequently close under the old rufous-mottled walls, from which young trees sprout up lustily, and enjoyed their decay almost as much as I did the palace. At one point near the Tower of Seven Stories (which has never quite recovered from being blown up by the French) there was a long stretch of garden where phlox and larkspur and chrysanthemums, that would not wait for autumn, grew rank among the fruit-trees. A Moorish water-pipe near the top of the wall had broken, and, bursting through the brick-work, its current had formed a narrow cascade that tumbled into the garden through wavering loops of maiden-hair, and over mosses or water-plants which it had brought into life on the escarpment. Grapes and figs rose luxuriantly about rings of box enclosing fountains, and at sunset some shaft of fire would level itself into the greenery, striking the gorgeous pomegranate blossoms into prominence, like scarlet-tufted birds' heads. All day there was a loud chir of cicadas, and a rain of white-hot light sifted through the leaves. But at night everything died away except the rush of water, which grew louder and louder till it filled the whole air like a ghostly warning. I used to wake long after midnight, and hear nothing but this chilling whisper, unless by chance some gypsies squatted on the road were singing _Malagueñas_, or the strange, piercing note of the tree-toad that haunts the hill rung out in elfin and inhuman pipings of woe. For the builders who laid them here these running streams make a fit memorial--unstable as their power that has slipped away, yet surviving them, and remaining here as an echo of their voices, a reminder of the absent race which not for an hour can one forget in Granada. But the supreme spell of the Alhambra reserves itself for moonlight. When the Madonna's lamp shone bright amid the ingulfing shadows of the Tower of Justice, while its upper half was cased in steely radiance, we passed in by Charles's Palace, where the moon, shining through the roofless top, made a row of smaller moons in the circular upper windows of the dark gray wall. In the Court of the Pond a low gourd-like umbellation at the north end sparkled in diamond lustre beneath the quivering rays; while the whole Tower of Comares behind it repeated itself in the gray-green water at our feet, with a twinkle of stars around its reversed summit. This image, dropped into the liquid depth, has dwelt there ever since its original was reared, and it somehow idealized itself into a picture of the tower's primitive perfection. The coldness of the moonlight on the soft cream-colored plaster, in this warm, stilly air, is peculiarly impressive. As for sound, absolutely none is heard but that of dripping water; nor did I ever walk through a profounder, more ghost-like silence than that which eddied in Lindaraxa's garden around the fountain, as it mourned in silvery monotones of neglected grief. The moon-glare, coming through the lonely arches, shaped gleaming cuirasses on the ground, or struck the out-thrust branches of citron-trees, and seemed to drip from them again in a dazzle of snowy fire; and when I discovered my two companions looking out unexpectedly from a pointed window, they were so pale in the brilliance which played over them that for a moment I easily fancied them white-stoled apparitions from the past. As we glanced from the Queen's Peinador, where the black trees of the shaggy ascent sprung toward us in swift lines or serpentine coilings as if to grasp at us, we saw long shadows from the towers thrown out over the sleeping city, which, far below, caked together its squares of hammered silver, dusked over by the dead gray of roofs that did not reflect the light. But within the Hall of Ambassadors reigned a gloom like that of the grave. Gleams of sharp radiance lay in the deep embrasures without penetrating; and, at one, the intricacies of open-work above the arch were mapped in clear figures of light on a space of jet-black floor. Another was filled nearly to the top by the blue, weirdly luminous image of a mountain across the valley. Through all these openings, I thought, the spirits of the departed could find entrance as easily as the footless night breeze. I wonder if the people who lived in this labyrinth of art ever smiled? In the palpitating dusk, robed men and veiled women seemed to steal by with a rustle no louder than that of their actual movement in life; silk hangings hung floating from the walls; scented lamps shed their beams at moments through the obscurity, and I saw the gleam of enamelled swords, the shine of bronze candlesticks, the blur of colored vases in the corners; the _kasidas_ of which poetry-loving monarchs turned the pages. But in such a place I could not imagine laughter. I felt inclined to prostrate myself in the darkness before I know not what power of by-gone yet ever-present things--a half tangible essence that expressed only the solemnity of life and the presentiment of change. IV. It is not surprising that Isabella the Catholic, who had so completely thrown her heart into the conquest of Granada, should have wished to be buried in that city, though dying far away. Her marble semblance rests beside that of Ferdinand in the Royal Chapel, which serves as vestibule to the ugly Renaissance cathedral. The statues are peculiarly impressive, and sleep on high sepulchres of alabaster, beautifully chased. Both of them are placed with their heads where, if sentient, they might contemplate the astonishing reredos of the altar--a wooden mass piled to the roof, and containing many niches filled by figures carved, gilded, and painted with flesh-color. Among them is John the Baptist standing upright, with blood gushing from his severed neck, while the head which has just quitted it is being presented on a charger to Herodias's daughter. There are other hideous things in this strange and brutal church ornament, which is a museum of monstrosities; but parts of it depict the triumphs of the royal pair, and it was no doubt accordant with their taste. Their bodies lie in a black vault under the floor, which we visited by the light of a single candle. Two long bulks of lead, with a simple letter F. on one and an I. on the other; that was all that marked the presence of two great monarchs' earthly part. Juana the Mad, Charles V.'s mother, rests in another leaden casket--the poor Queen, whom her famous son probably reported crazy for his own political purposes, but whose supposed mania of watching her dead husband's body, in jealous fear that he could still be loved by other women, has been effectively treated in Padilla's picture. Her husband, Philip the Fair, lies on the opposite side. Hardly could there be a more impressive contrast than that between this tomb under the soft, musty shadows of the chapel--all that is left of the conqueror--and that glorious sun-imbued ruin on the hill--all that is left of the conquered. Two mighty forces met and clashed around Granada in 1492; and, when the victory was won, both receded like spent waves, leaving the Alhambra to slow burial in rubbish and oblivion, under which Washington Irving literally rediscovered it. How fine a coincidence that the very spot from which Isabella finally despatched Columbus on his great quest should owe so much to a son of the new continent which Columbus discovered! Another edifice of no small interest, although seldom heard of at a distance, is La Cartuja, the Carthusian church and monastery, lying upon a hill-slope called Hinadamar, across the city and on its outskirts, due west from the Alhambra. The monks who formerly occupied it have, in common with those of other orders, been driven out of Spain; so that we approached the church-steps through an old arched gate-way, no longer guarded, and by way of a grass-grown enclosure that bore the appearance of complete neglect. The interior, however, is very well preserved. It was curious to walk through it, under the guidance of a pursy old woman, and, afterward, of the lame sacristan, who did his best with chattering gossip to rob the place of whatever sanctity remained to it. The refectory (fitly inhabited by an echo) stands bare and empty, save for the reading-desk, from which the monks used to be refreshed with Scripture while at their meals; and on the wall at one end of this long, high hall hangs apparently a wooden cross, which at first it is impossible to believe is only painted there. The barren, round-arched cloisters are frescoed with an interminable series of scenes by Cotan, the same artist who painted the cross; and in this case he was given a free commission, of which he availed himself to the utmost in depicting the most distressing incidents of Carthusian martyrology. Especially does he seem to have delighted in the persecutions inflicted by English Protestants under Henry VIII. on San Bruno, the founder of this order. How strange the conception of a holy and exalted life which led men in religious retirement to keep before their eyes, in these corridors meant for mild exercise and recreation, representations so full of blood and horror! In fact, one cannot escape the impression, stamped more vividly on the mind here in Granada than anywhere else, except perhaps in Toledo, that Christianity in Spain meant barbarism. But where it was released from the immediate purposes of ecclesiastic dogma, Christian art showed a taste not so much barbarous as barbaric, and the results of its activity were often beautiful. In this same monastery is a splendid example of that tendency. The church is not remarkably fine or impressive; but the sacristy is a marvel of sumptuous decoration, and decoration very peculiar in kind. Its walls are wholly incased in a most effective species of green and white marble, cut in smooth, polished slabs, the natural veinings of which present grotesque resemblances to human and other forms, which are somewhat trivially insisted upon by the custodian and guide, and should be allowed to lose themselves in the general richness of aspect. The great doors of this sacristy are inlaid with ebony, silver, mother-of-pearl, and tortoise-shell, in designs of much intricacy and richness; and all around the room (which is provided with an altar, so that it becomes a sort of sub-church or chapel, adjoining the main church) are low closets fitted into the wall. These were originally used for holding the vestments of the brotherhood. Made of sweet-scented cedar, they are adorned on the outside with the same inlaid work that appears on the doors. The dim, veiled shimmer of the mother-of-pearl, the delicate, translucent browns of the tortoise-shell, and the wandering threads of silver, form a decorative surface wonderful in its refinement, its perfection of elegance. I scarcely know how to give an idea of its appearance, unless I say that it was somewhat as if layers of spider-webs had been spread, with all their mystery of exact curves and angles, over the wood-work, and then had had their fibres changed by some magic into precious and enduring materials. The frail but well-adjusted fabric has outlasted the dominion of those for whose selfish and secluded pride of worship it was made; and, seeing it, one may pardon them some of their mistakes. It is pleasant also to find that the art of making this inlay, after having long fallen out of use, has been revived in Granada; for in these days of enlightened adaptation and artistic education there seems to be no reason why such a handicraft should be lost or even confined to Spain. The gypsies of Granada are disappointing, apart from their peculiar quivering dance, performed by _gitanas_ in all Spanish cities under the name of _flamenco_.[10] Their hill-caves, so operative with one's curiosity when regarded from across the valley, gape open in such dingy, sour, degraded foulness on a nearer view, that I found no amount of theory would avail to restore their interest. Yet some of the fortune-telling women are spirited enough, and the inextinguishable Romany spark smoulders in their black eyes. Perhaps it was an interloping drop of Celtic blood that made one of them say to me, "Señorito, listen. I will tell you your fortune. But I speak French--_I come from Africa!_" And to clinch the matter she added, "You needn't pay me if every word of the prediction isn't true!" Much as I had heard of the Spanish bull, I never knew until then how closely it resembled the Irish breed. Fortuny's model, Marinero, who lives in a burrow on the Alhambra side, occasionally starts up out of the earth in a superb and expensive costume, due to the dignity of his having been painted by Fortuny. Dark as a negro, with a degree of luminous brown in his skin, and very handsome, he plants himself immovably in one spot to sell photographs of himself. His nostrils visibly dilate with pride, but he makes no other bid for custom. He expands his haughty nose, and you immediately buy a picture. Velveteen chanced upon Marinero's daughter, and got her to pose. When he engaged her she was so delighted that she took a rose from her hair and presented it to him, with a charming, unaffected air of gratitude, came an hour before the time, and waited impatiently. She wore a wine-colored skirt, if I remember, a violet jacket braided with black, and a silk neckerchief of dull purple-pink silk. But that was not enough: a blue silk kerchief also was wound about her waist, and in among her smooth jet locks she had tucked a vivid scarlet flower. The result was perfect, for the rich pale-brown of her complexion could harmonize anything; and in Spain, moreover, combinations of color that appear too harsh elsewhere are paled and softened by the overpowering light. [Illustration: GYPSIES.] Episodes like these tinged our dreams of the Alhambra with novel dashes of living reality. Even the tedious bustle of a Spanish town, too, has its attractions. The moving figures on the steep Albaycin streets, that perpetually break into flights of steps; the blocks of pressed snow brought in mule panniers every night from the Sierra to cool sugar-water and risadas of orange at the cafés; peasants coming in to the beautiful old grain market with gaudy mantles over their shoulders, stuffing into their sashes a variety of purchases, and becoming corpulent with a day's transactions; the patient efforts of shop-keepers to water the main street, Zacatin, with a pailful at a time--all this was amusing to watch. The Generalife was another source of pleasure, for in its topmost loggia one may sit like a bird, with the Alhambra spread out below in all the distinctness of a raised map. In the saloons of the Generalife hang the portraits of the Moorish and the Christian ancestors of the present owner. Their direct descendant is a woman; therefore she has married an Italian count, and flitted from this ideal, quite unparalleled eyry, returning to her ancestral home only at rare intervals. There came an hour when we too flitted. To oblige an eccentric time-table we had to get up at dawn; but the last glimpse of the Alhambra at that early hour was a compensation. The dim red towers already began to soften into a reminiscence under this tender blending of moonlight and morning; but a small constellation in the east sparkled on the blue like a necklace of diamonds, and Saturn still flamed above the mountains, growing momently larger, as if it were a huge topaz in the turban of some giant Moor advancing in the early stillness to reclaim the Alhambra throne. _MEDITERRANEAN PORTS AND GARDENS._ I. [Illustration: A] A gypsy dance! What does one naturally imagine it to be like? For my part, I had expected something wild, free, and fantastic; something in harmony with moonlight, the ragged shadows of trees, and the flicker of a rude camp-fire. Nothing could have been wider of the mark. The _flamenco_--that dance of the gypsies, in its way as peculiarly Spanish as the church and the bull-ring, and hardly less important--is of Oriental origin, and preserves the impassive quality, the suppressed, tantalized sensuousness belonging to Eastern performances in the saltatory line. It forms a popular entertainment in cafés of the lower order throughout the southern provinces, from Madrid all the way around to Valencia, in Sevilla and Malaga, and is gotten up as a select and expensive treat for travellers at Granada. But we saw it at its best in Malaga. We were conducted, about eleven o'clock in the evening, to a roomy, rambling, dingy apartment in the crook of an obscure and dirty street, where we found a large number of sailors, peasants, and _chulos_ seated drinking at small tables, with a very occasional well-dressed citizen or two here and there. In one corner was a stage rising to the level of our chins when we were seated, which had two fronts, like the Shakspearian stage in pictures, so that spectators on the side might have a fair chance, and be danced to from time to time. On this sat about a dozen men and women, the latter quite as much Spanish as gypsy, and some of them dressed partially in tights, with an affectation of sailors' or pages' costume in addition. At Madrid and Sevilla their sisters in the craft wore ordinary feminine dresses, and looked the possessors of more genuine Romany blood. But here, too, the star _danseuse_, the chief mistress of the art _flamenco_, was habited in the voluminous calico skirt which Peninsular propriety prescribes for this particular exhibition, thereby doing all it can to conceal and detract from the amazing skill of muscular movement involved. A variety of songs and dances with guitar accompaniments, some effective and others tedious, preceded the gypsy performance. I think we listened nearly half an hour to certain disconsolate barytone wailings, which were supposed to interpret the loves, anxieties, and other emotions of a _contrabandista_, or smuggler, hiding from pursuit in the mountains. Judging from the time at his disposal for this lament, the smuggling business must indeed be sadly on the decline. The whole entertainment was supervised by a man precisely like all the chiefs of these troupes in Spain. Their similarity is astounding; even their features are almost identical: when you have seen one, you have seen all his fellows, and know exactly what they will do. He may be a little older or younger, a little more gross or less so, but he is always clean-shaven like the other two sacred types--the bull-fighter and the priest--and his face is in every case weakly but good-humoredly sensual. But what does he _do_? Well, nothing. He is the most important personage on the platform, but he does not pretend to contribute to the programme beyond an exclamation of encouragement to the performers at intervals. He is a Turveydrop in deportment at moments, and always a Crummles in self-esteem. A few highly favored individuals as they come into the café salute him, and receive a condescending nod in return. Then some friend in the audience sends up to him a glass of chamomile wine, or comes close and offers it with his own hand. The leader invariably makes excuses, and without exception ends by taking the wine, swallowing a portion, and gracefully spitting out the rest at the side of the platform. He smokes the cigars of admiring acquaintances, and throws the stumps on the stage. All the while he carries in his hand a smooth, plain walking-stick, with which he thumps time to the music when inclined. [Illustration: GYPSY DANCE.] At last the moment for the _flamenco_ arrives. The leader begins to beat monotonously on the boards, just as our Indians do with their tomahawks, to set the rhythm; the guitars strike into their rising and falling melancholy strain. Two or three women chant a weird song, and all clap their hands in a peculiar measure, now louder, now fainter, and with pauses of varying length between the emphatic reports. The dancer has not yet risen from her seat; she seems to demand encouragement. The others call out, "Ollé!"--a gypsy word for "bravo!"--and smile and nod their heads at her to draw her on. All this excites in you a livelier curiosity, a sort of suspense. "What can be coming now?" you ask. Finally she gets up, smiling half scornfully; a light comes into her eyes; she throws her head back, and her face is suffused with an expression of daring, of energy, and strange pride. Perhaps it is only my fancy, but there seems to creep over the woman at that instant a reminiscence of far-off and mysterious things; her face, partially lifted, seems to catch the light of old traditions, and to be imbued with the spirit of something belonging to the past, which she is about to revive. Her arms are thrown upward, she snaps her fingers, and draws them down slowly close before her face as far as the waist, when, with an easy waving sideward, the "pass" is ended, and the arms go up again to repeat the movement. Her body too is in motion now, only slightly, with a kind of vibration; and her feet, unseen beneath the flowing skirt, have begun an easy, quiet, repressed rhythmical figure. So she advances, her face always forward, and goes swiftly around a circle, coming back to the point where she began, without appearing to step. The music goes on steadily, the cries of her companions become more animated, and she continues to execute that queer, aimless, yet dimly beckoning gesture with both arms--never remitting it nor the snapping of her fingers, in fact, until she has finished the whole affair. Her feet go a little faster; you can hear them tapping the floor as they weave upon it some more complicated measure; but there is not the slightest approach to a springing tendency. Her progress is sinuous; she glides and shuffles, her soles quitting the boards as little as possible--something between a clog dance and a walk, perfect in time, with a complexity in the exercise of the feet demanding much skill. She treats the performance with great dignity; the intensity of her absorption invests it with a something almost solemn. Forward again! She gazes intently in front as she proceeds, and again as she floats backward, looking triumphant, perhaps with a spark of latent mischief in her eyes. She stamps harder upon the floor; the sounds follow like pistol reports. The regular _clack_, _clack-clack_ of the smitten hands goes on about her, and the cries of the rest increase in zest and loudness. "Ollé! ollé!" "Bravo, my gracious one!" "Muy bien! muy bien!" "Hurrah! Live the queen of the ants!" shouts the leader. And the audience roars at his eccentric phrase. The dancer becomes more impassioned, but in no way more violent. Her body does not move above the hips. It is only the legs that twist and turn and bend and stamp, as if one electric shock after another were being sent downward through them. Every few minutes her activity passes by some scarcely noted gradation into a subtly new phase, but all these phases are bound together by a certain uniformity of restraint and fixed law. Now she almost comes to a stand-still, and then we notice a quivering, snaky, shuddering motion, beginning at the shoulders and _flowing_ down through her whole body, wave upon wave, the dress drawn tighter with one hand showing that this continues downward to her feet. Is she a Lamia in the act of undergoing metamorphosis, a serpent, or a woman? The next moment she is dancing, receding--this time with smiles, and with an indescribable air of invitation in the tossing of her arms. But the crowning achievement is when the hips begin to sway too, and, while she is going back and forward, execute a rotary movement like that of the bent part of an auger. In fact, you expect her to bore herself into the floor and disappear. Then all at once the stamping and clapping and the twanging strings are stopped, as she ceases her formal gyrations: she walks back to her seat like one liberated from a spell, and the whole thing is over. Velveteen and I came to Malaga direct from the Alhambra. The transition was one from the land of the olive to that of the palm. When we left Granada, an hour after daybreak, the slopes of the Sierra Nevada below the snow-line were softly overspread with rose and gold upon the blue, and the unmatchably pale bright yellow-white of the grain fields along the valley was spotted with the dark clumps of olive-trees, at a distance no bigger than cabbages. The last thing we saw was a sturdy peasant in knee-breeches and laced legs, with a tattered cloak flung around his chest and brought over the left shoulder in stately folds, that gave him the mien of a Roman senator, and put to shame our vulgar railroad plans. As the day grew, the hills in shadow melted into a warm citron hue, and those lifting their faces to the light were white as chalk, with faint blue shadows down in the clefts. It was in this same neighborhood that we saw peasant women in trousers doing harvest-work. To the enormity of donning the male garb they added the hardihood of choosing for the color of their trousers a bright sulphur-yellow. My friend the artist, I believe, secretly envied them this splendor denied to men; and in truth they would make spirited and effective material for a painter. Their yellow legs descended from a very short skirt of blue or vermilion, a mere concession to prejudice, for it was mostly caught up and pinned in folds to keep it out of the way. Above that the dress and figure were feminine; the colored kerchief around the throat, and the gay bandanna twisted around the dark loose hair under a big straw hat, finishing off the whole person as something dashing, free, novel, and yet quite natural and not unwomanly. An old man at Bobadilla offered us some _palmitos_--pieces of pith from the palm-trees, tufted with a few feathery young leaves, and considered a delicacy when fresh. It had a bitter-sweet, rather vapid taste, but I hailed it as a friendly token from the semi-tropical region we were approaching. So I bought one, and my companion presented the old man with some of the lunch we had brought; whereupon the shrivelled merchant, with a courtesy often met with in Spain, insisted upon his taking a _palmito_ as a present. Thus, bearing our victorious palm leaves, we moved forward to meet the palms themselves. The train rumbled swiftly through twelve successive tunnels, giving, between them, magnificent glimpses of deep wild gorges; fantastic rocks piled up in all conceivable shapes, like a collection of giant crystals arranged by a mad-man, amid mounds of gray and slate-colored clay pulverized by the heat, and reduced absolutely to ashes. The last barrier of the Alpujarras was passed, and we rushed out upon lower levels, immense and fertile vales, dense with plantations of orange and lemon, interspersed with high-necked, musing palms and brilliant thickets of pomegranate. Through the hot earth in which these plantations were placed ran the narrow canals, not more than two feet wide, containing those streams of milky water from the snow-fields on which all the vegetation of the region depends. It is of this and the neighboring portions of Spain that Castelar, in one of his recent writings, says: "The wildest coasts of our peninsula--those coasts of Almeria, Alicante, Murcia, where the fruits of various zones are yielded--compensate for their great plenty by years of desolation comparable only to those described in the chronicles of the Middle Ages, and suffered in the crowded lands of the Orient.... The mountains of those districts, which breathe the incense of thyme and lavender, are carpeted with silky grasses, and full of mines, and intersected by quarries. The _honduras_, or valleys, present the palm beside the pomegranate, the vine next to the olive, barley and sugar-cane in abundance, orange orchards and fields of maize; in fine, all the fruits of the best zones, incomparable both as to quantity and quality. The azure waves of their sea, resembling Venetian crystals, contain store of savory fish; and the equality of the temperature, the purity of the air, the splendor of the days, and the freshness, the soothing calm of the nights, impart such enchantment that, once habituated to them, in whatever other part of the world you may be, you feel yourself, alas! overcome by irremediable nostalgia." The eloquent statesman has something to say, likewise, of the people. "Nowhere does there exist in such vitality," he declares, "the love of family and the love of labor.... Property is very much divided; the customs are exceedingly democratic; there exist few proprietors who are not workers, and few workers who are not proprietors." Democratic the country is, no doubt; too much so, perhaps, for peace under monarchical rule. These fervid, fertile coast lands, containing the gardens of Spain, are also the home of revolution. [Illustration: A SPANISH MONK.] The north was the Carlist stronghold; the south furnished in every city a little Republican volcano. Nor is the simple, patriarchal state of society which Castelar indicates quite universal. Here, as in other provinces, we found luxurious wealth flourishing in the heart of pitiable poverty. The Governor of Malaga was on our train, and a delightfully honest and amiable old gentleman in our compartment, seeing him on the platform surrounded by a ring of dapper sycophants, who laughed unreasonably at his mild jokes, began to exclaim, in great wrath, "So many cabals! so many cabals! Unfortunate nation! there is nothing but cabal and intrigue all the time. Those men have got some sugar they want to dispose of to advantage, and so they fawn on the Governor. It is dirty; it is foul," etc. At Malaga there was a coast-guard steamer lying in the harbor, and, as we were looking at it, I asked our companion, a resident, whether they caught many smugglers. "Oh, sometimes," was the answer. "Just enough to cover it." "Cover what?" "Oh, the fraud. Out of twenty smuggling vessels they will take perhaps one, to keep up appearances." And he made the usual significant movement of the fingers denoting the acceptance of bribes. The heat at Malaga surpassed anything we had encountered before. The horses of the cabs had gay-colored awnings stretched over them on little poles fixed to the shafts, so that when they moved along the street they looked like holiday boats on four legs. The river that runs through the city was completely dry, and, as if to complete the boat similitude, the cabs drove wantonly across its bed instead of using the bridges. These equipages, however, are commonplace compared with the wagons used for the transportation of oil and water jars (_tinajas_) in the adjoining province of Murcia. A delightful coolness was diffused from the sea at evening, when the fashionable drive--the half-moon mole stretching out to the light-house--was crowded with stylish vehicles, and the sea-wall all along the street was lined with citizens, soldiers, priests, and pretty women, who dangled their feet from the low parapet in blissful indolence. Then, too, the lamps were lighted in the floating bath-houses moored in the harbor, and one of them close to the mouth of a city drain seemed to be particularly well patronized. The streets, almost forsaken by day, were crowded after nightfall. The shops were open late. By eight or nine o'clock life began. The Café de la Loba (the Wolf)--an immense building, where there is a court entirely roofed over by a single grape-vine, spreading from a stem fifteen inches in diameter, and rivalling the famous vines of Hampton Court and Windsor--was well filled, and in many small _tiendas de vino_ heavy drinking seemed to be going on. But the Malaguenese do not imbibe the rich sweet wines manufactured in their vicinity. These are too heating to be taken in such a climate, as we were able to convince ourselves on tasting some fine vintages at one of the _bodegas_ the next day. Nevertheless, the lower class of the inhabitants find no difficulty in attaining to a maximum of drunkenness on milder beverages. Even the respectable idlers in the café under our hotel drank a great deal too much beer, if I may judge from their prolonging their obstreperous discussion of politics into the small hours, while we lay feverish in a room above listening to their voices, blended with the whistle of a boatswain on some ship at the neighboring quay; ourselves meanwhile enduring with Anglo-Saxon reserve the too effusive attentions offered by mosquitoes of the Latin race. [Illustration: TRANSPORTATION OF POTTERY.] In justice to the Spaniards it should be said that excessive drinking is a rare fault among them. As a nation they surpass all other civilized peoples in setting an example of temperance as to potations (excepting water), and of remarkable frugality in eating. The Mediterranean ports, through their commerce with the outside world, are tinged by foreign elements; license creeps in with notions of liberty; the sailors, and that whilom powerful fraternity the smugglers, have likewise assisted in fostering turbulent characteristics. [Illustration: GARLIC VENDER.] To me the best part of Malaga was the view of it from the deck of a Segovia steamer, on the eve of a cruise along the coast. Behind the plain sandy-colored houses rose a background of mountains fantastic in outline as flames; the cathedral, in no way striking, towered up above the roofs, and was in turn overshadowed by an ancient fortress on the eastern height, which was one of the last to fall before the returning tide of Spanish arms, and still claws the precipitous ridge with innumerable towers and bastions, as if to keep from slipping off its honorable eminence in the drowsy lapses of old age. Below this, close to the water, stood the inevitable Plaza de Toros--an immense cheese-shaped structure of stone, where a friend of mine, Spanish by birth, tells me he was once watching the game of bulls, when part of the crowd were struck by the happy thought of starting a revolution. They acted at once on this bright idea; they "pronounced" in favor of something, and attacked the military guard. In an instant a battle had begun; the place resounded with musketry, and the populace tore away pieces of the masonry to hurl at the troops below. But that was in the good old days, and such things do not happen now, though there is always a strong detachment of soldiers on hand at the arena, ready for any sudden revival of these freaks. The water around us shone with a lustre like satin; and, fluttering over the bright green surface, played incredibly vivid reflections of blue and red from the steamers; while the pure white light, striking back from the edges of the undulations, quivered and shimmered along the black hulk of a vessel, and looked like steam or mist in constant motion. Highly effective, too, was the carbineer (all custom-house officers in Spain, whether armed or not, are called _carabineros_) who stood on deck with a musket at rest, a living monument to the majesty of the revenue laws. We had been solemnly warned beforehand of the risk we ran in carrying a basket of ale on board in the face of this functionary, and the importance of giving him a _peseta_ (twenty cents) had been urged upon us; but we at first looked for him in vain, and when we found him he appeared so harmless that we kept the _peseta_. I noticed that he laid his gun aside as much as possible. Part of the time he smoked a short pipe under cover of his huge mustache, and eyed people sternly, as if suspecting that they might take advantage of this temporary relaxing of vigilance; but he studiously avoided seeing any merchandise of any description. The steamer was to start at four in the afternoon, and we made great haste to get on board in time; but there had evidently never been the smallest intention of despatching her until an hour and a half later. This was in accord with the national trait of distrust. No one was expected to believe the announcement as to the time, and if the real hour had been named, no one _would_ have believed it. Aware of this, the more experienced natives did not even begin to come aboard until toward five o'clock. Spanish clocks are the most accommodating kind of mechanism I have ever had the fortune to encounter. They appear to exist rather as an ornamental feature than as articles of use. You order a carriage, and it is promised at a certain time; you are told that something is to be accomplished at a fixed hour; but this is only done out of deference to your outlandish prejudices. The hour strikes, and the thing is not done. You begin to doubt whether the hour itself has arrived. Is it not a vulgar illusion to suppose so? Your Spaniard certainly thinks it is. He knows that time is an arbitrary distinction, and prefers to adopt the scale of eternity. The one exception is the bull-fight. That is recognized as a purely mundane and temporal institution; it must not be delayed a moment; and to make sure of punctuality, it is begun almost before the time announced. But anything like a sea-voyage, though it be only along the shore, comes under a different heading, and must be undertaken with as much mystery and caution as if it were a conspiracy to erect a new government. To tell the truth, we were glad to get away from the tyranny of the minute-hand, and were not displeased at the lazy freedom of the steamer. The stewards came up and shut the skylights, spread a table-cloth over them, laid plates, and formed a hollow square of fruits and olives in the centre. Those of the passengers that listed took their places at this improvised banqueting board, and by the time the _puchero_ was served--a savory stew composed of chopped meat, beans, carrots, spices, and any little thing the cook's fancy may suggest--we were moving out of the basin, past the curved mole and the light-house, and toy battery at its end. The sunset had thrown its glow over sky and mountains, as if it were an after-thought, to make the surroundings perfect. We glided smoothly over a floor of blue--deep, solid-looking, and veined with white--a pale golden dome above us, and a delicious wind playing round us, like the exhalation of some balmy sub-tropical dream. On these coast steamers one buys a ticket for the transport, and then pays for what he eats. This rule reduced the company at our deck table to a choice and pleasant circle, the head of which was Señor Segovia, one of the owners of the line, a benignant, comfortable Spaniard--"an Andalusian to the core," as he proudly said. We had, as usual, early chocolate at six or seven; breakfast not so near eleven as to admit any suspicion of subserviency to the base time-keeping clock; and dinner--a second but ampler breakfast--between five and six. Some of the first-cabin passengers brought their own provision, or purchased it at the towns where we touched every day, and fed secretly in out-of-the-way places. As for the second-class, consisting mainly of peasants swathed in strange garments edged and spotted with fantastic color, they were never seen to eat; but I think that privately they gnawed the pride of ancient race in their hearts, and found it sufficient provender. We would come upon them, when we went forward in our night patrol, lying on the deck in magnificent unconcern, enveloped by stately rags wound round and round their bodies, and lifting toward us a stern, reproachful gaze at our interruption of their tranquillity. The Mediterranean was calm as a pond, and we roused ourselves to a serene morning, under which the hills gleamed pale and clear along the margin of the waves, the huge sides seamed with dry water-courses, like the creases in a human palm. Beyond the first line of peaks we could descry for a while the soft ghostly whiteness of an inland snow range glimmering above the faded green, the violet shadows, the hard streaks of white and powderings of red earth in the lower series. No sign of life was seen upon the puckered, savage coast. It was the bulwark of that Tarshish to which Solomon sent his ships for gold; new to us as it was new to him, yet now unutterably old; silent, yet speaking; uncommunicative, yet vaguely predicting a future vast and unknown as the vanished ages. It would be hard to tell how awful in its unchanged grandeur was the face of those mighty hills, so unexpectedly eloquent. [Illustration: DIVING FOR COPPERS.] It was a relief to find that we were approaching Almeria. A road cut in the rock; a stout arched bridge carrying it over an indentation of the sea; a small square edifice on a rock to guard the road; then the distant jumble of low houses along a sheltered bay, and an empty fortress on the sharp hillcrest over it--these were the tokens of our progress toward another inhabited spot. We had on board a two-legged enigma in a white helmet-hat, who wrote with ostentatious industry in a note-book, played fluently on the cabin piano, and now emerged upon the quarterdeck in a pair of bulging canary leather slippers which gave his feet the appearance of overgrown lemons. He afterward proved to be an English colporteur. We also had a handsome, gay, talkative, and witty Frenchman, who, with a morbid conscientiousness as to what was fitting, insisted on being sea-sick, although the sea was hardly ruffled; and him we succeeded in resuscitating, after the boat had come quietly to anchor in the harbor, so far that he began to long audibly for Paris and the café on the boulevard, "_et mon absinthe_." We watched with these companions the naked boys who surrounded the vessel in a flotilla of row-boats, offering to dive for coppers thrown into the water, precisely as I have seen young Mexican Indians do at Acapulco. Near by lay another steamer just in from Africa, disembarking a mass of returned Spanish settlers, fugitives from the atrocities of the Arabs at Oran: a pathetic sight as they dropped silently into the barges that bore them to shore--some utterly destitute, with only the clothes in which they had fled before the fanatic murderers, and others accompanied by a few meagre household goods. Did they feel that "irremediable nostalgia," I wonder, of which Señor Castelar speaks? The sun was as hot as that which had shone upon them just across the strait, on the edge of the Dark Continent; and the low-roofed glaring houses huddled at the feet of the Moorish stronghold, the Alcasaba, were so Oriental that I should think they must have found it hard to believe they had left Africa at all. Almeria, like other towns of this southern shore-line, is more Eastern than Spanish in appearance--only the long winding or zigzag covered ways, traced on the steep hills like swollen veins, indicated the presence of the lead-mines which give it an existence in commerce. These conduct the poisonous smoke to a point above the air inhaled by the townsfolk, and it is seen puffing from tall chimneys at the crest of the steep, as if the mountain were alive and gasping for breath. The town, faintly relieved against its pale, dusty background as we first saw it, almost disappeared in the blinding blaze of light that swept it when we got closer. We landed, and attempted to walk, but the dry, burning heat made us shrink for shelter into any narrow thread of shadow that the houses presented. Even the shadows looked whitish. It was impossible to get as far as the weed-grown cathedral, which, as we could see from the water, had been provided in former times with fortified turrets for defence against piratical incursions. So we sunk gratefully into a restaurant kiosk at the head of the _alameda_, where we could look down the hot, yellow street to a square of cerulean sea; and there we sipped lemonade while tattered, crimson-sashed peasants moved about us, some of them occasionally dashing the road with water dipped from a gutter-rivulet at the side. We had barely become reconciled to the Granadan women in trousers, when we were obliged to notice that the men in this vicinity wore short white skirts in place of the usual nether garment. How is Spain ever to be unified on such a basis as this? The local patriots had seemingly wrestled with the problem and been defeated, for a dreary memorial column in front of the kiosk recorded how they had fallen in some futile revolutionary struggle. On a promontory, passed as we sailed away, the drought and dust of the town yielded suddenly to luxurious greenness of sugar-cane and other growths. Almeria was once surrounded by similar fertility, but the land has been so wastefully denuded of forest that all through this region--the old kingdoms of Murcia and Valencia--only certain favorable spots retain their earlier plenty by means of constant care and assiduous watering. Cartagena, one of the chief naval stations of the country, cannot exhibit even such an oasis. It is unmitigated desert. Not a tree or shrub shows itself amid the baked and calcined stone-work and blistering pavements of the city; and the landscape without looks almost as arid. The place is considered impregnable to a foreign foe, and I can't imagine that foe wanting it to be otherwise, if conquest involves residence. Entered by a narrow gap commanded by batteries, the harbor is a round and spacious one, scooped out of frowning highlands that bear on the apex of their cones unattainable forts, thrown up like the rim around volcanic craters. There is but one level access to the city on the land side, and that is blockaded by a stout wall with a single gate. Such was our next goal, reached after a quiet night, which Velveteen and I spent in the open air, having carried our rugs and pillows up from the state-room on its invasion by new passengers. At two o'clock in the morning our vessel stole into the port. There was one pale amber streak in the east, over the gloomy, indistinct heights studded with embrasured walls and mine chimneys. By-and-by a brightness grew out of it. Then the amber was reflected in the glassy harbor. An arch of rose cloud sprung up after this, and was also reflected, the hills lightening to a faded gray and brown. All this time the stars continued sparkling, and one of them threw rings of dancing diamond on the broken wave. Suddenly the diamond flash and the rose tint vanished, and it was broad golden-white day, with calorific beams beating strongly upon us, instead of the crepuscular chill of dawn that had just been searching our veins. Cartagena has its war history, of course. A Commune was established there by Roque Barcia in 1873, which declined allegiance to the republican government at Madrid, and the city was accordingly besieged. Barcia had been living on forced loans from the inhabitants, and was loath to go; but the army of the republic made a few dents in the stone wall with twenty-pounders, and that decided him. He got on board the Spanish navy in the harbor, and ran away with it to Africa. Perhaps that accounts for the slimness of the naval contingent now. There is an academy for cadets in the place, but only two small ships-of-war were anchored in the noble bay. The town of Cartagena is remarkable for big men and very minute donkeys. The men ride on the donkeys with incredible hardihood. You see a burly Sancho Panza flying along the main street at a rapid pace, with his sandalled feet some three inches from the ground, and wonder what new kind of motor he has discovered, until you perceive beneath his ponderous body a nervous, vaguely ecstatic quivering of four black legs, attached to a small spot of head from which two mulish ears project. [Illustration: A MODERN SANCHO PANZA.] There is not much to see in Cartagena. Blind people seem to be numerous there--a fact which may be owing to the excessive dazzle of the sunlight and absence of verdure. But I couldn't help thinking some of them must have gone blind from sheer _ennui_, because there was nothing around them worth looking at. Our visit, however, was in one respect a success: we found a broad strip of shade there. It was caused by the high city wall intercepting the forenoon light. Out of the shadow some enterprising men had constructed, with the aid of two or three chairs and several pairs of shears, a barber's shop _al fresco_; and asses and peasants, as they travelled in and out through the city gate, stopped at this establishment to be shaved. For it is an important item in the care of Spanish donkeys that they should be sheared as to the back, in order to make a smoother resting-place for man or pannier. So while the master held his animal one of the barbers plied some enormous clacking shears, and littered the ground with mouse-colored hair, leaving the beast's belly fur-covered below a fixed line, and for a small additional price executing a raised pattern of starpoints around the neck. The tonsorial profession is an indispensable one in a country where shaving the whole face is so generally practised among all the humbler orders, not to mention _toreros_ and ecclesiastics; but the discomfort to which the barber's customers submit is astonishing. Instead of being pampered, soothed, labored at with confidential respectfulness, and lulled into luxurious harmony with himself, as happens in America, a man who courts the razor in Spain has to sit upright in a stiff chair, and meekly hold under his chin a brass basin full of suds, and fitting his throat by means of a curved nick at one side. One individual we saw seated by the dusty road at the gate, with a towel around his shoulders and another in his hands to catch his own falling locks. He looked submissive and miserable, as if assisting at his own degradation, while the barber was magnified into a tyrant exercising sovereign pleasure, and might have been expected, should the whim cross him, to strike off his victim's head instead of his hair. [Illustration: STREET BARBER.] [Illustration: BIBLES _VERSUS_ MELONS.] The voyage continued as charmingly as it began. Quiet transitions from the deep blue outside to the pronounced green within the harbors were its most startling incidents. The colporteur gave tracts to the sailors, or traded Bibles for melons with the fruit boys; the Frenchman, who was making a commercial tour through the provinces, bestowed a liberal and cheerful disparagement on the nation which afforded him a business. We continued to eat meals in holiday fashion on the skylight hatches, and slept there through the balmy night, occasionally seeing the sailors clambering on the taffrail or in the rigging, always with cigarettes, the glowing points of which shone in the darkness like fire-flies. The gravity with which they stuck to these _papelitos_ while knotting ropes or lowering a boat was fascinating in its inappropriateness. The headlands grew less bold before we tied to the dock at Alicante in the hush of a sultry night. We could see nothing of the town except a bright twinkle of lamps along the quay, contrasting gayly with the blood-red light on a felucca in the harbor, its long vivid stain trickling away through the water like the current from a wound; and the rules of the customs would not admit of our landing till morning. II. Our trunks had been on the dock two or three hours when we debarked in a small boat, and some fifteen men had gathered around them, waiting for the owners, like sharks attracted by floating fragments from a ship and wondering what manner of prey is coming to them. They all touched their caps to us as we bumped the shore. These cap-touches are worth in the abstract about one real--five cents. The grand total of speculative politeness laid out upon us was therefore more than half a dollar; but, on our selecting two porters, values rapidly declined, and the market "closed in a depressed condition." The customs officers wore a wild, freebooters' sort of uniform--blue trousers with a red stripe, blue jeans blouses with a belt and long sword, and straw hats. They were also very lazy; and while we were awaiting their attentions we had time to observe the manner of unloading merchandise in these latitudes. Every box, barrel, or bale hoisted out of a lighter was swung by a rope to which twenty men lent their strength; there were three more men in the lighter, and three others arranged the hoisting tackle; in all, twenty-six persons were occupied with a task for which two or three ought to suffice. Each time, the crowd of haulers fastened on the cable, ran off frantically with it, and then, in a simultaneous fit of paralysis, dropped it as the burden was landed. These laborers wore huge straw hats, on the crown of which was fitted a _birreta_, the small ordinary blue cap of the country. They had a queer air of carrying this superfluous cap around on top of the head as a sort of solemn ceremony. The wharf was alive, too, with small wagons, roofed over by a cover of heavy matting made of _esparto_ grass, and furnished with a long, rough-barked pole at the side, to be used as a brake. Above this busy scene towered a luminous sienna-tinted cliff, sustaining the castle of Santa Barbara poised in the white air like a dream-edifice; though a rift high up in the hill marks the spot where the French exploded a mine during the Peninsular war. All these Mediterranean towns are guarded by some such eagle's eyry overlooking the sea, and the old monarchs showed a fine poetic sense in granting them for municipal arms their local castle resting on a wave. Close to the lapping waters lay the serried houses, bordered by an esplanade planted with rows of short palms. When the carbineers had looked vaguely into our trunks, and shut them again, the porters tossed them into a little cart, and plunged into the town at a pace with which we could compete only so far as to keep them in sight while they twisted first around one corner and then another, and then up a long chalky street to the Fonda Bossio, which has the name of being the best hotel in Spain. It has excellent cookery, and some furlongs of tile-floored corridor, which the servants apparently believe to be streets, for they water them every day, just as the thoroughfares are watered, out of tin basins. We were overwhelmed with courtesy. For instance, I would call the waiter. [Illustration: CUSTOMS OFFICERS.] "Command me, your grace," was his reply. "Can you bring me some fresh water?" ("Fresh" always means cold.) [Illustration: POST INN, ALICANTE.] "With all the will in the world." When he came with it I tried to rise to his standard by saying, "Thanks--a thousand thanks." "They do not merit themselves, señor," said he, not to be outdone. I asked if I could have a _garspacho_ for breakfast. The _garspacho_ is an Andalusian soup-salad, very cooling, made of stewed and strained tomato, water, vinegar, sliced cucumber, boiled green peppers, a dash of garlic, and some bits of bread; the whole served frost-cold. "I don't know--it is not in the list. I feel it, señor. It weighs upon my soul. But I will see, and will return in an Ave Maria to let you know." He never left me without asking, "Is there anything wanting still?" [Illustration: ALICANTE FRUIT-SELLER.] The waiters and chamber-maids ate their meals at little tables in the hall, and whenever I passed them, if they were eating, they made a gracious gesture toward their _pillau_ of rice. "Would your grace like to eat?" This offer to share their food with any one who goes by is a simple and kindly inheritance from the East; but it becomes a little embarrassing, and I longed for a pair of back stairs to slink away by, without having to decline their hospitality every time I went out. To go out in the middle of the day was like looking into the sun itself. Everybody stayed in-doors behind thick curtains of matting, and dozed or dripped away the time in idle perspiration; but hearing unaccountable blasts of orchestral music during this forced retirement, I inquired, and found them to proceed from the rehearsal of a Madrid opera company then in Alicante. Our attendant at table proved to be a duplex character--a serving-man by day and a fourteenth lord in the chorus by night, with black and yellow stockings, and a number of gestures indicating astonishment, indignation, or, in fact, anything that the emergency required. We had the pleasure of seeing him on the stage that very evening, and of listening to an extravagant performance of "La Favorita," between two acts of which an usher came in and collected the tickets of the whole audience. The theatre was remarkably spacious for a town of thirty thousand inhabitants; but Alicante is a favorite winter resort, and even maintains a "Gallistic Circus;" that is, a place for cock-fights. The Garden of Alicante is a luscious spot, hidden away some two or three miles from the town, and owned by the Marques de Venalua, a young man of large wealth, who spends all his time at Alicante, and is a public benefactor, having introduced water in pipes at his own expense. The carriage and consumption of water, indeed, seemed to be the chief business of the population. They have a system of fountains for distributing sea-water from which the salt has been extracted, and women and children are kept going to these with huge jars, to satisfy the local thirst. To be born thirsty, live thirsty, and die so, is a privilege enjoyable only in countries like Southern Spain. One can form there, too, a vivid idea of the desert, from the delight with which he hails the green _Huerta_, or garden. The road and fields on the way thither were like a waste of cinders and ashes. The almond and fig trees, the pomegranates and algarrobas beside the way, were coated with dust that lay upon them like thin snow; and the almond-nuts, where they hung in sight, resembled plaster casts, so pervasive was the white deposit. But all at once we mounted a low rise, and the wide stretch of verdant plantations lay before us, thick-foliaged, cool, sweet, and refreshing, with villas embowered among the oranges and palms, a screen of dim mountains beyond, and the silent blue sea brimming the horizon on the right. It was a spectacle delicious as sleep to tired eyes; it brought a cry of pleasure to my lips and grateful life to the heart. But this spot, lovely as it is, becomes insignificant beside the glorious Huerta of Valencia, stretching for more than thirty miles from the olive-clad hills around Jativa to that city, which is the pleasantest in Mediterranean Spain, and the most characteristic of all, after Toledo, Granada, and Sevilla. There one travels through an unbroken tract of superb cultivation--a garden in exact literalness, yet a territory in size. [Illustration: METHOD OF IRRIGATION NEAR VALENCIA.] [Illustration: CHURCH OF SANTA CATALINA, VALENCIA.] We took the rail from Alicante in the evening; but a mass of Oran fugitives, escorted by a company of soldiers (for the most part drunk), encumbered our train, and delayed its starting for an hour or two. Then followed a slow, wearisome ride through the black night, with a change at the junction of La Encina about twelve o'clock, involving much tribulation in the re-weighing and renewed registering of baggage; after which we were stowed into a totally dark compartment of the other train, and made to wait three hours longer. With the first rays of dawn our locomotive began to creep, and we fell into a doze, from which I was awakened after a while by the loud irruption of somebody into our carriage, accompanied by a jangle like that of sleigh-bells. It turned out to be a peasant, who, in consequence of the general over-crowding, had been ushered into the first-class carriage, bringing with him a couple of children and some mule-harness provided with bells. I was inclined to be indignant with him for his disturbing intrusion; but, as it was now broad daylight, I began to look out of the window, and soon had cause to consider the peasant a benefactor; for we were just leaving Jativa, a most picturesque old town, with a castle famous even in Roman times; the native place, also, of the Borgias (Pope Calixtus III., and Rodrigro, the father of Cæsar Borgia). Immediately afterward we entered the garden region. Miles of carefully-tended growth, thousands of orchards linked together in one series, acres upon acres of fields where every square inch is made to yield abundantly--such is the Huerta of Valencia. We passed endless orange-groves, each single tree in which had its circle of banked earth to hold the water when let on from the canals of tile that coursed everywhere like veins of silver, carrying life to the harvests. Then came vast fields dotted with the yellow blossom of the pea-nut, on low vine-like plants. Again, breadths of citron and lemon, followed by extensive rice farms, where the cultivators stood dressing the unripe plantations, up to their ankles in the water of a feathery green swamp. Not a rood of earth is unimproved, excepting where some thriving red-roofed village is hemmed in by the fragrant paradise. In one place you will see, perhaps, a mouldering red tower like those of the Alhambra, or a church spire lifted amid the trees, and, high above the other greenery, clusters of date-palms leaning together, as if they whispered among themselves of other days. Near by is the Lake of Albufera, close to the sea and twenty-seven miles in circumference--nourished both from the sea and from the river Turia, so that it becomes an immense reservoir of fish and game. Its marshy edges once offered shelter to numerous smugglers, and it is said that General Prim, who was on good terms with them, found a hiding-place there while in danger and before he came to power. No wonder that the Cid fought gallantly to win this land from the infidel, and when he had gained it sent for his wife and daughter from distant Burgos to come and see the prize! Its fertility to-day, however, is due to the irrigation introduced by the Moors, and since maintained. The same thing could be done with the Tagus and Ebro rivers, but the Spaniard having had the example before him for only about six centuries, has not yet found time to follow it. The water supply is so precious that proprietors are allowed to use it for their own crops only on fixed days, and for so many hours at a time. Disputes of course arise, but they are settled by the Water Court--a tribunal without appeal, consisting of twelve peasant proprietors, who meet once a week in Valencia; and I saw them there holding their session in very primitive style, on a long pink sofa set in an arched door-way of the cathedral. [Illustration: A VALENCIA CAB.] Valencia was in the midst of its annual festival when we arrived; a bright, gay, spirited, and busy town, more cheerful than ever just then. There were to be three days of bull-fighting--"bulls to the death!"--with eight taurian victims each day; the best swordsmen in Spain; and horses and mules displaying gilded and silvered hoofs. The theatres were perfumed. There were match games of _pelota_--rackets--the national substitute for cricket or base-ball; and a week's fair was in progress on the other side of the river Turia, with bannered pavilions, thousands of painted lanterns; lotteries, concerts, and booth shows, to which the admission was "half price for children and soldiers." Trade was brisk also in the city; brisk in the Mercado, that quaint business street crowded with little stalls, and with peasants in blue, red, yellow, mantled and cothurned, their heads topped with pointed hats or wrapped with variegated handkerchiefs deftly knotted into a high crown; brisk, likewise, in those peculiar shops behind the antique Silk Exchange, which are named from the signs they hang out, representing the Blessed Virgin, Christ, John the Baptist, or the Bleeding Heart. One had for its device a rose, and another, distinguished by two large toy lambs placed at its door, was known without other distinction as the Lamb of God. But in the more modern quarter the shop-keepers ventured on a Parisian brilliancy which we did not encounter anywhere else. Their arrangement of wares was prettily effective, and the fashion prevailed of having curtains for the show-windows painted with figures in modern dress, done in exceedingly clever, artistic style, well drawn, full of humor and fine realistic characterization. Altogether, Valencia is the cheeriest of Spanish cities, unless one excepts Barcelona, which is half French, and in its present estate wholly modern. Moreover, Valencia abounds in racy and local traits, both of architecture and humanity. The Street of the Cavaliers is lined with sombre, strange, shabbily elegant old mansions of the nobility, with Gothic windows and open arcades in the top story; the new houses are gayly tinted in blue and rose and cream-color; and the gourd-like domes of the cathedral and other large buildings glisten with blue tiles and white, set in stripes. You find yourself continually, as you come from various quarters, bringing up in sight of the octagonal tower of Santa Catalina, strangely suggestive of a pagoda, without in the least being one. The Silk Exchange, from which the shining web that wealth is woven out of has long since vanished, contains one of the most beautiful of existing Gothic halls under a roof sustained by fluted and twisted pillars, themselves light as knotted skeins; while from the outer cornice grotesque shapes peer out over the life of to-day; a grinning monk, an imp playing a guitar, a crumbling buzzard, serving as gargoyles. Just opposite is the market, where you may buy enormous bunches of luscious white grapes for a penny, or pry into second-hand shops rich in those brilliant mantles with the "cat" fringe of balls, for which the town is as noted as for its export of oranges. The old battlemented walls of the city, it is true, have been torn down: it was done simply to give employment to the poor a few years since. But there are some fine old gates remaining--those of Serranos and Del Cuarte. We drove out of one and came in by the other, about half a mile away--a diversion that brought us under a rigid examination from the customs guard, which levies a tax on every basket of produce brought in from the country, and was inclined to regard us as a dutiable importation. [Illustration: BARCELONA FISHERMEN.] One may go quite freely to the port, however--the Grao--which is two miles distant. A broad boulevard hedged with sycamores leads thither, which in summer is crowded by _tartanas_--bouncing little covered wagons lined with crimson curtains, and usually carrying a load of pretty señoritas--and by more imposing equipages adorned with footmen in the English style. Everybody goes to the shore to bathe toward evening, for Valencia is the Brighton of the Madrileños. The little bathing establishments extend for a long distance on the sands, and are very neat. Each has its fanciful name, as "The Pearl," or "The Madrid Girl," and the proprietors stand in front vociferously soliciting your custom. Between these and the water are refreshment sheds with tables, and every one eats or drinks on coming out of the sea. Farther down the shore the women have their own houses, and a fence of reeds protects them from intrusion while they are running to or from the surf; but it is my duty to record that the men formed a line at this fence, and systematically gazed through the breaks in it, which was the more embarrassing, perhaps, because the fair Valencians bathe in very plain, baggy, and ugly gowns. On the streets or in the Glorieta Garden, and in their proper habiliments, they are the noblest looking and most beautiful of Spanish women, often possessing flaxen hair and dark-blue eyes which recall a Gothic ancestry, together with something simple and regular about the features that is perhaps due to the ancient Greek colonization. At still another part of the beach horses were allowed to go into the waves; and this was a sight also eminently Greek in its suggestion. Naked boys bestrode the animals, and urged them forward into the spray-fringed tide. The arched necks, the prancing movement of the horses, the sportive shock of foam against their broad chests, and the pressing knees of the nude riders in full play of muscle to keep their seats, were like a breathing and stirring relief on some temple frieze, clear-cut in the pure and sparkling sunlight. There was once a Valencian school of painters, but we saw nothing of this in their work. The museum offers what our newspapers would call a "carnival" of rubbish, but it also contains some striking, shadowy, startlingly lighted canvases of Ribalta--saints and martyrs and ascetics vividly but not joyously portrayed; a few wonderful portraits by Goya, fresh as if only just completed; and one of Velasquez's three portraits of himself. From Valencia to Barcelona the valleys along the coast are fertile. Vineyards, spreading their long files of green over a warm red soil that seems tinged with the blood of the grape, vie with the olive in that picturesque, productive belt between the hills and the blue, swelling sweep of the Mediterranean. Here is Murviedro, the old Saguntum, once the scene of a fierce siege and horrible sufferings, now basking quietly in the hot light--a time-worn, sun-tanned, beggared old city, which is not ashamed to make a show of its decayed Roman theatre; and farther on Tarragona, which professes to have had at one time a million inhabitants, and is now a little wine-producing town. Churches and castles, rich in delicate workmanship and all manner of historic association, crop up everywhere. The very shards in the fields, you fancy, may suddenly unfold something of that full and varied past which was once as real as to-day's meridian glow. Yet at any moment you may lose sight of all this in the brilliant, stimulating, yet softly modified beauty of the landscape's colors, and your whole mind is absorbed by the vague neutral hues of a treeless hill-side, or the rich, positive blue of the sea, in which the white sail of a _chalupa_ seems to be inlaid like a bit of ivory. All the while, as you go northward, Spain--the real Spain--is slipping from you. The palms disappear as if a noiseless earthquake had swallowed them up; even the olive becomes less frequent, and by-and-by you are in piny Catalonia. You reach Barcelona, the greatest commercial city of the kingdom, and you find it the boast of the citizens that they are not Spaniards. They are Spanish mainly in their love of revolt. So prompt are they to join in every uprising, that the garrison quartered there has to be kept as high as ten thousand men; but for the most part it is rather a French maritime dépot than a thing of ancient or peculiar Spain. There is a large and artificial park on one side, and the fort of Monjuich on the other, and a lot of shipping in the harbor; and a glorious embowered avenue, called the Rambla, where pale-faced, long-lashed, coquettishly smiling women walk in great numbers, carrying out the usual national custom of a peripatetic reception and conversation party. It was the feast of Santiago when we came--it is always a feast of something everywhere in that pious country--and the theatres were doing a great business with trifling plays and charming ballets. Barcelona is not only the industrious city, it is also the cultivated one of the Peninsula. The opera there is one of the best in the world, and was once carried off bodily to Madrid by an ardent manager, who for his pains received the scorn of the envious Madrid people: they would not come to his performances, and he was almost ruined in consequence. The old cathedral of the city is a temple singularly impressive by simple means--a sober Spanish-Gothic structure bathed in a perpetual gloom, through which the stained windows show with a jewelled splendor almost supernatural. The weirdness of the interior effect is farther intensified by the dark pit of Santa Eulalia's shrine opening under the altar, and set with a row of burning lamps, on which the darkness seems to hang like a cloak depending from a chain of gold. The invariable rule in Spanish cathedrals is that the choir should be placed in the central nave, like that at Westminster Abbey, and elaborated into a complete enclosure by itself--which, although it interferes with the total effect of the interior, is frequently very striking in its lavish agglomeration of carved wood and stone, metal railings, gilding, and similar details. It was in the peculiarly picturesque choir of this cathedral of Santa Eulalia that the order of the Golden Fleece was once convened by Charles V., and the panels over the stalls are blazoned with the bearings of the various nations and nobles represented in that body. Being discovered only after one has grown accustomed to the dark, these fading glories of heraldry steal gradually upon the eye, as if through the obscuring night of time. I found the ancient cloister, without, on the south-west side, a delightful, shadowy, suggestive place: there, too, may be seen a fountain surmounted by a small equestrian statue of St. George, which reminds one of a fabulous story in Münchausen; for the tail of the horse is formed by a jet of water flowing out of the body at the rear. Inside the church again hangs, under the organ-loft, an enormous wooden and painted Saracen's head--a species of relic not uncommon, I believe, in Catalonian temples. It may be added here that the custom of the "historical giants" at Corpus Christi is maintained in Barcelona as we had seen it at Burgos, and those effigies are stowed away somewhere in the sacred precincts. There is a curious mingling of the naïve and the sophisticated in the fact that some of the giants, wearing female attire, have new dresses for each year, and thereby set the fashions for the ensuing twelvemonth for all the womankind of the city. And however advanced the urban society may be, with its trade, its opera, its books, gilded cafés and superb clubs, the spirit of progress does not spread very far into the country. When a piece of railroad was built, not very long ago, opening up a new rural section in the neighborhood, the peasants watched the advance of the locomotive along the rails with profound interest. Finally, one old man asked, "But where is the _mule_ kept?--inside?" He was willing to admit that the engine worked finely, but no power could convince him that it was possible for it to go by other impulsion than that of a mule's legs. Another relic of by-gone times is the cap universally worn in this region by the longshoremen, the fishers, and the male portion of the lower orders generally; for it is nothing less than the old Phrygian liberty cap, imported hither by the Paul Pry Phoenicians ages ago. Woven in a single piece, it appears at first sight to be a long, soft, commodious bag, tinted with vermilion or violet or brown as the case may be. Into the aperture the native inserts his head and then pulls the rest of the flapping contrivance down as far as he pleases, letting the end float loose in the wind, or more commonly bringing it round to the front, curling it over and tucking it in upon itself in such a way as to make an overhanging protection for the eyes, and to give the whole a look that recalls the top of an Oxford student's cap. With this head-gear, and wearing sandals made of fine hempen cord tied by long black tapes, the men presented a free, half barbarous and sufficiently picturesque appearance. I don't know how long we might have continued to roam the streets of Barcelona, listening to the uncouth _patois_ of the locality, in which French and Spanish words are so outlandishly mingled, nor how long we should have clung to the remnants of architecture and history that jutted seductively above the surface of the modern here and there, if it had not been that cold necessity limited our time and propelled us relentlessly northward. Even now I find that my pen is reluctant to leave the tracing of those vanished scenes, and hesitates to write the last word as much as if it were an enchanter's wand, instead of a plain, business-like little instrument. With its usual fatuity the railroad obliged us to start so early that at the first dusky gray streak of dawn we were dismally taking our coffee in the _patio_ of the hotel. The _dueño_ was sleeping by sections on two hard chairs, considerately screened from us by a clump of orange shrubs, and murmuring now and then some direction to the half-invisible waiter floating about in a dark arcade; but he roused himself, and woke up wholly for a minute or two while perpetrating a final extortion. Otherwise the silence was profound. It was the silence of the past, the unseen current of oblivion that sets in and begins to eddy round the facts of to-day, in such a country, the moment human activity is suspended or the reality of the present is at all dimmed. Silence here leads at once to retrospection; differing in this from the mute solitude of American places, which somehow always tingles with anticipation. And the _dueño_, in overcharging us, became only the type of a long line of historic plunderers that have infested the Peninsula from the date of the Roman rule down to the incursion of Napoleon and the most recent period. His little game was invested with all the dignity of history and tradition. The sickly light of day above the court struggled feebly and dividedly with the waning yellow of the candle-flame on our table. "After all," said Velveteen, "I'm glad to be going, for this is no longer Spain." And yet, at the instant of leaving, we discovered that it was indeed Spain, and a pang of regret followed those words. As we issued from the hotel we saw, crossing the street in the increased dawn-light, and striding toward the dépot, the two Civil Guards. It looked as if we should be captured on the very threshold of liberty. The thought lent wings to our haste.... Some hours afterward, when we were passing through the tunnels of the Pyrenees, we congratulated ourselves on our escape; and, indeed, as we looked back to the mountain-wall from France, we could fancy we saw two specks on the summit which might have been our pursuers. They were too late! Their own excess of mystery had baffled them. They had dogged us every league of the way, and yet we had traversed Spain without being detected as--what? I really don't know, but I'm sure those Civil Guards must. If not, their military glare, their guns, and their secrecy are the merest mockeries. How softly the waves broke along the Mediterranean sands that morning, close to the rails over which we were flying! Green and white, or violet, and shimmered over by the crimson splendor of the illumined East, they surged one after another upon the golden shore and spent themselves like wasted treasure. There was something mournful in their movement--something very sad in the presence of this beauty which I was never to see again. Did I not hear mingled with the sparkling flash and murmur of those waves a long-drawn "_A-a-ay!_"--the most pathetic of Spanish syllables, which had thrown its shadow across the fervid little songs heard so often by the way? "Bird, little bird that wheelest Through God's fair worlds in the sky"-- the strain came back again, with the memory of a low-tuned guitar; and the waves went on, arriving and departing; and the land of our pilgrimage steadily receded. The waves are breaking yet on that windless coast; but, for us, Spain--brilliant, tawny, bright-vestured Spain, with all its ruins and poetry, its desolation and beauty and gaudy semi-barbarism--has been rapt away once more into the atmosphere of distance and of dreams! [Illustration] HINTS TO TRAVELLERS. Spain is by no means so difficult a country to reach, nor so inconvenient to travel in after one has got there, as is generally supposed. Doubtless the obstacles which it presented to the tourist until within a few years were great; and much that is disagreeable still remains to vex those who are accustomed to the smoother ways, and carefully-oiled machinery for travel, of regions more civilized. But the establishment of a system of railroads, describing an outline that passes through nearly all the places which it is desirable to visit, has supplied a means of transit sufficient, safe, and passably comfortable. The other disadvantages formerly opposed to the inquiring stranger are likewise in process of diminution. In order to make clear the exact state of things likely to be encountered by those who, having followed the present writer in his account of a rapid journey, may determine to take a similar direction themselves, this chapter of suggestion is added, which it is hoped will have value in the way of a practical equipment for the voyage. _Patience_.--The first requisite, it should be said, in one about to visit Spain, is a reasonable amount of good-humored patience, with which to meet discomforts and provoking delays. The customs of that country are not to be reversed by fuming at them; anger will not aid the digestion which finds itself annoyed by a peculiar cookery; and no amount of irritation will suffice to make Spanish officials and keepers of hostelries one whit more obliging than they are at present--their regard for the convenience of the public being just about equal to that of the average American hotel clerk or railroad employé. _Passports_.--Next to patience may be placed a passport; though it differs from the former article in being of no particular use. I observe that guide-books lay stress upon the passport as something very important; and, no doubt, it is gratifying to possess one. There is a subtle flattery in the personal relation, approaching familiarity, which an instrument of this kind seems to set up on the part of government toward the individual; there is a charming unreality, moreover, in the description it gives of your personal appearance and the color of your eyes, making you feel, when you read it, as if you were a character in fiction. Following the rules, I procured a passport and put it into a stout envelope, ready for much use and constant wear; but all that it accomplished for me was to add a few ounces of weight to my _impedimenta_. No one ever asked for it, and I doubt whether the military police would have understood what it was, had they seen it. My experience on first crossing the frontier taught me never to volunteer useless information. Our trunks had been passed after a mere opening of the lids and lifting of the trays, and an officer was listlessly examining the contents of my shoulder-bag. Thinking that he was troubled by the enigmatic nature of a few harmless opened letters which it contained, I said, re-assuringly, as he was dropping them back into their place, "They are only letters." "Letters!" he repeated, with rekindled vigilance. And, taking up the sheets again, of which he could not understand a word, he squandered several minutes in gazing at them in an absurd pretence of profundity. If I had insisted on unfurling my country's passport, I should probably have been taken into custody at once, as a person innocent enough to deserve thorough investigation. Nevertheless, a passport may be a good thing to hold in reserve for possible contingencies. It is said also to be of use, now and then, in securing admission to galleries and museums on days or at hours when they are generally closed to the public; but of this I cannot speak from experience. _Custom-house_.--We had no great difficulty with examinations by custom-house officers, except at Barcelona, where we arrived about one o'clock in the morning and had to undergo a scene excessively annoying at the time, but comical enough in the retrospect. Being desirous to embark on the hotel omnibus in search of quarters, we hastened to the baggage-room to claim our trunks by the registry receipt given us at Valencia; but the "carbineer" explained that we could not have them just then. After waiting a little, we took out keys and politely proposed to open them for examination. This, also, he declined. I then offered him a cigar, which he accepted in a very gracious way, giving it a slight flourish and shake in his hand (after the usual manner), to indicate his appreciation of the courtesy; but still he made no motion to accommodate us in the matter we had most at heart. Some agreeable young Scotchmen, who had joined our party, urged me to make farther demonstrations, and I conferred with the omnibus-driver, who explained that we must wait for some other parcels to be collected from the train before anything could be done; accordingly, we waited. The other parcels arrived; the policy of inaction continued. Meanwhile, several French commercial travellers, who had journeyed hither by the same train in all the splendor of a spurious parlor-car, chartered for their sole use, had proceeded around the station, and now attacked the bolted doors at the front of the baggage-room with furious poundings and loud bi-lingual ejaculations. But even this had no effect. I therefore concluded that the object of the "carbineer's" strategy was a bribe; and, for the first and only time in our journey, I administered one. Getting him aside, I told him confidentially, with all the animation proper to an entirely new idea, that we were anxious to get our belongings examined and passed promptly, so as to secure a resting-place some time before day, and that we should be greatly obliged if he would assist us. At the same time I slipped two or three _pesetas_ into his hand, which he took with the same magnanimous tolerance he had shown on receiving the cigar. This done, he once more relapsed into apathy. All known resources had now been exhausted, and there was nothing to do but wait. With dismay I stood by and saw my silver follow the cigar, swallowed up in the abyss of official indifference that yawned before us; and to my companions, who had just been envying me my slight knowledge of Spanish, and admiring my tact, I became all at once a perfectly useless object, a specimen of misguided imbecility--all owing to the dense unresponsiveness of the inspector, whose incapacity to act assumed, by contrast with my own fruitless energy, a resemblance to genius. The oaths and poundings of the French battalion at the door went on gallantly all the time, but were quite as ineffectual as my movement on the rear. Finally, just when we were reduced to despair, the guard roused himself from his meditations, rushed to the door, unbolted it to the impatient assailants, and passed everything in the room without the slightest examination. The whole affair remains to this day an enigma; and, as such, one is forced to accept every trouble of this kind in the Peninsula. But, as I have said, matters went smoothly enough in other places. Every important town, I believe, collects its imposts even on articles brought into market from the surrounding country; and at Seville we paid the hotel interpreter twenty cents as the nominal duty on our personal belongings. I have not the slightest doubt that this sum went to swell his own private revenue; at all events, no such tariff was insisted upon, or even suggested, elsewhere. The only rule that can be given is to await the action of customs officials without heat, and, while avoiding undue eagerness to show that you carry nothing dutiable, hold yourself in readiness to unlock and exhibit whatever you have. In case a fine should be exacted, ask for a receipt for the amount; and, if it seems to be excessive, the American or British consul or commercial agent may afterward be appealed to. _Extra Baggage_.--One point of importance in this connection is generally overlooked. Only about sixty pounds' weight of luggage is allowed to each traveller; all trunks are carefully weighed at every station of departure, and every pound over the above amount is charged for. Hence, unless a light trunk is selected, and the quantity of personal effects carefully reduced to the least that is practicable, the expense of a tour in Spain will be appreciably increased by the item of extra baggage alone. Baggage of all kinds is registered, and a receipt given by which it may be identified at the point of destination. It is important, however, to get to the station at least half an hour before the time for leaving, since this process of weighing and registering, like that of selling or stamping tickets, is conducted with extreme deliberation, and cannot be hastened in any way. On diligence routes the allowance for baggage is only forty-four pounds (twenty kilograms). A good precaution, in order to guard against unfair weighing, is to get one's trunk or trunks properly weighed before starting, and keep a memorandum of the result. _Tickets, etc_.--It is unadvisable to travel in any but first-class carriages on the Spanish railroads; and the fare for these is somewhat high. But a very great saving may be made, if the journey be begun from Paris, by purchasing _billets circulaires_ (circular or round-trip tickets), which--with a limitation of two months, as to time--enable the tourist to go from Paris either to San Sebastian, on the Bay of Biscay, or Barcelona, on the Mediterranean, and from either of those points to take in succession all the cities and towns which it is worth while to visit. A ticket of this kind costs only about ninety dollars, whereas the usual fare from Paris to Madrid alone is nearly or quite forty dollars. The _billets circulaires_ may be obtained at a certain central ticket-office in the Rue St. Honoré, at Paris, to which the inquirer at either of the great Southern railroads--that is, the Paris-Lyons and the Orleans lines--will be directed. The list of places at which one is permitted to stop, on this round-trip system, is very extensive, and a coupon for each part of the route is provided. It must be observed, however, that when once the trip is begun the holder cannot return upon his traces, unless a coupon for that purpose be included, without paying the regular fare. He must continue in the general direction taken at the start--entering Spain at one of its northern corners, and coming out at the opposite northern corner, after having described a sort of elliptical course through the various points to be visited. And this is, in fact, the most convenient course to take. It is also prescribed that at the first frontier station, and at every station from which the holder afterward starts, he shall show the ticket and have it stamped. Occasionally, conductors on the trains displayed a tendency to make us pay something additional; but this was merely an attempt at imposition, and we always refused to comply. Should the holder of one of these tickets have a similar experience, and be unable to make the conductor comprehend, the best thing to do is quietly to persist in not paying, and, if necessary, have the proper explanation made at the end of the day's trip. Journeys by steamer are not included in this arrangement; but we got our steamer tickets at Malaga remarkably cheap, and in the following manner: Two boats of rival lines were to start in the same direction on the same day, and the interpreter, or _valet de place_, attached to our _fonda_, volunteered to take advantage of this circumstance by playing one company off against the other, and thus beating them down from the regular price. So he summoned a dim-eyed and dilapidated man, whilom of the mariners' calling, to act as an intermediary. This personage was to go to the office of the boat on which we wanted to embark, and tell them that we thought of sailing by the other line (which had, in fact, been the case), but that if we could obtain passage at a price that he named, we would take their steamer; in short, that here was a fine chance of capturing two passengers from the opposition. The sum which we handed to our dim-eyed emissary was seventy-five francs; but, while he was absent upon his errand of diplomacy, the interpreter figured out that we ought to have given him eighteen more, and we quite commiserated the poor negotiator for having gone off with an insufficient supply of cash. Imagine our astonishment when he returned and, instead of asking for the additional amount which we had counted out all ready for him, laid before us a shining gold piece of twenty-five francs which he had not expended! Deciding to improve upon his instructions, he had paid only fifty francs for the two passages. We certainly were amazed, but the interpreter was still more so; for he had evidently expected his colleague to say nothing about having saved the twenty-five francs, but to pocket that and eighteen besides for their joint credit (or _dis_credit) account. He controlled his emotions by a heroic effort; but the complicated play of stupefaction at his agent's honesty, of bitter chagrin at the loss involved, and of pretended delight at our remarkable success, was highly interesting to witness. I have always regretted that some old Italian medallist could not have been at hand to mould the exquisite conflict of expression which his face presented at that moment, and render it permanent in a bronze bass-relief. As it was, we gave each man a bonus of five francs, and then had paid for our tickets only about half the established rate. _Personal Safety_.--Risk of bodily peril from the attacks of bandits, on the accustomed lines of travel in Spain, need no longer be feared. The formidable pillagers who once gathered toll along all the highways and by-ways have been suppressed by the Civil Guards, or military police, a very trustworthy and thorough organization, which really seems to be the most (and is, perhaps, the sole) efficient thing about the government of the kingdom. Of these Guards there are now twenty thousand foot and five thousand horse distributed throughout the country, keeping it constantly under patrol, in companies, squads and pairs, never appearing singly; and where there are only two of them, they walk twelve paces apart on lonely roads, to avoid simultaneous surprise. They are armed with rifles, swords, and revolvers, and are drawn from the pick of the royal army. Some time since there occurred a case in which two of these men murdered a traveller in a solitary place for the sake of a few thousand francs he was known to have with him; but the crime was witnessed by a shepherd lad in concealment, and they were swiftly brought to trial and executed. This instance is so exceptional as to make it almost an injustice even to mention it; for, as a rule, perfect dependence may be placed on the Guards, who are governed by military law and possess a great _esprit de corps_. A strong group of them is posted in every city; at every railroad station, no matter how small, there are two members of the force on duty, and two more usually accompany each train. The result of all these precautions is that one may take his seat in a Spanish railroad-carriage absolutely with less fear of robbery or violence than he might reasonably feel in England or America. The only instance of banditti pillaging a railroad-train that is known to have occurred while I was in Spain, was that of the James brothers in Missouri, whose outrages upon travellers, in our peaceful and fortunate Republic, were reported to us by cable, while we were struggling through the imaginary perils of a perfect police system in a country that knows not the subtleties of American institutions. And, while we were thus proceeding upon our way, an atrocious murder was committed in a carriage of the London and Brighton Railway, which was not the first of its kind to set the English public shivering with dread and horror. Even the diligence now appears to be as safe as the rail-carriage. But it should be clearly understood that, when one goes off the beaten track and attempts horseback journeys, he exposes himself to quite other conditions, which it is absurd to expect the police to control. An acquaintance tells me that he has made excursions of some length in the saddle, in Spain, meeting nothing but courtesy and good-will; but he took care to have his pistol-holsters well filled and in plain sight. To travel on horseback without an armed and trusty native guide (who should be well paid, and treated with tact and cordiality) is certainly not the most prudent thing that can be done; but solitary pedestrianism is mere foolhardiness. A young French journalist of promise, known to be of good habits, had been loitering alone about Pamplona a short time before the date of my trip, and was one morning found murdered outside of the walls. While I was in the South, too, as I afterward learned, an Englishman, who was concluding a brief foot-tour in the North, attempted to make his way in the evening from San Sebastian to Irun, on the frontier: he was captured by bandits, kept imprisoned for a week in a lonely hut, and doubtless narrowly missed coming to his death. His own account of his escape gives a vivid idea of the treatment that may be expected from the rural population by anybody who gets into a similar predicament. "I resolved," he says, "to strive for liberty. Having worked out a stone, which I found rather loose in the wall near me, and having taken advantage of the darkness of my corner, I gnawed asunder the cord that bound me. I made for the door, which opened into the other apartment, and there being but one guard left over me--the others being off on some expedition--I watched for an opportunity. Presently it was afforded me. As the fellow sat with his back toward me, resting his head upon his hands, I stole forward, holding my stone in readiness, and with one blow laid him on the floor. Then, snatching up a knife from the table, I ran out, and after wandering among the mountains most of the night found myself at daybreak on the high-way, my feet cut with the stones and my strength gone. I fainted. On coming round I attempted in vain to rise, when, two men coming along with a bullock-cart, I asked for help. All they did was to prod me with their goads and march on. The laborers were now returning to their work in the fields, and seeing my attempt to regain my feet, several of them pelted me with clods. I had little strength left, but at last I managed to get on my feet, and having rested a while to regain my strength, I staggered along to the town and waited upon the English vice-consul, who kindly provided me with food and clothes, after which I accompanied him before the governor of the province, to make my statement." The Spanish Government do not acknowledge responsibility for proceedings of this kind on the part of their people; hence it is doubtful whether in such a case the victim, after all his peril and suffering, can even recover the value of what has been stolen from him. But it is perfectly, easy to keep out of the way of such adventures. In the Hotel de los Siete Suelos, at Granada, it is true that the night-porter used to strap around his meagre waist, when he went on duty, a great swashbuckler's sword, as if some bloody nocturnal incursion were impending. But whatever the danger was that threatened, it never befell: the door of the hotel always remained wide open, and our bellicose porter regularly went to sleep soundly on a bench beside it, with his weapon dangling ingloriously over his legs. No one ever seemed to think of using keys for their hotel rooms except in Madrid; and so far as any likelihood of theft was concerned, this confidence seemed to be well justified. Many articles that might have roused the cupidity of unambitious thieves, and could easily have been taken, were left by my companion and myself lying about our unlocked apartments, but we sustained no loss. _Language_.--One cannot travel to the best advantage in Spain without having at least a moderate knowledge of French; or, still better, of Spanish. Railroad employés, customs officers, guards, and inn-keepers there, as a rule, understand only their native tongue. Now and then one will be found who has command of a very few French words; but this is quite the exception, and even when it occurs, is not of much use. At the hotels in all places frequented by foreigners there are interpreters, who conduct transactions between traveller and landlord, and act as guides to places of public interest. For services of this kind they must be paid seven or eight francs a day, certainly not more, and in the smaller towns less will suffice. These interpreters always speak a little French; but their English is a decidedly variable quantity. Of course, people constantly make their way through the kingdom on the resources of English alone; but it is obvious that in so doing they must miss a great many opportunities for curious or instructive observation; and even in viewing the regulation sights the want of an easy medium of communication will often cause interesting details to be omitted. The possibility of employing a courier for the whole journey remains open; but that is a very expensive expedient, and greatly hampers one's freedom. Enough Spanish for the ordinary needs of the way can be learned in a month's study, by any one who has an aptitude for languages. Italian will by no means take the place of it, although some acquaintance with that language may facilitate the study of Spanish; the fact being kept in mind, however, that the guttural character of Spanish is quite alien to the genius of Italian speech, and comes more naturally to one who knows German. If the tourist have time enough at his disposal, it is well to take quarters somewhere in a _casa de huespedes_, or boarding-house, for two or three weeks, in order to become familiar with the vernacular. _Manners_.--There is a superstition that, if you will only keep taking off your hat and presenting complimentary cigars, you will meet with marvels of courteous response, and accomplish nearly everything you want to, in Spain. But the voyager who relies implicitly on this attractive theory will often suffer disappointment. It will do no harm for him to cool his brow by a free indulgence in cap-doffing; and to make presents of the wretched government cigars commonly in use will be found a pleasanter task than smoking them. In fact, a failure to observe these solemn ceremonies places him in the position of a churlish and disfavored person. But, on the other hand, polite attentions of this kind are often enough met by a lethargic dignity and inertia that are far from gratifying. Under such circumstances, let the tourist remember and apply that prerequisite which I began with mentioning--good-humored patience. I found my companions by the rail or at _tables d'hóte_ sometimes considerate and agreeable, at others quite the reverse, and disposed to ignore the existence of foreigners as something beneath notice. I remember once, when Velveteen and I, obliged to change cars, had barely time, before the train was to move again, to spring into a compartment pointed out by the conductor, we found there a well-dressed but gross Spaniard, of the wealthy or noble class, who had had the section marked _reservado_, and the curtains carefully drawn. He sprang up from his nap with a snort, and glared angrily at the intruders, then burst into a storm of rage and expostulation, most of which he discharged out of window at the conductor: but, finding that he could get no satisfaction in that way, he subsided into sullen disdain, paying no attention to my "_Buenas dias_" ("Good-day"), and making his dissatisfaction prominent by impatient gestures and mutterings from time to time. Owing to the cost of baggage transport, too, the natives generally carry a large number of bundles, bags, and miniature trunks in the first-class as well as other carriages--thus avoiding any fee--so that it is often difficult to find a place for packages, or to pass in and out; and those who thus usurp the room are apt to look with cynical indifference at the perplexities of the latest comer, whom they leave to shift for himself as well as he can. Nevertheless, it is an almost universal custom that any one who produces a lunch during the ride, offers it to all the chance company in the compartment before partaking of it himself. It is a point of politeness not to accept such an invitation, but it must be extended just the same as if this were not the case. In one respect the Spaniards are extremely polite--that is, in showing strangers the way from point to point. Frequently, the first man of whom you inquire how to get back to your hotel, or elsewhere, will insist upon accompanying you the whole distance, in order to make sure that you do not go wrong; and this although it may lie entirely out of his own direction. Such a favor becomes a very important and desirable one in the tortuous streets of most Spanish towns. Among themselves the rule is that all ranks and classes should treat each other with respect, meeting on terms of a grave but not familiar equality: hence they expect a similar mode of address from strangers. When all the conditions are fulfilled, their courtesy is of the magnificent order--it is serious, composed, and dignified. Each individual seems to be living on a pedestal; he bows, or makes a flowing gesture, and you get an exact idea what it would be like to have the Apollo Belvedere receive you as a host, or a Jupiter Tonans give you an amicable salutation. As in America, however, it is usually not easy to get information from those who are especially hired or appointed to give it. The personal service of the railroads, with rare exceptions, is ungracious and careless. One must be sure to ask about all the details he wants to know, for these are seldom volunteered. There is a main office (called Despacho Central) in each city, where you may buy tickets, order an omnibus for the station, make inquiries, etc. At the one in Toledo I presented our circular tickets for stamping, on departure, and asked several questions about the train, which showed the agent plainly what line we were going to take. When we reached Castillejo, I found that, in spite of all this, he had allowed us to take a road on which the tickets he had stamped were not valid, and we were forced to pay the whole fare. Neither will conductors be at the pains to shut the doors on the sides of the cars; passengers must do this for themselves. I had travelled all night in a compartment, and in the morning, wishing to look out, I leaned against the door, and it instantly flew open. As it was on the off-side when I got in, it was at that time already closed; but I now discovered that the handle had not even been turned to secure it. The superficial way in which people do things over there is seen in the curious little fact that, from the time of leaving France until that of our return, we could nowhere get the backs of our boots blacked, though repeatedly insisting on it; the national belief being that trousers conceal that part of the shoe, and labor given to improving its appearance would therefore be thrown away. The demand for fees is in general not so systematic or impudent as in England; but when one intends to stay more than a day in a place, better attendance will be obtained by bestowing a present of a franc or two, although service is included in the regular daily rate of the hotel. Finally, the Spaniard with whom one comes most in contact as a tourist is peculiarly averse to being scolded; so that, whatever the provocation, it is better to deal with him softly. _Hotels, Diet, etc_.--The Spanish hotels are conducted on the American plan; so much a day being paid for room, fare, light, heat, and service. This sum ranges commonly from $1 50 to $2 00 a head, except where the very best rooms are supplied. The foreigner, of course, pays a good deal more than the native, but it is impossible for him to avoid that. Sometimes coffee after dinner is included in this price, but coffee after the mid-day breakfast is charged as an extra; and so are all wines except the ordinary red or white Val de Peñas, which are supplied with both meals. Nothing is furnished before the breakfast hour excepting a cup of chocolate, some bread, and, possibly, butter. One should always see his rooms before engaging them, and also be particular to ask whether the price named includes everything, otherwise additional items will be foisted upon him when the bill is settled. Confusion in the account may be avoided by paying for all extras at the moment of obtaining them. Those who are unaccustomed to the light provend furnished for the morning will do well to carry a stock of beef-extract, or something of the kind. Cow's milk is difficult to get, and such a thing as a boiled egg with the chocolate is well-nigh unheard of. The national beverage is the safest: warm chocolate, not very sweet, and so thick that it will almost hold the spoon upright. Coffee in the morning does not have the same nutritive force; indeed, quite otherwise than in France and Germany, it appears to exert in this climate an injurious effect if drunk early in the day--at least, a comparison of notes shows it to be so in summer. Rather more attention should be given to diet in Spain than in the countries above named, or in England and Italy, owing to peculiarities of the climate and the cookery. Whoever has not a hardy digestion runs some danger of disturbance from the all but universal use of olive-oil in cooking; but, with this exception, the tendency is more and more toward the adoption of a French _cuisine_ in the best hotels of the larger cities, and various good, palatable dishes are to be had in them. The native wines are unadulterated, but strong and heavy. Owing to something in their composition, or to the unpleasant taste imparted by the pig-skins, they are to some persons almost poisonous; so that a degree of caution is necessary in using them. Water has the reputation of being especially pure in all parts of the kingdom, and of exercising a beneficial influence on some forms of malady. It certainly is delicious to drink. There is much greater cleanliness in the hotels, taking them all in all, than I had expected; but the want of proper sanitary provision, omitting the solitary case of the Fonda Suizo at Cordova, where everything was perfect in this respect, leads to a state of things which may be described in a word as Oriental--that is, barbarous in the extreme, and scarcely endurable. On this point professional guide-writers are strangely silent. A wise precaution is to carry disinfectants. A small medicine-case, by-the-way, might with advantage be included in the equipment proper for travel in the Peninsula. We touched the nadir of dirt and unsavoriness, as you may say, in our first night at the Fonda del Norte, in Burgos; and there the maid who ushered me to my room warned me, as she retreated, to be careful about keeping the doors of the anteroom closed because, as she said, "There are many rats, and if the doors are open they run in here." But luckily the rest of our experience was an agreeable decline from this early climax. There is another hotel at Burgos, the Raffaele, which, as we learned too late, is--in complete contradiction of the guide-books--clean and pleasant. On the practical side, that voyager will achieve success who plans his route in Spain so as to evade the Fonda del Norte at Burgos, which is the stronghold of dirt, and the Hotel de Paris at Madrid, which takes the palm for extortion. Naturally, in exploring minor towns or villages, one must be prepared to face a good deal of discomfort, since he must seek shelter at a _posada_ or _venta_, where donkeys and other domestic beasts are kept under one roof with the wayfarer, and perhaps in close proximity to his bed and board. But among the inns of modern type he will get on fairly well without having to call out any very great fortitude. _Expense of Travel_.--From what has been said about circular tickets and hotel prices, some notion can be formed as to the general cost of a Spanish expedition. Housing and transportation should not be reckoned at less than six dollars a day; and allowance must next be made for guides, carriages, admission fees, and so on. Altogether, ten dollars a day may be considered sufficient to cover the strictly necessary outlay, if the journey be conducted in a comfortable manner; but it is safer to assume one hundred dollars a week as the probable expense for one person, and this will leave a margin for the purchase of characteristic articles here and there--a piece of lace, a little pottery, knives, cheap fans, and so on. This estimate is made on the basis of first-class places _en route_, and of stops at the best hotels. It could be materially reduced by choosing second-class hotels, which is by no means advisable when ladies are of the party; and, even with the better accommodation, if small rooms be selected and a careful economy exercised in other directions, sixty dollars a week might be made to do. To dispense with the aid of the local guides is no saving, if the design be to move rapidly; because, without such assistance, more time has to be spent in getting at a given number of objects. _Mail-service, Telegrams, Books, etc_.--The mails are conveyed with promptness and safety, it appears; although at Malaga I observed a large padlocked and green-painted chest with a narrow aperture in it, lying on the sidewalk in no particular custody, and learned that it was a convenient movable post-office. Furthermore, it is bewildering to find, after painfully travelling to the genuine post-office (the _Corréo_), that you cannot buy any stamps there. These are kept on sale only at the shops of tobacconists, whose trade likewise makes them agents of the governmental monopoly in cigars, cigarettes, etc. The tobacconists' stores bear the sign _Estanco_ (stamp-shop); and, after one is accustomed to the plan, it becomes really more convenient to obtain one's postage from them. To weigh large envelopes or packages, however, the sender must resort to the _Corréo_. International postal cards may be had, which are good between Spain and France, and other rates are not high. Those who intend to pass rapidly from point to point will do well to have all correspondence directed to the care of the American consul or vice-consul--or, if in Madrid, to the legation there. There is no difficulty about letters addressed in English, provided the writing be plain. At the first city which he touches the tourist should ascertain from the representative of his nationality the names of all representatives in the other places he expects to go to, so that he can forward the precise address for each place, and himself be informed just where to apply for letters or counsel. In cases where there is no time to take these measures, the plan may be followed of having letters addressed _poste restante_ at the various points; but they must then be called for at the post-office, and at each town orders should be left with the postmaster to forward to some farther objective point any mail-matter expected at that town, but not received there. In requesting any service of this kind from consuls, do not forget to leave with them a proper amount of postage. Telegrams may be sent from all large places, in English, at rates about the same as those which prevail elsewhere; but if it is intended to send many messages by wire, a simple code ought to be arranged with correspondents beforehand, to save expense. Telegrams have to be written very carefully, too; I attempted to send one from Granada, but made a slight correction in one word--a fact which caused it to be brought all the way back from the city to my hotel on the Alhambra hill, with an imperative request that it should be rewritten and returned free from the least scratch or blot. Whatever books you may wish to consult on the journey should be provided at the very start, in America, London, or Paris: ten to one you will not find them in Spain. It is pleasant, for example, to refer on the spot to an English version of "Don Quixote," or the French "Gil Blas;" or Prescott's "Ferdinand and Isabella," and the "Columbus," the "Conquest of Granada," and "Tales of the Alhambra," by Irving. Théophile Gautier's "Voyage en Espagne" is another very delightful hand-mirror in which to see your own observations reflected. But none of these are obtainable except, possibly, in Madrid and Barcelona; and even there it is not certain that they will be found. These two cities are the head-quarters, however, for such Spanish books as may be required. _Bankers and Money_.--Little need be said on this point, beyond suggesting the usual circular letter of credit, except to forewarn all persons concerned that they will be charged and must submit to very heavy commissions and exchange at the houses where their letters entitle them to draw. Another particular which it is essential to note is the uncertain currency of certain silver coinage in Spain, and the prevalence of counterfeit pieces. Strangers must fight shy of any kind of _peseta_ (equivalent to a franc) except the recent and regulation ones, though there are many dating from earlier reigns than Alfonso's, which will pass anywhere. The small money of one province frequently will not be received in another; and it happened to me to preserve with great care a Barcelona _peseta_, which I found unavailable everywhere else, and had accepted by an oversight in Sevilla, in the confident hope that I could get rid of it at Barcelona itself; but I discovered that that was exactly the place where they treated it with the most contempt. Hence it is best, before leaving one province for another, to convert your change into gold pieces of twenty-five _pesetas_ worth, or into silver dollars (which are called _duros_), worth five _pesetas_ each. Here, however, let it be noted that the one infallible course to prevent deception is to ring on some solid surface of wood or stone every gold or silver coin you receive at the hotel, the banker's, or anywhere else. If it give a flat sound, no matter what its real value may be, great trouble will be had in passing it; hence, you must in that case refuse to take it. For example, a five-dollar piece was given me which failed to yield the true sound; and though it was perfectly good, having merely become cracked, I could do nothing with it, even at the Madrid banker's; finally getting its value in silver, by a mere chance, from a professional money-changer of more than common enlightenment. Never give a gold piece to a waiter or any one else to be changed, unless the transaction is effected under your own eye; for, if he carries the coin away out of your sight, a substitution will very likely be made, and you cannot then get rid of the uncurrent money which will be forced upon you. The precaution of ringing or sounding money, on receipt, is so general that no one need feel any hesitation at practising it, however it may seem to reflect upon the person who has proffered the coin. Spanish gold pieces in small quantity may with advantage be bought in Paris. On the other hand, it is well to carry more or less Napoleons with you, because French gold is trusted, and passes with slight discount. The traveller should be provided with both kinds. Always and persistently refuse Spanish paper. _Buying Bric-à-brac, Lace, etc_.--Those who wish to purchase characteristic products of the country, ancient or modern, need not fear that opportunity will be wanting; but the most obvious means are not always the best. The interpreters or guides attached to hotels are in most places only too anxious to aid in this sort of enterprise; but it is because they wish to dispose of some private stock of their own, for which they will surely demand double price. By courteous but decided treatment they may be led to make most astonishing reductions from their first demand; and this channel is accordingly, if properly handled, often as good as any other. Guides in Cordova will offer an assortment of old hand-made lace, and introduce you to the silversmiths who there manufacture a peculiarly effective sort of filigree in ear-rings, shawl-pins, brooches, and other forms. Cordova is the best place in which to get this kind of ware; but if lace be the object sought, Sevilla or Barcelona is a much more advantageous market. Machine-made lace, which is now the favorite kind among Spanish ladies, and has been brought to a high degree of delicacy, can be obtained in the greatest variety and on the best terms at Barcelona, where it is made. Many foreigners, however, prefer the hand-made kind; and these should explore Sevilla in search of what they wish, for they can there get it at reasonable prices. In this connection it is to be premised that the assistance of some personal acquaintance among the Spaniards themselves, if it can be had, will always effect a considerable saving; and, when time can be allowed, the best way always is to make inquiry and prowl around among the stores for one's self. There are few professed antiquarian and bric-à-brac salesrooms out of Madrid; but one can often pick up what he wants in out-of-the-way places. Perhaps the best towns in which to buy the peculiar gay-colored and ball-fringed _mantas_, or mantles of the country, and the equally curious _alforjas_ used by the peasantry, are Granada and Valencia. In Toledo there is a very peculiar and effective sort of black-and-gray felt blanket, with brilliant embroideries; that city, like the two just mentioned, being a centre of textile industry. The purchase of costumes in actual use, from the peasants themselves, which is something that artists may find useful, can be accomplished after due bargaining, and by the intervention of the professional interpreter. The pottery and porcelain of Spain exhibit a great variety of beautiful shapes, many of them doubtless Moorish in their origin; and some kinds are invested with a bold, peculiar coloring, dashed on somewhat in the Limoges style, but very characteristic of the climate and landscape in which they are produced. The abundance of unusual and graceful forms constantly suggests the idea of making a collection. I shall not attempt to specify the localities most favorable for the carrying out of this idea; because, so far as my own observation went, there seemed to be material worth investigating almost everywhere. The common unglazed bottles and jars made and used by the peasantry in the South, however, are especially attractive, and are met with only in that part of the country. They are likewise nearly as cheap as the substance from which they are made. At Granada, too, there is manufactured a heavy blue-and-white glazed ware, turned with refined and simple contours, of honest elegance. Formerly barbers' basins moulded on the Spanish plan--that is, with a curved piece cut out at one side--were made of porcelain; and these may still sometimes be picked up in Madrid junk-shops or antiquarian lairs. They are not always good specimens of decorative art, but they are curious and effective. Part of an extensive collection I saw, which had recently been made by an American gentleman; and I could imagine that, when hung upon the wall by his distant fireside across the Atlantic, they would form an interesting series of trophies--a row of ceramic scalps, one might say, marking the fate of so many vanquished dealers. Old furniture, heavy with carving or marvellously inlaid according to traditions of the Moors--monumental pieces, such as were to be seen in the loan collection of Spanish Art at the South Kensington in 1881, and are sparsely imported into the United States--offers larger prizes to those who search and pay. Many relics of ancient costume, dating from the period of courtly splendor; rich fabrics; embroideries; sacerdotal robes and disused altar-cloths; and occasional precious metal-work, may farther be unearthed in the bric-à-brac shops. With due care such objects will often be obtained at moderate cost. But it is to be remembered that the price paid on the spot forms only one item. Transportation to the final shipping-point and the ocean freightage are very high; amounting in the case of cheap articles to far more than the original outlay for their purchase. _Seasons for Travel_.--A question of very great moment is, what time of year should be chosen for a sojourn in Spain? The answer to it depends entirely upon the organization of the person asking, and his object in going. For a simple trip in search of novelty, the voyager being of good constitution, it makes little difference. From the first of June until the first of October the heat, in almost any spot south of the Pyrenees, will be found severe. From the first of October until the first of June, severe, cold, treacherous changing winds, snow, and ice will be encountered, save in a few favored localities hereinafter to be named, under the head of "Climate for Health." Of the two extremes, summer is perhaps to be preferred; because the voyager at that time knows precisely what he has got to prepare for and can meet it, whereas winter is a more variable emergency. A person of good constitution, understanding how to take care of himself in either case, and with an eye to local habits as adapted to the season, may go at any time. Autumn and spring, however, are obviously the ideal seasons for a visit. From a comparison of authorities, and from my own observation of a part of the summer, I should advise going during the period from October 1 to December 1, or from April 1 to June 1. A tour involving more than two months' time, of course, must pass these limits. For hardy and judicious travellers there is no objection to a sojourn including June and July; although it must be said that sight-seeing at the South during these months is more in the nature of endurance than of recreation. I encountered no serious local fever or other ailment due to hot weather, excepting a kind of cholera referred to in one of the preceding chapters, called _el minuto_ (the minute), at Sevilla. By beginning a trip at the southern end of the Peninsula and gradually working along northward toward France, four months from March 1 or April 1 could be utilized without any unusual discomfort. _Routes_.--The topic just discussed necessarily has a good deal to do with the selection of a route, which, from the position of the country, must be made to begin from the North or from the South. Let us notice, first, the general lines of approach from different quarters. From New York direct, for example, one may sail for Cadiz in steamers of the Anchor and Guion lines, or in the Florio (Spanish) steamers, which last I have heard spoken of in favorable terms by authority presumably good. From London there are two lines of steamers: one, Messrs. Hall's, leaving weekly for Lisbon, Gibraltar, Malaga, and Cadiz; the other, Messrs. MacAndrew's, leaving London three times a week for Bilbao and the principal ports on the Mediterranean. For any one wishing to visit Spain alone, these form the cheapest and nearest means of reaching the country. To go by steamer from London is, however, very obviously a slower way than to take the rail from the English capital to Paris and thence to the frontier, either at Irun and San Sebastian, or at Barcelona by way of Marseilles and Perpignan. So that, where speed alone is the object, one may take a fast steamer from New York to Liverpool, use the rail thence to London, and arrive in Burgos, for instance, about fifty hours after leaving London. The through train from Paris for Spain leaves in the evening. Voyagers from the East and Italy, designing to pass through Spain on their return westward, can embark on the Peninsular and Oriental steamers, or those of the Messageries Imperiales. When one passes through France, on the way, it is possible to buy a Continental railroad guide, which gives all the trains in Spain and France, and the connection of one system with the other across the boundary. This is to be recommended as an exceedingly useful document. It may as well be remarked here that the information ordinarily given in books about the coasting steamers from one port to another along the Mediterranean coast of Spain is as untrustworthy as it is vague. The precise date of departure from any given town on the coast for the other ports to the north-east or south-west is not very easy to ascertain, except in the town itself. One or another steamer, however, is pretty sure to sail from Cadiz, Malaga, Valencia, and Barcelona two or three times a week; so that one can scarcely fail of what the Germans call an "opportunity." There is undoubtedly a difference in the various lines, as regards comfort and swiftness of progress; but it is not true, as the guide-books assert, that the French steamers alone are good, and that the Spanish are dirty and comfortless. We personally inspected two boats in the harbor of Malaga before making choice; one was French and the other Spanish, and we found the latter much the more commodious and cleanly. But, then, it is possible that some other Spanish line than the one we selected may be inferior to some still other French line which we did not see. Everybody can satisfy himself, by simply viewing whatever steamers happen to be on hand for the trip, before engaging passage. The accommodations on all of them seem to be of a kind that would not be tolerated for a day in America; but they compare well with those of the best boats on the English Channel, being fairly on a level with the incomplete civilization of Europe in respect of convenience, privacy, and hygiene. The cabins become close and unwholesome at night, and few staterooms are provided. These last are built to receive from four to six persons, who may be total strangers to each other; hence, any one who wishes to be independent of chance comers must betake himself to the deck at night, or else make special arrangements to secure an entire room before starting. Again, on the railroads, many journeys have to be made at night; and it is seldom that one can secure a sleeping-coach. On much-travelled lines these are usually bespoken a week in advance. Failing to get the _wagon-lit_, as the sleeping-car is called, after the French fashion, one may sometimes engage a _berlina_, which is simply the _coupé_ or end compartment of a car. This, being made to seat three persons instead of six, is allowed to be reserved. It costs about two dollars for a distance of one hundred miles. The route to be followed in any particular case has, in the nature of things, to be determined by the purpose and circumstances of the tourist. One may make a geological and mineralogical tour, inspecting the mountains and the mines of Spain, and find his hands tolerably full at that; or, one may wend his way to the Peninsula solely to study the achievements of the former national schools of painting there, in which case Sevilla and the picture-gallery at Madrid will be his only objective points--the latter chief and almost inexhaustible. The architectural treasures of Spain constitute another source of interest sufficient in itself for a whole journey and months of study. But those who go with aims of this sort will find all the advice they need in guides and special works. What will more probably be sought here is merely an outline for the wanderer who sets out to obtain general views and impressions in a brief space of time. Him, then, I advise, if the season be propitious, to enter Spain from the north, pursue in the main a straight line to the southern extremity; and then, having made the excursion to Granada--which in the present state of the railways must be a digression from the general circuit--proceed along the shores of the Mediterranean toward France again. In this case his trip will arrange itself in the following order: DAYS Paris to San Sebastian 2 Thence to Pamplona. Back to main line. Burgos 3 Valladolid 1 Thence to Salamanca 2 Back to main line. Avila 1 Escorial, and drive to Segovia 2 Madrid 8 Or, from Avila go direct to Madrid, and then to Escorial, Segovia, and return. Alcalá de Henáres (birthplace of Cervantes) may be reached by a short railtrip from Madrid eastward 1 Aranjuez 1 Toledo 2 Cordova 2 Sevilla 5 Cadiz 2 Gibraltar (by steamer) 2 Malaga 1 Ronda (by rail and diligence) 2 Granada 4 Return to Malaga 1 Cartagena (steamer) 2 Murcia (rail) 1 Elche palmgroves (diligence) 1 Alicante (diligence) 1 Or, diligence and rail direct to Valencia 1 Valencia (drive in the Huerta) 2 Zaragoza 2 Manresa, and monastery of Monserrat 3 Barcelona 3 Gerona 1 To Marseilles 1 -- 60 The preceding estimate includes the time to be allowed for going from place to place; but, as will be seen, the total includes some extra days occurring in the count where an option is suggested. To accomplish all that is laid down here in two months, however, would be very close and hard work; in order to go over the ground comfortably, an extra week or two should be allowed. The great advantage of entering the kingdom by way of San Sebastian is that the first impression of the Pyrenees is much finer there than by way of Perpignan to Gerona and Barcelona. One also plunges immediately into the heart of ancient Spain on touching Pamplona and Burgos; and these lead in the most natural and direct way to Valladolid (the old capital and the place where "Don Quixote" was written), to Salamanca, Avila, Segovia, and the Escorial. Furthermore, after Madrid has intervened between North and South with its mingling of past and present, the succession of interest follows an ascending scale through Toledo, Cordova, and Sevilla, culminating at Granada. Next, the Mediterranean route presents itself as something having a special unity of its own, with a recurrence to special phases of antiquity again in Zaragoza, Monserrat, and Gerona. If, on the other hand, we begin with Barcelona and go southward before coming up to Madrid, we receive a first impression less striking and characteristic, and also pluck the most ideal flowers--Granada, Sevilla, Cordova--before coming to Madrid. Taken in the light of such a contrast, Toledo, Avila, Burgos, and the rest of the northern places will seem less attractive than when grouped together in an introductory glimpse, as a prelude to the more poetic South. Supposing, however, that the traveller lands at once in Cadiz, from the deck of a steamer, he must put all this fine theory aside, and make the best of the case. His programme will then depend on whether he proposes to end by going into France, or to return without crossing the Pyrenees. In the latter event, he might do well to follow the rail to Sevilla, Cordova, Toledo, and Madrid; then visit the Escorial, Avila, Segovia, and afterward strike off abruptly to the north-east, through Zaragoza and Monserrat to Barcelona, coming down the coast again either by rail or steamer to Valencia, and reserving Granada until near the end. After Granada, a return to Malaga and a touch at Gibraltar would deposit him exactly where he started from, at Cadiz. Should he wish to wind up in France, the situation is more complicated. He must then take Gibraltar first, come back to Sevilla, go to Granada, thence to Cordova and Toledo--omitting Valencia wholly, unless he be willing to double interminably on his tracks--pass from Toledo to Madrid, and then decide whether he will go north-westward through Avila and Burgos, north-eastward through Zaragoza and Barcelona, or attempt to embrace both routes by zigzagging across the widest part of the kingdom. There remains, finally, the alternative of starting from Cadiz, visiting Sevilla and Granada, and then, by way of Cordova, Toledo and Madrid, continuing north to Valladolid, Burgos, and the French frontier, without troubling the eastern half of the country at all. This route, after all, includes the most that is best worth seeing, if we leave out Zaragoza and Monserrat. Let me add only that nobody should be deterred, by the schedule given on the preceding page, from making a shorter visit to the Peninsula, if it come within his range, when circumstances grant him less time than is there allotted. Even in _three_ weeks a general tour could be accomplished, allowing several days at Madrid and very brief pauses at Avila, the Escorial, Toledo, Cordova, Sevilla, Granada, and Barcelona. So rapid a flight, nevertheless, the voyager must be prepared to find, will induce a harassing sense that at every point much that it would be desirable to see has been passed over. But even an outline of actual experience is sometimes more prized than a complete set of second-hand impressions. Furthermore, a _single week_ would suffice the traveller who found himself on the borders of Spain, to make an excursion which he could hardly regret. Thus from Biarritz one can, in that space of time, cross the border and run down to Madrid, glance rapidly at the gallery there, and take the Escorial, Avila, or Burgos--or possibly two of these--on the return. From Marseilles he can visit Gerona, Barcelona, and Monserrat. Similarly, touching at Cadiz, he can go to Sevilla, Cordova, and Granada, get a general survey of those places, including the Alhambra and two of the most beautiful cathedrals in the world, and return to Cadiz or Malaga, all in seven or eight days. Indeed, one who has it in his power to reach Granada and spend a day or two there, without attempting to see anything else, ought not to forego the opportunity. The sight of the Alhambra alone, and of the enchanting landscape that surrounds it, may well repay the loss incurred by an inability to make farther explorations. All these details in regard to flying trips I submit with due knowledge that whoever profits by them, at the same time that he admits himself under obligation for the counsel, will perhaps never forgive himself for seeing thus much and no more, and may even include in this unrelenting mood his benevolent adviser. Enough, I think, has now been said to furnish a basis for all manner of individual modification. The large anatomical lines, as it were, have been indicated; and on these each tourist may construct his own ideal, with any desired curtailment or extension of time to be consumed. _Climate for Health_--The resources of Spain as a health resort are, in general, hardly suspected, much less widely known; and a great deal has doubtless yet to be done before they can be rendered available. Still, the existing conditions and favorable circumstances are worth summarizing in this place. In a singularly careful work on the winter and spring climates of the Mediterranean shores, Dr. J. H. Bennett, of England, arrives at some important conclusions respecting the localities of the Spanish coast. To begin with, the vital distinction has to be noted that the Peninsula (leaving out the corner abutting on the Atlantic) possesses two distinct climates: _first_, that of the central raised plains stretching from range to range of its several mountain-ribs; and, _second_, that of the sea-level and the latitude in which the country lies. The former is perforce much the colder, and is subject to raw winds; the latter is mild and uncommonly dry. The health regions of Spain are confined to the east and south-east coasts, where the land subsides nearly to the sea-level, and is open to the balmy influences natural to the latitude. Dr. Bennett observes that the north and north-west winds precipitate their moisture in the mountains of the central regions of Spain, and that the north-east winds are drawn down to Algeria by the Desert of Sahara, which creates a sort of vacuum compelling them southward. As a matter of fact, they do not molest the eastern coast. Hence, in the words of this physician, "the eastern coast of Spain is probably the driest region of Europe, drier even than the Genoese Riviera." Accordingly, Murcia, Alicante, Valencia, Tarragona, and even Barcelona--far north though the last-mentioned is--all offer extraordinary advantages of climate to the average run of patients afflicted with chronic chest disease, pulmonary consumption, chronic bronchitis, bronchitic asthma, chronic diseases of the kidney, debility and anæmia from any cause, and the failing vitality of old age. Cadiz, too, possesses a most equable temperature. It is noted, however, by the writer whom I follow, that the dry air of these places is injurious in those exceptional cases of chest disease, of nervous asthma and neuralgia, which are found to be aggravated by a stimulating atmosphere. Dr. Bennett's theory is that the towns just referred to lie under a qualifying disadvantage, inasmuch as they stand at some distance from the mountains, thus permitting the cold winds from the latter to fall into the plain and sweep the towns to a certain extent. But in this connection he seems not to remember that in Nice, at least, the invalid population are now and then scourged by the cold northern bise rushing down the Rhone to the sea. The most serious objection to these Spanish towns is the want of comfortable and airy quarters for invalids. Again, at Malaga, which has been so highly recommended, the sanitary conditions are such that any benefit from the climate is likely to be nullified by the evil influences of a want of drainage, and of latent pestilence. Here it may be mentioned that the Alhambra hill, at Granada, is much resorted to by Spaniards in summer as a cool, airy, and healthful spot; and truly there is none more lovely in its surroundings on the globe, so far as it is usually permitted man to see. In and about the Alhambra, too, small cottages may be hired, where the sick and weary may rest after their own fashion, and keep house for themselves, with docile native servants. But, whosoever fares to Spain in search of bettered health, let him not mount the Alhambra hill save in spring, nor enter the Mediterranean towns until after September. And, above all, let him avoid the fatal error of supposing that the high regions of the interior will offer any influences more soothing than those of harsh-tempered New England. This consideration remains, that whatever obstacles to complete comfort may exist, the perfection of the coast climate, the stimulus of scenery and surroundings so unique and picturesque, and the resources of observation or of historic association opened to the sojourner in Spain are likely to have a good effect, both mental and spiritual. [Illustration] IMPORTANT ART BOOKS. * * * * * Herrick's Poems. Selections from the Poetry of Robert Herrick. With Drawings by EDWIN A. ABBEY. 4to, Illuminated Cloth, Gilt Edges, $7 50. (_In a Box_.) Highways and Byways; Or, Saunterings in New England. By W. HAMILTON GIBSON, Author of "Pastoral Days." Superbly Illustrated by the Author. 4to, Illuminated Cloth, Gilt Edges, $7 50. (_In a Box_.) Pastoral Days. By W. HAMILTON GIBSON. 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Illustrated. 8vo, Ornamental Cloth, $3 50. Pottery and Porcelain of all Times and Nations. With Tables of Factory and Artists' Marks, for the Use of Collectors. By W. C. PRIME, LL.D. 8vo, Cloth, Gilt Tops and Uncut Edges, $7 00. (_In a Box_.) Art in America. By S. G. W. BENJAMIN. Profusely Illustrated. 8vo, Illuminated Cloth, $4 00. Contemporary Art in Europe, By S. G. W. BENJAMIN. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, Illuminated and Gilt, $3 50. Art Education Applied to Industry. By G. W. NICHOLS. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, Illuminated and Gilt, $4 00. Art Decoration Applied to Furniture. By HARRIET P. SPOFFORD. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, Illuminated and Gilt, $4 00. The Ceramic Art. A Compendium of the History and Manufacture of Pottery and Porcelain. By JENNIE J. YOUNG. With 464 Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, $5 00. Caricature and other Comic Art, In All Times and Many Lands. By JAMES PARTON. With 203 Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, Gilt Tops and Uncut Edges, $5 00. Songs from the Published Writings of Alfred Tennyson. Set to Music by various Composers. Edited by W. G. CUSINS. With Portrait and Illustrations. Royal 4to, Cloth, Gilt Edges, $5 00. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. By SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. Illustrated by GUSTAVE DORÉ. Folio, Cloth, Gilt Edges, $10 00. (_In a Box_.) * * * * * PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK. [Illustration: pointing hand] HARPER & BROTHERS _will send any of the above works by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States, on receipt of the price_. * * * * * Boudoir of Lindarana=> Boudoir of Lindaraxa {pg 12} azucarilios=> azucarillos {pg 5} encouragment=> encouragement {pg 65} intrepreter=> interpreter {pg 190} in in the South=> in the South {pg 202} * * * * * FOOTNOTES: [1] The dancing boys still officiate at Seville, also, in Holy-week, where they leap merrily before the high altar, and do not even take off their hats to the Host. The story runs that, years ago, a visiting bishop from Rome found fault with this as being unorthodox, and threatened to put a stop to it. He complained to the Pope, and a lenient order issued from the Vatican that the observance should be discontinued when the boys' clothes should be worn out. Up to the present day, curiously enough, the clothes have not been worn out. [2] These last are called _tocas_, and are rapidly superseding the long mantilla. [3] This characterization, our own experience led us to conclude, was exceedingly unjust. [4] Some time before this he had, by too adventurous play, received a tossing which laid him up for eight months, and his death in the ring has since been reported. [5] In this connection it is curious to observe that the Toledan peasants, like the Chinese, confound the letters _r_ and _l_--as when they say _flol_ for _flor_, "flower." [6] Contained in the series called "The Man with Five Wives." [7] A nickname alluding to the sooty black of the clerical costume. [8] Literally, "sun-trap." [9] Irving's name heads the ponderous register in which visitors, embracing some of the most distinguished of the earth, have recorded themselves for fifty years past; and though it is not generally known, his signature may also be found pencilled on the inner wall of the little mosque near the Comares Tower, just under the interpolated Spanish choir gallery. Yet there seems to be a degree of mistiness in the Granadian mind respecting the author of "Tales of the Alhambra." I think the people sometimes confounded him with the Father of his Country. At all events, the Hotel Washington Irving is labelled, at one of its entrances, "Hotel Washington," as if that were the same thing. [10] "Fleming," a name commonly applied to Spanish gypsies; whence it has been inferred that the first of them came from the Netherlands. 
33833	----	Books. GLORIES OF SPAIN [Illustration: INTERIOR OF ZARAGOZA CATHEDRAL.] GLORIES OF SPAIN BY CHARLES W. WOOD, F.R.G.S., AUTHOR OF "LETTERS FROM MAJORCA," "IN THE VALLEY OF THE RHONE," ETC., ETC. [Illustration] WITH EIGHTY-FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS. London MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1901 LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED. STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. AT THE GARE D'ORLÉANS. On Calais quay--At the Custom-house--A lady of the past--Ungallant examiner--Better to reign than serve--Paris--Vanity Fair--Sowing and reaping--Laughing through life--At the Hôtel Chatham--A pleasant picture--In maiden meditation--M. Pascal is wise in his generation--The secrets of the Seine--Notre Dame--Ile St. Louis--A mediæval atmosphere--Victor Hugo--Ghosts of the Hôtel Lambert--H. C. again--His little comedy--M. the Inspector--Outraged ladies--"En voiture, messieurs!"--Mystery not cleared--The Orléanais--La Vendée--Garden of France--A dilemma--Polite Chef de Gare--Crossing the Garonne--Land of corn and wine 1 CHAPTER II. A NARBONNE HOSTESS. Carcassonne--In feudal times--Simon de Montfort--Canal du Midi--L'âge d'or et le Grand Monarque--A modern Golden Fleece--One of earth's fair scenes--Choice of evils--M. le Chef yields--Narbonne--A woman of parts--The course of true love runs smooth--_Diner de contrat_--Honey _versus the lune de miel_--Madame's philosophy--_L'Allée des Soupirs_--An unfinished cathedral--At the gloaming hour--Mystery and devotion--The Hôtel de Ville--A domestic drama--High festival and champagne--The next morning--H. C. repentant--Madame at her post--Ambrosial breakfast--"Il faut payer pour ses plaisirs"--Dramatic exit--Perpignan--Home of the kings of Majorca--Elne--"Adieu, ma chère France!"--Over the frontier--Gerona--Crowded platform--What H. C. thought--Unpoetical incident--From the sublime to the ridiculous 12 CHAPTER III. BLACK COFFEE--AND A CONFESSION. Continued uproar--H. C. disillusioned--A dark night--Not like another Cæsar--More crowds--A demon scene--Fair time--Glorious days of the past--In marble halls and labyrinthine passages--Our excellent host--His substantial partner--Contented minds--Picturesque court--Songless nightingales--Conscription--H. C.'s modesty--Our host appreciative but personal--Bears the torch of genius--A mistake--Below the salt--Host's fair daughters--Catalonian women--The Silent Enigma--Remarkable priest--Good intentions--Lecture on black coffee--Confessions--Benjamin's portions--A gifted nature 27 CHAPTER IV. A NIGHT VISION. Wrong turnings--H. C.'s gifts and graces--Out at night--The arcades of Gerona--At the fair--Ancient outlines--Demons at work--In the dry bed of the river--Roasting chestnuts--Mediæval outlines--In the vortex--Clairvoyantes and lion-tamers--Clown's despair--Deserted streets--Vision of the night--Haunted staircase--Dark and dangerous--A small grievance--The reeds by the river--Cry of the watchmen--Hare and hounds--Fair Rosamund--Jacob's ladder--New rendering to old proverbs--Cathedral by night--H. C. oblivious--Scent fails--Return to earth--Romantic story--Last of a long line--_El Sereno!_--The witching hour--H. C. unserenaded--Next morning--Grey skies--A false prophet--Magic picture--Cathedral by day--Mediæval dreams 41 CHAPTER V. GERONA THE BEAUTIFUL. A Gerona señora--Grace and charm--Lord of creation--Morning greeting--Arcades and ancient houses--Conscription--Gerona a discovery--Streets of steps--Ancient eaves and rare ironwork--Old-world corner--Desecrated church--Gothic cloisters--Ghosts of the past--Visions of to-day--Soldiers interested--"Happy as kings"--Lingerings--Colonel seeks explanation--No lover of antiquity--More conscription--Dramatic scene--Pedro to the rescue--Mother and son--Sad story--Strong and merciful--Pedro grateful--Restricted interests--Colonel becomes impenetrable again 58 CHAPTER VI. ANSELMO THE PRIEST. Beauties of age--Apostles' Doorway--How the old bishops kept out of temptation--Interior of cathedral--Its vast nave--Days of Charlemagne--And of the Moors--A giant dwarfed--Rare choir--Surly priest--And a more kindly--Our showman--Dazzling treasures--Father Anselmo--Romantic story--Heaven or the world?--Doubts--The gentle Rosalie decides--Sister Anastasia--Told in the sacristy--A heart-confession--Anselmo's mysticism--Heresy--Charms of antiquity--Scene of his triumph--Celestial vision--Church of San Pedro--Pagan interior--Rare cloisters--Desecrated church--Singular scene--Chiaroscuro--Miguel the carpenter--His opinions--Daily life a religion--Anselmo improves his opportunity--"A reflected light"--Ruined citadel--War of succession--Alvarez and Marshall--Gerona in decadence--A revelation--Dreamland--Midday vision 72 CHAPTER VII. A DAY OF ENCOUNTERS. "Can a prophet come out of Galilee?"--The unexpected happens--Under the probe--Wise reservation--Born to command--Contrasts--Nothing new under the sun--The señora prepares for the fair--Grievance not very deep seated--Bewitching appearance--Señora dramatic--Ernesto--Marriage a lottery--Every cloud its silver lining--Gerona _en fête_--Delormais' mission--Deceptive appearances--Evils of conscription--Ernesto's ambition--Les beaux jours de la vie--Rosalie--A fair picture--Strange similarity--Heavenwards--Anastasia or Rosalie--Her dreams and visions--Modern Paul and Virginia--Eternal possession--A Gerona saint--The better part--More heresy--Fénélon--One creed, one worship--Not peace but a sword--Not dead to the world--Angel of mercy--H. C. mistaken--Earthly idyll 99 CHAPTER VIII. MOTHER AND SON. Demons at work--In the crowd--Ernesto and his mother--Roasted chestnuts--Instrument of torture--New school of anatomy--Rhine-stones or diamonds?--Happy mother--Honest confession--Danger of edged tools--Cayenne lozenges for the monkeys--Joseph--Early compliments--Ernesto pleads in vain--Down by the river--Music of the reeds--Rich prospect--Faust--Singers of the world--Joseph takes tickets--Gerona keeps late hours--Its little great world--Between the acts--Successful evening--In the dark night--On the bridge--Silence and solitude--Astral bodies--Joseph turns Job's comforter--Magnetism--Delormais psychological--Alone in the streets--Saluting the Church militant--Haunted staircase again--Sighs and rustlings--H. C. retires--"Drink to me only with thine eyes"--Delormais' challenge--Leads the way--Illumination--Coffee equipage--"Only the truth is painful"--Lost in reverie 114 CHAPTER IX. DELORMAIS. Magnetism--Past life--Impulsive nature--First impressions--Perfumed airs--A gentle spirit--Haunted groves--Blue waters of the Levant--Great devotion--A rose-blossom--Back to the angels--Special Providence--Fair Provence--Charmed days--Excursions--Isles of Greece--Ossa and Pelion--City of the violet crown--Spinning-jennies have something to answer for--Olympus--Ægina--Groves of the Sacred Plain--Narrow escapes--Pleasures of home-coming--Rainbow atmosphere--Orange and lemon groves--The nightingales--Impressionable childhood--Fresh plans--The Abbé Rivière--Rare faculty--Domestic chaplain--Debt of gratitude--Treasure-house of strength Given to hospitality--First great sorrow--Passing away--Resolve to travel--"I can no more"--The old Adam dies hard--Chance decides 130 CHAPTER X. DELORMAIS' ROMANCE. Rome--Count Albert--Happy months--Sweets of companionship--Egypt--Strange things--Quiet weeks--Sinai--Freedom of the desert--Crossing the Red Sea--Mount Serbal--Convent of St. Catherine--In the Valley of the Saint--Tomb of Sheikh Saleh--Pools of Solomon--Jerusalem the Golden--Bethel--Lebanon--Home again--Fresh scenes--Algeria--Hanging gardens of the Sahel--Mount Bubor and its glories--Rash act--At the twilight hour--Earthly paradise--Fair Eve--Fervent love--Arouya--Nature's revenge--Not to last--Eternal requiem of the sea--In the backwoods--Hunting wolves--Prairies of California--Honolulu--Active volcanoes--Lake of fire--Rare birds and wild-flowers--Worship of Peleus--An eruption--Mighty upheaval--Coast of Labrador--Shooting bears 143 CHAPTER XI. MONSEIGNEUR. Great conflict--Returning to Paris--Count Albert married--Marriages declined--Love buried in the grave of Arouya--Frivolities--Napoleon at the Tuileries--Illness--Doctors' errors--Days of horror--Vow registered--Between life and death--Victory--Home again--Abbé's objections--Resolve strengthened--Death of the Abbé--Taking vows--Life of energy and action--Rapid sketch--Sympathies--All ordained--"Monseigneur"--"Mon ami"--Cry of the watchmen--Candles wax dim and blue--Wandering in dreams--False prophet--H. C. rises with the lark--Beauty of Gerona--Pathetic scene--Colonel administers consolation--Widow's heart sings for joy--In the cloisters again--Good-bye--In the cathedral--Anselmo--Sunshine over all--Miguel--On the ruined citadel--Anselmo's signal--A glory departs 154 CHAPTER XII. A MINISTERING SPIRIT. Sweet illusions--Everything seen and done--True devotion--In the vortex--Sunshine and blue skies--Less demon-like pit--Lights and shadows--Arcades lose their gloom--Rosalie--Charm of Anselmo--Romance not dead--H. C. in ecstasy--Escorting an angel--Cathedral steps--San Filiu--A lovely spot--Ancient house--Mullions and latticed windows--Passing away--Rosalie's ministrations--Resignation--Rosalie's farewell--"Consuelo"--Taken from the evil to come--The door closed--Ernesto's world topsy-turvy--Ernesto turns business-like--The catapult again--Up the broad staircase--Not the ghostly hour--Madame in her bureau--Posting ledger--Balance on right side--Madame philosophises--Shrieks to the rescue--"My dear daughter"--Our host and the nightingales--Waiting for next year's leaves--The Señorita Costello--Delormais on the wing--Another vigil--Promise given--Departure--Inspector quails--H. C. collapses--The susceptible age--Lady Maria alters her will--Possession nine-tenths of the law 168 CHAPTER XIII. A WORLD'S WONDER. Barcelona--H. C.'s anxiety--Mutual salutes--Old impressions--Disappointment--Familiar cries and scenes--Flower-sellers--Perpetual summer--Commercial element--Manchester of Spain--Surrounding country--Where care comes not--Barcelonita--The quays--A land of corn and wine--Relaxing air--Lovely ladies--Ancient element conspicuous by its absence--Historical past--Great in the Middle Ages--Wise and powerful--Commerce of the world--Wealth and learning--Waxes voluptuous--Ferdinand and Isabella--Diplomatic but not grateful--Brave and courageous--Fell before Peterborough--Napoleon's treachery--Republican people--Prosperous once more--Ecclesiastical treasures--Matchless cathedral--Inspiration--Influence of the Moors--Work of Majorcan architect--Dream-world--Imposing scene 184 CHAPTER XIV. IN THE CLOISTERS OF SAN PABLO. In the cloisters--Sacred geese--Bishop's palace--House of the Inquisition--Striking quadrangles--_Ajimez_ windows--A rare cloister--Desecration--Library--Rare MSS.--Polite librarian--Romantic atmosphere--Santa Maria del Mar--Cloisters of Santa Anna--Sister of Mercy--San Pablo del Campo--More dream cloisters--Communing with ghosts and shadows--Spring and winter--Constant visitor--Centenarian--Chief architect--Cathedrals of Catalonia--Barbarous town-council--Hard fight and victory--Failing vision--Emblems of death--Laid aside--Wholesome lessons--Placing the keystone--_Finis_--_Resurgam_--Charmed hour--Possessing the soul in patience--City of Refuge 203 CHAPTER XV. MONTSERRAT. Early rising--Imp of darkness--Death warrant--The men who fail--Ranges of Montserrat--Sabadell--Labour and romance--The Llobregat--Monistrol--Summer resort--Sleeping village--Empty letter-bags--Ascending--Splendid view--Romantic element--Charms of antiquity--Human interests--Mons Serratus--A man of letters--_Solitude à deux_--Fellow-travellers--Substantial lady-merchant--Resignation--Military policeman--"Nameless here for evermore"--Round man in square hole--Romantic history--_Cherchez la femme_--Woman a divinity--Good name the best inheritance--No fighting against the stars--Fascinations of astrology--Love and fortune--Too good to last--Taste for pleasure--Ruin--Sad end--Truth reasserts itself--Fortune smiles again--Ceylon--Philosophical in misfortune--A windfall--Approaching Montserrat--Paradise of the monks--Romance and beauty--New order of things--Gipsy encampment 214 CHAPTER XVI. A HIDDEN GENIUS. Monk's face--Superfluous virtue--"Welcome to Montserrat"--Mean advantage--Exacting but not mercenary--Another Miguel--Missing keys--Singular monk--Hospederia--Uncertainty--Monk's idea of luxury--Rare prospect--Haunted by silence--Father Salvador privileged--Monk sees ghosts--Under Miguel's escort--In the church--Departed glory--The black image--Gothic and Norman outlines--Franciscan monk or ghost?--Vision of the past--Days of persecution--Sensible image--Great community--Harmony of the spheres--Sad cypresses--Life of a hermit--Monk's story--Loving the world--Penitence--Plucked from the burning--Talent developed--A world apart--False interest--Salvador--Temptation and a compromise--Salvador extemporises--"All the magic of the hour"--Salvador's belief--Waiting for manifestations. 227 CHAPTER XVII. SALVADOR THE MONK. Gipsies--Picturesque scene--Love passages--H. C. invited to festive board--Saved by Lady Maria's astral visitation--The fortune-teller--H. C. yields to persuasion--Fate foretold--Warnings--Photograph solicited--Darkness and mystery--Night scene--Gipsies depart--Weird experiences--Troubled dreams--Mysterious sounds--Ghost appears--H. C. sleeps the sleep of the just--Egyptian darkness--In the cold morning--Salvador keeps his word--Breakfast by candle-light--Romantic scene--Salvador turns to the world--Agreeable companion--Musician's nature--Miguel and the mule--Leaving the world behind--Darkness flies--St. Michael's chapel--Sunrise and glory--Marvellous scene--Magic atmosphere--Salvador's ecstasy--Consents to take luncheon--Heavenly strains--"Not farewell"--Departs in solitary sadness--Last of the funny monk 249 CHAPTER XVIII. A STUDY IN GREY. Manresa--Tropical deluge--Rash judgment--Catalan hills and valleys--Striking approach--Taking time by the forelock--Primitive inn--Strange assembly--Unpleasant alternative--Sebastien--Manresa under a cloud--Wonderful outlines--Disappointing church--Sebastien leads the way--Old-world streets--Picturesque and pathetic--Popular character--"What would you, señor?"--Sebastien's Biblical knowledge at fault--Lesson deferred--A revelation--La Seo--Church cold and lifeless--Cave of Ignatius Loyola--Hermitage of St. Dismas--Juan Chanones--Fasting and penance--Visions and revelations--Spiritual warfare--Eve of the Annunciation--Exchanging dresses--Knight turns monk--Juan Pascual--Loyola comes to Manresa--Fanaticism--Vale of Paradise--"Spiritual Exercises"--Founding the Jesuit Order--Dying to self--The fair Anita--In the convent chapel--Two novices--Vision of angels--The White Ladies--Agonising moment--Another Romeo and Juliet--Back to the hotel--Sebastien disconsolate--"To-morrow the sun will shine"--Building castles in the air--A prophecy fulfilled 263 CHAPTER XIX. LERIDA. Picturesque country--Approaching Lerida--Rambling inn--Remarkable duenna--Toothless and voiceless--Smiles upon H. C.--Nearly expires--Civilised chef--A procession--Lerida Dragon--City of the dead--Night study--Charging dead walls--A night encounter--Armed demon--Wise people--Watchman proves an old friend--No promotion--Locked out--Rousing the echoes--Night porter appears on the scene--Also El Sereno--Apologetic and repentant--The charming Rose--Porter congratulates himself--Cloudless morning--H. C. confronted by the Dragon--In the hands of the Philistines--A Lerida fine art--Boot-cleaner in Ordinary--Remarkable character--H. C. hilarious--Steals a march 285 CHAPTER XX. THE STORY OF A LIFE. Lerida by daylight--Second city in Catalonia--Past history--Days of the Goths--And Moors--Becomes a bishopric--Troublous times--Brave people--Striking cathedral--Splendid outlines--Desecration--The new cathedral--Senseless tyranny--One of the most interesting of towns--Crowded market-place--Picturesque arcades and ancient gateways--Wine-pressers--Good offer refused--Another revelation--Wonderful streets--Amongst the immortals--Our Boot-cleaner in Ordinary again--Thereby hangs a tale--His story--Blind wife--Modest request--Nerissa--Charming room--Little queen in the arm-chair--Faultless picture--Renouncements but no regrets--"All a new world"--Time to pass out of life--Back to the quiet streets--H. C. contemplative--Proposes emigration to Salt Lake City--Lerida glorified by its idyll 296 CHAPTER XXI. THE END OF AN IDYLL. Days of chivalry not over--In the evening light--Night porter grateful--Dragon in full force--Combative and revengeful--Equal to the occasion--Gall turns to sweetness when H. C. appears--Last night in Lerida--Bane of our host's life--Mysterious disappearance--Monastery of Sigena--Devout ladies--Returning at night--Place empty and deserted--Birds flown with keys--Quite a commotion--"The señor is pleased to joke"--Was murder committed?--Mysteries explained--Probably down the well--Drag for skeletons--Host's horror--"We drink the water"--A tragedy--Out in the quiet night--Discords--Lerida café--Create a sensation--Polite captain--Offer declined--Regrets--Final crash--Paradise or Lerida--Deserted market-place--Trees whisper their secrets--El Sereno at the witching hour--Hard upon the angels--Not a bed of roses--Alphonse--End of a long life--Until the dawn--Acolyte and priest--"We must all come to it, señor"--El Sereno disappears for the last time--Daybreak--In presence of death--Alone, but resigned--Surpassing loveliness--Sacred atmosphere 313 CHAPTER XXII. A SAD HISTORY. Broad plains of Aragon--Wonderful tones--Approaching Zaragoza--Celestial vision--Distance lends enchantment--Commonplace people--The ancient modernised--Disillusion followed by delight--Almost a small Paris--Cafés and their merits--Not socially attractive--Friendly equality--Mixture of classes--Inheritance of the past--Interesting streets--Arcades and gables--Lively scenes--People in costume--Picture of Old Spain--Ancient palaces--One especially romantic--The world well lost--Fair Lucia--Where love might reign for ever--Paradise not for this world--Doomed--The last dawn--Inconsolable--Seeking death--Found on the battlefield--A day vision--Few rivals--In the new cathedral--Startling episode--Asking alms--Young and fair--Uncomfortable moment--Terrible story--Fatal chains--"And after?"--How minister to a mind diseased?--Sunshine clouded--Burden of life--Any way of escape?--Suggestions of past centuries--The mighty fallen 329 CHAPTER XXIII. IN ZARAGOZA. Bygone days--Sumptuous roosting--Old exchange--Traders of taste--Glory of Aragon--Cathedral of La Seo--Modernised exterior--Interior charms and mesmerises--Next to Barcelona--Magnifice effect--Parish church--Moorish ceiling--Tomb of Bernardo de Aragon--The old priest--Waxes enthusiastic--Supernatural effect--Statuette of Benedict XIII.--Mysterious chiaroscuro--One exception--Alonza the Warrior--Moorish tiles--Bishop's palace--Frugal meal--Trace of old Zaragoza--Fifteenth century house--Juanita--Streets of the city--Cæsarea Augusta--Worship of the Virgin--Alonzo the Moor--Determined resistance--Days of struggle--Falling--Return to prosperity--Fair maid of Zaragoza--The Aljaferia--Ancient palace of the Moorish kings--Injured by Suchet--Salon of Santa Isabel--Spanish café--Four generations--Lovely voice--Lamartine's _Le Lac_--Recognised--Reading between the lines--Out in the night air--An inspiration--Night vision of El Pilar--In the far future 343 CHAPTER XXIV. THE CANON'S HOSPITALITY. El Pilar by day--In the old cathedral--The canon reproachful--Equal to the occasion--No pressure needed--_Un diner maigre_--Dream of forty years--True to time--Juanita--Fruits of long service--Exploring Juanita's domains--House of magic--"Surely not a fast-day"--Artistic dreams--Who can legislate after death?--Canon's abstinence--Juanita withdraws--Our opportunity--Canon earnest and sympathetic--Eugenie de Colmar--Canon's surprise--An old friend--Truth stranger than fiction--"You will forget the old priest"--Ingratitude not one of our sins--Arivederci--Canon's letter--End of Eugenie's story--En route for Tarragona--Landlord turns up at Lerida--Missing keys--Skeletons floated out to Panama--Domestic drama--Dragon again to the front--Tarragona--Matchless coast scene--Civilised inn--Military element--Haunted house--Mystery unsolved--Distinct elements--Roman and other remains--Dream of the past--Green pastures and sunny vineyards 357 CHAPTER XXV. QUASIMODO. Tarragona by night--Cathedral--Moonlight vision--Dream-fabric--Deserted streets--Ghostly form approaches--Quilp or Quasimodo?--Redeeming qualities--Pale spiritual face--Open sesame--Approaching the apparition--Question and answer--Invitation accepted--Prisoners--The Shadow--Under the cold moonlight--Enter cathedral--Vast interior--Gloom and silence--Fantastic effects--Enigma solved--Strange proceeding--No inspiration--Why Quasimodo turned night into day--Weird moonlight scene--Soft sweet sounds--Schumann's Träumerei--Spellbound--The magician--Witching hour--Cathedral ghosts--An eternity of music--Varying moods--Returning to earth--Quasimodo's rapture--Travelling moonbeams--Night grows old--Sky full of music--Lost to sight--Dreams haunted by Quasimodo--New day 372 CHAPTER XXVI. IN THE DAYS OF THE ROMANS. Charms of Tarragona--Roman traces--Cyclopean remains--Augustus closes Temple of Janus--Great past--House of Pontius Pilate--View from ramparts--Feluccas with white sails set--Life a paradise--City walls--Cathedral outlines--Lively market-place--Remarkable exterior--Dream-world--West doorways--Internal effect--In the cloisters--Proud sacristan--Man of taste and learning--Delighted with our enthusiasm--Great concession--Appealing to the soul--Señor Ancora--Human or angelic?--In the cloister garden--Sacristan's domestic troubles--Silent ecclesiastic--Sad history--Church of San Pablo--Challenge invited--Future genius--Rare picture--Roman aqueduct--A modern Cæsar--Reminiscences--Rich country--Where the best wines are made--Aqueduct--El puente del diablo--Giddy heights--Lonely valley--H. C. sentimental--Rosalie and Fair Costello--Romantic situation--Quarrelsome Reus--Masters of the world--Our driver turns umpire--Battle averted--Men of Reus--Whatever is, is wrong--Driver's philosophy--Dream of the centuries 389 CHAPTER XXVII. LORETTA. Our ubiquitous host--Curious mixture of nations--Francisco--His enthusiasm carries the point--French lessons--English prejudice--Landlord's lament--Days of fair Provence--Francisco determines to be in time--Presidio--Tomb of the Scipios--Fishing for sardines--Early visit to cathedral--Still earlier sacristan--Francisco's delight--Freshness of early morning--Reus--Bark worse than bite--Where headaches come from--An evil deed--Valley of the Francoli--Moorish remains--Montblanch--The graceful hills of Spain--Espluga--Francisco equal to occasion--Beseiged--Donkeys versus carriage--Interesting old town--Decadence--Singular woman--Loretta's escort--Strange story--Unconscious charm--What happened one Sunday evening--Caro--"The right man never came"--Comes now--How she was betrothed--Primitive conveyance--Making the best of it--Wine-pressers--Loving cup--Nectar of the gods--Fair exchange--Rough drive--Scene of Loretta's adventures 405 CHAPTER XXVIII. THE RUINS OF POBLET. A dream-world--Ruins--Chapel of St. George--Archways and Gothic windows--Atmosphere of the Middle Ages--Convent doorway--Summons but no response--Door opens at last--Comfortable looking woman--Ready invention--Confusion worse confounded--True version--Francisco painfully direct--Guardian gets worst of it--Picturesque decay--Gothic cloisters--Visions of beauty--Rare wilderness--King Martin the Humble--Bacchanalian days--When the monks quaffed Malvoisie--Simple grandeur of the church--Philip Duke of Wharton--Cistercian monastery--History of Poblet the monk--Monastery becomes celebrated--Tombs of the kings of Aragon--Guardian sceptical--Paradise or wilderness--Monks all-powerful--Escorial of Aragon--The great traveller--Changing for the worst--Upholding the kingly power--Time rolls on--Downfall--Attacked and destroyed--Infuriated mob--Fictitious treasures--Fiendish act--Massacre--Ruined monastery--Blood-red sunset--Superstition--End of 1835 418 CHAPTER XXIX. LORENZO. Day visions--All passes away--End of the feast--Francisco gathers up the fragments--Ghosts of the past--Outside the monastery--Oasis in a desert--After the vintage--Francisco gleans--Guilty conscience--Custom of country--Dessert--Primitive watering-place--Off to the fair--Groans and lamentations--Sagacious animal--Cause of sorrows--Rage and anger--Donkey listens and understands--A hard life--Washing a luxury--Charity bestowed--Deserted settlement--Quaint interior--Back to the monastery--Invidious comparisons--A promise--Good-bye to Poblet--Troubled sea again--Suffering driver--Atonement for sins--Earns paradise--Wine-pressers again--Rich stores--Good Samaritans--Quaint old town--Bygone prosperity--Lorenzo--Marriage made in heaven--House inspected--On the bridge--At the station--Kindly offer--Glorious sunset--Loretta's good-bye--"What shall it be?"--Flying moments--As the train rolls off. 430 CHAPTER XXX. THE GARDEN OF SPAIN. Charms of Tarragona--Dream of the past--Quasimodo comes not--Of another world--Host's offer--Francisco inconsolable--A mixed sorrow--No more holidays--List of grievances--Fair scene--Luxuriance of the South--Hospitalet--Pilgrims of the Middle Ages--Amposta--Centre of lost centuries--Historical past--Here worked St. Paul--Our fellow-travellers--Undertones--Enter old priest--Draws conclusions--Love's young dream--Impressions and appearances--Not always a priest--Fool's paradise--Youth and age--Awaking to realities--Driven out of paradise--Was it a judgment?--Calmness returns--Judging in mercy--Nameless grave--"Writ in water"--Withdrawing from the world--Entering the Church--Busy life--Romances of the Confessional--"To Eve in Paradise"--Tortosa--Garden of Spain--Vinaroz--Wise mermen--Cradle of history and romance--Gibraltar of the West--a race apart--Benicarlo--Flourishing vineyards--"If the English only knew"--Eve recognises priest--"I am that charming daughter"--Lovely cousin engaged--Count Pedro de la Torre--Mutual recognitions--Congratulations--Breaking news to H. C.--Despair--"To Adam in Hades"--Gallant priest--Saved from temptation 447 CHAPTER XXXI. LOVE'S YOUNG DREAM. First impressions--Devoted to pleasure--Peace-loving--Climate makes gay and lively--New element--Few traces of the past--Old palaces--Steals into the affections--City of the Cid--Ecclesiastical attractions--Archbishopric--University--Homer must nod sometimes--Comparative repose--De Nevada carries us off--Admirable host--Conversational--Grave and gay--Mercy, not sacrifice--Library--At Puzol--Exacting a promise--The hour sounds--Count Pedro appears--Fragrant coffee--Served by magic--Specially prepared temptation--Perverting facts--Land flowing with milk and honey--Inquiring mind--Mighty man of valour--Cid likened to Cromwell--Retribution--Ibn Jehaf the murderer--Reign of terror--The faithful Ximena--Cid's death-blow--Priest turns schoolmaster--"Beware!"--Earthly paradise--Land of consolation--System of irrigation--Famous council--Poetical Granada--No appeal--Apostles' Gate-way--Earth's fascinations--Picturesque peasants--Pretty women--Countess Pedro shakes her head--Leave-taking--Next morning--Quiet activity--Market-day--Splendours of flower-market--Lonja de Seda--Vanishing dream--Audiencia--San Salvador--Antiquity yields to comfort--Convent of San Domingo--Miserere--Impressive ceremony--City of Flowers--Without the walls--Famous river--Change of scene 458 CHAPTER XXXII. OLD ACQUAINTANCES. Port and harbour--Sunday and fresh air--In the market-place--De Nevada protests--A curse of the country--In the days gone by--On the breakwater--Invaded tramcar--De Nevada confirmed--Another crusade needed--Plaza de Toros--In Sunday dress--Domestic interiors--When the play was o'er--Bull-ring at night--Fitful dreams--Fever--Maître d'hôtel prescribes--Magic effect--Depart for Saguntum--Before the days of Rome--Primitive town--Days of the Greeks--Attacked by Hannibal--Rebuilt by the Romans--Absent guardian--The hunchback--Reappears with custodian--Doors open--Moorish fortress--Fathomless cisterns--Sad procession--Weeping mourners--Key of Valencia--Miguella--Time heals all wounds--Proposes coffee--Proud and pleased--Scenes that remain--In Barcelona--Drawing to a close--Sorrow and regret--Many experiences--Our Espluga friends--Loretta's gratitude--In the Calle de Fernando--A last favour--Glories of Spain--Eastern benediction 481 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE INTERIOR OF ZARAGOZA CATHEDRAL _Frontispiece_ PEDRO 23 THE BOULEVARD: GERONA 31 ARCADES: GERONA 42 VIEW OF GERONA FROM THE STONE BRIDGE 43 BANKS OF THE OÑAR: GERONA 47 APOSTLES' DOORWAY, CATHEDRAL: GERONA 51 A FRAGMENT OUTSIDE THE WALLS OF GERONA 59 STREETS IN GERONA 61, 101, 103, 123 ENTRANCE TO MILITARY CLOISTERS: GERONA 65 MILITARY CLOISTERS: GERONA 67 WAITING FOR THE VERDICT 69 CATHEDRAL CLOISTERS: GERONA 75, 109 INTERIOR OF CATHEDRAL: GERONA 79 CLOISTERS OF SAN PEDRO: GERONA 81, 97 APOSTLES' DOORWAY AND BISHOP'S PALACE: GERONA 83 CHURCH OF SAN PEDRO: GERONA 85 DOORWAY OF SAN PEDRO: GERONA 89 DESECRATED CHURCH: GERONA 93 OUTSIDE THE WALLS: GERONA 95 OLD HOUSES ON THE RIVER: GERONA 119, 173 SAN FILIU, FROM WITHOUT THE WALLS: GERONA 163 A GERONA PATIO 169 MARKET PLACE: GERONA 177 THE RAMBLA: BARCELONA 187 INTERIOR OF CORO, GERONA CATHEDRAL 191 PULPIT AND STALLS, BARCELONA CATHEDRAL 195 TWILIGHT IN BARCELONA CATHEDRAL 199 SMALL CLOISTER OR PATIO: BARCELONA 205 CLOISTERS OF SANTA ANNA: BARCELONA 207 CLOISTERS OF SAN PABLO: BARCELONA 209 MONISTROL 217 CHURCH OF MONTSERRAT 231, 239 CLOISTERS OF MONTSERRAT 235 SALVADOR THE MONK 241 VALLEY OF MONTSERRAT 251 A FEW OF THE GIPSIES AT MONTSERRAT 255 MONS SERRATUS IN CLOUDLAND 259 MANRESA 267 MANRESA FROM THE RIVER: MORNING 269 MANRESA FROM THE HILL-SIDE: EVENING 273 ARCADES: LERIDA 291 LERIDA MULES 299 LERIDA 301 WINE-PRESSERS: LERIDA 303 OLD GATEWAYS: LERIDA 309 ENTRANCE TO POBLET 319 OLD CATHEDRAL: LERIDA 323 FAIR LUCIA'S HOUSE: ZARAGOZA 333, 337 BRIDGE AND CATHEDRAL OF EL PILAR: ZARAGOZA 339 AN OLD NOOK IN ZARAGOZA 345 NORTH WALL OF CATHEDRAL: ZARAGOZA 347 TOWER OF LA SEO: ZARAGOZA 351 INTERIOR OF CATHEDRAL, SHOWING CORO AND ORGAN: ZARAGOZA 359 SOUTH-WEST EXTERIOR OF CATHEDRAL: TARRAGONA 373 EAST END OF CATHEDRAL, SHOWING NORMAN APSE: TARRAGONA 377 INTERIOR OF CATHEDRAL: TARRAGONA 381 CLOISTERS: TARRAGONA 385, 393 SAN PABLO: TARRAGONA 397 AN OLD NOOK IN TARRAGONA 399 ROMAN AQUEDUCT, NEAR TARRAGONA 401 ON OUR WAY TO POBLET 415 ENTRANCE TO CLOISTERS: POBLET 421 MONKS' BURIAL GROUND: POBLET 425 RUINS OF POBLET 427, 441 CLOISTERS OF POBLET 431 POBLET, FROM THE VINEYARD 435 ANCIENT GATEWAY: VALENCIA 459 A STREET IN VALENCIA 461 RENAISSANCE TOWER: VALENCIA 469 MARKET PLACE, VALENCIA 473 LONJA DE SEDA: VALENCIA 475 SALON DE CORTES: AUDIENCIA 477 RUINS OF SAGUNTUM 487 BARCELONA 491 COURTYARD OF AUDIENCIA: BARCELONA 495 Know ye the land of the cedar and vine, Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine; Where the light wings of Zephyr, oppress'd with perfume, Wax faint o'er the gardens of Gúl[A] in her bloom; Where the citron and olive are fairest of fruit, And the voice of the nightingale never is mute; Where the tints of the earth, and the hues of the sky, In colour though varied, in beauty may vie, And the purple of ocean is deepest in dye; Where the virgins are soft as the roses they twine, And all, save the spirit of man, is divine? BYRON. GLORIES OF SPAIN. CHAPTER I. AT THE GARE D'ORLÉANS. On Calais quay--At the Custom-house--A lady of the past--Ungallant examiner--Better to reign than serve--Paris--Vanity Fair--Sowing and reaping--Laughing through life--At the Hôtel Chatham--A pleasant picture--In maiden meditation--M. Pascal is wise in his generation--The secrets of the Seine--Notre Dame--Ile St. Louis--A mediæval atmosphere--Victor Hugo--Ghosts of the Hôtel Lambert--H. C. again--His little comedy--M. the Inspector--Outraged ladies--"En voiture, messieurs!"--Mystery not cleared--The Orléanais--La Vendée--Garden of France--A dilemma--Polite Chef de Gare--Crossing the Garonne--Land of corn and wine. The Channel waters were calm and placid as the blue sky above them. Though late autumn the temperature was that of mid-summer. At Calais every one landed as jauntily as though they had just gone through the pleasure of a short yachting trip. As usual there were all sorts and conditions of men and women, and again the curious, the grotesque, the impossible predominated. They streamed across the new quay in a disordered procession, struggling with all that amount of hand-baggage which gets into everyone's way but their own, as they hurry forward to secure for themselves the best seats and most comfortable corners. The Custom-house was over. One ancient lady who stood near us was politely demanded by the examiner if she had cigars, tobacco or brandy to declare. Her flaxen wig seemed to stand on end as she asked if they mistook her for a New Woman: Quaker-like answering one question with another. The examiner received her query _au pied de la lettre_, and earnestly looked at the lady, who, in spite of flaxen wig, rouge, pencilled brows, was of the Past. All his intelligence in his eyes, he replied: "About the same age as the century, I should say, madame;" then marked her packages and turned to the next in waiting. Had those two found themselves alone together, judging from the lady's expression there would have been terrible paragraphs in the next day's papers. As it was she entered one of the waiting trains and we saw her no more. Evidently she had been a beauty in her day, and it is hard to serve where one has reigned. So we steamed on to the gay capital, in her day almost to the modern world what Rome was to the ancient. And if not altogether that now, who has she to thank but herself? Nations like people must reap as they sow. Yet, whirling through the broad thoroughfares, we felt she still holds her own. Nowhere such floods of light, turning night into day, making one blink like owls in the sunshine. Nowhere shops so resplendent that a Jew's ransom would not purchase them. Nowhere such a Vanity Fair crowded with a light-hearted people, who dance through the world to the tune of _Away with Melancholy!_ Passing from the Gare du Nord, the brilliant boulevards were full of life and movement. Our coachman turned into the Rue Daunou and brought up at the Hôtel Chatham: quiet, comfortable, but like all Parisian hotels terribly in want of air. The manager received us with as much attention as though we had arrived for six months instead of a couple of hours, in order to fortify ourselves for the night journey southwards. The salle-à-manger opened its hospitable doors, disclosing a number of small tables, snow-white cloths, sparkling glass and silver; a pleasant vision. Richly dressed ladies, blazing with jewels, fanned themselves with lazy grace. In a quiet corner sat two quiet people, evidently mother and daughter, since the one must have been twenty years ago what the other was now. They were English, as one saw and heard, for we were at the next table. No other country could produce that fair specimen of girlhood; no other country own that lovely face, gentle voice, refined tones: charms of inheritance, destined one day to translate some happy swain to fields Elysian, where the sands of life are golden and run swiftly. Then came up our cunning _maître-d'hôtel_, portly and commanding, deigned to glance at the wine card we held, and went in for a little diplomacy. "A bottle of your excellent '87 St. Julien, M. Pascal;" knowing the wine of old. "Ah, if monsieur only knew, the Château d'Irrac is superior." "Is it possible?" incredulous but yielding. "Then let it be Château d'Irrac." And presently we realised that the '87 St. Julien was growing low in the cellar, whilst many bins of Château d'Irrac cried out to be consumed. We sent for the great man and confided our suspicions, adding, "You cannot compare the two wines." "Monsieur donc knows the St. Julien? Ah," with a keener glance, "I had not remarked. I ask a thousand pardons of monsieur. After all, it is a matter of taste. The Château d'Irrac is much appreciated--especially by the English. Monsieur will allow me to change the wine?" _Amende honorable_, but not accepted; and the Château d'Irrac remained. Presently we entered upon our longer drive to the Gare d'Orléans. Paris had put up her shutters and toned down her illuminations. Shops were closed, lights were out, Vanity Fair had disappeared. The streets grew more and more empty. Our driver found his way to the river and went down the quays, where on summer evenings lovers of old books spend hours examining long rows of stalls, on which sooner or later every known and unknown literary treasure makes its appearance. Perhaps he was a man who liked the tragic side of life--and where is it more suggested than on the banks of the Seine? Night after night its turbid waters close over the heads of the rashly despairing. The ghastly Morgue is weighted with secrets. Every bridge is surrounded by an atmosphere of sighs. One last look upon the world, the sky, the quiet stars, then the fatal plunge into the silent waters, and another soul has risked the unknown. Once more in the darkness uprose the outlines of Notre Dame in all the beauty of Gothic refinement; all the delicate lacework and flying buttresses subdued and dreamlike under the night sky. Who can look upon this architectural wonder without thinking of those historical, twelfth-century days when the first stone was laid, and it slowly rose to perfection? All the centuries that have since rolled on, changing and destroying much of its charm? The perils it went through and did not altogether escape in those terrible days of '93 when, condemned, it was saved by a miracle? That Age of Reason, which drove half the excitable Frenchmen of Paris stark staring mad. How can we haunt these precincts without thinking of their high priest Victor Hugo, who loved them as Scott and Burns loved their wholesomer banks and braes? Everywhere uprises a vision of the old grey-headed man as we remember him, with pale heavy face, grave earnest manner, deep thoughtful eyes, and on the surface, so little that was light, excitable and French; for ever pondering upon the mysteries of life, human suffering and endurance, broken destinies. His face looks at you from every dark and vacant window in the neighbouring Ile St. Louis. The shadows of Notre Dame fall upon its mediæval roofs; the dark waters of the river wash their foundations, and sometimes flood them also. If they could only whisper their secrets of human sin and suffering, that great army of martyrs who have died, not in defence of the good but in consequence of the evil, the world would surely dissolve and disappear. Many a time has he stood contemplating these problems, planning the destinies of his characters, from the windows of the Hôtel Lambert. Its painted ceilings recall the days of Lebrun, and up and down the old staircases and deserted corridors one hears the cynical laugh of Voltaire and the tripping footsteps of Madame de Châtet. We left this delightful and romantic atmosphere behind us as our driver pursued his way down the right bank of the Seine. Another world, inhabited by another people. Darkness reigned; lamps were few and far between; the roar of the great city sounded afar off, and amidst that roar dwelt all the rank and fashion, wealth and intrigue, that turn the heaven-sent manna to ashes of the Dead Sea fruit. Presently he crossed a bridge and there was a flash of lamps upon the dark waters below. The Seine was pursuing her relentless course, carrying her burden of sorrows to the far-off sea, burying them in the ocean of eternity, recording them in the books of heaven. A few moments more, and at the Gare d'Orléans we dismissed our man with his _pourboire_. We were in good time, and had the place almost to ourselves. "Le train n'est pas encore fait, monsieur," said a polite official. "Ah! there it comes. You will not be over-crowded to-night, I imagine." Good hearing, for a night journey in a full train without a reserved carriage means martyrdom. We marked our seats, then walked up and down the lighted platform. It was nearly ten o'clock and passengers were arriving. Presently, missing H. C., we turned and saw him at the lower end of the train examining the last carriage. What did it mean? Evidently mischief of some sort. The hundred-and-one occasions rose up before us in which we had saved him from ladies with matrimony on the brain, from intrigues, from his susceptible self. Only a year ago there had been that narrow escape in the Madrid hotel with the siren who had married the Russian count. He saw us coming, turned and met us with laughter. What now? "Come and see," placing his arm in ours. "But don't interfere with the liberty of the subject. I will not be controlled. You shall no longer find me weak and yielding as in other years." All this went in at one ear and out at the other, as the saying runs. Silence is the best reply to incipient rebellion. At the last carriage the mystery was solved. In one compartment sat two lovely ladies, waiting the departure of the train to draw down the blinds and settle themselves for the night. H. C. silently pointed to the label, which said: _Pour Fumeurs._ Fortune seemed to favour his humour for we had seldom seen the announcement on a French carriage. Then he went on to the next compartment. Three young men had entered and were laughing, talking, blowing clouds of smoke. This was labelled _Pour Dames Seules_. H. C. had quietly changed the iron labels and turned the world upside down. The inmates were in blissful ignorance of the frightful thing that had happened. "We had no time for the theatre to-night, yet I had a mind for a little comedy," said H. C. "Now we have it on the spot, and without paying. I had such trouble to ram the plaques into the grooves that they will never come out again. Here comes the inspector--evidently not to be trifled with; exactly the man for the occasion. Now for it." We trembled as the great man approached, each particular hair standing on end, the pallor of death on our cheek. Appearances would have condemned us. H. C., on the other hand, looked innocence itself. Suddenly the inspector gave a start, exactly reproduced in us; on his part, astonishment and indignation; on ours, nervous terror. Then the door of the compartment was thrown open and the scene began. The inspector's powerful bass voice made itself felt and heard. "Gentlemen," in his deepest diapason, "what is the meaning of this? How dare you enter a compartment reserved _For Ladies Only_, fill it with vile smoke, and treat with contempt the rules of our organisation department? For this, gentlemen," waxing wrath and perhaps overstating his case, "I could fine and summons you--and believe I should be justified in handing you over to the _Police Correctionnelle_. Your act is infamous--and no doubt designed." Instead of pouring oil upon troubled waters, the young men were combative and defiant. "Qu'est-ce que vous nous chantez là?" said one. "Surely, my dear inspector, your sight is failing--time rolls on, you know; or you cannot read; or you have dined too well. But if you have your senses about you and examine the plaque closely, you will see that it states: _For Smokers._ And we are smokers. My compliments to you, Monsieur the famous Inspector. Like Dumas, we are here and we remain." "Very good," said H. C. innocently looking on. "As a scene at the Vaudeville it would bring down the house and make the fortune of the piece. You ought to be grateful for this little distraction, but you don't look it. All was done so easily and develops so naturally." The inspector listened whilst this fuel was being added to the fire of his wrath. "We will see about that," he said. "Come out this instant and read for yourself." He grasped the arm of the young man. As he was strong and the youth weak, the result was that Dumas' famous saying fell to the ground and he with it. In a moment he stood upon the platform and read the fatal notice. "But it is conjuring, it is a miracle!" he cried. "I can assure you, Monsieur the Inspector, that before entering I read the label with my own eyes--we all did. Anatole--de Verriers--I appeal to you for confirmation. It positively stated _For Smokers_. No, oh no, I am certain of it--and I have _not_ dined too well," laughing in spite of himself. "For Ladies only! It is too good a joke. I assure you we want a quiet night's rest; we don't want to be disturbed by the gentle snoring of the fair sex. An enemy hath done this. Tenez, Monsieur the Inspector," going to the next carriage and reading the label: "look at that. There are the innocent conspirators calmly seated in the compartment. The ladies themselves have done this. I was wrong in saying it was an enemy, for are we not all friends of the lovelier sex? But take my word for it, they are the culprits. Remark how unconscious they look; one sees it is too natural to be real--it is assumed. Poor ladies! They are nervous, perhaps, and want a safeguard about them during the perilous night journey. Or it may be that they even like smoking. After all, it is an innocent little ruse on their part to attain a very harmless end." "Innocent, sir! harmless!" cried the outraged and perplexed inspector. "We will see!" He approached the compartment, threw wide the door, addressed the ladies severely, as became his office, but tempered with respect and admiration, as became a man. "How is this, ladies?" to the startled women. "Allow me to inform you that it is not _convenable_ for members of your sex to deliberately compose themselves for the night in a compartment labelled _For Smokers_." "What!" cried the ladies in a breath. "_For Smokers?_ _Quel horreur!_ Monsieur the Inspector, you must be mad, or you have dined too well--_l'un ou l'autre_. _For Smokers!_ Why, we are horrified at smoke. It makes me cough, it makes my companion sneeze, it gets into our hair, it ruins our complexion. Monsieur the Inspector," shaking out their ruffled plumage, "this is an infamous accusation. We feel ourselves insulted. We shall appeal to the Chef de Gare. You had better at once say that we have done this thing ourselves, whilst the culprits are no doubt those three young men who are laughing behind your back. You have attacked our reputation and we will pursue the matter. When we entered this compartment it was labelled _For Ladies Only_, and if you will examine the plaque with sober senses you will find it still reads _For Ladies Only_." "Mesdames," returned the bewildered inspector, "I will trouble you to alight and read for yourselves. No one shall accuse me of dining too well with impunity; and no one, not even such charming women as yourselves, shall exact an apology for an offence never committed." Apparently there was nothing else for it. The ladies gracefully alighted, assisted by the gallant but uncompromising inspector, and the fatal words stared them in the face. "But it is conjuring, it is a miracle!" they cried breathlessly, just as the young men had cried. "An enemy hath done this, Monsieur the Inspector, and the enemy is represented by those three young men who doubtless look upon it as a _petite plaisanterie_. But if there is law in the land they shall suffer for it. It is nothing more or less than an outrage to our feelings. In the meantime, Monsieur the Inspector, not to delay the train, have the kindness to change back the labels to their right positions, and put those three young men under the surveillance of the guard." "If it is the last word we ever speak we are guiltless in this matter," protested the young men. "Mephistopheles is no doubt on the platform in disguise"--here we felt a nudge from H. C. and a whispered "Complimentary!"--"but we beg to say that we are not Fausts, and we have no reason to suppose these ladies are Marguerites." The outraged ladies were absolutely speechless with anger; twice they opened their mouths but no sound would come. And as the train was now about to start, there was nothing for it but to re-enter their compartment. The young men did likewise. The doors were closed. The inspector tried to remove the offending labels. They would not budge. He brought all his strength to bear upon them, but they were fixed as the stars in their course. If Mephistopheles had been at work, he had done his work well. The plaques might have been soldered in their sockets. The inspector was guilty of language not quite parliamentary. He felt mystified, baffled; the whole thing was inexplicable. There came a cry down the platform: "En voiture, messieurs!" Our own carriage was some way off; we went up and entered, hiring pillows for the night. Final doors were slammed; the train moved off. And the ladies were in a compartment labelled _For Smokers_, and the three young men had to themselves the carriage _Pour Dames Seules_. They must have been laughing immoderately, for the inspector shook his fist as they slowly rolled away; and the shake said as plainly as though we had heard the words: "There go the culprits! Ah, _scélérats!_ If I only had you now in my grasp!" The young men must have interpreted the action in like manner, for the window was suddenly put down and three hands waved him a derisive farewell. We rolled away in the darkness. The lights of Paris grew faint and dreamy, then went out. All the old familiar landmarks were invisible, and when we crossed the Seine not a star was reflected in its deep dark waters. As the night went on we passed through the glorious country of the Orléanais, washed by the waters of the historical and romantic Loire. Who that has gone down its broad winding course can forget the charms of its ancient towns? The halo surrounding Orléans, the pure accents of Tours, the architectural wonders of Loches--home of the Plantagenets--its towers and churches visible even under the stars; and beyond Nantes, the gentle splendours of La Vendée. Porters in the darkness of night shouted "Orléans!" and we felt in the very garden of France, where nature is so bountiful that the labour of man is hardly needed to bring forth the fruits of the earth. In these sunny provinces dwell the happiest, most light-hearted of her sons. The earth abundantly furnishes their daily bread and wine. It comes without trouble and is eaten without care. Night and darkness rolled away. We approached Bordeaux. Last year, at this same hour, about this same time, we had found it enveloped in mist, had made the acquaintance of Monsieur le Comte San Salvador de la Veronnière, and wondered how his small body bore the weight of its majestic name. But the wind is tempered to the shorn lamb and the back is fitted to the burden. This time there was no comte and no mist. We had watched the dawn break and a glorious sunrise turn fleecy clouds into flaming swords. The earth awoke and the lovely woods and forests, with their wealth of fern and bracken, were touched with rosy glowing light as the sun shot above the horizon. Just before reaching Bordeaux we made a discovery. A secret impulse urged us to examine our luggage-ticket, and we were electrified at finding it registered to Irun instead of Portbou. Steaming into the crazy old station, we found out the station-master, and explained the difficulty. He was politeness itself, and once more we could not help contrasting the courtesy of the French officials with the less agreeable manners of the Spanish. "This would have been serious," said M. le Chef. "I am glad you found it out in time. After Bordeaux it would have been too late. You and your luggage would have gone your separate ways." Then calling a porter, he handed him the ticket, bade him search the luggage-vans and bring away the numbers indicated. "A little against the rules," said the Chef smiling; "but life is full of inevitable exceptions, and because we stick to too much red tape, and will not recognise the need of exceptions, half life's worries occur." Evidently our Chef was a philosopher, and fortunately a man of common-sense. Presently up came the porter. His search had been successful. The luggage was re-registered for Portbou, and we had the satisfaction of thanking M. le Chef for sparing us an awkward dilemma. "Monsieur," he replied, with a finished French bow, "it is a pleasure to be of use, and I am always at your disposition." The train left the station and crossed the lordly Garonne. Nothing in the way of river could look more majestic, with all the light of the sky and all the blue of the heavens reflected on its broad surface. Once more we were dazzled by the rich splendour of the autumn tints, glories of colour. In the vineyards the deep purple leaves still lingered upon the branches. White farmhouses, with their green shutters, red-tiled roofs, strings of yellow Indian maize, heaps of pumpkins and cantaloupe melons, stood out in striking contrast with the landscape. Many a vine-laden porch threw its lights and shades upon walls and pavement. Many a field was picturesque with ploughing-oxen. A hardy son of the South guided the furrow, and a woman with red or blue handkerchief tied round the head, followed, sowing the seed. One only wanted twilight and the angelus bell to complete the scene's devotion. All this we had found a year ago. Nothing was altered--it seemed as yesterday. But now we were changing our direction, and going east instead of westward. Last year Irun and St. Sebastian; now Gerona and Barcelona the bright and pleasant, for ever associated with Majorca the beautiful and beloved. CHAPTER II. A NARBONNE HOSTESS. Carcassonne--In feudal times--Simon de Montfort--Canal du Midi--L'Âge d'or et le Grand Monarque--A modern Golden Fleece--One of earth's fair scenes--Choice of evils--M. le Chef yields--Narbonne--A woman of parts--The course of true love runs smooth--_Diner de contrat_--Honey _versus_ the _lune de miel_--Madame's philosophy--_L'Allée des Soupirs_--An unfinished cathedral--At the gloaming hour--Mystery and devotion--The Hôtel de Ville--A domestic drama--High festival and champagne--The next morning--H. C. repentant--Madame at her post--Ambrosial breakfast--"Il faut payer pour ses plaisirs"--Dramatic exit--Perpignan--Home of the kings of Majorca--Elne--"Adieu, ma chère France!"--Over the frontier--Gerona--Crowded platform--What H. C. thought--Unpoetical incident--From the sublime to the ridiculous. The hours went on and the sun declined, and we looked upon the wonderful old city of Carcassonne. Rising out of the plain the great limestone rock was crowned by this fortress of the Middle Ages, its walls and round towers clearly outlined against the blue sky. These enclose a dead world given up to the poor and struggling. Its steep, narrow streets have no longer the faintest echo of military glories. The inner walls date back to the Visigothic kings; the foundations of some of the towers are Roman, but nothing of the outer walls seems later than the twelfth century. Here in 1210 the army of crusaders under Simon de Montfort laid siege, the cruel Abbot of Citeaux most determined of the enemy. The massacre at Béziers had just taken place, de Montfort foremost in eagerness to shed blood. Some had escaped to this little City of Refuge, amongst them the brave Vicomte de Béziers: one of those men of whom the world has seen not a few, saving lives at the cost of their own. The little fortress unable to hold out was taken, and again the massacre was terrible, Béziers himself dying in prison after great suffering. A hundred and fifty years later it more successfully resisted the Black Prince, who, after scattering terror right and left in the plains of Languedoc, found that he had to retire from these walls baffled and mortified. To-day they still stand, the most perfect mediæval monument in France. The new town lies in the plain, quietly industrious as the old is silent and dead, modern and commonplace as the other is ancient and romantic. Trees overshadow the boulevards, costly fountains plash through the hot days and nights of summer, running streams make the air musical and reflect the sapphire skies. On one side runs the great Canal du Midi, Canal des deux Mers, as it is called, uniting the Mediterranean with the Atlantic. Two hundred and fifty years ago it was one of the finest engineering works in the world, and perhaps would never have been finished but for the encouragement of le Grand Monarque, prime mover in that _âge d'or_ when the literary firmament was studded with such stars of the first order as Molière, Corneille, Lafontaine, Bossuet, Fénélon, Pascal, and last, not least, Madame de Sevigné. There came a crowd of splendours, a succession of startling events, into that lengthened reign, our own Marlborough taking his part in such decisive battles as Blenheim and Malplaquet. This Canal du Midi, reflecting the outlines of Carcassonne, added much to the trade of Southern France. If that has declined amidst the world's chances and changes, its numerous barges plying to and fro with sails set to the evening breeze and the setting sun, still form one of earth's most rare and beautiful scenes, full of calm repose. Corn and wine and oil are their freights; rich Argosies commanded by many a modern Jason, carrying many a Golden Fleece to the fair and flourishing towns that lie in its path between the tideless shores of the Levant and the restless waters of Biscay. On the other side of the town runs the River Aude, also reflecting the ancient outlines of Carcassonne in waters less placid than those of the great Canal. This takes its way through a fertile valley given up to vines and olives, fig-trees and pomegranates; and here flock crowds of invalids to the mineral baths and waters, penances due to indiscretions of the table or sins of their forefathers. Our train rolled over both these waterways on its journey towards Narbonne. By this time we had realised that we had been misinformed as to the hour we should reach Gerona, our first resting-place, adding one more record to the chapter of small accidents. At Narbonne we had the good fortune to find a Chef de Gare civil and obliging as he of Bordeaux, who declared it impossible to reach Gerona that day as there was no railway communication. We should have to spend the night at Portbou, the Spanish frontier, where our quarters would be wretched, and all our sweet turn to bitter against those who had misled us. We decided at once. "Better remain where there is a good inn, than go on to the miseries of Portbou, Monsieur le Chef." "That is clear," he replied. "Here you will be comfortable--and on French ground," laughing: "a virtue in my eyes, and I hope in yours also." We willingly agreed. "But our luggage? It is registered to Portbou." He looked grave. "That is unfortunate; it must go on to Portbou. I cannot give it to you. It is against all rules, and I greatly regret it." "Yet we cannot do without it. If you send it on to Portbou, we cannot remain behind. Have you the heart to consign us to that _chambre de tortures?_" He paused a moment, revolving the momentous situation. "No," he laughed at length, "I cannot do that, and for once will make an exception in your favour. Advienne que pourra, you shall have your luggage." Then in the kindest way he personally superintended the matter, delayed the train until the luggage was found, and carried out sundry forms necessary for the next day's journey. We discovered very little in Narbonne to repay our change of plans, but the hotel was comfortable and the energetic landlady a character worth studying. Grass never grew under her feet. She seemed gifted with ubiquity, and startled one by her rapid movements. A capable woman, who made her little world work with a will, wound them up and set them going. If the machinery flagged, she at once applied the master-key of her energy, and the wheels went on again. To-day she was on her mettle, as she informed us, having a large wedding dinner on hand. "To-night was the _diner de contrat_, to-morrow the _diner de noce_. A hundred and fifty people would sit down to it, and she expected great conviviality." Nor was she disappointed, if the noise we heard later on was any sign of festive enjoyment. Loud laughter, applause, healths pledged, good wishes bestowed--all indicated the state of the assembled guests. Madame had taken us into the banquet-room to prove that she was capable of decorating her table very effectively. Glass and silver glittered under the rays of light; flowers perfumed the air; orange-trees stood in corners, fruit and flowers mingled their delights. We asked for whom all this extensive preparation. "The daughter of an innkeeper, with a magnificent dowry, was marrying one of the most popular doctors of the place. But it was really a mariage d'amour, not merely de convenance. Les mariés were both delightful. One hardly knew which to congratulate the most. In short, it was one of those rare events in life when the social sky is without a cloud." Madame was almost poetical in her enthusiasm. But she was no less practical, and it was wonderful how everything went smoothly under her guidance. "Narbonne, famous for its honey." We seemed to remember this as one of our geography lines in days gone by. "But where was the honey?" we asked during the course of our own dinner, which madame was quite equal to in spite of the greater ceremony on hand. "You may well ask," placing upon the table a choice bottle of the vin-du-pays, which she saw unsealed and uncorked by one of her officials who had just been wound up again and was flying about the room like a firework. "You may well ask, monsieur. No house so badly supplied with coals as the charbonnier, and in Narbonne we see little of our own honey. Like the fish in a seaport, it is all sent away, and you will find more of it in Paris than here. But I will try to unearth a jar from my stores." Apparently the quest was unsuccessful, for no honey appeared. Or it may be that in contemplating the _lune de miel_ in the garlanded banqueting-room the more material article was lost sight of. With one hundred and fifty people on her brain, no wonder if small matters were forgotten. And yet madame seemed of those who forget nothing, her faculties embracing both wide organisation and minute detail. A thin, wiry woman, with a quick walk and a light step, dark eyes that nothing escaped, yet without tyranny or sharpness of manner. Only once did we hear her rebuking one of her waiters for the sin of procrastination. "Leave nothing till to-morrow that can be done to-day," she wound up with, "or you will soon find the world ahead and you left behind in the race. Those are the people that come to poverty and have only themselves to thank for it. That, monsieur," turning to us who waited a direction, "is the reason we cannot very much help what are called the poor. Some great failing brings them to that condition--laziness, stupidity or vice, and your aid will never give them energy, wisdom or virtue." Then the direction we asked for was bestowed, and the erring waiter ordered to show us the way to the cathedral. In the town we found very little that was not ordinary and common-place. It is ancient, its streets are badly paved and tortuous, and it possesses scarcely anything in the way of picturesque outlines, nothing in the way of Roman remains. Yet it flourished as far back as the fifth century B.C., and in the first century was in the hands of the Romans, great in theatres, baths, temples, and triumphal arches. Of these not a vestige has survived. It was one of the great ports of the Mediterranean, which flowed up to its foundations, but has gradually receded some eight miles. From one of the great towers of the Hôtel de Ville you may trace the outlines of the Cevennes and Pyrenees on the one side, on the other watch the broad blue waters shimmering in the sunshine, more beautiful than a dream in their deep sapphire; you may count the white-winged boats sailing lazily to and fro upon its flashing surface; and on still, dark nights, when the stars are large and brilliant, watch the lights of fishing fleets clustered together, and hear upon the shore the gentle plash of this tideless sea. On such summer nights the _Allée des Soupirs_ is the favourite walk of the people. Whence its sad, romantic name? Has it seen many sorrows? Do ghosts of the past haunt it with long-drawn sighs? Has it had more than its share of Abelards and Héloïses, Romeos and Juliets? Has some sorrowful Atala been borne under its branches to a desert grave, some Dante mourned here his lost Beatrice, some Petrarch his Laura? We knew not, and turning from it climbed the ill-paved streets towards the Cathedral--a Cathedral no longer, for Narbonne, once an Archbishopric, has been shorn of ecclesiastical dignity. As far as it went, we found it a fine, interesting, but unfinished Gothic building of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Little beyond the choir exists--a splendid fragment, but a fragment only. It might have been one of the world's wonders. We entered for the second time in the gloaming, when its great height was lost in shadows. A few lights about the church and on the altar deepened the mystery. A few kneeling figures motionless at their devotions added their quiet pathos to the scene. From the end of the choir it had the effect of a vast church infinitely impressive. An immense nave with aisles and pillars and vaulted roofs might stretch behind us. Such was the intention of the architect, but his plans were not carried out. In reality there was nothing. Within a few feet came the narrow outer passage and the dead wall of the west front; but in the darkness all this was not realised. We only saw the splendid choir, vast height, graceful outlines, groined roof, pointed arches, and slender pillars, steeped in the mystery and shadow of a dim religious light by the few candles gleaming here and there like faint stars in the night. Some of the painted glass was beautiful, as we had seen earlier in the day, and much of the sixteenth century flamboyant tracery was very good. There were many fine tombs and statues. The Gothic Hôtel de Ville close by is partly modern. A portion of it formed the ancient Archbishop's Palace, and some of this remains, more especially the old towers. The courtyard has a few interesting outlines, and the staircase leading to the museum is of broad, massive marble. Up and down these stairs and corridors was once wont to pass the proud footstep of a primate, with head erect under the cardinal's red hat, whilst the rustle of silken robes, white and scarlet, whispered of greatness and vanity. It now shines by the light of other days. All its pomp and pride has vanished; dead, silent and deserted, its glory has been transferred to Toulouse, now the Archbishop's See. We discovered the ancient dame who keeps the keys of the Museum. She dwells in almost an underground room of the building, a distant wing in the garden, where in days gone by the Archbishop paced and meditated in the seclusion of impenetrable walls. Looking upwards nothing would arrest the eye but the far-off serene sky and unfinished fragment of the Cathedral. It is still a grey, venerable pile, this wing, silent and empty. But in the quiet little lodge of the custodian hearts still beat to the tune of life's small dramas. A slight altercation was going on. The dame was laying down the law to a young man, evidently her son. What the transgression we could not tell. Possibly debt, and he had come to draw upon the hard-earned savings in the chimney-corner: a sort of mental and moral earthquake to the frugal mother-mind. Perhaps he was announcing his marriage with one who would make him a bad wife. Or he had grown tired of his narrow world, and pleaded to cross the seas and begin life on a new soil. Whatever it might be, he departed looking very much as if he too had his burden to bear. In passing he saluted, and said, "Bonjour, messieurs," and his looks were comely and his voice was pleasant. He had the air of a sailor, and possibly was a fisherman from the little port eight miles off. When he had disappeared beyond the trees, the old mother, who must also have been comely in her day, took the keys and led the way up the broad marble staircase to the Museum. The shades of evening were gathering, and our visit would almost have been lost labour had there been anything else to do. It was too dark to judge fairly, but amidst a great amount of rubbish we thought we discovered a few good old pictures. Long after the sun had set and the afterglow had faded, we went back to the hotel and madame's hospitable attentions. She was determined we should not suffer from the demands of the banquet. The whole corridor was now lined with orange trees, whose sheeny green leaves stood out in strong contrast with some strings of red peppers she had artistically festooned against the walls; so that from the entrance to the dining-room the procession would walk through an avenue of peace and plenty. The effect was charming. Nothing could be more beautiful than the luscious perfumed blossoms, richer than the deep foliage, more picturesque than the scented golden fruit hanging gracefully from the branches. As night went on, the sounds of merriment grew louder. Champagne could not run like water without leading to noisy if not brilliant wit. A hundred and fifty sons and daughters of sunny Southern France might be trusted to make the most of their opportunity. We left them to their rites when by-and-by the clock struck ten, lights began to burn dim, and we realised that a sleepless night in the train is more or less trying. Bidding madame _le bonsoir_, who flashed to and fro like lightning, yet was neither hurried nor flurried, she politely returned us _la bonne nuit_; adding, with a certain dry humour, that after all she was glad marriages were not an everyday occurrence--at any rate from her hotel. If profitable, they were fatiguing. Next morning we rose before dawn. The man came in, lighted our candles, and said it was time to rise. We thought we had slept five minutes; the unconscious hours had passed too quickly. Overnight we had settled to take an early train, and devote a few hours to Perpignan; hours of enforced waiting on our way to Gerona. After an amount of rapping and calling that might have roused the dead, H. C. had risen, lighted his own candles, and protested by going back to bed and to slumber. Fortunately the man went up to his room half an hour after, and seeing the state of affairs upset the fire-irons, knocked down a couple of chairs, and opened the window with a rattle. "Are those wedding people still at it?" murmured H. C., in his dreams. "It must be past midnight." Then consciousness dawned upon him and the full measure of his iniquity; and presently he came down to a late breakfast, subdued and repentant. Early as it was, madame was at her post, brisk and wide-awake as though yesterday had been nothing but a very ordinary fête-day. It was that uncomfortable hour when the early morning light creeps in, and candles and gas-lamps show pale and unearthly. The room looked chilly and forsaken; that last-night aspect that is always so ghostlike and unfamiliar. A white mist hung over the outer world. Then the most comforting thing on earth made its triumphant entry--a brimming teapot; and with the addition of tea tabloids a fine brew of the cup which cheers sent our mental barometer to fair weather. We were even admitted to the internal economy of the establishment. In came the baker with a basket of steaming rolls giving out a delicious odour of bread fresh from the oven; and with new-churned butter--the last we tasted for many a long day--we made an ambrosial breakfast. In a few minutes, madame cloaked and bonneted, came up to wish us bon voyage, with a hope that we should again visit Narbonne. Nothing is certain in this world or we should have told her it was a very forlorn hope. "I have to go to market," she said, "and the sooner I am there the better my choice of provisions. To-day, too, I have my _diner de noce_, and must be back early. _Vraiment, c'est une charge!_ Ah! they amused themselves last night! What headaches to-day, je parie, in spite of the excellence of the wines. _Enfin! Il faut payer pour ses plaisirs._" "But, madame, you are perpetual motion. You go to bed late--if you go to bed at all, which we begin to doubt--and rise up early. This morning you look as fresh as a rose. Have you the gift of eternal youth?" Madame was not above a compliment, and smiled her pleasure. "Quant il y a de la bonne volonté--" she laughed. "There is the whole secret. And now, au revoir, messieurs. Bon voyage. Portez vous bien. My best wishes go with you." "Au revoir, on one condition, madame. That the next time we come you present us without fail with a pot of Narbonne honey." Madame uttered a cry, fell back a pace or two, struck her forehead reproachfully, and disappeared like a flash into the street. Up rattled the omnibus, absorbing ourselves and our traps. Narbonne was of the past. A short journey landed us at an early hour at Perpignan. We had passed nothing very interesting on the road, for just here the sunny South seems to have stayed her bountiful hand. The low bare outlines of the rocky Corbières were traced, and great stretches of heath where bees gathered the famous honey we were not permitted to enjoy. Here and there were immense salt lakes, giving the country a flooded appearance, bringing fever to the neighbourhood. Once, years ago, passing these endless lake districts in the night, weird, solemn, mysterious, we wondered what they could be. One saw nothing but a world under water, reflecting the stars; occasionally the black outline of some small boat with the flash of a low-lying lamp streaming over its surface. And presently, this morning, there was the blue Mediterranean to make up for all other shortcomings. Then Perpignan. This time we separated from our old-man-of-the-sea; the baggage went on to Portbou to await our afternoon arrival. We felt we ought to know Perpignan, and with affection, for it was once the residence of the kings of Majorca. But that was seven hundred years ago, and it has gone through many changes at the hands of many masters. For centuries it belonged to Spain, and still looks more Spanish than French. Only in the middle of the seventeenth century was it finally annexed to France by Richelieu. In summer its narrow streets are covered with awnings, many of its buildings are moresque, and its houses have the iron and wooden courts and balconies so common to Spain. Some of its thoroughfares are picturesque and arcaded, and every now and then you come upon an assemblage of wonderful roofs with their red tiles, gorgeous creepers, and enormous vines; but they are the exception. It is strongly fortified, and some of the old gateways are interesting. In days gone by these fortifications were needed, for Perpignan was the great point of defence in the Eastern Pyrenees between Spain and France. The Cathedral is chiefly famous for the immense span of its vault. In this it resembles Majorca, but is infinitely less beautiful. Though larger, Perpignan seemed still more quiet and dead than Narbonne. We soon exhausted its merits, and the hour for departure found us ready. At the moment we were in the great courtyard of the inn watching the chef in white cap and apron at a small table on the opposite side, enjoying his dessert and hour of repose, to which coffee and cognac formed the conclusion. For that hour he was a gentleman of leisure and had earned his ease. There was no time to visit Elne with its old Romanesque Cathedral and cloisters worth a king's ransom; and keen was the regret as we passed it in the train, and noticed its decayed aspect and wonderful outlines rising above the town like a rare twelfth-century vision. Here Hannibal encamped on his way to Rome. Here came Constantine and named it Elena in memory of his mother. Here the Emperor Constantine was assassinated by order of Maxentius. Here came the Moors in the eighth century, the Normans in the eleventh, the kings of France in the thirteenth, fifteenth, and seventeenth centuries; all more or less destructive in their changes. And now it remains a small dead town; grass grows in its streets, where eternal silence reigns. Passing away, we noted how its clear outlines stood out against the blue sky of the South, whilst beyond it stretched the sapphire waters of the Levant. The train hurried on, and at Cerbère we bade farewell to pleasant France: a language that rings music in our ears; a people for whom we have a sincere affection. In the space of a few yards we seemed to pass from one country and people and tongue to another. At Cerbère nothing but French was heard. A few minutes afterwards, at Portbou, we spoke in French to one of the officials, who listened to the end, shook his head, and gruffly said "No entendo." We had entered Spain--land of slow trains, abrupt officials, many discomforts, but of romance and beauty. Once more we thought fate was to be against us. As inevitably as the slippers turned up in the Eastern story, so it seemed that our luggage was destined to be the _bête noire_ of our wanderings. [Illustration: PEDRO.] "You wish to go to Gerona," said the station-master; "but your ticket only states Barcelona. If you break your journey at Gerona, your luggage must go on to the farther town." Again we protested--and again conquered. "For once I yield and make you an exception," said the chef; "but you will have trouble at Gerona." All this had taken time, and the train moved off as we entered. At eight o'clock we reached Gerona, and even in the darkness could see its wonderful outlines; its countless reflections in the river that rolled below. The station was in an uproar. Crowds of people, young men and old, surged to and fro. Deafening shouts arose. What was the matter, and what could it mean? We gave a shrewd guess. Conscripts were going off, and all this crowd and noise was a farewell ovation, in which the conscripts joined uproariously. On the platform we almost fell against two stalwart old men, who stood conspicuously above the multitude. Each had evidently come to see a son off. One was especially a typical Catalonian, with strongly marked features, broad-brimmed hat, and picturesque costume. His friend called him Pedro. They had probably grown up and grown old together, and life, youth and the heritage of the world were being handed on to the boys--who no doubt troubled themselves very little about the matter. We made way into the luggage-room. "Ah!" cried the porter, looking at our tickets. "This is incorrect and cannot be passed." And he turned to the superintendent. "Diablo!" cried the latter impatiently. "Do you think I can be troubled with luggage on such a night as this? Take it where the gentlemen desire you! Maldicion!" Saved once more. As we walked outside through the crowd, a deafening cheer went up. "What can it mean?" said H. C. "Have they discovered that I am a poet, and all this is a little delicate attention on their part? If so, I must say they are appreciative. Perhaps my volume of Lyrics, dedicated to my aunt, Lady Maria, has been translated into Spanish, and has--ahem!--found more popularity here than at home. Ah!--Oh!" The exclamation was caused by a sudden tearing away of the omnibus we had entered, whereby H. C. found himself sprawling in a most unpoetical attitude. Picking himself up as carefully as if he had been made of delicate china suffering from a few compound fractures, he rubbed his bruised knees sympathetically, and quietly asked if we had brought a supply of Elliman's embrocation. So quickly one passes from poetry to prose, from the sublime to the ridiculous. CHAPTER III. BLACK COFFEE--AND A CONFESSION. Continued uproar--H. C. disillusioned--A dark night--Not like another Cæsar--More crowds--A demon scene--Fair time--Glorious days of the past--In marble halls and labyrinthine passages--Our excellent host--His substantial partner--Contented minds--Picturesque court--Songless nightingales--Conscription--H. C.'s modesty--Our host appreciative but personal--Bears the torch of genius--A mistake--Below the salt--Host's fair daughters--Catalonian women--The Silent Enigma--Remarkable priest--Good intentions--Lecture on black coffee--Confessions--Benjamin's portions--A gifted nature. Our omnibus rattled off, with the result described. The crowd still cheered; a prolonged and mighty strain. As we went on this grew fainter by degrees, yet did not cease. H. C. collected his thoughts and looked about him. In the dim glimmer of the omnibus lamp we saw shades of doubt and disappointment in his face. "I begin to think this ovation was not for me after all," he said. "They would hardly go on shouting insanely when we are out of sight and hearing. The people would have accompanied us; taken the horses out of the omnibus; drawn us up to the inn, where I should have arrived like another Cæsar. My volume of Lyrics is worth this recognition if they have rendered all the fire and spirit of its theme, beauty of language, charm of rhythm and rhyme. Above all, my dedication to Lady Maria, a masterpiece of English composition and delicate flattery. I begin to think there must be some other cause for this demonstration. And if it is not a poetical reception, I should call it a disgraceful riot." He paused for breath. We were now going up-hill, and even the horses found it a tug-of-war. "The people would have had some trouble in dragging you up here," we remarked, as the animals toiled slowly onwards. "Enthusiasm will carry you through anything," said H. C. "If I assisted at a demonstration I would help to drag a coach up the Matterhorn, and succeed or perish in the attempt. But these people evidently have some other object in view--organising a raid on the train, proclaiming a republic, or something equally barbarous. What a very dark night!" We looked out. The stars had disappeared. The sky was overcast and threatening. Our horses struggled on and soon entered the town. Crossing the bridge over the river we noticed everywhere an unusual crowd of people, flaring lamps and torches, a sea of upturned faces thrown into lights and shadows that looked weird and demon-like, an undercurrent of voices, a perpetual movement. What could it all mean? We expected to find Gerona, in spite of its 20,000 inhabitants, almost a dead city, full of traces of the past, oblivious of the present; a city of outlines, echoes and visions of the Middle Ages. We looked down the tree-lined boulevard and felt the very word a desecration of the buried centuries. The broad thoroughfare ran beside the river, and the trees followed each other in quick succession. Without and within their shadows a long double row of booths held sway, whose flaming torches turned night into day, paradise into pandemonium. A great fair possessed the town, thronged with sightseers of all ages and every stage of emotion. We lamented our fate in visiting Gerona at such a time, but in the end it interfered very little either with our comfort or impressions. It had its own quarters and kept to them. The omnibus passed into narrower thoroughfares, without any trace of fair, sign or sound of excitement or flaming torches. All was delightfully dead as the most advanced antiquarian could desire when we drew up at the _Fondu de los Italianos_. Most of the hotels in the smaller towns of Spain have little to do with the ground floor of the building, often nothing but a cold, unlighted, deserted passage, sometimes leading to a stable yard. No one receives you, and you have to find your own way upstairs. When there is a choice of staircases you probably take the wrong one. On this occasion we had only one course before us--broad white marble stairs that bore witness to a very different destiny in days gone by, the pomp and splendour of life, the glory of the world. At the head of this sumptuous staircase our host met us with a polite bow and welcome; and throughout Spain we never met landlord more intelligent and well-informed, more agreeable and anxiously civil. We were puzzled as to his nationality. He did not look Catalonian, or Spanish of any sort, spoke excellent French, yet was decidedly not a Frenchman. When the mystery was solved we found him an Italian. A man ruling very differently from our energetic hostess at Narbonne, who, full of electricity herself, seemed to have the power of galvanising every one else into perpetual motion. Our Gerona host was quiet and passive, as though all day long he had nothing to do but rest on his oars and take life easily. He never hastened his walk beyond a certain measure or raised his voice above a gentle tone. Yet, like well-oiled works, he kept the complicated machinery in order. There was no friction and no noise, but everything came up to time. He was last in bed at night, first up in the morning. A tall, thin, dark man, with an expression of face in which there was no trace of impatient fretting at life. If wealth had not come to him (we knew not how that was), evil days had passed him by. He had learned the secret of contentment, and was a man of peace. Yet he had brought up a large family of sons and daughters, and could not have escaped care and responsibility. They now took their part in the _ménage_, but it was evident that without the father nothing would hold together for an hour. The youngest son, a tall, presentable young fellow, had been partly educated at Tours and spoke very good French. His ambition now was to spend two years in England to perfect himself in the language, which he was good enough to consider difficult and barbarous. "French," he plaintively observed, "is pronounced very much as it is spelt; so are Spanish and Italian; I have them all at my finger-ends. But English has done its best to confound all foreigners. It is worse than Russian or Chinese." This he related the next day as we went about the town, for we had accepted his polite offer to guide us; and very intelligent and painstaking he proved himself. Our host's wife was fat, broad and buxom as the husband was the opposite. When her homely face beamed upon her guests from behind the counter of her little bureau, she looked the picture of an amiable Dutch vrouw. Nothing less than a Frank Hals could have done her justice. Her lines seemed to have been cast in pleasant places, and her days also had been without shadow of evil. It was also evident that our host was cheerfully disposed. His walls were all painted with landscapes, and if rainbow-colours predominated, he reasoned that they were more enlivening than grey skies and dark shadows. Even the walls of his garden-court had not escaped: a court put to many uses, level with the first floor, bounded on one side by the kitchen, on the other by the dining-room, at right angles with each other. A picturesque court with a slightly Italian atmosphere about it, due perhaps to the sunny landscapes. Orange and small eucalyptus trees stood about in large tubs. The far end was roofed, and the fine red tiles slanted downwards. Over these grew a large abundant vine bearing rich clusters of grapes in due season. Under the eaves were hung cages with captive nightingales and thrushes that looked anything but unhappy prisoners. "In the spring they sing gloriously," said our host, who, evidently full of tender mercies as of cheerfulness, gazed affectionately at his birds. "I hang them outside our front windows sometimes, and night and day the street echoes with the nightingales' song. You may close your eyes and fancy yourself in the heart of a wood. I have often done so, and dreamed I was in my Italian home, listening to the birds on the one hand, the murmur of the Mediterranean on the other. That is one reason why I love and keep them. They bring back lost echoes, and make me feel young again." Pigeons and doves strutted about the yard, and were evidently considered very nearly as sacred as those of St. Mark's, for they were as fearless as if the days of the millennium had come at last. [Illustration: THE BOULEVARD: GERONA.] But on the first evening of our arrival we had yet to learn the many virtues of our host. We only saw in broad outlines that we were in good hands. "Not having telegraphed, you are fortunate to find accommodation, sirs," he said, as he lighted candles and marshalled us to his best rooms. "Last year at the fair we were full to overflowing--not an available hole or corner to spare. This year we are comparatively empty, simply because the town corporation have not organised the usual fêtes, which bring us visitors from all parts of the country. Nevertheless we may be full to-morrow." "It is an annual fair, then?" "Very much so, and one of the most celebrated in Spain. This is the first night, to-morrow the first day. That and the next day are comparatively quiet; the day after comes the horse and cattle fair, and the whole town is crowded with a rough, noisy set of people. You would hardly think them agreeable." "In that case our visit to Gerona must terminate within forty-eight hours. The train which brought us to-night shall take us on to Barcelona." "Where you have it more civilised but will not be more welcome," said our polite host, still leading the way. The corridors were paved with stone, the ceilings were lofty. Turning into a narrower passage to the right, we looked into the yard, where our famous omnibus reposed; the horses had been taken out and were marching up to their stable. This passage led to a salon, out of which one of our bedrooms opened; our host had given us of his best. Placing one of the candles down and lighting others, he turned to see that everything was in order. We opened the window and looked out to the main street--long, narrow, almost in darkness. Electric lamps here and there gave little light. "Why so?" we asked the landlord. "Because we get our motive force from the river; and just now the river is almost dry," he replied. "So they have to work with a machine, and the machine is not strong enough to light the whole town. That is why I don't have it in the hotel. One day we should have illumination, the next total darkness. Better go on in the old way." "There was quite a riot at the station," we remarked; "we were told it had to do with conscription. At one time we thought they were going to storm the omnibus." "You were well-informed," said the landlord; "it is the conscription. Fathers, brothers and cousins have assembled to see the poor fellows depart. Generally speaking they all turn up again after a time, like bad money; but on this occasion who knows? Raw recruits as they are, many may get drafted off to Cuba, with small chance of ever seeing their native land again. Luckily they are more full of excitement at the change of life and scene than of regret at leaving home. The noise, as you say, might be that of a riot; without exception, the Spanish are the noisiest people in the world, but it means nothing. It is the froth of champagne, and when it subsides there is good wine beneath." "Are the people of Gerona poetical?" asked H. C., rather anxiously. "Poetical, sir?" with a puzzled expression. "Do you mean to ask if they write poetry, like Dante and Shakespeare? You do them too much honour." "No, one could hardly expect that of them. But do they read and appreciate the poetry of others? There was a moment when I thought that crowd at the station was an ovation in honour of----" H. C. paused and lowered his eyes modestly. Our intelligent landlord at once divined his meaning. We invariably found that he guessed things by intuition; two words of explanation with him went as far as twenty with others. "Ah, I understand. You, sir, are a poet, and at first thought this riotous assemblage an ovation in your honour. I fear I must undeceive you--though you probably have already undeceived yourself. I hope it was not a bitter awakening. Still, I am enchanted to make the acquaintance of an English poet. I once saw and spoke to Mr. Browning in Italy. He did not look to me at all poetical. One pictures a poet with pale face, dreamy eyes, flowing locks, and abstracted manner. Mr. Browning was the opposite of all this. Now you, sir, with that beautiful regard and far-away expression looking into nothingness----" H. C. bowed his acknowledgments; our host though flattering was growing a little personal. "You have lost your poet-laureate," he continued; "and another has not been appointed. I read the newspapers and know the leading events of every country; for though I live out of the world, I must know everything that is going on there. Perhaps, sir, you are to be the new poet-laureate?" "Not at present," said H. C., flushing deeply as a vision of future greatness rose up before him. "I hope to be so in time. At present I am rather young to bear the weight of the laurel wreath, which seldom adorns the unwrinkled brow." "There is rhythm in your prose," said the landlord in quiet appreciation. "Truth will out. But, sir, though a poet, you are mortal; at least I conclude so, in spite of your diaphanous form and spiritual regard; and I bethink me that time flies in talking, and we shall have dinner ready before we can turn round. In England, being a poet, you probably feast upon butterflies' wings and the bloom of peaches; but----" "On the contrary," cried H. C. hastily; "I have an excellent appetite and love substantial dishes. Crystallised violets and the bloom of peaches I leave to my aunt, Lady Maria. Like George III. my favourite repast is boiled mutton and apple dumplings; and like the king I have never been able to understand how the apples get inside the pastry. That does not affect their flavour. So we will, if you please, make ready for dinner. Do you patronise the French or Spanish cuisine? Oh, I am indifferent. It is a mere matter of butter versus oil, and both are good." Then they went off in a procession of two, the landlord carrying the flambeau. "We will look upon it as the torch of genius," said the latter, "and I am proud to bear it. But methinks, sir, it should be in your hands." After this we heard only receding footsteps. The scene presently changed to the dining-room. At first we had made for the wrong room devoted to the humbler folk indoors and out. Here, too, the landlord and his own people took their meals; and once or twice, casting a glance in passing, it was a pleasure to see how madame's broad buxom face and capacious form was doing justice to the good things on the festive board. Her husband and children did not take after her; they were all very much after Pharaoh's lean kine: she could have sheltered them all under her ample wing. We were rather horrified on entering. A few curious looking people, very much _sans gêne_, sat at a table in a state of disorder. Even H. C.'s capacious appetite would have fled at the aspect of things. From a door beyond opening to the kitchen came sounds of fizzing and frying and savoury fumes. The chef and his imps were flitting about excitedly. We were beginning to think that after all our lines had fallen in strange places, when the landlord appeared at the door, pounced upon us, and marshalled us off the premises. "That is not for you, sir," he said. "We are obliged to have two rooms. A certain number will neither pay fair prices nor heed good manners, and these we place below the salt, as I have read in some of your English books. I put up with them because it would not answer me to have three rooms. And then we have our meals when nobody else has theirs, and waiting and running to and fro is over for the moment. To keep an hotel is indeed no sinecure." Saying this, he led the way to a large and unobjectionable room, its walls adorned with the sunny landscapes already described. If perspective and colouring were eccentric, why, we had only to think that variety was charming, as H. C. observed, and defects became virtues. The room was well illuminated with gas, whatever might be going on in the streets; to no tenebrous repast were we invited. The linen was snow-white. Our host's daughters waited quietly and silently, with a certain grace of manner: dark-eyed, good-looking young women, with something both Italian and Spanish about them, whereby we imagined the buxom lady-mother was probably Catalonian. Throughout Catalonia we observed that the women after a certain age--by no means old age--grow inordinately stout. Time after time a little whipper-snapper, lean, shrivelled and short would enter a dining-room followed by an enormous spouse, who came crushing down upon him like a Himalaya mountain upon a sand-hill. They would take their seat at a table, the lady with a great deal of difficult arranging, and the little husband would gaze up at the huge wife with adoration in his eyes, as proudly as if she had been the Venus de Milo come to life with all her arms and legs about her and a fair proportion of garments. The back is fitted to the burden, but here the order of things was reversed--the wife's broad shoulders must needs bear the weight of life. There were no stout ladies in the dining-room to-night. At different parts of the long table sat some eight or ten people of various nations. Opposite us were two Englishmen separated by a Spaniard. They were of one party, yet never spoke a word from the time they entered to the time they left. Occasionally they glared at each other on passing a dish or the wine of the country, which was supplied _ad libitum_. What the entente cordiale or bone of contention we never discovered; every meal they kept to their silent programme, until it became almost oppressive. Once or twice we thought they were perhaps monks of La Trappe in disguise, but gave up the idea as far-fetched. The Englishmen, at any rate, judging by expression, were certainly not devoted to fasting and penance. They were young, and the world held attractions not at all in harmony with solitary cells and the midnight mass. We never solved the Silent Enigma, as H. C. called them. Not far off sat a priest, who no doubt had himself helped to celebrate many a midnight mass, perhaps both in and out of a monastery. He was the most interesting character at table, tall, distinguished looking, with flowing white hair, a singularly handsome face and magnificent head. The system of serving was different from most hotels. Dishes were not handed round, but every person or party had placed before them their own dish, of which each took as much or as little as they pleased. Whether the priest was father confessor to the ladies of the inn, or whether they merely had a very proper respect for his cloth, we knew not, but he invariably came in for a Benjamin's portion, and sent most of it away untasted. Also it was evident that he could sit in judgment on others. The next day at luncheon he took his seat next to us. We were suffering from headache, which has made life more or less a burden. Severe diseases require strong remedies. We ate dry bread, and drank sundry cups of black coffee mixed with brandy; the latter half a century old and almost as mild as milk, its healing properties sovereign. The priest, we say, sat next, and we almost resented his not leaving the breathing interval of a chair between us, where empty chairs were abundant. The Silent Enigma at the lower end of the table were quite a long way off. At our second cup, the priest looked anxious; at our third, reproachful; at our fourth and last, contained himself no longer. Yet the four cups were only equal to two ordinary black-coffee cups. Possibly the priest thought age conferred privilege. He was also probably impulsive, and like all similar people often said and did the wrong thing. But he was evidently actuated by a pure spirit of philanthropy, which would set the world to rights if it could accomplish the impossible. Looking earnestly at us, he spoke, and then we found he was a Frenchman. "Monsieur," he said in his own tongue, "that is a most insidious beverage, fatal to digestion, destructive to the nerves. If I see any one repeating the dose, at the risk of being thought indiscreet, I cannot avoid speaking. When I count up to the fourth cup, I feel they are in jeopardy. And shall I tell you why?--I speak from experience. I once myself was nearly overcome by the fatal basilisk, only that in my case it was strong waters without coffee more often than with it. For a time it was a question which should conquer, the tempter or the better nature. Then came a period in which I was wretched and miserable, yielding and fighting alternately. Finally, I made a greater effort, and vowed that if strength were given me to overcome, I would dedicate my life to the Church. Soon after that I fell ill; sick almost unto death. Weeks and months passed and I recovered to find the temptation vanished; hating the very sight of brandy, with coffee or without. Mindful of my vow--I was a young man at the time--I took steps to enter the Church; and here I am. And now, sir, forgive me for saying so much about myself, and for preaching a little sermon taken from real life, though time and place are perhaps not quite fitted to the occasion." We forgave him on the spot. His intentions were excellent, his sympathies keen; two admirable qualities. We assured him that strong waters were no temptation, held no charm; yet twice four cups had been taken if needed. The good priest shook his head doubtfully. "A dangerous remedy, monsieur. But, now, I am interested in you. I like the amiable manner in which you have received my little homily. Many would take fire and proudly tell me to mind my own business. You arouse my sympathies and invite my confidence. Let me confess that I placed myself here to enter into conversation. Mine has been a singular life, both since I entered the Church and before it: full of lessons. If before retiring to-night you should have an hour to spare and will give it me, I will relate to you passages in a very eventful career. You will say it contains many marvels. However late, it will not be too late for me. I never retire to bed before three in the morning, and am always broad awake at seven. Four hours' sleep in the twenty-four is all nature ever accords me. I have reason to believe that I shall be offered the next vacant See in the Church: I could place my finger upon the very spot: and my wakeful nights will enable me to do much work. Let me hope that wisdom and judgment may be accorded. But what am I doing?" drawing himself up. "Talking as though I had known you for a lifetime; giving you my confidence, betraying my secrets! What power are you exercising? What does it mean? Sir, you must be a hypnotist, and I have fallen into your meshes. Yet, no; I feel I am not mesmerised, and you are to be trusted. Yes, I repeat that if you will give me an hour this evening, though it be the dead of night, I will confide strange experiences to your ear that until now have been locked within my own bosom. And why not? My life is my own; I have a right to withhold or disclose what pleases me." The words of the priest made us almost uncomfortable. We aspired to no undue influence over any one, much less a stranger. Confidences are not always desirable; but then we reflected that confidences need not be confessions. The experiences even of a simple life must always be of use, how much more those of an active man of the world--thoughtful, observing, retentive and philosophical. There was something unusually attractive about our priest. He possessed great refinement of face; a profile that reminded us of the fine outlines of Père Hyacinthe as we had many a time watched him in a Paris pulpit preaching with so much earnestness, fire and conviction, raising a crusade against the errors and shams both within and without the Church. When our present neighbour was a bishop, would he too uphold the good and condemn the evil? We looked closely and thought Nature had not been unmindful of her power. As already stated, his long flowing hair was white; the head was splendidly developed; there was a ring and richness in the subdued voice that would reach the farthest corners of Notre Dame. We asked ourselves the question but could not answer it. The future holds her own secrets and makes no confidences. But strangely interested in Père Delormais--to make a slight but sufficient change in his name--we promised him an hour, two hours if he would, and even found ourselves awaiting the interview with curiosity and impatience. And this was the result of black coffee and brandy. But all this took place on the second day. On the first night of our arrival we had needed neither one nor the other. The priest sat on the opposite side of the table, and we noticed nothing about him but his distinguished appearance and Benjamin's portions. Yet he evidently had been closely studying us. The Silent Enigma had occupied a little of our attention and wonder, but this soon passed away. The remainder of the scattered guests called for no remark whatever. CHAPTER IV. A NIGHT VISION. Wrong turnings--H. C.'s gifts and graces--Out at night--The arcades of Gerona--At the fair--Ancient outlines--Demons at work--In the dry bed of the river--Roasting chestnuts--Medieval outlines--In the vortex--Clairvoyantes and lion-tamers--Clown's despair--Deserted streets--Vision of the night--Haunted staircase--Dark and dangerous--A small grievance--The reeds by the river--Cry of the watchmen--Hare and hounds--Fair Rosamund--Jacob's ladder--New rendering to old proverbs--Cathedral by night--H. C. oblivious--Scent fails--Return to earth--Romantic story--Last of a long line--_El Sereno!_--The witching hour--H. C. unserenaded--Next morning--Grey skies--A false prophet--Magic picture--Cathedral by day--Mediæval dreams. Dinner ended we went to our rooms preparatory to investigating the town. These rooms were only reached through a labyrinth of passages, and to the last hour we were always taking wrong turnings. H. C. had the organ of locality as well as the gift of rhyme, and we often had to summon him from some distant chamber to the rescue; vainly remarking that it was a little hard all the talents should have fallen to his share. He would condescendingly reply that we must be thankful for small mercies; adding with great modesty that all his talents and graces, far beyond our ken, were counterbalanced by a feeling of tremendous responsibility. We left the hotel with all our curiosity awakened. It was very dark. No stars were shining; a small aneroid indicated rain. Where we came to openings in the streets, the sky above was lighted with a lurid glare, reflection of the countless torches in the fair. Our own street was in comparative darkness. Sauntering down whither fate would lead us, we came to some splendid arcades, deep, massive and solemn. Few towns in Spain possess such arcades as Gerona; so exceedingly picturesque and substantially built that time may mellow but hardly destroy them. To-night they were not quite impenetrable; a little of the glare from the sky or the fair--the latter unseen but near at hand--seemed to faintly light their obscurity and add mystery to the finely-arched outlines. They were deserted, not a creature was visible, the shops were closed. There is no time like night and darkness for solemn outlines and impressions. [Illustration: ARCADES: GERONA.] A few steps farther on and we suddenly burst upon the full glory of the fair. Not the glory of the sun or moon, but of smoking torchlights and lurid flames carried hither and thither by the wind. We traced them far as the eye could reach. The houses, with their quaint outlines and iron balconies shadowed by the waving trees, stood out vividly. A double stream of people sauntered to and fro, treading upon each other's heels. At one booth a Dutch auction was going on--great attraction of the evening. [Illustration: VIEW OF GERONA FROM THE STONE BRIDGE.] We stood on the bridge and looked quite far down upon the bed of the river. As our host had said, the water was very low. The stream had narrowed and half the bed was dry. Here and there huge fires were burning and flaming, and men danced round them, looking like demons as the flames now and then burst forth and lighted up their grim faces. They were roasting chestnuts, and as each batch was finished it was carried up to the fair to be quickly devoured by the boys and girls to-night supreme. Every dog has its day, and it was their turn to reign. They must make the most of it. To-morrow the garlands would fade. When the clock struck twelve Cinderella went back to her rags and chimney-corner. Black Monday always comes. Every stall displayed nothing but toys, from juvenile knives to slice off finger-ends to seductive-looking purses that were a mortifying reflection upon empty pockets. As we stood on the bridge all this light and glare outlined the wonderful houses that rise up straight from the river so that its waters wash their foundations--and at very high tides come in at the ground-floor windows, a visitor more free than welcome. The occurrence is rare, but has been known. We could just trace the marvellous outlines; their strangely picturesque, old-world look: and we waited with patience for the morning and the splendours it should reveal. Plunging boldly into the crowd, we were swallowed up in the vortex. It was rather bewildering. All the people seemed to do was to walk up and down in an endless stream, eat chestnuts and blow penny trumpets. To-night, at any rate, the stalls were almost neglected. Possibly they had not had time to digest the glamour, and to-morrow the harvest would come. At the end of the long thoroughfare lights and stalls and crowd were left behind. We reached a quaint corner which cunningly led to another bridge. This we crossed and soon found ourselves in the wide market square and a different scene. Here the shows had taken up their abode, and every effort was being made to excite an unresponsive crowd. It was the usual thing. The learned pig, the two-headed lady, the gentleman who drew portraits with his feet, the clairvoyante who told fortunes and promised wealth and marriage, the lion-tamer who put his head into the lion's mouth, the enchanting ballet, where ladies and gentlemen pirouetted and made love in dumb motions: these attractions were faithfully described and freely offered to the dazzled multitude. In vain a clown tried to be facetious, shouted himself hoarse, and blew a trumpet until his face grew dark. Bells rang and drums beat--the crowd did not respond. We left them to it, not tempted by the unseen. Our day for shows and illusions was over. This was not what we had expected of Gerona the beautiful and ancient. If we felt a slight grievance, who could wonder? Presently we found ourselves in the darkness of night at the edge of the river. There was more water here, no dry bed visible. Away to the left, as far as one could gather, stretched the open country. Tall trees, sombre and mysterious, waved and rustled behind us. Evidently this was one of the public parks or promenades that exist just outside so many Spanish towns, refuges from the mid-day sun and evening glare; Elysian fields for those disembodied souls who pace to and fro to the music of love's young dream; vows of eternal fidelity more or less writ in sand. The water looked cold and calm and tranquil. Rushes grew by the side and the wind whispered through them. Pan was playing his pipes. Lights twinkled from the windows of many a house down by the river. A lurid glow still hung in the sky, and beneath it, in front of us to the right, we traced the marvellous outlines of the town. Above all, crowning the heights, stretching heavenwards like mighty monsters, uprose the towers of the cathedral and other churches. Almost unearthly was the scene in its gloom and grandeur of mystery. Far down on the dry bed of the river the chestnut-roasters danced like demons about their holocausts. No clown need cry the virtues of their wares; the demand was equal to the supply, and both were unlimited. We hardly knew how we found our way here or found it back again. Instinct guides one on these occasions and seldom fails as it failed in the midnight streets of Toledo. But a conjuror would be lost in those narrow wynds, which all resemble each other and are without plan or sequence. [Illustration: BANKS OF THE OÑAR: GERONA.] To-night it was plainer sailing. Afar off we heard the clown bidding people to his feast of good things. Like the siren in stormy weather it told us which way to steer, what to avoid. We passed well on the outskirts of the gaping crowd and found ourselves on the bridge: the dark bridge, with the river flowing beneath, the houses rising in a great impenetrable mass, and the distant chestnut-roasters at their demon work. The evening was growing old; a neighbouring church clock struck ten. This served to change the current of one's thoughts, which had simply drifted with the scene before us. "Let us go to the cathedral," said H. C. "We shall then have two impressions instead of one. I always like to see an important building first at night. Next morning's view is so different that it becomes a revelation." This was true enough; but how find our way to the cathedral and back again to the hotel? We had no desire to repeat that Toledo adventure. The story of the Babes in the Wood is only amusing to those who listen. "Evidently a very different town from Toledo," replied H. C. "We have only to climb the height to reach the cathedral. Let us play Hare and Hounds. I will drop pieces of paper by way of scent. Or like Hop o' my Thumb scatter stones on the road." "Wouldn't a silken thread be more poetical?" "True; but," with a profound sigh, "there is no Fair Rosamund at the end of it. Here we can only worship the antique. Rosamund was not antique." "But this has one great virtue; it can never disappoint or play you false. And, rare merit, its charms increase with age." Again he sighed deeply. He had had many disappointments, but then he deserved them. Butterflies flit from flower to flower, until by-and-by they alight on a nettle and it stings: a little allegory always lost upon H. C. The gift of knowing themselves is still denied to mortals. We left the bridge and found ourselves once more in the quaint octagonal corner; in front of us a narrow turning; a long flight of steps apparently without end; a Jacob's Ladder. "Leading to Paradise," said H. C. "Let us take it." "Would you be admitted with all those broken vows upon your conscience?" The Oracle was silent. With a bold plunge we commenced the ascent: a rugged climb with dead walls about us; twistings and turnings and crooked ways and rough uneven steps; a veritable pilgrimage. "Patience," said H. C. "Everything comes to him who climbs. I like to vary our proverbs; the old forms grow hackneyed." As he spoke, we came upon a hidden turning to the left; short, straight, and evidently full of purpose. We took it without doubting and soon found ourselves in the open square, bound on one side by the cathedral with the Bishop's palace at right angles. On this occasion no majestic outlines rewarded us. Only for its interior is the cathedral famous. All doors were locked and barred. We knocked for admission. These wonderful buildings should be open at night as well as by day, and some of their finest effects are lost by this tyrannical custom. But we knocked in vain; ghostly echoes answered us. Ghosts pass through doors; we never heard that the most accommodating ghost ever opened them to mortals. It was the great south doorway at which we appealed--the Apostles' Doorway--and in the darkness we could just trace its fine deeply-recessed arch. Above the cathedral rose its one solitary pagan tower, shadowy and unreal against the night sky. A broad, magnificent, apparently endless flight of steps such as few cathedrals possess faced the west front. To-night we could see nothing beyond of the town and river, the great stretch of country and far-off Pyrenees we knew must be there. All this must wait for the morning. Nor should we have to wait long, for night and the moments were flying. The glare had died out of the sky; shows and booths had put out their lights; the crowd had gone home. Gerona might now truly be likened to a dead city. No sound disturbed the stillness but the cry of the watchmen in different parts of the town. One proclaimed the time and weather and another took up the tale; sometimes a discordant duet rose upon the air. We heard it all distinctly from our citadel above the world. [Illustration: APOSTLES' DOORWAY, CATHEDRAL: GERONA.] As we looked, one of them passed in slow contemplation at the foot of the long flight of steps--steps nearly as broad as the cathedral itself. His staff struck the ground, his light flashed shadows upon the houses. The effect was weird. Heavy footsteps echoed right and left through the narrow streets, in fitting accompaniment to his monotonous chant. We had long grown familiar with these old watchmen, who come laden with an atmosphere of the past. They are in harmony with these towns of ancient outlines, suggesting days when perhaps the faintest glimmer of an oil lamp only made darkness more hideous; days when their office was no sinecure as now, but one of danger and responsibility. The cathedral clock struck eleven, and when the last faint vibration had died upon the air we turned to go. It seemed a great many hours since we had risen in the darkness of the Narbonne misty morning, H. C. had been reawakened with a sort of volcanic eruption, and madame, wishing us bon voyage over our tea and hot rolls, had disappeared like a flash into the mist to put the final touches to her _diner de noce_. "Now for Hare and Hounds, H. C. Lead the way." "By the beard of Mahomet! I forgot all about it and have put none down." "So the scent has failed?" Remorse made him silent for a moment. Then he tried to turn the tables. "After all, it was your fault. Your saying what you did about the silken thread and Fair Rosamund, set me thinking what a romantic adventure it would be if it could only come true. Naturally everything else went out of my mind." "We must make the best of it, H. C., and get back to the hotel as we can. Suppose we vary the route. These steps look inviting; we will take them. All roads lead to Rome." We went down the interminable flight, turned and looked back. A vision of a church in the clouds and a pagan tower that went out of sight. We had returned to earth, and not far off the old watchman was still awaking shadows and echoes in the narrow street. We could not do better than follow, and presently found ourselves in our quaint little octagonal corner. All was well. The long thoroughfare, so crowded lately, was now forsaken. Stalls were shut down, lights were out. It was like a deserted banqueting-hall. The chestnut sellers had left their pans and baskets, but left them empty. From the bed of the river the dancing demons had departed, and the smoke of their incense still ascended from dying embers. Next came the old arcades, darker, lonelier, more mysterious than ever. These we knew faced our street, and turning our backs upon them we found ourselves in a few moments at the hotel. Only a couple of old watchmen broke the solitude, meeting at their boundaries. They stood on the pavement in close converse and we wondered if they were hatching mischief; then they threw their light upon us and no doubt returned the compliment. We disappeared within the great doorway and left them to their reflections. Up the broad staircase, the white marble glistening in the rays of the one electric lamp that still lighted up the courtyard. We thought of the sumptuous crowd that had passed up and down in the centuries gone by; fair dames in rustling silks and gay cavaliers with clanking swords; all the grandeur and gorgeousness of that once ducal palace. The staircase seemed haunted with ghosts and shadows, the murmur of voices, echo of laughter, weeping of tears. And now, dim and vapoury, a brilliant pair appeared in tender proximity to each other. His arm encircled her waist, her fair white hand rested with fond appropriation upon his doublet. The love-look in her eyes was only equalled by the fervour and constancy of his. Yet sadness predominated, for it was a farewell interview. She was the last daughter of the ducal house, last of her race. They were betrothed and the course of true love had run smooth. But now he was bidden fight for his country and would depart at daybreak. He never lived to return, but died on the battlefield. Within his gloved hand was found a golden tress tightly clasped, and next his heart a small miniature of his beautiful betrothed. Both were buried with him. She soon faded and declined, and found him again in a Land where wars and partings are unknown. House and name became extinct. As we thought of this, suddenly the staircase seemed full of sighs, lights grew dim. We passed on and found the hotel empty and deserted. Every one had gone to bed and left the long gloomy corridors to silence and the ghosts. We lighted candles and H. C. led the way through the labyrinth to our rooms. Windows were open and the two old watchmen below were just where we had left them, apparently still gazing at the doorway through which we had disappeared. _"El sereno!"_ cried he. "Call your hours and guard the city. Enemies lurk in secret corners." They looked up and wished us good night. We were not marauders after all. So they separated with easy conscience, and from opposite ends of the street we heard them announce the time and weather. It was hardly necessary, for another watchman rang out with iron tongue. Midnight slowly tolled over the town from all the churches. Impossible to believe an hour had passed since we stood at the top of that vast flight of steps overlooking the darkness. How had we sauntered back? Where had the moments flown? One grows absorbed in these night visions, dark shadows and outlines, and time passes unconsciously. We counted the strokes, listened to the vibrations, and then H. C. went off to his own regions. The watchmen were all very well in their way, but for his part an open window and a love serenade--such as we had been favoured with in Toledo--had greater charms. To-night passionate appeals and the melody of the lute were sought in vain. Every window was closed and dark. We also said good-night to the sleeping world. The next morning rose in due course, but not with promise. Heavy rain had fallen during the night, lowering clouds foretold more. Just now, however, they had proclaimed a truce. We went out and felt that the grey sky was in harmony with the grey tones of the town. Nevertheless Spain essentially needs sunshine to bring out all its colouring and brilliancy. Under dark clouds it falls for the most part flat and dead, its finest effects lost. "The rainy season has begun," said H. C. "We are in for a spell of wet weather. Generally it comes in September. This year it has obligingly put it off until November. My usual ill-luck." "I fear it is so," said José our host's son, who, as we have said, volunteered to pilot us about the town and show forth its hidden wonders--delighted to air his French and give us Spanish lessons. "We have a weather-wise prophet who never was known to go wrong; a great meteorologist. He has just written to the papers to say we are to have a month's deluge." A cheerful beginning. As it proved, they were all mistaken, but at the moment the skies seemed to confirm the tale. All the same we would not lose hope, which has brought many a sinking ship into harbour. So we put on a cheerful countenance, bid them take heart of grace and their umbrellas. It would be invidious to enter, at the end of a chapter, upon the wonders of the town which met us at every step and turning; but we must record one experience before concluding. Let us close our eyes, take flight upwards and alight at the head of that vast stone staircase with our backs to the cathedral. We see this morning what last night was veiled in darkness. The town lies chiefly to our left. We overlook a sea of red and grey roofs. To our right are the old walls with their gateways, round bastions and irregular outlines. Near to us is a church-tower, graceful, octagonal, excellent in design; but the upper part of its spire is gone and we can only imagine its once perfect beauty. Low down beyond the town lies the river, winding through a picturesque country. We can even see the reeds and rushes that border its banks, but cannot hear their murmur as we did last night. If Pan still pipes it is to the pixies. In the distance the Pyrenees are sleeping in graceful, long-drawn undulations. Nothing can be lovelier than their outlines. Some are snow-capped and stand out pure and white against the grey skies. A magic picture and we long to see it under sunshine. No wonder if Pan is silent. We turn to the cathedral. No need to knock this morning. The great west doors are unlocked and we enter. The first thing to strike us is an intense obscurity; a dim religious light deeper than we remember to have seen in any other sacred building. But to-day the grey skies have something to answer for in this matter. As the sight grows accustomed to the gloom, the next thing we notice is the vastness and splendour of the nave in which we stand: a single span seventy-three feet broad. No other church in Christendom can boast of such a nave. Light comes in from windows high up, filled in with rich stained glass. The tone of the walls and pillars is perfect, never having been touched with brush or knife; a rich subdued claret delighting the senses. Those great men of the Middle Ages made no mistakes. Nothing was admitted to disturb their love of harmony and proportion. They built wonders for the glory of their country and for all time: knew and recognised one thing only--the charm of perfection. Where they failed, their efforts were crippled; they were told to make bricks without straw. Without waiting at this moment to examine the church more closely, we pass through a great doorway on the left and find ourselves in the cloisters. Here too is a marvellous vision. Few cloisters in the world compare with them. The four sides are unequal, but this almost heightens their attraction. They have been little interfered with and are almost in their original state. The simple round arches rest on coupled pillars of marble, slender and graceful. The capitals are extremely rich, elaborate and delicate in their carving. Here Romanesque art seems to have been introduced into Spain through France. The cathedrals of Catalonia are of exceeding beauty and appear to have laid the foundation of mediæval Spanish art. This also, though they would deny it, is due to French influence--happily at that time at its best and purest. In this wonderful cloister we lost ourselves in dreams of the Middle Ages, days which have glorified the earth, and appear almost as necessary to us as light and air. In the centre was an ancient well, without which no cloister seems perfect. Shrubs and trees embowered it, and the fresh green stood out in contrast with creamy walls and Romanesque arches. At the end of the north passage we passed through an open porch to a view extensive and magnificent. A steep rugged descent led to the town. Below us was the ancient Benedictine church of San Pedro, with its Norman doorway and cloisters scarcely less wonderful than those we had just visited. Near it was a smaller, equally ancient church, now desecrated and turned into a carpenter's shop. We will pay it a visit by-and-by and make acquaintance with its sturdy owner, who passes his days and does his work under the very shadow of sanctity. Beyond all, on the brow of the hill outside the walls, we trace the ruins of the great castle and citadel that so nobly stood the siege of Gerona, until the twin spectres famine and disease stalked in hand in hand and conquered the brave defenders. We gazed long upon all these historical landmarks, pointed out and explained by our guide-companion. Then turning back through the cloisters again found ourselves lost in visions of the past as we fell once more under the magic influence of the vast space and dim religious light of Gerona's splendid cathedral. CHAPTER V. GERONA THE BEAUTIFUL. A Gerona señora--Grace and charm--Lord of creation--Morning greeting--Arcades and ancient houses--Conscription--Gerona a discovery--Streets of steps--Ancient eaves and rare ironwork--Old-world corner--Desecrated church--Gothic cloisters--Ghosts of the past--Visions of to-day--Soldiers interested--"Happy as kings"--Lingerings--Colonel seeks explanation--No lover of antiquity--More conscription--Dramatic scene--Pedro to the rescue--Mother and son--Sad story--Strong and merciful--Pedro grateful--Restricted interests--Colonel becomes impenetrable again. Last night we had found much to admire, though in the darkness the charms were only half seen. This morning on opening our window clouds hung low and threatening; yet the grey tone over all was in such singular harmony with the ancient city that we hardly regretted the gloomy skies. Immediately opposite our casement was a small draper's shop presided over by an industrious feminine genius. She was up betimes and worked as though she had taken to heart all the proverbs of Solomon. A short, dark woman of the true Spanish type, bright, active, and not above all manner of work, for she swept her pavement diligently and arranged her wares; doing all with a certain natural grace that was not without its charm. We thought her a young widow struggling for existence, but when all the work was done and everything was comfortably arranged, a husband appeared upon the scene; evidently a lord of creation who looked upon women, and especially wives, as born to labour. It was their portion under the sun. She had no doubt grown used to this state of things and accepted it as part of life's penances. "I hope you have slept well," we heard her say with the slightest tinge of sarcasm--the street was so narrow as to bring them almost within half-a-dozen yards of us. "I have been up these two hours, whilst you were serenely unconscious," veiling her head in a graceful mantilla. "Yet you hardly seem refreshed," as he yawned lazily. "_Cara mia_, you are an admirable woman and the best of wives. I admit that without your aid life would go hardly with me. But to you work is a pleasure, and I would not deprive you of it for the world." [Illustration: A FRAGMENT OUTSIDE THE WALLS OF GERONA.] By this time the mantilla was adjusted and the dark little woman swept good-temperedly out of the shop. The prettiest of small feet tripped on to the pavement. She looked up, saw us gazing in her direction, and her smile disclosed the whitest of teeth. "Ah, señor, you have heard our conjugal Good-morning. It is always the same. Fate has been hard upon us women. The weaker vessel, we get terribly imposed upon by our masters. Now I go to church to pray for a blessing upon my work and reformation to my lord. Not that he is bad or unkind or tyrannical, as husbands go--only incorrigibly lazy. Oh, you know it is true, Stefano." Upon which the little lady--she was quite lady-like in spite of swept pavement and hard work--made us a court-curtsey, flourished a farewell to her _caro sposo_, and passed swiftly and gracefully down the street. It is said that only Spanish women know how to walk, and there is some truth in the proverb. Rain had fallen heavily during the night, as the watchmen reported through the small hours. It had ceased--with a promise of more to come. Remembering the proverb we took umbrellas. H. C. shouldered his and put on his military manner. The town indeed, quiet as it was, seemed full of a military atmosphere, for conscription was still going on and we presently came upon the official scene. We had gone out without our amiable guide to wander at will and let chance take us whither it would. In the light of day the arcades seemed deeper, more massive, more picturesque even than last night. Standing on the bridge we looked down upon the dry bed of the river far below. The altars of the chestnut-roasters were cold and dead; the demons absent. But even at that moment there came down a small band of them to rake out fires and prepare for action. The ancient houses on either side make this view from the bridge one of the most remarkable in the world. These rose straight from the river-bed, and where water still ran their outlines were reflected: houses looking old enough to date from the days of the deluge: a huge mass once white, now yellow, brown and black with weather and age. All the windows seemed to have been taken out, resulting in that curious air of unglazed wreck and ruin so often seen in warm latitudes. Countless balconies adorned with flowers and coloured draperies hung over the water. Above all rose the outlines of the cathedral and other churches in the background with striking effect. The distant view was closed in by the winding river, where the houses on both sides appeared to join hands. Just beyond this we had stood last night listening to the rustling of the reeds, lost in the scene so vividly reflected by the lurid glare of the torches. [Illustration: STREET IN GERONA.] People were gradually waking up and opening their stalls. All down the long thoroughfare were more ancient and massive arcades, hardly noticed last night in the restless crowd. In this country _par excellence_ of arcades we had never seen such as these. "Gerona is a discovery," said H. C. for the twentieth time. "The view from this bridge is something to dream about. Yet one longs for sunshine and lights and shadows. Remarkable as the scene is, it is a study in grey. We want contrast." But the town had more wonders in reserve, when presently our host's son joined us and pointed out the hidden treasures of the narrow tortuous streets. Houses with gabled ends, tiled roofs and windows ornamented with magnificent wrought ironwork; the true tone of antiquity over all--as yet unspoilt. Gerona, in its dying prosperity, has, like Segovia, escaped the ravages of the restorer. Its substantial mansions are firm and steadfast as in the far gone Middle Ages. The irregularities of the place add to its charm. Built on rising ground, the streets are a pilgrimage of rough, uneven, picturesque steps. From these, narrow openings lead into many a _cul-de-sac_ crowded with ancient outlines that are nothing less than artistic dreams. We soon came to one of these ascending streets with its endless flight. Far up, it was crowned by a church with a solitary square tower and a Renaissance west front. Houses on either side had wonderful ironwork windows; we cannot help reverting to this special feature; and many a gothic casement was rich in the remains of refined tracery and ornamented balconies; whilst from the deep overhanging eaves quaint waterspouts here and there craned their long necks like gargoyles of some ancient cathedral. Reaching the church and turning to the right down a narrow passage between high dead walls we found ourselves in an excited scene: no less than the building given up to the rites of conscription. The spot and its surroundings was one of the most picturesque in Gerona. A long, broad flight of steps led up to an ancient church now desecrated and turned into barracks. Groups of young soldiers were clustered together and sentinels paced to and fro. To the left, facing the long flight, low ancient houses wonderful in tone and construction were decorated with wrought ironwork windows, some of them almost Moorish in design, the upper floors terminating in round open arcades and tiled roofs with projecting eaves; one of those old-world bits only to be seen in these mediæval towns of Spain. We climbed the steps and braved the sentinel, feeling there must or ought to be hidden cloisters attached to this old church of which nothing remained but the west front. But we were not to pass unchallenged. An inner sentry came up and asked our business. Hearing that we wished to see the cloisters, he beckoned to a further sentry who evidently belonged to the colonel or commandant of the regiment. Permission was soon brought, and pointing out the way, we were left to our own devices. Instinct had not failed us. In a few moments we were standing in the midst of large lovely old cloisters with Gothic arcades resting on slender coupled marble columns. Above these rose a gallery of round arcades supported by single pillars with carved capitals, the arches, wider and more open than the pointed arches beneath them, presenting a fine contrast. A deep archway reached by some half-dozen steps led through the palace to the east end of the cathedral and the town walls beyond. In the square in front of palace and cathedral was an ancient and beautiful well. Above these again a slanting tiled roof fitly crowned the scene. Here in days gone by monks and priests had paced the silent corridors. A sacred atmosphere in which the world had no part hung over all. Father-confessors listened to the secret struggles of young novices who hoped to leave the vanities and temptations of life outside the walls of their cells, only to find that in this state of probation conflict can never cease. So confessions were made and penances exacted, and soft footsteps and pale faces haunted those quiet cloisters. Large dark eyes--larger and darker for the sunk cheeks--gazed upwards at the sky that canopied the quadrangle with such divine peace, vainly seeking a clue to the mysteries of existence. To-day all was changed. The cloisters were still militant, but in quite another way. All the ancient serenity and repose had departed and the beauty of outline alone remained. Soldiers and recruits in every stage of undress went about in restless activity. [Illustration: ENTRANCE TO MILITARY CLOISTERS: GERONA.] In the upper gallery some were making or mending clothes, others drawing from the well in what was once the cloister garden. It was still ornamented with its fine old ironwork. Monks and priests once looked down and saw pale, cowled faces reflected in the calm water; and perhaps as they drew it to the surface there came a vision of another well in a far-off land and a certain woman of Samaria. No such vision troubled the five or six closely-cropped soldiers, whose reflected images below had nothing saintly, troubled or questioning about them. These rough specimens of an undersized, undisciplined army were out of all harmony with the ancient outlines that nothing could deprive of their beauty and refinement. We felt the charm and incongruity of it all. The men crowded within a few yards of us, delighted at being taken by the small camera, interested at finding themselves reflected on the object glass, unhappy that we could not there and then present each with a photograph duly printed and mounted. Such a machine surely performed miracles. "You all look very happy," H. C. remarked, for more carelessly contented faces were never seen--a mixture of types good and bad. "As happy as kings," they answered. "We eat, drink and sleep well. Clothes and lodging are found us and we never have any fighting to do. We should like a little more money for tobacco--but one can't have everything." Finally, we stayed so long answering questions, satisfying curiosity, lingering over the beauty of the cloisters, that the colonel himself appeared upon the scene in full uniform, sword and all. No lover of architecture, he could not understand how any one bestowed a second glance on these old outlines. Were we trying to worm military secrets out of the men with the intention of starting another Peninsular war? The worthy colonel who had so freely given us permission to enter was now anxious for an explanation. Pointing out the charm and merit of the cloisters--the pity they should have transposed the order of things and turned pruning-hooks into swords--he declared he could not agree with us. "I discover no great beauty in these old corridors," he said, "and would infinitely rather see them filled with brave soldiers than with a parcel of effeminate monks and priests." We argued the fitness of things--a time and place for everything. "If there were once more a siege of Gerona I would turn our very churches into barracks," laughed our colonel, clanking his sword and looking fierce as a fire-eater. "And who knows? As far as I am a prophet we are not anywhere near the days of the millennium. There are more signs of universal war than of eternal peace." We had left the cloisters and were standing almost within touch of the west front of what had been the church. The colonel caught our "mild regretful gaze," laughed and clanked his sword again. [Illustration: MILITARY CLOISTERS: GERONA.] "What will you?" he said. "After all, I would not have been the one to do it myself; but finding it done, I use it without prickings of conscience. See," pointing to the crowd below, "we must have room for our recruits. Poor Spain is not England. Our resources are limited. Yet you, sirs, monarchs of the world notwithstanding, had your days of desecration under Cromwell. Opportunity given, and all evil is possible as well as all good." The crowd alluded to was full of dramatic interest. The very walls of the great grey building seemed pregnant with the chances of fate; the wide doorway greedy to swallow up the youth of the country. Young men disappeared within to the human lottery with anxious faces or reckless humour. Free agents this morning, to-night perhaps bound down to servitude: a willing bondage to some, to others worse than a death-blow. Perhaps the chief interest centred in the crowd of elders--parents and friends waiting for the verdict--many a face full of that patient endurance so terrible to look upon. Mothers with the sickness of hope deferred, to whom the very shadow of war was a nightmare; fathers wondering if the boy who had now become companion and part bread-winner, was about to be thrown into the whirl of barrack life with its manifold temptations. They had passed that way in their own youth and knew that only the strong are firm. Stalwart amongst the crowd we recognised Pedro, our last night's platform acquaintance. "Why, Pedro," said the colonel--we were standing just a little above the people--"what brings you here to-day? Surely you have made your offering to the country and your boy is now at Tarragona?" "True, colonel," returned this veteran, firm as an oak tree. "My boy has left me; I saw him off last night and you might have heard the noise going on up here; half the town was at the station. I have no fears for him. He knows good from evil and has strong principles. I gave him my blessing and please Heaven he will return when the years are over. But my heart aches for these poor women who are weak when their emotions are in question. So I thought I would come and console them a bit, and tell them that military discipline after all is a very fine thing--the best thing that could happen to them if they only do their duty. You agree, colonel?" "Of course I do," returned the colonel sharply. "There is no training like it. It makes men of boys if they have only an inch of wood in them that will bear carving." [Illustration: WAITING FOR THE VERDICT.] We had noticed one pale woman close to the doorway, drooping and woe-begone. She seemed superior to those about her, and over her head, half draping her face, was the graceful mantilla. At that moment a youth appeared, a handsome, manly image of his mother--the resemblance was at once evident; his thread-bare clothes proving him scantily endowed with worldly goods. As he advanced a serious expression and hesitating manner betrayed his fate. No need to ask the question, and with a cry that was half sob, wholly despair, the mother threw her arms about her boy's neck as though life could hold no further ill for her. At such a moment reticence was thrown to the winds. What to her the lookers-on? Were they not all fellow-sufferers? "A sad story," said our colonel, whose eyes glistened. "They were amongst the most prosperous people in Gerona, when the husband died and left them almost in poverty. Her eldest son turned scapegrace and this boy was her last hope. No doubt she feels that fate is hard upon her. Pedro," to the old man who looked on compassionately, "tell her it will all come right in the end. Stay; quietly whisper to her to come to my office to-morrow morning at ten and ask for me. I will promise to keep a special eye upon that boy of hers. He is of finer mould and deserves a better fate than many. I will see that he has it." Pedro looked his gratitude, thought there was only one colonel in the world, and he stood before him. To be strong and merciful is to win hearts. "There is more interest for me in this little crowd than in all your ecclesiastical outlines," said the colonel. "I never saw a building that I did not tire of in a week, but my work and my men interest me more year by year. I feel I have something to live for." He was small and wiry, this colonel, with piercing dark eyes and a mouth of which a fierce moustache could not conceal the kindliness. One wished him a finer body of men than these recruits, too many of whom were of the lowest type and had not, to use his own metaphor, even the inch of wood that would bear carving. "That need not greatly trouble you," he said. "It is surprising how many are the exceptions. After all, it is a survival of the fittest. But I see you are interested in humanity just as much as I am," noting how we followed every movement and expression of this pathetic little crowd. "So far your resources are wider than mine, for when on the subject of old buildings you are as absorbed as in front of this little drama. My interests are more restricted. Well then, if you like to come to my office to-morrow morning at ten you shall have more food for your sympathies. We will interview that poor woman together and see how far we can minister consolation to the widow and fatherless." This was not one's idea of severe military discipline, but we could not help admiring a nature that after years of experience and repeated discouragements--in spite of what he had said--still possessed so warm a heart, so much of human faith. No doubt he had shown a little of his true self on the spur of the moment, influenced by the above incidents. All his kindliness of feeling was kept well out of sight of others. The next instant he had passed beyond the sentry and was holding forth in tones hard as the Pyramids, cold as the Sphinx. CHAPTER VI. ANSELMO THE PRIEST. Beauties of age--Apostles' Doorway--How the old bishops kept out of temptation--Interior of cathedral--Its vast nave--Days of Charlemagne--And of the Moors--A giant dwarfed--Rare choir--Surly priest--And a more kindly--Our showman--Dazzling treasures--Father Anselmo--Romantic story--Heaven or the world?--Doubts--The gentle Rosalie decides--Sister Anastasia--Told in the sacristy--A heart-confession--Anselmo's mysticism--Heresy--Charms of antiquity--Scene of his triumph--Celestial vision--Church of San Pedro--Pagan interior--Rare cloisters--Desecrated church--Singular scene--Chiaroscuro--Miguel the carpenter--His opinions--Daily life a religion--Anselmo improves his opportunity--"A reflected light"--Ruined citadel--War of Succession--Alvarez and Marshall--Gerona in decadence--A revelation--Dreamland--Midday vision. The colonel disappeared, and we went our way through narrow, tortuous, deserted wynds until we found ourselves in the quaint cathedral square. Here again we were surrounded by the beauties of antiquity. Before us was the south front of the cathedral with its deeply-arched Apostles' Doorway at which we had knocked in vain last night. At right angles, its grey walls of exactly the same tone as the cathedral, was the Bishop's Palace, its picturesque windows guarded by ancient ironwork. Why so carefully secured? Had the mediæval bishops feared a reversal of things--serenades from fair dames yielding to the charm of forbidden fruit? Or mistrusting their own strength had wisely put temptation out of reach? Ancient walls are discreet and disclose nothing. The outer gloom was intensified when we passed within the cathedral. After a time pillars and arches and outlines grew more or less visible, a shadowy distinctness full of mystery, appealing to the senses. The vast nave is the widest Gothic vault in existence and on entering strikes one with astonishment. So bold was the architect's design considered that it created consternation in the minds of Bishop, Dean and Chapter then ruling. Council after council was summoned and opinions were taken from the great architects of foreign countries. Finally a jury of twelve men was appointed who gave their verdict in favour of Boffy, and the nave was erected. This was in the year 1416. There had existed a cathedral on this very spot since the eighth century and the days of Charlemagne. Like so many of those early cathedrals it was pulled down and rebuilt; and sometimes it happened that the new was no improvement on the old. This was not the case with Gerona. The cathedral was rebuilt in 1016, but the nave was reserved for Boffy and his genius four hundred years later. That early cathedral was turned into a mosque when the Moors took Gerona, but they allowed Catholic services to be held in the Church of San Filiu, close at hand, now shorn of part of its spire. In 1015 the Moors were expelled and the old cathedral was reinstated. The nave has the fault of being too short, and Boffy could not fail to see that it wants in proportion. Either space or funds failed him, and the giant had to be dwarfed. Still it remains gigantic with a clear width of seventy-three feet. Toulouse, next in width, has sixty-three feet; Westminster Abbey only thirty-eight feet. For the effect of contrast the smaller choir and aisles throw up the proportions of the vast vault. Over all is its wonderful tone; whilst the obscure light brings out the pointed arches of choir and chapels and the slender fluted pillars in softened outlines. The choir has a magnificent retablo and baldachino of wood and silver: a rare work of art dating back to the year 1320: so promising that we wished to see the treasures of the sacristy. It was the duty of a certain priest to show them. The priests take the office in turn. To-day he whose turn it was proved unamiable. "He would not show them; had other things to do; we must come another day," hurriedly buttoning his heavy black cloak as he spoke; an ill-favoured example of his race, short, swarthy, unshaven. We explained that our hours were limited. Without further parley he marched rapidly down the aisle, cloak flying, hobnailed shoes waking desecrating echoes. Then another and kindlier priest came up; altogether a different and more refined specimen of humanity. He would gladly show us the treasures if we would wait whilst he sought the keys. With these he soon returned and thought he had been long. "I am sorry to keep you," he said, "but they were not in their place. Now let me turn showman and do the honours." Leading the way into the large sacristy he unlocked a cupboard and took out a key. With this he opened a drawer and took out another key. The treasure was well guarded. Finally he swung back great doors and our eyes were dazzled as he lighted a beautiful old lamp whose rays flashed upon gemmed and jewelled crooks and crosses, enamelled plates and chalice, a wealth of gold and silver ornaments, many dating back to the twelfth century. Some of the crosses were magnificent in design and execution, some had strange and interesting histories. Then he showed us rare and wonderful needlework rich in gold thread and coloured silks, also dating back seven or eight hundred years. He explained everything in a quaint fashion of his own, then took us through a series of rooms each having its special attraction. Amongst the pictures were one or two of rare merit and a very early period. These rooms and their treasures were well worth the little trouble it had cost to see them. Moreover we were brought into contact with an amiable ecclesiastic full of refinement and romance. [Illustration: CATHEDRAL CLOISTERS: GERONA.] "It is a pleasure to show them to you," he said, when we thanked him. "I love all these things amongst which my life has been spent, for I hardly recall the time when I was not attached to the cathedral. As a child I was an acolyte, and remember the delight with which I used to turn the wheel at the altar and listen to its silver chiming. I was never happy but in church, attending on the priests, filling every office permitted to a boy. From the age of ten I determined to be a priest myself and never lost sight of that hope--though I once hesitated. But I was poor, and don't know whether it would have come to pass unaided by one of our canons who was rich and good; educated and half adopted me, and dying four years ago left me a sufficient portion of his wealth. I almost think of myself as one of those romances which only occasionally happen in life. But there was a moment"--he smiled almost sadly--"when I was sorely tempted to abandon religion for the world." "For what reason?" we asked, for he paused. Evidently he wished the question, and there was something so interesting about him that we were willing to linger and listen. "A very ordinary reason. I daresay you can guess, for it was the old, old story: nothing less than love. I had not yet taken religious vows and was free to choose. Should it be earth or heaven? Few perhaps have been more completely enthralled than I. Walking and sleeping my thoughts were filled with the gentle Rosalie. She was beautiful and I thought her perfect. Outward grace witnessed to her inward purity of soul. "To make my conflict harder, she returned all my affection. It was perhaps singular that her life too had been destined to the cloister, as mine to the Church. For one whole year we both struggled, miserable and unsettled. Every fresh meeting only seemed to strengthen our attachment. An excellent opening in the world presented itself--might we take this as an indication that Heaven favoured our desires? It was a sore strait and perhaps we should not have done wrong to yield. During the daylight hours it seemed so. But night after night I awoke with one verse ringing in my ears: 'He that having put his hand to the plough looketh back, is not fit for the Kingdom of Heaven.' In my excited, almost diseased imagination, the text seemed to stand out in the darkness in letters of fire. I tossed and turned upon my troubled bed. Drops of anguish would break upon my brow. On the one hand bliss that seemed infinite; surrounded by all the false colouring and attraction of forbidden fruit. On the other the sure service of Heaven--a higher, nobler destiny without doubt. "I grew pale and emaciated under my heart-fever. If left to my own decision I know not how it would have ended: perhaps in yielding. My gentle Rosalie proved the stronger vessel. "One morning--shall I ever forget it?--the sun was shining, the skies were blue, birds and flowers were at their best and brightest, song and perfume filled the air, I received a letter in the beloved handwriting. Before opening it I felt that it held our fate and knew its contents. The soul is never mistaken in such crises. "'Anselmo, my beloved,' it said, 'my choice is made and I trust you not to render my difficult task impossible. Last night in a dream my mother visited me; so real her presence that I feel we have held communion together. Her face was full of a divine love and pity, and O so sad and sympathising. Suddenly she pointed and I saw two roads before me. On each I recognised myself. On the one broad road you walked with me hand in hand. We were both bowed and broken and foot-sore. We seemed unhappy, full of care and sorrow. Romance and sunshine? They had fled with the long past years. Nothing was left but to lay down our burden and die. "'On the other road I walked alone, but I was strong, upheld by unseen support. The way was long, yet my footsteps never wearied. I wore the dress of a Sister of Mercy. At the far, far end, bathed in divine light, a glorified being yet yourself, you beckoned and seemed to await me. Beyond you there was a faint vision of Paradise--I knew you had passed to the higher life. Then my mother turned and spoke. Her voice still rings in my ears. "My child, in the world you should have tribulation such as you are not fitted to bear. Your path lies heavenward." Then she pointed upwards, seemed gradually to fade away, and I awoke. I felt it an indication accorded me, and rising, on my knees dedicated afresh my life to Heaven if it would deign to receive me. Beloved, you will help me; you will lighten my task. Though never united on earth, none the less do we belong to each other; none the less shall spend eternity together.' [Illustration: INTERIOR OF CATHEDRAL: GERONA.] "Even now," continued the priest, returning to his own narrative, his voice somewhat agitated: "even now I cannot always think quite calmly of that morning. I sat amidst the birds and flowers, spell-bound, heart-broken. The serene skies and laughing sunshine seemed to mock at my calamity. Earthly dreams were over. Never for a moment did I question Rosalie's decision or seek to turn it aside. I prayed for strength, and it was sent me. She became a Sister of Mercy, I a priest. So our lives are passing, dedicated to Heaven. Not for us the feverish joys of earth, but quiet streams undisturbed by worldly cares." "And Rosalie? She still lives?" [Illustration: CLOISTER OF SAN PEDRO: GERONA.] "Yes, and in Gerona. Her new name is Sister Anastasia. We meet sometimes in the silent streets; sometimes at the bedside of the sick and dying; occasionally at the house of a friend. I believe that we are as devoted to each other as in the days of our youth, but it is love purified and refined, containing a thousand-fold more of real happiness than our first passionate ecstasy. If we are to believe her vision, I shall be the first to enter the dark passage and cross to the light beyond. It may yet be half a lifetime--who knows? I am only thirty-seven, Rosalie thirty-five--but whenever the summons comes for her, I feel that I shall be awaiting her on the divine shores." We were seated in a room beyond the sacristy where silence and solitude reigned amidst the evidences of the past centuries on walls and crucifix and ancient Bibles--a delightful room in which to receive such a confession. A halo of romance surrounded our priestly guide; his pale, refined face glowed with a light from which, as he said, all earthly dross was purified. And yet he was evidently very human; sympathies and affections were not straitened; his interests in Gerona and its people were keenly alive. It was the kindliness of his nature had caused him to take compassion upon us when his more surly fellow-labourer in the vineyard had turned a deaf ear to our request. But our golden moments were passing; we could not linger for ever in old-world sacristies listening to heart-confessions. Treasures were locked up, keys placed in their hiding-places; we went back into the church and the closing of the great sacristy door echoed through the silent aisles. More beautiful and impressive seemed the wonderful interior each time we entered; a vision of arches and rare columns and exquisite windows wonderfully solemn and sacred. In darkened corners and gloomy recesses, in shadows lost in the high and vaulted roof, we fancied guardian angels lurked unseen, bringing rest for the heavy-laden, pardon for the sinner, strength for those who faint by the way. "I have often felt it," said our companion, reading our thoughts by some secret influence; "and have stood here many and many an hour, utterly alone, lost in meditation. At times mysticism seems to take me captive. Visions come to me, unsought, not desired; the church is full of a shining celestial choir; I hear music inaudible to earthly ears; the rustle of angels' wings surrounds me. These visions or experiences--call them what you will--have generally occurred after long fastings, when the spirit probably is less restrained by mortal bonds. But underlying all my days and action, an intangible incentive for good, I feel the influence of Rosalie. You see I am still mortal and the earthly must mix with the heavenly. Nor would I wish it otherwise as long as I have to minister to mortals, or how could I sympathise with the sin and sorrow and suffering around me? Even our Lord had to become human, that being in all things tempted like as we are, He is able to succour them that are tempted." [Illustration: APOSTLES' DOORWAY AND BISHOP'S PALACE: GERONA.] We were walking down the broad nave. Anselmo had thrown on his long cloak, which added grace and dignity to his tall slender figure. His pale face shone out in the surrounding gloom like a saintly influence. What strange charm was about this man? In the course of a few moments we felt we had known him for years. He was singularly lovable and attractive. Underlying all his gentleness was an undercurrent of strength; an evident self-reliance, yet the reliance of one who leans on a higher support than his own. Here was one worthy of enduring friendship had our lines not been thrown far apart. As it was he too would disappear out of our life and we should see his face no more. But his memory would remain. At the west doorway we turned and looked upon the splendid vision: the magnificent nave with its slender pillars and lofty roof, the distant choir with aisles and arches visible and invisible in the dim religious light that threw upon all its sense of mystery. Above all the wonderful tone. "For five and twenty years I have looked upon this scene, and its influence upon me is as strong as ever," said the priest. "Here I have found that peace which passeth all understanding. How many a time have I let myself in with my key, and in these solitary aisles withdrawn from the world to hold communion with the unseen. Here strength has come to fight life's battles. Here I have composed many a sermon, here silently confessed my sins to the Almighty and obtained pardon. Breathe not the heresy, but confession to man brings me no rest. I have to go to the great Fountain Head, trusting in the one Atonement and one Mediator. Nothing else gives me consolation." We crossed to the doorway of the cloisters. Anselmo, unwilling to leave us, crossed also. We were too glad of his companionship to wish it otherwise. He added much to the spell of our surroundings; a central figure from which all interest radiated. It was passing from the gloom of the interior to the broad light of day subdued by the grey clouds that hid the sunshine. The cloisters reposed in all the charm of antiquity. For eight hundred years Time had rolled over them with all its subtle influence. There they stood, an irregular quadrangle, the simple, beautiful round arches resting on coupled shafts, whose carved capitals were so singularly elaborate and delicate. Seldom had the attraction of Romanesque architecture been more evident. [Illustration: CHURCH OF SAN PEDRO: GERONA.] "I love them," said the priest. "How often have I paced these silent corridors until the very stones seem worn with my footsteps. And they witnessed the most painful scene, the last great struggle of my life--but my triumph also. For here I bade my earthly farewell to Rosalie; on this very spot on which we stand renounced all human hopes and claims upon her and gave her into Heaven's keeping. Here I placed her treasured letter next my heart, where it still reposes; where it will lie when that heart has ceased to beat and this frame has returned to the dust from which it was taken." We passed through the little north doorway to the outer world. Far away the snow-capped Pyrenees rose heavenwards like a celestial vision. In the plain the silvery river ran its winding course listening to the love-songs of the reeds and rushes. Near us was the lovely octagon tower, shorn of its spire. Without the ancient walls we traced the remains of the citadel; and within them the yet more ancient churches of San Pedro and its desecrated companion. "Let us go down to them," said Anselmo: "examine the wonderful little cloisters and make the acquaintance of Miguel the carpenter. He seems to care little that where now is heard the fret of saw and swish of plane, once rose voices of priests at worship and faint whispers of the confessional." It was a rough descent, but a singularly interesting scene. We found ourselves in narrow streets with ancient houses whose windows were guarded by splendid ironwork. Last night the watchmen had paced and cried the hour, awakening the echoes, summoning the silent shadows with their lanterns. To-day there was no sense of mystery about streets and houses; daylight loves to disillusion. We had to content ourselves with quaint gables and old-world outlines. Behind us was one of the ancient gateways strong and massive, leading directly into the precincts of the cathedral. Framed through its archway we saw a portion of the vast flight of steps crowned by the uninteresting west front. It was one of the very best, most old-world bits of Gerona, and within a small circle were antiquities and outlines that would have furnished an artist with work for half his days. Upon all this we turned our backs as we went towards San Pedro. Here everything is in opposition to the cathedral; the exterior of this Benedictine church is its glory. Rounding a corner we are in full view of the beautiful west Norman doorway with its delicately wrought carving and fern-leaf capitals. Above the doorway is a very effective cornice and above that an admirable rose window: altogether a rare example of the Italian Romanesque. The whole church is very striking, with its fine octagonal tower and Norman apses built into the old town walls. Just beyond the tower a gateway leads to the citadel and open country beyond. A church existed here as early as the tenth century--possibly earlier; the present church dates from the beginning of the twelfth, when it was given to the Benedictine Convent of Santa Maria by the Bishop of Carcassonne. We passed through the lovely old doorway to the uninteresting interior: a nave and isles with rude arches and piers plain and square. There was something cold and pagan about the general effect, exaggerated no doubt by contrast with the cathedral we had just left. Anselmo was not insensible to the influence. "If I were Vicar of San Pedro, half the delight of my days would vanish," he said. "Instead of living in a refined, almost celestial atmosphere, existence would be a daily protest against paganism. Let us pass to the cloisters." Here indeed the scene changed. Smaller than those of the cathedral, they were almost as beautiful and effective though more ruined and more restored. "Not time but wanton mischief has been at work here," said Anselmo. "The work of destruction was due to the French in the Peninsular War. Which of Spain's treasures did they leave untouched?" Nevertheless a great part of their beauty remained. The passages were full of collected fragments; old tombs, broken pillars, carved capitals and ancient crosses: a museum of antiquities: and the Norman arches resting upon their marble shafts were a wonderful setting to the whole. Above them, all round the cloisters, a series of small blind Norman arcades rested upon delicately carved corbels--charming and unusual detail. [Illustration: DOORWAY OF SAN PEDRO: GERONA.] Within a few yards of San Pedro was a still more ancient and interesting church with a most picturesque interior; yet a church no longer, for it has been turned into workshops. A low octagonal tower crowns a red-tiled roof with slightly overhanging eaves. Beneath the eaves repose small blind arcades, and here and there in the lower hall other arcades are gradually crumbling away. The wonderful roof is rounded and broken into sections to suit the plan of the building. Ancient eyelets admit faint rays of light, and a fine rounded arch points to what was once the principal doorway. The interior is domed, vaulted and massive, black with age. Small, it seems to carry one back to the days when Christians were few and worshipped in secret. Now fitted as a carpenter's shop, it is full of the sound of hammer and plane. In one corner, men are melting glue and heating irons at a huge fireplace. The floor is uneven and below the level of the road. Light enters with difficulty. An obscure, suggestive scene worthy of Rembrandt, who would have revelled in this combination of mysterious gloom and human occupation. The master, a stalwart Spaniard, bade us enter and gave us welcome. He was probably a man who did not trouble himself about religion, but his reverence and admiration, even affection for Father Anselmo were evident. "You honour me with your presence and bring back a sacred atmosphere to this desecrated building," he said to the priest. "Not every day will you come upon such a scene. Yet there is a certain fitness in it after all. Was not Joseph a carpenter? and did not our Saviour work in the carpenter's shop? So that, as it seems to me, it has become noble above all other callings. And so, if this church must be turned to secular use, we have chosen for the best. To me there is no sense of desecration. You have San Pedro and the cathedral for worship, and there is room and to spare in both." "I fear you seldom add to the number of worshippers," said Anselmo, with the mildest of rebukes. "Yet, Miguel, how often have I said there is good in you--an apprehension of the beauty of a religious life--if only you would not allow it to run to seed." "Father," returned Miguel good-humouredly--it was curious to hear an older man thus address a younger--"all in good time. I conceive that I am living a fair life, working hard, treating my wife well, looking after my children. But somehow I can't go to confession--what have I to confess, in the name of wonder?--and I never feel a bit the better for Mass, high or low. So I just make a religion of daily life, and by-and-by, when I am old, I will try to find benefit in your set forms and ceremonies." Anselmo shook his head. We knew how closely he sympathised with at least one part of Miguel's objections, though he could not tell him so. He only looked a vain remonstrance, which Miguel received with the good-natured smile that seemed a part of himself. "Last Sunday," said Anselmo, placing his hand on Miguel's shoulder, "I took for my text those words which are some of the most solemn, most hopeless, most full of warning in the whole Bible: _'And the door was shut.'_ There, Miguel, is a sermon in a nutshell. Bear it in mind and ponder over it. Your door is still open; so is mine; but who can be sure of the morrow? Forgive me," turning to us; "I did not come here for this, but Miguel and I are old friends and understand each other. As continual dropping will wear away a stone, so I seldom neglect to put in a word when we meet, though to-day I might for your sake have refrained. It will tell in the end," nodding to Miguel, "for he has a conscience and I will not let it rest. And what a building in which to preach a sermon!" looking upwards and around. "These blackened vaults, those massive time-defying walls, this earthy, uneven floor--everything suggests a pagan rather than Christian past. If anything could heighten the effect it is those weird workers at the fire with faces lighted up by tongues of flame. All seems a remnant of barbarism. But it is a wonderful spot, and I come again and again and every time it reads a fresh lesson to the soul. The whole place seems full of ghostly shadows. And it is perfect, as you see; transepts, a chancel and apses; nothing wanting. And so, Miguel, you who so to say dwell in the odour of sanctity, on ground once consecrated, within walls once devoted to the service of Heaven, should be influenced by your surroundings and become a shining light." "Then I fear it will never be anything but a reflected light," laughed Miguel, "and that proceeding from your revered and beloved person. I shall be content if only the shadow of Elijah's mantle touches me in falling." We left the wonderful little building so crowded with interest past and present. Miguel professed to feel honoured by our visit, and placing himself in attitude outside his door intimated that he should like to be taken with our instantaneous camera. This was done and the result promised in due time. We left him standing there--a tall, strong, magnificent specimen of his race, with hair turning grey and rugged features full of a certain power. [Illustration: DESECRATED CHURCH: GERONA.] "That man has in him the making of a hero," said Anselmo, as we passed through the gateway in the old wall. "In a different station of life he would have been a master of the world. But I always feel that the lives and destinies of such men, missed here, will be carried on to perfection in another state of existence. Great powers were never meant to be lost. Here he is the acorn, there he will become the full-grown tree bearing fruit." We were climbing towards the ruined citadel and at last found ourselves within the once formidable fortress. Much remained to show the strength of what had been, but its immense area was now given up to silence and weeds. "It is full of a sad atmosphere and melancholy recollections," said Anselmo. "One goes back in spirit to the terrible days of the past. First that War of Succession, when Gerona with two thousand men manfully but hopelessly resisted Philip V. with an army five times as great. Again in 1808, with three hundred men, chiefly English, she repulsed Duhesme with his six thousand warriors. In 1809 the French besieged her with thirty-five thousand men. Alvarez, who was then Governor--you will have observed his house in the cathedral square--was terribly handicapped. He had little food and scarcely any ammunition, but was one of the bravest and wisest men of Spain. The siege was long and fierce, the suffering great. We were much helped by the English, but your gallant Colonel Marshall was killed in the breaches. It is said that Alvarez wept at his death, declaring he had lost his right hand. In such straits was the town that even the women enrolled themselves into a company dedicated to Santa Barbara. The enemy failed to take the city; never was resistance more manful and determined. Many of the besieging generals gave up in angry impatience and went off. "But at last two new enemies arose--famine and disease--inseparable spectres. Before these Gerona could not stand. Everything depended on Alvarez, and he fell a prey to fever. A successor was appointed whose first and last act was to capitulate. The siege had lasted nearly eight months, and the French lost fifteen thousand men. So," looking around, "we are on classic ground, sacred to courage, consecrated by human suffering, watered with streams of human blood. Gerona has never recovered. She has steadily declined and still declines. [Illustration: OUTSIDE THE WALLS: GERONA.] Nevertheless, she is and ever will be Gerona the brave and beautiful." Anselmo had not exaggerated. Gerona was indeed a revelation. It is not a Segovia, for there is only one Segovia in the world; but, little known or visited, it is yet one of Spain's most picturesque and interesting towns. Nature and art have combined to make it so--the art of the Middle Ages, not of to-day. A modern element exists, but the new and the old, the hideous and the beautiful are so well divided by the river, that you may wander through the ancient streets undisturbed by the nineteenth century and fancy yourself in dreamland. [Illustration: CLOISTERS OF SAN PEDRO.] We had mounted to the highest point of the ruins and seated ourselves on the embankment. Fragments of the old citadel lay about in all directions; crumbling walls, desolated chambers, dark entrances leading to underground vaults. Over all grew tall sad weeds, so suggestive of vanished hands and departed glory. It was a romantic scene, and as we sat and pondered, citadel and plains seemed suddenly filled with a vast army; the ground trembled with the tramp of horsemen, march of troops. In imagination we saw the dead and dying, the bold resistance to human foes, the falling away before a foe that was not human. The air was full of the shout of warriors, flash of swords, roar of cannon. Then the vision passed away, leaving nothing but the empty deserted scene before us. The grass on which we sat was covered with flowers, and wild thyme scented the air with its pungent fragrance. A little below, stretching far round, were the old town walls, grey and massive. The ground in front broke into a ravine, disclosing fresh outlines of towers, walls and ancient houses. San Pedro was conspicuous, and just beyond it the short octagon of the desecrated church. In its rich sheltered slope grew a luxuriant garden, with hanging shrubs and weeping trees and many fruits of the earth. To-day, it was a scene of peace and plenty; wars and rumours of wars might never have been or be again. Above all, within the ancient walls rose the outlines of the cathedral overlooking the whole town and vast surrounding country as though in perpetual benediction. Beside us sat Father Anselmo, his pale refined face and clear-cut features full of the beauty of holiness. Suddenly the great cathedral bell struck out the twelve strokes of mid-day, and we listened in silence as the last faint vibrations seemed to die away amidst the distant Pyrenees. "It is my summons," said the priest. "I would fain linger with you, but duty calls me elsewhere. I cannot say farewell. Let us again meet to-morrow." We promised; then looking steadily at him saw a wave of emotion pass over his expressive face. Following his intent gaze, our eyes rested upon a slight, graceful figure in the dress of a _Religieuse_, flitting silently through the small square beside the desecrated church. Miguel, who stood at his door, bowed as to a saint. "Sister Anastasia," said Anselmo, his eyes having already betrayed the fact. "She is bound on some errand of mercy. May Heaven have her in its holy keeping!" CHAPTER VII. A DAY OF ENCOUNTERS. "Can a prophet come out of Galilee?"--The unexpected happens--under the probe--Wise reservation--Born to command--Contrasts--Nothing new under the sun--The señora prepares for the fair--Grievance not very deep seated--Bewitching appearance--Señora dramatic--Ernesto--Marriage a lottery--Every cloud its silver lining--Gerona _en fête_--Delormais' mission--Deceptive appearances--Evils of conscription--Ernesto's ambition--Les beaux jours de la vie--Rosalie--A fair picture--Strange similarity--Heavenwards--Anastasia or Rosalie--Her dreams and visions--Modern Paul and Virginia--Eternal possession--A Gerona saint--The better part--More heresy--Fénélon--One creed, one worship--Not peace but a sword--Not dead to the world--Angel of mercy--H. C. mistaken--Earthly idyll. That same afternoon the people had recovered from their glamour. The fair was in full swing, Gerona festive. It was a general holiday and work was suspended. The shops were open, but no one attempted to make purchases. Even our industrious little lady with the idle husband gave up hoping for customers and turned to pleasure. And she took her pleasure as she did her work, with a great amount of earnestness. Luncheon had long been over. Black coffee and headache were of the past. The Silent Enigma had gone their way. Mutely they had risen, taken their hats, and marched out in a procession of three. Delormais had duly administered his homily; and after so strangely opening his heart had gone into the town to prosecute his mission. Whether an inspection of the numerous convents, a private embassy from the Pope, or some other weighty matter only to be entrusted to a man of tact and judgment, he did not say. Before separating we had asked him if his object in visiting Gerona were ecclesiastical or domestic, concerned himself or his office. "Your question is very natural, but on that point I must be silent," he returned. "My mission--I may tell you so much--is delicate and momentous. It is secret, but the secret is not mine, and can no more be disclosed than a secret of the confessional. Just now when I promised to relate to you a part of my life I was offering you of my own. No one has a right to stay me. My experiences injure none. I might publish them to-morrow and disturb no one's slumbers. But at the present moment I may call myself an ambassador--though not in bondage like St. Paul--and every act I do and every word I utter need be consecrated by prayer and reflection." "Who would have supposed anything so weighty within this little town?" we remarked. "Before arriving we looked upon it as a deserted village, the ends of the earth. From the train Gerona appears in the last stage of misery and destitution." "Can a prophet come out of Galilee?" quoth the priest. "The unexpected happens. I have long learned not to judge beforehand; above all not to be prejudiced by appearances. Rags may conceal the noblest heart, and a silken doublet cover the bosom of a Judas. Confess," laughing, "that when I took my seat next to you just now you voted me intrusive; said to yourself: 'Why does this old man usurp my elbow room, with ten vacant chairs lower down? He is troublesome. I will chill him with a proud disdain.' And now all is changed and you ask me to sit next you at dinner. Is it not so?" So near the truth, indeed, that one felt as though under the searching X-rays. "Suffering is misanthropical," we replied. "Not physical but heart pain brings out the sympathies. So it is dangerous to ask a favour of a man tortured by gout--or headache." "All which really means that I knew you better than you know yourself," returned Père Delormais, in his rich, round tones. "That is only a general experience. And now I go my way. If all be well, we meet again at dinner. Ah! I never speak without that reservation. How many times have I seen the evening appointment cancelled by death at noon." [Illustration: STREET IN GERONA.] He left the room; a tall, stately figure with hair white as snow; a man full of life and energy, evidently born to command and fill the high places of earth: a power for good or evil as he should be well or ill-directed. A very different nature from Anselmo, whom we had left at mid-day. The one ruling the destinies of men; the other content to follow in the Divine footsteps of humility and love; satisfied with a limited horizon; doing good by precept and example but asking no wider sphere than his little world. Yet in his way capable of influencing human hearts; of stirring up enthusiasm in a great crusade if only the torch of ambition inflamed his zeal. Very different the method and influence of the two men, though each had the same end in view. But in the many phases of human nature some must be led, others driven. One will hear the still, small voice, another needs the burning bush; James was the Son of Thunder, Barnabas of Consolation. As in the days of old, so now. We too went our way down the broad marble staircase of the ancient palace, but with no secret or delicate mission to perform like Delormais. We had followed rather closely, but up and down the street not a vestige of him remained. Whether he had gone right or left we knew not. The place was deserted. Looking upwards nothing was visible but outlines of the rare old houses. Here and there a gabled roof and dormer window; many a wrought-iron balcony; many a Gothic casement rich in tracery and decoration; many a lower window protected by a strong iron grille, despair of serenaders, consolation of parents, paradise of artists. It was now that we saw our industrious and amiable señora preparing for the fair. Again the mantilla was being gracefully arranged. The lady--very properly--had evidently no idea of neglecting the good looks nature had bestowed upon her. "Ah, señor," as we stopped with a polite greeting, "for a whole week this fair is the upsetting and devastation of the town. It comes with all its shows and shoutings; distracts our attention; we may as well close the shutters for all the business that is done; finally it walks off with all our spare money. And who is a bit the better for it?" But madame's grievance was evidently not very deep-seated, for she laughed as she adjusted the folds of her mantilla more becomingly, and looking across at a mirror could only confess herself satisfied with her bewitching appearance. Near her stood a good-looking boy of some fourteen years, who evidently just then thought the attractions of the fair far more important than his mother's adorning. He was impatient to be gone. "Calm yourself, my treasure," she remonstrated. "The day is yet young. Chestnuts will not all be roasted, nor brazen trumpets all sold. These are eternal and inexhaustible, like the snows of the Sierra. Oh! youth, youth, with all its capacities!" she dramatically added. "Ah, señor, you will think me very old, when you see me the mother of this great boy!" We gallantly protested she was under a delusion: he must be her brother. "My son, señor, my son. I married at sixteen, when I was almost such a child as he, and I really do feel more like his sister than his mother. _Ahimé!_ If I had only waited a few years longer I might have chosen more wisely; perhaps have found a husband to keep me instead of my keeping him. Marriage is a lottery." We suggested that every cloud has its silver lining. "True, señor. And after all if I did not draw the highest number, neither did I fall upon the lowest. This dear youth too is a consolation. He is fond of swords and trumpets, but never shall be a soldier. I have long had the money put by for a substitute in case he should be unlucky. For that matter, Heaven has prospered my industry and in a humble way we are at ease." This recalled the scene witnessed in the earlier hours of the morning and the appointment half made with the colonel for the morrow. "Evidently you do not approve of conscription, madame, which to-day seems to be running hand-in-hand with the revels of the fair." "I see that conscription is a necessary evil," returned madame, "for without it we should not get soldiers; but you will never persuade me any good can come of it. That my son here, who has been carefully brought up, should suddenly be thrown under the influence of the worst and vilest of mankind--no, it is impossible to avoid disaster. So, Ernesto, never fix your affections on a military life, for it can never be, never shall be. I would sooner make you a priest, though I haven't the least ambition that way either." To do the boy justice, he seemed quite ready to yield, laughed at the idea of priesthood, and if fond of swords and trumpets, his military ardour went no further. If one might judge, a civil life would be his choice, and possibly a successful one, for he seemed to inherit his mother's energy with her dark eyes and brilliant colouring. But for the moment the fair and the fair only was the object of his desires. This was in accordance with the fitness of things. He was at the age which comes once only, with swift wings, when life has no alloy and happiness lies in gratifying the moods and fancies of the moment. "Now I am ready," said the mother, evidently very happy herself. "Ah, señor, you are too good," as we slipped a substantial coin into the boy's hand and bade him buy his mother a fairing and himself chestnuts and ambitions. "But after all, the pleasure of conferring happiness is the most exquisite in the world. There is nothing like it. So perhaps I should envy, not chide you." They went off together, the boy taking his mother's arm with that confidential affection and good understanding so often seen abroad. To him the world was still a paradise, and his mother at the head of all good angels. _Les beaux jours de la vie_--short-lived, but eternally remembered. So, parents, indulge your children but do not spoil them. The one is quite possible without the other. It was to be a day of encounters. We followed our happy pair down the deserted street, admiring the graceful walk of the mother, the boy's tall, straight, well-knit form and light footstep. As they disappeared round the corner leading to the noisy scene of action, a quiet figure issued from beneath the wonderful arcades and approached in our direction. She was dressed as a Sister of Mercy and seemed to glide along with noiseless movements. "Rosalie," we breathed, turning to H. C. for confirmation. "Without doubt," he replied. "There could not be two Rosalies in one town." "Or in one world." On the impulse of the moment we went up and, bareheaded, spoke to her; felt we knew her--had known her long. Anselmo's vivid confession had taken the place of time and custom. Yes, it was Rosalie. A more beautiful face was seldom seen, never a more holy; all the refinement and repose of Anselmo's added to an infinite feminine grace and softness. They were even strangely alike, as though the same impulse in their lives, a constant dwelling upon each other, their fervent, though purified, affection had created a similarity of feature and expression. Hers was the face of one whose life is turned steadily heavenwards, to whom occasionally, whether waking or sleeping, a momentary glimpse of unseen glories is vouchsafed, one whose daily work on earth is that of a ministering spirit. As far as it is possible or permitted here, Rosalie bore the evidence of a perfect and unalloyed life that had never looked back or attempted to serve two masters. Perhaps she might have become a mystic, but the serious and practical nature of her work kept her mind in a healthy groove, free from introspection. She was walking her lonely pilgrimage along the narrow road of her dream with firm, unflinching steps. The end, far off though it might yet be for Anselmo and for her, could not be doubted. "_Ma soeur_, you are Anastasia, devoted to good works; and once were Rosalie devoted to Anselmo," we said, without waiting to choose our words. "There could not be another Rosalie in Gerona, as there could not be another Anastasia." "Nay," she returned, "I am Rosalie still, and still devoted to Anselmo. There is no past tense for our affection, señor, which sweetens my days and makes me brave in life's battles." She seemed neither surprised nor startled by our sudden address. Calm self-possession never for a moment forsook her, though in our rashness we might have been probing a half-healed wound or rousing long dormant emotions. But it was far otherwise. Naturally as Anselmo had told us his story she replied to our greeting. They were a wonderful pair, these two. United, their careers would have been very different, but never otherwise than pure and holy. As we spoke to her a slight colour mounted to her pale, lovely face, a light came into her eyes, a sweet smile parted the lips. She looked almost childlike in her innocence, utter absence of self-consciousness. "Yes, I was Rosalie," she repeated; "and I am Rosalie still, though my life compels me to adopt a new name. But I ever think of myself as Rosalie, and in my dreams am Rosalie of the days gone by. Sometimes my mother visits me in those dreams and calls me Rosalie. If we retain our names in the next world I shall be Rosalie once more. Señor, you have been with Anselmo and he has told you our story--or how could you know?" "It is true. We have been with Anselmo, were with him this morning and parted at mid-day. As the clock struck twelve we stood on the ruined citadel and saw you cross the square of San Pedro." "Ah, señor, I saw you also, for I recognised Anselmo. He is never within many yards of me but seen or unseen I know it. Some spiritual instinct never fails to tell me he is near." "You are both remarkable. Your love and constancy ought to be placed side by side with the histories of Paul and Virginia, Abelard and Héloïse. Yet you are distinct and different from these, as you are above them." "Señor, if we only knew, there are thousands of histories in the world similar to our own, but they are never heard of. Shakespeare records a Juliet, Chateaubriand an Atala, and they become immortal; but what of the numberless heroines who have had no writer to send them down to posterity? Depend upon it they are as the sand of the sea. And is it so much to give up for Heaven? We possess each other still, Anselmo and I; and the possession is for ever. You think it strange to hear a Sister of Mercy talking of love in this calm and passionless way," she smiled. "You imagine me cold and severe. You do not believe that I have feelings deep as the sea, wide as eternity. It is true that my love for Anselmo is only the love we should all bear towards each other; but for him it is supreme and exalted above all words. In my dreams he comes to me as an angel of light bidding me be of good courage; in my waking hours he is my best and truest friend, my hero and my king. Is not this better than all the passionate vows which rarely survive one's early youth, and too often die under the strain of life's daily work? For me, Anselmo is still surrounded by all the romance of our first youth. He is a sort of earthly shekinah, a pillar of fire guiding me onwards." "And you never regret the choice you have made? the companionship you have given up? the right of calling Anselmo husband? the sacrifice of motherhood, which is said to be sweetest of all earthly ties to woman?" [Illustration: CATHEDRAL CLOISTERS: GERONA.] "Regret?" she softly murmured. "A hundred times since it happened conviction has been vouchsafed to me in my dreams, strengthening my faith, showing the wisdom of my choice. Every day of my life I thank Heaven for the power it gave me. Had I married Anselmo, he would have become my religion; my heart's best affection given to him, Heaven would have come second. I know and feel it. And we know Who has said: 'He that loveth father and mother more than Me, is not worthy of Me.' Yet that would have been my case in the earlier years; and in the later--who can tell?--perhaps what I have described." "Impossible, for Anselmo is worthy of all love, and could never change. One rarely meets any one like him. He seems little less than saint." "He is very saintly," replied Rosalie, with almost a look of ecstasy. "I frequently meet the priesthood in the sick-room, at the bedside of the dying. The difference in the ministrations is wonderful. The very entrance of Anselmo brings consolation, seems to sanctify the chamber. Sometimes it is almost as though an angel spoke." If she at all exaggerated, who could wonder? She saw and heard and judged everything through her own nature; and to the sick and sorrowing no doubt came herself as a rainbow of hope. "You have done wisely and chosen the better part," we said. "Your life in consequence is peaceful and happy." "It could not be more so," answered Rosalie. "I have my earthly shekinah to lighten my path. My heart is so much in my work that if I lived for a century I should never weary of it. What higher mission or greater privilege could there be? I am constantly at the bedside of the sick, assisting the last moments of the dying, helping to restore others to health. The love they give me is unbounded. My existence is made up of love. I feel I have many in the other world who pray for me, perhaps watch over my daily life." "But are they not in purgatory?" For of course Rosalie was a Roman Catholic. "I do not believe in purgatory," she murmured in subdued tones. "I have seen many die who cannot possibly be going to torment. If there be a transition state, it is one of bliss and holiness, where the soul, in gratitude to God for His mercies, grows and expands until it becomes fit for the heaven of heavens." "But this is perplexing. Here are two devout Romanists who reject the very first conditions of their faith. Anselmo believes not in confession, you reject purgatory. Of course we agree with you, but then we are Protestants." "Hush!" murmured Rosalie. "The very walls of Gerona have ears. We can only act up to our convictions, and where they disagree with the Church keep differences to ourselves. What Anselmo believes, I believe. It is wonderful how we think alike in all great matters. This morning I had the privilege of a long conversation with Père Delormais, who is staying for a week here. There, indeed, is a broad-minded Churchman who ought to be Pope of Rome. He would favour Protestants as much as Roman Catholics--and scandalise the narrow-minded community. In that he reminds me of the Abbé Fénélon, who is so earnest and devout. Do you know his 'Spiritual Letters,' señor?" "It is one of our favourite books, Rosalie. Those who read and follow Fénélon will hardly go wrong. We have always felt he was a Protestant at heart." "A follower of Christ at heart," returned Rosalie, "without distinction of forms and ceremonies. To him if the heart was right, the rest mattered little. He cared not whether a soul worshipped within or without the Church of Rome. Would that all errors could be swept away and we were all Protestants and Catholics, united in one creed and ritual, even as we worship the one true God and believe in the all-sufficient Saviour." "That day is far distant. We must wait the millennium, Rosalie. Until then it is not to be peace but a sword. The bitterest persecutors are those who fight for what they call Religion." "'A man's foes shall be they of his own household,'" quoted Rosalie. "That applies equally to the 'Household of Faith.' There is the prophecy. I suppose we must not look for a Church Triumphant until the Church Militant has ceased. But I must go my way. Señor, I rejoice that you spoke to me. I am glad to know you. Whether the acquaintance be of hours or years, you are evidently Anselmo's friends, therefore mine. Do not think my heart closed to all human interests because I wear a religious garb and go through life as Sister Anastasia, ministering to the sick and dying. On the contrary, I take pleasure in all the worldly concerns of my friends. I like to hear of their being married and given in marriage. Nothing delights me more than the sight of a happy home and devoted family. And I like to hear of all the changes, improvements, inventions that are turning the world upside down and revolutionising the lives of men. If you are staying in Gerona we shall meet again. I am constantly flitting to and fro. My life is a great privilege, as I have said. You will keep a corner in your heart for me and for Anselmo; one niche for both. Adieu, señor. Adieu." She glided away rapidly with her quiet graceful motion; an angel of mercy, we thought, if earth ever held one. "Never, never should I have had strength to give her up," said H. C., following her with all his susceptible nature in his eyes. "This morning I admired Anselmo, now I feel quite angry with him." "You do wrong and are mistaken. It was her choosing, not his. He behaved nobly. They have found their vocation. Both are happy, and we cannot doubt it is Heaven's ordering. There is no shadow in their lives; remember how rare that is. You know Mrs. Plarr's lines: 'There are twin Genii both strong and mighty, Under their guidance mankind retain, Never divided where one can enter, Ever the other doth entrance gain; And the name of the lovely one is Pleasure, And the name of the loathly one is Pain.' For them the genii have separated. Their life has no pain. Think of Rosalie's vision. Had they married it might have been all sorrow and suffering. No, best as it is. Their story is an idyll too perfect for this world. They have had their romance, and have kept it." CHAPTER VIII. MOTHER AND SON. Demons at work--In the crowd--Ernesto and his mother--Roasted chestnuts--Instrument of torture--New school of anatomy--Rhine-stones or diamonds?--Happy mother--Honest confession--Danger of edged tools--Cayenne lozenges for the monkeys--Joseph--Early compliments--Ernesto pleads in vain--Down by the river--Music of the reeds--Rich prospect--Faust--Singers of the world--Joseph takes tickets--Gerona keeps late hours--Its little great world--Between the acts--Successful evening--In the dark night--On the bridge--Silence and solitude--Astral bodies--Joseph turns Job's comforter--Magnetism--Delormais psychological--Alone in the streets--Saluting the Church militant--Haunted staircase again--Sighs and rustlings--H. C. retires--"Drink to me only with thine eyes"--Delormais' challenge--Leads the way--Illumination--Coffee equipage--"Only the truth is painful"--Lost in reverie. We were facing the wonderful arcades which still seemed haunted by Rosalie's shadow, so vivid the impression she left behind her. It was one of the most striking bits of Gerona the beautiful, with its massive masonry and deep recesses requiring sunlight to relieve their mysterious gloom. In a few moments we stood once more on the bridge, looking upon the remarkable scene. The demons were in full work down in the dry bed of the river; their altars threw out tongues of flame as wood, coal and braise mingled their elements, and the air seemed full of the scent of roasted chestnuts. Those marvellous houses stood on either side with their old-world outlines and weather-beaten stains. Above them rose the towers of Gerona's churches, sharply cutting the grey sky. To our right, the boulevard stretched far down, with its waving, rustling trees. All the shows were in full operation; streams of people went to and fro; the booths were making a fortune; the Dutch auction was giving away its wares--if the auctioneer might be relied on. We joined the crowd and presently felt a tug at our elbow. It was Ernesto with radiant face, his hands full of chestnuts freely offered and accepted. We found it easy to persuade ourselves the indigestible horrors were excellent. "Ernesto, you are taking liberties," said his mother, as the boy took our arm to confide his purchases. A Rhine-stone brooch for the mother, which Mrs. Malaprop would have declared quite an object of bigotry and virtue; a wonderful knife for himself, full of sharp blades and secret springs. A purse capable of holding gold, and a pocket-book that would soon become dropsical with a boy's treasures. Finally, from the innermost recess of a trousers' pocket, he produced for an instant--a catapult; to be held a profound secret from the mother. "It keeps her awake at night," he confided; "and when she does get to sleep she dreams of smashed windows and murdered cats. Now I never smash windows, though I do go for the cats when I have a chance. It does them no harm. If I hit them, you hear a thud like a sound from a drum--the cats are not over-fed in these parts--but instead of tumbling down dead, which would be exciting, they rush off like mad." "Perhaps they die afterwards, Ernesto, of fractured liver or broken heart." This was at once negatived. "Oh no, cats haven't livers and hearts like human beings. Their insides are nothing but india-rubber. You can't kill a cat. If one fell from the top of San Filiu, it would get up, shake its paws and run away." We noted this revelation, intending to bring it before the Faculty on our return to England, which evidently still gropes in Egyptian darkness. The catapult was restored to safe depths, and before long no doubt many a domestic tabby would be missing; there would be widowed cats and orphaned kittens in many a household. Then Ernesto, drawing us under an arcade out of the throng of the fair, insisted upon fastening his mother's mantilla with the new brooch that we might all admire the flashing stones. "I believe they have made a mistake, and these are real diamonds," he cried excitedly, kissing his mother and duly admiring the effect. "And I haven't spent half my pocket-money yet." "Thanks to you, señor," said the happy mother. "I was his first thought. He bought me the brooch before he would look at a knife or chestnut. It shall be kept amongst my treasures." She was evidently almost as happy and light-hearted as the boy, her eyes flashing with proud affection. No great care haunted her life in spite of her conjugal good-morning. "Confess that your lot is favoured," we said, "and you would not change your lazy husband even if you had the chance. Confess you adore him and are to be envied." "Well, señor, you are not my father-confessor," she laughed, "but I will confess to you all the same. I admit I would rather bear the ills I have than fly to those of which I know nothing," unconsciously quoting Shakespeare. "Then the conjugal good-morning must be a little sweetened. It is dangerous to play with edged tools." Again she laughed, a laugh free from anxiety. "We understand each other, señor. If I received him too amiably he would not appear upon the scene till twelve o'clock. Not that I really mind; but it is a bad example for Ernesto. The boy, however, takes after me. Never will grass grow under his feet." Ernesto was impatient to be off; he must certainly act up to the proverb to-day. "Now for the shows," cried the lad. "We are losing too much time here. I smell roasted chestnuts, but their flavour is better. We must cross the iron bridge to get to the shows. I want to hear the lions growl, and administer cayenne lozenges to the monkeys. It is great fun to see them. You must often have done the same, señor?" We virtuously disowned the impeachment. But he was full of harmless mischief, after the manner of boys healthy in mind and body; free and open in his thoughts and ways. A few minutes and we found ourselves in the market-place listening to the clown who had used superhuman exertions last night, still apparently in excellent health and spirits. Night was the great harvest-time, but even now his labours were receiving fair success. The people had got over their first glamour and were responding. "There is José, your landlord's son, señor, looking to right and left," said madame, in the interval between two terrific trumpet blasts. "Probably searching for you. Ah! he sees us." The tall, slight young man was making his way through the few remaining stalls in the market. These sold nothing but fruit and were altogether neglected. Gerona did not shine in that department. "I have been looking for you everywhere," said our young host as he came up, bowing politely after the fashion of his country. "I thought, señor, you might want me to pilot you about the town; but you are in the hands of a fairer guide, and I am not needed." Joseph had evidently not pursued his studies at Tours for nothing, and was beginning early to turn compliments. "On the contrary, we shall be glad of your company," we replied. "Ernesto and his mother are going in to hear the lions roar and administer delicacies to the monkeys. And having no ambition to shake in our shoes or be taken up for cruelty to animals, we would rather explore the antiquities of Gerona under your care. So you appear at the right moment." "Ah, señor, do come in," pleaded Ernesto. "I should enjoy it so much more. And you would shriek with delight when you saw the antics of the monkeys eating cayenne----" "Ernesto, you are incorrigible," we interrupted, laughing. "We decline the risk; and whilst detesting monkeys, we have a conscience. Yours evidently has still to be awakened. But you may come and tell us your experiences at the hotel later on--that is if you are still at large." So the boy, taking his mother's arm, boldly mounted the steps, and with a final happy nod, and flourishing a small packet of cayenne lozenges, he disappeared beyond the curtain. How the lions would roar or the monkeys receive the indignity remained to be seen. Ernesto was not wanting in purpose and might be trusted to do his best. We left the shows and the crowd for a moment, went round to the banks of the river, and listened to the whispering reeds and rushes. What repose; what a contrast to the glare and glitter and crowding of the fair. Not a soul visible excepting the ferryman a little way up-stream, waiting dejectedly in his boat for custom that would not come. The rustling reeds harmonised musically with the quiet flow of the water as it rippled and plashed on its way to the sea. To the left the plain spread far and wide--a rich, productive country with much fair beauty about it. Where we stood the river was broad and reflected the magic outlines of the town, faint and subdued under the grey skies. Above the music of the rushes we could hear the distant hum of the pleasure-seekers, where everything was life and movement. Presently passing the theatre, we saw "Faust" announced for that evening. An operatic company had arrived from Barcelona. Wonders would never cease. In this dull town, decaying remnant of Spain, there was an Opera-house, and the tempter was to play off his wiles on beautiful Margaret. What would the performance resemble? "Quite a large house," said Joseph, "and a very fine one; the players are often excellent." Of course he judged from his own experience, which had never gone beyond Tours; never dreamed of the great voices of the world. Who indeed could dream of Titiens, never having heard of her? Or of Ilma di Murska?--those stars in the world of song: not to mention Grisi and Malibran the incomparable, of the far-gone days. Still, he spoke with enthusiasm, and we felt we must hear this Faust and Marguerite. "Take three tickets for to-night, José, and you shall point out all the _élite_ of Gerona; the great, the good, the beautiful." Joseph needed no second bidding. Diving through the doorway to the office he returned with three excellent stalls. The performance was to be fashionably late. Everything in the way of entertainment is late in Spain, and especially in Gerona. At night the streets are soon deserted, but people do not go to bed. They sit up in their own homes, amusing themselves. "It is announced for half-past eight," said Joseph, "but seldom begins before nine." [Illustration: OLD HOUSES ON THE RIVER: GERONA.] Accordingly before eight-thirty we found ourselves in our seats waiting the lifting of the curtain. The house was nearly empty, though it was within five minutes of the appointed hour. Not a sign of any orchestra. We feared a cold reception and a dead failure. "Not at all," said Joseph. "It is always the same. Before nine o'clock the house will be full, with hardly an empty seat anywhere." So it proved. About twenty minutes to nine the orchestra streamed in and took their places, laughed, talked and made jokes, as if the audience--now quickly appearing--had been so many cabbage-stalks. In various parts of the house there were notices forbidding smoking; but the musicians lighted their abominable pipes and cigars without ceremony, and soon ruined the atmosphere. We wondered how this would affect the singers, and when they came on they coughed, sneezed, and looked reproachful. It was a large, well-appointed house, of excellent proportions. Half the town might surely find room here. Curtains and all such elements disturbing to the voice were conspicuous by their absence. Before nine o'clock every seat was filled, as Joseph had foretold. Between the acts we were able to survey the little world of Gerona. Many clearly thought themselves members of a great world. Humility was not their leading virtue. From the construction of the house, every one was very much in evidence, and from our places in the front stalls we saw and heard perfectly. "Monarchs of all we survey," said H. C. after a long stare in all directions. "No, I don't quite mean that; it would be slightly embarrassing. I mean that we survey everything as though we were monarchs. It comes to the same." Every species of temperament was represented; the solemn and sober, excited and flirting, prude and profligate. Extremes met. Some of the ladies made play with their eyes and fans, were full of small gestures and rippling laughter. Many were dressed "in shimmer of satin and pearls," their white arms and necks very décolletés. Thus we had both a play and an opera. It was quite as amusing to study the audience between the acts, as to watch the drama upon the stage. Ladies were admitted to the stalls, and the house looked more civilised in consequence. Many of the men in this polite Spain sat with their hats on until the curtain drew up. Altogether the house presented a very lively appearance. "Who would have thought it!" said H. C. "The place overflows with wealth and rank. These people might be dukes and duchesses--and look the character much more than many of our 'Coronets and Norman blood.' Yet as we passed Gerona in the train it seemed nothing but an encampment for beggars. Beggars? Let me apologise. Beggars would want something more recherché. In these days that flourishing profession dines at eight o'clock and sleeps on down." In the foyer, between one of the acts, we came into closer contact with this aristocratic crowd. It was a very large long room, gorgeously fitted up; great mirrors giving back full-length reflections. Few ladies honoured it with their presence, but a crowd of short, dark, handsome Spaniards went to and fro, smoking cigarettes, wildly gesticulating about Margaret, abusing the unfortunate Siebel, openly passing their opinions upon the ladies of the audience. Mixing freely amongst them we heard many an amusing remark upon people we were able to identify on returning to our seats. At the end of the third act we began to feel like old habitués. A week in Gerona and we should be familiar with every one's history. "A happy thought, coming here to-night," said H. C. "I am now quite at home amongst these people, and should like to call upon some of them to-morrow. That exquisite creature, for instance, with the lovely eyes, perfect features, and complexion of a blush rose. I believe--yes, I am sure--look--she is gazing at me with a very sweet expression!" He was growing excited. We grasped his arm with a certain magnetic touch which recalled him to himself. Keepers have this influence on their patients. "Look at the old woman next to her," he went on indignantly. "Can she be the mother of that lovely girl? She ought to blush for herself. Her dress-bodice ends at the waist. And behind her fan she is actually ogling a toothless old wretch who has just sat down near her." Here, fortunately, the curtain went up, and H. C.'s emotions passed into another channel. [Illustration: STREET IN GERONA.] The performance had equalled our modest expectations. One must not be too critical. If Faust was contemptible and Siebel impossible, Margaret and Mephistopheles saved all from failure. She was pretty and refined, with a certain touching pathos that appealed to her hearers. She sang with grace, too, but her voice was made for nothing larger than a drawing-room, and when the orchestra crashed out the dramatic parts, we had to imagine a great deal. Siebel was the great stumbling-block and burlesque; her singing and acting so excruciating that when the audience ought to have melted to tears they laughed aloud. When Valentine died she clasped her hands, not in despair but admiration of the fine performance, looked at the audience as much as to say, "Would you not like him to get up and die again?" and when his body was carried off, skipped after it, as though assisting at some May-day frolic. Faust was beneath criticism, and one felt angry with Margaret for falling in love with him. In reality she must have hated him. Mephistopheles, on the contrary, was admirable, and would have done honour to Her Majesty's in the days of Titiens and Trebelli. The "Old Men's Chorus" was crowning triumph of the performance. Three decrepit objects came forward and quavered through their song. When it was ended the audience insisted upon having it all over again, whilst they kept up a running accompaniment of laughter, in which the old men joined as they retreated into the background. Altogether it was a successful evening. Every one left in good humour, and many were charmed. We went out into the night, glad to exchange the atmosphere. It looked doubly dark after the brilliancy of the house. Every light was out, every house buried in profound slumber. We turned to the bridge, and stood there until all the playgoers had streamed homewards, and silence and solitude reigned. Once more the chestnut-roasters had departed and their sacrificial altars were cold and dead. Down the boulevard not a creature was visible. Stalls and booths were closed, torches extinguished. The leaves of the trees gently rustled and murmured in the night wind. We almost felt as though we still saw Ernesto and his mother walking up and down in close companionship. It must have been their astral bodies. Both no doubt were slumbering, and perhaps the same vision haunted their dreams; broken windows and four-footed victims--seen from different points of view. In the firmament a great change had taken place. The clouds had rolled away; not a vapour large as a man's hand remained to be seen; stars shone clear and brilliant; the Great Bear ploughed his untiring way, and Orion, dipping westward, was closely followed by his faithful Sirius. All seemed to promise fair weather. "What do you think of it, Joseph? Is your weatherwise astronomer for once proving a false prophet?" "It looks like it," replied Joseph, gazing north and south. "No man is infallible," philosophically. "But our prophet has never been wrong yet, and I expect you will find the skies weeping in the morning." "You are a Job's comforter, and ought to be called Bildad the Shuhite. Was not he the worst of the three, and would have the last word?" Joseph shook his head. He was not acquainted with the Book of Job. "I am jealous for the honour of my prophet," he laughed. Standing on the bridge, we could see the dark flowing water beneath--a narrow shallow stream here, which reflected the flashing stars. The houses were steeped in gloom, all their quaint, old-world aspect hidden away. The night was growing apace, and it suddenly occurred to us that we had made a half-engagement with Delormais to hear passages from his life. Would he hold us to it? Or would reflection have brought a change of plans and an early pillow? Surely there is a mental or psychological magnetism about people, neither realised nor understood, never sufficiently taken into account. As the thought flashed over us, a tall dark form in long cloak and round hat, full of dignity and power, turned the corner and approached the bridge. It was the priest. "I knew it!" he cried in that sonorous voice which was like a deep and mellow diapason. "An unseen influence guided me to the bridge. You told me you were going to the opera. I felt that when it was over you would come here star-gazing and lose yourselves in this wonderful scene. And here, had I not sought you out, you would have remained another hour, forgetting the engagement to which I hold you." "Nay, at this very moment recollection came to us," we returned. "We were wondering whether for once you had changed your mind and sought an early repose." "My approach influenced you," said Delormais: "work of the magnetic power constantly passing to and fro between kindred spirits, as real as it is little estimated. No one believed in it more firmly than Goethe, who in spite of his contradictory life was in close touch with the supernatural. And amongst my own people, how many have declared the reality of this mysterious link between the material and spiritual. Even sceptical Voltaire admitted some invisible influence he could not analyse. Sceptical? Will you persuade me a man with so terrible a death-bed was ever sceptic at heart? It is impossible. But how could you think I should change my mind and forget my engagement? Uncertainty plays no part either in your character or mine. Let us to our rooms. There you will lend me your ears, and I will brew you black coffee to refresh you after your evening's dissipation. And if you like you shall bring your century-old flask, and I will not read you a homily. Or was it only the contents of the flask that was a century old?" The hotel was at hand. We four alone possessed the street and awoke the silent echoes. Always excepting the ubiquitous old watchmen, who seemed to spend half their time in gazing at the great doorway, flashing weird lights and shadows with their lanterns. These they now turned upon us, but recognising the ecclesiastical figure, quickly lowered their lights, turned the spears of their staffs to the ground, and gave a military salute. "As a member of the Church Militant such a greeting is perhaps not out of place," he laughed. "No general on this earth ever fought more valiantly than I to gain battles--but the weapons are wide as the issues. They fight for an earthly, I for a heavenly kingdom." He spoke a few words to the watchmen; bade them be strong and of good courage; and we fancied--we were not quite certain--that he glided a small token of good-will into their hands. Then we crossed the road, entered the courtyard, and passed up the broad marble staircase. It was the hour for ghosts and shadows and unearthly sounds. Again we thought of the rich and rare crowd that had passed up and down in sacques and swords in the centuries gone by; every one of whom had long been a ghost and shadow in its turn. Again we saw clearly as in a vision that last happy pair who had separated--he to find death on the battlefield, she to rejoin him in the Land o' the Leal. Distinctly we heard the rustle of the gown, the fervency of their last embrace, the sighs that came in quick succession. So easily imagination runs away with us. We were awakened to realities by José, who, heavy-eyed and dreamy, was politely wishing us good-night, hardly wakeful enough to reach his room. "I will follow his example," said H. C. "The air of Gerona conduces to slumber. I verily believe you never sleep. To-morrow I shall hear that the good father's confessions terminated with the breakfast hour. Ah! I shall miss the black coffee--but I have a flask of my own, though its contents have nothing to do with the centuries." Then Delormais turned to us, his eyes full of kindly solicitude. "Are you equal to a vigil? Is it not too bad, after your hard day's work--pleasure is often labour--to ask you to give an old man an hour or two from your well-earned slumbers? Do you not also find the air of Gerona conducive to sleep? I warn you that at the first sign of drooping eyelid I dismiss the assembly." "A challenge! Never was sleep less desired. Though the breakfast hour finds us here, as H. C. foretells, there shall be no want of attention. But do not forget the black coffee!" We heard H. C.'s receding echoes through the labyrinthine passages; the closing of a door; then a voice gently elevated in song, utterly oblivious of small hours and unconscious neighbours. "Drink to me only with thine eyes, and I will pledge with mine," it warbled; "leave but a kiss within the cup, and I'll ne'er ask for wine." Here recollection seemed to come to the voice; an open window looking on to a passage was softly closed, and all was silent. H. C. was evidently thinking of the charming face he had seen at the opera, all the more lovely and modest contrasted with the shameless old woman at its side. Delormais led the way through the corridors. His light threw weird shadows around. A distant clock struck the hour of one. The hush in the house was ghostly. The very walls seemed pregnant with the secrets of the past. They had listened to mighty dramas political and domestic; heard love-vows made only to be broken; absorbed the laughter of joy and the tears of sorrow. All this they now appeared to be giving out as we went between them, treading quietly on marble pavement sacred to the memory of the dead. We entered Delormais' sitting-room. At once he turned up two lamps, and lighting some half-dozen candles produced an illumination. "One of my weaknesses," he said. "I love to take night walks and lose myself in thought under the dark starlit skies, but that is quite another thing. In my room I must have brilliancy." "When you are a bishop you will so indulge this weakness that your palace will be called a Shining Light, its lord a Beacon of the Church." A peculiar smile passed over the face of Delormais. We did not understand it at the moment, but knew its meaning later on. Then he brought forward the coffee equipage, for which, if truth must be told, though slumber was never farther from us, we were grateful. "I had it all prepared by our amiable host, and I have my own spirit-lamp, without which I never travel," said the priest. "There are times when I visit the most uncivilised, hope-forgotten places, and if I had not a few accessories with me, should fare badly." The water soon boiled, an aromatic fragrance spread through the room; the clear black coffee was poured into white porcelain cups. "But where is the supplement? I do not see the century-old flask," said Delormais. "That is sacred to headache--or the charm would go; there are other fixed rules besides the Persian laws." "I am glad to hear it. Then after all my little homily this morning was not needed. That is why you took it so amiably. Only the truth is painful." He placed for us a comfortably cushioned armchair near the table, and one for himself. Our coffee equipage was between us, the steaming incense rising. A shaded lamp threw its rays upon the white china and crimson cloth, gently illumined the intellectual and refined face of Delormais. We could note every play of the striking features, every flash of the large dark eyes. A sudden stillness came over him; he seemed lost in profound thought, his eyes took a deep, dreamy, far-away look. They were gazing into the past, and saw a crowd of events and people who had lived and moved and had their being, but were now invisible to all but the mental vision. The hands--firm, white, well-shaped and made for intellectual work--were spread out and met at the tips of the long slender fingers. The legs were crossed, bringing into prominence a shapely foot and ankle set off by a thin well-fitting shoe. In all matters of personal appointment Delormais was refined and fastidious. For some minutes he appeared thus absorbed in mental retrospect. The man of life and energy had suddenly changed to contemplation. Apparently he had forgotten our presence, and the silence of the room was profound. One almost heard the rising of the incense from the coffee-cups, as it curled upwards in fantastic forms and devices, and died out. We were motionless as himself. Not ours to break the silence, though it grew strained. We had come to listen, and waited until the spirit moved him. Nor had we to wait long. He roused himself from his reverie; the dreamy light passed out of his eyes; his spirit seemed to come back to earth as he turned to us with a penetrating, kindly gaze. CHAPTER IX. DELORMAIS. Magnetism--Past life--Impulsive nature--First impressions--Perfumed airs--A gentle spirit--Haunted groves--Blue waters of the Levant--Great devotion--A rose-blossom--Back to the angels--Special providence--Fair Provence--Charmed days--Excursions--Isles of Greece--Ossa and Pelion--City of the violet crown--Spinning-jennies have something to answer for--Olympus--Ægina--Groves of the Sacred Plain--Narrow escapes--Pleasures of home-coming--Rainbow atmosphere--Orange and lemon groves--The nightingales--Impressionable childhood--Fresh plans--The Abbé Rivière--Rare faculty--Domestic chaplain--Debt of gratitude--Treasure-house of strength--Given to hospitality--First great sorrow--Passing away--Resolve to travel--"I can no more"--The old Adam dies hard--Chance decides. Delormais roused himself to the present as one who awakes from a dream. Those large dark eyes seemed capable of every expression; could flash with intellect, melt with fervent love or grow earnest with condemnation; sparkle with wit, or suffuse with sympathy and pathos. In Delormais susceptibilities and intellect seemed equally balanced. "I have been reviewing my life," he began. "And I am asking myself why we are here seated together as old familiar friends. How it is that to you, a comparative stranger, I have promised to speak of the past, open my heart, disclose secrets unknown to the world? It must be that you deal in magnetism. Or that we were born in the same mystic sphere, or under the same conjunction of stars; and that for the third time in my life I discover one who is altogether sympathetic to me; to whom I feel I can speak as to my other self. Nor is it necessary that this feeling should be shared by you in an equal degree. Enough that you are not antagonistic; even approach me with a friendly liking. I, many years your senior, am the dominant power. You follow where I lead. But a truce to metaphysics; searchings into spiritual conditions we cannot altogether fathom; wandering into realms withholden from mortal vision. Let us leave the unseen and uncertain, and turn altogether to the present world." We made no reply. Our sympathy was strongly awakened in this singular man. Here was a nature rare as it was powerful; distinguished by all the finest and noblest qualities vouchsafed to mankind. But we wished him to take his own way, utter his own thoughts, not disturbed by remark or turned aside by suggestion. He rose for a moment, replenished the cups, and went on with his narrative. "I have not asked you to join me to-night to read you a lesson," he continued. "In reviewing my past life, I find it full of incident and action. But it has none of those startling dramas and strange coincidences, none of those high achievements or fatal mistakes, which occasionally make biographies a solemn warning to some or a pillar of fire to others. I have brought you here simply for the pleasure of spending an evening with you. If I beguiled you at this late hour under any other impression I am guilty of false pretences. But late though it be it is still evening to me, to whom all hours are alike. For a whole week at a time I have slept an hour in the twenty-four in my arm-chair, and found this sufficient rest. We give too much time to sleep. Like everything else it is a habit. The day will come soon enough for the folding of the hands. At any time I can turn night into day, and feel no sense of fatigue or loss of power. Nature never takes her revenge by turning day into night. I cannot remember the time when the daylight hours caught me napping. "So then, for the pleasure of your company, and that we may become better acquainted, I have persuaded you to join me; not that I have much to tell you that can be useful or instructive. And yet it is said that the record of every life is a lesson. But all this you do not require. I was presumptuous enough at mid-day to read you a homily of which black coffee was the text and strong waters were the application. It was done partly from the impulsiveness of my nature which has carried me into a thousand-and-one unpremeditated scenes and circumstances; partly that my heart warmed towards you and I thought it a surer introduction to a better acquaintance than the usual topic of the weather. Throughout my life of more than sixty years, from the day I was able to observe and reflect I have been a student of human nature. You see even my rashness did not mislead me. I was not rebuked. On the contrary, your heart immediately responded to the singular and presuming old man." He called himself old, but in reality, though six decades had rolled over his head, he was still in full force and vigour of life. He paused a moment. The deep musical voice echoed through the room in subdued cadences. There was nothing harsh or loud in its tones. Delormais was too well-bred, too much a man of the world and student of human nature, as he had said, not to know the charm and value of modulation. He paused, but we the patient listener: Saul sitting at the feet of Gamaliel: made no reply. "Nevertheless, if I cannot instruct, I think I can interest you," continued Delormais, breaking the momentary silence. "My life has been singular and eventful. I will rapidly sketch some of its passages: a mere outline. To go through it circumstantially, in detail, would prolong the narrative to days and weeks. To write the life chapter by chapter, incident by incident, would fill many volumes. "I have a good memory and it carries me back to the earliest scenes of childhood: scenes full of fairy visions and sweet remembrances. Orange-groves and lemon-groves, olive-yards and vineyards, orchards where grew all the luscious fruits of the earth, gardens filled with its choicest flowers, these are my first impressions. I breathed an air for ever perfumed. "These realms were inhabited by beings fitted for paradise. My mother's lovely and gentle face haunted the groves; my father's voice filled the house with music and energy. He was a man born to command, but ruled by charm, not by power: expressed a wish rather than gave an order. Most lovable of husbands and most indulgent of fathers, we, who were to him as the breath of his nostrils, worshipped him. I was his constant companion. Day after day, when just old enough to run by his side, he would sail about with me in his white-winged boat, on the blue waters of the Levant. On the terrace in front of the château my mother would sit and watch us, an open book before her to which only half her thoughts were given and nothing of her heart. That followed the little craft skimming to and fro in the sunshine. "Or in a larger yacht, we would take longer voyages; but if my mother were not with us these absences were rare, three days their limit. I was the idol of the sailors, just as my father was their king, who could do no wrong. "All my days and surroundings were coloured by this gentle, dark-eyed mother of exquisite loveliness and delicate refinement, whose only failing was too great a devotion to her husband and boy. I was an only surviving child, and for that reason doubly precious to my parents. A little daughter had first been born to them; a child, I have heard, the very counterpart of her mother--frail, delicate, and too good for earth; her soul too pure and her face too fair. At the age of three, when she was budding into loveliest rose-blossom, she went back to the angels. "There never was any fear of that sort for me. From the first I was strong and sturdy, escaping even the ordinary ailments of childhood. So far I saved my parents all anxiety. Their only care was to check my high and venturesome spirit, which now would cause me to be fished up from the bottom of shallow waters; and now would bring me down to earth with a broken olive-bough that possibly had borne fruit for centuries and might have done so for ages yet to come. I never came to harm. A special providence watched over me--I record it with all reverence. "As the bird flies my home was not so very far from here, though it was in France, not Spain. We lived in one of the loveliest spots of fair Provence, where indeed the earth brought forth abundantly all her fruits and flowers. "My mother had offended her family by her marriage, yet in no sense of the word was my father her inferior. But she was of noble birth and he was not, though a patrician. He was a gentleman in all his thoughts and deeds, a great landed proprietor, a man of vast intellectual culture and refinement. The _mésalliance_ her people chose to see in the matter existed only in their worldly minds and wicked ambitions. For to marry my father she had refused the Duke of G., an empty-headed _bon vivant_, with nothing but his title and wealth to recommend him. For fifteen years my mother's life was happy as life on earth can be. The day came when her people acknowledged the wisdom of her choice, the hollowness of theirs. But one circumstance in her father I have always thought condoned all his obstinacy. He finally yielded to her wishes. Without this the marriage would have been impossible. When he saw that her very existence depended upon it, he at length dismissed the duke and gave his consent--reluctantly, with a bad grace it must be admitted, but it was done. The duke married elsewhere. Wild, unprincipled, unstable as water, he entangled himself in all sorts of intrigues, gambled, and finally fell into embarrassment. Not until then was my father really and truly received without reservation as a son of the family--a position to which he was in every possible way entitled. "Those were charmed and charming days of childhood and youth. It has been said that when the early years are specially happy, the after-life is the opposite. I cannot say that this has been my experience, though, as you will see, the hand of sorrow has sometimes been heavy upon me. "My father was wealthy. He spent much time in his library, where my mother might almost always be found, her seat near to him. By stretching forth his hand he could occasionally clasp hers, as though to assure her that his heart still beat for her alone. In all my father's intellectual pursuits she was thoroughly at home--no study was too deep or abstruse for her comprehension. "Now and then she would accompany us in our yacht, and it was delightful to witness the reverence and devotion of the crew on those occasions--men who remained with us year after year, nor ever thought of change. I believe that every one of them would have laid down his life for her. She never liked the sea; the least rising of wind or ruffling of water alarmed her. When she accompanied us our excursions would be lengthened. We explored the islands of the Mediterranean, visited friends in some of the more distant towns on the seaboard. How well I remember a longer absence than usual, when we made acquaintance with all the Greek isles, and explored the fair city of the violet crown. Who that has approached those classic shores can forget the first sight of Ossa and Pelion--scene of the battle between the gods and Titans--though Homer reverses possibilities in placing Pelion upon Ossa! Who can forget his first impression of the rocky gorge and valley between Ossa and Olympus! All is now in a state of sad but picturesque ruin and poverty, but in days gone by industries flourished here--a happy and contented people. The spinning-jennies of England have a little to answer for in this. "To my mother's classic mind, all ancient history appealed with a special charm. The shores of Greece, like our own, were washed by the blue waters of the Mediterranean. There too the hills, in all their exquisite form, stood out in a bright clear atmosphere. We journeyed leisurely from the frontier to the Piræus; visited the islands of the Peloponnesus, with all their ancient and romantic interest; rested ourselves at the Monastery of Daphne, and from the summit of the pass gazed upon that wonderful view of Athens. Together we ascended Mount Olympus and pictured ourselves amongst the gods of the ancient mythology. We admired its richly-wooded slopes, where the endless mulberry trees put forth their spreading foliage, and visited the Monastery of St. Dionysius, which lies in that wonderful Olympian amphitheatre--one of the grandest scenes in nature. "All Athens opened its doors to us. They could not greet too warmly or _fête_ too highly my mother's beauty and grace, my father's rare gifts of heart and mind. "But our happiest hours were spent alone. Together we studied the wonders of the capital, and grew familiar with the Byzantine churches. We passed days upon lovely Ægina where blow the purest of Heaven's pure winds. We stood almost in awe before the wonderful ruins of the Doric Temple of Zeus, Ægina's glory, whose columns have stood the test of 2,500 years. What can be lovelier than the view from the summit of that rugged hill crowned by its imperishable monument? I remember as though it were yesterday my first glimpse of Helicon and Parnassus, as we sailed through the Gulf of Corinth; the walk through the olive-groves of the Sacred Plain, where, turn which way you will, the eye rests on historic ground. In the fair city we thought of Paul as he preached to the Athenians under the shadow of the Parthenon. We haunted the Acropolis with its barren rocks and fragments of past glories. From the charmed heights we gazed upon the sapphire sea ever flashing in brilliant sunshine. In the distance, faint and hazy and dreamlike, were ever the sleeping mountains, Ægina and Argolis protecting the magic ranges. Sometimes we penetrated too far inland, and more than once my father's adventurous spirit had nearly brought us within the grasp of the lawless, a condition of things that would have been the death of my mother, and for which he would never have forgiven himself. "But all the pleasure of our wanderings never equalled the charm of our home-coming. There was our life and our delight. There we were truly happy. Looking back, I see that it was an ideal existence: a condition Heaven never permits to remain too long unbroken, or we might forget that this is not our abiding city. "My father filled his leisure moments by cultivating vineyards, which in those days were very successful, and in the form of wine returned rich revenues. We lived in a rainbow atmosphere, and, if you know Provence--as doubtless you do--you will also know that this is no mere figure of speech. The airs of heaven were ever balmy. In those days one never heard of cold and snow and frost on the Riviera. We have since approached some degrees nearer to the North Pole. Little need for others to go off in search of it and bring it to us. At that time we lived in perpetual summer. The sapphire waters of the Mediterranean for ever flashed and flowed upon the white sands of the shores that belonged to us. It seems to me now that the skies were always blue and the sun ever shone. Olive-yards and vineyards, I have said, surrounded us. Orange and lemon-groves sent forth an exquisite perfume only known to those who live amongst them. An amphitheatre of hills rose about us; the lovely Maritime Alps with all their graceful undulations, all their rich foliage. Birds flashed in the sunshine. In the balmy nights of May the nightingales never ceased their song. "I must have been an impressionable child, with all my strong, sturdy health, inheriting something of my mother's romantic nature. It is certain that the memory of those early days has never faded, but has been the background and colouring of all my after life. Even now in thought I often go back to them. There are times when I am a little undecided how to act. I ask myself how my father or mother would have acted under the circumstances, and in their clear, sensible tones seem to hear the reply. "Up to the age of seven they were my sole instructors. Then fresh plans were formed. A precocious child, it was felt that I ought to enter upon more serious studies than they had leisure to direct. "A tutor was found; the Abbé Rivière; a man of large mind and solid attainments; a profound thinker. To this he added the simple nature of a child. The marvel was that he condescended to become tutor and companion to a lad of seven. We soon found that his ambition was to have leisure for the writing of metaphysical works. His present appointment gave him his heart's desire. He had no parish or people to look after. With less singleness of purpose and more worldliness, he might have risen to any position in the church. No better companion for a boy could have been found, and he possessed the rare faculty of imparting knowledge. His mind could unbend, and he adapted his conversation to his hearers. No mere bookworm was he, dry, tedious and incomprehensible. My studies were a delight. I knew afterwards that one of the joys of his life was to watch day by day the unfolding of his pupil's mind. Thus he took the keenest interest in his work, and considered his days doubly blessed. I have heard him say that the offer of the triple crown could not have tempted him to change his life. "He did not live in the château, but in a small house on the estate. It was supposed that here he would feel himself more his own master, free to order, to come and go as he would, whilst every comfort was secured to him. My father was the most generous of men, full of thoughtful consideration for all in any way dependent upon him. From the highest to the lowest, none were passed over. He soon discovered the Abbé's true character; the high purpose that actuated his life; and became devoted to him. My father's mind was quite equal to the Abbé's, though he had not spent his life in metaphysical studies. Still, he sympathised with his pursuits, and read his works in MS. Now he agreed with the writer and now differed. His clear, correct vision many a time won over the Abbé to his opinion. "The Abbé became, so to say, our domestic chaplain. As often as he could be persuaded, he made a fourth at the dinner-table, and said grace in his quiet, refined tones. And he needed far less persuasion on these occasions than when the château was filled with guests. He was always an acquisition. A man of deep and varied thought, possessing the gift, not always given to great men, of putting his thoughts into words. An earnest, fluent talker, who could unstring his bow and throw a charm even over ordinary topics. This was far more apparent, far more exercised when we were alone and he was sure of the sympathy of his hearers, than when others were present. If he only spoke of the passing clouds, the ripening fruit, or the flashing sea, his rare mind would clothe his ideas in a form peculiarly his own, and especially attractive. "I often think Providence helped my father in his selection. When indeed does Providence _not_ direct the paths of its children? Without doubt I owe the Abbé a deep debt of gratitude. He did much to shape and consolidate my character. I was his pupil in all those important years when the seeds are being sown to bear fruit in the after life. From the age of seven to nineteen, I was seldom absent from him. Occasionally he would join in our yachting excursions. Then, unbending, throwing work to the winds, he became the most delightful of companions. In spite of his more than fifty years and his long white hair, he could be almost child-like in his ways. His was one of those simple and rare natures that never grow old. "Rightly or wrongly, my parents elected to keep me at home. I was their all in life; they would have me under their own roof. And why not? My future was assured. I should be wealthy. It was not necessary to go out into the world to learn to fight my way, as it is called. In the matter of education I certainly did not suffer. Experience of the world came soon enough. "So our quiet and charming life went on. Looking back, I would not change one single circumstance of those early days. They are a treasure-house on which I still draw for strength and guidance. "We were by no means isolated. My father was given to hospitality and delighted in receiving his friends. We mixed freely with the few families of our own rank in the neighbourhood. Nevertheless these were exceptional times. He was happiest--we all were--when the house was free from guests and we were all in all to each other. It was a paradise of four people; for the Abbé in time became as one of ourselves. If good influence were wanted, he gave it. He was a deeply religious man in the wide acceptance of the term; not thinking of saints and fasts and penances, but of the higher life which looks Above for strength and consolation. I much fear me he would have passed but a poor examination before the Consistory of Rome. I doubt if he would have escaped excommunication. Holy, upright man!" cried Delormais with emotion. "He was as much above ordinary human nature, with all its petty ways and narrowing limits, as the stars are above the earth." Again he paused, and for a moment seemed plunged in profound sadness. He had evidently reached a painful crisis in his life. A deep sigh escaped him which seemed weighted with the burden of years. Then with an effort, still turning upon us that kindly, penetrating eye, he went on with his narrative. "At the age of fifteen came my first great sorrow--the greatest sorrow of my life. I could not have conceived that our cloudless sky would so suddenly become overcast with the blackness of night. "My mother died. A man loses his wife, and however much he loved her, he may get him another. But he can have but one mother in his life, one father. "For long she had been gradually failing. Much as I loved her, my boyish eyes did not perceive the change that was coming. I did not see that this earthly angel was quietly passing away to heaven. She herself was conscious of it. There were times--how well I remembered it afterwards--when I would find her eyes fixed upon me with a yearning ineffable sadness. Her whole soul and spirit seemed to be speaking to me without words. She was about to leave me to the temptations and tender mercies of the world--how would it fare with me in the years to come? But she never spoke or gave me word or sign of warning. "My father also saw the change coming, but would not admit it; could not believe or realise it. The loss would be his death-blow. For him there could be no second wife, no other companion. When the blow fell, it crushed him. He was never the same again. I never again heard him laugh, scarcely saw him smile. His body was still on earth, thought and spirit seemed to have followed his wife into the unseen world. His affection for me, the kindly remonstrances of the good Abbé, even these were not powerful enough to restore his desire for life. He went on quietly, patiently for four years, then followed the wife without whom it seemed he could not remain on earth. "I told you just now their life was too happy to remain long without interruption. Fifteen years of perfect companionship had passed as a flash, the dream of a long day, and then vanished. "I was now nineteen, but mentally and physically more like five-and-twenty. A restlessness seized me. My home was haunted by the spirits of my parents; by the remembrance of days whose perfect happiness made that remembrance for the moment intolerable. I had passionately, tenderly loved both father and mother. If I went into the groves, her face seemed ever gazing at me amidst the fruit and foliage. Her accustomed place in the terrace was filled with her presence. In every room in the house I heard my father's voice, felt the clasp of his hand. "The good Abbé was my frequent companion, but the blow had told upon him also. He had aged wonderfully. Though he tried to be cheerful for my sake, it was clearly forced. My life grew impossible. I felt that I must change the scene if I would recover mental tone and vigour. For a time I must travel; see the world; wander from place to place, country to country, until rest and calm returned to my soul. Even the Abbé, sorry as he was to part from me, commended my resolution. "I was my own master; wealthy; free to come and go as I would; everything favoured the idea. At home I would change nothing. The Abbé should remain in his little house, his days and leisure at his own disposal. The old servants were retained in the château. Only the living-rooms should be closed to the ghosts that haunted them. The able superintendent of all outdoor concerns, a domestic chargé-d'affaires, who had for years filled the position under my father, remained at the head of all things. The only change in his routine was that once a week he should have a morning with the Abbé. All matters were to pass under the scrutiny of that wise judgment. If any difficulty arose he was to be appealed to. It was the only service I asked at the hands of my old tutor in return for the home and stipend it was my privilege to afford him. He had long been white-haired, and was now venerable beyond his nearly seventy years. He gave me his solemn benediction at parting, and for the first time I saw him break down. He wept as he placed his hands upon my head. 'This third parting is too much for me,' he cried. 'I can no more.' "So I turned my back upon my home, my face to the world. I was strong, energetic, full of life and spirit, though for the moment clouded and subdued. The Abbé had taken care that my mental powers should be thoroughly trained. For twelve years I had been his constant care. In many things he thought me his superior. Mathematics and classics, the sciences, these by his rare skill he had made my amusement. But my impulsive nature, quick sometimes to rashness, had not been conquered. He had only given me a certain amount of judgment and common-sense which must stand by me in moments of difficulty or danger. Altogether I was well-fitted to take care of myself, in spite of my love of adventure and quick temperament. You see that it clings to me still," added Delormais with a smile. "The old Adam dies hard within us. Who else would have treated you to a homily on black coffee and strong waters as I did this morning? "I departed on my travels with no fixed purpose other than to see the world. To which point of the compass I turned, chance should decide." * * * * * Again Delormais paused as though absorbed in past recollections. For a moment his white, well-shaped hand shielded his eyes. Then returning to his former attitude, now gazing earnestly at us and now into space, he continued his narrative. CHAPTER X. DELORMAIS' ROMANCE. Rome--Count Albert--Happy months--Sweets of companionship--Egypt--Strange things--Quiet weeks--Sinai--Freedom of the desert--Crossing the Red Sea--Mount Serbal--Convent of St. Catherine--In the Valley of the Saint--Tomb of Sheikh Saleh--Pools of Solomon--Jerusalem the Golden--Bethel--Lebanon--Home again--Fresh scenes--Algeria--Hanging gardens of the Sahel--Mount Bubor and its glories--Rash act--At the twilight hour--Earthly paradise--Fair Eve--Fervent love--Arouya--Nature's revenge--Not to last--Eternal requiem of the sea--In the backwoods--Hunting wolves--Prairies of California--Honolulu--Active volcanoes--Lake of fire--Rare birds and wild flowers--Worship of Peleus--An eruption--Mighty upheaval--Coast of Labrador--Shooting bears. "The first morning that I wakened up away from home I found myself in the Eternal City. I had always loved Rome. Here I thought I might lose myself in ancient history. In imagination I trod the palace of the Cæsars, and in the Coliseum beheld the martyred Christians. I pictured the gilded pageantries of the Tiber, the splendours of the pleasure-lost citizens. I saw the vast Campagna clothed with its armies, listened to the clash of arms and shouts of warriors ascending heavenwards. I walked the Appian Way with St. Paul and at the Three Taverns seemed to hear his voice in sorrowful farewell. At the shrine of Cecilia Metella I lingered in sympathetic communion; and from the Pincio Hill watched the sunsets of those matchless skies. Why are the skies of Rome more beautiful than any other? The Vatican opened its doors to me and the Pope gave me his most intimate and friendly benediction. I fear that I thought too lightly of the latter. "What just then was more to my purpose, in Rome I found a great friend. He, Count Albert, was the nephew of the duke my mother had refused to marry. We had been intimate from childhood, but he was five years my senior. I need not say that he was a very different man from his uncle: high-minded, earnest, a cultivated citizen of the world. About to visit Egypt and Palestine, he begged me to join him. His happiness he declared would then be complete. "Thus chance, or an over-ruling Providence, decided for me. I willingly acquiesced, and the many months we spent together remain as some of the happiest of my life. Though never ceasing to mourn my loss, I quickly threw off depression in the excitement of ever-changing scenes. Only in the still darkness of the night hours would the beloved faces and voices come to me with an ever-recurring sense of loneliness, and, man though I was, my pillow was frequently wet with tears. But our friendship for each other was sincere and has remained so. For the Duke of G.--he has now by the decrees of fate become the head of his family--is still living, though we have seldom met of late years. "We travelled together, enjoying those sweet pleasures of companionship only given us in youth. With Egypt and Palestine we became intimate and familiar. Cairo delighted us. It was less modern in those days than in these. We were never tired of visiting the mosques with all their sacred and historic charm. We made the acquaintance of the sheikhs, saw them perform impossible magic, heard strange things revealed in a drop of ink. To me these mysteries have remained unsolved to this day. We spent hours and days amongst the tombs of the Caliphs, revelling in their wonderful refinement. We visited all the ancient cities of the Nile: Thebes with its hills and ruins, Memphis with its palm forests and Pyramids--those monuments the most ancient in the world. We contemplated the great Pyramids of Ghizeh by moonlight and felt steeped in mystery. In the same weird light I have stood before the Sphinx and asked the reason and origin of its existence, but only profound silence has answered me. At Dendera, that perfect temple begun by Cleopatra and finished by Tiberius, I gazed upon the features of the famous queen and compared them with those of Hermonthis. I found they resembled each other and confess that I wondered in what consisted the beauty of the woman who changed the fate of the world--but beautiful she must have been. We chartered our dahabeah and travelled up to the Second Cataract. Never shall I forget the soothing repose of those quiet weeks, the delight of our uninterrupted companionship, the books we read together, the daily thoughts we exchanged, the ruined cities we explored. It was an experience that comes only once in a lifetime. "We both felt strongly the connection between Sacred Geography and Sacred History: how the one would be better understood if the other were visited. So together we became acquainted with the Peninsula of Sinai, its mountains, plains, and sea. The charm and freedom of the desert I had often dreamed about, but how far greater was the reality! Here we revelled day after day in the wonderful isolation: sky and sand and nothing else. A mingling of gorgeous tones: a vast expanse of blue and yellow; a molten sun burning down upon all by day, at night the infinite repose of darkness and star-lit skies. How endless were those sandy wastes, broken only by the wild broom and acacia yielding its gum arabic, the wild palm and manna-giving tamarisk! "We traversed the desert in which the Israelites wandered for forty years, and crossed the Red Sea over the very spot where Pharaoh and his host were drowned. We ascended Mount Serbal and the cluster of Jebel Mûsa, and therefore must have trod the very Sinai of Israel. We stayed for days at the wonderful convent of St. Catherine, a strange building to exist in the very centre of the desert, with its massive walls, gorgeous church and galleries, monkish cells and guest chambers, its wonderful gardens. We spent much time in the Library, examining its ancient and singularly interesting MSS. We conversed frequently with the monks, and wondered why they should be Greek and not Arabian; and whether, so far removed from the world, temptation and sin and sorrow still assailed them. "In the Valley of the Saint we visited the tomb of Sheikh Saleh, the 'great unknown,' where the tribes of the Desert assemble once a year and hold their races and dances and offer up burnt sacrifices. We looked upon Hebron, that wonderful sepulchre of the Patriarchs, and passed through the Valley of Eschol, once so abundant in the fruits of the earth. We visited the three Pools of Solomon on our way to Bethlehem. Never can I forget the gorgeous splendour of the scene, the wonderful undulations of those vine-clad hills. In the vast depression lie the sleeping pools, square and regular, and sky and atmosphere seem full of flaming colours, and one realises the true meaning of the glories of the East. Beyond lies Rachel's tomb, and from the top of a neighbouring hill one looks down upon Jerusalem the Golden. We feel that we are treading the holiest ground on earth. "We went up the Passage of Michmash to Bethel; that dreary and barren spot where Jacob made him a pillar of stones and dreamed his dream. You remember his words: 'Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.... This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.' The spot is very desolate; no wonder Jacob feared as he gazed around. "We visited Lebanon, and in its grove reposed under the few remaining cedars, listened to the cry of the cicale, and watched the birds of brilliant plumage flitting from branch to branch. Though in the midst of the desert there was no silence. A wonderful spot, with its rushing streams, its vineyards and corn-fields, the magnificent sea flashing in the sunshine. What a forest life it must have been before Sennacherib laid it low! "So we became thoroughly acquainted with Sinai and Palestine. I can never understand those who leave this magic land with a sense of disappointment. It is true that we were young, full of life and vigour, ready to extract all the honey from our sweets; but to me no after experience ever equalled this first lengthened journey of my manhood. With what sorrow and regret I brought it to an end and parted from my friend, you will easily imagine. "But it had to be. I had been long absent from home. The Abbé wrote to me regularly; all had gone well and quietly, but I began to feel anxious to gaze once more upon the beloved groves and familiar shores; to hear once more the voice of the good old man who I knew hungered and thirsted for my return. "One morning when the sun was shining and everything looked bright and happy, I suddenly appeared before the Abbé. He was absorbed upon a MS., putting the finishing touches to a chapter of peculiar merit, when he looked up and saw the desire of his eyes. For a moment I thought he was about to lose consciousness. Then the blood rushed to his pale, refined face, and I found myself clasped in his arms. "We spent a quiet happy month together. I took up my abode in his house, not in the château. Everything was pursuing the calm and even tenor of its way. Every one was happy, and the return of the master made that happiness complete. They all hoped I had come to remain; but I found that could not be. I was unable to settle down to a quiet domestic life. This home-coming had brought back all my loss, the happiness of days gone for ever. I felt I must seek fresh scenes, and soon departed again on my wanderings. This time they were not very distant. "I crossed over to Algeria, and from the bright green slopes of the Sahel learned to love the white terraces and hanging gardens that contrasted so well with the matchless blue of the Mediterranean. That was not all that I learned to love. "I mixed freely with the Arabs and the French of all classes. Fate took me to Djidjelly. I wished to ascend Mount Bubor, and from its summit gaze as it were upon all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them. Here I committed the most rash, most impulsive act of my life. You will say it was impossible in one brought up as I had been. I have learned that nothing is impossible. Remember also my youth; that I was in a sense alone in the world; had never loved, never even thought of love. I will now tell you a secret hitherto locked within my own breast. In a word, I married. Djidjelly has been considered almost impregnable, but no fortress can keep out the arrows of Cupid. "I had been in the town for about a week, exploring the rocks and heights, picturing that terrible expedition two centuries ago, when the Kabyles brought Beaufort and his men to utter defeat. One day I had walked some ten miles into the interior. I was revelling in the perfume of one of the lovely groves that abound, when suddenly I came upon a vision of grace and beauty that absolutely dazzled and astounded me. It was that witching hour of evening when the sun nears the horizon and all nature seems sinking to repose. A perfect paradise of orange and almond trees, olives and pomegranates interspersed with the wild laurel, surrounded me. Never did paradise boast a fairer Eve. The declining sun threw deep shadows athwart the paths; branches and foliage traced fairy pictures of sunlight and shade. "In this enchanting scene stood a young Kabyle woman, lovelier than anything I had ever seen before or have ever dreamed of since. She was about seventeen, but here, as you know, women develop early. Her form was perfect as her face. If she walked, her step was light and majestic. If she ran, it was with the grace of the gazelle. Everything about her was harmonious. Her abundant dark hair crowned a small and shapely head. Her eyes, large, dark and soft, flashed with sensibility and intelligence beneath pencilled eyebrows and long drooping eyelashes that almost swept her cheek. Her expression was one of singular purity and guilelessness. All the passionate temperament of the East seemed to have passed her by. Yet how purely, how fervently she could love. Over a silken robe she wore a haick or burnous of fine gossamer that fell about her in graceful folds. When her small coral lips parted they revealed the most exquisite of pearly teeth. Her voice was music. You will say that I am making her too perfect. This would indeed be impossible. I have never met any one to approach her either in grace of mind or beauty of feature. "But Nature had been cruel. She had bestowed those matchless charms only to withdraw them too soon. I saw her and from that moment loved her: loved her for ever. There was no doubt or wavering in my mind. I approached her. She met me fearlessly, naturally, without thought of guile. To my delight she spoke perfect French, was evidently refined and educated. Her father was the proprietor of this little paradise. This meant that he was probably at ease in the world without being exactly rich. I quickly got to know him. Wooing in this part of the world is not a matter of months or years. Within a week of our first meeting, I was engaged to Arouya. Her father was only too willing to give her to one who was young, good-looking, above all had wealth at his command. Almost immediately, without counting the cost or reflecting upon the mistake of a union with one of another race and religion, we were married. But all the reflection in the world would have made no difference. I was borne on by a mighty torrent against which there was no struggling. "For six months I lived a charmed, enraptured, secluded life with Arouya, my wife. We were intensely happy in each other's love: bliss that is rarely given to mortals. It was not a mere life of the senses; her mind was wonderfully pure, bright and expansive. From the very first I laboured to convert her to Christianity, and with singular clearness she grasped and embraced all its profound yet simple truths: became deeply, devotedly religious. This only seemed to strengthen her affection for me. "But it was not to last. Almost from the day of our marriage I felt the shadow of the sword. Our happiness was to be as fleeting as it was perfect. Arouya was already stricken with mortal illness. Consumption had set its seal upon her. Before we had been married three months she began to droop; at the end of six months she died. Died in my arms, blessing the hour in which we had first met. I laid her in her far-off grave, within sound of the sea, which chants her eternal requiem. "I will draw a veil over my grief. For the third time in my young life I was heavily stricken. But I have learned to see the hand of mercy in the blow, and in time I lived it down. It was an episode in my life so romantic, so sacred, that I never spoke of it even to the good Abbé. You are the first to whom I have confided it. The secret is locked in my own breast--and in yours. "I left Algeria and sought distraction from my grief by going farther abroad. I visited America, where I saw Nature on a gigantic scale. There I went through endless experiences and adventures. In the backwoods of the North I have spent whole nights watching for wolves, and heard their howlings on all sides. Often I have been sore beset. Many a tree have I climbed to save my life; from its branches shot many a tiger whose glaring eyes and deep growls told me one or other must conquer. But as in childhood, so in later years I seem to have carried about with me a charmed life. Many a time has my thirst been assuaged by the monkeys, who in return for stones pelted me with cocoanuts. In the Indian jungle I have hunted lions, and once was surprised and sprung upon by a tiger that at that very moment was providentially shot by my servant. Otherwise I should not now be here to tell you the tale. It was a narrow escape. "In the vast prairies of California I delighted. Here I saw vegetation as I had never conceived it. Even the cedars of Lebanon paled before these gigantic monarchs of the forest. Loveliest flowers of gorgeous hues, wonderful tree-ferns, abounded. There was no limit to their wealth. Once, whilst here, the desire seized me to visit Hawaii--the Sandwich Islands as they are called: those wonderful volcanic isles of the Pacific. Beside them, everything else of a like nature fades into insignificance. Vesuvius, Ætna, Hecla, these are child's play in comparison. The eight islands form a rich and productive chain. "I embarked from San Francisco for Honolulu, and reached it after a run of sixteen days before the wind. Here I found much to repay me. The island is full of rocky spurs which form so great a contrast to the green plains of the interior with their clear flowing streams and endless forests. Vast craters are ever in a state of eruption: the largest volcanoes in the world: some extinct, others in a state of activity. One of these days I believe that a tremendous upheaval will take place and the islands will disappear. The mountain peaks of Hawaii, Mauna Kia and Mauna Loa, 14,000 feet high, with their eternal snows, would alone repay a visit. Perpendicular precipices 3000 feet high present a bold savage front to the sea, and looking at them you think that never before have you gazed upon rock scenery. The sandy shores have the loveliest, most perfect of coral reefs. The waters surrounding the islands are clear and brilliant with every rainbow colour. Here the world is a paradise; but its people, though harmless enough, are not angels. "Kilanea on Mauna Loa is the largest of the active volcanoes. Its oval-shaped crater is nine miles in circumference and 6000 feet above the level of the sea. Within this a lake of fire is for ever burning and seething, moving and heaving to and fro in liquid waves of molten lava. Imagine the tremendous, the awful sight. I was there in 1856 when it was in a very active state and continued so for some years. At night the spectacle was sublime beyond description. Herds of wild horses roam the islands. There is a curious bat that flies by day. Many of the trees are productive. The sugar-cane flourishes; the palm, banana, cocoanut and _ti_. The natives bake and eat the roots of the latter and thatch their huts with its leaves. The snow-clad hills are the most distinctive feature, here and there rising in overpowering masses wreathed in fantastic vapours. Above these the clear blue sky rises in brilliant contrast and unbroken serenity. At sundown the white snow-tops flush a rosy red. Wonderful creepers interlace the trees of the forest, so that you walk under an endless magic roof of green, through which the sun at mid-day penetrates only in delicate gleams and patches. Gorgeous wild-flowers grow everywhere through the pathless woods. Birds of rare plumage flash from bough to bough, chattering and calling, but soulless in point of song. Everywhere one meets the pungent odour of wild fruit. Here too I found orange and lemon-groves that almost rivalled those of my Mediterranean home. You have heard of those wonderful trees with their wealth of blossoms that live one day, changing colour three times in the daylight hours: white in the morning, yellow at noon, red at sundown--blushing their life away. "The heat of the days was intense, but at sunset a cool breeze would spring up, laden with the perfume of orange and lemon-groves. I mixed freely with the natives, a curious, superstitious race. "It was here that I first experienced the sensation of earthquakes. They are common enough in these volcanic islands, and unless violent, excite little attention. I had been travelling for two days. Suddenly I felt the ground as it were slipping under my feet. The trees about us swayed, the leaves rustled as though moved by a strong wind. In the air was a brooding stillness. We were not far from a tremendous volcano. An eruption was evidently about to take place. I had two or three native servants with me, and an acquaintance who was half a Frenchman and had settled in the island. The former were frightened and superstitious, given up to the worship of Peleus, goddess of the volcano. "With difficulty we made our way to the mouth of the crater through the pathless forests surrounding it. Never can I forget the beauty of the immense tree-ferns that abounded. It was no doubt a rash proceeding, but at last we stood at the edge of the crater. We looked upon a vast lake of liquid fire. The sight was terrific, and made me think of Dante's most graphic passages. "All this soon changed. Presently the surface of the lake of fire had turned black, sure sign of an approaching eruption. Not a breath of air stirred. All nature was steeped in a profound hush. The very birds ceased to fly and flutter. Our horses trembled and manifested every symptom of fear. There was no time to be lost if we wished to save our lives. After a sharp ride we gained the slopes of a snow mountain. Here we waited for what soon came; shock after shock of earthquake. Rocks and stones detached themselves around us and rolled into the valley. Trees were uprooted. Then came a mighty, rushing, hissing sound, as a sea of molten lava rolled down in many directions and spread over the plain. Never shall I forget the grandeur, the awful majesty of the sight. We knew not how far it would reach or to what extent our lives were in danger. Dense volumes of smoke rose in the air, obscuring the sky. Torrents of ashes fell far and wide. I thought of the fate of Herculaneum and Pompeii, scenes I had visited with my parents only a few years before. Was such a fate to be ours? We were almost choked with the smell of sulphur. Vegetation was scorched and burnt up under the terrible influence. It was a monster devouring all that came within its path. The poor monkeys in the cocoa-nut trees no longer thought of pelting us with fruit. They crouched and hid themselves in the branches, and understood the peril of their lives. I will not weary you with further description. Suffice it that we escaped, and when I again found myself in Honolulu, it was to bid the islands a long farewell. "For a time there was no end to my wanderings. From Honolulu I went off in an American whaler to the coast of Labrador and shot bears as they drifted southward on icebergs coming from that mysterious and hitherto inaccessible North Pole. Once I spent a week with that curious little people, the Esquimaux, who inhabit the creeks of Labrador and live chiefly on the excellent fish abounding in those waters: waters so wonderfully tempered by the Florida stream. In my travels I have experienced the extremes of refinement on the one hand, of hardship on the other. But the latter has been my own choice, and this makes all things bearable. I once had a friend who went out to break stones on the road; work we give to our convicts; but he did it for pleasure and thought it delightful." * * * * * Once more Delormais paused as though in deep reflection. The silence in the room was only broken by the faint ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. Outside not a sound disturbed the sleeping world. Not a breath stirred in all the corridors of the old palace that had seen better days. We waited until the spirit should move him again. CHAPTER XI. MONSEIGNEUR. Great conflict--Returning to Paris--Count Albert married--Marriages declined--Love buried in the grave of Arouya--Frivolities--Napoleon at the Tuileries--Illness--Doctors' errors--Days of horror--Vow registered--Between life and death--Victory--Home again--Abbé's objections--Resolve strengthened--Death of the Abbé--Taking vows--Life of energy and action--Rapid sketch--Sympathies--All ordained--"Monseigneur"--"Mon ami"--Cry of the watchmen--Candles wax dim and blue--Wandering in dreams--False prophet--H. C. rises with the lark--Beauty of Gerona--Pathetic scene--Colonel administers consolation--Widow's heart sings for joy--In the cloisters again--Good-bye--In the cathedral--Anselmo--Sunshine over all--Miguel--On the ruined citadel--Anselmo's signal--A glory departs. "I have told you of the great romance of my life," he presently continued. "Now let me tell you of its great conflict. "After many wanderings I returned to Paris. Here the great world opened wide its doors to me. In a short time I was _l'enfant de la maison_ amongst all people worth knowing. Count Albert had married one of the most charming women in the great world. You can picture my welcome. Few days passed but I spent some portion of my time with them. I was naturally sought after, my wealth and position rendering that inevitable. Fathers proposed marriage for their daughters after the French fashion, offering the bribe of large dowries. But they knew not my secret. All my love was buried in a quiet Algerian grave, within sight of the ever-sounding sea. I had never loved before; I should never love again. I shuddered at the idea of a mere _mariage de convenance_. Love and love only could make the chains of matrimony bearable. Who could love again after such a love, such a marriage as mine? "I soon felt the life of Paris feverish, enervating. There was no rest, or repose, or freedom about it. A wild series of frivolities succeeded each other: court ceremonies--Napoleon III. reigned at the Tuileries--balls, receptions, the life of the clubs. I hated wine, yet indulged freely in it to help me through the days. I had not been made for this kind of life; all the better parts of my nature were being stifled. Still I went on from week to week, partly because I could not tear myself away from Albert and his charming wife. "At last I fell ill of a nervous malady which prostrated my strength. The doctors ordered brandy in large doses. They should rather have forbidden it. The day came when I saw that brandy was my master. I could not live without it. Nothing could exceed my horror when I made the discovery. Then the moral struggle began, and that my nature was strong only made the conflict more severe. But the evil was more physical than mental or moral and so far beyond my control. "At length, almost in despair, sick of this frivolous, aimless life, I vowed to devote my days to the service of Heaven if I might be permitted to conquer. "Again I fell ill, but this time of a malady for which all stimulant was forbidden. For weeks I kept my bed, part of the time hovering between life and death. Heaven was merciful. My vow had been heard, my prayer answered. When I recovered, the victory had been gained for me. I hated the very sight of all stimulant. From that hour nothing stronger than tea or coffee has passed my lips. "I left Paris and returned to my home in Provence. What delight, what repose, what charm I found there. Paradise had once more opened its gates. There, with the Abbé, I spent a whole year in calm and quiet retreat. Health and vigour of mind, strength of body, returned to me. "But I did not forget my vow. The Abbé treated me to many an argument and disquisition upon the subject. He showed me the life of an ecclesiastic in all its lights and shadows; the sacrifice of domestic happiness it entailed; the constant self-denials if I would do my duty in the spirit as well as letter. He pointed out how by nature and position I was eminently fitted to take my part in the world; to marry; become the ruler of a little kingdom, as it were; the father of sons and daughters. He was growing old, he declared, and certainly in the last year had greatly changed. An expression on his face told me he was not far from heaven. He felt his own end approaching. "All this only strengthened my resolve. If anything could have made me more in favour of a religious life, it was the quiet ecstasy with which he contemplated passing to celestial regions. Nothing could be more saintly and beatific than his last days. He was in perfect happiness, and frequently said so. I was permitted to be with him when his eyes looked their last upon the world. I was the last object they rested on; my name was on his lips as his soul winged its flight to heaven. For the fourth time the hand of affliction was laid upon me. My last link with the world was severed. I stood alone. "In due time I took upon myself the vows of the Church. Never for a moment had I contemplated the cloister. Mine must be a life of energy and activity. Whether it be a weakness or not, I have ever loved to command; to rule mankind; to have the ordering of things. There I feel in my element. I have a capacity for organisation which will not lie dormant. It has been my lot to have it more or less fully exercised. With all humility, and giving the sole glory to Heaven, I may say that I have succeeded in every work or mission I ever undertook; advanced every cause in which I have been concerned. The great moral, the great secret of my life, is this: I have first of all been convinced of the soundness of my intentions; I have held decided views; I have never entered upon a single act of importance without first placing it under the guidance of Heaven, as Hezekiah went up into the Temple and spread the letter before the Lord. And then I have gone forward, nothing doubting. Paul may plant and Apollos may water in vain, if they trust to their own strength. That has been my rule and conviction through life. I have constantly endeavoured to have no will of my own; no personal ends and aims and prejudices; but to obey the great Master, whose I am and Whom I serve." Here Delormais rapidly sketched his life in the Church. He described every office he had held in succession; the difficulties he had contended with; the evils he had suppressed; the reforms he had made; the manner in which he had once fought with and at length convinced the Consistory of Rome. Through all he spoke with the utmost humility, recognising himself an agent, not a principal to whom any credit was due. Over this portion of his life we draw a discreet veil. It was disclosed under secrecy. Partly to prevent identification; partly because other names were inevitably introduced, some of which were as household words in the world of the French Church. The time had passed unconsciously. There was a singular charm and attraction about Delormais. His fine presence and high breeding, his animated way of talking and graphic powers of description, all carried you beyond yourself. Everything was forgotten but the man before you. For the moment you were lost in the scenes he portrayed so vividly. Underlying all, running through all like a fine silken warp, his sympathetic nature was evident. Strong, decided, commanding, loving to rule, he was yet singularly lovable. When was this ever otherwise where sympathy was the keynote of the disposition? He was a man to come to for advice and consolation. Broad-minded above all the small views and judgments of human nature, if he chastised with the one hand, he took care to heal with the other. No one need dread his condemnation. We had been so recently under the influence of both men it was impossible to help contrasting this strong, admirable nature with the calm, retiring, almost celestial beauty of Anselmo: each perfect in its way. We mentioned him to Delormais as a type. "Ay, I know him well," he replied: "have known him always. The Canon who was his protector and left him a portion of his wealth, was one of my few intimate friends. A purer spirit than Anselmo's never breathed. He might be advanced to high places in the Church, but is better and happier where he is. In all my wide experiences I have never met his equal. Of course I know his story, and his love for Rosalie--hers for him: an idyll almost too perfect for earth. I know her well also, and all her saintliness. Such love and faith are rare: a consistency worth all the sermons that ever were preached. How different was my fevered love from theirs; my rash, unreflecting impulse in that Algerian paradise. And yet, Heaven be praised, nothing but good came of it. All is ordained; all is for the best if only our heart's desire is to do well. All comes right in the end. I have never known it otherwise. If ever I feel in the slightest degree discouraged, if ever my faith in human nature is unduly tried, I immediately think of these two saintly people, and courage revives." Once more he paused, and seemed lost in thought. Whether it was given to Anselmo and Rosalie, or whether to retrospection, we could not tell. The clock ticked its faint warning of the passing of time. All else was profound silence. But he soon roused himself to the present, and again turned to us with an expression in which humour was mixed with kindliness. "And now," said Delormais, with that peculiar smile that had puzzled us at the beginning of our interview, "I am going to surprise you. Life is full of the strangest coincidences and combinations, which would be laughed to scorn in fiction. It is the unexpected which happens. You remarked some time ago that my palace would be known as a shining light, if I ever were made a bishop. I shall never be made a bishop," he laughed, "and for this reason." Here he quietly took an official-looking document out of a capacious side pocket, and placed it in our hands. It was an intimation of his elevation to the See of X.---- a place we knew by heart, and loved. "Can this be true?" we asked in perplexity. "It is indeed," laughed Delormais. "So you see I cannot be made a bishop, for I am one already; though not duly enthroned. You will have to be present at that ceremony. I am not surprised. I knew it was coming, though I could not tell the exact day and hour. It reached me only this evening. And you are the first to whom I have told it." "Then," we replied, rising and making him a profound bow, "let us be the first to greet you by your title, _Monseigneur_. The first to wish you all honour and success in that high office Heaven has destined you to fill." "Nay," he returned; "Monseigneur to others it may be; but to you it shall be ever _mon ami_. For with your permission I intend our acquaintance to ripen into friendship. You shall come and visit the old Bishop in his palace. We will make it a shining light together. The oftener you come, the longer you stay, the more welcome you will be. You know that X. is surrounded by antiquities, endless monuments of interest. Amidst these attractions you will feel at home. Your visits will not be a mere sacrifice to friendship." "You are sketching a delightful picture. Will it ever be realised?" "That only depends upon yourself," laughed Delormais. "The Bishop has not to be made, nor the palace to be built; the guest-chamber awaits you with the blue skies and balmy airs of spring. Of all appointments it is the one I would have chosen. A life of activity, of responsibility and usefulness; a wide sphere of action; opportunities for doing much good in public, still more in private. The latter brings the greater blessing." "You are a wonderful man," we could not help exclaiming. "Your life ought to be written. We should love to make it known to the world." "You shall become my biographer," laughed Delormais, "if you will undertake it in French. Do what you will with what I have told you to-night. Only keep to yourself all my ecclesiastical history. That is sacred and private, at any rate as long as I am living. For the rest, change names and dates only sufficiently to prevent recognition. Not that it would matter. My life is my own, as I have said. And not that I have anything to conceal. My faults, follies and indiscretions have been those of impulse; of the head, not of the heart, I would fain believe. I cannot remember the time when I did not at least wish to do well. Of evil men and deliberate sin I have ever had a wholesome horror. But all and everything by God's grace, not of my own strength." At that moment we were startled by a cry in the street: the well-known call of El sereno. "Another watchman," cried Delormais. "What is the hour?" We had not thought of time. A few months earlier and the sun would long have been up. Want of space prevents our giving more than a mere outline of Delormais' life. He filled in an infinite number of details impossible to be recorded here. They would swell to a volume, but a volume of singular interest. He spoke rapidly and with few pauses. Our watches marked the hour of five. It was that period of the night when darkness is greatest before dawn. The watchman's voice cried the hour and the starry night for the last time. "For your own sake I must break up the assembly," laughed Delormais. "Two hours' sleep will refresh us both. Presently we shall meet again. See! our candles wax dim and blue--or is it fancy? This is a ghostly house, you know. My great-grandmother was Spanish, and for all I can tell some of its ancestors and mine may have met here in times long past and played out their comedies and tragedies together. As we are playing ours." We parted. Sleep came to us, but scarcely unconsciousness. In our dreams we lived over again all the scenes Delormais had so graphically described, but more highly-coloured, full of impossible adventures. We wandered through endless groves of paradise peopled with myriads of Arouyas. Our only difficulty was to choose the fairest. Life was one long poem; time had passed into eternity. From such celestial regions we were awakened at eight o'clock by the entrance of our host with morning coffee and steaming rolls, accompanied by José bearing hot water. The latter had constituted himself our _criado_ or _valet de chambre_. "Señor," he said, "it is a cloudless morning. Our astronomer has proved a false prophet. My heart bleeds for him. I fear his glory has departed. Heaven send he does not commit suicide. Is it you, señor, who have influenced the stars against him?" "Monsieur," said our host, putting down the tray, "your friend the poet rose with the lark--figuratively speaking, for who knows what time the lark rises in November? Taking his coffee, he went out with his umbrella shouldered à la militaire. For a poet, monsieur, your friend can put on a very defiant air, as if, like Don Quixote, he had a mind to fight with windmills. He told me he was inflated with inspiration. He was going to contemplate the Pyrenees from the Citadel, and to write a sonnet to the eyebrows of a young lady he saw last night at the opera. I confess I should have thought the eyes a finer theme. Joseph tells me it was the Señorita Costello. She is considered the great beauty of Gerona; and even in Madrid, I am told, created a profound sensation. No wonder the susceptible monsieur's heart beat fast when he beheld her. Now, señor, we leave you to enjoy your coffee and perform your toilet. His reverence, Père Delormais, sends you his greeting and hopes you have slept. I have just taken his coffee also. Contrary to his usual custom, though wide awake he was still reposing. Ah! what a great character we have there!" Upon which the attentive deputation retired and we were left in peace. It was indeed glorious to see the blue unclouded sky, to find the cold winds departed, summer reigning once more. How changed the aspect of Gerona. How all the wonderful colouring came out, the effects of light and shadow, under the sunshine. H. C. arrived just as we left the hotel, and together we went to the bridge where we had stood not many hours ago under the stars. It almost seemed as though we had gone through years of experience since then. This morning everything was bright and animated. The river now flashed and sparkled and reflected brilliant, broken outlines. The old houses looked older than ever in this youthful atmosphere, but seemed warmed into life. They now appeared quite habitable, almost cheerful. The towers standing above and beyond them were pencilled against the blue sky. The very air seemed full of sun-flashes. In the boulevard the trees in the sunshine made wonderful play of light and shade upon the white houses. The arcades lost their gloom. Every one seemed to rejoice and expand. No people are so responsive to atmosphere as the Spanish. Warmth and sunshine are more necessary to them than food and sleep. They are hot-house plants. Towards ten o'clock we made our way up the street of steps to the barracks. The scene was much the same as yesterday; conscription was not yet over. We were evidently expected, and a sentry at once conducted us to the colonel's office. "I knew you would come," he cried, with quite an English handshake. "Your interests are not of the butterfly nature, passing with the moment. And see; here is our disconsolate widow. Now you have come, we will talk to her." We easily recognised the forlorn mother of yesterday's little drama. She was quietly seated in a chair, her mantilla drawn closely about her, a pathetic image of grief. "Oh, señor Colonel, it is useless," she said. "Hope is dead and my heart broken. Heaven has seen fitting to afflict me at all points. I have lost my husband, my position; I am poor and in misery; my eldest son turns out a disgrace; my remaining consolation is torn from me by the cruel conscription. Nothing is left for me but to die." "This is quite wrong," returned the colonel, pretending a severity he did not feel. "Heaven is merciful. Brighter days will dawn for you if you are patient. You will see that conscription is a blessing, not a curse. It will make a man of your boy. Discipline is good for all. It is just what he needed. He will return to you strong and vigorous; able and willing to make a home for you. I promise to make him my special charge. He shall be always about me. I will give him all the favour possible, and will keep a constant eye upon him. Heaven permitting, he shall return to you, not spoilt or lowered, but mentally and physically improved. In the meantime--I have been making enquiries--I have found you a position where you can honourably earn your living; where you will be comfortable and respected; and if you will only look at the best side of things, happy also. What do you say to it?" Here he described the nature of the proposed occupation. The poor lady burst into tears. "Heaven reproves me for my ingratitude by showering mercies upon me," she cried. "Hope once more kindles within me. This is the one thing for which I am fitted. Ah, colonel! it is you who have brought back life and hope to my despairing heart." "Nay," he returned, "I am merely the humble instrument, as we all are, carrying out the purposes of Heaven. But I exact one thing of you. Cease to be sad: let hope and energy return; carry out your daily tasks heartily; and make up your mind that life still has much in store for you." The change was already apparent. A drooping, grief-stricken woman had entered the office; one with hope and energy and patient waiting revived left it. [Illustration: SAN FILIU, FROM WITHOUT THE WALLS: GERONA.] "Life is full of such sorrows," said the colonel. "Unfortunately we cannot reach a millionth part of them. In this case help has been made strangely easy. It is so seldom that the wish to aid and the power go together. Let us now take a turn in your favourite cloisters." Reposing under the blue skies, in the strong light and shade thrown by the sunshine, they were even more beautiful and effective than yesterday. In presence of their colonel, the men kept at a respectful distance. They were all occupied in the same way; drawing water from the well, mending clothes, running to and fro; some diligently doing nothing. All seemed happy and contented. "And they are so," said the colonel. "To a large number the change is infinitely better in every way. They all find their own level. Those of the better class discover each other, soon fraternise, and form themselves into cliques. Youth is the age of friendship and enthusiasm. Even these have their popes and go in for hero-worship. Life has its charms for them. Yes," looking around, "no doubt these cloisters have a beauty of their own. They influence me more to-day than ever before. I think you would convert me in time," he laughed; "widen my interests and enlarge my sympathies. You see, to me they are mere military barracks. The men come first, and you will admit that they are not romantic. Plant these cloisters in the midst of a desert, and no doubt I should be duly impressed with their refined atmosphere." We left them and stood at the head of the long flight of steps, admiring the picturesque scene. To-day everything was radiant with light and sunshine. The very crowd outside the Conscription-house looked more hopeful. Even misfortune was less depressing under such blue skies. The wonderful houses to our right, in their deep lights and shadows, looked more rare and more artistic than ever. The ancient red roofs of the town sloping downwards were deep and glowing. Many a gable stood out vividly, many a dormer window and lattice pane seemed on fire as it reflected in crimson flashes the rays of the ascending sun. We reluctantly said good-bye to our colonel. These passing episodes, possessing all the charm of the unexpected, are one of the delights of travel. But they leave behind them a regret, for too often there can be no renewal of the intimacy. Yet we realise that the world holds many pleasant people, and that life is too short for all its possibilities. "If you ever visit Gerona again," he said, with a final hand-shake, "you will come and see me. If I am no longer quartered here, find out where I am, send me a telegram, and follow quickly. May we meet again!" Then we took our winding way up to the cathedral. The fine square was in full sunshine. Deep lights and shadows lay upon cathedral and palace. The house in which Alvarez once lived looked as though human tragedy had never touched it. A golden glow lay on the grey stone, restoring its lost youth. The ancient windows with their wonderful ironwork, seemed kindled into life, ready to reveal a thousand secrets of the dead-and-gone centuries. There was no gloom and mystery to-day. The long, magnificent flight of steps were in full sunshine also. Sunshine lay upon the town with its clustering roofs; flashed here and there upon the surface of the winding river; gilded the snow-tops of the far-off Pyrenees. The skies were blue and laughing; all nature was radiant. We passed through the west doorway into the cathedral. Even here there was a change. The dim religious light might still be felt; nothing could take that away. A sense of vastness and grandeur still lay upon the splendid nave; a feeling of mystery still haunted pillars and aisles and arches, and the deep recesses of the east end. But to-day shafts of wonderful light flowed in, redeeming all from the faintest suspicion of gloom. Rainbow-coloured beams from the upper windows fell athwart the nave in rich prismatic streams. Beautiful as the interior had been yesterday, it was yet more so this morning. These shafts of light piercing the semi-darkness created a marvellous effect of contrast, adding infinitely to the charm of the lovely building. There was no mistaking the tall slender figure that approached us with its quiet grace. It was Anselmo, his face lighted up with its rare smile. "We meet again," he said, in tones subdued to the sacred spot on which we stood. "And yesterday I know that you met and conversed with Rosalie. As we went together this morning to the bedside of a dear maiden whose days are numbered, she told me of your encounter. I am glad. Now you know us both and will keep us together in your memory. You must have seen that she is more angel than woman walking the earth. I often wonder how all her deep affection, purified and exalted, can be given to one so unworthy. You smile! You think ours a strange history, we a singular pair. I suppose it is so. Ours must be almost a unique experience; and I believe that to few in this world is given the peace and happiness we enjoy." Talking, we passed on to the cloisters, lovelier than ever in their brilliant light and shade. Once more we went through the north doorway and gazed down upon San Pedro, the desecrated church, the ancient town walls, and ruined citadel crowning the slopes. Sunshine everywhere; hope upon all; the gloomy skies of yesterday forgotten; earth seemed many degrees nearer heaven. We climbed down into the narrow streets and found Miguel at his door waiting to give us a morning salutation. "The photograph, señor. Is it a success?" We told him that still lay in the uncertain future. Again we found ourselves seated upon the ruined citadel. It was difficult to realise all the horrors of that long past invasion under the influence of these glorious skies, the gladness of this laughing sunshine. The air was scented with wild thyme. The outlines of the towers stood out wonderfully; the blue of heaven shone through the open work of San Filiu's lovely steeple. All the sunshine glinted upon the leaves of the trees in the hollow and traced patterns in the hanging gardens. "How beautiful it all is," said Anselmo. "On such days how thin the veil separating the seen from the unseen. Our vision seems only just withholden. What an awakening it will be to the higher life!" With him, also, we had to part; a yet more reluctant farewell than that lately gone through at the barracks. But we hoped to meet again. This must not be our only visit to Gerona; and here Anselmo wished to live and die. He had no ambition for a higher destiny, though even this, it has lately been whispered to us, may one day come to him without change of scene. We parted as friends part, not mere acquaintances of a day. There is, we have said, a magnetic power that bridges over time and conventionality. As in dreams we sometimes live a lifetime in a moment, so in friendship an hour may do the work of years. Again the clock struck twelve; Anselmo's signal. History repeats itself. To-day he went alone, leaving us standing amidst the ruins. We watched him as he climbed the rugged heights of the cathedral, a tall, dark, graceful figure upon the landscape. At the north doorway he turned, gazed steadily at us for a few moments, raised his hands as though in benediction, and the next moment was lost to sight. A glory appeared to depart; the spot seemed emptier without him; there was less brightness in the sunshine. We hastened to change the scene, and in the lively streets of the fair, to disperse the sad current of our thoughts. For our hours in Gerona the beautiful were numbered. CHAPTER XII. A MINISTERING SPIRIT. Sweet illusions--Everything seen and done--True devotion--In the vortex--Sunshine and blue skies--Less demon-like pit--Lights and shadows--Arcades lose their gloom--Rosalie--Charm of Anselmo--Romance not dead--H. C. in ecstasy--Escorting an angel--Cathedral steps--San Filiu--A lovely spot--Ancient house--Mullions and latticed windows--Passing away--Rosalie's ministrations--Resignation--Rosalie's farewell--"Consuelo"--Taken from the evil to come--The door closed--Ernesto's world topsy-turvy--Ernesto turns business-like--The catapult again--Up the broad staircase--Not the ghostly hour--Madame in her bureau--Posting ledger--Balance on right side--Madame philosophises--Shrieks to the rescue--"My dear daughter"--Our host and the nightingales--Waiting for next year's leaves--The Señorita Costello--Delormais on the wing--Another vigil--Promise given--Departure--Inspector quails--H. C. collapses--The susceptible age--Lady Maria alters her will--Possession nine-tenths of the law. It was not an unmixed sorrow. At sunrise the next morning preparations for the cattle fair must commence. By mid-day bipeds and quadrupeds would rule the town, our beautiful palace find itself desecrated. In its present half-deserted condition an air of refinement and antiquity hung over it. One felt, almost saw and heard, the great crowd of cavaliers and dames, besacked and besworded, that had passed up and down the broad marble staircase in the picturesque and romantic Middle Ages. All the ghosts and ghostly sighs and shadows lurking in secret corners, halls and corridors, would vanish before the vulgar herd. Under this influence Gerona the beautiful would become intolerable; better leave with impressions and sweet illusions undisturbed. And little remained. Everything had been seen, everything done. We had said farewell to Anselmo, then plunged into the vortex of the fair, where noise, crowd and confusion fought with each other. Sunshine and blue skies were having their usual effect upon the Spanish people. Every one was in high spirits, inclined to patronise booths, monkeys, and fortune-tellers. [Illustration: A GERONA PATIO.] Every hour spent in the ancient town strengthened our devotion. This old-world atmosphere, these marvellous outlines lost nothing by familiarity. Standing once more on the bridge we confessed how difficult it would be to look upon such a scene again. To-day, under the sunshine the chestnut-roasters appeared less demon-like, the bed of the river less a bottomless pit. A little of the weird element had departed. The sense of mystery so strongly felt last night could not live in this brilliant atmosphere. By way of compensation the deep lights and shadows appealed to the imagination quite as strongly as any sense of mystery. They filled the air with life and motion. The trees rustled and gleamed and glinted and drew moving pictures upon the white houses. Arcades lost their gloom, but not their charm, and these apart from all else raise Gerona far above the rank of any ordinary town. As we left the fair and turned into the quieter streets, it seemed almost a natural consequence that from one of the deep round arches there glided the quiet, graceful form of Rosalie. She had foretold that we should meet again. "But for the last time, Rosalie," as she greeted us with her rare sweet smile. "We leave this evening. Time presses, and we would avoid to-morrow's ceremony." "They are terrible days," returned Rosalie. "No wonder you escape them. Until they are over we keep as far as possible out of sight. You have seen Anselmo to-day, señor?" "Yes, and wished him farewell. It was a sad moment. He alone has repaid us for our visit to Gerona. We should like to spend many days here and know him more intimately." "Days of profit, if I may venture to say so, señor. The more you saw Anselmo, the more you would love him. It is every one's experience. Apart from his saintliness, you cannot tell on a slight acquaintance how much there is in him. His is not the goodness of a weak but of a strong nature; intellectually strong; but so refined and unambitious that to an ordinary observer it may seem passive. He is of a different order from Père Delormais, who is full of action and energy, and does so much and does all well. But Delormais was born to great things; they are his of inheritance. Anselmo had not these privileges." "The greater merit, Rosalie; but we think you count for very much in his life. He has kept you before him, and your image has inspired him to deeper holiness." "Ah, no, señor. Rather is it the other way. He has been my guide and king, as I told you yesterday. Anselmo is above all earthly mortals, all human aid. But you will meet him again and know him better. This your first visit to Gerona will not be your last. Few people come here, but those who do always return. I think of it as a place apart, possessing ideal beauties, a separate atmosphere. And for me," she smiled, "everything seems imbued with the charm of Anselmo. The bells ring out his name; I hear it in the song of the birds, the whispering of the trees. Romance is not dead within me because I am Sister Anastasia." Here H. C. struck in, unable to contain himself any longer. "If I were here very long," he cried excitedly, "I should fall madly in love with you myself, and write reams of poetry to your lovely eyes. I have never seen such eyes. They have all the light of heaven in them, and--and--all the beauty of earth." Rosalie laughed. "You are very outspoken, señor. I could have told you were a poet from your look. But you must exercise your genius on a worthier theme. On me it would be wasted; my life, all I have, all I am, is dedicated to Heaven. Time is passing. Will you not go with me on my way that I may show you one of the loveliest spots in Gerona?" So Rosalie walked through the quiet old-world streets with an escort on either side. We felt we were attending an angel. H. C. did not attempt to conceal his rapture. It is a weakness of which he seems unconscious. Rosalie pointed out many a house in which she had ministered; here soothing the pillow of the dying, there rescuing one from the grasp of death. Under her guidance the streets seemed more beautiful than ever; a holier atmosphere surrounded them. At length we reached the wonderful steps leading to the cathedral. They were flooded with sunlight and gave dignity to the ugly west front, so unworthy of the splendid interior. Passing under the fine old gateway and turning to the left, we found ourselves close to the old church of San Filiu. In days gone by, when the Moors captured Gerona and changed its cathedral into a mosque, the Christians had worshipped here. Whatever its interior at that time, it is now dark, gloomy and depressing. Rosalie entered a quiet street beyond, a short narrow turning of only a few yards, then halted. It was, as she had said, one of the loveliest spots in Gerona; so hidden that few would find it by chance. A small house of great antiquity but perfectly preserved. An exquisite Gothic archway over which the house was built led into a small quadrangle. Beside this archway was a mullioned window with latticed panes. We imagined the quaint old room within and longed to enter. Above this was another latticed window with Gothic mullions and ornaments. It was open, and sweet-scented flowers threw their perfume upon the air. This was crowned by a sloping roof with red tiles bearing all the tone and beauty of age. At least three centuries must have rolled over them unmolested. Even H. C. forgot the charms of Rosalie and became enthusiastic in favour of still life. "It is my destination," said Rosalie. "I was hastening here yesterday when you saw me crossing the square of San Pedro. Where those lovely flowers are scenting the air, a lovelier earthly flower is passing away. Consumption is doing its work. The only child of a mother who will soon have no tie left on earth. So Heaven sometimes sees well to draw our souls upwards. There are those who need this discipline. Trouble, like everything else, enters into the wise economy of God's purposes. I doubt if a single unnecessary care or pain is dealt out to us. But here the hand of affliction is charged with a heavy burden. The invalid is a fair maiden of seventeen, pure and beautiful. Her resignation is a gift from heaven, a lesson to us all. But for that I don't know what would become of the mother." As she spoke a face appeared at the window above the flowers; the sweet gentle face of a middle-aged woman, pale and pathetic, to which the mantilla added grace and charm. There was a look of patient sorrow in the dark eyes, lightened by a momentary gleam as they caught sight of Rosalie. "Sister Anastasia," said the subdued woman, "the sun is not more true to its course than you to your hour. My child hungers for you. Next to her mother you are her only consolation." "I come, I come," replied Sister Anastasia. "Tell Rosita that in my bag I bring her refreshment for the mind and food for the soul. Ah, señor, this is indeed farewell, since you tell me your moments in Gerona are numbered. The sun shines, the skies are blue, let these be an omen of your life until we meet again. For by the love you bear Anselmo--you must love him; we all love him--you must return. He will be here and so shall I. We shall probably see no change until Heaven calls us to the great change of all. This fair child above will have passed away, and the mother's heart will be desolate. But Heaven that brings the sorrow will heal the wound. Adieu señor. Adieu." [Illustration: OLD HOUSES ON THE RIVER: GERONA.] She glided through the archway and on the other side gained admittance to the house. The door opened to receive her, a quiet voice was heard in greeting. "You are an angel of light," it said. "Your new name should have been Consuelo. But, oh, Anastasia, my child is worse. I fear me a few days will see the ending, and I shall be lonely and desolate upon earth. Why did Heaven take the child and spare the mother?" "God knows best," returned Anastasia. "Let His will be done. Be sure He who deals the blow will not forsake you. Your child is spared the sorrows of earth. You will think of her as in safe keeping; taken from the evil to come." We heard no more. The door was closed. Let us leave Rosalie in her true element, a ministering spirit shedding abroad more happiness and consolation, more holy influence, than she at all realised; doing all with that unconscious modesty which was one of her greatest gifts. The picture of that last interview remains vividly in our memory. A little mediæval old house that has scarce its equal in Gerona; the flowers behind the latticed panes and the sad, subdued face appearing above them; Rosalie's eyes looking up in all their loveliness with an expression of almost divine sympathy. We went our way, richer for having known her. It was our last look upon these cathedral precincts. The afternoon shadows were lengthening as we went back through the quiet streets to the hotel. All the brilliant glory of the day had departed. These repeated farewells were depressing, yet not quite over, for as we approached the Fonda who should be standing at their own door but Ernesto and his mother. We had not met them since the previous day when they had disappeared within the lion's den, and we had gone round to the reeds and the river. "Ernesto! how is this? Why are you not at school?" "School, señor!" opening very wide eyes. "Fair week is holiday. We should have a revolution if they attempted school upon us. For this one week in the year we change places with our fathers and mothers, pastors and teachers. They obey and we command." "We congratulate you on this topsy-turvy state of things. But as you are strong be merciful. Remember that Black Monday comes. Cinderella went back to her rags at midnight; you must go back to school and good work. And the monkeys? You are still at large; we feared the opposite, as you had not brought us your report." "Oh! I brought it, señor; but it was rather late, and Señor Lasoli said you were at the opera. You should have seen the monkeys!" And here he went off into convulsions at the recollection of the performance. "They couldn't understand what was inside the lozenges to bite their tongues so! First they would take a nibble, then rub the lozenge on the arm; then another nibble; then a whole torrent of monkey-swearing and lozenge-rubbing because it kept on biting and burning. I quite thought I should die with laughing." From the way he laughed now, it seemed doubtful whether all danger was over. "But that is not the worst, señor," said the mother, at length making herself heard. "Will you believe that the boy has a wretched catapult in his pocket, and there will be any number of broken windows and assassinated cats in the town. I don't know what will become of us. If there is one thing I dread more than another, it is a catapult. They are the implements of the devil." "There is absolutely no fear," laughed Ernesto. "I never broke a window in my life--at least, hardly ever. As for cats, they are quite outside the law of murder. A dead cat is as rare as a dead donkey. Are you really going to-day, señor? Then I shall have no more pleasure in the fair, though this year it is better than usual. The lions roared like thunder, and the monkeys accepted all the lozenges. They were punished for their greediness. But will you come back to spend a whole month at Gerona? And if you allowed me, I would take you to some of the excursions in the neighbourhood. There are any number within twenty miles; ruined churches and deserted monasteries. I don't care much about them myself, but I know many who do. It seems to me that a good show and a handful of chestnuts are worth all the wretched old ruins in the world." In spite of this vandalism, we assured Ernesto that when we spent a month in Gerona he should have the honour of escorting us, provided it was not school-time. He wished to bind us to a given date, thereby showing a decided talent for business, but we refused to be committed to the inevitable. We left mother and son together, a picture of domestic happiness. As we disappeared under the archway of the hotel, Ernesto held up his catapult in triumph, successfully parrying his mother's attempt to obtain possession of the forbidden weapon. She evidently looked upon it as only one degree below an infernal machine. Once more up the broad marble staircase. But it was not the ghostly hour, and sighs and rustlings and shadows were in the land of the unseen. Madame in her bureau looked the picture of massive contentment. At this moment she was posting a ledger, and the balance was evidently on the right side. [Illustration: MARKET PLACE: GERONA.] "As it need be, for they worked hard enough for their living," she assured us. "She couldn't tell how it was; no one would think from her size that she never relaxed in her exertions. Do what she would, she could not get thin. As for her husband, she made him eat all the richest bits at dinner; never allowed him to fast; supplied him with eggs and butter and beer _ad libitum_. No; he was obstinate. He _would_ keep thin. The consequence was they were a ridiculous couple. She was the Duomo at Florence, he was the Campanile. However, they made the best of it. Life was too short to grieve over inevitable troubles. Clearly she was an inevitable. When she was a girl, there were five ladies who might be seen walking out morning, noon, and night, and always together. Go which way you would you were sure to meet them. They knew every one, and five perpetual bows were everlastingly see-sawing like a wound-up machine going through its performance. They were called the Inevitables. No one ever thought of them by any other name. They were quite aware of it and rather liked it. It was something to be in constant evidence. What other five sisters would live together in such harmony? Well, these five ladies were for ever running in her head. For a long time past she had felt like all five ladies rolled into one. She was one great Inevitable. Fate was a little cruel. Her movements might be compared to those of the elephant. As for her husband, he could still run up and down stairs like a lamplighter--almost pass through a keyhole--but it took her five minutes to get up a dozen steps. Soon it would take her ten. And then she wanted pulling up in front and pushing up behind. It was quite a ceremony. She had serious thoughts of having a crane and pulley adjusted to her windows, and of being hoisted up and down, but the question was whether a hempen rope would bear her weight, or anything under a cast-iron chain. Was it true that Queen Victoria was carried wherever she went, because she suffered from rheumatism? Ah! it was a great thing to be a queen. No ledgers to post up; no anxiety as to whether the balance would be on the right side at the end of every month. What a blessing to have a good, solid, comfortable margin at one's bankers to draw upon for contingencies, which was only another word for the unexpected. This year it was painting inside, next year painting outside. If there was no painting, it was chairs, tables or linen. The extras went on for ever and swallowed up all the profits." We thought the old lady, like the extras, would also have gone on for ever, but to our infinite relief a piercing shriek was heard from an upper region. Madame turned pale and mildly echoed the scream. "My dear daughter!" she cried. "Something has frightened her, or she is suddenly taken worse. She is always being taken worse, though worse from what I cannot possibly imagine. Sometimes I think it is fancy or hysteria. She is really perfectly well all the time." At this moment the mysterious daughter appeared upon the scene, running downstairs at a speed that testified to the soundness of her limbs, whatever her state of nerves. "A dreadful mouse," she moaned, throwing herself into her mother's capacious protection. "It ran right over my feet, across the room, and went into my little cupboard." "Perhaps you have some cake there?" said this sensible mamma. "A mere fragment," acknowledged the daughter. "Poor little mouse," said the mother soothingly. "It is hungry, perhaps, and fond of cake. My dear, it will eat cake; it will not eat you." We caught sight of our industrious host in his garden surveying his possessions, and escaped. The cook stood in his doorway in white cap and apron, a satisfactory object in all hotels. Over the slanting tiled roof grew the fruitful vine, a picture of beauty. Our host, surrounded by his birds and pigeons, was vainly imploring the nightingales to sing. They only looked at him with their little black eyes, opened their beaks, shook their heads, and said as plainly as possible that the song had left them. It would return with next year's leaves and garlands, more glorious for the rest. "I should have liked you to hear them," said their proud owner in quite a melancholy voice. "You would have thought yourselves in Italy, as I often do." "Or on the Rhine, or the Blue Moselle, or the Dauphiné Alps, Señor Lasoli, where the nightingales assemble in myriads, and sing and rave night and day through the weeks of spring. We have heard them." "They are more beautiful near water," said our host. "The song gains volume and vibration by being carried across. But I have chiefly heard them in our woods on the Mediterranean shores. France to me is a sealed book. So, señor, you leave us, and I cannot even wish you to remain. To-morrow you would not be in your element. Gerona will be out of joint until we settle down again to our normal condition. I trust you will one day return, and that your friend will write an epic poem in honour of our town. It would certainly be translated and might be dedicated to the Señorita Costello. He would be fêted on his arrival; fireworks, illuminations, and municipal addresses. The hubbub of conscription would be nothing to it. At five o'clock, señor, the omnibus will be at your service." As we went through the haunted corridors to our rooms, Delormais came up the marble staircase, apparently somewhat hurried. "We are both on the wing," he cried, "and so I the less regret your going. I thought to have stayed until to-morrow, but sudden news compels me to leave to-night. Summoned to Rome, I must obey. I know that I have a battle before me, and also know that I shall win. Conquering as a humble Vicar of Rheims, I shall not do less as Bishop of X. You will see me dismissed with a Cardinal's hat, an honour I would not cross the road to obtain, so little do I care for the pomps of the world. With such models before me as my father and mother and the good old Abbé, one feels that the only thing worth living for is to do good and cultivate the graces of the spirit." We were in his room, scene of last night's vigil, where he had sketched an outline of his life and the hours had passed unconsciously. "Another night of vigil, but without companionship," said Delormais. "On the contrary, time will only place distance between us. You go southward, I northward into France, reaching my destination about two o'clock to-morrow afternoon. Would that I might accompany you to Barcelona and gaze with you upon the wonders of that loveliest of cathedrals. Again I say that the Catalonian cathedrals are the glories of Spain. But my own has its charms, and those at least we shall often see together. I have your promise?" We gave it unconditionally, in this instance not fearing to commit ourselves to a given date. Delormais was a man whose friendship was a privilege and whose sympathy and conversation made all days a delight. We parted, hoping to meet again. Not long after this the omnibus rattled out of the courtyard, and our host intimated that time was up. The sun had set, darkness had fallen when we clattered through the quiet streets. Passing the deep, round arcades we looked out for Rosalie, but no light, graceful figure speeding on its errand of mercy appeared. The arcades were again mysterious and impenetrable. We turned on to the bridge and for the last time looked upon the scene as the omnibus rattled on. All down the boulevard booths were on active service. Torches flared and still the crowd sauntered to and fro. The river flowed on its way, and all the outlines of those wonderful old-world houses were faintly visible. We knew them by heart now, and they were almost as real to us by night as by day. The station once more. Only forty-eight hours had passed since we had struggled across that crowded platform, but we had gone through so many experiences, heard and seen so much, that many days seem to have flown. When we thought of Delormais it was impossible to realise we had not known him for years, visited his early home, joined in his travels. The father and mother, still the objects of his undying affection, the old Abbé in whom he delighted, had become personal friends by his vivid descriptions. Reflections were suddenly put to flight as the omnibus brought up with a jerk that almost landed H. C. once more on his knees. The station crowd was small compared with that previous crowd. Again we had a slight adventure with our luggage, and began to fear in earnest that we and it should never reach Barcelona together. They refused to register or have anything to do with it; luggage was never booked to Gerona by the express. One other miserably slow train left in the early morning, and the officials calmly intimated that we might wait for it. But a worm will turn, and we felt the law must be taken into our own hands. We bade the omnibus conductor leave at his peril, made him carry our baggage through the buffet to the platform, and when the train arrived, the whole, great and small, was put into a carriage. Then we followed and mounted guard. The inspector came up and demanded an explanation, upon which H. C. put on his Napoleon air and shouldered his umbrella. He looked so much in earnest that the inspector quailed, bowed, withdrew, and gave a hasty signal for departure. Away we steamed, masters of the situation. Then H. C.'s military aspect collapsed. He turned paler than usual. "What is it?" we asked; for his susceptible heart is subject to spasmodic attacks. The doctors declare they are functional and not organic, and will pass away with the emotional age. Lady Maria was once terribly frightened and sent post-haste for Sir William Broadbent--though he was not Sir William at that time. The report was encouraging, but Lady Maria had received a shock. "I am sure my dear nephew will never be fit for hard work in this world," she said; "he must be made independent of it." And forthwith she sent for her man of business, and altered the paltry £200 a year she had left him into four th----. Well, well; Lady Maria is still living, and nothing on earth, they say, is certain excepting death and quarter-day. "What is it, H. C.?" we asked. "Will you take a little of the century-old----" "No, no," he cried despondently. "I am only thinking that that inspector will be one too many for us. He looked revengeful. At Barcelona we shall find ourselves under arrest. Instead of a comfortable night at the Four Nations, we shall occupy a dark cell in the town prison." A gloomy prospect indeed--too terrible for reality. "Calm yourself," we replied. "You played your part too well just now. The inspector was really alarmed and glad to get rid of you at any price. If he pursued us with vengeance, we might turn up against him, like the eastern slippers. Depend upon it we have seen the last of him." We looked round comfortably upon our possessions. With nine points of the law on our side all must be well. CHAPTER XIII. A WORLD'S WONDER. Barcelona--H. C.'s anxiety--Mutual salutes--Old impressions--Disappointment--Familiar cries and scenes--Flower-sellers--Perpetual summer--Commercial element--Manchester of Spain--Surrounding country--Where care comes not--Barcelonita--The quays--A land of corn and wine--Relaxing air--Lovely ladies--Ancient element conspicuous by its absence--Historical past--Great in the Middle Ages--Wise and powerful--Commerce of the world--Wealth and learning--Waxes voluptuous--Ferdinand and Isabella--Diplomatic but not grateful--Brave and courageous--Fell before Peterborough--Napoleon's treachery--Republican people--Prosperous once more--Ecclesiastical treasures--Matchless cathedral--Inspiration--Influence of the Moors--Work of Majorcan architect--Dream world--Imposing scene. We made way without further let or hindrance, and about ten o'clock the train steamed into Barcelona. H. C. gazed out anxiously for a regiment of soldiers with drawn swords, and was relieved at seeing only the usual couple of policemen with guns and cocked hats, looking harmless and amiable. He smiled benignly, saluted, and they returned the compliment. Our hearts beat quicker as we found ourselves in presence of familiar haunts. The very name conjured up a thousand scenes and pictures, every one of them a delightful recollection. From its fair port we had more than once sailed in days gone by for our beloved Majorca, loveliest of islands. Here we had spent days of pleasant expectation, waiting for the island steamer; more than once had returned with a cargo of Majorcan pigs, and after a tug-of-war seen some of the obstinate animals landed at last without their tails. Arriving from the sea was a far pleasanter way of gaining a first impression. The coast views are very fine. Approaching the harbour, church turrets and towers are outlined against the transparent sky. Passing between low reaches, the immense fortress of Montjuich, nearly a thousand feet high, rises like an impregnable rock defying the world. Approaching to-night by train was less exciting and romantic. Still it was Barcelona, and the porters calling out the syllables in their soft Spanish set our heart beating. It was a certain disappointment to find our favourite Four Nations--at that time one of the best hotels in Spain--closed. We had to put up with the Falcon, not by any means the same thing. It is pleasant to return to familiar quarters and people who welcome you as old habitués. The atmosphere of the Falcon was also more commercial and had no repose about it. Yet it was on the Rambla, and the next morning we awoke to the well-known cries of Barcelona, the old familiar scene. A very Spanish scene, with its broad imposing thoroughfare and double row of well-grown trees rustling in the wind, glinting in the sunshine, filling the air with music and flashes of light. As the morning went on, the broad road became more crowded. Stretching far down, under the trees, were flower-stalls full of lovely blossoms. Roses, violets and hyacinths scented the air. It was delightful to see such profusion in November; to find blue skies and balmy airs rivalling the flowers. This land of perpetual summer is highly favoured. If a cold wind arises, turning the skies to winter, it is only for a short interval. Though it be December, summer soon returns, and the sunny clime is all the lovelier by contrast. Like the Hôtel Falcon, the element of Barcelona is, we have said, commercial. It is perhaps the most flourishing and enterprising of all the towns of Spain. There are immense ship-building yards, and all sorts of ironwork is made, but the town itself has no sign or sound of manufacturing. It has been called the Manchester of Spain, yet its skies are for ever blue, the air is clear and untainted: a peculiar brilliancy and splendour of atmosphere not often met with even in the sunny South. The country for many miles around is beautiful and undulating; beyond the immediate hills it has often a wild and savage grandeur that sometimes reaches the sublime. Year by year the town grows in extent. Well-organised tramways carry you to and fro through endless thoroughfares. The richer merchants have built themselves streets of palatial residences that stretch away into suburbs. Few cities are so brilliantly lighted. If Spain is a poor country, Barcelona seems to have escaped the evil. There is animation about it, perpetual movement, a quiet activity. For it is quiet with all its business and energy, and so far has the advantage over Madrid, where the commercial element was less evident but the noise infinitely greater. There people seemed to like sound for its own sake. In Barcelona they were intent upon making money, and as far as one can see, gained their object. Everything prospered. It was delightful to go down to the fine harbour and watch the vessels loading and unloading, the flags of all nations vividly contrasting with the brilliant blue sky as they flashed and fluttered in the wind. The port is magnificent. Its waters are blue as the heaven above them, and a myriad sun-gleams light up its surface. Nothing can be more exhilarating and picturesque. The faintest outline of a ship possesses a nameless charm; suggests freedom, wide seas, infinite space: speaks of enterprise, danger, and courage, yet is an emblem of absolute repose; hours and days and weeks where the world cannot reach you, and its cares and worries are non-existent. Nowhere is the element found under more favourable conditions than in Barcelona. Few harbours are so well placed. Climb the heights for a bird's-eye view of the port, and the scene is enchanting. Low-lying shores undulate towards the mouth of the harbour; green pastures, glittering sandhills, the blue flashing sea stretch beyond. If your vision could carry so far, you might gaze upon the lovely Island of Majorca, rising like a faultless gem out of its deep blue setting of the Levant. Nothing meets the eye but the broad line of the horizon, broken here and there by a passing vessel. [Illustration: THE RAMBLA: BARCELONA.] On the other side the water, beyond the shipping, lies a small new settlement of houses called Barcelonita. It is not aristocratic and is the laundry of the mother town, where dwell the ladies who undertake to rapidly bleach and destroy one's linen with unrighteous chemicals, and have earned for Barcelona an unenviable reputation. Ship-builders and fishermen alone dispute the right of way with these women of the wash-tub. Turning back to the town, the broad thoroughfare running down a portion of the quays is lined with magnificent palms, giving it an almost Oriental aspect. At one end rises a monument to Columbus; at the other an enormous triumphal arch, combining the Oriental with the classical; the former quite the pleasanter. Everything bears witness to the well-being of Barcelona. Its quays are lined with bales of goods. Men keep tally with the monotonous sing-song one knows so well. Boxes of oranges betray themselves by their exquisite perfume, and the whole year round brings a succession of fruits. In this lovely climate the earth is abundantly productive. It is a land of corn and wine; the warm days of winter more beautiful than those of summer. Of Barcelona this is especially true. Its climate seemed more relaxing than that of any other Spanish town. Even Valencia, so much farther south, appeared less enervating. Long walks were out of the question. All one could do was to hire one of the open carriages and drive lazily about: a luxury obtained at a trifling cost. But vehicles and drivers hardly seemed to share in the general prosperity; both appeared equally shabby, worn-out and antediluvian. Their horses looked no less forlorn. In the afternoons the Rambla was crowded with people, strolling to and fro under the shadow of the trees. All the town seemed to close ledgers, lock up counting-houses, and turn to the very innocent pleasure of taking the air. Ladies appeared with mantillas and fans; the younger women here as in Madrid using a distinct language of fan and eye. Large, softly flashing eyes, full of expression for the most part. H. C.'s susceptible heart had no chance of repose. His dreams were feverish and disturbed by night; his leisure moments by day devoted to love-sonnets. These lovely ladies in their first youth are certainly very captivating and poetical; and a slight touch of the voluptuous, _dolce far niente_ element is a distinct characteristic of their subtle grace and charm. In the afternoons, if the Rambla gained a charm it also lost one. The flower-stalls disappeared with their picturesque and pretty flower-sellers. Empty spaces remained, looking forlorn and neglected. Great masses of blossom that delighted the eye and scented the early morning were no more. Here the red and white camellias flourish in the open air, but are by no means given away, as they were almost given away in Valencia. Barcelona has its price for flowers as for everything else. All this, the reader will say, belongs to the modern element. The splendid outlines of Gerona; the old-world houses, with their ancient ironwork and Gothic windows; the Anselmos, Rosalies, Delormais' of Barcelona--where were they? Conspicuous by their absence. With the exception of a few narrow tortuous streets, Barcelona is essentially modern. Even these picturesque thoroughfares are distinguished by discomfort, a shabby air, and little beauty of outline. In the Rambla you might almost fancy yourself on a Paris boulevard. Barcelona has increased so rapidly that all the new part, including the rich suburb of Gracia--its West-End--is twice as large as the old. All its great buildings are modern; and modern, though specially bright and engaging, is the scene of its port and harbour. Yet with few vestiges of age, Barcelona has an historical past. In both a religious and military sense, she has played her part in the annals of Spain. More than one document in the archives of Samancas holds records to her honour and glory. Her days are said to go back to four centuries before Rome, and tradition credits Hercules with her foundation. Two hundred years later, under the Romans, it became a city, and about the year 400 A.D. began to prosper. Tarragona was the capital when the Moors destroyed it, and Barcelona, wise in its generation, yielded to the conquerors and succeeded as chief town. In the ninth century it was ruled by a Christian chief of its own under the title of Count of Barcelona, merged later on into that of King of Aragon. But it was in the Middle Ages that Barcelona was great, and these Middle Ages have left their mark on her ecclesiastical history. Powerful, she used her power well; rich, she spent wisely. [Illustration: INTERIOR OF CORO, GERONA CATHEDRAL.] At that time, she divided with Italy the commerce of the East, practically the commerce of the world. She was the terror of the Mediterranean. Trade was her sheet-anchor. The Castilians held trade in contempt, and suffered in consequence; Barcelona, proud of her commerce, flourished. Her name was great in Europe. The city became famous for wealth and learning, a rendezvous of kings, the resort of fashion, voluptuous in its tastes. Ferdinand and Isabella especially loved it, though self-indulgence played little part in their lives. Here in 1493 they received Columbus after his famous voyage of discovery. Yet this very connection with Castile led to the decline of Barcelona. In her policy she has never been consistent, otherwise than consistently selfish. Now and then, to keep up her prestige, she has claimed the aid of a foreign power, only to throw it off when her turn was served. Diplomacy, but not gratitude, has been her strong point--and sometimes she has overreached herself. Nevertheless, as we have said, there are passages in her history of which she may be proud. She behaved bravely, but suffered, at the time Marlborough was gaining his victories elsewhere, when she had to fight Spain and France single-handed--for Barcelona, it will be remembered, formed part of an independent kingdom. Louis XIV. sent Berwick with 40,000 men to the rescue of Philip V., and an English fleet under Wishart blockaded them. Against this formidable array, Barcelona acted with courage, but the foe was strong. She fell; was sacked, burnt, and lost her privileges. In the War of Succession, in 1795, her almost impregnable fort was taken by Lord Peterborough--one of the great captures of modern times. But she arose again and kept her prosperity until Napoleon obtained possession of her by treachery in 1808, when Duhesme, entering with 11,000 men as a pretended ally, took the Citadel. Napoleon looked upon Barcelona as the key of Spain, and considered it practically impregnable. Of the beauty of her site there can be only one opinion, but she is, and always has been, very Republican. That her people are noisy, turbulent, riotous, they have clearly shown of late years. In any revolt she would be ready to take the lead. Should the kingly power ever fall in Spain, Barcelona will be amongst the first to hoist the red flag. Though no longer the terror of the Mediterranean, she seems to have regained more than her former prosperity, and on a safer basis than of old. In 1868 one of the last vestiges of antiquity--the town walls--disappeared to make way for the modern element. But if the streets of Barcelona are modern, and to some extent uninteresting, the same cannot be said of her churches. She is rich in ecclesiastical treasures. Catalonia has a style of architecture as marked as it is pre-eminently her own. If her churches are less magnificent and extensive than those of other countries, in some points they are more beautiful. We have referred to one of these points--the extreme width of the interiors. This, however, is not a feature in Barcelona, though in both height and breadth it is splendidly proportioned. In effect, tone and feeling, we place this cathedral before all others whether in Spain or elsewhere. Beauty and refinement, the repose of a dim religious light, softness and perfection of colouring, these merits cannot be surpassed. Crowded with detail, it is so admirably designed that perfect harmony exists. Every succeeding hour spent within its walls seems to bring to light some new and unexpected feature. Day after day admiration increases, and wonder and surprise; and many visits are needed before its infinite beauties can be appreciated. From the moment of entering you are charmed beyond all words. Here is a building no human mind could plan or human hands have raised. Never other building suggested this. However great the admiration--from St. Peter's at Rome, largest in the world, to Westminster Abbey, one of the most exquisite--nothing seems beyond man's power to accomplish. Barcelona alone strikes one as a dream-vision enchanted into shape and substance, possessing something of the supernatural, and is full of a sense of mystery. A faint light softens all outlines; half-concealed recesses meet the eye on every hand; mysterious depths lurk in the galleries over the side chapels. Sight gradually penetrates the darkness only to discover some new and beautiful work. Not very large, it is so perfectly proportioned that the effect is of infinitely greater space. Not a detail would one alter or single outline modify. [Illustration: PULPIT AND STALLS, BARCELONA CATHEDRAL.] Some of its coloured windows are amongst the loveliest and richest in the world. Rainbow shafts fall across pillars and arches. We are in Eden and this is its sacred fane. The whole building is an inspiration. It is cruciform, and stands on the site of an ancient Pagan temple. This, in 1058, gave place to the first Christian church, very little of which now remains. Converted into a mosque, it ceased to be Christian during the reign of that wonderful people, the Moors--wonderful throughout their long career, and falling at last, like Rome, by a fatal luxury. The more one sees their traces and remains, the more their strength is confirmed. Their influence upon Spain was inestimable. In all they did a certain religious element is apparent, not an element of barbaric worship, but of cultivation and reverence. Strange they should have hated the Christians, failing to realise an influence that was gradually changing the face of the earth. In Spain their history runs side by side with that of the Christians, yet they were so divided that nothing done by the one was right in the sight of the other. So each kept its school jealously separate, to our endless gain. The very name of Moorish architecture quickens the pulse, conjuring visions that appeal to all one's imagination and sense of beauty. Intellectually they were more advanced. The rough and warlike Christians had not the nervous development of the Moors, who were learned in the arts and sciences; possessed the traditions of centuries; had ruled the fortunes of the world. Christianity had to triumph in the end; but for long the Moors were powerful and supreme. Barcelona Cathedral was commenced at the end of the thirteenth century, in the year 1298, and carried on through a great part of the fourteenth. It seems to have been the work of Jayme Fabre, who was summoned over from Palma de Mallorca by the King of Aragon and the reigning bishop, and designed and for many years superintended the work. To him is due the chief credit of this world's wonder, to Mallorca the honour of producing him. Nearly the whole merit lies in the interior, and the exterior is of little value. Its poor and modern west front opens to a square, but the remainder is so surrounded by buildings and houses that it is difficult to see any part of it. The octagonal steeples are plain below the belfry; but the upper stages, pierced and beautiful, are finished off by pierced parapets. Some of the windows are richly moulded. The small flying buttresses are not effective. The east end is the best part, with its Gothic windows and fine tracery, though otherwise severely simple. Here the upper part of the buttresses have been destroyed, and the walls ending without roof or parapet give it a half-ruinous appearance. The interior has an aisle and chapels around the apse, following the French rather than the Spanish school. The details, however, are entirely Catalonian. The arches are narrow, but extremely beautiful. The capitals of the fluted pillars are small, delicate, and refined, and the groining of the roof is carried up in exquisite lines. Beyond the main arches is a small arcaded triforium, and above this a circular window to each bay. The dark stone is rich, solemn and magnificent in effect. Owing to the clever placing of the windows and the prevalence of stained glass, a semi-obscurity for ever reigns: not so great as that of Gerona, but so far dim and religious that only when the sun is full on the south windows can many of the details be seen. The Coro, forming part of the plan of the building, is less aggressive than in many of the Spanish cathedrals. The stalls are of great delicacy and refinement; the Bishop's throne, which has been compared to that of Winchester, is large and magnificent, taking its proper position at the east end of the choir. The pulpit at the north corner, and the staircase leading to it, are marvels of exquisite wood-carving and rare old ironwork. The canopies are delicately wrought, and the _misereres_ ornamented with fine foliage. Upwards, the eye is arrested by the beauty of the surrounding fluted pillars, on which rest the main arches of the nave. These cut and intersect the pointed arches of the deep galleries beyond, placed above the side chapels, of which there are an immense number. Turn which way you will, it is nothing but a long view of receding aisles, arches, and columns free or partly hidden by some lovely pillar; windows of the deepest, richest colours ever seen; mysterious recesses where daylight never penetrates; a subdued tone of infinite refinement; a solemn repose and sense of unbroken harmony. [Illustration: TWILIGHT IN BARCELONA CATHEDRAL] A little to the right the eye rests on the great organ, filling up one of the deep dark galleries. Its immense swinging shutters are open, exposing silvery pipes. The organist is at his post, but only for recreation, for it is not the hour of service. Soft, sweet music breathes and vibrates through the aisles, dies away in dim recesses, floats out of existence in the high vaulting of the roof; but the sense of repose is never disturbed. Sitting in a quiet corner of the stalls, amidst all this beauty of tone and outline, one feels in Paradise. But the charm of charms lies in the octagonal lantern at the west end, and here Barcelona stands unrivalled. This crowning glory is of extreme richness yet delicacy of detail. Looking upwards and catching all the infinite combinations of arches and angles--the bold piers resting on square outlines--the marvellous cuttings and intersectings--the purity yet simplicity of design--the dim religious light in which all is so mysteriously veiled--the few beams of light cunningly admitted at the extreme summit--observing this, one is lost in silent wonder. It seems almost as difficult to penetrate into the beauty and mystery of this lantern as into heaven itself. And we ask ourselves again and again if the world contains a more exquisite dream-building than this. Well do we remember the first time we saw this lantern and its imposing accompaniment. A state council was being held in the church. Immediately beneath it sat the clergy; Bishop, Dean, and Canons in gorgeous vestments. One carried a Cardinal's hat, whose thin inscrutable face reminded us a little of Antonelli, that man of influence and mystery, whom none understood, and whose greatest schemes and ambitions were not destined to succeed. Many were dressed in purple and fine linen; not a few looked as though they fared sumptuously. Their actions were grave and solemn. Something weighty and momentous as the election of a new pope or the founding of a new religion, might have been under discussion. In reality, it was the choice of a new canon. One or two possessed refined, intellectual faces, but the greater number were not born to be leaders of men. The gravity of the occasion, perfect outlines of the building, splendour of the vestments, all the pomp and ceremony with which, at last, they broke up the assembly; the veneration paid to the old Bishop and he of the crimson hat; the solemn procession filing down the aisle and through the cloisters to the Bishop's palace--this remains in the memory as an impressively splendid picture. Fifteen years have gone by since that day, but we see it as vividly before us as though it had been but yesterday. CHAPTER XIV. IN THE CLOISTERS OF SAN PABLO. In the cloisters--Sacred geese--Bishop's palace--House of the Inquisition--Striking quadrangles--_Ajimez_ windows--A rare cloister--Desecration--Library--Rare MSS.--Polite librarian--Romantic atmosphere--Santa Maria del Mar--Cloisters of Santa Anna--Sister of Mercy--San Pablo del Campo--More dream cloisters--Communing with ghosts and shadows--Spring and winter--Constant visitor--Centenarian--Chief architect--Cathedrals of Catalonia--Barbarous town-council--Hard fight and victory--Failing vision--Emblems of death--Laid aside--Wholesome lessons--Placing the keystone--Finis--_Resurgam_--Charmed hour--Possessing the soul in patience--City of Refuge. Every succeeding visit to Barcelona has confirmed our love and reverence for its cathedral. Toledo, Burgos and all the greater cathedrals pale before the charm of its rare beauty and refined splendour. It could only be that such a cathedral had corresponding cloisters, and passing through the south doorway, we accordingly found ourselves in another old-world dream; but with the blue sky for canopy, and with no mysterious recesses or hidden depths. Exception has been taken to the detail of the cloisters, but as a whole they are amongst the most effective in existence. Gothic arches, large and beautiful, rested upon fluted pillars whose capitals very much resemble those of the interior; an enchanted land and an architectural revelation. The garden was full of orange trees and flowers not too carefully tended, so that a certain wild beauty, all the contrast of the green with the ancient stone and wonderful outlines, charmed the vision. Plashing fountains caught the sunbeams and threw rainbow drops into the air. In a corner of the enclosure behind the iron railings some sacred geese intruded upon the sanctity of the precincts. The piety of these ungainly birds had to be taken for granted. They were aggressive, and hissed if only one ventured to look at them. Nothing could be more strangely out of place in a scene so beautiful and full of repose, and for which with all their sacredness they evidently had no veneration. Life passed lazily; they grew monstrously fat, and we wondered if at a certain age they disappeared for the benefit of the Bishop's table: other geese taking their place in the cloistered garden. No one could tell us anything about them, but the people seemed to think them indispensable to the welfare of the town. Here we found the best view of the exterior. Through lovely and graceful arches which framed in the picture, one caught the pointed windows of the nave with their rich tracery, above which rose the decorated belfries with pierced parapets. But the immediate surroundings were also exceptionally interesting. South of the cloister is the Bishop's palace, with a quadrangle ornamented with some fine Romanesque arcading and moulding. North, is an immense fifteenth-century barrack built for a palace, and given over to the Secret Inquisition by the Catholic monarchs. The Casa Consistorial and Casa de la Disputacion, though much altered, retain splendid traces of fourteenth-century work. The quadrangles are striking, though one has been much spoilt; and the _ajimez_ windows with their slender columns, capitals and arches are full of grace. Seeing an open doorway close to the cathedral, we had the curiosity to enter, and found ourselves in a wonderful little cloister, half sacred, half secular, its ancient walls grey and lichen-stained. In the centre grew a tall palm-tree whose graceful fronds seemed to caress and curve and blend with the Gothic outlines that charmed one back to the days of the Middle Ages. A crumbling staircase, old and beautiful, led to the upper gallery, where open windows with rare Gothic mouldings and ornamentation invited one to enter into silent, empty, but strangely quaint rooms. As we looked, two women approached the wonderful old fountain in the centre with its splendid carvings, and filled their picturesque pitchers. The cloisters were in the hands of workmen. We asked a reason, and found that a new tenant, objecting to the refined atmosphere of time's lovely ravages, was scouring, cleaning, and polishing up the general effect. One shed tears at the desecration. [Illustration: SMALL CLOISTER OR PATIO: BARCELONA.] Still nearer the cathedral is the Library, with its ancient picturesque _patio_, and the most striking roof and staircase in Barcelona. The library is rich in volumes and MSS., containing amongst much that is interesting all the archives of the kingdom of Aragon. Amidst other records will be found those of Catherine, who was bold enough to place her hand--and head--at the disposal of Henry of England. The chief librarian conducted us over the whole building, and most kindly and patiently showed everything worthy of note, dwelling humorously upon passages in records that in any way referred to Great Britain. [Illustration: CLOISTERS OF SANTA ANNA: BARCELONA.] In such an atmosphere we lost sight of the Barcelona of to-day. It became ancient, ecclesiastical, historical, learned and romantic. Here we returned to scenes and influences of the Middle Ages. And here, within a narrow circle, this "Manchester of Spain" is one of the most absorbing towns in the world. But the ecclesiastical merit of Barcelona is not confined to the cathedral. Though some of her best and most ancient churches have disappeared, others remain. Amongst the foremost is Santa Maria del Mar, taking rank after the mother church. A vast building, simple to a fault; cold, formal and severe, though architecturally correct; the interior hard and repelling, without sense of mystery or feeling of devotion. Yet it has been much praised; even to comparison with the Cathedral of Palma, and is said to be the work of the same architect; but Palma with all its simplicity is full of dignity and grandeur. The west front of Santa Maria is its best feature. The central doorway is fine, but the rose window above is hard and German in tracery, therefore has little beauty, and is of later date than the church. Not far from here, in the narrowest of narrow streets, beyond an obscure archway we found the small church of Santa Anna, interesting by reason of its cloisters with their pointed arches springing from delicately carved capitals that rested upon slender, graceful shafts; a vision of refined beauty. In the centre grew a wild and lovely garden. Spain is undoubtedly the land of cloisters, loveliest in existence; and Barcelona is especially rich in them. As we looked, a Sister of Mercy passed through on some errand of charity. We thought of Rosalie, only to be more certain than ever that there was but one Rosalie in the world. Yet more marvellous was a still smaller church of extreme interest and antiquity; San Pablo del Campo, formerly a Benedictine convent of some renown, said to have been founded in the tenth century by Wilfred II., Count of Barcelona. In the twelfth century it was incorporated with the convent of San Cucufate del Vallés, a few miles from Barcelona, of which the interesting church and cloister still exist. This remarkable San Pablo is extremely small, and cruciform, with three apses, a short nave and an octagonal vault over the crossing. It is solidly and roughly built, and until recently possessed every aspect of antiquity. All this will probably now disappear, for it has been given over to the workmen to be restored and ruined, and the work will be done to perfection. [Illustration: CLOISTERS OF SAN PABLO: BARCELONA.] So with the west front. With the exception of the circular window over the striking Romanesque doorway, one feels in presence of the remote ages; but the window rather spoils an otherwise admirable effect. By this time it has no doubt shared the fate of the interior; when we were there it was still a glorious dream of the past. Yet more dreamlike were the small cloisters. In point of tone and atmosphere we might have almost been in the early ages of the world. No one had thought it worth while to interfere with this little old-world building, buried in solitude by surrounding houses. The obscurity reigning even at mid-day was never designed by its architect. No one would dream that in this little corner, unknown, unvisited, exists a gem of the first water and great antiquity; dating probably from the eleventh century. It was a very small cloister, having only four arches on each side divided by a buttress in the centre. The arches were trefoil-headed, separated by double shafts and the capitals were richly carved. In the north wall a fine fourteenth-century doorway admitted into the church, and in the east wall of the cloister an equally fine doorway led to the fourteenth-century chapter-house. Everything was complete on a small scale. It was solemn and imposing to the last degree; an effect of age and decay so perfect that we seemed to meet face to face with the dead past. To enter these little cloisters was to commune with ghosts and shadows. If ever they lurked anywhere on earth, here they must be found. We were infinitely charmed with their tone. In spite of surrounding houses--where dead walls were seen--a tomb-like silence reigned. We looked at the small neglected enclosure, where the hand and foot of man might not have intruded for ages, and almost expected to see rising from their graves the dead who had possibly lain there for eight centuries. The stones were stained with damp and the lapse of time; wild unsightly weeds grew amongst them; but nothing stirred. As we looked, lost in the past, we became aware that we were not alone. Entering the small cloister was an aged man with long white hair and a long grey beard, half-led by a small child of some eight or nine summers. He might have been one of the patriarchs come back to earth, and seemed venerable as the cloister themselves. More fitting subject for such surroundings could not exist. His movements were slow and deliberate, as though for him time's hour-glass had ceased to run. The child seemed to have learned to restrain its youthful ardour; gazed up into the old man's face with fearless affection, and appeared to watch his will and pleasure. A lovely child, with blue eyes and fair hair, who might belong to Andalusia, or possibly a northern province of Europe. "Spring and winter," said H. C., looking at this strange advancing pair. "Or life and death; for surely they are fitting emblems? Who can they be, and what do they want in this forsaken spot?" The child said something to the aged man and motioned towards us. He paused a moment as though in doubt, then approached yet nearer. "I am your humble servant, gentlemen," he said, with something of courtliness in his manner. "It is seldom any one shares with me the solitude of these cloisters." "You are then in the habit of coming here?" returning his salutation. "For many years I have paid them an almost daily visit," was the reply. "I live not very far off, and they speak to me of the past. A long past, sirs, for I am old. I have no need to tell you that. You see it in my face, hear it in my voice. In three years I shall be a centenarian, if Heaven spares me as long. I do not desire it. A man of ninety-seven has almost ceased to live. He is a burden to himself, a trouble to others. I was once chief architect of this city, and many of the more modern buildings that your eyes have rested upon are due to me. In my younger days I had a boundless love for the work of the ancients. Gothic and Norman delighted me. Half my leisure moments were spent in our wonderful cathedral, absorbing its influence. Ah, sirs, the cathedrals of Catalonia are the glories of Spain. I dreamt of reproducing such buildings; but we are in the hands of town committees who are vandals in these matters. Fifty years ago--half a century this very month--the destruction of this church and these cloisters was taken into consideration. They wanted to pull down one of the glories of Barcelona and build up a modern church and school. I was to be the architect of this barbarous proceeding. It happened that this was one of my most loved haunts. Here I would frequently pace the solitary cloisters, thinking over my plans and designs, trying to draw wholesome inspiration from these matchless outlines. I was horrified at the sacrilege, though it was to be to my profit. I fought valiantly and long; would not yield an inch; pleaded earnestly; and at last persuaded. The idea was abandoned. That you are able to stand and gaze to-day upon this marvel is due to me. Ever since then I have looked upon it as my own peculiar possession. Day after day I pay them a visit. My failing sight now only discerns vague and shadowy outlines. It is enough. Shadowy as they are, their beauty is ever present. What I fail to see, memory, those eyes of the brain, supplies. Rarely in my daily visits do I find any one here. Few people seem to understand or appreciate the beauty of these cloisters. They are like a hermit in the desert, living apart from the world. But here it is a desert of houses that surrounds them. Like myself, they are an emblem of death in life." We started at this echo of our own words. Could his sense of hearing be unduly awakened? Or was the emblem so fitting as to be self-evident? "You have long ceased to labour?" we observed, for want of a better reply to his too obvious comparison. "For five-and-twenty years my life has been one of leisure and repose," he answered. "It has gone against the grain. I was not made for idleness. But when I was seventy-two years old, cataract overtook me. A successful operation restored my sight, but the doctors warned me that if I would keep it, all work must be abandoned. Since then I have more or less cumbered the ground. But for many friends who are good to me, life would be intolerable. Heaven blessed my labours, and gave me a frugal wife; I have all the comforts I need and more blessings than I deserve. This child is my favourite little great-granddaughter, and is often my charming companion to these cloisters. A dreary scene, gentlemen, for a child of tender years, but they read a solemn and wholesome lesson. Unconsciously she imbibes their influence. They tell her, as I do, that life is not all pleasure; that as these ancient architects left beautiful traces and outlines behind them, so we must build up our lives stage by stage, taking care that the outlines shall be true and straight, the imperishable record pure and beautiful. For every one of us comes the placing of the keystone, with its momentous _Finis_. But, blessed be Heaven, as surely beneath it appears the promised _Resurgam_." We walked round the cloisters together, and for a full hour this patriarch, with the support of our arm, charmed us with reminiscences of Barcelona, descriptions of the lovely monuments of Spain he had visited in the course of his long life. In spite of his years, his memory still seemed keen and vivid, his mind clear. He had not passed into that saddest of conditions a mental wreck. "And I pray Heaven to call me hence ere such a fate overtake me," he said, in answer to our remark upon his admirable recollection. "Whilst memory lasts and friends are kind, life may be endured. I possess my soul in patience." We parted and went our several ways, leaving the little cloisters to solitude and the ghosts that haunted them. The streets of Barcelona grated upon us after our late encounter. It was returning to very ordinary life after the refined and delightful atmosphere of the past ages. We crossed the Rambla, and entering a side street quickly reached the cathedral, which became more and more a world's wonder and glory as we grew familiar with it, an unspeakable delight. In this little City of Refuge we again for a time lost ourselves in celestial visions. In this inspired atmosphere all earthly influences and considerations fell away; sorrow and sighing were non-existent: a millennium of happiness reigned, where all was piety and all was peace. CHAPTER XV. MONTSERRAT. Early rising--Imp of darkness--Death warrant--The men who fail--Ranges of Montserrat--Sabadell--Labour and romance--The Llobregat--Monistrol--Summer resort--Sleeping village--Empty letter-bags--Ascending--Splendid view--Romantic element--Charms of antiquity--Human interests--Mons Serratus--A man of letters--_Solitude à deux_--Fellow travellers--Substantial lady-merchant--Resignation--Military policeman--"Nameless here for evermore"--Round man in square hole--Romantic history--_Cherchez la femme_--Woman a divinity--Good name the best inheritance--No fighting against the stars--Fascinations of astrology--Love and fortune--Too good to last--Taste for pleasure--Ruin--Sad end--Truth reasserts itself--Fortune smiles again--Ceylon--Philosophical in misfortune--A windfall--Approaching Montserrat--Paradise of the monks--Romance and beauty--New order of things--Gipsy encampment. We rose early one morning for the purpose of visiting Montserrat the sublime, the magnificent, and the romantic. Early as it was, Barcelona was by no means in a state of repose. Many of its people never seemed to go to bed at all, and some of its shops never closed. If we looked out upon the world at midnight, at three in the morning, or at five, Bodegas selling wine and bread were open to customers. The Rambla was never quite deserted. Before daylight trams began to run to and fro; the street cries soon swelled to a chorus. Early rising is not always agreeable when wandering about the world in search of the picturesque. Perhaps you have gone to bed late overnight, tired out with running to and fro. Energy is only half-restored when an imp of darkness enters, lights your candles, and pronounces a death-warrant. "It is five o'clock, señor. Those who wish to catch the train must get up." You think it only five minutes since you fell asleep. "Two o'clock, not five," cries a drowsy voice. "You have waked me too soon." "As you please, señor. Not for me to contradict you." The imp retires. If, like Mrs. Major O'Dowd, you carry a _repater_, you strike it. Five o'clock, sure enough, and ten minutes towards six. Nothing for it but to yield. Not as a certain friend who once bribed another imp of darkness with half-a-crown to wake him at five o'clock. The half-crown was duly earned. "Another half-crown if you let me sleep on until eight," cried the sluggard. The imp disappeared like a flash, and a gold mine was lost through an appointment. Of such are the men who fail. We came down and found the hotel in the usual state of early-morning discomfort--doors and windows all open, a general sweeping and uprooting, sleepy servants, a feeling that you are in every one's way and every one is in yours. Breakfast was out of the question, but tea was forthcoming. The omnibus rattled up. "Take your great-coats," said the landlord, who set others the example of rising early. "You will find it cold in the mountains of Montserrat, especially if you remain all night to see the sun rise." He forgot that we were not chilly Spaniards. Our imp of darkness, however, who stood by, disappeared in a twinkling and returned with the coats. The landlord--a very different and less interesting man than our host of Gerona--wished us a pleasant journey, closed the door, and away we went under the influence of a glorious morning. The sun shone brilliantly, everything favoured us. After some ten miles of rail the wonderful ranges of Montserrat began to show up faint and indistinct, with their sharp outlines and mighty peaks. In the wide plains below cultivated fields and flowing undulations abounded. Sabadell, the midway station, proved a true Catalonian manufacturing town, but very different from an English town of the same nature. No smoke, no blackness of darkness, no pallid sorrowful faces. Under these blue skies and brilliant sunshine the abundant signs of work and animation almost added a charm to the scene. To those who delight in labour, life here is a combination of romance and reality--a state of things wholesome and to be desired. We looked down upon many a valley well-wooded with small oaks, pines and olive trees, many a hill-slope covered with vines. Approaching the mountains of Montserrat, their savage and appalling grandeur became more evident. The monastery was seen high up, reposing on a gigantic plateau with its small settlement of dependencies. Villages were scattered over the plain, through which the river Llobregat took its winding way. The train drew up at Monistrol. Here we left the main line for the small railway which winds up into the mountains. Not being a crowded time of year, the train consisted of two carriages only, with an engine pushing up behind. The outer carriage was open, and here we took seats, the better to survey nature. We were high above the plains; the train had to descend into the valley, then re-ascend into the mountains. Far down was the little town of Monistrol, with its white houses. The river rushed and frothed over its weir, spanned by a picturesque stone bridge of many arches. As the train twisted and turned like a serpent, it seemed that we must every moment topple over into the seething foam, but nothing happened. Down, down we went, until we rolled over the bridge, felt the cool wind of the water upon our faces, and drew up at the little station amongst the white houses of the settlement. Here people from the hot towns spend the months of summer, exchanging in this hill-enclosed valley one species of confinement for another. It was the perfection of quiet life, no sound disturbing the air but the falling water. Not a soul was visible; the lifeless village, like Rip Van Winkle, seemed enjoying a long sleep. We might have been a phantom train in a phantom world. Though the train stopped at the little station, no one got in or out--no one but the postman, who silently exchanged attenuated letter-bags. Evidently the correspondence of this enchanted place was not extensive. Not here were wars planned or treaties signed. [Illustration: MONISTROL.] Away we went again and now began to ascend. Every moment widened our view and added to its splendour. Until recently all this had to be done by coach, a journey of many hours of courageous struggling. Now the whole thing is over in three-quarters of an hour, and it is good to feel that all the hard work is done mechanically. We had once gone through something similar in the Hex River Valley of South Africa, but in the Montserrat journey there was a more romantic element; the charm and glamour surrounding antiquity, the keen human interest attached to a religious institution dating from past ages. We easily traced the old zigzag carriage road up which horses had once toiled and struggled. Almost as zigzag was our present road, winding about like forked flashes of lightning. The scene was almost appalling. Before us the ponderous Mons Serratus, with all its cracks and fissures, ready to fall and reduce the earth to powder. Its sharp, fantastic peaks against the clear sky looked like the ruins of some mighty castle. The mountain rises four thousand feet high and is twenty-four miles in circumference--a grey, barren mass of tertiary conglomerate, an overwhelming amount of rock upon rock seemingly thrown and piled against each other. In all directions are enormous cañons and gorges with precipitous ravines; one rent dividing the range having occurred, it is said, at the hour of the Crucifixion. No eye has ever penetrated the depths below. Far up the mountain reposes the monastery, with its dependencies and cultivated gardens. Every new zigzag took us a little nearer than the last. Very high up we stopped at another small station. No doubt some sequestered nook held an unseen village, for again the old postman silently exchanged letter-bags. He was a fine specimen of humanity, this "man of letters," whose grey hairs and rugged features witnessed to a long and possibly active life. The head was cast in a splendid mould, to which the face corresponded. Such a man ought to have made his mark in the world. That he should end his days in playing postman to the monks of Montserrat seemed a sorry conclusion. The times must have got out of joint with him. As a leader in parliament or head of some great financial house, his appearance would have assured success. There must be a story behind this exterior, a mystery to unravel. But physiognomy seldom errs, and the expression of the face spoke in favour of honest purpose. He was a notable man, a man to be observed passing him on life's highway. For a time we watched him closely. There was a certain unconscious dignity about him. His remarks to the conductor were above the chatter of ordinary people. Our carriage was a third class, though we had lavishly taken first; but in those small, closed compartments nothing could be seen. This carriage was large, open, airy; we breathed, and were in touch with our surroundings; our fellow-travellers were also more interesting than the turtle-doves who occupied the luxurious compartment in a blissful _solitude à deux_. They were few and characteristic. First the conductor, who varied the monotony of his going by paying visits to the engine-driver and leaving the train to look after itself. Next, our postman, the study of whom would have been lost in any other compartment. Then a stout lady, who wore a hat that was quite a flower-garden, and substantial seven-leagued boots; a large basket laden with small nick-nacks was very much in evidence, to which she clung affectionately, and one felt it was all her living. This modest pedlar was on her way to Montserrat to dispose of her stock-in-trade--not to the monks, who could have no interest in housewifes and pocket-mirrors, but amongst the visitors. A humble peasant, with an honest, upright look in her dark eyes; a certain patient resignation in their expression which often comes to those who live from day to day, uncertain whether the morrow will bring fast or feasting. She sat at the end of the large square carriage, under the short bit of roofing. Here the magnificent surroundings were less seen, but what mattered? She was of those to whom the realities of life mean much more than the beauties of nature. Next came a military policeman duly accompanied by his gun and cocked hat, on his way to a three months' duty at Montserrat. Thus the carriage contained a poet, who could be on occasion a Napoleon; a man of letters, though apparently of letters limited; an armed Government official of more or less exalted rank; a lady-merchant representing the great world of commerce; and a humble individual who, like Lost Lenore, shall be "nameless here for evermore;" all personally conducted by a paid menial who neglected his duty and jeopardised the lives of his passengers. No merit to him that the journey passed without accident, but a great escape for ourselves. Of this small group of Catalonians, our postman alone was of the higher type and by far the most interesting. "I see you are not of our country, señor," he remarked after exchanging letter-bags at the last station. "Your interest in the journey proves you unfamiliar with it. You may well marvel at this stupendous miracle of nature." "We marvel at everything. The whole scene is overpowering. And, if we may venture to say so, you are yourself an enigma. In England we have a proverb which speaks of a round man in a square hole; might it not almost be applied to you?" "In other words, you pay me the compliment of saying that I magnify my office," quickly returned the postman. "Well, it is true that I was not born to this, but it is not every one who has the wit to find it out. My father was an officer in the Spanish navy, and in the navy my first years of labour were spent. And now I am playing at postman--to such base uses do we come. Yet is my calling honourable. "You would ask how I fell from my high estate, and politeness withholds the question. In reply I can only quote the old saying, _cherchez la femme_. They say that a woman is at the bottom of all mischief, and I believe it. On the other hand, there is no doubt that at her best she is a divinity. No, sir; I perceive what you would say; but I have nothing questionable to disclose; no intrigues or complications, or anything of that sort. "My father died when I was twenty. He had been made admiral, and lived to enjoy his rank just four months. Unfortunately, all Admiral Alvarez had to bequeath to his son was his good name. Of fortune he had none. You will say that a good name is the greatest of all inheritance, and so it is; and a young man with health, strength, and a noble profession before him should be independent of fortune. I quite agree with you. But there are exceptions, and the exceptions are those who are born under a conjunction of stars against which there is no fighting. If I had lived in the days of the Egyptians I should have been an astrologer, for I believe there is something in the science. Right or wrong, it possesses a mysterious fascination. "At twenty-one I married, apparently with discretion. The lady I chose was young, handsome, and owned a fortune. Without the latter matrimony for me would have been a dream. My lieutenant's pay, which hardly sufficed for one, would have reduced two to the necessity of living upon love, air, or any other ethereal ingredient that may be had for nothing. "For a time all went merrily. We were both well-favoured by Nature--perhaps I may be allowed to speak thus of myself when life is closing in--and fortune seemed to have been equally considerate. It was, however, too good to last. As I have said, I was not born under a lucky star. All through life I have just missed great opportunities. Even as a child I can remember that the ripe apples never fell to my share. If we drew lots for anything I was always next the winning number and might as well have drawn the lowest. My father, who really ought to have left me something in the way of patrimony, left me only his blessing. "Well, señor, my wife, I repeat, was young and handsome. She was fond of gaiety, and having the _entrée_ to a very fine society, her taste for pleasure was easily gratified. She became extravagant, and gradually fell into a state of nervous excitement which required constant dissipation. I was often away from home with my vessel, but not for long absences. They were, however, sufficiently frequent to render me careless and unsuspicious as to the true state of our finances. When I really learned this, it was too late. We were ruined. And not only ruined, but overwhelmed in debt. "In the first moment of horror I bitterly upbraided my wife. She, poor thing, took her misfortunes and my anger so much to heart that she fell into a consumption, and died in less than a year. I was so affected by my troubles--more, I believe, for the loss of my wife, whom I really loved, than for the loss of my income--that I fell for a time into a despondent frame of mind. I had felt compelled to retire from my profession--a man in a state of debt and bankruptcy had no right to be holding a royal commission--and my enforced idleness did not help to mend matters. At length life, health, and youth--I was not yet thirty--asserted themselves. Melancholy flew away; energy, a wish to be up and doing something, returned. "I looked around me. The prospect was a sad one. There was nothing to be done. No one wanted me. "At length fortune, tired of frowning upon me, smiled awhile. I fell in with an old friend of my father's, a wealthy coffee-planter in Ceylon. He had come over for a holiday to his native country. For the father's sake, for the sake of old times and the days of his youth, he was kind to the son. He sympathised with my sorrows, which were not of my own making. About to return to Ceylon, he offered me a certain partnership in his business, promising greater things if I remained. "How thankfully I turned my back upon Spain, the land of all my misfortunes, I could never say. I began a new and prosperous life in a new country. In course of time my old friend died, and I became senior partner in a flourishing concern. For twenty-five years I remained out in Ceylon. I had made a considerable fortune, and you will think that I had probably married again. No, señor. I gave up my life to work, and would not a second time tempt fate. "At last, after an absence of a quarter of a century, a feeling crept over me that had every symptom of _mal du pays_. As this increased, I realised my possessions and returned to my own country, a rich man. But, alas! youth had fled. Wealth did not now mean for me what it had meant at five-and-twenty. The first thing I did was to pay up all my debts with interest, and to stand a free, honourable and honoured man. What surprised me most was the comparative smallness of the sum which in the hour of our misfortunes I had thought so formidable. "And now, señor, do you think that I could let well alone: or, rather, that fortune could still turn to me a smiling face? It seemed as though the land of my birth--my mother country--was to bring me nothing but sorrow. In searching to place my capital, and remembering that you should not have all your eggs in one basket, I invested some of it in certain bank shares. It was a flourishing concern, paying a steady nine per cent. That it should be unlimited was a matter of no importance. So prosperous a company could never fail. Yet, señor, in less than a year, fail it did for an amount which swept away every penny of my fortune, and left me stranded high and dry on the shores of adversity. "This time my ruin was more complete than before, for I was getting old and could not begin life afresh. Yet--perhaps for that very reason--I felt it less, and bore it philosophically. I had brought no one down in my reverses. There was no one to upbraid me, and more than ever I felt thankful that I had never married again. I obtained a situation in the Post Office of a light description, which would just enable me to live. Three years ago, a small windfall came to me: a sum of money that, safely invested, assures me comfortable bread and cheese for the remainder of my days. No more flourishing banks with unlimited liabilities. And now here I am, in daily charge of the mail-bags between Monistrol and Montserrat. A humble office you will say, but not ignoble. After the free life of Ceylon, with all its magnificent scenery, I felt it impossible to live shut up in a town, and especially requested this post might be given me. In the midst of this wild grandeur, which really somehow reminds me of parts of Ceylon, I am happy and contented. Bricks and mortar are my abomination; they weigh upon one's soul and crush out one's vital power. I love to breathe the morning air with the lark. At best I can live but a few years more, and I will not spend them in regretting the past. On the whole, I consider that I am rather to be envied than pitied. That I am no longer obliged to work for my bread gives an additional zest to my occupation.--We are approaching Montserrat. Is it not a sublime scene?" It was indeed nothing less. We rose above the vast magnificent valley, until at last it looked dream-like and intangible. We seemed to overhang bottomless precipices. On a plateau of the great mountain reposed the monastery and its dependencies. Luxuriant gardens flourished, paradise of the monks--a strange contrast of barren rocks and rich verdure. Here dwelt a wonderful little world of its own, never deserted even in winter, and in summer crowded with people who spend hours, days, weeks breathing the mountain air, living a life of absolute freedom from all restraint. No monastery can be more romantically placed; perhaps none ever equalled it; yet of late years some of its romance and beauty has disappeared. The lovely old buildings that were a dream of Gothic and Norman refinement, of architectural perfection, have given place to new and hideous outlines. Nothing remains to show the glory of what has been but one side of a cloister through whose pointed arches you gaze upon a perfect Norman doorway--a dream-vision. A railway has brought Montserrat into touch with the world, and to accommodate the crowd of visitors, a new Hospederia has been built containing a thousand rooms, resembling an immense and very hideous prison. The passages are long, dark, narrow and cold. Rooms open on each side--single rooms and sets of rooms. The latter are furnished with a kitchen; so that a family or party of friends may come here with bag and baggage, pots, pans and all kitchen equipage, servants included, and encamp for as long or as short a time as may please them. Our train stopped at the little station under the very shadow of the mountain. This was the more crowded part of the settlement, and on the left we noticed what looked like a party of gipsies encamped, enjoying an open air feast with much laughter and merriment. The monastery buildings were at the other end of the plateau. We left the station under the pilotage of our friend the postman, carrying his mail-bag. Before us, raised on a terrace, was a long row of buildings old and new, of every shape and size. These were the dependencies, and helped to form the little world of Montserrat. Towering behind, up into the skies, were the precipitous sides, peaks and pinnacles of the great mountain. "There lies the Post Office," said our man of letters, "and that is my destination. If you have any intention of remaining the night, you should first pay a visit to the little house on the right. The funny little monk who attends to visitors will receive you, conduct you to the Hospederia and give you rooms. In summer every room is often occupied to overflowing, but now you will have the place to yourselves--you and the ghosts--for I maintain that it is haunted. I will not say farewell, señor; we shall frequently meet during the day. There is small choice of ways in this little settlement; but for all that you will find that Montserrat is one of the glories of Spain." He went his way, and we wondered what news from the outer world could now have any interest for the monks who were as dead to that world as though they reposed under their nameless graves in the little cemetery. CHAPTER XVI. A HIDDEN GENIUS. Monk's face--Superfluous virtue--"Welcome to Montserrat"--Mean advantage--Exacting but not mercenary--Another Miguel--Missing keys--Singular monk--Hospederia--Uncertainty--Monk's idea of luxury--Rare prospect--Haunted by silence--Father Salvador privileged--Monk sees ghosts--Under Miguel's escort--In the church--Departed glory--The black image--Gothic and Norman outlines--Franciscan monk or ghost?--Vision of the past--Days of persecution--Sensible image--Great community--Harmony of the spheres--Sad cypresses--Life of a hermit--Monk's story--Loving the world--Penitence--Plucked from the burning--Talent developed--A world apart--False interest--Salvador--Temptation and a compromise--Salvador extemporises--"All the magic of the hour"--Salvador's belief--Waiting for manifestations. We turned to the right, and entering the building indicated, passed into a bare, unfurnished room. Through a square hole in the wall, not unlike a buttery-hatch, a monk's face peered at us with large coal-black eyes, startling in their effect; a small, spare monk, with unshaven face, round head and black hair, habited in the ugly dress of the Jesuit order. It struck us rather unpleasantly that everything about him was black, not the eyes and hair only. He evidently belonged to a sect who thought washing superfluous, if not sinful. "Ah!" he exclaimed in quite friendly tones. "Welcome to Montserrat! I am very happy to see you." "We might be chums of a lifetime," said H. C., shuddering, as the well-disposed ecclesiastic advanced a dusky hand; for we saw it coming and meanly put him in the foreground. In spite of his Napoleon manner, he had to shake it. The little monk was not to be frowned down. "I am very happy to see you," he repeated. "You are welcome. Our visitors are few at this time of the year. Every visitor adds his quota to our common fund. However small, it is acceptable. Do not think me mercenary. The fathers and brothers must live, and they do a great deal of good. Even up here, out of the world, you have no idea how much may be done. And we have many branches. But the beauty of Montserrat is supreme, and you know that it is world-wide. Now you want rooms," continued the eloquent little monk. "I will go across with you to the Hospederia. But first you must record your names in this book. Miguel," to a young man in attendance, "where are the keys? They are not here. Why are they not here? How often am I to report you to the Father-Superior for carelessness?" The keys were guiltily produced by Miguel. "I thought so," cried the monk. "Suppose, now, you had gone down to Monistrol with the keys in your pocket! We must have got through a window like thieves and vagabonds. A very undignified proceeding. The Reverend Father would have stopped your butter for a month. As it is, I must overlook it, I suppose; you are so very fond of butter. Now, gentlemen---- Dear me, what beautiful writing you English always have!" scanning the book, in which, with the aid of a very bad pen, we had hieroglyphically scratched our names. "Now, gentlemen, I am at your service. We will take our little pilgrimage. You have a choice of rooms. There is not a soul in the Hospederia--a thousand rooms, every one empty. Miguel, attend us; you will have to make up beds for these gentlemen." The pilgrimage was certainly a short one. We gave the little monk as wide a berth as politeness and the way permitted. To keep step with him was impossible. He had a curious motion which resembled more the trotting of a young colt than the walk of a human being. As he skipped across the road, a small, animated mass of quicksilver, full of peculiar life and energy, it was difficult to keep becomingly grave. The great Hospederia was in front of us, huge, modern, unsightly, depressing. The monk jingled the great keys as though they made pleasant music in his ear. Then he applied one of them to the huge lock and the heavy door rolled back on its hinges. If the exterior had looked depressing, it was cheerfulness itself to the interior. A chilling, silent, uninhabited, ghostly atmosphere met us at the very threshold. Our postman might well say it was haunted. Voices and footsteps echoed in the long, bare, gloomy corridors. A monk's cell could scarcely have been more guiltless of comfort. We had hardly made up our minds whether to stay the night or not, and our proposed lodging kept us still more undecided. As far as sunrise was concerned, at this time of the year the effects were doubtful. More often than not a thick mist enshrouded the whole visible world like a white sea. We might remain, have our trouble and discomfort for our pains, and nothing more. "Here," said the monk, throwing open the door of a small room, and pointing to a bed hard as pavement, "you may sleep in comfort, even luxury. And," opening the window, "what a prospect!" True enough as regarded the outlook. Such an assemblage of vale, mountain and river could hardly be surpassed. The luxury of the bed, on the other hand, was a distinct effort of the imagination. We would not, however, disturb the sensitiveness of the little monk by arguing the matter, and indeed, it would have been difficult to lower his self-complacency. Two rooms belonging to a suite were duly apportioned to us. The bare kitchen between them looked cold and lifeless. These rooms would be prepared, and any one remaining here for the night might reasonably consider it a penance for his sins. It would be rather a gruesome experience to find ourselves in sole possession of this vast building of a thousand rooms. An army of ghosts--the ghosts of dead-and-gone monks--would certainly come down upon us, and H. C.'s most Napoleon manner would have no effect whatever. Like the little monk, ghosts are not to be frowned down. "A pity to disturb this Hospederia, which may be considered closed for the season," we remarked. "My poet friend is very much afraid of ghosts, and this place might very well be haunted. It is certainly haunted by silence. Why not give us cells in the monastery, where, in presence of the Father-Superior, ghosts would hardly venture to intrude?" "An excellent idea," said H. C., looking blue and shivery. "This place is more gloomy than the grave." "In the darkness one place is very much the same as another," said the monk. "No one is allowed even within the walls of the monastery without an order from the Holy Father at Rome, the Archbishop of Toledo, or some equally great authority. Father Salvador is the only one who can prevail with our Superior. As for ghosts, I have seen them with my own eyes on All Souls' Eve, at midnight, in the monastery graveyard, and oh! how frightened I was! How I shivered in my sandals! They were the ghosts of two monks who had committed suicide within a year of each other in their cells. Of course, they were quite mad, and they left a letter behind them--both of them--to say they could bear their solitude no longer. In the dead of night they heard groans, and saw shapes like immense bats flying about. Each bat had four wings, two tails, fiery eyes and forked tongues. They were quite insane. But there are no ghosts here, sirs. For the matter of that, the building is far too modern. Ghosts have excellent taste and cultivate the antique. There, that is settled. Everything is at your disposal--the whole building. Now, Miguel, show the gentlemen where they can dine. I have heard that the fare in the restaurant is equal to anything in Madrid. I am your most humble servant and delighted to see you. Welcome to Montserrat." Upon which the little monk skipped once more across the road with the same acrobatic motion, and disappeared within his sanctum. Under Miguel's escort--who had had so narrow an escape from losing his butter, and doing a month's fasting out of Lent--we found the dining-room. Several dining-rooms indeed, of great size, one above another, apparently quite prepared to entertain the Hospederia with its full complement of guests. The manager informed us that we could have any meal we liked at any appointed hour; he was equal to the largest dinners at the shortest notice; and having settled this part of the programme to H. C.'s satisfaction, we dismissed Miguel and took to exploring. As Don Alvarez had said, we could not go very far wrong. One road led to the summit of Mons Serratus, another down into the world; a third round the mountain into another part of the world. This was still traversed by a coach and four, and presently we had the pleasure of seeing it start with great preparation and ceremony. For the moment we contented ourselves with the immediate precincts. [Illustration: CHURCH OF MONTSERRAT.] The convent buildings stood on a plateau at the far end of the settlement. Almost buried under the side of the mountain was the immense church or chapel in which the monks attend mass. One may see them at stated hours in the choir behind the great iron _grille_ that separates them from the outer worshippers. There are now only about twenty fathers, for the monastery was suppressed some sixty years ago, only a few being allowed to remain. It is of very ancient origin, and rose from small to great things, and again has fallen from its high estate. The foundation is due to a black image of the Virgin; a small figure in black wood supposed to have been specially carved by St. Luke, and specially brought to Spain by St. Peter. If in St. Luke's best style, he was certainly not a Michel Angelo. The image, however, is highly prized by the religious order, as having worked countless miracles and brought them fame and wealth. In crossing towards the chapel we met our funny little monk. "Ah, you are going into the church?" he cried. "You will find the fathers at prayer--it is nearly the hour for the refectory. And you will see the black Virgin--the beautiful black image--carved by St. Luke--carried by St. Peter--blessed by twelve popes! No wonder she performs miracles. Withered arms and legs come to life again. I have seen old people turn young. Once when I looked at her she blinked with both eyes. It is true I am short-sighted, but I am certain of the fact: as certain as that I saw ghosts in the graveyard on All Souls' Eve. Señor, that wonderful black image is the one great thing to see at Montserrat. The cleverness of the railway, the beauty of the landscape, the grandeur of the mountain, the splendour of the church--all this is very well in its way; but it is as nothing compared with the black image. Go and study it, and if you look long enough perhaps she will blink her eyes at you too, or bow her head. It is quite possible." Then he skipped through the quadrangle back to his den. This quadrangle was very interesting; large, quiet, and solidly built: an outer court to the holy of holies, which was the church itself. Under the mountain-side, its covered passages ever seemed in deep gloom and shadow; a death-in-life atmosphere hung about it. In days gone by it was one of the loveliest nooks in the world, for the ancient buildings were beautiful and refined. Gothic cloisters and Norman doorways mingled their outlines in close companionship without rivalry, and the beholder was charmed at finding himself in an element where nothing jarred. All has disappeared to make way for the modern traveller, whose name is legion. Nothing remains but the one little Gothic fragment, with its pointed windows and slender shafts. A lady in a mantilla graced them as we stood looking at the Norman archway beyond: the more interesting of the turtle-doves who had travelled with us from Monistrol. Her mate was attending to the vulgar side of life, arranging a select repast with the restaurant manager at the farther end of the settlement. We saw him come out and advance towards her with that degree of fervour which generally marks the _lune de miel_. She, too, went to meet him half-way--and they disappeared out of our lives. As we looked at the Norman doorway it was suddenly filled with the figure of a monk. Nothing could have been more appropriately romantic and picturesque. He was clothed not as a Jesuit, but in the far more becoming dress of a Franciscan. His cowl was thrown back, revealing a pale, refined face and well-formed head, on which the hair seemed to be arranged almost like a circlet of leaves--the crown of the poet. He stood still and motionless as though carved in stone. In his hand he held a breviary. A girdle was round his waist confining the long brown robe. As far as we could see, he appeared unmindful of his surroundings, lost in a dreamy gaze which penetrated beyond the skies. It was the attitude and expression of a visionary or mystic. What was this monk in the strange garb? Who was he? What brought him apparently at home amidst the Jesuits, he who evidently belonged to another order? Had he thrown in his lot amongst them? Or did he live, a solitary being, in one of the surrounding hermitages? Whilst we looked he slowly turned, and, with bent head and lingering steps, as though in deep contemplation, passed out of sight. Nothing remained but the empty doorway with a vision of arches beyond; a few ruined walls stained with the marks of centuries, to which patches of moss and drooping creepers and hardy ferns added grace and charm. We were alone, surrounded by intense quiet and repose. Sunshine was over all, casting deep shadows. No sound disturbed the stillness, not even the echo of the monk's receding footsteps. So silent and motionless had been his coming and going, we asked ourselves whether he was in truth flesh and blood or a mid-day visitor from the land of shadows. How remote, how out of the world it all was! Suddenly, as we looked upwards, an eagle took majestic flight from one of the mountain peaks, and, hovering in the blue ether, seemed seeking for prey. But it was not the time of the lambs, and with a long, sweeping wing, it passed across the valley to an opposite range of hills. The great church was before us with its dome, of Roman design and sufficiently common-place. But, after all, what mattered? Its effects and those of the hideous Hospederia were lost in their wonderful surroundings, just as a drop of water is lost in the ocean. On entering the church this comparison disappeared. There was an expanse about its aisles, largeness and breadth in the high-domed roof, that produced a certain dignity, yet without grace and refinement. No magic and mystery surrounded them, and the dim religious light was the result, not of rich stained glass admitting prismatic streams, but of an obscurity cast by the shadows of Mons Serratus. For great effects one had to go back in imagination to the days when the monks were many and assembled at night for service. It is easy to picture the impressive scene. Beyond the ever-closed screen, within the great choir, a thousand kneeling, penitential figures chanting the midnight mass, their voices swelling upward in mighty volume; the church just sufficiently lighted to lend the utmost mystery to the occasion; a ghostly hour and a ghostly assemblage of men whose lives have become mere shadows. On great days countless candles lighted up the aisles and faintly outlined the more distant recesses. The fine-toned organ pealed forth its harmony, shaking the building with its diapasons and awakening wonderful echoes in the far-off dome. [Illustration: CLOISTERS OF MONTSERRAT.] All this may still be seen and heard now and then, but with the number of monks sadly curtailed. It is said that they now never exceed twenty. When their day of persecution came they escaped to their mountain fastness, climbing higher and ever higher like hunted deer, hiding in the cracks and crevices of the rocks; fear giving them strength to reach parts never yet trodden by the foot of man, whilst many a less active monk slipped and fell into the bottomless abyss, his last resting place, like that of Moses, remaining for ever unknown. The troops of Suchet followed the refugees, found them out, and put an end to many a life that, if useless, was also harmless. Not a few of the survivors became hermits, and on many a crag may be found the ruins of a hermitage, once, perhaps, inhabited by a modern St. Jerome, though the St. Jeromes of the world have been few and far between. Some sort of religious institution existed here in the early centuries, long ages before Ignatius Loyola founded the order of the Jesuits. In the eighth century the famous black image was hidden away in a cave under a hill to save it from the Moors. Here it miraculously disclosed itself a hundred years later to some simple shepherds. These hastened to the good Bishop, who took mules, crook and mitre, and came down with all the lights of the church and all the pomp of office to remove the treasure to Manresa. Apparently the image preferred the fresh mountain air to the close, torrent-washed town with its turbid waters, for having reached a certain lovely spot overlooking the vast plain, it refused to go any farther. As it could not speak--being a wooden image--it made itself so heavy that mortal power could not lift it. This was the first of a long succession of miracles. On the spot where the image rested, the Bishop with crook and mitre, and bell and book, and Dean and Chapter, held solemn conclave and there and then went through a service of Consecration. A chapel was built, and the image became the object of devoted pilgrimages. All traces of the chapel have disappeared long since. Nothing now marks the spot but an iron cross which may be seen far and near. Approaching, you may read the inscription: _Aqui sè hizo inmovil la Santa Imagen_. After this a nunnery was founded, which in the tenth century became a Benedictine convent. Ages rolled on, and it grew famous. When destroyed by the French it held as many as 900 monks: a great religious community, wealthy and powerful. But the mighty are fallen. The few remaining monks, more exclusive in their retirement than the great body of their predecessors, have a school attached to the monastery in which much time is given to the study of music. It is going far out of the world for instruction, but Nature herself should come to their aid. Amidst these lonely solitudes the Harmony of the Spheres might well be heard. Passing through the great quadrangle, we entered a narrow passage between the church and hill-side, reminding one a little of some of the narrow streets of Jerusalem. Here, too, we found some arches and buttresses framing in the sky, arch beyond arch. At the end of all we came out once more upon the open world, and what a scene was disclosed! In front of us was a small chapel attached to a little hermitage. Beside it ran a long avenue of sad and solemn cypresses. It might have been the cemetery of the dead-and-gone monks, but no small mounds or wooden crosses marked where the dead reposed. This mournful avenue extended to the brow of the hill, where we overlooked vast wild precipices. Cañons and gorges opened beneath us and above us in appalling magnitude. The stupendous valley stretched right and left in the distance. Far on the other side reposed a chain of snow-clad hills. Villages lay about the plain and hill-sides. In the far-off hollow slept the little town of Monistrol, its blue smoke mingling with the clearer atmosphere. Through all the valley the river ran its winding, silvery course on its way to the sea. The plateau on which we stood held the monastery buildings. Near us stretched the gardens of the monks in cultivated terraces, and above them, winding round the mountain was the white road leading out into the world lying to the south of Montserrat. Again, as we looked, another eagle soared from one of the peaks and took its slow majestic flight across the valley, no doubt on the track of its mate, perhaps to find out why he tarried so long. A string of boys in caps and black cloaks left the convent and wound round the white road, conducted by a few of the monks whose duty it was to keep watch and ward over the students. These passed out of sight, and once more we seemed alone with nature. But on turning back down the cypress avenue, sitting against the little chapel we saw the Franciscan monk who had lately filled the Norman archway. Though his breviary was open, he was not reading. His eyes--large, dark, dreamy eyes that ought to belong to a genius--were looking out on the mountain and the far-off sky, lost in profound contemplation. [Illustration: CHURCH OF MONTSERRAT.] Of what nature were his thoughts? Introspective or retrospective? Was he thinking of days that were past, or of the life to come? Were regret and remorse his portion, or resignation to his present surroundings? Was he dwelling upon some terrible Might-have-been? He looked inexpressibly lonely, as though he and the world had parted company for ever, but there was something singularly interesting about him. It seemed difficult to intrude upon his solitude, as impossible to pass without speaking. Some influence compelled us to stop. His face was pale and refined. He was so thin as to be almost cadaverous; not an ounce of flesh had he to spare on his bones; there was a certain look of hunger in his large magnificent eyes; not a hungering after the flesh-pots of Egypt, but, as it seemed, for peace of mind and repose of soul. Grazing at the skies, he appeared to be asking questions of the Infinite Beyond. Where was the kingdom of Heaven and what was it like? When there came for him the great apocalypse of the soul how would it find its way to the realms of paradise? We stopped in front of him, and he started as though he had only that moment became aware of our presence. He did not seem to resent the intrusion, but looked up with a searching inquiring glance, which presently changed to a smile beautiful and almost childlike in its confidence: sad, beseeching, as though it were in our power to interpret to him the hidden mysteries of the unseen; the perplexing problems of life; the doubts and difficulties with which his questioning heart contended. "You have indeed found a quiet corner for contemplation," we remarked after he had greeted us with a subdued: "May Heaven have you in its holy keeping." [Illustration: SALVADOR THE MONK.] "It is all my want and all my desire," he replied, in a voice that was full of melody. "I live the life of a hermit. Near at hand I have my small hermitage, and I also have my cell in the monastery, occupying the one or the other as inclination prompts me. For you see by my dress that though this is my home, where I shall live and die, I do not belong to the Jesuits. I am really a Franciscan, but have obtained a dispensation, and I live here. I love to contemplate these splendours of nature; to read my breviary under the blue sky and the shadow of our great mountain. Here I feel in touch with Heaven. The things unseen become real and tangible, doubts and difficulties vanish. My soul gathers strength. I return to my cell, and its walls crush all life and hope out of me; weigh upon me with an oppression greater and deeper than that of yonder giant height. I feel as though I should die, or fall away from grace. There have been times when they have come to my cell and found me unconscious. I have only revived when they have brought me out to the fresh air, this freedom and expanse. The good Father-Superior recognises my infirmity and has given me the hermit's cave. I will show it to you if you like. It is quite habitable and not what you might imagine, for it is a built-up room with light and air, not a cavern dark and earthy. I love solitude and am never solitary. Once I loved the world too much; I lived in the fever of life and dissipation. Heaven had mercy upon me, and you behold a brand plucked from the burning. When my heart was dead and seared, and love and all things beautiful had taken wing, I left the world. The profligate became a penitent. I took vows upon me and joined the Franciscan Order. But I should have died if I had not come up here, where I have found pardon and peace. That was twenty years ago. Yet I am not fifty years old, and am still in the full vigour of manhood. It may be long before a small wooden cross marks my resting-place in the cemetery. When the last hour comes I shall pray them to bring me here, that amidst these splendours of nature my soul may wing its flight to the greater splendours of paradise. I feel that I could not die in my cell." "How is it you are allowed so much freedom?" we asked. "We thought that here you were all more or less cloistered. It was our wish to see the interior of the monastery, but the lay monk who receives visitors said it was not permitted." "A strict rule," returned the monk; "but if you are staying here a couple of days, I could take you in. To-morrow is a great fast; to enter would be impossible; the day after it might be done." "Unhappily we cannot remain. To-morrow at latest we return to Barcelona. But, if we may ask it again without indiscretion, whence have you this indulgence and power?" "The secret lies in the fact that I possess a talent," smiled the monk. "I was always passionately fond of music, and as a pastime studied it closely and earnestly. Here I have turned it to account. Whether it was the necessity for an occupation, or that it was always in me, I developed a strange faculty for imparting knowledge to others. I fire them with enthusiasm, and they make vast progress. My name, I am told, has become a proverb in our large towns. It has been of use to the monastery: has enlarged the school, added to the revenues. In return I have obtained certain privileges; a greater freedom of action. Otherwise my power would leave me. This is why I can promise to open doors to you that are usually closed to the world. Yet in what would you be the better? Curiosity would hardly be satisfied in viewing the bare cells and long gloomy passages, the cold and empty refectory, where perchance you might see spread out a banquet of bread and water, a little dried fish or a few sweet herbs." "There is always something that appeals to one, strangely attractive, in the interior of a monastery," we returned. "I know it," replied the monk, whose new name he told us was Salvador. "It is a world apart and savours of the mysterious. It possesses also a certain mystic element. Thus the atmosphere surrounding it is romantic and picturesque, appealing strongly to the imagination. Sympathy goes out to the little band of men who have bound themselves together by a vow, forsaken the world and given up all for religion. But if you were called upon to share that life only for a month, all its supposed mystery and charm would disappear. It only exists in the sentiment of the thing, not in the reality. It lies in the beauty of the solitary mountains in which the monasteries are often placed; or the splendid architecture they occasionally preserve. In the dull monotony of a daily round never varied, you would learn to dread the lonely cell--even as I once dreaded it more than death itself. Hence my freedom. It will soon be our refectory hour," looking at a small silver watch he carried beneath his robe. "I must return or fast." Then there came to us a bright idea. "Why leave us?" we said. "Or if you must do so now, why not return? Would you not be allowed to dine with us this evening? You would tell us of your past life before you became a monk, and of your life since then. It must contain much that is interesting. In the evening shadows you would guide us about the mountain paths, tell us of the evil days that fell upon the monks and their flight into the hills." Salvador the monk smiled. "You tempt me sorely," he replied. "I should like it much. Such a proposal has never been made to me since I put on cloak and cowl. It would be like a short return to the world--a backward glance into the life that is dead and buried. Then imagine the contrast between your sumptuous repast and the bread and sweet herbs with which we keep our bodies alive. I fear it would not be wise to awaken memories. No, I must not think of it. But to-night I shall dream that I have been to a banquet and walked with you in quiet paths, taking sweet counsel. Oh, I am tempted. What a break in my life to spend a whole day with you, and become once more, as it were, a citizen of the world! But I will make a compromise. If you go up the mountain to-morrow morning to see the sun rise, I will accompany you. Though a fast day, I can do this; and I may take a modest breakfast with you." This decided us, and we agreed to remain: it would have been cruel to deny him. He folded his camp-stool and prepared to depart. "You will accompany me to my door," he said, somewhat wistfully, "though to-day I may not ask you to pass beyond." So we wended back through the arches in the narrow passage between the hill and monastery, and the mountain shadows fell upon us. We reached the great quadrangle, lonely and deserted. "Let us enter by way of the church," said the monk; "I will show you our little private door." The great building was silent and empty. Our footsteps woke weird echoes in the distant aisles. Salvador by some secret touch unfastened the door of the screen, which rolled back on its hinges, and we passed into the choir. "Here we attend mass," said our guide; "a small community of monks, though I am more often at the organ. In days gone by, when they numbered nearly a thousand, it was a splendid and powerful institution--a magnificent sight and sound. No need then to add to the funds by teaching. All the glory has departed, but perhaps, in return, we are more useful. Nothing, however, can take from our scenery, though its repose is no longer unbroken. With a railroad at our very doors, who can say that we are now out of the world? Ah!" as a man crossed the choir towards the sacristy; "there is my organ-blower. Would you like me to give you some music?" "It would be enchanting. But your repast--would you not lose it?" "I have twenty minutes to spare, and should then still be in time for the end." He beckoned to the man, who approached. "Hugo, have you dined?" "Si, Padre Salvador." "Then come and blow for me a little." He bade us seat ourselves in the stalls, where the organ was best heard. We listened to their receding footsteps ascending the winding staircase leading to the organ loft. In a few minutes we had lost all sense of outward things. The loveliest, softest, most entrancing music went stealing through the great building. Salvador was evidently extemporising. All his soul was passing into melody. Divine harmonies succeeded each other in one continued flow. It was music full of inspiration, such as few mortals could produce; fugitive thoughts more beautiful by reason of their spontaneity than any matured composition ever given to the world. Here indeed was a genius. Never but once before had we heard such playing. Many years had gone by since one evening on the Hardanger Fjord, we glided through the water under the moonlight and listened to such strains as Beethoven himself could not have equalled. Many a hand oft-clasped in those days lies cold and dead; life has brought its disillusions; the world has changed; but even as we write the glamour of that moonlit night surrounds us, those matchless strains still ring in our ears, lifting us once more to paradise. This monk's music brought back all those past impressions; "all the sorrow and the sighing, all the magic of the hour." We listened spell-bound, enraptured; and again we were in paradise. No wonder he inspired his pupils to accomplish the impossible. It lasted only a quarter of an hour, but during that time we never stirred hand or foot, scarcely breathed. Ordinary life was suspended; we were conscious only of soul and spirit. When this divine influence ceased we were hardly aware of the silence that succeeded. The monk had thrown us into a trance from which it was difficult to awaken. Only when his cloaked and cowled figure once more entered the choir and quietly approached us did we rouse to a sense of outward things. "I see my music has pleased you," he said. "I do not affect to depreciate its power, since it influences me no less than others. For the time being I am lost to myself. All my soul seems expressing thoughts that words could never utter. No credit is due to me for a power outside and beyond me. The moment I sit down to the organ, Saint Cecilia takes possession of me, and I merely follow whither she leads. Of all arts, it is the most divine. Now before we separate let me take you into the Chapel of the Virgin. The image, you know, is considered the great treasure of the monastery." In his voice there seemed almost an inflection of doubt or amusement. "And you also look upon it in this light?" we asked. "You believe in all the miracles, legends and traditions time has gathered round the image?" "I must not talk heresy," smiled the monk; "but I believe more in my music." We had entered the small chapel, where a light was burning before the celebrated image, black and polished as ebony; an image less than two feet high, seated in a chair, with an infant in its arms. The workmanship was rough and rude, the face ugly and African. There was nothing about it to raise the slightest emotion, for it was not even artistic. "On this very spot," said the monk, "Ignatius Loyola is said to have waited for hours in rapture watching the image and receiving manifestations, after which he founded the Order of the Jesuits. He laid his sword upon the altar, declaring that he had done with it for ever, and henceforth his life should be devoted to paths of peace. In like manner I have stood here for hours, waiting for inspiration, for some manifestation, some token, though it should be only borne in upon the mind with no outward and visible sign. And I have waited in vain. Nothing has ever come to me. But I seat myself at the organ and seem wafted at once into realms immortal; my soul awakens and expands; I feel heaven within me. It is my one happiness and consolation; that and being alone with nature." He conducted us back to the screen. "Then we cannot prevail upon you to be with us this evening?" we said in a final effort. "You will not give us all the experiences of your past life, spiritual and otherwise?--all you went through in your transition state?" "Tempt me not," returned the monk. "Your voice would persuade me against my reason. I must not return to the sweets of the world even for an evening. Think of the going back afterwards. But to-morrow morning before dawn breaks in the east I will be with you." He bade us farewell and closed the gate. We watched the solitary figure glide down the choir until it disappeared. The quiet footsteps ceased to echo, and we stood alone in the church. The silence was painful and the building had no power to charm. We passed out to the great quadrangle and soon found ourselves in a very different scene. CHAPTER XVII. SALVADOR THE MONK. Gipsies--Picturesque scene--Love passages--H. C. invited to festive board--Saved by Lady Maria's astral visitation--The fortune-teller--H. C. yields to persuasion--Fate foretold--Warnings--Photograph solicited--Darkness and mystery--Night scene--Gipsies depart--Weird experiences--Troubled dreams--Mysterious sounds--Ghost appears--H. C. sleeps the sleep of the just--Egyptian darkness--In the cold morning--Salvador keeps his word--Breakfast by candlelight--Romantic scene--Salvador turns to the world--Agreeable companion--Musician's nature--Miguel and the mule--Leaving the world behind--Darkness flies--St. Michael's chapel--Sunrise and glory--Marvellous scene--Magic atmosphere--Salvador's ecstasy--Consents to take luncheon--Heavenly strains--"Not farewell"--Departs in solitary sadness--Last of the funny monk. It was the other end of the settlement. All the houses were behind us; the railway station was in a depression at our left. The plateau expanded, forming a small mountain refuge, sheltered and surrounded by great boulders that were a part of Mons Serratus towering beyond them. Grass and trees grew in soft luxuriance. Under their shadow a picnic party had encamped; noisy Spaniards who looked very much like gipsies; an incongruous element in these solemn solitudes, yet a very human scene. They were scattered about in groups, and the bright handkerchiefs of the women formed a strikingly picturesque bit of colouring. Baskets of rough provisions were abundant. A kettle hung on a tripod and a fire burnt beneath it, from which the blue smoke curled into the air and lost itself in the branches of the trees. The people were enjoying themselves to their hearts' content. Here and there a couple had hoisted a red or green umbrella, which afforded friendly opportunities for tender love passages. Some were drinking curiously out of jars with long spouts shaped like a tea-kettle. These they held up at arm's length and cleverly let the beverage pour into their mouths. Practice made perfect and nothing was wasted. Chatter and laughter never ceased. They were of humble rank, which ignores ceremony, and when H. C. approached rather nearly, he was at once invited to join their festive board and make one of themselves. One handsome, dark-eyed maiden looked at him reproachfully as he declined the honour--the astral body of Lady Maria in her severest aspect having luckily presented itself to his startled vision. The siren had a wonderfully impressive language of the eyes, and it was evident that her hand and heart were at the disposal of this preux chevalier. "Señor," she said, "I am a teller of fortunes. Show me your hand and I will prophecy yours." H. C. obligingly held it out. She studied it intently for about half a minute, then raised her eyes--large languishing eyes--and seemed to search into the very depths of his. "Señor, you are a great poet. Your line of imagination is strongly influenced by the line of music, so that your thoughts flow in rhyme. But the line of the head communicates with the line of the heart, and this runs up strongly into the mount of Venus. You have made many love vows and broken many hearts. You will do so again. You cannot help it. You are sincere for the moment, but your affections are like champagne. They fizz and froth and blaze up like a rocket, then pass away. You will not marry for many years. Then it will be a lady with a large fortune. She will not be beautiful. She will squint, and be a little lame, and have a slight hump--you cannot have everything--but she will be amiable and intellectual. I see here a rich relative, who is inclined in your favour. It is in her power to leave you wealth. Beware how you play your cards. I see by your hand that you just escape many good things by this fickle nature. I warn you against it, but might as well tell the wind not to blow. There is one thing, however, may save you--the stars were in happy conjunction at your birth. The influence of the house of Saturn does not affect you. I see little more at present. Much of your future depends on yourself. To you is given, more than to many, the controlling of your fate. You may make or mar your fortune. No, señor," as H. C. laughed and tried to glide a substantial coin into her hand, "I do not tell fortunes for money to-day. It is a _festa_ with our tribe, almost a sacred day, the anniversary of a great historical event. To-day we do all for love; but I should much like your photograph." [Illustration: VALLEY OF MONTSERRAT.] H. C. chanced to have one in his pocket-book, which he had once put aside for the Madrid houri who married the Russian nobleman. This he presented with much grace to the enraptured Sibyl. Their heads were very close together at the moment; there seemed a clinking sound in the air. We happened to be consulting the time, and on looking up, the Sibyl's face seemed flushed and conscious, and H. C.'s poetically pale complexion had put on a delicate pink. This was a little too suspicious--even to our unsuspecting mind--and with a hasty bow to the interesting assembly, and wishing them all good appetites and fair fortunes, we went on our way. Looking back once, the charming Sibyl was still gazing towards us with a very sentimental expression, whilst H. C. for the next ten minutes fell into silence. The day wore on to evening. We watched the shades of night gathering over the vast valley and distant hills. Everything grew hazy and indistinct, and finally gave place to a world of darkness and mystery. The outlines of Mons Serratus loomed upwards against the night sky. The stars came out flashing and brilliant as they travelled along in their awful and majestic silence. The great constellations were strongly marked. Here and there lights twinkled in the monastery, and in the various houses of the settlement. Where the gipsy party had encamped, silence and solitude now reigned. A black mark told where the tripod had held the kettle and betrayed what had been. The whole encampment had returned to the lower world by the evening train. We had watched them enter a special carriage, which they filled to overflowing. Their spirits had not failed. As the train moved off they sent up a shout which echoed and re-echoed in many a gorge and cleft. Presently, when the stars had travelled onwards, we felt it was time to disappear from the world for a season. We were taking a last look at the Gothic arches, through which the sky and the stars shone with serene repose. The night was solemn and impressive; a strange hush lay upon all. It might have been a dead universe, only peopled by the spirits of the dead-and-gone monks and hermits roaming the mountain ranges. Throughout the little settlement not a soul crossed our path; doors and windows were closed; here and there a light still glimmered. We caught sight of another wandering light far up a mountain path, held by some one well acquainted with his ground--perhaps a last surviving hermit taking his walks abroad, or a monk contemplating death and eternity in this overwhelming darkness. We wondered whether it was Salvador, our musical monk, seeking fresh inspiration as he climbed nearer heaven. As we passed out of the arches we came upon our funny little monk, who, having ended all his duties, was going to his night's rest. He caught sight of us and gave a brisk skip. "Welcome to Montserrat," he cried once more. "I am delighted to see you." From long habit he evidently used the form unconsciously--it was his peculiar salutation. "You are about to retire, señor. Let me conduct you to your rooms. I should like to see you comfortably settled for the night." From his tone and manner he might have been taking us to fairyland; beds of rose-leaves; a palace fitted up with gold and silver, where jewels threw out magic rays upon a perfumed atmosphere. He swung back the great gates of the Hospederia. We passed into an atmosphere dark, chilling, and certainly not perfumed. Mysterious echoes died away in distant passages. The little monk lighted a lantern that stood ready in the corridor, and weird shadows immediately danced about. One's flesh began to creep, hair stood on end. In this huge building of a thousand rooms we were to spend a solitary night. It was appalling. As the monk led the way passages and staircases seemed endless: a labyrinth of bricks and mortar. Should we survive it: or, surviving, find a way out again? [Illustration: A FEW OF THE GIPSIES AT MONTSERRAT.] At last our rooms. Small candles were lighted that made darkness visible. We should manage to see the outline of the ghosts that appeared and no more. The little monk skipped away, wishing us pleasant dreams. Pleasant dreams! Never but once before--and that in the fair island of Majorca--did we spend such a night of weird experiences. If we fell asleep for a moment our dreams were troubled. We awoke with a start, feeling the very thinnest veil separated us from the unseen. The corridors were full of mysterious sounds: our own particular room was full of sighs. Ghostly hands seemed to pass within an inch of our face, freezing us with an icy cold wind that never came from Arctic regions. Once we were persuaded an unearthly form stood near us; to this day we think it. We were wide awake, and when we sat up it was still there. The form of a monk in cloak and cowl. A strange phosphoric light seemed to emanate from it, making it distinctly visible. The face was pale, sad and hopeless. Large dark eyes were full of an agony of sorrow and disappointment. It was evidently the ghost of a monk who had repented his vows and learned too late that even a convent cell cannot bring peace to the soul. A strange thrill passed through us as we gazed, yet of fear or terrors we felt nothing. The sadness and beauty of the face held us spell-bound. We found courage to address it. "Spirit of the dead and gone, wherefore art thou here? Why wander in this unrest? Can we do aught to ease thee of thy burden? Will our earthly prayers and sympathy avail thee in thy land of shadows?" No doubt there was a slight suspicion of rhythm in the words that would have become H. C. rather than our more sober temperament; but they came of their own accord, and we did not wait to turn them into better prose. We listened and longed for a reply, but none came. Nothing but a deep-drawn sigh more expressive of sorrow than all the words that ever were coined. The singular part of it was that whilst the apparition was visible, all the mysterious sounds and echoes in the passages ceased, and began again when it disappeared. As disappear it did. No word was spoken; no sign was made. For one instant a mad thought had passed through our brain that perhaps it was about to conduct us to some buried treasure: some Aladdin's lamp, whose possession should make us richer than Solomon, more powerful than the kings of the earth. But the strange light grew faint, the outlines shadowy, until all faded into thin air. The room was once more empty; and we held no treasure. It was a long and troubled night. Rest we had none. Yet next morning H. C.--whose poetical temperament should have made him susceptible to all these influences--informed us that he had slept the dreamless sleep of the just. He had heard and seen nothing. This seemed unfair, and was not an equal division of labour. Before daylight we were up and ready for our pilgrimage. It required some courage to turn out, for the world was still wrapped in Egyptian darkness. In the east as yet there was not the faintest glimmer of dawn. In the house itself a ghostly silence still reigned. Apparently throughout the little settlement not a soul stirred. Nevertheless it was the end of the night, and before we were ready to sally forth there were evidences of a waking world. We went down through the dark passages carrying a light, which flickered and flared and threw weird shadows around. We opened the door and passed out into the clear, cold morning. The stars still shone in the dark blue sky. Through the gloom, passing out of the quadrangle, we discerned a mysterious figure approaching: a cowled monk with silent footstep. It was Salvador, true to his word. "We are both punctual," he said, joining us. "I think the morning will be all we could desire." It had been arranged that breakfast should be ready at the restaurant. Salvador had refused to dine with us, he did not refuse breakfast. The meal was taken by candle-light, and he added much to the romance of the scene as he threw back his cowl, his well-formed head and pale, refined face gaining softness and beauty in the subdued artificial light. Salvador had the square forehead of the musician, but eyes and mouth showed a certain weakness of purpose, betraying a man easily influenced by those he cared for, or by a stronger will than his own. Perhaps, after all, he had done wisely to withdraw from temptation. This morning his monkish reticence fell from him; he came out of his shell, and proved an agreeable companion with a great power to charm. Once more for a short time he seemed to become a man of the world. "You make me feel as though I had returned to life," he said. "It is wonderful how our nature clings to us. I thought myself a monk, dead to all past thoughts and influences; I looked upon my old life as a dream: and here at the first touch I feel as though I could throw aside vows and breviary and cowl and follow you into the world. Well for me perhaps that I have not the choice given me. Why did you not leave me yesterday to my solitude and devotions, and pass on, as others have done? You are the first who ever stopped and spoke. To-day I feel almost as though I were longing once more for the pleasures of the world." [Illustration: MONS SERRATUS IN CLOUDLAND.] We knew it was only a momentary reaction. He had the musician's highly nervous and sensitive organisation. Our meeting had awakened long dormant chords, memories of the past; but the effect would soon cease, and he would go back to his monkish life and world of melody, all the better and stronger for the momentary break in the monotony of his daily round. We did not linger over breakfast. At the door a mule stood ready saddled. This also went with us in case of need. H. C. and the monk were capable of all physical endurance. Like Don Quixote they would have fought with windmills or slain their Goliaths. Nature had been less kindly to us, and the mule was necessary. It would be difficult to describe that glorious morning. When we first started, the path was still shrouded in darkness. We carried lighted lanterns, and Miguel, following behind with the mule, looked a weird, picturesque object as he threw his gleams and shadows around. Our path wound round the mountain, ever ascending. One by one the stars were going out; in the far east the faintest glimmer was creeping above the horizon. This gradually spread until darkness fled away and light broke. We were high up, approaching St. Michael's chapel, when the sun rose and the sky suddenly seemed filled with glory. It was a scene beyond imagination. The vast world below us was shrouded in white mist. Under the influence of the sun this gradually rolled away, curling about the mountain in every fantastic shape and form, and finally disappeared like a great sea sweeping itself from the earth. The whole vast plain lay before us. Towns and villages unveiled themselves by magic. Across the plains the Pyrenees rose in flowing undulations, their snow-caps standing out against the blue sky. The winding river might be traced in its course by the thin line of vapour that hung over it like a white shroud. The whole Catalonian world, all the sea coast from Gerona to Tarragona, came into view, with the blue waters of the Mediterranean sleeping in the sunshine. In the far distance we thought we discerned our lovely and beloved Majorca, and were afterwards told this was possible. All about us were deep, shuddering crevices, into which one scarcely gazed for horror. Immense boulders jutted out on every hand; some of them seeming ready to fall and shake the earth to its centre. Wild and barren rocks gave foothold to trees and undergrowth more beautiful than the most cultivated garden; nothing lovelier than the ferns and wildflowers that abounded. As the sun rose higher, warmth and brilliancy increased until the air was full of light. We breathed a magic atmosphere. "This is what I delight and revel in," cried Salvador the monk. "This lifts me out of myself. It is one of the glories of Spain, and makes me feel a new being with one foot on earth and one in heaven. Can you wonder that I should like to inhabit yonder cave? Day by day I should watch the sun rise and the sun set, all the hours between given to happiness and contemplation. As I look on at these effects of nature my soul seems to go out in a great apocalypse of melody. The air is filled with celestial music. Yet no doubt our Principal is right, and in the end the influence would not be good for me. I am a strange contradiction. There are moments when I feel that I could go back to the world and take my place and play my part in all its rush and excitement; other moments when I could welcome the solitude of the desert, the repose of the grave." It was almost impossible to turn away from the scene, undoubtedly one of the great panoramas of the world. Here, indeed, we seemed to gaze upon all its kingdoms and glories. Without the least desire to become hermits, we would willingly have spent days upon the mountain. As that could not be we presently commenced our long descent, winding about the mountain paths, gathering specimens of rare wildflowers, and gazing upon the world below. We made many a halt, rested in many a friendly and verdant nook, and took in many an impression never to be forgotten. On returning to the settlement we felt we had been to a new world where angels walked unseen. It was difficult to come back to the lower levels of life. We had quite an affection for our patient mule, that looked at us out of its gentle eyes as though it knew quite well the service rendered was as valued as it was freely given. Salvador joined us at luncheon: we would not be denied. "It is a fast-day," he said; "how can I turn it into a feast?" "You are a traveller, and as such are permitted an indulgence." He smiled. "It is true," he returned. "I perceive that you know something of our rules." Nevertheless he was abstemious almost to fasting. "And yet it has been indeed a feast compared with my daily food," he said when it was over. "Now would you like to go into the church and have some music? My soul is full of the melody I heard on the mountain." So it happened that presently we were listening to such strains as we never shall hear again. Once more we were lifted to paradise with melody that was more heavenly than earthly. Again his very soul seemed passing out in music. Had he gone on for hours we should never have moved. But it came to an end, and silence fell, and presently we had to say farewell. "I cannot say it," he cried in a voice slightly tremulous. "It has been a day of days to me, never to be repeated. Another glimpse of the world, and a final leave-taking thereof. I will never again repeat this experience--unless you return and once more ask me to guide you up Mons Serratus." This was very improbable, and he knew it. He grasped our hand in silence, essayed to speak, but the farewell words died unuttered. Then he silently turned, drew up his cowl and left us for ever. We watched him disappear within the shadows of the church, heard a distant door closed, and knew that in a moment he would have regained the solitude of his cell. We went back to the world. As we crossed the quadrangle the little lay brother who had first received us caught sight of and skipped towards us. "Welcome to Montserrat. I am most happy to see you," he cried. "So you have been to the top of the mountain to see the sun rise. And our good Salvador has been your guide. He is lucky to get so many indulgences, but he deserves them. What would the school do without him?--lose half its pupils. And what would the convent do without the school?--starve. Did you sleep comfortably in your beautiful rooms?" We thought it hardly worth while to relate our ghostly visitations, and left him with the impression that, like H. C., we had slept the sleep of the just. "And now you are going back to Barcelona," he said. "Well, there is nothing more to be seen. After looking upon the beautiful black Virgin and sunrise from St. Michael's chapel, you may depart in peace." And in peace we departed when the time came, wondering whether we should ever again look upon this little world and listen to the divine harmonies of Salvador of Montserrat. CHAPTER XVIII. A STUDY IN GREY. Manresa--Tropical deluge--Rash judgment--Catalan hills and valleys--Striking approach--Taking time by the forelock--Primitive inn--Strange assembly--Unpleasant alternative--Sebastien--Manresa under a cloud--Wonderful outlines--Disappointing church--Sebastien leads the way--Old-world streets--Picturesque and pathetic--Popular character--"What would you, señor?"--Sebastien's Biblical knowledge at fault--Lesson deferred--A revelation--La Seo--Church cold and lifeless--Cave of Ignatius Loyola--Hermitage of St. Dismas--Juan Chanones--Fasting and penance--Visions and revelations--Spiritual warfare--Eve of the Annunciation--Exchanging dresses--Knight turns monk--Juan Pascual--Loyola comes to Manresa--Fanaticism--Vale of Paradise--"Spiritual Exercises"--Founding the Jesuit Order--Dying to self--The fair Anita--In the convent chapel--Two novices--Vision of angels--The White Ladies--Agonising moment--Another Romeo and Juliet--Back to the hotel--Sebastien disconsolate--"To-morrow the sun will shine"--Building castles in the air--A prophecy fulfilled. Only a few miles from Montserrat and within sight of some of its mountain peaks, you find the wonderful old town of Manresa. Thither we wended our way one gloomy morning. From the skies came a constant downpour of almost tropical rain. We were well sheltered and comfortably housed in Barcelona, but H. C. declared Joseph's friend was a true prophet after all, the rainy season had set in, and if we waited for the weather, we might wait for ever. Acting upon this rash judgment we departed under lowering skies. Water ran down the streets like small rivers, and the omnibus waded to the station. "Such days have their beauty," said H. C. in his best artistic style. "The effect of atmosphere is very fine. And after all we are not made of sugar." "We need be to bear this infliction calmly," was the reply; a sarcasm lost upon H. C. who was diligently studying the clouds. The very train seemed to struggle against the elements as it made way through the Catalan hills and valleys, and we certainly acknowledged a peculiar charm as we saw them half veiled through the mist and the rain that yet was distinctly depressing. On nearing Manresa, it lightened a little: the clouds lifted and the rain ceased, but only for a short respite. Nothing could be more striking than the approach to the old town. Perched on a hill, outlined against the grey sky was the famous old cathedral, rising upwards like a vision. Far down at the foot of the hill ran the rapid river, winding through the country between deep banks. A splendid old bridge added much to the impressive scene, about which there was a wildness that seemed very much in harmony with the grey and gloomy skies. As we crossed the bridge outside the railway station, a young man, well built, handsome, with a fresh colour and honest face, came up and offered to bring us a carriage or personally conduct us to the hotel. Few people visit Manresa; omnibuses are unknown, and carriages only come out when ordered. We chose to walk, in spite of the rain, which was coming down again with vengeance. The services of the guide were accepted, and we soon found that he filled the important office of general factotum to the hotel. "Ah, señor," taking us into his confidence in the first five minutes, "if you would only petition the padrone in my favour and get him to promote me to the dining-room! As it is, I fetch and carry all day long and scarcely earn money enough to pay for the boots I wear out." We certainly thought no time was being lost in enlisting our sympathies, and mildly suggested the padrone might not thank us for meddling with his own affairs. The streets were very steep, stony and winding. Water streamed from the houses and ran down the hills, and the place altogether looked very hope-forsaken, for it especially needed sunshine. Yet in spite of all we found it very interesting, and its situation is so striking that it could never be otherwise. We waded on and thought the rain would never cease or the walk ever end. At last the inn, which would hardly have been found without our guide. He pointed to it with pride, but we could not rise to the sentiment. The entrance was small, and we soon found ourselves mounting a narrow wooden staircase which had neither the fashion of Barcelona nor the dignity of Gerona. The first landing opened to a long low room of many windows, looking old enough to have seen the birth and death of many a century. This was given over to the servants of the house, and the humbler folk whose rank entitled them to a place below the salt. They were seated at round tables--but certainly were not knights--in detachments of eight or ten, and their boisterous manners and loud voices kept us at a respectful distance, without any desire for a nearer approach. For ourselves, we had to go a stage higher in the world, represented by the second floor. Here we found the quality at breakfast--the substantial mid-day meal: a worthy crew hardly a degree better than those we had just interviewed. They proved, indeed, the roughest specimens we had yet met in Catalonia: an assemblage of small farmers, pedlars and horse-dealers. Had the landlord added house-breakers to his list, one or two might have answered to the description. But as travelling, like adversity, makes us acquainted with strange companions, and we cannot always choose our types, we sat down to table with a good grace. The only alternative was to fast, a penance in which H. C. had no faith whatever. To-day this motley assemblage seemed peculiarly objectionable, without any of the redeeming points such people often have: honest, straightforward speech, directness of purpose and modesty of manner which are a certain substitute for cultivation, and atone for the want of breeding. Nothing of this was perceptible to-day. The room like the one beneath was long and low, but lighted only by one window at the end, so that we were in a semi-obscurity still further increased by the weeping skies. A redeeming feature was the civility of the inn people, a fault their slowness. To make matters worse, the food was coarse and ill-served, and we had to pass almost everything. Long before déjeuner came to an end we left them to it and went forth to explore. We had very little time to spare, having arranged not to spend the night in Manresa: a lucky arrangement on our part, for picturesque and striking as the place really is, its resources are soon exhausted. A wet evening in such an inn would have landed one in the profoundest depths of melancholy. On leaving the table we found that for the moment the rain had ceased. Our guide evidently thought it his duty to look after us, and no sooner caught sight of us as we passed downwards than he sprang up, leaving upon his plate a delicious piece of _black-pudding_. In vain we offered to wait whilst he finished his bonne-bouche. "You are very good, señor, but it is not necessary," he replied. "I am very fond of black-pudding, but this was my third helping, and really I have had enough." This seemed probable. "Apparently the supply equals the demand," we said. "You must have a liberal master in the landlord of the inn." "Yes, that is true," returned Sebastien--for such he soon told us was his name. "But we only have black-pudding once a week, and we ought to have it twice. We are agitating for it now, and as the padrone knows the value of a good servant I expect we shall get it." Sebastien would not leave us again and became our shadow, sublimely indifferent to the rain which every now and then came down in waterspouts. To this day we feel that we saw Manresa under a cloud. It was a study in grey; and if we paid it another visit in sunshine we should probably not know it again. For this H. C. was responsible in preaching up his rainy season: the true fact being that the next day and for ever after we had blue skies and cloudless sunshine. Manresa is rich in outlines. Its church towers stand out conspicuously on the summit of the rock on whose slopes much of the town is built. On leaving the inn we saw before us one of the old churches standing in solemn repose, grey and silent above the houses. The interior proved uninteresting in spite of the nave, wide after the manner of the Catalan churches. Sebastien thought every moment spent here waste of time. "It is cold and ugly," he declared, constituting himself a judge--and perhaps not far wrong. "It makes me shiver. But when the altar is lighted up on a Sunday evening, and the place is full of people, and the organ plays, and the priest gives the Benediction, then it is passable." We felt inclined to agree with him, and wished we could see the effect of a Benediction service, but as this was not possible we left the church to its silent gloom and shadows, Sebastien cheerfully leading the way. [Illustration: MANRESA.] The streets, decayed and old-world looking, had a wonderfully picturesque and pathetic element about them, and on a bright day would have been full of charm. A canal ran through one of them, spanned by a picturesque single-arch stone bridge. On each side the houses rose out of the water, reminding one of Gerona or a Venetian street; handsome, palatial, full of interesting detail; a multitude of balconies, many of rich wrought ironwork; many a Gothic window with deep mullions; many an overhanging casement, from which you might have dropped into the running stream. Waterspouts stood out like gargoyles, and slanting tiled roofs were full of colouring. Towering above these rose a lovely church tower, splendid with Gothic windows, rich ornamentation and an openwork parapet, with a small round turret at one corner. We stood long on the bridge, gazing at the wonderful scene, all its infinite detail and harmony of effect; the deep shadows reflected in the dark water which needed so much the blue sky and laughing sunshine. It was evident that Sebastien could not understand what kept us spell-bound. He stood by in patience, now looking intently as though trying to learn what was passing in our minds, now directing his attention to the water and the houses, as though to guess the secret of their fascination. Apparently he was hail-fellow-well-met with every one in the town--that dangerous element, a popular character; for not a creature passed us, man or woman, youth or maiden, but he had something to say to them. "You seem to know every one, Sebastien," we remarked, as we took our kodak out of the case he had slung over his shoulder, in the wish to carry away with us some of these splendid outlines. "What would you, señor? The town is not large, the inhabitants do not change, and I was born and bred here. I am fond of company, and make friends with them all. I wanted to be a soldier and go out and see the world, but they said my sight was not strong enough, and they would not have me; so I turned to and took service in the hotel. I am comfortable enough, and just earn my living, without a trifle over for the old mother, but I don't see much prospect of rising unless I am promoted to the dining-room." "Your eyes look quite strong," we said; large blue eyes, bright and clear, without a sign of weakness about them. [Illustration: MANRESA FROM THE RIVER: MORNING.] "They are as strong as yours, señor--if I may say so without offence. I never could make out what they meant. Sometimes I have thought my old mother was at the bottom of it, and because I was her only child, went to the authorities and begged them to spare me. I don't _know_ that she did, but I have my suspicions. One day I taxed her with it point-blank. She was very confused for a moment, and then told me not to be foolish--the authorities wouldn't pay attention to such as her, even if she had gone to them. I'm not so sure of that. It is well known the old mother has seen better days, and when she goes out dressed in her best, with her black lace mantilla over her head, which she has had ever since she was a young woman, why, she commands respect, and I can quite believe the authorities would listen to her." "Why not try again with those eyes of yours?" we suggested. "You cannot be more than nineteen." "Not more than nineteen!" returned Sebastien, opening the said eyes very wide. "Why, señor, I am twenty-three, going on for twenty-four. I know I look young, and do what I will I can't help it, and can't make myself look any older. I have tried hard to grow a moustache, but it is only just beginning to sprout." He laughed, and we laughed with him, for the down upon his upper lip was of the most elementary description. He looked youthful in every way, but we cheered him with the reflection that it was a fault time would inevitably rectify. "I have one consolation," he said. "At the fonda I get as much black-pudding as I want--once a week; in the army they don't give black-pudding at all. So if I have lost something, I have gained something too." "Sebastien, we are ashamed of you! Would you sacrifice your birthright for a mess of pottage?" "What does the señor mean?" asked Sebastien, looking puzzled. "Have you never heard of Esau?" "Never, señor. Was he a Spaniard or an Englishman? And was he, too, fond of black-pudding?" It was impossible to help laughing; but we passed over the question, feeling that a course of Bible history begun on the bridge would come to an untimely end. So we left him to his ignorance and his preference for black-pudding, passed away from the canal, the old bridge and ancient outlines, and climbed about the steep decayed streets. The rain poured through the water-spouts, and every now and then we came in for an unwelcome shower-bath. This highly amused Sebastien, who never enjoyed the fun more than when he himself was victim. Suddenly we found ourselves confronted by one of those views which come upon one as a revelation of what nature sometimes accomplishes. We had seen nothing equal to it, nothing to resemble it since the days of Segovia. In sunshine the likeness might have been still more striking. We had passed by a steep descent into the lower part of the town and stood upon the hill side. To our right rose the great collegiate church of La Seo, crowning a massive and majestic rock. Houses stretched far down the slopes, and the church rose above them in magnificent outlines. It was built of yellow greystone that harmonised wonderfully with the grey skies. For the time being these had ceased to weep, and everything was bathed in a thin mist, which rolled and curled about and threw a wonderful romance and glamour over the scene, especially refining and beautifying. Still below us, on the left, ran the broad river, with its dark, almost blood-red waters flowing swiftly under the high, picturesque bridge. We traced its winding course between deep banks far out into the country; just as we had traced it from the heights of Montserrat, not far off as the eagle flew. Here too everything was veiled in a thin mist. The rock on which the church stood consisted of a series of hollows, where grew lovely hanging gardens and flowering trees. The church with its striking outlines looked massive enough to defy the ages. It was of the true fourteenth century Catalan type, and took the place of a church that had existed here in the tenth century. Its buttresses are especially large and prominent. The lofty tower stands over the north aisle. Four arched stone ribs crown the steeple, within which a bell is suspended. A fine Romanesque doorway leads into the modern uninteresting cloister. Other fine doorways lead into the interior of the church. Its great size, high and wide, is impressive, but the details are trivial. The capitals of the enormous octagonal columns are poor, and the arches they support, thin and almost contemptible, take immensely from the general effect. Here also, there was no need to remain long. With the charms of Barcelona cathedral lingering in the mind as a dream and a world's wonder, the collegiate church of Manresa, with all its loftiness and expanse, was cold and lifeless, without sense of beauty or devotion. In its striking situation lies the chief merit of the town. [Illustration: MANRESA FROM THE HILL-SIDE: EVENING.] We went down the banks, stood on the shallows and watched the deep red waters rushing through the bridge. Beyond it was a slight fall over which the waters poured in a crimson stream. Near the bridge stood a large, ancient crucifix. On the farther bank of the river rose the outlines of the Cave of Ignatius Loyola. Above the cave has now been built a great church, and the cave itself, reached by a short passage in its north-east corner, has been turned into a votive chapel, to which pilgrims flock at stated times. Manresa is of course for ever associated with the name of Loyola. He had been staying some time at the Monastery of Montserrat, preparing his mind for the great change he intended to make in his life. As he wandered about the mountain in his cavalier's dress, he must have looked far more fitted to lead an army than to become a member of the Church militant. One of his most frequent visits was to the Hermitage of St. Dismas, high up amongst the rocks. Here dwelt a saintly priest, Juan Chanones, who gave Loyola much holy counsel. It must needs be that Loyola earnestly weighed the cost of what he contemplated; impossible but there were moments when the tempter placed before him in the strongest colours imaginable the allurements of the life he was renouncing. When the final die was cast there must be no turning back, no lingering regrets. Loyola was one of the last men to be vacillating or lukewarm; with him it was ever one thing or the other; and so in the quiet monastery, far out of the world, he considered well his decision. Chanones was the very man for such a crisis. The hermit was one who imposed upon himself every possible penance. He fasted, wore a hair shirt, and spent many hours of the twenty-four in long prayers and devotions. Loyola had begun by confessing to him the whole of his past life, and confiding his hopes and aspirations for the future: how he wished to become a monk and devote his days to religion. He was already a mystic, full of ecstasies, seeing visions and dreaming dreams. Chanones strengthened his resolutions and fired him yet more with the spirit of mysticism. Under his influence, the night before leaving the monastery he hung up his sword and dagger beside the image of the Virgin as a sort of votive offering, declaring that henceforth he had done with the world and with wars. His only warfare should be spiritual: fighting against the powers of darkness and the influence of evil. He spent the whole night in prayer before the altar; where according to his mystic moods, visions and revelations had been vouchsafed to him. But earlier in the evening a slight event had happened. It was the eve of the Annunciation, in the year 1522. Loyola had come down from the hermit's cave dressed in the rich garb of a cavalier which as yet he had not thrown off. In the Hospederia of the monastery were many poor pilgrims; beggars dressed in rags. Meeting one of these, Loyola persuaded him to exchange his rags for his own splendid dress. Disguised in his sackcloth gown and girdle, few would have recognised the once magnificent knight. His head, accustomed to a helmet, was now bare. His left foot was unshod, on his right he wore a sandal of grass. He was lame from that wound in his leg which had been the turning-point of his career. Never perfectly healed, of late it had become inflamed and painful. In this garb he spent his last night at Montserrat. Next morning he went forth at daybreak with a few companions, one of whom was Juan Pascual. They had not proceeded many miles before they were overtaken by a hasty messenger who asked Loyola if it was he who had presented a beggar with the rich dress of a cavalier. The story had been doubted and the man put into confinement. Loyola declared that it was true, lamented the trouble he had brought upon the beggar, and prayed he might be liberated; adding that he had made the exchange from motives of penance and religion, as well as disguise. The messenger returned to the convent, and the little band of pilgrims continued on their way. They journeyed slowly, but the distance was not great. At noon they were overtaken by the mother of Pascual, who in company with others, was returning from celebrating the Feast of the Annunciation at Montserrat. This lady, Inez, directed him to the hospital of Santa Lucia, where he would obtain relief for his leg, which threatened to become troublesome if not dangerous. Inez quickly discovered that Loyola was no ordinary pilgrim, and supplied him with food from her own table during the five days he remained in the hospital. The day after his arrival he went up to the great church of La Seo, and remained in prayer for five hours, seeking direction for his movements. At the end of five days he left the hospital for a room found him by Inez. Here he at once adopted that spirit of fasting and penance which knew no moderation and with him became fanaticism. The food sent by Inez he gave away, and lived upon black bread and water. He constantly went bare-headed and bare-footed, wore a hair shirt like Chanones, and occasionally added to his sufferings by putting on a girdle made of the leaves of the prickly gladiole. He neglected himself in every way, never cutting his nails or combing his hair and beard; so that he who had once been the most fastidious of cavaliers now became a byword to those who met him and gazed in contempt and derision. He spent much time at the hospital nursing the sick, devoting himself to the most forbidding cases. This life continued for four months, and then he withdrew to the cave which he declared had been miraculously revealed to him. It overlooked a valley called by the people the Vale of Paradise, and its existence was known to few. The cave was dark and small and belonged to a friend of Loyola's who lived to be a century old. Here he existed in great seclusion, spending seven hours of every day in prayer, and often remaining on his knees all night. It was here that he chiefly composed his "Spiritual Exercises," which contain so much beauty and devotion. Here also came to him the first idea of the Order of Jesus, which he afterwards founded. But it must be remarked that the Jesuit Society as framed by Ignatius Loyola was a more simple and unworldy institution than it afterwards became. His own rules seem to have been very pure and without guile or worldly ambition; his mind embraced only heaven and the things which concerned heaven. If Loyola were to return to earth, he would be the first to condemn many of its principles and practices and to say: "These are none of mine." That he became spiritual as perhaps has been given to few cannot be doubted by any one who had read his writings and studied his life. We of another creed cannot be in touch with him on many points, but all must profoundly admire his absolute death to self, the perfect resignation of all his thoughts and wishes to the Divine guidance. In Manresa, we have said that his penances amounted to fanaticism. His prayers and fastings so weakened the body, that frequently for hours and sometimes for days he would lose consciousness, and fall into death-like swoons. He retired to his cave and was tormented by a morbid recollection of his past sins. For many months he was filled with horror and knew nothing of peace of mind or spiritual consolation. He was haunted by terrible voices and visions; and it was only after body and soul had, as it were, been torn asunder, and he had gone through all the agonies of a living spiritual death, that at last peace and light, the certainty of pardon and the Divine favour, came to him. After that his past life seems to have been placed behind him and knew him no more. He became a teacher of men; a great spiritual healer in whom the heavy-laden found comfort and encouragement; a profound reader of the human heart, to which he never ministered in vain. Perhaps one of his greatest weapons was humility, by which he placed himself on a level with all who came to him, and which enabled him to apply in the right way all the deep and earnest sympathy that was in him. His visions, the voices he heard, the so-called miracles he witnessed, were no doubt delusions due to the highly wrought imagination and ecstatic state of the mystic; but with Loyola they did not end here. They bore fruit. He was practical as well as theoretical: and dead as he became to self, a little of the sensible, matter-of-fact discipline of his early training must have clung to him to the last. His after life was full of activity and action. It would be difficult to say where he did not go, what countries he did not visit with practical issues, in days when men could not easily run to and fro on the earth as they do now. Loyola died as he had lived, full of faith and hope. He had caught the malarial fever in Rome, and was not strong enough to fight against it. In August, 1556, the end came, when he was sixty-five years old; but in everything except years he might have gone through a century of time. His physical powers were worn out with hard work and abstinence; and perhaps the greatest miracle in connection with Ignatius Loyola was the fact that he lived long after the vital forces should have ceased to hold together. After his death the doctors found it impossible to discover what power had kept him alive during his later years, but agreed that it was nothing less than supernatural. Thus Manresa is for ever connected with the name and fame of Ignatius Loyola the saint. * * * * * Crossing the bridge and winding through a very ancient and dilapidated part of the town, we presently reached the church, which struck us as being new and gaudy, with very little to recommend it. But we had come to see what had once been the cave, and wished we could have found it in its original state. Certainly the saint himself would never recognise it as the old earthy cavern, nine feet by six, whose mouth was concealed by brier bushes, and where he was wont to pass long days and nights in prayer and penance. The walls are now lined with marble; a light burns before the altar; some poor sculpture represents Loyola writing his book and performing his first miracle. The view from his cave must have been magnificent even in his day. There in front of him ran the famous river, and there stood the old bridge. Beyond it rose the rock with its hollows and gardens; and towering above were the splendid outlines of the collegiate church. Beyond all in the distance rose the chain of the Pyrenees, undulating and snow-capped; whilst in one distant spot, standing alone, cleaving the sky with their sharp outlines, appeared the peaks and pinnacles of Mons Serratus; the monastery resting half way down on its plateau, far more beautiful and perfect than it is to-day. Upon this the hermit Loyola--as he might at that time be called--would fix his eyes for hours day after day, seeking inspiration for his "Exercises," perhaps occasionally dreaming of the days when he still wore his cavalier's dress, and had not yet renounced all the pomps and vanities of the world. But as we have said, he was not a man of two minds; having put his hand to the plough, as far as we know he never turned back even with the faintest regret or longing for the pleasures deliberately placed from him. Sebastien our guide was evidently a good Catholic, having a great reverence for Loyola, with whom he was more familiar than with Esau. He watched us narrowly as we entered the chapel, and was evidently disappointed at the little impression made upon us: expecting a drop-down-deadness of manner, when we stood before the effigy of the saint, which unfortunately only excited a feeling of irritation at the badness of its workmanship. So we were not sorry to find ourselves once more under the skies, dark and lowering though they were. Here indeed the magnificent view, the splendid outlines of Manresa, all slightly veiled in that charming mist, might well appeal to all one's sense of the beautiful and the sublime, and raise emotions the poor votive chapel could never inspire. As we went back into the town, for the moment it seemed very much haunted by the presence of Loyola. Passing a picturesque little house in the centre of a small garden, Sebastien suddenly stopped in front of it and gave a peculiar call, whilst a flush of expectation rose to his face. Surprised at the movement we waited for the sequel. This quickly followed in the opening of a casement, at which appeared the charming head of a young woman. "Sebastien!" she cried, clasping her hands in ecstasy. "Have you come to see me?" "Yes, since I see you now," returned Sebastien. "But I cannot come in, Anita. I am guiding these gentlemen through the town, and have to show them everything; they would be lost without me. We have just been to the chapel of the saint, where I said a short prayer for our speedy marriage. Ah! when will it be?" "Patience, patience!" cried the fair Anita. "I am getting on well, and you must make el padrone advance you to the dining-room. Oh, it will all come right. Then we are both young and can afford to wait." We thought it a pity so interesting a conversation should be carried on in a public thoroughfare, and at a tantalising distance, and offered Sebastien five minutes' interval if he liked to go in and pay his respects to his ladye-love. But he declined, and wafting a warm salute to the fair vision of the casement, intimated he was again at our service. "She is the sweetest girl in Manresa," said Sebastien quite openly, "and I am a lucky fellow to have won her. Unfortunately we are both poor. But Anita is with a dressmaker, and will soon be able to start on her own account: we shall not have much difficulty in getting on, if the padrone will only advance me--as indeed I deserve." We congratulated Sebastien upon his good fortune and wished him promotion and success: and looking at his straight-forward open face, so singularly free from guile, we thought the fair Anita was by no means to be condoled with, however humble their prospects. Then we made way into the upper part of the town, and presently Sebastien turned into a chapel attached to a convent. It was a small building of no pretension, but with a marvellous repose and quietness about it. A screen divided the body of the church from the altar, and immediately before the altar, separated from us by the screen, was a strange and striking vision. Two young girls who might have been some eighteen years old, knelt side by side at the foot of the steps, motionless as carven images and dressed in white. Their veils were thrown back, but their faces, turned towards the altar, were invisible. Their posture was full of grace, and their dress, whether by accident or design, was becomingly arranged and fell in artistic folds. All the time we looked they moved neither hand nor foot, and might have been, as we have said, carved in stone. We almost felt as though gazing upon a vision of angels, so wonderfully did the light fall upon them as they knelt: whilst in the body of the church we were in semi-obscurity. Presently a bell tinkled, a side door opened, and two other young girls very much of the same age and dressed in exactly the same way, entered. The two at the altar rose, made deep, graceful curtsies, and veiling their faces, passed out of the chapel. Those who entered at once threw back their veils. In the obscurity we were not observed. We had full view of their charming faces, far too charming to become the nuns for which Sebastien said they were qualifying. "They are White Ladies," he whispered, "and very soon will be cloistered and never see the world again. It is enough to break one's heart." "You don't approve, Sebastien?" "Ah, señor, I shudder at the thought. It occurs to me what a terrible thing it would be if Anita were to turn nun instead of becoming my happy wife--at least I shall do all I can to make her happy. But these poor girls--think for a moment of the humdrum life they are taking up; nothing to look forward to; no change, no pleasure of any sort. They might as well be buried alive at once and put out of their misery." As the door opened to admit the two novices--if novices they were--we had caught sight of others in the passage; some eight or ten, as we fancied. An elderly nun, equally dressed in white, was going amongst them, almost, as it seemed, in the act of benediction. She was evidently counselling, encouraging, fortifying those to whom she ministered. One might have thought that passing through that doorway was renouncing an old life and taking up a new one; an irrevocable step and choice from which there was no recall and no turning back. H. C. was taken with a lump in his throat as the young fair women unveiled and moved towards the altar. One of them was certainly very beautiful. Large wistful blue eyes stood out in contrast with the ivory pallor of her oval face, than which the spotless veil was not more pure and chaste. It was too much for H. C.'s equanimity. He coughed and betrayed himself. She turned hurriedly; and seeing a face that corresponded to her own in pallor, and eyes that were quite as wistful, gave him an appealing, imploring glance which seemed to say that she would be saved from her present fate. For an instant we trembled. The case was so hopeless. There was the dividing screen. There was the nun on guard beyond the closed door. There was the drenching rain outside. An escape in a deluge would not have been romantic--and where could they escape to? It was one of those agonising moments of helplessness that sometimes drive men insane. H. C. grasped the screen. There was an instant when we thought he would have torn it down come what might. He looked reckless and desperate and miserable. Then we placed our hand on his arm as we had done that night at the opera in Gerona, and he calmed down. We turned to leave the chapel. As we did so, a louder bell rang out, the door opened, and in walked the Mother-Superior at the head of her little army of novices. They quickly grouped themselves round the altar, moved in utter silence like phantoms and subsided into graceful attitudes, apparently absorbed in devotion. The sight was as charming as it was painful: for who could say how many of these young girls were voluntarily renouncing the world, or in the least realised what they were doing? Before passing out we gave a last look at this angelic vision. Quiet as we were we did not move exactly like phantoms. The meaning of our slight stir penetrated beyond the screen. It was too great a temptation for the fair young novice we have described. She felt that her last hope was dissolving, and she turned towards H. C. with a gaze that would have moved a stone. Fortunately his eyes were buried in his handkerchief, or it is certain that we should never have left the chapel in the state in which we found it. The screen would have gone; the Mother-Superior defied, there would have been rout and consternation, the alarm bell rung, and perhaps--who knows?--a priest would have appeared upon the scene and married this romantic Romeo and Juliet. The novices would have turned into bridesmaids, and the Mother-Superior have given away her spiritual daughter. A lovely transformation scene indeed! Slighter currents have before now changed the course of nations. The door closed upon us without tragic event or catastrophe. Through the deluge we waded to the hotel. The long dining-room was now empty. The waiter brought us coffee and cognac, ordered to restore H. C.'s nervous system; we paid our bill, which was by no means as modest as the pretensions of the inn; and under the faithful and unfailing pilotage of Sebastien, departed for the railway station. The poor fellow looked melancholy. "Oh, señor, I wish you were going to stay a week," he cried. "I did hope you would be here for at least four days." "The fates forbid!"--horrified at the bare thought. "A week here in such weather would make one desperate, Sebastien. Remember that we have no fair Anita to turn all our thistles to roses, dull streets into a paradise." Sebastien sighed. "To-morrow the sun will shine, señor. You would not know Manresa again under a blue sky." "But our poet friend declares the rainy season has begun. This deluge is to last many days, if not weeks, Sebastien." "It is a mistake," said Sebastien. "We have no rainy season. You will see that to-morrow there will be no rain, no clouds. Then if you had stayed, I am sure you would have spoken to the padrone for me, and got him to promote me to the dining-room. And then we could have been married." Sebastien, like everyone else, was building his castles and dreaming his dreams; and it certainly caused us a slight regret that we could not help to lay them on a solid foundation. All we could do was to give him our best wishes, and tell him that if sufficiently earnest and persevering he would certainly gain the desire of his heart. It only depended on himself. This prophecy seemed to inspire him with hope and courage; and our last reminiscence of Manresa was that of a young man, strong, handsome, fresh coloured, standing hat in hand on the platform, and begging us "with tears in his voice" to stay at least two days in Manresa the next time we passed that way and formally petition the landlord in a deputation of one for his promotion.[B] CHAPTER XIX. LERIDA. Picturesque country--Approaching Lerida--Rambling inn--Remarkable duenna--Toothless and voiceless--Smiles upon H. C.--Nearly expires--Civilised chef--A procession--Lerida Dragon--City of the dead--Night study--Charging dead walls--A night encounter--Armed demon--Wise people--Watchman proves an old friend--No promotion--Locked out--Rousing the echoes--Night porter appears on the scene--Also El Sereno--Apologetic and repentant--The charming Rose--Porter congratulates himself--Cloudless morning--H. C. confronted by the Dragon--In the hands of the Philistines--A Lerida fine art--Boot-cleaner in Ordinary--Remarkable character--H. C. hilarious--Steals a march. No sooner had we left Manresa than the rain ceased, and though the sky remained grey, the clouds lifted. As far as Cervera the country we passed through was evidently picturesque, and only wanted the contrast of sun and shade to make it charming. Conspicuous amidst the landscape for many and many a long mile was the wonderful mountain of Montserrat with its peaks and pinnacles, about which the white mists still rolled and wrapped themselves. The scenery was diversified by many a wide ravine, where tangled bushes grew over the hard rock; many a fertile vale rich in fruit trees, pines, olives, oak and cork trees, intermixed their various shades of green. Beyond Cervera, the country was cold and barren and abounded in rock-strewn plains, to which the grey skies gave a still more sad and sombre tone. We approached Lerida when the shades of night were falling, and could just discern its grand outlines rising out of the great plain. These seemed to yield in interest only to Manresa, whilst the town itself proved far more attractive. We found the place sufficiently civilised to possess an omnibus, which transported us bag and baggage to the hotel. The long straight thoroughfare in which we found ourselves looked in the darkening night like the fag end of a village, unfinished and unpaved; almost like the street of some far away colonial settlement. It was wide and lined with trees, and beyond the trees on one side, a row of large houses; amongst them our inn; a rambling, cheerless sort of building, too new to be peopled with ghosts or distinguished by artistic outlines. Anything more opposite to the ghostly element could not be imagined. Still, in spite of frightful drawbacks it was some degrees better than Manresa. We were conducted by a curious but amiable duenna to a large lofty sitting room with a bedroom opening on each side: evidently the state apartments. The place looked empty and neglected, and our candles hardly lighted the obscurity. The electric bells were all broken, and we soon found that if we rang till doomsday no one appeared. Our duenna was toothless and apparently voiceless, for when she opened her capacious mouth and began to talk, no sound came forth. The mouth worked up and down in absolute silence, and the effect was creepy and peculiar. It almost felt as though a mummy had been galvanised into life minus the voice. Her costume had nothing redeeming about it. An impromptu turban placed over a shock head of hair, petticoats of the shortest, revealing feet and ankles that would have supported a substantial Dutch vrouw. We afterwards found she was the laundress of the establishment, and this was the costume in which she presided at the wash-tub. She smiled sweetly upon H. C. and her face looked like a huge, amiable cavern. With an imagination full of the lovely face of that young novice in Manresa, he shuddered, dropped into the furthest chair, and begged us to complete the arrangements without him. There was nothing to arrange, and the Dragon soon withdrew with her cavernous smiles and voiceless words. Then from a distant corner we heard an anxious murmur: "What about dinner?" H. C.. had not expired; the Dragon had evidently not frightened away all earthly desires. Fortunately dinner was forthcoming, though when we had finally settled down and removed the stains of travel, and H. C. had recovered his nerves, the night was growing apace. We plunged into wide passages, and after half a dozen wrong turnings at length found ourselves in the dining-room, large, lofty and well lighted. The chef sent up a civilised bill of fare, and the landlord himself waited upon us; whilst under the influence of fortifying dishes and refined wines the charms of the Manresa novice faded into the background, and H. C. felt almost equal to challenging the Lerida Dragon to single combat as a libel upon her sex. We were conducted back to our rooms by quite a procession, including the thin landlord and imposing landlady, headed by the Dragon bearing a flambeau. Once on our balcony, we found the night had changed for the better. Clouds had disappeared, stars shone, the trees before us were rustling gently in the wind, calmness and repose had fallen upon the world. It was past ten o'clock; the place seemed still and deserted as a city of the dead; not a sound broke the silence as we went forth for a night-study of Lerida. It was intensely dark. Here and there an oil lamp glimmered, making darkness visible. Presently we found ourselves on the bridge, looking down upon the waters of the river that runs so closely to the town as to reflect its outlines. To-night it was too dark to reflect anything, excepting here and there a faint track of light thrown by a distant star. The surface was not disturbed by any sort of craft. To the right rose the houses of the town, and above them faint and shadowy against the night sky, the outlines of the wonderful old cathedral, perched on its rock 300 feet above the town itself. We tried to reach it, climbing and stumbling up the narrow ill-paved thoroughfares, that seemed to wind and twist about like the contortions of a snake. The darkness might be felt. There was not a solitary light to guide our feet, and every now and then we found ourselves charging a dead wall as Don Quixote charged the windmills. Once H. C. plunged against the door of a low cottage, and before he could turn round there rushed out a demon in light attire with a torrent of hard words and a blunderbuss-sort of weapon. Fortunately for H. C. a dog also rushed out at the moment between the man's legs, bringing him to the ground, where he and his blunderbuss lay motionless. All the dogs in the neighbourhood set up a howl and a bark, and the place was fast turning to pandemonium. We were evidently on dangerous ground, where strangers were not expected and made welcome; doors opened above us and voices inquired who passed that way so late. Our lives were in jeopardy amongst these wild Catalonians, howbeit they have not the sword-and-dagger temperament of the more impulsive Spaniards. We had fallen amongst thieves. Discretion being the better part of valour, we glided back like phantoms, passing safely through the ranks of the enemy, and found ourselves on the great square which is the market-place, and where we breathed freely. No one followed in pursuit. It seemed as though, their own territories abandoned, they cared nothing what became of intruders. Presently the dogs ceased to bark, silence once more fell upon the night. We hoped our friend of the blunderbuss had not been seriously wounded, but under the circumstances it was impossible to make anxious inquiries. It was difficult to get even a faint impression of the town. Here and there we caught a vision of promising arcades, and apparently ancient outlines of houses and gabled roofs, but everything was in tenebrous gloom. Hardly a single window reflected the faintest ray; the streets were deserted. Only from a solitary café came forth, as we passed, a small band of some half dozen men, who quietly went up a side street and disappeared. It was only a little past eleven, but the people of Lerida are wise and know nothing of midnight oil, wasting energies, and burning the candle at both ends. "We are doing no good," said H. C. whose head had been rather damaged by coming in contact with doors and walls in the narrow lane. "I think it would be as well to follow the example of these people and retire, reserving our energies for to-morrow. In this darkness we might charge another cottage door without a friendly dog to deliver us from a murderous blunderbuss." So we turned back in the long narrow street of which Lerida seemed chiefly composed, and presently found ourselves in the broad hotel avenue. In the very centre of it was an old watchman with his staff and lantern. He threw his light upon us as we approached, then gave a "Buenas noches" and turned down the spear of his staff in friendly token. We thought we recognised both face and voice. Where had we met? "You are late, gentlemen. It grows towards midnight. In a few minutes I must call the hour and the weather. The people of Lerida are even earlier than those of Burgos, where I was watchman until six months ago." Then the mystery was solved. This was the very old watchman who had piloted us to the hotel the night we had lost ourselves in that most uncomfortable of Spanish towns, with the worst of Spanish inns. "Have you forgotten us?" we asked. "Do you not remember taking two strangers through the streets of Burgos more than a year ago, and seeing them safely to their door?" The watchman put down his lantern deliberately and struck the ground with his spear. "Is it possible, señor! Santa Maria! A plague upon memory and eyesight! But the night is dark, and my lantern burns dim. Indeed I remember it well. Can I ever forget your largesse on that occasion? I have often wondered how you fared in Spain and whither you wandered. Often wished I might meet you again." "But what brings you here? Surely Burgos is more important than Lerida, and you have progressed backwards. This hardly looks like promotion." "Oh, señor, there is no promotion for us poor watchmen. One town is much as another. I earn as much in Lerida as I did in Burgos, and the saints know either pays little enough." "Were you, then, sent here for any special reason?" "A reason of my own, señor. My wife's old parents live here and she wanted to be near them; so I petitioned to come here and it was granted. On the whole I am better off than in Burgos." After some further conversations, and with a substantial remembrance for auld lang syne, we left the old watchman and turned for our hotel. We soon felt almost as lost as in that past time at Burgos. The houses were all exactly alike. Every light was out, every door closed. There was no especial lamp to indicate which was the inn, and we could discover neither sign nor name. At last in the darkness we managed to trace on a lamp, in small characters, the words _Fonda de España_. The great door beneath was shut, like every other door; but there was a ponderous knocker, to which we directed our energies. It was all in vain, for no one responded. Knock after knock brought forth no result. The echoes we roused in the avenue were enough to wake the dead. Our watchman had gone to the far end, and by the gleam of his lamp we saw him turn and hasten. The habitable part of the inn was upstairs, a league of passages separated it from the outer door. If everyone was in bed and asleep, we might knock away until daybreak. We were growing concerned, when just as our old friend the watchman arrived upon the scene, up rushed another functionary in breathless agitation: the night porter of the hotel, and he carried great keys in his hand. "A thousand pardons, gentlemen," he began, as far as want of breath would allow him. "I did not know any one was out and went for a short walk just to breathe the midnight air and contemplate the stars. I heard you knocking when quite a mile away. You have indeed the strength of Hercules. And there is also something peculiar in this knocker. You may hear it all over the town, but cannot hear it in the hotel unless you are in the porter's lodge. It has been said the house is bewitched, and I think it; for once, when the Bishop breakfasted here, as soon as he entered the doors a loud report was heard and the place trembled, just as if some evil spirit were frightened and had departed in a flash of lightning. If you only knew how I ran when I heard the knocker, you would pity me." "I guessed what was up," said our watchman, "but waited, thinking you would be sure to arrive. Contemplating the stars with you, Juan, means taking an extra glass or two at your favourite bodega. You are too fond of leaving your post, and one of these days your post will leave you." [Illustration: ARCADES: LERIDA] This we thought highly probable, but the porter merely shrugged his shoulders, intimating that if he lost one place another would turn up. He applied one of the great keys to the lock, and the great door rolled open. We passed into a dark vaulted passage which rather reminded us of the gloomy entrance to the Hospederia at Montserrat. Upstairs every one had gone to bed, and they had not even left us a light. But for the night porter we might have sat all night upon chairs. When the candles threw out a faint illumination, H. C. looked round shudderingly as though he expected to see the Dragon lurking in some corner. We had found out that this extraordinary creature rejoiced in the charming name of _Rose_, and mentioned the name aloud. "Rose," said the night porter, "that is my wife. She is not a beauty, señor, but she can't scold--she has no voice. When I see other good-looking wives rating their husbands I say to myself, 'Ah ha, my fine fellow! after all beauty is only skin-deep. I wouldn't exchange my peace of mind for all your handsome wives put together.' I married her because she had no voice and also earns good wages. But though she is voiceless by day, she snores by night, and really becomes quite musical. It is a singular contradiction, but nature is freaky." He marshalled us to our rooms, a candle in each hand, striding along with great dignity and evidently thinking that he was the life and soul of the establishment. Putting the candles on the sitting-room table, he backed towards the door, made a low bow, once more apologised for being absent without leave and keeping us beating a midnight tattoo, and begged as a favour that we would not mention the circumstance to the landlord. This we readily promised, and as it was utterly impossible to maintain any sort of gravity on the occasion, the night porter, wishing us refreshing slumbers, departed in great peace of mind--probably to resume his devotions at the untimely bodega. We heard his receding footsteps, and the house sank into repose. The next morning there was not a cloud in the sky. Our study in grey had given place to more positive tones. H. C.'s rainy season had been a pure effort of the imagination. Sebastien was right after all, and in sheer gratitude we sat down and wrote an epistle to his master that would have moved a heart of stone. We represented in glowing colours the happiness of the young pair that a word from him could make or mar; enlarged upon the moral question of conferring pleasure where it was possible, and wound up with a rash assertion, almost an undertaking, that Sebastien would prove a tower of strength to the well-being of the hotel. The result has been recorded. We rose early. With that glorious sun shining, who could waste moments in sleep? Presently we heard a sort of alarmed shout from H. C., and on going into the sitting-room, and asking how he had slept, found him pale, agitated, and confronted by the Dragon. She looked if anything more terrible than last night. Her cavernous mouth was wide open, but no sound came forth, though her capacious jaws moved up and down and her eyes rolled in a fine frenzy. Her sleeves were tucked up above the elbow, revealing a muscular arm that would not have disgraced a prize-fighter. She was evidently primed for another field day at the wash-tub. When we went in she was smiling sweetly upon H. C. "What does it all mean?" we asked. "Surely you have not been offering to elope with the Dragon?" "I simply want my boots," said H. C. unromantically. "I rang away at the bell just as we knocked at the door last night, and with the same result. The place _must_ be bewitched. Then I opened the door and clapped my hands, and the Dragon suddenly sprang out upon me from a dark cupboard close by, right into my very arms. I nearly had a fit of convulsions. And now when I ask for my boots all she does is to mouth and shake her head. What's to be done? Is it a plot to keep us here? Have we fallen into the hands of the Philistines?" Being in a more advanced stage of toilet than H. C., we marched forth in search of the landlord on what we hoped would not prove a bootless errand. He was in his counting-house counting out his money--and arranging his dinners. On making anxious inquiries we discovered that in Lerida boot-cleaning was considered one of the fine arts. There was a Boot-cleaner in Ordinary to the town, who took the inns in turn and was paid according to his work. People had to wait his pleasure. That morning he had not yet arrived; we had risen early. Fortunately he appeared at the moment: an old, grey-bearded man with a fine presence, who looked almost past boot-cleaning or any other occupation. We found him quite above his humble employment. He was a Frenchman by birth, but had lived in Spain for nearly seventy years--was now verging on ninety, and his old wife, he told us, was eighty-seven, and two years ago had gone blind. He had not forgotten his native language, which he still spoke very purely. In his last days he was supporting himself and his old wife by cleaning boots. It was the custom of the town. The hotels would do anything for you but clean boots. As far as he was concerned he just managed to keep the wolf from the door, and that after all was all they wanted. He went off to his task, and returning to H. C. we found a change had come over the spirit of his dream. He sat hilarious and comforted before an empty tray of rolls and coffee, our own share as well as his having disappeared, whilst the Dragon had departed to adorn other realms. In due time the old man arrived with his boots, was duly paid for his work, and we presently found ourselves under the blue skies of Lerida. CHAPTER XX. THE STORY OF A LIFE. Lerida by daylight--Second city in Catalonia--Past history--Days of the Goths--And Moors--Becomes a bishopric--Troublous times--Brave people--Striking cathedral--Splendid outlines--Desecration--The new cathedral--Senseless tyranny--One of the most interesting of towns--Crowded market-place--Picturesque arcades and ancient gateways--Wine-pressers--Good offer refused--Another revelation--Wonderful streets--Amongst the immortals--Our Boot-cleaner in Ordinary again--Thereby hangs a tale--His story--Blind wife--Modest request--Nerissa--Charming room--Little queen in the arm-chair--Faultless picture--Renouncements but no regrets--"All a new world"--Time to pass out of life--Back to the quiet streets--H. C. contemplative--Proposes emigration to Salt Lake City--Lerida glorified by its idyll. A greater contrast than Lerida in the morning and Lerida at midnight could not be imagined. Last night had by no means prepared us for the charms of to-day. Little as one hears of it, it is the second city in Catalonia, with an historical and eventful past that has submitted to constant wars and sieges. In the far-off days it was occupied by the Romans, and the present bridge is built on Roman foundations. It was held by Pompey in the first century B.C. and these were unsettled times for Ilerda, as it was then called. In very early days it became a university town, but so little esteemed that the students of Rome were sent here when rusticated. As the centuries rolled on it grew in favour, though the trail of the rusticated Romans must have remained upon it, for two of its most famous students were Vicenti Ferrer the inquisitor and Calixtus III. the wicked pope. The Goths had much to do with Lerida, and in 546 it became a Bishopric. It fell under the influence of the Moors, but was destroyed by the French at the end of the eighth century. For the next 400 years little is heard of Lerida; but in 1150 it was restored by Ramon Berenguer, and quickly became popular and important. In the seventeenth century during the great Catalonian revolt, Lerida chose Louis XIII. for king; upon which Philip IV. came down upon them and defeated La Mothe, causing him to raise the siege. Four years afterwards, in 1644, the French again tried to take it but were again defeated. The Grand Condé opened another siege, and caused a number of violins to play before the town to encourage his soldiers. But this also had the effect of encouraging brave Gregorio Brito, the Portuguese Governor, who sallied forth with his army, silenced the fiddlers and put the French to the rout. In the War of Succession Lerida was again besieged by the French, who behaved with great treachery and cruelly sacked the town after capitulation. Retaliation came in 1710, when Stanhope routed Philip V. at Almenara. The French fled before the English bayonets, and Philip himself, in these early days of his long reign, nearly lost his life. He would have been spared many troubles. A little later on, in 1810, during the Peninsular War, it was taken by Suchet, and the inhabitants men, women and children were so cruelly treated that the governor, unable to bear the sight of so much suffering, capitulated. Since then Lerida has enjoyed more or less tranquil days. She would now hardly be thought worth taking. It was during some of these troublous times, in 1707, that her beautiful cathedral was desecrated, and remains to this day a prominent illustration of the barbarities of war. It towers 300 feet above the town, a magnificent outline against the clear blue sky. The first church existed here as far back as the sixth century. This in time gave place to the present church, of which the first stone was laid by Pedro II. in 1203. It is one of the finest specimens in Europe of the early-pointed style and its desecration was a world's regret. Nevertheless, its style is a little contradictory, for the windows are for the most part round-headed. Perched on the summit of an almost perpendicular rock, it looks even higher and larger than it really is. Its fine octagonal steeple stands out a bold and conspicuous object over many a mile of plain and country. As the sun declines, its shadow falls upon the houses of the town sleeping below, and creeps over the surface of the river. Near it is a building now used as a powder magazine, but in the Middle Ages was a palace given up to the rude scenes of splendour of which those days were typical, and before that it had been a Moorish castle and a Christian temple. Its walls have defied the centuries, but nothing is left of its Moorish beauty and refinement. In 1707 the French turned the great church into a fortress, and it was never restored to its sacred uses. Peace fell upon Lerida, but the fat old canons had learned to shirk the steep climbing of the rocks in all seasons and all weathers. They agitated for a new cathedral within the town, and had their wish. A hideous Corinthian building arose, and the magnificent church upon the hill after five hundred years of faithful service was shorn of its glory. Yet its outlines are as fine and as striking as ever, and the columns, stonework and tracery that remain, still bear witness to its ancient splendour. It is, however, with the greatest difficulty that admission is obtained, a senseless piece of tyranny. The interior is to the last degree interesting to the lover of ancient architecture, and there are no military or other secrets to be carried away. But say what one will, courtesy is not one of the virtues of the Spanish, and in this matter the Catalonians perhaps take the lead. They are abrupt and uncivil, and unwilling to stir hand or foot to oblige you unless something is to be gained by it. Sallying forth this morning, we had these magnificent outlines in full view. We have said that the tenebrous darkness of last night had not prepared us for the charms of to-day. Lerida proved one of the most interesting of Spanish towns. This morning it was full of life and movement. The market-place was crowded with buyers and sellers; men and women still wearing a certain amount of picturesque costume. The air seemed full of sound. Fruit and flower-stalls were splendid, and large quantities of each could be bought for a very small sum. As we had discovered last night, the town consisted of one long street running parallel with the river. It was narrow and straggling, full of lights and shadows. Now and then you came upon short arcades that were singularly picturesque, whilst every here and there a fine old gateway led to the river-side. These gateways form part of the fortifications of the town, for Lerida is strongly protected. Making way through this long street, we presently came upon a wine-pressing machine in the very middle of the road, worked by strong, stalwart men; a very southern and picturesque scene. We watched them pile up the grapes, that had already once been pressed, until the machine was full. Then adjusting it by means of long poles, they turned the press and the rich red grape-juice poured itself into a vat placed for the purpose. The air was full of the scent of muscatel. The men looked as though the red juice ran in their veins and inspired them with energy. [Illustration: LERIDA MULES.] As the vat filled, it was emptied with a great ladle into a larger barrel that stood inside the archway of the adjoining house. The sight was novel, and the men seemed amused at our interest. They offered us of the juice in a small vessel, declaring it excellent; but there was a suspicious want of cleanliness about the whole thing--it might have been fancy--and we civilly declined the attention; upon which, possibly to set us a good example, they emptied the vessel themselves, smacked their lips and pronounced it very good. Narrow streets led upwards from the main street to the old cathedral, a steep, rough climb. It was a place to revel in, full of wonderful perspectives and artistic groupings, as much the result of accident as of purpose. The eye was arrested by a bewildering accumulation of wrought-iron balconies, casements and sunblinds, all sparkling in sunshine and shadow, whilst above one could trace a long succession of ancient gabled roofs, clear-cut against the blue sky, the projecting water-spout of every house looking like a grinning gargoyle and adding much to the quaint antiquity of the place. Through the old gates we watched the mules passing in their rich and curious trappings. Very distinctly we felt that Lerida was a revelation and a discovery; a town by no means to be passed over when searching out the glories of Spain. We found the narrow thoroughfare in which last night we had almost come to grief; so tortuous and ill-paved, we wondered how we had escaped destruction. Here and there small houses of the meanest description broke the continuity of dead grey walls. At the door of the cottage H. C. had charged sat an evil-looking dog that growled and showed its teeth as we passed and evidently connected us with the midnight raid. Whether the owner of the blunderbuss had killed himself with his own weapon or was only absent on business remained uncertain; he did not appear. Continuing upwards we presently came out upon the open space surrounding the old cathedral. The precincts were certainly not ecclesiastical. We seemed to have reached the poorest part of the town, and the houses were quite picturesque in their shabbiness. A splendid doorway admitted to the interior of the semi-religious fortress, before which a sentinel with gun and bayonet kept watch and ward. No one passed him without a special permission from the churlish old commandant of the town, who, after tracing your pedigree back to Adam, bestowed the simple favour as though conferring upon you the dignity of Spain's high order of the Saint Esprit. [Illustration: LERIDA.] Strangers and especially Englishmen, evidently visit Lerida at long intervals, and wherever we went we found ourselves attracting an amount of attention that might have confused more bashful minds. As in most other places, the people were especially interested in our little kodak, and seemed to think the honour of being taken equal to canonisation. In the market-place men and women threw themselves into groups and attitudes, set out their stalls to the best advantage, and begged the favour of being made immortal. But as the day wore on the crowd dispersed and disappeared, the market-place grew empty, arcades lost their loungers; the afternoon shadows lengthened; there were not so many sun-flashes in the air; outlines mellowed as the sky behind them grew less dazzling; the river lost some of its jewels. We were gazing at the latter, at the wonderful outlines of the town rising gradually upon its rock, crowned by that magnificent fortress with its imposing and impressive tower, when a voice suddenly said beside us: "We hope, señor, you have spent a happy day in Lerida and seen the interior of the old cathedral--now nothing but a useless barrack. The commandant suffers from dyspepsia and is capricious. No one ever knows beforehand whether he will grant or withhold permission. It entirely depends upon his digestion." We turned and saw our Boot-cleaner in Ordinary standing meekly and humbly beside us. Noting his fine face--it was really dignified in spite of his office--his white hair, his nearly ninety years, we thought humility should have been on our side. "How is it that you, a Frenchman, come to be living on Spanish ground?" we asked. [Illustration: WINE-PRESSERS: LERIDA.] "Ah, señor, thereby hangs a tale. If I am to give you my reason, I must go back seventy years in my life, for it dates from that time. And that, you see, will take us very nearly to the days of Waterloo. All my people were respectable and well-to-do, some even distinguished: there was a prosperous life before me. I was in the French army, serving my time. I had been unfortunate and drawn a low number in conscription; besides which, soldiers were wanted and few escaped. Napoleon in devastating other countries had not spared his own. It was then I committed the one great folly of my life, which has ever since been one of repentance. I fell in love with a beautiful Norman girl of gentle blood and breeding; so madly, so desperately, that I think for the time being I lost the balance of my mind. Every consideration faded before the strength of my passion. This beautiful girl seemed equally in love with me. I was young, they told me I was good-looking, and in my uniform I dare say I was not unattractive. Then came my error. I obtained a week's leave of absence, and deserted. We fled together to Spain, and of course I was outlawed. I sacrificed home, country and honour; I ruined all my worldly prospects; and for what? For a pair of bewitching eyes. Nay, she had more than that; she was a good woman and has made me a good wife; but had she been twice favoured, my folly would have been equally vast. For years and years I was possessed of a fever--that of mal du pays: all I had deliberately thrown away gained a hundred-fold in charm, haunted my mind by day, coloured my dreams. But there was no place for repentance. Now it has all passed away. Señor, my great-nephew is a French count, rich and well spoken of, one of the high ones of the land. He does not even know of my existence. Life has only one thing left me--death! But I pray I may live to close the sightless eyes of my wife, and then follow her speedily, that we may rest in one grave." "Has your wife long been blind?" we asked in sympathy. "Only two years, señor. You would not know it to look at her. In spite of her eighty-seven years, her eyes are still soft and bright, though closed to the world. I have now not only to earn the daily bread, but to buy it and manage the household. We have many good neighbours who help the old couple, and look in upon the wife when I am at work. Ah, señor, it is delightful to find one to whom I can talk in my own tongue. Surely the señor is French too?" "Land of our birth," we confessed; "nevertheless we are English, and would have it so." The old man hesitated; we saw there was something upon his mind; it came out at last. "Would the señor deign to come and see the wife, and talk to her a little of France and the French? She still speaks it perfectly, and she too has often longed for the country and privileges that for her sake I threw away. Such a visit would colour the remaining of her days. It is but a few steps." Who could resist such an appeal? We turned and accompanied the patriarch, who in spite of his nearly ninety years, still walked with a certain amount of vigour. The few steps grew into a good many, as the old man passed under the gateway and turned to the left down the long narrow street. Soon we reached the spot where we had watched the grape-pressing. The men were giving up work and clearing away, leaving nothing behind them but the stains of the fruit and the scent of the muscatel. They nodded in friendly recognition, and we knew the laugh they gave meant to say that the cup we had refused they had found very cheering. The narrow street was growing dim, and in the arched room, half cellar, half wine vault, they had lighted candles. The semi-obscurity was weird and picturesque in the extreme, almost Rembrandt-like in effect. The men's faces were thrown up against the dark background as the light fell upon them; and as one of them sitting astride a barrel raised a cup to his lips, he looked a true disciple of Bacchus. Our guide passed on and turning up a narrow street halted before the door of a quaint old house. The street was quiet and respectable; the house clean and well cared for, in spite of its age. "We have lived here for a quarter of a century and more--twenty-seven years," said the old man, "and the house does not look a day older than it looked then. Ah, señor," with a sigh, "we cannot say the same of ourselves. Twenty-seven years in a lifetime make all the difference between youth and age. But let us mount. My wife does not expect you, but you will find her ready to receive the young king himself if he paid her a visit." We passed up a broad old staircase of solid oak, that would almost have adorned a palace. In days gone by, this house, fallen to a low estate, must have had a greater destiny. The walls were panelled. There was a refined, imposing air about the place. We would have given worlds for the power to transport the staircase over the seas. The old man mounted to the topmost floor, and knocked at a large oak door which well matched its surroundings. A voice responded, he lifted the latch and we walked in. "I bring you visitors, Nerissa," said the old man. "A gentleman from France, who will talk to you in our beautiful language, and tell you of scenes and places you have not looked upon for nearly seventy years. You were only eighteen, I only twenty when we turned our backs for ever upon la belle Normandie." It was a sight worth seeing. The room was large and airy, quaint and old as the rest of the house. Light came in through large casements with latticed panes that bore the unmistakable seal of time. The room itself was in perfect and spotless order. In a large alcove stood the bed, neatly draped and curtained. What furniture the room contained matched its surroundings. There was an utter absence of any commonplace element about it. But it was not all this that distinguished it so singularly. It was the figure of a little old woman seated near the latticed panes in an arm-chair. The evening light, still strong in the west, fell upon her. As we entered she did not move, but turned her sightless eyes towards us, with the intent, listening look that is so pathetic. She was very small, and looked almost like a fairy-queen. Her hair was white as snow, but still abundant and faultlessly arranged. The face was small and refined, and possessed all the beauty of age, just as in years gone by it must have possessed in a very marked manner all the beauty of youth. It had the placid look the blind so often wear, was delicately flushed, and without line or wrinkle. This was very strange in one who must have had, to some extent at least, a hard and laborious life, with many anxieties. Her dress was neatness itself; an old dark silk probably given to her by a rich visitor whose turn it had served; and it was worn with the air that seemed to betoken one who had been a lady. But her whole appearance and bearing was gentle. It was a perfect and faultless picture, charming to look upon. We turned to the old man in wonder. His eyes were fixed upon his wife with an intensity of admiration and reverence almost startling. It was evident that the love of youth had survived every trial, all life's rough lessons. So far he could have nothing to regret. The folly of which he had been guilty--and it was an undoubted folly and mistake--had been condoned and excused by the after life. "We no longer marvel that you deserted the ranks of the army for those of a sweeter service," we said, looking from one to the other and feeling that we gazed upon a wonderful idyll. "Was she not worth it--even all I renounced!" he cried. "Nerissa, I have told these gentlemen all my boyish folly and indiscretion--all you made me give up for your bewitching eyes." Almost a youthful flush passed over the old lady's face as she smiled rather sadly in response. "It was indeed much to renounce for me," she said, in a very sweet voice. "I was not worth it; no woman could be worth it. I ought never have permitted it, and the thought has been one of the lasting sorrows of my life. But we act first and think after. Though after all, what I renounced was also great." "We are quite sure you would do it all over again. You do not in the least regret it, and your life has been a very happy one." Again the youthful flush passed over the old lady's face. She put out her hand--a small, delicate hand--as though searching for her husband's. He had soon clasped it. "Nerissa, you do not regret anything," he said. "You know quite well you would do it all over again if we could go back to the beginning of life." Her sightless but still wonderfully expressive eyes looked up into his face. "With you to tempt me, Alphonse, how could I resist? Alas, human nature is weak where the heart is concerned." "Have you any children?" we asked. "We have four, señor," replied the old lady. "And grand-children also. Our children are all out in the world, and not one of them lives in Lerida. As far as I was able I brought them up well, and tried to give them a little bearing and refinement. But we have always been poor, and poverty means limitation. They are all prospering, but in fairly humble life. At rare intervals one or other pays us a visit; but time flies quickly and they are soon gone again." [Illustration: OLD GATEWAYS: LERIDA.] Then we talked about France and the French. We happened to know many places in common, and describing what they are to-day, enabled her to realise the vast changes seventy years had worked. The old lady gave many a sigh. "Alphonse, it is all a new world," she said over and over again. "If we went back to it we should be lost and strange. It is time we passed out of life. But, señor, your visit has brought back a breath of that old life to me. Those who come to us now are humble, and know nothing of our past world. You almost make me feel young again; bring back lost realities, when I was a lady, and had not thrown up all for love, and dreamed not of a humble life of poverty. But, oh, I would renounce it all again a second time for my husband's sake." Who would have supposed such an idyll in the quiet town of Lerida? When our Boot-cleaner in Ordinary had come to us that morning and received his humble dole for the work done, who could have imagined that such a romance, a poem in real life, was concealed in his history? When we went back into the quiet streets the gloom had deepened; twilight reigned; a soft glow was in the evening sky; one or two stars were faintly shining. We could not lose the impression of the visit we had just paid; the wonderful little fairy-queen in the arm-chair, who was still ladylike and beautiful and refined in spite of a hard and humble life, and the fine and venerable old man, who for seventy years had remained true and faithful to his first love. No Knight of the Round Table could ever have proved more noble and devoted; worthier King Arthur's friendship. The very streets of the town seemed to have gained a charm as we passed through them on our way to the fonda. H. C. was singularly quiet and grave. "Of what are you thinking?" we asked. He started, as if suddenly aroused from sleep. "I am thinking of the faithfulness of that beautiful old couple," he replied. "No, if I tried for a hundred years I never could be as constant as that. In fact I begin to think my only chance of happiness is to emigrate to Salt Lake City and become a Mormon." "Wait until you are in love," we returned. "You were never that yet. Your fancy has been touched often enough, but your heart never. That comes only once in a lifetime." H. C. only shook his head and murmured something about having a heart large enough to embrace a whole Agapemone of beauty. We did not argue the point, feeling there are opinions and delusions time alone can correct. But we went back to the bridge and looked down upon the quiet stream, and beyond the houses of the town to the wonderful outlines of the old cathedral, darkly and distinctly visible against the evening sky. Everything seemed glorified by the story we had just learned, the romance we had witnessed. It was an experience we would not have lost; and henceforth to us the word Lerida would be weighted with a hidden charm of which the interpretation meant everything that was true and chivalrous, everything that was brave and constant, lovely and of good report. CHAPTER XXI. THE END OF AN IDYLL. Days of chivalry not over--In the evening light--Night porter grateful--Dragon in full force--Combative and revengeful--Equal to the occasion--Gall turns to sweetness when H. C. appears--Last night in Lerida--Bane of our host's life--Mysterious disappearance--Monastery of Sigena--Devout ladies--Returning at night--Place empty and deserted--Birds flown with keys--Quite a commotion--"The señor is pleased to joke"--Was murder committed?--Mysteries explained--Probably down the well--Drag for skeletons--Host's horror--"We drink the water"--A tragedy--Out in the quiet night--Discords--Lerida café--Create a sensation--Polite captain--Offer declined--Regrets--Final crash--Paradise or Lerida--Deserted market-place--Trees whisper their secrets--El Sereno at the witching hour--Hard upon the angels--Not a bed of roses--Alphonse--End of a long life--Until the dawn--Acolyte and priest--"We must all come to it, señor"--El Sereno disappears for the last time--Daybreak--In presence of death--Alone, but resigned--Surpassing loveliness--Sacred atmosphere. So the days of chivalry and devotion were not over: could never be over as long as there are Alphonses and Nerissas in the world. As we went back to the hotel in the evening light, the whole town seemed full of romance. One by one the outlines faded and died out, and when we entered the fonda the stars were beginning to shine. The night porter was standing in the doorway, though his reign had not yet begun. He made us a low bow. "Señor, allow me to thank you for not complaining of me this morning to the padrone. I am still full of remorse for having locked you out last night, but it is seldom any of our visitors trouble the dark streets of Lerida at midnight. Most of our guests are commercial travellers, who have no eye for the ancient and picturesque, and are generally glad to get early to bed." Again assuring the worthy man of our good will, we passed up the shabby old staircase. At the top we came into contact with the Dragon striding along with bare arms and flourishing a rolling-pin. She looked the picture of fiery indignation and we wondered what had gone wrong. After some difficulty we managed to gather that the waiter, in spite of her want of beauty, in spite of her being an appropriated blessing, had offered her a chaste salute. In return for the affront, the rolling-pin--it was a _washing_ pin, by the way--had come into sharp contact with his skull, which, fortunately for him was a hard one. Since then the Dragon had been marching up and down with threatening weapon and flashing eyes, brandishing her rolling-pin like another Communist, mouthing voiceless words. As soon as she caught sight of H. C., however, her gall turned to sweetness; she marshalled him to our rooms, threw wide the door, and beamed on him one of her most cavernous smiles. That a chaste salute from him would have been very differently received was evident. It was our last night in Lerida. The landlord still attended us at dinner, for the waiter was nursing his wounds in the kitchen. A violent headache had come on, and he was vowing vengeance against the Dragon, declaring she had imagined the whole thing. "But for the servants, my life would be happy," said our host. "If they keep the peace with me, they are disputing amongst themselves. The last waiter and chambermaid I had, after quarrelling like cat and dog for six months, suddenly went off one day together, and we never heard of them again. It was a Sunday, and madame and I had gone off with some friends by train to Sariñena--a long day's excursion, for we were going to the Monastery of Sigena, near Villanueva. Has the señor visited the famous monastery?" We had never done so. "It is to be regretted," returned the landlord, as he busily changed the plates and poured out the wine. "The monastery is the most interesting in our neighbourhood; and people come from far and wide to see it. In situation it is most romantic, standing near a lovely stream full of fine fish. The nuns, however, don't fish; the very thought would be sacrilege. They are devout ladies, some of them very handsome; a pity so much beauty should be wasted. They are of the order of St. John of Jerusalem, which I have heard dates as far back as the twelfth century, but I am not learned in those matters. I have seen the nuns at mass in their chapel, and they looked like a vision of angels. But I was saying. We had left the hotel in charge of the waiter and chambermaid. As it happened, there were no guests staying here. When we came home at night, we found the place locked and empty. Both servants had flown, and to add insult to injury had taken the keys with them. Fortunately the glass doors in this very dining-room had been left open, and by means of a ladder, and climbing over walls at the risk of one's life, I managed to get in, took the duplicate keys out of my desk, and admitted madame. It caused quite a commotion." "And had the enterprising pair taken nothing but the keys?" we asked. "Was your gold plate safe, and madame's diamonds?" "The señor is pleased to joke," laughed the landlord. "My gold plate is pewter, and madame's jewelry is false, excepting her wedding-ring and the few things she happened to have on that never-to-be-forgotten day. No; they had taken nothing. But they had made a first-rate meal, and had tapped and emptied three bottles of my very best Chambertin 1868 vintage, and consumed half a bottle of Chartreuse." "But you have no proof that they went off together," we suggested. "It may be that murder was committed. The dead body of the chambermaid all this time may be crumbling to dust and ashes in some hole or corner of your cellar. Have you a cellar, or any other place in which a murdered body might be concealed?" "Santa Maria!" cried our host, turning pale. "The idea never occurred to me, but I shouldn't wonder if you are right. It would explain a good deal that has remained a mystery. We have a deep well out in the yard; so deep that we do not know the bottom, which is supposed to communicate with the river. The man might easily have murdered the woman and thrown her down. And we drink the water!" "That is hardly the solution that suggests itself. After drinking your three bottles of Chambertin and your half-bottle of Chartreuse, depend upon it their heads began to go round; they felt the world coming to an end, and determined to be beforehand with it. It is clear as daylight: they both threw themselves down the well, and there you will find the skeletons. You had better have it dragged and give them decent burial, or you will certainly be seeing ghosts in the house." By this time the landlord was trembling with horror; his eyes, grown large and round, would almost have matched the Dragon's. He was no longer in a fit state to pour out wine or change plates. "And we drink the water," he murmured half a dozen times over. "We drink the water. This accounts for my queer symptoms. But, after all, the bodies cannot be there. They must have communicated with the river, and so floated out to sea. I dare say they will some day turn up in the Panama Canal or on the shores of New Zealand. Señor, I am quite certain this is the true state of the case. I never could understand why those two should go off together. They were always quarrelling, and seemed to hate each other like poison, and I dare say they even disputed as to which should go first down the well. But when all's said and done, it is three years ago, and they will never come back to trouble me." "Not even as ghosts?" He shivered. "I never saw a ghost, señor, but I suppose there are such things. I shouldn't care to see one. Nevertheless, I will have the well dragged--quietly, not to raise a scandal. I can pretend to have dropped in a diamond ring belonging to a client. If the skeletons turn up we must hush up the matter as well as we can, and so dispose of the ghosts. They would never walk after decent burial. Ah, señor, what a tragedy you have opened up! And all the time I was accusing the wretched pair of I know not what!" Fortunately for us this conversation took place towards the end of dinner, or we should have fared badly. We left the landlord in his dining-room. He had dropped into a chair and was gazing on vacancy, evidently in deep thought as to how he could have the well dragged without creating a scandal to the detriment of his hotel. We went out into the quiet night, making sure the night porter was on duty and would keep there. The streets were as dark, quiet and ill-lighted as ever, and we took care to avoid Pandemonium. The market-place, so full and lively this morning, was now empty and silent. From the café already alluded to streams of light and strains of music were flowing. We turned in out of curiosity. Half a dozen musicians at the further end were making unearthly discords: shrieking and wailing instruments set one's teeth on edge and went down one's back like cold water. The room was fairly full, the atmosphere heavy with smoke; such smoke as only the Catalonians know how to produce. Our entrance created quite a sensation. We were recognised as English, and the English who visit Lerida are few and far between. Was our visit friendly or the opposite? Their glances plainly asked the question. Then one in military uniform came up, and, with a military salute ventured to sit down near us. We thought it a singular proceeding, but decided to take it in good part. He proved to be a captain of the regiment stationed at Lerida, and a really friendly and polite man. "I perceive, sirs, that you are strangers," he said. "Can I be of any service to you in a place where I am very much at home?" To which we replied that our stay was drawing to a close, and we had probably seen the best of the town. "There is nothing you can do for us, though we are grateful for your good intentions. But if you would induce those in authority to grant their passes into the fortress with less restriction, you would confer a favour upon any who may come after us." "A senseless restriction indeed," replied our new friend, "and we all feel it so; but until some disappointed visitor of consequence appeals to the Queen or the Madrid Government, the thing will go on. There is absolutely no reason why all the world should not be admitted." At this moment the musicians finished up with a crash. The sound was horrible. H. C. made an excruciating grimace and our captain shook with laughter. "Do you call that music?" we asked. "_I_ do not," he returned, "because I have spent much time in Paris, where barbaric music would not be tolerated. But these frantic discords just please the people of Lerida, who have not been educated to anything better. It is over for the night, and now everyone will depart. They have drunk their coffee or wine or spirit, sat a whole evening in a clouded, heated atmosphere, listening enraptured to the strains which have set you quivering, and are going home feeling that if this or paradise were offered to them they would not hesitate to reject paradise. Such is their life." We got up to depart also. "I am sorry that I can be of no use to you," said our polite captain; "but if you are leaving Lerida to-morrow, time certainly runs short. I can, however, give you my card, and place myself and all I have at your disposal. If ever you visit Lerida again, and I am quartered here, I hope you will find me out. I will at least promise you a pass into the fortress; and there are a few things you would not be likely to see without the open sesame of one of ourselves." Upon which he shook hands, gave us a military salute, "wrapped his martial cloak about him," and passed out into the night. We listened to his quick receding footsteps and then turned away. The silence was only broken by the distant cry of a watchman proclaiming the hour and the weather. "El Sereno," as we called the old guardians of the darkness in Majorca, where many a time we wandered with them in the dead of night amidst the old palaces and watched them light up the wonderful old Moorish remains with their swinging lanterns. [Illustration: ENTRANCE TO POBLET.] It was a very dark night, though the stars flashed overhead. We found ourselves on the empty market-place, where trees whispered together. In the morning, when fruit and flowers and a hundred stalls and a crowd of noisy people called for all one's attention, the whispering trees were neglected. Now it was their hour, and they told each other their mighty secrets, and one felt that they were wiser and greater than mankind in its little brief authority. We stood and listened, but they talked in an unknown tongue. Almost as mysterious and full of meaning seemed the outlines of the gabled houses on the hill slopes crowned by that splendid semi-religious fortress, the tall tower cleaving the sky. From this in days gone by the bells had rung the people to church, and hastened the steps and shortened the breath of many a fat old canon who, purple and panting, crept into his place before the altar after service had begun. But those days are over. For nearly two hundred years the bells have been silent. The sober cassock of the priest no longer haunts the precincts. Sentries with gun and bayonet now rule, and signs and symbols of warfare fill up the ancient aisles and desecrate the sacred pavement. Gazing upon the faint outlines in the darkness of night, the gleam of a distant lantern coming up a narrow side street caught our eye. It was a watchman, and instinct told us he was none other than our Burgos _Sereno_. He waved his lantern more energetically than usual, as though expecting to find the inhabitants of Pandemonium lurking in secret corners. As he walked, his staff struck the ground "in measured moments," keeping time with his footsteps. "It is twelve of the night," he cried, "and the night is fair. _El sereno._" We gradually approached him, knowing well we were in his mind. The rays suddenly flashed upon us, and the lantern had peace. "Señor, instinct told me you were still in Lerida. Midnight seems your hour for walking. In truth it is far better than midday, for the world is sleeping and we have the stars in the sky. I hope that wily porter does not mean to play you the same trick to-night. To-day fifty people have asked me if the town had been bombarded, declaring they expected to see the place in ruins. Have you seen his wife, señor? She is not the angel she looks----" "Are you not rather hard upon the angels, _Sereno_?" "I don't think I quite meant to put it that way," he returned, with a laugh that seemed to come from great depths. "No, she does not look an angel--and she is not one either. It is said that when her husband misbehaves, she beats him with her washing-pin; and it is also said that more than once she has held it over the landlord himself. It may be a fable, but when a woman has no voice she is bound to find some other way of venting her spleen. I don't think the porter sleeps on a bed of roses, though his wife is named Rose, and he tries to make the best of his bargain." "How did you leave Burgos?" we asked, feeling speculations on the porter's domestic relations unprofitable. "Just the same as ever, señor. There was no change anywhere. The everlasting bells chime out the hours and the quarters, and the voices of a half a dozen watchmen take up the tale. The hotel grows rather worse and more unpopular, if that be possible, and for want of a good inn the town is neglected. No one ever goes there a second time. In that respect one is better off in Lerida." We were standing near the new cathedral in the market-place, when suddenly we saw a quiet figure hurrying towards us. Even afar off we knew it well. It was our Boot-cleaner in Ordinary. At once we felt something was wrong; the figure, in spite of quick footsteps, was tragic in its bearing. We went up to him. He grasped our hand and his face told its own tale. "Oh, señor! the end has come, the end of a long life. Who would have thought it would be so sudden? My poor Nerissa! My life's partner, and my life's blessing! Two hours ago the heart suddenly failed. The doctor gives her until the dawn. But she is quite ready and quite resigned. 'Think what it will be, Alphonse,' she said to me just now. 'To-morrow morning I shall see once more.' Señor, I am broken-hearted. And now that she is being taken from me, I feel that I have not prized her half enough." "You have been her joy and happiness on earth, and have an eternity of happiness to look forward to. For you and for her life is only beginning. The end of a long and happy life is a matter for rejoicing, not for sorrow." We had no need to ask a reason for his presence there. He passed on to fulfil his mission. [Illustration: OLD CATHEDRAL: LERIDA.] Presently a small door was opened and there issued forth in the stillness of the night an acolyte bearing a lighted lantern, followed by a priest carrying the Host. Alphonse had gone before, and we felt that the greatest kindness was to let him return alone, unhindered. The small silent procession was full of mysterious pathos and solemnity. It told of a soul about to take its solitary and awful journey to the unknown and the unseen. Seldom, we felt, would extreme unction have been administered to a soul so pure as that of our little fairy-queen. El Sereno went down on one knee as it passed, and bared and bowed his head. With arm outstretched resting on his staff of office, he looked quite solemn and picturesque. "We must all come to it, señor. But I often ask myself what consolation even extreme unction can bring to a badly spent life." We watched the little procession cross the great square, their footsteps scarcely echoing. The sacred hush and atmosphere that surrounds the dying seemed to go with them as they walked. Fitful gleams and shadows were thrown out by the lantern--they might have been shades of departed spirits. In the dark night, under the silent stars, and in that solemn moment, we seemed brought into touch with the unseen world. We felt deeply for Alphonse, who was passing through the great sorrow of his life. His own silver cord would now loosen, and no doubt he too would quickly follow into the unseen. His wife would take with her all his hold upon life. After this solemn incident we could only make our way back to the fonda. El Sereno accompanied us to its threshold. We walked down the avenue between the trees, that were still whispering their mighty secrets to each other. Now they seemed laden with immortal mysteries: their burden was of souls winging their flight to realms where no torment touches them. They were in communion with the stars overhead shining down with a serene benediction. Our portal to-night was open and the night porter was at his post, watching for his tardy visitors! wondering why they tarried. What to him was that tragedy that was passing at the other end of the town? We inquired for Rose. She had put up her washing-pin, and forgiven the erring waiter; the sun had not gone down upon her wrath. Had her spouse also forgiven the gay Lothario, or had they arranged for coffee and pistols? The señor was joking. Such manner of dealing was for gentlefolk. For his part, if he owed any one a mortal grudge he would avenge himself by the short Corsican way: a stab in the dark. A short reckoning and a long rest. But he had never quarrelled in his life; never owed any man a grudge. Life was too short; he was too lazy. He thought it a good plan to let things take their course. If any one cared to embrace his wife, they were welcome to do so. He had no jealousy in his composition. She was now sleeping the sleep of the just: and for all he knew and for all he cared, her dreams were of gay Lotharios whom she was chastening with her washing-pin. We said farewell to El Sereno, who lamented our departure on the morrow, and feared he might see us no more. This was probable. Lerida, for all its quaint streets, old-world nooks and splendid outlines, was hardly a place to come to a second time. He moved away rather sadly, for he had his duty to perform, and the moments would not stand still. We watched him receding in the dark night; a stalwart figure; an honest man, with much that was good in him, though his lines were not cast in grooves where influences for good are strong. At the end of the avenue he called the hour and the night; then passed up out of sight into the market-place once more. There in due time would return that quiet, solemn procession of two; the acolyte bearing the lantern, the priest with his bent back and the weight of years upon him bearing the Host: their mission accomplished: the last rites administered: the pure soul perhaps already far on its long journey. The night passed on to dawn and daybreak and sunrise: a new day, a new world. Was Nerissa still lingering here, or, as she had said, had her sightless eyes opened to the world beyond? It was impossible to leave Lerida without ascertaining how it fared with this couple that we had found so interesting and exceptional. Though it delayed us some hours, it must be done, the visit paid. We breakfasted, attended by the erring waiter, who looked pale and brooding and revengeful, as though he meditated drowning the Dragon in her own soapsuds. Then, in the clear early morning, we went forth. The way was familiar by this time. We knew its every aspect: all the outlines were old friends. We passed up the avenue and through the crowded market-place, where people laughed and talked and bought and sold, as if life were one long joke and would last for ever, and there was no such thing as death and decay. Down the long narrow street where we again saw the men pressing the grapes, and noted the stain of the rich red juice, and smelt the luscious perfume of the muscatel--for they have red grapes here with the muscatel scent and flavour. Onwards into a quiet side street and the quaint old house that now had upon it the dark grey shadow. We mounted the fine broad staircase with its carved oak balusters and panelled walls. There was not a sound to be heard. At such moments sympathy is quick to respond, and the awful messenger makes the weight of his errand known. The door was slightly ajar. We pushed it gently open and entered, feeling ourselves in the presence of death. Peace had fallen upon the house. There in the quiet room was the vacant chair near the latticed window, where so recently we had seen that wonderful embodiment of beauty in age. It would never be seen again. Near the bed Alphonse was seated, holding the hand of his dead wife, his other hand up to his face. He looked the picture of sad despair. The aged form, so recently still endowed with life and vigour, was now bent and bowed under the weight of sorrow. As we entered he glanced up, and stronger than all the evident grief we were surprised to see an unmistakable look of resignation. Quietly placing the cold hand that never would move or clasp his own again, he rose and came towards us. "Oh, señor, this is kind. You come to me in my loneliness. It is all over. The sightless eyes are closed, the beautiful voice is still. I have often prayed that I might be the last to be taken. Heaven is merciful, and has answered me. As the dawn broke in the east her spirit went. Raising her hand as though pointing to some unseen vision: 'Alphonse,' she said, 'I am called. You will soon join me, beloved.' Then a glory seemed to pass over her face, and she was gone. Señor, come near and look upon that beautiful face once more." He approached the bed and with reverent hand drew down the sheet. We were almost startled by the beauty disclosed. The face seemed to have gone back to the days of its youth; it might have been that of a young woman of surpassing loveliness. The rapt expression the old man had spoken of was still there. It was impossible but that some divine vision had been seen at the last by those eyes closed to mortal things. It spoke of intense happiness, of a joy that was to be eternal. "Alphonse, how can you look upon that face, which has the divine image upon it and the divine glory, and be sad?" "Señor, I have lost my all. I am very lonely. Yesterday I was rich; I knew not how rich; to-day I am poor and stricken. Yet I am resigned; and I am happy in the thought that in a few days--I verily believe in a few days--my body will rest with hers in one grave, and our spirits will be united in Paradise. I am not sad; only intensely lonely. Señor, you gave her almost her very last pleasure. After you had left, she said that for years our little room had not seemed so bright. You brought her a breath from her old world and she declared that she felt her youth renewed. Was it not the spirit telling her in advance how soon her youth should indeed return to her? Oh, Nerissa, my life's joy, my best beloved, in what realms is your pure spirit now wandering? Surely you need me to perfect your happiness?" We stayed awhile with him, and before leaving found the forlorn attitude, the despairing droop had departed. As we said good-bye we quietly placed money in his hand. "To buy flowers," we explained. "Place them gently in her coffin. The fairest flowers you can find. They will still be less fair than she." "Ah, señor," he returned, "it is a long farewell. I shall look upon your face no more. But when I meet her again we will talk of you. And do not think that you leave me to utter solitude. I have many friends about me, and though humble they are good. For my few remaining days I need have no thought, and I have no fear." We departed. The little episode was over. But it would be ever associated in our mind with Lerida, enshrouding the town in a peculiarly sacred atmosphere. CHAPTER XXII. A SAD HISTORY. Broad plains of Aragon--Wonderful tones--Approaching Zaragoza--Celestial vision--Distance lends enchantment--Commonplace people--The ancient modernised--Disillusion followed by delight--Almost a small Paris--Cafés and their merits--Not socially attractive--Friendly equality--Mixture of classes--Inheritance of the past--Interesting streets--Arcades and gables--Lively scenes--People in costume--Picture of Old Spain--Ancient palaces--One especially romantic--The world well lost--Fair Lucia--Where love might reign for ever--Paradise not for this world--Doomed--The last dawn--Inconsolable--Seeking death--Found on the battlefield--A day vision--Few rivals--In the new cathedral--Startling episode--Asking alms--Young and fair--Uncomfortable moment--Terrible story--Fatal chains--"And after?"--How minister to a mind diseased?--Sunshine clouded--Burden of life--Any way of escape?--Suggestions of past centuries--The mighty fallen. The sun was still high in the heavens when our train steamed out of the station towards Zaragoza and the ancient kingdom of Aragon. Much of the journey lay through broad plains that had no specially redeeming feature about them. Even fertility seemed denied, for they were often destitute of trees and vegetation. Yet were they sometimes covered with a lovely heather possessing a wonderful tone and beauty of its own. Most to be remembered in the journey was the sunset. Towards evening as we approached Zaragoza, the sun dipped across the vast plains and went down in a blood-red ball. Immediately the sky was flushed with the most gorgeous colours, which melted into an after-glow that remained far into the night. In the midst of this splendid effect of sky we saw across the plains the wonderful towers and turrets and domes of Zaragoza rising like a celestial vision. As we neared, we thought it a dream-city: not perched on a gigantic rock like Segovia, but on a gentle height of some 500 feet above the sea-level. The approach to the town is very striking. There is an abundant promise of good things, not, we are bound to confess, eventually carried out. Apparently, it is of all cities the most picturesque, with its splendid river running rapidly through the plain, spanned by its world-famed bridge, above which rise the beautiful, refined, eastern-looking outlines; but once inside the town the charm in part disappears. It is to be worshipped at a distance. Our first impression told us this, as we rumbled through the streets in the old omnibus and marked their modern aspect, the busy, common-place bearing of the people. We had expected a great deal of Zaragoza; hoped to find a city of great antiquity, with nothing but gabled houses and ancient outlines worthy the fair capital of the fair kingdom of Aragon. These we found the exception. Its antiquity is undoubted, but too much of the town has been modernised and rebuilt. Still, the exceptions are so striking that when one's first disillusion is over, it is followed by something very like delight and amazement. The hotel was a large rambling building which might have existed for centuries; and as comfortable as most of the Spanish provincial inns. A perfect maze of passages; and when the hotel guide piloted us to a far-off room to see a collection of antiquities of very modest merit we felt it might have taken hours to get back alone to our starting point. Zaragoza is large and flourishing; its prosperity is evident; its new streets are handsome and common-place. Some of them are wide boulevards lined with trees, lighted with electric lamps, possessing "every new and modern improvement." As you go through them you almost think of a small Paris. At night its cafés are brilliantly lighted, and rank as the finest in Spain. They are always crowded, and fond and foolish parents bring their children and keep them in the glare and glitter until towards midnight, when they fall off their perches. Music of some sort is always going on; sometimes the harsh, barbarous discords and howlings the Spanish delight in, at others civilised harmonies and trained voices that are really beautiful but less popular. Those who frequent these cafés are not socially of an attractive class. Many are rough country people who are evidently in Zaragoza as birds of passage. The roughest specimens of apparently unwashed waifs and strays will take possession of a table, and at the very next table, almost touching elbows with them, will be a fashionable couple, dressed smartly enough for a wedding. The one in no way disconcerts the other, and all treat each other on the basis of a friendly species of equality. The lowest of the people who have a few sous to spare in their pocket devote them to this, their earthly paradise. They love the glare and glamour and warmth--it is the one green oasis in the desert of their every-day lives; all the working hours are gilded by the thought of the evening's amusement. Many of them have dull, dark homes, in which they feel cribbed and cabined. Of the quiet pleasures of domestic life they know little, but they are all perfectly happy. One of the strongest characteristics of human nature is its adaptability to circumstances; the back fits itself to the burden. People seldom die of a broken heart. In Zaragoza, more than anywhere else, we saw this strange mixture of classes; wondered that some of them were admitted. But they behaved like ladies and gentlemen, drinking coffee and helping themselves to detestable spirit with an air and a grace only they know how to put on. Yet it is not put on; it is born with them; an inheritance from the past. It was not in all this, however, that the charm of Zaragoza consisted. These everyday common-place sights and experiences have few attractions for those who seek to link themselves with the past in its ancient outlines and glorious buildings. The cafés were all very well as studies of human nature, but one very soon had enough of them. There was one long street especially old and interesting. On each side were deep, massive arcades of a very early period, above which the houses rose in quaint, gabled outlines, many of the windows still possessing latticed panes, which added so much to their charm. To make the street more interesting, the market was held here. On both sides the road, in front of the arcades was a long succession of stalls, where everything relating to domestic life was sold. Fruit and flower and vegetable stalls were the most picturesque, full of fragrance and colouring. Luscious grapes and pomegranates were heaped side by side with a wealth of roses and orange blossoms and the still sweeter verbena. Many of the stall-holders wore costumes which harmonised admirably with the arcades and gabled roofs. The street was crowded with buyers and sellers and loungers, though few seemed alive to the picturesque element, in which we were absorbed. Many of the men, stalwart, strong and vigorous, were dressed in the costume of the country; knee-breeches and broad-brimmed hat; whilst broad blue and red silken sashes were tied round the waist: a hardy, active race, made for endurance. This scene had by far the most human interest of any we found in Zaragoza. As a picture of Old Spain, it would have made the fortune of an artist as we saw it that day in all the effect of sunlight and shadow, all the life and movement that seemed to rouse the arcades of the past into touch with the present. Near to this a wonderful leaning-tower stood until recently; a magnificent Moorish-looking clock-tower built about the year 1500. This was one of the glories of Zaragoza; but the inhabitants after subscribing a sum of money to prop it up, grew alarmed and subscribed another sum to pull it down. In reality it was perfectly safe and might have stood for centuries. But when all is said and done, it is in its side streets, narrow, tortuous and gloomy, that the interest of Zaragoza chiefly lies. Many of the houses are ancient and enormous palaces, once inhabited by the old aristocracy of Aragon. They are so solidly built that they not only defy time, but almost the destructive hand of man. Some of them have wonderfully interesting facades: roofs with overhanging eaves and Gothic windows guarded by wrought ironwork; features that can never tire. Magnificent and imposing gateways lead into yet more imposing courtyards. One of these was especially beautiful: and its history was romantic. [Illustration: FAIR LUCIA'S HOUSE: ZARAGOZA.] It once belonged to the son of a reigning duke who renounced all for love, and thought the world well lost. He offended his family by his marriage, and they treated him as one dead. The lady of his choice, fair Lucia, was beautiful and charming, but beneath him. Tradition says that she was an actress, and that he fell hopelessly in love with her as she played in a drama where all ended tragically. It might have been a warning to them, but when was love ever warned? He espoused her and they took up their abode in this wonderful old palace, fitting home of romance. As we gazed upon the matchless courtyard: the overhanging eaves, the rounded arches of the balcony with their graceful and refined pillars, the exquisitely-carved ceilings and staircase of rich black oak: the latter wide enough to drive up a coach and four: we felt that here love might reign for ever. And probably it would have lasted long; for the lady, as history says, had all graces of the spirit as well as all the charm of exquisite form and feature: whilst her knight was true as the needle to the pole, constant as death. They were happy in each other; life was a paradise; and when did such a perfect condition of things ever last? Paradise is not for this world. Five summers and winters passed and found them still devoted to each other. Every day was a dream. Then a cruel visitation came to their town: an epidemic, sparing not high or low. It attacked the fair Lucia: and though her husband nursed her night and day, and all the leeches of the town combined their skill and judgment to save her, a stronger power than theirs was against them. The last day dawned; instinct told her that another sun for her could never rise. Her husband bent over her in an agony of grief. She clasped her fair, frail arms around his neck. "My love, my love, we have been very happy: all in all to each other," she murmured. "These five years, an eternity of bliss, have yet flown swiftly as a day. You have been good--so good; dear--so dear. Perhaps it is well to die thus and now, with all our youth, and all our dreams, and all our illusions undispelled. Eternity will restore us to each other. I leave you with not one mark on the delicate bloom of our great love." She died and he was not to be consoled. His people offered to be reunited to him but he would none of them. It was the time of the War of Succession. Into this he madly plunged, seeking death and finding it. As a rule death is said to avoid those who court him; but here it was not so. The knight, faithful to the end, was found upon the battlefield, his eyes wide open, looking upon the heavens; where perhaps he saw the vision of his lovely wife, whilst her miniature lay next his heart. The house still stands much as it stood in those days, but two centuries older. It is the most beautiful in Zaragoza, perhaps has few equals in all Spain. A special atmosphere surrounds it: and as we look a vision rises. Standing in the courtyard and gazing upon that wide staircase, we see that youthful pair, so favoured by nature, passing to and fro; we see them looking into each other's eyes, hear their love vows. Their arms entwine, their love-locks mingle. A mist blurs the scene, and when it passes all has changed. A sad cortége is descending. A coffin bearing the remains of what was once so fair and full of life. A knight armed cap-à-pied follows, with clanking sword and spur; but his face is pale and his eyes are red with weeping, though they weep not now. They will never weep again. The fountain of his tears is dried. Again the mist blurs the scene, and when it clears nothing is visible but the solitary knight ascending to his lonely room, love flown, hope dead, his life gone from him. Presently the palace is closed; no one ascends or descends the staircase; voices are never heard, footsteps never echo. Surely ghosts haunt the sad corridors, look out from the vacant arcades upon the silent courtyard. For the knight has long lain dead upon the battlefield and no one comes to claim the palace and once more throw wide its portals to life, and laughter and sunshine. We paid it more than one visit during our sojourn in Zaragoza, and each time there passed before us in vivid colours the love-poem of two hundred years ago. In the bright sunshine, the morning after our arrival we had gone forth to acquaint ourselves with the city. No view was more striking than that beyond the river looking upon the town. [Illustration: FAIR LUCIA'S HOUSE: ZARAGOZA.] We stood on the farther bank. The stream flowed rapidly at our feet. Before us the wonderful bridge spanned the water with its seven arches: a massive, time-edifying structure. Above this in magic outlines rose the towers, turrets and domes of the new cathedral of El Pilar, as splendid from this point of view as it is really worthless both outwardly and inwardly on a closer inspection. It is certainly one of the most remarkable scenes in all Spain: and from this point Zaragoza possesses few rivals. The new cathedral of El Pilar: so called because it possesses the pillar on which the Virgin is said to have descended from heaven. It is a very large building, and the domes from a distance are very effective, but the interior is in the worst and most debased style. As we stood within the vast space that morning, wondering so much wealth had been wasted on this poor fabric, a female, apparently a lady, dressed in sable garments, her face veiled by the graceful mantilla, glided up to us and solicited alms. At the first moment we thought we had mistaken her meaning, but on looking at her in doubt, she repeated her demand more imploringly. "Señor, for the love of heaven, give me charity." The building was large, the worshippers were few, it was easy to converse. "But what do you mean?" we said. "You look too respectable to be asking alms. Surely you cannot be in want?" "In want? I am starving." And throwing back her mantilla she disclosed a face still young, still fair to excess, but pale, pinched and careworn. We felt terribly uncomfortable. She walked and spoke as a lady. There was a refinement in her voice and movement that could only have come from gentle breeding. How had she fallen so low? Eyes must have asked the question tongue could not. [Illustration: BRIDGE AND CATHEDRAL OF EL PILAR: ZARAGOZA.] "Listen, señor," she said, as though in reply. "Listen and pity me. I was tenderly and delicately brought up, possessed a comfortable home, indulgent parents. We lived in Madrid, where my father held an office under Government. I was an only child and indulged. Pale, quiet and subdued as you see me now, I was passionate, headstrong and wilful. I fell under the influence of one outwardly an angel, inwardly a demon. He was a singer at the opera, and his voice charmed me even more than his splendid presence. He was beneath me, but we met clandestinely again and again, until at last he persuaded me to fly with him. I was infatuated to madness. All my past life, all past influence, teaching, thought of home, love of parents--all was thrown to the winds for this wild passion. We were secretly married before we fled, for mad as I was I had not lost all sense of honour. Almost from the very first day retribution set in. My father had long suffered from disease of the heart though I knew it not, and the shock of my flight killed him. The home was broken up, my mother was left almost destitute, and in a frenzy of despair, a moment of insanity, took poison. I was an orphan, and then discovered that my husband had thought I should be rich. On learning the truth, he began to ill-treat me. His fancy had been caught for a moment by my fair face. Of this he soon tired and, base villain that he was, transferred his worthless affections elsewhere. Things went from bad to worse. There were times when he even beat me--and I could not retaliate. I had come to my senses; I recognised the hand of retribution, and accepted my punishment. But what wonder that in my misery I learned to seek oblivion in the wine cup? Perhaps my worthless husband first gave me the idea of this temptation, for he was seldom sober. It was in one of those terrible moments that he fell from a height and so injured himself that after five days of intense agony he died. I was free but penniless; knew not where to go, which way to turn. I had not a friend in the world--all had forsaken me. There was but one thing I could do. I had a voice and could sing. I sang in cafés, at small concerts, wherever I could get an engagement and earn a trifle. Now I am in Zaragoza. Most nights I sing in the great café, but my small earnings all go in the same way--to satisfy my craving for wine. Wine, wine, wine; it is my one sin, but oh! I feel that it is fatal. I know that it is surely drawing my feet to the grave. And after that?" She shuddered; then pointed to a tawdry image of the Virgin, before which we stood. "There, before that altar, I have knelt day after day and prayed to be delivered; but I have prayed in vain; no answer comes, and the chains are binding about me. Señor, I saw you enter; recognised that you were a stranger. Something told me I might address you and you would at least listen; would not spurn me or turn away in hateful contempt. But what can you do? I have asked for alms. I have told you I am starving--and so I am; but it is the soul that is starving more than the body. You will bestow your charity upon me--I know you will--and it will not go in food but in wine. Ah, if you could cure me, or give me an antidote that would send me into a sleep from which I should never waken, that indeed would be the greatest and truest charity." Then we realised that the pale face and pinched look were not due to want of food. The cause was deeper and more hopeless. It was one of the saddest stories we had ever listened to; and it came upon us so abruptly that we felt helpless and bewildered: sick at heart at the very thought of our want of power to minister to this mind diseased. "Give us your name and address," we said, after trying to think out the situation. "Let us see if there is any way of escape for you. Your sad story has clouded the sunshine." She drew a card from her pocket in a quiet, ladylike way and placed it in our hands with a pathetic, appealing look that haunts us still. We watched her turn away and noted the quiet, graceful movement with which she glided down the aisle and disappeared through a distant door; and our keenest sympathy went out to the poor, fair, frail creature whose burden of life was greater than she could bear. Could by any possibility a way of escape be found for her? We passed out of the church, which now seemed laden with an atmosphere of human sorrow and suffering, glad to escape to the free air and pure skies of heaven. From the Cathedral Square we turned into the narrow streets with their great grey palaces and enormous courtyards all full of suggestions of the past centuries. But the mighty have fallen: Aragon has not escaped decline any more than the rest of Spain. CHAPTER XXIII. IN ZARAGOZA. Bygone days--Sumptuous roosting--Old exchange--Traders of taste--Glory of Aragon--Cathedral of La Seo--Modernised exterior--Interior charms and mesmerises--Next to Barcelona--Magnificent effect--Parish church--Moorish ceiling--Tomb of Bernardo de Aragon--The old priest--Waxes enthusiastic--Supernatural effect--Statuette of Benedict XIII.--Mysterious chiaroscuro--One exception--Alonza the Warrior--Moorish tiles--Bishop's palace--Frugal meal--Trace of old Zaragoza--Fifteenth century house--Juanita--Streets of the city--Cæsarea Augusta--Worship of the Virgin--Alonzo the Moor--Determined resistance--Days of struggle--Falling--Return to prosperity--Fair maid of Zaragoza--The Aljaferia--Ancient palace of the Moorish kings--Injured by Suchet--Salon of Santa Isabel--Spanish café--Four generations--Lovely voice--Lamartine's _Le Lac_--Recognised--Reading between the lines--Out in the night air--An inspiration--Night vision of El Pilar--In the far future. The prosperity of Zaragoza to-day is entirely commercial, but on a small scale. It is not a great financial or manufacturing town. The rooms that once echoed with the voices of dames and cavaliers, flashed with the blaze of jewels and the gleam of scabbards, have now in many cases been turned into stables. The courtyards, once crowded with mailed horsemen setting out for the wars, are now given over to the fowls of the air, that roost in the eaves and have little idea how sumptuously and artistically they are lodged. Going on to the old Cathedral Square, we faced the ancient Exchange with its splendid cornice and decorations of medallion heads of the bygone kings and warriors of Aragon. The Gothic interior is very interesting, with low, vaulted passages leading to the one great room with its high roof and fine pointed windows, where once the merchants of the town carried on their operations. It would seem that in those past days the sale of stocks and shares, the great questions of finance, did not imply a contempt for the charms of outline and refinement. They loved to surround themselves with the splendours of architecture; and in more than one Spanish town the last and best remnant of the Gothic age is to be found in the Exchange. The whole square was striking. In the centre was a splendid fountain, at which a group of women for ever stood with their artistic pitchers, filling them in turn. Fun and laughter seemed the order of the day. The square echoed with merriment, to which the many-mouthed plashing fountain added its music. On the further side of the square is the great glory, not of Zaragoza alone, but of the whole kingdom of Aragon--the old cathedral of La Seo. The exterior has been much modernised, and perhaps was never specially striking. It is curious only at the N.E. angle, where the wall is inlaid with coloured tiles of the fourteenth century; of all shapes, sizes, patterns and colours. The whole has a rich Moorish effect almost dazzling when the sun shines upon them. Above this rises an octagonal tower decorated with Corinthian pillars. From all this glare and sound, hurry and bustle of life, you pass into the interior and at once are charmed, mesmerised. Calmness and repose fall upon the spirit; in a moment you have suddenly been removed from the world. At once it takes its place in the mind as ranking next to Barcelona. If some of its details are not to be too closely examined, the general effect is magnificent in the extreme. In form it is peculiar and unlike any other cathedral, for it is almost a perfect square, but this is not observed at the first moment; the Coro occupies the centre, and a multitude of splendid columns support and separate the double aisles. The nave and aisles are all roofed to the same level, giving a very lofty appearance to the whole interior. The vaulting springs from the capitals of the main columns with an effect of beauty and grace seldom equalled. To look upwards is like gazing at a palm-forest with spreading fronds. Like many of the Spanish churches, the light is cunningly arranged, and the shadow-effect is very telling. A solemn obscurity for ever reigns, excepting when sunbeams fall upon the windows. Towards evening the gloom deepens, and all looks weird and mysterious. The outlines of the lofty roof and spreading capitals are almost lost. We seem to be in a vast building of measureless dimensions: a dream-structure. The grey, subdued colour of the stone is perfect. Immense buttresses support the side walls, and between these are the chapels. [Illustration: AN OLD NOOK IN ZARAGOZA.] The first chapel on the left on entering is used as a parish church. Its Moorish ceiling is magnificent, though difficult to make out in the dim religious light that too often reigns. The chapel also contains a very remarkable alabaster tomb of Bernardo de Aragon, brother of King Alfonso. When we entered, it was almost at the end of a service, and for congregation the old priest had no one but the verger. He seemed relieved when it was over, waddled down the steps and disrobed. Then in a very kindly way he turned to us, bowed as gracefully as his rotund personage permitted, and bade us note the beauty of ceiling and tomb. "Light a few more candles," he said to the verger, "and let us try to get at a few of the exquisitely carved details. It is considered one of the finest Moorish ceilings in Spain," he continued; "and in my opinion it is so. You will mark the depth of the sections, beauty of the workmanship, rich and gorgeous effect of the whole composition. There never was a people like those wonderful Moors--never will be again as long as the world lasts. How these candles add a charm to the scanty daylight, giving out almost a supernatural effect! Has it ever struck you in the same way, this strange mingling of natural and artificial light? It is especially refining. Then look at this tomb, and admire its beauty--though it is of a very different character from the ceiling. Here we have nothing Moorish. That overwhelming wealth and gorgeousness of imagination is absent from the cold marble. But how pure and perfect! Note that exquisite statuette of Benedict XIII.: the figures of the knights that surround him with their military orders; the drooping figures of the mourners in the niches. But after all, what is all this compared with the splendours of the cathedral itself," cried the old priest, without pausing to take breath. "Put out the lights, Mateo," turning to the verger; and then without further ceremony led the way into the larger building. He had a large, red, amiable face, this old priest; some day we felt sure that he would die of apoplexy; but he was evidently a lover of the beautiful, and as evidently one who loved his fellow-men. [Illustration: NORTH WALL OF CATHEDRAL: ZARAGOZA.] "Look!" he said, throwing up his hands as we stood entranced at the scene. "What can be more perfect? Whichever way you gaze you are met by a forest of pillars--a true forest, full of life and breath, for are not those growing like spreading palms? And where will you find pillars so lofty and massive? Where will you discover such a feeling of devotion, so mysterious a chiaroscuro? Apart from their beauty, we must not disdain these influences. They are aids to devotion, and poor, frail, erring human nature needs all the help it can receive both from without and within, from below and Above. I always tell our organist to play soft voluntaries and pull out his sweetest stops, so that he may make music which will creep into the spirit and rouse all its capacities for worship. That should be the true aim of all harmony. Look at the richness of the coro--the splendour of the carving. It all forms an effect which makes this the most wonderful and perfect cathedral in the whole of Spain." "With one exception," we ventured modestly to observe. "Which is that?" cried the old priest, evidently sharpening his weapon of warfare--the tongue that did him such good suit and service. "Your cathedral is a gem of the very first water," we said. "It throws one into a dream from which one might almost wish not to awaken; but it is not equal to Barcelona." The old priest put his hand to his forehead and looked depressed. "You are right," he said; "I cannot contradict you. But then Barcelona is beyond comparison." Here he brightened again. "Let me tell you the difference. Barcelona was never built by men; it was the work of angels. It is a dream-building that came down from the skies, and some day it will disappear into the skies again. And then here we shall reign supreme. With all its beauty and splendour and charm, there is nothing here to suggest angel master-builders; it is a dream-fabric if you will, but essentially the work of man: firm and strong and substantial, lasting through the ages. In the days of the Goths there was another building on this very spot. The Moors came and it was turned into a mosque; and when Alonza the Warrior re-took the city the church was reconstructed. This was early in the twelfth century. Here the kings of Aragon were crowned with pomp and ceremony, and here our most important councils have been held. Now come and look at our Moorish tiles." And again, without pause in his talk, and without ceremony, he led the way. We could only willingly follow through the lovely forest of pillars, crossing one aisle after another, sharing his enthusiasm. We had the whole church to ourselves. The people of Zaragoza seemed too busy to trouble themselves about dreams of architecture. "Look again," said the old priest, as we stood outside in front of the north wall. "These tiles are very beautiful and remarkable. They are undoubtedly Moorish; the work of Moorish craftsmen. Do you observe the fineness of the colours, the rich deep blue that contrasts so well with the emerald green? You would think the effect of so much colour would be garish, but on the contrary it is quiet and subdued, with great dignity about it. This is quite the oldest part of the exterior. One can only regret that the whole was not tiled, for then we should have possessed a unique building with which to challenge the world. You see there are still evidences of an earlier church than this," and he pointed to certain remains which were unmistakably Romanesque: in the lower part of the apse, the buttresses and in one of the windows. "And there," said the old priest, pointing to an immense building, "is the Bishop's palace, which was sacked and ruined by the French in that terrible war. Since that day much that was interesting in Zaragoza has disappeared; but heaven be praised, we have still our cathedral, and as long as we have that, the rest matters little. And now I must wish you good-morning. It is my hour for breakfast--a very frugal meal with me, consisting chiefly of eggs and sweet herbs. Ah, señor," with a round gurgling laugh, "I see what you are thinking--that eggs and sweet herbs never developed this rotundity of person. You are wrong. I fast twice in the week; I never touch anything stronger than coffee; I have only two simple meals a day; and yet you see how prodigal nature is in her dealings with me. You doubt me? Come with me. I live at a stone's throw. You shall see my abode and interrogate my old housekeeper, and you will hear how she corroborates my tale." He led the way, this singular old priest, whom we found not only appreciating the beautiful, but brimming over with humour: one of those delightfully simple, self-unconscious men, who are all sympathy and amiability. We could but follow: down a small narrow street into a quaint sort of _cul-de-sac_, where we came upon an exquisite trace of Old Zaragoza. A small fifteenth-century house, with a quaint Gothic doorway, and a window guarded by magnificent iron-work. Touching a hidden spring, this door opened and admitted us into a panelled passage that apparently had not been touched for centuries. Then he turned into a wonderful old room, black with panelled oak, some of which was vigorously and splendidly carved. "This is my living room," he said, "and here I am happy. I live in the past; the fine old fifteenth-century days when men knew how to produce the beautiful and were great in all their ideas. Here I live, and here I hope to die." He went to the door. "Juanita!" he called. A distant voice answered, and in a moment a quaint old woman dressed in black appeared upon the scene. "Juanita, is my breakfast ready?" asked the old priest. "Si, el canon." "What have you prepared?" "Two fried eggs, canonigo, flavoured with sweet herbs; bread, butter and coffee at discretion--as usual." "You see," laughed the priest. "There is no collusion here! Would that I could ask you to share my frugal meal; but it is emphatically only enough for one--and that an abstemious old canon. Now if you will come and see me this evening or to-morrow, I shall be delighted to receive you. I would even ask you to come and dine with me, but my dinner is as frugal as my déjeuner. Well, for the moment we part; but you will come again." As we said good-bye, Juanita appeared with her fried eggs, and steaming coffee served in a chaste silver pot that must have been at least a hundred and fifty years old; and the old priest accompanying us to the door, speeded us on our way with true courtesy and an old-fashioned blessing. [Illustration: TOWER OF LA SEO: ZARAGOZA.] We passed from this delightful atmosphere into the modern streets of the city, thinking how little remained of its former traces. For it goes far back in history, even to the days of the Romans, when it was called Cæsarea Augusta; a name that in course of ages was transformed to Zaragoza. Early in the first century it was prosperous; a free city possessing its own charters, seat of the Assizes, owning a mint. But of the old Roman city all traces have disappeared. It was one of the first cities to renounce Paganism. Aurelios Prudentius the first Christian poet was born here in the year 348. Christianity was then the keynote of its life, and martyrs died for the faith. Now it is given up to the worship of the Virgin almost more than any town in Spain. In the eighth century it fell under the dominion of the Moors, who kept it until the twelfth century. Then came Alonso the Warrior, who captured it after a desperate siege of five years, when the people had most of them perished from hunger: one of the most determined resistances in the history of the world. It passed through many vicissitudes as the centuries rolled on. Then in 1808 came the French, who without taking the town managed to leave it almost in ruins. Then came the attack under Napoleon's four generals, and Zaragoza resisted them single-handed for sixty-two days of terrible struggle, combined with plague and famine. All Spain looked on and did nothing to relieve it. It fell in 1809. Since that time it has had a peaceful return to prosperity. Many of the ancient outlines and splendours of the city had disappeared in the "heap of ruins" left by the French. A new element arose, and as we walked towards our rambling old inn, with its thousand-and-one passages, we thought them painfully evident. At the inn we took up our guide, who escorted us through many streets and turnings to the Plaza del Portillo, where stood the ancient west gate of the city. It was on this very spot that occurred the romantic episode of Augustina the Fair Maid of Zaragoza; a Spanish Joan of Arc on a small scale. In the terrible siege to which the city was to succumb, Augustina was fighting on the walls side by side with her devoted lover. She watched him fall, death-stricken, then took the match from his loosening hand and worked the gun herself. Determined to avenge her lover, it is said that she fought long and desperately and with more fatal execution than any two artillerymen. But we all know the story by heart; and how, though courting death, she escaped all dangers. Not to see this romantic spot were we here, but the Aljaferia, just beyond the gate, in some measure by far the most interesting secular building in Zaragoza. This was the ancient palace of the Moorish kings, and still possesses some exquisite Moorish traces and outlines, though chiefly by way of restoration. It was built by a Sheikh of Zaragoza as a royal fortress, with almost impregnable walls. Ferdinand the Catholic gave it over to the Inquisition party to add to the power of this wretched tribunal, partly because in these strong walls the hated judges found a safe refuge after the murder of the popular and ill-fated Arbues. In the French war it was much injured by Suchet, who turned it into a barrack, then degraded this ancient palace of the Moorish kings and the kings of Aragon to the rank of a prison. Alphonso XII. restored the palace, and had it redecorated as far as possible to imitate its ancient splendour. The staircase is very fine, and the ceilings of some of the rooms are magnificent. One of the rooms is called the Salon of Santa Isabel, because here that future queen of Hungary, so famous for her goodness, was born in 1271. It is richly decorated in blue and gold. There is a small octagonal mosque of great beauty, which has been left just as it was in the days of the Moors; and some of the horseshoe doorways, in outline at least, have not changed. The visit was full of interest, and in spite of all alteration, carried us back to the days when that wonderful people reigned in Zaragoza. In the upper part was a magnificent armoury, kept in good order by the soldiers--for this fine old building has again been turned into a barrack, and devoted to military use. The day passed on to night, and there came an hour when we found ourselves sitting for a time in the café that is said to be the largest in Spain, studying human nature, listening to the music--for once an interesting and civilised performance. The room was gorgeously fitted up with gilding and mirrors that seemed to reflect a million lights. The atmosphere was fast growing to that state of blue haze which the Spaniards delight in, many of whom are said to carry on their smoke in their sleep by some process of conjuring only to be acquired after long practice. We happened to be looking away from the orchestra, in deep study of a curious group to our right--a group which seemed to comprise four generations. One was one of the oddest little old women we had ever seen, with a wonderfully wrinkled face, and small restless eyes sharp as an eagle's, and withered hands that looked like a bird's claws. This was the little great-grandmother. She had by no means passed into her dotage, the nonentity of old age, and was possibly not more than seventy or seventy-five, though she looked a hundred. Then came her son and daughter-in-law--unmistakably her son from the likeness to her on a larger and somewhat pleasanter scale. Then a still younger generation: a young man and woman, evidently husband and wife; she as evidently the man's daughter. These were better dressed and looked as though they had climbed a few rungs up the social ladder; they were prosperous in their small way; and the young man was distinctly of a better grade than his father-in-law. On his knee sat a lovely boy some five years old, fast asleep, his head pillowed against the father's shoulder. Here was the fourth generation. But what most attracted us was the singular beauty of the young man's wife, with her delicate flushed cheeks, her white teeth, clear hazel eyes, and abundant hair perfectly arranged. He seemed to follow her looks and hang upon her words and worship the ground she trod upon, and we did not wonder. We were absorbed in this domestic picture, when suddenly we were arrested by the spell of a lovely voice, and well-remembered words fell upon our ear. It was that touching song of Lamartine's, _Le Lac_, so pathetic in words and music. We turned and felt thrilled and startled as we recognised the face and form that had accosted us in El Pilar and poured out her sad story. But the face was changed. In place of the hungry pallor there was now a crimson flush; the eyes sparkled with light. Was it all due to inward fever, to the wine-cup, or to artificial aid? Not the latter, we thought. There was a beauty upon the face nothing artificial ever yet possessed. She was quietly dressed in black. It might have been the very robe she had worn in the morning, differently arranged. We must have moved or slightly started, for at that moment she evidently recognised us. For an instant her face changed colour, her voice trembled; then she recovered herself, and apparently did not again notice us. The very first words of the introduction had caught our ear with all the charm and familiarity of an old friend. All its dramatic power was well rendered by the singer. "Ainsi toujours poussés vers de nouveaux rivages, Dans la nuit éternelle emportés sans retour, Ne pourrons-nous jamais sur l'océan des âges Jeter l'ancre un seul jour?" So it went on, to the end of the declamation. Then, after a slight pause, whilst the accompanist went through the short refrain, the soft sweet melody, the graceful, mournful words rose upon the air: "Un soir, t'en souvient-il, nous voguions en silence, On n'entendait au loin sur l'onde et sous les cieux, Que le bruit des rameurs qui frappaient en cadence Tes flôts harmonieux! "O Lac! Rochers muets, grottes, forêt obscure, Vous que le temps épargne, ou qu'il peut rajeunir, Gardez de cette nuit, gardez, belle nature, Au moins le souvenir! "Que le vent qui gémit, le roseau qui soupire, Que les parfums légers de ton air embaumé, Que tout ce qu'on entend, l'on voit, ou l'on respire, Tout dise: ils ont aimé!" Not a word was lost. Every syllable rang out softly, distinctly, clear as a bell. We had never heard the song more beautifully sung, or greater justice done to its pathos. Every shade of sadness in its cadences was perfectly given. It was only too evident that trouble had helped the exquisite voice to its sorrowful ring. To us, who were to some extent behind the scenes of the singer's life, it was difficult to listen without emotion. We could read between the lines and knew the source of her inspiration; the deep suffering and misery that lay behind it all. When the song was over, with its applause that grated, and the singer had retired, we felt the room had become stifling and unbearable, and went out into the night air. The streets seemed to have grown small and contracted. Something must be done for that sad life that would otherwise soon be lost in every sense of the word; yet apparently we were powerless to move in the matter. Suddenly, as though by an inspiration, we thought of the old canon, so full of sympathy and human kindness. If there could be any possible way of escape, he was the one to suggest it; and we determined to lay the whole case before him. Thus thinking, we unconsciously found ourselves on the banks of the river. The night was clear and calm; the stars hung in the sky: the moon, brilliant and silvery, was rising behind El Pilar, showing up in magic outlines all the grace of its domes and towers. The old bridge spanned the stream, whose dark waters flowed rapidly through its seven arches. It was a perfect night, a witching scene. Everywhere intense quiet reigned, absolute stillness and repose. The world might have been a sleeping paradise, knowing nothing of human suffering. But we had learned that day by sad experience that the time for sorrow and sighing to flee away lay still in the far-off future. CHAPTER XXIV. THE CANON'S HOSPITALITY. El Pilar by day--In the old cathedral--The canon reproachful--Equal to the occasion--No pressure needed--_Un diner maigre_--Dream of forty years--True to time--Juanita--Fruits of long service--Exploring Juanita's domains--House of magic--"Surely not a fast-day"--Artistic dreams--Who can legislate after death?--Canon's abstinence--Juanita withdraws--Our opportunity--Canon earnest and sympathetic--Eugenie de Colmar--Canon's surprise--An old friend--Truth stranger than fiction--"You will forget the old priest"--Ingratitude not one of our sins--A _rivederci_--Canon's letter--End of Eugenie's story--En route for Tarragona--Landlord turns up at Lerida--Missing keys--Skeletons floated out to Panama--Domestic drama--Dragon again to the front--Tarragona--Matchless coast scene--Civilised inn--Military element--Haunted house--Mystery unsolved--Distinct elements--Roman and other remains--Dream of the past--Green pastures and sunny vineyards. It was the next day. We had again been standing on the farther bank of the river watching the flowing waters. They were dark and deep, a mighty stream that swept through the seven arches of the wonderful bridge reflecting its outlines. We had contemplated for the twentieth time the marvellous effect of the domes and towers of El Pilar rising like an eastern vision against the clear sky, had asked ourselves over and over again where we should find a fairer and a more striking view, and found the question difficult to answer. We had strolled over that same bridge back into the town, where the charm of outline and ancient atmosphere so strangely disappeared; had passed the fine old Exchange, crossed the square with its plashing fountain and ever-changing group of chattering women filling their artistic pitchers. Finally we had found ourselves within the cathedral, also, for the twentieth time, lost in this architectural splendour; this wonder of a bygone age, where all the fret of every-day life had no room for existence. As we looked, we noticed a portly figure hurriedly crossing the aisles in our direction. At the first moment he did not see us. An expression of intense amiability and benevolence "was upon the large round face, that would otherwise have been so ugly, and by its aid was made so beautiful. He raised his eyes and came down upon us as an eagle to its prey. "You are here!" he cried. "I have been wondering all the morning why I did not come across you, in what ancient nook you had buried yourselves. I was now on my way to your hotel to ask whether you had departed to other fields, and to find out why you did not come to me last night. To-night I shall make sure of you. You shall dine with me--I will take no refusal. For once the old priest's frugal fare must suffice you. It shall be a fast-day. Abstinence from flesh-meat occasionally is good, even for travellers. Tell me you will come. Do not pain me by refusing, or make me guilty of pressing you too much. Juanita, my old housekeeper, tells me she is quite equal to preparing you _un diner maigre_." Pressure was not needed; we were too glad to accept the good priest's invitation. He was given to hospitality in the best sense of the word, and we readily promised to dine with him. For us, the diner maigre had no terrors. "That is good," he replied, in his rich round voice. "I shall expect you at seven o'clock, though we shall not dine until eight. So you are still lost in amazement at this architectural dream. The oftener you see it, the more beautiful it becomes. With few interruptions I have looked upon it daily for forty years, and every morning its charm seems new and strange to me. Well, since I have seen you I shall not go to your hotel. I have sundry visits to pay to poor sick folk. Until the infirmities of old age become too strong for me I will not give them up. And before that happens I trust a merciful Creator will remove me to scenes where there is neither age nor infirmity nor sick poor in need of consolation." He hurried away, leaving us to the marvellous interior. We were glad to go to the old canon's, and felt it would be our opportunity for laying before him that interesting but unhappy case. [Illustration: INTERIOR OF CATHEDRAL, SHOWING CORO AND ORGAN: ZARAGOZA.] As the clock struck seven we rang the bell. The drooping handle was in itself an object of art: a wonderful specimen of iron work cunningly wrought. We were not privileged to use the hidden spring, which moreover we could not discover. The bell was immediately answered by Juanita in grey hair, placid face and black silk gown; a picture of high respectability. She greeted us with a serene smile and assured us that we were welcome: tones and manner a reflection of her master's: the fruits of long and faithful service. Hers was a face to be taken on trust. As we entered, the canon came out of his dining-room. "I like this punctuality," he cried, "and you are doubly welcome. As our frugal dinner is not ready, I will take you through my little house whilst a glimmer of daylight lasts. Let us first lay siege to Juanita's regions--my good old housekeeper who has been with me or mine for fifty years--ever since she was a maiden of ten. We will explore the mysteries of her preparations for our benefit. I always feel like a child when gazing upon her handiwork." A long passage panelled in old dark oak led from the dining-room to the kitchen. Here, indeed, we found ourselves in fairyland. The room was far larger than the dining-room. Latticed windows looked out upon a small courtyard, half conservatory, where bloomed a profusion of sweet-smelling flowers. The kitchen itself was a picture; walls were panelled, the ceiling was of oak; everything bore the unmistakable tone of age. Facing the windows were hooks and shelves bearing the brightest of brass pots and pans. The latticed windows, the flowers beyond all, here found their reflections multiplied. Every brass implement was of the most artistic description. At right angles with this, other shelves bore a small but special dinner-service of old Spanish ware, the only example of its kind we had ever seen. Below this was an old dresser on which the silver used by the canon was displayed, with here and there an artistic water-pot and cooler. In the centre of the spacious kitchen was a large, solid, substantial oak table. At one end lay some work at which Juanita had evidently lately been busy. At the other end was a small pile of the curious Spanish-ware plates, evidently on their way to the dining-room. Under one of the latticed windows was Juanita's help-mate: a young woman busily engaged in preparing a dish of olives. One could have lived in this room with the greatest pleasure, and never asked for anything more artistic or luxurious. A savoury smell, as of frying of eggs with sweet herbs, was in the air; yet were there no signs of stove or cooking. A huge chimney-place there was, in which half a dozen people might have comfortably found seats; but nothing was to be seen excepting a couple of old-fashioned dogs on which some lighted wood and peat sparkled and crackled, whilst the blue smoke went curling up the wide opening. "Wonderful!" we cried, taking in the incomparable effect of the whole room. "This is a house of magic." "Very simple magic," laughed the old canon. "I fear that in sleight of hand Juanita and I would be failures. Her magic lies in preparing simple dishes." "But where are they prepared?" we said. "There is neither sign nor sound of cooking here." "Come and see," laughed the canon; and crossing the kitchen, he led the way through a further door down a short passage into a small, whitewashed room beyond. Here on a large stove Juanita and her hand-maiden conducted their mysteries. A dozen brass pans stood upon the stove, and every one of them seemed in use. "Surely these are not for dinner!" we cried. "It was to be a fast-day." "A fast-day as far as flesh is concerned," laughed the canon. "That does not absolutely mean that you are to starve. I know no more than you what Juanita has prepared. If I intruded upon her province with the faintest suggestion, she might retaliate by sending us empty dishes. I fear our faces would lengthen before them--that is if anything could lengthen mine," he gurgled, turning his large, round, delightful countenance full upon us. "I see signs of approaching readiness in those steaming saucepans. Let us continue our inspection. Daylight dies; nothing remains but the afterglow." We passed again through the charming old kitchen, where the logs on the great hearth blazed and crackled. "Summer and winter, Juanita will have a fire," said the old canon, pointing to the crackling logs. "She declares that she is growing old and shivery, and the bright flames chase the vapours from her mind." We passed up the old oak staircase. Everywhere we came upon the same signs of age; the same artistic old panelling; bedrooms with ancient oak furniture, oak ceilings finely carved. A perfect house of its kind, and much larger than it appeared from the outside. One room was the canon's own sanctum, fitted up with book-shelves, where reposed many a precious volume. Amongst his treasures he produced some ancient illuminated manuscripts of rare value. The desk at which he sat and worked was placed near a latticed window in a corner of the room, through which one just caught sight of the tower of La Seo. Again we exclaimed that so perfect a house should be found in Zaragoza. "Mine by inheritance," said the canon. "Early in the sixteenth century it belonged to a far-away ancestor, who was Bishop of Zaragoza. Dying, he left it to his brother and his children, of whom I am a direct descendant. The singular thing is that between the bishop and myself there has not been a single ecclesiastic in the family. When I die, the direct line of nearly four centuries will be broken. The house will pass to my nephew, who is mixed up with Court life, and has married a Court beauty. He is already nearly middle-aged, with sons and daughters growing up. As far as possible I have ordained that the house shall never be altered. But who can legislate for what shall happen after death?" We returned to the dining-room, where we soon found that our fast was to be in reality a light, refined and delicate feast. Fish of more kinds than one, dressed to perfection; eggs and sweet herbs in many forms and disguises; choice fruits. And from his cellar the canon brought forth exquisite wines--priceless Johannisberg and Chambertin; whilst with our coffee he gave us Chartreuse fifty years old. Yet he himself passed over all delicacies, limiting his dinner to eggs and sweet herbs, with which he drank coffee. "You censure others by the dignity of excelling," we said. "Though crowding upon us these indulgences, you abstain from all." "I believe in St. James, who said, 'Use hospitality one to another without grudging,'" returned the canon. "I delight in doing this. Heaven has blessed me with means; how can they be better employed than in ministering to others, whether rich or poor? As for myself, do not think I am exercising self-denial. Habit is second nature. Did I not tell you that the pleasures of the table had nothing to do with my physical rotundity. But heaven be praised, I can still manage to roll over the ground without trouble." Juanita waited upon us with unruffled ease, her comely face looking the delight she evidently felt in dispensing luxuries. Her hands were clothed in black silk mittens; her black silk gown rustled with a gentle dignity as she quietly moved about, taking plates and dishes from her hand-maiden, who stood outside the door. Some wonderful old silver adorned the table and everything from first to last showed the ruling hand and head of one born and bred in an atmosphere of refinement. We had not sat down to table until eight o'clock, and when coffee was served the old clock on the oak mantelpiece had chimed nine, and its last vibrations had long died upon the air. Yet the time had passed with lightning rapidity, for the canon in giving us some of the experiences of his long life, and in telling us many legends of Zaragoza, had engaged our whole interest and attention. When Juanita had handed us coffee, and left the charming old silver coffee-pot steaming upon the table dispensing its aromatic fumes, she made us collectively a court-curtsey at the door and withdrew. Then came our opportunity, and we related to the canon our previous day's adventure, with all its sadness and its apparently hopeless element. He listened with earnest attention and sympathy. "The world is full of these instances," he cried with a profound sigh, when we had ended. "Do you wonder at my frugal living when I hear of these wrecked lives? I have seen so much of this terrible vice. I know how hard it is to conquer, how seldom the victory is gained. It requires daily care on the part of one stronger than the tempted, and too often even that fails. But who is this frail creature? She must and shall be rescued if human aid, under divine help, can avail. For heaven will not always save us in spite of ourselves. 'My Spirit shall not always strive with men.'" Her name and domestic history had been withheld to the last. We now explained who she was, who her father had been, his position under Government, his sudden death from grief. and we gave him her card, which bore both her married and her maiden name--the latter written in pencil: Eugenie de Colmar. The canon quite started as we spoke it, and threw himself back in his chair. "Is it possible!" he cried. "Is it possible! But life is full of these coincidences. Verily the Divine hand holds the threads of the world's human actions; and what we call coincidences are the silent drawing together of these threads for ordained purposes. De Colmar was my intimate friend, though many years my junior. He would come and spend a week at a time with me here, but his visits were not frequent. I knew little of his wife, still less of his child, whom I saw but once when she was about ten years old. I was told of his death; had heard of a tragedy; but the full details I now learn for the first time. It is one of the saddest stories I ever listened to. For the sake of the father I must make every effort to save the child. It will be a hard task, but only needing the more courage. To-morrow I will seek her out. She must be taken from this unwholesome life and excitement. I will tell her that she owes it to the memory of her father, in atonement for the wrong she did him, to place herself in my hands; to give up her will to mine. She shall come into this house and take up her abode with us for a time. Her reform shall be my daily care. Juanita, for all her placid face, has plenty of good sense and decision; she is quite equal to being her companion and to watching over her. It shall be done. I have seldom failed in what I earnestly took in hand, and I must not fail now." This was good news. A load was taken from our mind. Surely all this would bear fruit. There seemed every hope that this poor creature would be rescued and restored. When we got up to leave, it was with a light heart. The time had passed quickly and the hands on the old clock pointed to eleven. "Alas, you are going away. When shall we meet again?" said the canon, in tones as melancholy as we felt sure ever fell from his lips. Not his to look on the sad side of life. He passed his days shedding light and warmth around him like a substantial sunbeam, distributing favours with both hands. "When shall we meet again?" he repeated. "Perhaps never! Even the splendours of La Seo may fail to draw from you a second visit; whilst the welcome awaiting you from the old priest will be altogether forgotten." We assured him that ingratitude was not one of our sins. The delightful evening he had given us would be remembered for ever; we truly declared it a privilege and a pleasure to know him; a sorrow to say farewell. "It is a word I never utter," quickly returned the canon. "With me it is ever _au revoir_; if not in this world then in the next. And we have now a bond of sympathy between us in this poor creature whom I am going to save and rescue whether she will or no. She is our joint protégée; I shall write and keep you posted up in her welfare. Be sure that if any power can possibly reclaim her, she is saved. _Au revoir_--let us leave it at this. Heaven be with you--and peace." Full of peace indeed was the night as we passed out into the darkness. The stars seemed to shine down upon the world with a serene benediction. Much of the pain we had felt last night was removed. Surely no chance hand had guided us. The work begun to-night was destined to succeed.[C] Before turning in, we went once more round to our favourite spot. It was our last look by starlight upon the deep, dark flowing river, the wonderful old bridge, the faint outlines of El Pilar rising beyond. To-night all was shadowy and indistinct; a dream vision; and the only sound to be heard was the swirling of the waters through the seven arches of St. Peter's bridge. The next morning we left Zaragoza by an early train for Tarragona: a long roundabout journey. Again we had to pass through Lerida, where we had twenty minutes to wait. As chance would have it, our landlord was on the platform, speeding parting guests. We went up to him and drew him apart. "Tell us," we said; "what about the dragging of the well? Has it been done?" Our late host threw up his hands. "Oh, señor, I shiver and shake at the very thought of it. I had it done the very day after you left. And what do you think came up?" "Two skeletons?" "The keys, señor: the missing keys and a pair of slippers--very much down at heel." "And the skeletons?" "Not a vestige, señor; not a single bone. I told you the well communicated with the river, and the river with the sea. They must have floated out, and probably are now reposing in the Panama Canal." "But why the Panama Canal?" "Everything bad must drift there, señor. I lost a large sum in the wretched affair." "And have you seen no ghost since we left?" "No ghost, señor, and no mysterious sounds. All the same we have had a domestic drama." "The Dragon?" "Exactly, señor. Your penetration is wonderful. As she was leaning over her wash-tub, the waiter came behind and ducked her head in the soapsuds. Her mouth--you know her mouth--was wide open, and she swallowed a great gulp of soapy water; upon which, presto! quick as lightning, she up with her washing-pin and hit him on the head. Such a crash! Down went the waiter, and the Dragon was stooping over him with wet locks like a dripping mermaid, gloating and mouthing upon the ruin." "And the waiter?" "In the hospital, señor, with a broken head. That is why I am here. I have to come to the station myself, and be my own porter, and see my guests off. Servants are the bane of one's life. Like the flies, they were invented for our torment. But, señor, these troubles are nothing compared with the relief of finding that the skeletons had cleared out to sea." Our train came up and we went our way, leaving Lerida behind us with its fine outlines, and the landlord to the difficult task of managing his womenkind. So far we had travelled on the line before, but now branched off towards Tarragona. We did not again see Manresa, but even a comparative approach to its neighbourhood brought all the splendid and imposing outlines, the blood-red river, vividly before us. Once more we saw Mons Serratus with its jagged, fantastic peaks: lived through our haunted night in the Hospederia; again Salvador the monk and his wonderful music took possession of our spirit and Serratus itself appeared enveloped in harmony and romance. We were glad not to pass through the station, where possibly Sebastien would have been on the watch for passengers; and we should have left a heart-broken expression behind us at the very thought of our not staying a couple of days to see Manresa under sunshine. The day was wearing on to evening as we approached Tarragona with its matchless coast scene. The blue waters of the Mediterranean stretched far and wide, and the harbour reposed upon them like a sleeping crescent. As the sun dipped in the west, the waters flashed out its declining rays, reflected the gorgeous colouring of the sky. The train landed us in the lower town. We had to reach the upper town, and the rickety old omnibus rolled and struggled up the steep streets, finally depositing us at the Fonda de Paris. We found the inn quite civilised. The landlord was half Italian and spoke several languages. On the first night of our arrival the cook must have been in a very amiable mood, for he sent up an excellent dinner. But to H. C.'s sorrow and surprise the after dinners were a lamentable falling-off. The cook had been crossed in love, received notice to quit, or his art failed him: everything was below par. On the evening of our arrival, the evil had not fallen. The hotel, like many of the Spanish inns was large and rambling. Our landlord conducted us to excellent rooms facing the road, and from the balcony the scene was enchanting. Before us was an old Roman tower. To our right, far down, 700 feet below our present level, we caught sight of the sleeping Mediterranean. It was not quite so pleasant to find ourselves surrounded by the military element; barracks to right and left of us; sentries in slippers patrolling up and down; raw recruits, looking as little like soldiers as anything to be conceived; constant snatches of bugle-calling, which seemed to end at midnight and begin again at four in the morning. So far, all was unrest. But we soon found that the charms of Tarragona soared far above all small and secondary considerations. Down the long passage behind our rooms we came to the garden of the hotel. It was after dinner and pale twilight reigned. In the centre of the garden a splendid spreading palm outlined itself against the evening sky, in which shone a large, liquid, solitary star. The garden was surrounded by a white wall, and the scene was quite eastern. Far down was the wonderful coast-line and crescent harbour. Of late we had had only rivers, and this broad expanse of sea brought new life to the spirit. Returning indoors, we found the inn haunted, but not by spirits of the dead. The ghost was unmistakably flesh and blood. The first time we caught sight of him--it was a masculine ghost, therefore doubly uninteresting--he was cautiously putting his head into our rooms and taking a look round. The said rooms were raised above the rest on that floor by steps that led to our own quarters only. Thus the ghost was clearly trespassing. He neither looked confused nor apologised as he took his slow departure. All his time seemed spent in prowling about the passages in a spirit of curiosity or unrest. Often we found him on our premises on suddenly coming in, and once or twice, when quietly writing, on looking up were startled by an evil-looking countenance intruding itself at the open door, and as quickly withdrawing on finding the room occupied. We never discovered the mystery. Whether the ghost was a little out of its mind, whether it was its peculiar way of taking exercise, or whether it suffered from kleptomania and had a passion for collecting sticks and umbrellas, nothing of this was ever learned. We only knew that the ghost looked like a broken-down dissenting parson, that it dressed in sable garments, and went about with a pale face and large black eyes that seemed to glow with hidden fire suggestive of madness, and long, straight, black hair plastered down each side of its face; a curiously unpleasant object to encounter at every trick and turn of the gloomy corridors. Tarragona possesses two distinct elements, both in an eminent degree. The town, especially the lower town, is mean and common-place. Ascending beyond a certain point, you come upon everything refined and beautiful. It stands on a hill which gradually rises to some seven or eight hundred feet above the sea-level. At the highest point of all is its mediæval cathedral, surpassing most of the cathedrals of Spain or elsewhere--one of those wonders of architecture that visit us in our dreams, but are seldom actually found. It does not, however, stand out far and wide in magnificent outlines, like Manresa or Lerida. Only a close inspection reveals its charms. The upper town is surrounded by walls ancient and imposing. Within their boundaries are many Roman and Christian remains, such as few places still possess, making of Tarragona a dream of the past crowded with interest. Outside the walls the views are splendid and extensive. Looking towards the ever-changing sea, the coast-line is magnificent. Point after point juts out; hill after hill rises towards the East. Far down at one's feet lies the little harbour, encircling all the craft that seek its shelter: steamers from Barcelona with their daily freights, steamers from Norway and Sweden laden with scented pinewood, a whole fleet of picturesque fishing boats. Inland, the country is a succession of rich green pastures and sunny vineyards, whilst on the sloping hills afar off reposes many a town and village. CHAPTER XXV. QUASIMODO. Tarragona by night--Cathedral--Moonlight vision--Dream-fabric--Deserted streets--Ghostly form approaches--Quilp or Quasimodo?--Redeeming qualities--Pale spiritual face--Open sesame--Approaching the apparition--Question and answer--Invitation accepted--Prisoners--The Shadow--Under the cold moonlight--Enter cathedral--Vast interior--Gloom and silence--Fantastic effects--Enigma solved--Strange proceeding--No inspiration--Why Quasimodo turned night into day--Weird moonlight scene--Soft sweet sounds--Schumann's Träumerei--Spellbound--The magician--Witching hour--Cathedral ghosts--An eternity of music--Varying moods--Returning to earth--Quasimodo's rapture--Travelling moonbeams--Night grows old--Sky full of music--Lost to sight--Dreams haunted by Quasimodo--New day. That first night we went out into the darkness, when details were lost in outlines. We passed the barracks where bugling seemed to be in full play. A narrow street to the right led to a short flight of steps, above which rose the west front of the cathedral. As far as we could see, the porches were deep and beautiful. But it was the south and east sides that presented the most marvellous outlines. Even the darkness could not hide their beauty. And presently, when the moon rose and her pale silvery light shone full upon the grey walls and gleamed upon the Gothic windows and ancient tower, it turned to a dream-fabric. The night was intensely still, not a sound could be heard, not a soul was visible. Our footsteps alone woke the echoes as we walked to and fro before that moonlight vision, and felt unable to leave it. [Illustration: SOUTH-WEST EXTERIOR OF CATHEDRAL: TARRAGONA.] The cathedral clock struck eleven. As the last stroke vibrated upon the air, we saw a shadowy form approaching. It was not yet the ghostly hour, therefore it must be flesh and blood, to be boldly challenged. Was the mysterious being that haunted our corridors prowling these precincts in search of relics? No; as the form approached we saw that it was short and slender; almost diaphanous, almost deformed. The head seemed enormous in comparison with the body; legs and arms were unusually long. Yet even in the moonlight we noticed that something pale and spiritual about the face redeemed its ugliness. We thought of Quilp, of Quasimodo, all the grotesques we had ever heard of, but he only resembled these at a distance; we soon found that he was far better than they. This apparition was followed by a lean, lanky youth who seemed to be shod in india-rubber, so silent his footsteps. He towered above Quasimodo, whom he followed as a shadow follows its substance. We happened to be standing near a small gate in the south railings, and up to this gate came Quasimodo, inserted a magic key into the lock and swung it open. What did it mean? Were they, this moonlight night, going into the interior? What a weird experience; what an opportunity not to be lost! The apparition must be won over. "Are you entering the cathedral?" we asked as they passed in and half closed the gate. To our relief a very earthly voice responded in matter-of-fact tones. "Yes," it replied. "Do you want to enter also?" It needed no further invitation. We passed through, and the gate was closed and locked. As we heard the sharp click and Quasimodo pocketed the key, we felt ourselves prisoners. All the possible and impossible stories we had ever heard of midnight murders and mysterious disappearances flashed through the brain. But the die was cast and we must follow. The enigma which even at the instant puzzled us was the motive for this midnight visit. We could think of none. We stood for a moment in the space between the railings and the building. Repairs were going on; it had been turned into a stonemason's yard. The cold moonlight fell upon heavy blocks of marble lying about. There was an erection that looked for all the world like a gibbet, and we almost expected to see a ghostly skeleton dangling from its cross-beam. Quasimodo moved on and opened a small south door. He entered and we waited whilst he took a lantern from the hands of the Shadow. It was lighted in a moment, and we found it to be a powerful electric lamp. Then we too passed in, and the door closed upon us. If we were to be murdered, it would not be in utter darkness. The lantern was brilliant, and threw around its ghostly lights and shadows. We are compelled to repeat the adjective, for everything was ghostly and weird. The vast interior was lost in profoundest silence and gloom. No single light could reach the depths and spaces, but round about us the lantern lighted up the outlines of aisles and arches and pillars. The effect was inexpressibly solemn. There seemed no limit to the space. We paced the aisles and thought them endless. Our footsteps awoke ghostly echoes. As far as could be discerned, we were surrounded by the loveliest, most refined outlines. Gothic aisles and arches were dimly visible. And still the Shadow followed Quasimodo, and still his footsteps made no sound. Quasimodo walked in silence for a time, evidently enjoying our own silent delight and experience. His long arms and legs, his large head, his long-drawn, backward shadow, all suggested gnome-land. He swung the lantern about as though charmed and allured by all the fantastic effects it produced. At last we felt we must break the silence. "Why are you here?" we said. "May we ask? It seems so strange to be walking with you in this midnight space and darkness." "Can you not guess?" he returned. "What object could I have in coming here at this dark hour? Look." Then we noticed for the first time that the Shadow carried a music-book. The enigma was solved. Quasimodo had come to practise. "But what a strange hour!" we exclaimed. "You turn night into day. Is it that these ghostly shadows inspire you as nothing else can?" [Illustration: EAST END OF CATHEDRAL, SHOWING NORMAN APSE: TARRAGONA.] "No," replied Quasimodo; "I have no inspiration. I possess the souls of others, I have no soul of my own. It is given to me to interpret the thoughts of all musicians with a wonderful interpretation, but not a single thought of my own do I possess. Not a single line can I extemporise. I am like a man to whom has been given all the feelings, all the aspirations, all the fire of the poet, and from whom is withheld the gift of language. But I am content. All the thoughts of the great masters are mine, my very own, and I am grateful for the power. It is a gift. As a rule I need no music. All is stamped on my brain in undying characters. You shall hear. This is a book of Bach's Fugues that I scarcely need; and this quiet and devoted creature is my organ-blower. He is deaf and dumb, which explains his silence." "But you have not told us your reason for turning night into day," we remarked. "Everything about you is so weird and unusual that we cannot help our curiosity. You must not think it impertinence." "True," replied Quasimodo. "It must indeed seem strange to you that I come here now, yet the reason is simple enough. I teach all day long, for I have to work for my living. Yet I cannot live without occasionally pouring out my soul in music; and as I have no time but the night, I come here now rather than not at all. I was not here last night or the night before; I shall not be here again any night this week. I have to work not only for my own living, but for a wife and two lovely children. You start. You wonder that any woman could have married this grotesque creature--much more a beautiful woman. You do not wonder more than I do. I tell my wife that she married me for my music, not for myself. The music charmed and bewitched her; threw a glamour over her eyes and judgment and taste. She laughs in reply. We have been married twelve years now, and she still seems the happiest of women, most devoted of wives. Heaven be praised, there is nothing grotesque in our lovely children. They might have come from paradise. But now I will go and play, and you shall listen. You have chosen to enter here, and here you must remain until I let you out again. I will leave you my lantern and you may wander where you will." With that he placed his lamp in our hand, and lighting a small wax candle which he produced from his pocket, departed down the long, dark, solemn, solitary aisle, followed by his silent Shadow. We soon lost them in the gloom, and nothing but the distant sound of Quasimodo's footsteps told us we were not alone. Even this sound ceased, and for a time absolute silence reigned. Presently a far-off glimmer showed where the organ-loft was placed. Quasimodo had lighted the candles and taken his seat. We turned off the light of our lantern. The moonlight was playing upon the windows, and the pale rays streamed across the aisles upon pillars and arches. Never was a more weird, more telling and effective scene. We sat down on the steps of one of the chapels. The whole ghostly building, shrouded in gloom and mystery and moonbeams, stood before us in all its solidity, all its grandeur and magnificence. Intense silence reigned. We could hear the beating of our hearts, feel the quickening of our pulses. Then through the silence there stole the softest, sweetest sounds. Quasimodo was interpreting the thoughts of others. He had chosen that soothing, flowing, exquisite Träumerei of Schumann's, and rendered it as never rendered before. The whole melody was hushed and subdued. Nothing seemed to rise above a whisper. All the aisles and arches were full of exquisite vibrations. Quasimodo appeared to linger upon every note as though he loved it and could not part with it. One note melted into another. The sense of rhythm was perfect. We listened spellbound to the end. Never had the simple, beautiful melody so held all our senses captive. It ceased, and again for a moment the whole vast interior was steeped in profound silence; the moonbeams streaming their pale light through the windows possessed the building. Then a different spirit held Quasimodo. Our dream changed. Louder stops were pulled out, and he plunged into a vigorous fugue of Bach's. Again we had never heard it so played. Every note fell clear and distinct. The music seemed gifted with words suggesting wild thoughts and emotions. What Quasimodo had said was true. The souls of the dead-and-gone masters possessed him. He was their true interpreter. The fugue came to an end. Again a moment's silence and again a change in our dream. [Illustration: INTERIOR OF CATHEDRAL: TARRAGONA.] This time it was Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. More fitting time and place could never have existed. The pulses thrilled as we listened. Never had music seemed so perfect. Beethoven himself would have declared the rendering beyond his own conception. Quasimodo was a magician. His body might be grotesque, his mind was angelic. Be his wife never so beautiful, he never so grotesque, she could not fail to love that soul and spirit. He was worthy, and she was wise. Again the soft sweet strains went trolling through aisles and arches, all their exquisite melancholy cadence fully rendered. And presently it changed to the louder, more passionate strains, suggestive more of storm and tempest than serene moonlight. It ceased; and one thing gave place to another; Quasimodo's moods seemed as wild and eccentric as they were uncertain but ever charming. For two whole hours he kept us spell-bound. We never thought of the night; of the passing of time; of the necessity for rest. We were in a new world. The moonbeams travelled onwards and downwards. Midnight struck. Twelve slow strokes fell upon the air. The ghosts came out to listen; it was their hour. We were persuaded that the aisles and arches were full of them. We saw faint shadows thrown upon the moonbeams, as they passed to and fro. It is useless to say ghosts do not throw shadows: that night we distinctly saw them. The wonderful moonlit building seemed full of sighs and subdued sobbings. H. C. declared it was nothing but the vibrations of the organ: we knew better. The ghosts were sighing and sobbing at the wonderful music. There could not be a more ghostly time or place; and they would not often have such harmonies to listen to. The moments passed. One o'clock struck; solitary, melancholy sound; more suggestive of ghosts and death and the long journey we must all take before we become ghosts ourselves, than the twelve drawn-out strokes of midnight which bear each other company. Into those two hours Quasimodo seemed to have crowded an eternity of music. Every vein, from the mournful to the triumphant, from the faintest whisper to a crashing torrent, possessed him. He passed into Wagner, and the sweetest strains from Lohengrin, the most impassioned from Tannhäuser, thrilled the darkness. He slided into Handel's airs, and with the aid of a wonderful voix céleste, that loveliest of melodies, _I know that my Redeemer liveth_, stole through the moonlit aisles with such pathos that our eyes wept involuntary tears, and the Divine drama of nearly two thousand years ago passed in detail before our mental vision. Quasimodo seemed to have power to raise emotion, to play upon every nerve, and he appeared to delight in using that power. He went on in all his varying moods, until again there came a pause, and once more Schumann's Träumerei in soft, sweet strains went stealing through the aisles. With this he had begun, with this he would end: as one who had taken a long journey, and would bring us safely back to haven. A journey indeed; a flight into fairyland; spiritual realms where nothing earthly can enter. It came to an end: and we had to return to earth. Quasimodo had poured out his soul and was satisfied. No wonder he could not live without it. Such a gift must find expression, or the spirit would die. The lights went out in the distant organ-loft, and by the help of his taper Quasimodo groped his way down the winding stair, followed by his silent Shadow. We turned on the lamp, and its light guided him to us. He sat down beside us on the steps. "Well," he said, "have you enjoyed my music? Have they kept you spell-bound, all the thoughts of the great masters of the past? Did you think there was so much in them? Have I given you new ideas, revealed unsuspected beauties? Have the hours passed as moments? Oh, the divine gift of melody to man, which brings us nearest to heaven! How could we live without it?" He had played himself into rapture. He was intoxicated with the influence of all the melody to which he had given such amazing expression. It was a language more powerful than words, more beautiful than poetry, more soul-satisfying than love itself. What a strange contradiction had nature here been guilty of--this grotesque, almost deformed exterior united to such loveliness of mind and spirit. [Illustration: CLOISTERS: TARRAGONA.] But time was passing. We could not indulge for ever in these dreams, perfect though they were. The change in the moonbeams warned us that the night was growing old. The ghosts would soon depart to the land of shadows. Yet the building was so weird and mysterious, the outlines were so marvellous, that it was difficult to break the spell. It had to be done. The grey dawn must not find us here. All our romance, all our charm of music would evaporate before the cold creeping upwards of daybreak. So we rose from the steps, and Quasimodo rose too, and his Shadow took up its customary position. We still held the lamp. As we went down the long aisles we flashed it to and fro. Lights and shadows mingled with the moonbeams, and all the fantastic forms we awoke were only reflections from ghostland. At the south doorway Quasimodo inserted the key; the door opened and we passed out into the night. The moon and the stars had travelled far; the sky itself seemed full of all the music and melody we had listened to. Quasimodo locked the door and joined us, followed by his Shadow. But once outside the iron gate the Shadow bade him good-night by a silent gesture in which we were included, and rapidly and silently, like the shadow he was, glided away and was soon lost to sight. We stood looking at the cathedral, all its wonderful outlines showing up clearly in the pale pure moonlight. Silence and solitude now reigned within and without. Then we turned away, and Quasimodo accompanied us as far as the bottom of the steps. There he bade us farewell and we never met him again. The incident passed almost as a dream. We sometimes ask ourselves whether Quasimodo was really flesh and blood, or an angel that for a short time had visited the earth in the form of man. But he was no spirit. We watched his quaint shape as he went down the narrow street, flashing his light. Towards the end he looked back and turned the lamp full upon us, as though by way of final benediction. Another turn and he had passed out of sight. The street had not the glimmer of a light or the ghost of a sound. Our own broad thoroughfare was in darkness. The Roman tower seemed wrapped in the silence and mystery of the centuries. From the end of the road we looked over the cliff at the sea sleeping in all its expanse, bathed in moonlight. In the harbour one caught the outlines of the vessels, and from one of them came the bark of a dog baying at the moon. It was one of those perfect nights, still, clear and calm, only to be found in these latitudes. The cathedral clock had long struck two, when we finally turned towards the hotel. What if the night-porter failed us, as he had failed in Lerida? But he was more cunning. He was not there, indeed, but he had left the door ajar, and the gas slightly turned on at the foot of the staircase. We made all fast and sought our rooms. With open windows, even from here we could hear the faint plash and beating of the ripples upon the shore--the slight ebb-and-flow movement of this tideless sea. Our dreams that night were haunted by Quasimodo. We had left the world for realms where no limit was, and divine harmonies for ever filled the air. Some hours later this harmony suddenly resolved itself into a bugle call, and we woke to a new day. CHAPTER XXVI. IN THE DAYS OF THE ROMANS. Charms of Tarragona--Roman traces--Cyclopean remains--Augustus closes Temple of Janus--Great past--House of Pontius Pilate--Views from ramparts--Feluccas with white sails set--Life a paradise--City walls--Cathedral outlines--Lively market-place--Remarkable exterior--Dream-world--West doorways--Internal effect--In the cloisters--Proud sacristan--Man of taste and learning--Delighted with our enthusiasm--Great concession--Appealing to the soul--Señor Ancora--Human or angelic?--In the cloister garden--Sacristan's domestic troubles--Silent ecclesiastic--Sad history--Church of San Pablo--Challenge invited--Future genius--Rare picture--Roman aqueduct--A modern Cæsar--Reminiscences--Rich country--Where the best wines are made--Aqueduct--El puente del diablo--Giddy heights--Lonely valley--H. C. sentimental--Rosalie and fair Costello--Romantic situation--Quarrelsome Reus--Masters of the world--Our driver turns umpire--Battle averted--Men of Reus--Whatever is, is wrong--Driver's philosophy--Dream of the centuries. Only the broad daylight could discover all the charms of Tarragona: the beauty of its situation, the extent of its ancient remains. The very perfect walls, fine in tone, bore distinct Roman traces. Below them, on a level with the shore, were other traces of a Roman amphitheatre. There were also Cyclopean remains, dating from prehistoric times. Tarragona was a great Roman station when the brothers Publius and Cneidos Scipio occupied it. Augustus raised it to the dignity of a capital: and twenty-six years B.C., after his Cantabrian campaign, he here issued his decree closing the Temple of Janus--open until then for seven hundred years. Tarragona was already a large and flourishing city with over a million of inhabitants. It was rich and highly favoured, and its chief people considered themselves lords of the world. Many temples were erected, one of them to the honour of Augustus, making him a god whilst still living. There are fragments in the cloister museum said to have belonged to this temple, which was repaired by Adrian. On our upward way near the Roman tower we passed the still wonderful house of Pontius Pilate, who was claimed by the Tarragonese as a fellow-townsman. It is said to have been also the palace of Augustus, and the lower portion bears traces of an existence before the Romans. To-day it is a prison, and as some of its walls are twenty feet thick the prisoners have small chances of escape. Few spots in Spain are more interesting, or so completely carry you back to the early centuries. On its south wall is an entrance to a short passage leading to the Cyclopean doorway, communicating by a subterranean passage with the comparatively modern Puerta del Rosario. To the east of this gateway we soon reach the ramparts, just above a ruined fort, and near the modern battery of San Fernando. From these ramparts you have the finest view of Tarragona and its surroundings. On one side stretch far and wide the blue waters of the Mediterranean. Lateen-rigged feluccas, with white sails set, are wafted to and fro by the gentle breeze. Life on board seems a paradise of luxurious ease and indolence. Nothing marks the passing hours but the slow progress of the sun. The sky is as intensely blue as the sea, and the air seems full of light. You are dazzled by so much brilliance. Distant objects stand out in clear detail. The wide undulating plain stretches far away to the left, broken by towns and villages, the famous castle of Altafulla in the distance. Below the town lies the aqueduct, one of the most perfect Roman remains in Spain. At our feet are the city walls, enclosing all the wonderful antiquities, and above the picturesque roofs of the houses rise the matchless outlines of the cathedral. To this same cathedral we made our way this morning, passing through the market-place lively with stalls, buyers and sellers; Spanish men and women picturesque in their national costumes: a modern human picture side by side with outlines of the highest antiquity. Passing through an archway we found ourselves in the Cathedral Square, dazzled by the splendour of the vision. Here the market had overflowed, and the market-women, full of life and colouring and animation, sat in front of their fruit and flower-stalls. One and all tempted us to buy, and rare were the wares they sold. Again the new and the ancient blended together; for beyond the women rose those marvellous outlines, sharply pencilled against the brilliant blue sky: magnificent contrast of colouring, wherein everything was in strong light and shadow. Our strange experience of last night was still full upon us. We had hardly recovered from the dream state into which the marvellous music of Quasimodo had plunged us with strange mesmeric influence. The beauty of the night, the pure pale moonlight effect, had not prepared us for the splendours of to-day: so effective, lovely and diversified a cathedral: the most remarkable exterior we had yet found in Spain. The whole square with its surrounding houses is a dream. The church dates from the eleventh century. Above the round apse of the choir at the east end--probably the oldest part of the building--rose outline upon outline, all bearing the refining mark of age. Much of it appeared never to have been touched or restored. On the south side was a tower, of which the lower part was Romanesque, the remainder fourteenth century and octagonal. Apart from the east end most of the church is transitional. The roofs are covered with pantiles, but they are not the original covering, and are not quite in harmony with the rest of the work. The west doorways are very fine. Those that open to the aisles are of the earliest date; the central and more important is fourteenth century, deeply recessed, with a massive buttress on each side. This doorway rises to a triangle, above which are many statues of the apostles in Gothic niches. Above the Romanesque side doors are rose windows with rare and delicate tracery, and the south door has a finely carved relief of the Entry into Jerusalem. The internal effect was most impressive. Few cathedrals are more solidly built, yet few display greater ornamentation. The columns are splendid, their richly-carved capitals redeeming the somewhat stern severity of the pure transition work. The piers are very massive, and the eye is at once arrested by the early-pointed clerestory and unusually large bays. The view of the interior of the transept, above which rises the octagonal lantern with its narrow pointed lights is especially striking. A little of the coloured glass is very brilliant and sixteenth century, but the greater part is modern. The chancel is pure Romanesque, the chapels are chiefly fourteenth century. In the baptistery the font is a Roman sarcophagus found in the palace of Augustus. But the cloisters are the gem of the cathedral. Here again was an architectural dream, grand in design, of noblest proportions: six splendid bays on each side, each bay enclosing three round arches. These are divided by coupled shafts of white marble, decorated with dog-tooth mouldings. Above them two large circles are pierced in the wall, some retaining the original interlacing work of extreme beauty and delicacy, and of Moorish origin. Many of the capitals are quaintly carved, with humorous subjects: one of them, for instance, representing a procession of rats carrying a cat to her burial. The cat shams death, and the too-confident rats omit to bind her. Presently the tables turn: the cat comes to life, springs upon the rats and devours them. The verger or sacristan was very proud of these capitals, and of the whole cathedral: full of energy and enthusiasm: understood every detail, delighted to linger at every turn. He seemed intelligent and educated, and declared he was only happy when gazing upon his beloved aisles and arches. He begged us to give him an English lesson in architectural terms, which he soon accomplished. Dressed in his purple gown, he looked as imposing as any of the priests in their vestments, and more intelligent than many. Enchanted to find our enthusiasm equal to his own, he left the cloister doorway unlocked, so that we might enter at any moment. This was a great concession, for in Spain they keep their cloisters under constant lock and key, partly for the sake of the fee usually given: a mercenary consideration quite beneath our sacristan. He talked and exhibited out of pure love for his work. "The cathedral is my hobby and happiness," he said, "and I would rather die than leave it. I know the history of every stone and pillar by heart, could sketch every minute detail from memory. In those glorious aisles, these matchless cloisters, I feel in paradise. I love to come here when the church is closed and sit and study and contemplate. Born in a better sphere, I should have become an architect. All these outlines appeal to my soul, just as music appeals to Señor Ancora." [Illustration: CLOISTERS: TARRAGONA.] "Is he your wonderful midnight player?" "Si, señor. Do you mean to say you have heard him?" "We were with him last night, and spent more than two hours in the cathedral listening to his wonderful music." "It is hard to believe. Never will he admit any one to his midnight vagaries, as I call them. I do not know how you won him over to let you in; but he seems to guess things by intuition. Something must have told him that you had a soul for music, and he could not find it in his heart to refuse you." "A curious, grotesque man, who almost gives one the impression of being supernatural," we observed. "We all think he is bordering upon it," returned the sacristan; "half man, half angel. Curious and almost deformed as he looks, he is the envy and admiration of the whole town, has the most beautiful wife and loveliest children. He came here twenty years ago, a pale, slight, ethereal youth of eighteen, looking as though he had dropped from the stars, or some far-off paradise. People still wonder whether he did so or not.--Look señor," pointing upwards. "Did you ever see such outlines, such a vision of beauty? Is it not the very spot for such a soul as Señor Ancora's?" We were standing in the cloister garden, where orange trees and graceful shrubs grew in wild profusion and exquisite contrast. In the centre of the garden a fountain threw up its spray and plashed with cool musical sound. Surrounding us were the wonderful cloister bays with their round arches resting on the white marble columns, all enclosed in an outer pointed arch. Above them rose the cathedral against the deep blue sky. Outline above outline; Romanesque and Gothic; the lantern crowning the whole. The shadows of the marble columns upon the ancient cloister pavement were sharply defined. "No wonder you love it," we said to the sacristan. "Rather we wonder you do not apply for permission to live in the chapter-house, and take up your abode here altogether." "Ah, señor, like Ancora, I also have my domestic ties: a wife and children to think about. But, alas, my wife has no soul, and cannot even understand my love for the cathedral. That indeed ought to have been my wife, and I should never have married commonplace flesh and blood. Here I have been day after day for thirty years, in constant attendance, and I grow to love it more and more, and daily discover fresh beauties. There are no cloisters in the world like these. There is no vision on earth to be compared with this, as we stand here and look upwards and around. None." As we stood listening to the sacristan's enthusiasm, a pale, refined, grave-looking ecclesiastic passed out of the beautiful doorway leading from the church, and with silent footstep walked through the cloister to the chapter-house. He was dressed in a violet silk robe or cassock, over which was a white lace alb. As he went by he bowed to us with great gravity, but said not a word. There was a sorrowful, subdued look upon the clear-cut features, the large grey eyes. "That is one of our canons," said the sacristan, after he had disappeared into the chapter-house; "the one I like best. He too loves this wonderful building." "He is sad-looking. One could almost imagine he had mistaken his vocation, or gone through some great sorrow in life." "You are right, señor: right in both instances. He was a man of noble family, never intended for the church. Engaged to a lovely lady to whom he was devoted, she died the very day before they were to have been married. He remained inconsolable, and at last took orders. At one time he had an idea of becoming a monk; but he is very clever, and was persuaded to take up a more active life in the church. As you saw him now, so he always is; grave, subdued, gentle and kindly. No one goes to him for help in vain. Here he is venerated." We felt drawn towards this refined ecclesiastic and wished to know him, but no opportunity presented itself. The cloisters seemed to gain an added charm by his presence. His dress and appearance exactly suited them, giving them an additional touch of picturesque romance and human interest. The whole scene inspired us with a strange affection for Tarragona, and there are few places in Spain we would sooner revisit. A little later, when we were going round the precincts, they seemed suddenly to swarm with a small army of boys. These were turning out of the new seminary, a mongrel building designed on old lines, therefore neither one thing nor the other. We entered, and turning to the left, found ourselves in modern cloisters echoing with the shouts of boys at play: cloisters attractive only from the fact that they enclosed a small, very ancient church--the church of San Pablo--a rare gem in its way; with a square-headed doorway and Romanesque capitals, and a small turret holding the bell, above which was a thin iron cross. It was a lovely building, and lost in admiration we stood gazing. The boys who came round us without the least shyness could not understand it. "What do you see in it?" asked one of them. "We should like to knock the old barrack down. It takes up our play-room. A wretched old building, neither use nor ornament. But we can't get rid of it. It won't burn; it is so solid that we can't demolish it; and we daren't use dynamite. We have to put up with it." "And you would rather put up with the grapes and the oranges in the market-place?" we suggested. "We should like to put them _down_, señor. Only try us." Having invited the challenge, it had to be accepted: and the whole troop tore off with one consent to drive bargains with the fruit-women. One boy, however, remained behind; a fair, thoughtful lad of about fifteen, with large, dreamy, beautiful brown eyes. "Why don't you join them, and take your share of the spoil?" we asked him. "Señor, I would rather study this old chapel than eat all the grapes in Catalonia," he replied. "My father is the sacristan of the cathedral. He loves old buildings too, but not as I do, I think. I have made up my mind to be an architect, and when I can do as I like I will build great churches on such models as these, like the mighty men of old." So the father's love had descended to the son, and in the latter may possibly some day bear good fruit. The boy looked a genius. We turned away, and he turned with us. "What is your name?" we asked him. "Hugo Morales, señor. Will you let me show you my favourite spot, señor," he said; and forthwith led us to a short street of steps, something like the streets of Gerona, ending in a lovely old arched passage, through which one caught a glimpse of ancient houses beyond. Above the archway rose a wonderful old house with an ajimez window of rare beauty, and other Gothic windows with latticed panes and deep mouldings. Then came the overhanging roof covered with pantiles. The tone was perfect. Next to this was a small church with a Norman doorway, crowned by a graceful belfry in which a solitary bell was hung. If not the most ancient, it was certainly the most picturesque bit in all Tarragona. "And you really love it?" we asked this singular boy. "With all my heart," he answered. "I often come here with my books and do my lessons sitting on that old staircase that you see on the left. The house is empty and no one interferes with me. But I must be off home. A Dios, señor." [Illustration: SAN PABLO: TARRAGONA]. "Good-bye, Hugo. Keep to your ideals and aspirations." "No fear, señor. I mean to do so." And away he went, none the less happy for sundry coins that rattled musically in his pocket and would probably be spent in something more lasting than fruit and flowers; whilst we went back to our beloved precincts and studied the outlines of the Middle Ages. * * * * * One sunny afternoon we hired a conveyance and started for the Roman Aqueduct. It was the only conveyance of the kind to be found in Tarragona. The owner, who drove us himself, called it a victoria, and seemed proud of it. Large and heavy, it might have dated from the days of the Cæsars. Its proper place undoubtedly was the Museum of Roman Antiquities to which we had just paid a visit; and so perhaps there was something à propos in the idea of its conveying us to a Roman aqueduct. Our driver was dressed in a smock frock, and in the high seat in front of us looked perched up like a lighthouse upon a rock--or a modern Cæsar in a triumphal progress. We rattled through the streets, and soon found ourselves on the broad white road that in time, if we persevered, would take us to Lerida the chivalrous and true. Not the least intention had we of paying that interesting old town a second visit, but the very fact of knowing that our faces were set that way, brought our late experiences vividly before us. We wondered how it fared with our much-tried landlord; whether the waiter was yet out of hospital, and he and the Dragon had made up their differences or agreed to differ. Though the well had been dragged, it was possible that the skeletons were still there; perhaps had risen to the surface to refute the old saying that dead men tell no tales. We thought of our polite captain, and almost wished we might come across him in Tarragona. He would be sure to know our silent but interesting old canon of the violet robe, and would open many doors to us. Above all we wondered how Alphonse fared. By this time his wife would be resting in her grave; and he, poor lonely wayfarer, would haunt the sad precincts of the cemetery, and dream of his early days and of walking through the world with the wife of his youth. No doubt he was right and would soon follow her to the Land o' the Leal, hailing the hour of his release. But all this had nothing to do with our present journey. On each side of the road we found a rich undulating country. We were in the neighbourhood of vineyards, and the wine, when pure, is some of the best that Spain produces. Here and there stood a picturesque farm-house, with whitewashed walls and green venetians, and heaps of yellow pumpkins, cantaloupe melons and strings of red peppers dangling from the balconies: the usual thing in Spain and Italy and the countries of the South. On a hillside, an occasional village slept in the sunshine; a quiet little place, apparently without inhabitants or any reason for existence. [Illustration: AN OLD NOOK IN TARRAGONA.] Presently we caught sight of the wonderful aqueduct built by the Romans so many centuries ago, yet still almost perfect. In the days of the ancients it brought the water to the city for a distance of twenty miles. Those were the days when the Tarragonese called themselves lords of the earth; when Augustus reigned in his palace and the amphitheatre was the scene of wild sports, and temples existed to the heathen gods. The portion of the aqueduct visible from the road was as it were a gigantic bridge with two tiers of arches. It had all the tone of the centuries, all the solidity which had kept it standing firm as a rock. Nearly one hundred feet high and eight hundred feet long, it spanned a green and lonely valley or ravine covered with heather. The people call it el puente del diablo, and may be forgiven for thinking that more than human hands helped to perfect the work. We went to the topmost height and walked over the giddy stoneway to the very centre. There we sat down and felt ourselves masters of the world. Wild flowers grew in the cracks and crevices, and ferns and fronds, and H. C. stretched over the yawning gulf for one almost out of reach, until we gave him up for lost and began to compose his epitaph. But he plucked his flower, and after looking at it with a sort of tender reverence, placed it carefully in his pocket-book. "Who is that for?" we asked, for there was no mistaking his soft expression. "The fair Costello. That exquisite vision that we saw in the opera-house at Gerona. The landlord gave me her full name and address before we left. I am thinking of proposing to her. Her presence haunts me still." We knew how much this was worth; how long it would last. "You would bestow it more worthily on Rosalie. There are many fair Costellos in the world--there can be only one Rosalie." "Do you think so?" replied this whirligig heart. "Certainly Rosalie's eyes were matchless; I tremble when I think of them. And then we got to know her, which is an advantage. After all it shall go to Rosalie. The fair Costello might have a temper--there's no knowing." [Illustration: ROMAN AQUEDUCT, NEAR TARRAGONA.] We were undoubtedly in a situation favourable to romance. The scene was magnificent. Surrounding us was a wide stretch of undulating country. The land was rich and cultivated; towns and villages reposed on the hill-sides. Far off to the right the smoke of busy Valls ascended, and through the gentle haze we traced the outlines of its fine old church. Following the long white road before us, the eye at length rested on the blue smoke of quarrelsome, disaffected Reus, which prospers in spite of its Republican tendencies. Here more distinctly we traced the fine tower of the old church of San Pedro, in which Fortuny the painter lies buried. Distant hills bounded the horizon, shutting out the world beyond. But there was no more interesting monument than the aqueduct on which we stood. Its rich tone contrasted wonderfully with the subdued green of the ravine, the deep shades of the heather, so full of charm and repose to the eye tired with wandering over the glaring country and straining after distant outlines. We stayed long, enjoying our breezy elevation; going back in imagination to the early centuries of mighty deeds--those Romans who were in truth masters of the world. At last, feeling that our driver's patience was probably exhausted, and treading carefully over the granite passage of the viaduct, we made our way to the prosy level of mankind. The driver had drawn under the shade of some trees, and was holding a levée. Half a dozen other drivers were grouped round him, and the bullock-carts with their patient animals were waiting their pleasure, one behind another. They were all laying down the law with any amount of gesture and loud tones; all more or less angry, each convinced that he was in the right. Our coachman, as owner of a superior conveyance and a man of substance, was evidently acting as a sort of judge or umpire, and just as we came up was delivering his weighty opinion. But it appeared to be the case of the old fable again, and in trying to propitiate all he pleased none. A pitched battle seemed averted by our arrival, which put an end to the discussion. As strangers and foreigners were objects of interest, we had to run the gauntlet of their scrutiny. But they were civil; and curiosity satisfied, mounted their heavy waggons and set off down the road towards Reus at break-neck speed, raising more dust and noise than a hundred pieces of artillery. Fortunately we were going the other way. As the driver mounted his box he shrugged his shoulders. "It is always the same," he observed. "These men of Reus are the most revolutionary, most disaffected in all Catalonia. They always have a grievance. Whatever is, is wrong. If it isn't political, it's social. If it's not taxes, it's the price of wheat. Their life is one perpetual contention, and every now and then they break out into open revolt. Only the other day an old man of Kens, a distant connection, on his death-bed declared to me that he had made all his miseries, and if he had his time to come over again, would make the best of the world and look on the bright side of things. Just what every one ought to do. Enjoy the sunshine, and let the shadows look after themselves." So our driver was a philosopher after all, and had more in him than we had imagined. With Cæsar's opportunities he might have proved another Cæsar. Whipping up his horses, he began his return journey up the long white road. Making way, the outlines of Tarragona came into view, bathed in the glow of the declining sun. The effect was gorgeous; and we fell into a dream of the centuries gone by, when the Romans marched up that very same road with their conquering armies, overlooked the very same sea that now stretched to right and left, blue and flashing, and made themselves aqueducts. In this vision of the past we saw them building their mighty monuments, looking about for fresh worlds to conquer; and we heard the famous decree of Augustus closing the Temple of Janus as a sign that quiet reigned upon the earth and the Star of Bethlehem was rising in the East--divine signal and fitting moment for the coming of the PRINCE OF PEACE. CHAPTER XXVII. LORETTA. Our ubiquitous host--Curious mixture of nations--Francisco--His enthusiasm carries the point--French lessons--English prejudice--Landlord's lament--Days of fair Provence--Francisco determines to be in time--Presidio--Tomb of the Scipios--Fishing for sardines--Early visit to cathedral--Still earlier sacristan--Francisco's delight--Freshness of early morning--Reus--Bark worse than bite--Where headaches come from--An evil deed--Valley of the Francoli--Moorish remains--Montblanch--The graceful hills of Spain--Espluga--Francisco equal to occasion--Beseiged--Donkeys versus carriage--Interesting old town--Decadence--Singular woman--Loretta's escort--Strange story--Unconscious charm--What happened one Sunday evening--Caro--"The right man never came"--Comes now--How she was betrothed--Primitive conveyance--Making the best of it--Wine-pressers--Loving cup--Nectar of the gods--Fair exchange--Rough drive--Scene of Loretta's adventures. Our landlord was a curious mixture of three nations: French, Spanish and Italian. He was small, dark and wiry, and seemed to possess the power of being in half a dozen places at once, yet was never in a hurry. One moment you would hear his voice in the bureau, the next in the kitchen, and two moments afterwards you might behold his head stretched out of a second-floor window watching the omnibus as it turned the corner on its way from the station: watching and wondering how many passengers it brought him. If he did not succeed, it should not be for want of effort; but he had been there long, and apparently did succeed, flourish and prosper. He was a very attentive host, anxious that we should see and appreciate all the marvels of Tarragona. Having lost his wife, the hotel had to be managed single-handed. One son, a boy of fifteen, was being trained to succeed him. He also spoke French, Spanish and Italian admirably, and his ambition now was to go to England to learn English. So far he resembled our Gerona guide José, but the one had grown to manhood, the other was a stripling, though a bright and interesting lad. "You have not been to Poblet," our host remarked one morning, as he waited upon us at our early breakfast in the salle à manger. A great condescension on his part; everyone else was left to the tender mercies of the waiter who was more or less a barbarian. "No," we replied; "but we were even now debating the possibility of going there this morning." "It is quite possible, señor. You could not have a better day. The weather is perfect. The train starts in an hour, and the omnibus shall take you down. I will pack you a substantial luncheon, for you can get nothing there. My son shall accompany you to carry the basket." The boy, who happened to be standing near his father, grew elated. "Oh, señor, say yes," he cried. "A day at Poblet will be splendid. I shall have a whole holiday, besides getting off my French lesson this afternoon." "You shall talk French to us, Francisco, which will be better than a lesson. We decide to go. Pack an excellent luncheon for three, not forgetting a bottle of H. C.'s favourite Laffitte." "Of which I have an excellent vintage," replied our host, who seemed equal to any emergency. "Frisco, take care that you are ready." "No fear about that," replied the boy, whose eyes sparkled with anticipation. And he went off to put on his best Sunday suit. The landlord on his part bustled off to the kitchen, where we heard him giving orders to the uncertain chef. Presently he returned. "You will allow me to put the smallest suspicion of garlic in your sandwiches," he suggested insinuatingly. "It is the greatest improvement. The English have an objection to it, but it is mere prejudice." A prejudice we unfortunately shared, and our host went back lamenting our want of taste. The little incident brought back vividly days when we sojourned in fair Provence, and from the cottage doors, mingling with the pure air of heaven wafted across the Mediterranean, there came the everlasting perfume of garlic. Hotels, houses, cottages, all seemed full of the terrible odour. The worthy people of Provence, with their dark skins and slow movements, were indefatigable in trying to win us over to their side. It was almost impossible to enter a public conveyance without putting one's head out of window: and stronger than all the impressions made upon us by the charms of Provence, its ripening vineyards, its wines, all the beauties of sea and sky, mountain and valley, were our garlic reminiscences. In Catalonia we had it to a less extent, but it was an evil to be avoided. So our landlord went back depressed to his kitchen to conclude the packing of the hamper. Francisco appeared in his Sunday's best long before the omnibus. At least half a dozen times he came up to our rooms to remind us that it would only rush round at the last moment and would not wait. Going off for a month's holiday could not have excited him more. With an agony of apprehension he saw us walk to the end of the road and look down upon the blue sea that stretched around in all its beauty and repose. Already there were white-winged feluccas gliding upon its surface, their lateen sails spread out, enjoying the cool of the morning. The cliff was almost perpendicular. To our left a sentry paced to and fro, to overlook the Presidio, a large convict establishment below us on a level with the sea. If any convict had attempted to escape--a very improbable event--he would quickly have been marked by the lynx-eyed sentry, who was relieved every two hours. Side by side with the Presidio were the remains of the old Roman amphitheatre, dating back to the days of the city walls, the house of Pontius Pilate, and all the vestiges of the past. Close to us rose the old Roman Tower, from which very possibly Augustus had looked many a time upon the undulating hills and far-stretching sea, feeling himself monarch of all he surveyed. But long years before, the Phoenicians--that enterprising people of Tyre and Sidon, of whom so little is known, yet who seem to have possessed the earth--had made a maritime station of Tarragona. What it actually was in those days can never be told; no archives contain their record; but in beauty and favour of situation the centuries have brought no change. The scene on which we looked that morning linked us to the past. Four miles to the east, under the shadow of the hills, and within sight of the quiet bays, reposed the Roman tomb of the Scipios, who, in conjunction with Augustus, had so much to do with the making of Tarragona. It is a square monument thirty feet high, built of stone, guarded by two sculptured figures, with an inscription blotted out long ages ago. A lovely spot for the long sleep that comes to all. The hills are pine-clad, the bays sheltered; the blue sea sleeps in the sunshine; no sound disturbs but the plashing of the water that does not rise and fall as other seas that have their tides. Fishermen live in the neighbourhood, and you may see them setting their nets or fishing from the shore for sardines; with this exception the little place shows no sign of life and is rarely trodden by the foot of strangers. We felt its influence as we waited for the omnibus. There, at least, to our right was something neither Augustus nor the Scipios had ever seen--the small harbour with its friendly arms outstretched, embracing all the shipping that comes to Tarragona. The east pier was partly built with the stones of the old Roman amphitheatre, a certain desecration that took place about the year 1500. A crowd of fishing vessels is almost always at rest in the harbour, and larger vessels trading in wine and oil. We were not allowed to look upon all this unmolested. Francisco constantly came to and fro to remind us that time was passing. At last we turned at the sound of rumbling wheels; the omnibus came up. Our host had neatly packed a luncheon-basket, and away rolled the machine through the prosy streets. We had turned our back upon all the wonders of Tarragona. It required no slight courage to abandon our beloved cathedral for one whole day. True, before breakfast we had gone up and looked upon the magic outlines: that marvellous mixture of Romanesque and Gothic that here blend together in strange harmony. Early as it was we had found the sacristan, and he, in full measure of delight, had taken us through the quiet aisles and arches, twice beautiful and impressive in their solitude, and thrown wide the door of the matchless cloisters. They were lovelier than ever in the repose that accompanies the early morning light. But neither light nor darkness, morning nor evening, could abate the enthusiasm of the sacristan. All this was left behind as we rattled down the steep streets. The station was on a level with the sea, and in front of it stretched the harbour with all its shipping. The train was in waiting, and to Francisco's evident pride and enjoyment we were soon whirling away in a first-class compartment. He had never travelled in anything beyond a second. The freshness of early morning was still upon everything, and our interesting journey lay through scenery rich and varied. Before reaching Reus, the train crossed the river, then came to an anchor. We found the station crowded with country people going to a neighbouring fair. The town rose in modern outlines, above which towered the hexagonal steeple of San Pedro. It was evidently a bustling, prosperous town with manufacturing signs about it. Everything seemed in direct opposition to Tarragona. The one ancient and stately, with its historic and cathedral atmosphere in strong evidence; the other given over to manual work. The one quiet and conservative, the other quarrelsome and republican. It was from Reus that our carters with a grievance had come the day we visited the aqueduct: and back to Reus they had all gone to continue their warfare. We recognised two of them on the platform, on their way to the fairs. They also recognised us and touched their large round hats with a broad smile plainly meant to intimate that their bark was worse than their bite. It is in Reus that many of the French imitation wines are made and sent over the world, passing for Mâcon, Chablis and Sauterne. Much imitation champagne and many headaches come from here. Enormous wine-cellars, in point of size worthy of Madrid or Barcelona, groan with their manufactured stores. Reus has many branches of industry and might be a happy community if it would subdue its revolutionary discontent. It has yet to redeem its terrible murder of the monks of Poblet in 1835. To-day, however, the crowd in the station were bent on pleasure or business and the warring element was put aside to a more convenient season. They scrambled into the train, and away we went up the lovely Valley of the Francoli as far as Alcober: a favourite settlement of the Moors, where many Moorish remains are still visible. The fine Romanesque church was once a mosque, so that it is full of the traditions of the past. Onwards through lonely, somewhat barren country to Montblanch; another old town apparently falling into ruin, with picturesque walls, towers and gates. Onwards again under the very shadow of the Sierra de Prades, rising in clear undulating outlines against the blue sky; a stately, magnificent chain of hills. Where indeed do we find such beautiful and graceful hills as in Spain? Finally Espluga, the station for Poblet. Here Francisco alighted at express speed, basket in hand. We followed more leisurely, trembling for the Laffitte, but the boy was equal to the occasion. In spite of enthusiasm, he had an old head upon his young shoulders, and even now would have been almost equal to managing the hotel single-handed. No sooner out than we were besieged by a man and a woman; the latter begging us to take her donkeys, the former praising his comfortable carriage. Discretion and the carriage won the day. A long donkey-ride over a rough country did not sound enticing. As it turned out we chose badly. Poblet was some miles from Espluga, and we had to pass through the town on our way to the said carriage. It had been taken on trust, neither carriage nor donkeys being at the station. The town lies at the foot of a towering hill. From the station you cross over a picturesque stone bridge dark with age, spanning the rushing river. Standing on the bridge you look down upon a romantic ravine and valley, through which the river winds its course. On the further side you enter the town: a primitive out-of-the-world spot, as though it had made no progress in the last hundred years. The people correspond with their surroundings. The streets were narrow and irregular, and the virtue of cleanliness was nowhere conspicuous. Our landlord had well said that if we did not take our luncheon with us, we should take it with Duke Humphrey. Nevertheless, there was that in Espluga which redeemed some of its disadvantages. Groups of houses with picturesque roofs and latticed windows: houses built without any attempt at beauty, yet beautiful because they belonged to a long-past age when men knew nothing of ugliness and bad taste. No one had thought it worth while to pull down these old nooks and remains and rebuild greater, or even adorn them with fresh paint. Consequently we saw them arrayed in all their early charm. It seemed a very sleepy town, with little life and energy. People plied their quiet trades. Everything was apparently dying of inanition. Our donkey-woman was an exception: comely and wonderfully good-tempered, with a surprising amount of energy. Not having succeeded in hiring her donkeys, she was not to be altogether outdone by the carriage-man, and insisted upon accompanying us through the town, to carry the basket and show us the way. The man had disappeared to make ready. "You have made a mistake, señor, in not taking my donkeys. They are beautiful creatures; six grey animals, as gentle as sheep. As for the carriage he praises, I pity you. The road is fearfully rough. When you reach Poblet, you will have no breath left in your body. All your bones will be broken." This sounded alarming; but we discounted something for disappointed ambition. "Are these donkeys all your living?" we asked, already feeling a certain regret that we had employed the man and not the woman. "Not quite, señor. And then, you know, we live upon very little. You would be surprised if I told you how few sous a day have sufficed me. Hitherto I have lived at home with my mother and sisters, who do washing. We have had that to fall back upon when my donkeys are not hired. It is lucky for me, since few people come at this time of the year: very few at any time compared with what you would imagine. The world doesn't know the beauties of Poblet. It languishes in solitude. You will see when you get there. My beautiful donkeys!" she continued. "I love them, and they love me. I have some strange power over all animals. They seem to know that I wish them well. The very birds perch upon my shoulders as I go along, if I stop and call to them." "Where have you learned your charm?" we asked, much interested in the woman. The loud voice of the station had disappeared, and she now talked in gentle tones. "Charm, señor? I never thought of it in that light. If it is a charm, it was born with me. It is nothing I have learned or tried to cultivate, for it comes naturally." "Can you transfer the power to others?" asked H. C. "Really," he added in an aside, "if this woman were in a higher station of life I could quite fall in love with her. She must be made up of sympathy and mesmerism. What a mistake it was to hire that wretched scarecrow of a driver. Don't you think we might take the woman as a conductor and so combine the two?" We ignored the question. "No, señor," replied the woman of strange gifts; "I cannot give my power to anyone. But why do you call it a power? It is merely an instinct on the part of the animals, who know I wish them well and would take them all to my heart, poor dumb, patient, much-tried creatures. Shall I tell you how I came to keep donkeys? It was not my own idea. I did not go to them: they came to me. It is ten years ago now, when I was eighteen. I went out one Sunday evening in August all by myself. We had had a quarrel at home. My mother wanted me to marry a man I hated, because he was well-to-do. I said I would never marry him if there was not another man in the world. My sisters were all angry, and said that with one well married they would soon all get husbands. I was the youngest. At last I burst into tears, and told them they might all have him, but I never would. And with that, between rage and crying, I went off by myself out into the quiet country. I took the road to Poblet, and wandered on without thinking. "At last I came in sight of Poblet, and felt it was time to turn back. I had recovered my calmness, for I reflected as I went along that they could not make me marry the man, and that their vexation was perhaps natural. We were poor and struggling: he was rich compared with us. Well, señor, just as I turned I saw a beautiful grey donkey with a black cross on its back coming towards me across the plain. I thought it singular, for it was all alone, and I had never seen a donkey alone there before. There was something strange-looking about it. Evidently it has strayed, I thought, and must just stray back again. But with my love for animals I could not help stopping and watching. It came straight up to me, and put its nose into my hand, just as if it knew me. 'Where have you come from?' I said, patting its head. 'Your owner will be anxious. You must go straight home.' But there it stood, and there I stood; and for at least five minutes we never moved. "Then I felt it was ridiculous, and set off home. Will you believe, señor, that the animal followed me like a dog. I could not get rid of it. When I arrived home the donkey arrived with me. What could I do? There was an empty stable next door, and I put it in there, thinking it would be claimed and perhaps I should get a small reward. The animal went in just as if the stable had been always its home. As I was leaving, it turned and looked at me, and said as plainly as possible, 'I hope you are not going to let me starve.' I went in and told them what had happened. 'It must be your lover who has taken the form of a donkey,' laughed my eldest sister. 'He knows you are fond of animals, Loretta, and has arranged this plan with the devil to make you like him.' 'I should soon prove the greater donkey of the two, if I allowed myself to marry him,' I retorted." "Was the donkey never claimed, Loretta?" "Señor, you shall hear. To sum up the story, the donkey never was claimed. We made every inquiry; we did all we could to find the owner; it was in vain; he never turned up, and to this day the donkey remains mine. People said he was a supernatural donkey, but of course I know better. The next thing was, how to make him earn his living, for I was determined never to part with him. Then the idea came to me to convey people to Poblet. The story got known, and sometimes at the station there would be quite a fight for Caro, as I called him. There is still. It gave me a start, and now in that very stable I have six beautiful donkeys that could not be equalled. And they all love me, and answer to their names, and come when I call them. Whichever I call comes; the others don't stir." It was a singular but by no means impossible story. As H. C. had said, there was a certain mesmeric influence about the woman to which the sensitive animal world might very probably respond. "And your lover? You did not take compassion upon him?" "No, señor," laughed the woman, with a decided shake of the head; "but one of my sisters did; the eldest, who had been the most angry with me. And for the first six years they led a regular cat-and-dog life. Then he tumbled over the bridge into the river and was nearly drowned. He was saved, but his leg was broken and had to be taken off, and after that somehow his temper improved. My sister laughs and says she loves him better with his one leg than ever she did when he had two. She is welcome to him." "But you," we observed, feeling the question a delicate one, "why have you never married? By your own confession you are twenty-eight." The woman laughed and blushed. "The right man never came, señor, and I was in no hurry. I was quite happy as I was. Five men in this town asked me to marry them. I did not care for any of them. 'Will you love my donkeys?' I said to each. Not one of them said Yes; so I said No to all But now I have said Yes at last. And there he goes," she added. A tall strong man with a plain but amiable and honest face crossed the road, and catching sight of the donkey-woman sent her a beaming nod and went on his way. "You have chosen well, Loretta. He will make you a good husband." "I think so," returned the woman, and evidently her heart was in the matter. "When I asked Lorenzo if he would love my donkeys, he said: Yes, a dozen if I had them. So I took him to the stables, and called Caro, and it came and put its nose into his hand just as it had done to me that very first evening at Poblet. 'You're the man for me,' I said: and that was our betrothal." "And suppose Caro had turned his back upon him?" we inquired. Loretta blushed. "Señor, I should have been angry with Caro: and I should have had compassion upon Lorenzo. But Caro had too much sense, and knew Lorenzo was to be its master. He is a carpenter, señor, and has a good trade. There is your carriage already waiting." [Illustration: ON OUR WAY TO POBLET.] "Ah, Loretta, you should have told us this story before. We should not have refused your donkeys. It would be an honour to ride the wise and gentle Caro." "Another time, señor. You will be coming again, then you shall have Caro, though twenty others fought for him. No one comes to Poblet once without coming a second time. You will see." As Loretta had said, the carriage was waiting. The carriage, save the mark! If we had regretted the donkeys before seeing it, what did we do now? It was nothing but a country cart covered with a white tarpaulin, and a door behind about a foot square, through which we had to scramble to find ourselves buried in the interior. The whole concern was only fit for a museum of antiquities, like the Tarragona victoria. But the thing was done, and we had to make the best of it. Passing through the streets, we came upon more men pressing out the grapes. It was a much larger affair than that of Lerida, and the juice poured out in a rich red stream. Four strong men were at work. We stopped the cart, struggled out of what Francisco called the cat-hole, and watched the process. It was a case of mutual interest. The men had their heads bound round with handkerchiefs. The thoroughfare was the end of the town, wide and cleanly. Altogether this was an improvement upon the Lerida wine-press, and when these men offered us of the juice in a clean goblet, we did not refuse them. This attention to strangers was evidently a peace-offering; a token of goodwill; and the loving-cup was cool, refreshing and delicious. Such must have been the true nectar of the gods. "Almost equal to Laffitte," said H. C. "I don't know that I ever tasted anything more poet-inspiring. Let us drink to the health and happiness of the fair Loretta. Lorenzo is a lucky man." With some genuine tobacco and a few cigars such as they had never seen or heard of, the men thought they had made an excellent exchange. We left them as happy as the gods on Olympus. Soon after this we found ourselves in the open country. The roads were of the roughest: hard and dry, now all stones, now all ruts: some of the ruts a foot deep, into which the cart would sink to an angle of forty-five degrees. There were no springs to the cart; never had been any. It was stiff and unyielding, and evidently dated from the stone age. We did not even attempt to keep our seats, but flew about like ninepins. "The Laffitte will be churned into butter," groaned H. C. spasmodically, feeling a general internal dislocation. "Butter-wine. I wonder what it will be like. A new discovery, perhaps." But the luncheon-basket was in comparative repose. How Francisco managed we never knew; habit is second nature; he neither lost his seat nor let go the basket. Never in roughest seas had we been so tossed about. The next day we were black and blue, and for a week after felt as though we had been beaten with rods. At last after what seemed an interminable drive, but was really only some three miles, we turned from the main road and the common--evidently the scene of Loretta's donkey adventure--into a narrow, shabby avenue of trees. At the end appeared the outer gateway of the monastery, where we were too thankful to dispense with the cart and its driver. CHAPTER XXVIII. THE RUINS OF POBLET. A dream-world--Ruins--Chapel of St. George--Archways and Gothic windows--Atmosphere of the Middle Ages--Convent doorway--Summons but no response--Door opens at last--Comfortable looking woman--Ready invention--Confusion worse confounded--True version--Francisco painfully direct--Guardian gets worst of it--Picturesque decay--Gothic cloisters--Visions of beauty--Rare wilderness--King Martin the Humble--Bacchanalian days--When the monks quaffed Malvoisie--Simple grandeur of the church--Philip Duke of Wharton--Cistercian monastery--History of Poblet the monk--Monastery becomes celebrated--Tombs of the kings of Aragon--Guardian sceptical--Paradise or wilderness--Monks all-powerful--Escorial of Aragon--The great traveller--Changing for the worse--Upholding the kingly power--Time rolls on--Downfall--Attacked and destroyed--Infuriated mob--Fictitious treasures--Fiendish act--Massacre--Ruined monastery--Blood-red sunset--Superstition--End of 1835. Once within the gateway we were in a dream-world; a world of the past; a world of ruins, but ruins rich and rare. From the outer gateway a long avenue of trees and buildings led to the monastery. Far down you looked upon a second gateway with a wonderful view of receding arches and outlines. Between the two gateways on the left were the workshops of the artisans of the days gone by, now closed and desolate. Just before reaching the second gateway, on the right, we found the small fifteenth-century chapel of St. George, with the original stone altar and groined and vaulted roof. On the left within the gateway was an ancient hospital and chapel, both crumbling into picturesque decay: and on higher ground, the palace of the bishops, where they lived and ruled in the days of their glory. Exquisite outlines of crumbling archways and Gothic windows surrounded us. Over all was a wonderful tone of age, soft and mellow. Towers and steeples rose in clear outlines against the sky, outlines still perfect and substantial. But the outer buildings, which had been palatial dwellings, were mere empty shells overgrown with weeds, given over to the bats and the owls. A wonderful bit of moulding or fragment of an archway, Roman or Gothic as might happen, showed the beauty and magnificence of what had once been, and would still exist but for the barbarities of man. Some of the outer walls might have defied a millennium of years. It was a dead world of surpassing beauty and refinement: a series of crumbling arches and moss-grown fragments of gigantic walls. We had it all to ourselves; the perfect repose was unbroken; no restless forms and loud voices intruded; no jarring element broke the spell of the centuries. We were in the very atmosphere of the Middle Ages. In days gone by the monastery must have been of regal splendour, as it was unlimited in power. At last we reached the convent doorway and a bell went echoing through the silence. No one responded, and we began to fear that perhaps the custodian had gone off like our night porter in Lerida, taking the keys with him. A second summons produced echoing footsteps, and the door was opened by a comfortable looking woman, who was neither a ruin nor a fragment nor specially antique. "Excuse me for keeping you waiting," she said. "I am not the guardian, only his humble wife. In fact he calls me his chattel. I object to the term. We did not expect any one here to-day, and he has just gone out to do a little commission." But we discovered that this was a stretch of the imagination. In reality the old man, seized with a fit of laziness, was only then dressing. He appeared on the scene almost at once, somewhat to his spouse's confusion. But she made the best of it, and patting her capacious apron and stiffening her neck, walked off with a proud step and a jaunty air to her special quarters. "We have had no one here for a fortnight," said the guardian. "I began to think we might advertise ourselves as closed for the winter season, like the seaside casinos. Quite worn out with doing nothing, I thought I might as well spend the morning in bed for a change. Of course just as an umbrella brings sunshine, so my staying in bed brought visitors." "But your wife said that you had gone out to do a commission," cried Francisco, with all a boy's direct statement of the truth. "Did she indeed now," replied the old guardian calmly. "That was over-zeal on her part; done with a good motive, but still wrong. I shall have to chastise her." "How shall you do it?" asked Francisco. "Beat her?" "We don't beat women, young señor," replied the guardian severely. "My chastisement takes the form of admonition." "When I wanted punishing, my father used to beat me with a cane," returned Francisco. "I don't think admonition would have done me any good at all. I don't suppose it will do your wife any good. On the very next occasion she'll tell another white lie. Much better give her a caning and have done with it." "Did your father ever cane his wife?" asked the old man drily. "She would have been much more likely to cane him," returned Francisco emphatically. "Does your wife beat you?" The old man felt he was getting the worst of it; was being driven into a corner by this enfant terrible; and took refuge in silence. This interesting conversation took place just inside the doorway, where we found ourselves lost in the beauty of the scene. A court with round arches on either side resting on pillars with small capitals. Above them the walls were in their rough, rude state, full of picturesque decay, but here as in many parts of the interior much had been restored. Nevertheless, so much of the original remains that the restoration does not offend. It has been well done. Before us, at the end of the short entrance-court was a large and splendid archway, and beyond we had a distant view of the Gothic cloisters. [Illustration: ENTRANCE TO CLOISTERS: POBLET.] The interior was so immense, the passages were so intricate, we could never have found our way without the custodian. Nothing could be lovelier than the half-ruined cloisters. The large exquisite windows were of rich pointed work, seven bays on each side, pillars and tracery either almost all gone, or partly restored. In one corner of the quadrangle was a hexagon glorieta enclosing the fountain that in days gone by supplied monks and bishops with water. Weeds and shrubs and stunted trees grew about it; a rare wilderness. Above rose the outlines of battlemented walls; of ruined pointed windows, lovely in decay; of crumbling stairways, rich mouldings and pointed roofs. The cloister passages opened to enormous rooms. On the east side was the chapter-house, supported by four exquisite pillars, from which sprang the groining of the roof; the doors and windows were specially graceful and refined; the floor was paved with monumental stones of the dead-and-gone abbots, many of the inscriptions effaced by time. Near this was the large refectory with pillars and pointed vault. Up the staircase, which still remains, we passed to the palace del Rey Martin; King Martin the Humble as he was called; and large and baronial in days gone by the palace must have been, its very aspect transporting one to feudal times. Below the palace were enormous vaults where the wine was once stored: great vats and channels, and a whole series of processes to which the wine was subjected. Those must have been bacchanalian days, and supplies never failed. All the rooms--the Chocolateria, where the abbots took their chocolate, the Novitiate, of enormous dimensions, the Library, the room of the Archives, the room that contained the rich monastery treasure, another that had nothing but rare MSS., some of which are scattered but many more destroyed--all these rooms seemed countless, and each had its special charm and atmosphere. It was impossible to enter the refectory with its vaulted roof lost in the semi-obscurity which reigned, without conjuring up a vision of monks and abbots who in past centuries feasted here and quaffed each other in draughts of rich Malvoisie. In the palace del Rey Martin, we imagined all the regal pomp and splendour in which the king delighted. In the wine vaults we beheld the wine running in deep red streams, traced it to the refectory table, and noticed the rapidity with which it disappeared before the worthy abbots. In the vaults it passed through every stage, from the crushing of the grape to the final storing in barrels. On one side of the cloisters was the partly restored church, high and wide, with a magnificent nave of seven fine bays, so slightly pointed as to be almost Romanesque. We were lost in wonder at the size of the building, its simple grandeur, even as a partial ruin. Open to it from the north side is the great sacristy, saddest room of all. For here we find a solitary tombstone on which is inscribed the name of Philip Duke of Wharton, who came over to the monastery, a lonely exile, and died at the age of thirty-two, without friend or servant to soothe his last moments, knowing little or nothing of the language of the monks who surrounded him. Most melancholy of stories. In the church, on each side of the high altar were remains of once splendid tombs. They are now defaced, and the effigies have altogether disappeared. Here was once the tomb of Jayme el Conquistador, which we had looked upon that very morning with our amiable sacristan on the left of the Coro in Tarragona cathedral. Its ancient resting-place in the great monastery church is now an empty space. The aisle behind the high altar contains five chapels, and behind these outside the church lies the cemetery of the monks, a beautiful and ideal spot with long rows of round arches one beyond another, so that you seem to be looking into vistas of countless pillars. Above the arches and pillars are walls of amazing thickness, with windows and projections, all ending in moss-grown, crumbling outlines. Below, small mounds and tombstones mark the resting-place of the dead. Here they sleep forgotten; no sign or sound penetrates from the outer world, and those who visit them are comparatively few. The whole monastery is nothing but an accumulation of crumbling walls still strong and majestic, of church and cloister, of palace and palatial courts, of refined Gothic windows with broken tracery, of ancient stairways and flying arches. Over all was the exquisite tone of age. It was originally a Cistercian monastery, dating from the middle of the twelfth century. Its abbots were bishops, who lived in great pomp and almost unlimited wealth and power. "Which they used according to their lights," said our custodian; "sometimes wisely, sometimes wastefully. I should like to have been cellarman to the old abbots in the days when the vaults were full of wine and a few quarts a day more or less were never missed." "Is there any legend connected with its origin?" "Indeed, yes, señor. When was there ever an old institution in Spain without its legend? As the señor knows and sees, the monastery dates back to the year 1150. But long before that, in the days of the Moors, a hermit named Poblet took refuge here that he might pray in peace. An emir found him one day, captured him and put him into prison. Angels came three times over and broke his chains. The emir grew frightened, repented, set the hermit at liberty, and gave him all the surrounding territory in this fertile valley of La Conca de Barbera. In 1140 the body of Poblet was miraculously discovered. It was nothing but a heap of bones, and so I suppose they were labelled, or how could they have identified them--but I don't know about that. The bones of course became sacred and had to be duly honoured. So Ramon Berenguer IV. built the convent of El Santo; the bones were interred under the high altar, and the king gave enormous grants to the clergy. The place grew celebrated above all others in Catalonia; it become a sort of Escorial, and here the kings of Aragon for a long time were buried." "And the bones of the hermit--where are they?" "Nobody knows," replied the guardian, shaking his head wisely. "They may pretend, but nobody knows. Is it likely? And what does it matter for a few human bones? Just as if they could work miracles or do any good. A poor old hermit, with all our weaknesses upon him!" "Then you don't believe the legend?" "Not I, señor. I believe much more in the jovial times the old abbots indulged in. At least we have a capacious refectory and inexhaustible wine vaults to prove what fine banquets they had in the Middle Ages. We have come down to poor times, in my opinion. The world in general seems very much what this monastery is--a patched-up ruin." "If the world were only half as beautiful," said H. C., "we should spend our years in a dream." "It would not be my sort of dream, señor," returned the old guardian drily. "I have been here for twenty years, and confess I would give all the ruins in the world for a good and gay back street in Madrid or Barcelona. To you, señor, who probably come from the great cities of the world and mix with gay crowds--well, I dare say you think this paradise. To me it is a dreary wilderness." It was not to be expected that the old custodian would appreciate all the beauty and refinement, all the ecclesiastical, regal and historical atmosphere that surrounded it with a special halo. And perhaps twenty years' contemplation of the outlines would have made many a better man long for a change of scene. Custom stales and familiarity breeds contempt. But not twice twenty years could have made us unmindful of the singular beauty of Poblet. [Illustration: MONKS' BURIAL GROUND: POBLET.] We had got round to the lovely cloisters again, and Francisco declared it was time to display the luncheon-basket. So there, in the silent cloisters, surrounded by all the tone and atmosphere and outlines of the early centuries, we spread our feast. The old guardian was equal to the occasion and produced table and chairs. Those he placed in the quadrangle, under the blue skies. The lovely glorieta was on one side of us; on the other, by looking through the broken tracery down the silent passage, we caught the outlines of the great church; a wonderful view and vision. Our host, better than his orders, had packed up two bottles of wine, and H. C. in the largeness of his heart presented the guardian with a brimming bumper of choice Laffitte, that nearly half emptied one of the bottles. Like a true courtier, he bowed and drank to our health and happiness, and when the wine had disappeared, patted his fine rotundity with affectionate appreciation. "Señor," he cried, "this is better than anything I ever tasted. A bottle of this a day would reconcile me even to the solitude of Poblet. Surely the old abbots never had anything equal to this--even when they drank Malvoisie. It has set the blood coursing through my veins as I have not felt it for twenty years. For such as this some people would sell their souls." The excellent fumes must have penetrated even to the guardian's private rooms, for at this moment, with an air of great innocence, the wife appeared upon the scene. Francisco declared she had heard the cork drawn and arrived for a share of good things. With true gallantry, but a sinking at the heart for the diminishing Laffitte, H. C. poured out another bumper and offered it to the lady, whose proportions matched her husband's. It was accepted with a reverence, and if appreciation were a reward for the empty bottle, H. C. had his to the full. Then the comfortable pair retired to the cloister passage, where the guardian had his own table and chairs and display of photographs, and there they sat down and contemplated life under Laffitte influence. Judging by their expressions they were in the enjoyment of infinite beatitudes. [Illustration: RUINS OF POBLET.] It was a calm, quiet, delicious hour, far removed from the world. For the moment we were back in the centuries, picturing scenes of the past. Days when Poblet rose from small things to great; when its abbots became mitred; when they could ask nothing of the kings of Aragon that was not immediately granted. The kings delighted to honour them. Wealth flowed into the treasury; power multiplied. At last they ruled as despots. The kings built them a palace within the hallowed precincts. Side by side dwelt humble monk and crowned head. Humble? Where the regal will clashed with the monkish, the king went on his knees and gave way. It became the Escorial of Aragon, a thousand times more beautiful and perfect than that other Escorial reposing on the hill-slopes of Castile. Here it pleased the kings to be buried, and close to the monks' cemetery reposed the dead who had held the sceptre. No special tomb or carved sarcophagus marked their rank. In death all should be equal. Or if there were tombs decorated with gold and enriched with sculpture, they were placed in the great church. What more indeed could they want than these wonderful arcades reposing under the pure skies of heaven. But the monks grew stiff-necked and proud; waxed rich and powerful, grasping and avaricious. Since kings bowed down to them, they were the excellent of the earth. Humility fled away. They were paving the road to their own downfall. At last they would only admit those of highest rank into their community. Of course they upheld the kingly power whilst trying to make it subservient to themselves. The throne was their stronghold: Republicanism meant confiscation. The revolutions of the world have attacked the religious orders before all else with hatred and violence. Time rolled on. Ferdinand VII. died, and in the War of Succession they became politically unpopular. Socially they had long been disliked for their oppression of the peasantry; but strong and rich, the feeling had to be cherished in silence. The monks were Carlists to the backbone. At length, in the year, 1835, Poblet was attacked by the peasantry, who came down like a furious avalanche upon the building that for its beauty should have been held twice sacred. By this time, too, a change for the better had come over the monks. Much wealth and influence had gone from them; they were quietly doing good. But the traditions of the past are slow in dying. The mob believed the monastery was a vast treasure-house; untold riches lay buried in fictitious graves, hidden in tombs and hollow pillars. It was now that the men of Reus proved capable of fiendish acts of excitement. The monks were driven from their refuge and many were cruelly massacred. The pent-up fury of ages was let loose like a torrent. No power could stay the thirst for so-called revenge. It was their hour; a short-lived hour; but how much was accomplished! The monastery was ruined. The mob, infuriated at finding no heaps of gold, no hidden treasures, tore down pillars, defaced monuments, desecrated the church, left the beautiful traceried windows in ruins, and then set fire to the building. The sun had risen on as fair and peaceful a scene as earth could show; it set on the saddest of devastations. Yet, thanks to the solid masonry, much escaped. For the monks it was lamentation and mourning and woe. It has been recorded that the sun went down in a deep-red ball, reflection of the blood of the martyred monks. But the people are superstitious. We have seen it ourselves sink over the Spanish plains also a fiery-red ball, intense and glowing, when the world was at peace. Yet, it must have been a special sunset on that memorable day of 1835, for it is recorded that long after the sun disappeared clouds shot to and fro in the sky like swords of flame. But this, too, we have gazed upon in days of peace and quietness. CHAPTER XXIX. LORENZO. Day visions--All passes away--End of the feast--Francisco gathers up the fragments--Ghosts of the past--Outside the monastery--Oasis in a desert--After the vintage--Francisco gleans--Guilty conscience--Custom of country--Dessert--Primitive watering-place--Off to the fair--Groans and lamentations--Sagacious animal--Cause of sorrows--Rage and anger--Donkey listens and understands--A hard life--Washing a luxury--Charity bestowed--Deserted settlement--Quaint interior--Back to the monastery--Invidious comparisons--A promise--Good-bye to Poblet--Troubled sea again--Suffering driver--Atonement for sins--Earns paradise--Wine-pressers again--Rich stores--Good samaritans--Quaint old town--Bygone prosperity--Lorenzo--Marriage made in heaven--House inspected--On the bridge--At the station--Kindly offer--Glorious sunset--Loretta's good-bye--"What shall it be?"--Flying moments--As the train rolls off. All this passed before us as a vision whilst we sat in those wonderful cloisters. We imagined the scene in all its ancient glory. We saw monks pacing to and fro in their picturesque Benedictine dress. The proud step of a mitred abbot echoed as it passed onwards in pomp and ceremony and disappeared up the staircase to the palace of King Martin the Humble: far more humble and conciliating than the uncrowned kings of Poblet. We heard the monotone of the Miserere ascending through the dim aisles of the great church, the monks bowing their heads in mock humility. We saw Martin the Humble take the throne-seat to the right of the altar as though he felt himself least of all the assembled. And we saw that solitary death-bed of Wharton the self-banished whilst yet in his youth, and marvelled what silent, secret sorrow had bid him flee the world. Everything had passed away; kings and monks, wealth and power, and to-day the silence of death reigns in Poblet. [Illustration: CLOISTERS OF POBLET.] When our modest feast was over, and H. C. had tried for the third time to extract a final drop of Laffitte from the second empty bottle, we left Francisco to gather up the fragments, and without the custodian--who was now taking a refreshing sleep after his appreciated bumper--wandered about the ruins as we would, realising all their beauty and influence, all the true spirit of the past that overshadowed them. Every room and court was filled with a crowd of cowled monks and mitred abbots. Up crumbling and picturesque' stairways we saw a shadowy procession ascending; the ghostly face of Martin the Humble looked down upon us from the exquisite windows of his palace, shorn of nearly all their tracery. It was difficult to leave it all, but we wanted to see a little of the outer world. Francisco committed his basket to the guardian--now wide awake--and in a few moments we found ourselves outside the great entrance, facing the crumbling dependencies. Beyond the gateway we turned to the left and passed up the valley. It was broad and far-reaching, and the monastery looked in the centre of a great undulating plain. From the slopes of a vineyard on which we sat awhile, it rose like an oasis in a desert, its picturesque outlines clearly marked against the blue sky. An irregular, half-ruined wall enclosed the vast precincts. In the far distance were chains of hills. There was no trace anywhere of a monks' garden, but in their despotic days they probably had all their wants supplied in the shape of tithes. The landscape was bare of trees, yet the rich soil yields abundantly the fruits of the earth. In the vineyard nearly all the grapes had been plucked; but Francisco wandering to and fro found a few bunches and plucked them. Warmed by the sunshine they were luscious and full of sweet flavour. We felt almost guilty of eating stolen fruit. "Are we not very much like boys robbing an orchard, Francisco?" "No," laughed the boy, "though I'm afraid if we were that would not stop me. What we are doing is quite allowed. It is the custom of the country. Anyone may take the overlooked bunches in a vineyard just as they may glean in a corn-field. If I had not picked these, they would have withered. The owner, if he came in at this moment, would wish us good appetite and digestion and probably hunt for another bunch or two to present to us. Not a bad dessert after luncheon." Higher up the road we found a settlement, where in summer people flock to the hotels to drink the waters and enjoy the country. To-day all was closed for the approaching winter. A few years ago the place had no existence beyond a few scattered farm cottages with latticed windows and thatched roofs, surrounded by small orchards. These still exist. The place looked light and primitive, as though life might here pass very pleasantly. It was too far from the monastery to intrude upon its solitude, and the whole settlement seemed deserted. Not a creature crossed our path until on the down-hill road on the other side we came upon an old woman struggling with an obstinate donkey. Approaching, we heard groans and lamentations: now the animal was threatened, now implored. He was equally indifferent to both appeals. Looking very sagacious, his ears working to and fro and his feet well planted upon the ground, as wide apart as possible, he would not budge an inch. The old woman would certainly never see eighty again. She was wrinkled and shrivelled and looked a black object; her old face so tanned by the sun that she might almost pass for a woman of colour. Her black hair was wiry and untidy, and a rusty black gown hung about her in scanty folds. We stopped to inquire the cause of her sorrows. "Ah, señor, this wretched animal will one day be the death of me. But no, you wretched brute," suddenly turning to rage and anger, "I will be the death of you. I know that one of these days I shall take a knife to its throat, and there will be an end of it. And there will be an end of me, for I have no other living. All I can do is to go about gathering sticks and begging halfpence from charity. But this miserable donkey is worse than a pig. A pig will go the wrong way, but my donkey won't go at all. Sometimes for an hour together he doesn't move an inch. I have known him keep me a whole afternoon within ten yards of the same spot. I have beaten him till I'm black and blue"--the old woman had evidently got mixed here--"until my arm has ached for a week and I hadn't a breath left in my body; and all he does is to kick up his hind legs and bray in mockery." [Illustration: POBLET, FROM THE VINEYARD.] All this time the donkey was switching its tail as though it understood every word that was said and thoroughly appreciated its bad character. And apparently to emphasise the matter, at this moment it suddenly gave a bray so loud, long and à propos that we were convulsed with laughter, in which the old woman joined. The donkey looked round with a ridiculously comical expression upon its face that was evidently put on. "Ah, señor, it is all very well to laugh, but I am a poor wretched old woman," said this sable donkey-owner. "I never know one day whether I shall not starve the next. My husband died forty years ago. I have one daughter, but she left me. For twenty years I have not heard of her. Mine has been a hard life." "How often do you wash?" we could not help asking out of curiosity. "Wash, señor?" opening very wide eyes. "I am too poor to buy soap, and water is scarce. And I am so thin that if I washed, my bones would come through the skin. Señor, if you will bestow your charity upon me I promise not to waste it upon soap." We were near the river. The clear, sparkling water flowed on its way to the sea. Near the bank were whispering reeds and rushes. We felt sorely tempted to lift the old woman with our stick--she could not have weighed more than a good fat turkey--drop her into the stream, and for once make her acquainted with the luxury of a cold bath. But we reflected that she probably had no change of things, and her death might lie at our door. So we bestowed upon her the charity she asked for and left her. Prayers for our happiness went on until we were out of sight, and up to that point the perverse animal had not moved. We now turned back on our road, and appeared to have the whole country-side to ourselves. As we passed the thatched cottages every one of them was closed and silent. No blue curling smoke ascended from any of the chimneys. "Is it always so quiet and deserted?" we asked Francisco, who had knocked at three or four cottages without success. He was anxious to show us the interiors, which he said were curious: great chimney-corners with the chain hanging down to hold the pot-au-feu that was always going: peat fires that threw their incense upon the air: enormous Spanish settles on which half a dozen people could sit easily and keep warm on winter evenings: wonderful old clocks that ticked in the corner. We saw all this in the fifth cottage. Its inmates had flown, but forgotten to lock the door. The fire was out, and the great iron pot swinging from the chain was cold. "No, señor. I have often been here and never found everybody away like this. One might fancy them all dead and buried, but they are at the fair, I suppose. The harvest is all in, fruits are all gathered; there is nothing left on the trees"--with a melancholy glance at the orchards--"and for the moment they have nothing to do. So they have gone in a body to amuse themselves and spend their money." We got back in time to the monastery, and again the woman opened to us. "This time he really has gone off for a commission," she laughed, as the colour mounted to her face at the remembrance of her late transgression. "I really had to make an excuse before," she added. "It might have been one of the directors, and I should not like them to think the old man was getting past his work." The guardian came up behind us at the moment, a bottle of wine in his hand for their evening meal. "Ah, señor," shaking his head mournfully, "it is not equal to yours. Until the flavour and recollection of yours have passed away, I shall find this but poor stuff. I must make believe very hard, and fancy myself living in the days of the old monks, drinking Malvoisie." We promised to send him a bottle of Laffitte the very next time any one came over from the hotel, and he declared the anticipation would add five years to his life. We took a last look at the lovely cloisters, and then with a heavy heart turned our backs upon Poblet. Seldom had any visit so charmed us. Never had we seen such ruins; such marvellous outlines and perspectives; never felt more in a world of the past; never so completely realised the bygone life of the monks: all their splendour and power, wealth and luxury, to which the kingly presence gave additional lustre. They were days of pomp and ceremony and despotism; but the surrounding atmosphere of refinement and beauty must have had a softening and religious effect that perhaps kept them from excesses of tyranny and self-indulgence: vices that might have made their name a byword to succeeding ages. Our primitive conveyance was in waiting. Once more we found ourselves tossed upon a troubled sea where no waters were. We passed through the plains in which the magic donkey had appeared to Loretta, now empty and gathering tone and depth as the day declined. Our driver was not communicative. Apparently all his energy had spent itself at the station in claiming our patronage. He now even seemed unhappy, and in spite of the abominable drive he was giving us, we ventured to ask him if the world went well with him. "I can't complain of the world, señor," he returned, in melancholy tones. "I have food enough to eat, but alas cannot eat it. I suffer from frightful toothache. At the last fair I mounted the dentist's waggon; boom went the drum, crash went the trumpets--I thought my head was off. He had pulled out the only sound tooth I possessed. 'Let me try again,' said he. 'No, thank you,' I answered. 'You have given me enough for one day, and if you expect any other payment than my sound tooth you will be disappointed.' Unfortunately, señor, he _had_ more than the tooth, for he had carried away a bit of my jaw with it. Since then I have no comfort in life. The next time the fair comes round I suppose he will have to try again. The priests tell us a good deal about the torments of purgatory, but they can be nothing compared with this toothache. After this I shall expect to go straight to paradise when I die--priest or no priest." The silence of the unhappy driver was more than accounted for, and we gave him our sympathy. "Thank you, señor," he answered. "It is very good of you. But," comically, "my tooth still aches." We had reached the outskirts of the little town and dismissed the conveyance, of which we had had more than enough. It rattled through the streets and we followed at leisure. The men at the wine-press were just giving up work. Inside, in large rooms, they showed us wide tubs full of rich red juice, waiting to be made into wine. "You have enough here for the whole neighbourhood," we remarked. "It is all ordered, señor, and as much again if we can get it. We are famed for our wine. May we offer you a really good specimen bottle, just to show you its excellence? It would be a most friendly act on your part--and a little return for your splendid tobacco and cigars." "By all means," cried H. C., before we had time to accept or decline. "We are all as thirsty as fishes--and as hungry as hunters." "It is last year's wine," said our cellarman, returning with a bottle and drawing the cork. Then he hospitably filled tumblers and with a broad smile upon his face waited our approval. We gave it without reserve. It was excellent. "And as pure as when it was still in the grape," said the man. "Take my word for it, señor, you won't get such stuff as this in Madrid or Barcelona. It goes through your veins and exhilarates you, and if you drank three bottles of it you might feel lively, but you would have no headache." We owed the wine-presser a debt of gratitude. His invigorating draught was doubly welcome after our late experience, and we went our way feeling there are many good Samaritans in the world. We had some time to wait in the little town, and made closer acquaintance with its curious old streets: the overhanging eaves and waterspouts that stretched out like grinning gargoyles; the massive walls of many of the houses, and casements with rich mouldings that suggested a bygone day of wealth and prosperity. In our wandering we came upon the man Loretta had pointed out as her future husband. He was almost in the very same spot we had last seen him, and his head was now adorned with a white cap. We stopped him. "So, Lorenzo, you are going to espouse Loretta." "With your permission, señor. I hope you are not going to forbid the marriage?" [Illustration: RUINS OF POBLET.] "Quite the contrary. We offer you our congratulations, and think you a very lucky man, Loretta a fortunate woman." "Thank you, señor," replied Lorenzo, laughing--he seemed made up of good-humour. "I think it promises well. You see we are neither of us children, but old enough to know our own mind. Loretta is twenty-eight, I am thirty-two, and as far as I can make out, we have neither of us cared for anybody before. Our marriage was evidently made in heaven. And then Mr. Caro settled the matter by accepting me as his master." "And you love the donkeys, we hear?" "I love all animals in general," returned Lorenzo, "and of course Loretta's donkeys in particular. If she could have an additional attraction in my eyes, it is her power over the dumb birds and beasts, which proves the goodness of her soul. I cannot approach her in that respect." "And when are you going to be married?" "Has Loretta not told you that?" said Lorenzo, the colour flushing to his face. "We are to be married to-morrow morning. Everything is ready. Loretta has her wedding-gown, and our rooms have been furnished some time. They are over my workshop, so that I shall be able to hear her singing whilst I am planing and sawing below. Here it is, señor; will you not come in and look at it? I think," a bright light in his eyes, "we shall be very happy. After we are married to-morrow we go to Barcelona for a few days, where I have a prosperous brother who will take us in. Then we come back and settle down to our life. Yes, I think we shall be as happy as the day's long, señor." We had no doubt about it. Happiness in this world is for such as these. Excellent natures, saved from the great cares and responsibilities of those in a higher walk; working for their daily bread, which is abundantly supplied; contented with their lot; knowing nothing of impossible wants and wishes; loving and shedding abroad their love. It is such natures as Loretta's and Lorenzo's that are the truly happy. Their very names harmonized. But they are rare amongst their own class; one might almost say rare in any class; the exception, not the rule. It was good to come upon two such people, and to find that a kindly fate had reserved them for each other. We left Lorenzo in his workshop, a strong, manly fellow, using his plane with a skilful hand, and went our way. Right and left Loretta was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps she was arranging things at home for the last time. The last evening in the old nest. She might be contemplating her wedding-gown, lost in thoughts of the past or dreams of the future. But she was not one to look on the sad side of life, or to spend time in melancholy introspection. From the picturesque old bridge beneath which the river ran its swift course, the scene was wild, picturesque and lonely. With all our loitering we had an hour to wait for the train. At the station we found Loretta, apparently anything but low-spirited. She was accompanied by a well-dressed woman who looked as if the world went well with her. Loretta saw us and came forward. "Señor, you are back from Poblet. Tell me, did I exaggerate its beauty? Will you not come again, if only to ride the gentle Caro?" "Poblet far surpasses anything we expected from it, Loretta. But why did you not tell us that to-morrow was your wedding-day?" "I did not like to," she returned, laughing. "And yet I am too old to be silly about it. How did you find out, señor? Surely the old guardian at Poblet knows nothing? I have not been near him for three weeks." "We met Lorenzo, and he told us. Loretta, you are a happy couple. He will make a famous husband, and you a model wife." "Ah, señor, I shall try my best; but sometimes I think I am not good enough for him. He is such a brave man, my Lorenzo." "Why are you here, Loretta?" "To escort Lorenzo's cousin, señor, who came over to see me to-day for the last time before my wedding. She lives in Tarragona. We have been great friends, and she has long hoped Lorenzo and I would marry." She carried in her hand, this cousin of Lorenzo's, a glass water-bottle of rare and exquisite shape. We could not help admiring it in strong terms. "It is not to be bought anywhere," she said. "It is old and they do not make them now. Señor, it would give me real pleasure if you would accept it. I do not mean in Spanish fashion, but truly and sincerely." This was very evident, but the gift had to be refused, however kindly offered. We walked up and down the platform in face of one of the loveliest sunsets ever seen. In spite of its gorgeous colouring there was a great calmness and repose about it. Wonderful tones from crimson to pale opal spread half over the sky. Every moment they changed from beauty to beauty, and lighted up the outlines of the town into something rare and ethereal. We have already said there is no country like Spain for the splendour of its sunsets, and especially in their afterglow. They are truly amongst her glories. At last the train came up and shut out the heavenly vision. Loretta approached and said good-bye. "You will come again, señor, and ride Caro. I shall be married then, and both Lorenzo and I will escort you to Poblet. It will delight us to serve you. We will make it a holiday. But do not tarry. Caro is not as young as he was, though I believe donkeys live for ever." "Now, Loretta," we said, whilst the train waited, "it is our ambition to send you a wedding-gift. What shall it be?" "Señor, you are too good. What have I done? I could never----" "Loretta, the train may start at any moment." "Señor, I have all I could wish for, excepting----" She hesitated. "Loretta, the moments are flying." "Señor, it is too great an object. I have not the courage----" "Loretta, the guard signals. Another moment and you are lost." "Well, then, señor, I long for a clock for our mantelpiece. We had made up our minds to wait, and----" "Loretta, the clock is yours. It shall be pure white. A golden Cupid shall strike the bells. In his other hand he shall hold a glass which turns with the hours, running golden sands. Fare you well, Loretta." The engine whistled. The carriage moved. Our last look was a vision of a comely woman standing on the platform, a tall erect figure gazing after the train, the reflection of the afterglow lighting up her face to something beyond mere earthly beauty. CHAPTER XXX. THE GARDEN OF SPAIN. Charms of Tarragona--Dream of the past--Quasimodo comes not--Of another world--Host's offer--Francisco inconsolable--A mixed sorrow--No more holidays--List of grievances--Fair scene--Luxuriance of the South--Hospitalet--Pilgrims of the Middle Ages--Amposta--Centre of lost centuries--Historical past--Here worked St. Paul--Our fellow-travellers--Undertones--Enter old priest--Draws conclusions--Love's young dream--Impressions and appearances--Not always a priest--Fool's paradise--Youth and age--Awaking to realities--Driven out of paradise--Was it a judgment?--Calmness returns--Judging in mercy--Nameless grave--"Writ in water"--Withdrawing from the world--Entering the church--Busy life--Romances of the Confessional--"To Eve in Paradise"--Tortosa--Garden of Spain--Vinaroz--Wise mermen--Cradle of history and romance--Gibraltar of the West--A race apart--Benicarlo--Flourishing vineyards--"If the English only knew"--Eve recognises priest--"I am that charming daughter"--Lovely cousin engaged--Count Pedro de la Torre--Mutual recognitions--Congratulations--Breaking news to H. C.--Despair--"To Adam in Hades"--Gallant priest--Saved from temptation. With sorrowful hearts we turned our backs one morning upon Tarragona. Though bound for Valencia, Tarragona the delightful possessed charms Valencia could never rival. Not again should we meet with such a cathedral, such cloisters, or even so original and enthusiastic a sacristan. We were leaving all that wonderful historical atmosphere that made this exceptional place a Dream of the Past, and great was our regret. We had stood near the tomb of the Scipios and fancied ourselves back in the days when our own era was dawning. Before us the ever-changing yet changeless sea looked just as it must have looked when they, loving it, decided to sleep within sound of its waters. In a last moonlight visit to the cathedral we had waited and listened in hope of hearing Quasimodo's footsteps, seeing his quaint and curious form approaching. He never came. No unseen talisman whispered to him our desire. Perhaps it was as well. A second experience is never the same as the first. The subtle charm of the new and the strange, the unexpected, the unprepared, is no longer there. Quasimodo now dwelt in our minds as a being spiritual, intangible, of another world. That he belonged to the highest order in this, is certain. The influence of his music haunted us, haunts us still. In waking and sleeping dreams we live over and over again the weird charm and experience of that wonderful night; see the moonbeams falling in shafts of clear-cut light across pillars and aisles and arches; hear and feel the touch, as of a passing breath, of the ghostly visitants from Shadow-land. All the marvellous music steals into our soul. There can be but one Quasimodo in the world. We doubt if there was ever another at any time endowed with his marvellous faculty. It was pain and grief to feel that we should see and hear him no more. Our very host added slightly to our reluctant leaving by declaring that if we would only stay another week he would charge us half-price for everything: nay, we should settle our own terms. Francisco was inconsolable, but perhaps a little selfishness was mixed with his sorrow. "No more holidays," he cried. "No more excursions to Poblet; no escape from French lessons. And yet, señor, there are other places besides Poblet, and every one of them would have delighted you. Think of all the lost luncheons; all the first-class compartments that will now be empty. There are lovely excursions, too, by sea." The boy's catalogue of grievances was as long as Don Giovanni's list of transgressions. But time the inexorable refused to stand still, and when the final hour struck, the relentless omnibus carried us away. Francisco accompanied us to the station, having an idea that without his help we should inevitably go wrong. He was a witness to the abominably rude station-master, who in this respect has not his equal in Spain, according to our experience. Finally we moved off. At the moment we felt a distinct mental wrench. Tarragona was indeed over. To our right was the harbour with its little crowd of fishing-boats; out on the sea lovely white-winged feluccas glided to and fro. The whole journey was one of extreme beauty. Very soon we had the sea on our left, and often the train skirted the very waves as they rolled over their golden sands. The coast was broken and diversified, now rising to hills and cliffs, now falling to a level with the shore. Where we passed inland the country was rich and fruitful, showing more and more the luxuriance of the South. Many of the towns had historical interests or remains to make them remarkable. At Hospitalet we found ourselves on the site of a House of Refuge for pilgrims from Zaragoza who in the Middle Ages were wont to cross the mountains in caravans after visiting the scene of some miraculous pillar or image. Near this we skirted a fishing village, where the train was almost washed by the sea that, blue and flashing, stretched far and wide. The little fleet was moving out of the small harbour as we passed, each followed by its shadow upon the water. Picturesque Amposta was the centre and atmosphere of the lost centuries. It existed long before the Romans, who, on taking it, made it one of their chief stations. Here came Hercules, and after him St. Paul, who did much work and ordained a bishop to carry on his labours. Later came the Moors, when it reached the height of its glory. In 809 Louis le Débonnaire, son of Charlemagne, besieged it, was repulsed, returned in 811 and conquered. The Moors quickly retook it, but the disorganised inhabitants had become nothing better than pirates. So in 1143 the Templars came down upon them, and inspired by the late victory at Almeria, aided by the Italians, conquered in their turn: only to be turned out again the following year by the inevitable Moors. Everywhere the eye rested upon a lovely scene of river, sea and land, intensely blue sky and brilliant sunshine. In our carriage we had a very interesting bride and bridegroom. She seemed to worship the very ground he trod upon, and both were evidently in paradise. At the same time he accepted the worship rather too much as his due--gracefully and graciously, but still distinctly his right. They were in the mood to admire lovely scenery, and undertones of delight were frequent. Presently an old priest entered the carriage, sat himself down beside us, and they quickly fell under his eye. He looked on with a smile of amusement at the silent unmistakable worship. We thought he drew his conclusions as one who observes a scene in which he has no part or lot. "Love's young dream," he said to us under cover of the rattle of the train. "My experience tells me it is only a dream, varying in length according to the constancy of the dreamers. You think I have no right to give an opinion? Then, señor, I should tell you that, like the world in general, you judge by appearances and judge too hastily. That is the difference between impressions and appearances. Of first appearances beware; of first impressions be assured. They have never failed me." We agreed with the old priest, but made no remark. "You think I have no business to judge of these matters?" he continued with a smile; "and you are mistaken. I was not always a priest clad in black robe and beaver hat, separated from the world by the barrier of the Church. In early life I took up law, pleaded, and generally won my cause. Then I pleaded my own cause with a beautiful woman, won her and married her. I, too, dwelt in my fool's paradise; thought the world all sunshine, the hours all golden. I was young and in those days handsome. Never can I reconcile the ugly, grey-headed man one becomes in age, with the charm and elegance of one's youth. But time has no mercy. However, the fact remains that in those days I was young and handsome." The old priest was handsome still; but again we were silent. "Then one fine morning I awoke to realities," he went on. "The angel with the flaming sword had come and driven me out of my paradise. Yet I had not transgressed. It was the woman, whom I fondly hoped heaven had given me as a life-long companion. She was beautiful; there was an indescribable charm about her; but she was frivolous and inconstant. She left me one day with one whom I had thought my friend. He was rich and free to roam. I heard of them in other countries: wandering to and fro like spirits ill at ease. "Finally they went to Rome. Was it a judgment upon the wife who had proved faithless to her husband, the man who had betrayed his friend? Both took the fever at the same time and died within a week of each other. They were buried side by side in a small cemetery near to the Eternal City. Some years after I went to Rome. I had lived down my life's tragedy and could gaze upon their graves with calmness. As I did so, and realised the certainty of retribution, I prayed that I might judge in mercy. They had blighted my life, but looking on those nameless graves I felt for the first time that I could forgive. Yes, the graves were nameless, for no stone had been placed over them. This I did. By way of inscription I merely recorded the initials on each: and the text 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.' "That very same day I was wandering about the English cemetery in Rome, and came upon the text 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water;' doubtless the expression of one whose life had been a failure or disappointment. 'My friend,' I thought, 'you are not to be pitied half so much as those whose names are writ in Sin.' "It was about this time that I determined to enter the Church. Since that terrible blow I had grown to hate the world, withdrew more and more from society. I had no near ties on earth. Again and again I thanked heaven that no child had been born to me. As soon as I had made the resolution I put it in force, and cannot say that I ever regretted it. Gradually all morbidness left me. I lead a busy life; I delight in society; people consider me a very jovial old priest. But I never lift a finger to promote a marriage; I never solemnise one without a sigh and a wonder as to what will be the end of it. And let me tell you a secret. I never hear in the confessional that love is on the wane between husband and wife, without pouring out upon them the sternest vials of my wrath, threatening them with all the terrors of purgatory if so much as a breath of inconstancy of mind or thought is whispered. Oh, if I were not pledged to silence, what Romances of the Confessional could I not tell you!" We had listened without interruption. Sitting side by side it was easy to talk without being overheard. The train clattered and beat and throbbed on its way. The happy pair were at the other end of the carriage. H. C., who sat opposite to us, instead of giving his undivided attention to the scenery, was composing a sonnet to the fair lady, which he headed, "To Eve in Paradise"--a questionable compliment. Tortosa, with its narrow streets and gloomy palaces, its strong walls, ancient castle and bridge of boats, all visible from the train, had passed away. One lovely view gave place to another. "It is indeed a rich country through which we are travelling," said the priest, "the very Garden of Spain, which appears to me to find its culminating point round about Valencia. Our whole progress is marked by historical footsteps. I never visit Tortosa without thinking of St. Paul, and a little of his amazing energy seems to fall upon me. He becomes a real presence to me. An influence he must and will be in all places and in all ages. Then comes Vinaroz with its crumbling walls--one of the loveliest spots in the whole province. I always think its people are like mermen, neither one thing nor the other. They fish the sea and plough the land by turns. Both occupations yield them good fruit, so perhaps they are wise. The fish are abundant, the lampreys excellent. It was here the Duc de Vendôme died from a surfeit of fish, of which he was passionately fond. But for this, Philip V. would probably never have entered upon his long and eventful reign. Look at those white-winged boats gliding upon the blue waters! Where is there another sea like the Mediterranean? It is the very cradle of history and romance; scene of half the mighty events of the world. Were I an idle man I would spend my life upon its surface." "What is that distant object?" indicating an enormous perpendicular rock some five miles away, that stood a picturesque, castle-crowned islet, round which the sea was breaking in faint white lines. "We call it Gibraltar of the West," replied the priest. "An interesting place to visit, and larger than you would imagine, with its 3000 inhabitants. They are curious people: in some things almost a race apart. It is neither an island nor yet part of the mainland. You cannot gain entrance by water, though surrounded by the sea. The only passage to it is a narrow strip of sand reaching to the shore. It was here that Pope Benedict XIII. took refuge after the Council of Constance had pronounced against him. And here comes Benicarlo with its old walls," he continued, as the train drew up at the small station. "The ancient town is worth a visit. Its people, poor and wretched, might be flourishing and well-to-do, for the neighbourhood is wonderfully productive. The vineyards are amongst the best in Spain; the luscious wines are sent to Bordeaux to mix with inferior clarets, which find their way to the English market. Ah! the English little know what adulterated articles are sold in England that the French would never look at." At this moment our fair Eve, who for the last few minutes had come out of paradise, looked attentively at the priest, hesitated a moment, then spoke. "From the singular likeness," she said, "I think you must be related to the Duke de Nevada in Madrid? Forgive me if I am mistaken." "Señora," replied the old priest with a polite bow, "Juan de Nevada is my elder and much-loved brother, though we seldom meet--for Madrid is the one place I never visit. I am gratified that you see in me the least resemblance to that truly noble and great man." "Have you never heard him speak of the Señor de Costello?" continued the lady. "Without doubt," returned the priest. "They are neighbours in Madrid. I have heard him mention a very charming daughter, and also very charming cousin who lives in Gerona." "I am that charming daughter," laughed the fair Eve; "but the term applies much more correctly to my lovely cousin. Her beauty has created a furore in Madrid. We are great friends, and she stays with us part of every year. She has just become engaged to your brother's eldest son, and therefore some day will be Duchess de Nevada--though I trust the day is far distant. You have doubtless heard of the engagement?" "Indeed, yes," returned the priest. "Only last week I wrote my nephew a long letter congratulating him upon his good fortune. But how comes it, madame, if I may be so indiscreet, that my fair travelling companion should not herself eventually have become Madame de Nevada?" "For the excellent reason that sits opposite to me," quickly replied this lovely Eve, laughing and blushing in the most bewitching manner. Upon which she introduced her husband to the priest as Count Pedro de la Torre. The name explained what had puzzled us for some time. We were haunted by a feeling of having met this young man in a previous state of existence, but now discovered that we had really met him in Toledo. He was amongst the group who had sat that first night of our arrival at the other end of the table, smoking and drinking wine and coffee. He it was who had come forward to speak to the man in the sheepskin, and then handed him a bumper of wine. He had left the very next day, and we had seen less of him than of the others. We recalled the circumstance to his memory. "I recognised you at once," he said, "but thought you had forgotten me. That man in the sheepskin was my father's head huntsman, a privileged being who was born and brought up on the estate, gave us our first lessons in sport and looks upon us as his own children. My father's place--my own, I fear, before long--is near Toledo. If you ever visit it again we should be delighted to show you hospitality. We live with my father when not in Madrid. He is old, in failing health, and could not bear the idea of my leaving home. On my part I was too glad to remain in the dear old nest." "And we see that we have to offer you our congratulations," bowing as in duty bound to his lovely partner. De la Torre laughed. "You make me your debtor," he replied. "But however profound your congratulations, they can never equal those I offer to myself. I am indeed far more blest than I merit." "Wait until I show you my true character," laughed madame, "take the reins of government into my own hands, and leave you with no will of your own--a henpecked husband. At present I tender you a velvet hand; presently it may turn into----" "If it changed into a cloven foot," he interrupted gallantly, "I should still say it was perfect." "Ah, you are in paradise," cried the old priest with a sigh; "in paradise. Try to remain there. Do not summon the angel with the flaming sword. Be ever true and tender to each other. Talk not of cloven feet. Let it ever be the velvet hand, the glance of love, the gentle accents of forbearance. You have every good gift that heaven and earth can give you. Be worthy of your fate." We interpreted as gently as possible to H. C. the sad news of the engagement of the beauty of Gerona, the lovely Señorita de Costello. It was a great shock. He turned deathly pale and remained for a time staring at vacancy. Then with a profound sigh he tore up his half-finished sonnet, "To Eve in Paradise," and began another self-dedicated, "To Adam in Hades." He keeps it in a sacred drawer, enshrined in lavender and pot-pourri. "All this rencontre is very à propos," said the old priest. "Again the world is smaller than it seems. And we are getting on. Here is Castellon de la Plana already, with its fine fruit and flower gardens and picturesque peasants. Alas, we see less costume everywhere than of old. The taste of the world is not improving." Very pleasantly passed the remainder of the journey, through a country beautiful and fertile. Everywhere we saw traces of vineyards and cultivated lands. Here and there oxen were ploughing. Often we saw them thrashing out the rice. Many an old and picturesque well stood out surrounded by trellis-work covered with vine-leaves. But the vines were not festooned after the picturesque manner of North Italy, where you walk under the trellis and pluck the grapes that hang in rich clusters. Here the vines are trained on sticks or grow like currant bushes, and as in Germany, lose their beauty. A single field will produce at the same time fruit-trees, almond or olive, corn and grapes, all mingling their beauty and perfume. We passed a multitude of orange and lemon groves with all their deep, rich, sheeny verdure. Nuts and olives, almonds and carobs abounded. Many a palm-tree added its Oriental grace to the landscape. The whole country seemed to revel in sunshine and blue skies. At Saguntum, that town of the ancients, the heights were crowned by walls, fortresses and castles, imperishable outlines grey with the lapse of centuries. As it chanced we were all bound for Valencia. Our interesting bride and bridegroom were staying there one night and continuing their journey the next day. The priest was to spend a week there. "I have a proposal to make," said de la Torre, as we neared the capital. "We telegraphed for rooms and ordered dinner in our sitting-room. You three gentlemen must join us. It will only be adding three covers--an effort the chef will be equal to." "Let me add my persuasions," added Countess de la Torre graciously and gracefully. "Remember we have been united a whole week and are quite an old married couple. You would give us great pleasure." But this, strongly supported by de Nevada the priest, we felt bound to decline. It would have been cruel to intrude so long upon a tête-à-tête which just now must form the delight of their existence. "I must be obdurate," said the priest. "In the first place your delicate paradise food--which no doubt consists of crystallised fruits and butterflies' wings--would be wasted upon three hungry travellers dwelling without the enchanted gates. But let us compromise. We are all staying at the same hotel. We three unappropriated blessings will dine together, and after that we will come and take our coffee and Chartreuse with you, remaining exactly one hour by the clock: not a moment more." So it was settled. Soon after this all the church towers and steeples of Valencia came into view. Across a stretch of country, we saw the blue sea sparkling in the evening sunshine. In the air, above the rush of the train, there was a sound of ringing bells. "It must be a gala day," said Madame de la Torre, listening for a moment to the swelling clamour. "It is for your arrival, madame," returned the priest gallantly. "They wish to do you honour." Our fair Eve laughed. "Monsieur de Nevada," she cried, "you were never intended for a priest. It was a mistaken vocation. You ought to have married, and your wife would have been your idol." Under the circumstances it was a somewhat unfortunate speech. The drama in de Nevada's life had taken place long before her birth. She evidently knew nothing of the story. But the priest had outlived his sorrow, and was of an age to sit loosely to the things of earth. A momentary shadow passed over his face, gone as soon as seen. "Madame," he laughed in clear tones, "if I were forty years younger and Mademoiselle de Costello were not Madame de la Torre, she would almost induce me to forget my vows. As it is, all is well. I am saved from temptation. Valencia at last! Never did journey pass so quickly and pleasantly." A well-appointed omnibus was in waiting. We filled it comfortably, and in a few moments found ourselves at the Hotel España. The manager settled us in admirable quarters, and having some time to spare before dinner we went out to survey the fair city by evening light. CHAPTER XXXI. LOVE'S YOUNG DREAM. First impressions--Devoted to pleasure--Peace-loving--Climate makes gay and lively--New element--Few traces of the past--Old palaces--Steals into the affections--City of the Cid--Ecclesiastical attractions--Archbishopric--University--Homer must nod sometimes--Comparative repose--De Nevada carries us off--Admirable host--Conversational--Grave and gay--Mercy, not sacrifice--Library--At Puzol--Exacting a promise--The hour sounds--Count Pedro appears--Fragrant coffee--Served by magic--Specially prepared temptation--Perverting facts--Land flowing with milk and honey--Inquiring mind--Mighty man of valour--Cid likened to Cromwell--Retribution--Ibn Jehaf the murderer--Reign of terror--The faithful Ximena--Cid's death-blow--Priest turns schoolmaster--"Beware!"--Earthly paradise--Land of consolation--System of irrigation--Famous council--Poetical Granada--No appeal--Apostles' Gateway--Earth's fascinations--Picturesque peasants--Pretty women--Countess Pedro shakes her head--Leave-taking--Next morning--Quiet activity--Market day--Splendours of flower-market--Lonja de Seda--Vanishing dream--Audiencia--San Salvador--Antiquity yields to comfort--Convent of San Domingo--Miserere--Impressive ceremony--City of Flowers--Without the walls--Famous river--Change of scene. Valencia proved more modern and bustling than we had imagined. After the quiet streets of Tarragona it appeared to us the most crowded place we had ever been in; tramcars ran to and fro; there was much noise and excitement. Half the crowd was composed of the student class. All seemed in an uproar, but it was only their natural tone and manner. The Valencians, especially the lower classes, are devoted to pleasure; the work of the day over, they live for enjoyment. [Illustration: ANCIENT GATEWAY: VALENCIA.] Involuntarily we were reminded of our old days in the Quartier Latin; but there, excitement often meant revolutionary mischief. The Valencians are peace-loving, and their climate forces them to be gay and lively. Though passionate and hasty, like a violent tornado the rage soon passes. This evening, in spite of much movement, a constant buzzing of voices, an excitement that filled the air, everything was in order. Laughter and chatter abounded, far more so than we had found in most Spanish towns. Until now the character of the Spaniard on ordinary occasions had seemed rather given to silence: in Valencia we came upon a new element, approaching the French or Italian. The city has lost much of its ancient interest. As late as 1871, the wonderful old walls, massive and battlemented, were pulled down to find work for the poor. Twelve gates admitted to the interior: and what the walls were may be judged by the few gates that remain. Within the city the air is close and relaxing, the skies are brilliant, the sun intensely hot, the streets narrow and densely packed with houses. This was designed to keep out the heat, but also keeps out air and light. The houses in the side-streets are tall, massive and sombre-looking, and here some of the wonderful old palaces remain. The principal thoroughfares are commonplace; one has, as it were, to seek out the beauties. It is in its exceptional features that Valencia shines, and gradually steals into your affections. Not, however, as Tarragona the favoured. The pure air, stately repose and dignified charm of that Dream of the Past is very opposed to the noisy unrest and crowded thoroughfares, constant going to and fro, and confined atmosphere of this ancient city of the Cid. Nevertheless it has its ecclesiastical attractions in the way of churches: some with interesting towers, though few with fine interiors. It is an archbishopric, therefore has a cathedral. It possesses a university, and most of the crowd we saw evidently thought that the bow cannot always be strung and Homer must sometimes nod. They fill the cafés and theatres, go mad with excitement in the bull-ring when the Sunday performance is given, and occasionally have a free fight amongst themselves; when some of them get locked up by way of warning to the many rather than as a punishment to the few. After such an outbreak, never very desperate, peace reigns for a time: peace that is never seriously broken. [Illustration: A STREET IN VALENCIA.] It was a relief that first evening to return to the comparative repose of the hotel. When the hour for dinner had struck, de Nevada in clerical garments came to our rooms and carried us off to his own sitting-room where dinner was served. We seemed fated to fall in with the clerical element in Spain, and as yet had certainly not regretted it. De Nevada was evidently well known and highly considered by the hotel people, who exerted their best efforts in his favour, which also fell to our portion. His conversation was a mixture of grave and gay, with much wit and humour. He had outlived his sorrows, it may be, yet their influence remained. Every now and then a chance word or allusion seemed to vibrate some long-silent chord in heart or memory. A momentary shadow would pass over his face as a small cloud passing over the sun for an instant overshadows the earth. It was over in a flash, and he would at once be his genial, jovial self, full of strong spirits toned down by excellent breeding and the thought of what was due to his cloth. Probably we saw more of his inner character than if we had dined with the de la Torres. We had him to ourselves, his undivided attention, and amongst various topics he gave us a great insight into many of the by-ways of the Spanish Church. "It is a subject in which I am deeply interested," he said. "I am writing a book thereon, and devoting considerable space to the vexed argument of the Inquisition. It has never been properly handled, and I am not afraid to say that it was a serious blot, if not on the characters, at least on the judgment of Ferdinand and Isabella. Souls were never yet gained nor religions established by cruelty and torture. It is partly for that reason that I am here. The Archbishop has a magnificent library, and I want a week of reference amongst the books. We are as brothers, and I should take up my quarters in the palace, only that I like to be independent. To-day he is at Puzol, where he has a country house. When here I generally dine with him; was to have done so to-morrow night; but it is an informal engagement, and if you will promise to meet me again at the same hour, we will dine here together. And now the hour sounds for the de la Torres. Let us be punctual, as we must be so in leaving. Did you ever see so charming, so devoted a couple? Who would not dwell in such a fools' paradise?" He sent our maître-d'hotel to inquire if it would be agreeable to them to receive us, and in response Count Pedro appeared upon the scene. All our rooms adjoined. "We are more than ready," he cried. "I am quite sure," laughing, "that you think we spend all our time sitting hand-in-hand and looking into each other's eyes. My dear Nevada, we are quite a sober couple, with a great deal of matter-of-fact sense about us." "Which only proves how difficult it is for people to know themselves," laughed the priest. "But now for the sunshine of madame's presence." In their sitting-room all banqueting signs had been removed. On the table steamed fragrant coffee, with a decanter of Chartreuse, side by side with cigars and cigarettes. The most fastidious woman in Spain will never object to smoking in her presence. Countess de la Torre had exchanged her becoming travelling-dress for a still more becoming evening costume. She looked dazzlingly beautiful, her pure white neck and arms decorated with jewels. As she rose and received us with a high-bred, bewitching grace, we thought we had seldom seen a fairer vision. "Ah!" cried de Nevada, glancing at the table. "Your feast of orange blossoms and butterflies' wings was served by magic. In fact I am not aware that we are told Adam and Eve in Paradise ate anything. Life was eternal and needed no renewing." "You forget," laughed Madame de la Torre. "They ate fruit, or how could Eve have tempted Adam with an apple?" "I have always held that as a specially prepared temptation," said the priest. "They had never eaten anything until then, and the danger lay in the new experience." "Monsieur de Nevada, you must go to school again," laughed Countess Pedro. "Or you are wilfully perverting facts to suit your purpose. I shall have to inform against you to the Archbishop. We are going to see him to-morrow morning. Are you not in his jurisdiction?" "No, madame," replied the priest. "I hold no preferment in the province of Valencia. This Garden of Spain blooms not for my pleasure. Yet, how can I say so, for who enjoys it more when fate brings me here?" "It is indeed the Garden of Spain," said de la Torre. "I often wished we were as favoured in the neighbourhood of Toledo--though we have little to complain of." "Valencia is a land flowing with milk and honey," said de Nevada. "You must not hope for two Canaans so near each other." "Tell me," said Madame de la Torre, as she poured out coffee with a graceful hand, "why this town is called Valencia del Cid. I thought the Cid had only to do with Burgos. I fear I am exposing my ignorance." "It would be difficult to know what the Cid had not to do with and where he did not go," returned de Nevada. "He was a mighty man of valour, according to his lights: also a great barbarian. In those days we might all have been the same. In my own mind, I have always likened him to the English Cromwell; and if Cromwell was in any way better than he, it is that he lived six centuries later. They were equally determined and unscrupulous. What a wonderful passage is that in the history of England! But the Cid had much to do with Valencia. He came here in 1094, and after a siege of twenty months took the town. It is remarkable how retribution follows a man, as surely as shadow follows the substance. 'Be sure your sin will find you out.' Never was truer proverb What says Shakespeare?" continued the priest, turning to us: "'Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, The fateful shadows that hang by us still.' "I don't know that I quote correctly, and my English is barbarous," he laughed. "Never could I master that fine language; perhaps for the reason that I never dwelt long enough in your country. Few and short have my visits been. It was in 1095 that the Cid took Valencia. Ibn Jehaf the murderer was on the throne, having killed Yahya, whom Alonso VI. had placed there. This act brought the Cid down upon them. The first thing he did was to burn Jehaf alive on the great square that you will see to-morrow when you go to the Archbishop: act worthy of the tyrant. He ruled here for five years. His will was law; it was a small reign of terror. Then he died, and his faithful wife Ximena endeavoured to hold the reins. Those were not times when a woman could rule easily, and in 1101 the Moors brought hers to an end and banished her from the province. It is said that when the Cid captured Valencia he took his wife and daughter to a height to show them the richness of the country; and promised his favourite daughter that if she pleased him in her marriage that fair prospect from the boundaries of the Saguntum Hills on the north to the confines of the sea on the east should be her dowry: a promise never to be fulfilled. Within three years the daughter died unwedded; a death so violent that it is said to have struck a death-blow to the Cid, and to have brought home to him many of his perfidious acts. Certain it is that he was never the same man afterwards. Another two years brought his own life to a close. But, madame, you are beguiling me into a history, and turning the old priest into a schoolmaster." Our fair hostess laughed. "You make me your debtor," she replied. "I shall take greater interest in what I see to-morrow, and look at everything through the eyes of the past. Has the Archbishop any relics of the Cid?" "Not only of the Cid, but of many other historical persons and events," said de Nevada. "You must especially notice the library with its fine collection of books. I may be there at the moment, and if so will promote myself to the honour of Librarian-in-chief to Countess Pedro de la Torre." "Beware!" laughed madame. "Countess Pedro has a thirst for knowledge. Your office will be no sinecure." "My labour of love will at least equal madame's diligence, though the climate is hardly favourable to very hard work," smiled the priest. "Even Nature conspires to indolence in the people. The ground brings forth abundantly, and almost unaided. The Moors thought it an earthly paradise--as it is. I am not sure but they considered it the scene of the first paradise. Heaven, they said, was suspended immediately above, and a portion of heaven had fallen to earth and formed Valencia. To the sick and sorrowing it is a land of consolation. In its balmy airs--far more healing than those of Italy--the former recover strength; in the brilliance of its sunshine, the blueness of its skies, the splendour of its flowers and vegetation, the troubled mind finds peace and repose." "Its system of irrigation--to descend to the commonplace," laughed de la Torre--"is perfect. Does the council still sit in the Apostles' Gateway?" "Indeed it does," replied the priest. "And far from being commonplace, the idea to me, surrounded by its halo of the past, is full of picturesque romance." "What is that?" asked madame. "It is dangerous to make these remarks before an inquiring mind." "The matter is simple," said de Nevada. "Valencia is the most perfectly irrigated province in Spain, not excepting Granada. Especially is that the case in the surrounding neighbourhood. You must have noticed narrow channels running through the fields as you passed in the train. The system presents infinite difficulties. Not one of the least is that all shall share alike in the fertilizing streams. In Granada a good deal is done by signals, and occasionally in the night-silence you may hear the silver bell sounding upon the air and carried from field to field: token that the dams are opened and the water flows. In Valencia they have nothing so poetical. The tribunal was instituted centuries ago by the Moors. It has been handed down from generation to generation and still continues. Being perfect, the system works well. Every Thursday morning seven judges sit in the great doorway of the cathedral, and hear all complaints relating to irrigation. These judges choose each other from the yeomen and irrigators of the neighbourhood. They pronounce sentence, and against that sentence there is no appeal. The judges are integrity itself. It is their motto, and it seems as impossible for them to go wrong as for a Freemason to betray the secrets of his craft. I think the system might with advantage be adopted by other tribunals." "I should like to see and converse with these judges," said madame, "and decorate them with the order of the Golden Fleece. Surely they deserve it?" "That order, I fear, is reserved for those of higher rank," replied the priest. "Yet I have often myself thought they should wear an order of Distinguished Merit: a sort of Cross of the Legion of Honour--after the French idea--open to all ranks and classes. But as you proceed on your journey to-morrow evening, you will not be here on a Thursday. The judges are indeed to be condoled with." "I have slightly changed our plans," said Count Pedro, "and we leave the day after to-morrow by the early train. It will be less fatiguing for Isabel. We shall also see more of the country. I never tire of gazing upon the beauties of nature, and fortunately my wife is in sympathy with me. Seas, mountains, forests, vast territories, cultivated plains or sandy deserts, all alike fill me with a delight and rapture nothing else can equal. I hope to spend some of the first years of our married life in becoming intimate with the best points of many lands." "You will find few more charming spots than Valencia," returned the priest. "Its rich plains never fail. No sooner has one harvest been gathered than another appears. Did you notice the peasants in the fields as we came along, sitting at work with their knees up to their ears? How picturesque they look walking down a road in their short white linen trousers and jackets and scarlet mantles, coloured handkerchiefs wound round the head like a turban, and blue scarves tied round the waist. I have watched them many a time. You will see nothing of this in the town itself." "I don't quite like the type of face," objected de la Torre. "It is too African. The sun has grilled them to a colour that is almost mahogany. And they are superstitious and revengeful." "But their imagination is lively and keeps them in almost constant good humour," returned the priest, "so they seldom think of revenge. How well they sing their _fiera_, how jovially they dance the _rondella_. It is quite a pleasure to look at this abandonment of happiness, this existence utterly free from care. Believe me, they have their virtues. And how pretty the women are! Few women in Spain equal those of Valencia. They are singularly graceful and their walk is perfect. Notice a congregation of women in church. You will hardly find elsewhere an assemblage so conspicuous for beauty of face and grace and nobility of form." Countess Pedro shook her head. "Oh!" she cried, raising her clasped hands. "I shall have more and more to tell to the Archbishop. Monsieur de Nevada, you are not supposed to know that female beauty exists, and here you are describing it with an eloquence which comes from the heart." [Illustration: RENAISSANCE TOWER: VALENCIA.] "With humble deference to your opinion, madame, I disagree with you," laughed the priest. "All things beautiful are to be appreciated; above everything else a beautiful woman, the noblest work of God. We worship the stars in the heavens, though we can never attain to them. Do you imagine that I could be in this room and remain insensible to such charms as few women possess?" Our fair hostess blushed with pleasure. No woman is insensible to a compliment of which she can easily judge the sincerity. Every woman also likes to be praised before the husband to whom she is devoted. The age of de Nevada permitted him to be candid in expressing his admiration, whilst the in some sort family connection that would take place at the marriage referred to, had paved the way to an immediate and friendly intimacy. In spite of the priest's emphatic determination to leave punctually, the hour had long struck when we reluctantly took our departure. Both de la Torre and his fair wife were charming, refined and intellectual, and the moments had passed all too quickly. * * * * * Next morning the crowded streets had thinned. Most of the people had disappeared, reserving themselves for the evening. Yet there was a constant, quiet activity going on, which gave the city a lively and prosperous air. It was market-day; the most picturesque market we had yet seen in Spain; thronged with buyers and sellers, piled up with all the fruits and vegetables of the South. Figs, grapes and pomegranates abounded at very small prices. The market-place was full of colouring, in part due to the bright handkerchiefs and scarves worn by men and women. All was as nothing compared with the splendour and perfume of the covered flower-market. For a few halfpence one carried away sufficient to decorate a palace. For ninepence one woman offered us a bouquet more than a yard round. We had never seen anything like it and wondered if it was meant to grace some foreign Lord Mayor's banquet. This sum was asked with some hesitation, seeing that we were strangers: she was prepared to take half the amount. The roses were far lovelier than those that grow in the gardens of Italy and find their way across the Channel. We gave a few halfpence for a large handful of tuberoses and pinks, and the woman was so charmed at the liberal payment that she presented us with a great bunch of sweet verbena. We possess some of the leaves now, and the scent--rare above all other scents--hangs round them still. Each morning we renewed our purchase. The flowers were always there. For them it was market-day all the year round. The market-place was a charming three-cornered square; on one side a Renaissance church that for its style was really picturesque and formed an admirable background to the women and stalls. The interior, all gilt and glitter, set one's teeth on edge, but that did not alter the outward effect. Opposite was a far lovelier building--the Lonja de Seda, or ancient Silk hall--of exquisitely beautiful and refined fifteenth-century Gothic. The immense rooms were ornamented with fluted columns without capitals, that spread out like the leaves of a palm-tree and lost themselves in the roof. Behind it was an old garden, with wonderful architectural surroundings. A long stone staircase ended in a Gothic doorway of graceful outlines and deep rich mouldings. Windows filled with half-ruined tracery looked on to the garden with its trees and flowers. The upper part was an open Gothic arcade with rich ornamentations and medallions, above which rose a massive square tower with a round Norman turret. This dream-building was vanishing under the hands of the restorer. The court was filled with workmen, and the exquisite tone of age, the rounded, crumbling outlines were beginning to disappear. We were just in time to see it at its best. [Illustration: MARKET PLACE, VALENCIA.] From this we made our way to the cathedral, of which little need be said. After the architectural dreams of Catalonia, it was terribly unsatisfactory. The interior gave out no sense of grandeur, repose or devotion. On Sunday, during service, it gained a certain solemn impressiveness from the kneeling crowd, but that was all. Begun in the thirteenth century, and originally Gothic, few traces of the first building remain. Certain portions of the exterior are beautiful and striking; especially the magnificent north doorway--the Apostles' Gateway; deep and richly ornamented, though many of its statues have disappeared. It is here that the Tribunal of the Waters sits in judgment, to which we have heard de Nevada allude. [Illustration: LONJA DE SEDA: VALENCIA.] Near the cathedral was the Audiencia, or Court of Justice, one of the most perfect buildings in Europe. Though the ground-floor has been divided into public offices, the elaborately carved and gilt ceilings remain, decorated with splendid honey-comb pendentives of the Moorish School. The first floor is given up to the matchless Salon de Cortes, where justice is administered; its walls covered with curious frescoes of the sixteenth century, chiefly portraits of the members of the Cortes assembled in session. The rich carving of the room is in native pine, and was finished in the sixteenth century, when art was still at its best. A narrow gallery runs round the room supported by slender columns. Below this are coats-of-arms and busts of the kings of Aragon, with appropriate historical incidents. The ceiling is also elaborately carved in lozenges encased in square panels. Not the smallest fragment of the room has been left undecorated, and its refined, subdued tone is lovely in the extreme. Here we found the sword and banner of Jayme el Conquistador, which the Valencians place amongst their chief treasures. The churches are numerous, but not specially interesting. San Salvador possesses a rude expressive sculpture of the thirteenth century, a curious image, supposed to have been carved by Nicodemus, and said to have miraculously found its solitary way from Syria across the seas. Not far from this is the Church, given to the Templars by James I. in 1238, when already a building of some antiquity. Here was the remarkable tower of Alibufat, on which the Cross was first displayed. But like the people of Zaragoza, who pulled down their leaning tower, so the Valencians demolished the tower of Alibufat to widen a street. We have seen that even their ancient walls were not spared. They have no respect for antiquity; no love for the past. A modern spirit possesses them; a love of pleasure and comfort; a desire to get money for the sake of indulgence. Gay, lively, full of excitement and impulse, everything yields to the passing moment. Next we come to the once vast and splendid Convent of San Domingo, in the days of its glory one of the richest and most powerful convents in Spain, but now shorn of all its ecclesiastical element. Outlines alone remain: the chapter-house and cloisters of late Gothic still beautiful and refined. In a small chapel supported by four slender pillars San Vincente Ferrer took upon him the vows of a monk. [Illustration: SALON DE CORTES: AUDIENCIA.] Of the religious ceremonies the most imposing is the Miserere which takes place every Friday in the church of the Colegio del Patriarca. High Mass is first given at nine o'clock. The music both at this and the Miserere is magnificent. Many of the rank and fashion of Valencia are constant in their attendance. Ladies assemble in a great crowd, each wearing a black mantilla. As they kneel in penitential attitude the scene is full of devotional grace and charm. The space above the high altar is covered with a purple pall which looks black and funereal. Chanting commences: slow and solemn and in the minor key. Suddenly, in the midst of the sad cadences, the picture above the altar descends by machinery, and in its place is seen a lilac veil. There is a slight movement, a half-raising of the head, amidst the congregation; an attitude of expectation. The mournful but exquisite music does not cease. It is soft and subdued, appealing to the senses. Presently the veil is withdrawn and gives place to a grey veil. This in turn passes away and a black veil appears, representing the veil of the Temple. It is torn asunder, and an image of the Saviour on the Cross is disclosed. The upturned heads gaze for a moment; on many a countenance appears the emotion actually felt. Imagination is stirred by the dramatic representation. A murmur escapes the kneeling multitude; the music swells to a louder strain, the voices gain a deeper pathos. Then voices and organ gradually die away to a whisper and cease. Silence reigns. For a moment there is no sound or stir. Then all is over; the Miserere is at an end. Quietly the fair penitents rise from their knees and stream out into the streets, which gain an additional charm as they pass onwards with their perfect forms and graceful walk. In spite of the somewhat claptrap element, the Miserere is impressive from the beautiful and refined music, the kneeling crowd, the deep obscurity that gives it mystery. It is even worth a day or two's delay in this fair City of Flowers and other delights. For in our mind we always associate Valencia with the perfume of flowers. Roses for ever bloom, and like silver in the days of Solomon, are accounted as little worth. But if they were plentiful as to the Greeks of old they would only seem the lovelier. Some of the streets are very picturesque, with long narrowing vistas of houses and balconies, casements and quaint outlines, all in the strong light and shadow of sunshine, with perhaps a church tower and spire rising above all at the end, sharply outlined against the intensely brilliant blue of the sky. Making way, we reach the gates of the city, which are still its glory, though so few remain of the twelve that once admitted to the interior. Some still retain their towers and machicolations. Outside these runs the famous river with its ancient bridges. Crossing one of them, and proceeding a distance of three miles down a straight, not very interesting road, you reach the famous port of Valencia: one of the finest ports in Spain, one of the largest harbours. After the close atmosphere of the town, the scene is agreeable and exhilarating. CHAPTER XXXII. OLD ACQUAINTANCES. Port and harbour--Sunday and fresh air--In the market-place--De Nevada protests--A curse of the country--In the days gone by--On the breakwater--Invaded tramcar--De Nevada confirmed--Another crusade needed--Plaza de Toros--In Sunday dress--Domestic interiors--When the play was o'er--Bull-ring at night--Fitful dreams--Fever--Maître d'hôtel prescribes--Magic effect--Depart for Saguntum--Before the days of Rome--Primitive town--Days of the Greeks--Attacked by Hannibal--Rebuilt by the Romans--Absent guardian--The hunchback--Reappears with custodian--Doors open--Moorish fortress--Fathomless cisterns--Sad procession--Weeping mourners--Key of Valencia--Miguella--Time heals all wounds--Proposes coffee--Proud and pleased--Scenes that remain--In Barcelona--Drawing to a close--Sorrow and regret--Many experiences--Our Espluga friends--Loretta's gratitude--In the Calle de Fernando--A last favour--Glories of Spain--Eastern benediction. Our first visit to the port and harbour was on a Sunday. Labour was suspended, and vessels of all countries were flying their flags. From the end of the long breakwater we breathed freely. Before us stretched the wide shimmering sea, blue as the sky above. A very few white-sailed boats were gliding about--only in summer are they found in large numbers. On such a day as this, hot, glowing, glorious to us of the North, the soft-climed Valencians would not venture upon the water. An occasional fishing-boat strayed in and out, but all else was at peace. The whole place was deserted. There was a strange calm and quiet upon everything; almost an English "Sabbath stillness" in the air. We wondered, but soon discovered the cause. This might have dawned upon us had we called to mind yesterday's experience. We were walking through the market-place with de Nevada the priest, when a large placard caught our eye, announcing a bull-fight for the next day, Sunday: the last of the season. "I have never seen one," said H. C. "We must go to it." "Surely you would not visit the barbarous exhibition?" said de Nevada. "In this matter I have nothing of the Spaniard in me. I hold bull-fights as a curse of the country; training up children to cruelty and laying the foundation of a host of evils." But his words had no weight with H. C. "I think everyone should see a bull-fight at least once in their lives. If I know nothing of its horrors, how can I join in a crusade against them? Once seen, I will write a scathing poem on the entertainment which shall be translated into Spanish. All my graphic power of description shall be exerted, and it may go far to put down the evil. I might also appeal to the people's superstition, which seems almost the strongest element in their nature. You will come?" turning to us. But we had had our experience once for all years before, in the bull-ring at Granada, accompanied by eight naval officers whose nerves were in excellent order. When the play was half over, and men shouted and women shrieked and waved, and there was universal applause and uproar, sick of the horrors, we left the building: to the surprise and no doubt contempt of the assembly. Thus H. C.'s appeal fell upon deaf ears. And when it came to the point he also would not go. So it fell out that we were both sitting on the breakwater, gazing upon the shimmering sea, revelling in the serene stillness of the atmosphere. The scene changed. We had to return, and seeing an empty tramcar, found ourselves enjoying the world from a solitary elevation: a short-lived pleasure. From a side-street there suddenly poured forth a crowd of men, who swarmed in and out and up the sides: and stillness and solitude were over. They were mad with excitement, and being already late, feverishly anxious to make way. One might have thought them intoxicated, but it was excitement only. They raved and shouted; their eyes flashed and glistened; they anticipated the horrors of the bull-ring; speculated as to how many bulls would be killed, whether the toreador would escape. For the moment they were as wild animals, and de Nevada's protest in the market-place wanted no better confirmation. H. C. shuddered. His poetical mind had received a shock in coming into contact with this coarse and savage element. "I am glad I decided not to go," he said. "De Nevada is right. Bull-fighting should be put down, even though the people rose up in revolt. It needs a Crusade as much as ever the cause for which the Templars went eastward." The Plaza de Toros was thronged with a crowd of men, women and children, who could not pay the fee or were too late for admission. If unable to enter, it was something to look upon the outer walls, whilst the thunders of applause helped them to realise the scene. The tramcar waited some twenty minutes, and we remained studying the crowd of eager faces that surged to and fro. From the bull-ring--one of the largest and finest in Spain--arose that constant roar and tempest of voices. We were almost prisoners, wondering how we should escape, when a city tramcar came up, stood side by side with ours, and we made the exchange. This slowly moved through the crowd and turned into a quieter thoroughfare, and the raving followed us far down the road. The car travelled slowly round the town, through the Cathedral Square, in and out of ancient gateways. Street after street, comparatively deserted, wore its Sunday dress. Flowers abounded. We were on a level with first-floor windows, and from many an open casement came a glimpse of domestic interiors: the scent of roses; fair ladies dressed in rustling silks and sheeny satin; ripples of laughter and conversation; occasional streams of melody from a fair performer. Absorbed, we did not observe the car gradually getting round to its starting-point, until we once more found ourselves in the centre of the crowd outside the bull-ring. They had not moved an inch. The spectacle was just over, the great doors were thrown open, and a cortége passed out: cart after cart with dead horses and bulls, the latter decorated as if for a prize show. A deafening roar, louder than ever, went up from the people. Finally came the vehicle with the toreadors and matadors dressed in all their fine colours, flushed with their performance, calmly taking the hurrahs. The very horses seemed maddened as they tore out of sight. Then the crowd began to disperse. Strolling out after dinner, we found ourselves once more in front of the bull-ring, looking in the darkness like a second Roman Coliseum. The square was deserted, its crowds having gone home to live the horrors over again in their dreams. Silence reigned. But the time would come round for fresh spectacles and more horrors. And so it goes on from one generation to another. That night our own dreams were fitful and broken. We had watched the sunset from the tramcar, full of splendour and colouring. As the sun went down, a chilliness had risen upon the air, and suddenly we shivered. Then it passed away, but there was no rest on retiring. Fever came on, and in semi-delirium we imagined that we were taking part in a bull-fight; warring with infuriated animals. There was no repose and no escape. Deafening shouts rang in our ears, but still the combat went on; seemed to have gone on for years, and must go on for ever. The agony was terrible. Molten lead coursed through our veins. We tried to rise, but chains bound us down. The night passed. In the early morning the fever abated, and presently we awoke from a short, unrefreshing slumber; rose as one who has gone through a long illness. When H. C. appeared and said it was time for the flower-market and the Lonja, he went alone. Our maître-d'hôtel, who felt he could not be sufficiently attentive to friends of de Nevada and the de la Torres, brought us strong tea; and on hearing an account of our night, suddenly departed, to reappear with a white powder procured at a chemist's. "A touch of the fever, señor, caught last night at sundown," he remarked. "It is taken in a moment, but seldom shaken off so quickly. This powder will go far to put you right." We took it in faith, and found it chiefly quinine. The effect was excellent. Though still weak, we were capable of an effort, and when H. C. returned with hands full of roses, carnations, orange-blossoms, sweet verbena--for which he had extravagantly paid threepence and made the flower-woman's heart sing for joy--we were able to carry out our programme and start for Saguntum. A short railway journey landed us amidst the ruins of this ancient city, where we were in the very atmosphere not only of Rome, but of days and people long before. The small, primitive town at the foot of the height was full of quaint outlines. Large circular doorways led to wonderful interiors; immense living-rooms in semi-obscurity; rich dark walls whose colour and tone were due to smoke and age. Here women were working and spinning and sometimes bending over a huge fire, deep in the mysteries of cooking. Beyond these dark rooms one caught sight of open courts or gardens, where orange and other trees flourished. Some of the women were busy making cheese, which here is quite an article of commerce and goes to many parts of the country. We had the place to ourselves. The women stopped their cheese-making and spinning to assemble in groups of twos and threes and stare after us. Human nature is curious and inquisitive all the world over. But the charm and attraction of the place are the ruins that crown the heights; walls and towers now crumbling and desolate, witnessing to the strength and power of Saguntum in ages gone by. It was founded nearly 1400 years before the Christian era by the Greeks of Zante, when the Phoenicians were still monarchs of the land. Why they permitted the Greeks to erect this stronghold does not appear. When a wealthy frontier town allied to Rome, it was attacked by Hannibal. The defence was brave, determined and prolonged; but Rome would not come to the rescue, and the town perished amidst frightful horrors. This chiefly led to the Second Punic War, by which Saguntum was revenged and Hannibal and his armies were routed out of Spain: reverses they never recovered. In time it was rebuilt by the Romans, and in the course of centuries fell under the dominion of the Goths and the Moors. Saguntum--Murviedro, as it is often called--is now a magnificent ruin. The climb to the castle is long, steep and rugged, and on reaching the gates we found them closed. There was no guardian to admit us; the ruins were uninhabited. After our feverish night, a return to the town for the keys and a second long climb seemed too much of a penance. Yet the interior must be seen. Fortune favoured us. We found a man near the gates cutting away the rank grass and weeds: a strange uncanny creature; terribly hump-backed; with a pale long-drawn face from which a couple of dark eyes looked out upon you with a strange inward fire that seemed consuming him. He was almost a skeleton, as though he and starvation were close companions. We made known our trouble, offering a substantial bribe if he would go down and bring up the keys. The man's eyes sparkled. Without hesitation he laid down his great shears and put on the coat he had placed under the walls. "If the keys are to be had by mortal power, señor, I will not return without them," he said; his voice was shrill with the sharpness of habitual suffering. "Go, then, and success attend you. We await you here." We sat down between the great gates and the ruins of the Roman theatre, and watched our messenger's long thin legs rapidly flying over the ground. Then he disappeared behind the houses. We waited and wondered. Presently he reappeared followed by an old woman dangling great keys. His eloquence had prevailed. Perhaps he had promised to share the bribe, or hoped it might be doubled. Panting and breathless, they reached us. "Ah, señor, this is unheard-of," said the old woman. "No one enters without permission from the commandant. If he knew, it would be as much as my place is worth--not that it is worth much. But he is away to-day; gone to Valencia to the marriage of a friend. So I have some excuse; and he will never know. I will admit you. The times I have opened these gates! I am sixty-five, señor, and have been up and down, through summer and winter, through storm and tempest, ever since I was fifteen. Pretty near the end now." Inserting the great key into the rough, rusty old lock, the rude doors opened and admitted us. [Illustration: RUINS OF SAGUNTUM.] We found the fortress distinctly Moorish and very interesting. The old woman, well up in her work, knew the history of every portion. Amidst the ruins of the castle were some Moorish cisterns she declared to be bottomless, where blind fish for ever swam. Below what was once the governor's garden, she led us to gloomy dungeons where heavily chained prisoners were confined for life, and she described many a horror that had taken place in the past. Everything testified to the strength of Saguntum of old. From the walls the views are magnificent. Stretching across the wide plain, one caught faint traces of Valencia and the shimmering sea; at our feet was the little town, and beyond it the hills rose in gentle outlines. As we looked we observed a procession set forth upon the long white road. Harsh, discordant music from brass instruments rose upon the air. Then we saw that it was a funeral. The coffin was being slowly borne on men's shoulders to the cemetery. The latter was near the town, enclosed in high walls, above which appeared the dark pointed tops of the melancholy cypress. A group of mourners followed the coffin; women bowed and weeping, men subdued: quite a long stream of them. Near us stood our curious messenger. "Who is it?" we asked. "A sad story, señor. A youth of seventeen, who caught the fever and died. A week ago he was as well as you or I: full of energy and enterprise: talking of what he wanted and what he would do in the future. His ambition was to emigrate, and for long he had been trying to get his parents' consent. But he was their only child, and they were loath to part with him. Ah! he has taken a longer journey now; emigrated to a more distant country. And there will be no coming back to Murviedro." "And the parents?" "Poor things! They are heartbroken. There goes his mother, supported by two women friends. One can almost hear her weeping. Oh that horrible music! It goes through my spine as if it would tear it asunder. When I am buried I hope they will have no music. I think I should turn in my coffin. Is it not a splendid view, señor? This fortress may well be called the key of Valencia. The key of the province, you understand, not of the town. We command the best of the country. You should see it in summer, when every tree is in full leaf and every flower in bloom, and the branches droop with the weight of their fruit. A land of abundance, is it not, Miguella?" turning to the old woman, who stood looking at the sad cortége with weeping eyes. "Ay, Juan, it is so," she returned with tearful voice. "Abundance of everything. But fate is cruel, and strong youth must die, and old people like you and I who half starve, for all the abundance, must still cumber the earth." "Speak for yourself, Madre Miguella," returned the man sharply. "Whatever you may be, I am not yet old and I don't see that I take the place of a better man. I shall be forty-one next New Year's Day. A hard life I have of it; few pleasures and little food. I am not formed as other men; no woman looking at me would take me for her husband. For all that, I am not tired of life, and have no desire to be in the place of that poor lad. It will come soon enough, Madre Miguella, without wishing oneself there before the time." "Santa Maria! what a clucking about nothing!" retorted Miguella. "If I called you an old man it was only a form of speech. I had in my mind's eye the strong lusty youth who has gone to his burial. Compared with him I should call you old and of little worth. After all, I was only thinking of the uncertainty of human life. You won't deny that, friend Juan." "I suppose I can't," replied the contrite hunchback. "Poor lad! I could almost have found it in my heart to die for him. He was always good to me; never mocked at me; gave me many a centimo from his little hoard; often shared his dinner if I met him on the road. I have lost a friend in him." Miguella was shedding tears afresh at the recital of the lad's virtues. "Poor boy!" she cried. "But he's better off. He hadn't time to grow hard and wicked. The angels make no mistake when they come for such as him. I wish his poor mother could see it in that light." "Give her time, give her time," returned the hunchback. "If you lost your leg, you would not all at once grow reconciled to a wooden one. Nature doesn't work in spasms, Miguella. [Illustration: BARCELONA.] By-and-by, the poor mother will come to see mercy in the blow, but she can't do that whilst the sound of her boy's voice rings in her ears, and she still feels the clasp of his arms round her neck. She wouldn't be a mother if she did." Time was on the wing. The sun was declining, the shadows were lengthening when we turned from the ruins and once more stood outside the walls. Miguella locked the doors with a firm hand and possessed herself of the keys. We took care the bribe should not be halved. It was a gala day for them, poor creatures. Juan's face lighted up with infinite contentment. "Lucky for me that I came up weeding, señor. For a whole week I need feel no hunger, and may give my poor body a little repose." "But life is not quite such hard lines with you, Miguella?" "Not quite, señor, though hard enough. Yet I have many mercies. I earn a little money by making cheeses; and in summer, when visitors now and then come to Murviedro, I take a trifle and put by a peseta for a rainy day. Heaven be praised I have never been in actual want; and Juan knows that he has never in vain asked me to lend him a centimo. Though I find his accounts very long reckonings," she quaintly added with a smile. "Miguella, you have been as good as a mother to me," returned Juan. "I never knew any other mother; have ever been a waif on the earth, without kith and kin either to bless or ban." We all went down the rugged steep together. At the bottom, Juan bade us farewell and turned to the left towards his humble cottage. Miguella escorted us up the quaint, quiet street. We passed through a picturesque gateway, and just beyond this was her small house. "Señor, if you would allow me to make you some coffee to refresh you for your journey, I should be happy," she said. "I am famous both for my cheese and my coffee." To refuse would give her pain; the train was not due for an hour and a half; a cup of Miguella's coffee was not to be despised. She turned with a glad smile, opened her door, and invited us to enter. It was a surprise to find her cottage the perfection of order, for the Spaniards are not famous for the virtue. She placed chairs, and bustled about her preparations. In a few moments a peat fire with sticks was blazing on the hearth, water was put on to boil, and a brown earthenware coffee-pot was placed on the embers to warm. In her own domain Miguella became a handy, comely old woman, who moved about without noise and must have been a good helpmeet to the husband she had lost a quarter of a century ago. Whilst the water was boiling, she took us into an inner room and showed us her arrangements for making cheese. It was an interesting sight, and the old woman went up still further in our estimation. Everything was spotlessly pure and clean. A grey cat followed her about like a dog and seemed devoted to her. "She is getting old like me," said poor Miguella, "but she is a faithful animal, and never by any chance puts her nose into a pan of milk. I might leave it all open; nothing would be touched. It is only ewes' milk, señor. Would you like some in your coffee?" We thought black coffee more stimulating. She placed it on the table, hot and fragrant. Miguella had not overpraised the cunning of her hand. With a slight diffidence meant for an apology, she took out one of her fresh little cheeses, and with home-made bread, placed it also on the table. The coffee she served in white cups of coarse porcelain, which we duly admired, and she brought forward plates of the same material. So Miguella, in largeness of heart gave us hospitality, and our simple collation was so perfect that a king need have wished no better. She had put on a white apron to serve us becomingly, and from her chimney-corner, where she added fuel to her fire, surveyed the appreciation of her labours with pride and pleasure. To us, the incident--not an every-day one--had borne a certain interest and charm. We had gone back for a moment to primitive days, "when Adam delved and Eve span." The best of Miguella's nature had come out simply because we had been a little kind to her: and we wisely reflected that too often the greatest enemy to mankind is man. Our last glimpse of Miguella was of a comely old woman standing in her doorway to watch us depart. The glow of the setting sun was upon her face, which was softened and refined by her abundant neat grey hair. She looked pleased and happy. No doubt she would return to her chimney-corner and cheese-making, and ponder over the day's small adventure. Juan would be no loser. Many a centimo would find its way from her pocket to his, and he would think her more motherly than ever. [Illustration: COURTYARD OF AUDIENCIA: BARCELONA.] On our way to the station we saw the sad funeral procession approaching. Most had dispersed, but some six or eight women were returning with the poor mother, who still looked bowed and broken. As Juan had wisely said, time would lessen the blow, but for the present no silver lining was visible in the heavy cloud overshadowing the life. We watched them disappear through one of the large round doorways into the home now desolate for ever. Then we went on, and presently the train came up, and Saguntum passed out of our lives, though not out of memory. Miguella and Juan, the ancient ruins and outlines crowning the heights, the quaint streets with their picturesque interiors, the sad procession winding slowly down the long white road, the bowed mourners and the weeping mother: nothing could ever be forgotten. * * * * * Some days after this we were walking in the streets of Barcelona. We had said good-bye to Valencia and our present sojourn in Spain was drawing to a close. With sorrow and sighing we remembered the motto of the wise king: THIS ALSO SHALL PASS AWAY. Oft quoted before, it is ever present with us and we quote it once more. We had gone through many experiences, made many acquaintances who had become friends. In imagination a small crowd of companions surrounded us, every one of them with a special niche in our heart and memory. Sauntering through the now long familiar streets, we had wandered instinctively into the neighbourhood of the cathedral. As we stood in the courtyard of the Audiencia, admiring for the fiftieth time its pointed arches, clustered columns and fine old staircase, two people entered, breaking upon our solitude. Their faces were radiant with happiness. At the first moment we hardly recognised them; the next we saw that it was Loretta and Lorenzo. "Still in Barcelona! How is this, Loretta?" "Señor, we have prolonged our stay. There was no special reason why we should not do so. Work is provided for, and the donkeys are in good keeping. We shall never again have such a holiday. It comes only once in our lives." "It is quite unnecessary to remark that you are happy, both of you." "Señor, I ask what I have done that heaven should have bestowed such favour upon me," returned Loretta, her face glowing with fervour. "I feel as though I could take the whole creation under my wing and love it for the sake of the love that is mine. I tell myself that I have not half cared for my dumb animals, though harsh word to them never passed my lips." "Loretta, we have found your clock," passing from the sublime to the commonplace. "Come both of you and see it." It was in the adjoining Calle de Fernando, not many yards from where we stood. We were just in time: the clockmaker was about to pack up and despatch it. Its design might have been made to order. A clock of white alabaster, pure as the heart of Loretta. Cupid with bow and arrows slung behind him struck the hours on a silver bell. The hour-glass was missing, it is true, but the sands of Loretta and Lorenzo were none the less golden. So the clock instead of being forwarded to Espluga, was sent to their address in Barcelona. "My happiness is now complete," cried Loretta. "Yet one thing is still wanting. I would that you, señor, should come as speedily as possible and ride Caro to Poblet, and that Lorenzo and I should wait upon you. Ah, do not delay." * * * * * "One of the most romantic episodes I ever heard of," cried H. C., as Loretta and Lorenzo walked away arm in arm in their great happiness, and we turned to contemplate once more the magic interior of the cathedral that has no rival. "It is indeed. And if these dream-churches and ancient towns are her glories, does Spain not possess yet other glories in the exalted lives of Rosalie and Anselmo, the simple hearts and annals of yonder couple, and all who resemble them? May their shadows never grow less and their faces never be pale!" "Amen," answered H. C., as the happy pair in question turned a corner and "passed in music out of sight." LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED. STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS. FOOTNOTES: [A] The rose. [B] If the reader feels any interest in Sebastien, he will be glad to hear that a petition sent to the landlord in the form of a letter proved as effective as the proposed deputation. He was promoted to the dignity (and fees) of second waiter in the dining-room: and on the first of last May was united to his beloved Anita. The sun shone and the skies were blue; the world smiled upon the young couple. The bride in her white veil and pale silk dress (the gift of her late employer, Madame la Modiste) must have appeared ravishing; and few bridegrooms in Manresa could have looked handsomer or more manly than Sebastien. We imagine how his face beamed, his eyes sparkled, his heart overflowed. His master--not to be outdone by Madame la Modiste--gave them a wedding breakfast, and the walls rang with the shouts that went up when the health of the happy pair was drunk. One can only wish them the serene bliss and success they deserve. [C] The following letter from the old canon, one of many, may be transcribed for the benefit of the reader: "You will be anxious to hear how our patient has been progressing since I last wrote to you. Better and better. There is nothing but good news to send you. I think I may almost affirm that Eugenie is now 'clothed and in her right mind.' The cure is effected. For many months she has not looked upon the wine cup, and declares that all desire for it has left her. I believe it has. As you know, the very day after our first and last evening together I sought her out, told her I was her father's friend, explained to her the atonement that was in her power. The poor creature, overcome with misery, sorrow and remorse, burst into such tears as I have never seen shed, and yielded without a murmur to my wish. I would give her no time for reconsideration, and that very day she took up her abode in my house. She never leaves it except in company with Juanita or myself. There has been no trouble from the beginning. It almost seemed as though the calm and peaceful atmosphere of our little household at once exorcised the evil spirit within her. Her better nature has triumphed, and I am persuaded that she will not fall away again. I do not intend that she shall. As long as I live this is to be her home. She asks nothing better; declares that for the first time in her life she has found peace and happiness. Her gratitude to you is unbounded. If I only mention your name, tears spring to her eyes. I believe she would lay down her life for you. She begs that you will one day come again to see, not the old Eugenie who accosted you in the church; she is dead and buried; but the new Eugenie who lives and has taken her place. She wonders what influence gave her courage to speak, and declares it was some unseen spirit or power which compelled her to go forward whether she would or no. The moment she saw you this spirit took possession of her and she was passive in its hands. Never before had such a thing happened to her. I put it down to other and higher influence. These things do not happen by chance. Heaven may spare my life for some years. During that time Eugenie's home is assured. She is now as a daughter to me; shares my modest repasts; occupies herself in the affairs of the house; spends much of her time with Juanita. She reads much, and is studying science with me. Her intelligence is of a high order, and she has a wide grasp of mind. By-and-by she may outrun me. Truly it is a pearl of price we have rescued from the fire. And I too have my reward. The house is brighter since she came to it. Even Juanita, who once only smiled, now laughs on occasion. She has taken a great affection for Eugenie, and when I am no longer here will transfer her services to our protégée. Heaven be praised, I am able to leave them independent of the world. And I have enlisted my nephew's sympathy in the matter. Eugenie is to be much with them when I go hence, but this is to be her home; hers for her life. Yet who can tell? She is young. If you thought her beautiful then, what would you say now to that calm, radiant face, those clear, steadfast eyes? One day she will probably marry again; and in a second and more worthy choice find all the happiness and protection that she missed in her first terrible and headstrong mistake. "And now, the old question. When are you coming? Juanita bids me say that all the resources of her simple art are waiting to be put forth in your favour. She declares she never was happier than that evening when she waited upon us and dispensed her simple luxuries. Eugenie says she shall never be at perfect rest until you have witnessed her transformation. For myself, I have a new work on Natural Philosophy to show you. I long once more to pace together the aisles of our beloved cathedral. At my age I live from day to day, grateful to heaven for each new day in this bright world. But it behoves me to sit loosely to all things. The end may come at any hour, it cannot be very far off now. The old man longs to welcome you yet once again. Deny him not." 
39199	----	http://www.archive.org/details/fortunateislesli00boydiala Transcriber's note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). THE FORTUNATE ISLES * * * * * BY THE SAME AUTHOR _Travel_ OUR STOLEN SUMMER A VERSAILLES CHRISTMAS-TIDE _Novels_ THE GLEN THE FIRST STONE WITH CLIPPED WINGS THE MAN IN THE WOOD BACKWATERS HER BESETTING VIRTUE THE MISSES MAKE-BELIEVE * * * * * [Illustration: Calle Del Calvario, Pollensa] THE FORTUNATE ISLES Life and Travel in Majorca, Minorca and Iviza by MARY STUART BOYD With Eight Illustrations in Colour and Fifty-Two Pen Drawings by A. S. Boyd, R.S.W. Methuen & Co. Ltd. 36 Essex Street W.C. London First Published in 1911 FOREWARNING "I hear you think of spending the winter in the Balearic Islands?" said the only Briton we met who had been there. "Well, I warn you, you won't enjoy them. They are quite out of the world. There are no tourists. Not a soul understands a word of English, and there's nothing whatever to do. If you take my advice you won't go." So we went. And what follows is a faithful account of what befell us in these fortunate isles. M. S. B. CONTENTS PAGE I. SOUTHWARDS 1 II. OUR CASA IN SPAIN 14 III. PALMA, THE PEARL OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 26 IV. HOUSEKEEPING 39 V. TWO HISTORIC BUILDINGS 51 VI. THE FAIR AT INCA 60 VII. VALLDEMOSA 66 VIII. MIRAMAR 79 IX. SÓLLER 94 X. ANDRAITX 107 XI. UP AMONG THE WINDMILLS 117 XII. NAVIDAD 128 XIII. THE FEAST OF THE CONQUISTADOR 143 XIV. POLLENSA 152 XV. THE PORT OF ALCUDIA 168 XVI. MINORCA 179 XVII. STORM-BOUND 193 XVIII. ALARÓ 203 XIX. THE DRAGON CAVES AND MANACOR 215 XX. ARTÁ AND ITS CAVES 225 XXI. AMONG THE HILLS 242 XXII. DEYÁ, AND A PALMA PROCESSION 252 XXIII. OF FAIR WOMEN AND FINE WEATHER 264 XXIV. OF ODDS AND ENDS 274 XXV. IVIZA--A FORGOTTEN ISLE 289 XXVI. AN IVIZAN SABBATH 301 XXVII. AT SAN ANTONIO 311 XXVIII. WELCOME AND FAREWELL 320 XXIX. LAST DAYS 328 INDEX 335 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR CALLE DEL CALVARIO, POLLENSA _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE PALMA DE MALLORCA, FROM THE TERRENO 26 VALLDEMOSA 70 SÓLLER 94 AFTER THE FEAST OF THE CONQUISTADOR, PALMA CATHEDRAL 143 THE ROMAN GATEWAY, ALCUDIA 168 MAHÓN, MINORCA 193 SUNDAY MORNING AT IVIZA 289 PEN DRAWINGS PAGE THE CATHEDRAL AND THE LONJA, PALMA 1 A PALMA _PATIO_ 9 THE SERENO 13 THE CASA TRANQUILA 14 THE GATE OF SANTA CATALINA, PALMA 19 OUR SUBURBAN STREET 24 CALLE DE LA ALMUDAINA, PALMA 29 A SUPPER PARTY 37 THE SATURDAY MARKET, PALMA 39 A CONSUMOS STATION 47 THE CASTLE OF BELLVER 51 PALMA, FROM THE WOODS OF BELLVER 57 SECOND CLASS 60 A CORNER OF THE FAIR AT INCA 64 WHERE THE HILLS MEET THE PLAIN, ESGLAYETA 66 CARABINEROS IN THE KITCHEN 77 LA TRINIDAD, MIRAMAR 79 A TIGHT FIT 91 THE MANDOLINE PLAYER 101 AT FORNALUTX 104 SON MAS, ANDRAITX 107 IN THE PORT OF ANDRAITX 117 ABOVE ANDRAITX 123 CHRISTMAS TURKEYS 128 A SCENE OF SLAUGHTER 135 THE COFFIN OF JAIME II IN PALMA CATHEDRAL 150 MARKET DAY AT POLLENSA 152 THE MAIN STREET OF POLLENSA 161 A _NORIA_ NEAR ALCUDIA 175 CIUDADELA SEEN FROM THE SEA 179 CALLE SAN ROQUE, MAHÓN 187 _COMERCIANTES_ IN THE FONDA AT MAHÓN 201 AN INTERIOR IN ALARÓ 203 ALARÓ 210 IN THE DRAGON'S CAVE 215 MANACOR 221 ARTÁ 225 TOWARDS THE PARISH CHURCH, ARTÁ 229 ENTERING THE CAVES OF ARTÁ 234 PALM-SUNDAY AT SÓLLER 242 DEYÁ 253 PROCESSIONISTS OF HOLY THURSDAY 262 DURING THE CARNIVAL AT PALMA 264 THE WOOER 269 THE NATIONAL SPORT 274 CALLE DE LA PORTELLA, PALMA 279 THANKSGIVING 296 A TRIO AND A QUARTETTE 301 THE GATES OF THE _FEIXAS_, IVIZA 309 THE CHURCH OF SAN ANTONIO, IVIZA 311 THE CHURCH OF JESUS, IVIZA 320 MOORISH TOWER AT THE PORT OF ALCUDIA 328 [Illustration: The Cathedral and the Lonja, Palma] THE FORTUNATE ISLES I SOUTHWARDS We had left London on a tempestuous mid-October Saturday morning, and Sunday night found us walking on the Rambla at Barcelona, a purple velvet star-spangled sky overhead, and crowds of gay promenaders all about us. When the Boy and I had planned our journey to the Balearic Isles (the Man never plans), our imaginings always began as we embarked at Barcelona harbour on the Majorcan steamer that was to carry us to the islands of our desire. So when we had strolled to where the Rambla ends amid the palm-trees of the port, it seemed like the materializing of a dream to see the steamer _Balear_ lying there, right under the great column of Columbus, with her bow pointing seawards, as though waiting for us to step on board. When at sunset next day the hotel omnibus deposited us at the port, the _Balear_ appeared to be the centre of attraction. It still lacked half an hour of sailing time, yet her decks, which were ablaze with electric light, were covered with people. Ingress was a matter of so much difficulty that our inexperience of the ways of Spanish ports anticipated an uncomfortably crowded passage. There was scarcely room on board to move, yet up the species of hen-ladder that acted as gangway people were still streaming--ladies in mantillas, ladies with fans, ladies with babies, and men of every age, the men all smoking cigarettes. Fortunately a recognized etiquette made those whose visits to the ship were of a purely complimentary nature confine themselves to the deck. When we descended to inspect our sleeping accommodation it was to find an individual cabin reserved for each of us; and to learn that, in spite of the mob on board, there were but four other saloon passengers. These, as we afterwards discovered, were a French honeymoon couple and a young Majorcan lady who was accompanied by her _dueña_. Rain had been predicted, and was eagerly looked for, as none had fallen for many weeks. Yet it was a perfect evening. There was hardly a ripple on the water, and the air was soft and balmy. Behind the brilliant city with its myriads of lights rose the dark Catalonian mountains. Clustered near us in the harbour the crews of the fishing boats made wonderfully picturesque groups as they supped by the light of hanging lamps. And over all, high above the tall palms of the Paseo de Colon, the statue of Columbus pointed ever westwards. Looking at the sparkling scene, it was difficult to credit that Barcelona, with its surface aspect of light-hearted gaiety, was under martial law, even though we had seen that alert-eyed armed soldiers guarded every street and alley, and knew that but a day or two earlier bombs had exploded with deadly effect where the crowds were now promenading. It was hard, too, to believe that at that moment the interest of all Europe was centred upon that sombre fortress to the south-west of the town, within whose walls, only five days earlier, Ferrer had, rightly or wrongly, met the death of a traitor. The warning siren sounded. The visitors reluctantly scuttled down the ridiculous hen-ladder. The moorings were cast away, the screw revolved, and we were off--bound for the Fortunate Isles. Out of many wondrous nights passed on strange waters I remember none more beautiful. We were almost alone on deck. So far as solitude went the _Balear_ might have been chartered for our exclusive use. The second-cabin passengers had all disappeared forward. The French bride and bridegroom had found a secluded nook in which to coo; and the vigilant _dueña_ had led her charge into retirement. We three sat late into the night watching the lights of the beautiful city of unrest fade away into the distance, while over the sinister fortress of Montjuich the golden sickle of the new moon hung like a note of interrogation. The Spanish coast had vanished. The ship's bow was pointing towards Africa, and wild-fire was flashing about the horizon when at last we descended to our cabins. The lightning was still flashing, but it was far in our wake, when we awoke about four in the morning to find the _Balear_ sailing along on an even keel, close by a mountainous coast whose highest promontory was crowned by a lighthouse. Having dressed and refreshed ourselves with biscuits, and chocolate made over a spirit-lamp, we went on deck while it was yet dark, and watched the land gradually become more and more distinct with the broadening dawn. The Boy, who had early recognised something British in the build of our steamer, made the interesting discovery from the unobliterated lettering on her bell that, though now known as the _Balear_, the vessel had begun her career as the _Princess Maud_, one of a line of steamers coasting between Glasgow and Liverpool. As the steamer skirted the picturesque coast we tried, not very effectively, it must be admitted, to pick out the bays and headlands history connects with Jaime, the valorous young King of Aragon, who, accompanied by a great fleet, set sail from Barcelona one September day early in the thirteenth century, determined to wrest Majorca from the tyranny of the Moors, who for hundreds of years had dominated it. But when we had decided that it must have been round _that_ point that his ships, with all lights extinguished, had crept at midnight to anchor in _this_ bay, the appearance of yet another point and another bay made us waver. Still, there could be no mistaking Porto Pi, with its beacon tower on the point where the Moors, warned of the approach of the enemy, gathered in force to resist his landing. The sun was illumining the wooded slopes about the ancient castle of Bellver, and shining radiantly upon Palma, lighting up the spires of the noble Cathedral and the encompassing city walls, and shining upon the mountains beyond, as about half-past six we entered the harbour, to find the wharf already busy with people. We had left grey gloom in London and in Paris. Here all was vivid and sparkling. The air was exhilarating, the port, with its nondescript craft, was a feast of colour. Voices speaking the island tongue sounded strangely in our unaccustomed ears. Our first impression of Palma was one of brightness: an impression conveyed partly by the warm amber and golden tints of the stone of which the charming city is built. On the previous night we had thought the _Balear_ half empty; but with the morning many unguessed passengers made their appearance forward. The _guardia civil_, who was travelling with his little boy, producing a pocket-handkerchief, dipped it in a bucket of water and scrubbed his son's face till it shone, the child keeping up an excited chatter the while. The honeymoon couple were early on deck looking out for the Grand Hotel omnibus. But we were nearly alongside the wharf before the young Majorcan lady, closely shadowed by her _dueña_, left her cabin. After the manner of Spanish aristocrats when travelling, she was dressed in black, and carried a fan that seemed to go oddly with her smart hat. She had a beautiful figure, and the graceful carriage of her race. But an expression of discontent, as though she were already weary looking for something that might have been expected to happen but did not, lent an unbecoming droop to her well cut lips. Her companion was a shrivelled little woman, whose gums were toothless and whose cheeks bore the pallor of enforced seclusion, but whose alert expression betokened generations of watchful patience. He would be an ingenious as well as an ardent lover whose attentions could escape the glint of those quiet eyes. A black mantilla covered her scant hair, a long semi-transparent shawl draped her narrow shoulders. In addition to her fan she held two parcels, one wrapped in green, the other in orange tissue-paper--a flimsy covering, surely, for a sea-passage. We put ourselves in the care of the first porter who mounted the gangway--a handsome brigand with a slouch hat, curled moustaches, and yellow boots. Gathering up a mountain of light luggage in either hand, he tripped airily on shore, we meekly following. A Spanish friend in London had recommended the _Fonda de Mallorca_ (locally known as "Barnils'") as the best specimen of a typical Majorcan hotel, and there we had decided to stay until our plans for the next few months were matured. As we left the harbour the hotel omnibus drew up in front of the Customs Office, and for the third and last time on the journey the solemn farce of the examination of our luggage was gone through. This time it was altogether perfunctory. Not an article was opened. The trunks, which followed on a cart, must have been treated with like trustful generosity, for their keys never left our possession. As our baggage included a double supply of artist's materials requisite for a six months' stay, it turned the scale at three hundred pounds. Between Charing Cross and Paris the overweight was charged 15s. 6d. From Paris to Barcelona we paid 35 francs. From there to Palma it travelled free. But though we saw fellow-travellers in variant stages of exasperation over vexatious claims, we paid no duty anywhere. Even the China tea that, unknown to my men-folk, I had smuggled, travelled unsuspected. And as tea in Majorca is a ransom, and Indian at the best, I had, while my small store lasted, an unfailing sense of satisfaction in my contraband possession. The Hôtel Barnils gave us a cordial welcome. The grateful fragrance of hot coffee was in the air as we were taken upstairs and delivered into the care of Pedro, the chamber-man, who was smoking a cigarette as he cleaned the tiled corridors with a basin of damp sawdust and an ineffectual-looking broom. Our suite of rooms on the second floor consisted of a tiny _salon_, from which on either side opened a bedroom. The smaller had a window to the Calle del Conquistador, the larger overlooked the inner courtyard with its potted palms and ginger-plants. All three rooms were papered alike in a pattern of large black and brown leaves on a yellow ground. The effect was decidedly bizarre. To those of a melancholy temperament it would assuredly have proved trying, even though there was a certain relief in the collection of French coloured lithographs that further adorned the walls. Our sitting-room, which, like the bedrooms, was paved with tiles, had a tall window that opened to the floor and was guarded by an iron railing. It had two red-covered easy-chairs, four fawn brocade small chairs, and a round table with a yellow and drab tablecloth. In an amazingly brief space we were seated round that table drinking coffee out of tall glasses, and making acquaintance with the _enciamada_, a local breakfast dainty which is neither pastry, bread, nor bun, yet appears to enjoy something of the good qualities of all three. In form it somewhat resembles the fossil known to our nursery days as an ammonite. To picture a nicely baked and browned ammonite that has been well dusted with icing-sugar is to see an _enciamada_. The little breakfast over, we went out to explore the city. Up the street of the Conquistador people were hurrying: men bearing on their heads flat baskets filled with pink or silver fish that were still dripping from the Mediterranean, and women carrying empty baskets. Following the stream, we found ourselves in the market, which is surrounded by tall, many-storied buildings. It was an animated scene. Everybody was busy--all the people who were not buying were selling. And round about were commodities that were strange to us. The fish-stalls, which were clustered in a corner by themselves, displayed odd fish, many of them repulsive-looking, and all, in our eyes, undersized. The meat stalls revealed joints of puzzling cut, and were garlanded with gamboge and vermilion sausages, as though the Majorcans' love of bright colours manifested itself even in the food they ate. The more attractive aspect of the fruit and vegetables drew us up the alleys where the salesfolk sat placidly surrounded by huge gourds, radishes eighteen inches long, strange and unappetizing fungi. They had a varied assortment of goods, but the vegetable that appeared to dominate the market was the sweet pepper, or _pimiento_; everywhere it lay in heaps whose colour shaded from a vivid green to glowing scarlets and orange. One or two ladies in mantillas were marketing, attended by maids whose hair, dressed in a single pleat, showed beneath the _rebozillo_ that is the national head-covering of the country-women. One piece of buying, and one only, did I venture on. The Man's favourite fruit is the green fig, a commodity that in London costs on an average eighteenpence a dozen. Seeing a woman with a hamper of choice fresh figs, I proceeded to try how Majorcan prices compared with those of Britain. Taking warning by the experience of a friend who, having asked for half-a-crown's worth of grapes in a foreign market, found himself confronted with the impossibility of carrying away his purchase, I discreetly held out the local equivalent of a penny and pointed to the figs. The vendor, seeing that I had no basket, held a brief colloquy with a neighbouring salesman, which resulted in the production of a piece of crumpled newspaper. Signing to me to open my hands, she spread it over them and began counting the figs into it, carefully selecting the finest specimens from her stock. Having heard that food was cheap in these fortunate isles, I confidently expected that my penny might purchase four green figs: but instead of stopping at a reasonable number, the woman went on piling them up until I felt inclined to say "Hold, enough!" When she desisted, the paper held a dozen juicy purple figs, and half a dozen of the golden green ones that are considered the more delicate in flavour. A Spanish proverb declares that to reach perfection a ripe fig must have three qualifications: "A neck for the hangman, a robe for the beggar, a tear for the penitent." These had all the required attributes: the slender neck, the rent in the skin, the oozing drop of juice. Better figs, we imagined, were never eaten than the experimental pennyworth we bought that October day in Palma market. The mind easily adjusts itself to existing conditions. A few minutes later it scarcely surprised us to see an old woman buy ten fine tomatoes for a halfpenny--or to hear her demand an eleventh as just value for her coin. Leaving the market square, we wandered about the narrow streets, which, with their tall old houses and quaint _patios_--the spacious central courtyards--are full of picturesque scenes. Palma is densely populated, and the moving crowds gave us the impression of a people good-looking and well dressed as well as healthy and happy. Few of the ladies we met wore hats, and to me it appeared odd to see a lady in a well-cut tailor suit wearing a mantilla as, accompanied by her maid, she did her shopping. [Illustration: A Palma _Patio_] Many of the native women had their hair in a long pigtail, and wore either the _rebozillo_--a neat white muslin headdress, in form like a diminutive hood with a collarette attached--or a coloured silk handkerchief, or both. A small fringed shawl usually covered their shoulders. But it was in the matter of footgear that the Majorcan fancy appeared to run riot. Yellow boots, green boots, cream-hued boots, elastic-sided orange boots were displayed on the feet of otherwise sedately-garbed people of both sexes; and the children wore slippers of lively shades embroidered with gay flowers. When a sudden shower, descending with tropical force made us seek shelter in a doorway whence we watched the passers-by, we had the opportunity of noting that, though all marketing dames wore smart boots, many of them had dispensed with stockings. A sharp distinction seemed to be drawn in the dress of the classes. As we passed the church of San Miguel, troops of ladies who had been attending morning service were leaving it. With almost the uniformity of a livery, they wore black gowns of brocaded satin. Black mantillas covered their beautifully-dressed hair, and in addition to their rosaries, each carried a fan. Our temporary shelter chanced to be close to the gate of Santa Margarita, and when the rain cloud had passed over, we went near to read the inscription graven in Spanish on the stone on one side of the gateway:-- _By this gate entered into the city on the 31st day of December, 1229, the hosts of King Don Jaime I. of Aragon, Conquistador of Majorca. As a remembrance of that memorable occasion, on which Majorca was restored to the faith and civilization of Christianity, this gate, called "Bab-al-Kofol" in the time of the Islamite dominion, since then "Esuchidor" and "Pintador," and in modern times "Santa Margarita," was declared a national monument on the 28th of July, 1908, and restored at the expense of the State._ The records of the more ancient races who inhabited the island seem to have almost vanished. The Gymnesias, known as the people whose gracious climate rendered the wearing of clothes a superfluity; the Phoenicians, the Romans, even the Balearic slingers, are well-nigh forgotten, while memorials of the valiant young King of Aragon meet one at every turn. Hunger sent us back to the hotel to have our first experience of the Majorcan cookery for which it is justly noted. The cheerful dining-room opened into the square courtyard, whose walls were striped in broad lines of blue and white like the bandbox of a French milliner. On each of the six tables was a large decanter of red wine. The first dish set before us required a certain amount of courage to tackle. It was a mound of amber-tinted rice in which was visible a weird conglomeration of fish, flesh, fowl, and chopped vegetables. The queer part was the preponderance of empty seashells, for while their contents had doubtless become incorporated with the other ingredients, the empty shells remained insistent and uninviting. But hunger had made us reckless, and on venturing, we found the _arroz con mariscos_ worthy the national esteem in which it is held. Highly seasoned meat of some sort followed. Then came delicately-cooked little fish; then something that defied us to discover whether it belonged to the animal or the vegetable kingdom. There were no sweets, but the dessert was abundant and delicious. Apricots, curiously exotic-looking apples that were streaked with crimson on a pink ground, great clusters of little yellow grapes that seemed as though the sunshine were imprisoned in their skins, and the tempting little baked almonds that are a speciality of Barnils'. The rain, that in a few minutes had turned the narrow streets into rivers, had ceased as suddenly as it began. The sky was again a deep glowing blue, and the pure soft air was a pleasure to breathe, when ascending a stair we found ourselves on the flat roof of the hotel, which commanded an extensive view over the city. About us were many flat Moorish roofs, some used as gardens, others bearing great cages full of pigeons. To the south was the port with its gay display of shipping and the sparkling waters of the Mediterranean. To north, east, and west, the towers and domes and city walls encircled us. Beyond were the fruitful plains, and farther still the blue mountains. Around us rose the softened murmur of the town, the chiming of bells, the whisper of the sea, the sound of voices speaking in strange tongues. All was charming, novel, and wholly delightful. Chopin's description of Palma, written seventy years ago when, with George Sand, he spent a winter in Majorca, needs no correction to-day:-- "Here I am at Palma," he wrote to his friend Fontana, "in the midst of palms, and cedars and cactuses, and olives and oranges, and lemons and figs and pomegranates.... The sky is like a turquoise, the sea is like lazuli, and the mountains are like emeralds. The air is pure like the air of Paradise. All day long the sun shines and it is warm, and everybody walks about in summer clothes. At night one hears guitars and serenades. Vines are festooned on immense balconies. Moorish walls rise all about us. The town, like everything here, looks towards Africa. In a word, it is an enchanted life that we are living." Soon after midnight a deep sonorous cry awoke me from the sleep of the pleasantly fatigued:-- _Alabado sea Dios.... Las doce y media.... Sereno...._ it rang out in the stillness. Jumping out of bed, I reached the open window in time to see the passing of a black figure wrapped in a great cloak, the rays from the lantern he carried throwing a wavering circle of light on the pavement beside him. It was the _sereno_, the guardian of the sleeping city. Pausing before one of the closed doors, he smote on it three times with his staff. Then he turned, and passed out of sight, his long wailing cry again rising into the night. [Illustration: The Sereno] [Illustration: The Casa Tranquila] II OUR CASA IN SPAIN Palma was gay with bunting in honour of the birthday of the young Queen of Spain, when on the afternoon of our second day in Majorca we set out to deliver a letter of introduction that was fated to have an important influence on our future arrangements. Much might be, and probably much has been written on the uses and abuses of letters of introduction. Sometimes the given letter proves a boon both to him who carries and him who receives it. Was not one of our best friends made known to us through the medium of a perfunctory note from a man we had not seen for many years, and whom the presenter of the note had never even met? When we left London we bore a letter of introduction to an Englishman resident in Barcelona, and he in turn gave us a letter to an American friend of his at Palma, who was Consul for certain of the Southern Republics. The home of the Consul was at Son Españolet, an attractive little residential suburb about a mile beyond the city walls. The busy district of Santa Catalina lies between it and the sea. Undulating groves of almond and olive separate it from the hills. Taking the mule-drawn tram-car that plies between Palma and Porto Pi, we alighted at Santa Catalina; and, after making various inquiries, found ourselves ringing the gate-bell of the house, over whose tower fluttered the gay banner of the Consulate. Had the Consul and his wife guessed that these three British invaders were going to trespass on their endurance for a period of six months, I doubt if they would have received us with such courteous geniality. As it was, their reception was so cordial that within half an hour of our meeting I felt emboldened to reveal what had been my secret desire--that we might rent a furnished house near Palma for the winter. Not a fine house--merely a roof under which we could stow our belongings, a centre from which our wanderings about the islands might radiate. Could they advise us? Did they think such an idea was feasible? The Consul shook his head. "Not near Palma," he said. "At Porto Pi or the Terreno you might chance on one. But these are summer seaside places. Most of the houses there are shut up now. You'd find it dull and inconvenient in winter." "This district seems delightful, and near town. Would there be a chance of our getting a house here?" "Unfurnished, yes--furnished, no. But why not take a vacant house and hire what you need? There's only three of you. You don't want much." "Say, Luis!" said pretty Mrs. Consul, "what about the house the Major left last week? That's empty now. Would that suit?" For a moment the Consul looked meditative. "I'm thinking," he said. "You're right. That's the very place. Nice little house. Got a garden. Stable too. And a fine view from the veranda." "Is the house near? Could we see it?" we asked. "It's close by, in the Calle de Mas. We'll see about it, right away, now." The Consul, happily for us, was a man of action. Ringing the bell, he summoned Isidoro, his man-servant, who summoned Margarita, his cook. And Margarita, having received instructions to search the wide world till she found the caretaker of the empty house and to bring her hither, departed at once on her quest. In an incredibly brief space of time she returned in company with a little old woman and two large door-keys. Following her guidance we walked in procession round the corners of several secluded roads, whose yellow stone walls, flat roofs, and almost tropical foliage looked Oriental under the evening glow. Viewed from the street, the house we sought, with its green shutters and tiled roof, resembled a hundred others. But when the big keys had performed their task, and we had passed through the two centre rooms and found ourselves on a wide stone-pillared veranda looking across the orange and lemon trees of the gardens to where the Mediterranean lay azure under the setting sun, our minds held no further hesitation. We knew that it was our own house. Merely to assure ourselves that the house had no equal, we investigated the claims of two other vacant dwellings before returning to the Consulate. One had a basement in which a native family lived--apparently wholly upon garlic. The other attempted to make up in stucco images what it lacked in view. It was too late that night to take any steps towards securing the house. The Consul, himself a versatile linguist, knowing that our meagre Spanish could hardly be expected to prove equal to the subtleties of house-hiring, arranged to accompany the Man and the Boy next day to interview the owner, and if possible to see the negotiations completed. I think we were all secretly uneasy until we learned that, on the personal recommendation of the Consul, the landlord had unhesitatingly accepted us as tenants, and that he had agreed to have the garden put in order, to mend any broken panes of glass in the doors or windows, to see that the well was clean, and to permit us to enter upon our tenancy at once. And then, the house being secured, the important subject of furniture had to be considered. Knowing that with hired goods we would feel conscious of certain restrictions, we had resolved to buy what was absolutely necessary. And the question was--how much or how little furniture would three unexacting people require during six months of a picnicking existence in a gracious climate? Already there were several indispensable articles in the house--two tables, one large enough to serve as dining-table, a bench, and a tall glass-doored corner cupboard. Beds would be needed, washstands, two more tables of the plainest description, half-a-dozen rush-seated chairs of local make for utility, lounge chairs for our laziness, and looking-glasses for our vanity. Still under the Consul's skilled guidance we visited an upholsterer's, a dark and narrow shop where the closely packed stock took up so much room that there was hardly space for a single customer. The shopkeeper, a smiling little round man in a pink shirt, and his daughter, a smiling big round girl in a white frock, entered heartily into the spirit of our requirements; and with the Consul's aid in the reduction of prices, we speedily acquired what was necessary. We had landed on Majorca on Tuesday morning. Before dusk fell on Thursday our house was not only taken, but the furniture purchased. Electric light is a cheap luxury in Palma, and for our comfort in the winter nights we were having it put in. Knowing that the installation of the light, the scrubbing out of the house, and the raking up of the garden would occupy a day or two, we decided to remain at Barnils' until Monday, on which morning we would journey out to Son Españolet and take possession. Meanwhile we roamed about Palma with our eyes open to the necessities of our bare establishment, picking up a broom here, a coffee-strainer there, some wooden cooking-spoons yonder. Matters moved with surprising briskness. Monday morning found the electric light fixed, the tiled floors well scrubbed, the scant provision of furniture in the rooms, and the garden dug. So, leaving our heavier luggage to follow by cart, we packed ourselves and our smaller baggage into a _carruaje_, and set out for our new home. The progress thither was circuitous, as first we had to journey up and down the narrow streets of the town collecting the smaller purchases we had made. First we called at a grocer's to pick up the supply of provisions that were to form the nucleus of our housekeeping. Then we meant to drive to the china shop where our store of crockery awaited us. Unfortunately the china shop, being situated on a street so steep that it ascended in a series of wide steps, was unapproachable by our two-horse conveyance. Leaving the carriage at the foot of the steps the Man and the Boy mounted to the shop, and by and by reappeared accompanied by a man and a maiden, all four laden with dishes. Space in the conveyance had been limited before. Now, surrounded by earthenware cooking-pots, and basins, and jugs, and plates, we were jolted over the primitively paved streets, and out beyond the gate of Santa Catalina to the little house in Son Españolet. Perhaps our sense of possession threw a glamour over the dwelling, but already it seemed to wear a look of home. The scanty furniture was in place, a few minutes sufficed to put the groceries on the shelves, the dishes in the glass cupboard, the earthenware cooking-pots and pans on the kitchen shelf. Then, when the table was spread with our new tea-cups, and decorated with roses and scented verbena from the garden, set in a jug, and the kettle was a-boil over our trusty spirit-lamp, we sat down, in great contentment, to enjoy the first meal in our _casa_ in Spain. The lines even of a foreign householder in Majorca are cast in pleasant places. From our point of view the Majorcan landlord has the worse of the bargain, his tenant the better. [Illustration: The Gate of Santa Catalina, Palma] We took our little house for three months, paying in advance the very moderate rent--it was twenty pesetas, about fifteen shillings, a month--and agreeing to give, or take, a month's warning. This done, our obligations appeared to cease. There were no taxes, at least none that the tenant was expected to pay. There was no water rate. The well in the garden afforded a supply of pure and wholesome rain-water. If windows were broken the landlord sent, or promised to send, a glazier to put in new panes. In the rare event of a chimney requiring cleaning, the accommodating landlord was expected to employ a mason to do the work. And with the arrival of the season locally considered best for the annual pruning of the vines--which is the period between the 15th and the 20th of January--a duly qualified gardener, instructed by the owner of the house, appeared and clipped those within our walls. Our Majorcan home proved to be full of the most charming informalities. Its architecture was the perfection of simplicity; a child might have designed it. It was on one floor only, and measured fifteen paces square. There were neither hall nor passages, and in a short time we found ourselves wondering why we had ever considered such things necessary. All the doors were glazed. The front door opened directly into a sitting-room, whose wide glass door led to another room that opened on to the veranda. To the right of the front door was the Boy's bedroom, to the left an apartment that served as studio. From the back sitting-room opened, on one side, a bedroom that had a useful dress closet; and on the other a compact little kitchen with a cool larder that was almost as big as itself. The kitchen walls were lined breast-high with blue and white tiles; and under the window that looked towards the sea was a neat range of stoves, for the consumption of both coal and charcoal. The two sitting-rooms boasted the distinction of wall papers, and the ceiling of our favourite room--that which opened on to the veranda--represented an azure sky among whose fluffy white clouds flitted birds and butterflies. At one side of the house was a stable, and an enclosure fitted with stone tubs and jars, meant to be used in the washing of clothes. The veranda, or _terras_, bade fair to become a perpetual joy to us. It was roofed by a spreading vine, whose foliage even in November was luxuriant. The former tenants had eaten all the grapes except one bunch, of which the wasps had taken possession; and we were either too generous or too timid to dispute their claim. On the broad ledge of the veranda, on either side of the short flight of steps leading down to the garden, were great green flower-pots. Three held pink ivy-leaved geraniums, one contained a cactus that had exactly the appearance of four prickly sea-urchins set in mould, the others were empty. The garden measured nineteen paces by twenty-two. Raised paths of concrete divided it into eight beds. The four larger encircled the quaint draw-well; the four smaller were in a row, two on either side of the veranda steps. The beds held a number of fruit trees. There was a sturdy lemon that bore both fruit and blossom, and three orange-trees; one carrying about sixty mandarin oranges. And besides a second vine there were seven almond-trees and two apricots. A shrub in whose racemes of hawthorn-scented blossom bees were busy, we had never before seen. Later we learned that it was the loquat. Some rose bushes, which obligingly flowered all winter, a jasmine, a tall scented verbena, a long row of sweet peppers, two clumps of artichokes, and sundry tufts of herbs completed our vegetable kingdom. Majorca is a paradise for the gardener--or would be, were the rainfall more assured--for the climate varies so little that almost anything can be planted at any season. The day we took possession of the house I sowed some rows of dwarf peas. In a week they were above the ground and continued to flourish exceedingly, until brought to a standstill by the long-continued drought. The rain in January set them a-growing again, and from early February till April we had dishes of green peas from our own ground. At the foot of the garden, separated from it by a high stone wall, were two small dwellings. One was empty. In the other there resided a cobbler named Pepe, his wife, and a lean red kitten. The sudden arrival of us foreigners proved an event of extraordinary interest in the circumscribed lives of the pair, and of the skinny kitten, who developed into quite a handsome cat on our scraps. Mr. and Mrs. Pepe had no veranda, but from their patch of garden a tiny staircase led to a _mirador_--a species of roof watch-tower--from which they had a capital view of the town, the port, and of their neighbours. As in these sunny November days we lived with the wide glass doors open to the veranda, there was so much to observe in our doings that for the first week at least of our stay Pepe's customers must have been neglected; for morning, noon, and night he was at his post of supervision. As we sat at table we got quite accustomed to seeing his squat figure outlined against the sky as he undisguisedly watched our movements. Sometimes he even carried his quaint spouted wine-bottle and hunk of rye bread up to the _mirador_, and enjoyed his breakfast with a vigilant eye on us. Pepe had a taste for gardening, and grew chrysanthemums and carnations in the few feet of soil attached to his dwelling. Sometimes, with due ceremonial, he presented us with one of his striped carnations. And one day, when I was in the garden, he hastened down from his post of observation to reappear, smiling broadly, at our side gate, bearing the gift of a sturdy root of French marigold. We showed our appreciation of the compliment by sending him a boot to mend; and, courteous preliminaries having been thus exchanged, we continued to live on terms of distant amity. The marigold I promptly planted in one of the empty green flower-pots, where throughout the winter it bore a constant succession of its brown and orange velvet flowers. A family from Andalusia--a father, mother, and four children--occupied the house adjoining ours. They seemed good-tempered, easy-going folks, living a happy careless life in this land of sunshine. Their somewhat extensive garden was well kept and fruitful. The father, like so many of the residents in these islands, was a bird-fancier. And when, on sunny mornings, assisted by his children, he had carried out the dozens of cages containing his pets, and had hung them on his pomegranate-trees, and on the pergola, where the purple convolvulus twined about branches heavy with golden oranges, our world was vocal with their song. At the foot of their garden was a flourishing little poultry-yard, in which, with laudable success, they reared chickens and ducks and rabbits. They supplied us regularly with eggs, and when any of the live stock was ripe for the pot we always had the first offer of purchase. The method of procedure was to catch the beast--plump rabbit, young rooster, or whatever it chanced to be--and to carry it, suspended by the legs and vigorously protesting, to the door of our _casa_ to exhibit its proportions, and to inquire if we would like to purchase. On the sale being effected, as it usually was, for the quality of their live stock was unequalled, the victim would be taken away, to reappear half an hour later stripped of fur or feather, and with its members decorously dressed for cooking. Early in the year the Andalusian family was increased by one--a fine boy. A few weeks after, the mother paid me a state visit to receive congratulations and exhibit the baby. Going into the studio, I said: "Our neighbour has brought her new baby to show us." The Man waved me away with a protesting paint-brush. "No," he said. "Don't buy it. Send her away. I don't mind the ducks and the chickens, but I absolutely refuse to eat the baby!" Life in the Casa Tranquila, as we had christened our winter home, was a pleasant irresponsible matter compared with existence in ceremonial Britain. Social pleasures we undoubtedly had, but no social duties. Housekeeping ran on the simplest of lines. Maria, the woman who had been key-keeper of the house while it was empty, came in to do the rough work. Apolonia, a smiling, rubicund old dame, with a keen sense of humour, acted as laundress. It was all so easy and unconventional and open-airy that we never quite got over the impression that we were enjoying a prolonged camping-out, and that it was by accident that our roof was of tiles and not of canvas. [Illustration: Our Suburban Street] Our morning began with the arrival of a baker who brought the bread, rolls, and _enciamadas_ for the day's consumption. We did not use the milk of goats, though, twice daily, a little flock, with tinkling bells, their udders tied up in neat bags of check cotton for protection against the unauthorised raids of their thirsty kids, was driven past our door to be milked before the eyes of each customer. A sprightly matron served us morning and evening with the milk of a cow, which her husband spent his days herding on any stray patches of herbage in the district. Each day at noon, Mundo, the greengrocer, called with a donkey-cart containing quite a comprehensive assortment of fruit and vegetables. Three kinds of potatoes he always brought--new, old, and sweet--pumpkins that were sold in slices, egg-plants, garlic strung in long festoons, spinach, cauliflowers, sweet peppers, curious fungi, purple carrots, sugar beans; all at astonishingly low prices. I shall always remember the November day when, in a moment of forgetfulness, I asked for a whole pennyworth of tomatoes, and was afterwards confronted by the difficulty of disposing of so many. A popular article of diet seemed to be the gigantic radishes, in which not only Mundo but all the little shops appeared to do a big trade. We puzzled long over the way in which they could be used before making the chance discovery that they are cut in round slices and eaten raw with soup or meat, as one would eat bread. III PALMA, THE PEARL OF THE MEDITERRANEAN As a place of winter residence for those who like sunshine, and are not enamoured of society, Palma could hardly be excelled. For one thing, the town is just the right size. It is not so small as to allow the visitor to feel dull, or so large as to permit him to become conscious of his own insignificance. While Palma is bright and full of movement and of cheerful sounds, it is an adorable place to be lazy in. The sunshine and soft air foster indolence; and though there is no stagnation, everybody takes life easily in this walled city by the southern sea. There is no bustle, no need to hurry. What is not accomplished to-day can be done to-morrow. And if to-morrow finds it still undone--why, what is the future made up of, if not of an illimitable succession of to-morrows? When the ancients christened Palma "the Pearl of the Mediterranean," they gave it a title that to this day it deserves. Something of the resplendence of the town is due to the warm-coloured stone of which it is built--a stone that shades from the palest cream to warm amber. Every stroll we took through its mediæval streets, every walk along its antique ramparts, every saunter down the mole, made us more and more in love with its beauty, which we seemed always to be viewing under some new condition of light or atmosphere. [Illustration: Palma de Mallorca, from the Terreno] The Man never wearied of the crooked secret-looking streets and fine buildings of the old, old city. By day or night they held for him an inexplicable charm. He was always discovering some new "bit"--a quaint _patio_, a Moorish arch, an antique gateway, a curious interior, a sculptured window. And the streets were always full of life. A cluster of officers in full dress chattering on the Borne; a company of soldiers marching to the strains of an inspiriting band; a priest, under a great rose-coloured silk umbrella, on the way to administer extreme unction to someone sick unto death--all the spectators falling on their knees as the solemn little procession passed by; or a party of queerly attired natives of Iviza, just arrived by the thrice-a-week boat, and curiously foreign both in speech and appearance, though their island home was only sixty or seventy miles distant; or a string of carriages whose occupants were on the way to a morning reception at the Almudaina, the old Moorish palace, now the residence of the Captain-General. Everything in the place was new to us, and the feeling of novelty never waned. As for the Boy, from the moment of our arrival his interest centred in the port. Its constantly changing array of shipping, and the fine sun-tanned buccaneers who did business on its blue waters, supplied him with endless congenial subjects for pictures. The port of Palma nestles, one might almost say, right into the heart of the city. The chief promenade, the Borne, ends on its brink. The Cathedral and the Lonja dignify its banks. The gay life of the harbour lies open to the casual observer. Under the ramparts, by the side of the public road, old men in red caps and suits of velveteen that the sun has faded to marvellous hues sit at their placid occupation of net-mending. There, too, when the _falucas_ are moored at the edge of the wharf, come the families of the fishermen to join them at lunch--the women bringing down wine and bread and the men supplying a tasty hot dish from the less saleable items of their catch. Sometimes a cloth is spread, and then the _al fresco_ repast assumes quite a ceremonious air. Stern on to the _muelle_, the long breakwater that partitions off the water of the harbour from the open bay, lie the larger craft: the most important of which are the white-painted steamers of the _Isleña Marítima_, the fleet of boats belonging to a Majorcan Company that carry mails and passengers between the island and Spain or Algeria. Once Palma was a great maritime centre. Now little foreign shipping does business in her port. But though the bulk of the traffic is local, an open port always holds the element of the unexpected. Sometimes a leviathan-like liner, making a holiday tour of Mediterranean ports, anchors by the wharf, and her tourists, eager to make the most of the hours at their disposal, hasten on shore to pack themselves into every available form of conveyance and drive off, enclosed in a pillar of dust of their own raising, to enjoy a hasty glance at Valldemosa, Miramar and Sóller. When at sunset they steam out of the harbour it is with the pleasantly erroneous conviction that they have exhausted the attractions of the island. Once a fine ship that sharp eyes recognized as the private yacht of the Czar of Russia quietly entered the bay, and after a brief stay, during which her voyagers held no intercourse with land, as quietly departed. And after a spring gale a Greek sailing ship, her main-mast gone, was towed in by a French tug. Sometimes it was the capture of a smuggler's _faluca_ caught in the act of trying to run a cargo of contraband tobacco that furnished the excitement. On the frequent feast days Palma was gay with flags. Every Consulate in the town--and they were many--mounted its special banner. The gun-boats sported strings of bunting out of all proportion to their size, the merchantmen flew their ensigns, and though the business of the town was transacted with its customary air of casual lightheartedness, the never-lacking holiday feeling was intensified. [Illustration: Calle de la Almudaina, Palma] One November feast day the Boy, who was painting at the port, discovered among the decorated craft a ship flying the British flag; a closer inspection revealed her to be the _Ancona_ of Leith, just arrived with a cargo of coal. Nearer home I doubt if the proximity of a Leith collier would have appealed strongly to our patriotism. In that southern latitude things were different. A sudden and fervent desire to hear our own northern accent awoke within us, and, incited by our adventurous son, we determined to board the _Ancona_ and pay our respects to her captain. It was a glorious morning, one of those wonderful mornings when the world seems newly born, that we three went down the mole. Lying beyond the schooner from Sóller, and the _pailebot_ from Valencia that was shipping a cargo of empty wicker-cased wine flasks, we came to the _Ancona_. Three railless plank gangways connected her with the wharf, and down two of the planks Majorcans in their elaborately bepatched blue linen suits were carrying straw baskets of coal. We ventured up the third. Our gangway ended on a six-feet-high platform situated on the verge of a hold still brimful of coal. As we hesitated on our perch, wondering what to do next, a bronzed man in slippers appeared. It was the first mate. "It's a fine day," the Man gave colloquial greeting. "Is the skipper on board?" "Ay. It's a real bonnie day," the mate made truthful reply. "No. He's just gone up the quay to see the ship's agents." The homely words, the familiar accent, fell like music on our ears. A few words of explanation brought the mate to our elevated platform, where he spoke with the inherent appreciation of the Scot of the beauty of the town. "Ay. It's a bonnie place this. I think it's as pretty a place as I've seen. No. We've been busy on board and I haven't had time to see the town yet. But I'm enjoyin' the view fine from here. The captain? Oh, you couldn't miss him. You're sure to come across him. He's just up on the front." So, in quest of a compatriot whom we couldn't miss, we set off up the street. And sure enough, before we had proceeded very far we met the captain face to face. If the captain of the _Ancona_ was surprised at being accosted by a trio of complete strangers, he was too much a Highland gentleman and a man of the world to reveal any astonishment. In five minutes we were all on a friendly footing, our nationality the firm basis of good-fellowship; a little later we were all seated outside the Lirico, over tall glasses of vermouth and seltzer, recalling familiar scenes and discovering mutual acquaintances. The captain was at a loose end. We were going to the fruit market, to the bookseller's, to the Cathedral. So he came too. In the market, as he saw me buy big bunches of yellow grapes at twopence-halfpenny a kilo (nearly two and a quarter pounds) his face lit up--"I'll be for sending the steward up here," he said. Chance favoured us. We turned into the Borne just in time to see an infantry battalion march past to the strains of a good military band. A general had died and the soldiers were on their way to escort his body to the cemetery. The music, which was appropriately solemn, was played with great feeling. And as the procession moved slowly up the street the closed window shutters were thrown open and fair señoras in light dresses thronged the balconies. It was as though Palma had determined to reveal herself at her best to our companion. Even the interior of the Cathedral, lit by the brilliant sunshine that filtered through the stained-glass windows, seemed grander than ever. "I've had a splendid time," the captain said when we parted. "Though I've been here two or three times, I never saw so much of the town before." We were leaving next morning for Miramar, and before our return the _Ancona_ would have sailed. But we said good-bye with the promise of meeting again--a promise that was fulfilled, for on two subsequent voyages the captain was a welcome guest at the Casa Tranquila. "The captain is a gentleman," the Boy said half-a-dozen hours later when he returned from the ship, where, by special invitation, he had been having a smoke and a chat with her master. "See what he insisted on giving me. I refused, of course, but he made me take _that_ and _this_." "That" was a batch of thrice precious literature in the shape of sixpenny editions of novels and magazines. "This" was a tin of tobacco marked "full strength," that class of dark-complexioned rum-odorous tobacco that the Boy specially affects, and whose lack in Majorca had formed the theme of his only regret. Life on the native craft in the port is entertaining to watch. The dark-skinned rovers of the deep contrast so oddly with the mildly domestic aspect given by the presence on board of the _patrón's_ wife, and by her way of keeping hens loose on deck, and of hanging feminine garments to dry on the poop. One Sunday morning we had been scrutinizing their doings with the open stare that life in Spain teaches one both to give and to take composedly, when we discovered that luncheon-time had stolen unawares upon us. As we walked back down the pier we glanced inquiringly at the cafés that lined the lower part of the way; they were all crowded with jovial seamen and uninviting. We had resolved to eat at the Lirico, and were leaving the pier, when something in the situation of a little open-air eating-place just on the brink of the sea, almost in the shadow of the city wall, attracted us; and advancing to the awning, under which little groups of people were seated, we demanded food. The proprietress, a plump, smiling woman with a purple silk kerchief on her head and a green apron, welcomed us in fluent but, unfortunately, unintelligible Majorcan. She knew no Spanish. All we could gather was that if we seated ourselves she would give us to eat. And nothing loth, we sat down at an unoccupied table whose bare boards were scrubbed as clean as hands could make them. Beyond the shade of the roof-awning the sun was shining; the pure air filtered through its matting sides, and in our full view the waves were dashing against the rocky shore. At a table close by, three old cronies were dining. Scorning the use of tumblers, they passed the quaint wine-flask from hand to hand, each in turn throwing back his head and letting the red wine fall in a stream, from what to us seemed an unbridgeable distance, between his parted lips. Four soldiers were eating macaroni. Two men who had been fishing off the breakwater were supping thick soup. A pretty little girl, her hair caught up in a business-like "bun," darted in and out amongst her mother's customers, her dark eyes quick to discern their wants. From inside the shanty that served as kitchen came an appetizing sound of frizzling. Turning her attention to us, the little girl put the inevitable dish of olives and a flask of red wine on the table; then she placed a wooden fork and spoon, a plate, a tumbler, and a roll, before each of us. Then, with the suggestion of an air of ceremony, she carefully laid at the Man's right hand something resembling a folded piece of clean canvas. It was not until the meal was nearing a conclusion that we discovered it was intended to be used as a napkin. The table thus spread, she darted into the kitchen and returned bearing a huge flat earthen dish, which held as inviting a mess as we had ever tasted. The main portion of its contents consisted of small thin slices of beef-steak, mushrooms, and strips of potatoes that had all been fried together, after the native fashion, in boiling oil. Daintily chopped green herbs lent a savoury garnish to the whole. After a momentary hesitation, due solely to lack of the customary cutlery, we helped each other with our wooden spoons, and fell to work with good will. Perhaps there was some charm in the oddity of our surroundings, in the fresh breath of the sea air, in the sparkle of the blue water; perhaps it may have lain in the discovery that if meat is tender and well-cooked, a fork--and wooden at that--is all the implement required. Certain it is that as we cleared the last chip of potato from the earthen dish we all agreed that we had enjoyed the simple meal more than anything we had eaten in Palma. When we asked for the bill our little waitress received the sign of departure with dismay; and the mother, running out, added her protest. Something else was evidently in active preparation. Fully convinced that to eat anything more would be an insult to the dish we had just finished, we waited. A moment later she triumphantly carried out and set before us a plate containing a slab of fish, thickly covered with minced garlic and floating in a pool of rich red oil. It may have been a delicacy for which the establishment was famed. Our fellow guests were devouring it with evident enjoyment, zealously sopping up the oil with their rolls, and leaving their plates polished clean. But to us it came as an anti-climax. Carefully inculcated politeness, combined with the knowledge that from the doorway the cook was eagerly watching us for sign of appreciation, induced us to choke it down with an outward affectation of gusto. But we left the garlic and the red oil. Even an exaggerated idea of the obligations of courtesy could not have prevailed upon us to swallow them. We paid the modest bill and fled, lest worse should follow. A few days later we returned to the quaint open-air café. It was a lovely evening early in November. All day out of a cloudless sky the sun had beat warmly upon Palma, and the sea had glowed a soft misty azure. We had been busy indoors letter-writing, for it was a mail day. It was only after dusk that we were free and, leaving the Casa Tranquila, set off port-wards to post our letters. The _Miramar_, the crack ship of the _Isleña Marítima_, was on the point of starting for Barcelona, and all the world of Palma was hastening towards the harbour to post letters on board; and then, while promenading the mole, to watch her departure. After the _Miramar_ had vanished into the darkness and the spectators had streamed towards the land, we still lingered on the breakwater. There was no moon, the stars were bright, the wavelets softly lapped the stones, and we felt placid and restful until quite suddenly we became aware that we were hungry. Our proximity suggested the little shanty under the city wall by the sea, and thither we went. It was the quiet hour there too. Except for three of the hussars we had seen before, the well-scrubbed tables were vacant. The soldiers, recognizing us, gave us friendly greeting, accompanied with the offer of their tobacco packets. Bright-eyed little Catalina ran to fetch the napkin, surely the sole emblem of gentility belonging to the establishment, and the señora herself appeared at the door of the shed, where she presided over the cooking-pots, to give us "Bona nit tengan" and to consult with us as to what we would like her to prepare. She shook her head when we suggested beef-steaks and mushrooms. At that hour, apparently, beef was "off." "Would we have soup?--Majorcan soup," she asked. We shook our heads. No. We did not fancy soup. Promising us fresh fish, and something with an untranslatable name, she disappeared into the shed. And, content to leave the selection to her, we awaited events. The comrades in arms had gone, and a pale slender girl, beautiful in the small-featured, refined type so common in Palma, had taken her place at the next table. With her was a friend of the same style, but doubly attractive in that she was overflowing with vivacity. The younger girl sat silent, her hands folded, her head drooping, while the elder--who was knitting a petticoat gay with coloured stripes--chatted briskly. They did not eat, and we guessed they were waiting for some one to join them. Sitting near them was a handsome taciturn man with a slouch hat, long curled moustaches, and a gaudy kerchief twisted about his neck. That the girls knew him was evident, for though he did not join in their conversation he seemed to listen to all that was said. Just as we were served with crisp little fried fish, a figure, coming from the darkness where the waves were washing the stones, entered the circle of light. It was the expected man. Hanging up his rod and fishing basket, he took his place at the table beside the girls. His skin was deeply bronzed, his garments were of blue cotton that sun and sea air had faded to a delicate hue. A scarlet sash was wound about his waist. His naked brown feet were thrust into string-soled green shoes. Catalina, who had been watching for his arrival, ran out with a slender-spouted bottle of wine and three wooden spoons. Her mother followed close with an earthenware pipkin of the thick Majorcan soup that we had declined. Grouped in an amicable trio, they ate from the same dish, and in turn drank from the slender spout of the green glass bottle. The pale girl remained pensively silent, but the other continued to talk, punctuating her conversation with dramatic movements of her hands. How we wished we could have understood what she was saying! When the combined efforts of the three wooden spoons had searched the red earthenware vessel to its depths, the man who came from the sea rose and, lifting it in his hand without a word, walked to the edge of the water and threw the pipkin far into the Mediterranean. Then returning, he resumed his seat. No one made any comment upon this inexplicable proceeding. Had the inoffending pipkin not been empty it might have seemed as though he were offering a libation to some unseen spirit of the water. But the actively plied spoons had succeeded in scooping out the last vestige of the soup. In the meantime we had been occupied with our second course, which consisted of lengths of orange-coloured sausage, served hot with fried potatoes. And a new-comer, an old man, was eating a big plate of macaroni. The nimble Catalina, flashing out, set a flat dish, heaped with some sort of stew, before the trio. What its contents were we could only guess. The lively maiden and the man were already poking among them with their wooden forks. The pensive girl had produced a silver fork and was delicately helping herself, fastidiously turning over the ingredients. The handsome reticent man sat motionless but observant. [Illustration: A Supper Party] They ate in leisurely fashion--nobody hurries in Palma. The gay girl rattled on in her musical voice, gesticulating with her pretty hands the while, only occasionally dropping the thread of her dramatic recital to send her fork foraging with the others, or to throw back her head and let the red wine trickle down her throat. "Will he throw that dish away when it is empty?" we were wondering, when the señora, who was making a special effort on our behalf, appeared in person carrying a tempting combination of sweet peppers and young pork. The question answered itself. When they had finished, the dish stood empty and ignored. The wine flask was refilled, and when we had paid our score--wine included, it came to about sevenpence each--we left the quartette still sitting under the flickering light by the edge of the unseen waves: the charming girl still lively, the pretty one distraite, the fisherman amiable, and the handsome listener still silently attentive. It had been an odd little interlude--nothing to relate, indeed, but one of those petty excursions beyond one's own stereotyped world that make the observers feel, for the moment, as though they were living in somebody else's life, not in their own. We finished the evening at what chanced to be the popular entertainment. If I remember correctly, it combined the attractions of a cinematograph and a variety show. We were again out in the starlight, and walking briskly westwards towards Son Españolet, when the Boy said abruptly:-- "I wish I knew why that man threw the pipkin into the sea!" [Illustration: The Saturday Market, Palma] IV HOUSEKEEPING Although, at Son Españolet, we were subject to no police or other rate, a small weekly tax was levied with extreme punctuality, on behalf of himself, by a functionary called the _vigilante_. The most onerous labour of this alleged guardian of the public would appear to have been the collection, on Sunday mornings, of a penny from each householder. I trust I do not malign a worthy citizen, when I hint that these periodic visits were the only occasions on which most of his supporters were made conscious of the _vigilante's_ existence. His professed duties were to protect the interests of the residents in the district by prowling about at night, to escort timid wayfarers home by the light of his lantern, and, like the _sereno_, to call those who wished to be roused at an early hour. But what manner of need a community already rich in police, _serenos_, _carabineros_, and _consumeros_, had of a _vigilante_, was hard to imagine. Nobody seemed to know who appointed the _vigilantes_. The Boy had a theory that our _vigilante_ had assigned himself to the post, and that his sole exertion lay in calling to collect the fees. On the morning of our first Sunday at the Casa Tranquila an imperative knock sounded at the front door. It was the _vigilante_, a good-looking white-bearded man clad in blue cotton. His designation was inscribed in bold letters on his cap-band. Having been forewarned of the custom, I handed over the expected ten centimos, which he accepted with the dignified courtesy of one who receives a right, and departed. Two hours later the Boy, who had been out at the time of the visit, answered a second summons. "It's the _vigilante_," he said, returning to the veranda where we were sitting. "Has anybody got a copper?" "But I gave the _vigilante_ his penny this morning," I said, hastening to the door. At my approach the applicant, recognizing me, waved the matter aside, as though the mistake had been mine, and he was graciously pleased to ignore it. "The houses are so many--one forgets," he said, and strutted off without loss of dignity. On Christmas Day he paid us an extra visit, and, sending in a card with his best wishes, awaited, not in vain, a monetary expression of our good-will. The card, which was resplendent in rainbow tints, and richly emblazoned in gold, bore a representation of a young, dapper, and exquisitely dressed _vigilante_ who was smoking a cigar. At his feet were portrayed a noble turkey, several bottles of champagne, and other seasonable dainties. A side tableau showed the _vigilante_, armed with his staff of office and a huge bunch of keys, opening a street door to a belated couple who, presumably, had been locked out. On the reverse side of the card was a long poem, which, on behalf of its presenter, claimed many good offices; notably, that he captured the evil-doer, and that, filled with fervent zeal, he watched over our repose. It concluded by stating:-- "_I try to be in all A perfect Vigilante._" Apart from similar curious and amusing conventions, with which one has to become acquainted, the early days of housekeeping in Majorca find the foreign resident grappling with a succession of petty difficulties. Besides the differences of language, of coinage, of weights and measures, the dissimilarity of climate renders advisable, even necessary, a mode of living that would be quite unsuited to dwellers in Britain. To begin with the morning--the customary Majorcan breakfast, which even at the best hotels consists of a glass of coffee, or a tiny cup of very thick chocolate, and tumbler of water taken with a single roll, or an _enciamada_, is a meal from which the ordinary Briton rises hungry. And one wonders why the Spanish landlord, whose table is so lavishly spread at other meals, should practise a false economy in the matter of breakfast. For, after all, a roll costs only a halfpenny. Dinner is invariably an early function, and an extensive one, for at their two later meals Spaniards make up for their abstinence at breakfast. Between the two o'clock dinner and supper, which is served at any time between eight and ten o'clock, there is a long blank, which the English visitor usually bridges with a cup of tea. To return to the question of breakfast. At the Casa Tranquila we compromised the matter, and broke our fast on an unstinted quantity of coffee or chocolate and milk, taken with fruit, rolls and butter, and _enciamadas_. Majorcan breakfast rolls are of two kinds--the ordinary crisp ones, and, what we liked better, a soft species called _panecillos de aceite_. Bacon is unknown in Majorca, though ham, of strong flavour and repellent aspect, may be had. It sells at twopence an ounce; and if you wish to astonish the vendor, you can do so by ordering more than a quarter of a pound. We had been warned that we would be forced to do without butter while in the islands. But matters have progressed--in Palma at least--since the old butterless days. Now the better class grocers sell a peculiarly white butter that is made at Son Servera, near Artá; and almost every provision shop stocks a tinned salt butter that comes from Copenhagen. By the way, the purchaser must not be surprised when asked if it is "pig's butter" he wants. The salesman only means lard. Cow's milk, another article of diet that used to be scarce in the islands, can easily be obtained. The price charged is almost the same as in London and the milk is much richer. With the aid of a Spanish dictionary it had been a comparatively simple matter to make out a list of groceries with which to furnish the shelves of our empty larder. But I must confess that a first visit to a butcher's shop made me wonder if Majorcan sheep and oxen differed in construction from British animals, such odd forms did their dead flesh present. Cold storage is unknown in Palma. The beasts are killed, cut up, and sold almost before they have had time to cool. And, if they were not invariably killed young, their flesh could hardly be so good as it is, the lamb especially being sweet and tender. A fact that forcibly strikes anyone from a meat-eating country is the small quantities of animal food consumed. Where the wife of a British working-man might spend a shilling on beef, a Majorcan would spend twopence. Naturally the meat is sold in small pieces, and inspection is courted. The east-end butcher's printed command to his customers--"Keep your hands off the beef," would be scorned in the Balearic Isles. If you shop in native fashion, you walk about the shop, turning over and critically examining the pieces exposed within easy reach. When your selection is made you need not invest in any great quantity. If you fancy calf's head, custom does not compel you to buy a half head. You can have a pound, a half-pound, or even a slice. If your taste turns to fowl, at your request the bird suspended by its heels is halved, quartered, or wholly dismembered. Its limbs may lack the noble proportions of a Surrey capon, but they will be well flavoured and succulent, and you can acquire a wing and slice of the breast, or a leg, or a yet smaller portion, as your fancy inclines. We had heard that Majorcans were apt to tax foreigners by making them pay more than was customary for anything purchased, but such occurrences were quite outside our experience; though I did come across an example of Majorcan reasoning that was so amusingly illogical that I am tempted to repeat it here. Finding in our picnicking style of housekeeping that a cold tongue was a useful thing to have in the larder, I frequently ordered one from the estimable butcher who served us. For a time the price charged was moderate. One day without warning it was increased by a half. My Spanish unaided did not enable me to argue the matter, but Mrs. Consul chancing to be with me next time I called at the shop, I got her to inquire the reason of this sudden and unexplained change of rate. "Yes. The tongue was a small one, and the price high," admitted the plump wife of the butcher, who acted as his accountant. "But then I had charged the señora too little for those we had supplied her with at first. And though we have many customers, each ox we kill has only one tongue. And, as I had charged the señora too little for the others, to be just to myself I was obliged to ask more than the true price for the last one!" The method of reasoning was so delightfully irrational and absurd that I cheerfully paid the confessed overcharge, and we left the shop laughing. Probably the worthy dame wonders to this day what we found entertaining in the situation. Many good and cheap eatables are to be had in Palma if one knows where to look for them. By degrees we found out the best place to buy the tasty little pies filled with fish, or meat, and herbs, raisins and pine-seeds, or the funny turn-overs stuffed with spinach, that all the bakers make; and discovered the confectioner who sold the nicest cakes and sweets, and where to buy freshly-baked almonds, and who had the best quince preserve. A little investigation introduced us to articles of food that we would never have met had we continued to live in a hotel--to the _cocas_ that so closely resemble the Scottish "cookies"; and the _bizcochos_, that are just crisp freshly toasted slices of the largest sized _cocas_. When we arrived in October, fruit was plentiful. Delicious grapes were selling at twopence-halfpenny a kilo (about a penny a pound), and ripe purple or golden figs were eighteen a penny. As the winter advanced the price of grapes gradually rose. And though one day in early December I bought for fivepence in the market four pounds of well-flavoured yellow grapes, by the end of January the finest were a peseta (about ninepence) a kilo. Fresh figs gradually declined in flavour as they rose in price. And towards Christmas the country folks, who come in on Saturday mornings to the smaller market that is held in the Plaza de Mercado, began to bring in rush baskets of the home-dried figs that have been ripened in the sun and packed between fig leaves. The continued drought raised the price of vegetables, though small cauliflowers were still only a halfpenny each, and a good sized bunch of carrots could be bought for the coin that is rather less in value than a farthing. Most Majorcan carrots are purple in hue, so deep a purple as to be almost black. They have to be partially cooked alone, before being added to anything else, as their colour dyes the water black. It is their only fault. Their flavour is excellent. Early in February we began to use the green peas and turnips that in November I had sown in our garden; but for the lack of rain they would have been ready a month earlier. And an occasional sowing of spinach yielded a quick and unfailing supply throughout the winter. The question of firing in so genial a climate is an easy one to answer. For cleanliness, coolness, convenience and economy in cooking there is no fuel that compares with charcoal. As a charcoal stove has no flue, the lighting is attended with a certain amount of smoke from the resinous sticks that are sold specially for the purpose of kindling. But once the charcoal is lit it gives no further trouble. It will cook slowly or quickly, as desired, scarcely soiling the outside of the vessels used in the process: and will stay alight, without much attention, as long as the cook requires. Further, it has the exceptional merit of keeping its heat concentrated within a small area, so that the temperatures of both the kitchen and the cook remain normal. Our favourite sitting-room--the one that opened directly to the veranda--had the unusual advantage of an open hearth, and a few chilly days that occurred in November made us hasten in search of logs for burning. Inquiry in the neighbourhood directed us to a large saw mill in the Calle de la Fábrica, where we ordered what to us was an unknown quantity of firewood. The price paid was less than five shillings. When the wood was delivered we were amazed to find that it half filled a cart; and that, in addition to an abundant supply of both logs and rough wood all cut into convenient sizes, the kindly saw-miller had included four little slabs of the resinous wood used for kindling. The wood was built up on the floor under the lower shelves of our roomy larder, and there, all through November, December, and the first half of January, it lay untouched. We had got to the point of discussing what we would do with it on our leaving for England, when the weather turned chilly enough to afford us excuse for indulging in the luxury of a log fire. But though we had a fire on every occasion when artificial heat was necessary, there were still logs remaining when at the end of April we quitted the Casa. A prominent feature of our district, which lay just without the walls of Palma, was the elaborate system employed to guard against the smuggling of contraband goods into the city. The boundary of Son Españolet, which joined the country, was heavily guarded. In addition to high walls and much intricate zigzagging of barbed wire, wherever two roads met there was a little station-house, or, to be more exact, a shanty, for the shelter of _consumeros_, both male and female, whose duty it was to examine all goods entering the city limits. And at frequent intervals all along the boundary roads was a species of sentry-box, usually containing a chair and a water-jar, in which for sixteen hours a day a _consumero_ was supposed to keep watch over his own bit of boundary, and to be ready, if anything suspicious attracted his notice, to warn the others, by a series of shrill whistles, to be on the alert. During the long hours passed in enforced idleness at their posts, many of the men had contrived to give their surroundings quite a home-like appearance. A pleasant man, whose location was at the end of our road, always seemed to have his children playing about him; and often his wife used to take her knitting and the newest baby, and the family goat and a big earthenware pan of amber-tinted rice, and make quite a picnic under the trees near his watch-box. Another _consumero_ had a stripling vine that he was carefully training up the trellis over his shed. We sometimes saw him watering it. And one, a tall silent man, whose station abutted on a piece of vacant ground, had gradually erected quite a long range of hen-coops along the base of a warm wall; and there he would stroll in the sunshine attended by a flock of flourishing poultry, chiefly of the Plymouth Rock breed. But these were exceptions. The majority of the _consumeros_ seemed content to lazy away their days and doze away their nights as comfortably as possible. When the early winter darkness had fallen, it was picturesque to see them lighting a brazier, or sitting huddled up in their warm brown blankets beside its glowing embers fast asleep. When we had been spending the evening in town and were coming home late, we sometimes enjoyed waiting until we were close upon one of these muffled figures, and then, in chorus, saying politely "Buenas noches." [Illustration: A Consumos Station] Then we would see the comatose form galvanize into a semblance of life, and hear a drowsy voice from the midst of the enwrappings reply "Buenas noches tengan." The discovery that the monetary recompense for the sixteen hours that the _consumero_ worked or played was only two pesetas--or about eighteenpence of English money--showed that if he was not overwrought neither was he overpaid. At nightfall these guardians of our district were reinforced by the addition of two active young _carabineros_ who carried loaded rifles. So between the police, the armed soldiers, the sleepy _consumeros_, the elusive _sereno_ and the ornamental _vigilante_, the residents of Son Españolet ought to have gone to bed with a feeling of security. The question of language is a somewhat grave one in Majorca, where the inhabitants naturally, but inconsiderately from our point of view, insist upon speaking their native tongue, which is neither Spanish nor French, but sounds like a corruption of both. Majorcan, which is said to be much older than _Castellano_, the official language of Spain, is closely allied to _Catalan_. And though many words suggest French, Spanish, and even Italian influence, the islanders seem, by an ingenious chipping of terminations and the addition of weird sounds entirely their own, to have evolved a tongue which goes far towards outdoing all others in unmelodious sounds. A peacefully animated conversation in Majorcan suggests impending bloodshed. To overhear a quarrel would be horrific. Happily discord is rare in Majorca. As far as our six months of experience showed, a better natured or more harmonious people never existed. The dialect in use in Minorca and Iviza, though practically the same as that of Majorca, varies in each island. So it is not surprising that the visitor to the Balearic Islands is strongly advised to confine his efforts to the acquirement of Spanish, not even to attempt to learn Majorcan. And indeed the facilities for doing so are few. We could find no Majorcan dictionary, though a weekly paper in the language, _Pu-Put_, is published in Palma. All the educated classes speak Spanish fluently. Yet in most of the shops, even in Palma, and in the country districts, the native language prevails. Very few of the working women understand Spanish. Their lives having been passed on the islands, they remain ignorant of any but their mother tongue; though it is common to find their menfolk speaking Spanish well, owing to their having been in the army, or to their having passed the period of voluntary exile that most of them serve almost as they do the demands of the State. Those who know, say that Majorca is a bad place to learn Spanish in; that in order to have a good accent the intending traveller is best to acquire it elsewhere. And as Borrow says, you must open your mouth and take your hands out of your pockets to speak Spanish. Before leaving London we tried, after a very desultory fashion, to pick up a little Spanish. The Boy, who took Berlitz lessons, got on famously and was our mainstay from the moment we crossed the Spanish frontier at Port Bou. But he declares that he had not been long in Palma before he found himself speaking Spanish with a Majorcan accent. For my part, in point of language I found the direction of even so small an establishment as the Casa Tranquila very puzzling, especially at first. After carefully gleaning a knowledge of the Spanish coinage that enabled me to count up to say ten, in pesetas and centimos, it was bewildering to find sums calculated in _reals_ and in _perros grandes_ and _perros pequeñas_. I shall never forget the first time Apolonia, the laundress, appeared to deliver up our clean linen and to receive her just recompense. When I inquired how much we owed her, Apolonia told me the sum, but she did it in Majorcan. "Onza reals, cuatro centims, dos centims." "Que vale en pesetas?" I asked, but Apolonia could not reckon in pesetas. Raising her stubby fingers, she proceeded to make cabalistic signs in the air, repeating the whole "Onza reals, cuatro centims, dos centims," in a voice that grew louder and louder, as though the more noise she made the more likely was she to pierce my thick understanding. Maria, hearing the discussion, left her dusting, and running swiftly on her string-soled _alpargatas_, came to the rescue. If matters had been bad before, they were now worse. Four hands were in the air. Two voices in Majorcan, that became momentarily more strident, kept repeating the tale of reals and centims until, feeling undecided whether to laugh or to cry, I cut the matter short by emptying the contents of my housekeeping purse on the table and imploring Apolonia to help herself. After many protestations she agreed to do so. And with much reluctant and timorous hovering of her fingers over the coins, at last selected the exact sum; which, before taking possession of, she carefully spread before my eyes, calling upon Maria to witness that she had not abused my trust. The calculations of Mundo, the vegetable man, were--if possible--more distracting; for having inherited the national characteristic of honesty to an almost unnatural degree, the worthy Mundo, in his desire to be strictly just in his dealings, had a way of splitting farthings that sometimes proved inexplicable, not only to his customers but also to himself. How often, when he stood puzzling over some fraction of a penny, have I felt impelled to say rashly: "Bother the expense, Mundo. I'll make you a present of the half farthing!" Fortunately for Mundo's opinion of my sanity, the spirit of economy that tinctures the balmy air of these Fortunate Isles prevented any such extravagant proceeding. [Illustration: The Castle of Bellver] V TWO HISTORIC BUILDINGS After we were fairly settled in our house our first excursion naturally was to the Castle of Bellver, the ancient fortress that, from the veranda, we saw clearly silhouetted against the western sky. The afternoon was glorious. The sky was a cloudless blue, the sunlight cast deep shadows; to drive there in one of the quaint, open-sided tramcars would have been a treat. But there had been thunder in the night, and the apprehensive authorities had decided that it was a day for bringing out the closed vehicles. So we sat in the stuffy little car, and drove out through crowded Santa Catalina and across the bridge that spanned the dry _torrente_ of San Magin, and past the _consumos_ sheds towards the Terreno, the favourite summer resort of Palma folks, whose charming villas clothe the slope leading to the steep hill on whose summit stands the old castle. The sun was hot, the air exhilarating. Flowers--roses, zinnias, plumbago, chrysanthemums, geraniums--still bloomed in the villa gardens. To us it was a glorious summer day. To the Majorcans it was already winter. The pretty houses were nearly all empty. Their owners had returned to town. The old road to the Castle is a stiff climb up a rocky slope. The new road is an excellent carriage drive that winds round the hill. We chose the steep way, and found ourselves frequently pausing and turning to look back across the sparkling waters of the bay to Palma, which at that moment was looking, as it so often does, like some celestial city. The air was fragrant with the essence of the pines that clothed the slopes--at their feet tall pink heath and wild lavender were in bloom. When Jaime the First built Bellver for a summer palace, he made it an invincible fortress. One thing only could one imagine as more difficult than getting into the Castle, and that would be getting out of it. Yet, had we so willed, on this balmy afternoon the hitherto impregnable stronghold with its deep moat, its implacable walls, might have been ours without even a show of resistance; for when we reached the gateway we found it open and unguarded. But fortunately for the reputation of Bellver our mood was pacific; and we were content to linger without until an old woman, who had espied us as she was leaving the Castle with what was presumably the washing of the custodian in a chequered handkerchief under her arm, ran back calling loudly for "Bordoi." Bordoi appeared in the person of the custodian of the Castle. He was an old soldier, gaunt, lean, courteous, and evidently possessing a genuine pride in his charge. The first thing to which he called our attention was the grating set high over the entrance, through which, after the endearing fashion of their time, the occupants of the Castle were accustomed to shower a gentle hint to depart, in the form of arrows or boiling water, upon the heads of any visitors whose appearance they did not fancy. The Castle, which is in the form of a circle, is built round a courtyard containing a great draw-well. Looking down, it was interesting to me to see that the moist sides of the interior were thickly coated with luxuriant maidenhair fern, such as we had years before noticed growing inside the mouth of the well in the house of the maker of amphoræ in Pompeii. Reaching down his long arm, the custodian picked me a frond, explaining that it made a wholesome medicinal drink--"quite as good as sarsaparilla." And here an odd query occurs to me. Does the office of caretaker conduce to dyspepsia, or does the enforced leisure of the occupation dispose to hypochondria? During a little journey through the Shakespeare country, for instance, it was impossible--even for such very polite people as ourselves--to avoid noticing the boxes of patent pills or of much-vaunted lotions that figured prominently amongst the private possessions of the people who showed us the places of interest. The stern face of the old keep has frowned on many tragic sights. It was up these rocky slopes that the headless body of the third Jaime was borne, after his luckless attempt, at the battle of Lluchmayor, to wrest his kingdom from a usurper. And it was there, too, that the boy son who had fought so bravely by his father's side was carried, desperately wounded. In more recent times Bellver has acted the part of a State prison. Political prisoners, numbering as many as three or four hundred at a time, have been immured within its massive walls. It was easy to picture them clustering in the spacious courtyard about the well, or pacing the open-sided gallery overlooking it, or lingering on the flat roof, from which such an amazingly comprehensive view may be had. Seen from beneath, the height of the Castle is dwarfed by its encircling walls. It is only on looking down from the battlements and seeing the immense depths of the surrounding moats that one realizes the strength of the inflexible grip in which captives would be held. In these days a rescue by means of airship might be feasible. For an aviator to alight on the vast flat circle of the Castle roof, to pick up a prisoner, and fly off again, would presumably be an easy matter. But in those days airships were unknown, and it must have been maddening to be pent so near Palma that every building might be distinguished, to be able to note the coming and going of the ships, to view the fair fertile country in every direction, and yet know that the deep encompassing moat rendered any attempt at escape a futility. In one of the rooms a memorial tablet had been inserted in the wall in remembrance of a deposed Minister of State, who endured six years of incarceration before dying there in 1808. In his chamber a window, reached by steps and stone-seated, afforded a lovely prospect across the blue waters of the harbour to the stately Cathedral and the town. It was pitiful to see that the gaudy tiles that paved the embrasure were worn bare, and to note that, by some curious coincidence, the face in the bas-relief looked longingly towards the window. In the immense kitchen the most remarkable feature was the chimney--a space like a large room--of which the smoke-blackened sides narrowed up and up, until far overhead its orifice appeared a mere eyelet of light against the sky. But this ancient fireplace had been superseded by a long range of charcoal stoves, and the savour of roasting oxen will never again ascend that giant chimney. The Castle of Bellver is full of interest, but it is the roof that holds the visitor fascinated. On its surface one can walk round and round in perfect security, meeting a fresh and glorious picture at every turn. To the north the high velvet hills bar the view. Southwards, beyond the clustered roofs of the Terreno, the Mediterranean ripples away towards the African coast. Towards the west amid the hills lies Ben Dinat, where, after the historic battle, the Conquistador dined well off bread and garlic; and east is the lovely plain of Palma, with Santa Catalina and Son Españolet (and the quite inconspicuous Casa Tranquila) in the middle distance. Round the battlements many names, both of the bond and of the free, were carven. Our guide proudly pointed out three that, coming amongst the Spanish designations, we read with a curious sense of familiarity:-- "JOHN SUTHERLAND BLACK. JAMES HUNTER. JAMES HUNTER, JUNR." The date was August, 1905. And the owners of the British names, our guide told us, were scientific men who had journeyed to Palma to witness the total eclipse of the sun. And in so doing they assuredly showed wisdom, for it would have been difficult to find a better place from which to observe the phenomenon than this wide roof that seemed so near the sky. When the men essayed to climb the high tower I waited below on the roof, and was idly leaning over the battlements when a stonecrop fast-rooted in the interstices of the wall attracted me. Wondering what manner of plant would choose to live in that arid situation, I was examining it closely when I discovered that, even in that seemingly inaccessible spot, a caterpillar had found it out, and was busily feeding on its succulent foliage. The caterpillar might be a common one--I have little knowledge of entomology--but it was new to me; and its appearance was so unusually gay as to appear to merit description. The body, which showed alternate stripes of light and dark grey, was girdled by black bands, which were further decorated by spots of vivid scarlet; while the head--or was it the tail?--flaunted a double scarlet plume. When the men again joined me, I drew the attention of the custodian to the gaudy insect, and asked if he knew the species. He shook his head dubiously, confessing that he had never noticed one like it before. Then his eyes caught sight of the plant on which it fed, and he instantly brightened up. "I know that plant," he said. "It is valuable, señora, very valuable. It makes a good medicine." Our next visit was to the Lonja. In the good old days when Palma was a great mercantile centre--the days when thirty thousand sailors found employment from its port--a Majorcan architect designed the Lonja to serve as an exchange. This old-time architect and his builders must have been past masters of their art, for though hundreds of years have slipped by since then, and the Lonja no more serves any active purpose, it still survives to delight by the simple grandeur of its design. Seen as it stands with only a wide thoroughfare separating it from the sparkling waters of the port, with its palm-trees in front and a cloudless blue sky overhead, the antique building is one of the most beautiful sights in a city that abounds in beautiful things. We had been told that the Lonja was open to the public on the afternoons of Thursdays and Sundays. So one Sunday evening, early in our stay, the Man and I stopped in front of the great door, and tried to push it open. It did not yield a hair's-breadth. Indeed, it seemed to wear an expression of stolid immobility, as though secretly defying our puny efforts to induce it to reveal the treasures it guarded. Sitting in a chair in the shadow of the building an old policeman was dozing. Him the Man roused and interrogated. He shook his head over the idea of the Lonja being on view on stated days. But the Lonja was at the _disposicion_ of the señor. The señor could see it on any day. He would fetch the keeper of the keys. [Illustration: Palma, from the Woods of Bellver] Toddling off across the square of the palm-trees, he disappeared, and in a few minutes returned, followed by that official, bearing the emblem of his office in the form of a massive key. The great door opened and closed behind us, and we found ourselves in a vast square hall, from whose dark marble floor six noble pillars rose to meet the high vaulted roof. Like the Cathedral, the Lonja was built of the warm, buff-hued native stone, and the marble flooring was also of Majorcan origin, for it was quarried in the mountains of the island. The materials used in the construction were the same; but while the Cathedral impresses by its solemn majesty of conception, the Lonja charms with its beautiful simplicity of design, its inspiriting sense of light and air. The four wide windows were partly boarded up, the light entering only through the open carving at the tops. Yet the hall was so well illuminated that it was easy to see every detail of the pictures that covered a great portion of the walls. The collection of pictures, though of no great importance, one imagines might be better hung, better framed, and in some way catalogued. Certain of the canvasses lacked frames. A soiled card inscribed with the name of the artist was stuck in the frames of others. One portion of the wall-space was covered by interesting old paintings that had been removed from the antique church of San Domingo. And a large modern picture by a well-known Spanish painter attracted us both by the excellence of its workmanship and by the peculiarity of its subject: a bride and bridegroom--the man old, uninviting, and with strangely deformed feet; the woman young, attractive, and evidently of a lower social position--were standing before a brilliantly lit altar joining hands in marriage. On the bride's left stood her peasant mother, proud almost to arrogance at the wealthy marriage her pretty daughter was making. Behind were two workmen brothers, whispering and giggling. The satire of the artist's intention was revealed in the title, _En el nombre del Padre, y del Higo, y del Espiritu Santo_, which was conspicuously painted on the frame. High on the wall over the door that opens on to the garden two grotesque gargoyles look down on a finely sculptured bas-relief of the Virgin and Child. Across the little enclosure with its fruit-laden palm-tree, its tired-looking olive--how is it that olives always seem to pine for mountain slopes?--and its aloes, is a strikingly antique gate. As the keeper of the keys pointed out, it was the original gate of the mole of the ancient port, and when in the seventeenth century the harbour was reconstructed, it was wisely deemed worthy of preservation. Behind it is the antique Concilio del Mar, which is now the Escuela Superior de Comercio. Showing us a door leading to a staircase, the custodian suggested that the view to be obtained from the roof of the Lonja was fine. He did not attempt to join our climb, and when we had mounted the eighty-two steps of the spiral stair we did not wonder that he had refrained. But the sight from the path which extended round the four sides of the square roof was wonderful. Each point of view held fresh interest--whether it was the harbour with the shipping and the shining sea beyond, or the grand Cathedral seen across the lively Marina, or the eight-storey-high houses, whose upper-floor dwellings opened to roof terraces or blossomed out in poultry-houses and dove-cots. But best of all, I think, was the vista of the road leading towards Santa Catalina, and the Terreno, and the Castle of Bellver, behind which the sun was setting. [Illustration: Second Class] VI THE FAIR AT INCA Our first experience of the Majorcan railway system was a curious and unexpected one. Having a fancy to see Inca, a thriving town situated in the very heart of the island, we called at Palma station one November day and asked for a time-table. The one handed us--it was the latest issued--bore the date of July, 1907. But even although it was well over two years old there appeared to have been no alteration either in the hours of departure or of arrival. Learning that Thursday was the market-day at Inca, we got up before sunrise on a Thursday morning and reached the station in good time for the train that was timed to leave at 7.40. The _other_ train, for only two trains a day leave Palma, was out of the question, as it did not start until two o'clock. We had imagined that the paucity of trains argued a corresponding scarcity of travellers, but to our surprise the station was already crowded with a pleasantly excited mob of people, all in gala dress. The women had their mantillas or lace-embroidered _rebozillos_ fastened to the hair with little gold pins, and many wore long white gloves reaching to the sleeves, which were decorated at the elbows with a row of gold or silver buttons. The little shawls that are always a feature of native full dress were of all colours and materials, from silk with long fringes to richly-hued plush or delicate light brocades. The trains of Majorca resemble those of most other civilized countries in providing first, second, and third-class carriages. The first are cramped and stuffy. The second are inferior to some old-fashioned uncushioned English third-class. The third closely resemble cattle-trucks with benches running along the sides and down the middle. They have no windows; leather curtains protect their open sides. We went second-class, as did the majority of our fellow-travellers. Long before the hour of starting, every carriage, with the exception of the firsts, which were almost empty, was packed full of passengers, all talking at the pitch of their voices. But nothing happened until quite forty minutes after the time fixed for departure, when the engine gave a violent jerk, as though putting all its strength into a superhuman effort, the women crossed themselves devoutly, and the train moved slowly out of the station. So slowly indeed, that three late-comers, arriving on the platform after the train was in motion, not only succeeded in entering the train but were able, by running forward, to secure places in the front carriages. Inca is separated from the capital by twenty miles of fertile orchard land. The single line of rail cuts through great tracts of country planted with fig-trees, with almonds, and with olives. In many cases the ground underneath the trees was red and golden with autumn tinted leaves of grape vines, or verdant with the green of shooting corn. As the moments passed, and the sun rose higher, the mist wreaths that had lain about the plain dispersed; and the blue hills to the north made noble background for the spreading plantations. Within our crowded carriage all was good humour. Nobody seemed to find anything to grumble at in the slow rate of progress. An early stopping-place was Santa Maria. We had only come a few miles, yet girls were waiting to sell nuts, and biscuits put up in neat paper cylinders, to those of the travellers--and they were many--who had already had time to be hungry; while an old woman carrying a water-jar and tumbler attended, ready for the smallest coin to supply the thirsty with water. The little journey was hardly begun, and there seemed but small reason to tarry at Santa Maria, yet the delay became so extended that the passengers, still maintaining their perfect good humour, began exchanging visits from one portion of the train to another. An old gentleman clad in a complete suit of striped mustard-colour plush and yellow elastic-sided boots called at our compartment to exchange compliments with a comely elderly dame, who in conjunction with handsome jewellery had her hair--which was in a pigtail--covered with a gaily striped silk handkerchief. So the minutes wore on. At intervals a warning bell rang, but nobody accorded it the slightest attention, and wisely so, for nothing happened. At length, with a joint-dislocating jerk, we again got under-way, only to come to a dead stop a hundred yards further on. The train, it was at length admitted, was too heavy for the motive power. The empty first-class carriages were detached; that accomplished, we actually progressed. The twenty miles were ultimately covered, and we succeeded in reaching Inca, with its picturesque row of windmills and grand setting of purple mountains, only two hours late. Joining the stream of people, we entered the town, to discover what spectators less accustomed to crowds would long ago have discovered--that by some lucky chance we had come to Inca on the great day of its year--the annual _feria_. All the ways leading towards the centre of the town were lined with empty vehicles and up-tilted carts, and in the narrow streets the owners were promenading. The fair was largely a business matter. It presented few of the elements of entertainment common to that of an English country town. The only thing in the way of amusement that we saw was a merry-go-round, and that was being quietly ignored. One interesting feature was that each street held its own species of merchandise. In one, clothing and brightly-hued foot-gear were sold. Another was wholly given up to sweet stalls, whose principal article was a species of white confection composed apparently of chopped almonds and sugar. That it was good the myriads of bees that were tasting its sweetness bore testimony. In yet another street we had to walk between a long double row of women seated on rush-bottomed chairs, each bearing in her lap an earthenware cooking-pot full of a puzzling commodity that had something of the appearance of crimson threads. It appeared to be the only commodity they had to offer, and I own we never succeeded in discovering what it was. The square in front of the principal church was the centre of attraction for us. On one side the ground was covered with a fine display of native ware. Jars, and plates, and pots, and vases, in the greens and yellows and browns that look so tempting and are so cheap. The touch of vermilion, artistically so valuable to the busy scene, was given by the huge sacks bulging with scarlet and orange sweet peppers that form such an important part of Majorcan food. Two maimed beggars, the first we had seen in the island, were hobbling about reaping a harvest; and, raised on a little platform, a travelling dentist was extracting juvenile teeth free; to the satisfaction of certain thrifty parents, and to the visible distress of their offspring. Just below the square was the cattle-market; and on its outskirts we saw, for the first time, a peasant clad in the native male dress that unfortunately has become so rare. The jolly old fellow wore the extremely baggy blue cotton pantaloons, the short black jacket, and wide-brimmed hat that make up so distinctive a costume. He even wore the quaint black shoes that suit the costume, and that seemed a blessed relief from the green and orange elastic-sided boots in vogue. [Illustration: A Corner of the Fair at Inca] A threatened shower and an actual thirst gave excuse for seeking refuge in a café. Most of those we glanced into were crowded with peasants, and we hesitated about forcing our way in. Finding at last one that looked more exclusive than the others, we entered and seated ourselves at one of the little tables set under the overhanging tissue-paper decorations. The Boy and I wanted wine, the Man chose cognac. The active waiter quickly served us with huge tumblers of red wine set in saucers; and placing before the Man a bottle of brandy in which were immersed spiky herbs, left him to help himself. The wine was rich and fruity, the liqueur the Man declared delicious; and while the rain, which was now falling in earnest, pattered down, we sipped and watched the passing life of the street. Just across the way, at the side entrance to a flourishing baker's shop, two women were frying dough-nuts in a big pan of boiling oil. The elder woman, scraping a segment of batter from the full basin at her elbow, deftly twisted it round her finger, then threw it into the oil, from which a minute later her assistant lifted it out with a long-handled spoon, transformed into a crisp golden ring. The shower had ceased, the sun was again shining out, and there was much to see; so we paid for our drinks and departed. "Fourpence!" said the Man, as he pocketed his change. "A penny each for the wine and twopence for the liqueur! It's enough to drive one to drink!" The one drawback to the complete enjoyment of the fair was the mud. The previous night had been wet, and the streets were inches deep in it. It was a buff-coloured slime of persistently adhesive nature, and not content with thickly coating one's shoes, it tried to drag them off. To walk about in mud three inches deep is fatiguing, so we decided to take the train that was due to leave Inca at one o'clock, instead of waiting for that leaving at four. It was a merciful fortune that guided us, for the one o'clock train took three hours to cover its twenty miles. Yet the scenery, with its grey-green olive plantations set against a background of beautiful mountains and enlivened with quaintly attired olive-gatherers, was so fine that we did not tire of feasting our eyes upon it. Our companions on the return journey were mainly men--Palma merchants probably, who had visited the fair as buyers and were anxious to return with the greatest possible expedition. When those who were so adventurous as to wait until the later train would get back to town, or whether they ever reached it at all, history does not relate. [Illustration: Where the Hills Meet the Plain, Esglayeta] VII VALLDEMOSA The fertile plain that occupies the greater portion of the island of Majorca is sheltered from cold winds by the range of mountains that runs along the northern coast. The scenery on the farther side of the mountains is of unusual grandeur, the tracts of precipitous country bordering the sea between Valldemosa and Sóller being exceptionally lovely. The district, which is almost entirely devoted to olive plantations, is a scantily populated one. And as there are no _fondas_ for a considerable distance, the Austrian Archduke Luis Salvador, who owns much land on the northern coast, has turned a large farm-house on his estate of Miramar into an _hospederia_, or free lodging-house, for the use of travellers. There are many _hospederias_ in Spain, but they are generally attached to monasteries and intended for the use of pilgrims to some shrine. That at Miramar is the only instance I know of one supported by a private individual, and many sojourners from far lands like ourselves must have felt grateful to the royal owner for the kindly provision he has made for them. Within the friendly walls of the Hospederia any sojourner can for three nights find free accommodation, the Archduke providing house-room, linen, service, and fuel. The apartments are always ready, the guest need send no warning of his intended arrival. All he requires to do is to supply himself with food sufficient for the sustenance of his party throughout the visit, as there are no shops within several miles of Miramar, and the servants at the Hospederia are forbidden to sell to the guests. Very early during our stay at Palma we had purposed journeying northwards to see the places of whose wonders we had heard; but we were so pleasantly interested in our new home and strange environment that it was nearing the close of November before we felt disposed to take the journey. At stated times diligences run the twelve miles between Palma and Valldemosa, and the charge is only sevenpence-halfpenny. But the diligence goes no farther than Valldemosa, and that is three miles distant from the Hospederia. So, when we had decided to go on the Tuesday morning, we engaged Bartolomé, a good-looking bachelor charioteer, who stabled his carriage and pair of horses in Son Españolet, to drive us thither. But Tuesday morning, when it came, brought a sudden change of weather. A strong easterly wind was blowing, and the temperature, for the first time since our arrival on these favoured isles, nearly approached cold. Bartolomé was warned that the journey was postponed for a day at least, and we spent the hours of uncertainty in grumbling at the weather, and in consuming the most perishable of the stock of provisions we had laid in for the expedition. Judging the Majorcan climate by our knowledge of that of other countries, we were all secretly convinced that we had delayed too long, that the weather had probably changed for the winter, and that our little excursion might require to be postponed until spring. But to our surprise and relief the succeeding morning proved calm and sunny. Having been duly instructed, Bartolomé drove up at ten o'clock precisely, with a jingling of bells that I am convinced set every feminine head in the Calle de Mas a-peer behind its discreetly closed venetian shutters. In appearance Bartolomé was the embodiment of buoyant geniality. His black hair curled in rings about his smiling face, and he had dressed for the occasion in a white suit, a pink shirt, and a pair of bright yellow elastic-sided boots. Bartolomé's carriage, the sides of whose interior were decorated with four antimacassars on each of which was embroidered a flamboyant representation of a rampant steed, proved both roomy and comfortable, and we were only three in number. Yet when we had got packed in with our luggage, which included sketching materials as well as comestibles, there was scarcely room to stir. Never before had we realized what a cumbersome article food was: or calculated the bulk of--say--the bread even so small a family will consume in three days. And when you add to the loaves the meat and groceries, the vegetables and fruit, necessary for three days' moderate consumption, they will be found to occupy a surprisingly large amount of space. The first portion of the journey led through the broad, fertile plain north of Palma, where plantations of almond, fig, and olive succeed each other with scarcely a break--that wide expanse whose fruitfulness has gained Majorca the title of the orchard of the Mediterranean. Near where the hills meet the plain we passed the village of Esglayeta, an attractive hamlet consisting of little more than a church and a wayside _fonda_. The noses of the horses had been pointing directly towards a precipitous cleft in the range of mountains, and almost unexpectedly we entered the valley that divided two great hills. As we drove on, the winding road gradually ascended, until we found ourselves in the midst of the mountains and within sight of the outlying portion of lovely Valldemosa. In his _Byways of Europe_ Bayard Taylor said: "Verily there is nothing in all Europe so beautiful as Valldemosa." And indeed the ancient town, rising on its heights amid still higher heights above the valley that runs seawards, is strikingly beautiful. It is only when taking Valldemosa in detail that one notices that its people are not quite so handsome, that they lack the gracious and light-hearted bearing of the inhabitants of Palma, that their dress is poorer, and the streets more squalid. Perhaps the difference in climate may account for the difference in appearance, for Valldemosa stands high among the mountains, and its climate is both colder and damper than that of Palma. The situation is supposed to be extremely healthy. It was at Valldemosa, on the site afterwards occupied by the Carthusian monastery, that in 1311 King Sancho, who was afflicted with asthma, built a palace to which he removed his Court, and from which he gave his hawking parties. At the suggestion of Bartolomé, we paused to visit the church attached to the old monastery, which was shown us by an elderly woman, who, unlike most of the country people, spoke excellent Spanish and understood our efforts in that language. Under her guidance we visited the chapel, a fine old treasure-house of carved effigies of saints, of paintings, and of relics in glass cases all carefully wrapped up and labelled. The colours of the paintings that adorn the walls and ceiling, the work of two Carthusian monks, are as vivid as though still wet from the brush. And the remarkable altar-piece, with its life-size figures in wax, is worth a special visit. Walking through the cloisters of the Carthusian monastery, we passed the doors of the cells, which are now used as dwelling-houses, and it occurred to us to ask if our old woman knew in which of the cells George Sand had passed her memorable winter in company with her children and with Chopin, and if it would be possible for us to see it. Our guide appeared to be familiar with both questions. She had no hesitation in answering them in the affirmative; and preceding us briskly down the long, ascetic-looking corridor (that accorded so ill with our notion of Madame Dudevant), knocked at the door numbered 1. "But if people are living in the house, will they not object? We must not disturb them," we demurred. Our guardian thrust aside our protest as trivial, and in truth it was offered in a perfunctory spirit. "No, no," she assured us. "The señor will be pleased. He is a nice gentleman. He was the doctor of Valldemosa for thirty years, till he retired. He will show you the house himself." And indeed the señor, when he appeared, was graciousness itself. Welcoming us after the Spanish fashion, he put his house and what it contained at our disposal. In this case the courtesy proved more than a form of words, for he personally conducted us over all his domain. First he showed us the terrace garden, from whose low boundary-wall, as from a balcony, one could look over the scattered houses that nestled among their laden orange-trees, towards the distant sea. The sun was shining; the air was heavy with the perfume of the loquat blossoms; a delicious languor lay over all. It was easy to imagine George Sand leaning on that wall, whose base was so thickly fringed with luxuriant maidenhair fern, revelling in the beauty of her surroundings. But my thoughts and sympathy were most with the monks who, on the suppression of the convents in 1835, were obliged to leave their quiet cells and the gardens that must have been a perpetual delight to them, and go elsewhere to subsist on the scant pension of a franc a day. [Illustration: Valldemosa] Taking us indoors, the doctor showed us the living-rooms, five of which looked out to the terrace-garden. The name of "cell" suggests accommodation that is cramped and austere, but nothing could have been more cheerful than these sunlit chambers. In the large, airy _salon_, with its domed ceiling, one could easily imagine both musician and novelist finding abundant space to work, he with his "velvet fingers," as his companion christened them, she with her facile pen. And in the quaint kitchen, with its range of charcoal stoves and big, open fireplace, one could picture them gathering on the nights of that cold winter. It would have been impossible to find a more idyllic setting for a romantic episode. Still, I must confess that doubts assailed me; for in November, 1838, when writing to a friend, George Sand had said:-- "I have a cell, that is to say, three rooms and a garden full of oranges and lemons, for thirty-five francs a year, in the large monastery of Valldemosa." And this house of the doctor's, with its spacious _salon_, its large dining-room, its many sleeping-apartments? No, much though we desired it, the descriptions hardly tallied. Then in her account of the unusually severe winter Madame Dudevant wrote of the "eagles and vultures that came down to feast on the poor sparrows that sheltered in their pomegranate trees from the snow." Now in the garden there was a _kake_ tree laden with ripe rose-red fruit, and other trees, but no pomegranate. But then that was many years past, and the trunk of the pomegranate-tree might long ago have been burnt on that wide hearth in the kitchen. Speaking of the matter to the good doctor, we found our uncertainty shared. Throwing out his hands he said humorously:-- "Who knows? There is no record. It was _one_ of the cells. That much is certain. And this was the house of the Superior. If not this house, it was another. That is enough." But as we descended the slope from the monastery we agreed that, whether or not the great French _artistes_ ever lived within the walls of that particular cell, there could be no question that they had breathed the sweet air of these terrace-gardens, and had known the enchantment of that wonderful panoramic view. And that made their personalities very real to us. Bartolomé awaited us smiling, and, insinuating ourselves among our medley of belongings, off we set along the three miles of road that led to Miramar. On the outskirts of Valldemosa we saw, for the first time in Majorca, vines climbing over tall trees by the wayside, their grapes in purple bunches suspended in profusion from the branches. The effect was so beautiful that we almost regretted the more prosaic vineyards near Palma, with the carefully trained vines that resembled well-pruned blackberry bushes. As we advanced, passing through a succession of olive plantations that rose above us towards the grand craggy mountains and fell beneath us to the blue sea, glimpses of which we caught over the foliage, the beauty of the scene that gradually unfolded surpassed all that we had yet seen. The Man groaned a little, as during the next three days he was fated to groan often, and for the same reason. "This is _too_ grand," he said. "It's hopeless. One could never paint it!" Turning a bend of the road, Bartolomé drew rein with a flourish before a quaint dwelling by the wayside; and we realized that we had reached the Hospederia. "I say! We ought to have sent word we were coming. I hope the house isn't full. I hope they'll have room for us," said the Boy, voicing the sudden apprehension of us all. But so far from being crowded with visitors, the Hospederia seemed totally deserted. The great door was shut and, except for a vagrant cat and a clucking hen, there was no sign of life about the place. Shouting lustily for "Fernando," Bartolomé jumped down and, running to the door, knocked loudly. Receiving no reply, he did not stand upon ceremony but, pushing open the door, went in, beckoning us to follow. Entering, we found ourselves in a large outer hall with a cobbled floor and a long well-scrubbed table and benches. Following our charioteer, who had opened an inner door, we went into a large dimly-lit room which, when the window-shutters had been opened, revealed itself as a long narrow dining-room of severely ascetic appearance. Tables extended down its length, chairs with seats of interwoven string stood round the walls. "Look, señora!" Running to a cupboard, Bartolomé had thrown open the door, disclosing shelves laden with china and crystal. Again--"Look! señora." Hastening to the opposite side of the room, he had opened the doors of a big _armário_, and was pointing to piles of clean table-linen. It was as though we had strayed into some enchanted castle where all had been prepared for our coming by invisible hands. Going off to explore further, we found our way into a snug kitchen. The whole of one side was occupied by a brown-tiled charcoal stove, on which many dinners could have been cooked simultaneously. The shelves were laden with cooking-pots and pans, of every description; the walls shone with an array of well-polished utensils. Over charcoal embers a huge earthenware pot, that for its better preservation had been encased in a strait-waistcoat of wire-netting, was slowly bubbling. Essaying to mount the stair leading from the hall, we peeped into closely shuttered apartments in which we could see the dim outlines of beds. And what we saw assured us of one thing--that there were no other guests at the Hospederia. From the perfect order of the house, and the fact that the fire was burning, it was clear that someone must be close at hand. But we had come a long way, and in the meantime we were famishing. Hastening to our aid, the ubiquitous Bartolomé spread the table, putting out plates and glasses, and finding wooden spoons and forks in the drawer of a side-table. Opening our packets of sandwiches and fruit, we invited him to join us. We were all seated at table, busily eating, when a swift clatter of feet sounded on the cobble stones of the outer hall; and a brisk little brown woman ran into the room, voluble with apology for the temporary absence of the keepers of the Hospederia. Netta, she explained, was away. Fernando was working at the farm. In their absence could she be of any service to our excellencies? Reassured on that point, the lady--Catalina was her name--remained to enliven our picnic lunch by rallying Bartolomé, who was an old acquaintance of hers, on his unparalleled effrontery in sitting down to table with us. "You have no right to eat with their excellencies," she said. "You are only a coachman." "But if he is a good coachman?" asked the Man. "Ah, no, señor. He is not a good coachman. He is a bad coachman. And, besides, he cannot spread a table. See! he has given you no table-cloth, no napkins, when he knows the cupboard is full of them. No, he is a very bad coachman indeed!" When our scrap meal was finished, Catalina proceeded to show us our sleeping accommodation. Unlocking a door that we had not tried, she led us through a pleasant room with two beds, to one with two windows--one facing the highroad, where Bartolomé's carriage still waited, the other affording a beautiful view of the rugged coast. Catalina explained that these rooms were usually allotted to foreigners such as ourselves, the less attractively situated being reserved for natives of the island, who were at liberty to share the Archduke's hospitality, although the Hospederia was originally intended for the use of other travellers. A handsome new dining-room in process of construction, though during our stay no one was actually working at it, was also planned for the accommodation of those from far countries, but to us the appointments of the older building seemed peculiarly in keeping with the quaint idea of the Hospederia. The bedrooms were simply but sufficiently furnished. Each had two single beds, half-a-dozen chairs, a plain wooden table, and a tripod washstand holding the smallest basin and ewer we had seen outside France. The roofs were raftered. All was the perfection of austere cleanliness. Before our inspection was ended Fernando, the host, a good-looking man with the gracious deportment of an operatic tenor, had returned. His grandmother had been the original housekeeper of the Hospederia. On her death, at the age of ninety-nine, her office had descended upon Fernando and his young wife Netta. We spent the all too short November afternoon and evening in exploring the slopes about Miramar, looking at the glorious views that perpetually presented some yet more glorious aspect. The Hospederia was over a thousand feet above the sea, to which the ground fell precipitously. Above the house the land rose up and up until it ended in towering crags. Northward stretched the Mediterranean. Elsewhere the eye met nothing but range upon range of mountains. The extensive grounds of Miramar are well shaded with olive and carob trees, but at every point that affords a specially good view of some part of the exquisite scenery the Archduke has caused to be erected a _mirador_, or walled enclosure, where one can sit in safety and glory in the beauty of the surroundings. From one of these we watched the after-glow of the setting sun illumine distant peaks, bringing into prominence heights whose existence we had scarcely realized. The darkness, falling swiftly, surprised us while a good distance from the Hospederia, and we had to find our way back by untried paths. But the fascination of the place held us captive, and when the moon began to peep out from among the clouds we could not remain indoors, as more sensible folks would have done. Wrapping up a little, for it was colder on the northern coast of the island than at Palma, we went out, determined to reach a headland by the sea, on which from above we had caught tantalizing glimpses of a shining white temple. Except from a _mirador_ the temple was not visible, and we wandered by many devious ways before we again came in sight of it, perched above the sea on a high rock that is reached by a stone bridge thrown over a deep gully. As we felt our way along, for the elusive moon was again behind a cloud, all was silent, mysterious. Surely Miramar at nightfall in winter is one of the most silent places on the earth. We felt as though there was not a human being alive but ourselves. Crossing the bridge timorously, we found ourselves confronting the ghostly white chapel. When we had told Catalina of our desire to visit it, she had given us keys, but they did not fit. And as we proceeded to fumble with the lock, the silence was so intense that I could almost have imagined that someone within was holding his breath to listen. Had we knocked upon that closed door I had an eerie conviction that the spectre of some long-dead monk would have opened it. But we did not knock. And the moon favouring us with a glimpse of her illumining power, we walked round the base of the temple, which is securely railed in, and watched the moon outline with silver finger-tips each point and pinnacle of the hills and shimmer softly on the sea. When we returned to the Hospederia, Fernando had gone to fetch his wife; and Catalina, who had been left in charge, bustled into the dining-room to tell us that two _carabineros_ had come, and were resting in the kitchen. "Have they come after us?" cried the Man; and Catalina, who enjoyed even the mildest of humour, wrinkled her brown face in delight. The dining-room where we sat was large and dimly lit by oil lamps. After the silence of those wooded slopes the prospect of even the company of two _carabineros_ was alluring. So when I went into the kitchen to cook the lamb cutlets and tomatoes that comprised our modest supper, my men followed me. [Illustration: Carabineros in the Kitchen] The kitchen, which was the most picturesque part of the Hospederia, was looking particularly snug and cosy. A fire of logs burned on the open hearth, below the shining tin pans and the strings of red peppers, and lit up the fine bronzed faces of the _carabineros_, who sat close to its warmth. They rose when we entered, to offer us their seats. One, spreading his striped blanket on the low settle, invited the Man to share it; and while I grilled the cutlets and Catalina washed dishes at the sink, the men chatted as freely as their difference of language would allow, the _carabineros_ talking of their long hours of duty--for their patrol begins at five or six o'clock in the evening and does not end until seven next morning--and of the constant watch that has to be kept for smugglers on that lonely and seemingly scarce accessible coast. Leaving them to resume their night watch, we supped and went to bed, to be roused in the early morning by voices. Netta, the house-mistress, had returned, and thenceforward the lively Catalina would relapse into the position of merely an obliging neighbour. [Illustration: La Trinidad, Miramar] VIII MIRAMAR When we went downstairs to breakfast Netta was setting the table; setting it, too, after a fashion of her own which never varied, were the meal breakfast, luncheon or dinner. First she spread the cloth, whose lack at luncheon on the previous day had so offended Catalina's sense of what was neat and proper. Then she put before each place a big tumbler, a little tumbler, two soup-plates, and a wooden spoon and fork. Netta proved to be tall and nice-looking, with tragic dark eyes, and a gravity of manner that was in striking contrast to her husband's smiling bonhomie. She was an admirable housewife. We never caught her at work; yet, without the slightest appearance of fuss and flurry, she managed to keep everything the pink of perfection. The weather was hardly promising. Rain had fallen in the night; veils of mist smothered the crests of the near hills and completely obliterated the more distant. But we were resolved to let nothing short of an actual downpour keep us indoors. And as the Man wished to sketch at Valldemosa, which had captivated us all on the previous day, the Boy and I accompanied him thither. Perhaps it is unwise to attempt to renew first impressions. Possibly the charm of Miramar clouded our eyes to the undoubted beauty of Valldemosa. More likely the fact that the sun only peeped out fitfully, and that the wind was damp and the sky sullen, influenced our view: but somehow Valldemosa seemed to have lost the glamour it cast over us when we first saw it basking in the warm sunlight. Everybody seemed chilly, and all the children looked as if they had colds in their noses. Leaving the Man working at a water-colour of the old Carthusian monastery from rising ground above a covered well, we set off with the intention of augmenting our little stock of provisions from the shops of the town. The store we chanced upon sold every likely and unlikely commodity, from green and orange boots to radishes. When we inquired where we might find a butcher, the shop-mistress, with a majestic wave of her hand, signed to us to follow her. And, walking in her footsteps, we threaded our way through an apartment, which was partly kitchen and partly an overflow stock chamber, into an inner room, where hung garlands of black and yellow sausages and the carcasses of two lambs. This was the butcher's shop, she announced, and there was no beef, only lamb. So perforce we added yet more cutlets to our diet, and humbly craved bread. But the only loaves she had were so large that, rejecting them, we went in search of a baker. In the less important Majorcan towns, shops are difficult to find. The fact that a tax is levied upon signs keeps all but the most prominent vendors from exhibiting one. The room of an ordinary house that opens directly to the street usually acts as the place of business; and a cabbage, or a basket of striped haricot beans, set casually on the doorstep, often serves to indicate the existence of a general shop. After a little searching we succeeded in finding a _panaderia_, but the loaves of the baker, in place of being smaller than those of the grocer (which sounds Ollendorffian), were so huge that they resembled cartwheels, or, to be more exact, perambulator wheels, baked of rye. For a moment the choice lay between possible starvation and the prospect of trundling the mammoth rye loaf up and down the three miles of highway that lay between us and the Hospederia. While we hesitated, the baker lady, and the half dozen or so of her intimate friends who had followed us into the shop to see what the foreigners would buy, regarded us interestedly. Then a compromise suggested itself. "Would it be possible to ask the señora to divide the loaf?" "Yes--without doubt." The complacent señora already had the large knife in her hand. So, clutching the half of the still steaming rye loaf, we returned to the Man, with whom we had arranged to share an open-air luncheon. Before we had reached him, the mist that had been threatening to swoop down upon us resolved itself into a shower. Taking advantage of the near vicinity of the covered well, we boiled our tea-kettle under the archway, and drank tea, to the surprise of the people who were constantly coming to fill their water-jars. Then, the sun consenting, rather sulkily, to peep out again, the Man returned to his work, while the Boy and I, feeling no further temptation to linger at Valldemosa, took up our section of the cartwheel and set off for Miramar. On the way, not far beyond the outskirts of the town, we caught sight of a notice-board, which stated that a Museum of Mallorquin antiquities might be seen in a house on the side of the road nearest to the mountains. Following the path indicated, we found ourselves, after a few minutes walking, in the courtyard of what had evidently been a fine old country seat. The doors stood open to the world. Except for a beautiful flock of cream-coloured turkeys, the place seemed utterly untenanted. There was no sign of humanity until the Boy woke the echoes by smiting lustily on a cow-bell that hung outside the kitchen door. Then a little sun-dried old woman popped her head out, and with a scared face fled up a broad flight of steps that led from the courtyard to the floor above. She had gone to warn the custodian of the Museum; and that dame, quickly appearing, invited us upstairs to see the collection. The house, Son Moragues, she told us, was one of the many owned by the Archduke on the different estates he had bought. He had never used it as a residence, and merely kept it as a receptacle for the specimens of typical Mallorquin manufactures, such as pottery, models of baskets, furniture, etc., he was collecting. The object that interested us perhaps more than any other exhibit was a jar that had been salved from the sea in Palma Harbour. Although a genuine antique it was of the shape in use to-day; and its unrecorded period of immersion had left it encrusted with a marvellous decoration of barnacles and shells. What really delighted us most in the Museum were the views from the balconies; especially those obtained from a great old _terras_ with a sloping floor, where we stood in the brilliant sunshine and watched the showers sweeping along the mountain tops and up the valley. Down below us was a thick hedge of prickly pear, the edges of the fleshy leaves ruched with scarlet fruit. And beside us, as we leant on the edge of the balcony, was a wire tray on which a quantity of figs, gathered presumably from the trees in the field beneath, were drying in the sun. The quaint old garden, which we saw on the way out, had tall box hedges and a spreading magnolia, and crumbling stone seats surrounded the fountain, whose waters have long run dry. In the evening I had gone to bed early, leaving the others to follow their own devices, and was sleeping the sleep of the woman who had been all day in the open air, when an insistent calling of my name aroused me back to semi-consciousness, and I gradually gathered that I must descend to open the door. The men, who had gone out walking in the moonlight, had returned to find that, inadvertently, the house door had been locked and barred against them. Had my room been less accessible, or my sleep more profound, they might have knocked and called in vain, for although it was hardly nine o'clock, Fernando and Netta were deep in the slumber of the agriculturist in some unknown roof-chamber of the tall old house. Although so isolated in position, Miramar is intimately connected with the romantic life-history of Ramon Lull--rake, recluse, scholar, fanatic, martyr, saint--what you will. The father of Ramon Lull--the name is variously spelt: Raymund Lully in the English; Ramundo Lulio in the Spanish; and Ramon Lull in the Mallorquin, which has a bad habit of chipping the ends off words--was one of those brave young knights of Aragon who fought with their King during his invasion and conquest of Majorca. When that war had ended happily for all but the Moors, the parent Lull, in company with the other nobles who had supported King Jaime the Conquistador, was rewarded with an estate in Majorca. And there, about six years later, his son Ramon was born. During his earlier manhood Ramon gave little hint of what he was ultimately to become. His behaviour was by no means sedate. Nay, more, it is on record that his love affairs were so numerous as to become a public scandal, which reached a climax on his riding on horseback into church in pursuit of a devout lady whom he madly adored. The fatal illness of this lady, by awakening his conscience and rousing him to a sense of sin, changed the current of his thoughts, and after a period of self-accusation and contrition, he decided not only to lead a better life, but to spend that life in the reformation of others. King Jaime, on being applied to, supplied the funds necessary for the carrying out of his project, and Lull erected a college at Miramar, where close by the house of the Archduke a fragment of the original chapel is still to be seen. His scheme was to teach thirteen monks Arabic, so that they could go forth as missionaries among the infidels. And Miramar, one of the most secluded spots on earth, as well as one of the most beautiful, he deemed a suitable place for study. But the scheme failed. Why, the chroniclers do not say. Perhaps the students, being merely human, wearied of the restrictions of existence in that seminary perched on the hill-side between the mountains and the sea, and pined for company. The project was abandoned. A later record speaks of King Sancho, grandson of the Conquistador, visiting Miramar in quest of relief from the asthma with which he was afflicted, and residing at the Arabic College. Lull, nothing daunted by the defection of his pupils, alone put into execution his plan of carrying the truth into other lands. We hear of his preaching Christ in Africa and being rewarded with stripes. Then we are told of his travelling in the Holy Land. Later he appears in Paris, in Egypt, and even in England, writing books and teaching. In spite of besetting dangers, Lull's life of study and propagandism lasted beyond the ordinary term of man. When he was an octogenarian, and probably weary of the struggle, he desired to quit the world in a blaze of glory; and, as the best means of attaining his end, returned to Africa, where earlier he had been received with contumely and severely beaten. There Lull met the fate he coveted: for continuing to preach openly and persistently, he was stoned to death at Bugia in June, 1315. Some Genoese disciples who had begged for his bruised and broken body brought it tenderly back to his birthplace. We had seen the spot of its interment in the beautiful church of San Francisco, at Palma, a Gothic temple of the thirteenth century, that vies in antiquity with the Cathedral. One of the chapels in the transept to the left of the high altar gives sepulture to the aged martyr. The effigy shown is that of an old man lying on his side, as though to signify that his unwavering and indomitable spirit had at last gained rest. We had spoken tentatively of Lull to Fernando, and Fernando had not only admitted a knowledge of the old-world frequenter of his slopes, but had volunteered to take us to visit his cave, a sanctuary high on the mountain-side above Miramar, where Lull was wont to go when he felt the need of seclusion. And at ten next morning we were waiting, expectant. But at ten Fernando, just returned from his morning's work on the farm, was at breakfast. So we went to the _mirador_, below the Hospederia, and spent the minutes of waiting enjoying the view that, no matter how often we saw it, always wore a different aspect. This morning, though the sun was shining on the sea and on the olives that covered the lower slopes, the higher peaks were obscured by filmy scarves of mist, and scarcely perceptible wisps were floating about the mountain sides, giving an air of mystery and grandeur to the lofty heights. Then Fernando appeared wiping his moustached lips, which already held the inevitable cigarette. Under his guidance we moved along the highroad until we came to a gate where a cross fixed to the post betokened monastery ground. A sandalled monk passing by gave us grave greeting. There the ascent began at once, the path zigzagging about on the terraced slopes that were thickly planted with olives. The undergrowth was bright with the vivid green foliage and brilliant scarlet berries of the winter cherry. Up and up we mounted, Fernando and the Boy walking lightly in advance, we others lagging a little behind, until we felt like birds seeking some mountain aerie; till looking down we saw nothing but a steeply shelving forest of tree tops, or looking up caught a glimpse of mist-obscured crags. The path wound about along narrow ledges and up crazy, almost obliterated steps, until with the suddenness of a surprise the track branched off to a ledge on the right, and we saw, set in the face of the solid rock, a little wicket gate. It was so long since the gate had been opened that it necessitated a strong effort on the part of Fernando's broad shoulders before it would consent to open. Within, the unexpected awaited us. Set in the wall of the cave facing the door was an old bas-relief carving that had evidently marked the place of the altar before which the saint had been wont to worship. The passing of the centuries has gradually blurred the outlines of the carving: still we could see the form of the Virgin and Child, and the worshipping figure of an angel. Behind the group was a background of palms. The wall still held a faint trace of fresco, and from the side hung the socket--in the shape of a bird--for an antique lamp. There was something so attractive, and even homely, in the cave, that we required no great effort of imagination to fancy Lull choosing it as his hermitage, and escaping thither when he yearned for a space to be free from the society of the thirteen monks who so soon had tired of their task. That raised ledge might have served for a couch; this stone seemed the right height for a seat; a small window hewn in the side admitted sufficient light did the recluse wish to study. In the wall was a natural basin, which to this day, except when long-continued drought has dried up all the watercourses, holds a supply of fresh water. It seemed to us that Lull had chosen an ideal place of seclusion in the rock-dwelling set far up in the pure air, where no sound save the twitter of bird or the far-off murmur of the sea could break the solemnity of his thoughts. Everything about the cave bespoke its antiquity. The trees that fronted the entrance were hoary with age and fringed with lichen. And on the hill-side above, amidst moss-grown trees and blooming heath, a tall cross had been erected in memory of the recluse whose haven it once had been. There was yet another cave that Fernando had promised to show us; one of worldly, not of religious uses this time. It was the place where in not very remote ages smugglers concealed the contraband goods that they had succeeded in landing on the coast below. So, leaving the cell of Ramon Lull, we followed our guide, clambering higher and yet higher, and speedily getting into the dim twilight of forests that might have existed since the beginning of the world, so venerable were they, so thickly mossed and festooned with grey-green lichen. The signs of foliage were of the scantiest. Many trees revealed no more than half a dozen leaves set at the extreme tips of the lichen-furred branches. And all about was a huddled waste of stones--the debris that collects at the base of great mountains. In these gloomy recesses where daylight never enters there was no indication of life--no flutter of startled bird, not even a scurrying beetle. All was still and weird. On hastened the light-footed Fernando, and on we followed more ponderously, marvelling how he knew his way where we could see no trace of a path. Suddenly branching off to the right, over the rough rocks, he preceded us to where, low down amongst a tumbled heap of boulders, a slight crevice showed. Smiling, he glanced back at us, then bent down and disappeared. Close on his heels the Boy followed. And both had vanished off the face of the earth, leaving us gaping at the mouth of the exaggerated rabbit burrow that had seemingly swallowed them up. We, wisely, did not attempt to enter. The prospect of a rough scramble did not tempt us. On his return to the surface the Boy described the interior of the cave as both wide and lofty. But I must confess the idea of the smugglers conveying their illicit cargoes from the beach all that distance up the steep mountain-side to store it in a cavern that was on the way to nowhere seemed absurd. It assuredly was inaccessible. And it spoke well for the vigilance of the carbineers that the _contrabandistas_ could find no more convenient place of concealment. But had Majorca not been free from the bandit plague, what a glorious place that would have been for brigands in which to keep prisoned the rich foreigners they were holding for ransom! In some such unattainable holes and crannies of the heights must the mountain Moors have existed during the two years that passed before their chief surrendered to the Conquistador. Just beyond the smugglers' cave were the fragmentary remains of a monastery, so old and long deserted that the lichen-fringed trees had rooted as deeply within the ruined walls of its chambers as without in the forest. Still further we went, keeping close on the heels of our untiring leader, for the track sloped downwards now and the going was easier. Once more we were in the region of trees that seemed alive, not merely fossilized and moss-grown. Like a born guide, Fernando had reserved the most charming part of the excursion to the last. All unexpectedly he brought us to where, on an outjutting pinnacle of rock, the Archduke had erected a chapel. From the stone seats placed round its base we had an enchanting and yet more comprehensive view than ever before of the scene that, from whatever point we chanced to see it, never failed to give us a fresh thrill of delight. And wasn't I glad to sit down! We had felt so much at home at the Hospederia and so enthralled with this new world of steeps and silences that, when the last of our three days had come, we felt sincerely sorry to leave it. In torrid summer weather, when the southern plains of the island lie baking in the sun, it would be impossible to imagine a more charming way of escape from the heat than to rest under the shades of leafy Miramar, or to sit at ease in one of the cunningly placed _miradors_ "looking lazy at the sea" and the everlasting hills. But the law is inexorable. When his three days' free lodging has come to an end each guest must move on to make room for others. A wise provision; for, had it not been so ruled, the first travellers who filled these beds and ate at these tables would never have left the Hospederia--they would have been there yet! Our next stopping-place was to be Sóller, a town that is envalleyed amid the highest mountains in the island. Sóller is ten miles distant from Miramar, and the question was how we were to get transported thither. At the Hospederia we were quite out of the way of traffic. Not even a diligence lumbered by. Fernando, coming to our rescue, offered to negotiate with a farmer for the use of a cart. It was the ploughing season, the busiest time of the year for both men and mules, but he succeeded in arranging that we could have the loan of a conveyance of some kind at two o'clock that afternoon for ten pesetas. The morning had been wet. Happily not with the drenching, torrential rain of these latitudes, but with an insinuating moisture reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands. Disregarding it, we made the most of the few hours at our disposal, seeking, and finding, fresh walks and wonders in our surroundings. One thing I remember that specially interested us in the terraced olive plantations of Miramar, was the method of throwing a little stone bridge from one walled terrace to another across the bed of the river. There was no water in the channel, the bed was dry and mossy. As we looked up at the succession of bridgelets, each flanked on either side by short flights of stone steps, it seemed to typify the extreme of the elaborate and painstaking system of culture that prevails all over the island. With appetites sharpened by the famed air of Miramar we had lunched off goats' milk, the toasted remains of our half cartwheel of rye bread, and something I had confidently expected would prove to be an omelet, but which turned out to be something entirely different. It was eatable, however, even delectable, and we devoured it to the last yellow fragment, then waited the arrival of our carriage. It came at last. And as it drew up in front of the Hospederia we looked first at it, then at each other, in silent dismay. In place of the roomy farm cart drawn by mules that we had expected to see, the conveyance was one of the gaily painted, two-wheeled cockleshells in which Majorcan farmers go a-junketing. It would have been an admirable vehicle for two people. Viewed as a means of carrying four with luggage, it at first sight seemed absolutely impracticable. "Oh, it's all right; I'll walk," said the Boy, regardless of the fact that ten long miles of wet road lay between us and the Hotel Marina at Sóller. Our luggage was as little as a party of three could be expected to require during a week's expedition, comprising as it did only one large portmanteau, a suit-case, some sketching materials, and a couple of rugs. Yet compared with the size of the conveyance it appeared of enormous dimensions. Nothing daunted by the overwhelming bulk of his prospective load, the driver put the suit-case under the seat, propped the big portmanteau up on it, and invited me to get in. That done, allowing a modicum of space for himself, the carriage was full. Obviously that plan would not do. Again we looked at each other in despair. Fortunately the driver was a man of resource. Hauling out the big bag, he wrapped it in a sail-like canvas cover, and, producing fragments of rope from all his pockets, proceeded to tie it on at the back of the cart. Running into the house, Netta brought more rope for its better security. With the load hanging behind, it seemed as though the tiny vehicle were already overweighted; but its capacity for endurance proved greater than we anticipated. The Man got in, the Boy got in, the driver also mounted. All three were jammed into a narrow seat for two. I was squeezed in somewhere at the back, and at last our journey began. As we drove on the feeling of insecurity lessened; we forgot to expect the cart to tip up. Our mule proved himself a good goer, and we early learned to adapt ourselves to conditions--to lean forwards going uphill, to incline backwards when the way led downwards. Though the mist still blurred the mountains the coast scenery was magnificent. The road, which lay half-way between sea and mountain-top, was bordered on either side by olive plantations. About three miles from the Hospederia it curved inwards into the most beautiful valley I had ever seen. [Illustration: A Tight Fit] Houses that looked like nests, so thickly were they surrounded by luxuriant foliage, were scattered about the lower parts of the hills that on three sides rose steeply; on the fourth the land declined gently to the Mediterranean. Here there were no jealous walls to hedge in the gardens. Oranges, lemons, and figs in full fruitage overhung the highway. Tall palms rose overhead, and down by a fountain women were washing. It was the village of Deyá, a sleepy nest seven miles from even a diligence, but, even seen through a blur of rain, a place of exquisite beauty. "We must come back here." "Yes, we'll come back----" "And stay a month," we agreed, as we had done about so many charming spots that we had got just a glimpse of, and as we were fated to do about so many more before our sojourn in these lovely isles came to a close. We would gladly have lingered to explore the beauties of Deyá, but the delay at starting had already encroached on the November afternoon, and the greater portion of our journey was yet to come. So the men, who had got down to walk through the village, remounted, and once more, huddled up together, off we joggled, out of the lovely valley and along a cliff-road where, among the grey-green olive-trees, girls in skirts of vivid scarlet were gathering the fallen fruit. It was five o'clock and dusk was already falling when we descended the zigzag road leading into Sóller and, passing a picturesque old cross, turned into a modern-looking street planted on either side with trees. "What I want to see now," I said, deliberately shutting my eyes to the scenery, "is a hotel with electric light, and a good fire, and German waiters, and French cookery." "Don't be hateful," retorted the Boy. "But it doesn't matter; you won't see it. My only fear is that they won't be able to take us in." The rain, which was now falling more heavily, had sent the townsfolk indoors. The only wayfarer in sight was a venerable gentleman who, as he sat astride a panniered donkey, protected himself from the rain with a large umbrella. Turning with a final jolt, we drew up in front of the Hotel Marina, whose wide glass doors opened hospitably to receive us. There was no question of lack of room, fortunately, but the dinner-hour was yet two hours ahead, and even the satisfaction derived from the omelet (which wasn't really an omelet) was already a vague memory. But we are people of resource. While I boiled the unfailing tea-kettle the men foraged, returning with provender in the shape of crisply toasted _bizcochos_ and _cocas_, and we had a cosy tea that enabled us to possess our bodies in patience until the dinner-hour. The waiter who served us was German, the cookery revealed more than a suspicion of French influence, the electric light was brilliant, and there was a cheery fire. But even the Boy did not complain. IX SÓLLER Though a longer acquaintance reveals many charming and wholly Majorcan characteristics, at first sight Sóller resembles a Swiss town, so closely do the high mountains encircle it. The likeness is emphasized when, as occasionally happens in winter, the double crest of the Puig Major is tipped with snow. With the exception of Palma, Sóller was the only Balearic town in which we had slept. Half unconsciously we found ourselves putting them in comparison, to discover that while each is, after its own fashion, delightful, they are entirely dissimilar. Palma, "compactly built together," stands, crowded a little, within its city walls, its feet lapped by the sea, a fertile plain behind it, while Sóller stretches itself at ease among its hills, with abundant elbow-room, in a fruitful orange grove. Water is a precious thing in Palma, where drinking-water in quaint Moorish stone jars is hawked through the streets, while a striking and refreshing feature of Sóller is the abundance of running water. It flowed--a little sluggishly perhaps, for the rains had not yet come--over the stony bed of the _torrente_; it gushed unchecked from the street fountains; it ran along cunningly contrived stone conduits and turned mills. [Illustration: Sóller] There are no rivers in Majorca. The beds of the _torrentes_ that ought to be rivers are often so dry that they resemble rough sun-baked roads. It was so many weeks since we had seen even a thread of running water that the sound of its flow was music in our ears. As a full and free supply of pure water is essential to the well-being of a town, one easily understands how Sóller has the advantage of Palma in health conditions. The absorbent soil of Sóller ensures freedom from rheumatism, and the old people remain hale and hearty to the close of lives that in many cases come within nodding distance of a century. Perhaps it was owing to the absence of the military, or the want of a railway--though Sóller has one in the making--or of the close vicinity of a port, but to our cursory view Sóller appeared less gay, and its people seemed to lack the irresponsible smiling light-heartedness of Palma folks. There were architectural differences also. To enter one of the better-class houses in the larger city one crosses a _patio_, or open courtyard, and having ascended a stair, knocks at a door; while in Sóller one steps directly from the street into a large hall, on either side of which, close to the wall, are set a long row of chairs all of similar design. Here visitors are received, and, as far as we could judge, penetrate no further. Sóller has few of the flat roof-tops or windows that are so prominent a feature of the old Moorish capital, but Sóller has more chimneys; in the stillness of early morning the faint blue haze of wood fires overhangs the town. Our first day at Sóller opened dull and grey. Much rain had fallen in the night. The streets were damp, the mountains mist-shrouded. The Boy and I felt depressed and cross. The Man, who had already discerned picturesque possibilities in the unique situation of the place, put a sketch-book in his pocket and went off in search of a typical subject. The Boy and I prowled about the narrow streets, allowing ourselves to be annoyed at everything--at the mud, at the Sunday crowds, and at the way they stared at us. In the square before the church was a busy little market. At the corner of the square, near where one gets a lovely view of the _torrente_ overhung by the balconies of crooked old houses, some of the ramshackle vehicles that convey marketers to and from the port of Sóller were waiting. "Let's go and have a look at the port," proposed the Boy. "Those people look at us as if we were wild beasts. And it will be better than hanging about here in the mud." The shower that had been threatening all the morning was beginning to fall, so I agreed. Selecting the coach that seemed on the point of starting, we took our seats. A young couple, an old couple, and half a dozen market baskets overflowing with greenstuff, shared the interior with us. Three more people and several more baskets mounted to the box, and, just as the rain began to patter heavily on the canvas roof, we drove off, glad to have secured the temporary shelter. The way from Sóller to its port seems to lie through an orange grove, so closely is it flanked on either side with gardens full of the shining leaves and golden fruit. It was sad to learn that a blight had attacked the crop in the lower part of the valley, and to see in one orchard a heap of trees, plucked up by the roots with the fruit still thick on the branches, waiting to be burnt. As we drove slowly along we met many country people townwards bent to mass or market. Long usage in sunshine and shadow had streaked the original hue of their great cotton umbrellas with broad lines of lighter tint--lines that until one guessed the cause looked like elaborately decorative stripes. By the time we had reached the entrance to the landlocked harbour the rain had ceased. Fitful gleams of sunshine broke through the clouds, and the air was soft and pleasant. Except from one point of view the natural harbour resembled a quiet inland lake. There was no sign of the near proximity of the sea. To the left rose a bold headland crowned by a lighthouse. To the right was a long sweep of bay lined at the farther end by a row of houses, before which small craft lay at anchor. Swart fishermen in red caps and yellow boots lounged by the doors of the cafés. Just beyond the houses the steamer _Villa de Sóller_, that makes periodical trips between the port, Barcelona and Cette, was loading boxes of the oranges for which the district is famed. Farther on was a second lighthouse. Climbing the steps that rose steeply between the two rows of houses, we reached the summit of the rocky promontory. Rusty cannon, their work long over, lay at rest in front of the old chapel that crowns the eminence. Before us lay the placid land-encircled sheet of water, behind us was a wall. Glancing over, we discovered, to our surprise and pleasure, that instead of the country landscape we had somehow expected to see, the ground fell sheer down to where the purple-blue Mediterranean ceaselessly surged beneath. The unexpected transition from the peaceful inland lake surrounded by mist-flecked mountains to a precipitous coast was curiously interesting. A moment earlier, with the moisture-laden air blowing softly in our faces, we could have imagined ourselves in the heart of the Scots Highlands. Now, by the mere turning of a head, we were gazing across a great tideless sea. A capacious coach, in which we chanced to be the only passengers, conveyed us back to Sóller and deposited us at the door of the Hotel Marina, where the Man, who had spent the morning sketching on a mountain-slope, was waiting to join us at luncheon. The town was busy when, later in the day, we made a tour of inspection, finding fresh interest at every turn. A row of bananas rich in pod, a group of quaint old-world houses, a great palm rearing its stately head, its thick clusters of orange-red fruit stems heavily beaded with shining yellow fruit. There was leisure in the air. It was evidently the visiting hour. In the entrance halls, in full view of the passing public, comely dames sat chatting all in a row, like the pretty maids in the garden of Mary-Mary-Quite-Contrary. To us it always seemed odd to see the gossipers seated side by side in a formal line--a position that one would imagine was not conducive to the exchange of confidences. The suggestion of French influence in the architecture of certain of the newer houses was explained by the fact that when natives of Sóller leave the island to seek their fortune they rarely go further than France--an easy journey with the _Villa de Sóller_ sailing at frequent intervals from the port to Cette. And when the exiles return--as they invariably do, for the emigrant Majorcan's sole desire is to make money that he may settle in his own country--they naturally import some of the ideas and tastes of the nation with which they have sojourned. French influence, too, was noticeable in the way the women dressed their hair. In many instances, particularly among the younger women, the pigtail and the _rebozillo_, or head-handkerchief, had given place to an elaborately dressed coiffure. All night the full moon had illumined a sleepy world. When I looked out at six o'clock it was still visible, though the light of the hidden sun was already flushing with roseate tints the highest mountain-tops. Over the valley the azure smoke of wood fires lay softly, and the sweet, sickly fragrance of steaming chocolate was in the air. The valley was still partly in shadow when after breakfast the Man went out to resume work. Leaving the Boy to his own devices, I went with him. The country immediately surrounding Sóller is so full of roads all beautiful, and paths all picturesque, that it is often difficult, even for those who know the district well, to find the way they look for. After a little winding in and out of the twisted streets we came upon the expected road--a track leading upwards towards the olive terraces. From the steep slope where we sat it was curious to watch the progress of the sun as it rose over the mountain-tops to note how, as it climbed higher, the shadows shortened, the moist streets dried, the chill vanished from the atmosphere, and new shadows crept over the sunlit sides of the surrounding hills. Beneath us ran the _torrente_, and from the roads on either side of its banks came the sound of wayfarers entering or leaving the town. The air was full of cheerful sounds, of the rattle of wheels, or the tinkle of bells and the bleat of lambs as a flock was driven by. The atmosphere was so clear that we caught the swift musical note of a church clock, and the sound of a gunshot reverberated among the hills like a peal of thunder. The few passers-by gave us kindly greeting. Two old women returning from market, a bevy of young girls on their way to gather the fallen olives, an old couple trotting briskly beside their panniered donkey--all had time to smile and wish us "Good-day." As the sun became stronger I rose and wandered on, up the steep, cobbled road, past the gardens where the oranges hung golden, looking for wild flowers. Even in the days of late November one rarely looks in vain for wild flowers in Majorca; and this morning, strolling along by the runnels of water, where the delicate maidenhair fern grew in profusion, I saw twining about the ivy berries in the hedge a lovely creeper that was new to me. Set at regular intervals on a slender brown stem, it bore clusters of glossy green foliage and drooping florets and buds. The blossoms, which had four petals, were cream-hued and flecked inside with crimson. It was a dainty and distinctive trailer. Even in its natural state it was difficult to imagine a more graceful wreath. A passer-by of whom I asked its name called it _Sylvestris montana_, and volunteered the information that, though it luxuriated on dry walls, no one could succeed in inducing it to grow in gardens. Following the path as it wound about the side of the hill, I found myself by easy stages rising high amid the olive terraces. There were silver-white olives beneath me, silver-white olives above me. The voices of the invisible gatherers mingled harmoniously with the music of the running water. A soothing sense of peace lay over all. I think it was then that I fell in love with Sóller. There are places that at first sight you are entranced with, and in two days find you have exhausted. Sóller is decidedly not one of these. At the close of the third day of our stay in the hill-encradled town we felt as though we had hardly yet had more than a glimpse of its beauties, so many and varied are they. It is said that you can stay at Sóller for two months and go for a different walk every day--and I believe it. From the first waking moments, when one could see the rising sun illumine the hill-tops, until, with its sinking, the grand crest of the Puig Mayor--the Greater Peak--was garbed in celestial glory, the day was a succession of artistic delights. Sóller had for us an added charm in the companionship of congenial fellow-visitors--an English lady who appreciates the beauty of the place and the homely, good qualities of its people so highly that she spends long periods there, and an enthusiastic young artist from the Argentine who, with the world to choose from, elects to paint at Sóller. Under their guidance we had driven to Biniaraix and, alighting, mounted the _Barranco_--a wonderful path by which the peasant proprietors reach the olive-trees that their untiring care in the preparation of the stony soil and their skill in husbandry have persuaded to grow on every possible--and, one might almost add, impossible--ledge of the rocky steeps. The Barranco, which was like a series of low, broad steps, zigzagged between the mountains like some eccentric, never-ending staircase. As we went up and up we paused often to look down to where, deep in the valley, Sóller lay embowered in its orange gardens. And while we climbed we marvelled at the ceaseless industry of a race that is willing to expend so much time and toil to reap so small a return. On the following afternoon we drove to Fornalutx, a little antique town three miles from Sóller. Fornalutx is the point from which expeditions start to climb the Puig Mayor. The little town, which is built from the warm, amber-brown stone of the hill-side on which it perches, is very old. There does not seem to be a yard of straight street within its bounds. The houses are set down pell-mell, anyhow and anywhere. A delightful lack of uniformity reigns supreme. An orange orchard pokes itself in here, a vine trellis projects there, a flight of steps interjects its crooked way at every corner. And it is all pictures! The Painter, who knew the place, reflecting our pleasure, hurried us on to see a good subject, and another good subject, and yet another. As we passed up a quaint side street the tinkle of mandolines fell gratefully on our ears, and we paused before the open doorway from which the sound issued. Green branches and tissue-paper frills decorated the entrance; within, some sort of merrymaking was in progress. [Illustration: The Mandoline Player] A group of pinafored urchins who were hanging about outside told us that it was the _fiesta_ of the master of the house. It was rude, inquisitive, and wholly inexcusable, of course, but, incited thereto by curiosity, we drew nearer and nearer until we could see into the room which opened directly from the street, and wherein a young girl and a grey-haired man were seated, mandolines on knees, playing a duet. They performed without music but in perfect harmony. The girl, who was dark-eyed and pretty, was attired gaily in honour of the festivity. She wore a red skirt, a pale-green bodice, and an elaborately embroidered white apron. Blue ribbons adorned her well-oiled hair, silver bracelets and rings decorated her slender wrists and skilful fingers. The man was evidently her father. In the background we got an impression of guests and of a presiding matronly presence. With a final flourish the melody ceased. "Bravo!" we cried, and clapped our hands. It was no longer possible to ignore the presence of the impertinent foreigners. Indeed, it almost seemed as though the sociable Majorcans welcomed the opportunity of recognizing our uninvited appearance. For, as we turned to go, the mistress of the house hurried out, a hastily vacated chair in either hand, to urge us to enter, and would take no refusal. Within, the guests had rearranged themselves. Retiring further into the room, they had left space for us. It would have been discourteous to reject the hospitality so unaffectedly offered. Our little party was soon grouped inside the doorway, and the father, whose _fiesta_ it was, laying aside his mandoline, seated himself at an old piano, and the concert began afresh, the daughter playing the mandoline to her father's accompaniment on the venerable instrument. The company, which included two priests, smoked as it listened appreciatively. On the centre table was a liqueur-stand, two decanters of red wine, and a large round dish holding a giant _enciamada_. When the music ended and we rose to go, the hostess advanced carrying the liqueur-stand, and, doing the honours with an ease of manner and dignity of bearing that might have adorned any social rank, she insisted on pouring out a little glass of _aniset_ for each of us. Having drunk to the health of the hero of the _fiesta_, we made our farewells and departed, delighted with this chance glimpse of placid and happy home-life, and wondering what manner of reception a party of curious intrusive foreigners who disturbed the peace of a family gathering would have met in our own conservative country. That afternoon at Fornalutx was fated to be one of those that stand clearly out in the memory, not because of any special adventure or of any great occurrence, but simply because it held a succession of captivating little incidents, of happy chances. Passing down a narrow street of steps we came upon an old house whose wide outer court tempted us to enter. Exploring, we found ourselves in an olive oil factory. In the inner chamber a patient mule, his eyes blindfolded by having miniature straw baskets tied over them, was walking sedately round, supplying the force that crushed the olives, and from the press the oil was gushing in streams that went to fill the vats underneath the floor. On the outside wall of the post office a caged bird was singing cheerily. Next door was the prison, but that cage was empty. The barred window of its cell opened breast-high on the street, but spiders had, undisturbed, woven webs across its bars, and the key stood in the door. Evidently malefactors are scarce in the quaint hill-town. Leaving the crooked streets, we strolled up the side of the _torrente_, which flowed amidst orange orchards and by the sides of picturesque houses. Pomegranate-trees, their dainty foliage flecked with autumnal gold, had rooted in the high banks by the water, and the unplucked rose-red fruit had already supplied many a luxurious meal for the birds. Were I a bird I would elect to build my nest at Fornalutx, for there I would be sure to find an abundance of good food. Figs bursting with ripeness hung on the trees, and all around were oranges, and vines, and yet more oranges. Far up the precipitous hill-path, at a point so high that it afforded a glorious view of Sóller, we came upon a farm-house known to our friends. The occupants, greeting us kindly, took us into the most curious kitchen imaginable. Goatskins covered the ceiling, and in the centre was a place where seats encircled a charcoal brazier--a Majorcan "cosy corner," where the household could sit and snugly toast their toes, when storms blew snell about the mountains and rain obscured the valley. The garden space in front of the farm-house had been turned into a great bower by a huge vine that, trained along a trellis, cast over it a pleasant shade. [Illustration: At Fornalutx] It was late in the season--the last day of November--yet a few glorious clusters of grapes, the berries all golden and pink and wearing a bloom unmarred by touch of hand, hung heavy from its branches. Here another instance of native generosity awaited us, for the housewife, resolutely refusing recompense, sent us away laden with bunches. As we descended to where the carriage waited we must have presented something of the appearance of the returning spies that Moses had sent out to view the land of Canaan. The sun had set when we reached Fornalutx. Looking up from the crooked street towards the hills we saw the peak of the Puig Mayor stand out against the darkening eastern sky, sublime, magnificent, bathed in a flood of roseate light. It was a fitting climax to a day of quiet delights. We had entered Sóller wet and weary on Saturday night, knowing no one within many miles. When, on Wednesday afternoon, the diligence bound for Palma called at the Marina to pick us up, people of four different nationalities assembled round the coach door to bid us "God-speed." We would fain have lingered amid the oranges and palms of Sóller, but time was flying and we had much to see elsewhere. The diligence was full--so full that there would hardly have been space for an added thimble. It was our first experience of a Majorcan diligence, and we were interested to see how pleasantly the already closely packed passengers squeezed together to make room for new-comers, and to note how quietly they all sat, without fidgeting, with scarcely a change of position, during a drive that lasted over four hours. The window in front and those at the sides were shut, and remained so throughout the journey. Fortunately our seats were by the door, and through its big window, which we kept open, we had a splendid view. The highroad from Sóller to Palma is, I verily believe, one of the most curious ever made. Immediately after leaving the town it has to ascend 1,500 feet, which exploit it accomplishes by zigzagging at acute angles to the summit. That done, it zigzags down the other side. The progress uphill was necessarily slow, so slow indeed, that the driver, who had traversed that road daily for thirty years, left his sure-footed mules to guide themselves, and trotted along behind the coach smoking the eternal cigarette. And, while we revelled in the ever-varying views afforded by the constant change of direction, our fellow travellers gently dozed, with the exception of a round-eyed little girl, who, oppressed by the glory of her first hat and the excitement of her first journey, kept wide-awake. Up we went, every moment revealing some fresh effect of light and shadow in the enchanting mountains, past where the embryonic workings of the new light railway scarred the hillside. Up we went and up, catching little glimpses of the town nestling far beneath in its cradle of mountains, and seeing the last flash of sunset illumine their crests. As we mounted slowly the somnolence of our fellow passengers became more profound, and a portly father who was seated beside the little girl, to her evident alarm, lurched farther and farther in her direction, threatening altogether to efface her. The Man was on the point of going to the rescue, but the coach having reached the old carven cross that marks the summit, a sudden and vivifying change came over our manner of progress. The driver remounted the box beside the two motionless old women, whose black-shrouded figures we had seen silhouetted against the light, and off we set, at a pace that atoned for our crawl uphill. The more rapid motion wrought a transformation on our companions. All the slumberers awoke. The portly gentleman, simultaneously opening eyes and mouth, gazed down in astonishment at the child, as though during his doze she had materialized out of nothing. Lively expressions lit up the blank faces. The little old man in the corner began softly chanting one of the quaint native songs, that to me always sound like improvisations. It was already dusk when we stopped to change our three hardy mules at a wayside _fonda_: and the lights of Palma were sparkling through the December darkness when we drew up at the city gate for the _consumero's_ inspection. During our days of absence the gay little city seemed to have decided that winter had come. The soldiers had donned their heavy coats, and men were going about muffled in great cloaks: but leaves were still thick on the plane-trees in the Borne, and to us the air seemed still soft and pleasant. A few minutes later we were entering the Casa Tranquila with that feeling of absolute contentment that return to one's own home alone can afford. [Illustration: Son Mas, Andraitx] X ANDRAITX A happy fortune more than good guiding led us to Andraitx. The Boy, painting at the port of Palma had seen the diligence, stuffed within with country folks and top-heavy without with their bundles, start with a gay jingle of bells for that little-known town, and was seized with a desire to visit it. Somewhat precipitately we engaged our seats in the following day's coach, and then proceeded to make inquiries about the place. Nobody, it seemed, had a good word to say of it, perhaps because no one went there. Baedeker scorned even to mention its name. There was only an inferior _fonda_, one informant said. There was no _fonda_ at all, amended another. The diligence left Palma at two o'clock, and the fee for the 30 kilometros--over 20 miles--was two pesetas. Taking only a light suit-case, we locked the doors of the Casa Tranquila that glorious December afternoon, and walking down, reached in good time the little back-street café whence the coach started. Several passengers were already in waiting--a pleasant-faced old man and his comely wife in native dress, sundry peasant women muffled in shawls, one or two men whom the mistress of the café was serving with lunch. A little pile of luggage--bundles tied in brilliant kerchiefs, and market baskets--littered the floor. As we waited, more passengers arrived and more. We were glad our places had been secured. At five minutes before two the mail-bag appeared; and at ten minutes past, the diligence rattled down the narrow cobbled street and pulled up at the door of the café. It was a cumbrous and yet cramped vehicle lined with clean striped cotton. The slender mail-bag having been deposited in a hollow seat, the Man and I hopped briskly in and secured the places on either side of the door, which had a wide window, arguing away our consciences' accusation of selfishness by the excuse that we were probably the only passengers to whom the scenery would be new. Then the nice old country couple came in, followed by a huge matron with a little son; and a pretty young girl took the seat next to me. An old dame, who, in spite of the heat, was muffled into a living mummy, mounted beside the Boy on the box. The country women were packed into a hooded cart that was waiting to receive the overflow, the driver got up in front, and we were ready to start. It was already half an hour after starting-time, but we delayed until a nice little boy, attended by two juvenile shop-lads clad in overalls of check cotton, appeared to join us. As fitting preparation for his four-hour journey in the stuffy interior of the coach, careful relatives had enveloped the urchin in a heavy top-coat and wound a thick muffler round his neck. He was hauled into the coach, his luggage, which consisted of two large round bundles neatly tied in gaily striped handkerchiefs, went to swell the mound on the top, and off we set at last, only to halt at the bottom of the street to admit a woman of such appalling dimensions that she seemed to prove what the Boy declares is the Majorcan rule with regard to diligences--that they first fill them quite full, and then add a couple of the fattest people procurable. Clambering ponderously in she subsided with a flop between the other massive matron and the pretty girl. "Caramba!" exclaimed the pretty girl, and the journey began in earnest. Palma was brilliant in sunshine. Looking back as we crawled up the heights towards the Terreno, it glowed like a jewel in the strong sunlight. The sea was a vivid azure. Beyond the opposite shores of the bay the distant isle of Cabrera showed distinctly. As the road wound onwards in and out, we got glimpses of fairy-like inlets of the sea, of beautiful caves and tiny bays all sparkling in the sunshine. As we passed the hotel at Cas Catalá a German waiter appeared to get the newspaper from our driver, and we felt glad that our journey ended in a place where German waiters were unknown. Turning from the sea, the road passed among rocky slopes crowned with pines and olives. Amid the stones we caught sight of rosy heath and of great clumps of lavender rich in purple blossom. It was on this beautiful sloping country-side that the first great battle was fought between the troops of King Jaime and the hosts of the Moorish Amir. The fighting was severe; and, though the victory was his, the chroniclers of the period tell how the brave young King of Aragon wept when he learned of the loss of two nobles, brothers, who had been boon companions of his own. A tapestry in one of the chambers of the Casa Consistorial at Palma gives a pictorial rendering of the scene. And under a large pine by the wayside, nearly half-way between the capital and Andraitx, is a monument--a simple iron cross set on a stone pedestal--commemorating the valour of the Spaniards who lost their lives to help to free the Christians. When the way was uphill, and the coach lumbered slowly along, slumber crept over the passengers. When we again reached the level and the pace quickened, everybody awoke, and conversation became general; at least, as far as the native element was concerned. The Man and I yearned for a knowledge of Majorcan when the two plump ladies, whose tongues were their only active members, took turn about in relating what were evidently incidents of dramatic interest. Once or twice, when the road ascended some specially steep slope in zigzags, the coach stopped, and most of us got out and, crossing the hill by a short cut--we followed those who knew the way--rejoined it on the farther side. Needless to mention, the only two dames whose absence would have made any appreciable lessening in the weight remained fixtures. The two points of difference between Majorcan and British travellers that we had noticed on the drive from Sóller again impressed us. One was their quiet demeanour. They were not restless, they never fidgeted. They sat quite still, their hands placidly folded--except when a little gesticulation was necessary to adorn a tale. The second, which was even more unlike the British of the same class, was that though the journey was one of about four hours' duration they had made no provision for it. Even the small boy, or the little child, had not so much as a sweet or a biscuit to break the monotony. When, half-way, we stopped to change horses, the old man, who had been pleasantly interested in the feminine gossip, stepped lightly out, and returning with a large tin mug of water, handed it round. It was the pretty girl who, when it came to her turn to drink, gracefully declined the privilege in favour of me, saying, with a wave of her hand, "Ah, no! The señora first." The way was wild and romantic. Only at long intervals was there a house even by the road-side. Just at dusk we passed several open carts crowded with young olive-gatherers returning from work--a gay band, shouting and singing. After that the night appeared to fall suddenly upon the earth, and the new moon, a bright star poised above her, shone in the sky. A second diligence, starting from some other point, had joined us; and as we moved slowly along in company, the two lumbering heavily-laden coaches and the covered van, the little procession had something of the aspect of a party of emigrants travelling in quest of a new home. When the mysterious beauty of the half-lights had vanished, and the night gathered, we began to wonder why we had left the Casa Tranquila, where we had been so comfortable. We had no special reason for coming to Andraitx; there was no attraction to draw us thither. And even now we did not know if there was any place where we might sleep. Just before we entered the town the coach stopped a moment and the Boy came round to the door. "I've been consulting the driver," he said. "He recommends a place where he says we'll get the best cooking in Andraitx." "Is it an inn?" we asked. "No, I don't think it's exactly an _inn_, but the man has been a cook. His house is at this end of the town. The driver says he'll stop there if we like. Will that do?" It was quite dark now. We were cramped and tired, and the refuge that wasn't exactly an inn was at least near. We agreed that it would do. Three minutes later the diligence drew up in front of an open door, through which the light from a good oil lamp streamed into the blackness of the street. "This seems to be the place," said the Boy. "But it's a shop!" There was no opportunity for hesitation. Our luggage was already on the pavement. Turning to a tall, bearded man in a white apron who appeared in the doorway, we asked if he had accommodation. Yes, he had room, he replied; would we enter?--and, following him, we found ourselves in a wide, airy shop. On one side were shelves filled with delicacies. On the other were three great wine barrels. And on the floor stood the usual assortment of hampers and open baskets containing fruits and vegetables. At the back of the shop, sandwiched between it and the kitchen, was a neat little dining-room. And when we had been ushered in there the Boy, as our spokesman, proceeded, after the custom of the country, to ask terms--"What would be the charge for board and lodging, wine included, a day?" Our host hesitated. He was an exceptionally nice-looking man and spoke beautiful Spanish. "The terms? That would depend upon what one had. He could make any terms that suited, from one peseta and a half a day. But for four pesetas--_then_ he could do us really well." A bargain was quickly struck. We were to pay three pesetas and a half a day, wine and the little breakfast included; and our first meal was to be served as soon as it could be prepared. After a short stroll through the dark streets, and not a little conjecture concerning immediate happenings, we returned to our lodging. The glass doors of the little dining-room opened on to the shop, its window looked to the kitchen, where our host was already busy over the stove. The sound of quick footsteps overhead suggested that rooms were being prepared for our reception. Her parents being engaged, the shop had been left in charge of the daughter of the house, a pretty, dark-eyed child of seven years old. She made a charming little picture, as she sat amongst the scarlet _pimientos_ and the yellow lemons waiting for custom. And when a younger child, carrying a quart bottle, entered to buy a pennyworth of wine, the business-like way in which she placed the funnel in the bottle, and filling the measure from the barrel poured it in without spilling a drop, delighted us. As also did the accustomed way in which she dropped the penny into the table-drawer that served as till. Before we had time to grow impatient our hostess, looking like an adult copy of her child, appearing, spread the table neatly with clean linen and shining crystal, then set before us a dish of rolls, one of olives, and small plates of spiced sausage and ham. Then the host entered carrying a bottle of a good brand of imported claret that he had taken from his shelves, and a syphon of seltzer. We were nibbling at the appetizers, trying to restrain ourselves from making a meal of them, when an excellent soup was served. "If I could choose, I know what I'd have next--a big fat omelet," the Boy said, as he finished his plate of soup. And on the thought, as though in answer to his wish, the landlord entered bearing a fine opulent omelet stuffed with green peas. When we had eaten that, he was waiting to replace it with a dish of delicately browned veal cutlets, savoury potatoes fried in butter, and more green peas. A sweet course is so rarely served in Majorca that it was a pleasant surprise to find the cutlets followed by a mould of the native preserve, _membrillo_ (quince) jelly, and pastry turn-overs. The dessert consisted of a pyramid of mandarin oranges cut with stems and leaves. It was a surprisingly complete meal to be served on an hour's notice in the back shop of a little unknown out-of-the-world town. The rooms allotted to us comprised the whole floor above. The _salon_, which was to the front, had two handsome wardrobes--wardrobes would seem to be as often placed in sitting-rooms as in bedrooms in Majorca--a chest of drawers, several comfortable chairs. The beds, with their lace-trimmed and monogrammed linen, were perfection. As we fell asleep we blessed the happy chance that had led us to so much more comfortable quarters than we had anticipated finding. Breakfast, of French chocolate and hot buttered rolls, served to confirm the good impression of the previous night. The ambition of my infancy--to keep a little shop--threatened to return as, from the stronghold of our neat little dining-room, we watched the life of the shop, a portion of whose trade appeared to consist of barter. First a woman entered with a basket of glowing sun-kissed pomegranates which she exchanged for macaroni and other groceries. She was quickly followed by a man who had a hamper of lemons and a bag of the scarlet waxen pods of the sweet pepper to dispose of. While the chocolate was still in process of consumption our host, courteously solicitous respecting our comfort of the night, waited on us, his tall, slender form begirt with an apron of spotless purity, on which was also embroidered the family monogram. From our concerns the conversation naturally passed to his, and with the simple friendliness of the Majorcan he told us his life-story. Told how, like most of the Andraitx lads, he had early left home to seek his fortune, but while most of his companions had become sailors, he had chosen to make cooking his profession. A course of years passed as a _chef_ in Havanna and other places had gained him the nest-egg he desired. Returning to his native town while still a comparatively young man, he had taken this shop, married to his liking, and settled down in comfort. There was neither sun nor wind. The air was calm and cool. It was a splendid day for exploring a new locality. But Andraitx was still a sealed letter to us. We did not even know what to look for. When we arrived on the previous night the town had been shrouded in darkness. So it was a charming surprise after we had mounted the commonplace street to find that in situation Andraitx resembled a miniature Sóller. Hills, some crowned by windmills, enclosed it on every side. Passing through the market square we climbed the eminence on which perched the quaint old church, and looking back, saw the town lying in the hollow beneath us; and to the north-west, its mouth guarded by sentinel hills, the wide inlet of the sea that marked the port. Within the church, gloom and silence held possession. A little distance off was the walled cemetery. Leaving an environment that threatened to depress us, we scrambled down the farther side of the rocky incline, and, finding a path, followed it. The path, chosen at random, passed in front of Son Mas, a quaint old building whose tower bore signs of great antiquity. The place was evidently now in use as a farm-house, and the tenant, seeing us pause to look in through the wide gateway, came out and cordially invited us to enter. He was a fine specimen of the handsome, robust sons of that gracious soil. His sun-tanned skin and workaday garb seemed at variance with his courteous dignity of manner, which admirably became the resident of so ancient a mansion. He appeared to feel a special pride in his surroundings and did not scamp the showing. Through the wide courtyard, and up the central staircase that led to the balconies, and through the deserted rooms he escorted us. The tall square tower that now formed part of the house, he told us, had in older times been used as a place of refuge by the Christians during the attacks of the piratical Moors who infested the coast--a stronghold to which they fled when news reached them that the heathen marauders had entered the port and were advancing towards the town. Would we like to see it? Would we not! Following our leader, we passed along more corridors and over floors aslant with age, till he stopped before the entrance to what was probably the smallest winding stair ever devised for the passage of human beings. Up that very stair, our guide assured us, had the Christians fled to seek safety in the tower. And as we timorously mounted the narrow steps we agreed that the Andraitx early Christians must have been the leanest of mankind. For one plump Christian in a hurry would assuredly have brought destruction on all the rest by sticking in the first bend of that pitch-dark winding staircase. We emerged, dusty and breathless, into a square room whose window framed a magnificent view over the town and the wide fruitful valley to the shining waters of the port beyond. In one of the walls was a groined cavity that had been a shrine. And close beside it was the now walled-up doorway that, when the tower stood apart, had been connected by a drawbridge with the main building. On the dusty floor in a corner lay some curious earthenware retorts of a primitive date. The vessels had been found in an old cabinet in company with a quantity of unknown drugs--presumably the stock of some long-dead alchemist. Scientific men, hearing of the discovery, had hastened to carry off the chemicals, the farmer told us, leaving the earthenware behind. All the acquisitive Briton in us yearned to possess one of the quaint retorts. It was only the thought of their bulky brittleness that conquered the covetous feeling. From the room more pigmy steps wound upwards to a roofed _mirador_, but, as the inner walls of the staircase were broken away in great gaps, only the Boy was daring enough to ascend. Returning, he reported a low roof that sloped down to battlemented walls pierced with loop-holes through which arrows and boiling water were wont to shower down on the besiegers. On one occasion the captain of the Moors was killed with scalding water thrown from the tower. To the present day the incident affords matter for intense satisfaction at Andraitx. [Illustration: In the Port of Andraitx] XI UP AMONG THE WINDMILLS When at noon we returned to the shop our host had a delightful little luncheon awaiting us. And it was in high good-humour with him, with ourselves, and with all the world, that we set off to walk the three miles of level road that lie between the town of Andraitx and its port. Every foot of the way was full of interest. At first it led past rustic dwellings set in their orange and lemon gardens. In one orchard a life-size, and life-like, male scarecrow was perched high up in the branches of a pomegranate-tree. Then the road ran for a long way close by the dry bed of a _torrente_, that in the rainy season would be a river, and through groves of almond and olive-trees before it reached the wide stretch of fruitful plain devoted to the culture of vegetables. Our path was cheerful with wayfarers. As we strolled along, a succession of old vehicles and picturesque folk passed us. Old men in suits of faded blue cotton, bright-hued handkerchiefs bound about their heads under their wide hats, trotted by beside their panniered donkeys. And dotted over the rich, red earth people were busy. In one field a man was ploughing, while close on his heels a handsome dark-eyed woman in a scarlet petticoat followed, dropping yellow peas into the newly turned furrows. Everybody within hailing distance gave us kindly greeting. Even an infant, whose age might have been reckoned in months, from where he was snugly seated in a basket, clearly echoed his parents' "Bon di tenga," much to our amusement and to the frankly evident delight of his father and mother. In the rich, moist soil of that sheltered valley we thought we had discovered the mould in which the gross eighteen-inch radishes are grown. Perhaps it is the nature of that alluvial plain that accounts also for so plentiful a harvest of mosquitoes. Certain it was that they positively swarmed, and that being quick to detect a new and, I trust, delectable flavour in foreigners, they paid us particularly insistent attention, escorting us even to the port, and out on the breakwater that cuts across the inlet, and makes snug haven for the fishing craft and for the few cargo _pailebots_ that anchor in the port. It was fortunate that, unlike those of the Palma mosquitoes, their stings proved harmless. We had brought tea-things with us, and leaving the Man sketching, seated on a mast that lay under the sea-wall, the Boy and I took the empty kettle, and set off in search of water, and of the men's constant need--tobacco. The sign over the door of the only shop in the place showed that it was authorized to sell the tobacco that is a Government monopoly of Spain. Going in, we found ourselves in a long, low-ceilinged apartment that might have served for a type of a smugglers' den. Several people of both sexes were within. From without we had heard the gay clamour of voices, but with our unexpected entrance all seemed stricken dumb. The woman who had been sweeping out the brood of adventurous chickens stopped short, broom in hand, as though turned to stone. The girl mixing something in a bowl paused to stare. The men ceased their loud discussion and gathered in a silent band to learn our business. We were not altogether unaccustomed to pointed attention. That very day in Andraitx our appearance had aroused something of the interest accorded in an English country town to a circus procession. But the silent scrutiny was distinctly embarrassing. The Boy is rarely abashed, yet his voice faltered a little as, in Spanish, he asked for cigarettes, naming a good brand. On learning that they were not in stock he asked for others, and yet others, lessening the monetary value of his demands until he reached those cigarettes that retail at seven for a halfpenny. But even these were not to be had. "Then what was for sale? Any brand would do." Hard pressed, the authorized vendor of Government tobacco confessed that he had none in stock. "But this is the Government tobacco shop, and you are all smoking--what on earth do you smoke, then?" demanded the Boy. There was a momentary hesitation; then--"We all smoke contraband tobacco, señor," he made reluctant admission. "That's good enough for me," said the Boy, and with a relieved expression the shopkeeper disappeared to return with a three-ounce packet of smuggled tobacco, for which he charged sevenpence-halfpenny. And vile though it undoubtedly was, the buyer declared that it was vastly superior to that usually sold with the sanction of the Spanish powers. When, bearing the full kettle and the contraband tobacco, we sauntered back to the breakwater, it was to find the Man the centre of an interested crowd of boys. And all the time we waited an engrossed audience surrounded us. Even the appearance of a longboat, rowed by what to our eyes seemed a crew of pirates, so picturesque was their garb, failed to divert a tithe of the attention. Apart from its beauty, the port of Andraitx impressed us as being the least prosperous place we had seen in Majorca. The houses were poor and huddled together. And the population seemed large in proportion to the probable increment. As one of the natives put it, "the fishermen are many and the fish few." The village lads, fine stalwart fellows all of them, were woefully patched as to attire. Majorcan women are marvellously dexterous with the needle. Their patches are so neatly inserted as to be works of art; but until that afternoon at the port of Andraitx we had never encountered patches that threatened to usurp the entire groundwork of a garment. We had heard of the existence of an official known as the "Captain of the Port," yet, one man being as dexterously mended as another, failed to distinguish him among the loiterers about the pier. At length a gentleman with side whiskers, taking up his stand behind the Man, bowed ceremoniously to me, silently raising his time-worn hat. "Buenos dias," I said; in my desire to be affable forgetting that it was already afternoon. There was a momentary pause. Then, "Buenas _tardes_, señora. Buenas _tardes_," he corrected, in a tone of gentle reproof. And I decided that in spite of his plenitude of patches, his total lack of waistcoat, and his dilapidated buff slippers, the gentleman who revealed so refined a desire for exactitude of speech must be the Captain of the Port. It was on the morning of our second day at Andraitx that we decided to go to Arracó, a little town about half an hour's walk farther north. When we spoke of going our host suggested our branching off from the road and climbing the hill of the windmills to see the view. Antonia, his little daughter, would accompany us to show the way. And in a trice Antonia was pronounced ready for the excursion. Her head was bare, her feet were encased in smart yellow boots, and in the pocket of her red frock there were stowed away, as provision for the journey, a roll and a diminutive black-pudding. It was a lovely day--sweet and peaceful. Even after two months' experience we never seemed to become accustomed to the consistent urbanity of the Majorcan weather, and each successive perfect day brought a fresh surprise. The road was a beautiful one. Once beyond the outskirts of the town it passed between slopes luxuriant in almonds and olives. Here and there the falling golden leaves of a pomegranate made an aureate glow on the red-brown earth. Perched high in an olive-tree by the wayside a man was pruning its branches. For the first ten minutes Antonia was demurely silent. Then, as her shyness wore off, her horns appeared. She was a charming imp of seven, the adored of her parents, who knew her variously as Anton, Antonia, and Antonetta. Anton, in a tone of reproof when she was caught pulling the hair of a friend, Antonia when she was ordinarily good, and Antonetta on the many occasions that they found her particularly adorable. She went, apparently only when she had got nothing more interesting to do, to a convent school, where she was, with exceeding reluctance, beginning to learn Spanish--a tongue against which she naturally cherished a grievance. "What is the use of learning Spanish?" she demanded of the Boy, who was urging her to speak it. "Majorcan--that is a useful language. Spanish? No. Spanish is no use." By the wayside the curious wild arums known as _frares_ (monks) were growing. Picking a handful, Antonia began with great enjoyment repeating a native rhyme, the point of which lay in knocking off the heads of one of the flowers at the conclusion of each repetition:-- "_Frare lleig, frare lleig, Si no dius se Misa, le tomeré es bech!_" --of which this is an easy translation:-- "_Lazy friar, lazy friar, If your Mass is not said I will chop off your head._" Antonia had a knowledge of vegetables too. Or is it some inherent faculty that teaches children the edible fruits? When we chanced to pass a big algarroba-tree she darted under it, and, after a little rummaging amid the dry leaves, returned triumphantly bearing some long dark-brown pods, in which the Man was amused to recognise a fruit known to his experimentive boyhood as "locusts." The pods, which are sweet and succulent, are used in Majorca as food for cattle. Just where the road came almost within sight of Arracó the path to the hills crowned by the windmills branched off. Deciding to get the climbing over first, we left the highway, and mounted amongst most beautiful and varied vegetation. All about us tall pink and crimson heaths were blooming. Small clumps of palms that we had not before seen out of a conservatory grew among the rocks, and great cactus rioted in picturesque masses. The base of the windmills reached, we enjoyed a view that extended in every direction. Beneath to one side was Arracó, its houses, save where near the church they were huddled closer together, scattered widely over the surface of a cup-like valley, that was so closely encircled by hills that we could discover no way leading out. Above the hills to the north the heights of the island of Dragonera rose from the sea. From another point we looked down on Andraitx, and marked the wide plain that ended in the placid waters of the port. We had not meant to stay long on the heights, but the varied prospects were so beautiful and the air so placid that we felt tempted to linger. Then the Man took out his sketching block, and the matter was settled. Arracó would remain unvisited. Like the lotus-eaters, we were content and would roam no farther. We were now so accustomed to Majorcan skilled and thrifty husbandry that it was no surprise to find that even the summit of the height was planted with fruit trees. On a rocky ledge, close under the spreading sails of the windmill, nestled a tiny house, and every handful of soil supported its fig-, almond-, pomegranate- or apple-tree. The air was soft and gentle. Even at that altitude there was scarcely a breath of wind. Butterflies were hovering about. All the world seemed at peace. From Arracó arose the faint chime of a bell, from beyond the rock-bound coast came the murmur of the sea. [Illustration: Above Andraitx] I think it was the discovery that just outside the little hut a man was eating his dinner that aroused us to the fact that we also were hungry. Breakfast had been light, and early dinner, a good way off, was not due till two o'clock. Antonia's sharp little white teeth had long ago devoured Antonia's roll and black-pudding. We had started out with the intention of foraging at Arracó; but Arracó, a scattered handful of pigmy dwellings, lay far down in the hollow. Then an idea occurred to us. The husbandman, who had finished his meal, and was now lighting a cigarette, would be sure to have food. We would ask him to sell us some bread. The peasant, who proved to be a kindly soul, had a beard and the most dilapidated hat ever worn by mortal man. But he had no bread. The hut under the windmill was only a shelter. His home was in the valley, and it was evidently his provisions for the day that he had just consumed. He did what he thought was next best, and drawing a great jar of clean water from his well, brought it to us. The Boy and Antonia, who had gone off to try their luck at the other windmill, returned bringing two shapeless lumps of the stalest rye bread ever eaten, and the kindly dilapidated man who, in genuine concern for our welfare, had been hovering near, disappeared into his shanty, and reappearing with a plate of olives, presented them to us. So off olives, water from an antique jar, and mouldy rye bread that vied with it in antiquity, we took the edge off our appetites. I must not forget the prickly pears--or cactus figs--that we had picked on the way up. A certain fearful joy attends the gathering of this fruit, which requires the exercise of some ingenuity in dodging its insidious prickles. But there the pleasure ends; for the fruit is both seedy and insipid. To appreciate the prickly pear one would require to meet it in an arid desert. The sun was sinking when we set out for a final stroll at Andraitx. We were to leave early next morning, and we knew that there were countless walks we must leave unexplored. A glory of grey and gold and orange was flushing the sky when we turned into the road that wound up the valley. The mountains that rose on either side were glowing roseate from the sunset; but under any conditions the way would have been very beautiful. It led by a _torrente_ in whose bed there was actually a trickle of water, and just beyond a picturesque bridge was a village--of no social importance probably, but assuredly of great artistic charm. The village straggling up the side of the valley was such a place as nobody ever tells one of--one of those unexpectedly picturesque spots that, with a thrill of delight, one discovers for oneself, and feels a proprietorial interest in ever after, almost as though one had invented it. We learned later that the name of the hamlet was Secoma, and that it was divided into two portions, which were known respectively as Secoma Hot and Secoma Cold. The narrow, winding street was busy. The olive-gatherers were returning from work, and those who had remained at home came out to gape at us. The barber who was shaving a customer, catching sight of our passing reflection in the mirror, abandoned his task and ran to the door to stare, with his customer, lathered and pinafored, close on his heels. Already were we beginning to recognize, and to be recognized, in the district. An amazingly stately old lady, who appeared to spend her days perched sideways on her panniered donkey, bowed with great dignity from her perch. A handsome fisher-lad, who had formed one of the Man's audience when he was sketching at the port, beamed when we encountered him delivering fish in back-of-the-world Secoma. We had entered Andraitx expecting little, and had found so much that was interesting and pleasant that we were reluctant to leave it. But an engagement for Sunday afternoon at Palma had to be kept. So perforce we bespoke seats in the diligence leaving at the extraordinary hour of four in the morning. An hour earlier three great knocks sounded on the closed door of the shop. It was the _vigilante_, who had been warned to arouse us. When we went downstairs it was to find our attentive landlord with a comforting meal of chocolate and hot buttered rolls ready to serve. And concerning this most excellent host it is only just to say that during our stay we found his efforts on our behalf increase rather than diminish. In case any of my readers may ever chance to visit this out-of-the-way town, I mention that his name is Gabriel Calafill, and his address is Calle Cerda, which, being interpreted, means Pig Street. All the cocks in Andraitx seemed to be awakened when a jingle of harness-bells drew us to the door of the lamp-lit shop. It was the darkest hour. A single dim lamp was all we saw of the diligence. As it drew up an invisible hand opened the coach door, and mounting the invisible steps I peered into the solid darkness of the interior. If there were any passengers inside, they were dumb and motionless. Hazarding a greeting, I interjected "Buenos dias" into the darkness. An instant reply from half a dozen throats showed that the coach was already well filled. A minute later we had insinuated ourselves into the places kept for us by the door, and the coach rolled off into the gloom. It was the hush before the dawn. The moon had long set. A few pale stars sprinkled the sky. Beyond the town the gloom was less impenetrable, and the road became a dim, grey ribbon slowly unwinding behind us. The trees and mountains were black, undistinguishable masses. The air was soft and very still. Within the coach all was silent. No one moved. Then, as the miles gradually slipped away, the sky began to lighten, and even the deep gloom of the interior became less tangible. In the farther corner dull white lines proclaimed a collar and shirt-cuffs while the sun-tanned flesh they encircled was yet unseen. As the daylight crept in, our fellow-travellers gradually became visible. Two men, vague entities, had left the coach when half-way we changed horses. There now remained a couple of quiet, respectable market women, a lovely little girl, and a strapping young man. At the foot of a steep ascent the conveyance stopped, and following the custom of able-bodied passengers the men got out to take the short cut, and rejoined the lightened diligence on the farther side. Glancing from the back window, as they passed up the heath slope, I noticed that the owner of the brown hands and the white cuffs had already entered into conversation with my men-folk. And when, a quarter of an hour later, they re-entered the coach, all three were on terms of unexpected intimacy. "This señor," the Boy explained, with an introductory wave of the hand, "is the father of that clever baby. You remember, mother. The one we saw yesterday on the way to the port. He sat in a basket and said 'Bon di tenga.'" The father, a strapping, clean-limbed Majorcan, fairly beamed with parental pride as he acknowledged the imputation. The boy, he told us, was now nearly three years old, but he had spoken as well ever since he was two. His own excellent Spanish he accounted for by saying that, like so many Andraitx young men, he had been a sailor, and had voyaged for several years to and from Cuba. Then, having saved some money, he had returned to his native town, had married, and was now farming his own bit of land. This morning he was journeying to Palma to collect the rent of a house he owned there. The sun was up when the diligence stopped before the _consumos_ station at the entrance to Santa Catalina, and we alighted. It was only as we returned to more sophisticated surroundings that I realized that since leaving Palma on Thursday I had not seen a single hat upon a feminine head. No wonder we were stared at in Secoma! Half an hour later we were sitting at breakfast in the sunshine at the Casa Tranquila. We had arrived at Andraitx in the dusk, and had quitted it in the dusk, so it seemed as though all that had happened during our stay there had been but a pleasant dream. [Illustration: Christmas Turkeys] XII NAVIDAD We returned from Andraitx to find that Christmas had stolen a march upon us, taking us unawares. Our first intimation of it was a communication that reached us from the postal authorities. It announced that a parcel awaited us at the head post office, and stated that if we called between the hours of twelve and thirteen on the following day, and paid the sum of eight pesetas seventy-six centimos charged as duty, we would be entitled to carry it away. The slip of green paper containing this laconic intimation fluttering into our uneventful lives, interested us hugely. To what could the notice refer? We expected nothing, and yet the amount of the duty--eight pesetas seventy-six centimos--argued it a possession of notable value. We would not have lost a moment before hastening off to pay the impost and claim our property had not the notice expressly mentioned the one hour of the morrow on which it might be procured. What could it be? Thinking ourselves discreet people, we professed to build no castles on the subject, but we all enjoyed the feeling of mystery. It was with a pleasant sense of expectancy that next day, shortly after noon, we entered the post office in the Calle San Felio, and after some inquiry discovered the department for the distribution of parcels. Two people were in advance of us. A young workman was getting a small package, a servant-maid was receiving a couple of round, flat boxes so large that a side door in the counter had to be opened for their egress. Watching, we wondered secretly if ours would be as big, or if it would be small and precious. After a preliminary signing of a book and the paying of the money, the parcel was produced and solemnly handed over to us. Its dimensions exceeded even our most sanguine expectations, and it was weighty in proportion. The address on the label showed that it had come from the best confectioner in London. This, taken in conjunction with its opulent proportions, seemed to presage a prolonged period of riotous living. "It must be cake," the Man said. "It must be a tremendous lot of cake," opined the Boy, who was carrying the bulky parcel. "Let's get home and open it." Owing, I think, to the cost of sugar, confections of every kind in Majorca are expensive and limited in variety. And although in England a plethora of good things had made us inclined to be blasé, two months of residence in this land where sweets are matters for consumption on high-days and holy-days had revealed in each of us the possession of an unexpected sweet tooth. And the sight of the ample proportions of that confectioner's parcel set them aching furiously. "If it's sweets, we must not begin eating them until luncheon is over," I said, more by way of counsel to myself than to the others. "We'll see," said the Boy, who was determined not to commit himself. When we had entered the Casa Tranquila the carefully packed box was lifted on to the table and the exciting task of opening it began. The seals had already been broken, but there seemed several miles of carefully knotted string to unwind. Beneath the enveloping brown paper was an encasing of the corrugated cardboard in which breakables are packed. Within that was a thick layer of fine shavings. The dimensions of the package had been considerably lessened when, all the outer wrappings thrown aside, there was revealed a large square tin box. The side presented to us bore no sign of an opening. It really seemed as though the elusive gift was determined to baffle us. "The box has been carefully soldered," said the Man. "I can't understand how the Customs could fix the amount of the duty without knowing what was inside. How are we going to open it, I wonder?" But when he turned the box over a wide gash in the bottom revealed that the task had already been performed. Pressing aside the jagged edges of the tin, we saw within yet more shavings. When they had been carefully removed, fragments of china, and something tied in a rent white cloth met our gaze. "It's been a plum-pudding, and they've smashed it to atoms," the Man said bitterly. "Oh, what a _shame_! The mean wretches!" I lamented. The Boy said nothing, but felt for his pipe. Having succeeded in widening the gash considerably, the Man drew out the remaining enclosures. The pudding--a particularly fine one--was intact, but the bowl that had encased it was shattered. Splinters of the china were adhering to its dark richness. The Spanish Customs at the frontier, in their zeal to discover the nature of the contents and their fear of permitting a concealed bomb to escape their vigilance, had not only cut open the box and smashed the bowl, they had also ripped across the cloth that tied up the pudding. "Perhaps they were right to charge eight pesetas seventy-six centimos, but they needn't have made mincemeat of that nice china bowl, and rags of the pudding-cloth," I said indignantly. "Probably they thought that as mincemeat was also seasonable fare it would be a proper accompaniment to the pudding," the Man said. But the proof of the pudding is ever the eating of it. Its misadventures over, ours turned out to be a prince of plum-puddings. The flavour was perfection, and the size was such that we had to call in the aid of our friends to eat it. Formal entertainments were outside the scheme of life at the Casa Tranquila, but the Consul and his wife came to supper--menu, hot plum-pudding and flaming brandy. And some native friends came to tea--menu, plum-pudding toasted in slices, and coffee. Should future generations of Majorcans grow up in the quite erroneous belief that the British serve rich black plum-pudding hot at all meals, I'm afraid the blame must rest with us. Palma is always bright, but at Christmas-tide an increase of liveliness seemed to pervade the town. The shop windows displayed new wares, and the streets were full of country folk pricing, bargaining, and purchasing. The confectioners' windows were full of large round cardboard boxes, each containing a sugar travesty of a serpent, a weird reptile, reposing on a bed of sweets. The market square at night, when it is usually deserted, displayed a new and popular species of merchandise. Its outer sides were lined with rows of stalls laden with slabs of native sweetmeats all made in long blocks, and piles of tempting crystallized fruits. Other stalls held nothing but the curious little figures of native ware--men, women, animals, poultry, all very small--that the Majorcan children use when, with the aid of cork, they build little models of the Nativity in imitation of those seen at Christmastide in the churches. During the days preceding Christmas Day great preparations for the feast were made. In the market the price of choice fruits and vegetables rose a little. And the wide open space just without the gate of San Antonio--the patron saint of swine--became a busy fair devoted to the sale of pigs, turkeys, sheep and fowls. The part whose colour and movement rejoiced the artistic soul of the Man was that given over to the display of turkeys. The portion whose comic element delighted the Boy and me was that devoted to the wards of San Antonio, who, to judge by the shrillness and insistence of their cries, was proving himself but an irresponsible and callous guardian. The peasant-women, neat in the native costume, gaily coloured kerchiefs over their heads, their hair in pigtails, armed with long rods, stood beside their flocks of turkeys. At intervals they scattered handfuls of grain amongst them; but to do the birds justice, they showed little inclination to stray. On one side a long wall was formed of hooded carts filled with turkeys. And round each brood was a little group of townsfolk, making critical survey of the birds and, after a good deal of wordy chaffering, purchasing. The other side was occupied by a long row of fowl-sellers, who treated their wares with less respect; for splendid cocks, their burnished plumage gleaming with a thousand prismatic hues, lay helpless, their feet tied together, their bills in the dust. Sucking-pig being the favourite Christmas dinner in this land of sunshine, by far the larger space was allotted to the swine. And swine there were to satisfy all demands, from litters of tiny sucking-pigs surrounding their mothers to pigs of quite considerable bulk. As the pigs were sold by weight, it is safe to say that there wasn't a thirsty pig in the market that day. And while we saw few pigs being fed, we saw many being encouraged to drink. Some of the salesmen stood by their laden carts ready, on the approach of a likely customer, to thrust a hand into the mass of swart animalism and extract a protesting squeaker. Others sat lazily on chairs by their flocks, content to wait to be approached. While some of the older herdsmen wore slung over the shoulders the distinctive goatskin of their calling, most of the younger were attired in suits of corduroy, sun-faded into glorious harmonies of golds and browns and blues. We noticed that whilst certain of the men dealt in turkeys, none of the women sold pigs. And out of the city streamed the townsfolk, money in hand for the purchase of their Christmas dinner. Ladies in mantillas, attended by neat maids, bought turkeys; prosperous-looking tradesmen, accompanied by pinafored shop-lads provided with bits of rope, walked about pricing pigs; and lean operatives, with a hungry eye for the yearly tit-bit. It was after a pig had changed owners that the fun began. The market being held outside the city walls, the purchase had first to be taken to the _consumos_ shed to be weighed and have the duty paid on it. And the pigs, although comparatively placid while yet in company with their old comrades, when severed from them protested with full strength of lung and limb. Then woe betide the luckless being whose task it was to carry the agitator home. One man only did we see who had had the forethought to bring a sack in which to carry home his rebellious purchase. Everybody appeared to have evolved a different method of conveyance. Some men wore them as a collar round the neck, grasping the fore feet in one hand, the hind in the other. Some tried to lead them, with dire results. One flustered woman we saw had a child in her arms and was dragging at the end of a string a plump young porker that refused to walk. The majority, relinquishing any attempt at suasion, simply clutched the furiously objecting quadrupeds desperately in their arms and made the best of their way through the streets. Just as we were leaving the market we encountered a trio of elderly ladies, attended by a demure little maid in pigtail and _rebozillo_, whom we had noticed making a careful scrutiny before deciding. Their choice seemed at last to have been made, for the young servant carried in her arms, as tenderly as though it were a baby, a tiny sucking-pig. So far it had uttered no complaint, but just as the group turned into the street it awoke to the knowledge that something untoward was happening, and with the energy of one thrice its fighting weight, began squealing and squirming. In a moment consternation fell upon the sedately pacing quartette. When we last saw them a man had been hired to carry home the pigling, whose lamentations still rent the air. During the day or two that would elapse before the creatures were sacrificed for consumption they appeared to reside in the bosom of the family circles and to be treated as honoured guests. The fact that a home was in a flat three floors up did not deter its occupants from housing a four-footed edible guest. Turkeys strutted in doorways and upon high balconies. Proud children escorted pigs out for an airing. Two days before the feast we noticed on a piece of waste ground just inside the gate of Santa Catalina an enclosure roughly constructed of planks and sacking. From a post fluttered a banner of brown paper inscribed with the legend, _Se matan lechonas_ (Little pigs kill themselves). And thither, the right moment having arrived, people brought their pets. Within the enclosure, but in full view of the public, the piglings were killed, soused with the boiling water that was kept bubbling over a fire, scraped and made ready for the pot in the twinkling of an eye. On Christmas Eve we attended the midnight service in the Cathedral. It was a beautiful moonlight night, and the streets of Palma were unusually busy. Groups of people, the women and children all carrying folding stools, or in some cases rush-seated chairs, were walking sedately in the direction of the churches. In the silver light there was something mysterious about the succession of black-robed figures--the women's heads muffled in black mantillas or black silk kerchiefs--that moved steadfastly along the narrow mediæval streets. [Illustration: A Scene of Slaughter] When we reached the Cathedral many people had already gathered. When we would have taken our usual seats under the organ, one of the canons in a robe of lace and rose-coloured silk approached and whispered to me in French that that portion of the church was reserved for men, but that I was free to take any place I liked on the opposite side. Crossing the foot-high wooden barrier that had been erected down the centre of the nave, under his escort, I set up the sketching stool I had brought at the base of one of the great pillars, and watched the edifice gradually fill with a reverent throng of worshippers. And now the necessity for the folding stools became evident, for while the portion of the building allotted to men was well provided with seats, only a great square of matting covered that half of the floor-space that had been set apart for the women. The Cathedral was brilliantly lit with electricity; and although there was something inexpressibly affecting in the sight of the kneeling multitude, to us the Cathedral lost much of the sombre magnificence it had in the daytime, when, except for the candles burning on the altar, the only light was that which stole in through the stained-glass windows, and the greater part of the grand temple was rendered impressive by obscurity. Later, when we spoke of this to our friend the padre he agreed with us. But, as he said in his irreproachable English, "What can we do? The Cathedral is very large, and the people are not all good." There was no respect of persons. Wrinkled old peasant-women and lovely young members of the ancient Majorcan nobility knelt side by side. The pew my men-folk occupied was shared by a gentleman in a fur-lined coat, and two little ragamuffins who, oblivious of their sacred surroundings, slumbered peacefully throughout the proceedings, curled up snugly together like a pair of monkeys nesting in a tree-top. At a pause in the service a white-robed youth, supposed to represent the Angel Gabriel, who was attended by two others carrying lighted candles, appeared in a pulpit. He wore a scarlet cap and bore a naked sword, and in a melodious voice chanted in Spanish _Sibila_--a hymn that foretells the varied fates awaiting the evil and the good at the end of the world. At one o'clock, when we slipped out of the Cathedral, leaving the multitude still at worship, and walked homewards through the brilliant moonlight, all was hushed and peaceful. The signs of carnage had vanished. The banner with the suicidal legend, _Se matan lechonas_, no longer fluttered by the gate of Santa Catalina; and only a few vagrant turkey feathers, blown about the roads, remained to tell of the innocents who had been butchered to make a Christian holiday. Christmas, we had been warned, would be a quiet day in Palma: a day of family greetings, of indoor festivities, when the streets would be deserted. Any feasts we might have shared were far away in fog-bound Britain, and neither turkey nor sucking-pig graced the larder of the Casa Tranquila. The weather was idyllic, like the most perfect of perfect summer days at home--even after more than two months' experience of Balearic Island weather we had not ceased to be surprised by its consistent beauty. So we decided to have a picnic. We had heard vaguely of a famous cave in the country behind our own district of Son Españolet--a cave important enough to afford shelter to the people of Palma who, in thousands, had fled thither to escape from a plague of cholera that sixty or seventy years before had devastated the town. But while everybody seemed to know of the existence of the cave, no amount of inquiry elicited information as to its exact whereabouts. So on this lovely Christmas morning we resolved to take luncheon with us and spend the day hunting for it. I think it was the Rudder Grangers who wished to live in the last house of a village, as by doing so they could be in touch with humanity on the one side and with Nature on the other. Our own road, the Calle de Mas, came very near answering these requirements, for, being the last road in the little suburb, it met both town and country. By walking to the end of the houses, over whose garden walls oranges gleamed golden, and turning to the left by the brand-new Villa Dolores, and past the old farm-house that stood hedged in with tall cactus by the wayside, we were at once on the verge of the beautiful rural scenery. Our informant had been right. The street was empty. As we passed along, a smell as of roast sucking-pig greeted us; but everybody was indoors behind their closely shuttered windows. The road that leads through the undulating almond and olive groves towards Son Puigdorfila and the hills had never been so deserted. And never had the air been softer or the mountains more mistily blue. The leaves of the gnarled olives shone silver-grey beside the dark, rich foliage of the carob-trees, and the white blossoms of a honey-scented weed thickly flecked the green of the six-inch high grain. The village of Son Rapiña, perched on its eminence, gleamed like a jewel in the strong sunlight; but the path leading towards it showed not a single traveller. For once, farm-work had ceased; the only sound that reached us was a far-off musical tinkle from the bells of a flock of goats as they moved about, seeking for fallen pods under the great algarroba-trees. The cave, we had gathered, was somewhere near Son Puigdorfila, but when we had passed that country-house, and had wandered down the valley towards the empty bed of the _torrente_, we found nothing that in the most remote way suggested the presence of a cave. We had almost abandoned the quest when a sound of bells warned us of the approach of a herd of plump brindled asses, which appeared under the guidance of an old man. In his suit of faded blue cotton, with a goatskin slung over his shoulders and a gaily striped kerchief bound round his brow and knotted at the back, the long ends falling beneath his wide-brimmed hat, and a tall staff in his wrinkled brown hands, he was a fine specimen of the hale Majorcan peasant whose declining years hold no greater physical discomfort than a gradual lessening of the full strength of manhood. He knew of the cave--_Cueva Fuente Santa_ he called it. Nay more, he knew its history from the making to the present day. And while the brindled asses browsed around us he told us the story of the Cave of the Holy Well. The Conquistador, it appeared, on setting out on his perilous mission, had vowed to the Virgin that if through her aid he succeeded in ousting the heathen from Majorca, he would signalize his victory by building a noble Cathedral in her honour; and it was in quarrying the stone from the steep ground by the side of the _torrente_ that the great cave had been formed. He told us of the refugees who, fleeing before the cholera, had camped there in safety; and brought the record up to date by mentioning that to the present day on the Sunday after Easter great crowds of the townsfolk made a little pilgrimage to the Holy Well, to drink its waters and to eat their _empanadas_--pies made specially of lamb for the occasion. The cave was near--only a little way, he added, as he hurried to overtake his now straying herd. If we would proceed farther down the side of the _torrente_ we would discover it, close by the old well. So in the sunshine, which was warm without a trace of oppression, for the sea air agreeably tempered the heat, we wandered on until, in the side of a fir-topped bank, we found the cave. And it was quite unlike anything we had imagined. To enter by the wide square portal was to find oneself in a vast, many-chambered hall. In quarrying out the interior the long-forgotten workmen had left at intervals great rudely sculptured blocks that served as supporting pillars to the roof. Four square holes, open to the sky, afforded ventilation. Round the walls, and about the bases of the pillars, had been hewn ledges which might have served for seats or for beds. At one point the roof had been blackened by smoke from the fugitives' fires. But the whole interior was dry and airy. There was not a trace of damp anywhere, and the sandy floor was one that could easily have been kept clean and wholesome. It would have been hard to imagine a more secure or a more sanitary place of refuge. Down below, nearer the river-bed, was the quaint Moorish well--square in form, with a domed roof. And looking down the valley of the _torrente_ from the brow of the hill in front of the cave where the fig-trees grew, we had a grand prospect of Palma Cathedral, that from each variant point of view seems to gain a new beauty. An unwonted silence lay over the sunlit land. For once there was no sound of human voice uplifted in song, and that aided the sense of peace. The Balearic islander is the most skilful market-gardener in the world. He makes roads that enable one to drive up one side of a mountain and down the other with perfect ease. He builds walls that look as though they would last throughout the ages and successfully resist a shock of earthquake at the end of time. But as a vocalist he is not attractive. I must write this heresy in a whisper, for the information would surprise him. He is unconscious of his lack of melody, and rather fancies himself as a songster. The merry Majorcan plough-boy does not "whistle o'er the lea." He sings, or rather chants, in a loud, discordant voice, an artless recitative, apparently improvising both words and music and weaving the little incidents of the day, the trivial happenings of his surroundings, into his interminable lay. When the Boy was painting in the beautiful undulating country that lay between Son Españolet and the mountains, he sometimes discovered a reference to himself in the _pastorale_. "_It is the painter English. He is making a picture. He has put Gabriel into it. Perhaps he will put me also, And my fine pigs._" But though the voice of the herdsman might be unmelodious, it mingled harmoniously with the jangle of bells as his flock of pigs, goats, sheep, or asses moved slowly over the uplands under the fragrant almond-trees. The air was sweet with perfume of the wild lavender that grew in profusion about the entrance to the caves. Not a soul was in sight. It was with a quiet scorn of flesh-pots--even of those that contained sucking-pig--that, sitting in the sunshine, we lunched frugally off sandwiches, claret, and big yellow Muscat grapes. We had left the Casa Tranquila with the understanding that the day was to be observed as a complete holiday. Yet when the cave revealed picturesque possibilities it would have surprised one unaccustomed to the devious ways of the Man and the Boy to have seen how well provided they chanced to be with working materials. Leaving them busily sketching, I wandered about gathering the heads of sweet lavender. I had a newly born ambition to fill a cushion with the dried blossoms--an ambition that in England would have been extravagant, but one that in this gracious land was to be gained by a little charming labour. So with that feeling of absolute mental content and of physical well-being that seemed to characterize our Balearic days, I picked and picked and picked until the luncheon-basket was full to overflowing with the purple-grey flowers, and the subtle odour of sweet lavender encompassed me with a cloud of fragrance. Even in these days of late December I had never taken a country walk without finding a fresh wild flower. To-day it was a rose-coloured cornflower, _cyanus_; and in addition, growing close to the caves, I came upon a fruit, or vegetable, that was quite new to me. The latter was splendidly decorative. Imagine a giant tomato plant erect and armed with aggressive prickles, that bore a profusion of apples whose colour varied from green mottled with white in the unripe, to brilliant yellow in the mature. I found afterwards that it is known as the "Devil's tomato." Tufts of the pale pink heath flourished under the pines, and on the slopes about the fig-trees my favourite Japanese-like dwarf asphodel, whose white, starry blossoms were striped with chocolate, were out in profusion. The far-off tinkle of bells that, to our now accustomed ears, ranked almost as a necessary accompaniment to the scenery, had gradually been drawing nearer; and soon the troop of donkeys again appeared, followed by their patient, kindly-faced herd. They were the only living things in sight, and as they moved slowly along they harmonized delightfully with the rustic surroundings. Approaching nightfall drove us homewards, reluctant to end a day that had been full of intangible charm. The record of its doings, baldly set forth on paper, reveals a total lack of incident. The preceding Christmas Day, spent at a seaside hotel in laboriously enjoying the festivities of the season, we had almost forgotten. These placid hours passed quietly in this country of sweet smells, of gentle noises, of pure, soft air, we would always remember. As we strolled towards Son Españolet the setting sun seemed determined, in honour of the day, to give an extra glorious display of fireworks. And when the glow had faded from the mountains, leaving them purple velvet, a vivid rose flush that melted into the blue haze of the distance lingered long in the eastern sky. And just above was the nearly full moon, a globe of shining silver. There was no actual dusk, hardly any gloaming; for before the sun had sunk to rest the moon, her lamp brilliantly burning, was ready to do duty. [Illustration: After the Feast of the Conquistador, Palma Cathedral] XIII THE FEAST OF THE CONQUISTADOR It was the 31st of December, and the day was one of a long succession of calm summer-like days. The sky was a cloudless blue, and the air so warm that in the plantations beyond Son Españolet sundry over-zealous almond-trees, deceived by the brilliance of the weather, were already bursting into premature bloom. It was too fine to waste indoors the remaining hours of the year, and the gay little town was always interesting. So we walked towards Palma, and, after strolling down the mole and revelling in the colour and movement of the harbour, we ascended the long flight of steps leading to the ramparts, and, passing the Almudaina, reached the Cathedral, whose grandeur and sacred beauty ever held a fresh fascination for us. Entering by a side door, we judged from the presence of certain extra decorative trappings in front of the high altar that some special service was in prospect. People were already seated in the pews that filled the front portion of the nave. Finding places at a side, we waited, listening to the joyous strains of the grand organ. Just before eleven o'clock the great doors of the Cathedral were thrown open, and the warm sunlight streamed into the sombre interior. Then, through the hush of expectancy that had fallen over the congregation, we heard the far-off beating of drums. Something was, looked for--was even now on its way--we knew not what; but we also waited, expectant. Nearer the sound came, and nearer. From our side seats we could see the guard in front of the Almudaina saluting, then from the brilliant sunlight into the mysterious half-gloom of the Cathedral there passed a quaint little procession, led by a drum-major gorgeous in scarlet and gold. Behind him, three and three, came the drummers, still--even within the sacred walls of the Cathedral--keeping up the _rat-a-plan_ with a vigour that seemed almost profane. Half-way up the nave they turned aside and stood, rapidly plying their drum-sticks; while, preceded by two mace-bearers in robes of scarlet, their symbols of office over their shoulders, came in evening dress the Civil Governor and the Alcalde, followed by members of the Council. Behind, in uniform, came the Chiefs of Police. When they were seated--the Civil Governor, as representing the King, being placed in a chair under an embroidered canopy, the others in a specially draped pew alongside--the service began. At one portion of the ceremony a priest with attendants mounted the pulpit, and in an eloquent address related the whole story of the conquest of Majorca by Jaime, the young King of Aragon, who on that very day six hundred and eighty years before had entered the city. In picturesque language and in fine declamatory style he told how for many hundreds of years the lovely island had suffered under the oppression of the wicked and tyrannical Moors. How prosperity had rendered them only the more piratical and cruel, so that no Christian ship was safe from their assaults. How, rendered yet bolder by success, they even raided the Catalan coast, sacking Barcelona, and killing its Count. How at length the indignation of the Spaniards roused them to take action; and the heads of the ecclesiastical, the military, and the royal sections meeting together, resolved to fit out a fleet, and to dispatch an expedition to wrest the island from the heathen. Under the handsome and daring young King of Aragon the fleet of over a hundred and forty vessels, containing an army thirty thousand strong, set sail. They left the Spanish coast on the 1st of September, 1229, but the Moors made so determined a resistance that it was the last day of the year before the hosts of King Jaime succeeded in entering the town. As in duty bound, the orator ascribed mainly to the influence of the Church over the Catholic hearts of the people the success of the expedition that had freed the Christians from their oppressors. The oration ended, service at the high altar proceeded, while at intervals gay, almost jocund, music burst forth from the grand organ. The lightsome strains were infectious. The Alcalde unconsciously beat time with his staff, and the fingers of the youngest representative of the municipal government played an imaginary instrument in time to the music. There was such a decidedly Gilbert-and-Sullivan suggestion about the sprightly air that one might be pardoned for expecting the chief ecclesiastical dignitary to advance singing-- "I am the Bishop of this Diocese" or for anticipating the attendant priests making hearty response-- "And a right good Bishop, too!" Later in the proceedings the clergy formed into a procession, led by white-robed acolytes and choristers carrying crucifixes and lighted candles, and walked slowly round the Cathedral, chanting as they went; the Civil Governor, the Alcalde, and the other representatives of the Government bringing up the rear. The impressive religious service ended, the drummers again fell into line, and the civic dignitaries, with the mace-bearers, marching to the sound of the drums, passed out into the sunlit streets. Following in their footsteps, we sped towards the Town Hall, in front of which, as we now gathered, the annual ceremony of saluting the flagstaff of King Jaime the Conquistador was to take place. There a gay scene awaited us. Detachments of soldiers, their bands playing, lined the laurel-strewn space before the building. All the balconies were full of spectators and the street was thronged with what appeared to be the entire juvenile population of Palma. With the arrival of the Governor and his escort the ceremony was speedily completed. The flagstaff, which was heavily wreathed in laurel, was carried round. Arms having been presented, the historic trophy retired into carefully tended seclusion until another anniversary would again bring it into prominence. The military formed up, and to the sound of inspiriting music marched cheerily off. The feast of the Conquistador was over. The origin of the custom we found reached back into bygone ages. For many centuries after King Jaime's death the people of Palma had an annual procession on the anniversary of the taking of the city, and walked through the streets with the banner under which their deliverer had fought so valiantly carried before them, while the entire populace prayed for the safety of his soul. The banner has long since rotted into dust. Now the staff alone is borne, and apart from the promenade inside the Cathedral there is no procession. The inner chambers of the Cathedral guard a wealth of treasure, the collection of centuries, and an inestimable array of relics, which, through the courtesy of the church dignitaries, we had the privilege of seeing. One morning about ten o'clock, when we entered the Cathedral from the sunlit streets, the faint blue mist of incense hung about the high altar, and the sound of chanting echoed through the aisles. At first sight the vast building appeared to be empty; but as our eyes became accustomed to the perpetual twilight that reigns under the great roof we became conscious of kneeling worshippers, dimly seen through the obscurity--a young lady, her mantilla-framed face bent over her rosary, an old man praying before one of the side chapels where a faint light was burning. We were expected. Our friend the padre, a dignified figure clad in vestments of lace and fur, welcoming us with a silent shake of the hand, led us noiselessly along a side aisle. As, passing through a door that led behind the high altar, we caught a glimpse of the officiating clergy, it almost seemed as though we were behind the scenes at a theatre where some great life-drama was being enacted. There were the stately and imposing performers, the engrossed and scarcely visible audience. Leaving us in charge of the brother priest who acts as custodian of the treasure, our sponsor returned to resume his part in the service. Preceding us through the sacristy, our new guide escorted us to an inner chamber where, in an impregnable safe built in the wall, the venerated sacred relics of the Cathedral are kept. Carefully unlocking and throwing open the guardian doors, he revealed a cabinet draped with a crimson curtain. Slipping behind the drapery, he busied himself lighting candles. Then, reappearing, he drew aside the curtain, revealing the almost startling magnificence of the precious metal and rare pearls in which the relics are enshrined. One object--that occupying the place of honour--was carefully enswathed. Bending low before it, the padre, with reverent hands, withdrew the covering, showing an exquisite cross of gold, inset with priceless gems and hung with strings of costly pearls. In the centre of the cross--faintly perceptible through its encasement of crystal--were some fragments of the true Cross. On certain occasions, such as the service on Good Friday afternoon, this relic is borne in procession round the Cathedral. The custodian, who was an enthusiast happy in his appreciation of and delight in his mission, proceeded to show us more of the wondrous treasures of the old Cathedral. Among the things almost too sacred to mention were three thorns from Christ's crown of thorns, a piece of the purple cloth of His robe, a fragment of His swaddling band, and a portion of a garment worn by the Virgin Mary. A bone, black and shrivelled with age, was from the finger of St. Peter. And an extremely interesting relic--one so veritably antique that it is mentioned in the first inventory of the sacred trophies belonging to the Cathedral--is the tip of one of the arrows with which St. Sebastian, who is the patron saint of Palma, was killed. Like all the other relics, this is carefully enclosed. Another relic of the saint is the bone of his fore-arm, which is enclosed in a case surmounted by a hand, on whose outstretched fingers are many costly rings, votive offerings presented in gratitude by those who believe they have benefited by his intercession on their behalf. Two magnificent crowns, those that on special occasions are worn by the effigies of the Virgin and the Holy Child, were also in that safe in company with other valuables too many to catalogue. The Mass was still in progress. While we gazed from the face of the priest, which glowed with fervour, to the wondrous things he showed us with such tender veneration, came a sound of chanting, the music of boys' voices rising sweet and clear. There was still the first impression of having been admitted behind the scenes--an impression which the entrance of certain of the officiating clergy who came into the sacristy to change their vestments served to deepen. Leaving an attendant to extinguish the lights and re-lock the great iron doors, the padre opened other cupboards and showed us a plethora of riches, valuable not only for the material but for the beauty and artistic skill of the workmanship. A crucifix bore an exquisitely carven ivory figure of the dead Christ, and in the hollow of the slender stem of a gold cup a craftsman of surprising ingenuity had contrived to mould a representation of the Last Supper, so minute in detail that it portrayed not only the table with the company seated around it but also the food that was placed before them. On the inner base of the vase, the executant of this triumph of the goldsmith's art had graven his name, which I forget, and his age, which at the date of the completion of this intricate and original piece of work was sixty-nine. Our guide did not scamp his task. He appeared to take both pride and pleasure in it, and showed us everything, from the vestments, which were rigid with gold and embroidery, to the massive silver candelabra worth nearly seven thousand pounds, that are so heavy that when they are moved into the body of the Cathedral for use during special services, it takes four men to carry the top, and six men the base, of each. At three different dates, when long-continued drought had induced privation, this silver has been sold for the relief of the poor; and three times has it been bought back again, and restored to its place in the Cathedral. Until recently the embalmed body of King Jaime II. (who died in his palace of the Almudaina just across the road from the principal entrance to the Cathedral), which rested in a marble sarcophagus in front of the high altar, was shown to the public on the 31st of December, the anniversary of the day on which his father, the Conquistador, freed Palma from the Moors. The mummified corpse is no longer publicly exhibited, and the coffin containing the remains has been removed to a recess behind and above the high altar, where it rests awaiting burial. By special permission we were allowed to see the body of the monarch. The coffin, taken from the sarcophagus, had been placed on a stone bracket. An attendant, mounting a ladder that leant against the wall at the head of the coffin, slid back the lid. And in turn we climbed up and, bending over, peeped into the open coffin to see, through intervening glass--what? A royal robe of velvet and gold and ermine, the lace-trimmed sleeves crossed at the empty wrists, and above the neck of the garment a dark fleshless skull, with the brown skin tightened over it, closed eyes deep sunk in the sockets, and toothless jaws wide agape. A rose-pink velvet nightcap encased the shrunken head of the monarch who, six hundred years ago, reigned over Majorca. [Illustration: The Coffin of Jaime II in Palma Cathedral] The reign of this second Jaime, which extended over a period of more than thirty years, would appear to have been an exceptionally placid one for these warlike days. We know that he brought from Spain cunning workmen who converted for his use the castle of the Moorish Amir, the Almudaina, into a royal palace, and there a code of Court etiquette was formulated and put into practice by the new monarch. The wife of the Captain-General, who now occupies the old Moorish palace, a few nights before we saw the remains of the former tenant of the Almudaina, gave a reception in the form of a "tea-party"--the guests to arrive at ten o'clock, the tea to be served at midnight. One wonders what the nature of King Jaime's Court functions were--at what hour his guests assembled, what the entertainment was, and when they dispersed. The imposing marble sarcophagus in which in times past these remnants of royalty were entombed has been removed to a corner of the cloisters, where we saw it standing forlorn and forgotten. [Illustration: Market Day at Pollensa] XIV POLLENSA We had intended deferring our expedition to the neighbouring isle of Minorca till later in the season; until after the week or two of cold weather that we had been warned to expect in January had passed. But as the opening days of the year went by in brilliant sunshine, and the temperature continued ideal, we felt tempted to delay no longer. It was the Man's suggestion that we should make a roundabout tour of it, visiting first the old-world towns of Pollensa and Alcudia, then sailing from the port of Alcudia to Minorca and returning from Mahón direct to Palma. So at daybreak on the 8th of January Bartolomé appeared to drive us to the station. The sun had risen, Bartolomé was smiling, and the hills beyond Son Españolet shone pink and heliotrope in the morning light as we drove along; yet there was a sharp little nip in the air, and the _consumeros_ were still shivering in their blankets, covered up to their noses and cowering over their braziers. Without these reminders we would have forgotten that it was the depth of winter in the Fortunate Isles. At Palma station the customary small bustle heralded the departure of the morning train. The porter of the Grand Hotel was seeing off a French couple who were going to Manacor to visit the Dragon Caves. Among the little company of natives with their fringed shawls and white muslin _rebozillos_ the French lady, who wore a smart flower-trimmed toque on her golden hair and costly furs on her shoulders, looked oddly out of place. On this occasion the 7.40 train left with extreme punctuality, and its rate of progress, though slow, was steady. The only other passenger in our second-class compartment was a swarthy man who wore a yachting cap, white shoes, and a striped blanket. He evidently felt cold, and as he sat curled up on the seat his appearance was a ludicrous combination of a member of the Royal Yacht Club and an Asiatic hospital patient who had risen to have his bed made. He was journeying to Inca, apparently for the first time, and when he asked for information regarding the number of stations to be passed before his destination was reached, it seemed reversing the natural order of things that we foreigners should be able to give it. Nearly two months had passed since we travelled over the line, and it was interesting to note the difference in the appearance of things. Then the rich red earth had been furrowed by the plough, or was in process of sowing. Now it was covered with long lines of sturdy beans, or with springing grain level and green as a tennis lawn. The fig-trees and grape-vines were leafless now; but the evergreen carobs showed the tender shades of the new leaves at the tips of the well-covered branches. The olives wore their accustomed silver-grey, but the first pale blossoms of the year flecked the almond-trees with white. We had taken _combinados_ tickets, and the second-class fare--two pesetas thirty-five centimos--included the ten-mile coach drive from La Puebla to Pollensa. When we alighted at the station two diligences were waiting, one for Pollensa, the other for Alcudia. Choosing the right one the Man and I got inside with six other folk--three young men, two young women, one old man, and a baby too young to count. The Boy went on the box, luggage was piled on the roof, and the horses set to work to drag their heavy load over the dry, newly mended road. The Majorcan way of repairing a road is to put a layer of roughly broken stones over the worn bits, then to block the smooth places with chunks of rock, so that the unhappy travellers are perforce obliged to do the work of levelling by driving over the loose stones. But though the way was rough and jolty there was no dust, and there were no mosquitoes; and our company, including the brand-new baby, was the soul of good nature. The young men and women chatted gaily together in the harsh Majorcan dialect; the old man evincing a friendly interest in the conversation, which difference of nationality unfortunately rendered unintelligible to us. Once or twice, when the subject under discussion appeared more than usually entertaining, the Man and I whispered to each other, as we had done before in similar circumstances, "If we could only understand what they are saying!" Our progress was slow, owing partly to the roughness of the road, and partly, as the Boy later explained, to the fact that the driver, who was a very old man, fell asleep at intervals, and only awoke when the horses stopped. Half-way to Pollensa we exchanged drivers with the coach that was on its way to La Puebla; and our new man being wide-awake, matters progressed more briskly. The Boy told us afterwards that, seen from his place on the box, the scenery had been glorious; but from the interior of the diligence it was impossible to gain more than a general impression of lovely wooded slopes, and of distant hills that seemed to draw nearer and nearer until, suddenly, while Pollensa seemed still a long way off, we found ourselves in a narrow lane lined with tall houses. In and out of the most tortuous streets imaginable the diligence twisted, then abruptly came to a standstill at no place in particular, and we realized that we had penetrated to the heart of Pollensa. We had no idea where to go. All the information we had been able to gather about the Pollensa _fondas_--there were no so-called hotels--was that they were reputed to be bad. But when the coach stopped, and we had alighted, and were standing with our luggage on the cobble-stones, wondering in what direction to turn for a lodging, a young man, plump, clean-shaven, bare-headed, appearing from nowhere, begged breathlessly to recommend his _fonda_. Following him through crooked ways we reached the hostelry, which was in a little square near the market-place. Mounting a steep stair, we entered a large lavishly windowed room furnished with many round tables and chairs. It had a little bar and looked to the square; behind it was a dining-room. The Boy, who was our spokesman, following the expected procedure, inquired the terms per day. "Six pesetas." Our host, following an equally expected procedure when arranging with foreigners, had quoted his top price. "No," said the Boy, whom experience had taught wisdom. "Three pesetas; that is enough. Can you not do it for that?" The landlord waved his hands. "That depends on what you have," he replied, quite reasonably. "Three pesetas--yes, if you will be content with soup and one other dish at dinner and at supper." "And is the little breakfast included?" "Yes, señor. Coffee and milk." So it was decided. Three pesetas a day was to be the price. And it was with a feeling of keen curiosity as to what our host would provide for the money that we awaited the appearance of the first meal, which was to be served immediately. Señor Calafill at Andraitx had given us the perfection of French cookery, the best of wines, at three and a half pesetas. But his house was less pretentious, being a shop only and not a _fonda_. Our hostess, a nice, bright little woman who wore her hair in a pigtail and the _rebozillo_, bustled in and began laying the marble-topped table with fresh napkins, good cutlery, rolls, a bottle of wine, and a syphon of soda-water. Then she added a dish of fruit, and running off to the kitchen returned with the soup--a good thick Majorcan soup, full of rice and sweet peppers and chopped meat. The second course was a large dish of fish served with fried potatoes. Then we had, as a fruit course, apples and mandarin oranges. The fare might not be lavish, but it was assuredly all we required. Our rooms, which were the best the house afforded, were small but clean, and during our stay proved quite free from mosquitoes. When we discussed how we would spend the afternoon, the Boy and I hotly advocated walking to the port of Pollensa. A traveller from an inland town who had shared the box-seat of the diligence with the Boy had spoken enthusiastically of its beauty. His family was accustomed to spend the hot months there. The fishing, he said, was splendid, the fish being of much finer quality than those taken in the neighbouring bay of Alcudia. "A salmonetta caught in the bay of Pollensa _is_ a salmonetta," he had declared emphatically. The Man wisely objected to the expedition. The port, he reminded us, was seven kilometros (nearly five miles) away, and that was too far to go and return comfortably in the short winter afternoon. Besides, when we had come to see a curious old town, why not stay to look at it? But from my bedroom window I had caught an enchanting glimpse of the port--a segment of blue water hemmed in by steep rocky mountains. It seemed so near that I flouted the idea of the five miles, and the afternoon being a glorious one we finally agreed to go. As we passed along an outlying street an old man, who stood outside his house superintending the drying of a great tray of macaroni, wished us "Good day." In returning his greeting the Man added a remark on the beauty of the weather, which indeed to us seemed perfect. "No. This weather is not good. It is bad," the old man said severely. "It is rain that is needed. The country suffers. No, señor. This weather is bad, not good." The way was a relic of the Roman occupation: a splendid wide level road that, except for a curve where it left the town, stretched like a broad ruled line between us and the blue sea. It could not really be so far as seven kilometros, I assured my vigilant conscience, which was inclined to remonstrate. It looked no distance at all. So we went on our wilful way, journeying gaily between the thorny hedges of aloes--one up among the rocks on the hill-side was in bloom--and beside the little farms that bordered either side of the road. The road was long--quite five miles--but there was always something interesting at hand, and the enticing strip of blue water drew us onward. The hills on the opposite side of the bay had already caught the rays of the setting sun, and looked like a bit of some dream-world. The port of Pollensa had a quaint semicircle of houses, divided in the middle by the road we had come, which ended only on the bit of wharf that ran out into the spacious well-sheltered bay, where the British fleet had often found commodious anchorage. Save for a few local _falucas_ it was now empty. In the little enclosed yards in front of the fisher-houses men and girls were at work weaving from bright yellow strips of bamboo the tall, beehive-looking lobster-traps in local use. Behind the houses, on the left side of the bay, rose a precipitous hill. In front, between the houses and the water, was a line of fig-trees. Along towards the seaward point were some small charmingly situated summer residences. When we turned our faces townwards the sun had already set; and though we walked smartly, the way that in the going had seemed short appeared to lengthen as the shadows crept over the hills and darkness encircled us. Pollensa lies, a close huddle of old sun-dried houses, in a narrow curved valley between high mountains. Until you are close upon it, it is almost entirely hidden, and that was probably the intention with which it was originally planned. During the last mile or two of the return journey, when the shades had fallen and we went on and on without apparently getting any nearer our habitation, my opinion of the distance that divided the port from the town became considerably modified. Still, we were only pleasantly tired when the first of the town lights appeared, and we found our way to the _fonda_ through the twisted streets, past many well-lit barbers' shops where, in full view of the public gaze, men were being shaved or sitting in patient rows resignedly awaiting turns that, to judge from the large number of customers and the paucity of barbers, would necessarily be a long time in coming. Supper was ready to serve, and the moment the meal was over I went upstairs to bed--to sleep soon and sweetly, in spite of the fact that conversation in the bar-room beneath sounded surprisingly distinct--about as loud, indeed, as though the owners of the voices were talking at my ear. Morning brought explanation of the phenomenon--one of the flooring tiles just at the head of the bed was missing, and through the gap thus left the noise of the unseen talkers entered the room as through a speaking-tube. On the following morning, which was Sunday, the weekly market was held at Pollensa. Very early, while it was yet hardly light, the little bustle of street traffic awoke me, and, looking from the window, I got a misty view of panniered donkeys and of rustic conveyances which vague shadowy figures were unloading. When we had breakfasted we went out and, within a few steps of our inn, found ourselves in the most picturesque market-place we had ever seen. I do not know what may be the leading article of Pollensa market at other seasons, but on this January day the outstanding feature was cabbages--of tremendous proportions. Piled in heaps and hillocks on the ground, they fairly dominated the market. Other wares there were no doubt, but the things that impressed us were the number and size of these giant vegetables and a feeling of wonder as to where the people would come from to buy them. As the morning wore on, the mounds sensibly diminished in height; but at that early hour the stacks of cabbages towered so high that sometimes only the heads of the vendors were visible above them. In the raised portion of the market-square women occupied the stone benches, their stock of home-grown fruits and of the finer vegetables exhibited in baskets before them. It was the scarce time for grapes. The field-produce was long over, and only garden bunches were still to be had. But without any attempt at bargaining we bought two pounds of delicious grapes for sixpence-farthing, and large golden oranges were offered us at twopence a dozen. The town was so full of strange and picturesque figures that every moment brought fresh entertainment. At the _feria_ into which we strayed at Inca we had thought ourselves lucky in seeing one old man attired in the curious _colsons en bufer_, as the voluminous zouave-like pantaloons of bright blue cotton are called. Here in Pollensa wearers of the delightfully odd old-world dress abounded. And it seemed as though they took a special pride in the quaintness of their garb, so particular were they about the set of their neckties, so trim about the ankles, so careful as to the fit of the low black shoes that went so well with the costume. The women of Pollensa, though less extraordinary of aspect, were also a pleasure to behold, for with scarcely an exception they wore the becoming native dress, and their heads were neatly covered with either the pretty white muslin head-dress or with handkerchiefs of gaily coloured silk. It was somewhat disconcerting to realize, as we did quite suddenly, that it was really we who were the oddities, and that in the eyes of the crowd, at whom we were gazing so curiously, I was a ludicrous object because I wore a hat! It was really quite an ordinary travelling-hat, but finding that the fact of a woman wearing a hat at all attracted undue attention from these unsophisticated folks, I hastened back to the _fonda_ and changed it for a chiffon scarf worn mantilla-fashion. That done, I found I could pass almost unnoticed. Majorca boasts many picturesque old towns, but probably Pollensa is the most picturesque of all. It is a beautiful antique: a town made for the painter. Its warm golden-brown houses have baked in the hot southern sunshine until they seem ready to crumble to pieces. It is by no means a rich town. Most of the dwellings appeared to belong to the poorer classes. As the Man said--"It is a city of slums--but what adorable slums!" The streets were all turnings, and every turn brought a subject ready for the brush. Here was a grand old cross, there a curious fountain, yonder an ancient stone washing-trough. And round every corner, that market-morning, came the quaint old men in their broad-brimmed felt hats and baggy breeches, unconsciously adding the note of human interest that completed the pictures. Pollensa is essentially a town of hills. Mountains closely girdle it round. To the Calvario, which is perched on a height in the midst of the town, one ascends by countless wide, low steps, the town ascending also. For on one side houses struggle half-way up the steep incline, while cactus plants, the edges of their thick, fleshy leaves heavily ruched by blood-red fruit, hedge the other. On the rocky slope beyond is a thick growth of _palmettos_, the dwarf palms whose inner stems the natives eat and from whose dried fronds baskets are made. [Illustration: The Main Street of Pollensa] To the dwellers in these sky-parlours the broad steps play the part of an extra sitting-room. As we climbed slowly up that hot morning, we trod closely upon many domestic scenes, but none of the actors therein objected to the intrusion. Fathers were happily employing their Sunday leisure in nursing their babies; and mothers, with the requisites placed for all the world to see, were washing their children's faces, tying up their locks with ribbon, and performing other niceties of the toilet that usually take place in the sanctity of the home. One old woman, sitting full in the sun, was reciting her prayers in a loud voice. Her occupation, however, did not appear in the slightest to detract from her interest in the passing of us _forasteros_. The open doors of the little chapel that perched amidst its guardian cypresses on the summit spoke a wordless welcome; and we entered, to find ourselves in a beautiful sanctuary. Above the altar was a very old carved tableau which represented Christ suspended on a heavy wooden cross, with Mary, kneeling, caressing His wounded feet. On the ceiling were various curious and evidently antique emblems of the Redemption. On either side of the altar was a recess devoted to the display of votive offerings. Many of them were akin to those exhibited in other churches, though one case was filled with tiny flat silver figures--miniature men in trousers and tiny women in petticoats. But on the wall of the chamber to the right was an offering that aroused both our interest and our curiosity. Suspended in a tall, narrow glass case, hung a pleat of dark brown hair, tied simply after the local fashion with a knot and ends of black ribbon. It was a pigtail such as was worn by most of the women in the town; but a pigtail of such unusual length and thickness that it might quite laudably have been the pride of its owner's heart. Beneath was a card bearing the following inscription, written large in a fair, round hand:-- _Promesa de Francisca 30 Noviembre 1902 Pollensa._ Now who was Francisca? And why did she promise to cut off her beautiful hair? Was it to avert the fatal issue of some illness of her own? Or was it because her lover was ill, or in danger by land or sea? Or was Francisca merely afraid that he might prove faithless? Whatever the nature of the terror Francisca dreaded, it was happily averted. The presence of the severed tresses assured us of that. But it was a particularly fine pigtail, and the sight of it tempted one to wonder what the feeling of Juan, or Pedro, or Miguel was when he first saw his sweetheart with closely cropped locks, and found that she had shorn off her glory for his sake. It is to be trusted that Francisca's hair was not her only beauty. From the terraced slope of the Calvario one gets a magnificent view of the town. Looking down on the tiled roofs, all tawny-brown with the passing of centuries, it is easy to realize the great age of Pollensa. The city itself occupies but a circumscribed area, so narrow are the streets, so huddled together the houses. There is scarcely room for a green leaf to sprout between them. But where the town ends abruptly the real country begins, and in the parts that are not closely flanked by hills the ancient town is girdled by a belt of almond-trees. And all about it the fertile ground is cut up into small holdings, each with its little yellow-brown dwelling-house. On every side, as far as the eye can reach, rise mountains, a glimpse of blue sea showing here and there between their rocky crags. Above one side of the town towers an isolated peak, from whose crest a magnificent panoramic view of half of the island of Majorca, and even a distant glimpse of Minorca, can be obtained. A superbly situated building that was once the Convent of Nuestra Señora del Puig (Our Lady of the Peak) crowns the top of the height. It was so named because of a marvellous image of the Virgin discovered by the nuns who were in residence there. In olden days, when the building was in the possession of the Church, the Convent of Our Lady of the Peak supported an _hospederia_ for the shelter of pilgrims; and now that the holy sisterhood has removed to Palma, the authorities of Pollensa continue to uphold their hospitable custom, and every traveller who mounts the steep--rather a stiff climb, by the way--is welcome to free lodging with fire, oil, olives, and goat's cheese for three nights and days at the expense of the town. As we looked from the Calvario where we were standing across the valley to the noble pile of the old convent, and thought how sublime the sunrises and sunsets would be, viewed from Our Lady of the Peak, I registered a vow to make a pilgrimage thither some day. The Man chose to be pleasantly sarcastic regarding the fulfilment of the intention. He cherishes a perhaps not altogether unfounded belief that I wish to revisit every place I have seen in Majorca. But we shall see.... As we passed back through the market-square, the business of buying and selling was still in progress. In every quarter of the town, down back alleys, mounting up the steps towards the Calvario, in the farthest-out streets, we had met women carrying home the Brobdingnagian cabbages. Dinners were already cooking over the little fires of almond shells, and the odour of boiling cabbage came from many earthenware cooking-pots, yet the piles seemed scarcely diminished. The cattle-market--a matter of a score or two of piglings, half a dozen sheep, a few horses--was held in the square before our _fonda_, and while it lasted the interest of the wearers of the _colsons en bufer_ centred there, though, as far as we could judge from our balcony, they took no active part in the trafficking. They had all brown, weather-beaten, shrewd old faces, and all gave the impression of leading lives of extreme respectability. It was impossible to imagine any one of them falling foul of the law. As the Boy said, "It would be a comic sight to see the old beggars flying from Justice in bags like these!" Since our arrival on the previous noon, the personality of our landlord had greatly puzzled us. At first sight he had appeared youngish, stout, clean-shaven, and slightly surly in manner, and at intervals he still presented the same characteristics. But there were other times when he surprised us by seeming rather older, slightly greyer, and decidedly more gracious of bearing. The simple solution of the little mystery came when we chanced to see him in both aspects at once; and learned that we had two hosts--father and son--who, even when seen in company, so strongly resembled each other that we christened them the two Dromios. In the afternoon we set off on the prowl, with the Town Hall--in which a native guide-book declared there was a collection of antique armour--as our objective. The Town Hall, which in common with so many important Balearic buildings was originally a convent, occupies a commanding position at the head of a steep street. Reaching it, we found an open doorway, but no sign of any custodian. We entered and wandered along empty passages and up a great staircase so old that the stone steps were worn down, and the lower balustrades had fallen quite away. Still in quest of the collection of ancient armour, we had strayed as far as an upper and seemingly deserted corridor, our footsteps echoing loudly on the tiled floors. We were about to retrace our steps when a door at the end of the passage opened, and a gentleman appeared. To our gratification he accepted our explanation of the intrusion, and courteously invited us to enter his house to see the views from his windows; for as official telegraphist to the town, he occupied a handsome suite of rooms in the old building. His wife, too, showed no surprise at having three outlandish foreigners thus rudely disturb her Sabbath peace. She received us most graciously, and, having invited us to be seated, entered into conversation with the Man. "We were from England, then?" "Yes, but for the winter we were resident at Palma." "Palma. So we lived in Palma?" Before her husband's translation to Pollensa a few months earlier, the señora explained, they also had lived in Palma. "In what part of Palma did we reside?" "Well, not exactly in the town--just beyond the walls, at Son Españolet." "At Son Españolet!" The señora confessed to having had a summer residence in Son Españolet. "Our house is in the Calle de Mas--Number 23." "In the Calle de Mas! Caramba! What a coincidence!" The señora's summer home had also been in the Calle de Mas--Number 26. With this unexpected interest between us, we were soon all chatting away volubly, though, I fear, not always intelligibly. And when we bade the señora "Adios" to resume our quest, the señor kindly accompanied us. With his aid we succeeded in unearthing an old woman who kept the keys that opened the treasures of the town. One most interesting chamber held the records of Pollensa for many hundreds of years--from the earliest archives that were inscribed on parchment now brown with age, to the smart morocco-bound chronicles of the day before yesterday. The arms of the city--the three cypresses, the silver star, and the cock with a claw in the air, that had already become familiar to us--were there also. Among the old cross-bows and halberds were the huge blunderbusses that, in accordance with an old custom, are still fired off yearly. And with them were specimens of a much older form of offensive weapon in the shape of huge rounded stones that in olden times had been hurled from the battlements of the Castillo del Rey, aimed at the skulls of attacking enemies. Articles that were specially interesting, because in use to the present day, were the big earthenware water-jugs from which are drawn by lot the young men whom Pollensa annually contributes to the Majorcan army. There must be anxious hearts, both inside and outside of the old building, on that morning in early February when the lads whose turn has come go up to draw from the narrow mouths of the Moorish jars the numbers that are to decide their manner of life for the next three years. In the Council Chamber was a large painting by a native artist of Juan Mas, the townsman to whom belongs the honour of having first delivered Pollensa from the Moors. Juan must either have been a _malade imaginaire_, or one whose spirit was stronger than his body; for, as the story goes, he was sick abed when the Moors reached the town, and leaping from his couch, without taking time to change his night-garb, he led the people on to victory. The artist shows the hero in what was presumably the sleeping-suit of the period--loose white breeches and a shirt. We were back at the _fonda_ taking tea when a sound of chanting voices in the street beneath drew us to the windows in time to see a religious procession passing slowly beneath. Priests in rich vestments, carrying banners, walked in front; behind in a double line came a long succession of females of all classes--women with _rebozillos_ and pigtails, ladies with mantillas. A band of little girls and nuns brought up the rear; and, still singing, the company passed on, and entered the adjacent church. XV THE PORT OF ALCUDIA On being consulted respecting a conveyance that would take us to Alcudia, the younger Dromio had suggested the possibility of hiring one from a friend of his own. The distance was twelve kilometros, the cost would be about six or seven pesetas. So next morning, when we were ready to start, quite a smart trap awaited us. It was after the fashion of the penitential gig in which we had journeyed from the Hospederia at Miramar to Sóller, but it was twice as large. The owner, who drove, had dressed for the occasion. He wore a sportive cap of green and gold tartan plush, a well-starched white shirt that was lavishly sprinkled with black spots as big as sixpences (no collar, of course), and he was smoking a cigar. Bidding farewell to the two Dromios, who shook us by the hands with seeming regret and craved the favour of a recommendation to our friends, we drove away through the sweet morning air. The lovely road curved about the foot of the hill crowned by the old Convent of Our Lady of the Peak, and past many little holdings--one-acre-and-a-goat sort of places--towards the sea. The road was dry, but there was no dust, and the January sun shone warmly from a cloudless sky. [Illustration: The Roman Gateway, Alcudia] When we had reached the broad Roman road that led directly to the old walled city of Alcudia, our way led between countless ranks of great fig-trees--their spreading branches now bare and grey. So many were they, and so wide an area did they cover, that, if we had not seen figs growing in profusion at other parts of the island, we could almost have believed that all the figs in Palma came from Alcudia. Our driver was a genial man who had emigrated and made his money in Buenos Ayres, and while still young had been able to follow the worthy native custom and return with his savings to his native district, where he was now comfortably settled, farming his own bit of land and driving his own pony-trap. When we asked his advice as to where we might stay at Alcudia, he said there were two hotels at the port, which is a mile beyond the old city. The Hotel Miramar was the larger. But the proprietors of the Fonda Marina were friends of his own. They were very nice people. He could heartily recommend them. And here I may say that one of the many nice features of the Majorcans is that they are almost invariably on friendly terms with each other. If a shopkeeper happens to be out of the commodity a buyer wants, he will put himself out of his way to direct the customer to a brother vendor. Alcudia is a curiously old city--far older even than Palma, they claim. It has a distinct inner wall--Moorish--and many substantial traces of an outer one--Roman. Entering by the gate of San Sebastian--near which a much-chipped wooden figure of the saint is sheltered in a netting-protected niche in the wall--we drove through the corkscrewy streets and out by a gate on the farther side. Before coming we had decided not to stay in the ancient city. Its sanitary condition was supposed to be doubtful, and we had failed to hear of an inn there. But when we had driven through the picturesque Roman gateway and past the antique cross beyond, we looked back, and the place seemed so enticingly old-world, so like a habitation out of another century than ours, that we felt sorry we had made no real endeavour to find a lodging within its walls. However, the recollection that we would have to start about 3 a.m. in a small boat to get on board the Minorca steamer reconciled us to the prospect of living as close as possible to the harbour. The Fonda Marina was an attractive-looking new house built at the very edge of the bay. As we drove up, the host and hostess, recognizing our driver, hastened out to welcome him. Before marrying and settling down as hotel-keepers, the husband had been a steward on South American steamers, and the wife had been cook to the former proprietors of the _fonda_. Both were pleasant, frank country folk, and terms were quickly arranged. "We would like to stay here till the boat for Minorca calls to-morrow night. Can you take us for three pesetas a day?" we asked. "For three pesetas _each_?" the host inquired dubiously, as though he thought we had suggested his accepting that sum for the trio. "If for three pesetas _each_--yes, surely." So, to the evident satisfaction of everybody concerned, the easy bargain was concluded. The Fonda Marina was particularly bright and airy. Its windows overlooked the great Bay of Alcudia, from which, in olden times, expeditions were wont to sail for Africa and the Levant. These were the days when the kings of Spain built whole fleets from wood grown in Majorcan forests. There was a drawing-room whose three windows each commanded a totally different point of view. It had a good balcony, and was lit by home-made acetylene gas. Our rooms, which were clean and comfortable, faced seawards. With a very long rod one might almost have fished from their windows. A more enticing summer residence could hardly be imagined. Our hostess had promised that in a few minutes luncheon would be ready. And it was with lively curiosity that we awaited its appearance. The two Dromios had entertained us for the same sum; and we were interested to see how the catering of the Fonda Marina would compare with that of their caravansary. Seating ourselves in one of the large halls downstairs, we waited the turn of events. The mistress of the house had disappeared into the kitchen, whence frizzling sounds expressive of hurried cooking smote cheerily upon our expectant ears. Presently a slim, dark-eyed young maid, Consuelo by name, hastened out bearing an armful of plates which she proceeded to set at intervals round a large baize-covered table near us. Then she added thick glass tumblers, a tall jug of water, and a large rye loaf. "I say," said the Boy, "there are _six_ plates. We're evidently expected to dine with the family. That'll be fun." But his hopes of a treat were disappointed by Consuelo reappearing to invite us into a neat little dining-room whose existence we had not suspected. There we found a table nicely spread for three, with the elaborately monogrammed linen one sees in every Majorcan home, good cutlery, a bottle of red wine, and a siphon of soda-water. When we had taken our places our host himself placed before us a large dish of _arroz_--the excellent native stew of rice mixed with anything savoury in the form of fish, flesh, fowl, or vegetable that happens to be at hand. Fried fish followed--fresh out of the sea, and so delicious of flavour that we were inclined to question whether those caught in the bay of Pollensa could possibly be better. While we were eating it, the hostess came in to ask what we would have next--whether we would prefer an omelet or cutlets. We unanimously chose omelet, and in a hand-clap one, hot and buoyant, was on the table. Oranges and apples and black coffee completed the menu. During the meal, the solicitude of the family to see that we lacked nothing that would conduce to our comfort was almost embarrassing. The door of our dining-room stood open, and although the host and Consuelo, who served us, did not actually remain in the room they were continually passing the door with anxious eyes turned on our proceedings. And when a dish was removed the señora would come in person to inquire if it had been to our liking. The climax came when the only child of the house--Cristobal, a dear brat of five--in his desire to see the eccentric strangers eat, crept stealthily up the staircase and stationed himself on his knees just opposite the open door of the dining-room, gazing down through the banisters at us. This ingenious little manoeuvre was discovered by his father. There ensued a sound resembling applause, and young hopeful was borne off, howling, to be comforted in the kitchen. Immediately after luncheon the Man walked back towards Alcudia to sketch the view of the sea-gate of the old city, that had struck him when we drove through. And, left to our devices, the Boy and I went boating. A jolly, flat-bottomed punt belonging to the _fonda_ was moored close at hand, and just across the blue and silver water lay an enticing stretch of lovely white sand. Behind it rose a bank of low shrubs overtopped by tall pines whose foliage had been so cropped that at a little distance they bore a striking resemblance to cocoanut palms. Beyond the flat expanse of land rose a line of mountains that glowed warm heliotrope and pink in the strong sunshine. The still water was so clear that we could see every grain of the sand, every spray of seaweed, beneath. And as we drifted over the lagoon we felt as though the intervening decade had slipped back and that we were once again on the coral strand of the Pacific Islands. I had heard that beautiful and, sometimes, very rare shells were to be found in the Bay of Alcudia. So, getting the Boy to put me on shore, I wandered along by the edge of the water looking for them. But my quest proved of little avail. Shells there were, it is true, but they were very small, very fragile, and almost colourless; most, indeed, were pure white and nearly transparent. I have gathered shells in many parts of the world, and I confess I was disappointed. Still, it was the only point on which Alcudia did not far exceed any expectations I had formed of it. The comparative failure of my search must have been owing to the long continuance of calm weather. As the Mediterranean is almost tideless, it is only after a storm that wave-borne treasures are usually to be found washed up on her beaches. Perhaps I may not have looked in the right spot, though I did wander a long way round the shore in the direction of the Albufera--the tract of marshy land where rice is cultivated. So far, that I was glad when the Boy, by skilful navigation, succeeded in avoiding the many sandbanks and could run the punt in and, picking me up, row me over to the _fonda_. The Man was awaiting our return, and after taking a cup of tea we walked eastwards along the coast towards an old Moorish tower that we had seen from the distance. The sun had set. It was in the mysterious half-light of the gloaming that we mounted the steps leading to the door and found it open at a touch. Within all was darkness. The flame of a match revealed chambers showing that the tower had evidently been a home as well as a place of defence. One had evidently been the living-room of the Moorish tenants, for almost half the floor-space was occupied by the wide chimney-corner, where a host might have gathered round the blazing logs. I never see an ancient dwelling without experiencing a keen desire to know what manner of folks were the first to kindle a fire on the deserted hearth. Feeling our way up the worn stairway, we reached a floor with more empty and silent apartments. Two or three broken steps led to a cunning opening placed exactly over the front entrance. Besiegers essaying to storm the door must have fallen easy victims to the alert watchers above; and that wide hearth had room to heat an amazing lot of water. At either side of the opening were embrasures into which the defender of the fortress might dart after he had aimed his missile--scalding water, arrows, heavy stones, or whatever the fashion of his time in projectiles chanced to be. Mounting yet higher, we found ourselves standing in the open air, on a flat circular roof overlooking the wide bay. On one side of the roof were two chambers and a draw-well. The view from the top of this ancient Moorish tower was grand. The sun had long set, but the sky still held a thousand glorious hues that were reflected in the sea. No craft moved on the surface of the water, and not a living being was in sight on land. The whole lovely world seemed to belong to us. Allured by the romantic beauty of the spot, we lingered until the colour had faded and the sky had become so dark that we had to stumble our way _fonda_-wards over the rough field-track, vowing to return on the morrow to see the place by daylight. Supper was waiting when we got indoors--half-a-dozen fried eggs served with fried potatoes, cutlets, cauliflower and cheese. A home-made sausage, a mould of _membrillo_ jelly, fruit and coffee--an _outré_ combination perhaps, but it was all very tempting and nicely cooked, and we enjoyed it. Another of our charming Balearic days had ended. And so, as Pepys would say, to bed. Our wonderful luck in weather continued. We awoke to yet another perfect morning. Immediately after breakfast the Man set off to sketch one of the countless curious antique Moorish wells--known as _norias_--used for the irrigation of the crops: wells whose chains of earthenware jars are worked by the motive power supplied by mules that, yoked to a long shaft, keep walking in a circle. The mule needs no guide, as the rein, which is tied to the beam overhead, at intervals gives a gentle tug in the required direction. It was oddly pathetic to see the patient brutes, their eyes blindfolded by having straw saucers fastened over them plodding steadfastly round and round, while from the ceaseless filling and emptying of the chain of jars the water gushed in a miniature waterfall into the trenches dug between the long lines of growing vegetables. In this fertile plain near the sea, the crop at this mid-winter season appeared to consist mainly of cabbages and cauliflowers. And when we saw those grown at Alcudia we knew where the mammoth cabbages that had dominated Pollensa market had been reared. [Illustration: A _Noria_ Near Alcudia] The Boy had gone alone to do a sketch on the roof of the Moorish tower that had interested us on the previous night. As he sat working, there came a sound of steps ascending the crumbling stairs; and to his pleasure three pretty Majorcan girls appeared, come to fill their earthen water-jars at the old draw-well on the roof, a well that even after the lapse of hundreds of years still continued to yield an abundant supply of pure water. The girls were exactly the figures required to complete the sketch. So to their gratification and his own benefit the Boy put them in. In the afternoon, the Man and I walked the easy mile to Alcudia, and wandered about the quaint old town, climbing both the inner and the outer walls, wishing we knew more of its history, and lamenting that our limitations of language kept us ignorant of the meaning of these extensive and variant lines of fortifications. So we made no exhaustive inquiries, but prowled about and drew our own rough conclusions as to the relative values of the Roman and Moorish manner of building and defence. Coming upon a handsome and imposing church, we went in. It was dark and silent. Straying through the outer building, which had a vast Moorish dome, we entered a curious and beautiful inner church, whose sides were lined with the nearest approach to private boxes that we had ever seen in a sacred edifice. Returning to the outer church, we were looking at the decorations in the dimness of the side chapels. The Man had struck a match to enable us to see a grotto that was rendered still more obscure by half-drawn curtains. The sound echoing through the silence brought a lad, who was evidently intensely interested in the church and its possessions. Lighting a tall candle, he drew aside the curtains, and with something of the pride of ownership in his manner revealed to us the Christmas tableau of the scene in the stable at Bethlehem. His glory in the display was so evident that we did not remark on the contempt for perspective that had represented the Virgin and Child as giants, and the worshipping kings and shepherds as merely pigmies; nor did we venture to hint that anything in the nature of an anachronism marked the presence of a gay satin cushion at Mary's feet. The lad's soul was evidently in the work of the church. When we thanked him, and the Man offered him a coin in recognition of the willing services he had rendered us, he at first refused to take it; then, when we insisted, accepted and immediately put it into the collection-box marked "For the High Altar." Our landlord had spoken of the remains of a Roman amphitheatre that was in the district; and finding that we were interested, he volunteered to pilot us thither. And, indeed, without his escort we would never have found the place, for it lies in the heart of a farm, the way to which leaves the main road half-way between the old city and her port. A commonplace path between stone walls led to the farm-house, whose quite ordinary exterior gave no suggestion of the strange tracks of bygone races that lay hid in the ground all about. Having asked and obtained the permission that enabled us to trespass, we passed on and reached a rocky slope which bore signs of having at some time been used as a quarry. To our unskilled eyes nothing seemed to promise that our surroundings would prove other than the usual Majorcan farm placed on a particularly rocky bit of country. Our guide, who had been walking in advance, stopping suddenly, pointed to the ground at his feet. "There!" he said. And looking, we saw that we were standing on the top step of a barely distinguishable semicircle that had been roughly hewn in the rock. With a beautiful disrespect for age, a stone dike had been built right across the seats. I think we counted six rows above and five below the wall. And in the arena flourishing almond-trees had rooted deep in the once blood-stained soil. A hole in the ground allowed a peep into a cavern where the wild beasts used in the combats had been housed. But the ground held other secrets. In the solid rock that rose above the sides of the amphitheatre there were many graves--once sealed; now, having been desecrated by bygone generations of Moors, merely slits gaping to the skies. About four years earlier a strange finding had taken place within a few paces of the farm-house. An untouched Roman grave had been discovered; and our guide, who had been present at the opening, described the scene in language so graphic, and accompanied by such dramatic gesture, that we had not the smallest difficulty in following the most minute detail. He told us how, when the hermetically sealed top stone had been lifted away, the complete body of a woman, apparently young, lay before them, as she had been placed two thousand years before, with a necklace of gold round her throat, earrings in her ears, rings on her fingers. And how, as they looked in awed silence, the body that throughout these ages had maintained a semblance of humanity, had before their eyes slowly crumbled into undistinguishable dust. [Illustration: Ciudadela Seen from the Sea] XVI MINORCA The weekly steamer from Barcelona to Minorca was due to call at the port of Alcudia at 3.30 a.m. We went to bed, but not to sleep, for half a dozen intending passengers, five of them commercial travellers, had arrived by diligence from La Puebla, and the _fonda_ echoed with unwonted noise. When, about three o'clock, we went downstairs, the large hall was brilliantly lit, and men muffled in big cloaks and scarves were gulping glasses of hot coffee before leaving the shelter of a roof. In the public room beyond, some harbourmen and one of the never-absent carbineers sat smoking. A nondescript being--faded red cap on head, bare feet thrust into hempen sandals--summoned by the landlord, appeared from the outer darkness and, shouldering our baggage, passed out into the night. We followed, and walking by faith, at length found ourselves standing on the pier, the unseen water lap-lapping at our feet, an increasing group of fellow-voyagers gathering about us. Out of the dense blackness a boat with a lantern burning dimly at her prow crept beneath us and paused. Some one lit a match, revealing a short flight of steps leading to the water. Descending with fumbling feet, we reached the elusive craft below. A curious company we were, vague, indefinable, all closely packed together, and all silent. A priest, a party of commercial travellers, and a gaunt Moorish-looking being, who was wrapped from his head--on which, as we afterwards saw, he wore, probably to save bother in packing, a wide felt sombrero with a jaunty yachting cap set a-top--to his naked ankles, in a great white blanket. There was no moon, and the paling stars gave but little light as the two boatmen, standing up facing the bow, moved the heavily laden boat across the smooth swart water. Urged on with strong, unswerving strokes, the boat moved away from the invisible land, the while we sat dumb, motionless. I was just thinking that in something of these attitudes of utter and hopeless despair might the unwilling passengers of Charon endure the last dread journey across the Styx, when the Boy, who was sitting next to me, whispered, "Don't we look exactly as though we were shipwrecked people adrift on the ocean?" Then the bulk of the _Monte Toro_ loomed vaguely ahead, and as our bow neared the accommodation ladder the elder boatman, abandoning his oar, began collecting his fees of fivepence each (_dos reales_) for piloting us over the bay. The illusion had vanished. We were everyday human beings once more. Before we left London a Spanish friend had strongly advised us to travel second-class in Balearic Island steamers. He said the second saloon accommodation was justly popular with those who knew, because, first-class passengers being few, it was better placed and more commodious. The Man has cherished a lifelong theory that when journeying by sea the best accommodation is not too good. But on this occasion of our crossing from Majorca to Minorca, as the weather was still tranquil, he allowed himself to be persuaded to put our friend's advice to the test. And the experience of that night was so eminently satisfactory that it not only added to our immediate comfort but saved us much money in the future. When crossing from Barcelona our first-class cabins, which were small and had thwart-ship berths, had been situated in the stern. The second-class cabin on the _Monte Toro_, which I shared with the only other lady passenger, was large, airy, and as gay as ivory paint, brass rods, and scarlet draperies could make it. It was right amidships too, had two port-holes, and berths that for comfort could scarcely have been improved upon. The lighter with a load of pigs being still on the way, the decks of the smart little steamer were quiet. A pet donkey, covered with a scarlet blanket, was tethered under the sheltering boat deck; a glint of gold lace in the galley revealed the captain warming himself by the cook's fire. When I entered the cabin labelled "Señoras," a pretty girl in a pink petticoat was standing before the mirror engaged in exaggerating the bulk of her abundant dark hair by padding it out with quite unnecessary "rats" and cushions into twice its natural proportions. Lying down, I fell asleep to the lullaby grunting of the pigs that were being hauled on board. When I awoke it was daylight, and a glance through a port-hole showed that we were nearing a flat coast. The pretty pink petticoat had already gone on deck, and putting on a cloak and hood, I followed to join my people in a sheltered corner of the promenade deck, from where we surveyed the coast that we were approaching with the deliberate rate of speed that characterizes Balearic Island steamers. The general aspect of Minorca, the flat country, the white houses, the windmills, vividly recalled our first glimpse of Guernsey as we had approached it early one winter morning many years ago. Ciudadela, which is the oldest city in the island, was the capital in the time of the Moors. It was to the rulers of Ciudadela that King Jaime sent his demand for the submission of Minorca. From our place on deck we could see Cape Pera, the eastern point of Majorca, twenty miles distant, where the young King and his knights kindled the huge bonfires that, by alarming the Moors into the belief that a hostile army lay encamped there ready to invade them, gained him a bloodless subjection. Ciudadela, which was the seat of a bishop in 423, is still the ecclesiastical capital of Minorca, though Mahón has long superseded her in all else. The sea is rarely smooth on the Minorcan coast. It was within a short distance of Ciudadela that, not many days later, the _General Chanzy_, bound from Marseilles to Algiers, was wrecked with the loss of every soul on board with the solitary exception of one young man, whose escape was surely the most marvellous on record. As we lay to outside the very narrow entrance to the harbour, the five _comerciantes_, who were preparing to go on shore, eyed askance the tossing cockleshells of boats that were advancing ready to convey them to land. By taking the motor-car that ran the twenty-eight miles connecting Ciudadela with Mahón, which is on the opposite extreme of the island, they would save three precious hours. With the prospect of a charming sail along the coast before us we did not envy them. After a protracted delay the boats succeeded in approaching near enough to the accommodation ladder to enable the commercial men to embark. And they were off, clutching at the sides of the little boats, as with rueful faces they joggled shorewards over the choppy waves. Our chilly friend of the enveloping blanket and the naked ankles, who was a deck passenger, had, as the Man reported, spent the night perched on a grating over the engine-room--a situation where he would surely be warm enough. Where he performed his toilet no one knows, but as we neared Port Mahón he appeared transformed from a shivering bundle into a dandy. Neat black socks covered his ankles, and his brown coat, orange shirt, and green velveteen trousers revealed a nice taste for colour. His yellow-white blanket had disappeared, but he still wore his two hats. Meanwhile the pigs, whose lamentations had rent the silence of the night, were being hauled, pulled, jerked, pushed, and dumped along the deck, over the side, and into the lighter that was to take them ashore, as they went raising their voices in shrill protest. As the Boy remarked, quoting Uncle Remus, "These pigs know whar dey come from, but dey don' know whar they gwine!" As the _Monte Toro_ steamed slowly round the low cliffs that seemed to descend sheer into deep water, so little sign of broken beach or of outlying reef was there, we could see how through the ages the restless sea had nibbled and gnawed at the edges of the cliffs, which in many places were deeply honeycombed, and even hollowed into caves. There were no first-class passengers. The accommodation reserved for them just over the screw was vacant. Third-class included an interesting quartette of stubby Spanish soldiers, and one slim naval stoker, whose flexible movements and sportive bonhomie were in striking contrast to the stolid immobility of his companions. Possibly the stoker felt more at home on shipboard. Certainly he had all the life of the party; for while the others muffled their heads in shawls, and squatted on their carefully spread cotton pocket-handkerchiefs, he was never still, helping an overburdened young mother by shouldering her small boy and taking him round to visit the pet donkey, making friends with the ship's dog, or playing good-humoured tricks upon the others. The sky was flecked with white clouds--the first we had seen for many days--and the houses scattered over the flat and almost treeless table-land were all white--gleamingly white, after the old russet towns of Pollensa and Alcudia. Here and there we could see one of the great beehive-like heaps of stones that the sailors have christened "watch-towers." Though Majorca was only twenty miles distant, we already felt in a new world. There was something oddly familiar in the nip of the air. And while we breakfasted on a satisfying "home" meal of omelet, ham, hot buttered toast, and coffee, we recalled what we had heard of the lingering effects of British rule in Minorca, and felt inclined to give it the credit of the breakfast, even though the ham was served raw, and decanters of wine and jars of wooden toothpicks jostled our coffee-cups. When we again went on deck there were signs that the short voyage was approaching its end. The bearded mate of the _Monte Toro_, who had made the trip in a red nightcap, had, with a toothpick behind his ear, appeared in a uniform cap, though he retained his velveteen coat. And the most stolid-looking of the soldiers, producing a comb and a tube of pomade, proceeded to make quite an elaborate toilet on deck. Still seated on his outspread handkerchief, he combed and recombed his hair, and greased it with extreme thoroughness; though it must be admitted that when it came to washing he contented himself with a cursory dipping of his hands in the water-bucket. His face he left to Nature. The pride of Port Mahón is its three-mile-long harbour. As we steamed up its length the trim fortifications recalled certain of our own naval and military stations, notably Portsmouth. But never did Portsmouth show such a glory of scarlet-blossomed aloes as burned on the face of these fortified rocks. Our first impression of Mahón was one of unexpected brilliance. Until we were well up the harbour the town was invisible. Then, as it came in sight with its dazzlingly white red-roofed buildings perched high on the crest of the brown serrated rock, the unexpected picturesque beauty of the scene filled us with surprise and delight. Already the military influence that is so noticeable a feature of Mahón coloured the scene. Boats manned by soldiers were rowing to and from the forts on the opposite shore. Soldiers were standing on the quay as we stepped down the gangway--for, happily, there is no need to land by small boats in a harbour of such accommodating depth. And as we followed the porter bearing our luggage up the rough twisted slope of the Calle Vieja--that old street whose haphazard construction is so different from the carefully planned new ones--we passed a group of officers going down. Throughout our stay in Mahón I do not believe we ever glanced up or down a street that was not enlivened by the glamour of a uniform. There isn't a river or even a stream on the entire island, yet, in spite of the apparently limited supply of fresh water, the whole effect of the town, with its green shutters, red-tiled roofs, its pavements and carefully whitened houses, is that of extreme cleanliness. To judge by results, the pail of whitewash must be almost an equal factor in a Minorcan housewife's daily task with a broom or a duster. During our few days in Mahón we became quite accustomed to seeing women touching up the street fronts of their dwellings with a whitewash brush. Minorca is said to be rarely visited by tourists, consequently it offers but small choice of hotels. The one we had been recommended to try--the Fonda Central--was a favourite stopping-place with commercial travellers. There could be no doubt of that. Their iron-clamped chests of samples lumbered the passages and stairway. Their sprightly presence filled the large principal table in the dining-room. At a hotel that is popular with these gentlemen of the road the cooking is said to be certain to be good. At the Fonda Central it could scarcely have been excelled. The proprietor, a reverend-looking señor, superintended it in person. And his efforts on their behalf were heartily appreciated by his guests, the summons to a meal at the Fonda Central invariably falling on eagerly expectant ears. "_Arroz_ to-day?" I overheard one guest inquire as he entered the dining-room for luncheon. And having received an affirmative reply, he sat down, adjusted his napkin, grasped his spoon, and awaited its appearance with an expression of anticipatory satisfaction. The rooms were scrupulously clean, the table service brisk and punctual. Yet the house was hardly one that could be recommended to ladies. Owing to the popularity of the hotel, all the available space had been turned into sleeping accommodation; there was no sitting-room proper. One of our bedrooms that faced the street and had two good writing-tables made us partly independent, and we had a side table to ourselves at meals, but I was the only woman in a company that numbered over two dozen. The beds were comfortable, but there were no bells in the rooms. When our chamber-man wanted to attract our attention, he did it by clapping his hands loudly in the corridor outside our doors. And when we wanted anything the Boy went downstairs and demanded it. Going out to explore the town, we could not help noticing certain of the lingering effects of the British occupations which came to an end early in the last century. The windows almost invariably had the regulation English window sashes, and many of them showed white lace curtains or little muslin window blinds; and the front doors opened into passages, not into either _patios_ or sitting-rooms, as in Majorca. The British craving for sweets seemed to have proved infectious. At the hotel luncheon we had been agreeably surprised by the appearance of a sweet course, and the shop windows revealed a tempting array of bon-bons and of jams and pickles, commodities in which Majorca is sadly deficient. And one grocer had quite a number of tins of Crosse & Blackwell's Scotch oatmeal. Tobacco pipes, which are seldom seen in Majorca, were both in use and displayed for sale. Wandering up and down in the short January afternoon we came upon many odd nooks and steep streets that had a picturesque character all their own. From the top of the quaint Calle de San Roque we got an extensive view inland, with Monte Toro, some eleven hundred feet, the higher of the two Minorcan hills, in the distance. [Illustration: Calle San Roque, Mahón] Down by the curve of the bay we found the Alameda, a charming little Italian-garden-like promenade, where on summer evenings Mahón society assembles. It must be pleasant and shady there under the trees by the cool water. Even in winter it was attractive, with its close-cropped low hedges and great clumps of the vivid scarlet-blossomed aloes. Just beyond the Alameda is a great cistern, from which is drawn much of the water for supplying the town. And from that point mules toil patiently up the rock-sided slopes, laden with barrels of water for the solace of thirsty folks. Next morning, while breakfasting, we arranged our plans for the day. The Man was bent upon going at once to sketch the town as we had first seen it from the harbour. The Boy and I agreed to ramble about during the morning; and after luncheon we all arranged to go in search of some of the famous stone monuments, respecting whose origin nobody appears to have been able to arrive at any satisfactory conclusion. But before breakfast was ended the sky had become darkly overcast. We reached our rooms to find hail tapping with ice-tipped fingers at the window panes, to see lightning flashing, and to hear the rattle of thunder. Our plans perforce being modified, we waited indoors until the storm had abated a little, then sought the _Ateneo Cientifico Literario y Artistico_, of whose existence the landlord had told us. The town, which has many cultured inhabitants, boasts three Athenæums. Two are for the use of the general public. The third, which we visited, is said to be the centre of literary and artistic Mahón, and is something of the nature of a club. The Museum is open to the townsfolk only on stated days. This did not happen to be one of those days. It was to the fact that we were foreigners that we owed our instant admission. And while the storm raged without, we enjoyed a private view of the many interesting things in the _Ateneo_, notably the old ware and natural history specimens. A very fine private collection of marine flora is housed in the Museum, but it is shown only when specially inquired for, and we were unfortunate in calling at a time when the custodian of the keys chanced to be absent. Among the pictures and drawings was a merciless but irresistibly amusing caricature of what had presumably been the English Governor of the date, riding upon a donkey. The nice young lad who was showing us round blushed a little when he saw us examine it. Though he did not say so, we felt that he would have liked to apologize to us for its intrusion in the show; but our withers were unwrung. The members of the _Ateneo_ were delightfully cosmopolitan in their interests. Besides the current Spanish papers the snug reading-room showed a comprehensive array of contemporary literature, from the _Graphic_, the _Studio_, _Review of Reviews_, and _Harper's Weekly_, to French, German, Belgian, Italian, and South American journals. When we left the _Ateneo_ the hail had ceased; and though the wind was still high, the Man hurried off to see what he could make of his subject, while the Boy and I strolled into the vegetable market. The big open enclosure in the middle was empty. Round the covered sides women were sitting beside their little heaps of fruit and vegetables. After the prolonged drought from which the island was suffering, it was perhaps only natural that the supply of fresh vegetables should be limited. But with the recollection still vivid in our memory of the mountains of green cabbages that we had seen at Pollensa market, the stock appeared especially meagre. The cactus, a shrub whose existence is almost independent of moisture, flourishes on the dry rocky soil, and the specimens of its fruit that, prepared in some way, were served at dinner on the previous night, seemed larger and much finer than any we had seen in Majorca. But even at its finest the prickly pear is hardly a thing to pine for. One thing that struck us as a particularly charming survival of English tastes was the discovery of cut flowers--chiefly little clusters of roses--for sale on several of the stalls. And one woman offered us sturdy pansy roots for planting. Up to this period of our stay in Palma I had never seen either cut flowers or flower-plants offered for sale in the market, though, indeed, we saw them later. The wind had been steadily increasing. It would have been decidedly more comfortable to pass the afternoon indoors, but we were determined to seek some of the countless prehistoric remains with which Minorca is lavishly sprinkled. And after an unavoidable delay we started. The delay, be it explained, was caused by waiting for the cleaning of the Boy's boots. The service in the Fonda Central had certain limitations. It did not brush boots. The night before, the Boy had put his outside his bedroom door, and had taken them in in the morning untouched. Before lunch he sent them downstairs with special instructions that he wanted them cleaned at once. But when luncheon was over and we were ready to go out there was no sign of the boots. Inquiries brought plausible promises of their return in ten minutes--in five minutes--at once. But still they failed to put in an appearance. At length a peremptory demand for their return clean or dirty sent Pedro flying down the street, to hasten back triumphantly bearing the cleaned boots. They had been sent to a shoemaker's to be brushed! From the deck of the steamer as we rounded the coast we had caught many passing glimpses of the great stone heaps called _talayots_, and imagining that they would be easily found, we rashly set off, without either guide or direction, in search of them. After walking a little way along the San Luis road, which we had taken partly by chance, and partly, I think, because there the wind would be at our backs, we saw in the distance a large _talayot_, and rejoiced at having so quickly come within easy reach of what we were looking for. Our rejoicing was premature, for when we sought a path that would lead us there we failed utterly to find it. On either side of the long straight road were high walls a yard thick, enclosing small stony fields. Beyond these were walls, and yet again walls. It was our first near view of Minorcan country, and the impression was one of stones, stones, and yet more stones--stones absolutely without limit. The attitude of the few olive-trees within sight showed the prevalence of the north wind. They bent away from that direction, their foliage twisted awry, looking exactly like people cowering before a blast that has blown their cloaks over their heads. The gale was waxing stronger. _Our_ cloaks were blown over our heads, but still we struggled on. A peasant boy, on being interrogated, directed us to proceed farther, then take a road to the left. Hopefully following his instructions, we "gaed and we gaed," like the classic Henny-penny, until we ultimately found ourselves entangled in a maze of these same thick walls of stone. And a maddeningly ingenious maze it proved. For as we wound about, the _talayot_ appeared to dodge us, sometimes popping up before us, sometimes lurking behind; often seeming comparatively near, more often looming at a wholly unexpected distance away, and always encircled by these impenetrable gateless walls of stone. Finally, leaving me on the lee-side of a wall--it wasn't really the lee-side: in such a wind there is no lee side; but they thought it was the lee-side--the men departed, determined to scale the offending obstacles and to get there somehow. After a time the Boy returned to free me from the brambles round which the tempest had twisted my veil and chiffon scarf, holding me prisoner; and to report that, after some climbing, the Man and he had succeeded in reaching the _talayot_, and that they thought if I didn't mind some rough scrambling I _might_ manage to get there. So ten minutes later, breathless, wind-tossed and earth-stained, with torn gloves and scratched boots, I too reached the goal of our desires, to find it nothing but an immense heap of stones, with no trace of opening or any apparent reason for existence. The Man, who, in spite of the decided opposition offered by the elements, had succeeded in scaling the top of the _talayot_, declared it to be merely a greatly magnified cairn, and there and then announced his adoption of Dr. Guillemand's theory that the primary reason for the origin of these much-disputed heaps was simply the need for clearing the fields of stones. I must confess that to me the really interesting thing regarding these vast memorials of a vanished race is the fact that, while everybody is free to conjecture, no one, not even the wisest, can boast the smallest knowledge of their meaning. Just behind the _talayot_, separated from it by certain thick walls, stands another relic of prehistoric times in the shape of a _taula_, or table stone--one huge slab placed horizontally on the top of a massive upright stone. And while the Man held on to something with one hand and tried to sketch with the other, I sheltered from the blast on the farther side. It was curious to see flowers blooming even in these conditions. Amongst the loose stones at the base of the _taula_ the periwinkle was in bloom. On the patch of stone-littered soil we had crossed we noticed some small lilac daisies, their heads bent close to the ground. And all about the broad tops of the maze of stone dykes clambered the curious and beautiful clematis-like creeper that delights to luxuriate in the most arid position it can secure, and is said to pine away and die when transplanted to a garden. The sole incident of our return journey was the sudden appearance of a cap, which, floating high in air, advanced towards us round a corner towards which we were battling. [Illustration: Mahón, Minorca] XVII STORM-BOUND The Man had declared his fixed intention of taking ship for Palma that night, no matter what weather conditions should prevail. So it was with unfeigned relief I learned at breakfast that, owing to the violence of the tempest, the mail steamer we expected to travel in had been unable to leave Barcelona. The wind still continuing high, there was some doubt as to how long we would be held prisoners. But even if the steamer direct to Palma was not able to run, we might return by the shorter sea route by which we had come, landing at the Port of Alcudia, and, after a night passed at our comfortable _fonda_ there, taking diligence and train back to Palma. A return trip in the steady little _Monte Toro_ would have been a pleasure, but when we made inquiry at the shipping-office in the harbour we learned that the _Monte Toro_ had already been laid aside for cleaning and that the _Vicente Sanz_ had been deputed to take up her running. The young clerk of the shipping company, who was muffled over the ears by the upturned collar of his astrakhan-trimmed top-coat and had his cap's chin-string in active service, shook a dubious head over the prospect of the _Isla de Menorca_ being able to cross from Spain, not only on that night but for many nights to come. The prevalent wind, according to him, often raged for considerable periods. Once for two months, he solemnly declared, no mails had been able to reach Minorca. We devoutly hoped he lied. Still, in case a grain of truth might lurk at the bottom of his gloomy prognostications, we decided to have a look at the cabin accommodation of the _Vicente Sanz_, which was lying a few yards away. The black and grimy _Vicente Sanz_ looked what she was--a cargo-boat that had been hastily adapted to the passenger service. One glance at her build was enough to convince even a tyro that as a roller she would be unequalled. Right aft over the screw a few cramped four-berth cabins formed the first-class accommodation, while the sailors' bunks in the forecastle head had been fitted up as second-class. We fled the _Vicente Sanz_, convinced that only dire necessity would compel us to voyage in her. The few people we encountered in the streets were huddled in cloaks and shawls, and the custom of muffling the lower part of the face gave the women something of an Eastern appearance. Perhaps it was due to the chilling effect of the weather, but to us foreigners the Minorcans appeared to lack the gracious charm of the Majorcans. Though we saw plenty of pretty faces, the girls of Mahón did not appear so universally attractive as those of Palma. The conditions of life are harder, the climate more severe, and the hard water used may have a bad effect on the complexions. There was no distinctive native dress either, and we missed it. The blood of many nations mingles in Minorcan veins--Vandal, Carthaginian, Moorish, Spanish, British and French. Port Mahón was originally called after Mago, the youngest son of Hamilcar, brother of Hannibal. The passage of time is responsible for the corruption of _Portus Magonis_ into Port Mahón. The island, which is about the size of the Isle of Wight, has known many rulers. For several hundred years the Romans held it. About the ninth century it lapsed into the hands of the Moors, who possessed it until in the thirteenth century King Jaime, the Conquistador of Majorca, demanded and received its capitulation. Two hundred years later, Barbarossa, the pirate chief, having entered the harbour by stratagem, besieged Mahón and captured it. Early in the eighteenth century the British took Minorca and held it for fifty years, until Admiral Byng allowed the French to capture it--a "misconduct" for which, after eight months of close arrest, he was shot. To her social and commercial advantage Minorca was restored to Britain at the peace of 1763, only to be seized by France and Spain while Britain was engrossed by the American War. Watching the opportunity, Britain retaliated at the time of the French Revolution by retaking Minorca, which remained hers until, by the conditions of the peace of Amiens, the island was ceded to Spain. "Well," said the Man, as a fierce gust blew us into the portal of the Fonda Central, "when I saw this place I felt grieved that the British had ever given it up to Spain, but I must confess that at this moment I'd gladly hand it over to any nation that would take a gift of it!" In the afternoon the wind, though still turbulent, had moderated a little. We let it blow us out to San Luis, along a fine level and absolutely straight road that in summer, when the trees are in leaf, must be charming. San Luis has all the outward semblance of a French village. Even the church looked French, and was light and airy, in striking contrast to the sombre church interiors of Majorca. The streets of the village were broad, and the roads leading to it were planted on either side with trees. The whole atmosphere was so reminiscent of Northern France that it was no surprise on entering the general shop to be greeted in French by the young man in charge. He, as he confessed, had secretly been studying the language for some months, and he was evidently spoiling to try his new acquirement upon foreigners of any nationality. The French, which he spoke very fairly, but which speedily lapsed into Spanish, naturally recalled our first impression of the place, and we remarked upon it. A bright small boy, who with his father was in the shop, explained matters. San Luis _was_ a French village, he said. It was named after the French king and had been built during the French occupation of the island. The site had been laid out and the church designed by French architects. For the moment we had forgotten that the French flag had flown over Minorca, but the boy's words brought back something we had read of the fête Madame de Pompadour gave at the Hermitage of Compiègne, where the Court happened to be when the news arrived of the taking of Port Mahón. A royal fête, when fountains flowed wine, and ribbons and sword-knots _à la Mahón_ were distributed to the guests. While buying sweets in the shop, we noticed a glass jar of the black sticks of Spanish liquorice beloved of our childhood. And on a shelf was a row of genuine English cottage-loaves. The wind had obligingly blown us on our feet out the three miles to San Luis, but we wisely drove back. Sitting snugly inside the closed carriage, watching the storm-harried crops and shrubs bend before the wind, while the sun beat warmly upon us, we agreed that, if one could only travel about in a glass-sided box during gales, life in Minorca would be fine. We fully realized the necessity for the houses being built of slabs of stone nearly twice as thick as those used in the sister island. In Minorca, somehow, we did not feel quite so much aliens as we did at first in Majorca. The greatest prosperity the island had known had been under British government, and the native mind seemed to cherish a kindly feeling towards our nation. It was curious that while in Palma we were always supposed to be French, in Mahón we were at once recognized as English. A few English words have been absorbed into the Minorcan language, as people seemed proud to tell us. But the only examples we gathered were "stop," "please," and "nuncle." In the harbour, over the door of a small tavern that bore no other sign, we saw suspended a bit of a shrub. Remembering the white wand at the door of the change-house in the clachan of Aberfoyle, we wondered if that symbol also had drifted across the seas. It was with something of the sensation of marooned sailors that on Friday night we fell asleep, to awake to changed conditions. The sun shone from a clear blue sky. The sting had disappeared from the wind, and the air was comparatively mild and calm. When we descended to breakfast, the young man upon whose fragmentary accomplishment the Hotel Central founded its claim to put "English Spoken" on its cards hastened to greet us with the welcome news: "The sheep 'as arrive." Going down to the harbour, we found ocular evidence that the report was true. The _Isla de Menorca_ had arrived and would sail for Palma at 7 o'clock that evening. Our friend of the shipping office was silent and despondent. The weather had disappointed him by declining to act up to his gloomy anticipations. Going, under his escort, to look over the ship, we found her a great, broad, tubby boat. At small tables placed on trestles on deck the crew were seated at breakfast, tall bottles of wine before them. The first saloon accommodation was gay in red plush. That was its only recommendation, for it was woefully cramped in point of space, and the cabins were placed directly over the screw. The second saloon, which was amidships, occupied far more room. The steward suggested the probability of my having the large and cheerful ladies' cabin to myself. On the previous night's journey from Barcelona there had been only one lady passenger. Greatly daring, we hinted that in the event of no other señora arriving, we three might share it. When we had parted from our escort, leaving him, we felt assured, inwardly deploring the comparative calm, and ghoulishly hoping for a sudden change of weather, the Man went off to finish his much interrupted sketch; while the Boy and I walked up to the market-square, from which--Minorca having no railways--a constant succession of more or less ramshackle vehicles acting as diligences left for the towns and villages round about. Accosting the driver of the nearest, we asked its destination. "Villa Carlos." "And the charge?" "Fifteen centimos each." "When will the carriage start?" The driver made the motion of the hands that takes the place of the Frenchman's shrug of the shoulders. "When it is full," he replied, and we got in. A polite Spaniard joined us. A little delay, and he was followed by a girl with a market basket. The driver, after gazing to east and west, and north and south, without discovering sign of any additional passengers, mounted the box-seat, which he shared with two big sacks of potatoes, and at last we started. Having jolted up a long long street of white houses, several of whose owners were busy with brush and whitewash pail effacing any traces of the storm, we rattled out over two miles of glaringly white road. Villa Carlos is a white town of small houses grouped about a big square of barracks on the top of a cliff, near the mouth of the harbour. The situation is exposed, and as the wind, though childlike and bland compared to the icy blasts of the preceding days, was by no means asleep, we found our way down to sea-level, and rested on a stone bench in the shelter of a great wall close by where the water curves into the little bay of Cala Fonts. The sea was purring at our feet. Between the fortress above us and that on the opposite shore, sail-boats, like winged things, skimmed past. Producing an unexpected box of pastels, the Boy began to make a rapid sketch of the pigmy harbour with its blue water and the half circle of houses that outlined its rocky coast. It was amusing to sit there and try to picture the appearance of the various fleets that must have sailed by on victory bent. When Barbarossa, the pirate chief, flying Christian banners to deceive the guardians of the forts, steered his eleven galleys up the harbour, he must have passed the very spot where we sat. Although the scene was tranquil, there was a constant movement of life. Two women carrying sacks and small picks came and foraged among the rocks for tufts of grass or other green stuff. A military water-cart drawn by a white mule, whose harness was resplendent with scarlet tassels, moved by, attended by a party of soldiers in white fatigue uniforms, their bare feet thrust into sandals. During a temporary stillness I caught the sound of a soft little crooning voice that harmonized sweetly with the murmur of the sea. It seemed to come from quite near, but there was no one in sight. Advancing to the edge of the bank, I looked down. On a ledge of the rock a few feet beneath, a little boy attired in sketchy garments sat fishing, and as he fished he crooned softly to himself, after the habit of contented children all the world over. His piscatorial implements were even more rudimentary than was his clothing. They consisted of a few inches of rod and a shred of string. His bait was a skinny hermit crab that he had scraped out of some crevice of the rock. A poor bait doubtless, but I can assure you the catch was even poorer. Still, perched on his ledge in the warm sunshine, Enrique fished hopefully and was happy. It was so delightful to be out of the wind that we would gladly have lingered. But the hour when the Man and luncheon would be awaiting us was near. Returning to the barrack square, which was melodious with the strains of a waltz played by an unseen military band, we got into a conveyance that was on the point of starting. A young corporal of Engineers quickly followed us, saluting as he entered. He was a good-looking, reddish-fair man, a native of the island, and an admirable example of the educated conscript. Hearing that we were British, he called to another corporal of the corps who was playing with a dog near, and who, on being introduced by his friend, spoke to us in surprisingly good English. Not only so, but he understood perfectly when spoken to, a much rarer accomplishment in a foreign language. He said he had been learning our language for ten months only, and without leaving Minorca. I don't know who his instructor had been; there are said to be no English residents in Mahón, yet the soldier certainly spoke good colloquial English. As we parted he amused us by saluting and saying "Well, so-long!" Another corporal having got into the conveyance--whose only flooring seemed to be a sagging mat--we started for Mahón. He, like the first, was a specialist in signalling and telegraphy. Both of these men struck us as taking their soldiering really seriously. They had each served two years in Madrid to learn their business thoroughly, and now had charge of telegraph stations on opposite sides of the harbour from each other. On one happy possession Minorca must be most heartily congratulated. She has a most excellent British Vice-Consul. When we called on him at his house in the Calle Rosario (just off the picturesque Calle de San Roque), which was not until the last afternoon of our stay at Mahón, his reception of us was so cordial that we sincerely regretted not having called sooner. Señor Bartolomé Escudero has many qualifications for the post he holds, and not least among them is a perfect knowledge of the language of the country he represents. Not only does the señor speak English, but it is his hobby to teach it to others who show a desire to learn. It was no surprise to hear that on his visit to Minorca the late King Edward had made his Consul a Member of the Victorian Order. From the bustle of departure in the hotel we judged that some of the _comerciantes_ might be our fellow-travellers on the _Isla de Menorca_. But when we went on board and, having taken up a position on the promenade deck, were watching the passengers arrive, it was something of a surprise to see all of them appear. The little man with the long trousers; the bald man who performed surprising feats with wine-flasks, drinking with the slender spout held far from his lips in a way that held us fascinated spectators until he chose to set it down; the beautiful being who, we were convinced, could travel in nothing less refined than perfumery; the man who always, even at table, wore the latest thing in smart caps, and whom we had seen coming out of a _sombrero_ shop--all were there. Not even the gentleman who, during our voyage together on the _Monte Toro_, had used a dust-coat as a dressing-gown was awanting. [Illustration: _Comerciantes_ in the Fonda at Mahón] There was little stir on the quay. The departure of a mail boat from Mahón does not cause so much commotion as does a like event at Palma, where the long breakwater is a favourite promenade, and where everybody who has a letter to post seems to delight in rushing on board with it at the last possible moment. Many young men have to leave Minorca to seek their fortune elsewhere. I wonder if they return to that rocky island as they love to do to fertile Majorca. Just as the siren blew the first warning, a fine well-built young Minorcan hastened up the long gangway. A male friend helped him to carry his substantial trunk, and three girls followed closely. They had barely time to bid him farewell--one with a lingering embrace, the others with a warm handshake, before the gangway was withdrawn and water was widening between the exile and his native land. For a little space he allowed his feelings to govern him, and with quivering shoulders wept unrestrainedly into his handkerchief in the intervals of waving it. Then, when the boat had rounded the horn of the bay and the beautiful city was out of sight, he put away his handkerchief, lit a cigarette, and resolutely turned his face towards the land of promise. There were no first-class passengers at all. Our commercial friends, taking possession of the after-deck, formed themselves into an impromptu concert party, the little man acting as conductor, as with admirable voices they sang popular choruses. Two ladies had come on board; but the steward, taking our hint of the morning, had given them a small cabin to themselves, as doubtless they preferred, and had reserved the whole of the large ladies' cabin for us. So once again we knew the luxury of travelling second-class on a Balearic Island steamer! The voyage was pleasantly uneventful, and not rough enough to disturb us. We awoke to find ourselves entering Palma harbour, and to see the lovely land bathed in the warm glow of sunrise. Soon we were in a _carruaje_, waving farewell to the _comerciantes_ as in a band they walked towards their hotel. A few minutes later we had reached Son Españolet, had passed the house of our friend the Consul with its flagstaff and gaily painted shields, and were back again under the homely roof of the Casa Tranquila. [Illustration: An Interior in Alaró] XVIII ALARÓ The shutters of the Casa windows had been left open that the growing light might awaken us in time to catch the morning train to Alaró, where we had planned to spend the day with two friends from England. Looking out while it was yet dark, we were conscious of a lowering sky. The pocket barometer had fallen two points, and for the first time in many weeks we felt that the downpour which appeared to be threatening would be unwelcome. While we dressed, the rain began to fall sulkily. It had been agreed that if the morning opened wet the expedition would be deferred, and having had experience of the thoroughness of Majorcan rain, I was half inclined to take a gloomy view of the situation and stay at home. But the others pooh-poohed my fears and off we set. The optimists proved to be right. When we entered the station at Palma the rain had ceased, and the sun shone out on the Squire and the Lady, who were in the act of alighting from the Grand Hotel omnibus. The town of Alaró, which lies close to the base of the northern range of mountains, is connected by a light railway with the main line at Consell. Horses drag the single carriage up the slight gradient to Alaró; it returns by the force of its own impetus. At Consell the funny conveyance with its tandem horses was waiting to receive the passengers. It had probably begun its career of usefulness by being a tram-car in some other part of the world. Now a partition divided the interior into first and second classes. Disregarding the suggestion of the driver, who followed to remind us that first-class was inside, we mounted to the top, where two long lines of seats were set back to back. Our progress towards the still invisible town was slow. The efforts of the driver to induce the leading horse to put on speed by throwing stones at him happily proved unavailing. With something of the smooth motion of a boat on a canal we glided on through fields of lush grain in whose midst olives grew luxuriantly. The threatening clouds had vanished, the sun was warm, the play of light and shade on the mountains was glorious, and there was not a soul in sight. The deliberate mode of progress through the lovely country was so delightful that when the line ended abruptly where the town began we all felt sorry. We agreed that we would have been content to glide thus slowly onwards for hours. But on alighting we found our interest in the surroundings for the time being subdued by a stronger and more insistent interest in food. Our seven o'clock breakfast had been necessarily scrappy and hurried, and our first concern was to find an inn. The civil guard who had been awaiting the arrival of our car was at hand. Applied to for direction, he not only recommended a _fonda_, but in person escorted us there. The _fonda_, which was close at hand, looked clean and inviting; but its mistress, overwhelmed by this sudden intrusion of five ravenous and unintelligible foreigners, eyed us dubiously. She did not know a word of Spanish, and her husband--who was evidently the linguist of the family--was at Inca market. As she gazed blankly at us her children, from the eldest--a pretty girl in a red frock--to the baby, clustered about her, their faces reflecting the bewilderment expressed in hers. The fact that the youngsters looked round and rosy and that they all held little branches of mandarin oranges hinted that we had come to the right place for food. Hunger has a universal language. The landlady's blank expression gradually gave place to one of intelligence. Before we left her she had promised to have a meal ready at ten o'clock; and comforting ourselves with that assurance, we went out to stroll about until the half hour of waiting had passed. Wandering through the streets of the little town and peeping in at the open doors with the unblushing effrontery peculiar to the Briton abroad, we were rewarded by glimpses of many quaint interiors. In one, beside an unclassable machine, a heap of the thick fleshy leaves of the _chumbera_ (cactus) was lying. The owner of the house, a man toothless and shrivelled, but endowed with that aspect and air of juvenility that seems the heritage of age in Majorca, cordially invited us in. He had no knowledge of Spanish, but he had what was far more valuable--a keen intelligence. Indulging our curiosity as to the nature of the odd machine, he ran off to return with a handful of macaroni; then darting into the machine house, he reappeared with a perforated bowl of burnished copper, and by signs proceeded to explain the process of pressing the paste through. "But the _chumberas_?" somebody asked. "Were they the food of the mule who drove the machine?" The old man shook his head. Evidently the motive power was not supplied by a member of the ass tribe. Returning to pantomime, he raised his hands to his head and protruded his fore-fingers after the manner of horns; then indicating to us to follow, ran out into the street, where we found him pointing down into an adjacent cellar, in whose depths two sleek grey oxen were placidly chewing the cud. So it was the oxen who turned the machine that made the macaroni, and it was the prickly foliage of the _chumberas_ that their jaws were patiently munching. The little town that nestles out of sight at the foot of the great range of hills is an enterprising one. Through the open front of a building in another street we caught sight of a fine dynamo; and being invited to enter, found ourselves in the presence of the electric plant of the town. As the grey-bearded superintendent told us, Alaró was the first town on the island to have electric light installed. Manacor was the second. "And Palma?" we asked. The superintendent shrugged his shoulders. Evidently the capital city had been a bad third. The half hour of waiting had passed quickly, and even in the passing were we conscious that the landlady of the _fonda_ was exerting herself on our behalf. For while we were gazing at the oxen the red-frocked eldest girl had hastened by carrying a big dish of fish. On the marble-topped table of the dining-room was a huge black sausage, a pyramid of rolls, a decanter of red wine, siphons of soda-water, and a plate of a pickled plant that was new to us all, even to the Squire and the Lady, who had a wide experience of many countries. We were in danger of making a meal of the sausage, when the little girl brought in a dish of the omelets that every Majorcan housewife makes to perfection. The pickle had proved delicious, but all our little waitress could tell us was that it came from the sea. And we had almost reconciled ourselves to the idea that we were eating seaweed when the explanation (which proved to be correct) that we might be eating samphire occurred to us. In England in Shakespeare's time, and on the Continent to this day, the tender young shoots of samphire, which grows on rocks by the ocean, are gathered, sprinkled with salt, and then preserved in vinegar. A dish of crisp fried fish followed the omelets. Then came a second dish of fish, then an abundance of very sweet mandarin oranges, freshly cut, with long stems and plenty of their green leaves. The moment of repletion having arrived, the men lit their pipes, and for a space we lazed. But a few minutes of indolence sufficed. Calling for our hostess, we asked for the bill. She was prepared for the question, and had the amount at the tip of her tongue--eight pesetas. Leaving our wraps in her care, we separated: the Squire and the Boy to climb the mountain called the Castle of Alaró, the Man to find a subject for his brush, and the Lady and I to prowl about and enjoy ourselves in a feminine way. Our prowl first led through a part of the town where at the open doors women, and little boys with aprons tied about their thin waists, were busy making boots. I wonder how it is that the sight of a small boy at work always makes me sad. I think it is the thought of the immensity of the task he has to accomplish before his labour ends. Once clear of the town, we sauntered along a path that crossed a field, and ended at a fine old mansion overlooking an orange grove. The trees were heavy with fruit, and the air was perfumed with the fragrance of the blossoms that starred the glossy foliage. A giant bougainvillea draped a complete wall with a mantle of royal purple. The front windows were closely shuttered. Except for three dogs the place might have been deserted. But on making our way round to the back we found ourselves in the midst of the bevy of people--caretakers, gardeners, labourers, and their families--who live about and in a big country house. The wife of the caretaker, supported by her half-dozen children and an old dame who was presumably their grandmother, advanced to the wide doorway of the kitchen to greet us. From the vicinity of the stables and outhouses men and lads gathered, and stood a silent group, attentive to our attempts at Spanish conversation, which attempts, it must be admitted, were puerile. We were merely asking if we might have the privilege of seeing over the house, but we failed to make our meaning clear. Calling her little dark-eyed _chica_, who was evidently the educated member of the family, the mother conjured her to translate; but the _chica_, for the first time removing her eyes from the Lady's hat and flowing veil, only blushed and hung her pretty head. At our wits' end, we were reduced to helpless laughter, when comprehension suddenly flashed upon the mother. "Si, si, señoras," she said, and trotted briskly off, with us close upon her heels and the children and the grandmother bringing up the rear, across the spacious kitchen, along a passage, and up a stair so dark that we had to grope our way. Passing quickly from one room to another, she threw open the jealously closed shutters of the windows, admitting the light. The house was one of the many delightfully unpretentious country seats to which Majorcan aristocrats migrate during the hot weather. Everything was arranged for the sake of coolness. There were no carpets or curtains. The tiled floors and lofty raftered ceilings of the large airy rooms made it an ideal summer residence. The windows and balconies afforded beautiful and varied views towards the romantic mountains, across the fragrant orange groves, or over the far-stretching fertile plains. The noble family, we gathered, had other homes: one at Palma, and yet another at Madrid, but still they liked to return to the house that nestled so close to the great frowning mountains. When we left she sent the pretty dark-eyed _chica_ to show us the path through the orange groves, and dispatched the eldest son hotfoot after to pick us a gift of oranges from the trees whose fruit was sweetest. Neither the Lady nor I was inclined for much exertion. Climbing a little way up the hill, we sat down in the shade of an olive-tree and ate oranges and gossiped. At our feet the ground slipped down into the valley, to rise on the farther side in the mountains, on whose crest we could see the remains of the towered battlements above which, in the seventeenth century, the two heroes Cabritt and Bassa kept the Majorcan flag flying, after the remainder of the island had surrendered to the usurper Alphonso IV of Aragon. We scanned the hill-side in vain for any trace of the climbers. And while we lingered the clouds began again to gather, and scarves of mist hid the summit. The air had turned a little chilly, and we were passing the mansion on our way back to the town when we noticed a charming loggia that was built over a barn in which men seemed to be crushing olives. Climbing the few steps that led to the open-sided loggia, we found it furnished with a couple of rush-bottomed chairs. Carrying them to the front of the balcony over which the gorgeous bougainvillea ran riot, we sat, under the row of bottle gourds that hung up to dry, looking across the wealth of rich purple blossom in which the bees were busy, and over the orange grove towards the luxuriant plain. A shower at length drove us back to the shelter of the dining-room at the _fonda_, where the big logs that burned on the open hearth glowed a welcome. There the Squire and the Boy joined us, wet from the rain that had caught them when half-way down the mountain, but by no means weary. They described the path as having been a zigzag mule-track all the way. It was rough walking, but presented no difficulty whatever. [Illustration: Alaró] Near the foot of the precipitous part of the climb they had passed the first of the fourteen stations of the Cross, the final one being at the Chapel of Our Lady of the Refuge on the summit of the mountain. Each station was marked with an iron cross set in a rough cairn of stones, and each exhibited a pictorial tile representing the incident commemorated. The rough mule-track had ended at the towered gateway, which was in fine preservation. Just within was a piece of smooth turf shaded by trees. The remainder of the narrow crest of the mountain was rocky and tumbled. Round the less precipitous sides were the remains of battlements and watch-towers. The side farthest from the plain was naturally so steep and impossible of assault as to need no artificial defence. The views from the mountain-top they had found magnificent, and worthy of a much harder climb. To the north the great mountainous range that culminates in the double peaks of the Puig Mayor had barred the prospect; otherwise most of the island had lain open before them. Inca, Binisalem, Muró, and other cities of the plain were visible, and the bays of Pollensa, Alcudia, and Palma. The hills beyond Artá, the hill behind Lluchmayor, Cabo Blanco, and the outlying island of Cabrera were all distinctly seen. The point that struck the climbers as curious was that, though all lay so clearly before them, the height prevented their being able to distinguish any sign of life or to hear any sound from below. The effect was almost as though the lovely land on which they looked had been deserted. When they turned their attention to their immediate surroundings, the only sentient creatures they discovered were a small boy who was in charge of the chapel, a great eagle that soared overhead, and a few hens that clucked and scraped the barren ground outside the building that had once been the abode of some hermit monks, but which was now an _hospederia_ in the care of the boy's parents. In the little chapel was a beautiful statue of the Virgin, while the sacristy held a sad relic in the form of two rib-bones of the brave defenders of the Castle of Alaró, who, after having been starved into surrender, were cruelly burned to death. The chapel, perched up among the mist-wreaths and mountain eagles, was very small; so small that a large covered veranda had been added to the front for the shelter of the pilgrims who flock thither in order to obtain the forty days' absolution gained by the attainment of its summit. Just beyond the veranda is a sheer drop down. The prospect to be obtained from the out-jutting rock our climbers described as awesome. They were half-way down on the return journey before the mist that had been floating about caught them in its clammy embrace. The ascent had occupied about two hours, the descent nearly one. Bidding our hostess farewell, we went up the street to a café for afternoon coffee. It was an unlucky hour. The schools had just closed for the day, and though the café was only a dozen paces from the _fonda_, we reached it with a train of children in close attendance. Our demands for coffee with milk and cakes and _enciamadas_ caused a flutter in the breast of the comely mistress of the café. Summoning her daughter Catalina--who was just seventeen and even more than usually attractive--from the corner where she was making pillow-lace, the mother thrust a large decanter into one hand, a big basket into the other, and dispatched her for supplies. Then she fanned the charcoal stove, placed a tall wine-glass, in which were two pieces of sugar and a spoon, before each of us, and retired behind the little bar to await the return of Catalina. As we too waited, our attention was attracted to the window nearest our table, to find a row of small girls' heads, the eyes gazing fixedly on us, lining the bottom of the lower panes. As the moments passed the numbers increased. Girls with babies in their arms augmented the back row. Taller girls peeped furtively from the sides, and when caught affected to be engaged in reprimanding the curiosity of their juniors. Two little girls, who had arrived too late to secure any place, in desperation opened the café door and peeped in. Needless to say, their boldness was rewarded with ignominious expulsion. It was with something of the sensation of menagerie animals when awaiting the meal that people have paid extra to see them consume that we looked for the return of Catalina. It came at last, and in the twinkling of an eye the milk was emptied from the decanter into a tin pannikin and set on the fire; and the contents of her basket--which proved to be neither _enciamadas_ nor cakes but rather limp _bizcochos_--were heaped on a dish on the table before us. The children who had been so lucky as to secure front places to see the lions fed got good value. We were all thirsty; the coffee-pot was kept busy, the pile of _bizcochos_ steadily diminished. When we had finished and went over to where Catalina had modestly resumed her lace weaving, the spectators changed their window the better to accommodate their desires to the altered conditions. When we said good-bye and left they accompanied us--babies and all. One gipsy-looking child ran in front, glancing back at us. The rest trotted in our wake, making occasional momentary delays to call round corners and into doorways for their friends to come and see the wild beasts. When the circus, as the Squire called it, had reached the outskirts of the town, many of our adherents fell away. But a staunch band of eight or ten remained faithful, and not only escorted us on our walk and back to the car station, but whiled away the time by chanting and performing dances for our better entertainment, one male infant, known phonetically as _Tomeow_, gravely turning a succession of somersaults before us, and we wondered if the religious dances that are annually performed in the church on the feast of San Roch, the patron saint of the town, which occurs on the 16th of August, accounted for their rudimentary knowledge of the art. Constant to the last, they formed a semicircle about us while we awaited the departure of the train, which took the place of the tram-car in which we had arrived, and listened wide-eared as we chatted with a corporal of the Civil Guard. "The children of Alaró seem good," remarked the Lady, who has the gift of saying graceful things. "Good--perhaps," allowed the corporal, frowning disapprovingly at our satellites, "but curious!" There was no possible repetition of our delightful canalboat cruise of the morning. Night had fallen when we began the return journey in one of the smallest railway carriages in existence. When we reached Palma rain was falling, and the view from the carriage window, of a wet platform with the lamplight falling on dripping umbrellas, vividly recalled the moist far-off land of our birth. But a few hours later, when we left the Grand Hotel, where we had dined, the stars were shining above the dimly lit mediæval streets. Palma was herself again. [Illustration: In the Dragon's Cave] XIX THE DRAGON CAVES AND MANACOR Majorca has two groups of stalactite caves that are reputed to rank among the finest in Europe--the Dragon Caves at Manacor, and the Caves of Artá which are near the most easterly point of the island and far from a railway. Life at the Casa Tranquila was so pleasant that none of us really wished to leave it; yet a sense of duty urged that these sights must not be ignored. At first we thought of visiting one or other of the series of subterranean wonders, but opinion seemed so equally divided as to which was the finer that, in perplexity, we finally decided to see both and judge for ourselves. The weather favoured our reluctant departure. The sun had just risen into a cloudless blue sky when the bells of Bartolomé's chariot jingled at the door, and with the crumbs of a hasty breakfast still clinging to our lips we hurried stationwards to catch the morning train for Manacor. We had spoken of going first to Artá, and a day or two later returning to Manacor and the Dragon Caves; but on the journey we made a chance acquaintance that had the effect of changing our plans. Two Englishmen, arrived that morning from Barcelona and giving five days to a rapid survey of the island, were going to the Dragon Caves. It was quickly arranged that we should view them in their congenial company. As a place to stay at in Manacor our Majorcan friends had recommended the Fonda Feminias, and there we went on arrival, to eat an early lunch and secure rooms for our return. The _fonda_, which has an architecture peculiarly its own, is situated right in the centre of the town. The large loggia, off which most of the sleeping apartments open directly, overlooks the fine church that is the pride of Manacor. My room, which was on the floor beneath, had a nice little sitting-room attached. I mention this specially because a lack of sitting-rooms is usually the weak point of Balearic _fondas_. The charge, arranged on arrival, was four pesetas a day, including the little breakfast. Lunch was quickly served in a large dining-room that was as quaintly original as the rest of the house. It had ten doors, four corner cupboards, and no windows. Light was admitted through two small cupolas in the roof. No time was lost. When we had eaten, a carriage was waiting to convey us to the caves. Just at the moment of starting a man, appearing from nowhere, silently seated himself on the box. He turned out to be the guide for the caves, an indispensable individual. The road to the coast, for one that was neither particularly steep nor crooked, was amazingly uncomfortable to drive over. Cruel patches of the sharp stones with which the roads are mended scarred the way. We bounced here, and bounced there; now surmounting an acclivity and catching a glimpse of the blue sea, now dipping into a hollow. It was a gratuitously bad road; evil alike for driving, walking, or cycling over. When we reached Puerto Cristo the carriage drew up beside two empty vehicles at the back door of a little _fonda_ that is said to be famed for its omelets and its pretty girls. Passing through a room where a table was set for lunch, we reached a trellised enclosure overlooking a charming little cove on whose waters a boat was sailing. The silent guide, who had lingered indoors to prepare his acetylene lamps, appeared with them already lit; and, following in his wake, we set off, past a few fisher houses in whose doorways sun-tanned boys were baiting lines, across a bridgelet that spanned a slender arm of the sea, and up a rough track over a moor so brown and bare that it might have been in Devon. Judging by outward appearance, it was the last place where one would have anticipated finding a cave of even the smallest dimensions. As we went we met two parties of Spaniards who had been seeing the caves and were now returning. It was for them that the carriages waited and the omelets were being prepared at the _fonda_ of the three pretty girls. Just as we were wondering if our taciturn guide would ever consent to humour us by producing a cave, he headed for an opening in a stone wall. Entering, we were confronted with a barred window and a locked door set in the side of a slope. Producing a key, the guide unlocked the door, then when we were all inside he carefully re-locked it. A breath of warm exhausted air met our faces. The guide, still preserving his impenetrable reserve, removed his coat, and the Boy, fortunately remembering the advice of an experienced friend, counselled us to follow his example. An hour and a half of hard going was before us. The temperature, which was high even in the entrance hall, was likely to increase as we got farther underground. So the men in shirt-sleeves and myself in a thin net blouse meekly pursued our dumb conductor down a flight of roughly cut steps that seemed to lead right into the bowels of the earth. Walking in advance, the guide flashed his light upon all sorts of varied wonders, from caverns so hideous and grimy that they looked as though coated with the refuse of a coal mine, to banks of glittering crystals or stalactites of glistening semi-transparent amber. At one point he drew aside, and stood mutely pointing in advance. Thinking he meant us to move on, I was walking forward, when he drew me back just in time to prevent my stepping into a lake so clear and pellucid as to be absolutely imperceptible. That was the beginning of the water effects that lend enchantment to the Caves of the Dragon. The Dragon himself is but a poor thing, diminutive and wholly unworthy his surroundings. We saw him. He was pointed out, sneaking up a pillar, a truly undignified position for any creature owning the romantic and awe-inspiring cognomen of dragon. And, speaking confidentially, the humble name of lizard would suit him better. The lakes and pools are indisputably lovely, and the charm of the Cave of Delights quite roused our enthusiasm. Imagine an azure lake overhung by myriads of glistening pendants. Near the centre a low pile of stalagmites suggestive of a fortress rose out of the water; from the miniature fortress extended a reef in the form of a cross. Stepping thereon, the guide set fire to a piece of ribbon which illumined the farthest recess of the cave, revealing new and unguessed beauties, and rendering the scene one of almost supernatural loveliness. Then came more caves and yet more. Up steps we went or down steps, getting hotter and hotter in these airless depths as in single file we "ducky-daidled" after our laconic conductor. Once, deep in some gruesome cavern, he announced that the name of the place was the Cave of the Catalans, and in reply to our question explained, with something of animation in the recital, that some years ago, before the entrance to the caves was guarded by lock and key, two young visitors from Spain had conceived the idea of exploring the caves without the aid of a guide. Twenty-seven hours later they were discovered in that repellent spot, deep in a dismal subterranean passage. It must have been soon after hearing this suggestive story that some one asked the guide if he could find his way out without a light. And when he confessed that he could not, we all secretly wondered how long the gas in the lamps we carried was calculated to burn; but we were all too considerate of the feelings of each other to express our thoughts. It was distinctly reassuring to remember that if the worst had befallen, if the man on whose guidance we trusted had been seized with illness or had met with an accident and the lamps had gradually flickered out, all we need do would be to sit down and wait; for the driver of our carriage, finding we did not return, would have routed out another guide, and we would soon have seen the lights of the search party gleaming among the pendants and pillars. At one point we were refreshed with water from a cleft in the rocks, served in a tumbler that was kept inverted over a conveniently placed stalagmite. Then we resumed the tramp. The sights seemed to be endless, and one of the best--the Lake of Miramar--was reserved for the last. About fourteen years ago this extensive waterway was made the subject of special exploration by M. Martel, the French expert. With the aid of a collapsible boat he spent a week in investigation, and at its close was obliged to leave the farthest reaches of the caves yet unexploited. Hot, clammy and tired, we had returned to the cooler air, and, resting upon the stone benches within the doorway, were refreshing ourselves with tea hot from a Thermos bottle, when the guide, suddenly dropping the mantle of reserve that had cloaked his pilotage, told us the story of the discovery of the Dragon's Caves. As he sat, a _coca_ in one hand, a square of chocolate in the other, he became almost loquacious for so taciturn a being. The history proved curiously limited for such remarkably extensive caverns. It began one wet day about thirty years earlier, when his father, who had been out shooting, took shelter in a cleft of the rocks to eat his breakfast. Happening to drop a loose pebble through a chink in the ground, he was surprised to hear by the sound that it had fallen into a cavity of unexpected dimensions. That accidental observation led to the research that opened the Dragon's Caves to the admiration of a curious world. Clothed and cool, though dusty and soil-stained, we regained the open air, where a group of small orchid plants growing beside the path attracted us. They were the fly orchis, and unusually perfect specimens. The neatest, most insect-like little flies I have ever seen poised amid the green leaflets on the slender stems. A glorious sunset was flooding the sky with colour as we lurched towards Manacor over the brutal road. The tall towers of the church of this city of the plain stood out sombre and imposing against glowing roseate banks of cloud. We had been discussing the puzzling appearance of the building, which had a faint resemblance to the Russian style of ecclesiastical architecture, and none at all to any other known school. Scaffolding still encircled the high steeple, and as we drew near the church it appeared as though exciting operations were in process. A constant stream of people entering the edifice was jostled in the passing by a rush of men, lads and boys, who were hurrying out propelling or dragging hand-carts and trolleys laden with blocks of stone, of which heaps were already piled about the exterior of the church. A useful rule in travelling, if you want to see what is going on, is to follow the crowd. Moving with the throng into the church, we stood astounded at the scene of destruction before us. The interior of the lofty building was a riot of wild commotion. The air was full of fine dust. By the light of the lanterns which showed dimly through the obscurity, we saw the great white dome rising to the sky; and on the floor beneath, two huge pyramids of broken stone and mortar. On the crest of the mounds vague figures were visible, working with almost feverish energy to remove the vast heap of _débris_. The air was vocal with the noise indispensable to violent and concerted action. And the raucous sound of the wheels grinding on the stone floor as a willing band seized each laden truck to propel it out of the church added to the unholy din. [Illustration: Manacor] The whole scene was so unexpected, so foreign to the manners of the twentieth century, that to our bewildered minds it almost appeared as though history had slipped back and we had become spectators of some iconoclastic mob engaged in the sacking of the church. It was a relief to find the labour sanctioned by the presence of priests, who looked with benign approval at the frenzied efforts of the workers. One of the number, seeing that we were strangers, and probably guessing at our bewilderment, kindly approached, and, with quiet pride illumining his fine old face, volunteered an explanation of the exciting scene before us. The clergy of Manacor, seeing the need of enlarging their already important church, had appealed to the people. The people promptly agreed to help, and the work of extension was quickly proceeded with, the labour being entirely local, even the statues that adorned the niches having been carved by one of the priests. The walls of the new church, gradually rising, enclosed the ancient building, in which service continued without intermission to be conducted. When the new walls were complete, the floor of the edifice was thickly covered with pine branches; and after Mass had been celebrated on the very morning of our arrival at Manacor, the ancient walls that had so well served their purpose were pulled down. After the inevitable blinding dust had settled a little, the labour of clearing away the _débris_ began. And we had returned from the Dragon Caves just in time to witness the multitude of helpers exerting their utmost strength to restore by lamplight the interior of the church from chaos to order. When we first viewed the scene of demolition the labour required appeared so herculean that it seemed as though toil that was merely human could make but little impression. But four hundred willing hands can accomplish marvels, and when we returned two hours later one great mound had been mostly cleared away, and the other was visibly diminished. With unabated enthusiasm the work was proceeding. When roused to their utmost effort there is no lassitude about these sturdy Majorcans. Strapping lads, shouting the while, seized each laden barrow and dashed off to empty it outside. Small boys imagined they were helping by pushing behind with an admirable assumption of strength, and adding their shrill voices to the clamour. Some of the smallest, with an air of importance, carried out single stones. Near where we stood a hole had been opened in the floor, and into the vacuum beneath a band of youthful assistants was emptying baskets of small stones and dust. Most of the labourers were of the thick-set Majorcan type, but at regular intervals a tall handsome young man--a veritable son of Anak--clad in a pink shirt, light blue trousers, and a wide felt hat, appearing out of the mist, advanced to the edge of the gaping hole and discharged into it the contents of a large basket of rubbish. He seemed to work alone, speaking to no one, and moving with the silent precision of a machine. The women kept strictly aside, taking no part in the work. In dark corners of the ancient chapels that had been left untouched, a few black-robed old women knelt in prayer. And near us a group of pretty girls stood tittering and whispering. At one moment human nature proved too much for some of the youths who had been passing us in relays, bearing on their heads great bundles of the pine branches that had been laid down for the preservation of the flooring. Making a species of organized sortie, they rushed towards the girls, brushing their faces with the ends of the dusty greenery. The girls, giggling and squeaking, fled before the onslaught, but soon stole back to resume their position as spectators. When work ceased for the night an incredible change had taken place in the interior of the church. And next morning, as we dressed, the sound of boys' voices chanting came in through our open windows. The people were already worshipping in their new church. For one evening only had service been suspended. During the labours of the previous night the women had perforce remained quiescent. It was now their turn to help. Active females carrying brooms were to be seen hastening through the sacred portals, to emerge later vigorously sweeping clouds of dust before them. One small girl had a baby tucked under one arm, while she industriously plied a broom with the other. When we took a final peep into the church before seeking the afternoon diligence for Artá, the yawning fissure in the floor had been cemented over, and rows of benches stood ready placed for evening service. An inconsiderable heap of rubbish in a side aisle was all that remained of the apparent desolation of the day before. [Illustration: Artá] XX ARTÁ AND ITS CAVES We met the diligence for Artá at Manacor station, where the single-line railway ends on a track so grass-grown as to suggest that it had, inadvertently, strayed into a field. Were the engine to diverge a yard or two from the rails it would wreck the stationmaster's goat, make havoc of his family washing, and devastate his prickly-pear patch. The Artá diligence, a spacious vehicle, supplied with good horses and a capital driver, leaves the station yard immediately after the arrival of the afternoon train from Palma. Should a sufficiency of passengers arrive by the morning train, a diligence would start then also; but the afternoon coach is a certainty. The distance is 20 kilometros, and the fare is three reales (sevenpence-halfpenny). The Man and I had secured the front seats. The Boy was inside with a typical set of travellers by diligence--a priest, a soldier, one of the very new recruits who had a six days' leave to visit his home; a specimen of the pleasant elderly countryman who is the inevitable accessory of such a journey, and two commercial travellers that we stopped to pick up as we passed a draper's shop in town. Our driver was a man of decision. Little time was lost over starting. Five minutes after the train had entered the station we dashed out of it at a pace that threatened to make the distance between us and Artá seem far too short. It was a perfect evening for driving. There was no wind, and the rain of the previous night had laid the dust. The road was a good one, broad and level--very different from that over which we had bumped and joggled on the previous day. The sinking sun cast a glamour over a land that was at any time beautiful. The swift motion was gloriously exhilarating. Perched up on the box seat, the Man and I felt radiant with the sheer joy of being alive as we drank in the sweet bean-scented air, and watched the approach of the picturesque groups of farm folk who were returning townwards from their day's work in the fields. Our driver, Canet by name, seemed to be popular. Sunburnt faces looked up to smile him a greeting. Laughing girls crowded into ramshackle carts exchanged gay repartee in the passing. As we drove onwards the surroundings became less flat, and in the distance a range of sugar-loaf hills--the mountains of Artá--appeared. About half-way on the journey we jingled through a nice little town, San Lorenzo, where grape-vines grew on the walls of the houses that lined the narrow streets, and old, old wives sat on the doorsteps taking their ease. Beyond San Lorenzo hills rose about us, and the road ran between tracts of uncultivated ground. Here, too, the road was busy with returning labourers in delightfully quaint groups. Many of the men wore their blue cotton shirts outside, like blouses, and all wore wide-brimmed hats of straw or felt. Each family party was accompanied by an animal--an ass or an ox, a goat or a black pig. What struck us as being funniest of all was to see the understanding way in which, in every instance, the pigs trotted sedately beside their owners, exactly like well-bred dogs. Then the road rose high between pine woods whose undergrowth was thick with the withered blossoms of heath, and we traversed a mountain pass up which the men walked, before rattling inspiritingly down the farther side. We were still some distance from the town, and the wayfarers we overtook had their faces turned towards it, when it became quite dark--too dark to distinguish anything except vague outlines of mountains. Leaving the smooth white road along which we had sped so bravely, we entered a narrow street thickly strewn with a misery of sharp jagged stones that made advance a penitential progress for both man and beast. And Canet, turning towards us, said impressively:-- "We are in Artá!" Our destination in Artá was the Fonda de Rande, which had been warmly recommended by our friend the padre at Palma, but when the coach drew up in front of the Café Mangol we alighted, to find ourselves literally in the embrace of its voluble landlord. By pledging our word to hire a carriage from him on the morrow we obtained our release, and with Canet acting the dual part of guide and porter, we retraced our steps for a few yards along the dark, stony streets. In speaking of the Fonda de Rande the padre had described the Señora Rande's cooking as being excellent, her charges moderate, and her house the cleanest in Artá. After two nights' experience we not only endorse his statements, but go further, and say that her house is the cleanest in all Majorca, and that is saying a very great deal. Within half an hour a meal was before us--a dish of pickled fish, another of fresh fish, hot lamb cutlets and fried potatoes, sweet oranges, and plums of the señora's own drying. Our rest that night was luxurious. The beds were soft, the blankets light and downy. We slept until the hour when a man promenaded the town blowing blasts on a seashell to call the people to their work. Before we had left our rooms ponderous steps resounded in the passage outside our doors. It was the proprietor of the diligence, brother to the host of the Café Mangol, come in person to ask at what time we would require a carriage for our visit to the caves. Having promised to be ready an hour later, we descended to the dining-room, where, after we had drunk our glasses of coffee, the señora insisted on refilling them: an attention without precedent in our experience of Spanish hostelries. Breakfast over, we sallied out in quest of provisions for our little expedition, a somewhat difficult matter, for the shops at Artá are even more independent of signs than those of the other Balearic towns. A little questioning revealed a quite unexpected house to be a baker's. The apartment next to the street was fitted up with a counter; but its window was closely shuttered, its shelves empty. To all appearance the entire business of the establishment was carried on in the bakehouse at the back, where, in full view of a pile of egg-shells and other evidences that proclaimed the genuineness of the ingredients employed, we bought little square sponge-cakes hot from the oven. Boldly entering another shop, which we knew to be a greengrocer's by the orange-hued gourd and basin of parsley on the doorstep, we found it half shop, half weaver's workroom. In one part the mistress and her daughter sold vegetables, boots, and many other requirements of both outer and inner man. In the other the portly father wrought at his hand-loom, weaving the strong dark-blue cotton material so much in use locally. Having bought a supply of sweet little mandarin oranges at twopence a dozen--just half the Palma price--we returned to the _fonda_ to find the carriage, with Canet and the two horses that had made such light work of the diligence, waiting in readiness to take us to the caves. [Illustration: Towards the Parish Church, Artá] It had been so dark when we entered Artá that it was not until we left the town and looked back that we realized how picturesquely it was situated. The blue mountains form a wide circle round it, and in the centre of the clustered houses a hill crowned with church towers rises grandly. Artá is a district of rural occupations. The fresh butter of the island is made at Son Servera, a village close by. On our way coastwards we met many interesting and paintable figures. Here an old man with a scarlet and yellow handkerchief tied under his hat, and a shaggy goatskin bag slung over his shoulder, herding a flock of kids; there a handsome girl, whose petticoat had faded to an adorable shade of crimson, and whose fingers were busy plaiting the strands of the palm-leaves as she watched by a cow that looked, as so many of the island cattle do, like an Alderney. The fields on either side of the road were planted with flourishing trees of almond and olive and fig. Assuredly in their season no traveller need go hungry in any Majorcan road. He has only to help himself. They say that if a native sees a stranger taking his fruit, in place of upbraiding he will volunteer with sincere good-will to show him the tree the flavour of whose fruit is finest. At a lonely bit of the way a contented-looking little group, consisting of a fine, stalwart lad in light-blue cotton, a smiling matron in workaday dress, and a plump black pig, stood at the corner of a field by the road to watch us go past. As we neared them the radiance that illumined their faces found reflection in those of the Boy and Canet. "It's the soldier who travelled in the diligence last night," the Boy explained. "That must be his home. He is one of the new recruits, and had six days' leave to spend with his mother. Don't they seem to be enjoying it?" And they did. Even the black pig radiated supreme contentment. High up on the left as we journeyed we saw a little ancient-looking town grouped about the lower slopes of an eminence whose height seemed to be crowned by a castle surrounded by defences. It was Capdepera, a relic of antiquity of which we knew but little, and instantly resolved to learn more. The way to the Dragon Caves had been across a bald moorland. That leading towards the Caves of Artá was down a fertile valley, that through the efforts of skilled husbandmen had been brought to a high state of cultivation. In a field by the wayside clumps of narcissus were blooming unappreciated, and as we came near the cliffs we saw that their rocky sides were yellow with a species of gorse which grew in cushioning clumps. When we were within easy distance of a fine, sandy bay, flanked on the east by a towering cliff, a man left the solitary house which stood in the middle of the valley and came towards us. "That is the guide," Canet said, pointing his whip-handle in his direction. The guide to the Caves of Artá was a lean, middle-aged man, whose well-cut face suggested an innate appreciation of humour. When we stopped he mounted to the box, and we went on slowly, for the sandy road was heavy. A little farther on we drew up again. A woman, supporting with both hands a tray containing something edible, had left the house and was hurrying towards us across the field. When she got near we saw that the tray contained three of the large pastry turnovers that, in outward appearance, at least, so strongly resemble Cornish pasties. "I could do with one of these turnovers. I wonder if she sells them?" said the Boy, as she climbed to the box beside her husband and the genial Canet. "A turnover wouldn't come amiss," agreed the Man. "I suppose she sells them." But the woman did not offer her provender to us. The guide got one. I suspect Canet of getting another. The third was probably the cook's own dinner. Leaving the carriage, we turned to the left of the lovely bay, on whose sands rollers were breaking, and walked along the mile of delightful path that runs along the side of a precipitous pine-covered cliff. Beneath us roared the sea; from above came the murmur of wind-tossed pines, with whose perfume the air was fragrant, but the way was warm and sheltered. Our guide, who accompanied us, kept modestly in the rear. It was only when we waited for him, and discovered that he was engaged lunching on one of the hot pasties, that we understood his reluctance to join us. To judge by eyesight, the pasty was stuffed with spinach and prunes. To judge by another sense it was stuffed with garlic. We were naturally eager to compare the attractions of the Caves of Artá with their rivals of Manacor. A striking contrast was evident from the first sight. The approach to the Dragon Caves had offered no suggestion of the glories within. The exterior of the Caves of Artá, viewed when, turning away from the sun, one mounted the big flight of steps leading to the vast opening in the face of the cliff, was sublime. When we had climbed the steps and were standing in the entrance-hall under the great overhanging roof, where maidenhair-fern grows green, the guide, kneeling on the ground before a lot of tin vessels, made a stock of acetylene gas to light our journey through the darkness. He had removed his hat, and as, with his mind intent on his work, he carefully mixed the ingredients, he suggested some magician preparing for some uncanny rite. While he was occupied with his incantations we surveyed our surroundings, and for the first time were able to understand how the Moorish refugees, who at the capture of Palma fled in vast numbers to the caves, were able, for so protracted a period, to defy the army of the Conquistador that had followed them thither. Beneath the wide opening the cliff falls precipitously to the sea. High above it the overhanging roof forms a protective hood. The rocky sides and floor of the caves afforded an endless supply of the rough-and-ready missiles popular in those days. A more perfect natural stronghold could hardly be imagined. And but for a clever stratagem on the part of two brothers, members of that band of intrepid young nobles who so ardently supported their valiant leader, the Moors might have held out interminably. These two brothers scaled the cliff, and, having reached the point directly above the mouth of the cave, threw lighted firebrands down upon the huts and defences that were clustered on the rocky shelf beneath, with the object of setting the huts on fire and filling the caves with suffocating smoke. But the caves were so extensive that even this ruse did not quickly prevail. And it was not until Palm Sunday, 1230, three months after the taking of Palma, that the fugitives surrendered. Shouldering an iron rod, from which were suspended two lamps, the guide announced that he was ready to start. There was no need to take off coats. The caves were so spacious and lofty that the temperature was pleasant, and although the distance to be traversed was considerable, the work of seeing them was not fatiguing. The attitude of our present guide was different from that of the former. The guide who showed us the Dragon Caves trotted us through them in the business-like fashion of a man who is paid a fixed sum for performing a stated task. He wasted few words, and was, we thought, a trifle stingy in the matter of magnesium wire. The moment of his expansion came only after unexpected tips had been added to the amount of the regulation fees. But Amoras, guide to these Caves of Artá, showed them as though, after even thirty-five years of performance, he still joyed to reveal their glories. His interest also was a hereditary one; his father, who had held the post before him, had been killed by falling from the cliff path to the rocks beneath. Half-way between the bay and the caves, a cross set in the side of the cliff marks the place of the tragedy. [Illustration: Entering the Caves of Artá] Amoras took the pace slowly, and after lighting us through a succession of vast caverns, paused to remark, with a quiet smile of enjoyment at our surprise, "We are only now at the end of the entrance-hall." The drought that prevailed without appeared to have had a malign influence even on the water supply of the Caves of Artá. Pointing to a hollow enclosed by stones, Amoras told us that was the well, which, for the first time in his thirty-five years of experience, he now saw dry. Before we had traversed a tithe of the extent of these capacious caverns we understood how the fifteen hundred Moorish refugees, men, women, and children, with their flocks and herds, an immense quantity of grain, and many precious belongings, had found hiding-place within. The Manacor Caves are fantastic and wonderful. Those of Artá are stupendous, overwhelming in their gloom and grandeur. Any conception I had ever formed of cavernous magnificence was far exceeded; and to me the Caves of Artá were infinitely more impressive than the Caves of Manacor. When I tried to express this, Amoras said devoutly:-- "The Cave of the Dragon is an oratory chapel. This is a cathedral." Countless glories are concealed in the vast caverns. Stalactites so large that to try to calculate the length of time occupied in their formation makes the brain reel. Statues as complete in detail as though carven by the chisel of a sculptor. Cascades of glistening crystal. The huge crouching figure of a winged Mephistopheles, and in the Hall of the Banners flags--marvels of immobile drapery--that stood out at right angles from the pillar whence they were suspended. It was in the Hall of the Banners that Amoras, warning us not to follow, disappeared from sight, leaving us in the dark. Then from a height came strange noises designed to strike terror into the breasts of the timid. Then the light of a Roman candle threw into weird effect the great maze of stalactite pillars, cones, and festoons that rose about and above us to unimagined heights. But perhaps the most beautiful if not the most amazing of the sights was that contained in the Salon of the Queen of the Columns, where, in a lofty hall, there stood alone, as though conscious of its exquisite beauty and holding aloof, a stately pillar twenty-two metros--over sixty feet--in height. About the base were grouped curiously modelled clusters of flowers, and above, as far as the eye could distinguish, the same delicate tracing was revealed. "Under it we are as nothing," Amoras had said reverently, as he stood beneath it, and one felt that had he worn a hat he would have uncovered before the column. There was a delightfully nerve-soothing effect in the absolute stillness of the caves. Not a sound from the outer world could penetrate these vast recesses. "All the neighbours are asleep," Amoras replied drily when the Man remarked on the silence. Though the Caves of Artá are astonishing in their immensity, there is nothing alarming or gruesome about them. It did not occur to anybody to speculate secretly on what would happen if the guide were seized with illness or anything happened to the lights. Both sets of caves--the Dragon and the Artá--are well worthy a special expedition. If it were possible to see only one I would give the preference to the Caves of Artá. But that is a matter of mere personal taste. I must confess that men seem more impressed by the fantastic marvels concealed in the Dragon Caves. I had promised to show Señora Rande the English way of serving spinach as a vegetable course. So when we reached the _fonda_, only a quarter of an hour late for lunch, the señora was waiting to hold me to my word. Fortunately the cooking of spinach is the simplest of culinary devices, and while the fresh green leaves were sinking to a pulp in the earthen pipkin, I had the privilege of watching the señora make one of her excellent omelets--an invaluable lesson, and one that I humbly trust will render impossible my again making such an egregious failure as I did when attempting to cook an omelet at the Hospederia at Miramar. Being certain of a good driver and good horses, we had engaged Canet to return for us at three o'clock. We were anxious to get a near view of the quaint old town, Capdepera, whose distant appearance had attracted us as we drove to the caves in the morning. And we wished also to visit Cala Retjada, a little fishing village a mile or two farther away, that we had heard was celebrated for its known fish and for its suspected smugglers. The short drive was full of the life and interest that characterize an agricultural district. About the stone dikes, sloe blossom lay in drifts, looking strangely home-like beside the giant clumps of cactus. Leaving the carriage when we had reached Capdepera, we walked about briskly, for the wind was fresh, bent on exploration. A peep into the church revealed nothing of special note. Turning away, we climbed a steep street, and found ourselves outside the old gateway leading to the fortified enclosure that in bygone days had evidently been the place of refuge for the citizens when danger threatened. And of a truth the space enclosed within these battlemented walls would have afforded shelter to a great community. To the well-preserved ramparts Nature had added an impregnable defence in the form of a thick growth of cactus. Both without and within the wall their prickly leaves luxuriated. From the flat roofs of the watch-towers that surmounted the battlements the watchers must have been able to see to a surprising distance. A white line across the sea revealed the coast of Minorca, twenty miles away. Close by was Cabo de Pera, the eastmost point of the island. With a vigilant guard stationed in these watch-towers no enemy, either from land or sea, could have reached Capdepera before the inhabitants had timely warning to remove themselves and their valuables within the safety of the stronghold. The old parish church--Our Lady of the Hope--is within the enclosure, close by a modern house that bore signs of occupation. In pockets of hungry soil a little spindly grain grew about the roots of hoary fig-trees. While all the fig-trees outside were still naked, one in a sheltered corner already showed bursting leaves and the diminutive knubbly warts that were to swell into fruit. Besides tufts of wild mignonette, henbane reared its downy foliage and evil-smelling creamy blossom. Seated in the open doorways of the houses, the women of this remote town were making baskets from the dried leaves of the palmetto (garbayous), a dwarf palm-tree that abounds on the mountains of Artá. Some were pleating the split fronds into long strips that others were sewing into the baskets, which besides being largely used in Majorca are exported by ship-loads to France. The pleasant and cleanly little industry seemed the ruling influence of the town. In the street we passed men carrying great numbers of the baskets fitted snugly inside one another. A glimpse into the open door of a warehouse revealed the place close packed from floor to rafters with the baskets. On the way to Cala Retjada we drove past a cart piled high with stock ready for shipment; and in a sheltered cove beyond the fishing village we saw, lying at anchor, the _pailebot_ that was waiting to convey the goods to an over-seas market. When we reached Cala Retjada the wind was blowing in fresh from the sea, and the boats lay snugly drawn up on the beach of a tiny haven. A number of small shut-up houses lining the semicircle of the bay showed that the stone-washed shore was a favourite place of summer residence. To the west is the imposing headland of Cape Vermay. Westwards pine woods clothe the rocky slopes about the sea. Truly a pleasant place to fly to when the interior of the island is hot and relaxing. The people of the eastern town struck us as being more Moorish in type than those of the more northern or western parts of Majorca. In Cala Retjada, in the person of the handsome bronzed captain of the _pailebot_, we saw and instantly recognized our ideal of a pirate chief--the heroic pirate who treats his enemies nobly. He wore a scarlet nightcap with a grass-green band, a golden brown velvet suit, an orange cummerbund, and yellow string-soled shoes. Truly he was a joy to behold. Daylight was fading when we turned our faces towards Artá; and as we approached the romantically situated town, we passed many parties of returning labourers, and many little bands of pretty girls, who had presumably strolled out to meet them, though each sex kept rigorously apart. It is the rarest thing to see an unmarried man and a girl walking alone in Majorca. The strict system of chaperonage that prevails in the higher classes evidently has its prototype in the lower also, for the maidens walked with twined arms--like some Maeterlinck chorus--and the men, as far as we could judge, confined their attentions to admiring glances. We had heard that the remains of a Phoenician village still existed in an ancient forest of ilex not far from Artá. When we questioned the señora next morning, as she poured out the coffee, regarding its whereabouts, she promptly suggested that her husband would take us there. So when we sallied forth it was in company with Señor Rande and the _perro de Rande_--a fine specimen of the ancient hunting dogs that are still prevalent in the island. It amused us to see him leap high into the air to sight his prey. The way, though it covered a bare half mile, was devious, and without assistance would have been difficult to find. But it ended in something far more wonderful than we had been led to anticipate. Near the summit of a gentle mound that was covered with ilex and low-growing scrub we found ourselves confronted by a wall built of vast, roughly hewn blocks of stone. Before us was an open portal, formed of two huge blocks supporting a third stone, one end of which was pierced by an orifice that had two openings towards the sky. Within this gateway were the tumbled remains of a city that had been encircled by walls constructed of great single blocks of stone--a city so old that all tradition of its builders was lost. We had thought the Roman remains at Alcudia and Pollensa as of surpassing antiquity. Here was evidence of an occupation far older still. An eminence in the centre of the enclosure revealed the site of the inevitable, and at that date indispensable, watch-tower. From its top, though now lowered by the passing of centuries and overgrown with herbage, we saw through the gaps in the trees beyond how comprehensive a view the watchers had commanded of the surrounding country. The top of the mound on which we stood had been hollowed out, and Señor Rande remarked that children came up from Artá to dig for treasures. "Do they find any?" we asked innocently. Raising his forefinger, the señor shook it before his face in the gesture we had grown to think characteristically Majorcan. "_Nada!_" he made laconic reply. Devil's tomatoes, heavy with golden fruit, and beautiful large-blossomed lavender periwinkle grew in great profusion about the devastated homes of the vanished people. And it seemed a curious coincidence to remember that the last periwinkles I had seen were those growing about the base of the megalithic monuments in Minorca. One wonders what connection this starry-eyed flower could have had with these prehistoric races. I had received the information that begonias grew wild in Majorca, with the mental reservation natural to a native of a less gracious climate. So it was a pleasant surprise to recognize a leaf or two of their distinctive marled foliage thrust out from between the heaped stones of the ruined Phoenician village. Our return journey from Artá was not worthy to rank in our memories with our triumphal progress thither. We had a special conveyance, but as Canet was already in Manacor, having driven the diligence that left Artá at three o'clock that morning, he could not act as our charioteer, and his employer, who drove us, set the pace sedately. The wind was high, dust was more than a possibility, and the box seat held no attractions. So we sat inside and yawned a little as the kilometros crept slowly past. In the little grass-grown station at Manacor the afternoon crowd was beginning to gather. And in the station yard the diligences for Artá, for Capdepera, for San Lorenzo, were drawn up prepared to start as soon as the train had arrived and their passengers had climbed into their seats. We had taken our places in one of the empty carriages that were standing ready to be attached to the train for Palma, when the smiling sun-tanned face of Canet appeared at the window. He had come to bid us good-speed, and remained to share our tea, and to puzzle over the powers of the Thermos bottle. Though he politely praised the tea, I am convinced that he secretly scorned the bad taste of the "Ingleses" who chose to drink so uninteresting a decoction in a land overflowing with good red wine. Our little excursion, undertaken though it had been with something of reluctance, had proved like others a charming one, and one whose every moment had been full of new interests. [Illustration: Palm-Sunday at Sóller] XXI AMONG THE HILLS March was more than half over; we had already reluctantly begun to measure our stay in the Fortunate Isles by weeks instead of months when we drove to Sóller to spend a few days with an English friend, who, with all the world to choose from, elects to make her home at Sóller. When we left Sóller on our previous visit in early December, darkness had fallen long before we reached Palma, so the first half of this return journey was new to us. And as the day was beautiful, we sat luxuriously back in the open carriage and enjoyed it to the full. The shower that had fallen had greatly refreshed the land, and though more rain was eagerly hoped for, the almond-trees were heavy in leafage and thickly ruched with the green-velvet casings of the embryonic fruit. During the winter we had noticed few wild birds. Now, amongst the olive-trees that lined the highway as we approached the rising ground, many were flying. A brightly plumaged bird with a crested head crossed our path like a flash of gold, and disappeared among the trees. It was the hoo-poo, the typical Balearic bird, known locally as the _pu-put_. The highway between Palma and Valldemosa passes through a picturesque gulch. The road between Palma and Sóller climbs a considerable mountain, up whose steep sides the native makers of roads--surely the most ingenious in the world--have carried the path in a series of amazing zigzags, so that the view of the traveller varies incessantly. As we mounted higher and massive crags rose about us, we sometimes stopped the carriage to look down over the vast orchard that covers the plain, to where the far distant spires of Palma Cathedral showed against the sea. As our altitude increased the air became colder. The wind that met us at the top was almost keen, and we were glad to rattle down the farther side of the hill up which we had climbed so slowly. A few turns down the zigzag, a fine old cross, its carvings gnawed by the corroding tooth of time, stands overlooking the valley and the tawny-roofed houses of Sóller, as they lie surrounded by their orange gardens. A poor cottage was hard by, and while we paused to let the Man make a rapid sketch, two children, a boy and girl, crept nearer and nearer, until at last they grouped themselves in conventional attitudes at the foot of the cross. It did not require words to tell us that they must have posed in the foreground of many photographs of the same subject. At the Hotel Marina, where our friend was staying, three good things awaited us--a gracious welcome, a glorious fire of almond shells, and a daintily spread tea-table. In the evening we went to Son Angelats, a beautiful "possession" dating back to the Moorish occupation. Son Angelats nestles snugly into the side of the mountain, and all the year round it is bowered in roses of every shade and hue. The air was fragrant with the mingled odours of flowers innumerable; and when we walked down to Sóller through the gloaming the sweet essence of the blossoms accompanied us, for our hands were full of roses and violets. As we strolled through the grounds I noticed what I thought was a blue bead lying on the path. Picking it up, I discovered it to be the seed of a small grassy-leaved plant new to me, but much used in Majorca for covering the sides of banks where grass refuses to grow. The seed, which was about the size of a pea, was of the pure deep blue of the sapphire. The name of the plant the gardener declared to be _convoladia_. I spell the word phonetically. And when I asked what the appearance of the flower was, he made the incredible statement--and stuck to it--that the plant had none. It is impossible to stay in Sóller without feeling the magnetic attraction of the Puig Mayor, which is higher than any mountain in the British Isles. A dozen times in an hour we found ourselves turning to see how it looked, for its aspect held the charm of exhaustless variety. One might leave it a purple shadow amid light-hued satellite hills and turn again a few minutes later to discover it rose-tipped and the others in shadow. Next morning I looked out on a lovely scene. In the growing light of dawn the encompassing mountains showed clearly their outlines, unblurred save by a wanton wisp of mist that seemed too trivial to bear any meaning. But when my breakfast tray was brought in, rain was falling with the quiet persistence of rain that has come to stay. So we spent the morning indoors enjoying refreshing gossip, and refreshing peeps into English books, and in watching from the windows and balconies the ever-changing cloud effects on the mountains. There were moments when the crest of the Puig Mayor rose majestic above a rolling fleece of vapour that blotted out all the lesser heights; and times when, though the clouds hung heavy over the town, and the few passers-by huddled beneath time-worn umbrellas, every red rock and cleft of the mountain glowed under a sun that shone for it alone. Or again the Puig Mayor itself might vanish, and some nearer height stand out against the wall of mist in unexpected beauty of contour--imposing only because of its temporary isolation. In the afternoon the sky cleared a little and we ventured out. The Good Fairy, our hostess, who abounds in individualities that are as charming as they are original, possessed, by right of purchase, the fruit of a tree of sweet oranges. Her tree grew in an orchard on the outskirts of the town that is itself an orange garden. And hither we went to listen to the sweet clamour of the nightingales while eating the fruit we had plucked. Among the glossy-green leaves Keats's "light-wingéd Dryads of the trees" were singing "of summer in full-throated ease." We would gladly have lingered long, but heavy rain again encompassed us; and we returned to the comforts of the hotel, reluctant to leave the melodious plot, but rejoicing for the sake of the islanders, in whose expectant ears the sound of the rain falling on their thirsty land must have been much more musical than the song of the immortal bird. Next day was Palm Sunday--the children's day. Yet when we left the hotel in the morning and ventured out into the rain-washed streets, there was not a child in sight. Old people--grandmothers, formless figures muffled from forehead to ankle in black shawls, moved decorously along carrying folding stools; grandfathers, protecting their Sabbath garb with rose-coloured umbrellas of a silk so fine and antique that one longed to implore them not to ruin it by exposure to the weather, were hastening towards the church. But the narrow streets of the quaint old town were curiously empty of children. To our uncomprehending eyes it appeared more the day of the grandparents than of the children. I blush now to acknowledge that, for the moment, we had forgotten that the day of the children is always, and in almost greater measure, the day of the grandparents also. We entered the church to find both the outer absence of youth and the presence of the aged explained. Above even the pungent odour of incense, the savour of sweet flowers perfumed the air. The centre of the church was a seething mass of greenery. Tall spikes of palm arose like sword blades from out a forest of green branches--a forest that looked as though ruffled by a strong wind, so restless was its incessant motion. Closer observance revealed the motive power to be a multitude of small boys who sat, closely packed together, on benches, holding aloft branches, many of which were wreathed with flowers. Most of the trophies showed the grey-green of olive--a shapely bough chosen with care from the family possession, with all the available blossoms of the garden twined about the stem. And many revealed ingenuity and artistic taste in the garlanding of the flowers. Certain of the palm fronds had a piece fixed athwart the tip to represent a cross. A proportion, happily but a small proportion, of the trophies carried struck the blatant note of artificiality, for in their case the palm frond was split and twisted into ornamental shapes, and out of all semblance of that they were supposed to represent. A few were travesties of Christmas-trees, for their fictitious branches were laden with silvered and gilt sweets, toys and trinkets, seemingly trivial, but doubtless owning a significance of their own. Beside the rows of close-cropped dark heads moved priests and black-robed teachers. And on the outskirts of the throng hovered bigger boys, torn betwixt two opinions--whether it were better to continue to assert their claim to have reached an age exempt from such childish matters, or to yield to their natural desire to join the palm-bearers and have a place in the procession that was to follow. One urchin, but recently advanced to the dignity of his first long trousers, held half-concealed a scrap of olive, to which he added by furtive gleanings from the fallen blossoms that littered the floor, garnering a battered, but still recognizable rose here, a gaudy marigold there, until he had achieved a trophy that, if not one to court careful examination, yet at a little distance presented quite a respectable appearance. When the rose-red umbrellas had dripped themselves almost dry, and the branches supported by the hot hands of restless boys were waving faster than ever, the black-robed teachers and a nun, moving noiselessly amongst their pupils, began to marshal them into a double line. Standing at the side, in company with grandfathers whose fine old weather-beaten faces gazed proudly intent at those who were to carry their names to succeeding generations, we watched as the little forest of branches, borne sedately, passed in front of the altar, and then moved in procession round the church. The smallest boys walked in front, and many of them were burdened with the care of umbrellas in addition to the proud glory of the decorated branch that wobbled in their tired hands; while boys of larger growth, unable to resist, yielded to a natural desire to shoulder their boughs as muskets. Very few girls took an active part in the proceedings. The half-dozen who did belonged to the class that have hats for Sunday wear, and the palms they carried had cost money. Little girls whom fortune had denied the envied possession of either ugly hats or ornamental palms looked on with longing in their soft dark eyes as the favoured ones marched by. When the complete circuit of the edifice had been made the palm-bearers moved to a side, and a band of clergy advancing paused just within the great doors, through which certain of their number had slipped outside. Standing thus, their resplendent robes of purple and scarlet thrown into strong relief against the old wood of the door, the group began chanting. When they ceased there came from without the sound of answering voices. Again were the voices within raised in recitative. From outside came again the reply. Then, reverberating solemnly through the deep silence that ensued, came the sound of a thrice repeated knock on the closed door. At the summons the wide doors were thrown open and the outside band admitted. Then, the symbol of the release of repentant souls from purgatory having been thus impressively enacted, the band, now chanting in unison, moved towards the high altar. The ceremony of the blessing of the palms is a beautiful one, and one of which no child who has taken part can ever forget the meaning. The last we saw of it was a hale old grandfather, who carried in his arms, under the shelter of his big rose-hued umbrella, a sleepy little boy, whose weary hand still grasped his flower-wreathed olive-branch as they took the path leading to the mountains. The earnestly prayed for rain, when it did come, came in unstinted quantity. It had rained all night, and on Monday rain was still falling, but more softly--almost, one might say, reluctantly--on the little white-robed first communicants who, sheltered by the umbrellas of mothers or aunts, were threading their way delicately among the pools of water that lay as traps for their white-shod feet. But the Majorcan climate is too beneficent to spoil the notable day for the young communicants. Before noon the clouds had drifted away from the mountains; and though the sun did not appear, the air was mild and balmy, and through the wonderfully absorbent nature of the Sóller soil the streets speedily became dry enough to enable the dainty white shoes to trip about almost without blemish. And all day long, everywhere one looked, young girls, some in expensive raiment, others in evidently home-made garments, but all with long white veils flowing from their wreathed heads, moved sedately from house to house, accompanied by an admiring train of female relatives, as they paid visits of ceremony to all their friends. And as for the boys!--words fail to tell of the glories of their harshly new suits, their shining patent leather boots, of their spreading collars, of the elaborate bow of gold embroidered white ribbon that decorated their left arms; or, greatest of all--of their self-importance. They, too, had their public promenade, and paid their visits. They, too, had their attendant group of appreciative relatives. On meeting any friends the little party would pause, and the graceful ceremony of asking forgiveness for past misdeeds be gone through, when the young communicant, bending and kissing the hand of the elder, would say, "If I have ever done you any harm, forgive me now." My men had gone off to see Biniaraix, a hamlet of brown houses grouped about the white tower of a church on the mountain-side, and to enjoy a reminiscent glance at Fornalutx, the quaint hill-town where, on our previous visit to Sóller, we had spent a well remembered afternoon. So the Good Fairy and I, left to our own devices, passed the afternoon in rambling about this town of amazing contrasts. As I said before, Sóller is endowed with a curiously absorbent soil--a soil that acts as a charm in cases of inflammatory rheumatism and is prime factor in the remarkable longevity of the inhabitants. The roads were already so dry and pleasant to walk on that, but for the evidence of the _torrente_, which was a raging river, it would have been hard to credit that for two days and nights thrice-blessed rain had fallen without intermission. Snow covered the crest of the Puig Mayor and lay heavy on its shoulders, yet down in the valley the soft air was sweet with the fragrance of orange blossoms, and all about the golden or copper-coloured fruit hung in profusion on the trees. Truly Sóller is a place of piquant contrasts. The trespasser is welcomed in Majorca. There are no notice-boards--except a few _vedados_ to warn against hunting--no padlocked gates. So we wandered about, following bypaths that led from one small "possession" to another; and never, after we left it, returning to the highroad until it was time to return home. That the Good Fairy is widely beloved was evident at every turn. Her diplomatic powers are great, but she had to exercise them all to avoid spending the afternoon indoors in the hospitable homes of her humble acquaintances, who, catching a glimpse of her as she passed, hastened out to entreat her to enter. Living in this place of natural delight must be cheaper even than in Palma. One courteous dame took us all over her house, that we might see the views from her windows. The house, which was in the town, was a comparatively new dwelling in a good airy street. It had a large high-ceilinged _zaguan_--the entrance chamber that is a combination of hall and reception-room--from which opened a neat kitchen. A few steps up from the _zaguan_ was a cosy parlour from which a stair led down to the _terras_. Above, on the first floor, were two bedrooms, and on the second floor two more, all well lit and affording exquisite views. Being in town the house had no garden; but the _terras_ with its big jars of plants seemed a favourite place for taking the air. When I indulged my curiosity by asking the rent, the good dame told us that for all this excellence she paid twenty-four dollars a year--less than five pounds; and the rent included taxes! As we strolled farther afield the wealth of the land was heaped upon us. Our hands overflowed with the Balearic violets, that are the sweetest in the world, and the Balearic pansies, that are, I verily believe, the poorest. For pansies love a cold damp soil, and rarely flourish south of the River Tweed; and the Tweed is a far, far cry from these sun-loved isles. We had sprays of orange blossom given us too, and ripe oranges, whose golden sides the beneficent sun had tanned to copper. And we sat in a garden and ate them, while the aged donor, who still possessed the fine features and limpid eyes of her bygone youth, talked to us, illustrating her stories by a pantomime of feature and gesture so expressive that even I, with my meagre knowledge of her language, could hardly fail to grasp their meaning. In the kitchen of her house the wide hearth was almost shut in by a three-sided settle, whose seats were strewn with fleecy white sheepskins. On the kitchen shelves the native ware of brown, decorated in crude patterns of red and yellow, was arranged with unconscious artistic effect. Mounting gradually higher, we rested at a point where the town lay open before us. Hills rose steeply behind us; in front the ground sloped down in terraces; and, far beyond, the fruitful gardens and russet houses of the town rose again towards the snow-crested mountains, or at one point fell gradually to the cleft beyond which showed the sea. Becoming suddenly conscious that we had let the tea hour slip past unheeded, we were hastening back to the hotel, when, crossing the bridge that spans the _torrente_, we caught the promise of a sight that made us quickly return to the open space of the market square that we might obtain a less interrupted view. Over the roofs of the houses the snow-capped mountain summits, struck by some magic shaft from the hidden sun, glowed rose-red, and the unearthly beauty of the transfiguration held us mute and spell-bound. The curious thing was, that though little groups of people stood gossiping in the market-place no one appeared to have eyes for this refulgence but ourselves. Seeing us standing gazing silently towards the mountains, they turned also to see what had attracted our attention, then turned away uncomprehending. XXII DEYÁ, AND A PALMA PROCESSION The last lingering trails of rain-clouds had vanished and the sun shone from a cloudless blue sky when next day we drove off behind Pepe and his pair of white horses to picnic at Deyá, the curiously distinctive little town that perches on a hill betwixt mountain and sea, half-way between Sóller and Miramar. The road was a good one, and as the way, though steep, was set in zigzag fashion, its ascent would have been easy but for the barbarous way in which, acting with the empty cunning of these would-be crafty island road-menders, someone had littered the road with lumps of stone, thus forcing the passing vehicle to act the ignominious part of road-roller by threading its way out and in over the newly mended parts. Sometimes the stones were so evilly placed as to impel us to venture perilously near the edge of the precipitous track. It was a relief as we slowly mounted upwards to come upon the perpetrator of the crime in the very act of further blocking our path. Taken thus red-handed, he was not one whit dismayed, but complacently stepped aside to let us pass. The opportunity was not one to be missed. Half drawing up and turning round on the box, Pepe launched towards him a few objurgations in trenchant Majorcan. And the Good Fairy, putting her head out of the carriage, added the weight of her gentle reproach. [Illustration: Deyá] "What is this you do?" she asked in her pretty Spanish. "Placing stones on the road to welcome the strangers! Is this the way you show them the delicacy of the Spaniard?" Thus doubly reproached, the _caminero_ stood transfixed; and our emotions having found vent, we drove on, leaving him with his hand raised to his brass-bound hat, his mouth open but speechless. Having reached the summit, we began the descent, losing sight of our grand mountains, but gaining a glimpse of the Mediterranean, which glowed in that warm blue that makes one wonder--until one tries the temperature--why sea-bathing should be confined to the summer months. The tawny-roofed houses of Deyá cluster on a high rock that rises like an island from out a sea of valley which is girdled by precipitous mountains. Streams in cascades were rushing down in a joyful pell-mell, the cherry-trees were heavy with blossom, and the pomegranates were opening their first delicate copper-tinted leaves as we drove along the highroad that follows the curve of the valley. The attentive _chef_ of the Marina had made us independent of _fondas_, and Pepe had promised to find us a good place to lunch in. So when he drew up at a path that branched off from the highway on the Miramar side of Deyá, we took our hamper, from which the neck of a bottle protruded alluringly, and started to explore it. The path ended at a gate that opened into private grounds. In any other country the most presumptuous among us would have hesitated before invading the garden of unknown owners. But we were in the Fortunate Isles and the charm of their unconventionality influenced us. Walking in, we found some conveniently placed stone seats under the shade of a huge lemon-tree, and there we spread our feast of lamb cutlets, potato omelets, cakes and fruit. The house, of one corner of whose quaintly terraced garden we had taken possession, appeared to be untenanted. Its windows were closely shuttered, its stable empty; but soon from the highest terrace an old head peeped at us. A little later it appeared on a terrace lower, then nearer still, the attached body becoming gradually more and more visible, until the owner appeared before us in the person of an aged woman whose frivolously abbreviated petticoats seemed incompatible with her sober face. It was the caretaker, come not to warn us that we were intruding, but to urge us to leave the place we had chosen for one where there was a proper table and much water. We resisted her enticements and she trotted off, her appearance a ludicrous combination of propriety and indecorum, with her serious face swathed in its black kerchief and her lavishly displayed light drab ankles. She did not quite abandon us, however; and when the men had gone off to paint she returned, and was so evidently desirous that we would not leave before seeing the marvels of the garden, that we consented to allow her to show them. And, indeed, the arrangement of the grounds revealed much ingenuity. The spot where she would have had us eat was a stone-built _mirador_, through a shallow cave, at whose back a mountain torrent had been induced to flow. As she had promised, there was both "a table" and "much water." In summer the suggestion of coolness imparted by even a trickle of water would be charming. Then, with the torrent rushing at breakneck speed, the effect was a little overpowering and the noise positively deafening. Our chosen place under the big lemon-tree might not be so extraordinary, but it had a placid charm that soothed while it did not detract from the matter in hand. The nephew of our unconsciously serio-comic cicerone, in the person of a one-eyed _calender_--I beg his pardon, gardener--joined us to reveal fresh attractions of summer-house and rivulets, and of a grotto where, amid a perfect cascade of maidenhair-fern, a graceful statue of Our Lady of Lourdes was embowered. From every point the view was lovely, but I defy anybody to find a spot about Deyá that does not afford a lovely prospect. When we left the place our lady of the stockings, eager to do something for the generous tip the Good Fairy had slipped into her hand, insisted on carrying our hamper. And during the remainder of our afternoon at Deyá, whether we went up hill or down dale, amongst the picturesque houses clustered on the church-crowned hill or through the gardens that lined the side of the river, we seemed always to be encountering her. Whether she was paying a round of visits to display her coin, or bound on an exhaustive shopping expedition to squander it, we did not know; but at every turn of the road we seemed to see the twinkle of those drab ankles. One of the many charms of Deyá is the proximity of the sea, which laves the foot of its valley. Another is its delicious irregularity. I do not believe there are a half-dozen yards of straight road in Deyá. Every house has its own elevation, its individual bypaths. Another and an invaluable charm to artists is the manageable quality of its pictorial effects. The extensive grandeur of Miramar is almost unpaintable, but Deyá has a complete picture at every turn. We saw many in the course of that afternoon stroll. Women washing, men gathering oranges, a handsome woman in a petticoat of vivid scarlet leading a recalcitrant black goat: all ready for transference to canvas. The hours flew past. Almost before we knew, dusk was falling and we were on our way back to where the snow-capped Puig Mayor presides over the wonderful Sóller valley. We had been a little apprehensive, expecting a repetition of the somewhat hazardous morning journey. But the Good Fairy's appeal to the chivalry of the Spaniard had borne immediate result. Every stone had been laboriously removed from the path. So without hindrance we rattled gaily down into the valley, where lights were already twinkling through the dusk. The final day of our visit to Sóller brought yet another experience of unusual interest. Our hostess had still another surprise in store for us. We had viewed the high mountains from beneath, now we were going to see them from the crest of one of their number. Pepe took the reins in his skilled hands and guided the surefooted mules, who, for this expedition, replaced the white horses, up a perilous road that curved about the mountain-side, rising higher and ever higher until we looked down over the many terraces of olives into the valley that lay placidly basking in the afternoon sunshine. Our ascent was necessarily very deliberate. As we wound slowly up we passed neither dwelling nor human being; and those of us to whom the way was new began to wonder why any road should have existed on so lonely a height. Then when we had got so high that it seemed as though an eaglet's aerie would be the most likely habitation, the road ended on a flat plateau, and we found ourselves driving into the outer courtyard of a farm-house so old and weather-beaten that in appearance it resembled the rocks and crags that surrounded it. We alighted unnoticed. Doves were flying overhead. A dog greeted our advent with an interrogative growl; fowls clucked about unheeding. Pepe, rolling himself up in a striped blanket, curled up on the box to await the hour when it might be our pleasure to return. And we walked on, wondering if we had left the everyday world behind in the valley and had all unwittingly climbed to the palace of the sleeping beauty. A stone-cast from the house was a _mirador_ known to our conductress. Securely seated therein, poised right on the edge of the mountain-crest, we looked at the vast panorama. Crags rose high about us. Behind and above us towered an unfamiliar side of the Puig Mayor, its massive shoulders deep in drifted snow. Far beneath, looking like some gaily coloured map when seen from that height, lay the port of Sóller with its lake-like harbour and pigmy headlands. And northwards spread the far-reaching sea, whose grandeur no altitude could dwarf. The sensation of being above the world was gloriously exhilarating. When a bird flew overhead we almost felt as though we too had wings, and two lines from Davidson's _Ballad of a Nun_ kept running through my mind: "I am sister to the mountains now, And sister to the sun and moon." Leaving the _mirador_, we wandered happily about the plateau. Among the grass a strange flower was blooming, and it seemed quite natural that this amazing location should boast a flower of its own. It was an orchid whose sugarloaf-shaped spike was covered with florets of dull purple, close-packed after the manner of a grape hyacinth. In many of the plants the flowers burst into a tuft at the top. It was strange and not pretty, but curiously in keeping with its isolated situation. When we returned to the house Pepe, swathed in his blanket, was still deep in the slumber of the man of tranquil mind: but the mistress of the house was at hand. Approaching, she greeted us with grave courtesy. She had the remains of much beauty. The soft bloom of girlhood lingered on her matronly cheeks, and the retrospective look of one accustomed to deep solitude was in her fine dark eyes. On her invitation we entered the house, whose tall sides surrounded an inner courtyard. One end of the big cool kitchen was partitioned off with high-backed settles, and right on the middle of the floor of the "cosy corner" thus formed a pile of logs was glowing. Looking up, we saw that overhead the roof contracted until it became a wide chimney, through which a glimpse of blue sky was visible. A gun hung on the whitewashed wall, and on one of the seats which was thickly spread with skins a shepherd lad was resting. Returning to the _mirador_, we watched the sun sink in a golden glory over the misty blue sea. Then, lamenting the inevitable close of another perfect day, we drove back down the vagrant deviating way, feeling as though we had for a brief space been translated to a new and inspiring world. It was with sincere regret that on the morning of Holy Thursday we bade the Good Fairy farewell and, with Pepe again as charioteer, started on our drive back by way of Deyá, Miramar, and Valldemosa to Palma, where we had an afternoon engagement. The scenery of this coast road must rank with the finest in the world, and on that March morning it was looking its loveliest. There was no wind, and both sea and sky were of that deep warm azure that makes so fitting a background to Balearic Island vistas. On reaching the first houses of Deyá, we stopped the carriage, and alighting, climbed the easy ascent to the church. Halfway up the slope a French artist was painting, filling in his canvas with a delicate mosaic of heliotropes and pinks and purples. He was enthusiastic about the pictorial quality of his surroundings. "Deyá," he declared, was "_un paradis pour les peintres_." When we peeped into the church Mass was being celebrated, and from the dusk of the interior the eyes of young communicants looked gravely at us from under their white wreaths. Amid the clustered houses halfway down the hill a quaint old building proclaimed itself the Casa Consistorial. A worm-eaten stair led to the town hall. The iron-barred door of the dungeon opened at a touch, revealing its abandonment to the base uses of a lumber-shed. As far as we could see, the sole person in charge of the municipal chambers of Deyá was a year-old infant who occupied a low chair in the wide-roofed porch. He, however, maintained a magisterial dignity of demeanour throughout our cursory inspection of the premises. As we left the valley the lofty crags and olive-clad slopes of Miramar rose about us. Their appearance was already familiar, and it was with a positive thrill of pleasure that we saw them again. Across the smooth surface of the Mediterranean a liner was passing, and we wondered what impression the passengers would get of the island. We reached the Hospederia to find that for the moment the solitude that in November we had found so attractive had vanished. Evidently some periodic household inspection was in process, for in the wide doorway women sat mending house-linen, and children clinging to their skirts glanced shyly at us. Fernando was absent, but Netta remembered us, and brought a large glass jug of the matchless Miramar water out to the _mirador_ overhanging the sea just beyond the house whither Pepe had already carried our lunch. Valldemosa was looking lovely in the fresh green beauty of spring, when an hour later we drove through its steep streets. The terrace gardens of the old Carthusian monastery were sweet with bud and blossom; and on the road beneath, a couple of bearded brown-robed Franciscan monks, treading softly on sandalled feet, gave us greeting. As we left the gorge whose precipitous sides rose high overhead, an eagle, clearly outlined against the azure sky, gave the finishing touch to the wild beauty of the spot. After the soul-inspiring grandeur of the everlasting hills, the plain, in spite of its luxuriant verdure, seemed tame; and even Palma appeared almost uninteresting. But it must be admitted that we were approaching it by the back way--by the kitchen entrance, so to speak--and in strict justice Palma should be entered by the front door, which is the port. We had been invited to the palace of one of the noble Majorcan families to witness the passing of the Holy Thursday procession, and as we walked into Palma in the early evening, signs of preparation for the ceremonial were in evidence. Strangely clad figures, looking supernaturally tall in their long robes and high pointed hoods, were advancing towards the city. And their odd garb and masked faces gave them the appearance of beings strayed from out the dread days of the Spanish Inquisition. By the gate of Santa Catalina one of the masked men--his face-covering thrown back--was having a heated argument with a _consumero_ respecting a demand for payment of duty on the tall candle he carried. And within the gates like figures were to be seen all advancing towards some given point. Outside the walls, where the buildings were comparatively new, the weirdly garbed shapes had seemed anachronisms, with more than a hint of the fancy dress carnival about them; but once within the walls of the ancient city, its narrow streets and tall closely shuttered dwellings made fitting setting for their mediæval guise. In the streets ladies wearing mantillas and the costumes of black brocaded satin that they reserve for religious ceremonials were hastening, rosaries in hand, from one church to another. It is the custom to visit as many churches as possible on Holy Thursday. One lady we knew told us she had entered twenty-two that day. Just opposite the old palace on whose balconies we were placed was one of the five churches through which the procession was to pass. In the roadway beneath, people had already gathered in expectation of its approach, and as we waited a sound of distant music, monotonous, penetrating, reached us. Then the town drummers, led by a small body of mounted civil guards (who defiled to a side and rode on to await their exit from the farther door of the building) appeared, and still vigorously plying their drum-sticks, marched into the church. Very few members of the clergy were to be seen. The participants in the solemnity were almost entirely laymen. Representatives of many municipal bodies took part in the procession. There were civic authorities who carried a well-brushed silk hat in one of their white-gloved hands and a lighted candle in the other: doctors, members of the Red Cross Society, the town band, firemen, police, boys from the orphanage, old men from the workhouse--all evidently proudly conscious of the importance of their position. [Illustration: Processionists of Holy Thursday] At intervals a platform supporting one of the fine carved images from the Cathedral was borne by. When the beautiful effigy of the Crucified Christ from the Church of La Sangre--that exquisite statue to whose flowing hair so many women have gloried to contribute their tresses--was carried past, the expectant crowd fell upon its knees before it. To our untutored eyes a striking feature of the observance was the long succession of masked penitents, who, bearing tall lighted candles, walked in a double line. The hue of their robes varied from almost bright blue to the more effective black and white. Some were handsomely embroidered, others plain. Two of the men were laden with chains; and one at least trod the cobble stones with naked feet, in public fulfilment of a vow taken in a time of impending danger. Most of the penitents held lace-edged handkerchiefs to protect the candles from the warmth of their hands; but in spite of the precaution certain of the candles already showed signs of softening. Many of the processionists bore emblems of the Passion, and one group as it entered the church broke into a mournful chant. One of the observances of the function appeared to be the distribution of sweets. It was curiously incongruous to see the masked figures drop comfits into outstretched hands. We noted one pause before a pretty pink-clad señorita, who with her _dueña_ was standing opposite our balcony, and signing to her to open the silver chain-bag she held, he poured into it a great handful of sugared almonds, to her blushing satisfaction. The ceremony was imposing, touching, full of affecting suggestion; but even as we looked we could not help regretting that night had not fallen. Then the sight of a long sequence of quaint figures bearing the tall lighted tapers through the sombre crooked streets of the old town would have been much more impressive. [Illustration: During the Carnival at Palma] XXIII OF FAIR WOMEN AND FINE WEATHER The first thing that impresses the traveller regarding the inhabitants of Majorca is the prevalence of good-looking young men and of pretty and graceful young women. Legend tells that in long-past days the people of Majorca were induced to make a treaty with the Dey of Algiers, by whose terms they yearly paid him a tribute of a hundred virgins, on condition that he restrained his piratical hordes from molesting the island. One feels that the Dey had an eye for beauty, for in these favoured isles to be handsome seems to be the rule, not the exception. While young the Majorcan women are charming after a peculiarly feminine fashion. Compared with them French working women of the same class are hard of feature and masculine and ungainly of form. Their features are refined, their complexions clear, their feet slender, their hands small, shapely, and well-cared for. When I mentally compared the condition of their hands with those of the rough toil-hardened hands of the women of the British working classes, I wondered if the substitution of charcoal for coal and of olive oil for grease in cooking could account for their better preservation. To rise to the admired standard of aristocratic Majorca a man should look as though he had never done a day's work in his life. His hands should be soft, his skin untanned. A youth who had been yachting declared regretfully that on his return to Palma he was so brown that none of the girls would look at him! To judge from a letter written to the Palma paper, _La Almudaina_, by a Majorcan on board an Italian liner bound for the Argentine, the delicacy and fine modelling of Majorcan hands would seem to be locally recognized and even gloried in. "What a misfortune," lamented the Voyager, "that the Italians have feet and hands so large, and fingers so twisted. Oh, hands of my country, with slender fingers and blushing nails, how my eyes feel home-sick to look upon you!" Women of all classes wear long skirts, which on being daintily held up reveal natty petticoats; and all show a pleasing taste in footgear. Boots are cheap in Majorca, and the servant maid or the work-girl on their Sunday afternoon promenade on the Borne will wear smart shoes of patent leather or high-heeled boots of cream-hued kid. Nothing more charming or more suitable for everyday wear than the native head-dresses--a mantilla of black lace for the mistress, a _rebozillo_ of white muslin for her maid--could possibly be devised. While for gala occasions, such as a bull-fight, the white lace blossom-bedecked mantilla is positively captivating. And one sincerely regrets that, in Palma at least, the hat is gradually making its way. The ladies who lead Palma fashion wear hats, and where they lead others hasten to follow. A positive thrill of excitement runs through fashionable Palma when notice is received of the approaching visit of a milliner or costumier from Paris or Madrid. The hotel where the private view of the new season's styles is held is thronged with eager buyers. When the cream of the stock has been secured, the enterprising adventurer disposes of the skim milk to the second-rate local shops, and sets sail with full pockets. The pity is that, with both the tradition and the usage of so picturesque a national custom for guidance, matrons who themselves rigidly adhere to the mantilla should, doubtless from the best possible motives, condemn their young daughters to wear hats. Even at the best the prevalent mode in hats was ugly, and possibly the choice in Palma was limited, but it must be admitted that in the matter of hat selection their customary refinement of taste appeared occasionally to have deserted the Palma mothers. It was sad to see the nice modest face of a young girl overshadowed by a huge erection of green or red felt that was trimmed with a wild scurry of dishevelled plumage--a style of headgear that might not have looked out of place in the Old Kent Road, but which looked hopelessly incongruous over the grave expectant eyes of a young Majorcan lady. Contrasted with the life of an English maiden, which is full of varied employments and endless social entertainments, the existence of a Majorcan young lady would appear to be needlessly lacking in interests. She does not ride, or shoot, or golf, or cycle, or play tennis or croquet, or do gardening, or smoke cigarettes. She has little concern with politics, and she is content to leave the care of the poor to an efficient staff of clergy. She has been carefully and thoroughly educated. She has probably had a special governess to teach her English, another for French or Italian. The private chaplain may have instructed her in Spanish, and she probably has a good knowledge of classical music. But, her course of study over, there seems little left for her to do. In the morning she goes to Mass; later she performs miracles of intricate embroidery. In the afternoon she drives out, in winter always in a closed carriage, and nearly always in the same direction, which is westwards towards Ben Dinat. Sometimes the carriage stops, and the occupants, alighting, take a little promenade; then, re-entering the carriage, drive back to the tall old palace in some narrow street in the city. After Mass on Sundays she strolls on the Borne; from four o'clock till sunset she may promenade on the ramparts or on the mole. That is the substance of a Palma girl's exercise, and everywhere she goes her footsteps are carefully shadowed by those of her _dueña_. Private dances, musical evenings, afternoon "At Homes," private theatricals, are almost unknown. There are plenty of house-parties, especially in summer, when the family is living at one or other of its country seats; but those gatherings are usually confined to relatives. Then there are the infrequent bull-fights; and occasionally a dance is given at the fashionable club, the _Circulo Mallorquin_--a festivity that begins at four o'clock in the afternoon and ends at eight o'clock in the evening. Sometimes the wife of the Captain-General gives an evening reception; or the rare function of a real ball sends a flutter through the higher circles of the island. Then and then only does the aristocratic Majorcan maiden permit her graceful shoulders to be seen. Frequently, carefully chaperoned, she goes to a theatre, and sits in the family box throughout the interminable waits between the acts. At the Carnival, which occupies three afternoons in the week preceding Lent, she can appear on a balcony or in a carriage on the Borne; and even, such is the _abandon_ of that time of licence, go to the extreme length of exchanging repartee in the form of confetti or paper streamers with an admiring foe. Yet already there are signs of the far-reaching influence of an English queen. Certain of the noble families have young English ladies to teach their language to their daughters, and the few Majorcans we heard speaking English in Palma spoke it beautifully. Nowadays a Majorcan lady is not ashamed to admit that she dislikes bull-fights. A few years ago such an admission would have been accounted the rankest heresy. And Palma residents say they can tell the girls who have English governesses--they always walk so quickly! And here I may say that any young English lady, of good family and of the Roman Catholic religion, who is so adventurous as to journey to Majorca to fill a post as companion or governess can do so with the assurance of meeting with every possible consideration. She will not get a large salary, for money has a higher value in Majorca than in Britain, but she will be treated like a princess. I know of one case where a Palma family, who had engaged an English governess, went to the trouble and expense of having a bedroom specially decorated and furnished for her, after a high-art chamber pictured in the _Studio_, that the expected guest might feel more at home than if her room had been fitted up in the native fashion. To our emancipated way of thinking there was something curiously mediæval in the careful chaperonage to which the lovely and graceful Majorcan girls were subjected. And the scrupulous separation of the sexes seemed to argue distrust, of the maidens as well as of the men. Matrimony is a popular institution in Majorca, and when a damsel has reached a marriageable age an eligible suitor is rarely awanting. It is when that suitor has cast the glad eye upon the lady of his choice that matters would appear to proceed after an unsatisfactory and yet most conspicuous fashion. Suppose Don Sebastian desires to pay court to a lady whom he has seen taking her carefully chaperoned walks, he writes a letter asking her permission to do so. If the reply is in the negative the matter ends. If it is in the affirmative the Don puts on his cloak, which is frequently picturesquely lined with scarlet, and hies himself to the palace of his inamorata, but in place of boldly knocking at the front door and being ushered into one of the reception-rooms, he takes up his position beneath the balcony on which she is most likely to take the air. When the object of his desire appears--and you may be certain the _dueña_ is close at hand--the lady looks down, the lover gazes up, and only those who have put the matter to the test can judge how physically harassing it is to breathe impassioned nothings to someone who is suspended above your head. [Illustration: The Wooer] At this stage the matter halts for a period that sometimes runs into years--for in these restful latitudes even the course of true love moves slowly. Then, permission having been asked and granted, Don Sebastian may accompany the lady and her chaperon in their walks for a period approaching six months. When this point is reached, the parents of Don Sebastian, carrying a handsome present, which most frequently takes the form of a ring, call on the guardians of the lady, and, their consent to the prospective union having been gained, the suitor is at length admitted to the house, and the public cease to see his love-lorn figure beneath the balcony. Even when matters have crawled to this advanced stage the visits of the Don are merely ceremonious calls, paid strictly under the watchful eyes of the _dueña_. And I am told it is not until the night before the wedding that he is favoured with an invitation to dine at the home of his bride. In order to impart the proper aspect of romance to this oft-played balcony scene, the actors ought to be, and often are, young and graceful. When they are otherwise it is only too easy to give a ludicrous rendering of the drama. During our early months at the Casa Tranquila we sometimes, in the evenings, passed a tall house, from a balcony on whose third storey a plump lady would be shouting down coy replies to the blandishments of an elderly swain who had to stand out in the middle of the road in order to see his sweetheart. After a time both balcony and street were vacant; presumably the suitor had been admitted inside. Then a _to-let_ bill appeared on the balcony. The little romance had evidently ended happily, and the mature lovebirds had built a nest elsewhere. Our six months' experience of the Balearic Isles fostered the belief that we had discovered the ideal winter climate. Perhaps we had chanced upon an abnormally fine season, though I question that; but certain it is that from the middle of October, when we entered the bay and saw Palma looking celestial in the rosy light of dawn, until the second week in January, the weather was perfect. Spain is proverbially sunny. Against England's 1,400 and Italy's 2,300 annual hours of sunshine, Spain offers 3,000. With this grand allowance of sunshine the Majorcan heat is temperate. Statistics show that during the Balearic summer the thermometer rarely rises above 90° Fahr., while in winter it seldom falls below 40° Fahr. A gentleman who has passed his life in Palma told us that twice only had he seen snow fall--once when he was twelve year old, and again a few years ago. Except for a sultry day or two in the end of October the atmosphere was only pleasantly warm. Week succeeded week when the sea reflected a sky of cloudless glowing azure, when the air was soft and yet exhilarating, and we could both walk and bask with pleasure. Rain never comes before it is welcome in Majorca. Sometimes the welcome waits long before it is claimed. When after an unbroken succession of days or weeks, or it may be months, of unbroken fine weather, one is awakened by the sound of rain falling in torrents on the tiled roofs, it is to rejoice with the knowledge that the thirsty crops are already drinking in the moisture, that the diminished store in the wells is being replenished, that your oranges are swelling, and that your lemons will soon lose the hardness of the nether millstone and become available for lemonade. There is no hesitation about Majorcan rain. It does not play at being wet; it is simply drenching. And when rain comes, no man, however distinguished the uniform he wears or elevated his position (he may even be mounted on a panniered mule), hesitates to carry an umbrella. _Consumeros_, carbineers, farm labourers, postmen, all shelter under them. Nobody thinks it funny to meet a solemn policeman carrying a sword, a revolver, _and_ an umbrella. After the middle of January the weather changed. The temperature fell, and for nearly a fortnight cold winds raged. Warm wraps were brought out of the trunks where they had hitherto lain, and in the evenings a wood fire became a much appreciated luxury. It was curious to note how speedily even this only comparatively cold weather made its malign influence felt on a people accustomed to warmth and sunshine. Colds and coughs abounded. Most of our Majorcan acquaintances appeared to suffer. As one lady said resignedly, "It is the tribute we must pay to winter." Even the Boy spent several days in bed with a cold, reading all the French and Spanish novels he could beg or borrow, and comforting himself with the reflection that had he been well the weather for the first time during the winter would have made it impossible for him to paint outside. Yet, had three months of sunshine not made us critical, we would never have grumbled at these few days of cold wind. Adopting unconsciously the local opinion of the weather, I found myself commiserating the Squire and his Lady, who had recently arrived from England. "What a pity you didn't come earlier than you did. There was no bad weather till you came." "But we've had _lovely_ weather!" the Lady said, opening wide eyes of surprise. "Why, we've been out long walks every day. It isn't really cold, and there's only been one shower, and that fell at night." Remembering our British standard I was dumb. Though Majorca was free from fog, sometimes on an absolutely windless morning a light mist would envelop Palma and the smoke from the works in the Calle de la Fábrica would hang heavy in the still air. Then the Boy would hasten to say that we might be in Bradford--a town, by the way, that he knows only by repute. But with the rising of even the faintest breeze the highest spires of the Cathedral would appear out of the mist as though, through some supernal agency, they were suspended in mid-air. Then gradually, as if a veil were being slowly drawn aside, the city would again become visible. With early February our radiant weather returned, and heads were shaken, for the young crops showed sign of wilting under the long-continued drought. Over a period of fifteen days the churches sent up special petitions for rain--petitions that must have been echoed in the heart of every man that owned a "possession," or farmed a patch of ground, or even rented a garden plot. We were at Sóller when for two days and two nights the rain fell incessantly, soaking the parched soil and transforming the dry _torrentes_ into raging rivers. Then it suddenly ceased, leaving us with the glory of snow-tipped mountains seen against a glowing blue sky. Late in March and early in April rain again fell, delaying the annual ceremony of the Swearing to the Flag, but making the spindling corn fill out in a magical fashion and the beans that had begun to shrivel and blacken become erect and juicy. When we left Majorca on the last day of April all fears of the fate of the crops had been removed; figs and vines were budding, almond-trees were luxuriant in foliage, and the far-spreading meadows were covered with grain that gave promise of a rich harvest. We had thought vegetables and fruit so cheap that it astonished us to hear the natives declare that _now_ prices would fall--that it was through the past two successive dry summers that they had risen so high! Residents told us that for nine months out of the year the weather in Palma might be relied upon to be delightful, but that during the three hot months--which were July, August, and September--the moist, damp heat was very relaxing. Then it is that the aristocracy, temporarily vacating their sombre palaces in the narrow streets, remove their entire establishment to one or other of their country seats, while people of smaller social importance flock to their villas at the Terreno, or Porto Pi, or Son Rapiña, or even to modest cottages at our little Son Españolet. To us there seemed something funny in the notion of people having coast residences that were within a twopence-halfpenny car-drive of their town homes. But it is undoubtedly pleasant to live in a land where, by a change of locality entailing, at the most, a two hours' drive, one can avoid any extreme of either heat or cold. [Illustration: The National Sport] XXIV OF ODDS AND ENDS In Majorca there are hotels to suit all purses. At Palma the Grand Hotel is probably the best suited to tourists, especially if there are ladies in the party; while those who would like to see a real Majorcan _fonda_ of the better class and eat good native cooking should go to Barnils' in the Calle del Conquistador. The sum charged is invariably by the day, and varies according to the pretensions of the establishment. In most hotels it includes both wine and aerated waters. On arrival it is always well to inquire what the rate will be and whether it includes the little breakfast. If the traveller thinks the terms asked too high and says frankly what he is prepared to pay, he is almost certain to be accommodated at his own price. Our experience of the country _fondas_ was that they were infinitely superior to British inns of similar standing. The cooking was far better and the prices much lower. If one knows a little Spanish and can make a bargain, three pesetas a day is quite a usual price for a country _fonda_. The best should not charge more than four, and the catering is surprisingly good. In remote places beef may be scarce, but fish are generally plentiful, the rye bread is good, and the omelets are always excellent. Here I might say that in every instance we found the beds admirably appointed and comfortable. The Majorcan housewife takes special pride in her daintily embroidered house-linen. Toilet arrangements are apt to be primitive, and, except at the larger hotels, baths are unknown. An india-rubber bath is easy to pack and will be found invaluable. In obedience to Baedeker's advice to travellers in Spain, we carried round a tin of insect-powder. But though the Balearic Isles are in Spain in one respect, at least they are not of it, for at the end of our wanderings the tin was still unopened. In Palma there are several clubs, notably the _Circulo Mallorquin_, the _Club Real de Regatas_, the _Veda_, and others, political, military, and social, to which the desirable foreigner would find little difficulty in being elected. The subscriptions, which are collected monthly, would strike a London clubman as ridiculously low. He would find his fellow-members both courteous and charming, but disinclined to join in any exertion. And unless in very exceptional instances their acquaintance would begin and end at the club. The Majorcan does not go in for sport, though there is a sports club. He detests walking, and very infrequently plays tennis. The entire group of islands does not boast a golf course. An English resident who was trying to get up a golf club found the natives apathetic; but the invasion of half a dozen good enthusiasts would probably change this attitude. Many of the Palma men keep boats. Yachting seems to be the only occupation they incline to; and it would be hard to conceive of a more delightful pastime than cruising about that picturesque coast. Furnished houses are difficult to find, anywhere in Majorca. But in Palma unfurnished flats can be had. We saw quite a nice one in a good locality that was let at forty pesetas a month--a rent that included all taxes. At the delightful suburbs of the Terreno and Porto Pi, houses with exquisite views of the sea can be obtained. But everywhere to the foreigner who does not speak Spanish terms are said to rise. Even in the capital town the wages of both male and female servants are very low. For about twelve pounds a year I imagine one might have the pick of ordinary female servants, the price paid men being alike small. But it would be futile to expect to find the carefully drilled attendance with which home usage has accustomed us. To our more conservative minds, the attitude of the island servitors towards their employers seems strangely familiar. And their dress is apt to be informal. Once when I was paying an afternoon call in Palma the man-servant entered the drawing-room to receive an order sketchily attired in a pink undervest and trousers. And throughout the visit his voice trilling roundelays in the adjacent pantry made unusual accompaniment to our polite conversation. At the moment I confess I was surprised, but that was during our very early days in Majorca. A few months later I doubt if I would have noticed anything odd in either occurrence. The cost of living strikes any one accustomed to British housekeeping as small--not perhaps because food is so very cheap, for it is dearer in Palma than in the country towns and rural districts, and much dearer than in Minorca and Iviza; but because life is much simpler and less pretentious and conventional than in England. Certain imported commodities such as sugar are expensive, consequently the sweets that with people of the same class at home would be an everyday article of diet are reserved for special occasions, particularly the frequently recurring feast days. Residence in Majorca entails no exhausting social demands on either the strength or the bank account. Even among themselves the inhabitants but rarely entertain beyond the circle of their own relatives. And their meetings with friends seem confined to the theatre, the promenade, the bull-fights, or at one of the infrequent entertainments given at the principal clubs. The payment of fourpence secured a stall at the combination of cinematograph and variety show that during our stay in Palma was the fashionable form of amusement. And without further disbursement the visitor who inclined that way was entitled to wait on through the interval between the two houses and witness the whole performance over again. For plays or for light opera the fees advanced a little, though I doubt if they ever rose to the sum charged for the pit of a London theatre. The bull-fights patronized by Majorcan society are those given in summer. We went to one held at Easter, and though society was absent the people were there in numbers that filled two-thirds of the Plaza de Toros, which seats five thousand. The action was mercifully modified, for no horses were exposed to the attacks of the bulls. We entered the place with our national prejudices strong upon us, and left it with a conflict of mingled attraction and repulsion. When a bull knocked down a clumsy _matador_ who had been making painful but futile attempts to give him the fatal stroke, we lamented that the bull failed to kill his torturer. Yet when another and more skilful _matador_ by a single thrust mercifully vanquished his bull, we shared something of the enthusiasm of the spectators, who threw hats and cigars into the arena, and finally bursting in, carried the hero of the moment shoulder-high round the ring. It had certainly not been a fashionable function. From a neighbouring box our Vigilante bowed graciously, and Bartolomé, who was of the Vigilante's party, beamed broadly upon us. When we left the Plaza de Toros we encountered Maria, who was chaperoning two tall daughters in mantillas. And as we walked back along the ramparts we overtook Mrs. Mundo trotting homewards with her twin girls, whose uncovered locks were tied up with ribbons till they looked like a couple of nice little ponies on their way to a horse show. For certain temperaments Majorca has a curious magnetic attraction. People who have first set foot upon its shores with comparative indifference find themselves returning again and yet again; with each visit becoming more under the thraldom of its charm. The Squire and his Lady, who half a dozen years ago visited the island because so many other Mediterranean resorts were already known to them, have returned with increased anticipation of pleasure each successive spring since. And during our stay in Palma we made the congenial acquaintance of a Scots lady and gentleman who find the glamour of these fair islands strong enough to induce them to make a yearly pilgrimage thither from the North of Scotland. Majorca is a delightful place to loaf in. I know no place where one more keenly experiences the mere joy of being alive. In that ideal temperature, under those cloudless skies, one at first feels content to let the days drift past, taking no heed for the things of the morrow. But the air has an amazingly rejuvenating effect. In a short time years drop off--one loses superfluous weight and regains colour. Exercise ceases to be exertion and becomes a keen delight. Walks that formerly ranked as a day's excursion become merely a pleasant stroll, to be undertaken between an early tea and a late dinner. [Illustration: Calle de la Portella, Palma] In Palma something to interest or touch one was always happening. Once--it was on the first day of February--we entered the usually deserted Rambla to find a crowd composed chiefly of young men, all of the same age, gathered in front of the barracks. The majority had the sunburnt complexion of the rustic. A few were evidently of higher social standing. Many girls and a few old peasants fringed the crowd. It was the occasion of the annual drawing of lots for the enrolment of the young men of the Palma district, who were to spend their next three years in the army. Some of the lads peered anxiously in at the closed gates of the barracks; others concealed their concern and chatted gaily with their friends. Military service in that land of sunshine is not arduous. Recruits thus drawn by lot are never sent off their native island, and to flirt with pretty maidservants on the Borne on a Sunday afternoon--which to the casual observer appears to be the leading labour of the Majorcan force--can hardly be termed hard labour. So no doubt many of the rustics were already wondering if they would not look better in shakos and crimson breeches than they did in the blue cotton and goatskins of their shepherds' dress. At length the gates were thrown open and sergeants called upon the conscripts to enter. Many paused to wave farewells, and almost all saluted or raised their hats as they advanced to put their fortunes to the test. A few of the more smartly dressed strolled nonchalantly in, smoking cigarettes, and we guessed that they, following the native love of a gamble, had already paid a hundred crowns to the insurance company that, in the event of their drawing an unlucky number, would forfeit to the State the three hundred crowns that would purchase their exemption from the three years of service. A period of suspense dragged past. Then a sympathetic movement of the crowd intimated the deliverance of the first two freed men, who, as they left the gate, threw high in air the couple of breakfast rolls that, with two reales, are presented to every man who has drawn a lucky number. Others relieved and hilarious followed quickly, but many pretty girls and old men waited in vain for the return of the candidates that fate had decreed were to swell the ranks of the standing army. The barracks had swallowed them up and they were seen no more. Perhaps they also had rolls and reales; perhaps they were elated at the prospect of town life; perhaps they already looked back with longing to their almond-trees and goatskins! For the adventurous, Majorca has plenty of peaks to climb, coasts to navigate, shrines to visit, caves to explore. The distances between the known points of interest--and there are very many places still unexploited--are so easy that a tourist with only a few days at his disposal can visit the most noted parts. The two brothers in whose interesting company we visited the Dragon Caves had only five days to spend in Majorca. But even in so brief a space of time they succeeded in seeing and in doing much. Their method of mapping out their time was so admirable that I am tempted to quote it. On Monday night they crossed from Barcelona, arriving at Palma early on Tuesday morning. Having breakfasted on the steamer, they caught the early train for Manacor, where they lunched before driving to the caves. After dining and sleeping at Manacor they took the train on Wednesday morning to the railway terminus at La Puebla, and from there drove to the old towns of Pollensa and Alcudia. That accomplished, they journeyed by rail to Inca, where they passed the night, returning on Thursday by the morning train to Palma, where they spent the day visiting as many places of interest as possible. On Friday they drove to Sóller by way of Valldemosa, Miramar, and Deyá. Rising early on Saturday morning they drove to Fornalutx, and starting from there, climbed the Puig Mayor, getting a superb view from the summit. In the afternoon they drove back to Palma in time to catch the mail boat to Barcelona. The weather had been perfect, and they were able to carry out their well-planned expedition without interruption. For those who enjoy gentle exploration Palma makes an admirable centre. A good pedestrian could encompass the island on foot, and a journey more full of varied scenery or among pleasanter or more unsophisticated folk could hardly be imagined. Those of less energetic nature would find much of interest within very easy walking distance. It is almost impossible--in Palma at least--to hire mules, but driving is comparatively cheap. Every few minutes tramcars run to Porto Pi, where there is a good aquarium, with, when we saw it, a splendid display of writhing octopi. A mile beyond the car terminus is Cas Catalá, where there is a delightfully situated hotel. Just beyond the hotel are lovely walks through the pine woods that border the sea, and pretty little bays, in one of which--that a little way past the _carabineros'_ hut, I think--I got some nice little shells and quite a lot of sponges that had been washed up by the sea. Genova, which is a very short walk inland from the car terminus at Porto Pi, makes an attractive point for a little excursion. In a garden off one of the by-ways is the entrance to a recently discovered cave, which is the property of the landlord of the little _taverna_--the Casa Morena--who discovered it when he was digging a well. The cave, though small in extent, resembles the Dragon Caves in miniature, and has beautiful stalactites and stalagmites which are both fine in form and quite unblackened by smoke. The village church, which until lately was a favourite place of pilgrimage, has many fine altar-pieces and other paintings, and it has the rare quality of being so well-lighted that visitors are able to admire their beauties. In one of the side chapels is a delicately modelled recumbent wax figure of a young girl. Another chapel has a small square glass case containing a representation of the Nativity that is peculiarly interesting because of the purely local dress of certain of the figures. The Virgin holding the Holy Child is seated in the centre. At her right stands an elderly man, apparently meant for Joseph. It was surely without humorous intent that the devotee who fashioned his garments garbed him in the quaint old Majorcan dress of abnormally wide blue breeches. After seeing Joseph's dress it is not the least surprising to notice that two women who are less important actors in the scene wear their hair in pigtails and the native _rebozillos_. From the hill-side that rises behind the church, where the prickly pear grows in great profusion, one can enjoy a glorious panoramic view of the coast. For slightly longer excursions diligences leave Palma almost daily for all sorts of out-of-the-way and wholly charming places, such as Esporlas, Andraitx, Lluchmayor, Sóller, Estallenchs, Calviá, and Valldemosa. And if the traveller is wise and hastens to book the front seat he will escape danger of death by compression, and be in a position to enjoy a leisurely and comprehensive view of the country. It is well worth while, when intending to remain overnight at a town, to arrange to arrive on the eve of the weekly market. For market morning brings many quaint rural people flocking into town on panniered mules or in odd ramshackle conveyances. Sunday is the market at Pollensa, and there the traveller may see a profusion of the old men of the zouave-like breeches. San Sellas and Binisalem hold their markets on Sunday also. That of Manacor is on Monday. Artá, Montuiri, Llubí, and Porreras hold market on Tuesday. Wednesday is the day at Sineu, and Thursday at Inca, Muró, and Andraitx. Lluchmayor has Friday, and the day of the week at Palma is Saturday, when the country folk bring in the harvest of their fields and hold a little market of their own in the Plaza del Mercado, under the shadow of the high-towered Church of San Nicolas. Early in May Sóller holds a three days' _fiesta_, when a historic incident of the landing and repulsion of a band of piratical Moors is enacted with great spirit by the people of the town. A hint that may prove useful to any one arriving at some remote place where there is no _fonda_ is to ask to be directed to the schoolmaster. He is certain to know Spanish, may be pleased to meet a foreigner, and is sure to be able to recommend a lodging. It is to the courteous schoolmaster of Santañy that we were indebted for this suggestion. Failing the presence of a schoolmaster, the civil guard is a good person to apply to. They are said to be a fine and absolutely reliable class of men. An artist friend chancing at nightfall to light upon a village where there was no inn, applied to the civil guard, who not only gave him a room in his own house, but appeared in the morning to offer the use of toilet appliances in the form of a comb and a pot of pomade. The Balearic Islands appear to offer a good field to the entomologist. A friend who visited Majorca during February has given me this list of the butterflies and moths that, even at that early season, he saw in plenty, mostly within a few miles of Palma: Bath White, Cabbage or Common White, Red Admiral, Painted Lady, Clouded Yellow, Brimstone, Wall Brown, Holly Blue, Small Copper, Swallow Tail, and the Humming-bird Hawk Moth. As the spring advanced and the giant poppies I had sown in November became a four-feet-high hedge, butterflies--strange, to me at least, and very beautiful--fluttered into the little garden of the Casa Tranquila, and probably not finding the poppies so luscious as their brilliant appearance had led them to expect, speedily fluttered out again. They did not make their home with us, as had the big locust that, in the late autumn, I captured when he was feasting on a moth in the shrubby field behind the convent. Bringing the prisoner home in my handkerchief, I set him on a pink ivy-geranium that flourished in one of the big green flower-pots on the veranda. He seemed well content with his new quarters, for there he stayed all winter, taking up his position first in the tall scented verbena, and, when that lost its leaves, changing his perch to an adjacent almond-tree, as though he knew that would be the first to bloom. Very early in the year he vanished, and we thought he had gone for good. But just as the first pale blossoms were opening in the almond groves he re-appeared, bringing with him the female of his species, and together in connubial amity they shared his old home in the almond-tree. When the pale rose-tinted blossoms had fallen, and the grey-green velvet pods of the young almonds were emerging from the crimson calyxes, the locust and his bride deserted us to seek a wider pasturage. Though we wandered far from beaten tracks, the sole trace of reptiles encountered was an occasional discarded snakeskin. In Iviza lovely green and golden lizards and highly-varnished toy frogs in all "art" shades abounded, but we saw none of either in Majorca. Our only insect pests were mosquitoes--who, probably recognizing an alien and attractive flavour in our blood, were a disturbing nocturnal influence until, with the aid of a few yards of mosquito netting, we succeeded in frustrating their knavish tricks. Even by day they were not invariably quiescent; but the mosquito is a gentleman. He always gives warning before attacking an enemy, and when we met in open combat, there was something of the joy of battle in the defence. According to local report, the tenure of his days should have ended with November; but it was not until a fall of the temperature about the middle of January that our assailant withdrew his battalions and left us in peace. Though our visit was a winter one, the wild flowers were an unfailing source of pleasure. The season was unusually dry, yet I never took a country walk without finding some blossom that was new to me. When we arrived in October the rocky slopes about Porto Pi were covered by a royal carpet of the purple autumnal crocus. The last of the sea lavender was fading, but horned poppies and chicory were in bloom. It was there, too, that in November we found the curiously shaped brown and green wild arums that are known in America as "Dutchmen's pipes," and locally referred to as _frares_, whose acquaintance we afterwards made at Andraitx. In April, when we left Majorca, pretty little white and lavender iris starred the ground and rich purple mallows and golden mesembryanthemums covered the rocks of Porto Pi. The beautiful coast about Cas Catalá had a herbage of its own. Tall flowering heath, a persistently blooming plant with dark blue buttons, and delicate yellow rock roses were, as the months slipped past, succeeded by a fine display of cistus. Throughout the whole time of our stay a constant succession of sweet lavender blossomed on the grey-green bushes. Asphodel, too, abounded. The first to open was the smaller species, with its rushy foliage and slender spikes of bloom. In January the tall rods of the poet's asphodel rose in such profusion that we were forced to give it place as the typical island flower. Forced reluctantly, I confess, for to some the odour of the tall asphodel, when growing in quantity, is far from pleasant. It was at Sóller, that district of piquant contrasts, that we saw the delicate greenhouse maidenhair-fern growing in masses with English ivy along walls, or draping the moist sides of the water runnels. It was at Sóller, too, that we first made the acquaintance of the ten-inch-high daisy. There was little of the character of its Scots relative, the "wee, modest, crimson-tippéd flower," in this aspiring plant. But the Balearic Islands have another form of the _Bellis perennis_, a lavender daisy, that sustains the family reputation for humility by cowering close to the soil. The winter had been so dry that the flowers of early spring were disappointing. I found a few purple anemones where I had expected to see hundreds, and gleaned a handful or two of narcissus from the dry bed of the torrent where I had hoped to gather baskets full. But with the coming of the long-hoped-for rain the earth gave up her secrets, and secrets worth knowing they proved themselves. There were amazing orchids--little round-bellied flies, so life-like that one half-expected to hear them buzz; or glorious travesties of insects that never were, some with bodies of glittering metallic blue daintily edged with brown fur, others with delicate wings of rosy heliotrope. It was odd to find garden pets--grape hyacinths, gladiolus, iris--leading a gipsy life on those sunny slopes, and odder still to discover begonias, or even _Nigella damascena_, camping out, as it were. One felt inclined to demand to be told why they were shirking their obvious duty of beautifying gloomy British gardens. The following list of the rarer Balearic plants, given me by a noted Scottish gardener, is specially interesting as showing the wide range of the island flora: Anthyllis cytisoides, Astragalus poterium, Cynoglossum pictum, Daphne vallæoides, Delphinium pictum, Digitalis dubia, Genista cineria, Hedysarum coronarium, Hedysarum spinosissimum, Helianthemum serræ, Helianthemum salicifolium, Helichrysum Lamarkii, Hippocrepis balearica, Hypericum balearicum, Lavatera cretica, Lavatera minoricensis, Leucojum Hernandezii, Linaria triphylla, Linaria fragilis, Lotus creticus, Melilotus messanensis, Micromeria Rodriguezii, Micromeria filiformis, Ononis crispa, Ononis breviflora, Ononis minutissima, Pastinæa lucida, Phlomis italica, Polygala rupestris, Scutellaria Vigineuxii, Sencio Rodriguezii, Sibthorpia africana, Silene rubella, Sonchus spinosus, Vicia atropurpurea. Perhaps it was because wild flowers bloomed all through the months that the native children did not care to gather them, and that indifference to natural blossoms prevailed in all classes of the community. It seemed as though the Majorcans had not yet realized the decorative value of flowers. One rarely saw cut flowers used on the table or in the reception-rooms even of people on whose country estates roses and violets blossomed all the year round. I never saw flowers for sale in the big daily market, and the few clusters that in spring the countryfolk brought in to the Saturday market would scarcely have sufficed to trim one fashionable hat. In February, when the rose-coloured blossoms of the cistus were beginning to open on the uplands, the brown-cheeked shepherd boys began to look for the young shoots of the wild asparagus, which they made into little bunches for sale, bound round with broad asphodel leaves fastened with long, sharp prickles. Though a gourmet could hardly have taken exception to the flavour of the asparagus thus gathered, he might have objected to the size, for the shoots were seldom larger than that sold in London under the mysterious name of "sprue." But the flavour was delicious, and when one added the pleasure of gathering to the value when found, the wild asparagus was worth its weight in gold. While the season lasted we often brought in a bunch or two from our sunset strolls, and these occasions were signalized by the appearance of asparagus omelet at supper. [Illustration: Sunday Morning at Iviza] XXV IVIZA--A FORGOTTEN ISLE With regard to Iviza, the third in importance of the Balearic Isles, even the usually omniscient Baedeker maintains a dignified reserve. And indeed Iviza is so little visited that while the _Isleña Marítima Compania Mallorquina de Vapores_ convey passengers thither from Majorca for fifteen pesetas first class, or eleven pesetas second, they charge eighteen and thirteen pesetas respectively to bring them back to Majorca, which looks as though they thought voyagers might require to be cajoled into going to Iviza, but would need no inducement to return. From the records in existence one gathers that no relics of the Stone Age have been discovered in Iviza, though traces left by many dynasties prove that from very early times occupation of the lovely and fertile isle was hotly contested. Chaldeans, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Romans, Greeks, Vandals, Saracens, and Moors fought for its possession, but since the Aragonese invasion of the thirteenth century Iviza has belonged to Spain. We had heard strange tales of the Ivizans--told, it must be admitted, by people who avowedly had never set foot on the island--grim stories of ferocity, of the crack of the ready pistol, of the slash of the handy knife. We had also heard that these grim islanders were invariably kind to strangers. Now we were on the way to judge for ourselves. While the departure of the Barcelona boat lures all Palma to the mole, only a handful of spectators was assembled when, at noon on the 8th of April, the _Lulio_ steamed westwards. It was a fine day with a brisk head-wind. Like the high mountains around Sóller, the waves were white-crested, and for the first three hours the voyage was a delight. As the _Lulio_ skirted the coast we enjoyed identifying the places now familiar to us by land. The little bays beyond Cas Catalá, Ben Dinat among its woods, the windmills above the town of Andraitx, and the long, high islet of Dragonera. As the heliotrope mountains of Majorca receded into the distance, the brilliance faded. From warm azure the sea changed to purple, from purple to grey, and the wind blew keenly against us. The _Lulio_ is only some 600 tons, and there was little shelter on the saloon deck, which is forward of the funnel. We felt inclined to envy the Ivizan passengers, who, camped on the snug lower deck, first ate strange messes, then after a brief but busy interlude of regret, curled up on their bundles and went snugly to sleep. With us there were half a dozen men and one lady. And when the captain invited her to share the cover of the chart-house which abutted on our promenade, I envied her also until, after the dubious enjoyment of a few moments of splendid detachment from the common herd, she revealed signs of inward discomfort and fled to seek a less conspicuous position. Before the land we had left was out of sight, two little clouds low on the western horizon were recognized as outlying islets of the Ivizan group. Then, as we gradually approached nearer, hills upon hills, promontories, more islets, appeared; and still we steadily steamed westwards. The sun sank in golds and greys behind the Ivizan heights, and still we went on through the grey gloom, past a rocky, indented coast on which we saw no sign of habitation. Then, out of the darkness arose the vision of a town piled on an eminence--a town of unexpected beauty, for from the tranquil waters of the almost landlocked bay to the highest point it was sparkling with lights. It was Iviza, the one important town of the main island. To the hoarse grating of her anchor chain the _Lulio_ swung to, and through the darkness the vague outlines of rowing boats could be seen approaching. The young boatman who was the first to accost us secured our custom, and we stepped down the accommodation-ladder into the swaying boat. Half a dozen natives followed, carrying their belongings in big cotton handkerchiefs, a form of Balearic travelling case that to me always seemed peculiarly alluring, for when not in actual service, the handkerchief-portmanteau could be folded and stowed in the pocket; or even, did occasion require, be put to other uses. The behaviour of the boatman who rows him ashore in a new country serves the experienced traveller as symbol of the treatment awaiting him in that country. Our boatman asked one real each--twopence-halfpenny--as his fee, which was exactly the sum required of the native passengers. And that served as our token of Iviza. We would be treated with strict honesty--there was but one price either for native or stranger. The arrival of the steamer, whose departure from Palma had attracted so little attention, was a matter of importance at Iviza. People clustered on the pier, and the steps leading to the water's edge were so densely crowded that it was difficult for those landing to find foot-room. A burly Ivizan took the luggage, and after a cursory custom's inspection we reached the _fonda_, which was only a stone's-cast away. The _fonda_, which appeared to be the only one in the town, was delightfully situated on the harbour. The rooms allotted to us were the best in the house. Two opened from the drawing-room and one had a balcony overlooking the water. The inclusive charge was six pesetas a day--about four shillings and sixpence of English money. Supper was in process of serving. Going downstairs, we entered the dining-room, to find one long table at which were seated about a dozen men. Judging rashly by our Minorcan experience, we classified them collectively as commercial travellers, and concluded that Iviza must be a more important place than we had imagined, if it gave employment to so many. The meal, which revealed a lack of inspiration on the part of the cook, was served by a solitary waiter. When it was over, we went out and felt our way about the streets. The capital town of Iviza, which is built on a high rock, faces the sea. It has no back, no other side. The old town, which is surmounted by the Cathedral and the castle, is entirely surrounded by a perfectly preserved Roman wall. The newer portion of the town, which is built on land reclaimed from the sea, lies just below the principal gate of the old city. Passing the quaint circular fish market and the vacant market-place, which consisted of a red-tiled and raftered shed, supported on white pillars and surrounded by trees, we walked up the slope leading to the great gate in the Roman wall that encircles the ancient town. In a niche on either side of the opening stood a massive marble figure. The heads were gone and certain other members had not outlasted the ravages of the centuries, but enough still remained to show the beauty of the workmanship. From the neck-socket of the draped figure foliage was springing, and the statue of the legionary had the scarce dignified effect of carrying a bundle of fodder, so boldly had the weeds sprouted from under his right arm. The streets within the old city walls were dark and steep and twisted. In their secretive recesses something of the atmosphere of the Middle Ages seemed still to linger. The Ivizans go early to bed. The lights that illumed our landing had already been extinguished, and finding our progress over these tortuous steeps a protracted stumble, we groped our way back to the _fonda_, resigned to leaving further exploration to the morrow. We slept soundly. When our early coffee came we drank it on the balcony as we watched two boys fishing from a boat in a shallow just beneath our windows. The bait seemed to be shell-fish, and the boy in the Carlist cap who held the rod was catching little wriggling fish as quickly as he could re-cast his hook into the water. Then for the first time we awoke to the picturesque charm of the Ivizan's choice of material and love of colour in dress. The fishing boy wore plush trousers of a lovely pinky-fawn shade. His companion's were moss-green, and his waist scarf was scarlet. A crew of fishermen, their garments a kaleidoscope of gay hues, were breakfasting in their boat near. And along the beach beneath, a boy clad in faded blue velvet was carrying in one hand a basket of beautiful rose-coloured fish and dangling a hideously suggestive octopus in the other. Our good friend the padre, a presbítero of Palma Cathedral, had kindly recommended us to his chosen friend, who was a beneficiado of Iviza Cathedral. So our first walk, on the morning after our arrival, led up the precipitous paths towards the superbly situated old church. Seen by daylight the streets were vaguely reminiscent of both Palma and Mahón, without resembling either. While the whitewashed walls recalled the austere cleanliness of the Minorcan capital, the condition of the streets gave one the impression that the inhabitants subsisted chiefly upon oranges. The plenitude of balconies held more than a hint of Palma, though most of the Ivizan balconies were heavily fashioned of wood; and from many the entire family washing (which in Palma would be dried on the flat roof), even to sheets, hung out to dry. The Ivizans showed both taste and skill in floriculture. Quite a number of the balconies were prettily decorated with pot plants, from cinerarias to peonies, in full bloom. The market was busy when we passed. Grave-looking women, with wide-brimmed white hats perched rakishly a-top the handkerchief that covered their heads, were selling oranges or vegetables. One, with a row of moist water-jars balanced on either side of the furriest donkey I ever saw, was plying the trade of water-carrier. We reached the Cathedral during morning service, and we waited, enjoying the music and the tuneful clamour of the great wheel of bells that mingled so harmoniously with the sound of the organ, and wondering in which of the officiating clergy we would discover the friend of our friend. He also had been looking out for us, and as we, along with two old men, were the entire congregation, he had no difficulty in distinguishing us. When Mass was over we met on the _mirador_ outside, and though by force of nationality, religion, language, and training we ought to have been poles asunder, from almost the first moment of our acquaintance we recognised a congenial spirit in Don Pepe, as the young choristers, who clustered round, affectionately called the padre. Under his care we re-entered the Cathedral, which, despite, or perhaps because of belonging to no known school of architecture, is very beautiful, the interior with its canopied Virgin having an inspiring sense of light. Then, accompanied by the sacristan, a grave man with a charming smile, we saw some of the treasures of the church, climbed the tower to see the comprehensive view from the top, and visited the adjacent castle, which is now used as a military barracks. While within the fortifications we were introduced to an especially interesting specimen of the cunning traps prepared by the Romans for their unwary invaders. From one portion of the castle, which is perched high within the strong fortifications, we were guided through a long, dark, shelving passage, down, down, down, until on passing through a massive door we entered an alley, lit from above, that ended abruptly in a four-feet-high portal deep set in the great city wall, and from without partly secured by a bastion. The ingenious plan of the ancient defenders had evidently been to leave unguarded the inconspicuous door, and when the besiegers, discovering it and imagining themselves in luck, had crept through the secret door into the alley, to shower missiles on them from the circular opening overhead. It was a shrewd device, but one hardly calculated to endear the Romans to their enemies. Leaving the heights, we walked down towards the church of Santo Domingo, an antique building with curious red-tiled domes. The priceless treasure of this old Dominican convent is an image of Christ which for ages has been the object of great devotion. Until the last century ships on leaving or entering the harbour of Iviza were in the custom of saluting it with their flag and a shot from their cannon. As we neared the church we saw approaching from a side street a peasant family of such attractively quaint appearance that we paused and, affecting to be admiring the prospect, waited for them to pass. They were all attired in the gala dress of the island. The sun-tanned farmer father wore a suit of old-gold embossed velvet and a purple scarf was wound about his waist. The mother wore the immoderately wide skirt gathered into a plain high-waisted bodice, the short green silk apron, the little shoulder shawl with its prettily flowered border and long fringe, and the gay embroidered head-wrap that make up the distinctive Ivizan costume. From the tip of her pigtail a brightly coloured ribbon hung down to the hem of her spreading skirts. The eldest child, a girl of eight or nine, was a diminutive facsimile of her mother. The elder boy wore a man's suit in miniature of very light blue, and a wide-brimmed yellow hat. The group tapered off with a wee boy in a quaintly cut long frock and a white Carlist cap, and a baby in bunching petticoats and a muslin cap with wings. The father, who smiled pleasantly when he saw us notice the children, carried with evident care a liqueur bottle. Moving decorously, as though bound on some important mission, they preceded us into the church. We had paused to examine a fine old painting, and when we reached the special chapel that contained the celebrated image we found the little family already kneeling before the altar, even the youngest apparently impressed by the solemnity of the occasion. After a few moments the father, rising from his knees and still holding the bottle, approached the padre to crave a private word with him, and they quitted the chapel together, leaving the mother and children still on their knees. A great silver lamp, suspended from the roof, burned in front of the _Cristo_, and all around the walls were votive offerings--models of hearts, of legs, of arms, even of heads, and little silver figures, some in peasant dress, one in a smart frockcoat. Oddest, perhaps, of all was a pair of silver trousers. [Illustration: Thanksgiving] There were medals, a fine model of a full rigged ship, a little muslin frock, another of rich satin in a glass case, all presented in token of succour prayed for and obtained in time of imminent danger to life or limb. While we lingered, a female attendant entered the chapel carrying the liqueur bottle, and drawing down the great silver lamp, proceeded to fill its reservoir from the store in the bottle, the family, who still maintained their devotional attitude, half turning with something of proprietary interest to watch her movements. Returning to the body of the church, we found the padre and the father of the family in earnest converse. During a recent serious illness, explained the padre, the peasant had vowed the gift of a bottle of olive oil for the sacred lamp. Now, on his recovery, his first action had been to make a little pilgrimage to the chapel, bringing his entire family to give thanks for his restoration to health and to deliver the promised gift. The exhibition of such unquestioning faith and gratitude in this world of scepticism was inexpressibly touching. And our hearts melted and were glad with the little household. Still, though the father declared himself again robust, a sickly pallor showed beneath his tan, and when he grasped our hands in farewell his touch was ice-cold. Walking back along the ramparts we noticed a gentleman who, though personally unknown to us, yet bore a remarkable racial resemblance to many people we had known in Britain. He was well dressed after the English fashion, wore fawn kid gloves, and though the sky was cloudless, carried a neatly rolled umbrella. "That is the Señor Wallis, a member of an illustrious family here. They all speak English. Shall I introduce you?" asked the padre, seeing that we were interested. To our gratification the Señor Wallis not only spoke English admirably, but also understood it perfectly. "My grandfather came here as British Consul," he explained. "He married and settled here. My father was Consul after him. We have always spoken the English language at home." Here then was a family, living in a remote island where they might not hear English spoken once a year, who because their ancestor had been English carefully maintained the language and traditions of their forebears. As the Boy said afterwards, it reminded one of Kipling's tale of Namgay Doola! A little farther along, a massive figure, joyously arrayed in a suit of maize-coloured corduroy, a lilac-check shirt and a green hat, gladdened our vision. "That is the present English Consul," said the padre, who seemed to be on good terms with everybody. "I shall introduce him to you." The British Vice-Consul blushed when presented to genuine natives of the country he represented. His knowledge of the language was rudimentary, and after a few tentative efforts the conversation lapsed into Spanish. As the Boy said, it was quicker. The padre had promised to call at three to take us to see the excavations in process on a slope just outside the city. And after lunch I strolled out to the fields in search of Ivizan wild flowers. Within a five minutes' walk of the town I soon gathered an armful--purple and yellow and white and yellow toad-flaxes, pink asters, blood-red poppies, big cream chrysanthemums, little blue and white iris, a handsome garlic-smelling pink flower, wild mignonette, both the tall and the dwarf asphodel, a yellow pheasant's eye, one or two unfamiliar blossoms, and, best of all, many regal spikes of the tall crimson gladioli that were growing among the green corn. The padre was punctual to a moment, and we were soon mounting the rocky hill just beyond the city wall where the excavations were going on. There was nothing in the appearance of the place to suggest that underneath our feet there existed Phoenician catacombs. Great spikes of the handsome evil-smelling asphodel were blooming all around, and two men in wide felt hats and abbreviated blouses, standing by some heaps of soil, were the only visible sign of the important work that was being done. When we reached them we saw that their labour consisted of passing the earth that had been brought to the surface through a fine sifter, and that close by yawned a hole overhung by a rope running on a wheel attached to a rough tripod. The Boy was the only one of the party daring enough to accept the invitation to descend. Leaving his coat behind, he slid down the rope and vanished through a hole in the bottom of the shaft. The younger workman followed. While we awaited their re-appearance we noticed that many bones, earth-coloured, light in weight and brittle to the touch, mingled with the mounds of refuse, and that bits of broken pottery and fragments of iridescent glass leavened the heaps. Soon the Boy and his guide, earth-stained and perspiring, for the underground atmosphere was close and hot, scrambled their way back to the surface. The Boy's account was that when he had swung himself down the shaft he and his guide entered the subterranean passage, feeling as though he were entering his own grave, in place of merely going to view that of other people. Passing through an outer hall, they came to a narrow chamber where, by the light of an acetylene lamp, a being looking like a gnome or a ghoul was sitting on the edge of a long stone coffin grubbing in the dust and ashes that filled it. Resting on the rim of the coffin were the relics that he had already recovered from the debris--bits of shattered pottery, and a beautiful but mutilated statuette of terra-cotta about five inches in height. From that cell they descended to a large chamber on a lower level, where there were many coffins and a plenitude of bones. When in recent years three Phoenician catacombs were discovered it was found that their existence had been known to the Moors, who at some unknown date had already despoiled them of treasure, leaving traces of their appropriation in the form of broken water jars and other worthless relics. Fortunately the Moors valued only the gold, so that, in spite of the damage caused by their rough handling, a mine of precious things still remains to gladden the archæologist. Leaving the sunny hill-side, where spring flowers were blooming among the crumbling bones of these nameless dead, we mounted to the house by the windmills, where the treasures found in the graves are primarily housed. There also was the padre a welcome guest, and in a small dark room wonderful things were shown us. Tiny jars delicately figured; perfect vases of iridescent glass; strange bas-relief recumbent figures with stiffly extended hands; antique coins, scarabs that the Moors had bereft of their setting, ornaments that had escaped their rapacity, and old lamps enough to have satisfied even the covetous Abanazer. It was oddly suggestive to think that, while the people who were entombed in these stone coffins thousands of years ago had known delicate arts and worn costly jewellery, their successors on the land lived in primitive dwellings and drew the water they drank in earthenware jars that in form were exact copies of those so long buried in the tombs. Truly in some things the world has not progressed! [Illustration: A Trio and a Quartette] XXVI AN IVIZAN SABBATH Sunday morning was as calm and beautiful as could be desired by visitors with only a few days in which to explore an island. With quite unwonted energy we rose before seven o'clock, and after dressing and taking a cup of tea in our own little sitting-room, went out to the Alameda to see the countryfolk coming in to Mass or market. On the ships in the harbour flags were flying. Everybody was in gala dress. The very air felt gay. And as we sat on one of the stone seats in the leafy Alameda and watched the people streaming into town from the broad white roads that lead to San Antonio, Santa Eulalia and other villages, we chirruped with irrepressible delight, so unexpectedly and deliciously quaint were the figures that passed before us. Some of the women rode mules, and sat perched high on a pile of sheepskins, their multi-coloured petticoats billowing about their neat ankles. Others were packed closely into open carts that had cushions placed low on either side of their sagging floor-matting. Many walked, accompanied by vigilant elderly relatives. And oh! how demure and decorous they all looked, with their dark hair parted in the middle and severely plastered down the sides of their rosy young faces. An object of fervent admiration in my childhood was a pincushion made of a little china doll, whose placid head and insignificant body appeared from a widely distended skirt. And on this brilliant Sunday morning the Ivizan women and girls in their exaggerated skirts seemed to me like a procession of walking dolls. The dresses appeared to be fashioned from any material that boasted a pattern, for the Ivizan detests a plain material. Even the velvet or plush used in the men's clothes was in many instances flowered or striped. The short broad aprons were of bright-coloured silk elaborately tucked above the hem. Their deeply fringed shawls and head wraps were bordered with wreaths of gaily tinted flowers. The chains of big oblong gold beads and elaborate gold pendants in the form of crosses and crowns gave a blatant and contradictory note to the staid costume, while the gaudy hue of the ribbon that tied the end of the pigtail and fell in long ends nearly to the hem of the skirt suggested a hint of the original Eve lurking behind all this apparent demureness. Gold buttons closely set ran from the wrist of the long sleeve, which was often of green, to the elbow. And the white sandalled shoes, whose toes were caught up by a cord bound round the ankles, had a suggestion of sabots that added a Dutch touch to the picture. Sometimes a mother in sober garments or a smiling father in a wide hat marched past in proud chaperonage of a diffident young daughter rigged out in all the family jewellery. One girl, who enjoyed the personal care of her mother, wore a gown of old rose-spotted brocade looped up in pannier form to show a pink petticoat. To our thinking the extreme of quaintness was reached in the person of a little maid of seven or eight, whose dress was a travesty of that of her widowed mother; with the sole difference that, while the mother's mourning garb was of unrelieved black, the kerchief and tiny shawl of the child had bordering wreaths of white flowers. As she walked slowly by, a tiny entity in over-voluminous garments, the Man declared that, despite her superhuman sobriety, and the "papa, prunes, prisms" expression of her infant lips, he felt convinced that it was with difficulty she resisted a desire to skip! They say there are ten men for every woman on the island, and our experience of that Sunday morning inclined us to believe it. From every direction came fine strapping lads moving in droves. A distinct resemblance in the dress, taken in combination with the rakish dare-devil air with which these young bloods set their wide hats to one side and swaggered along, vividly suggested the Mexican cowboy. In striking contrast to the expansive attire of the women, the men's dress appeared designed to accentuate their natural slimness. The trousers of velvet or plush in all manner of rich shades fitted closely to the figure except at the ankle, where they spread widely. Gaily hued shirts or short full blouse jackets, usually black or blue, were worn. Red or striped sashes were wound about their waists. Most of the hats were large and adorned with gold cords. And in addition to one necktie for use, it was customary to add a second and sometimes even a third for show. We were sincerely sorry to find that nine o'clock, the hour when we were due at the hotel for coffee, had rushed upon us. When we came out again on our way to visit the Museum, the streets about the market were busy with a moving throng resplendent in colour. For the moment the girls appeared to have got rid of their chaperons and were parading about in quartettes, sextettes, even septettes, their tightly pleated pigtails streaming stiffly behind, their hands, holding pocket-handkerchiefs heavily edged with substantial crochet lace, sedately crossed in front. One group that particularly rejoiced the artistic soul of the Man was made up of four demure damsels who walked in a row, the tallest at one end, the others decreasing in height till the row ended in a dear dot. Their outlines were so much alike that they had the effect of having been stencilled in a diminishing scale. It was perhaps only to be expected that wherever one saw a bevy of girls a corresponding cluster of men would not be far distant. Yet we rarely saw them address each other. The modern etiquette of peasant courtship in Iviza runs on strict though simple lines. A plenitude of suitors being assured, it is the maiden who makes the selection. The admirers of a marriageable girl wait for her outside the church door on Sunday. When she leaves Mass the one who has the premier claim attaches himself to her, and trots beside her for the first portion of the homeward journey, then at a fixed point or within a stated time-limit he gives place to the second, and so on until the number is exhausted. If any man seeks to exceed his allotted space, or in any other way tries to transgress the unwritten law, pistols may flare and knives are apt to spring! Apart from this the people of Iviza are peaceable, and on all points moral and virtuous. It must be admitted that certain of the more frolicsome spirits still keep up the old custom of saluting the maidens of their choice with a charge of rock salt fired at the ankles. And it is devoutly to be hoped that the unwieldy masses of petticoats serve at least one useful purpose by shielding their wearers from the saline missiles of love's artillery. When we had reached the Cathedral square, where the Museum is situated, we found the door open and the custodian--in whom we were surprised to recognize one of our fellow-guests at the _fonda_--waiting to receive us. Though the Museum at Iviza has been in existence for little more than two years it already contains a notable collection of Phoenician, Roman, Byzantine and Moorish remains. To an archæologist, inspection of the contents would have been a special treat. Even to us who had little knowledge of the subject it was intensely interesting. Within the centre cases and in the glass-doored cupboards that line the walls were many things whose worth we could not venture to guess. The varied assortment of coins seemed especially valuable. One jar found during the process of excavation had contained over six hundred specimens. Among the other exhibits were several primitive bas-relief figures with abruptly out-jutting hands, resembling those we had seen on the previous day. Two figures had the hands clasped on the bust over something suggesting a loaf, and one had a ring through the nose. Many of the vases and slender vials from the tombs were beautiful, both in outline and in decoration. And we saw a particularly fine scarab that had been found in one of the stone coffins immediately after our visit to the catacombs on the previous afternoon. In the second room were some curious old documents and certain of the more bulky exhibits. And from a top shelf a row of skulls of these bygone races grinned down upon us creatures of to-day, as though their owners found something ludicrous in the idea of a special house being set apart in which to guard as treasures what to them had been but everyday possessions. When we left the Museum the padre, with kindly thought and subtle intuition of what is most likely to interest the stranger in a foreign land, took us a-visiting. First he introduced us to the only professional artist on the island, who like everybody else in the place seemed a special friend of our sponsor. And in the artist of this far-off southern islet we rejoiced to meet the romantic painter of fiction--the picturesque hero one reads about but rarely has the good fortune to encounter. Don Narciso--his very name was in keeping--was young, buoyant of spirit, charming in manner, and enthusiastic regarding art. He had a thick curly black beard, abundant wavy black hair. He wore a becoming blouse, and his loosely knotted silk tie was of _amarilla_ silk. The painter welcomed us cordially, and took us into his studio, where he was at work upon a full-length portrait of a bishop who had been a native of the island. Round the walls were brilliant studies both in figure and landscape. We had been living close to Nature for six months. It was a pleasure to breathe again the studio atmosphere. In less than two minutes the three artists were deep in discussion of kindred interests. Their nationalities might be different, but Art has only one language. Names--Velasquez, Goya, and others of more recent date--were bandied between them, the while the padre and I sat dumbly attentive. When we were leaving, Narciso took us into the artistically unkempt garden attached to the studio, and from the line of orange-trees beyond the old well plucked a spray heavy with the luscious blossom. This he presented to me with a grace that dignified the sprig into a bouquet. And we all parted with promise of an early reunion. A few yards farther down the road we passed a group of ladies, whose smart Paris hats and modern raiment, seen in that land of quaint attire, gave the wearers an oddly foreign look. "Son la familia Wallis," murmured the padre, as he raised his hat to them. The house of the padre, our next place of call, was just beyond the seminary where the students whom we had seen leaving the Cathedral in their robes of black and scarlet were undergoing their thirteen years of probation before entering the Church. The padre's home in all its appointments impressed us as being exactly suited to the quiet refinement of its master. From the windows one gained a superb view of the rippling waters of the landlocked harbour and of the undulating country beyond. We had the honour of meeting the padre's mother, a lady who, though shrunk a little by weight of years, was still hale and bright. And his sister, the widow of a distinguished officer. And his niece, who was so vivacious and charming, that when she waved to us from her balcony as we left we wondered if the _novio_ who was standing in the street, whispering love up to a maiden in a mantilla on the balcony just beneath hers, had not made the mistake of a floor! It was evidently the feast-day of one of our fellow-guests at the hotel, for at the close of the midday meal a tray of dainty Spanish sweetmeats in frilled paper cases was passed round--being handed, evidently by special instructions, to us also. When we had helped ourselves we bowed indecisively towards the farther end of the table, saying vaguely--in the hope that our gratitude might reach the donor--"Muchos gracias, señor." The other señores were quick to indicate the benefactor, who flushed a little as he acknowledged our thanks. While lunch was being served a dark silent young man, who was one of the regular company, several times left his place, and from our seats at table we saw him go to the open front door of the hotel and glance up and down the street, as though on the look-out for somebody. Seeing him return alone for the third time, we whispered hints of a dilatory sweetheart. But when the eagerly expected guest did appear it was not some graceful doña, but a little baby girl, the sleeves of her white frock tied with black ribbon, who was carried in in the arms of a stout peasant nurse. As the padre told us later, our taciturn fellow-guest was the postmaster, who had lost his young wife, and this was their babe come to pay the bereaved father her weekly visit. When we went out in the afternoon the townsfolk were promenading under the shade of the Alameda, but the _payeses_ had all vanished--gone back to the rural homes whither we would like to have followed them. With the disappearance of the quaint figures the charm seemed to have vanished, and when we met our new friend the sacristan we cajoled him into going for a stroll along the watercourses that intersect the reclaimed land beyond the harbour. These are a curious feature of a delightfully curious country. On either side of the raised centre path were broad ditches full of clear water, whose yellow sand was speckled with black shell-fish. Shoals of little fish darted in and out among the rushes, and on every patch of floating weed a tiny frog sat and croaked. The fertile ground on either side of the ditches was divided into small holdings, or _feixas_ as they are locally called. And there mixed crops of fruit and vegetables flourished abundantly. Vines trained to trellises bordered the water, and at frequent intervals tall whitewashed gateways, reached by little bridges and quite unsupported by walls, reared their gleaming bulk with something of the self-conscious air that might be attributed to whited sepulchres. As in Majorca, the small agriculturists appeared to live in the towns. There were no dwellings on the _feixas_, though a few had sheds from which issued the grunts of unseen animals. The evening glow was on the hills when we left the watercourses and followed a track that led between fields of full-bearded rye dotted with blood-red poppies towards a picturesque white-walled _noria_. In the shadow of the trees close by the old Moorish well, which was encircled by a trellised vine, sat the farm folk enjoying the rest of the Sabbath. A guest in a mantilla was with them. So far from resenting our intrusion they welcomed it. Seeing that we were interested in the working of the _noria_, the farmer ran forward and, seizing the long wooden donkey shaft, set the wheel revolving, and made the circle of buckets (which were not fashioned of earthenware as in Majorca, but formed from lengths of hollowed pine stem--a peseta each they cost, he told us) discharge their contents for our benefit, the primitive machinery, which made laudable objection to Sunday labour, protesting the while with groans and squeaks. [Illustration: The Gates of the _Feixas_, Iviza] His wife--who had received us with friendly looks and kindly greeting in the Ivizan dialect, that, while greatly resembling Majorcan, omits the harsher sounds, hastened further to reveal her good will by picking me the few blossoms within reach. Even the townified guest in the mantilla added a genial word of greeting. Yes, the Majorcans had spoken truly when they said the people of the sister isle were courteous to strangers. [Illustration: The Church of San Antonio, Iviza] XXVII AT SAN ANTONIO It was Monday morning, and when the Man went out in search of a subject to sketch, I lured him along by my favourite watercourses. The sun beat warmly on the limpid water, in which the swarms of little fish, looking like vivified marks of exclamation, were ceaselessly flashing about. And on the surface herbage countless glistening frogs, green, golden, bronze, and chocolate, were perched, like little kings, each on his floating throne. It was with lamentable lack of monarchical dignity that each in turn, as he got hint of our approach, took an agile header into the water and disappeared. Going on past the tall whitewashed gates that seemed to have so scant reason for existence, we reached the San Antonio road, and there in the shadow of a wall at the side of a bean-field the Man sat down to paint. Against the cloudless sky the Cathedral-crowned town rose grandly. From where we sat the encircling ramparts appeared as complete and impregnable as they did in the time of the Roman occupation. From our point of view, which afforded no glimpse of the newer houses sheltered close between the ancient gate and the harbour, the city looked much as it must have done in those bygone days when the ground on which the lower portion of the town is built was still lapped by the salt water of the bay. While the Man painted I sat by, well content. The bean blossoms made sweet savour in our nostrils, and the gentle swish of falling water from the _noria_ in an adjacent field gave a refreshing suggestion of coolness. And as we sat near the roadside quaint figures passed by in slow succession. Perched sideways on their panniered mules came broad-hatted women. The local convention that proscribes hats for Sunday female wear permits them on weekdays; and so, set jauntily on top of the sober handkerchief that covered the head, most of the peasant women wore a wide white hat, bound with black, and encircled with a black ribbon that hung in long ends behind--women whose grave sun-browned faces argued that the day for protecting the complexion was surely past. Leaving the Man at work, I crossed to where in the raised _noria_, a dozen yards beyond the white highroad, a blindfold mule was patiently at work. All alone there by the creaking old Moorish well he was walking round and round the path, already worn to dust by the passage of his willing feet. But if one chanced to be born a mule and had to draw water for a living, a pleasanter place in which to carry out one's vocation could hardly be imagined. For close about the stone-sided platform that surrounded the well grew two immense fig-trees and a large pomegranate; and for many months of the year the _noria_ must have been an oasis of leafy shade in the midst of sun-baked fields. Even on that April day the fig leaves were unfolding, and the small green knobs of the first crop of fruit had sprouted close under the foliage at the tips of the ash-grey branches. The big pomegranate-tree held its spreading branches over the mule-track, as though desirous of warding off the sun from the patient worker. On the delicate tracery of branches the leaves, that always seem too minute and finely fashioned to be in perfect accord with the heavy roseate fruit, were showing rich copper hues. In humid spots about the stone bastions of the well moisture-loving maidenhair fern was clinging. As the shaft, slowly revolving, turned the wheel, the chain of wooden buckets emptied themselves with a musical tinkle of falling water into the wooden trough beneath, from which it flowed into a big square tank. At first sight the enduring mule had seemed the only sentient being near, but a second glance revealed abounding life. The water in the reservoir was dotted with lively black entities that proved to be tadpoles. On a decaying log sat a handsome frog with a panel of green, of so vivid a tint as to seem as though freshly enamelled, neatly let into his glistening brown back. Along the sandy bottom of the clear water a great warted toad moved sluggishly. Close in the shadow a dark trout was lurking. Within reach of my hand a golden lizard lazily sunned himself; and on the top of the wall rested a dragon-fly with a broken wing. A swallow swooped overhead. Among the poppy-strewn barley grasshoppers were chirping merrily. In the sunshine a newly-hatched swarm of insects gyrated, tentatively exercising their wings--all Nature seemed indolently happy. But still the patient mule trod on its way. Sometimes it paused a space, and I rejoiced; but the moment the listening ears ceased to hear the trickle of the falling water the persevering beast had again started upon the monotonous circular tour. It must have been a case of conscience, for nobody was at hand to see whether the task was accomplished or not; but still, with eyes blinded to the beauty around, the patient mule pursued the ceaseless round, until, ashamed of my own inactivity, I longed to loosen the halter, to take off the straw blinders that covered his eyes, and to turn him into the cornfields to eat his fill. "What have you done with yourself?" asked the Man, as he closed his colour-box and prepared to return to the hotel for lunch; "I'm afraid you must have had a dull morning." But when I would have explained to him how excellently well I had been entertained I found it difficult. So I said nothing, for, after all, what possible social community could one find in a blindfold old mule and a handful of saltant or fluttering creatures? * * * * * In the afternoon the padre came with us, and we drove right across the island to San Antonio, the town that ranks second in importance. From Iviza diligences run to San Antonio, to Santa Eulalia, to San Carlos, San José, and San Juan, and the fare is fivepence. But Ivizan diligences are impossible things. We had seen them and shuddered, for they were merely rough carts with matted floors and close airless canvas covers. And any we had seen were so crammed that segments of squashed passengers protruded from every opening. To secure the services of a two-wheeled carriage, a horse, and a man for a complete day costs a douro (four shillings) in Iviza, and the charge for a half-day is the same. The padre, Don Pepe, accompanied us, and in the care of a grave-faced Ivizan clad in a mourning suit of black ribbed velvet we set off, pausing at the hamlet of San Rafael to see the fine vista of the town from the plateau before the church. I must confess that at first sight San Antonio was disappointing. What we had expected I do not know. What we found was a whitewashed village set on a rocky slope by an enclosed bay. The situation was delightful; but after the grandly characteristic city of Iviza this zealously whitewashed town, in spite of its antiquity, seemed insignificant and _new_. Antonio, the friend whom Don Pepe sought, was away on his "possession." So while a willing messenger sped to fetch him, we visited the church. The cura was absent, though his lace-trimmed vestments--which, like the town, were white as the driven snow--were hanging to dry within the precincts by the church porch. The church of San Antonio shares the attractive informality which is the distinctive feature of Ivizan architecture. It was once a fortress of defence against the Moors. From the flat roof we had a magnificent survey of the country about, saw the bay, which, like all the water about the island, abounds in fish, and the lighthouse, to which Don Pepe promised to take us, and the rough track up the solid rock towards the _Cueva de Santa Inés_, into whose recesses Antonio was going to guide us. We had left the church and were moving in the direction of the lighthouse, when the padre's quick eyes noted a figure hastening towards us. The messenger had done his work. Antonio had returned. The señor was in the prime of manhood and on the eve of marriage. After our other sightseeing was done, we were promised a glimpse of his chosen one--or, to speak quite correctly, of the damsel who had selected him; for, as I have said before, in Iviza it is the lady who chooses. On the sunny bank near the lighthouse we encountered an interesting and venerable trio--the Alcalde, the Captain of the Port, who wore earrings, and the cura of San Antonio. With them also our padre was a favourite. The cura urged us to return to the _curato_ and take coffee with him. But the afternoon was passing and there was still much to see. So we said good-bye and left them with something of envy in our hearts, to resume their dawdle among the white flowering asters and butterflies, by the shores of the placid bay. Wherever their lives had been passed, they seemed at length to have found anchorage in a spot remote from the storms and dissensions that agitate and perplex the world. The men walked the mile to the cave. I drove, but many times during the short journey I realized that it would have been far less exertion to walk. The road lay over wickedly disposed rock, and when my hat was not butting the canvas sides of the trap it was violently colliding with that of the driver, who, though he bounced up and down on his seat, still managed to preserve his air of imperturbable calm. The story of this subterranean chapel is a curious and interesting one. It is believed that in the early years following the conquest, before the fortress was converted into a church, the inner chamber of the cave was used as a temple where Mass and other religious services were held. Some time later--probably towards the end of the sixteenth century--a wooden image of the martyred Saint Inés was discovered in the cave, an image that, though it was several times removed to the Church of San Antonio, always mysteriously reappeared in the cave. This was ultimately accepted as a sign that the saint desired her image to remain in the cave, which then received her name. On the anniversary of San Bartolomé's day--the very day on which the image had been discovered--in the height of a violent tempest, a foreign barque found safe harbourage in the bay of San Antonio. On board the distressed ship was a gentleman who had in his possession a beautiful painting of Santa Inés. In his extremity he made a definite bargain with the saint, vowing that, if through her intercession the whole ship's company landed without scath, he would present her portrait to the church of the first port where they disembarked in safety. It was on hearing of this miraculous intervention, and of the widespread notice it attracted, that the ecclesiastical authorities at Iviza gave permission for the little subterranean cavern to be used as a place of worship. After that time, on the annual recurrence of San Bartolomé's day, people in great numbers journeyed from all parts of the island to the little town, and after attending Mass in the parish church went with the inhabitants of the town to the cave, near which they picnicked. Then, after having taken a draught of water from the holy well in the interior of the cave, they assembled outside and danced until sunset. This quaint custom continued until 1865, when it was modified because the roof of the cave showed signs of collapse, and the natives of Iviza had a superstitious belief that the impending catastrophe would occur on the day of the annual gathering. Since then the dance has been held in the town, but is only attended by those from a distance, as, since the scene of the festival has been changed, the girls of San Antonio refuse to take part in it. When we had secured the key from a silent woman at the farm-house near by, we gained the mouth of the cave by treading unconventional paths--first walking in single file along the broad top of a stone wall, then treading across a tobacco patch, where, warmly sheltered by surrounding walls, the broad young leaves were growing strongly. At the entrance to the cave Antonio and a companion who had joined him--we knew him only as "Charles, his friend"--lit candles, and close on each other's heels we crept, doubled up and with stumbling feet, through the burrow-like passage that led to the inner shrine. Many changes must have taken place of late years, for the chapel was cumbered with fallen refuse. The arch of the roof masonry and the hollow where the altar had stood could still be distinguished, otherwise there was little token left of the strange history of this underground place of devotion. As we crawled back towards the light and the outer air, Antonio pointed to where, at the bottom of a tortuous and shelving passage, was situated the holy well. The climax of our visit to the little white town was the promised introduction to the beloved of Antonio, whom we met in the house of her mother, in the street near the church. Antonia could not have been more than twenty, if indeed she had quitted her teens, but in sobriety of dress and demureness of outer deportment she was a facsimile of her comely mother. It was only when you noticed that her full red lips had difficulty in refraining from curving into smiles, just as the dark hair so smoothly plastered down on either side of her rosy face seemed rebelliously determined to ripple into waves, that you realized that Antonia was overflowing with exuberant young life. Antonio knew it, though. No disguise of decorous matronly garments or assumption of a demure manner could conceal from him Antonia's real girlish charm. One could see that by the way his string-seated chair edged imperceptibly nearer hers, and by the ingenious manner in which, without seeming to do so, he yet managed to watch her every motion. It was at this juncture that a happy thought occurred to the padre. Would it be possible for the Man to do a sketch--just the smallest jotting--of Antonia, as a memento of the occasion? "Of course it would," agreed the Man. "And of Antonio, too!" At this the lips that Antonia had been trying so hard to keep prim broke apart in irrepressible giggles and her hand slipped up to see if her rebellious hair was smooth enough to do her credit. And Antonio straightened his shoulders and gave a furtive twist to the ends of his moustache. The light was fading, and the chairs had to be placed--close enough together to satisfy even Antonio's desires--near by the open door; just outside which a row of children had already secured front places to view the show. The sketch was necessarily hurried, even perfunctory, but it gave immense satisfaction. "Oh! Look at Antonio," Antonia gurgled joyously. "See his moustache! Is it not fine?" "It is like the moustache of an officer of _carabineros_," said Antonio, feeling it to see if it were actually more imposing than he had thought. "If I really look like that I ought to be a Minister of State; but--I prefer to be the husband of Antonia!" [Illustration: The Church of Jesus, Iviza] XXVIII WELCOME AND FAREWELL The shimmer of the sunrise and the reflection of the hills in the unruffled waters of the harbour were so ethereally beautiful in these Ivizan mornings, that I found it impossible to stay in bed. On the last day of our stay I was early out on the balcony. Scarcely anybody was about. A man in a red cap and a coat of yellow velvet was baiting lobster-pots. And a boy in velvet trousers that sun and the passage of time had faded to an inimitable shade of pale moss-green was playing with a dog. Otherwise the town seemed asleep. The scene was the perfection of drowsy restfulness, when the sudden blast of a steam-siren broke in upon the placidity, and with the sound a steamer, looking gigantic in these miniature surroundings, entered the bay. With her appearance the world awoke. As the ship moved slowly in towards her berth, which was just below my balcony, people appeared from all directions, as though they had been lying in ambush awaiting the signal to concentrate upon a given point. Probably the fact that the military element was present in force suggested the simile. A band of officers in full dress, with short natty astrakhan-lined overcoats and white gloves, stood a little apart from, and in advance of, the general public. Among them were the lieutenant in command of the carbineers, and the tall chief of the civil guard, who looked immense in a heavy cloak lined with scarlet. The municipal authorities had assembled in force, also representatives of the Church, the British Consul--"Good morning, sir!" to me on the balcony--and a comprehensive gathering of townsfolk, all with the air of being pleasantly excited about something that was going to happen. The steamer--it was the _Cataluña_--was close to the wharf now, but there was no sign on deck of any unusual occurrence. Except for the crew, a few steerage passengers, and a knot of priests who clustered on the boat deck amidships, nobody appeared to be on board. But still the crowd waited expectant. Then just as the gangway connected the _Cataluña_ with the land a solitary martial figure, a uniformed officer whose breast was decorated with several medals, appeared on the poop. And towards the ship and up the gangway, in slow and ceremonial order, moved the officers. The lieutenant-colonel of the Ivizan battalion of the _cazadores_ led. Over the gangway, across the deck, up the companion, and into the arms of the decorated officer, which were outstretched to receive him. In quick succession the others passed up, to be received cordially, if not so affectionately as their colonel. Then, as in turn the waiting authorities followed, it dawned upon us that we had been close spectators of the arrival of the new Governor of Iviza, and that from our point of vantage we had witnessed his first official reception. It was about this stage of the proceedings that among the men in uniform who were surrounding the new Governor on the poop we began to recognize different members of our hotel party. The imposing captain of infantry was the tall man who sat next to us and spoke to nobody. The man with the bellowing voice and the beautiful eyes was the lieutenant in command of the Ivizan carbineers. The man at the end of the table was a captain of engineers. The man with the eye-glasses was the captain of the medical corps. So much for our fancied astuteness. In place of sharing the table with a party of commercial travellers, as we had imagined, we had really been eating at the Ivizan equivalent to an officers' mess! When everybody with any claim to the distinction had been presented and the company on the poop had dwindled down to a few, the family of the newly arrived Governor made its appearance, in the persons of three lively boys and a baby in a nurse's arms. Then, coincident with the appearance on deck of a lady in a hat and motor-veil, the six soldiers in fatigue uniform who had been in waiting sped up the gangway, to return laden with hand baggage, which, with other femininities, included a blue bandbox. And in their wake the Governor and his little tribe, accompanied by the colonel, stepped in stately measure across the wharf, and disappeared into the door of the hotel that gaped hospitably open beneath us. As we drank the coffee that the overworked Paco had just brought us, we wondered a little what the new Governor's impressions of Iviza would be. He looked worn, we thought, as though weary with years of service; and we hoped that he would find his new home in this remote island a place of peace. The little breakfast over, our black-garbed driver and the British Consul, who had suggested taking us to see the _Salinas_, were waiting. And we drove out in the sweet morning towards the curious series of lagoons where two great harvests of salt are yearly reaped. The day was glorious, the air crisp, exhilarating, as we drove out over the country roads towards the wide stretch of flat land where the sea-water, prisoned by a cunning sequence of locks into vast shallow vats, was slowly evaporating in the strong sunshine. Although lead and zinc are mined near Santa Eulalia, the Salinas at Iviza and at Formentera form the great industry of the Ivizan group of islands, salt to the amount of nine thousand tons being shipped each year to various parts of the world. The history of these vast salt lagoons reaches back to before the conquest. In 1871 the Salinas, which for many years previously had belonged to the State, became the property of a private company, now known as the _Salinera Española_. The road, which led between green fields, had been lovely. An occasional girl perched on a donkey comprised almost the entire traffic. We reached the Salinas to find a scene of great brilliancy. All along the sides of the pools rose pyramids of salt, their glistening sides clearly reflected in the still water with something of the effect of carefully moulded icebergs. And along the portable line of rails strings of trucks laden with the sharp-faceted crystals of the rough salt were moving towards the wharf. Down by the wharf everything was white--the roads, the few houses, the great stores of salt that lay awaiting shipment, the shoes of the men that stood in the flat-bottomed barges beneath with long rakes, packing away the salt as it streamed down in a sparkling white torrent from the pulverizing machine on the staging of the quay above. From Iviza salt is shipped in great quantities to many distant countries. It was interesting to hear that even in salt the taste of the nations varies--Russia liking hers large in crystal, America preferring that supplied her to be as fine as possible. We stood on the pier that jutted out over the clear green waters of the islet-studded bay, watching the men at work filling the barges with the salt that was to be transhipped to the Italian barque that lay in the bay of Iviza. A fine, robust, brown-faced smiling lot of men they were. And the work on which they were at the moment engaged seemed mechanical and easy. Hanging on the railing close by were fishing nets, and they told us they caught many fish in the bay. On that bright airy morning the work seemed pleasant and not over-arduous: different from what it must be when the fierce southern heat has dried up the sea-water and the labour consists of standing under the burning sun, beset by mosquitoes, scooping up the salt from the floor of the lagoons and building it up into pyramids. If ever there was specially thirsty work it must be salt salving. There seemed to be surprisingly little accommodation for the labourers near the Salinas. In summer, when close upon a thousand labourers are employed, a large proportion of them are forced to live in the town of Iviza and add a walk of many miles to the exertion of the day. At the hotel at luncheon the newly installed Governor with all his family (except the baby) and the colonel sat by us at table. The elder men were still in uniform, but the _habitués_ of the board had been quick to return to mufti. Our walk that afternoon was in the care of Don Narciso, and under his guidance we walked through pleasant country byways towards the few clustered houses that comprise the little village of Jesus, to see a notable picture in the church there. It was through a fair green world that Narciso led us that radiant afternoon--under trees heavy with great green velvet almonds, and through fields deep in full-bearded grain and rich in blood-red poppies and crimson gladioli, among which wide-hatted women, the upper of their many skirts tucked up pannier fashion, were busy working. Just outside the Church of Jesus, at a _noria_ in the shade of a tall palm, trellised vines, and budding pomegranate-trees, a sun-browned man, his little brown son, and an old brown mule were working in happy unison. The church itself belonged to that informal type of architecture in which Iviza abounds. The roof was red-tiled, and without and within the building was severely whitewashed. The special panel which formed the centre of the great altar-piece was the work of an unknown painter of the early Valencian school. In a broad, simple composition it represented the Virgin and Holy Child surrounded by angels. The details were obscure, even after Don Narciso had thrown open the big door of the church to allow more light to enter; but the colour was remarkably rich and full. And though the surrounding subjects were inferior in workmanship, their subdued tones harmonized well with the dignity of the central panel. The cura was not at home, but his parents, a dear old peasant couple who lived with him, received us warmly, offering that ready and insistent hospitality that struck us as being a special feature of the Ivizan life. Our winter in Majorca had accustomed us to the polite but purely perfunctory fashion in which, like the Spaniard, the Majorcan tenders food to all comers, secure in the knowledge that it will be declined. But when the Ivizan offers refreshment to the visitor he means it to be accepted. The moment we were all seated on chairs set round the walls of the wide, airy room into which the large door directly opened, the good old father hastened to bring out a tray of tiny glasses and a decanter of the pure, amber-hued Ivizan wine--wine that had been pressed from grapes ripened close by. And the mother ran to fetch a plate of sweet biscuits and goblets of clear water. Then they watched with genuine pleasure while we sipped the wine, and, having praised it in all sincerity, followed the custom of the country and drank of the water. The sole family of the worthy couple had been two sons, both of whom had shown a vocation for the Church. The one in whose house they lived was now cura of Jesus, the other that of San Raphael, only a short walk distant. Our casual visit to the little hamlet left in our minds an unfading picture of rustic sweetness of atmosphere and of modest pride that had attained its ideal. From there we went to see a fine old country house, one of the "possessions" of a friend of Don Narciso, who, though he does not live there, courteously cycled over to do the honours. From the roofed _mirador_ we had a good view of the town rising on its rocky height above the sea. Here, too, we had evidence of the Ivizan spirit of hospitality. Native wine was again offered us, and from the orange gardens down by the palm-encircled _noria_ we got abundance of huge oranges, and a curious fruit that, with the outward appearance of the lemon, boasted the sweetness of the orange allied to a floating essence of bergamot. There the kindly Don Pepe joined us, and together we walked back through the gloaming. At dinner the new Governor, still in uniform, his handsome wife and their three nice boys again were present. After the State reception of the morning, it amazed us to see with what an utter lack of consideration they were treated. The very officers who had risen at daybreak and donned their best uniforms to honour his arrival sat at table with the Governor as though unconscious of his presence. The sole sign of deference that we could discover was that the landlord and Paco had put on their best coats in which to wait at table. But there the distinction ended. In common with the others, the Governor and his family patiently endured the tedious service. To me it was almost painful to see the representative of official power sit uncomplainingly, until the overworked Paco, having made the round of the long table, handed the few chilled fragments still remaining in the dish to the hero of the imposing little ceremony of the morning. It made us inclined to wonder if the hospitality of the Ivizans was confined to the humbler classes, or whether it would have been a breach of Ivizan etiquette had one or other of the principal residents offered these new-comers the freedom of their homes. So ended our visit to Iviza. For when dinner was over and our farewells said, the _Cataluña_ was ready to take us back to Palma. Our experience of the remote island that we had approached with doubts had been a thoroughly delightful one, and when we steamed out over the placid water we watched the lights of Iviza sink in the distance with the feeling that we left real friends among the kindly islanders. Our visit had been a short one, yet our minds held precious memories of the sincere and kindly people--of the padre, Don Pepe, and his affectionate care for his flock; of Narciso and his pictures, of the loves of Antonia and Antonio, and of the dear old father and mother of the cura of Jesus. Though it lacks the savage grandeur of some parts of Majorca, Iviza has beautiful and romantic scenery, and life in the lovely island is sweet and simple and wholesome. There is little money in circulation, but more is not needed. The ground is fertile, the climate gracious, the water-supply is unfailing, and fish may be had for the catching. So food is plentiful and cheap. House rent in the town of Iviza may be counted at about a half less than in Palma, and when the townsfolk speak of the cost of living in the smaller towns, such as San Antonio, they hold up their hands at the amazing cheapness of it. This, then, was our impression of Iviza, the remote island about which such extravagant tales are circulated. That fire-arms and knives still play a part when the interests of rival lovers clash is openly acknowledged. But during our visit the course of true love must have run smoothly, for no echo of pistol shot or clash of weapon marred the peace of our stay. As we found the people of that forgotten isle--honest, courteous, generous, and hospitable, quaint of dress and soft of voice--so have I written. [Illustration: Moorish Tower at the Port of Alcudia] XXIX LAST DAYS The golden months had flown past, speeding so swiftly that we felt as though time must have defrauded us. Scarcely a day seemed to have elapsed after our return from Iviza before we were saying, "Next week we must go home." But before beginning preparation for departure, three days were our own. Three clear days in which to take a real lazy holiday; for though the holiday spirit had pervaded our wanderings, we had all been working hard. To be really idle we knew we must seek a spot already familiar to us, one that offered no temptation to register fresh impressions. And a brief family conclave found us unanimous in the opinion that the port of Alcudia, from which, in January, we had sailed to Minorca, was the ideal place. Friday morning found us at La Puebla station, mounting the little one-horse diligence that runs to and from Alcudia in connection with the trains. I shared the box-seat with a semi-comatose driver, a big box, a bigger sack, a loaf of bread, and sundry nondescript parcels. Besides my people, the only occupant of the interior was a bronzed young man who had travelled in the same compartment with us from Palma. In the train the studied perfection of his dress had made me wonder on what errand of ceremony he was bound. His trousers and waistcoat were of very light piqué, his coat of shining black alpaca. His linen was new, his tie resplendent; his watch-chain of linked metals was an inch broad; his face beamed with expectancy; his whole being seemed to vibrate with glad impatience. The way to Alcudia passed through a rural district, running at first by many small holdings, where patient mules were turning water-wheels to irrigate the little fields where their masters were hard at work. The driver, curling himself up in his corner of the box-seat, dozed off after the manner of diligence drivers who have started on their first journey long before dawn. The horse, taking advantage of his master's somnolence, walked more and more and more slowly, until at intervals the driver, unwillingly opening half an eye to see how far we had progressed and finding us almost at a standstill, would urge him on with opprobrious words. The day was lovely--how often I seem to have written that! In the lush green corn grasshoppers were chirping. By the wayside the convolvulus was opening its big pink cups. And in the dark interior of the diligence the bronzed man was telling his story. He was a son of the district towards which we were slowly advancing. His parents had a wayside _taverna_ and a tiny farm. But in the family there were many mouths to feed, and though in Majorca there was always food for all, money was scarce. So five years ago he had gone to Algeria to push his fortunes. Now, having made a little money, he was returning, without warning of his coming, to his old home. As to the future? Well, that was for his parents to decide. One did not require to be told that the five years of exile had been industrious and frugal ones. Now the great moment was at hand. He was already experiencing the expectant joy of the returning wanderer. When the small holdings had been left far in the rear and rocky hills rose beyond the fertile fields, his assumed composure vanished. He became frankly excited, eagerly watching the lonely road and scanning the fields for sign of familiar forms and faces. As the coach made a momentary pause while the driver delivered a loaf and an amorphous parcel to a road-mender, the Exile, thrusting his head from the back window, shouted greeting. And the roadman, recognizing an old friend, ran after the already receding coach to grasp him warmly by the hand. The driver was wide-awake now, and evidently determined to make up for lost time. And the cigars our Exile wished to give the _caminero_ had to be thrown on the road, from which with grateful nods and smiles he picked them up. As he drew near his old home the Exile, though even more keenly alert, became silent. When the little _taverna_ by the wayside came in sight the driver, rising to the occasion, put on pace and pulled up before the door in grand style. The unusual sight of the coach stopping brought the old _tavernero_ and his wife to the wide doorway. From my perch on the box I saw their expressions change from surprise to amazed delight. It was the father--a typical Majorcan with a hale spare figure and shrewd kindly face--who, advancing first, seized his exultant son in his arms. The mother held back a moment, quivering with joyous emotions, her lips parted in speechless welcome. Then, running forward, she fell upon his neck. The host and hostess of the Fonda Marina gave us hearty welcome, and, as before, heaped benefits upon us. In our three months of absence young Cristobal had grown perceptibly. He was at school now, and had already learned to recite in Spanish sing-song the days of the week and the months of the year. Our former rooms overlooking the bay were vacant, and for three long summer days we wandered as we listed--over the white sands, which were now rich with the rare shells and scarlet coral for which, on our previous visit, I had looked in vain; or among the pines, whose sun-distilled fragrance mingled with the sea air. One radiant morning we took a luncheon basket and wandered as far as the Albufera, but at all other times the excellent cooking of the mistress of the _fonda_ lured us back in time for meals. The few people we encountered looked pleasantly at us. And the Captain of the Port--a retired naval officer who spent much of his time fishing from a boat moored at his own front door--most courteously called, and presented me with a bouquet sent by the ladies of his house. Monday evening saw us back at the Casa Tranquila. With Tuesday began the uncongenial labour of dissolution; for the little house that during the never-to-be-forgotten months had been our headquarters had to be emptied of its contents. Our belongings were few in number, but our manner of living had brought us into such intimate relations with them that we felt personal interest in each article. We had developed quite an affection for our yellow cups and saucers with their crude bunches of red and blue flowers; and our chocolate-pot of brown and yellow native ware, with its perforated lid and wooden pestle, ranked as a family friend. The great vine that during the first months of our stay had converted the veranda into an airy bower was again covered with foliage and with embryonic clusters of grapes that some more lucky tenants would enjoy. The rose-bushes that had bloomed all winter were sending out an abundance of bud-laden shoots. Ripe lemons still clung to the higher branches of the tree, though the new fruit was already formed. There was scant time for all we had to do. Yet we managed to pay good-bye visits; to take final peeps at our favourite haunts; to secure on behalf of a poultry-fancying friend a setting of the eggs of certain Moorish-looking fowls whose jet black bodies were topped by huge white feather turbans; to dig up bulbs of the most curious kinds of fly orchis for another friend who is so fortunate as to possess a "wonder garden." Our final day, which rushed upon us before we had steeled ourselves to meet it, was deplorably wet. It seemed as though the climate that had treated us so generously was weeping at the thought of our departure. We lunched daintily at the home of our good friends the Consul and his wife. Then came the moment when, for the last time, the bells of Bartolomé's chariot jingled at the door of the Casa Tranquila, and the neighbours came out to wish us God-speed. None of them came empty-handed. Pepe brought his finest carnations. The Andalusian lady, her entire brood clinging to her matronly skirts, also offered flowers, and the retired gentleman who lived in the lordly mansion across the way hastened to cut his choicest roses. So with the carriage full of fragrant evidence of good will, we drove off, to pause a moment at Apolonia's door to bid her farewell. At the distribution of odds and ends a rug and a hat had been allotted to Apolonia. And when she seized this opportunity of thanking us for the trifles sent her, Apolonia spoke appreciatively of the rug, but there were tears in her bright eyes when she referred to the _sombrero_. And that makes one wonder how it is that the utterly useless and incongruous gifts are often the most valued. The dear old soul had never worn a hat in her life and certainly never would. The article could be of no possible use to her, but perhaps, like Jess in the _Window in Thrums_ with her mantle, she "would aye ken it was there." As we turned the corner we got a glimpse of Mr. and Mrs. Pepe carrying a gaily coloured handkerchief containing the discarded suit of the Boy's that had fallen to Pepe's share. Waving the bundle, they indicated that they were already on their way to the tailor's to have the suit altered. The Angelus was ringing as the _Miramar_ steamed out into the mist. Standing at the stern, we looked back while the rain-clouds gradually blotted out the town, and thought of the little house at Son Españolet standing empty and forlorn. We had hoped that when the inevitable hour of parting came we might leave in one of those magnificent sunsets under which we had so often watched the mail-boat start for Barcelona. But though our last sight of Majorca was veiled with rain and tears, we will always remember it as a land of sunshine and of smiles. INDEX Afterglow, 251 Alaró, 204 Castle of, 211 Children of, 213 Albufera, the, 173 Alcudia, 169, 175 Port of, 170 Almudaina Palace, 27, 149 _Almudaina, La_, 265 Aloes, 184, 188 Amphitheatre, Roman, 176 Amusements, 277 Andalusia, family from, 22, 332 Andraitx, 111 Port of, 117 Aquarium at Porto Pi, 282 Archduke Luis Salvador, 66, 82 Arracó, 123 Artá, 227 Caves of, 232 Asparagus, wild, 288 Asphodel, 286, 298 Astronomers, British, 55 Banners, Hall of the, 235 Barbarossa, 198 Barcelona, 1 Barnils, Hotel, 5, 6 Barranco, the, 100 Basket-making, 238 Begonias, 240 Bellver, Castle of, 4, 51 Biniaraix, 100, 249 Birthday party, 102 Boot-brushing, 190 Borrow, 49 Breeches, baggy, 64, 159, 164, 282 British Consul at Iviza, 297, 321 " " " Mahón, 200 " influence in Minorca, 186 Bull-fighting, 277 Butterflies, 284 Byng, Admiral, 195 Cabo Blanco, 211 Cabo de Pera, 182, 237 Cabrera, 169, 211 Cabritt and Bassa, 209 Cactus (prickly pear), 21, 122, 124, 160, 189, 205 Cala Fonts, Minorca, 198 Cala Retjada, 238 Calvario at Pollensa, 160 Candelabra, silver, 149 Capdepera, 231, 237 Cape Vermay, 238 Carabineros, 77 Carthusian Monastery, 71 Cas Catalá, 109 Castle of Alaró, 211 " " Bellver, 4, 51 " and fortifications, Iviza, 294 Catalans, Cave of the, 218 Cathedral, Palma, 134, 143, 147 " Iviza, 294 Cave at Genova, 282 " of the Holy Well, 139 " " Ramon Lull, 86 " " Santa Inés, Iviza, 316 " Smugglers', 87 Caves of Artá, 232 " the Dragon, Manacor, 217 Chaperonage, 5, 239, 268 Charcoal stove, 45 Charioteer, our, 67, 74, 152, 277, 332 Chopin, 12,70 Christians, early, 115 Christmas Eve, 134 " market, 132 Church of Jesus, Iviza, 324 Ciudadela, Minorca, 181 Clubs, 275 Cobbler and his wife, 21, 333 Coinage, 49 Columns, Queen of the, 236 Commercial travellers, 182, 200 Conquistador, the, 4, 10, 52, 83, 109, 139, 144, 181, 194, 232 " Feast of, 143 Conscripts, 166, 280 Consell, 204 Consul, our friend the, 15, 43, 131, 202, 332 Consumos, 46, 127, 133 Cookery, 11, 33, 65, 93, 113, 156, 171, 206, 227, 236 Coral, 331 Cost of living, 276 Courtship, 268, 304, 318 Customs, 5, 130 Dances, religious, 213 Dancing at San Antonio, Iviza, 317 Delights, Cave of, 218 Deyá, 91, 254, 259 Diligence, travelling by, 105, 126, 225, 283, 329 Dogs for hunting, 239 Dress, fashionable, 266 Dress, native, 10, 61, 63, 159, 226, 265, 293, 312 Dromios, the two, 165, 168 Eagles, 71, 211, 260 Electric light, 17, 136, 206 Enciamada, the, 6 Esglayeta, 68 Exile, returned, 330 Fairy, the Good, 245, 250, 252, 255 Ferrer, 3 Firewood, 45 First communicants, 248 Flowers, wild, 99, 121, 141, 192, 220, 240, 258, 285, 286, 298 Fonda de Mallorca, Palma, 5 " " Rande, Artá, 227 " Central, Mahón, 185 " Feminias, Manacor, 216 " Marina, Alcudia, 170, 331 " at Iviza, 291 Fondas, country, 274 Footgear, 10 Fornalutx, 100 French influence, 98 Frogs at Iviza, 311 Furnishing, 17 Gardening, 21, 45 _General Chanzy_, wreck of, 182 Genova, 282 Governesses, 268 Governor of Iviza, 321, 326 Grand Hotel, Palma, 4, 204, 214, 274 Gymnesias, 11 Holy Thursday, procession on, 260 Hoo-poo, 243 Hospederia, 67, 72, 90, 260 Hospitality, 15, 325 Hotel Barnils, Palma, 5, 6 " Grand, 4, 204, 214, 274 " Marina, Sóller, 92, 97, 105, 244 Hot months, the, 273 House-hiring, 16 Housekeeping, 23 Ilex, forest of, 239 Inca, 63 Iviza, 289 British Consul at, 297, 321, 322 Castle and fortification, 294 Cathedral, 294 Cave of Santa Inés, 316 Church of Jesus, 324 Cost of living, 327 Courtship, 304, 318 Dress, 293, 302, 308, 312 Driving, 314 Early occupation of, 289 Fonda, 291 Frogs, 311 Hospitality, 325 Market, 293 Museum, 304 New Governor, 321, 326 Noria, 308, 312, 324 Phoenician catacombs, 298 Roman wall and statues, 292 Salinas, 323 San Antonio, 314 San Rafael, 314 Santo Domingo, 295 Small holdings, 308 Wild flowers, 298 King Alphonso IV, 209 " Jaime, el Conquistador, 4, 10, 52, 83, 109, 139, 144, 181, 194, 232 " Jaime II, 149 " Sancho, 69, 84 Kitchen, farm, 103, 258 Language, 48, 121, 196, 200 Laundress, our, 49, 332 Lavender, sweet, 141 Locusts, 284 Lonja, the, 56 Lull, Ramon, 83 Mahón, 184 Mallorquin antiquities, 81, 150, 177, 240 " prices, 7, 43, 44, 112, 155, 168, 170 Manacor, 216 Marketing, 7, 63, 80, 132, 159, 164, 189, 225, 283 Martel, French expert, 219 Mas, Juan, 167 Masked penitents, 263 Military service, 280 Minorca, 181 Athenæum at Mahón, 189 Barbarossa, 198 Boot-brushing, 190 British Consul, 200 " influence, 186 Byng, Admiral, 195 Cala Fonts, 198 Ciudadela, 181 Commercial travellers, 182, 200 English words, 196 Fonda Central Mahón, 185 Market at Mahón, 189 San Luis, 195 Talyots, 190 Taula, 192 Villa Carlos, 198 Whitewash, 185 Wreck of the _General Chanzy_, 182 Miramar, 75 Monastery, Carthusian, 71 Montjuich, 3 Moorish oppression, 144 " refugees, 232 " tower, 173 Mosquitoes, 118, 285 Music, 31, 102, 140, 145 Navidad, 128 Nightingales, 245 Noria, 174, 308, 312, 324 Offerings, votive, 162, 297 Olive-oil factory, 103 Operations in church, exciting, 220 Orchis, fly, 220, 286 Our Lady of the Peak, 164 " " " Refuge, 209 Palma de Mallorca, 4 Almudaina, 27, 149 Body of Jaime II, 150 Cathedral, 134, 143 " treasures of, 147 Consumeros, 46 Customs office, 5 First impression, 4 Grand Hotel, 4, 204, 214, 274 Hotel Barnils, 5, 6 Lonja, the, 56 Markets, 7, 132 Port, 27 Post-office, 129 San Francisco, church of, 85 Social life, 266 Tavern at the port, 32 Palmettos, 160, 238 Palm Sunday, 245 Peak, Our Lady of the, 164 Penitents, masked, 263 Phoenician catacombs, Iviza, 298 " village, 239 Pigs, 134, 181, 183 Plants, the rarer Balearic, 287 Plum pudding, 130 Pollensa, 155 Port of, 157 Town hall of, 165 Port of Palma, 27 Porto Pi, 4, 15, 273, 276, 285 Post-office, Palma, 129 Prices, Majorcan, 7, 43, 44, 112, 155, 168, 170 Puebla, La, 154, 329 Puerto Cristo, 217 Puig Mayor, 100, 105, 244, 245, 249, 256, 257 Queen of the Columns, 236 " of Spain, birthday of, 14 Rain, 10, 92, 203, 271 Ramon Lull, 83 Refuge, Our Lady of the, 209 Refugees, Moorish, 232 Relics, sacred, 147 Rent, house, 19, 250 Road-mending, 252 Roman amphitheatre, 176 " gateway, 169 " graves, 177 " statues, Iviza, 292 Salinas, 323 Saloon accommodation, first, 2, 194, 197 " " second, 180, 194, 197, 202 Salt, shipping, 323 Samphire, 207 San Antonio, Iviza, 314 San Francisco, church of, 85 San Lorenzo, 226 San Luis, Minorca, 195 San Rafael, Iviza, 314 San Roch, Feast of, 213 Sand, George, 12, 70 Santa Catalina, 15, 18 Santa Maria, 62 Santo Domingo, Iviza, 295 Scots visitors, 278 Secoma, 125 Sereno, the, 12 Servants, 276 Shells, 172, 282, 331 Smugglers' cave, 87 Snow, 271 Social life, 266 Sóller, 94, 243 Port of, 96, 257 Fiesta at, 283 Son Españolet, 15, 18, 46, 166, 273 Son Mas, Andraitx, 115 Son Moragues, 82 Son Puigdorfila, 138 Son Rapiña, 138, 273 Son Servera, 230 Sponges, 282 Squire and Lady, 204, 272, 278 Steamer _Ancona_ of Leith, 30 _Balear_, 1, 3 _Cataluña_, 321 _Isla de Menorca_, 197 _Lulio_, 290 _Miramar_, 34, 333 _Monte Toro_, 180 _Vicente Sanz_, 194 _Villa de Sóller_, 97 Sunshine, 270 Talyots, 190 Taula, 192 Taylor, Bayard, 69 Tea, 6, 81, 241 Temple, the white, 76 Terreno, the, 15, 51, 273, 276 Tobacco, 32, 119, 317 Torrentes, 94, 117, 140, 249 Tourists, 28, 281 Tower, Moorish, 173 Town Hall, Pollensa, 165 Train, travelling by, 61, 153 Travellers, commercial, 182 Travelling by diligence, 105, 108, 126, 154 Valldemosa, 69, 80, 260 Vegetable man, our, 25, 50 Vermay, Cape, 238 Vigilante, our, 39, 277 Villa Carlos, Minorca, 198 Votive offerings, 162, 297 Wells, chain (norias), 174, 308, 312, 324 Whitewash, 185 Wild asparagus, 288 Wild flowers, 99, 121, 141, 192, 220, 240, 258, 285, 286, 298 Wind at Minorca, 191 Windmills, 122 Wine shop, 65, 112 Winter climate, ideal, 270 Yachting, 275 Yacht of the Czar, 28 The Gresham Press UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, WOKING AND LONDON. * * * * * Transcriber's note: Times are shown using a period notation e.g. 7.40, these have been left unchanged. Changed quatro to cuatro in the second repetition of "Onza reals, _cuatro_ centims, dos centims". (Ch. IV Housekeeping.) Changed jewelry to jewellery in "conjunction with handsome _jewelry_" for consistency with the rest of the book. (Ch. VI THE FAIR AT INCA.) _En el nombre del Padre, y del Higo, y del Espiritu Santo_ was left unchanged, but this is normally written _En el nombre del Padre, y del =Hijo=, y del Espiritu Santo_. (Ch. VI THE FAIR AT INCA.) Changed biscochos to bizcochos in "crisply toasted _bizcochos_". (Ch. VIII MIRAMAR.) Changed 'were' to 'was' in "Even in its natural state it _was_ difficult". (Ch. IX SÓLLER.) "made his money in Buenos Ayres" was left unchanged, although more commonly known as Buenos Aires. (Ch. XV THE PORT OF ALCUDIA.) "Muchos gracias, señor." was left unchanged, but this is correctly said - "Muchas gracias, señor." (Ch. XXVI AN IVIZAN SABBATH.) There is quite a lot of inconsistency in the book with words that are hyphenated or spaced and/or joined. These have been left unchanged. Likewise, accents and indication of foreign words (using italics) are inconsistent. These have been corrected for placenames without comment; all others have been left unchanged. 
40776	----	POOR FOLK IN SPAIN _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_ MODERN FRENCH PAINTERS With 20 Illustrations in colour and 24 in black and white. Crown 4to. 21_s._ net. MOTHER AND CHILD Drawings by BERNARD MENINSKY. With letterpress by JAN GORDON. Crown 4to. 15_s._ net. THE BODLEY HEAD [Illustration: SPANISH COURTYARD] POOR FOLK IN SPAIN BY JAN AND CORA GORDON ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHORS JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD LIMITED VIGO ST.:::::::: LONDON _First published 1922_ _Printed in Great Britain by Richard Clay & Sons, Ltd., Bungay, Suffolk._ CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. LONDON 3 II. JESUS PEREZ 7 III. THE FRONTIER 17 IV. MEDINA DEL CAMPO 29 V. AVILA 40 VI. MADRID 51 VII. A HOT NIGHT 60 VIII. MURCIA--FIRST IMPRESSIONS 70 IX. MURCIA--SETTLING DOWN 81 X. MURCIA--BLAS 90 XI. MURCIA--THE ALPAGATA SHOP 95 XII. MURCIA--BRAVO TORO 98 XIII. AN EXCURSION 109 XIV. VERDOLAY--HOUSEKEEPING 123 XV. VERDOLAY--SKETCHING IN SPAIN 133 XVI. VERDOLAY--CONENI 142 XVII. VERDOLAY--THE INHABITANTS 147 XVIII. VERDOLAY--THE DANCE AT CONENI'S 156 XIX. MURCIA--THE LAUD 161 XX. ALICANTE 169 XXI. JIJONA--THE FIESTA 185 XXII. JIJONA--TIA ROGER 200 XXIII. JIJONA--A DAY'S WORK 207 XXIV. JIJONA--THE GOATHERDS 218 XXV. MURCIA--AUTUMN IN THE PASEO DE CORVERAS 226 XXVI. LORCA 244 XXVII. MURCIA--LAST DAYS 260 XXVIII. THE ROAD HOME 268 LIST OF PLATES _To face page_ SPANISH COURTYARD _Frontispiece_ CARTERS IN THE POSADA 70 A MURCIAN BEGGAR WOMAN 78 GIRL SINGING A MALAGUEÑA 220 THE VALENCIAN JOTA DANCED BY THREE COUPLES 222 POOR FOLK IN SPAIN CHAPTER I LONDON We had tasted of Spain before ever we had crossed her frontiers. Indeed, perhaps Spain is the easiest country to obtain samples from without the fatigue of travelling. The Spaniard carries his atmosphere with him: wherever he goes he re-creates in his immediate surroundings more than a hint of his national existence. The Englishman abroad may be English--more brutally and uncompromisingly English than the Spaniard is Spanish--yet he does not carry England with him. He does not, that is, re-create England to the extent of making her seem quite real abroad; there she appears alien, remote, somewhat out of place. So, too, neither the Russian, the German, the Dane, the Portuguese, the Italian, nor the American can carry with him the flavour of his homeland in an essence sufficiently concentrated to withstand the insidious infiltration of a foreign atmosphere. To some extent the Scandinavian countries, Norway and Sweden, have this power; but Spain is thus gifted in the greatest measure. These three countries seem to possess a national unconsciousness which fends them off from too close a contact with lands which are foreign to them; perhaps one might almost accuse them of a lack of sensitiveness in certain aspects.... However, be the reason what it may, we had gathered some experience of Spain in Paris before, and in London during the war. What we had tasted we had liked, and so when in our low-ceilinged attic refuge in London we gazed out upon a sky covered with flat cloud, as though with a dirty blanket, and wondered how we might escape in order to seek for our original selves--if they were not irretrievably lost--we thought of Spain. I think that we went to Spain to look for something that the war had taken from us. It was as though the low ceiling of our room, and the low-lying sky, shut us in with something which was not altogether true; indeed, we feel that many years must pass before the dissipation of this curious sensation of unreality which the war had stamped on to every one, except the most callous. It is now clear that peace is the normal condition of the human race. In the olden days this was not the case, but the tendency has been changing, and to-day we increase our powers during times of peace, and our powers fall from us during the disorganizations of war. The artist, who is the barometer of social change, was attuned to peace. In peace he exercises important functions. But with the sudden outbreak of war the whole foundation of his being was suddenly torn away. When war broke out Art for the artist seemed almost meaningless. In the face of a human catastrophe who could paint pictures? Nero may have fiddled while Rome was burning, but it must have been a poor meaningless tune that he played, some popular jingle, a Roman variation of "Ta-ra-ra-Boom-de-Ay." We had come at last to a peace which still carried on its breezes all the poisons of war, and we, at least, felt an imperative need of escape to some place where the war had not been; to some place where perchance life had carried on a not too distorted existence since 1914. Spain drew us to her more than did Scandinavia. Romance certainly had a finger in it; the sun perhaps two fingers--for we are undoubted sun-worshippers; the music of Spain, which had attracted us in Paris, causing Jan to abandon the banjo for the guitar, added an appeal; and I think an exhibition of Spanish landscapes by Wyndham Tryon at the Twenty-One Galleries settled the matter. We had been in Majorca before the war, and this combined with our experience of Spaniards in Paris had fixed in our minds a belief in a simplicity and courtliness of the Spanish people which we hoped would be very soothing. Finally, two houses were offered by a friend rent free for the whole of the summer, together with introductions which would smooth the way. We then packed up painting materials, stamped clothes into a trunk, worried a strangely assorted collection of packages down our narrow and twisted staircase into a cab, and so--hey, for the Sun, southward! Perhaps the reader should be warned that this is not properly a book about Spain in the true sense of the word; it is a book about ourselves. We are inclined to doubt if, in the true sense of the word, a book can ever be written about a country. Curiously enough the native scarcely perceives his country at all as long as he is living in it. When he travels he may come to a clearer vision, but then scarcely perceives with truth the country in which he is travelling. We might say that by travelling he makes out of the foreign land a sort of inverted image of his home. What he relishes abroad is probably what is lacking, what he dislikes abroad is perhaps more perfect in his own country. And thus his vision of abroad makes, as it were, a mould, and, if one could pour into it a substance which would reproduce the exact reverse as one makes a cast, one might procure a fairly faithful image of his unconscious judgment of his own land. So perhaps if this book could be turned inside out it might be found that, after all, stripped of its unessentials, we have been writing a book, not about Spain, but about England. Indeed, we have been writing about England already--romance, sun, an interesting national music, the guitar, and national unconsciousness are not assets to be found here in any overwhelming quantities. We must then deny that we are trying to write a book of any authority; we do not even assert that our facts are correct, even though they are as we saw them; we admit a mental astigmatism which we cannot avoid and which may have twisted actual happenings or hearings as much as optical astigmatism may twist a straight line. CHAPTER II JESUS PEREZ Jesus Perez took us to Spain in spirit while we were still in Paris. We were off to Spain to paint, that being the normal course of our lives, but in addition Jan had formed a fixed resolution that happen what might he was not coming home without having bought a good Spanish guitar by the best guitar-maker he could find, while I wished to buy a Spanish lute. Arias and Ramirez, the two best modern _luthiers_ in Madrid, both had recently died; we had, however, the address of the widow of Ramirez, who carried on her husband's business, but faintly in Jan's mind a cloud hung over the lady's name. He did not trust her. Not she, but Ramirez had made those superfine instruments. So we were overjoyed to meet Perez upon the Boulevard Montparnasse soon after our arrival in Paris. Perez was a friend of ours from the times before the war. He was almost a mystery man. Native of Malaga, self-styled painter--though he never showed his work--nobody could tell how he had managed to make a living during fifteen years of apparently unproductive existence. It is true that one summer he had disappeared from the quarter, returning late in November browned by the sun, and had explained that he had been smuggling in the Pyrenees; but that event was an exception, and for some months subsequently Perez was obviously well off as a result of his risky enterprises. Normally, he survived like so many others in the Quartier Montparnasse, drawing sufficient nourishment (supplemented very obviously by borrowing) from mysterious sources. But while most of his confrères in penury had no talents, not even the talent for painting, Perez did know the guitar. Rumour said that he was one of the best amateur players of the Jota Arragonesa in Spain. Rumour may have exaggerated without detracting from the real quality of Perez's exquisite gift. We saw a Perez very much polished up by so many years of war. He wore a clean straw hat, new clothes of the latest cut, a waistcoat of check with ornamental buttons, patent leather boots with a lacquer which flung back the rays of the June sun, and heavy owlish eyeglasses of tortoise-shell fastened with a broad black ribbon. Indeed, so transformed was he, that it was he who recognized us; and for some moments we stood trying to pierce through the new respectability, as though it were through a disguise. Seated together at the "Rotonde" we exchanged some petty items of news. Perez had but recently returned from Spain; he had held a small exhibition, he said, which had provided funds; pictures were selling well in Spain.... He was delighted to hear of our plan, and thereupon wrote for us an introduction to a painter, a friend, who lived in Madrid. "Un homme très serviable," he said, manufacturing a French word out of one Spanish. Jan then asked his question. "A good guitar-maker in Spain," said Perez, pinching his lower lip between finger and thumb. He shook his head slowly. "A good guitar-maker," repeated Perez. "In Madrid, eh? Frankly, no, I do not know of one at the moment. And you are going away at once. Tomorrow. Well, this afternoon I am free, that is good. The best guitar-maker at the moment lives here, here in Paris. His name is Ramirez. Yes, a relative of that other Ramirez. He has found a new form for the guitar. More fine, more powerful. Each one like a genuine _Torres_. You come with me. I will show you one or two that he made from an old piano which he pulled to pieces for the wood. Exquisite! And if you like them, together we will seek out Ramirez and he will make you one. He is very busy, oh, excessively busy, but he will make you one because he is an old friend of mine." So the hot afternoon found us sweating up the slopes of Montmartre. "First," said Perez, "I will take you to the house of a friend who possesses two of Ramirez' guitars. One is one of those made from the old piano. It is marvellous!" But when we reached the street he could not remember the number. It was four years, he explained, since last he had been there. "However," he went on, "not far away is another possessor of such a guitar; possibly he will be in." Up the hill we went into streets which became more narrow and more steep, until at length he led us through a courtyard with pinkwashed walls, up five flights of polished stairs, to a studio door upon which a visiting card was pinned: AUGUSTE LA BRANCHE _Artiste Peintre_ _Aquafortist_ The door, under Perez's knuckles, sounded hollow and forlorn. We waited for a while, and Perez was beginning to finger his lip when a faint shuffle on the other side of the door changed into the noise of locks. The door swung ajar revealing a small man, with a thin face and tousled head, clad in pyjamas and a Jaeger dressing-gown which trailed behind him on the floor. Failing to penetrate to the real Perez, as we also had failed, he blinked inquiringly at us. A moment of confused explanation ended with a warm hand-shake. Perez explained our presence and our purpose; with protestations of apology for his _négligé_ M. La Branche led us into his studio. [Illustration] From the card upon his door we must presume that M. La Branche was both painter and etcher, and pictures hanging from the walls, and an etching press almost buried beneath a mound of tossed draperies, were evidences of the fact. But where he found space either to paint or to etch was a puzzle. The large studio was crammed with bric-à-brac. Indian tables, Chinese tables, wicker chairs, lacquer stools, screens, figures in armour, large vases, birdcages and innumerable articles strewed the floor, across which narrow lines of bare parquet showed like channels upon the chart of an estuary. Over the chairs were heaped draperies, on the tables smaller bric-à-brac crowded together. Upon a sofa thrust to one side sat a woman methodically sewing at the hem of a long sheet. She took no notice of us, nor of M. La Branche, but continued her sewing, careful, however, not to swing her arm too wide for fear of banging into several guitars and other musical instruments, which almost disputed possession of the sofa with her. Having cleared a table and sufficient chairs, M. La Branche gave us _thé anglais_, by the usual complex French method. Then from amongst his guitars he selected that made by Ramirez, and sitting down began to play. It is strange how a man's personality appears in everything he does. M. La Branche in his paintings was an expert painter rather than an artist; his etchings, large colour plates, showed a similar skill with the burin. His music was of the same nature. Everything that a practiced player should do, he did; his nimble fingers raced up and down the frets, his tempo and his modulations were impeccable, yet he did not make music. But we had not come with the intention of hearing music, but of hearing the qualities and power of the guitar, and this was, perhaps, more ably shown by the technicalities of M. La Branche than it might have been in the hands of a more artistic though less able musician. The shop of Ramirez, the luthier, was down the hill, and to this, thoroughly satisfied about the excellence of his instruments, we went, Perez grumbling to us in undertones. "That fellow La Branche--he does not play Spanish music. No--he comes from Toulouse. That explains it. It is the talent of the South of France, all on the top, all lively and excitable and showing off--that is how it is. Now I tell you, Monsieur and Madame Gordon, just because of that the Frenchman never will be able to understand our music. You English are nearer to us. You, when you have acquired ability, will play our music with much more insight and much more sensibility than that La Branche." This comforted us exceedingly, for one day in wrath Modigliani, the Italian painter, had said that it was mere impertinence for an Englishman to think that he could understand the subtleties of the music of Spain. Ramirez almost makes his guitars out in the street. His workshop was about ten feet square with a door six feet wide. Here was a piece of pure Spain, though we could not recognize it (at the moment having no data), ten feet square, thrust bodily into the lower floor of a French house. The only light came in from the door, but the door was nearly as broad as the room. Almost blocking up the entrance, Ramirez, a burly, blue-jowled Spaniard, with something of the physical construction of a boxer, was working at delicate shavings of wood. Behind him the wall was hung with templates, cut from white wood, of the parts of the instruments he was making, guitars and lauds and bandurrias, strange instruments which Europe, outside of Spain, scarcely knows. On a shelf at the back of the small shop were heaped unfinished bandurrias bound with string, for the glue to become hardened in them. The workshop of Ramirez was not what we had expected. One is, I think, justified in expecting a neatness, a delicacy, about the place where fine musical instruments are made. Had Ramirez been a maker of chairs, or even of cartwheels, his workshop, though small, would have appeared appropriate; but that, from this rough place, could come out "the most difficult of musical instruments to make" disturbed one's sense of suitability. The greeting which Ramirez gave us touched with doubt the picture which we had conceived of the amiability of the Spaniard. There was no cordiality in him. Some of his aloofness cleared away when he had penetrated through the disguise of a dandy to the real Perez beneath, but he continued his occupation, and to the statement that we wished him to make a guitar for Jan he shrugged his fat shoulders. He declared that he had already too much work. "Those two instruments, for instance," he said, pointing to two unfinished guitars elaborately ornamented standing in a corner, "I have already been nine months over those, and have not had time to finish them. It is true they are exhibition instruments, for shops, and therefore have little if any interest for me." Perez led him on with compliments, thawing away his frostiness gradually with Jan's admiration for the guitar of M. La Branche. Suddenly Ramirez put down his tools. "Look here," he said, "I'll make the Señor a guitar. Three hundred francs is the price, and it will be finished in three months." The bargain concluded, Ramirez picked up one of the unfinished instruments. He handed it to Jan, exhorting him to explore with a finger the exquisite workmanship of its interior. He rapped on the belly with his knuckle, and at the sound of its deep musical boom he smiled for the first time. Ramirez, having thawed, did not freeze up again. He began explaining the novel shape of his instrument, a shape which had been worked out for him by a mathematical philosopher. He said that the guitar was the most difficult of musical instruments to make, requiring a volume of tone which had to be produced from strings easy to pluck and finger. A problem very difficult to solve. "And the guitar I made for you," he said, turning to Perez, "you gave it to S----?" "Yes," said Perez. "See here," said Ramirez, turning to us, "I make a guitar, an excellent one, one of my best. This fellow comes to see me, he hears the instrument. He says to me, 'Ramirez, keep that guitar for me, and I will at once go to work in a French munition factory, and I will work like a slave, and every week I will send you money until the guitar is paid for.' And I agree. And he goes and makes aeroplanes, and does honest work for the first time in his life, I believe, and every week he sends money to me. And the week it is all paid up he stops work and goes off with the guitar. And he is crazy about the instrument. And he goes back to Spain and then he hears S---- playing. He is so enraptured by the wonderful playing of the man, that he runs home, fetches his guitar, and thrusts it into S---- 's hands, exclaiming: 'Here is an instrument worthy of you. It is too good for me, for I am a mere bungler beside you.' And so he gives away the guitar that he has laboured for. Ah yes, you villain, I have heard of you." As we went down the hill, Perez tried to explain away this generosity so characteristic of his impulsive nature. "It is not as though I would have played on the instrument again after having heard S---- touch it. Every time that I wished to play I would have thought, 'Ah yes, but if only _he_ were playing it and not I.' And I had to give it to him, or perhaps I would never have been able to play again." He asked us to come that evening to a certain small café in the Rue Campagne Premier; some other Spaniards were to come also and there was to be playing and singing. We were to come after the legal closing time, and we were to thump on the shutters. In the night, in the dark, we rapped upon the rusty iron shutters, and one by one, like conspirators, were admitted into the dimly-lit café. It was a small place, characteristic of Paris, a combination of _buvette_ with zinc bar, and cheap restaurant with marble-topped tables. Five years ago a good meal could be bought here for less than a franc. Behind the bar bottles and glass vats reached up to the ceiling; upon the dirty, green, oil-painted walls, cheap almanacs and trivial popular prints hung, together with excellent drawings and sketches, presented to Madame by her clients. One by one the _invités_ slipped in. Madame and her two girl waitresses laughed and giggled at the kitchen door, while the _patron_, grey-moustached, hollow-eyed and cadaverous, uncorked the bottles of wine behind the bar. Here again for several hours the Spaniards re-created Spain. Perez is a player of temperament. Half of his skill and art he appears to suck from his audience. Thus at first he plays but indifferently well; but any music will rouse a crowd of Spaniards. To the growing excitement Perez responds, playing the better for it, thus creating more enthusiasm, and these interchanges continue, until he reaches the limit of his ability. But he is so sensitive to his audience that one indifferent person can take the edge off all his power. This night there was no one unresponsive. The playing of Perez became more and more brilliant. With his nails be rasped deep chords from his responsive instrument; to and fro he beat the strings in the remorseless rhythm of Jota Arragonesa. In the dimly lit café the dark figures and the sallow faces of the Spaniards were crowded about him in an irregular circle. "Olé! Olé!" they cried, and clapped their hands in time with the music. The air within the café throbbed and pulsated with the music. "Mais, c'est très bien," exclaimed Madame at intervals from her corner. "C'est très amusant, hein?" Two of the younger men were murmuring to the waitresses and were making them titter. "Come," exclaimed Perez at last, "enough of this piece playing. Let us have a song. Vamos! who will sing?" But something, possibly my presence, deterred the Spaniards from singing. They were shy as a group of schoolboys. One at last began to chant in a high quavering falsetto, but before the first half of his _copla_ was ended he broke down into a laugh of hysterical shyness. "Why then," cried Perez, "I'll have to sing myself, and Heaven knows I've got no voice." The Spaniard believes that any singing is better than no singing. One of his chief pursuits in life is that of happiness--"_allègre_" he calls it. This _allègre_ is produced not by perfect results but by evidence of good intentions. He would rather have a bad player who plays from his heart than a good player who plays for his pocket. Any singing, then, so long as it is of the right nature, will suffice, no matter what its musical effect. Perez's singing had _allègre_, but no music. He lowed like a calf, rising up into strange throaty hoarseness like a barrow merchant who has been crying his goods all day, and descending into dim growls of deep notes. But even he at last tired; and after Madame had been yawning for some while, after the last bottle of wine had been drained of its last drops, we slipped out one by one into the moonlit streets of Paris and said our farewells on the Boulevard. CHAPTER III THE FRONTIER I wonder what Charlemagne would have done if one had whisked him down from Paris to the Spanish Frontier in something under twenty hours? Probably the hero would have been paralysed with terror during the journey and would have revenged himself upon the magician by means of a little stake party. But what would have been magic and miracle to Charlemagne remains in one's mind as a jumble--the interior of a second-class carriage; antimacassars; an adolescent who ate lusciously a basket of peaches, thereby reminding us that French peaches ripen early in June; intrusive knees and superfluous legs; an obese man who pinched my knee in his sleep, probably from habit; touches of indigestion which made one fidget, and in the dawn a little excitement roused by observing the turpentine tapping operations at work on the pine-trees by the side of the railroad--cemented together by the thick atmosphere of a summer's night enclosed between shut windows. It is a strange fact that the more perfect do we make travelling, the more tedious does it become--I wonder whether the same may not apply to almost all progress in civilization. The most primitive aspect of travel is that of walking, and even upon the most tedious of walks the exercise itself seldom degenerates into definite boredom, one is never far away from one's fellow men, yet even if one is quite alone the mere fact of walking is an occupation which cannot be despised; of riding similar things may be said. Coaching may have had its inconveniences, yet a coach drive cannot have been lacking in definite interest. One was in very close contact with one's fellow passengers, coaching made as strange bedfellows as any adversity, and the journey was seldom so short that one could enjoy a sort of snuffy insulation from one's fellows--mutual discomforts, even mutual terrors of footpads made a definite bond of humanity. It is true that in all these primitive processes the act of getting from here to there is prolonged--perhaps extremely prolonged--but mere duration is not tedium. If the act itself is interesting and vivid then the act itself is worth while. To-day the act of travelling by a fast train is scarcely worth while--the traveller can almost count it out as so much time lost out of life. I fear that when the aeroplane is perfected journeys will be performed in a tedium absolutely unrelieved, and those patients who have to undertake journeys would be advised to take a mild anæsthetic at the beginning. What is missing to-day from the act of travelling--and what lacks from much modern civilization--is the expectation of the unexpected; the sense of adventure, the true sauce of life. Now to have the true sense of adventure it is not necessary that one should always be expecting to meet a lion round the corner. Any little thing will do, anything not before experienced, anything that will give the imagination that extra fillip of interest which will convince it that the world will always remain a Fortunatus purse of new things to learn, anything that will make positive the fact that the act of living is also the act of growing,--anything of this nature will contribute to the sense of adventure. But the trend of civilization to-day is that all these little interests are being quietly but very effectively crushed: we fling them beneath the wheels of railway trains and into the cogs of factories, with the result that only those experiences which are too large for us to fling thus are allowed to flourish. We have, in fact, almost cleared away the little things and left only the big. Now, if we turn the corner, either there is nothing at all or, in one case out of a hundred, we find the lion. In our railway travelling to-day, either nothing happens or there is a railway accident; but we have turned so many corners in our lives which led to the mere blankness of more empty road, that the possibility of the lion has almost faded from our minds--and so the sense of adventure in little, the true sense of adventure, is in danger of atrophy. Some day, I feel sure that this sense of adventure will take a revenge on the civilization which would destroy it. We kill off birds and caterpillars flourish. Some worm lies near the heart of things ready to gnaw at the right moment. I fear that never will they apply "preservation laws" to the sense of adventure, or we, as adventurers, properly appreciated, should be in receipt of a scholarship or of a civil list pension. We were too dazed by the drug of twenty hours of tedium and sleeplessness to suck any adventure from the passage through the French Customs House at Hendaye. But this experience roused us so that we were quite mentally awake by the time that we reached Irun. Here a problem confronted us. We had in our large leather trunk a good many yards of government canvas, several pounds' worth of paints, and ten pounds in weight of preparation for turning the government canvas into material for painting upon. We had heard that the Spanish customs were very strict; very strict in theory, that is. "But if they worry you, bribe them a bit," had said a friend. Were these things contraband? If so, how much was one to bribe, and how was one to do it? There are plenty of men with nerve enough to try to tip Charon for his trip over the Styx, but Jan is not one of these. Now for a man of Jan's kind to attempt a delicate piece of palmed bribing often results in things worse than if he had left well alone. Ten to one there is a fumble and the coin drops to the floor beneath the nose of the chief bug-a-bug. So, fingering two unpleasantly warm five-peseta pieces in his pocket, he prayed fervently to kind Opportunity to step in. To his prayer the goddess answered. We had brought with us from our Paris studio a mosquito curtain which once before had been used in Majorca. As our baggage was packed in London we had, rather than undo straps and locks, tied this mosquito curtain, wrapped in clean brown paper, on to the outside of our suit-case. Upon this the authorities flung themselves. "Hi!" they cried. "You will pay duty on this, it is new." Two gendarmes and a clerk tore off the paper, pitched the mosquito curtain into a pair of scales, weighed it and wrote out the bill. All the while we had been clamouring, with a sudden memory from Hugo: "Antigua, antigua, antigua...." This clamour became suddenly effective as soon as the officials had nothing to do than to collect the money. Instead of cash we gave them a chorus of "Antigua, antigua." The clerk and the two gendarmes then began what seemed to be an impromptu imitation of Miss Loie Fuller in her celebrated skirt dancing--mosquito curtain whirled this way and that in voluptuous curves. They were looking for evidence. Suddenly I pointed out a spot where perchance some full-blooded mosquito had come to a sudden death in 1913, when the world was yet at peace. The mosquito curtain was refolded, the bill torn up. They were quite peremptory with the rest of our luggage; so Jan dropped the two warm five-peseta pieces back into his pocket. However much one may be in a country, one never feels that one _is_ in the country until the door leading out of the customs house has been passed. So we never really thought of ourselves as being in Spain until we stepped on to the platform where the train for Madrid was standing. With a bitter shock, we realized that it was a chill day and raining. We had come all the way from England, hunting the sun, to be greeted in June by a day which would fit, both in temperature and atmosphere, the tail-end of a March at home. [Illustration] Of those minor adventures which make life so valuable, some of the finest flowers amongst them which may be picked are the delicate first impressions of a new country. These impressions have a flavour all their own; they are usually compressed within the space of one hour or so, and once experienced they never return. New impressions indeed one may gather by the score, but those first, fine savourings of the new can never be retasted. We had expected so much from Spain. We had hoped at the first moment to open out our arms to her sun, to satiate our colour sense with the blueness of her skies--we were received instead with this grey, gloomy weather. How can one describe the revulsion? It would be an exaggeration to say that it was as though we had touched a corpse where we had expected to find a living man, but the revulsion was of this nature though perhaps less poignant. I left Jan to finish with the larger luggage and, securing the aid of a porter, set out to look for an hotel. At the exit of the station I was accosted by a sallow man with a large, peaked jockey cap pulled down over a thin face. He said: "Hey, Señora! Hotel? Spik Engleesh. Yes." "We don't want a dear place," I answered in English. "We want a cheap one, understand?" "Hotel. Spik Engleesh. Yes," replied the tout. "Cheap hotel--cheap," I said. "Hotel. Spik Engleesh--yes," said he. "Puede usted recomendarme una fonda barata?" said I, out of the conversation book, though the "_barata_"[1] at the end was my own. But the tout turned sulky and would not answer--I suppose he thought his fee would diminish if he were enticed into Spanish. The porter stood on one side; he was a small, inadequate man and he sniffed continually. Whether he had caught cold from the rain, or whether he was expressing his private opinion of travellers, I did not learn. Jan was arranging about our trunk and a hold-all; I had in my charge two thermos flasks, a camera, two rucksacks--memories of days in the German Tyrol before the war--and a suit-case which had been with us in Serbia and which still bore the faint traces of a painted red cross, but the cat had for the last two years been sharpening her claws upon it and the leather now looked something like "Teddy Bear" material. These I distributed between the porter and the tout, and, trusting to Providence and my own powers of observation, we entered Irun. Where was the queer magic which lies in the first impressions of a new land, the dreamlike quality, the unreality which almost puts one's feet for a moment into Fairyland? Spain had played a nasty trick upon us; the grey sky and the low-lying cloud and the drizzling rain had nothing of Fairyland for us. With head held low against the drizzle one was conscious of nothing but a wall on the right hand and of dirty pavement beneath the feet. The tout led me into the first house we reached. There, was a narrow passage which passed by a room of a dingy whiteness; but the tout showed me on, up some stumbly stairs and through a spring door. We came into a dark room in which, by means of the light filtering through the slats of the closed shutters, could be seen the dim outlines of a bed and of a tin wash-hand-stand. "Ocho pesetas," said the tout. "Por todo," I answered. "Todo--todo--comida y toda," protested the tout. I had been waiting for this moment. In the conversation book which I had been studying was a phrase which had caught my fancy; it meant "no extras," but it was much more beautiful. The time had come. "No hay extraordinario?" said I sternly. "No, Señora, no," said the tout, spreading out his hands. The matter having been thus settled, he took me downstairs again; and, in the dingy white diningroom, introduced me to a plump woman, the proprietress. I was ravenously hungry; the tables were laid. I asked: "What time is lunch?" "At two, Señora." I was dismayed. It was now eleven o'clock--we had eaten little since the night before. "But," I stammered, "I am hungry. Tengo hambre." My memory shuffled with conversation-book sentences and faint recollections of Majorca, but could find nothing about the minutiæ of food. "Tengo hambre," I repeated desperately. Suddenly inspiration came to me. I made motions of beating up an omelet and clucked like a hen that has laid an egg. For a moment there was a silence, a positive kind of silence, which is much more still than mere absence of noise. Then a roar of laughter went up. The fat hostess shook like a jelly, the tout guffawed behind a restraining hand--he had not yet received his tip--while an old woman who had been sitting in one of the darker corners, went off: "Ck! Ck! Ck! He! He! He! Ck! Ck! Ck! He! He! He!" At this moment Jan arrived, having deposited the bigger luggage and having been informed that the train to Avila, our first stopping-place, went out at 8 a.m. I led him along the dark passage and upstairs. He flung wide the shutters. The window looked into a deep, triangular well at the bottom of which was a floor of stamped earth, a washtub and a hen-coop. Windows of all sizes pierced the walls at irregular intervals and across the well were stretched ropes, from some of which flapped pieces of damp linen or underclothes. In the light of the open window the room was dingy. We wondered if there were bugs in it, for we had been cautioned against these insects. But the room did not smell buggy; it had a peculiar smell of its own. The strong characteristics of odours need more attention than novelists give them. For instance, I remember that German mistresses had a faint vinegary scent, but French governesses an odour like trunks which had been suddenly opened. This room had an austere smell. It smelt, I don't know how, Roman Catholic: not of incense nor of censers, but of a flavour which, by some combination of circumstances, we have associated with Roman Catholicism in bulk. The bedroom door was largely panelled with tinted glass; it had a very flimsy lock, but we did not fear that we would be murdered or burgled in our bed. The omelet was ready when we came down. The diningroom had two doors, one leading to the kitchen, one up some steps and into the street. There was a broad stretch of window and almost all the other walls of the room were covered with big mirrors. [Illustration] About five grim people, mostly clad in black--including the old lady--sat in the room and stared at us as we ate. We could not avoid this disconcerting gaze--look where we would we either caught a human eye or else, what was worse, we were fascinated by a long procession of eyes passing away into the dim mysteries of reflection and re-reflection of the mirrors. We had to choose between the gaze of one real old lady or of twenty-five reflected old ladies, of one callow youth or of twenty-five youths diminishing towards the infinite. The audience stared at us as we ate our omelet, watched the fruit--apricots, cherries and hard pears--with which we finished the meal, and noted each sip of coffee. At last, unable to bear any longer the embarrassment of this mechanically intensified curiosity, we took refuge in our bedroom and lay down. We then noted that the bed was too small, all the rest of the furniture, on the contrary, being much too big. We rested till lunch. The omelet and the fruit had but filled some of the minor vacancies within us and we were ready again on the stroke of two. Once more we faced the Spanish stare and all the reflected repetitions of it. A fair number of persons lunched at the hotel. As they came in the women sat themselves directly at the table, but the men without exception went to the far corner where, suspended against the wall, was a small tin reservoir with a minute tap and beneath it a tiny basin. Each man rinsed his hands in the infinitesimal trickle, before he sat down to dinner. Why the men and women made this distinction we could not guess. It seemed to be a custom and not to be dependent upon whether the hands were dirty or not. Even if the hands had been dirty the small amount of water used would not have cleaned them. In the centre of the dining table were white, porous vessels containing drinking water. The water oozes through the porous clay and appears on the outside of the vessel as a faint sweat. This layer of moisture evaporates and keeps all the water in the vessel at several degrees cooler than the surrounding atmosphere. Between mouthfuls of soup and wedges of beef the diners were watching us. As soon as the meal was over we fled into the streets of Irun. One cannot call Irun Spanish. It is abominably French, though France is pleasant in its own place. The café in the little plaza is French, with a French _terrasse_, French side screens of ugly ironwork and glass, and faces a square full of shady trees between which one sees modern fortifications of French appearance. So we sat sipping coffee and we said to ourselves: "Forget that you are in Spain. Put off your excitement. Don't waste your sensations with false sentiment". Nor did the fact that all the wording on the shops was Spanish, nor even the sight of a building of pure modern Spanish architecture rouse us from our cloudy resignation. The building which towered into some six stories by the side of the railway was of a maroon brick. The lower story, including the entrance door, was decorated with _appliqué_ in the design which the French used to call "l'art nouveau," and which now is confined almost exclusively to the iron work on boulevard cafés. It is marked by exaggerated curves. The whole bottom story of this building was sculptured in this fantastic fashion; in order to fit in with the decorations the front door was wider at the top than it was at the bottom, while the windows were of every variety of shape, squashed curves, dilated hearts, indented circles and so on. Above this story the building rose gravely brick save for the corners, which were decorated with bathroom tiles of bad glaze upon which flowers had been painted; roses, violets and pansies: the top story, however, was part Gothic, part Egyptian, with a unifying intermixture of more bathroom tiles. A munition millionaire went to an art dealer saying he wanted a picture, but he didn't mind what sort of a picture it was provided it looked expensive. We imagined that the architect of this house had received a similar order. Later on we were undeceived. A yellow tram went by bearing the name "Fuentarabia." Having heard eulogies of this place, we decided to go. We reached the terminus of the tramway and the conductor told us we were there. Since then we have met so many people who were in ecstasies about the beauties of Fuentarabia, about its pure Spanish character, etc., etc., that we are still wondering if we went to Fuentarabia after all. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: Cheap.] CHAPTER IV MEDINA DEL CAMPO If civilization were without a flaw, the happy civilized traveller could pass through and circumambulate a foreign country yet never come into closer contact with the inhabitants than that transmitted through a Cook's interpreter. So that if you want to learn anything about a country, either you must put a sprag into the wheels of this civilization or you must let Opportunity do it for you. Opportunity is a very complaisant goddess: give her an inch and the ell at least is offered to you. She smiled upon us when we decided to stay the night at Irun; once more she smiled when the porter told us that the train to Avila left about eight o'clock, so we humped the two rucksacks and the suit-case from the inn to the station, got our trunk and hold-all from the baggage office and went to buy our tickets. Then we realized what Opportunity had been up to. The ticket clerk refused to give us tickets to Avila. "Why not? "The train does not go through Avila, it goes to Madrid by the other branch through Segovia. The train by Avila goes at four." "Where, then, does it branch off?" "At Medina del Campo." "Then give us tickets to Avila and we will wait at Medina del Campo." But the authorities did not approve of this novel idea. It seemed that the through-ticket system had not become the custom in Spain. We must then take tickets to Medina or wait in Irun till the proper, respectable Avila train should go, so to the astonishment of the booking clerk we said: "All right, give us tickets for Medina." [Illustration] I do not believe that any pleasure traveller had stopped at Medina before we did. That is the impression we received, both from the behaviour of the porters at Irun and of those at Medina itself. The scenery from the railway was, as scenery always is, fascinating because of one's elevation and the scope of one's view, tiring because of its continuous movement. We passed through mountains worthy of Scotland, very Scotch in colour, and at last came out upon the big plain of Valladolid. While we were streaming across this and the mountains were fading slowly into a distant blue the luncheon-car waiter announced his joyful news. We had heard that living in Spain was going to be dear, so, with some trepidation, we decided to take that train luncheon--for our financial position did not encourage extravagance. The whole trip was, in theory, to come within the limits of Jan's war gratuity--about £120. We had calculated the railway travelling as £50 in all; this gave us £70 for all other expenses, including the purchase of the musical instruments upon which we had set our minds, and we hoped to stay for four or five months. Yet in spite of the need for economy luncheon called us if only as an experience. The meal cost us about three and fourpence apiece: it was a complicated affair of many courses--even in a Soho restaurant the same would have come to about ten shillings, so that the spirit of economy in us was cheered and inspirited. Of our fellow passengers we remember nobody save a gigantic priest who waddled slowly along the corridors, carrying, suspended on a plump finger, a very small cage in which, like a mediæval captive in a "little ease," was a canary almost as large as its prison. Medina station looked like an exaggerated cart-shed on a farm; two long walls and a roof of corrugated iron--there were no platforms, only one broad pavement along one of the walls. A small bookstall was against the wall and further along the pavement a booth of jewellery. This booth had glass windows and "Precio Fijo"[2]--"No bargaining," in other words--was painted across the glass in white letters. Why Spaniards, _en route_, should have mad desires to purchase jewellery, we have not learned, but these jewellery booths are common on Spanish stations. The jewellers seem to detest bargaining, for these words always appear on the windows. I suppose the fact that the purchaser of jewellery has got to catch a train may give him some occult advantage over the seller. One may imagine him slamming his last offer down on the counter and sprinting off with the coveted trinket to the train, while the defrauded merchant is struggling with the door-handle of his booth--so "No Bargaining" is painted up, very white and very positive. As we had nine hours to wait, there was no need to hurry, so we allowed the crowd to drift out of the platform before we began to see about the disposal of our luggage. Stumbling about in Hugo Spanish we discovered that, owing to the receipt that had been given us at Irun, our big trunk would look after itself until claimed, but that there was no luggage office or other facility for getting rid of our smaller baggage. We, however, insinuated understanding into the head of a porter, who thereupon led us to a door amongst other doors in the wall labelled "Fonda." We came into a huge hall. Across one end stretched a majestic bar four feet high, of elaborately carved wood, upon the top of which were vases of fruits, tiers of bottles and glittering machines for the manufacture of drink. Three long tables were in the room, two spread simply with coffee-cups. The third table occupied the full length of the middle of the room. It seemed spread for some Lord Mayor's banquet. Snowy napery was covered along the centre with huge cut-glass dishes, stacked with fruit, alternated with palms flanked by champagne bottles and white and red wine bottles. Fully fifty places were laid, each place having seven or eight plates stacked upon it while the cutlery sparkled on either hand. A cadaverous, unshaven waiter lounged about amongst this magnificence and lazily flicked at the flies with his napkin. This huge, deserted room, expectant of so many guests, made one think of the introduction to a fairy story: one could have sat the mad hatter, the dormouse and the March hare down there, but one could never imagine that fifty passengers could in sober earnestness crowd to have supper at Medina del Campo upon the same day. No, rather here was one flutter of the dying pomp and majesty of Spain. We placed our bags in a corner of the pretentious room and went from the station to look for the town. It was nowhere to be seen. A white road deep in dust gleamed beneath the afternoon sun and led away across the ochreous plain, but, of town, not a sign. Yet the white road was the only road; Medina must be somewhere, so off we walked. The plain was not quite flat, it flowed away in undulations which appeared shallow, but which proved sufficiently deep to swallow up all signs of Medina del Campo at the distance of a mile. First we came to a line of little brightly coloured hovels, square boxes, many of only one room, then to a church, an ancient Spanish-Gothic church surrounded by gloomy trees. Suddenly the road turned a corner and we were almost in the middle of the town. Medina was Spanish enough. Here was the plaza at the end of which towered a high cathedral decorated with colour and with carving. The plaza lay broad and shining beneath the sunlight; loungers sprawled in the shadows beneath the small, vivid green trees, and in the deep stone arcades which edged the open square the afternoon coffee-drinkers, clad in cool white, lolled at the café tables. In the centre of the plaza was a fountain running with water, and about it came and went a continual procession of women bearing large, white amphoras upon their hips, children carrying smaller drinking vessels, and men wheeling long, barrow-like frameworks into which many amphoras were placed. The shops and cafés were painted in gay colours which were brilliant in the sun and which contrasted pleasantly with the crude--as though painted--green of the trees and the clear, soothing hue of the sky. I know that historical things have happened at Medina del Campo, but we are not going to retail second-hand history. To us, as living beings, it is far more important that we bought our first oily, almondy Spanish cakes here than that Santa Teresa (who started off at the age of ten years to be martyred by the Moors) founded a convent in the town. Medina is a dead place and must be typical of Spain. It has a market, a plaza and a few ragged fringes of streets more than half full of collapsing houses, and in this gay-looking remnant of past glory are at least three enormous churches with monasteries in attendance. But even the churches are falling into ruin and the storks' nests are clustered flat on the belfries, while Hymen's debt collectors, clapping their beaks, gaze down from aloft into the empty roadways. Sunset had played out a colour symphony in orange major by the time we had arrived back at the station where we asked for a meal; but the cadaverous, blue-jowled waiter had not laid covers for fifty in order that intrusive strangers might push in and demand food at whatever hour they chose. "Supper," he said with some dignity and disgust at our ignorance, "is at eight." So out we went on to the pavement platform, found a lattice seat and ate the cakes we had bought. They were like treacly macaroons, so oily that the paper in which they had been wrapped was soaked through, but it was with pure almond oil and the cakes were delicious. Lunch had been eaten at twelve and in trains one never eats quite at one's ease; hunger had gripped us when eight o'clock struck by the station clock. We took our seats at the long table before those piles of plates. A quarter-past eight went by, half-past eight was approaching. One by one about six or seven persons sauntered into the room and seated themselves, distant from each other in comparison with the size of the table as are the planets in the solar system. Nearest to us, our Mars, as it were, was a very fat commercial man, his face showing the hue of the ruddy planet. Our Venus was represented by a pale young priest, his long wrists projecting far from the sleeves of his cassock. Mercury looked appropriately enough like one who was always travelling; Saturn was covered with rings--he must have been one of the customers of the "precio fijo" booths--the other planets were lost amongst cumulus of fruit and cirrus of palm. The waiter became active. Balancing a large soup tureen, he ladled a thin, greenish soup into the upper plate. We then understood that we would have to eat our way down through the pile of plates, each plate a course. Mars rushed at his soup in such a wild manner that we felt it was a good thing indeed that the soup-plate was thus raised so near to his mouth or fully the half of the soup would have drenched his waistcoat. Alice again was recalled to my mind. I remembered her dismay during her regal banquet when the dishes once introduced to her were whisked away from under her nose, for every time I laid down my knife and fork to speak to Jan my plate was seized and carried off by the cadaverous waiter. No sooner was I introduced to a new Spanish dish than it was wrested from me. Twice this had occurred. On the third occasion I lay in wait: as the waiter swooped for my plate I seized it. There was a momentary struggle, but I had two hands to his one; he retired with a look of astonishment on his face. Gradually I became aware of the fact that Mars never loosed his knife and fork until he had cleared his plate. He held both firmly in his two red hands. If he drank--which he did with gusto, throwing his head back, washing the wine, which had a queer tarry taste, about the inside of his mouth, almost cleaning his teeth with it--he held his fork sceptre-wise as if to say to the waiter, "Touch that last corner of beefsteak at your peril." When he had quite finished the course, when he had mopped up all the remnants with a piece of bread, then and then only did he lay down both knife and fork. Unconsciously I had been giving a signal to the waiter. After the beefsteak we had a surprise. One has been so long accustomed to the French custom in gastronomy, that one almost forgets that courses are not arranged in an immutable order. Once indeed I did make a bet in Paris that I would eat a meal in the inverse direction, beginning with the coffee and sweets and ending with the soup--which, by the way, proved very hard to swallow--but the mere fact that one could bet about it proves how fixed one imagines the laws of food progression to be. At Medina del Campo, after the beefsteak, which was about the third item on the menu, the waiter brought us fried fish, thereby proving that gastronomic progression is not so unalterable as is usually imagined. The fish looked like very small plaice, but they had a strange flavour which we had never before tasted. That the fish had been packed for several days in rotting hay seemed the nearest description and explanation, and we would have clung to this idea if the salad had not also had a perceptible tang of this unpleasant taste. We asked the waiter what the flavour was, but our Spanish broke down under the strain, and the waiter said "Claro"[3] and went away. For some weeks afterwards the word "Claro" became our bugbear. The Spaniard gets little amusement from hearing his language spoken by foreigners. If the unfortunate foreigner does not get pronunciation, accent and intonation perfect the Spaniard says "Claro," in reality meaning "I can't make head or tail of what you are talking about." Both laziness and courtesy make the Spaniard say "Claro," and often the poor foreigner is quite delighted with his progress in the language--the people tell him that everything he says is perfectly clear, hooray; he thinks that he must have an unsuspected gift for languages--until one day he asks the way to somewhere and receives the usual answer, "Claro." The Redonda Mesa,[4] which would I think be the Spanish for a "square meal," cost us again four pesetas, and it was an even better three and eightpenn'orth than we had been given on the train. The meal finished, the planets held a public tooth-picking competition for a while, then one by one they resumed their normal orbits and passed from our sight. We, with the processes of digestion heavy upon us, went back to the seat in the ill-lit station. Three more hours we had to wait for the train to Avila, so we sat in the mild night watching the only engine at Medina--an engine which looked like an immediate descendant of Stevenson's Rocket--push trucks very slowly to and fro. This engine, though it made a lot of spasmodic noise, did not destroy, it only interrupted, the intense silence which lay over the country-side. The platform was quite deserted. Presently two small boys came along. One had a red tin of tobacco which he offered to Jan; Jan shook his head but did not answer. They then tried to talk to us, but we knew better than to expose our imperfect Castilian to two small boys--so we kept silence. At last they said we were "misteriosos" and went away. A luggage train steamed in. At the tail end of the train were three third-class carriages, and from these carriages, as well as from the waggons, poured out a mob of wild-looking men. They were dark brown, unshaven, covered with broad tattered straw hats, clothed in rough and ragged fustian and carried blankets of many coloured stripes. Huge bundles, sacks and strange implements were slung upon their backs. As they crowded in beneath the dim lamp at the station exit one could almost have sworn that all the figures from Millet's pictures had come to life. A smell of the soil and of labour and of sweat went up from them. These men were peasants from Galicia; they had come in third-class carriages, in goods waggons, travelling probably for two or three days, attached to luggage trains, across the country to the harvesting. One by one they passed out, their voices trailed away into the night towards Medina, and once more the silence came back. Time wears itself out in the end. The train to Avila, when it came, was fairly empty, so we could lay ourselves out at full length and rest, disturbed, however, by the continual fear that we might overshoot our destination. It was pitchy night when we clambered down from the train at Avila. The large barn of a station was lit by but three minute lamps and the glow from the fonda door. In the semi-darkness the passengers moved about like ghosts, each intent on his own business. It was two o'clock in the morning, so before exploring we again put our baggage in a corner of the fonda; where also we found the one waiter presiding over a banquet laid for fifty non-existent guests. Speaking as little of the language as we did, it seemed impossible to go exploring a foreign town in the dead of night for a hotel which would probably be shut when we found it. So, feeling somewhat like Leon Berthelini and his wife in Stevenson's story, we sat down on a seat in the station to await the dawn. The temperature of the night was almost perfect; there was a hint of chill in our faces which, however, did not penetrate through the clothing. For awhile porters moved about arranging luggage, then one by one the three lights were extinguished and the station was left to darkness. One porter clambered into a carriage which was standing on a siding; as he did not come out again nor pass down on the other side we imagine he went to bed in it. We were tempted to follow his example, but feared the train might move off unexpectedly and carry us to some remote part of Spain before we could wake up. One can tempt opportunity too far. But the seat was hard. If, like Berthelini, we had had a guitar we might have performed miracles with it similar to his, but we had left our guitars in England. So Jan went exploring. Outside the station he found a small omnibus, its horses eating hay out of nose-bags. Hearing faint voices he discovered a sort of dimly lit underground bar annexed to the fonda, in which the driver of the omnibus and a friend were drinking spirits, while the tired waiter lounged yawning behind the counter. Our ignorance of Spanish prevented us from thrusting ourselves into their company: but we waited for the driver to attend to his horses and in halting Hugo we asked him at what hour the omnibus went to the hotel. He replied "In the morning" and went back to his drinking. The eau-de-nil of dawn found us on the edge of shivering, but the day warmed rapidly. A train thundered into the station pouring out its cascade of passengers. Gathering up our packages and tipping the waiter fifty centimes, we found a new omnibus which was labelled "Hotel Jardin" and took our seats inside. Dawn was over by the time we reached the hotel, though it was but four o'clock. We had a confused impression of great buff battlements overhanging the buildings, of a few stunted bushes, of one or two girls in black, of a huge room which was to be our bedroom and then--bed--sleep. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 2: Fixed prices.] [Footnote 3: "That is clear."] [Footnote 4: Round table.] CHAPTER V AVILA Borrow has a description of an inn in Galicia in which a whole family occupies but one bedroom while the servant sleeps across the door. Our bedroom in the Hôtel del Jardin was quite large enough for any family other than, perhaps, a French Canadian, which sometimes runs, we have heard, into twenties and thirties. The walls were painted a pinky-mauve stucco, decorated with a broad olive-green ribbon of colour making a complete oblong or frame on each wall about eighteen inches within the edges of the wall, top, bottom and sides. This method of making, as it were, a separate frame of each wall, was novel and rather pleasant. It is a common practice in Spanish wall decoration and is probably Moorish in origin. The hotel was full of dark corridors leading to huge bedrooms: it had a broad veranda upstairs full of large wicker chairs, bottoms up, while downstairs was a dining room with square tables and a small entrance hall in which sat the three old ladies. With one of the old ladies we had bargained in a sleepy way upon our arrival. She had conceded us the room with full _pension_ (no extraordinarios) for eight pesetas a day, but in general the three old ladies sat in the entrada together, giving a sense of black-frocked repose and of quiet dignity to the place. One was thin-faced, dried-up but energetically capable; one was large and motherly, while the third had no characteristics whatever and was ignored by every one. [Illustration] I do not think we realized that these three old ladies were the proprietresses until the second or third day at lunch-time. We had been given our seats at a table by the waiter; suddenly we found the three old ladies had surrounded us and were glowering down at us. We were rising to our feet but they peremptorily commanded us to stay where we were, breaking the rising tide of their wrath upon the waiter. Then, for the first time, we realized how completely we were married in Spain. In France, for instance, married people are "les époux," plural, separate; in England they are a "married couple," which still recognizes a duality though perhaps less definitely than does France; but in Spain we were "un matrimonio," indissolubly wedded into one in the language, and into a masculine one at that. Somehow I always felt that we ought to be wheeled in on casters: it was improper that so stately a thing as a matrimonio like the Queen of Spain should use legs. From the old ladies' annoyance we understood that the matrimonio had done something which was not correct, but they talked so fast, and they all talked together, so that the matrimonio could not make head or tail of what they were saying. Nor indeed did we ever discover our misdemeanour. For our six and eightpence a day we had breakfast in a little side room. This meal was of _café au lait_ in a huge bowl, rolls and butter. Sometimes we had companions for this meal. On the second day I was some minutes earlier than Jan. At the table was a young peasant priest. He ignored my tentative bow but began muttering to himself protective prayers in Latin. However, once I looked up suddenly and surprised him in the act of staring at me. He quickly crossed himself and redoubled the urgency of his protestations to God. The other meals were excellently cooked and with four or five courses to each, but the diningroom bore on its walls a placard saying that owing to the rise of prices the management regretted that it was unable to provide wine at the _pension_. So there was an extraordinario after all--and a very good extraordinario it was too--red Rioja wine with the faint, strange exotic taste in it of the tar with which the wine barrels are caulked. You know the queer old drawings one finds in ancient books: towns like bandboxes with the walls round a perfect circle, and peaked houses all comfortably packed inside, and soldiers' heads sticking out of the battlemented towers? Well, Avila is like that. You may stand on the opposite hillside and see the full circle of her walls with never a breach in it, with towers at every two hundred yards or so, and you can gaze down into her houses, fitted neatly within the bandbox, and wonder if the old manuscripts were quite as exaggerated as one often supposed. From this hillside one might imagine that Avila has never changed from the days when the monks drew their primitive pictures. The walls top the hill-side and one sees nothing of the modern Avila which has spread beyond those great frowning gateways facing the plaza, but even the modern part of Avila which has oozed out beyond the walls is not overwhelmingly modern. There are none of the exquisite specimens of Spanish bad taste like that we found in Irun. The plaza is surrounded by coloured houses and arcades much as is that of Medina; the sun-blinds of the two large cafés are tattered and weather-beaten; the peasants stare at strangers with an unspoilt curiosity. The habit of rushing about towns, of penetrating into every gloomy interior, ecclesiastical or otherwise, which seems to be decently penetrable, is a modern convention to which we do not subscribe. There are two aspects to every place, the living and the dead, and we prefer the former. There is this advantage in our attitude, that one does not have to seek out the living, it flows quite easily and naturally by, and one does not remain an open-mouthed spectator with a jackdaw brain, but incorporates oneself with it. We did not go into the cathedral, nor into any convent, nor did we climb up the towers or into the walls: we sat at the café drinking in both coffee and Spain. Of costume, as Spain is so often painted, there was little; the peasant men wore tall, flat-brimmed hats and broad, blue sashes about their stomachs; the women shawls and woven leggings; the mules and donkeys had trappings of bright-coloured woolwork and often saddlebags with fine woven coloured patterns on them. String-soled sandals were the footwear of the men and of the soldiers: string-soled shoes, alpagatas, were worn by the women and children. The town was moderately alive until eleven o'clock. Very early in the morning the peasants came into the market with their mules or donkeys, then gradually a quiet settled down, a quiet which lasted till the evening. After six o'clock Avila awoke, the business men left their shops, the officers their cantonments. The cadets and youths gathered in the plaza to flirt with the girls who, dressed in gay cottons, paraded to and fro in small giggling and swaying groups. Booths selling cool drinks and ices opened at the corners of the plaza, while wandering sweetmeat merchants sold fried almonds and sugared nuts. There was no woman with a lace mantilla and a high comb, nor any one with a flat hat, embroidered shawl and cigarette; so the cigar boxes are liars. As one sits at the café table in Spain, life is, perhaps, presented to one in an aspect almost too crude. Lazarus lay at the rich man's gates exhibiting his sores, and the Spanish beggar follows his example. Spain needs no Charles Lamb to write of the decay of beggars. Decayed indeed they are, but not in that sense of which Lamb wrote: in tattered and unspeakable rags they pursue their trade from the Asturias to Cadiz. No dishonour attaches to beggary in Spain. A Spaniard was horrified when Jan told him that begging was not permitted in England. "What, then, can those do who are unable or unwilling to work?" he asked. A humble though probably verminous official refuge is provided for the beggar in each town, and, as he tells his clients, "God repays" his small extortions. The Spaniard is accustomed to his beggars, he does not nag at his conscience about them, but it harrows the unaccustomed heart of the Englishman who, taking his modest coffee or Blanco y negro after supper, finds a procession of misery thrusting importunate hands into his moment of quiet luxury. The Spanish beggar has no tenderness for one's sensibility. Each has the motto, "If you have tears prepare to shed them now." Naturally we were their quarry. They presented us with a series of specimens worthy of a hospital museum. We hardened our hearts, as we were afraid of consequences, but after two days, when the beggars, disappointed with us, relaxed their exertions, we gave or withheld alms with the outward serenity of a Spaniard, but feeling inwardly brutal whenever we refused to give a dole. Dirty, half-naked children dodged about the café pillars, hiding from the waiter's eyes. They stared wistfully at the small, square packets of beet sugar which the waiter brought with the coffee, and if a lump were left over they would creep up and in a cringing whine ask for it. Boys slightly older usually begged for a perra chica or for a cigarette. Their voices would be pathetic enough almost to break one's heart--they would say they had not eaten for three days--but if the refusal was decisive they would suddenly change their tones and shout out gaily to a comrade or run away whistling, or turn a few cartwheels down the gutter. In Avila, too, we encountered the money problem. We had been told that the Spaniard calculates his cash in pesetas and centimos, the peseta being worth normally tenpence in English money and the ten-centimo piece about one penny. So far this had worked fairly well, we had been on the travellers' route and the peculiarity of travellers had been catered for; but here we found a new system of coinage. "How much is that?" I asked a woman in the market, pointing to some object. "That," she replied, "is worth six 'little bitches.'" "Six what?" I exclaimed. "Well, three 'fat dogs,' if you prefer." "Three 'fat dogs'?" "Yes, or one 'royal' and one 'little bitch.'" "But I cannot understand. What is a 'royal'?" "Oh, don't you know? Why, twenty 'royals' make a 'hard one.'" At last we worried it out. The little bitch (perra chica) is five centimos, or one halfpenny. The fat dog (perro gordo) is the ten-centimo piece; these are both so called because of the lion on the back, though why the sex should be changed we do not know. The royal (real) is twenty-five centimos or twopence-halfpenny, the "hard one" (duro) is a five-peseta piece. The peseta is ignored. Nobody except an ignorant foreigner calculates in pesetas. The Spaniard, who often cannot write, does staggering sums in mental arithmetic, reducing thirty-two "little bitches" or seventeen "royals" almost instantly into the equivalent in minted coin. We had come to Spain for the several reasons mentioned in Chapter I. We had found the freedom: it was as though some oppressing weight were lifted from off us, as though an attack of mental asthma had been relieved. But on the whole we felt that we had been defrauded in other respects. The weather, except for the afternoon at Medina, had been very cloudy and at times almost cold. We had heard no guitar during our week in Spain. One day a man with a primitive clarinet, accompanied by a man with a side drum, had wandered about the town making a queer music which had given us thrills of unexpected delight. But Jan does not play the clarinet. He had made up his mind about guitars, and guitars he would have. The last night which we were to spend in Avila, he said: "See here, Jo, we'll go out and we'll walk up and down, through and round this town, till we hear a guitar playing. Then we will walk in and explain. I'm sure the people, whoever they may be, will not mind, but I am going to hear Spanish music." After supper we set out again. We walked the town from the top to the bottom. Not a whisper of guitar or of any other music. We bisected the town from left to right--still silence except for the dim sounds of normal evening life. We went out into the little garden which was beyond the walls and, leaning on the parapet, stretched our ears over the small suburb beneath. The cries of a wailing child or two, of a scolding woman and the shouts of an angry man answered us; of music not a note. We walked round the walls and were about to return in disappointment to the hotel, when Jan said "Hush!" We listened. Barely audible, from below on the hill-side, came the faint tinkle of a guitar. We looked out across the dark country. The hill sloped steeply from our feet and rose again in planes of blue blackness to the distant mountains. Almost in the bottom of the valley we saw a square of light from an open door. The sound came from this direction. Cautiously we crept down the hill, which was steep, pebbly and without paths. As we came down, the noise grew louder. There was a small drinking house or venta by the roadside; near to it, drawn up on a grassy spot beneath some big trees, were gipsy caravans and booths, and as we passed by we could see, dimly white, the blanketed shapes of the gipsies as they lay on the grass asleep under the stars. From the venta came the sounds of music. After a momentary hesitation we went in. The room, lit by one dim lamp, was crowded with gipsies and workmen. It was long in shape and an alcove almost opposite to the door was partitioned off as a bar. At one end was a table upon which three gipsies with dark, lined Spanish faces were sitting, and the audience had formed itself into rough, concentric semicircles spreading down the length of the room. Most of the men were swarthy with the sun, clad in the roughest of clothes, some with tall hats on, others with striped blankets flung over their shoulders. The inn looked like what the average traveller would describe as a nest of brigands. We murmured a bashful "buenos noches," bowed to the company and crept into the background. A few returned our greeting, but with delicacy of feeling the majority took no overt notice of our presence. The man on the table who held the guitar began to thrum on the instrument. A tall gipsy, whose face was drawn into clear, almost prismatic shapes, and who might have stepped out of an etching by Goya, put his stick into a corner, slipped off his blanket and, standing in the open space before the table, began a stamping dance, snapping his fingers in time with the rhythm. A workman standing near to us said: "That man does not play the guitar very well, the other one plays better." He went out and in a short while returned with his wife, a laughing woman whom he placed next to me. There was no drinking of wine. The alcarraza, an unglazed, bottle shaped drinking vessel, full of water, was handed about. It has a small spout, and from this the Spaniard pours a fine stream of water into his mouth. But beware, incautious traveller--ten to one you will drench yourself. Though the audience apparently took no notice of our presence, in reality they were extremely conscious of us. One by one, as if by accident, gipsy women clad in red cottons came into the already crowded room. Soon a girl was urged to dance. She demurred, giggling. At last she was pushed into the open space, and with a gesture of resignation she began to dance. We are not judges of Spanish dancing: we had been looking for atmosphere, and had plunged into the thick of it. This was no café in Madrid or Seville got up for the entertainment of the traveller. This was the true, natural, romantic Spain. Opportunity again had blessed her disciples. One of the women pushed her way out of the door, and in a short while returned, dragging with her a child about nine years old. The little girl's face was frowning and angered, the sleep from which she had been roused still hung heavy on her eyelids. "Aha!" exclaimed the audience. "She dances well." The man who was reputed the better player roused himself from the table and sat down on a chair. They put castanets into the child's hands. The man struck a few chords and slowly the music formed itself into the rhythm of a Spanish measure. [Illustration] Relaxing none of her angry, sleepy expression, the child danced wonderfully. The castanets clashed and fluttered beneath her fingers, her skirts swirled this way and that, her feet beat the floor in time with the pulsation of the guitar. The audience shouted encouragement at her. With a wild series of movements, the dance at last came to an end. "Brava! Brava!" cried the gipsies. "One day that girl will be worth much money," said a man, with approval in his voice. Then the best male dancer took the floor. With true artistic instinct he did not attempt to rival the active dancing of the child, but performed a stately movement, holding his arms above his head, and slowly turning himself about. When he sat down an old man of seventy or so began a series of senile caperings, thumping his stick on the floor. The audience rolled with laughter at the ancient buffoon. For some while Jan had been wondering whether he should pay for two or three bottles of wine for the company, but we did not know the delicacies of Spanish etiquette, nor had we sufficient language in which to make an inquiry, so, pushing my way to the child who had danced so well, I pressed a few coppers into her hand. She looked up at me in astonishment. "What do you want me to do, then?" she asked. Our Spanish failed to shape a proper reply, so I smiled at her as answer. "Buenos noches," and "Muchos gracias," we said to the crowd, and made our way out again into the night. We were followed up the hill by a gipsy boy who begged cigarettes, but he had pestered us during the whole of our stay at Avila, and we did not feel kindly towards him. Nor indeed had we any cigarettes to give, because Spain was suffering from a tobacco famine, and those which we had brought with us from France had just come to an end. The next morning we left the Hôtel del Jardin, which owes its name to the fact that it possesses in the front a tiny square of earth on which grow five bushes and a small tree. We were bound for Madrid. CHAPTER VI MADRID Madrid Station was the usual dark barn into which the trains ran and where they rested, as the diligences rest beneath the barn of the coaching inn. One descended the steps of the carriage into gloom; found a dim porter whom one would never recognize again; made one's way amongst the towering, sniffling black Pargantua of locomotives; was fought for by an excited mob of cabmen, amongst whom one remained passive until a cabman dowered with more character than his fellows had managed to attract one's notice; and finally we were packed into a small, four-square omnibus, our luggage on the top, the driver and his tout on the box. A police official in a grey uniform halted us. He asked our names, our destination and warned us not to pay the driver more than five pesetas for the trip, including the luggage. To-day was Sunday. We had, indeed, on getting up at Avila imagined it to be Saturday. We were leaving Avila expressly on a Saturday in order to be in Madrid for the great Sunday bullfight, for practically all bullfighting in Spain is reserved as a mild sport for Sunday afternoon, or for other days of Church festival. Unfortunately, we had learned on the train that it was not Saturday but Sunday. Somehow, we had mislaid a day. We had presented ourselves with a Wednesday or a Thursday or a Friday too many, and now Sunday had gone bang and the bullfight with it. But in consequence our entry into Madrid had some of the dignity of a royal procession. We plunged, a shabby omnibus, into the flood of carriages which parade the parks of Madrid on bullfight occasions. There were doubtless ladies with high combs placed in their raven hair; with lustrous eyes glowing from the deep caverns of their eye sockets; with a waxy and sensuous flower hanging from their full-blooded lips; clad in mystery-lending mantilla and gorgeous shawl, over which the Orient has burst a splendour of silken blossom. There were, no doubt, such spectacles to see; there must have been; all the artists who paint Spain cannot lie. Yet I confess that we did not see them. Though we are beginning to be suspicious of Spanish painters, we will not assert that no such ladies drove in procession, tempting the lounging Spaniard with glances from eyes of melting jet. We did not see them because the whole flood of carriages was plunged in a strange golden haze. Dusk had fallen and overhead signs of daylight showed purplish through the fog, but lower down it was quite dark, and through this haze of orange-gold particles, which drifted in the air as golden particles drift in a chemical solution, the lamps of the carriages threw long searchlights, arresting strange silhouettes of the coach-borne crowd, so that we made our first acquaintance with the people of Madrid merely as black shadows against a radiance of gold. It was, indeed, somewhat a prophetic introduction. These black shadows against the gold may stand as a figure for Spain. We think of Spain as the land of the last romance, whereas the Spaniard's real romance is money and the gaining of it. But this is a mixing of secondary and primary impressions. Before our eyes Madrid rolled forward, gloating in an aureate solution, accompanied by the shouts of coachmen and the blaring from aristocratic and impatient motor-cars. We sat looking out of the black windows of the omnibus with much of that childish delight which a shadowgraph theatre gives. In time, however, we began to cough. After a while longer we began to realize that this haze so exquisite in the lamplight was dust--dust. We rolled along, manufacturing our halo as we went, until, coming out of the press of carriages into cobbled and ill-lit streets, our glory fell away from us and we rocked on, reflecting on this apt illustration of the old French proverb concerning beauty and suffering. Gradually we decided that we could have dispensed with this weird introduction to Madrid in order to have spared our throats. Our friend Jesus Perez had given us an address appropriately enough in the Place of the Angel. But there were three _pensions_ in the same building and he had not discriminated. So I, leaving Jan to look after the bus, went to explore, and knocking at random was brought face to face with an old lady who had not a trace of the angelic in her constitution. While she was grumpily and wilfully misunderstanding me, insisting that the Señor for whom I was looking did not live there, a crowd of well-fed persons sifted from the dining-room and stood in a circle staring at me with cold-eyed curiosity. As they stared they all picked their teeth. At last I forced understanding on her and she told me in a surly voice that her _pension_ was full. The other two _pensions_ were full also. It was explained to me that Madrid was suffering from congestion, that never had such a season been experienced. So I retreated from the stairs and we held a council of distress in the street. The driver of the bus, who did not indeed look like a very competent judge, said that he knew of a good _pension_. By a series of manoeuvres, about as complicated as the turning of a large ship in a small river, he got his bus reversed and we set off again the way we had come. But once more we met a refusal, backed by wide-eyed staring and public tooth-picking. We had the address of an hotel, as a last resource indeed, for it was somewhat beyond our means, costing seventeen pesetas a day _en pension_. So in despair we made our way to it, wondering whether the congestion had spread from the eight peseta boarding-houses to the seventeen-peseta hotels, and whether our first night in Madrid was to be spent in the bus. We came back into the garishly lit main streets of Madrid and at last the bus halted. There was no hotel front, and we plunged between two shops along a passage from which photographs of the beauties of Madrid showed exquisite sets of teeth from the showcases of a society photographer. A narrow, twisting staircase--the lift was out of order--spiralled us up to a sumptuous hotel decorated with mirrors and white paint arranged with a Permanic taste. Rooms were to be had, and so we resigned ourselves to luxury for a few days. Luxury indeed it was. For our eight pesetas a day in Avila we had had as much as we wanted. Here it was in proportion. We were expected to eat our seventeen pesetas' worth a day. Course followed course until, more than replete, we had to wave away almost the whole of the second half of this truly Roman repast. The waiters were aghast. What? Not eat seventeen pesetas worth when one had paid for it? Incredible! We gazed about at our fellow diners and saw that we were unique. But then as a rule our fellow diners surpassed us as much in girth as in appetite; they had "excellent accommodations." Your true Spaniard adores his dinner. There is a general superstition that love is the Spaniard's prime passion. But I doubt it. For the once that we have been asked what we think of Spanish beauty, we have been twenty times questioned about our judgment of Spanish cooking. Madrid at night. How much has one not dreamed of southern romance beneath skies of ultramarine? But Madrid seems just like any other large European city. It is Paris without the wit, Munich without the music. We talk, of course, of first impressions. The first impressions of a town are rarely national. Collective humanity is collective humanity everywhere; has the same needs and devises the same methods of satisfying them. Some needs Madrid supplies more blatantly than is done in other places. The Latin is indifferent to noise and the Spaniard is the most hardened of the Latin races. There seems to be no curb on the cries of the street vendors. The consequence is that each shouts out his wares in competition with his fellows; the louder the yell the more the custom. The peculiar qualities of Spanish singing further stimulate to a point of mordant acidity the Iberian voice. For a person of sensitive hearing Madrid is intolerable: newspaper men, flower-merchants, toothpick-sellers, and above all the lottery ticket vendors, scream their wares with nerve-racking persistency; added to which, to make pandemonium complete, the cab-drivers and their touts bellow and shout, while the horns of the motor-cars are the most discordant that we have ever heard. As the night progressed from a stifling heat to a comparative coolness the noise seemed to increase. At two o'clock in the morning we thought, surely, it had reached its limit. And to some extent it had. One thanks Heaven sometimes that the human machine runs down; and we, when the "sweet sister of death" laid her hands upon newspaper and lottery ticket sellers, sent a thanksgiving up towards the stars, a thanksgiving the more sincere at the moment because it was silent. The diminution of noise went on steadily until about three, and we imagined that Madrid was going to sleep. It was, however, but a ruse of the subtle city. As is well known, one can become used to a persistent or regularly repeated noise, for Jan used to sleep sweetly close to the stamp battery of a mine, the din of which was so deafening that the voice was inaudible, even at the loudest shout; and dwellers near a railway line are but little disturbed by the nightly trains. Madrid knew that in time we would become accustomed to the human babel, in spite of its strident note; so she substituted a fictitious silence torn into strips by the sudden passage of motors which had taken advantage of the clearness of the streets to put on full speed and also to cut off the silencer. Irregularly these motors went by about one every five minutes. Each silence was about long enough to let us reach the edge over which one tumbles into sleep, and each roaring passage of a car jerked us back into disgusted wakefulness. We arose to a very early breakfast, wishing we had Mr. G. K. Chesterton at hand so that we could enter into an argument with him about the beauties of liberty. To retrace our steps for a moment, it was just about at the hither side of the noise climax, that is, about 2.20 in the morning, that we got back to our hotel. We found the street door shut and locked, and no bell could we find to pull. We thumped on the door, but only a hollow, drum-like echoing answered us. We were dismayed. We had got up early at Avila, a train journey and discoverings in Madrid had worn us out, and on the other side of this locked door our bed tempted us; for we were not then aware that sleep was forbidden to us whether we got in or stayed in the street. It seemed strange in Madrid, wide awake and noisy, that our hotel should have locked up so early and should have shut us out. Despairingly again we drummed on the door. We awakened sympathy in a passer-by. A few words explained our plight. He whistled, and we presently saw a man with a lantern in his hand and with an official cap on his head coming towards us. Our helper explained and the official unlocked the door, let us in, and locked the door behind us. This wandering latchkey is the equivalent to our old night-watchman. Amongst his duties is that of chanting out the hours of the night as they pass--for the benefit of the sleepless--to which he adds the condition of the weather. Since fully ninety-five per cent. of the Spanish nocturnes are Whistlerian blue, he has earned the title of El Sereno, or the serene. There is an advantage in this custom--one cannot forget one's latchkey. The worst evil which can happen to one is that one's latchkey may forget itself: but Spain is on the whole a sober country. A big town reveals its flavour but by degrees. Madrid, whatever its real character may be, had hidden herself behind a veil--a veil of dust. That golden aura which had enveloped our first vision was not a permanent characteristic of the town. The dust hung in the air, rising higher than the houses. From the outskirts, maybe one would have seen Madrid as it were enclosed in a dome of dust. We marvelled that people could live in such at atmosphere. We had noticed that, in addition to its dustiness, Madrid was suffering from a dreadful shortage of water. It was, of course, July, and one might expect some famine on the high and arid tableland of Spain, but we wondered that so great a city could have arisen with so meagre a water supply. At street corners queues of tired women and children waited for hot hours with buckets, pails, jugs and amphoras. Soldiers with a hose pipe from which trickled a paltry stream of water filled the vessels one by one. There was gaiety and bad temper, giggling and quarrelling amongst the women. "This," said we, "is a primitive city." In the public gardens water-carts were standing, and crowds of men were baling water up from the decorative ponds. "A real famine," said we, "could not be worse than this." This was in fact the case. Madrid is supplied from the mountains by an ancient aqueduct. The Spaniard has a principle of interfering with nothing until the last moment; the ideals of liberty are carried so far in Spain that they apply to inanimate objects as well as human beings. Thus, if the aqueduct wishes to break, it is allowed to do so. Panic ensues. The government is criticized, but words hurt nobody. The aqueduct had given way a few days before our arrival. Had it not been for the generosity of a nobleman who turned a private water supply into the conduits of Madrid, we would have found not calamity but catastrophe. Madrid was unsavoury enough. The breakdown of the water-supply entails also the failure of the drainage system. In a land of wine one might dispense with water as a mere drink; but to dispense with flushed drains in a semi-tropical climate is impossible. [Illustration] One late afternoon we were in our bedroom, having taken advantage of the quiet which reigns from one p.m. till five, (for we got no other sleep during out stay), we heard a faint strange murmur which seemed to be drawing nearer. We went to the balcony and looked out. The sound was coming from the direction of the Puerto del Sol, the sun's gate, the torrid centre of Madrid so well named. The sound drew nearer. Soon it shaped itself into a word murmur from thousands of throats: "Agua, agua, agua." The word passed us and fled down the streets, sweeping before the hesitating trickle which crept along the gutters. With the word a communal shiver of delight ran through the town, like a sort of physical earthquake. Before six o'clock the road men were dragging their hoses about the street, and the rising damp was dragging the dust out of the air. CHAPTER VII A HOT NIGHT (_This Chapter should be omitted by Prudes_) The expense of an omnibus is not necessary to the experienced traveller. A Spanish friend took us to a bureau of town porters in Madrid, and we gave instructions to a dark-faced man in a shabby uniform, who promised to see all our baggage to the station in good time for the evening train to Murcia. Señor Don Mateo Bartolommeo was the name of the porter, for he gave us his visiting card, on which was his professional and private address, and a deep black mourning border like that on one's grandmother's envelopes. The preliminaries to travelling in Spain are lengthy. The ticket office opens fifteen or twenty minutes before the train leaves, but the passengers arrive an hour before, so that there is always a long queue waiting at the ticket office. One can buy either tickets for the journey or tickets for the thousand or more kilometres. The latter are a great saving if one does much travelling, but they entail further delay at the booking office, for verifying, tearing off, stamping, and so forth. Then with one's tickets one goes to the luggage bureau, where the van luggage is weighed, overweight charged, and a long slip receipt given. The luggage is then presumed to travel to the journey's end and should be forthcoming on the production by the passenger of the receipt. This is not invariably the case; but of that we will tell in its place. The wealthy traveller does not undergo all this fatigue. He shows a porter the luggage for the van, tells him the station to which he wishes to travel, gives him the money to pay for ticket and luggage, and bothers his head no more about it. The Spanish porter is unusually honest. You can give him two or three hundred pesetas to buy tickets with, and a few minutes before the train starts up he runs with the tickets, the luggage receipt, and the exact change. We, however, wanted to experience everything; we did not wish to spend our small capital on exorbitant tips, so I, leaving Jan to see to the tickets and heavy luggage, argued my way past the ticket collector, who is supposed to let nobody on to the platform without a ticket, found an empty carriage, appropriated seats, and sat on the step waiting for the porter to bring up the smaller luggage. An old lady in black, with a huge bandbox and a birdcage, accompanied by three hatless girls dressed in purple silk, all carrying at least four parcels apiece, filled up my compartment, and I thought: "We are going to have a stuffy time of it." The train was full of talk. In the corridors the people chattered at the top of their voices like a rookery. Presently, conversing in shrill tones, the old lady and her three daughters swooped back into the carriage, and with much rustling of silk dragged all their parcels to some other part of the train. A young officer, carrying about six packages, took one of the vacated places, and marked his seat by unbuckling his sword, which he placed in the corner. An old man, rather run to stomach, took the seat opposite the soldier. He then stood in the doorway, wedging his stomach into the opening, so that nobody else should enter. The time drew closer to the departure of the train. The noise increased a hundredfold. Three girls rushed along the corridor and unceremoniously butted the old gentleman in the waistcoat. The corridor was filled with a confused crowd of people, who handed in large hat-boxes, brightly striped, square cardboard boxes, small suit-cases with gilt locks, and a huge doll. The carriage was filled with a strong smell of scent. There was giggling and the kissing of adieux. The escort then retreated down the corridor and the three girls set to arranging themselves for the journey. One of the girls was very dark, her face like old ivory, her eyes large caverns of gloom, and her mouth painted a brilliant scarlet; one was fair with a long face and grey eyes, very excitable in manner, talking a high-pitched Spanish with a queer intonation; the third was bigger than either of her companions, yet less remarkable. One could easily have imagined her dressed in cowgirl's costume, performing in a travelling Buffalo Bill show. All three had bobbed hair, though that of the second girl was an elaborate _coiffure_ of short hair rather than a mere bob. The dark girl picked up the soldier's sword and tossed it into the luggage rack. The cowgirl pushed the stout old man's suit-case out of his corner and took his seat. The old man but grinned and guffawed, seeming pleased rather than angry. The soldier stood in the corridor and glowered at the dark girl through the glass. He offered no objection to the robbery of his seat, but it was evident what were his thoughts. The second girl flung herself down on the seat next to Jan, blew out a long sigh and exclaimed: "Aie, que calor, que calor." It was indeed hot. All day long the sun had been beating down into Madrid. The Puerto del Sol had been more like the "Puerto del Infierno." The little trickles of water which the repaired aqueduct had afforded to Madrid had done little to mitigate the dull reverberant heat of the still air. Even now that the night had come the air was yet quivering, and came into the lungs like half-warmed water. The girls got down their dainty suit-cases from the rack, opened them, burrowing amongst tawdry finery, manicure sets, powder-boxes and other articles of toilet use, found boxes of cigarettes. To do this, the cowgirl placed her suit-case on the seat and, standing, bent over it. The stout old man, with a giggle, leant forward and gave the girl a resounding smack with his open palm upon that part of her which was nearest to him. The officer, through the glass, frowned and pursed up his lips. The girl next to Jan caught my eye, smiled at me, and winked. "Aie, que calor!" she exclaimed, blowing cigarette smoke into the air. The train dragged itself out of the station and started southward through the night. The girl who was sitting next to Jan broke out into unexpected French. "Mon Dieu! Qu'il fait chaud!" she exclaimed, as though Spanish would not properly express the quality of the heat. "But," said Jan to her, "you speak French very well." "Well," she retorted, "I ought to, seeing that I am French." Suddenly she came to a resolution. She stood up and again took down her suit-case. She took from it a wrapper of tinted muslin. Slowly then she began to take off her clothes. Her silk dress she folded up very neatly and laid along the little rack which is set just below the ordinary one. Then she slipped off her petticoat and camisole, and put on the muslin wrapper. "That is better," she exclaimed; folded up her discarded underwear, put it into the suit-case, which she then replaced on the rack. She then began on her _coiffure_. She detached a series of little curls from over her ears, and twisting the wires on which they were made into hooks, she suspended them from the netting of the rack, where over her head they swung to and fro with the movement of the train. "Maintenant," she said, "on est plus à son aise. Besides," she added, with the instinct of true French economy, "it does so spoil one's clothes if one takes a long railway journey in them." The act had been performed with naturalness, and in view of the heat of the night we could not help envying the French girl for her good sense in making the long journey as comfortable as possible. She began to tell Jan the story of her life. "Mother was a nuisance," she said; "she made life a little bit of hell at home. Well, one day we had a fine old flare-up. I told mother that she could go to the devil if she liked, and I just packed up and ran away. I came down to Madrid, and on the whole I haven't done so badly. I send mother about eight hundred pesetas a month. Most of that she'll keep for me, and I'll have a nice little sum to start business with when I get back. Of course one can't keep up a quarrel with one's mother for ever. _Hein!_" Jan asked her how long she had been in Spain. "Four months," she answered. "You speak very good Spanish," said Jan. "Oh," she answered, with a touch of desperation in her voice, "one can't be all day doing nothing. It's a distraction learning something new." "Where are you going now?" asked Jan. "We are all going to Carthagena," said the French girl. "We'll be down there all the summer. There are English there too, I have heard--sailors. I like sailors. You see, I had to get away from Madrid. I had a friend, and one day while I was out he stole all my spare money, and all my clothes, which he took to the pawnshop. And that left me stranded. Then I heard these two girls were going to Carthagena, to a place, so I said, 'I'll come too,' and here I am. Anyway one has to be somewhere, and I adore knocking about. It's life, isn't it?" The dark girl was merely a selfish, pretty animal. She curled up on the officer's seat like a black cat. She then slyly prodded the poor little stout man with her high heels, so that he gradually moved up towards me, leaving me little room in which to sit, while the dark girl could stretch out at her ease. The other girl sat in her corner, saying little, smoking cigarette after cigarette. She seemed to be one of those stolid creatures who drop through life, taking good and bad without change of face or of manner. She might have been rather South German than Spanish. In contrast with these two the French girl was simple and attractive. One noted, too, that she had a fine streak of unselfishness in her character; she even talked without bitterness of the man who had robbed her. [Illustration] Young men drifted along the corridors and stared in at the girls. One man, who looked well off, dressed in a tweed sporting coat, came in and made friends. He gave them cigarettes and drinks of brandy from a flask. At about one o'clock in the morning, one of the cardboard boxes was opened and disclosed a large pie, which was divided. The stout old gentleman had a piece, so did "Tweeds." Some was offered to us, but we had dined well at Madrid and did not feel hungry. But to refuse in Spain is a delicate matter, so we gave them cigarettes to indicate goodwill. We stopped at a dark station. The door was flung open and a tall sunburned man clambered into the carriage. He had around his waist a broad leather belt which was stuck full of knives. These implements were clasp knives, and varied from small pocket knives and pruning knives to veritable weapons a foot in length. He was not a famous brigand, though he looked one, but a salesman. The larger knives had a circular ratchet and a strong spring at the back, so that upon opening they made a blood-curdling noise, which in itself would be enough to induce any angry man to finish the matter by burying the blade in his enemy's gizzard. He did no business in our carriage, and went off down the platform opening and shutting a sample of his murderous wares, crying out: "Navajos! Navajos!" The train went on, and as we reached southward the night became warmer. The stout old man left us, and the black girl stretched out at full length, occasionally prodding me with her French heels. Presently the darkness became less opaque. A faint silhouette of low hills, and then a dim reflection from flat lands, appeared. We stopped at another station; an unimportant wayside station with a small house for booking-office and a drinking-booth in a lean-to alongside. "I must have a drink," exclaimed "Tweeds." "Who will come with me?" Neither the black girl nor the cowgirl would move. We had still lemonade in our Thermos flasks. So the French girl, in her muslin _peignoir_, and "Tweeds" clambered down the carriage steps and disappeared through the door of the fonda. Disappeared is the right word. Without warning, the train began to move. It gathered speed and clattered away southward. We never saw "Tweeds" or the French girl again. In the thinnest of _négligés_ she was left stranded upon the wayside station, to which no other train would come for at least twelve hours, and possibly not for twenty-four. The day broke, and we pounded along through a dusty arid country. There was green in the bottom of the valley, but from the roads rose high columns of dust, while the plastered villages of box-like houses near the railroad were dried up and dust-coated. Dust blew in through the carriage windows and settled thick upon the curls which, still swinging and bobbing from the netting of the rack, were fast leaving their mistress behind. At first her companions had been anxious; now they were laughing. "But," they said, "we wonder if she knows where to come for her things when she does arrive?" The train became more crowded. Soon people were running up and down, looking angrily for places. Third-class passengers began to fill the corridor of our second-class carriage. A boy of about nineteen, with the half-angry intense face characteristic of some Latins, came into the carriage and demanded a seat from the dark girl who was still stretched at full length. This seat "Darkey," with her habitual selfishness, refused to give up. Suddenly, we were in the middle of a full-fledged Spanish row. To us it had a comic side. It was not what we would have called a row, as much as a furious debate. Of course with our slight acquaintance with Spanish we missed the finer points of the varied arguments. "Darkey" began by saying that she was keeping the seat for a friend who was somewhere else. This was to some extent true; the French girl was somewhere else, though there was little likelihood of her claiming the seat. The boy retorted that if she was somewhere else she probably had another seat. This argument went to and fro, increasing in acerbity. Each of the quarrellers listened in silence to what the other had to say, making no attempt to interrupt, though the voices grew hoarse with anger. [Illustration] Presently "Darkey" was telling the boy that he was a wretched third-class passenger anyhow, and that he had no right in a second-class carriage, and even if the seat were free he wasn't going to have it. The boy retorted by saying that anybody could see what she was, and that her mother was probably sorry that she had ever been born, etc., etc. No English quarrel could have gone to half the length that this proceeded. We were waiting to see either the boy jump into the carriage and shake the life out of "Darkey," or to see "Darkey" spring, like the young tiger-cat she was, at the boy and scratch his face. But nothing happened. The crowded corridor listened with delight to the progress of the quarrel. The train stopped at a station. "Darkey" had sat up to pulverize the impertinent youth with some evil retort. The carriage door on the opposite side opened, and a placid, middle-aged peasant woman, followed by an ancient peasant man, stepped into the carriage, and before "Darkey" had well discovered what was happening had squashed down in the disputed seat, left vacant by the removal of "Darkey's" feet. The woman grinned at us all and sat nursing a large basket on her lap. Then the quarrel slowly died down. After a while the boy went away. However, he came back again whenever he had thought of something good, and barked it round the corner of the door at "Darkey," who, usually taken by surprise, could find nothing to retort before he had lost himself again in the crowd. The peasant woman smiled at us all, and, opening her basket, handed to each of us a large peach. She selected one especially big for "Darkey," presumably as refreshment after the tiring argument. The day became hotter and hotter. The dust gathered more thickly on to the French girl's poor little curls. When the train stopped, children ran up and down beside the carriages, selling water at the price of "one little bitch" the glass. We were now in the province of Murcia, and the scenery put on the characteristic appearance of that province, tall bare hills of an ochreous mauve, sloping down into a flat, irrigated, fertile valley. The division between mountain and valley, between the "desert and the strown" was as sharp as though drawn with the full brush of a Japanese. On the mountains were dead remnants of Saracen castles, of dismantled Spanish robber fortresses, and the white or coloured buildings of monasteries which still lived sparkling in the sun. CHAPTER VIII MURCIA--FIRST IMPRESSIONS One has a right to expect that the station which is the finish of a long and tiring journey should be both a terminus and have a quality all of its own. Our egoism makes it seem at that moment the most important place in the world. But Murcia (pronounced locally Mouthia) had only a big ugly barn of a station like many through which we had already passed, and even lacked a Precia Fijo jewellery shop. All we could see of the town, on emerging, was a few houses and a line of small trees which appeared as though they had been in a blizzard of whole-meal flour, so thick was the dust. Over this buff landscape quivered the blue sky. In front of us were one or two cranky omnibuses and many green-hooded two-wheeled carts. These carts were Oriental in appearance and had the most distinctive appearance we had yet noted in Spain. They were gaily painted, and the hoods bulged with the generous curves of a Russian cupola. Inside they were lined with soiled red velvet, and the driver sat outside of this magnificence on a seat hanging over one of the tall wheels. Into one of these we were squeezed in company with two grinning travellers, and started off, soon plunging into the shadow of an avenue of lime trees, behind the grey trunks of which cowered insignificant little houses painted in colours which once had been bright. [Illustration: CARTERS IN THE POSADA] The more communicative of our fellow travellers said it was indeed the hottest day of the year. It was hot, but we were not oppressed by it, and found out in time that the Spaniard always seemed to suffer from the heat more than we did. Our endeavours to be agreeable in imperfect Spanish worked up the traveller to a discussion on languages, and to a eulogy on ourselves for taking the trouble to learn. We said that we were artists. He answered: "Ah, yes, that explains it. Poor people, of course, are forced to learn languages." We drove across a stone bridge, almost in collision with a bright blue tram-car. A momentary glimpse was given to us of a muddy river running between deep embankments; and we drew up before a square barrack of red brick pierced by a regiment of balconied windows. The proprietor, oily like a cheerful slug, waved his fingers close to us, and drew back his hand in delicate jerks as though we were rare and brittle china. He preceded us into an Alhambra-like central hall, led us carefully up a stone staircase to a wide balcony, opened a door into a palatial bedroom with a flourish; and demanded fifteen pesetas "sin extraordinario." Intuition told us that this was not a case of "Precio Fijo," and we reduced him gently to eleven pesetas before we accepted the bargain. Then, to take off the raw edge left by the chaffering, Jan said: "I don't suppose you get many foreigners here, Señor?" "Si, si!" returned the hotelkeeper, anxious for the reputation of his caravanserai. "We get quite a lot. Oh, yes, quite a lot. Why, only last year we had two French people, un matrimonio; and this year you have come." The maid was in appearance and behaviour like an india-rubber ball, and the conviction was firmly fixed in her mind either that we couldn't speak Spanish or that she could not understand if we did. So she grunted, bounced at us and smiled with her mouth wide open like a dog, hoping that by this means she was translating a Spanish welcome into an English one. With difficulty we dissuaded her from these antics and persuaded her to speak, but she turned her words--which were already dialect--into baby talk; and the less we understood the louder she shouted. However, she was a kindly creature and succeeded in cheering our spirits, which were flagging, for we were very tired and almost ill, having barely recovered from a severe attack of influenza before leaving London. We washed off the thick dust and went downstairs into the large cool hall. The central quadrangle had once probably been open to the sky, but now was covered, five stories up, by a glass roof, beneath which sackcloth curtains stretched on wires shut out the sun. There were comfortable wicker chairs all about, and the hall was decorated with four solemn plaster busts, one in each corner. We were curious to find out who were thus honoured in a southern Spanish hotel. One was of Sorolla, a popular Valencian painter, one was of a woman, a poetess. The other two we did not know, but think they represented contemporary literature and architecture. Imagine finding in an English hotel hall busts of Brangwyn, Mrs. Meynell, Conan Doyle and Lutyens. The hall was cool. We ordered coffee and buttered toast. But the butter was rancid, for we had crossed the geographical line, almost as important as the equator, below which butter is not, and oil must take its place. Four children, making a lot of noise over it, were in the hall, playing a game peculiarly Spanish. The smallest boy, who always had the dirty work to do, carried flat in front of him a board, to the end of which were fixed a pair of bull's horns. He dashed these at his comrades in short straight rushes. Two of the other boys carried pieces of red cloth which they waved in front of the bull. The fourth boy carried a pair of toy banderillas, straight sticks, covered with tinted paper and pointed with a nail. As the bull rushed the "banarillero" dabbed his sticks into a piece of cork. Then they decided that the bull was to die. One of the cloak-wavers took a toy sword which he triumphantly stuck into the cork. With a moan the small boy sank on to the floor. His companions seized his heels and dragged him round the tiled floor of the hall. The game seemed to us a little tedious; later on we were to learn how like to actual bullfighting it was. The hotel interpreter, for whom we had inquired, now came in. He spoke in French: [Illustration] "What can I do for you?" We wished to find a gipsy guitar-player named Blas, and we had been told that the interpreter knew his house. We feared that he might be in Madrid, where he sometimes played in the Flamenco cafés; but the interpreter said that he was in Murcia, and that we could look for him at once. From the cool hall we stepped into the blazing sun of midday Spain, crossed an open space so dazzling that it hurt the eyes, and entered a maze of narrow, tall streets. Jan and I moved along in single file, clinging to the narrow margins of shadow which edged the houses, while the interpreter with a mere uniform cap on his head stalked imperturbably in the sunlight. Across squares we hurried as rapidly as possible to the shadow on the opposite side. The houses were orange, pink, blue or a neutral grey which set off the hue of the tinted buildings. The squares were planted with feathery trees of a green so vivid that it appeared due to paint rather than to nature. It was a clear and windless day, and soon we remarked a characteristic which Murcia exhibited more strongly than any other Spanish town we have visited. Each house had exuded its own smell across the pavement, so as one went along one sampled a variety of Spanish household odours. Some people find an intimate connection between colour and smell. We might say that we passed successfully through a pink smell, a purple smell, a citron green smell, a terra verte smell (very nasty), a cobalt smell, a raw sienna smell, and so on. This characteristic clung to Murcia during the greater part of our stay. About fifteen minutes' walk through these variegated odoriferous layers brought us into a street of mean appearance. The interpreter stopped before a large gateway door, pushed it open and ushered us into a courtyard in the corner of which was a black earthenware pot astew over an open fire. A brown-faced crone, withered with dirt and age, her clothes ragged, her feet shod in burst alpagatas, asked us what had brought us there. "Where is Blas?" said the interpreter. With an unctuous gesture the old gipsy crone spread out her hands, and turning to a doorway shouted out some words. Gipsy women young and old came from the house. They were dark, dirty and tousled, clad in draggled greys or vermilions, many carrying brown babies astraddle on the hip. With gestures, almost Indian in subservience, they crowded about us, looking at us with ill-disguised curiosity. The interpreter repeated his question. "Blas," said a young, beautiful, though depressed-looking woman, "is not in the house." [Illustration] "The English Señor will speak to him," commanded the interpreter. "Send him to the hotel when he comes home." Then our friend the interpreter determined to earn a large tip, and calculating on our ignorance brought us back by the longest route, past all the principal buildings of the town; thereby quadrupling the journey through the baking streets. Our desires, however, were fixed on home. We were staggering beneath the heat. Had the interpreter but known it, his tip would have been increased by celerity; but, stung by our apathy over public monuments, he took us into a courtyard to look at some gigantic tomatoes gleaming in the shade, and ran us across the street to examine a skein of fine white catgut, dyed orange at the tips, which a workman was carrying. He explained that this was for medical operations and for fishing lines, which was a local industry. Lunch was ready when we got back, a prolonged and delicious lunch for those in health, but we could eat little of it. Black olives were in a dish on the table; and the fruit included large ripe figs, peaches, pears and apricots. A curious fact we had noted was that much of the fruit did not ripen properly. Either it was unripe or else had begun to rot in the centre. The sun was too strong to allow it to reach the stage of exquisite ripeness which the more temperate climate of England encourages. The waiter was dismayed by our lack of appetite. He urged us repeatedly to further gastronomic efforts, and holding dishes beneath our noses stirred up the contents with a fork. At last he made us a special salad which was not on the menu. The other occupants of the long white restaurant were all fat men who swallowed course after course in spite of the heat. We looked at them and thought: "No wonder there are so many plump people in Spain." After coffee in the large hall, we went to our bedroom for a rest. The windows of our room looked southwards, over the muddy river. Immediately beneath was a road on which was a wayside stall of bottles and old ironwork, an ice-cream vendor, a boy roasting coffee on a stove, turning a handle round and round while the coffee beans rustled in the heated iron globe, sending up a delicious smell to our windows. A row of covered carriages, tartanas, waited beneath the shadows of the riverside trees. All along the opposite bank were two-storied mills, and beyond them the town stretched out in a wedge of flat roofs bursting up into church towers. Green market gardens came up to the edge of the town, and covered the valley to the base of the hills with a dense growth of flat and flourishing green which one had not expected thus far south in Spain. We were awakened from our siesta by the spherical maid who mouthed and pantomimed that a Señor was waiting for us in the hall. Luis Garay, a young painter and lithographer to whom our friend had written about us, had come at the earliest opportunity. He was slim, sallow, almost dapper, with dark frank eyes, and we took a liking to him at once. Together we went outside the hotel and sat at a table in the open place facing the principal promenade of Murcia. The river was on the right-hand side, and on the left was a line of tall buildings, some cafés, others municipal. The heat attacked one in waves, it seemed as palpable as though it possessed substance. When we took our seats the plaza was empty because the siesta was not yet over, but after four o'clock had passed gradually the life of the town blossomed out. The army of beggars attacked us; in monotonous undertones they moaned their woes. "Hermanito, una limosna qui Dios se la pagara,"[5] they whined. To those who seemed unworthy Luis answered, "Dios le ayude."[6] How exquisite is the courtesy of the Spaniard even to a beggar. Our manners have not this fine habitual touch--after the international occupation of Scutari the beggars of the town had learned two English phrases; one was "G'arn," the other "Git away." It is true that under this harsh exterior the Englishman may hide a soft heart; he may be like the schoolmaster who feels the caning more poignantly than does the schoolboy; indeed many a man puts a deliberately rough exterior on to mask the flabbiness of his sentimental nature; and the Spaniard, for all his courtesy, may have the harder nature. Yet the courtesy which recognizes a common level of humanity is a precious thing. It may be that by refusing alms with respect one may be preserving in the beggar finer qualities than would be generated by giving with contempt. A Spaniard once said, "I like a beggar to say 'Hermanito, alms which God will repay.' It is naïf and simple. It has a beauty for which one willingly pays a copper. But when a beggar whines that he has eaten nothing for three days, it is offensive. It is an insult to give a man a halfpenny who has eaten nothing for three days; and one cannot afford to give him the price of a square meal; and anyhow one knows that he is lying." As well as the pitiful beggars there were the musical beggars. Two men came playing the guitar and laud. Another followed with a gramophone which he carried from his shoulder by a strap. Then came the barrel-organ. We had not noted its arrival. Suddenly the most appalling din broke out. Awhile ago in Paris M. Marinetti organized a futurist orchestra; one could imagine that it had been transported in miniature to Murcia. There were bangs and thumps and crashes of cymbals, and tattoos of drums, and tinkles of treble notes, and plonkings of base notes intermixed apparently without order, rhythm or tune. What a state the barrel must have been in! Once we presume that it played a tune, but now it was so decrepit that nothing as such was recognizable. It was dragged by a donkey and a cart and shepherded by a fat white dog which had been shaved, partly because of the heat, partly because of vermin. It was an indecent-looking dog, and the flesh stood out in rolls all round its joints. No sooner had this musical horror disappeared round the corner than another organ in an equal state of disrepair took its place. [Illustration: A MURCIAN BEGGAR-WOMAN] "It is all right," Luis reassured us; "you have suffered the worst. There are only two in the town." A crowd of urchins carrying home-made boot-blacking boxes pestered us with offers of "Limpia botas." A man and a woman sauntered between the tables bellowing and screaming "Les numeros"; these were state lottery sellers. Also there were sellers of local lotteries, which were promoted by the Church in aid of the disabled whom they employed to sell the tickets. Nuns, too, were amongst the beggars. There were boys selling newspapers; men selling meringues and pastry, others hawking fried almonds, very salt to excite thirst; children hunting between the legs of the tables and chairs for cast cigarette ends or straws discarded by the drinkers; a man peddling minor toilet articles--toothpicks, scent, powder, buttonhooks--and another with a basket of very odorous dried fish. The smell of the fish banished our new-won universal brotherhood and we waved the fish vender away without courtesy. But an elegantly dressed young man sitting near accosted him and began to chaff him. But what was pretence to the dude was earnest to the salesman. He had some talent for selling and he pestered the dude for nearly half an hour, at the end of which the latter in self-defence and for the sake of peace bought a portion of the smelly commerce. Probably the fishmonger's total gain out of the transaction was a fraction of a penny. But the Spanish is not a wasteful nation. When the dude walked off home he took with him the fish wrapped in his newspaper. At last we called the waiter by the Spanish custom of clapping the hands, paid for the drinks, and guided by Luis set out to visit the house which our friend had lent us for the summer. Habits of cleanliness were shown in the streets. Young girls were hard at work, each industriously brushing the dust from the sidewalk in front of her house, even though that sidewalk were itself of dried mud. To us it seemed that the story was being repeated of the old woman who tried to besom the tide out of her front door. Many of the householders had spread their sphere of influence even beyond the sidewalk, and had soaked their patch of road, turning the dust into viscous mud. The pavements were already beginning to be encumbered by chairs, and by groups of people sitting out in the cooling day. The Paseo de Corveras is a one-sided street darkened by tall trees. On the other side stretch maize fields surrounding a small farm, and walled-in gardens filled with tall feathery date palms. The dates were already hanging in orange clusters beneath the sprouting heads of fronds. Luis took us to the house of Antonio Garrigos, who lived at No. 12. Antonio was a handsome man of pure Spanish type, giving an impression of nervous vitality. He produced three keys, each of about a pound in weight and large as any key of a theatrical gaoler. The house key was of monstrous size, and he assured us that we would have to carry it with us wherever we went. Our friend's apartment at No. 26 was on the first floor and spread right across two humbler dwellings below. It was cool and roomy, filled with specimens of Spanish draperies, pottery and furniture, which he had collected during several years in Spain. At the back was a kitchen, with large earthen vessels for water, and Spanish grids for cooking on charcoal. The bed was big for one, but very small for two, so we suggested taking off the spring mattress and laying planks in its place. Antonio at once said that to-morrow he would get the planks in time for the night. Then, feeling very tired but thoroughly pleased with our prospective house, and with the new acquaintances we had found, we walked back to the hotel, had a supper as liberal as the lunch, and went to bed. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 5: "Little brother, alms which God Himself will repay."] [Footnote 6: "God will help you."] CHAPTER IX MURCIA--SETTLING DOWN By the time we left the hotel, which we did on the second day, the maid had reviewed her decision as to the state of our mentality. Receiving her tips she shook our hands warmly, asked where we were going and said that she would without fail call upon us. The tatterdemalion bootblack at the hotel door, who could never quite make up his mind whether he were bootblack or lottery-ticket seller--neglecting each business in favour of the other--helped us with our luggage. He also on receipt of a tip inquired our future address and assured us that he would call upon us. The driver of the tartana told us that he would look us up one day to see how we were getting on; and another visit was promised by a ragged lounger whom we called in to aid us in getting our luggage upstairs. "Spain," we said, "seems to be a sociable country." Don Antonio was waiting for us at his house, which was but a few doors away from our own. He introduced us to his wife, a buxom, jolly woman of about twenty-five; his sister, tall, elegant and dark, perhaps the most complete type of Spanish woman we had yet met; and his brother-in-law. Don Thomas, for such was the brother-in-law's name, was able to speak a portion of the American language, and often by his imperfect knowledge he would deepen our ignorance of what others were saying in Spanish. Don Antonio had a small box factory. His house was two-storied, as were most of the houses in the Paseo. On the ground floor the front room, or entrada, was filled with wood, wood-working benches, and stacks of unfinished boxes; the kitchen behind was not exempt from business, for here Antonio made up his glues and pastes, while the whole top story was occupied by girls who covered the crude shells of the boxes with velvet and looking-glass and papier mâché adornments. Antonio and his wife were crowded into two small rooms, a bedroom in the front alongside of the entrada and a dining-room at the back parallel with the kitchen. Our planks were ready for us, but Antonio refused to be paid for them. He said that when we had finished with them he could make boxes out of them. We spent the afternoon in our flat unpacking and arranging the plank bed. The mattress was not broad enough to cover the planks which we put down, but we managed to find a padded sofa-covering which, laid alongside of the mattress, supplemented the inefficient breadth. As we had met neither mosquitoes nor net in the hotel, we left the mosquito-net in the trunk. In the evening Luis Garay called for us. He led us through a maze of darkened streets, at one time skirting the tall, over-decorated rococo front of the cathedral, and brought us to a large doorway within which was a smaller door. Two sharp raps and the door swung wide mechanically, though a long rope tied to the latch and looping its way upstairs showed how it had been opened. Up wide white stone stairs we went, watched by an old, old man hanging over the balcony of the second floor. Luis said no word to him, nor he to Luis. The chief keynote of Spanish interiors is whiteness. The room into which we came was white, and out of it was another white room set with dining-tables and decorated with a huge white filter. This was "Elias," where we could dine excellently for the sum of one peseta fifty centimos apiece. Elias himself looked like a cheery monk painted by Dendy Sadler. Clad in a long white overall, he stood in the midst of his snowy tables and greeted us merrily. Luis went away, having said good night, for he had an engagement. We ate omelet, beefsteak and fried potatoes, finishing with a plate of fruit, fixed by the multiple stare of the young men dining there. I was the only woman at Elias while we dined there, for Spanish women are home clinging folk, and even to the cafés they never go in large numbers. As the young men finished their meals, they went out. Each one as he passed through the door bowed and said something. It sounded like "Dobro Vetche," but "Dobro Vetche" is Serbian for good evening. We could not make out what the words were, so, as the Serbian seemed to be appropriate, we boldly answered it in return. Later on we discovered that they said "Buen Aproveche" with the first part of the sentence slurred over by habit. It means "May it do you good," and the customary sentence to say to any one who is dining. The correct answer is "Gracias." We left Elias' very satisfied with our cheap discovery. Jan, who generally has a good head for locality, engaged to find his way back without a guide. But he turned the wrong way out of Elias' door. We wandered amongst deep darkened streets till suddenly we came out into one as narrow as the others, but laid with flat pavements, instead of rugged cobbles, and blazing with light. Through this we ran the gauntlet of Murcia. The street was crowded with hotels and cafés, both sides being lined with tables at which the evening drinkers were sitting. The street itself was filled with a flux and reflux of the youth and beauty, the "Hooventud, Bellitza and Looho,"[7] of the town. We came, especially I, upon them as a catastrophe. The light died out of their eyes, the smiles disappeared from their faces, mouths dropped open, fingers pointed, people grasped each other. It was similar to the moment when an elephant comes along in the village circus procession, and I was the elephant. During our first weeks in Murcia our appearance in the streets invariably caused excitement and shrieks of laughter among young girls and gossips. If we entered a shop the children crowded in with us to listen to our attempts at Spanish. This was not done with deliberate rudeness, but was more the result of unrestrained curiosity. This attitude was not very evident when we went for strolls with Luis: the presence of a fellow-townsman seemed to have a calming influence. At last I found an effective weapon. With mock horror I stared at the feet and ankles of any young woman too malicious. Self-consciousness at once gripped her--almost invariably she hurried away to examine her shoes and wonder what was wrong with them. Curiously enough we never became conscious of a case of incivility among the men. Even groups of lads at the difficult age which breeds larrikins in Australia were on the whole less offensive than in other countries. It seemed to us that if a Spanish woman were kind-hearted--and the majority are so--she was the most kindly and charming of women, but if of a spiteful nature she took less pains to hide or curb it than do the women of more sophisticated countries. The narrow street which we had discovered by accident was perhaps the most disconcerting part of the town, as it was full of cafés, and therefore of loungers; but we often had to go there for small necessities. There we had to go for smoked glasses because of the brilliance of the sun, for a parasol, and for a hatpin. The first two objects were easily found, but the last was difficult. Hats, even in Southern Spain, are worn only by the _crème de la crème_ for great ceremonies, and the hatpins sold by the jewellers were intended for such occasions. They were decorated affairs with huge heads of complicated workmanship set with garish stones. Probably no other woman in the town wore a hat for normal use, so we gave up the search and Jan made out of hairpins something which served. We ran the gauntlet of the quizzing street and made our way home. All along the streets the people had brought their chairs out of doors and were sitting on the pavements in the cool of the night. At Antonio's door we found a group of his family, almost invisible in the dark. We sat down with them. Presently Antonio said: "I will go and fetch Don Luis, and he will play for us." What then could be seen of Don Luis was a large nose, a check cap and a pair of gnarled hands which grasped his guitar in a capable manner. He sat down on a chair on the sidewalk and began to play. "Curse it!" he exclaimed. "Do you know I used to play very well, but all this factory work ruins the fingers for playing. Mine are getting as stiff as if they had no joints in them." Presently he was playing a jota and demanded that somebody should dance. "Dance, dance!" he shouted. "Curse it! What's the good of playing if nobody dances?" By this time most of the inhabitants of the houses near had gathered round, although almost hidden; but there were no young men. Antonio's sister danced a jota with a pretty girl. The jota is the most common of Spanish dances, as the waltz used to be with us. It has a _tempo_ which fluctuates between three-four and two-four, the phrases being divided into two beats each or three bars of two beats each at the will of the player. The jota that evening appeared to be a very sedate kind of dance. When it was over the crowd urged us to dance something English. We asked Don Luis to play the jota again, and to it we danced a rather mad waltz which we had invented. The path upon which we danced was of dried mud, which is pounded into unusual shapes in the winter and dries in whatever shape it happens to be when the heat comes. It was full of lumps and holes, and the light was dim. In a moment we partially understood why Antonio's sister had been so sedate. But the brother-in-law informed us: "Say," he said, "my girl can dance wonderful. But 't'aint proper, in de town. Say, you see 'er in de country. Den she hop. She kick de window in wid 'er toe. Sure. Show you one day." Murcia is a town of about 100,000 inhabitants and is the capital of its province, but it is hardly more than an overgrown village in spite of its cathedral, its bullring, its theatre and its cinema palace. Both at Avila and at Madrid they had said to us: "Aha, you are going to the town of the beautiful women!" But the women of Murcia, with the exception of some lovely and filthy gipsies, were not unusually beautiful. They were thick-set and useful looking with muscular necks and ankles, and their eyes had a domesticated expression. Their clothes emphasized their defects. They indulged in pastel shades and frills which were used in fantastic ways. We have seen frills in spiral twisting around the frock from neck to hem, or a series of jaunty inverted frills round the hips, which gave to the wearer something of the appearance of one of those oleographs of a maiden half emerging from the calyx of a flower: or perpendicular frills which made the wearer resemble a cog-wheel. We had ample opportunities of observing them from the windows of our house, at which we started our experimental sketches in Spain, but we had to sit back from the balcony because small crowds began to gather, and boys to shout. Antonio then said that he would take us to one of the big walled-in gardens where we could paint at our ease. A huge gateway led into a courtyard which was completely covered by a vine pergola. The grapes hung in large bunches, though yet green. At one side of the courtyard was a low stall on which fruit and vegetables were for sale, and near an arched door a woman was washing clothes in a large basin of antique pattern. The garden was a rich mass of green. Huge trees of magnolia were covered with waxy white flowers and gave out a strong odour which scented the wide garden. Lemon trees and orange trees were ranged in rows; the lemons yellow on the trees or lying on the ground as thick as fallen apples after an autumn storm, the oranges still hard spheres of dark green. Along the edges of the paths stood up the tall palm trees with their golden clusters of unripe dates, or with their fronds tied up in a stiff spike, some mystery of palm cultivation. Fronds of palm, hacked from off the trees, lay about the ground, and we were surprised to find by experience that they possessed long, piercing and painful thorns. We painted for several days in this small paradise, but our conscience was accusing us. We had not come to Spain to paint gardens. One day we took our courage in our hands. "It is market day," said we; "we will go and paint the market." Peasant carts loaded with fruit and vegetables were crowding into the town; men clad in black cottons were dragging donkeys, upon the backs of which were panniers filled with saleable provisions; women with umbrellas aloft against the sun carried baskets in their arms or heavy packages upon their hips. The market was spread in the sunlight behind the Hôtel Reina Victoria. Grain was for sale in broad, flat baskets, cheap cottons were on stalls; fruits--peaches, plums, and lemons--were mixed with tomatoes, berenginas, and red or green peppers. To one side of the market place was the fonda which had once been a monastery. This was for the travellers by road as the hotels were for travellers by rail. In a huge arched entrada carters and villagers were sitting at their ease. To one side was a kitchen in which could be seen large red earthen vessels which made one think of the last scene in "The Forty Thieves," and beyond the entrada was an open courtyard in which the high tilted road waggons were drawn up in rows. Skirting the fonda wall I found a corner which seemed secluded, and sitting down I began to paint an old woman and her fruit stall. One by one a few people gathered behind me. Blas, the gipsy musician, came up, greeted me, and added his solid presence to the spectators. A baker came out of his shop and watched. The crowd began to increase. Soon they were pressing all round, even in front, so that I could see nothing. "I cannot paint if I cannot see," I exclaimed to Blas. He and the baker set themselves one on each side and hustled an opening in the crowd. "Atras, atras!" they shouted. "En la cola, en la cola."[8] But more and more people hurried up to see what was happening. Soon the crowd, despite the strenuous efforts of Blas and the baker, closed up again in front, and no efforts could keep an open vista. Jan, who had been drawing in another part of the market, came up. He saw in the midst of a maelstrom of heads the extreme tip of my hat and worked his way through, to speaking distance. Brown-faced old women, with market baskets, men with turkeys hung in braces over their shoulders, young women with babies, gipsy men with tall hats and gig-whips, noisy boys, all smiling, friendly and curious, were peeping under my hat discussing the phenomenon. We left the disappointed maelstrom, which changed its shape and followed us like a rivulet to a café, where they stood for a while gazing solemnly while we sipped iced coffee. We then decided that sketching in the streets of Murcia was not to be thought of. Luis, to whom we confided this, said that he would find us balconies and roofs from which we could work, but we wanted to settle in some small village where we could know everybody in a day, and sketch where we liked, so Luis made arrangements to take us across the plain at the foot of the mountains to see some villages that might suit us. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 7: (Spelt phonetically.) These three words, meaning youth, beauty and luxury, are used in all Spanish theatre advertisements as especial attractions of the spectacle advertised.] [Footnote 8: "Back, back! Get into queue, get into queue!"] CHAPTER X MURCIA--BLAS Spain is the true home of the guitar. Only in Spain is the guitar--the most complete of solo instruments--heard in its true perfection. But even in Spain the cult of the guitar is dying out. Nowadays, at marriages, births or christenings the guitar is no longer inevitable, for the cheap German piano and the gramophone are ousting the national instrument. Jan had become enamoured of the guitar in Paris, some small progress he had made with the help of a friend; but one cannot get the true spirit of Spanish music at second hand. So Blas, the gipsy, was called in to given him instruction. We had been told not to give Blas more than twenty pesetas a month, these to be full payment for a daily lesson. However, Blas proved to be more adept at bargaining than we were. He looked very Egyptian in the face, was very smart in a grey check suit, patent leather boots and straw hat, a strange contrast to the poverty of his home and the slatterns of women who were his family and relations. He came in rubbing his hands together, grinning with an expanse of strong, white teeth, and showing a sly expression in his curious eyes. He cringed to us. He demanded two pesetas a lesson, or sixty pesetas a month. We held out that we had been told to offer him twenty. This, he answered, was impossible, quite impossible, out of the question. Some of his subserviency was immediately put into his pocket. Jan said that as he would be painting a good deal he would not want more than three lessons a week. Blas hummed and hawed and chewed the idea for a while. Then, with the air of one who is making a great concession, he said that since it was the Señor and since he appeared "muy sympatico" he would consent to take twenty-five pesetas, and that was his final offer. Jan agreed. Blas then added that he was reducing his terms solely because of the sympathetic nature of the Señor, and that he was by no means satisfied with the bargain, and that it was "muy poco." He then asked Jan if he had a guitar. Jan said that he was using the big white instrument made by Ramirez which our friend had left in his house. Blas answered that he possessed the brother of that instrument himself, and that it was a good one. Only after he had gone did we realize that three lessons a week meant twelve lessons a month, and, at his original price, this would have amounted to twenty-four pesetas, and that Bias had wheedled out a peseta more than his original offer. We do not like the bargaining system which is prevalent all over Spain, a habit from which, in spite of their stern notices, the "precio fijo" shops are not quite exempt. We are not registering this objection because Blas cozened us of a peseta; but it seems to us that the whole habit of chaffering inculcates a lack of generosity and lays a foundation of unfriendly relationships between people. No matter upon what friendly terms the bargaining is carried out, too much of an element of positive personal competition is brought in; but much bargaining is not carried on in a friendly way. It also necessitates a wholesale campaign of lying--appreciative and depreciative--on the part of both buyer and seller, and a certain amount of personal feeling on the side of the loser. Nor does the constant simulation of anger tend to make a person more pacific by habit. Curiously enough the most generous man is often the worst treated by the bargaining system. He offers a sum in excess of the real value in order to shorten the ordeal, and by doing so only excites the seller to greater cupidity. We have noted that the successful bargainer is treated with respect, while the other who cuts short the bargain by paying too much earns contempt. Blas came to our house at about twelve o'clock. He was a true musician and lived--as far as we could discover--for but two things, music and drink. He had seemed to understand our Spanish well enough to get the better of the bargain, but he had forgotten this. He, like the maid, had a fixed idea that Jan could not speak Spanish. He grinned, and made strange noises, but never tried to explain anything by means of words. One cannot say that he was a good teacher. All that he could do was to play a piece over and over again, and trust you to get it by ear. Now and again he would grasp Jan's fingers and try to force them into the necessary positions. He was even incapable of playing his tunes slowly. If Jan wished to analyse a movement which came in the middle of a melody Blas had to begin at the beginning. Sometimes Jan was almost in despair, but he worked hard and in the end drew a profit out of Blas's inadequate instruction. Spanish guitar music is unlike the music of Europe. It has a strange primitive character depending for its marvellous rhythmic properties upon a rhythm of phrase more than upon the rhythm of the bar division. The form is simple, a passage played with the back of the nails across the strings, called the "Rasgueado," a passage like a refrain or chorus, "the Paseo," in reality the introduction of the dance or melody, and the melodies proper called "Falsetas." The rhythmic structure which does not correspond to the bar division of the music is usually emphasized by drum taps made upon the sound board of the guitar with the nail of the second finger. Blas considered it his duty to teach Jan two falsetas on each visit. [Illustration] But if he was a bad teacher, he was a fine player. Resting his chin on the great guitar as if the passage of the vibrations through his body were a source of pleasure, he crouched, looking like something between a bullfrog and a Cheshire cat. Then with supple fingers he played, drawing delicious melodies; or rasping with his nails he beat out complex harmonies that seemed to vie with an orchestra in richness of sound. When he came to a falseta, he would throw up his negroid eyes like a Greco saint, he would kiss his hand, and, as likely as not, spit on the floor to emphasize his delight. Before he left the house he always tried to get an advance upon his salary. After all, to him we were only _Busné_ to be fleeced if possible. But when his indebtedness amounted to the whole of his month's pay we fended him off by saying that we had no change. I do not think we realized how much we were overpaying Blas until we decided to leave Murcia. We found a house, as you will hear, at Verdolay about five miles away. When he heard that we were leaving, Blas volunteered to come out as usual for the same pay. He said that he would cheerfully walk the distance--ten miles--for that money. But we were getting rather shy of Blas. He was too persistent a borrower for our slender means and we had heard of other teachers who were cheaper. So we took this opportunity and dropped him as a pilot to the guitar. CHAPTER XI MURCIA--THE ALPAGATA SHOP Save upon feast days, and with the exception of the nobility, who are few, and of the merchants, who have to be worldly commonplace, alpagatas, or string-soled shoes, are the footwear of the Spanish nation. If you dodge the big towns you may go for days and never see a boot. The agricultural labourer, the artisan, the beggar, the soldier, the engine-driver, the porters all wear either the alpagata or, in the summer, its cooler brother, the string-soled sandal. In Spain boots are not meant for real wear, you swagger around the town in boots, and have them cleaned four or five times a day. At a café a horde of bootblacks precipitate themselves towards you to renew the lustre--possibly dimmed by the all-prevalent dust--of those foot ornaments. The young man who goes to meet his _novía_ removes his alpagatas, and puts on boots highly polished and with check tops; the young maiden who is sitting out with her _novio_ has placed her alpagatas in the corner and stretches high-heeled shoes across the pavement. But for all-day-up-and-down use the alpagata wins every time; the baby wears alpagatas, and its grandmother wears a larger variant; there are white alpagatas, brown alpagatas, grey alpagatas, black alpagatas for those in mourning--a very important ceremony in Spain--and there are the elaborate, almost Eastern, alpagatas, entirely of esparto grass, the making of which occupies the time when the goatherd is not yelling at his goats. Even the horsemen, the caballeros, often wear alpagatas. It is true that one cannot strap a spur on to an alpagata, but on the whole spurs are little used in Spain. If the rider wishes his horse or donkey to mend his pace, he thumps the animal with a thick cudgel at about the place where St. Dunstan kicked the devil. The alpagata is also a cheap form of footwear. Those which we were wearing cost three pesetas, say 2_s._ 9_d._ They should last two months. We were therefore spending 1_s._ 4-1/2_d._ a month each on shoes. A little arithmetic will show this as 16_s._ 6_d._ a year. To-day boots alone cost more than this in repairs, not counting the first cost. For children, of course, they are unrivalled, as the life of the alpagata almost fits the growth of the infant, which is spared the torture one remembers in childhood of boots which were too good to throw away and yet too small to wear with ease. But to taste the full romantic flavour of the alpagata, it should have been bought in the true alpagata shop. If you are in Spain don't go to the boot-shop. It does sell alpagatas, but it ought not to do so. In Spain the boot-seller should be classed with the jeweller. He sells ornaments. The boot merchant who sells alpagatas in Spain is as bad as the jeweller here who sells umbrellas. Go to the shop which sells things for the road, for that picturesque, coloured, moving life of Spain. The doorway of this fascinating shop is piled up with bales of a rough cloth of an exquisite hyacinthine blue, or of a strange yellow, which is seen to perfection only in the alpagata shop or in El Greco's pictures. This cloth is used for lining horse-collars and saddles. Above these beautiful bales are collars of white leather, heavy with small cone-shaped bells of copper, for the goats, larger collars of brown leather, either with small bells in rows, like a lady's pearl collar, or with one large bell pendant, for the oxen. Within are large coronet-shaped semicircles of leather and coloured woolwork, red, yellow, black, white, for the oxen's foreheads, long ribbons of coloured woolwork for the donkeys' harness, and fringes of brightly coloured wool netting, ending in tassels, like that which decorated the under edge of our grandmothers' sofas, to hang across the donkey's chest or down his nose. Muzzles for goats and for donkeys are here too. There is harness also in the shop, Gargantuan-looking harness studded with nails, so broad in its facets of leather that when the horse has his face inside it he looks not unlike an ancient knight in his armour. Only his eyes and his mouth are visible, and often indeed not the latter, for it may be guarded by a piece of leather work not unlike the tongue of a brogue shoe. Talking of shoes brings us back to the alpagata. A man will be working at a table like a butcher's block. Deftly he cuts the rope, bending it around an iron peg into the shape of the sole, then with a long awl he pierces it through and through, sewing it with great rapidity, and almost hey presto! as it were, a pair of soles are finished. Women who sit almost on the edge of the street, chattering and gossiping--often with the passers-by--are making the uppers of stout canvas. They spring from work to serve you with a gracious kindliness, and seeing that you are English they probably with the same gracious kindliness clap an extra fifty centimos on to the price. If only we had such an alpagata shop in London what a rush there would be to purchase. Your old alpagatas you leave behind you. What happens to them is to us a mystery. Old boots are the nuisance of the London dust heaps, the terror of the errant mongrel. Yorick, who, Sam Weller assures us, is the only person who has ever seen a dead donkey, may also in his travels have seen an extinct alpagata, but his "Sentimental Journey" is unfinished and we shall never know. CHAPTER XII MURCIA--BRAVO TORO Along cool colonnades of raw-coloured brick, up a staircase arched with concrete, and out through a sort of concrete culvert which spouted humanity, we came into the huge round amphitheatre of the bullring. Owing to Spanish dilatoriness, we were later than we had intended, and in consequence were unable to get seats within the coveted shadow which lay over half the great enclosure; but, thank goodness, the sky was mottled with clouds which tempered both the heat and the glare of the Spanish afternoon. We were in the cheapest seats, having disdained to go skywards into the boxes, for we had come to taste the full flavour of an average bullfight as a popular spectacle, and we wished it as pure as possible. So we had bought purple tickets for two pesetas and a white one for me at half price; at the same time repelling the persistence of a feminine hawker, who pressed upon us large flabby looking paper bags of mysterious content which we imagined to be some form of refreshment. The seats of the bullring were of flat stone rising tier upon tier, and we chose our places low down to get a good view, yet as near as possible to the slowly creeping shadow; only one row of stone seats and two rows of chairs of iron lattice separated us from the arena itself. The chairs were empty, so I asked Luis if they were reserved for some special purpose. "No," he answered, "but the bull may leap out of the ring. Those chairs would entangle him, but it is uncomfortable if you happen to be sitting there, so they are not very popular." As the edge of the arena was guarded by a palisade of stout planking about five feet high, through which were cut narrow gaps--bolt-holes--for the toreadors, and the seats were separated from this palisade by a passage some six feet wide, the lowest seats being set some ten feet above the floor, I felt that the risk of finding an enraged bull in one's lap was rather remote. The culverts spouted Spanish humanity: soldiers in greenish khaki; women in black, white or colours dominated by a very popular pink; peasants in blue blouses and sandals; bourgeoisie in straw hats and drill; youths in caps of exaggerated English cut. Immediately below us two small children, mothered by a third aged about eleven, all three exceedingly unkempt, rather dirty, and possibly verminous, took their seats, and, recognizing that I was a stranger, advised me in hoarse whispers all through the progress of the spectacle. In spite of her obvious poverty the eldest girl wore a large tortoise-shell comb of elaborate pattern in a carefully arranged _coiffure_. Numberless children seemed to have attended the spectacle thus, as the small Londoners go to the cinema. At this moment the ring itself was full of them, some playing football, a game very popular--there is even a Spanish periodical called _Free-Kick_--others giving imitation exhibitions of bullfighting, more or less like that played by the children in the hotel. When the imitation bull, stabbed to death, was dragged around the ring, the real spectators cheered loudly. We wondered what the bull's mother would say about the state of his pants. This was no Mantilla day, nor day of fiesta. It was just an ordinary Sunday afternoon diversion in this provincial town. We took our first dose of bullfight in this place for a reason. Essentially a popular sport should be judged as a sport of the people: not by its highest exponents, but by its average. An intelligent foreigner would not get the truest impression of what cricket means to England at Lord's or at the Oval; but on some village green at an inter-parochial contest. The horrors of bullfighting began with a band, the age of the bandsmen varying between fourteen and seventy years. The band marched around the ring playing music as out of tune as the new age is with the old. The ring emptied of children, and two horsemen superbly mounted dashed across the arena to demand from the President the key of the bull-pen. This was followed by a general parade of the toreros. Alas, for romance! Their gilt was somewhat tarnished, most of their cloaks worn and faded; usually the only part of the costume which seemed to have retained its original brilliance was the coloured seat of the tight trousers, which I suppose comes in for very little wear and tear. The picadors with their nail-headed lances seemed veritable Don Quixotes on their more than Rosinante steeds: poor beasts doomed to the knackers anyhow. The procession ended with two cart-horses and a yoke destined to drag the slaughtered bulls from the ring. There was a pause. Luis said in a low murmur: "Doesn't your heart beat? Isn't this moment exciting?" He spoke truly. Around the huge oval all eyes were concentrated on the red door of the bull-pen: the very air seemed rarefied and electric. For me, I think this was the most tense moment of the day: that moment before anything had happened. A bugle call cut the silence. The red door swung open and with a peculiar rolling gallop the bull dashed into the arena. "Now," I thought, "this terrible bullfight, about which so much has been written, so much discussed, has indeed begun." The bullfights of our imagination are spectacles of sun and colour--of madness stained with cruelty; the cruelty perhaps partly condoned by the fierceness of the bull, by a sort of wild frenzy of sport which seems in some part to excuse the murderous instinct of man. [Illustration] The bull, a coloured rosette nailed to its shoulder, reached the centre of the ring, and then, for me, half the anticipated interest of the fight vanished. We had expected a wild and furious gallop around the arena; a bull lusting to kill or be killed; mad charges at the toreros, who would elude it with quick baffling passes of the cloaks, wild dashes at the unfortunate horses, the riders of which would at least make some pretence of manoeuvering before the furious bull was allowed to fling horse and rider into the air. But no! The bull slowed up, halted and looked to this side and that. It was obviously perplexed. One could almost imagine a crease of puzzlement between its eyes. What was all this; where the sierras of its youth; into what strange place had it come? And now began a taunting of the unwilling bull. The toreros flapped their faded cloaks at it, but whenever the bull was tempted to charge the man ran for safety and crammed himself through one of the bolt-holes in the palisade--once a torero scampering for life reached an opening at the same instant as a companion. For a moment there was a flurry, but both men contrived to push through before the bull was able to reach them. The first impression of the fight was of a certain power and some magnificence on the part of the bull, and of degradation on the part of the toreros--one thought of the shorn Sampson taunted by the Philistines. In this contest the men seemed somehow ignoble in comparison with the animals. The next act of the drama made this feeling no better. The picador was led out on his blindfolded and skeleton-like steed by a little man in a red shirt, who from behind the horse's head held out, like a policeman regulating the traffic, a protesting hand at the bull, as if to imply that the animal was not to charge till he was ready to bolt. For some while the bull did not take the invitation, though whenever he appeared likely to do so the small man dropped the reins and ran for the paling, from which, however, he took care never to be very far away. The picador himself is not in great danger, for his trousers are armour plated. By this time the audience was shouting out: "No quiere!"[9] but at last the bull charged, the picador thrust his lance, and the bull with a great thrust of its head overturned both horse and man. Immediately the bull was surrounded by the toreros who with flapping cloaks distracted its attention. Man and horse were lifted up again. Large numbers of Spaniards do not like bullfighting, but a great many Spaniards who do not in principle object to bullfighting do object to the horse-slaughter. One, cutting to the roots of the truth, said it was "not æsthetic." He was right. There should be a strong sense of the æsthetic in sport--it is a thing more subtle than mere "fair play," and when this sense of the æsthetic is ignored the sport becomes brutality. This horse-slaughter more than oversteps the line of the æsthetic, so for us did the bolt-holes provided for the toreros. For us bullfighting would begin to be a serious sport if the men and the bull stood on the same conditions. [Illustration] One picador, who by means of his lance kept the bull off from his horse, received a round of well-earned applause. The bugle sounded once more and the picadors were led out of the ring. There followed another rather dull interval of cloak-flapping. One of the matadors, however, gave an exhibition of passes which made the bull charge repeatedly within a foot or so of the man's body, during which the torero did not move his feet. When the bull, baffled and panting with exhaustion at his fruitless tosses, paused, the torero went upon one knee before the animal. The spectators shrieked applause and flung their hats into the ring. But this exhibition was very different from the usual cloak-flapping followed by a scamper for the bolt-hole: nor, indeed, was it shown often. A torero who had carried an exceedingly faded violet cloak, and who had been perhaps most hasty in his dashes for the safety gaps, now discarded his cloak, and waving a pair of pink banderillas stepped into the centre of the ring. Like a foreigner at cricket we naturally missed much of the subtlety, but it was obvious that there were certain conditions under which the banderillero would meet the bull and others under which he would not. When the toreador seemed to think the bull in a good position, he waved his banderillas and stamped his feet as though about to fence. But the bull did not want banderillas stuck into him. Again and again he declined the invitation while the populace howled "No quiere, no quiere!" Personally I should have sent the bull home and ordered another with more ginger in it. At last, exasperated, the bull charged, the banderillero ran towards it in a slightly circular path, planted his two sticks, each some thirty inches long, into the bull's neck, and, curving out more widely, avoided by a few inches the upward thrust of the bull's horns. This piece of work looked dangerous, and the pay of a banderillero amounts to between £3 and £4 an afternoon. I think that he earns his money. What surprised us was to see the torero who had appeared such a scamperer with the faded purple cloak performing most pluckily with the paper-covered sticks. I suppose it is the case of a good batsman and good bowler--the arts are not interchangeable. The six banderillas having been placed, another interval of harrying the unfortunate animal with minor exasperations of cloak-flapping followed: but at last the espatero, the swordsman, and the matador prepared to give the death stroke. Here again in first-class bullfighting probably the whole exhibition is one of supreme skill. We expected a certain number of showy passes with the scarlet flag, the matador keeping the bull circling about him--"wearing the bull as a waist-belt," as the saying is in Spain. Then a pause, a sudden thrust with the sword--and, with a groan, the bull is dead. It was not so. The espatero walked about flapping the cloak, at which sometimes the bull did charge, but more often did not. Several times the espatero had to run into a bolt-hole. The bull showed strong desires to go home: it went to the side of the ring and looked at the door from whence it had emerged, while more venturesome members of the audience leaned over the palisade and tried to snatch out a banderilla as a souvenir. The toreador chivied the bull round the ring, trying to get it face foremost. However, when he succeeded in this he did not seem satisfied, for though the people yelled: "Ahora! Ahora!"[10] the matador only flapped his cloak. [Illustration] "He is rather a nervous espatero," said Luis, "so, when he does prepare to kill, look out. Sometimes the sword flies. Not very long ago it landed in the audience and killed a spectator." At last, however, the bull, tongue hanging out, foam dripping from its mouth, blood streaming from the lance and banderilla wounds in the shoulders, faced the matador with half lowered and sullen head. The matador, taking up the position of a man about to throw a javelin, aimed his sword, which was curiously curved in the blade, and with quick steps ran in, thrust, and side-stepped. The bull, taken by surprise, could not bring its weight into action rapidly enough, the upward tossing horns missed the man by inches: the bull rushed forward at another torero who had taken position in line to attract the animal's attention. The matador had made no master stroke, the sword stood eighteen inches out of the bull's shoulder. The bull showed no signs of death, so the matador went away to procure another sword. Finally the bull, stabbed by four swords, was worried to death rather than killed, after which the corpse was dragged triumphantly around the ring at the tail of the team of horses, while the spectators stood on the stone seats and cheered. It may be that we English take our pleasures sadly, but at that moment it struck me that at an ordinary bullfight the Spaniard seems to take rather dull pleasures with ecstasy. The second bull proved more lively, the second matador more expert, or more lucky than his confrère; but here also the show seemed to partake rather of the nature of what should properly be termed bull-baiting than bullfighting. This second bull provided the thrill of the day to the three small dirty children. With one thrust of its horn it killed a horse. The small boy (aged six or seven) turned to me with eyes sparkling with pleasure. "Did you see that?" he exclaimed. "One thrust only." After the death of this bull came the Interval. "Look up the numbers printed on your tickets," said Luis. Having found the papers, I raised my head and to my amazement saw, in the centre of the arena, a donkey, two young calves and a sewing-machine. "Good heavens!" I exclaimed. "What are those?" "They are the prizes of the tombola," explained Luis; "you or the Señor may win one." The lots were drawn out of a large hat-box, and the numbers displayed on a blackboard. The donkey fell to a small boy, the calves to a peasant. But for some while the sewing-machine, forlorn and incongruous, stood in the centre of the bloodthirsty arena awaiting a claimant. Attention was finally concentrated upon a point high up amongst the cheap seats, to the right of the President's box. Shouting, persuasion, hand-clapping and arm-waving ensued, and at last the crowd squeezed out a small, dark woman, blushing and giggling behind her fan, accompanied by husband, husband's friend and six-year-old son. The sewing-machine was escorted out of the same door through which the dead bulls had been dragged. Then the bullfight began again. The third bull, a lusty black, was the most willing of all. He did charge, he leapt high in his endeavours to kill those phantom cloaks. After all the necessary banderillas had been placed, there followed an incident. A boy of about sixteen years leapt the barrier and ran across the ring, hastily as he ran unwrapping something from a covering of newspaper. There was a sudden hum of excited voices from the spectators. "Ei!" cried Luis. "An amateur!" The boy reached the President's box, the unwrapped objects being a pair of dirty banderillas. Bowing to the President he craved permission to plant his banderillas in the bull. But, alas for youthful aspirations, permission was not given. The boy clambered sadly over the palisade to hide himself in the audience. Unfortunately this bull, the bravest of the four, fell to the lot of the nervous matador. Death was a very lengthy operation, during the progress of which the bull knocked down the bullfighter. For a moment we wondered if the bull were going to take its revenge, but flapping cloaks instantly distracted it. Meanwhile, between the forelegs of the bull the matador lay very still, shielding his head with his arms. The nervous matador, however, went on with his task, using three swords before it was completed. The matador of the fourth bull made an exceedingly bad thrust. The populace howled insults at him, flinging at the same time those paper bags which we had seen on sale near the ticket-office. They contained no refreshment, nor material for bombarding unsuccessful matadors, but were stuffed with horsehair to soften the stone seats. By this time we wished we had inquired more about them, for the stone had proved anything but soft. The fourth bull dead, the bullfight was over. "Come and see the toreros," said Luis. So with the outflowing press we repassed into the culvert, down the stairs and along the corridors of brick, till we reached a window or grille, by staring through which we could see the "heroes of Spain" clambering into an ordinary station bus, in which they sat, stiff, cramped, dignified and unsmiling, conscious of their importance. We returned with the returning crowds along the roads deep in dust, back to the centre of the town where there were cooling drinks and seats softer than those stone benches. While we were sitting thus, revelling in varied positions and summing up our first impressions, a large box cart of lattice work passed by. Within the cart were hung great joints of meat which swung to and fro as the cart bumped over the uneven road. "There," said Luis, "go the bulls. They will be sold to-morrow in the market. The meat is cheap because it is rather tough." This incident, because it seemed to contain a note of irony, because it had in it something sardonic and something callous, seemed to us a fitting termination to the spectacle which we had witnessed. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 9: "He doesn't want to fight."] [Footnote 10: "Now! Now!"] CHAPTER XIII AN EXCURSION Murcia was very hot, very dusty and very sultry. We did not mind mere heat--though Spanish midsummer heat was not the best of pick-me-ups for the influenza--dust we could outlive, but the sultriness of the Murcian valley was beyond our physique. This flat valley, which is ten miles wide between abrupt mountains, is irrigated over the whole of its breadth and is one of the richest agricultural parts of Spain. The evaporation of the water makes the heat of Murcia damp; the summer in addition was cloudy, and the sun shining on to the clouds seemed to cook the air enclosed in the valley until the atmosphere resembled that of a glass-house for orchids. We wished to leave Murcia in spite of an affection which was growing in us for the town. Luis met us at one o'clock on the terrace of the Reina Victoria. We had _café au lait_ while waiting for the tartana. Luis said that the milk in the coffee was not good: he deduced preservatives. But the lean waiter stood loyally by his hotel. "The milk is excellent, I assure you, Señor," he said. "My stomach is excessively delicate; the slightest thing and it is ... I assure you that I drink pints of this milk in this hotel. In fact my stomach is so delicado that I am a connoisseur in milk, es vero.[11] If the milk were bad this fatality would happen to me." He gave a dumb-crambo exhibition of the results of bad milk on his delicate digestion; it needed no words. With deference he then proposed a new _café au lait_, which Luis sipped with a judicial but unconvinced manner. The tartana was a tight fit. It is about as large as a governess-cart inside, and we were six. Luis, Jan and myself, a monk in brown, a thin pale Señor who had long eyelashes and many rings, and another passenger, a world type, the result of overwork and underpay, neither smart nor slovenly, with a rough manner covering a kindly nature. THE DRIVE [Illustration] We discovered why tartanas have bulging hoods. The vehicles roll and rock so much over the bad roads that it is necessary to make room for the passengers' heads to jerk backwards. Otherwise cerebral concussion would be the invariable result. _Luis_ (to the little monk): "Excuse me, but are not your clothes very hot?" _The Monk_ (spreading out his hands): "They are hot, but nevertheless they keep out the sun." We come out of the town into the gardens. There are flat fields of cultivation spotted with mulberry trees, the trunks of which seem vivid purple in the afternoon light. I make a remark in Spanish. (Jan was still at the stage of appreciative listener). _The Clerkly Man_: "Señora, your Spanish is good for a stranger--you can pronounce the Spanish J, which is difficult for foreigners." _I_: "I have learned that from speaking German; it is rather like the German _ch_." A discussion on idioms at once begins. The Spaniard, though he speaks foreign languages badly, has an inextinguishable interest in the subject of tongues. If ever you are bored in Spanish company start an argument about languages. After the discussion has been going on for some while the pale Señor says: "Nevertheless it is sad that the Catalans wish to root Castilian out of their country." _Luis_ (with some heat): "Well! why should they not? They are the hardest working and the most valuable people of Spain. Why should not they do as they like? Why should everybody not do as he likes if he hurts nobody else?" _The pale Señor_ (with frigidity): "But that is Bolshevism." _Luis_ (with increasing heat): "If that is Bolshevism then I do not mind being a Bolshevik." Conversation is at an impasse. The carriage flings us to and fro for a while. A motor-car passes us. The dust which is about six inches deep on the road is whirled up in a cloud so thick that we have to halt for a few minutes to allow it to settle, or we might have driven into the deep water-channels which edge each side of the road. _Luis_ (to the Clerkly Man): "My friends want to live for a while out in the mountains. Do you by any chance know of a house?" _The Clerkly Man_: "I am living with my family in the monastery of Fuen Santa. There is a guest house there and habitations are to let. I will find out all about them if you wish." _The pale little Señor_ (who has apparently forgotten all about Bolshevism): "There are one or two houses in my village of Verdolay. The proprietor is a friend of mine. I will inquire for you about it." The tartana stops. In front of a solitary house is a small wooden frame on which a few strips of dusty meat are hung. The driver buys some of this from the woman who comes out of the house. _The Driver_ (confidentially to the passengers): "Better get a bit of meat while you have the chance." Nobody follows his example. The carriage bumps on. The sun is now shining through the thin dust-laden trees which edge the road: they appear as flames of pale gold. We mount over a bridge. A broad deep but waterless canal stretches away to right and left. _The little Señor_: "We are now nearing Verdolay. It is still too hot for you to go hunting for a house. I shall be delighted if you will take possession of my house until the sun is cooler." _Luis_: "Señor, I thank you very much, but we cannot do it." _The little Señor_: "I insist--you will come?" _Luis_: "Thank you very much." This is Spanish courtesy. A single invitation is for politeness only, like the last piece of bread and butter left for Miss Manners. A second invitation means that it is really offered. We pass a group of houses the colour of baked bread; the most arid-looking spot we have seen as yet. The gardens come to an abrupt end. The road rises slightly, and grey-green olive foliage over gnarled trunks throw a thin lacework of shadow on the dry earth. The tartana stops. We all get out. The clerkly man goes east; the priest south; we, led by the pale Señor, west. * * * * * We were at the entrance of a village. It spread over a mound at the foot of the higher hills. It was like a pyramid with toy houses coloured yellow, orange, green and grey upon the ledges, and all around trees like those from a child's play box. The village was fronted by a line of houses painted a deep crimson-vermilion. An iron windmill for pumping water was placed on the extreme point of the mound. The little Señor showed us through the village to his house and left us in the entrada, while he went to get beer. The room was decorated with wooden "art-nouveau" chairs, oleographs and an extremely bad oil painting of a bull with banderillas shedding much blood. On a cane table was a gramophone. The little Señor had shut a door made on the system of a Venetian blind to keep out the sun, and presently the lattice-work was crowded with children trying to peer in at us. The Señor returned preceded by a large English setter. He drew the corks of the beer and asked us to make ourselves at home. "The house and all that is in it is at your service," he said in the phrase of Spanish courtesy. I was patting the dog. "That dog," said the little Señor, "is a very valuable dog. It is unique in the province and possibly is unique in the south of Spain. It has a romantic history. It is bred by the monks in high Switzerland, and when the snow is deep on the mountains it goes out to hunt for lost travellers. It is the only specimen of a San Bernar' in the south of Spain." We looked at the setter; and drank some more beer. "That bull," went on the Señor, pointing to the picture, "was painted by one of the best bull painters in Spain." We looked at the picture and again took refuge in beer. Luis, who did not know about setters, but did know about pictures, drank in sympathy. The Señor wound up his gramophone. "Do you know 'Frou-Frou'?" he inquired. "'Frou-Frou'?" we said. "Yes, the French Comic Opera." "But," said Luis, "have you not by chance a disc of Spanish music? You see," he added as excuse, "the Señors are foreign. It interests them to hear the national music, the Flamenco." The little Señor pursed his lips. "But," he said, "it is so vulgar. Nobody wants to hear that." He possessed, however, a disc or two which he turned on, to our delight. But before we left him he insisted that we should sit through his favourite "Frou-Frou." We went away. The strains of "Frou-Frou" which the little Señor had turned on once more followed us on the still air. The setter-St. Bernard walked with us to the beginning of the hill, from whence he turned sedately homewards. We strode upwards--past cottages of all colours, past a large rambling monastery, which, perched on the far side of the Verdolay hill, very cubic in shape, is as romantic as it is possible for a building to be; past a watercourse, above which were dwellings hollowed out of the soft rock of the mountain-side, cave dwellings, and out on to the side of the mountains lying between Murcia and Carthagena. From here we could appreciate the width, flatness and verdure of the Murcian valley in the midst of which was the town, the campanile of the cathedral soaring into the air. Here we had our first experience of a Spanish country walk. We were all wearing alpagatas, the canvas sides of which are not exceedingly thick. The dried herbage of the hills was intermingled with all manner of prickly weeds. The vegetation protects itself in this way from being eaten by anything less leather-tongued than a goat. The results are uncomfortable for the walker. The little hairlike spines pierce the shoes and break off, remaining as a continual irritant until the shoe is removed. Even then the spines, almost microscopic in size and almost flesh colour, are often difficult to find. The same uncomfortable fate is in wait for the unwary stranger who sits down without having carefully explored the place where he is going to seat himself. Indeed the fate is worse, because the thorns thus encountered cannot with decency be extracted in a public place and the victim is condemned to a lot similar to that of the naughty schoolboy. The sun poured the full of its summer power on to the hill-side, which reflected both heat and light with overpowering intensity. Though it was almost four o'clock in the afternoon we felt that our salamandrine limits were being put to a test. A broad white road, mounting up the hill, crossed our path and we turned into it. "We are going to the monastery of La Luz," said Luis. "I have heard that they sometimes take visitors for short periods. It would be interesting for you to spend a fortnight in a monastery." [Illustration] The road climbed up beneath high black cliffs. The other side of the valley was coloured orange and red upon which the sun was shining with all its force. The side of the hill was dotted with aloes, some having upright flower stems fifteen feet high in the air, around the flowers of which the bees were swarming in harmonious halos. A stately stone pine overshadowed a medley of old buildings which sprang from the top of a precipice out of which sprouted the weird branches of the prickly pear cactus. The road circled round the foot of this cliff, and still mounted till, making a full semicircle, it brought us on to a platform. On one side of the flat space was an open cistern into which led a pipe. From the pipe a deliberate trickle of water fell. Two women and two men sat about this pipe slowly filling their amphoras of Grecian form, while donkeys waited patiently in the background bearing panniers for the water-vessels on their backs. On the other side of the platform the monastery showed a high wall with a large gate leading into a courtyard from which arose the face of the church, painted a Cambridge blue. We could find no bell. The water-carriers shouted instructions to us. The bell clanged with an empty sound, as though echoing through miles of untenanted corridors. We rang again. No response. We rang three or four times before we heard the sound of shuffling steps. A peep-hole, shaped like a cross, opened and an eye examined us. The door swung slowly open, revealing a small obsequious man dressed in peasant costume. Through passages we came into a cloister which was built around a small courtyard full of flowers. In the middle of the courtyard was a high statue of the Virgin. It was framed and almost hidden by a creeper which offered to it a tribute of gorgeous purple bell-shaped flowers. At the foot of the figure was stretched a large cat. A strange thought came to me that the cat did not bother itself about the Virgin other than as something which threw a grateful shadow. The apologetic little peasant monk, who had let us in was evidently an underling. He murmured something about Brother Juan and went away. Brother Juan came groaning along the corridor with rheumatic steps. He had a tiny head and large-framed body; dressed in peasant's clothes, white shirt, black cummerbund, short knee trousers, long white drawers to the ankle and sandals on bare feet. He was rather like a dear old gardener who has been in the family for years, and who has supported the teasings of generations of children. Age and a sweet nature had carved his face with horizontal wrinkles of kindliness; rheumatism and pain had crossed these with downward seams of depression. Luis introduced the object of our visit. Brother Juan doubtingly shook his head. They did have visitors, yes, but those were always well-known to the monastery. Introductions would be necessary. But, in any circumstance, the Father Superior was in Murcia at the moment, and nothing could be done without him. I, made conceited by the praise of the clerkly man in the carriage, then tried to charm Brother Juan by a series of apposite remarks in my most careful Spanish. Brother Juan scratched his head. "Doubtless, what the Señora says is very interesting." He raised his hands and eyes in pantomimed dismay. "But, oh, these languages! I can't understand a word!" Brother Juan, groaning with rheumatism, led us to the gate. By some means an old woman dressed in black had joined us. As Juan was taking his leave of us his eyes suddenly lit up with a merry twinkle. "If you will excuse me," he said to Luis, "it would be better, when you see the Father Superior, if the woman would dress rather less indecently. You see, we are monks and are not used to it." We went down the hill accompanied by the old woman in black, who was chuckling at Brother Juan's last remark. "If only the woman would ... he ... he ... we are monks and aren't used to it ... ho ... ho." I was surprised. It had not seemed to me that I was indecent. I was wearing an ordinary English midsummer walking dress. Luis said: "I think it was the opening at your neck that worried him. You see we haven't really taken up the open neck in Murcia as yet." Directed by the old woman, we scrambled down steep paths to the bottom of the orange-coloured ravine, and up the other side past the aloes; we went through an olive grove, and again up a steep zigzag road to the second monastery. Here lived the clerkly man, but we did not know his name. This monastery began with a terra-cotta-coloured Gothic church with three tall towers and a cupola of blue glazed tiles, and rambled on up the ridge of a long hill to end in a tall building which looked like an overgrown Turkish bath. A grey building with a huge entrance door was pointed out as the _pension_ of the monastery. We wandered into a large courtyard and to us came a fat priest wearing a biretta. He was courteous but firm. "We have no room," he said. But we remembered that the clerkly one had said that there was room. I suppose again my dress was the real objection. We went back towards the village of the little Señor. On our way we again crossed the dusty road which led to La Luz. A carriage was driving along it. In the carriage were two priests. Luis said: "There probably goes the Father Superior. Shall we ask him now?" After a moment's hesitation we turned and strode up the hill. We had to walk fast to catch the carriage, but at last the driver, perceiving that we were following him, halted. "No," said one of the priests, "we are not the Superior of La Luz. Indeed, at this moment he is behind you. There." He pointed out an old man in the costume of a peasant, who, bent with age, was toiling up the hill aided by his staff. The Father Superior was still some distance away. Hastily, with a brooch, we pinned my blouse up close around my throat. The Father Superior had the face of one designed to be an ascetic, but his expression was inscrutable. He was very suave. He felt honoured, he said, by the request of the Señors, but there was no room. Now Brother Juan had said that there was room. Luis tried to urge the matter: he instanced our Red Cross work in Serbia. The Father Superior said it was very praiseworthy of us, but ... and bowing unfelt regrets he left us. We went back to our little Señor. He found for us a woman with the usual pound's weight of keys and conducted us to two bright red houses. Both were one story in height, but one was for three months' tenancy only. We decided to take the other. It was occupied to its limits by a Spanish family, so we took but the most cursory of glances into it. Then, our business settled, we said au revoir to the little Señor, who in Spanish fashion offered us his services whenever they should be needed. We walked down a road and, in a short while, came to the village of Alverca. This was the first typical Spanish village we had passed through. It was long, stretched on the edge between the bare mountain and the fertile valley. The houses were low, one-storied for the most part, and the dust was all-prevalent. In the dusty street boys were playing football, which in Spain seems to be a summer game. In the middle of the village was a shop, which advertised itself as a Tobacco Agency, for tobacco is a Spanish government monopoly and can be sold only in licensed places. We went in to get a drink and to ask if by chance they had some tobacco, for all the while we were in Spain there was a famine of tobacco. The inside of the shop was a curious mixture of the modern and of the very ancient. At one end of the counter was a modern brass beer machine, with carbonic acid gas cylinder--which gives to the tepid beer an extra fizz--pressure gauge and lead-lined sink. At the other end of the shop were huge jars four feet high, and nine or ten feet in circumference; amphoras of pale porous unglazed pottery, direct successors of the Grecian vase; small drinking pots of clay with short spouts for water or of glass with long spouts for wine, the latter in shape not unlike the brass drinking-vessels of Benares. Pendent from the ceiling hung candles two or three feet in length, for devotional purposes, and side by side with the candles were festooned strings of orange-coloured, highly flavoured sausages, which appeared very ominous. Some day one felt that one would be tempted by a Spanish friend to eat one of these sausages, and the fear of the experiment was always within us. Wine of a deep ruby tinged with brown filled a large glass barrel; wine which could be bought for one halfpenny a glass. Inside the shop, leaning against the zinc bar, were two tramps; the one swart with three days' beard on his chin, dressed in a blue jean smock and soiled yellow velveteen trousers; the other leaner, more pallid, furtive: in spite of the heat of the day he was covered with a large black cloak. They at once offered us their glasses of wine. "Gracias. Buen aproveche," said we in customary refusal. They offered cigarettes to Jan and Luis. These, by courtesy, had to be accepted. While we were drinking our tepid beer--fizzed up with the carbonic acid gas--Jan asked for and bought a box of matches. The Spanish matches, very bad, a government monopoly, are packed in a small cardboard box. This box is quite difficult to open. Whichever way you push it, like the well-known trick matchbox, the inside part seems to have two bottoms and no opening. The impatient traveller usually tears the box to pieces trying to get at the forty matches which are inside. Jan asked for tobacco. "There is not," sighed the fat woman. Outside the shop the two tramps were waiting for us. The swart one peered quickly from left to right. "We have tobacco," he said in a hoarse whisper. He snapped his fingers at his companion, who produced from beneath the cloak, furtively, a square orange packet. "Good tobacco from Gibraltar," growled "Swart"; "will you buy?" "No," said Luis. The pallid man slid the tobacco beneath the cloak again. The two slouched off through the dust. "That would be tobacco at each end and cabbage or other refuse in the middle," said Luis. We turned towards the setting sun. Murcia has a tramway system. Blue cars run all over the town and reach out into the country at several spots. We came to the terminus in this direction at Palma, on the road to Carthagena. The people of the village crowded about us in curiosity; but by this time we were becoming used to a publicity which is, as a rule, only reserved for Royalty. As the tram carried us home--with several halts due to failure of the electrical supply--we noticed through an open door a delightful interior, decorated with the huge water-jars--on a raised step--with which beautiful specimens of old Spanish pottery were arranged. The village of the little Señor had pleased us so much that we made arrangements to move out there as soon as possible; for the heat of Murcia was now unbearable and we were in consequence on the verge of being really ill. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 11: That is truth.] CHAPTER XIV VERDOLAY--HOUSEKEEPING The house in Verdolay had five large rooms, stone-floored, and was unfurnished. We decided to borrow all our friend's kitchen furniture, to wit, a table, three chairs, water-vessels, etc., and we bought for ourselves a large frying-pan. But the bed was a problem. Our friend's bed looked too good to knock about, so at last we determined on the planks which we had already, and four packing-cases on which to lay the planks. Antonio, always eager to help us, promised to find the packing-cases and to make all the arrangements about a cart. At this moment Antonio's wife Rosa was ill. He had invited us to a noble lunch, and upon the day following he had told us that the lunch had disagreed seriously with Rosa. She did not get better. "There is much fever with it," said Antonio. Marciana, our charwoman, of whom we will tell more later, was also working for Antonio, and would bring us news of Rosa's illness, which appeared quite serious for so slight a cause. "We must look out for tummy-troubles," said I. It is amazing what a lot a small amount of furniture appears when one is preparing to move. We had thought the cart much too big, but we had some difficulty in stacking into it all our material, including the guitar, of which the driver was told to take especial care. We drove out to Verdolay in a tartana, passing on the road our cart of furniture. We noted that the driver had added above our load two huge bundles of straw colour. We wondered what they might be. We were to discover later. The little Señor took us to the owner of our prospective abode. His house was full of children, and the study, where we signed a Spanish agreement, was festooned with swords, pistols and guns, while a large photograph of him in officer's uniform explained the meaning of this warlike equipment. The proprietor, Don Ferdinand--a most unmilitary looking man--received our money with aloof dignity; but said, after the transaction was over, that if we ever needed a friend we now knew where to look for him. Subsequently Don Ferdinand placed in the yard next to ours a large dog, which howled all night and prevented us from sleeping, but the friendliness which he had professed did not induce him to move it. The cart of furniture had not arrived by the time we were in full possession of our new home. The front door led into a large entrada, from which one passed into an equally spacious kitchen, and then by a wide double door into the back yard. To the right and left of the entrada were rooms with windows, covered with a grille, looking on to the road. To the right of the kitchen the last room had a window looking into the yard. Evening had come and still the cart delayed. Antonio had given us an introduction to a friend called "La Merchora." We found her in the village shop which she owned. Her shop was smaller than that in Alverca, but similar, save that she sold her beer in bottles and dispensed with the beer machine. The same bilious-looking sausage hung in festoons from the ceiling. She was like a fat, happy aunt to us, talked very fast, but was very proud of being able to understand what I said. She assured us that she would arrange things for us. In the dusk we sat on the step of our empty house, and, illuminated by the light of a couple of candles lent by the little Señor, we ate provisions which we providentially had brought with us in the tartana. The cart arrived at about eight o'clock. The two large bundles had disappeared, but a certain amount of chopped straw scattered about amongst the furniture showed us what they had contained. The driver hesitated before accepting the tip which Jan offered him. We set up the bed as best we could. We had intended to put the packing-cases upright, but the structure seemed rather unsafe; so we laid them flat, put two of the planks lengthways and the rest crossing. Unfortunately two of the packing-cases were much narrower than the others. This made the structure slope down about a foot at one end. We did not have time or surplus energy to alter this arrangement during our stay, with the result that in the morning we had as a rule slipped gently down so that our feet projected some distance beyond the end of the bed. Mosquitoes had threatened us during our meal, so that we rigged the net at once. We had been warned by many travellers of the verminous condition of Spain. We had taken the chances of this house, which in truth had appeared reasonably clean. Nevertheless we went to bed with some anxiety. No sooner had we lain down and the candle was out, than the trouble began. It was as though we had been invaded by a hundred thousand bugs. We both tossed about and cursed our luck. Suddenly a piercing and prolonged sting made me clap my hand suddenly to the spot attacked. I had imprisoned something. I had experienced bugs in Serbia: this did not seem like a bug, but much larger. "Jan," I exclaimed, "I've caught something. Strike a light." The match revealed _a short piece of chopped straw_. The carter, with his bundles of chaff, had provided us with as uncomfortable a specimen of an "apple-pie" bed as it has been my lot to experience. The chaff had sifted down through everything, and had impregnated both the cover of the mattress and the sheets with the fine spikes of straw. We spent the better part of the night picking the tiny irritants out of our bedding. Even the thought that the house had proved bugless was at that moment but a poor solace. In addition to our discomforts of that night, the house was almost unbearable from the heat. We had chosen our first residence with some lack of experience. The house, we discovered on the morrow, faced east and west, and not, as did the majority of the houses in the village, north and south. In consequence of this fact we suffered from the sun, which poured through the front door all the morning, and through the back door all the afternoon. It was almost impossible to open the windows on both sides, to allow a draught to pass through the house. And for the worst house in the village we were being charged forty pesetas a month by our _friend_, Don Ferdinand. The discomforts of the night were added to by the cats, which chose our back wall for the most awesome serenades we have ever heard; and also by the plaintive baaing of a sheep tethered in an adjoining yard. We fell into an uneasy sleep about dawn, but were soon awakened by strange sounds which came from the kitchen. We listened, but could make nothing of them; they were strange hollow vocal sounds as though a small carpet was being beaten at irregular intervals. The front door was locked, the front windows barred; what had come in must have done so by the back, over the wall. What was it? Jan peeped through a crack of the door. On the kitchen floor was a flock of pigeons, which had come in to search the chaff, scattered by the previous night's unpacking, for grains of corn. It was now about 5.30. We decided to rest for a while, in view of the failure of our sleep. A rousing thump, thump on the front door drew Jan once more from bed. At the door was a brown-faced peasant, clad in black cotton, with bare sandalled feet. Spotted about the street were goats, their distended udders almost trailing on the ground. "Milk," said the peasant. "Do you want milk? La Merchora sent me." [Illustration] He took our milk-jug, selected a goat the udder of which seemed stretched almost to bursting, and milked the animal directly into the jug. He handed the jug of milk, hot and frothy, with a flourish. "Three fat dogs and a little bitch," said he. In such a hot country the milk keeps better inside the animal than outside. Milk shops in Spain therefore are usually quadruped, and there is never a question of inspector or of adulteration. We made up our minds to get up. We did not know what other venders La Merchora had prepared for us. We had scarcely finished our breakfast of tea, bread and chocolate, when another thump, thump on the door announced the arrival of another ascetically faced peasant, tall, clad in blue. With him was a pretty girl of about fifteen and a dusty, tilted donkey-cart. "Vegetables and fruit," said the girl. The man, having firmly fixed in his head that we knew no Spanish, grunted and made noises, strange though cheery, in his throat. The inside of the cart was piled with all manner of excellent things--tomatoes, green and yellow melons, berenginas, peaches, plums, pears, red peppers, cucumbers, potatoes, huge purple onions, and lemons. We bought many things. The system of weights and measures is supposed to be that of the kilogramme, as it is in France, but the methods by which these weights are translated into practice in Spain is delightful. Evidently there is no inspection of weights and measures. One of the weights used by the tall man was a small axe-head, another was a lump of rock. After the donkey-cart, a man stumpy enough to be almost a dwarf rode up to our steps. He was grim-visaged and paunchy; and said in a sour voice that he would fetch us water if we so wished. The price was one peseta a donkey-load, a donkey-load of water being four full Grecian vases (called cantaros) which were carried in panniers, on the top of which the old man sat and looked grumpily at the world, while the water gurgled and clucked cheerfully beneath him. Then came a witch-faced woman with a disagreeable voice. She carried a huge basket and said she was the shopping woman of Verdolay. Verdolay had no market, nor could one buy there anything other than the few immediate necessities which La Merchora sold. This woman was equivalent to our country carriers. She walked to Murcia every day and returned with laden basket through the heated dust. For this work she demanded a small percentage upon the value of her purchases; probably she also extracted a small commission from the shops in which she dealt. We did not employ her much, as her temperament was not agreeable to us. [Illustration] Last of all came a little old woman--with a face seamed like a kindly walnut--dragging an old grey donkey. On the donkey's back was a pair of time-worn panniers from which bulged a medley of fruit and vegetables. She was the donkey-cart's rival. I had forgotten to buy onions. During our trip we had been bothered by the fact that at moments our uncertain Spanish would be displaced by the language we had last learned, Serbian. Instead of the Spanish sentence, quite against our wills Serbian would speak itself. This phenomenon is quite common, I believe, to those who learn several languages more or less imperfectly. I now asked the old woman in unwished-for Serbian for onions. She struck an attitude of theatrical dismay. "Señora," she exclaimed, "que es eso?"[12] I repeated my desire, and again Serbian came out. The old lady shook her head, and seemed frightened. I got a strong hold over my tongue, and said slowly in Spanish: "Tiene cebollas?"[13] The old lady's face broke into a hundred wrinkles of delight. "Ahe, Señora," she cried, "if you say 'cebollas,' I can understand that you want cebollas. But if you say something different from 'cebollas,' how can I know that you need cebollas?" We walked round the corner to La Merchora's to discover what could, and what could not, be bought at first hand. La Merchora could supply us with olive oil, but not with vinegar. She sold beer, wine, lemonade and soda-water in siphons; dried sardines, very smelly; orange-coloured sausages; bread at a peseta the kilo; Dutch cheese, red pepper, chocolate and eggs. The last-named item on the list she said was scarce and variable in quality. I then asked her if it would be possible to find a maid in the village. The little Señor had said that servants were as plentiful as flies in June, but La Merchora said that they were as scarce as were the eggs. All the girls went off to Murcia, she said. There were several women in the little shop and a discussion began; they reviewed a list of the likely girls. A young woman came in, and said at once that her sister was out of a job. She would send her along. La Merchora was reluctant to tell us the correct price to pay. I suppose she thought that she might be spoiling a beautiful piece of bargaining. Upon pressure, however, she admitted that the local price was about ten pesetas a month, this to include all the washing of linen, both house and personal. We bought some of La Merchora's chocolate. She asked us if we would have Spanish or French flavouring. We naturally chose the Spanish variety. It was very cheap. It had a dusty consistency in the mouth, and tasted of chocolate not at all, but strongly of cinnamon. It was eatable, but not exciting; we consoled ourselves with the reflection that it was nourishing without temptations towards greediness and ate no other chocolate during our stay in Verdolay. Behind her shop La Merchora had a large yard, with outside stove for cooking. In the yard was a flock of turkeys and several pigs. A black and white terrier pup was having a game with the pigs, running about and pulling their tails with his sharp teeth. Our house had inconveniences. There was, as far as we could see, no place to put household refuse, nor any means in the village of collecting it. The windows on the road commanded a view almost of the whole house, and if we left them open at once the curious were at the grilles, staring through at us. As we could not open the back door or windows during the afternoon, this meant that if we wished for privacy we had to live in semi-gloom. Nobody in Spain, however, tries to live other than in public; the people walked in and watched us as we were having our meals; walked round the house examining with interest the pictures which we hung on the walls to dry; and in time we became case-hardened to this semi-public life. We had a siesta during the afternoon to make up for the sleep we had lost. At first we lay down without the mosquito-net, but the flies soon drove us to its protection. In the evening we called on the little Señor. He was a delicate and very likeable man, but his pretty wife showed a strong dislike for us, for which we could find no explanation save that perhaps she had been a pro-German during the war. We sat uncomfortably in a mixed atmosphere of liking and hate for some while, then, making our adieux, and followed by the setter-St. Bernard, we went home. I think that we first discovered the lack of privacy while we were undressing. We had left the front windows open for air, and soon a crowd was watching our preliminaries to sleep. Luckily we discovered it early. Jan closed the shutters, upon which a number of boys sat down on our doorstep and sang serenades to us for several hours. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 12: "What is that?"] [Footnote 13: "Have you onions?"] CHAPTER XV VERDOLAY--SKETCHING IN SPAIN Sketching in Spain has inconveniences. In the summer the heat makes it imperative that the painter should be up with the dawn, for between eleven a.m. and four p.m. the heat and the brilliance of the light impose too great a strain on the eyes and the endurance. Under any circumstances we were almost forced to rise with the sun, for Milk and Vegetables both called before six. Verdolay was an excellent spot at which to begin an acquaintance with Spanish scenery. There was a great variety of subject matter. The village itself was full of vividly coloured houses, and at the back was the wonderful old monastery of Santa Catalina. In the valley less than half a mile away were the huertas, or irrigated gardens, full of rich green. On the sides of the mountains were the olive terraces, which traced the architecture of the hills in a way to delight the painter's heart. Between the olives and the garden was the dusty cart road with its intermittent traffic, and the small dusty strung-out villages, the houses threaded on the road like beads on a necklace, especially that one called El Angel--though anything more arid and less angelic could hardly be imagined. In the hills themselves were fine ravines of strangely coloured ferruginous earths, orange, purple and blue; and the tops of the foothills were often crested with monasteries, like that of La Luz, which gave the scene a most romantic atmosphere. I clung more or less to the village, Jan wandered about the surrounding country or sat in the insufficient shadow of the olive trees near El Angel. [Illustration] The first real inconvenience which we noted was that seldom did the best view possess a suitable piece of shade from which to paint it. Thus the artist's task was doubled; one had to find coincident scene and shadow. The apparently aimless wander of the artist looking for a subject usually excited the curiosity of the passers-by, so that either one was irritated by a series of remarks or became possessed of a small following of the curious. I use a square hole cut in a piece of cardboard in order to test the view and judge whether it would frame as satisfactorily as it promised to do. Whenever I placed this square to my eye one of my followers bobbed up his head and stared back at me through the hole, trying to fathom the mystery of my act. Once I had begun work I would become the centre of an excited conversation. [Illustration] The first strokes of the brush aroused merriment. But often some onlooker astonished me by perceiving the object of my sketch long before the drawing was in any way clear. She (it was generally a she) would then be eager to exhibit her superior knowledge to the others. She would therefore dab her finger on to my painting to point out what she had perceived. This nuisance I fought by covering intrusive fingers with oil paint. By the time the overwise one had cleaned off the paint the drawing would be far advanced enough for the others to see for themselves what I was doing. As soon as I got well into the swing of work questions would begin. "Why do you do this? Is it to make picture postcards from? Why isn't your husband with you? Are your father and mother alive? Do you like Spanish food? Have you got any children? If you have no children, as we have too many, would you like a baby to take away with you? Are you doing this for the cinematograph? Do you like painting? How old are you? Why haven't you put in So-and-so's house?" In this case the house in question was usually behind me. These questions were asked in Murcian Spanish not very easy to understand with my small lack of acquaintance; and I had to take my attention off my painting in order to find suitable Spanish answers. I tried once not to answer, but my audience then demanded: "Are you deaf? Can't you hear? Don't you understand what we say?" All this was said with the most courteous of intentions, direct questioning being permissible in Spain. Chairs were generally brought out, one for me and others for the spectators. Nurse-maids with half-nude babies formed a large proportion of my audiences. The Spanish baby suffers from over nursing; it is carried remorselessly about from six in the morning till twelve at night; it is as a rule fretful and feverish both from the heat and from lack of sleep. Indeed Verdolay always shrilled with wailing children. At about nine o'clock the Spaniard takes a morning snack. This consists of a slice of bread soaked with olive oil and a dried sardine, the smell of which was almost paralysing. With the perfect courtesy which marked all my peasant audiences, this would be offered to me before it was chewed loudly in my ear. When the heat was very great I would abandon my sketch as soon as the sardine stage arrived. I was continually pestered by polite requests that So-and-so should be painted in. This often led to a lecture on composition and on the introduction of figures. If I did, however, paint in anybody the enthusiasm was enormous. People would run down the road shouting in at every cottage door: "She has painted Enrico" (or Miguel or Maria) "into her picture." Once while near the water-fountain I painted in the donkey of a water-carrier. For days afterwards Paco, the donkey-boy, grasped the passers-by and exclaimed with tears of joy in his voice: "Ha pintado mi burro, _mi_ burro."[14] The water-fountain was one of the gathering places of the village. It was the end of a small iron pipe which writhed down from the hills. There were generally three or four donkey-boys with cantaros, and a crowd of women with amphoras waiting their turns to wedge their pots beneath the small trickle which ran from the nozzle of the pipe. Old Grumpy spent the best part of his day there, sitting with sour face in the shadow of a small tree--his chief work was either waiting his turn or leaving his pots to fill themselves. A tall bank of prickly pear cactus made a background to the gay scene. Women came from dawn until midnight, and even from the villages of the valley, for water was very scarce and most of the water in the valley wells unfit for drinking. With their heavy cantaros balanced on a projecting hip, these women walked two miles or more beneath the sweltering sun; and they asked me if I _liked_ painting. Sometimes the ladies of the village stopped and made suitable remarks. One, a summer visitor, told me that she knew a very good painter--"very good indeed," she said with a gentle emphasis which revealed what she thought of my work. "Why, he painted things five times as big as these which you do." As the sketch progressed my audiences were very eager to point out to me anything which I seemed to have forgotten. At this moment somebody always said that Uncle Pepe's or Aunt Conchas' house wasn't in the sketch. These houses were invariably out of sight or behind my back. The Spaniards had futuristic instincts. But once they knew me, my friends would not have me criticized. One passer-by made some disparaging remark about the painting. [Illustration] "We won't have our Doña abused," said the nurse-maids. "She is very clever. She knows lots more than you do; and plays the piano as well." Sometimes I accompanied Jan out into the country, in the direction of La Luz or down into the huertas. One day we were near La Luz and my interest was captured by a lemon and vine garden which was cultivated on terraces down the side of a baking ravine. The farmer's house with a red roof topped the hill. I sat down to paint. Presently the farmer with his wife and family clambered down into the ravine and climbed up the side to where I was sitting. Each time I returned the family came back and in awed silence watched the progress of the sketch. It happened that the water of Verdolay was not very nice for drinking purposes, being full of minerals and salts, while that of La Luz was delicious. A poor woman, who did charing jobs for the farmer above-mentioned, was delighted to be allowed to carry us heavy cantaros full of La Luz water, a mile and a half, for the pay of fivepence a cantaro. One day after the sketch was finished she came in with a look of importance on her face. "My Señora," she said, "is enamoured of the little painting which you have done of her house and farm. She wishes to buy the sketch." I had had some experience of Spanish prices, so I said: "These paintings are made to exhibit in England. It is of no use to tell you the price, because English prices and Spanish prices are different." "But, Señora," said the woman, "my masters are very rich, excessively rich. They will pay any price that you like to ask." But I suspected her protestations. The sketch was one of the best I had done in Spain. I was not very eager to part with it. But owing to her entreaties, against my better judgment, fixing a low price because of Spain, I said at last: "Two hundred pesetas."[15] Her mouth dropped open. For a moment she remained speechless with amazement. Then hastily crossing herself she gasped out: "Madre Maria Sanctissima!" Being a woman I was often asked to paint female portraits, but suspecting the monetary value which the people would put on paintings I refused. Jan overheard a red-faced, wealthy looking farmer discussing with his father on our doorstep the question of how much I was likely to ask for a portrait of the farmer's daughter. _Red Face_: "I think we might offer her ten pesetas."[16] _The Grandfather_: "Well, she is foreign, she might demand fifteen." _Red Face_: "Even if she wishes twenty we might yet consider it; or perhaps twenty-five; but then we would have to think it carefully over." Occasionally we would be asked into houses to examine pictures which the peasants believed to have value. In one house, a room was set aside as a small private chapel; it was full of painted plaster images covered with false jewels and tinsel; on the walls were oleograph reproductions of the Virgin by Spanish Old Masters, but one painting of the Murillo School probably had a real value. In another house we found a picture of Napoleon before which the inhabitants were burning a candle under the impression that the print represented an unidentified Saint. Maybe stranger personalities have been canonized before now. Jan escaped from intimate touch with the people by making for the open country. He thus had fewer adventures than did I. Often, however, peasants spied him from the distance of a mile, and came to see what he was doing. Once, when he had been painting on the cart-road near El Angel and had put a cart into his painting, a small boy followed him all the way home, shouting out to every one that he passed: "That is a painter! He painted a cart and horse; just as it went along; all in a flash!" We used to pin up our sketches on the wall of the house; because, as we intended to travel, we wished the sketches to become as dry as we could make them. This used to attract numbers of people, and usually the grilled window of our front room was occupied by a crowd of faces peering into the house. The fame of our picture exhibition spread over the country-side. People came from some distance to see the pictures; and if the front door was unlocked walked in, saluted us, and proceeded to go the round of the walls. At first we found this disconcerting, but with use much of our needless self-consciousness and desire for unessential privacy began to wear off. As we left our front window open during the night for air, we were many times awakened by the voices of the picture-gazers who gathered at our window as soon as the day broke. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 14: "She has painted my donkey, _my_ donkey."] [Footnote 15: £8.] [Footnote 16: 8_s._ 4_d._] CHAPTER XVI VERDOLAY--CONENI The peasant who came every morning with his daughter and donkey-cart full of vegetables and fruit at the dawn was rather like a genial bird of prey in features. This type is typically Spanish. There was something of the condor about him, though one can scarcely picture a condor with his welcoming smile or his kindly nature. He began with a fixed idea of our practical dumbness and deafness to the Spanish language. He was, we learned later, an exquisite dancer. We have heard tell of a well-known musician who has a dance for making the household beds, and another for digging potatoes, and so on, trying to bring æsthetics into the commonplaces of life. Coneni, for such was the peasant's name, tried to dance for us the fact that tomatoes were a halfpenny a pound or that a melon was sixpence. His pretty, demure daughter resorted to more practical measures, held up fruit as samples and condescended to calculate in pesetas and centimos instead of in "royals" and "little bitches." But the manners both of Coneni and of his daughter were impeccable. I think that they overcharged us slightly, but that was the Spanish tradition. Certainly they did not overcharge us as much as they would have done had they not liked us, and later on they quieted their consciences by making us presents. Coneni was one of the first of our picture admirers, but he had pre-Raphaelite tendencies, and always said that he supposed they would be better when we painted them out properly. He became eager that we should sketch in his market garden, and gave us elaborate topographical directions. So one day, shouldering our sketch-boxes, off we set. [Illustration] We passed through El Angel on to the Murcia road. We then asked a group of men, who were winnowing corn on a flat biblical threshing floor of beaten mud, which was the direction. Unfortunately we had got rather mixed in the name. The peasant had not spoken his name very clearly and we had confused it with conecho.[17] The winnowers said that they could not understand us very clearly, but that it was probably further along, and they wished us to "go with God." Further along the road we, having found in the dictionary what conecho really means, tried the other name. The use of this brought us into a narrow side-path between rows of mulberry trees and deep watercourses. It took a sudden turn to the left, and on the path we saw Coneni, tall and lank, waving welcoming arms at us. The place was embowered in trees: lemon, fig, pear, plum, apple, quince and pomegranate flourished luxuriantly in the irrigated soil. The huertas of the Murcian plain were not separated, one from another, by hedges, and it was difficult to know how large was Coneni's garden. In one corner, beneath the shelter of overhanging fruit-trees, was a hut made of stiff bamboo-like reeds, the roof daubed with mud against the rain. From the front of this hut projected a long awning of reeds, beneath which the Coneni family was awaiting us. Mrs. Coneni was plump, motherly, and had a genial nature covering an inflexible will. She also had perfect manners, was full of courtliness and kindness, and was delighted to see us. She showed her naïve pleasure by touching me whenever she was able to do so without rudeness. Our broken Spanish aroused her sense of wonder. Coneni, for the first time in his life, made up his mind to understand us. He stopped his habitual pre-breakfast pantomime and swaggered about, saying: "But I understand all they say. Yes, I do." He disappeared into the square small hut and came out again carrying an enormous green water-melon called locally a sandia. He tapped it with a knuckle and, from the sound that it made, decided that it was ripe. He then cut off top and bottom with a small hatchet and divided it into huge slices. While we were eating the luscious pink fruit neighbours began to saunter up. They stood in a circle around us. Coneni, with the air of a showman, said: "Now I will show you something. She smokes; it is true. I have seen her myself." He made me a cigarette. The men were delighted and Mrs. Coneni was amazed. Coneni stood behind me with a lean hand on his hip, as if to say: "Alone I did it." Beneath the reed shelter some of the children were lying asleep, and the youngest of all, a baby, was sitting by itself in a corner, stark naked, playing with a large lemon. The exquisite colour contrast between the transparency of skin of the sunburnt child and the hard yellow brilliance of the lemon filled me with a wild desire to paint it. Indeed, one does not come to appreciate the full beauty of the nude until one has seen it in a country where it is natural. In Spain the children, usually half nude, sprawled about in the heat in the most graceful of relaxed poses, sometimes lying half asleep across their mothers' laps, and a continual impulse was driving me to make studies of them. But the task is almost impossible. The fact of being sketched is too unusual. The people, naturally unselfconscious, at once become stiff and formal. Within Coneni's hut was no furniture other than a four-post bed which almost filled the floor space. Here slept Coneni and his wife, and the space beneath the bed was used as a storehouse for melons. The children, three girls and four boys, all slept on the ground in the open beneath the shelter. But Mrs. Coneni explained to me with some care that the poverty was only apparent; that this was but their summer residence. For the winter they had a fine house in Alverca. We did not have any very keen impulse to paint--it had become for that afternoon rather too much of a ceremony, like the old State painter _performing_ before the Court--but to save our faces we had to do something, so Jan painted a portrait of a calf, while I selected a lemon tree. Before I had half finished, the interior of the tree was swarming with Coneni's children, hoping that they would be included. By my side sat Coneni's little girl nursing a bantam, like a doll, assuring it that mother wouldn't love it if it were not more quiet. "And the Señor plays the guitar," exclaimed Coneni. "He is affectionate to music." We discussed Spanish music and dancing. Coneni, bursting with hospitality, said: "Come again next Sunday. I will invite the young men and the girls and we will have a party. There are guitar and lute players at Alverca. They will all come." Antonio's brother-in-law, Thomas, had spoken of the gay times when there is a party in the huertas; we accepted eagerly. We went home laden with presents of fruit which Coneni had pressed upon us. Especially was our greed delighted with a large basket of figs. We had been asking the Conenis to bring us some figs for some days, but they had said: "We can't bring you figs. Nobody sells figs here. We give them to the pigs." So that evening we rivalled the pigs FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 17: Rabbit.] CHAPTER XVII VERDOLAY--THE INHABITANTS The little village of Verdolay was not a characteristic Spanish village, it was a watering-place. One came into it along the dusty road between banks on which grew the spiky aloe shrubs, behind which spread the spaced olive groves with trees drawn up into demure lines, amongst the grey foliage of which could be seen the red painted corrugated roofs of the French Silk Company. The village scrambled up a terraced hill. The lower edge was a line of orange-vermilion one-storied houses faced with a small promenade. Then the houses scattered. To the right as one faced the hill were the baths, a collection of bulky, ramshackle buildings which hid deep, cool courtyards, and from which came the plash of water and the sound of young voices. The hill-side was covered with terraced gardens in which were set houses painted yellow, green, blue or pink. The apex of the hill was decorated by an iron windwheel for pumping. A ridge joined the crest of the hill to the mountains, and here perched the ancient monastery of Santa Catalina; while a mile away to the right, showing white amongst a green bed of palms and firs, was the country seat of the Count of El Valle, and to the left amongst groves of oranges was the villa of an ex-Prime Minister. One had almost a specimen of Spain in little in this one village. The vermilion houses, called the Malecon, sheltered a transitory population; visitors to the baths, who like ourselves arrived in carts with furniture, and after a few months disappeared back to town duties. These were usually of the superior artisan or small shopkeeping class. The second row of houses contained persons such as Don Ferdinand, the little Señor or the people who kept the baths. These represented the larger tradesmen and in general lived all the year in Verdolay, travelling to Murcia by tartana or by tram via Palmar. The two roads which swept up each side of the hill were edged with small cottages where the real peasantry lived, and the houses which stood amongst gardens on the hill terraces, each owning its proper entrance, were the residences of the merchantry. The Count of El Valle represented the county aristocracy and the ex-Prime Minister the Court. [Illustration] In spite of a somewhat evil local reputation, the peasantry could be counted as a quiet, hard-working, rather unintelligent, good-natured community which leaned vaguely, on the male side, to liberalism and atheism, but lacking the courage or determination to make either effective. It cursed the Court and told dirty stories about the priesthood, but all exasperation evaporated in words. This peasantry is the foundation on which the whole of this plutocratical hill of Verdolay rests; and it labours as severely as any other peasantry, perhaps even working harder because of the lack of water, which adds a need to be satisfied before work is over. The average traveller has the idea that the Spaniard is lazy. We are not sure that this is a correct estimate of him. We English have made a god of "Work." But indeed unnecessary work is mere foolishness. The great blessing to be sought for is leisure. Human advance comes from the reflections of leisure rather than from the activities of work. The Spaniard recognizes leisure as the benefit which it is. He has no false ideas about work. Adam bit the apple, and we pay his debts, but why load ourselves with compound interest at many hundreds per cent.? That is the Spaniard's point of view. He works when he must work. He rises with the dawn or before it, say four a.m., he works till eleven o'clock, then in the afternoon resumes toil from 3.30 till 6.30. The late-rising traveller who mouches about in his English custom during the hottest hours of the day sees the Spanish labourer at his siesta, snoozing by the roadside, or thrumming his guitar to a herd of sleepy goats. He draws a natural, though incorrect, conclusion. The Spaniard may be dilatory. He puts off doing to-day what he can do to-morrow, but it is from an exaggerated respect for the benefits of leisure. His handicap is that he has no proper means of filling that leisure, his apparent laziness comes from lack of education. About eighty per cent. cannot read, schooling is not enforced, and children begin work at ten years of age or thereabouts. But do not lay up the Spaniard's desire for inactivity as a crime; it is a virtue ill employed. Our particular specimen of the Spanish peasant was my female servant, named Encarnacion. She was thirteen years old, could neither read nor write, and worked like a small mule for the not extravagant wage of eleven shillings and sixpence a month. She only worked half the day, it is true, but we did not give her food. We indeed overpaid her, for the regular wage of her kind was about eight shillings and fourpence a month. She had a small, stumpy child's body, sprouting into a long neck, at the top of which was a rounded head. Her forehead was intellectual, her features flattened, and her hair, done up tight into a small ball, was usually decorated with a flower or a green leaf. At first, like all Spanish peasants, she made up her mind that she could not understand what I said, but gradually learned that she had to do so, and in general succeeded pretty well. But it was to her a tremendous intellectual effort. She would wrinkle her noble-looking brow with the strain, and was never satisfied until she had translated my orders into her own patois for clarity. But she would not allow her fundamental ideas of what was proper to be influenced by my foreign notions. Sometimes she would interrupt me. "No, Señora," she would say, "I do not like it done thus. That is not the custom. It must be done so." If one insisted upon one's own way, the work was ill done. So that, as a rule, to save trouble, one allowed her to do as she wished. Encarnacion worked all the morning, singing an interminable Spanish song, which struck our ears queerly and pleasantly at the beginning, but of which in the end we grew very tired. By eleven o'clock she would have done all the housework, the shopping and the cooking, and would leave the stone floors soaked in water, the evaporation of which did a little to counteract the intense heat. She had a habit which we did not like of scattering our household refuse all over the small square yard. It looked dirty and untidy, but we found out that she knew better than we did. The vagrant cats soon cleared up any remains of meat, while the hot sun dried up all the other refuse, which could then be thrown away conveniently. Encarnacion was sad that she could neither read nor write, and was proudly jealous of her younger sister, who, working in the milk factory, was being taught to spell. She of course acquired a proprietary right in us. She upheld the honour of the house, and gave a lesson in manners to a gipsy girl from the cave dwellings who had once thrown a stone at me. She also criticized our work. To the almost daily parties of strangers who walked into our house whenever the door was left unlocked, she acted as guide to our pictures drying on the walls, and she would explain to whom each house in the sketches belonged. But she never said "Thank you." There are considerable differences between Spanish customs and those of ordinary Europe, and these are apt to disconcert the traveller. Here are a few Spanish ones that we noted _en passant_. You may walk into any house or garden if moved to do so by curiosity if you, previous to entering, utter the magic formula: "Se pueda entrar?"[18] You may stare as much as you like at anything or anybody, for staring is in reality a compliment. Self-consciousness is a silly vanity. If you feel friendly towards an acquaintance you may call on him at nine in the morning and you may repeat your call three or four times during the same day. (What the man does to get rid of you we have not yet discovered. We have only been the victims, not the visitors.) You must refuse everything that is suddenly offered to you, except cigarettes or sweets offered in the fingers. Do not accept other things until the third offer. But to refuse sweets or cigarettes is almost insulting. You must offer to give any object to anybody who admires it (especially objects of jewellery or babies). You may ask any questions you like, even upon the most intimate of subjects; and you must expect to be asked similar questions. If invited to a meal, you may refuse no dish that is served to you, even though indigestion is clutching at your vitals, or repletion stopping your throat. For a specimen of the small tradesman class of the malecon we had La Merchora. She kept the village shop, the last house on the terrace, and was in some way a relative of Antonio. Her home was planned like ours was, and one of the rooms beside the entrada had been filled with a counter, some shelves, and a large tin of paraffin oil; ginger-coloured sausages were festooned from the roof and the shop was complete. She was unmarried, and therefore, from a theoretical point of view, negligible; but it did not disturb her. Indeed, little did disturb her. She had the figure which grows out of a combination of good living, no thinking and reasonable working. In any village you will find an example of her kind. She is good-natured but respected. Liberties are not taken with her, and in Cornwall she is called Aunt So-and-so. La Merchora was not even black-visaged, there was in fact nothing that one can count for Spanish about her. She had two epithets--atrocidad and barbaridad--but she said them with so jovial an aspect that atrocity or barbarity faded into the gentlest of denunciations. When our first servant, Encarnacion's elder sister, deserted us without warning for a better job, La Merchora said it was an atrocidad; when the water-carrier overcharged us she said it was barbaridad. When the Count El Valle's watchman chased us off some square miles of unfenced unproductive mountain she said it was atrocidad; when the weather was hot she said it was barbaridad. Every evening after supper there was a gathering outside La Merchora's shop. La Merchora, Uncle Pepe, her father, the niece, the gaunt woman from next door, her baby, half naked but with a flower in its hair, women coming through the night to fetch water (an interminable task), carters returning from work and others, would gather on chairs, benches, or on the stone wall of the malecon; and beneath the faint glow of the electric light would gently talk of things, while the niece was catching the foolish cicadas or crickets (attracted by the light) with which to amuse the baby and with which to awaken in the child some primary instinct of cruelty to animals. Uncle Pepe was La Merchora's father. He was a withered brown peasant baked by the sun to the colour of a pot. Wrinkles of careful economy and of good humour were as indelibly roasted into him as the pattern on a Roman dish. In recognition of La Merchora's accumulated kindnesses I painted his portrait on a small panel for her. She pondered some while on the problem of a suitable recompense, and at last gave us an antique Sevillian basin decorated with a primitive painting of a yellow and green cat. It was an old and valuable piece of earthenware used for washing the linen, and had probably been employed to wash Uncle Pepe's shifts and himself as well when he was a baby. These basins, two feet in diameter, are used as decorative and practical adjuncts to the huge red earthenware pots in which the villagers of the Murcian valley store the household water. We protested against the generosity of this gift, but in vain. One day, while we were out, she had it carried to our house, and would on no account receive it back. Pepe and La Merchora illustrate the rapid evolution of the modern Spanish gentleman. Antonio is the third stage in the development. The little Señor is the fourth. Pepe is an unlettered peasant, knowing nothing but the labour of the soil but possessing the traditional culture of Spain. By the time one has reached the little Señor and the people of the Baths, one has arrived at letters but one has lost much of the culture. Pepe's wisdom is the common sense of centuries stored up in proverbs; he has one to fit every occasion. The little Señor's learning is supplied by the newspapers. The grandparents of all these people, even of the rich merchants who lived on the apex or Verdolay hill, were peasantry--Pepes, as a rule. Then one perceives that with the accumulation of wealth, the culture gradually diminishes in a like proportion. The third generation has lost almost all culture and has nothing but a kind heart and a love of making money. The Spanish bourgeoisie is inverting the processes which are going forward in England to-day. It is trying to forget its old customs--too late we are trying to revive ours. It has learned to despise its exquisite folk music, already becoming forgotten--we are trying to fudge out a few miserable tunes from the memories of senile fiddlers. These people have won to that leisure so sweet to the heart of man; but they don't know what to do with it. They sleep and so grow fat. Having become fat they are good-natured and laugh. The old saw should be inverted. Indeed, many an old saw is in reality the truth turned inside out. They were a good-natured kindly people, these bulky tradesmen, but they were deadly dull. The daughters of Verdolay banged untuned pianos to the strains of dances forgotten by Europe, polkas, mazurkas and pas de quatre; but their own dances--the malagueñas and baturras--were unknown to them. They were pressing in their invitations, and were angry with us because we preferred La Merchora's doorstep with its changing audience of passers-by. Of the Count and the ex-Prime Minister we know but little; they lie, anyway, beyond the scope of this book. The Count possessed in this district a country house set in a deep, wooded valley, in which was a medicinal spring, and a few square miles of unfenced sterile mountain land from which his watchman, armed with a gun, was instructed to drive away unauthorized pedestrians. He was not popular and was always at daggers drawn with the village; though from other sources we have learned that he is personally a charming and a generous man. At any rate he has left a fine estate to remain practically unproductive (the two farms and the house itself are in ruins). This practice seems to be normal in Spain, and we have heard of many a case where the aristocracy have deliberately hindered national development. There are rumours, however, that this estate is being bought for the government and will be afforested and developed. The ex-Prime Minister's villa was the most amazing example of bad taste in architecture that we have ever seen. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 18: "May one enter?"] CHAPTER XVIII VERDOLAY--THE DANCE AT CONENI'S We had been looking forward to the dance which Coneni had promised us. Spanish music had become with us a hobby, and the dancing which goes with it had excited our imagination. Antonio's sister had led us to believe that wonderful dancing was to be found in the Murcian huertas, and the vague hints of gay times _al campo_ stirred us up to eager anticipation. On Sunday afternoon at about four o'clock we set off, Jan carrying the big white guitar in its case. The cicadas were making their accustomed strident din in the mulberry trees, men on the roadside shouted to us: "Vaya con dios, y con la guitarra." The Conenis were furbished up for the occasion. A few girls in bright cottons and a few young men in check suits, English caps and buttoned brilliant boots were awaiting us. Others came in one by one. Coneni chopped up a huge pink-fleshed melon for us, and while we were yet revelling in its cool lusciousness the faint sound of music was heard through the saw-note of the cicadas. The sound came nearer. Presently through the trees a band of youths and girls headed by a girl playing a guitar, and a boy of fourteen playing a Spanish lute (or laud) were visible. They marched into the garden thrumming bravely a popular two-step march. It is the custom of the musicians thus to arrive in full cry, as it were. Amongst the group was the little Señor's nurse-maid bravely carrying through the heat the inevitable baby. Later on the baby caused a diversion by getting itself stung by a bee. The arrival of the music drove Coneni to a pitch of excitement. He brought out a drinking flask of wine. The flask had a long slender spout, and the guests drank by pouring the wine straight into their mouths, tilting their heads backwards. I was afraid of this method, and to my disgrace had to be given a glass. Tables and chairs, made of rough planking, were brought from neighbouring huertas. "Now," cried Coneni, "for some dancing." The guitar and laud players sat down. They played a polka, a common polka. And the girls and English-capped youths danced a solemn polka. Then followed a schottische, then another polka, then a murdered two-step. Disappointment rushed upon us. But where then was the Spanish dancing? Had this infernal European mechanical civilization quite driven all feeling from the land? Where were the jotas, the malagueñas, the baturras? "But," said Jan at last to Coneni, "can you not dance a Spanish dance?" "Why, of course," cried Coneni. "Here, let us dance a malagueña. It is my favourite dance. Come, who will dance with me?" But there was nobody amongst the girls who could dance it. Mrs. Coneni said that she was too old and too fat. Nor was there amongst the laud players one who could play a malagueña, nor could the guitar player beat the _tempo_. So in the end it was Jan who played the malagueña as best he could, while Coneni, using his lank limbs with the flexibility of a youth, danced in marvellous fashion. But he soon tired of dancing solos. We went home, headed by the band, seconded by Coneni's son carrying for us a large green melon, followed by Coneni's daughter loaded with a basket of figs. We parted from the band at El Angel, we going up to Verdolay, they going across to Alverca, but with the good-byes the guitar playing girl said: "Aha, but since you are so 'affectionate' to music we will come and play to you this evening at your house." When Encarnacion heard this, she said: "Oh, beautiful! And I will ask all my friends and we will dance. And I will bring all Mother's chairs." [Illustration] We arranged all Encarnacion's mother's chairs in a neat circle in our entrada and waited. Nine o'clock went by--no music--ten passed and 10.30. At eleven o'clock we heard the band far away on the Alverca road. It came musically through the night. We had contrived an especial illumination of candles, but our guests repudiated houses. They were too hot. So in spite of any possible traffic the chairs were dragged out into the middle of the road, and we had our concert there. It was not a very inspiring concert. At the opening of it the young laud player handed his instrument to Jan, demanding that it should be tuned. We discovered later that quite a number of the minor village executants cannot tune their own instruments. Jan, however, at this time knew nothing about lauds. So the boy had to do the best he could with it. He managed to worry the instrument more or less into tune with itself, but the task of getting his laud accorded with his sister's guitar was beyond his power. However, a concert could not be disturbed for so trifling a matter; and to the perfect satisfaction of the players, and, as far as we could see, of the audience, the two instruments played until about three o'clock in the morning, each one a semi-tone different in pitch from the other. We had provided bottles of wine for the occasion at the cost of sixpence a bottle. This wine was the ordinary drinking wine of the district. It speaks well of the abstemiousness of the Spaniard that though we had at least thirty guests about half a bottle of wine only was drunk. The major part of the audience contented itself with cool water from the algazarra. Some time later on in the evening the players confided to us that they were the pupils of a maestro who lived in Alverca, and that they had only been studying for two months. The fact that there was a teacher in Alverca fired me. I had wanted to learn the laud for some while, but the opportunity had not offered itself. I inquired his terms. The band said that they were twopence-halfpenny a lesson. So I at once told it to send the maestro along. At 3.30--after we had been wondering for some time how much longer our eyes would remain open--the band took its leave, saying that it would come again one evening. It then marched, playing loudly, back to Alverca. The maestro sent word that he would come on Tuesday evening. He was of that type of southern European that the American terms "Dago." He was typically Dago. He was a plumber by trade, and in the evening augmented his income by odd twopence-halfpennies picked up from the would-be "affectionates" of the guitar or laud. He loved wine with a sincere though timid reverence. When she heard that he was coming to give me a lesson, Encarnacion said: "Oh, beautiful! And we will all come and listen to your lesson, and afterwards we will dance." But even Spain could not make me unselfconscious enough to support that test. With grim harshness we locked the door on our lessons. The maestro, like Blas, considered two airs his daily portion. At the end of the first air he would empty his tumbler of wine, and would gently repudiate the idea that it should be refilled. The third glass he accepted with quite vehement protestations. His course homeward was, I fear, usually more discursive than that of his coming. Like all Spanish musicians he sang upon the slightest excuse. He corrected my melody by singing: "Lo, La, Lo, La, Lo, La," as I played. Having played the violin, the mandolin and the piano, I did not find the laud very difficult. It has a queer tuning in fourths and is played with the plectrum. But when La Merchora discovered that I had learned a piece in two days she was quite eloquent in her astonishment. CHAPTER XIX MURCIA--THE LAUD During our month in Verdolay we had not quite cut off communication with Murcia. Luis and his friend Flores had come out to lunch with us, bringing with them a slab of odoriferous dried fish which _they said_ was excellent in salads. On this occasion many families in Verdolay had offered to cook our dinner for us, Encarnacion's mother, the shopping woman, the woman who brought the water and La Merchora were the principal competitors; and the dinner was finally cooked out in the open in La Merchora's back-yard in a huge frying-pan. We had also travelled the five dusty miles into Murcia, walking, to the grave astonishment of Verdolay plutocracy. On the first occasion Antonio told us with a face of joy that his wife _was out of danger_. "Out of danger," cried we; "but she was only suffering from a small digestive attack!" "Oh, no," replied Antonio; "didn't I tell you that she had smallpox? Why, a man died of it three doors down the street." Before we had quitted Verdolay, Rosa (Antonio's wife) was well enough to be moved, and Antonio had brought her into the country to the Count's country house. She was spotted like a pard with large brown marks which Antonio assured us would disappear with time, leaving no pits. [Illustration] On another visit Jan had gone into the shop of Emilio Peralta to buy some guitar strings. The shop of Emilio was not like that of Ramirez in Paris. It was set in a canyon of a street so deep that the midday sun for one short hour or so shines on the cobbles, so narrow that the carts which pass through it are permitted to go in one sole direction marked at the entrance by a pointing arrow. Ramirez had a workshop only, but Emilio had as well onhis working bench three brave showcases painted apple green, one of which was filled with instruments--guitars, lauds and bandurrias--with a drawer for strings, capo-d'astros and other instrumental appurtenances. Of the two other showcases, one housed the guitar-maker's tools, the third having degenerated to a pantry, and while one was buying strings from Emilio, his wife would be surreptitiously taking dishes of boiled garbanzos or of dried sardines out of the garishly painted frand. The place was indeed workshop, pantry and reception room. A counter cut the place in two. To the left as you entered Emilio made his instruments. To the right was a rough semicircle of chairs, and here the _aficionados_[19] of the guitar came in the evening, to play on Emilio's latest creation. To our dismay, however, we found that the intensely interesting music of Spain, the Flamenco, as it is called, was somewhat despised in Emilio's shop. In Spain, music is divided to-day into the major divisions, Classical and Flamenco. Classical includes anything from Beethoven to Darewski, from Sonata or Symphony to Fox-trot or Polka. The guitar-maker to-day says proudly: "I do not make instruments for 'Flamenco,' mine are made for 'Classical'": and he but echoes the bad taste of the educated Spaniard. The Flamenco, the native music, having perhaps a stronger character than any other Folk music in Europe, is considered very vulgar; it is called "Tavern Music," as "still lives" in painting are called "Tavern pictures." Nevertheless, we were not to be seduced from our desire to study the Flamenco, and for the purpose of continuing that study I had been looking out for a laud which is peculiarly adapted to the music, much of which was composed originally upon this instrument. Hitherto I had been unable to find an instrument which I had liked, for the ordinary lute is queer in shape and rather harsh in quality. But the plumber-maestro in Alverca had lent me an instrument--a laud of simpler form and sweeter tone, called a sonora--which pleased me. Jan going into Emilio's shop had found there a newly completed sonora, very like that of the little maestro's, but better in quality. He engaged Emilio to keep it till we returned, and Emilio said he would bring the Professor down to play it for us to show off its qualities. On the evening of the day on which we came back to Murcia we went to Emilio's shop. The chairs were all set in their prim semicircle and Emilio, round-shouldered and heavy-faced, sat us down while he expatiated on the excellence of the workmanship and the beauty of the tone of his instrument. He demanded sixty pesetas for the instrument, but said that we might possibly come to some friendly arrangement over the price, as he was trying to popularize this form of laud. The little Professor came in. He was a strange man. He was extremely emaciated, with one eye destroyed and almost blind in the other, dressed in _outré_ style as though he were acting as jockey in an impromptu charade. His flexible hands seemed almost translucent in their delicacy. He at once addressed us with such rapidity of speech that we were unable to understand what he said (though our understanding of Spanish had made great progress), and he was extremely irritable with us for seeming so stupid. This frail, delicate, peering thing was a queer contrast to the burly, almost clumsy form of Emilio. The little Professor picked up the sonora, and passed it backwards and forwards slowly beneath his short-sighted eye. He sat down and played. His nimble fingers ran up and down the strings. We had almost decided to begin the delicate matter of bargaining when a fat form, white-waist-coated, straw hat perched jauntily over an Egyptian face, showed itself in the doorway. It was Blas. And Blas was drunk. He bowed in an heroic manner to me, shook hands in simulated affection with Jan; and, his soul obviously consumed with jealousy, greeted the little Professor, who returned his salutation with coldness. "Go on," ordered Blas to the little Professor, "play." The little man put the sonora again on his thigh. One could almost hear his teeth grit. Then he began to show off. He possessed a very effective trick of playing intricate runs by the mere beat of the fingers of his left hand, that is without plucking the strings with his right. This he now exhibited to its full. He was on his mettle, Greek and Trojan were face to face. Blas, seated on his chair, his fat hands on his knees, smiled a drunken and somewhat patronizing approval of his rival's exhibition. [Illustration] The little Professor finished his exhibition, which the gipsy did not attempt to rival, for he played only the guitar. For a moment there was an embarrassing silence. The gentle art of bargaining was about to displace the art of music. But we had reckoned without the half-drunken Blas. Suddenly rising to his feet he faced Jan, and rubbing his finger and thumb together he exclaimed: "Now comes the main point. The brass. Now is the question of cashing up for it." Doubtless this was a frank statement of fact. But three-quarters of life continues bearable enough because one does not put things frankly. Emilio changed colour and put on a sullen face, Emilio's wife looked alarmed, Jan was embarrassed, the little Professor seemed to wither into a crouching shape of half his normal smallness. But Blas went on in a breezy voice to Jan: "Come on, come on. What's the matter? You suggest a price to him and he will tell you if it fits." Emilio's delicacy was quite revolted by this crude exhibition of gipsy bad taste. He seized the laud from the little Professor, thrust it on one side and said loudly that he did not want to sell it at all. Unfortunately, Jan was afraid of offending Emilio's susceptibility. Not knowing how to behave in the unfortunate circumstances, he blurted out: "Look here, Emilio, you said sixty pesetas. Will you not come down a little, and then we could settle the matter?" Emilio was, however, extremely bad-tempered by the turn things had taken. The Spanish sense of decency was outraged. At last, with an evil look at Blas, he muttered: "Well, fifty-five pesetas. Not a penny less and no more bargaining." Jan, to cut the scene short, agreed. The instrument was wrapped up in a paper bag. While Jan was paying over the money, Blas said: "And you will give five pesetas to this gentleman, who is a poor man: and five pesetas to me also." He seized five pesetas of the money from the counter and pressed them on the little Professor. The latter, with girlish giggles, refused; but Blas, with the insistence of a drunkard, pressed his desire until, to quieten him, the little Professor slipped the money into his waistcoat pocket. Blas then demanded his own commission, saying that as he had been Jan's Professor, and as Jan had once mentioned the subject of the laud to him, he was fully entitled to his claim. But Jan, outwardly calm, inwardly annoyed with Blas, would not give him a halfpenny. At last Blas was begging: "Well, at least give me a peseta to get a drink with." "You have had enough drink already," said Jan. He picked up the laud, and with farewells to Emilio, his wife and the little Professor we walked out of the shop, pushing our way through the crowd which had gathered at the shop door. On the following day we returned to Emilio's shop to apologize for the contretemps. We found both Emilio and his wife very disturbed by what had happened. They said that their regrets were eternal, and that it would have been better had we deferred the business matter until a better occasion. "It was a disgraceful affair," said Emilio, "disgraceful; and to cap it all, after you had gone, Blas was most outrageous. We had actually to pay him two pesetas to go away." "We were afraid for our lives," said Mrs. Emilio. "He is a bad man, and one never knows what rogues he might have brought upon us." Though Jan did not believe much in the active danger of Blas, yet the terror of Emilio and of his wife was quite evident. So in the end he disbursed the five pesetas given to the little Professor as well as the two given to Blas. So that our laud actually cost us sixty-two pesetas, instead of the sixty for which we might have bought it without any bargaining. With the little Professor we had made an engagement for the afternoon. He was to give me a lesson on which I could study while we were away at Jijona. He came, feeling his way up our staircase. He shook hands with us and said that the affair of last night had greatly oppressed his spirit. "I felt it much in my heart," he said. We explained to him that we were going away for a month, but that we would return to Murcia later, and that when we returned I would take lessons from him. "My price," he exclaimed (all his speech was exclamation), "is one duro a month. I am not one of those villains who charge one price to one person and a different price to another. No, my price is fixed and unalterable. One duro, five pesetas, a month." Now, although this little man was probably as good a teacher as could be found in the town of Murcia, his price averaged about _twopence a lesson_. We discovered later that the laud suffers not only from a ban of "bad taste," but also from a moral one. To-day its use in Spain is almost limited to the playing of dance music in houses of bad fame. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 19: Lovers.] CHAPTER XX ALICANTE Our second experience in Spanish village life was to be at Jijona, a small town in the country near Alicante. Our friend had what he called a studio there, and this was at our service. Luis said that there was furniture in the studio but no cooking utensils or bed. After our packing-case bed in Verdolay, we determined to take with us nothing but a mattress and either to sleep on the floor or to buy planks locally. So we had packed our trunk with painting materials, crockery and clothes. We had also made up a large roll of bedclothes and mattress such as emigrants travel with. Having risen with the dawn, our preparations were complete by the time at which the donkeyman who peddled drinking-water about the streets of Murcia called for us with his long cart. He was not quite satisfied with our roll, and with expert hands repacked it in a professional manner. But his long water-cart would only take our trunk and the rolled mattress, so, burdened with rucksacks, camera, guitar, thermos flasks and a rush basket containing crockery which would not pack into the trunk, and the laud, we walked the quarter of a mile to the station. Thus burdened, we expected more staring and laughter than before from the Murcianos, but, to our amazement, the people looked upon us with kindly eyes and wished us God-speed. Thus Spain reverses the manner of England. [Illustration] Jan took his place in the ticket queue while I, assisted by a friendly porter, looked for seats in a third-class carriage. The carriages were full enough despite the fact that we were in good time. Large numbers of children seemed to be travelling, and many of the passengers were stretched out on the wooden seats, taking a snooze before the train should start. The divisions between the compartments were only breast high, and already animated conversations had begun between the passengers who, from different compartments, shouted remarks to each other. In our compartment were a sandalled peasant stretched at full length, a bearded man with a huge brass plate on his breast and a shot-gun, evidently a gamekeeper, and a smart young man with patent leather boots and a straw hat. The last was reading a hook. On the platform we noted an important priest striding about, his black soutane covered with a silk dust-coat, and an old woman with a posy of bright flowers about twice as big as her head. The train was the centre of an excited crowd, the carriage full almost to bursting-point. As the time for departure came near most of those we had imagined to be our fellow passengers got slowly down on to the platform; all the children disappeared. They had merely been taking advantage of the train's presence in the station to take a rest. The three strokes on the bell, which denote the starting of the train, had sounded when our carriage door was flung open and a panting bundle of humanity was thrust upwards and amongst us. As the train moved out, it resolved itself into a small woman, very loquacious, carrying in her arms three babies. Talking very excitedly, she laid her brood out on a wooden seat. The woman was-black-haired and her jet eyes sparkled with excitement. "They are bandits," she exclaimed. "Yes, bandits they are, rushing about like that. I was with my children in Uncle Pepe's donkey-cart. Then they come along. Of course the bullocks in the stone waggon in front wouldn't move quick enough, and so they come tearing across the road, flip us under the axle, and over we all go into the dust. Uncle Pepe strained his wrist and the shaft is broken. And that's the way they treat us just after my poor husband has died of smallpox. It's lucky that nobody was killed and that I didn't lose the train. Murderers, that's what they are." We noted that she and her babies were covered with dust, and that she was dressed all in black even to her alpagatas. While she had been talking so volubly she had been unpacking a basket which, with the bundles, had been thrust in after her. She got out a bottle of water and a piece of rag. With a moistened rag she tried to wash the babies, but made rather a smeary mess of it. The occupants of the other compartments were leaning over sympathizing with her mishap. But, as she had omitted the cause of the mishap, somebody questioned her. "Why, motors, of course," she snapped. "It's murderous the way they go rushing about. Not caring for any one, and not waiting to see what damage they have done." As most of the carriage occupants seemed to be peasantry, they agreed with her. Somebody went on: "And are those all you have?" The young woman drew herself up with pride. "No," she answered, "I've got four, and all men too." The train was rolling with a determined manner down the Murcian valley. On one side the bills drew closer, on the other they were receding. We noted that all the carriage doors were left swinging wide open to admit as much air as possible. Presently there was a noise outside and the ticket-collector scrambled into the carriage. He examined all the tickets in our coach, and swung himself again out on to the footboard, making his way slowly forward. Some of the passengers, too, who had friends in other carriages made visits _en route_, scrambling along the moving train. And the carriage doors had notices on them saying: "It is dangerous to put the head out of the window." After an hour or more of sedate travel, we came to Orihuela, which boasts a huge monastery on the hill and a broad zigzag road which looked like an engineering feat. The station was like a flower shop. Vendors were running up and down the train thrusting elaborate bouquets into the windows. Some women dressed in royal blue satin came into our carriage, they stuffed unfortunate live poultry and rabbits, with feet tied up, under the seat and covered the wooden bench of the compartment with magnificent flowers. During the rest of the journey, the monotonous flip, click of their fans as they were opened and shut punctuated the conversation. We passed through the famous date palm groves of Elche and at last came in sight of the sea at Alicante, which was our terminus. The journey of about forty-five miles had taken us nearly four hours, and we were almost an hour and a half late. Time-tables are more or less ornamental in Spain. Outside the station at Alicante there was a horde of omnibuses surrounded by a fringe of touts. They were conducting their chaffering for passengers with a reasonable quietness, until they espied us. But perceiving that we were English and, therefore, fair prey, pandemonium broke out. Gradually the omnibuses filled and the babel, for babel it was, consisting of Spanish, Valenciano, bad French and worse English, died down. Two omnibus touts, however, persisted, and at last, in order to prevent battle between them, we chose our man for his looks. He promised to take us to the fonda from which started the motor service to Jijona. We had been warned by our English friend that it was often difficult to get seats on the motor, because the conveyance started from Jijona and many of the passengers booked return tickets. The omnibus tout added to this that there was a fiesta at Jijona, and that many people were going there. However, he said: "If there are no seats in the motor, we will surely get them on the lorry, which will do just as well and is cheaper." The omnibus was full with an unsmiling family, but we were crushed in. We were dragged along beneath a magnificent avenue of date palm trees which bordered the deep blue expanse of the Mediterranean, and then into streets of modern and of bad architecture. The family got out and paid the driver. Jan strained his eyes to see how much was the price, for we had foolishly made no bargain with the driver. As far as he could see most was paid in coppers. We then passed up into narrow and steep streets and halted before a wide door. The tout got down, but returned almost immediately, saying that the motor was full for two days. "The motor-lorry is better," he said. With some difficulty the bus was turned round in the narrow street and we went downhill again, coming at length to the entrance of another fonda. We passed through its broad entrance and at a small office window interviewed an old man who said that there was room in the lorry but that he did not know when it was going. So we deposited our luggage in the wide entrance, amongst packing-cases, sacks of flour, mattresses and japanned boxes. We then asked the price of the bus from the tout. "Seven pesetas," he said. The whole drive had not taken twenty minutes, and Jan was sure that the other family of four had not paid more than two pesetas for the lot. After some argument and much blasphemy from the driver, we paid five pesetas, and the bus drove off vomiting curses at us from both driver and tout. (On the return journey from Jijona we happened on the same bus, but we made our bargain beforehand. The same trip then cost us two pesetas, and was accomplished with smiles instead of curses, and both driver and tout clapped us on the shoulder and wished us: "Vaya con dios.") This fonda was a typical peasant inn. The entrance door which pierced through a block of buildings was big enough to admit a full-sized traction engine, had there been such a thing in Alicante. This wide passage led into a big courtyard open to the skies. On each side of the courtyard a staircase led to balconies from which opened the doors of the bedrooms, below were the dark stables, and the courtyard itself was filled with the large two-wheeled tilted carts which, dragged by from two to eight draught animals, keep up communications in Spain wherever the railway does not penetrate. To the right of the entrance was the fonda restaurant, and also a huge kitchen with several cooking fires at which the traveller, if he wished, could cook his own meals, and a long dining-table at which he could eat them. We went into the restaurant, for we were hungry. To our table came an old couple. They were at once friendly and told us that they had come from Africa. They were Spanish but had lived more than thirty years in North Africa, and though the old man could neither read nor write he could speak several African dialects quite well. They were making a pleasure tour of the south of Spain for a short holiday. They told us that the fonda was quite clean, and that we could take a room in it without fear. They added that though Murcia was but "a dirty village" the fonda there had been clean also, but that at Guadix they had been eaten alive. Our dinner finished, we sat ourselves down on a bench in the entrada and looked about us. To one side of the entrance was a small stall which sold iced drinks. Men and women were sitting in after-lunch ease amid the boxes and sacks which lined the opposite wall, on low chairs, or on the bench with us. A dog, shaved all over its body, partly because of the heat, partly to keep off the fleas with which all Spanish animals are infested, was asleep on our mattress. The proprietor of the fonda was standing in a lordly manner in the middle of the floor. He was dressed in white shirt and flannel trousers, and must have weighed almost sixteen stone, although quite young. He looked as if he had been inflated with air. We had noticed, though we have not before mentioned, a curious illness which seems prevalent in Spain. In Murcia were large numbers of monstrous children; boys and girls had reached enormous proportions before the age of ten years old. We came to the conclusion that it was a form of illness, because, though the children seemed healthy enough, we have never seen this development of monstrosity elsewhere, nor did large numbers of them appear to survive adolescence, though there were a certain number of excessively fat girls. The proprietor was such a monstrosity grown up. His wife, a dark-eyed beauty, was sitting in a rocking-chair near the kitchen door and her baby of about three years old, standing in its mother's lap, was having a great lark, pretending to catch lice in its mother's head. Thus do our ideas of innocent sports for children differ from those of other nations. There was some coming and going amongst the fonda visitors. The guests seemed to be all peasants, the men in blouses, the women in pale skirts, black blouses and shawls of paisley pattern over the shoulders. Many had bundles of towels and of bathing dresses. One group we heard saying that they had come down to Alicante for a week's sea bathing. As the afternoon drew on and the lorry delayed, we again interviewed the old man, who answered that probably it would not come that day. Accordingly, we spoke to the proprietor, who rather roughly said that we could have a room for two pesetas a night. The room was small, and the bed only just big enough for two. There were two doors, one leading into the interior of the inn, one out on to a balcony. The latter was half of glass and had no lock, and as there was plenty of traffic along the balcony, which was used for drying linen, underclothes and bathing dresses, one only had a chance of privacy by closing the shutters, leaving oneself in the dark, and no chance of sleeping with the window open despite the heat. But Spain does not believe in open windows or doors at night; it has "a robber complex." We put our small luggage into the bedroom, leaving the large trunk and the roll of mattress in the entrada. We then went out to explore the town and to find a young painter to whom we carried an introduction from Luis. Emilio, for such was his name, was one of the lucky ones of this world. His parents kept a wine-shop which relieved him of a pressing need of earning a living. He could thus study at his ease. Our investigations took us through a shop full of large barrels, up some narrow stairs and on to a landing where two girls were working at pillow lace. Emilio received us with a brusque cordiality, showed us some of his work, which had talent, came back to the inn with us, where he arranged for our transport by the lorry whenever it should arrive, and said that he would also find a carter to take our heavier luggage out on a road waggon. This readiness to help a stranger, often at considerable personal effort, we found characteristic of the parts of Spain which we have visited. Emilio, having an engagement, left us, and we strolled through the town. To the east lies the older part of the Port clambering up the rugged side of the steep rock, at the top of which lies the castle. The fishing village, at the extreme end of Alicante, is beautiful with its small primitive cubic houses painted in garish patterns. Through steeply sloping streets we came to the beach. Here were Mediterranean fishing boats drawn up in ranks; then, as we returned towards the harbour, more open beach covered with people in gay dresses and children playing on the sands. Then came the bathing establishments built out on piles over the tideless sea. The bathing establishments increased in luxury towards the town and were, for the most part, fantastic wooden erections of Moorish design. We came back to the broad double avenue of palm trees which faced the more luxurious hotels and cafés. Night came softly on, and one by one amongst the palms the lights of the town threw beams over the chattering people who strolled in ever-thickening processions to and fro beneath the palm trees; mingled with the conversation was the incessant click, click of the fans of the girls and women. We went back to the fonda for supper and afterwards returned to the sea front. The cafés had spread tables beneath the palms, and we sat down enjoying our "Blanco y negro," an iced drink composed half of white cream ice flavoured with vanilla, and half of iced coffee. Bands of musical beggars assailed us. Most of the mendicants were blind. One group, a veritable orchestra, travelled from café to café clinging to the edges of a bass viol which the one seeing member, the money collector, dragged the way it should go, by the peg-head. There was an old guitarist who played and made queer noises through a small gazoo. Another orchestra of three, guitar, laud and bandurria, the latter instrument a small cousin of the laud, and in this case played beautifully by a blind boy of about nineteen years. There were other beggars too, but the devil of cheap European music had entered into them all. Not one played their own native Spanish music. I suppose nobody would pay to hear it played. At the end of the palm avenue an artist had set up an easel on a raised dais. His work was illuminated by a strong acetylene gas lamp. The canvas was painted bright sparrow's egg blue and surrounded by a frame of staring gilt. [Illustration] On the blue canvas he was painting an imaginary landscape, the blue serving as sky and for the waters of a still lake. A drab woman was threading her way to and fro through the crowd which surrounded him, crying out: "The numbers, the numbers. Who would like to win a magnificent picture, framed complete for ten chances a penny?" Another crowd surrounded a buck nigger who, displaying his magnificent and gleaming teeth, was crying out the virtues of his dentifrice. A third crowd listened to a quack doctor who, backed by a large picture depicting the jungle, was selling a specific called "African Tonic." The tonic, he said, was derived from essences extracted at enormous expense from the tiger, the elephant, the monkey, and from I know not what else. From time to time he rested his voice by turning on a squeaky gramophone. Tired from our journey we went to bed betimes. We got up early. In the waggons, which were lined up in the big courtyard, the families which had slept in them were making their toilet. In the entrada, the old man of the inn, aided by the stable boy, was packing away the hammock beds slung from trestles, on which slept those travellers who, having no waggon, did not wish to pay the expense of a bedroom. We had noted small café stalls near to the market, so, in order to see some more of Alicante life, we took our breakfast there rather than in the fonda. The café stalls were wooden box-like kiosks, and they spread wicker chairs and tables over the open street, and soldiers and workmen were sitting sipping their morning refreshment. Beneath the shelter of the kiosk a lad was making the day's supply of ice cream. The cream is frozen by the amount of heat absorbed from it by the freezing mixture. One might also say that the amount of refreshment to be derived from ice cream seems proportionate to the amount of energy absorbed from the lad who manufactures it: it appeared a fatiguing business. Crowds of people on the way to market passed us, and to where we sat came the cries of the market salesmen. We were not stared at here as we had been in Murcia. Strangers were evidently more common. A small boy stationed himself near our table gazing longingly at a breakfast roll. To all intents and purposes he hypnotized it from the table into his hand. He broke into unexpected French. His father, like so many Spaniards, had been working at Lyons during the war. He deplored the fact that he had no education, but said that he was trying to learn some English from the sailors who came to Alicante. He had begun with the swear words, of which already he had a fair collection. He said that his father was a bootmaker, out of work, and asked if we had any boots to mend. He wheedled also some cigarettes and a few coppers from us. Emilio, who had sent off our heavy luggage on the previous night as he had promised, met us, and together we went to a café on the front, where we wrote a letter to Antonio saying that we had left our passports behind by accident. In spite of this oversight we had decided to push on to Jijona and to trust to luck. After lunch we again sat down in the fonda wondering if the motor-lorry would come. Many peasants also were there. Motor omnibuses drove in, but these were destined for other parts. Opposite the bus office was a gambling machine, into which one pushed a penny and if one were lucky received back twopence, fourpence, sixpence or even tenpence. But this machine had gone wrong, and the bulky proprietor spent the greater part of the afternoon over it with a screw-driver. A drunkard was staggering up and down, now shouting, now singing, now dancing a few unsteady steps. The stable boys were making a butt of him. Presently he sat down on a sack and fell asleep, his head tilted back, his mouth open. The opportunity was too good to miss. Pulling out his sketch book, Jan began to make a sketch. The old ticket-office man, perceiving what Jan was doing, leaned over his shoulder, and as the sketch developed began to chuckle. Soon there was a double queue of spectators, giggling with suppressed laughter, stretching on each side from Jan to the drunkard across the width of the entrada. When the drawing was finished, the old man exclaimed: "But that is excellent; will you not give it to me, Señor?" Jan made of the drawing a rapid tracing which pleased the old man as much as the original. "I'll keep that," said the old man. [Illustration] To our horror he walked across the entrada, with a thump in the ribs awoke the drunkard, and showed him the sketch. Gradually, as he realized what had been done, an expression of wrath grew on the drunkard's face. Luckily for us, he became possessed of the idea that the drawing had been done by one of the stable boys. No one undeceived him and, amidst roars of laughter, he addressed a long speech to the stable boy in question. "The rights of man," said the drunkard, "are inalienable, and of all the rights of man, the greatest right is that of his person. The stable boy has, therefore, transgressed against the most sacred of men's rights. I could have excused most things," went on the drunkard, "but this is inexcusable; to inflict indignity on a man in his own person. Since neither the stable boy nor the spectators of this crime seem sensible of the enormity they have committed, the only act by which I can express the contempt which I feel for the meanness of your natures is that of removing myself from the company of such low mortals." Having thus delivered himself with the air of a Demosthenes, he literally shook the dust from the soles of his alpagatas and staggered out into the street. Coincident with the departure of the drunkard was the arrival of the Jijona motor-lorry. The lorry was heavy, with solid tyres. Michelin's motor guide had described the route as: "Cart road bad and very indisposed," and we wondered what the sixteen miles would value as experience. We all scrambled in, arranging our luggage as best we could on our laps or under the narrow wooden benches nailed to the lorry's sides. The centre of the lorry was occupied with cargo, in this case barrels, some full, some empty, standing on end. We thought that we had all fitted in so nicely, but a wail from the courtyard drew our attention to an old woman who, loaded with parcels and almost weeping with despair, had failed to find a seat. We said "Move up" to each other, but no moving up was possible. The old man came out in anger from the ticket-office. "But this is ridiculous," he shouted; "there is room, there are so many seats on the lorry, I sell so many seats, therefore there must be room." Slowly the elucidation of the mystery dawned on us. Three of our passengers were of such girth that each ought in common fairness to have booked two seats for himself. So with much effort we squeezed and shoved into the fat men until we gained a narrow slit of seat into which the little old woman was dropped. But immediately the active pressure was released the resilience of fat reasserted itself, and the little old woman spent the first part of the journey moaning out that she was being crushed to death. Most of the voyagers were peasants; one or two were travellers going to the fiesta; one was dressed in soldier's uniform, but he seemed to be neither officer nor private. We discovered later that he was a veterinary surgeon. Our musical instrument caused some attention and our fellow voyagers smiled at us with sympathy and kindness. "Are you artists?" they asked. "Yes," we replied. "Then we will come to your concert," said they. The road was indeed "indisposed." We rolled, rocked, and bumped along miles of dusty road, by the side of which the trees were so drenched in dust that they were but ghosts of themselves; the herbage below seeming like the delicate clay work of a magic potter, having no hint of green for the eye. Nor can empty barrels be considered good travelling companions. If the lorry were toiling uphill the barrels sidled down the floor with a seeming leer. One snatched one's toes out of the way without ceremony. On reaching the end of the lorry, the barrels spread themselves sideways, crushing the knees of the sitters. When the lorry reached the top of the hill and began to thunder down the new slope the barrels bounced and bumped to the other end of the lorry, bruising everybody in their passage. Finally the young soldier sat on one of the centre barrels and tried to quell their antics, without much success. The lorry climbed into the mountains, round roads which curved like a whiplash. At one spot the young soldier remarked: "The motor-bus fell over here once; six of the passengers were killed." The sun beat down on the canvas top of the lorry, and the large white porous water-jug hanging at the end was in constant demand. We halted at a small and lonely house where beer was for sale. The passengers also bought beans pickled in salt and handed them to each other. The dusty miles rolled off, at one moment through grey cliffs which shone in the evening light, and another over deep water courses, along the bottom of which ran serried terraces of vines. Presently a pretty girl, whom we took to be the daughter of a wealthy farmer, and who had spent the better part of the journey flirting with the young soldier, exclaimed: "Mira! Shishona!"[20] Through a cleft between two mountains we caught a glimpse of distant houses clustered up the side of a hill towards an old Saracen ruin which gleamed ochreous against the evening sky. In spite of the presence of a couple of factories, the entrance of Jijona from the south is one of the most romantic sights we have seen in Spain. Ancient Spanish buildings sprang from the edge of a ravine covered with prickly pear, and faced a steep cliff, along the precipitous face of which ran water courses. Old houses stood step above step, on a hill so steep that the roadways were all staircases and the houses had two entrances, the front into the lowest story and the back into the upper, and often the back-yard was higher than the roof. A white stone bridge carried the road with a noble curve across the ravine, and round this curve we swung, the passengers waving hands and shouting greetings, into the town. Our destination was a casa de huespedes (half inn, half boarding-house) called "La Vinaigre," and the name was not altogether unsuitable. But our first reception was as cordial as we could have wished. Owing to our friend's mattress, which the old hostess had recognized, we were welcomed with open arms. CHAPTER XXI JIJONA--THE FIESTA The only fiesta we had hitherto experienced in Spain had been a small peasant feast during an afternoon at Verdolay. We had gone to it; but finding that we as foreigners constituted the chief centre of interest, we had run away to the seclusion of our house. At the big fiesta of Jijona were so many strangers that we were almost overlooked. [Illustration] The family at the "Vinegar" consisted of an old bent-backed father peasant, sandalled; a mother, in black with black shawl; several sons, reaching towards mercantile gentility owing to the turron factory, which was in the cellars of the house; and several daughters, most of whom had married personages of importance in the little town. In fact the "Vinegar" family was upon the up-grade. They promised us a week of unparalleled amusement. First, they said the town was crammed with people--a most necessary concomitant to Spanish enjoyment. In no other country in the world is the gregarious nature of man so plainly exhibited. The man who plays his lonely golf matched with an imaginary colonel would not be understood; your solitary pleasurer would find no sympathizers. Crowds, crowds, form the oil in the salad of Spanish amusement. Secondly: that very night the priests were giving a free public cinema entertainment. Thirdly: "They will loose a cow on the streets to-morrow night. Oh, it is precioso. It is a wonderful diversion. The cow gallops, the men try to catch her. They are tossed right and left, others come to the rescue. Magnificent! Eh?" Fourthly: the old drama of the Moors and Christians was to be performed. Jijona lies in territory once captured by the Moors. They say that the original name was Saracena, and to-day locally it is pronounced "Shishona." It owes its considerable wealth to the extensive terrace cultivation of almonds, by means of which the hard-working Moors converted the mountains from barrenness to fertility. "There is a castle of boards erected in the plaza," said the Vinegars; "this will be stormed first by the Moors, then by the Christians. It is very luxurious. Not so luxurious as last year, perhaps, because the captains of the fiesta are not so wealthy as those of last year, and owing to the tobacco famine, the Contrabandistas will omit their drama of tobacco smuggling. Yet it will exhibit much lujo."[21] At supper we tasted for the first time the famous turron of Jijona. This was manufactured by our hosts. It is a crisp, dry, almond sweetmeat, probably Moorish in origin, for it is not unlike Halva de Smyrne and carries behind its almond flavour a queer but not unpleasant taste resembling the smell of an over-heated chair. Supper over, we went out to the plaza. The first need of Spanish amusement had been fulfilled. The streets were crowded. A few of the more sophisticated visitors were even wearing hats. At the far end of the plaza, dimly, could be seen the wooden castle, in shape not unlike one of those quaint wood cuts from an old edition of Froissart; some distance in front of it, high in the air, was the sheet on which the free "pictures" were to be thrown from the topmost pinnacle of the castle. As the time of the performance drew near, the people came bringing chairs with them until both before and behind the screen the plaza was crammed. The performance was not a success. The illumination was dim; the sheet stretched high above the people's heads. In addition, a young moon in its first quarter intruded from above the mountain-tops. This intrusive crescent, shining almost through the centre of the sheet, sometimes took the place of the heroine's head, sometimes of the hero's waistcoat. After straining our eyes for a while, having reflected on gift-horses and teeth we went back to the Vinegars' and to bed. As we went we wondered what those spectators who were on the wrong side of the sheet and who in consequence could not read the legends--if they were able to read--would construe out of those dim dramas. We awoke on the morrow eager to see what the "Studio" of our friend was like. Father Vinegar had gone before us, but Mother Vinegar took the road and showed us up through tortuous and romantic staircases of streets, up--up--until we reached the highest level of the town. But our friend's house was yet higher. We clambered up a zigzag path over a widening hill-side to the crest of the ridge. There on the top, fronting the ruins of the old Saracen fortress, was our friend's house "El Torre de Blay." It was a long house of one story, backed by a round tower of three stories. The tower was claimed to be Saracen in origin: it overlooked a walled yard, which was filled with chickens, rabbits and turkeys, for the Vinegars were using the house during the absence of our friend. A pile of almond shells was in the entrada and a back door led out into a terraced garden full of pomegranate, pear, fig, almond and olive trees and grape vines. Old Vinegar, called locally "Père Chicot," led us round, discoursing on the beauty of the house, which was indeed cool, large and airy. But the _clou_ of the house Père Chicot kept till the last. With a gesture of profound pride he swung open a small door. "Señor and Señora," he exclaimed, "I will warrant that there is not a W.C. to compare with this in the whole province of Alicante." Mother Vinegar, talking in a high-pitched, querulous voice, was complaining of the rise in prices, of the hardness of the season. The garden of the Torre, she said, was not worth looking after, there were no grapes, and as for the almonds, she went on, pointing to a small heap, that was the whole crop for the year. She added that only a little while ago somebody had broken into the yard and had stolen two hundred and fifty pesetas' worth of poultry and rabbits. It occurred to us that some of her cordiality to us came from the fact that she looked on us to make up some of that lost money. So I gently led her on to the question of ways and means. She said: "Oh, El Señor used this place as a working place only. He lived and slept at our house, and for that he paid ten pesetas a day." Now El Señor (our English friend) had told us that he paid seven pesetas. Our suspicions were correct. I am afraid that in the end Mrs. Vinegar, like the undertaker in Tcheckov's story, counted us amongst her losses. Her manner changed gradually from cordial to chilly: she had promised to help me to shop, but she put obstacles in my way and also, I believe, tried to prevent us from finding a servant. Finally we made an arrangement that Mrs. Vinegar should supply us with meals at two pesetas fifty each. Remembering that Elias had fed us in Murcia for one peseta fifty I struggled to reduce the price to two pesetas for less food, but Mrs. Vinegar said that Jijona was far more expensive than Murcia (as a matter of fact it was, if anything, cheaper), and that the reputation of her house would not stand a lower price. Finally, to her disgust, I announced that we could not afford more than three meals a week at that rate, and we were accordingly scrawled down, heavily underlined, with red ink, amongst the stolen chickens and rabbits. But the idea of the cow chase through the streets excited us. As in the well-known story, the cow turned out to be a bull; nor was the chase to be in the narrow winding streets, but in the plaza, the entrances of which had been blocked up with extempore barricades of wooden beams. The women and the less courageous of the men were to fill the balconies, and places in a balcony had been found for us by the Vinegar girls, who were quite different in manners from their parents. The bulls were stabled at the back of the town; and, like a wasp in a spider's web, plunging at the ends of long ropes tied to its horns, the bull was dragged to the plaza, when it was insinuated into a rough bull-pen erected near the castle. There were three bulls, and a second was thus dragged up and penned in. The third, however, was tied to a tree, and pads, like boxing-gloves, were fixed solidly to its murderous horns. Then with some precautions the bull was loosened. The game was a sort of ticky-touchwood. Home in this case was anywhere out of reach of the bull's tossing capacity: open doors, the ironwork of windows, water pipes, trees, the barricades of the streets, lamp posts, a fountain--around which one could dodge--and a wall topped by a rickety pailing, and the woodwork of some swing-boats near the castle. Jan had gone down into the plaza to get some photos. From the balcony the game was exciting, though not furious. Some of the boys showed considerable pluck; and it was amusing to watch the strange concavities shown in the back of one running away who thought that the bull was close behind and who could feel in imagination those horns prodding his spine. [Illustration] But the fun was not furious enough to bear long watching from the balcony. So I went down into the square and joined Jan. I had several reasons for this action. I was bored, and thought it would be more exciting below. But the chief idea I had was that by this manoeuvre I would be able to introduce myself to Jijona _en bloc_. I should be universally known, and would thus escape the continual shrieks and giggles with which strangers greeted my appearance. So I went down into the plaza. A loud gasp went up from the crowds. Some youths ran up to me. "Señora, Señora," they cried, "you mustn't stay here. It is dangerous!" "Why?" asked I. "But don't you understand? The bull! He might get you." "But," I answered, "he might get you too." "Oh, but we can run." [Illustration] "Well, I can run also." At this moment theory turned hurriedly into practice. The bull came charging down upon us. Jan and I with a number of youths made a run for the wall, clambered on to it, and clung there, hanging on its rickety pailings, while the bull smelt our toes. "Curse you! Curse you!" screamed out an old man who was dancing with rage on the other side of the pailings. "Get down. Can't you see that in a minute you'll bring the whole place down? Get off at once." But the boys merely gave him retort for curse. The bull turned on to another baiter and dashed away. This boy sprang into the branches of a young tree. The bull, going full speed, hit the stern of the sapling with his forehead, and the youth was shot off, describing a graceful parabola, and landing with a thump on to the ground. Gradually the game drifted to the other end of the plaza and we came down from the fence. [Illustration] "Señora," said an anxious voice, "I have here a balcony. It is quite respectable, for my wife is there. Pray do not risk your life any longer." The speaker was the husband of one of the Vinegar girls, one of the nicest men we met in Jijona. He was short and plump, and even as he spoke to me he gazed anxiously towards the end of the plaza. While he was still urging me, the bull made a movement in our direction, and he bolted. This time we sought shelter in an open doorway, accompanied by two priests. One lad tripped and the bull rolled him over with its padded horns, but other lads ran up, one flapped a handkerchief before the animal's nose, another hung on to its tail. Somehow we could not help wondering what would have happened to the bull had twenty public schoolboys been loosed in that plaza! At last the light faded. First the bull, then the boys grew tired. The animal, captured with ropes, was led away to become meat for future Jijona dinners--eating a playmate, it seemed to me. Further north in Spain they have a variant of this game. A young bull is put into a wide circle formed of carts. The bull's horns are not padded, and this game is quite dangerous. A Polish painter, a friend of ours, once entered such a ring. He was chased by the bull and to escape sprang for a cart. He was not quite quick enough. With the upward toss the bull thrust a horn through the seat of his trousers, as the painter was in mid-air. Luckily the trousers were an old pair, the seat came out wholesale and the painter tumbled head first into the cart. He says that for the rest of the day he went about with his hat clapped behind him. The bull-baiting over, we called upon the doctor to whom we carried an introduction from Luis. Then we scrambled up to our Torre, taking with us provisions and candles. We made up our mattress on the floor and slept the more soundly for our hard bed. [Illustration] We had one joy at Jijona--there were no mosquitoes, and the nights were deliciously cool. Our windows were far enough from the ground to allow the most timid of Spanish women to sleep secure from robbers. The sun streaming in at our windows awoke us before six--we dressed and breakfasted, looking down on the town, which still lay in the shadow. Immediately beneath our windows were two hundred yards of stony hillside; then began the houses, small and closely crowded as though they feared the rough arid expanse of the towering hills of rock. We looked down upon an almost Moorish succession of flat roofs, plunging downhill into the valley. The surrounding country was like a rough sea suddenly frozen, in front of us the mountains seemed almost to curl over. A violet smoke was rising from Jijona chimneys, a smoke which drifted a sweet scent to our nostrils, a scent of sage and of fir. From the middle of the village the church tower covered with blue and white tiles suddenly chimed the hour with discordant bells. Mrs. Vinegar was to take me the round of the shops. She had previously tried to impress me with the dreadful price of provisions in Jijona, and this time she prevented me from buying eggs. The greengrocer's shop, kept by a gay woman named Concha, was only an entrada filled with baskets. Mrs. Vinegar had refused to change a note of 100 pesetas for me, and we discovered later that notes of any magnitude greater than twenty-five pesetas are difficult to change in villages. But Concha changed the money cheerfully and earned my gratitude. Opposite Concha's shop, frowning on the main street with grated windows, was the prison, of which somebody said: "Heavens! The Jijona men are so good that there hasn't been a soul in the prison for the last five years. It is full of chickens and rabbits." We bought a frying-pan, having to choose between one very small and one very large. The latter was thick in rust, and must have been I don't know how many years on the shelves of the shop. We chose it on condition that the shop man could get it clean, and he at once put the whole of his family to work on it, including a prospective daughter-in-law, a French-African girl just arrived from Morocco. The customers were whispering one to another, and at last one more bold than the others addressed me: "I saw you yesterday go down amongst the bulls. Were you not terribly frightened? I thought that my heart was going to stop." We went to buy drinking glasses. The china shop was deserted and we had to shout loudly before we could get anybody to serve us. The woman did not know the price of the glasses. "But no matter," she said, "you can pay any time you like. And weren't you terribly frightened yesterday, going down into the bulls? I couldn't draw my breath when I saw you jump on to the wall." There were children crowded at the shop door. As we came out I heard murmurs, which gradually we made out as: "La Valiente, La Valiente, La Valiente!" I was known by this name during the whole of my stay in Jijona. On Sunday we dined at the Vinegars' and in the afternoon the doctor took us to the Casino. I believe there is gambling at these Casinos, but this takes place upstairs, and on the ground floor they perform the function of the local club. On Sunday afternoons and in the evenings the aristocracy of the place collect here to sip ices while the local pianist rattles off the latest music which has reached the town. After supper we walked through the streets, feeling our way up and down hill, for lights were few and the streets full of rocks and unexpected steps. We heard the sound of guitars and at once climbed towards it. At the top of a staircase we came to a shop in front of which a family was sitting. A woman with a rough voice began to chaff us. "Ah, yes," she exclaimed, "you are the English of the Torre de Blay. And the lady is the valiant one who is not afraid of bulls. Ha ha! What? You are going to see the dancing--well, let's all go." The family heaved itself to its feet, surrounded and escorted us down a narrow lane which ended at a platform which hung on the cliff's edge. Three men were sitting on the doorstep of a house, two playing guitars, one playing the bandurria. A crowd, young men in blouses and girls, with light skirts and shawls, were standing about or dancing. Three couples were dancing a Valencian jota. Some of the movements of the dance seemed intricate, but they danced with a fine natural grace, and there was a beautiful balance of body which echoed the movement of the music. A woman standing behind me said: "Now, Señora, I will teach you the jota one of these evenings. And you will take my baby, because I have lots and they say you have none." [Illustration] Both on Saturday and on Sunday bull-baiting exhibitions had taken place, but we had not gone to see them. One day had been quite sufficient. On Monday morning we were awakened by the sounds of music. The local band was parading the streets playing a queer semi-Oriental music. As the morning advanced other bands came in until seven or eight bands were in full blast, each playing a different tune and each trying to drown its rivals with sound. Gradually Moors and Christians gathered. The Moors came from the Near East and from the Far. The Chief and his immediate suite were Bedouin Arabs, and there were Turks, Saracens, Hindus, Chinamen, negroes and some of uncertain lineage. Girls accompanied each group dressed in appropriate Houri costume, carrying bottles filled with a liquor which would have pleased Omar rather than Mahomet. The Christians included Roman soldiers, crusaders, cavaliers and smugglers of 1800. The latter were the chief Christian and his retinue. Vivandières attended the Christians with drink no less stimulating than that supplied to their Moorish enemies. Moors and Christians carried large blunderbusses of ancient mode, and all day long to the sounds of indefatigable melody they paraded the town. It appeared to be the duty of the Moors to be comic; they wore big goggles and many had huge imitation beards with which, when the heat grew greater, they fanned themselves. They pranced and postured through the streets while the Christians marched along in solemn ranks. Nor did the fiesta end with the going down of the sun. With discreet intervals for refreshment, marching and music continued till 2 a.m., at which time sleep and a blessed silence fell on Jijona. Undeterred by but four hours' rest, punctually at six the cacophony of brass began again. By midday crusaders and bandsmen, having exchanged helmets and caps, were dancing jotas down the principal streets. But a short siesta revived them for the principal work of the day: the entry of the Moors. At about four in the afternoon the performers gathered at the picturesque southern entrance of the village, thus symbolizing the direction from which the Moors had come. Then group by group, with blunderbusses banging off into the air, the Christians retreated slowly up the street, going backwards. Last of all the Christians went the Contrabandistas, and last of the Contrabandistas the Captain, dressed in a wonderful ancient costume of velvet, embroidered with gold, silver and silk, and a blanket striped in many colours. Facing him, advanced with equal solemnity and noise the chief Moor. After some two hours of deafening reports the whole troupe was in movement, some forwards, others backwards, and had arrived at the wooden castle in the plaza. By seven o'clock, at this funereal pace, the Moors were at last massed before the castle. "Now for the charge and for some fun," we thought. But mounting a profusely decorated horse, the chief Moor began a speech. The Contrabandista, evidently a man of deeds only, had hired a real actor, dressed in the costume of a cavalier, to represent him. For almost an hour exchange of dramatic verse continued, after which the Christians quietly walked out of the castle, and the Moors walked in. "Good heavens," thought we, "is that all?" With ears deafened from the guns we went home; passing on the way a booth of green branches in which Moors and Christians, overcome either by the heat or by the assiduous ministrations of Houri or Vivandière, were laid out on sacks. Though officially the day was ended, practically it was not. Those who had private stocks of powder continued the gunfire till midnight. The bands, their music becoming more and more incoherent, played on till two o'clock. We decided that we had seen enough fiesta. We stayed in our castle and went out sketching in the country to avoid the appalling din which rose from the town to our windows. At night there was a modest display of fireworks in the plaza, which we were quite content to enjoy from where we were. After all was over they said to us: "Wasn't it a beautiful fiesta?" Outwardly we were forced to agree with them, but inwardly we recognized--perhaps with a sense of regret--that to enjoy these fiestas as they ought to be enjoyed, that is, as a Spaniard enjoys them, requires a sense of values and perhaps a nervous organism which we do not possess. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 20: "Look! Jijona!"] [Footnote 21: Luxury.] CHAPTER XXII JIJONA--TIA ROGER Jijona lived on almond paste. All around us the grey, pallid or zebra striped mountains were terraced, and wherever enough earth could be gathered together for an almond tree to grow, there it was planted. The turron of Jijona, which is made in perfection nowhere else, is a very popular sweet meat all over Spain and even is widely appreciated in South America. In Barcelona I have been greeted by turron-selling youths who addressed me as La Valiente. On the French frontier in a little village we found a turron-stall kept by a man in Jijona costume of black blouse and pointed hat; but he was a fraud: he had never been near Jijona, nor could he speak the Jijona dialect. But the whole life of Jijona was dominated by turron marzipan, and the varieties of sweet meats made from almonds. We arrived as the almonds were beginning to ripen. Out on the mountains one heard the thrashing of the canes amongst the branches as the peasants beat the nuts off the almond trees. From the village rose up a sound like that of a gigantic typewriter as the women of the village sat in the streets in circles and cracked the almond shells. In our entrada old Père Chicot crouched most of the day on his haunches, peeling, drying and cracking the almonds from El Señor's garden. In consequence of the turron work we found it very difficult to get a woman to work for us. Life became difficult. The conditions in Jijona were not the same as those in Verdolay. In the latter place we could buy excellent charcoal, but to our surprise we found charcoal difficult to get in Jijona. When we did get it, from the proprietor of the local cinematograph theatre, it was so hard that it would not burn. Père Chicot said gruffly, "What are almond shells for?" We then tried burning almond shells; but they made a poor fire, and an accumulation of shells soon put itself out. We wasted one and a half hours trying to fry potatoes on an almond-shell fire. So as long as we could not get a woman, we had to live on cold stuff that we could buy from the shops: Dutch cheese, and sardines, principally. At last I thought that I had found a woman. I was perched on the watercourse which ran across the face of the precipice opposite the entrance of the town. From this spot there was an excellent view of Jijona in its most romantic, but also in its most plastic aspect. To me came a woman walking along the edge of the watercourse, balancing on her head a large washing-basket. She stopped to watch my work, and as was the custom in those early days began to talk about the bull episode. "Ah, that was a terrible thing to do," she said. "If I had gone down into the plaza, my knees would have turned to water." I then asked her how I could get somebody to work for me. "Why," she answered, "I'll come myself, or send somebody else." She then began to move along her way. The wall of the watercourse was about a foot wide; but ten yards further along it ceased to curve around the face of the precipice and sprang across a chasm over a narrow bridge. The approach to this bridge was guarded by a large polished boulder about three feet high, and to get on to the bridge one had to clamber over this boulder. I had crossed it on hands and knees cautiously, for there was a sheer drop of forty or fifty feet below. The woman looked at this boulder and turning said to me: "That is a nasty spot. I'll have to be careful there, or I'll drop my washing." With the basket on her head she walked to the boulder and began to walk up its slippery side. Balancing herself and basket in what appeared a dangerous manner, giving little cries of "Aie! Aie! I'm afraid I'll drop my basket," she surmounted the obstacle and strode carelessly across the bridge. My heart left my throat to regain its normal position and I realized that there is even a fashion in "fear." But the woman never came, and for a week we were servantless. The pretty girl who had driven out with us in the lorry, and who we had imagined to be the daughter of a fairly well-to-do farmer, was as a matter of fact our nearest neighbour. She lived at the top house of the town. Her father was the village dust-cart, and any day could be seen walking about the streets bent almost double beneath the weight of a huge pannier which he carried on his back, into which he flung any object which had no permanent right on the high road. Her house was a small affair of two rooms only. We put our difficulty to her as she was friendly, and to our surprise she said that she would come and do it herself. She did arrange that the goat with his milk should call upon us; but the Vinegars enticed her into their turron factory, and again we were in despair. However, the girl had an idea. "Why, Mother will do it for you," she said. Mother was an apt-looking spouse for the dust-cart, and was considered, we heard, the dirtiest woman in the village. Her foggy blue eyes showed white all round them, and she threw up her lips like a biting horse when she spoke Castilian (which she did very badly). I don't know why she made me think of the Red queen in Alice, but her silhouette was not unlike, and she had a queer trick of being in the house one instant, and in the next of having quite vanished--which was Red-queenlike. She was called "Aunt Roger" in the village, because of her ruddy hair. Aunt Roger cleared up the mystery of the Jijona fuel. She made bargains with boys, who wandered out over the hills, and returned looking like walking haycocks under a load of branches of mountain pine and other coniferous shrub. From then on we cooked over large bonfires built on the square hearth which was in our largest room. Tia Roger was elusive in small matters, as she was in larger ones. She had a hasty Spanish way of agreeing at once to save herself the trouble of understanding my language, and we never knew whether she would come or no. She drew our pay without demur, but if an occasion offered for other employment she took it. We would return home at eleven o'clock worn out with a hard day's painting, to find the place uncleaned, no fire alight, no food either bought or prepared. This would entail on our part a rush down the steep hill into the town, to search for food. Probably on the way we would discover Tia Roger sitting amongst a circle of gossiping and pleased women, industriously cracking almonds. She would show no signs of conscious sin, but would grin and nod at us as we passed. Then we had to scramble again up to our eyrie under the full heat of the Mediterranean sun. Tia Roger had many children. Her eldest daughter was married to a man who for some time puzzled us. We first saw him wandering about the upper streets of the old town during the fiesta. He carried an elaborate pair of sandwich boards. On the front was the well-known picture, "St. Veronica's Handkerchief," and on the back an oleograph representing two conventional angels--golden hair, nightdress, and wings. Both pictures were surrounded by flat wooden frames fretworked in the hideous art-nouveau manner. He wandered about thus, enclosed, as it were a slab of humanity between two slices of divinity; but we could not imagine what his purpose was. We imagined that he filled a semi-religious post, something connected with the priests, and their fiesta, and their cinema, and bull chasings. But on the fourth day of the fiesta, this wandering, apparently purposeless man tripped over a washing-basket. His language at once put to flight all our ideas of his religious functions, it issued straight from a nature by no means purged of old Adam, despite its devotional enclosure. Later, he fell over me as I was sketching, and he cursed me with gusto. I then saw he was blind. This had not been apparent to us earlier, for he took the rough and precipitous streets of Jijona at an extraordinary speed. One day we saw him still wandering to and fro, but the pictures had disappeared. A cage was on his back, and in the cage, balancing against the joggle and movement of his walk, was an uncomfortable hen. We had become more accustomed to the Jijona speech by this time, and the tickets which the pictures had hidden were plainly visible in his hands. He was running a private lottery at three chances "a little bitch." I took thirty tickets for the hen, and gave fifteen of them to Tia Roger, but we pulled blanks. His next venture was a bedroom looking-glass, the stand of which stuck out from his back in an ungainly fashion. It must have needed considerable ingenuity to keep his small village clientèle sufficiently desirous to ensure for him any sort of a living. His wife learned that I had put him into one of my sketches. She hurried to the Torre de Blay, carrying her child, and accompanied by a horde of women friends to see "The Portrait." Her disappointment was great to find that he was but a minute figure in a street landscape. She told me that her husband had lost his sight ten years before in a street quarrel. His opponent had slashed a knife across his eyes. For this the law exacted no penalty. But she had drawn no lesson from her husband's misfortune. Her baby was in a bad condition, flies, dust and exposure to the sun were working wickedly on the child's eyes, and even then early blindness appeared to be threatening. But it seemed to us that many of the more ignorant Spanish were careless of their children's eyesight. Blindness is rampant, but blindness leads to beggary; and beggary accompanied by blindness is a profitable pursuit. Possibly a woman may say, "Little Juan seems to be going blind. Well, that's a comfort, he will be settled in life anyhow." Jijona had two other blind men. The one made a living by selling cigars from a glass case strapped to his chest. We were sitting in the entrada of the Vinegars' on the first day of the fiesta. The curtain was pushed slowly aside and through the opening crept a pathetic figure. It was that of an old man; his eyes were sightless and suppurating, a straw hat with a torn brim shaded his heavy face, in one hand he grasped an aged guitar, in the other a stick with which he explored the entrada for a chair. Jan quickly got out of his chair for fear that the blind man should sit down on his lap. The man found the chair with his stick, and trembling with the pain of movement took a seat. Adjusting the guitar, with stiff fingers he rasped the strings which gave out a sound, thin as though withered by extreme age. With exercise his fingers strengthened, until from the decrepit instrument he plucked a melody from which one might imagine that the blind in Maeterlinck's play were dancing to solace their loneliness. The almost macabre dance came to an end, then striking out a new set of chords he broke into a Spanish song. His voice was an instrument as worn out as the guitar. He ceased his heartrending performance, collected his meed of halfpence; I spoke to him, and he broke into an hysterical laugh of joy. "You have returned, you have returned," he cried. "It is El Señor that he takes you for," explained one of the girls. "He was very good to him. The old man recognizes the English accent." We explained to him his mistake, and the delight faded from his poor old face, and the blank expressionless look of the blind came back. Slowly he turned to the entrance and his tapping, which led him away down the street. Thus he pursued his trade, feeling his way from door to door, entering any one that was open, seating himself upon the first unoccupied chair which he could find: few could have been hard-hearted enough to deny his unspoken pleading. One evening we met him in the upper town.... An accident had happened, and his guitar was opened out like an old boot; it still held together at the handle, but at the front of the instrument the soundboard and back had become detached from the sides. In a clumsy fashion the hurt had been bound up with string. We asked him what had happened. He did not reply, but cried out with a high-pitched, half-crazy laugh. Then standing astraddle in the precipitous street he began to pluck at the strings as though the guitar could answer for him. The thin voice of it had now sunk to a mere ghost of a sound, the murmur of a summer freshet might well have drowned its plaintive whisper. Then turning he made his way downhill. CHAPTER XXIII JIJONA--A DAY'S WORK It was a toss-up which would arrive first: the sun shooting its long level rays over the mountain-top through our windows, or Tia Roger's daughter hammering on the door with the milk, warm and frothy, in a jug. Either the one or the other aroused us from our mattress on the floor--for we had dispensed quite comfortably with the complications of a bed. Possibly our night had been restless, for inadvertently I had imported a host of fleas into the house. They had come from the garden, from a small spot near an outhouse door, where there was a fascinating view, and I had stood there one morning with bare legs and feet admiring the scene. When I had returned to the house, I had noticed a strange blackish discoloration on my ankles, and stooping had discovered to my horror that hordes of hungry fleas were crawling up my legs. I had jumped into a basin of water, but many had escaped. From that moment the house was never clear of them, and our nights were sometimes disturbed. We suspect that Père Chicot kept his rabbit skins in the outhouse. We got out of bed either at the call of the sun or of the milk; and as we were dressing we watched the purple and green mists of night clearing off the valley and from the town below us. Breakfast was a simple affair--tea and dry bread and grapes. Spanish coffee is expensive and bad, cocoa we did not find, and butter and jam were unprocurable. For the boiling water we could not go to the trouble of building a bonfire, so in spite of the expense of spirit we used a methylated spirit stove. This Jan had bought in Murcia. The shopman had ill understood Jan's attempts to make his needs known. "Lampara para alcool"[22] had elicited no response, but at last, driven by repeated requests with variations, explanations, hand wavings, and so on, intelligence had brightened the shopman's face. "Ah, Señor," he had cried, "I understand you now. What you require is a 'little hell.'" So the kettle sang daily over "little hell," but this morning, Tia Roger having forgotten to purchase alcohol overnight, it looked as if we were to breakfast on goat's milk alone. But an idea occurred to me. El Señor, when he had transferred his major residence to Murcia, had left some furniture and much litter in El Torre de Blay. Amongst the litter were odd bottles which had contained toilet lotions, one was half full. Was there not a chance then that it was alcoholic? I routed out the bottle. The smell told me nothing. Practical experiment was the only thing. Imagination was rewarded. "Little hell" worked as well on hair-wash as with any other fuel. We ate our simple breakfast at an ancient refectory table, the top hewn from the width of a large tree, the legs curved and carved like those in Viking pictures. Then we set to packing up paint and brushes, and the preparing of sketch boxes. Leaving the things untidy for Tia Roger to clear, we set off on our respective ways, I down into the old town, Jan out across the mountains. Jijona was a maze of zigzag streets. In the morning it was almost manless, but women went to and fro on their household errands, and the children followed me in swarms. Standing about in the streets were small coops, enclosing either a chicken or a turkey, while the queer lean Egyptian cats, with rat-like tails, slunk along the walls, vanishing like ghosts at any attempt to stroke them. Even the kittens of a few days old spat at a proffered pat as though at a dog. I was bound for the street near the monastery which, with its blue-tiled roof, brought the eastern end of Jijona to a full stop. As soon as I had settled down the questions began. They were the usual Spanish questions such as one had heard in Verdolay, and many of the answers I knew now by heart. But one woman behind me said something new. "It is an English Señora. She is painting. All the English people paint, for there have been other English here--El Señor, and his friends--and they, too, painted. It is strange, indeed, that a whole nation should be thus gifted. Also all the English are very rich, for they come here from a long distance, and they paint pictures, and all that is very expensive. Another thing that I can tell you about the English is that they are all very tall. Every Englishman that I have seen (she had seen four) is much taller than we Spanish are. It does not matter that I am saying this out loud because La Doña does not understand Valenciano." While I was working this morning there was a continual sound of squealing pigs. Men's voices mingled with those of the pigs, urging them to be quiet. The sound came from a high-walled enclosure to which the entrance was an archway closed by a massive wooden door. Then along came a goat herd leading his flock. But as soon as the herd came opposite to this door it refused to pass it. With shouts, curses, and stones the man urged the goats along. In little quick rushes, thus urged on, one by one the goats dashed past the door and on down the road. But two refused the passage perilous. They made sneezing noises of protestation, but nothing would induce them to move. In despair the man at last had to bring all his goats back and take them to the hills by some other route. Later I realized that the door which these intelligent animals would not pass was the slaughter-house. Old men, dressed in the ancient Jijona costume of black blouse and black velvet hat with turned-up brim and pointed crown--kept on to the head by an elastic at the back--would address me in a patois impossible to understand. As the sketch neared completion my audience became excited. "Ha Pintado tod'! tod'! tod'!"[23] they exclaimed. They searched the picture for the smaller details, the strings of red peppers hanging from the balconies especially delighted them. Indeed, they gave my pictures titles because of some minute detail. "What is she doing?" a new-comer exclaimed. The answer was "The fig tree." I was astonished, because I could see no fig tree in the whole sketch. At last one of my audience pointed to one tiny branch of green projecting over a wall. Jan had four directions to choose from. North and south led him across a flattish plain seamed with deep watercourses, east and west took him into the mountains. To the east the mountains were grey bare stone, almost uncultivated; to the west the mountains went steeper and steeper, ending in a high ridge, at the foot of which was a queer leprous country, the earth spotted all over with lichens and looking as though mouldy. Wherever he went were the terraces and almond trees; and lonely little farms were perched high up on the slopes. Terrible little places those farms were for the doctor, for, if any one were ill in them, there was often no means of approach other than miles of climbing on foot. But all across the mountains, incongruous enough in that landscape of primitive agriculture where the plough was but a stake with an iron spike, and where no roads were, went standards carrying wires of electricity. On the standards, deaths'-heads were painted to scare off the inquisitive child. Jan had not only to contend with sun and flies. Shadow was even more difficult to find at Jijona than at Verdolay; the almond as a shade tree is negligible. It was hot setting out, but it was hotter coming back. One did not delay much after half-past ten, but, whether the sketch were finished or no, one packed up one's things and set off homeward. As one walked one could feel the heat of the ground through the soles of the alpagatas. There were reputed to be scorpions in the mountains, and it was as well to be careful when taking a seat or when picking up some painting implement dropped to the ground. But Jan never saw one. The peasants said that if he were stung the best thing to do was to plunge the stung part--usually a finger--into a raw egg; when the yolk had turned black, a fresh egg was to be substituted. We were both back in good time on this day, because we were to lunch with the doctor and his wife. They had promised us a truly Spanish meal. Here is the menu: 1. Smoked uncooked ham. 2. Hors d'oeuvre, olives (cured in anis and mint), pink tomatoes (a Jijona speciality), cucumber, and orange-coloured sausage. 3. Soup. 4. A stew of chicken, potatoes and garbanzos. (Garbanzos, or chick-peas, look something like dried nasturtium seeds. They are cooked like haricot beans, and taste like a blend of haricot bean and lentil. They are a very favourite Spanish vegetable.) 5. Cold fish and mayonnaise. (The mayonnaise was made from almond oil, lemon juice and hard-boiled egg, and was extremely delicate in flavour.) 6. Fried ham and grilled tomatoes. 7. Turron and almond paste sweets. 8. Yellow melon and muscatel grapes. Brandy. 9. Iced coffee (brought in by a boy from the Casino). The doctor's wife asked me if it were true that English people did not like questions. I said personally we did not mind questions, but that in England direct intimate questions were generally avoided. "But," said the doctor's wife in amazement, "if you wish to find out something about anybody, how do you do so? And how do you carry on conversations?" The meal over, we toiled slowly up again to El Torre, taking the hill in as leisurely a manner as we could. Tia Roger's daughter was sitting on our doorstep eating grapes. As we passed she held the bunch out to us. "Les Gusta?"[24] she said. "Buen aproveche," we replied. Before their gateway, the two aged men and the one old woman sat, as they did from morning till night, plaiting an everlasting rope of esparto grass. We had acquired the siesta habit, so lay down until four o'clock. Then, as the dinner had rather disorganized our desire to paint, Jan and I went for a walk. We clambered down through the town, passed out by the southern entrance, across the bridge, and clambered up the hill opposite. At a long open washing-place, women were on their knees beating and scrubbing clothes with the Spanish soap which will not lather; amongst them, working as hard as the rest, was a child of five years old. We skirted the line between the mountains, and the flat and plain for about two miles, then Jan took a path leading away from the mountains. We came out into the most fantastic scenery of its kind I have ever seen. In the winter the torrential rains burst on the mountains and the water rushing down had scooped deep clefts in the earth of the plain. The ground itself appeared to be in layers of various colours, and these layers falling in one above the other had striped the sides of the deep canyon purple, blue, white, orange and red. The water had cut out of the clayey earth a hundred fantastic shapes--I have seen photographs of the Grand Canyon of Colorado, this was like them on a small scale; at one place the clay was harder and the water dripping down had carved the cliff-side like great organ pipes or like the columns of an Egyptian temple. In the deep bottoms of the canyon were vine terraces; and further down flat, irrigated fields of tomatoes, of herbage or of vegetables. Little farm-houses sheltered under the mud cliffs, and on the circular threshing floors almonds and red peppers were spread out to dry in the sun. In one place a man had scooped his dwelling out of the cliff-side. These cave dwellings are common enough. At Verdolay was a whole colony of them, and the cavemen were reputed to be thieves and vagabonds, and the members were despised by the peasants proper. At the end of the ravine or barranca we came to a many-arched bridge which towered high above our heads, and clambering up by a zigzag track found ourselves on the Alicante road. In appearance this country is very deceptive. It appears arid, almost desolate, but the mountains are covered with almond trees, which for all their scanty foliage bear valuable crops, while the plain hides its richness in ravines a hundred feet or more below the level of its surface. We arrived home to find a stranger dressed in black clothes, but with an official cap on his head, sitting on a stone seat before our door. He was reading a book, and as we came up he bowed and said that he hoped his presence was not distasteful to us. We, of course, in the fashion of Spanish courtesy, put our whole home at his disposal, and invited him indoors. He demurred in the correct fashion, but on a second invitation came in with us. In the long entrada Père Chicot was looking out through the back door and shaking his head at the garden. "There's another tree dying," he said. "All the trees are dying, and the vines won't bear. You can't do anything without water." "But is there no water at all?" we asked. "Ay," replied Père Chicot, "there used to be the right to two hours of water once a fortnight. But the owners sold it. They wanted money and it was worth many hundreds of pesetas." Our visitor was very interested in the house, for he confided in us that there was a housing shortage in Jijona, like that in the rest of the world. He was chief of the municipal officers, dust-cart, water-supply, electric light and so on. He had just come from Toledo, and the only place he could find in Jijona was not nearly large enough for his family. "This would just suit me," he said, peering into room after room, "seven rooms; and they say that St. Sebastian used to live here. Did you know that?" His eye was attracted by the guitar of El Señor, which we had brought with us. "And you an afficionado of the guitar," he exclaimed. "I, too, have played in my time." We pressed him to play. "No, no; indeed I would like to, but I may not. You see, my wife's father died a week ago, and it would seem very wicked if I were to play, or to sing." Jan played him a farouka which he had learned from Blas. "It seems a good guitar," said the man. He picked it up, and fingered the chords. Then he went to the door and peered round it to see if Père Chicot had gone home. "I might sing you something if you won't tell any one," said the chief of the municipal officers. "But I will sing it in a very low voice, so that it will be less disrespectful to my wife's father." He sang, in a hoarse unmusical whisper, a guajiras. "I like the guajiras and also the tango," said he. "You see, I did my military duty in Cuba, and I learned many over there." Here are three of the songs he sang: "I will never marry, For as a bachelor I am gay, I have money to spend, I live like a general all day. And if I come to marry, Though I may be rich, I shall have to lower my crest, Like 'Barrabas' the cock, But the bachelor is Like God painted by Peter." "On a serene night The sad lament was heard Of a poor soldier, wounded And covered with blood and sand. For the ambulances were full, And the Red Cross doctors were busy. At the sight of his oozing blood The brave soldier prayed That death should overtake him, For no one could assist him." "At breakfast one morning A wise man said, sighing, That women in weeping Are false as are traitors. This has oft been ignored. But I've seen and I know That the tears of a woman, As down they are falling, Make naught but deception For the man who supports her." As he went on he began to forget his father-in-law, and in a short while he was bawling indecent tangos at the top of his voice. He showed no signs of departure, so I began to prepare for supper. I lit the bonfire which Tia Roger had laid in the wide hearth-place, placed over it a three-legged trivet of iron and on the trivet our huge saucepan full to the brim with olive oil. We then made use of a Spanish custom. We asked him to supper with us. This he was forced by Spanish custom to refuse, and as we did not repeat the invitation he had to make his compliments--which he did with the greatest courtesy--and go home. After supper, as our bread supply was short, we felt our way down the hill in the dark and down the staircases of streets to the shop of Manuel Garcia. Garcia and his wife sold bread at one fat dog cheaper than the other shops. The bread was quite as good as any other, it had a very white powdery kind of consistency, baked in flat loaves with a very hard, anæmic crust. The Garcias had showed us one of the economical devices which were in current use. We had for some days bought candles at this shop, but Mrs. Garcia said: "Why do you spend all this money on candles? Here is a thing much better, and much cheaper. You first pour water into a cup or bowl until half-way up, then fill to the top with olive oil. Float one of these on the top of the oil, and set fire to it. There you have a light at half the cost of candles." The box she handed to us was full of pieces of cork through which a wick had been thrust. On the top of the box was the name of the device "little-lamps-little-boats" and a picture of the Virgin. We stepped back in our illumination to the most ancient of methods--the old Roman conquerors of Spain must have illuminated their villas in this way. "Little-lamps-little-boats" had probably given light to the halls of the Saracen castle which now was but a few crumbling masses of slowly disintegrating cement. It was curious to think that one-half of Jijona was lit by electric light, the other by this antique device, and that there was practically nothing between. Mrs. Garcia had urged us to the stewing of garbanzos. The Garcias were go-ahead Spaniards. Starting from very small origins, they had begun a small turron factory in a back room. Not content with making turron alone, they had peddled it all over the Balearic Isles. Gradually they had prospered, and the whole upper part of the house was now factory, the entrance to the factory being higher up the hill in a back street. Yet they remained simple people, sitting, in the evenings, on their doorstep gossiping, while the flaxen-haired daughter, sixteen years old, painted with a toothpick dipped in dye eyes and noses on sugar pigs and cats. "We had a hard time at first," said Mrs. Garcia. "In Majorca the people were very jealous of us, and often very rude. They would tell us to go back to our own district; they used to laugh at our speech, though God knows they can't speak proper Spanish themselves." This inter-district jealousy seems characteristic of Spain. The man from Toledo laughed at the Jijona people; the people of Jijona called those of Murcia "gipsies"; the people of Murcia say that the Jijona folk are mere uncultivated mountaineers; Catalan and Castilian are in semi-enmity. Each person that one spoke to lauded the beauties and the food of his own district at the expense of other places. All about Jijona they would have nothing but malegueñas and Valencian jotas. The other varieties of Spanish music they were not interested in. But the Garcias were progressive people. They had made a success of their Balearic venture, and now had a stall in the market of Alicante. This was kept by a sister-in-law. Garcia and his wife were making preparations to go to the great fair at Albacete. The shop was full of large bales done up in straw matting, boxes and crates of sweets and of turron. They would go by road, for it was cheaper, and only about a hundred miles away. "That is a queer town," said Garcia. "There are gates to the walls, and at a certain hour they shut the gates, and if you are outside you stay outside till the morning." Mrs. Garcia wanted me to paint her portrait. If she would have posed to me in the ordinary, peasant, workaday dress I would have done it with pleasure. But she had a fine fashionable modern silk dress of black and she wanted to pose in this. I managed to put off the proposal until the time of her departure was too close. She went away unsatisfied. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 22: Spirit lamp.] [Footnote 23: "She has painted everything, everything, everything!"] [Footnote 24: "Would you like them?"] CHAPTER XXIV JIJONA--THE GOATHERDS Murcia could be counted as unmusical, in Verdolay one heard either a gramophone of the little Señor, or the piano banged by the girls who lived in the topmost house of the village. In Jijona, on the contrary, almost every evening could be heard the sound of the guitar or of that strange Eastern singing of Spain. Young men sat on the edge of the cliff below the Saracen castle and thumped two or three chords from a guitar for half the night long. It had a delight, analogous to that which the tom-tom gives, a delight drawn from the hypnotism of inexorable rhythm. But save for the commandant of the municipal officers, who was a stranger, we had made the acquaintance of none of the musicians until one afternoon the goatherds perched themselves in the shadow beneath our walls. We were taking a siesta when the sound of thrumming roused us from the half sleep which the afternoon gives. Jan exclaimed: "That music sounds quite near." He jumped up and looked out of the window. On a narrow ledge of flat rock at the foot of the wall three men were sitting in the shadow of the house. Two had guitars, and all along the wall of the garden a number of goats were lying down or were browsing on the small weeds which sprouted between the rocks. On the hill-side the kids were engaging one another in mock battle, rearing up in feint, with the most dainty of gestures, or interlocking their infantile horns. We slipped on our clothes, and crawling out by the garden door, the opening of which was only about four feet high, we joined the goatherds in their patch of shadow. "Buenos dias," said Jan. "I, too, love the guitar." "Si, Señor," answered one of the herds, "through the windows we have heard you playing." [Illustration] One of the men was thin but wore an enormous pagoda-like sombrero of straw, one was a boy of eighteen with a huge moustache, the third was an old man with a large nose, the wrinkles on his face drawn more deeply than any we have before seen. Their guitars were poor instruments and the strings were broken and knotted together, in consequence of which little bits of stick were tied across the arm of the instrument in order to clamp the strings down to the fingerboard below the knotted parts. As the strings break and are repaired, this stick is moved up the fingerboard until the strings are too short to play upon. Jan crawled through the small door and brought out the big white guitar. The thin man handled it with reverence. "I know the instrument," he said. "It is El Señor's. It is a good instrument, but he has a better. A big brown one which is a marvel. He must be very rich. They say he gave more than two hundred pesetas for it." He played on it for a moment, but soon handed it back to Jan. "I'd rather play on my old one," he said. "I'm not afraid of it, and I can knock it about as I like." All three were dressed in cotton shirts and pants, tied at the ankle with tape, over these they wore cotton coats and trousers; when the weather was very hot they dispensed with the trousers. Their feet were bare of stocking, but their shoes were heavy; woven by themselves out of esparto grass, very Oriental in shape with turned-up, pointed toes. On their backs were sacks containing esparto grass and half-fashioned sandals. Each possessed a long, heavy, crook'd stick shod with an iron point. All too soon they said that they must be moving on. "But come down to the street of the soap house, top side, this evening, and we'll have a dance and singing." I had sketched in this street. It was on the steepest part of the hill and ran almost horizontally across, so that the front door of the upper houses were on a level with the roofs of the lower ones. The roadway was divided along the centre, one-half being some twenty feet above the other; a low parapet protected the drop. It was lucky that the dwellers in the upper part of the street were sober Spaniards. [Illustration: GIRL SINGING A MALAGUEÑA This type song is in 3/4-time, and is as a rule very melancholy. It is very popular in the south of Spain.] We found, as usual, the party seated on chairs in the middle of the street, near a small electric light; some of the men were sitting along the parapet. We were greeted by an old, but very large woman who groaned all the evening with rheumatism. The girls were in their best dresses of pale coloured skirt and embroidered paisley patterned shawls. A long silence followed our arrival. We were waiting for a player who was the best in the village. He could not come, but sent his brother instead, who played well, but was left-handed. Three guitars and a guitarron formed the orchestra. Thrum, thrum, thrum, went the guitars, while across the deeper chords the little guitarron, with its strange tuning, threaded a shrill pattern of monotonous arpeggios. The music of Spain has something fundamental about it. It has a hint of the heart-beat of the universe. The rich, pulsating rhythm of it seems to set the air flowing in waves like those in a disturbed pool. It seems to speak of something ideally simple, to create an harmonious forgetfulness. A girl sitting amongst us threw back her head and sang. Her voice carried the sad minor cadences of the eternal East; it was pitched queerly in the throat and wailed across the still night like the voice of a passionate soul. "When I am dead a hundred years, And when the worms have eaten me, The signs you find in my dead bones, Will show that I have worshipped thee. When I am dead a hundred years." The song began with a long-drawn-out aie-e-e, which ran a gamut of strange, almost creepy modulations, the guitars slowed down their tempo, but when the last echo of the song had died amongst the hills, the instruments took up once more the remorseless beat of the malagueña. Again she sang: "New pain drives out old pain, New grief drives out old grief, One nail drives out another nail, But love to love gives no relief. New pain drives out old pain, Aie-e-e...." Once more she sang: "Your eyes like double evils are, Black as is the dark of Hades, And you have to cover them The ebon thickets of your lashes. Your eyes like double evils are." The guitars beat up the rhythm once more and then a man began to sing: "In your eyes there is a sky, Your mouth with heaven itself can vie, A garden blooms whene'er you smile, But in your breast's a crocodile.[25] In your eyes there is a sky." Again he sang: "The only love which I discovered, Like black gunpowder reacted; Fire, explosion, light; then after ... Followed ashes, silence, darkness. The only love which I discovered." By this time a large number of men and of girls had gathered. "Vamos!" they cried. "Let's have a jota. Come on, Perico, play something that we can dance to." The guitar-players changed their tempo, the little guitarron beat out with a more insistent though more flexible rhythm. The jota has a beat which is partly the beat of the bar, partly that of the phrase. This is common in Spanish music and has points of resemblance with early European music generally. Three girls and three of the youths lined up face to face, and soon the dancers were swinging to and fro over the uneven roadway. There is an agile grace in the jota. We watched it with delighted eyes. But the old rheumatic woman did not look pleased. [Illustration: THE VALENCIAN JOTA DANCED BY THREE COUPLES] "That girl," she muttered to me, nodding her head at one of the dancers, "she has no right to dance. She is apunto. You know," she went on, noting my perplexed expression, "she is expecting a baby soon. It is very wrong of her to dance." The dancers moved with flexible rhythm, snapping their fingers with the music, and their shadows, flung on the wall by the dim electric light, caricatured their movements. The guitars beat on, creating an atmosphere of careless joy which seemed to bring us into more sensitive contact with the Spaniards than ever we had been before. We wonder if civilization has anything to give to these people. They live simple, straightforward and pleasant lives, tempered, it is true, by sickness and pain and sometimes by privation; but it would be a rash man who would promise to give them greater store of valuable things than they already have. The fact that most cannot read does not hamper them very much. They have wisdom stored up in a thousand witty proverbs, and for their leisure they have the guitar and their songs. What a wonderful instrument the guitar is! The simplest of all instruments for the learner, a few days' practice makes him so that he can play as do the generality of these herdsmen. Then one can hypnotize oneself with the sonorous rhythm of repeated chords. But if one wishes to go further, the range and variety of the guitar is inexhaustible. It has as many moods as nature and is as difficult to conquer. Sarasate, they say, gave up the guitar because it was so difficult. But the guitar in the hands of the master is the finest of all instruments. Of single portable instruments it alone is complete; it alone is fully satisfying. We English do not know the guitar. Outside of Spain it has never been played. And the Spanish music made for the guitar ... like life itself with its interwoven themes of sadness and of joy; with mournful melody accompanied by strange gay accompaniment, the words often in strange contrast with the melodic theme. There is no native music in Europe which has the range, the variety, and the depth of feeling possessed by that of Spain. We tore ourselves away while yet they were dancing; for we remembered that 5.30 was our rising time. The thin goatherd, who wore the enormous hat in the daytime, took us into his house and gave us a drink. The baby was in its cradle, its face carefully tucked under the sheet. The aguadiente which he poured out for us was strong and harsh to the taste; and one was grateful for the glass of water which it is customary to drink afterwards. As we were getting ready for bed, we could still hear the sounds of the guitars and the cries of the dancers on the calm air of the night. The goatherds used to come almost every afternoon to the foot of our castle, and we gave up the siesta habit in their favour. I made the acquaintance of one other goatherd in Jijona. I was painting in a street near the Garcias' shop. When the picture was nearly complete, I wished for a figure and asked an old man to pose for me. He was nearing eighty, and his face was a map of wrinkles, with a mountain of nose and chin and a valley of toothless mouth. His clothes were a patchwork of different materials. The study which I made of him delighted him so much that he begged for it. He would pay me, he said. "The price does not matter," he exclaimed, "if only La Doña will put in a goat also." For he owned the flock which he led every day into the mountains. I made him a copy of it, and all the other goatherds trooped up to the castle to see Tio Pepe's portrait. "Ay, there's Pepe," they cried, slapping their thighs; "there he is with his patches, and his crook'd stick, and his sandals and his old nose and all. Tod', Tod'." It was near the time of our departure from Jijona. Tio Pepe in vain tried to press on me a few pesetas for the portrait. He searched his old mind for a means of showing his gratitude; and just as we were leaving he found a solution. At five o'clock in the morning, as our trunk was leaving the house on the shoulders of Tia Roger's strong young son, up ran Uncle Pepe with a large can of goat's milk, all of which we had to drink on the spot; or he would never have forgiven us. The night before our departure we had packed, for we had to start early to catch the motor-bus. Then we had gone to bed. We had just snuggled down beneath the blankets, for the nights were getting quite fresh, when I heard the sounds of a guitar. The sounds drew closer. They were coming up the hill. A suspicion grew to a certainty. "Jan," I cried, "those goatherds are giving us a farewell serenade." We hurried into our clothes. The goatherds had sat themselves down on the stone bench at the front door and were singing lustily at the moon. I don't know what the Spanish etiquette in such matters is, but we went out and took part in our own serenade. It was a lengthy affair. The time crept on, and we, shivering somewhat, for the night grew quite cold, sat ungratefully thinking of the sleep we were missing, and wondering how we were to awaken ourselves at four o'clock. At two o'clock they went away, and we rushed back to bed to seize the two hours of sleep which remained for us. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 25: Crocodile is Spanish slang for a false lover.] CHAPTER XXV MURCIA--AUTUMN IN THE PASEO DE CORVERAS We came back to Murcia, to our headquarters in the Paseo de Corveras, at the beginning of October. Though the town was so far south, the cold weather had well begun. In the daytime the sun seemed as fierce as ever, but the dust that had lain inches deep during the summer was now an equal depth of semi-liquid mud, and the house, without fireplaces or any means of creating artificial warmth, had in it a faint though insidious chill. Save in the hottest weather, stone or cement floors are comfortless to live with. Marciana, the woman whose services we had shared with Antonio during Rosa's smallpox, returned to us. She was a woman of sixty years, bulky in figure, dressed in black of an eternal mourning, and was mother of the most talented sculptor of Murcia. She was an illustration of the inter-provincial jealousy of the Spaniard. She came from Don Quixote's country, La Mancha, and was never weary of chanting its praises. "Ah, Señora," she exclaimed, "that is a wonderful land. Corn, oil and wine in abundance. Dancing and singing in the villages all night long. And what a wonderful people are those of mi pueblo.[26] My two sisters, they each weigh at least twice as much as do I. And then we are a civilized folk there, I can assure you. You saw how they treated it here when Rosa had the smallpox. No precautions, even though one died of it a few doors down the street. Now in mi pueblo they stretch sheets in front of the doors of warning; the necessaries of life are put on to the doorstep, and the money to pay for them is dropped by the hands of those who are in the house, and who are not allowed beyond the sheet, into pans of vinegar, so that they may be purified of the disease. Now that is real cleanliness." "But, thanks to God, Señora, Rosa is much better. The spots are disappearing, she will not be marked, and she has given birth to a son. It was a most divine birth. Of course it was fear for the son that made everybody so anxious." Marciana was a dilatory servant. Nothing was ever ready up to date, and she invariably drowned all my commissions for the market with a flood of words. She would wait all the morning in the queue which gathered at the Government Olive Oil depot, to buy olive oil for me at a few centimos cheaper than she could buy it from the grocers; and no explanation that she wasted more of our pay than she gained in cheapness convinced her. Antonio greeted us with delight, as did Emilio, the guitar maker, whom we went to visit on the first day of our return. Each, however, was in a different mood. Antonio, in spite of the joy caused by his new son, who he said had been born "most preciously," was in a rage. He was in trouble with the local authorities about his taxes. It appears that there is a factory tax which does not depend upon the size of the business, but the mere fact that there is a business. Thus Antonio, with his three or four girl helpers, was condemned to pay the same sum as a factory employing a thousand hands. "It is impossible!" shouted Antonio. "We are thus crushed out of existence. I may be able to arrange it, but, if I cannot, then it is no use my going on. All the profits are swallowed up in one gulp. I shall shut down, and sell up everything." Emilio, on the other hand, was flushed with unsullied delight. A pompous man was sitting in his shop with a guitar across his knees. Now and then he drew from it a flourish of arpeggios, very technical, but rather meaningless. Emilio stood over him, his eyes sparkling at the guitar, which appeared to be exquisite in tone and strong in volume. "Aha! my friends, congratulate me," cried he. "I have surpassed myself. Permit me, Señor." He took the guitar from the pompous man, and handed it reverently to Jan. "Try it, only touch it and see what a quality it has. See how the bass note rings out, and how well-balanced to it is the treble. I had no more than set the strings out on to it when Don Feliz, the little maestro whom you know, came in. He played upon it, and so full was my heart with the perfect tone of it, and with the thought that I, Emilio Peralta, had made it, that the tears came running down my face. I wept, Señor, to hear it. All night long I could not sleep for fear that the tone might alter, as sometimes it does. Sometimes, indeed, a guitar newly made sounds of no value, but in a few days or weeks even it may become first rate. But this was good from the beginning, and it has remained so." The pompous man took a stately leave of us. Emilio was so excited by his new achievement that he went on talking: "One does not come to make guitars like this easily. How many are there alive in Spain to-day who could do it? Only one, and I am he. Arias is dead, Raminez also, though I have not seen a Raminez to equal this one. For I will warrant that there are few better guitars than this in Spain. Unluckily, it was sold before it was completed, or I would scarcely have let it go. It was ordered by a colonel in the Army. Play on it, Señor, but do not play Flamenco, for you must not tap upon the soundboard, or you will injure the varnish. This is built for Classical." Jan played, and it gave out a sonorous arid clear melody. "From whom did I learn, Señor? I learned from nobody. My father was a guitar-maker, but a poor one. He taught me nothing. Indeed, I was married before the desire came to me to make fine instruments. Then how I worked, Señor! I had an idea of the perfect guitar in my head; but between idea and accomplishment what a gap! I could not cross it. Of two guitars, made equally alike, one would be good, the other useless. When this happened I would take them to pieces to search for the reason. For years I have lived in poverty, spoiling good wood which cost me all my earnings. I have not studied the guitars of others. Always in my head I carried the idea of the perfect instrument. Slowly I have struggled towards it. Now I know. But at what a cost have I acquired knowledge!" Jan touched a chord on the instrument in his hands, and as it throbbed out its deep responsive note he remembered the saying of Chopin: "Nothing is more beautiful than a good guitar; save perhaps two." Emilio promised to send Professor Feliz to us as soon as he came in; and we walked back to the house through the Murcian mud, which, soaking through our shoes, made us modify our previous eulogy of the alpagata. On barrows in the street they were selling the first culled clusters of dates of the season; we bought both pale and dark varieties, but they were hard and tasteless. With the dates on the barrows were the orange fruit of the persimon. While we had been away at Jijona a cat had taken possession of our house for the purpose of kittening. How she had got in was a mystery, for the windows and doors all had been tightly sealed up, but we had discovered her with her family at the bottom of the packing-cases which had formed our bed at Verdolay. We had heard strange faint sounds as though of mice on the evening of our return. The noises, however, did not cease for all our presence. We had gone to explore; suddenly, a noise like a boxful of exploding matches had burst up from under our noses, and something black dashed across the dimly lit room and out through the window. There were two kittens at the bottom of the narrowest of the packing-cases. We had moved them to a large box near to the window. That night there had been a fearful noise of yowling and squeaking. In the morning we found the kittens back in the box from which we had moved them. The cat was quite unapproachable. She burst out into a fury of spitting whenever we came near. Then with one final explosion hurried from the room. These wild cats were the pest of Murcia. One could leave no window open but they poured into the house. All food had to be securely shut up, the marks of their dusty paws were everywhere. When we returned from Emilio's we found that our presence in the house had been too much for the cat's nerves. She had disappeared from her box and the kittens were gone with her. Don Feliz, the half-blind guitar teacher, came in the evening. He again said he was an honest man, and that his terms were five pesetas a month. He was delighted to hear that we both were to be his pupils. Part of his delight came from the money he would earn; but some of his delight was due to the fact that he had ousted Blas as Jan's teacher. I do not think we have met anybody more inappropriately named than Don Feliz. If Mr. Shandy's theories have any foundation he was cursed from his christening. He was not a Murciano, but a Castilian, and, in consequence, depreciated the people he lived amongst and was in turn not appreciated by them. He lived constantly torn by jealousy of the other guitar-players in the town. "Tell me," he exclaimed, "what do you think of the playing of Don Ambrosio?" Don Ambrosio was the pompous man we had met in Emilio's shop. "Technically, excellent, but rather frigid," we said. "Yes," exclaimed Don Feliz, "that is it. Frigid, yes, frigid! Nor is Don Timoteo a good player, and as for that Blasito, that gipsy--pah! You see, he has never learned music. So that, if he does get a good melody from somebody else, he cannot harmonize it. And his Flamenco is of the taverns. It is low, common music. Now I play Classical. Have you heard my piece which represents a battle? How I imitate the mitrailleuse on the base string? Now that is quite different from anything which that fellow Blas can play. Of course I regret that you wish to learn Flamenco. But that which I will teach you will be a classicized Flamenco. I have made it into music. You see, I have been in a conservatoire in my youth. That puts me on a different level from all these other players. So I have made of my Flamenco something more refined. It is no longer your tavern monstrosity that Blas plays." Personally we preferred Blas as a player, and the music of Blas as music. But Don Feliz was somewhat better as a teacher. His conservatoire had taught him at least the names of the notes. But he was very irritable. Poor fellow, at twopence a lesson, he had to give a round of thirty lessons per day to make a bare subsistence. Sometimes he said that his pupils were so dense that he could teach them but three or four consecutive notes per day. Once we heard him debating with a possible client whether it was worth while or no to walk two miles in order to get three lessons in the same house. Our consciences--concerning sweating--pricked us and we paid him double fees. In consequence of his gratitude he came to our house last of all and gave us lessons of four times the duration of any one else. After he had gone, we were still playing, when Marciana came in with some parcels. "Aha!" she cried. "That is a jota. It is the music of mi pueblo. La jota, La jota." She put down the parcels; spread out her arms and with a balance and elegance extraordinary in one so bulky began to dance. After twenty bars, however, she stopped. "Ei," she sighed, "how sad it is that one grows old. How sad that youth passes all too quickly!" That night a terrific thunderstorm broke over the valley. The thunder crashed, the lightning flared and the rain came down as though pouring from a gigantic hose. In the middle of all the noise we heard a strange sound. "Wah! wah! wah! Squeak! Squeak!" The cat had come back; but with only one kitten. The next morning we stayed in the house. From the windows we could mark the change which autumn had brought over the Paseo de Corveras. The dust was no longer blown along the road, which was now a still river of liquid mud. The town dust-cart, a donkey with panniers, no longer promenaded the street; no longer did we hear the cheerful blasphemy of the dust-boy who, stooping to gather up some refuse, found that his dust-cart had impatiently trotted on. In its place were the exhortations of the pig-drivers, who urged hordes of monstrous black pigs through the mud. Some of the porkers were, however, so heavy on their feet that they had to be brought in carts. The squealing of them filled the morning air. The fruit merchants, also with panniered donkeys, no longer called out "Melacotones, peras!" but "Uvas! Uvas!"[27] and a man wandered about with a huge basket of snails. The maize fields in front of the house were cut and stacked, and in the fields queens of Sheba were dragging the primitive ploughs, while men behind them beat to powder the lumps of baked earth which were turned up. Instead of the almost dead silence which greeted the strengthening sun, people moved about all day; parasols had given place to flirting fans. The country girls wore bunches of flowers in their hair, some even put one tall blossom sticking upright from the _coiffure_, where it nodded and bowed with the movements of the wearer. In the fruit garden the lemons had quite fallen, but the oranges were beginning to become a livid yellow on one side of the bush, while the dates had passed from a pale to a deep golden hue. I went about with Luis exploring balconies for views, and finally decided upon a view of Murcia from the tall campanile of the Cathedral. When I got back I found that the cat once more had decamped, taking the kitten with her. The second kitten had been lost. In the afternoon Luis came in. He brought an invitation from some friends for me to play the piano at their house on Saturday evening. That evening Don Feliz exclaimed: "I have an old guitar. It is a unique instrument, none other like it has ever been seen in Spain. I bought it, at a bargain, for thirty pesetas; but I would sell it to a friend for the same money. Now you, Señor, have no guitar of your own. This is a veritable instrument for a museum. Come and see it on Sunday morning. I will show you the way." We dined at Elias', as was our custom, and trudged back through the mud. On the darkened stairs of our house we heard a wailing and almost tumbled over the spitting cat, which had brought back the kitten once more. We gathered up the kitten and, followed at some distance by the suspicious cat, put it back into the packing-case. All this while we were rather short of electric lights in our house. Antonio had borrowed most of the light-bulbs to decorate a shrine which he had erected in one of the churches. The candle which the righteous once offered up to God is going out of fashion. Nowadays, instead of burning so many feet of bees-wax, one turns on so many volts. Lamb has drawn a picture of two priests disputing as to which should offer up a blessing, with a final compromise that neither should do so; and the disappointment of the defrauded God. To-day he could go further, he could depict the deity being forced to go to the factory chimney for the scent of his burnt sacrifice. A Spanish writer, Pio Baroja, in a novel proposes a society called the "Extra-Rapid to Heaven Assurance Society." The insurer pays in a sum, and on his death hundreds of gramophones are turned on chanting prayers for his speedy deliverance from purgatory. "God," says the author, "is so far away, that he will not notice the substitution." This is, of course, a satire on the modern habit of replacing candles by electric lights, but the satire is no more absurd than the actuality. Alongside of the bridge was a tall shrine built into the side of the house and lit up thus at night with electric light. The image was covered with a large sheet of plate glass, and I said that it was a sculptured figure. Jan, on the other hand, insisted that it was a painting. We had an argument about it and on the next day returned to verify together. It was, in fact, a painting. But at night, returning from Elias', we looked up at the shrine by chance, and stopped, astonished. If it was a painting it was most realistic. We looked more closely. The more we examined it, the more did it seem sculptured. Then the explanation dawned on us. It was sculptured, but during the daytime a painted curtain was drawn down in front of it. At luncheon next day we were disturbed by a hullabaloo from the attic. The wretched cat had taken her kitten up there, to look for peace from those meddlesome humans. That night we were awakened again by terrible noises from under our bed. The cat was still wandering like a lost soul looking for peace. Daily the kitten appeared and disappeared with exasperating irregularity. At last, however, we managed to tame the cat so that we were able to stroke her. Then the animal burst out into the strangest of noises, like a small badly oiled circular saw. It was purring. From that moment it took possession of the house. All its shyness vanished. It tucked up its sleeves and turned out of the house any other feline intruder. One afternoon we were awakened from our siesta by a furious cat fight underneath the bed. The black cat and a ginger-coloured female were locked in combat, and making a noise like a hundred siphons. The battle continued across the sitting-room, the ginger cat giving ground. Finally she retreated to the balcony, where there was for a while armed neutrality, both singing war songs quite Spanish in their intervals. Then the black cat sprang. Ginger backed to avoid the rush, but backed too far. She toppled over into the street, fell with a thud on to the mud pavement, gathered herself together and with a scream of disappointed fury dashed through the nearest open door. To our amazement all the occupants of the house, a young man, an old woman, a girl of seventeen and one of six hurried into the street, their eyes wide open with terror. "What is the matter?" we shouted to them. "A cat with rabies has just rushed into our house," they cried in answer. The fear of rabies is very prevalent, and with reason. One does not pat stray dogs in Spain, nor does one make advances to unknown cats. Any animal which can bite is under suspicion. It is lucky, indeed, that fleas can't get rabies. One Saturday I began sketching in the Cathedral campanile. The ascent of the tower was not by means of steps but by sloping lanes which travelled all round the inner walls. I had chosen my view from the belfry. On each side of me were small bells, and as each in turn clanged out the half or quarter hour according to size I stopped my ears. Suddenly there was a deafening crash. Before I realized what had happened I had fallen from my seat, the easel had gone spinning ... almost fainting from the shock, I looked about me. Over my head an enormous clapper was swinging. Unconsciously, I had seated myself almost inside one of the biggest bells in the south of Spain, and it had rung. The clapper again swung itself with force against the side of the bell, and in spite of my protecting hands the sound burst through my head. For ten minutes afterwards my hand was shaking too violently to allow me to paint. The view from the tower was exquisite. Immediately below me were the blue glazed cupolas and the arabesques of the cathedral facade on which little stone saints gazed out over the town. Then came a large square centred on a circular garden of flowers--edged on one side by the pink front of the Archbishop's palace, many windowed. From the end of the square narrow sunless streets led into the town, which gradually became a patchwork of flat roofs on which smaller buildings were erected. The huge square block of red brick of the Reina Victoria Hotel stood out over the sinuous river, on the banks of which stood the red pepper mills and beyond which showed the huertas stretching out to the mountains. Red, ochre, yellow and green were the chief colour notes, while blue and purple shadows gave relief and solidity to the whole. In the evening I played the piano at the house of Luis' friends. Here was a typical Spanish bourgeois interior. Every resting-place was crowded with cheap bric-à-brac. The chairs were draped with velvet and silk hangings and antimacassars; the walls hung with enormous photographic enlargements, from the decorating of which Flores made some of his living. Card-racks covering the interspaces of the walls were filled with coloured picture postcards. "We have brought you here," said Flores, "because it is just opposite to the Circulo des Varios Artes.[28] The pianist of the Arts Club is very conceited. We want to take him down, by showing him that a Señora can play better than he does." [Illustration] I was rather annoyed; but could not draw back. So I put my best into the music. Grieg (pronounced by them Hriech) seems to suit the Spanish temperament: so I played The Wedding March, Papillion and the Carnival. There was a pause. Then faintly as a retort, from the Circulo des Varios Artes, came the easiest of Grieg's "lyrical pieces" played carefully by the maestro. As if he would say, "I too can play Grieg." On Sunday morning we set off with Don Feliz to see the old guitar. "It is in the house of my novia,[29] whom I shall be delighted to introduce to you." We were amazed. Until that moment we had imagined Don Feliz to be quite an old man, but looking closely at him one could see that he might be within the limit of thirty to forty years. On this second visit to Murcia the people were not so strongly affected by my appearance in the streets. For my part I no longer wore a hat, but carried a parasol; I had exchanged my ordinary dress for an ex-munition overall, which people said was _muy elegante_. But we penetrated into a new part of the town, then was some staring and some pointing. I mentioned this casually to Don Feliz. "Do not fear," he exclaimed, "you are safe with me. I have a terrible reputation in these parts. I am known as a bad man. If I get into a rage, my anger is terrible to see ... terrible. The children slink away in the street at my coming." This was not the estimate we had formed of him, from his encounter with Blas in Emilio's shop. Poor Don Feliz, like so many others he had formed a dream self which contained most of the qualities in which he was lacking. I fear that only his illusive self was terrible, and that none but dream children ever shrank at his passing. The house of his novia bore on its weather-beaten front the arms of some bygone hidalgo; now it was an apartment house. We clambered up staircases of black wood, into one of the few dark-coloured interiors we have seen in Spain. The guitar was of a strange form and with a scrolled head, the curve of its shape having some of the beauty to be found in negro sculpture. Jan seized the bargain, and carried it home. No sooner had he the guitar in the house than he tuned it, and crashing his finger-nails across it, struck out a rasped chord. He quickly followed it with a shout of dismay. From out of one of the big holes had crept a startled bug. After my experience with the church bell I could sympathize with the insect, weeping perhaps "walrus tears" upon its death-bed. But the problem of how one could disinfect a guitar was worrying. The case had no cracks for vermin-harbouring, so we shut up the instrument; and after some indecision Jan decided to trust to luck and leave it alone. On Sunday night we gave a party to Emilio, his wife, the little Professor and other afficianados of the guitar. We played to them selections of genuine classical music, Bach, Beethoven, Handel on the gramophone. Don Feliz sat by himself in a corner, his head in the air, tapping his foot to the metre. "All that, all that I have heard before," he said. Emilio listened with delight on his rugged face. Every few minutes he whispered to his wife: "Shut up talking. This is worth listening to." Then we tried an experiment. We had just received from El Señor a plate of Stravinsky's "Oiseau du Feu." We put it on to the machine. The audience kept an intense silence. "But that is marvellous!" they exclaimed as soon as the record was over. "Play it once more, Señor." "Señor," said one of Emilio's friends, "what can I do for you? Have you any milk--no?" He ran downstairs and out of the house. In ten minutes he came back, thrust a milk-can into Jan's hands. "There!" he exclaimed. "And if you want any more cow's milk, come to me. I keep a milk-shop, you know." Then he went on more seriously: "But you are indeed lucky to have bought that old guitar of Don Feliz. He would never sell it to me. I have offered a hundred pesetas for it; and there are others who have offered more." This left us with a problem in psychology to work out for the next few days. Why had Don Feliz sold Jan the guitar? We put the question to Luis. "Oh," he answered, "probably Don Feliz found the Señor Juan sympathetic." But this did not satisfy us. Don Feliz had made much of the fact that we were leaving the country: that we were going far away. At last we worked it out thus. Don Feliz had bought his novia a laud. He was short of money to pay for it. This, however, would not have been enough reason in itself, but he was also jealous of the other players in the town, and by selling the guitar definitely to Jan he would first allay the temptation that he might sell it locally. He put the price low, because he knew we were badly off; but some of the wrench of parting with the instrument--of which he was very proud--was eased by knowing that it was going to be taken to the grand cities of London and Paris, where its uniqueness would be valued. But we think he would have died of starvation rather than allow one of his local rivals to possess his old guitar. When I was not sketching in the campanile, Jan and I went to the cafés and drew the people sitting about us. This gave delight to the waiters. One morning while we were at one of the café's facing the river Blas came up. He passed over the fact that we had quarrelled, and that Jan had dropped him for Don Feliz. "Draw me!" said Blas. The result was that one by one all the richest gipsies of the town came and posed to me at the café tables. This was, in fact, the gipsies' café. They were on the whole a handsome set of men, very intelligent and shrewd in expression and of prosperous appearance. Most of these carried the indefinable touch which makes an internationalism amongst those who are interested in beasts of burden. They are reputed to be expert cattle and horse thieves, and are still to some extent despised by the Spaniard. But our first impressions were not unfavourable. [Illustration] [Illustration] The autumn seemed to be a period of fiesta. We had luckily just missed the great fiesta of Murcia which culminates with a huge procession out to Fuen Santa in the mountains. But often we were awakened at three in the morning by a series of alarming reports and explosions in the street outside. There was a large church at the end of the Paseo de Corveras, and it seemed as though guns were going off all around the walls. The first time we heard this we sprang to our windows, for we had heard something of the quarrelsome nature of the Murcians. But the explosions were up in the air. Rocket after rocket soared up into the air and exploded with a loud crash, then large zigzag crackers were thrown down into the street. Grumbling at the noise, we went back to bed. Next day we found out that it was a fiesta, the rockets sent up by the priests; and often after that we were awakened in the dead of night by these almost Chinese religious ceremonies. We had heard much of the quarrelsome nature of the huertanos. Luis and Flores had both told us tales of quarrels amongst the cultivators. Both at Verdolay and in Murcia we had seen small bands of young men wandering about at eventide with guitars and songs. They were hunting for trouble, and if they should meet another band, then a fight ensued, ending with broken instruments and possibly a stab or two. One afternoon Jan was walking homewards from Emilio's, where he had been buying guitar-strings. He was close to the Paseo de Corveras, when a young man rushed round a corner and cannoned hard into him. Jan stumbled and to save himself clutched the man by the coat. It was a corner around which youths were accustomed to lark, and Jan, believing this to be a piece of horse-play, decided, while yet stumbling and clutching, that the horse-play was too rough. So dragging at the blouse of the man, who struggled to escape, Jan exhorted him to come back and to explain himself. While he was still holding on to the man, a crowd burst around the corner and flung itself on to the presumed joker. Jan's head was in a whirl. One man leapt fiercely on to the joker's back, wrenched his arms behind him and grasped him. The struggling crowd swayed to and fro and suddenly lurched sideways through the door of a tobacconist's shop. Two women in the shop began to shriek at the upper pitch of their voices. The turmoil quietened. A furious talk began in the shop. The young man who had pinioned the joker, trying to explain, loosened his grip to use his hands conversationally. At once the joker leapt for freedom. He ran, panting like a dog, out of the shop, the crowd bellowing, amid screaming, at his heels. The man was chased into an ironmonger's, where he took refuge behind the counter. The crowd blocked up the doorway. Jan, who had joined the crowd in dismayed curiosity, then began to pick up detached words: "Asesino, Asesino ... asesinato." "Good Lord!" said Jan to himself. "I don't want to get mixed up in a murder trial." As he turned away, two gendarmes, with the ridiculous schoolgirl hats on their heads, led the murderer away. During this time I had been at home. A sudden outburst of noise dragged me to the window. Down the street, a man was running. He went in a queer way, holding himself between the legs with his hands, and sometimes stumbling, sometimes leaping as one does in dreams of pursuit. Carts were driven furiously after him. He was shouting out in a voice, full of surprise and of anger. After a moment I made out the words: "Catch the man who has murdered me! Catch the villain who has killed me!" He stumbled once more and fell. Men jumped from the carts, lifted him into one, and drove him away. I ran downstairs. Antonio's gaunt mother-in-law was standing in the doorway. "It is an assassination," she said. "I doubt that the poor man will live. He was stabbed in a ticklish part." "I wonder where Jan is," I said to myself; and at that moment saw him coming along the sidewalk. I ran to him. "Jan," I cried, "a man has been murdered." "I know," he answered; "I unwittingly caught the murderer." The Paseo de Corveras must have more than its fair percentage of fat old women. They all stood on their doorsteps talking in awed tones of the tragedy. Then with a ludicrous unanimity each pushed her skirts between her legs with a dramatic hand and holding herself so that she plainly illustrated her meaning exclaimed, "Ei! el pobre! Y en un sitio tan delicado." FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 26: My village.] [Footnote 27: "Peaches, Pears!" but "Grapes! Grapes!"] [Footnote 28: The Arts Club of Murcia.] [Footnote 29: Betrothed.] CHAPTER XXVI LORCA We still had money for another three weeks, although we had been four months in Spain. The weather in Murcia was very cold; damp, chilling winds blew down the valley. We decided to go westwards, to explore Lorca, which we had heard was both fine pictorially and also which was called "the City of the Sun." On suggesting the idea to some of our Murcian friends, they advised us not to go. "It is a town of bad people," they said; "they are all gipsies." We had heard before of these towns of bad people. One lay on the far side of the Murcian valley; a village which clustered round the foot of the peak of rock on the top of which was a ruined castle. These people had the reputation of chasing out intruding strangers with sticks and stones. Antonio, fishing in the vicinity of this village, had once been maltreated. The villagers were proud of this brutality. "Yes," they would say, "we _are_ brutes. We _are_ uncultivated. We are the biggest brutes for fifty miles around, and we mean to remain so." Other people had said that Lorca was charming. So we decided to find out for ourselves. We hoped to find rooms in a posada, and we reduced our luggage to moderate dimensions; most of it we put in the van, leaving ourselves only the guitar and the laud to look after. The train left early in the morning, and stopped at the first station, where we had to change. We rushed across the line, having to clamber under a long train of waggons which blocked the way, and won corner seats. A lanky boy of eighteen, dressed in a long white travelling ulster, with a _béret_ on his head, took most of the other seats in the carriage, filling them with packages. The young man seemed very familiar with railway travelling: he called all the porters by name, and exchanged smokes with the engine-driver. But the train did not move. Presently the youth came back and said: "The engine is a bad one. It won't start. They are sending to Murcia for another." He went away once more. A luggage train rumbled into the station. This brought our boy back with a rush. "Here," he cried, "spread out, spread out as much as you can. It's an agricultural train, and we shall be swamped with labourers." He pushed his boxes and packages more widely over the seats. His prediction was justified. A horde of unshaven men, carrying sacks and implements clambered up the side of the train and peered with round eyes into the windows. "No room here, no room here," cried the youth. "But there is nobody in the carriage," protested one of the agriculturists. "They are in the fonda," said the youth. In spite of the energies of officials accommodation could not be found. Soon the agriculturists were wailing their protests, wandering forlornly up and down. At last the heart of our youth was softened. "Here," he cried. "Room for two. Got to let some in," he added to us in an undertone, "or they'll push the lot in on us." The two who accepted the invitation were very subservient, almost cringing, and we stowed their sacks and other luggage between our legs. They talked together in hoarse whispers. In time most of the peasants were placed, but one man who carried an enormous sack of potatoes seemed to be unplaceable, for he refused to be parted from his sack. The officials said the sack was too big for carriage traffic: it ought to go in the van. But no protestation moved the owner. He was determined that, come what might, he and his sack would never part. Eventually, as usually happens in Spain, he was allowed to do as he liked. He and his sack were crushed into another carriage. Then ensued another dreary wait, and at last, three hours late, the train drew out of Alcantarilla. As soon as we were well under way, the youth said: "I'm off to a second-class carriage." He opened the carriage door, got down on to the running board and clambered off. After half an hour he returned. "They collect tickets round about here," he said. Sure enough within ten minutes came the ticket collector. The train stopped at a station. The youth got out on to the platform with a carriage whip and a square parcel, which he handed to a waiting man, for which service he received money. This he did at other stations, and gradually we realized what was his occupation. In one part of Murcia we had noted shops which called themselves Agencies. They had large notices saying, "Commissions for Lorca, for Barcelona, for Zaragoza, etc., etc." We had not understood their purport, but by some jump of intuition connected the youth with these shops. He was the only Spanish substitute for the parcels post. At Totana two gipsy women came into the carriage, very friendly and talkative. At the next station the two workmen left us. In the carriage they had appeared good-humoured, inadequate morsels of humanity. But they descended into the bosoms of their family. Wives and daughters crowded round them and seized and shouldered their bags, packs, sacks and implements. The men seemed to swell out like a dry thing cast into water, blooming like a dead sea lily as they stood receiving the caresses of their womenfolk. The last we saw of the more insignificant of the two was a picture of him striding like a king along the dusty road to the village with his family in humble though happy procession behind. Well does the Spanish proverb say, "It is better to be the head of a mouse than the tail of a lion." [Illustration] Two gendarmes--greenish khaki in uniform, with the schoolgirlish helmets--armed with rifles took the place of the peasants. The younger gipsy woman addressed them. One of the gendarmes grunted, the other glared his eye round and said nothing. Again she made a remark, and again there was no reply. Then she said: "But it _was_ you who arrested José." "Well," answered the gendarme with a beard, "what of it? "But why did you arrest him?" said the gipsy. "He was innocent. He did not murder Ramon." "So you say." "But it is true. He is a cousin of Conchita here. He was at her house that evening. There is no evidence." "There was enough to get him arrested." "But that was all made up. You see, Esteban hates him, and Esteban got up that false evidence. You look up what Esteban was doing. I don't say that he was the murderer, but he knows something about it." "Yes, he knew that José did it." "But I tell you José was with Conchita here." "Well, tell that to the Judge. It is nothing to do with me. I was told to arrest José and I arrested him. Hum"--he looked at Conchita--"I suppose she is going to see him now?" "Yes, we are going to see José. Poor fellow, and him innocent." "Well, if his defence is all right, he'll get off. If it isn't, he won't--that's all." We did not think that José's neck was in any danger. We had gained an impression that the average sentence for casual murder in Spain is about two or three years' imprisonment. This conversation went on for some time. The gipsies talked round the subject, over it, under it, twisted it inside out and outside in. With all these variations it lasted till we arrived at Lorca, when we all, gipsies, gendarmes, agency boy and ourselves, got down from the train. We put our luggage into the luggage-room and set out to look for the town, which we had learned by experience would be found at some distance from the station. A boy who carried a rope over his shoulder accosted us, but we declined his services. We strode out into a dusty road, and there stood undecided, for there were two paths to choose from. The boy with the rope, who now had a huge box on his shoulders, came up, and saying, "Follow me, Señores," walked on. We looked at him and realized that here again we had touched the East. Here was a cord porter straight out of _The Arabian Nights_. The rope was round the box and he held it to his shoulders. With his rope he earned his living. We followed him, asking him for some place where we could eat. He named the dearest hotel at once. We declined, explaining that we wanted the cheapest possible, that is, as long as the cooking was fit to eat. "I understand," he said. "Follow me." The long avenue of lime trees came to an end--and our first view of Lorca was opened out. The town was almost like a mathematical line, length without breadth. It skirted the foot of a hill for three miles, almost one long street, which we were looking at end on. Spires towered into the air, and on the top of the cliff the walls of a great Saracen ruin overlooked the town. The whole hill-side, between town and castle, was covered with the grotesque foliage of the prickly pear. The cord porter took us down to the river, which was crossed by a plank, then up into the town. He led us through small streets which fringed the great main street, put down his box at a corner, led us up another street and stopped at a high barricaded gate. Two filthy children were playing on the step. The cord porter rapped with his knuckles. There was no answer. He rapped again loudly. A hoarse voice cried out in questioning reply. "It's Paco," shouted the porter. "I've got two customers here." A quarrel ensued through the keyhole. There was a sound of a rusty lock and the door swung open. A woman heated with cooking and with annoyance began to curse the cord porter. "Why couldn't you bring them to the proper entrance?" she cried. But she let us in, took us through a yard in which huge stew-pots and frying-pans were cooking over a wood fire, and ushered us upstairs, past rooms filled with workmen diners, into a long chamber lit by a window at one end, with bullfight posters on the walls. She brought us a plate of stew and wine. We asked for bread. "Why didn't you bring your own?" she said. "We did not know," we answered. "Oh, all right. I'll give you bread this time. But, next time, bring your own bread with you." We thought, "Lorca is a rough place." There was a sound of loud chaffing, and in walked our agency boy of the train. "Hullo," he exclaimed to us. "Are you here?" "Yes," we answered. "And, now we see you here, we are sure this is the best place." He grinned, chucked the waitress under the chin, and ordered a complex meal. As soon as the staff perceived our acquaintance with the agency boy, their manners changed. They became charming, inquiring after our need with a lively solicitude. We asked the diners about a posada. A bluff man, with a walrus moustache, seated at the same table, said the posada at which he was staying was comfortable. "When you have finished your meal," he said, "I will lead you there and introduce you to the proprietor, an excellent fellow. But you come unluckily. To-day is market day. There are many farmers in from the country, and it is possible that you will find difficulties." As we went out the waitress came running after us. "You have left your bread behind," she cried. With our new friend we went off. But the posada was full for the night. "There is another one, we will look at that," said our guide. "If the other is full also, you shall have my room, and I will find a bed somewhere until a room is free. Tomorrow the place will be emptier." On the way to the second posada, we fell in once more with the cord porter. "You are looking for rooms," he cried. "Why didn't you tell me before? I know of a splendid place. I will lead you there." [Illustration] "Perhaps that will be better," said the man. "I do not think the other posada would really suit you. They say it is the meeting-place of loose women. You understand?" The cord porter took us to a house outside of which were about ten hen-coops. In the midst of the coops an old woman was sitting on a low chair. She was an extraordinary shape; like a Chinese lucky image, Hotei. Her knees were perched on the rung of the chair, and so large was her stomach that it rose in front of her like a balloon, coming in its highest part well to the level of her chin. She looked dingy and unwashed, but we could not well draw back, for the cord porter had told her our needs. The obese woman stood up, balancing her fantastic stomach by a backward bend of the spine. She had two rooms, one with a single bed, one with a couple. The single bed was small, the ceiling looked as if it were not innocent of vermin. We chose the double-bedded room after the conventional bargaining. "You will indeed be better there," said our friend. "Two beds are better than one." The cord porter was commissioned to fetch our luggage and we went off with the other man. We had invited him to take coffee with us. He preceded us to a small _buvette_, and the waiter showed us into a room partitioned into private boxes by means of canvas screens. "Here one is at one's ease," said our acquaintance. We told him that we were painters. "I am a zapatero,"[30] he said. "I have been here some weeks looking for work. My proper town is Aguilas, though I was born here. But Aguilas is not large. There was another zapatero in the town. The people all took their work to him. They said, 'He is a fool, but you are clever. Therefore he can make a living only where he is known, and where folks sympathize with him; while you can easily make good elsewhere.' So I had to come away. But times are bad. They say that there are too many zapateros in Lorca already. "Times are so bad in Lorca," he went on, "that I don't expect you will do the business here that you hope. Now, if you are the painters you ought to be, I have a proposal to make. You come with me to some towns I know of down the coast. You will put up your easel in the main street, and will paint, and I will sell lottery tickets at three goes for the real. We will do a splendid business. I can assure you that." Had the offer come at another moment we would have jumped at the chance of the fun. But we had a London Exhibition hanging over our heads. We dared not waste the time. This we explained to the zapatero, adding also our regrets and how well the idea would have gone in the book we were projecting. His expression altered at once. "Books?" said he. "You are book people?" "Yes." "But," he persisted, "you don't mean to say that you are that kind of persons? Not with _those_ books that Englishmen come selling. You are book people"--his voice rose with indignation--"you have to do with those Bibles!" Shades of Borrow! we roared with laughter. Somewhat reassured the zapatero resumed his seat. We explained. "Ah," he said, "I did not think that you could be that sort of persons and yet ... You are English. I," he added proudly, "am an Atheist! Of course I let my little boy read _that_ book, one has to learn to read somehow. But I say to him, 'Don't believe it. Use it if you like, but don't be taken in by it.'" We went back to the house to find that our luggage had arrived. A button was coming loose from my boot, so the zapatero borrowed needle and cotton and sewed it on professionally. Then, as he said he liked the guitar, we took out our instruments and began to play. The female Hotei ran into the entrada waving her hands. "Oh, oh," she cried, "you mustn't play here! You mustn't play here! The owner of this house died three days ago, so we cannot allow any music here. It would show the greatest disrespect." We said au revoir to the zapatero, and went out to examine Lorca. The houses on one side of the long street had swelled up the hill towards the Saracen castle. Through this we went clambering upwards. In appearance it was the oldest town we had seen. The houses were of all shapes, but of a uniform colour, like yellow rust, and the earth was of the same tint. The houses piled themselves up in fine shapes, but Lorca suffered from the same drawback as Murcia, a drawback we had feared: it was too big. Had we attempted to sketch in the streets we should have been swamped by people as I had been in the market-place. The streets were full of men sitting in groups making alpagatas. They called out after us as we passed. The songs were different from those of Murcia or Jijona. Here is one, a guajiras which a woman was singing: "Love is an insect Which enters the body, And no rest is left there When it takes possession. It gnaws like a wood-louse The tree where it burrows; And in time it devours Volition and strength, Leaving only desires For the one who is worshipped." We scrambled up to the castle and from thence found a view of the surrounding country. On the south there was a passage not unlike that of Murcia, a flat cultivated valley; but to the north it looked as though giants had been at mining operations. The hills looked not like the result of nature but of artifice, they appeared to be huge mine dumps and slag heaps. It was fantastic and unpaintable. The town itself was too much like the conventionally picturesque mud coloured compositions of Southern Europe that every painter brings back from his travels, and we decided that Lorca was not a painting ground for us; and that we would go back to Murcia on the following day, looking for some suitable spot at which to paint on the homeward route to Barcelona. We came down by a different path, passing a cluster of seven white hermitages built on a square plateau. They were small box-like structures, and once, we believe, hermits did live in them, but now they are deserted. We reached Mrs. Hotei's house both tired and hungry. A crowd of women in black had just returned from the landlord's funeral. They consented to boil us some eggs for supper, which we ate under Mrs. Hotei's piercing eyes. From the ceiling of the supper-room hung clusters of quinces, and on the mantelpieces were some interesting specimens of antique Spanish pottery. We went to bed early, and to our dismay found that one of the beds had been taken away. There was no washing apparatus in the room, and the window looking on to the road was curtained by an old dirty sack. "Well," said we, "we are in for it. Pray Heaven that there are no bugs." As we were about to undress we heard scuffling and giggling which drew our attention to another drawback, one to which we would not submit. There was a second door to our room, half glazed, and the glass was covered by a hanging drapery. But this drapery, which was outside the glass, had been pulled aside, and a row of faces of curious children were staring in on us. We rang the bell. The daughter of Mrs. Hotei was half surprised at our objection to publicity and that we were so squeamish about undressing as a popular spectacle. But we persuaded her to pin up a pink shawl on our side of the door, and we then went to bed. To bed, but not to sleep. The bed was distressingly narrow. We could remain in it by clinging together, but if we loosened our grip, one or the other began to roll out. After some while Jan had ideas of getting out and of sleeping on the floor, but the floor was of stone and the only mat in the room was small and circular. Our determination to leave Lorca strengthened as the night wore on. At last we found a partial solution, we lashed ourselves together with the blankets. When sheer weariness was making us doze off, a man upstairs began to take off his boots. The floors were thin, and he seemed to be a centipede. Boot after boot he hurled into a corner, but even his feet were not inexhaustible, and at last we slept fitfully. We awoke very early, grateful at least that no bugs had disturbed us. In spite of the many warnings we had had of the verminous condition of Spain, it has not been our experience to encounter in the provinces of Murcia and Alicante even as much insect life as one might easily find in Chelsea. Fleas, of course, there are, but in a hot dusty country fleas are to be expected. Washing things were brought on demand, though I think they had expected us to wash at the public sink in the outhouse. Then we breakfasted on bread, coffee and grapes, while Mrs. Hotei sat by resting her stomach on the edge of the table and chanting in a hollow voice a pæan of her own virtues. It ran somewhat thus: "I am la gorda, The fat one of Lorca. My stomach is ill. Of an illness which makes it Swell up like a football. But my heart has no illness; It is sound, it is loving, And makes no distinctions Between different peoples. "I am la gorda, The fat one of Lorca. My home is well known Because of its cheapness And the love of a mother, Which I shed o'er my lodgers. Nowhere else will you Find meals of such richness Or cooking so luscious For people whose purses Are small in dimensions. "I am la gorda, The fat one of Lorca. My house is so loved by The folk of the district That _my_ bedrooms never One moment are empty. I'll give you an instance: Last night, for example, Each bed carried double And would have contained more Could one but compress folks To smaller dimensions. "I am la gorda, The fat one of Lorca. Those who once come here Come back again, always. My card I will give you That you may remember That Lorca possesses A kind-hearted mother, Or, anyhow, one who Will fill that position As long as you settle The bill she presents you." In this plain song she explained both the disappearance of our second bed and the centipedal man upstairs. When she had finished we broke to her the news of our imminent departure. We lunched once again at the eating-house, which this day was full of peasants. Three women in black who might have stepped out of the pages of the Bible faced us. They were not friendly in manner. A small soldier, half tipsy, came in and, soon after him, the agency youth. The latter began to tease the tipsy soldier, and in a short while both had pulled out knives and were threatening each other in mock earnestness. But one could see that it needed little--an accidental word, a sentence misunderstood--to swing the drunken soldier over from joking to earnest. We took coffee at a café in the central street. La gorda rolled up the street, came to our table, and accepted a glass of anis dulce for the illness of her stomach. We set off to the station followed by a small boy wheeling our luggage on a barrow. As I went people shouted after me: "Sombrero, Sombrero." The train was, of necessity, late. We sat down in the station hall, and the gipsy woman who had come from Totana joined us. A blind woman led by a child took up her position at the booking-office exit, cunningly begging from the folk as they were handling their small change. The small child had one bad eye and was wiping both eyes with the same handkerchief. One could see that she, too, was threatened with blindness. The zapatero came, having dined at a friend's house. A good deal of farm produce was being prepared for the train. There were crates of chickens, which were thrown about from hand to hand; but some unfortunate turkeys were not even as lucky as the hens. About twenty of them were packed loosely into a large net bag. The porter picked up each bag and, the turkeys squeaking loudly, pitched it up to a man who was standing in the truck. The bags were packed one on the top of another with a total lack of consideration for the turkeys' feelings. There is no S.P.C.A. in Spain. Jan told the zapatero that if he were coming to Murcia he could give him an address which might be useful. He then wrote Antonio's name and direction, which the zapatero accepted almost with reverence. Jan went off to the ticket-office, while I, aided by the zapatero, found a carriage in the train, which had just arrived. The gipsy woman came with us; and an old man also got into the carriage. Up and down the platform a hawker was walking with a broad basket over his arm. He was selling thin circular cakes. I bought five, one for each person in the carriage. The old man accepted the cake which I offered him, took a large bite, ruminated for a moment over it and remarked: "These cakes value nothing." The zapatero and the gipsy woman each took a bite. Opinion seemed unanimous. I then bit in my turn. The cake had a queer taste: it was something like a thin cold muffin flavoured with cayenne pepper. The gipsy woman collected the cakes, each with a bite out of it (like the mad hatter's saucer), and put them into her basket, saying, "Oh, the children won't grumble at them." But I was determined that Jan should have the experience. As he came out of the ticket-office he was intercepted by the cake-sellers, who said to him: "Señor, you have a wife, who is a remarkable woman." The old man turned to the zapatero. "Who are these people?" he demanded. The zapatero began to give an account of us. "They are painters," he said; "they travel about the country making pictures with paint and brushes, not with a machine. Not content with that they are amateur musicians, and can play. There are their instruments. But better than all this they can read and write; and what is more I can prove it." With an air of pride he drew from his bosom the card on which Jan had written Antonio's address. The old man took it. He perched a pair of horn spectacles on his nose and read the address through from end to end. Then he handed the treasure back solemnly to the zapatero. "And very well done too," he said. We said good-bye to the zapatero, and the train drew out of the station some two hours late. Gradually the night darkened. There was a long wait at Alcantarilla, and we arrived at Murcia within the four hours' limit which one must place on the Spanish time-table. We left our van luggage to be collected in the morning, and carrying our instruments in our hands walked back to the Paseo de Corveras. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 30: Bootmaker.] CHAPTER XXVII MURCIA--LAST DAYS Next morning we sent Marciana to tell Jesus, the water-carrier, to bring our registered luggage from the station. After a long delay she came back saying that no luggage with a number corresponding to that of the receipt was to be found. We set off through the mud to the station, and after having suffered from some lack of courtesy on the part of one or two of the clerks we were able to convince ourselves that Jesus had spoken the truth. Our luggage, consisting of a suit-case, a rucksack and a hold-all, containing all our warm clothes, our painting materials, all our drawings of the past five months, was missing. We were assured that we had nothing to be anxious about. The next train from Lorca would arrive about six-thirty, and the things which _must_ have been left behind at Lorca would come on by it. But the Spanish reassurances had no foundation, the baggage did not come, and the baggage officials confessed themselves astounded. "Such a thing," they said, "has never happened before." The station-master, a short, portly, grumpy fellow, at first refused to listen to our complaints. When at last we compelled him to do so, he shrugged his shoulders and said, "It is a fatality." After some pressing, however, he consented to telegraph to Lorca, and to telephone to Alcantarilla, the junction. The next day no news was forthcoming of our luggage, and the station-master was hostile. He saw in us persons who were troubling the peaceful round of his easy duties. The other station officials said plainly the baggage had gone to Madrid by mistake, or perhaps to Carthagena. But neither Lorca, Alcantarilla, Madrid nor Carthagena would confess knowledge of our errant luggage. We were indeed in rather an awkward situation. We had reserved just enough money with which to travel homewards, but were now faced with the prospect of a long stay in Murcia waiting till our luggage was found and, if it continued missing, with the purchase of many necessary articles which we now lacked. For instance, we had no boots, having made the journey in alpagatas. By this time, of course, Antonio, and indeed, through the agency of Marciana and of Jesus, the whole quarter had learned of our misfortune. Antonio arranged for a meeting with a clerk of some commercial firm. This clerk's chief occupation seemed to be the pestering of the Spanish railways for lost objects, and he entered with gusto into our affair. He made us work out a list of our losses and added on a thousand pesetas to our total, which he said was ridiculously underestimated. Then we went, backed by Antonio, to the railway station. "What do you want?" snarled the station-master, as he saw us appear once more. "These Señores have come to make a claim," said Antonio. "Ha ha!" said the station-master, grinning. "They won't be able to do so. They are foreigners, and will not be able to write it out properly." "Pardon me," answered the clerk. "I am here to write it properly in their names, and they will sign it. This will be sufficient." After a short argument the station-master gave way. He took us into an office and spread out before us a large book. It seemed that the railway companies had made ample provision for recording losses. The clerk opened it, tucked up his sleeves, squared his elbows, and in careful orthography began to shape on the page a complex document, full of Spanish equivalents for "whereas" and "wherefore." When the signing was completed we went home. "I have given them a week in which to find the luggage," said the clerk. "After that delay is over, they will have to pay you. Even if the luggage is recovered the day after the week is up, you may refuse it, and demand the cash in its place." We went home to count up our diminishing resources: "Here is a week," said we, "here are two pairs of boots." We had heard rumours of boats which travelled round the coast, and understanding these to be cheaper than the railways we made inquiries; but Murcia was just too far from the sea to be interested in shipping, and we had to give up the idea of reaching France by this means. Murcia was bitterly cold during those days of waiting. Our warmer underclothes were lost with the luggage, and our friend's house, wonderfully cool on the hottest day of summer, was frigid in the damp, rainy autumn. We had nothing to do, for all our materials were missing, and one could not make excursions on foot, because the roads were deep in mud. So we waited, shivering, until we could escape from a country which had no suitable appliances for warming its chilled inhabitants. We at last came to the end of the week's grace, and the luggage had not appeared. So, finding that the process of extracting payment from the railways was going to be a long one, we decided to give Antonio a power of attorney to manage the affair for us. We were assured that payment would certainly be made eventually, though with a little delay. Antonio took charge of arrangements to draw up the necessary papers, while we set to packing what remained to us of luggage, including the large Sevillian basin given to us by La Merchora. At last everything was ready; on the following day we were to sign the papers in the presence of a lawyer, and the next day we were to set out for Alicante by the morning train. On the morning of the last day, while we were sewing La Merchora's Sevillian basin into a huge rush basket which was to protect it from damage on the journey, we looked out of the window and saw, somewhat to our dismay, a fat, familiar figure strolling along the pavement. The bootmaker had arrived from Lorca hunting for work. In spite of a feeling of gratitude which we entertained towards him for the help he had given us at Lorca, we could not but wish that he had come at some other time. Our day would be as full as we could well manage. The complications which might be added by having to dance attendance on the zapatero filled us with dismay. To our relief the bootmaker sauntered on towards the town. Selfishly we hoped that he would leave us alone. We had told Antonio about him, and both Luis and Flores had promised to help him to find work when he arrived. Commissions called us into the town, and we slunk along the streets, spying for a portly form. But upon our return we met it, coming out of Antonio's house. Our Fate could not be avoided, so we asked him in to a simple lunch, at which we put before him, amongst other things, a large dish of especially selected olives which we had bought to take back with us to England. The zapatero approved so much of our taste in olives that, to our dismay, he almost finished up our store; and in consequence we had to waste more of our precious time in buying a new supply. We might indeed have saved ourselves the trouble: we were fated to reach England without olives, for the bottle holding them was afterwards forgotten and left in a railway waiting-room. After lunch we dismissed the zapatero, hinting to him as broadly as we could that we now had a lot to do, but that we would be delighted to see him at about seven o'clock, by which time our business would be over. However, when at three o'clock we called at Antonio's house to bring him to the lawyer's office at which the power of attorney was to be signed, the zapatero was sitting comfortably in one of the rocking-chairs awaiting our arrival. We suggested to him that we had business to attend to. He replied that he would accompany us into the town. So Antonio, the clerk, the zapatero, Jan and I set out for the lawyer's office. We had expected the bootmaker to leave us on the threshold, but he stalked gravely in our rear, and introduced himself to the lawyer's clerks as a friend of the family. The lawyer's office was a large apartment with a black and white tiled floor, at one end of which was the clerk's table and at the other that of the lawyer. He was a thick-set man covered with a huge golfing cap in loud checks. Over his head was suspended from the ceiling, with outstretched wings, a stuffed and dilapidated eagle from which generations of moth had stolen all hint of beauty. We discovered that this eagle, in some form or another, is the recognized trademark of the lawyer. One is tempted to wonder if this bird of prey hovers thus emblematically over the head of the man of law as a sort of symbolic warning to the simple-minded peasants. The legal preliminaries were brought to a stop by the discovery that Jan had forgotten the passports; so, while he set off in a hurry to get them, we sat around in an uncomfortable circle. Meanwhile the chill from the tiled floor crept upwards through my feet. To break the silence the lawyer began to pay me the usual compliments on my Castilian. Immediately in came the zapatero. "She is a talented lady," he exclaimed. "Not only does she speak English in addition to our language, but she can paint pictures, and play on musical instruments. These I have seen and heard myself. Furthermore, she has other talents: she can read and write, and so can her husband. In case you do not believe this latter statement I can prove it." [Illustration] Whereupon he pulled from his pocket the address which Jan had written for him at Lorca and, unfolding it with some solemnity, placed it on the lawyer's desk. The latter, perceiving nothing humorous in the zapatero's action, read the writing gravely and handed it back with expressions of approval. But the arrival of Jan with the passports by no means seemed to satisfy the lawyer. He turned the papers over and over and said that with these nothing could be done. After much difficulty we discovered that no justice could be claimed in Spain unless one were registered at the municipal offices. The tax for registration depended upon one's station and possessions. There was just time, with luck, to get ourselves registered before the offices were shut; so, fearful that we should miss another day, we hurried through the narrow Murcian streets, led by Antonio and followed by the bootmaker. On the way a sudden doubt attacked Jan. His passport name is Godfrey Jervis, but he generally signs himself by his pen-name of "Jan." Thoughtlessly he had signed the claim in the station book "Jan" and was afraid that if this name was not entered in the other papers a legal flaw might be entailed. The municipal registry office was a long, dark passage pierced with small, square, deep-set pigeon-holes and about large enough to admit the passage of a head. Through one of these holes we made our claim, asking for tramps' certificates--the cheapest of all. My municipal paper was filled in easily enough, but we had a tough struggle to induce the official to alter "Godfrey Jervis" to "Jan." At first, as is official habit, he was hidebound, but in Spain by persistence one can achieve anything. In turn Jan, myself, Antonio and the zapatero, thrust a head through the hole adding urging to expostulation. Luckily the passport name was not very clearly written, and at last the official admitted a compromise: he put "Godfrey Jan," and our spirits rose once more. Back we went to the lawyer's office, where, with some delays, and the expenditure of eighteen pesetas, we turned Antonio into our representative against the railway companies. We may add that one year and six months have passed since then; we have since paid twenty-two pesetas more for another document; and a few months ago we were informed that possibly our case would come up for settlement next year.[31] Before the night was over we also learned to our satisfaction that Luis had found a job for the zapatero, and that Antonio had got him a bedroom at the small confectioner's in a street close by. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 31: At the time of going to press we have just received a message from Spain. The Spanish authorities announce a _happy_ ending to the trouble. Our luggage has been discovered at Alcantarilla, four miles from Murcia, where it has been all the while.] CHAPTER XXVIII THE ROAD HOME We set out on our journey home next morning. The bootmaker, who arrived at the house almost before we were dressed, came with us to the station, where he presented us with a large packet of angels-hair cakes as sustenance for the journey. This favourite Murcian delicacy, made from the inside of a gourd, has a stringy consistency and a sickly flavour. The zapatero had secured them "on tick" from the confectioner's where he was lodging. As we take leave of him, we may summarize his subsequent history as we drew it by hints and half-made revelations from Antonio and his companions. I am afraid that the zapatero's account of his departure from his village may have been invention. In Murcia he revealed himself as a man who was work-shy. He borrowed money to get his tools, he got advances on his wages, he arrived late to work, he ran up a large bill at the confectioner's; and then, one fine morning, decamped. This much we gathered. Antonio would never tell us, but I believe that he himself paid the confectioner's bill after the zapatero's disappearance; but to what extent our friends had suffered we could never learn. As we had just finished breakfast we put the angels-hair cakes into our haversack. But under the strain of travel the flimsy paper bag in which they were packed went to pieces, the angels-hair spread itself in fibrous stickiness all over the contents of the haversack. We felt no gratitude to the zapatero for his parting gift. Our resources, despite an extra hundred pesetas borrowed from Antonio, were at a low ebb, and, after some tedious searching of a Spanish railway guide, we had decided to make our way home up the east coast of Spain to Barcelona and thence to Paris. This route was cheaper than that through Madrid. In addition, we could travel by night, spending our days in the towns, and thus dodge the expenses of hotels. We travelled, of course, third class because of cheapness, and because of the interest which was always to be found amongst one's fellow passengers. The journey was cold on account of our thin clothes, and in spite of our hopes the carriages were so full and the interchanges of passengers so frequent that we could get no sleep. After two days and nights we reached Barcelona worn out, having passed through Alicante, Valencia and Tarragona, but too weary to get interest or amusement from any of these towns. We arrived at Barcelona on a chill morning and set out from the station to look for the British Consul, whom we wished to consult about our lost luggage. Barcelona is large, and we waited for a tram. A passer-by told us that our waiting was vain. There was a traffic strike in progress and neither tram, omnibus nor cab was to be had. We would have to walk. Bad luck seemed to have reserved her efforts for the last few days. We do not think that England realized the great interest excited all over the world by the sufferings of the late Mayor of Cork. While his fate hung in the balance people would stop us in the streets of Murcia, or even in the outlying villages, to ask us if we believed that there was a chance of his recovery. He had died shortly before our homeward journey began. The Northern parts of Spain see a parallel between their position and that of Ireland. Indeed, the parallel is not exact; rather one might compare them to the position to which Ulster fears to be relegated. The fact remains that Catalonia and the Basque countries, the hard-working, commercial parts of Spain, object to the domination, laxity and misrule of the Government of Madrid. I believe that the party which wishes independence, the Spanish Sinn Fein, is very small; but it has become mixed with socialistic propaganda, communism, and so forth. At any rate, Barcelona, combining as it does the excitable nature of the Spaniard with the organization of a working community, provides the field for a series of extremely unpleasant strikes, riots and demonstrations. The transport strike was an illustration of this. During the two days we were in Barcelona, three employers were shot in the streets by employés. To return to the Mayor of Cork. His death was the signal for a typical demonstration in Barcelona, in favour of the Sinn Fein and of the Irish Republic. England was far enough away to remain undisturbed. The English Consul was at hand. When we reached his house we found that all his window-glass had been smashed in sympathy for Irish freedom. At a first glance Barcelona does not seem to be a Spanish town. There is something Germanic about it. Sitting in the main square and watching the people pass by, one could well imagine oneself in some town on the German border of Alsace. We remained in Barcelona two days, recovering from the fatigues of the journey. On our last afternoon, as we were strolling through a narrow back street, our attention was caught by a window full of small figures, baked in clay, highly coloured and gilt. The figures were all those of saints and biblical characters, not depicted in the formal manner of religious moments, but in a familiar and homelike way. We went into the small shop and asked their purpose, and were told that these figures were for Christmas decorations. We bought two--one of the Blessed Virgin hanging on a line a chemise which she had just washed, the other an incognita lady saint with a distaff and a cat. We had taken up our quarters at a small, disreputable lodging-house opposite the station, where they charged us the exorbitant fee of two pesetas a night each. (We suspect that the real price was one peseta). The night-watchman got us out of bed at three o'clock, as our train left at half-past four in the morning, and the preliminaries to Spanish travelling are complicated. To our surprise we found but a small queue of people waiting at the ticket-office. Our immediate neighbour was a shabby man in a bowler hat from beneath which showed the curly black hair of an Italian. He was accompanied by a middle-aged bustling bourgeois. The bourgeois took a ticket, which he handed to the Italian. We then demanded tickets to the French frontier at Cerbere. "We cannot book you to Cerbere," said the clerk; "the railway bridge between Figueras and Port Bou has been damaged. It will not be passable for three days." We thought drearily of having to return to the lodging-house, of three days more in this large, transportless town of Barcelona, of again getting up at three a.m. At this moment the Italian came to our aid. "From Figueras," he said, "there are motor-cars which will carry the passengers over the frontier. You can get along that way easily." So we booked to Figueras. The Italian accompanied us and revealed his history. He was wandering about, looking for work. He had crossed the frontier on foot from France. His papers were in a queer condition, and some of them he had had to leave in the custody of the frontier officials as a guarantee. But there was no work in Barcelona, so he was going back once more. The bourgeois was an employé of the Italian Consulate, who had come to the station to pay his fare and to see that he really left the town. The train rolled along through that rich Catalan scenery depicted in the landscapes of José Pujo, and at about ten o'clock we reached Figueras. With some difficulty we found a boy and a hand-cart, by means of which we could transport our luggage to the diligence office. The road was uphill and deep in a clayey mud. The poor boy tugged and pushed, and Jan had to go into the slime to help him. Through a long, narrow, old-fashioned street, Figueras opened out into a plaza planted with tall lime trees, the fallen leaves of which made a sodden carpet on the ground. The dead leaves seemed to give the dominant note of Figueras, a note of exhausted melancholy. Misfortune, as has so often been said, is sometimes good luck in disguise. More "get on or get out" passengers had forestalled us with the car, notably a fussy man who, dragging with him two or three musical instrument cases, was loudly informing everybody that he had a concert engagement somewhere in France and that his career would be blasted if he did not fulfil it. There was no seat left for us. We turned to the boy and asked him to find us some sleeping place for the night. "There is the Grand Hotel," he said. "Do not talk to us of grand hotels," we answered. "Grand hotels are institutions which level humanity to a dead datum of boredom and mulct it of expensive fees in the process." "Claro," responded the boy. "Take us to some local pub," we continued, "where the stranger rarely intrudes." The boy, forcing his cart uphill, led us down a side street to a small wine-shop, the woodwork of whose windows had recently been painted a gay violet hue. We pushed our way inside. A man with beady eyes, who might well be called "black-complexioned," curtly demanded our business. On our request for a bed he scanned us from head to foot. We were indeed somewhat respectable, having travelled in our best clothes for fear of another accident to our luggage, wishing, if such occurred, to save the best we had. The dark man turned to a woman who had a kind of hard, crystalline beauty, and consulted with her. At last the woman said in a coarse voice: "They can have a room if they will take their meals here." To which we consented. The Italian had been following us, vainly begging us to walk over the frontier with him, but as we had still a trunk, two rucksacks, and the large Sevillian dish in its basket, his suggestion did not seem feasible. So we finally said good-bye to one another, he setting off again on foot for France. We were sitting over our coffee after lunch, when the black-eyed host came near, drew a chair close up to us, stared at us with perplexed brows for a moment, then said, suddenly: "I know why you have come here." "We have come because the bridge is broken," we said. He waved this aside. "You need not mince matters with me," he answered. "I can see, I have two eyes. I have plenty of opium upstairs." "Opium?" "Yes, you can smuggle it over to France quite easily from here." "But we are not smugglers." "I'll let you have it cheap," answered the host, closing one eye. We again protested the entire innocence of our trafficking, but obviously did not convince him. He knew that people in our condition did not come to his shanty for nothing. He renewed his attack after supper. "Why have you come to my dram shop?" he asked. "Because big hotels are dull," we answered. He shook his head. "You have some reason for wanting to get to France secretly," he persisted. "Your papers, for instance, are not in order." We protested that they were. "You need not be afraid of me," went on our host. "I am quite trustworthy." We replied that in spite of the high opinion he had of us we had done nothing to deserve it. "Let me see your passports," said the landlord. "I knew it," he went on, as soon as he had examined them. "You have not been viséd at Barcelona. You will not be able to get over the frontier. They will turn you back." We had understood that no visé was necessary to get back into France. He said that we were mistaken. "This is where I can aid you," said the host. "I can get you over the frontier, so that you need not pass the customs or the passport office at all. I have a special route by which I pass French deserters to and fro. Of course, as you are not really dangerous, I would only charge you a small sum--say forty or fifty pesetas apiece. For the deserters the charge is considerably higher, as the risk if caught is considerable; while if you were caught you would only be sent back again into Spain. One of my men would drive you up at night, and then at about four o'clock in the morning you would dash over the frontier. I have sent hundreds to and fro." We must confess that the adventure attracted us. We had just enough money left to pay for the passage, but one thing deterred us. We had with us all the pictures which we had painted in Spain. If we were captured these would possibly be confiscated, and this was a risk we could not cheerfully face. We told our host that we would take a day to think it over. The next day we decided that if the bridge were repaired within two days we would go to Cerbere and try the normal course, but that if the delay were longer we would take the deserters' route. That day at Figueras was so tedious that we mutually shortened our probation by a day. On the morrow, however, we heard by chance that the bridge had been reopened and that a special train would pass through Figueras at eleven o'clock. It was then half-past ten. Jan rushed to pack, while I hurried to our host to find some means of transport. I found him giving his small child a ride-a-cock-horse on his foot. To my news he answered that it was impossible, that we could not reach the train, that it was a train-de-luxe and terribly expensive, and so on. After a long and aggravating demur he suddenly turned to me. "All right," he exclaimed. "If you _will_ do it, it shall be done." He hurried me round a series of back streets, routed out an old man and a donkey-cart, and in a few minutes the luggage was packed and we were off to the station. It was a close race. Jan ran on to get the tickets. I remained with the old man and the donkey. We had been told to pay the man a peseta; but he expostulated at the wage, demanding three. We held firm, however, and at last, with sighs and groans of despair, the old fellow was going off, apparently as heartbroken as though a near and dear friend had died. We called him back and added twopence-halfpenny to his shilling. He immediately broke into wreathed smiles and patted us cheerfully on the back, wishing us a good journey. At Cerbere our passports were refused. We had to go back to Port Bou, where the French Vice-Consul stamped them and, with the loss of another day, we were once more on our way to Paris. The night journey from Cerbere to Paris was terrible. Owing to the loss at Lorca we were in thin summer clothes, the temperature was three degrees below freezing point, owing to some defect in the apparatus the carriages were not heated, and a bulky market woman thrust her hand through the glass of the window; so that for twenty-three hours a freezing draught searched every cranny of the carriage. Amongst our lost luggage had been our winter hats, and we landed in Paris, much to the amusement of the Parisians, wearing Panama hats in the middle of November. THE END THE SPANISH SERIES Edited by ALBERT F. CALVERT. _Crown 8vo._ 7s. 6d. _net each vol._ =MURILLO.= A Biography and Appreciation. Illustrated by over 165 reproductions from photographs of his most celebrated pictures. =SPANISH ARMS AND ARMOUR.= A Historical and Descriptive Account of the Royal Armoury at Madrid. Illustrated with over 300 reproductions from photographs. =THE ESCORIAL.= A Historical and Descriptive Account of the Spanish Royal Palace, Monastery and Mausoleum. 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43852	----	[Illustration: _London Printed for W. Chetwood at Cato's head in Russel Street Covent Garden_] THE REVOLUTIONS OF _PORTUGAL_. Written in _French_ by the Abbot _DE VERTOT_, Of the ROYAL ACADEMY of INSCRIPTIONS. Done into _English_ from the last _French_ Edition. _O think what anxious Moments pass between The Birth of Plots, and their last fatal Periods! Oh! 'tis a dreadful Interval of Time, Fill'd up with Horror all, and big with Death! Destruction hangs on ev'ry Word we speak, On ev'ry Thought, till the concluding Stroke Determines all, and closes our Design._ ADDISON'S Cato. _LONDON_, Printed for WILLIAM CHETWOOD, at _Cato_'s- _Head_, in _Russel-Street, Covent-Garden_. M.DCC.XXI. [Illustration] To His GRACE _PHILIP_ Duke of _Wharton_. _May it please your Grace_; I am not ignorant of the Censure I lay my-self open to, in offering so incorrect a Work to a Person of Your Grace's Judgment; and could not have had Assurance to do it, if I was unacquainted with Your Grace's Goodness. As this is not the first time of this Excellent Author's appearing in _English_, my Undertaking must expose me to abundance of Cavil and Criticism; and I see my-self reduced to the Necessity of applying to a Patron who is able to protect me. Our modern Dedications are meer Daub and Flattery; but 'tis for those who deserve no better: Your Grace cannot be flatter'd; every body that knows the Duke of WHARTON, will say there is no praising him, as there is no loving him more than he deserves. But like other Great Minds, Your Grace may be blind to your own Merit, and imagine I am complimenting, or doing something worse, whilst I am only giving your just Character; for which reason, however fond I am of so noble a Theme, I shall decline attempting it. Only this I must beg leave to say, Your Grace can't be enough admir'd for the Universal Learning which you are Master of, for your Judgment in discerning, your Indulgence in excusing, for the great Stedfastness of your Soul, for your Contempt of Power and Grandeur, your Love for your Country, your Passion for Liberty, and (which is the best Characteristick) your Desire of doing Good to Mankind. I can hardly leave so agreeable a Subject, but I cannot say more than all the World knows already. Your Grace's illustrious Father has left a Name behind Him as glorious as any Person of the Age: it is unnecessary to enter into the Particulars of his Character; to mention his Name, is the greatest Panegyrick: Immediately to succeed that Great Man, must have been extremely to the Disadvantage of any other Person, but it is far from being so to Your Grace; it makes your Virtues but the more conspicuous, and convinces us the Nation is not without one Man worthy of being his Successor. I have nothing more to trouble Your Grace with, than only to wish you the Honours you so well deserve, and to beg you would excuse my presuming to honour my-self with the Title of, _May it please your Grace, Your Grace's most Obedient, Humble Servant_, Gabriel Roussillon. [Illustration] PREFACE. _Amongst the Historians of the present Age, none has more justly deserv'd, neither has any acquir'd a greater Reputation than the Abbot ~de Vertot~; not only by this Piece, but also by the ~Revolutions of~ Sweden ~and of~ Rome, which he has since publish'd._ _This small History he has extracted from the[A] Writings of several ~French~, ~Spanish~, ~Portuguese~, and ~Italian~ Authors, as well as from the Testimony of many Persons, who were in ~Lisbon~ at the time of the Revolution. And I believe that it will be no difficult matter to persuade the Reader, that this little Volume is written with much more Politeness and Fidelity than any which has been publish'd on this Subject._ _And indeed there could be no Man fitter to undertake the Work than Monsieur ~de Vertot~; not only as he was Master of an excellent Style, and had all the Opportunities imaginable of informing himself of the Truth, but also as he could have no Interest in speaking partially of either the one or the other Party; and therefore might say much more justly than ~Salust, de Conjuratione, Quam verissime potero, paucis absolvam; eoque magis, quod mihi a Spe, Metu, Partibus Reipublicæ Animus liber est~._ _Would I undertake to prove the Impartiality of my Author, I could easily do it from several little Circumstances of his History. Does he not tell us, that the Inquisition is oftner a Terror to honest Men than to Rogues? Does he not paint the Archbishop of ~Braga~ in all the Colours of a Traitor? And I am fully persuaded, that if a Churchman will own and discover the Frailties, or rather the Enormities of those of his own Cloth, he will tell them in any thing else, and is worthy of being believed._ _There are several Passages in the following Sheets, which really deserve our Attention; we shall see a Nation involv'd in Woe and Ruin, and all their Miseries proceeding from the Bigotry and Superstition of their Monarch, whose Zeal hurries him to inevitable Destruction, and whose Piety makes him sacrifice the Lives of ~13000~ Christians, without so much as having the Satisfaction of converting one obstinate Infidel._ _Such was the Fate of the rash Don ~Sebastian~, who seem'd born to be the Blessing of his People, and Terror of his Foes; who would have made a just, a wise, a truly pious Monarch, had not his Education been entrusted to a Jesuit. Nor is he the only unfortunate Prince, who, govern'd by intriguing and insinuating Churchmen, have prov'd the Ruin of their Kingdom, and in the end lost both their Crown and Life._ _We shall see a People, who, no longer able to bear a heavy Yoke, resolve to shake it off, and venture their Lives and their Fortunes for their Liberty: A Conspiracy prevail, (if an Intent to revolt from an Usurping Tyrant may be call'd a Conspiracy) in which so many Persons, whose Age, Quality and Interest were very different, are engag'd; and by the Courage and Publick Spirit of a few, a happy and glorious Revolution brought about._ _But scarce is the new King settled upon his Throne, and endeavouring to confirm his Authority abroad, when a horrid Conspiracy is forming against him at home; we shall see a Prelate at the head of the Traitors, who, tho a bigotted Churchman, makes no scruple of borrowing the Assistance of the most profess'd Enemies of the Church to deliver her out of Danger, and to assassinate his Lawful King: but the whole Plot is happily discover'd, and those who were engaged in it meet with the just Reward of Treason and Rebellion, the Block and Gallows. Nor is it the first time that our own Nation has seen an Archbishop doing King and Country all the harm he could._ _After the Death of her Husband, we see a Queen of an extraordinary Genius, and uncommon Courage, taking the Regency upon her; and tho at first oppress'd with a Load of Misfortunes, rises against them all, and in the end triumphs over her Enemies._ _Under the next Reign we see the Kingdom almost invaded by the antient Usurper, and sav'd only by the Skill of a Wife and Brave General, who had much ado to keep the Foes out, whilst the People were divided at home, and loudly complain'd of the Riots and Debaucheries of their Monarch, and the Tyrannick Conduct of his Minister. But we find how impossible a thing it is, that so violent a Government should last long; his Brother, a Prince whose Virtues were as famous, as the other's Vices were odious, to preserve the Crown in their Family, is forced to depose him, and take the Government upon himself: ~Ita Imperium semper ad optumum quemq; ab minus bono transfertur~._ [Illustration] THE REVOLUTION OF _PORTUGAL_. Portugal is part of that vast Tract of Land, known by the Name of _Iberia_ or _Spain_, most of whose Provinces are call'd Kingdoms. It is bounded on the West by the Ocean, on the East by _Castile_. Its Length is about a hundred and ten Leagues, and its Breadth in the very broadest part does not exceed fifty. The Soil is fruitful, the Air wholesome; and tho under such a Climate we might expect excessive Heats, yet here we always find them allay'd with cooling Breezes or refreshing Rains. Its Crown is Hereditary, the King's Power Despotick, nor is the grand Inquisition the most useless means of preserving this absolute Authority. The _Portuguese_ are by Nature proud and haughty, very zealous, but rather superstitious than religious; the most natural Events will amongst them pass for Miracles, and they are firmly persuaded that Heaven is always contriving something or other for their Good. Who the first Inhabitants of this Country were, is not known, their own Historians indeed tell us that they are sprung from _Tubal_; for my part, I believe them descended from the _Romans_ and _Carthaginians_, who long contended for those Provinces, and who were both at sundry times in actual possession of them. About the beginning of the fifth Century, the _Swedes_, the _Vandals_, and all those other barbarous Nations, generally known by the Name of _Goths_, over-run the Empire; and, amongst other Places, made themselves Masters of the Provinces of _Spain_. _Portugal_ was then made a Kingdom, and was sometimes govern'd by its own Prince, at other times it was reckon'd part of the Dominions of the King of _Castile_. [Sidenote: 712.] About the beginning of the eighth Century, during the Reign of _Roderick_, the last King of the _Goths_, the _Moors_, or rather the _Arabians_, _Valid Almanzor_ being their Caliph, enter'd _Spain_. They were received and assisted by _Julian_, an _Italian_ Nobleman, who made the Conquest of those Places easy, which might otherwise have proved difficult, not out of any Affection to the _Arabians_, but from a Desire of revenging himself on _Roderick_, who had debauched his Daughter. [Sidenote: 717.] The _Arabians_ soon made themselves Masters of all the Country between the Streights of _Gibraltar_ and the _Pyrenees_, excepting the Mountains of _Asturia_; where the Christians, commanded by Prince _Pelagus_, fled, who founded the Kingdom _Oviedo_ or _Leon_. _Portugal_, with the rest of _Spain_, became subject to the Infidels. In each respective Province, Governours were appointed, who after the Death of _Almanzor_ revolted from his Successor, made themselves independent of any other Power, and took the Title of Sovereign Princes. They were driven out of _Portugal_ about the beginning of the twelfth Century, by _Henry_ Count of _Burgundy_, Son to _Robert_ King of _France_. This Prince, full of the same Zeal which excited so many others to engage in a holy War, went into _Spain_ on purpose to attack the Infidels; and such Courage, such Conduct did he show, that _Alphonso_ VI. King of _Castile_ and _Leon_, made him General of his Army: and afterwards, that he might for ever engage so brave a Soldier, he married him to one of his Daughters, named _Teresia_, and gave him all those Places from which he had driven the _Moors_. The Count, by new Conquests, extended his Dominions, and founded the Kingdom of _Portugal_, but never gave himself the Royal Title. [Sidenote: 1139.] _Alphonso_, his Son, did not only inherit his Father's Dominions, but his Virtues also; and not content with what the Count his Father had left him, he vigorously carried on the War, and encreas'd his Territories. Having obtained a signal Victory over the _Arabians_, his Soldiers unanimously proclaimed him King; which Title his Successors have ever since borne. And now this Family had sway'd the Scepter of _Portugal_ for almost the space of five hundred Years, when Don _Sebastian_ came to the Crown; he was the posthumous Son of Don _John_, who died some time before his Father, Don _John_ III. Son of the renowned King _Emanuel_. [Sidenote: 1557.] Don _Sebastian_ was not above three Years of Age when the old King died; his Grandmother _Catherine_, of the House of _Austria_, Daughter to _Philip_ I. King of _Castile_, and Sister to the Emperor _Charles_ V. was made Regent of _Portugal_ during his Minority. Don _Alexis de Menezes_, a Nobleman noted for his singular Piety, was appointed Governour to the young King, and Don _Lewis de Camara_, a Jesuit, was named for his Tutor. From such Teachers as these, what might not be expected? They filled his Mind with Sentiments of Honour, and his Soul with Devotion. But, (which may at first appear strange or impossible) these Notions were too often, and too strongly inculcated in him. _Menezes_ was always telling the young Prince what Victories his Predecessors had obtain'd over the _Moors_ in the _Indies_, and in almost every part of _Africa_. On the other hand, the Jesuit was perpetually teaching him, that the Crown of Kings was the immediate Gift of _God_, and that therefore the chiefest Duty of a Prince was to propagate the Holy Gospel, and to have the Word of the _Lord_ preached to those Nations, who had never heard of the Name of _Christ_. These different Ideas of Honour and Religion made a deep impression on the Heart of Don _Sebastian_, who was naturally pious. Scarce therefore had he taken the Government of _Portugal_ upon himself, but he thought of transporting an Army into _Africa_; and to that end he often conferr'd with his Officers, but oftener with his Missionaries and other Ecclesiasticks. A Civil War breaking out about this time in _Morocco_, seem'd very much to favour his Design. The Occasion was this: _Muley Mahomet_ had caus'd himself to be proclaim'd King of _Morocco_ after the Death of _Abdalla_, his Father; _Muley Moluc_, _Abdalla_'s Brother, opposed him, objecting that he had ascended the Throne contrary to the Law of the Cherifs, by which it is ordained, That the Crown shall devolve to the King's Brethren, if he has any, and his Sons be excluded the Succession. This occasion'd a bloody War between the Uncle and the Nephew; but _Muley Moluc_, who was as brave a Soldier as he was a wise Commander, defeated _Mahomet_'s Army in three pitch'd Battles, and drove him out of _Africa_. The exil'd Prince fled for Refuge to the Court of _Portugal_, and finding Access to Don _Sebastian_, told him, that notwithstanding his Misfortunes, there were still a considerable Number of his Subjects, who were loyal in their Hearts, and wanted only an Opportunity of declaring themselves in his favour. That besides this, he was very well assured that _Moluc_ was afflicted with a lingring Disease, which prey'd upon his Vitals; that _Hamet_, _Moluc_'s Brother, was not belov'd by the People; that therefore if Don _Sebastian_ would but send him with a small Army into _Africa_, so many of his Subjects would come over to him, that he did not in the least question but that he should soon re-establish himself in his Father's Dominions: which, if he did recover by these means, the Kingdom should become tributary to the Crown of _Portugal_; nay, that he would much rather have Don _Sebastian_ himself fill the Throne of _Morocco_, than see it in possession of the present Usurper. Don _Sebastian_, who was ever entertaining himself with the Ideas of future Conquests, thought this Opportunity of planting the Christian Religion in _Morocco_ was not to be neglected; and therefore promis'd the _Moorish_ King not only his Assistance, but rashly engaged himself in the Expedition, giving out that he intended to command the Army in Person. The wisest of his Counsellors in vain endeavour'd to dissuade him from the dangerous Design. His Zeal, his Courage, an inconsiderate Rashness, the common Fault of Youth, as well as some Flatterers, the Bane of Royalty, and Destruction of Princes, all prompted him to continue fixed in his Resolution, and persuaded him that he needed only appear in _Africa_ to overcome, and that his Conquests would be both easy and glorious. To this end he embarked with an Army of Thirteen Thousand Men, with which he was to drive a powerful Prince out of his own Dominions. _Moluc_ had timely notice given him of the _Portuguese_ Expedition, and of their landing in _Africa_; he had put himself at the head of Forty Thousand Horsemen, all disciplin'd Soldiers, and who were not so much to be dreaded for their Number and Courage, as they were for the Conduct of their General. His Infantry he did not at all value himself upon, not having above Ten Thousand Regular Men; there was indeed a vast Number of the Militia, and others of the People who came pouring down to his Assistance, but these he justly look'd upon as Men who were rather come to plunder than to fight, and who would at any time side with the Conqueror. Several Skirmishes were fought, but _Moluc_'s Officers had private Orders still to fly before the Foe, hoping thereby to make the _Portuguese_ leave the Shore, where they had intrench'd themselves. This Stratagem had its desir'd Effect; for Don _Sebastian_ observing that the _Moors_ still fled before him, order'd his Army to leave their Intrenchments, and marched against the Foe as to a certain Victory. _Moluc_ made his Army retire, as if he did not dare to fight a decisive Battle; nay, sent Messengers to Don _Sebastian_, who pretended they were order'd to treat of Peace. The King of _Portugal_ immediately concluded, that his Adversary was doubtful of the Success of the War, and that 'twould be an easier matter to overcome _Moluc_'s Army, than to join them; he therefore indefatigably pursued them. But the _Moor_ had no sooner drawn him far enough from the Shore, and made it impossible for him to retire to his Fleet, but he halted, faced the _Portuguese_, and put his Army in Battalia; the Horse making a half Circle, with intent, as soon as they engaged, to surround the Enemy on every side. _Moluc_ made _Hamet_, his Brother and Successor, Commander in chief of the Cavalry; but as he doubted his Courage, he came up to him a little before the Engagement, told him that he must either conquer or die, and that should he prove Coward enough to turn his back upon the Foe, he would strangle him with his own hand. The reason why _Moluc_ did not command the Army himself, was, that he was sensible of the Increase of his lingring Disease, and found that in all probability this Day would be his last, and therefore resolved to make it the most glorious of his Life. He put his Army, as I said before, in Battalia himself, and gave all the necessary Orders with as much Presence of Mind, as if he had enjoy'd the greatest Health. He went farther than this; for foreseeing what a sudden Damp the News of his Death might cast upon the Courage of his Soldiers, he order'd the Officers that were about him, that if during the Heat of the Battle he should die, they should carefully conceal it, and that even after his Death, his _Aides de Camp_ should come up to his Litter, as if to receive fresh Orders. After this he was carried from Rank to Rank, where he exhorted his Soldiers to fight bravely for the Defence of their Religion and their Country. But now the Combat began, and the great Artillery being discharg'd, the Armies join'd. The _Portuguese_ Infantry soon routed the _Moorish_ Foot-Soldiers, who, as was before mention'd, were raw and undisciplin'd; the Duke _d'Aviedo_ engaged with a Parry of Horse so happily, that they gave ground, and retir'd to the very Center of the Army, where the King was. Enraged at so unexpected a Sight, notwithstanding what his Officers could say or do, he threw himself out of his Litter; Sword in hand he clear'd himself a Passage, rallied his flying Soldiers, and led them back himself to the Engagement. But this Action quite exhausting his remaining Strength and Spirits, he fainted; his Officers put him into his Litter, where he just recover'd Strength enough to put his Finger upon his Mouth once more, to enjoin Secrecy, then died before they could convey him back to his Tent. His Commands were obey'd, and the News of his Death conceal'd. [Sidenote: _Aug. 4. 1578._] Hitherto the Christians seem'd to have the Advantage, but the _Moorish_ Horse advancing at last, hemm'd in _Sebastian_'s whole Army, and attack'd them on every side. The Cavalry was drove back upon their Infantry, whom they trampled under foot, and spread every where amongst their own Soldiers, Disorder, Fear, and Confusion. The Infidels seiz'd upon this Advantage, and Sword in hand fell upon the conquer'd Troops; a dreadful Slaughter ensu'd, some on their knees begg'd for quarter, others thought to save themselves by flight, but being surrounded by their Foes, met their Fate in another place. The rash Don _Sebastian_ himself was slain, but whether he fell amidst the Horror and Confusion of the Battle, not being known by the _Moors_, or whether he was resolv'd not to survive the Loss of so many of his Subjects, whom he had led on to a Field of Slaughter, is doubtful. _Muley Mahomet_ got off, but passing the River _Mucazen_, was drown'd. Thus perish'd, in one fatal Day, three Heroick Princes. The Cardinal, Don Henry, great Uncle to Don _Sebastian_, succeeded him; he was Brother to _John_ III. the late King's Grandfather, and Son to _Emanuel_. During his Reign, his pretended Heirs made all the Interest they could in the Court of _Portugal_, being well assur'd that the present King, who was weak and sickly, and sixty-seven Years old, could not be long-liv'd; nor could he marry, and leave Children behind him, for he was a Cardinal, and in Priest's Orders. The Succession was claim'd by _Philip_ II. King of _Spain_; _Catherine_ of _Portugal_, espous'd to Don _James_, Duke of _Braganza_; by the Duke of _Savoy_; the Duke of _Parma_; and by _Antonio_, Grand Prior of _Crete_: They all publish'd their respective Manifesto's, in which every one declar'd their Pretensions to the Crown. _Philip_ was Son to the Infanta _Isabella_, eldest Daughter of King _Emanuel_. The Dutchess of _Braganza_ was Granddaughter to the same King _Emanuel_, by _Edward_ his second Son. The Duke of _Savoy_'s Mother was the Princess _Beatrix_, a younger Sister of the Empress _Isabella_. The Duke of _Parma_ was Son to _Mary_ of _Portugal_, the second Daughter of Prince _Edward_, and Sister to the Dutchess of _Braganza_. Don _Lewis_, Duke of _Beja_, was second Son to King _Emanuel_ by _Violenta_, the finest Lady of that Age, whom he had debauch'd, but whom the Grand Prior pretended to have been privately married to that Prince. _Catherine de Medicis_, amongst the rest, made her Claim, as being descended from _Alphonso_ III. King of _Portugal_, and _Maud_ Countess of _Bolonia_. The _Pope_ too put in his Claim; he would have it, that after the Reign of the _Cardinal_, _Portugal_ must be look'd upon as a fat Living in his Gift, and to which, like many a modern Patron, he would willingly have presented himself. But notwithstanding all their Pretensions, it plainly appear'd that the Succession belong'd either to _Philip_ King of _Spain_, or to the Dutchess of _Braganza_, a Lady of an extraordinary Merit, and belov'd by the whole Nation. The Duke, her Spouse, was descended, tho not in a direct Line, from the Royal Blood, and she herself was sprung from Prince _Edward_; whereas the King of _Spain_ was Son to _Edward_'s Sister: besides, by the Fundamental Laws of the Kingdom, all Strangers were excluded the Succession. This _Philip_ own'd, since thereby the Pretensions of _Savoy_ and _Parma_ vanish'd; but he would by no means acknowledge himself a Stranger in _Portugal_, which he said had often been part of the Dominions of the King of _Castile_. Each had their several Parties at Court, and the _Cardinal_ King was daily press'd to decide the Difference, but always evaded it; he could not bear to hear of his Successors, and would willingly have liv'd to have bury'd all his pretended Heirs: however, his Reign lasted but 17 Months, and by his Death _Portugal_ became the unhappy Theatre of Civil Wars. [Sidenote: 1580.] By his last Will he had order'd, that a Juncto, or Assembly of the States, should be call'd, to settle the Succession; but King _Philip_ not caring to wait for their Decision, sent a powerful Army into _Portugal_, commanded by the Duke of _Alba_, which ended the Dispute, and put _Philip_ in possession of that Kingdom. [Sidenote: 1581.] We cannot find that the Duke of _Braganza_ us'd any Endeavours to assert his Right by force of Arms. The Grand Prior indeed did all he could to oppose the _Castilians_; the Mob had proclaim'd him King, and he took the Title upon him, as if it had been given by the States of _Portugal_: and his Friends rais'd some Forces for him, but they were soon cut in pieces by the Duke of _Alba_, than whom _Spain_ could not have chosen a better General. As much as the _Portuguese_ hate the _Castilians_, yet could they not keep them out, being disunited among themselves, and having no General, nor any Regular Troops on foot. Most of the Towns, for fear of being plunder'd, capitulated, and made each their several Treaty; so that in a short time _Philip_ was acknowledg'd their lawful Sovereign by the whole Nation, as being next Heir Male to his great Uncle, the late King: of such wondrous use is open Force to support a bad Cause! After him reign'd his Son and Grandson, _Philip_ III. and IV. who us'd the _Portuguese_ not like Subjects, but like a conquer'd People; and the Kingdom of _Portugal_ saw itself dwindle into a Province of _Spain_, and so weaken'd, that there was no hope left of recovering their Liberty: Their Noblemen durst not appear in an Equipage suitable to their Birth, for fear of making the _Spanish_ Ministers jealous of their Greatness or Riches; the Gentry were confin'd to their Country-Seats, and the People oppress'd with Taxes. The Duke of _Olivarez_, who was then first Minister to _Philip_ IV. King of _Spain_, was firmly persuaded, that all means were to be us'd to exhaust this new Conquest; he was sensible of the natural Antipathy of the _Portuguese_ and _Castilians_, and thought that the former could never calmly behold their chief Posts fill'd with Strangers, or at best with _Portuguese_ of a _Plebeian_ Extraction, who had nothing else to recommend 'em but their Zeal for the Service of _Spain_. He thought therefore, that the surest way of establishing King _Philip_'s Power, was to remove the Nobility of _Portugal_ from all Places of Trust, and so to impoverish the People, that they should never be capable of attempting to shake off the _Spanish_ Yoke. Besides this, he employ'd the _Portuguese_ Youth in foreign Wars, resolving to drain the Kingdom of all those who were capable of bearing Arms. As politick as this Conduct of _Olivarez_ might appear, yet did he miss his aim; for carrying his Cruelty to too high a pitch, at a time when the Court of _Spain_ was in distress, and seeming rather to plunder an Enemy's Country, than levying Taxes from the _Portuguese_, who daily saw their Miseries encrease, and be the consequence of their Attempt what it would, they could never fare worse; unanimously resolv'd to free themselves from the intolerable Tyranny of Spain. [Sidenote: 1640.] _Margaret of Savoy_, Dutchess of _Mantua_, was then in _Portugal_, where she had the Title of Vice-Queen, but was very far from having the Power. _Miguel Vasconcellos_, a _Portuguese_ by Birth, but attach'd to the _Spanish_ Interest, had the Name of Secretary of State, but was indeed an absolute and independent Minister, and dispatch'd, without the knowledge of the Vice-Queen, all the secret Business; his Orders he receiv'd directly from _d'Olivarez_, whose Creature he was, and who found him absolutely necessary for extorting vast Sums of Money from the _Portuguese_. He was so deeply learn'd in the Art of Intriguing, that he could perpetually make the Nobility jealous of one another, then would he foment their Divisions, and encrease their Animosities, whereby the _Spanish_ Government became every day more absolute; for the Duke was assur'd, that whilst the Grandees were engag'd in private Quarrels, they would never think of the Common Cause. The Duke of _Braganza_ was the only Man in all _Portugal_, of whom the _Spaniards_ were now jealous. His Humour was agreeable, and the chief thing he consulted was his Ease. He was a Man rather of sound Sense, than quick Wit. He could easily make himself Master of any Business to which he apply'd his Mind, but then he never car'd much for the Trouble on't. Don _Theodosius_, Duke of _Braganza_, his Father, was of a fiery and passionate Temper, and had taken care to infuse in his Son's Mind an Hereditary Aversion to the _Spaniards_, who had usurp'd a Crown, that of Right belonged to him; to swell his Mind with the Ambition of repossessing himself of a Throne, which his Ancestors had been unjustly depriv'd of; and to fill his Soul with all the Courage that would be necessary for the carrying on of so great a Design. Nor was this Prince's Care wholly lost; Don _John_ had imbib'd as much of the Sentiments of his Father as were consistent with so mild and easy a Temper. He abhorr'd the _Spaniards_, yet was not at all uneasy at his Incapacity of revenging himself. He entertain'd Hopes of ascending the Throne of _Portugal_, yet did he not shew the least Impatience, as Duke _Theodosius_, his Father, had done, but contented himself with a distant Prospect of a Crown; nor would for an Uncertainty venture the Quiet of his Life, and a Fortune which was already greater than what was well consistent with the Condition of a Subject. Had he been precisely what Duke _Theodosius_ wish'd him, he had never been fit for the great Design; for _d'Olivarez_ had him observ'd so strictly, that had his easy and pleasant manner of Living proceeded from any other Cause but a natural Inclination, it had certainly been discover'd, and the Discovery had prov'd fatal both to his Life and Fortune: at least the Court of _Spain_ would never have suffer'd him to live in so splendid a manner in the very Heart of his Country. Had he been the most refin'd Politician, he could never have liv'd in a manner less capable of giving Suspicion. His Birth, his Riches, his Title to the Crown, were not criminal in themselves, but became so by the Law of Policy. This he was very sensible of, and therefore chose this way of Living, prompted to it as well by Nature as by Reason. It would have been a Crime to be formidable, he must therefore take care not to appear so: At _Villa-Viciosa_, the Seat of the Dukes of _Braganza_, nothing was thought of but Hunting-Matches, and other Rural Diversions; the Brightness of his Parts could not in the least make the _Spaniards_ apprehend any bold Undertaking, but the Solidity of his Understanding made the _Portuguese_ promise themselves the Enjoyment of a mild and easy King, provided they would undertake to raise him to the Throne. But an Accident soon after happen'd, which very much alarm'd _Olivarez_. Some new Taxes being laid upon the People of _Evora_, which they were not able to pay, reduc'd 'em to Despair; upon which they rose in a tumultuous manner, loudly exclaiming against the _Spanish_ Tyranny, and declaring themselves in favour of the House of _Braganza_. Then, but too late, the Court of _Spain_ began to be sensible of their Error, in leaving so rich and powerful a Prince in the Heart of a Kingdom so lately subdued, and to whose Crown he had such Legal Pretensions. This made the Council of _Spain_ immediately determine, that it was necessary to secure the Duke of _Braganza_, or at best not to let him make any longer stay in _Portugal_. To this end they nam'd him Governour of _Milan_, which Government he refus'd, alledging the Weakness of his Constitution for an Excuse: besides, he said he was wholly unacquainted with the Affairs of _Italy_, and by consequence not capable of acquitting himself in so weighty a Post. * * * * * [Sidenote: 1640.] The Duke _d'Olivarez_, seem'd to approve of the Excuse, and therefore began to think of some new Expedient to draw him to Court. The King's marching at the head of his Army to the Frontiers of _Arragon_, to suppress the rebelling _Catalonians_, was a very good Pretence; he wrote to the Duke of _Braganza_, "to come at the head of the _Portuguese_ Nobility to serve the King in an Expedition, which could not but be glorious, since his Majesty commanded it in Person." The Duke, who had no great relish for any Favour confer'd by the Court of _Spain_, excus'd himself, upon pretence that "his Birth would oblige him to be at a much greater Expence than what he was at present able to support." This second Refusal alarm'd _d'Olivarez_. Notwithstanding Don _John_'s easy Temper, he began to be afraid that the _Evorians_ had made an impression upon his Thoughts, by reminding him of his Right to the Throne. It was dangerous to leave him any longer in his Country, and equally dangerous to hurry him out of it by force; so great a Love had the _Portuguese_ ever bore to the House of _Braganza_, so great a Respect did they bear to this Duke in particular. He must therefore treacherously be drawn into _Spain_, nor could any properer means be thought of, for compassing this end, than by shewing him all the seeming Tokens of an unfeigned Friendship. _France_ and _Spain_ were at that time engag'd in War, and the _French_ Fleet had been seen off the Coasts of _Portugal_. This gave the _Spanish_ Minister a fair opportunity of accomplishing his Ends; for it was necessary to have an Army on foot, under the Command of some brave General, to hinder the _French_ from making a Descent, or landing any where in _Portugal_. The Commission was sent to the Duke of _Braganza_, with an absolute Authority over all the Towns and Garisons, as well as a Power over the Maritime Forces; in short, so unlimited was the Command given him, that the Minister seem'd blindly to have deliver'd all _Portugal_ into his power: but this was only the better to colour his Design. Don _Lopez Ozorio_, the _Spanish_ Admiral, had private Orders sent him, that as soon as Don _John_ should visit any of the Ports, he should put in, as if drove by stress of Weather; then artfully invite the General aboard, immediately hoist sail, and with all possible expedition bring him into _Spain_. But propitious Fortune seem'd to have taken him into her Protection; a violent Storm arose, which dispers'd the _Spanish_ Fleet, part of which suffer'd shipwreck, and the rest were so shatter'd, that they could not make _Portugal_. This ill Success did not in the least discourage _Olivarez_, or make him drop his Project; he attributed the Escape of the Duke of _Braganza_ to meer Chance: he wrote him a Letter, full of Expressions of Friendship, and as if he had with him shar'd the Government of the whole Kingdom, wherein he deplor'd the Loss of the Fleet, and told him, that the King now expected that he would carefully review all the Ports and their respective Fortifications, seeing that the Fleet, which was to defend the Coasts of _Portugal_ from the Insults of the _French_, had miserably perish'd. And that his Villany might not be suspected, he return'd him Forty Thousand Ducats to defray his Expences, and to raise more Troops, in case there should be a necessity of them. At the same time he sent private Orders to all the Governours of Forts and Citadels, (the greatest part whereof were _Spaniards_) that if they should find a favourable occasion of securing the Duke of _Braganza_, they should do it, and forthwith convey him into _Spain_. This entire Confidence which was repos'd in him, alarm'd the Duke; he plainly saw that there was Treachery intended, and therefore thought it just to return the Treachery. He wrote an Answer to _Olivarez_, wherein he told him, that with Joy he accepted the Honour which the King had confer'd upon him, in naming him his General, and promis'd so to discharge the important Trust, as to deserve the Continuation of his Majesty's Favour. But now the Duke began to have a nearer Prospect of the Throne; nor did he neglect this opportunity of putting some of his Friends into Places of Trust, that they might be the more able to serve him upon occasion; he also employ'd part of the _Spanish_ Money in making new Creatures, and confirming those in his Interest whom he had already made. And as he partly mistrusted the _Spaniards_ Design, he never visited any Fort, but he was surrounded by such a Number of Friends, that it was impossible for the Governours to execute their Orders. Mean while the Court of _Spain_ loudly murmur'd at the Trust which was repos'd in Don _John_, they were ignorant of the Prime Minister's Aim, and therefore some did not stick to tell the King, that his near Alliance to the House of _Braganza_ made him overlook his Master's Interest; seeing that it was the highest Imprudence to put so absolute an Authority into the hands of one who had such Pretensions to the Crown, and to entrust the Army to the Command of one, who in all probability might make the Soldiers turn their Arms against their lawful Sovereign. But the more they complain'd, the better was the King pleas'd, being persuaded that the Plot was artfully laid, since no one could unravel the dark Design. Thus _Braganza_ not only had the liberty, but was oblig'd to visit all _Portugal_, and by that means laid the Foundation of his future Fortune. The Eyes of the Many were every where drawn by his magnificent Equipage, all that came to him, he mildly, and with unequal'd Goodness heard; the Soldiers were not suffer'd to commit the least Disorders, and he laid hold of all Opportunities of praising the Conduct of the Officers, and by frequent Recompences bestow'd upon them, won their Hearts. The Nobility were charm'd with his free Deportment, he receiv'd every one of them in the most obliging manner, and paid each the Respect due to his Quality. In short, such was his Carriage, that the People began to think there could be no greater Happiness for them upon Earth, than the Restoration of the Prince to the Throne of his Ancestors. Mean while his Party omitted nothing that they thought might contribute to the establishing of his Reputation. Amongst others, _Pinto Ribeiro_, Comptroller of his Household, particularly distinguish'd himself, and was the first who form'd an exact Scheme for the Advancement of his Master. There was no Man more experienc'd in Business, who at the same time was so careful, diligent, and watchful: he was firm to the Interest of the Duke, not doubting but that if he could raise him to the Throne, he should raise himself to some considerable Post. His Master had often privately assur'd him, that he would willingly lay hold of any fair Opportunity for his Restoration, yet would not rashly declare himself, as a Man who had nothing to lose; that notwithstanding he might endeavour to gain the Minds of the People, and to make new Creatures, yet he must do it with that Caution, that it might appear his own Work, and done without the Consent and Knowledge of the Duke. _Pinto_ had spar'd no pains in discovering who were, and the Number of the Disaffected, which he daily endeavoured to encrease; he rail'd against the present Government sometimes with Heat, at other times with Caution, always accommodating himself to the Humour of the Company which he was in: tho indeed so great was the Hatred which the _Portuguese_ bore the _Spaniards_, that there was no need of Reserve in complaining of them. He would often remind the Nobility what honourable Employments their Forefathers had borne, when _Portugal_ was govern'd by its own Kings. Then would he mention the Summons which had so much exasperated the Nobility, and by which they were commanded to attend the King in _Catalonia_. _Pinto_ us'd to complain of this Hardship as of a kind of Banishment, from which they would scarce find it possible to return; that the Pride of the _Spaniards_, who would command them, was insufferable, and the Expence they should be at intolerable; that this was only a plausible Pretence to drain _Portugal_ of its bravest Men, that in all their Expeditions they might be assur'd of being expos'd where the greatest Danger was, but that they must never hope to share the least part of the Glory. When he was amongst the Merchants and other Citizens, he would bewail the Misery of his Country, which was ruin'd by the Injustice of the _Spaniard_, who had transfer'd the Trade, which _Portugal_ carried on with the _Indies_, to _Cadiz_. Then would he remind them of the Felicity which the _Dutch_ and _Catalonians_ enjoy'd, who had shaken off the _Spanish_ Yoke. As for the Clergy, he did not in the least question but that he should engage 'em in his Interest, and exasperate 'em most irreconcileably against the _Castilians_; he told them, that the Immunities and Privileges of the Church were violated, their Orders contemn'd and neglected, and that all the best Preferments and fattest Livings were possess'd by foreign Incumbents. When he was with those, of whose Disaffection he was already convinc'd, he would take care to turn his Discourse to his Master, and talk of his manner of Living. He would often complain, that that Prince shew'd too little Affection for the Good of his Country, and Concern for his own Interest; and that at a time when it was in his power to assert his Title to the Crown, he should seem so regardless of his own Right, and lead so idle a Life. Finding that these Insinuations made an impression upon the People, he went still farther: To those who were publick-spirited, he represented what a glorious thing it would be for them to lay the Foundations of a Revolution, and to deserve the Name of _Deliverers of their Country_. Those who had been injur'd and ill-treated by the _Spaniards_, he would excite to the Desire of Revenge; and the Ambitious he flatter'd with a Prospect of the Grandeurs and Preferments they might expect from the new King, would they once raise him to the Throne. In short, he manag'd every thing with so much Art, that being privately assur'd of the unshaken Affection of many to his Master, he procur'd a Meeting of a considerable Number of the Nobility, with the Archbishop of _Lisbon_ at the head of them. This Prelate was of the House of _Acugna_, one of the best Families of all _Portugal_; he was a Man of Learning, and an excellent Politician, belov'd by the People, but hated by the _Spaniards_, and whom he had also just cause to hate, since they had made Don _Sebastian Maltos de Norognia_, Archbishop of Braga, President of the Chamber of _Opaco_, whom they had all along prefer'd to him, and to whom they had given a great share in the Administration of Affairs. Another of the most considerable Members of this Assembly, was Don _Miguel d'Almeida_, a venerable old Man, and who deserv'd, and had the Esteem of every body; he was very publick-spirited, and was not so much griev'd at his own private Misfortunes, as at those of his Country, whose Inhabitants were become the Slaves of an usurping Tyrant. In these Sentiments he had been educated, and to these with undaunted Courage and Resolution he still adher'd; nor could the Entreaties of his Relations, nor the repeated Advices of his Friends, ever make him go to Court, or cringe to the _Spanish_ Ministers. This Carriage of his had made them jealous of him. This therefore was the Man whom _Pinto_ first cast his eyes upon, being well assur'd that he might safely entrust him with the Secret; besides which, no one could be more useful in carrying on their Design, his Interest with the Nobility being so great, that he could easily bring over a considerable Number of them to his Party. There were, besides these two, at this first Meeting, Don _Antonio d'Almada_, an intimate Friend of the Archbishop's, with Don _Lewis_, his Son; Don _Lewis d'Acugna_, Nephew to that Prelate, and who had married Don _Antonio d'Almada_'s Daughter; _Mello_ Lord _Ranger_, Don _George_ his Brother; _Pedro Mendoza_; Don _Rodrigo de Saa_, Lord-Chamberlain: with several other Officers of the Houshold, whose Places were nothing now but empty Titles, since _Portugal_ had lost her own natural Kings. [Sidenote: Conostagio.] The Archbishop, who was naturally a good Rhetorician, broke the Ice in this Assembly; he made an eloquent Speech, in which he set forth the many Grievances _Portugal_ had labour'd under since it had been subject to the Domination of _Spain_. He reminded them of the Number of Nobility which _Philip_ II. had butchered to secure his Conquest; nor had he been more favourable to the Church, witness the famous Brief of Absolution, which he had obtain'd from the Pope for the Murder of Two Thousand Priests, or others of Religious Orders, whom he had barbarously put to death, on no other account but to secure his Usurpation: And since that unhappy time the _Spaniards_ had not chang'd their inhuman Policy; how many had fallen for no other Crime but their unshaken Love to their Country! That none of those who were there present, could call their Lives or their Estates their own: That the Nobility were slighted and remov'd from all Places of Trust, Profit, or Power: That the Church was fill'd with a scandalous Clergy, since _Vasconcellos_ had dispos'd of all the Livings, and to which he had prefer'd his own Creatures only: That the People were oppress'd with excessive Taxes, whilst the Earth remain'd untill'd for want of hands, their Labourers being all sent away by force, for Soldiers to _Catalonia_: That this last Summons for the Nobility to attend the King, was only a specious Pretence to force them out of their own Country, lest their Presence might prove an Obstacle to some cruel Design, which was doubtless on foot: That the mildest Fate they could hope for, was a tedious, if not a perpetual Banishment; and that whilst they were ill-treated by the _Castilians_ abroad, Strangers should enjoy their Estates, and new Colonies take possession of their Habitations. He concluded by assuring them, that so great were the Miseries of his Country, that he would rather chuse to die ten thousand Deaths, than be obliged to see the Encrease of them; nor would he now entertain one thought of Life, did he not hope that so many Persons of Quality were not met together in vain. This Discourse had its desir'd effect, by reminding every one of the many Evils which they had suffer'd. Each seem'd earnest to give some instance of _Vasconcellos_'s Cruelty. The Estates of some had been unjustly confiscated, whilst others had Hereditary Places and Governments taken from them; some had been long confin'd in Prisons thro the Jealousy of the _Spanish_ Ministers, and many bewail'd a Father, a Brother, or a Friend, either detain'd at _Madrid_, or sent into _Catalonia_ as Hostages of the Fidelity of their unhappy Countrymen. In short, there was not one of those who were engag'd in this Publick Cause, but what had some private Quarrel to revenge: but nothing provoked them more than the _Catalonian_ Expedition; they plainly saw, that it was not so much the want of their assistance, as the desire of ruining them, which made the _Spanish_ Minister oblige them to that tedious and expensive Voyage. These Considerations, join'd to their own private Animosities, made 'em unanimously resolve to venture Life and Fortune, rather than any longer to bear the heavy Yoke: but the Form of Government which they ought to chuse, caus'd a Division amongst them. Part of the Assembly were for making themselves a Republick, as _Holland_ had lately done; others were for a Monarchy, but could not agree upon the choice of a King: some propos'd the Duke of _Braganza_, some the Marquis de _Villareal_, and others the Duke _d'Aviedo_, (all three Princes of the Royal Blood of _Portugal_,) according as their different Inclinations or Interests byass'd them. But the Archbishop, who was wholly devoted to the House of _Braganza_, assuming the Authority of his Character, set forth with great strength of Reason, That the Choice of a Government was not in their power; that the Oath of Allegiance which they had taken to the King of _Spain_, could not in conscience be broken, unless it was with a design to restore their rightful Sovereign to the Throne of his Fathers, which every one knew to be the Duke of _Braganza_; that they must therefore resolve to proclaim him King, or for ever to continue under the Tyranny of the _Spanish_ Usurper. After this, he made 'em consider the Power and Riches of this Prince, as well as the great number of his Vassals, on whom depended almost a third part of the Kingdom. He shew'd 'em it was impossible for 'em to drive the _Spaniards_ out of _Portugal_, unless he was at their head: that the only way to engage him, would be by making him an Offer of the Crown, which they would be under a Necessity of doing, altho he was not the first Prince of the Royal Blood. Then began he to reckon all those excellent Qualities with which he was endow'd, as his Wisdom, his Prudence; but above all, his affable Behaviour, and inimitable Goodness. In short, his Words prevail'd so well upon every one, that they unanimously declared him their King, and promis'd that they would spare no Pains, no Endeavours to engage him to enter into their Measures: after which, having agreed upon the time and place of a second Meeting, to concert the ways and means of bringing this happy Revolution about, the Assembly broke up. _Pinto_ observing how well the Minds of the People were dispos'd in favour of his Master, wrote privately to him, to acquaint him with the Success of the first Meeting, and advis'd him to come, as if by chance, to _Lisbon_, that by his Presence he might encourage the Conspirators, and at the same time get some Opportunity of conferring with them. This Man spent his whole time in negotiating this grand Affair, yet did it so artfully, that no one could suspect his having any farther Interest in it, than his Concern for the Publick Welfare. He seemingly doubted whether his Master would ever enter into their Measures, objecting his natural Aversion to any Undertaking which was hazardous and requir'd Application: then would he start some Difficulties, which were of no other use but to destroy all Suspicion of his having any Understanding with his Master, and were so far from being weighty enough to discourage them, that they rather serv'd to excite their Ardour. Upon the Advice given by _Pinto_, the Duke left _Villa-viciosa_, and came to _Almada_, a Castle near _Lisbon_, on pretence of visiting it as he had done the other Fortifications of that Kingdom. His Equipage was so magnificent, and he had with him such a number of the Nobility and Gentry, as well as of Officers, that he looked more like a King going to take possession of a Kingdom, than like the Governour of a Province, who was viewing the Places and Forts under his Jurisdiction: he was so near _Lisbon_, that he was under an obligation of going to pay his Devoirs to the Vice-Queen. As soon as he enter'd the Palace-yard, he found the Avenues crowded with infinite numbers of People, who press'd forward to see him pass along; and all the Nobility came to wait upon him, and to accompany him to the Vice-Queen's. It was a general Holiday throughout the City, and so great was the Joy of the People, that there seem'd only a Herald wanting to proclaim him King, or Resolution enough in himself to put the Crown upon his Head. But the Duke was too prudent to trust to the uncertain Sallies of an inconstant People. He knew what a vast difference there was between their vain Shouts, and that Steddiness which is necessary to support so great an Enterprize. Therefore after having paid his respects to the Vice-Queen, and taken leave of her, he return'd to _Almada_, without so much as going to _Braganza-House_, or passing thro the City, lest he should encrease the Jealousy of the _Spaniards_, who already seem'd very uneasy at the Affection which the People had so unanimously express'd for the Duke. _Pinto_ took care to make his Friends observe the unnecessary Caution which his Master us'd, and that therefore they ought not to neglect this Opportunity, which his Stay at _Almada_ afforded them, to wait upon that Prince, and to persuade, nay, as tho it were to force him to accept the Crown. The Conspirators thought the Counsel good, and deputed him to the Duke to obtain an Audience. He granted them one, but upon condition there should come three of the Conspirators only, not thinking it safe to explain himself before a greater Number. _Miguel d'Almeida_, _Antonio d'Almada_, and _Pedro Mendoza_, were the three Persons pitched upon; who coming by night to the Prince's, and being introduc'd into his Chamber, _d'Almada_, who was their Spokesman, represented in few words the present unhappy State of _Portugal_, whose Natives, of what Quality or Condition soever, had suffer'd so much from the unjust and cruel _Castilians_: That the Duke himself was as much, if not more expos'd than any other to their Treachery; that he was too discerning not to perceive that _d'Olivarez_'s Aim was his Ruin, and that there was no other Place of Refuge but the Throne; for the restoring him to which, he had Orders to offer him the Services of a considerable Number of People of the first Quality, who would willingly expose their Lives, and sacrifice their Fortunes for his sake, and to revenge themselves upon the oppressing _Spaniards_. He afterwards told them, that the Times of _Charles_ V. and _Philip_ II. were no more, when _Spain_ held the Ballance of _Europe_ in her hand, and gave the neighbouring Nations Laws: That this Monarchy, which had been once so formidable, could scarce now preserve its antient Territories; that the _French_ and _Dutch_ not only wag'd War against them, but often overcame 'em; that _Catalonia_ itself employ'd the greatest part of their Forces; that they scarce had an Army on foot, the Treasury was exhausted, and that the Kingdom was governed by a weak Prince, who was himself sway'd by a Minister, abhor'd by the whole Nation. He then observ'd what foreign Protection and Alliances they might depend on, and be assur'd of; most of the Princes of _Europe_ were profess'd Enemies to the House of _Austria_; the Encouragement _Holland_ and _Catalonia_ had met with, sufficiently shew'd what might be expected from that able[B] Statesman, whose mighty Genius seem'd wholly bent upon the Destruction of the _Spanish_ King; that the Sea was now open, and he might have free Communication with whom he pleas'd; that there were scarce any _Spanish_ Garisons left in _Portugal_, they having been drawn out to serve in _Catalonia_; that there could never be a more favourable Opportunity of asserting his Right and Title to the Crown, of securing his Life, his Fortune, and his Liberty, which were at stake, and of delivering his Country from Slavery and Oppression. We may easily imagine, that there was nothing in this Speech which could displease the Duke of _Braganza_; however, unwilling to let them see his Heart, he answer'd the Deputies in such a manner, as could neither lessen, or encrease their Hopes. He told them, that he was but too sensible of the Miseries to which _Portugal_ was reduc'd by the _Castilians_, nor could he think himself secure from their Treachery; that he very much commended the Zeal which they shew'd for the Welfare of their Country, and was in an especial manner oblig'd to them for the Affection which they bore him in particular; that notwithstanding what they had represented, he fear'd that matters were not ripe for so dangerous an Enterprize, whose Consequence, should they not bring it to a happy Period, would prove so fatal to them all. Having return'd this Answer, (for a more positive one he would not return) he caress'd the Deputies, and thank'd them in so obliging a manner, that they left him, well satisfy'd that their Message was gratefully receiv'd; but at the same time persuaded, that the Prince would be no farther concerned in their Design, than giving his content to the Execution of it, as soon as their Plot should be ripe. After their Departure, the Duke confer'd with _Pinto_ about the new Measures which they must take, and then return'd to _Villa-viciosa_; but not with that inward Satisfaction of Mind which he had hitherto enjoy'd, but with a Restlessness of Thought, the too common Companion of Princes. As soon as he arriv'd, he communicated those Proportions, which had been made him, to the Dutchess his Wife. She was of a _Castilian_ Family, Sister to the Duke of _Medina Sidonia_, a Grandee of _Spain_, and Governor of _Andalusia_. During her Childhood, her Mind was great and heroick, and as she grew up, became passionately fond of Honour and Glory. The Duke, her Father, who perceived this natural Inclination of hers, took care to cultivate it betimes, and gave the Care of her Education to Persons who would swell her Breast with[C] Ambition, and represent it as the chiefest Virtue of Princes. She apply'd herself betimes to the Study of the different Tempers and Inclinations of Mankind, and would by the Looks of a Person judge of his Heart; so that the most dissembling Courtier could scarce hide his Thoughts from her discerning Eye. She neither wanted Courage to undertake, nor Conduct to carry on the most difficult things, provided their End was glorious and honourable. Her Actions were free and easy, and at the same time noble and majestick; her Air at once inspir'd Love, and commanded Respect. She took the _Portuguese_ Air with so much ease, that it seem'd natural to her. She made it her chief Study to deserve the Love and Esteem of her Husband; nor could the Austerity of her Life, a solid Devotion, and a perfect Complaisance to all his Actions, fail of doing it. She neglected all those Pleasures, which Persons of her Age and Quality usually relish; and the greatest part of her time was employ'd in Studies, which might adorn her Mind, and improve her Understanding. The Duke thought himself compleatly happy in the possession of so accomplish'd a Lady; his Love could scarce be parallel'd, and his Confidence in her was entire: He never undertook any thing without her Advice, nor would he engage himself any farther in a matter of such consequence, without first consulting with her. He therefore shew'd her the Scheme of the Revolution; the Names of the Conspirators, and acquainted her with what had pass'd as well in the Assembly held at _Lisbon_, as in the Conference he had had with them at _Almada_, and the Warmth which every one had shown upon this occasion. He told her, That the Expedition of _Catalonia_ had so incens'd the Nobility, that they were all resolv'd to revolt, rather than to leave their native Country; he dreaded, that if he should refuse to lead them on, they would forsake him, and chuse themselves another Leader. Yet he confess'd, that the Greatness of the Danger made him dread the Event; that whilst he view'd the Throne at a distance, the flattering Idea of Royalty was most agreeable to his Mind, but that now having a nearer Prospect of it, and of the intervening Obstacles, he was startled; nor could he calmly behold those Dangers into which he must inevitably plunge himself and his whole Family, in case of a Discovery: That the People, on whom they must chiefly depend for the Success, were inconstant, and disheartned by the least Difficulty: That the Number of Nobility and Gentry which he had on his side, was not sufficient, unless supported by the Grandees of the Kingdom; who doubtless, jealous of his Fortune, would oppose it, as not being able to submit to the Government of one, whom they had all along look'd upon as their Equal. That these Considerations, as well as the little Dependance he could make on foreign Assistance, overrul'd his Ambition, and made him forget the hopes of reigning. But the Dutchess, whose Soul was truly great, and Ambition her ruling Passion, immediately declar'd herself in favour of the Conspiracy. She ask'd the Duke, "Whether in case the _Portuguese_, accepting his Denial, should resolve to make themselves a Republick, he would side with them, or with the King of _Spain_?" "With his Countrymen undoubtedly, _he reply'd_; for whose Liberty he would willingly venture his Life." "And why can you not do for your own sake, _answer'd she_, what you would do as a Member of the Commonwealth? The Throne belongs to you, and should you perish in attempting to recover it, your Fate would be glorious, and rather to be envy'd than pity'd." After this she urg'd "his undoubted Right to the Crown; that _Portugal_ was reduc'd to such a miserable State by the _Castilians_, that it was inconsistent with the Honour of a Person of his Quality to be an idle Looker-on; that his Children would reproach, and their Posterity curse his Memory, for neglecting so fair an Opportunity of restoring them what they ought in justice to have had." Then she represented the difference between a Sovereign and a Subject, and the pleasure of ruling, instead of obeying in a servile manner. She made him sensible, that it would be no such difficult matter to re-possess himself of the Crown; that tho he could not hope for foreign Assistance, yet were the _Portuguese_ of themselves able to drive the _Spaniards_ out of their Country, especially at such a favourable Juncture as this. In short, so great was her persuasive Art, that she prevailed upon the Duke to accept the Offer made him, but at the same time confess'd his Prudence, in letting the Number of the Conspirators encrease before he join'd with them; nor would she advise him to appear openly in it, till the Plot was ripe. Mean while the Court of _Spain_ grew very jealous or him. Those extraordinary Marks of Joy, which the _Lisbonites_ had shewn at his coming thither, had very much alarm'd _d'Olivarez_. It was also whisper'd about, that there were nightly Meetings and secret Assemblies held at _Lisbon_: So impossible it is, that a Business of such a consequence should be wholly conceal'd. [Sidenote: _Octob. 20. 1640._] Upon this several Councils were held at _Madrid_, in which it was resolv'd, that the only way to prevent the _Portuguese_ from revolting, was by taking from them their Leader, in favour of whom it was suppos'd they intended to revolt. Wherefore _d'Olivarez_ immediately dispatch'd a Courier to the Duke of _Braganza_, to acquaint him, that the King desir'd to be inform'd, by his own mouth, of the Strength of every Fort and Citadel, the Condition of the Sea-Ports, and what Garisons were plac'd in each of them: to this he added, that his Friends at Court were overjoy'd at the thoughts of seeing him so soon, and that every one of them were preparing to receive him with the Respect due to his Quality and Deserts. This News thunder-struck the unhappy Prince; he was well assur'd, that since so many Pretences were made use of to get him into _Spain_, his Destruction was resolv'd on, and nothing less than his Life could satisfy them. They had left off Caresses and Invitations, and had now sent positive Orders, which either must be obey'd, or probably open Force would be made use of. He concluded, that he was betray'd. Such is the Fear of those, whose Thoughts are taken up with great Designs, and who always imagine that the inquisitive World is prying into their Actions, and observing all their Steps. Thus did the Duke, whose Conduct had been always greater than his Courage, dread that he had plung'd himself into inevitable Destruction. But to gain time enough to give the Conspirators notice of his Danger, by the Advice of the Dutchess, he sent a Gentleman, whose Capacity and Fidelity he was before assur'd of, to the Court of _Madrid_, to assure the _Spanish_ Minister, that he would suddenly wait on the King; but had at the same time given him private Orders to find out all the Pretences imaginable for the delaying his Journey, hoping in the mean time to bring the Conspiracy to Ripeness, and thereby to shelter himself from the impending Storm. As soon as this Gentleman arriv'd at _Madrid_, he assur'd the King and the Duke _d'Olivarez_, that his Master follow'd him. To make his Story the more plausible, he took a large House, which he furnish'd very sumptuously, then hir'd a considerable Number of Servants, to whom he before-hand gave Liveries. In short, he spar'd no Cost to persuade the _Spaniards_ that his Master would be in a very little time at Court, and that he intended to appear with an Equipage suitable to his Birth. Some days after he pretended to have receiv'd Advice that his Master was fallen sick. When this Pretence was grown stale, he presented a Memorial to _d'Olivarez_, in which he desir'd that his Master's Precedence in the Court might be adjusted. He did not in the least question but that this would gain a considerable time, hoping that the Grandees, by maintaining their Rights, would oppose his Claims. But these Delays beginning to be suspected, the first Minister had the thing soon decided, and always in favour of the Duke of _Braganza_; so earnestly did he desire to see him once out of _Portugal_, and to have him safe at _Madrid_. The Conspirators no sooner heard of the Orders which the Duke had receiv'd, but fearing that he might obey them, deputed _Mendoza_ to know what he intended to do, and to engage him firmly, if possible, to their Party. This Gentleman was chosen preferably to any other, because he was Governor of a Town near _Villa-viciosa_; so that he could hide the real Intent of his Journey from the _Spaniards_, under the specious Pretence of Business. He did not dare to go directly to the Prince's House, but took an opportunity of meeting him in a Forest one morning as he was hunting; they retir'd together into the thickest part of the Wood, where _Mendoza_ shew'd him what Danger he expos'd himself to, by going to a place where all were his Enemies: That by this inconsiderate Action the Hopes of the Nobility, as well as of the People, were utterly destroy'd: That a sufficient Number of Gentlemen, who were as able to serve him, as they were willing to do it, or to sacrifice their Lives for his sake, only waited for his Consent to declare themselves in his favour: That now was the very Crisis of his Fate, and that he must this instant resolve to be _Cæsar_ or nothing: That the Business would admit of no longer Delay, lest the Secret being divulg'd, their Designs should prove abortive. The Duke, convinc'd of the Truth of what was said to him, told him that he was of his mind, and that he might assure his Friends, that as soon as their Plot should be ripe, he would put himself at the head of them. This Conference ended, _Mendoza_ immediately return'd home, for fear of being suspected, and wrote to some of the Conspirators that he had been hunting; "We had almost, _continued he_, lost our Game in the Pursuit, but at last the Day prov'd a Day of good Sport." Some few Days after _Mendoza_ return'd to _Lisbon_, and acquainted _Pinto_ that his Master wanted him, who set out as soon as they had together drawn out a shorter Scheme to proceed upon. Coming to _Villa-viciosa_, the first thing he acquainted the Duke with, was the Difference which had lately happen'd at the Court of _Lisbon_, the Vice-Queen loudly complaining of the haughty Pride and Insolence of _Vasconcellos_; nor could she any longer bear that all Business should be transacted by him, whilst she enjoy'd an empty Title, without any the least Authority. What made her Complaints the juster, was, that she was really a deferring Princess, and capable of discharging the Trust which was committed to her Secretary. But it was the Greatness of her Genius, and her other extraordinary Deserts, which made the Court of _Spain_ unwilling to let her have a greater share in the Government. _Pinto_ observ'd, that this Difference could never have happen'd in a better time, seeing that the Ministers of _Spain_ being taken up with this Business, would not be at leisure to pry into his Actions, or to observe the Steps he should take. The Duke of _Braganza_, since _Mendoza_'s Departure, was fallen into his wonted Irresolution, and the nearer the Business came to a Crisis, the more he dreaded the Event: _Pinto_ made use of all his Rhetorick to excite his Master's Courage, and to draw him into his former Resolution. Nay, to his Persuasions he added Threatnings; he told him, in spite of himself, the Conspirators would proclaim him King, and what Dangers must he run then, when the Crown should be fix'd upon his Head, at a time when, only for want of necessary Preparation, he was not capable of preserving it. The Dutchess join'd with this faithful Servant, and convinc'd the Duke of the Baseness of preferring Life to Honour: he, charm'd with her Courage, yet asham'd to see it greater than his own, yielded to their Persuasions. Mean while, the Gentleman whom he had sent to _Madrid_, wrote daily to let him know, that he could no longer defer his Journey on any pretence whatsoever, and that _Olivarez_ refus'd to hear the Excuses which he would have made. The Duke, to gain a little longer time, order'd the Gentleman to acquaint the _Spanish_ Minister, that he had long since been at _Madrid_, had he had Money enough to defray the Expence of his Journey, and to appear at Court in a manner suitable to his Quality: That as soon as he could receive a sufficient Sum, he would immediately set out. This Business dispatch'd, he consulted with the Dutchess and _Pinto_ about the properest Means of executing their Design: several were propos'd, but at last this was agreed upon, That the Plot must break out at _Lisbon_, whose Example might have a good effect upon the other Towns and Cities of the Kingdom: That the same Day wherein he was proclaim'd King in the Metropolis, he should be also proclaim'd in every Place which was under his Dependance; nay, in every Borough and Village, of which any of the Conspirators were the leading Men, they should raise the People, so that one half of the Kingdom being up, the other of course would fall into their Measures, and the few remaining _Spaniards_ would not know on which side to turn their Arms. His own Regiment he should quarter in _Elvas_, whose Governour was wholly in his Interest. That as for the manner of their making themselves Masters of _Lisbon_, Time and Opportunity would be their best Counsellors; however, the Duke's Opinion was, that they should seize the Palace in the first place, so that by securing the Vice-Queen, and the _Spaniards_ of Note, they would be like so many Hostages in their hands, for the Behaviour of the Governour and Garison of the Citadel, who otherwise might very much annoy 'em when they were Masters of the Town. After this, the Duke having assur'd _Pinto_, that notwithstanding any Change of Fortune, he should still have the same place in his Affection; he sent him to _Lisbon_ with two Letters of Trust, one for _Almeida_, the other for _Mendoza_; wherein he conjur'd 'em to continue faithful to their Promises, and resolutely and courageously to finish what they had begun. As soon as he arriv'd at _Lisbon_, he deliver'd his Letters to _Almeida_ and _Mendoza_, who instantly sent for _Lemos_ and _Coreo_, whom _Pinto_ had long since engag'd in the Interest of his Master. These were two rich Citizens, who had gone thro all the Offices of the City, and had the People of it very much at their command; as they still carry'd on their Trade, there were a vast Number of poor People daily employ'd by 'em, and whose Hatred to the _Spaniards_ they had still taken care to encrease, by insinuating that there were new Taxes to be laid upon several things at the beginning of the next Year. When they observ'd any one of a fiery Temper, they would take care to discharge him, on pretence that the _Castilians_ had utterly ruin'd their Trade, and that they were no longer able to employ them; but their Aim was to reduce them to Poverty and Want, insomuch that Necessity should oblige them to revolt: but still would they extend their Charity towards them, that they might always have them at their service. Besides this, they had engag'd some of the ablest Merchants and Tradesmen in every part of _Lisbon_, and promis'd, that if the Conspirators would give 'em warning over night of the Hour they intended to rise, punctually at that time they would have half the City up in Arms. _Pinto_ being thus sure of the Citizens, turn'd his Thoughts to the other Conspirators: he advis'd them to be ready for the Execution of their Plot upon the first notice given them; that mean while he would have them pretend they had some private Quarrel, and engage their Friends to assist them, for many, he observ'd, were not fit to be entrusted with so important a Secret, and others could not in cold Blood behold the Dangers they must go thro, and yet both be very serviceable when Matters were ripe, and only their Swords wanted. [Sidenote: _Dec. 1. 1640._] Finding every body firm in their Resolutions, and impatient to revenge themselves upon the _Spaniards_, he conferr'd with _Almeida_, _Mendoza_, _Almada_, and _Mello_, who fix'd upon Saturday, the first of _December_, for the great, the important Day: Notice was immediately given to the Duke of _Braganza_, that he might cause himself to be proclaim'd King the same day in the Province of _Alentejo_, most part of which belong'd to him. After which they agreed upon meeting once more before the time. On the Twenty-fifth of _November_, according to their Agreement, they met at _Braganza-House_, where mustering their Forces, they found that they could depend upon about One Hundred and Fifty Gentlemen, (most of them Heads of Families) with their Servants and Tenants, and about Two Hundred substantial Citizens, who could bring with them a considerable Number of inferior Workmen. _Vasconcellos_'s Death was unanimously resolv'd on, as a just Victim, and which would be grateful to the People. Some urg'd, that the Archbishop of _Braga_ deserv'd the same Fate, especially considering the Strength of his Genius, and the Greatness of his Courage; for it was not to be suppos'd that he would be an idle Looker-on, but would probably be more dangerous than the Secretary himself could be, by raising all the _Spaniards_ who were in _Lisbon_, with their Creatures; and that whilst they were busy in making themselves Masters of the Palace, he, at the head of his People, might fling himself into the Citadel, or come to the assistance of the Vice-Queen, to whose Service he was entirely devoted; and that at such a time as this, Pity was unseasonable, and Mercy dangerous. These Considerations made the greatest part of the Assembly consent to the Prelate's Death; and he had shar'd _Vasconcellos_'s Fate, had not[D] Don _Miguel d'Almeida_ interpos'd. He represented to the Conspirators, that the Death of a Man of the Prelate's Character and Station, would make them odious to the People; that it would infallibly draw the Hatred of the Clergy, and of the Inquisition in particular, (a People who at this Juncture were to be dreaded) upon the Duke of _Braganza_, to whom they would not only give the Names of Tyrant and Usurper, but whom they would also excommunicate; that the Prince himself would be sorely griev'd to have the Day stain'd with so cruel an Action; that he himself would engage to watch him so closely on that Day, that he should not have an Opportunity of doing any thing which might be prejudicial to the common Cause. In short, he urg'd so many things in his behalf, that the Prelate's Life was granted, the Assembly not being able to deny any thing to so worthy an Advocate. Nothing now remain'd but to regulate the Order of the March and Attack, which was agreed upon in this manner: They should divide into four Companies, which should enter the Palace by four different Ways; so that all the Avenues to it being stopt, the _Spaniards_ might have no Communication with, or be able to assist one another: That Don _Miguel d'Almeida_, with his, should fall on the _German_ Guard, at the Entrance of the Palace: That _Mello_ Lord _Ranger_, his Brother, and Don _Estevan d'Acugna_, should attack the Guard, which was always set at a Place call'd the _Fort_: That the Lord-Chamberlain _Emanuel Saa_, _Teillo de Menezes_, and _Pinto_, should enter _Vasconcellos_'s Apartment, whom they must immediately dispatch: That Don _Antonio d'Almada_, _Mendoza_, Don _Carlos Norogna_, and _Antonio Salsaigni_, should seize the Vice-Queen, and the _Spaniards_ which were with her, to serve for Hostages, in case of need. Mean while, some of the Gentlemen, with a few of the most reputable Citizens, should proclaim Don _John_, Duke of _Braganza_, King of _Portugal_ throughout the City; and that the People being rais'd by their Acclamations, they should make use of them to assist, wherever they found any Opposition. After this they resolv'd to meet on the first of _December_ in the morning, some at _Almeida_'s, some at _Almada_'s, and the rest at _Mendoza_'s House, where every Man should be furnish'd with necessary Arms. While these things were transacting at _Lisbon_, and that the Duke's Friends were using all their Endeavours for his Re-establishment, he receiv'd an Express from _Olivarez_, (who grew very jealous of his Conduct) with positive Orders to come immediately to _Madrid_; and that he might have nothing to colour his Delay, he remitted him a Bill upon the Royal Treasury for Ten Thousand Ducats. The Commands laid upon him were so plain and positive, that the Duke could not put off his Journey without justly encreasing his Suspicion. He plainly foresaw, that if he did not obey those Orders, the Court of _Madrid_ would take some such Measures as might prove fatal to him, and wholly destroy their Projection; he would not therefore refuse to obey, but made part of his Houshold immediately set out, and take the _Madrid_ Road. In the presence of the Courier he gave several Orders relating to the Conduct of those he left his Deputy-Governours, and in all respects behav'd himself like a Man who was going a long Journey. He dispatch'd a Gentleman to the Vice-Queen, to give her notice of his Departure, and wrote to _Olivarez_, that he would be at _Madrid_ in eight Days time at farthest; and that he might engage the Courier to report all these things, he made him a considerable Present, under pretence of rewarding him for his expeditious Haste, in bringing him Letters from the King, and his first Ministers. At the same time he let the Conspirators know what new Orders he had receiv'd from Court, that they might see the Danger of deferring the Execution of their Design; but they were scarce in a Capacity of assisting him, an Accident having happen'd, which had almost broken all their Measures. There was at _Lisbon_ a Nobleman, who on all Occasions had shewn an immortal Hatred to the _Spanish_ Government; he never call'd them any thing but Tyrants and Usurpers, and would openly rail at their unjust Proceedings, but nothing anger'd him more than the Expedition of _Catalonia_: _d'Almada_ having taken care to fall often into his Company, thought there was not a truer-hearted _Portuguese_ in the whole Kingdom, and that no one would more strenuously labour for their Liberty. But oh Heaven! how great was his Surprize! when having taken him aside, and discover'd the whole Conspiracy to him, this base, this cowardly Wretch, whose whole Courage was plac'd in his Tongue, refus'd to have any hand in the Business, or to engage himself with the Conspirators, pretending that their Plot had no solid Foundation: Bold and adventrous where no Danger was, but fearful and daunted as soon as it appear'd. "Have you, _said he to_ Almada, Forces enough to undertake so great a thing? Where is your Army to oppose the Troops of _Spain_, who upon the first News of the Revolt will enter the Kingdom? What Grandees have you at your head? Can they furnish you with Money sufficient to defray the Expence of a Civil War? I fear, _continued he_, that instead of revenging yourselves on the _Spaniards_, and freeing _Portugal_ from Slavery, you will utterly ruin it, by giving the _Spaniards_ a specious Pretence for doing what they have been so long endeavouring at." _D'Almada_, who expected nothing less than such an Answer, and being very much troubled at his having entrusted the Secret to a Man, who in all probability would betray it, without replying drew his Sword, and coming up to the other, his Eyes sparkling with Rage; "Base Wretch, _said he_, by thy deceitful Words thou hast drawn a Secret from me, with which thou must take my Life, or by the Loss of thine atone for thy Treachery." The other, who had always thought it safest to avoid the nearest Danger, at the sight of _d'Almada_'s naked Sword, promis'd to do any thing. He offer'd to sign the Conspiracy, and found weighty Reasons to destroy his former Objections; he swore that he would bury the Secret in his Heart, and endeavour'd all he could to persuade _Almada_, that it was neither want of Courage, or Hatred to the _Spaniards_, which had at first made him averse to what he had propos'd. Notwithstanding his Oaths and Promises, _d'Almada_ could not be thoroughly satisfy'd of this Man's Fidelity; he took care, without losing sight of him, to let the others know what had happen'd. A general Consternation immediately spread itself amongst them, and they fear'd, that the Prospect of the Danger which he must share, or the Hope of a Reward, would make this Wretch betray them. Upon this they resolv'd to defer the Execution of their Project, and forc'd _Pinto_ to write to his Master, to put off his being proclaim'd in his Country, till he should hear further from them. But _Pinto_, who knew how dangerous it was to defer such a thing, tho but for a Day, at the same time sent him another Letter, in which he desir'd him to take no notice of his first, seeing that it was only the Effect of a panick Fear, which had seiz'd the Conspirators, and which would be over long before the Express arriv'd. Nor was this crafty Man at all deceiv'd; for the next Day finding every thing still and quiet, and the Person who caus'd the Alarm making fresh Promises of Secrecy, they concluded that either he had arm'd his Mind with a generous Resolution of assisting them, or was afraid of impeaching so many Persons of Quality; and therefore they determin'd to proceed to Execution on the appointed Day. But another Adventure happen'd, which disquieted 'em as much as the former. There were always in the Palace several of the Conspirators, walking up and down like Courtiers out of Place, whose Business it was to observe what was done within; but on the Evening of the last of _November_, they came in a Fright to their Companions, to tell them that _Vasconcellos_ (by whose Death they were to begin the mighty Work) was just gone on board a Yacht, and had cross'd the _Tagus_. Who but Conspirators would have taken notice of so indifferent a thing? For a thousand Reasons, in which they were not concern'd, might have made him go on the other side of the Water; but they immediately concluded, that this artful Statesman, who had always his Spies abroad, had discover'd their Plot, and was about to bring into _Lisbon_ those Soldiers which were quarter'd in the Villages on the other side of the River. Death, in its most ghastly Shape, appear'd to them, and they fancy'd that they already felt the cruellest Torments which could be inflicted. Some were resolving to fly into _Africa_, others into _England_; and all of them spent the first part of the Night in the greatest Disquiet imaginable, between the Hopes of Life and Fear of Death. But about the middle of the Night their Apprehensions vanish'd; for some who had been sauntring about the Port, to endeavour to discover the Secretary's Design, came and brought them the welcome News, that _Vasconcellos_ had been only diverting himself upon the Water, and that he was return'd, with the Musick playing before him. A sudden Joy succeeded to their Grief, and about an hour after, being inform'd that every thing was quiet in the Palace, and every body bury'd in a profound Sleep, they return'd home to enjoy a little Rest; that they might be fitter for the Morning's Work. It was very late, or rather very early, when they parted, and within some few hours of their appointed time, and yet an Accident happen'd within those few hours, which had almost betray'd them; so dangerous and uncertain are Enterprizes of this nature, whilst there are Men, whom Hopes of Gain, or Fear of Punishment, can work upon to betray their Fellows. Don _George Mello_, Brother to the Lord _Ranger_, lodg'd at a Relation's House, in the furthest Suburbs of _Lisbon_. This Gentleman thought, that now the time was come in which the Conspiracy would break out, and there was no necessity of hiding it any longer from this Relation, whom he had reason to believe was his Friend, as also one that might be serviceable to them, and who otherwise would for ever reproach him with having distrusted him as one not true to the Interest of his Country. Wherefore as soon as he came home, he went into his Chamber, and there reveal'd the Secret, desiring him to join in the Enterprize with so many Persons of Quality, and to behave himself as a _Portuguese_ ought to do upon such an occasion. The other, surpriz'd at the Strangeness of this News, affected a seeming Joy for the approaching Liberty of his Country, thank'd _Mello_ for the Confidence he repos'd in him, and assur'd him, that he accounted himself happy in having an opportunity of exposing his Life in so just and glorious a Cause. Upon this _Mello_ retir'd to his Chamber, to lay himself down to sleep, but scarce was he got thither, when he began seriously to reflect upon what he had been doing, and could not but think himself guilty of a very inconsiderate Action, in putting the Lives of so many Persons of Quality in the power of one, of whose Principles he was not overwell assur'd; then began he to fancy, that he had observ'd something of Fear in the Countenance of the Person, at the time when he was advising him to share the Danger of the Undertaking. Full of these Reflections, he could not lay him down to rest, but was walking in great Disorder about his Chamber, when he thought he over-heard a kind of whispering Noise. Opening his Window softly, to see if any body was in the Street, he could perceive a Servant holding his Relation's Horse, and himself ready to mount. Enrag'd at this, he snatch'd his Sword, and hastening down stairs, seiz'd his Kinsman, and ask'd him whither he was going at this unseasonable time. The other would have forg'd an Excuse, and was hammering out a Lye, but _Mello_ holding his Point to his Breast, threaten'd to kill him, if he did not immediately go in again; then order'd he the Keys of the House to be brought him, and having fasten'd all the Doors himself, he retir'd with his Kinsman, nor would he lose sight of him till it was time to go to the Rendevouz, to which he carried him. But now the Morning dawn'd, that was to decide whether the Duke of _Braganza_ should be the King and Deliverer of his Country, or be accounted a Rebel and Traitor. Betimes in the Morning the Conspirators met at the appointed Places, where they were to be furnish'd with Arms. They all appear'd with so much Resolution and Courage, that they rather seem'd marching to a certain Victory, than to an uncertain Enterprize. But what is very much to be admir'd at, is, that amongst such a Number of Nobility, Gentry, Citizens, nay Priests, not one should falsify his Word, or break his Promise, tho their Interests in the Event were very different; but they all seem'd as impatient for the important Moment, as if each there had been the Contriver of the Scheme, or at the Head of the Enterprize; or rather, as if the Crown was to have been the Reward of each individual Man's Labour. Several Ladies also made themselves famous on that Day. But the noble Behaviour of Donna _Philippa de Villenes_ ought never to be forgotten, who with her own hands arm'd both her Sons; and giving them their Swords, "Go, my Children, _said she_, put an end to a Tyrant's Power, revenge yourselves on your Enemies, free your Country, and be assur'd, that if Success does not crown your Undertaking, your Mother never will live to see the cruel Fate of so many brave and deserving Patriots." Every one being arm'd, they made the best of their way towards the Palace, most of them in Litters, that they might conceal their Number and their Arms. There they divided into four Companies, and waited with impatience till the Palace-Clock struck Eight; that, and the firing of a Pistol, being the appointed Signal. Never did time seem so long; they fear'd that their being at that Place so early, and in such a Number, might make the Secretary jealous of their Design: but at last the long-expected Hour struck, and _Pinto_ firing a Pistol, they rush'd forward to execute their bold Design. Don _Miguel d'Almeida_, with those that accompany'd him, fell upon the _German_ Guard, who were so far from expecting any Attack, that they were sitting very carelessly, few of them having their Arms in hand; so that they were cut to pieces, without scarce making any resistance. The Lord _Ranger_, with his Brother _Mello_, and Don _Estevan d'Acugna_, fell on the _Spaniards_ who kept Guard at a Place before the Palace, call'd the _Fort_. These Nobles, followed by most of the Citizens who were engag'd in the Conspiracy, fell upon the _Castilians_ Sword in hand, and fought most resolutely; but no one behav'd himself more bravely than one of the City Priests: this Reverend Man, with a Crucifix in one hand, and a Sword in the other, appear'd at the head of his Party, and encourag'd the People, both by his Words and his Example, to cut their Enemies in pieces. The _Spaniards_, aw'd at the sight of so religious an Object, neither durst offend him, nor defend themselves, but fled before him. In short, after some small Resistance, the Officer of the Guard, willing to save his own Life, was forc'd to cry out with the rest, _Long live the Duke of_ Braganza, _King of_ Portugal! _Pinto_ having forced his way into the Palace, march'd at the head of those, who were to enter _Vasconcellos_'s Apartment, so undauntedly, and with so little concern, that meeting with an Acquaintance, who, surpriz'd and frighted, ask'd him, whither he was going with such a Number of arm'd Men, and what they design'd to do; "Nothing, _said he smiling_, but change our Master, rid you of a Tyrant, and give _Portugal_ their rightful King." Entring the Secretary's Apartment, the first Person they met with was the[E] _Civil Corregidor_; who, thinking that the Noise he heard proceeded from some private Quarrel, would have interpos'd his Authority, but hearing a Cry of _Long live the Duke of_ Braganza, _&c._ thought he was in honour oblig'd to cry out _Long live the King of_ Spain _and_ Portugal: but he lost his Life for his ill-tim'd Loyalty, one of the Conspirators immediately shooting him thro the Head. _Antonio Correa_, first Clerk of the Secretary's Office, ran out to know the Occasion of this Tumult. This was the Man who was employ'd in oppressing the People, and who, after the Example of his Master, treated the Nobility of the Kingdom with Scorn and Contempt; therefore as soon as he appear'd, Don _Antonio de Menezes_ plung'd his Sword into his Bosom. But the Blow not ending either his Life or Pride, and thinking that they had mistaken him, he turn'd towards _Menezes_, his Eyes sparkling with Rage and Indignation, and, in a passionate manner, cry'd out, _Villain! darest thou strike me?_ But _Menezes_, without answering, redoubled his Blows; and the other, having receiv'd four or five Stabs, fell down: However, none of the Wounds prov'd mortal, and he escap'd at that time, to lose his Life afterwards in an ignominious manner, by the hands of the common Hangman. This Business had stop'd the Conspirators, but as soon as _Correa_ fell, they all rush'd forwards towards _Vasconcellos_'s Apartment. There was with him, at that time, Don _Garcez Palleia_, a Captain of Foot; who seeing so many arm'd Men, immediately concluded, that their Design was to butcher the Secretary. And altho' he was under no manner of Obligation to that Minister, yet he thought himself in honour oblig'd to lend him what Assistance he could; wherefore standing at the Door, with his Sword in hand, he barr'd that Passage: but one of the Conspirators running him thro' the Arm, and several, who were unwilling to give him fair play, pressing forward, he was glad to make his Escape, by leaping out of a Window. Upon this all the Company, that was with _Pinto_, enter'd the Chamber at once, and sought _Vasconcellos_; they overturn'd the Bed and Tables, broke open the Trunks, and every one was desirous of giving him the first Blow; yet, spite of their Endeavour, they could not find him, and they began to fear that he had made his Escape: but at last an old Maid-Servant being threaten'd with Death, unless she would tell where her Master was; and seeing the uplifted Swords, pointed to a Press which was made within the Wall, and in which they found the Secretary bury'd under a heap of Papers. So great was his fear of Death, which he saw surrounding him on every side, that it prevented his Speech. Don _Roderigo de Saa_, Lord Chamberlain, was the Man who kill'd him, by shooting him through the Head with a Pistol; after which several of the Conspirators stabb'd him, then threw him out of the Window, crying, _Liberty! Liberty! The Tyrant is dead! Long live Don_ John _King of_ Portugal! The Noise which all this had made, had drawn a vast number of People to the Palace-Court, who seeing the Secretary's Body thrown out, shouted in a most joyful manner; then rushing upon the Carcase, they mangled it, every one being eager to give him a Stab, thinking that, thro his sides, they wounded Tyranny. Thus perish'd _Miguel Vasconcellos_, a _Portuguese_ by Birth, but by Inclination a _Spaniard_, and an Enemy to his Country. He had an excellent Genius for Business, was crafty, politick, nor could any Man apply himself closer to it than he did. He was always inventing new ways of extorting Money from the People, was unmerciful, inexorable, and cruel, without the least regard to Friend or Relation; so fix'd, that after he had taken a Resolution, no one could byass his Temper; and so harden'd, that he never knew what the Stings of Conscience were. He had a Soul that was not capable of relishing any pleasure, but that of hoarding up Money; so that he left vast Sums behind him, part of which the People plunder'd, being willing to repay themselves, in some measure, that which had been extorted from them. _Pinto_, without loss of time, march'd directly to join the other Conspirators, who were to make themselves Masters of the Palace, and to seize the Vice-Queen; he found that the Business was already done, and that Success had every where crown'd their Undertakings. Those who were appointed for that Expedition, came directly up to her Chamber, and the furious Mob, who follow'd them, threatning to set her Apartment on fire, if the Door was not immediately open'd; the Vice-Queen thinking by her Presence to pacify the Nobility, and awe the People, came out, attended by her Maids of Honour, and the Archbishop of _Braga_; and addressing herself to the chief Conspirators, "I own, Gentlemen, _said she_, that the Secretary justly deserv'd your Hatred and Indignation; his Cruelty and his haughty Insolence were intolerable, nor can his Death be charg'd upon you as a Crime, since you have only deliver'd yourselves from an oppressing Minister: But cannot his Blood satisfy you? Or what other Victim would you sacrifice to your Resentment? Think seriously, that altho' his illegal Conduct may excuse this Insurrection, yet should you any longer continue in Arms, Rebellion will be laid at your doors, and you will put it out of my power to make your Peace with the King." Don _Antonio de Menezes_ answer'd, and assur'd her, "That so many Persons of Quality had not taken up Arms to murder a Wretch, who ought to have lost his Life by the hands of the common Hangman; but that their Design was to restore the Crown to the Duke of _Braganza_, to whom it lawfully belong'd, and which the King of _Spain_ had unjustly usurp'd; and that they were all ready to sacrifice their Lives in so glorious a Cause." She was about to reply, and to interpose the King's Authority; but _d'Almeida_, who fear'd that such a Speech might have a dangerous effect upon the People, or at least cool their Courages, interrupted her, saying, "That _Portugal_ acknowledg'd no other King but the Duke of _Braganza_." Upon which the People shouted again, crying, _Long live Don_ John, _King of_ Portugal! The Vice-Queen believing that her Presence might be of service in the City, and have a good effect upon the People every where, where the Conspirators were not present, was going in haste down stairs, but Don _Carlos Norogna_ stopp'd her, desiring that she would retire to her own Apartment, assuring her that she should be treated with as much Respect as if she still had the supreme Command in the Kingdom; but told her that it would be dangerous for so great a Princess to expose herself to the Insults of a furious People, who were jealous of their Liberties, and enflam'd with Thirst of Revenge. The Queen easily understood the meaning of his words, and found that she was their Prisoner. Enrag'd at this, "And what can the People do to me?" _cry'd she_. "Nothing, Madam, _reply'd_ Norogna _in a passion_, but fling your Highness out of the Window." The Archbishop of _Braga_ hearing this Answer, grew furious, and snatching a Sword from one of the Soldiers who stood next him, he flew towards _Norogna_, resolving to revenge the Vice-Queen, and had certainly met with Death, the just Reward of his Rashness, had not Don _Miguel d'Almeida_ laid hold of him, and embracing him, begg'd him to consider what Danger he expos'd himself to, telling him that he was already hated enough by the Conspirators; nor had he found it an easy Task to obtain a Promise of them that they would spare his Life, why then would he urge them by an Action, which would not only be unprofitable to his Cause, but which also so highly misbecame his Character. The Prelate, convinc'd of the Truth of what his Friend said, was obliged to dissemble his Anger; however, he hoped that he should meet with some favourable Opportunity of revenging himself on _Norogna_, and doing something for the service of _Spain_, to whose Interest he was entirely devoted. The rest of the _Spaniards_ who were in the Palace, were made Prisoners by the other Conspirators: Amongst these were the Marquiss of _Puebla_, Major-Domo to the Vice-Queen, and elder Brother to the Marquiss _de Leganez_; Don _Didaco Cardenas_, Lieutenant-General of the Cavalry; Don _Ferdinand de Castro_, Comptroller of the Navy-Office; the Marquiss _de Baynetto_, an _Italian_, Gentleman-Usher to the Vice-Queen: with some Sea-Officers, who lay on shore, and whose Ships were in the Harbour. All this was done as regularly and as quietly, as if they had been taken up by an Order from the King of _Spain_, nobody stirring to their Assistance, and they not being able to defend themselves, most of them having been seiz'd in their Beds. This done, Don _Antonio de Salsaigni_, follow'd by a Crowd of Friends, and an innumerable Multitude of People, went up into the Hall, where the Court of Justice was then sitting, and in an elegant Speech laid before them the present Happiness of _Portugal_, who had restor'd their own lawful King; he told them, that Tyranny was now no more, and that the Laws, which had been long slighted and neglected, should henceforward take their regular Course. This Speech was applauded by the whole Court, and they chang'd the Title of their Decrees, which they no longer made in the Name of the King of _Spain_, but in the Name of Don _John_, King of _Portugal_. Whilst _Salsaigni_ was thus persuading the high Court of Justice to adhere to the Duke of _Braganza_'s Interest, Don _Gaston Coutingno_ was taking out of Prison those who had been thrown into it by the Cruelty of the _Spanish_ Minister. These unhappy Wretches, who had all along been persuaded, that they should end their Lives in their dismal Dungeons, unless taken out to be led to a cruel Death; seeing themselves now at liberty, and their Country in a fair way of being freed, and resolving to suffer any thing, rather than to return to their dark Prisons, form'd a Body no less formidable than that of the Conspirators, and who were as fully resolv'd to set the Duke of _Braganza_ on the Throne. But in the midst of this general Joy, _Pinto_, with the rest of the Leaders, were under great Apprehensions: The _Spaniards_ were yet Masters of the Citadel, from whence they could easily burn and destroy the Town; besides which, the Port was open to the _Spanish_ Fleet: therefore thinking that they had done nothing till they had taken that Place, they went up to the Vice-Queen, and desir'd her to sign a Warrant to the Governour, by virtue of which he should be oblig'd to give them possession of the Citadel. She, far from granting what they ask'd, upbraided them as Rebels and Traitors, and with Indignation ask'd them, Whether they had a mind to make her an Accomplice? But _d'Almada_, who knew how dangerous it was to leave the Enemies any longer in that Fort, and being provok'd at the Vice-Queen's Denial, his Eyes sparkling with Rage, swore violently, that if she did not sign the Warrant, he would forthwith put every one of the _Spaniards_ to death, whom they had taken in the Palace. The poor Princess, frightened with these Threats, and unwilling to be the Occasion of the Death of so many Persons of Quality, was obliged to comply, thinking at the same time that the Governour knew his Duty too well, to obey an Order, which he might be assur'd was sign'd by Compulsion; but she was very much mistaken in her Conjecture, for Don _Lewis del Campo_, the _Spanish_ Governour, was a Man of no Resolution at all, and seeing the Conspirators coming arm'd towards the Citadel, and all the People of the Town following them, who threaten'd to cut him and his Garison in pieces, unless he immediately surrender'd, was glad to see the Warrant, and have so fair an Excuse for his Cowardice; wherefore he immediately obey'd the Order, and gave up the Fort. Proud of having dispatch'd their Business so happily, the Conspirators forthwith deputed _Mendoza_ and the Lord _Ranger_ to the Duke of _Braganza_, to acquaint him with their Success, and assure him, that nothing was now wanting but the Presence of their King, to compleat the Happiness of his Subjects. Notwithstanding their Message, his Presence was not equally coveted by every body. The Grandees of the Kingdom could not see him rais'd to the Throne, without being inwardly jealous of his Fortune; and those of the Nobility, who were not let into the Secret, refus'd as yet to declare themselves; nay, some went so far as to assure the People, that the Duke would never approve of so rash an Action, and whose consequence might be so fatal to them all. Those who were in the _Spanish_ Interest, were in a strange Consternation, and did not dare so much as stir abroad, lest they should be sacrific'd by the People, whose Rage was not yet appeas'd: In short, every body seem'd at an uncertainty, and waited impatiently for the Resolutions of the Duke of _Braganza_. But his Friends, who were better acquainted with his Intentions, still pursued what they had so happily began, and assembled in the Palace, to give the necessary Orders. The Archbishop was unanimously chosen President of the Council, and Lord-Lieutenant of _Portugal_ till the King's Arrival. He would at first have refus'd the Office, declaring that his opinion was, that they had more need of a good General at their head, than of a Man of his Character. However, being press'd by the Assembly to accept the Place, he consented to it, on condition that he might have the Archbishop of _Braga_ for his Collegue; who, he said, was well acquainted with the Business, and might be very serviceable to him during the King's Absence. This cunning Prelate chose his Brother Archbishop sooner than any other Man, well knowing that if he did accept it, he made himself an Accomplice in what he call'd Rebellion, and would be accounted criminal by the _Spanish_ Minister: Besides which, he would have only had the Title of one of the Lord-Lieutenants, without any share of the Power. But if, on the other hand, he refus'd it, he should for ever put him out of the King's Favour, and make him odious to all the People, who henceforwards would look on him as an open and profess'd Enemy to his Country. The Archbishop of _Braga_ was very sensible of the Snare which was laid for him, but as he was wholly devoted to the Vice-Queen, and firm to the _Spanish_ Interest, he refus'd having any thing to do with the Administration; so that the whole Burden of the publick Affairs fell upon the Archbishop of _Lisbon_: to ease him of part of which, they gave him for Assistants Don _Miguel d'Almeida_, _Pedro Mendoza_, and Don _Antonio d'Almada_. One of the first Orders which the new Governour gave, was to seize upon the three _Spanish_ Galloons which were then in the Harbour; upon which they arm'd a few Barks, and in them went most part of the _Lisbon_ Youth, so desirous were they of shewing their Affection to the King: but the Galloons were taken without Resistance, the Officers, and the greatest part of the Ships Crew, having been seiz'd in the Morning ashore. That very Evening Couriers were dispatch'd to every Province, to exhort the People to give thanks for the Recovery of their Liberties, and the Restoration of the Duke of _Braganza_; with Orders at the same time to all Governours of Towns, and other Magistrates, to have him proclaim'd King of _Portugal_, and to take all the _Spaniards_, in their respective Districts, into custody. And now they began to prepare every thing at _Lisbon_ for the Reception of the new King, and the Archbishop sent word to the late Vice-Queen, that she would very much oblige them, in leaving the Palace where she was, for he thought the King would want her Apartment, and that he had prepar'd every thing for her Reception at the Palace of _Xabregas_, which was at the farther end of the Town. This Princess receiv'd the Order with a scornful Look, and without answering a word, obey'd it. She went thro the Street, but without the usual Train of Courtiers and Crowd of People; there was only the Archbishop of _Braga_ with her, who still gave her manifest Tokens of his Respect, even now when he expos'd his Life by so doing. Mean while the Duke of _Braganza_ continued in the cruel State of Uncertainty, sometimes flattering himself with the most pleasing Ideas which a lively Hope can form, and sometimes under the most dismal Apprehensions which frighten'd Fancy can suggest. The Distance between _Villa-viciosa_ and _Lisbon_ being thirty Leagues, he could not know what pass'd in his behalf so soon as he could have wish'd. All that he knew was, that on this Day his Life and Fortune were at stake. He had at first resolv'd to have himself proclaim'd at the same time in all the Towns which were under his Dependance; but his mind chang'd, and he determin'd to wait for the News of what had pass'd at _Lisbon_, before he undertook any thing. There still remain'd the Kingdom of _Algarva_, and the Citadel of _Elvas_, to which he could retire, in case his Party at _Lisbon_ should fail; nay, he thought he could clear himself of having any hand in the Conspiracy, especially at a time when the _Spaniards_ would be glad to believe him innocent. He had planted several Couriers on the Road to _Lisbon_, and thereby expected to have an Account of what had pass'd betimes; but he had waited with impatience all the Day, and the greatest part of the Night, without hearing any thing, and the next Morning was already near at hand, when _Mello_ and _Mendoza_, who had rode post from _Lisbon_, arriv'd. They threw themselves at the Duke's feet, by which Action, as well as by the Joy which appear'd in their Faces, the Success of their Undertaking might be better read, than it was possible for them to express. They were about to give him an exact Account of every thing, but the Duke, without hearing a word of what they had to tell him, conducted them to the Dutchess's Apartment. The two Noblemen saluted her with the same Respect, as if she had actually been upon the Throne; they assur'd her of the Good-Wishes and Fidelity of her Subjects: and to shew her that they acknowledg'd her their Queen, they now gave her the Title of _Majesty_, whereas the Kings and Queens of _Portugal_ had hitherto been always call'd their _Highnesses_. We may easily judge of what pass'd in the Heart of this Royal Pair, if we consider the Fears and Agitations which they were before in, and to what Grandeur they were now rais'd. Nothing but Shouts of Joy were heard throughout the Palace, the happy News soon spread, and the same Morning the King was proclaim'd in all those Places, where it should have been done the Day before; _Mello_ and _Alphonso_ also had him proclaim'd at _Elvas_. The People came in Crouds to pay their Homage to the new King; which, tho in a confus'd manner, was no less agreeable to him, than what he afterwards receiv'd in all the formal Pomp of Ceremony. The King immediately set out for _Lisbon_, with the same Equipage which had been prepar'd for his setting out for _Madrid_. He was accompany'd by the Marquiss _de Ferreira_, a Relation of his; the Count _de Vimioso_; and several other Persons of Quality, who were come to wait upon him to the Capital. [Sidenote: _Decem. 6._] The Queen he left at _Villa-viciosa_, knowing that her Presence was necessary there, to keep the Provinces in awe. Every where, upon the Roads to _Lisbon_, they met with infinite Numbers of People, who crouded forwards to see the King; who had the satisfaction every where of hearing the People blessing him, and cursing the _Spaniards_. All the Nobility, with the whole Court, and the Magistrates of the City, met him at a great distance from _Lisbon_, and he enter'd the Town amidst the Acclamations of a joyful People. That Evening there were Illuminations every where, and Fireworks in every publick Place; each Citizen in particular had a Bonfire before his door, which made a _Spaniard_ say, "The Duke of _Braganza_ was a happy Prince, who had got a whole Kingdom for a Bonfire." Nor was it long indeed before he was Master of the whole Kingdom, every Town follow'd the Example of their Capital, and seem'd as if they had a Plot ripe for Execution. Fresh Couriers every day arriv'd, who brought News of Towns, and sometimes of whole Provinces, which had driven the _Castilians_ out, and proclaim'd the Duke of _Braganza_. Nor were many of the _Spanish_ Governours more resolute than the Commander of the Citadel of _Lisbon_; and whether they wanted Soldiers, Ammunition, or Courage, is uncertain, but most of them surrender'd, without so much as giving the _Portuguese_ the trouble of firing a Gun. In short, they fled the Kingdom like so many Criminals who had broke out of Prison; each Man dreaded _Vasconcellos_'s Fate, and trembled at the sight of an incens'd Multitude: nor was there a _Spaniard_ left in the whole Kingdom, but those who were taken into Custody, and all this in less than a Fortnight's time. Don _Ferdinand de la Cueva_, Commander of the Citadel of _St. Juan_, at the Mouth of the _Tagus_, was the only Man who offer'd to make any resistance, and to preserve the Place for the King his Master. The Garison was wholly compos'd of _Spaniards_, the Officers brave, and resolv'd to hold it out to the last; and therefore, as soon as the _Portuguese_ approach'd them, made a vigorous Defence. They were oblig'd to besiege it in form; to that end they brought Cannon from _Lisbon_, and open'd the Trenches before it, which they carry'd as far as the Counterscarp, spite of the Besieged's continual Fire, and their frequent Sallies. But the King, who knew that treating with the Commander would be not only the safest, but the shortest way, made him such advantageous Proposals, that the Governour could not resist the Temptation; but dazled with the Prospect of the vast Sum which was offer'd, besides a Commandry of the _Order of Christ_, and pretending that his Garison was not strong enough to hold out a Siege, he surrender'd upon Terms, spite of the chief Officers, who refus'd to sign the Capitulation. This done, the King thought it best not to defer his Coronation, that he might thereby confirm his Royalty, and consecrate his Majesty. The Ceremony was perform'd on the Fifteenth of _December_ with all the Magnificence imaginable; the Duke _d'Aveiro_, the Marquiss _de Villareal_, the Duke _de Carmino_, his Son, the Count _de Monsano_, and all the other Grandees of the Kingdom, being present. The Archbishop of _Lisbon_, at the head of all the Clergy of his Diocese, and accompany'd by several other Bishops, met him at the Door of the Cathedral; there he was solemnly acknowledg'd by the States of the Kingdom their Rightful and Lawful King: after which every one of them took the Oath of Allegiance. Some few Days after the Coronation, the Queen arriv'd at _Lisbon_ with a sumptuous Equipage and numerous Retinue. All the Court went out of Town to meet her, and she already had with her all the Officers of her Houshold. The King himself met her at some distance from the Town. This Prince omitted nothing which might make her Entry appear magnificent, and convince the People that he believ'd she had very much contributed to the placing the Crown upon his Head. Every one observ'd, that notwithstanding her Fortune was alter'd, yet was not the Queen in the least chang'd, but behav'd herself as majestically, as if she had been born to, and was educated for the Possession of a Throne. * * * * * Such was the Success of this great Enterprize, as happily finish'd, as it was prudently begun; which may be reckon'd a sort of Miracle, considering the vast Number of Persons, and the different Quality and Inclinations of those who were let into the Secret: Nor can it be accounted for, but from the natural Hatred which the _Portuguese_ had to a _Spanish_ Government; a Hatred! which took its first Rise from the frequent Wars which these neighbouring Nations waged against one another, ever since they had been Monarchies; as well as from their being both concern'd in the Discovery of the _Indies_, and the frequent Debates which they had concerning their Commerce; these at last grew into an inveterate Hatred, which was now encreas'd by the Tyranny of _Spain_. The News of the Revolution soon reach'd the Court of _Spain_. _D'Olivarez_ was almost driven to Despair at the hearing it; he saw his own Project miscarry, and Ruin threatning his Country, which might have been easily prevented, but could not now be remedy'd. Nor had _Spain_ any need of acquiring new Enemies, the _French_ and _Dutch_ Troops already employ'd their utmost Forces, with much ado they resisted their combin'd Strength; and the Revolt of _Catalonia_, he fear'd, might invite other Provinces to do the like. There was no one now in the Court of _Madrid_ ignorant of the News, but the King himself; every one thought that he ought to be inform'd of it, yet no one dar'd undertake the ungrateful Task, for fear of incurring the Minister's Displeasure, whose implacable Temper they knew too well, to hope that he would ever forgive an Offence of this nature. At last the Duke, seeing that the Story was too well known to be any longer conceal'd from the King, and fearing that some of his Enemies, either to ingratiate or revenge themselves, should tell it in such a manner, that the whole Fault would seem to fall upon him, he resolv'd to be himself the Messenger, and coming up to the King, with a serene Look, and a Face on which a dissembled Joy sat confess'd, "I wish your Majesty Joy," _said he_, "of a noble Dutchy, and a fine Estate, which are lately fallen to you." "How _Olivarez!" answer'd the King_; "what do you mean?" "Mean!" _reply'd the Minister_; "why the Duke of _Braganza_ is run mad, the Mob have proclaimed him King of _Portugal_, and he has accepted the Title; so that now all he has is confiscated, and you have a good Pretence to rid yourself of the whole Family: Henceforwards you may reign King of _Portugal_, nor fear that any one will dispute your Title to that Kingdom." As weak a Prince as _Philip_ was, he easily comprehended the meaning of these words; but as he could no longer see but thro his Minister's Eyes, he only told him, That he must take care betimes to put an end to a Rebellion, whose Consequence might otherwise prove dangerous. [Sidenote: _Jan. 28. 1644._] Mean while the King of _Portugal_ took all the necessary Measures to confirm his new Authority. As soon as he came to _Lisbon_, he nam'd Governours for every Town of _Portugal_, as much distinguish'd for their Fidelity to him, as for their Experience and approv'd Valour; who immediately, with what Soldiers they could get together, went to take possession of their Command, and to put the Place in a posture of Defence. At the same time recruiting Commissions were given out; and the Solemnity of his Coronation being over, he call'd together the States of the Kingdom: in which, to prevent all the Doubts and Scruples which might rise in the Minds of the People, his Pretensions to the Crown were examin'd, and by a solemn Decree of the States he was acknowledg'd Rightful and Lawful King, as being descended from Prince _Edward_, Son to King _Emanuel_; whereas the King of _Spain_ was only descended from a Daughter of the same King _Emanuel_, who also by the Fundamental Laws of _Portugal_ was excluded the Succession, having espous'd a foreign Prince. In this Assembly the King declar'd, that he would content himself with his own Estate, and that the usual Royal Revenue should be apply'd to the defraying of the extraordinary Expences, and paying the Debts of the Kingdom. And the better to ingratiate himself with the People, he took off all the Taxes which the oppressing _Spaniards_ had laid upon them. To all the considerable Offices and Employments he promoted those of the Conspirators, whose Birth and Capacity might give them just Pretensions to it, and who had shewn the greatest Desire of raising him to the Throne. In this Promotion no notice was taken of _Pinto_; the King did not think his Royalty sufficiently confirm'd, to venture at raising one of his Servants, and whose Extraction was but mean. However, the Prince was not in the least unmindful of his Service, and without having the Title of a Minister of State, he had the Authority of one; so great was his Influence over his Master, and such entire Confidence did he repose in him. Having given all the necessary Orders within the Kingdom, he resolv'd to assure himself of some foreign Assistance in case of necessity, as well by making strict Alliances with all the Enemies of _Spain_, as by raising them new ones. To this end he endeavour'd to persuade the Duke of _Medina Sidonia_, Governour of _Andalusia_, and his Brother-in-law, to follow his Example, shake off the _Spanish_ Yoke, and make himself an independent Prince. The Marquiss _Daiamonti_, a _Spanish_ Nobleman, and related to the Queen of _Portugal_, was to negotiate this Business, the Success of which will be seen in the Sequel of this History. The King of _Portugal_ made a League offensive and defensive with the _Dutch_; _France_ promis'd him its Protection, and he sent Ambassadors to all the Courts of _Europe_, that his Title might be acknowledg'd by their Princes. But the King of _Spain_ was so destitute of Men, _Catalonia_ employing all his Forces, that he did very little all that Campaign for the Recovery of _Portugal_, and even what he did undertake met with no Success. Some little time after this, News was brought that _Goa_, and all those other Places which belong'd to _Portugal_, whether in the _Indies_, _Africa_, or in _Peru_, had follow'd the Example of their _European_ Masters, and revolted from the _Spaniards_. Thus was the King flatter'd with the Prospect of a happy Reign, and rejoic'd to see Peace and Tranquillity preserv'd within his Kingdom, whilst his Arms met with Success abroad; little suspecting the Danger which threaten'd his Life and Crown, both which he had almost lost by a cursed Conspiracy, which was form'd even in the midst of that Prince's Court. The Archbishop of _Braga_, as has before been observ'd, was wholly devoted to the King of _Spain_, during whose Reign in _Portugal_ he had had a great share in the Ministry. He now plainly saw, that he must never hope for any Preferment, unless the _Spanish_ Government could be again introduc'd into that Kingdom; besides, he fear'd that the new King, who out of a tender regard to his Character, had not had him put into Prison with the other _Spaniards_, might alter his Mind, and seeing his Authority once confirm'd, and dreading no longer the Danger of incensing the People, or provoking the Inquisition, might make him share the Fate of those, whose Courage or Politicks 'twas thought might prove prejudicial to the new King's Government, and who had all been depriv'd of their Liberty. But the chief Motive which induc'd him to undertake something for their Cause, was his Affection to the late Vice-Queen: with impatience he beheld that Princess under Confinement, especially in a Place where he thought it was her Right to rule; and his Rage was violently increas'd by the Orders which were given her Guards to admit neither the Prelate, nor any other Person of Quality, the King having been inform'd that she endeavour'd to infuse Sentiments of Rebellion into all those _Portuguese_ who went to visit her; and therefore thought fit to deprive her of that Liberty, which she so palpably abus'd. As just and as necessary as this Proceeding was, the Archbishop call'd it cruel and tyrannick; and as he had some Notions of Gratitude, believ'd himself under an Obligation of doing something for the Liberty of a Princess, who had done so much for him. The remembrance of her past Kindness enflam'd his Soul with Anger, and made him resolve to embrace any Opportunity whatsoever of revenging himself on her Enemies, and delivering her out of their hands. But as he plainly saw it would be impossible either to surprize or corrupt her Guards, he could not think of any surer way than going directly to the Fountain-head, and by the Death of the King to restore her Liberty and Authority both at once. Being fully confirm'd in this Resolution, he began to think of the speediest Means of putting it in execution, well knowing that he should not long enjoy the Place of President of the Palace, which was not as yet taken from him. He plainly saw that it was in vain to follow the King's Measures, by endeavouring to win the People, and make them join with him; their Hatred to the _Spaniards_ being too deeply rooted in their Hearts. The Nobility, he was assur'd, wou'd not assist him, since by their means the Crown was placed upon the Duke of _Braganza_'s Head: he could therefore only depend upon the Grandees, who with envy beheld one that had been their Equal, upon the Throne. The first thing he did, was to assure himself of _Olivarez_'s Protection and Assistance: after which, he began to work upon the Marquiss of _Villareal_; to whom he represented, that the new King was timorous and diffident, for which reason he sought all opportunities of ruining his Family, lest he should leave a Subject who was capable of disputing the Crown with his Successor: That he and the Duke _d'Aveiro_, who were both of the Royal Blood, were not thought worthy of any Office or Employment; whilst all Places of Trust were fill'd by a company of factious and seditious People: That with indignation the People saw how little he was valued, and were very much troubled to think that a Person of his Quality and Capacity must spend his time at a Country-Seat, and in an inglorious Ease: That one of his Birth and Estate was too great to be the Subject of so petty a Prince as the King of _Portugal_: That he had lost a Master in the King of _Spain_, who only was capable of bestowing such Employments on him as he deserv'd, by reason of the many Kingdoms of which he was Sovereign, and over which he must establish Governours. Seeing that this Discourse made an impression on the Mind of the Marquiss, he went so far as to assure him, that he had Orders from the King of _Spain_ to promise him the Viceroyalty of _Portugal_, as a Reward of his Loyalty, in case he would assist him in his Design of recovering that Kingdom. Notwithstanding what the Archbishop promis'd, the thing was very far from his Heart; his chief Aim being to restore the Dutchess of _Mantua_ to her Liberty and former Authority: for the compassing of which, he thought it very lawful to promise what he never intended to perform; and he knew that ambitious Motives were the likeliest to engage the Marquiss _de Villareal_, upon whom his fair Speeches had at last such an effect, that he yielded to his Persuasions, and promis'd that he, with his Son the Duke of _Camino_, would be at the head of the Enterprize. This Prelate being thus assur'd of these two Princes, made it his next business to engage the Grand Inquisitor, who was his intimate Friend, and than whom no one could be more necessary in carrying on their great Design; seeing that by his means he should also prevail upon all the Officers belonging to the Inquisition, a People more to be dreaded by honest Men than Rogues, and who bear a great sway amongst the _Portuguese_. He endeavour'd at first to alarm his Conscience, by reminding him of the Oath of Allegiance which he had taken to the King of _Spain_, and which he ought not to break in favour of an usurping Tyrant; but finding the Inquisitor a true Churchman, over whom Interest had a greater sway than Conscience, he told him that he must join in the Plot, if he hoped to keep his Place much longer, for that the new King made it his business to give all the Employments to Persons whose Fidelity he could depend upon. After this, he spent several Months in encreasing the Number of Conspirators, the chief of which were the Commissary _de la Crusada_; the Count _d'Armamar_, Nephew to the Archbishop; the Count _de Ballerais_; Don _Augustin Emanuel_; _Antonio Correa_, that Clerk of _Vasconcellos_, to whom _Menezes_ had given divers Stabs on the first Day of the Revolution; _Laurento Pidez Carvable_, Keeper of the Royal Treasury; with several others, who were the Creatures of the _Spanish_ Ministers, to whom they ow'd their Fortunes and their Places, and which they could not hope to keep long, unless by once more introducing the _Spanish_ Government. There were also a vast number of _Jews_ who were concern'd in the Plot, and who had long liv'd at _Lisbon_ in an outward Profession of the Christian Faith. These had lately offer'd the King a vast Sum of Money, if he would free them from the Persecution of the Inquisitors, and let them have their Synagogues at _Lisbon_; but the Prince rejected their Offer, and deny'd their Petition. This had thrown the chief of them into a great Consternation, for appearing at the head of the Petitioners, they had made themselves known, and thereby expos'd themselves to all the Torments which the Inquisition could invent. With these the Archbishop took care to get acquainted, and taking advantage of the Confusion they were in, promis'd them his Protection, which was not to be despis'd, since he had such an Influence over the Grand Inquisitor; but insinuated at the same time, that they were in danger of being banish'd _Portugal_ by the King, who affected very much to be thought a true and pious Catholick: and at the same time promis'd in the Name of the King of _Spain_, that if they would be instrumental to his Restoration, they should have Liberty of Conscience, and Leave openly to profess their Religion. So violent was the Passion of the Archbishop, that he was not asham'd to make use of the profess'd Enemies of _Jesus Christ_, to drive a _Christian_ Prince from a Throne, which rightfully belong'd to him; and this was perhaps the first time that ever the Inquisition and Synagogue went hand in hand together. Several Schemes were propos'd, but at last this, which was drawn by the Archbishop, and approv'd of by the first Minister of _Spain_, was agreed upon; That the _Jews_ should set fire to the four Corners of the Palace on the 5th of _August_, and at the same time to several Houses both in the City and Suburbs, that the People might every where be employ'd in extinguishing the Fire; that the Conspirators should all fly to the Palace under pretence of assisting, and that amidst the Horrour and Confusion which this vast Conflagration would cause, some of them should assassinate the King; that the Duke _de Camino_ should seize the Queen and her Children, who might be as serviceable to them in regaining the Citadel, as the Dutchess of _Mantua_ had been to their Enemies; that at the same time there should be Fireworks ready to be play'd off, to set the _Portuguese_ Fleet on fire; that the Archbishop, with the Grand Inquisitor and all his Officers, should march thro the Town, to keep the People in awe, and prevent their coming to the Assistance of the King, so much do they dread the Power of the Inquisition; and that the Marquiss _de Villareal_ should take the Administration upon him, till they had receiv'd Orders from the Court of _Spain_. But as they had not the least reason to hope that the People would second them, they thought it necessary to make sure of some Troops, and to that end wrote to _Olivarez_ to send a Fleet towards the Coasts of _Portugal_, which should be ready to enter the Port of _Lisbon_ at the time when the Conspiracy should break out; and that there should be some Forces on foot on the Frontiers of the Kingdom, which should be in a readiness to act against any Place, which would not willingly surrender to the King of _Spain_. But the most difficult part of their Labour was to keep an exact Correspondence with the _Spanish_ Minister: for since the King had been inform'd that the Dutchess of _Mantua_ had sent Letters to _Madrid_, there was such a strict Guard kept upon the Frontiers of the Kingdom, that no one could go into _Castile_ without the King's own Passport; nor did they dare attempt to corrupt the Guards, lest they should reveal what had been offer'd them. But at last, seeing themselves under an absolute Necessity of acquainting the _Spanish_ Minister with their Design, without which all their Measures would infallibly be broken; they cast their Eyes upon a rich Merchant of _Lisbon_, who was Treasurer of the Custom-House, and who, by reason of his great Trade, had the King's immediate leave to send Letters into _Castile_ at any time. This Man's Name was _Baeze_; he outwardly profess'd the Christian Religion, but was suppos'd to be a conceal'd Observer of the _Jewish_ Law. To him they offer'd vast Sums of Money for his Assistance; which, together with the Persuasions of the _Jews_ who were engag'd in the Conspiracy, prevail'd upon him so far, that he promis'd to take care that their Letters should be deliver'd to the Duke _d'Olivarez_. To this end he enclos'd the Pacquet directed to the Marquiss _Daiamonti_, Governour of the first Town on the Frontiers of _Spain_, believing his Letters safe, when once out of the Dominions of _Portugal_. The Marquiss, who was nearly related to the Queen, and was at that time negotiating a Business for the King of _Portugal_, was very much surpriz'd to see Letters seal'd with the Great Seal of the Inquisition, and directed to the first Minister of _Spain_; and beginning to fear that his own Business was discover'd, and notice of it hereby given to _Olivarez_, he open'd them, and found that they contain'd the Scheme of a Conspiracy against the Royal Family, and which was speedily to be put in execution. Startled at the Contents, he dispatch'd a Courier to the Court of _Portugal_ with the intercepted Letters. It is impossible to express the Surprize of the King, when he saw that three Princes, who were so nearly related to him, with the Archbishop, and several Grandees of the Kingdom, were contriving how to take away his Life, and give his Crown to a Stranger. He immediately communicated their intended Treason to his Privy-Council, who after a small Deliberation came to a Resolution, which some few days afterwards was executed. The fifth of _October_ was the Day appointed by the Conspirators, and the Time Eleven at Night. That very Morning, about Ten of the Clock, all the Soldiers who were quarter'd in the neighbouring Villages, march'd into _Lisbon_, it having been given out that they were then to be review'd in the Court of the Palace. The King at the same time gave Notes with his own hand to several Officers and others of his Court, which were seal'd up, with positive Orders not to open them till Twelve, and then punctually to execute the Contents. A little before Noon the Archbishop and the Marquiss _de Villareal_ were sent for to the Palace about some Business, and coming into the King's Apartment, were arrested without the least noise, or any body's knowing it; and at the same time one of the Captains of the Guard made the Duke _de Camino_ a Prisoner. Those who had receiv'd the seal'd Notes having open'd them, found Orders to arrest such a Man, whom they should convey to such a Prison, and not lose sight of him till farther Orders. In short, Matters were manag'd so prudently, that in less than an hour's time the Forty-seven Conspirators were seiz'd, without so much as giving any one of them time enough to escape, or even the least suspicion that their Plot was discover'd. The News of their intended Barbarity reaching the ears of the People, they came flocking towards the Palace, and in a tumultuous manner demanded the Prisoners, that they might tear them piece-meal. Tho the King was well pleas'd with the Affection and Loyalty of his Subjects, yet was he a little troubled to see how easily they could be gather'd together, and what mischief they were at such a time able to do. Wherefore having thank'd them for the care which they took of him, and having promis'd that the Traitors should be punish'd according to Law, he order'd the Magistrates to disperse them. But as he knew that the most violent Passions of an incens'd People will soon grow cool, and perhaps dwindle into Compassion, when they no longer should consider the Criminals as the worst of Villains, who would have destroy'd their King and Country, but as unhappy Wretches, who must shortly suffer an ignominious Death; he took care to publish, that the Conspirators Intent was to assassinate him and all the Royal Family, to set the whole Town on fire, and those who escaped the raging Flames, should have fallen by the Sword of the Rebels: That _Spain_ being resolv'd to have nothing more to fear from the _Portuguese_, would have sent all their Citizens into _America_, to toil like Slaves, and be bury'd alive in those Mines, where so many had already perish'd, and to people the City of _Lisbon_ with a Colony of _Castilians_. After this the King order'd the Traitors to be brought to their Tryal, and to this end he appointed Judges, which he took out of the supreme Court of Judicature, and to whom he added two Grandees of the Kingdom, upon account of the Archbishop of _Braga_, the Marquiss _de Villareal_, and the Duke _de Camino_. The King put their Letters, which they had sent to _Olivarez_, into the hands of those who were appointed to prosecute them; but with Orders not to make use of them, if they could by any other means prove them guilty of High Treason, lest the Court of _Spain_ should thereby discover the Correspondence which he held with the Marquiss _Daiamonti_: but there was no necessity of producing them to discover the Truth; for _Baeze_, who was the first that was brought to the Bar, contradicted himself in almost every Question which was ask'd him, and being put to the Torture, his Courage fail'd him, he confess'd his Crime, and discover'd the whole Plan of the Conspiracy. He own'd that their Design was to kill the King, that the Office of the Inquisition was now full of Arms, and that they waited only for _Olivarez_'s Answer to execute their Design. Most of the other Conspirators were put to the Torture, and their Deposition entirely agreed with _Baeze_'s. The Archbishop, the Grand Inquisitor, the Marquiss _de Villareal_, and the Duke _de Camino_, being unwilling to suffer the Torments of the Question, confess'd their Crime. These two last were condemn'd to be beheaded, the rest of the Lay-Traitors to be hang'd, drawn and quarter'd, and the Sentence of the Ecclesiasticks was refer'd to the King himself. Upon this the King immediately assembled his Council, and told them, that the consequence of putting so many Persons of Quality to death, altho they were criminal, might be fatal: That the chief Conspirators were of the first Families of the Kingdom, whose Relations would be for ever his conceal'd Enemies, and that the Desire of revenging their Death would be the unhappy Source of new Plots: That the Consequence of the Death of Count _d'Egmont_ in _Flanders_, and of the _Guises_ in _France_, had prov'd fatal: That if he pardon'd some of them, and chang'd the Sentence of the others into a Punishment less severe than Death, he should for ever win theirs, their Friends, and their Kindreds Hearts, and bind them to his Service by the Ties of Gratitude: but yet, That notwithstanding he himself was inclin'd to Mercy, he had assembled his Council to know their Opinions, and to follow that which should seem the most reasonable, and the most just. The Marquiss _de Ferreira_ was the first who spoke, and was for having them executed without delay: he represented, That in such cases as these Justice only ought to be consulted, and that Mercy was most dangerous: That Pardon would seem not so much the Effect of the Goodness, as Weakness of the Prince, or the Fear of their threatning powerful Friends: That if these should go unpunish'd, it would bring the Government into Contempt, and encourage their Relations to deliver them out of Prison, or perhaps to carry Matters farther: That now, at his Accession to the Crown, he ought, by an Example of Severity, to deter others from ever attempting the like. He urg'd farther, That they were Traitors not only to the King, but also to the State, whose present Constitution they had endeavour'd to subvert: That he ought rather to hearken to the Justice which he ow'd his People, and punish these Criminals, than to his own Inclination of forgiving them, especially at a time when his Preservation and the publick Safety were inseparable. The whole Council being of the same opinion, the King yielded, and the next day Sentence was executed. The Archbishop of of _Lisbon_ being willing to save one of his Friends, came to the Queen, and sollicited her for a Pardon, with all the Assurance of a Man, who thought that nothing could be deny'd him, and that his former Services might claim a much greater Favour. But the Queen, who was convinc'd of the Justice and absolute Necessity of their suffering the Law, and how much a Distinction of this nature would incense the Friends and Relations of the rest, answer'd the Archbishop in few words, but with such a Tone, as made him see it would be in vain to urge his Request any farther; "My Lord, the only Favour I can now grant you, is to forget that you ever ask'd me this." The King, unwilling to disoblige the Clergy, and especially the Court of _Rome_, who had not as yet acknowledg'd him King, or receiv'd his Ambassadors, would not suffer the Archbishop of _Braga_, or the Grand Inquisitor, to be executed, but condemn'd them to a perpetual Imprisonment; where the Archbishop shortly after died of a violent Fever, a Disease often fatal to State-Prisoners, who for some politick Reason must not be led to open Execution. Nothing could be equal to the Surprize of _Olivarez_, when this News was brought him; he could not imagine by what means the King of _Portugal_ had discover'd their Design, nor would it ever have been known, had not an Accident happen'd, which made him see that it was the Marquiss _Daiamonti_, who had unravel'd the dark Design, and acquainted the King with it. This Prince still kept a very good Correspondence with the Enemies of _Spain_, his Ports were open to the Fleets of _France_ and _Holland_; he had a Resident at _Barcelona_, and encourag'd the revolting _Catalonians_: in short, he did all he could to weaken _Spain_, not only by increasing the Rage of its Foes, but also by endeavouring to raise up new ones. To this end, he had already inclin'd the Duke _de Medina Sidonia_, his Brother-in-law, to rebel; whom the Marquiss _Daiamonti_, a _Castilian_, and their mutual Confidant, at length entirely seduced. This Nobleman was, as has been before observ'd, nearly related to the Queen of _Portugal_, and the Duke of _Medina_: He was Governour of a Place at the Mouth of the _Guadiano_, and just on the Frontiers of _Portugal_, which made it easy for him to keep a good Correspondence with that Court; nor did he question, but that by being serviceable to two such powerful Families, he should easily make his own Fortune. He was valiant, enterprizing, hated the first Minister, and at the same time did not in the least value his Life; a Quality so very necessary to those who embark themselves in any dangerous Design. He wrote privately to the Duke, to congratulate him upon the Discovery of the Archbishop's Plot, and the Preservation of the Life of the Queen his Sister, and all the Royal Family; he at the same time observ'd how grateful it must be to him to see the Crown of _Portugal_ one day adorn the Head of his Nephews, which made that Kingdom a sure Refuge for him in time of Distress: which perhaps might be too near at hand, since he could never reckon himself safe while _Olivarez_ was at the head of Affairs, whose only aim was to ruin all the Grandees; nor was it to be suppos'd that the crafty Statesman would long leave him Governour of so large a Province, and in the Neighbourhood of _Portugal_: That he would advise him seriously to reflect on all these things, and let him know his Resolutions; to which end he should send him a Person in whom he could confide, and to whom they both might safely trust their Secret. The Duke was naturally proud and ambitious, and with Envy had beheld his Brother-in-law raising himself to the Throne; nor would he, on his side, willingly neglect any Opportunity of doing the like. Believing by what the Marquiss said, that he had some very advantageous Proposal of this kind to make him, he sent _Lewis de Castile_, his Confidant, to _Daiamonti_, who seeing his Credentials, at once open'd his Mind, and bid him remember with what ease the Duke of _Braganza_ had made himself Master of the Crown of Portugal; nor could there ever be a more favourable time for the Duke of _Medina Sidonia_ to do the like, and make himself independent of the Crown of _Spain_. After this he represented the Weakness of that Kingdom, which was exhausted by the Wars which the _French_ and _Dutch_ had continually waged against them: That _Catalonia_ now employ'd all its Forces, nor would the King know how to help himself, should _Andalusia_ rise in Arms against him, and the War be thus carry'd into the very Heart of the Kingdom: That the People would certainly side with him, being always fond of a new Government; besides which, they had reason enough to complain of the old one, which had so oppress'd them with Taxes, and extorted such vast Sums from them: That the Duke of _Medina_ was as well beloved by the _Andalusians_, as the Duke of _Braganza_ was at the time of the Revolution by the _Portuguese_: That the only thing which now remain'd to be done, was to gain all those, who, under him, were Governours of Towns and Forts, without entrusting them with the Secret, which might be done; and to fill all Places of Trust with his surest Friends: That as soon as the Galloons, which were expected from the _Indies_, arriv'd, he should seize them, and the Riches which were on board would defray the Expences of this Enterprize: That the King of _Portugal_, with his Allies, should have a Fleet ready to enter _Cadiz_, and there land a sufficient Number of Forces, to subdue those who would unseasonably shew their Loyalty to _Spain_. _Lewis de Castile_ being return'd to his Master, gave him a faithful Account of all that had pass'd between him and the Marquiss. The Duke, dazled with the Prospect of a Crown, resolv'd to hazard every thing, rather than fail of obtaining one. He was chief Commander there both by Sea and Land, as Captain-General of the Ocean, and Governour of the Province, in which he also had a very large Estate, and several Towns under his own immediate Jurisdiction. This seem'd very much to facilitate his Design, and made him believe, that it was in his power to put a Crown upon his Head whenever he pleas'd. Upon this he sent _Lewis de Castile_ back to the Marquiss, that they might together agree upon the properest Measures of accomplishing their Project, and especially of engaging the Crown of _Portugal_ to lend them all the Assistance it possibly could. Mean while, he himself was disposing every thing for the intended Revolution; he put his own Creatures in all those Places where their Assistance would be most serviceable to him; he frequently would pity the Soldiers, who were not paid as they ought to be, and the People, who were over-burden'd with excessive Taxes. The Marquiss _Daiamonti_ was well pleas'd to see the Duke in that Disposition he had long wish'd to see him in; he wanted to acquaint the King of _Portugal_ with it, but was unwilling to trust to Letters, and fear'd he could not send a Messenger so privately, but that the Court of _Spain_ might discover it, and have just cause to mistrust his Fidelity: However, at last he cast his eyes upon a crafty and intriguing Monk, who for love of Money, or hope of Preferment, would undertake any thing; he was call'd Father _Nicholas de Valasco_, of the Order of _St. Francis_. No one could be fitter for his purpose, since in the Countries where the Inquisition is, this Habit is so much respected, that no one would dare to pry into his Actions, and observe his Steps. As soon as he had receiv'd his Instructions, he came to _Castro-Marino_, the first Town on the Frontiers of _Portugal_, pretending to ransom some _Castilian_ Prisoners which were detain'd in _Portugal_. The King, who had notice given him of it, by a Letter from the Marquiss _Daiamonti_, was desir'd to seize him, and bring him to Court: This was accordingly done; he was arrested as a Spy, loaded with Chains, and brought to _Lisbon_ as a State-Criminal, whom the Ministry themselves would examine; where he was immediately cast into Prison, and seemingly watch'd very strictly: some time after he was set at liberty, since upon Examination it appear'd, that his only Intent was to ransom some _Castilian_ Prisoners; and partly, to make him amends for his former ill Usage, he was permitted to come to Court, to treat with the proper Officer about it. The King saw him himself several times, and promis'd him, that as a Reward of his Industry and faithful Service, he would give him a Bishoprick. The Monk, flatter'd with the hopes of the Mitre, would never stir from the Palace; he made his court to the Queen, and was always waiting upon the Ministers: He wanted to be let into all the State-Intrigues, and did all he could to shew what Credit he had at Court; and thus, without directly revealing his Secret, he betray'd it by his Pride and Inconsiderateness. It plainly appear'd, that the Severity of his Prison was only a blind, and the Examination of the Ministry a pretence to introduce him into Court. Many and various were the Conjectures which were made about his real Business there; but at last a _Castilian_, who was Prisoner at _Lisbon_, discover'd the whole Intrigue. This _Castilian_, nam'd _Sancho_, was a Creature of the Duke of _Medina Sidonia_'s, and, before the late Revolution, Pay-Master of the _Spanish_ Army in _Portugal_. He, with the rest of his Countrymen who were taken up at that time, groan'd in Confinement, nor had they any prospect of Liberty; but hearing of this Monk, and being inform'd of his Country, his extravagant Conduct, his Credit at Court, and several other Circumstances, which made it plain that he was there employ'd in some secret Business; he thought he had now an opportunity of obtaining his Liberty, and with this hope he wrote the Monk a long Letter, full of Expressions fit to sooth his Vanity; in it he complain'd, that the King of _Portugal_ detain'd him in Prison, (with the other _Castilians_) who was a Servant and Creature of the Duke his Brother-in-law: and to confirm it, he sent him several Letters, wrote to him by that Prince himself some little time before the Revolution, in which he treated him as one in whom he repos'd an entire Confidence. The _Franciscan_ answer'd _Sancho_'s Letter, and assur'd him, that nothing could recommend him more to him, than his belonging to the Duke of _Medina_; that he would use all his endeavour to procure him his Liberty, but in the mean time he must take care not so much as to open his mouth about it. The _Spaniard_ waited some days for the Effect of his Promise, and at last sent him a second Epistle, in which he represented, that seven Months were expir'd since he was cast into Prison; that the _Spanish_ Minister seem'd to have quite forgotten him, since he neither talk'd of ransoming or exchanging him; and that therefore he had no hopes of Liberty left, but what were built upon the Charity and Interest of the Reverend Father. The Monk, who thought he should very much oblige the Duke of _Medina_, by procuring _Sancho_ his Freedom, begg'd it of the King, and obtain'd it. He went to the Prison himself, to fetch him out of it, and offer'd to have him included in a Passport, which was to be given to some of the Dutchess of _Mantua_'s Servants, who were then returning to _Madrid_. But the crafty _Castilian_ answer'd him, that _Madrid_ was a Place to which he could never more return; that he must not pretend to appear at Court, unless he desir'd to be thrown into Prison again, seeing that _Olivarez_ was so severe and unjust, that he would expect his Accounts to be made up, altho in the late Revolution he had been stript not only of his Money, but had had his Books also taken from him: To this he added, that he desir'd nothing more than to be near the Duke of _Medina_, his Patron, who was both able and willing, he did not question, to advance him. The _Franciscan_ wanting somebody whom he could trust his Secret to, and by whom he might give the Marquiss _Daiamonti_ a strict Account of his Negotiation, cast his eyes upon the _Castilian_, who seem'd very much attach'd to the Interest of the Duke of _Medina_. To this end he detain'd the _Spaniard_ some time, pretending that he could not as yet procure him a Passport, tho his Intent was to observe him, and see whether or not he was a Person fit to be entrusted. Their being frequently together begat an intimate Acquaintance, which they both mutually desir'd; the Monk, that he might engage the _Spaniard_ to serve him; and the _Spaniard_, that he might make himself Master of the Monk's Secret. This holy Man, like the rest of his Brethren, puff'd up with Vanity, could not forbear one day telling his Friend, that he would not long see him in that Garb in which he was, that he had a Bishoprick promis'd him, and that he did not despair of obtaining the _Roman_ Purple. _Sancho_, to make him prattle the faster, pretended that he did not believe a word of what he said. The Fryar laugh'd at his Incredulity: "And I suppose, _continued he_, you would not believe me neither, if I should tell you, that the Duke of _Medina_ will shortly be a King." The other, to get the Secret quite out of him, urg'd the Impossibility of it; upon which the Monk told him the whole Story: That _Andalusia_ must in a little time acknowledge the Duke for their Sovereign: That the Marquiss _Daiamonti_, who had also discover'd the _Spanish_ Plot to the King of _Portugal_, was the chief Negotiator and Instrument of this intended Revolution: That he should shortly see strange Alterations in _Spain_, and that he had now an opportunity of making his Fortune only by being secret, and taking care to deliver some Letters from him to the Duke and Marquiss. _Sancho_, well pleas'd at the Discovery of this Secret, which he had long labour'd to get out of him, renew'd his Protestations of Fidelity and Secrecy, and his Offers of Service; and having taken _Velasco_'s Letters, told him, that he should be proud of the Opportunity of serving the Prince, and hoped that he should be thought worthy of the Honour of bringing him an Answer. Upon this the _Castilian_ set out for _Andalusia_, but was no sooner got into the _Spanish_ Territories, than he took the _Madrid_ Road; and as soon as he arriv'd, went strait to the Minister's House, and sent him word that _Sancho_, Pay-Master of the Army in _Portugal_, was just escaped out of Prison, where he had been confin'd by the Usurper, and had some important Business to communicate to him. It was a very hard matter to gain Access to _Olivarez_, who had his set Hours of granting Audience, and at which time he sent word the Pay-Master must return. Enrag'd at this Refusal, _Sancho_ cry'd he must, he would speak to him; that his Business was no Trifle, but the Safety of the Kingdom depended on its being immediately reveal'd. This being told _Olivarez_, he order'd him to be admitted: _Sancho_ enter'd the Room, and threw himself at his feet, crying the Kingdom was sav'd from the Ruin which threaten'd it, since he had gain'd Admittance to one, in whose power it was to prevent it; then told the whole Story of the Duke of _Medina_'s Intent, encourag'd in it by the King of _Portugal_, and persuaded to it by the Marquiss _Daiamonti_, his Design of seizing upon the Galloons, and of making the Soldiers of _Andalusia_ turn their Arms against their King: to justify all which, he deliver'd those Letters given him by the _Franciscan_ for the Duke and Marquiss, and which contain'd the Scheme of the Conspiracy. _Olivarez_, was so surpriz'd at the Strangeness of this News, that he could not for some time utter a word, but at last recovering himself, he prais'd _Sancho_ for his Loyalty, and told him that he deserv'd a double Reward, not only as he had reveal'd the Plot, but also as he had not been afraid to discover it even to the nearest Relation of the chief Conspirator. Then order'd he the _Spaniard_ to be conducted into a private Apartment, and be debarr'd the liberty of speaking to any one. Mean while the Minister went into the King's Apartment, and told him all that _Sancho_ had related, and shew'd him the Letters which he had deliver'd him. Never was Prince in a greater Consternation than _Philip_ was, long had he observ'd and dreaded the haughty Carriage of the _Gusmans_; and as the Loss of _Portugal_, which he thought was owing to the Dutchess of _Braganza_, was still fresh in his Memory, he could not forbear telling _Olivarez_, in a reproachful manner, that all the Misfortunes which the _Spaniards_ had lately suffer'd, they were beholden to his Family for. This Prince wanted neither Wit or Judgment, but he was so addicted to Pleasure, that he would never apply himself to any thing that carry'd the face of Business, but would rather have lost half his Dominions, than be oblig'd to quit his indolent and effeminate manner of Living: Wherefore having vented his Passion in this Reproach, he gave the _Franciscan_'s Letters back to _Olivarez_, without so much as opening them; ordering him to have them examin'd by a Committee, compos'd of three Members of his Privy-Council, who should make their Report to him. This was all that _Olivarez_ desir'd, for now he could give the Business what Turn he pleas'd. He chose three of his own Creatures for the Commissioners, into whose hands the Letters were put, and by whom _Sancho_ was examin'd several times; all their Aim was to acquit the Duke of _Medina_, to which end _Olivarez_, himself came to _Sancho_, and affecting an affable Behaviour, and an extraordinary Kindness for the Man; "How, my dear _Sancho, said_ he, shall we contrive to acquit the Duke of _Medina_ of a Crime, which is testify'd only by the Letters of an unknown Monk, and who probably was bribed by the Duke's Enemies to lay this to his charge; for certain it is, that never Governour of _Andalusia_ discharg'd his Duty better, both towards the King and his Province." _Sancho_, who was fully persuaded of the Truth of his Deposition, and fear'd that any of the Criminals should be acquitted, lest he should lose his hoped-for Reward, still maintain'd, that he was well assur'd that there was an horrid Conspiracy form'd against the Government in favour of the Duke, who was also at the head of it; that the Marquiss _Daiamonti_ was the Contriver of the Plot; and that he himself had read several of their Letters, which were shewn him by the _Franciscan_, and was certain, that if _Olivarez_ did not prevent it in time, all _Andalusia_ would be up in Arms, to make their Governour their Monarch. _Olivarez_, very unwilling that this Business should be too narrowly search'd into, took an opportunity of telling the King, that the Monk's Letters had been decypher'd and examin'd, and that he really believ'd him to be some Wretch who had been bribed to calumniate the Duke; for there was no Letter of his produc'd, nor did _Sancho_ make any formal Deposition against him. However, as it was impossible to be too cautious in such a case as this, his Opinion was, that the Duke must be artfully drawn to Court, for if he had any such Design on foot, it was not safe to arrest him in _Andalusia_; that some Forces must be sent to _Cadiz_, under a new Governour; that the Marquiss _Daiamonti_ must be taken up at the same time, and if they were found guilty, his Majesty might deliver them over to the Severity of the Law. This haughty Minister's Will was not only generally a Law to the Subjects of _Spain_, but was always one to the King; who told him, that he should manage this Business as he thought fit, for he left it entirely to him. Upon this _Olivarez_ sent his Nephew, Don _Lewis d'Haro_, to the Duke of _Medina_, to tell him what had been depos'd against him, and with Orders, that guilty or not guilty, he should immediately come to Court, which if he did, his Pardon should be granted; but that if he defer'd his Journey, it would no longer be in his power to procure it. This Message thunder-struck the Duke of _Medina_, and he saw himself under a necessity of obeying, or immediately flying into _Portugal_: but then considering how ignominious it was to spend his days in Indolence, and live a banish'd Man, especially in a Country where there was no Employment worthy of him, and at the same time knowing how great _Olivarez_'s Power was; he resolv'd to trust him: and set out for _Madrid_, and with such diligence did he pursue his Journey, that the King was immediately inclin'd to believe him innocent, or to forgive him, should he be found guilty. Whilst Don _Lewis d'Haro_ was employ'd in this Business, a Messenger was sent to take up the Marquiss _Daiamonti_; and the Duke of _Ciudad-real_ march'd into _Cadiz_ at the head of 5000 Men. As soon as the Duke of _Medina_ arriv'd at _Madrid_, he went and alighted at _Olivarez_'s House, to whom he confess'd the Conspiracy, shew'd him the Scheme by which they were to proceed, but cast all the Odium of it upon the Marquiss. _Olivarez_ that instant introduc'd him into the King's Closet, where he threw himself at his Majesty's feet, and with Tears confess'd his Crime, and begg'd his pardon. _Philip_, who was of a soft and compassionate nature, mix'd his Tears with the Duke's, and easily forgave him. But as it would have been very imprudent to have expos'd him to the same Temptation a second time, he was order'd to stay at Court; part of his Estate was also confiscated, the King being sensible, that had he not been too rich, and too powerful, he would never have made an Attempt of this kind: and a Governour and a Garison were plac'd in _Saint Lucar de Barameda_, the Town in which the Dukes of _Medina Sidonia_ generally resided. _Olivarez_, to persuade the King that his Relation's Repentance was sincere, advis'd him to send a formal Challenge to the Duke of _Braganza_; which he refus'd at first, objecting that both Divine and Human Laws forbad Duels. But _Olivarez_ persisting in his Resolution of having one sent, _Medina_ reply'd, that he could not in Conscience come to this Extremity with his Brother-in-law, unless the King would obtain a Bull from the Pope, which should secure him from the Censure of the Church, which always excommunicated Duelists. _Olivarez_ answer'd him, that this was not a time for Scruples of Conscience, but that he must now think of satisfying both the King and People of the Sincerity of his Repentance; that in short it was no matter whether he would fight or not, provided he would not disown a Challenge, which he would publish in his Name. The Duke, who now plainly saw that _Olivarez_'s Intent was only to amuse the People, consented to it, and the Minister drew up one himself. Several of them were sent into _Portugal_, as well as into most Courts of _Europe_. A Copy of it may probably not be displeasing to the Reader, who will be surpriz'd to see a Challenge, which by its Length, Formality, and Stile, would better have became a Knight-Errant of old, than such a Prince as the Duke of _Medina Sidonia_ was. [Illustration] Don _GASPAR ALONCO Perez de Gusman_, Duke of _Medina Sidonia_, Marquiss, Earl, and Baron of _Saint Lucar de Barameda_, Captain General of the Ocean, of the Coasts of _Andalusia_, and of the Armies of _Portugal_, Gentleman of the Bed-Chamber to his Catholick Majesty; Whom God Preserve. _Whereas nothing has been more conspicuous to the whole World, than the treasonable Practices of ~John~ late Duke of ~Braganza~; Be also_ _his damnable Intentions known, of seducing and tainting with Disloyalty the faithful Family of the ~Gusmans~, which ever has been, and for the future ever shall be most true and loyal to the King their Master, in whose Service so many of them have shed their Blood. This Usurper has endeavour'd to insinuate into the Minds of Foreign Princes, as well as of his own Rebel ~Portuguese~, that I would aid and assist him, and enter into his Measures; hoping thereby to keep up the Spirits of those who have join'd with him, and to put me out of favour with the King my Master, (whom God preserve) thinking that by these means he should alienate my Duty and Affection from my Master, and then I should consent to his cursed Designs, without that Repugnance_ _which he has found in me. And the better to accomplish his Design, he has made use of a Monk, who was sent by the Town of ~Daiamonti~ to ~Castro-Marino~ in ~Portugal~, to treat about the Ransom of a prisoner: which Monk being carried to ~Lisbon~, was suborn'd, and persuaded to give out that I was engag'd in the Conspiracy, and that I would permit any Foreign Army to land in ~Andalusia~, to favour their Designs: and to give the better colour to his Story, he shew'd some forg'd Letters, and which he pretended to have receiv'd from me._ _All this was done with a Design to persuade several Princes to send him some Forces, and would to God they had, that I might have shewn my Loyalty, by destroying them and their_ _Ships; which will easily appear to have been my Intent, by the Orders which I left on all the Coasts._ _These things have been a sore Affliction to me; but what grieves me still more, is, that his Wife should be my Sister, whose Blood I would gladly shed, since by Rebellion tainted and corrupted, that I might give an evident Proof of my Loyalty to my King, and efface all those Suspicions, which these Rumours may have imprinted in the Minds of the People._ [Sidenote: 1641.] _For these Reasons therefore I challenge the said ~John~ late Duke of ~Braganza~, as being a Traitor both to God and his King, and invite him to meet me in Person, and in single Combat try our Fortune, with or without Seconds, and arm'd in_ _what manner he please; the Place shall be near ~Valentia d'Alcantra~, which is on the Frontiers both of ~Castile~ and ~Portugal~, and where I will wait for him four-score Days, from the first of ~October~ to the nineteenth of ~December~ of this present Year. The twenty last Days I will wait for him in Person, and on the time which he shall appoint I will enter the Lists; which time, though it be long, I give him, not only that he the said Tyrant, but also that all ~Europe~, nay, that the whole World may know it. To this end, I will send Ten Chevaliers a League within ~Portugal~; as also, he shall send Ten a League within ~Castile~, as Hostages, and on that day I will shew him the Heinousness and Baseness of his Crime._ _But if he the said ~John~ late Duke of ~Braganza~, should fail meeting me, to give me Gentleman-like Satisfaction, and thereby deprive me of the Opportunity of shewing my Loyalty to the King my Master, and the natural Hatred which our Family has to Traitors; I offer (with Submission to his Catholick Majesty, whom God preserve) my good Town of ~St. Lucar de Barameda~, which always has been the Seat of the Dukes of ~Medina Sidonia~, to any Man who shall kill him. To which end, I beg of his Catholick Majesty, that I may not have any longer the Command of the Army which is to march against him, being so transported with Rage, that I should not be Master of that Sedateness and Conduct, which are so necessary to_ _a General; but that his Majesty would give me leave to be only at the head of a Thousand of my own People, on whose Courage, as well as my own, I may rely, that in case the said Usurper should not accept my Challenge, we may bring him dead or alive to his said Majesty. And that I may not be thought to be wanting in my Duty to my King, I offer one of my best Towns to the first Governour, or other Officer, belonging to the Usurper, who will surrender any Place to the King my Master; never thinking that I can do enough for his Service, since to him, and to his glorious Ancestors, I owe all that I enjoy._ Given at _Toledo_ the 29th of _September_, 1641. [Illustration] According to his Promise, the Duke of _Medina_ appear'd in the Lists, follow'd by Don _John de Garray_, Lieutenant-General of the _Spanish_ Cavalry; there the Duke of _Braganza_ was summon'd in a formal manner: But that Prince was too prudent to play a part in this Farce; or had the thing been of a more serious nature, a Sovereign Prince was not to venture his Life against a Subject of his Enemy. Whilst _Olivarez_ amus'd the People in this manner, he was also taking care to turn the Resentment of the King and People upon the Marquiss _Daiamonti_, whom he intended to prove the only guilty Person: to this end he flatter'd him with the Hopes of a Pardon, and that, as well as the Duke of _Medina_, he should taste the Bounties of a merciful Prince, provided he would be open in his Confession; but that Kings, like God, whose Images they were, never forgave any, but those who heartily and sincerely repented them of their Crimes. The Marquiss trusting to this Promise, which the Duke of _Medina_'s Example gave him no room to doubt of, sign'd a Paper which _d'Olivarez_ brought him, and which he immediately put into the hands of those who were to try him. Upon this Confession of his he was indicted, and condemn'd to be beheaded. When the Judge pass'd Sentence, he heard it without the least Concern, or so much as murmuring at _Olivarez_ or the Duke. That same Night he supp'd as heartily as usual, and when they came to lead him to Execution the next Morning, he was still asleep. He ascended the Block without speaking one word, whilst a Contempt of Death might be read in his Looks, and died with a Courage and Resolution worthy of a better Cause. Such was the end of a Conspiracy, from which the King of _Spain_ escaped meerly by Accident, or rather by a Decree of Providence, which cannot connive at Crimes of this nature, and will seldom suffer Treachery to prevail. The King of _Portugal_ seeing this Project miscarry, resolv'd to maintain himself on the Throne no longer by such clandestine Means, but by open Force, and the Assistance of his Allies. _France_ seem'd particularly to take the House of _Braganza_ under its Protection, as being the most antient Branch of their own Royal Family. The foreign War so employ'd the _Spanish_ Forces, that the _Portuguese_ had always the advantage over them, and they drove them still farther from their Frontiers. The King might easily at that time have enter'd into the very Center of _Castile_, had he had a good General, and disciplin'd Soldiers; but his Army was chiefly compos'd of Militia, fitter to make sudden Incursions into the Enemy's Country, than to bear the Fatigue of a regular Campaign. Another thing that hinder'd his making a greater Progress with his Army, was, that he had not Money enough to pay them, and consequently not Forces enough on foot; for as at his coming to the Crown, he had taken off all Taxes from the People, that they might the better relish his Government, and had only his own Estate to defray the Expences of the War; nor would he ever venture to lay new Taxes upon them. But this Want of his was partly recompens'd by the Necessity of _Spain_, who at that time had no better Generals than the _Portuguese_, and whose Treasures, towards the latter end of _Philip_ the Fourth's Reign, were exhausted. On the sixth of _November_, 1656. died this Prince: in all the Encomiums and Panegyricks made upon him by the _Portuguese_, he is celebrated for his Piety and Moderation. Foreign Historians upbraid him with Cowardice, and report, that he always distrusted both himself and others; that it was a difficult point, especially for the Grandees, to get Access to him; and that he was free with no one but his ancient domestick Servants, especially with one that was always in company with his Confessor. In short, from what we can gather of his Life, he was a peaceable and religious Prince, and endow'd with Qualities which would better have became a private Gentleman than a Monarch; so that we can attribute his being rais'd to the Throne only to the inveterate Hate which the _Portuguese_ bore the _Castilians_, and to the Ambition, Courage, and Counsels of his Queen, whom by his last Will he nam'd Regent of the Kingdom during his Son's Minority; not doubting but that one who could raise herself to a Throne, would not want Courage to preserve it for her Children. He left behind him two Sons and a Daughter; the elder of the Sons was Don _Alphonso_, of a peevish and melancholy Temper, who had quite lost the Use of one Side, and was at the time of his Father's Death near thirteen Years old: Don _Pedro_, the younger, was but eight: Donna _Catharina_ their Sister, was older than either of them, and was born before the Revolution. Don _Alphonso_ was immediately shewn to the People, and proclaim'd King, and the Queen took the Regency upon her. This Princess would willingly have signaliz'd herself by some glorious Action, but the Commanders of the _Portuguese_ Army were fitter for Soldiers than Generals, and there was not an Officer amongst them, who was Engineer enough to know how to fortify a Place, or besiege a Town. Nor was there a Man in the Privy-Council, who could be look'd upon as a Statesman; most of them could indeed make fine Speeches and elaborate Discourses upon the Necessities of the State, and the Misfortunes in which it would probably fall, but never a one of them knew how to prevent or remedy them. * * * * * [Sidenote: 1657.] To these Evils we must attribute the ill Success of her Arms before _Olivenza_ and _Badajos_, where the _Spaniards_ obliged them to raise the Siege. Besides this, they had fallen out with the _Dutch_ about the Trade to the _Indies_; and the _French_, after the _Pyrenean_ Treaty, seem'd to have forgotten them. The Queen finding herself without any regular Troops, without able Officers or good Counsellors, and without foreign Alliances, was obliged by her Courage, Capacity, and Application, to supply the want of all these; she herself discharg'd the Duty of a Secretary of State, and took care to keep a good Correspondence with all the Courts of _Europe_, which might be serviceable to her: In short, had she never encounter'd all these Difficulties, she could not have reveal'd all those _hidden Vertues, which shun the Day, and lie conceal'd in the smooth Seasons, and the Calms of Life_. By such Care and Diligence for a long time she sav'd _Portugal_ from that Ruin which threaten'd it; but _Spain_ now pouring all its Forces in upon her, she found herself unable to resist them, unless she could procure better Officers. To this end she cast her Eyes upon _Frederick_ Count of _Schomberg_, whose Name and Valour were already sufficiently known. She would willingly have given him the chief Command of the Army, but was afraid at this juncture of disobliging her Generalissimo; wherefore she order'd the Count _de Soure_, her Ambassador in _France_, to treat with the Count _de Schomberg_ about his coming into _Portugal_, where he should have only the Title of Lieutenant-General; but in case of the Death or Resignation of the present Commander, he should be made Generalissimo of all her Forces. The Count set out for _Lisbon_ with four-score Officers, and above four hundred Horsemen, all Veterans, who perfectly understood the Discipline of an Army, and would upon occasion make good Leaders. Before the Count went into _Portugal_, he made a Voyage into _England_, where he saw King _Charles_ the Second, who was lately restor'd: He had private Orders from the Regent, to endeavour to discover whether King _Charles_ might be brought to marry the Infanta of _Portugal_. The Count negotiated this Business with so much Address, that he made both the King and Chancellor _Hyde_ desirous of this Alliance. The Queen, extremely satisfy'd with what he had done, desir'd him to hasten into _Portugal_, and sent the Marquiss _de Sande_ to conclude the Business. [Sidenote: _May 31. 1662._] But the King of _Spain_, foreseeing what might be the consequence of this Match, did all he could to prevent it; he offer'd to give any Protestant Princess Three Millions for her Portion, provided the King would marry her; and by his Ambassador propos'd the Princesses of _Denmark_, _Saxony_, or _Orange_. But the Chancellor represented to the King how nearly it concern'd him to maintain the House of _Braganza_ on the Throne, and not let _Philip_ become Master of all _Spain_ and the _Indies_. His Speech produc'd the desir'd Effect, and King _Charles_ married the Infanta. Thus did a Protestant Statesman persuade his Sovereign to marry a Catholick Princess, whilst a Prince of the _Roman_ Communion, who valued himself in a particular manner upon the Title of the most Catholick King, offer'd him vast Sums of Money, to engage him to wed a Protestant. Shortly after King _Charles_, by his Mediation, establish'd a Treaty of Commerce between the States of _Holland_ and the Crown of _Portugal_; after which he sent a considerable Number of Troops into that Kingdom, commanded by the Earl of _Inchequin_: but having recall'd him, he order'd that the Forces should stay under the Command of _Schomberg_; so that the Count shortly saw himself at the head of the chosen Forces of three Kingdoms. Not but that there was a _Portuguese_ Generalissimo, or at least one who had the Title, but the Count had all the Authority, which he made use of to establish an exact and regular Discipline amongst the _Portuguese_: He taught them the Order of marching, encamping, besieging, and regularly fortifying a Town; so that all those Places on the Frontiers of the Kingdom, which were before naked and defenceless, soon became capable of making a vigorous Defence. The Regent Queen, proud of having met with such a General, carry'd the War vigorously on, and her Arms were almost every where crown'd with Success; never were the _Portuguese_ Forces better disciplin'd, the People bless'd her Government, the Grandees continu'd in perfect Submission to it through Fear and Respect: but though Fortune favour'd her abroad, she met with domestick Cares and Troubles, which chang'd the face of every thing. Whilst the Regent was taking care to place the Crown with Surety on her Son's Head, he, on the other hand, endeavour'd to make himself unworthy of it, by his irregular Manner of Living; he was mean-spirited, melancholy, and cruel, could not bear the Authority of his Mother, and despis'd the Advices of his Governours and Ministers; he always refus'd the Company of the Lords of his Houshold, and would divert himself with none but Negroes, Mulattoes, and all the Scum of the _Lisbonite_ Youth: and spite of the Care of his Governours, he had got a little Court compos'd of such like People, whom he call'd his Bravoes, with whom he us'd to scour the Streets at Night, and insult all those who unfortunately fell into his way. This Disorder of Mind had been first caus'd by a Palsy, which had afflicted him when about four Years of Age, and which had made fatal Impressions not only on his Limbs, but also on his Brain. Whilst he was young, his Faults had been wink'd at by his Tutors, who thought that so infirm a Child could never bear the Fatigues of a severe Education, and hoped that Time would both strengthen his Body, and sweeten his Temper: but this Indulgence ruin'd him. 'Tis true, that by the assistance of Remedies, and help of Time, his Constitution grew stronger, he could fence, ride, and bear any Fatigue; but his Temper never became better. His Passions encreasing with his Age, they soon prevail'd over his Reason, which was but weak, and he gave a loose to Licentiousness and Debauchery. He would bring common Prostitutes into the Palace, fetch them himself from the Stews, and very often spend whole Nights amongst them there. The Queen, overwhelm'd with Grief, and fearing that the Irregularity of her Son would at once destroy the Labours of her whole Life, resolv'd several times within herself to have him confin'd, and make his Brother reign in his stead; but dreading to excite a Civil War, which would have favour'd the _Spanish_ Arms, she dropp'd the bold Design: sometimes she hoped the King might yet be reclaim'd, especially if he was depriv'd of the Company of _Conti_, a Merchant's Son, his first Favourite, and Companion of all his Debaucheries. To this end she had _Conti_ privately seiz'd, and carry'd on board a Ship which was bound for _Brazil_, with Orders that he should never return to _Portugal_ on pain of Death. The King at first seem'd very much griev'd at the Loss of his Favourite, but comforting himself by little and little, he was at last pacify'd, and seem'd very much alter'd for the better, would hearken to Advice, and paid the Queen an unusual Respect, who was congratulated by the Ministry and the whole Court, upon the extraordinary Success of her Enterprize. But this apparent Tranquillity and Alteration of the King's, was only a Veil to cover a deep Design, and of which his Mother never thought him capable; so that this Princess, who could read in the very Hearts of the most dissembling Courtiers, was overreach'd by a half-witted Youth. The King had complain'd of _Conti_'s Banishment to the Count _de Castel-Melhor_, a _Portuguese_ Nobleman, of an illustrious Birth, subtle and insinuating, but fitter to manage a Court-Intrigue, than a Business of Importance. The Count thought that a fair Opportunity offer'd of supplying _Conti_'s Place in the King's Favour; wherefore to ingratiate himself, he deplor'd the Exile's Misfortune, and promis'd to use his utmost Endeavours to have him recall'd. He told the Prince at the same time, that it was in his own power to remedy this, or any Grievance of the like nature; that he was of Age, and had been so a great while; that he might as soon as he pleased take the Supreme Command upon himself, then recall _Conti_, and let him triumph over the Queen, and all his other Enemies. The King was pleas'd with this Advice, and determin'd to follow it; the Count was his sole Confidant and Favourite: however, he desir'd the King that their Intimacy should still be a Secret, that the Queen might not suspect him: but it could not be long conceal'd from this Princess, who meeting him one day in the King's Train, caught him by the Arm, and staring him in the face with that Majestick Air, which made every one tremble; "I am inform'd, Count, _said she_, that the King is wholly govern'd by your Counsels; take therefore good care of him, for if he does any thing to thwart me, your Life shall answer it." The Count, without answering, made a submissive Bow, and follow'd the King, who call'd him. As soon as he was alone with him, he gave him an account of what the Queen had said: "I suppose, _continued he_, that I shall shorty share _Conti_'s Fate, but yet with Joy should I go to Banishment, could I at the same time see my King shake off the Authority of an imperious Mother, who will let him enjoy the Title, but never the Power of a Sovereign." This artful Discourse threw the Prince into a violent Passion, and he would go immediately and take the Royal Authority from the Queen, by taking the Great Seal, which is the Mark of it; but the Count, who knew too well what the consequence of this would be, advis'd him to retire to _Alcantra_, and from thence to send Couriers to the Magistrates of _Lisbon_, and to all the Governours of Provinces, to let them know that he was of Age, and had taken the Government upon himself. The King approv'd the Counsel, and having that Evening disguis'd himself, he left the Palace, follow'd only by the Count and a few Friends. That Night they arriv'd at _Alcantra_, from whence he sent Orders to the Secretaries of State, and to the _German_ Guard, to come to him; and at the same time dispatch'd Couriers to every Town of _Portugal_, to let them know that he was of Age, and by consequence the Regency of the Queen at an end. Most of the Court set out for _Alcantra_, and the Queen saw herself in a manner forsaken; notwithstanding which, she resolv'd to lay down her Authority as became her: wherefore she wrote to the King, to ask him the reason why he took possession of the Throne like an Usurper, that had no Right to it; and added, that if he would return to _Lisbon_, she would lay down her Authority in presence of the Grandees and the Magistrates. The King accordingly return'd, and the Queen having summon'd the Grandees, Magistrates, and others of the Nobility, to attend her, in presence of the Assembly took the Seals out of the Great Purse, and putting them into her Son's Hand, "Here are, _said she_, the Seals, which, together with the Regency, were entrusted to my Care by the Will of my late Sovereign Lord: I return them to your Majesty with all the Authority, which they are the Emblems of; I heartily pray God that you may make a good use of them, and that your Reign may be as prosperous as I can wish it." The King took the Seals, and gave them to the first Secretary of State; after which the Prince, and all the Grandees, kiss'd his Hand, and acknowledg'd him their Sovereign. The Queen Dowager had given out, that she intended in six Months time to retire into a Convent, but that six Months she would spend at Court, to see what Measures the young King would take. But the Favourite Count, who still dreaded that Princess, who knew her tow'ring Genius, and was sensible of the natural Sway which a Mother has over the Mind of her Son, persuaded the King to treat her most inhumanly, that by frequent Affronts he might oblige her to leave the Court much sooner than she intended. The Queen, who was of a haughty Temper, could not bear to be thus us'd, but immediately threw herself into a Convent; where, being fully satisfy'd of the Vanities of human Greatness, she spent the Remainder of her Time, which was scarce a Year, in preparing herself for another World, and died on the eighteenth of _February_, 1666. lamented by the whole Nation: for never was there a Princess of a more extraordinary Genius, or more amply endow'd with all the Vertues requisite to either the one or the other Sex. Whilst on the Throne, she shew'd a truly great and heroick Soul; when she quitted it for a religious Life, she seem'd entirely to have forgotten what Pomp and Grandeur were, and all her Ambition then was to deserve Heaven. The King, who now saw himself fully at liberty, and no longer fear'd the prudent Queen's just Reproofs, gave a loose to his Passions, and indulg'd his pernicious Inclinations. He would scour the Streets at Night with his Bravoes, and abuse every one he met with; nor did the Watch fare better than their Neighbours. Never a Night did he ramble, but the next Morning tragical Histories were publish'd, of several who had been wounded or murder'd in the Streets; and People fled before him with greater Fear than they would before a hungry Lion, just broke loose from his Den. The Count _de Castel-Melhor_ was his first Minister; he was an intriguing, insinuating Courtier, but far from being an able Statesman: haughty in Prosperity, fawning and timorous in Adversity. In his hands were the Reins of the Government, the King reserving no Authority to himself, but that of doing what mischief he pleas'd unpunish'd; nor did the Count ever make it his business to reclaim him, well knowing that the King's Follies and his Authority were inseparable. The _Spaniards_ flatter'd themselves with the Hopes of easily reducing _Portugal_, whilst it had such a Monarch as Don _Alphonso_. To this end they sent a strong Army against it, under the Command of Don _John_ of _Austria_, natural Son to _Philip_ IV. The King of _Portugal_ sent _Schomberg_ to oppose him, notwithstanding the Count _de Villa-Flor_ had the Title of Generalissimo. And to the Count of _Schomberg_'s Courage and Conduct it was that Don _Alphonso_ ow'd the Preservation of his Crown: He beat the _Spaniards_ several times, notwithstanding what _Villa-Flor_ did; who, jealous of his Glory, endeavour'd all he could to cross his Measures, and had effectually done it, had not _Schomberg_'s Interest been greater both at Court and in the Army, which joyfully obey'd the Commands of their brave Leader, who always led them to a certain Victory. _Castel-Melhor_ did all he could to persuade the People, that this happy Success was owing to him; though if the Truth had been search'd into, it would have appear'd that all he could justly boast of, was his being the first Man to whom the News was sent. By these means the Minister's Credit encreas'd, and he actually enjoy'd the Sovereign Authority. The King was nothing but a piece of Clock-work, whose Springs he could wind up, and put into what Motion he pleas'd. The Barbarity of his Temper he made use of, to ruin and destroy all those of whom he was jealous; amongst these were the greatest part of the late Queen's Ministry: so that there was a strange Alteration at Court, all Places were fill'd with the Count's Creatures; nor could any one hope for Favour, but those who took care to please the Favourite. _Melhor_ went farther than this, for _Conti_ being recall'd, he got him banish'd a second time; for no sooner was he landed, but the King sent him an Express, to congratulate him upon his safe Arrival, and _Melhor_, by the same Express, sent him Orders not to come near the Court: such a Sway had this Minister over his Sovereign, that he durst not contradict his Orders, but for fear of dipleasing him, was obliged to see _Conti_ in private. The Count had notice of it, and fearing that should their antient Intimacy be renew'd, there would be no place left for him in the King's Favour, had him accus'd of a Design upon the Prince's Life; and tho there were no Witnesses found, no Proofs, no Probabilities of his Guilt, yet Sentence of Banishment was pass'd upon him. The Count, no longer apprehensive of _Conti_, began to consider how he should secure his Interest at Court, in case of any Accident. To this end he endeavour'd to ingratiate himself with Don _Pedro_, the King's Brother, but a Prince of a quite different Character: His Soul was truly great, and his Inclinations noble; his Actions princely, and his manner of Living regular: the _Portuguese_ admir'd, or rather ador'd him, for he had not his own Vertues only, but his Brother's Vices also, to set him off. To this end, _Melhor_ plac'd a Brother of his in the Prince's Houshold, and bad him do all he could to insinuate himself into his Master's Favour, as he had into the King's; hoping by these means to govern both the Princes. Don _Pedro_ us'd him with all the Civility imaginable, and shew'd him more than common Respect; but as for giving him any place in his Favour, or Confidance, he could not; the whole was taken up. The late Queen having always look'd upon her younger Son as the Hopes and Support of her Family, she had taken care to put about him none but those, whose Wisdom, Learning, and Integrity might entitle them to a share of the Prince's Love; such were his Governours, and of such chiefly was his Houshold compos'd. These had taken care to let the Prince know, that he need not despair of one day wearing the Crown of _Portugal_, for that there was no great likelihood of his Brother's ever having any Children; but at the same time they told him, that there was nothing but _Melhor_ was capable of doing, to keep him from inheriting the Crown, since he was well assur'd that he must never hope for any share in the Ministry, when Don _Pedro_ should ascend the Throne. By degrees these different Views and Interests divided the Court into two Cabals; the Count indeed had the greatest Number on his side, there being more who love to swim with the Stream, than against it. But the ablest Statesmen, who plainly saw that so violent and arbitrary a Government could not last long, with all the Grandees, and the best of the Nobility, who would not cringe to such a Favourite as the King's was, were always about the Prince, to whom they paid their Respects as to the Heir apparent. The Count being sensible that the Hope of the adverse Faction was founded upon the Infirmity of the King, determin'd to destroy it at once, by marrying him; and by his Advice a Match was propos'd and concluded between the King and _Mary-Elizabeth-Frances_ of _Savoy_, Daughter to _Charles_ Duke of _Nemours_, and _Elizabeth de Vendome_. _Cæsar d'Estrées_, a Relation of hers, Bishop and Duke of _Laon_, and known all over _Europe_ by the Name of the illustrious Cardinal _d'Estrées_, conducted her into _Portugal_, accompany'd with the Marquiss _de Ruvigni_, the _French_ Ambassador, and several other Persons of Quality. This Marriage was celebrated with all the Pomp and Magnificence imaginable. The whole Court admir'd the young Queen's extraordinary Beauty, but no one was more sensibly affected with it than the Prince. The King was the only Person who seem'd regardless of her Charms, and who by his Indifference soon convinc'd the whole Nation, that he had taken the Name of a Husband, but was not capable of discharging the Duty of one. Count _Melhor_ had at first flatter'd himself with the Hopes of governing the Queen as well as the King, but soon found that she had too great a Spirit for such a Submission. Enrag'd at this, he resolv'd to lose no Opportunity of revenging himself, all publick Business was carefully hid from her, all her Desires were cross'd; her Recommendation certainly excluded any Person from the Place to which she recommended him. Shortly after, neither the Expences of her Houshold, nor her own Pensions were paid, under pretence that the War and other Necessities of the State had exhausted the Royal Treasury. And so insolent was this haughty Minister to every body, to the Prince himself, but especially to the Queen, that she has been often seen coming out of the King's Apartment bath'd in Tears. Her Beauty, her Merits, her Misfortunes, and the Complaints of all the Ladies of the Court, and the Officers of the Queen's Houshold, whose Salaries were stopp'd, touch'd the Hearts of all those who had not an immediate Dependence on the Minister; and these form'd a third Party at Court, where nothing now was talk'd of but the Improbability of the Queen's having any Children, tho she had not yet been married a Year. What encreas'd every one's Suspicion, was the Report which was spread of a private Door, which by the King's Order was made in the Queen's Chamber, and open'd just against her Bed-side, and of which he himself kept the Key. The Queen was alarm'd at the Novelty of the thing, and the Danger to which she saw her Honour expos'd. And many concluded, that this was an Artifice of _Melhor_'s, who, notwithstanding the Infirmity of the King, was nevertheless resolv'd that the Queen should have Children. The poor unfortunate Princess discover'd her Apprehensions to her Confessor, with Orders to impart them to the Prince's. These two Religious Men advis'd them to unite their Cabals, and go hand in hand together in a Matter so much the Concern of them both. The Count of _Schomberg_ was easily drawn into this Party, and the Prince took care to make himself beloved by the Magistrates of the City, and all those who had any influence over the People. It would have been a very easy matter to have push'd the King from out his Throne, had he not had a Minister to support him, who was ambitious, could govern the King as he pleas'd, make him do any thing, and who would spare no pains to preserve himself at the head of Affairs; the only way therefore of compassing their Ends, was to remove this Man, which was at last brought about in this manner. One of his Friends was bribed to tell him, that the Prince had swore he would sacrifice him, if he continued any longer at Court. The Count upon this Information doubled the Guards, arm'd all the Officers of the Household, and would have had the King go at the head of them, and seize the Prince. But as furious as the King was in his Midnight-Revels and Debauches, he had not Courage enough to attempt any thing of this nature, justly fearing that he should meet with no small Resistance. Wherefore he only wrote a Letter to the Prince, to order him to come to the Palace. He excus'd himself, objecting that he could not come whilst the Count was at Court, who had spread so many Stories to his disadvantage, and endeavour'd all he could to blast his Reputation; besides which, the Count was Master of the Palace, and that therefore he fear'd he could not be in safety there. Several Letters pass'd between the King and Prince; the former offer'd, that _Melhor_ should come, and on his Knees beg his pardon. But this was not what the Prince wanted, and he openly refus'd to come to Court till _Melhor_ was banish'd from it. The News of this had put _Lisbon_ into a strange Confusion, and a Civil War was just breaking out; but _Melhor_ with grief perceiv'd that _Schomberg_ favour'd the other Party, and that the Grandees of the Kingdom had all unanimously declar'd themselves in favour of the Prince; who, assisted also by the Queen's Friends, grew too powerful for him. Nay, _Melhor_'s very Relations, and those whom he had rais'd, forsook him, and told him, that if he must sink, he should sink alone. Wherefore disguising himself, he by Night escaped from the Palace, and retired to a Monastery seven Leagues from _Lisbon_; which he soon after left, to seek a sure Refuge in the Court of _Turin_. Upon this the Prince immediately came to the Palace, to pay his Devoirs to the King; every thing fell under his Management, and he soon dispersed all the late Favourite's Creatures. The King, destitute of Counsel, lay at the Prince's mercy, who had a Design upon, but durst not as yet touch his Crown, for fear of being thought an Usurper; but waited with patience till it should be given him by Lawful Authority, that is, by a Decree of the States of the Kingdom. But then it was in the King's power only to call together this Assembly of the States, which he was often advis'd to do, there being an absolute Necessity of their Meeting, to remedy the present Grievances of the Nation. The King was not so weak, but he plainly perceiv'd that this Advice was given him, with a design to transfer the Royalty from himself to his Brother; wherefore he long refus'd it, but was at last so press'd to it both by his Council, and by different Petitions from several Parts of the Kingdom, that he call'd them together, and they were order'd to meet on the first of _January_, 1688. The Prince having obtain'd this, which he look'd upon as a sure step to the Throne, gave the Queen notice, that it was time for her now to appear, and play her part. Upon which she immediately retired into a Convent, and wrote a Letter to the King, to tell him, that she thought herself in Conscience obliged to quit the Palace, since he was not capable of being her Husband; that he was very sensible that their Marriage was never consummated, and that therefore she begg'd that he would repay her her Portion, and give her leave to return to her Country, and amongst her own Relations. Upon the Receipt of this Letter, the King in a great Rage flew towards the Convent, to fetch the Queen back to the Palace by force; but the Prince, who foresaw the Effect of her Message, took care to be at the Convent-Door, with all the Nobility, and told his Brother this was a Place too sacred to have any Violence us'd in it, and persuaded, or rather forc'd the King to return to the Palace, who all the way complain'd of being calumniated, and was for bringing half the Prostitutes of _Lisbon_ to prove his Virility, and swore that he would be reveng'd both on the Queen and the Prince. [Sidenote: _Nov. 23. 1667._] But Don _Pedro_ was not in the least frightned at his Menaces, knowing that the whole Power of the Kingdom was in his own hands; and the next Morning (thinking it unsafe to delay the mighty Work any longer) order'd the Council to assemble, and follow'd by the Nobility, the Magistracy, and a whole Crowd of People, who wanted to see the Event of this Business, he went into the Palace to them; and after a short Debate, an Order was sent by the Prince to arrest the King, who shortly after this sign'd his own Abdication. Notwithstanding this, the Prince would not take any other Title, but that of Regent; under which Name the States of the Kingdom took the Oath of Allegiance to him. [Sidenote: _Febr. 13. 1668._] The next thing he did, was to secure a Peace with _Spain_; the King of _England_ made himself their Mediator, and _Spain_, by a solemn Treaty, acknowledg'd the Crown of _Portugal_ independent of the Crown of _Spain_. [Sidenote: _Nov. 22. 1667._] [Sidenote: _Mar. 24. 1668._] But one thing was still wanting to compleat the Regent's Happiness: he loved his Sister-in-law; who, as soon as she was got into the Convent, had presented a Petition to the Chapter of the Cathedral of _Lisbon_, to desire them, during the Vacancy of the Holy See, to declare her Marriage void; since, notwithstanding fifteen Months Cohabitation with her Husband, it had not been consummated. The Chapter, without waiting for any farther Proof, immediately declar'd the Marriage void. [Sidenote: _March 2. 1668._] [Sidenote: _Dec. 10. 1668._] By these means the Regent saw himself at liberty to marry his Sister-in-law; however, he was advis'd, for fear of scandalizing any one, to get a Dispensation from the See of _Rome_. Just at this time the Cardinal _de Vendome_, Legate _à Latere_, was order'd by the See to put on the Papal Dignity, that he might assist as Pope at the Christening of the Dauphin of _France_; from him was the Dispensation obtain'd, which Mr. _Verjus_ arriv'd with in _Portugal_ about the time that the Chapter pronounced their Sentence. All which Accidents falling out together, made some People imagine that they were premeditated. The Bishop of _Targa_, Coadjutor to the Archbishop of Lisbon, married them in virtue of this Brief, which was afterwards confirm'd by Pope _Innocent_ IX. Don _Alphonso_ was banish'd to the Isle of _Tercera_, which belongs to the _Portuguese_. This something displeas'd the People, who generally pity the Unfortunate, and who now cry'd out, that it was enough to rob him of his Wife and Crown, without driving him from his Country; but however, no one dar'd speak to the Regent about it. He continued in this Exile till the Year 1675, at which time the Regent recall'd him, being inform'd that there were some discontented People contriving how to fetch him from _Tercera_, and reinstate him in the Throne. He died not far from _Lisbon_, 1683, and at his Death Don _Pedro_ was proclaim'd King; a Title he would not, during his Brother's Life, accept, and the only thing of which he had not depriv'd that unfortunate Prince. _=FINIS=._ [Illustration] [Illustration] INDEX. A. Abdalla, _King of ~Morocco~_, 5. Acugna, _Archbishop of ~Lisbon~, his Character_, 24. _His Speech to the Confederate Nobility_, 25. _Is made Lord-Lieutenant of ~Portugal~ after the Revolution_, 65. Aiamonti, _a ~Castilian~ Nobleman, related to the Queen of ~Portugal~_, 76. _Negotiates a Business between the King of ~Portugal~ and the Governour of ~Andalusia~_, ibid. _Discovers the ~Spanish~ Plot_, 85. _His Character_, 91. _Writes to the Duke of ~Medina Sidonia~, to persuade him to revolt_, 92. _Is seiz'd as a Traitor_, 104. _Deceiv'd by ~Olivarez~_, 114. _His Courage when led to Execution_, 115. Alba, _the Duke of, General to ~Philip II.~ King of ~Spain~, conquers ~Portugal~_, 12 Almada, _a Castle near ~Lisbon~_, 29 Almada, _~Antonio~ and ~Lewis~, two of the Conspirators_, 25 Almanzor, _the Caliph, conquers ~Spain~_, 2 Almeida, _one of the chief Conspirators, his Character_, 24. _Is deputed with two more to confer with the Duke of ~Braganza~_, 30 Alphonso VI. _King of ~Castile~ and ~Leon~, gives ~Portugal~ in Dowry with his Daughter to ~Henry~ Count of ~Burgundy~_, 3 Alphonso, _Son to the former, first King of ~Portugal~_, 4 Alphonso VI. _King of ~Portugal~, is but thirteen Years old when his Father dies_, 117. _His Character_, 121. _Debaucheries_, 122. _Retires to ~Alcantra~_, 124. _Takes the Government upon himself_, 125. _Marries ~Mary-Elizabeth-Frances~ of ~Savoy~, Princess of ~Nemours~_, 130. _Signs his Abdication_, 136. _Is banish'd to ~Tercera~_, 137. _Recall'd, and dies near ~Lisbon~_, 138 Antonio, _Grand-Prior of ~Crato~, pretends to the Crown of ~Portugal~_, 10. _Is proclaim'd King by the People, and defeated by the Duke of ~Alba~_, 12 Aviedo, _the Duke of, an Officer in ~Africa~ under ~Don Sebastian~_, 9 B. Baeze, _a rich ~Jew~ of ~Lisbon~, drawn into the Conspiracy against the King of ~Portugal~_, 84. _Sends Letters for the other Conspirators_ _into Castile_, ibid. _Is examin'd, and confesses_, 88 Baynetto, _an ~Italian~ Nobleman, arrested at ~Lisbon~_, 62 Braganza, _Don ~James~ Duke of, claims the Crown of ~Portugal~ at the Death of the Cardinal King_, 10. _But does not assert his Right by Force of Arms_, 12 Braganza, _~Theodossus~, Son to the former, his Character_, 15 Braganza, _Don ~John~, Grandson to Don ~James~, his Character_, 15. _Stratagems us'd to draw him out of ~Portugal~_, 17. _Is made Governour of that Kingdom, and General of the ~Spanish~ Forces in it_, 18. _~Olivarez~'s Design to arrest him when on board the Admiral's Ship_, ibid. _All Governours of Forts and strong Places order'd to seize him_, 19. _He disappoints them_, 20. _Comes to ~Lisbon~_, 29. _His Answer to the Confederate Nobility_, 32. _Is proclaim'd King_, 56. _Endeavours to make the Governour of ~Andalusia~ rebel against the King of ~Spain~_, 76. _His Death and Character_, 116 Braganza, _~Louisa de Gusman~, married to Don ~John~, her Character_, 33. _Her Answers to the Duke when he talk'd about his Restoration_, 36. _Her Answer to the Archbishop of ~Lisbon~, when he begg'd the Life of a Traitor_, 90. _Is made Regent_, 117. _Engages the Earl of ~Schomberg~ to come and command her Forces_, 118. _Marries her Daughter to King ~Charles II.~ of England_, 119. _Her Speech to the Count ~de Castel-Melhor~_, 124. _To her Son when she resign'd the Regency_, 125. _Retires into a Convent, and dies_, 126 C. Camino, _the Duke of, assists at the King's Coronation_, 72. _Conspires against him_, 80. _Is arrested_, 86. _Executed_, 90 Cardenas, _Don ~Didaco~, Lieutenant-General of the ~Spanish~ Cavalry, is arrested at ~Lisbon~ at the time of the Revolution_, 62 Castel-Melhor, _Favourite and first Minister of State to ~Alphonsus VI.~ King of ~Portugal~, his Character_, 123. _Persuades the King to take the Government upon himself_, ibid. _To affront the Queen his Mother, that she might retire from Court_, 126. _Places his Brother near the Prince_, 129. _Marries the King_, 130. _Yet cannot agree with the Queen_, 131. _Persuades the King to go himself and arrest the Prince_, 133. _Is forc'd to leave the Court, and fly to ~Turin~_, 134 Catherine _of ~Austria~, Regent of ~Portugal~ during the Minority of Don ~Sebastian~_, 4 Catherine de Medicis _pretends to the Crown of ~Portugal~_, 11 Catherine, _Daughter to King ~John IV.~ of ~Portugal~, married to King ~Charles II.~_, 119 Castro-Marino, _a Town in ~Portugal~_, 95 Challenge _sent to the King of ~Portugal~_, 107 Cherifs, _a Law of theirs_, 5 Ciudad-real, _the Duke of, enters ~Cadiz~ with ten thousand Men_, 104. Conti, _the Son of a Merchant of ~Lisbon~, ~Alphonsus~'s first Favourite_, 122. _Is banish'd by the Regent Queen into ~Brazil~_, ibid. _Recall'd by the King, but banish'd again by ~Castel-Melhor~_, 128 Correa, _a Clerk of ~Vasconcellos~'s, runs out as the Conspirators are coming up to the Secretary's Apartment_, 56. _And receives several Stabs, but does not die_, 57. _Conspires against the King of ~Portugal~_, 81. _And is executed with the other Traitors_, 90 Coreo, _a Citizen of ~Lisbon~, an Instrument of the Revolution_, 43 Coutingno, _Don ~Gaston~, during the time of the Revolution delivers the Prisoners_, 63 D. Del Campo, _Governor of the Citadel of ~Lisbon~, surrenders to the Confederate Nobility_, 64 Diego Garcez Palleia, _a Captain of Foot, defends ~Vasconcellos~ for some time_, 57 Daiamonti, _vid. ~Aiamonti~_. E. Estrees _related to the young Queen of ~Portugal~, Bishop and Duke of ~Laon~, and known by the Name of the Cardinal ~d'Estrees~_, 130 Evora, _the People of, rise in a tumultuous manner, and declare themselves for the House of ~Braganza~_, 16 F. Ferdinand de Castro, _Comptroller of the Navy-Office, arrested at ~Lisbon~ at the time of the Revolution_, 62 Ferdinand de la Cueva, _Governour of the Citadel of ~St. John~'s, surrenders upon Terms_, 71 Ferreira, _the Marquiss of, is of opinion that all the Traitors ought to be executed_, 89 G. Goa, _and all the other Places in ~India~ and ~Africa~, which formerly belong'd to ~Portugal~, revolt from the King of ~Spain~, and acknowledge the Duke of ~Braganza~_, 77 Garray, _Don ~John~, Lieutenant-General of the ~Spanish~ Forces, Second to the Duke of ~Medina~_, 114 George, _Brother to the Lord ~Ranger~, a Conspirator_, 25. _Reveals the Conspiracy to a Relation_, 52 H. Hamet, _Brother to ~Muley-Moluc~, King of ~Morocco~, commands the Army_, 8 D'Haro, _Don ~Lewis~, Nephew to ~Olivarez~_, 103 Henry, _Count of ~Burgundy~, Son to ~Robert~ King of ~France~, drives the ~Moors~ from ~Portugal~_, 3 Henry, _Cardinal and Archbishop of ~Evora~, succeeds Don ~Sebastian~_, 10. _Refuses to name his Successor_, 12 Hyde, _Chancellor of ~England~, persuades King ~Charles II.~ to marry the Infanta of ~Portugal~_, 119 I. Jews _conspire against the King of ~Portugal~_, 82 Inchequin, _General of the ~English~ Forces in ~Portugal~_, 120 Inquisitor, _the ~Grand~, conspires against the King_, 81. _Is arrested_, 86. _And condemn'd to perpetual Imprisonment_, 90 John, _Don, Prince of ~Portugal~, Son to King ~John III.~ dies before his Father_, 4 John, _Don, of ~Austria~, natural Son to ~Philip IV.~ King of ~Spain~, and General of the Troops sent against ~Portugal~_, 127 Julian, _an ~Italian~ Nobleman, invites the ~Moors~ into ~Spain~_, 2 L. Lemos, _a Merchant of ~Lisbon~, and an Instrument of the Revolution_, 43 Lewis de Camara, _a Jesuit, Tutor to Don ~Sebastian~_, 4 Lewis de Castile, _is sent by the Duke of ~Medina~ to the Marquis ~Daiamonti~_, 92. _Returns back to the Duke_, 94 M. Margaret _of ~Savoy~, Dutchess of ~Mantua~, Vice-Queen of ~Portugal~_, 14. _Complains of ~Vasconcellos~'s Conduct_, 40. _Endeavours to appease the Confederate Nobility_, 59. _Is confin'd_, 61. _Removes to ~Xabregas~-House_, 67 Mattos, _Don ~Sebastian de Norogna~, Archbishop of ~Braga~, and President of the Chamber of ~Opaco~_, 24. _Conspires against the King of ~Portugal~_, 78. _Confesses his Crime_, 88. _Dies in Prison_, 90 Mello, _Lord ~Ranger~, one of the Conspirators_, 25. _Cuts the ~Spanish~ Guard to pieces_, 55. _Acquaints the Duke and Dutchess of ~Braganza~ with the Success of their Enterprize_, 69 Mendoza, _another of the chief Conspirators_, 25. _Meets the Duke of ~Braganza~ in a Forest, and confers with him_, 39. _Goes with ~Mello~ to ~Villa-viciosa~_, 69 Menezes, _~Alexis~, Governour to Don ~Sebastian~_, 4 Menezes, _~Antonio~, his Answer to the Vice-Queen_, 60 Medina Sidonia, _~Gaspar Perez de Gusman~, Duke of, Brother-in-law to the King of ~Portugal~, resolves to have himself crown'd King of ~Andalusia~_, 92. _Sends his Confidant to the Marquiss ~Daiamonti~_, 94. _His Intent discover'd_, 100. _Is sent for to the Court of ~Spain~_, 103. _And pardon'd_, 104. _He challenges the King of ~Portugal~_, 107 Monsano, _the Count ~de~_, 72 Muley Mahomet, _flies to the Court of ~Portugal~ for Refuge_, 5. _Goes into ~Africa~ with Don ~Sebastian~_, 7. _Is drown'd in the River ~Mucazen~_, 10 Muley Moluc, _takes possession of the Kingdom of ~Morocco~_, 5. _Gives the Command of the Army to his Brother ~Hamet~_, 8. _Dies during the Battle_, 9 N. Norogna, _one of the Confederate Nobility, his passionate Answer to the Vice-Queen_, 61 O. Olivarez, _the Duke of, of the House of the ~Gusmans~, first Minister to ~Philip IV.~ King of ~Spain~_, 13. _His Policy_, ibid. _Orders the Duke of ~Braganza~ to come immediately into ~Spain~_, 47. _His artful way of acquainting the King with the Revolution_, 74. _Obtains the Duke of ~Medina~'s Pardon_, 104. _And then makes him challenge the King of ~Portugal~_, 105 Ozorio, _Don ~Lopez~, the ~Spanish~ Admiral, has private Orders to seize the Duke of ~Braganza~, and bring him into ~Spain~_, 18 P. Parma, _the Duke of, pretends to the Crown of ~Portugal~_, 10 Pelagus, _founds the Kingdom of ~Leon~_, 3 Pedro, _Don, Prince of ~Portugal~, his Character_, 129. _Is misused by Count ~Castel-Melhor~_, ibid. _Arrests the King_, 136. _Is declared Regent_, ibid. _Marries the young Queen_, 137. _After his Brother's Death is proclaim'd King_, 138 Philip II. _King of ~Spain~, claims the Crown of ~Portugal~_, 10. _Takes possession of it by force of Arms_, 12 Philip IV. _King of ~Spain~, his Character_, 101. _Offers King ~Charles~ three Millions to marry a Protestant Princess_, 119 Pinto Ribeiro, _Comptroller of the Duke of ~Braganza~'s Houshold, his Policy_, 22. _His Answer to a Friend_, 56. _Is not promoted by the King_, 76 Portugal, _its Description_, 1. _Acknowledg'd to be a Kingdom independent of the Crown of ~Spain~_, 136 Portuguese, _their Character_, 2 Puebla, _the Marquiss of, Major-Domo to the Vice-Queen, is arrested at the time of the Revolution_, 62 R. Richelieu, _the Cardinal of_, 32 Roderick, _the last King of the ~Goths~ who reign'd in ~Portugal~_, 2 Ruvigni, _the Marquiss of, the ~French~ Ambassador, accompanies the Princess of ~Nemours~ into ~Portugal~_, 131 S. Saa, _Lord-Chamberlain, one of the Conspirators_, 25. _Shoots ~Vasconcellos~ thro the Head_, 58 Saldaigni, _another of the Conspirators_, 62 Sancho, _Paymaster of the ~Spanish~ Troops in ~Portugal~, is detain'd Prisoner there_, 96. _Discovers to ~Olivarez~ the Duke of ~Medina~'s Intent to revolt_, 100 Sande, _the Marquiss of, sent into ~England~ by the Regent of ~Portugal~ to conclude the Match between the Infanta and King ~Charles II.~_, 119 Savoy, _~Philibert-Emanuel~, Duke of, pretends to the Crown of ~Portugal~_, 10 Schomberg, _~Frederick~, Count of, is invited by the Queen of ~Portugal~ to be her General_, 118. _Takes his way thro ~England~, and treats of a Marriage between the Infanta and King ~Charles~_, 119. _Beats the ~Spaniards~ during the Regent's time_, 120. _As also under the Reign of ~Alphonso~_, 127 Soarez d'Albergaria, _the Corregidor, is kill'd at the time of the Revolution_, 56 Soure, _the Portuguese Ambassador in ~France~, treats with ~Schomberg~_, 118 T. Tubal, _the ~Portuguese~ pretend to be descended from him_, 2 V. Vasconcellos, _Secretary to the ~Spanish~ Regency in ~Portugal~_, 14. _His Haughtiness and Cruelty_, 26, 27. _Is killed in the Revolution_, 58. _His Character_, 59 Velasco, Nicholas de, _of the Order of ~St. Francis~, is sent by the Marquiss ~Daiamonti~ into ~Portugal~_, 95. _His Pride and Inconsiderateness_, 96. _Discovers his Business to ~Sancho~, who betrays him_, 99 Villa-Flor, _the ~Portuguese~ Generalissimo_, 127 Villa-Viciosa, _the Seat of the Dukes of ~Braganza~_, 16 Villareal, _the Marquiss of, assists at the King of ~Portugal~'s Coronation_, 72. _Conspires against him_, 80. _Is arrested_, 86. _And executed_, 90 Villenes, _her Behaviour and Speech to her Sons_, 54. X. Xabregas, _a Palace of ~Lisbon~_, 67 _The End of the Index._ _BOOKS Printed, and Sold, by ~W. CHETWOOD~, at ~Cato~'s-~Head, Russel-street, Covent-Garden~._ 1. 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Monarchia Lusitana. Connestag. Philippus Rex Lusitaniæ. Histoire de Portugal, par Monsieur de la Neufvil. Lusitan. Vindic. Caëtan Passar de Bello Lusita. Portugal Restaurado de Menezes. Siry Mem. Recond. Mercure François. Troubles de Portugal. Mem. d'Ablan.] [Footnote B: _Cardinal_ Richelieu.] [Footnote C: Ad hæc politicas Artes, bonos & malos Regiminis Dolos, Dominationis Arcana, humani Latibula ingenii, non modo intelligere Mulier, sed & pertractare quoque ac provehere, tam Naturâ quam Disciplinâ mirificè instructa fuit. Caëtan. Passar. de Bello Lusitan._] [Footnote D: Macedo _tells us, that it was Don_ Antonio d'Almada.] [Footnote E: _The Judge in Capital Cases._] Transcriber's notes: gesspert is indicated with = antiqua font is indicated with ~ 
45797	----	Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 45797-h.htm or 45797-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/45797/45797-h/45797-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/45797/45797-h.zip) JOSE: OUR LITTLE PORTUGUESE COUSIN * * * * * THE Little Cousin Series (TRADE MARK) Each volume illustrated with six or more full-page plates in tint. Cloth, 12mo, with decorative cover, per volume, 60 cents LIST OF TITLES BY MARY HAZELTON WADE (unless otherwise indicated) Our Little African Cousin Our Little Alaskan Cousin By Mary F. Nixon-Roulet Our Little Arabian Cousin By Blanche McManus Our Little Argentine Cousin By Eva Canon Brooks Our Little Armenian Cousin Our Little Australian Cousin By Mary F. Nixon-Roulet Our Little Belgian Cousin By Blanche McManus Our Little Bohemian Cousin By Clara V. Winlow Our Little Brazilian Cousin By Mary F. Nixon-Roulet Our Little Brown Cousin Our Little Canadian Cousin By Elizabeth R. MacDonald Our Little Chinese Cousin By Isaac Taylor Headland Our Little Cuban Cousin Our Little Dutch Cousin By Blanche McManus Our Little Egyptian Cousin By Blanche McManus Our Little English Cousin By Blanche McManus Our Little Eskimo Cousin Our Little French Cousin By Blanche McManus Our Little German Cousin Our Little Grecian Cousin By Mary F. Nixon-Roulet Our Little Hawaiian Cousin Our Little Hindu Cousin By Blanche McManus Our Little Hungarian Cousin By Mary F. Nixon-Roulet Our Little Indian Cousin Our Little Irish Cousin Our Little Italian Cousin Our Little Japanese Cousin Our Little Jewish Cousin Our Little Korean Cousin By H. Lee M. Pike Our Little Mexican Cousin By Edward C. Butler Our Little Norwegian Cousin Our Little Panama Cousin By H. Lee M. Pike Our Little Persian Cousin By E. C. Shedd Our Little Philippine Cousin Our Little Porto Rican Cousin Our Little Portuguese Cousin By Edith A. Sawyer Our Little Russian Cousin Our Little Scotch Cousin By Blanche McManus Our Little Siamese Cousin Our Little Spanish Cousin By Mary F. Nixon-Roulet Our Little Swedish Cousin By Claire M. Coburn Our Little Swiss Cousin Our Little Turkish Cousin L. C. PAGE & COMPANY 53 Beacon Street, Boston, Mass. * * * * * [Illustration: "A SLIM SLIP OF A BOY ... WALKED AT THE HEAD OF A PAIR OF FAWN-COLORED OXEN." (_See page 1_)] JOSE: OUR LITTLE PORTUGUESE COUSIN by EDITH A. SAWYER Author of "The Christmas Makers' Club," "Elsa's Gift Home," etc. Illustrated by Diantha Horne Marlowe [Illustration] Boston L. C. Page & Company MDCCCCXI Copyright, 1911, by L. C. Page & Company (Incorporated) All rights reserved First Impression, May, 1911 Preface ONE of the important historic events of the present century is the revolution which took place in Portugal on the third day of October, 1910, when King Manuel II lost his throne. The king and his mother were exiled and fled from Lisbon, the capital city, to England. A republic was proclaimed throughout Portugal, and a new, progressive government was adopted on December 1st, 1910. Portugal is often described as "a garden by the side of the sea." Its strength as a country lies in its agriculture, especially in its vineyards, which are the chief source of wealth. Education in Portugal has generally been at a low ebb. At the time of the revolution less than one-fifth of the Portuguese people could read and write. Plans for the new government include the opening of many primary schools and the development of a system of higher education. The Portuguese are an earnest people, enthusiastic yet serious-minded. Even the children play soberly. Whether rich or poor, Portuguese children are taught to respect age as well as to honor their parents. Throughout the country even a small boy takes off his cap and makes a bow when he meets an older person. Little girls also are taught gentleness of manner. The home life is simple and happy. Contents CHAPTER PAGE PREFACE v I. JOSE'S SECRET 1 II. THE ELDER BROTHER 11 III. A PORTUGUESE HOME 17 IV. GARDEN AND VINEYARD 28 V. THE HUSKING OF THE MAIZE 38 VI. AN AUTUMN RAMBLE 45 VII. WINTER WORK AND PLAY 56 VIII. WHEN SPRING UNLOCKS THE FLOWERS 67 IX. ON ST. ANTONIO'S DAY 71 X. BETTER TIMES 85 List of Illustrations PAGE "A SLIM SLIP OF A BOY ... WALKED AT THE HEAD OF A PAIR OF FAWN-COLORED OXEN" (_See page 1_) _Frontispiece_ "JOSE CALLED TO THE DOG TO LEAVE OFF BARKING" 12 "JOANNA, WITH A BOAT-SHAPED BASKET OF CLOTHES UPON HER HEAD" 34 "SHE WAS A PICTURE OF YOUTH, BEAUTY AND GRACE" 43 "FOR A LONG TIME THE BROTHERS WERE SILENT" 50 "HE AND JOSE LOOKED ACROSS THE CITY" 82 Jose Our Little Portuguese Cousin CHAPTER I JOSE'S SECRET "The childhood shows the man."--_John Milton._ A SLIM slip of a boy, with dark brown eyes and pale olive skin, walked at the head of a pair of fawn-colored oxen as he turned homeward from the market-place of a small village in the north of Portugal. The village was just a humble collection of narrow streets paved with round, worn cobble stones; a few shops and a long, one-storied inn; a group of cottages and two or three larger houses, and a little white granite church. Along the street through which Jose Almaida passed with the oxen, the market-day produce was spread out under the trees. There were great piles of maize-cobs, potatoes, chestnuts and beans; baskets full of grapes, figs and apples; strings of garlic and onions; heaps of giant early yellow gourds, scarlet pimentos and deep red tomatoes; panniers of fish, fresh and salted, and red earthenware household dishes, crocks and water-jars. Jose had exchanged the grapes, onions and tomatoes, which he had brought from the home farm, for a small amount of tea and of hard, brown salted codfish,--now the only luxuries of the Almaida family. In the rough ox-cart, Carlos, his dog, a thick-nosed pointer, white with brown spots, mounted guard over these provisions. The market-place was no new sight to Jose. He did not stop in passing along the street, except at the village fountain to fill a jar with water for an old woman. Around the fountain good-natured looking groups of women were talking over village affairs,--women in peasant dress of dark, full short skirts, bright-colored waists, and gay red, blue or orange kerchiefs over their shoulders and hanging from under their round pork-pie black hats. Each woman carried a boat-shaped basket or a water-jar upon her head. Little Jose was a familiar figure on the market-day. For five months past, he had done the family marketing, sometimes with his oldest sister Joanna as companion, but often, as to-day, alone. At each greeting, he bowed and pulled off his long black knitted stocking-cap. To-day, early in October, the market-place had confused him. He had heard groups of men saying that the king had gone away from the country, never to return, and that there would be great changes in Portugal. Jose had three miles to travel before dark. There was no time to lose, so he urged on the oxen. But every now and then, out on the main road, he turned to look back toward the village, shading his eyes with his hand. Not seeing what he sought, he urged on the oxen again with the goad, which was twice as long as himself. The road was steep. The oxen plodded on with low-bowed heads. They were small and intelligent-looking oxen with strong shoulders and wide-branched horns. Above their heavy yoke rose the _canga_, or head-board, the pride of the Portuguese farmer. This was a piece of hard wood, about eighteen inches high and five feet wide, and handsomely carved in open work. It was the same kind of head-board used by the Romans two thousand years ago, when they held control of Portugal. The up-hill road had many sharp stones. But the boy's hardened bare feet heeded them not. Carlos jumped from the cart to run by his master's side. Jose gave the dog a loving pat: "Ah, Carlos, brother Antonio does not come yet." The dog was the only one who knew Jose's secret. He looked up with eyes which seemed full of sympathy, and put his nose into the boy's hand. Along the wayside were rows and rows of oaks, chestnuts, planes, and most of all, white poplars. The poplars were covered to the top by trailing vines, loaded with purple grapes. On the hillsides were scattered little cottages, whitewashed or painted pale blue, pink, or buff, with red-tiled roofs. Every cottage which Jose passed had its shady porch built with trellis covering, and heavy bunches of grapes hung over the heads of women spinning at the open doorways, surrounded by quiet, bare-foot children. In the distance stood green pine-covered hills. Farther away rose vast mountains, peak upon peak, purple now in the shadows of the October afternoon. It is a beautiful, mountainous country, this Minho region around Guimarães, the old capital city. Minho is Portugal's richest province. And here, it is said, faces are brighter and manners gentler than anywhere else in Portugal. Up-hill the road wound always. Jose met many other boys, barefooted like himself, but usually older, driving oxen or pannier-loaded donkeys. The boys were dressed, as he was, in loose white linen shirt and blue cotton trousers which came just to the knees, a scarlet sash wound three times around the waist, a long, knitted black cap, and a jacket of brown homespun slung upon one shoulder. Sometimes the cap was red or green, but oftenest black; and it ended in a tassel which hung down the back. Many a bare-foot girl, too, trudged along the road, dressed in peasant costume, and driving a donkey with a short stick. With a last wistful look in the direction of the village, Jose turned the oxen from the main road into the rough wooded lane which led to his father's home. The ox-cart creaked and rumbled over the uneven ground. Like all such carts in Portugal, it was made of four or five boards laid flat and resting upon two supports. It had two wheels of solid wood, without spokes, and with iron tires, fixed fast to an axle which turned with the wheels. Long as the three mile journey was to Jose, it was easier to walk than to ride in the jolting car. Jose felt very tired. Although it was almost sunset time, he stopped the oxen and threw himself down near a clump of fragrant shrubs to rest before the last half mile of the hard journey. Carlos came and licked his master's face, then darted off after a red-legged partridge. Upon this young boy had fallen the man's duty in a family of six, including himself,--a now helpless father, a hard-working mother, and three sisters. Since May, when the Senhor Almaida had a stroke of paralysis, Jose had done the heavy work--for a young boy--of caring for the oxen, the cow, the chickens and pig. Besides, he had done what he could, with the help of Joanna, the seventeen-year-old sister, to carry on the farm garden and the vineyard. There was an elder brother, Antonio, now twenty-one years old. He had left home, four years ago, to seek his fortune in America. It was this elder brother whom Jose had been eagerly looking for during the last four months. Joanna had at once written to Antonio of the father's illness, but had not suggested Antonio's return. "We must not send for Antonio," she and her mother decided. Three times each year they had received money from this elder brother; and the money would be even a greater help now that the father could not work. Jose had been given the letter to post on a village market-day. It was then that the plan for his secret came to him. At the _correio_, post-office, he spent all the money he had ever owned for a post-card and stamp,--twenty _reas_, two cents, for the card and twenty _reas_ more, for a two-cent stamp. On one side of the card he copied in printed letters, Antonio's American address; on the other side he wrote the words: "Please come home. We need you. Jose." How glad the boy was then that in the evenings last winter his father had taught him to write and to spell,--something which very few Portuguese children know. For a long time after mailing the post-card Jose felt very guilty with the heavy burden of his secret. As days and weeks went by, the burden grew lighter, but the desire for Antonio's return grew stronger. No letter had come from Antonio since Joanna had written. No money had come, either. This fact, which caused anxiety to the elders, gave Jose strong hope. He felt that Antonio's not sending any money meant that Antonio himself was coming. CHAPTER II THE ELDER BROTHER "His first, best country ever is at home." --_Oliver Goldsmith._ THE few moments of rest in the sweet, cool air refreshed Jose. He jumped up quickly. The farm-work must be done before nightfall. Carlos was barking excitedly. Had he caught the red-legged partridge? Jose turned to see. No, the dog was running toward a stranger, who was walking rapidly in their direction. Could it be Antonio? Jose's heart-beats almost choked him. But no; this was a well-dressed stranger, with shoes on. He was evidently a man from the city, and a traveller, too, because he carried a hand-bag. And he had a black moustache. Of course it was not Antonio. Antonio would be barefooted; Antonio had no moustache. [Illustration: "JOSE CALLED TO THE DOG TO LEAVE OFF BARKING."] Jose called to the dog to leave off barking. The stranger drew near. Stopping, he stroked one of the fawn-brown oxen. He looked at Jose with piercing dark eyes. His olive skin was clear and sunburned. "Do you live near here, boy?" Jose pulled off his cap as he answered: "_Sim, Senhor_--Yes, sir--a half mile away." "What is your name?" "Jose Almaida, _Senhor_." The stranger dropped his hand-bag. He waited a moment to control his voice before he said: "Jose,--this is your brother Antonio." The two brothers rushed into each other's arms and kissed each the other on the cheek. "_Accolade!_"--Welcome! Jose cried out at last. Antonio, thumping him gently on the shoulders, had drawn back to look into his face. "Is it truly you, Antonio? You are so changed--so old--so splendidly dressed!" "It is your brother Antonio. You, too, are so changed, Jose, that I did not know you. Instead of a very small boy I find a tall, grown lad. How are the father and mother, and the sisters? One little sister, Tareja, I have never seen." Eager talk followed, questions and answers coming close together. The mild-eyed oxen looked around as if to ask the reason why the homeward journey was so long delayed. "You say the father can never walk again?" Antonio asked sadly. "We have had the doctor once. He said father may perhaps have the use of his right hand and foot sometime, if he has the best of care." "Are there any crops on the farm this year? Who could do the work?" "The apple and fig trees have borne well. We have good crops of maize and melons and gourds, because father had done the early spring planting before his illness came. Joanna and I did the hoeing and took what care we could. The vines are full of grapes. Father had pruned and trimmed them last winter. Joanna and I are gathering the grapes nowadays and beginning to press them. And I sold some to-day." "Is this your dog, Jose?" Antonio asked. Carlos had burst out again into barking. "Yes. Inez Castillo, the daughter of Senhor Castillo--you remember our neighbor who lives on the big farm?--gave Carlos to me when he was a puppy, a year ago. He stays with me always when I work and goes with me wherever I go. He barks in such a friendly way at you that I think he must know you belong to the family." One of the oxen gave a low cry which the other echoed. Jose picked up the ox-goad and started them forward. "It is time to go on; the night work must be done." Antonio lifted his hand-bag into the cart. "Who does that work?" he asked. "I do. Sometimes Joanna helps. You will help now? You have come to stay at home?" Jose's voice was very wistful. "I shall stay a while to help. We will not talk about this before the others." "A little while will help. I am growing bigger every day." Jose drew his slight figure to its fullest height. Antonio was silent. "Did you get my post-card, Antonio?" Jose asked timidly, after a few moments. "Yes; that is why I came home, Jose." Antonio threw his arm lovingly over the little brother's shoulder as they walked on, side by side. "Please, oh please, do not speak about it before the others,--about my writing to you," Jose begged in a half frightened voice. "I will not speak about it, Jose, I promise you." Antonio looked down at his brother, whom he remembered as little more than a baby. It was hard to realize that this mere child had been the head of the family for five months. CHAPTER III A PORTUGUESE HOME "He was a man of single countenance, Of frank address and simple faith." --_Francisco de Sá de Miranda._ IT was twilight when Antonio, Jose, the patient oxen and the frisky dog reached home. Great was the joy over that home-coming. The father, sitting propped with pillows by the hearth, put his left hand in blessing upon the head of his eldest son and exclaimed "_Graças à Deus_," thanks be to God. The mother, weeping tears of joy, held Antonio's strong body in her arms for a long moment. Joanna, the tall bronzed sister, who had just come in with the pails from milking, greeted him with a glad kiss upon the forehead. Shy, thirteen-year-old Malfada, her jet black hair floating over her shoulders, hugged the big brother, and then ran to a shadowy corner to watch him. Two-year-old baby Tareja held out her chubby hands: Antonio had her on his shoulder now. The green parrot in its gilded cage cried "_Accolade, accolade_," in a shrill tone. Joanna quickly began preparing for supper the _bôlos de bacalhau_--the Portuguese delicacy for feast days--made of minced salt fish, mixed with garlic, shaped into cakes and fried in olive oil. Jose ran out and put the oxen into their corner of the farm-yard near the house, fed them and the cow, the chickens and the pig; brought in firewood, and, last of all, filled the red earthenware jar with cool water from the well on the terrace below the garden. Soon the supper was ready. With thankful hearts and glad talk the family gathered around the long, dark, polished chestnut-wood table. The father's chair was drawn to the side nearest the hearth where a bright fire blazed, lighting the room. The mother held little Tareja. Joanna kept the plates filled with _bacalhau_, with _brôa_--the maize and rye bread of Portugal--with the vegetable stew of gourds, dried beans and rice, flavored with bacon, which was the usual supper-dish; then, with ripe olives, fresh figs and sweet seed cakes. Malfada helped the father take his food. Jose ate hungrily, and once in a while slipped a piece of _brôa_, or bacon, into Carlos' mouth. The front door stood open. Beyond the trees, the shadow of twilight lingered in the valley. The hills were bathed in rosy mist. The Almaida home was one of the better class of small farmhouses. It stood in the centre of a hillside farm of about four acres. It was a square, plastered stone house, whitewashed inside and out. The overhanging eaves of the red-tiled roof were painted deep red underneath. This was the house where Senhor Miguel Almaida's father, his grandfather and great-grandfather had lived. The central room, into which one entered from the vine-clad porch, was uncarpeted. The furnishings showed that the Almaidas were a family of more than peasant rank. At one end of the room stood a large cupboard or cabinet of carved chestnut-wood. Its shelves were full of odds and ends,--some old pieces of English ware, souvenirs of long ago days when trade relations existed with Great Britain, and there was a silver platter of the fine old Portuguese handwork of two hundred years ago. There were also a few books on the shelves, and a violin, a guitar and a flute. Against the wall, opposite the cabinet, were the beds, separated from one another by partitions which did not reach quite to the top of the room. On the walls hung framed colored pictures of the Portuguese hero king, Affonso Henriquez, of Inez de Castro and Prince Pedro, her lover. A large gilt-framed mirror hung near the door, and over the mantel was a crucifix. Never was there a cleaner or a prettier farmhouse in all Portugal. Never were there better-trained, more obedient children than Miguel Almaida's. The father, in these many days when he had to sit helpless by the fireside in his arm-chair, felt grateful for his tidy home, his good wife, and his dutiful children. He was a man of middle height, thick-set in figure. He was of grave character and of great common sense. Even during this illness he kept himself cheerful and of good hope. While the mother strained and cared for the milk, the older sisters washed and put away the dishes. Jose sat on a low stool by his father's side, holding Tareja on his knee, and listening to Antonio's stories about America, of his voyage home, and of the revolution in Portugal. Indeed the events in Portugal were of more interest even than the wonders of far-away America. "Our country has changed very little in the past ten, twenty and perhaps fifty years. Now we can hope for better times," said Miguel Almaida. News of the revolution had been slow in reaching the hillside farm. What the father had heard before as rumors Antonio now told him as facts. The revolution had taken place while Antonio was on the voyage from New York to Gibraltar. The news had greeted him when he landed. As he had journeyed from Gibraltar to Lisbon, the capital city of Portugal, and then, northward still, to Guimarães, people everywhere were talking of the great event. Since then, travelling by foot from Guimarães out into the hill country and past the little market-place, always the one topic of interest had been King Manuel's banishment and the fact that the Portuguese people were now to rule and govern themselves. Jose could not understand all that the change meant. But to Antonio and his father it meant better times,--not so much money to be paid in taxes, better laws, and a chance for the children to go to school. Almost all of the education which the Almaida children had received had been at home. Senhor Almaida was a man better educated than many of his neighbors. When the evening work was done, the mother and the two older sisters drew around the hearth. Tiny Tareja soon fell asleep in the mother's arms. Joanna and Malfada began to embroider: Portuguese girls do beautiful work with their needles. The hearth-fire of maple wood burned brilliantly. Two candles on the mantel lighted up the crucifix. Every few moments the parrot in its cage near the mantel, opened its eyes, blinked, and called out "_Accolade! à deus!_"--Welcome! Good-by! "I am sure the old parrot remembers you, Antonio," the mother said, each time. "He has not talked so much as this for six months." Now it was that Antonio opened his heavy travelling-bag. One by one he took out the presents he had brought. Joanna and Malfada quickly put aside their work. First there was a silver watch for the father,--who had never before in all his life owned a watch. Next came three silver-link hand-bags, the largest for the mother, the middle sized one for Joanna, the smallest for Malfada. When Malfada hung the bag from her round wrist and held it forth to look at it, Antonio burst into a hearty laugh and said: "That is just the way I imagined that Malfada would dangle the little bag from her wrist." Antonio put the present for sleeping Tareja into his mother's hands. It was a wonderful American doll with yellow hair and with eyes which would shut and open, and it was dressed all in white, just as Joanna had sometimes, on rare visits to Guimarães, seen foreign children dressed. Then how gleefully they all laughed at the next present which Antonio brought out! It was for the house,--a china salt-cellar, red and round like a tomato. "We must put it in the cabinet. It is too fine to use except on holidays and feast-days," said the mother. Jose's present was the last to appear. Now it was the little boy's turn to receive a paper-covered package, tied with pink string. Jose's short fingers trembled in impatience as he untied the string,--careful, even in his haste, not to break it, for a piece of string was very precious to the boy. Off came the paper and out came a square white box. Off came the box-cover and out came an engine and four gaily painted cars,--such a wonderful toy as Jose had never seen before. It was an evening always to be remembered in the Almaida family. They looked at one another's presents. They listened to Antonio's tales of great American cities and railroads and bridges, of active, rapid-moving people, and of his own work as foreman on a section of railroad diggers. By and by the mother saw that the father, in his arm-chair, was growing tired. So she told the children it was time to go to bed, because they could hear more to-morrow about all these things. Jose took the engine and cars, the box and the pink string to bed with him, and held them clasped in both hands to make sure that the treasures were real. He was very wide-awake. He heard his mother and Antonio talking after they had helped the father to his bed. And the little boy never forgot Antonio's last words to his mother that night: "Before I went away from home, mother, you said to me 'Each morning, resolve not to do anything during all the day which will make you feel sorry when night comes.' I remembered that each morning, mother, and it kept me always from wrong ways and wrong places." CHAPTER IV GARDEN AND VINEYARD "Trees manifold here left their branches tall, Fruit laden, fragrant, exquisite and rare." --_Camoens._ WHEN, the next morning, Jose led Antonio through the garden and vineyard, crimson vine leaves and purple grapes were the only signs of autumn. The green of summer was fresh over everything else. The granite gate-posts, which divided the front yard and flower garden from the fields, were almost buried in ferns and covered with ivy. In the garden blossomed roses, bright geraniums, asters, balsams, verbenas, salvias and dahlias. The Portuguese are great lovers of flowers. Their climate, where the temperature hardly ever goes below forty degrees, is favorable to the growing of all the flowers, as well as the trees and shrubs, of both temperate and tropical zones. On the borders of the Almaidas' garden and fields, great palms and tall cedars of Lebanon stood side by side with orange, lemon, citron and fig-trees. Here and there was an olive-tree, with gray-green leaves. "How beautiful the flowers are, Jose, and how the trees have grown!" Antonio breathed a happy sigh as he spoke. Many times in his absence these last four years his heart had cried out for the flowers and trees and the quiet happiness of his childhood home. Jose darted off to the house with the large bouquet of flowers he had gathered for his father. As he ran back to Antonio, he called: "Come to the farm-yard. I want you to see our pretty, gentle cow, and the chickens and the pig." At the right-hand side of the house was a good-sized farm-yard, kept more than ankle-deep in gorse and bracken litter. This yard was formed by one side of the house and by a small granite building which held the grape-vats. High over the yard hung grave-vines on strong wooden trellises. Here the cattle found shade and shelter in the heat of mid-summer. In Portugal, cattle are kept in the yards instead of being put out to pasture. The dun-brown cow was indeed a gentle creature. She leaned her head to one side while Jose stroked her neck, and she looked at Antonio with friendly brown eyes. The chickens, in their corner coop, hurried forward, as if expecting food, so Jose ran outside the yard and pulled some handfuls of chickweed for them. The long, tall pig grunted a welcome, standing still to have his back scratched. The oxen turned restlessly, as if wondering why work was so late in beginning to-day. Next the brothers visited the grape-vats. The wide, shallow tubs were full of trodden grapes. For several days Jose with Joanna, and Malfada to help sometimes, had carefully removed the green and decayed grapes from the huge purple clusters they had gathered, and had thrown the good grapes into the vats. Jose and the girls had trodden these grapes with their bare feet. Now the juice was running from the vats through the troughs and the strainers in rich crimson streams into caskets set upon slabs of granite outside. This is the way that port, the wine for which Portugal is famed, is made throughout the country. Antonio stood looking out over the maize field and vineyard, of about an acre, beyond the flower gardens. It was surrounded by poplar trees. Upon the trees hung grape-vines, heavy with fruit. "We must gather more grapes to-day, Jose. I will help, and together we will tread the wine-press." Antonio's quick eyes saw that only a small part of the grapes had been taken from the vines. They must make the most of the vineyard crop. Beyond the grape-vats was the _eira_, or threshing-floor, made of granite slabs set close together, and beyond the _eira_, a small barn and storehouse. The _eira_ was well open to sun and wind. Piled high at one side were stacks of maize-stalks, full of unhusked ears. The farm-work was behindhand at this harvest time: it had been more than Jose and his two sisters could do. Yet they had bravely tried. The oxen's inquiring looks had reminded Jose that the day's watering of the gardens and fields ought to begin. "Let me take the oxen out to-day, Antonio, please," Jose said, when his brother would have gone ahead with the work. Jose knew that his part as leader would soon be ended. Hard as the care had been, he felt more than half sorry to give it up to Antonio. The obedient oxen came forth under the yoke and the high, carved head-board. With the long ox-goad Jose guided them, Antonio following, to the wide terrace at the left side of the house, where a well was sunk into a deep spring, which had a supply of water that never failed. Jose fastened the oxen to the _nora_, the old-time water-wheel. Round and round the oxen went, in a wide circle, under trellises covered with vines. Their moving carried power to an endless chain which was set a few feet apart with buckets. These buckets, sent dipping in turn down into the well, brought up water from its depths. Half of it was spilled by the way. But enough was saved to make a plentiful stream which flowed off to the thirsty gardens and fields below. In this Portuguese part of Europe there is scarcely any rain from May to November. Therefore through the long dry season, watering is necessary to the growth of the crops and the vines. Irrigation by the water of springs brought down from the hill-tops to the farms on the way, is increasing every year. But many farmers, in remote places, like the Almaidas', still follow the two thousand year old custom of watering from a well by means of the oxen's turning of the endless chain. [Illustration: "JOANNA, WITH A BOAT-SHAPED BASKET OF CLOTHES UPON HER HEAD."] "This is water enough for to-day," Jose said at last. "Will you drive the oxen to the yard? I must help Joanna." And off the boy ran. Joanna, with a boat-shaped basket of clothes upon her head, had just gone to the stream beyond the barn, near the wood-lane entrance to the farm. She waded out into the stream, above her ankles, and took the clothes which Jose handed to her, washing out one piece after another in the running water. When this task was done, busy Jose hurried back to join Antonio, who had begun to gather grapes. For an hour they worked, filling and emptying other boat-shaped baskets, till the sun was high overhead. "We will tread the grapes toward night, Jose," Antonio said, when Joanna called them to dinner. At the noon-day meal they ate _brôa_--bread--dipped in olive oil, a little dried fish, oranges and figs. After dinner, in the heat of the day, Antonio went out to a rocky corner of the farm and lay down in the cool shade. Jose brought along his engine and cars. It was the first chance he had found to-day to play with them. And until Antonio grew too sleepy, he told Jose about real trains and railroads. Oh, it was good to be free, good to be in the shade of the trees, to look off over the hills and dream of the cities and the people beyond! Antonio fell asleep, thinking these thoughts. When he awoke, Jose was drawing the train of cars by the pink string, back and forth. A far-away strain of music sounded upon the air. "Have you learned yet to play the flute or violin, Jose?" Antonio asked. "Yes, Antonio, I can play the violin a little." "Run to the house, bring both violin and flute. You can play the one, and I will see if I have forgotten what I knew about the other." Away sped Jose. Returning, he gave Antonio the flute, keeping the violin. Then for an hour the brothers played, not by note but by ear, the simple, sweet melodies of the country-side. The Portuguese people are lovers of music as of flowers. Each farmer, peasant, shepherd and charcoal-burner has his guitar or violin, his pipe or flute. Jose's violin notes were true and liquid. The old violin--it had been his grandfather's--was rich-toned. Presently Antonio laid aside the flute and listened to the little brother's playing. CHAPTER V THE HUSKING OF THE MAIZE "If all the year were playing holidays, To sport would be as tedious as to work." --_William Shakespeare._ JOSE and Antonio, Malfada and Joanna worked side by side those busy days of the next two weeks. They gathered and trod the grapes. They cut and carried through the threshing-floor great sheaves of maize and of bean-stalks, leaving them to dry there in readiness for the threshing. The girls were active and willing, strong and cheerful. Both girls and boys worked with the eager purpose of helping the invalid father and the mother so wearied with constant care of the sick man and the young child. After the grapes were gathered, and the maize and beans harvested, the hard work was over for a time. The gourds and watermelons, which had been planted between the rows of maize and beans, now open to the sunshine, were gaining in mellow color. There was some free time for the Almaida family in the afternoons of these October days. Jose drew his engine and cars back and forth on the terrace, Carlos barking after him. Sometimes Jose played with Malfada around the water-works, and swam oranges in the streams still running from the endless chain of buckets. The mother and Joanna worked in the flower garden. Antonio wandered off on the hillside with his flute. At the maize-husking season in Portugal there is many a gay assembly. The threshing-floor is the social gathering-place for old and young. Antonio, Joanna, Malfada and even little Jose had already been to the _Decamisadas_, or husking, on neighboring farms, when the work and the dancing had lasted until late into the evening. Now Antonio had, in turn, invited their neighbors to a maize-husking. On the afternoon set, eager troops of men and boys, most of them carrying some musical instrument, came in holiday costume of homespun trousers, white linen shirt with a large gold or silver stud at the neck, a red sash bound around the waist, broadcloth or homespun cloak hung over one shoulder, and newest hat of black felt or cap of knitted yarn. Eager troops of girls came also, in full short skirts, in bodices of dark red or yellow worn over white waists, the large sleeves newly starched and ironed. Each girl had a gay-colored cotton or silk kerchief over her shoulders, and almost every one wore handsome filigree gold earrings. Jose's mother was dressed in the same kind of costume, except that her kerchief was of soft dark red silk; and she wore her chief treasure, a heavy gold chain and cross. That afternoon, for the first time since his illness, Senhor Almaida sat out on the porch in his arm-chair, his best broadcloth cloak wrapped about him. In the excitement of the family preparation for the _Decamisadas_, he had moved his right hand slightly. How the mother and the children rejoiced in this sign of returning strength! The husking went on merrily. Skilful fingers made quick work. Gossip and song filled the air with busy hum. At times one or two of the men left off work, upon Antonio's asking, and for a half hour played familiar tunes on flute, guitar, violin or pipe. Toward sunset, when the sky was all aglow with red light, the mother, Joanna and Malfada brought out the supper of _brôa_, dried fish and preserved fruits. The large platters were piled high with the food, and there was plenty more in the house. The workers had hearty appetites, and each took a cupful of the fresh-pressed grape-juice which Antonio passed around. [Illustration: "SHE WAS A PICTURE OF YOUTH, BEAUTY AND GRACE."] The round harvest moon rose just at sunset. In the red-silver glow of twilight and moonlight, the cheerful workers began their tasks again. After an hour more, the husking was finished. A huge heap of golden ears gleamed in the centre of the threshing-floor. Willing hands carried these off to the barn. The threshing-floor was cleared of maize-stalks and chaff. All was ready for dancing. First the young men and maidens formed a circle and went round and round in a merry jig. Then they danced, in groups, the _bolero_, a dance slow and firm in motion, with well-marked time. This was followed by a lively reel. As the music grew louder, little Jose dared to join in with his beloved violin. Then singing burst forth to the music, players and dancers taking part in the simple country-side melodies, until, warm and breathless, the dancers drew back to the edges of the threshing-floor. And now they began eagerly calling upon Inez Castillo for the dance she did so well. Eighteen-year-old Inez Castillo had stood aside while the others danced. She did not like so much romping. But now she stepped forward good-naturedly at their request. Her deep black eyes glowed with the lustre of health. There was a ripe red flush upon her cheeks, an expression of gentle modesty upon face and figure. "You play for me, Jose, you alone, please," the girl asked. She knew how perfectly in tune and in time Jose's music was. Steadily, but rather low at first, the boy began to play. Steadily and gracefully Inez danced forth, her silver bracelets tinkling upon her wrists. Her arms and body moved in perfect time. She was a picture of youth, beauty and grace. Jose did not think about the people listening as he drew his bow back and forth. He thought only of making his music as true as possible for Inez,--Inez who had given him his dear dog-friend Carlos. Antonio leaned against the stone wall of the barn, watching the face of his music-loving little brother. "I must try to let the lad have some music-training," he said to himself. He watched, too, the modest, graceful dancing of Inez; and he decided that however interesting far-away America had been, his own fatherland was a goodly country. CHAPTER VI AN AUTUMN RAMBLE "With dreamful eyes My spirit lies Under the walls of Paradise." --_Thomas Buchanan Read._ THE father was better. He could move the weak hand and foot, although he was not yet able to use them. But he could sit all day in the arm-chair on the porch. From there he was able to direct the late autumn work. This was fortunate. Antonio had half forgotten what needed to be done, and Jose did not yet know much about it. The mother's face had brightened. She did the work of the household and cared for Tareja with a thankful heart. Joanna and Malfada were again busy all day out of doors in the field with their brothers. Now the winter's supply of gourds, left among the stubble of maize-stalks, had grown very large and yellow. There were two kinds of gourds,--one, smooth and round, the other, long and striped. These were gathered and lifted, some to the low roof of the barn, others to the top of the rocky ledge, where they would not have to stand in the wet after the autumn rains began. The melons, also, were gathered and stored in the same way. Upon these places, gourds and melons would keep sound until February. All through the winter the better ones would be valuable food for the family, while the coarser ones would be used for cattle and pig. There was a good supply of cabbage in the garden for the winter's house-use and for feeding the live stock. Sown late in the summer, the cabbage had grown to four or five feet in height. Its lower leaves would be picked off, week after week, then the stalks cut down in the spring to make room for other crops. Twice Jose went with Antonio to the wild lands of the remote hillside, and loaded upon the ox-cart gorse, heather, bracken and wild grass as winter stabling for the cattle. This they cut or scraped together with broad-bladed hoes,--simple tools made of a flat piece of iron shaped like a spade and fastened upon a handle. Jose's hoe-handle was so long that he had very hard work to manage it. But he bravely kept on, no matter how his arms and back ached during those early November days. It would soon be time to plough the stubble and to sow the winter barley, rye and wheat, the flax, and the maize for cattle feed. "We will take a holiday, Jose, before we begin this new work. Where would you like to go?" Antonio asked, as they walked homeward from the wild-land by the side of the oxen. Carlos ran ahead on the wood-road, sniffing the fresh air. "I would like best to go up to the hill-top, where we can look off and see Guimarães and the old ruined Roman city, Citania." "We will go to-morrow. You have earned a holiday, and the up-hill walk will straighten your shoulders. The hoeing has made you bend over like a little old man." The next morning's work of caring for the live-stock was done early. Each with a lunch-basket, and a cloak hung over one shoulder, the two brothers set forth, followed by Carlos, and watched out of sight by the family on the front porch. They found the mossy old foot-path which led from the main road up the hill. Pine needles made the rocks here and there as slippery as glass. But tufts of tall, stout grass along the path served as a help in climbing. The sky overhead was deepest blue. Through the trunks of trees on both sides of the path they could see many a maize-field yellow with stubble, and many a vineyard with brilliant bronze leaves. The trees were very beautiful. Here was the straight trunk of a eucalyptus "tall as the mast of some great admiral;" here was a cork-tree with a rich, brown velvet-like trunk, and here a gum-tree, its long drooping leaves of russet, red and orange showing like jewels against the slender, dark trunk. There were seats for the weary built against the trees along the way. Once in a while the brothers stopped to rest. And at the noon hour they ate their luncheon, Jose sitting at Antonio's feet, and giving a large part of his own share to the dog. By early afternoon they came to the rocky crag of the hill. A humble hermitage stood upon the outer edge of this great rock. Near the hermitage a gilded cross was built upon a broad pillar of piled stones,--the work of some long-ago, shoeless Carmelite or Trappist monk. The hermitage was deserted now, but the palms and ferns around it were rich in beauty. Antonio, who had read much about his country's history, told Jose that all these green growing things had been planted and tended with loving care by the devout monks who had taken on themselves the vows of poverty and of silence. [Illustration: "FOR A LONG TIME THE BROTHERS WERE SILENT."] Antonio and Jose lay down upon the soft, fine grass, under a tall palm-tree, and looked out over the wide view which the rocky crag gave. The mole-crickets made a soft churr-churring sound around them. Blackbirds in the tree-tops gave shrill, crowing calls. From hilly pastures, shepherds among their sheep sang in rivalry with one another. For a long time the brothers were silent. The beauty of the scene almost took away speech. On all sides were purple hills and upon every hill-top stood a hermitage or shrine with a shining cross above it. Far away rose the giant peak of the Penha, a mountain covered with green up the greater part of its height, then bare granite to its top. Antonio pointed to the southeast: "There on the plain, is Guimarães, with its many roofs and chimneys; and, look, there is the smoke of a railroad train." "Will you take me there some time, Antonio, so that I can see a real train of cars?" "Yes, Jose, we will go there on our next long holiday. Now look over yonder. Half way up the hill do you see some rows of stone wall?" "Yes, Antonio." "There lies the old fortress city, built by the Romans more than a hundred years before Christ was born. It is called Citania now, and it is in ruins. Some day you will read about it in a book of history." Jose sighed as he said: "I fear it will be a long, long time before I can read a book. I can only spell out a few words now,--not much more than I wrote on the post-card to you." "Would you like to go to school this winter, Jose?" "Oh, how I should like it,--more than anything else in all the world! But there is no school, and if there was one, I could not leave the farm-work to go to it." "There is to be a free primary school opened this winter, with a good teacher, in our village where we go on market-days. I want you to attend the school, Jose." "But who will do the work at home, Antonio? You will soon go back to America, I think." Jose never forgot, even in the joy of having Antonio at home, that this big brother might soon go away again. Antonio was silent a long time. Then he said slowly, looking off to the far Penha Mountain: "Jose, how would you feel if I told you I will stay at home?" "I should be very happy, oh, so happy, brother." "Well, Jose, I have decided to stay." Jose raised himself upon his elbow and looked eagerly into Antonio's face: "Do you really mean it?" he asked. "Yes, Jose." "Then I _can_ go to school, and learn as much as you know?" Antonio laughed a little sadly: "It is not very much that I know, from books. Most of the small amount I know is what I have learned from men and things in America, and from the newspapers. But I will study in the evenings this winter. I would rather have an education than be a millionaire. There was a school in the village when I was your age. The new school will be better than that." "Why will it be better, Antonio?" Jose asked. He knew nothing of schools except that they were places where children could learn to read from books. "We had old, dull books to study, and we had to wait, all in one class, until every boy and every girl had learned the lesson. But Senhor Castillo has told me that in the new school there will be new books, and there will be more than one class, so that the boys and girls who are quickest to learn can go ahead of the others." "I am afraid I shall not be quickest to learn, Antonio." "Try as hard as you can, Jose. Then, in the future, perhaps you will be one of the rulers of Portugal. The time is coming in this country when education will mean power." Jose listened with close attention. And although he could not understand Antonio's words, he remembered them. A moment later he asked: "May I be the one to tell the family that you will stay at home with us, Antonio? I know the father and mother have felt very anxious about this." "Yes, Jose, you may tell them this evening. Now take a last look toward Guimarães. We must start for home. It is nearly the sunset hour, and darkness will soon follow. The path is so steep that we need light to tread it." CHAPTER VII WINTER WORK AND PLAY "See, winter comes to rule the varied year." --_James Thomson._ WHAT joy in the home when Jose that evening, after the late supper, told the good news! How they crowded around Antonio, clapping him on the shoulders! With what glee did Joanna bring out preserved fruits and sweet cakes for them to eat as they drew their chairs around the hearth! "We will have many a happy winter evening together;" the father spoke with a new courage shining in his eyes. "The doctor you sent for, Antonio, came to-day while you and Jose were away. He told me that if I rest this winter, free from care, I shall have full use of my right hand and foot again. Your taking the care from me will be what saves me, Antonio." "I can do more than keep you from care, father. I saved money while I was away, and have over two hundred dollars now, even after paying my passage home. I will spend some of this money to make the farm better." This was the first time Antonio had spoken of his savings. He had kept silent until he could decide as to whether or not he would go back to America. "You are a rich man, my son." A look of pride shone in the father's eyes as he spoke. "You deserve it, Antonio. You are a good son," the mother said, as she wiped happy tears from her eyes. Indeed this seemed to the whole family a very great fortune. Even Senhor Castillo was not worth more than five hundred dollars, and he was the wealthiest man for miles around. "I will buy a new plough and some new tools. We shall soon have enough better crops to more than pay for this spending. When you are well again, father, there will be two men of us to work instead of one." "And what about Jose?" The father put his left hand upon the little boy's shoulder. Jose was kneeling beside him, roasting chestnuts on the hearth. "I am going to school this winter, Antonio says." Jose looked up with a happy face. "A school term will begin early in January, at the village. Jose can go for the sixteen weeks; he is strong enough to walk there and back, I think," said Antonio. "Sometimes can I go, too?" Malfada asked, tossing back her thick black hair. "Yes, little one, you can go with Jose, that is the best plan. Then you can help each other with your lessons," the father said quickly. Soon the winter began. The dull weather with heavy rains lasted two or three weeks. In this Portuguese country, autumn meets winter with pouring rain and with strong winds, which break down almost everything in the gardens and which cover gardens and fields with wet leaves and long sprays of vine. During these days Antonio and Jose wore about the farm-work curious coats made of several layers of dried grass. These were some protection against rain and wind. But there was not much work to be done until the heavy storms should cease. In late November the sun came forth brightly. It was time to plough the stubble fields. The only plough Jose had ever seen until now, was one made of a crooked branch of hardwood tree, shod with iron,--of the same pattern as the plough used by the Romans two thousand years ago. It was a plough so light in weight that after the day's work was done, the man lifted it from the ground and hung it over the yoke of the ox. This old kind of plough was drawn by one ox, and it stirred the soil only six or seven inches deep. The new plough--which Antonio brought home one day behind the oxen--turned a deep straight furrow in the light crumbling soil. The old harrow, to level the ground after the ploughing, was made of fifteen or twenty teeth of iron set into a wooden framework. The new harrow which Antonio bought had many strong, close-set teeth. Jose had followed after the plough with great delight, to watch its working. Now, when Antonio let him ride on the harrow-seat, the boy kept his head turned back most of the way, in order that he might see the ploughed land grow level under the harrow's teeth. "Surely our crops will be doubled next season--twice as large as ever before--because the ground is so well-prepared," the father said each day as he watched the work from the doorway. He seemed to gain in strength daily, even during this dullest season of the year. It was hard, though, for him to be unable to help, for there was much work to be done. Jose was given the sowing of the winter wheat and rye, and of the maize for the winter food of the cattle. Antonio pruned the grape-vines and cut off the tops of the trees on which the vines hung. Soon the maize shot up, and the young stalks had to be cut, morning and night. Jose stayed around the house all one market-day afternoon, taking care of little Tareja and being company for his father, while the mother, Joanna and Malfada went to the village with Antonio. Malfada dangled the silver-link bag from her wrist, just as Antonio knew she would; and she brought back home in it a little boxful of candies for Jose. It was a great day for them all. There were long, pleasant evenings, for Portuguese families stay at home together instead of going to their neighbors for amusement. Jose played softly on his violin. The mother, Joanna and Malfada sewed or embroidered. Antonio read aloud from some book, or oftener from a newspaper he had bought on the weekly market-day and which gave news of the nation's progress. Sometimes, but not often, he went out with his flute; and then the family knew that he had gone to serenade Inez Castillo. Swiftly the days passed. Soon came _Natal_--Christmas--the great holiday of the year. On this day and on New Year's, there were fireworks and decorations at each farmhouse, singing, and visits back and forth. Daily between Christmas and New Year's the Almaida family ate _bôlos de bacalhau_, and _rebanadas_,--thick slices of _brôa_ soaked in new milk, fried in olive oil and spread with honey. _Rebanadas_ is the special holiday food for Christmas and New Year's. The red tomato salt-cellar was used at table on each of these days. The holidays from farm-work lasted up to the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6th. On the day after, the school in the village opened. Five days each week Jose and Malfada walked barefoot the three miles in the early morning, returning in the dusk of the mild winter day. The walk was very tiring sometimes. It was fortunate that both children were strong, and used to being much on their feet. At first Carlos wanted to go with them. But soon he seemed to understand that he was not to be allowed to take these morning walks. On each school-day, however, at four o'clock, he would begin watching for the children, and the moment he caught sight of them coming along the wood-lane, he dashed off at top speed to meet them. The old parrot was very funny these days. So much going and coming confused him. In the mornings when Jose and Malfada went away he called out _Accolade_--welcome, and in the afternoons, when they returned, _à deus_--good-by. These were the only words he knew; Jose had tried in vain to teach him other words, just as Antonio had tried when a little boy. "The parrot is growing very old; he is losing his sense," the mother said one day when the bird greeted the children on their return from school with _à deus! à deus! à deus!_ "Oh no, mother; I am sure he thinks it is a joke, just as we do," Jose said, very earnestly. On the Saturday holiday Jose worked from dawn till dark, helping Antonio. The vine-pruning and tying did not end until February. Jose learned to tie the vine branches skilfully to the trees, leaving room for the vines to grow and not be hurt by the cord. In February, March and April came the sowing for the crops of the summer and autumn. The sixteen weeks' term of school ended in April. Jose had been put into the class of the quickest learners. He had gone rapidly ahead of Malfada, who, although three years older, stayed in the lower class. Jose had been eager over his books,--far more eager than Malfada. But he ran almost all the way home, and reaching there long before she did, put away his books gladly. The school-room, with its crowd of boys and girls, had seemed hot and dusty those days when the outside world was growing so beautiful. Antonio was out in the field, planting cabbages, when Jose hurried toward him calling: "No more school, Antonio, no more school now." Antonio straightened back his shoulders and asked: "Is this the boy who wanted so much to go to school?" Jose's face turned very red under its tan. But when he saw the teasing look in Antonio's eyes, he laughed and said: "It is good to have spring come after winter, so I think it is good to change from going to school to not going. Besides, the teacher says there will be a ten weeks' term next autumn." "Spring unlocks the flowers, so the spring should let children come out of doors," said Antonio. "There will be some hard work for you, Jose, but never mind!" "Never mind," repeated Jose, racing back to the house with Carlos at his heels. CHAPTER VIII WHEN SPRING UNLOCKS THE FLOWERS "In the merry month of May." --_William Shakespeare._ THE hills were sweet with the air of spring. Down their sides ran rills of water, foaming with golden light. The fresh grass of the fields was carpeted with flowers. The young vine-shoots were full of tender, pale green leaves. Lemon and orange trees shone with white blossoms. The elder, lotus, and shining-leaved magnolia showed almost more white than green. The pomegranate held forth fiery red blossoms. The olive-tree, with its stunted growth and its gray-green leaves, glowed all day long with a beautiful silver color under the bright sunshine. In the flower-garden, roses, geraniums and heliotrope were a-bloom. Crops were growing wonderfully. The effects of the deep ploughing already showed in the stronger maize-stalks, the more abundant bean pods and the well-started vegetables. "The fourth leaf-spike has appeared on the maize: it is time for the hoeing," said the father. He could walk now, slowly, with the aid of a stout cane, as far as the field. It was easy for Jose to work with the new short-handled hoe Antonio had bought for him. Yet at the end of the day his arms and wrists were so tired that he could scarcely draw the bow across the violin. Many an evening the bow dropped from his hand as he fell asleep, heavy-eyed after being all day in the open air. As soon as the young maize-stalks were strong enough to stand the flow of water, the oxen were set to work at the _nora_ and streams of water began running down through the fields. The dry season had commenced. There was day after day of bright, unclouded sunshine. Then came the thinning of the crops, to make the strong stalks grow stronger, and to give food for the cattle. Working with his bare feet two or three inches deep in the warm, moist soil, Jose felt as if he were a part of this great, growing, beautiful world. The strength of the earth seemed to come into him with the air he breathed. He was taller and more sturdy: he no longer looked like the slim slip of a boy of six or seven months ago. Early in June the crops had grown to their limit. Their turning to a yellow color showed the ripening. It would soon be time for cutting down the first crop of barley, oats, rye and wheat, and to make ready for a second sowing. The flax had already been taken up, and had been steeped or soaked in water for more than a week. Now, well-dried in the sun, it must be broken and scutched by hand, or taken to some mill to be finally made ready for spinning. Antonio decided that he would carry the flax to Guimarães, where there were good mills, instead of having his mother and sisters do the work at home. Besides, he wanted to buy some new seeds for the second sowing. "Would you like to take a holiday with me to-morrow?" he asked Jose on the evening before St. Antonio's day. "Yes. Where? To Guimarães?" Jose replied quickly. "How did you guess, little brother?" "Because last autumn, when we went on a holiday, you said you would take me to Guimarães when we went away again." "We will start early to-morrow. We will take the oxen, because I am going to carry the flax to the mill." "It is good to have the holiday on St. Antonio's day. Because you have that name, the day should be your holiday, Antonio." CHAPTER IX ON ST. ANTONIO'S DAY "--in my soul is naught but gayety." --_Antonio Ferreira._ FOR the first time in all his life, Jose was to see Guimarães, the old city where Portugal's hero king, Affonso Henriquez, was born in 1109, the great warrior who made of Portugal a united country. On the morning of St. Antonio's day, the thirteenth of June, the family was up early to eat with Antonio and Jose the holiday breakfast of _estofado_--stewed meat and vegetables. At six o'clock they gathered on the wide stone doorstep to see the brothers start. Carlos lay at the edge of the step, his nose upon his paws, waiting, both eyes fixed upon Jose. The dog knew that some unusual journey was planned; he was all ready to go, too. But Carlos could not go. This was Jose's only regret at starting. "He would be frightened and perhaps lost in the city," Antonio said. So the dog was held back by Joanna, and he decided, in his dog way, that Jose must be going off to school again. The parrot's cries of _Accolade! Accolade!_ followed the brothers until they were beyond reach of the sound. It was a glorious June morning. Although so early, the sun was even now high in the blue heavens. The air was fragrant with sweet flower perfumes. Many small brown and yellow butterflies fluttered along the roadside. Large gray sand-lizards ran out from the underbrush. Meadow-larks and blackbirds sang in every tree-top. All beyond the village market-place was new to Jose. The road grew constantly better. Soon above the pine forests appeared the granite peak of Penha. On the approach to Guimarães, the ground rises and pine forests spread around the city for miles. In that wild country, Affonso Henriquez first learned the art of war, and in his very boyhood became the trusted leader of his troops. As the brothers drew nearer, they saw the gentle hill on which stand the walls of the old castle, still keeping watch over the city which lies beneath. It is impossible to imagine a ruin more stately than that of this grand old castle of the Middle Ages, the first Christian fortress in Portugal,--a castle-fortress which tells the story of the strong spirit of the race of men who built it. The huge granite blocks, each taller than a man, which form the battlements, still stand erect and immovable. On the road, as the brothers drew yet nearer, were many other travellers, like themselves bound for the city. It was market-day as well as the holiday of St. Antonio. There were men and women, boys and girls, in gala-day costume. Sometimes the women and girls were driving donkeys, pannier-laden. But oftenest, these women-folk had baskets, heavily filled, upon their heads; in Portugal women carry everything in baskets, from babies to bales of goods. There were herdsmen on the way, driving flocks of goats. Groups of children walked soberly along with their parents. Now and then a beggar asked Antonio for a bit of money; but Portugal has few beggars compared with its neighboring country, Spain. The crowd of holiday-makers grew. Jose climbed into the ox-cart, because he could see more and because the long walk and the unusual excitement were making him feel rather tired. Most of the travellers passed on ahead, for the oxen, pulling their load up-hill, made slow progress. But Jose did not mind this. The music of a brass band was coming to his ears. He had to ask Antonio what it was; he had never before heard a band. Guimarães is a delightful old city. Even people who have travelled much more than Jose think so. It is full of picturesque buildings. There are many houses with balconies and windows of fine wood-carving. Several of the streets are hardly more than narrow alleys, and the eaves of the houses all but meet overhead. Some of the wider streets end in wonderful views of the hills, seen across fields brilliant green with rye and clover. And there is a beautiful old granite cathedral church. Jose had never seen anything so marvellous as this building. In its graceful granite belfry tower the peal of eight bells was ringing out the hour of ten as the oxen moved slowly past, along the crowded street. But Jose hardly noticed the people: he was looking up, full of eager curiosity, at the strange heads and faces, half like men, half like animals,--the gargoyles carved on church and tower. "Take me to see the cars and the railroad first of all, please, Antonio," had been Jose's request, made over and over again that morning on the way. So, to please the little brother, Antonio drove the oxen directly to the railway station. By good fortune they were just in time to see the arrival of a long passenger train. Jose was almost terrified by the rushing in of the tall black engine with its smoke and noise. The cars, with their seats and windows and curtains, seemed to him like strange little homes. Many a traveller turned to gaze with interest at the earnest-faced, black-eyed boy and the handsome, strong-looking brother, with the fresh color of the country upon their faces. A little girl dressed in white stepped from the cars, holding fast to her mother's hand. "See, Antonio," Jose cried out in a voice so loud that everyone around heard: "See, she looks just like Tareja's doll!" As the mother and little girl passed, they smiled with friendly blue eyes at the brothers. After the passenger train moved out of the station, a puffing freight engine went back and forth, shifting and changing about many long, box-like looking freight cars. Presently the cars were all in place, and the puffy engine pulled them slowly away. Jose would have stayed all day at the station, waiting for other trains to come and go. His eyes were not yet satisfied. But Antonio had many other things to do. When they finally turned away, Jose looked back as long as the station remained in sight. He soon, however, grew interested in seeing other sights. To Antonio, Guimarães seemed very old-fashioned and slow, compared with the busy American cities of the same size which he had seen. But to Jose everything was new and wonderful,--so many people, such tall buildings, such beautiful things in the shop windows, so much noise. Everywhere on the corners of the quaint, crowded streets groups of men were talking about the new government, and curious small boys were listening at the edges of the crowds. Jose wanted to stop long enough to hear what was being said; but Antonio urged the oxen on toward the mill. Processions of young men marched through the streets to the music of flutes, pipes, and drums. On many a street the statue figure of St. Antonio, in a shrine, was decorated with flowers and garlands of leaves. Around bonfires in the city square young people were dancing. When they reached the mill, Antonio fastened the oxen at the corner of a near-by side street. Jose helped carry the flax into the mill, but he hurried back to take his seat in the ox-cart: he liked this better even than staying in the mill. A red, whizzing machine which Jose knew at once, from descriptions Antonio had given him, was an automobile--came rushing through the narrow street. The frightened oxen pulled so hard at the chain that Jose thought they would break it and run away. He jumped down, and, in his effort to quiet the oxen, lost the chance really to see the darting red machine. But he saw other automobiles, by and by. From the mill Antonio went to a neighboring shop to buy the seeds he wanted for the second crop planting. This took a long time. Just as he came back, the sweet-toned bells of the cathedral tower were chiming out one o'clock. He guided the oxen to the end of a short side street, where he let them graze upon the rich grass by the road while he and Jose ate their luncheon. Streams of water ran along in stone channels by the roadside. The murmur of running water was heard everywhere and always, for this was an especially dry season, and the gardens and fields of Guimarães needed much moisture. Back the brothers went with the oxen into the city crowds. Antonio wanted to get some presents to take home. Jose helped him choose these. They bought a bright-colored little basket for the mother, new silk kerchiefs for the sisters, a gay little scarlet kerchief for Tareja, and a book, about modern ways of farming, for the father. After this was done, Antonio was ready to go home. But Jose begged: "Please, oh please, Antonio, let us stay till dark. The band keeps on playing; I never should tire of hearing that. And some boys were saying on the street as we passed that there are going to be fireworks at dusk." Antonio hesitated. They were a long way from home, and it had been a long day. "Joanna will milk the cow, and feed the chickens and pig. Mother will know we are safe together. Do stay, Antonio." So, because the little brother did not often have a holiday, Antonio delayed starting for home. The sky was very clear. A bright moon would give them light on the way after the late twilight ended. There were many more people now in the city square. The crowds were cheerful, rather quiet, and very orderly; the Portuguese people are sober-minded, even on their holidays. Toward nightfall the scene grew gayer. More bonfires were lighted. A second, third, and fourth brass band marched through the streets to their own lively strains of music. Jose's quick ear caught many a tune which he afterward played upon his violin. Candles were lighted now on the shrines of the holiday saint. The cathedral bells rang forth a beautiful vesper hymn. And almost before the sun had set, the fireworks began. [Illustration: "HE AND JOSE LOOKED ACROSS THE CITY."] Antonio bought a bagful of buns and seed-cakes, which they ate as they sat in the ox-cart on the edge of the crowd. It was not long before he saw that Jose was growing very tired. Antonio stepped down from the cart. "We will start now, Jose. We can watch the fireworks as we move away from the city. Then we can stop outside and let the oxen feed a while. They must be very hungry." And because the big brother had been so kind, Jose did not object now to the homeward start. A half mile out in the country, just before they reached the borders of the pine forest, Antonio turned the willing oxen aside to let them crop the thick grass. Seated on a high rock, he and Jose looked across at the city. Wonderful gleams of colored light--red, blue, green and orange--shot out over the surrounding valleys. Showers of bright stars fell, it seemed, as if at their very feet. The tall granite castle ruin was lighted up with a red glow. The city itself, with its many towers and tops showing in the blaze of color, with its bursts of music which floated across on the soft night air, was like a story or a dream. At last Antonio turned the oxen to the road again. "Truly we have had a wonderful end to our holiday, Jose," he said. "Truly we have," Jose replied drowsily. The rest by the roadside had made him very sleepy, and the glare of light had almost blinded his eyes. "Climb into the cart, Jose. There is no need for two of us to walk. The road is growing rougher now, and the cart jolts badly, but that is easier to bear than going afoot." Jose crept into the cart, and put his folded jacket under his head for a pillow. He had tight in his hand the paper bag with the three seed-cakes he had saved for his sisters. A few moments later he was fast asleep. Antonio, without stopping the oxen who were now going at top speed toward home, gently put his cloak over the sleeping little man-brother. CHAPTER X BETTER TIMES "In measureless content." --_William Shakespeare._ BETTER times had surely come to the Almaida family. By July, the father was able to walk about without a cane; and the doctor, whom Antonio asked to come again, said that Senhor Almaida might begin work in September. The first crops of the year were the largest that the farm had ever raised. The early harvest of oats, rye, and wheat was piled high in the barn by the last of July, and the new crops were growing abundantly. "Another year we shall have twice as much of everything," Jose said, as he sat with his father and Antonio at the barn door in the summer twilight. The father looked smilingly into the little boy's eager face as he answered: "Yes, and we can keep two cows instead of one cow, and more chickens, perhaps another pig. We shall have more feed for them, and with our larger crops to sell, we can soon pay back to Antonio the money which he has spent for new farm implements and tools. It was good for us all that you went away, Antonio, and came back with the new ideas." There were other plans for the farm forming in Antonio's mind, but he was not yet quite ready to talk them over with his father. A few days later, as Antonio and Jose finished the work of watering the maize-fields for the second time that day, by means of the oxen's turning of the _nora_, Antonio said to Jose: "You know there is the good full stream which flows beyond the barn and along by the wood-lane? This autumn, when the farm-work grows lighter, we will put in pipes from that stream to the vineyard and garden, so that the crops can be watered by what is called irrigation, and without using the _nora_, which takes the oxen away from the other work. We will not tell this to the father until the time comes. He may think it too large a thing for us to do." In mid-August a party of students from Coimbra University came strolling through the village and up the hillside to the Almaidas' and other farms. They were on a vacation pilgrimage to Braga, one of the oldest cities in Portugal, known in Roman times as _Baraca Augusta_, and in more modern times as the home of the royal Braganza family, to which King Manuel II belonged. While these students, in long black coats buttoned close to the chin, ate the _brôa_ and the fresh fruits which the good mother set before them, Jose asked them many questions about the place from which they came. And they told the little boy about Coimbra University, famous for many centuries as the seat of learning for all Portugal, and about the great buildings of the University on the hill overlooking the town. "Like the old castle of Guimarães?" Jose asked. "Yes, have you ever seen that?" the leader of the students asked. Then Jose shyly described to them his holiday with Antonio at Guimarães. "There is Antonio off in the field now, and father is sitting with him, in the shade." The five students were very comfortable on the vine-covered porch this warm August afternoon, so they stayed a little longer, and told Jose more about Coimbra,--how the city was, after Guimarães, made the capital of Portugal, and how, as the Christian kings, beginning with Affonso Henriquez, drove the Moors farther and farther south, until, after Coimbra, the more southern city of Lisbon was made the capital. The students shook Jose's hand and clapped him on the back as they started to go on with their journey. "Some day I hope you will visit Coimbra," one of them said. "_Graçias, senhor_," Jose answered very politely. "Some day I will go there, but not yet, for I am only a little boy." "You have seen and learned more than most boys of your age in Portugal. I believe you will some day come to study at Coimbra," the leader of the students said. "_Á deus, à deus_, boy; come to Coimbra some day," the students cried as they went off; a jolly, laughing group in their black coats. Through the summer, talk of public reforms, of railroad strikes, of riots and unrest, reached the Almaida farm. It made the father think with a half regret of the old days of quiet. It made Antonio long for the time when the young republic of Portugal would have passed through these first months of change and become settled. But none of this talk disturbed Jose. He was the happiest boy in all Portugal. His father was nearly well. His big brother was going to stay in Portugal. His mother grew brighter of face every day. Joanna was soon to marry a young village carpenter. Malfada and Jose himself could go to school again in the autumn. Little Tareja in a few years would also be able to go. And every day Antonio told Jose stories about the great world outside of Portugal. Antonio valued education more than ever, since his four years of life in America. He knew that it was too late for him to go to school again, because of his age and because of the need for him to work on the farm. But he talked with Jose of the future when, if the boy turned out to be good at studies, he might go to the University at Coimbra. And it happened in the years afterward, that Jose did go to Coimbra, and that the leader of the students who had stopped at the Almaida farm for brôa and fruits on the August afternoon, was then a teacher at Coimbra. Of the money brought from America Antonio had spent hardly any except that for farm tools and implements. The rest of the money, a good round sum for a young Portuguese farmer, was in the bank at Guimarães. Once a month, now, Antonio added a few dollars to this--not half nor quarter as much as he might have had in America, but although a man earns less in Portugal, living costs less there. With this money, and with what he would add to it in the future, Antonio planned to pay for Jose's education, and some time soon it would make him able to build near his father's, a new home where he could bring Inez Castillo as his bride. If Antonio and Jose have hot summers of sixteen hours' work daily to toil through, they have no great severity of winter weather to bear. If their summer days bring more than common heat and weariness, they find rest during the cool, pleasant nights. In the summer and winter evenings alike, father, mother and children find quiet enjoyment together, and always, best of all, they have the power to enjoy simple things "in measureless content." Meanwhile Jose and Malfada, with many other Portuguese children, are eagerly gaining education in the bettered schools which are a part of Portugal's new government. THE END. BOOKS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE THE LITTLE COLONEL BOOKS (Trade Mark) _By ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON_ _Each 1 vol., large 12mo, cloth, illustrated, per vol._ $1.50 THE LITTLE COLONEL STORIES (Trade Mark) Being three "Little Colonel" stories in the Cosy Corner Series, "The Little Colonel," "Two Little Knights of Kentucky," and "The Great Scissors," put into a single volume. THE LITTLE COLONEL'S HOUSE PARTY (Trade Mark) THE LITTLE COLONEL'S HOLIDAYS (Trade Mark) THE LITTLE COLONEL'S HERO (Trade Mark) THE LITTLE COLONEL AT BOARDING-SCHOOL (Trade Mark) THE LITTLE COLONEL IN ARIZONA (Trade Mark) THE LITTLE COLONEL'S CHRISTMAS VACATION (Trade Mark) THE LITTLE COLONEL, MAID OF HONOR (Trade Mark) THE LITTLE COLONEL'S KNIGHT COMES RIDING (Trade Mark) MARY WARE: THE LITTLE COLONEL'S CHUM (Trade Mark) MARY WARE IN TEXAS _These eleven volumes, with The Little Colonel's Good Times Book, boxed as a twelve-volume set_, $18.00. THE LITTLE COLONEL (Trade Mark) TWO LITTLE KNIGHTS OF KENTUCKY THE GIANT SCISSORS BIG BROTHER Special Holiday Editions Each one volume, cloth decorative, small quarto, $1.25 New plates, handsomely illustrated with eight full-page drawings in color, and many marginal sketches. IN THE DESERT OF WAITING: THE LEGEND OF CAMELBACK MOUNTAIN. THE THREE WEAVERS: A FAIRY TALE FOR FATHERS AND MOTHERS AS WELL AS FOR THEIR DAUGHTERS. KEEPING TRYST THE LEGEND OF THE BLEEDING HEART THE RESCUE OF PRINCESS WINSOME: A FAIRY PLAY FOR OLD AND YOUNG. THE JESTER'S SWORD Each one volume, tall 16mo, cloth decorative $0.50 Paper boards .35 There has been a constant demand for publication in separate form of these six stories, which were originally included in six of the "Little Colonel" books. JOEL: A BOY OF GALILEE: By ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON. Illustrated by L. J. Bridgman. New illustrated edition, uniform with the Little Colonel Books, 1 vol., large 12mo, cloth decorative $1.50 A story of the time of Christ, which is one of the author's best-known books. THE LITTLE COLONEL GOOD TIMES BOOK Uniform in size with the Little Colonel Series $1.50 Bound in white kid (morocco) and gold 3.00 Cover design and decorations by Peter Verberg. Published in response to many inquiries from readers of the Little Colonel books as to where they could obtain a "Good Times Book" such as Betty kept. THE LITTLE COLONEL DOLL BOOK Large quarto, boards $1.50 A series of "Little Colonel" dolls,--not only the Little Colonel herself, but Betty and Kitty and Mary Ware, yes, and Rob, Phil, and many another of the well-loved characters,--even Mom' Beck herself. There are many of them and each has several changes of costume, so that the happy group can be appropriately clad for the rehearsal of any scene or incident in the series. The large, cumbersome sheets of most of the so-called doll "books" have been discarded, and instead each character, each costume, occupies a sheet by itself, the dolls and costumes being cut out only as they are wanted. ASA HOLMES: OR, AT THE CROSS-ROADS. A sketch of Country Life and Country Humor. By ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON. With a frontispiece by Ernest Fosbery. Large 16mo, cloth, gilt top $1.00 "'Asa Holmes; or, At the Cross-Roads' is the most delightful, most sympathetic and wholesome book that has been published in a long while."--_Boston Times._ THE RIVAL CAMPERS; OR, THE ADVENTURES OF HENRY BURNS. By RUEL PERLEY SMITH. Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated $1.50 A story of a party of typical American lads, courageous, alert, and athletic, who spend a summer camping on an island off the Maine coast. THE RIVAL CAMPERS AFLOAT; OR, THE PRIZE YACHT VIKING. By RUEL PERLEY SMITH. Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated $1.50 This book is a continuation of the adventures of "The Rival Campers" on their prize yacht _Viking_. THE RIVAL CAMPERS ASHORE By RUEL PERLEY SMITH. Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated $1.50 "As interesting ashore as when afloat."--_The Interior._ THE RIVAL CAMPERS AMONG THE OYSTER PIRATES; OR, JACK HARVEY'S ADVENTURES. By RUEL PERLEY SMITH. Illustrated $1.50 "Just the type of book which is most popular with lads who are in their early teens."--_The Philadelphia Item._ PRISONERS OF FORTUNE: A TALE OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY COLONY. By RUEL PERLEY SMITH. Cloth decorative, with a colored frontispiece $1.50 "There is an atmosphere of old New England in the book, the humor of the born raconteur about the hero, who tells his story with the gravity of a preacher, but with a solemn humor that is irresistible."--_Courier-Journal._ FAMOUS CAVALRY LEADERS. By CHARLES H. L. JOHNSTON. Large 12mo, With 24 illustrations $1.50 Biographical sketches, with interesting anecdotes and reminiscences of the heroes of history who were leaders of cavalry. "More of such books should be written, books that acquaint young readers with historical personages in a pleasant informal way."--_N. Y. Sun._ FAMOUS INDIAN CHIEFS. By CHARLES H. L. JOHNSTON. Large 12mo, illustrated $1.50 In this book Mr. Johnston gives interesting sketches of the Indian braves who have figured with prominence in the history of our own land, including Powhatan, the Indian Cæsar; Massasoit, the friend of the Puritans; Pontiac, the red Napoleon; Tecumseh, the famous war chief of the Shawnees; Sitting Bull, the famous war chief of the Sioux; Geronimo, the renowned Apache Chief, etc., etc. FAMOUS SCOUTS. By CHARLES H. L. JOHNSTON. Large 12mo, illustrated $1.50 Mr. Johnston gives us historical facts and biographical sketches and interesting anecdotes of those heroes of early pioneer days who made names for themselves among the hardy adventurers who thronged the border. There are tales of Gen. Israel Putnam; the celebrated Daniel Boone; Kit Carson, the noted scout; Lewis and Clarke, the hardy explorers; the world-renowned Buffalo Bill, and of many other famous scouts, trappers and pioneers. BEAUTIFUL JOE'S PARADISE: OR, THE ISLAND OF BROTHERLY LOVE. A sequel to "Beautiful Joe." By MARSHALL SAUNDERS, author of "Beautiful Joe." One vol., library 12mo, cloth, illustrated $1.50 "This book revives the spirit of 'Beautiful Joe' capitally. It is fairly riotous with fun, and is about as unusual as anything in the animal book line that has seen the light."--_Philadelphia Item._ 'TILDA JANE. By MARSHALL SAUNDERS. One vol., 12mo, fully illustrated, cloth decorative, $1.50 "I cannot think of any better book for children than this. I commend it unreservedly."--_Cyrus Townsend Brady._ 'TILDA JANE'S ORPHANS. A sequel to "'Tilda Jane." By MARSHALL SAUNDERS. One vol., 12mo, fully illustrated, cloth decorative, $1.50 'Tilda Jane is the same original, delightful girl, and as fond of her animal pets as ever. THE STORY OF THE GRAVELEYS. By MARSHALL SAUNDERS, author of "Beautiful Joe's Paradise," "'Tilda Jane," etc. Library 12mo, cloth decorative. Illustrated by E. B. Barry $1.50 Here we have the haps and mishaps, the trials and triumphs, of a delightful New England family, of whose devotion and sturdiness it will do the reader good to hear. BORN TO THE BLUE. By FLORENCE KIMBALL RUSSEL. 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated $1.25 The atmosphere of army life on the plains breathes on every page of this delightful tale. The boy is the son of a captain of U. S. cavalry stationed at a frontier post in the days when our regulars earned the gratitude of a nation. IN WEST POINT GRAY By FLORENCE KIMBALL RUSSEL. 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated $1.50 "Singularly enough one of the best books of the year for boys is written by a woman and deals with life at West Point. The presentment of life in the famous military academy whence so many heroes have graduated is realistic and enjoyable."--_New York Sun._ THE SANDMAN: HIS FARM STORIES By WILLIAM J. HOPKINS. With fifty illustrations by Ada Clendenin Williamson. Large 12mo, decorative cover $1.50 "An amusing, original book, written for the benefit of very small children. It should be one of the most popular of the year's books for reading to small children."--_Buffalo Express._ THE SANDMAN: MORE FARM STORIES By WILLIAM J. HOPKINS. Large 12mo, decorative cover, fully illustrated $1.50 Mr. Hopkins's first essay at bedtime stories met with such approval that this second book of "Sandman" tales was issued for scores of eager children. Life on the farm, and out-of-doors, is portrayed in his inimitable manner. THE SANDMAN: HIS SHIP STORIES By WILLIAM J. HOPKINS, author of "The Sandman: His Farm Stories," etc. Large 12mo, decorative cover, fully illustrated $1.50 "Children call for these stories over and over again."--_Chicago Evening Post._ THE SANDMAN: HIS SEA STORIES By WILLIAM J. HOPKINS. Large 12mo, decorative cover, fully illustrated $1.50 Each year adds to the popularity of this unique series of stories to be read to the little ones at bed time and at other times. A TEXAS BLUE BONNET By EMILIA ELLIOTT. 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated $1.50 This is the story of a warm-hearted, impulsive and breezy girl of the Southwest, who has lived all her life on a big ranch. She comes to the far East for a long visit, and her experiences "up North" are indeed delightful reading. Blue Bonnet is sure to win the hearts of all girl readers. THE DOCTOR'S LITTLE GIRL By MARION AMES TAGGART, author of "Pussy-Cat Town," etc. One vol., library 12mo, illustrated $1.50 A thoroughly enjoyable tale of a little girl and her comrade father, written in a delightful vein of sympathetic comprehension of the child's point of view. SWEET NANCY THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF THE DOCTOR'S LITTLE GIRL. By MARION AMES TAGGART. One vol., library, 12mo, illustrated $1.50 In the new book, the author tells how Nancy becomes in fact "the doctor's assistant," and continues to shed happiness around her. CARLOTA A STORY OF THE SAN GABRIEL MISSION. By FRANCES MARGARET FOX. Small quarto, cloth decorative, illustrated and decorated in colors by Ethelind Ridgway $1.00 "It is a pleasure to recommend this little story as an entertaining contribution to juvenile literature."--_The New York Sun._ THE SEVEN CHRISTMAS CANDLES By FRANCES MARGARET FOX. Small quarto, cloth decorative, illustrated and decorated in colors by E. B. Barry $1.00 Miss Fox's new book deals with the fortunes of the delightful Mulvaney children. SEVEN LITTLE WISE MEN By FRANCES MARGARET FOX. Small quarto, cloth decorative, illustrated in colors by E. B. Barry $1.00 In this new story Miss Fox relates how seven little children, who lived in Sunny California, prepared for the great Christmas Festival. PUSSY-CAT TOWN By MARION AMES TAGGART. Small quarto, cloth decorative, illustrated and decorated in colors $1.00 "Anything more interesting than the doings of the cats in this story, their humor, their wisdom, their patriotism, would be hard to imagine."--_Chicago Post._ THE ROSES OF SAINT ELIZABETH By JANE SCOTT WOODRUFF. Small quarto, cloth decorative, illustrated and decorated in colors by Adelaide Everhart $1.00 This is a charming little story of a child whose father was caretaker of the great castle of the Wartburg. GABRIEL AND THE HOUR BOOK By EVALEEN STEIN. Small quarto, cloth decorative, illustrated and decorated in colors by Adelaide Everhart $1.00 Gabriel was a loving, patient, little French lad, who assisted the monks in the long ago days, when all the books were written and illuminated by hand, in the monasteries. A LITTLE SHEPHERD OF PROVENCE By EVALEEN STEIN. Small quarto, cloth decorative, illustrated in colors by Diantha Horne Marlowe $1.00 This is the story of Little lame Jean, a goatherd of Provence, and of the "golden goat" who is supposed to guard a hidden treasure. THE ENCHANTED AUTOMOBILE Translated from the French by MARY J. SAFFORD. Small quarto, cloth decorative, illustrated and decorated in colors by Edna M. Sawyer $1.00 "An up-to-date French fairy-tale which fairly radiates the spirit of the hour,--unceasing diligence."--_Chicago Record-Herald._ O-HEART-SAN THE STORY OF A JAPANESE GIRL. By HELEN EGGLESTON HASKELL. Small quarto, cloth decorative, illustrated and decorated in colors by Frank P. Fairbanks $1.00 "The story comes straight from the heart of Japan. From every page breathes the fragrance of tea leaves, cherry blossoms and chrysanthemums."--_The Chicago Inter-Ocean._ THE YOUNG SECTION-HAND; OR, THE ADVENTURES OF ALLAN WEST. By BURTON E. STEVENSON. Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated $1.50 Mr. Stevenson's hero is a manly lad of sixteen, who is given a chance as a section-hand on a big Western railroad, and whose experiences are as real as they are thrilling. THE YOUNG TRAIN DISPATCHER. By BURTON E. STEVENSON. Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated $1.50 "A better book for boys has never left an American press."--_Springfield Union._ THE YOUNG TRAIN MASTER. By BURTON E. STEVENSON. Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated $1.50 "Nothing better in the way of a book of adventure for boys in which the actualities of life are set forth in a practical way could be devised or written."--_Boston Herald._ CAPTAIN JACK LORIMER. By WINN STANDISH. Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated $1.50 Jack is a fine example of the all-around American high-school boy. JACK LORIMER'S CHAMPIONS; OR, SPORTS ON LAND AND LAKE. By WINN STANDISH. Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated $1.50 "It is exactly the sort of book to give a boy interested in athletics, for it shows him what it means to always 'play fair.'"--_Chicago Tribune._ JACK LORIMER'S HOLIDAYS; OR, MILLVALE HIGH IN CAMP. By WINN STANDISH. Illustrated $1.50 Full of just the kind of fun, sports and adventure to excite the healthy minded youngster to emulation. JACK LORIMER'S SUBSTITUTE; OR, THE ACTING CAPTAIN OF THE TEAM. By WINN STANDISH. Illustrated $1.50 On the sporting side, this book takes up football, wrestling, tobogganing, but it is more of a _school_ story perhaps than any of its predecessors. THE RED FEATHERS. By THEODORE ROBERTS. Cloth decorative, illustrated $1.50 "The Red Feathers" tells of the remarkable adventures of an Indian boy who lived in the Stone Age, many years ago, when the world was young. FLYING PLOVER. By THEODORE ROBERTS. Cloth decorative. Illustrated by Charles Livingston Bull $1.00 Squat-By-The-Fire is a very old and wise Indian who lives alone with her grandson, "Flying Plover," to whom she tells the stories each evening. COMRADES OF THE TRAILS. By G. E. THEODORE ROBERTS. Cloth decorative. Illustrated by Charles Livingston Bull $1.50 The story of a fearless young English lad, Dick Ramsey, who, after the death of his father, crosses the seas and takes up the life of a hunter and trapper in the Canadian forests. LITTLE WHITE INDIANS. By FANNIE E. OSTRANDER. Cloth decorative, illustrated $1.25 "A bright, interesting story which will appeal strongly to the 'make-believe' instinct in children, and will give them a healthy, active interest in 'the simple life.'" THE BOY WHO WON By FANNIE E. OSTRANDER, author of "Little White Indians." 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated by R. Farrington Elwell $1.25 A companion volume to "Little White Indians" continuing the adventures of the different "tribes," whose "doings" were so interestingly told in the earlier volume. MARCHING WITH MORGAN. HOW DONALD LOVELL BECAME A SOLDIER OF THE REVOLUTION. By JOHN V. LANE. Cloth decorative, illustrated $1.50 This is a splendid boy's story of the expedition of Montgomery and Arnold against Quebec. * * * * * Transcriber's note: Punctuation errors were corrected without note. Page 70, "Guimãraes" changed to "Guimarães" (to Guimarães, where there) Page 89, "A" changed to "Á" changed to (Á deus!) Page A-4, subtitle of "Prisoners of Fortune" small-capped to match rest of usage in text. 
46034	----	[Transcriber's Note: Underscores are used as delimiter for _italics_] GIBRALTAR [Illustration: THE ALAMEDA PARADE.] GIBRALTAR BY Henry M. Field _ILLUSTRATED_ LONDON: CHAPMAN AND HALL, Limited. 1889. [_All rights reserved._] TROW'S PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY, NEW YORK. To My Friend and Neighbor IN THE BERKSHIRE HILLS, JOSEPH H. CHOATE, WHO FINDS IT A RELIEF NOW AND THEN TO TURN FROM THE HARD LABORS OF THE LAW TO THE ROMANCE OF TRAVEL: I SEND AS A CHRISTMAS PRESENT A STORY OF FORTRESS AND SIEGE THAT MAY BEGUILE A VACANT HOUR AS HE SITS BEFORE HIS WINTER EVENING FIRE. PREFACE. The common tour in Spain does not include Gibraltar. Indeed it is not a part of Spain, for, though connected with the Spanish Peninsula, it belongs to England; and to one who likes to preserve a unity in his memories of a country and people, this modern fortress, with its English garrison, is not "in color" with the old picturesque kingdom of the Goths and Moors. Nor is it on the great lines of travel. It is not touched by any railroad, and by steamers only at intervals of days, so that it has come to be known as a place which it is at once difficult to get to and to get away from. Hence easy-going travellers, who are content to take circular tickets and follow fixed routes, give Gibraltar the go-by, though by so doing they miss a place that is unique in the world--unique in position, in picturesqueness, and in history. That mighty Rock, "standing out of the water and in the water," (as on the day when the old world perished;) is one of the Pillars of Hercules, that once marked the very end of the world; and around its base ancient and modern history flow together, as the waters of the Atlantic mingle with those of the Mediterranean. Like Constantinople, it is throned on two seas and two continents. As Europe at its southeastern corner stands face to face with Asia; at its southwestern it is face to face with Africa: and these were the two points of the Moslem invasion. But here the natural course of history was reversed, as that invasion began in the West. Hundreds of years before the Turk crossed the Bosphorus, the Moor crossed the Straits of Gibraltar. His coming was the signal of an endless war of races and religions, whose lurid flames lighted up the dark background of the stormy coast. The Rock, which was the "storm-centre" of all those clouds of war, is surely worth the attention of the passing traveller. That it has been so long neglected, is the sufficient reason for an attempt to make it better known. CONTENTS. PAGE I. Entering the Straits, 1 II. Climbing the Rock, 12 III. The Fortifications, 18 IV. Round the Town, 29 V. Parade on the Alameda, and Presentation of Colors to the South Staffordshire Regiment, 35 VI. The Society of Gibraltar, 48 VII. A Chapter of History--The Great Siege, 63 VIII. Holding a Fortress in a Foreign Country, 110 IX. Farewell to Gibraltar--Leaving for Africa, 128 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. The Alameda Parade, _Frontispiece_. FACING PAGE The Lion Couchant, 4 General View of the Rock, 12 The Signal Station, 14 The New Mole and Rosia Bay, 19 The Saluting Battery, 27 Walk in the Alameda Gardens, 62 Catalan Bay, on the East Side of Gibraltar, 65 Plan of Gibraltar, 71 "Old Eliott," the Defender of Gibraltar, 108 Windmill Hill and O'Hara's Tower, 132 Europa Point, 143 CHAPTER I. ENTERING THE STRAITS. I heard the last gun of the Old Year fired from the top of the Rock, and the first gun of the New. It was the very last day of 1886 that we entered the Straits of Gibraltar. The sea was smooth, the sky was clear, and the atmosphere so warm and bright that it seemed as if winter had changed places with summer, and that in December we were breathing the air of June. On a day like this, when the sea is calm and still, groups of travellers sit about on the deck, watching the shores on either hand. How near they come to each other, only nine miles dividing the most southern point of Europe from the most northern point of Africa! Perhaps they once came together, forming a mountain chain which separated the sea from the ocean. But since the barrier was burst, the waters have rushed through with resistless power. Looking over the side of the ship, we observe that the current is setting eastward, which would not excite surprise were it not that it never turns back. The Mediterranean is a tideless sea: it does not ebb and flow, but pours its mighty volume ceaselessly in the same direction. This, the geographers tell us, is a provision of nature to supply the waste caused by the greater evaporation at the eastern end of the Great Sea. But this satisfies us only in part, since while this current flows on the surface, there is another, though perhaps a feebler, current flowing in the opposite direction. Down hundreds or fathoms deep, a hidden Gulf Stream is pouring back into the bosom of the ocean. This system of the ocean currents is one of the mysteries which we do not fully understand. It seems as if there were a spirit moving not only upon the waters, but in the waters; as if the great deep were a living organism, of which the ebb and flow were like the circulation of the blood in the human frame. Or shall we say that this upper current represents the Stream of Life, which might seem to be over-full were it not that far down in the depths the excess of Life is relieved by the black waters of Death that are flowing darkly beneath? Turning from the sea to the shore, on our left is Tarifa, the most southern point of Spain and of Europe--a point far more picturesque than the low, wooded spit of land that forms the most southern point of Asia, which the "globe-trotter" rounds as he comes into the harbor of Singapore, for here the headland that juts into the sea is crowned by a Moorish castle, on the ramparts of which, in the good old times of the Barbary pirates, sentinels kept watch of ships that should attempt to pass the Straits from either direction: for incomers and outgoers alike had to lower their flags, and pay tribute to those who counted themselves the rightful lords of this whole watery realm. I wonder that the Free-Traders do not ring the changes on the fact that the very word _tariff_ is derived from this ancient stronghold, at which the mariners of the Middle Ages paid "duties" to the robbers of the sea. If both sides of the Straits of Gibraltar were to-day, as they once were, under the control of the same Moslem power, we might have two castles--one in Europe and one in Africa--like the "Castles of Europe and Asia," that still guard the Dardanelles, at which all ships of commerce are required to stop and report before they can pass; while ships-of-war carrying too many guns, cannot pass at all without special permission from Constantinople. But the days of the sea-robbers are ended, and the Mediterranean is free to all the commerce of the world. The Castle of Tarifa is still kept up, and makes a picturesque object on the Spanish coast, but no corsair watches the approach of the distant sail, and no gun checks her speed; every ship--English, French, or Spanish--passes unmolested on her way between these peaceful shores. Instead of the mutual hatred which once existed between the two sides of the Straits, they are in friendly intercourse, and to-day, under these smiling skies, Spain looks love to Barbary, and Barbary to Spain. While thus turning our eyes landward and seaward, we have been rounding into a bay, and coming in sight of a mighty rock that looms up grandly before us. Although it was but the middle of the afternoon, the winter sun hung low, and striking across the bay outlined against the sky the figure of a lion couchant--a true British lion, not unlike those in Trafalgar Square in London, only that the bronze is changed to stone, and the figure carved out of a mountain! But the lion is there, with his kingly head turned toward Spain, as if in defiance of his former master, every feature bearing the character of leonine majesty and power. That is Gibraltar! It is a common saying that "some men achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." The same may be said of places; but here is one to which both descriptions may be applied--that has had greatness thrust upon it by nature, and has achieved it in history. There is not a more picturesque spot in Europe. The Rock is fourteen hundred feet high--more than three times as high as Edinburgh Castle, and not, like that, firm-set upon the solid ground, but rising out of the seas--and girdled with the strongest fortifications in the world. Such greatness has nature thrust upon Gibraltar. And few places have seen more history, as few have been fought over more times than this in the long wars of the Spaniard and the Moor; for here the Moor first set foot in Europe, and gave name to the place (Gibraltar being merely Gebel-el-Tarik, the mountain of Tarik, the Moorish invader), and here departed from it, after a conflict of nearly eight hundred years. [Illustration: THE LION COUCHANT.] The steamer anchors in the bay, half a mile from shore, and a boat takes us off to the quay, where after being duly registered by the police, we are permitted to pass under the massive arches, and through the heavy gates of the double line of fortifications, and enter Waterport Street, the one and almost only street of Gibraltar, where we find quarters in that most comfortable refuge of the traveller, the Royal Hotel, which, for the period of our stay, is to be our home. When I stepped on shore I was among strangers: even the friend who had been my companion through Spain had remained in Cadiz, since in coming under the English flag I had no longer need of a Spanish interpreter, and I felt a little lonely; for inside these walls there was not a human being, man or woman, whom I had ever seen before. Yet one who has been knocked about the world as I have been, soon makes himself at home, and in an hour I had found, if not a familiar face, at least a familiar name, which gave me a right to claim acquaintance. Readers whose memories run back thirty years to the laying of the first Atlantic Cable in 1858, may recall the fact that the messages from Newfoundland were signed by an operator who bore the singular name of De Sauty, and when the pulse of the old sea-cord grew faint and fluttering, as if it were muttering incoherent phrases before it drew its last breath, we were accustomed to receive daily messages signed "All right: De Sauty!" which kept up our courage for a time, until we found that "All right" was "All wrong." The circumstance afforded much amusement at the time, and Dr. Holmes wrote one of his wittiest poems about it, in which the refrain of every verse was "All right: De Sauty!" Well, the message was true, at least in one sense, for De Sauty was all right, if the cable was not. The cable died, but the stout-hearted operator lived, and is at this moment the manager of the Eastern Telegraph Company in Gibraltar. This is one of those great English companies, which have their centre in London, and whose "lines have" literally "gone out through all the earth." Its "home field" is the Mediterranean, from which it reaches out long arms down the Red Sea to India and Australia, and indeed to all the Eastern world. Its General Manager is Sir James Anderson, who commanded the Great Eastern when she laid the cable successfully in 1866. I had crossed the ocean with him in '67, and now, wishing to do me a good turn, he had insisted on my taking a letter to all their offices on both sides of the Mediterranean, to transmit my messages free! This was a pretty big license; his letter was almost like one of Paul's epistles "to the twelve tribes scattered abroad, greeting." It contained a sort of general direction to make myself at home in all creation! With such an introduction I felt at home in the telegraph office in Gibraltar, and especially when I could take by the hand our old friend De Sauty. He has a hearty grip, which speaks for the true Englishman that he is. If any of my countrymen had supposed that he died with the cable, I am happy to say that he not only "still lives," but is very much alive. He at once sent off to London a message to my friends in America--a good-bye for the old year, which brought me the next morning a greeting for the new. From the telegraph office I took my way to that of the American Consul, who gave me a welcome such as I could find in no other house in Gibraltar, since his is the only American family! When I asked after my countrymen (who, as they are going up and down in the earth, and show themselves everywhere, I took for granted must be here), he answered that there was "not one!" He is not only the official representative of our country, but he and his children the only Americans. This being so, it is a happy circumstance that the Great Republic is so well represented; for a better man than Horatio J. Sprague could not be found in the two hemispheres. He is the oldest Consul in the service, having been forty years at this post, where his father, who was appointed by General Jackson, was Consul before him. He received _his_ appointment from President Polk. Through all these years he has maintained the honor of the American name, and to-day there is not within the walls of Gibraltar a man--soldier or civilian--who is more respected than this solitary representative of our country. Some may think there is not much need of a Consul where there are no Americans, and yet nearly five hundred ships sailed from this port last year for America: pity that he should have to confess that very few bore the American flag! Thus the post is a responsible one, and at times involves duties the most delicate and difficult, as in the late war, when the Sumter was lying here, with three or four American ships off the harbor (for they were not permitted to remain in port but twenty-four hours) to prevent her escape. At that time the Consul was constantly on the watch, only to see the privateer get off at last by the transparent device of taking out her guns, and being sold to an English owner, who immediately hoisted the English flag, and put to sea in broad daylight in the face of our ships, and made her way to Liverpool, where she was fitted out as a blockade-runner! Those were trying days for expatriated Americans. However, it was all made up when Peace came, and Peace with Victory--with the Union restored and the country saved. Since then it has been the privilege of the Consul at Gibraltar to welcome many who took part in the great struggle, among them Generals Grant and Sherman and Admiral Farragut. Of course a soldier is always interested in a fortress, for it is in the line of his profession; and the greatest fortification in the world could but be regarded with a curious eye by old soldiers like those who had led our armies for four years; who had conducted great campaigns, with long marches and battles and sieges--battles among the bloodiest of modern times, and one siege (that of Richmond) which lasted as long as the famous siege of Gibraltar. But perhaps no one felt a keener interest in what he saw here than the old sea-dog, who had bombarded the forts at the mouth of the Mississippi six days and nights; had broken the heavy iron boom stretched across the river; and run his ships past the forts under a tremendous fire; only to find still before him a fleet greater than his own, of twenty armed steamers, four ironclad rams, and a multitude of fire-rafts, all of which he attacked and destroyed, and captured New Orleans, an achievement in naval warfare as great as any ever wrought by Nelson. To Farragut Gibraltar was nothing more than a big ship, whose decks were ramparts. Pretty long decks they were, to be sure, but only furnishing so many more port-holes, and carrying so many more guns, and enabling its commander to fire a more tremendous broadside. Talking over these things fired my patriotic breast till I began to feel as if I were in "mine ain countrie," and among my American kinsmen. And as I walked from the Consul's back to the Royal Hotel, I did not feel quite so lonely in Gibraltar as I felt an hour before. As the afternoon wore away, the Spaniards who had come in from the country to market, to buy or sell, began to disappear, and soon went hurrying out, while the belated townsmen came hurrying in. At half-past five the evening gun from the top of the Rock boomed over land and sea, and with a few minutes' grace for the last straggler, the gates of the double line of fortifications were closed for the night, and there was no more going out or coming in till morning. It gave me a little uncomfortable feeling to be thus imprisoned in a fortress, with no possibility of escape. The bustling streets soon subsided into quietness. At half-past nine another gun was the signal for the soldiers to return to their barracks; and soon the town was as tranquil as a New England village. As I stepped out upon the balcony, the stillness seemed almost unnatural. I heard no cry of "All's well" from the sentinel pacing the ramparts, as from sailors on the deck, nor the "Ave Maria santissima" of the Spanish watchman. Not even the howling of a dog broke the stillness of the night. The moon, but in her second quarter, did not shut out the light of stars, which were shining brightly on Rock and Bay. Even the heavy black guns looked peaceful in the soft and tender light. It was the last night of the year--and therefore a holy night, as it was to be marked by a Holy Nativity--the birth of a New Year, a "holy child," as it would come from the hands of God unstained by sin. A little before midnight I fell asleep, from which I started up at the sound of the morning gun. The Old Year was dead! He had been a long time dying, but there is always a shock when the end comes. And yet in that same midnight a new star appeared in the East, bringing fresh hope to the poor old world. Life and death are not divided. The very instant that the old year died, the new year was born; and soon the dawn came "blushing o'er the world," as if such a thing as death were unknown. The bugles sounded the morning call, as they had sounded for the night's repose. Scarcely had we caught the last echoes, that, growing fainter and fainter, seemed to be wailing for the dying year, before a piercing blast announced his successor. The King is dead! Long live the King! [Illustration: Moorish Castle.] CHAPTER II. CLIMBING THE ROCK. It was a bright New-Year's morning, that first day of 1887, and how could we begin the year better than by climbing to the top of the Rock to get the outlook over land and sea? The ascent is not difficult, for though the Rock is steep as well as high, a zigzag path winds up its side, which to a good pedestrian is only a bracing walk, while a lady can mount a little donkey and be carried to the very top. If you have to go slowly, so much the better, for you will be glad to linger by the way. As you mount higher and higher, the view spreads out wider and wider. Below, the bay is placid as an inland lake, on which ships of war are riding at anchor, "resting on their shadows," while vessels that have brought supplies for the garrison are unlading at the New Mole. Nor is the side of the Rock itself wanting in beauty. Gibraltar is not a barren cliff; its very crags are mantled with vegetation, and wild flowers spring up almost as in Palestine. Those who have made a study of its flora tell us that it has no less than five hundred species of flowering plants and ferns, of which but one-tenth have been brought from abroad; all the rest are native. The sunshine of Africa rests in the clefts of the rocks; in every sheltered spot the vine and fig-tree flourish, and the almond-tree and the myrtle; you inhale the fragrance of the locust and the orange blossoms; while the clematis hangs out its white tassels, and the red geranium lights up the cold gray stone with rich masses of color. [Illustration: GENERAL VIEW OF THE ROCK.] Thus loitering by the way, you come at last to the top of the Rock, where a scene bursts upon you hardly to be found elsewhere in the world, since you are literally pinnacled in air, with a horizon that takes in two seas and two continents. You are standing on the very top of one of the Pillars of Hercules, the ancient Calpe, and in full view of the other, on the African coast, where, above the present town of Ceuta, whose white walls glisten in the sun, rises the ancient Abyla, the Mount of God. These are the two Pillars which to the ancient navigators set bounds to the habitable world. On this point is the Signal Station, from which a constant watch is kept for ships entering the Straits. There was a tradition that it had been an ancient watch-tower of the Carthaginians, from which (as from Monte Pellegrino, that overlooks the harbor of Palermo) they had watched the Roman ships. But later historians think it played no great part in history or in war until the Rock served as a stepping-stone to the Moors in their invasion and conquest of Spain. When the Spaniards retook it, they gave this peak the name of "El Hacho," The Torch, because here beacon-fires were lighted to give warning in time of danger. A little house furnishes a shelter for the officer on duty, who from its flat roof, with his field-glass, sweeps the whole horizon, north and south, from the Sierra Nevada in Spain, to the long chain of the Atlas Mountains in Africa. Looking down, the Mediterranean is at your feet. There go the ships, with boats from either shore which dip their long lateen-sails as sea-gulls dip their wings, and sometimes fly over the waves as a bird flies through the air, even while large ships labor against the wind. As the current from the Atlantic flows steadily into the Mediterranean, if perchance the wind should blow from the same quarter, it is not an easy matter to get out of the Straits. Ships that have made the whole course of the Mediterranean are baffled here in the throat of the sea. Before the days of steam, mariners were subject to delays of weeks, an experience which was more picturesque than pleasant. Thirty years ago a friend of mine made a voyage from Boston to Smyrna in the Henry Hill, a ship which often took out missionaries to the East, and now had on board a mixed cargo of missionaries and rum! Whether it was a punishment for the latter, on her return she had head winds all the way; but in spite of them was able to make a slow progress by tacking from shore to shore, for which, however, she had less room as she came into the Straits, through which, as through a funnel, both wind and current set at times with such force as in this case detained the Bostonian _five weeks_! "The captain," says my informant, "was a pretty good-natured man, but as he was a joint-owner of the ship, this long detention was very trying. But to me"--it is a lady who writes--"it was quite the reverse. I found it delightful to tack over to the side of Gibraltar every morning, and drift back every evening to the shores of Africa, with the little excitement from the risk of being boarded by pirates in the night! I never tired of the brilliant sunsets, the gorgeous clouds, with the snow-capped mountains of Granada for a background. But for the captain (even with missionaries on board, who were returning to America) the head winds were too much for his temper, and after vainly striving day after day to get through the Straits, he would take off his cap, scratch his head, and shake his fists at the clouds! [Illustration: THE SIGNAL STATION.] "After tacking for three weeks off Gibraltar, wearing out our cordage and exhausting our larder, we put into the bay and anchored. Here we were surrounded by vessels from all parts of the world, and were so near the town that we could almost exchange greetings with those on shore. One Sunday the Spaniards had a bull-fight just across the Neutral Ground; but I preferred a quiet New England Sabbath on shipboard. "After lying at anchor in the bay for two weeks I went on shore one day to lunch with an American lady. Returning to the ship in the evening, I betook myself to my berth. At midnight I heard unusual sounds, clanking of chains, and sailors singing 'Heave ho!' From my port-hole I could see an unusual stir, and dressing in haste went on deck. Sure enough the wind had changed, and all the vessels in the bay were alive with excitement. The captain was radiant. I could see his beaming face, for it was clear and beautiful as moonlight could make it. He invited me to stay on deck, sent for a cup of coffee, and made himself very agreeable. We were soon under way. I was in a kind of ecstasy with the novelty and the beauty of it all. The full moon, the grand scenery, the Pillars of Hercules, solemn in the moonlight, and the added charm of six hundred vessels, from large to small craft, all in full sail, made a rare picture. I sat on deck till morning, and certainly never saw a more beautiful sight than that fleet spreading its wings like a flock of mighty sea-birds, and moving off together from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic." Such picturesque scenes are not so likely to be witnessed now; for since the introduction of steam the plain and prosaic, but very useful, "tug" tows off the wind-bound bark through the dreaded Straits into the open sea, where she can spread her wings and fly across the wide expanse of the ocean. To-day, as we look down from the signal station, we see no gathered ships below waiting for a favoring breeze; the wind scarcely ripples the sea, and the boats glide gently whither they will, while here and there a great steamer from England, bound for Naples, or Malta, or India, appears on the horizon, marking its course by the long line of smoke trailing behind it. To this wonderful combination of land and sea nothing can be added except by the changing light which falls upon it. For the fullest effect you must wait till sunset, when the evening gun has been fired, to signal the departing day, and its heavy boom is dying away in the distance, "Swinging low with sullen roar." Then the sky is aflame where the sun has gone down in the Atlantic; and as the last light from the west streams through the Straits, they shine as if they were the very gates of gold that open into a fairer world than ours. CHAPTER III. THE FORTIFICATIONS. If Gibraltar were merely a rock in the ocean, like the Peak of Teneriffe, its solitary grandeur would excite a feeling of awe, and voyagers up and down the Mediterranean would turn to this Pillar of Hercules as the great feature of the Spanish coast, a "Pillar" poised between sea and sky, with its head in the clouds and its base deep in the mighty waters. But Gibraltar is at the same time the strongest fortress in the world, and the interest of every visitor is to see its defences, in which the natural strength of the position has been multiplied by all the resources of modern warfare. A glance at the map will show what is to be defended. The Rock is nearly three miles long, with a breadth of half to three quarters of a mile, so that the whole circuit is about seven miles. But not all this requires to be defended, for on the eastern side the cliff is so tremendous that there is no possibility of scaling it. It is fearful to stand on the brow and look down to where the waves are dashing more than a thousand feet below. The only approach must be by land from the north, or from the sea on the western side. As the latter lies along the bay, and is at the lowest level, it is the most exposed to attack. Here lies the town, which could easily be approached by an enemy if it were not for its artificial defences. These consist mainly of what is called the Line-Wall, a tremendous mass of masonry two miles long, relieved here and there by projecting bastions, with guns turned right and left, so as to sweep the face of the wall, if an enemy were to attempt to carry it by storm. Indeed the line defended is more than two miles long, if we follow it in its ins and outs; where the New Mole reaches out its long arm into the bay, with a line of guns on either side; followed by a re-entering curve round Rosia Bay, the little basin whose waters are so deep and still, that it is a quiet haven for unlading ships, but where an enemy would find himself in the centre of a circle of fire under which nothing could live; and if we include the batteries still farther southward, that are carried beyond Europa Point, until the last gun is planted under the eastern cliff, which is itself a defence of nature that needs no help from man. [Illustration: THE NEW MOLE AND ROSIA BAY.] Within the Line-Wall, immediately fronting the bay, are the casemates and barracks for the artillery regiments that are to serve the guns. The casemates are designed to be absolutely bomb-proof, the walls being of such thickness as to resist the impact of shot weighing hundreds of pounds, while the enormous arches overhead are made to withstand the weight and the explosion of the heaviest shells. Such at least was the design of the military engineers who constructed them: though, with the new inventions in war, the monster guns and the new explosives, it is hard to put any limit to man's power of destruction. This Line-Wall is armed with guns of the largest calibre, some of which are mounted on the parapet above, but the greater part are in the casemates below, and therefore nearer the level of the sea, so that they can be fired but a few feet above the water, and thus strike ships in the most vital part. The latest pets of Gibraltar are a pair of twins--two guns, each of which weighs a hundred tons! These are guarded with great care from the too close inspection of strangers. No description can give a clear impression of their enormous size. In the early history of artillery, the Turks cast some of the largest pieces in the world. Those who have visited the East, may remember the huge cannon-balls of stone, that may still be seen lying under the walls of the Round Towers on the Bosphorus. But those were pebbles compared with shot that can only be lifted to the mouth of the guns by machinery. The bore of these monsters would delight the soul of the Grand Turk, for, (as a man could easily crawl into one of them,) if the barbarous punishment of the old days were still reserved for great offenders, a Pasha who had displeased the Sultan might easily be put in along with the cartridge, and be rammed down and fired off! The guns had recently been tried, and found to be perfect, though the explosion was not so terrible as had at first been feared. There had been some apprehension that a weapon which was to be so destructive to enemies, might not be an innocent toy to those who fired it; that it might split the ear-drums of the gunners themselves. Some years ago I was at Syra, in the Greek Archipelago, when the English ironclad Devastation was lying in port, which had four thirty-five-ton guns, (the monsters of that day,) and one of her officers said that they "never fired them except at sea, for that the discharge in the harbor would break every window in the town." But here the effect seems not to have been so great. One who was present at the firing of one of the hundred-ton guns, told me that all who stood round expected to be deafened by the concussion. Yet when it came, they turned and looked at each other with a mixture of surprise and disappointment. The sound was not in proportion to the size. Indeed our Consul tells me that some of the sixty-eight pounders are as ear-splitting as the hundred-ton guns. But an English gentleman whom I met at Naples gave me a different report of his experience. He had just come from Malta, where they have a hundred-ton gun mounted on the ramparts. One day, while at dinner in the hotel, they heard a crash, at which all started from their seats, and rushed to the windows to throw them open, lest a second discharge should leave not a pane of glass unbroken. But this came only as they left the harbor. When about three miles at sea, they saw the flash, which was followed by a boom such as they never heard before. It was the most awful thunder rolling over the deep in billows, like waves of the sea, filling the whole horizon with the vast, tremendous sound. It was as "the voice of God upon the waters." But, of course, with the hundred-ton guns, as with any other, the main question is, not how much noise they make, but what is their power of destruction. Here the experiment was entirely satisfactory. It proved that a hundred-ton gun would throw a ball weighing 2,000 pounds over eight miles![1] With such a range it would reach every part of the bay, and a brace of them, with the hundreds of heavy guns along the Line-Wall, might be relied upon to clear the bay of a hostile fleet, so that Gibraltar could hardly be approached by sea. But these are not the whole of its defences; they are only the beginning. There are batteries in the rear of the town, as well as in front, that can be fired over the tops of the houses, so that, if an enemy were to effect a landing he would have to fight his way at every step. As you climb the Rock, it fairly bristles with guns. You cannot turn to the right or the left without seeing these open-mouthed monsters, and looking into their murderous throats. Everywhere it is nothing but guns, guns, guns! There are guns over your head and under your feet-- "Cannon to the right of you, Cannon to the left of you;" and what is still more, cannon pointed directly at you, till you almost feel as if they were aimed with a purpose, and as if they might suddenly open their mouths, and belch you forth, as the whale did Jonah, though not upon the land, but into the midst of the sea! But my story is not ended. It is a good rule in description to keep the best to the last. The unique feature of Gibraltar--that in which it surpasses all the other fortresses of Europe, or of the world--is the Rock Galleries, to which I will now lead the way. These were begun more than a hundred years ago, during the Great Siege, which lasted nearly four years, when the inhabitants had no rest day nor night. For, though the French and Spanish besiegers had not rifled guns, nor any of the improved artillery of modern times, yet even with their smooth-bore cannon and mortars they managed to reach every part of the Rock. Bombs and shells were always flying over the town, now bursting in the air, and now falling with terrible destruction. So high did these missiles reach, that even the Rock Gun, on the very pinnacle of Gibraltar, was twice dismounted. Thus pursued to the very eagle's nest of their citadel, and finding no rest above ground, the besieged felt that their only shelter must be in the bowels of the earth, and gangs of convicts were set to work to blast out these long galleries, which we are now to visit. As it is a two miles' walk through them, we may save our steps by riding as far as the entrance. It is an easy drive up to the Moorish Castle, built by the African invader who crossed the Straits in 711, and finding the south of Spain an easy conquest, resolved to establish himself in the country, and a few years later built this castle on a shoulder of the hill, where it has stood, frowning over land and sea for nearly twelve centuries. Here we present an order from the Military Secretary, and the officer in charge details a gunner to conduct us through the galleries. The gate is opened, and we plunge in at once, beginning on the lower level. The excavation is just like that of a railway tunnel, except that no arches are required, as it is for the whole distance hewn through the solid rock, which is self-supporting. But it is not a gloomy cavern that we are to explore, through which we can make our way only by the light of torches, for at every dozen yards there is a large port-hole, by which light is admitted from without, at all of which heavy guns are mounted on carriages, by which they can be swung round to any quarter. After we have passed through one tier, perhaps a mile in length, we mount to a second, which rises above the other like the upper deck of an enormous line-of-battle ship. Enormous indeed it must be, if we can imagine a double-decker a mile long! Following the galleries to the very end, we find them enlarged to an open space, called the Hall of St. George, in which Nelson was once fêted by the officers of the garrison. It must have been a proud moment when the defenders of the Great Fortress paid homage to the Conqueror of the sea. As they drank to the health of the hero of the Battle of the Nile, they could hardly have dreamed that a greater victory was yet to come; and still less, that it would be a victory followed by mourning, when all the flags in Gibraltar would be hung at half-mast, as the flagship of Nelson anchored in the bay, with only his body on board, one week after the battle of Trafalgar. As we tramped past these endless rows of cannon, it occurred to me that their simultaneous discharge must be very trying to the nerves of the artilleryman (if he has any nerves), as the concussion against the walls of rock is much greater than if they were fired in the open air, and I asked my guide if he did not dread it? He confessed that he did; but added, like the plucky soldier that he was: "We've got to stand up to it!" These galleries are all on the northern side of the Rock, which, as it is very precipitous, hardly needs such a defence. But it is the side which looks toward Spain, and is intended to command any advance against the fortress from the land. Keeping in mind the general shape of the Rock as that of a lion, this is the Lion's head, and as I looked up at it afterward from the Neutral Ground, I could but imagine these open port-holes, with the savage-looking guns peering out of them, to be the lion's teeth, and thought what terror would be thrown into a camp of besiegers if the monster should once open those ponderous jaws and shake the hills with his tremendous roar. It is not often that this roar is heard; but there is one day in the year when it culminates, when the British Lion roars the loudest. It is the Queen's birthday, when the Rock Gun, mounted on the highest point of the Rock, 1,400 feet in air, gives the signal; which is immediately caught up by the galleries below, one after the other; and the batteries along the sea answer to those from the mountain side, until the mighty reverberations not only sweep round the bay, but across the Mediterranean, and far along the African shores. Nothing like this is seen or heard in any other part of the world. The only parallel to it is in the magnificent phenomena of nature, as in a storm in the Alps, when "Not from one lone cloud, But every mountain now hath found a tongue, And Jura answers from her misty shroud Back to the joyous Alps that call to her aloud." This is magnificent: and yet I trust my military friends will not despise my sober tastes if I confess that this "roar," if kept up for any length of time, would greatly disturb the meditations of a quiet traveller like myself. Indeed it would be a serious objection to living in Gibraltar that I should be compelled to endure the cannonading, which, at certain times of the year, makes the rocks echo with a deafening sound. I hate noise, and especially the noise of sharp explosions. I have always been of Falstaff's opinion, that "But for those vile guns I would be a soldier." But here the "vile guns" are everywhere, and though they may be quiet for a time, it is only to break out afterward and make themselves heard in a way that cannot but be understood. [Illustration: THE SALUTING BATTERY.] As I have happened on an interval of rest, I have been surprised at the quietness of Gibraltar. In all the time of my stay I have not heard a single gun, except at sunrise and sunset, and at half-past nine o'clock for the soldiers to return to their barracks. There has not been even a salute, for, although there is on the Alameda a saluting battery, composed of Russian guns taken in the Crimean War, yet it is less often used than might be supposed, for the ships of war that come here are for the most part English (the French and Spaniards would hardly find the associations agreeable), and these are not saluted since they are _at home_, as much as if they were entering Portsmouth. For these reasons I have found Gibraltar so quiet that I was beginning to think it a dull old Spanish town, fit for a retreat, if not for monks, at least for travellers and scholars, when the Colonial Secretary dispelled the illusion by saying, "Yes, it is very quiet just now; but wait a few weeks and you will have enough of it." As the spring comes on, the artillerymen begin their practice. The guns in the galleries are not used, but all the batteries along the sea, and at different points on the side of the Rock, some of which are mounted with the heaviest modern artillery, are let loose upon the town. But this is not done without due notice. The order is published in the _Chronicle_, a little sheet which appears every morning, and lest it might not reach the eyes of all, messengers are sent to every house to give due warning, so that nervous people can get out of the way; but the inhabitants generally, being used to it, take no other precaution than to open their windows, which might otherwise be broken by the violence of the concussion. Lord Gifford, soldier as he is, said, "It is awful," pointing to the ceiling over his head, which had been cracked in many places so as to be in danger of falling, by the tremendous jar. He told me how one house had been so knocked to pieces that a piece of timber had fallen, nearly killing an officer. This is an enlivening experience, of which I should be sorry to deprive those who like it. But as some of us prefer to live in "the still air of delightful studies," I must say that I enjoy these explosions best at a distance, as even in an Alpine storm I would not have the lightning flashing in my very eyes, but rather lighting up the whole blackened sky, and the mighty thunder rolling afar off in the mountains. CHAPTER IV. ROUND THE TOWN. Accustomed as we are to think of Gibraltar as a Fortress, we may forget that it is anything else. But it is an old Spanish town, quaint and picturesque as Spanish towns are apt to be, with twenty thousand inhabitants, in which the Spanish element, though subject to another and more powerful element, gives a distinct flavor to the place. Indeed, the mingling of the Spanish with the English, or the appearance of the two side by side, without mingling, furnishes a lively contrast, which is one of the most piquant features of this very miscellaneous and picturesque population. Of course, in a garrison town the military element is first and foremost. As there are always five or six thousand troops in Gibraltar, it is perhaps the largest garrison in the British dominions, unless the troops in and around London be reckoned as a garrison. But that is rather an army, of which only a small part is in London itself, where a few picked regiments are kept as Household Troops, not only to insure the personal safety of the sovereign, but to keep up the state and dignity of the court; while other regiments are distributed in barracks within easy call in case of need, not for defence against foreign enemies so much as to preserve internal order; to put down riot and insurrection; and thus guard what is not only the capital of Great Britain, but the commercial centre of the world. Very different from this is a garrison town, where a large body of troops is shut up within the walls of a fortress. Here the military element is so absorbing and controlling, that it dominates the whole life of the place. Everything goes by military rule; even the hours of the day are announced by "gun-fire;" the morning gun gives the exact minute at which the soldiers are to turn out of their beds, and the last evening gun the minute at which they are to "turn in," signals which, though for the soldiers only, the working population of the town find it convenient to adopt; and which outsiders _must_ regard, since at these hours the gates are opened and shut; so that a large part of the non-military part of the population have to "keep step," almost as much as if they were marching in the ranks, since their rising up and their lying down, their goings out and their comings in, are all regulated by the fire of the gun or the blast of the bugle. The presence of so large a body of troops in Gibraltar gives a constant animation to its streets, which are alive with red-coats and blue-coats, the latter being the uniform of the artillery. This is a great entertainment to an American, to whom such sights in his own country are rare and strange. A few years ago we had enough of them when we had a million of men in arms, and the land was filled with the sound of war. But since the blessed days of peace have come we seldom see a soldier, so that the parades in foreign capitals have all the charm of novelty. In fondness for these I am as much "a boy" as the youngest of my countrymen. Almost every hour a company passes up the street, and never do I hear the "tramp, tramp," keeping time to the fife and drum, that I do not rush to the balcony to see the sight, and hear the sounds which stir even my peaceful breast. There is nothing that stirs me quite so much as the bugle. Twice a day it startles us with its piercing blast, as it follows instantly the gun-fire at sunrise and sunset. But this does not thrill me as when I hear it blown on some far-off height, and dying away in a valley below, or answered back from a yet more distant point, like a mountain echo. One morning I was taking a walk to Europa Point, and as the path leads upward I came upon several squads of buglers (I counted a dozen men in one of them) practising their "calls." They were stationed at different points on the side of the Rock, so that when one company had given the signal, it was repeated by another from a distance, bugle answering to bugle, precisely like the echoes in the Alps, to which every traveller stops to listen. So here I stopped to listen till the last note had died away in the murmuring sea; and then, as I went on over the hill, kept repeating, as if it were a spell to call them back again: "Blow, bugles, blow, Set the wild echoes flying!" As the English are masters of Gibraltar, I am glad to see that they bring their English ideas and English customs with them. Nothing shows the thoroughly English character of the place more than the perfect quiet of the day of rest. Religious worship seems to be a part of the military discipline. On Sunday morning I heard the familiar sound of music, followed by the soldiers' tramp, and stepping to the balcony again, found a regiment on the march, not to parade but _to church_. Gibraltar has the honor of being the seat of an English bishop, because of which its modest church bears the stately name of a Cathedral; and here may be seen on a Sunday morning nearly all the officials of the place, from the Governor down; with the officers of the garrison: and probably the soldiers generally follow the example of their officers in attending the service of the Church of England. But they are not compelled to this against their own preferences. The Irish can go to mass, and the Scotch to their simpler worship. In all the churches there is a large display of uniforms, nor could the preachers address more orderly or more attentive listeners. The pastor of the Scotch church tells me that he is made happy when a Scotch regiment is ordered to Gibraltar, for then he is sure of a large array of stalwart Cameronians, among whom are always some who have the "gift of prayer," and know how to sing the "Psaumes of Dawvid." These brave Scots go through with their religious exercises almost with the stride of grenadiers, for they are in dead earnest in whatever they undertake, whether it be praying or fighting; and these are the men on whom a great commander would rely to lead a forlorn hope into the deadly breach; or, as an English writer has said, "to march first and foremost if a city is to be taken by storm!" Besides the garrison, and the English or Spanish residents of Gibraltar, the town has a floating population as motley in race and color as can be found in any city on the Mediterranean. Indeed it is one of the most cosmopolitan places in the world. It is a great resort of political refugees, who seek protection under the English flag. As it is so close to Spain, it is the first refuge of Spanish conspirators, who, failing in their attempts at revolution, flee across the lines. Misery makes strange bedfellows. It must be strange indeed for those to meet here who in their own land have conspired with, or it may be against, each other. Apart from these, there is a singular mixture of characters and countries, of races and religions. Here Spaniards and Moors, who fought for Gibraltar a thousand years ago, are at peace and good friends, at least so far as to be willing to cheat each other as readily as if they were of the same religion. Here are long-bearded Jews in their gabardines; and Turks with their baggy trousers, taking up more space than is allowed to Christian legs; with a mongrel race from the Eastern part of the Mediterranean, known as Levantines; and another like unto them, the Maltese; and a choice variety of natives of Gibraltar, called "Rock scorpions," with Africans blacker than Moors, who have perhaps crossed the desert, and hail from Timbuctoo. All these make a Babel of races and languages, as they jostle each other in these narrow and crowded streets, and bargain with each other, and, I am afraid, sometimes swear at each other, in all the languages of the East. Here is a field for the young American artists, who after making their sketches in Florence and Rome and Naples, sometimes come to Spain, but seldom take the trouble to come as far as the Pillars of Hercules. As an old traveller, let me assure them that an artist in search of the picturesque, or of what is curious in the study of strange peoples, may find in Gibraltar, with its neighbor Tangier, (but three hours' sail across the Straits) subjects for his pencil as rich in feature, in color, and in costume, as he can find in the bazaars of Cairo or Constantinople. CHAPTER V. PARADE ON THE ALAMEDA. PRESENTATION OF COLORS TO THE SOUTH STAFFORDSHIRE REGIMENT. The garrison of Gibraltar, in time of peace, numbers five or six thousand men, made up chiefly of regiments brought home from foreign service, that are stationed here for a few months, or it may be a year or two, not merely to perform garrison duty, but as a place of rest to recover strength for fresh campaigns, from which they can be ordered to any part of the Mediterranean or to India. While here they are kept under constant drill, yet not in such bodies as to make a grand military display, for there is no parade ground large enough for the purpose. Gibraltar has no Champ de Mars on which all the regiments can be brought into the field, and go through with the evolutions of an army. If the whole garrison is to be put under arms, it must be marched out of the gates to the North Front, adjoining the Neutral Ground, that it may have room for its military manoeuvres. When our countryman General Crawford, who commanded the Pennsylvania Reserves at the Battle of Gettysburg, was here a few years since, the Governor, Sir Fenwick Williams, gave him a review of four thousand men. But that was a mark of respect to a distinguished military visitor, and presented a sight rarely witnessed by the ordinary traveller. It was therefore a piece of good fortune to have an opportunity to see, though on a smaller scale, the splendid bearing of the trained soldiers of the British Army. One morning our Consul (always thoughtful of what might contribute to my pleasure) sent me word that there was to be a parade of one of the regiments of the garrison for the purpose of receiving new colors from the hands of the Governor. Hastening to the Alameda, (which is the only open space within the walls at once large enough and level enough even for a single regiment,) I found it already in position, the long scarlet lines forming three sides of a hollow square. Joining a group of spectators on the side that was open, we waited the arrival of the Governor, an interval well employed in some inquiries as to the corps that was to receive the honors of the day. "What did you tell me was the name of this Regiment?" "The South Staffordshire!" But that is merely the name of a county in England, which conveys no meaning to an American. And yet the name caught my ear as one that I had heard before. "Was not this one of the Regiments that served lately in the Soudan?" It was indeed the same, and I at once knew more of it than I had supposed. As I had been twice in Egypt, I was greatly interested in the expedition up the Nile for the relief of Khartoum and the rescue of General Gordon, and had followed its progress in the English papers, where, along with the Black Watch and other famous troops, I had seen frequent mention of the South Staffordshire Regiment. As the expedition was for months the leading feature of the London illustrated papers, they were filled with pictures of the troops, engaged in every kind of service, sometimes looking more like sailors than soldiers, from which, however, they were ready, at the first alarm, to fall into ranks and march to battle. Many of the comrades who sailed from England with them left their bones on the banks of the Nile. With this recent history in mind, I could not look in the faces of the brave men who had made all these marches, and endured these fatigues, and fought these battles, without my heart beating fast. It beat faster still when I learned that the campaign in Egypt was only the last of a long series of campaigns, reaching over not only many years, but almost two centuries! The history of this regiment is worth the telling, if it were only to show of what stuff the British Army is made, and how the traditions of a particular corps, passing down from sire to son, remain its perpetual glory and inspiration. The South Staffordshire Regiment is one of the oldest in the English Army, having been organized in the reign of Queen Anne, when the great Marlborough led her troops to foreign wars. But it does not appear to have fought under Marlborough, having been early transferred to the Western Hemisphere. After four years' service at home it was sent to the West Indies, where it remained nearly _sixty years_, its losses by death being made good by fresh recruits from England, so that its organization was kept intact. Returning home in 1765, it was stationed in Ireland till the cloud began to darken over the American Colonies, when it was one of the first corps despatched across the Atlantic. As an American, I could not but feel the respect due to a brave enemy on learning that this very regiment that I saw before me _had fought at Bunker Hill_! From Boston it was ordered to New York, where it remained till the close of the war. No doubt it often paraded on the Battery, as to-day it parades on the Alameda. After the war it was stationed several years in Nova Scotia. From that time it has had a full century of glory, serving now in the West Indies, and now at the Cape of Good Hope, and then coming back across the Atlantic to the River Plate in South America, where it distinguished itself at the storming and capture of Monte Video, and afterward fought at Buenos Ayres. But the "storm centre" in the opening nineteenth century was to be, not in America, North or South, nor in Africa, but in Europe, in the wars of Napoleon. This regiment was with Sir John Moore when he fell at Corunna, and afterward followed the Iron Duke through Spain, fighting in the great battle of Salamanca, and later with Sir Thomas Graham at Vittoria, and in the siege and storming of San Sebastian. It was part of the army that crossed the Bidassoa, and made the campaign of 1813-14 in the South of France. After the fall of Napoleon it returned home, but on his return from Elba was immediately ordered back to the Continent, and arrived at Ostend, too late to take part in the Battle of Waterloo, but joined the army and marched with it to Paris. When the great disturber of the peace of the Continent was sent to St. Helena, Europe had a long rest from war; but there was trouble in other parts of the world, and in 1819 the regiment was again at the Cape of Good Hope, fighting the Kaffirs; from which it went to India, and thence to Burmah, where it served in the war of 1824-26. This is the war which has been made familiar to American readers in the Life of the Missionary Judson, who was thrown into prison at Ava, (as the King made no distinction between Englishmen and Americans), confined in a dungeon, and chained to the vilest malefactors, in constant danger of death, till the advance of the British army up the Irrawaddi threw the tyrant into a panic of terror, when he sent for his prisoner to go to the British camp and make terms with the conquerors. England made peace, but the regiment was half destroyed, having lost in Burmah eleven officers and five hundred men. The ten years of peace that followed were spent in Bengal. When at last the regiment was called home, it was stationed for a few years in the Ionian Islands, in Jamaica, Honduras, and Nova Scotia. Then came the Russian War, when it was sent to Turkey, and fought at the Alma and Inkerman, and through the long siege of Sebastopol. Only a single year of peace followed, and it was again ordered to India, where the outbreak of the mutiny threatened the loss of the Indian Empire, and by forced marches reached Cawnpore in time to defeat the Sepoy army; from which it marched to Lucknow, where it was part of the fiery host that stormed the Kaiser-Bagh, where it suffered fearful loss, but the siege was raised and Lucknow delivered; after which, in a campaign in Oude, it helped to stamp out the mutiny. Its last campaign was in Egypt, where it went up the Nile as a part of the River Column, hauling its boats over the cataracts, and was the first regiment that reached Korti. From this point it kept along the course of the river toward Berber (while another column, mounted on camels, made the march across the desert), and with the Black Watch bore the brunt of the fighting in the battle of Kirbekan, in which the commander of the column and the colonel of the regiment both fell.[2] Such is the story of a hundred and fifty years. Of the hundred and eighty-four years that the Regiment has been in existence, it has spent a hundred and thirty-four--all but fifty--in foreign service, in which it has fought in thirty-eight battles, and has left the bones of its dead in every quarter of the globe. Was there ever a Roman legion that could show a longer record of war and of glory? And now this British legion, with a history antedating the possession of Gibraltar itself, (for it was organized in 1702, two years before the Rock was captured from Spain,) had been brought back to this historic ground, bringing with it its old battle-flags, that had floated on so many fields, which, worn by time and torn by shot and shell, it was now to surrender, to be taken back to England and hung in the oldest church in Staffordshire as the proud memorials of its glory, while it was to receive new colors, to be borne in future wars. The rents in its ranks had been filled by new recruits, so that it stood full a thousand strong, its burnished arms glistening as if those who bore them had never been in the heat of battle. In the hollow square in which it was drawn up were its mounted officers, waiting the arrival of the Governor, who presently rode upon the ground, with Major-General Walker, the Commander of the Infantry Brigade, at his side; followed by other officers, who took position in the rear, according to their rank. The band struck up "God save the Queen," and the troops, wheeling into column, began the "march past," moving with such firm and even tread that it seemed as if the regiment had but one body and one soul. After a series of evolutions it was again formed in a square, for a ceremony that was half military and half religious, for in such pageants the Church of England always lends its presence to the scene. I had read of military mass in the Russian army, when the troops drawn up in battle array, fall upon their knees, while the Czar, prostrating himself, prays apparently with the utmost devotion for the blessing of Almighty God upon the Russian arms! Something of the same effect was produced here, when the Bishop of Gibraltar in his robes came forward with his assistant clergy. At once the band ceased; the troops stood silent and reverent. The silence was first broken by the singing of a Hymn, whose rugged verse had a strange effect, as given by the Regimental Choir. I leave to my readers to imagine the power of these martial lines sung by those stentorian voices: When Israel's Chief in days of yore, Thy banner, Lord, flung out, Old Kishon's tide ran red with gore, Dire was the Pagan rout. And later, when the Roman's eye Turned upward in despair, The Cross, that flickered in the sky, Made answer to his prayer. So, Lord, to us Thy suppliants now, Bend Thou a gracious ear, And mark, and register the vow We make before Thee here. Through fire and steel, 'mid weal or woe, Unwavering and in faith, Where'er these sacred banners go, We'll follow, to the death. We'll follow, strengthened by the might That comes of trust in Thee, And if we conquer in the fight, Thine shall the glory be: Or if Thy wisdom wing the ball, And life or limb be riven, The Cross we gaze on as we fall Shall point the way to Heaven. When this song of battle died away, the voice of the Bishop was heard in a prayer prepared for the occasion. Some may criticise it as implying that the God of Battles must always be on the side of England. But such is the character of all prayers offered in time of war. Making this allowance, it seems as if the feeling of the hour could not be more devoutly expressed than in the following: Almighty and most merciful Father, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy, we come before Thee with a deep sense of Thine exceeding Majesty and our own unworthiness, praying Thee to shed upon us the light of Thy countenance, and to hallow and sanctify the work in which we are this day engaged. We beseech Thee to forward with Thy blessing, the presentation to this Regiment of the Colors which are henceforth to be carried in its ranks; and with all lowliness and humility of spirit, we presume to consecrate the same in Thy great name, to the cause of peace and happiness, truth and justice, religion and piety. We humbly pray that the time may come when the sound of War shall cease to be heard in the world; but forasmuch as to our mortal vision that blessed consummation seems still far distant, we beseech Thee so to order the course of events that these colors shall be unfurled in the face of an enemy only for a righteous cause. And in that dark hour may stain and disgrace fall upon them never; but being borne aloft as emblems of loyalty and truth, may the brave who gather round them go forward conquering for the right, and maintaining, as becomes them, the honor of the British Crown, the purity of our most holy faith, the majesty of our laws, and the influence of our free and happy constitution. Finally, we pray that Thy servants here present, not forgetful of Thine exceeding mercies vouchsafed to their regiment in times gone by, and that all the forces of our Sovereign Lady the Queen, wherever stationed and however employed, may labor through Thy grace to maintain a conscience void of offence towards Thee and towards man, always remembering that of soldier and of civilian the same account shall be taken, and that he is best prepared to do his duty, and to meet death, let it come in what form it may, who in the integrity of a pure heart is able to look to Thee as a God reconciled to him through the blood of the Atonement. Grant this, O Lord, for Thine only Son Jesus Christ's sake! Amen. Then followed the usual prayer for the Queen: O Lord, our Heavenly Father, high and mighty, King of kings, Lord of lords, the only Ruler of princes, who dost from Thy throne behold all the dwellers upon earth, most heartily we beseech Thee with Thy favor to behold our most gracious Sovereign Lady Queen Victoria, and so replenish her with the grace of Thy Holy Spirit that she may always incline to Thy will and walk in Thy way; endue her plenteously with heavenly gifts; grant her in health and wealth long to live; strengthen her that she may vanquish and overcome all her enemies; and finally, after this life, she may attain everlasting joy and felicity, through Jesus Christ our Lord! Amen. * * * * * The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore! Amen. The service ended, the Governor, dismounting from his horse, took the place of the Bishop in a service which had a sacred as well as patriotic character. Two officers, the youngest of the Regiment, advancing, surrendered the old flags, which had been carried for so many years and through so many wars, and then each bending on one knee, received from his hands the new colors which were to have a like glorious history. As they rose from their knees, the Governor remounted his horse, and from the saddle delivered an address as full of patriotic sentiment, of loyalty to the Queen and country, and as spirit-stirring to the brave men before him, as if they were to be summoned to immediate battle. With that he turned and galloped off the ground, while the Regiment unfurling its new standards, with drums beating and band playing, marched proudly away. As it wound up the height, the long scarlet line had a most picturesque effect. It has been objected to these brilliant uniforms that they make the soldiers too conspicuous a mark for the sharpshooters of the enemy. But, however it may be in war, nothing can be finer on parade. Our modern architects and decorators, who attach so much importance to color, and insist that everything, from cottage to castle, should be "picked out in red," would have been in ecstasies at the colors which that day gleamed among the rocks and trees of Gibraltar. Indeed, if you should happen to be sauntering on the Alameda just at evening, as the sunset-gun is fired, and should look upward to see the smoke curling away, you might see above it a gathering of black clouds--the sure sign of the coming of the terrible East wind known as the "Levanter"; and if at the same moment the afterglow of the dying day should touch a group of soldiers standing on the mountain's crest (where colors could be clearly distinguished even if figures were confused), it might seem as if that last gleam under the shadow of the clouds were itself the red cross of England soaring against a dark and stormy sky. This was the brilliant side of war: pity that there should be another side! But the next day, walking near the barracks, I met a company with reversed arms bearing the body of a comrade to the grave. There was no funeral pomp, no waving plumes nor roll of muffled drums: for it was only a common soldier, who might have fallen on any field, and be buried where he fell, with not a stone to mark his resting-place. But for all that, he may have been a true hero; for it is such as he, the unknown brave, who have fought all the battles and gained all the victories of the world. Turning from this scene, I thought how hard was the fate of the English soldier: to be an exile from the land of his birth, "a man without a country"; who may be ordered to any part of the world (for such is the stern necessity, if men are to defend "an Empire on which the sun never sets"); serving in many lands, yet with a home in none; to sleep at last in a nameless grave! Such has been the fate of many of that gallant regiment which I saw marching so proudly yesterday. Their next campaign may be in Central Asia, fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, amid the snows of the Himalayas. If so, I fear it may be said of them with sad, prophetic truth, as they go into battle: "Ah! few shall part where many meet; The snow shall be their winding-sheet; And every turf beneath their feet Shall be a soldier's sepulchre." CHAPTER VI. SOCIETY IN GIBRALTAR. The best thing that I find in any place is the men that are in it. Strong walls and high towers are grand, but after a while they oppress me by their very massiveness, unless animated by a living presence. Even the great guns, those huge monsters that frown over the ramparts, would lose their majesty and terror, if there were not brave men behind them. And so, after I had surveyed Gibraltar from every point of land and sea; after I had been round about it, and marked well its towers and its bulwarks; to complete the enjoyment I had but one wish--to sit down in some quiet nook and talk it all over. There is no man in the world whom I respect more than an old soldier. He is the embodiment of courage and of all manly qualities, and he has given his life to his country. And if he bears in his person the scars of honorable wounds, I look up to him with a feeling of veneration. Of such characters no place has more than Gibraltar, which perhaps may be considered the centre of the military life of England. True, the movements of the Army are directed by orders from the Horse Guards in London. But here the military feature is the predominant, if not the exclusive, one; while in London a few thousand troops would be lost in a city of five millions of inhabitants. Here the outward and visible sign is ever before you: regiments whose names are historical, are always coming and going; and if you are interested in the history of modern wars, (as who can fail to be, since it is a part of the history of our times?) you may not only read about them in the Garrison Library, but see the very men that have fought in them. Here is a column coming up the street! I look at its colors, and read the name of a regiment already familiar through the English papers; that has shown the national pluck and endurance in penetrating an African forest or an Indian jungle, or in climbing the Khyber Pass in the Himalayas to settle accounts with the Emir of Cabul. There must be strange meetings of old comrades here, as well as new companionships formed between those who have fought under the same royal standard, though in different parts of the world. A regiment recalled from Halifax is quartered near another just returned from Natal or the Cape of Good Hope; while troops from Hong Kong, or that have been up the Irrawaddi to take part in the late war in Upper Burmah, can exchange experiences with their brother soldiers from the other side of the globe. Almost all the regiments collected here have figured in distant campaigns, and the officers that ride at their head are the very ones that led them to victory. To a heart that is not so dead but that it can still be stirred by deeds of daring, there is nothing more thrilling than to sit under the guns of the greatest fortress in the world, and listen to the story as it comes from the lips of those who were actors in the scenes. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the society of Gibraltar is confined to men. The home instincts are strong in English breasts; and wherever they go they carry their household gods with them. In my wanderings about the world, it has been my fortune to visit portions of the British Empire ten thousand miles away from the mother country; yet in every community there was an English stamp, a family likeness to the old island home. Hence it is that in the most remote colony there are the elements of a good society. Whatever country the English may enter, even if it be in the Antipodes, as soon as they have taken root and become established they send back to England for their wives and daughters, that they may renew the happy life that they have lived before, so that the traveller who penetrates the interior of Australia, of New Zealand, or Van Dieman's Land, is surprised to find, even "in the bush," the refinement of an English home. This instinct is not lost, even when they are in camps or barracks. If you visit a "cantonment" in Upper India, you will find the officers with their families about them. The brave-hearted English women "follow the drum" to the ends of the earth; and I have sometimes thought that their husbands and brothers owed part of their indomitable resolution to the inspiration of their wives and sisters. It is this feature of garrison life, this union of "fair women and brave men," which gives such a charm to the society of Gibraltar--a union which is more complete here than in most garrison towns, because the troops stay longer, and there is more opportunity for that home-life which strangers would hardly believe to exist. Most travellers see nothing of it. Indeed it is probable that they hardly think of Gibraltar as having any home-life, since its population is always on the come and go; living here only as in a camp, and to-morrow "Folding its tents like the Arabs, And silently stealing away." This is partly true. Soldiers of course are subject to orders, and the necessities of war may cause them to be embarked at an hour's notice. But in time of peace they may remain longer undisturbed. Regiments which have done hard service in India are sometimes left here to recruit even for years, which gives their officers opportunity to bring their families, whose presence makes Gibraltar seem like a part of England itself, as if it were no farther away than the Isle of Wight. This it is which makes life here quite other than being imprisoned in a fortress. I may perhaps give some glimpses of these interiors (without publicity to what is private and sacred), which I depict simply that I may do justice to a place to which I came as a stranger, and from which I depart as a friend. Just before I left America, I was present at a breakfast given to M. de Lesseps on his visit to America to attend the inauguration of Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty. As I sat opposite the "grand Français," I turned the conversation to Spain, to which I was going, and where I knew that he had spent many years. He took up the subject with all his natural fire, and spoke of the country and the people in a way to add to my enthusiasm. Next to him sat Chief Justice Daly, who kindled at the mention of Spain, and almost "raved" (if a learned Judge ever "raves") about Spanish cathedrals. He had continued his journey to the Pillars of Hercules, and said that "in all his travels he had never spent a month with more pleasure than in Gibraltar." He had come with letters to the Governor, Lord Napier of Magdala, which at once opened all doors to him. Wishing to smooth my path in the same way, the English Minister at Madrid, who had shown me so much courtesy there, gave me a letter to the Colonial Secretary, Lord Gilford, who received me with the greatest kindness, and took me in at once to the Governor, who was equally cordial in his welcome. The position of Governor of Gibraltar is one of such distinction as to be greatly coveted by officers in the English army. It is always bestowed on one of high rank, and generally on some old soldier who has distinguished himself in the field. Among the late Governors was Sir Fenwick Williams, who, with only a garrison of Turks, under the command of four or five English officers, defended Kars, the capital of Armenia, in 1855, repelling an assault by the Russians when they endeavored to take it by storm, and yielding at last only to famine; and Lord Napier of Magdala, who, born in Ceylon, spent the earlier part of his military life in India, where he fought in the Great Mutiny, and distinguished himself at Lucknow. Ten years later he led an English army (though composed largely of Indian troops, with the Oriental accompaniment of guns and baggage-trains carried on the backs of camels and elephants) into Abyssinia, and took the capital in an assault in which King John was slain, and the missionaries and others, whom he had long held as prisoners and captives, were rescued. He was afterward commander-in-chief of the forces in India, and, when he retired from that, no position was thought more worthy of his rank and services than that of Governor of Gibraltar, a fit termination to his long and honored career. The present Governor is a worthy successor to this line of distinguished men. Sir Arthur Hardinge is the son of Lord Hardinge, who commanded the army in India a generation ago. Brought up as it were in a camp, he was bred as a soldier, and when little more than a boy accompanied his father to the wars, serving as aide-de-camp through the Sutlej campaign in 1845-46, and was in the thick of the fight in some hard-fought battles, in one of which, at Ferozeshah, he had a horse shot under him. When the Crimean War broke out he was ordered to the field, and served in the campaign of 1854-55, being at the Alma and at Inkerman, and remaining to the close of the siege of Sebastopol. Here he had rapid promotion, besides receiving numerous decorations from the Turkish Government, and being made Knight of the Legion of Honor. Returning to England, he seems to have been a favorite at court and at the Horse Guards, being made Knight Commander of the Bath, honorary Colonel of the King's Royal Rifle Corps, and Extra Equerry to the Queen, his honors culminating in his present high position of Governor and Commander-in-chief of Gibraltar. The politeness of the Governor did not end with his first welcome: it was followed by an invitation to his New Year's Reception. It was but a few weeks since he had taken office; and, wishing to do a courtesy to the citizens of Gibraltar as well as to the officers of the garrison, both were included in the invitation. The Government House was the one place where all--soldiers and civilians--could meet on common ground, and form the acquaintance, and cultivate the friendly feeling, so important to the happiness of a community shut up within the limits of a fortress. Although I was a stranger, the Consul desired me to attend, as it would give me the opportunity to see in a familiar way the leading men of Gibraltar, civil and military, and further, as, owing to the recent death of his son, he could not be present nor any of his family, so that I should be the only representative of our country. It was indeed a notable occasion. The Government House is an old Convent, which still retains its ancient and venerable look, though the flag floating over it, and the sentry marching up and down before the door, tell that it is now the seat of English power. To-night it took on its most festive appearance, entrance and stairway being hung with flags, embowered in palms, and wreathed with vines and ferns and flowers; and when the officers appeared in their uniforms, and the military band filled the place with stirring music, it was a brilliant scene. The gathering was in a large hall, part of which was turned to a purpose which to some must have seemed strangely incongruous with the sacred associations of the place: for in the old Spanish days this was a Convent of the Franciscan Friars, who, if they ever revisit the place of their former habitation, must have been shocked to find their chapel turned into a place for music and dancing, and to hear the "sound of revelry by night," where they were wont to say midnight mass, and to offer prayers for the quick and dead! While this was going on in one part of the hall, at the other end the Governor sat on a dais, quietly enjoying the meeting of old friends and the making of new ones. It was my good fortune to be one of the group, which gave me the best possible opportunity to see the society of Gibraltar: for here it was all gathered under one roof. Of course it was chiefly military. There was a brilliant array of officers--generals, colonels, and majors; while in still larger number were captains and lieutenants, in their gay uniforms, who, if they did not exactly realize my idea of "Whiskered Pandours and fierce Hussars," looked like the brave and gallant Englishmen they were. Nor were they alone: for there were civilians also--magistrates and lawyers and judges; and, better still, the lovely English women, who are the ornament of every English colony. All received me with a manner so cordial as assured me that I was not to be treated with cold formality as a stranger. If I had come into a camp of American officers, I could not have had a more hearty welcome. At length the clock struck the hour of midnight, and I rose to take leave of the Governor; but he answered, "No, that will never do; you must take a lady out to supper." Being under military orders, I could but obey, and, essaying for the first time the part of a Spanish cavalier, conducted a Spanish lady into the dining-hall. This is a historical apartment, in which have been fêted all the royalties that have visited Gibraltar. On the walls are hung the portraits of the Governors from the beginning of the English occupation in 1704, among which every visitor looks for that of "Old Eliott," the defender of the place in the great siege. He was followed by a long succession of brave men, who, in keeping Gibraltar, felt they were guarding the honor of England. After this pleasant duty had been performed, I returned to the Governor to "report" that "I had obeyed his orders," and that "in taking leave, I could only express the wish that Gibraltar might never be attacked in any other way than it had been that evening," adding that "if he should treat all my countrymen as he had treated me, I could promise him on their part, as on mine, an unconditional surrender!" Thus introduced, I found myself at home in a circle which included men who had seen service in all parts of the world. Next to the Governor I was attracted by a grand old officer whom I had observed on the parade, his breast being covered with decorations won in many wars. This was Major-General Walker, who has been in the army for a large part of the reign of Queen Victoria. As long ago as the Anglo-Russian war, he was an adjutant in one of the regiments sent to the Crimea, where he fought at the Alma and at Inkerman, and took part in the long siege of Sebastopol. Eager to be in the post of danger, he volunteered for a night attack, in which he led a party that took and destroyed a Russian rifle-pit. Soon after he was dangerously wounded in the trenches, and his right arm amputated, for which he was promoted and received a number of decorations. He afterward served throughout the campaign of 1860, in China.[3] Lord Gifford, though too young for service dating so far back, and of such slender figure that he looks more like a university student than like a soldier, was the hero of the Ashantee War, who led his men through forest and jungle, in the face of the savage foe, to the capture of Coomassie, for which he received the Victoria Cross, the proud distinction of a British soldier. A little volume published in England, entitled "The Victoria Cross in the Colonies," by Lieutenant-Colonel Knollys, F.R.G.S., gives the following sketch of this gallant officer. "The hero of the Ashantee War, 1873-74, was undoubtedly Ederic, third Baron Gifford. Born in 1849, he entered the Eighty-third Regiment as ensign in 1869, became lieutenant the following year, and in 1873 was transferred to the Twenty-fourth Regiment. He was one of the body of volunteers who accompanied Sir Garnet Wolseley to the Gold Coast. Appointed to train and command the Winnebeh company of Russell's native regiment, he took part in the defence of Absacampa and the defeat of the Ashantee army. He subsequently, for several weeks, performed the duties of adjutant to Russell's regiment. When the Ashantee territory was invaded, to Lord Gifford was assigned the command of a scouting party. This party was fifty strong, and composed of men from the West India Regiment of Houssas, Kossos, and Bonny natives. "Early on the morning of January 6th, 1874, Gifford, with his scouts, crossed the Prah in canoes, and explored the country on both sides of the road to Coomassie. The rest of the army crossed by the bridge the same day. Marching some five miles ahead of the advance guard, he reached a village called Essiaman, and found that it was occupied by an Ashantee detachment, which, on advancing, he at once attacked and put to flight, losing only one man severely wounded. Advancing to a village called Akrofumin, he discovered that it was held by the Ashantees; but not being able to ascertain their strength, which he believed to be superior to his own, he prudently contented himself with observing them. "After remaining in this critical position for several days, he had the satisfaction of seeing the enemy retire. He then pushed on--indeed never left off pushing on in the most daring yet skilful manner till Coomassie was reached--always keeping well ahead. His scouts were devoted to Lord Gifford, 'whose docile savages,' writes an historian of the campaign, 'worshipped the English gentleman for his superior skill and spirit in climbing that steep barrier range, the Adansi Hills, dividing the Assin from the Ashantee country. The night previous to the action at Amoaful, he carefully reconnoitred the enemy's position, and during the fight he was, with his gallant little band, as usual, well in advance. "The next day he was sent to reconnoitre the village of Becqua. He had got close up when some twenty Ashantees sprang up in the bush and fired, but providentially without effect. On receipt of his report Sir Garnet Wolseley despatched a strong force to capture the place. Gifford's scouts led, followed by a body of Houssas, Russell's Regiment, and the Naval Brigade, the Forty-second Highlanders, and a company of the Twenty-third Royal Welsh Fusileers acting as supports. As soon as the firing began, Gifford, followed by his handful of scouts, rushed on, and dashed into the town, though it was occupied by a thousand Ashantees. The Houssas, for once, could not be induced to charge; they persisted in lying down and firing unaimed shots into the bush. "In the meantime Lord Gifford and his party were exposed to the concentrated fire of the defenders. His best scout was killed, and he and all his men were wounded. In fact, he was in an almost desperate situation. On this he shouted to the Naval Brigade to come to his assistance. With a cheer the gallant fellows replied to the appeal, and at their charge the enemy fled. "Three days later the action of Ordahsu took place, Coomassie was entered, and the campaign was virtually at an end. "From that time Lord Gifford, there being no further need for his services as a scout, acted as aide-de-camp to Sir Garnet Wolseley. During the whole war this young, slight, modest-looking lad had displayed the greatest enterprise and intrepidity, and rendered the most valuable services. Fortune had in this case certainly favored the brave; for notwithstanding unremitting exertions and constant exposure both to climate and the bullets of the enemy, he escaped disease, and was only once wounded. Modest as he was brave, he never sought to make capital out of his exploits. They were, however, too conspicuous to escape notice, and he was repeatedly mentioned in despatches. "On his return to England, he paid a visit to his regiment, the Twenty-fourth, then stationed at Aldershot. He was received with the greatest enthusiasm by both men and officers. The former carried him shoulder-high into camp, and the latter entertained him at dinner; yet he was as unaffected and simple as if he had only returned from an ordinary duty. For his daring conduct on the Gold Coast he was granted the Victoria Cross." It was a privilege to spend an hour with General Walker at his own table, and to draw him into conversation on the wars in which he had taken part, and the great soldiers who had been his companions in arms. Of his own part in these events he spoke very modestly, like the true soldier that he is; though no modesty could hide the story told by that empty sleeve of the arm that he had left in the trenches at Sebastopol. From the Southeastern corner of Europe to the eastern coast of Asia, is a long stretch round the globe, but here, when the scene of war was transferred from Russia to China, we find the same gallant officer among the foremost in the storming of the Taku forts, and with the combined French and English army that fought its way to Peking. As the house of the Major General stands on the Line-Wall, it is close to the enormous batteries in the casemates below, (while one of the hundred-ton guns is mounted near the Alameda, quite "within speaking distance,") and must be rudely rocked by the thunder which shakes even the solid ground like an earthquake. "What do you do at such a time?" I asked of the ladies of the family, to which they answered gayly, "Oh, we don't mind it." They took good care, however, to take down their mirrors, and to lay away their glass and china, lest they should be shattered in pieces. Then they threw open their windows, and let the explosion come. For me this would be a trifle too near, and with all my love for Gibraltar, I do not think I should choose a hundred-ton gun as a next-door neighbor. As I rose to leave, I found horses saddled and bridled at the door, on which the General and his niece were about to take their afternoon ride, for the officers in Gibraltar are not so shut up within its walls, that they cannot take their pleasure as if they were in the field. True, the Rock does not offer a very wide space for excursions, but the gay troopers of both sexes have but to ride out of the Northern gate, and cross the Spanish lines, and the whole country is before them. One day I met the Governor coming in at full speed, with his staff behind him; and almost daily there are riding parties or hunting parties, which go off for hours, and come back with the ruddy English glow of health upon their faces. Indeed if one had to go about on foot, he need not feel as if he were shut up in a fortress-prison, for there are pleasant walks over the Rock, leading to many a nook, from which one may look off upon the sea, where, if he has an agreeable companion, the hours will not seem long. If for a few months the climate has a little too much of the warmth of Africa, there is a delightful promenade along the Alameda, where friends may saunter on summer evenings, inhaling the fresh breezes; or sit under the trees, and (as they listen to the bands playing the familiar airs of England) talk of their dear native island. [Illustration: WALK IN THE ALAMEDA GARDENS.] CHAPTER VII. THE GREAT SIEGE. Although Gibraltar is the greatest fortress in the world, if it were only that, it would not have half the interest which it now has. The supreme interest of the Rock is in the record of centuries that is graven on its rugged front. For nearly eight hundred years it was the prize of war between the Spaniard and the Moor, and its legends are all of battle and of blood. Ten times it was besieged and passed back and forth from conqueror to conqueror, the Cross replacing the Crescent, and the Crescent the Cross. Ten times was the battle lost and won. When, at last, in 1598 the Spaniards drove the Moors out of Spain, they remained masters of Gibraltar, and held it with undisputed sway for a little more than a hundred years. They might have held it still but for a surprise, hardly worthy to be called a siege; for the place was taken by a _coup de main_, that is one of the strangest incidents of history. It was the War of the Spanish Succession, waged by half Europe to determine which of two incompetents should occupy the throne of Spain. The English sent a squadron into the Mediterranean, under Sir George Rooke, who, after cruising about and accomplishing little, bethought himself, in order not to return in complete failure, to try his hand on Gibraltar. The place was well fortified, with a hundred guns, but inside the walls only a hundred and fifty men (a man and a half to a gun!), so that it could offer but a brief resistance to a bombardment, and thus the Spaniards lost in three days what they spent more than three years to recover, and spent in vain. Though the place was taken by an English fleet, it was not taken for England, but in the name of an Archduke of Austria, whom England supported as a pretender to the Spanish throne; and had he succeeded in gaining it the place would doubtless have been turned over to him (as on a visit to Gibraltar he was received by the garrison as lawful sovereign of Spain, and proclaimed King by the title of Charles III.), but as he was finally defeated, England thought it not a bad thing to keep the place for herself. [Illustration: CATALAN BAY, ON THE EAST SIDE OF GIBRALTAR. Cliff Scaled by the Spaniards in an Attempt to Take the Rock by Surprise.] Hardly had it slipped from their hands before the Spaniards realized the tremendous blow which had been given to their power and their pride, and made desperate endeavors to recover it. The very same year they attacked it with a large army and fleet. At the beginning an attempt was made which would seem to have been conceived in the heroism of despair. The eastern side of Gibraltar terminates in a tremendous cliff, rising fourteen hundred feet above the sea, which thunders against the rocks below. This side has never been fortified, for the reason that it is so defended by nature that it needs no other defence. One would as soon think of storming El Capitan in the valley of the Yosemite as the eastern side of the Rock of Gibraltar. Yet he who has followed a Swiss guide in the Alps knows that with his cool head and agile step he will climb heights which seemed inaccessible. And so a Spanish shepherd, or goatherd, had found a path from Catalan Bay, up which he offered to lead a party to the top, and five hundred men were daring enough to follow him. They knew that the attempt was desperate, but braced up their courage by religious enthusiasm, devoting themselves to the sacrifice by taking the sacrament, and binding themselves to capture Gibraltar or perish in the attempt. In the darkness and silence of the night they crept slowly upward till a part had reached the top, and concealed themselves in St. Michael's Cave until the break of day; when with the earliest dawn they attacked the Signal Station, killing the guard, and then by ropes and ladders brought up the rest of the party. Following up the momentary success, they stormed the wall of Charles V., so called because constructed by him. But by this time the garrison had been awakened to the fact that there was an enemy within the walls. The roll of drums from below summoned the troops to arms, and soon the grenadiers came rushing up the hill. Exposed to the fire from above, many fell, but nothing could check their advance, and reaching the top they charged with such fury that half of the party that had scaled the heights soon fell, some of whom were driven over the cliff into the sea. An officer who was present during the whole of the siege tells how they made short work of it. "Five hundred Spaniards attacked the Middle Hill but were soon repulsed, and two hundred men with their commanding officer taken. The rest were killed by our shot, or in making their escape broke their necks over the rocks and precipices, which in that place are many and prodigiously high." So ended the first and last attempt to take Gibraltar in the rear. But still the Spanish army lay encamped before the town, and the siege was kept up for six months with a loss of ten thousand men. No other attack was made during that war, though the war itself raged elsewhere for seven years more, till it was closed by the treaty of Utrecht, in which Gibraltar was finally ceded to Great Britain. But the Spaniards did not give it up yet. In 1727 they renewed the struggle, and besieged the place for five months with nearly twenty thousand men, but with the same result as before, after which it had rest and quiet for half a century, till the time of the Great Siege, which I am now to describe. It seems beginning a long way off to find any connection between the siege of Gibraltar and the battle of Saratoga; but one followed from the other. The surrender of General Burgoyne (who had marched from Canada with a large army to crush the Rebellion in the Colonies) was the first great event that gave hope, in the eyes of Europe, to the cause of American independence, and led France to join it openly, as she had before favored it secretly. Spain followed France, having a common hatred of England, with the special grievance of the loss of Gibraltar, which she hoped, with the help of her powerful ally, to recover. In such a contest the chances were more evenly balanced than might be at first supposed. True, England had the advantage of possession, and if possession is nine points of the law, it is more than nine points in war, especially when the possessor is intrenched in the strongest fortress in the world. But as an offset to this, she had to hold it in an enemy's country. Gibraltar was a part of the territory of Spain, in which the English had not a foot of ground but the Rock on which they stood; while it was much nearer to France than to England. Thus the allied powers had facilities for attacking it both by land and sea, and brought against it such tremendous forces that it could not have held out for nearly four years, had it not been for the British power of resistance, animated by one of the bravest of soldiers. To begin with, England did not commit the folly by which Spain had lost Gibraltar--in leaving it with an insufficient garrison. It had over five thousand troops in the fortress--a force by which it was thoroughly manned. But its power for defence was doubled by having a commander, who was fitted by nature and by training for the responsibilities that were to be laid upon him. George Augustus Eliott was the son of Sir Gilbert Eliott, of Roxburghshire, where he was born in 1718. Scotch families in those days, like those of our New England fathers, were apt to be large, and the future defender of Gibraltar was one of eleven children, of whom but two were daughters, and of the nine sons George was the youngest. After such education as he could receive at home, he was sent to the continent, and entered the University of Leyden, where, with his other studies, he acquired a knowledge of German, which was to be of practical use to him afterward, as he was to serve for a year in a German army. But France was the country that then took the lead in the art of war; and from Holland he was sent to a famous military school in Picardy, founded by Vauban, the constructor of the French fortresses, where he learned the principles which he was to apply to the defence of a greater fortress than any in France. He gave particular attention also to the practice of gunnery. As Napoleon learned the art of war in the artillery school of Brienne, so did Eliott in the school of La Fère. An incidental advantage of this French education was that he acquired the language so that he could speak it fluently, a knowledge which was of service to him afterward when he had so much to do with the French, even though it were as enemies. From France Eliott travelled into other countries on a tour of military observation, and then enlisted for a year in the Prussian army, which was considered the model in the way of discipline. Thus equipped for the life of a soldier, he returned to Scotland, where (as his father wished that he should be further inured to the practice of arms), he entered a Welsh regiment then in Edinburgh as a volunteer, and served with it for a year, from which he went into the engineer corps at Woolwich, and then into a troop of "horse grenadiers," that, under his vigorous training, became famous as a corps of heavy cavalry. When it was ordered to the Continent, he went with it, and served in Germany and the Netherlands, where he took part in several engagements and was wounded at the battle of Dettingen. In this varied service Eliott had gained the reputation of being a brave and capable officer, but had as yet no opportunity to show the extraordinary ability which he was afterward to display. He had, however, acquired such a mastery of the art of war, that he was fitted for any position. In those days, however, promotion was slow, and he had served in the army (which he entered at the age of seventeen,) forty years, and was fifty-seven years old, and had yet reached only the grade of a Lieutenant-General, when, in 1775, he was placed in command of the fortress of Gibraltar. This was four years before the siege began, by which time he was a little turned of sixty, so that he was familiarly called "Old Eliott." But his good Scotch frame did him service now, for he was hale and strong, with a heart of oak and a frame of iron; asking no indulgence on account of his years, but ready to endure every fatigue and share every danger. Such was the man who was to conduct the defence of Gibraltar, and to be, from the beginning to the end, its very heart and soul.[4] [Illustration: PLAN OF GIBRALTAR.] It was in the year 1779, and on the very longest day of the year, the 21st of June, that Spain, by order of the King, severed all communication with Gibraltar. But this was not war; it was simply non-intercourse, and not a hostile gun was fired for months. It is an awkward thing to strike the first blow where relations have been friendly. It had long been the custom of the Spaniards to keep a regiment of cavalry at San Roque, and one of infantry at Algeciras, across the bay, between which and the garrison there was a frequent exchange of military courtesies. Two days before this abrupt termination of intercourse, the Governor had been to pay his respects to General Mendoza, and found him very much embarrassed by the visit, so that he suspected something was wrong, and was not surprised when the order came down from Madrid to cut off all friendly communication. The Spaniards had resolved to make a fresh attempt to recapture Gibraltar, thinking at first that it might be done by a blockade, without a bombardment. There are two ways to take a fortress--by shot and shell, or _by starvation_. The latter may be slower and not so striking to the imagination as carrying a walled city by storm, but it is even more certain of success if only the operation can be completely done. But to this end the place must be sealed up so tightly that there shall be no going out nor coming in. This seems a very simple process, but in execution is not so easy, especially if the fortress be of large extent, and has approaches by land and sea. The Spaniards began with a vigor that seemed to promise success, by constructing a parallel across the isthmus which connects the Rock with the mainland. This was itself a formidable undertaking, but they seemed not to care for cost or labor. Putting ten thousand men at work, they had in a few weeks drawn a line across the Neutral Ground, which rendered access to the garrison impossible _by land_. Any supplies must come _by sea_. To prevent this, the Spaniards had a large fleet in the Bay and cruising in the Straits. But with all their vigilance, they found it hard to keep a blockade of a Rock, with a circuit of seven miles, when there were hundreds of eyes looking out from the land, answered by hundreds of watchers from the sea. In dark nights boats with muffled oars glided between the blockading ships, and stole up to some sheltered nook, bringing news from the outside world. And there were always daring cruisers ready to attempt to run the blockade, taking any risk for the sake of the large reward in case of success. Sometimes the weather would favor them. A fierce "Levanter" blowing from the east, would drive off the fleet, and fill the Straits with fog and mist, under cover of which they could run in undiscovered. At another time a bold privateer would come in, in face of the fleet, and if sighted and pursued, would set all sail, and rush to destruction or to victory. Once under the guns of the fortress she was safe. Thus for a time the garrison received irregular supplies.[5] But in spite of all it was often in sore and pressing need. The soldiers required to be well fed to be fit for duty, and yet not infrequently they were half starved. Six thousand capacious mouths made havoc of provisions, and a brig-load was quickly consumed. As if this was not enough, the hucksters of the town, who had got hold of the necessaries of life, secreted them to create an appearance of greater scarcity, that they might extort still larger prices from the famine-stricken inhabitants. Drinkwater, in his "History of the Siege," gives a list of prices actually paid. "The hind-quarter of an Algerian sheep, with the head and tail, was sold for seven pounds and ten shillings; a large sow for upwards of twenty-nine pounds; a goat, with a young kid, the latter about twelve months old, for near twelve pounds. An English milch cow was sold for fifty guineas, reserving to the seller a pint of milk each day whilst she gave milk; and another cow was purchased by a Jew for sixty guineas, but the beast was in such a feeble condition that she dropped down dead before she had been removed many hundred yards." But it was not only meat that was wanted: bread was so scarce that even biscuit-crumbs sold for a shilling a pound! The economy of flour was carried to the most minute details. It was an old custom that the soldiers who were to mount guard should powder their hair, like the servants in the royal household; but even this had to be denied them. The Governor would not waste a thimbleful of the precious article, which he had rather see going into the stomachs of his brave soldiers than plastered on their hair. A brief entry in a soldier's diary, tells how the pinch came closer and closer: "Another bakery shut up to-day. No more flour. Even salt meat scarce, and no vegetables." Shortly after this an examination of supplies revealed the fact that no fresh meat remained, with the exception of an old cow, which was reserved for the sick. A goose was sold for two pounds, and a turkey for four. In such a condition--so near to the starvation point--there was but one thing to do. It was a hard necessity, but there was no help for it, and an order was issued for the immediate reduction of the soldiers' rations, already barely sufficient to sustain life. The effect of this continued privation upon the _morale_ of the garrison was very depressing. Hunger, like disease, weakens the vital forces, and when both come together they weigh upon the spirit until the manliest give way to discouragement. That this feeling did not become general was owing chiefly to the personal influence of the Governor, whose presence was medicine to the sick, and a new force to the well, making the brave braver and the strong stronger. When famine stared them in the face he made light of it, and taught others to make light of it by sharing their privations. At the beginning of the siege he had formed a resolution to share all the hardships of his men, even to limiting himself to the fare of a common soldier. His food was of the plainest and coarsest. As a Scotch boy he had perhaps been brought up on oatmeal porridge, and it was good enough for him still. If a blockade-runner came in with a cargo of fresh provisions, he did not reserve the best for himself, but all was sold in the open market. If it be said that he had the means to buy which others had not, yet his tastes were so simple that he preferred to share the soldier's mess rather than to partake of the richest food. Besides, he had a principle about it. To such extent did he carry this, that, on one occasion, when the enemy's commander, as a courtesy not unusual in war, sent him a present of fruit, vegetables, and game, the Governor, while returning a polite acknowledgment, begged that the act might not be repeated, for that he had a fixed resolution "never to receive or procure, by any means whatever, any provisions or other commodity for his own private use;" adding, "I make it a point of honor to partake both of plenty and scarcity in common with the lowest of my brave fellow-soldiers." Once indeed when the stress was the sharpest, he showed his men how close they could come to starvation and not die, by living eight days on four ounces of rice a day! The old hero had been preparing for just such a crisis as this by his previous life, for he had trained himself from boyhood to bear every sort of hardship and privation. The argument for total abstinence needs no stronger fact to support it than that the defence of Gibraltar was conducted by a man who needed no artificial stimulus to keep up his courage or brace his nerves against the shock of battle. "Old Eliott," the brave Scotchman and magnificent soldier, was able to stand to his guns with nothing stronger to fire his blood than cold water. Chalmers' Biographical Dictionary says: "He was perhaps the most abstemious man of the age. His food was vegetables, and his drink water. He neither indulged himself in animal food nor wine. He never slept more than four hours at a time, so that he was up later and earlier than most other men. He had so inured himself to habits of hardness, that the things which are difficult and painful to other men were to him his daily practice, and rendered pleasant by use. It could not be easy to starve such a man into a surrender, nor to surprise him. His wants were easily supplied, and his watchfulness was beyond precedent. The example of the commander-in-chief in a besieged garrison, has a most persuasive efficacy in forming the manners of the soldiery. Like him, his brave followers came to regulate their lives by the most strict rules of discipline before there arose a necessity for so doing; and severe exercise, with short diet, became habitual to them by their own choice." Thus the old Governor, by starving himself, taught his men how to bear starvation. After that a soldier, however pinched, would hardly dare to complain. He might not indeed care for himself, but he could not help caring for those dependent on him. The cruel hardship of it was that the suffering fell not on the soldiers alone, but on women and children. The Governor had tried, as far as possible, to send away all non-combatants. But it was not always easy to separate families. There were soldiers' wives, who clung to their husbands all the more because of their danger. If a Scotch grenadier were to have his legs carried off by a cannon-ball, or frightfully torn by a shell, who could nurse him so well as his faithful wife, who had followed him in the camp and in the field? And so, for better, for worse, many a wife, with the courage of womanhood, determined to share her husband's fate. It was a brave resolution, but it only involved them in the common distress. There were so many more mouths to feed, when the supply even for the soldiers was all too little. The captain who has recorded so faithfully the heroisms and the privations of the siege, says: "Many officers and soldiers had families to support out of the pittance received from the victualling office. A soldier and his wife and three children would inevitably have been starved to death had not the generous contribution of his corps relieved his family. One woman actually died through want, and many were so enfeebled that it was not without great attention they recovered. Thistles, dandelions, and wild leeks were for some time the daily nourishment of numbers." Another account tells the same pitiful tale, with additional horrors: "The ordinary means of sustenance were now almost exhausted, and _roots and weeds_, with thistles and wild onions, were greedily sought after and devoured by the famished inhabitants. "Bread was becoming so scarce that the daily rations were served out under protection of a guard, and the weak, the aged, and the infirm, who could not struggle against the hungry, impetuous crowd that thronged the doors of the bakeries, often returned to their homes robbed of their share."[6] "Ancell's Journal," kept during the siege, thus records the impressions of the day: "It is a terribly painful sight to see the fighting among the people for a morsel of bread at an exorbitant price; men wrestling, women entreating, and children crying, a jargon of all languages, piteously pouring forth their complaints. You would think sensibility would shed a tear, and yet when we are in equal distress ourselves our feelings for others rather subside." While this slow and wasting process of starvation was going on, the garrison were in a fearful state of suspense. Sometimes it seemed as if England had forgotten them, but again came tidings that the nation was watching their defence with the utmost anxiety, and would speedily send relief. The time of waiting seemed long as the months passed--summer and autumn and part of winter, and no help appeared. The blockade began in June, 1779, and it was January, 1780, before the fleet of Admiral Rodney, after gaining a battle over the Spanish fleet off the coast of Portugal, bore away to the south. To those who were watching from the top of the Rock, probably no event of their lives ever moved them so much as when they first caught sight of the English ships entering the Straits of Gibraltar. Men, women, and children, wept aloud for joy, for the coming fleet brought them life from the dead. And when it anchored in the bay, and the ships began to unload, they brought forth not only guns and ammunition, but more priceless treasures--beef, pork, butter, flour, peas, oatmeal, raisins, and biscuits, as well as coals, iron hoops, and candles! Revelling in such abundance, could they ever want again? It was indeed a timely relief, and if the fleet could have remained, it might have put an end to the siege. But England was then carrying on wars in two hemispheres; and while the French fleet was crossing the Atlantic to aid the American colonies in gaining their independence, she could not afford that her largest fleet should lie idle in the Bay of Gibraltar. As soon, therefore, as the stores could be landed, Admiral Rodney returned to England. The Governor seized the opportunity to send home great numbers of invalids and women. It was necessary that the garrison should "strip for the fight," as there were darker days to come. Gibraltar had been saved from the jaws of famine by the arrival of the English fleet. But as soon as it left, the Spanish ships remained masters of the bay, and the blockade was closer than ever. The garrison had had a narrow escape. That it might not be caught so again, the Governor, with his Scotch thrift, put his men upon a new kind of service, quite apart from military duty. The Rock is not wholly barren. There are many nooks and corners that are bright with flowers, and anything that the earth can yield will ripen under that warm southern sky. Accordingly the soldiers, in the intervals of firing the big guns, were put to do a little gardening; and turned patches of ground here and there to cultivation; and where the hillside was too steep, the earth was raised into terraces and banked up with walls, on which they raised small quantities of lettuce or cabbages; so that afterward, although they still suffered for many of the comforts, if not the necessaries, of life, they never came quite so near absolute starvation. This "home produce" was the more important as the garrison was now to be cut off from its principal resource outside. For a time it had been able to obtain supplies from the Barbary Coast. At first the Moors were all on the side of England, for the Spaniards were their hereditary enemies, who had fought them for hundreds of years, and finally driven them out of Spain, for which the Moors took a pious revenge by thronging the mosques of Tangier to pray that Allah would give the victory to the arms of England! But after a time they saw things in a new light. It could not be Christian charity that softened their hearts toward their old enemies, for they hated the very name of Christian, but some secret influence (was it Spanish gold?) so worked on the mind of the Sultan of Morocco that he became convinced that Allah was on the side of the besiegers--a discovery which he announced in a manner that was not quite in the usual style of diplomatic intercourse. Thus, without any warning, "A party of black troops that were quartered in the vicinity of Tangier, came to the house of the British Consul, and being introduced, informed him that they had orders from their master to abuse and insult him in the grossest manner, which they immediately put in execution by spitting in his face, seizing him by the collar, and threatening to stab him with their daggers!" Fortunately he escaped with nothing worse than this gross outrage; but the serious part of the business was that it cut off all communication of Gibraltar with the Barbary Coast; for the Sultan prohibited the export of provisions, and as the supplies brought by the convoy were exhausted in a few months, the garrison was again, not indeed at the starvation point, but in sore need of what was for its health and vigor. The meagre diet threatened to produce a pestilence. At one time there were seven hundred men in the hospitals; at another the small-pox broke out; and at another the garrison was so reduced by the scurvy, caused by the use of salt meats, that strong men became weak as children, and hobbled about on crutches. This threatened a great disaster, which was averted only by lemons! In the moment of extremity a Dutch "dogger" coming from Malaga was captured, and found to be laden with oranges and lemons, "a freight which, at such a crisis, was of more value to the garrison than tons of powder or magazines of ammunition." The lemons were instantly distributed in the hospitals. The men seized them and devoured them ravenously, and the restoration was so speedy as to seem almost miraculous. And yet this relief was only temporary. Soon we have this picture of the condition of the garrison: "As the spring of 1781 advanced, the situation assumed the most distressing aspect. The few provisions which remained were bad in quality, and having been kept too long were decomposed and uneatable. The most common necessaries of life were exorbitantly dear; bad ship biscuit, full of worms, was sold at a shilling a pound; flour, in not much better condition, at the same price; old dried peas, a shilling and fourpence; salt, half dirt, the sweepings of ships' bottoms and storehouses, at eight pence; old salt butter, at two shillings and sixpence; and English farthing candles cost sixpence apiece. Fresh provisions commanded a still higher price: turkeys sold at three pounds twelve shillings, sucking pigs at two guineas, and a guinea was refused for a calf's pluck. "The English government, aware of this condition of things, had for months turned their attention to the relief of the fortress; but the many exigencies of the war, and the extensive arena over which it was spread, caused so many demands upon the navy that it had hitherto been impossible to provide a fleet for the succor of Gibraltar. But the relief of the garrison was indispensable, and the honor of England required that it should be executed. Accordingly the government made extraordinary efforts to equip a squadron to convoy a flotilla of merchantmen to the Rock."[7] But with all their efforts, it was more than a year before the second fleet arrived. When it came, it was loaded with all conceivable supplies, which took ten days to unload. The joy of the beleaguered garrison knew no bounds. And yet this new relief only precipitated a calamity which had been long impending. The scene of the arrival is thus described by an eye-witness: "At daybreak, April 12th, the much-expected fleet, under the command of Admiral Darby, was in sight from our Signal-house, but was not discernible from below, being obscured by a thick mist. As the sun, however, became more powerful, the fog gradually rose, like the curtain of a vast theatre, discovering to the anxious garrison one of the most beautiful and pleasing scenes it is possible to conceive. The convoy, consisting of near a hundred vessels, led by several men-of-war, their sails just enough filled for steerage; whilst the majority of the line-of-battle ships lay-to under the Barbary shore, having orders not to enter the bay lest the enemy should molest them with their fire-ships. The ecstasies of the inhabitants at this grand and exhilarating sight are not to be described. Their expressions of joy far exceeded their former exultations [at the arrival of the fleet under Admiral Rodney]. Alas! they little dreamed of the tremendous blow that impended, which was to annihilate their property, and reduce many of them to indigence and beggary."[8] What this blow was, at once appeared. The arrival of the second fleet from England convinced the Spaniards that it would be impossible to reduce Gibraltar by blockade, and determined them to try the other alternative of bombardment. Enormous batteries, mounting 170 guns and 80 mortars, had been planted along the shore; and now (before even the English ships could be unladen of their stores) was opened all round the bay a _feu d'enfer_, which was kept up for six weeks! Only two hours out of the twenty-four was there any cessation, and that for a singular reason. National customs must rule in war as in peace. The Spaniards began their fire at daybreak, and continued it without intermission till noon. Then suddenly it ceased, and the camp of the besiegers relapsed into silence: for that the officers, if not the men, _were asleep_! What Spanish gentleman could be deprived of his _siesta_? At two o'clock precisely they woke up and went to fighting again. At nightfall the cannon ceased, but only that the mortars (which did not need to be aimed with precision, and therefore could be fired in darkness as well as in daylight) opened their larger throats, and kept up the roar till daybreak. Thus, with only the time of the _siesta_, there was not an hour of day or night that the Rock did not echo with tremendous reverberations. The town was soon set on fire, and completely destroyed. There was no safety anywhere, not even in the casemates. If a bomb-proof withstood a falling shell, it would sometimes explode at the open door, wounding those within. Men were killed sleeping in their beds. The scene at night was more terrible than by day, as the shells were more clearly seen in their deadly track. Sometimes a dozen would be wheeling in the air at the same moment, keeping every eye strained to see where the bolts would fall, and the bravest held their breath when (as was several times the case) they fell near the powder magazines! Again, the soldiers were not the only ones to suffer: their wives and children were their partners in misery. When the town was on fire, the people fled from it, and at a distance watched the flames that rose from their burning dwellings, in which all their little property was consumed--the roofs that sheltered them, and even the food that fed them. For six weeks they had not a moment's rest, day nor night. Although they had fled to the southern end of the Rock, destruction pursued them there. The Spanish ships had a custom of sailing round Europa Point, and firing indiscriminately on shore. This was generally at night, so that the poor creatures who had lain down to snatch a moment of forgetfulness, were roused at midnight and fled almost naked to seek for shelter behind rocks and in holes in the ground, in which they cowered like hunted beasts, till the storm of fire had passed over them. The troops were not quite so badly off, for though they were shelled out of their old quarters, and had not a roof to cover them, yet English soldiers and sailors are ingenious, and getting hold of some old ship canvas they rigged up a few forlorn tents, which they pitched on the hillside. But again they were discomfited. Gibraltar is subject at certain seasons to terrific storms of thunder and lightning, and now the rains poured down the side of the Rock in such floods as to sweep away the tents, and leave the men exposed to the fury of the elements. It seemed as if the stars in their courses fought against them. But they were to find that the stars in their courses fight for those who fight for themselves. Sometimes the storms, so terrible in one way, brought relief in another. There had been a scarcity of fuel as well as of food. A soldier could hardly pick up sticks to make his pot boil, and cook his scanty meal; so that when a furious gale wrecked a ship in the bay, and cast its fragments on the shore, which furnished fuel for their camp-fires for some weeks, they counted it a providential interposition for their deliverance; and as the firelight cast its ruddy glow in their faces, they thanked God and took courage. But with all their courage, kept up by such occasional good fortune, it was a life-and-death struggle, as they fought not only with the enemy, but with hunger and cold, and every form of privation. During all this dreadful time the old Governor was magnificent. Going among the families that were houseless and homeless, for whom he felt the utmost sympathy (for with all his rugged strength he had a very tender heart), he allayed their fears; terrified and miserable as they were, it was impossible to resist the sunshine of that kindly Scotch face.[9] Then he turned to his soldiers, who may well have been appalled by the tremendous fire, which wrought such wreck and ruin. If they were troubled and anxious, he was calm. He shunned no danger, as he had shunned no privation. Indeed danger did not affect him as it did other men, but only roused the lion in his breast. The more the danger grew, the higher rose his unconquerable spirit. He was constantly under fire, and his perfect coolness tended to produce the same composure in others equally exposed. Terrible as the bombardment was, not for one moment did he admit the possibility of surrender. But now came a new danger, not from without, but from within. The fire which swept the town uncovered cellars and other hiding-places in which the hucksters had concealed provisions and other stores to double their price, and extort the last penny from the half-fed population. When their storehouses were destroyed little sympathy was felt for them. Indeed, there was a general feeling of savage exultation; and as here and there supplies of food were found, they were seized without scruple and appropriated to the common use. Men who have been living on short allowance are apt to be led into excesses by sudden plenty, and the soldiers could hardly be blamed if for once they gave themselves a generous supply. From the extreme of want they went to the extreme of waste. In some cases incredible profusion prevailed. Drinkwater says: "Among other instances of caprice and extravagance, I recollect seeing a party of soldiers roast a pig by a fire made of cinnamon!" If this had been all, there would not have been so much to regret. But in the stores were casks of wine and barrels of spirits, which were now knocked on the head, and the contents distributed with no restraint, till soon a large part of the garrison was in such a state of intoxication as to be utterly unfit for duty. "As the enemy's shells forced open the secret recesses of the merchants, the soldiers instantly availed themselves of the opportunity to seize upon the liquors, which they conveyed to haunts of their own. Here in parties they barricaded their quarters against all opposers, and insensible of their danger, regaled themselves with the spoils." For a time this sudden madness ran riot in the streets, threatening the overthrow of all order and discipline. It can hardly be matter of surprise that the reaction from this long tension of feeling, with the sudden temptation to drunkenness, should show itself in wild extravagances. An incident related in "Ancell's Journal," shows the soldier in the mood of making sport of his dangers: "April 15, 1781.--Yesterday I met a soldier singing in the street with uncommon glee, notwithstanding the enemy were firing with prodigious warmth, 'A soldier's life is a merry life, From care and trouble free.' He ran to me with eagerness, and presenting his bottle, cried: 'D----n me if I don't like fighting, with plenty of good liquor for carrying away. 'Why, Jack,' says I, 'what have you been about?' 'Faith,' says he, 'I scarce know myself. I have been constantly, on foot and watch, half-starved and without money, facing a parcel of pitiful Spaniards. I have been fighting, wheeling, marching, counter-marching, sometimes with a firelock, sometimes with a handspike, and now with my bottle.' "A shell that instant burst, a piece of which knocked the bottle out of his hand. 'Jack,' says I, 'are you not thankful to God for your preservation?' 'How do you mean?' says he; 'fine talking of God with a soldier whose trade and occupation is cutting throats. Divinity and slaughter sound very well together; they jingle like a cracked bell in the hands of a noisy crier. My religion is a firelock, open touch-hole, good flint, well-rammed charge, and seventy rounds: this is military creed. Come, comrade, drink!'" Such license as this would soon demoralize the best troops in the world. Had the Spaniards known the degree to which it existed at that moment, and been able to effect an entrance into the fortress, Gibraltar might have been lost. The insubordination was suppressed only by the most strenuous efforts of the Governor and the vigorous enforcement of discipline. An order was issued that any soldier caught marauding should be "executed _immediately_," and this summary judgment was put in force in several cases, where men were not only executed without a moment's delay, but on the very spot where the crime was committed. This timely severity, with the personal influence of the Governor, at length brought the soldiers to their senses, and order was restored. Perhaps they were brought back to duty in part by the continued roar of that terrific bombardment, for in a true soldier nothing rouses the martial spirit like the sound of the enemy's guns. Danger and duty go together: and many of those who had been carried away by this temporary frenzy, when they "came to themselves," were among the bravest who fought in the conflicts that were yet to come. It was now a struggle of endurance--firing and counter-firing month after month, with exciting incidents now and then to relieve the monotony of the siege. Of these episodes the most notable was the sortie executed on the night of November 26, 1781. The siege had lasted more than two years, and the Spaniards, boastful and confident as they are apt to be, by this time appreciated the enormous difficulty of attacking the Rock of Gibraltar. To do them justice, instead of being daunted by the greatness of the task, their military ardor rose with the vastness of the undertaking, and they had been engaged for months in rearing a stupendous parallel across the Neutral Ground, to be mounted with the heaviest battering artillery. The Governor had kept his eye upon the progress of the work, and as he saw its lines spreading out wider and wider, and rising higher and higher, he could not but feel anxiety for the moment when these batteries should open, and rain shot and shell upon the devoted garrison. The way in which he met the new danger showed that he had the promptness in action of a great commander. From the beginning of the siege he had observed the utmost economy in the use of his resources. He was sparing of his ammunition, and sometimes reproached his officers with great severity for wasting it in unimportant attacks. He saved his powder as he saved his men. Indeed he was sparing of everything except himself. Yet "he never relaxed from his discipline by the appearance of security, nor hazarded the lives of his garrison by wild experiments. Collected within himself, he in no instance destroyed, by premature attacks, the labors which would cost the enemy time, patience, and expense to complete; he deliberately observed their approaches, and seized on the proper moment in which to make his attack with success." For months he had been waiting and watching: the time for action had now come. During the siege there had been frequent desertions on both sides. Now and then soldiers of the garrison, wearied with the interminable siege (and thinking it better to take the chances of instant death than to be shut up in a fortress-prison and perish by inches), let themselves down by ropes over the face of the Rock. Some escaped to the enemy, and some were dashed on the rocks below. On the other side there were among the Spanish soldiers a good many Walloons from Belgium, who had no interest in the contest, and were as ready to fight on one side as the other. Occasionally one of these would stray out of the camp, as if without intention, and when he had got at a distance which he thought gave him a chance of escape, would take to his heels and run for the gates of the fortress. If discovered, he was immediately fired at, and a mounted guard started in pursuit, and if overtaken, he was brought back, and the next day his body, hanging from the scaffold, in full sight of the Rock, served as a ghastly warning alike to the besiegers and the besieged. But, in spite of all, desertions went on. One day a couple of deserters were brought to the Governor, one of whom proved to be uncommonly intelligent, and gave important information. "Old Eliott" took him up to a point of the Rock from which they could look down into the camp of the besiegers, and questioned him minutely as to its condition and the intentions of the enemy. He said that the parallel was nearly completed; and that as soon as all was ready the Spaniards would make a grand assault; but that meanwhile the works, enormous as they were, were not guarded by a large force, the besiegers not dreaming that the batteries prepared for attack could be themselves attacked! The Governor instantly perceived the value of this information, but kept it to himself, and had the deserter closely confined lest he should incautiously reveal to others what he had told to him. Keeping his own counsel, he made his preparations, which he did not disclose even to his lieutenants until the moment for action. It was in the evening when he called them together, and announced his intention to make an attack on the works of the besiegers _that very night_, and at midnight about two thousand men were in arms on the "Red Sands," now the Alameda, to carry the daring purpose into execution. Their orders were of the strictest kind: "Each man to have thirty-six rounds of ammunition, with a good flint in his piece and another in his pocket. No drums to go out, excepting two with each of the regiments. _No volunteers will be allowed._" The brave old commander wanted no amateurs on such an occasion. "No person to advance before the front, unless ordered by the officer commanding the column: and _the most profound silence to be observed_." As it took two or three hours to form the columns, and acquaint all with the special duty to be undertaken, and the necessity for the strictest obedience, it was nearly three o'clock when they began to move. The moon was just setting across the bay, and soon all was dark and still, as the men advanced with quick but cautious steps through the silent streets. The commander had picked his men for the daring attempt. Knowing how powerful are the traditions of bravery, he had chosen two regiments that had fought side by side at the battle of Minden, twenty-two years before. The officers to lead them he had chosen with equal care, and yet, when it came to the moment of action, the old soldier felt such a fire in his bones that he could not resist the impulse to keep them company. As they emerged from the gates they had still three-quarters of a mile across the plain to reach the enemy's works. With all the precautions to secure silence, the tramp of two thousand men, however muffled, could not but reach the ears of the Spanish sentinels, and a few rapid shots told that they were discovered. But the alarm was given too late. It only quickened the advance of the column, which, as it reached the works, rushed over the parapet, bayoneting the men, such as did not flee, panic-stricken by the sudden attack, and spiking the guns. As the soldiers had come prepared with faggots for the purpose, they immediately set the works on fire. But even at this moment of terror there was one who thought of mercy as well as of victory. Before the flames had spread the Governor, "anxious that none of the wounded should by any accident perish in the burning batteries, went into the trench himself and found among the bodies of the slain a wounded officer, whom by his uniform he knew to be a captain of the Spanish artillery, to whom he spoke with all kindness, and promising him every assistance, ordered him to be removed, as the fire was now rapidly spreading to the spot where he lay. But the Spaniard, raising himself with difficulty, feebly exclaimed, "No, sir, no, leave me and let me perish amid the ruins of my post." In a few minutes he expired. It was afterward found that he had commanded the guard of the San Carlos battery, and that when his men threw down their arms and fled, he rushed forward into the attacking column, exclaiming, "At least one Spaniard shall die honorably," and fell where he was found, at the foot of his post."[10] It was now too late to talk of mercy. In an hour the flames had spread into a conflagration that could not be subdued. As it rose into the air, it lighted up the Rock above and the plain below. Leaving the elements to complete the work of destruction, the assailants made their retreat, only to hear, as they re-entered the gates, the explosion of the magazines. So vast was the ruin wrought that the camp was like a city on fire, and continued to burn for four days, without an effort on the part of the Spaniards (who seemed to be stunned and bewildered by the sudden attack) to subdue the flames. Thus was destroyed at a single stroke what it had cost months of labor and millions of money to construct. And so the game of war went on for three long years, until it had fixed the gaze of the whole civilized world. The last act was to be inaugurated by a change in the military command, and in the method of attack. Hitherto the siege had been conducted chiefly by the Spaniards, as was fitting, since, if the fortress were taken, to Spain would fall the splendid prize. They had fought bravely, maintaining the reputation which had never been shaken from the days of Alva, when the Spanish infantry was more dreaded than any other on the battle-fields of Europe. During the siege the officers of the garrison, as they looked down from their heights into the hostile camp, could not but admire the way in which both officers and men exposed themselves. It was not to their dishonor if they had failed in attempting the impossible. But having to confess defeat, it was but military prudence to see if another mode of operation might not be more successful. Accordingly, French skill in the art of war was now called in to take part in the tremendous conflict. The Duc de Crillon, who had recently distinguished himself by the capture of Minorca, was put in command of the combined land forces; while a French engineer, the Chevalier d'Arçon, was to prepare an armament more formidable than had ever been known in naval warfare. The plan had certainly the merit of boldness. There was to be no more long blockade, and no more attempt to take the place by stratagem. Gibraltar was to be taken, if at all, by hard fighting. But the conditions of battle were unequal: for how could wooden ships be matched against stone walls? No ships of the day could stand an hour against guns fired from behind those ramparts. But this engineer was bold enough to believe that vessels could be made so strong that they would withstand even that tremendous fire. He proposed to construct "battering ships" of such enormous strength that they could be moored within short range, when he in turn would open a fire equally tremendous, that should blow Gibraltar into the air! All he asked was that his flotilla might be laid close alongside the enemy, when, gun to gun and man to man, the contest should be decided. Once let him get near enough to make a breach for a storming party to mount the walls, and his French grenadiers would do the rest. It was bravely conceived, and to the day of battle it seemed as if it might be bravely done. To begin with, ten of the largest ships in the Spanish navy were to be sacrificed: for it seemed like a sacrifice to cut down the huge bulwarks of their towering sides. But show was to be sacrificed to strength. The new constructor would have no more three-deckers, nor two-deckers. All he wanted was one broad deck, reaching the whole length of the ship, from stem to stern, which should be as solid as if it were a part of the mainland, or a floating island, on which he could plant his guns as on the ramparts of a fortress. Having thus dismantled and razeed the great ships, he proceeded to reconstruct them without and within. His method is of interest, as showing how a hundred years ago a naval engineer anticipated the modern construction of ironclads. His battering ships were in outward shape almost exactly what the Merrimac was in our civil war. He did everything except case them with iron, the art of rolling plates of wrought iron, such as are now used in the construction of ships, not being then known. But if they could not be "plated" with iron on the outside, they were "backed" by ribs of oak within. Inside their enormous hulls was a triple thickness of beams, braced against the sides. Next to this was a layer of _sand_, in which it was supposed a cannon-ball would bury itself as in the earth. To this sand-bank, resting against its oaken backing, there was still an inner lining in a thick wall of _cork_, which, yielding like india-rubber, would offer the best resistance to the penetration of shot. Having thus protected the hulls, it was only necessary to protect the crews. For this the decks were roofed with heavy timbers, which were covered with _ropes_, and next with _hides_, after the manner of the ancient Romans; so that the men working at the guns were almost as secure from the enemy's fire as if they were inside of the strongest casemates that the art of fortification could construct. Thus shielded above and below--from the deck to the keel--these novel ships-of-war were in truth floating fortresses, and it was hardly presumptuous in their constructor to say that they "could not be burnt, nor sunk, nor taken." These preparations for attack could not be made without the knowledge of the garrison. From the top of the Rock they had but to turn their glasses across the bay, and they could see distinctly hundreds of workmen swarming over the great hulks, and could almost hear the sound of the hammers that ceased not day nor night. Turning to the camp of the besiegers, they could see "long strings of mules streaming hourly into the trenches laden with shot, shell, and ammunition." Deserters brought in reports of the vast preparations, and the confidence they inspired. The fever of expectation had spread to the capitals of Spain and France. The King of Spain was almost beside himself with eagerness and impatience. Every morning his first question was "Is it taken?" and when answered in the negative he always kept up his courage by saying, "It will soon be ours." His expectations seemed now likely to be realized. All felt that at last the end was nigh, and the Comte d'Artois, the brother of Louis XVI., the King of France, had made the journey all the way from Paris to be present at the grand culmination of the surrender of Gibraltar! So sure were the allies of victory that they debated among themselves as to "how many hours" the garrison could keep up a resistance. Twenty-four hours was the limit, and when the French commander, less sanguine than the naval constructors and engineers, thought it might be even _two weeks_ before the place fell, he was the subject of general ridicule. Taking for granted that the fire of the garrison would soon be silenced, precise directions were given about the landing of the storming party. As soon as a break was made, the grenadiers were to mount the walls. It was especially ordered that strong bodies of troops should _advance rapidly and cut off the retreat_ of the garrison, which might otherwise flee to the heights of the Rock, and keep up for a while longer the hopeless resistance. The victory must be complete. On the other hand, the garrison was roused to greater exertion by the greater danger. Its ardor was excited also by what was passing in other parts of the world. War was still raging in both hemispheres, with the usual vicissitudes of victory and defeat. England had lost America, but her wounded pride was soon relieved, if not entirely removed, by a great victory at sea. Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, in October, 1781, and only six months after, in April, 1782, Admiral Rodney (the same who had relieved Gibraltar only two years before) gained a victory in the West Indies over Count de Grasse, which almost annihilated the French fleet, and assured to England, whatever her losses upon land, the mastery of the seas. The tidings of this great victory reached Gibraltar, and fired the spirit of every Briton. The Governor was now sixty-four years old, and the events of the last three years might well make him feel that he was a hundred. But his youth returned in the great crisis that was upon him. Both Governor and garrison burned to do something worthy the name and fame of Old England. The opportunity soon came. Though the battering ships were regarded as invincible, yet to make assurance doubly sure the French and Spanish fleets had been quadrupled in force. If any man's heart had been trembling before, it must have failed him on September 12, 1782, when there sailed into the bay thirty-nine ships of the line, raising the naval armament to fifty line-of-battle ships, with innumerable smaller vessels--the largest naval armament since the Spanish Armada--supported on land by an army of forty thousand men, whose batteries, mounted with the heaviest ordnance, stretched along the shore. Against this mighty array of force by land and sea the English commander, mustering every gun and every man, could oppose only ninety-six pieces of artillery, manned by seven thousand soldiers and sailors. As the allied forces had been waiting only for the fleet, the attack was announced for the following day, and accordingly soon after the sun rose the next morning the battering-ships were seen to be getting under way. It was a grand sight, at which the spirits of the besiegers rose to the highest pitch. So confident were they of victory that thousands of spectators, among whom were many of the Spanish nobility, had gathered near the "Queen's Seat," in the Spanish lines, to witness the final capture of Gibraltar, for which they had been waiting three long years. Even the Englishmen who lined the ramparts could not but admire the order in which the ships took up their positions. So confident was the Spanish Admiral that they were shot-proof and bomb-proof, that he took no pains to keep at long range, but advanced boldly and moored within half gunshot, with large boats full of men ready to land as soon as the guns of the fortress were silenced. To both sides it was evident that the decisive day had come. While the ships were being ranged in line of battle, the English stood at their guns in silence till "Old Eliott" took his stand on the King's Bastion, and gave the signal for the roar of earth and hell to begin. Instantly the floating batteries answered from the whole line, and their fire was taken up along the shores of the bay, till there were four hundred guns playing on the devoted town. No thunderstorm in the tropics ever shot out such lightnings and thunderings. As the hills echoed the tremendous reverberations, it seemed as if the solid globe was reeling under the shock of an earthquake. The ships at first aimed their guns a little too high, so that balls and shells flew over the line-wall and fell in the rear; but they soon got the range, and lowering their guns to almost a dead-level, fired point-blank. "About noon their firing was powerful and well-directed." Guns were dismounted, and the wounded began to fall and to be carried to the rear. But others took their place at the guns, and kept up the steady fire, never turning from the one object directly in front. Although the batteries on the land tried to divert their fire, the Governor disdained to answer them with a single gun. "Not there! not there!" was the danger. His keen eye saw that the fate of Gibraltar was to be decided that day by the answer given to those battering ships that were pouring such a terrific fire into his lines. In the midst of it all he was as cool as if on parade. A large part of the day he kept his place on the King's Bastion, the centre at which the enemy's fire was directed, and his presence had an inspiring effect upon his men. To do them justice, the soldiers, who had served under such a commander for three years, were worthy of their leader. As he looked along the lines they were wrapped in a cloud of smoke, and yet now and then, by the flashing of the guns, he could see their heroic features glowing "with the light of battle in their faces." On that day, as with Nelson twenty-three years later, "England expected every man to do his duty," and did not expect in vain. But for a time all their courage and skill seemed to be without result. For hours the battle raged with doubtful issue. Though the English fired at such short range, they did not produce much effect. Their thirty-two-pound shot could not pierce the thick-ribbed sides of the battering-ships, while their heaviest shells were seen to rebound from the roofs, as the shots of the Congress and the Cumberland rebounded from the roof of the Merrimac. Apparently the fire of the garrison produced as little impression on the ships as the fire of the ships produced on the rocks of Gibraltar. The disparity of forces was so great that the allies might have carried the day if that inequality had not been balanced by one advantage of the besieged. They had one means of destruction which could not be so easily turned against land defences--in the use of hot shot. The experiment had been tried on the works of the besiegers, and they now hoped it would have still greater effect upon the ships. But their enemies were neither surprised nor daunted by this new mode of attack. They were fully aware of what the English had done, and what they proposed to do, and with true Castilian pride laughed at this new method of destruction. So much did they despise it, that one of the Spanish commanders said "he would engage to receive in his breast all the hot shot of the enemy." Meanwhile "Old Eliott" had gone on with his preparations. A few days before, coal had been served out to the furnaces, which had been placed beside the batteries. These were now kept at white heat, and the heavy balls dropped into them till they glowed like molten iron, and then were carefully lifted to the guns.[11] As the artillerymen sighted their guns they observed with grim satisfaction that the ships had anchored at the right distance, so that they had but to elevate their guns _very slightly_, just enough to save the necessity of ramming the ball with a second wadding to hold it in place; and thus not a moment was lost when moments were very precious, but the ball was simply rolled into the cannon's mouth, from which it was instantly hurled at the foe. Yet even the hot shot did not at first make much impression. The French engineer had guarded against them by having pumps constantly pouring water into the layer of sand below, where a red-hot cannon-ball would soon be rendered harmless. In fact, a number of times during the day smoke was seen to issue from the floating batteries, showing that the hot shot had taken effect, but the flames were promptly extinguished. It was not till late in the afternoon that they began to burst out, and it was seen that the Admiral's ship was on fire. As the night drew on the flames became more visible, showing the exact position of the Spanish line, and furnishing a mark for the English guns. On another ship the fires advanced so rapidly that they had to flood the magazine for fear of an explosion. Others threw up rockets, and hoisted signals of distress to their consorts, and boats were seen rowing toward them. At midnight nine out of the ten battering-ships were on fire. The scene at this moment was awful beyond description, as the flames mounted higher and higher till they lighted up the whole bay and the surrounding shores. When it became evident that the ships could not be saved, there was a panic on board; all discipline was lost in the eagerness to escape from the burning decks; sailors and gunners threw themselves into the sea. French and Spanish boats picked up hundreds, and still there were hundreds more who were perishing, whose agonized shrieks rose upon the midnight air. The English heard it, and stout hearts that quailed not at the roar of guns, quivered "At the cry Of some strong swimmer in his agony." Then it was that the English showed that their courage was equalled by their humanity, as the very men who had fought all day at the guns pushed off in boats to save their foes from drowning. This was an attempt which involved the utmost danger, for the ships were on fire, and might blow up at any moment. But Brigadier Curtis, learning from the prisoners that hundreds of officers and men, some wounded, still remained on board, forgot everything in his eagerness to save them. Careless of danger from the explosions which every instant scattered fragments of wreck around him, he passed from ship to ship, and literally dragged from the burning decks the miserable Spaniards whom their own countrymen had left to perish. The Governor watched the movement with the utmost anxiety, which rose to "anguish," to use his own word, as he saw the gallant officer push his boat alongside one of the largest ships, that was a mass of flames. As he stood transfixed with horror at the sight, there came a tremendous explosion, and the ship was blown into the air, its fragments falling far and wide over the sea. That was a moment of agony, for he could not doubt that friend and foe had perished together. But as the wreck cleared away the little pinnace was seen, by the light of the other burning ships, to be still afloat, though shattered. A huge beam of timber had fallen through her flooring, killing the coxswain, wounding others of her crew, and starting a large hole in her bottom, through which the water rushed so rapidly that it seemed as if she must sink in a few minutes. But English sailors are equal to anything, and stripping off their jackets they stuffed them into the hole, and thus kept the boat above water till they reached the shore, bringing with them 357 of their late enemies, whom they had saved from a horrible death. The wounded were sent to the hospitals and treated with the greatest care; and an officer who died four days after, received the honors that would have been paid to one of their own countrymen, the grenadiers following his bier and firing their farewell shot "O'er the grave where the hero was buried." This last act was all that was wanting to complete the glory of England on that immortal day. History records the heroic conduct of British seamen at the Battle of the Nile, when the French Admiral's ship, the Orient, took fire, and Nelson sent his boats to pick up the drowning crew. While this should be remembered, let it not be forgotten that sixteen years before the Battle of the Nile, the garrison of Gibraltar had set the splendid example. The next morning saw the bay covered with wrecks. The victory was complete. The siege was still kept up in form, and the besiegers continued firing, and for some days threw into the town four, five, and six hundred shells, and from six hundred to a thousand shot, every twenty-four hours! But this was only the muttering thunder after the storm. The battle was over, and from that day to this--more than a hundred years--the Red Cross of England has floated from the Rock of Gibraltar. The close of this long and terrible conflict was like the ending of a play, when the curtain falls at last upon a scene of happy reunion. Even during the years of fiercest strife the courtesies of war had been strictly observed. Flags of truce passed between the garrison and the camp of the besiegers; prisoners were exchanged, and now and then one or the other of the commanders paid a compliment that was well deserved, to the courage and skill of his antagonist. Especially did the Duc de Crillon, true Frenchman as he was, indulge in these flattering phrases. In a letter written just before the attack of the battering-ships, he assures General Eliott of his "highest esteem," and of "the pleasure to which I look forward of becoming your friend, after I shall have proved myself worthy of the honor, by facing you as an enemy!" That pleasure he was now to have. He had faced the General as an enemy; he was now to know him as a friend. [Illustration: Painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds P.R.A. Engraved by J. Cochran. GEORGE AUGUSTUS ELIOTT, LORD HEATHFIELD, BARON GIBRALTAR. [The above portrait of "Old Eliott" was taken on his return from Gibraltar, in 1787, when he was the hero of England. The figure is drawn against a background of the clouds of war, with the cannon pointing downward, as when fired from the top of the Rock; while he holds firmly in his hand the key of the fortress he has won. The face is open, frank, and bold, with eyes looking straight before him, as if he did not fear any enemy. Many have remarked a likeness to Wellington, with a more prominent nose, a feature which Napoleon always looked for in one whom he chose for a post of peculiar difficulty and danger.]] For months, there had been whispers in the air of a coming peace, and the attitude of the contending parties was more that of armed neutrality than of active war. At last the announcement came. The besiegers were the first to receive it, and sent the news to the garrison; but "Old Eliott," true soldier as he was, waited for orders from home. At length a British frigate sailed into the harbor with the blessed tidings that Great Britain had acknowledged the independence of America, and that the three powers--England, France, and Spain--had solemnly agreed to be at peace. Now all barriers to intercourse were removed, and the Governor rode out to meet his late enemy at a point midway between the lines. Both Generals instantly dismounted and embraced, thus answering a blow, or the many blows given and received, with a kiss. The Duke soon after returned the visit, and found the gates of Gibraltar, which had not been forced in three and a half years of war, now thrown wide open to his coming in the attitude of peace. He was received with all the honors of war. As he rode through the gates his appearance was greeted with loud huzzas, which ran along the lines, and echoed among the hills, a salutation which at first he did not understand, and was confused by it, as it might be interpreted as a cheer of triumph over a fallen enemy; but when it was explained to him that it was the way in which English soldiers greeted one whom they recognized as a hero, he was very much flattered by the demonstration. As the artillery officers were presented to him he complimented them highly on their courage and skill, saying pleasantly (no one could doubt his sincerity in this) that he "would rather see them here as friends than on their batteries as enemies!" And so at last, after these long and terrible years, the curtain fell on a scene as peaceful as ever ended a tragedy on the stage. Such are the heroic memories which gather round Gibraltar, and overshadow it as its mighty crags cast their shadows on the sea. Let us not say, "All this is nothing to us, because we are neither Englishmen, nor Frenchmen, nor Spaniards." "We are men, and whatever concerns man concerns us." If it be indeed "beautiful to die for one's country," the spot is holy ground where, for the dear sake of "country," brave men have fought and died. CHAPTER VIII. HOLDING A FORTRESS IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY. There is one thing in Gibraltar which strikes me unpleasantly, and yet (such are the contradictions in our likes and dislikes) it is the very thing which has made it so attractive, viz., the English occupation. For picturesqueness of situation, the mighty Rock, standing at the entering in of the seas, is unique in the world, and the outlook along the shores of Africa and Europe is enough to captivate the eye of the most sight-worn traveller. And the people who hold this rock-fortress are worthy to be its masters, for they are not only brave, as soldiers are by profession, but they have all the manly qualities of the English race; they are chivalrous and generous. Nowhere does English hospitality appear more charming. If ever a man had occasion to like Gibraltar and the English _in_ Gibraltar, I have; and I shall keep them both in grateful memory. And yet--and yet--in this general accord of pleased reflection, which comes to me in the midst of these happy days, there is one thing which strikes a discordant note. The English are here, not by right of birth, but of conquest. Gibraltar is not a part of England: it is a part of Spain, to which it belongs by nature, if nature has anything to do with the boundaries of States. True, the English have taken it and hold it, and by the right of war it belongs to them, as a fortress belongs to the power that is strongest. Yet that does not change the relation of things, any more than it changes the geographical position of the captured fortress. And so it remains that England holds Gibraltar, I will not say in an enemy's country, but certainly in a foreign country--a fact which, however it be disguised, it is not pleasant to contemplate. The stranger does not feel this so much while he is inside the gates as when he leaves the town and goes out into the country. Perhaps the reader will share my feeling if he will give me the pleasure of his company. It was a bright, crisp winter afternoon that a friend from Boston and I planned an excursion on foot. But stop a moment! When I travelled in the East I learned the wisdom of the old Oriental custom of "girding up the loins"; and so, stepping into a shop in Waterport Street, I bought something like a soldier's belt, my only military trapping, with which I braced myself so firmly together that I felt "in prime marching order," and away we went at a swinging gait, as merry as two New England boys out of school and off for a holiday. It is not a long walk to the gates, and once through them and outside the walls we took a long breath as we once more inhaled the free air of the country. At a little distance we came to a row of sentries--a line of red-coats that kept guard over the majesty of England. Then a half-mile walk across a low, sandy plain--the Neutral Ground--and we came to another line of sentinels in different uniforms and speaking a different tongue, a little beyond which is Linea (so named from its being just beyond the lines), a place of twelve thousand inhabitants, which has the three requisites of a Spanish town--a church, a market, and a bull-ring! Here was the situation: a double line of soldiers facing each other, not in a hostile attitude, not training their guns on each other, but certainly not in a position which was calculated to promote friendly relations. Strolling through the town it seemed to us (perhaps it was only imagination) that there was a sullen look in the faces of the people; that they did not regard Englishmen, or those speaking the English tongue, with special affection. Linea has a bad name for being a nest of smugglers; but whether it is worse than other frontier towns, which afford special facilities for smuggling, and therefore offer great temptations, I cannot say. It was not an attractive place, and after an hour's walk we retraced our steps back to our fortress home. As we turned toward the Rock we were facing the British Lion just as the descending sun was putting a crown upon his royal head. Never did he wear a more kingly look than in that evening sky. If the God of War has a throne on earth, it must be on that height, more than a thousand feet in air, looking down on the petty human creatures below, all of whom he could destroy with one breath of his nostrils. It was indeed a glorious sight. But how do the Spaniards like it? How should _we_ like it if we were in their place? This was a very inconvenient question to be asked just at that moment, as we were crossing the Neutral Ground. But if I _must_ answer, I cannot but say that, if I were a Spanish sentinel, pacing back and forth in such a presence and compelled at every turn to look up at that Lion frowning over me, it would be with a very bitter feeling. I might even ask my English friends who are masters of Gibraltar, how they would like to see the flag of another country floating over a part of _their_ country? Of course, the retention of Gibraltar is to England a matter of pride. It is a great thing to see the red cross flying on the top of the Rock in the sight of two continents, and of all who go sailing up and down in these waters. But this pride has to be paid for by a good many entanglements of one kind and another. For example: It is a constant source of complaint on the part of Spain that Gibraltar is the headquarters for smuggling across the frontier. This is not at all surprising, since (like Singapore and perhaps other distant places in the British Empire) it is a "free port." Its deliverance from commercial restrictions dates back to the reign of Queen Anne, in the beginning of the last century--an immunity which it has enjoyed for nearly two hundred years. A few years since a light restriction was placed upon wines and spirits, probably for a moral rather than a commercial purpose, lest their too great abundance might lead to drunkenness among the soldiers. But with respect to everything else used by man, trade is absolutely free; whatever is brought here for sale is not burdened with the added tax of an import duty. Though Gibraltar is so near Tarifa, there is no _tariff_ levied on merchandise any more than on voyagers that go up and down the seas. Not only English goods, but French and Italian goods, all are free; even those which, if imported into England, would pay duty, here pay none, so that they are cheaper than in England itself. Thus Gibraltar is the paradise of free-traders, since in it there is no such "accursed thing" as a custom-house, and no such hated official as a custom-house officer! This puts it at an advantage as compared with any port or city or country which is not free, and they have to suffer from the difference. Especially does Spain, which is not yet converted to free trade, suffer from its close contact with its more liberal neighbor. The extraordinary cheapness on one side of the Neutral Ground, as compared with the dearness on the other, is a temptation to smuggling which it requires more virtue than the Spaniards possess to resist. The temptation takes them on their weakest side when it presents itself in the form of tobacco, for the Spaniards are a nation of smokers. The manufacture and sale of tobacco is a monopoly of the Government, and yields a large revenue, amounting, I believe, to fifteen millions of dollars. It might amount to twice as much if every smoker in Spain bought only Spanish tobacco. But who will pay the price for the Government cigars and cigarettes when they can be obtained without paying duty? Smuggling is going on every day, and every hour of the day; and the Spaniards say that it is winked at and encouraged by the English in Gibraltar; to which the latter reply that whatever smuggling is done, is done by the Spaniards themselves, for which they are not responsible. A shopkeeper in Gibraltar has as good a right to sell a pound of tobacco to a Spanish peasant as to an English sailor. What becomes of it after it leaves his shop is no concern of his. Of course the Spanish police are numerous, and are, or are supposed to be, vigilant. The Carabineros are stationed at the lines, whose duty it is to keep a sharp look-out on every passing vehicle; whether it be a lordly carriage rolling swiftly by, or a market wagon; to poke their noses into every little cart; to lift up the panniers of every donkey; and even to thrust their hands into every basket, and to give a pinch to every suspicious-looking parcel. And yet, with this great display of watchfulness, which indeed is a little overdone, somehow an immense quantity slips through their fingers. Many amusing stories are told of contrabandists. One honest Spaniard had a wonderful dog that went through miraculous transformations: he was sometimes fat and sometimes lean, nature (or man) having provided him with a double skin, between which was packed a handsome allowance of tobacco. This dog was a model of docility, and would play with other dogs, like the poor innocent that he was, and then dart off to his master to "unload" and be sent back again! It was said that he would make several trips a day. In another case a poor man tried to make an honest living by raising turkeys for market; but even then fate had a spite against him, for after he had brought them into town, he had no luck in selling them! The same ill-fortune attended him every day. But one evening, as he came out of the gates looking sad and sorrowful, the Carabineros took a closer inspection of his cart, and found that every turkey had been prepared for another market than that of Gibraltar, by a well-spiced "stuffing" under her motherly wings! Of course the Spanish officers are indignant at the duplicity which permits this smuggling to take place, and utter great oaths in sonorous Castilian against their treacherous neighbors. But even the guardians of the law may fall from virtue. The Governor, who took office here but a few weeks since, tells me that when the Governor of Algeciras, the Spanish town across the bay, came to pay his respects to him, the officers of his suite, while their horses were standing in the court of the Convent [the Government House], filled their pockets with tobacco! Fit agents indeed to collect the revenue of Spain! But smuggling is not the worst of the complications that arise out of having a fortress in a foreign country. Another is that Gibraltar becomes the resort of all the characters that find Spain too hot to hold them. Men who have committed offences against Spanish law, flee across the lines and claim protection. Some of them are political refugees, who have escaped from a Government that would persecute and perhaps imprison them for their opinions, and find safety under the English flag. The necessity for this protection is not so great now as in former years, when the Government of Spain was a despotism as absolute and intolerant as any in Europe. Even so late as thirty years ago, Castelar would have been shot if he had not escaped across the frontier into Switzerland; as his father, twenty years before, had been sentenced to death, and would have been executed if he had not made haste to get inside of Gibraltar, and remained here seven years. In his case, as in many others, the old fortress was a bulwark against tyranny. Within these walls the laws of national hospitality were sacred. No Spanish patriot could be taken from under this flag, to be sent to the dungeon or the scaffold. All honor to England, that she has a City of Refuge for the free and the brave of all lands, and that she has so often sheltered and saved those who were the champions, and but for her would have been the martyrs, of liberty! But the greater number of those who seek a refuge here have no claim to protection, since they are not political refugees, but ordinary criminals--thieves, and sometimes murderers--who have fled here to escape the punishment of their crimes. In such cases it is easy to say what should be done with them: they should be given up at once to the Spanish authorities, to be tried by Spanish law and receive the just reward of their deeds. If all cases were like these, the disposition of them would be a very simple matter. But they are not all so clear; some of them, indeed, are very complex, involving questions of international law, which an army officer, or even a civil officer, might not understand. A man may be accused of crime by the Spanish authorities, and yet, in the eye of impartial judges of another country, be guilty of no greater crime than loving his country too well. But the Spanish Government demands his surrender. The case is referred to the Colonial Secretary, as the highest authority in Gibraltar next to the Governor. It is a grave responsibility, which requires not only a disposition to do what is right and just, but a knowledge of law which a military or a civil officer may not possess. The present Secretary is Lord Gifford, and a more honorable English gentleman it would be impossible to find. But though a gallant soldier, brave and accomplished as he is, he may not be familiar with all the points which he may have to decide. He tells me that this matter of extradition is the most difficult duty that is laid upon him. He said, "I have two cases before me to-day," in the decision of which he seemed a good deal perplexed. With the most earnest desire to decide right, he might decide wrong. His predecessor had been removed for extraditing a man without proper authority. He told me the incident to illustrate the responsibility of his position, and the extreme difficulty of adjudicating cases which are of a doubtful character. It was this: The island of Cuba, as Americans know too well, is in a chronic state of insurrection. In one of the numerous outbreaks, a man who was implicated made his escape, and took refuge in Tangier, and while there asked of some visitors from Gibraltar if he would be safe here, to which they promptly replied, "Certainly; that he could not be given up," and on the strength of that assurance he came; but the Spanish agents were watching, and somehow managed to influence the officers here to surrender him. The English Government promptly disavowed the act, and claimed that the man was still under their protection, and should be brought back. This Spanish pride did not permit them to do. However, he was sent to Port Mahon, in the Balearic Islands, and there (perhaps by the connivance of the authorities, who may have thought it the easiest way to get rid of a troublesome question) he was not so closely guarded but that he was able to make his escape, and so the matter ended. But the Colonial Secretary who had permitted his extradition was promptly recalled, in disapprobation of his conduct. With such a warning before him, as well as from his own desire to do justice, the present Secretary wished to act with due prudence and caution, that he might not share the fate of his predecessor. I could but admire his patience and care, and yet a stranger can but reflect that all this complication and embarrassment comes from holding a fortress in a foreign country! But while this is true, yet what are such petty vexations as smuggling and extradition; what is the million of dollars a year which it costs to keep Gibraltar; in a matter which concerns the majesty and the colossal pride of England--the sense of power to hold her own against the world? A hundred years ago Burke spoke of Gibraltar with exultation as "a post of power, a post of superiority, of connection, of commerce--one which makes us invaluable to our friends and dreadful to our enemies;" and the feeling has survived to this day. Not an Englishman passes through the Straits whose heart does not swell within him to see the flag of his country floating from the top of the Rock, from which, as he believes, the whole world cannot tear it down. Every true Briton would look upon the lowering of that flag as the abdication of Imperial power. But is not this an over-estimate of the value of Gibraltar to England? Is it worth all it costs? Would it weigh much in the balance in a great contest of nations for the mastery of the world? The object of this Rock-fortress is to command the passage into the Mediterranean. The arms of Gibraltar are a Castle and a Key, to signify that it holds the key of the Straits, and that no ship flying any other flag than that of England can enter or depart except by her permission. But that power is already gone. England may hold the key of the Straits, but the door is too wide to be bolted. The hundred-ton guns of Gibraltar, even if aimed directly seaward, could not destroy or stop a passing fleet. I know this is not the limit of construction in modern ordnance. Guns have been wrought weighing a hundred and twenty tons, which throw a ball weighing a ton over ten miles! Such a gun mounted at Tarifa might indeed hurl its tremendous bolt across the Mediterranean into Africa. But Tarifa is in Spain, while opposite Gibraltar it is fourteen miles to Ceuta, a point not to be reached by any ordnance in existence, even if the last product of modern warfare were mounted on the height of O'Hara's Tower; so that a fleet of ironclads, hugging the African coast, would be quite safe from the English fire, which could not prevent the entrance of a French or German or Russian fleet into the Mediterranean, if it were strong enough to encounter the English fleet. The reliance must be therefore on the fleet, not on the fortress. Of course the latter would be a refuge in case of disaster, where the English ships could find protection under the guns of the fort. But the fortress _alone_ could not bar the passage into the Mediterranean. As to the fleet, England has been mistress of the seas for more than a century; and yet it does not follow that she will always retain this supremacy. Her fleet is still the largest and most powerful in the world, and her seamen as skilful and as brave as in the days of Nelson; but the conditions of naval warfare are greatly changed. The use of steam for ships of war as well as for commerce, and the building of ironclads mounted with enormous guns, tend to equalize the conditions of war. Battles may be decided by the weight of guns or the thickness of defensive armor, and in these particulars other nations have advanced as well as England. France, Germany, and Russia have vied with each other as to which should build the most tremendous ships of war. Even Italy has within a few years risen to the rank of a first-class naval power, as she has some of the largest ships in the world. The Italia, which I saw lying in the harbor of Naples, could probably have destroyed the whole fleet with which Nelson won the battle of Trafalgar; and hence the Italian fleet must be counted as a factor of no second importance in any future struggle for the control of the Mediterranean. And yet some military authorities think too much importance is attached to these modern inventions. Farragut did not believe in iron ships. He judged from his own experience in naval warfare, and no man had had greater. He had found wooden ships good enough to win his splendid victories. In his famous attack upon Mobile he ran his fleet close under the guns of the fort, himself standing in the round-top of his flag-ship to overlook the whole scene of battle, and then boldly attacked ironclads, and sunk them in the open bay. His motto was: "Wooden ships and iron hearts!" Ships and guns are good, but men are better. And so I do not give up my faith in English prowess and skill, but hold that, whatever the improvements in ships or guns, to the last hour that men meet each other face to face in battle, the issue will depend largely on a genius in war; on the daring to seize unexpected opportunities; to take advantage of sudden changes; and thus by some master-stroke to turn what seemed inevitable defeat into victory. In the year 1867 I crossed the Atlantic in the Great Eastern, then in command of Sir James Anderson. Among the passengers was the Austrian Admiral Tegetthoff, who had the year before gained the battle of Lissa, with whom I formed a pleasant acquaintance; and as we walked the deck together, drew from him some particulars of that great victory. He was as modest as he was brave, and did not like to talk of himself; but in answer to my inquiries, said that before the battle he knew the immense superiority of the Italian fleet; and that his only hope of victory was in disregarding all the ordinary rules of naval warfare: that, instead of drawing up his ships in the usual line of battle, he must rush into the centre of the enemy, and confuse them by the suddenness of his attack where they did not expect him. The manoeuvre was successful even beyond his own expectation. The _Rè d'Italia_, the flagship of the Italian Admiral, which had been built in New York as the masterpiece of naval architecture, was sunk, and the fleet utterly defeated! What Tegetthoff did at Lissa, the English may do in future battles. Of this I am sure, that whatever _can_ be done by courage and skill will be done by the sons of the Vikings to retain their mastery of the sea. But it would be too much to expect of any power that it could stand against the combined navies of the world. If Gibraltar be thus powerless for offence, is it altogether secure for defence? Is it really impregnable? That is a question often asked, and on which only military men are competent to give an opinion, and even they are divided. Englishmen, who are most familiar with its defences, say, Yes! Those defences have been enormously increased even in our day. In the Great Siege we saw its powers of resistance a hundred years ago. Yet Eliott defeated the French and Spanish fleets and armies with less than a hundred guns. Ninety years later--in 1870--there were _seven hundred_ guns in position on the Rock, the smallest of which were larger than the heaviest used in the siege. And yet since 1870 the increase in the size of guns and their weight of metal, is greater than in the hundred years before. In the siege it was counted a wonderful shot that carried a ball two miles and a half. Now the hundred-ton guns carry over eight miles. Putting these things together, English officers maintain that Gibraltar cannot be taken by all the powers of Europe combined. On the other hand, French and German engineers--familiar with the new inventions in war, and knowing that they can use dynamite and nitro-glycerine, instead of gunpowder, to give tremendous force to the new projectiles--would probably say that there is no fortress which cannot be battered down. To me, who am but a layman in such matters, as I walk about Gibraltar, it seems that, if all the armies of Europe should come up against it, they could make no impression on its rock-ribbed sides; that only some convulsion of nature could shake its "everlasting foundations." And yet such is the power of modern explosives to rend the rocks and hills, with a new invention every year of something still more terrible, that we know not but they may at last almost tear the solid globe asunder. What wreck and ruin of the works of man may be wrought by such engines of destruction, it is not given us to foresee. Meanwhile to the Spaniards the English possession of Gibraltar is a constant irritation. It is of no use to remind them that they had it once, and might have kept it; that is no comfort; it only makes the matter worse; for they are like spoiled children, who grieve the most for that which they have thrown away. Again it was offered to them by England, with only the condition that they should not sell Florida to Napoleon; but as he was then in the height of his career, they thought it safer to trust to his protection; albeit a few years later they found out his treachery, and had to depend on an English army, led by Wellington, to drive the French out of Spain. And still these spoiled children of the South will not recognize the English sovereignty. To this day the King of Spain claims Gibraltar as a part of his dominions, though he recognizes it as "temporarily in the possession of the English," and all who are born on the Rock are entitled to the rights of Spanish subjects! But whether Gibraltar can be "taken" or not by siege or storm, in the course of human events there may be a turn of fortune which shall compel England to surrender it. If there should come a general European war, in which there should be (what the first Napoleon endeavored to effect) a combination of all the Continental powers against England, she might, standing alone, be reduced to such extremity as to be obliged to sue for peace, and one of the hard conditions forced upon her might be the surrender of Gibraltar! But while we may speculate on such a possibility of the future, it is not a change which I desire to see in my day. The transfer of Gibraltar to Spain might satisfy Spanish pride, but I fear that it would be no longer what it is if it had not the treasury of England to supply its numerous wants. The Spaniards are not good managers, and Gibraltar would ere long sink into the condition of an old, decayed Spanish town. Further than this, I confess that, as a matter of sentiment, it would be no pleasure to me to visit it if the charm of its present society were gone. I should miss greatly the English faces, so manly and yet so kindly, and the dear old mother tongue. So while I live I hope Gibraltar will be held by English soldiers. "After me the deluge!" No: not the deluge, but universal peace! Let the old Rock remain as it is. Lover of peace as I am, I should be sorry to see it dismantled. It would not be the same thing if it were to become another Capri--a mere resort for artists, who should sit upon Europa Point, and make their sketches; or if lovers only should saunter in the Alameda gardens, whispering softly as they look out upon the moonlit sea. The mighty crag that bears the name of Hercules should bear on its front something which speaks of power. Let the Great Fortress remain as the grim monument of War, even when men learn war no more; as the castles on the Rhine are kept as the monuments of mediæval barbarism. If its guns are all silent, or unshotted, it will stand for something more than a symbol of brute force: it will be a monumental proof that the blessed age of peace has come. Then, if there be any change in the flag that waves over it; if the Red Cross of England, which has never been lowered in war, should give place to an emblem of universal peace; it may be a Red Cross still--red in sign of blood, but only of that blood which was shed alike for all nations, and which is yet to unite in One Brotherhood the whole Family of Mankind. CHAPTER IX. FAREWELL TO GIBRALTAR--LEAVING FOR AFRICA. All too swiftly the days flew by, and the time of my visit to Gibraltar was coming to an end. But in travel I have often found that the last taste was the sweetest. It is only when you have come to know a place well that you can fully enjoy it; when emancipated from guides, with no self-appointed cicerone to dog your footsteps and intrude his stereotyped observations; when, in short, you have obtained "the freedom of the place" by right of familiar acquaintance, and can wander about alone, sauntering slowly in favorite walks, or sitting under the shade of the trees, and looking off upon the purple mountains or the rippling sea, that you are fully master of the situation. "Days of idleness," as they are called, are sometimes, of all days, at once the busiest and the happiest, when, having finished up all regular and routine work, and thus done his duty as a traveller, one devotes himself to "odds and ends," and gathers up his varied impressions into one delightful whole. These are delicious moments, when the pleasure of a foreign clime-- "Blest be the time, the clime, the spot!"-- becomes so intense that we are reluctant to let it go, and linger still, clinging to that which is nearly exhausted, as if we would drain the cup to the very last drop. Such is the feeling that comes in these last days, as I go wandering about, full of moods and fancies born of the place and the hour. There is a strange spell and fascination in the Rock itself. If it be proper ever to speak of respect for inanimate things, next to a great mountain, I have a profound respect for a great rock. It is the emblem of strength and power, which by its very height shelters and protects the feebleness of man. How often on the desert, under the burning sun, have I espied afar off a huge cliff rising above the plain, and urging on my wearied camel, thrown myself from it, and found the inexpressible relief of "the shadow of a great rock in a weary land!" So here this mountain wall that rises above me, does not awe and overwhelm so much as it shelters and protects; the higher it lifts its head, the more it carries me upward, and gives me an outlook over a wider horizon. If I were a dweller in Gibraltar, I would seek out every sequestered nook upon its side, where I could be away from the haunts of men, and could "dream dreams and see visions." Often would I climb to the Signal Station, or O'Hara's Tower, to see the glory of the sunrisings and sunsettings; and, as the evening comes on, to see the African mountains casting their shadows over the broad line of coast and the broader sea. Next to the Rock itself, the oldest thing in Gibraltar--the very oldest that man has made--is the Moorish Castle, on which the Moslem invader planted the standard of the Crescent near twelve centuries ago, making this his first stronghold in the land which he was to conquer. And now I must look upon its face again, because of its very age. American as I am, coming from a country where everything is supposed to be "brand new," I feel a strange delight in these old castles and towers, and even in ruins, gray with the moss of centuries. I know it is a "far cry" to the time of the Moors, but we must not think of it as a time of barbarism. The period in which the Moors held Gibraltar was that of the Moorish rule in Spain, when they were the most highly civilized people in Europe, and the Goths were the barbarians. In that day the old Moorish town must have been a very picturesque place, with the domes of its mosques, and the slender minarets rising above them, from which at the sunset hour voices called the faithful to prayer; and very picturesque figures were those of the turbaned Moors, as they reverently turned toward Mecca, and bowed themselves and worshipped. Nor did the romance die when the Spaniards followed in the procession of races, for they were only less picturesque than the Moors. They too had their good times. A life which would seem tame and dull to the modern Englishman had its charms for the children of the sun, whether they were children of Europe or of Africa. When the church took the place of the mosque, mollahs and ulemas were replaced by priests and monks; and the old Franciscan friars, whose Convent is now the residence of the Governor, marched in sombre procession through the streets, and instead of the call from the minaret, the evening was made holy by the sound of the Ave Maria or the Angelus bell. And these Spaniards had their gayeties as well as their solemnities. They danced as well as prayed. When their prayers were ended, the same dark-eyed senoritas who had knelt in the churches sat on balconies in the moonlight, while gallant cavaliers sang their songs and tinkled their guitars--diversions which filled the intervals of stern and savage war. Out of all this strange old history, with many a heroic episode that still lives in Spanish song and story, might be wrought, if there were another Irving to tell the tale, an historical romance as fascinating as that of the Conquest of Granada. The materials are abundant; all that is wanting is that they be touched by the wand of the enchanter. But as I have just now more freshly in mind the English history of Gibraltar, I leave the Spaniards and the Moors, and betake me to the King's Bastion, on which "Old Eliott" stood on the greatest day that Gibraltar ever saw. And here we must not forget the second in command, his brave companion-in-arms, General Boyd, who built the Bastion in 1773, and who, on laying the first stone, prayed "that he might live to see it resist the united fleets of France and Spain"--a wish that was gloriously fulfilled nine years later, when he took part in the immortal defence; and it is fitting that his body should sleep under his own work, at once the instrument and the monument of that great victory. Even the trees have a historic air, as they are old--at least many of them have a look of age. One would think that the constant firing of guns, the shock and "sulphurous canopy," would kill vegetation or stunt it in its growth. But there are many fine old trees in Gibraltar. Near the Alameda stands a magnificent _bella sombra_ (so named because its wide-spreading branches are dark and sombre, and yet strangely beautiful), which must be very old. Perhaps it was standing a century ago, and heard all the guns fired in the Great Siege, as possibly a few years later it may have heard, across the bay and away over the Spanish hills, even the thunder of Nelson at Trafalgar. [Illustration: WINDMILL HILL AND O'HARA'S TOWER.] On one of the last days I had engaged to take a midday dinner with the pastor of the Scotch Church, who lives in the southern part of the town. It is a pleasant walk beyond the Alameda over the hill, where you can but stop now and then to look down on the long breakwater of the New Mole, or into the quiet dock of Rosia Bay; or to hear the bugles waken the echoes of the hills. After dinner my friend proposed a stroll, in which I was glad to join him, especially as it took me to new points of view, from which I could look up at the Rock on its southern side, as I had already seen it on the north. Taking our way across the level plateau of Windmill Hill, past barracks and hospitals that are here somewhat retired from the shore, we descended toward the sea. This end of Gibraltar is a great resort of the people in the summer time, and furnishes the only drive, unless they go out of the gates and crossing the Neutral Ground enter the Spanish lines. Here they are wholly within the Peninsula, and yet in a space so limited is a drive such as one might find along the Riviera. The road is beautifully kept, and winds in and out among the rocks, in one place crossing a deep gorge, which makes you almost dizzy as you look over the parapet of the little bridge which spans it. At each turn you get some new glimpse of the sea, and whenever you raise your eyes to look across the Strait, there is the long line of the African Coast. This is the favorite drive of officers and ladies on summer afternoons, since here they can escape the blistering sun, and get into the cool shadows. As we come to Europa Point we are at the very foot of the Rock, and must stop to look upward; for above us rises the highest point of Gibraltar, O'Hara's Tower, which, as it is also nearest to the sea, is the one that first catches the eye of the mariner sailing up or down the Mediterranean. Here the old Phoenicians sacrificed to Hercules, as they were approaching what was to them the end of the habitable globe; and here, in later ages, a lamp was always hung before the shrine of the Virgin, and the devout sailor crossed himself and repeated his Ave Maria as he floated by. Winding round Europa Point, we found our progress barred by an iron gateway; but rattling at the gate brought a sentinel, who, seeing nothing suspicious in our appearance, allowed us to enter the guarded enclosure. Here in this quiet spot, on a shelf of rock which hangs above the road, and is itself overhung by the mighty cliff which rises behind it and above it, is the cottage which is the Governor's summer retreat. The Convent answers very well for a winter residence; but in summer Gibraltar is a very hot place, as it has the reflection of the sun both from the sea in front and the Rock behind; and the Convent, standing on the shore of the bay, gets the full force of both. But there are cool retreats both north and south. On the north the townsfolk pour out of the gates to get under the giant cliff which casts its mighty shadow across the Neutral Ground. A little farther to the east, they come to the sands of a beach, which seems so like a watering-place in dear Old England that they have christened it Margate. So also, turning the corner at the south end of the Rock, one is sheltered from the heat in the long summer afternoon. The cottage is without any pretension to ornament; but as it has a somewhat elevated perch, like a Swiss chalet, it is a sort of eyrie, in which one can look down upon the sea and catch every wind that comes from the Mediterranean. Just now this little eyrie was turned to another purpose--a place of confinement for Zebehr Pasha, a name that brings back memories of Egypt. An Arab sheikh, at the head of one of the most powerful tribes on the Upper Nile, he was at the same time one of the most famous slave-hunters of Africa. And yet such was his influence in the Soudan, that he was the one man to whom Gordon turned in his isolation at Khartoum, when neither England nor Egypt came to the rescue; and his one message to the authorities at Cairo was: "Send me Zebehr Pasha!" The request was refused, and we know the rest. Had it been granted, the result might have been different. But the British Government seemed to have a great fear of letting him return to the scene of his old exploits lest he should turn against them, and after the English occupation of Egypt, had him remanded for safe-keeping to Gibraltar. His detention is made as little irksome as possible. He is not confined in a prison. He is even the occupant of the Governor's cottage, and has his family with him. Looking up at the windows, I saw dark faces (perhaps those of his wives), that moved away as soon as they were observed. But to be comfortably housed is nothing without liberty. To the lion in captivity it matters little whether he is in a barred cage, or has the most luxurious quarters in a Royal Zoölogical Garden. Zebehr Pasha is a lion of the desert that has never been tamed. How he must chafe at the gilded bars of his prison, and look out wistfully upon the blue waves that separate him from his beloved Africa! He envies the eagles that he sees soaring and screaming over the sea. If they would but lend him their wings, he would "homeward fly," and mounting the swiftest dromedary, taste once more the wild freedom of the desert.[12] But all things must have an end, and my stay in Gibraltar, delightful as it was, must be brought to a close. I was not eager to depart. So quickly does one become at home in new surroundings, that a place which I never saw till a few days before, now seemed like an old friend. My new acquaintances said I "ought to stay a month at least," and I was sure that it would pass quickly and delightfully. But travellers, like city tramps, must "move on," and it is certainly better to go regretting and regretted, than to carry away only disagreeable memories. I had taken passage for Oran on the Barbary Coast, when the Colonial Secretary, kind to the last, proposed to send me off to the ship in a government launch, an offer which my modesty compelled me to decline. But he insisted (for these Englishmen, when they do a thing, must do it handsomely) till I had to submit. That evening, while dining at the Hotel, a servant brought me word that a messenger had a special message for me, and when I presented myself, he put into my hands the following: "_Memorandum from the Colonial Secretary to the Captain of the Port._ "Dr. Field, an American gentleman, introduced here by Sir Clare Ford, is now staying at the Royal Hotel, and leaving Friday evening by the steamer for Algiers. "His Excellency wishes every attention to be shown him: so you will send a Boarding Officer to-morrow at 6 P.M., and ask him at what hour he desires to leave from Waterport, and have a launch ready for him: the Boarding Officer making all arrangements for Dr. Field and his friends passing through the gates. Gifford." On the back of the above order was written in red ink, in very large letters: "Boarding Officer: _Comply with His Excellency's wishes_. "G. B. Bassadone, "For the Captain of the Port." This was the first time in my life that I had been waited upon for orders! Having this greatness thrust upon me, I did not betray my unfamiliarity with such things by any light and trivial conduct, but kept my dignity with a sober face, and graciously announced my sovereign pleasure to depart the following evening at eight o'clock. This was really a great convenience, as it gave me a few hours more on shore, whereas otherwise I must leave before sunset, when the gates are shut, not to be opened till morning. Appreciating not only the courtesy, but the distinction, I invited an American party at the Hotel to keep me company. But they had already made their arrangements, and went off ingloriously before "gun-fire"; while His Republican Highness took his dinner quietly, and awaited the coming of his escort. One young lady, however, (a cousin of Mr. Joseph H. Choate, of New York, my friend and neighbor at our summer homes in the Berkshire Hills,) stood by me, and at eight o'clock in the evening we walked down Waterport Street, attended by two stalwart defenders. The street was strangely silent, for as the outsiders leave at sunset when the gates are closed, the town is very quiet. It was dark as we approached the first gate, which had been shut hours before; but the guard, having "received orders," instantly appeared to unlock it, a form which was repeated at the second line of fortifications. At the quay we found the launch ready, with steam up, and as we took our places in the stern of the boat, on the cushioned seat provided for distinguished guests, I felt as if I were a Lord High Admiral. It was a beautiful night. The moon was up, though half hidden by clouds, from which now and then she burst forth, covering the bay with a flood of light. At that moment--stern Puritan as I am, and impassible as my friends know me to be--if I had been put upon my oath, or my honor, I should have been compelled to confess, that to be floating over a moonlit sea, with a fair countrywoman at my side, was not altogether the most miserable position in which I have ever been placed in my wanderings up and down in this world. Once on the deck, the whole broadside of the Rock was before us, with the lights glimmering far up and down the heights. At half-past nine the last gun was fired, and in another half hour the lights in the barracks were put out, and all was dark and still. It was midnight when the steamer began to move. The moon had now flung off her misty veil, and risen to the zenith, where she hung over the very crest of the Rock, her soft light falling on every projecting crag. The ship itself seemed to feel the holy stillness of the night, and glided like a phantom-ship, almost without a sound, over the unruffled sea. As we crept past the long line of batteries, the great Fortress, with its hundreds of guns, was silent; the Lion was sleeping, with all his thunders muffled in his rocky breast. Thus our last glimpse of Gibraltar was a vision not of War, but of Peace, as we rounded Europa Point and set our faces toward Africa. [Illustration: EUROPA POINT.] [Footnotes] [1] The exact figures of this Armstrong Gun are: Weight, 101.2 tons. Length, 32.65 feet. Length of bore, 30.25 feet. Diameter of bore, 17.72 inches. Length of charge of powder, 5 feet. Weight of charge, 450 pounds. Weight of shot, 2,000 pounds. Velocity at the muzzle, 1,548 feet per second. At such velocity, a ball of such weight would have a "smashing effect" of 33.230 "foot-tons," and would penetrate 24.9 inches of wrought iron. Range, when fired at the highest elevation, over 8 miles. [2] A letter received from Sir Charles Wilson, who was in the column that crossed the desert, and who went up the Nile and arrived in sight of Khartoum only to learn that the city had fallen and Gordon been killed, speaks warmly of both these officers, his old companions in arms. He says: "General Earle, who was killed at Kirbekan, was a regimental officer in the Guards, and had been on the staff in Canada and India--in both cases, I think, as military secretary to the Viceroy. He was much beloved by every one. Colonel Earle, who commanded the South Staffordshire Regiment, was also killed at Kirbekan. He originally rose from the ranks, and was looked upon as one of the best regimental officers up the Nile. [3] War Services of General Officers, in Hart's Annual Army List for 1882. [4] The above outline is derived chiefly from Chalmers' Biographical Dictionary, a work in thirty-two octavo volumes, published in London more than seventy years ago (in 1814). I have sought for fuller information from other sources, but without result. The "Encyclopædia Britannica," in its article on Gibraltar refers to a "Life of Eliott," but I have not been able to find it either in the United States or in England. After a fruitless search in the Astor Library, with the aid of the Librarian, I cabled twice to London, the second time directing that search be made in the British Museum, but received reply that the book could not be found. The American Consul at Gibraltar writes me that he cannot find it there. Can it be possible that there is not in existence any full and authentic record of one of the greatest heroes that England has produced? Has such a man no place in English history except to furnish the subject of an article in a Biographical Dictionary? [5] The incidents so briefly told in the following sketch are derived chiefly from "A History of the Siege of Gibraltar," by John Drinkwater, a Captain in the 72d Regiment, which formed part of the garrison, and who was therefore a witness and an actor in the scenes he describes. His narrative, though written in the plain style of a soldier, yet being "compiled from observations daily noted down upon the spot," is invaluable as a minute and faithful record of one of the greatest events in modern war. [6] Sayer's History of Gibraltar, pp. 297, 298. [7] Sayer's History of Gibraltar, pp. 346, 347. [8] Drinkwater, p. 68. [9] It is a common saying that the brave are generous, but this is not always so. Some of the bravest men that ever lived have been cold-hearted and cruel. But Eliott, though he had an iron frame and iron will, was as soft-hearted as a woman. Nothing roused his indignation more than an act of inhumanity on the part of a superior toward an inferior. Hence he was the protector not only of women and children, but of prisoners who fell into his hands, and who might otherwise be exposed to the license of soldiers demoralized by victory. He repressed all pillage and stood between the victors and the vanquished, as the defender of the defenceless. So noted was he for his humanity that those who were in trouble sought his protection, and his response to their appeals sometimes took them by surprise. An amusing illustration of this occurred some years before at the capture of Havana: A Frenchman who had suffered greatly by the depredations of the soldiery, came to him, and begged in bad English that he would interfere to have his property restored. But his wife, who was a woman of high spirit, was angry at her husband that he should ask any favor of an enemy, and turned to him sharply, saying, "Comment pouvez vous demander de grace à un homme qui vient vous dépouiller? N'en esperez pas." The husband persisting in his application, the wife grew more loud in her censure, and said, "Vous n'étes pas Français!" The General, who was busy writing at the time, overheard the conversation, and as he spoke French perfectly, turned to the woman, and said smiling, "Madame, ne vous échauffez pas; ce que votre mari demande lui sera accordé." At this she broke out again, as if it were the last degree of indignity, that the Englishman should speak French: "Oh, faut-il pour surcroit de malheur, que le barbare parle Français!" The General was so much pleased with the woman's spirit that he not only procured them their property again, but also took pains to accommodate them in every respect.--_Chalmers' Biographical Dictionary._ [10] Sayer's History, p. 365. [11] "The shot were heated either in the grates and furnaces made for that purpose, or by piling them in a corner of some old house adjoining the batteries, and surrounding them with faggots, pieces of timber, and small coal." Afterwards "the engineers erected kilns (similar to those used in burning lime, but smaller) in various parts of the garrison. They were large enough to heat upwards of one hundred balls in an hour and a quarter."--_Drinkwater._ [12] A few months after I left Gibraltar, the old Arab was set at liberty by the British Government, but on very strict conditions. A letter from the American Consul, in reply to my questions, says: "Zebehr Pasha was released August 3, 1887, on signing a certain document sent from the Home Government relative to his future conduct. This was an engagement 'to remain in the place which should be chosen by the Egyptian Government; to place himself under its surveillance; and to abstain from interference in political or military questions relating to the Soudan or otherwise.' This he signed in the presence of two British staff officers. He had arrived in Gibraltar in March, 1885, and from that time had been a prisoner in the Governor's cottage for about two years and a half, under charge at different times of several officers of the garrison. He left Gibraltar August 16th, for Port Said, accompanied by his household, which included two women and three men, and was attended by three male and two female servants. He also took back to his African home an infant born in the Governor's cottage at Europa." [Transcriber's Notes The following modifications have been made, Page vii: ».« changed to »,« (memories of a country and people, this modern fortress) Page 3: ».« added (is free to all the commerce of the world.) Page 32: »'« changed to »"« (Set the wild echoes flying!")] 
34203	----	[Illustration: image of book's spine] [Illustration: image of book's cover] [Illustration: DON JOHN OF AUSTRIA. FROM THE ORIGINAL IN THE ROYAL MUSEUM AT MADRID. London: George Routledge & Sons, Broadway, Ludgate Hill.] HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF PHILIP THE SECOND _KING OF SPAIN_ VOLUME THE THIRD AND BIOGRAPHICAL & CRITICAL MISCELLANIES BY WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL NEW YORK: 416, BROOME STREET PRESCOTT'S WORKS. _One-Volume Edition._ FERDINAND AND ISABELLA, 5s. CONQUEST OF MEXICO. 5s. CONQUEST OF PERU. 5s. PHILIP THE SECOND. Vols. I. and II. in One Vol., 5s. PHILIP THE SECOND. Vol. III., and ESSAYS, in One Vol., 5s. CHARLES THE FIFTH. 5s. CONTENTS OF THE THIRD VOLUME. BOOK V. CHAPTER I. PAGE THE MOORS OF SPAIN 1 Conquest of Spain by the Arabs 1 Hostility between the Two Races 2 The Country recovered by the Spaniards 2 Effect of the Struggle on the National Character 2 Religious Intolerance of the Spaniards 3 Attempts to convert the Moslems 3 Policy of Ximenes 3 Suppression of the Mahometan Worship 4 Outward Conformity to Christianity 4 Moors abandon their National Habits 4 Their Condition under Philip the Second 5 Their Industry and Commerce 5 Treatment by the Government 6 Ordinance of 1563 8 Stringent Measures called for by the Clergy 9 Prepared by the Government 9 Severity of the Enactments 10 Approval of them by Philip 11 Proclamation at Granada 12 Indignation of the Moriscoes 12 Representations to Deza 12 Appeal to the Throne 13 Rejection of their Prayers 14 CHAPTER II. REBELLION OF THE MORISCOES 14 The Edict enforced 14 Plans for Resistance by the Moriscoes 15 Their Descent on Granada 16 Failure of the Attempt 16 General Insurrection 17 Election of a King 17 Character of Aben-Humeya 18 His Coronation 18 His Preparations for Defence 19 The Christian Population 19 Unsuspicious of their Danger 19 Attacked by the Moors--Panic 20 General Massacre 21 Horrible Cruelties 21 Fate of the Women and Children 22 Fierceness of Aben-Farax 23 Deposed from his Command 23 CHAPTER III. REBELLION OF THE MORISCOES 24 Consternation in the Capital 24 Mutual Fears of the Two Races 24 Garrison of the Alhambra strengthened 25 Troops mustered by Mondejar 25 Civic Militia--Feudal Levies 25 Warlike Ecclesiastics 26 March of the Army 26 Pass of Tablate 27 Bridge crossed by a Friar 27 The Army follows 28 The Moriscoes withdraw 28 Entrance into the Alpujarras 28 Night Encampment at Lanjaron 29 Relief of Orgiba 29 Mondejar pursues his March 30 Gloom of the Mountain Scenery 30 Defile of Alfajarali 30 Sudden Attack 30 Bravery of the Andalusian Knights 31 Precipitate Retreat of the Moriscoes 31 Capture of Bubion 31 Humanity of Mondejar 31 Sufferings of the Army 32 Capture of Jubíles 33 Prisoners protected by Mondejar 33 Massacred by the Soldiers 33 Christian Women sent to Granada 34 Welcomed by the Inhabitants 34 CHAPTER IV. REBELLION OF THE MORISCOES 35 Mondejar's Policy 35 Aben-Humeya at Paterna 35 Offers to Surrender 36 Flight to the Sierra Nevada 36 Disposition of the Moorish Prisoners 37 Attack on Las Guájaras 38 Evacuated by the Garrison 38 Massacre ordered by Mondejar 38 Cruelty of the Count of Tendilla 39 Attempt to capture Aben-Humeya 39 His Escape 40 Heroism of Aben-Aboo 40 The Marquis of Los Velez 40 His Campaign in the Alpujarras 41 Cruelties committed by the Troops 41 Celebration of a religious _Fête_ 42 Licentiousness of the Soldiery 42 Contrast between Mondejar and Los Velez 43 Accusations against the former 44 Decision arrived at in Madrid 44 Effect on the Army 45 Moorish Prisoners in Granada 45 Rumours circulated in the Capital 45 Night Attack on the Prisoners 46 Fearful Struggle and Massacre 46 Apathy of the Government 47 Renewal of the Insurrection 47 CHAPTER V. REBELLION OF THE MORISCOES 48 Don John of Austria 48 Birth and Early History 49 Placed under the Care of Quixada 49 Secresy in regard to his Origin 50 The young Geronimo at Yuste 50 Testamentary Depositions of the Emperor 51 The Boy presented to the Regent 51 Curious Scene 52 Meeting appointed with the King 53 Philip acknowledges his Brother 53 Assigns him an Establishment 54 Royal Triumvirate at Alcalá 54 Chivalrous Character of Don John 55 His adventurous Disposition 55 He is entrusted with the Command of a Fleet 56 His Cruise in the Mediterranean 56 He is selected for the Command in Granada 57 Restrictions on his Authority 57 His Reception at Granada 57 Answers to Petitioners 58 Discussions in the Council of War 59 New Levies summoned 59 Increased Power of Aben-Humeya 60 Forays into the Christian Territory 60 Movements of Los Velez 61 Extension of the Rebellion 61 Successful Expedition of Requesens 61 Moriscoes lay Siege to Seron 62 Surrender and Massacre of the Garrison 62 Decree for removing the Moriscoes from Granada 63 Their Consternation and Grief 63 Expulsion from the City 64 Farewell to their ancient Home 64 Distribution through the Country 64 Ruinous Effects on Granada 65 Character of the Transaction 66 CHAPTER VI. REBELLION OF THE MORISCOES 66 State of the Troops under Los Velez 66 Encounter with Aben-Humeya 67 Flight of the Morisco Prince 67 Desertions from the Spanish Camp 68 Mondejar recalled to Court 68 His Character 68 Exterminating Policy of the Government 69 Sensual Tyranny of Aben-Humeya 69 Treachery towards Diego Alguazil 70 Plan of Revenge formed by Alguazil 71 Conspiracy against Aben-Humeya 71 His Assassination 72 He is succeeded by Aben-Aboo 72 Energy of the new Chief 73 Repulse at Orgiba 73 The Place evacuated by the Garrison 74 Continual Forays 74 Conflicts in the _Vega_ 75 Don John's desire for Action 75 Philip yields to his Entreaties 76 Preparations for the Campaign 76 Surprise of Guejar 76 Mortification of Don John 77 Mendoza the Historian 77 CHAPTER VII. REBELLION OF THE MORISCOES 79 Philip's Instructions to his Brother 80 Don John takes the Field 80 Discontent of Los Velez 80 His Meeting with Don John 81 He retires from the War 81 Investment of Galera 82 Description of the Place 82 Munitions and Garrison 83 Establishment of Batteries 84 The Siege opened 84 First Assault 84 Spaniards repulsed 85 Mines opened in the Rock 86 Second Assault 86 Explosion of the Mine 87 Troops rash to the Attack 87 Struggle at the Ravelin 87 Bravery of the Morisco Women 87 Ill Success of Padilla 87 Failure of the Attack 88 Insubordination of the Troops 88 Severe Loss of the Spaniards 88 Bloody Determination of Don John 89 Prudent Advice of Philip 89 Condition of the Besieged 89 Preparations for a last Attack 90 Cannonade and Explosions 91 Third Assault 91 Irresistible Fury of the Spaniards 91 Struggle in the Streets and Houses 92 Desperation of the Inhabitants 92 Inhumanity of the Conqueror 92 Wholesale Massacre 92 The Town demolished 94 Tidings communicated to Philip 94 Reputation gained by Don John 94 CHAPTER VIII. REBELLION OF THE MORISCOES 95 Seron reconnoitred 95 Sudden Attack by the Moriscoes 95 Army thrown into Confusion 96 Indignation of Don John 96 Death of Quixada 97 His Character 98 Doña Magdalena de Ulloa 98 Rapid Successes of Don John 98 Negotiations opened with El Habaqui 99 Merciless Pursuit of the Rebels 99 Guerilla Warfare 99 Conferences at Fondon 100 Aben-Aboo consents to treat 100 Arrangement concluded 100 Submission tendered by El Habaqui 101 Dissatisfaction with the Treaty 102 Vacillation of Aben-Aboo 102 El Habaqui engages to arrest him 103 Fate of El Habaqui 103 Mission of Palacios 104 His Interview with Aben-Aboo 104 Spirited Declaration of that Chief 104 Stern Resolve of the Government 104 War of Extermination 105 Expedition of the Duke of Arcos 105 March across the Plain of Calaluz 106 Engagement with the Moriscoes 106 The Rebellion crushed 106 Edict of Expulsion 106 Removal of the Moriscoes 107 Don John's Impatience to Resign 108 His Final Dispositions 108 Hiding-place of Aben-Aboo 109 Plot formed for his Capture 109 His Interview with El Senix 109 His Murder 110 His Body brought to Granada 110 His Head placed in a Cage 110 Remarks on his Career 111 Wasted Condition of the Country 112 The scattered Moriscoes 112 Cruelly treated by the Government 112 Their Industry and Cheerfulness 113 Increase of their Numbers 113 They preserve their National Feeling 114 Mutual Hatred of the Two Races 114 Expulsion of the Moriscoes from Spain 114 Works of Marmol and Circourt 114 CHAPTER IX. WAR WITH THE TURKS 116 Sultan Selim the Second 116 Determines on the Conquest of Cyprus 116 Spirit of Pius the Fifth 117 His Appeal to Philip 117 King's Entrance into Seville 117 Determines to join the League 118 Capture of Nicosia 118 Vacillating Conduct of Venice 118 Meeting of Deputies at Rome 119 Treaty of Confederation 119 Ratified and proclaimed 120 Turkish Fleet in the Adriatic 120 Papal Legate at Madrid 120 Concessions to the Crown 121 Fleets of Venice and Rome 121 Preparations in Spain 121 Enthusiasm of the Nation 122 Don John's Departure 122 His Reception at Naples 128 His noble Appearance 123 Accomplishments and Popularity 123 Presentation of the Consecrated Standard 124 Arrival at Messina 124 Grand Naval Spectacle 124 Strength and Condition of the Fleets 125 Discretion of the Generalissimo 125 Communications from the Pope 126 Departure from Messina 126 CHAPTER X. WAR WITH THE TURKS 126 Arrival at Corfu 127 Council of War 127 Resolution to give Battle 127 Arbitrary Conduct of Veniero 128 Passage across the Sea of Iona 128 Fall of Famagosta 128 The Enemy in Sight 129 Preparations for Combat 129 Final Instructions of Don John 129 Approach of the Turkish Fleet 130 Its Form and Disposition 130 Change in the order of Battle 131 Last Preparation of the Christians 131 Battle of Lepanto 132 Left Wing of the Allies turned 132 Right Wing, under Doria, broken 132 Don John and Ali Pasha engaged 133 Superior Fire of the Spaniards 133 Bird's-eye View of the Scene 134 Venetians victorious on the Left 134 Continued Struggle in the Centre 135 Turkish Admiral boarded 135 Death of Ali Pasha 135 Victory of the Christians 136 Flight of Uluch Ali 137 Chase and Escape 137 Allies take Shelter in Petala 137 CHAPTER XI. WAR WITH THE TURKS 137 Losses of the Combatants 137 Turkish Armada annihilated 138 Roll of Slaughter and Fame 138 Exploits of Farnese 138 Noble Spirit of Cervantes 139 Sons of Ali Pasha Prisoners 139 Generously treated by Don John 139 His Conduct towards Veniero 140 Operations suspended 141 Triumphant Return to Messina 141 Celebrations in Honour of the Victory 141 Tidings despatched to Spain 142 Philip's reception of them 142 Acknowledgments to his Brother 143 Don John's Conduct criticised 144 Real Fruits of the Victory 145 Delay in resuming Operations 145 Death of Pius the Fifth 145 Philip's Distrust 146 Permits his Brother to Sail 146 Turks decline to accept Battle 147 Anniversary of Lepanto 147 Allies disband their Forces 147 Perfidy of Venice 147 The League dissolved 148 Tunis taken by Don John 148 He provides for its Security 149 Returns to Naples 149 His Mode of Life there 150 His Schemes of Dominion 150 Tunis retaken by the Moslems 150 Don John's Mission to Genoa 151 He prepares a fresh Armament 151 His Disappointment and Return to Madrid 151 BOOK VI. CHAPTER I. DOMESTIC AFFAIRS OF SPAIN 153 Internal Administration 153 Revolutions under Isabella and Charles V. 153 Absolute Power of the Crown 154 Contrast between Charles and Philip 154 The latter wholly a Spaniard 154 The Royal Councils 155 Principal Advisers of the Crown 155 Character of Ruy Gomez de Silva 155 Figueroa, Count of Feria 157 Cardinal Espinosa 157 Two Parties in the Council 159 Balance held by Philip 159 His Manner of transacting Business 159 His Assiduity 160 His Mode of dividing the Day 161 His Love of Solitude 161 Extent of his Information 161 Partial Confidence in his Ministers 162 His Frugality 162 His magnificent Establishment 162 His fatal Habit of Procrastination 163 Remonstrances of his Almoner 164 Habits of the great Nobles 164 Manners of the Court 165 Degeneracy of the Nobles 165 Splendour of their Households 165 Loss of Political Power 166 Depressed Condition of the Commons 166 Petitions of the Cortes 166 Their Remonstrance against Arbitrary Government 167 Their Regard for the National Interests 167 Erroneous Notions respecting Commerce 168 Sumptuary Laws 168 Encouragement of Bull-Fights 169 Various Subjects of Legislation 169 Schools and Universities 170 Royal Pragmatics 170 Philip's Replies to the Cortes 170 Freedom of Discussion 171 Standing Army 171 Guards of Castile 171 CHAPTER II. DOMESTIC AFFAIRS OF SPAIN 172 Philip the Champion of the Faith 172 Endowments of the Church 172 Alienations in Mortmain 172 Disputed Prerogatives 173 Appointments to Benefices 173 The Clergy dependent on the Crown 174 The Escorial 174 Motives for its Erection 174 Site selected 175 Convent founded 175 Royal Humility 176 Building commenced 176 Philip's Interest in it 177 His Architectural Taste 177 His Oversight of the Work 177 He governs the World from the Escorial 178 The Edifice endangered by Fire 178 Materials used in its Construction 179 Artists employed 179 Philip's Fondness for Art 180 Completion of the Escorial 180 The Architects 180 Character of the Structure 181 Its Whimsical Design 181 Its Magnitude 181 Interior Decorations 182 Ravages it has undergone 182 Its present Condition 182 Anne of Austria 183 Her Reception in Spain 183 Her Marriage with Philip 184 Her Residence at the Escorial 185 Her Character and Habits 185 Her Death 185 HISTORY OF PHILIP THE SECOND. BOOK V CHAPTER I. THE MOORS OF SPAIN. Conquest of Spain by the Arabs.--Slow Recovery by the Spaniards.--Efforts to convert the Moslems.--Their Homes in the Alpujarras.--Their Treatment by the Government.--The Minister Espinosa.--Edict against the Moriscoes.--Their ineffectual Remonstrance. 1566, 1567. It was in the beginning of the eighth century, in the year 711, that the Arabs, filled with the spirit of conquest which had been breathed into them by their warlike apostle, after traversing the southern shores of the Mediterranean, reached the borders of those straits that separate Africa from Europe. Here they paused for a moment, before carrying their banners into a strange and unknown quarter of the globe. It was but for a moment, however, when, with accumulated strength, they descended on the sunny fields of Andalusia, met the whole Gothic array on the banks of the Guadalete, and, after that fatal battle, in which King Roderick fell with the flower of his nobility, spread themselves, like an army of locusts, over every part of the Peninsula. Three years sufficed for the conquest of the country,--except that small corner in the north, where a remnant of the Goths contrived to maintain a savage independence, and where the rudeness of the soil held out to the Saracens no temptation to follow them. It was much the same story that was repeated, more than three centuries later, by the Norman conquerors in England. The battle of Hastings was to that kingdom what the battle of the Guadalete was to Spain; though the Norman barons, as they rode over the prostrate land, dictated terms to the vanquished of a sterner character than those granted by the Saracens. But whatever resemblance there may be in the general outlines of the two conquests, there is none in the results that followed. In England the Norman and the Saxon, sprung from a common stock, could not permanently be kept asunder by the barrier which at first was naturally interposed between the conqueror and the conquered; and in less, probably, than three centuries after the invasion, the two nations had imperceptibly melted into one; so that the Englishman of that day might trace the current that flowed through his veins to both a Norman and a Saxon origin. It was far otherwise in Spain, where difference of race, of religion, of national tradition, of moral and physical organization, placed a gulf between the victors and the vanquished too wide to be overleaped. It is true, indeed, that very many of the natives, accepting the liberal terms offered by the Saracens, preferred remaining in the genial clime of the south to sharing the rude independence of their brethren in the Asturias, and that, in the course of time, intermarriages, to some extent, took place between them and their Moslem conquerors. To what extent cannot now be known. The intercourse was certainly far greater than that between our New-England ancestors and the Indian race which they found in possession of the soil,--that ill-fated race, which seems to have shrunk from the touch of civilization, and to have passed away before it like the leaves of the forest before the breath of winter. The union was probably not so intimate as that which existed between the old Spaniards and the semi-civilized tribes that occupied the plateau of Mexico, whose descendants, at this day, are to be there seen filling the highest places, both social and political, and whose especial boast it is to have sprung from the countrymen of Montezuma. The very anxiety shown by the modern Spaniard to prove that only the _sangre azul_--"blue blood"--flows through his veins, uncontaminated by any Moorish or Jewish taint, may be thought to afford some evidence of the intimacy which once existed between his forefathers and the tribes of Eastern origin. However this may be, it is certain that no length of time ever served, in the eye of the Spaniard, to give the Moslem invader a title to the soil; and after the lapse of nearly eight centuries,--as long a period as that which has passed since the Norman conquest,--the Arabs were still looked upon as intruders, whom it was the sacred duty of the Spaniards to exterminate or to expel from the land. This, then, was their mission. And it is interesting to see how faithfully they fulfilled it; and during the long period of the Middle Ages, when other nations were occupied with base feudal quarrels or border warfare, it is curious to observe the Spaniard intent on the one great object of reclaiming his country from the possession of the infidel. It was a work of time; and his progress, at first almost imperceptible, was to be measured by centuries. By the end of the ninth century it had reached as far as the Ebro and the Douro. By the middle of the eleventh, the victorious banner of the Cid had penetrated to the Tagus. The fortunes of Christian Spain trembled in the balance on the great day of Navas de Tolosa, which gave a permanent ascendancy to the Castilian arms; and by the middle of the thirteenth century the campaigns of James the First of Aragon, and of St. Ferdinand of Castile, stripping the Moslems of the other southern provinces, had reduced them to the petty kingdom of Granada. Yet on this narrow spot they still continued to maintain a national existence, and to bid defiance for more than two centuries longer to all the efforts of the Christians. The final triumph of the latter was reserved for the glorious reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. It was on the second of January, 1492, that, after a war which rivalled that of Troy in its duration, and surpassed it in the romantic character of its incidents, the august pair made their solemn entry into Granada; while the large silver cross which had served as their banner through the war, sparkling in the sunbeams on the red towers of the Alhambra, announced to the Christian world that the last rood of territory in the Peninsula had passed away for ever from the Moslem. [Sidenote: EFFORTS TO CONVERT THEM.] The peculiar nature of the war in which the Spaniard for eight centuries had thus been engaged, exercised an important influence on the national character. Generation after generation had passed their lives in one long uninterrupted crusade. It had something of the same effect on the character of the nation that the wars for the recovery of Palestine had on the Crusaders of the Middle Ages. Every man learned to regard himself as in an especial manner the soldier of Heaven,--for ever fighting the great battle of the Faith. With a mind exalted by this sublime conviction, what wonder that he should have been ever ready to discern the immediate interposition of Heaven in his behalf--that he should have seen again and again the patron saint of his country, charging on his milk-white steed at the head of his celestial chivalry, and restoring the wavering fortunes of the fight? In this exalted state of feeling, institutions that assumed elsewhere only a political or military aspect wore here the garb of religion. Thus the orders of chivalry, of which there were several in the Peninsula, were founded on the same principles as those of Palestine, where the members were pledged to perpetual war against the infidel. As a consequence of these wars with the Moslems, the patriotic principle became identified with the religious. In the enemies of his country the Spaniard beheld also the enemies of God; and feelings of national hostility were still further embittered by those of religious hatred. In the palmy days of the Arabian empire, these feelings, it is true, were tempered by those of respect for an enemy who, in the various forms of civilization, surpassed not merely the Spaniards, but every nation in Christendom. Nor was this respect wholly abated under the princes who afterwards ruled with imperial sway over Granada, and who displayed, in their little courts, such a union of the courtesies of Christian chivalry with the magnificence of the East, as shed a ray of glory on the declining days of the Moslem empire in the Peninsula. But as the Arabs, shorn of their ancient opulence and power, descended in the scale, the Spaniards became more arrogant. The feelings of aversion with which they had hitherto regarded their enemies, were now mingled with those of contempt. The latent fire of intolerance was fanned into a blaze by the breath of the fanatical clergy, who naturally possessed unbounded influence in a country where religious considerations entered so largely into the motives of action as they did in Spain. To crown the whole, the date of the fall of Granada coincided with that of the establishment of the Inquisition,--as if the hideous monster had waited the time when an inexhaustible supply of victims might be afforded for its insatiable maw. By the terms of the treaty of capitulation, the people of Granada were allowed to remain in possession of their religion and to exercise its rights; and it was especially stipulated that no inducements or menaces should be held out to effect their conversion to Christianity.[1] For a few years the conquerors respected these provisions. Under the good Talavera, the first archbishop of Granada, no attempt was made to convert the Moslems, except by the legitimate means of preaching to the people and of expounding to them the truths of revelation. Under such a course of instruction the work of proselytism, though steadily, went on too slowly to satisfy the impatience of some of the clergy. Among others, that extraordinary man, Cardinal Ximenes, archbishop of Toledo, was eager to try his own hand in the labour of conversion. Having received the royal assent, he set about the affair with characteristic ardour, and with as little scruple as to the means to be employed as the most zealous propagandist could have desired. When reasoning and expostulation failed, he did not hesitate to resort to bribes, and, if need were, to force. Under these combined influences the work of proselytism went on apace. Thousands were added daily to the Christian fold; and the more orthodox Mussulmans trembled, at the prospect of a general defection of their countrymen. Exasperated by the unscrupulous measures of the prelate, and the gross violation they involved of the treaty, they broke out into an insurrection, which soon extended along the mountain ranges in the neighbourhood of Granada. Ferdinand and Isabella, alarmed at the consequences, were filled with indignation at the high-handed conduct of Ximenes. But he replied, that the state of things was precisely that which was most to be desired. By placing themselves in an attitude of rebellion, the Moors had renounced all the advantages secured by the treaty, and had, moreover, incurred the penalties of death and confiscation of property! It would be an act of grace in the sovereigns to overlook their offence, and grant an amnesty for the past, on condition that every Moor should at once receive baptism or leave the country.[2] This precious piece of casuistry, hardly surpassed by anything in ecclesiastical annals, found favour in the eyes of the sovereigns, who, after the insurrection had been quelled, lost no time in proposing the terms suggested by their minister as the only terms of reconciliation open to the Moors. And, as but few of that unhappy people were prepared to renounce their country and their worldly prospects for the sake of their faith, the result was, that in a very short space of time, with but comparatively few exceptions, every Moslem in the dominions of Castile consented to abjure his own faith and receive that of his enemies.[3] A similar course of proceeding was attended with similar results in Valencia and other dominions of the crown of Aragon, in the earlier part of Charles the Fifth's reign; and before that young monarch had been ten years upon the throne, the whole Moorish population--_Moriscoes_, as they were henceforth to be called--were brought within the pale of Christianity,--or, to speak more correctly, within that of the Inquisition.[4] Such conversions, it may well be believed, had taken too little root in the heart to bear fruit. It was not long before the agents of the Holy Office detected, under the parade of outward conformity, as rank a growth of infidelity as had existed before the conquest. The blame might in part, indeed, be fairly imputed to the lukewarmness of the Christian labourers employed in the work of conversion. To render this more effectual, the government had caused churches to be built in the principal towns and villages occupied by the Moriscoes, and sent missionaries among them to wean them from their errors and unfold the great truths of revelation. But an act of divine grace could alone work an instantaneous change in the convictions of a nation. The difficulties of the preachers were increased by their imperfect acquaintance with the language of their hearers; and they had still further to overcome the feelings of jealousy and aversion with which the Spaniard was naturally regarded by the Mussulman. Discouraged by these obstacles, the missionary became indifferent to the results. Instead of appealing to the understanding, or touching the heart, of his hearer, he was willing to accept his conformity to outward ceremony as the evidence of his conversion. Even in his own performance of the sacred rites, the ecclesiastic showed a careless indifference, that proved his heart was little in the work; and he scattered the purifying waters of baptism in so heedless a way over the multitude, that it was not uncommon for a Morisco to assert that none of the consecrated drops had fallen upon him.[5] [Sidenote: THEIR HOMES IN THE ALPUJARRAS.] The representations of the clergy at length drew the attention of the government. It was decided that the best mode of effecting the conversion of the Moslems was by breaking up those associations which connected them with the past,--by compelling them, in short, to renounce their ancient usages, their national dress, and even their language. An extraordinary edict to that effect, designed for Granada, was accordingly published by Charles in the summer of 1526; and all who did not conform to it were to be arraigned before the Inquisition. The law was at once met, as might have been expected, by remonstrances from the men of most consideration among the Moriscoes, who, to give efficacy to their petition, promised the round sum of eighty thousand gold ducats to the emperor in case their prayers should be granted. Charles, who in his early days did not always allow considerations of religion to supersede those of a worldly policy, lent a favourable ear to the petitioners; and the monstrous edict, notwithstanding some efforts to the contrary, was never suffered to go into operation during his reign.[6] Such was the state of things on the accession of Philip the Second. Granada, Malaga, and the other principal cities of the south, were filled with a mingled population of Spaniards and Moriscoes, the latter of whom,--including many persons of wealth and consideration,--under the influence of a more intimate contact with the Christians, gave evidence, from time to time, of conversion to the faith of their conquerors. But by far the larger part of the Moorish population was scattered over the mountain-range of the Alpujarras, south-east of Granada, and among the bold sierras that stretch along the southern shores of Spain. Here, amidst those frosty peaks, rising to the height of near twelve thousand feet above the level of the sea, and readily descried, from their great elevation, by the distant voyager on the Mediterranean, was many a green, sequestered valley, on which the Moorish peasant had exhausted that elaborate culture which, in the palmy days of his nation, was unrivalled in any part of Europe.[7] His patient toil had constructed terraces from the rocky soil, and, planting them with vines, had clothed the bald sides of the sierra with a delicious verdure. With the like industry he had contrived a network of canals along the valleys and lower levels, which, fed by the streams from the mountains, nourished the land with perpetual moisture. The different elevations afforded so many different latitudes for agricultural production; and the fig, the pomegranate, and the orange grew almost side by side with the hemp of the north and the grain of more temperate climates. The lower slopes of the sierra afforded extensive pastures for flocks of merino sheep;[8] and the mulberry-tree was raised in great abundance for the manufacture of silk, which formed an important article of export from the kingdom of Granada. Thus, gathered in their little hamlets among the mountains, the people of the Alpujarras maintained the same sort of rugged independence which belonged to the ancient Goth when he had taken shelter from the Saracen invader in the fastnesses of the Asturias. Here the Moriscoes, formed into communities which preserved their national associations, still cherished the traditions of their fathers, and perpetuated those usages and domestic institutions that kept alive the memory of ancient days. It was from the Alpujarras that, in former times, the kings of Granada had drawn the brave soldiery who enabled them for so many years to bid defiance to their enemies. The trade of war was now at an end. But the hardy life of the mountaineer gave robustness to his frame, and saved him from the effeminacy and sloth which corrupted the inhabitants of the capital. Secluded among his native hills, he cherished those sentiments of independence which ill suited a conquered race; and, in default of a country which he could call his own, he had that strong attachment to the soil which is akin to patriotism, and which is most powerful among the inhabitants of a mountain region. The products of the husbandman furnished the staples of a gainful commerce with the nations on the Mediterranean, and especially with the kindred people on the Barbary shores. The treaty of Granada secured certain commercial advantages to the Moors, beyond what were enjoyed by the Spaniards.[9] This, it may be well believed, was looked upon with no friendly eye by the latter, who had some ground, moreover, for distrusting the policy of an intercourse between the Moslems of Spain and those of Africa, bound together as they were by so many ties--above all, by a common hatred of the Christians. With the feelings of political distrust were mingled those of cupidity and envy, as the Spaniard saw the fairest provinces of the south still in the hands of the accursed race of Ishmael, while he was condemned to earn a scanty subsistence from the comparatively ungenial soil of the north. In this state of things, with the two races not merely dissimilar, but essentially hostile to one another, it will readily be understood how difficult it must have been to devise any system of legislation by which they could be brought to act in harmony as members of the same political body. That the endeavours of the Spanish government were not crowned with success would hardly surprise us, even had its measures been more uniformly wise and considerate. [Sidenote: THEIR TREATMENT BY THE GOVERNMENT.] The government caused the Alpujarras to be divided into districts, and placed under the control of magistrates, who, with their families, resided in the places assigned as the seats of their jurisdiction. There seem to have been few other Christians who dwelt among the Moorish settlements in the sierra, except, indeed, the priests who had charge of the spiritual concerns of the natives. As the conversion of these latter was the leading object of the government, they caused churches to be erected in all the towns and hamlets; and the curates were instructed to use every effort to enlighten the minds of their flocks, and to see that they were punctual in attendance on the rites and ceremonies of the Church. But it was soon too evident that attention to forms and ceremonies was the only approach made to the conversion of the heathen; and that below this icy crust of conformity the waters of infidelity lay as dark and deep as ever. The result, no doubt, was to be partly charged on the clergy themselves, many of whom grew languid in the execution of a task which seemed to them to be hopeless.[10] And what task, in truth, could be more hopeless than that of persuading a whole nation at once to renounce their long-established convictions, to abjure the faith of their fathers, associated in their minds with many a glorious recollection, and to embrace the faith of the very men whom they regarded with unmeasured hatred? It would be an act of humiliation not to be expected even in a conquered race. In accomplishing a work so much to be desired, the Spaniards, if they cannot be acquitted of the charge of persecution, must be allowed not to have urged persecution to anything like the extent which they had done in the case of the Protestant Reformers. Whether from policy or from some natural regard to the helplessness of these benighted heathen, the bloodhounds of the Inquisition were not as yet allowed to run down their game at will; and, if they did terrify the natives by displaying their formidable fangs, the time had not yet come when they were to slip the leash and spring upon their miserable victims. It is true there were some exceptions to this more discreet policy. The Holy Office had its agents abroad, who kept watch upon the Moriscoes; and occasionally the more flagrant offenders were delivered up to its tender mercies.[11] But a more frequent source of annoyance arose from the teasing ordinances from time to time issued by the government, which could have answered no other purpose than to irritate the temper and sharpen the animosity of the Moriscoes. If the government had failed in the important work of conversion, it was the more incumbent on it, by every show of confidence and kindness, to conciliate the good-will of the conquered people, and enable them to live in harmony with their conquerors, as members of the same community. Such was not the policy of Philip, any more than it had been that of his predecessors. During the earlier years of his reign, the king's attention was too closely occupied with foreign affairs to leave him much leisure for those of the Moriscoes. It was certain, however, that they would not long escape the notice of a prince who regarded uniformity of faith as the corner-stone of his government. The first important act of legislation bearing on these people was in 1560, when the Cortes of Castile presented a remonstrance to the throne against the use of negro slaves by the Moriscoes, who were sure to instruct them in their Mahometan tenets, and thus to multiply the number of infidels in the land.[12] A royal _pragmatic_ was accordingly passed, interdicting the use of African slaves by the Moslems of Granada. The prohibition caused the greatest annoyance; for the wealthier classes were in the habit of employing these slaves for domestic purposes, while in the country they were extensively used for agricultural labour. In 1563 another ordinance was published, reviving a law which had fallen into disuse, and which prohibited the Moriscoes from having any arms in their possession, but such as were duly licensed by the captain-general and were stamped with his escutcheon.[13] The office of captain-general of Granada was filled at this time by Don Iñigo Lopez de Mendoza, count of Tendilla, who soon after, on his father's death, succeeded to the title of marquis of Mondejar. The important post which he held had been hereditary in his family ever since the conquest of Granada. The present nobleman was a worthy scion of the illustrious house from which he sprung.[14] His manners were blunt, and not such as win popularity; but he was a man of integrity, with a nice sense of humour and a humane heart,--the last of not too common occurrence in the iron days of chivalry. Though bred a soldier, he was inclined to peace. His life had been passed much among the Moriscoes, so that he perfectly understood their humours; and, as he was a person of prudence and moderation, it is not improbable, had affairs been left to his direction, that the country would have escaped many of those troubles which afterwards befell it. It was singular, considering the character of Mendoza, that he should have recommended so ill-advised a measure as that relating to the arms of the Moriscoes. The ordinance excited a general indignation in Granada. The people were offended by the distrust which such a law implied of their loyalty. They felt it an indignity to be obliged to sue for permission to do what they considered it was theirs of right to do. Those of higher condition disdained to wear weapons displaying the heraldic bearings of the Mendozas instead of their own. But the great number, without regard to the edict provided themselves secretly with arms, which, as it reached the ears of the authorities, led to frequent prosecutions. Thus a fruitful source of irritation was opened; and many, to escape punishment, fled to the mountains, and there too often joined the brigands who haunted the passes of Alpujarras, and bade defiance to the feeble police of the Spaniards.[15] [Sidenote: THE MINISTER ESPINOSA.] These impolitic edicts, as they were irritating to the Moriscoes, were but preludes to an ordinance of so astounding a character as to throw the whole country into a state of revolution. The apostasy of the Moriscoes,--or, so to speak more correctly, the constancy with which they adhered to the faith of their fathers,--gave great scandal to the old Christians, especially to the clergy, and above all to its head, Don Pedro Guerrero, archbishop of Granada. This prelate seems to have been a man of an uneasy, meddlesome spirit, and possessed of a full share of the bigotry of his time. While in Rome, shortly before this period, he had made such a representation to Pope Pius the Fourth as drew from that pontiff a remonstrance, addressed to the Spanish government, on the spiritual condition of the Moriscoes. Soon after, in the year 1567, a memorial was presented to the government, by Guerrero and the clergy of his diocese, in which, after insisting on the manifold back-slidings of the "New Christians," as the Moriscoes were termed, they loudly called for some efficacious measures to arrest the evil. These people, they said, whatever show of conformity they might make to the requisitions of the Church, were infidels at heart. When their children were baptized, they were careful, on returning home, to wash away the traces of baptism, and, after circumcising them, to give them Moorish names. In like manner, when their marriages had been solemnized with Christian rites, they were sure to confirm them afterwards by their own ceremonies, accompanied with the national songs and dances. They continued to observe Friday as a holy day; and what was of graver moment, they were known to kidnap the children of the Christians, and sell them to their brethren on the coast of Barbary, where they were circumcised, and nurtured in the Mahometan religion. This last accusation, however improbable, found credit with the Spaniards, and sharpened the feelings of jealousy and hatred with which they regarded the unhappy race of Ishmael.[16] The memorial of the clergy received prompt attention from the government, at whose suggestion, very possibly, it had been prepared. A commission was at once appointed to examine into the matter; and their report was laid before a junta, consisting of both ecclesiastics and laymen, and embracing names of the highest consideration for talent and learning in the kingdom. Among its members we find the Duke of Alva, who had not yet set out on his ominous mission to the Netherlands. At its head was Diego de Espinosa, at that time the favourite minister of Philip, or at least the one who had the largest share in the direction of affairs. He was a man after the king's own heart, and, from the humble station of _colegial mayor_ of the college of Cuença in Salamanca, had been advanced by successive steps to the high post of president of the Council of Castile and of the Council of the Indies. He was now also bishop of Siguenza, one of the richest sees in the kingdom. He held an important office in the Inquisition, and was soon to succeed Valdés in the unenviable post of grand inquisitor. To conclude the catalogue of his honours, no long time was to elapse before, at his master's suggestion, he was to receive from Rome a cardinal's hat. The deference shown by Philip to his minister, increased as it was by this new accession of spiritual dignity, far exceeded what he had ever shown to any other of his subjects. Espinosa was at this time in the morning, or rather, the meridian of his power. His qualifications for business would have been extraordinary, even in a layman. He was patient of toil, cheerfully doing the work of others as well as his own. This was so far fortunate that it helped to give him that control in the direction of affairs which was coveted by his aspiring nature. He had a dignified and commanding presence, with but few traces of that humility which would have been graceful in one who had risen so high by his master's favour as much as by his own deserts. His haughty bearing gave offence to the old nobility of Castile, who scornfully looked from the minister's present elevation to the humble level from which he had risen. It was regarded with less displeasure, it is said, by the king, who was not unwilling to see the pride of the ancient aristocracy rebuked by one whom he had himself raised from the dust.[17] Their mortification, however, was to be appeased ere long by the fall of the favourite--an event as signal and unexpected by the world, and as tragical to the subject of it, as the fall of Wolsey. The man who was qualified for the place of grand inquisitor was not likely to feel much sympathy for the race of unbelievers. It was unfortunate for the Moriscoes that their destinies should be placed in the hands of such a minister as Espinosa. After due deliberation, the junta came to the decision that the only remedy for the present evil was to lay the axe to the root of it; to cut off all those associations which connected the Moriscoes with their earlier history, and which were so many obstacles in the way of their present conversion. It was recommended that they should be interdicted from employing the Arabic either in speaking or writing, for which they were to use only the Castilian. They were not even to be allowed to retain their family names; but were to exchange them for Spanish ones. All written instruments and legal documents, of whatever kind, were declared to be void and of no effect unless in the Castilian. As time must be allowed for a whole people to change its language, three years were assigned as the period at the end of which this provision should take effect. They were to be required to exchange their national dress for that of the Spaniards; and, as the Oriental costume was highly ornamented, and often very expensive, they were to be allowed to wear their present clothes one year longer if of silk, and two years if of cotton, the latter being the usual apparel of the poorer classes. The women, moreover, both old and young, were to be required, from the passage of the law, to go abroad with their faces uncovered,--a scandalous thing among Mahometans. Their weddings were to be conducted in public, after the Christian forms; and the doors of their houses were to be left open during the day of the ceremony, that any one might enter and see that they did not have recourse to unhallowed rites. They were further to be interdicted from the national songs and dances with which they were wont to celebrate their domestic festivities. Finally, as rumours--most absurd ones--had got abroad that the warm baths which the natives were in the habit of using in their houses were perverted to licentious indulgences, they were to be required to destroy the vessels in which they bathed, and to use nothing of the kind thereafter. These several provisions were to be enforced by penalties of the sternest kind. For the first offence the convicted party was to be punished with imprisonment for a month, with banishment from the country for two years, and with a fine varying from six hundred to ten thousand maravedis. For a second offence the penalties were to be doubled; and for a third, the culprit, in addition to former penalties, was to be banished for life. The ordinance was closely modelled on that of Charles the Fifth, which, as we have seen, he was too politic to carry into execution.[18] [Sidenote: EDICT AGAINST THE MORISCOES.] Such were the principal provisions of a law which, for cruelty and absurdity, has scarcely a parallel in history. For what could be more absurd than the attempt by an act of legislation to work such a change in the long-established habits of a nation--to efface those recollections of the past, to which men ever cling most closely under the pressure of misfortune--to blot out by a single stroke of the pen, as it were, not only the creed, but the nationality of a people--to convert the Moslem, at once, both into a Christian and into a Castilian? It would be difficult to imagine any greater outrage offered to a people than the provision compelling women to lay aside their veils--associated as these were in every Eastern mind with the obligations of modesty; or that in regard to opening the doors of the houses, and exposing those within to the insolent gaze of every passer; or that in relation to the baths--so indispensable to cleanliness and comfort, especially in the warm climate of the South. But the masterpiece of absurdity, undoubtedly, is the stipulation in regard to the Arabic language; as if by any human art a whole population, in the space of three years, could be made to substitute a foreign tongue for its own; and that, too, under circumstances of peculiar difficulty, partly arising from the total want of affinity between the Semitic and the European languages, and partly from the insulated position of the Moriscoes, who, in the cities, had separate quarters assigned to them, in the same manner as the Jews, which cut them off from intimate intercourse with the Christians. We may well doubt, from the character of this provision, whether the Government had so much at heart the conversion of the Moslems as the desire to entangle them in such violations of the law as should afford a plausible pretext for driving them from the country altogether. One is strengthened in this view of the subject by the significant reply of Otadin, professor of theology at Alcalá, who, when consulted by Philip on the expediency of the ordinance, gave his hearty approbation of it, by quoting the appalling Spanish proverb, "The fewer enemies, the better."[19] It was reserved for the imbecile Philip the Third to crown the disasters of his reign by the expulsion of the Moriscoes. Yet no one can doubt that it was a consummation earnestly desired by the great body of the Spaniards, who looked, as we have seen, with longing eyes to the fair territory which they possessed, and who regarded them with the feelings of distrust and aversion with which men regard those on whom they have inflicted injuries too great to be forgiven. Yet there were some in the junta with whom the proposed ordinance found no favour. Among these, one who calls to mind his conduct in the Netherlands may be surprised to find the duke of Alva. Here, as in that country, his course was doubtless dictated less by considerations of humanity than of policy. Whatever may have been his reasons, they had little weight with Espinosa, who probably felt a secret satisfaction in thwarting the man whom he regarded with all the jealousy of a rival.[20] What was Philip's own opinion on the matter, we can but conjecture from our general knowledge of his character. He professed to be guided by the decision of the "wise and learned men" to whom he had committed the subject. That this decision did no great violence to his own feelings, we may infer from the promptness with which he signed the ordinance. This he did on the 17th of November, 1566, when the pragmatic became a law. It was resolved, however, not to give publicity to it at once. It was committed to the particular charge of one of the members of the junta, Diego Deza, auditor of the Holy Office, and lately raised by Espinosa to the important post of president of the chancery of Granada. This put him at once at the head of the civil administration of the province, as the Marquis of Mondejar was at the head of the military. The different views of policy entertained by the two men led to a conflict of authority which proved highly prejudicial to affairs. Deza, who afterwards rose to the dignity of cardinal, was a man whose plausible manners covered an inflexible will. He showed, notwithstanding, an entire subserviency to the wishes of his patron, Espinosa, who committed to him the execution of his plans. The president resolved, with more policy than humanity, to defer the publication of the edict till the ensuing first of January, 1667, the day preceding that which the Spaniards commemorated as the anniversary of the surrender of the capital. This humiliating event, brought home at such a crisis to the Moriscoes, might help to break their spirits, and dispose them to receive the obnoxious edict with less resistance. On the appointed day the magistrates of the principal tribunals, with the corregidor of Granada at their head, went in solemn procession to the Albaicin, the quarter occupied by the Moriscoes. They marched to the sound of kettle-drums, trumpets, and other instruments; and the inhabitants, attracted by the noise, and fond of novelty, came running from their houses to swell the ranks of the procession on its way to the great square of _Bab el Bonat_. This was an open space, of large extent, where the people of Granada, in ancient times, used to assemble to celebrate the coronation of a new sovereign; and the towers were still standing from which the Moslem banners waved, on those days, over the heads of the shouting multitude. As the people now gathered tumultuously around these ancient buildings, the public crier, from an elevated place, read, in audible tones and in the Arabic language, the royal ordinance. One may imagine the emotions of shame, sorrow, and indignation with which the vast assembly, consisting of both sexes, listened to the words of an instrument, every sentence of which seemed to convey a personal indignity to the hearers--an outrage on all those ideas of decorum and decency in which they had been nurtured from infancy; which rudely rent asunder all the fond ties of country and kindred; which violated the privacy of domestic life, deprived them of the use of their own speech, and reduced them to a state of utter humiliation unknown to the meanest of their slaves. Some of the weaker sort gave way to piteous and passionate exclamations, wringing their hands in an agony of grief. Others, of sterner temper, broke forth into menaces and fierce invective, accompanied with the most furious gesticulations. Others, again, listened with that dogged, determined air which showed that the mood was not the less dangerous that it was a silent one. The whole multitude was in a state of such agitation that an accident might have readily produced an explosion which would have shaken Granada to its foundations. Fortunately there were a few discreet persons in the assembly, older and more temperate than the rest, who had sufficient authority over their countrymen to prevent a tumult. They reminded them that in their fathers' time the emperor Charles the Fifth had consented to suspend the execution of a similar ordinance. At all events, it was better to try first what could be done by argument and persuasion. When these failed, it would be time enough to think of vengeance.[21] [Sidenote: THEIR INEFFECTUAL REMONSTRANCE.] One of the older Moriscoes, a man of much consideration among his countrymen, was accordingly chosen to wait on the president and explain their views in regard to the edict. This he did at great length, and in a manner which must have satisfied any fair mind of the groundlessness of the charges brought against the Moslems, and the cruelty and impracticability of the measures proposed by the government. The president, having granted to the envoy a patient and courteous hearing, made a short and not very successful attempt to vindicate the course of the administration. He finally disposed of the whole question by declaring that "the law was too just and holy, and had been made with too much consideration, ever to be repealed; and that, in fine, regarded as a question of interest, his majesty estimated the salvation of a single soul as of greater price than all the revenues he drew from the Moriscoes."[22] An answer like this must have effectually dispelled all thoughts of a composition, such as had formerly been made with the emperor. Defeated in this quarter, the Moriscoes determined to lay their remonstrance before the throne. They were fortunate in obtaining, for this purpose, the services of Don Juan Henriquez, a nobleman of the highest rank and consideration, who had large estates at Beza, in the heart of Granada, and who felt a strong sympathy for the unfortunate natives. Having consented, though with much reluctance, to undertake the mission, he repaired to Madrid, obtained an audience of the king, and presented to him a memorial on behalf of his unfortunate subjects. Philip received him graciously, and promised to give all attention to the paper. "What I have done in this matter," said the king, "has been done by the advice of wise and conscientious men, who have given me to understand that it was my duty."[23] Shortly afterwards, Henriquez received an intimation that he was to look for his answer to the president of Castille. Espinosa, after listening to the memorial, expressed his surprise that a person of the high condition of Don Juan Henriquez should have consented to take charge of such a mission. "It was for that very reason I undertook it," replied the nobleman, "as affording me a better opportunity to be of service to the king." "It can be of no use," said the minister; "religious men have represented to his majesty that at his door lies the salvation of these Moors; and the ordinance which has been decreed, he has determined shall be carried into effect."[24] Baffled in this direction, the persevering envoy laid his memorial before the councillors of state, and endeavoured to interest them in behalf of his clients. In this he met with more success; and several of that body, among whom may be mentioned the duke of Alva and Luis de Avila, the grand commander of Alcántara, whom Charles the Fifth had honoured with his friendship, entered heartily into his views. But it availed little with the minister, who would not even consent to delay the execution of the ordinance until time should have been given for further inquiry, or to confine the operation of it, at the outset, to one or two of the provisions, in order to ascertain what would probably be the temper of the Moriscoes.[25] Nothing would suit the peremptory humour of Espinosa but the instant execution of the law in all its details. Nor would he abate anything of this haughty tone in favour of the captain-general, the marquis of Mondejar. That nobleman, with good reason, had felt himself aggrieved that, in discussions so materially affecting his own government, he should not have been invited to take a part. From motives of expediency, as much as of humanity, he was decidedly opposed to the passage of the ordinance. It was perhaps a knowledge of this that had excluded him from a seat in the junta. His representations made no impression on Espinosa; and when he urged that, if the law were to be carried into effect, he ought to be provided with such a force as would enable him to quell any attempt at resistance, the minister made light of the danger, assuring him that three hundred additional troops were as many as the occasion demanded. Espinosa then peremptorily adjourned all further discussion, by telling the captain-general that it would be well for him to return at once to Granada, where his presence would be needed to enforce the execution of the law.[26] It was clear that no door was left open to further discussion, and that, under the present government, no chance remained to the unfortunate Moriscoes of buying off the law by the payment of a round sum, as in the time of Charles the Fifth. All negotiations were at an end. They had only to choose between implicit obedience and open rebellion. It was not strange that they chose the latter. CHAPTER II. REBELLION OF THE MORISCOES. Resistance of the Moriscoes--Night Assault on Granada--Rising in the Alpujarras--Election of a King--Massacre of the Christians. 1568. The same day on which the ordinance was published in the capital, it was proclaimed in every part of the kingdom of Granada. Everywhere it was received with the same feelings of shame, sorrow, and indignation. Before giving way to these feelings by any precipitate action, the Moriscoes of the Alpujarras were discreet enough to confer with their countrymen in the Albaicin, who advised them to remain quiet until they should learn the result of the conferences going on at Madrid. Before these were concluded, the year expired after which it would be penal for a Morisco to wear garments of silk. By the president's orders it was proclaimed by the clergy, in the pulpits throughout the city, that the law would be enforced to the letter. This was followed by more than one edict relating to other matters, but yet tending to irritate still further the minds of the Moriscoes.[27] [Sidenote: RESISTANCE TO THE EDICT.] All hope of relieving themselves of the detested ordinance having thus vanished, the leaders of the Albaicin took counsel as to the best mode of resisting the government. The first step seemed to be to get possession of the capital. There was at this time in Granada a Morisco named Farax Aben-Farax, who followed the trade of a dyer. But though he was engaged in this humble calling, the best blood of the Abencerrages flowed in his veins. He was a man of a fierce, indeed ferocious nature, hating the Christians with his whole heart, and longing for the hour when he could avenge on their heads the calamities of his countrymen. As his occupation earned him frequently into the Alpujarras, he was extensively acquainted with the inhabitants. He undertook to raise a force there of eight thousand men, and bring them down secretly by night into the _vega_, where, with the aid of his countrymen in the Albaicin, he might effect an entrance into the city, overpower the garrison in the Alhambra, put all who resisted to the sword, and make himself master of the capital. The time fixed upon for the execution of the plan was Holy Thursday, in the ensuing month of April, when the attention of the Spaniards would be occupied with their religious solemnities. A secret known to so many could not be so well kept, and for so long a time, but that some information of it reached the ears of the Christians. It seems to have given little uneasiness to Deza, who had anticipated some such attempt from the turbulent spirit of the Moriscoes. The captain-general, however, thought it prudent to take additional precautions against it; and he accordingly distributed arms among the citizens, strengthened the garrison of the Alhambra, and visited several of the great towns on the frontiers, which he placed in a better posture of defence. The Moriscoes, finding their purpose exposed to the authorities, resolved to defer the execution of it for the present. They even postponed it to as late a date as the beginning of the following year, 1569. To this they were led, we are told, by a prediction found in their religious books, that the year of their liberation would be one that began on a Saturday. It is probable that the wiser men of the Albaicin were less influenced by their own belief in the truth of the prophecy, than by the influence it would exert over the superstitious minds of the mountaineers, among whom it was diligently circulated.[28] Having settled on the first of January for the rising, the Moslems of Granada strove, by every outward show of loyalty, to quiet the suspicions of the government. But in this they were thwarted by the information which the latter obtained through more trustworthy channels. Still surer evidence of their intentions was found in a letter which fell by accident into the hands of the marquis of Mondejar. It was addressed by one of the leaders of the Albaicin to the Moslems of the Barbary coast, invoking their aid by the ties of consanguinity and of a common faith. "We are sorely beset," says the writer, "and our enemies encompass us all around like a consuming fire. Our troubles are too grievous to be endured. Written," concludes the passionate author of the epistle, "in nights of tears and anguish, with hope yet lingering,--such hope as still survives amidst all the bitterness of the soul."[29] But the Barbary powers were too much occupied by their petty feuds to give much more than fair words to their unfortunate brethren of Granada. Perhaps they distrusted the efficacy of any aid they could render in so unequal a contest as that against the Spanish monarchy. Yet they allowed their subjects to embark as volunteers in the war; and some good service was rendered by the Barbary corsairs, who infested the coasts of the Mediterranean, as well as by the _monfis_,--as the African adventurers were called,--who took part with their brethren in the Alpujarras, where they made themselves conspicuous by their implacable ferocity against the Christians. Meanwhile the hot blood of the mountaineers was too much inflamed by the prospect of regaining their independence to allow them to wait patiently for the day fixed upon for the outbreak. Before that time arrived, several acts of violence were perpetrated,--forerunners of the bloody work that was at hand. In the month of December, 1568, a body of Spanish alguazils, with some other officers of justice, were cut off in the neighbourhood of Granada, on their way to that city. A party of fifty soldiers, as they were bearing to the capital a considerable quantity of muskets,--a tempting prize to the unarmed Moriscoes,--were all murdered, most of them in their beds, in a little village among the mountains where they had halted for the night.[30] After this outrage Aben-Farax, the bold dyer of Granada, aware of the excitement it must create in the capital, became convinced it would not be safe for him to postpone his intended assault a day longer. At the head of only a hundred and eighty followers, without waiting to collect a larger force, he made his descent, on the night of the twenty-sixth of December, a week before the appointed time, into the _vega_ of Granada. It was a dreadful night. A snow-storm was raging wildly among the mountains, and sweeping down in pitiless fury on the plains below.[31] Favoured by the commotion of the elements, Aben-Farax succeeded, without attracting observation, in forcing an entrance through the dilapidated walls of the city, penetrated at once into the Albaicin, and endeavoured to rouse the inhabitants from their slumbers. Some few came to their windows, it is said, but, on learning the nature of the summons, hastily closed the casements and withdrew, telling Aben-Farax that "it was madness to undertake the enterprise with so small a force, and that he had come before his time."[32] It was in vain that the enraged chief poured forth imprecations on their perfidy and cowardice, in vain that he marched through the deserted streets, demolishing crucifixes and other symbols of Christian worship which he found in his way, or that he shouted out the watchword of the faithful, "There is but one God, and Mahomet is the prophet of God!" The uproar of the tempest, fortunately for him, drowned every other noise; and no alarm was given till he stumbled on a guard of some five or six soldiers, who were huddled round a fire in one of the public squares. One of these Farax despatched; the others made their escape, raising the cry that the enemy was upon them. The great bell of St. Salvador rang violently, calling the inhabitants to arms. Dawn was fast approaching; and the Moorish chief, who felt himself unequal to an encounter in which he was not to be supported by his brethren in the Albaicin, thought it prudent to make his retreat. This he did with colours flying and music playing, all in as cool and orderly a manner as if it had been only a holiday parade. [Sidenote: RISING IN THE ALPUJARRAS.] Meantime the citizens, thus suddenly startled from their beds, gathered together, with eager looks, and faces white with fear, to learn the cause of the tumult; and their alarm was not diminished by finding that the enemy had been prowling round their dwellings, like a troop of mountain wolves, while they had been buried in slumber. The marquis of Mondejar called his men to horse, and would have instantly given chase to the invaders, but waited until he had learned the actual condition of the Albaicin, where a population of ten thousand Moriscoes, had they been mischievously inclined, might, notwithstanding the timely efforts of the government to disarm them, have proved too strong for the slender Spanish garrison in the Alhambra. All, however, was quiet in the Moorish quarter; and, assured of this, the captain-general sallied out, at the head of his cavalry and a small corps of foot, in quest of the enemy. But he had struck into the mountain-passes south of Granada; and Mendoza, after keeping on his track, as well as the blinding tempest would permit, through the greater part of the day, at nightfall gave up the pursuit as hopeless, and brought back his wayworn cavalcade to the city.[33] Aben-Farax and his troop, meanwhile, traversing the snowy skirts of the Sierra Nevada, came out on the broad and populous valley of Lecrin, spreading the tidings everywhere, as they went, that the insurrection was begun, that the Albaicin was in movement, and calling on all true believers to take up arms in defence of their faith. The summons did not fall on deaf ears. A train had been fired which ran along the mountain regions to the south of Granada, stretching from Almeria and the Murcian borders on the east to the neighbourhood of Velez Malaga on the west. In three days the whole country was in arms. Then burst forth the fierce passions of the Arab,--all that unquenchable hate which seventy years of oppression had nourished in his bosom, and which now showed itself in one universal cry for vengeance. The bloody drama opened with the massacre of nearly every Christian man within the Moorish borders,--and that too with circumstances of a refined and deliberate cruelty, of which, happily, few examples are to be found in history. The first step, however, in the revolutionary movement had been a false one, inasmuch as the insurgents had failed to secure possession of the capital, which would have furnished so important a _point d'appui_ for future operations. Yet, if contemporary chroniclers are correct, this failure should rather be imputed to miscalculation than to cowardice. According to them, the persons of most consideration in the Albaicin were many of them wealthy citizens, accustomed to the easy, luxurious way of life so well suited to the Moorish taste. They had never intended to peril their fortunes by engaging personally in so formidable a contest as that with the Castilian crown. They had only proposed to urge their simple countrymen in the Alpujarras to such a show of resistance as should intimidate the Spaniards, and lead them to mitigate, if not indeed to rescind, the hated ordinance.[34] If such was their calculation, as the result showed, it miserably failed. As the Moriscoes had now proclaimed their independence, it became necessary to choose a sovereign in place of the one whose authority they had cast aside. The leaders in the Albaicin selected for this dangerous pre-eminence a young man who was known to the Spaniards by his Castilian name of Don Fernando de Valor. He was descended in a direct line from the ancient house of the Omeyas,[35] who for nearly four centuries had sat with glory on the throne of Cordova. He was but twenty-two years of age at the time of his election, and, according to a contemporary who had seen him, possessed a comely person and engaging manners. His complexion was of a deep olive; his beard was thin; his eyes were large and dark, with eyebrows well defined, and nearly approaching each other. His deportment was truly royal; and his lofty sentiments were worthy of the princely line from which he was descended.[36] Notwithstanding this flattering portrait from the pen of a Castilian, his best recommendation, to judge from his subsequent career, seems to have been his descent from a line of kings. He had been so prodigal in his way of life that, though so young, he had squandered his patrimony, and was at this very time under arrest for debt. He had the fiery temperament of his nation, and had given evidence of it by murdering, with his own hand, a man who had borne testimony against his father in a criminal prosecution. Amidst his luxurious self-indulgence he must be allowed to have shown some energy of character and an unquestionable courage. He was attached to the institutions of his country; and his ferocious nature was veiled under a bland and plausible exterior, that won him golden opinions from the multitude.[37] Soon after his election, and just before the irruption of Aben-Farax, the Morisco prince succeeded in making his escape from Granada, and, flying to the mountains, took refuge among his own kindred, the powerful family of the Valoris, in the village of Beznar. Here his countrymen gathered round him, and confirmed by acclamation the choice of the people of Granada. For this the young chieftain was greatly indebted to the efforts of his uncle, Aben-Jahuar, commonly called El Zaguer, a man of much authority among his tribe, who, waiving his own claims to the sceptre, employed his influence in favour of his nephew. The ceremony of the coronation was of a martial kind, well suited to the rough fortunes of the adventurer. Four standards, emblazoned with the Moslem crescent, were spread upon the ground, with their spear-heads severally turned towards the four points of the compass. The Moorish prince, who had been previously arrayed in a purple robe, with a crimson scarf or shawl, the insignia of royalty, enveloping his shoulders, knelt down on the banners, with his face turned towards Mecca, and, after a brief prayer, solemnly swore to live and die in defence of his crown, his faith, and his subjects. One of the principal attendants, prostrating himself on the ground, kissed the footprints of the newly-elected monarch, in token of the allegiance of the people. He was then raised on the shoulders of four of the assistants, and borne aloft amidst the waving of banners and the loud shouts of the multitude, "Allah exalt Muley-Mohammed-Aben-Humeya, lord of Andalucia and Granada!"[38] [Sidenote: MASSACRE OF THE CHRISTIANS.] Such were the simple forms practised in ancient times by the Spanish-Arabian princes, when their empire, instead of being contracted within the rocky girdle of the mountains, stretched over the fairest portions of the Peninsula.[39] The first act of Aben-Humeya was to make his appointments to the chief military offices. El Zaguer, his uncle, he made captain-general of his forces. Aben-Farax, who had himself aspired to the diadem, he removed to a distance, by sending him on an expedition to collect such treasures as could be gathered from the Christian churches in the Alpujarras. He appointed officers to take charge of the different _tahas_, or districts, into which the country was divided. Having completed these arrangements, the new monarch--the _reyezuelo_, or "little king," of the Alpujarras, as he was contemptuously styled by the Spaniards--transferred his residence to the central part of his dominions, where he repeated the ceremony of his coronation. He made a rapid visit to the most important places in the sierra, everywhere calling on the inhabitants to return to their ancient faith, and to throw off the hated yoke of the Spaniards. He then established himself in the wildest parts of the Alpujarras, where he endeavoured to draw his forces to a head, and formed the plan of his campaign. It was such as was naturally suggested by the character of the country, which, broken and precipitous, intersected by many a deep ravine and dangerous pass, afforded excellent opportunities for harassing an invading foe, and for entangling him in those inextricable defiles, where a few mountaineers acquainted with the ground would he more than a match for an enemy far superior in discipline and numbers. While Aben-Humeya was thus occupied in preparing for the struggle, the work of death had already begun among the Spanish population of the Alpujarras; and Spaniards were to be found, in greater or less numbers, in all the Moorish towns and hamlets that dotted the dark sides of the sierras, or nestled in the green valleys at their base. Here they dwelt side by side with the Moriscoes, employed probably less in the labours of the loom, for which the natives of this region had long been famous, than in that careful husbandry which they might readily have learned from their Moorish neighbours, and which, under their hands, had clothed every spot with verdure, making the wilderness to blossom like the rose.[40] Thus living in the midst of those who professed the same religion with themselves, and in the occasional interchange, at least, of the kind offices of social intercourse, which sometimes led to nearer domestic ties, the Christians of the Alpujarras dwelt in blind security, little dreaming of the mine beneath their feet. But no sooner was the first note of insurrection sounded, than the scene changed as if by magic. Every Morisco threw away his mask, and, turning on the Christians, showed himself in his true aspect, as their avowed and mortal enemy. A simultaneous movement of this kind, through so wide an extent of country, intimates a well-concerted plan of operations; and we may share in the astonishment of the Castillan writers, that a secret of such a nature, and known to so many individuals, should have been so long and faithfully kept,--in the midst, too, of those who had the greatest interest in detecting it,[41]--some of them, it may be added, spies of the Inquisition, endowed, as they seem to have been, with almost supernatural powers for scenting out the taint of heresy.[42] It argues an intense feeling of hatred in the Morisco, that he could have been so long proof against the garrulity that loosens the tongue, and against the sympathy that so often, in similar situations, unlocks the heart, to save some friend from the doom of his companions. But no such instance, either of levity or lenity, occurred among this extraordinary people. And when the hour arrived, and the Christians discerned their danger in the menacing looks and gestures of their Moslem neighbours, they were as much astounded by it as the unsuspecting traveller on whom, as he heedlessly journeys through some pleasant country, the highwayman has darted from his covert by the roadside. The first impulse of the Christians seems to have been very generally to take refuge in the churches; and every village, however small, had at least one church, where the two races met together to join in the forms of Christian worship. The fugitives thought to find protection in their holy places and in the presence of their venerated pastors, whose spiritual authority had extended over all the inhabitants. But the wild animal of the forest, now that he had regained his freedom, gave little heed to the call of his former keeper,--unless it were to turn and rend him. Here crowded together, like a herd of panic-stricken deer with the hounds upon their track, the terrified people soon found the church was no place of security, and they took refuge in the adjoining tower, as a place of greater strength, and affording a better means of defence against an enemy. The mob of their pursuers then broke into the church, which they speedily despoiled of its ornaments, trampling the crucifixes and other religious symbols under their feet, rolling the sacred images in the dust, and desecrating the altars by the sacrifice of swine, or by some other act denoting their scorn and hatred of the Christian worship.[43] They next assailed the towers, the entrances to which the Spaniards had barricaded as strongly as they could; though, unprovided as they were with means of defence, except such arms as they had snatched in the hurry of their flight, they could have little hope of standing a siege. Unfortunately, these towers were built more or less of wood, which the assailants readily set on fire, and thus compelled the miserable inmates either to surrender or to perish in the flames. In some instances they chose the latter; and the little garrison--men, women, and children--were consumed together on one common funeral pile. More frequently they shrank from this fearful death, and surrendered at the mercy of their conquerors,--such mercy as made them soon regret that they had not stayed by the blazing rafters. [Sidenote: MASSACRE OF THE CHRISTIANS] The men were speedily separated from the women, and driven with blows and imprecations, like so many cattle, to a place of confinement. From this loathsome prison they were dragged out, three or four at a time, day after day, the longer to protract their sufferings; then, with their arms pinioned behind them, and stripped of their clothing, they were thrown into the midst of an infuriated mob, consisting of both sexes, who, armed with swords, hatchets, and bludgeons, soon felled their victims to the ground, and completed the bloody work. The mode of death was often varied to suit the capricious cruelty of the executioners. At Guecija, where the olive grew abundantly, there was a convent of Augustine monks, who were all murdered by being thrown into caldrons of boiling oil.[44] Sometimes the death of the victim was attended with circumstances of diabolical cruelty, not surpassed by anything recorded of our North-American savages. At a place called Pitres de Ferreyra, the priest of the village was raised by means of a pulley to a beam that projected from the tower, and was then allowed to drop from a great height upon the ground. The act was repeated more than once in the presence of his aged mother, who, in an agony of grief, embracing her dying son, besought him "to trust in God and the blessed Virgin, who through these torments would bring him into eternal life." The mangled carcase of the poor victim, broken and dislocated in every limb, was then turned over to the Moorish women, who, with their scissors, bodkins, and other feminine implements, speedily despatched him.[45] The women, indeed, throughout this persecution, seem to have had as rabid a thirst for vengeance as the men. Even the children were encouraged to play their part in the bloody drama; and many a miserable captive was set up as a target to be shot at with the arrows of the Moorish boys. The rage of the barbarians was especially directed against the priests, who had so often poured forth anathemas against the religion which the Moslems loved, and who, as their spiritual directors, had so often called them to account for offences against the religion which they abhorred. At Coadba the priest was stretched out before a brazier of live coals until his feet, which had been smeared with pitch and oil, were burned to a cinder. His two sisters were compelled to witness the agonies of their brother, which were still further heightened by the brutal treatment which he saw them endure from their tormentors.[46] Fire was employed as a common mode of torture, by way of retaliation, it may be, for similar sufferings inflicted on the Infidel by the Inquisition. Sometimes the punishments seemed to be contrived so as to form a fiendish parody on the exercises of the Roman Catholic religion. In the town of Filix the pastor was made to take his seat before the altar, with his two sacristans, one on either side of him. The bell was rung, as if to call the people together to worship. The sacristans were each provided with a roll containing the names of the congregation, which they were required to call over, as usual, before the services, in order to see that no one was absent. As each Morisco answered to his name, he passed before the priest, and dealt him a blow with his fist, or the women plucked his beard and hair, accompanying the act with some bitter taunt expressive of their mortal hate. When every one had thus had the opportunity of gratifying his personal grudge against his ancient pastor, the executioner stepped forward, armed with a razor, with which he scored the face of the ecclesiastic in the detested form of the cross, and then, beginning with the fingers, deliberately proceeded to sever each of the joints of his wretched victim![47] But it is unnecessary to shock the reader with more of these loathsome details, enough of which have already been given, not merely to prove the vindictive temper of the Morisco, but to suggest the inference that it could only have been a long course of cruelty and oppression that stimulated him to such an awful exhibition of it.[48] The whole number of Christians who, in the course of a week, thus perished in these massacres--if we are to receive the accounts of Castilian writers--was not less than three thousand![49] Considering the social relations which must to some extent have been established between those who had lived so long in the neighbourhood of one another, it might be thought that, on some occasions, sympathy would have been shown for the sufferers, or that some protecting arm would have been stretched out to save a friend or a companion from the general doom. But the nearest approach to such an act of humanity was given by a Morisco, who plunged his sword in the body of a Spaniard in order to save him from the lingering death that otherwise would await him.[50] Of the whole Christian population very few of the men who fell into the hands of the Moslems escaped with life. The women were not always spared. The Morisco women, especially, who had married Christian husbands and embraced Christianity, which they refused to abjure, became the objects of vengeance to their own sex. Sad to say, even the innocence and helplessness of childhood proved no protection against the fury of persecution. The historians record the names of several boys, from ten to twelve or thirteen years of age, who were barbarously murdered because they would not renounce the religion in which they had been nurtured for that of Mahomet. If they were too young to give a reason for their faith, they had at least learned the lesson that to renounce it was a great sin; and, when led out like lambs to the slaughter, their mothers, we are told, stifling the suggestions of natural affection in obedience to a higher law, urged their children not to shrink from the trial, nor to purchase a few years of life at the price of their own souls.[51] It is a matter of no little gratulation to a Catholic historian, that, amongst all those who perished in these frightful massacres, there was not one of any age or either sex who could be tempted to secure personal safety by the sacrifice of religious convictions.[52] On the contrary, they employed the brief respite that was left them in fortifying one another's courage, and in bearing testimony to the truth in so earnest a manner that they might almost seem to have courted the crown of martyrdom. Yet among these martyrs there were more than one, it is admitted, whose previous way of life showed but a dim perception of the value of that religion for which, they were thus prepared to lay down their lives.[53] [Sidenote: MASSACRE OF THE CHRISTIANS.] The chief blame of these indiscriminate proscriptions has been laid on Aben-Farax, the famous dyer of Granada, whose appetite for blood seems to have been as insatiable as that of any wild beast in the Alpujarras. In executing the commission assigned to him by Aben-Humeya, he was obliged to visit all parts of the country. Wherever he came, impatient of the slower movements of his countrymen in the work of destruction, he caused the prisons to be emptied, and the wretched inmates to be butchered before his eyes. At Ugijar he thus directed the execution of no less than two hundred and forty Christians, laymen and ecclesiastics.[54] His progress through the land was literally over the dead bodies of his victims. Fierce as he was, Aben-Humeya had some touches of humanity in his nature, which made him revolt at the wholesale murders perpetrated by his lieutenant. He was the more indignant when, on hastening to Ugijar to save the lives of some of the captives, his friends, he found that he had come too late, for the man of blood had been there before him. He soon after summoned his officer into his presence, not with the impolitic design of taxing him with his cruelties, but to call him to a reckoning for the treasure he had pillaged from the churches; and dissatisfied, or affecting to be so, with his report, he at once deposed Aben-Farax from his command. The ferocious chief submitted without a murmur. He descended into the common file, and no more appears on the scene. He was one of those miscreants who are thrown on the surface by the turmoil of a revolution, and, after floating there for a while, disappear from sight, and the wave of history closes over them for ever. CHAPTER III. REBELLION OF THE MORISCOES. Panic in Granada--Muster of Troops--Mondejar takes the Field--Bold Passage at Tablate--Retreat of the Moriscoes--Combat at Alfajarali--Perilous March--Massacre at Jubiles--The Liberated Christians. 1568, 1569. As day after day brought tidings to the people of Granada of the barbarities perpetrated in the Alpujarras, the whole city was filled with grief and consternation. The men might be seen gathered together in knots in the public squares; the women ran about from house to house, telling the tale of horrors which could hardly be exaggerated in the recital. They thronged to the churches, where the archbishop and the clergy were all day long offering up prayers to avert the wrath of heaven from Granada. The places of business were abandoned. The shops and booths were closed.[55] As men called to mind the late irruption of Aben-Farax, they were filled with apprehensions that the same thing would be attempted again; and rumours went abroad that the mountaineers were plotting another descent on the city, and, with the aid of their countrymen in the Albaicin, would soon deluge the streets with the blood of the Christians. Under the influence of these fears, some took refuge in the fortress of the Alhambra; others fled into the country. Many kept watch during the long night, while those who withdrew to rest started from their slumbers at the least noise, supposing it to be the war-cry of the Moslem, and that the enemy was at the gates. Nor was the alarm less that was felt by the Moriscoes in the city, as it was certainly better founded,--for the Moriscoes were the weaker party of the two. They knew the apprehensions entertained of them by the Christians, and that, when men have the power to relieve themselves of their fears, they are not apt to be very scrupulous as to the means of doing so. They were afraid to venture into the streets by day, and at night they barricaded their houses as in a time of siege.[56] They well knew that a single act of imprudence on their part, or even the merest accident, might bring the Spaniards upon them, and lead to a general massacre. They were like the traveller who sees the avalanche trembling above him, which the least jar of elements, or his own unwary movements, may dislodge from its slippery basis, and bring down in ruin on his head. Thus the two races, inhabitants of the same city, were like two hostile camps, looking on each other with watchful and malignant eyes, and ready at any moment to come into deadly conflict. In this stage of things the Moriscoes, anxious to allay the apprehensions of the Spaniards, were profuse in their professions of loyalty, and in their assurances that there was neither concert nor sympathy between them and their countrymen in the Alpujarras. The government, to give still greater confidence to the Christians, freely distributed arms among them, thus enabling them, as far as possible, to provide for their own security. The inhabitants enrolled themselves in companies. The citizen was speedily converted into the soldier, and every man, of whatever trade or profession,--the mechanic, the merchant, the lawyer,--took his turn of military service. Even the advocates, when attending the courts of justice, appeared with their weapons by their side.[57] [Sidenote: MUSTER OF TROOPS.] But what contributed above all to revive the public confidence was the care of the government to strengthen the garrison in the Alhambra by the addition of five hundred regular troops. When, by these various means, the marquis of Mondejar saw that tranquillity was restored to the capital, he bestowed all his thoughts on an expedition into the Alpujarras, desirous to crush the insurrection in its bud, and to rescue the unfortunate captives, whose fate there excited the most dismal apprehensions amongst their friends and relatives in Granada. He sent forth his summons accordingly to the great lords and the cities of Andalusia, to furnish him at once with their contingents for carrying on the war. The feudal principle still obtained in this quarter, requiring the several towns to do military service for their possessions, by maintaining, when called upon, a certain number of troops in the field, at their own expense for three months, and at the joint expense of themselves and the government for six months longer.[58] The system worked well enough in those ancient times, when a season rarely passed without a foray against the Moslems. But since the fall of Granada, a long period of inactivity had followed, and the citizen, rarely summoned to the field, had lost all the essential attributes of the soldier. The usual term of service was too short to supply the experience and the discipline which he needed; and far from entering on a campaign with the patriotic or the chivalrous feeling that gives dignity to the profession of arms, he brought with him the mercenary spirit of a trader, intent only on his personal gains, and eager, as soon as he had enriched himself by a lucky foray, or the sack of some ill-fated city, to return home, and give place to others, as inexperienced and possessed of as little subordination as himself.[59] But, however deficient this civic militia might be in tactics, the men were well provided with arms and military accoutrements; and, as the motley array of troops passed over the _vega_, they made a gallant show, with their gay uniforms and bright weapons glancing in the sun, while they proudly displayed the ancient banners of their cities, which had waved over many a field of battle against the infidel.[60] But no part of the warlike spectacle was so brilliant as that afforded by the chivalry of the country; the nobles and cavaliers who, with their retainers and household troops, had taken the field with as much alacrity on the present occasion as their fathers had ever shown when roused by the cry that the enemy was over the borders.[61] They were much inferior in numbers to the militia of the towns. But inferiority of numbers was more than compensated by excellence of discipline, by their perfect appointments, and by that chivalrous feeling which made them discard every mercenary consideration in the pursuit of glory. Such was the feeling of Luis Paer de Castillego, the ancient regidor of Córdova. When offered an independent command, with the emoluments annexed to it, he proudly replied: "I want neither rank nor pay. I, my sons, my kindred, my whole house, will always be found ready to serve our God and our king. It is the title by which we hold our inheritance and our patent of nobility."[62] With such loyal and high-mettled cavaliers to support him, Mondejar could not feel doubtful of the success of his arms. They had, however, already met with one reverse; and he received tidings that his advance-guard, sent to occupy a strong pass that led into the mountains, had been driven from its position, and had sustained something like a defeat. This would have been still more decisive, had it not been for the courage of certain ecclesiastics, eight in number--four of them Franciscans, and four of the Society of Jesus--who, as the troops gave way, threw themselves into the thick of the fight, and by their example shamed the soldiers into making a more determined resistance. The present war took the form of a religious war; and many a valiant churchman, armed with sword and crucifix, bore his part in it as in a crusade. Hastening his preparations, the captain-general, without waiting for further reinforcements, marched out of Granada on the second of January, 1569, at the head of a small body, which did not exceed in all two thousand foot and four hundred horse. He was speedily joined by levies from the neighbouring towns--from Jaen, Loja, Alhama, Antequera, and other places--which in a few days swelled his little army to double its original size. The capital he left in the hands of his son, the count of Tendilla; a man of less discretion than his father, of a sterner and more impatient temper, and one who had little sympathy for the Morisco. By his directions, the peasantry of the _vega_ were required to supply the army with twenty thousand pounds of bread daily.[63] The additional troops stationed in the city, as well as those who met there, as in a place of rendezvous, on their way to the sierra, were all quartered on the inhabitants of the Albaicin, where they freely indulged in the usual habits of military licence. The Moriscoes still retained much of that jealous sensibility which leads the natives of the East to seclude their wives and daughters from the eye of the stranger. It was in vain, however, that they urged their complaints in the most respectful and deprecatory terms before the governor. The haughty Spaniard only answered them with a stern rebuke, which made the Moriscoes too late repent that they had not profited by the opportunity offered them by Aben-Farax of regaining their independence.[64] Leaving Granada, the captain-general took the most direct route, leading along the western slant of the Sierra Nevada, that mountain-range which, with its frosty peaks glistening in the sun like palisades of silver, fences round the city on the south, and screens it in the summer from the scorching winds of Africa. Thence he rapidly descended into the beautiful vale of Lecrin, which spreads out, like a gay carpet embroidered with many a wild flower, to the verge of the Alpujarras. It was now, however, the dead of winter, when the bright colouring of the landscape, even in this favoured region, watered as it was by numerous fountains and running streams, had faded into the sombre tints more in harmony with the rude scenes on which the Spaniards were about to enter. [Sidenote: BOLD PASSAGE AT TABLATE.] Halting a night at Padul to refresh his troops, Mondejar pressed forward to Durcal, which he reached barely in time to save his advance-guard from a more shameful discomfiture than it had before experienced; for the enemy, pressing it on all sides, was in possession of the principal avenues to the town. On the approach of the main body of the Spaniards, however, he made a hasty retreat, and established himself in a strong position at the pass of Tablate. The place was defended by a _barranca_, or ravine, not formidable from its width, but its rocky side swept sheer down to a depth that made the brain of the traveller giddy as he looked into the frightful abyss. The chasm extended at least eight leagues in length, thus serving, like a gigantic ditch scooped out by the hand of Nature, to afford protection to the beautiful valley against the inroads of the fierce tribes of the mountains. Across this gulf a frail wooden bridge had been constructed, forming the only means of access from this quarter to the country of the Alpujarras. But this structure was now nearly demolished by the Moriscoes, who had taken up the floor, and removed most of the supports, till the passage of the tottering fabric could not safely be attempted by a single individual, much less by an army.[65] That they did not destroy the bridge altogether, probably arose from their desire to re-establish as soon as possible their communications with their countrymen in the valley. Meanwhile the Moslems had taken up a position which commanded the farther end of the bridge, where they calmly awaited the approach of the Spaniards. Their army, which greatly fluctuated in its numbers at different periods of the campaign, was a miscellaneous body, ill disciplined and worse armed. Some of the men carried fire-arms, some crossbows; others had only slings or javelins, or even sharp-pointed stakes; any weapon, in short, however rude, which they had contrived to secrete from the Spanish officials charged with enforcing the laws for disarming the Moriscoes. But they were a bold and independent race, inured to a life of peril and privation; and, however inferior to the Christians in other respects, they had one obvious advantage, in their familiarity with the mountain wilds in which they had been nurtured from infancy. As the Spaniards approached the ravine, they were saluted by the enemy, from the other side, with a shower of balls, stones, and arrows, which, falling at random, did little mischief. But as soon as the columns of the Christians reached the brow of the _barranca_, and formed into line, they opened a much more effective fire on their adversaries; and when the heavy guns with which Mendoza was provided were got into position, they did such execution on the enemy that he thought it prudent to abandon the bridge, and take post behind a rising ground, which screened him from the fire. All thoughts were now turned on the mode of crossing the ravine; and many a look of blank dismay was turned on the dilapidated bridge, which, like a spider's web, trembling in every breeze, was stretched across the formidable chasm. No one was bold enough to venture on this pass of peril. At length a Franciscan monk, named Christoval de Molina, offered himself for the emprise. It was again an ecclesiastic who was to lead the way in the path of danger. Slinging his shield across his back, with his robe tucked closely around him, grasping a crucifix in his left hand, and with his right brandishing his sword, the valiant friar set his foot upon the bridge.[66] All eyes were fastened upon him, as, invoking the name of Jesus, he went courageously but cautiously forward, picking his way along the skeleton fabric, which trembled under his weight, as if about to fall in pieces and precipitate him into the gulf below. But he was not so to perish; and his safe arrival on the farther side was greeted with the shouts of the soldiery, who, ashamed of their hesitation, now pressed forward to follow in his footsteps. The first who ventured had the same good fortune as his predecessor. The second, missing his step or becoming dizzy, lost his foothold, and, tumbling headlong, was dashed to pieces on the bottom of the ravine. One after another, the soldiers followed, and with fewer casualties than might have been expected from the perilous nature of the passage. During all this time they experienced no molestation from the enemy, intimidated, perhaps, by the unexpected audacity of the Spaniards, and not caring to come within the range of the deadly fire of their artillery. No sooner had the arquebusiers crossed in sufficient strength, than Mondejar, putting himself at their head, led them against the Moslems. He was received with a spirited volley, which had well-nigh proved fatal to him; and had it not been for his good cuirass, that turned the ball of an arquebuse, his campaign would have been brought to a close at its commencement. The skirmish lasted but a short time, as the Moriscoes, already disheartened by the success of the assailants, or in obedience to the plan of operations marked out by their leader, abandoned their position, and drew off rapidly towards the mountains. It was the intention of Aben-Humeya, as already noticed, to entangle his enemies in the defiles of the sierra, where, independently of the advantage he possessed from a knowledge of the country, the rugged character of the ground, he conceived, would make it impracticable for both cavalry and artillery, with neither of which he was provided.[67] The Spanish commander, resuming his former station, employed the night in restoring the bridge, on which his men laboured to such purpose, that by morning it was in a condition for both his horse and his heavy guns to cross in safety. Meanwhile he received tidings that a body of a hundred and eighty Spaniards, in the neighbouring town of Orgiba, who had thrown themselves into the tower of the church on the breaking out of the insurrection, were still holding their position, and anxiously looking for succour from their countrymen. Pushing forward, therefore, without loss of time, he resumed his march across the valley, which was here defended on either side by rugged hills, that, growing bolder as he advanced, announced his entrance into the gorges of the Alpujarras. The weather was tempestuous. The roads were rendered worse than usual by the heavy rains, and by the torrents that descended from the hills. The Spaniards, moreover, suffered much from straggling parties of the enemy, who had possession of the heights, whence they rolled down huge rocks, and hurled missiles of every kind on the heads of the invaders. To rid himself of this annoyance, Mondejar ordered detachments of horse--one of them under the command of his son, Don Antonio de Mendoza--to scour the crests of the hills and dislodge the skirmishers. Pioneers were sent in advance, to level the ground and render it practicable for cavalry. The service was admirably performed; and the mountaineers, little acquainted with the horse, which they seemed to have held in as much terror as did the ancient Mexicans, were so astounded by seeing the light-footed Andalusian steed scaling the rough sides of the sierra, along paths where the sportsman would hardly venture, that, without waiting for the charge, they speedily quitted the ground and fell back on the main body of their army. [Sidenote: RETREAT OF THE MORISCOES.] This was posted at Lanjaron, a place but a few miles off, where the Moriscoes had profited by a gentle eminence that commanded a narrow defile, to throw up a breastwork of stone and earth, behind which they were entrenched, prepared, as it would seem, to give battle to the Spaniards. The daylight had begun to fade, as the latter drew near the enemy's encampment; and, as he was unacquainted with the ground, Mondejar resolved to postpone his attack till the following morning. The night set in dark and threatening. But a hundred watchfires blazing on the hill-tops illumined the sky, and sent a feeble radiance into the gloom of the valley. All night long the wild notes of the musical instruments peculiar to the Moors, mingling with their shrill war-cries, sounded in the ears of the Christians, keeping them under arms, and apprehensive every moment of an attack.[68] But a night attack was contrary to the usual tactics of the Moors. Nor, as it appeared, did they intend to join battle with the Spaniards at all in this place. At least, if such had been their design, they changed it. For at break of day, to the surprise of the Spaniards, no vestige was to be seen of the Moriscoes, who, abandoning their position, had taken flight, like their own birds of prey, into the depths of the mountains. Mondejar, not sorry to be spared the delay which an encounter must have caused him at a time when every moment was so precious, now rapidly pushed forward to Orgiba, where he happily arrived in season to relieve the garrison, reduced almost to the last extremity, and to put to flight the rabble who besieged it. In the fulness of their hearts, and with the tears streaming from their eyes, the poor prisoners came forth from their fortress to embrace the deliverers who had rescued them from the most terrible of deaths. Their apprehensions of such a fate had alone nerved their souls to so long and heroic a resistance. Yet they must have sunk ere this from famine, had it not been for their politic precaution of taking with them into the tower several of the Morisco children whose parents secretly supplied them with food, which served as the means of subsistence--scanty though it was--for the garrison. But as the latter came forth into view, their wasted forms and famine-stricken visages told a tale of woe that would have softened a heart of flint.[69] The situation of Orgiba pointed it out as suitable for a fortified post, to cover the retreat of the army, if necessary, and to protect the convoys of supplies to be regularly forwarded from Granada. Leaving a small garrison there, the captain-general, without longer delay, resumed his pursuit of the enemy. Aben-Humeya had retreated into Poqueira, a rugged district of the Alpujarras. Here he had posted himself, with an army amounting to more than double its former numbers, at the extremity of a dangerous defile, called the Pass of Alfajarali. Behind lay the town of Bubion, the capital of the district, in which, considering it as a place of safety, many of the wealthier Moriscoes had deposited their women and their treasures. Mondejar's line of march now took him into the heart of the wildest regions of the Alpujarras, where the scenery assumed a character of sublimity very different from what he had met with in the lower levels of the country. Here mountain rose beyond mountain, till their hoary heads, soaring above the clouds, entered far into the region of eternal snow. The scene was as gloomy as it was grand. Instead of the wide-spreading woods that usually hang round the skirts of lofty mountains, covering up their nakedness from the eye, nothing here was to be seen but masses of shattered rock, black as if scathed by volcanic fires, and heaped one upon another in a sort of wild confusion, as if some tremendous convulsion of nature had torn the hills from their foundations, and thrown them into primitive chaos. Yet the industry of the Moriscoes had contrived to relieve the savage features of the landscape, by scooping out terraces wherever the rocky soil allowed it, and raising there the vine and other plants, in bright patches of variegated culture, that hung like a garland round the gaunt and swarthy sierra. The temperature was now greatly changed from what the army had experienced in the valley. The wind, sweeping down the icy sides of the mountains, found its way through the harness of the cavaliers and the light covering of the soldiers, benumbing their limbs, and piercing them to the very bone. Great difficulty was experienced in dragging the cannon up the steep heights, and along roads and passes, which, however easily traversed by the light-footed mountaineer, were but ill suited to the movements of an army clad in the heavy panoply of war. The march was conducted in perfect order, the arquebusiers occupying the van, and the cavalry riding on either flank, while detachments of infantry, the main body of which occupied the centre, were thrown out to the right and left, on the higher grounds along the route of the army, to save it from annoyance from the mountaineers. On the thirteenth of January, Mondejar entered the narrow defile of Alfajarali, at the farther end of which the motley multitude that had gathered round the standard of Aben-Humeya were already drawn up in battle-array. His right wing rested on the bold side of the sierra; the left was defended by a deep ravine, and his position was strengthened by more than one ambuscade, for which the nature of the ground was eminently favourable.[70] Indeed, ambushes and surprises formed part of the regular strategy of the Moorish warrior, who lost heart if he failed in these,--like the lion, who, if balked in the first spring upon his prey, is said rarely to attempt another. [Sidenote: COMBAT AT ALFAJARALI.] Putting these wily tactics into practice, the Morisco chief, as soon as the Spaniards were fairly entangled in the defile, without waiting for them to come into order of battle, gave the signal; and his men, starting up from glen, thicket, and ravine, or bursting down the hill-sides like their own winter-torrents, fell at once on the Christians,--front, flank, and rear,--assailing them on every quarter.[71] Astounded by the fiery suddenness of the assault, the rear-guard retreated on the centre, while the arquebusiers in the van were thrown into still greater disorder. For a few moments it seemed as if the panic would become general. But the voice of the leader was heard above the tumult, and by his prompt and sagacious measures he fortunately succeeded in restoring order, and reviving the confidence of his men. He detached one body of cavalry, under his son-in-law, to the support of the rear, and another to the front under the command of his son, Antonio de Mendoza. Both executed their commissions with spirit; and Mendoza, outstripping his companions in the haste with which he galloped to the front, threw himself into the thickest of the fight, where he was struck from his horse by a heavy stone, and was speedily surrounded by the enemy, from whose grasp he was with difficulty, and not till after much hard fighting, rescued by his companions. His friend, Don Alonso Portocarrero, the scion of a noble house in Andalusia, whose sons had always claimed the front of battle against the infidel, was twice wounded by poisoned arrows; for the Moors of the Alpujarras tipped their weapons with a deadly poison distilled from a weed that grew wild among the mountains.[72] A fierce struggle now ensued; for the Morisco was spurred on by hate and the recollection of a thousand wrongs. Ill provided with weapons for attack, and destitute of defensive armour, he exposed himself to the hottest of his enemy's fire, and endeavoured to drag the horsemen from their saddles, while stones and arrows, with which some musket-balls were intermingled, fell like rain on the well-tempered harness of the Andalusian knights. The latter, now fully roused, plunged boldly into the thickest of the Moorish multitude, trampling them under foot, and hewing them down, right and left, with their sharp blades. The arquebusiers, at the same time, delivered a well-directed fire on the flank of the Moriscoes, who, after a brave struggle of an hour's duration, in which they were baffled on every quarter, quitted the field, covered with their slain, as precipitately as they had entered it, and, vanishing among the mountains, were soon far beyond pursuit.[73] From the field of battle Mondejar marched at once upon Bubion, the capital of the district, and now left wholly unprotected by the Moslems. Yet many of their wives and daughters remained in it; and what rejoiced the heart of Mondejar more than all, was the liberation of a hundred and eighty Christian women, who came forth, frantic with joy and gratitude, to embrace the knees of their deliverers. They had many a tale of horror to tell their countrymen, who had now rescued them from a fate worse than that of death itself; for arrangements had been made, it was said, to send away those whose persons offered the greatest attractions, to swell the harems of the fierce Barbary princes in alliance with the Moriscoes. The town afforded a rich booty to the victorious troops, in gold, silver, and jewels, together with the finest stuffs, especially of silk, for the manufacture of which the people of the country were celebrated. As the Spanish commander, unwilling to be encumbered with unnecessary baggage, had made no provision for transporting the more bulky articles, the greater part of them, in the usual exterminating spirit of war, was consigned to the flames.[74] The soldiers would willingly have appropriated to themselves the Moorish women whom they found in the place, regarding them us the spoils of victory; but the marquis, greatly to the disgust of his followers, humanely interfered for their protection. Mondejar now learned that Aben-Humeya, gathering the wreck of his forces about him, had taken the route to Jubiles,--a place situated in the wildest part of the country, where there was a fortress of much strength, in which he proposed to make a final stand against his enemies. Desirous to follow up the blow before the enemy had time to recover from its effects, Mondejar resumed his march. He had not advanced many leagues before he reached Pitres, the principal town in the district of Ferreiras. It was a place of some importance, and was rich in the commodities usually found in the great Moorish towns, where the more wealthy of the inhabitants rivalled their brethren of Granada in their taste for sumptuous dress and in the costly decorations of their houses. The conquerors had here the satisfaction of releasing a hundred and fifty of their poor countrywomen from the captivity in which they had been held, after witnessing the massacre of their friends and relatives. The place was given up to pillage; but the marquis, true to his principles, notwithstanding the murmurs, and even menaces, of his soldiers, would allow no injury to be done to the Moorish women who remained in it. In this he acted in obedience to the dictates of sound policy, no less than of humanity, which indeed, happily for mankind, can never be dissevered from each other. He had no desire to push the war to extremities, or to exterminate a race whose ingenuity and industry were a fruitful source of revenue to the country. He wished, therefore, to leave the door of reconciliation still open; and while he carried fire and sword into the enemy's territory, he held out the prospect of grace to those who were willing to submit and return to their allegiance. The route of the army lay through a wild and desolate region, which, from its great elevation, was cool even in midsummer, and which now, in the month of January, wore the dreary aspect of a polar winter. The snow, which never melted on the highest peaks of the mountains, lay heavily on their broad shoulders, and, sweeping far down their sides, covered up the path of the Spaniards. It was with no little difficulty that they could find a practicable passage, especially for the train of heavy guns, which were dragged along with incredible toil by the united efforts of men and horses. The soldiers, born and bred in the sunny plains of Andalusia, were but ill provided against an intensity of cold of which they had never formed a conception. The hands and feet of many were frozen. Others, benumbed, and exhausted by excessive toil, straggled in the rear, and sunk down in the snow-drifts, or disappeared in the treacherous ravines and crevices, which, under their glittering mantle, lay concealed from the eye. It fared still worse with the Moriscoes, especially with the women and children, who, after hanging on the skirts of the retreating army, had, the better to elude pursuit, scaled the more inaccessible parts of the mountains, where, taking refuge in caverns, they perished, in great numbers, of cold and hunger.[75] Meanwhile Aben-Humeya, disheartened by his late reverses, felt too little confidence in the strength of his present position to abide there the assault of the Spaniards. Quitting the place, therefore, and taking with him his women and effects, he directed his course by rapid marches towards Paterna, his principal residence, which had the advantage, by its neighbourhood to the Sierra Nevada, of affording him, if necessary, the means of escaping into its wild and mysterious recesses, where none but a native would care to follow him. He left in the castle of Jubiles a great number of Morisco women, who had accompanied the army in its retreat, and three hundred men, who, from age or infirmity, would be likely to embarrass his movements. [Sidenote: MASSACRE AT JUBILES.] On reaching Jubíles, therefore, the Spanish general met with no resistance from the helpless garrison who occupied the fortress, which, moreover, contained a rich booty in gold, pearls, and precious stones, to gratify the cupidity of the soldiers.[76] Yet their discontent was expressed in more audacious terms than usual at the protection afforded by their commander to the Morisco women, of whom there were more than two thousand in the place. Among the women found there was also a good number of Christian captives, who roused the fierce passions of their countrymen by their piteous recital of the horrors they had witnessed, of the butchery of fathers, husbands, and brothers, and of the persecutions to which they had themselves been subjected in order to convert them to Islamism. They besought the captain-general to take pity on their sufferings, and to avenge their wrongs by putting every man and woman found in the place to the sword.[77] It is evident that, however prepared they may have been to accept the crown of martyrdom rather than abjure their faith, they gave little heed to the noblest of its precepts, which enjoined the forgiveness of their enemies. In this respect Mondejar proved himself decidedly the better Christian; for while he listened with commiseration to their tale of woe, and did all he could to comfort them in their affliction,[78] he would not abandon the protection of his captives, male or female, nor resign them to the brutality of his soldiers. He provided for their safety during the night by allowing them to occupy the church. But as this would not accommodate more than a thousand persons, the remainder, including all the men, were quartered in an open square in the neighbourhood of the building. The Spanish troops encamped at no great distance from the spot. In the course of the night one of the soldiers found his way into the quarters of the captives, and attempted to take some freedoms with a Morisco maiden. It so happened that her lover, disguised in woman's attire, was at her side, having remained with her for her protection. His Moorish blood fired at the insult, and he resented it by striking his poniard into the body of the Spaniard. The cry of the latter soon roused his comrades. Rushing to the place, they fell on the young Morisco, who, now brandishing a sword which he had snatched from the disabled man, laid about him so valiantly that several others were wounded. The cry rose that there were armed men, disguised as women, among the prisoners. More soldiers poured in to the support of their comrades, and fell with fury on their helpless victims. The uproar was universal. On the one side might be heard moans and petitions for mercy; on the other, brutal imprecations, followed by deadly blows, that showed how little prayers for mercy had availed. The hearts of the soldiers were harder than the steel with which they struck; for they called to mind the cruelties inflicted on their own countrymen by the Moriscoes. Striking to the right and left, they hewed down men and women indiscriminately,--both equally defenceless. In their blind fury they even wounded one another; for it was not easy to discern friend from foe in the obscurity, in which little light was to be had, says the chronicler, except such as came from the sparks of clashing steel or the flash of fire-arms.[79] It was in vain that the officers endeavoured to call off the men from their work of butchery. The hot temper of the Andalusian was fully roused; and it would have been as easy to stop the explosion of the mine when the train has been fired, as to stay his fury. It was not till the morning light showed the pavement swimming in gore, and the corpses of the helpless victims lying in heaps on one another, that his appetite for blood was satisfied. Great numbers of the women, and nearly all the men, perished in this massacre.[80] Those in the church succeeded in making fast the doors, and thus excluding their enemies, who made repeated efforts to enter the building. The marquis of Mondejar, indignant at this inhuman outrage perpetrated by his followers, and at their flagrant disobedience of orders, caused an inquiry into the affair to be instantly made; and the execution of three of the most guilty proved a salutary warning to the Andalusian soldier that there were limits beyond which it was not safe to try the patience of his commander.[81] Before leaving Jubíles, Mondejar sent off to Granada, under a strong escort, the Christian captives who, since their liberation, had remained with the army. There were eight hundred of them, women and children,--a helpless multitude, whose wants were to be provided for, and whose presence could not fail greatly to embarrass his movements. They were obliged to perform that long and wearisome journey across the mountains on foot, as there were no means of transportation. And piteous was the spectacle which they presented when they reached the capital. As the wayworn wanderers entered by the gate of Bib-arranbla, the citizens came forth in crowds to welcome them. A body of cavalry was in the van,--each of the troopers holding one or two children on the saddle before him, with sometimes a third on the crupper clinging to his back. The infantry brought up the rear; while the centre of the procession was occupied by the women,--a forlorn and melancholy band, with their heads undefended by any covering from the weather; their hair, bleached by the winter's tempests, streaming wildly over their shoulders; their clothes scanty, tattered, and soiled with travel; without stockings, without shoes, to protect their feet against the cold and flinty roads; while in the lines traced upon their countenances the dullest eye might read the story of their unparalleled sufferings. Many of the company were persons who, unaccustomed to toil, and delicately nurtured, were but poorly prepared for the trials and privations of every kind to which they had been subjected.[82] [Sidenote: SITUATION OF ABEN-HUMEYA.] As their friends and countrymen gathered round them, to testify their sympathy and listen to the story of their misfortunes, the voices of the poor wanderers were choked with sobs and lamentations. The grief was contagious; and the sorrowing and sympathetic multitude accompanied the procession like a train of mourners to the monastery of Our Lady of Victory, in the opposite quarter of the city, where services were performed with much solemnity, and thanks were offered up for their deliverance from captivity. From the church they proceeded to the Alhambra, where they were graciously received by the marchioness of Mondejar, the wife of the captain-general, who did what she could to alleviate the miseries of their condition. Those who had friends and relations in the city, found shelter in their houses; while the rest were kindly welcomed by the archbishop of Granada, and by the charitable people of the town, who provided them with raiment and whatever was necessary for their comfort.[83] The stories which the fugitives had to tell of the horrid scenes they had witnessed in the Alpujarras, roused a deeper feeling of hatred in the Spaniards towards the Moriscoes, that boded ill for the security of the inhabitants of the Albaicin. CHAPTER IV. REBELLION OF THE MORISCOES. Situation of Haben-Humeya--Fate of the Moorish Prisoners--Storming of Guajaras--Escape of Haben-Humeya--Operations of Los Velez--Cabal against Mondejar--Licence of the Soldiers--Massacre in Granada--The Insurrection rekindled. 1569. Before the marquis of Mondejar quitted Jubíles, he received a visit from seventeen of the principal Moriscoes in that part of the country, who came to tender their submission, exculpating themselves, at the same time, from any share in the insurrection, and humbly suing for the captain-general's protection. This, agreeably to his policy, he promptly accorded, granting them a safe-conduct, with instructions to tell their countrymen what he had done, and persuade them, if possible, to return to their allegiance, as the only way of averting the ruin that else would speedily overtake them. This act of clemency, so repugnant to the feelings of the Spaniards, was a new cause of disgust to his soldiers, who felt that the fair terms thus secured by the rebels were little less than a victory over themselves.[84] Yet the good effects of this policy were soon made visible, when the marquis resumed his march; for, as his favourable dispositions became more generally known, numbers of the Moriscoes, and several places on the route, eagerly tendered their submission, imploring his mercy, and protection against his followers. Aben-Humeya, meanwhile, who lay at Paterna, with his wives and his warriors gathered around, saw with dismay that his mountain throne was fast sliding away from beneath him. The spirit of distrust and disaffection had crept into his camp. It was divided into two parties; one of these, despairing of further resistance, would have come instantly to terms with the enemy; the other still adhered to a bolder policy; but its leaders, if we may trust the Castilian writers, were less influenced by patriotic than by personal motives, being for the most part men who had borne so conspicuous a part in the insurrection, that they could scarcely hope to be included in any amnesty granted by the Spaniards. Such, in particular, were the African adventurers, who had distinguished themselves above all others by their ferocious persecution of the Christians. They directed, at this time, the counsels of the Moorish prince, filling his mind with suspicions of the loyalty of some of his followers, especially of the father of one of his wives,--a person of much authority among the Moriscoes. To suspect and to slay were words of much the same import with Aben-Humeya. He sent for his relative, and, on his entering the apartment, caused him to be despatched before his eyes.[85] He would have followed this up by the murder of some others of the family, if they had not eluded his grasp; thus establishing his title to a descent from those despots of the East with whom the lives of their kindred were of as little account as the vermin in their path.[86] He was still at the head of a numerous army; its number, indeed, amounting to six thousand men, constituted its greatest strength; for, without discipline, almost without arms, it was made up of such rude, incongruous materials, that, as he already had experience, it could never abide the shock of battle from the militia of Castile. The Moorish prince had other causes for discouragement in the tidings he was hourly receiving of the defection of his subjects. The clemency shown by the conqueror was doing more for him than his arms,--as the snow which the blasts of winter have only bound more closely to the hill-side loosens its hold and falls away under the soft touch of spring. Notwithstanding his late display of audacity, the unhappy young man now lost all confidence in his own fortunes and in his followers. Sorely perplexed, he knew not where to turn. He had little of the constancy or courage of the patriot who has perilled his life in a great cause; and he now had recourse to the same expedient which he had so lately punished with death in his father-in-law. He sent a message to the marquis of Mondejar, offering to surrender, and, if time were given, to persuade his people to follow his example. Meanwhile he requested the Spanish commander to stay his march, and thus prevent a collision with his troops. Mondejar, though he would not consent to this, advanced more leisurely, while he opened a negotiation with his enemy. He had already come in sight of the rebel forces, when he consented, at the request of Aben-Humeya, to halt for a night in the neighbouring village of Iniza, in order to give time for a personal interview. This required the troops, some of whom had now advanced within musket-range of the enemy, to fall back, and take up ground in the rear of their present position. In executing this manoeuvre, they came almost in contact with a detachment of the Moorish army, who, in their ignorance of its real object, regarding the movement as a hostile demonstration, sent a shower of arrows and other missiles among the Spaniards, which they returned, with hearty goodwill, by a volley of musketry. The engagement soon became general. Aben-Humeya at the time was reading a letter, which he had just received from one of Mondejar's staff, arranging the place for the interview, when he was startled by the firing, and saw with consternation his own men warmly engaged with the enemy. Supposing he had been deceived by the Spaniards, he flung the letter on the ground, and throwing himself into the saddle, without so much as attempting to rally his forces, which were now flying over the field in all directions, he took the road to the Sierra Nevada, followed by only five or six of his attendants.[87] His horse was fleet, and he soon gained the defiles of the mountains. But he was hotly pursued; and, thinking it safer to trust to himself than to his horse, he dismounted, cut the hamstrings of the animal, to prevent his being of service to his pursuers, and disappeared in the obscure depths of the sierra, where it would have been fruitless to follow him. [Sidenote: THE FALL OF JUBILES.] The rout of his army was complete; and the victors might have inflicted an incalculable loss on the fugitives, had not the marquis of Mondejar called off his troops, and put a stop to the work of death. He wished to keep open as widely as possible the door of reconciliation. His conduct, which was not understood, and could not have been appreciated by his men, was stigmatized by them as treachery. They found some amends for their disappointment in the pillage of Paterna, the residence of Aben-Humeya, which well provided with the costly finery so much loved by the Moriscoes, furnished a welcome booty to the conquerors.[88] Among the Moorish captives were Aben-Humeya's mother, two of his sisters, and one of his wives, to whom, as usual, Mondejar extended his protection. Yet the disposal of his prisoners was a subject of perplexity to the Spanish commander. His soldiers, as we have seen, would have settled it at once, had their captain consented, by appropriating them all as the spoils of victory. There were many persons, higher in authority than these soldiers, who were of the same way of thinking on the subject with them. The question was one of sufficient importance to come before the government. Philip referred it to the council of state; and, regarding it as a case of conscience, in which the interests of religion were concerned, he asked the opinion of the Royal Audience of Granada, over which Deza presided. The final decision was what might have been expected from tribunals with inquisitors at their head. The Moriscoes, men and women, were declared to have incurred by their rebellion the doom of slavery. What is more remarkable is the precedent cited for this judgment, it being no other than a decision of the Council of Toledo, as far back as the time of the Visigoths, when certain rebellious Jews were held to have forfeited their liberty by an act of rebellion.[89] The Morisco, it was said, should fare no better than the Jew, since he was not only, like him, a rebel and an infidel, but an apostate to boot. The decision, it was understood, was very satisfactory to Philip, who, however, "with the pious moderation that distinguished so just and considerate a prince,"[90] so far mitigated the severity of the sentence, in the pragmatic which he published, as to exempt from its operation boys under ten years of age and girls under eleven. These were to be placed in the care of responsible persons, who would give them the benefits of a Christian education. Unhappily, there is reason to think that the good intentions of the government were not very conscientiously carried out in respect to this provision by those intrusted with the execution of it.[91] While the question was pending, Jubíles fell into the hands of the victors; and Mondejar, not feeling himself at liberty to release his female captives, of whom more than a thousand, by this event, had come into his possession, delivered them in charge to three of the principal Moriscoes, to whom, it may be remembered, he had given letters of safe-conduct. They were allowed to restore the women to their families, on condition that they should all be surrendered on the demand of the government. Such an act, it must be admitted, implies great confidence in the good faith of the Moslems,--a confidence fully justified by the result. When, in obedience to the pragmatic, they were claimed by the government, they were delivered up by their families,--with the exception of some who had died in the meantime,--and the greater part of them were sold by public auction in Granada.[92] The only place of any importance which now held out against Mondejar was Las Guájaras, situated in the plains of Salobreña, in the direction of Velez Malaga. This was a rocky, precipitous hill, on the summit of which, nature, with little assistance from art, had constructed a sort of rude fortress. It was held by a fierce band of Moriscoes, who, descending from the heights, swept over the plains, carrying on devastating forays, that made them the terror of the surrounding country. Mondejar, moved by the complaints of the inhabitants, left Ugijar on the fifth of February, at the head of his whole array, now much augmented by the arrival of recent levies, and marched rapidly on Guájaras. He met with a more formidable resistance than he had expected. His first attempt to carry the place was repulsed with a heavy loss on the part of the assailants. The Moorish garrison, from its elevated position, poured a storm of missiles on their heads, and, what was worse, rolled down huge masses of rock, which, ploughing through the Castilian ranks, overthrew men and horses, and did as great execution as would have been done by artillery. Eight hundred Spaniards were left dead on the field: and many a noble house in Andalusia had to go into mourning for that day's disaster. Mondejar, stung by this repulse,--the first reverse his arms had experienced,--determined to lead the attack in person on the following day. His approaches were made with greater caution than before; and, without much injury, he succeeded in bringing his arquebusiers on a higher level, where their fire swept the enemy's intrenchments and inflicted on him a terrible loss. Still the sun went down, and the place had not surrendered. But El Zamar, its brave defender, without ammunition, almost without arms, felt that there was no longer hope for his little garrison. Silently evacuating the place, therefore, at dead of night, the Moriscoes, among whom were both women and children, scrambled down the precipice with the fearlessness of the mountain goat, and made their escape without attracting the notice of the Spaniards. They left behind only such as, from age or infirmity, were unable to follow them in their perilous descent. On the next day, when the Spanish general prepared to renew the assault, great was his astonishment to find that the enemy had vanished, except only a few wretched beings incapable of making any resistance. All the evil passions of Mondejar's nature had been roused by the obstinate defence of the place, and the lives it had cost him. In the heat of his wrath, he ordered the helpless garrison to be put to the sword. No prayer for mercy was heeded. No regard was had to age or to sex. All were cut down in the presence of the general, who is even said to have stimulated the faltering soldiers to go through with their bloody work.[93] An act so hard to be reconciled with his previous conduct has been referred by some to the annoyance which he felt at being so frequently taxed with excessive lenity to the Moriscoes, an accusation which was carried, indeed, before the crown, and which the present occasion afforded him the means of effectually disproving. However this may be, the historian must lament the tarnished honour of a brave and generous chief, whose character up to this time had been sullied by none of those acts of cruelty which distinguished this sanguinary war.[94] [Sidenote: CAPTURE AND DEATH OF EL ZAMAR.] But even this cruelty was surpassed by that of his son, the count of Tendilla. El Zamar, the gallant defender of the fortress, wandered about among the crags with his little daughter, whom he carried in his arms. Famished and fainting from fatigue, he was at length overtaken by his enemies, and sent off as a prisoner to Granada, where the fierce Tendilla caused the flesh to be torn from his bones with red-hot pincers, and his mangled carcase, yet palpitating with life, to be afterwards quartered. The crime of El Zamar was that he had fought too bravely for the independence of his nation. Having razed the walls of Guajaras to the ground, Mondejar returned with his blood-stained laurels to his head-quarters at Orgiba. Tower and town had gone down before him. On every side his arms had proved victorious. But one thing was wanting--the capture of Aben-Humeya, the "little king" of the Alpujarras. So long as he lived, the insurrection, now smothered, might be rekindled at any time. He had taken refuge, it was known, in the wilds of the Sierra Nevada, where, as the captain-general wrote, he was wandering from rock to rock with only a handful of followers.[95] Mondejar sent two detachments of soldiers into the sierra, to discover his haunts, if possible, and seize upon his person. The commander of one of these parties, named Maldonado, ascertained that Aben-Humeya, secreting himself among the fastnesses of the mountains by day, would steal forth at night, and repair, with a few of his followers, to a place called Mecina, on the skirts of the sierra. Here he found shelter in the house of his kinsman, Aben-Aboo, one of those Moriscoes who, after the affair of Jubíles, had obtained a safe-conduct from Mondejar. Having gained this intelligence, and learned the situation of the house, the Spanish captain marched, with his little band of two hundred soldiers, in that direction. He made his approach with the greatest secrecy. Travelling by night, he reached undiscovered the neighbourhood of Aben-Aboo's residence. Advancing under cover of the darkness, he had arrived within gunshot of the dwelling, when, at this critical moment, all his precautions were defeated by the carelessness of one of his company, whose arquebuse was accidentally discharged. The report, reverberating from the hills in the silence of night, roused the inmates of the house, who slept as the wearied mariner sleeps when his ship is in danger of foundering. One of them, El Zaguer, the uncle of Aben-Humeya, and the person who had been mainly instrumental in securing him his crown--a crown of thorns--was the first roused, and, springing to the window, he threw himself down, though the height was considerable, and made his way to the mountains. His nephew, who lay in another part of the building, was not so fortunate. When he reached the window, he saw with dismay the ground in front occupied by a body of Castilian troops. Hastening to another window, he found it still the same; his enemies were everywhere around the house. Bewildered and sorely distressed, he knew not where to turn. Thus entrapped, and without the means of making any terms with his enemies, he knew he had as little to hope from their mercy as the wolf has from the hunters who have caught him in his lair. The Spaniards, meanwhile, were thundering at the door of the building for admittance. Fortunately it was well secured. A sudden thought occurred to Aben-Humeya, which he instantly put in execution. Hastening down stairs, he took his station behind the door, and gently drew the bolts. The noise was not heard amidst the din made by the assailants, who, finding the door give way, supposed they had forced the fastenings, and pouring in, soon spread themselves in every direction over the house in search of the fugitive. Aben-Humeya, ensconced behind the door, escaped observation; and, when his enemies had disappeared, stole out into the darkness, and, under its friendly mantle, succeeded in finding his way to the mountains. It was in vain that the Spaniards, enraged at the loss of the quarry, questioned Aben-Aboo as to the haunts of his kinsman, and of El Zaguer, his uncle, in the sierra. Nor could the most excruciating tortures shake his constancy. "I may die," said the brave Morisco, "but my friends will live." Leaving him for dead, the soldiers returned to the camp, taking with them a number of prisoners, his companions. There was no one of them, however, that was not provided with a safe-conduct from the marquis, who accordingly set them at liberty; showing a respect for his engagements, in which unhappily, as we shall see hereafter, he was not too well imitated by his soldiers. The heroic Aben-Aboo, though left for dead, did not die, but lived to head another insurrection, and to take ample vengeance on his enemies.[96] While the arms of the marquis of Mondejar were thus crowned with success, the war raged yet more fiercely on the eastern slopes of the Alpujarras, where a martial race of mountaineers threatened a descent on Almeria and the neighbouring places, keeping the inhabitants in perpetual alarm. They accordingly implored the government at Granada to take some effectual measures for their relief. The president, Deza, in consequence, desired the marquis of Los Velez, who held the office of _adelantado_ of the adjoining province of Murcia, to muster a force and provide for the defence of the frontier. This proceeding was regarded by Mondejar's friends as an insult to that nobleman, whose military authority extended over the country menaced by the Moriscoes. The act was the more annoying, that the person invited to assume the command was a rival, between whose house and that of the Mendozas there existed an ancient feud. Yet the king sanctioned the proceeding, thinking perhaps that Mondejar was not in sufficient force to protect the whole region of the Alpujarras. However this may be, Philip, by this act, brought two commanders of equal authority on the theatre of action; men who, in their characters and habitual policy, were so opposed to each other, that little concert could 'be expected between them. Don Luis Fajardo, marquis of Los Velez, was a nobleman somewhat advanced in years, most of which had been passed in the active duties of military life. He had studied the art of war under the great emperor, and had acquired the reputation of a prompt and resolute soldier, bold in action, haughty, indeed overbearing, in his deportment, and with an inflexible will, not to be shaken by friend or foe. The severity of his nature had not been softened under the stern training of the camp; and, as his conduct in the present expedition showed, he was troubled with none of those scruples on the score of humanity which so often turned the edge of Mondejar's sword from the defenceless and the weak. The Moriscoes, who understood his character well, held him in terror, as they proved by the familiar _sobriquet_ which they gave him of the "iron-headed devil."[97] [Sidenote: OPERATIONS OF LOS VELEZ.] The marquis, on receiving the invitation of Deza, lost no time in gathering his kindred and numerous vassals around him; and they came with an alacrity which showed how willingly they obeyed the summons to a foray over the border. His own family was a warlike race, reared from the cradle amidst the din of arms. In the present expedition he was attended by three of his sons, the youngest of whom a boy of thirteen, had the proud distinction of carrying his father's banner.[98] With the levies promptly furnished from the neighbouring places, Los Velez soon found himself supported by a force of greater strength than that which followed the standard of Mondejar. At the head of this valiant but ill-disciplined array, he struck into the gloomy gorges of the mountains, resolved on bringing the enemy at once to battle. Our limits will not allow room for the details of a campaign which in its general features bears so close a resemblance to that already described. Indeed the contest was too unequal to afford a subject of much interest to the general reader, while the details are of still less importance in a military view, from the total ignorance shown by the Moriscoes of the art of war. The fate of the campaign was decided by three battles, fought successively at Huécija, Filix, and Ohanez, places all lying in the eastern ranges of the Alpujarras. That of Filix was the most sanguinary. A great number of stragglers hung on the skirts of the Morisco army; and besides six thousand--many of them women[99]--left dead upon the field, there were two thousand children, we are told, butchered by the Spaniards.[100] Some fled for refuge to the caves and thickets; but they were speedily dragged from their hiding-places, and massacred by the soldiers in cold blood. Others, to escape death from the hands of their enemies, threw themselves headlong down the precipices,--some of them with their infants in their arms,--and thus miserably perished. "The cruelties committed by the troops," says one of the army, who chronicled its achievements, "were such as the pen refuses to record.[101] I myself," he adds, "saw the corpse of a Morisco woman, covered with wounds, stretched upon the ground, with six of her children lying dead around her. She had succeeded in protecting a seventh, still an infant, with her body, and though the lances which pierced her had passed through its clothes, it had marvellously escaped any injury. It was clinging," he continues, "to its dead mother's bosom, from which it drew milk that was mingled with blood. I carried it away and saved it."[102] For the credit of human nature he records some other instances of the like kind, showing that a spark of humanity might occasionally be struck out from the flinty breasts of these marauders. The field of battle afforded a rich harvest for the victors, who stripped the dead, and rifled the bodies of the women of collars, bracelets, ornaments of gold and silver, and costly jewels, with which the Moorish female loved to decorate her person. Sated with plunder, the soldiers took the first occasion to leave their colours and return to their homes. Their places were soon supplied, as the display of their riches sharpened the appetites of their countrymen, who eagerly floaked to the banner of a chief that was sure to lead them on to victory and plunder. But that chief, with all his stern authority, was no match for the spirit of insubordination that reigned among his troops; and, when he attempted to punish one of their number for a gross act of disobedience, he was made to understand that there were three thousand in the camp ready to stand by their comrade and protect him from injury.[103] The wild excesses of the soldiery were strangely mingled with a respect for the forms of religion, that intimated the nature of the war in which they were engaged. Before entering into action the whole army knelt down in prayer, solemnly invoking the protection of Heaven on its champions. After the battle of Ohanez, where the mountain streams were so polluted with the gore that the Spaniards found it difficult to slake their thirst, they proceeded to celebrate the _fête_ of the Purification of the Virgin.[104] A procession was formed to the church, which was headed by the marquis of Los Velez and his chivalry, clad in complete mail, and bearing white tapers in their hands. Then came the Christian women, who had been rescued from captivity, dressed, by the general's command, in robes of blue and white, as the appropriate colours of the Virgin.[105] The rear was brought up by a body of friars and other ecclesiastics, who had taken part in the crusade. The procession passed slowly between the files of the soldiery, who saluted it with volleys of musketry as it entered the church, where _Te Deum_ was chanted, and the whole company prostrated themselves in adoration of the Lord of Hosts, who had given his enemies into their hands. [Sidenote: CABAL AGAINST MONDEJAR.] From this solemn act of devotion the troops proceeded to the work of pillage, in which the commander, unlike his rival, the marquis of Mondejar, joined as heartily as the meanest of his followers. The Moorish captives, to the number of sixteen hundred, among whom, we are told, were many young and beautiful maidens, instead of meeting with the protection they had received from the more generous Mondejar, were delivered up to the licentious soldiery; and for a fortnight there reigned throughout the camp a carnival of the wildest riot and debauchery.[106] In this strange confusion of the religious sentiment and of crimes most revolting to humanity, we see the characteristic features of the crusade. Nowhere do we find such a free range given to the worst passions of our nature as in the wars of religion,--where each party considers itself as arrayed against the enemies of God, and where the sanctity of the cause throws a veil over the foulest transgressions that hides their enormity from the eye of the transgressor. While the Moriscoes were stunned by the fierce blows thus dealt in rapid succession by the iron-hearted marquis, the mild and liberal policy of his rival was still more effectually reducing his enemies to obedience. Disheartened by their reverses, exhausted by fatigue and hunger, as they roved among the mountains, without raiment to clothe or a home to shelter them, the wretched wanderers came in one after another to sue for pardon. Nearly all the towns and villages in the district assigned to Mondejar, oppressed with like feelings of despondency, sent deputations to the Spanish quarters, to tender their submission and to sue for his protection. While these were graciously received, the general provided for the future security of his conquests, by establishing garrisons in the principal places, and by sending small detachments to different parts, to act as a sort of armed police for the maintenance of order. In this way, says a contemporary, the tranquillity of the country was so well established, that small parties of ten or a dozen soldiers wandered unmolested from one end of it to the other.[107] Mondejar, at the same time, wrote to the king, to acquaint him with the actual state of things. He besought his master to deal mercifully with the conquered people, and thus afford him the means of redeeming the pledges he had given for the favourable dispositions of the government.[108] He made another communication to the marquis of Los Velez, urging that nobleman to co-operate with him in the same humane policy, as the one best suited to the interests of the country. But his rival took a very different view of the matter; and he plainly told the marquis of Mondejar, that it would require more than one pitched battle yet to break the spirit of the Moriscoes; and that, since they thought so differently on the subject, the only way left was for each commander to take the course he judged best.[109] Unfortunately, there were others--men, too, of influence at the court--who were of the same stern way of thinking as the marquis of Los Velez; men acting under the impulse of religious bigotry, of implacable hatred of the Moslems, and of a keen remembrance of the outrages they had committed. There were others who, more basely, thought only of themselves and of the profit they should derive from the continuance of the war. Among those of the former class was the president Deza, with the members of the Audience and the civil authorities in Granada. Always viewing the proceedings of the captain-general with an unfriendly eye, they loudly denounced his policy to the king, condemning his ill-timed lenity to a crafty race, who would profit by it to rally from their late disasters and to form new plans of rebellion. It was not right, they said, that outrages like those perpetrated against both _divine and human majesty_ should go unpunished.[110] Mondejar's enemies did not stop here, but accused him of defrauding the exchequer of its dues, the fifth of the spoils of war gained in battle from the infidel. Finally, they charged him with having shown want of respect for the civil authorities of Granada, in omitting to communicate to them his plan of operations. The marquis, advised by his friends at court of these malicious attempts to ruin his credit with the government, despatched a confidential envoy to Madrid, to present his case before his sovereign and to refute the accusations of his enemies. The charge of peculation seems to have made no impression on the mind of a prince who would not have been slow to suspect, had there been any ground for suspicion. There may have been stronger grounds for the complaint of want of deference to the civil authorities of Granada. The best vindication of his conduct in this particular must be found in the character and conduct of his adversaries. From the first, Deza and the municipality had regarded him with jealousy, and done all in their power to thwart his plans and circumscribe his authority. It is only confidence that begets confidence. Mondejar, early accustomed to command, was probably too impatient of opposition.[111] He chafed under the obstacles and annoyances thrown in his way by his narrow-minded rivals. We have not the means before us of coming to a conclusive judgment on the merits of the controversy, but from what we know of the marquis's accusers, with the wily inquisitor at their head, we shall hardly err by casting our sympathies into the scale of the frank and generous-hearted soldier, who, while those that thus censured him were living at ease in the capital, had been fighting and following up the enemy, amidst the winter's tempests and across mountains covered with snow; and who, in little more than a month, without other aid than the disorderly levies of the cities, had quelled a dangerous revolt, and restored tranquillity to the land. Philip was greatly perplexed by the different accounts sent to him of the posture of affairs in Granada. Mondejar's agent suggested to the council of state that it would be well if his majesty would do as his father, Charles the Fifth, would have done in the like case--repair himself to the scene of action, and observe the actual state of things with his own eyes. But the suggestion found no favour with the minister, Espinosa, who affected to hold the Moriscoes in such contempt, that a measure of this kind, he declared, would be derogatory to the royal dignity. A better course would be for his majesty to send some one as his representative, clothed with full powers to take charge of the war, and of a rank so manifestly pre-eminent, that neither of the two commanders now in the field could take umbrage at his appointment over their heads. This suggestion, as the politic minister doubtless had foreseen, was much more to Philip's taste than that of his going in person to the scene of strife; for, however little he might shrink from any amount of labour in the closet, he had, as we have seen, a sluggish temperament, that indisposed him to much bodily exertion. The plan of sending some one to represent the monarch at the seat of war was accordingly approved; and the person selected for this responsible office was Philip's bastard brother, Don John of Austria.[112] [Sidenote: LICENCE OF THE SOLDIERS.] Rumours of what was going on in the cabinet at Madrid, reaching Granada from time to time, were followed by the most mischievous consequences. The troops, in particular, had no sooner learned that the marquis of Mondejar was about to be superseded in the command, than they threw off the little restraint he had been hitherto able to impose on them, and abandoned themselves to the violence and rapine to which they were so well disposed, and which seemed now to be countenanced by the president and the authorities in Granada. The very patrols whom Mondejar had commissioned to keep the peace were the first to set the example of violating it. They invaded the hamlets and houses they were sent to protect, plundered them of their contents, and committed the foulest outrages on their inmates. The garrisons in the principal towns imitated their example, carrying on their depredations, indeed, on a still larger scale. Even the capital, under the very eyes of the count of Tendilla, sent out detachments of soldiers, who with ruthless violence trampled down the green plantations in the valleys, sacked the villages, and dragged away the inhabitants from the midst of their blazing dwellings into captivity.[113] It was with the deepest indignation that the marquis of Mondejar saw the fine web of policy he had been so busily contriving thus wantonly rent asunder by the very hands that should have protected it. He now longed as ardently as any in the province for the coming of some one entrusted with authority to enforce obedience from the turbulent soldiery; a task of still greater difficulty than the conquest of the enemy. While such was the state of things, an event occurred in Granada which, in its general character, may remind one of some of the most atrocious scenes of the French Revolution. In the beginning of the troubles, the president had caused a number of Moriscoes, amounting to not less than a hundred and fifty, it is said, to be arrested and thrown into the prison of the Chancery. Certain treasonable designs, of which they had been suspected for a long time, furnished the feeble pretext for this violent proceeding. Some few, indeed, were imprisoned for debt. But the greater number were wealthy men, who enjoyed the highest consideration among their countrymen. They had been suffered to remain in confinement during the whole of the campaign; thus serving, in some sort, as hostages for the good behaviour of the people of the Albaicin. Early in March, a rumour was circulated that the mountaineers, headed by Aben-Humeya, whose father and brother were among the prisoners, were prepared to make a descent on the city by night, and, with the assistance of the inhabitants of the Albaicin, to begin the work of destruction by assaulting the prison of the Chancery and liberating their countrymen. This report, readily believed, caused the greatest alarm among the citizens, boding no good to the unhappy prisoners. On the evening of the seventeenth, Deza received intelligence that lights had been seen on some of the neighbouring mountains, which seemed to be of the nature of signals, as they were answered by corresponding lights in some of the houses in the Albaicin. The assault, it was said, would doubtless be made that very night. The president appears to have taken no measures for the protection of the city, but, on receiving the information, he at once communicated it to the alcayde of the prison, and directed him to provide for the security of his prisoners. The alcayde lost no time in gathering his friends about him, and caused arms to be distributed among a body of Spaniards, of whom there appears to have been a considerable number confined in the place at this time. Thus prepared, they all remained, as in silent expectation of some great event. At length, some time before midnight, the guard posted in the Campana, one of the towers of the Alhambra, struck the bell with a succession of rapid strokes, such as were used to give an alarm. In a moment every Spaniard in the prison was on his feet; and, the alcayde throwing open the doors and leading the way, they fell at once on their defenceless victims, confined in another quarter of the building. As many of these were old and infirm, and most of them inoffensive citizens, whose quiet way of life had little fitted them for brawl or battle, and who were now destitute of arms of any kind, they seemed to be as easy victims as the sheep into whose fold the famishing wolves have broken in the absence of the shepherd. Yet they did not give up their lives without an effort to save them. Despair lent them strength, and snatching up chairs, benches, or any other article of furniture in their cells, they endeavoured to make good their defence against the assailants. Some, exerting a vigour which despair only could have given, succeeded in wrenching stones from the walls or iron bars from the windows, and thus supplied themselves with the means, not merely of defence, but of doing some mischief to the assailants in their turn. They fought, in short, like men who are fighting for their lives. Some, however, losing all hope of escape, piled together a heap of mats, bedding, and other combustibles, and, kindling them with their torches, threw themselves into the flames, intending in this way to set fire to the building, and to perish in one general conflagration with their murderers.[114] But the flames they had kindled were soon extinguished in their own blood, and their mangled remains were left to blacken among the cinders of their funeral pile. For two hours the deadly conflict between parties so unequally matched had continued; the one shouting its old war-cry of "Saint Iago," as if fighting on an open field; the other, if we may take the Castilian account, calling on their prophet to come to their assistance. But no power, divine or human, interposed in their behalf; and, notwithstanding the wild uproar caused by men engaged in a mortal struggle, by the sound of heavy blows and falling missiles, by the yells of the victors and the dying moans and agonies of the vanquished, no noise to give token of what was going on--if we are to credit the chroniclers--found its way beyond the walls of the prison. Even the guard stationed in the court-yard, we are assured, were not roused from their slumbers.[115] At length some rumour of what was passing reached the city, where the story ran that the Moriscoes were in arms against their keepers, and would soon probably get possession of the gaol. This report was enough for the people, who, roused by the alarm-bell, were now in a state of excitement that disposed them to any deed of violence. Snatching up their weapons, they rushed, or rather flew, like vultures snuffing the carrion from afar, to the scene of slaughter. Strengthened by this reinforcement, the assailants in the prison soon completed the work of death; and, when the morning light broke through the grated windows, it disclosed the full extent of the tragedy. Of all the Moriscoes only two had escaped,--the father and brother of Aben-Humeya, over whom a guard had been especially set. Five Spaniards were slain, and seventeen wounded; showing the fierce resistance made by the Moslems, though destitute of arms.[116] [Sidenote: THE INSURRECTION REKINDLED.] Such was the massacre in the prison of the Chancery of Granada, which, as already intimated, nowhere finds a more fitting parallel than in the murders perpetrated on a still larger scale during the French Revolution, in the famous massacres of September. But the miscreants who perpetrated these enormities were the tools of a sanguinary faction, that was regarded with horror by every friend of humanity in the country. In Granada, on the other hand, it was the government itself, or at least those of highest authority in it, who were responsible for the deed. For who can doubt that a proceeding, the success of which depended on the concurrence of so many circumstances as to preclude the idea of accident, must have been countenanced, if not contrived, by those who had the direction of affairs? Another feature, not the least striking in the case, is the apathy shown by contemporary writers,--men who on more than one occasion have been willing to testify their sympathy for the sufferings of the Moriscoes. One of these chroniclers, after telling the piteous tale, coolly remarks that it was a good thing for the alcayde of the prison, who pocketed a large sum of money which had been found on the persons of the wealthy Moors. Another, after noticing the imputation of an intended rising on the part of the prisoners as in the highest degree absurd, dismisses the subject by telling us that "the Moriscoes were a weak, scatter-brained race, with just wit enough to bring on themselves such a _mishap_,"--as he pleasantly terms the massacre.[117] The government of Madrid received the largest share of the price of blood. For when the wives and families of the deceased claimed the inheritance of their estates, in some cases very large, their claims were rejected--on what grounds we are not told--by the alcaldes of the Court of Audience in Granada, and the estates were confiscated to the use of the crown. Such a decision, remarks a chronicler, may lead one to infer that the prisoners had been guilty of even more heinous offences than those commonly imputed to them.[118] The impartial reader will probably come to a very different conclusion; and since it was the opulent burghers who were thus marked out for destruction, he may naturally infer that the baser passion of avarice mingled with the feelings of fear and hatred in bringing about the massacre. However this may be, so foul a deed placed an impassable gulf between the Spaniards and the Moriscoes. It taught the latter that they could no longer rely on their perfidious enemy, who, while he was holding out to them one hand in token of reconciliation, was raising the other to smite them to the ground. A cry of vengeance ran through all the borders of the Alpujarras. Again the mountaineers rose in arms. They cut off stragglers, waylaid the patrols whom Mondejar had distributed throughout the country, and even menaced the military posts of the Spaniards. On some occasions, they encountered the latter with success in the open field, and in one instance defeated and slew a large body of Christians, as they were returning from a foray laden with plunder. Finally they invited Aben-Humeya to return and resume the command, promising to stand by him to the last. The chief obeyed the call and, leaving his retreat in the Sierra Nevada, again took possession of his domains, and, planting his blood-red flag on his native hills,[119] soon gathered around him a more formidable host than before. He even affected a greater pomp than he had before displayed. He surrounded himself with a body-guard of four hundred arquebusiers.[120] He divided his army into battalions and companies, and endeavoured to introduce into it something of the organization and tactics of the Spaniards.[121] He sent his brother Abdallah to Constantinople, to represent his condition to the Sultan, and to implore him to make common cause with his Moslem brethren in the Peninsula. In short, rebellion assumed a more audacious front than at any time during the previous campaign; and the Christians of Andalusia and Granada looked with the greatest anxiety for the coming of a commander possessed of sufficient authority to infuse harmony into the counsels of the rival chiefs, to enforce obedience from the turbulent soldiery, and to bring the war to a speedy conclusion. CHAPTER V. REBELLION OF THE MORISCOES. Early life of Don John of Austria--Acknowledged by Philip--His Thirst for Distinction--His Cruise in the Mediterranean--Made Commander-in-chief--The War renewed--Removal of the Moriscoes. 1569. As Don John of Austria is to occupy an important place, not only in the war with the Moriscoes, but in some of the most memorable scenes in the remainder of this history, it will be proper to acquaint the reader with what is known of the earlier part of his career. Yet it is precisely over this part of it that a veil of mystery hangs, which no industry of the historian has been able wholly to remove. It seems probable that he was born in the year 1547.[122] The twenty-fourth of February is assigned by common consent--I hardly know on what ground--as the day of his birth. It was also, it may be remembered, the birthday of his father, Charles the Fifth. His mother, Barbara Blomberg, was an inhabitant of Ratisbon, in Germany. She is described as a beautiful young girl, who attracted the emperor's notice several years after the death of the empress Isabella.[123] The Spanish chroniclers claim a noble descent for Barbara.[124] Indeed, it would go hard but a Spaniard could make out a pedigree for his hero. Yet there are several circumstances which suggest the idea that the mother of Don John must have occupied a very humble position. [Sidenote: DON JOHN OF AUSTRIA.] Subsequently to her connexion with Charles she married a German named Kegell, on whom the emperor bestowed the office of commissary.[125] The only other notice, so far as I am aware, which Charles took of his former mistress was the settlement on her of a yearly pension of two hundred florins, which he made the day before his death.[126] It was certainly not a princely legacy, and infers that the object of it must have been in a humble condition in life to have rendered it important to her comfort. We are led to the same conclusion by the mystery thrown around the birth of the child, forming so strong a contrast to the publicity given to the birth of the emperor's natural daughter, Margaret of Parma, whose mother could boast that in her veins flowed some of the best blood of the Netherlands. For three years the boy, who received the name of Geronimo, remained under his mother's roof, when, by Charles's order, he was placed in the hands of a Fleming, named Maffi, a musician in the imperial band. This man transferred his residence to Leganes, a village in Castile, not far from Madrid. The instrument still exists that contains the agreement by which Maffi, after acknowledging the receipt of a hundred florins, engages for fifty florins annually, to bring up the child with as much care as if he were his own.[127] It was a moderate allowance, certainly, for the nurture of one who was some day to come before the world as the son of an emperor. It showed that Charles was fond of a bargain, though at the expense of his own offspring. No instruction was provided for the child except such as he could pick up from the parish priest, who, as he knew as little as Maffi did of the secret of Geronimo's birth, probably bestowed no more attention on him than on the other lads of the village. And we cannot doubt that a boy of his lively temper must have preferred passing his days in the open fields, to confinement in the house and listening to the homilies of his teacher. As he grew in years, he distinguished himself above his young companions by his courage. He took the lead in all their rustic sports, and gave token of his belligerent propensities by making war on the birds in the orchards, on whom he did great execution with his little crossbow.[128] Four years were passed in this hardy way of life, which, if it did nothing else for the boy, had the advantage of strengthening his constitution for the serious trials of manhood, when the emperor thought it was time to place him in a situation where he would receive a better training than could be found in the cottage of a peasant. He was accordingly transferred to the protection of Luis Quixada, Charles's trusty major-domo, who received the child into his family at Villagarcia, in the neighbourhood of Valladolid. The emperor showed his usual discernment in the selection of a guardian for his son. Quixada, with his zeal for the faith, his loyalty, his nice sentiment of honour, was the very type of the Castilian hidalgo in his best form; while he possessed all those knightly qualities which made him the perfect mirror of the antique chivalry. His wife, Doña Magdalena de Ulloa, sister of the marquis of Mota, was a lady yet more illustrious for her virtues than for her rank. She had naturally the most to do with the training of the boy's earlier years; and under her discipline it was scarcely possible that one of so generous a nature should fail to acquire the courtly breeding and refinement of taste which shed a lustre over the stern character of the soldier. However much Quixada may have reposed on his wife's discretion, he did not think proper to try it, in the present instance, by communicating to her the secret of Geronimo's birth. He spoke of him as the son of a great man, his dear friend, expressing his desire that his wife would receive him as her own child. This was the less difficult, as Magdalena had no children of her own. The solicitude shown by her lord may possibly have suggested to her the idea that the boy was more nearly related to him than he chose to acknowledge,--in short, that he was the offspring of some intrigue of Quixada previous to his marriage.[129] But an event which took place not long after the child's introduction into the family, is said to have awakened in her suspicions of an origin more in accordance with the truth. The house at Villagarcia took fire; and, as it was in the night, the flames gained such head that they were not discovered till they burst through the windows. The noise in the street roused the sleeping inmates; and Quixada, thinking first of his charge, sprang from his bed, and, rushing into Geronimo's apartment, snatched up the affrighted child, and bore him in his arms to a place of safety. He then reentered the house, and, forcing his way through the smoke and flames, succeeded in extricating his wife from her perilous situation. This sacrifice of love to loyalty is panegyrized by a Castilian chronicler as "a rare achievement, far transcending any act of heroism of which antiquity could boast."[130] Whether Magdalena looked with the same complacency on the proceeding we are not informed. Certain it is, however, that the interest shown by her husband in the child had no power to excite any feeling of jealousy in her bosom. On the contrary, it seemed rather to strengthen her own interest in the boy, whose uncommon beauty and affectionate disposition soon called forth all the tenderness of her nature. She took him to her heart, and treated him with all the fondness of a mother,--a feeling warmly reciprocated by the object of it, who, to the day of his death, regarded her with the truest feelings of filial love and reverence. In 1558, the year after his retirement to Yuste, Charles the Fifth, whether from a wish to see his son, or, as is quite as probable, in the hope of making Quixada more contented with his situation, desired his major-domo to bring his family to the adjoining village of Cuacos. While there, the young Geronimo must doubtless sometimes have accompanied his mother, as he called Doña Magdalena, in her visits to the monastery. Indeed, his biographer assures us that the sight of him operated like a panacea on the emperor's health.[131] We find no allusion to him, however, in any of the letters from Yuste; and, if he did go there, we may be sure that Charles had sufficient control over himself not to betray, by any indiscreet show of fondness, his relationship to the child.[132] One tradition respecting him lingered to a late period among the people of Cuacos, where the peasants, it is said, pelted him with stones as he was robbing their orchards. It was the first lesson in war of the future hero of Lepanto. [Sidenote: DON JOHN OF AUSTRIA.] There is no reason to doubt that the boy witnessed the obsequies of the emperor. One who was present tells us that he saw him there, dressed in full mourning, and standing by the side of Quixada, for whose page he passed among the brethren of the convent.[133] We may well believe that a spectacle so solemn and affecting as these funeral ceremonies must have sunk deep into his young mind, and heightened the feelings of veneration with which he always regarded the memory of his father. It was, perhaps, the appearance of Geronimo as one of the mourners that first suggested the idea of his relationship to the emperor. We find a letter from Quixada to Philip, dated soon after, in which he speaks of rumours on the subject as current in the neighbourhood.[134] Among the testamentary papers of Charles was found one in an envelope sealed with his private seal, and addressed to his son Philip, or in case of his death, to his grandson Carlos, or whoever might be in possession of the crown. It was dated in 1554, before his retirement to Yuste. It acknowledged his connexion with a German maiden, and the birth of a son named Geronimo. The mother's name was not given. He pointed out the quarter where information could be got respecting the child, who was then living with the violin-player at Leganes. He expressed the wish that he should be trained up for the ecclesiastical profession, and that, when old enough, he should enter a convent of one of the reformed orders. Charles would not, however, have any constraint put on the inclinations of the boy, and in case of his preferring a secular life, he would have a suitable estate settled on him in the kingdom of Naples, with an annual income of between thirty and forty thousand ducats. Whatever course Geronimo might take, the emperor requested that he should receive all the honour and consideration due to him as his son. His letter concluded by saying that, although for obvious reasons he had not inserted these directions in his will, he wished them to be held of the same validity as if he had.[135] Philip seems from the first to have so regarded them, though, as he was then in Flanders, he resolved to postpone the public acknowledgment of his brother till his return to Spain. Meanwhile, the rumours in regard to Geronimo's birth had reached the ears of the regent, Joanna. With natural curiosity, she ordered her secretary to write to Quixada and ascertain the truth of the report. The trusty hidalgo endeavoured to evade the question, by saying that some years since a friend of his had entrusted a boy to his care; but as no allusion whatever was made to the child in the emperor's will, the story of their relationship to each other should be treated as idle gossip.[136] The reply did not satisfy Joanna, who seems to have settled it in her own mind that the story was well founded. She took an occasion soon after to write to Doña Magdalena, during her husband's absence from home, expressing her wish that the lady would bring the boy where she could see him. The place selected was at an _auto de fe_ about to be celebrated in Valladolid. Doña Magdalena, reluctant as she was, felt herself compelled to receive the request from such a source as a command, which she had no right to disobey. One might have thought that a ceremony so heartrending and appalling in its character as an _auto de fe_ would be the last to be selected for the indulgence of any feeling of a light and joyous nature. But the Spaniard of that and of a much later age regarded this as the sweetest sacrifice that could be offered to the Almighty; and he went to it with the same indifference to the sufferings of the victim--probably with the same love of excitement--which he would have felt in going to a bull-fight. On the day which had been named, Magdalena and her charge took their seats on the carpeted platform reserved for persons of rank, in full view of the scaffold appropriated to the martyrs who were to suffer for conscience' sake. It was in the midst of the august company here assembled, that the son of Charles the Fifth was to receive his first lesson in the school of persecution; that he was to learn to steel his heart against sympathy with human suffering; to learn, above all, that compassion for the heretic was a crime of the deepest dye. It was a terrible lesson for one so young--of an age when the mind is most open to impressions; and the bitter fruits of it were to be discerned ere long in the war with the Moriscoes. As the royal train approached the place occupied by Doña Magdalena, the regent paused and looked around for the boy. Magdalena had thrown her mantle about him, to conceal him as much as possible from the public eye. She now drew it aside; and Joanna looked so long and earnestly on the child, that he shrunk abashed from her gaze. It was not, however, before she had recognized in his bright blue eyes, his ample forehead, and the rich yellow locks that clustered round his head, some of the peculiarities of the Austrian line, though happily without the deformity of the protruding lip, which was no less its characteristic. Her heart yearned with the tenderness of a sister, as she felt convinced that the same blood flowed in his veins as in her own; and, stooping down, she threw her arms around his neck, and, kissing him, called him by the endearing name of brother.[137] She would have persuaded him to go with her and sit by her side, but the boy, clinging closely to his foster-mother, refused to leave her for the stranger lady. This curious scene attracted the attention of the surrounding spectators, which was hardly diverted from the child by the appearance of the prisoners on the scaffold to receive their sentences. When these had been pronounced, and the wretched victims led away to execution, the multitude pressed so eagerly round Magdalena and the boy, that it was with difficulty the guards could keep them back, till the regent, seeing the awkwardness of their situation, sent one of her train, the count of Osorno, to their relief; and that nobleman, forcing his way through the crowd, carried off Geronimo in his arms to the royal carriage.[138] [Sidenote: DON JOHN ACKNOWLEDGED BY PHILIP.] It was not long before all mystery was dispelled by the public acknowledgment of the child as the son of the emperor. One of the first acts of Philip, after his return to Spain in 1559, was to arrange an interview with his brother. The place assigned for the meeting was an extensive park, not far from Valladolid, in the neighbourhood of the convent of _La Espina_, a spot much resorted to by the Castilian princes of the older time for the pleasures of the chase. On the appointed day, Quixada, richly dressed, and mounted on the best horse in his stables, rode forth, at the head of his vassals, to meet the king, with the little Geronimo, simply attired, and on a common palfrey, by his side. They had gone but a few miles when they heard, through the woods, the sound of horses' hoofs, announcing the approach of the royal cavalcade. Quixada halted, and alighting, drew near to Geronimo, with much deference in his manner, and, dropping on one knee, begged permission to kiss his hand. At the same time he desired his ward to dismount, and take the charger which he had himself been riding. Geronimo was sorely bewildered by what he would have thought a merry jest on the part of his guardian, had not his sedate and dignified character forbidden the supposition. Recovering from his astonishment, he complied with his guardian's directions; and the vision of future greatness must have flashed on his mind, if, as we are told, when preparing to mount, he turned round to Quixada, and with an affected air of dignity, told him that, "since things were so, he might hold the stirrup for him."[139] They had not proceeded far when they came in sight of the royal party. Quixada pointed out the king to his ward, adding that his majesty had something of importance to communicate to him. They then dismounted; and the boy, by his guardian's instructions, drawing near to Philip, knelt down and begged leave to kiss his majesty's hand. The king, graciously extending it, looked intently on the youth; and at length broke silence by asking "if he knew who was his father." Geronimo, disconcerted by the abruptness of the question, and, indeed, if the reports of his origin had ever reached his ears, ignorant of their truth, cast his eyes on the ground and made no answer. Philip, not displeased with his embarrassment, was well satisfied, doubtless, to read in his intelligent countenance and noble mien an assurance that he would do no discredit to his birth. Alighting from his horse, he embraced Geronimo, exclaiming, "Take courage, my child, you are descended from a great man. The emperor Charles the Fifth, now in glory, is your father as well as mine."[140] Then, turning to the lords who stood around, he presented the boy to them as the son of their late sovereign, and his own brother. The courtiers, with the ready instinct of their tribe, ever prompt to worship the rising sun, pressed eagerly forward to pay their obeisance to Geronimo. The scene was concluded by the king's buckling a sword on his brother's side, and throwing around his neck the sparkling collar of the Golden Fleece. The tidings of this strange event soon spread over the neighbourhood, for there were many more witnesses of the ceremony than those who took part in it; and the king and his retinue found, on their return, a multitude of people gathering along the route, eager to get a glimpse of this newly discovered gem of royalty. The sight of the handsome youth called forth a burst of noisy enthusiasm from the populace, and the air rang with their tumultuous _vivas_ as the royal party rode through the streets of the ancient city of Valladolid. Philip expressed his satisfaction at the events of the day, by declaring that "he had never met better sport in his life, or brought back game so much to his mind."[141] Having thus publicly acknowledged his brother, the king determined to provide for him an establishment suited to his condition. He assigned him for his residence one of the best mansions in Madrid. He was furnished with a numerous band of retainers, and as great state was maintained in his household as in that of a prince of the blood. The count of Priego acted as his chief major-domo; Don Luis Carrillo, the eldest son of that noble, was made captain of the guard; and Don Luis de Córdova master of the horse. In short, nobles and cavaliers of the best blood in Castile did not disdain to hold offices in the service of the peasant boy. With one or two exceptions, of little importance, he enjoyed all the privileges that belonged to the royal _infantes_. He did not, like them, have apartments in the palace; and he was to be addressed by the title of "Excellency," instead of "Highness," which was their peculiar prerogative. The distinction was not always scrupulously observed.[142] A more important change took place in his name, which from _Geronimo_ was now converted into _John of Austria_,--a lofty name, which intimated his descent from the imperial house of Hapsburg, and on which his deeds in after-life shed a lustre greater than the proudest title that sovereignty could confer. Luis Quixada kept the same place after his pupil's elevation as before. He continued to be his _ayo_, or governor, and removed with Doña Magdalena to Madrid, where he took up his residence in the house of Don John. Thus living in the most intimate personal relations with him, Quixada maintained his influence unimpaired till the hour of his own death. Philip fully appreciated the worth of the faithful hidalgo, who was fortunate in thus enjoying the favour of the son in as great a degree as he had done that of the father,--and, as it would seem, with a larger recompense for his services. He was master of the horse to Don Carlos, the heir to the crown; he held the important post of president of the Council of the Indies; and he possessed several lucrative benefices in the military order of Calatrava. In one of his letters to the king, we find Quixada remarking that he had endeavoured to supply the deficiencies of his pupil's early education by training him in a manner better suited to his destinies in after-life.[143] We cannot doubt that, in the good knight's estimate of what was essential to such a training, the exercises of chivalry must have found more favour than the monastic discipline recommended by the emperor. However this may have been, Philip resolved to give his brother the best advantages for a liberal education by sending him to the University of Alcalá, which, founded by the great Ximénes, a little more than a century before, now shared with the older school of Salamanca the glory of being the most famous seat of science in the Peninsula. Don John had for his companions his two nephews, Don Carlos and Alexander Farnese, the son of Margaret of Parma. They formed a triumvirate, each member of which was to fill a large space in the pages of history; Don Carlos from his errors and misfortunes, and the two others from their military achievements. They were all of nearly the same age. Don John, according to a writer of the time, stood foremost among the three for the comeliness, or rather beauty of his person, no less than for the charm of his manners;[144] while the soul was filled with those nobler qualities which gave promise of the highest excellence.[145] [Sidenote: DON JOHN'S THIRST FOR DISTINCTION.] His biographers tell us that Don John gave due attention to his studies, but the studies which found most favour in his eyes were those connected with the art of war. He was perfect in all chivalrous accomplishments; and he sighed for some field on which he could display them. The knowledge of his real parentage filled his soul with a generous ambition, and he longed by some heroic achievement to vindicate his claim to his illustrious descent. At the end of three years, in 1564, he left the university. The following year was that of the famous siege of Malta; and all Christendom hung in suspense on the issue of the desperate conflict, which a handful of warriors, on their lonely isle, were waging against the whole strength of the Ottoman empire. The sympathies of Don John were roused in behalf of the Christian knights; and he resolved to cast his own fortunes into the scale with theirs, and win his maiden laurels under the banner of the Cross. He did not ask the permission of his brother. That he knew would be refused to him. He withdrew secretly from the court, and with only a few attendants took his way to Barcelona, whence an armament was speedily to sail, to carry succour to the besieged. Everywhere on the route he was received with the respect due to his rank. At Saragossa he was lodged with the archbishop, under whose roof he was detained by illness. While there he received a letter from the king, who had learned the cause of his departure, commanding him to return, as he was altogether too young to take part in this desperate strife. Don John gave little heed to the royal orders. He pushed on to Barcelona, where he had the mortification to find that the fleet had sailed. He resolved to cross the mountains and take ship at Marseilles. The viceroy of Catalonia could not dissuade the hot-headed youth from his purpose, when another despatch came from court, in which Philip, in a more peremptory tone than before, repeated his orders for his brother to return, under pain of his severe displeasure. A letter from Quixada had warned him of the certain disgrace which awaited him, if he continued to trifle with the royal commands. Nothing remained but to obey; and Don John, disappointed in his scheme of ambition, returned to the capital.[146] This adventure caused a great sensation throughout the country. The young nobles and cavaliers about the court, fired by Don John's example, which seemed like a rebuke on their own sluggishness, had hastened to buckle on their armour, and follow him to the war.[147] The common people, peculiarly sensible in Spain to deeds of romantic daring, were delighted with the adventurous spirit of the young prince, which gave promise that he was one day to take his place among the heroes of the nation. This was the beginning of the popularity of John of Austria with his countrymen, who in time came to regard him with feelings little short of idolatry. Even Philip, however necessary he may have thought it to rebuke the insubordination of his brother, must in his heart have been pleased with the generous spirit he had exhibited. At least, the favour with which he continued to regard the offender showed that the royal displeasure was of no long continuance. The sudden change in the condition of Don John might remind one of some fairy tale, where the poor peasant boy finds himself all at once converted by enchantment into a great prince. A wiser man than he might well have had his head turned by such a rapid revolution of the wheel of fortune; and Philip may naturally have feared that the idle dalliance of a court, to which his brother was now exposed, might corrupt his simple nature and seduce him from the honourable path of duty. Great, therefore, must have been his satisfaction, when he saw that, far from this, the elevation of the youth had only served to give a wider expansion to his views, and to fill his bosom with still higher and nobler aspirations. The discreet conduct of Don John in regard to his nephew, Don Carlos, when the latter would have engaged him in his wild and impracticable schemes, established him still more firmly in the royal favour.[148] In the spring of the year 1568, an opportunity occurred for Philip to gratify his brother's ambition, by entrusting him with the command of a fleet then fitting out, in the port of Carthagena, against the Barbary corsairs, who had been making alarming depredations of late on the Spanish commerce. But, while giving him this appointment, the king was careful to supply the lack of experience in his brother by naming as second in command an officer in whose abilities he perfectly confided. This was Antonio de Zuñiga y Requesens, grand commander of St. James, an eminent personage, who will come frequently before the reader in the progress of the narrative. Requesens, who at this time filled the post of ambassador at Rome, was possessed of the versatility of talent so important in an age when the same individual was often required to exchange the duties of the cabinet for those of the camp. While Don John appeared before the public as the captain of the fleet, the actual responsibility for the conduct of the expedition rested on his lieutenant. On the third of June, Don John sailed out of port, at the head of as brave an armament as ever floated on the waters of the Mediterranean. The prince's own vessel was a stately galley, gorgeously fitted up, and decorated with a profusion of paintings, the subjects of which, drawn chiefly from ancient history and mythology, were of didactic import, intended to convey some useful lesson to the young commander. The moral of each picture was expressed by some pithy maxim inscribed beneath it in Latin. Thus, to whatever quarter Don John turned his eyes, they were sure to fall on some homily for his instruction; so that his galley might be compared to a volume richly filled with illustrations, that serve to impress the contents on the reader's memory.[149] The cruise was perfectly successful; and Don John, on his return to port, some eight months later, might boast that, in more than one engagement, he had humbled the pride of the corsairs, and so far crippled them that it would be long before they could resume their depredations; that, in fine, he had vindicated the honour of his country's flag throughout the Mediterranean. His return to Madrid was welcomed with the honours of a triumph. Courtier and commoner, men of all classes, in short, vied with each other in offering up the sweet incense of adulation, filling his young mind with lofty visions of the future, that beckoned him forward in the path of glory. [Sidenote: DON JOHN MADE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF.] When the insurrection of the Moriscoes broke out in 1568, the eyes of men naturally turned on Don John of Austria, as the person who would most likely be sent to suppress it. But Philip thought it would be safer to trust the command to those who, from their long residence in the neighbourhood, were better acquainted with the character of the country and of its inhabitants. When, however, the dissensions of the rival chiefs made it necessary to send some one invested with such powers as might enable him to overawe this factious spirit and enforce greater concert of action, the council of state recommended Don John to the command. Their recommendation was approved by the king, if, indeed, it was not originally made at his suggestion. Still the "prudent" monarch was careful not to invest his brother with that independent command which the public supposed him to possess. On the contrary, his authority was restricted within limits almost as narrow as those which had curbed it in the Mediterranean. A council of war was appointed, by whose opinions Don John was to be guided in every question of moment. In case of a division of opinion, the question was to be referred to the decision of Philip.[150] The chief members of this body, in whom the supreme power was virtually lodged, were the marquis of Mondejar, who from this time does not appear to have taken the field in person; the duke of Sessa, grandson of the great captain, Gonsalvo de Córdova, and endowed with no small portion of the military talent of his ancestor; the archbishop of Granada, a prelate possessed of as large a measure of bigotry as ever fell to the lot of a Spanish ecclesiastic; Deza, president of the Audience, who hated the Moriscoes with the fierce hatred of an inquisitor; and, finally, Don John's faithful _ayo_, Quixada, who had more influence over him than was enjoyed by any other, and who had come to witness the first of his pupil's campaigns, destined, alas! to be the closing one of his own.[151] There could hardly have been a more unfortunate device than the contrivance of so cumbrous a machinery as this council, opposed as it was, from its very nature, to the despatch so indispensable to the success of military operations. The mischief was increased by the necessity of referring every disputed point to the decision of the king. As this was a contingency that often occurred, the young prince soon found almost as many embarrassments thrown in his way by his friends as by his foes,--embarrassments which nothing but an uncommon spirit of determination on his own part could have overcome. On the sixth of April, 1569, Don John took leave of the king, then at Aranjuez, and hastened towards the south. His coming was eagerly expected by the inhabitants of Granada; by the Christians, from their hopes that it would remedy the disorders in the army and bring the war to a speedy conclusion; by the Moriscoes, from the protection they anticipated he would afford them against the violence of the Spaniards. Preparations were made in the capital for giving him a splendid reception. The programme of the ceremonies was furnished by Philip himself.[152] At some miles from the city, Don John was met by the count of Tendilla, at the head of a small detachment of infantry, wearing uniforms partly of the Castilian fashion, partly of the Morisco,--presenting altogether a strange and picturesque spectacle, in which silks, velvets, and rich embroidery floated gaily amidst the iron mail and burnished weapons of the warrior.[153] As the prince proceeded along his route, he was met by a long train of ecclesiastical and civic functionaries, followed by the principal cavaliers and citizens of Granada. At their head were the archbishop and the president, the latter of whom was careful to assert his rank by walking on the right of the prelate. Don John showed them both the greatest deference; and as they drew near, he dismounted from his horse, and, embracing the two churchmen, stood with hat in hand, for some moments, while conversing with them.[154] As their train came up, the president presented the most eminent persons to the prince, who received them with that frank and graceful courtesy which won the hearts of all who approached him. He then resumed his route, escorted on either side by the president and the archbishop. The neighbouring fields were covered with spectators, and on the plains of Béyro he found a large body of troops, not less than ten thousand, drawn up to receive him. As he approached, they greeted him with salvoes of musketry, delivered with admirable precision. As Don John glanced over their beautiful array, and beheld their perfect discipline and appointments, his eyes brightened and his cheek flushed with a soldier's pride. Hardly had he entered the gates of Granada, when he was surrounded by a throng of women, who gathered about him in an attitude of supplication. They were the widows, the mothers, and the daughters of those who had so miserably perished in the massacres of the Alpujarras. They were clad in mourning, some of them so scantily as too plainly to reveal their poverty. Falling on their knees, with tears streaming from their eyes, and their words rendered almost inarticulate by their sobs, they demanded justice,--justice on the murderers of their kindred. They had seen their friends fall, they said, beneath the blows of their executioners; but the pain with which their hearts were then rent was not so great as what they now felt on learning that the cruel acts of these miscreants were to go unpunished.[155] Don John endeavoured to calm their agitation by expressions of the deepest sympathy for their misfortunes,--expressions of which none who saw his countenance could doubt the truth; and he promised that he would do all in his power to secure them justice. A livelier scene awaited him as the procession held its way along the streets of the ancient capital. Everywhere the houses were gaily decorated with tapestries of cloth of gold. The multitude who thronged the avenues filled the air with their loyal acclamations. Bright eyes glanced from balconies and windows, where the noblest matrons and maidens of Granada, in rich attire, were gathered to look upon the splendid pageant, and the young hero who was the object of it.[156] In this state he moved along until he reached the palace of the Royal Audience, where, by the king's command, apartments had been sumptuously fitted up for his accommodation.[157] [Sidenote: DISCUSSIONS OF THE COUNCIL.] The following day, a deputation waited on Don John from the principal Moriscoes of the city, claiming his protection against the injuries and insults to which they were exposed whenever they went abroad. They complained especially of the Spanish troops quartered on them, and of the manner in which they violated the sanctity of their dwellings by the foulest outrages. Don John replied in a tone that expressed little of the commiseration which he had shown to the female petitioners on the preceding day. He told the Moriscoes that he had been sent to restore order to Granada, and that those who had proved loyal would find themselves protected in all their rights. Those, on the contrary, who had taken part in the late rebellion, would be chastised with unsparing rigour.[158] He directed them to state their grievances in a memorial, with a caution to set down nothing which they could not prove, or it would go hard with them. The unfortunate Moriscoes found that they were to expect such justice only as comes from the hand of an enemy. The first session of the council showed how defective was the system for conducting the war. In the discussions that ensued, Mondejar remarked that the contest, in his opinion, was virtually at an end; that the Moriscoes, for the most part, were in so favourable a mood, that he would undertake, if the affair were placed in his hands, to bring them all to submission in a very short time. This proposal was treated with contempt by the haughty president, who denounced them as a false-hearted race, on whose promises no one could rely. The war, he said, would never be ended so long as the Moriscoes of the capital were allowed to communicate with their countrymen in the mountains, and to furnish them with secret intelligence respecting what was passing in the Christian camp. The first step was to remove them all from Granada into the interior; the second, to make such an example of the miscreants who had perpetrated the massacres in the Alpujarras as should strike terror into the hearts of the infidels, and deter them from any further resistance to authority. In this division of opinion the members took different sides, according to the difference of their tempers. The commander-in-chief and Quixada both leaned to Mondejar's opinion. After a protracted discussion, it became necessary to refer the question to the king, who was by no means distinguished for the promptness with which he came to his conclusions. All this required much time, during which active operations could not be resumed.[159] Yet Don John did not pass it idly. He examined the state of the works in Granada and its neighbourhood; he endeavoured to improve the condition of the army, and to quell the spirit of insubordination which had risen in some portions of it; finally, he sent his commands for enforcing levies, not merely in Andalusia and the adjoining provinces, but in Castile. The appeal was successful; and the great lords in the south, more particularly, gathering their retainers, hastened to Granada, to draw their swords under this popular chieftain.[160] Meanwhile the delay was attended with most mischievous consequences, as it gave the enemy time to recover from the disasters of the previous campaign. Aben-Humeya had returned, as we have seen in the former chapter, to his mountain throne, where he soon found himself in greater strength than before. Even the "Moriscoes of the peace," as they were called, who had resumed their allegiance to the crown, exasperated by the outrages of the Spanish soldiery, and the contempt which they showed for the safe-conduct of the marquis of Mondejar, now came in great numbers to Aben-Humeya's camp, offering their services, and promising to stand by him to the last. Other levies he drew from Africa. The Moslem princes to whom he had applied for succour, though refusing to embark openly in his cause, as he had desired, allowed such of their subjects as chose to join his standard. In consequence a considerable body of Barbary Moors crossed the sea, and entered into the service of the Morisco chief. They were a fierce, intrepid race, accustomed to a life of wild adventure, and possessing a better acquaintance with military tactics than belonged to the Spanish mountaineers.[161] While strengthened by these recruits, Aben-Humeya drew a much larger revenue than formerly from his more extended domains.[162] Though showy and expensive in his tastes, he did not waste it all on the maintenance of the greater state which he now assumed in his way of living. He employed it freely in the pay of foreign levies, and in procuring arms and munitions for his own troops; and he profited by his experience in the last campaign, and by the example of his African mercenaries, to introduce a better system of tactics among his Morisco warriors. The policy he adopted, as before, was to avoid pitched battles, and to confine himself chiefly to the _guerilla_ warfare, better suited to the genius of the mountaineer. He fell on small detachments of Spaniards, who were patrolling the country, cut off the convoys, and thus greatly straitened the garrisons in their supplies. He made forays into the Christian territories, penetrating even into the _vega_, and boldly carried the war up to the walls of Granada. His ravages in this quarter, it is true, did not continue long after the arrival of Don John, who took effectual measures for protecting the capital from insult. But the prince was greatly chagrined by seeing the rapid extension of the Morisco domain. Yet he could take no decisive measures to check it until the council had determined on some plan of operations. He was moreover fettered by the king's orders not to take the field in person, but to remain and represent him in Granada, where he would find enough to do in regulating the affairs and providing for the safety of the city.[163] Philip seems to have feared that Don John's adventurous spirit would lead him to some rash act that might unnecessarily expose him to danger. He appears, indeed, as we may gather from numerous passages in his letters, to have been more concerned for the safety of his brother than for the success of the campaign.[164] He may have thought, too, that it was better to trust the war to the hands of the veteran chief, the marquis of Los Velez, who could boast so much larger experience than Don John, and who had possessed the king with a high idea of his military talents. [Sidenote: THE WAR RENEWED.] This nobleman still held the command of the country east of the Alpujarras, in which lay his own large property. He had, as we have seen, a hard and arrogant nature, which could ill brook the paramount authority of the young commander-in-chief, to whom he rarely condescended to write, preferring to make his communications directly to the king.[165] Philip, prompted by his appetite for power, winked at this irregular proceeding, which enabled him to take a more direct part in the management of affairs than he could otherwise have done. It was a most injudicious step, and was followed, as we shall see, by disastrous consequences. The marquis, without waiting for orders, resolved to open the campaign by penetrating into the Alpujarras with the small force he had under his command. But a body of some four hundred troops, which he had caused to occupy the pass of Ravaha, was cut off by the enemy, and the haughty chieftain reluctantly obeyed the orders of Don John to abandon his design. Aben-Humeya's success encouraged him to attack the marquis in his new quarters at Verja. It was a well-concerted enterprise, but unfortunately, before the time arrived for its execution, it was betrayed by a prisoner to the Spanish commander. It consequently failed. Aben-Humeya penetrated into the heart of the town, where he found himself in the midst of an ambuscade, and with difficulty, after a heavy loss, effected his retreat. But if the victory remained with the Spaniards, the fruits of it fell to the Moriscoes. The spirit shown by the Moslem prince gave new life to his countrymen, and more than counterbalanced the effects of his defeat. The rich and populous country of the Rio de Almanzora rose in arms. The marquis of Los Velez found it expedient to abandon his present position, and to transfer his quarters to Adra, a seaport on the Mediterranean, which would afford him greater facilities for receiving reinforcements and supplies.[166] The spirit of insurrection now spread rapidly over other parts of the Alpujarras, and especially along the sierra of Bentomiz, which stretches from the neighbourhood of Alhama towards the south. Here the mountaineers, who had hitherto taken no part in the troubles of the country, ranging themselves under the crimson banner of Aben-Humeya, broke forth into open rebellion. The inhabitants of Velez and of the more important city of Malaga were filled with consternation, trembling lest the enemy should descend on them from the mountains and deluge their streets with blood. They hastily mustered the militia of the country, and made preparations for their defence. Fortunately, at this conjuncture, they were gladdened by the sight of the grand-commander, Requesens, who sailed into the harbour of Velez-Malaga with a squadron from Italy, having on board several battalions of Spanish veterans, who had been ordered home by the government to reinforce the army of the Alpujarras. There were no better troops in the service, seasoned as they were by many a hard campaign, and all under the most perfect discipline. The first step of Requesens,--the same officer, it will be remembered, who had acted as the lieutenant of Don John of Austria in his cruise in the Mediterranean,--was to request of his young general the command of the expedition against the rebels of Bentomiz. These were now gathered in great force on the lofty table-land of Fraxiliana, where they had strengthened the natural defences of the ground by such works as rendered the approach to it nearly impracticable. The request was readily granted; and the grand-commander of St. James, without loss of time, led his battalions into the heart of the sierra. We have not space for the details. It is enough to say that the expedition was one of the best-conducted in the war. The enemy made a desperate resistance; and, had it not been for the timely arrival of the bold burghers of Malaga, the grand-commander would have been driven from the field. The Morisco women fought by the side of their husbands; and when all was lost, many threw themselves headlong from the precipices rather than fall into the hands of the Spaniards.[167] Two thousand of the enemy were slain, and three thousand captives, with an immense booty of gold, silver, jewels, and precious stuffs, became the spoil of the victors. The spirit of rebellion was effectually crushed in the sierra of Bentomiz. Yet it was not a bloodless victory. Full six hundred of the Christians fell on the field of battle. The loss bore most heavily on the troops from Italy. Nearly every captain in this valiant corps was wounded.[168] The bloody roll displayed, moreover, the name of more than one cavalier as distinguished for his birth as for his bravery. Two thousand Moriscoes succeeded in making their escape to the camp of Aben-Humeya. They proved a seasonable reinforcement, for that chief was meditating an assault on Seron.[169] This was a strongly-fortified place, perched like an eagle's eyry on the summit of a bold cliff that looked down on the Rio de Almanzora, and commanded its formidable passes. It was consequently a most important post, and at this time was held by a Spanish garrison under an officer named Mirones. Aben-Humeya sent a strong detachment against it, intending to carry it by storm. But the Moriscoes had no battering train, and, as it soon appeared, were little skilled in the art of conducting a siege. It was resolved, therefore, to abandon the present plan of operations, and to reduce the place by the slower but surer way of blockade. Five thousand men, accordingly, sat down before the town on the 18th of June, and effectually cut off all communication from abroad. The garrison succeeded in conveying intelligence of their condition to Don John, who lost no time in ordering Alonso de Carbajal to march with a body of troops and a good supply of provisions to their relief. But, just after his departure, Don John received information that the king had entrusted the marquis of Los Velez with the defence of Seron. He, therefore, by Quixada's advice, countermanded his orders to Carbajal, and directed him to return. That officer, who had approached within a short distance of the place, reluctantly obeyed, and left Seron to its fate. The marquis of Los Velez, notwithstanding the jealousy he displayed of the interference of Don John in the affair, showed so little alacrity in providing for the safety of the beleaguered fortress, that the garrison, reduced to extremity, on the eleventh of July, surrendered on honourable terms. But no sooner had they given up the place, than the victors, regardless of the terms of capitulation, murdered in cold blood every male over twelve years of age, and made slaves of the women and children. This foul act was said to have been perpetrated by the secret command of Aben-Humeya. The Morisca chief might allege, in vindication of his perfidy, that he had but followed the lesson set him by the Spaniards.[170] [Sidenote: REMOVAL OF THE MORISCOES.] The loss of Seron caused deep regret to the army. Nor could this regret be mitigated by the reflection, that its loss was to be attributed not so much to the valour of the Moslems as to the misconduct of their own commanders, or rather to the miserable system adopted for carrying on the war. The triumph of the Moriscoes, however, was greatly damped by the intelligence which they had received, shortly before the surrender of Seron, of disasters that had befallen their countrymen in Granada. Philip, after much hesitation, had given his sanction to Deza's project for the removal of the Moriscoes from the capital into the interior of the country. The day appointed for carrying the measure into effect was the twenty-third of June. A large body of troops, with the principal commanders, was secretly assembled in the capital to enforce the execution of the plan. Meanwhile, rumours were current that the Moriscoes in the city were carrying on a secret communication with their countrymen in the Alpujarras; that they supplied the mountaineers with arms and money; that the young men were leaving Granada to join their ranks; finally, that a conspiracy had been planned for an assault on the city, and even that the names of the leaders were given. It is impossible, at this time, to say what foundation there was for these charges; but the reader may recollect that similar ones had been circulated previous to the barbarous massacre in the prison of the Chancery. On the twenty-third of the month, on the eve of St John's, an edict was published, commanding all the Morisco males in Granada between ten and sixty years of age, to repair to the parish churches to which they respectively belonged, where they were to learn their fate. The women were to remain some time longer in the city, to dispose of the most valuable effects, such as could not easily be transported. This was not difficult, at the low prices for which, in their extremity, they were obliged to part with their property. We are left in ignorance of the fate of the children, who, no doubt, remained in the hands of the government, to be nurtured in the Roman Catholic faith.[171] Nothing could exceed the consternation of the Moriscoes on the publication of this decree, for which, though so long suspended by a thread, as it were, over their heads, they were wholly unprepared. It is not strange, as they recalled the atrocious murders perpetrated in the prison of the Chancery, that they should have been led to believe that nothing less than a massacre of the whole Moorish population was now designed. It was in vain that the marquis of Mondejar endeavoured to allay their fears. They were somewhat comforted by the assurance of the President Deza, given under his own hand, that their lives were in no danger. But their apprehensions on this point were not wholly quieted till Don John had pledged his royal word that no harm should come to their persons; that, in short, the great object of the government was to secure their safety. They then submitted without any attempt at resistance. Resistance, indeed, would have been hardly possible, destitute as they were of weapons or other means of defence, and surrounded on all quarters by the well-armed soldiery of Castile. They accordingly entered the churches assigned to them, at the doors of which strong guards were stationed during the night. On the following morning the Moriscoes were marched out and formed into a procession, which was to take its way to the great hospital in the suburbs. This was a noble building, erected by the good Queen Isabella the Catholic, not long after the Conquest. Here they were to stay till the arrangements were completed for forming them into divisions according to their several places of destination. It was a sad and solemn spectacle, that of this company of exiles, as they moved with slow and uncertain step, bound together by cords,[172] and escorted, or rather driven along like a gang of convicts, by the fierce soldiery. There they were, the old and the young, the rich and the poor, now, alas! brought to the same level, the forms of most of them bowed down, less by the weight of years than of sorrow, their hands meekly folded on their breasts, their cheeks wet with tears, as they gazed for the last time on their beautiful city, the sweet home of their infancy, the proud seat of ancient empire, endeared to them by so many tender and glorious recollections.[173] The march was conducted in an orderly manner, with but a single interruption, which, however, was near being attended by the most disastrous consequences. A Spanish alguazil, offended at some words that fell from one of the prisoners--for so they might be called--requited him with a blow from his staff. But the youth whom he struck had the fiery blood of the Arab in his veins. Snatching up a broken tile, he dealt such a blow on the offender's head as nearly severed his ear from it. The act cost him his life. He was speedily cut down by the Spaniards, who rushed to the assistance of their wounded comrade. A rumour now went round that the Moriscoes had attempted the life of Don John, whose dress resembled in its colour that of the alguazil. The passions of the soldiery were roused. They flocked to the scene of violence, uttering the most dreadful imprecations. Their swords and lances glittered in the air, and in a few moments would have been sheathed in the bodies of their terrified victims. Fortunately, the quick eye of Don John discerned the confusion. Surrounded by a body-guard of arquebusiers, he was there in person to superintend the removal of the Moriscoes. Spurring his horse forward into the midst of the tumult, and showing himself to the troops, he exclaimed that no one had offered him any harm. He called on them to return to their duty, and not to dishonour him as well as themselves, by offering violence to innocent men, for whose protection he had so solemnly pledged his word. The soldiers, abashed by the rebuke of their young chief, and satisfied with the vengeance they had taken on the offender, fell back into their ranks. The trembling Moriscoes gradually recovered from their panic, the procession resumed its march, and without further interruption reached the hospital of Isabella.[174] [Sidenote: REMOVAL OF THE MORISCOES.] There the royal _contadores_ were not long in ascertaining the number of the exiles. It amounted to thirty-five hundred. That of the women, who were soon to follow, was much greater.[175] The names, the ages, and the occupations of the men were all carefully registered. The following day they were marched into the great square before the hospital, where they were distributed into companies, each under a strong escort, to be conducted to their various places of destination. These, far from being confined to Andalusia, reached into New Castile. In this arrangement we may trust that so much respect was paid to the dictates of humanity, as not to separate those of the same kindred from one another. But the chroniclers give no information on the subject; probably regarding details of this sort, in regard to the fallen race, as below the dignity of history. It was on the twenty-fifth of June, 1569, that, bidding a sad farewell to the friends and companions of their youth, from whom they were now to be for ever parted, they set forth on their doleful pilgrimage. The morning light had broken on the red towers of the Alhambra, as the bands of exiles, issuing from the gates of their beloved capital, the spot dearest to them upon earth, turned their faces towards their new homes,--homes which many of them were destined never to behold. The government, with shameful indifference, had neglected to provide for the poor wanderers the most common necessaries of life. Some actually perished of hunger by the way. Others, especially those accustomed from infancy to a delicate nurture, sank down and died of fatigue. Some were seized by the soldiers, whose cupidity was roused by the sight of their helplessness, and were sold as slaves. Others were murdered by their guards in cold blood.[176] Thus reduced far below their original number, they reached their appointed places, there to linger out the remainder of their days in the midst of a population who held them in that abhorrence with which a good Catholic of the sixteenth century regarded "the enemies of God."[177] But the evils which grew out of this stern policy of the government were not wholly confined to the Moriscoes. This ingenious people were so far superior to the Spaniards in the knowledge of husbandry, and in the various mechanical arts, that they formed the most important part of the population of Granada. The only art in which their rivals excelled them was that which thrives at the expense of every other--the art of war. Aware of this, the government had excepted some of the best artisans in the capital from the doom of exile which had fallen on their countrymen, and they had accordingly remained in the city. But their number was too small to produce the result desired; and it was not long before the quarter of the town which had been occupied by the Moriscoes exhibited a scene of woeful desolation. The light and airy edifices, which displayed in their forms the fantastic graces of Arabian architecture, fell speedily into decay. The parterres and pleasure-grounds, filled with exotics, and glowing in all the exuberance of southern vegetation, became a wilderness of weeds; and the court-yards and public squares, where tanks and sparkling fountains, fed by the streams of the Sierra Nevada, shed a refreshing coolness over the atmosphere in the sultriest months of summer, were soon converted into a melancholy heap of rubbish. The mischiefs growing out of the removal of the Moriscoes fell sorely on the army. The men had been quartered, as we have seen, in the houses of the Moriscoes. From the present occupants, for the most part needy and thriftless speculators, they met with very different fare from what they had enjoyed under the former wealthy and luxurious proprietors. The troops supplied the deficiency, as far as they could, by plundering the citizens. Hence incessant feuds arose between the people and the army, and a spirit of insubordination rapidly grew up in the latter, which made it more formidable to its friends than to its foes.[178] An eyewitness of these troubles closes his narrative of the removal of the Moriscoes by remarking that it was a sad spectacle to one who reflected on the former policy and prosperity of this ill-starred race; who had seen their sumptuous mansions in the day of their glory, their gardens and pleasure-grounds, the scene of many a gay revel and jocund holiday, and who now contrasted all this with the ruin into which everything had fallen.[179] "It seems," he concludes, "as if Providence had intended to show, by the fate of this beautiful city, that the fairest things in this world are the most subject to decay."[180] To the philosopher of the present age it may seem rather the natural result of that system of religious intolerance which had converted enemies those who, under a beneficent rule, would have been true and loyal subjects, and who by their industry and skill would have added incalculably to the resources of the country. CHAPTER VI. REBELLION OF THE MORISCOES. Operations of Los Velez--Conspiracy against Aben-Humeya--His Assassination--Election of Aben-Aboo--Vigorous Prosecution of the War--Fierce Combats in the Vega--Impetuous Spirit of Don John--Surprise of Guejar. 1569. While the events related in the preceding chapter were occurring, the marquis of Los Velez lay, with a considerable force, at Adra, a port on the Mediterranean, at the foot of the Alpujarras, which he had selected chiefly from the facilities it would afford him for getting supplies for his army. In this he was disappointed. Before the month of June had expired, his troops had begun to be straitened for provisions. The evil went on increasing from day to day. His levies, composed chiefly of raw recruits from Andalusia, were full of that independent, and indeed turbulent spirit, which belongs to an ill-disciplined militia. There was no lack of courage in the soldiery. But the same men who had fearlessly braved the dangers of the campaign, now growing impatient under the pinch of hunger, abandoned their colours in great numbers. There were various causes for the deficiency of supplies. The principal one of these may probably be found in the remissness of the council of war, several of whose members regarded the marquis with an evil eye, and were not sorry to see his embarrassments. [Sidenote: OPERATIONS OF LOS VELEZ.] Some vigorous measures were instantly to be taken, or the army, it was evident, would soon altogether melt away. By the king's command, orders were despatched to Requesens, who lay with his squadron off the port of Velez-Malaga, to supply the camp with provisions, while it received reinforcements, as before, principally from the Andalusian militia. The army received a still more important accession in the well-disciplined veterans who had followed the grand-commander from Italy. Thus strengthened, and provisioned for a week or more, Los Velez, at the head of twelve thousand men, set forth on the twenty-sixth of July, and struck at once into the Alpujarras. He had been directed by the council to establish himself at Ugibar, which, by its central position, would enable him to watch the movements of Aben-Humeya, and act on any point as occasion required. The marquis, without difficulty, defeated a force of some five or six thousand men, who had been stationed to oppose his entrance into the mountain country. He then pressed forward, and on the high lands beyond Ugibar--which place he had already occupied--he came in sight of Aben-Humeya, with the flower of his troops drawn up to receive him. The two chiefs, in their characters, their persons, and their equipments, might be considered as no bad types of the European and the Arab chivalry. The marquis, sheathed in complete mail, of a sable colour, and mounted on his heavy war-horse, also covered with armour, was to be seen brandishing a lance which, short and thick, seemed rather like a truncheon, as he led his men boldly on, prepared to plunge at once into the thick of the fight.[181] He was the very emblem of brute force. Aben-Humeya, on the other hand, gracefully managing his swift-footed, snow-white Andalusian, with his Morisco mantle of crimson floating lightly from his shoulders, and his Turkish turban wreathed around his head,[182] instead of force, suggested the opposite ideas of agility and adroitness, so characteristic of the children of the East. Riding along his lines, the Morisco prince exhorted his followers not to fear the name of Los Velez: for, in the hour of danger, God would aid His own; and better was it, at any rate, to die like brave men in the field, than to live dishonoured.[183] Notwithstanding these magnanimous words, it was far from Aben-Humeya's wish to meet his enemy in a fair field of fight. It was contrary to the genius and the habit of his warfare, which was of the guerilla kind, abounding in sallies and surprises, in which, seeking some vulnerable point, he could deal his blow and retreat precipitately among the mountains. Yet his followers, though greatly inferior in numbers to the enemy, behaved with spirit; and the field was well contested, till a body of Andalusian horse, making a _détour_ under cover of some rising ground, fell unexpectedly on the rear of the Moriscoes, and threw them into confusion. The marquis pressing them at the same time vigorously in front, they broke, and soon gave way on all sides. Aben-Humeya, perceiving the day lost, gave the rein to his high-mettled genet, who swiftly bore him from the field; and, though hotly pursued, he soon left his enemies behind. On reaching the foot of the Sierra Nevada, the chief dismounted, and hamstringing his noble animal, plunged into the depths of the mountains, which again opened their friendly arms to receive him.[184] Yet he did not remain there long before he was joined by his followers; and no sooner was he in sufficient strength, than he showed himself on the eastern skirts of the sierra, whence, like an eagle stooping on his prey, he rushed down upon the plains below, sweeping through the rich valley of the Rio de Almanzora, and carrying fire and sword to the very borders of Murcia. Here he revenged himself on Los Velez by falling on his town of Las Cuevas, firing his dwellings, ravaging his estates, and rousing his Morisco vassals to rebellion.[185] Meanwhile the marquis, instead of following up his victory, remained torpid within the walls of Calahorra. Here he had desired the council to provide stores for the subsistence of his army. To his dismay, none had been provided; and as his own attempts to procure them were unsuccessful, he soon found himself in the same condition as at Adra. The famine-stricken troops, with little pay and less plunder, first became discontented, then mutinous, and at length deserted in great numbers. It was in vain that the irascible old chief poured out his wrath in menaces and imprecations. His arrogant temper had made him hated even more than he was feared by his soldiers. They now went off, not stealthily and by night, but in the open day, whole companies at a time, their arquebuses on their shoulders, and their matches lighted.[186] When Don Diego Fajardo, the marquis's son, endeavoured to stay them, one, more audacious than the rest, lodged a musket-ball in his body. It was not long before the gallant array with which the marquis had so proudly entered the Alpujarras, was reduced to less than three thousand men. Among them were the Italian veterans, who refused to tarnish their well-earned laurels by thus basely abandoning their commander. The council of war complained loudly to the king of the fatal inactivity of the marquis, and of his neglect to follow up the advantages he had gained. Los Velez angrily retorted by throwing the blame on that body, for neglecting to furnish him with the supplies which would have enabled him to do so. Philip, alarmed, with reason, at the critical aspect of affairs, ordered the marquis of Mondejar to repair to court, that he might confer with him on the state of the country. This was the avowed motive for his recall. But, in truth, it seems probable that the king, aware of that nobleman's leaning to a pacific policy, and of his personal hostility to Los Velez, deemed it best to remove him altogether from any share in the conduct of the war. This he did most effectually, by sending him into honourable exile, first appointing him Viceroy of Valentia, and afterwards raising him to the important post of Viceroy of Naples. From this period the name of Mondejar no more appears on the theatre of the Morisco war.[187] [Sidenote: DECLINE OF ABEN-HUMEYA'S POPULARITY.] The marquis did not win the favour to which he was entitled by his deserts. He seems to have possessed some of the best qualities of a good captain. Bold in action, he was circumspect in council. Slow and sagacious in the formation of his plans, he carried them out with singular perseverance. He knew the country well which was the seat of the insurrection, and perfectly understood the character of its inhabitants. What was more rare, he made allowance for the excesses into which they had been drawn by a long course of insult and oppression. The humanity of his disposition combined with his views of policy to make him rely more on conciliatory measures than on fear, for the reduction of the enemy. How well this worked we have seen. Had he been properly supported by those engaged with him in the direction of affairs, we can hardly doubt of his ultimate success. But, unhappily, the two most prominent of these, the President Deza and the Marquis of Los Velez, were narrow-minded, implacable bigots, who, far from feeling compassion for the Moriscoes, looked on the whole race as "God's enemies." Unfortunately, these views found favour with the government; and Philip, who rightly thought that the marquis of Mondejar would only prove a hindrance to carrying on hostilities with vigour, acted consistently in sending him from the country. Yet, while he was thus removed from the conduct of the war, it may be thought an unequivocal acknowledgment of Mondejar's deserts, that he was transferred to the most considerable post in the gift of the crown. Before the marquis's departure, Philip had transferred his court to Córdova, in order to facilitate his communication with the seat of war. He hoped, too, that the knowledge of his being so near would place some check on the disorderly temper of the soldiery, and animate them with more loyal and patriotic feelings. In this way of proceeding he considered himself as imitating the example of his great ancestors, Ferdinand and Isabella, who, during the war of Granada, usually transferred their court to one of the capitals of the South. He did not, however, think it necessary, like them, to lead his armies in person, and share in the toils of the campaign. On the nineteenth of October, Philip published an edict, which intimated his design of following up the war with vigour. It commanded that such of the Moriscoes as had hitherto been allowed to remain in Granada should now be removed from it, in order that no means of communication might be left to them with their brethren in the mountains. It was further proclaimed, that the war henceforth was to be carried on with "fire and blood;"[188] in other words, that no mercy was to be shown the insurgents. This was the first occasion on which this fierce denunciation had been made by the government. To reconcile the militia of the towns to the service, their pay was to be raised to a level with that of the Italian volunteers; and to relieve the towns, the greater part of the expense was to be borne by the crown. Before the publication of this ordinance the king had received intelligence of an event unexpected alike by Christian and by Moslem--the death of Aben-Humeya, and that by the hands of some of his own followers. The Morisco prince, after carrying the war up to the borders of Murcia, laid siege to two or three places of strength in that quarter. As might have been expected, he failed in these attempts, from his want of battering artillery. Thus foiled, he led back his forces into the Alpujarras, and established his quarters in the ancient Moorish palace of Lanjaron, on the slopes of the mountains commanding the beautiful valley of Lecrin. Here the torpid condition of the Spaniards under Los Velez allowed the young monarch to remain, and give himself up to those sensual indulgences with which the Moslem princes of the East were apt to solace their leisure in the intervals of war. His harem rivalled that of any Oriental satrap in the number of its inmates. This was strange to the Moriscoes, who, since their nominal conversion to Christianity, had of course repudiated polygamy. In the eyes of the Moslems, it might pass for good evidence of their prince's orthodoxy. Ever since Aben-Humeya's ascent to the throne he had been declining in popularity. His handsome person, the courtesy of his manners, his chivalrous spirit, and his devotion to the cause, had easily won him the affections of his subjects. But a too sudden elevation had unfortunately that effect on him which it is wont to have on weak minds, without any settled principles or lofty aim to guide them. Possessed of power, he became tyrannical in the use of it.[189] His arbitrary acts created enemies, not the less dangerous that they were concealed. The consciousness of the wrongs he had committed made him suspicious. He surrounded himself with a body-guard of four hundred men. Sixteen hundred more were quartered in the place where he was residing; and the principal avenues to it, we are told, were defended by barricades.[190] Those whom he suspected he treated with particular kindness. He drew them around his person, overwhelmed them with favours, and, when he had won them by a show of confidence, he struck the fatal blow.[191] During the short period of his reign, no less than three hundred and fifty persons, we are assured, fell victims to his jealousy or his revenge.[192] Among Aben-Humeya's officers was one named Diego Alguazil, who had a beautiful kinswoman, with whom he lived, it is said, on terms of greater intimacy than was justified by the relationship of the parties. As he was one day imprudently speaking of her to Aben-Humeya in the glowing language of a lover, the curiosity of the king was so much inflamed by it that he desired to see her. In addition to her personal charms, the fair Zahara was mistress of many accomplishments which rendered her still more attractive. She had a sweet voice, which she accompanied bewitchingly on the lute, and in her dancing displayed all the soft and voluptuous movements of the dark-eyed beauties of Andalusia.[193] When brought before the king, she did her best to please him; for though attached, as it seems, to her kinsman, the ambitious coquette had no objection to having a royal suitor in her chains. In this she perfectly succeeded; and the enamoured prince intimated his desire to Alguazil that he would resign to him the possession of his mistress. But the Morisco loved her too well; and neither threats nor promises of the most extravagant kind were able to extort his consent. Thus baffled, the reckless Aben-Humeya, consulting only his passion, caused the perhaps not reluctant Zahara to be taken by force and lodged in his harem. By this act he made a mortal enemy of Alguazil. Nor did he long enjoy the favour of his new mistress, who, come of an ancient lineage in Granada,[194] had hoped to share the throne of the Morisco monarch. But Aben-Humeya's passion did not carry him to this extent of complaisance; and Zahara, indignant at finding herself degraded to the rank and file of the seraglio, soon breathed only a desire for vengeance. In this state of things she found the means of communicating with her kinsman, and arranged with him a plan for carrying their murderous intent into execution. [Sidenote: CONSPIRACY AGAINST ABEN-HUMEYA.] The most important corps in the Morisco army was that of the Turkish mercenaries. But they were so fierce and turbulent a race that Aben-Humeya paid dear for their services. A strong body of these troops lay on the frontiers of Orgiba, under the command of Aben-Aboo--a near relative of the Morisco prince, whose life, it may be remembered, he had once saved by submitting to every extremity of torture rather than betray his lurking-place. To this commander Aben-Humeya despatched a messenger, directing him to engage the Turks in a certain expedition, which would serve both to give them employment, and to satisfy their appetite for plunder. The time named for the messenger's departure was communicated by Zahara to her kinsman, who caused him to be waylaid and murdered, and his despatches to be secured. He then had a letter written to Aben-Aboo, which bore apparently the royal signature. This was counterfeited by his nephew, a young man then holding the post of secretary to Aben-Humeya, with whom he had lately conceived some cause of disgust. The letter stated that the insubordination of the Turks made them dangerous to the state; and that in some way or other they must be removed, and that speedily. With this view, Aben-Aboo was directed to march them to Mecina, on the frontiers of the Sierra Nevada, where he would be joined by Diego Alguazil, with a party of soldiers, to assist him in carrying the plan into execution. The best mode, it was suggested, of getting rid of the Turks, would be by poison. This letter was despatched by a courier, who was speedily followed by Alguazil and a hundred soldiers, as the cunning conspirator desired to present himself before Aben-Aboo without leaving him time for consideration. He found that commander in a state of the utmost perplexity and consternation. Alguazil declared that he had come in consequence of certain instructions he had received from the king, of too atrocious a nature for him to execute. Aben-Aboo had as little mind to perform the bloody work assigned to him. He had no distrust of the genuineness of the letter. Hosceyn, the commander of the Turks, happening to pass the house at that time, was called in, and the despatches were shown to him. The fiery chief insisted on communicating them to some of his comrades. The greatest indignation prevailed among the Turkish leaders, outraged by this base treachery of the very man whom they had come to serve at the peril of their lives. They one and all demanded, not his deposition, but his death. Diego Alguazil saw that his scheme was working well. He artfully fanned the flame, and professed to share deeply in the indignation of the Moslems. It was at length agreed to put the tyrant to death, and to offer the crown to Aben-Aboo. This chieftain enjoyed a high reputation for sagacity and prudence. His passions, unlike those of Aben-Humeya, seemed ever under the control of his reason; and, far from indulging an ill-regulated ambition, he had been always faithful to his trust. But the present temptation was too strong for his virtue. He may have thought that, since the throne was to be vacant, the descendant of the Omeyas had a better claim to it than any other. Whatever may have been the sophistry to which he yielded, he knew that those who now promised him the crown had the power to make their promise good. He gave his assent on condition that, in the course of three months, his election should be confirmed by the dey of Algiers, as the representative of the Turkish sultan. Having arranged their plans, the conspirators lost no time in putting them in execution. They set out that very hour, on the evening of the third of October, for Lanjaron, with a body of four hundred troops--one half being Turks, the other Moriscoes. By midnight they reached their place of destination. Diego Alguazil and the Turkish captains were too well known as enjoying the confidence of Aben-Humeya to meet with any opposition to their entrance into the town. Nor, though the Morisco king had retired to rest, did the guard oppose any difficulty to their passing into his dwelling. Proceeding to his chamber, they found the doors secured, but speedily forced an entrance. Neither arm nor voice was raised in his defence.[195] Aben-Humeya, roused from sleep by the tumult, would have sprung from his couch; but the faithless Zahara held him fast in her embrace, until Diego Alguazil and some others of the conspirators, rushing in, bound his arms together with a Moorish veil.[196] Indeed, he was so much bewildered as scarcely to attempt resistance. The Turkish commander then showed him the letter. Aben-Humeya recognized the writing of his secretary, but declared that he had never dictated such a letter, nor was the signature his. How far his assertion gained credit we are not informed. But the conspirators had already gone too far to be forgiven. To recede was death. Either Aben-Humeya or they must be sacrificed. It was in vain that he protested his innocence, and that he offered to leave the question to the sultan, or to the dey of Algiers, or to any person competent to decide it. But little heed was given to his protestations, as the conspirators dragged him into an adjoining apartment. The unhappy young man perceived that his hour was come--that there was no one of all his friends or menials to interpose between him and his fate. From that moment he changed his tone, and assumed a bearing more worthy of his station. "They are mistaken," he said, "who suppose me to be a follower of the Prophet. I die, as I have lived, in the Christian faith. I accepted the post of head of the rebellion that I might the better avenge the wrongs heaped on me and my family by the Spaniards. They have been avenged in full measure, and I am now ready to die. Neither," said he, turning to Aben-Aboo, his destined successor, "do I envy you. It will not be long before you will follow me." He then, with his own hands, coolly arranged around his neck the cord with which he was to be strangled, adjusted his robes, and, covering his face with his mantle, submitted himself without a struggle to his executioners.[197] His body was thrown into a neighbouring sewer, with as little concern as if it had been that of a dog. There it continued, till Don John of Austria, hearing that Aben-Humeya had died a Christian, caused his remains to be removed to Guadix, and laid in the ground with the solemnities of Christian burial.[198] That Aben-Humeya should have come to so miserable an end is not strange. The recklessness with which he sacrificed all who came between him and the gratification of his passions, surrounded him with enemies, the more dangerous in a climate where the blood is hot, and the feeling of revenge is easily kindled in the bosom. At the beginning of his reign his showy qualities won him a popularity which, however, took no root in the affections of the people, and which faded away altogether when the defects of his character were more fully brought to light by the exigencies of his situation; for he was then found to possess neither the military skill necessary to insure success in the field, nor those higher moral attributes which command respect and obedience at home. [Sidenote: CHARACTER OF ABEN-ABOO.] Very different was the character of his successor, Aben-Aboo. Instead of displaying the frivolous and licentious tastes of Aben-Humeya, his private life was without reproach. He was much older than his predecessor; and if he had not the same fiery enthusiasm and dashing spirit of adventure which belonged to Aben-Humeya, he discovered both forecast in the formation of his plans, and singular courage in carrying them into execution. All confided in his integrity; while the decorum and gravity of his demeanour combined with the more substantial qualities of his character to inspire a general feeling of reverence in the people.[199] It was not till the time of his proposed elevation to the supreme power, that the lustre of these qualities was darkened by the perpetration of one foul deed,--his connivance at the conspiracy against his sovereign. But if he were really the dupe, as we are told, of Alguazil's plot, he might plead, to some extent, the necessity of self-preservation; for he may well have believed that, if he refused to aid Aben-Humeya in the execution of his bloody purpose in reference to the Turks, the tyrant would not long suffer him to live in possession of a secret so perilous to himself. At all events, the part he had taken in the conspiracy seems to have given no disgust to the people, who, weary of the despotism under which they had been living, welcomed with enthusiasm the accession of the new sovereign. Many places which had hitherto taken no part in the struggle for independence, now sent in their adhesion to Aben-Aboo, who soon found himself the ruler over a wider extent of territory than, at any time, had acknowledged the sway of his predecessor. It was not long before the confirmation of his election arrived from Algiers; and Aben-Aboo, assuming the regal name of Muley Abdallah Mohammed as a prefix to his own, went through the usual simple forms of a coronation of a king of Granada. In his right hand on this occasion, he bore a banner inscribed with the legend, "More I could not desire--less would not have contented me."[200] Such an inscription maybe thought to intimate that a more aspiring temper lurked within his bosom than the world had given him credit for. The new sovereign did not, like his predecessor, waste his time in effeminate sloth. He busied himself with various important reforms, giving especially a new organization to the army, and importing a large quantity of arms and munitions from Barbary. He determined not to allow his men time for discontent, but to engage them at once in active service. The first object he proposed was the capture of Orgiba, a fortified place, which commanded the route to Granada, and which served as a point of communication between that capital and remoter parts of the country. Aben-Aboo got everything in readiness with such despatch, that on the twenty-sixth of October, a few weeks only after the death of Aben-Humeya, he set out on his expedition at the head of a well-appointed army, consisting of more than ten thousand men, partly foreign mercenaries and partly natives. Hastening his march, he soon presented himself before Orgiba, and laid siege to the place. He pushed matters forward so vigorously, that in a few days he was prepared to storm the works. Four times he brought his men to the assault; but though, on the fourth, he succeeded in throwing himself, with a small body of troops, on the ramparts, he was met with such determined resistance by the garrison and their brave commander, Francisco de Molina, that he was obliged to fall back with loss into his trenches. Thus repulsed, and wholly destitute of battering ordnance, the Morisco chief found it expedient to convert the siege into a blockade. The time thus consumed gave opportunity to Don John of Austria to send a strong force, under the duke of Sesa, to the relief of the garrison. Aben-Aboo, desirous to intercept his enemy's march, and occupy one of those defiles that would give him the advantage of position, silently broke up his encampment, under cover of the night, and took the direction of Lanjaron. Here he came so suddenly on the advanced guard of the Christians, that, taken by surprise, it gave way, and falling back, after considerable loss, on the main body of the army, threw the whole into confusion. Happily the duke of Sesa, though labouring at the time under a sharp attack of gout, by extraordinary exertions was enabled to rally his men, and inspire them with courage to repulse the enemy, thus retrieving his own honour and the fortunes of the day. Meanwhile, the brave Molina and his soldiers no sooner learned that the besiegers had abandoned their works, than, eager to profit by their temporary absence, the cause of which they suspected, they dismantled the fortress, and, burying their guns in the ground, hastily evacuated the place. The duke of Sesa, finding that the great object of his expedition--the safety of the garrison--was now accomplished, and not feeling himself in sufficient strength to cope with the Morisco chief, instantly began his retreat on Granada. In this he was not molested by Aben-Aboo, who was only too glad to be allowed without interruption to follow up the siege of Orgiba. But, finding this place, to his surprise, abandoned by the enemy, he entered it without bloodshed, and with colours flying, as a conqueror.[201] These successes in the commencement of his reign furnished a brilliant augury for the future. The fame of Aben-Aboo spread far and wide through the country; and the warlike peasantry thronged from all quarters to his standard. Tidings now arrived that several of the principal places on the eastern skirts of the Alpujarras had proclaimed their adherence to the Morisco cause; and it was expected that the flame of insurrection would soon spread to the adjoining provinces of Murcia and Valencia. So widely, indeed, had it already spread, that, of all the Morisco territory south of Granada, the country around Malaga and the sierra of Ronda, on the extreme west, were the only portions that still acknowledged the authority of Castile.[202] The war now took the same romantic aspect that it wore in the days of the conquest of Granada. Beacon-fires were to be seen along the highest peaks of the sierra, throwing their ominous glare around for many a league, and calling the bold mountaineers to the foray. Then came the gathering of the wild militia of the country, which, pouring down on the lower levels, now in the faded green of autumn, swept away herds and flocks, and bore them off in triumph to their fastnesses. Sometimes marauders penetrated into the _vega_, the beautiful _vega_, every inch of whose soil was fertilized with human blood, and which now, as in ancient times, became the battle-ground of Christian and Moslem cavaliers. Almost always it was the former who had the advantage, as was intimated by the gory trophies,--the heads and hands of the vanquished, which they bore on the points of their lances, when, amidst the shouts of the populace, they came thundering on through the gates of the capital.[203] [Sidenote: IMPETUOUS SPIRIT OF DON JUAN.] Yet sometimes fortune lay in the opposite scale. The bold infidels, after scouring the _vega_, would burst into the suburbs, or even into the city of Granada, filling the place with consternation. Then might be seen the terror-stricken citizens hurrying to and fro, while the great alarm-bell of the Alhambra sent forth its summons, and the chivalry, mounting in haste, shouted the old war-cry of _Saint Jago_, and threw themselves on the invaders, who, after a short but bloody fray, were sure to be driven in confusion across the _vega_, and far over the borders. Don John, on these occasions, was always to be descried in the front of battle, as if rejoicing in his element, and courting danger like some paladin of romance. Indeed, Philip was obliged, again and again, to rebuke his brother for thus wantonly exposing his life, in a manner, the king intimated, wholly unbecoming his rank.[204] But it would have been as easy to rein in the war-horse when the trumpet was sounding in his ears, as to curb the spirits of the high-mettled young chieftain when his followers were mustering to the charge. In truth, it was precisely these occasions that filled him with the greatest glee; for they opened to him the only glimpses he was allowed of that career of glory for which his soul had so long panted. Every detachment that sallied forth from Granada on a warlike adventure was an object of his envy; and as he gazed on the blue mountains that rose as an impassable barrier around him, he was like the bird vainly beating its plumage against the gilded wires of its prison-house, and longing to be free. He wrote to the king in the most earnest terms, representing the forlorn condition of affairs,--the Spaniards losing ground day after day, and the army under the marquis of Los Velez wasting away its energies in sloth, or exerting them in unprofitable enterprises. He implored his brother not to compel him to remain thus cooped up within the walls of Granada, but to allow him to have a real as well as nominal command, and to conduct the war in person.[205] The views presented by Don John were warmly supported by Requesens, who wrote to Philip, denouncing, in unqualified terms, the incapacity of Los Velez. Philip had no objection to receive complaints, even against those whom he most favoured. He could not shut his eyes to the truth of the charges now brought against the hot-headed old chief, who had so long enjoyed his confidence, but whose campaigns of late had been a series of blunders. He saw the critical aspect of affairs, and the danger that the rebellion, which had struck so deep root in Granada, unless speedily crushed, would spread over the adjoining provinces. Mondejar's removal from the scene of action had not brought the remedy that Philip had expected. Yet it was with reluctance that he yielded to his brother's wishes; whether distrusting the capacity of one so young for an independent command, or, as might be inferred from his letters, apprehending the dangers in which Don John's impetuous spirit would probably involve him. Having formed his plans, he lost no time in communicating them to his brother. The young warrior was to succeed Los Velez in the command of the eastern army, which was to be strengthened by reinforcements, while the duke of Sesa, under the direction of Don John, was to establish himself, with an efficient corps, in the Alpujarras, in such a position as to cover the approaches to Granada. A summons was then sent to the principal towns of Andalusia, requiring them to raise fresh levies for the war, who were to be encouraged by promises of better pay than had before been given. But these promises did not weigh so much with the soldiers as the knowledge that Don John of Austria was to take charge of the expedition; and nobles and cavaliers came thronging to the war, with their well-armed retainers, in such numbers that the king felt it necessary to publish another ordinance, prohibiting any, without express permission, from joining the service.[206] All now was bustle and excitement in Granada, as the new levies came in, and the old ones were receiving a better organization. Indeed, Don John had been closely occupied for some time with introducing reforms among the troops quartered in the city, who, from causes already mentioned, had fallen into a state of the most alarming insubordination. A similar spirit had infected the officers, and to such an extent, that it was deemed necessary to suspend no less than thirty-seven out of forty-five captains from their commands.[207] Such were the difficulties under which the youthful hero was to enter on his first campaign. Fortunately, in the retainers of the great lords and cavaliers, he had a body of well-appointed and well-disciplined troops, who were actuated by higher motives than the mere love of plunder.[208] His labours, moreover, did much to restore the ancient discipline of the regiments quartered in Granada. But the zeal with which he had devoted himself to the work of reform had impaired his health. This drew forth a kind remonstrance from Philip, who wrote to his brother not thus to overtask his strength, but to remember that he had need of his services; telling him to remind Quixada that he must watch over him more carefully. "And God grant," he concluded, "that your health may be soon re-established." The affectionate solicitude constantly shown for his brother's welfare in the king's letters, was hardly to have been expected in one of so phlegmatic a temperament, and who was usually so little demonstrative in the expression of his feelings. Before entering on his great expedition, Don John resolved to secure the safety of Granada, in his absence, by the reduction of "the robber's nest," as the Spaniards called it, of Guejar. This was a fortified place, near the confines of the Alpujarras, held by a warlike garrison, that frequently sallied out over the neighbouring country, sometimes carrying their forays into the _vega_ of Granada, and causing a panic in the capital. Don John formed his force into two divisions, one of which he gave to the duke of Sesa, while the other he proposed to lead in person. They were to proceed by different routes, and, meeting before the place, to attack it simultaneously from opposite quarters. [Sidenote: CAPTURE OF GUEJAR.] The duke, marching by the most direct road across the mountains, reached Guejar first, and was not a little surprised to find that the inhabitants, who had received notice of the preparations of the Spaniards, were already evacuating the town; while the garrison was formed in order of battle to cover their retreat. After a short skirmish with the rear-guard, in which some lives were lost on both sides, the victorious Spaniards, without following up their advantage, marched into the town, and took possession of the works abandoned by the enemy. Great was the surprise of Don John, on arriving some hours later before Guejar, to see the Castilian flag floating from its ramparts; and his indignation was roused as he found that the laurels he had designed for his own brow had been thus unceremoniously snatched from him by another. "With eyes," says the chronicler, "glowing like coals of fire,"[209] he turned on the duke of Sesa, and demanded an explanation of the affair. But he soon found that the blame, if blame there were, was to be laid on one whom he felt that he had not the power to rebuke. This was Luis Quixada, who, in his solicitude for the safety of his ward, had caused the army to be conducted by a circuitous route, that brought it thus late upon the field. But though Don John uttered no word of rebuke, he maintained a moody silence, that plainly showed his vexation; and, as the soldiers remarked, not a morsel of food passed his lips until he had reached Granada.[210] The constant supervision maintained over him by Quixada, which, as we have seen, was encouraged by the king, was a subject of frequent remark among the troops. It must have afforded no little embarrassment and mortification to Don John, alike ill-suited, as it was, to his age, his aspiring temper, and his station. For his station as commander-in-chief of the army made him responsible, in the eyes of the world, for the measures of the campaign. Yet, in his dependent situation, he had the power neither to decide on the plan of operations, nor to carry it into execution. Not many days were to elapse before the death of his kind-hearted monitor was to relieve him from the jealous oversight that so much chafed his spirit, and to open to him an independent career of glory, such as might satisfy the utmost cravings of his ambition. One of the authorities of the greatest importance, and most frequently cited in this book, as the reader may have noticed, is Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. He belonged to one of the most illustrious houses in Castile--a house not more prominent for its rank than for the great abilities displayed by its members in the various walks of civil and military life, as well as for their rare intellectual culture. No one of the great families of Spain has furnished so fruitful a theme for the pen of both the chronicler and the bard. He was the fifth son of the marquis of Mondejar, and was born in the year 1503, at Granada, where his father filled the office held by his ancestors, of captain-general of the province. At an early age he was sent to Salamanca, and passed with credit through the course of studies taught in its venerable university. While there he wrote--for, though printed anonymously, there seems no good reason to distrust the authorship--his famous "Lazarillo de Tormes," the origin of that class of _picaresco_ novels, as they are styled, which constitutes an important branch of Castilian literature, and the best specimen of which, strange to say, was furnished by the hand of a foreigner,--the "Gil Blas" of Le Sage. Mendoza had been destined to the Church, for which the extensive patronage of his family offered obvious advantages. But the taste of the young man, as might be inferred from his novel, took another direction, and he persuaded his father to allow him to enter the army, and take service under the banner of Charles the Fifth. Mendoza's love of letters did not desert him in the camp; and he availed himself of such intervals as occurred between the campaigns to continue his studies, especially in the ancient languages, in the principal universities of Italy. It was impossible that a person of such remarkable endowments as Mendoza, the more conspicuous from his social position, should escape the penetrating eye of Charles the Fifth, who, independently of his scholarship, recognized in the young noble a decided talent for political affairs. In 1538 the emperor appointed him ambassador to Venice, a capital for which the literary enterprises of the Aldi were every day winning a higher reputation in the republic of letters. Here Mendoza had the best opportunity of accomplishing a work which he had much at heart,--the formation of a library. It was a work of no small difficulty in that day, when books and manuscripts were to be gathered from obscure, often remote sources, and at the large cost paid for objects of _virtù_. A good office which he had the means of rendering the sultan, by the redemption from captivity of a Turkish prisoner of rank, was requited by a magnificent present of Greek manuscripts, worth more than gold in the eyes of Mendoza. It was from his collection that the first edition of Josephus was given to the world. While freely indulging his taste for literary occupations in his intervals of leisure, he performed the duties of his mission with an ability that fully vindicated his appointment as minister to the wily republic. On the opening of the Council of Trent, he was one of the delegates sent to represent the emperor in that body. He joined freely in the discussions of the conclave, and enforced the views of his sovereign with a strength of reasoning and a fervid eloquence that produced a powerful impression on his audience. The independence he displayed recommended him for the delicate task of presenting the remonstrances of Charles the Fifth to the papal court against the removal of the council to Bologna. This he did with a degree of frankness to which the pontifical ear was but little accustomed, and which, if it failed to bend the proud spirit of Paul the Third, had its effect on his successor. Mendoza, from whatever cause, does not seem to have stood so high in the favour of Philip the Second as in that of his father. Perhaps he had too lofty a nature to stoop to that implicit deference which Philip exacted from the highest as well as the humblest who approached him. At length, in 1568, Mendoza's own misconduct brought him, with good reason, into disgrace with his master. He engaged in a brawl with another courtier in the palace; and the scandalous scene, of which the reader will find an account in the preceding volume, took place when the prince of Asturias, Don Carlos, was breathing his last. The offending parties were punished first by imprisonment, and then by banishment from Madrid. Mendoza, who was sixty-five years of age at this time, withdrew to Granada, his native place. But he had passed too much of his life in the atmosphere of a court to be content with a provincial residence. He accordingly made repeated efforts to soften his sovereign's displeasure, and to obtain some mitigation of his sentence. These efforts, as may be believed, were unavailing; and the illustrious exile took at length the wiser course of submitting to his fate and seeking consolation in the companionship of his books,--steady friends, whose worth he now fully proved in the hour of adversity. He devoted himself to the study of Arabic, to which he was naturally led by his residence in a capital filled with the monuments of Arabic art. He also amused his leisure by writing verses, and his labours combined with those of Boscan and Garcilasso de la Vega to naturalize in Castile those more refined forms of Italian versification that made an important epoch in the national literature. But the great work to which he devoted himself was the history of the insurrection of the Moriscoes, which, occurring during his residence in Granada, may be said to have passed before his eyes. For this he had, moreover, obvious facilities, for he was the near kinsman of the captain-general, and was personally acquainted with those who had the direction of affairs. The result of his labours was a work of inestimable value, though of no great bulk--being less a history of events than a commentary on such a history. The author explores the causes of these events. He introduces the reader into the cabinet of Madrid, makes him acquainted with the intrigues of the different factions, both in the court and in the camp, unfolds the policy of the government and the plans of the campaigns--in short, enables him to penetrate into the interior, and see the secret working of the machinery, so carefully shrouded from the vulgar eye. The value which the work derived from the author's access to these recondite sources of information is much enhanced by its independent spirit. In a country where few dared even think for themselves, Mendoza both thought with freedom and freely expressed his thoughts. Proof of this is afforded by the caustic tone of his criticism on the conduct of the government, and by the candour which he sometimes ventures to display when noticing the wrongs of the Moriscoes. This independence of the historian, we may well believe, could have found little favour with the administration. It may have been the cause that the book was not published till after the reign of Philip the Second, and many years after its author's death. [Sidenote: MENDOZA.] The literary execution of the work is not its least remarkable feature. Instead of the desultory and gossiping style of the Castilian chronicler, every page is instinct with the spirit of the ancient classics. Indeed, Mendoza is commonly thought to have deliberately formed his style on that of Sallust; but I agree with my friend Mr. Ticknor, who, in a luminous criticism on Mendoza, in his great work on Spanish Literature, expresses the opinion that the Castilian historian formed his style quite as much on that of Tacitus as of Sallust. Indeed, some of Mendoza's most celebrated passages are obvious imitations of the former historian, of whom he constantly reminds us by the singular compactness and energy of his diction, by his power of delineating a portrait by a single stroke of the pencil, and by his free criticism on the chief actors of the drama, conveyed in language full of that practical wisdom which, in Mendoza's case, was the result of a large acquaintance with public affairs. We recognize also the defects incident to the style he has chosen--rigidity and constraint, with a frequent use of ellipsis, in a way that does violence to the national idiom, and, worst of all, that obscurity which arises from the effort to be brief. Mendoza hurts his book, moreover, by an unseasonable display of learning, which, however it may be pardoned by the antiquary, comes like an impertinent episode to break the thread of the narrative. But, with all its defects, the work is a remarkable production for the time, and, appearing in the midst of the _romantic_ literature of Spain, we regard it with the same feeling of surprise which the traveller might experience who should meet with a classic Doric temple in the midst of the fantastic structures of China or Hindostan. Not long after Mendoza had completed his history, he obtained permission to visit Madrid, not to reside there, but to attend to some personal affairs. He had hardly reached the capital when he was attacked by a mortal illness, which carried him off in April, 1575, in the seventy-third year of his age. Shortly before his death he gave his rich collection of books and manuscripts to his obdurate master, who placed them, agreeably to the donor's desire, in the Escorial, where they still form an interesting portion of a library of which so much has been said, and so little is really known by the world. The most copious notice with which I am acquainted, of the life of Mendoza, is that attributed to the pen of Iñigo Lopez de Avila, and prefixed to the Valencian edition of the "Guerra de Granada," published in 1776. But his countrymen have been ever ready to do honour to the memory of one who, by the brilliant success which he achieved as a statesman, a diplomatist, a novelist, a poet, and an historian, has established a reputation for versatility of genius second to none in the literature of Spain. CHAPTER VII. REBELLION OF THE MORISCOES. Don John takes the Field--Investment of Galera--Fierce Assaults--Preparations for a last Attack--Explosion of the Mines--Desperation of the Moriscoes--Cruel Massacre--Galera demolished. 1570. Don John lost no time in completing the arrangements for his expedition. The troops, as they reached Granada, were for the most part sent forward to join the army under Los Velez, on the east of the Alpujarras, where that commander was occupied with the siege of Galera, though with but little prospect of reducing the place. He was soon, however, to be superseded by Don John. Philip, unable to close his ears against the representations of his brother, as well as those of more experienced captains in the service, had at length reluctantly come to a conviction of the unfitness of Los Velez for the command. Yet he had a partiality for the veteran; and he was willing to spare him, as far as possible, the mortification of seeing himself supplanted by his young rival. In his letters, the king repeatedly enjoined it on his brother to treat the marquis with the utmost deference, and to countenance no reports circulated to his prejudice. In an epistle filled with instructions for the campaign, dated the twenty-sixth of November, the king told Don John to be directed on all occasions by the counsels of Quixada and Requesens. He was to show the greatest respect for the marquis, and to give him to understand that he should be governed by his opinions. "But, in point of fact," said Philip, "should his opinion clash at any time with that of the two other counsellors, you are to be governed by theirs."[211] On Quixada and Requesens he was indeed always to rely, never setting up his own judgment in opposition to theirs. He was to move with caution, and, instead of the impatient spirit of a boy, to show the circumspection of one possessed of military experience. "In this way," concluded his royal monitor, "you will not only secure the favour of your sovereign, but establish your reputation with the world."[212] It is evident that Philip had discerned traits in the character of Don John which led him to distrust somewhat his capacity for the high station in which he was placed. Perhaps it may be thought that the hesitating and timid policy of Philip was less favourable to success in military operations than the bold spirit of enterprise which belonged to his brother. However this may be, Don John, notwithstanding his repeated protestations to the contrary, was of too ardent a temperament to be readily affected by these admonitions of his prudent adviser. The military command in Granada was lodged by the prince in the hands of the duke of Sesa, who, as soon as he had gathered a sufficient force, was to march into the western district of the Alpujarras, and there create a diversion in favour of Don John. A body of four thousand troops was to remain in Granada; and the commander-in-chief, having thus completed his dispositions for the protection of the capital, set forth on his expedition on the twenty-ninth of December, at the head of a force amounting only to three thousand foot and four hundred horse. With these troops went a numerous body of volunteers, the flower of the Andalusian chivalry, who had come to win renown under the banner of the young leader. He took the route through Guadix, and on the third day reached the ancient city of Baza, memorable for the siege it had sustained under his victorious ancestors, Ferdinand and Isabella. Here he was met by Requesens, who, besides a reinforcement of troops, brought with him a train of heavy ordnance and a large supply of ammunition. The guns were sent forward, under a strong escort, to Galera; but, on leaving Baza, Don John received the astounding tidings that the marquis of Los Velez had already abandoned the siege, and drawn off his whole force to the neighbouring town of Guescar. [Sidenote: LOS VELEZ RESIGNS HIS COMMAND.] In fact, the rumour had no sooner reached the ears of the testy old chief, that Don John was speedily coming to take charge of the war, than he swore in his wrath that if the report were true, he would abandon the siege and throw up his command. Yet those who knew him best did not think him capable of so mad an act. He kept his word, however; and when he learned that Don John was on the way, he broke up his encampment and withdrew, as above stated, to Guescar. By this course he left the adjacent country open to the incursions of the Moriscoes of Galera; while no care was taken to provide even for the safety of the convoys which, from time to time, came laden with supplies for the besieging army. This extraordinary conduct gave no dissatisfaction to his troops, who, long since disgusted with the fiery yet imbecile character of their general, looked with pleasure to the prospect of joining the standard of so popular a chieftain as John of Austria. Even the indignation felt by the latter at the senseless proceeding of the marquis was forgotten in the satisfaction he experienced, at being thus relieved from the embarrassments which his rival's overweening pretensions could not have failed to cause him in the campaign. Don John might now, with a good grace, and without any cost to himself, make all the concessions to the veteran so strenuously demanded by Philip. It was in this amiable mood that the prince pushed forward his march, eager to prevent the disastrous consequences which might arise from the marquis's abandonment of his post. As he drew near to Guescar, he beheld the old nobleman riding towards him at the head of his retainers, with a stiff and stately port, like one who had no concessions or explanations to make for himself. Without alighting from his horse, as he drew near the prince, he tendered him obeisance by kissing the hand which the latter graciously extended towards him. "Noble marquis," said Don John, "your great deeds have shed a lustre over your name. I consider myself fortunate in having the opportunity of becoming personally acquainted with you. Fear not that your authority will be in the least abridged by mine. The soldiers under my command will obey you as implicitly as myself. I pray you to look on me as a son, filled with feelings of reverence for your valour and your experience, and designing on all occasions to lean on your counsels for support."[213] The courteous and respectful tone of the prince seems to have had its effect on the iron nature of the marquis, as he replied, "There is no Spaniard living who has a stronger desire than I have to be personally acquainted with the distinguished brother of my sovereign, or who would probably be a greater gainer by serving under his banner. But to speak with my usual plainness, I wish to withdraw to my own house; for it would never do for me, old as I am, to hold the post of a subaltern."[214] He then accompanied Don John back to the town, giving him, as they rode along, some account of the siege and of the strength of the place. On reaching the quarters reserved for the commander-in-chief, Los Velez took leave of the prince; and, without further ceremony, gathering his knights and followers about him, and escorted by a company of horse, he rode off in the direction of his town of Velez Blanco, which was situated at no great distance, amidst the wild scenery stretching toward the frontiers of Murcia. Here among the mountains he lived in a retirement that would have been more honourable had it not been purchased by so flagrant a breach of duty.[215] The whole story is singularly characteristic, not merely of the man, but of the times in which he lived. Had so high-handed and audacious a proceeding occurred in our day, no rank, however exalted, could have screened the offender from punishment. As it was, it does not appear that any attempt was made at an inquiry into the marquis's conduct. This is the more remarkable, considering that it involved such disrespect to a sovereign little disposed to treat with lenity any want of deference to himself. The explanation of the lenity shown by him on the present occasion may perhaps be found, not in any tenderness for the reputation of his favorite, but in Philip's perceiving that the further prosecution of the affair would only serve to give greater publicity to his own egregious error in retaining Los Velez in the command, when his conduct and the warnings of others should long ago have been regarded as proof of his incapacity. On the marquis's departure, Don John lost no time in resuming his march at the head of a force which now amounted to twelve thousand foot and eight hundred horse, besides a brilliant array of chivalry, who, as we have seen, had come to seek their fortunes in the war. A few hours brought the troops before Galera; and Don John proceeded at once to reconnoitre the ground. In this survey he was attended by Quixada, Requesens, and the greater part of the cavalry. Having completed his observations, he made his arrangements for investing the place. The town of Galera occupied a site singularly picturesque. This, however, had been selected, certainly not from any regard to its romantic beauty, still less for purposes of convenience, but for those of defence against an enemy,--a circumstance of the first importance in a mountain country so wild and warlike as that in which Galera stood. The singular shape of the rocky eminence which it covered was supposed, with its convex summit, to bear some resemblance to that of a galley with its keel uppermost. From this resemblance the town had derived its name.[216] The summit was crowned by a castle, which in the style of its architecture bore evident marks of antiquity. It was defended by a wall, much of it in so ruinous a condition as to be little better than a mass of stones loosely put together. At a few paces from the fortress stood a ravelin. But neither this outwork nor the castle itself could boast of any other piece of artillery than two falconets, captured from Los Velez during his recent siege of the place, and now mounted on the principal edifice. Even these had been so injudiciously placed as to give little annoyance to an enemy. The houses of the inhabitants stretched along the remainder of the summit, and descended by a bold declivity the north-western side of the hill to a broad plain known as the _Eras_, or "Gardens." Through this plain flowed a stream of considerable depth, which, as it washed the base of the town on its northern side, formed a sort of moat for its protection on that quarter. On the side towards the Gardens, the town was defended by a ditch and a wall now somewhat dilapidated. The most remarkable feature of this quarter was a church with its belfry or tower, now converted into a fortress, which, in default of cannon, had been pierced with loopholes and filled with musketeers,--forming altogether an outwork of considerable strength, and commanding the approaches to the town. [Sidenote: INVESTMENT OF GALERA.] On two of its sides, the rock on which Galera rested descended almost perpendicularly, forming the walls of a ravine fenced in on the opposite quarter by precipitous hills, and thus presenting a sort of natural ditch on a gigantic scale for the protection of the place. The houses rose one above another, on a succession of terraces, so steep that in many instances the roof of one building scarcely reached the foundation of the one above it. The houses which occupied the same terrace, and stood therefore on the same level, might be regarded as so many fortresses. Their walls, which, after the Moorish fashion, were ill-provided with lattices, were pierced with loopholes, that gave the marksmen within the command of the streets on which they fronted; and these streets were still further protected by barricades thrown across them at only fifty paces' distance from each other.[217] Thus the whole place bristled over with fortifications, or rather seemed like one great fortification itself, which nature had combined with art to make impregnable. It was well victualled for a siege, at least with grain, of which there was enough in the magazines for two years' consumption. Water was supplied by the neighbouring river, to which access had been obtained by a subterranean gallery, lately excavated in the rock. These necessaries of life the Moriscoes could command. But they were miserably deficient in what, in their condition, was scarcely less important,--fire-arms and ammunition. They had no artillery except the two falconets before noticed; and they were so poorly provided with muskets as to be mainly dependent on arrows, stones, and other missiles, such as had filled the armories of their ancestors. To these might be added swords, and some other weapons for hand-to-hand combat. Of defensive armour they were almost wholly destitute. But they were animated by an heroic spirit, of more worth than breastplate or helmet, and to a man they were prepared to die rather than surrender. The fighting men of the place amounted to three thousand, not including four hundred mercenaries, chiefly Turks and adventurers from the Barbary shore. The town was, moreover, encumbered with some four thousand women and children; though, as far as the women were concerned, they should not be termed an incumbrance in a place where there was no scarcity of food; for they showed all the constancy and contempt of danger possessed by the men, whom they aided not only by tending the sick and wounded, but by the efficient services they rendered them in action. The story of this siege records several examples of these Morisco heroines, whose ferocious valour emulated the doughtiest achievements of the other sex. It is not strange that a place so strong in itself, where the women were animated by as brave a spirit as the men, should have bid defiance to all the efforts of an enemy like Los Velez, though backed by an army in the outset at least as formidable in point of numbers as that which now sat down before it under the command of John of Austria.[218] Having concluded his survey of the ground, the Spanish general gave orders for the construction of three batteries, to operate at the same time on different quarters of the town. The first and largest of these batteries, mounting ten pieces of ordnance, was raised on an eminence on the eastern side of the ravine. Though at a greater distance than was desirable, the position was sufficiently elevated to enable the guns to command the castle and the highest parts of the town. The second battery, consisting of six heavy cannon, was established lower down the ravine, towards the south, at the distance of hardly more than seventy paces from the perpendicular face of the rock. The remaining battery, composed of only three guns of smaller calibre, was erected in the Gardens, and so placed as to operate against the tower which, as already noticed, was attached to the church. The whole number of pieces of artillery belonging to the besiegers did not exceed twenty. But they were hourly expecting a reinforcement of thirteen more from Cartagena. The great body of the forces was disposed behind some high ground on the east, which effectually sheltered the men from the fire of the besieged. The corps of Italian veterans, the flower of the army, was stationed in the Gardens, under command of a gallant officer named Pedro de Padilla. Thus the investment of Galera was complete. The first object of attack was the tower in the Gardens, from which the Moorish garrison kept up a teasing fire on the Spaniards, as they were employed in the construction of the battery, as well as in digging a trench, in that quarter. No sooner were the guns in position than they delivered their fire, with such effect that an opening was speedily made in the flimsy masonry of the fortress. Padilla, to whom the assault was committed, led forward his men gallantly to the breach, where he was met by the defenders with a spirit equal to his own. A fierce combat ensued. It was not a long one; for the foremost assailants were soon reinforced by others, until they overpowered the little garrison by numbers, and such as escaped the sword took refuge in the defences of the town that adjoined the church. Flushed with his success in thus easily carrying the tower, which he garrisoned with a strong body of arquebusiers, Don John now determined to make a regular assault on the town, and from this same quarter of the Gardens, as affording the best point of attack. The execution of the affair he entrusted, as before, to Juan de Padilla and his Italian regiment. The guns were then turned against the rampart and the adjoining buildings. Don John pushed forward the siege with vigour, stimulating the men by his own example, carrying fagots on his shoulders for constructing the trenches, and, in short, performing the labours of a common soldier.[219] By the twenty-fourth of January, practicable breaches had been effected in the ancient wall; and at the appointed signal, Padilla and his veterans moved swiftly forward to the attack. They met with little difficulty from the ditch or from the wall, which, never formidable from its height, now presented more than one opening to the assailants. They experienced as little resistance from the garrison. But they had not penetrated far into the town before the aspect of things changed. Their progress was checked by one of those barricades already mentioned as stretched across the streets, behind which a body of musketeers poured well-directed volleys into the ranks of the Christians. At the same time, from the loopholes in the walls of the buildings, came incessant showers of musket-balls, arrows, stones, and other missiles, which swept the exposed files of the Spaniards, soon covering the streets with the bodies of the slain and the wounded. It was in vain that the assailants stormed the houses, and carried one entrenchment after another. Each house was a separate fortress; and each succeeding barricade, as the ascent became steeper, gave additional advantage to its defenders, by placing them on a greater elevation above their enemy. [Sidenote: FIERCE ASSAULTS.] Thus beset in front, flank, and rear, the soldiers were completely blinded and bewildered by the pitiless storm which poured on them from their invisible foe. Huddled together, in their confusion they presented an easy mark to the enemy, who shot at random, knowing that every missile would carry its errand of death. It seemed that the besieged had purposely drawn their foes into the snare, by allowing them to enter the town without resistance, until, hemmed in on all sides, they were slaughtered like cattle in the shambles. The fight had lasted an hour, when Padilla, seeing his best and bravest falling around him, and being himself nearly disabled by a wound, gave the order to retreat; an order obeyed with such alacrity, that the Spaniards left numbers of their wounded comrades lying in the street, vainly imploring not to be abandoned to the mercy of their enemies. A greater number than usual of officers and men of rank perished in the assault, their rich arms making them a conspicuous mark amidst the throng of assailants. Among others was a soldier of distinction named Juan de Pacheco. He was a knight of the order of St. James. He had joined the army only a few minutes before the attack, having just crossed the seas from Africa. He at once requested Padilla, who was his kinsman, to allow him to share in the glory of the day. In the heat of the struggle, Padilla lost sight of his gallant relative, whose insignia, proclaiming him a soldier of the Cross, made him a peculiar object of detestation to the Moslems; and he soon fell, under a multitude of wounds.[220] The disasters of the day, however mortifying, were not a bad lesson to the young commander-in-chief, who saw the necessity of more careful preparation before renewing his attempt on the place. He acknowledged the value of his brother's counsel, to make free use of artillery and mines before coming to close quarters with the enemy.[221] He determined to open a mine in the perpendicular side of the rock, towards the east, and to run it below the castle and the neighbouring houses on the summit. For this he employed the services of Francesco de Molina, who had so stoutly defended Orgiba, and who was aided in the present work by a skilful Venetian engineer. The rock, consisting of a light and brittle sandstone, was worked with even less difficulty than had been expected. In a short time the gallery was completed, and forty-five barrels of powder were lodged in it. Meanwhile the batteries continued to play with great vivacity on the different quarters of the town and castle. A small breach was opened in the latter, and many buildings on the summit of the rock were overthrown. By the twenty-seventh of January all was ready for the assault. It was Don John's purpose to assail the place on opposite quarters. Padilla, who still smarted from his wound, was to attack the town, as before, on the side towards the Gardens. The chief object of this manoeuvre was to create a diversion in favour of the principal assault, which was to be made on the other side of the rock, where the springing of the mine, it was expected, would open a ready access to the castle. The command on this quarter was given to a brave officer named Antonio Moreno. Don John, at the head of four thousand men, occupied a position which enabled him to overlook the scene of action. On the twenty-seventh, at eight in the morning, the signal was given by the firing of a cannon; and Padilla, at the head of his veterans, moved forward to the attack. They effected their entrance into the town with even less opposition than before; for the cannonade from the Gardens had blown away most of the houses, garrisoned by the Moslems, near the wall. But as the assailants pushed on, they soon became entangled, as before, in the long and narrow defiles. The enemy, entrenched behind their redoubts thrown across the streets, poured down their murderous volleys into the close ranks of the Spaniards, who were overwhelmed, as on the former occasion, with deadly missiles of all kinds from the occupants of the houses. But experience had prepared them for this; and they had come provided with mantelets, to shelter them from the tempest. Yet, when the annoyance became intolerable, they would storm the dwellings; and a bloody struggle usually ended in putting their inmates to the sword. Each barricade, too, as the Spaniards advanced, became the scene of a desperate combat, where the musket was cast aside, and men fought hand to hand with sword and dagger. Now rose the fierce battle-cries of the combatants, one party calling on St. Jago, the other on Mahomet, thus intimating that it was still the same war of the Cross and the Crescent which had been carried on for more than eight centuries in the Peninsula.[222] The shouts of the combatants, the clash of weapons, the report of musketry from the adjoining houses, the sounds of falling missiles, filled the air with an unearthly din, that was reverberated and prolonged in countless echoes through the narrow streets, converting the once peaceful city into a Pandemonium. Still the Spaniards, though slowly winning their way through every obstacle, were far from the table-land on the summit, where they hoped to join their countrymen from the other quarter of the town. At this crisis a sound arose which overpowered every other sound in this wild uproar, and for a few moments suspended the conflict. This was the bursting of the mine, which Don John, seeing Padilla well advanced in his assault, had now given the order to fire. In an instant came the terrible explosion, shaking Galera to its centre, rending the portion of the rock above the gallery into fragments, toppling down the houses on its summit, and burying more than six hundred Moriscoes in the ruins. As the smoke and dust of the falling buildings cleared away, and the Spaniards from below beheld the miserable survivors crawling forth, as well as their mangled limbs would allow, they set up a fierce yell of triumph. The mine, however, had done but half the mischief intended; for by a miscalculation in the direction, it had passed somewhat to the right of the castle, which, as well as the ravelin, remained uninjured. Yet a small breach had been opened by the artillery in the former; and what was more important, through the shattered sides of the rock itself a passage had been made, which, though strewn with the fallen rubbish, might afford a practicable entrance to the storming party. [Sidenote: FIERCE ASSAULTS.] The soldiers, seeing the chasm, now loudly called to be led to the assault. Besides the thirst for vengeance on the rebels who had so long set them at defiance, they were stimulated by the desire of plunder; for Galera, from its great strength, had been selected as a place of deposit for the jewels, rich stuffs, and other articles of value belonging to the people in the neighbourhood. The officers, before making the attack, were anxious to examine the breach and have the rubbish cleared away, so as to make the ascent easier for the troops. But the fierce and ill-disciplined levies were too impatient for this. Without heeding the commands or remonstrances of their leaders, one after another they broke their ranks, and, crying the old national war-cries, "_San Jago!_" "_Cierra Espana!_" "St. James!" and "Close up Spain!" they rushed madly forward, and, springing lightly over the ruins in their pathway, soon planted themselves on the summit. The officers, thus deserted, were not long in following, resolved to avail themselves of the enthusiasm of the men. Fortunately the Moriscoes, astounded by the explosion, had taken refuge in the town, and thus left undefended a position which might have given great annoyance to the Spaniards. Yet the cry no sooner rose, that the enemy had scaled the heights, than, recovering from their panic, they hurried back to man the defences. When the assailants, therefore, had been brought into order and formed into column for the attack, they were received with a well-directed fire from the falconets, and with volleys of musketry from the ravelin, that for a moment checked their advance. But then rallying, they gallantly pushed forward through the fiery sleet, and soon found themselves in face of the breach which had been made in the castle by their artillery. The opening, scarcely wide enough to allow two to pass abreast, was defended by men as strong and stout-hearted as their assailants. A desperate struggle ensued, in which the besieged bravely held their ground, though a Castilian ensign, named Zapata, succeeded in forcing his way into the place, and even in planting his standard on the battlements. But it was speedily torn down by the enemy, while the brave cavalier, pierced with wounds, was thrown headlong on the rocky ground below, still clutching the standard with his dying grasp. Meanwhile the defenders of the ravelin kept up a plunging fire of musketry on the assailants; while stones, arrows, javelins, fell thick as rain-drops on their heads, rattling on the harness of the cavaliers, and inflicting many a wound on the ill-protected bodies of the soldiery. The Morisco women bore a brave part in the fight, showing the same indifference to danger as their husbands and brothers, and rolling down heavy weights on the ranks of the besiegers. These women had a sort of military organization, being formed into companies. Sometimes they even joined in hand-to-hand combats with their enemies, wielding their swords and displaying a prowess worthy of the stronger sex. One of these Amazons, whose name became famous in the siege, was seen on this occasion to kill her antagonist, and bear away his armour as the spoils of victory. It was said that, before she received her mortal wound, several Spaniards fell by her hand.[223] Thus, while the besieged, secure within their defences, suffered comparatively little, the attacking column was thrown into disorder. Most of its leaders were killed or wounded. Its ranks were thinned by the incessant fire from the ravelin and castle; and, though it still maintained a brave spirit, its strength was fast ebbing away. Don John, who from his commanding position had watched the field, saw the necessity of sending to the support of his troops six companies of the reserve, which were soon followed by two others. Thus reinforced, they were enabled to keep their ground. Meanwhile the Italian regiment under Padilla had penetrated far into the town. But they had won their way inch by inch, and it had cost them dear. There was not an officer, it was said, that had not been wounded. Four captains had fallen. Padilla, who had not recovered from his former wound, had now received another, still more severe. His men, though showing a bold front, had been so roughly handled, that it was clear they could never fight through the obstacles in their way, and join their comrades on the heights. While little mindful of his own wounds, Padilla saw with anguish the blood of his brave followers thus poured out in vain; and, however reluctantly, he gave the order to retreat. This command was the signal for a fresh storm of missiles from the enemy. But the veterans of Naples, closing up their ranks as a comrade fell, effected their retreat in the same cool and orderly manner in which they had advanced, and, though wofully crippled, regained their position in the trenches. Thus disengaged from the conflict on this quarter, the victorious Moslems hastened to the support of their countrymen in the castle, where they served to counterbalance the reinforcement received by the assailants. They fell at once on the rear of the Christians, whose front ranks were galled by the guns from the enemy's battery--though clumsily served--while their flanks were sorely scathed by the storm of musketry that swept down from the ravelin. Thus hemmed in on all sides, they were indeed in a perilous situation. Several of the captains were killed. All the officers were either killed or wounded; and the narrow ground on which they struggled for mastery was heaped with the bodies of the slain. Yet their spirits were not broken; and the tide of battle, after three hours' duration, still continued to rage with impotent fury around the fortress. They still strove, with desperate energy, to scale the walls of the ravelin, and to force a way through the narrow breach in the castle. But the besieged succeeded in closing up the opening with heavy masses of stone and timber, which defied the failing strength of the assailants. Another hour had now elapsed, and Don John, as from his station he watched the current of the fight, saw that to prolong the contest would only be to bring wider ruin on his followers. He accordingly gave the order to retreat. But the men who had so impetuously rushed to the attack, in defiance of the commands of their officers, now showed the same spirit of insubordination when commanded to leave it; like the mastiff who, maddened by the wounds he has received in the conflict, refuses to loosen his hold on his antagonist, in spite of the chiding of his master. Seeing his orders thus unheeded, Don John, accompanied by his staff, resolved to go in person to the scene of action, and enforce obedience by his presence. But on reaching the spot, he was hit on his cuirass by a musket-ball, which, although it glanced from the well-tempered metal, came with sufficient force to bring him to the ground. The watchful Quixada, not far distant, sprang to his aid; but it appeared he had received no injury. His conduct, however, brought down an affectionate remonstrance from his guardian, who, reminding him of the king's injunctions besought him to retire, and not thus expose a life so precious as that of the commander-in-chief to the hazards of a common soldier. The account of the accident soon spread, with the usual exaggerations, among the troops, who, after the prince's departure, yielded a slow and sullen obedience to his commands. Thus for a second time the field of battle remained in possession of the Moslems; and the banner of the crescent still waved triumphantly from the battlements of Galera.[224] [Sidenote: PREPARATIONS FOR A LAST ATTACK.] The loss was a heavy one to the Spaniards, amounting, according to their own accounts--which will not be suspected of exaggeration--to not less than four hundred killed and five hundred wounded. That of the enemy, screened by his defences, must have been comparatively light. The loss fell most severely on the Spanish chivalry, whose showy dress naturally drew the attention of the well-trained Morisco marksmen. The bloody roll is inscribed with the names of many a noble house in both Andalusia and Castile. This second reverse of his arms stung Don John to the quick. The eyes of his countrymen were upon him; and he well knew the sanguine anticipations they had formed of his campaign, and that they would hold him responsible for its success. His heart was filled with mourning for the loss of his brave companions in arms. Yet he did not give vent to unmanly lamentation; but he showed his feelings in another form, which did little honour to his heart. Turning to his officers, he exclaimed: "The infidels shall pay dear for the Christian blood they have spilt this day. The next assault will place Galera in our power; and every soul within its walls--man, woman, and child--shall be put to the sword. Not one shall be spared. The houses shall be razed to the ground, and the ground they covered shall be sown with salt."[225] This inhuman speech was received with general acclamations. As the event proved, it was not an empty menace. The result of his operations showed Don John the prudence of his brother's recommendation,--to make good use of his batteries and his mines before coming to close quarters with the enemy. Philip, in a letter written some time after this defeat, alluding to the low state of discipline in the camp, urged his brother to give greater attention to the morals of the soldiers,--to guard especially against profanity and other offences to religion, that by so doing he might secure the favour of the Almighty.[226] Don John had intimated to Philip, that, under some circumstances, it might be necessary to encourage his men by leading them in person to the attack. But the king rebuked the spirit of the knight-errant, as not suited to the commander, and admonished his brother that the place for him was in the rear; that there he might be of service in stimulating the ardour of the remiss; adding, that those who went forward promptly in the fight, had no need of his presence to encourage them.[227] Don John lost no time in making his preparations for a third and last assault. He caused two new mines to be opened in the rock on either side of the former one, and at some thirty paces' distance from it. While this was going on, he directed that all the artillery should play without intermission on the town and castle. His battering-train, meantime, was reinforced by the arrival of fourteen additional pieces of heavy ordnance from Cartagena. The besieged were no less busy in preparing for their defence. The women and children toiled equally with the men in repairing the damages in the works. The breaches were closed with heavy stones and timber. The old barricades were strengthened, and new ones thrown across the streets. The magazines were filled with fresh supplies of stones and arrows. Long practice had made the former missile a more formidable weapon than usual in the hands of the Moriscoes. They were amply provided with water, and, as we have seen, were well victualled for a siege longer than this was likely to prove. But, in one respect, and that of the last importance, they were miserably deficient. Their powder was nearly all expended. They endeavoured to obtain supplies of ammunition, as well as reinforcements of men, from Aben-Aboo. But the Morisco prince was fully occupied at this time with maintaining his ground against the duke of Sesa, in the west. His general, El Habaqui, who had charge of the eastern army, encouraged the people of Galera to remain firm, assuring them that before long he should be able to come to their assistance. But time was precious to the besieged.[228] The Turkish auxiliaries in the garrison greatly doubted the possibility of maintaining themselves, with no better ammunition than stones and arrows, against the well-served artillery of the Spaniards. Their leaders accordingly, in a council of war, proposed that the troops should sally forth and cut their way through the lines of the besiegers, while the women and children might pass out by the subterranean avenue which conducted to the river, the existence of which, we are told, was unknown to the Christians. The Turks, mere soldiers of fortune, had no local attachment or patriotic feeling to bind them to the soil. But when their proposal was laid before the inhabitants, they all, women as well as men, treated the proposition with disdain, showing their determination to defend the city to the last, and to perish amidst its ruins rather than surrender. Still sustained by the hope of succour, the besieged did what they could to keep off the day of the assault. They did not, indeed, attempt to counter-mine; for, if they had possessed the skill for this, they had neither tools nor powder. But they had made sorties on the miners, and, though always repulsed with loss, they contrived to hold the camp of the besiegers in a constant state of alarm. On the sixth of February, the engineers who had charge of the mines gave notice that their work was completed. The following morning was named for the assault. The orders of the day prescribed that a general cannonade should open on the town at six in the morning. It was to continue an hour, when the mines were to be sprung. The artillery would then play for another hour, after which the signal for the attack would be given. The signal was to be the firing of one gun from each of the batteries, to be followed by a simultaneous discharge of all. The orders directed the troops to show no quarter to man, woman, or child. [Sidenote: EXPLOSION OF THE MINES.] On the seventh of February, the last day of the Carnival, the besiegers were under arms with the earliest dawn. Their young commander attracted every eye by the splendour of his person and appointments. He was armed _cap-à-pié_, and wore a suit of burnished steel, richly inlaid with gold. His casque, overshadowed by brilliant plumes, was ornamented with a medallion displaying the image of the Virgin.[229] In his hand he carried the baton of command; and as he rode along the lines addressing a few words of encouragement to the soldiers, his perfect horsemanship, his princely bearing, and the courtesy of his manners reminded the veterans of the happier days of his father, the emperor. The cavaliers by whom he was surrounded emulated their chief in the richness of their appointments; and the Murcian chronicler, present on that day, dwells with complacency on the beautiful array of southern chivalry gathered together for the final assault upon Galera.[230] From six o'clock till seven, a furious cannonade was kept up from the whole circle of batteries on the devoted town. Then came the order to fire the mines. The deafening roar of ordnance was at once hushed into a silence profound as that of death, while every soldier in the trenches waited, with nervous suspense, for the explosion. At length it came, overturning houses, shaking down a fragment of the castle, rending wider the breach in the perpendicular side of the rock, and throwing off the fragments with the force of a volcano. Only one mine, however, exploded. It was soon followed by the other, which, though it did less damage, spread such consternation among the garrison, that, fearing there might still be a third in reserve, the men abandoned their works, and took refuge in the town. When the smoke and dust had cleared away, an officer with a few soldiers was sent to reconnoitre the breach. They soon returned with the tidings that the garrison had fled, and left the works wholly unprotected. On hearing this, the troops, with furious shouts, called out to be led at once to the assault. It was in vain that the officers remonstrated, enforcing their remonstrances, in some instances, by blows with the flat of their sabres. The blood of the soldiery was up; and, like an ill-disciplined rabble, they sprang from their trenches in wild disorder, as before, and, hurrying their officers along with them, soon scaled the perilous ascent, and crowned the heights without opposition from the enemy. Hurrying over the _débris_ that strewed the ground, they speedily made themselves masters of the deserted fortress and its outworks,--filling the air with shouts of victory. The fugitives saw their mistake, as they beheld the enemy occupying the position they had abandoned. There was no more apprehension of mines. Eager to retrieve their error, they rushed back, as by a common impulse, to dispute the possession of the ground with the Spaniards. It was too late. The guns were turned on them from their own battery. The arquebusiers who lined the ravelin showered down on their heads missiles more formidable than stones and arrows. But, though their powder was nearly gone, the Moriscoes could still make fight with sword and dagger, and they boldly closed, in a hand-to-hand contest with their enemy. It was a deadly struggle, calling out--as close personal contest is sure to do--the fiercest passions of the combatants. No quarter was given; none was asked. The Spaniard was nerved by the confidence of victory, the Morisco by the energy of despair. Both fought like men who knew that on the issue of this conflict depended the fate of Galera. Again the war-cries of the two religions rose above the din of battle, as the one party invoked their military apostle, and the other called on Mahomet. It was the same war-cry which for more than eight centuries had sounded over hill and valley in unhappy Spain. These were its dying notes, soon to expire with the exile or extermination of the conquered race. The conflict was at length terminated by the arrival of a fresh body of troops on the field with Padilla. That chief had attacked the town by the same avenue as before; everywhere he had met with the same spirit of resistance. But the means of successful resistance were gone. Many of the houses on the streets had been laid in rains by the fire of the artillery. Such as still held out were defended by men armed with no better weapons than stones and arrows. One after another, most of them were stormed and fired by the Spaniards; and those within were put to the sword, or perished in the flames. It fared no better with the defenders of the barricades. Galled by the volleys of the Christians, against whom their own rude missiles did comparatively little execution, they were driven from one position to another; as each redoubt was successively carried, a shout of triumph went up from the victors, which fell cheerily on the ears of their countrymen on the heights; and when Padilla and his veterans burst on the scene of action, it decided the fortunes of the day. There was still a detachment of Turks, whose ammunition had not been exhausted, and who were maintaining a desperate struggle with a body of Spanish infantry, in which the latter had been driven back to the very verge of the precipice. But the appearance of their friends under Padilla gave the Spaniards new heart; and Turk and Morisco, overwhelmed alike by the superiority of the numbers and of the weapons of their antagonists, gave way in all directions. Some fled down the long avenues which led from the summit of the rock. They were hotly pursued by the Spaniards. Others threw themselves into the houses, and prepared to make a last defence. The Spaniards scrambled along the terraces, letting themselves down from one level to another by means of the Moorish ladders used for that purpose. They hewed openings in the wooden roofs of the buildings, through which they fired on those within. The helpless Moriscoes, driven out by the pitiless volleys, sought refuge in the street. But the fierce hunters were there, waiting for their miserable game, which they shot down without mercy,--men, women, and children; none were spared. Yet they did not fall unavenged; and the corpse of many a Spaniard might be seen stretched on the bloody pavement, lying side by side with that of his Moslem enemy. More than one instance is recorded of the desperate courage to which the women as well as the men were roused in their extremity. A Morisco girl, whose father had perished in the first assault in the Gardens, after firing her dwelling, is said to have dragged her two little brothers along with one hand, and, wielding a scimitar with the other, to have rushed against the foe, by whom they were all speedily cut to pieces. Another instance is told, of a man who, after killing his wife and his two daughters, sallied forth, and calling out, "There is nothing more to lose; let us die together!" threw himself madly into the thick of the enemy.[231] Some fell by their own weapons, others by those of their friends, preferring to receive death from any hands but those of the Spaniards. Some two thousand Moriscoes were huddled together in a square not far from the gate, where a strong body of Castilian infantry cut off the means of escape. Spent with toil and loss of blood, without ammunition, without arms, or with such only as were too much battered or broken for service, the wretched fugitives would gladly have made some terms with their pursuers, who now closed darkly around them. But the stag at bay might as easily have made terms with his hunters and the fierce hounds that were already on his haunches. Their prayers were answered by volley after volley, until not a man was left alive. More than four hundred women and children were gathered together without the walls, and the soldiers, mindful of the value of such a booty, were willing to spare their lives. This was remarked by Don John, and no sooner did he observe the symptoms of lenity in the troops, than the flinty-hearted chief rebuked their remissness, and sternly reminded them of the orders of the day. He even sent the halberdiers of his guard and the cavaliers about his person to assist the soldiers in their bloody work; while he sat a calm spectator, on his horse, as immovable as a marble statue, and as insensible to the agonizing screams of his victims and their heart-breaking prayers for mercy.[232] [Sidenote: CRUEL MASSACRE.] While this was going on without the town, the work of death was no less active within. Every square and enclosure that had afforded a temporary refuge to the fugitives was heaped with the bodies of the slain. Blood ran down the kennels like water after a heavy shower. The dwellings were fired, some by the conquerors, others by the inmates, who threw themselves madly into the flames rather than fall into the hands of their enemies. The gathering shadows of evening--for the fight had lasted nearly nine hours[233]--were dispelled by the light of the conflagration, which threw an ominous glare for many a league over the country, proclaiming far and wide the downfall of Galera. At length Don John was so far moved from his original purpose as to consent that the women, and the children under twelve years of age, should be spared. This he did, not from any feeling of compunction, but from deference to the murmurs of his followers, whose discontent at seeing their customary booty snatched from them began to show itself in a way not to be disregarded.[234] Some fifteen hundred women and children, in consequence of this, are said to have escaped the general doom of their countrymen.[235] All the rest, soldiers and citizens, Turks, Africans, and Moriscoes, were mercilessly butchered. Not one man, if we may trust the Spaniards themselves, escaped alive! It would not be easy, even in that age of blood, to find a parallel to so wholesale and indiscriminate a massacre. Yet, to borrow the words of the Castilian proverb, "If Africa had cause to weep, Spain had little reason to rejoice."[236] No success during the war was purchased at so high a price as the capture of Galera. The loss fell as heavily on the officers and men of rank as on the common file. We have seen the eagerness with which they had flocked to the standard of John of Austria. They showed the same eagerness to distinguish themselves under the eye of their leader. The Spanish chivalry were sure to be found in the post of danger. Dearly did they pay for that pre-eminence; and many a noble house in Spain wept bitter tears when the tidings came of the conquest of Galera.[237] Don John himself was so much exasperated, says the chronicler, by the thought of the grievous loss which he had sustained through the obstinate resistance of the heretics,[238] that he resolved to carry at once into effect his menace of demolishing the town, so that not one stone should be left on another. Every house was accordingly burnt or levelled to the ground, which was then strewed with salt, as an accursed spot, on which no man was to build thereafter. A royal decree to that effect was soon afterwards published; and the village of straggling houses, which, undefended by a wall, still clusters round the base of a hill, in the Gardens occupied by Padilla, is all that now serves to remind the traveller of the once flourishing and strongly fortified city of Galera. In the work of demolition Don John was somewhat retarded by a furious tempest of sleet and rain, which set in the day after the place was taken. It was no uncommon thing at that season of the year. Had it come on a few days earlier, the mountain torrents would infallibly have broken up the camp of the besiegers, and compelled them to suspend operations. That the storm was so long delayed, was regarded by the Spaniards as a special interposition of Heaven. The booty was great which fell into the hands of the victors; for Galera, from its great strength, had been selected by the inhabitants of the neighbouring country as a safe place of deposit for their effects,--especially their more valuable treasures of gold, pearls, jewels, and precious stuffs. Besides these, there was a great quantity of wheat, barley, and other grain, stored in the magazines, which afforded a seasonable supply to the army. No sooner was Don John master of Galera, than he sent tidings of his success to his brother. The king was at that time paying his devotions at the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The tidings were received with exultation by the court,--by Philip with the stolid composure with which he usually received accounts either of the success or the discomfiture of his arms. He would allow no public rejoicings of any kind. The only way in which he testified his satisfaction was by offering up thanks to God and the Blessed Virgin, "to whom," says the chronicler, "he thought the cause should be especially commended, as one in which more glory was to be derived from peace than from a bloody victory."[239] With such humane and rational sentiments, it is marvellous that he did not communicate them to his brother, and thus spare the atrocious massacre of his Morisco vassals at Galera. [Sidenote: DISASTER AT SERON.] But, however revolting this massacre may appear in our eyes, it seems to have left no stain on the reputation of John of Austria in the eyes of his contemporaries. In reviewing this campaign, we cannot too often call to mind that it was regarded not so much as a war with rebellious vassals, as a war with the enemies of the Faith. It was the last link in that long chain of hostilities which the Spaniard for so many centuries had been waging for the recovery of his soil from the infidel. The sympathies of Christendom were not the less on his side, that now, when the trumpet of the crusader had ceased to send forth its notes in other lands, they should still be heard among the hills of Granada. The Moriscoes were everywhere regarded as infidels and apostates; and there were few Christian nations whose codes would not at that day have punished infidelity and apostasy with death. It was no harder for them that they should be exterminated by the sword than by the fagot. So far from the massacre of the Moriscoes tarnishing the reputation of their conqueror, it threw a gloomy _éclat_ over his achievement, which may have rather served to add to its celebrity. His own countrymen, thinking only of the extraordinary difficulties which he had overcome, with pride beheld him entering on a splendid career, that would place his name among those of the great paladins of the nation. In Rome he was hailed as the champion of Christendom; and it was determined to offer him the baton of generalissimo of the formidable league which the pope was at this time organizing against the Ottoman empire.[240] CHAPTER VIII. REBELLION OF THE MORISCOES. Disaster at Seron--Death of Quixada--Rapid Successes of Don John--Submission of the Moriscoes--Fate of El Habaqui--Stern Temper of Aben-Aboo--Renewal of the War--Expulsion of the Moors--Don Juan returns to Madrid--Murder of Aben-Aboo--Fortunes of the Moriscoes. 1570, 1571. Don John was detained some days before Galera by the condition of the roads, which the storm had rendered impassable for heavy waggons and artillery. When the weather improved he began his march, moving south, in the direction of Baza. Passing through that ancient town, the scene of one of the most glorious triumphs of the good Queen Isabella the Catholic, he halted at Caniles. Here he left the main body of his army, and, putting himself at the head of a detachment of three thousand foot and two hundred horse, hastened forward to reconnoitre Seron, which he purposed next to attack. Seron was a town of some strength, situated on the slope of the sierra, and defended by a castle held by a Morisco garrison. On his approach, most of the inhabitants, and many of the soldiers, evacuated the place, and sought refuge among the mountains. Don John formed his force into two divisions, one of which he placed under Quixada, the other under Requesens. He took up a position himself, with a few cavaliers and a small body of arquebusiers, on a neighbouring eminence, which commanded a view of the whole ground. The two captains were directed to reconnoitre the environs, by making a circuit from opposite sides of the town. Quixada, as he pressed forward with his column, drove the Morisco fugitives before him, until they vanished in the recesses of the mountains. In the meantime, the beacon-fires, which for some hours had been blazing from the topmost peaks of the sierra, had spread intelligence far and wide of the coming of the enemy. The whole country was in arms; and it was not long before the native warriors, mustering to the number of six thousand, under the Morisco chief, El Habaqui, who held command in that quarter, came pouring through the defiles of the mountains, and fell with fury on the front and flank of the astonished Spaniards. The assailants were soon joined by the fugitives from Seron; and the Christians, unable to withstand this accumulated force, gave way, though slowly, and in good order, before the enemy. Meanwhile, a detachment of Spanish infantry, under command of Lope de Figueroa, _maestro del campo_, had broken into the town, where they were busily occupied in plundering the deserted houses. This was a part of the military profession which the rude levies of Andalusia well understood. While they were thus occupied, the advancing Moriscoes, burning for revenge, burst into the streets of the town, and, shouting their horrid war-cries, set furiously on the marauders. The Spaniards, taken by surprise, and encumbered with their booty, offered little resistance. They were seized with a panic, and fled in all directions. They were soon mingled with their retreating comrades under Quixada, everywhere communicating their own terror, till the confusion became general. It was in vain that Quixada and Figueroa, with the other captains, endeavoured to restore order. The panic-stricken soldiers heard nothing, saw nothing, but the enemy. At this crisis, Don John, who from his elevated post had watched the impending ruin, called his handful of brave followers around him, and at once threw himself into the midst of the tumult. "What means this, Spaniards?" he exclaimed. "From whom are you flying? Where is the honour of Spain? Have you not John of Austria, your commander, with you? At least, if you retreat, do it like brave men, with your front to the enemy."[241] It was in vain. His entreaties, his menaces, even his blows, which he dealt with the flat of his sabre, were ineffectual to rouse anything like a feeling of shame in the cowardly troops. The efforts of his captains were equally fruitless, though in making them they exposed their lives with a recklessness which cost some of them dear. Figueroa was disabled by a wound in the leg. Quixada was hit by a musket-ball on the left shoulder, and struck from his saddle. Don John, who was near, sprang to his assistance, and placed him in the hands of some troopers, with directions to bear him at once to Caniles. In doing this the young commander himself had a narrow escape; for he was struck on his helmet by a ball, which, however, fortunately glanced off without doing him injury.[242] He was now hurried along by the tide of fugitives, who made no attempt to rally for the distance of half a league, when the enemy ceased his pursuit. Six hundred Spaniards were left dead on the field. A great number threw themselves into the houses, prepared to make good their defence. But they were speedily enveloped by the Moriscoes, the houses were stormed or set on fire, and the inmates perished to a man.[243] Don John, in a letter dated the nineteenth of February, two days after this disgraceful affair, gave an account of it to the king, declaring that the dastardly conduct of the troops exceeded anything he had ever witnessed, or indeed could have believed, had he not seen it with his own eyes. "They have so little heart in the service," he adds, "that no effort that I can make, not even the fear of the galleys or the gibbet, can prevent them from deserting. Would to Heaven I could think that they are moved to this by the desire to return to their families, and not by fear of the enemy."[244] He gave the particulars of Quixada's accident, stating that the surgeons had made six incisions before they could ascertain where the ball, which had penetrated the shoulder, was lodged; and that, with all their efforts, they had as yet been unable to extract it. "I now deeply feel," he says, "how much I have been indebted to his military experience, his diligence, and care and how important his preservation is to the service of your majesty. I trust in God he may be permitted to regain his health, which is now in a critical condition."[245] [Sidenote: DEATH OF QUIXADA.] In his reply to this letter, the king expressed his sense of the great loss which both he and his brother would sustain by the death of Quixada. "You will keep me constantly advised of the state of his health," he says. "I know well it is unnecessary for me to impress upon you the necessity of watching carefully over him." Philip did not let the occasion pass for administering a gentle rebuke to Don John for so lightly holding the promise he had made to him from Galera, not again to expose himself heedlessly to danger. "When I think of your narrow escape at Seron, I cannot express the pain I have felt at your rashly incurring such a risk. In war, every one should confine himself to the duties of his own station; nor should the general affect to play the part of the soldier, anymore than the soldier that of the general."[246] It seems to have been a common opinion, that Don John was more fond of displaying his personal prowess than became one of his high rank; in short, that he showed more the qualities of a knight-errant, than those of a great commander.[247] Meanwhile, Quixada's wound, which from the first had been attended with alarming symptoms, grew so much worse as to baffle all the skill of the surgeons. His sufferings were great, and every hour he grew weaker. Before a week had elapsed, it became evident that his days were numbered. The good knight received the intelligence with composure,--for he did not fear death. He had not the happiness in this solemn hour to have her near him on whose conjugal love and tenderness he had reposed for so many years.[248] But the person whom he cherished next to his wife, Don John of Austria, was by his bedside, watching over him with the affectionate solicitude of a son, and ministering those kind offices which soften the bitterness of death. The dying man retained his faculties to the last, and dictated, though he had not the strength to sign, a letter to the king, requesting some favour for his widow, in consideration of his long services. He then gave himself up wholly to his spiritual concerns; and on the twenty-fourth of February, 1570, he gently expired, in the arms of his foster-son. Quixada received a soldier's funeral. His obsequies were celebrated with the military pomp suited to his station. His remains, accompanied by the whole army, with arms reversed, and banners trailing in the dust, were borne in solemn procession to the church of the Jeronymites in Caniles; and "we may piously trust," says the chronicler, "that the soul of Don Luis rose up to heaven with the sweet incense which burned on the altars of St. Jerome; for he spent his life, and finally lost it, in fighting like a valiant soldier the battles of the faith."[249] Quixada was austere in his manners, and a martinet in enforcing discipline. He was loyal in his nature, of spotless integrity, and possessed so many generous and knightly qualities, that he commanded the respect of his comrades; and the regret for his loss was universal. Philip, writing to Don John, a few days after the event, remarks: "I did not think that any letter from you could have given me so much pain as that acquainting me with the death of Quixada. I fully comprehend the importance of his loss, both to myself and to you, and cannot wonder you should feel it so keenly. It is impossible to allude to it without sorrow. Yet we may be consoled by the reflection that, living and dying as he did, he cannot fail to have exchanged this world for a better."[250] Quixada's remains were removed, the year following, to his estate at Villagarcia, where his disconsolate widow continued to reside. Immediately after her lord's decease, Don John wrote to Doña Magdalena, from the camp, a letter of affectionate condolence, which came from the fulness of his heart: "Luis died as became him, fighting for the glory and safety of his son, and covered with immortal honour. Whatever I am, whatever I shall be, I owe to him, by whom I was formed, or rather begotten in a nobler birth. Dear sorrowing widowed mother! I only am left to you; and to you, indeed, do I of right belong, for whose sake Luis died, and you have been stricken with this woe. Moderate your grief with your wonted wisdom. Would that I were near you now, to dry your tears, or mingle mine with them! Farewell, dearest and most honoured mother! and pray to God to send, back your son from these wars to your bosom."[251] Doña Magdalena survived her husband many years, employing her time in acts of charity and devotion. From Don John she ever experienced the same filial tenderness which he evinces in the letter above quoted. Never did he leave the country or return to it without first paying his respects to his mother, as he always called her. She watched with maternal pride his brilliant career; and when that was closed by an early death, the last link which had bound her to this world was snapped for ever. Yet she continued to live on till near the close of the century, dying in 1598, and leaving behind her a reputation for goodness and piety little less than that of a saint. Don John, having paid the last tribute of respect to the memory of his guardian, collected his whole strength, and marched at once against Seron. But the enemy, shrinking from an encounter with so formidable a force, had abandoned the place before the approach of the Spaniards. The Spanish commander soon after encountered El Habaqui in the neighbourhood, and defeated him. He then marched on Tijola, a town perched on a bold cliff, which a resolute garrison might have easily held against an enemy. But the Moriscoes, availing themselves of the darkness of the night, stole out of the place, and succeeded, without much loss, in escaping through the lines of the besiegers.[252] The fall of Tijola was followed by that of Purchena. In a short time the whole Rio de Almanzora was overrun, and the victorious general, crossing the south-eastern borders of the Alpujarras, established his quarters, on the second of May, at Padules, about two leagues from Andarax. [Sidenote: NEGOTIATIONS WITH EL HABAQUI.] These rapid successes are not to be explained simply by Don John's superiority over the enemy in strength or military science. Philip had turned a favourable ear to the pope's invitation to join the league against the Turk, in which he was complimented by having the post of commander-in-chief offered to his brother, John of Austria. But before engaging in a new war, it was most desirable for him to be released from that in which he was involved with the Moriscoes. He had already seen enough of the sturdy spirit of that race to be satisfied that to accomplish his object by force would be a work of greater time than he could well afford. The only alternative, therefore, was to have recourse to the conciliatory policy which had been so much condemned in the marquis of Mondejar. Instructions to that effect were accordingly sent to Don John, who, heartily weary of this domestic contest, and longing for a wider theatre of action, entered warmly into his brother's views. Secret negotiations were soon opened with El Habaqui, the Morisco chief, who received the offer of such terms for himself and his countrymen as left him in no doubt, at least, as to the side on which his own interest lay. As a preliminary step, he was to withdraw his support from the places in the Rio de Almanzora; and thus the war, brought within the narrower range of the Alpujarras, might be more easily disposed of. This part of his agreement had been faithfully executed; and the rebellious district on the eastern borders of the Alpujarras had, as we have seen, been brought into subjection, with little cost of life to the Spaniards. Don John followed this up by a royal proclamation, promising an entire amnesty for the past to all who within twenty days should tender their submission. They were to be allowed to state the grievances which had moved them to take up arms, with an assurance that these should be redressed. All who refused to profit by this act of grace, with the exception of the women, and of children under fourteen years of age, would be put to the sword without mercy. What was the effect of the proclamation we are not informed. It was probably not such as had been anticipated. The Moriscoes, distressed as they were, did not trust the promises of the Spaniards. At least we find Don John, who had now received a reinforcement of two thousand men, distributing his army into detachments, with orders to scour the country and deal with the inhabitants in a way that should compel them to submit. Such of the wretched peasantry as had taken refuge in their fastnesses were assailed with shot and shell, and slaughtered by hundreds. Some, who had hidden with their families in the caves in which the country abounded, were hunted out by their pursuers, or suffocated by the smoke of burning fagots at the entrance of their retreats. Everywhere the land was laid waste, so as to afford sustenance for no living thing. Such were the conciliatory measures employed by the government for the reduction of the rebels.[253] Meanwhile the duke of Sesa had taken the field on the northern border of the Alpujarras, with an army of ten thousand foot and two thousand horse. He was opposed by Aben-Aboo with a force which in point of numbers was not inferior to his own. The two commanders adopted the same policy; avoiding pitched battles, and confining themselves to the desultory tactics of _guerilla_ warfare, to skirmishes and surprises; while each endeavoured to distress his adversary by cutting off his convoys and by wasting the territory with fire and sword. The Morisco chief had an advantage in the familiarity of his men with this wild mountain fighting, and in their better knowledge of the intricacies of the country. But this was far more than counterbalanced by the superiority of the Spaniards in military organization, and by their possession of cavalry, artillery, and muskets, in all of which the Moslems were lamentably deficient. Thus, although no great battle was won by the Christians, although they were sorely annoyed, and their convoys of provisions frequently cut off, by the skirmishing parties of the enemy, they continued steadily to advance, driving the Moriscoes before them, and securing the permanency of their conquests by planting a line of forts, well garrisoned, along the wasted territory in their rear. By the beginning of May, the duke of Sesa had reached the borders of the Mediterranean, and soon after united his forces, greatly diminished by desertion, to those of Don John of Austria at Padules.[254] Negotiations, during this time, had been resumed with El Habaqui, who with the knowledge, if not the avowed sanction, of Aben-Aboo, had come to a place called Fondon de Andarax, not far distant from the head-quarters of the Spanish commander-in-chief. He was accompanied by several of the principal Moriscoes, who were to take part in the discussions. On the thirteenth of May they were met by the deputies from the Castilian camp, and the conference was opened. It soon appeared that the demands of the Moriscoes were wholly inadmissible. They insisted, not only on a general amnesty, but that things should be restored to the situation in which they were before the edicts of Philip the Second had given rise to the rebellion. The Moorish commissioners were made to understand that they were to negotiate only on the footing of a conquered race. They were advised to prepare a memorial preferring such requests as might be reasonably granted; and they were offered the services of Juan de Soto, Don John's secretary, to aid them in drafting the document. They were counselled, moreover, to see their master, Aben-Aboo, and obtain full powers from him to conclude a definitive treaty. Aben-Aboo, ever since his elevation to the stormy sovereignty of the Alpujarras, had maintained his part with a spirit worthy of his cause. But as he beheld town after town fall away from his little empire, his people butchered or swept into slavery, his lands burned and wasted, until the fairest portions were converted into a wilderness,--above all, when he saw that his cause excited no sympathy in the bosoms of the Moslem princes, on whose support he had mainly relied,--he felt more and more satisfied of the hopelessness of a contest with the Spanish monarchy. His officers, and indeed the people at large, had come to the same conviction; and nothing but an intense hatred of the Spaniards, and a distrust of their good faith, had prevented the Moriscoes from throwing down their arms and accepting the promises of grace which had been held out to them. The disastrous result of the recent campaign against the duke of Sesa tended still further to the discouragement of the Morisco chief; and El Habaqui and his associates returned with authority from their master to arrange terms of accommodation with the Spaniards. On the nineteenth of May, the commissioners from each side again met at Fondon de Andarax. A memorial, drafted by Juan de Soto, was laid before Don John, whose quarters, as we have seen, were in the immediate neighbourhood. No copy of the instrument has been preserved, or at least none has been published. From the gracious answer returned by the prince, we may infer that it contained nothing deemed objectionable by the conquerors. [Sidenote: SUBMISSION OF THE MORISCOES.] The deputies were not long in agreeing on terms of accommodation--or rather of submission. It was settled that the Morisco captain should proceed to the Christian camp, and there presenting himself before the commander-in-chief, should humbly crave forgiveness, and tender submission on behalf of his nation; that, in return for this act of humiliation, a general amnesty should be granted to his countrymen, who, though they were no longer to be allowed to occupy the Alpujarras, would be protected by the government wherever they might be removed. More important concessions were made to Aben-Aboo and El Habaqui. The last-mentioned chief, as the chronicler tells us, obtained all that he asked for his master, as well as for himself and his friends.[255] Such politic concessions by the Spaniards had doubtless their influence in opening the eyes of the Morisco leaders to the folly of protracting the war in their present desperate circumstances. The same evening on which the arrangement was concluded, El Habaqui proceeded to his interview with the Spanish commander. He was accompanied by one only of the Morisco deputies. The others declined to witness the spectacle of their nation's humiliation. He was attended, however, by a body of three hundred arquebusiers. On entering the Christian lines, his little company was surrounded by four regiments of Castilian infantry, and escorted to the presence of John of Austria, who stood before his tent, attended by his officers, from whom his princely bearing made him easily distinguished. El Habaqui, alighting from his horse, and prostrating himself before the prince, exclaimed, "Mercy! We implore your highness, in the name of his majesty, to show us mercy, and to pardon our transgressions, which we acknowledge have been great!"[256] Then unsheathing his scimitar, he presented it to Don John, saying that he surrendered his arms to his majesty in the name of Aben-Aboo and the rebel chiefs for whom he was empowered to act. At the same time the secretary, Juan de Soto, who had borne the Moorish banner, given him by El Habaqui, on the point of his lance, cast it on the ground before the feet of the prince. The whole scene made a striking picture, in which the proud conqueror, standing with the trophies of victory around him, looked down on the representative of the conquered race as he crouched in abject submission at his feet. Don John, the predominant figure in the _tableau_, by his stately demeanour tempered with a truly royal courtesy, reminded the old soldiers of his father the emperor, and they exclaimed, "This is the true son of Charles the Fifth!" Stooping forward, he graciously raised the Morisco chief from the ground, and, returning him his sword, bade him employ it henceforth in the service of the king. The ceremony was closed by flourishes of trumpets and salvoes of musketry, as if in honour of some great victory. El Habaqui remained some time after his followers had left the camp, where he met with every attention, was feasted and caressed by the principal officers, and was even entertained at a banquet by the bishop of Guadix. He received however, as we have seen, something more substantial than compliments. Under these circumstances, it was natural that he should become an object of jealousy and suspicion to the Moriscoes. It was soon whispered that El Habaqui, in his negotiations with the Christians, had been more mindful of his own interests than of those of his countrymen.[257] Indeed, the Moriscoes had little reason to congratulate themselves on the result of a treaty which left them in the same forlorn and degraded condition as before the breaking out of the rebellion,--which in one important respect, indeed, left them in a worse condition, since they were henceforth to become exiles from the homes of their fathers. Yet, cruel and pitiable in the extreme as was the situation of the Moriscoes, the Spanish monks, as Don John complains to his brother, inveighed openly in their pulpits against the benignity and mercy of the king;[258] and this too, he adds, when it should rather have been their duty to intercede for poor wretches who, for the most part, had sinned through ignorance.[259] The ecclesiastic on whom his censure most heavily falls, is the President Deza,--a man held in such abhorrence by the Moriscoes as to have been one principal cause of their insurrection; and he beseeches the king to consult the interests of Granada by bestowing on him a bishopric, or some other dignity, which may remove him from the present scene of his labours.[260] Among those disappointed at the terms of the treaty, as it soon appeared, was Aben-Aboo himself. At first he affected to sanction it, and promised to all he could to enforce its execution. But he soon cooled, and, throwing the blame on El Habaqui, declared that this officer had exceeded his powers, made a false report to him of his negotiations, and sacrificed the interests of the nation to his own ambition.[261] The attentions lavished on that chief by the Spaniards, his early correspondence with them, and the liberal concessions secured to him by the treaty, furnished plausible grounds for such an accusation. According to the Spanish accounts, however, Aben-Aboo at this time received a reinforcement of two hundred soldiers from Barbary, with the assurance that he would soon have more effectual aid from Africa. This, we are told, changed his views. Nor is it impossible that the Morisco chief, as the hour approached, found it a more difficult matter than he had anticipated to resign his royal state and descend into the common rank-and-file of the vassals of Castile,--the degraded caste of Moorish vassals, whose condition was little above that of serfs. However this maybe, the Spanish camp was much disquieted by the rumours which came in of Aben-Aboo's vacillation. It was even reported that, far from endeavouring to enforce the execution of the treaty, he was secretly encouraging his people to further resistance. No one felt more indignant at his conduct than El Habaqui, who had now become as loyal a subject as any other in Philip's dominions. Not a little personal resentment was mingled with his feeling towards Aben-Aboo; and he offered, if Don John would place him at the head of a detachment, to go himself, brave the Morisco prince in his own quarters, and bring him as a prisoner to the camp. Don John, though putting entire confidence in El Habaqui's fidelity,[262] preferred, instead of men, to give him money; and he placed eight hundred gold ducats in his hands, to enable him to raise the necessary levies among his countrymen. [Sidenote: FATE OF EL HABAQUI.] Thus fortified, El Habaqui set out for the head-quarters of Aben-Aboo, at his ancient residence in Mecina de Bombaron. On the second day the Morisco captain fell in with a party of his countrymen lingering idly by the way, and he inquired, with an air of authority, why they did not go and tender their submission to the Spanish authorities, as others had done. They replied, they were waiting for their master's orders. To this El Habaqui rejoined, "All are bound to submit: and if Aben-Aboo, on his part, shows unwillingness to do so, I will arrest him at once, and drag him at my horse's tail to the Christian camp."[263] This foolish vaunt cost the braggart his life. One of the party instantly repaired to Mecina and reported the words to Aben-Aboo. The Morisco prince, overjoyed at the prospect of having his enemy in his power, immediately sent a detachment of a hundred and fifty Turks to seize the offender and bring him to Mecina. They found El Habaqui at Burchal, where his family were living. The night had set in, when the chieftain received tidings of the approach of the Turks; and under cover of the darkness he succeeded in making his escape into the neighbouring mountains. The ensuing morning the soldiers followed closely on his track; and it was not long before they descried a person skulking among the rocks, whose white mantle and crimson turban proved him to be the object of their pursuit. He was immediately arrested and carried to Mecina. His sentence was already passed. Aben-Aboo, upbraiding him with his treachery, ordered him to be removed to an adjoining room, where he was soon after strangled. His corpse, denied the rights of burial, having been first rolled in a mat of reeds, was ignominiously thrown into a sewer; and the fate of the unhappy man was kept a secret for more than a month.[264] His absence, after some time, naturally excited suspicions in the Spanish camp. A cavalier, known to Aben-Aboo, wrote to him to obtain information respecting El Habaqui, and was told, in answer, by the wily prince, that he had been arrested and placed in custody for his treacherous conduct, but that his family and friends need be under no alarm, as he was perfectly safe. Aben-Aboo hinted, moreover, that it would be well to send to him some confidential person with whom he might arrange the particulars of the treaty,--as if these had not been already settled. After some further delay, Don John resolved to despatch an agent to ascertain the real dispositions of the Moriscoes towards the Christians, and to penetrate, if possible, the mystery that hung round the fate of El Habaqui. The envoy selected was Hernan Valle de Palacios, a cavalier possessed of a courageous heart, yet tempered by a caution that well fitted him for the delicate and perilous office. On the thirteenth of July he set out on his mission. On the way he encountered a Morisco, a kinsman of the late monarch, Aben-Humeya, and naturally no friend to Aben-Aboo. He was acquainted with the particulars of El Habaqui's murder, of which he gave full details to Palacios. He added, that the Morisco prince, far from acquiescing in the recent treaty, was doing all in his power to prevent its execution. He could readily muster, at short notice, said the informer, a force of five thousand men, well armed, and provisioned for three months; and he was using all his efforts to obtain further reinforcements from Algiers. Instructed in these particulars, the envoy resumed his journey. He was careful, however, first to obtain a safe-conduct from Aben-Aboo, which was promptly sent to him. On reaching Mecina, he found the place occupied by a body of five hundred arquebusiers; but by the royal order he was allowed to pass unmolested. Before entering the presence of "the little king of the Alpujarras," as Aben-Aboo, like his predecessor, was familiarly styled by the Spaniards, Palacios was carefully searched, and such weapons as he carried about him were taken away. He found Aben-Aboo stretched on a divan, and three or four Moorish girls entertaining him with their national songs and dances. He did not rise, or indeed change his position, at the approach of the envoy, but gave him audience with the lofty bearing of an independent sovereign. Palacios did not think it prudent to touch on the fate of El Habaqui. After expatiating on the liberal promises which he was empowered by Don John of Austria to make, he expressed the hope that Aben-Aboo would execute the treaty, and not rekindle a war which must lead to the total destruction of his country. The chief listened in silence; and it was not till he had called some of his principal captains around him, that he condescended to reply. He then said, that God and the whole world knew it was not by his own desire, but by the will of the people, that he had been placed on the throne. "I shall not attempt," he said, "to prevent any of my subjects from submitting that prefer to do so. But tell your master," he added, "that, while I have a single shirt to my back, I shall not follow their example. Though no other man should hold out in the Alpujarras, I would rather live and die a Mussulman than possess all the favours which King Philip can heap on me. At no time, and in no manner, will I ever consent to place myself in his power."[265] He concluded this spirited declaration by adding, that, if driven to it by necessity, he could bury himself in a cavern, which he had stowed with supplies for six years to come, during which it would go hard but he would find some means of making his way to Barbary. The desperate tone of these remarks effectually closed the audience. Palacios was permitted to return unmolested, and to report to his commander the failure of his mission. The war, which Don John had flattered himself he had so happily brought to a close, now, like a fire smothered, but not quenched, burst forth again with redoubled fury. The note of defiance was heard loudest among the hills of Ronda, a wild sierra on the western skirts of the Alpujarras, inhabited by a bold and untamed race, more formidable than the mountaineers of any other district of Granada. Aben-Aboo did all he could to fan the flame of insurrection in this quarter, and sent his own brother, El Galipe, to take the command. The Spanish government, now fully aroused, made more vigorous efforts to crush the spirit of rebellion than at any time during the war. Don John was ordered to occupy Guadix, and thence to scour the country in a northerly direction. Another army, under the Grand-Commander Requesens, marching from Granada, was to enter the Alpujarras from the north, and taking a route different from that of the duke of Sesa, in the previous campaign, was to carry a war of extermination into the heart of the mountains. Finally, the duke of Arcos, the worthy descendant of the great marquis of Cadiz, whose name was so famous in the first war of Granada, and whose large estates in this quarter he had inherited, was entrusted with the operations against the rebels of the Serrania de Ronda. [Sidenote: RENEWAL OF THE WAR.] The grand-commander executed his commission in the same remorseless spirit in which it had been dictated. Early in September, quitting Granada, he took the field at the head of five thousand men. He struck at once into the heart of the country. All the evils of war in its most horrid form followed in his train. All along his track, it seemed as if the land had been swept by a conflagration. The dwellings were sacked and burned to the ground. The mulberry and olive groves were cut down; the vines were torn up by the roots; and the ripening harvests were trampled in the dust. The country was converted into a wilderness. Occasionally small bodies of the Moriscoes made a desperate stand. But for the most part, without homes to shelter or food to nourish them, they were driven, like unresisting cattle, to seek a refuge in the depths of the mountains, and in the caves in which this part of the country abounded. Their pursuers followed up the chase with the fierce glee with which the hunter tracks the wild animal of the forest to his lair. There they were huddled together, one or two hundred frequently in the same cavern. It was not easy to detect the hiding-place amidst the rocks and thickets which covered up and concealed the entrance. But when it was detected, it was no difficult matter to destroy the inmates. The green bushes furnished the materials for a smouldering fire, and those within were soon suffocated by the smoke, or, rushing out, threw themselves on the mercy of their pursuers. Some were butchered on the spot; others were sent to the gibbet or the galleys; while the greater part, with a fate scarcely less terrible, were given up as the booty of the soldiers, and sold into slavery.[266] Aben-Aboo had a narrow escape in one of these caverns, not far from Bérchul, where he had secreted himself with a wife and two of his daughters. The women were suffocated, with about seventy other persons. The Morisco chief succeeded in making his escape through an aperture at the farther end, which was unknown to his enemies.[267] Small forts were erected at short intervals along the ruined country. No less than eighty-four of these towers were raised in different parts of the land, twenty-nine of which were to be seen in the Alpujarras and the vale of Lecrin alone.[268] There they stood, crowning every peak and eminence in the sierra, frowning over the horrid waste, the sad memorials of the conquest. This was the stern policy of the victors. Within this rocky girdle, long held as it was by the iron soldiery of Castile, it was impossible that rebellion should again gather to a head. The months of September and October were consumed in these operations. Meanwhile the duke of Arcos had mustered his Andalusian levies, to the number of four thousand men, including a thousand of his own vassals. He took with him his son, a boy of not more than thirteen years of age,--following in this, says the chronicler, the ancient usage of the valiant house of Ponce de Leon.[269] About the middle of September he began his expedition into the Sierra Vermeja, or Red Sierra. It was a spot memorable in Spanish history for the defeat and death of Alonso de Aguilar, in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, and has furnished the theme of many a plaintive _romance_ in the beautiful minstrelsy of the South. The wife of the duke of Arcos was descended from Alonso de Aguilar, as he himself was the grandson of the good count of Ureña, who, with better fortune than his friend, survived the disasters of that day. The route of the army led directly across the fatal field. As they traversed the elevated plain of Calaluz, the soldiers saw everywhere around the traces of the fight. The ground was still covered with fragments of rusty armour, bits of broken sword-blades, and heads of spears. More touching evidence was afforded by the bones of men and horses, which, in this solitary region, had been whitening in the blasts of seventy winters. The Spaniards knew well the localities, with which they had become familiar from boyhood in the legends and traditions of the country. Here was the spot where the vanguard, under its brave commander, had made its halt in the obscurity of the night. There were the faint remains of the enemy's entrenchments, which time had nearly levelled with the dust; and there, too, the rocks still threw their dark shadows over the plain, as on the day when the valiant Alonso da Aguilar fell at their base in combat with the renowned Fèri de Ben Estepar. The whole scene was brought home to the hearts of the Spaniards. As they gazed on the unburied relics lying around them, the tears, says the eloquent historian who records the incident, fell fast down their iron cheeks; and they breathed a soldier's prayer for the repose of the noble dead. But these holier feelings were soon succeeded by others of a fierce nature, and they loudly clamoured to be led against the enemy.[270] The duke of Arcos, profiting by the errors of Alonso de Aguilar, had made his arrangements with great circumspection. He soon came in sight of the Moriscoes, full three thousand strong. But, though well posted, they made a defence little worthy of their ancient reputation, or of the notes of defiance which they had so boldly sounded at the opening of the campaign. They indeed showed mettle at first, and inflicted some loss on the Christians. But the frequent reverses of their countrymen seemed to have broken their spirits; and they were soon thrown into disorder, and fled in various directions into the more inaccessible tracts of the sierra. The Spaniards followed up the fugitives, who did not attempt to rally. Nor did they ever again assemble in any strength, so effectual were the dispositions made by the victorious general. The insurrection of the Sierra Vermeja was at an end.[271] The rebellion, indeed, might be said to be everywhere crushed within the borders of Granada. The more stout-hearted of the insurgents still held out among the caves and fastnesses of the Alpujarras, supporting a precarious existence until they were hunted down by detachments of the Spaniards, who were urged to the pursuit by the promise from government of twenty ducats a head for every Morisco. But nearly all felt the impracticability of further resistance. Some succeeded in making their escape to Barbary. The rest, broken in spirit, and driven to extremity by want of food in a country now turned into a desert, consented at length to accept the amnesty offered them, and tendered their submission. [Sidenote: EXPULSION OF THE MOORS.] On the twenty-eighth of October Don John received advices of a final edict of Philip, commanding that all the Moriscoes in the kingdom of Granada should be at once removed into the interior of the country. None were to be excepted from this decree, not even the _Moriscos de la Paz_, as those were called who had loyally refused to take part in the rebellion.[272] The arrangements for this important and difficult step were made with singular prudence, and, under the general direction of Don John of Austria, the Grand-Commander Requesens, and the dukes of Sesa and Arcos, were carried into effect with promptness and energy. By the terms of the edict, the lands and houses of the exiles were to be forfeited to the crown. But their personal effects--their flocks, their herds, and their grain--would be taken, if they desired it, at a fixed valuation by the government. Every regard was to be paid to their personal conveniences and security; and it was forbidden, in the removal, to separate parents from children, husbands from wives; in short, to divide the members of a family from one another;--"an act of clemency," says a humane chronicler, "which they little deserved; but his majesty was willing in this to content them."[273] The country was divided into districts, the inhabitants of which were to be conducted, under the protection of a strong military escort, to their several places of destination. These seem to have been the territory of La Mancha, the northern borders of Andalusia, the Castiles, Estremadura, and even the remote province of Galicia. Care was taken that no settlement should be made near the borders of Murcia or Valencia, where large numbers of the Moriscoes were living in comparative quiet on the estates of the great nobles, who were exceedingly jealous of any interference with their vassals. The first of November, All-Saints' Day, was appointed for the removal of the Moriscoes throughout Granada. On that day they were gathered in the principal churches of their districts, and after being formed into their respective divisions, began their march. The grand-commander had occupied the passes of the Alpujarras with strong detachments of the military. The different columns of emigrants were placed under the directions of persons of authority and character. The whole movement was conducted with singular order,--resistance being attempted in one or two places only, where the blame, it may be added, as intimated by a Castilian chronicler, was to be charged on the brutality of the soldiers.[274] Still, the removal of the Moriscoes on the present occasion was attended with fewer acts of violence and rapacity than the former removal, from Granada. At least this would seem to be inferred by the silence of the chroniclers; though it is true such silence is far from being conclusive, as the chroniclers, for the most part, felt too little interest in the sufferings of the Moriscoes to make a notice of them indispensable. However this may be, it cannot be doubted that, whatever precautions may have been taken to spare the exiles any unnecessary suffering, the simple fact of their being expelled from their native soil is one that suggests an amount of misery not to be estimated. For what could be more dreadful than to be thus torn from their pleasant homes, the scenes of their childhood, where every mountain, valley, and stream were as familiar friends,--a part of their own existence,--to be rudely thrust into a land of strangers, of a race differing from themselves in faith, language, and institutions, with no sentiment in common but that of a deadly hatred? That the removal of a whole nation should have been so quietly accomplished, proves how entirely the strength and spirit of the Moriscoes must have been broken by their reverses.[275] The war thus terminated, there seemed no reason for John of Austria to prolong his stay in the province. For some time he had been desirous to obtain the king's consent to his return. His ambitious spirit, impatient of playing a part on what now seemed to him an obscure field of action, pent up within the mountain barrier of the Alpujarras, longed to display itself on a bolder theatre before the world. He aspired, too, to a more independent command. He addressed repeated letters to the king's ministers,--to the Cardinal Espinosa and Gomez de Silva in particular,--to solicit their influence in his behalf. "I should be glad," he wrote to the latter, "to serve his majesty, if I might be allowed, on some business of importance. I wish he may understand that I am no longer a boy. Thank God, I can begin to fly without the aid of others' wings, and it is full time, as I believe, that I was out of swaddling-clothes."[276] In another letter he expresses his desire to have some place more fitting the brother of such a monarch as Philip, and the son of such a father as Charles the Fifth.[277] On more than one occasion he alludes to the command against the Turk as the great object of his ambition. His importunity to be allowed to resign his present office had continued from the beginning of summer, some months before the proper close of the campaign. It may be thought to argue an instability of character, of which a more memorable example was afforded by him at a later period of life. At length he was rejoiced by obtaining the royal consent to resign his command and return to court. [Sidenote: MURDER OF ABEN-ABOO.] On the eleventh of November, Don John repaired to Granada. Till the close of the month he was occupied with making the necessary arrangements preparatory to his departure. The greater part of the army was paid off and disbanded. A sufficient number was reserved to garrison the fortresses and to furnish detachments which were to scour the country and hunt down such Moriscoes as still held out in the mountains. As Requesens was to take part in the expedition against the Ottomans, the office of captain-general was placed in the hands of the valiant duke of Arcos. On the twenty-ninth of November, Don John, having completed his preparations, quitted Granada and set forth on his journey to Madrid, where the popular chieftain was welcomed with enthusiasm by the citizens, as a conqueror returned from a victorious campaign. By Philip and his newly-married bride, Anne of Austria, he was no less kindly greeted; and it was not long before the king gave a substantial proof of his contentment with his brother, by placing in his hands the baton, offered by the allies, of generalissimo in the war against the Turks. There was still one Morisco insurgent who refused to submit, and who had hitherto eluded every attempt to capture him, but whose capture was of more importance than that of any other of his nation. This was Aben-Aboo, the "little king" of the Alpujarras. His force of five thousand men had dwindled to scarcely more than four hundred. But they were men devoted to his person, and seemed prepared to endure every extremity rather than surrender. Like the rest of his nation, the Morisco chief took refuge in the mountain caves, in such remote and inaccessible districts as had hitherto baffled every attempt to detect his retreat. In March, 1571, an opportunity presented itself for making the discovery. Granada was at this time the scene of almost daily executions. As the miserable insurgents were taken, they were brought before Deza's tribunal, where they were at once sentenced by the inexorable president to the galleys or the gibbet, or the more horrible doom of being torn in pieces with red-hot pincers. Among the prisoners sentenced to death, was one Zatahari, who was so fortunate as to obtain a respite of his punishment at the intercession of a goldsmith named Barredo, a person of much consideration in Granada. From gratitude for this service, or perhaps as the price of it, Zatahari made some important revelations to his benefactor respecting Aben-Aboo. He disclosed the place of his retirement and the number of his followers, adding, that the two persons on whom he most relied were his secretary, Abou-Amer, and a Moorish captain named El Senix. The former of these persons was known to Barredo, who, in the course of his business, had frequent occasion to make journeys into the Alpujarras. He resolved to open a correspondence with the secretary, and, if possible, win him over to the Spanish interests. Zatahari consented to bear the letter, on condition of a pardon. This was readily granted by the president, who approved the plan, and who authorized the most liberal promises to Abou-Amer in case of his co-operation with Barredo. Unfortunately--or, rather, fortunately for Zatahari, as it proved,--he was intercepted by El Senix, who, getting possession of the letter, carried it to Abou-Amer. The loyal secretary was outraged by this attempt to corrupt him. He would have put the messenger to death, had not El Senix represented that the poor wretch had undertaken the mission only to save his life. Privately the Moorish captain assured the messenger that Barredo should have sought a conference with him, as he was ready to enter into negotiations with the Christians. In fact, El Senix had a grudge against his master, and had already made an attempt to leave his service and escape to Barbary. A place of meeting was accordingly appointed in the Alpujarras, to which Barredo secretly repaired. El Senix was furnished with an assurance, under the president's own hand, of a pardon for himself and his friends, and of an annual pension of a hundred thousand maravedis, in case he should bring Aben-Aboo, dead or alive, to Granada. The interview could not be conducted so secretly but that an intimation of it reached the ears of Aben-Aboo, who resolved to repair at once to the quarters of El Senix, and ascertain the truth for himself. That chief had secreted himself in a cabin in the neighbourhood. Aben-Aboo took with him his faithful secretary and a small body of soldiers. On reaching the cave, he left his followers without, and, placing two men at the entrance, he, with less prudence than was usual with him, passed alone into the interior. There he found El Senix, surrounded by several of his friends and kinsmen. Aben-Aboo, in a peremptory tone, charged him with having held a secret correspondence with the enemy, and demanded the object of his late interview with Barredo. Senix did not attempt to deny the charge, but explained his motives by saying that he had been prompted only by a desire to serve his master. He had succeeded so well, he said, as to obtain from the president an assurance that, if the Morisco would lay down his arms, he should receive an amnesty for the past, and a liberal provision for the future. Aben-Aboo listened scornfully to this explanation; then, muttering the word, "Treachery!" he turned on his heel, and moved towards the mouth of the cave, where he had left his soldiers, intending probably to command the arrest of his perfidious officer. But he had not given them, it appears, any intimation of the hostile object of his visit to El Senix; and the men, supposing it to be on some matter of ordinary business, had left the spot to see some of their friends in the neighbourhood. El Senix saw that no time was to be lost. On a signal which he gave, his followers attacked the two guards at the door, one of whom was killed on the spot, while the other made his escape. They then all fell upon the unfortunate Aben-Aboo. He made a desperate defence. But though the struggle was fierce, the odds were too great for it to be long. It was soon terminated by the dastard Senix coming behind his master, and with the butt-end of his musket dealing him a blow on the back, of his head that brought him to the ground, where he was quickly despatched by a multitude of wounds.[278] The corpse was thrown out of the cavern. His followers, soon learning their master's fate, dispersed in different directions. The faithful secretary fell shortly after into the hands of the Spaniards, who, with their usual humanity in this war, caused him to be drawn and quartered. The body of Aben-Aboo was transported to the neighbourhood of Granada, where preparations were made for giving the dead chief a public entrance into the city, as if he had been still alive. The corpse was set astride on a mule, and supported erect in the saddle by a wooden frame, which was concealed beneath ample robes. On one side of the body rode Barredo; on the other, El Senix, bearing the scimitar and arquebuse of his murdered master. Then followed the kinsmen and friends of the Morisco prince, with their arms by their side. A regiment of Castilian infantry and a troop of horse brought up the rear. As the procession defiled along the street of Zacatin, it was saluted by salvoes of musketry, accompanied by peals of artillery from the ancient towers of the Alhambra, while the population of Granada, with eager though silent curiosity, hurried out to gaze on the strange and ghastly spectacle. In this way the company reached the great square of Vivarambla, where were assembled the president, the duke of Arcos, and the principal cavaliers and magistrates of the city. On coming into their presence, El Senix dismounted, and, kneeling before Deza, delivered to him the arms of Aben-Aboo. He was graciously received by the president, who confirmed the assurance which had been given him of the royal favour. The miserable ceremony of public execution was then gone through with. The head of the dead man was struck off. His body was given to the boys of the city, who, after dragging it through the streets with scoffs and imprecations, committed it to the flames. Such was one of the lessons by which the Spaniards early stamped on the minds of their children an indelible hatred of the Morisco. [Sidenote: CHARACTER OF ABEN-ABOO.] The head of Aben-Aboo, enclosed in a cage, was set up over the gate which opened on the Alpujarras. There, with the face turned towards his native hills, which he had loved so well, and which had witnessed his brief and disastrous reign, it remained for many a year. None ventured, by removing it, to incur the doom which an inscription on the cage denounced on the offender: "This is the head of the traitor Aben-Aboo. Let no one take it down, under penalty of death."[279] Such was the sad end of Aben-Aboo, the last of the royal line of the Omeyades who ever ruled in the Peninsula. Had he lived in the peaceful and prosperous times of the Arabian empire in Spain, he might have swayed the sceptre with as much renown as the best of his dynasty. Though the blood of the Moor flowed in his veins, he seems to have been remarkably free from some of the greatest defects in the Moorish character. He was temperate in his appetites, presenting in this respect a contrast to the gross sensuality of his predecessor. He had a lofty spirit, was cool and circumspect in his judgments, and, if he could not boast that fiery energy of character which belonged to some of his house, he had a firmness of purpose not to be intimidated by suffering or danger. Of this he gave signal proof when, as the reader may remember, the most inhuman tortures could not extort from him the disclosure of the lurking-place of his friends.[280] His qualities, as I have intimated, were such as peculiarly adapted him to a time of prosperity and peace. Unhappily, he had fallen upon evil times, when his country lay a wreck at his feet; when the people, depressed by long servitude, were broken down by the recent calamities of war; when, in short, it would not have been possible for the wisest and most warlike of his predecessors to animate them to a successful resistance against odds so overwhelming as those presented by the Spanish monarchy in the zenith of its power. The Castilian chroniclers have endeavoured to fix a deep stain on his memory, by charging him with the murder of El Habaqui, and with the refusal to execute the treaty to which he had given his sanction. But, in criticising the conduct of Aben-Aboo, we must not forget the race from which he sprung, or the nature of its institutions. He was a despot, and a despot of the Oriental type. He was placed in a situation--much against his will, it may be added--which gave him absolute control over the lives and fortunes of his people. His word was their law. He passed the sentence, and enforced its execution. El Habaqui he adjudged to be a traitor; and, in sentencing him to the bowstring, he inflicted on him only a traitor's doom. With regard to the treaty, he spoke of himself as betrayed, saying that its provisions were not such as he had intended. And when we consider that the instrument was written in the Spanish tongue; that it was drafted by a Spaniard; finally, that the principal Morisco agent who subscribed the treaty was altogether in the Spanish interest, as the favours heaped on him without measure too plainly proved, it can hardly be doubted that there were good grounds for the assertion of Aben-Aboo. From the hour of his accession, he seems to have devoted himself to the great work of securing the independence of his people. He could scarcely have agreed to a treaty which was to leave that people in even a worse state than before the rebellion. From what we know of his character, we may more reasonably conclude that he was sincere when he told the Spanish envoy, Palacios, who had come to press the execution of the treaty, and to remind him of the royal promises of grace, that "his people might do as they listed, but, for himself, he would rather live and die a Mussulman than possess all the favours which the king of Spain could heap on him." His deeds corresponded with his words; and, desperate as was his condition, he still continued to bid defiance to the Spanish government, until he was cut off by the hand of a traitor. The death of Aben-Aboo severed the last bond which held the remnant of the Moriscoes together. In a few years the sword, famine, and the gallows had exterminated the outcasts who still lurked in the fastnesses of the mountains. Their places were gradually occupied by Christians, drawn thither by the favourable terms which the government offered to settlers. But it was long before the wasted and famine-stricken territory could make a suitable return to the labours of the colonists. They were ignorant of the country, and were altogether deficient in the agricultural skill necessary for turning its unpromising places to the best account. The Spaniard, adventurous as he was, and reckless of danger and difficulty in the pursuit of gain, was impatient of the humble drudgery required for the tillage of the soil; and many a valley and hill-side which, under the Moriscoes, had bloomed with all the rich embroidery of cultivation, now relapsed into its primitive barrenness. The exiles carried their superior skill and industry into the various provinces where they were sent. Scattered as they were, and wide apart, the presence of the Moriscoes was sure to be revealed by the more minute and elaborate culture of the soil, as the secret course of the mountain-stream is betrayed by the brighter green of the meadow. With their skill in husbandry they combined a familiarity with various kinds of handicraft, especially those requiring dexterity and fineness of execution, that was unknown to the Spaniards. As the natural result of this superiority, the products of their labour were more abundant, and could be afforded at a cheaper rate than those of their neighbours. Yet this industry was exerted under every disadvantage which a most cruel legislation could impose on it. It would be hard to find in the pages of history a more flagrant example of the oppression of a conquered race, than that afforded by the laws of this period in reference to the Moriscoes. The odious law of 1566, which led to the insurrection, was put in full force. By this the national songs and dances, the peculiar baths of the Moriscoes, the _fêtes_ and ceremonies which had come down to them from their ancestors, were interdicted under heavy penalties. By another ordinance, dated October 6, 1572, still more cruel and absurd, they were forbidden to speak or to write the Arabic, under penalty of thirty days' imprisonment in irons for the first offence, double that term for the second, and for the third a hundred lashes and four years' confinement in the galleys. By another monstrous provision in the same edict, whoever read, or even had in his possession, a work written or printed in the Arabic, was to be punished with a hundred stripes and four years in the galleys. Any contract or public instrument made in that tongue was to be void, and the parties to it were condemned to receive two hundred lashes and to tug at the oar for six years.[281] [Sidenote: FORTUNES OF THE MORISCOES.] But the most oppressive part of this terrible ordinance related to the residence of the Moriscoes. No one was allowed to change his abode, or to leave the parish or district assigned to him, without permission from the regular authorities. Whoever did so, and was apprehended beyond these limits, was to be punished with a hundred lashes and four years' imprisonment in the galleys. Should he be found within ten leagues of Granada, he was condemned, if between ten and seventeen years of age, to toil as a galley-slave the rest of his days; if above seventeen, he was sentenced to death![282] On the escape of a Morisco from his limits, the hue and cry was to be raised, as for the pursuit of a criminal. Even his own family were required to report his absence to the magistrate; and in case of their failure to do this, although it should be his wife or his children, says the law, they incurred the penalty of a whipping and a month's imprisonment in the common gaol.[283] Yet, in the face of these atrocious enactments, we find the Moriscoes occasionally making their escape into the province of Valencia, where numbers of their countrymen were living as serfs on the estates of the great nobles, under whose powerful protection they enjoyed a degree of comfort, if not of independence, unknown to their race in other parts of the country. Some few, also, finding their way to the coast, succeeded in crossing the sea to Barbary. The very severity of the law served in some measure to defeat its execution. Indeed, Philip, in more than one instance in which he deemed that the edicts pressed too heavily on his Moorish vassals, judged it expedient to mitigate the penalty, or even to dispense with it altogether,--an act of leniency which seems to have found little favour with his Castilian subjects.[284] Yet, strange to say, under this iron system, the spirit of the Moriscoes, which had been crushed by their long sufferings in the war of the rebellion, gradually rose again as they found a shelter in their new homes, and resumed their former habits of quiet industry. Though deprived of their customary amusements, their _fêtes_, their songs, and their dances,--though debarred from the use of the language which they had lisped from the cradle, which embodied their national traditions, and was associated with their fondest recollections,--they were said to be cheerful, and even gay. They lived to a good age, and examples of longevity were found among them, to which it was not easy to find a parallel among the Spaniards. The Moorish stock, like the Jewish, seems to have thriven under persecution.[285] One would be glad to find any authentic data for an account of the actual population at the time of their expulsion from Granada. But I have met with none. They must have been sorely thinned by the war of the insurrection and the countless woes it brought upon the country. One fact is mentioned by the chroniclers, which shows that the number of the exiles must have been very considerable. The small remnant still left in Granada, with its lovely _vega_ and the valley of Lecrin, alone furnished, we are told, over six thousand.[286] In the places to which they were transported they continued to multiply to such an extent that the Cortes of Castile, in the latter part of the century, petitioned the king not to allow the census to be taken, lest it might disclose to the Moriscoes the alarming secret of their increase of numbers.[287] Such a petition shows, as strongly as language can show, the terror in which the Spaniards still stood of this persecuted race. Yet the Moriscoes were scattered over the country in small and isolated masses, hemmed in all around by the Spaniards. They were transplanted to the interior, where, at a distance from the coast, they had no means of communicating with their brethren of Africa. They were without weapons of any kind; and, confined to their several districts, they had not the power of acting in concert together. There would seem to have been little to fear from a people so situated. But the weakest individual, who feels that his wrongs are too great to be forgiven, may well become an object of dread to the person who has wronged him. The course of the government in reference to the Moriscoes was clearly a failure. It was as impolitic as it was barbarous. Nothing but the blindest fanaticism could have prevented the Spaniards from perceiving this. The object of the government had been to destroy every vestige of nationality in the conquered race. They were compelled to repudiate their ancient usages, their festivals, their religion, their language,--all that gave them a separate existence as a nation. But this served only to strengthen in secret the sentiment of nationality. They were to be divorced for ever from the past. But it was the mistake of the government that it opened to them no future. Having destroyed their independence as a nation, it should have offered them the rights of citizenship, and raised them to an equality with the rest of the community. Such was the policy of ancient Rome towards the nations which she conquered; and such has been that of our own country towards the countless emigrants who have thronged to our shores from so many distant lands. The Moriscoes, on the contrary, under the policy of Spain, were condemned to exist as foreigners in the country,--as enemies in the midst of the community into which they were thrown. Experience had taught them prudence and dissimulation; and in all outward observances they conformed to the exactions of the law. But in secret they were as much attached to their national institutions as were their ancestors when the caliphs of Cordova ruled over half the Peninsula. The Inquisition rarely gleaned an apostate from among them to swell the horrors of an _auto da fé_; but whoever recalls the facility with which, in the late rebellion, the whole population had relapsed into their ancient faith, will hardly doubt that they must have still continued to be Mahometans at heart. Thus the gulf which separated the two races grew wider and wider every day. The Moriscoes hated the Spaniards for the wrongs which they had received from them. The Spaniards hated the Moriscoes the more, that they had themselves inflicted these wrongs. Their hatred was further embittered by the feeling of jealousy caused by the successful competition of their rivals in the various pursuits of gain,--a circumstance which forms a fruitful theme of complaint in the petition of the Cortes above noticed.[288] The feeling of hate became in time mingled with that of fear, as the Moriscoes increased in opulence and numbers; and men are not apt to be over scrupulous in their policy towards those whom they both hate and fear. With these evil passions rankling in their bosoms, the Spaniards were gradually prepared for the consummation of their long train of persecutions by that last act, reserved for the reign of the imbecile Philip the Third,--the expulsion of the Moriscoes from the Peninsula,--an act which deprived Spain of the most industrious and ingenious portion of her population, and which must be regarded as one of the principal causes of the subsequent decline of the monarchy. [Sidenote: MARMOL--CIRCOURT.] An historian less renowned than Mendoza, but of more importance to one who would acquaint himself with the story of the Morisco rebellion, is Luis del Marmol Carbajal. Little is known of him but what is to be gathered from brief notices of himself in his works. He was a native of Granada, but we are not informed of the date of his birth. He was of a good family, and followed the profession of arms. When a mere youth, as he tells us, he was present at the famous siege of Tunis, in 1535. He continued in the imperial service two-and-twenty years. Seven years he was a captive, and followed the victorious banner of Mohammed, Scherif of Morocco, in his campaigns in the west of Africa. His various fortunes and his long residence in different parts of the African continent, especially in Barbary and Egypt, supplied him with abundant information in respect to the subjects of his historical inquiries; and, as he knew the Arabic, he made himself acquainted with such facts as were to be gleaned from books in that language. The fruits of his study and observation he gave to the world in his "_Descripcion General de Africa_," a work in three volumes folio, the first part of which appeared at Granada in 1573. The remainder was not published till the close of the century. The book obtained a high reputation for its author, who was much commended for the fidelity and diligence with which he had pushed his researches in a field of letters into which the European scholar had as yet rarely ventured to penetrate. In the year 1600 appeared, at Malaga, his second work, the "_Historia del Rebelion y Castigo de los Moriscos del Reyno de Granada_," in one volume, folio. For the composition of this history the author was admirably qualified, not only by his familiarity with all that related to the character and condition of the Moriscoes, but by the part which he had personally taken in the war of the insurrection. He held the office of commissary in the royal army, and served in that capacity from the commencement of the war to its close. In the warm colouring of the narrative, and in the minuteness of its details, we feel that we are reading the report of one who has himself beheld the scenes which he describes. Indeed, the interest which, as an actor, he naturally takes in the operations of the war, leads to an amount of detail which may well be condemned as a blemish by those who do not feel a similar interest in the particulars of the struggle. But if his style have somewhat of the rambling, discursive manner of the old Castilian chronicler, it has a certain elegance in the execution, which brings it much nearer to the standard of a classic author. Far from being chargeable with the obscurity of Mendoza, Marmol is uncommonly perspicuous. With a general facility of expression, his language takes the varied character suited to the theme, sometimes kindled into eloquence and occasionally softened into pathos, for which the melancholy character of his story afforded too many occasions. Though loyal to his country and his faith, yet he shows but few gleams of the fiery intolerance that belonged to his nation, and especially to that portion of it which came into collision with the Moslems. Indeed, in more than one passage of his work we may discern gleams of that Christian charity which, in Castile was the rarest, as it was, unhappily, the least precious of virtues, in the age in which he lived. In the extensive plan adopted by Marmol, his history of the rebellion embraces a preliminary notice of the conquest of Granada, and of that cruel policy of the conquerors which led to the insurrection. The narrative, thus complete, supplied a most important hiatus in the annals of the country. Yet notwithstanding its importance in this view, and its acknowledged merit as a literary composition, such was the indifference of the Spaniards to their national history, that it was not till the close of the last century, in 1797, that a second edition of Marmol's work was permitted to appear. This was in two volumes, octavo, from the press of Sancha, at Madrid,--the edition used in the preparation of these pages. The most comprehensive, and by far the most able history of the Moors of Spain with which I am acquainted, is that of the Count Albert de Circourt,--"_Histoire des Arabes en Espagne_." Beginning with the beginning, the author opens his narrative with the conquest of the Peninsula by the Moslems. He paints in glowing colours the magnificent empire of the Spanish caliphs. He dwells with sufficient minuteness on those interminable feuds which, growing out of a diversity of races and tribes, baffled every attempt at a permanent consolidation under one government. Then comes the famous war of Granada, with the conquest of the country by the "Catholic Kings;" and the work closes with the sad tale of the subsequent fortunes of the conquered races until their final expulsion from the Peninsula. Thus the rapidly shifting scenes of this most picturesque drama, sketched by a master's hand, are brought in regular succession before the eye of the reader. In conducting his long story, the author, far from confining himself to a dry record of events, diligently explores the causes of these events. He scrutinizes with care every inch of debateable ground which lies in his path. He enriches his narrative with copious disquisitions on the condition of the arts, and the progress made by the Spanish Arabs in science and letters; thus presenting a complete view of that peculiar civilization which so curiously blended together the characteristic elements of European and Oriental culture. If, in pursuing his speculations, M. de Circourt may be sometimes thought to refine too much, it cannot be denied that they are distinguished by candour and by a philosophical spirit. Even when we may differ from his conclusions, we must allow that they are the result of careful study, and display an independent way of thinking. I may regret that in one important instance--the policy of the government of Ferdinand and Isabella--he should have been led to dissent from the opinions which I had expressed in my history of those sovereigns. It is possible that the predilection which the writer, whether historian or novelist, naturally feels for his hero when his conduct affords any ground for it, may have sometimes seduced me from the strict line of impartiality in my estimate of character and motives of action. I see, however, no reason to change the conclusions at which I had arrived after a careful study of the subject. Yet I cannot deny that the labours of the French historian have shed a light upon more than one obscure passage in the administration of Ferdinand and Isabella, for which the student of Spanish history owes him a debt of gratitude. CHAPTER IX. WAR WITH THE TURKS. League against the Turks--Preparations for the War--Don John Commander-in-Chief--His Reception at Naples--His Departure from Messina. 1570-1571. While Philip was occupied with the Morisco insurrection, his attention was called to another quarter, where a storm was gathering that menaced Spain in common with the rest of Christendom. In 1566, Solyman the Magnificent closed his long and prosperous reign. His son and successor, Selim the Second, possessed few of the qualities of his great father. Bred in the seraglio, he showed the fruits of his education in his indolent way of life, and in the free indulgence of the most licentious appetites. With these effeminate tastes, he inherited the passion for conquest which belonged not only to his father, but to the whole of his warlike dynasty. Not that, like them, he headed his armies in the field. These were led by valiant commanders, who had learned the art of war under Solyman. Selim was, above all, fortunate in possessing for his grand vizier a minister whose untiring industry and remarkable talents for business enabled him to bear on his own shoulders the whole burden of government. It was fortunate for the state, as well as for the sultan, that Mahomet had the art to win the confidence of his master, and to maintain it unshaken through the whole of his reign. The scheme which most occupied the thoughts of Selim was the conquest of Cyprus. This island, to which nature had been so prodigal of her gifts, belonged to Venice. Yet, placed at the extremity of the Mediterranean, it seemed in a manner to command the approaches to the Dardanelles, while its line of coast furnished convenient ports, from which swarms of cruisers might sally forth in time of war, and plunder the Turkish commerce. Selim, resolved on the acquisition of Cyprus, was not slow in devising a pretext for claiming it from Venice as a part of the Ottoman empire. The republic, though willing to make almost any concession rather than come to a rupture with the colossal power under whose shadow she lay, was not prepared to surrender without a struggle the richest gem in her colonial diadem. War was accordingly declared against her by the Porte, and vast preparations were made for fitting out an armament against Cyprus. Venice, in her turn, showed her usual alacrity in providing for the encounter. She strained her resources to the utmost. In a very short time she equipped a powerful fleet, and took measures to place the fortifications of Cyprus in a proper state of defence. But Venice no longer boasted a navy such as in earlier days had enabled her to humble the pride of Genoa, and to ride the unquestioned mistress of the Mediterranean. The defences of her colonies, moreover, during her long repose, had gradually fallen into decay. In her extremity, she turned to the Christian powers of Europe, and besought them to make common cause with her against the enemy of Christendom. [Sidenote: LEAGUE AGAINST THE TURKS.] Fortunately the chair of St. Peter was occupied, at this crisis, by Pius the Fifth, one of those pontiffs who seem to have been called forth by the exigencies of the time, to uphold the pillars of Catholicism, as they were yet trembling under the assaults of Luther. Though he was near seventy years of age, the fire of youth still glowed in his veins. He possessed all that impetuous eloquence which, had he lived in the days of Peter the Hermit, would have enabled him, like that enthusiast, to rouse the nations of Europe to a crusade against the infidel. But the days of the crusades were past; and a summons from the Vatican had no longer the power to stir the souls of men like a voice from heaven. The great potentates of Europe were too intent on their own selfish schemes to be turned from these by the apprehension of a danger so remote as that which menaced them from the East. The forlorn condition of Venice had still less power to move them; and that haughty republic was now made to feel, in the hour of her distress, how completely her perfidious and unscrupulous policy had estranged from her the sympathies of her neighbours. There was one monarch, however, who did not close his ears against the appeal of Venice,--and that monarch, one of more importance to her cause than any other, perhaps all others united. In the spring of 1570, Luigi Torres, clerk of the apostolic chamber, was sent to Spain by Pius the Fifth, to plead the cause of the republic. He found the king at Ecija, on the route from Córdova, where he had been for some time presiding over a meeting of the Cortes. The legate was graciously received by Philip, to whom he presented a letter from his holiness, urging the monarch, in the most earnest and eloquent language, to give succour to Venice, and to unite with her in a league against the infidel. Philip did not hesitate to promise his assistance in the present emergency; but he had natural doubts as to the expediency of binding himself by a league with a power on whose good faith he had little reliance. He postponed his decision until his arrival at Seville. Accompanied by the legate, on the first of May, he made his solemn entry into the great commercial capital of the South. It was his first visit there, and he was received with tumultuous joy by the loyal inhabitants. Loyalty to their monarchs has ever been a predominant trait of the Spaniards; and to none of their princes did they ever show it in larger measure than to Philip the Second. No one of them, certainly, was more thoroughly Spanish in his own nature, or more deeply attached to Spain. After swearing to respect the privileges of the city, the king received the homage of the authorities. He then rode through the streets under a gorgeous canopy, upheld by the principal magistrates, and visited the churches and monasteries, hearing _Te Deum_, and offering up his prayers in the cathedral. He was attended by a gay procession of nobles and cavaliers, while the streets of the populous city were thronged with multitudes, filled with enthusiasm at the presence of their sovereign. By this loyal escort Philip was accompanied to the place of his residence, the royal alcazar of Seville. Here he prolonged his stay for a fortnight, witnessing the shows and festivals which had been prepared for his entertainment. At his departure he received a more substantial proof of the attachment of the citizens, in a donation of six hundred thousand ducats. The object of this magnificent present was to defray, in part, the expenses of the king's approaching marriage with his fourth wife, Anne of Austria, the daughter of his cousin, the emperor Maximilian. The fair young bride had left her father's court, and was already on her way to Madrid, where her nuptials were to be celebrated, and where she was to take the place of the lovely Isabella, whose death, not two years since, had plunged the nation in mourning.[289] While at Seville, Philip laid the subject of the league before his ministers. Some of these, and among the number Espinosa, president of the council of Castile, entertained great doubts as to the policy of binding Spain by a formal treaty with the Venetian republic. But, with all his distrust of that power, Philip took a broader view of the matter than his ministers. Independently of his willingness to present himself before the world as the great champion of the Faith, he felt that such an alliance offered the best opportunity for crippling the maritime power of Turkey, and thus providing for the safety of his own colonial possessions in the Mediterranean. After much deliberation, he dismissed the legate with the assurance that, notwithstanding the troubles which pressed on him both in the Low Countries and in Granada, he would furnish immediate succours to Venice, and would send commissioners to Rome, with full powers to unite with those of the pope and the republic in forming a treaty of alliance against the Ottoman Porte. The papal envoy was charged with a letter to the same effect, addressed by Philip to his holiness. The ensuing summer, the royal admiral, the famous John Andrew Doria, who was lying with a strong squadron off Sicily, put to sea by the king's orders. He was soon after reinforced by a few galleys which were furnished by his holiness, and placed under the command of Mark Antonio Colonna, the representative of one of the most ancient and illustrious houses in Rome. On the last of August, 1570, the combined fleet effected its junction with the Venetians at Candia, and a plan of operations was immediately arranged. It was not long before the startling intelligence arrived that Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, had been taken and sacked by the Turks, with all the circumstances of cruelty which distinguish wars in which the feeling of national hostility is embittered by religious hatred. The plan was now to be changed. A dispute arose among the commanders as to the course to be pursued. No one had authority enough to enforce compliance with his own opinion. The dispute ended in a rupture. The expedition was abandoned; and the several commanders returned home with their squadrons, without having struck a blow for the cause. It was a bad omen for the success of the league.[290] Still the stout-hearted pontiff was not discouraged. On the contrary, he endeavoured to infuse his own heroic spirit into the hearts of his allies, giving them the most cheering assurances for the future, if they would but be true to themselves. Philip did not need this encouragement. Once resolved, his was not a mind lightly to be turned from its purpose. Venice, on the other hand, soon showed that the Catholic king had good reason for distrusting her fidelity. Appalled by the loss of Nicosia, with her usual inconstancy, she despatched a secret agent to Constantinople, to see if some terms might not yet be made with the Sultan. The negotiation could not be managed so secretly, however, but that notice of it reached the ears of Pius the Fifth. He forthwith despatched an envoy to the republic to counteract this measure, and to persuade the Venetians to trust to their Christian allies rather than to the Turks, the enemies of their country and their religion. The person selected for this mission was Colonna, who was quite as much distinguished for his address as for his valour. He performed his task well. He represented so forcibly to the government that the course he recommended was the one dictated not less by interest than by honour, that they finally acquiesced, and recalled their agent from Constantinople. It must be acknowledged that Colonna's arguments were greatly strengthened by the cold reception given to the Venetian envoy at Constantinople, where it was soon seen that the conquest of the capital had by no means tended to make the sultan relax his hold on Cyprus.[291] [Sidenote: LEAGUE AGAINST THE TURKS.] Towards the close of 1570, the deputies from the three powers met in Rome to arrange the terms of the league. Spain was represented by the cardinals Granvelle and Pacheco, together with the ambassador, Juan de Zuñiga, all three at that time being resident in Rome. It will readily be believed that the interests of Spain would not suffer in the hands of a commission with so skilful a tactician as Granvelle to direct it. Yet though the parties seemed to be embarked in a common cause, there was found much difficulty in reconciling their different pretensions. The deputies from Venice, in the usual spirit of her diplomacy, regarded the league as exclusively designed for her benefit; in other words, for the protection of Cyprus against the Turks. The Spanish commissioners took a wider view, and talked of the war as one waged by the Christian against the Infidel; against the Moors no less than the Turks. In this politic view of the matter, the Catholic king was entitled to the same protection for his colonies on the coast of Africa as Venice claimed for Cyprus. Another cause of disagreement was the claim of each of the parties to select a commander-in-chief for the expedition from its own nation. This pre-eminence was finally conceded to Spain, as the power that was to bear the largest share of the expenses. It was agreed that the treaty should be permanent in its duration, and should be directed against the Moors of Tunis, Tripoli, and Algiers, as well as against the Turks; that the contracting parties should furnish two hundred galleys, one hundred transports and smaller vessels, fifty thousand foot, and four thousand five hundred horse, with the requisite artillery and munitions; that by April, at farthest, of every succeeding year, a similar force should be held in readiness by the allies for expeditions to the Levant; and that any year in which there was no expedition in common, and either Spain or the republic should desire to engage in one on her own account against the Infidel, the other confederates should furnish fifty galleys towards it; that if the enemy should invade the dominions of any of the three powers, the others should be bound to come to the aid of their ally; that three-sixths of the expenses of the war should be borne by the Catholic king, two-sixths by the republic, the remaining sixth by the Holy See; that the Venetians should lend his holiness twelve galleys, which he was to man and equip at his own charge, as his contribution towards the armament; that each power should appoint a captain-general; that the united voices of the three commanders should regulate the plan of operations; that the execution of this plan should be entrusted to the captain-general of the league, and that this high office should be given to Don John of Austria; that, finally, no one of the parties should make peace, or enter into a truce with the enemy, without the knowledge and consent of the others.[292] Such were the principal provisions of the famous treaty of the Holy League. The very first article declares this treaty perpetual in its nature. Yet we should be slow to believe that the shrewd and politic statesmen who directed the affairs of Spain and the republic could for a moment believe in the perpetuity of a contract which imposed such burdensome obligations on the parties. In fact, the league did not hold together two years. But it held together long enough to accomplish a great result, and as such occupies an important place in the history of the times. Although a draft of the treaty had been prepared in the latter part of the preceding year, it was not ratified till 1571.[293] On the twenty-fourth of May, the pope caused it to be read aloud in full consistory. He then, laying his hand on his breast, solemnly swore to the observance of it. The ambassadors of Spain and Venice made oath to the same effect, on behalf of their governments, placing their hands on a missal with a copy of the Gospels beneath it. On the day following, after mass had been performed, the treaty was publicly proclaimed in the church of St. Peter.[294] The tidings of the alliance of the three powers caused a great sensation throughout Christendom. Far from dismaying the sultan, however, it only stimulated him to greater exertions. Availing himself of the resources of his vast empire, he soon got together a powerful fleet, partly drawn from his own dominions, and in part from those of the Moslem powers on the Mediterranean, who acknowledged allegiance to the Porte. The armada was placed under the command of Selim's brother-in-law, the Pacha Piali, a man of an intrepid spirit, who had given many proofs of a humane and generous nature; qualities more rare among the Turks, perhaps among all nations, than mere physical courage. Early in the spring of 1571, the Ottoman admiral sailed out of the Golden Horn, and directed his course towards Candia. Here he remained until joined by a strong Algerine force under the redoubtable corsair Uluch Ali,--a Calabrian renegade, who had risen from the humblest condition to the post of dey of Algiers. Early in the season the combined fleets sailed for the Adriatic; and Piali, after landing and laying waste the territory belonging to the republic, detached Uluch with his squadron to penetrate higher up the gulf. The Algerine, in executing these orders, advanced so near to Venice as to throw the inhabitants of that capital into a consternation such as they had not felt since the cannon of the Genoese, two centuries before, had resounded over their waters. But it was not the dey's purpose to engage in so formidable an enterprise as an assault upon Venice; and soon drawing off, he joined the commander-in-chief at Corfu, where they waited for tidings of the Christian fleet.[295] The indefatigable Pius, even before the treaty was signed, had despatched his nephew, Cardinal Alessandrino, to the different courts, to rouse the drooping spirits of the allies, and to persuade other princes of Christendom to join the league. In the middle of May, the legate, attended by a stately train of ecclesiastics, appeared at Madrid. Philip gave him a reception that fully testified his devotion to the Holy See. The king's brother, Don John, and his favourite minister, Ruy Gomez de Silva, with some of the principal nobles, waited at once on the cardinal who had taken up his quarters in the suburbs, at the Dominican monastery of Atocha, tenanted by brethren of his own order. On the following morning the papal envoy made his entrance, in great state, into the capital. He was mounted on a mule, gorgeously caparisoned, the gift of the city. John of Austria rode on his right; and he was escorted by a pompous array of prelates and grandees, who seemed to vie with one another in the splendour of their costumes. On the way he was met by the royal cavalcade. As the legate paid his obeisance to the monarch, he remained with his head uncovered; and Philip, with a similar act of courtesy, while he addressed a few remarks to the churchman, held his hat in his hand.[296] He then joined the procession, riding between the legate on the right and his brother on the left, who was observed, from time to time, to take part in the conversation,--a circumstance occasioning some surprise, says an historian, as altogether contrary to the established etiquette of the punctilious Castilian court.[297] [Sidenote: PREPARATIONS FOR THE WAR.] The ceremonies were concluded by religious services in the church of Santa Maria, where the legate, after preaching a discourse, granted all present a full remission of the pains of purgatory for two hundred years.[298] A gift of more worth, in a temporal view, was the grant to the king of the _cruzada_, the _excusada_, and other concessions of ecclesiastical revenue, which the Roman see knows so well how to bestow on the champions of the Faith. These concessions came in good time to supply the royal coffers, sorely drained by the costly preparations for the war. Meanwhile, the Venetians were pushing forward their own preparations with their wonted alacrity,--indeed, with more alacrity than thoroughness. They were prompt in furnishing their quota of vessels, but discreditably remiss in their manner of equipping them. The fleet was placed under the charge of Sebastian Veniero, a noble who had grown grey in the service of his country. Zanne, who had had the command of the fleet in the preceding summer, was superseded on the charge of incapacity, shown especially in his neglect to bring the enemy to action. His process continued for two years, without any opportunity being allowed to the accused of appearing in his own vindication. It was finally brought to a close by his death,--the consequence, as it is said, of a broken heart. If it were so, it would not be a solitary instance of such a fate in the annals of the stern republic. Before midsummer the new admiral sailed with his fleet, or as much of it as was then ready, for the port of Messina, appointed as the place of rendezvous for the allies. Here he was soon joined by Colonna, the papal commander, with the little squadron furnished by his holiness; and the two fleets lay at anchor, side by side, in the capacious harbour, waiting the arrival of the rest of the confederates and of John of Austria. Preparations for the war were now going actively forward in Spain. Preparations on so large a scale had not been seen since the war with Paul the Fourth and Henry the Third, which ushered in Philip's accession. All the great ports in the Peninsula, as well as in the kingdom of Naples, in Sicily, in the Balearic Isles, in every part of the empire in short, swarmed with artisans, busily engaged in fitting out the fleet which was to form Philip's contingent to the armament. By the terms of the treaty, he was to bear one-half of the charges of the expedition. In his naval preparations he spared neither cost nor care. Ninety royal galleys, and more than seventy ships of small dimensions, were got in readiness in the course of the summer. They were built and equipped in that thorough manner which vindicated the pre-eminence in naval architecture claimed by Spain, and formed a strong contrast to the slovenly execution of the Venetians.[299] Levies of troops were at the same time diligently enforced in all parts of the monarchy. Even a corps of three thousand German mercenaries was subsidized for the campaign. Troops were drawn from the veteran garrisons in Lombardy and the kingdom of Naples. As the Morisco insurrection was fortunately quelled, the forces engaged in it, among whom were the brave Neapolitan battalion and its commander, Padilla, could now be employed in the war against the Turk. But it can hardly be said to have required extraordinary efforts to fill the ranks on the present occasion; for seldom had a war been so popular with the nation. Indeed, the Spaniards entered into it with an alacrity which might well have suggested the idea that their master had engaged in it on his own account, rather than as an ally. It was, in truth, a war that appealed in a peculiar manner to the sensibilities of the Castilian, familiar from his cradle with the sound of the battle-cry against the Infidel. The whole number of infantry raised by the confederates amounted to twenty-nine thousand. Of this number Spain alone sent over nineteen thousand well-appointed troops, comprehending numerous volunteers, many of whom belonged to the noblest houses of the Peninsula.[300] On the sixth of June, Don John, after receiving the last instructions of his brother, set out from Madrid on his journey to the south. Besides his own private establishment, making a numerous train, he was escorted by a splendid company of lords and cavaliers, eager to share with him in the triumphs of the Cross. Anxious to reach the goal, he pushed forward at a more rapid rate than was altogether relished by the rest of the cavalcade. Yet, notwithstanding this speed on the road, there were matters that claimed his attention in the towns through which he passed that occasioned some delay. His journey had the appearance of a royal progress. The castles of the great lords were thrown open with princely hospitality to receive him and his suite. In the chief cities, as Saragossa and Barcelona, he was entertained by the viceroys with all the pomp and ceremony that could have been shown to the king himself. He remained some days in the busy capital of Catalonia, and found there much to engage his attention in the arsenals and dockyards, now alive with the bustle of preparation. He then made a brief pilgrimage to the neighbouring hermitage of our Lady of Montserrat, where he paid his devotions, and conversed with the holy fathers, whom he had always deeply reverenced, and had before visited in their romantic solitudes. [Sidenote: DON JOHN'S RECEPTION AT NAPLES.] Embarking at Barcelona, he set sail with a squadron of more than thirty galleys,--a force strong enough to guard against the Moslem corsairs in the Mediterranean, and landed, on the twenty-fifth, at Genoa. The doge and the senate came out to welcome him, and he was lodged during his stay in the palace of Andrew Doria. Here he received embassies and congratulatory addresses from the different princes of Italy. He had already been greeted with an autograph letter, couched in the most benignant terms, from the sovereign pontiff. To all these communications Don John was careful to reply. He acquainted his holiness, in particular, with the whole course of his proceedings. While on the way, he had received a letter from his brother, giving him a full catalogue of the appropriate titles by which each one of his correspondents should be addressed. Nor was this list confined to crowned heads, but comprehended nobles and cavaliers, of every degree.[301] In no country has the perilous code of etiquette been more diligently studied than in Spain, and no Spaniard was better versed in it than Philip. Pursuing his route by water, Don John, in the month of August, dropped anchor in the beautiful bay of Naples. Arrangements had been made in that city for his reception on a more magnificent scale than any he had witnessed on his journey. Granvelle, who had lately been raised to the post of viceroy, came forth, at the head of a long and brilliant procession, to welcome his royal guest. The houses that lined the streets were hung with richly-tinted tapestries, and gaily festooned with flowers. The windows and verandahs were graced with the beauty and fashion of that pleasure-loving capital; and many a dark eye sparkled as it gazed on the fine form and features of the youthful hero, who at the age of twenty-four had come to Italy to assume the baton of command, and lead the crusade against the Moslems. His splendid dress of white velvet and cloth of gold set off his graceful person to advantage. A crimson scarf floated loosely over his breast; and his snow-white plumes, drooping from his cap, mingled with the yellow curls that fell in profusion over his shoulders. It was a picture which the Italian maiden might love to look on. It was certainly not the picture of the warrior sheathed in the iron panoply of war. But the young prince, in his general aspect, might be relieved from the charge of effeminacy, by his truly chivalrous bearing and the dauntless spirit which beamed from his clear blue eye. In his own lineaments he seemed to combine all that was most comely in the lineaments of his race. Fortunately he had escaped the deformity of the heavy Burgundian lip, which he might perhaps have excused, as establishing his claims to a descent from the imperial house of Hapsburg.[302] Don John had found no place more busy with preparations for the campaign than Naples. A fleet was riding at anchor in her bay, ready to sail under the command of Don Alvaro Bazan, first marquis of Santa Cruz, a nobleman who had distinguished himself by more than one gallant achievement in the Mediterranean, and who was rapidly laying the foundations of a fame that was one day to eclipse that of every other admiral in Castile. Ten days Don John remained at Naples, detained by contrary winds. Though impatient to reach Messina, his time passed lightly amidst the _fêtes_ and brilliant spectacles which his friendly hosts had provided for his entertainment. He entered gaily into the revels; for he was well skilled in the courtly and chivalrous exercises of the day. Few danced better than he, or rode, or fenced, or played at tennis with more spirit and skill, or carried off more frequently the prizes of the tourney. Indeed, he showed as much ambition to excel in the mimic game of war as on the field of battle. With his accomplishments and personal attractions, we may well believe that Don John had little reason to complain of coldness in the fair dames of Italy. But he seems to have been no less a favourite with the men. The young cavaliers, in particular, regarded him as the very mirror of chivalry, and studiously formed themselves on him as their model. His hair clustered thickly round his temples, and he was in the habit of throwing it back, so as to display his fine forehead to advantage. This suited his physiognomy. It soon became the mode with the gallants of the court; and even those whose physiognomies it did not suit were no less careful to arrange their hair in the same manner. While at Naples he took part in a ceremony of an interesting and significant character. It was on the occasion of the presentation of a standard sent by Pius the Fifth for the Holy War. The ceremony took place in the church of the Franciscan convent of Santa Chiara. Granvelle officiated on the occasion. Mass was performed by the cardinal-viceroy in his pontificals. _Te Deum_ was then chanted, after which Don John, approaching the altar with a slow and dignified step, gracefully knelt before the prelate, who, first delivering to him the baton of generalissimo, in the name of his holiness, next placed in his hands the consecrated standard. It was of azure damask. A crucifix was embroidered on the upper part of the banner, while below were the arms of the Church, with those of Spain on the right, and of Venice on the left, united by a chain, from which were suspended the arms of John of Austria. The prelate concluded the ceremony by invoking the blessing of Heaven on its champion, and beseeching that he might be permitted to carry the banner of the Cross victorious over its enemies. The choir of the convent then burst forth into a triumphant peal, and the people from every quarter of the vast edifice shouted "Amen!"[303] It was a striking scene, pregnant with matter for meditation to those who gazed on it. For what could be more striking than the contrast afforded by these two individuals,--the one in the morning of life, his eye kindling with hope and generous ambition, as he looked into the future and prepared to tread the path of glory under auspices as brilliant as ever attended any mortal; the other drawing near to the evening of his day, looking to the past rather than the future, with pale and thoughtful brow, as of one who, after many a toilsome day and sleepless night, had achieved the proud eminence for which his companion was panting,--and had found it barren! The wind having become more favourable, Don John took leave of the gay capital of the South, and embarked for Messina, which he reached on the twenty-fifth of August. If in other places he had seen preparations for war, here he seemed to be brought on the very theatre of war. As he entered the noble port, he was saluted with the thunders of hundreds of pieces of ordnance from the combined fleets of Rome and Venice, which lay side by side awaiting his arrival. He landed beneath a triumphal arch of colossal dimensions, embossed with rich plates of silver, and curiously sculptured with emblematical bas-reliefs, and with complimentary legends in Latin verse, furnished by the classical poets of Italy.[304] He passed under two other arches of similar rich and elaborate construction, as he rode into the town amidst the ringing of bells, the cheers of the multitude, the waving of scarfs and handkerchiefs from the balconies, and other lively demonstrations of the public joy, such as might have intoxicated the brain of a less ambitious soldier than John of Austria. The festivities were closed in the evening by a general illumination of the city, and by a display of fireworks that threw a light far and wide over the beautiful harbour and the countless ships that floated on its waters. [Sidenote: THE ARMADA OF THE ALLIES.] Nothing could be finer, indeed, whether by day or by night, than the spectacle presented by the port of Messina. Every day a fresh reinforcement of squadrons, or of single galleys or brigantines, under some brave adventurer, entered the harbour to swell the numbers of the great armada. Many of these vessels, especially the galleys, were richly carved and gilt, after the fashion of the time, and with their many-coloured streamers, and their flags displaying the arms of their several states, made a magnificent show as they glanced over the waters. None, in the splendour of their decorations, exceeded the _Real_, as the galley of the commander-in-chief was termed. It was of great size, and had been built in Barcelona, famous for its naval architecture all the world over. The stern of the vessel was profusely decorated with emblems and devices drawn from history. The interior was furnished in a style of luxury that seemed to be designed for pleasure, rather than for the rough duties of war. But the galley was remarkable for both strength and speed,--the two most essential qualities in the construction of a ship. Of this she gave ample evidence in her contest with the Turk.[305] The whole number of vessels in the armada, great and small, amounted to something more than three hundred. Of these full two-thirds were "royal galleys." Venice alone contributed one hundred and six, besides six _galeazzas_. These were ships of enormous bulk, and, as it would seem, of clumsy construction, carrying each more than forty pieces of artillery. The Spaniards counted a score of galleys less than their Venetian confederates. But they far exceeded them in the number of their frigates, brigantines, and vessels of smaller size. They boasted a still greater superiority in the equipment of their navy. Indeed, the Venetian squadron was found so indifferently manned, that Don John ordered several thousand hands to be drafted from the ships of the other Italian powers, and from the Spanish, to make up the necessary complement. This proceeding conveyed so direct a censure on the remissness of his countrymen, as to give great disgust to the admiral, Veniero. But in the present emergency he had neither the power to resist nor to resent it.[306] The number of persons on board of the fleet, soldiers and seamen, was estimated at eighty thousand. The galleys, impelled by oars more than by sails, required a large number of hands to navigate them. The soldiers, as we have seen, did not exceed twenty-nine thousand; of which number more than nineteen thousand were furnished by Spain. They were well-appointed troops, most of them familiar with war, and officered by men, many of whom had already established a high reputation in the service. On surveying the muster-roll of cavaliers who embarked in this expedition, one may well believe that Spain had never before sent forth a fleet in which were to be found the names of so many of her sons illustrious for rank and military achievement. If the same can be said of Venice, we must consider that the present war was one in which the prosperity, perhaps the very existence, of the republic was involved. The Spaniard was animated by the true spirit of the Crusades, when, instead of mercenary motives, the guerdon for which men fought was glory in this world and paradise in the next. Sebastian Veniero, trembling for the possessions of the republic in the Adriatic, would have put to sea without further delay, and sought out the enemy. But Don John, with a prudence hardly to have been expected, declined moving until he had been strengthened by all his reinforcements. He knew the resources of the Ottoman empire; he could not doubt that in the present emergency they would be strained to the utmost to equip a formidable armament; and he resolved not to expose himself unnecessarily to the chances of defeat, by neglecting any means in his power to prepare for the encounter. It was a discreet determination, which must have met the entire approbation of his brother. While he was thus detained at Messina, a papal nuncio, Odescalco, bishop of Pena, arrived there. He was the bearer of sundry spiritual favours from the pontiff, whose real object, no doubt, was to quicken the movements of John of Austria. The nuncio proclaimed a jubilee; and every man in the armada, from the captain-general downwards, having fasted three days, confessed and partook of the communion. The prelate, in the name of his holiness, then proclaimed a full remission of their sins; and he conceded to them the same indulgences as had been granted to the deliverers of the Holy Sepulchre. To Don John the pope communicated certain revelations and two cheering prophecies from St. Isadore, which his holiness declared had undoubted reference to the prince. It is further stated, that Pius appealed to more worldly feelings, by intimating to the young commander that success could not fail to open the way to the acquisition of some independent sovereignty for himself.[307] Whether this suggestion first awakened so pleasing an idea in Don John's mind, or whether the wary pontiff was aware that it already existed there, it is certain that it became the spectre which from this time forward continued to haunt the imagination of the aspiring chieftain, and to beckon him onward in the path of perilous ambition to its melancholy close. All being now in readiness, orders were given to weigh anchor; and on the sixteenth of September the magnificent armament--unrivalled by any which had rode upon these waters since the days of imperial Rome--stood out to sea. The papal nuncio, dressed in his pontificals, took a prominent station on the mole; and as each vessel passed successively before him, he bestowed on it his apostolic benediction. Then, without postponing a moment longer his return, he left Messina and hastened back to Rome to announce the joyful tidings to his master.[308] CHAPTER X. WAR WITH THE TURKS. Plan of Operations--Tidings of the Enemy--Preparations for Combat--Battle of Lepanto--Rout of the Turkish Armada. 1571. [Sidenote: PLAN OF OPERATIONS.] As the allied fleet coasted along the Calabrian shore, it was so much baffled by rough seas and contrary winds that its progress was slow. Not long before his departure Don John had sent a small squadron under a Spanish captain, Gil de Andrada, to collect tidings of the enemy. On his return that commander met the Christian fleet, and reported that the Turks, with a powerful armament, were still in the Adriatic, where they had committed fearful ravages on the Venetian territories. Don John now steered his course for Corfu, which, however, he did not reach till the twenty-sixth of September. He soon had ample opportunities of seeing for himself the traces of the enemy, in the smoking hamlets and desolated fields along the coast. The allies were welcomed with joy by the islanders, who furnished them with whatever supplies they needed. Here Don John learned that the Ottoman fleet had been standing into the Gulf of Lepanto, where it lay as if waiting the coming of the Christians. The young commander-in-chief had now no hesitation as to the course he ought to pursue. But he chose to call a council of his principal captains before deciding. The treaty of alliance, indeed, required him to consult with the other commanders before taking any decisive step in matters of importance; and this had been strenuously urged on him by the king, ever afraid of his brother's impetuosity. The opinions of the council were divided. Some who had had personal experience of the naval prowess of the Turks appeared to shrink from encountering so formidable an armament, and would have confined the operations of the fleet to the siege of some place belonging to the Moslems. Even Doria, whose life had been spent in fighting with the infidel, thought it was not advisable to attack the enemy in his present position, surrounded by friendly shores, whence he might easily obtain succour. It would be better, he urged, to attack some neighbouring place, like Navarino, which might have the effect of drawing him from the gulf, and thus compel him to give battle in some quarter more advantageous to the allies. But the majority of the council took a very different view of the matter. To them it appeared that the great object of the expedition was to destroy the Ottoman fleet, and that a better opportunity could not be offered than the present one, while the enemy was shut up in the gulf, from which, if defeated, he would find no means of escape. Fortunately, this was the opinion, not only of the majority, but of most of those whose opinions were entitled to the greatest deference. Among these were the gallant marquis of Santa Cruz, the Grand-Commander Requesens, who still remained near the person of Don John, and had command of a galley in his rear, Cardona, general of the Sicilian squadron, Barbarigo, the Venetian _provveditore_, next in authority to the captain-general of his nation, the Roman Colonna, and Alexander Farnese, the young prince of Parma, Don John's nephew, who had come, on this memorable occasion, to take his first lesson in the art of war,--an art in which he was destined to remain without a rival. The commander-in-chief, with no little satisfaction, saw himself so well supported in his own judgment; and he resolved, without any unnecessary delay, to give the Turks battle in the position they had chosen. He was desirous, however, to be joined by part of his fleet, which, baffled by the winds, and without oars, still lagged far behind. For the galley, with its numerous oars in addition to its sails, had somewhat of the properties of a modern steamer, which so gallantly defies both wind and wave. As Don John wished also to review his fleet before coming into action, he determined to cross over to Comenizza, a capacious and well-protected port on the opposite coast of Albania. This he did on the thirtieth of September. Here the vessels were got in readiness for immediate action. They passed in review before the commander-in-chief, and went through their various evolutions, while the artillerymen and musketeers showed excellent practice. Don John looked with increased confidence to the approaching combat. An event, however, occurred at this time, which might have been attended with the worst consequences. A Roman officer, named Tortona, one of those who had been drafted to make up the complement of the Venetian galleys, engaged in a brawl with some of his crew. This reached the ears of Veniero, the Venetian captain-general. The old man, naturally of a choleric temper, and still smarting from the insult which he fancied he had received by the introduction of the allies on board of his vessels, instantly ordered the arrest of the offender. Tortona for a long while resisted the execution of these orders; and when finally seized, with some of his companions, they were all sentenced by the vindictive Veniero to be hung at the yardarm. Such a high-handed proceeding caused the deepest indignation in Don John, who regarded it, moreover, as an insult to himself. In the first moments of his wrath he talked of retaliating on the Venetian admiral by a similar punishment. But, happily, the remonstrances of Colonna--who, as the papal commander, had in truth the most reason to complain--and the entreaties of other friends, prevailed on the angry chief to abstain from any violent act. He insisted, however, that Veniero should never again take his place at the council-board, but should be there represented by the _provveditore_ Barbarigo, next in command,--a man, fortunately, possessed of a better control over his temper than was shown by his superior. Thus the cloud passed away, which threatened for a moment to break up the harmony of the allies, and to bring ruin on the enterprise.[309] On the third of October, Don John, without waiting longer for the missing vessels, again put to sea, and stood for the Gulf of Lepanto. As the fleet swept down the Ionian Sea, it passed many a spot famous in ancient story. None, we may imagine, would be so likely to excite an interest at this time as Actium, on whose waters was fought the greatest naval battle of antiquity. But the mariner probably gave little thought to the past, as he dwelt on the conflict that awaited him at Lepanto. On the fifth, a thick fog enveloped the armada, and shut out every object from sight. Fortunately, the vessels met with no injury, and, passing by Ithaca, the ancient home of Ulysses, they safely anchored off the eastern coast of Cephalonia. For two days their progress was thwarted by headwinds. But on the seventh, Don John, impatient of delay, again put to sea, though wind and weather were still unfavourable. While lying off Cephalonia he had received tidings that Famagosta, the second city of Cyprus, had fallen into the hands of the enemy, and this under circumstances of unparalleled perfidy and cruelty. The place, after a defence that had cost hecatombs of lives to the besiegers, was allowed to capitulate on honourable terms. Mustapha, the Moslem commander, the same fierce chief who had conducted the siege of Malta, requested an interview at his quarters with four of the principal Venetian captains. After a short and angry conference, he ordered them all to execution. Three were beheaded. The other, a noble named Bragadino, who had held the supreme command, he caused to be flayed alive in the market-place of the city. The skin of the wretched victim was then stuffed; and with this ghastly trophy dangling from the yardarm of his galley, the brutal monster sailed back to Constantinople, to receive the reward of his services from Selim.[310] These services were great. The fall of Famagosta secured the fall of Cyprus, which thus became permanently incorporated in the Ottoman empire.[311] [Sidenote: PREPARATIONS FOR COMBAT.] The tidings of these shocking events filled the breast of every Venetian with an inextinguishable thirst for vengeance. The confederates entered heartily into these feelings; and all on board of the armada were impatient for the hour that was to bring them hand to hand with the enemies of the Faith. It was two hours before dawn, on Sunday, the memorable seventh of October, when the fleet weighed anchor. The wind had become lighter; but it was still contrary, and the galleys were indebted for their progress much more to their oars than their sails. By sunrise they were abreast of the Curzolari,--a cluster of huge rocks, or rocky islets, which on the north defends the entrance of the Gulf of Lepanto. The fleet moved laboriously along, while every eye was strained to catch the first glimpse of the hostile navy. At length the watch on the fore-top of the _Real_ called out "A sail!" and soon after declared that the whole Ottoman fleet was in sight. Several others, climbing up the rigging, confirmed his report; and in a few moments more, word was sent to the same effect by Andrew Doria, who commanded on the right. There was no longer any doubt; and Don John, ordering his pennon to be displayed at the mizen-peak, unfurled the great standard of the League, given by the pope, and directed a gun to be fired, the signal for battle. The report, as it ran along the rocky shores, fell cheerily on the ears of the confederates, who, raising their eyes towards the consecrated banner, filled the air with their shouts.[312] The principal captains now came on board the _Real_, to receive the last orders of the commander-in-chief. Even at this late hour, there were some who ventured to intimate their doubts of the expediency of engaging the enemy in a position where he had a decided advantage. But Don John cut short the discussion. "Gentlemen," he said, "this is the time for combat, not for counsel." He then continued the dispositions he was making for the attack. He had already given to each commander of a galley written instructions as to the manner in which the line of battle was to be formed in case of meeting the enemy. The armada was now disposed in that order. It extended on a front of three miles. Far on the right, a squadron of sixty-four galleys was commanded by the Genoese admiral, Andrew Doria,--a name of terror to the Moslems. The centre, or _battle_, as it was called, consisting of sixty-three galleys, was led by John of Austria, who was supported on the one side by Colonna, the captain-general of the pope, and on the other by the Venetian captain-general, Veniero. Immediately in the rear was the galley of the Grand-Commander Requesens, who still remained near the person of his former pupil; though a difference which arose between them on the voyage, fortunately now healed, showed that the young commander-in-chief was wholly independent of his teacher in the art of war. The left wing was commanded by the noble Venetian, Barbarigo, whose vessels stretched along the Ætolian shore, to which he approached as near as, in his ignorance of the coast, he dared to venture, so as to prevent his being turned by the enemy. Finally, the reserve, consisting of thirty-five galleys, was given to the brave marquis of Santa Cruz, with directions to act in any quarter where he thought his presence most needed. The smaller craft, some of which had now arrived, seem to have taken little part in the action, which was thus left to the galleys. Each commander was to occupy so much space with his galley as to allow room for manoeuvring it to advantage, and yet not enough to allow the enemy to break the line. He was directed to single out his adversary, to close with him at once, and board as soon as possible. The beaks of the galleys were pronounced to be a hindrance rather than a help in action. They were rarely strong enough to resist a shock from an antagonist, and they much interfered with the working and firing of the guns. Don John had the beak of his vessel cut away. The example was followed throughout the fleet, and, as it is said, with eminently good effect. It may seem strange that this discovery should have been reserved for the crisis of a battle.[313] When the officers had received their last instructions, they returned to their respective vessels; and Don John, going on board of a light frigate, passed rapidly through the part of the armada lying on his right, while he commanded Requesens to do the same with the vessels on his left. His object was to feel the temper of his men, and to rouse their mettle by a few words of encouragement. The Venetians he reminded of their recent injuries. The hour for vengeance, he told them, had arrived. To the Spaniards and other confederates he said--"You have come to fight the battle of the Cross; to conquer or to die. But whether you are to die or conquer, do your duty this day, and you will secure a glorious immortality." His words were received with a burst of enthusiasm which went to the heart of the commander, and assured him that he could rely on his men in the hour of trial. On returning to his vessel, he saw Veniero on his quarter-deck; and they exchanged salutations in as friendly a manner as if no difference had existed between them. At this solemn hour both these brave men were willing to forget all personal animosity in a common feeling of devotion to the great cause in which they were engaged.[314] The Ottoman fleet came on slowly and with difficulty. For, strange to say, the wind, which had hitherto been adverse to the Christians, after lulling for a time, suddenly shifted to the opposite quarter, and blew in the face of the enemy.[315] As the day advanced, moreover, the sun, which had shone in the eyes of the confederates, gradually shot its rays into those of the Moslems. Both circumstances were of good omen to the Christians, and the first was regarded as nothing short of a direct interposition of Heaven. Thus ploughing its way along, the Turkish armament, as it came more into view, showed itself in greater strength than had been anticipated by the allies. It consisted of nearly two hundred and fifty royal galleys, most of them of the largest class, besides a number of smaller vessels in the rear, which, like those of the allies, appear scarcely to have come into action. The men on board of every description were computed at not less than a hundred and twenty thousand.[316] The galleys spread out, as usual with the Turks, in the form of a regular halfmoon, covering a wider extent of surface than the combined fleets, which they somewhat exceeded in number. They presented, indeed, as they drew nearer, a magnificent array, with their gilded and gaudily-painted prows, and their myriads of pennons and streamers, fluttering gaily in the breeze; while the rays of the morning sun glanced on the polished scimitars of Damascus and on the superb aigrettes of jewels which sparkled in the turbans of the Ottoman chiefs. [Sidenote: PREPARATIONS FOR COMBAT.] In the centre of the extended line, and directly opposite to the station occupied by the captain-general of the League, was the huge galley of Ali Pasha. The right of the armada was commanded by Mahomet Sirocco, viceroy of Egypt, a circumspect as well as courageous leader; the left, by Uluch Ali, dey of Algiers, the redoubtable corsair of the Mediterranean. Ali Pasha had experienced a difficulty like that of Don John, as several of his officers had strongly urged the inexpediency of engaging so formidable an armament as that of the allies. But Ali, like his rival, was young and ambitious. He had been sent by his master to fight the enemy; and no remonstrances, not even those of Mahomet Sirocco, for whom he had great respect, could turn him from his purpose. He had, moreover, received intelligence that the allied fleet was much inferior in strength to what it proved. In this error he was fortified by the first appearance of the Christians; for the extremity of their left wing, commanded by Barbarigo, stretching behind the Ætolian shore, was hidden from his view. As he drew nearer, and saw the whole extent of the Christian lines, it is said his countenance fell. If so, he still did not abate one jot of his resolution. He spoke to those around him with the same confidence as before, of the result of the battle. He urged his rowers to strain every nerve. Ali was a man of more humanity in his nature than often belonged to his nation. His galley-slaves were all, or nearly all, Christian captives; and he addressed them in this brief and pithy manner: "If your countrymen are to win this day, Allah give you the benefit of it; yet if I win it, you shall certainly have your freedom. If you feel that I do well by you, do then the like by me."[317] As the Turkish admiral drew nearer, he made a change in his order of battle, by separating his wings further from his centre; thus conforming to the dispositions of the allies. Before he had come within cannon-shot, he fired a gun by way of challenge to his enemy. It was answered by another from the galley of John of Austria. A second gun discharged by Ali was as promptly replied to by the Christian commander. The distance between the two fleets was now rapidly diminishing. At this solemn moment a deathlike silence reigned throughout the armament of the confederates. Men seemed to hold their breath, as if absorbed in the expectation of some great catastrophe. The day was magnificent. A light breeze, still adverse to the Turks, played on the waters, somewhat fretted by the contrary winds. It was nearly noon; and as the sun, mounting through a cloudless sky, rose to the zenith, he seemed to pause, as if to look down on the beautiful scene, where the multitude of galleys, moving over the water, showed like a holiday spectacle rather than a preparation for mortal combat. The illusion was soon dispelled by the fierce yells which rose on the air from the Turkish armada. It was the customary war-cry with which the Moslems entered into battle. Very different was the scene on board of the Christian galleys. Don John might be there seen, armed _cap-à-pié_, standing on the prow of the _Real_, anxiously awaiting the conflict. In this conspicuous position, kneeling down, he raised his eyes to heaven, and humbly prayed that the Almighty would be with His people on that day. His example was followed by the whole fleet. Officers and men, all prostrating themselves on their knees, and turning their eyes to the consecrated banner which floated from the _Real_, put up a petition like that of their commander. They then received absolution from the priests, of whom there were some in every vessel; and each man, as he rose to his feet, gathered new strength, as he felt assured that the Lord of Hosts would fight on his side.[318] When the foremost vessels of the Turks had come within cannon-shot, they opened their fire on the Christians. The firing soon ran along the whole of the Turkish line, and was kept up without interruption as it advanced. Don John gave orders for trumpet and atabal to sound the signal for action; which was followed by the simultaneous discharge of such of the guns in the combined fleet as could be brought to bear on the enemy. The Spanish commander had caused the _galeazzas_, those mammoth war-ships of which some account has been already given, to be towed half a mile ahead of the fleet, where they might intercept the advance of the Turks. As the latter came abreast of them, the huge galleys delivered their broadsides right and left; and their heavy ordnance produced a startling effect. Ali Pasha gave orders for his galleys to open their line and pass on either side, without engaging these monsters of the deep, of which he had had no experience. Even so, their heavy guns did considerable damage to several of the nearest vessels, and created some confusion in the pacha's line of battle. They were, however, but unwieldy craft, and, having accomplished their object, seem to have taken no further part in the combat. The action began on the left wing of the allies, which Mahomet Sirocco was desirous of turning. This had been anticipated by Barbarigo, the Venetian admiral, who commanded in that quarter. To prevent it, as we have seen, he lay with his vessels as near the coast as he dared. Sirocco, better acquainted with the soundings, saw there was space enough for him to pass; and darting by with all the speed that oars could give him, he succeeded in doubling on his enemy. Thus placed between two fires, the extreme of the Christian left fought at terrible disadvantage. No less than eight galleys went to the bottom, and several others were captured. The brave Barbarigo, throwing himself into the heat of the fight, without availing himself of his defensive armour, was pierced in the eye by an arrow, and, reluctant to leave the glory of the field to another, was borne to his cabin. The combat still continued with unabated fury on the part of the Venetians. They fought like men who felt that the war was theirs, and who were animated not only by the thirst for glory, but for revenge.[319] Far on the Christian right a manoeuvre similar to that so successfully executed by Sirocco was attempted by Uluch Ali, the dey of Algiers. Profiting by his superiority in numbers, he endeavoured to turn the right wing of the confederates. It was in this quarter that Andrew Doria commanded. He had foreseen this movement of his enemy, and he succeeded in foiling it. It was a trial of skill between the two most accomplished seamen in the Mediterranean. Doria extended his line so far to the right indeed, to prevent being surrounded, that Don John was obliged to remind him that he left the centre too much exposed. His dispositions were so far unfortunate for himself, that his own line was thus weakened, and afforded some vulnerable points to his assailant. These were soon detected by the eagle eye of Uluch Ali; and, like the king of birds swooping on his prey, he fell on some galleys separated by a considerable interval from their companions, and, sinking more than one, carried off the great _Capitana_ of Malta in triumph as his prize.[320] [Sidenote: BATTLE OF LEPANTO.] While the combat opened thus disastrously to the allies both on the right and on the left, in the centre they may be said to have fought with doubtful fortune. Don John had led his division gallantly forward. But the object on which he was intent was an encounter with Ali Pasha, the foe most worthy of his sword. The Turkish commander had the same combat no less at heart. The galleys of both were easily recognized, not only from their position, but from their superior size and richer decoration. The one, moreover, displayed the holy banner of the League; the other, the great Ottoman standard. This, like the ancient standard of the caliphs, was held sacred in its character. It was covered with texts from the Koran, emblazoned in letters of gold, and had the name of Allah inscribed upon it no less than twenty-eight thousand nine hundred times. It was the banner of the sultan, having passed from father to son since the foundation of the imperial dynasty, and was never seen in the field unless the Grand Seigneur or his lieutenant was there in person.[321] Both the chiefs urged on their rowers to the top of their speed. Their galleys soon shot ahead of the rest of the line, driven through the boiling surges as by the force of a tornado, and closed with a shock that made every timber crack, and the two vessels quiver to their very keels. So powerful, indeed, was the impetus they received, that the pacha's galley, which was considerably the larger and loftier of the two, was thrown so far upon its opponent that the prow reached the fourth bench of rowers. As soon as the vessels were disengaged from each other, and those on board had recovered from the shock, the work of death began. Don John's chief strength consisted in some three hundred Spanish arquebusiers, culled from the flower of his infantry. Ali, on the other hand, was provided with an equal number of janizaries. He was followed by a smaller vessel, in which two hundred more were stationed as a _corps de reserve_. He had, moreover, a hundred archers on board. The bow was still as much in use with the Turks as with the other Moslems. The pacha opened at once on his enemy a terrible fire of cannon and musketry. It was returned with equal spirit and much more effect: for the Turks were observed to shoot over the heads of their adversaries. The Moslem galley was unprovided with the defences which protected the sides of the Spanish vessels; and the troops, crowded together on the lofty prow, presented an easy mark to their enemy's balls. But though numbers of them fell at every discharge, their places were soon supplied by those in reserve. They were enabled, therefore, to keep up an incessant fire, which wasted the strength of the Spaniards; and as both Christian and Mussulman fought with indomitable spirit, it seemed doubtful to which side victory would incline. The affair was made more complicated by the entrance of other parties into the conflict. Both Ali and Don John were supported by some of the most valiant captains in their fleets. Next to the Spanish commander, as we have seen, were Colonna and the veteran Veniero, who, at the age of seventy-six, performed feats of arms worthy of a paladin of romance. In this way a little squadron of combatants gathered round the principal leaders, who sometimes found themselves assailed by several enemies at the same time. Still the chiefs did not lose sight of one another; but, beating off their inferior foes as well as they could, each, refusing to loosen his hold, clung with mortal grasp to his antagonist.[322] Thus the fight raged along the whole extent of the entrance to the Gulf of Lepanto. The volumes of vapour rolling heavily over the waters effectually shut out from sight whatever was passing at any considerable distance, unless when a fresher breeze dispelled the smoke for a moment, or the flashes of the heavy guns threw a transient gleam on the dark canopy of battle. If the eye of the spectator could have penetrated the cloud of smoke that enveloped the combatants, and have embraced the whole scene at a glance, he would have perceived them broken into small detachments, separately engaged one with another, independently of the rest, and indeed ignorant of all that was doing in other quarters. The contest exhibited few of those large combinations and skilful manoeuvres to be expected in a great naval encounter. It was rather an assemblage of petty actions, resembling those on land. The galleys, grappling together, presented a level arena, on which soldier and galley-slave fought hand to hand; and the fate of the engagement was generally decided by boarding. As in most hand-to-hand contests, there was an enormous waste of life. The decks were loaded with corpses, Christian and Moslem lying promiscuously together in the embrace of death. Instances are recorded where every man on board was slain or wounded.[323] It was a ghastly spectacle, where blood flowed in rivulets down the sides of the vessels, staining the waters of the gulf for miles around. It seemed as if a hurricane had swept over the sea, and covered it with the wreck of the noble armaments which a moment before were so proudly riding on its bosom. Little had they now to remind one of their late magnificent array, with their hulls battered, their masts and spars gone or splintered by the shot, their canvas cut into shreds and floating wildly on the breeze, while thousands of wounded and drowning men were clinging to the floating fragments, and calling piteously for help. Such was the wild uproar which succeeded the Sabbath-like stillness that, two hours before, had reigned over these beautiful solitudes. The left wing of the confederates, commanded by Barbarigo, had been sorely pressed by the Turks, as we have seen, at the beginning of the fight. Barbarigo himself had been mortally wounded. His line had been turned. Several of his galleys had been sunk. But the Venetians gathered courage from despair. By incredible efforts, they succeeded in beating off their enemies. They became the assailants in their turn. Sword in hand, they carried one vessel after another. The Capuchin was seen in the thickest of the fight, waving aloft his crucifix, and leading the boarders to the assault.[324] The Christian galley-slaves, in some instances, broke their fetters, and joined their countrymen against their masters. Fortunately, the vessel of Mahomet Sirocco the Moslem admiral, was sunk; and though extricated from the water himself, it was only to perish by the sword of his conqueror, Giovanni Contarini. The Venetian could find in his heart no mercy for the Turk. [Sidenote: BATTLE OF LEPANTO.] The fall of their commander gave the final blow to his followers. Without further attempt to prolong the fight, they fled before the avenging swords of the Venetians. Those nearest the land endeavoured to escape by running their vessels ashore, where they abandoned them as prizes to the Christians. Yet many of the fugitives, before gaining the land, perished miserably in the waves. Barbarigo, the Venetian admiral, who was still lingering in agony, heard the tidings of the enemy's defeat, and, uttering a few words expressive of his gratitude to Heaven, which had permitted him to see this hour, he breathed his last.[325] During this time the combat had been going forward in the centre between the two commanders-in-chief, Don John and Ali Pasha, whose galleys blazed with an incessant fire of artillery and musketry, that enveloped them like "a martyr's robe of flames." The parties fought with equal spirit, though not with equal fortune. Twice the Spaniards had boarded their enemy, and both times they had been repulsed with loss. Still their superiority in the use of fire-arms would have given them a decided advantage over their opponents, if the loss they had inflicted had not been speedily repaired by fresh reinforcements. More than once the contest between the two chieftains was interrupted by the arrival of others to take part in the fray. They soon, however, returned to each other, as if unwilling to waste their strength on a meaner enemy. Through the whole engagement both commanders exposed themselves to danger as freely as any common soldier. In such a contest even Philip must have admitted that it would be difficult for his brother to find, with honour, a place of safety. Don John received a wound in the foot. It was a slight one, however, and he would not allow it to be dressed till the action was over. Again his men were mustered, and a third time the trumpets sounded to the attack. It was more successful than the preceding. The Spaniards threw themselves boldly into the Turkish galley. They were met with the same spirit as before by the janizaries. Ali Pasha led them on. Unfortunately, at this moment, he was struck in the head by a musket-ball, and stretched senseless in the gangway. His men fought worthily of their ancient renown. But they missed the accustomed voice of their commander. After a short but ineffectual struggle against the fiery impetuosity of the Spaniards, they were overpowered, and threw down their arms. The decks were loaded with the bodies of the dead and the dying. Beneath these was discovered the Turkish commander-in-chief, severely wounded, but perhaps not mortally. He was drawn forth by some Castilian soldiers, who, recognizing his person, would at once have despatched him. But the disabled chief, having rallied from the first effects of his wound, had sufficient presence of mind to divert them from their purpose, by pointing out the place below where he had deposited his money and jewels; and they hastened to profit by the disclosure, before the treasure should fall into the hands of their comrades. Ali was not so successful with another soldier, who came up soon after, brandishing his sword, and preparing to plunge it into the body of the prostrate commander. It was in vain that the latter endeavoured to turn the ruffian from his purpose. He was a convict, one of those galley-slaves whom Don John had caused to be unchained from the oar and furnished with arms. He could not believe that any treasure would be worth so much as the head of the pacha. Without further hesitation, he dealt him a blow which severed it from his shoulders. Then, returning to his galley, he laid the bloody trophy before Don John. But he had miscalculated on his recompense. His commander gazed on it with a look of pity mingled with horror. He may have thought of the generous conduct of Ali to his Christian captives, and have felt that he deserved a better fate. He coldly inquired "of what use such a present could be to him;" and then ordered it to be thrown into the sea. Far from the order being obeyed, it is said the head was stuck on a pike, and raised aloft on board of the captured galley. At the same time the banner of the Crescent was pulled down; while that of the Cross, run up in its place, proclaimed the downfall of the pacha.[326] The sight of the sacred ensign was welcomed by the Christians with a shout of "Victory!" which rose high above the din of battle.[327] The tidings of the death of Ali soon passed from mouth to mouth, giving fresh heart to the confederates, but falling like a knell on the ears of the Moslems. Their confidence was gone. Their fire slackened. Their efforts grew weaker and weaker. They were too far from shore to seek an asylum there, like their comrades on the right. They had no resource but to prolong the combat or to surrender. Most preferred the latter. Many vessels were carried by boarding, others were sunk by the victorious Christians. Ere four hours had elapsed, the centre, like the right wing, of the Moslems might be said to be annihilated. Still the fight was lingering on the right of the confederates, where, it will be remembered, Uluch Ali, the Algerine chief, had profited by Doria's error in extending his line so far as greatly to weaken it. Uluch Ali, attacking it on its most vulnerable quarter, had succeeded, as we have seen, in capturing and destroying several vessels; and would have inflicted still heavier losses on his enemy had it not been for the seasonable succour received from the marquis of Santa Cruz. This brave officer, who commanded the reserve, had already been of much service to Don John when the _Real_ was assailed by several Turkish galleys at once during his combat with Ali Pasha; for at this juncture the marquis of Santa Cruz arriving, and beating off the assailants, one of whom he afterwards captured, enabled the commander-in-chief to resume his engagement with the pacha. No sooner did Santa Cruz learn the critical situation of Doria, than, supported by Cardona, "general" of the Sicilian squadron, he pushed forward to his relief. Dashing into the midst of the _mêlée_, the two commanders fell like a thunderbolt on the Algerine galleys. Few attempted to withstand the shock. But in their haste to avoid it, they were encountered by Doria and his Genoese galleys. Thus beset on all sides, Uluch Ali was compelled to abandon his prizes, and provide for his own safety by flight. He cut adrift the Maltese _Capitana_, which he had lashed to his stern, and on which three hundred corpses attested the desperate character of her defence. As tidings reached him of the discomfiture of the centre, and of the death of Ali Pasha, he felt that nothing remained but to make the best of his way from the fatal scene of action, and save as many of his own ships as he could. And there were no ships in the Turkish fleet superior to his, or manned by men under more perfect discipline. For they were the famous corsairs of the Mediterranean, who had been rocked from infancy on its waters. [Sidenote: ROUT OF THE TURKISH ARMADA.] Throwing out his signals for retreat, the Algerine was soon to be seen, at the head of his squadron, standing towards the north, under as much canvas as remained to him after the battle, and urged forward through the deep by the whole strength of his oarsmen. Doria and Santa Cruz followed quickly in his wake. But he was borne on the wings of the wind, and soon distanced his pursuers. Don John, having disposed of his own assailants, was coming to the support of Doria, and now joined in the pursuit of the viceroy. A rocky headland, stretching far into the sea, lay in the path of the fugitive; and his enemies hoped to intercept him there. Some few of his vessels were stranded on the rocks. But the rest, near forty in number, standing more boldly out to sea, safely doubled the promontory. Then, quickening their flight, they gradually faded from the horizon, their white sails, the last thing visible, showing in the distance like a flock of Arctic sea-fowl on their way to their native homes. The confederates explained the inferior sailing of their own galleys on this occasion by the circumstance of their rowers, who had been allowed to bear arms in the fight, being crippled by their wounds. The battle had lasted more than four hours. The sky, which had been almost without a cloud through the day, began now to be overcast, and showed signs of a coming storm. Before seeking a place of shelter for himself and his prizes, Don John reconnoitred the scene of action. He met with several vessels too much damaged for further service. These, mostly belonging to the enemy, after saving what was of any value on board, he ordered to be burnt. He selected the neighbouring port of Petala, as affording the most secure and accessible harbour for the night. Before he had arrived there, the tempest began to mutter, and darkness was on the water. Yet the darkness rendered only more visible the blazing wrecks, which, sending up streams of fire mingled with showers of sparks, looked like volcanoes on the deep. CHAPTER XI. WAR WITH THE TURKS. Losses of the Combatants--Don John's Generosity--Triumphant Return--Enthusiasm throughout Christendom--Results of the Battle--Operations in the Levant--Conquest of Tunis--Retaken by the Turks. 1571--1574. Long and loud were the congratulations now paid to the young commander-in-chief by his brave companions-in-arms, on the success of the day. The hours passed blithely with officers and men, while they recounted to one another their manifold achievements. But feelings of gloom mingled with their gaiety, as they gathered tidings of the loss of friends who had bought this victory with their blood. It was, indeed, a sanguinary battle, surpassing, in this particular, any sea-fight of modern times. The loss fell much the most heavily on the Turks. There is the usual discrepancy about numbers; but it may be safe to estimate their loss at nearly twenty-five thousand slain and five thousand prisoners. What brought most pleasure to the hearts of the conquerors was the liberation of twelve thousand Christian captives, who had teen chained to the oar on board the Moslem galleys, and who now came forth, with tears of joy streaming down their haggard cheeks, to bless their deliverers.[328] The loss of the allies was comparatively small,--less than eight thousand.[329] That it was so much less than that of their enemies, may be referred in part to their superiority in the use of fire-arms; in part also to their exclusive use of these, instead of employing bows and arrows, weapons on which, though much less effective, the Turks, like the other Moslem nations, seem to have greatly relied. Lastly, the Turks were the vanquished party, and in their heavier loss suffered the almost invariable lot of the vanquished. As to their armada, it may almost be said to have been annihilated. Not more than forty galleys escaped out of near two hundred and fifty which entered into the action. One hundred and thirty were taken and divided among the conquerors. The remainder, sunk or burned, were swallowed up by the waves. To counterbalance all this, the confederates are said to have lost not more than fifteen galleys, though a much larger number, doubtless, were rendered unfit for service. This disparity affords good evidence of the inferiority of the Turks in the construction of their vessels, as well as in the nautical skill required to manage them. A great amount of booty, in the form of gold, jewels, and brocade, was found on board several of the prizes. The galley of the commander-in-chief alone is stated to have contained one hundred and seventy thousand gold sequins,--a large sum, but not large enough, it seems, to buy off his life.[330] The losses of the combatants cannot be fairly presented without taking into the account the quality as well as the number of the slain. The number of persons of consideration, both Christians and Moslems, who embarked in the expedition, was very great. The roll of slaughter showed that in the race of glory they gave little heed to their personal safety. The officer second in command among the Venetians, the commander-in-chief of the Turkish armament, and the commander of its right wing, all fell in the battle. Many a high-born cavalier closed at Lepanto a long career of honourable service. More than one, on the other hand, dated the commencement of their career from this day. Such was Alexander Farnese, prince of Parma. Though he was but a few years younger than his uncle, John of Austria, those few years had placed an immense distance between their conditions, the one filling the post of commander-in-chief, the other being only a private adventurer. Yet even so, he succeeded in winning great renown by his achievements. The galley in which he sailed was lying yardarm and yardarm alongside of a Turkish galley, with which it was hotly engaged. In the midst of the action Farnese sprang on board of the enemy, and with his good broadsword hewed down all who opposed him, opening a path into which his comrades poured one after another, and, after a short but murderous contest, succeeded in carrying the vessel. As Farnese's galley lay just astern of Don John's, the latter could witness the achievement of his nephew, which filled him with an admiration he did not affect to conceal. The intrepidity displayed by the young warrior on this occasion gave augury of his character in later life, when he succeeded his uncle in command, and surpassed him in military renown.[331] [Sidenote: DON JOHN'S GENEROSITY.] Another youth was in that fight, who, then humble and unknown, was destined one day to win laurels of a purer and more enviable kind than those which grow on the battle-field. This was Cervantes, who, at the age of twenty-four, was serving on board the fleet as a common soldier. He had been confined to his bed by a fever; but, notwithstanding the remonstrances of his captain, he insisted, on the morning of the action, not only on bearing arms, but on being stationed in the post of danger. And well did he perform his duty there, as was shown by two wounds on the breast, and by another in the hand, by which he lost the use of it. Fortunately it was the left hand. The right yet remained to indite those immortal productions which were to be known as household words, not only in his own land, but in every quarter of the civilized world.[332] A fierce storm of thunder and lightning raged for four-and-twenty hours after the battle, during which time the fleet rode safely at anchor in the harbour of Petala. It remained there three days longer. Don John profited by the delay to visit the different galleys and ascertain their condition. He informed himself of the conduct of the troops, and was liberal of his praises to those who deserved them. With the sick and the wounded he showed the greatest sympathy, endeavouring to alleviate their sufferings, and furnishing them with whatever his galley contained that could contribute to their comfort. With so generous and sympathetic a nature, it is not wonderful that he should have established himself in the hearts of his soldiers.[333] But the proofs of this kindly temper were not confined to his own followers. Among the prisoners were two sons of Ali, the Turkish commander-in-chief. One was seventeen, the other only thirteen years of age. Thus early had their father desired to initiate them in a profession which, beyond all others, opened the way to eminence in Turkey. They were not on board of his galley; and when they were informed of his death, they were inconsolable. To this affliction was now to be added the doom of slavery. As they were led into the presence of Don John, the youths prostrated themselves on the deck of his vessel. But raising them up, he affectionately embraced them, and said all he could to console them under their troubles. He caused them to be treated with the consideration due to their rank. His secretary, Juan de Soto, surrendered his quarters to them. They were provided with the richest apparel that could be found among the spoil. Their table was served with the same delicacies as that of the commander-in-chief; and his chamberlains showed the same deference to them as to himself. His kindness did not stop with these acts of chivalrous courtesy. He received a letter from their sister Fatima, containing a touching appeal to Don John's humanity, and soliciting the release of her orphan brothers. He had sent a courier to give their friends in Constantinople the assurance of their personal safety; "which," adds the lady, "is held by all this court as an act of great courtesy,--_gran gentileza_;--and there is no one here who does not admire the goodness and magnanimity of your highness." She enforced her petition with a rich present, for which she gracefully apologized, as intended to express her own feelings, though far below his deserts.[334] In the division of the spoil, the young princes had been assigned to the pope. But Don John succeeded in obtaining their liberation. Unfortunately, the elder died--of a broken heart, it is said--at Naples. The younger was sent home, with three of his attendants, for whom he had a particular regard. Don John declined keeping Fatima's present, which he gave to her brother. In a letter to the Turkish princess, he remarked that he had done this, not because he undervalued her beautiful gift, but because it had ever been the habit of his royal ancestors freely to grant their favours to those who stood in need of them, but not to receive aught by way of recompense.[335] The same noble nature he showed in his conduct towards Veniero. We have seen the friendly demonstration he made to the testy Venetian on entering into battle. He now desired his presence on board his galley. As he drew near, Don John came forward frankly to greet him. He spoke of his desire to bury the past in oblivion, and complimenting the veteran on his prowess in the late engagement, saluted him with the endearing name of "father." The old soldier, not prepared for so kind a welcome, burst into tears; and there was no one, says the chronicler who tells the anecdote, that could witness the scene with a dry eye.[336] While at Petala, a council of war was called to decide on the next operations of the fleet. Some were for following up the blow by an immediate attack on Constantinople. Others considered that, from the want of provisions and the damaged state of the vessels, they were in no condition for such an enterprise. They recommended that the armada should be disbanded, that the several squadrons of which it was composed should return to their respective winter quarters, and meet again in the spring to resume operations. Others, again, among whom was Don John, thought that before disbanding, they should undertake some enterprise commensurate with their strength. It was accordingly determined to lay siege to Santa Maura, in the island of Leucadia, a strongly-fortified place, which commanded the northern entrance into the Gulf of Lepanto. [Sidenote: DON JUAN'S TRIUMPHANT RETURN] The fleet, weighing anchor on the eleventh of October, arrived off Santa Maura on the following day. On a careful reconnaissance of the ground, it became evident that the siege would be a work of much greater difficulty than had been anticipated. A council of war was again summoned; and it was resolved, as the season was far advanced, to suspend further operations for the present, to return to winter quarters, and in the ensuing spring to open the campaign under more favourable auspices. The next step was to make a division of the spoil taken from the enemy, which was done in a manner satisfactory to all parties. One half of the galleys and inferior vessels, of the artillery and small arms, and also of the captives, was set apart for the Catholic king. The other half was divided between the pope and the republic, in the proportion settled by the treaty of confederation.[337] Next proceeding to Corfu, Don John passed three days at that island, making some necessary repairs of his vessels; then, bidding adieu to the confederates, he directed his course to Messina, which he reached, after a stormy passage, on the thirty-first of the month. We may imagine the joy with which he was welcomed by the inhabitants of that city, which he had left but little more than six weeks before, and to which he had now returned in triumph, after winning the most memorable naval victory of modern times. The whole population, with the magistrates at their head, hurried down to the shore to witness the magnificent spectacle. As the gallant armament swept into port, it showed the results of the late contest in many a scar. But the consecrated standard was still proudly flying at the masthead of the _Real_; and in the rear came the long line of conquered galleys, in much worse plight than their conquerors, trailing their banners ignominiously behind them in the water. On landing at the head of his troops, Don John was greeted with flourishes of music, while salvoes of artillery thundered from the fortresses which commanded the city. He was received under a gorgeous canopy, and escorted by a numerous concourse of citizens and soldiers. The clergy, mingling in the procession, broke forth into the _Te Deum_; and thus entering the cathedral, they all joined in thanksgivings to the Almighty, for granting them so glorious a victory.[338] Don John was sumptuously lodged in the castle. He was complimented with a superb banquet,--a mode of expressing the public gratitude not confined to our day,--and received a more substantial guerdon in a present from the city of thirty thousand crowns. Finally, a colossal statue in bronze was executed by a skilful artist, as a permanent memorial of the conqueror of Lepanto. Don John accepted the money, but it was only to devote it to the relief of the sick and wounded soldiers. In the same generous spirit, he had ordered that all his own share of the booty taken in the Turkish vessels, including the large amount of gold and rich brocades found in the galley of Ali Pasha, should be distributed among the captors.[339] The news of the victory of Lepanto caused a profound sensation throughout Christendom; for it had been a general opinion that the Turks were invincible by sea. The confederates more particularly testified their joy by such extraordinary demonstrations as showed the extent of their previous fears. In Venice, which might be said to have gained a new lease of existence from the result of the battle, the doge, the senators, and the people met in the great square of St. Mark, and congratulated one another on the triumph of their arms. By a public decree, the seventh of October was set apart, to be observed for ever as a national anniversary. The joy was scarcely less in Naples, where the people had so often seen their coasts desolated by the Ottoman cruisers; and when their admiral, the marquis of Santa Cruz, returned to port with his squadron, he was welcomed with acclamations such as greet the conqueror returning from his campaign. But even these honours were inferior to those which in Rome were paid to Colonna, the Captain-general of the papal fleet. As he was borne in stately procession, with the trophies won from the enemy carried before him, and a throng of mourning captives in the rear, the spectacle recalled the splendours of the ancient Roman triumph. Pius the Fifth had, before this, announced that the victory of the Christians had been revealed to him from Heaven. But when the tidings reached him of the actual result, it so far transcended his expectations, that, overcome by his emotions, the old pontiff burst into a flood of tears, exclaiming in the words of the Evangelist, "There was a man sent from God; and his name was John."[340] We may readily believe that the joy with which the glad tidings were welcomed in Spain fell nothing short of that with which they were received in other parts of Christendom. While lying off Petala, Don John sent Lope de Figueroa with despatches for the king, together with the great Ottoman standard, as the most glorious trophy taken in the battle.[341] He soon after sent a courier with further letters. It so happened that neither the one nor the other arrived at the place of their destination till some weeks after the intelligence had reached Philip by another channel. This was the Venetian Minister, who on the last of October received despatches from his own government, containing a full account of the fight. Hastening with them to the palace, he found the king in his private chapel, attending vespers on the eve of All-Saints. The news, it cannot be doubted, filled his soul with joy; though _it is said_ that, far from exhibiting this in his demeanour, he continued to be occupied with his devotions, without the least change of countenance, till the services were concluded. He then ordered _Te Deum_ to be sung.[342] All present joined with overflowing hearts in pouring forth their gratitude to the Lord of Hosts for granting such a triumph to the Cross.[343] [Sidenote: ENTHUSIASM THROUGHOUT CHRISTENDOM.] That night there was a grand illumination in Madrid. The following day mass was said by the papal legate in presence of the king, who afterwards took part in a solemn procession to the church of St. Mary, where the people united with the court in a general thanksgiving. In a letter from Philip to his brother, dated from the Escorial, the twenty-ninth of November, he writes to him out of the fulness of his heart, in the language of gratitude and brotherly love:--"I cannot express to you the joy it has given me to learn the particulars of your conduct in the battle, of the great valour you showed in your own person, and your watchfulness in giving proper directions to others--all which has doubtless been a principal cause of the victory. So to you, after God, I am to make my acknowledgments for it, as I now do; and happy am I that it has been reserved for one so near and so dear to me to perform this great work, which has gained such glory for you in the eyes of God and of the whole world."[344] The feelings of the king were fully shared by his subjects. The enthusiasm roused throughout the country by the great victory was without bounds. "There is no man," writes one of the royal secretaries to Don John, "who does not discern the hand of the Lord in it;--though it seems rather like a dream than a reality, so far does it transcend any naval encounter that the world ever heard of before."[345] The best sculptors and painters were employed to perpetuate the memory of the glorious event. Amongst the number was Titian, who in the time of Charles the Fifth had passed two years in Spain, and who now, when more than ninety years of age, executed the great picture of "The Victory of the League," still hanging on the walls of the _Muséo_ at Madrid.[346] The lofty theme proved a fruitful source of inspiration to the Castilian muse. Among hecatombs of epics and lyrics, the heroic poem of Ercilla[347] and the sublime _cancion_ of Fernando de Herrera perpetuate the memory of the victory of Lepanto in forms more durable than canvas or marble--as imperishable as the language itself. While all were thus ready to render homage to the talent and bravery which had won the greatest battle of the time, men, as they grew cooler, and could criticise events more carefully, were disposed to ask, where were the fruits of this great victory. Had Don John's father, Charles the Fifth, gained such a victory, it was said, he would not thus have quitted the field, but, before the enemy could recover from the blow, would have followed it up by another. Many expressed the conviction, that the young generalíssimo should at once have led his navy against Constantinople. There would indeed seem to be plausible ground for criticising his course after the action. But we must remember, in explanation of the conduct of Don John, that his situation was altogether different from that of his imperial father. He possessed no such absolute authority as the latter did over his army. The great leaders of the confederates were so nearly equal in rank, that they each claimed a right to be consulted on all measures of importance. The greatest jealousy existed among the three commanders, as there did also among the troops whom they commanded. They were all united, it is true, in their hatred to the Turk. But they were all influenced, more or less, by the interest of their own states, in determining the quarter where he was to be assailed. Every rood of territory wrung from the enemy in the Levant would only serve to enlarge the domain of Venice; while the conquests in the western parts of the Mediterranean would strengthen the empire of Castile. This feeling of jealousy between the Spaniards and the Venetians was, as we have seen, so great in the early part of the expedition, as nearly to bring ruin on it. Those who censured Don John for not directing his arms against Constantinople would seem to have had but a very inadequate notion of the resources of the Porte--as shown in the course of that very year. There is a remarkable letter from the duke of Alva, written the month after the battle of Lepanto, in which he discusses the best course to be taken in order to reap the full fruits of the victory. In it he expresses the opinion, that an attempt against Constantinople, or indeed any part of the Turkish dominions, unless supported by a general coalition of the great powers of Christendom, must end only in disappointment--so vast were the resources of that great empire.[348] If this were so,--and no better judge than Alva could be found in military affairs,--how incompetent were the means at Don John's disposal for effecting this object--confederates held together, as the event proved, by a rope of sand, and a fleet so much damaged in the recent combat that many of the vessels were scarcely seaworthy! In addition to this, it may be stated, that Don John knew it was his brother's wish that the Spanish squadron should return to Sicily to pass the winter.[349] If he persisted, therefore, in the campaign, he must do so on his own responsibility. He had now accomplished the great object for which he had put to sea. He had won a victory more complete than the most sanguine of his countrymen had a right to anticipate. To prolong the contest under the present circumstances, would he in a manner to provoke his fate, to jeopard the glory he had already gained, and incur the risk of closing the campaign with melancholy cypress, instead of the laurel-wreath of victory. Was it surprising that even an adventurous spirit like his should have shrunk from hazarding so vast a stake with the odds against him? [Sidenote: RESULTS OF THE BATTLE.] It is a great error to speak of the victory of Lepanto as a barren victory, which yielded no fruits to those who gained it. True, it did not strip the Turks of an inch of territory. Even the heavy loss of ships and soldiers which it cost them was repaired in the following year. But the loss of reputation--that tower of strength to the conqueror--was not to be estimated. The long and successful career of the Ottoman princes, especially of the last one, Solyman the Magnificent, had made the Turks to be thought invincible. There was not a nation in Christendom that did not tremble at the idea of a war with Turkey. The spell was now broken. Though her resources were still boundless, she lost confidence in herself. Venice gained confidence in proportion. When the hostile fleets met in the year following the battle of Lepanto, the Turks, though greatly the superior in numbers, declined the combat. For the seventy years which elapsed after the close of the present war, the Turks abandoned their efforts to make themselves masters of any of the rich possessions of the republic, which lay so temptingly around them. When the two nations came next into collision, Venice, instead of leaning on confederates, took the field single-handed, and disputed it with an intrepidity which placed her on a level with the gigantic power that assailed her. That power was already on the wane; and those who have most carefully studied the history of the Ottoman empire date the commencement of her decline from the battle of Lepanto.[350] The allies should have been ready with their several contingents early in the spring of the following year, 1572. They were not ready till the summer was well advanced. One cause of delay was the difficulty of deciding on what quarter the Turkish empire was to be attacked. The Venetians, from an obvious regard to their own interests, were for continuing the war in the Levant. Philip, on the other hand, from similar motives, would have transferred it to the western part of the Mediterranean, and have undertaken an expedition against the Barbary powers. Lastly, Pius the Fifth, urged by that fiery enthusiasm which made him overlook or overleap every obstacle in his path, would have marched on Constantinople, and then carried his conquering banners to the Holy Land. These chimerical fancies of a crusader provoked a smile--it may have been a sneer--from men better instructed in military operations than the pontiff.[351] Pius again laboured to infuse his own spirit into the monarchs of Christendom. But it was in vain that he urged them to join the League. All, for some reason or other, declined it. It is possible that they may have had less fear of the Turk, than of augmenting the power of the king of Spain. But the great plans of Pius the Fifth were terminated by his death, which occurred on the first of May, 1572. He was the true author of the League. It occupied his thoughts to the latest hour of his existence; and his last act was to appropriate to its uses a considerable sum of money lying in his coffers.[352] He may be truly said to have been the only one of the confederates who acted solely for what he conceived to be the interests of the Faith. This soon became apparent. [Sidenote: WAR WITH THE TURKS.] The affairs of Philip the Second were at this time in a critical situation. He much feared that one of the French faction would be raised to the chair of St. Peter. He had great reason to distrust the policy of France in respect to the Netherlands. Till he was more assured on these points, he was not inclined to furnish the costly armament to which he was pledged as his contingent. It was in vain that the allies called on Don John to aid them with his Spanish fleet. He had orders from his brother not to quit Messina; and it was in vain that he chafed under these orders, which threatened thus prematurely to close the glorious career on which he had entered, and which exposed him to the most mortifying imputations. It was not till the sixth of July that the king allowed him to send a part of his contingent, amounting only to twenty-two galleys and five thousand troops, to the aid of the confederates. Some historians explain the conduct of Philip, not so much by the embarrassments of his situation, as by his reluctance to afford his brother the opportunity of adding fresh laurels to his brow, and possibly of achieving for himself some independent sovereignty, like that to which Pius the Fifth had encouraged him to aspire. It may be thought some confirmation of this opinion--at least, it infers some jealousy of his brother's pretensions--that, in his despatches to his ministers in Italy, the king instructed them that, while they showed all proper deference to Don John, they should be careful not to address him in speech or in writing by the title of _Highness_, but to use that of _Excellency_; adding, that they were not to speak of this suggestion as coming from him.[353] He caused a similar notice to be given to the ambassadors of France, Germany, and England. This was but a feeble thread by which to check the flight of the young eagle as he was soaring to the clouds. It served to show, however, that it was not the will of his master that he should soar too high. Happily Philip was relieved from his fears in regard to the new pope, by the election of Cardinal Buoncampagno to the vacant throne. This ecclesiastic, who took the name of Gregory the Thirteenth, was personally known to the king, having in earlier life passed several years at the court of Castile. He was well affected to that court, and he possessed in full measure the zeal of his predecessor for carrying on the war against the Moslems. He lost no time in sending his "briefs of fire,"[354] as Don John called them, to rouse him to new exertions in the cause. In France, too, Philip learned with satisfaction that the Guises, the devoted partisans of Spain, had now the direction of public affairs. Thus relieved from apprehensions on these two quarters, Philip consented to his brother's departure with the remainder of his squadron. It amounted to fifty-five galleys and thirty smaller vessels. But when the prince reached Corfu, on the ninth of August, he found that the confederates, tired of waiting, had already put to sea, under the command of Colonna, in search of the Ottoman fleet. The Porte had shown such extraordinary despatch, that in six months it had built and equipped a hundred and twenty galleys, making, with those already on hand, a formidable fleet.[355] It was a remarkable proof of its resources, but suggests the idea of the wide difference between a Turkish galley of the sixteenth century and a man-of-war in our day. The command of the armament was given to the Algerine chieftain, Uluch Ali, who had so adroitly managed to bring off the few vessels which effected their escape at the battle of Lepanto. He stood deservedly high in the confidence of the sultan, and had the supreme direction in maritime affairs. [Sidenote: OPERATIONS IN THE LEVANT.] The two fleets came face to face with each other off the western coast of the Morea. But though the Algerine commander was much superior to the Christians in the number and strength of his vessels, he declined an action, showing the same adroitness in eluding a battle that he had before shown in escaping from one. At the close of August the confederates returned to Corfu, where they were reinforced by the rest of the Spanish squadron. The combined fleet, with this addition, amounted to some two hundred and forty-seven vessels, of which nearly two-thirds were galleys. It was a force somewhat superior to that of the enemy. Thus strengthened, Don John, unfurling the consecrated banner as generalissimo of the League, weighed anchor, and steered with his whole fleet in a southerly direction. It was not long before he appeared off the harbours of Modon and Navarino, where the two divisions of the Turkish armada were lying at anchor. He would have attacked them separately, but, notwithstanding his efforts, failed to prevent their effecting a junction in the harbour of Modon. On the seventh of October, Uluch Ali ventured out of port, and seemed disposed to give battle. It was the anniversary of the fight of Lepanto; and Don John flattered himself that he should again see his arms crowned with victory, as on that memorable day. But if the Turkish commander was unwilling to fight the confederates when he was superior to them in numbers, it was not likely that he would fight them now that he was inferior. After some manoeuvres which led to no result, he took refuge under the castle of Modon, and again retreated into port. There Don John would have followed him, with the design of forcing him to a battle. But from this he was dissuaded by the other leaders of the confederates, who considered that the chances of success in a place so strongly defended by no means warranted the risk. It was in vain that the allies prolonged their stay in the neighbourhood, with the hope of enticing the enemy to an engagement. The season wore away with no prospect of a better result. Meantime provisions were failing, the stormy weather of autumn was drawing nigh, and Don John, disgusted with what he regarded as the timid counsels of his associates, and with the control which they were permitted to exercise over him, decided, as it was now too late for any new enterprise, to break up and postpone further action till the following spring, when he hoped to enter on the campaign at an earlier day than he had done this year. The allies, accordingly, on reaching the island of Paxo, late in October, parted from each other, and withdrew to their respective winter-quarters. Don John, with the Spanish armament, returned to Sicily.[356] The pope and the king of Spain, nowise discouraged by the results of the campaign, resolved to resume operations early in the spring on a still more formidable scale than before. But their intentions were defeated by the startling intelligence, that Venice had entered into a separate treaty with the Porte. The treaty, which was negotiated, it is said, through the intervention of the French ambassador, was executed on the seventh of March, 1573. The terms seemed somewhat extraordinary, considering the relative positions of the parties. By the two principal articles the republic agreed to pay the annual sum of one hundred thousand ducats for three years to the sultan, and to cede the island of Cyprus, the original cause of the war. One might suppose it was the Turks, and not the Christians, who had won the battle of Lepanto.[357] Venice was a commercial state, and doubtless had more to gain from peace than from any war, however well conducted. In this point of view, even such a treaty may have been politic with so formidable an enemy. But a nation's interests, in the long run, cannot, any more than those of an individual, be divorced from its honour. And what could be more dishonourable than for a state secretly to make terms for herself with the enemy, and desert the allies who had come into the war at her solicitation and in her defence? Such conduct, indeed, was too much in harmony with the past history of Venice, and justified the reputation for bad faith which had made the European nations so reluctant to enter into the League.[358] The tidings were received by Philip with his usual composure. "If Venice," he said, "thinks she consults her own interests by such a proceeding, I can truly say that in what I have done I have endeavoured to consult both her interests and those of Christendom." He, however, spoke his mind more plainly afterwards to the Venetian ambassador. The pope gave free vent to his feelings in the consistory, where he denounced the conduct of Venice in the most bitter and contemptuous terms. When the republic sent a special envoy to deprecate his anger, and to excuse herself by the embarrassments of her situation, the pontiff refused to see him. Don John would not believe in the defection of Venice when the tidings were first announced to him. When he was advised of it by a direct communication from her government, he replied by indignantly commanding the great standard of the League to be torn down from his galley, and in its place to be unfurled the banner of Castile.[359] Such was the end of the Holy League, on which Pius the Fifth had so fully relied for the conquest of Constantinople and the recovery of Palestine. Philip could now transfer the war to the quarter he had preferred. He resolved, accordingly, to send an expedition to the Barbary coast. Tunis was selected as the place of attack,--a thriving city, and the home of many a corsair who preyed on the commerce of the Mediterranean. It had been taken by Charles the Fifth, in the memorable campaign of 1535, but had since been recovered by the Moslems. The Spaniards, however, still retained possession of the strong fortress of the Goletta, which overlooked the approaches to Tunis. In the latter part of September, 1574, Don John left the shores of Sicily at the head of a fleet consisting of about a hundred galleys, and nearly as many smaller vessels. The number of his troops amounted to not less than twenty thousand.[360] The story of the campaign is a short one. Most of the inhabitants of Tunis fled from the city. The few who remained did not care to bring the war on their heads by offering resistance to the Spaniards. Don John, without so much as firing a shot, marched in at the head of his battalions, through gates flung open to receive him. He found an ample booty awaiting him,--nearly fifty pieces of artillery, with ammunition and military stores, large quantities of grain, cotton and woollen cloths, rich silks and brocades, with various other kinds of costly merchandise. The troops spent more than a week in sacking the place.[361] They gained, in short, everything--but glory; for little glory was to be gained where there were no obstacles to be overcome. [Sidenote: DON JOHN AT TUNIS.] Don John gave orders that no injury should be offered to the persons of the inhabitants. He forbade that any should be made slaves. By a proclamation, he invited all to return to their dwellings, under the assurance of his protection. In one particular his conduct was remarkable. Philip, disgusted with the expenses to which the maintenance of the castle of the Goletta annually subjected him, had recommended, if not positively directed, his brother to dismantle the place, and to demolish in like manner the fortifications of Tunis.[362] Instead of heeding these instructions, Don John no sooner saw himself in possession of the capital, than he commanded the Goletta to be thoroughly repaired, and at the same time provided for the erection of a strong fortress in the city. This work he committed to an Italian engineer, named Cerbelloni, a knight of Malta, with whom he left eight thousand soldiers, to be employed in the construction of the fort, and to furnish him with a garrison to defend it. Don John, it is said, had been urged to take this course by his secretary, Juan de Soto, a man of ability, but of an intriguing temper, who fostered in his master those ambitious projects which had been encouraged, as we have seen, by Pius the Fifth. No more eligible spot seemed likely to present itself for the seat of his dominion than Tunis,--a flourishing capital surrounded by a well-peopled and fruitful territory. Philip had been warned of the unwholesome influence exerted by De Soto; and he now sought to remove him from the person of his brother by giving him a distinct position in the army, and by sending another to replace him in his post of secretary. The person thus sent was Juan de Escovedo. But it was soon found that the influence which Escovedo acquired over the young prince was both greater and more mischievous than that of his predecessor; and the troubles that grew out of this new intimacy were destined, as we shall see hereafter, to form some of the darkest pages in the history of the times. Having provided for the security of his new acquisition, and received, moreover, the voluntary submission of the neighbouring town of Biserta, the Spanish commander returned with his fleet to Sicily. He landed at Palermo, amidst the roaring of cannon, the shouts of the populace, and the usual rejoicings that announce the return of the victorious commander. He did not, however, prolong his stay in Sicily. After dismissing his fleet, he proceeded to Naples, where he landed about the middle of November. He proposed to pass the winter in this capital, where the delicious climate and the beauty of the women, says a contemporary chronicler, had the attractions for him that belonged naturally to his age.[363] His partiality for Naples was amply requited by the inhabitants, especially that lovelier portion of them whose smiles were the well-prized guerdon of the soldier. If his brilliant exterior and the charm of his society had excited their admiration when he first appeared among them as an adventurer in the path of honour, how much was this admiration likely to be increased when he returned with the halo of glory beaming around his brow, as the successful champion of Christendom? The days of John of Austria glided merrily along in the gay capital of Southern Italy. But we should wrong him did we suppose that all his hours were passed in idle dalliance. A portion of each day, on the contrary, was set apart for study. Another part was given to the despatch of business. When he went abroad, he affected the society of men distinguished for their science, or still more for their knowledge of public affairs. In his intercourse with these persons he showed dignity of demeanour tempered by courtesy; while his conversation revealed those lofty aspirations which proved that his thoughts were fixed on a higher eminence than any he had yet reached. It was clear to every observer that ambition was the moving principle of his actions,--the passion to which every other passion, even the love of pleasure, was wholly subordinate. In the midst of the gaieties of Naples his thoughts were intent on the best means of securing his African empire. He despatched his secretary, Escovedo, to the pope, to solicit his good offices with Philip. Gregory entertained the same friendly feelings for Don John which his predecessor had shown, and he good-naturedly acquiesced in his petition. He directed his nuncio at the Castilian court to do all in his power to promote the suit of the young chief, and to assure the king that nothing could be more gratifying to the head of the Church than to see so worthy a recompense bestowed on one who had rendered such signal services to Christendom. Philip received the communication in the most gracious manner. He was grateful, he said, for the interest which the pope condescended to take in the fortunes of Don John; and nothing, certainly, would be more agreeable to his own feelings than to have the power to reward his brother according to his deserts. But to take any steps at present in the matter would be premature. He had received information that the sultan was making extensive preparations for the recovery of Tunis. Before giving it away, therefore, it would be well to see to whom it belonged.[364] Philip's information was correct. No sooner had Selim learned the fate of the Barbary capital, than he made prodigious efforts for driving the Spaniards from their conquests. He assembled a powerful armament, which he placed under the command of Uluch Ali. As lord of Algiers, that chief had a particular interest in preventing any Christian power from planting its foot in the neighbourhood of his own dominions. The command of the land forces was given to Sinan Pasha, Selim's son-in-law. Early in July, the Ottoman fleet arrived off the Barbary coast. Tunis offered as little resistance to the arms of the Moslems as it had before done to those of the Christians. That city had been so often transferred from one master to another, that it seemed almost a matter of indifference to the inhabitants to whom it belonged. But the Turks found it a more difficult matter to reduce the castle of the Goletta and the fort raised by the brave engineer Cerbelloni, now well advanced, though not entirely completed. It was not till the middle of September, after an incredible waste of life on the part of the assailants, and the extermination of nearly the whole of the Spanish garrisons, that both the fortresses surrendered.[365] [Sidenote: DON JOHN ON A MISSION TO GENOA.] No sooner was he in possession of them, than the Turkish commander did that which Philip had in vain wished his brother to do. He razed to the ground the fortress of the Goletta. Thus ended the campaign, in which Spain, besides her recent conquests, saw herself stripped of the strong castle which had defied every assault of the Moslems since the time of Charles the Fifth. One may naturally ask, Where was John of Austria all this time? He had not been idle, nor had he remained an indifferent spectator of the loss of the place he had so gallantly won for Spain. But when he first received tidings of the presence of a Turkish fleet before Tunis, he was absent on a mission to Genoa, or rather to its neighbourhood. That republic was at this time torn by factions so fierce, that it was on the brink of a civil war. The mischief threatened to extend even more widely, as the neighbouring powers, especially France and Savoy, prepared to take part in the quarrel, in hopes of establishing their own authority in the state. At length Philip, who had inherited from his father the somewhat ill-defined title of "Protector of Genoa," was compelled to interpose in the dispute. It was on this mission that Don John was sent, to watch more nearly the rival factions. It was not till after this domestic broil had lasted for several months, that the prudent policy of the Spanish monarch succeeded in reconciling the hostile parties, and thus securing the republic from the horrors of a civil war. He reaped the good fruits of his temperate conduct in the maintenance of his own authority in the counsels of the republic; thus binding to himself an ally whose navy, in time of war, served greatly to strengthen his maritime resources.[366] While detained on this delicate mission, Don John did what he could for Tunis, by urging the viceroys of Sicily and Naples to send immediate aid to the beleaguered garrisons.[367] But these functionaries seem to have been more interested in the feuds of Genoa than in the fate of the African colony. Granvelle, who presided over Naples, was even said to be so jealous of the rising fame of John of Austria, as not to be unwilling that his lofty pretensions should be somewhat humbled.[368] The supplies sent were wholly unequal to the exigency. Don John, impatient of the delay, as soon as he could extricate himself from the troubles of Genoa, sailed for Naples, and thence speedily crossed to Sicily. He there made every effort to assemble an armament, of which he prepared, in spite of the remonstrances of his friends, to take the command in person. But nature, no less than man, was against him. A tempest scattered his fleet: and when he had reassembled it, and fairly put to sea, he was baffled by contrary winds, and taking refuge in the neighbouring port of Trapani, was detained there until tidings reached him of the fall of Tunis. They fell heavily on his ear; for they announced to him that all his bright visions of an African empire had vanished, like the airy fabric of an Eastern tale. All that remained was the consciousness that he had displeased his brother by his scheme of independent sovereignty, and by his omission to raze the fortress of the Goletta, the unavailing defence of which had cost the lives of so many of his brave countrymen. But Don John, however chagrined by the tidings, was of too elastic a temper to yield to despondency. He was a knight-errant in the true sense of the term. He still clung as fondly as ever to the hope of one day carving out with his good sword an independent dominion for himself. His first step, he considered, was to make his peace with his brother. Though not summoned thither, he resolved to return at once to the Castilian court,--for in that direction, he felt, lay the true road to preferment. BOOK VI. CHAPTER I. DOMESTIC AFFAIRS OF SPAIN. Internal Administration of Spain--Absolute Power of the Crown--Royal Councils--Alva and Ruy Gomez--Espinoza--Personal Habits of Philip--Court and Nobles--The Cortes--The Guards of Castile. Seventeen years had now elapsed since Philip the Second ascended the throne of his ancestors,--a period long enough to disclose the policy of his government; longer, indeed, than that of the entire reigns of some of his predecessors. In the previous portion of this work, the reader has been chiefly occupied with the foreign relations of Spain, and with military details. It is now time to pause, and, before plunging anew into the stormy scenes of the Netherlands, to consider the internal administration of the country and the character and policy of the monarch who presided over it. The most important epoch in Castilian history since the great Saracen invasion in the eighth century, is the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, when anarchy was succeeded by law, and from the elements of chaos arose that beautiful fabric of order and constitutional liberty which promised a new era for the nation. In the assertion of her rights, Isabella, to whom this revolution is chiefly to be attributed, was obliged to rely on the support of the people. It was natural that she should requite their services by aiding them in the recovery of their own rights,--especially of those which had been usurped by the rapacious nobles. Indeed, it was the obvious policy of the crown to humble the pride of the aristocracy and abate their arrogant pretensions. In this it was so well supported by the commons, that the scheme perfectly succeeded. By the depression of the privileged classes and the elevation of the people, the different orders were brought more strictly within their constitutional limits; and the state made a nearer approach to a well-balanced limited monarchy than at any previous period of its history. This auspicious revolution was soon, alas! to be followed by another, of a most disastrous kind. Charles the Fifth, who succeeded his grandfather Ferdinand, was born a foreigner,--and a foreigner he remained through his whole life. He was a stranger to the feelings and habits of the Spaniards, had little respect for their institutions, and as little love for the nation. He continued to live mostly abroad; was occupied with foreign enterprises; and the only people whom he really loved were those of the Netherlands, his native land. The Spaniards requited these feelings of indifference in full measure. They felt that the glory of the imperial name shed no lustre upon them. Thus estranged at heart, they were easily provoked to insurrection by his violation of their rights. The insurrection was a failure; and the blow which crushed the insurgents on the plains of Villalar, deprived them for ever of the few liberties which they had been permitted to retain. They were excluded from all share in the government, and were henceforth summoned to the Cortes only to swear allegiance to the heir apparent, or to furnish subsidies for their master. They were indeed allowed to lay their grievances before the throne. But they had no means of enforcing redress; for, with the cunning policy of a despot, Charles would not receive their petitions until they had first voted the supplies. The nobles, who had stood by their master in the struggle, fared no better. They found too late how short-sighted was the policy which had led them to put their faith in princes. Henceforth they could not be said to form a necessary part of the legislature. For as they insisted on their right to be excused from bearing any share in the burdens of the state, they could take no part in voting the supplies; and as this was almost the only purpose for which the Cortes was convened, their presence was no longer required in it. Instead of the powers which were left to them untouched by Ferdinand and Isabella, they were now amused with high-sounding and empty titles, or with offices about the person of the monarch. In this way they gradually sank into the unsubstantial though glittering pageant of a court. Meanwhile the government of Castile, assuming the powers of both making the laws and enforcing their execution, became in its essential attributes nearly as absolute as that of Turkey. Such was the gigantic despotism which, on the death of Charles, passed into the hands of Philip the Second. The son had many qualities in common with his father. But among these was not that restless ambition of foreign conquest which was ever goading the emperor. Nor was he, like his father, urged by the love of glory to military achievement. He was of too sluggish a nature to embark readily in great enterprises. He was capable of much labour; but it was of that sedentary kind which belongs to the cabinet rather than the camp. His tendencies were naturally pacific: and up to the period at which we are now arrived, he had engaged in no wars but those into which he had been drawn by the revolt of his vassals, as in the Netherlands and Granada, or those forced on him by circumstances beyond his control. Such was the war which he had carried on with the pope and the French monarchy at the beginning of his reign. But while less ambitious than Charles of foreign acquisitions, Philip was full as tenacious of the possessions and power which had come to him by inheritance. Nor was it likely that the regal prerogative would suffer any diminution in his reign, or that the nobles or commons would be allowed to retrieve any of the immunities which they had lost under his predecessors. Philip understood the character of his countrymen better than his father had done. A Spaniard by birth, he was, as I have more than once had occasion to remark, a Spaniard in his whole nature. His tastes, his habits, his prejudices, were all Spanish. His policy was directed solely to the aggrandisement of Spain. The distant races whom he governed were all strangers to him. With a few exceptions, Spaniards were the only persons he placed in offices of trust. His Castilian countrymen saw with pride and satisfaction that they had a native prince on the throne, who identified his own interests with theirs. They contrasted this conduct with that of his father, and requited it with a devotion such as they had shown to few of his predecessors. They not only held him in reverence, says the Venetian minister Contarini, but respected his laws, as something sacred and inviolable.[369] It was the people of the Netherlands who rose up against him. For similar reasons it fared just the opposite with Charles. His Flemish countrymen remained loyal to the last: it was his Castilian subjects who were driven to rebellion. [Sidenote: ALVA AND RUY GOMEZ.] Though tenacious of power, Philip had not the secret consciousness of strength which enabled his father, unaided as it were, to bear up so long under the burden of empire. The habitual caution of the son made him averse to taking any step of importance without first ascertaining the opinions of others. Yet he was not willing, like his ancestor, the good Queen Isabella, to invoke the co-operation of the Cortes, and thus awaken the consciousness of power in an arm of the government which had been so long smitten with paralysis. Such an expedient was fraught with too much danger. He found a substitute in the several councils, the members of which, appointed by the crown and removable at its pleasure, were pledged to the support of the prerogative. Under Ferdinand and Isabella there had been a complete reorganization of these councils. Their number was increased under Charles the Fifth, to suit the increased extent of the empire. It was still further enlarged by Philip.[370] Under him there were no less than eleven councils, among which may be particularly noticed those of war, of finance, of justice, and of state.[371] Of these various bodies the council of state, charged with the most important concerns of the monarchy, was held in highest consideration. The number of its members varied. At the time of which I am writing, it amounted to sixteen.[372] But the weight of the business devolved on less than half that number. It was composed of both ecclesiastics and laymen. Among the latter were some eminent jurists. A sprinkling of men of the robe, indeed, was to be found in most of the councils. Philip imitated in this the policy of Ferdinand and Isabella, who thus intended to humble the pride of the great lords, and to provide themselves with a loyal militia, whose services would be of no little advantage in maintaining the prerogative. Among the members of the council of state, two may be particularly noticed for their pre-eminence in that body. These were the duke of Alva and Ruy Gomez de Silva, prince of Eboli. With the former the reader is well acquainted. His great talents, his ample experience both in civil and military life, his iron will, and the fearlessness with which he asserted it, even his stern and overbearing manner, which seemed to proclaim his own superiority, all marked him out as the leader of a party. The emperor appears to have feared the ascendancy which Alva might one day acquire over Philip. "The duke," wrote Charles to his son in a letter before cited, "is the ablest statesman and the best soldier I have in my dominions. Consult him, above all, in military affairs. But do not depend on him entirely in these or any other matters. Depend on no one but yourself." The advice was good; and Philip did not fail to profit by it. Though always seeking the opinions of others, it was the better to form his own. He was too jealous of power to submit to the control, even to the guidance, of another. With all his deference to Alva, on whose services he set the greatest value, the king seems to have shown him but little of that personal attachment which he evinced for his rival, Ruy Gomez. This nobleman was descended from an ancient house in Portugal, a branch of which had been transplanted to Castile. He had been early received as a page in the imperial household, where, though he was several years older than Philip, his amiable temper, his engaging manners, and above all, that tact which made his fortune in later life, soon rendered him the prince's favourite. An anecdote is reported of him at this time, which, however difficult to credit, rests on respectable authority. While engaged in their sports, the page accidentally struck the prince. The emperor, greatly incensed, and conceiving that such an indignity to the heir-apparent was to be effaced only by the blood of the offender, condemned the unhappy youth to lose his life. The tears and entreaties of Philip at length so far softened the heart of his father, that he consented to commute the punishment of death for exile. Indeed, it is hard to believe that Charles had ever really intended to carry his cruel sentence into execution. The exile was of no long duration. The society of Gomez had become indispensable to the prince, who, pining under the separation, at length prevailed on his father to recall the young noble, and reinstate him in his former situation in the palace.[373] The regard of Philip, who was not of a fickle disposition, seemed to increase with years. We find Ruy Gomez one of the brilliant suite who accompanied him to London on his visit there to wed the English queen. After the emperor's abdication, Ruy Gomez continued to occupy a distinguished place in Philip's household, as first gentleman of the bedchamber. By virtue of this office he was required to attend his master both at his rising and his going to rest. His situation gave him ready access at all hours to the royal person. It was soon understood that there was no one in the court who exercised a more important influence over the monarch; and he naturally became the channel through which applicants for favours sought to prefer their petitions.[374] Meanwhile the most substantial honours were liberally bestowed on him. He was created duke of Pastraña, with an income of twenty-five thousand crowns--a large revenue, considering the value of money in that day. The title of Pastraña was subsequently merged in that of Eboli, by which he has continued to be known. It was derived from his marriage with the princess of Eboli, Anna de Mendoza, a lady much younger than he, and, though blind of one eye, celebrated for her beauty no less than her wit. She was yet more celebrated for her gallantries, and for the tragic results to which they led--a subject closely connected with the personal history of Philip, to which I shall return hereafter. Among his other dignities Ruy Gomez was made a member of the council of state, in which body he exercised an influence not inferior, to say the least of it, to that of any of his associates. His head was not turned by his prosperity. He did not, like many a favourite before him, display his full-blown fortunes in the eye of the world; nor, though he maintained a state suited to his station, did he, like Wolsey, excite the jealousy of his master by a magnificence in his way of living that eclipsed the splendours of royalty. Far from showing arrogance to his inferiors, he was affable to all, did what he could to serve their interests with the king, and magnanimously spoke of his rivals in terms of praise. By this way of proceeding he enjoyed the good fortune, rare for a favourite, of being both caressed by his sovereign and beloved by the people.[375] [Sidenote: FIGUEROA AND ESPINOSA.] There is no evidence that Ruy Gomez had the moral courage to resist the evil tendency of Philip's policy, still less that he ventured to open the monarch's eyes to his errors. He had too keen a regard to his own interests to attempt this. He may have thought, probably with some reason, that such a course would avail little with the king, and would bring ruin on himself. His life was passed in the atmosphere of a court, and he had imbibed its selfish spirit. He had profoundly studied the character of his master, and he accommodated himself to all his humours with an obsequiousness which does little honour to his memory. The duke of Alva, who hated him with all the hatred of a rival, speaking of him after his death, remarked: "Ruy Gomez, though not the greatest statesman that ever lived, was such a master in the knowledge of the humours and dispositions of kings, that we were all of us fools in comparison."[376] Yet the influence of the favourite was, on the whole, good. He was humane and liberal in his temper, and inclined to peace,--virtues which were not too common in that iron age, and which in the council served much to counteract the stern policy of Alva. Persons of a generous nature ranged themselves under him as their leader. When John of Austria came to court, his liberal spirit prompted him at once to lean on Ruy Gomez as his friend and counsellor. The correspondence which passed between them when the young soldier was on his campaigns, in which he addressed the favourite by the epithet of "father," confessing his errors to him and soliciting his advice, is honourable to both. The historian Cabrera, who had often seen him, sums up the character of Ruy Gomez by saying: "He was the first pilot who in these stormy seas both lived and died secure, always contriving to gain a safe port."[377] His death took place in July, 1573. "Living," adds the writer, in his peculiar style, "he preserved the favour of his sovereign;--dead, he was mourned by him,--and by the whole nation, which kept him in its recollection as the pattern of loyal vassals and prudent favourites."[378] Besides the two leaders in the council, there were two others who deserve to be noticed. One of these was Figueroa, count, afterwards created by Philip duke, of Feria, a grandee of Spain. He was one of those who accompanied the king on his first visit to England. He there married a lady of rank, and, as the reader may remember, afterwards represented his master at the court of Elizabeth. He was a man of excellent parts, enriched by that kind of practical knowledge which he had gained from foreign travel and a familiarity with courts. He lived magnificently, somewhat encumbering his large estates indeed by his profusion. His person was handsome; and his courteous and polished manners made him one of the most brilliant ornaments of the royal circle. He had a truly chivalrous sense of honour, and was greatly esteemed by the king, who placed him near his person as captain of his Spanish guard. Feria was a warm supporter of Ruy Gomez; and the long friendship that subsisted between the two nobles seems never to have been clouded by those feelings of envy and jealousy which so often arise between rivals contending for the smiles of their sovereign. The other member of the council of state was a person of still more importance. This was the Cardinal Espinosa, who, though an ecclesiastic, possessed such an acquaintance with affairs as belonged to few laymen. Philip's eye readily discovered his uncommon qualities, and he heaped upon him offices in rapid succession, any one of which might well have engrossed his time. But Espinosa was as fond of labour as most men are of ease; and in every situation he not only performed his own share of the work, but very often that of his associates. He was made president of the council of Castile, as well as that of the Indies, and finally a member of the council of state. He was inquisitor-general, sat in the royal chancery of Seville, and held the bishopric of Siguença, one of the richest sees in the kingdom. To crown the whole, in 1568, Pius the Fifth, on the application of Philip, gave him a cardinal's hat. The king seems to have taken the greater pleasure in this rapid elevation of Espinosa, that he sprang from a comparatively humble condition; and thus the height to which he raised him served the more keenly to mortify the nobles. But the cardinal, as is too often the case with those who have suddenly risen to greatness, did not bear his honours meekly. His love of power was insatiable; and when an office became vacant in any of his own departments, he was prompt to secure it for one of his dependents. An anecdote is told in relation to a place in the chancery of Granada, which had become open by the death of the incumbent. As soon as the news reached Madrid, Hernandez de Cordova, the royal equerry, made application to the king for it. Philip answered that he was too late, that the place had been already given away. "How am I to understand your majesty?" said the petitioner; "the tidings were brought to me by a courier the moment at which the post became vacant, and no one could have brought them sooner unless he had wings." "That may be," said the monarch; "but I have just given the place to another, whom the cardinal recommended to me as I was leaving the council."[379] Espinosa, says a contemporary, was a man of noble presence. He had the air of one born to command. His haughty bearing, however, did little for him with the more humble suitors, and disgusted the great lords, who looked down with contempt on his lowly origin. They complained to the king of his intolerable arrogance; and the king was not unwilling to receive their charges against him. In fact, he had himself grown to be displeased with his minister's presumption. He was weary of the deference which, now that Espinosa had become a cardinal, he felt obliged to pay him; of coming forward to receive him when he entered the room; of taking off his cap to the churchman, and giving him a seat as high as his own; finally, of allowing him to interfere in all appointments to office. It seemed incredible, says the historian, that a prince so jealous of his prerogatives should have submitted to all this so long.[380] Philip was now determined to submit to it no longer; but to tumble from its pride of place the idol which he had raised with his own hands. He was slow in betraying his intention, by word or act, to the courtiers, still more to the unfortunate minister, who continued to show the same security and confidence as if he were treading the solid ground, instead of the crust of a volcano. [Sidenote: THE COUNCIL OF STATE.] At length an opportunity offered when Espinosa, in a discussion respecting the affairs of Flanders, made a statement which the king deemed not entirely conformable to truth. Philip at once broke in upon the discourse with an appearance of great indignation, and charged the minister with falsehood. The blow was the more effectual, coming from one who had been scarcely ever known to give way to passion.[381] The cardinal was stunned by it. He at once saw his ruin, and the vision of glory vanished for ever. He withdrew, more dead than alive, to his house. There he soon took to his bed; and in a short time, in September 1572, he breathed his last. His fate was that of more than one minister whose head had been made giddy by the height to which he had climbed.[382] The council of state under its two great leaders, Alva and Ruy Gomez, was sure to be divided on every question of importance. This was a fruitful source of embarrassment, and to private suitors, especially, occasioned infinite delay. Such was the hostility of the parties to each other, that, if an applicant for favour secured the good-will of one of the chiefs, he was very certain to encounter the ill-will of the other.[383] He was a skilful pilot who in such cross seas could keep his course. Yet the existence of these divisions does not seem to have been discouraged by Philip, who saw in them only the natural consequence of rivalry for his favour. They gave him, moreover, the advantage of seeing every question of moment well canvassed, and, by furnishing him with the opposite opinions of his councillors, enabled him the more accurately to form his own. In the mean time, the value which he set on both the great chiefs made him careful not to disgust either by any show of preference for his rival. He held the balance adroitly between them; and if on any occasion he bestowed a mark of his favour on the one, it was usually followed by some equivalent to the other.[384] Thus, for the first twelve years of his reign, their influence may be said to have been pretty equally exerted. Then came the memorable discussion respecting the royal visit to the Netherlands, Alva, as the reader may remember, was of the opinion that Philip should send an army to punish the refractory and bring the country to obedience, when the king might visit it with safety to his own person. Ruy Gomez, on the other hand, recommended that Philip should go at once, without an army, and by mild and conciliatory measures win the malcontents back to their allegiance. Each advised the course most congenial to his own temper, and the one, moreover, which would have required the aid of his own services to carry into execution. Unfortunately, the violent measures of Alva were more congenial to the stern temper off the king, and the duke was sent at the head of his battalions. But if Alva thus gained the victory, it was Ruy Gomez who reaped the fruits of it. Left without a rival in the council, his influence became predominant over every other. It became still more firmly established, as the result showed that his rival's mission was a failure. So it continued, after Alva's return, till the favourite's death. Even then his well-organized party was so deeply rooted, that for several years longer it maintained an ascendancy in the cabinet, while the duke languished in disgrace. Philip, unlike most of his predecessors, rarely took his seat in the council of state. It was his maxim that his ministers would more freely discuss measures in the absence of their master than when he was there to overawe them. The course he adopted was for a _consulta_, or a committee of two or three members, to wait on him in his cabinet, and report to him the proceedings of the council.[385] He more commonly, especially in the later years of his reign, preferred to receive a full report of the discussion, written so as to leave an ample margin for his own commentaries. These were eminently characteristic of the man, and were so minute as usually to cover several sheets of paper. Philip had a reserved and unsocial temper. He preferred to work alone, in the seclusion of his closet, rather than in the presence of others. This may explain the reason, in part, why he seemed so much to prefer writing to talking. Even with his private secretaries, who were always near at hand, he chose to communicate by writing; and they had as large a mass of his autograph notes in their possession, as if the correspondence had been carried on from different parts of the kingdom.[386] His thoughts too--at any rate his words--came slowly; and by writing he gained time for the utterance of them. Philip has been accused of indolence. As far as the body was concerned, such an accusation was well founded. Even when young, he had no fondness, as we have seen, for the robust and chivalrous sports of the age. He never, like his father, conducted military expeditions in person. He thought it wiser to follow the example of his great-grandfather, Ferdinand the Catholic, who stayed at home and sent his generals to command his armies. As little did he like to travel,--forming too in this respect a great contrast to the emperor. He had been years on the throne before he made a visit to his great southern capital, Seville. It was a matter of complaint in Cortes that he thus withdrew himself from the eyes of his subjects. The only sport he cared for--not by any means to excess--was shooting with his gun or his crossbow such game as he could find in his own grounds at the wood of Segovia, or Aranjuez, or some other of his pleasant country seats, none of them at a great distance from Madrid. On a visit to such places he would take with him as large a heap of papers as if he were a poor clerk, earning his bread; and after the fatigues of the chase, he would retire to his cabinet and refresh himself with his despatches.[387] It would, indeed, be a great mistake to charge him with sluggishness of mind. He was content to toil for hours, and long into the night, at his solitary labours.[388] No expression of weariness or of impatience was known to escape him. A characteristic anecdote is told of him in regard to this. Having written a despatch, late at night, to be sent on the following morning, he handed it to his secretary to throw some sand over it. This functionary, who happened to be dozing, suddenly roused himself, and, snatching up the ink-stand, emptied it on the paper. The king, coolly remarking that "it would have been better to use the sand," set himself down, without any complaint, to rewrite the whole of the letter.[389] A prince so much addicted to the pen, we may well believe, must have left a large amount of autograph materials behind him. Few monarchs, in point of fact, have done so much in this way to illustrate the history of their reigns. Fortunate would it have been for the historian who was to profit by it, if the royal composition had been somewhat less diffuse and the handwriting somewhat more legible. [Sidenote: PERSONAL HABITS OF PHILIP.] Philip was an economist of time, and regulated the distribution of it with great precision. In the morning, he gave audience to foreign ambassadors. He afterwards heard mass. After mass came dinner, in his father's fashion. But dinner was not an affair with Philip of so much moment as it was with Charles. He was exceedingly temperate both in eating and drinking, and not unfrequently had his physician at his side, to warn him against any provocative of the gout,--the hereditary disease which at a very early period had begun to affect his health. After a light repast, he gave audience to such of his subjects as desired to present their memorials. He received the petitioners graciously, and listened to all they had to say with patience,--for that was his virtue. But his countenance was exceedingly grave,--which, in truth, was its natural expression; and there was a reserve in his deportment which made the boldest feel ill at ease in his presence. On such occasions he would say, "Compose yourself,"--a recommendation that had not always the tranquillizing effect intended.[390] Once when a papal nuncio forgot, in his confusion, the address he had prepared, the king coolly remarked: "If you will bring it in writing, I will read it myself, and expedite your business."[391] It was natural that men of even the highest rank should be overawed in the presence of a monarch who held the destinies of so many millions in his hands, and who surrounded himself with a veil of mystery which the most cunning politician could not penetrate. The reserve so noticeable in his youth increased with age. He became more difficult of access. His public audiences were much less frequent. In the summer he would escape from them altogether, by taking refuge in some one of his country places. His favourite retreat was his palace-monastery of the Escorial, then slowly rising under his patronage, and affording him an occupation congenial with his taste. He seems, however, to have sought the country not so much from the love of its beauties as for the retreat it afforded him from the town. When in the latter, he rarely showed himself to the public eye, going abroad chiefly in a close carriage, and driving late, so as to return to the city after dark.[392] Thus he lived in solitude even in the heart of his capital, knowing much less of men from his own observation than from the reports that were made to him. In availing himself of these sources of information he was indefatigable. He caused a statistical survey of Spain to be prepared for his own use. It was a work of immense labour, embracing a vast amount of curious details, such as were rarely brought together in those days.[393] He kept his spies at the principal European courts, who furnished him with intelligence; and he was as well acquainted with what was passing in England and in France, as if he had resided on the spot. We have seen how well he knew the smallest details of the proceedings in the Netherlands, sometimes even better than Margaret herself. He employed similar means to procure information that might be of service in making appointments to ecclesiastical and civil offices. In his eagerness for information, his ear was ever open to accusations against his ministers, which, as they were sure to be locked up in his own bosom, were not slow in coming to him.[394] This filled his mind with suspicions. He waited till time had proved their truth, treating the object of them with particular favour till the hour of vengeance had arrived. The reader will not have forgotten the terrible saying of Philip's own historian, "His dagger followed close upon his smile."[395] Even to the ministers in whom Philip appeared most to confide, he often gave but half his confidence. Instead of frankly furnishing them with a full statement of facts, he sometimes made so imperfect a disclosure, that, when his measures came to be taken, his counsellors were surprised to find of how much they had been kept in ignorance. When he communicated to them any foreign despatches, he would not scruple to alter the original, striking out some passages and inserting others, so as best to serve his purpose. The copy, in this garbled form, was given to the council. Such was the case with, a letter of Don John of Austria, containing an account of the troubles of Genoa; the original of which, with its numerous alterations in the royal handwriting, still exists in the archives of Simancas.[396] But though Philip's suspicious nature prevented him from entirely trusting his ministers,--though with chilling reserve he kept at a distance even those who approached him nearest,--he was kind, even liberal, to his servants, was not capricious in his humours, and seldom, if ever, gave way to those sallies of passion so common in princes clothed with, absolute power. He was patient to the last degree, and rarely changed his ministers without good cause. Ruy Gomez was not the only courtier who continued in the royal service to the end of his days. Philip was of a careful, or, to say truth, of a frugal disposition, which he may well have inherited from his father; though this did not, as with his father in later life, degenerate into parsimony. The beginning of his reign, indeed, was distinguished by some acts of uncommon liberality. One of these occurred at the close of Alva's campaigns in Italy, when the king presented that commander with a hundred and fifty thousand ducats, greatly to the discontent of the emperor. This was contrary to his usual policy. As he grew older, and the expenses of government pressed more heavily on him, he became more economical. Yet those who served him had no reason, like the emperor's servants, to complain of their master's meanness. It was observed, however, that he was slow to recompense those who served him until they had proved themselves worthy of it. Still it was a man's own fault, says a contemporary, if he was not well paid for his services in the end.[397] [Sidenote: THE ROYAL ESTABLISHMENT.] In one particular he indulged in a most lavish expenditure. This was his household. It was formed on the Burgundian model,--the most stately and magnificent in Europe. Its peculiarity consisted in the number and quality of the members who composed it. The principal officers were nobles of the highest rank, who frequently held posts of great consideration in the state. Thus the duke of Alva was chief major-domo; the prince of Eboli was first gentleman of the bedchamber; the duke of Feria was captain of the Spanish guard. There was the grand equerry, the grand huntsman, the chief muleteer, and a host of officers, some of whom were designated by menial titles, though nobles and cavaliers of family.[398] There were forty pages, sons of the most illustrious houses in Castile. The whole household amounted to no less than fifteen hundred persons.[399] The king's guard consisted of three hundred men, one-third of whom were Spaniards, one-third Flemings, and the remainder Germans.[400] The queen had also her establishment on the same scale. She had twenty-six ladies-in-waiting, and, among other functionaries, no less than four physicians to watch over her health.[401] The annual cost of the royal establishment amounted to full two hundred thousand florins.[402] The Cortes earnestly remonstrated against this useless prodigality, beseeching the king to place his household on the modest scale to which the monarchs of Castile had been accustomed.[403] And it seems singular that one usually so averse to extravagance and pomp should have so recklessly indulged in them here. It was one of those inconsistencies which we sometimes meet with in private life, when a man, habitually careful of his expenses, indulges himself in some, which taste, or, as in this case, early habits, have made him regard as indispensable. The emperor had been careful to form the household of his son, when very young, on the Burgundian model; and Philip, thus early trained, probably regarded it as essential to the royal dignity. The king did not affect an ostentation in his dress corresponding with that of his household. This seemed to be suited to the sober-coloured livery of his own feelings, and was almost always of black velvet or satin, with shoes of the former material. He wore a cap garnished with plumes after the Spanish fashion. He used few ornaments, scarce any but the rich jewel of the Golden Fleece, which hung from his neck. But in his attire he was scrupulously neat, says the Venetian diplomatist who tells these particulars; and he changed his dress for a new one every month, giving away his cast-off suits to his attendants.[404] It was a capital defect in Philip's administration, that his love of power and his distrust of others made him desire to do everything himself; even those things which could be done much better by his ministers. As he was slow in making up his own opinions, and seldom acted without first ascertaining those of his council, we may well understand the mischievous consequences of such delay. Loud were the complaints of private suitors, who saw month after month pass away without an answer to their petitions. The state suffered no less, as the wheels of government seemed actually to stand still under the accumulated pressure of the public business. Even when a decision did come, it often came too late to be of service; for the circumstances which led to it had wholly changed. Of this the reader has seen more than one example in the Netherlands. The favourite saying of Philip, that "time and he were a match for any other two," was a sad mistake. The time he demanded was his ruin. It was in vain that Granvelle, who at a later day came to Castile to assume the direction of affairs, endeavoured, in his courtly language, to convince the king of his error, telling him that no man could bear up under such a load of business, which sooner or later must destroy his health, perhaps his life.[405] A letter addressed to the king by his grand almoner, Don Luis Manrique, told the truth in plainer terms, such as had not often reached the royal ear. "Your majesty's subjects everywhere complain," he says, "of your manner of doing business; sitting all day long over your papers, from your desire, as they intimate, to seclude yourself from the world, and from a want of confidence in your ministers.[406] Hence such interminable delays as fill the soul of every suitor with despair. Your subjects are discontented that you refuse to take your seat in the council of state. The Almighty," he adds, "did not send kings into the world to spend their days in reading or writing, or even in meditation and prayer,"--in which Philip was understood to pass much of his time,--"but to serve as public oracles, to which all may resort for answers. If any sovereign have received this grace, it is your majesty; and the greater the sin, therefore, if you do not give free access to all."[407] One may be surprised to find that language such as this was addressed to a prince like Philip the Second, and that he should have borne it so patiently. But in this the king resembled his father. Churchmen and jesters--of which latter he had usually one or two in attendance--were privileged persons at his court. In point of fact, the homilies of the one had as little effect as the jests of the other. The pomp of the royal establishment was imitated on a smaller scale by the great nobles living on their vast estates scattered over the country. Their revenues were very large, though often heavily burdened. Out of twenty-three dukes, in 1581, only three had an income so low as forty thousand ducats a year.[408] That of most of the others ranged from fifty to a hundred thousand; and that of one, the duke of Medina Sidonia, was computed at a hundred and thirty-five thousand. Revenues like these would not easily have been matched in that day by the aristocracy of any other nation in Christendom.[409] [Sidenote: POMP OF THE NOBLES.] The Spanish grandees preferred to live on their estates in the country. But in the winter they repaired to Madrid, and displayed their magnificence at the court of their sovereign. Here they dazzled the eye by the splendour of their equipages, the beauty of their horses, their rich liveries, and the throng of their retainers. But with all this the Castilian court was far from appearing in the eyes of foreigners a gay one; forming in this respect a contrast to the Flemish court of Margaret of Parma. It seemed to have imbibed much of the serious and indeed sombre character of the monarch who presided over it. All was stately and ceremonious, with old-fashioned manners and usages. "There is nothing new to be seen there," write the Venetian envoys. "There is no pleasant gossip about the events of the day. If a man is acquainted with any news, he is too prudent to repeat it.[410] The courtiers talk little, and for the most part are ignorant; in fact, without the least tincture of learning. The arrogance of the great lords is beyond belief; and when they meet a foreign ambassador, or even the nuncio of his holiness, they rarely condescend to salute him by raising their caps.[411] They all affect that imperturbable composure, or apathy, which they term _sosiego_."[412] They gave no splendid banquets, like the Flemish nobles. Their chief amusement was gaming,--the hereditary vice of the Spaniard. They played deep, often to the great detriment of their fortunes. This did not displease the king. It may seem strange that a society so cold and formal should be much addicted to intrigue.[413] In this they followed the example of their master. Thus passing their days in frivolous amusements and idle dalliance, the Spanish nobles, with the lofty titles and pretensions of their ancestors, were a degenerate race. With a few brilliant exceptions, they filled no important posts in the state or in the army. The places of most consideration to which they aspired were those connected with the royal household; and their greatest honour was to possess the empty privileges of the grandee, and to sit with their heads covered in the presence of the king.[414] From this life of splendid humiliation they were nothing loth to escape into the country, where they passed their days in their ancestral castles, surrounded by princely domains, which embraced towns and villages within their circuit, and a population sometimes reaching to thirty thousand families. Here the proud lords lived in truly regal pomp. Their households were formed on that of the sovereign. They had their major-domos, their gentlemen of the bedchamber, their grand equerries, and other officers of rank. Their halls were filled with hidalgos and cavaliers, and a throng of inferior retainers. They were attended by body-guards of one or two hundred soldiers. Their dwellings were sumptuously furnished, and their sideboards loaded with plate from the silver quarries of the New World. Their chapels were magnificent. Their wives affected a royal state: they had their ladies of honour; and the page who served as cupbearer knelt while his mistress drank. Even knights of ancient blood, whom she addressed from her seat, did not refuse to bend the knee to her.[415] Amidst all this splendour, the Spanish grandees had no real power to correspond with it. They could no longer, as in the days of their fathers, engage in fends with one another; nor could they enjoy the privilege, so highly prized, of renouncing their allegiance and declaring war upon their sovereign. Their numerous vassals, instead of being gathered as of yore into a formidable military array, had sunk into the more humble rank of retainers, who served only to swell the idle pomp of their lord's establishment: they were no longer allowed to bear arms, except in the service of the crown; and after the Moriscoes had been reduced, the crown had no occasion for their services, unless in foreign war.[416] The measures by which Ferdinand and Isabella had broken the power of the aristocracy had been enforced with still greater rigour by Charles the Fifth, and were now carried out even more effectually by Philip the Second; for Philip had the advantage of being always in Spain, while Charles passed most of his time in other parts of his dominions. Thus ever present, Philip was as prompt to enforce the law against the highest noble as against the humblest of his subjects. Men of rank commanded the armies abroad, and were sent as viceroys to Naples, Sicily, Milan, and the provinces of the New World. But at home they were rarely raised to civil or military office. They no longer formed a necessary part of the national legislature, and were seldom summoned to the meetings of the Cortes; for the Castilian noble claimed exemption from the public burdens, and it was rarely that the Cortes were assembled for any other purpose than to impose those burdens. Thus, without political power of any kind, they resided like so many private gentlemen on their estates in the country. Their princely style of living gave no umbrage to the king, who was rather pleased to see them dissipate their vast revenues in a way that was attended with no worse evil than that of driving the proprietors to exactions which made them odious to their vassals.[417] Such, we are assured by a Venetian envoy--who, with great powers of observation, was placed in the best situation for exerting them--was the policy of Philip. "Thus," he concludes, "did the king make himself feared by those who, if they had managed discreetly, might have made themselves feared by him."[418] While the aristocracy was thus depressed, the strong arm of Charles the Fifth had stripped the Castilian commons of their most precious rights. Philip, happily for himself, was spared the odium of having reduced them to this abject condition. But he was as careful as his father could have been, that they should not rise from it. The legislative power of the commons--that most important of all their privileges--was nearly annihilated. The Castilian Cortes were, it is true, frequently convoked under Philip--more frequently, on the whole, than in any preceding reign; for in them still resided the power of voting supplies for the crown. To have summoned them so often, therefore, was rather a proof of the necessities of the government than of respect for the rights of the commons. [Sidenote: THE CORTES.] The Cortes, it is true, still enjoyed the privilege of laying their grievances before the king; but as they were compelled to vote the supplies before they presented their grievances, they had lost the only lever by which they could effectually operate on the royal will. Yet when we review their petitions, and see the care with which they watched over the interests of the nation, and the courage with which they maintained them, we cannot refuse our admiration. We must acknowledge that, under every circumstance of discouragement and oppression, the old Castilian spirit still lingered in the hearts of the people. In proof of this, it will not be amiss to cite a few of these petitions, which, whether successful or not, may serve at least to show the state of public opinion on the topics to which they relate. One, of repeated recurrence, is a remonstrance to the king on the enormous expense of his household--"as great," say the Cortes, "as would be required for the conquest of a kingdom."[419] The Burgundian establishment, independently of its costliness, found little favour with the honest Castilian; and the Cortes prayed his majesty to abandon it, and to return to the more simple and natural usage of his ancestors. They represented "the pernicious effects which this manner of living necessarily had on the great nobles and others of his subjects, prone to follow the example of their master."[420] To one of these petitions Philip replied, that "he would cause the matter to be inquired into, and such measures to be taken as were most for his service." "No alteration took place during his reign; and the Burgundian establishment, which in 1562 involved an annual charge of a hundred and fifty-six millions of maravedis, was continued by his successor."[421] Another remonstrance of constant recurrence--a proof of its inefficacy--was that against the alienation of the crown lands, and the sale of offices and the lesser titles of nobility. To this the king made answer in much the same equivocal language as before. Another petition besought him no longer to seek an increase of his revenue by imposing taxes without the sanction of the Cortes, required by the ancient law and usage of the realm. Philip's reply on this occasion was plain enough. It was, in truth, one worthy of an eastern despot. "The necessities," he said, "which have compelled me to resort to these measures, far from having ceased, have increased, and are still increasing, allowing me no alternative but to pursue the course I have adopted."[422] Philip's embarrassments were indeed great,--far beyond the reach of any financial skill of his ministers to remove. His various expedients for relieving himself from the burden which, as he truly said, was becoming heavier every day, form a curious chapter in the history of finance. But we have not yet reached the period at which they can be most effectively presented to the reader. The commons strongly urged the king to complete the great work he had early undertaken, of embodying in one code the municipal law of Castile.[423] They gave careful attention to the administration of justice, showed their desire for the reform of various abuses, especially for quickening the despatch of business, proverbially slow in Spain, and, in short, for relieving suitors, as far as possible, from the manifold vexations to which they were daily exposed in the tribunals. With a wise liberality they recommended that, in order to secure the services of competent persons in judicial offices, their salaries--in many cases wholly inadequate--should be greatly increased.[424] The Cortes watched with a truly parental care over the great interests of the state--its commerce, its husbandry, and its manufactures. They raised a loud, and as it would seem not an ineffectual, note of remonstrance against the tyrannical practice of the crown in seizing for its own use the bullion which, as elsewhere stated, had been imported from the New World on their own account by the merchants of Seville. Some of the petitions of the Cortes show what would be thought at the present day a strange ignorance of the true principles of legislation in respect to commerce. Thus, regarding gold and silver, independently of their value as a medium of exchange, as constituting in a peculiar manner the wealth of a country, they considered that the true policy was to keep the precious metals at home, and prayed that their exportation might be forbidden. Yet this was a common error in the sixteenth century with other nations besides the Spaniards. It may seem singular, however, that the experience of three-fourths of a century had not satisfied the Castilian of the futility of such attempts to obstruct the natural current of commercial circulation. In the same spirit, they besought the king to prohibit the use of gold and silver in plating copper and other substances, as well as for wearing-apparel and articles of household luxury. It was a waste of the precious metals, which were needed for other purposes. This petition of the commons may be referred in part, no doubt, to their fondness for sumptuary laws, which in Castile formed a more ample code than could be easily found in any other country.[425] The love of costly and ostentatious dress was a passion which they may have caught from their neighbours, the Spanish Arabs, who delighted in this way of displaying their opulence. It furnished accordingly, from an early period, a fruitful theme of declamation to the clergy, in their invectives against the pomp and vanities of the world. Unfortunately Philip, who was so frequently deaf to the wiser suggestions of the Cortes, gave his sanction to this petition; and in a _pragmatic_ devoted to the object, he carried out the ideas of the legislature as heartily as the most austere reformer could have desired. As a state paper, it has certainly a novel aspect, going at great length into such minute specifications of wearing-apparel, both male and female, that it would seem to have been devised by a committee of tailors and milliners, rather than of grave legislators.[426] The tailors, indeed, the authors of these seductive abominations, did not escape the direct animadversion of the Cortes. In another petition they were denounced as unprofitable persons, occupied with needlework, like women, instead of tilling the ground or serving his majesty in the wars, like men.[427] In the same spirit of impertinent legislation, the Cortes would have regulated the expenses of the table, which, they said, of late years had been excessive. They recommended that no one should be allowed to have more than four dishes of meat and four of fruit served at the same meal. They were further scandalized by the increasing use of coaches, a mode of conveyance which had been introduced into Spain only a few years before. They regarded them as tempting men to an effeminate indulgence, which most of them could ill afford. They considered the practice, moreover, as detrimental to the good horsemanship for which their ancestors had been so renowned. They prayed, therefore, that, considering "the nation had done well for so many years without the use of coaches, it might henceforth be prohibited."[428] Philip so far complied with their petition, as to forbid any one but the owner of four horses to keep a coach. Thus he imagined that, while encouraging the raising of horses, he should effectually discourage any but the more wealthy from affecting this costly luxury. [Sidenote: THE CORTES.] There was another petition, somewhat remarkable, and worth citing, as it shows the attachment of the Castilians to a national institution which has often incurred the censure of foreigners. A petition of the Cortes of 1573 prayed that some direct encouragement might be given to bull-fights, which of late had shown symptoms of decline. They advised that the principal towns should be required to erect additional circuses, and to provide lances for the combatants, and music for the entertainments, at the charge of the municipalities. They insisted on this as important for mending the breed of horses, as well as for furnishing a chivalrous exercise for the nobles and cavaliers. This may excite some surprise in a spectator of our day, accustomed to see only the most wretched hacks led to the slaughter, and men of humble condition skirmishing in the arena. It was otherwise in those palmy days of chivalry, when the horses employed were of a generous breed, and the combatants were nobles, who entered the lists with as proud a feeling as that with which they would have gone to a tourney. Even so late as the sixteenth century it was the boast of Charles the Fifth, that, when a young man, he had fought like a _matador_, and killed his bull. Philip gave his assent to this petition, with a promptness which showed that he understood the character of his countrymen. It would be an error to regard the more exceptionable and frivolous petitions of the Cortes, some of which have been above enumerated, as affording a true type of the predominant character of Castilian legislation. The laws, or, to speak correctly, the petitions of that body, are strongly impressed with a wise and patriotic sentiment, showing a keen perception of the wants of the community, and a tender anxiety to relieve them. Thus we find the Cortes recommending that guardians should be appointed to find employment for such young and destitute persons as, without friends to aid them, had no means of getting a livelihood for themselves.[429] They propose to have visitors chosen, whose duty it should be to inspect the prisons every week, and see that fitting arrangements were made for securing the health and cleanliness of the inmates.[430] They desire that care should be taken to have suitable accommodations provided at the inns for travellers.[431] With their usual fondness for domestic inquisition, they take notice of the behaviour of servants to their masters, and, with a simplicity that may well excite a smile, they animadvert on the conduct of maidens who, "in the absence of their mothers, spend their idle hours in reading romances full of lies and vanities, which they receive as truths for the government of their own conduct in their intercourse with the world."[432] The books thus stigmatized were doubtless the romances of chivalry, which at this period were at the height of their popularity in Castile. Cervantes had not yet aimed at this pestilent literature those shafts of ridicule which did more than any legislation could have done towards driving it from the land. The commons watched over the business of education as zealously as over any of the material interests of the state. They inspected the condition of the higher seminaries, and would have provision made for the foundation of new chairs in the universities. In accordance with their views, though not in conformity to any positive suggestion, Philip published a pragmatic in respect to these institutions. He complained of the practice, rapidly increasing among his subjects, of going abroad to get their education, when the most ample provision was made for it at home. The effect was eminently disastrous; for while the Castilian universities languished for want of patronage, the student who went abroad was pretty sure to return with ideas not the best suited to his own country. The king, therefore, prohibited Spaniards from going to any university out of his dominions, and required all now abroad to return. This edict he accompanied with the severe penalty of forfeiture of their secular possessions for ecclesiastics, and of banishment and confiscation of property for laymen.[433] This kind of pragmatic, though made doubtless in accordance with the popular feeling, inferred a stretch of arbitrary power that cannot be charged on those which emanated directly from the suggestion of the legislature. In this respect, however, it fell far short of those ordinances which proceeded exclusively from the royal will, without reference to the wishes of the commons. Such ordinances--and they were probably more numerous than any other class of laws during this reign--are doubtless among the most arbitrary acts of which a monarch can be guilty; for they imply nothing less than an assumption of the law-making power into his own hands. Indeed, they met with a strong remonstrance in the year 1579, when Philip was besought by the commons not to make any laws but such as had first received the sanction of the Cortes.[434] Yet Philip might vindicate himself by the example of his predecessors--even of those who, like Ferdinand and Isabella, had most at heart the interests of the nation.[435] It must be further admitted, that the more regular mode of proceeding, with the co-operation of the Cortes, had in it much to warrant the idea, that the real right of legislation was vested in the king. A petition, usually couched in the most humble terms, prayed his majesty to give his assent to the law proposed. This he did in a few words; or, what was much more common, he refused to give it, declaring that, in the existing case, "it was not expedient that any change should be made." It was observed that the number of cases in which Philip rejected the petitions of the commons was much greater than had been usual with former sovereigns. [Sidenote: THE GUARDS OF CASTILE.] A more frequent practice with Philip was one that better suited his hesitating nature and habit of procrastination. He replied in ambiguous terms, that "he would take the matter into consideration," or "that he would lay it before his council, and take such measures as would be best for his service." Thus the Cortes adjourned in ignorance of the fate of their petitions. Even when he announced his assent, as it was left to him to prescribe the terms of the law, it might be more or less conformable to those of the petition. The Cortes having been dismissed, there was no redress to be obtained if the law did not express their views, nor could any remonstrance be presented by that body until their next session, usually three years later. The practice established by Charles the Fifth, of postponing the presenting of petitions till the supplies had been voted, and the immediate adjournment of the legislature afterwards, secured an absolute authority to the princes of the house of Austria, that made a fearful change in the ancient constitution of Castile. Yet the meetings of the Cortes, shorn as that body was of its ancient privileges, were not without important benefits to the nation. None could be better acquainted than the deputies with the actual wants and wishes of their constituents. It was a manifest advantage for the king to receive this information. It enabled him to take the course best suited to the interests of the people, to which he would naturally be inclined when he did not regard them as conflicting with his own. Even when he did, the strenuous support of their own views by the commons might compel him to modify his measures. However absolute the monarch, he would naturally shrink from pursuing a policy so odious to the people that, if persevered in, it might convert remonstrance into downright resistance. The freedom of discussion among the deputies is attested by the independent tone with which in their petitions they denounce the manifold abuses in the state. It is honourable to Philip, that he should not have attempted to stifle this freedom of debate; though perhaps this may be more correctly referred to his policy, which made him willing to leave this safety-valve open for the passions of the people. He may have been content to flatter them with the image of power, conscious that he alone retained the substance of it. However this may have been, the good effect of the exercise of these rights, imperfect as they were, by the third estate, must be highly estimated. The fact of being called together to consult on public affairs gave the people a consideration in their own eyes which raised them far above the abject condition of the subjects of an Eastern despotism. It cherished in them that love of independence which was their birthright, inherited from their ancestors, and thus maintained in their bosoms those lofty sentiments which were the characteristics of the humbler classes of the Spaniards beyond those of any other nation in Christendom. One feature was wanting to complete the picture of absolute monarchy. This was a standing army,--a thing hitherto unknown in Spain. There was, indeed, an immense force kept on foot in the time of Charles the Fifth, and many of the troops were Spaniards. But they were stationed abroad, and were intended solely for foreign enterprises. It is to Philip's time that we are to refer the first germs of a permanent military establishment, designed to maintain order and obedience at home. The levies raised for this purpose amounted to twenty companies of men-at-arms, which, with the complement of four or five followers to each lance, made a force of some strength. It was further swelled by five thousand _ginetes_, or light cavalry.[436] These corps were a heavy charge on the crown. They were called "the Guards of Castile." The men-at-arms, in particular, were an object of great care, and were under admirable discipline. Even Philip, who had little relish for military affairs, was in the habit of occasionally reviewing them in person. In addition to these troops there was a body of thirty thousand militia, whom the king could call into the field when necessary. A corps of some sixteen hundred horsemen patrolled the southern coast of Andalusia, to guard the country from invasion by the African Moslems; and garrisons established in fortresses along the frontiers of Spain, both, north and south, completed a permanent force for the defence of the kingdom against domestic insurrection, as well as foreign invasion. CHAPTER II. DOMESTIC AFFAIRS OF SPAIN. The Clergy--Their Subordination to the Crown--The Escorial--Queen Anne. A review of the polity of Castile would be incomplete without a notice of the ecclesiastical order, which may well be supposed to have stood pre-eminent in such a country, and under such a monarch as Philip the Second. Indeed, not only did that prince present himself before the world as the great champion of the Faith, but he seemed ever solicitous in private life to display his zeal for religion and its ministers. Many anecdotes are told of him in connection with this. On one occasion, seeing a young girl going within the railing of the altar, he rebuked her, saying, "Where the priest enters is no place either for me or you."[437] A cavalier who had given a blow to a canon of Toledo he sentenced to death.[438] Under his protection and princely patronage, the Church reached its most palmy state. Colleges and convents--in short, religious institutions of every kind--were scattered broadcast over the land. The good fathers loved pleasant and picturesque sites for their dwellings; and the traveller, as he journeyed through the country, was surprised by the number of stately edifices which crowned the hill-tops, or rested on their slopes, surrounded by territories that spread out for many a league over meadows and cultivated fields and pasture-land. The secular clergy, at least the higher dignitaries, were so well endowed as sometimes to eclipse the grandees in the pomp of their establishments. In the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, the archbishop of Toledo held jurisdiction over fifteen principal towns and a great number of villages. His income amounted to full eighty thousand ducats a year.[439] In Philip's time the income of the archbishop of Seville amounted to the same sum, while that of the see of Toledo had risen to two hundred thousand ducats, nearly twice as much as that of the richest grandee in the kingdom.[440] In power and opulence, the primate of Spain ranked next in Christendom to the pope. The great source of all this wealth of the ecclesiastical order in Castile, as in most other countries, was the benefactions and bequests of the pious--of those, more especially, whose piety had been deferred till the close of life, when, anxious to make amends for past delinquencies, they bestowed the more freely that it was at the expense of their heirs. As what was thus bequeathed was locked up by entail, the constantly accumulating property of the Church had amounted, in Philip's time, if we may take the assertion of the Cortes, to more than one-half of the landed property in the kingdom.[441] Thus the burden of providing for the expenses of the state fell with increased heaviness on the commons. Alienations in mortmain formed the subject of one of their earliest remonstrances after Philip's accession, but without effect; and though the same petition was urged in very plain language at almost every succeeding session, the king still answered that it was not expedient to make any change in the existing laws. Besides his goodwill to the ecclesiastical order, Philip was occupied with the costly construction of the Escorial; and he had probably no mind to see the streams of public bounty, which had hitherto flowed so freely into the reservoirs of the Church, thus suddenly obstructed, when they were so much needed for his own infant institution. [Sidenote: THE CLERGY.] While Philip was thus willing to exalt the religious order, already far too powerful, he was careful that it should never gain such a height as would enable it to overtop the royal authority. Both in the Church and in the council--for they were freely introduced into the councils--theologians were ever found the most devoted servants of the crown. Indeed, it was on the crown that they were obliged to rest all their hopes of preferment. Philip perfectly understood that the control of the clergy must be lodged with that power which had the right of nomination to benefices. The Roman see, in its usual spirit of encroachment, had long claimed the exercise of this right in Castile, as it had done in other European states. The great battle with the Church was fought in the time of Isabella the Catholic. Fortunately the sceptre was held by a sovereign whose loyalty to the Faith was beyond suspicion. From this hard struggle she came off victorious; and the government of Castile henceforth retained possession of the important prerogative of appointing to vacant benefices. Philip, with all his deference to Rome, was not a man to relinquish any of the prerogatives of the crown. A difficulty arose under Pius the Fifth, who contended that he still had the right, possessed by former popes, of nominating to ecclesiastical offices in Milan, Naples, and Sicily, the Italian possessions held by Spain. He complained bitterly of the conduct of the councils in those states, which refused to allow the publication of his bulls without the royal _exequatur_. Philip, in mild terms, expressed his desire to maintain the most amicable relations with the see of Rome, provided he was not required to compromise the interests of his crown. At the same time he intimated his surprise that his holiness should take exceptions at his exercise of the rights of his predecessors, to many of whom the Church was indebted for the most signal services. The pope was well aware of the importance of maintaining a good understanding with so devoted a son of the Church; and Philip was allowed to remain henceforth in undisturbed possession of this inestimable prerogative.[442] The powers thus vested in the king he exercised with great discretion. With his usual facilities for information he made himself acquainted with the characters of the clergy in the different parts of his dominions. He was so accurate in his knowledge, that he was frequently able to detect an error or omission in the information he received. To one who had been giving him an account of a certain ecclesiastic, he remarked--"You have told me nothing of his amours." Thus perfectly apprised of the characters of the candidates, he was prepared, whenever a vacancy occurred, to fill the place with a suitable incumbent.[443] It was his habit, before preferring an individual to a high office, to have proof of his powers by trying them first in some subordinate station. In his selection he laid much stress on rank, for the influence it carried with it. Yet frequently, when well satisfied of the merits of the parties, he promoted those whose humble condition had made them little prepared for such, an elevation.[444] There was no more effectual way to secure his favour than to show a steady resistance to the usurpations of Rome. It was owing, in part at least, to the refusal of Quiroga, the bishop of Cuença, to publish a papal bull without the royal assent, that he was raised to the highest dignity in the kingdom, as archbishop of Toledo. Philip chose to have a suitable acknowledgment from the person on whom he conferred a favour; and once, when an ecclesiastic, whom he had made a bishop, went to take possession of his see without first expressing his gratitude, the king sent for him back, to remind him of his duty.[445] Such an acknowledgment was in the nature of a homage rendered to his master on his preferment. Thus gratitude for the past and hopes for the future were the strong ties which bound every prelate to his sovereign. In a difference with the Roman see, the Castilian churchman was sure to be found on the side of the sovereign, rather than, on that of the pontiff. In his own troubles, in like manner, it was to the king, and not to the pope, that he was to turn for relief. The king, on the other hand, when pressed by those embarrassments with which he was too often surrounded, looked for aid to the clergy, who for the most part rendered it cheerfully and in liberal measure. Nowhere were the clergy so heavily burdened as in Spain.[446] It was computed that at least one-third of their revenues was given to the king. Thus completely were the different orders, both spiritual and temporal, throughout the monarchy, under the control of the sovereign. A few pages back, while touching on alienations in mortmain, I had occasion to allude to the Escorial, that "eighth wonder of the world," as it is proudly styled by the Spaniards. There can be no place more proper to give an account of this extraordinary edifice, than the part of the narrative in which I have been desirous to throw as much light as possible on the character and occupations of Philip. The Escorial engrossed the leisure of more than thirty years of his life; it reflects in a peculiar manner his tastes, and the austere character of his mind; and whatever criticism may be passed on it as a work of art, it cannot be denied that, if every other vestige of his reign were to be swept away, that wonderful structure would of itself suffice to show the grandeur of his plans and the extent of his resources. The common tradition that Philip built the Escorial in pursuance of a vow which he made at the time of the great battle of St. Quentin, the 10th of August, 1557, has been rejected by modern critics, on the ground that contemporary writers, and amongst them the historians of the convent, make no mention of the fact. But a recently-discovered document leaves little doubt that such a vow was actually made.[447] However this may have been, it is certain that the king designed to commemorate the event by this structure, as is intimated by its dedication to St. Lawrence, the martyr on whose day the victory was gained. The name given to the place was _El Sitio de San Lorenzo el Real_. But the monastery was better known from the hamlet near which it stood,--_El Escurial_, or _El Escorial_,--which latter soon became the orthography generally adopted by the Castilians.[448] [Sidenote: THE ESCORIAL.] The motives which, after all, operated probably most powerfully on Philip, had no connection with the battle of St. Quentin. His father, the emperor, had directed by his will that his bones should remain at Yuste, until a more suitable place should be provided for them by his son. The building now to be erected was designed expressly as a mausoleum for Philip's parents, as well as for their descendants of the royal line of Austria. But the erection of a religious house on a magnificent scale, that would proclaim to the world his devotion to the Faith, was the predominant idea in the mind of Philip. It was, moreover, a part of his scheme to combine in the plan a palace for himself; for, with a taste which he may be said to have inherited from his father, he loved to live in the sacred shadows of the cloister. These ideas, somewhat incongruous as they may seem, were fully carried out by the erection of an edifice dedicated at once to the threefold purpose of a palace, a monastery, and a tomb.[449] Soon after the king's return to Spain, he set about carrying his plan into execution. The site which, after careful examination, he selected for the building, was among the mountains of the Guadarrama, on the borders of New Castile,[450] about eight leagues north-west of Madrid. The healthiness of the place and its convenient distance from the capital combined with the stern and solitary character of the region, so congenial to his taste, to give it the preference over other spots, which might have found more favour with persons of a different nature. Encompassed by rude and rocky hills, which sometimes soar to the gigantic elevation of mountains, it seemed to be shut out completely from the world. The vegetation was of a thin and stunted growth, seldom spreading out into the luxuriant foliage of the lower regions; and the winds swept down from the neighbouring sierra with the violence of a hurricane. Yet the air was salubrious, and the soil was nourished by springs of the purest water. To add to its recommendations, a quarry, close at hand, of excellent stone, somewhat resembling granite in appearance, readily supplied the materials for building,--a circumstance, considering the vastness of the work, of no little importance. The architect who furnished the plans, and on whom the king relied for superintending their execution, was Juan-Bautista de Toledo. He was born in Spain, and, early discovering uncommon talents for his profession, was sent to Italy. Here he studied the principles of his art, under the great masters who were then filling their native land with those monuments of genius that furnished the best study to the artist. Toledo imbibed their spirit, and under their tuition acquired that simple, indeed severe taste, which formed a contrast to the prevalent tone of Spanish architecture, but which, happily, found favour with his royal patron. Before a stone of the new edifice was laid, Philip had taken care to provide himself with the tenants who were to occupy it. At a general chapter of the Jeronymite fraternity, a prior was chosen for the convent of the Escorial, which was to consist of fifty members, soon increased to double that number. Philip had been induced to give the preference to the Jeronymite order, partly from their general reputation for ascetic piety, and in part from the regard shown for them by his father, who had chosen a convent of that order as the place of his last retreat. The monks were speedily transferred to the village of the Escorial, where they continued to dwell until accommodations were prepared for them in the magnificent pile which they were thenceforth to occupy. Their temporary habitation was of the meanest kind, like most of the buildings in the hamlet. It was without window or chimney, and the rain found its way through the dilapidated roof of the apartment which they used as a chapel; so that they were obliged to protect themselves by a coverlet stretched above their heads. A rude altar was raised at one end of the chapel, over which was scrawled on the wall, with charcoal, the figure of a crucifix.[451] The king, on his visits to the place, was lodged in the house of the curate, in not much better repair than the other dwellings in the hamlet. While there, he was punctual in his attendance at mass, when a rude seat was prepared for him near the choir, consisting of a three-legged stool, defended from vulgar eyes by a screen of such old and tattered cloth that the inquisitive spectator might, without difficulty, see him through the holes in it.[452] He was so near the choir, that the monk who stood next to him could hardly avoid being brought into contact with the royal person. The Jeronymite who tells the story assures us that Brother Antonio used to weep as he declared that more than once, when he cast a furtive glance at the monarch, he saw his eyes filled with tears. "Such," says the good father, "were the devout and joyful feelings with which the king, as he gazed on the poverty around him, meditated his lofty plans for converting this poverty into a scene of grandeur more worthy of the worship to be performed there."[453] The brethren were much edified by the humility shown by Philip when attending the services in this wretched cabin. They often told the story of his one day coming late to matins, when, unwilling to interrupt the services, he quietly took his seat by the entrance, on a rude bench, at the upper end of which a peasant was sitting. He remained some time before his presence was observed, when the monks conducted him to his tribune.[454] On the twenty-third of April, 1563, the first stone of the monastery was laid. On the twentieth of August following, the corner-stone of the church was also laid, with still greater pomp and solemnity. The royal confessor, the bishop of Cuença, arrayed in his pontificals, presided over the ceremonies. The king was present, and laid the stone with his own hands. The principal nobles of the court were in attendance, and there was a great concourse of spectators, both ecclesiastics and laymen; the solemn services were concluded by the brotherhood, who joined in an anthem of thanksgiving and praise to the Almighty, to whom so glorious a monument was to be reared in this mountain wilderness.[455] [Sidenote: THE ESCORIAL.] The rude sierra now swarmed with life. The ground was covered with tents and huts. The busy hum of labour mingled with the songs of the labourers, which, from their various dialects, betrayed the different, and oftentimes distant, provinces from which they had come. In this motley host the greatest order and decorum prevailed; nor were the peaceful occupations of the day interrupted by any indecent brawls. As the work advanced, Philip's visits to the Escorial were longer and more frequent. He had always shown his love for the retirement of the cloister, by passing some days of every year in it. Indeed, he was in the habit of keeping Holy Week not far from the scene of his present labours, at the convent of Guisando. In his present monastic retreat he had the additional interest afforded by the contemplation of the great work, which seemed to engage as much of his thoughts as any of the concerns of government. Philip had given a degree of attention to the study of the fine arts seldom found in persons of his condition. He was a connoisseur in painting, and, above all, in architecture, making a careful study of its principles, and occasionally furnishing designs with his own hand.[456] No prince of his time left behind him so many proofs of his taste and magnificence in building. The royal mint at Segovia, the hunting-seat of the Pardo, the pleasant residence of Aranjuez, the alcazar of Madrid, the "Armeria Real," and other noble works which adorned his infant capital, were either built or greatly embellished by him. The land was covered with structures both civil and religious, which rose under the royal patronage. Churches and convents--the latter in lamentable profusion--constantly met the eye of the traveller. The general style of their execution was simple in the extreme. Some, like the great cathedral of Valladolid, of more pretension, but still showing the same austere character in their designs, furnished excellent models of architecture to counteract the meretricious tendencies of the age. Structures of a different kind from these were planted by Philip along the frontiers in the north and on the southern coasts of the kingdom; and the voyager in the Mediterranean beheld fortress after fortress crowning the heights above the shore, for its defence against the Barbary corsair. Nor was the king's passion for building confined to Spain. Wherever his armies penetrated in the semi-civilized regions of the New World, the march of the conqueror was sure to be traced by the ecclesiastical and military structures which rose in his rear. Fortunately, similarity of taste led to the most perfect harmony between the monarch and his architect, in their conferences on the great work which was to crown the architectural glories of Philip's reign. The king inspected the details, and watched over every step in the progress of the building, with as much care as Toledo himself. In order to judge of the effect from a distance, he was in the habit of climbing the mountains at a spot about half a league from the monastery, where a kind of natural chair was formed by the crags. Here, with his spyglass in his hand, he would sit for hours, and gaze on the complicated structure growing up below. The place is still known as the "king's seat."[457] It was certainly no slight proof of the deep interest which Philip took in the work, that he was content to exchange his palace at Madrid for a place that afforded him no better accommodations than the poverty-stricken village of the Escorial. In 1571 he made an important change in these accommodations, by erecting a chapel which might afford the monks a more decent house of worship than their old weather-beaten hovel; and with this he combined a comfortable apartment for himself. In these new quarters he passed still more of his time in cloistered seclusion than he had done before. Far from confining his attention to a supervision of the Escorial, he brought his secretaries and his papers along with him, read here his despatches from abroad, and kept up a busy correspondence with all parts of his dominions. He did four times the amount of work here, says a Jeronymite, that he did in the same number of days in the capital.[458] He used to boast that, thus hidden from the world, with a little bit of paper, he ruled over both hemispheres. That he did not always wisely rule, is proved by more than one of his despatches relating to the affairs of Flanders, which issued from this consecrated place. Here he received accounts of the proceedings of his heretic subjects in the Netherlands, and of the Morisco insurgents in Granada. And as he pondered on their demolition of church and convent, and their desecration of the most holy symbols of the Catholic faith, he doubtless felt a proud satisfaction in proving his own piety to the world by the erection of the most sumptuous edifice ever dedicated to the Cross. In 1577, the Escorial was so far advanced towards its completion as to afford accommodations not merely for Philip and his personal attendants, but for many of the court, who were in the habit of spending some time there with the king during the summer. On one of these occasions, an accident occurred which had nearly been attended with most disastrous consequences to the building. A violent thunderstorm was raging in the mountains, and the lightning struck one of the great towers of the monastery. In a short time the upper portion of the building was in a blaze. So much of it, fortunately, was of solid materials, that the fire made slow progress. But the difficulty of bringing water to bear on it was extreme. It was eleven o'clock at night when the fire broke out, and in the orderly household of Philip all had retired to rest. They were soon roused by the noise. The king took his station on the opposite tower, and watched with deep anxiety the progress of the flames. The duke of Alva was one among the guests. Though sorely afflicted with the gout at the time, he wrapped his dressing-gown about him, and climbed to a spot which afforded a still nearer view of the conflagration. Here the "good duke" at once assumed the command, and gave his orders with as much promptness and decision as on the field of battle.[459] All the workmen, as well as the neighbouring peasantry, were assembled there. The men showed the same spirit of subordination which they had shown throughout the erection of the building. The duke's orders were implicitly obeyed; and more than one instance is recorded of daring self-devotion among the workmen, who toiled as if conscious they were under the eye of their sovereign. The tower trembled under the fury of the flames; and the upper portion of it threatened every moment to fall in ruins. Great fears were entertained that it would crush the hospital, situated in that part of the monastery. Fortunately, it fell in an opposite direction, carrying with it a splendid chime of bells that was lodged in it, but doing no injury to the spectators. The loss which bore most heavily on the royal heart was that of sundry inestimable relics which perished in the flames. But Philip's sorrow was mitigated when he learned that a bit of the true cross, and the right arm of St. Lawrence, the martyred patron of the Escorial, were rescued from the flames. At length, by incredible efforts, the fire, which had lasted till six in the morning, was happily extinguished, and Philip withdrew to his chamber, where his first act, we are told, was to return thanks to the Almighty for the preservation of the building consecrated to his service.[460] [Sidenote: THE ESCORIAL.] The king was desirous that as many of the materials as possible for the structure should be collected from his own dominions. These were so vast, and so various in their productions, that they furnished nearly every article required for the construction of the edifice, as well as for its interior decoration. The grey stone, of which its walls were formed, was drawn from a neighbouring quarry. It was called _berroquena_,--a stone bearing a resemblance to granite, though not so hard. The blocks hewn from the quarries, and dressed there, were of such magnitude as sometimes to require forty or fifty yoke of oxen to drag them. The jasper came from the neighbourhood of Burgo de Osma. The more delicate marbles, of a great variety of colours, were furnished by the mountain-ranges in the south of the Peninsula. The costly and elegant fabrics were many of them supplied by native artisans. Such were the damasks and velvets of Granada. Other cities, as Madrid, Toledo, and Saragossa, showed the proficiency of native art in curious manufactures of bronze and iron, and occasionally of the more precious metals. Yet Philip was largely indebted to his foreign possessions, especially those in Italy and the Low Countries, for the embellishment of the interior of the edifice, which, in its sumptuous style of decoration, presented a contrast to the stern simplicity of its exterior. Milan, so renowned at that period for its fine workmanship in steel, gold, and precious stones, contributed many exquisite specimens of art. The walls were clothed with gorgeous tapestries from the Flemish looms. Spanish convents vied with each other in furnishing embroideries for the altars. Even the rude colonies in the New World had their part in the great work, and the American forests supplied their cedar and ebony and richly-tinted woods, which displayed all their magical brilliancy of colour under the hands of the Castilian workman.[461] Though desirous, as far as possible, to employ the products of his own dominions, and to encourage native art, in one particular he resorted almost exclusively to foreigners. The oil-paintings and frescoes which profusely decorated the walls and ceilings of the Escorial were executed by artists drawn chiefly from Italy, whose schools of design were still in their glory. But of all living painters, Titian was the one whom Philip, like his father, most delighted to honour. To the king's generous patronage the world is indebted for some of that great master's noblest productions, which found a fitting place on the walls of the Escorial. The prices which Philip paid enabled him to command the services of the most eminent artists. Many anecdotes are told of his munificence. He was, however, a severe critic. He did not prematurely disclose his opinion. But when the hour came, the painter had sometimes the mortification to find the work he had executed, it may be with greater confidence than skill, peremptorily rejected, or at best condemned to some obscure corner of the building. This was the fate of an Italian artist, of much more pretension than power, who, after repeated failures according to the judgment of the king--which later critics have not reversed--was dismissed to his own country. But even here Philip dealt in a magnanimous way with the unlucky painter. "It is not Zuccaro's fault," he said, "but that of the persons who brought him here;" and when he sent him back to Italy, he gave him a considerable sum of money in addition to his large salary.[462] Before this magnificent pile, in a manner the creation of his own taste, Philip's nature appeared to expand, and to discover some approach to those generous sympathies for humanity which elsewhere seemed to have been denied him. He would linger for hours while he watched the labours of the artist, making occasional criticisms, and laying his hand familiarly on his shoulder.[463] He seemed to put off the coldness and reserve which formed so essential a part of his character. On one occasion, it is said, a stranger, having come into the Escorial when the king was there, mistook him for one of the officials, and asked him some questions about the pictures. Philip, without undeceiving the man, humoured his mistake, and good-naturedly undertook the part of _cicerone_, by answering his inquiries, and showing him some of the objects most worth seeing.[464] Similar anecdotes have been told of others. What is strange is, that Philip should have acted the part of the good-natured man. In 1584, the masonry of the Escorial was completed. Twenty-one years had elapsed since the first stone of the monastery was laid. This certainly must be regarded as a short period for the erection of so stupendous a pile. St. Peter's church, with which one naturally compares it as the building nearest in size and magnificence, occupied more than a century in its erection, which spread over the reigns of at least eighteen popes. But the Escorial, with the exception of the subterraneous chapel constructed by Philip the Fourth for the burial-place of the Spanish princes, was executed in the reign of one monarch. That monarch held in his hands the revenues of both the Old World and the New; and as he gave, in some sort, a personal supervision to the work, we may be sure that no one was allowed to sleep on his post. Yet the architect who designed the building was not permitted to complete it. Long before it was finished, the hand of Toledo had mouldered in the dust. By his death it seemed that Philip had met with an irreparable loss. He felt it to be so himself; and with great distrust consigned the important task to Juan de Herrera, a young Asturian. But though young, Herrera had been formed on the best models; for he was the favourite pupil of Toledo, and it soon appeared that he had not only imbibed the severe and elevated tastes of his master, but that his own genius fully enabled him to comprehend all Toledo's great conceptions, and to carry them out as perfectly as that artist could have done himself. Philip saw with satisfaction that he had made no mistake in his selection. He soon conferred as freely with the new architect as he had done with his predecessor. He even showed him greater favour, settling on him a salary of a thousand ducats a year, and giving him an office in the royal household, and the cross of St. Iago. Herrera had the happiness to complete the Escorial. Indeed, he lived some six years after its completion. He left several works, both civil and ecclesiastical, which perpetuate his fame. But the Escorial is the monument by which his name, and that of his master, Toledo, have come down to posterity as those of the two greatest architects of whom Spain can boast. This is not the place for criticism on the architectural merits of the Escorial. Such criticism more properly belongs to a treatise on art. It has been my object simply to lay before the reader such an account of the execution of this great work as would enable him to form some idea of the object to which Philip devoted so large a portion of his time, and which so eminently reflected his peculiar cast of mind. [Sidenote: THE ESCORIAL.] Critics have greatly differed from each other in their judgments of the Escorial. Few foreigners have been found to acquiesce in the undiluted panegyric of those Castilians who pronounce it the eighth wonder of the world.[465] Yet it cannot be denied that few foreigners are qualified to decide on the merits of a work, to judge of which correctly requires a perfect understanding of the character of the country in which it was built, and of the monarch who built it. The traveller who gazes on its long lines of cold grey stone, scarcely broken by an ornament, feels a dreary sensation creeping over him, while he contrasts it with the lighter and more graceful edifices to which his eye has been accustomed. But he may read in this the true expression of the founder's character. Philip did not aim at the beautiful, much less at the festive and cheerful. The feelings which he desired to raise in the spectator were of that solemn, indeed sombre complexion, which corresponded best with his own religious faith. Whatever defects may be charged on the Escorial, it is impossible to view it from a distance, and see the mighty pile as it emerges from the gloomy depths of the mountains, without feeling how perfectly it conforms in its aspect to the wild and melancholy scenery of the sierra. Nor can one enter the consecrated precincts without confessing the genius of the place, and experiencing sensations of a mysterious awe as he wanders through the desolate halls, which fancy peoples with the solemn images of the past. The architect of the building was embarrassed by more than one difficulty of a very peculiar kind. It was not simply a monastery that he was to build. The same edifice, as we have seen, was to comprehend at once a convent, a palace, and a tomb. It was no easy problem to reconcile objects so discordant, and to infuse into them a common principle of unity. It is no reproach to the builder that he did not perfectly succeed in this, and that the palace should impair the predominant tone of feeling raised by the other parts of the structure, looking in fact like an excrescence, rather than an integral portion of the edifice. Another difficulty, of a more whimsical nature, imposed on the architect, was the necessity of accommodating the plan of the building to the form of a gridiron--as typical of the kind of martyrdom suffered by the patron saint of the Escorial. Thus the long lines of cloisters, with their intervening courts, served for the bars of the instrument. The four lofty spires at the corners of the monastery, represented its legs inverted; and the palace, extending its slender length on the east, furnished the awkward handle. It is impossible for language to convey any adequate idea of a work of art. Yet architecture has this advantage over the sister arts of design, that the mere statement of the dimensions helps us much in forming a conception of the work. A few of these dimensions will serve to give an idea of the magnitude of the edifice. They are reported to us by Los Santos, a Jeronymite monk, who has left one of the best accounts of the Escorial. The main building, or monastery, he estimates at seven hundred and forty Castilian feet in length by five hundred and eighty in breadth. Its greatest height, measured to the central cross above the dome of the great church, is three hundred and fifteen feet. The whole circumference of the Escorial, including the palace, he reckons at two thousand nine hundred and eighty feet, or near three-fifths of a mile. The patient inquirer tells us there were no less than twelve thousand doors and windows in the building; that the weight of the keys alone amounted to fifty _arrobas_, or twelve hundred and fifty pounds, and, finally, that there were sixty-eight fountains playing in the halls and courts of this enormous pile.[466] The cost of its construction and interior decoration, we are informed by Father Siguença, amounted to very near six millions of ducats.[467] Siguença was prior of the monastery, and had access, of course, to the best sources of information. That he did not exaggerate, may be inferred from the fact that he was desirous to relieve the building from the imputation of any excessive expenditure incurred in its erection--a common theme of complaint, it seems, and one that was urged with strong marks of discontent by contemporary writers. Probably no single edifice ever contained such an amount and variety of inestimable treasures as the Escorial,--so many paintings and sculptures by the greatest masters,--so many articles of exquisite workmanship, composed of the most precious materials. It would be a mistake to suppose that, when the building was finished, the labours of Philip were at an end. One might almost say they were but begun. The casket was completed; but the remainder of his days was to be passed in filling it with the rarest and richest gems. This was a labour never to be completed. It was to be bequeathed to his successors, who with more or less taste, but with the revenues of the Indies at their disposal, continued to lavish them on the embellishment of the Escorial.[468] Philip the Second set the example. He omitted nothing which could give a value, real or imaginary, to his museum. He gathered at an immense cost several hundred cases of the bones of saints and martyrs, depositing them in rich silver shrines, of elaborate workmanship. He collected four thousand volumes, in various languages, especially the Oriental, as the basis of the fine library of the Escorial. The care of successive princes, who continued to spend there a part of every year, preserved the palace-monastery and its contents from the rude touch of Time. But what the hand of Time had spared, the hand of violence destroyed. The French, who in the early part of the present century swept like a horde of Vandals over the Peninsula, did not overlook the Escorial. For in it they saw the monument designed to commemorate their own humiliating defeat. A body of dragoons under La Houssaye burst into the monastery in the winter of 1808; and the ravages of a few days demolished what it had cost years and the highest efforts of art to construct. The apprehension of similar violence from the Carlists, in 1837, led to the removal of the finest paintings to Madrid. The Escorial ceased to be a royal residence: tenantless and unprotected, it was left to the fury of the blasts which swept down the hills of the Guadarrama. The traveller who now visits the place will find its condition very different from what it was in the beginning of the century. The bare and mildewed walls no longer glow with the magical tints of Raphael and Titian, and the sober pomp of the Castilian school. The exquisite specimens of art with which the walls were filled have been wantonly demolished, or more frequently pilfered for the sake of the rich materials. The monks, so long the guardians of the place, have shared the fate of their brethren elsewhere, since the suppression of religious houses, and their venerable forms have disappeared. [Sidenote: QUEEN ANNE.] Silence and solitude reign throughout the courts, undisturbed by any sound save that of the ceaseless winds, which seem to be ever chanting their melancholy dirge over the faded glories of the Escorial. There is little now to remind one of the palace or of the monastery. Of the three great objects to which the edifice was devoted, one alone survives,--that of a mausoleum for the royal line of Castile. The spirit of the dead broods over the place,--of the sceptred dead, who lie in the same dark chamber where they have lain for centuries, unconscious of the changes that have been going on all around them. During the latter half of Philip's reign, he was in the habit of repairing with his court to the Escorial, and passing here a part of the summer. Hither he brought his young queen, Anne of Austria,--when the gloomy pile assumed an unwonted appearance of animation. In a previous chapter, the reader has seen some notice of his preparations for his marriage with that princess, in less than two years after he had consigned the lovely Isabella to the tomb. Anne had been already plighted to the unfortunate Don Carlos. Philip's marriage with her afforded him the melancholy triumph of a second time supplanting his son. She was his niece; for the empress Mary, her mother, was the daughter of Charles the Fifth. There was, moreover, a great disparity in their years; for the Austrian princess, having been born in Castile during the regency of her parents, in 1549, was at this time but twenty-one years of age, less than half the age of Philip. It does not appear that her father, the emperor Maximilian, made any objection to the match. If he felt any, he was too politic to prevent a marriage which would place his daughter on the throne of the most potent monarchy in Europe. It was arranged that the princess should proceed to Spain by the way of the Netherlands. In September, 1570, Anne bade a last adieu to her father's court, and with a stately retinue set out on her long journey. On entering Flanders, she was received with great pomp by the duke of Alva, at the head of the Flemish nobles. Soon after her arrival, Queen Elizabeth despatched a squadron of eight vessels, with offers to transport her to Spain, and an invitation for her to visit England on her way. These offers were courteously declined; and the German princess, escorted by Count Bossu, captain-general of the Flemish navy, with a gallant squadron, was fortunate in reaching the place of her destination after a voyage of less than a week. On the third of October she landed at Santander, on the northern coast of Spain, where she found the archbishop of Seville and the duke of Bejar, with a brilliant train of followers, waiting to receive her. Under this escort, Anne was conducted by the way of Burgos and Valladolid to the ancient city of Segovia. In the great towns through which she passed she was entertained in a style suited to her rank; and everywhere along her route she was greeted with the hearty acclamations of the people: for the match was popular with the nation; and the Cortes had urged the king to expedite it as much as possible.[469] The Spaniards longed for a male heir to the crown; and since the death of Carlos, Philip had only daughters remaining to him. In Segovia, where the marriage ceremony was to be performed, magnificent preparations had been made for the reception of the princess. As she approached that city, she was met by a large body of the local militia, dressed in gay uniforms, and by the municipality of the place, arrayed in their robes of office and mounted on horseback. With this brave escort she entered the gates. The streets were ornamented with beautiful fountains, and spanned by triumphal arches, under which the princess proceeded, amidst the shouts of the populace, to the great cathedral.[470] Anne, then in the bloom of youth, is described as having a rich and delicate complexion. Her figure was good, her deportment gracious, and she rode her richly-caparisoned palfrey with natural ease and dignity. Her not very impartial chronicler tells us that the spectators particularly admired the novelty of her Bohemian costume, her riding-hat gaily ornamented with feathers, and her short mantle of crimson velvet richly fringed with gold.[471] After _Te Deum_ had been chanted, the splendid procession took its way to the far-famed _alcazar_, that palace-fortress, originally built by the Moors, which now served both as a royal residence and as a place of confinement for prisoners of state. Here it was that the unfortunate Montigny passed many a weary month of captivity; and less than three months had elapsed since he had been removed from the place which was so soon to become the scene of royal festivity, and consigned to the fatal fortress of Simancas, to perish by the hand of the midnight executioner. Anne, it may be remembered, was said, on her journey through the Low Countries, to have promised Montigny's family to intercede with her lord in his behalf. But the king, perhaps willing to be spared the awkwardness of refusing the first boon asked by his young bride, disposed of his victim soon after her landing, while she was yet in the north. Anne entered the _alcazar_ amidst salvoes of artillery. She found there the good Princess Joanna, Philip's sister, who received her with the same womanly kindness which she had shown twelve years before to Elizabeth of France, when, on a similar occasion, she made her first entrance into Castile. The marriage was appointed to take place on the following day, the fourteenth of November. Philip, it is said, obtained his first view of his betrothed when, mingling in disguise among the cavalcade of courtiers, he accompanied her entrance into the capital.[472] When he had led his late queen, Isabella, to the altar, some white hairs on his temples attracted her attention.[473] During the ten years which had since elapsed, the cares of office had wrought the same effect on him as on his father, and turned his head prematurely grey. The marriage was solemnized with great pomp in the cathedral of Segovia. The service was performed by the archbishop of Seville. The spacious building was crowded to overflowing with spectators, among whom were the highest dignitaries of the Church and the most illustrious of the nobility of Spain.[474] During the few days which followed, while the royal pair remained in Segovia, the city was abandoned to jubilee. The auspicious event was celebrated by public illuminations and by magnificent _fêtes_, at which the king and queen danced in the presence of the whole court, who stood around in respectful silence.[475] On the eighteenth, the new-married couple proceeded to Madrid, where such splendid preparations had been made for their reception as evinced the loyalty of the capital. As soon as the building of the Escorial was sufficiently advanced to furnish suitable accommodations for his young queen, Philip passed a part of every summer in its cloistered solitudes, which had more attraction for him than any other of his residences. The presence of Anne and her courtly train diffused something like an air of gaiety over the grand but gloomy pile, to which it had been little accustomed. Among other diversions for her entertainment, we find mention made of _autos sacramentales_, those religious dramas that remind one of the ancient Mysteries and Moralities which entertained our English ancestors. These _autos_ were so much in favour with the Spaniards as to keep possession of the stage longer than in most other countries; nor did they receive their full development until they had awakened the genius of Calderon. [Sidenote: QUEEN ANNE.] It was a pen, however, bearing little resemblance to that of Calderon which furnished these edifying dramas. They proceeded, probably, from some Jeronymite gifted with a more poetic vein than his brethren. The actors were taken from among the pupils in the seminary established in the Escorial. Anne, who appears to have been simple in her tastes, is said to have found much pleasure in these exhibitions, and in such recreation as could be afforded her by excursions into the wild, romantic country that surrounded the monastery. Historians have left us but few particulars of her life and character,--much fewer than of her lovely predecessor. Such accounts as we have, represent her as of an amiable disposition, and addicted to pious works. She was rarely idle, and employed much of her time in needlework, leaving many specimens of her skill in this way in the decorations of the convents and churches. A rich piece of embroidery, wrought by her hands and those of her maidens, was long preserved in the royal chapel, under the name of "Queen Anne's tapestry." Her wedded life was destined not to be a long one,--only two years longer than that of Isabella. She was blessed, however, with a more numerous progeny than either of her predecessors. She had four sons and a daughter. But all died in infancy or early childhood, except the third son, who, as Philip the Third, lived to take his place in the royal dynasty of Castile. The queen died on the twenty-sixth of October, 1580, in the thirty-first year of her age, and the eleventh of her reign. A singular anecdote is told in connection with her death. This occurred at Badajoz, where the court was then established, as a convenient place for overlooking the war in which the country was at that time engaged with Portugal. While there the king fell ill. The symptoms were of the most alarming character. The queen, in her distress, implored the Almighty to spare a life so important to the welfare of the kingdom and of the Church, and instead of it to accept the sacrifice of her own. Heaven, says the chronicler, as the result showed, listened to her prayer.[476] The king recovered; and the queen fell ill of a disorder which in a few days terminated fatally. Her remains, after lying in state for some time, were transported with solemn pomp to the Escorial, where they enjoyed the melancholy pre-eminence of being laid in the quarter of the mausoleum reserved exclusively for kings and the mothers of kings. Such was the end of Anne of Austria, the fourth and last wife of Philip the Second. FOOTNOTES: [1] "Que ningun Moro ni Mora serán apremiados á ser Christianos contra su voluntad; y que si alguna doncella, ó casada, ó viuda, por razon de algunas se quisiere tornar Christiana, tampoco será recebida, hasta ser interrogada." See the original treaty as given _in extenso_ by Marmol, Rebelion de los Moriscos (Madrid, 1797), tom. i. pp. 88-98. [2] "Y que pues habian sido rebeldes, y por ello merecian pena de muerte y perdimento de bienes, el perdon que les concediese fuese condicional, con que se tornasen Christianos, ó dexasen la tierra."--Ibid. p. 122. [3] The reader curious in the matter will find a full account of it in the History of Ferdinand and Isabella, part II. chapters 6, 7. [4] Advertimientos de Don Geronimo Corella sobre la Conversion de los Moriscos del Reyno de Valencia, MS. [5] "Sin tratar de instruir á cada uno en particular ni de examinar los ni saber su voluntad los baptizaron á manadas y de modo que algunos de ellos, segun es fama, pusieron pleito que no les avia tocado el agua que en comun les hechavan."--Ibid. [6] Marmol, Rebelion de los Moriscos, tom. i. pp. 133-155.--Bleda, Coronica de los Moros de España (Valencia, 1618), p. 656.--Advertimientos de Corella, MS.--Ferreras, Hist. Générale d'Espagne, tom. ix. pp. 65, 68.--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 55. The last writer says that, besides the largess to the emperor, the Moriscoes were canny enough to secure the good-will of his ministers by a liberal supply of doubloons to them also.--"Sirvieron al Emperador con ochenta mil ducados. Aprovechóles esto, y buena suma de doblones que dieron a los privados para que Carlos suspendiesse la execucion deste acuerdo." [7] Calderon, in his "Amar despues de la Muerte," has shed the splendours of his muse over the green and sunny spots that glitter like emeralds amidst the craggy wilds of the Alpujarras, "Porque entre puntas y puntas Hay valles que la hermosean, Campos que la fertilizan, Jardines que la deleitan. Toda ella está poblada De villages y de aldeas; Tal, que, cuando el sol se pono A las vislumbres que deja, Parecen riscos nacidos Cóncavos entre las peñas, Que rodaron de la cumbre Aunque á la falda no llegán." [8] Señor de Gayangos, correcting a blunder of Casiri on the subject, tells us that the Arabic name of the Alpujarras was _Al-busherât_, signifying "mountains abounding in pastures."--See that treasure of Oriental learning, the History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain (London, 1843), vol. ii. p. 515. [9] Such was the exemption from certain duties paid by the Christians in their trade with the Barbary coast--a singular and not very politic provision.--"Que si los Moros que entraren debaxo de estas capitulaciones y conciertos, quisieren ir con sus mercaderias á tratar y contratar en Berbería, se les dará licencia para poderlo hacer libremente, y lo mesmo en todos los lugares de Castilla y de la Andalucía, sin pagar portazgos, ni los otros derechos que los Christianos acostumbran pagar."--Marmol, Rebelion de los Moriscos, tom. i. p. 93. [10] Such is the opinion expressed by the author of the "_Advertimientos_," whose remarks--having particular reference to Valencia--are conceived in a spirit of candour, and of charity towards the Moslems, rarely found in a Spaniard of the sixteenth century.--"De donde," he says, "colije claramente que el no sanar estos enfermos hasta agora no se puede imputar á ser incurable la enfermedad, si no á averse errado la cura, y tambien se vee que hasta oy no estan bastamente descargados delante de Dios nuestro Señor aquellos à quien toca este negocio, pues no han puesto los medios que Christo nuestro Señor tiene ordenados para la cura de este mal."--MS. [11] "Forzandoles con injurias y penas pecuniarias y justiciando á algunos de ellos."--Ibid. Mendoza, speaking of a somewhat later period, just before the outbreak, briefly alludes to the fact that the Inquisition was then beginning to worry the Moriscoes more than usual:--"Porque la Inquisición los comenzó á apretar mas de lo ordinario."--Guerra de Granada (Valencia, 1776), p. 20. [12] Marmol, Rebelion de los Moriscos, tom. i. p. 135. [13] Ibid. tom. ii. p. 338.--Ordenanzas de Granada, fol. 375, ap. Circourt, Hist. des Arabes d'Espagne (Paris, 1846), tom. ii. p. 267. The penalty for violating the above ordinance was six years' hard labour in the galleys. That for counterfeiting the stamp of the Mendoza arms was death. _Væ victis!_ [14] The name of Mendoza, which occupied for so many generations a prominent place in arms, in politics, and in letters, makes its first appearance in Spanish history as far back as the beginning of the thirteenth century.--Mariana, Historia de España, tom. i. p. 676. [15] M. de Circourt in his interesting volumes, has given a minute account--much too minute for these pages--of the first developments of the insurrectionary spirit of the Moriscoes, in which he shows a very careful study of the subject.--Hist. des Arabes d'Espagne, tom. ii. pp. 268 et seq. [16] Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. ix. p. 524.--Marmol, Rebelion de los Moriscos, tom. i. p. 142.--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 55. [17] Such was the judgment of the acute Venetian who, as one of the train of the minister Tiepolo, obtained a near view of what was passing in the court of Philip the Second.--"Levato di bassissimo stato dal re, e posto in tanta grandezza in pochi anni, per esser huomo da bene, libero et schietto, et perchè S. M. vuol tener bassi li grandi di Spagna, conoscendo l' altierissima natura loro."--Gachard, Relations des Ambassadeurs Vénitiens sur Charles-Quint et Philippe II. (Bruxelles, 1855), p. 175. [18] This remarkable ordinance may be found in the Nueva Recopilacion (ed. 1640), lib. viii. tit. 2, leyes 13-18. The most severe penalties were those directed against the heinous offence of indulging in warm baths. For a second repetition of this, the culprit was sentenced to six years' labour in the galleys and the confiscation of half his estates. [19] "De los enemigos los menos."--Circourt gives a version of the whole of the professor's letter, with his precious commentary on this text. (Hist. des Arabes d'Espagne, tom. ii. p. 278.) According to Ferreras, Philip highly relished the maxim of his ghostly counsellor.--Hist. d'Espagne, tom. ix. p. 525. [20] Cabrera, throwing the responsibility of the subsequent troubles on Espinosa and Deza, sarcastically remarks that "two cowls had the ordering of an affair which had been better left to men with helmets on their heads."--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, lib. vii, cap. 21. [21] Marmol, Rebelion de los Moriscos, tom. i. pp. 147-151,--Circourt, Hist. des Arabes d'Espagne, tom. ii. p. 283.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. ix. p. 535. Dr. Salazar de Mendoza considers that nothing but a real love of rebellion could have induced the Moriscoes to find a pretext for it in a measure so just and praiseworthy, and every way so conducive to their own salvation as this ordinance.--"Tomaron par achaque esta accion tan justificada, y meritoria del Rey, y para sus almas tan provechosa y saludable."--Monarquia de España, tom. ii. p. 137. [22] "Y al fin concluyó con decirle resolutamente, que su Majestad queria mas fe que farda, y que preciaba mas salvar una alma, que todo quanto le podian dar le renta los Moriscos nuevamente convertidos."--Marmol, Rebelion de los Moriscos, tom. i. p. 163. [23] "Que él habia consultado aquel negocio con hombres de ciencia y conciencia, y le decian que estaba obligado á hacer lo que hacia."--Ibid. p. 175. [24] "Que el negocio de la prematica estaba determinado, y su Magestad resoluta en que se cumpliese."--Ibid, ubi supra. [25] Ibid. p. 176.--Cabrera. Filipe Segundo, lib. vii. cap. [26] "A estas y otras muchas razones que el marques de Mondejar daba, Don Diego de Espinosa le respondió, que la voluntad de su Magestad era aquella, y que se fuese al reyno de Granada, donde serio de mucha importancia su persona, atropellando como siempre todas las dificultades que le ponian por delante."--Marmol, Rebelion de los Moriscos, tom. i. p. 168. [27] An ordinance was passed at this time that the Moriscoes who had come from the country to reside with their families in Granada should leave the city and return whence they came, under pain of death.--(Marmol, Rebelion de los Moriscos, tom. i. p. 169.) By another ordinance, the Moriscoes were required to give up their children between the ages of three and fifteen, to be placed in schools and educated in the Christian doctrine and the Castillan tongue. (Ibid. p. 170.) The _Nueva Recopilacion_ contains two laws passed about this time, making it a capital offence to hold any intercourse with Turks or Moors who might visit Granada, even though they came not as corsairs, but for purposes of traffic. (Lib. viii. tit. 26, leyes 16, 18.) Such a law proves the constant apprehensions in which the Spaniards lived of a treasonable correspondence between their Morisco subjects and the foreign Moslems. [28] Marmol Rebelion de los Moriscos, tom. i. pp. 223-233.--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada (Valencia, 1776), p. 43.--Hita, Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. p. 724. [29] "Escrita en noches de augustia y de lagrimas corrientes, sustentadas con esperanza, y la esperanza deriva de la amargura."--Marmol, Rebelion de los Moriscos, tom. i. p. 219. [30] Marmol, Rebelion de los Moriscos, tom. i. p. 235. [31] "La furia horrible de los torbellinos Cada momento mas se vee yr creciendo; Cubre la blanca nieve les caminos, Tambien los hombres luego va cubriendo." So sings, or rather says, the poet-chronicler Rufo, whose epic of four and twenty cantos shows him to have been much more of a chronicler than a poet. Indeed, in his preface, he avows that strict conformity to truth which is the cardinal virtue of the chronicler.--See the Austriada (Madrid, 1584). [32] "Pocos sois, i venís presto."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 47. Hita gives a _cancion_ in his work, the burden of which is a complaint that the mountaineers had made their attack too late instead of too early:-- "Pocos sois, y venís tarde." (Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. p. 32.) The difference is explained by the circumstance that the author of the verses--probably Hita himself--considers that Christmas Eve, not New Year's Eve, was the time fixed for the assault. [33] Marmol, Rebelion de los Moriscos, tom. i. p. 238.--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, pp. 45-52.--Miniana, Hist. de España, p. 367.--Herrera, Historia General, tom. i. p. 726.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. ix pp. 573-575. [34] "Creyendo que lo uno y lo otro seria parte para que por bien de paz se diese nueva orden en lo de la prematica, sin aventurar ellos sus personas y haciendas."--Marmol, Rebelion de los Moriscos, tom. i. p. 239. [35] Beni Umeyyah, in the Arabic, according to an indisputable authority, my learned friend Don Pascual de Gayangos. See his Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain, _passim_. [36] "Era mancebo de veinte y dos años, de poca barba, color moreno, verdinegro, cejijunto, ojos negros y grandes, gentil hombre de cuerpo: mostraba en su talle y garbo ser de sangre real, como en verdad lo era, teniendo los pensamientos correspondientes."--Hita, Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. p. 13. Few will be disposed to acquiesce in the savage tone of criticism with which the learned Nic. Antonio denounces Hita's charming volumes as "Milesian tales, fit only to amuse the lazy and the listless." (Bibliotheca Nova, tom. i. p. 536.) Hita was, undoubtedly, the prince of romancers; but fiction is not falsehood; and when the novelist, who served in the wars of the Alpujarras, tells us of things which he professes to have seen with his own eyes, we may surely cite him as an historical authority. [37] "Usava de blandura general; queria ser tenido por Cabeza, i no por Rei: la crueldad, la codicia cubierta engañó á muchos en los principios."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 129. [38] Ibid. p. 40. The ceremonies of the coronation make, of course, a brave show in Rufo's epic. One stanza will suffice:-- "Entonces con aplauso le pusieron Al nuevo Rey de purpura un vestido, Y a manera de beca le ciñeron Al cuello y ombros un cendal bruñido, Quatro vanderas a sus pies tendieron, Una házia el Levante esclarecido, Otra a do el sol se cubre en negro velo, Y otras dos a los polos dos del cielo." La Austriada, fol. 24. [39] "Tal era la antigua ceremonia con que eligian los reyes de la Andalucia, i despues los de Granada."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 40. [40] "Que en la agricultura tienen Tal estudio, tal destreza, Que á preñeces de su hazada Hacen fecundas las piedras." Calderon, Amar despues de la Muerte, Jornada ii. [41] "Tres años tuvo en silencio Esta traicion encubierta Tanto número de gentes, Cosa, que admira y eleva."--Ibid, ubi supra. [42] "Una cosa mui de notar califica los principios desta rebelion, que gente de mediana condicion mostrada á guardar poco secreto i hablar juntos, callasen tanto tiempo, i tantos hombres, en tierra donde hai Alcaldes de corte i Inquisidores, cuya profesion es descubrir delitos."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 36. [43] Bleda, Cronica de España, p. 680--"Robaron la iglesia, hicieron pedazos los retablos y imagines, destruyeron todas las cosas sagradas, y no dexaron maldad ni sacrilegio que no cometieron."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 275. [44] "Quemaron por voto un convento de Frailes Augustinos, que se recogieron a la Torre echandoles por un horado de lo alto azeite hirviendo: sirviendose de la abundancia que Dios les dió en aquella tierra, para ahogar sus Frailes."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 60. [45] Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 271.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. ix. P. 582. [46] "Y para darle mayor tormento traxeron alli dos hermanas doncellas que tenia, para que le viesen morir, y en su presencia las vituperaron y maltrataron."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 316. [47] "Llegó un herege á él con una navaja, y le persinó con ella, hendiendole el rostro de alto abaxo, y por través; y luego le despedazó coyuntura por coyuntura, y miembro á miembro."--Ibid. p. 348. Among other kinds of torture which they invented, says Mendoza, they filled the curate of Manena with gunpowder, and then blew him up.--Guerra de Granada, p. 60. [48] Of all the Spanish historians no one discovers so insatiable an appetite for these horrors as Ferreras, who has devoted nearly fifty quarto pages to an account of the diabolical cruelties practised by the Moriscoes in this persecution--making, altogether, a momentous contribution to the annals of Christian martyrologv. One may doubt, however, whether the Spaniards are entirely justified in claiming the crown of martyrdom for all who perished in this persecution. Those, undoubtedly, have a right to it who might have saved their lives by renouncing their faith; but there is no evidence that this grace was extended to all; and we may well believe that the Moriscoes were stimulated by other motives besides those of a religious nature,--such motives as would naturally operate on a conquered race, burning with hatred of their conquerors and with the thirst of vengeance for the manifold wrongs which they had endured. [49] "Murieron en pocos mas de quatro dias, con muertes exquesitas y no imaginados tormentos, mas de tres mil martires."--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 70. [50] "Se adelantó un Moro, que solia ser grande amigo suyo, y haciendose encontradizo con él en el umbral de la puerta, le atravesó una espada por el cuerpo, diciendole: Toma, amigo, que mas vale que te mate yo que otro."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 277. [51] Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. ix. p. 617. [52] "Fue gran testimonio de nuestra fé i de compararse con la del tiempo de los Apostoles; que en tanto numero de gente como murió a manos de infieles ninguno huvo que quisiese renegar."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 61. [53] "Todos estuvieron tan constantes en la fé, que si bien fueron combidados con grandes riquezas y bienes á que la dejasen, con ninguno se pudo acabar; aunque entre los martyrizados huvo muchas mugeres, niños, y hombres que havian vivido descompuestamente."--Salazar de Mendoza, Monarquia de España, tom. ii. p. 139. [54] "Murieron este dia en Uxixar docientos y quarenta Christianos clerigos y legos, y entre ellos seis canonigos de aquella iglesia, que es colegial."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 297. [55] "Estavan las casas yermas i tiendas cerradas, suspenso el trato, mudadas las horas de oficios divinos i humanos; atentos los Religiosos i ocupados en oraciones i plegarias, como se suele en tiempo i punto de grandes peligros."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 54. Mendoza paints the panic of Granada with the pencil of Tacitus. [56] Circourt, Hist. des Arabes d'Espagne, tom. ii. p. 322. [57] "En un punto se mudaron todos los oficios y tratos en soldadesca, tanto que los relatores, secretarios, letrados, procuradores de la Audiencia entraban con espadas en los estrados, y no dexaban de pareseer muy bien en aquella coyuntura."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 358. [58] "Servian tres meses pagados por sus pueblos enteramente, i seis meses adelante pagavan los pueblos la mitad, i otra mitad el Rei."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 53. [59] Mendoza, with a few vigorous touches, has sketched, or rather sculptured in bold relief, the rude and rapacious character of the Andalusian soldiery.--"Mal pagada i por esto no bien disciplinada; mantenida del robo, i a trueco de alcanzar o conservar este mucha libertad, poca verguenza, i menos honra."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 103. [60] "Toda gente lucida y bien arreada á punto de guerra, que cierto representaban la pompa y nobleza de sus ciudades."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 396. [61] "Muchos capitanos fuertes, muchos lucidos soldados, ricos banderas tendidas, y su estandarte dorado." Hita, Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. p. 63. [62] Circourt, Hist. des Arabes d'Espagne, tom. ii. p. 326. Seville alone furnished two thousand troops, with one of the most illustrious cavaliers of the city at their head. They did not arrive, however, till a later period of the war.--See Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla (Madrid, 1677, fol.), p. 533. [63] "Repartió los lugares de la vega en siete partidos, y mandóles, que cada uno tuviese cuidado de llevar diez mil panes amasados de á dos libras al campo el dia que le tocase de la semana."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 404. [64] "Pasó este negocio tan adelante, que muchos Moriscos afrentados y gastados se arrepintieron por no haber tomado las armas cuando Abenfarax los llamaba."--Ibid. p. 407. [65] "Apenas podia ir por ella un hombre suelto; y aun este poco paso, le tenian descavado y solapado por los cimientos, de manera que si cargase mas de una persona, fuese abaxo."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, p. 409. [66] "Mas un bendito frayle de la orden del serafico padre San Francisco, llamado fray Christoval de Molina, con un crucifixo en la mano izquierda, y la espada desnuda en la derecha, los habitos cogidos en la cinta, y una rodela echada á las espaldas, invocando el poderoso nombre de Jesus, llegó al peligroso paso, y se metió determinadamente por él."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 410. [67] Ibid. p. 410, et seq.--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, pp. 67, 68.--Herrera, Historia General, tom. i. p. 736. Hita has commemorated the bold passage of the bridge at Tablate in one of the _romances_, or ballads, with which he has plentifully besprinkled the second volume of his work, and which present a sorry contrast to the ballads in the preceding volume. These, which form part of the popular minstrelsy of an earlier age, have all the raciness and flavour that belong to the native wild-flower of the soil. The ballads in the second volume are, probably, the work of Hita himself,--poor imitations of the antique, and proving that, if his rich and redundant prose is akin to poetry, his poetry is still nearer allied to prose. [68] "Estuvo alli aquella noche á vista de los enemigos, que teniendo ocupado el paso con grandes fuegos por aquellos cerros, no hacian sino tocar sus atabalejos, dulzaynas, y xabecas, haciendo algazaras para atemorizar nuestros Cristianos, que con grandisimo recato estuvieron todos con las armas en las manos."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 413. [69] Ibid. p. 414.--Herrera, Historia General, tom. i. p. 737.--Bleda, Cronica de España, p. 684.--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, pp. 69, 70.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. x. p. 17. [70] "A la mano derecha cubiertos con un sierro, havia emboscados quinientos arcabuceros i vallesteros, demás desto otra emboscada en lo hondo del barranco de mucho mayor numero de gente."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, tom. i. p. 71. [71] "Ellos quando pensaron que nuestra gente iva cansada acometieron por la frente, por el costado, i por la retaguardia, todo a un tiempo; de manera que quasi una hora se peleó con ellos a todas partes i a las espaldas, no sin igualdad i peligro."--Ibid. ubi supra. [72] This poison was extracted from the aconite, or wolf's-bane, that grew rife among the Alpujarras. It was of so malignant a nature that the historian assures us that, if a drop mingled with the blood flowing from a wound, the virus would ascend the stream and diffuse itself over the whole system! Quince-juice was said to furnish the best antidote.--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, tom. i. pp. 73, 74. [73] Ibid. pp. 71-74.--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, p. 554.--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. pp. 416-418.--Herrera, Historia General, tom. i. p. 737.--Bleda, Cronica de España, p. 684. [74] "Mas la priesa de caminar en siguimiento de los enemigos, i la falta de bagages en que la cargar i gente con que aseguralla, fue causa de quemar la máyor parte, porque ellos no se aprovechasen."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 75. [75] "Los Moros tomaron lo alto de la sierra, y no pararon hasta meterse en la nieve, donde perecieron cantidad de mugeres y de criatura de frio."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 437. [76] "El Marques les dió á saco todo el mueble, en que habia ricas cosas de seda, oro, plata, y aljofar, de que cupo la mejor y mayor parte á los que habian ido delante."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 444. [77] "No tomen, señores, á vida hombre ni muger de aquestos hereges, que tan malos han sido, y tanto mal nos han hecho."--Ibid. p. 440. [78] "El Marques se enterneció de ver aquellas pobres mugeres tan lastimadas, y consolandolas lo mejor que pudo," &c.--Ibid, ubi supra. [79] "Hubo muchos soldados heridos, los mas que se herian unos á otros, entendiendo los que venian de fuera, que los que martillaban con las espadas eran Moros, porque solamente les alumbraba el centellear del acero, y el relampaguear de la polvora de los arcabuces en la tenebrosa escuridad de la noche."--Ibid. p. 445. [80] "De los Moriscos quasi ninguno quedó vivo, de las Moriscas huvo muchas muertas, de los nuestros algunos heridos, que con la escuridad de la noche se hacian daño unos á otros."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 77. [81] Ibid. ubi supra.--Bleda, Cronica de España, p. 685.--Herrera, Historia General, tom. i. p. 787.--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 441 et seq.--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, p. 558. [82] "Habia entre ellas muchas dueñas nobles, apuestas y hermosas doncellas, criadas con mucho regalo, que iban desnudas y descalzas, y tan maltratadas del trabajo del captiverio y del camino, que no solo quebraban los corazones á los que las conocian, mas aun á quien no las habia visto."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 448. [83] "Y volviendo á las casas del Arzobispo, las que tenian parientes las llevaron á sus posadas, y las otras fueron hospedadas con caridad entre la buena gente, y de limosna se les compró de vestir y de calzar."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. ubi supra. [84] "Los soldados no podian llevar á paciencia ver que se tratase de medios con los rebeldes; y quando otro dia se supo que los admitia, fue tan grande la tristeza en el campo, como si hubieran perdido la jornada."--Ibid. p. 443. [85] Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 455. [86] Abderrahman--or, as spelt by Gayangos, Abdu-r-rhamàn--the First, the founder of the dynasty from which Aben-Humeya claimed his descent, took refuge in Spain from a bloody persecution, in which every member of his numerous family is said to have perished by the scimitar or the bowstring. [87] "Y como vió que los Christanos iban la sierra arriba, y que los suyos huían desvergonzadamente, entendiendo que todo lo que Don Alonso Venegas trataba era engaño, echo las cartas en el suelo, y subiendo á gran priesa en un caballo, dexó su familia atras, y huyo tambien la vuelta de la sierra."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 460. [88] Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 458 et seq.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. x. PP. 28-31.--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, pp. 80, 81.--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, pp. 560, 561.--Herrera, Historia General, tom. i. p. 737. [89] The decision referred to was, probably, one in the last Council of Toledo, A.D. 690.--See Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. i. p. 452. [90] I quote the words of Marmol:--"Con una moderacion piadosa, de que quiso usar como principe considerado y justo."--Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 495. [91] Ibid. ubi supra. [92] Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. pp. 465, 498. Mendoza says they were all returned:--"a thing never before seen, whether it arose from fear or obedience, or that there was such an abundance of women that they were regarded as little better than household furniture."--Guerra de Granada, p. 96. [93] "Fue tanta la indignacion del Margues de Mondejar, que, sin perdonar á ninguna edad ni sexo, mandó pasar á cuchillo hombres y mugeres, quantos habia en el fuerte; y en su presencia los hacia matar á los alabarderos de su guardia, que no bastaban los ruegos de los caballeros y capitanes, ni las piadosas lagrimas de las que pedian la miserable vida."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 493. [94] Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 482 et seq.--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, pp. 85-95.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. x. pp. 32-36.--Bleda, Cronica de España, p. 688 et seq.--Herrera, Historia General, tom. i. p. 738.--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, p. 589. The storming of Guajaras is a favorite theme with both chroniclers and bards. Among the latter Hita has not failed to hang his garland of verse on the tombs of more than one illustrious cavalier who perished in that bloody strife, and for whose loss "all the noble dames of Seville," as he tells us, "went into mourning."--Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. pp. 112-118. [95] "Que no habia osado parar en la Alpuxarra, y con solos cincuenta ó sesenta hombres, que le seguian, andaba huyendo de peña en peña."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 464. [96] The Castillian chronicler Marmol refuse his admission--somewhat roughly expressed--to this brave Morisco,-"este barbaro," as he calls him, "hijo de aspereza y frialdad indomable, y menospreciador de la muerte."--(Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 503.) The story of the escape of Aben-Humeya is also told, and with little discrepancy, by Cabrera (Filipe Segundo, p. 573), and Ferreras (Hist. d'Espagne, tom. x. pp. 39, 40). [97] "Quando entendieron que peleaban contra el campo del Marques de los Velez, á quien los Moros de aquella tierra solian llamar Ibiliz Arraez el Hadid, que quiere decir, _diabolo cabeza de hierro_, perdieron esperanza de vitoria."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 451. Hita, who was a native of Murcia, and followed Los Velez to the war, gives an elaborate portrait of this powerful chief, whom he extols as one of the most valiant captains in the world, rivalling in his achievements the Cid, Bernardo del Carpio, or any other hero of greatest renown in Spain.--Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. p. 68 et seq. [98] Circourt, Hist. des Arabes d'Espagne, tom. ii. p. 346. [99] "Mas mugeres que hombres," says Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 83. [100] "En menos de dos horas fueron muertas mas de seis mil personas entre hombres y mugeres; y de niños, desde uno hasta diez años, habia mas de dos mil degollados."--Hita, Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. p. 126. We may hope this is an exaggeration of the romancer. Mendoza says nothing of the children, and reduces the slain to seven hundred. But Hita was in the action. [101] "La soldadesca que andaba suelta por el lugar cometió crueldades inauditas, y que la pluma se resiste á transcribir."--Ibid. p. 125. [102] "El niño arrastrando como pudó se llegó á ella, y movido del deseo de mamar, se asió de los pechos de la madre, sacando leche mezclada con la sangre de las heridas."--Hita, Guerras de Granada, p. 126. [103] "Advirtiendo al mismo tiempo que hay tres mil hombres paisanos suyos puestos sobre las armas, y decididos á perder la vida por salvarle."--Ibid. p. 132. [104] Hita has devoted one of the most spirited of his _romances_ to the rout of Ohanez. The opening stanza may show the tone of it:-- "Las tremolantes banderas del grande Fajardo parten para las Nevadas Sierras, y van camino de Ohanez. Ay de Ohanez!" [105] "Todos los caballeros y capitanes en la procesion armados de todas sus armas, con velas de cera blanca en las manos, que se las habian enviado para aquel dia desde su casa, y todas las Christianas en medio vestidas de azul y blanco, que por ser colores aplicados á nuestra Señora, mandó el Marques que las vistiesen de aquella manera á su costa."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 469. [106] "Trayéndose muchas Moras hermosas, pues pasaron de trescientas las que se tomaron allí; y habiéndolas tenido los soldados á su voluntad mas de quince dias, al cabo de ellos mandó el marqués que llevasen á la iglesia."--Hita, Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. p. 155. [107] "Por manera que estaba la Alpuxarra tan llana, que diez y doce soldados iban de unos lugares en otros, sin hallar quien los enojase."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 498. Mendoza fully confirms Marmol's account of the quiet state of the country.--Guerra de Granada, pp. 96, 97. [108] "Le suplicase de su parte los admitiese, habiendose misericordiosamente con los que no fuesen muy culpados, para que él pudiese cumplir la palabra que tenia ya dada á los reducidos, entendiendo ser aquel camino el mas breve para acabar con ellos por la via de equidad."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 483. [109] "Que hiciese por su parte lo que pudiese, porque ansi haria él de la suya."--Ibid. p. 470. [110] "Dexar sin castigo exemplar á quien tantos crimenes habian cometido contra la Magestad _divina y humana_."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, p. 499. [111] "El Marques," says Mendoza, "hombre de estrecha i rigurosa disciplina, criado al favor de su abuelo i padre en gran oficio, sin igual ni contradictor, impaciente de tomar compañia, communicava sus consejos consigo mismo."--Guerra de Granada, p. 103. [112] Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 115 et seq.--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. pp. 511-513.--Miniana, Historia de España, p. 376.--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, pp. 573, 574. [113] Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 8 et seq.--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, pp. 97, 128.--Miniana, Historia de España, p. 376.--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, pp. 575, 576. [114] "Otros, como desesperados, juntando esteras, tascos, y otras cosas secas, que pudiesen arder, so metian entre sus mesmas llamas, y las avivaban, para que, ardiendo la carcel y la Audiencia, pereciesen todos los que estaban dentro."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 517. [115] Ibid. ubi supra. [116] "Los mataron á todos, sin dexar hombre á vida, sino fueron los dos que defendió la guardia que tenian."--Ibid. ubi supra. See also Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 122; Herrera, Historia General, tom. i. p. 744. [117] "Havia en ellos culpados en platicas i demonstraciones, i todos en deseo; gente flaca, liviana, inhabil para todo, sino para dar ocasion a su desventura."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 122. [118] "Las culpas de los quales debieron ser mayores de lo que aqui se escribe, porque despues pidiendo las mugeres y hijos de los muertos sus dotes y haciendas ante los alcaldes del crimen de aquella Audiencia, y saliendo el fiscal á la causa, se formó proceso en forma; y por sentencias y revista fueron condenados, y aplicados todos sus bienes al real fisco."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. i. p. 517. [119] "Levantó un estandarte bermejo, que mostrava el lugar de la persona del Rei a manera de Guion."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 118. [120] "Para seguridad de su persona pagó arcabuceria de guardia, que fue creciendo hasta quatrocientos hombres."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, ubi supra. [121] "Siguió nuestra orden de guerra, repartió la gente por escuadras, juntóla en compañias, nombró capitanes."--Ibid. ubi supra. [122] This, which is two years later than the date commonly assigned by historians, seems to be settled by the researches of Lafuente. (See Historia General de España (Madrid, 1854), tom. xiii. p. 437, note.) Among other evidence adduced by the historian is that of a medal struck in honour of Don John's victory at Lepanto, in the year 1571, the inscription on which expressly states that he was twenty-four years of age. [123] Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol 3.--Villafañe, Vida y Virtudes de Doña Magdalena de Ulloa (Salamanca, 1722), p. 36.--See also Lafuente, Historia de España, tom. xiii. p. 432. This last historian has made the parentage of John of Austria the subject of a particular discussion in the Revista de Ambos Mundos, No. 3. [124] Vanderhammen, alluding to the doubts thrown on the rank of his hero's mother, consoles himself with the reflection that, if there was any deficiency in this particular, no one can deny that it was more than compensated by the proud origin of her imperial lover.--Don Juan de Austria, fol. 3. [125] Lafuente, Hist. de España, tom. xiii. p. 432, note. [126] Gachard, Retraite et Mort de Charles-Quint, tom. ii. p. 506. In a private interview with Luis Quixada, the evening before his death, the emperor gave him six hundred gold crowns to purchase the above-mentioned pension. [127] This interesting document was found among the testamentary papers of Charles the Fifth. A copy of it has been preserved among the manuscripts of Cardinal Granvelle.--Papiers d'Etat, tom. iv. pp. 499, 500. [128] "Gastava buena parte del dia en tirar con una ballestilla a los paxaros."--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 10. [129] "Y puede ser llegase á sospechar, si acaso tendria por padre á su esposo."--Villefañe, Vida de Magdalena de Ulloa, p. 38. [130] "Accion singular y rara, y que dexa atras quantas la antiguedad celebra por peregrinas."--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 31. According to another biographer, two fires occurred to Quixada, one in Villagarcia and one in Valladolid. On each of these occasions the house was destroyed, but his ward was saved, borne off by the good knight in his arms. (Villafañe, Vida de Magdalena de Ulloa, pp. 44, 53.) The coincidences are too much opposed to the doctrine of chances to commend themselves readily to our faith. Vanderhammen's reflection was drawn forth by the second fire, the only one he notices. It applies, however, equally well to both. [131] Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 16. [132] Indeed, Siguenza, who may have had it from the monks of Yuste, tells us that the boy sometimes was casually seen by the emperor, who was careful to maintain his usual reserve and dignified demeanour; so that no one could suspect his secret. "Once or twice," adds the Jeronymite father, "the lad entered the apartment of his father, who doubtless spoke to him as he would have spoken to any other boy."--Historia de la Orden de San Geronimo, tom. iii. p. 205. [133] Relation d'un Religieux de Yuste, ap. Gachard, Retraite et Mort de Charles-Quint, tom. ii. p. 55. [134] "Hallo tan público aquí lo que toca aquella persona que V. Mtad sabe que está á mi cargo que me ha espantado, y espántame mucho mas las particularidades que sobrello oyo."--Ibid. tom. i. p. 449. [135] A copy of this interesting document was found in the collection of Granvelle at Besançon, and has been lately published in the beautiful edition of the cardinal's papers.--Papiers d'Etat, tom. iv. p. 495 et seq. [136] "Que pues su Mtad, en su testamento ni codecilo, no hazia memoria dél, que era razon tenello por burla, y que no sabía que poder responder otra cosa, en público ni en secreto."--Gachard, Retraite et Mort de Charles-Quint, tom. i. p. 446. [137] "La Princesa al punto arrebatada del amor, lo abraçó, y besó, sin reparar en el lugar que estava, y el acto que exercia. Llamóle hermano y tratóle de alteza."--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 23. [138] "Llego el caso a estado, que le huvo de tomar en braços el Conde Osorno hasta la carroça de la Princesa, porque le gozassen todos."--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 25. The story must be admitted to be a strange one, considering the punctilious character of the Castilian court, and the reserved and decorous habits of Joanna. But the author, born and bred in the palace, had access, as he tells us, to the very highest sources of information, oral and written. [139] "Vuelto ya en si de la suspension primera, alargó la mano, y montó en el caballo; y aun se dice que con airosa grandeza, añadió; Pues si eso es asi tened el estribo."--Villafañe, Vida de Doña Magdalena de Ulloa, p. 51. [140] "Macte, inquit, animo puer, prænobilis vire filius es tu; Carolus Quintus Imperator, qui coelo degit, utriusque nostrum pater est."--Strada, De Bello Belgico, tom. i. p. 608. [141] "Jamás habia tenido dia de caza mas gustoso, ni logrado presa que le hubiese dado tanto contento."--Villafañe, Vida de Doña Magdalena de Ulloa, p. 52. This curious account of Philip's recognition of his brother is told, with less discrepancy than usual, by various writers of that day. [142] Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 27.--"Mandóle llamar Ecelencia; pero sus reales costunbres le dieron adelante titulo de Alteza i de señor entre los grandes i menores."--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, lib. v. cap. 3. [143] "Tengo mucho cuidado que aprenda y se le enseñen las cosas necesarias, conforme á su edad y á la calidad de su persona, que, segun la estrecheza en que se crió y ha estado hasta que vino á mi poder, es bien menester con todo cuidado tener cuenta con él."--Gachard, Retraite et Mort de Charles-Quint, tom. i. p. 450. [144] "Longè tamen anteibat Austriacus et corporis habitudine, et morum suavitate. Facies illi non modò pulchra, sed etiam venusta."--Strada, De Bello Belgico, tom. i. p. 609. [145] "Eminebat in adolescente comitas, industria, probitas, et, ut in novæ potentiæ hospite, verecundia."--Ibid. loc. cit. [146] Strada, Be Bello Belgico, tom. ii. pp. 609, 610.--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 34-36.--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, lib. vi. cap. 24. [147] "La fama de la partida de Don Juan sacó del ocio a muchos cavalleros de la corte i reynos, que avergonçados de quedarse en él, le siguieron."--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, loc. cit. [148] Ante, vol. ii. book iv. ch. 6. [149] Vanderhammen has given a minute description of this royal galley, with its pictorial illustrations. Among the legends emblazoned below them, that of "_Dolum reprimere dolo_" savours strongly of the politic monarch.--Don Juan de Austria, fol. 44-48. [150] "Su comision fue sin limitacion ninguna; mas su libertad tan atada, que de cosa grande ni pequeña podia disponer sin comunicación i parecer de los consegeros, i mandado del Rei."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 139. [151] Ibid. p. 130 et seq.--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 81.--Marmol, tom. i. pp. 511-513.--Villafañe, Vida de Doña Magdalena de Ulloa, p. 73.--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, lib. ix. cap. 1. [152] "Ya el Presidente tenia orden de su Magestad de la que se habia de tener en el recibimiento de su hermano."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 17. [153] "De manera que entre gala y guerra hacian hermosa y agradable vista."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, ubi supra. [154] "El qual lo recibió muy bien, y con el sombrero en el mano, y le tuvo un rato abrazado. Y apartandose á un lado, llegó el Arzobispo, y hizo lo mismo con él."--Ibid. tom. ii. p. 18. [155] "Que no sintieron tanto dolor con oir los crueles golpes de las armas con que los hereges los mataban á ellos y á sus hijos, hermanos y parientes, como el que sienten en ver que han de ser perdonados."--Ibid. p. 19. From this, it would seem that the love of revenge was a stronger feeling with these Christian women than the love of friends. [156] "Y mas galas y regocijos, porque estaban las ventanas de las calles, por donde habia de pasar, entoldadas de paños de oro y seda, y mucho numero de damas y doncellas nobles en ellas, ricamente ataviadas, que habian acudido de toda la ciudad por verle."--Ibid. ubi supra. [157] Ibid. pp. 17-19.--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 83.--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 133. [158] "Juntamente con usar de equidad y clemencia con los que lo merecieren, los que no hubieren sido tales serán castigados con grandisimo rigor."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 21. [159] Ibid. pp. 23, 24.--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 85.--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, lib. ix. cap. 1.--Herrera, Historia General, tom. i. pp. 744, 745. [160] Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 141.--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 85.--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 27.--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, lib. ix. cap. 1. [161] The historian of the Morisco rebellion tells us that these Africans wore garlands round their heads, intimating their purpose to conquer or to die like martyrs in defence of their faith.--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 73. [162] Besides a tenth of the produce of the soil, one source of his revenue, we are told, was the confiscated property of such Moriscoes as refused to yield him obedience. Another was a fifth of the spoil taken from the enemy.--Ibid. p. 35.--Also Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 120. [163] "Y la vuestra, ya yo os dixe que la queria para cosas mayores, y que asi agora yo no os embiaba á las de la guerra sino á esa ciudad á dar desde ella la orden en todo que combiniese: Pues y por otras ocupaciones y cartas no lo podia hazer."--Carta del Rey á Don Juan de Austria, 10 de Mayo, 1569, MS. [164] Don John seems to have chafed under the restrictions imposed on him by the king. At least we may infer so from a rebuke of Philip, who tells his brother that, "though for the great love he bears him he will overlook such language this time, it will not be well for him to repeat it."--Ibid. 20 de Mayo, 1569, MS. [165] Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 94. Marmol, with one or two vigorous _coups de pinceau_, gives the portrait of the marquis. "No se podia determinar qual era en él mayor extremo, su esfuerzo, valentia y discrecion, ó la arrogancia y ambicion de honra, acompañada de aspereza de condicion."--Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 99. [166] Ibid. p. 73 et seq.--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 94.--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 175 et seq.--Miniana, Historia de España, p. 377. [167] "Quando vieron el fuerte perdido, se despeñaron por las peñas mas agrias, quiriendo mas morir hechas pedazos, que venir en poder de Christianos."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 89. [168] "Casi todos los capitanes."--Ibid. loc. cit. [169] The fierce encounter at Fraxiliana is given in great detail by Mendoza (Guerra de Granada, pp. 165-169), and Marmol (Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. pp. 86-90). No field of fight was better contested during the war; and both historians bear testimony to the extraordinary valour of the Moriscoes, worthy of the best days of the Arabian empire. Philip, while he commends the generous ardour shown by the grand-commander in the expedition, condemns him for having quitted his fleet to engage in it. "El comendador mayor tubo buen suceso como deseais, y como entiendo yo que lo merece su zelo y su intencion, mas salir su persona en tierra, teniendo en vuestra ausencia el cargo de la mas fué cosa digna de mucha reprehension."--Carta del Rey á Don Juan, 25 de Junio 1569, MS. [170] Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. pp. 108-111.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. x. pp. 83, 84--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, lib. ix. cap. 6. [171] Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 146--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 100.--Bleda (Cronica de España, p. 705), in the part of his work, has done nothing more than transcribe the pages of Mendoza, and that in so blundering a style as to mistake the date of this event by a month. [172] "Puestos en la cuerda, con guarda de infanteria i cavalleria por una i otra parte."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 147. [173] "Fue un miserable espectaculo," says an eyewitness; "ver tantos hombres de todas edades, las cabezas baxas, las manos cruzadas y los rostros bañados de lagrimas, con semblante doloroso y triste, viendo que dexaban sus regaladas casas, sus familias, su patria, y tanto bien como tenian, y aun no sabian cierto lo que se haria de sus cabezas."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 102. [174] Ibid. p. 103.--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 147. Both historians were present on this occasion. [175] "Los que salieron por todos tres mil i quinientos, el numero de mugeres mucho mayor."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 147. [176] "Muchos murieron por los caminos de trabajo, de cansancio, de pesar, de hambre; a hierro, por mano de los mismos que los havian de guardar, robados, vendidos por cautivos."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 148. [177] "Los enemigos de Dios,"--the charitable phrase by which the Moriscoes, as well as Moors, came now to be denominated by the Christians. [178] Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, pp. 148-150. [179] "Quedó grandisima lastima á los que habiendo visto la prosperidad, la policía, y el regalo de las casas, carmenes y guertas, donde los Moriscos tenian todas sus recreaciones y pasatiempos, y desde á pocos dias lo vieron todo asolado y destruido."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 104. [180] "Parecia bien estar sujeta aquella felicisima ciudad á tal destruccion, para que se entienda que las cosas mas esplendidas y floridas entre la gente están mas aparejadas á los golpes de fortuna."--Marmol, ubi supra. [181] "Armado de unas armas negras de la color del acero, y una celada en la cabeza llena de plumages, y una gruesa lanza en la mano mas recia que larga."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 133. [182] "Andaba Aben Umeya vistoso delante de todos en un caballo blanco con una aljuba de grana vestida, y un turbante Turquesco en la cabeza."--Ibid. p. 134. [183] "No temiesen el vano nombre del Marques de los Velez, porque en los mayores trabajos acudia Dios á los suyos; y quando les faltase, no les podria faltar una honrosa muerte con las armas en las manos, que les estaba mejor que vivir deshonrados."--Ibid. p. 134. [184] "Y apeandose del caballo, le hizo desjarretar, y se embreñó en las sierras."--Ibid. loc. cit. Hita commemorates the flight of the "little king" of the Alpujarras in one of his ballads.--Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. p. 310. [185] Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 209.--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 150.--Hita, Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. p. 233. [186] "I tan adelante pasó la desorden, que so juntaron quatrocientos arcabuceros, i con las mechas en las serpentinas salieron a vista del campo."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 195. [187] Ibid. p. 198 et seq.--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 146. [188] "Que se publicase la guerra á fuego y á sangre."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 160. [189] "Vivia ya con estado de Rei, pero con arbitrio de tirano."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 209. [190] "Teniendo barreadas las calles del lugar de manera, que nadie pudiese entrar en él sin ser visto ó sentido."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 163. [191] Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 210. Such is the Tiberius-like portrait given of him by an enemy--by one however, it may be added, who for liberal views and for discrimination of character was not surpassed by any chronicler of his time. [192] "Los cuales pasaron de trescientos cincuenta, segun yo he sido informado de varios Moriscos que seguian sus banderas; y de tal manera procedia el reyecillo, que vino á ser odiosísimo á los suyos por sus crueldades."--Hita, Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. p. 303. [193] "Que no la hay mas hermosa en toda la Andalucia: blanca es y colorada, como la rosa mas fina; Tañe, danza, canta á estremo, que es un encanto el oírla; es moza, bella y graciosa nadie vió tal en su vida."--Ibid. tom. ii. p. 324. The severer pencil of Mendoza does not disdain the same warm colouring for the portrait of the Morisco beauty.--Guerra de Granada, p. 213. [194] "Muger igualmente hermosa i de linage."--Ibid. [195] "Ninguno huvo que tomase las armas, ni bolviese de palabra por él."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 217. [196] "Ataronle las manos con un almaizar."--Ibid. p. 218. [197] "El mismo se dió la buelta como le hiciesen menos mal; concertó la ropa, cubrióse el rostro."--Ibid. p. 219. [198] There is less discrepancy than usual in the accounts both of Aben-Humeya's assassination and of the circumstances which led to it. These circumstances have a certain Oriental colouring, which makes them not the less probable, considering the age and country in which they occurred.--Among the different authorities in prose and verse, see Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. pp. 162-169; Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, pp. 212-220; Rufo, La Austriada, cantos 13, 14; Hita, Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. p. 337 et seq. Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 103-105. [199] "Con la reputacion de valiente i hombre del campo, con la afabilidad, gravedad, autoridad de la presencia, fue bien quisto, respetado, obedecido, tenido como Rei generalmente de todos."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 224. This was painting him _en beau_. For a painting of an opposite complexion see Miniana, who represents him as "audaz, perfido, suspicaz, y de pésimas costumbres." (Historia de España, p. 378.) Fortunately for Aben-Aboo, the first-mentioned writer, a contemporary, must be admitted to be the better authority of the two. [200] "No pude desear mas, ni contentarme con menos."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 168. See also, for the account of this martial ceremony, Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 222. [201] Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. x. pp. 111-118.--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. pp. 169-189.--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 225 et seq.--Miniana, Hist. d'España, p. 378. [202] "Desta manera quedaron levantados todos los Moriscos del Reino, sino los de la Hoya de Malaga i Serrania de Ronda."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 241. [203] "Llevando los escuderos las cabezas y las manos de los Moros en los hierros de las lanzas."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 159. The head of an enemy was an old perquisite of the victor--whether Christian or Moslem--in the wars with the Spanish Arabs. It is frequently commemorated in the Moorish _romances_ as among the most honourable trophies of the field, down to as late a period as the war of Granada. See, among others, the ballad beginning "A vista de los dos Reyes." [204] "Y que salir á tales rebatos es desautoridad vuestra, siendo quien sois y teniendo el cargo que tenis."--Carta de Felipe Segundo á Don Juan de Austria, 30 de Setiembre, 1569, MS. [205] "Le suplico mire que ni á quien soy, ni á la edad que tengo ni á otra cosa alguna conviene encerrarme, cuando mas razon es que me muestre."--Carta de Don Juan de Austria al Rey, 23 de Setiembre, 1569, MS. [206] "Entendióse por España la fama de su ida sobre Galera, i movióse la nobleza della con tanto calor, que fue necesario dar al Rei á entender que no era con sua voluntad ir Cavalleros sin licencia á servir en aquella empresa."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 256. [207] "Havian las desordenes pasad tan adelante, que fue necesario para remediallas hacer demostracion no vista ni leida en los tiempos pasados, en la guerra: suspandar treinta i dos capitanes de quarenta i uno que havia, con nombre de reformacion."--Ibid. p. 237. [208] "Tambien la gente embiada por los señores, escogida, igual, disciplinada, movidos por obligacion de virtud i deseo de acreditar sus personas."--Ibid. p. 234. [209] "Pusieronsele los ojos encendidos como brasa de puro corage."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 224. [210] "Sin comer bocado en todo aquel dia se volvió á la ciudad de Granada."--Ibid. p. 225. [211] "Y porque podria ser que ordenase al marqués de los Velez que quedase con vos y os aconsejase, convendrá en este caso que vos le mostreis muy buena cara y le trateis muy bien y le deis á entender que tomais su parecer, mas que en efecto tomeis el de los que he dicho cuando fuesen diferentes del suyo."--Carta del Rey á D. Juan de Austria, 26 de Noviembre, 1569, MS. [212] "Y que os goberneis como si hubiésedes visto mucha guerra y halládoos en ella, que os digo que comigo y con todos ganeis harta mas reputacion en gobernaros desta manera, que no haciendo alguna mocedad que á todos nos costare caro."--Ibid. MS. [213] "I que seais obedecido de toda mi gente, haciendolo yo asimismo como hijo vuestro, acatando vuestro valor i canas, i amparandome en todas ocasiones de vuestros consejos."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 260. [214] "Pues no conviene a mi edad anciana haver de ser cabo de esquadra."--Ibid. loc. cit. [215] The marquis of Los Velez was afterwards summoned to Madrid, where he long continued to occupy an important place in the council of state, apparently without any diminution of the royal favour. For the preceding pages consult Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. pp. 229-232; Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, pp. 257-260; Herrera, Hist. General, tom. i, pp. 777, 778; Bleda, Cronica, pp. 733, 734. [216] The punning attractions of the name were too strong to be resisted by the ballad-makers of the day. See in particular the _romance_ (one of the best, it may be added--and no great praise--in Hita's second volume) beginning-- "Mastredages marineros de Huescar y otro lugar han armado una Galera que no la hay tal en la mar. No tiene velas, ni remos, y navegar, y hace mal,"-- and so on, for more stanzas than the reader will care to see.--Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. p. 469. [217] "Las tenian los Moros barreadas de cincuenta en cincuenta pasos, y hechos muchos traveses de una parte y de otro en las puertas y paredes de las casas, para herir á su salvo á los que fuesen pasando."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 234. The best and by far the most minute account of the topography of Galera is given by this author. [218] Ibid. p. 233 et seq.--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 112, 113.--Hita, Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. p. 377 et seq. Hita tells us he was not present at the siege of Galera; but he had in his possession the diary of a Murcian officer named Tomás Perez de Hevia, who served through the siege, and of whom Hita speaks as a person well known for his military science. He says he has conformed implicitly to Hevia's journal which he commends for its scrupulous veracity. According to the judgment of some critics, the Murcian officer, if he merits this encomium, may be thought to have the advantage of Hita himself. [219] "Para que los soldados se animasen al trabajo, iba delante de todos á pie, y traía su haz acuestas como cada uno, hasta ponerlo en la trinchea."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 237. [220] Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, pp. 236-238.--Hevia, ap. Hita, Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. pp. 386, 387.--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 113.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. x. p. 140. [221] "Convendrá por no aventurar mas gente buena que se haga todo lo que sea posible con las minas y artilleria, ántes de venir á las manos."--Carta del Rey á D. Juan de Austria, 6 de Febrero, 1570, MS. [222] "Unos llaman á Mahoma otros dicen _Santiago_, Otros gritan _cierra España,_ _muera el bando renegado_." Romance, ap. Hita, Guerras de Granada. [223] No less than eighteen, according to Hevia. But this number, notwithstanding Hita's warrant for the writer's scrupulous accuracy, is somewhat too heavy a tax on the credulity of the reader.--"Esta brava mora se llamaba a Zarzamodonia, era corpulenta, recia de miembros, y alcanzaba grandísima fuerza; se averiguó que en este dia mató ella sola por su mano á diez y ocho soldados, na de los peores del campo."--Hita, Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. p. 393. [224] For an account of the second assault see Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, pp. 264, 265; Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. pp. 240-243; Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 113, 114; Hevia, ap. Hita, Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. p. 389 et seq.; Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, pp. 629, 630. [225] "Yo hundiré á Galera, y la asolaré, y sembraré toda de sal; y por el riguroso filo de la espada pasarán chicos y grandes, quantos están dentro, por castigo de su pertinacia, y en venganza de la sangre que han derramado."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 244. [226] "No puedo yo dejar de encargaros que le engais muy grande de que él no sea deservido en ese campo, ni haya las maldades y desórdenes que decís, que siendo tales no pueden hacer cosa buena, y así lo procurad, y que no haya juramentos ni otras ofensas de Dios, que con esto él nos ayudará y todo se hará bien."--Carta del Rey á D Juan de Austria, 6 de Febrero, 1570, MS. [227] "Y con esa gente, segun lo que decís, mas importará estar detras dellos deteniéndolos y castigándolos que no delante, pues para los que lo están y hacen lo que deben no es menester."--Ibid. [228] It is singular that no one of the chroniclers gives us the name of the Moorish chief who commanded in Galera. A romance of the time calls him Abenhozmin. "Marinero que la rige Sarracino es natural, criado acá en nuestra España por su mal y nuestro mal: Abenhozmin ha por nombre, y es hombre de gran caudal." Hita, Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. p. 470. [229] "Relumbrante y fortísimo morríon adornado de un penacho bello y elegante, sentado sobre una rica medalla de la imagen de nuestra Señora de la Concepcion."--Hevia, ap. Hita, Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. p. 429. [230] "Igualmente se arreó lo mejor que pado toda la caballería, y era cosa digna de ver la elegancia y hermosura de un ejército tan lucido y gallardo."--Hevia, ap. Hita, Guerras de Granada, loc. cit. [231] These anecdotes are given by Hevia, ap. Hita, Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. pp. 449-451. [232] "Los quales mataron mas de quatrocientas mugeres y niños... y ansi hizo matar muchos en su presencia á los alabarderos de su guardia."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 248. [233] "Duró el combate, despues de entrado el lugar, desde las ocho de la mañana hasta las cinco de la tarde."--Hevia, ap. Hita, Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. p. 448. [234] "Y no paráran hasta acabarlas á todas, si las quejas de los soldados, á quien se quitaba el premio de la vitoria, no le movieran; mas esto fue quando se entendió que la villa estaba ya por nosotros, y no quiso que se perdonase á varon que pasase de doce años."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 248. [235] "Se cautivaron hasta otras mil y quinientas personas de mugeres y niños, porque á hombre ninguno se tomó con vida, habiendo muerto todos sin quedar uno en este dia, y en los asaltos pasados."--Hevia, ap. Hita, Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. p. 448. Marmol, while he admits that not a man was spared, estimates the number of women and children saved at three times that given in the text. [236] "Si Africa llora, España no rie." [237] For the account of the final assault, as told by the various writers, with sufficient inconsistency in the details, compare Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. pp. 244-249; Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, pp. 266-268; Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 114, 115; Hevia, ap. Hita, Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. p. 429 et seq.; Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, pp. 630, 631; Bleda, Cronica, p. 734; Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. x. pp. 143, 144. [238] "Tanto le crecia la ira, pensando en el daño que aquellos hereges habian hecho."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 248. [239] "Solo dar gracias á Dios y á la gloriosa virgen Maria, encomendandoles el Catholico Rey aquel negocio, por ser de calidad, que deseaba mas gloria de la concordia y paz, que de la vitoria sangrienta."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 249. [240] "Cela faict, par sa renommée qui voloit par le monde, tant des chrestiens que des infidelles, il fut faict general de la saincte ligue."--Brantôme, OEuvres, tom. i. p. 326. [241] "Qué es esto, Españoles? de qué huis? dónde está la honra de España? No teneis delante á Don Juan de Austria, vuestro capitan? de qué temeis? Retiraos con orden como hombres de guerra con el rostro al enemigo."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 257. [242] "Acudiendo á todas las necesidades con peligro de su persona, porque le dieron un escopetazo en la cabeza sobre una celada fuerte que llevaba, que á no ser tan buena, le matáran."--Ibid. p. 258. [243] Carta de D. Juan de Austria al Rey, 19 de Febrero, 1570, MS.--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 253 et seq.--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 273.--Villafañe, Vida de Magdalena de Ulloa.--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 116, 117. [244] "Conforme á esto entenderá V. M. la poca costancia y aficion que tienen á la guerra, estos que la dejan al mejor tiempo sin poderles reprimir galeras, ni horca ni cuantas diligencias se hacen. Y plega á Dios que el amor de los hijos y parientes sea la causa y no miedo de los enemigos."--Carta de D. Juan de Austria al Rey, 19 de Febrero, 1570, MS. [245] Ibid. [246] "Que cada uno ha de hacer su oficio y no el general de soldado, ni el soldado el de general."--Carta del Rey á D. Juan de Austria, 24 de Febrero, 1570, MS. [247] One evidence of this is afforded by the frankness of his friend, Ruy Gomez de Silva. "La primera," he writes to Don John, "que por cuanto V. Ex.ª está reputado de atrevido y de hombre que quiere mas ganar crédito de soldado que de general, que mude este estilo y se deje gobernar."--(Carta de 4 de Marzo, 1570, MS.) It is to Don John's credit that, in his reply, he thanks Ruy Gomez warmly for his admonition, and begs his monitor to reprove him without hesitation, whenever he deems it necessary, since, now that his guardian is gone, there is no other who can take this liberty.--Carta de D. Juan de Austria á Ruy Gomez de Silva, MS. [248] According to Villafañe, Doña Magdalena left Madrid on learning her husband's illness, and travelled with such despatch that she arrived in time to receive his last sighs. Hita also speaks of her presence at his bedside. But as seven days only elapsed between the date of the knight's wound and that of his death, one finds it difficult to believe that this could have allowed time for the courier who brought the tidings, and for the lady afterwards, whether in the saddle or litter, to have travelled a distance of over four hundred and fifty miles, along execrable roads, with much of the way lying through the wild passes of the Alpujarras. [249] "Creemos piadosamente que el alma de D. Luis subiria al ciclo con el oloroso incienso que se quemó en los altares de S. Gerónimo, porque siempre habia empleado la vida en pelear contra enemigos de nuestra santa fé, y por último murió batallando con ellos como soldado valeroso."--Hita, Guerras de Granada, tom. ii. p. 487. [250] Carta del Rey á D. Juan de Austria, 3 de Marzo, 1570, MS. [251] The letter is translated by Stirling from a manuscript, entitled "Joannis Austriaci Vita, auctore Antonio Ossorio," in the National Library at Madrid.--See Cloister Life of Charles the Fifth (Am. ed.), p. 286. [252] Tijola is the scene of the story, familiar to every lover of Castilian romance, and better suited to romance than history, of the Moor Tuzani and his unfortunate mistress, the beautiful Maleha. It forms the most pleasing episode in Hita's second volume (pp. 523-540), and is translated with pathos and delicacy by Circourt, Hist. des Arabes d'Espagne, tom. iii. p. 345 et seq. [253] Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. pp. 290-320, 340-346.--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 119 et seq.--Ferreras Hist. d'Espagne, tom. x. p. 170 et seq. [254] Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 271 et seq.--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. pp. 283-289, 303-315, 321 et seq. In a letter without date, of the duke of Sesa, forming part of a mass of correspondence which I was so fortunate as to obtain from the collection at Holland House, he insists on starvation as a much more effectual means of reducing the enemy than the sword. "Esta guerra parece que no puede acabarse por medio mas cierto que el de la hambre que necesitará á los enemigos á rendirse ó perecer, y esta los acabará primero que el espada."--MS. [255] "Con estas cosas y otras particulares que El Habaqui pidió para Aben Aboo, y para los amigos, y para sí mismo, que todas se le concedieron."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 360. [256] "Misericordia, Señor, misericordia nos conceda vuestra Alteza en nombre de su Magestad, y perdon de nuestras culpas, que conocemos haber sido graves."--Ibid. p. 361. [257] The fullest account of these proceedings is to be found in Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. pp. 355-362. [258] "Predicando en los púlpitos publicamente contra la benignidad y clemencia que V. M. ha mandado usar con esta gente."--Carta de D. Juan de Austria al Rey, 7 de Junio, 1570, MS. [259] "Que los religiosos que habrían de interceder con V. M. por estos miserables, que cierto la mayor parte ha pecado con ignorancia, hagan su esfuerzo en reprender la clemencia."--Ibid. [260] "The wise king," as Bleda tells us, "did not forget Deza's eminent services. He became one of the richest cardinals, passing the remainder of his days in Rome, where he built a sumptuous palace for his residence."--(Cronica de España, p. 753.) Unfortunately this happy preferment did not take place till some time later--too late for the poor Moriscoes to profit by it. [261] "Que El Habaqui habia mirado mal por el bien comun, contendandose con lo que solamente Don Juan de Austria le habia querido conceder, y procurando el bien y provecho para si y para sus deudos."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 390. [262] "En lo que á esto toca, no tengo mas prendas que la palabra del Habaqui, el cual me podria engañar; pero certifico á V. M. que en su manera de proceder ma paresce hombre que tracta verdad, y tal fama tiene."--Carta de D. Juan de Austria al Rey, 21 de Mayo, 1570, MS. [263] "Que quando Aben Aboo de su voluntad no lo hiciese, le llevaria él atado á la cola de su caballo."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 392. [264] "Lo hizo ahogar secretamente, y mandó echar el cuerpo en un muladar envuelto en un zarzo de cañas, donde estuvo mas de treinta dias sin saberse de su muerte."--Ibid. p. 393. [265] "Que quando no quedase otro sino él en la Alpuxarra con sola la camisa que tenia vestida, estimaba mas vivir y morir Moro, que todas quantas mercedes el Rey Filipe le podia hacer; y que fuese cierto, que en ningun tiempo, ni por ninguna manera, se pondria en su poder."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 410. [266] It is the language of Marmol, who will not be suspected of exaggerating the cruelties of his countrymen. He does not seem, indeed, to regard them as cruelties. "Unos enviaba el Comendador mayor á las galeras, otros hacia justicia de ellos, y los mas consentia que los vendiesen los soldados para que fuesen aprovechados."--Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 436. [267] Ibid. p. 433. [268] Circourt gives a precise enumeration of the fortresses in different districts of the country.--Hist. des Arabes d'Espagne, tom. iii. pp. 135, 136. [269] "Llevando cerca de sí a su hijo, mozo quasi de trece años Don Luis Ponce de Leon, cosa usada en otra edad en aquella Casa de los Ponces de Leon, criarse los muchachos peleando con los Moros, i tener a sus padres por maestros."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 318. [270] For the celebrated description of this event by Mendoza, see Guerra de Granada, pp. 301, 302. The Castilian historian, who probably borrowed the hint of it from Tacitus (Annales, lib. i. sec. 31), has painted the scene with a consummate art that raises him from the rank of an imitator to that of a rival. The reader may find a circumstantial account of Alonso de Aguilar's disastrous expedition, in 1501, in the History of Ferdinand and Isabella, part ii. chap. 7. [271] Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, pp. 298-314.--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. pp. 425-431. [272] Circourt quotes a remarkable passage from the _Ordenanzas de Granada_, which well illustrates the _conscientious manner_ in which the government dealt with the Moriscoes. It forms the preamble of the law of February 24, 1571. "The Moriscoes who took no part in the insurrection ought not to be punished. We should not desire to injure them; but they cannot hereafter cultivate their lands; and then it would be an endless task to attempt to separate the innocent from the guilty. We shall indemnify them certainly. Meanwhile their estates must be confiscated, like those of the rebel Moriscoes."--Hist. des Arabes d'Espagne, tom. iii. p. 148. [273] "Que las casas fuesen y estuviesen juntas; porque aunque lo merecian poco, quiso su Magestad que se les diese esto contento."--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. p. 439. [274] "Saquearon los soldados las casas del lugar, y tomaron todas las mugeres por esclavas; cosa que dió harta sospecha de que la desorden habia nacido de su cudicia."--Ibid. p. 444. The better feelings of the old soldier occasionally--and it is no small praise, considering the times--triumph over his national antipathies. [275] For the removal and dispersion of the Moriscoes, see Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. pp. 437-444; Ferraras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. x. pp. 227, 228; Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 126. It may well seem strange that an event of such moment as the removal of the Moriscoes should have been barely noticed, when indeed noticed at all, by the general historian. It is still more strange that it should have been passed over in silence by a writer like Mendoza, to whose narrative it essentially belonged, and who could bestow thirty pages of more on the expedition into the Serrania de Ronda. But this was a tale of Spanish glory. The haughty Castilian chronicler held the race of unbelievers in too great contempt to waste a thought on their calamities, except so far as they enabled him to exhibit the prowess of his countrymen. [276] "Querria tambien que allá se entendiese que ya no soy mochacho, y que puedo, á Dios gracias, comenzar en alguna manera á volar sin alas ajenas, y sospecho ques ya tiempo de salir de pañales."--Carta de D. Juan de Austria á Ruy Gomez de Silva, 16 de Mayo, 1570, MS. [277] "No teniendo el lugar y auctoridad que ha de tener hijo de tal padre, y hermano de tal hermano."--Ibid., 4 de Junio, 1570, MS. [278] Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. pp. 449-454.--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, pp. 324-327.--Bleda, Cronica de España, p. 752.--Herrera, Historia General, tom. i. p. 781.--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 123. [279] "Esta es la cabeza del traidor de Abenabó. Nadie la quite so pena de muerte."--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 329.--Marmol, Rebelion de Granada, tom. ii. pp. 455, 456--Bleda, Cronica de España, p. 752.--Miniara, Hist. de España, p. 383. [280] Ante, p. 40. [281] Nueva Recopilacion, lib. viii. tit. ii. ley 19. [282] "Si estos tales que se huyieren huydo, y ausentado fueren hallados en el dicho Reyno de Granada, ó dentro de diez leguas cercanas á el, caygan é incurran en pena de muerte que sea en sus personas executada."--Ibid. ubi supra. [283] Nueva Recopilacion, lib. viii. tit. ii. ley 19. [284] Examples of this are cited by Circourt, Hist. des Arabes d'Espagne, tom. iii. pp. 150, 151. [285] Ibid. p. 163. M. de Circourt has collected, from some authentic and not very accessible sources, much curious information relative to this part of his subject. [286] Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. x. p. 227. [287] "Ils représentèrent que ce recensement allait leur révéler la secret de leur nombre effrayant; qu'ils fourmillaient."--Circourt, Hist. des Arabes d'Espagne, tom. iii. p. 164. [288] "Qu'ils accapareaint tous les métiers, teut le commerce."--Ibid. loc. cit. [289] Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. x. pp. 239, 240.--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, p. 641.--Zuñiga, Anales de Sevilla, pp. 536-538. The chroniclers paint in glowing colours the splendours of the royal reception at Seville, which, enriched by the Indian trade, took its place among the great commercial capitals of Christendom in the sixteenth century. It was a common saying, "Quien no ha visto á Sevilla No ha visto á maravilla." [290] Herrera, Historia General, tom. i. p. 798 et seq.--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, lib. vi. cap. 17.--Sagredo, Monarcas Othomanos, p. 277. [291] Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, p. 667.--Sagredo, Monarcas Othomanos, p. 277. [292] A copy of the treaty in Latin, dated May 25, 1571, exists in the library of the Academy of History, at Madrid. Señor Rosell has transferred it to the appendix of his work, Historia del Combate Naval de Lepanto (Madrid, 1853), pp. 180-189. [293] A copy from the first draft of the treaty, as prepared in 1570, is incorporated in the Documentos Inéditos (tom. iii. pp. 337 et seq.). The original is in the library of the duke of Ossuna. [294] Rosell, Combate Naval de Lepanto, p. 56. [295] Paruta, Guerra di Cipro, p. 120 et seq.--Herrera, Hist. General, tom. ii. pp. 14, 15. [296] Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, lib. ix. cap. 22.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. x. pp. 247, 248.--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 152. [297] "No poco se maravillaron los curiosos, viéndole, ó por casualidad ó bien de intento, terciar llanamente en la conversacion, contra las etiquetas hasta entonces observadas."--Rosell, Combate Naval de Lepanto, p. 59. [298] "Y concede dozientos años de perdon á los presentes."--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 152. [299] "_De las mejores que jamas se han visto_,"--"among the best galleys that were ever seen,"--says Don John in a letter, from Messina, to Don Garcia de Toledo.--Documentos Inéditos, tom. iii. p. 15. The earlier part of the third volume of the Documentos Inéditos is taken up with the correspondence between John of Austria and Garcia de Toledo, in which the former asks information and advice in respect to the best mode of conducting the war. Don Garcia de Toledo, fourth marquis of Villafranca, was a man of high family, and of great sagacity and experience. He had filled some of the highest posts in the government, and, as the reader may remember, was viceroy of Sicily at the time when Malta was besieged by the Turks. The coldness which on that occasion he appeared to show to the besieged, excited general indignation; and I ventured to state, on an authority which I did not profess to esteem the best, that in consequence of this he fell into disgrace, and was suffered to pass the remainder of his years in obscurity. (Ante, vol. ii. circ. fin.) An investigation of documents which I had not then seen shows this to have been an error. The ample correspondence which both Philip the Second and Don John carried on with him, gives undeniable proofs of the confidence which he continued to enjoy at court, and the high deference which was paid to his opinion. [300] Authorities differ as usual as to the precise number both of vessels and troops. I have accepted the estimate of Rosell, who discreetly avoids the extremes on either side. [301] Vanderhammen has been careful to transcribe this precious catalogue.--Don Juan de Austria, fol. 156 et seq. [302] Ibid. fol. 159 et seq.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. x. p. 251.--Herrera, Hist. General, tom. ii. p. 15 et seq. [303] "Luego su Alteza, el Coro, y Pueblo dixeron con musica, vozes, y alegria; Amen."--Vanderhammen, Juan de Austria, fol. 159. [304] For a minute account of these arches and their manifold inscriptions, see Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 160-162. [305] Rosell, Combate Naval de Lepanto, p. 84. [306] Don John, in his correspondence with his friend Don Garcia de Toledo, speaks with high disgust of the negligence shown in equipping the Venetian galleys. In a letter dated Messina, August 30, he says: "Póneme cierta congoja ver que el mundo me obliga á hacer alguna cosa de momento, contando las galeras pro número y no por cualidad."--Documentos Ineditos, tom. iii. p. 18. [307] Rosell, Combate Naval de Lepanto, p. 82. The clearest and by far the most elaborate account of the battle of Lepanto is to be found in the memoir of Don Cayetan Rosell, which received the prize of the Royal Academy of History of Madrid, in 1853. It is a narrative which may be read with pride by Spaniards, for the minute details it gives of the prowess shown by their heroic ancestors on that memorable day. The author enters with spirit into the stormy scene he describes. If his language may be thought sometimes to betray the warmth of national partiality, it cannot be denied that he has explored the best sources of information, and endeavoured to place the result fairly before the reader. [308] Torres y Aguilera, Chronica de Guerra que ha acontescido en Italia y partes de Levante y Berberia desde 1570 en 1574 (Çaragoça, 1579), fol. 54.--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 165 et seq.--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, lib. lx. cap. 23. [309] Torres y Aguilera, Chronica, fol. 64.--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 173.--Paruta, Guerra di Cipro, p. 149.--Relacion de la Batalla Naval que entre Christianos y Turcos hubo el año 1571, MS.--Otra Relacion, Documentos Inéditos, tom. iii. p. 365. [310] Paruta, Guerra di Cipro, pp. 143, 144.--"Despues hizo que lo degollassen vivo, y lleno el pellejo de paja lo hizo colgar de la entena de una galeota, y desta manera lo llevo pol toda la ribera de la Suria."--Torres y Aguilera, Chronica, fol. 45. [311] Ibid. fol. 44, 45.--Paruta, Guerra di Cipro, pp. 130-144.--Sagredo, Monarcas Othomanos, pp. 283-289. [312] Torres y Aguilera, Chronica, fol. 65.--Documentos Inéditos, tom. iii. p. 241.--Rosell, Historia del Combate Naval, pp. 93, 94. [313] Torres y Aguilera, Chronica, fol. 53.--Herrera, Hist. General, tom. ii. p. 30.--Relacion de la Batalla Naval, MS.--Rosell, Historia del Combate Naval, pp. 95, 99, 100. [314] Torres y Aguilera, Chronica, fol. 67 et seq.--Relacion de la Batalla Naval, MS.--Otras Relaciones, Documentos Inéditos, tom. iii. pp. 242, 262. [315] Most of the authorities notice this auspicious change of the wind. Among others, see Relacion de la Batalla Naval, MS.; Relacion escrita por Miguel Servia, confesor de Don Juan, Documentos Inéditos, tom. xi. p. 368: Torres y Aguilera, Chronica, fol. 75. The testimony is that of persons present in the action. [316] Amidst the contradictory estimates of the number of the vessels and the forces to the Turkish armada to be found in the different writers, and even in official relations, I have conformed to the statement given in Señor Rosell's _Memoria_, prepared after a careful comparison of the various authorities.--Historia del Combate Naval, p. 94. [317] "Si hoy es vuestro dia, Dios os lo dé; pero estad ciertos que si gano la jornada, os daré libertad: por lo tanto haced lo que debeis á las obras que de mi habeis recebido."--Rosell, Historia del Combate Naval, p. 101. For the last pages see Paruta, Guerra di Cipro, pp. 150, 151; Sagrado, Monarcas Othomanos, p. 292; Torres y Aguilera, Chronica, fol. 65, 66; Relacion de la Batalla Naval, MS. [318] This fact is told by most of the historians of the battle. The author of the manuscript so often cited by me further says, that it was while the fleet was thus engaged in prayer for aid from the Almighty that the change of wind took place. "Y en este medio, que en la oracion se pedia á Dios la victoria, estaba el mar alterado de que nuestra armada recibia gran daño y antes que se acabase la dicha oracion el mar estuvo tan quieto y sosegado que jamas se a visto, y fué fuerça á la armada enemiga amainar y venir al remo." [319] Torres y Aguilera, Chronica, fol. 71.--Paruta, Guerra di Cipro, p. 156.--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, p. 688.--Relacion de la Batalla Naval, MS.--Otra Relacion, Documentos Inéditos, tom. xi. p. 368. The inestimable collection of the Documentos Inéditos contains several narratives of the battle of Lepanto by contemporary pens. One of these is from the manuscript of Fray Miguel Servia, the confessor of John of Austria, and present with him in the engagement. The different narratives have much less discrepancy with one another than is usual on such occasions. [320] Torres y Aguilera, Chronica, fol. 72.--Relacion de la Batalla Naval, MS. The last-mentioned manuscript is one of many left us by parties engaged in the fight. The author of this relation seems to have written it on board one of the galleys, while lying at Petala, during the week after the engagement. The events are told in a plain, unaffected manner, that invites the confidence of the reader. The original manuscript, from which my copy was taken, is to be found in the library of the University of Leyden. [321] A minute description of the Ottoman standard, taken from a manuscript of Luis del Marmol, is given in the Colleccion de Documentos Inéditos, tom. iii. pp. 270 et seq. [322] Documentos Inéditos, tom. iii. p. 265; tom. xi. p. 368.--Torres y Aguilera, Chronica, fol. 70.--Paruta, Guerra di Cipro, pp. 156, 157.--Relacion de la Batalla Naval, MS. [323] Herrera notices one galley, "_La Piamontesa de Saboya_ degollada en ella toda la gente de cabo y remo y despedazado con once heridas D. Francisco de Saboya." Another, "_La Florencia_," says Rosell, "perdió todos los soldados, chusma, galeotes y caballeros de San Esteban que en ella habia, excepto su capitan Tomás de Médicis y diez y seis hombres más, aunque todos heridos y estropeados."--Historia del Combate Naval, p. 113. [324] "Tomo una Alabarda o Pertesana, y ligando en ella el Sancto Crucifixo, verdadera pendon, se puso delante de todos assi desarinado como estava, y fue el primero que entro en la Galera Turquesca, haziendo con su Alabarda cosas que ponian admiracion."--Torres y Aguilera, Chronicas, fol. 75. [325] "Vivió hasta que sabiendo que la vitoria era ganada dijo: que daba gracias á Dios que lo hubiese guardado tanto que viese vencida la batalla y roto aquel comun enemigo que tanto deseó ver destruido."--Herrera, Relacion de la Guerra de Cipro, Documentos Inéditos, tom. xxi. p. 360. [326] Relacion de la Batalla Naval, MS.--Herrera, Hist. General, tom. ii. p. 33.--Paruta, Guerra di Cipro, pp. 157, 158.--Documentos Inéditos, tom. iii. p. 244. Torres y Aguilera tells a rather extraordinary anecdote respecting the great standard of the League in the _Real_. The figure of Christ emblazoned on it was not hit by ball or arrow during the action, notwithstanding every other banner was pierced in a multitude of places. Two arrows, however, lodged on either side of the crucifix, when a monkey belonging to the galley ran up the mast, and, drawing out the weapons with his teeth, threw them overboard! (Chronica, fol. 75) Considering the number of ecclesiastics on board the fleet, it is remarkable that no more miracles occurred on this occasion. [327] Torres y Aguilera, Chronica, fol. 72 et seq.--Relacion de la Batalla Naval, MS.--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 182.--Documentos Inéditos, tom. iii. p. 247 et seq.--Paruta, Guerra di Cipro, p. 160.--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, lib. ix. cap. 25, 26. "Dó el estandarte bárbaro abatido la Cruz del Redentor fue enarbolada con un triunfo solene y grande gloria, cantando abiertamente la vitoria." Ercilla, La Araucana, par. ii. canto 24. [328] The loss of the Moslems is little better than matter of conjecture, so contradictory are the authorities. The author of the Leyden MS. dismisses the subject with the remark, "La gente muerta de Turcos no se ha podido saber por que la que se hecho en la mar fuera de los degollados fueron infinitos." I have conformed, as in my other estimates, to those of Señor Rosell, Historia del Combate Naval, p. 118. [329] Rosell computes the total loss of the allies at not less than seven thousand six hundred; of whom one thousand were Romans, two thousand Spaniards, and the remainder Venetians.--Ibid. p. 113. [330] Ibid. ubi supra.--Torres y Aguilera, Chronica, fol. 74 et seq.--Documentos Inéditos, tom. iii. pp. 246-249; tom. xi. p. 370.--Sagredo, Monarcas Othomanos, pp. 295, 296.--Relacion de la Batalla Naval, MS. [331] Relacion de la Batalla Naval, MS. Don John notices this achievement of his gallant kinsman in the first letter which he wrote to Philip after the action. The letter, dated at Petala, October 10, is published by Aparici, Documentos Inéditos relativos á la Batalla de Lepanto, p. 26. [332] Navarrete, Vida de Cervantes (Madrid, 1819), p. 19. Cervantes, in the prologue to the second part of "Don Quixote," alluding to Lepanto, enthusiastically exclaims, that, for all his wounds, he would not have missed the glory of being present on that day. "Quisiera antes haberme hallado en aquella faccion prodigiosa, que sano ahora de mis heridas, sin haberme hallado en ella." [333] This humane conduct of Don John is mentioned, among other writers, by the author of the Relacion de la Batalla Naval, whose language shows that his manuscript was written on the spot: "El queda visitando los heridos y procurando su remedio haziendoles merced y dandoles todo lo que aviase menester."--MS. [334] "Lo qual toda esta corte tuvo á gran gentileza, y no hazen sino alabar la virtud y grandeza de vuestra Alteza." The letter of Fatima is to be found in Torres y Aguilera, Chronica (fol. 92). The chronicler adds a list of the articles sent by the Turkish princess to Don John, enumerating, among other things, robes of sable, brocade, and various rich stuffs, fine porcelain, carpets, and tapestry, weapons curiously inlaid with gold and silver, and Damascus blades ornamented with rubies and turquoises. [335] "El presente que me embio dexe de rescibir, y le huvo el mismo Mahamet Bey, no por no preciarle como cosa venida de su mano, sino por que la grandeza de mis antecessores no acostumbra rescibir dones de los necessitados de favor, sino darios y hazeries gracias."--Ibid. fol. 94. [336] According to some, Don John was induced, by the persuasion of his friends, to make these advances to the Venetian admiral. (See Torres y Aguilera, Chronica, fol. 75; Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 123.) It is certain he could not erase the memory of the past from his bosom, as appears from more than one of his letters, in which he speaks of the difficulty he should find, in another campaign, in acting in concert with a man of so choleric a temper. In consequence the Venetian government was induced, though very reluctantly, to employ Veniero on another service. In truth, the conduct which had so much disgusted Don John and the allies seems to have found favour with Veniero's countrymen, who regarded it as evidence of his sensitive concern for the honour of his nation. A few years later they made ample amends to the veteran for the slight put on him, by raising him to the highest dignity in the republic. He was the third of his family who held the office of doge, to which he was chosen in 1576, and in which he continued till his death. [337] The spoil found on board the Turkish ships was abandoned to the captors. There was enough of it to make many a needy adventurer rich. "Assi por la victoria havida como porque muchos venian tan ricos y prosperados que no havia hombre que se preciasse de gastar moneda de plata sino Zequies, ni curasse de regatear en nada que comprasse."--Torres y Aguilera, Chronica, fol. 79. [338] For the preceding pages see Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 186; Torres y Aguilera, Chronica, fol. 79; Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, p. 696; Herrera, Historia General, tom. ii. p. 37; Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. x. p. 261. [339] An old _romance_ thus commemorates this liberal conduct of Don John:-- "Y ansi seda como de oro Ninguna cosa ha querido Don Juan, como liberal, Por mostrar do ha descendido, Sino que entre los soldados Fuese todo repartido En premio de sus trabajos Pues lo habian merecido." Duran, Romancero General (Madrid, 1851), tom. ii. p. 185. [340] Lorea, Vida de Pio Quinto, cap. xxiv. § ii.--Torres y Aguilera, Chronica, fol. 80.--Rosell, Historia del Combate Naval, pp. 124, 125. [341] Philip, in a letter to his brother, dated from the Escorial in the following November, speaks of his delight at receiving this trophy from the hands of Figueroa. (See the letter, ap. Rosell, Hist. del Combate Naval, Apénd. No. 15.) The standard was deposited in the Escorial, where it was destroyed by fire in the year 1671.--Documentos Inéditos tom. iii. p. 256. [342] "Y S. M. no se alteró, ni demudó, ni hizo sentimiento alguno, y se estuvo con el semblante y serenidad que antes estaba, con el qual semblante estuvo hasta que se acabaron de cantar las vísperas."--Memorias de Fray Juan de San Gerónimo, Documentos Inéditos, tom. iii. p. 258. [343] The third volume of the Documentos Inéditos contains a copious extract from a manuscript in the Escorial written by a Jeronymite monk. In this the writer states that Philip received intelligence of the victory from a courier despatched by Don John, while engaged at vespers in the palace monastery of the Escorial. This account is the one followed by Cabrera (Filipe Segundo, p. 696) and by the principal Castilian writers. Its inaccuracy, however, is sufficiently attested by two letters written at the time to Don John of Austria, one by the royal secretary Alzamora, the other by Philip himself. According to their account, the person who first conveyed the tidings was the Venetian minister; and the place where they were received by the king was the private chapel of the palace of Madrid, while engaged at vespers on All-Saints eve. It is worthy of notice, that the secretary's letter contains no hint of the _nonchalance_ with which Philip is said to have heard the tidings. The originals of these interesting despatches still exist in the National Library at Madrid. They have been copied by Señor Rosell for his memoir (Apénd. Nos. 13, 15). One makes little progress in history before finding that it is much easier to repeat an error than to correct it. [344] "Y ansi á vos (despues de Dios) se ha de dar el parabien y las gracias della, como yo os las doy, y á mi de que por mano de persona que tanto me toca como la vuestra, y á quien yo tanto quiero, se haya hecho un tan gran negocio, y ganado vos tanta honra y gloria con Dios y con todo el mundo."--Rosell, Historia del Combate Naval, Apénd. No. 15. [345] Carta del secretario Alzamora á Don Juan de Austria, Madrid, Nov. 11, 1571, ap. Rosell, Historia del Combate Naval, Apénd. No. 13. [346] See Ford, Handbook for Spain, vol. ii. p. 697. [347] Ercilla has devoted the twenty-fourth canto of the Araucana to the splendid episode of the battle of Lepanto. If Ercilla was not, like Cervantes, present in the fight, his acquaintance with the principal actors in it makes his epic, in addition to its poetical merits, of considerable value as historical testimony. [348] The letter, which is dated Brussels, Nov. 17, 1571, is addressed to Juan de Zuñiga, the Castilian ambassador at the court of Rome. A copy from a manuscript of the sixteenth century, in the library of the duke of Ossuna, is inserted in the Documentos Inéditos, tom. iii. pp. 292-303. [349] "Ya havreis entendido la órden que se os ha dado de que inverneís en Meçina, y las causas dello."--Carta del Rey á su hermano, ap. Rosell, Historia del Combate Naval, Apénd. No. 15. [350] See Rosell, Historia del Combate Naval, p. 157; Lafuente, Historia de España (Madrid, 1850), tom. xiii. p. 538. Ranke, who has made the history of the Ottoman empire his particular study, remarks: "The Turks lost all their old confidence after the battle of Lepanto. They had no equal to oppose to John of Austria. The day of Lepanto broke down the Ottoman supremacy."--Ottoman and Spanish Empires (Eng. tr.), p. 23. [351] "Su Santidad ha de querer que de gane Constantinopla y la Casa Santa, y que tendrá muchos que le querrán adular con facilitárselo, y que no faltarán entre estos algunos quo hacen profesion de soldados y que como su Beatitud no pueden entender estas cosas."--Carta del Duque de Alba, ap. Documentos Inédites, tom. iii. p. 300. [352] Ranke, History of the Popes (Eng. tr.), vol i. p. 384. [353] Lafuente, Historia de España, tom. xiii. p. 530. [354] "Breves de fuego."--Ibid, p. 529. [355] "E si è veduto, che quando gli fu data la gran rotta, in sei mesi rifabbricò canto venti galere, oltre quelle che si trovavano in essere, cosa che essendo preveduta e scritta da me, fu giudicata piuttosto impossibile che creduta."--Relazione di Marcantino Barbaro 1573, Alberi, Relazioni Venete, tom. iii, p. 306. [356] For the preceding pages see Torres y Aguilera, Chronica, fol. 87-89; Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, lib. x. cap. 5; Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 159 et seq.; Paruta, Guerra di Cipro, p. 206 et seq.; Sagredo, Monarcas Othomanos, pp. 301, 302. [357] It is Voltaire's reflection: "Il semblait que les Turques eussent gagné la bataille de Lépante."--Essais sur les Moeurs, chap. 160. [358] The treaty is to be found in Dumont, Corps Diplomatique, tom. v. par. 1 pp. 218, 219. [359] Rosell, Historia del Combate Naval, p. 149.--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, p. 747.--Torres y Aguilera, Chronica, fol. 95. [360] Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 172. [361] Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, p. 765.--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 174, 175--Torres y Aguilera, Chronica, fol. 103 et seq.--The author last cited who was present at the capture of Tunis, gives a fearful picture of the rapacity of the soldiers. [362] The Castilian writers generally speak of it as the _peremptory command_ of Philip. Cabrera, one of the best authorities, tells us: "Mandió el Rey Catolico a Don Juan de Austria enplear su armada en la conquista de Tunez, i que le desmantelase, i la Goleta." But soon after he remarks: "Olvidando el _buen acuerdo_ del Rey, por consejo de lisongeros determinó de conservar la ciudad." (Filipe Segundo, pp. 763, 764.) From this qualified language we may infer that the king meant to give his brother his decided opinion, not amounting, however, to such an absolute command as would leave him no power to exercise his discretion in the matter. This last view is made the more probable by the fact that in the following spring a correspondence took place between the king and his brother, in which the former, after stating the arguments both for preserving and for dismantling the fortress of Tunis, concludes by referring the decision of the question to Don John himself. "Representadas todas estas dificultades, manda remitir S. M. al Señor Don Juan que él tome la resolucion que mas convenga."--Documentos Inéditos, tom. iii. p. 139. [363] "Porque la gentileza de la tierra i de las damas en su conservacion agradaba a su gallarda edad."--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, p. 755.--Also Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 176. [364] Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. x. p. 286.--Vanderhammen, Don Juan de Austria, fol. 178. [365] Torres y Aguilera, Chronica, fol. 116 et seq.--Relacion particular de Don Juan Sanogera, MS. Vanderhammen states the loss of the Moslems at thirty-three thousand slain. (Don Juan de Austria, fol. 189.) But the arithmetic of the Castilian is little to be trusted as regards the infidel. [366] For a brief but very perspicuous view of the troubles of Genoa, see San Migual, Hist. de Flipe Segundo (tom. ii. cap. 36). The care of this judicious writer to acquaint the reader with contemporary events in other countries, as they bore more or less directly on Spain, is a characteristic merit of his history. [367] Torres y Aguilera, Chronica, fol. 113. [368] The principal cause of Granvelle's coldness to Don John, as we are told by Cabrera (Filipe Segundo, p. 794), echoed, as usual, by Vanderhammen (Don Juan de Austria, fol. 184), was envy of the fame which the hero of Lepanto had gained by his conquests both in love and in war. "La causa principal era el poco gasto que tenia de acudir á Don Juan, invidioso de sus favores de Marte i Venus." Considering the cardinal's profession, he would seem to have had no right to envy any one's success in either of these fields. [369] "Questa oppinione, che di lui si hà, rende le sue leggi più sacrosancte et inviolabili."--Relazione di Contarini, MS. [370] A manuscript, entitled "_Origen de los Consejos_," without date or the name of the author, in the library of Sir Thomas Phillips, gives a minute account of the various councils under Philip the Second. [371] "Sono XI.; il consiglio dell' Indie, Castiglia, d'Aragona, d'inquisitione, di camera, dell' ordini, di guerra, di hazzienda, dl giustizia, d'Italia, et di stato."--Sommario del' ordine che si tiene alla corte di Spagna circa il governo delli stati del Ré Catholico, MS. [372] Ibid. The date of this manuscript is 1570. [373] Relazione di Badoer, MS. [374] Instead of "Ruy Gomez," Badoer tells us they punningly gave him the title of "Rey Gomez," to denote his influence over the king. "Il titolo principal che gli vien dato è di Rey Gomez e non Ruy Gomez, perchè pare che non sia stato mai alcun privato con principe del mondo di tanta autorità e cosi stimato dal signor suo come egli è da questa Maestà."--Relazione, MS. [375] Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, pp. 712, 713. Cabrera has given us, in the first chapter of the tenth book of his history, a finished portrait of Ruy Gomez, which for the niceness of its discrimination and the felicity of its language may compare with this best compositions of the Castilian chroniclers. [376] "El señor Ruy Gomez no fué de los mayores consejeros que ha habido, pero del humor y natural de los reyes le roconozco por tan gran maestro, que todos los que por aqui dentro andamos tenemos la cabeza donde pensamos que traemos los pies."--Bermudez de Castro, Antonio Perez (Madrid, 1841), p. 28. [377] "Fue Rui Gomez el primero piloto que en trabajos tan grandes viviò y muriò seguro, tomando sienpre el mejor puerto."--Cabrera, p. 713. [378] "Vivo conservò la gracia de su Rey, muerto le doliò su falta, i la llorò su Reyno, que en su memoria le à conservado paro exemplo de fieles vasallos i prudentes privados de los mayores Principes."--Ibid. ubi supra. [379] "Puede ser, pero el Cardenal Espinosa me consultô en saliendo del consejo, i proveí la plaça."--Cabrera, p. 700. [380] "Que en principe tan zeloso de su immunidad i oficio pareciò increible su tolerancia hasta alli."--Ibid. ubi supra. [381] The anonymous author of a contemporary relation speaks of the king as a person little subject to passions of any kind. The language is striking: "E questo Re poco soggetto alle pasioni, venga ció, o per inclinazione naturale, o per costume; e quasi non appariscono in lui i primi movimenti nè dell' allegrezza, nè del dolore, nè dell' ira ancora."--MS. [382] "El Rey le hablò tan asperamente sobre el afinar una verdad, que le matò brevemente," says Cabrera emphatically.--Filipe Segundo, p. 699. [383] "Perché chi vuole il favore del duoa d'Alva perde quello di Ruy Gomez, e chi cerca il favore di Ruy Gomez, non ha quello del duca d'Alva."--Relazione di Soriano, MS. [384] Ranke has given some pertinent examples of this in an interesting sketch which he has presented of the relative positions of these two statesmen in the cabinet of Philip.--Ottoman and Spanish Empires (Eng. trans.), p. 38. [385] "Non si trova mai S.M. presente alle deliberationi ne i consigli, ma deliberato chiama una delle tre consulte.... alla qual sempre si ritrova, onde sono lette le risolutioni del consiglio."--Relazione di Tiepolo, MS. [386] Ranke, Ottoman and Spanish Empires, p. 32. [387] "El dia que iva à caça bolvia con ansias de bolver al trabajo, como un oficial pobre que huviera de ganar la comida con ello."--Los Dichos y Hechos, del Rey Phelipe II. (Brusselas, 1666), p. 214.--See also Relazione di Pigafetta, MS. [388] Relazione di Vandramino, MS.--Relazione di Contarini, MS. "Distribuia las horas del dia, se puede decir, todas en los negocios, quando yo lo conocí; porque aunque las tenia de oçio ú ocupaciones forçosas de su persona, las gastava con tales criados elegidos tan à proposito que quanto hablava venia à ser informarse mucho, descanso en lo que à otro costara nota y fatiga."--MS. Anon. in the Library of the dukes of Burgundy. [389] Dichos y Hechos de Phelipe II., pp. 339, 340. [390] "A estos estando turbados, y desalentados, los animava diziendoles, Sossegaos."--Dichos y Hechos de Phelipe II., p. 40. [391] "Diziendole si lo traeis escrito, lo verè, y os harè despachar."--Ibid. p. 41. [392] "Quando esce di Palazzo, suole montare in un cocchio coperto di tela incerata, et serrata a modo che non si vede..... Suole quando va in villa ritornare la sera per le porte del Parco, senza esser veduto da alcuno."--Relazione di Pigafetta, MS. [393] Ranke, Ottoman and Spanish Empires, p. 32. Inglis speaks of seeing this work in the library when he visited the Escorial.--Spain in 1830, vol. i. p. 348. [394] Ranke, Ottoman and Spanish Empires, p. 33. [395] See ante, vol. ii. circ. fin. [396] Lafuente, Historia de España, tom. xiv. p. 44. The historian tells us he has seen the original letter with the changes made in it by Philip. [397] "Chi comincia a servirlo può tener per certa la remunerazione, se il difetto non vien da rei."--Relazione Anon. MS. [398] Relazione della Corte di Spagna, MS.--Relazione di Badoer, MS.--Etiquetas de Palacio, MS. [399] Relazione di Badoer, MS. [400] "Ha tre guardie die 100 persone l'una; la più honorata è di Borgognoni e Fiamminghi, che hanno ad esser ben nati e servono a cavallo, e si dicono Arcieri accompagnando bene il Re per la città a piede non in fila, ma alla rinfusa intorno alla persona reale; l'altri sono d'Albardieri 100 di nazion tedesca, et altri e tanti Spagnuoli."--Relazione della Corte di Spagna, MS. [401] Raumer, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, vol. i. p. 106. [402] Ibid. p. 105. [403] Cortes of 1558, peticion 4. [404] "Questi habiti sempre sono nuovi et puliti, perche ogni mese se gli muta, et poi gli dona quando ad uno, e quando ad un altro."--Relazione di Pigafetta, MS. [405] Gachard cites a passage from one of Granvelle's unpublished letters, in which he says, "Suplico á V. M., con la humildad qua devo, que considerando quanto su vida importa al principe nuestro señor, á todos sus reynos y Estados, y vasallos suyos, y aun á toda la christiandad, mirando en que miserando estado quedaría sin V. M., sea servido mirar adelante más por su salud, descargandose de tan grande y continuo trabajo, que tanto daño le haze."--Rapport prefixed to the Correspondance de Philippe II. (tom. i. p. li.), in which the Belgian scholar, with his usual conscientiousness and care, enters into an examination of the character and personal habits of Philip. [406] "Habiendo en otra ocasion avisado á vuestra magestad de la publica querella y desconsuelo que habia del estilo que vuestra magestad habia tomado de negociar, estando perpetuamente asido á los papeles, por tener mejor título para huir de la gente, ademas de no quererse fiar de nadie."--Carta que escrivio al Señor Rey Felipe Segundo Don Luis Manrique, su limosnero mayor, MS. [407] "No embio Dios á vuestra magestad y á todos los otros Reyes, que tienen sus veces en la tierra, para que se extravien leyendo ni escribiendo ni aun contemplando ni rezando, si no para que fuesen y sean publicos y patentes oraculos á donde todos sus subditos vengan por sus respuestas.... Y si á algun Rey en el mundo dió Dios esta gracia, es á vuestra magestad y por eso es mayor la culpa de no manifestarse á todos."--Ibid. A copy of this letter is preserved among the Egerton MSS. in the British Museum. [408] Nota di tutti li Titolati di Spagna con li loro casate et rendite, &c. fatta nel 1581, MS. [409] Ibid. The Spanish aristocracy, in 1581, reckoned twenty-three dukes, forty-two marquises, and fifty-six counts. All the dukes and thirteen of the inferior nobles were grandees. [410] "La corte è muta; in publico non si ragiona di nuove, et chi pure le sa, se le trace."--Relazione di Pigafetta, MS. [411] "Sono d'animo tanto elevato... che è cosa molto difficile da credere.... e quando avviene che incontrino o nunzi del pontefice o ambasciadori di qualehe testa cororata o d'altro stato, pochissimi son quelli che si levin la berreta."--Relazione di Badoero, MS. [412] "Non si attende à lettere, ma la Nobilità è a maraviglia ignorante e ritirata, mantenenda una certa sua alterigia, ehe loro clriamano _sussiego_, che vuol dire tranquillità et sicurezza, et quasi serenità."--Relazione di Pigafette, MS. [413] "Non si convita, non si cavalca, si giuoca, et si fa all' amore."--Ibid. See also the Relazioni of Badoero and Contarini. [414] Dr. Salazar y Mendoza takes a very exalted view of the importance of this right to wear the hat in the presence of the king,--"a prerogative," he remarks, "so illustrious in itself and so admirable in its effects, that it alone suffices to stamp its peculiar character on the dignity of the grandee."--Dignidades de Castilla, p. 34. [415] Ranke, Ottoman and Spanish Empires, p. 57. [416] Relazione di Tiepolo, MS.--Relazione Anon. MS.--Relazione di Contarini, MS. [417] "Che per contrario affligiono i loro proprii sudditi ende incorrono nel loro odio."--Relazione di Contarini, MS. [418] "Temono Sua Maesta, dove, quando si governassero prudentemente, sarieno da essa per le loro forze temuti."--Ibid. [419] "Que bastarán para conquistar y ganar un reyno."--Cortes of Valladolid of 1558, pet. 4. [420] Cortes of Toledo of 1559, pet. 3. [421] Lafuente, Historia de España, tom. xiii. p. 118. [422] Ibid. tom. xiv. p. 397. [423] Cortes of Valladolid of 1558, pet. 12. [424] Lafuente, Historia de España, tom. xiii. p. 125. [425] The history of luxury in Castile, and of the various enactments for the restraint of it, forms the subject of a work by Sempere y Guarinos, containing many curious particulars, especially in regard to the life of the Castilians at an earlier period of their history.--Historia del Luxo (Madrid, 1788, 2 tom. 12mo.). [426] "Anssi mismo mandamos que ninguna persona de ninguna condicion ni calidad que sea, no pueda traer ni traya en ropa ni en vestido, ni en calzas, ni jubon, ni en gualdrapa, ni guarnicion de mula ni de cavallo, ningun genero de bordado ni recamado, ni gandujado, ni entorchado, ni chapería de oro ni de plata, ni de oro de cañutillo, ni de martillo, ni ningun genero de trenza ni cordon ni cordoncillo, ni franja, ni pasamano, ni pespunte, ni perfil de oro ni plata ni seda, ni otra cosa, aunque el dicho oro y plata sean falsos," &c.--Pracmatica expedida á peticion de la Cortes de Madrid de 1563. [427] "Ocupados en este oficio y género de vivienda de coser, que habia de se para las mugeres, muchos hombres que podrian servir á S. M. en la guerra dejaban de ir á ella, y dejaban tambien de labrar los campos."--Cortes of 1573, pet. 75, ap. Lafuente, Hist. de España, tom. xiv. p. 407. [428] Cortes of 1573, pet. 75, ap. Lafuente, Hist. de España, tom. xiv. p. 408. [429] Ranke, Ottoman and Spanish Empires, p. 59. [430] "Que cada semana ó cada mes se nombren en los ayuntamientos de cada ciudad ó villa destos Reynos, dos Regidores, los quales se hallen á la vision y visitas de la carcel."--Cortes of Toledo of 1559, 1560, pet. 102. [431] Provision real para que los mesones del reyno esten bien proveidos de los mantenimientos necesarios para los caminantes, Toledo, 20 de Octubre de 1560. [432] "Como los mancebos y las donzellas por su ociosidad se principalmente ocupan en aquello [leer libros de mentiras y vanidades], desvanecense y aficionanse en cierta manera á los casos que leen en aquellos libros haver acontescido, ansi da amores como de armas y otras vanidades: y afficionados, quando se offrece algun caso semejante, danse á el mas á rienda suelta que si no lo huviessen leydo."--Cortes of 1558, pet. 107, cited by Ranke, Ottoman and Spanish Empires, p. 60. [433] Pracmatica para que ningun natural de estos reynos vaya á estudiar fuera de ellos, Aranjuez, 22 de Noviembre de 1559. [434] Marina, Teoria de las Cortes, tom. ii. p. 219. [435] See the "Pragmaticas del Reyno," first printed at Alcalá de Henares, at the close of Isabella's reign, in 1503. This famous collection was almost wholly made up of the ordinances of Ferdinand and Isabella. After passing through several editions, it was finally absorbed in the "Nueva Recopilacion" of Philip the Second. [436] Relazione di Contarini, MS. [437] "Vos ni yo no avenios de subir donde los Sacerdotes."--Dichos y Hechos de Phelipe II., p. 96. [438] Catrera, Filipe Segundo, p. 894. [439] L. Marineo Siculo, Cosas Memorabiles, fol. 23. [440] Nota di tutti li Titolati di Spagna, MS. [441] Lafuente, Historia de España, tom. xiv. p. 416. [442] Lafuente, Historia de España, tom. xiii. p. 261.--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, pp. 432, 433. [443] Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, lib. xi. cap. 11; lib. xii. cap. 21.--Relazione Anon. 1588, MS. [444] "Otras vezes presentaba para Obispos Canonigos tan particulares i presbiteros tan apartados no solo de tal esperança, mas pensamiento en si mismos, i en la comun opinion, que la cedula de su presentacion no admitia su rezelo de ser engañados ó burlados. Eligia á quien no pedia, i merecia."--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, p. 891. [445] Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, lib. xi. cap. 11. [446] Relazione di Contarini, MS.--Ranke, Ottoman and Spanish Empires, p. 61. [447] The document alluded to is a letter, without date or signature, but in the handwriting of the sixteenth century, and purporting to be written by a person entrusted with the task of drafting the necessary legal instruments or the foundation of the convent. He inquires whether in the preamble he shall make mention of his majesty's vow. "_El voto que S. M. hijo_, si S. M. no lo quiere poner ni declarar, bien puede, porque no hay para que; pero si S. M. quisiere que se declare en las escrituras, avisemelo v. m."--Documentos Inéditos, tom. xxviii. p. 567. [448] Examples equally ancient, of both forms of spelling the name, may be found; though _Escorial_, now universal in the Castilian, seems to have been also the more common from the first. The word is derived from _scoriæ_, the dross of iron-mines, found near the spot.--See Ford, Handbook for Spain (3rd edition), p. 751. [449] A letter of the royal founder, published by Siguença, enumerates the objects to which the new building was to be specially devoted.--Historia de la Orden de San Geronimo, tom. iii. p. 534. [450] "The Escorial is placed by some geographers in Old Castile; but the division of the provinces is carried on the crest of the _Sierra_ which rises behind it."--Ford, Handbook for Spain, p. 750. [451] Siguença, Hist. de la Orden de San Geronimo, tom. iii. p. 549.--Memorias de Fray Juan de San Geronimo, Documentos Inéditos, tom. vii. p. 22. [452] "Tenia de ordinario una banquetilla de tres pies, batísima y grosera, por silla, y cuando iba á misa porque estuviese con algun decencia se le ponia un paño viejo francés de Almaguer el contador, que ya de gastado y deshilado hacia harto lugar por sus agujeros á los que querian ver á la Persona Real."--Memorias de Fray Juan de San Geronimo, Documentos Inéditos, tom. vii. p. 22. [453] "Jurábame muchas veces llorando el dicho fray Antonio que muchas veces alzando cautamente los ojos vió correr por los de S. M. lágrimas; tanta era su devocion mezclada con el alegría de verse en aquella pobreza y ver trás esto aquella alta idea que en su mente traia de la grandeza á que pensaba levantar aquella pequeñez del divino culto."--Ibid., ubi supra. [454] "Para levantar tanta fábrica menester eran actos de humildad tan profunda!"--Ibid., p. 23. [455] Ibid., p. 25 et seq.--Siguença, Hist. de la Orden de San Geronimo, tom. iii. p. 546. [456] "Tenia tanta destreça en disponer las traças de Palacios, Castillos, Jardines, y otras cosas, que quando Francisco de Mora mi Tio Traçador mayor suyo, y Juan de Herrara su Antecessor le traian la primera planta, assi mandava quitar, ò poner, ò mudar, como si fuera on Vitrubio."--Dichos y Hechos de Phelipe II., p. 181. [457] Lafuente, Historia de España, tom. xiii. p. 253. [458] "Sabese de cierto que se negociava aqui mas en un dia que en Madrid en quatro."--Siguenca, Hist. de la Orden de San Geronimo, tom. iii. p. 575. [459] "El buen Duque de Alba, aunque su vejez y gota no le daban lugar, se subió á lo alto de la torre á dar ánimo y esfuerzo á los oficiales y gente;.... y esto lo hacia S.E. como diestro capitan y como quien se habia visto en otros mayores peligros en la guerra."--Memorias de Fray Juan de San Geronimo, Documentos Inéditos, tom. vii. p. 197. [460] Memorias de Fray Juan de San Geronimo, Documentos Inéditos, tom. vii. p. 201. [461] Siguença, Hist. de la Orden de San Geronimo, tom. iii. p. 596.--Dichos y Hechos de Phelipe II., p. 289.--Lafuente, Hist. de España, tom. xiv. p. 427. [462] Stirling, Annals of the Artists of Spain, tom. i. p. 211. [463] Stirling, Annals of the Artists of Spain, tom. i. p. 203. [464] Dichos y Hechos de Phelipe II., p. 81. [465] One of its historians, Father Francisco de los Santos, styles it on his title-page, "_Unica Maravilla del Mundo_."--Descripcion del Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de el Escorial (Madrid, 1698). [466] Los Santos, Descripcion del Escorial, fol. 116. [467] Siguença, Hist. de la Orden de San Geronimo, tom. iii. p. 862. [468] The enthusiasm of Fray Alonso de San Geronimo carries him so far, that he does not hesitate to declare that the Almighty owes a debt of gratitude to Philip the Second for the dedication of so glorious a structure to the Christian worship! "Este Templo, Señor, deve á Filipo Segundo vuestra Grandeza; con que gratitud le estará mirando, en el Impireo, vuestra Divinidad!" This language, so near akin to blasphemy, as it would be thought in our day, occurs in a panegyric delivered at the Escorial on the occasion of a solemn festival in honour of the hundredth anniversary of its foundation. A volume compiled by Fray Luis de Santa Maria is filled with a particular account of the ceremonies, under the title of "Octava sagradamente culta, celebrada en la Octava Maravilla," &c. (Madrid, 1664, folio). [469] Florez, Reynas Catholicas, tom. ii. p. 905. [470] Ibid. p. 908. [471] "Realzada con gracia por el mismo trage del camino, sombrero alto matizado con plumas, capotillo de terciopelo carmesí, bordado de oro á la moda Bohema."--Florez, Reynas Catholicas, tom. ii. p. 907. [472] Ibid., ubi supra. [473] Ante, vol. i. circ. fin. [474] Florez, Reynas Catholicas, tom. ii. p. 908.--Cabrera, Filipe Segundo, p. 661. [475] "En el sarao bailaron Rey y Reyna, estando de pie toda la Corte."--Florez, Reynas Catholicas, tom. ii. p. 908. [476] "El efecto dijo, que oyó Dios su oracion: pues mejorando el Rey, cayó mala la Reyna."--Ibid., p. 913. [Illustration: image of book's back cover] 
38767	----	Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Italic text is denoted by _underscores_. SPANISH HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS [Illustration: SAN SEBASTIAN] SPANISH HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS BY KATHARINE LEE BATES _Author of "American Literature" "The English Religious Drama," etc._ ILLUSTRATED WITH MANY ENGRAVINGS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS _Published by_ THE MACMILLAN COMPANY _New York MCM_ LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY _Norwood Press_ _J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith_ _Norwood, Mass., U.S.A._ Madre Mia AQUI TIENES TU LIBRO Preface A tourist in Spain can hope to understand but little of that strange, deep-rooted, and complex life shut away beyond the Pyrenees. This book claims to be nothing more than a record of impressions. As such, whatever may be its errors, it should at least bear witness to the picturesque, poetic charm of the Peninsula and to the graciousness of Spanish manners. Contents Chapter Page I. "The Lazy Spaniard" 1 II. A Continuous Carnival 11 III. Within the Alhambra 27 IV. A Function in Granada 39 V. In Sight of the Giralda 48 VI. Passion Week in Seville 58 VII. Traces of the Inquisition 82 VIII. An Andalusian Type 102 IX. A Bull-fight 113 X. Gypsies 132 XI. The Route of the Silver Fleets 147 XII. Murillo's Cherubs 162 XIII. The Yolk of the Spanish Egg 183 XIV. A Study in Contrasts 203 XV. The Patron Saint of Madrid 214 XVI. The Funeral of Castelar 233 XVII. The Immemorial Fashion 246 XVIII. Corpus Christi in Toledo 263 XIX. The Tercentenary of Velázquez 283 XX. Choral Games of Spanish Children 297 XXI. "O la Señorita!" 338 XXII. Across the Basque Provinces 362 XXIII. In Old Castile 376 XXIV. Pilgrims of Saint James 394 XXV. The Building of a Shrine 409 XXVI. The Son of Thunder 423 XXVII. Vigo and Away 439 List of Illustrations San Sebastian _Frontispiece_ Facing Page Pasajes 8 An Arab Gateway in Burgos 23 Playing at Bull-fight. From painting by Bayeu 30 The Mosque of Cordova 39 The Columbus Monument in Granada 46 The Alhambra. Hall of Justice 55 Filling the Water-jars 62 Off for the War. From painting by Rubio 71 Looking toward the Darro 78 A Milkman of Granada 101 A Roman Well in Ronda 112 The Giralda 131 The Passing of the Pageants 146 The Pageant of Gethsemane 167 "Jesus of the Passion" 174 "Christ of the Seven Words" 195 Maria Santisima 210 A Spanish Monk. From painting by Zurbarán 215 A Seville Street 222 An Old-fashioned Bull-fight. From painting by Goya 243 The Bull-fight of To-day 258 The King of the Gypsies 275 Gypsy Tenants of an Arab Palace 290 From the Golden Tower down the Guadalquivír 311 Cadiz, from the Sea 318 The Divine Shepherd. From painting by Murillo 339 The Royal Palace in Madrid 354 The Royal Family 359 The Manzanares 366 A Spanish Cemetery 375 Toledo 382 Toledo Cathedral. Puerta de los Leones 391 St. Paul, the first Hermit. From painting by Ribera 398 The Maids of Honor. From painting by Velázquez 407 Dancing the Sevillana 414 Within the Cloister 423 The Trampler of the Moors 430 Santiago Cathedral. Puerta de la Gloria 439 St. James. From painting by Murillo 446 SPANISH HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS Spanish Highways and Byways I "THE LAZY SPANIARD" "There is a difference between Peter and Peter."--CERVANTES: _Don Quixote_. "Spain is a contradiction," was the parting word of the Rev. William H. Gulick, the honored American missionary whose unwearied kindness looked after us, during the break in official representation, more effectively than a whole diplomatic corps. "Spanish blood is a strange _mezcla_, whose elements, Gothic, African, Oriental, are at war among themselves. You will find Spaniards tender and cruel, boastful and humble, frank and secretive, and all at once. It will be a journey of surprises." We were saying good-by, on February 4, 1899, to sunshiny Biarritz, whither Mrs. Gulick's school for Spanish girls had been spirited over the border at the outbreak of the war. Here we had found Spanish and American flags draped together, Spanish and American friendships holding fast, and a gallant little band of American teachers spending youth and strength in their patient campaign for conquering the Peninsula by a purer idea of truth. Rough Riders may be more pictorial, but hardly more heroic. We were barely through the custom house, in itself the simplest and swiftest of operations, before the prophesied train of surprises began. One of our preconceived ideas went to wreck at the very outset on the industry of the Basque provinces. "The lazy Spaniard" has passed into a proverb. The round world knows his portrait--that broad _sombrero_, romantic cloak, and tilted cigarette. But the laborious Spaniard can no longer be ignored. Even at Biarritz we had to reckon with him, for the working population there is scarcely less Spanish than French. Everybody understands both languages as spoken, and it is a common thing to overhear animated dialogue where the talk is all Spanish on the one side and all French on the other. The war set streams of Spanish laborers flowing over the mountain bar into French territory. Young men fled from conscription, and fathers of families came under pressure of hard times. Skilled artisans, as masons and carpenters, could make in Biarritz a daily wage of five francs, the normal equivalent of five _pesetas_, or a dollar, while only the half of this was to be earned on their native side of the Pyrenees. Such, too, was the magic of exchange that these five francs, sent home, might transform themselves into ten, eight, or seven and a half _pesetas_. Even when we entered Spain, after the Paris Commission had risen, the rate of exchange was anything but stable, varying not merely from day to day, but from hour to hour, a difference of two or three per cent often occurring between morning and evening. The conditions that bore so heavily on the crafts were crushing the field laborers almost to starvation. In point of excessive toil, those peasants of northern Spain seemed to us worse off than Mr. Markham's "Man with the Hoe," for the rude mattock, centuries out of date, with which they break up the ground, involves the utmost bodily exertion. And by all that sweat of the brow, they were gaining, on an average, ten or twelve cents a day. No wonder that discontent clouded the land. We met this first at Pasajes, on one of the excursions arranged for our pleasure by the overflow goodness of that missionary garrison. The busiest of teachers had brought us--a young compatriot from a Paris studio and myself--so far as San Sebastian, where she lingered long enough to make us acquainted with a circle of friends, and, incidentally, with Pasajes. This Basque fishing hamlet is perched between hill and sea, with a single rough-paved street running the length of the village from the Church of St. Peter to the Church of St. John. Nature has not been chary of beauty here. The mountain-folded Bay of Pasajes appears at first view like an Alpine lake, but the presence of stately Dutch and Spanish merchantmen in these sapphire waters makes it evident that there must be an outlet to the ocean. Such a rift, in fact, was disclosed as the strong-armed old ferry woman rowed us across, a deep but narrow passage (hence the name) between sheer walls of rock, whose clefts and crannies thrill the most respectable tourist with longings to turn smuggler. The village clings with difficulty to its stony strip between steep and wave. On one side of that single street, the peering stone houses, some still showing faded coats of arms, are half embedded in the mountain, and on the other the tide beats perilously against the old foundation piles. Above the uneven roofs, on the precipitous hillside, sleep the dead, watched over by Santa Ana from her neglected hermitage. Only once a year, on her own feast day, is her gorgeous altar cloth brought forth and her tall candles lighted, while the rats, who have been nibbling her gilded shoes and comparing the taste of the blues and crimsons in her painted robes, skurry into their holes at the unaccustomed sound of crowding feet. Pasajes boasts, too, a touch of historical dignity. From here Lafayette, gallant young Frenchman that he was, sailed for America, and probably then, as now, little Basque girls ran at the stranger's side with small hands full of wild flowers, and roguish Basque boys hid behind boulders and tried to frighten him by playing brigand, with a prodigious waving of thorn-branch guns and booming of vocal artillery. But not the joy of beauty nor the pride of ancient memory takes the place of bread. We approached a factory and asked of the workman at the entrance, "What do you manufacture here?" "What they manufacture in all Spain, nowadays," he answered, "misery." This particular misery, however, had the form of tableware, the long rows of simple cups and plates and pitchers, in various stages of completion, being diversified by jaunty little images of the Basque ball players, whose game is famous throughout the Peninsula. We finally succeeded in purchasing one of these for fifteen cents, although the village was hard put to it to make change for a dollar, and was obliged, with grave apologies, to load us down with forty or so big Spanish coppers. "The lazy Spaniard!" Look at the very children as they romp about San Sebastian. This is the most aristocratic summer resort in Spain, the Queen Regent having a châlet on that artistic bay called the _Concha_ or Shell. It is a crescent of shimmering color, so dainty and so perfect, with guardian mountains of jasper and a fringe of diamond surf, that it is hard to believe it anything but a bit of magical jewel-work. It might be a city of fairyland, did not the clamor of childish voices continually break all dreamy spells. What energy and tireless activity! Up and down the streets, the cleanest streets in Spain, twinkle hundreds of little _alpargatas_, brightly embroidered canvas shoes with soles of plaited hemp. Spanish families are large, although from the ignorance of the mothers and the unsanitary condition of the homes, the mortality among the children is extreme. Here is a household, for example, where out of seventeen black-eyed babies but three have fought their way to maturity. Spanish parents are notably affectionate, but, in the poorer classes, at least, impatient in their discipline. It is the morning impulse of the busy mother, working at disadvantage in her small and crowded rooms, to clear them of the juvenile uproar by turning her noisy brood out of doors for the day. Surprisingly neat in their dress but often with nothing save cabbage in their young stomachs, forth they storm into the streets. Here the stranger may stand and watch them by the hour as they bow and circle, toss and tumble, dance and race through an enchanting variety of games. The most violent seem to please them best. Now and then a laughing girl stoops to whisk away the beads of perspiration from a little brother's shining face, but in general they are too rapt with the excitement of their sports to be aware of weariness. Such flashing of eyes and streaming of hair and jubilee of songs! One of their favorite games, for instance, is this: An especially active child, by preference a boy, takes the name of _milano_, or kite, and throws himself down in some convenient doorway, as if asleep. The others form in Indian file, the _madre_, or mother, at the head, and the smallest girl, Mariquilla, last in line. The file proceeds to sing:-- "We are going to the garden, Although its wicked warden, Hungry early and late, Is crouching before the gate." Then ensues a musical dialogue between the mother and Mariquilla:-- _Mother._ Little Mary in the rear! _Little Mary._ What's your bidding, mother dear? _Mother._ Tell me how the kite may thrive. _Little Mary [after cautiously sidling up to the doorway and inspecting the prone figure there]._ He's half dead and half alive. Then the file chants again:-- "We are going to the garden, Although its wicked warden, Hungry early and late, Is crouching before the gate." _Mother._ Little Mary in the rear! _Little Mary._ What's your bidding, mother dear? _Mother._ Of the kite I bid you speak. _Little Mary [after a second reconnoissance, which sends her scampering back to her own place]._ He whets his claws and whets his beak. Here the enemy advances, beating a most appalling tattoo:-- _Kite._ Pum, pum! Tat, tat! _Mother._ Who is here and what is that? _Kite._ 'Tis the kite. _Mother._ What seeks the kite? _Kite._ Human flesh! A bite, a bite! _Mother._ You must catch before you dine. Children, children, keep the line! And with this the dauntless parent, abandoning song for action, darts with outspread arms in front of the robber, who bends all his energies to reaching and snatching away Little Mary. The entire line, keeping rank, curves and twists behind the leader, all intent on protecting that poor midget at the end. And when the wild frolic has resulted in her capture, and every child is panting with fatigue, they straightway resume their original positions and play it all over again. In Seville this game takes on a religious variation, the kite becoming the Devil, and the _madre_ the angel Michael defending a troop of souls. In Cuba we have a hawk pitted against a hen with her brood of chickens. We stepped into a Protestant Kindergarten one day to see how such stirring atoms of humanity might demean themselves in school. Talk of little pitchers! Here were some twoscore tiny jugs, bubbling full of mischief, with one bright, sympathetic girl of twenty-two keeping a finger on every dancing lid. Impossible, of course! But all her week's work looked to us impossible. We had known diligent teachers in the United States; this "lazy Spaniard," however, not only keeps her Kindergarten well in hand from nine to twelve, but instructs the same restless mites--so many of them as do not fall into a baby-sleep over their desks--in reading and counting from two to four, gives a Spanish lesson from six to seven, and struggles with the pathetic ignorance of grown men and women in the night school from eight to half-past nine or ten. The Spanish pastor and his wife, also teachers in day school, night school, Sunday school, are no less marvels of industry. The multiplication table, lustily intoned to the tramp of marching feet, called us into a class-room where the older girls were gathered for lessons in reading and writing, arithmetic and geography, sewing and embroidery. The delicate little lady who presides over this lively kingdom may be seen on Sunday, seated at the melodeon, leading the chapel music--an exquisite picture of a Spanish señora, with the lace mantilla crowning the black hair and gracefully falling to the slender shoulders. We had heard her give an address on foreign soil, before an audience of a hundred strangers, speaking with an irresistible fervor of appeal, and no less charming was she at the head of her own table, the soul of vivacious and winsome hospitality. As for the pastor himself, he carries the administrative burdens of church and school, teaches the larger boys morning and afternoon, and the men in the evening, preaches once on Thursday and twice on Sunday, and slips in between these stated tasks all the innumerable incidental duties of a missionary pastorate. And yet this man of many labors is not only Spanish, but Philippine. His childhood was passed at Cavite, the home of his father, a Spanish officer, who had chosen his bride from a native family. The boy was put to school with the friars at Manila, where, rather to the disgust of the soldier-father, he formed the desire to enter the brotherhood. He was not blind--what students are?--to the blemishes of his teachers. He had often stood by with the other lads and shouted with laughter to see a group of friars, their cassocks well girded up, drive a pig into their shallow pond and stab the plunging creature there, that it might be counted "fish" and serve them for dinner on Friday. But his faith in the order held firm, and, when his novitiate was well advanced, he was sent to Madrid for the final ceremonies. Here, by chance, he dropped into a Protestant service, and after several years of examination and indecision, chose the thorny road. [Illustration: PASAJES] All his wearing occupations do not dull that fine sense of courtesy inherent in a Spanish gentleman. The sun itself had hardly risen when we departed from San Sebastian, yet we found Don Angel at the station, muffled in the inevitable Spanish _capa_, to say good-by once more and assure us that, come what might, we had always "a house and a friend in Spain." We laid down the local journal, hard reading that it was with its denunciations of "the inhuman barbarities of the North Americans toward the Filipinos," and ventured to ask for his own view of the matter. "The United States," he answered, speaking modestly and very gently, "means well and has, in the main, done well. When I say this in the Casino, men get angry and call me a Yankee filibuster. But in truth the Philippines are very dear to me and I carry a sad heart. It was the protocol that did the mischief. It is not easy for simple islanders to understand that words may say one thing and mean another. Philippine faith in American promises is broken. And red is a hard color to wash out. Yet I still hope that, when the days of slaughter are over, peace and life may finally come to my unhappy birthplace from your great nation. The Tagalos are not so worthless as Americans seem to think, though the climate of the Philippines, like that of Andalusia, tempts to indolence. But strong motives make good workers everywhere." II A CONTINUOUS CARNIVAL "This periodical explosion of freedom and folly."--BECQUER: _El Carnaval_. Having re-formed our concept of a Spaniard to admit the elements of natural vigor and determined diligence, we were surprised again to find this tragic nation, whose fresh grief and shame had almost deterred us from the indelicacy of intrusion, entering with eager zest into the wild fun of Carnival. Sorrow was still fresh for the eighty thousand dead in Cuba, the hapless prisoners in the Philippines, the wretched _repatriados_ landed, cargo after cargo, at ports where some were suffered to perish in the streets. Every household had its tale of loss; yet, notwithstanding all the troubles of the time, Spain must keep her Carnival. "It is one of the saddest and most disheartening features of the situation," said a Spaniard to us. "There is no earnestness here, no realization of the national crisis. The politicians care for nothing but to enrich themselves, and the people, as you see, care for nothing but to divert themselves." Yet we looked from the madcap crowd to the closed shutters, keeping their secrets of heartbreak, and remembered the words of Zorrilla, "Where there is one who laughs, there is ever another who weeps in the great Carnival of our life." The parks of San Sebastian were gay with maskers and music, tickling brushes and showers of _confetti_, on our last day there, but the peculiar feature of the festivity in this Basque city is "the baiting of the ox." On that Carnival-Sunday afternoon we found ourselves looking down, from a safe balcony, upon the old _Plaza de la Constitución_, with its arcaded sides. The genuine bull-fights, which used to take place here, have now a handsome amphitheatre of their own, where, when the summer has brought the court to San Sebastian, the choicest Andalusian bulls crimson the sand of the arena. But the _Plaza de la Constitución_, mindful of its pristine glory, still furnishes what cheap suggestions it can of the terrible play. The square below was crowded with men and boys, and even some hoydenish girls, many in fantastic masks and gaudy dominos, while the tiers of balconies were thronged with eager spectators. A strange and savage peal of music announced that "the bull" was coming. That music was enough to make the hereditary barbarian beat in any heart, but "the bull"! At the further corner of the _plaza_, pulled by a long rope and driven by a yelling rabble, came in, at a clumsy gallop, an astonished and scandalized old ox. Never did living creature bear a meeker and less resentful temper. At first, beaten and pricked by his tormentors, he tore blindly round and round the _plaza_, the long rope by which he was held dragging behind him, and sometimes, as he wheeled about, tripping up and overturning a bunch of the merrymakers. This was a joy to the balconies, but did not often happen, as the people below showed a marvellous dexterity in skipping over the rope just in time to escape its swinging blow. Sometimes the poor, stupid beast entangled his own legs, and that, too, was a source of noisy glee. But, on the whole, he was a disappointing and inglorious ox. He caused no serious accident. Nothing could ruffle his disposition. The scarlet cloaks waved in his eyes he regarded with courteous interest; he wore only a look of grieved surprise when he was slapped across the face with red and yellow banners; tweaks of the tail he endured like a Socrates, but now and then a cruel prod from a sharp stick would make him lower his horns and rush, for an instant, upon the nearest offender. The balconies would shout with the hope of something vicious and violent at last, but the mobile crowd beneath would close in between the ox and his assailant, a hundred fresh insults would divert his attention, and indeed, his own impulses of wrath were of the shortest. To the end he was hardly an angry ox--only a puzzled, baffled, weary old creature who could not make out, for the life of him, into what sort of red and yellow pasture and among what kind of buzzing hornets his unlucky hoofs had strayed. Finally he gave the enigma up and stood wrapped in a brown study among his emboldened enemies, who clung to his horns and tail, tossed children upon his back, tickled his nostrils with their hat brims, and showered him with indignities. The balconies joined in hooting him out of the _plaza_, but he was so pleased to go that I doubt if human scorn of his beastly gentleness really interfered with his appetite for supper. He trotted away to that rude clang of music, the babies who were dancing to it on their nurses' arms not more harmless than he. And although that worrying half hour may have told upon his nerves, and his legs may have ached for the unaccustomed exercise, no blood was to be seen upon him. It was all a rough-and-tumble romp, nothing worse, but the balconies would have liked it better had it been flavored with a broken leg or two. A few sprawlings over the rope really amounted to so little. But the _toro de fuego_ was to come there Tuesday evening, and when this blazing pasteboard bull, with fireworks spluttering all over him from horns to tail, is dragged about among the throng, there is always a fine chance of explosions, burnings, and even of blindings for life. But Carnival Tuesday found us no longer in sunny San Sebastian. We were shivering over a _brasero_ in storied Burgos, a city chill as if with the very breath of the past. And the Spanish _brasero_, a great brass pan holding a pudding of ashes, plummed with sparks, under a wire screen, is the coldest comfort, the most hypocritical heater, that has yet come my way. Our Monday had been spent in a marvellous journey through the Pyrenees, whose rugged sublimities were bathed in the very blue of Velázquez, a cold, clear, glorious blue expanding all the soul. These are haunted mountains, with wild legends of lonely castles, where fierce old chieftains, beaten back by the Franks, shut themselves in with their treasure and died like wounded lions in their lairs. We passed fallen towers from whose summits mediæval heralds had trumpeted the signal for war, ruined convents whence the sound of woman's chanting was wont to startle the wolves of the forest, mysterious lakes deep in whose waters are said to shine golden crowns set with nine precious pearls--those ducal coronets that Rome bestowed upon her vassals--craggy paths once trod by pilgrims, hermits, jugglers, minstrels, and knights-errant, and shadowy pine groves where, when the wind is high, the shepherds still hear the weeping ghost of the cruel princess, whose beauty and disdain slew dozens of men a day until her love was won and scorned, so that she died of longing. We had reached Burgos at dusk and, without pausing for rest or food, had sallied out for our first awe-stricken gaze up at the far-famed cathedral towers, then had ignominiously lost our way over and over in the narrow, crooked streets and been finally marched back to our hotel by a compassionate, though contemptuous, policeman. My artist comrade was fairly ill by morning with a heavy cold, but she would not hear of missing the cathedral and sneezed three or four enraptured hours away in its chill magnificence. As we came to know Spanish and Spaniards better, they would exclaim "_Jesús, Maria y José!_" when we sneezed, that the evil spirit given to tickling noses might take flight; but the Burgos sacristan was too keen to waste these amenities on stammering heretics. What we thought of the cathedral is little to the purpose of this chapter. In a word, however, we thought nothing at all; we only felt. It was our first introduction to one of the monster churches of Spain, and its very greatness, the terrible weight of all that antiquity, sanctity, and beauty, crushed our understanding. Like sleepwalkers we followed our guide down the frozen length of nave and aisles and cloisters; we went the round of the fifteen chapels, splendid presence-chambers where the dead keep sculptured state; we looked, as we were bidden, on the worm-eaten treasure-chest of the Cid, on the clock whose life-sized tenant, Papa-Moscas, used to scream the hours to the embarrassment of long-winded pulpiteers, on the cathedral's crown of fretted spires whose marvellous tracery was chiselled by the angels, and on the "Most Holy Christ of Burgos," the crucified image that bleeds every Friday. Fulfilled with amazement, we searched our way back to the hotel through the sleety rain, ate a shivering luncheon at the "_mesa redonda_," that "round table" which is never round, and agreed to postpone our anticipated visits to the haunts of the Cid until a less inclement season. For of course we should come back to Burgos. The proud old city seemed to fill all the horizon of thought. How had we lived so long without it? That the stormy afternoon was not favorable to exploration mattered little. We peeped down from our balconies into the ancient streets, half expecting the exiled Cid to come spurring up, seeking the welcome which we, like all the craven folk of Burgos, must refuse him. "With sixty lances in his train my Cid rode up the town, The burghers and their dames from all the windows looking down; And there were tears in every eye, and on each lip one word: 'A worthy vassal--would to God he served a worthy lord!' Fain would they shelter him, but none durst yield to his desire. Great was the fear through Burgos town of King Alphonso's ire. Sealed with his royal seal hath come his letter to forbid All men to offer harborage or succor to my Cid. And he that dared to disobey, well did he know the cost-- His goods, his eyes, stood forfeited, his soul and body lost. A hard and grievous word was that to men of Christian race; And since they might not greet my Cid, they hid them from his face." Meanwhile the streets were a living picture-book. Muffled cavaliers, with cloaks drawn up and hats drawn down till only the dance of coal-black eyes, full of fire and fun, was visible between, saluted our balcony with Carnival impertinence. Beggars of both sexes, equally wound about with tattered shawls, reached up expectant hands as if we were made of Spanish pennies. A funeral procession passed, with the pale light of tapers, the chanting of priests, with purple-draped coffin, and mourners trooping on foot--men only, for in Spain women never accompany their dead either to church or grave. A troop of infantry, whose dapper costume outwent itself in the last touch of bright green gloves, dazzled by, and then came a miscellany of maskers. It was rather a rag-tag show, take it all in all--red devils with horns, friars extremely fat, caricatures of English tourists with tall hats and perky blue eye-glasses, giants, dwarfs, tumblers, and even a sorry Cid mounted on a sorrier Bavieca. But the climax of excitement was reached when a novel bull-fight wheeled into view. It was a stuffed calf this time, set on wheels and propelled by a merry fellow of the tribe of Joseph, if one might judge by his multi-colored attire. With white hood, black mask, blue domino, garnet arms, and yellow legs, he was as cheery as a bit of rainbow out of that sombre sky. All the people in sight hastened to flock about him, policemen left their beats, and servant maids their doorways, an itinerant band of gypsy girls ceased clashing their tambourines, the blind beggar opened his eyes, and the small boys were in ecstasies. For over an hour the populace played with that mimic bull in this one spot under our windows, good-humored _caballeros_ lending their scarfs and cloaks to delighted urchins, who would thrust these stimulating objects into the calf's bland face and then run for their lives, while the motley Mask trundled his precious image in hot pursuit behind them. We were reminded of the scene months after by an old painting in the Escorial, depicting an almost identical performance. Spain is not a land of change. But that teeth-chattering cold, "_un frio de todos los demonios_," eased our farewells to Burgos, and night found us dividing the privileges of a second-class carriage with two black-bearded Castilians, who slept foot to foot along the leather-cushioned seat on the one side, while we copied their example on the other. I started from my first doze at some hubbub of arrival to ask drowsily, "Is this Madrid?" "Be at peace, señora!" cooed one of these sable-headed neighbors, in that tone of humorous indulgence characteristic of the dons when addressing women and children. "It is twelve hours yet to Madrid. Slumber on with tranquil heart." So we lay like warriors taking our rest, with our travelling rugs, in lieu of martial cloaks, about us, until the east began to glow with rose and fire, revealing a bleak extent of treeless, tawny steppe. We had only a few days to give to "the crowned city" then, but those sufficed for business, for a first acquaintance with the _Puerta del Sol_ and its radiating avenues, a first joy in the peerless _Museo del Prado_, and a brilliant glimpse of Carnival. We found the great drive of the _Prado_, on Ash Wednesday afternoon, reserved for carriages and maskers. Stages were erected along one side of the way, and on the other the park was closely set with chairs. Stages and chairs were filled with a well-clad, joyous multitude, diverted awhile from their pretty labors of shooting roses and showering _confetti_ by the fascinating panorama before their eyes. The privileged landaus that held the middle of the road were laden with the loveliest women of Castile. Carriages, horses, and coachmen were all adorned, but these showy equipages only served as setting to the high-bred beauty of the occupants. The cream of Madrid society was there. The adults were elegantly dressed, but not as masqueraders. The children in the carriages, however, were often costumed in the picturesque habits of the provinces--the scarlet cap and striped shawl of the Catalan peasant, the open velvet waistcoat, puffed trousers, and blue or red sash of the Valencian, the gayly embroidered mantle of the Andalusian mountaineer, the cocked hat and tasselled jacket of the gypsy. Moors, flower girls, fairies, French lords and ladies of the old régime, even court fools with cap and bells, were brightly imaged by these little people, to whom the maskers on foot seemed to have left the monopoly of beauty. The figures darting among the landaus, in and out of which they leaped with confident impudence, were almost invariably grotesques--smirking fishwives, staring chimney-sweeps, pucker-mouthed babies, and scarecrows of every variety. Political satires are sternly forbidden, and among the few national burlesques, we saw nowhere any representation of Uncle Sam. He was hardly a subject of the King of Nonsense then. Squeaking and gibbering, the maskers, unrebuked, took all manner of saucy liberties. A stately old gentleman rose from his cushion in a crested carriage to observe how gallantly a bevy of ladies were beating off with a hail of _confetti_ and bonbons an imploring cavalier who ran by their wheels, and when he would have resumed his seat he found himself dandled on the knees of a grinning Chinaman. Sometimes a swarm of maskers would beset a favorite carriage, climbing up beside the coachman and snatching his reins, standing on the steps and throwing kisses, lying along the back and twitting the proudest beauty in the ear or making love to the haughtiest. This all-licensed masker, with his monstrous disguise and affected squeal, may be a duke or a doorkeeper. Carnival is democracy. Meanwhile the inevitable small boy, whose Spanish variety is exceptionally light of heart and heels, gets his own fun out of the occasion by whisking under the ropes into this reserved avenue and dodging hither and thither among the vehicles, to the fury of the mounted police, whose duty it is to keep the public out. One resplendent rider devoted his full energies for nearly an hour to the unavailing chase of a nimble little rogue who risked ten of his nine lives under coaches and in front of horses' hoofs, but always turned up laughing with a finger at the nose. Yet this jocund day did not set without its tragedy. A hot-tempered Madrileño, abroad with his wife, resented the attentions paid her by one of the maskers and shot him down. The mortally wounded man was found to be a physician of high repute. This was not the only misadventure of the afternoon, a lady losing one eye by the blow of a flying sugar-plum. Our next night journey was less fortunate than our first, though it should be remembered that our discomforts were partly due to our persistency in travelling second-class. The carriage had its full complement of passengers, and each of our eight companions brought with him an unlawful excess of small luggage. Valises, boxes, bundles, sacks, cans, canes, umbrellas wedged us in on every side, while our own accumulation of grips, shawl-straps, hold-alls, and sketching kit denied us even the relief of indignation. We all sat bolt upright the night through in an atmosphere that sickens memory. Not a chink of window air would those sensitive _caballeros_ endure, while the smoke of their ever puffing cigarettes clouded the compartment with an uncanny haze that grew heavier hour by hour. Conversation, which seldom flagged, became a violent chorus at those intervals when the conductor burst in for another chapter of his serial wrangle with a fiery gentleman who refused to pay full fare. Every don in the carriage, even to the chubby priest nodding in the coziest corner, had an unalterable conviction as to the rights and wrongs of that question, and men we had supposed, from their swaying and snoring, fast asleep, would leap to their feet when the conductor entered, fling out their hands in vehement gestures, and dash into the midst of the vociferous dispute. Lazy Spaniards, indeed! We began to wish that the Peninsula would cultivate repose of manner. Our tempers were sorely shaken, and when, in the pale chill of dawn, we arrived at Cordova, sleepless, nauseated, and out of love with humanity, we had every prospect of passing a wretched forenoon. Thus it is I am inclined to believe we lay down under an orange tree and dreamed a dream of the "Arabian Nights." Or perhaps it was only another freak of the Carnival. At all events, a cup of coffee, and the world was changed. Cordova! A midsummer heat, a land of vineyards and olive groves, palms and aloes, a white, unearthly city, with narrow, silent, deathlike streets, peopled only by drowsy beggars and by gliding maskers that seemed more real than this Oriental picture in which they moved, high walls with grated, harem-like windows, and an occasional glimpse, through some arched doorway, into a marble-floored, rose-waving, fountain-playing patio, enchanted and mysterious, a dream within a dream. Cordova is more than haunted. It is itself a ghost. The court of the Spanish caliphs, at once the Mecca and the Athens of the West, a holy city which counted its baths and mosques by hundreds, a seat of learning whose universities were renowned for mathematics and philosophy, chemistry, astronomy, and medicine, and within whose libraries were treasured manuscripts by hundreds of thousands, a star of art and poetry, it ever reproaches, by this lovely, empty shadow, the Christian barbarism that spurned away the Moors. The insulted Mosque of Cordova well-nigh makes Mohammedans of us all. Entering by the studded Door of Pardon into the spacious Court of Oranges, with its ancient trees and sparkling quintette of fountains, one passes onward under the Arch of Blessings into a marble forest of slender, sculptured pillars. The wide world, from Carthage to Damascus, from Jerusalem to Ephesus and Rome, was searched for the choicest shafts of jasper, breccia, alabaster, porphyry, until one thousand four hundred precious columns bore the glory of rose-red arches and wonder-roof of gilded and enamelled cedar. More than seven thousand hanging lamps of bronze, filled with perfumed oil, flashed out the mosaic tints,--golds, greens, violets, vermilions,--of ceiling, walls, and pavement. All this shining sanctity culminated in the Mihrâb, or Prayer-Niche, an octagonal recess whose shell-shaped ceiling is hollowed from a single block of pure white marble. This Holy of Holies held the Koran, bound in gold and pearls, around which the Faithful were wont to make seven turns upon their knees, an act of devotion that has left indisputable grooves in the marble of the pavement. [Illustration: AN ARAB GATEWAY IN BURGOS] The Christian conquerors splashed whitewash over the exquisite ceiling, hewed down the pillars of the outer aisles to give space for a fringe of garish chapels, and even chopped away threescore glistening columns in the centre to make room for an incongruous Renaissance choir, with an altar of silver gilt and a big pink retablo. We could have wandered for endless hours among the strange half-lights and colored shadows of that petrified faith of Islam, marvelling on the processes of time. It is claimed that the Arab mosque rose on the site of a Roman temple, whence Mahomet drove forth Janus, to be in his own turn expelled by Christ. The race of those who bowed themselves in this gleaming labyrinth has fared ill at Spanish hands. Even now a Moor, however courteous and cultured, is refused admission to certain Castilian churches, as the Escorial. How did we ever part from Cordova, from her resplendent, desecrated mosque, her stone lanes of streets, her hinted patios, the Moorish mills and Roman bridge of her yellow Guadalquivír? It must all have been a morning dream, for the early afternoon saw us tucked away in another second-class carriage speeding toward Granada. We were in beautiful Andalusia, _la tierra de Maria Santisima_. The green slopes of the Sierra Morena, planted to the top with olive groves, watched the beginnings of our journey, and banks of strange, sweet flowers, with glimpses of Moorish minarets and groups of dark-faced, bright-sashed peasants, looking as if they had just stepped down from an artist's easel, beguiled us of all physical discomforts save heat and thirst. When the sun was at its sorest, the train drew up at a tumble-down station, and we looked eagerly for the customary water seller, with his cry of "Water! Fresh water! Water cooler than snow!" But it was too warm for this worthy to venture out, and our hopes fastened on a picturesque old merchant seated in a shaft of cypress shade beside a heap of golden oranges. Those juicy globes were a sight to madden all the parched mouths in the train, and imploring voices hailed the proprietor from window after window. But our venerable hidalgo smoked his cigarette in tranquil ease, disdaining the vulgarities of barter. At the very last moment we persuaded a ragged boy in the throng of bystanders to fetch us a hatful of the fruit. Then the peasant languidly arose, followed the lad to our window, named an infinitesimal price, and received his coin with the bow of a grandee. He was no hustler in business, this Andalusian patriarch, but his dignity was epic and his oranges were nectar. We shall never know whether or not we had an adventure that evening. A wild-eyed tatterdemalion swung himself suddenly into our compartment and demanded our tickets, but as all the Andalusians looked to our unaccustomed view like brigands, we did not discriminate against this abrupt individual, but yielded up our strips of pasteboard without demur. A swarthy young Moor of Tangier, the only other occupant of the carriage, sharply refused to surrender his own until the intruder should produce a conductor's badge, whereupon the stranger swore in gypsy, or "words to that effect," wrenched open the door and fled, like Judas, into the outer dark. The Moor excitedly declared to us that our tickets would be called for at the station in Granada, that we should have to pay their price to the gate-keeper, and that our irregular collector, hiding somewhere along the train, would be admitted by that corrupt official to a share in the spoils. Moved by our dismay, this son of the desert thrust his head through the window at the next stop, and roared so lustily for the conductor and the civil guard that, in a twinkling, the robber, if he was a robber, popped up in the doorway again, like a Jack-in-the-box, and rudely flung us back the tickets. Thereupon our benefactor, if he was a benefactor, solemnly charged us never, on the Granada road, to give up anything to anybody who wore no gilt on his cap. More and more the purple mountains were folding us about, until at last we arrived at Granada, too tired for a thrill. Mr. Gulick's constant care, which had secured us harborage in Madrid, had provided welcome here. Content in mere well-being, it was not until the following afternoon that tourist enterprise revived within us. Then we somewhat recklessly wandered down from the Alhambra hill into the heart of the People's Carnival, a second Sunday of festival given over to the enjoyment of the lower classes. The grotesque costumes were coarser than ever and the fun was rougher. The maskers cracked whips at the other promenaders, blew horns, shook rattles, and struck about them with painted bladders, but the balconies were bright with the bewitching looks of Andalusian beauties, each vying with the rest in throwing the many-colored _serpentinas_, curly lengths of paper that crisp themselves in gaudy fetters about their captives. A single business house in Granada claimed to have sold over a million of these, representing a value of some ten thousand dollars, during Carnival week. Southern Spain was grumbling bitterly against the Government and the war taxes, and in Seville, where a tax is put on masks, the Carnival had been given up this year as last; but Granada would not be cheated of her frolic. Our study of this closing phase of the Carnival was cut short by the recollection that it was, above all, the _fiesta_ of pickpockets. Finding ourselves, on the superb _Paseo del Salón_, in the midst of a hooting, jostling, half-gypsy mob, rained upon with _confetti_, called upon in broken French and English, pressed upon by boys and beggars, and happening to catch sight of the stately bronze statue of Columbus which the women of Granada had recently stoned because, by discovering America, he brought all the Cuban troubles upon Spain, we took the hint of the wise navigator's eye and decided that we two stray Yankees might be as well off somewhere else. "Feet, why do I love you?" say the Spaniards; and so said we, suiting the action to the word. III WITHIN THE ALHAMBRA "The Sierra Nevada, an enormous dove which shelters under its most spotless wings Saracen Granada."--ALARCÓN: _Los Seis Velos_. Our surprises were by no means over. We had come to Granada to bask in the quintessence of earthly sunshine, and we found bleak rains, dark skies, and influenza. The Moorish palace was indeed as wonderful as our lifelong dream of it,--arched and columned halls of exquisite fretwork, walls of arabesque where flushes and glints of color linger yet, ceilings crusted with stalactite figures of tapering caprice, but all too chill, even if the guides would cease from troubling, for tarrying revery. We tarried, nevertheless, were enraptured, and caught cold. We were dwelling in the village on the Alhambra hill, within the circuit of the ruined fortress, in a villa kept by descendants of the Moors, but the insolent grippe microbe respected neither ancient blood nor republican. During the month of our residence, every member of the household was brought low in turn, and there were days when even the stubborn Yankees retreated to their pillows, lulled by the howling of as wild March winds as ever whirled the grasshopper vane on Faneuil Hall. From beyond the partition sounded the groans of our fever-smitten hostess, and from the kitchen below arose the noise of battle between our sturdy host and the rebel spoons and sauce-pans. If we could not always swallow his bold experiments in gruel and porridge, we could always enjoy the roars of laughter with which that merry silversmith plied his unaccustomed labors. It is said that there are only three months of the year when Granada is fit to live in, and certainly February and March are not of these. But our delighted spirits had no thought of surrender to our discomfited bodies. We would not go away. It is better to ache in beautiful Granada than to be at ease elsewhere. At the first peep of convalescence, we fled out of doors in search of a sunbeam and discovered, again to our surprise, this immemorial Alhambra hill as young as springtime. The famous fragments of towers, with their dim legends of enchantment, all those tumbled masses of time-worn, saffron-lichened masonry, are tragically old, yet the tender petals of peach blossoms, drifting through the fragrant air, lay pink as baby touches against those hoary piles. We rested beside many an ancient ruin overclambered by red rosebuds or by branches laden with the fresh gold of oranges, where thrushes practised songs of welcome for the nightingales. We were too early for these sweetest minstrels of the Alhambra, who, like the Moors of long ago, were yearning on the edge of Africa for the Vega of Granada. One expects, shut in by the crumbling walls of the Alhambra, in shadow of the ruddy towers, in sound of the Moslem fountains, to live with dreams and visions for one's company, to have no associates less dignified than the moonlight cavalcades of shadowy Arabian warriors, whom the mountain caverns cast forth at stated seasons to troop once more in their remembered ways, or lustrous-eyed, lute-playing sultanas, or, at least, a crook-backed, snow-bearded magician, with a wallet full of talismans, and footsteps that clink like the gold of buried treasure. But here again the eternal fact of youth in the world disconcerts all venerable calculations. The Alhambra dances and laughs with children--ragamuffins, most of them, but none the less radiant with the precious joy of the morning. They are gentle little people, too. It became well known on the hill that we were Americans, yet not a pebble or rude word followed us from the groups of unkempt boys among whom we daily passed. Once a mimic regiment, with a deafening variety of unmusical instruments and a genuine Spanish flag, charged on me roguishly and drew up in battle square about their prisoner, but it was only to troll the staple song of Spanish adolescence: "I want to be a soldier," and when I had munificently rewarded the captain with a copper, the youngsters doffed their varied headgear, dipped their banner in martial salute, and contentedly re-formed their ranks. It was seldom that we gave money, but we usually carried _dulces_ for the little ones, who, even the dirtiest, have their own pretty standard of manners. Some half-dozen _pequeñitos_, not one of whom was clearly out of petticoats, were scampering off one day, for instance, their thanks duly spoken, and their bits of candy just between hand and mouth, when they turned with one accord, as if suddenly aware of an abruptness in their leave-taking, and trotted back to bow them low, their tatters of cap sweeping the ground, and lisp with all Spanish gravity, "Good afternoon, señora." One chubby hidalgo tipped over with the profundity of his obeisance, but the others righted him so solemnly that the dignity of the ceremonial was unimpaired. The habit of begging, that plague of tourist resorts, is an incessant nuisance on the Alhambra hill. Half-grown girls and young women were the most shameless and persistent of our tormentors. Age can be discouraged, and babyhood diverted, while the Spanish boy, if his importunities are met by smile and jest, will break into a laugh in the midst of his most pathetic appeals and let you off till next time. "A little money for our Blessed Lady's sake, señora. I am starving." "Wouldn't you rather have a cigarette?" "And that I would." "Then you are not starving, little brother. Run away. I have no cigarettes." "But you have money for me, señora." "No, nor enough for myself, not enough to buy one tile of the Alhambra." "Then may God take care of you!" "And of you!" [Illustration: PLAYING AT BULL-FIGHT] But the wild-haired, jet-eyed gypsy girl from the Albaicín is impervious to mirth and untouched by courtesy. She would not do us the honor of believing our word, even when we were telling the truth. "Five _centimos_ to buy me a scarlet ribbon! Five _centimos_!" "Not to-day, excuse me. I have no change." "Hoh! You have change enough. Look in your little brown bag and see." "I have no change." "Then give me a _peseta_. Come, now, a whole _peseta_!" "But why should I give you a _peseta_?" The girl stares like an angry hawk. "But why shouldn't you?" Darting away, she hustles together a group of toddlers, hardly able to lisp, and drives them on to the attack. "Beg, Isabelita! Beg of the lady, little Conception! Beg, Alfonsito! Beg, beg, beg! Beg five _centimos_, ten _centimos_! Beg a _peseta_ for us all!" And out pop the tiny palms, and the babble of baby voices makes a pleading music in the air. It is for such as these that the little brown bag has learned to carry _dulces_. Before the month was over we had, in a slow, grippe-chastened fashion, "done our Baedeker." We had our favorite courts and corridors in the magical maze of the Moorish palace; we knew the gardens and fountains of the _Generalife_, even to that many-centuried cypress beneath whose shade the Sultana Zoraya was wont to meet her Abencerrage lover; our fortunes had been told in the gypsy caves of the Albaicín; we had visited the stately Renaissance cathedral where, in a dim vault, the "Catholic Kings," Ferdinand and Isabella, take their royal rest; we had made a first acquaintance with the paintings of the fire-tempered Granadine, Alonso Cano, and paid our dubious respects to the convent of Cartuja, with its over-gorgeous ornament and its horrible pictures of Spanish martyrdoms inflicted by that "devil's bride," Elizabeth of England. We had explored the parks and streets of the strange old city, where we possessed, according to the terms of Spanish hospitality, several houses; but better than the clamorous town we liked our own wall-girdled height, with its songful wood of English elms, planted by the Duke of Wellington, its ever murmuring runlets of clear water, its jessamines and myrtles, its Arabian Nights of mosque and tower, and its far outlook over what is perhaps the most entrancing prospect any hill of earth can show. The sunset often found us leaning over the ivied wall beneath the _Torre de la Vela_, that bell-tower where the first cross was raised after the Christian conquest, gazing forth from our trellised garden-nook on a vast panorama of gray city all quaintly set with arch and cupola, of sweeping plain with wealth of olive groves, vineyards, orange orchards, pomegranates, aloes, and cypresses, bounded by glistening ranks of snow-cloaked mountains. From the other side of the Alhambra plateau, the fall is sheer to the silver line of the Darro. Across the river rises the slope of the Albaicín, once the chosen residence of Moorish aristocracy, but now dotted over, amid the thickets of cactus and prickly pear, with whitewashed entrances to gypsy caves. Beyond all shine the resplendent summits of the great Sierras. Yet it is strange how homely are many of the memories that spring to life in me at the name of the Alhambra,--decorous donkeys, laden with water-jars, trooping up the narrow footpath to the old Fountain of Tears, herds of goats clinging like flies to the upright precipice, a lurking peasant darting out on his wife as she passes with a day's earnings hidden in her stocking and holding her close, with laughter and coaxing, while he persistently searches her clothing until he finds and appropriates that copper hoard, and our own cheery little house-drudge washing our linen in a wayside rivulet and singing like a bird as she rubs and pounds an unfortunate handkerchief between two haphazard stones:-- "I like to live in Granada, It pleases me so well When I am falling asleep at night To hear the _Vela_ bell." There is the proud young mother, too, whom we came upon by chance over behind the Tower of the Princesses, where her pot of _puchero_ was bubbling above a miniature bonfire, while the velvet-eyed baby boy sucked his thumb in joyous expectation. She often made us welcome, after that, to her home,--a dingy stone kitchen and bedroom, unfurnished save for pallet, a few cooking-utensils, a chest or two, and, fastened to the wall, a gaudy print of _La Virgen de las Angustias_, the venerated _Patrona_ of Granada. But this wretched abode, the remains of what may once have been a palace, opened on a lordly pleasure-garden with walls inlaid with patterns of rainbow tiles, whose broken edges were hidden by rose bushes. There were pedestals and even fragments of images in this wild Eden, jets of sparkling water and walks of variegated marble. In the course of the month, English and Spanish callers climbed the hill to us and encompassed us with kindness, but we still maintained our incorrigible taste for low society and used to hold informal receptions on sunny benches for all the tatterdemalions within sight. Swarthy boys, wearied with much loafing, would thriftily lay aside their cigarettes to favor us with conversation, asking many questions about America, for whose recent action they gallantly declined to hold us responsible. "It was not the ladies that made the war," said these modern cavaliers of the Alhambra. Their especial spokesman was a shambling orphan lad of some fifteen summers, with shrewd and merry eyes. Nothing pleased him better than to give an ornamental hitch to the shabby, bright-colored scarf about his thin, brown throat, and proceed to expound the political situation. "You admire the Alhambra? I suppose you have no palaces in America because your Government is a republic. That is a very good thing. Our Government is the worst possible. All the loss falls on the poor. All the gain goes to the rich. But there are few rich in Spain. America is the richest country of all the world. When America fought us it was as a rich man, fed and clothed, fighting a poor man weak from famine. And the rich man took from the poor man all that he had. Spain has nothing left--nothing." "Oh, don't say that! Spain has the Alhambra, and beautiful churches, beautiful pictures." "Can one eat churches and pictures, my lady?" "And a fertile soil. What country outblooms Andalusia?" His half-shod foot kicked the battle-trampled earth of the immortal hill contemptuously. "Soil! Yes. All the world has soil. It serves to be buried in." This budding politician graced us with his company one Sunday afternoon, when we went down into Granada to see a religious procession. Our Lady of Lourdes, escorted by a distinguished train of ecclesiastical and civic dignitaries, with pomp of many shining lights and sonorous instruments, with peal of church bells and incongruous popping of fireworks, passed through extended ranks of candle-bearing worshippers, along thronged streets, where every balcony was hung with the national red and yellow, to the Church of Mary Magdalene. There the sacred guest was entertained with a concert, and thence conducted, with the same processional state, amid the same reverent salutations of the multitude, back to her own niche. Our youthful guide showed himself so devout on this occasion, kneeling whenever the image, borne aloft in a glory of flowers and tapers, passed us, and gazing on every feature of the pageant with large-eyed adoration, that we asked him, as we climbed the hill again, if he would like to be a priest. But he shrugged his shoulders. "There are better Christians in Spain than the priests," he answered. The son of the house, Don Pepe, a young man of five and twenty, who usually attended us on any difficult excursion, was also frankly outspoken in his disapproval of the clergy. He could hardly hold his countenance in passing a Franciscan friar. "There walks the ruin of Spain," he muttered once, with bitter accent, turning to scowl after the bareheaded, brown-frocked figure so common in Granada streets. We had, indeed, our own little grudge against the friars, for they were the only men of the city who forced us off the narrow sidewalks out into the rough and dirty road. All other Granadines, from dandies to gypsies, yielded us the strip of pavement with ready courtesy, but the friars, three or four in Indian file, would press on their way like graven images and drive us to take refuge among the donkeys. This escort of ours, formally a Catholic, was no more a lover of State than of Church. He was eager to get to work in the world and, finding no foothold, charged up his grievance against the Government. He was firmly persuaded that Madrid had sold the Santiago and Manila victories to Washington for sums of money down,--deep down in official pockets. But his talk, however angry, would always end in throwing out the hands with a gesture of despair. "But what use in revolutions? Spain is tired--tired of tumult, tired of bloodshed, tired of deceit and disappointment. A new government would only mean the old dogs with new collars. We, the people, are always the bone to be gnawed bare. What use in anything? Let it go as God wills." The Silvela and Polavieja ministry came in during our stay at Granada, and the Liberal and Republican chorus against what was known as the Reactionary Government swelled loud. "It means the yoke of the Jesuits," growled our burly host. Our Alhambra dream suffered frequent jars from these ignoble confusions of to-day. When we were musing comfortably on the melancholy fortunes of Boabdil, a cheap newspaper would be thrust before our eyes with an editorial headed "Boabdil Sagasta." It is always best to do what one must. Since we could not be left in peace to the imagination of plumy cavaliers, stars of Moslem and Christian chivalry, who sowed this mount so thick with glorious memories, we turned our thoughts to the poor soldiers from Cuba, especially during the week throughout which they paraded the cities of Spain in rag-tag companies under rude flags with the ruder motto: "_Hungry Repatriados_." Their appearance was so woful that it became a by-word. A child, picking up from a gutter one day a mud-stained, dog-eared notebook, cried gleefully, "It's a _repatriado_." There was no glamour here, but the courage and sacrifice, the love and anguish, held good. Granada had borne her share in Spain's last war sorrow. So many of her sons were drafted for the Antilles that her anger against America waxed hot. A few months before our arrival every star-spangled banner that could be hunted out in shop or residence was trampled and burned in the public squares. The Washington Irving Hotel hastened to take down its sign, and even the driver of its omnibus was sternly warned by the people to erase those offensive American names from his vehicle on pain of seeing it transformed into a chariot of fire. A shot, possibly accidental, whistled through the office of the English consul, who was given to understand, in more ways than one, that Spain made little difference between "the cloaked enemy" and the foe in the field. Meanwhile, month after month, the recruits were marched to the station, and the City Fathers, who came in all municipal dignity to bid the lads godspeed, were so overwhelmed by the weeping of the women that they forgot the cream of their speeches. Among the new tales of Spanish valor told us on the Alhambra hill was this:-- When lots were drawn for military service, one blithe young scapegrace found in his hand a fortunate high number, but, walking away in fine feather over his luck, he met the mother of a friend of his, sobbing wildly as she went. Her son had been drafted, and the two hundred dollars of redemption money was as far beyond her reach as those dazzling crests of the Sierra Nevada are above the lame beggar at the Alhambra gate. Then the kindly fellow, troubled by her grief and mindful of the fact that, orphan as he was, his own parting would be at no such cost of tears, offered to serve in her boy's stead. Her passion of gratitude could not let his service go all unrecompensed. Poorest of the poor, she went about among her humble friends, lauding his deed, until she had collected, _peseta_ by _peseta_, the sum of sixteen dollars, which she thrust into his hands to buy comforts for the campaign. But another sobbing mother sought him out. He had saved her neighbor's son; would he not save hers? Laughing at her logic and moved by her faith in him, he answered: "I am only one man, señora. I cannot go in place of two. But here are sixteen dollars. If you can find a substitute at such a price, the money is yours." Sixteen dollars is a fortune to hunger and nakedness, and the substitute was found. As the year wore on those two mothers did not let the city forget its light-hearted hero, and a great assembly gathered at the station to honor his return. A remnant of his comrades descended from the train, but as for him, they said, he had died in Cuba of the fever months before. His was no poetic death like that of the Abencerrages. Happy Abencerrages! They knew the Alhambra in the freshness of her beauty. Their last uplifted glances looked upon the most exquisite ceilings in the world. Their blood left immortal stains on the marble base of the fountain. But this young Spaniard, in his obscure Cuban grave, only one out of the eighty thousand, will promptly be forgotten. _No importa._ There must be something better than glory for the man who does more than his duty. [Illustration: THE MOSQUE OF CORDOVA] IV A FUNCTION IN GRANADA "O Love Divine, Celestial Purity, Pity my cries! My soul is prone before a clouded throne. Let thy keen light arise, Pierce this obscurity And free my dream-bound eyes!" --_Ganivet's Last Poem._ The civilization of Spain, streaked as it is with Oriental barbarisms, belated and discouraged as the end of the nineteenth century finds it, is still in many respects finer than our own. In everything that relates to grace and charm of social intercourse, to the dignified expression of reverence, compassion, and acknowledgment, Spain puts us to the blush. I was especially touched in Granada by the whole-souled sympathy and veneration with which the city rendered public honors to one of its sons, Angel Ganivet, who died in the preceding winter, a poet hardly thirty. Although I had glanced over obituary notices of this Spanish writer in the Paris papers, I had but a vague idea of his work and life, and sought, before the night of the memorial ceremonies, for further information. I appealed, first of all, to our table waiter, whose keen black eyes instantly turned sad and tender. "_Pobre! Pobre!_ He threw himself into the river at Riga, in Russia, where he was consul. It was at the close of the war. And he such a genius! So young! So true a Spaniard! But all Granada will be at the theatre. He left his play to Granada, asking that it be seen here first of all. I have never read his books, but I have met him in the streets, and lifted my hat to him for a wise _caballero_ who cared greatly for Spain." My next appeal was to our kind neighbor, the English consul, who assured me laughingly that he, like myself, was vainly ransacking the few bookstores of Granada for Ganivet's works. "The first time I ever heard the name," he added, "was some three or four years ago, when I noticed an old gentleman standing often in front of my house, and gazing at the British coat-of-arms above my door. He told me one day when I drew him into talk that he had a nephew, Angel Ganivet, roaming in foreign lands. 'But he does not forget his old uncle,' said he. 'I always receive my little pension prompt to the day, and so I like to look at the foreign shields about the city, and remember my nephew, far away, who remembers me.' That was a trifle, of course, but it gave me a kindly feeling for the young fellow, and I'm sorry he came to such an end. They found him in the river, you know. I dare say it was suicide, and likely enough the defeat of Spain had its share in causing his despondency; but nobody knows. He was a zealous patriot, I understand, and all Granada seems to take his death to heart." My next authority was an aged Granadine, a man of letters; but he had not read Ganivet's books. "I have heard of him often," he said, "but I never met him. He was not much in Granada, although he seems to have had a romantic affection for the place. _Bueno!_ Its pomegranates are worth remembering. But Ganivet liked to live in foreign countries, with the idea of understanding his own better by comparison. He was young; he still had hopes for Spain. Eighty years are on my head, and I have long done with hoping. I have served in my country's armies, I have served in her Government, I have seen much of Church and State, and since the night when they murdered General Prim I have seen nothing good. But Ganivet had faith in the national future, and the people, without waiting to ask on what that faith was founded, love him for it, and mourn his loss as if he had been their benefactor. They are all going to pour into the theatre to-morrow night to hear his symbolic drama, that not one in a hundred of them will try to understand, and the hundredth will get it all wrong." The "function" took place in the _Gran Teatro de Isabel la Católica_, a name to conjure with throughout all Spain, and especially in Granada. The day set for the performance, and widely advertised by newspapers and posters for a month in advance, was a Wednesday. On Tuesday, in a fever lest we be too late, we arrived at the ticket office. We had our hurry all to ourselves. Apparently nobody else had as yet taken a seat. The office was empty, save for us and our attendant train of boys and beggars. The official in charge, deaf, slow, and courteous, invited us into a private room and gave us rocking-chairs by the _brasero_, while he, with paper and pencil, laboriously added the price of our _entradas_ to the price of our modest box, and spent five minutes in subtracting the amount from the figure of the small bill we handed him. The counting out of the change was another strain on his arithmetic, and, after all these toils, we were still without tickets. He said he would "write them out at home," and we might send some one for them the next day. But he affably offered to show us the theatre, and led us through black passages to a great dusky space, where, while he struck match after match, we could catch glimpses of pit and balconies, and even a far-off stage, with a group of actors gathered about a lamp, rehearsing the play. In Wednesday morning's paper, however, they announced with entire nonchalance that they were not ready yet, and would postpone the representation until Thursday. On Thursday evening the theatre, choking full though it was, hardly presented a brilliant appearance. Granada is not Madrid, nor Seville, and the best the Granadines had to offer their dead poet was the tribute of their presence in such guise as they could command. The big, barnlike theatre, with its rows of broken lamp-chimneys, looked shabby, and the rag-tag proportion of the audience was so great that it overflowed the _Paraiso_ into the aisles and doorways and all conceivable corners. People were so jumbled and crumpled together that, with reminiscences of my traveller's hold-all, I found myself wondering if they would ever shake out smooth again. Whole families were there, from the infant in arms that invariably screamed when the actors were reciting any passage of peculiar delicacy, to the dozing old grandfather, who kept dropping his cigarette out of his mouth in a way that threatened to set us all on fire. The gentlemen, even in the boxes and the stalls, were generally ungloved, and we did not see a dress suit in the house. Cloaks and neckties were ablaze with color as usual, but the masculine toilets eluded our stricter observation; for when the curtain was up, our eyes were all for the stage, and between acts your Spaniard sits with hat on head, enveloped in a cloud of tobacco smoke. But the Andalusian ladies made amends for everything. By some prehistoric agreement, Spanish women have yielded the rainbow to the men, reserving for their own attire the quiet elegance of black or the festive beauty of pure white. The dress that evening, even in the principal boxes, was conspicuously simple. But the clear brunette complexions, the delicate contours, the rich black hair worn high and crowned with natural flowers, the waving fans and flashing glances, cast a glamour over the whole scene. The memorial rites themselves made up in quantity whatever they might lack in quality, continuing from eight o'clock till two. An orchestra, organized from Granada musicians for this occasion, opened the programme. The bust of Ganivet, wrought by a young Granada sculptor, was reverently unveiled. The star actor, Fuentes of Granada, who had undertaken with his troupe to present his fellow-townsman's drama purely as a labor of love, read an interpretation written by one of Granada's leading critics. The orchestra was in evidence again, introducing the first act, entitled "Faith." After this the orchestra played Bretón's serenade, "In the Alhambra," and the curtain rose for the second act on so natural a scene-painting of the famous fortress that the audience went wild with enthusiasm, and the blushing artist, also a Granadine, had to be literally shoved from the wings upon the stage to receive his plaudits. Between the second act, "Love," and the last act, "Death," came an _andante elegiaco_, "written expressly for this artistic solemnity" by a Granada composer. Here, again, the appreciation of the audience was unbounded, and nothing would do but the reluctant master must leave his box, struggle through the packed multitude to the conductor's stand, and take the baton himself for a second rendering from the first chord to the last. At the close of the third act the orchestra did its part once more, and the celebration ended, somewhat incongruously, with a lively bit of modern comedy. There was imperfection enough, had one been disposed to look for it. The fifty members of the impromptu orchestra had hardly brought themselves into accord, the acting was not of the best Spanish quality, and the players had not half learned their parts. Every long declamation was a duet, the prompter's rapid undertone charging along beneath the actor's voice like a horse beneath its rider. But the audience understood, forgave, were grateful, and sat with sublime patience through the long pauses between the acts, repeating one to another, "They say Fuentes is studying his speeches." As the caustic old scholar had predicted, most of them, apparently, did not try to understand the allegory. They applauded the obviously poetic touches, the palpably dramatic situations, and when, in the Alhambra act, a gypsy air was sung, the galleries delightedly caught it up and chorused it over again. But in general that nondescript assembly looked on in passive gravity while _El Escultor de su Alma_ was rendered, as their poet had bidden, in their own theatre and for them. They may have gathered hints and snatches of that mystical message from the dead, whose lofty look, fixed in shining marble, dominated all the house. The restless Spirit of Man, seeking the perfect Truth, tears himself loose from the bride of his youth, Heavenly Faith, and wanders in beggary through the world. Yet Truth for him can only be the child of his union with Faith, and in parting from one he has parted from both. In old age, almost maddened by his wanderings and woes, he meets his Truth again, full-grown and beautiful, but is so fierce and wild in his desire to possess her that only Death can reconcile them--Death and that Heavenly Faith who could not abandon him, though he had forsaken her. Ganivet's mother, who, with his brothers, witnessed the play from behind the scenes, is said to have rejoiced in it as a last solemn assurance from her son of his secure repose in the Catholic faith of his fathers. It may not have meant so much to that great audience, many of whom could neither read nor write, but those tiers upon tiers of dark Spanish faces were full of earnestness and of a proud content. However it may have baffled their heads, this legacy of a play, in its Alhambra setting, spoke clearly to their hearts. One ragamuffin said to another, as an all-sufficient criticism, "He was thinking of Granada when he wrote it." A few days later, I found and eagerly read Angel Ganivet's most significant booklet, _Idearium_, published in the autumn of 1896, in which he sets forth his dream for the future of his beloved country. Ganivet claims that the deepest moral element in Spanish character is stoicism, "not the brutal and heroic stoicism of Cato, nor the serene and majestic stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, nor the rigid and extreme stoicism of Epictetus, but the natural and humane stoicism of Seneca." He holds that Seneca, himself a Spaniard, found his philosophy in the inherent genius of the country, and only gave voice to the indwelling soul of Spain. The Spanish church, cherishing this element, became a thing apart from the general Catholicism of Europe. The long warfare and incidental intercourse with the Moors stamped Spanish Christianity with its two other characteristic features of mysticism and fanaticism. "Mysticism was like a sanctification of African sensuality, and fanaticism was a turning against ourselves, when the Reconquest ended, of the fury accumulated during eight centuries of combat." The author, _muy español_, is naturally _muy católico_, yet he protests against violence in the repression of other forms of religion. "Liberty should bring with it no fear." He believes that Spain is, above all, _sui generis_, independent and individual. The representative Spaniard is a free lance, striving and conquering by his own impulse and under his own direction, like the Cid of old or Cortes in the field of arms, like Loyola in the church, like Cervantes in letters. He lays stress on the achievements of Spanish art--the master paintings of Velázquez and Murillo, the master dramas of Lope de Vega and Calderon, as expressing, better than political history has expressed, that intensification of Spanish life resulting from the struggle against the Arabs "and making of our nation a Christian Greece." [Illustration: THE COLUMBUS MONUMENT IN GRANADA] He finds it logical and right that Spain, after her successive periods of Roman influence, Visigothic influence, Arab influence, and her modern era of colonial expansion, should now abandon foreign policies and concentrate all her vitality within her own borders. Not by the sword, but by the spirit, would he have Spain henceforth hold sway over mankind, and especially over the Spanish-descended peoples of South America. He winces under the monopoly of the term "American" by the citizens of the United States--"a formidable nation," he admits, "very populous, very rich, and apparently very well governed." He notes, in contrast, the poverty and comparative anarchy of the South American republics, but he urges still that the Spanish character, shaped through such eventful centuries, is an entity, clear and firm, with qualities well defined, whereas the Yankees are yet in the fusing pot. He would have all the peoples of Hispanian descent recognize and realize in themselves this Spanish individuality, effecting not a political union, but a "confederation, intellectual and spiritual," whose first aim should be the preservation of Spanish ideas and ideals, and the second, the free gift of these to all the nations of the earth. The ancient glory of Spain, he says, has vanished like a dream; let a new and whiter glory dawn. Her career of material conquest is ended. Those savage struggles have left her faint and spent. Let her now seek to attain, through purification and discipline, such fresh fulness of life as shall insure the triumph of her spiritual forces--her fervent faith and her unworldly wisdom. "Our Ulysses is Don Quixote." V IN SIGHT OF THE GIRALDA "We were nearing Seville. I felt the eager throbbing of my heart. Seville had ever been for me the symbol of light, the city of love and joy."--VALDÉS: _La Hermana San Sulpicio_. One of the wise sayings of Andalusia runs, "Do not squeeze the orange till the juice is bitter." And so we said good-by to Granada before we were ready to go, and persuaded ourselves, in defiance of maps and time-tables, that our shortest route to Seville led by Ronda. The weather did its very best to dampen our enthusiasm for this wildest of crag aeries, equally famed for romantic beauty of outlook and salubrity of air. Men live long in Ronda, unless, indeed, they hit against a bullet while practising their hereditary trade of _contrabandista_. They have a saying that octogenarians there are only chickens, but one should not believe all that they say in Ronda. Did we not clamber, slipping on wet stones, down a precipitous path to peer, from under dripping umbrellas, at what our guide declared was an old Roman bridge? "It doesn't look old and it doesn't look Roman," was the artist's dubious comment, but our highly recommended conductor, a Gib, as the English-Spanish natives of Gibraltar Rock are called, assured us that it was built in the days of Julius Cæsar, but had been wonderfully well preserved. We eyed him thoughtfully, bearing in mind that he had already pointed out the statue of a long-dead poet as a living politician; but we meekly continued through the lashing rain to follow his long footsteps over the breakneck ways of that natural fortress where race after race has left its autograph. The Roman columns of the church make the Arab cupolas look young, and put the Gothic choir altogether out of countenance. A bright-shawled peasant woman, who we fondly hoped might be a smuggler's wife, drew us delicious water from a Roman well in a Moorish patio, where a mediæval king of gentle memory used to drink his wine from cups wrought of the skulls of those enemies whom he had beheaded with his own sword. But not all this, and more, could efface our doubts of that Roman bridge, which, indeed, we found, on a belated perusal of our guide-books, had been erected by a Malaga architect in the last century. The street rabble of Ronda was the rudest and fiercest we encountered anywhere in Spain. Several times our guide wheeled suddenly to confront some gypsyish lad, creeping up behind us with stone all ready to throw, and when, at a glint of sunset through the stormy clouds, we tried to slip out unattended to the neighboring _alameda_, with its far-sweeping prospect of folded mountain ranges and its vertical view of gorge and rushing river, the children actually hounded us back to the hotel. Their leader was a scrofulous boy, with one cheek eaten away, who had been taught to press his face so closely upon strangers that, in fear of his open sore, they would hastily give money to keep him back. He was a merry scamp and got a world of sport out of his sickening business, laughing at the top of his voice to see himself "avoided like the sun." Although the tempest had lulled by evening, Ronda, still inhospitable, would not let us sleep. All up and down the window-grated street sounded, from midnight to morning, a tinkling of guitars. It was, forsooth, St. Joseph's Day, and every Don José, every Doña Josefa, every little Pepe, every pretty Pepita, must be saluted by a serenade. All Andalusians are musical, taking much pleasure, moreover, in one of their own bits of philosophy, "The poorest player has his uses, for he can at least drive the rats out of the house." Rats or no, we left Ronda by the morning train. Our carriage was crowded with several Spaniards and a "Jew-Gib," who, without saying "_oxte ni moxte_," assumed full charge of us and our belongings for the journey. This unceremonious but really helpful escort put every one of his fellow-travellers through a sharp catechism as to birthplace, business, destination, and the like. Our turn came first of all. "You are English?" "We speak English." "Ha!" He fell into our own vernacular. "Came about three thousand miles to Spain?" "Across the channel." He chuckled with prompt appreciation of the situation and mendaciously translated to the carriage at large, "The ladies are distinguished Londoners, on their way to visit relatives in Seville," whereat the Andalusians smiled sleepily upon us and asked permission to smoke. We consented cheerfully, as our Spanish sisters had taught us that we should. "I like it," one pallid señora had said on an earlier trip. "It makes me sick, yes, but men ought to be men." We were journeying toward the very palace of the sun, with gray ranks of olive trees standing guard on either hand. "And posted among them, like white doves, could be seen now and again a few mills where the bitter olive is wont to pour its juice." Orange plantations and hedges of the bluish aloe, fig trees, palms, and all manner of strange, tropical flowers gladdened our approach to Seville. And when, at last, we saw from afar the world-praised Giralda, the Moorish bell-tower of the cathedral, soaring pink into a purple sky, we felt as if we were really arrived in fairyland. Our friendly Gib put his tall figure between us and the howling press of swarthy porters and cab-drivers, scolded, expostulated, threatened, picked out his men, beat down their prices, called up a policeman to witness the bargain and take the number of our cab, raised his hat, and vanished into grateful memory. Six weeks in Seville! And six weeks in a Seville home, where evening after evening the gay youth of Andalusia laughed and sang, danced and rattled the castanets, and cast about our wondering Western souls strange witcheries from which we shall never more go free. It was all as Oriental as a dream. The Sultana of the South lifted her gleaming coronet of domes and pinnacles above such a kingdom of idle, delicious mirth as has permanently unfitted us for considering it important to do our duty. Our hereditary bits of Plymouth Rock were melted up in that fervent heat. Right or wrong? "Where there is music, there can be no harm." True or false? "In this world, my masters, There's neither truth nor lie, But all things take the color Of the glass before the eye." Only six weeks, and yet we shall ever go homesick for Seville, for her palm trees and orange gardens, her narrow streets like lanes of shadow, her tiled and statued patios, with caged birds singing answer to the ripple of the fountain, the musical midnight cry of her _serenos_, "her black and burning eyes like beacons in the dark," her sighing serenaders, "lyrical mosquitoes," outside the grated window or beneath the balcony, her fragrances of rose and jessamine, her poetic sense of values. A homeless Andalusian, dinnerless and in rags, strums on his guitar, a necessity which he would not dream of selling for such a mere luxury as bread, and is happy. There is always sun to sleep in. There are always piquant faces and gliding forms to gaze after. What more does a mortal want? Exquisite Seville! No wonder that her exiled sons still sing, after years of "comfortable living" in foreign cities:-- "When I am missing, hunt me down In Andalusia's purple light, Where all the beauties are so brown, And all the wits so bright." Yet the old Arabian enchantment casts a glamour which the Anglo-Saxon vision dimly recognizes as such and faintly strives against. To the clear survey all is not charm. Grace, mirth, and music, on the one hand, are offset by ignorance, suffering, and vice on the other. Many evil things were told us, and some ugly things we saw, but to look on Andalusia is to love her, even while realizing that to live with her would put that love to a very stringent test. The lordly Guadalquivír, for instance, so fair to see from the picture-making summit of the Giralda, as he lingers through his blooming Paradise, forgetful of the ocean, is not altogether goodly. "Ay, ay, the black and stinging flies he breeds To plague the decent body of mankind!" The Andalusian leisure was a perpetual delight to us. A typical Seville shop reaches far along the street front, with many open doors, and a counter running the full length. Here ladies sit in pairs and groups, never singly, to cheapen fans and mantillas, while the smiling salesmen, cigarette in hand, shrug and gesticulate and give back banter for banter as gayly as if it were all a holiday frolic. Scraps of the graceful bargaining would float to our ears. "Is the quality good?" "As good as God's blessing." Among the tempting wares of Seville are Albacete knives, with gorgeous handles of inlaid ebony, tortoise, or ivory. The peasant women of Andalusia so resent the charge of carrying these knives in their garters that the Seville gamin dodges offence by asking them in an unnecessarily loud voice if they carry garters in their knives. The irascible dames do not stand upon fine points of rhetoric, however, and when the small boy has delivered his shot, he does well to take to his heels. We once saw one of these sturdy women, while a line of soldiers, bristling with steel, was holding a street, seize a gallant son of Mars by the shoulder and swing him, amid the laughter of his comrades, out of her path as if he were a cabbage. Nobody knew how to stop her, and she trudged serenely on, her broad back to those helpless bayonets, down the forbidden way. The beggars of Seville are gentler than those of Ronda and Granada, but hardly less numerous. Mendicant figures are thick as Guadalquivír mosquitoes in my memory of Andalusia. Some of those pitiful children will haunt me till I die. There was a forlorn urchin, with filmy, frightful eyes, to be seen in all weathers crouching on one side of the road leading up to the Alhambra, so dull and dreary a little fellow that he hardly grasped the coppers when they were thrust into his weakly groping hands, and hardly stayed his monotonous formula of entreaty for his other monotonous formula of thanks. There was an idiot child in Seville--a mere lump of deformity--that would rush out upon the startled stranger with an inarticulate, fierce little yell, clutching at charity with a tiny, twisted claw. He seemed the very incarnation of childish woe and wrong. Almost every hand dived into pocket for him, and he was probably worth far more to his proprietors than his rival on the street, a crafty little girl, with the most lustrous eyes that painter ever dreamed. They were not blue nor gray, but a living light in which both those colors had been melted. The economists, who say so firmly that "nothing should ever be given to mendicant children," can hardly have had the experience of seeing Murillo's own cherubs, their wings hidden under the dirt, fluttering about the car windows at Andalusian stations. I have it still on my conscience that I occasionally gave away my comrade's share of our luncheon as well as my own. She was too young and too polite to reproach me, but too hungry to be comforted by the assurance that I reproached myself. Sometimes a foreign traveller, very sure of his Spanish, would attempt remonstrance with these small nuisances. I remember one kindly Teuton in particular. Commerce had claimed him for its own, but the predestined German professor shone out of his mild blue eyes. A ragamuffin had mounted the car steps to beg at the window, and Mein Herr delivered him such a lecture that the youngster clung to his perch, fascinated with astonishment at the novel doctrine, until the train was in alarmingly swift motion. [Illustration: THE ALHAMBRA. HALL OF JUSTICE] "This is a very bad habit of thine. I told thee so a month ago." "Me, sir?" "Thee, boy. When I passed over this road last, thou wert begging at the windows, to my shame if not to thine. Tut, tut! Go thy ways. Look for work, work, work." "Work, sir?" "Work, boy. And when thou hast found it, love it, and do it with a will. Learn to read and write. Wash thy face and change thy customs, and when thou art richer than I, then will I give thee a _peseta_." Mendicancy is bred of ignorance, and in the seventeen and a half millions that make up the population of Spain, more than twelve millions do not read nor write. Seville sight-seeing is no brief matter. You must climb the Giralda, walk in the parks, view the yellowed fragments of the ancient city wall, visit the tobacco factory, shop in _Las Sierpes_, buy pottery in Triana, see the gypsy dances in the cafés, attend the Thursday rag-fair, do reverence to the Columbus manuscripts in the _Biblioteca Columbina_, look up the haunts of Don Juan, Figaro, Pedro the Cruel, and explore the curious "House of Pilate," which, tradition says, was built by a pilgrim noble after the Jerusalem pattern. You must lose your heart to the Alcázar, the Alhambra of Seville, a storied palace embowered in fountain-freshened gardens of palm and magnolia, oranges and cypresses, rose and myrtle, with shadowy arcades leading to marble baths and arabesqued pavilions. You must follow Murillo from gallery to gallery, from church to church, above all, from the _Hospital de la Caridad_, where hang six of his greatest compositions, to the _Museo Provincial_, where over a score of the Master's sacred works, lovely Virgins, longing saints, deep-eyed Christ-Childs, rain their sweet influence. And first, last, and always, there is the cathedral. We had been stunned at Burgos, blind to all save the Moorish features of Cordova, almost untouched by the cold splendors of Granada, but to Seville, as later to Toledo, we surrendered utterly. Beauty, mystery, sublimity--these are Seville cathedral. Five centuries have gone to the rearing and enriching of those solemn aisles and awful choir. The colossal structure, second in size only to St. Peter's, is a majesty before which Luther himself might well have trembled. Within a Spanish cathedral one begins to understand the mighty hold of Roman Catholicism on Spain. "I love," says Alarcón, whose jest and earnest are as closely twined as fibres of the same heart, "the clouds of incense which rise to the cupola of the Catholic temple, amid the harmonies of the holy organ. (For this I am not a Protestant.)" And elsewhere, writing of his childhood, he speaks of receiving in the cathedral of Guadix all his first impressions of artistic beauty,--beauty of architecture, music, painting, processional splendors, tissue of gold and silver, cunning embroideries and jewel-work, his first sense, in short, of poetry. And all these impressions were inextricably blent with his first yearnings of holy aspiration, his first passion of mystical devotion. But not even Seville cathedral could win over our full sympathy. Too heavy were the faces of the priests who "sang the gori gori," too selfish that wigged and jointed doll, "Our Lady of Kings," with her sixty gorgeous mantles, a few of which would have clothed all the poor of Andalusia. Who shall draw the line between faith and superstition? But let not the tourist suppose he can escape his tyrant Baedeker even at the top of the Giralda. There are excursions that must be taken to points of interest outside the city. Most imperative of all is the trip to the ruined Roman amphitheatre of Italica, guarded by the mighty names of Scipio Africanus, Trajan, Hadrian, and Theodosius. Off we start, a dozen strong, in a great, open carriage, all the women-folk with fans and veils and with flowers in the hair. We rattle past the cathedral, over the bridge to Triana and out into the sweet-breathed country, passing many a picturesque group on the road,--these two peasants, for example, with their yellow-handled knives thrust into scarlet girdles, tossing dice under a fig tree. Our meditations among the crumbling blocks of that savage play-house would perhaps interest the reader less than our luncheon. Such Andalusian dainties as we swallowed,--cold soups like melted salads, home-made fig marmalade, cinnamon pastes of which the gypsies know the secret, and sugared chestnuts overflowed by a marvellous syrup wherein could be detected flavors of lemon peel, orange peel, and a medley of spices! In that scene of ancient bloodshed, of the lion's wrath and the martyr's anguish, we ate, drank, and were merry, but our banquet tasted of ghosts. VI PASSION WEEK IN SEVILLE "All that was gracious was bestowed by the Virgin, and she was the giver of all that human creatures could ask for. God frowned, while she smiled; God chastised, but she forgave; this last notion was by no means a strange one. It is accepted with almost absolute faith among the laboring classes of the rural parts of Spain."--GALDÓS: _Marianela_. Holy week throngs Seville to overflowing. The devout no longer scourge themselves in public, sprinkling the pavements with their blood, but Spaniards flock from all Andalusia, from Madrid, and even from the northern provinces to the sunny city on the storied Guadalquivír. Hotel charges run from twelve dollars a day up to incredible figures; a mere bed in a lodging house costs its three dollars, four dollars, or five dollars a night, and fortunate are those who enjoy the hospitality of a private home. The ceremonies opened Sunday morning with the procession of palms. We had been told by our cathedral guide the day before that this procession would take place at seven or half-past seven at the latest, and had asked the maid to call us at half-past six. As the chiming bells should have warned us, her knock was an hour tardy, but when, breakfastless and eager, we reached the cathedral a few minutes after eight, there was as yet no sign of a procession. Mass was being said in the Sagrario and in several chapels, and the morning light poured in through the rich-colored windows upon groups of kneeling figures before every shrine. The women wore black mantillas, for, although this most graceful of headdresses is losing credit on the fashionable promenades of Seville, and is almost never seen in open carriages, Holy Week demands it of all the faithful. We asked a white-robed young chorister when the procession would form. He answered with encouraging precision, "In twenty minutes." We roamed about for a half hour or more through those majestic spaces, beneath those soaring arches, aspiration wrought in stone, until by chance in that shifting multitude we came face to face with our guide of the day before. We asked how soon the procession would form. He said, "In twenty minutes," and we went home for coffee. When we returned the procession was streaming out of the cathedral into the street of the _Gran Capitán_. It was simple and all the more attractive for that simplicity. The colors of standards and vestments were mainly purple and gold, and the long, yellow fronds of palm, blown by the fresh breeze from the river, gleamed brighter than the sheen of candle or of mitre. Turning the corner, the procession, now facing the beautiful Giralda, entered by the ample Door of Pardon, still incrusted with its Arabic decorations, into the Court of Oranges, whose ripe fruit gave new touches of gold to the picture. Venders of palm were stationed in every sheltered corner, selling their wares, more than twice the height of a man, at fifteen cents the frond, while boys, darting about with armfuls of olive, were glad to take a cent the branch, and not have the best of their leafy store filched from them by sly old women, more intent, like the rest of us, on getting a blessing than deserving it. Through the multitude the glittering palms and purple robes swept on back into the cathedral, where the silent and remote archbishop, an image of gold in his splendid apparel, shed his benediction not only over the proud palms, but over every spray of "little gray leaves," like those of Gethsemane. These blessed palms, sprinkled with holy water and wafting strange fragrances of incense, would be carried home and kept in myriad balconies all the year through, to protect the house from "the all-dreaded thunder-stone." That Sunday afternoon at five o'clock we were leaning out expectantly from our host's best balcony. With the constant Spanish courtesy, he had betaken himself, with the children of the household, to a less commanding balcony below, and his eldest son had considerately withdrawn, accompanied by his fiancée, to a mere speck of a balcony above. This left a dozen of us, Spanish, English, and American, to enjoy as good a view as the city afforded of the processional tableaux. The oblong _Plaza de la Constitución_, the scene in days gone by of many a tournament, _auto de fe_, and bull-fight, is bounded on one side by the ornate Renaissance façade of the city hall, and on the other, in part, by the plain front of the court-house, before which criminals used to be done to death. Private dwellings, with their tiers of balconies, one of which had fallen to our happy lot, cross the wider end of the _plaza_, while the other opens into the brilliant street of _Las Sierpes_, too narrow for carriages, but boasting the gayest shop windows and merriest cafés of all the town. The _plaza_, always animated, fairly rippled with excitement this Palm Sunday afternoon. The grand stand, erected in front of the city hall, was filled, although many of the camp-chairs and benches placed in thick-set rows on the farther side of the line of march were not yet rented. Thursday and Friday are the days that draw the multitudes. The crowd was bright with uniforms, most conspicuous being the spruce white-edged, three-cornered hats and dark-blue, red-faced coats of the civil guard. Venders of peanuts, peanut candy, macaroons, caramels, and all manner of _dulces_ swung their baskets from one sweet-toothed Spaniard to another, while wisely the water-seller went in their wake, with the artistic yellow jar over his shoulder. One young pedler was doing a flourishing business in crabs, the customers receiving these delicacies in outstretched pocket handkerchiefs. Busy as our eyes were kept, we were able to lend ear to the explanations of our Spanish friends, who told us that the church dignitaries, after the procession of palms, took no official part in the shows of Passion Week, although many of the clergy belonged, as individuals, to the religious brotherhoods concerned. The church reserves its street displays for Corpus Christi. These brotherhoods, societies of ancient origin, and connected with some church or chapel, own dramatic properties often of great intrinsic value and considerable antiquity. For days before Holy Week one may see the members busy in the churches at the task of arranging groups of sacred figures, vested as richly as possible in garments of silk and velvet, with ornaments of jewels and gold, on platforms so heavy that twenty-five men, at the least, are needed to carry each. These litters are escorted through the principal streets and squares of the city by their respective societies, each brotherhood having its distinctive dress. It is customary for every _cofradia_ to present two pageants--the first in honor of Christ; the second, and more important, in honor of Mary, to whom chivalrous Spain has always rendered supreme homage; but sometimes the two tableaux are combined into one. After long watching and waiting we saw, far down _Las Sierpes_, the coming of the first procession. A line of police marched in advance to clear the road. Then appeared a loosely ordered company of fantastic figures in blue capes and blue peaked caps, absurdly high and reaching down to the shoulder, with holes cut for the eyes. From beneath the capes flowed white frocks, and the gloves and sandals were white. These "Nazarenes," who looked like a survival of the Carnival, conducted in silence a litter upon which was erected an image of the crucified Christ, with face uplifted as if in prayer. The pageant halted before the doors of the city hall to greet the Alcalde, who rose from his red velvet chair and bared his head. Men uncovered, and people stood all along the route, but acclamations were reserved for Our Lady of the Star. Her attendant troop was dressed like the preceding, with a star embroidered in white on the shoulder of the blue tunic. Her litter was ablaze with candles and laden with flowers; her outsweeping train was upborne by four little pages, and a brass band followed her with unceasing music. [Illustration: FILLING THE WATER-JARS] Sunset colors were in the sky before the procession of the second brotherhood arrived. At last, far down the _Sierpes_, the dusk was dotted with the gleam of many tapers, and above these, most impressive in the dim distance, glimmered a white figure high upon the cross. As the pageant drew near, waves of incense rolled out upon the air. The crash of trumpets and deep boom of drums announced that Our Lady of the Angels was advancing upon the same platform with her Son, for music in these Passion Week processions is always a sign of the presence of the Virgin. The brothers of this retinue wore black, save that their peaked caps were purple. As twilight gathered, a company of strange dark shapes bore past in solemn hush the Most Holy Christ of the Waters. The Saviour hung upon the cross, an angel receiving in a golden cup the blood from his wounded side. Then her great banner of white and blue heralded the approach of Our Lady of the Utter Grief, who passed with her accustomed pomp of lights and music, holding to her eyes a handkerchief said to be of the most exquisite lace. Night had fallen when, at eight o'clock, a maid left on vigil called us all from the dinner table to see the beautiful procession of white-robed figures conducting Our Father Jesus of the Silence. The figure of Christ, resplendent in gold and purple, stood before Herod, whose mail-clad soldiers guarded the prisoner. The Roman costumes were so well copied, and all the postures and groupings so startlingly natural, that _vivas_ went up all along the crowded square. As the banner of the Virgin saluted the Alcalde, her attendants let fall their long white trains, which swept out quite six yards behind, reaching from one brother to the next and yielding a wonderfully fine effect in the slow march. Our Lady of the Bitterness, toward whom leaned the tender look of St. John, was robed in superb brocade, so precious that her train, which stood stiffly out behind, was guarded by a soldier with drawn sword. This closed the ceremonies of Palm Sunday, and the throng, catching one from another the blithe, sweet Andalusian melodies, went singing softly through the darkness on their various ways. After Palm Sunday a secular quiet fell upon Seville, not broken until Wednesday. At five o'clock this March afternoon it was still so hot that few people were rash enough to move about without the shelter of parasols. Sevillian priests, sombre-robed as they were, sauntered cheerily across the _plaza_ under sunshades of the gayest hues, orange, green, azure, red, and usually all at once, but the shamefaced Englishmen flapped up broad umbrellas of an uncompromising black. There was a breezy flutter of fans on the grand stand, the water-sellers had to fill their jars again and again, and the multitude of smokers, puffing at their paper cigarettes to cool themselves, really brought on a premature twilight. It was nearly seven before a score of gendarmes, marching abreast, cleared the way for the procession. Then appeared, in the usual guise, some twenty feet apart, two files of those strange shapes, with high, peaked caps, whose visors descended to the breast, slowly advancing, with an interval of about six feet from man to man. Their caps and frocks were black, but the long capes glowed a vivid red. They carried the customary lighted tapers, so tall that, when rested on the ground, they reach to the shoulder. Midway between the files walked a cross-bearer, followed by a Nazarene, who uplifted the standard of St. Andrew's Cross in red on a black ground. Bearers of other insignia of the order preceded the great litter, on which, under a golden palm tree, was represented by life-size effigies the arrest of Christ among His Disciples, St. Andrew having the foremost place. The second pageant presented by this brotherhood was accompanied by bevies of white-robed boys swinging censers and chanting anthems. Then came, in effulgence of light, the Most Holy Virgin, escorted, as if she were the earthly Queen of Spain, by a detachment of the Civil Guard, whose white trimmings and gold belts gleamed in the candle rays. The remaining three _cofradias_ that had part in the Wednesday ceremonies exhibited but one pageant each. A troop in black and gold conducted a Calvary, with Mary Mother and Mary Magdalene both kneeling at the foot of the cross, robed in the richest velvet. Figures in white, with stripes of red, came after, with a yet more costly Calvary. The well-carved crucifix rose from a gilded mound, and Our Mother of Healing wore a gold crown of exceeding price. But the third Calvary, all wrought in black and gold, the colors of the brotherhood, which were repeated in standard and costume, won the plaudits of the evening. Here Longinus, the Roman centurion, mounted on a spirited horse, was in the act of piercing with his lance the Saviour's side. Amid _vivas_ and _bravos_ this Passion picture passed, like its predecessors, in clouds of incense and peals of solemn music. On Thursday the wearing of black was almost universal. We rummaged our shawl straps for some poor equivalent of the Spanish black silks and black mantillas. The Civil Guard was more superb than ever in full-dress uniform, with red vests and white trousers. No sound of wheels was suffered within the city limits, and late arrivals had to commit their luggage to a porter and follow him on foot. At three o'clock, in the Sagrario of the cathedral, the archbishop washed the feet of thirteen old paupers, who sat in two confronting rows, looking neat as wax and happy as honey, each dressed in a brand-new suit, with a long-fringed damask towel over his shoulder. Their old blood had been warmed by the archbishop's own wine, for they had just come from luncheon in the ecclesiastical palace, where they had been served by the highest dignitaries of the church and the proudest nobles of the city. The function of foot washing was not taken too seriously. The fat canons smiled good-humoredly on their archbishop, as his group of attendants lowered him to his knees and lifted him again before every old man in turn, and the acolytes nudged one another with boyish mirth over the rheumatic, embarrassed efforts of the beneficiaries to put on their stockings. A Franciscan friar mounted the pulpit, however, and turned the congregation, thickly sprinkled with English visitors, serious enough by a succinct and fiery sermon, saying, in a nutshell, that love is the glory of the religious life, but is the fruit only of Catholicism, for nowhere, though one searches the world over, can there be found a work of mercy--hospital, asylum, endowed school, charity of any sort or kind--due to Protestantism. And the old paupers, glancing down at their new suits and feeling the glow of their banquet, were glad to the tips of their purified toes that their lots had been cast in Catholic Spain. By six o'clock the squares and streets along the processional route were thronged again, although our Spanish friends assured us that the numbers were less than usual. The war feeling kept the Americans and, to some extent, the English away, while many of the Spanish of the provinces, who were accustomed to take their annual outing in Seville during the _Semana Santa_, were held at home this year by poverty or mourning. The first two pageants of the afternoon, those of the bull-fighters and the cigarette-makers, were awaited with especial eagerness. For these Seville brotherhoods, more than thirty in all, still maintain something of the mediæval structure of the guilds. Just as in England and France, from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, or thereabouts, organized companies of craftsmen used to present in Passion Week successive scenes from the life of Christ, these Spanish _cofradias_ to-day maintain such general lines of division in performing a similar function. Yet any Catholic Sevillian may, if he chooses, secure admission to any of these societies, irrespective of his occupation. The young _caballero_ who chanced to be our prime source of information this Thursday afternoon was himself of a prominent family, a protégé of the archbishop, and a student of law, yet he belonged to the brotherhood of Fruit Venders, although his devotion seemed a little languid, and he had excused himself on this occasion from the long march in the breathless Nazarene garb. Not all the brothers feel bound to perform this penitential service every Passion Week, and, indeed, not all the brotherhoods. Several of the most elaborate pageants were missing from the ranks this year. Such omissions are not as disastrous to the processional effect as they would have been in England, for example, some six centuries ago. Then the gilded and tapestried platforms, set on wheels, which the processions conducted through the streets, were really stages, and at the halting places the best actors of each guild played upon its particular platform an appointed scene from the sacred drama. The sequence of events was duly observed, and the spectator, standing in market-place or at street corner, while one theatre after another rolled by him, saw acted out with much finery of wardrobe and ingenuity of machinery, with tragic dialogue and declamation, relieved by comic interludes, all the Bible story, from the revolt of Lucifer to the Day of Judgment. But modern Spain, abandoning the acting and recitation and substituting puppets for living men, has let slip the dramatic sequence, so that a few pageants less means only so much abatement in the general splendor of the spectacle. The bull-fighters of Andalusia are eminently religious and are said, likewise, to be remarkable for their domestic virtues. All their manly fury is launched against the bull, and they have only gentleness left for wives and children. I have heard no better argument for the bull ring. At all events, these _toreros_, marching soberly in black, with yellow belts, escorted with well-ordered solemnity an image of the crucified Christ, followed by a queenly effigy of Our Lady of Refuge, erect behind terraced ranks of candles on a flower-strewn litter, under a costly canopy of black velvet embroidered with gold. The cigarette-makers came after with their two pageants, Christ fastened to the pillar, and Our Lady of Victory. It was, as usual, the second upon which the main expense had been lavished. A great company of acolytes, richly clad and swinging censers of pure silver, went in advance of the Virgin, and three bands of music followed her with continuous acclaim, while a regiment of soldiers attended as a guard of honor. Immediately in front of the _paso_ went, surrounded by officers and aides, General Ochando, his head uncovered and his breast glittering with decorations, for the young king of Spain is a member of this _cofradia_, and had sent the distinguished military governor of the Provinces, who has a palace in Seville, to represent him. Especial enthusiasm was called out by this image of Mary, for the cigarette-makers had just presented her with a new mantle at a cost of nine thousand dollars. The brothers were willingly aided by the seven thousand women who work in the immense tobacco factory, the average contribution of each donor being two _centimos_ (two-fifths of a cent) a week during the preceding year. No wonder that the Virgin seemed to stand proudly upon her silvered pedestal, her gorgeous new mantle streaming out until it almost touched the head of a white-vested girl who walked barefoot close behind the litter, so fulfilling a vow made in extremity of illness. Black and white were the banners and costumes of the third procession, very effective through the deepening dusk. Their leading pageant was a Gethsemane, famous for the beauty of the carving. Christ is represented in prayer before an angel, who bears in one hand the cross and in the other the cup of bitterness, while Peter, James, and John are sleeping near their Master. These Passion groups are, with a few exceptions of still earlier date, works of the seventeenth century, the glorious period of Spanish art, the day of Murillo and Velázquez. The most and best are from the hand of the Sevillian Montañés, of chief repute in the Spanish school of polychrome sculpture, but this Gethsemane was carved by his imitator, Roldan, whose daughter, La Roldana, is accredited with the figure of the angel and with the reliefs that adorn the pedestal. Another Virgin, who, like all the rest, seemed a scintillation of gold and jewels, swept by, and a new troop of Nazarenes, this time in purple and white, passed with two august pageants,--the Descent from the Cross and the Fifth Anguish of Mary. Then came two files of ash-colored figures, who marshalled, between their rows of starry tapers, each taper bending toward its opposite, a vivid presentation of the Crowning with Thorns; and, after this, their Mary of the Valley, noted for the gracious sweetness of her countenance. This image is held to be one of Montañés's masterpieces in wood-carving. Five processions had now passed, with their two pageants each, and the hour was late, but we could not leave the balcony for anything so commonplace as dinner. Far down the street of _Las Sierpes_ waved a river of lights, announcing the advent of the most ancient of all the Sevillian brotherhoods, Jesus of the Passion. The crowded _plaza_ rose in reverence as the Crucifixion _paso_ was borne by, and Our Lady of Mercy, too magnificent for her name, was greeted with rapturous outcries. [Illustration: OFF FOR THE WAR] Just how and when and where something in the way of food was taken, I hardly know, but as this, the last of the Thursday evening processions, passed in music out of the _plaza_, a few of us made speed by a deserted side street to the cathedral. We were too late for the _Miserere_, which was just closing in that surprising hubbub, the stamping of feet and beating of canes and chairs against the floor, by which Spanish piety is wont to "punish Judas." But we took our station near by the entrance to the Royal Chapel, wherein had been erected the grand Holy Week monument, in white and gold, shaped like a temple, and shining with innumerable silver lamps and taper lights. Within this monument the Host, commonly spoken of in Spain as _Su Majestad_, had been solemnly placed the night before, much as the mediæval church used to lay the crucifix, with requiems, under the High Altar on Good Friday, and joyously bring it forth again Easter morning. But Spanish Catholicism is strangely indifferent to dates, burying the Host on Wednesday and celebrating the Resurrection Saturday. All day long the Royal Chapel had been filled with relays upon relays of kneeling worshippers, and the hush there had been so profound that the hum of the tourist-haunted nave and the tumult of the streets seemed faint and foreign to the hearing, like sounds a universe away. Before this chapel entrance all the pageants, as they were borne in silence through the cathedral, paused and did homage to the Host. Having outstripped the procession, we had arrived in season to witness three of these salutations. The Nazarenes, in passing, fell upon their knees in the light of the great, gleaming monument, and each of the heavy platforms was slowly swung about so that it faced this symbol of Christ's sepulchre. Yet there was something besides devotion in the cathedral. As the crowd pressed close, we felt, more than once, a fumbling at our pockets, and the little artist lost her purse. The rest of us comforted her by saying over and over that she ought to have known better than to bring it, and by severally relating how cautious we had been on our own accounts. It was hard upon eleven when we returned to the house, but the streets were all alive with people. I went to the balcony at midnight, and again at the stroke of one, and both times looked down upon a _plaza_ crossed and recrossed in all directions by talkative, eager groups. Many of these restless promenaders had been able to get no lodgings, and were walking to keep warm. The pressure upon the hotels was so great that one desperate stranger this Thursday night paid twenty dollars for a cot from ten o'clock till two, and private hospitality was taxed to a degree that nothing but Spanish courtesy and good-nature could ever have endured. In the house which harbored us, for instance, we were all fitted in as compactly as the pieces of a puzzle, when the unexpected friends began to arrive. On Wednesday there appeared from the far north a man and wife, acquaintances of ten years back. Our host and hostess greeted this surprise party with Andalusian sunshine in their faces, and yielded up their own room. Thursday morning there walked gayly in one of the son's university classmates from Madrid. Don Pepe embraced him like a brother, and surrendered the sofa, which was all he had left to give. And this Thursday midnight, as a crowning touch, three more chums of college days came clattering at the bell. Their welcome was as cordial as if the household were pining for society. The tired maids, laughing gleefully over the predicament, contributed their own mattresses and pillows, and made up beds on the study floor, where Don Pepe camped out with his comrades, to rise with a headache that lasted for days after. By two o'clock I had taken my station on the balcony for an all-night vigil. The most of the family bore me company for the cogent reason that they had nowhere to sleep, but the other guests of the house held out for only an hour or two, and then went blinking to their repose. My memory of the night is strangely divided between the dreamlike, unearthly pomps and splendors streaming through the square below and the kindly, cheery people who came and went about me. The señora, still fresh and charming, although she has wept the deaths of fourteen out of her nineteen children, was merrily relating, with weary head against her husband's shoulder, her almost insuperable difficulties in the way of furnishing her table. The milkman roundly declared that if she wanted a double quantity of the precious fluid (and goat's milk at that), she must make it up with water. There was no meat to be had in the Catholic city during these holy days, and even her baker had forsaken his oven and gone off to see the sights. And the black-bearded señor, who, like his wife, had not been in bed for forty odd hours, laughed at her and comforted her, puffed harder than ever at his cigarette, and roguishly quoted the saying, "He whom God loves has a house in Seville." By two o'clock the seats on the grand stand were filling fast, the _plaza_ hummed with excitement, the balconies resounded with song and laughter, and the strong electric lights in front of the city hall cast a hard, white brilliance over all the scene. The frying of _calientes_, an Andalusian version of twisted doughnuts, was in savory progress here and there on the outskirts of the throng, and our ever thoughtful hostess did not fail to keep her balcony well supplied with these crisp dainties. The twinkling of taper lights, so warm and yellow under those pallid globes of electric glare, appeared while people were still hurrying to their places; but hundreds upon hundreds of black and gold figures had paced by before the first of their _pasos_ came into view. For these processions of the dawn, _de madrugada_, call out great numbers of the devout, who would thus keep the last watch with their Lord. The clocks struck three as the leading pageant, a very ancient image of Christ, bearing a silver-mounted cross of tortoise-shell, halted before the Alcalde. A white banner wrought with gold heralded the Virgin, who rose, in glistening attire, from a golden lake of lights. The wealthy _cofradia_ of San Lorenzo followed in their costly habits of black velvet. They, too, conducted a pageant of Christ bearing His cross, one of the most beautiful groups of Montañés, the pedestal adorned with angels in relief. To the Christ, falling on the Via Dolorosa, the brotherhood, with the usual disregard of historic propriety, had given a royal mantle of ermine, embroidered with gold and pearls. A large company of black-clad women, carrying candles, walked behind the _paso_, on their penitential march of some eight hours. Many of them were ladies delicately bred, whose diamonds sparkled on the breast of the approaching Mary. For the Sevillian señoras are accustomed to lend their most valuable gems to their favorite Virgins for the _Semana Santa_, and San Lorenzo's Lady of Grief is said to have worn this night the worth of millions. She passed amid a great attendant throng, in such clouds of incense that the eye could barely catch the shimmer of her silver pedestal, the gleam of the golden broideries that almost hid the velvet of her mantle, and the flashes and jets of light that shot from the incredible treasure of jewels that she wore. The third troop of Nazarenes, robed in white and violet, bore for banner a white cross upon a violet ground. Their Christ-pageant pictured Pilate in his judgment seat in the act of condemning the Son of God to death. Jesus, guarded by armed soldiers, calmly confronts the troubled judge, at whose knee wait two little pages with a basin of water and towels. And now came one of the most gorgeous features of the Holy Week processions--a legion of Roman soldiers, attired as never Roman soldiers were, in gold greaves and crimson tunics, with towering snow-white plumes. But a splendid show they made as, marching to drum and fife, they filed down _Las Sierpes_ and stretched "in never ending line" across the _plaza_. Our most Holy Mary of Hope, who followed, wearing a fair white tunic and a gold-embroidered mantle of green, the color of the hopeful season, drowned the memory of that stern military music in a silver concert of flutes. After this sumptuous display, the fourth band of Nazarenes, gliding through the _plaza_ between night and day in their garb of black and white, could arouse but little enthusiasm, although their Crucifixion was one of the most artistic, and their Lady of the Presentation had her poorest garment of fine satin. A pearly lustre was stealing through the sky, and the chill in the air was thinning the rows of spectators on the grand stand, when mysterious, dim-white shapes, like ghosts, bore by in utter silence a pageant of Christ fainting beneath the burden of the cross. But soon the clamor of drums and fifes ushered in another long array of Roman soldiers, a rainbow host in red and pink and blue, crimson plumes alternating with white, and golden shields with silver. The electric lights, globed high overhead, took one look at this fantastic cavalcade and went out with a gasp. It was now clear day. Canaries began to sing in their cages, and parrots to scream for chocolate. Sleepy-eyed servant-maids appeared on the balconies, and market women, leading green-laden donkeys, peered forth from the side streets into the square. The morning light made havoc with the glamour of the pageants. Something frank and practical in the sunshine stripped those candle-lighted litters of their dignity. Busy people dodged through the procession lines, and one Nazarene after another might be seen slipping out of the ranks and hurrying awkwardly, in his cumbersome dress, with the half-burned taper under his arm, to the refuge of his own mosquito-netting and orange tree. The tired crowd grew critical and irreverent, and openly railed upon the Virgin of this ghostly _cofradia_ because her velvet mantle was comparatively plain. "Bah! how poor it is! Are we to sit here all the night for such stingy shows as that?" But the last brotherhood in the _madrugada_ processions had, with their white frocks and blue caps and capes, suited themselves to the colors of the day. The stumbling children, blind with sleep, whom fathers were already leading off the square, turned back for a drowsy gaze at the resplendent tunic of the Christ in the Via Dolorosa _paso_, a tunic claimed to be the richest of all the garments worn by the effigies of Jesus. So lovely was this trooping company in their tints of sky and cloud, bearing a great blue banner and a shining ivory cross, that they brought order and decorum with them. The division that escorted the Virgin marched on with especial steadiness, not a peaked cap drooping, nor a boyish acolyte faltering under the weight of his tall gilded censer. This most Holy Mary of Anguish, whose litter and canopy were all of white and gold, swept by in triumphal peals of music while the clocks were striking six. In some mental confusion, I said good night to the people I left on the balcony, and good morning to the people I met on the stairs, and ate my breakfast before I went to bed. It seemed as if human nature could bear no more; the eyes ached with seeing, and phantasmal processions went sweeping through our dreams; yet Friday afternoon at five o'clock found our balcony, like all the rest, full to overflowing. Some twenty thousand people were massed in the _plaza_, and it was estimated that over one hundred thousand waited along the line of march. Our Spanish entertainers, still unrefreshed by any chance for sleep, were as gayly and punctiliously attentive to their guests as ever, from our gallant host, who presented the ladies with fragrant bouquets of roses and orange blossoms, to the little pet of the household, who at the most engrossing moments in the ceremonial would slip away from her privileged stand on a footstool against the railing to summon any member of the party who might be missing the spectacle. The Spanish colors floated out from city hall and court-house, but the great concourse below was all in hues of mourning, the black mantillas often falling over dresses of plain purple. The señoritas in the balconies had substituted knots of black ribbon for the customary flowers in the hair. Jet trimmings abounded, and the waving fans were black. The coming procession, we were assured on every hand, would be the most solemn of all and the most sumptuous. The habits of the Nazarenes would be of satin, silk, and velvet. The images of Christ and the Virgin would be attired with all possible magnificence of damask and ermine, gold and jewels. Brotherhood would vie with brotherhood in splendor, and one prodigy of luxury would succeed another. The leading company, whose far-trailing robes carpeted the street with fine black velvet, stood for the olive industry. This _cofradia_ had been poor and unimportant for generations, but in recent years a devoted brother, a manufacturer of olive packing-barrels, had poured forth his accumulated fortune upon the society, with the result that their _pasos_ are now second in ostentation and expense to none. The donor, long since too feeble to bear his taper in the line, lives in humble obscurity, but his old heart swells with joy this great day of the year when he sees, following the elaborate carving of the Crucifixion, the dazzling chariot of Our Lady of Solitude. Upon her mantle, which enjoys the proud distinction of being the very costliest of all, he has lavished twenty thousand dollars. Longer by a yard than any of the others, it was yet unable to find place for all the gold which the zealous Nazarene had given for it, and the residue was bestowed about the pedestal and canopy. The _paso_ is so heavy with gold that it requires a double force of men to carry it; but each of these hidden bearers, getting air as best he can through a silver breathing-tube, is sure of a dollar for his recompense as well as two glasses of good wine. [Illustration: GRANADA. LOOKING TOWARD THE DARRO] All the adornment of the litter is of pure gold, and such wealth of jewels glinted from the Virgin's glorious raiment that a triple force of Civil Guards was detailed for her protection. Her ardent worshipper has denied her nothing. The very columns that uphold her canopy are exquisite in carving, and it is his yearly pride to see that her clouds of incense are the thickest, and her train of musicians the most extended, in all that glittering line. The second _cofradia_ exhibited but a single pageant, relying for effect upon the beauty of the sculpture. The Mater Dolorosa was bowed in her desolation at the foot of the Holy Rood, from which hung only the white folds of the winding-sheet. But the third brotherhood had bethought themselves to introduce, between their austere Crucifixion and their shining image of Mary, another preposterous parade of Roman soldiers--flower-colored, plume-tossing, butterfly creatures far too bright, if not too good, "for human nature's daily food." One whiff from Cæsar's iron breast would have blown them away like soap bubbles. The silversmiths trooped by in graver, more majestic state, their purple velvet habits girded with gold cords. Upon a gilded pedestal, wrought with high relief, was seen their Christ, bowed beneath a precious cross of tortoise-shell and silver. Our Lady of Expectation gleamed with gold and gems, and this haughty brotherhood received a full meed of applause. Black from top to toe was the fifth procession. Their Jesus of the Via Dolorosa bent beneath a sombre cross of ebony embossed with gold, but the blithe young voices of the countless choir-boys, singing like birds before the dawn, ushered in a sun-bright image of Mary. But something was amiss with the processional order. Where were the stately ranks of Montserrat? Alas and alas! Scarcely had this aristocratic _cofradia_ gone a hundred paces from their chapel when, in the narrow street of Murillo, a leaning candle touched the lace skirt of the Virgin and instantly all the front of the litter was in flames. It was hardly a matter of minutes. From the balconies above were dashed down pailfuls and pitcherfuls of water. The Nazarenes, wrenching away the blue velvet mantle wondrously embroidered in gold with castles, lions, and _fleurs de lis_, succeeded in rescuing a ragged half of it, and the Civil Guards, drawing their swords and forming a circle about the smoking litter, saved the jewels from robbery. Perhaps the other _paso_, too, Christ of the Conversion of the Penitent Thief, had some protecting influence. But in all this ado about her finery, the poor Virgin's face, beloved for its winsome look, was completely burned away. In sorry plight Our Lady of Montserrat was hurried back to her chapel, and the swift rumor of the disaster sent a superstitious trouble through the city. But more and more solemnly the taper-bearing troops of Nazarenes poured by with the culminating pictures of the Passion. These last three _cofradias_ presented each a single pageant. An escort in dark purple conducted an impressive Descent from the Cross. The Virgin, her crowned head bowed in anguish, clasps the drooping body of Christ to her heart, while John and Mary Magdalene look on in hopeless sorrow. Figures in black and white came after, with their sixteenth-century carving, Christ of the Dying Breath, beneath the cross standing Our Lady of Tears. And last of all, in slow, sad movement, their white trains streaming like a line of light along the stone-paved way, passed the second brotherhood of San Lorenzo, bearing the Most Blessed Virgin in her Solitude. The gold of her mantle seemed one with the gold of the candle rays, and, for many a silent watcher, those gliding, gleaming, spiritlike forms will move forever down a shining path in memory. So closed the Holy Week processions. "How sorry I am," said our host, with the Andalusian twinkle in his eye. "It is almost eleven o'clock. Ladies and gentlemen, will you please walk out to dinner?" On Saturday morning we went early to the cathedral for the closing rite. The Sagrario was thronged. Some of the señoras had brought low folding chairs with them, others sat upon the floor, but most of that innumerable congregation knelt or stood. We were all facing the great purple veil which concealed the high altar, with Roldan's retablo of the Descent from the Cross. There was an hour or more of expectation, during which rosaries slipped through the fingers of many a veiled nun, and the soft murmur of prayer came from strong men as well as from pale-faced women. Suddenly, while a shock of thunder crashed from the organ, hidden ministrants sharply drew on hidden cords, the purple curtain parted in the midst, and the two folds rolled asunder, revealing the high altar, with its carving of the accomplished Passion. The organ poured forth jubilees of victory, all the bells of the cathedral pealed together, _Gloria in Excelsis_ soared in choral chant, and amid the awe-stricken multitudes fallen to their knees, _Su Majestad_ was borne in priestly procession from the tomb in the Royal Chapel to the candles and incense which awaited at the high altar that triumphal coming. Easter Sunday was celebrated by a bull-fight. VII TRACES OF THE INQUISITION "I live a life more great than I. The life I hope is life so high, I die because I cannot die." --_Santa Teresa de Jesús._ All Spaniards venerate the name of _Isabel la Católica_, nor is the impressionable De Amicis the only foreigner who has trembled and wept at Granada before the enshrined memorials, jewel box, mirror, missal, and crown, of her royal womanhood. She is a precious figure in Spain's sunset revery--a saint beneath a conquering standard, a silken lady in a soldier's tent. Yet this peerless queen, merciful, magnanimous, devout, "the shield of the innocent," caring supremely for the glory of God and the good of her country, gave consent, albeit reluctant, to the establishment of the Inquisition, Christianity's chief scandal and Spain's most fatal blight. So ironic were the stars of Isabel. The Inquisition, it is true, originated in Italy early in the thirteenth century and followed the flight of some of the Albigenses into Aragon, but its work in Spain had been comparatively slight and merciful until the "Catholic Kings," in the interests of religious reform, for the purification of the national faith, let its horrors loose. Wherever one moves in Spain the sickening breath of the _auto de fe_ lingers in the air. In such a square, we read, was once a mighty bonfire of Jews; beneath our feet, we are told, is a mass of human bones and cinders. This sunshiny Seville, with her parks and patios, her palms and orange groves, a city seemingly fashioned only for love and song, had her army of nearly twoscore thousand martyrs, who, dressed in the hateful _San Benitos_, yellow coats painted with flames and devils, were burned to death here in our gay _Plaza de la Constitución_, then known as the _Plaza de San Francisco_, and in the _Quemadero_ beyond the walls. As one mingles with some outdoor throng, all intent on pageant, dance, or other spectacle, one shudders to remember that just such dark, eager faces were ringed about the agonies of those heroic victims. For there are two sides to the Spanish Inquisition. If Spaniards were the inquisitors, Spaniards, too, were the dauntless sufferers. The sombre gaze of the torturer was met, as steel meets iron, by the unflinching eye of the tortured. But "the unimaginable touch of Time" transforms all tragedy to beauty, and red poppies, blowing on the grassy plain of the _Quemadero_, translate into poetry to-day that tale of blazing fagots. Sometimes the victims were of foreign blood. Hakluyt has preserved the simple narratives of two English sailors, who were brought by their Spanish captors from the Indies as a sacrifice to the Holy House of Seville. One, a happy-go-lucky fellow, Miles Phillips, who had been too well acquainted in Mexico with the dungeons of the Inquisition, slipped over the ship's side at San Lúcar, made his way to shore, and boldly went to Seville, where he lived a hidden life as a silk-weaver, until he found his chance to steal away and board a Devon merchantman. The other, Job Hortop, added to his two years of Mexican imprisonment two more years in Seville. Then "they brought us out in procession, every one of us having a candle in his hand, and the coat with S. Andrew's cross on our backs; they brought us up on an high scaffold, that was set up in the place of S. Francis, which is in the chief street of Seville; there they set us down upon benches, every one in his degree, and against us on another scaffold sate all the Judges and the Clergy on their benches. The people wondered, and gazed on us, some pitying our case, others said, burn those heretics. When we had sat there two hours, we had a sermon made to us, after which one called Bresinia, secretary to the Inquisition, went up into the pulpit with the process, and called Robert Barret, ship-master, and John Gilbert, whom two Familiars of the Inquisition brought from the scaffold before the Judges, where the secretary read the sentence, which was that they should be burnt, and so they returned to the scaffold, and were burnt. "Then I, Job Hortop, and John Bone, were called, and brought to the place, as before, when we heard our sentence, which was, that we should go to the Galleys, and there to row at the oar's end ten years, and then to be brought back to the Inquisition House, to have the coat with S. Andrew's cross put on our backs, and from thence to go to the everlasting prison remediless. "I with the rest were sent to the Galleys, where we were chained four and four together.... Hunger, thirst, cold, and stripes we lacked none, till our several times expired, and after the time of twelve years, for I served two years above my sentence, I was sent back to the Inquisition House in Seville, and there having put on the coat with S. Andrew's cross, I was sent to the everlasting prison remediless, where I wore the coat four years, and then upon great suit I had it taken off for fifty duckets, which Hernando de Soria, treasurer of the king's mint, lent me, whom I was to serve for it as a drudge seven years." But this victim, too, escaped in a fly-boat at last, and on a certain Christmas Eve, about the time when people in London were beginning to like the comedies of a certain poor player, one Will Shakespeare, did Job Hortop, Powder-maker and Gunner, walk quietly, after twenty-three years of martyrdom, into the village of Redcliffe, where he had been a ruddy English boy with no dream of the day when he should be "prest forth" by Sir John Hawkins and compelled, sore against his will, to embark for the West Indian adventure. Religious liberty now exists under the laws of Spain, although the administration of those laws leaves much to be desired. In three old conventual churches of Seville gather her three Protestant congregations. Beneath the pavements of two of these heretic strongholds old inquisitors sleep what uneasy sleep they may, while one of the Protestant pastors, formerly a Catholic priest, has quietly collected and stored in his church-study numerous mementos of the Holy Office. Here may be seen two of those rare copies of the 1602 revision of the Spanish Bible, by Cipriano de Valera, whom the Inquisition could burn only in effigy, since the translator, who had printed his book in Amsterdam, did not return to accompany the Familiars to the _Quemadero_. Here are old books with horrible woodcuts of the torments, and time-stained manuscripts, several bearing the seal and signatures of the "Catholic Kings," these last so ill written that it is hard to tell the name of Ferdinand from that of Isabella. Among these are royal commissions, or licenses, granted to individual inquisitors, records of _autos de fe_, and wills of rich inquisitors, the sources of whose wealth would hardly court a strict examination. Here, too, is the standard of the Holy Office, the very banner borne through Seville in those grim processions. Its white silk is saffroned now, but the strange seal of the Inquisition, a bleeding Christ upon the cross, is clearly blazoned in the centre, while the four corners show the seal of San Domingo. The Inquisition prison, the dreaded Holy House of Seville, is used as a factory at present, and heresy no longer secures admission there; but I looked up at its grated windows, and then, with a secret shiver, down on the ground, where the Spanish pastor of antiquarian tastes was marking out with his cane the directions of the far-branching subterranean cells. We slipped into an outer court of the _fabrica_, where the two gentlemen, effectively aided by a couple of sturdy lads, pried up and flung back a sullen door in the pavement and invited me to grope my darkling way down some twenty crumbling steps, overgrown with a treacherous green mould. There was no refusing, in face of the cloud of witnesses whose groans these stones had heard, and I took a heart-breaking plunge into the honeycomb of chill, foul-smelling, horror-haunted dungeons, whose roofs let fall a constant drip of water and from whose black recesses I was the unwilling means of liberating a choice variety of insects. "But even yet one cannot call one's self a Protestant in Spain, you know," said an English diplomat to us in another city of Andalusia. "It's not socially respectable. Spanish Protestants are the very scum of the earth--illiterate, dirty, boorish. You couldn't associate with them for a minute." "But that Spanish pastor who called on us yesterday was entirely a gentleman," we remonstrated. "He has studied for seven years in Switzerland and Scotland, seems more open-minded and intelligent than most Spaniards we have met, and was so courteous and graceful in his bearing--not to mention the whiteness of his linen--and so entertaining in his talk, that the Spanish ladies in the room chorussed his praises, after he had bowed himself out, and declared him most delightful company." The diplomat twirled his mustache and smiled, as only diplomats can. "And you owned up that he was a Protestant? And their faces darkened as if a storm-cloud had blown over from the Sierras?" "Precisely so," we admitted, "and after that the best they could say for him was that they never would have thought it." The diplomat claimed that he had made his point, while we protested that the incident only went to show how unreasonable was the prejudice of whose existence throughout Spain there can be no manner of doubt. Perez Galdós, for instance, the most popular novelist of the day, stated to an American friend, who repeated it to us, that he frankly could not afford to introduce the figure of a Protestant into one of his stories. "It would not only kill that book," he said, "but it would hurt the sale of everything I have in the market and embarrass all my future undertakings. I should simply be risking the loss of my reading public." And yet Señor Galdós is the author of "Doña Perfecta," that artistic study of the conflict between new ideas and old in Spain. In this significant novel, a civil engineer, a man of thirty, whose scientific education in the large cities of Seville and Madrid has been supplemented by study in Germany and England, comes to one of those mediæval towns, or corpses of towns, that rise so spectre-like from the ash-colored plains of Old Castile. Crumbling walls and blackened towers jealously guard the life of ages since, that feudal life of high and low, pride of station, pride of animal prowess, pride of holiness, pride of idleness, pride of ignorance; the life of superstition, of family exclusiveness resulting in intermarriage to the point of insanity; of that fierce local bigotry, peculiarly Spanish, which dreads and hates all foreign intrusion. The streets, devoid of business activity, swarm with vigorous mendicants, who have no better shift, when times grow hard, than to deform the children who are born to them like kittens in their mud-walled hovels. The casino, where half the town smokes half its time away, hums with malicious gossip. The university languidly pursues the studies of Latin, scholastic divinity, Church history, and all that savors of the past. Under the gray vault of the cathedral women kneel before the image of the Christ Child, bringing Him a new pair of embroidered pantalets and entreating of His rosy simplicity what they would not dare ask from the "Ecce Homo"; or they kiss the satin-slippered feet of the miracle-working Virgin and vow her, if their prayer is granted, seven bright new swords of the finest Toledo workmanship to pierce her patient heart. The man of scientific training, fresh from the modern world, is brought into sharp collision with this dim old town. High principles and essential, spiritual Christianity count him for nothing; he is speedily denounced as no better than "a murderer, an atheist, or a Protestant," and his strong young life is actually beaten out by that blind, terrible force of Spanish fanaticism. So far the novelist can go; such a hero he dares paint; but not a Protestant. The notions of Protestantism prevalent among the people, not the peasants only, but the gentry, are little short of ludicrous. A black-eyed lady of Cadiz was amazed at our assertion that Protestants prayed. A Madrid señorita asked us, in friendly confidence, if it were true that Protestants "denied Christ and spat on the Virgin." The popular identification of Protestantism with all that is impious and criminal we encountered as early as our second afternoon in Spain. We were visiting, in the picturesque fishing-hamlet of Pasajes, a gaunt Basque church, where the old dame who served as caretaker showed us a waxen image of a sleeping girl, said, not without probability, to have been brought from Rome. Beneath the figure is a burial stone, whose inscription would locate it in the Catacombs. When friends of ours were at Pasajes some three years before, the grandam's story ran that the image was the likeness of a Christian martyr, slain by her pagan father at Rome in the time of the Imperial persecutions; but the tale glibly recited to us was this: "_Ay de mi!_ The poor young lady! Her father was a Protestant, and, of course, hated religion, and when his daughter, so beautiful, was on her way to her first communion, he hid behind a corner, with an axe, and of a sudden jumped out on her and struck her dead." It is such prejudice that goes far toward justifying the maintenance by foreign societies of Protestant churches in Spain. They cannot stand alone, in face of all this hostility, and yet the country has need of them. No European nation can nowadays be shut in to any single channel of religious life, and doubtless, apart from all questions of creed, there are Spanish temperaments to which the simpler _culto_ is more natural than the elaborate ritual of Rome; but, waiving discussion as to the relative gifts and graces of these two great divisions of Christ's fellowship, the new seems essential, not for itself alone, but as a stimulus and corrective to the old. Time may make it clear that a purified Roman Catholicism is better suited to the Latin races in general than plainer rites and less symbolic worship, but there are heavy counts against the Roman Catholic Church as it exists in Spain. The private lives of the clergy, as a class, have been so open to reproach that even the finger-games and nonsense songs of the little children, learned with their baby lispings, mock priestly immorality. The Church, steward of untold wealth, has endowed many charities, but the fundamental trust of knowledge it has most sluggishly and inadequately dispensed. Santiago de Compostela, for example, is a very nest of religious foundations. Thirty-six Christian fraternities are gathered there, yet we were told on good authority that not one peasant in a hundred of those within hearing of Santiago's fivescore and fourteen holy bells can read and write. In matters of State, the Church has utterly lost the allegiance of the progressive party and, to a large extent, the political confidence of the nation. As Spaniards study the history of their country, they realize more and more that her colossal mistakes and misfortunes have been due in large measure to Jesuit and Dominical policy--to the father confessor in the royal chamber, the inquisitor in shadow of the throne. With reference to the success of the Church in promoting spiritual life, a beautiful young nun, her eyes glistening like happy stars, assured us that there was more devotion in Catholic Spain than in all the rest of Christendom. A scientist of repute, his voice choking with grief and wrath, declared to us that the fetters of superstition had become hopelessly riveted, during these ages of Church control, on the Spanish mind. But call it what you will, devotion or superstition, and admitting, as the tourist must, that it is a most conspicuous and impressive feature of Spanish life, there are nevertheless thousands of Spaniards, especially the younger men, over whom it has lost sway. These are the _indiferentes_, many of whom might find, as some have found, in a fresh presentation of Christianity, the Godward impetus which they no longer gain from the Church of Rome. The most cheerful _indiferente_ I encountered in Spain was a whimsical old philosopher, well on his way to the nineties, yet so brisk and hardy as almost to vie with Borrow's Portuguese dame whose hair "was becoming gray" after a life of one hundred and ten years. His hair, indeed, is white, and extreme age has written its deforming marks on face and figure, yet he runs up the steepest stairs, reads the finest print, fills his days with a close succession of labors and amusements, and scoffs at religion as airily as if Death had passed him on the crowded way and would never turn back to look for him again. At our first meeting he offered, with characteristic kindness, to come and read Spanish with me. As I had invaded Spain for the express purpose of studying the Spanish drama, I took a volume of Calderon from my trunk and hopefully awaited his visit. But it was a matter of several visits before I could open my Calderon. The jaunty old cavalier arrived, brimming over with chat and anecdote, and when at last I hinted at the reading, produced with pride from his inner coat pocket a little, paper-bound _geografia_ that he had written himself for use in the Spanish schools, and proceeded to regale me with extracts from its pages. I looked severely at the little artist, whose eyes were dancing in a demure face, and endeavored to profit by this unexpected course of instruction. The author chuckled much over his sagacity in having arranged the subject-matter of his book in paragraphs and not by question and answer. In the latter case, he explained, the children would learn the answers without reading the questions, a process bound to result in geographical confusion. The little volume, as is the wont of school books in other lands, tended to give to its students a disproportionate idea of the importance of their own country. Spain and her colonies were treated in seventy pages, Great Britain and her colonies in three, France in four, while America, from Greenland to Patagonia, was handled as a single entity, one figure each, and those absurdly small, being set for "her population, army, and navy." The _Confederación de los Estados Unidos_ was barely mentioned as one of the five "States" of North America. But the only feature of his book for which the author felt called upon to apologize, was the catering to popular superstition, as in stating, for instance, that in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela is adored the veritable body of St. James. He cast a quizzical glance at me in reading this, and then laughed himself purple in the face. "One has to say these things in this country," he gasped, still breathless from his mirth. "Drops of water must run with the stream. If only there were a shrine where people might be cured of being fools!" Quick-witted as the old gentleman was, he presently detected a lack of geographical enthusiasm in his audience. His literary vanity smarted for a moment and then he fell to laughing, declaring that ladies always had a distaste for useful information. "That old wife of mine" could not abide arithmetic. He digressed into an explanation of the Roman notation, making it quite clear to us wherein IX differs from XI, and with antiquated courtliness of phrase, even for Spain, asked our gracious permission to cause himself the pain of departure. He often reappeared. His wiry arm, reached through the Moorish bars of the outer door, would give its own peculiarly energetic twitch to the bell chain looped within. A maid, leaning over the railing of an upper story, would call down the challenge inherited from good old fighting times, "Who comes here?" And his thin voice would chirp the Andalusian answer, "Peace." On his second visit he fairly gurgled with pleasure as he placed another volume with his name on the title-page before me. Since I did not incline to solid reading, behold him equally ready to supply me with the sweets of literature! This, too, was a school book, a somewhat haphazard collection of Castilian poems, with brief biographies of the authors represented. Its novel educational feature was the printing of each poem in a different type. The result was a little startling to the eye, but the editor was doubtless right in claiming that it made the reading harder for the children, and so developed their powers through exercise. Here, again, he was ashamed of the fact that fully two-thirds of the poems were religious. "But what can one do in this country?" he asked testily. "All the reading books have to be like that. Bah! But we will not read these pious verses. The others are much more entertaining." Determined not to wound him again by any lack of interest in books of his own shaping, we sat patiently through page after page of that juvenile school reader; but when, with a pamphlet on spelling and punctuation, we had completed the list of his works, I once more called his attention to Calderon. This struck him as a capital joke. He had never read Calderon himself, he had hardly heard of Calderon, and that a foreigner, a woman at that, should insist on reading Calderon, was funny enough to make his old sides ache. There were modern authors in plenty who must certainly write much better than an out-of-date fellow like that. He had books that he could lend me. He had friends from whom he could borrow. But nothing would please me but Calderon! Why under the fanciful moon should I set my heart on Calderon? "_Bueno!_" he cried at last, whisking the mirthful tears from his eyes. "_Vamos á ver!_ Let us go on and see!" We opened the classic volume at the Catholic Faust-drama, _El Mágico Prodigioso_, and began to read, soon passing into the great argument between Cipriano and Lucifer as to the nature of God. Our guest, sensitive to all impressions as he was, became immediately amazed and delighted. "But this is lofty!" he exclaimed. "This is sublime! Good, Cipriano, good! Now you have him! What will the devil say to that? _Vamos á ver!_" At the close of that tremendous scene he shut the book, fairly panting with excitement. But nevertheless there was a twinkle in his eye. He knew now why I craved this Calderon. He was evidently a religious writer, and women were all religious. It was an amiable feminine weakness, like the aversion to geography and arithmetic. But his indulgent chivalry rose to the occasion. Having learned my taste, such as it was, he would gratify it to the utmost. "If you would only come and see my library!" he proposed. "I have exactly the book there that will please you. I have not read it myself, but it is very large, with most beautiful pictures, and it tells these old stories about Lucifer and all that. I am sure it is just what you would like. Will you not do your humble servant the honor of coming to-morrow afternoon?" I ran over in my mind our engagements for the morrow. He mistook the cause of my hesitation. "Indeed you need not be afraid to come," he urged. "My house is as safe as a convent. That old wife of mine, too, will be sure to be somewhere about. And you can bring the silent señorita with you." I was aware of a slight convulsion in "the silent señorita." She could speak all the Spanish she chose, but she found the eccentricities of this visitor so disconcerting that she affected ignorance, and he supposed her mute presence at our interviews to be purely in deference to the Spanish proprieties. My youthful chaperon, much elated by this reversal of our natural positions, duly attended me the next day to our friend's surprisingly elegant home. He was forever crying poverty and telling us, with the tears that came to his old age as easily as the laughter, how the hardships of life had beaten out of him every ambition save hope to "gain the bread" until his death, but we found him luxuriously housed, and I was afterward informed that he was one of the richest men in the city. He ran with that wonderful sprightliness of his across the marbled court to meet us, and ceremoniously conducted us up the handsome staircase. He led us through all "our house," typically Andalusian, with statues and urns of blossoming trees set in the open patios, with Moorish arches and bright-hued tiles, shaded balconies, tapestried and curtained beds, _braseros_, and rocking-chairs, and in every room images and paintings of the saints, at which he made irreverent grimaces. There were family portraits, too, before three of which he broke down into weeping--the son who had died in the prime of manhood, the daughter lost in her fair maidenhood, and, where the stormy sobs shook him from head to foot, the Benjamin of his heart, a clear-eyed young officer who had fallen in the Cuban war. The tears were still streaming down the quivering old face when we turned silently away--for what word of comfort would Americans dare to speak?--and followed him to his study. He was of extravagant repute in his locality as a scholar and a man of letters, and his study was what a study ought to be,--well furnished with desk, pigeon-holes, all the tools of literary labor, and walled with books. Among these was an encyclopædia in which, to his frank astonishment, he found an article of fifteen pages on Calderon. The great volume we had come to see lay open on a reading stand. It was a Spanish Bible, with the Doré illustrations. I wanted to look at the title-page, but our eager host, proud to exhibit and explain, tossed over the leaves so fast that I had no opportunity. As he was racing through the Psalms, impatient because of their dearth of pictures, my eye was caught by the familiar passage, "As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God." With prompt curiosity, he popped down his white head, in its close-fitting skullcap, to see what I was noting, and instantly went off into an immoderate gust of laughter. "_Muy bien!_" he wheezed, as soon as he could recover anything like a voice. "But that is very cleverly put. He was a witty fellow who wrote that. Just so! Just so! The deer goes to the water because he means to get something for himself, and that is why the young men go into the priesthood, and why the women go to mass. It's all selfishness, is religion. But how well he says it!" "No, no!" I exclaimed, for once startled into protest. "He is saying that religion is the impulse of thirst." The incorrigible old worldling took this for another jest, and, as in gallantry bound, laughed harder at my sally than at poor King David's. "Excellent! Perfect! So it is! So it is! Religion is the impulse to fill one's own stomach. Just what I have always said! 'As the hart panteth after the water brooks'--ho, ho! I must try to remember that." His enthusiasm for Calderon soon kindled to a flame. As the plot thickened he ceased to be of the slightest help in any difficulties that the text might offer. In vain I would beseech him to clear up some troublesome passage. "Oh, never mind!" he would say, vexed at the interruption. "They didn't write very well in those old days. And I want to know which of her three suitors Justina took. Three at once! What a situation! _Vamos á ver!_ I hope it will be Cipriano." As the spell of Calderon's imagination passed more and more strongly upon him, this most sympathetic of readers quite accepted, for the time being, the poet's Catholic point of view, trembling for Cipriano and almost choking with agitated joy when Justina, calling in her extremity upon the name of God, put Lucifer to flight. But after we had read the drama to the end, through its final scene of triumphant martyrdom, he sat silent for several minutes, and then shook his head. "Not true; it is not true. There is no devil but the evil passions of humanity. And as for Cipriano's definition of God--it is good, yes; it is great, yes; but who can shut God into a definition? One might as well try to scoop up the ocean in a cocoanut shell. No! All religions are human fictions. We have come, nobody knows whence or why, into this paltry, foolish, sordid life, for most of us only a fight to gain the bread, and afterward--_Bueno!_ I am on the brink of the jump, and the priests have not frightened me yet. Afterward? _Vamos á ver!_" This man had heard of Protestantism simply as an ignorant notion of the lower classes. For the typical Spanish Protestant of to-day presents a striking contrast to the typical Spanish Protestant of the Reformation. When heresy first entered the Peninsula, it gained almost no footing among the common people, who supposed Luther to be another sort of devil and the Protestants a new variety of Jews or Moors; but the rank and learning of Spain, the youthful nobility, illustrious preachers and writers, officers and favorites of the Court, even men and women in whose veins flowed the blood royal, welcomed with ardor the wave that was surging over Europe. The very eminence of these heretics sealed their doom. The Inquisition could not miss such shining marks. The Holy Office did its work with abominable thoroughness. Apart from the countless multitudes whom it did to death in dungeon and torture-chamber, it burned more than thirty thousand of the most valuable citizens of Spain and drove forth from the Peninsula some three millions of Jews and Moors. The _autos de fe_ were festivals. Among the wedding pomps for the French bride of Philip II, a girl thirteen years old, was one of these horrible spectacles at Toledo. The holiday fires of Seville and Valladolid drank the most precious blood of Andalusia and Castile. Though Saragossa had a mind to Huguenot fuel; though Pamplona, on one festal day, heaped up a holocaust of ten thousand Jews; though Granada, Murcia, and Valencia whetted their cruel piety on the Moors who had made the southern provinces a garden of delight; yet in all these cities, as in Toledo, Logroño, and the rest, the Spanish stock itself was drained of its finest and most highly cultivated intelligence, its sincerest conscience, purest valor, its most original and independent thought. Spain has been paying the penalty ever since. Her history from Philip II has been a judgment day. No root of the Lutheran heresy survived in the Peninsula. The new Protestantism does not spring from the old. The blood of the Spanish martyrs was not the seed of the Spanish church. The Protestant of to-day is far removed, socially and politically, from the courtiers, marquises, knights of Santiago--those gallant cavaliers who were stripped upon the scaffold of their honorable decorations and clad in the yellow robe of infamy. This nineteenth-century Protestant may be a lawyer or a journalist, but by exception. Ordinarily he is a petty farmer, a small shop-keeper, mechanic, miner, day-laborer, of humble calling and of lowly life. In politics he is almost surely a republican. When the monarchy was overthrown, in '68, Protestantism was, for the moment, in favor, and hundreds of the triumphant party hastened to profess the reformed faith. With the return of a Roman Catholic court and perhaps upon the discovery that the new Christianity, too, has its burden and its yoke, many fell away. Yet Protestantism has now an assured footing in Spain. Protestant churches may be found in most of the important cities. There are some fifty foreign preachers and teachers in the field, aided by nearly eighty Spanish pastors and colporteurs. The number of Spanish communicants is between three and four thousand, the church attendance is reckoned at nine thousand, and there are five thousand Spanish children in the Protestant schools. Several centres have been established for the sale of Bibles and Protestant books, and six or seven Protestant periodicals are published and circulated. In answer to the continual Romish taunt that Protestantism is a war of sects, a house divided against itself, a Protestant Union was organized at Madrid in the spring of 1899. All, save two, of the fifteen missions, supported by various societies of Great Britain, Germany, Switzerland, and America, joined hands in this. Only the Plymouth Brethren and the Church of England held aloof. [Illustration: A MILKMAN OF GRANADA] The Inquisition exists no longer. Religious liberty, even in Spain, has the support of law. Yet still the Spanish Protestant, this poor, plain Protestant of to-day, as obscure as those Galilean fishermen whom the Master called, is harassed by petty persecutions. Children sing insulting verses after him in the street, especially that pious ditty:-- "Get away with you, Protestants, Out of our Catholic Spain, That the Sacred Heart, the Sacred Heart, May love our land again." He is jealously watched on the passing of "His Majesty the Wafer" and pursued with mud and spittings if he fails to do it homage. College boys rub charcoal over the front of his chapel and stone his schoolroom windows; work is refused him; promotion denied him; his rent is higher than his neighbor's, yet not his neighbor's family nor his landlord's cross his threshold. If scorn can burn, he feels the _auto de fe_. VIII AN ANDALUSIAN TYPE "'True,' quoth Sancho: 'but I have heard say there are more friars in heaven than knights-errant.' 'It may be so,' replied Don Quixote, 'because their number is much greater than that of knights-errant.' 'And yet,' quoth Sancho, 'there are abundance of the errant sort.' 'Abundance indeed,' answered Don Quixote, 'but few who deserve the name of knights.'"--CERVANTES: _Don Quixote_. It might have been in Seville, though it was not, that I met my most _simpático_ example of the Andalusian. He was of old Sierra stock, merry as the sunshine and gracious as the shadows. Huge of build and black as the blackest, he was as gentle as a great Newfoundland dog, until some flying spark of a word set the dark fires blazing in his eyes. This was no infrequent occurrence, for the travelling Englishman, as frank as he is patriotic, cannot comprehend the zest with which well-to-do Spaniards, even in time of war, escape military service by a money payment. Not the height and girth of our young giant, nor his cordial courtesy and winning playfulness, shielded him from the blunt question, "Why didn't you go over to Cuba, a great fellow like you, and fight for your flag?" His usual rejoinder was the eloquent Southern shrug of the shoulder, twist of the eyebrow, and waving lift of the hand, with the not easily answerable words, "And to what good?" But now and then the query came from such a source or was delivered with so keen a thrust that his guarded feeling outleaped reserve. The sarcasms and mockeries that then surged from him in a bitter torrent were directed chiefly against Spain, although the American eagle rarely went scot-free. "Ah, yes, it is a fine fowl, that! He has the far-seeing eye; he has the philanthropic beak and claw!" But it was the golden lion of Spain against which his harshest gibes were hurled--"_un animal doméstico_, that does not bite." No one of the party was a tithe as outspoken as our Spaniard himself in condemning the errors of the Spanish campaign or censuring the methods of the Spanish Government. If he turned angrily toward a criticism from a foreigner, it was only, in the second instant, to catch it up like a ball and toss it himself from one hand to the other--like a ball that burns the fingers. Such wrath can easily be the seamy side of love, and, in a way, the man's national pride was measured by his national shame; but always over these outbursts there brooded that something hopelessly resigned, drearily fatalistic, which seems to vitiate the Spanish indignation for any purposes of practical reform. To suggestions of sympathy he responded with a pathetic weariness of manner, this handsome young Hercules, so radiant with the joy of life, who, in his normal mood, sprinkled mirth and mischief from him as a big dog shakes off water drops. "What can one do? I am a Spaniard. I say it to myself a hundred times a day. I am a Spaniard, and I wish my country were worth the fighting for, worth the dying for. But is it? Is it worth the toothache? God knows the truth, and let it rest there. Oh, you need not tell me of its past. It was once the most glorious of nations. Spaniards were lords of the West. But--ah, I know, I know--Spain has never learned how to rule her colonies. He who sows brambles reaps thorns. The Church, too, has done much harm in Spain--not more harm than another. I am a Catholic, but as I see it, priests differ from other men only in this--in the café sit some bad men and many good, and in the choir kneel some good priests and many bad. The devil lurks behind the cross. But Spain will never give up her Church. It is burned in. You are a heretic, and like my figure, do you not? It is burned in. There is no hope for Spain but to sink her deep under the earth, and build a new Spain on top. And why do I not work for that new Spain? How may a man work? There is talk enough in Spain as it is. Most Spaniards talk and do no more. They go to the cafés and, when they have emptied their cups, they draw figures on the tables and they talk. That is all. The new Spain will never come. What should it be? Oh, I know better what it should not be. It should have no king. A republic--that is right. Perhaps not a republic precisely like America. It may be," and the melancholy sarcasm of the tone deepened, "there could be found something even better. But Spain will not find it. Spain will find nothing. "What can one do? I know Spain too well. Now, hear! I am acquainted with a _caballero_. I have been his friend ten years and more. But he has had the luck, not I. For, first, when we were at the university, he had a fortune left to him. He became betrothed to a señorita whom he loved better than his eyelashes. He travelled for his pleasure to Monte Carlo, and played his fortune all away in one week. He came back to Madrid, and went to one of the Ministers, to whom his father had in former days done a great service. My friend said: 'I am to marry. The lady expects to share the fortune which I have lost. My position is not honorable. I must have an opening, a chance to redeem myself, or I shall stand disgraced before her.' The Minister sent him to one of the Cuban custom-houses, and in two years he returned with great wealth. On his wedding journey he spent a night at Monte Carlo and gambled it away to the last _peseta_. A stranger had to lend him money to get home with his bride. Was he not ashamed and troubled? Ashamed? I do not know. But troubled? Yes, for he wanted to play longer. Every one is as God has made him, and very often worse. Again he went to the Minister, whose heart was softer than a ripe fig and who found him a post in the Philippines. This time he made a fortune much quicker than before, knowing better how to do unjustly, but a few weeks before the war he came home and lost it all again at Monte Carlo. And now he is horribly vexed, for it is another Minister, and, besides, there are no colonies to enrich him any more. "What use to care for Spain? No, no, no, no, no! Spain is a good country to leave--that is all. And you do well to travel in Spain. American ladies like change, and Spain is not America. Here you are not only in a different land, but in a different century. You can say, when you come out, that you have been journeying a hundred years ago." On another occasion one of those pleasant individuals who would, as the Spaniards say, "talk of a rope in the house of one who had been hanged," saw fit to entertain the dinner-table with anecdotes of Spanish cruelty. "But Spaniards are not cruel," protested our young blackamoor in his softest voice an hour later, stroking with one great hand the head of a child who nestled against his knee. "What did that English fellow mean? Why should any one think that Spaniards are cruel?" I ran over in mind a few of the frightful stories of Las Casas, that good Dominican friar who would not hold his peace when he saw the braining of Indian babies and roasting of Indian chiefs. I remembered how De Soto tossed his captives to the bloodhounds, and what atrocities were wrought in the tranquil realm of the Incas; I recalled the horrors of the Inquisition, but these things were of the past. So I answered, "Perhaps the bull-fights have done something to give foreigners that impression." Unlike many educated Spaniards who would rather attend the bull-fights than defend them, he squared his shoulders for an oration. "The bull-fights? But why? Bull-fights are not cruel--not more cruel than other sports in other countries. I have been told of prize-fights in America. I beg your pardon. I see by your look that you do not like them. And, in truth, I do not altogether like the bull-fights. The horses! They are blindfolded, and it is short, but I have seen--ah, yes! You would not wish to hear what I have seen. I have been often sorry for the horses. Yet some pain is necessary in everything, is it not? In nature, perhaps? In society, perhaps? Even, if you will pardon the illustration, in the deliverance of the Filipinos from Spanish tyranny?" I briefly suggested that there was no element of necessity in bull-fights. The waving hand apologized gently for dissent. "But, yes! The bulls are killed for food. That is what foreigners do not seem to understand. It may be ugly, but it is universal. To supply men with meat, to feed great cities with the flesh of beasts--it is not pleasant to think of that too closely. But how to help it? Do you not have slaughter-houses in America? These also we have in Spain. I have visited one. It seemed to me much worse than the bull-ring. Faugh! I did not like it. The cattle stood trembling, one behind another, waiting for the blow. I should not like to die like that. I would rather die in the wrath of battle like a _toro bravo_. Oh, it is not cruel. Do not think it. For these bulls feel no fear. It is fear that degrades. They may feel pain, but I doubt--I doubt. They feel the wildness of anger, and they charge and charge again until the _estocada_, the death stab. That is not so bad a way to die, is it? Any man would choose it rather than to stand in terror, bound and helpless, hearing the others fall under the axe and seeing his turn draw near. Yes, yes! The bull-ring rather than the slaughter-house for me!" This was a novel view of the case to the auditor, who ignominiously shifted her ground. "But what country uses the slaughter-house as a spectacle and a sport? It is one thing to take life for food, and another to make a holiday of the death struggle." Again that deprecatory waving of the hands. "I beg your pardon. I do not know how it is in America. Perhaps" [circumflex accent] "all is merciful and noble there. But when I was in England I saw something of the chase and of the autumn shooting. I saw a poor little fox hunted to the death. It was not for food. The dogs tore him. I saw wounded birds left in the cover to die. It was too much trouble to gather them all up. And the deer? Does not the stag suffer more in his flight than the bull in his struggle? I believe it. To run and run and run, always growing weaker, while the chase comes nearer--that is an agony. The rage of combat has no terror in it. I would not die like the deer, hunted down by packs of dogs and men--and ladies. I would die like the bull, hearing the cheers of the multitude." The big fellow bent over the baby that was dropping to sleep against his knee, and slipped the drowsy little body, deftly and tenderly, to a sofa. Such sweetness flooded the soft black eyes, as they were lifted from the child, that it was hard to imagine them sparkling with savage delight over the bloody scenes of the _corrida de toros_. I asked impulsively how long it was since he had seen a bull-fight. Brows and hands and shoulders were swift to express their appreciation of the bearings of the question, and the voice became very music in courteous acquiescence. "Ah, it is four years. Of course, I was much younger then. Yes, yes! It might not please me now. _Quien sabe?_ And yet--I beg your pardon--I think I shall go next Sunday in Madrid, on my way to Paris. It is so weary in London on the Sundays. It was always colder Sunday, and there was not even a café. There was nowhere to go. There was nothing to do. Why is that good? At the bull-fight one feels the joy of life. Is it more religious to sit dull and dismal by the fire? I had no use for the churches. Walking is not amusing, unless the sun shines and there is something gay to see. I do not like tea, and I do not care for reading. Spaniards like to laugh and be merry, and when there is nothing to laugh for, life is a heaviness. There is no laughter in a London Sunday. I hope Paris will be better, though I believe there are no bull-fights there as yet. You are not pleased with me, but let me tell you why I love the _corrida_. It is not for the horses, you remember. I have sometimes looked away. But why should I pity the bulls, when they are mad with battle? They do not pity themselves. They are glad in their fury, and I am glad in seeing it. But I am more glad in the activity and daring of the men. When they run risks, that is what makes me cheer. It is not that I would have them hurt. I am proud to find men brave. And I am excited and eager to see if they escape. Do you not understand? If you would go yourself--just once--no? Is it always no? Then let me tell you what is the best of all. It is to stand near the entrance and watch the people pass in, all dressed in their holiday clothes, and all with holiday faces. It is good and beautiful to see them--especially the ladies." The most attractive qualities of our young Spaniard were his mirth and courtesy. His merriment was so spontaneous and so buoyant that his grace of manner, always tempered to time and place and person, became the more apparent. His humor dwelt, nevertheless, in the borderlands of irony, and it was conceivable that the rubs of later life might enrich its pungency at the cost of its kindliness. He was excellent at games (not sports), especially the game of courtliness (not helpfulness). The letter was not posted, the message slipped his memory, the errand was done amiss, but his apologies were poetry. He made a pretty play of the slightest social intercourse. We would open our Baedeker at the map which we had already, in crossing Spain, unfolded some hundred times. He would spring as lightly to his feet as if his mighty bulk were made of feathers, and stand, half bowing, arching his eyebrows in appeal, spreading out his hands in offer of assistance, but not venturing to approach them toward the book until it was definitely tendered him. Then he would receive it with elaborate delicacy of touch, unfold the creased sheet with a score of varied little flourishes, and restore the volume with a whole fresh series of gesticulatory airs and graces. The next instant he would peep up from under his black lashes to detect the alloy of amusement in our gratitude, and drop his face flat upon the table in a boyish bubble of laughter, saying:-- "Ah! But you think we Spaniards make much of little things. It is true. We are best at what is least useful." Light-hearted Andalusian though he was, he had full share of the energy and enterprise of young manhood. Like the dons of long ago, he was equipping himself for the great Western adventure. Despite his Spanish wrath against America, she had for him a persistent fascination. All his ambitions were bent on a business career in New York, the El Dorado of his imagination. But it was no longer, at the end of the nineteenth century, a case of leaping aboard a galleon and waving a Toledo blade in air. The commercial career demands, so he fancied, that its knight go forth armed cap-a-pie in the commercial tongues. Thus he had spent four years of his youth and half of his patrimony in London and Berlin, and now, after this hasty visit home, purposed to go to Paris, for a year or two of French. This unsettled life was little to his liking, but beyond gleamed the vision of a Wall Street fortune. Yet even now, at the outset of his task, a frequent lethargy would steal over his young vigor. It was curious to see, when the March wind blew chill or the French verbs waxed crabbed, how all his bearing lost its beauty. There was a central dignity that did not lapse, but the brightness and effectiveness were gone. His big body drooped and looked lumpish. His comely face was clouded by an animal sluggishness of expression. Foreign grimaces twisted across it, and something very like a grunt issued from beneath his cherished first mustache. His sarcasm became a little savage. He would sit for hours in a brooding fit, and, when an inexorable call to action came, obey it with a look of dreary patience older than his years. It was as if something inherent in his nature, independent of his will, weighed upon him and dragged him down. The Spain at which he gibed and from which he would have cut himself away was yet a millstone about his neck. He was in the heyday of his youth, progressive and determined, but the torpid blood of an aged people clogged his veins. Spain will never lose her hold on him, despite his strongest efforts. His children may be citizens of the great Republic, but he must be a foreigner to the end. He must wander a stranger in strange cities, puzzling his Spanish wits over alien phrases and fashions and ideals, unless, indeed, his spirit loses edge, and he drifts into chill apathy of disappointment on finding that his golden castles in America are wrought of that same old dream-stuff which used to be the monopoly of castles in Spain. But it is best to leave ill-boding to the gypsies. Good luck may take a liking to him, if only for the music of his laugh. For even if blithe heart and courtly bearing bring no high cash value in the modern business market, they may smooth the road to simple happiness. Moreover, a Spaniard dearly loves a game of chance, and at the worst, our fortune-seeker will have thrown his dice. His may seem to the Yankee onlooker but a losing play, and yet--who knows? "He who sings frightens away his ills." God's blessing sails in summer clouds as lightly as in costly pleasure yachts. Out of a shaft of sunshine, a cup of chocolate, and a cigarette, this Andalusian immigrant, though stranded in an East Side tenement, may get more luxury than can be purchased by a multi-millionaire. [Illustration: A ROMAN WELL IN RONDA] IX A BULL-FIGHT "I wish no living thing to suffer pain."--SHELLEY: _Prometheus Unbound_. From our first crossing of the Pyrenees we were impressed, even beyond our expectation, with the Spanish passion for the bull-fight. The more cultivated Spaniards, to be sure, are usually unwilling to admit to a foreigner their pleasure in the pastime. "It is brutal," said a young physician of Madrid, as we discussed it. "It is a very painful thing to see, certainly. I go, myself, only two or three times a year, when the proceeds are to be devoted to some religious object--a charity or other holy work." No sight is more common in streets and parks than that of a group of boys playing _al toro_--one urchin charging about with sticks fastened to his shoulders for horns, or with a pasteboard bull's head pulled over his ears, and others waving scarlet cloths and brandishing improvised swords and lances. It is said that in fierce Valencia youths have sometimes carried on this sport with knives for horns and swords, the spectators relishing the bloodshed too well to interfere. Not easily do such lads as these forgive the little king for crying, like the sensitive child he is, the first time he was taken to the bull-ring. The _corridas de toros_, although denounced by some of the chief voices in Spain, are held almost a national shibboleth. Loyal supporters of the queen regent will add to their praises the sigh, "If only she loved the bull-fight!" Cavaliers and ladies fair reserve their choicest attire to grace these barbarities. It is a common saying that a Spaniard will sell his shirt to buy a ticket to the bull-ring, but whatever the deficiencies of the inner costume, the dress that meets the eye is brave in the extreme. It is recently becoming the fashion for _caballeros_, especially in the north of Spain, to discard those very fetching cloaks with the vivid linings--cloaks in which Spaniards muffle their faces to the eyebrows as they tread the echoing streets of cities founded some thousand or fifteen hundred years ago. But for a good old Spanish bull-fight, the good old Spanish costumes are out in force, the bright-hued _capas_ and broad _sombreros_, and for the ladies, who also are beginning to discard the customary black mantilla for Parisian headgear, the exquisite white mantillas of early times and the largest and most richly decorated fans. It is in such places as the grim Roman amphitheatre of Italica, whose grass-grown arena has flowed so red with martyrdoms of men and beasts, that one despairs most of Spanish ability to give up the bull-fight. It is in the air, in the soil, in the blood; a national institution, an hereditary rage. "But it is the link that holds your country bound to barbarism. The rest of the world is on the forward move. I tell you, the continuance of the bull-fight means the ruin of Spain," urged a gigantic young German, in our hearing, on his Spanish friend. The slight figure of the Madrileño shook with anger. "And I tell _you_" he choked, "that Spain would rather perish with the bull-fight than survive without it." _Isabel la Católica_, who earnestly strove to put down these savage contests, wrote at last to her Father Confessor that the task was too hard for her. The "Catholic Kings" could take Granada, unify Spain, establish the Inquisition, expel Moors and Jews, and open the Americas; but they could not abolish bull-fighting. Nor was Pius V, with his denial of Christian burial to all who fell in the arena, and his excommunication for princes who permitted _corridas de toros_ in their dominions, more successful. The papal bull, like the bulls of flesh and blood, was inevitably overthrown. Spanish legend likes to name the Cid as the first _torero_. "Troth it goodly was and pleasant To behold him at their head, All in mail on Bavieca, And to hear the words he said." In mediæval times the sport was not without chivalric features. Knights fought for honor, where professionals now fight for _pesetas_. When the great Charles killed a bull with his own lance in honor of the birth of Philip II, the favor of the Austrian dynasty was secured. The Bourbons looked on the sport more coldly, but as royalty and nobility withdrew, the people pressed to the fore. Out of the hardy Spanish multitude rose a series of masters,--Romero the shoemaker, who, in general, gave to the art its modern form; Martincho the shepherd, who, seated in a chair with his feet bound, would await the charging brute; Cándido, who would face the bull in full career and escape by leaping to its forehead and over its back; Costillares, who invented an ingenious way of getting in the death-stroke; the famous Pepe Hillo, who, like Cándido, perished in the ring; a second Romero, said to have killed five thousand six hundred bulls; Montés the brick-layer, and a bloody band of followers. Andalusia is--alas!--the classic soil of the bull-fight, as every peasant knows, and Seville the top of Andalusia. "I have a handsome lover, Too bold to fear the Devil, And he's the best _torero_ In all the town of Seville." The extravagance of the popular enthusiasm for these _fiestas de toros_ is often ridiculed on the stage, where dramas dealing with bull-fighting, especially if they bring in the heroes of the arena, Pepe Hillo, Romero, Costillares, are sure to take. One _zarzuela_ represents a rheumatic old _aficionado_, or devotee of the sport, trying, with ludicrous results, to screw his courage to the point of facing the bull. Another spends its fun on a Madrid barber, who is likewise a brain-turned patron of the ring. Disregarding the shrill protests of his wife, he lavishes all his time, love, and money on the _corridas_ and encourages his daughter's _novio_, an honest young paper-hanger, to throw over his trade and learn to _torear_. After two years of the provincial arenas, the aspirant, nicknamed in the ring The Baby, has nothing but torn clothes and bruises to show for his career, and his sweetheart, eager to recall him from the hazardous profession, vows a waxen bull, large as life, to the Virgin, in case he returns to papering, with its humble security and its regularity of wages. Mary hears. On that great occasion, The Baby's début at Madrid, the barber, who has just been lucky in the lottery, rents for him a gorgeous suit of second-hand finery, but in the _Plaza de Toros_ not even a rose-and-silver jacket can shield a quaking heart. The Baby is a coward born, and from the first rush of the first bull comes off with a bloody coxcomb, crying out his shame on the shoulder of his Pilar, who shall henceforth have him all her own. The little artist and I went into Spain with the firm determination not to patronize the bull-fight. Half our resolution we kept,--her half. Wherever we turned we encountered suggestions of the _corrida_. Spanish newspapers, even the most serious, devote columns to _Los Toros_. Bull-fighting has its special publications, as _El Toril_ and _El Toreo Cómico_, and its special dialect. On the morning after a holy day the newspapers seem actually smeared with the blood of beasts. In the bull-fight season, from Easter to All Saints, _corridas_ are held every Sunday in all the cities of southern and central Spain, while the smaller towns and villages butcher as many bulls as they can possibly afford. The May and June that I passed in the capital gave me a peculiar abhorrence of the Madrid Sunday,--that feverish excitement everywhere; the rattle of all those extra omnibuses and cars with their red-tasselled mules in full gallop for the _Plaza de Toros_; that sense of furious struggle and mortal agony hanging over the city all through the slow, hot afternoon; those gaping crowds pressing to greet the _toreros_, a gaudy-suited company, on their triumphal return in open carriages; that eager discussion of the day's tragedy at every street-corner and from seat to seat along the _paseos_, even at our own dainty dinner table and on our own balconies under the rebuking stars. At this strange Sabbath service the Infanta Isabel, whose mother's birth was celebrated by the slaying of ninety-nine bulls, is a regular attendant, occupying the royal box and wearing the national colors. A French bull-fighter, visiting the Spanish capital, was invited by the Infanta to an audience and presented with a diamond pin. Not even the public mourning for Castelar could induce Madrid to forego the _corrida_ on that Sunday just before his burial. Past the very senate-house where his body lay in state rolled the aristocratic landaus, whose ladies displayed the gala-wear of white mantillas. But the Sundays were not enough. Every Catholic feast-day called for its sacrifice. Granada could not do fitting honor to Corpus Christi with less than three "_magnificas corridas_." The royal saint of Aranjuez, Fernando, must have his pious birthday kept by an orgy of blood. At the _fiesta_ of Christ's Ascension all Spain was busy staining his earth with the life-stream of His creatures. Valladolid was, indeed, ashamed to have torn to death only seven horses, but Segovia rejoiced in an expert who sat at his work and killed his bulls with drawing-room ease. Bordeaux improved the occasion, with aid of two celebrated Spanish _espadas_, by opening a French _Plaza de Toros_, and Valencia had the excitement of sending to the infirmary one _torero_ with a broken leg and another with a crushed foot. Such accidents are by no means uncommon. A _matador_ was mortally wounded in the Valencia ring that summer, a _banderillero_ was trampled at the Escorial, and those favorite stabbers, Reverte and Bombita, were themselves stabbed by avenging horns. If there is a temporary dearth of saint days, Spanish ingenuity will nevertheless find excuse for _corridas_. Bulls must bleed for holy charity,--for hospitals, foundling asylums, the families of workmen out on strike. If the French squadron is at Cadiz, hospitality demands a bull-fight. In the interests of popular education, an historical _corrida_ was arranged, with instructed _toreros_ to display the special styles of bull-killing that have prevailed from the Cid to Guerrita. Again, as a zoölogical by-play, an elephant was pitted against the bulls. This, too, had precedent, for did not Philip IV once keep his birthday by turning in among the horned herd a lion, a tiger, a camel, and a bear, "all Noah's ark and Æsop's fables"? A bull of Xarama vanquished them every one and received the gracious reward of being shot dead by Philip himself. It was on a Wednesday afternoon, at one of the three grand _corridas_ of the Seville _Feria_, that I became an accomplice in this Spanish crime. Our friends in Seville, people of cultivation and liberal views, had declared from the first that we could have no conception of Spanish life and character without sharing in the national _fiesta_. "We ourselves are not enthusiasts," they said. "In fact, we disapprove the bull-fight. We regard it as demoralizing to the community at large. It is, nevertheless, a thing scientific, artistic, heroic, _Spanish_. Besides, a large portion of the proceeds goes to charity. We do not attend the _corridas_, except now and then, especially when we have foreign guests who wish to see them. Before going they all regard bull-fighting as you do, as an atrocity, a barbarity, but invariably they return from the _Plaza de Toros_ filled with delight and admiration. They say their previous ideas were all wrong, that it is a noble and splendid spectacle, that they want to see it again and again, that they cannot be too grateful to us for having delivered them from prejudice." I winced at the word. I have a prejudice against being prejudiced, and to the bull-fight I went. My yielding came too late for securing places in a box or in any part of the house from which one can make exit during the performance. Our gory-looking tickets admitted us to the uppermost row of high, whitewashed, stone seats of the circus proper, where we were soon inextricably wedged in by the human mass that formed around and below us. The hour of waiting passed merrily enough. The open amphitheatre, jammed to its full capacity of fourteen thousand, lay half in brilliant sunlight and half in creeping shadow. Above us arched the glowing blue sky of Seville, pricked by the rosy Giralda, and from time to time a strong-winged bird flew over. The great arena, strewn with yellow sand, was enclosed by a dark red barrier of wood, about the height of a man. This was encircled, at a little distance, by a more secure and higher wall of stone. The concourse was largely composed of men, both roughs and gentles, but there was no lack of ladies, elegantly dressed, nor of children. Two sweet little girls in white-feathered hats were just in front of us, dancing up and down to relieve the thrills of expectancy. White mantillas, pinned with jewels, bent from the boxes, while the daughters of the people dazzled the eye with their festival display of Manila shawls, some pure white, some with colored figures on a white ground or a black, and some a rainbow maze of capricious needle-work. The rich-hued blossoms of Andalusia were worn in the hair and on the breast. The sunny side of the circus was brightly dotted by parasols, orange, green, vermilion, and fans in all the cardinal colors twinkled like a shivered kaleidoscope. The men's black eyes glittered under those broad _sombreros_, white or drab, while they puffed their cigarettes with unwonted energy, scattering the ashes in soft gray showers over their neighbors on the seats below. The tumult of voices had a keener note of excitement than I had yet heard in Spain, and was so loud and insistent as often to drown the clashing music of the band. The cries of various venders swelled the mighty volume of noise. Water-sellers in vivid blouses and sashes, a red handkerchief twisted around the neck, on the left shoulder a cushion of folded carpeting for the shapely, yellow-brown jar, and a smart tin tray, holding two glasses, corded to the belt, went pushing through the throng. Criers of oranges, newspapers, crabs, and cockles, almond cakes, fans, and photographs of the _toreros_, strove with all the might of their lungs against the universal uproar. "Crece el entusiasmo; Crece la alegría; Todo es algazara; Todo es confusión." A tempest of applause marked the entrance in a box above of a popular _prima donna_, who draped a resplendent carmine scarf over the railing before her seat. Immediately the complete circuit of the rail was ablaze with color, cloaks and shawls instantly converting themselves into tapestry. At last two attendants entered the arena, walked up to a hydrant in the centre, fastened on a hose, and watered the great circle. They pulled out the hydrant and raked sand over the hole. Simple as these actions were, a dreadful quiet fell on all the circus. A trumpet blared. Mounted _alguaciles_, or police, tricked out in ancient Spanish costume, on blue saddles, and with tall blue plumes in their hats, rode in and cleared the arena of all stragglers. A door opened, and forth issued the full circus troupe, making a fine show of filigree, and urging their wretched old nags to a last moment of equine pride and spirit. Amid roars of welcome, they flaunted across the sanded enclosure and saluted the presiding officer. He dropped the key of the _toril_, that dark series of cells into which the bulls had been driven some hours before. An _alguacil_ caught the key and handed it to the _torilero_, who ran with it toward a second door, ominously surmounted by a great bull's head. Then there was a twinkling of the pink stockings and black sandals. Most of the gay company leaped the barrier, and even the _chulos_ who remained in the ring placed themselves within convenient distance of the rail. Some of the _picadores_ galloped out, but a few awaited the coming charge, their long pikes in rest. The door on which all eyes were bent flew open, and a bellowing red bull rushed in. The fierce, bloodthirsty, horrible yell that greeted him checked his impetuous onset. For a few seconds the creature stood stock-still, glaring at the scene. Heaven knows what he thought of us. He had had five perfect years of life on the banks of the Guadalquivír,--one baby year by his mother's side, one year of sportive roving with his mates, and then had come the trial of his valor. He had found all the herdsmen gathered at the ranch one morning, and, nevertheless, flattered himself that he had evaded those hateful pikes, _garrochas_, that were always goading him back when he would sally out to explore the great green world. At all events, here he was scampering alone across the plain. But promptly two horsemen were at his heels, and one of these, planting a blunt _garrocha_ on his flank, rolled the youngster over. Up again, panting with surprise and indignation, he felt a homesick impulse to get back to the herd, but the second horseman was full in his path. So much the worse for the horseman! The mettlesome young bull lowered his horns and charged the obstacle, only to be thrown back with a smarting shoulder. If he had yielded then, his would have been the quiet yoke and the long, dull life of labor, but he justified his breed; he charged anew, and so proved himself worthy of the arena. Three more years of the deep, green river-reeds and the sweet Andalusian sunshine, three years of free, far range and glad companionship, and then the end. His days had been exempt from burden only to save his wild young strength for the final tragedy. One summer morning those traitors known as decoy-oxen, with bells about the neck, came trotting into the herd. The noble bulls, now at their best hour of life, the glory of their kind, welcomed these cunning guests with frank delight and interest, and were easily induced to follow them and their tinkling bells across the rich pastures, along rough country roads, even to the city itself and the fatal _Plaza de Toros_. The herdsmen with their ready pikes galloped behind the drove, and everywhere along the way peasants and townsfolk would fall in for a mile or two to help in urging the excited animals onward to their cruel doom. In that strange, maddening sea of faces, that hubbub of hostile voices, the bull, as soon as his blinking eyes had effected the change from the darkness of the _toril_ to the glaring light and gaudy colors of the coliseum, caught sight of a horseman with the familiar pike. Here was something that he recognized and hated. Lowering his head, the fiery brute dashed with a bellow at that tinselled figure. Ah, the pike had never been so sharp before! It went deep into his shoulder, but could not hold him back. He plunged his horns, those mighty spears, into the body of the helpless, blindfolded horse, which the _picador_, whose jacket was well padded and whose legs were cased in iron, deliberately offered to his wrath. The poor horse shrieked, plunged, reeled, and fell, the _chulos_ deftly dragging away the armored rider, while the bull ripped and trampled that quivering carcass, for whose torment no man cared, until it was a crimson, formless heap. Such sickness swept over me that I did not know what followed. When I looked again, two bloody masses that had once been horses disfigured the arena, and the bull, stuck all over like a hedge-hog with derisive, many-colored darts, had gone down under Guerrita's steel. My friends, observing with concern that I was not enjoying myself as much as they had promised, tried to divert my attention to the technical features of their ghastly game. It was really, they explained, a drama in three acts. It is the part of the mounted _picador_ to draw off the first rage and vigor of the bull, weakening him, but not slaying him, by successive wounds. Then the jaunty _banderilleros_, the streamers of whose darts must correspond in color with their costumes, supply a picturesque and amusing element, a comic interlude. Finally an _espada_, or _matador_, advances alone to despatch the tortured creature. The death-blow can be dealt only in one of several fashions, established by rule and precedent, and the _espada_ who is startled into an unprofessional thrust reaps a bitter harvest of scoffs and hisses. A team of gayly-caparisoned mules with jingling bells had meanwhile trundled away the mangled bodies of the slaughtered animals, fresh sand had been thrown over the places slippery with blood, and the band pealed the entrance of the second bull. This was a demon, black as a coal, with a marvellous pride and spirit that availed him nothing. Horse after horse crashed down before his furious rushes, while the circus, drunk with glee, shouted for more victims and more and more. It was a massacre. At last our hideous greed was glutted, and the _banderilleros_ took their turn in baiting the now enfeebled but undaunted bull. Wildly he shook himself, the fore half of his body already a flood of crimson, to throw off the ignominy of those stinging darts. The _chulos_ fretted and fooled him with their waving cloaks of red and yellow, till at last the creature grew hushed and sullen. A strain of music announced that the _matador_ Fuentes was asking beneath the president's box permission to kill the bull. For my part, I gave the bull permission to kill the man. Fuentes, all pranked out in gray and gold, holding his keen blade behind him and flourishing a scarlet square of cloth, swinging from a rod, the _muleta_, advanced upon the brute. That bleeding body shook with a new access of rage, and the other _espadas_ drew near and stood at watch. But even before a blow was struck the splendid, murdered creature sank to his knees, staggered up once more, sank again with crimson foam upon his mouth, and the music clashed jubilantly while Fuentes drove the weapon home. And again the team of mules, with foolish tossing of their bright-ribboned heads, jerked and jolted their dead kindred off the scene. The third bull galloped in with a roar that was heard far beyond the _Plaza_ and gored his first two horses so promptly and so frightfully that, while the hapless beasts still struggled in their agony, the amphitheatre howled with delirious joy. Several _capas_ were caught away on those swift, effective horns, and one _picador_ was hurt. But the rain of darts teased and bewildered the bull to the point of stupidity, although he was dangerous yet. "Dark is his hide on either side, but the blood within doth boil; And the dun hide glows, as if on fire, as he paws to the turmoil. His eyes are jet, and they are set in crystal rings of snow; But now they stare with one red glare of brass upon the foe." It was the turn of Bombita, a dandy in dark-green suit with silver trimmings; but his comrades, pale and intent, stood not far off and from time to time, by irritating passes, drew the bull's wrath upon themselves, wearying him ever more and more, until at last Bombita had his chance to plant a telling blow. Would it never end? Again the fatal door swung open, and the fourth bull bounded in to play his tragic rôle. He was of choicest pedigree, but the utter strangeness of the scene turned his taurine wits. He made distracted and aimless rushes hither and thither, unheeding the provocations of the horsemen, until he came upon the spot drenched with his predecessor's life-blood. He pawed away the hasty covering of sand, sniffed at that ominous stain, and then, throwing up his head with a strange bellow, bolted back to the door by which he had entered, and turned tail to the arena. The fourteen thousand, crazy with rage, sprang to their feet, shook their fists, called him _cow_. The _chulos_ brandished their cloaks about his horns; men leaned over from the barrier and prodded him with staffs. Finally, in desperation, he turned on the nearest horse, rent it and bore it down. The _picador_, once set up by the _chulos_ upon his stiff, iron-cased legs, his yellow finery streaked with red from his lacerated horse, tugged savagely at the bridle to force that dying creature to a second stand. One attendant wrenched it by the tail, another beat it viciously over the face; the all-enduring beast, his entrails swinging from a crimson gash, struggled to his feet. The _picador_ mounted, drove in the spurs, and the horse, rocking and pitching, accomplished a few blind paces toward those dripping horns that horribly awaited him. But to the amazement and scandal of the _aficionados_, the circus raised a cry of protest, and the discomfited rider sprang down in the very moment when his horse fell to rise no more. A _chulo_, at his leisurely convenience, quieted those kicking hoofs by a stab,--the one drop of mercy in that ocean of human outrage. Straw-colored darts, wine-colored darts, sky-colored darts, were pricking the bull to frenzy. I wished he had any half-dozen of his enemies in a clear pasture. Those glittering dragon-flies were always just out of reach, but he stumbled on the sodden shape of the unhappy horse and tossed it again and again, making the poor carcass fling up its head and arch its neck in ghastly mockery of life. Cowardice avails a bull as little as courage. This sorry fighter had been deeply pierced by the _garrochas_, and now, as he galloped clumsily about the arena, in unavailing efforts to escape from his tormentors, his violent, foolish plunges made the dark blood flow the faster. It was Guerrita, Guerrita the adored, Guerrita in gold-laced jacket and violet trousers, who struck the ultimate blow, and so cleverly that _sombreros_ and cigarettes, oranges and pocket-flasks, came raining, amid furies of applause, into the arena. This was such a proud moment as he had dreamed of long ago in the Cordova slaughter-house, when, the little son of the slaughter-house porter, he had stolen from his bed at midnight to play _al toro_ with the calves, and then and there had solemnly dedicated himself to the glorious profession. Now the master of his art and the idol of all Spain, easily making his seventy-five thousand dollars a year, earning, in fact, three thousand on that single afternoon, Guerrita little foresaw that with the coming autumn he should go on pilgrimage to _La Virgen del Pilar_, and before her beloved shrine at Saragossa cut off his bull-fighter's pigtail and renounce the ring. The fifth bull was black as ebony. He dashed fearlessly into the arena, charged and wheeled and tossed his horns in the splendor of his strength, sending every red-vested _chulo_ scrambling over the wall. Then he backed to the middle of the sanded circle, snorting and pawing the earth. Another instant, and the nearest horse and rider went crashing against the barrier. The _picador_, with a bruised face, forced up the gasping horse, mounted and rode it, the beast treading out its entrails as it went, to meet a second charge. But the swaying horse fell dead before it reached those lowered horns again. The next _picador_, too, went down heavily under his jade and received an awkward sprain. He mounted once more, to show that he could, and the circus cheered him, but his horse, torn to death, could not bear his weight. He gave it an angry push with the foot as he left it writhing in its life-blood. This whirlwind of a bull, who shook off all but one of the _banderillas_, mortified even the _matadores_. Disregarding the red rag, he rushed at Fuentes himself. The nimble _torero_ leapt aside, but the bull's horn struck his sword and sent it spinning half across the arena. His comrades immediately ran, with waving _capas_ and bright steel, to his aid, but that too intelligent bull, fighting for his life, kept his foes at bay until the circus hissed with impatience. The _toreros_, visibly nettled, gathered closer and closer, but had to play that death-game cautiously. This bull was dangerous. The coliseum found him tedious. He took too long in dying. Stabbed again and again and again, he yet agonized to his feet and shook those crimsoned horns at his tormentors, who still hung back. It really was dull. The _matadores_ buzzed about him, worrying his dying sight, but he stood sullen in their midst, refusing the charges to which they tempted him, guarding his last drops of strength, and, cardinal offence in a _toro_, holding his head too high for the professional stroke. His vital force was ebbing. Red foam dripped from his mouth. That weary hoof no longer pawed the earth. The people shouted insults even to their pet Guerrita, but Guerrita, like the rest, stood baffled. At last that formidable figure, no longer black, but a red glaze of blood and sweat and foam, fell in a sudden convulsion. Then his valiant murderers sprang upon him, the stabs came thick and fast, and the jingling mule-team pranced in to form his funeral cortège. One more,--the sixth. I was long past indignation, past any acuteness of pain, simply sickened through body and soul and unutterably wearied with this hideous monotony of slaughter. The last bull, a white star shining on his black forehead, tore into the arena, raced all about the circle, and struck with amazing rapidity wherever he saw a foe. Three horses were down, were up again, and were forced, all with trailing intestines, to a second charge. The bull flashed like a thunderbolt from one to another, rending and digging with his savage horns, until three mangled bodies writhed on the reddened sand, and stabbers watched their chances to run forward and quiet with the knife the horrible beating of those hoofs in air. The circus yelled delight. It had all been the work of a moment,--a brave bull, a great sensation! For the performers it was rather too much of a good thing. Those disembowelled carcasses cluttered up the arena. The scattered entrails were slippery under foot. The dart-throwers hastened to the next act of the tragedy. Theirs was a subtlety too much for the fury-fuddled wits of that mighty, blundering brute. He galloped to and fro, spending his strength in useless charges and, a score of times, ignoring the men to hook wildly at their brandished strips of colored cloth. The darts had been planted and he was losing blood. The _matador_ went to his work, but the uncivil bull did not make it easy for him. Bombita could not get in a handsome blow. The house began to hoot and taunt. A stentorian voice called to him to "kill that bull to-morrow." Exasperated by the laughter that greeted this sally, Bombita drove his Toledo blade to its mark. While the final scene of general stabbing was going on, boys, men, even women vaulted into the arena, played over again with one another the more memorable incidents, ran to inspect those shapeless carcasses of what God created horses, and escorted the funeral train of the bull, one small boy riding in gleeful triumph on top of the great black body, harmless and still at last. As we passed out by a hallway where the dead animals had been dragged, we had to pick our way through pools of blood and clots of entrails. Thus by the road of the shambles we came forth from hell. [Illustration: THE GIRALDA] "I do not understand at all," sincerely protested my Spanish host, disconcerted by the continued nausea and horror of red dreams which, justly enough, pursued me for weeks after. "It was a very favorable _corrida_ for a beginner,--no serious accident, no use of the fire-darts, no houghing of the bull with the demi-lune, nothing objectionable. And, after all, animals are only animals; they are not Christians." "Who were the Christians in that circus?" I asked. "How could devils have been worse than we?" He half glanced toward the morning paper but was too kindly to speak his thought. It was not necessary. I had read the paper, which gave half a column to a detailed account of a recent lynching, with torture, in the United States. X GYPSIES "'Life is sweet, brother.' "'Do you think so?' "'Think so!--There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?' "'I would wish to die.' "'You talk like a gorgio--which is the same as talking like a fool--were you a Rommany Chal you would talk wiser. Wish to die, indeed!--A Rommany Chal would wish to live forever!' "'In sickness, Jasper?' "'There's the sun and stars, brother.' "'In blindness, Jasper?' "'There's the wind on the heath, brother; if I could only feel that, I would gladly live forever. _Dosta_, we'll now go to the tents and put on the gloves; and I'll try to make you feel what a sweet thing it is to be alive, brother!'" --GEORGE BORROW. No foreigner has known the Zingali better than George Borrow, the linguistic Englishman, who could speak Rommany so well that gypsies all over Europe took him for a brother. In the employ of the English Bible Society, he spent some five adventurous years in Spain, wandering through the wilds and sharing the life of shepherds, muleteers, even the fierce _gitanos_. As he found the Spanish gypsies half a century ago, so, in essentials, are they still--the men jockeys, tinkers, and blacksmiths, the women fortune tellers and dancers, the children the most shameless little beggars of all the Peninsula. Yet there has been an improvement. The _gitanos_ are not such ruffians as of old, nor even such arrant thieves, although it would still be unwise to trust them within call of temptation. "There runs a swine down yonder hill, As fast as e'er he can, And as he runs he crieth still, 'Come, steal me, Gypsyman.'" Still more compromising is the Christmas carol:-- "Into the porch of Bethlehem Have crept the gypsies wild, And they have stolen the swaddling clothes Of the new-born Holy Child. "Oh, those swarthy gypsies! What won't the rascals dare? They have not left the Christ Child A single shred to wear." There are wealthy gypsies, whose wives and daughters go arrayed with the utmost elegance of fashion, in several Spanish cities. Seville has her gypsy lawyer, but her gypsy bull-fighter, who died two years ago, was held to reflect even greater credit on the parent stock. By law the gypsies are now established as Spaniards, with full claim to Spanish rights and privileges--_Nuevos Castellanos_, as they have been called since the day when Spain bethought her of these Ishmaels as "food for powder" and subjected them to the regular military draft. Even in Granada, where the gypsy community still lives in semi-barbarism, there are hopeful signs. The _gitanos_ drive a sharp trade in donkeys, but their forge fires, gleaming far up the Albaicín in the evening, testify to their industry. The recent opening by the municipality of schools for the gypsy children has already wrought a marked change for the better. Some half-dozen dirty little palms, outstretched for _cinco centimos_, pester the stranger to-day where scores used to torment him, and the mothers take pride in the literary accomplishments of their tawny broods. On one occasion, when, having, as the Spanish say, "clean pockets," I firmly declined to see a small gypsy girl dance or hear her sing, the mother assured me, as a last greedy expedient, that "the child could pray." On the Alhambra hill the gypsies, who scent tourists from afar and troop thither, on the track of newly arrived parties, like wolves to their banquet, are picturesque figures enough, the men in peaked hats, spangled jackets, and sashes of red silk, the women with bright handkerchiefs bound over their raven hair, large silver earrings, gay bodices, and short, flounced petticoats. There is one old _gitano_, in resplendent attire, who haunts the Alhambra doors and introduces himself to visitors, with bows queerly compounded of condescension and supplication, as the King of the Gypsies, modestly offering his photograph for a _peseta_. If you turn to your attendant Spaniard and ask, _sotto voce_, "But is this truly the Gypsy King?" you will receive a prompt affirmative, while the quick-witted old masquerader strikes a royal attitude, rolls his eyes prodigiously, and twirls his three-cornered hat at arm's length above his head, until its tinsel ornaments sparkle like crown jewels. But no sooner is his Majesty well out of hearing than your guide hastens to eat his own words. "No, no, no! He is not the King of the Gypsies, but he is a gypsy, yes, and it is better not to have his ill will." Whether this hardened pretender could cast the evil eye or not, we never knew, for having bought two of his pictures at the first onset, we suffered ever afterward the sunshine of his favor. In fact we often made a wide detour rather than pass him on the hill, for he would spring to his feet at our remotest approach and stand bowing like an image of perpetual motion, his hat brandished high in air, until our utmost in the way of answering nods and smiles seemed by contrast sheer democratic incivility. The swarthy faces and glittering eyes of the gypsies meet one everywhere in the Granada streets, but to see them in their own precinct it is necessary to take off your watch, empty your pockets of all but small silver and coppers, and go to the Albaicín. This hill, parted from the Alhambra by the deep ravine of the gold-bearing Darro, was in Moorish times the chosen residence of the aristocracy. Still Arabian arches span the gorge, and many of the toppling old houses that lean over the swift, mountain-born current, shabby as they look to the passer-by, are beautiful within with arabesque and fretwork, carven niches, delicate columns and open patios, where fountains still gush and orange blossoms still shed fragrance. Such degenerate palaces are often occupied by the better class of gypsies, those who traffic in horses, as well as in donkeys, while their women, grouped in the courts and doorways, embroider with rainbow wools, in all fantastic patterns, the stout mantles of the Andalusian mountaineers. As we climbed the Albaicín, fronting as it does the hill of the Alhambra, the exceeding beauty of the view at first claimed all our power of seeing. Below was the gray sweep of the city and beyond the fruitful plain of Granada, its vivid green shading into a far-off dimness like the sea. Just opposite us rose the fortress of the Alhambra, a proud though broken girdle of walls and towers, while in the background soared the dazzling snow peaks of the Sierra Nevada, glistening with unbearable splendor under the intense blue of the Andalusian sky. In the midst of our rhapsodies I became aware of a shrill voice at my feet, a persistent tug at my skirts, and reluctantly dropped my eyes on a comely little gypsy lass lying along a sunny ledge and imperiously demanding _cinco centimos_. "Now what would you do with _cinco centimos_ if you had them?" With the universal beggar gesture she pointed to her mouth. "Buy a rusk. I am starving. I am already dead of hunger." Crossing her hands upon her breast, she closed her eyes in token of her mortal extremity, but instantly flashed them open again to note the effect. "Your cheeks are not the cheeks of famine." At a breath the young sorceress sucked them in and succeeded, plump little person though she was, in looking so haggard and so woe-begone that our political economy broke down in laughter, and we gave her the coveted cent in return for her transformation act. Off she darted, with her wild locks flying in the wind, and was back in a twinkling, a circlet of bread suspended from her arm. She tripped along beside us for the rest of the afternoon, using the rusk sometimes as a hoop, sometimes as a crown, sometimes as a peephole. She tossed it, sang through it, dandled it, stroked it, and occasionally, while the bread approximated more and more in hue to her own gypsy complexion, took an artistic nibble, dotting the surface with a symmetrical curve of bites. It was not mere food to her; it was luxury, it was mirth--like a Lord Mayor's feast or a Delmonico breakfast. Following the _Camino del Sacro Monte_, marked by many crosses, our attention was more and more withdrawn from the majestic views spread out before us to the gypsies, whose cave dwellings lined the way. Burrowing into the earth, from the midst of thickets of prickly pear, are these strange abodes, whose chimneys rise abruptly out of the green surface of the hillside. Dens as they are, the best of them possess some decencies. Flaps of cloth serve them for doors, their peering fronts are whitewashed, they are furnished with a stool or two, a box of tools or clothing, a few water-jars, a guitar, and, in the farther end of the lair, a family bedstead, or more often a heap of dirty sheepskins. Cooking tins, bottles, saddles, and coils of rope hang on the rough walls; there may be a shelf of amulets and toys for sale, and the indispensable pot of _puchero_ simmers over a handful of fire. Out from these savage homes swarmed a whining, coaxing, importunate horde of sly-eyed women and an impish rabble of children. Young and old clutched at us with unclean hands, clung to us with sinewy brown arms, begged, flattered, demanded, and dragged us bodily into their hill. We felt as if we had gone back to German fairy tales and had fallen into the evil grip of the gnomes. Hardly could escort, carriage, and a reckless rain of coppers break the spell. We were forced to taste their repulsive messes, to cross witch palms with silver, to buy even the roadside weeds the urchins gathered before our eyes. We were birds for the plucking, sheep for the shearing. Only when we had turned our pockets inside out to show that we had not a "little dog" left, were we suffered to go free, followed, doubtless, by the curses of Egypt, because we had yielded such poor picking. In Seville, too, the gypsies have their own quarter, but in proportion as Seville is a gentler city than Granada, so are the looks and manners of her gypsy population more attractive. Crossing the yellow Guadalquivír by the bridge of Isabel Segunda, we come immediately on the picturesque, dark-visaged figures, with their uneffaced suggestion of wildness, of freedom, of traditions apart from the common humdrum of humanity. The boy, clad in one fluttering garment, who is perilously balancing his slender brown body on the iron rail; the bright-kerchiefed young mother, thrusting her tiny black bantling into our faces; the silent, swarthy men who lean along the bridge side, lithe even in their lounging;--all have a latent fierceness in their look. Their eyes are keen as knives--strange eyes, whose glitter masks the depth. But as we go on into the potter's suburb of Triana, into the thick of the gypsy life, we are not more seriously molested than by the continual begging, nor is this the rough, imperious begging of Granada; a flavor of Sevillian grace and fun has passed upon it. Offer this bush-headed lad, pleading starvation, the orange he has just tossed away, and he will double up over the joke and take to his little bare heels. Give to the fawning sibyl who insists on telling your fortune a red rose for her hair, and the chances are that she will rest content. But the time to see the gypsies in their glory is during the three days and nights of the _Feria_. On the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth of April Seville annually keeps, on the _Prado de San Sebastian_, where the Inquisition used to light its fires, the blithest of spring festivals. The _Feria_ is a fair, but much more than a fair. There are droves upon droves of horses, donkeys, cattle, goats, sheep, and pigs. There are rows upon rows of booths with toys, booths with nuts and candies, booths with the gay-handled Albacete knives and daggers. There are baskets upon baskets of rainbow fans, mimic fighting cocks, oranges, and other cheap Sevillian specialties. Cooling drinks are on sale at every turn, but there is no drunkenness. There are thousands and tens of thousands of people in motion, but there is no bustling, no elbowing, no rudeness of pressure. Dainty little children wander alone in that tremendous throng. The order and tranquillity that prevail by day and night in this multitude of merrymakers render it possible for the _Feria_ to be what it is. For during these enchanted April hours even the noblest families of Seville come forth from the proud seclusion of their patios and live in _casetas_, little rustic houses that are scarcely more than open tents, exposed to the gaze of every passer-by. A lofty bridge, crossed by two broad flights of stairs and tapering to a tower, stands at the intersection of the three chief _Feria_ avenues. The bridge is brilliantly illuminated by night, and close-set globes of gas, looped on running tubes along both sides of these three festal streets, pour floods of light into the _casetas_. Chinese lanterns in red and yellow abound, and lines of banner-staffs flaunt the Spanish colors. The _casetas_ are usually constructed of white canvas on a framework of light-brown fretwood, though the materials are sometimes more durable. Clubhouses are large and elaborate, and individual taste varies the aspect of the private tents. The more important families of Seville own their _casetas_, but in general these airy abodes are rented from year to year, the price for the three days of the _Feria_ ranging from twenty-five dollars on the central avenue to five dollars for the more remote houselets on the two streets that branch off at right angles. The numerous byways are occupied by cafés, booths, penny shows, and the like, the gypsies having one side of a lane to themselves. The other side is given over to circus-rings, merry-go-rounds, cradle-swings marked "For Havana," "For Manila," "For Madrid," dancing dwarfs, braying bands, caged bulls, and tents provided with peepholes through which one may see "The Glorious Victory of the Spanish Troops at Santiago," and other surprising panoramas of the recent war. These are in high favor with soldiers and small boys, whose black heads bump together at every aperture. Such attractions are especially potent over the country folk, who come jogging into Seville during fair time, mounted two or three together on jaded horses, sorry mules, and even on indignant little donkeys. Their peasant costumes add richly to the charm of the spectacle, and their simplicity makes them an easy spoil for the canny folk of Egypt. You see them especially in the cool of the early morning, when trade in cattle is at its liveliest. Ten to one they have been fleeced already by the _gitanos_, who, out in the great meadow where the live-stock is exposed for sale, have their own corner for "dead donkeys," as the Sevillians term the decrepit old beasts that have been magically spruced up for the occasion. Cervantes has his jest at "a gypsy's ass, with quicksilver in its ears." Then comes the turn of the _gitanas_, looking their prettiest, with roses in hair, and over the shoulders those captivating black silk shawls embroidered in many-colored patterns of birds and flowers. The younger enchantresses keep watch, each in front of her family tent, before whose parted curtains the more ill-favored women of the household are busy frying the crisp brown _buñuelos_, a species of doughnut dear to the Spanish tooth. As you loiter down the lane, be you wide-eyed shepherd from the provinces, or elegant grandee from Madrid, or haughty foreigner from London or Vienna, the sturdy sirens rush upon you, seize you by arm or neck, and by main force tug you into their tented prisons, from which you must gnaw your way out through a heap of hot _buñuelos_. Or you may compromise on a cup of Spanish chocolate, flavored with cinnamon and thick as flannel, or perhaps win your liberty by gulping down a cupful of warm goat's milk. The prices shock the portliest purses, but at your first faint sign of protest a gathering mob of gypsies presses close with jeers and hisses, and even the frying-pan sputters contempt. The _Feria_ presents its most quiet aspect during the afternoon. Some twenty or thirty thousand of the promenaders have been drawn off by the superior attraction of the bull-fight, and others have retired for their siestas. Yet there are thousands left. This is a grand time for the children, who disport themselves in the avenues with whistles, swords, balls, kites, and other trophies from the toy booths. These little people are exquisitely dressed, often in the old Andalusian costumes, and tiny lad and tiny lass, of aristocratic look and bearing, may be seen tripping together through one of the graceful national dances in the midst of a sidewalk throng. The toddlers, too, are out, under charge of happy nursemaids. Even the babies have been brought to the fair, and lie, contentedly sucking their rosy thumbs, in the doorways of the _casetas_. The lords of these doll-houses are enjoying peaceful smokes together in the background of the open parlors, which are furnished with as many chairs as possible, a piano, and a central stand of flowers; while semicircles of silent ladies, languidly waving the most exquisite of fans, sit nearer the front, watching the ceaseless stream of pedestrians, and beyond these the double procession of carriages, which keep close rank as they advance on one side of the avenue and return on the other. It is bad form not to go to the _Feria_ once at least in a carriage. Large families of limited means hire spacious vehicles resembling omnibuses, and, squeezed together in two opposite rows, drive up and down the three chief streets for hours. There are crested landaus, with handsome horses, gay donkey-carts, decked out with wreaths and tassels, shabby cabs, sporting red and yellow ribbons on their whips, tooting coaches--every sort and kind of contrivance for relieving humanity of its own weight. There are mounted cavaliers in plenty, and occasionally, under due masculine escort, a fair-haired English girl rides by, or a group of Spanish señoras, who have come into Seville on horseback from their country homes. But all this movement is slow and dreamy, the play of the children being as gentle as the waving of the fans. Even Gypsy Lane shares in the tranquillity of the drowsy afternoon. We were captured there almost without violence, and, while we trifled with the slightest refreshment we could find, a juvenile entertainment beguiled us of our coppers with pleasurable ease. A coquettish midget of four summers innocently danced for us the dances that are not innocent, and a wee goblin of seven, who could not be induced to perform without a cap, that he might pull it down over his bashful eyes, stamped and kicked, made stealthy approaches and fierce starts of attack through the savage hunting jigs inherited from the ancient life of the wilderness. The women swung their arms and shrilled wild tunes to urge the children on, but a second youngster who attempted one of these barbaric dances for us broke down in mid career, and, amid a chorus of screaming laughter, buried his blushes in his mother's lap. The tent had become crowded with stalwart, black _gitanos_, but they were in a domestic mood, smiled on the children's antics, and eyed us with grim amusement as the women caught up from rough cradles and thrust into our arms those elfish babies of theirs. Even the infant of five days winked at us with trickery in its jet beads of vision. But so inert was gypsy enterprise that we were suffered to depart with a few _pesetas_ yet in our possession. In the evening, from eight till one, the _Feria_ is perfect Fairyland. Under the light of those clustered gas globes and butterfly-colored lanterns pass and repass the loveliest women of the world. Beautifully clad as the señoritas have been during morning and afternoon, their evening toilets excel and crown the rest. White-robed, white-sandalled, their brown, bewitching faces peeping out from the lace folds of white mantillas, with white shawls, embroidered in glowing hues, folded over the arm, and delicate white fans in hand, they look the very poetry of maidenhood. Months of saving, weeks of stitching, these costumes may have cost, but the _Feria_ is, above all, a marriage mart, and the Andalusian girl, usually so strictly guarded, so jealously secluded, never allowed to walk or shop alone, is now on exhibition. As these radiant forms glide along the avenues, the men who meet them coolly bend and look full into their faces, scanning line and feature with the critical air of connoisseurs. But well these cavaliers illustrate the Andalusian catch:-- "Because I look thee in the face, Set not for this thy hopes too high, For many go to the market-place To see and not to buy." The girl's opportunity is in her dancing. Every Andalusian woman, high or low, knows the _Sevillana_. Some have been trained in it by accredited teachers of the art, but the most learn the dance in childhood, as naturally as they learn to speak and sing. They are never weary of dancing it, morning, noon, and night, two girls together, or a girl and a lad, but such dancing is confined to the Moorish privacy of the Spanish home--except in Fair time. Then the whole world may stand before the _casetas_ and see the choicest daughters of Seville dancing the dance that is very coquetry in motion. Rows of girls awaiting their turn, and of matrons who are chaperoning the spectacle, sit about the three sides of the mimic drawing-room. A dense crowd of men, crying "_Ole! Ole!_" and commenting as freely on the figures and postures of the dancers as if they were ballet artistes in a café chantant, is gathered close in front. For their view these rhythmic maidens dance on, hour after hour, until their great, dusky eyes are dim with sleep. The tassels of curly ribbon, tinted to match the dainty touches of color in their costumes, seem to droop in exhaustion from the tossing castanets. What matter? For a Spanish girl to reach her twenty-fifth birthday without a _novio_ is a tragedy of failure, and these tired dancers are well aware that _caballeros_ are making the rounds from _caseta_ to _caseta_, on purpose to select a wife. In Gypsy Lane there is no sugar coating. The Flamenco dances are directly seductive. The life of the forest animal seems reproduced in the fierceness, the fitfulness, the abandon, of each strange series of abrupt gesticulations. Yet these gypsy women, boldly as they play on the passions of the spectators, care only for Gentile money, and fling off with fiery scorn the addresses that their songs and dances court. Many a flouted gallant could tell the tale of one who "Like a right gypsy, hath, at fast and loose, Beguiled me to the very heart of loss." Husbands and lovers look on at the dancers' most extreme poses, even caresses, in nonchalant security. While one _gitana_ after another takes the stage, a crescent of men and women, seated behind, cheer her on with cries and clappings, strummings of the guitar, and frenzied beatings of the floor with staff and stool. Yet their excitement, even at its apparent height, never sweeps them out of their crafty selves. Beyond the dancer they see the audience. Disdain and dislike are in the atmosphere, and never more than when the rain of silver is at its richest. Still they follow the gypsy law, "To cheat and rob the stranger always and ever, and be true only to our own blood." [Illustration: THE PASSING OF THE PAGEANTS] XI THE ROUTE OF THE SILVER FLEETS "Paul, the Physician, to Cristobal Colombo, greeting. I perceive your magnificent and great desire to find a way to where the spices grow." "And thus leade they their lyves in fullfilling the holy hunger of golde. But the more they fill their handes with finding, the more increaseth their covetous desire." --_Decades in the New Worlde._ I wanted to go from Seville to Cadiz by water. I longed to sail by the "Silver Road" in the wake of the silver fleets. The little artist, as befitted her youth, preferred a Manila shawl to that historic pilgrimage. So I proposed to make this trifling trip alone. Don José was shocked. Merriest and most indulgent of hosts, he was inclined at this point to play the tyrant. If I must see Cadiz, well and good. He would take me to the morning express and put me under charge of the conductor. At Utrera, an hour farther on, his son would come to the train and see that all was well. At _Puerto de Santa Maria_, another hour distant, I should be met by a trusted friend of the family, who would transfer me to another train and another conductor, and so speed me for my third hour to Cadiz, where I should be greeted by a relative of mine hostess and conveyed in safety to his home. I appreciated the kindness involved in this very Andalusian programme, but otherwise it did not appeal to me. That was not the way Columbus went, nor Cortés. And much as I delighted in the Alhambra, and the Mosque of Cordova, and the Alcázar of Seville, I did not feel called upon to bow a New England bonnet beneath the Moorish yoke. Thus Don José and I found ourselves quietly engaged in an Hispano-American contest. He heartily disapproved of my going, even by train. "_Una señora sola!_ It is not the custom in Andalusia." His plan of campaign consisted in deferring the arrangements from day to day. "_Mañana!_" Whenever I attempted to set a time for departure he blandly assented, and presently projected some irresistibly attractive excursion for that very date. His household were all with him. His wife had not been able to procure the particular _dulces_ indispensable to a traveller's luncheon. Even my faithless comrade, draped in her flower-garden shawl, practised the steps of a _seguidilla_ to the rattle of the castanets and laughed at my defeats. At last, grown desperate, I suavely announced at the Sunday dinner table that I was going to Cadiz that week. My host said, "_Bueno!_" and my hostess, "_Muy bien!_" But there was no surrender in their tones. On Monday, instead of writing the requisite notes to these relays of protectors along the route, Don José took us himself, on a mimic steamboat, for a judicious distance down the Guadalquivír. Tuesday he put me off with Roman ruins, and Wednesday with a private gallery of Murillos. By Thursday I grew insistent, and, with shrug and sigh, he finally consented to my going by train on Friday. I still urged the boat, but he heaped up a thousand difficulties. There wasn't any; it would be overcrowded; I should be seasick; the boat would arrive, wherever it might arrive, too late for my train, whatever my train might be. Compromise is always becoming, and I agreed to take the nine o'clock express in the morning. After the extended Spanish farewells, for to kiss on both cheeks and be kissed on both cheeks down a long feminine line, mother, daughters, and maid-servants, is no hasty ceremony, I sallied forth at half-past eight with Don José in attendance. He called a cab, but in Spain the cabbies are men and brothers, and this one, on learning our destination, declared that the train did not start until half-past nine and it was much better for a lady to wait _en casa_ than at the depot. This additional guardianship goaded me to active remonstrance. Why not take the cab for the hour and look up a procession on our way to the station? There are always processions in Seville. This appealed to both the pleasure-loving Spaniards, and we drove into the palmy _Plaza de San Fernando_, where an array of military bands was serenading some civic dignitary. The music was of the best, and we fell in with the large and varied retinue that escorted the musicians to the palace of the archbishop. As they were rousing him from his reverend slumbers with _La Marcha de Cadiz_, I caught a twinkle in Don José's eye. Did he hope to keep me chasing after those bands all the forenoon? I awakened the cabman, whom the music had lulled into the easy Andalusian doze, and we clattered off to the station. Of all silent and forsaken places! I looked suspiciously at Don José, whose swarthy countenance wore an overdone expression of innocent surprise. A solitary official sauntered out. "Good morning, señor! Is the express gone?" asked the driver. "Good morning, señor! There isn't any express to-day," was the reply. "The express runs only Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays." "What a pity," cooed Don José, contentedly. "You will have to wait till to-morrow." "Yes, you can go to-morrow," indulgently added the driver, and the official chimed sweetly in, "_Mañana por la mañana!_" "But is there no other train to-day?" I asked. The official admitted that there was one at three o'clock. Don José gave him a reproachful glance. "But you do not want to go by train," said my ingenious host. "Perhaps to-morrow you can go by steamboat." "Perhaps I can go by steamboat now," I returned, seizing my opportunity. "When does that boat start?" Nobody knew. I asked the cabman to drive us to the Golden Tower, off which sea-going vessels usually anchor. Don José fell back in his seat, exhausted. The cabman drove so fast, for Seville, that we ran into a donkey and made a paralyzed beggar jump, but we reached the river in time to see a small steamer just in the act of swinging loose from the pier. In the excitement of the moment Don José forgot everything save the necessity of properly presenting me to the captain, and I, for my part, was absorbed in the ecstasy of sailing from the foot of the Golden Tower along the Silver Road. It was not until a rod of water lay between boat and wharf that the captain shouted to Don José, who struck an attitude of utter consternation, that this craft went only to Bonanza, and no connection could be made from there to Cadiz until the following afternoon. And I, mindful of the austere dignity that befitted these critical circumstances, could not even laugh. It was a dirty little boat, with a malodorous cargo of fish, and for passengers two soldiers, two peasants, and a commercial traveller. But what of that? I was sailing on a treasure ship of the Indies, one of those lofty galleons of Spain, "rowed by thrice one hundred slaves and gay with streamers, banners, music," that had delivered at the Golden Tower her tribute from the hoard of the Incas, and was proudly bearing back to the open roads of Cadiz. We dropped down past a noble line of deep-sea merchantmen, from Marseilles, Hamburg, and far-away ports of Norway and Sweden. We passed fishing boats casting their nets, and met a stately Spanish bark, the _Calderon_. On the shores we caught glimpses of orange grove and olive orchard, lines of osiers and white poplars, and we paused at the little town of Coria, famous for its earthen jars, to land one of our peasants, while a jolly priest, whose plain black garb was relieved by a vermilion parasol, tossed down cigars to his friends among the sailors. Then our galleon pursued her course into the flat and desolate regions of the _marismas_. These great salt marshes of the Guadalquivír, scarcely more than a bog in winter, serve as pasture for herds of hardy sheep and for those droves of mighty bulls bred in Andalusia to die in the arenas of all Spain. For long stretches the green bank would be lined with the glorious creatures, standing like ebony statues deep amid the reeds, some entirely black, and many black with slight markings of white. The Guadalquivír intersects in triple channel this unpeopled waste, concerning whose profusion of plant life and animal life English hunters tell strange tales. They report flocks of rosy flamingoes, three hundred or five hundred in a column, "glinting in the sunshine like a pink cloud," and muddy islets studded thick with colonies of flamingo nests. Most wonderful of all, the camel, that ancient and serious beast of burden, a figure pertaining in all imaginations to the arid, sandy desert, keeps holiday in these huge swamps. It seems that, in 1829, a herd of camels was brought into the province of Cadiz, from the Canaries, for transport service in road-building and the like, and for trial in agriculture. But the peculiar distaste of horses for these humpy monsters spoiled the scheme, and the camels, increased to some eighty in number, took merrily to the marshes, where, in defiance of all caravan tradition, they thrive in aquatic liberty. The fascination of this wilderness reached even the dingy steamer deck. Gulls, ducks, and all manner of wild fowl flashed in the sunshine, which often made the winding river, as tawny as our James, sparkle like liquid gold. If only it had been gold indeed, and had kept the traceries of the Roman keels that have traversed it, the Vandal swords whose red it has washed away, the Moorish faces it has mirrored, the Spanish-- "_Usted come?_" It might have been Cortes who was offering that bowl of _puchero_, but no! Cortes would have mixed it in his plumy helmet and stirred it with that thin, keen sword one may see in the Madrid _Armería_. This was a barefooted cabin boy, in blue linen blouse and patched blue trousers, with a scarlet cloth cap tied over his head by means of an orange-colored handkerchief. The dancing eyes that lit his shy brown face had sea blues in them. He was a winsome little fellow enough, but I did not incline to his cookery. While I was watching river, shores, and herds and chatting with the _simpático_ sailor, who, taking his cue from my look, expressed the deepest abhorrence of the bull-fights, which, I make no doubt, he would sell his dinner, jacket, bed, even his guitar, to see, I had taken secret note of the cuisine. This child, who could not have counted his twelfth birthday, kindled the fire in a flimsy tin pail, lined with broken bricks. He cracked over his knee a few pieces of driftwood, mixed the fragments with bits of coal which he shook out of a sheepskin bottle, doused oil over the whole, and cheerfully applied the match, while the commercial traveller hastily drew up a bucket of water to have on hand for emergencies. Then the boy, with excellent intentions in the way of neatness, whisked his blackened hands across the rough end of a rope and plunged them into the pot of _garbanzos_, to which he added beans, cabbage, remnants of fried fish, and other sundries at his young discretion. And while the mess was simmering, he squatted down on the deck, with his grimy little feet in his fists, rocking himself back and forth to his own wild Malaga songs, and occasionally disengaging one hand or the other to plunge it into the pot after a tasty morsel. "Will you eat?" he repeated manfully, reddening under the scrutiny of stranger eyes. "Many thanks! May it profit yourself!" I opened my luncheon, and again we exchanged these fixed phrases of Spanish etiquette, although after the refusals enjoined by code of courtesy, the boy was finally induced to relieve me of my more indigestible goodies. "Did you ever hear of Columbus?" I asked, as we munched chestnut cakes together, leaning on the rail. "No, señora," he replied, with another blush, "I have heard of nothing. I know little. I am of very small account. I cook and sing. I am good for nothing more." And is it to this those arrogant Spanish boasts, which rang like trumpets up and down the Guadalquivír, have come at last! We were in the heart of a perfect sapphire day. The river, often turbulent and unruly, was on this April afternoon, the sailors said, _buen muchacho_, a good boy. The boat appeared to navigate herself. The captain nodded on his lofty perch, and the engineer was curled up in his own tiny hatchway, trying to read a newspaper, which the fresh breeze blew into horns and balloons. The rough cabin bunks were full of sleeping forms, and the leather wine-bottles, flung down carelessly in the stern, had cuddled each to each in cozy shapes, and seemed to be sleeping, too. The two soldiers, who had been gambling with coppers over innumerable games of dominos, were listening grimly to the oratory of the commercial traveller. "No fighting for me!" this hero was declaiming. "In strenuous times like these a man ought to cherish his life for the sake of his country. Spain needs her sons right here at home. It is sweet, as the poet says, to die for the _patria_, but to live for the _patria_ is, in my opinion, just as glorious." "And more comfortable," grunted one of the soldiers, while the other gave a hitch to those red infantry trousers which look as if they had been wading in blood, and walked forward to view from the bows the little white port of Bonanza. As the boat went no farther, I had to stain my silver route by a prosaic parenthesis of land. It was some comfort to remember that Magellan waited here for that expedition from Seville which was the first to sail around the globe. I think I travelled the three miles from Bonanza, Good Weather, to San Lúcar de Barrameda in Magellan's own carriage. It was certainly old enough. As I sat on a tipsy chair in the middle of a rude wagon frame mounted on two shrieking wooden wheels, and hooded with broken arches of bamboo, from which flapped shreds of russet oilcloth, I entered into poignant sympathy with Magellan's ups and downs of hope and fear. The jolting was such a torture that, to divert my attention, I questioned the driver as to the uses of this and that appliance in his rickety ark. "And what are those ropes for, there in the corner?" was my final query. "Those are to tie the coffins down when I have a fare for the cemetery," he replied, cracking his whip over the incredibly lean mule that was sulkily jerking us along. "Please let me get out and walk," I entreated. "You may keep the valise and show me the way to the inn, and I can go quite as fast as that mule." "Now, don't!" he begged, with even intenser pathos. "Strangers always want to walk before they get to the inn, and then the people laugh at me. I know my carriage isn't very handsome, but it's the only one in Bonanza. Just do me the favor to keep your seat a little longer." I had been lurched out of it only a minute before, but I could not refuse to sacrifice mere bodily ease to the pride of Spanish spirit. Notwithstanding Don José's dark predictions, this was the only trial of the trip. To realize to the full the honesty, kindliness, and dignity of the everyday Spaniard, one needs to turn off from the sight-seer's route. On the beaten tourist track are exorbitant hotels, greedy guides, cheating merchants, troops of beggars--everywhere "the itching palm." But here in San Lúcar, for instance, where I had to spend twenty-four hours at a genuine Spanish _fonda_, the proprietor took no advantage of the facts that I was a foreigner, a woman, and practically a prisoner in the place until the Saturday afternoon train went out, but gave me excellent accommodations, most respectful and considerate treatment, and the lowest hotel bill that I had seen in Spain. San Lúcar has, in early Spanish literature, a very ill name for roguery, but, so far as my brief experience went, Boston could not have been safer and would not have been so genial. I strayed, for instance, into a modest little shop to buy a cake of soap, which its owner declined to sell, insisting that I ought to have a choicer variety than his, and sending his son, a lad of sixteen, to point me out more fashionable counters. This youth showed me the sights of the pleasant seashore town, with its tiers of closely grated windows standing out from the white fronts of the houses, and its sturdy packhorses and orange-laden donkeys streaming along the rough stone streets, and when, at the inn door, I hesitatingly offered him a piece of silver, doffed his cap with smiling ease, and said he did not take pay for a pleasure. Once off the regular lines of travel, however, speed is out of the question. I might have gone from Seville to Cadiz in three hours; thanks to historic enthusiasms, it took me nearer three days. After escaping from San Lúcar, I had to pass four hours in Jerez, another whitewashed, palm-planted town, whose famous sherry has made it the third city in Spain for wealth. The thing to do at Jerez is to visit the great _bodegas_ and taste the rich white liquors treasured in those monster casks, which bear all manner of names, from Christ and His twelve disciples to Napoleon the Great; but mindful, in the light of Don José's admonitions, that the weak feminine estate is "as water unto wine," I contented myself with seeing the strange storage basin of the mountain aqueduct--an immense, immaculate cellar, where endless vistas of low stone arches stretch away in the silent dusk above the glimmer of a ghostly lake. The train for Cadiz must needs be two hours late this particular evening, but my cabman drove me to approved shops for the purchase of bread and fruit, and then, of his own motion, drew up our modest equipage in a shady nook opposite the villa of the English consul, that I might enjoy my Arcadian repast with a secure mind. Jehu accepted, after due protestations, a share of the viands, and reciprocated the attention by buying me a glass of water at the nearest stand, much amused at my continued preference for Jerez water over Jerez wine. One of the Jerez wine merchants, German by birth, shared the railway carriage with me for a while, and after the social wont of Continental travel fell to discussing the war. "The Spaniards deserved to be beaten," he declared, "but the Yankees didn't deserve to beat. They were conceited enough before, heaven knows, and now they expect all Europe to black their shoddy shoes. Your own country was a bit to blame in blocking every effort to keep them in their place." I felt it time to explain that I was not English, but American. Much disconcerted, he did his best to make amends. "I wouldn't have said that for the world if I had known you were an American--but it's every syllable true." He thought over this remark in silence for a moment, his Teutonic spirit sorely strained between kindliness and honesty, and tried again. "I would like to say something good about the United States, I would indeed,--if there was anything to say." It seemed to occur to him, after a little, that even this apology left something to be desired, and he brightened up. "Wouldn't you like some roses? They sell them here at this station. There comes a boy now with a nice, big bunch. One _peseta_! I think that's too dear, don't you?" I hastened to assent. "The lady says that's too dear. Seventy-five _centimos_? No. The lady can't pay that. Sixty _centimos_? No. The lady can't afford sixty _centimos_. Fifty _centimos_? No. The lady says fifty _centimos_ is too much. She will take them at forty _centimos_. Here's a half _peseta_. And you must give me back a fat dog." The boy held back the penny and tried to substitute a cent. "Oh, sir, please, sir, forty-five _centimos_! There are two dozen roses here, and all fresh as the dawn. Give me the puppy-dog over." But the German, who knew how to put even a sharper edge on the inveterate Spanish bargaining, secured for the value of eight cents, instead of twenty, his great bouquet of really beautiful roses, and presented it with as much of a bow as the carriage limits permitted. "I meant to pay all the time, you know; but one can always make a better trade, in Spain, if it is done in the name of a lady." And he added, with that sudden tact which innate goodness and delicacy give to the most blundering of us mortals, "If you don't like to take them from a stranger for yourself, you will take them as my peace-offering to your country." I was reminded again of my native land by another fellow-traveller--a Spaniard of the Spaniards, this time, one of the Conservative and Catholic leaders, greeted at the various stations by priests and monks and friars, whose hands he solemnly kissed. This distinguished personage was absorbed in a voluminous type-written manuscript, from which he occasionally read aloud to the band of political confidants who accompanied him. It was an arraignment of the Liberal Party, and, by way of exposing the errors of the Sagasta government, included a merciless résumé of the Spanish naval and military disasters, with elaborate comparisons of the American and Spanish equipments. He was then on his way to join in a consoling pilgrimage to a certain image of Christ, which had been cudgelled by a grief-maddened priest whose dying mother the image had failed to heal. These surroundings more or less jostled my sixteenth-century dream, but I held to it so stubbornly that, when pyramids of salt began to glimmer like ghosts along the way, and a sweeping curve of lights warned me of our approach to Cadiz, I made a point of seeing as little as possible. It was midnight, but Spanish hours are luckily so late that Don José's friends were still at the height of evening sociability and regaled me with alternate showers of sweetmeats and questions. Finally, after many exclamations of horror at the audacity of the trip, all the feminine hospitality of the household lighted me to a chamber whose walls were hung with pictures of martyrs and agonizing saints. Among these I counted five colored representations of Christ opening his breast to display the bleeding heart. The next morning I promptly took boat to _Puerto de Santa Maria_, embarked on the return steamer, and so at last found myself once more on the Silver Road, entering Cadiz harbor from the sea. To be sure, the _Montserrat_ was riding proudly in my view, although the warships to which she had been used to curtsy in the open roads of Cadiz would never cut those shining waves again. The waters were as turquoise blue as if they had just come from the brush of an old master, and the towered city rose before us like a crystal castle in the air. Its limited space, built as it is within great sea walls on an outlying rock, which only a rope of sand moors to the mainland, has necessitated narrow streets and high houses, whose _miradores_, lookouts that everywhere crown the terraced roofs, give this battlemented aspect to the town. One of the most ancient and tragic cities known to time, claiming Hercules for its founder, in turn Phoenician, Carthaginian, Roman, Gothic, Moorish, Spanish, it yet looks fresh as a water-lily. I could have spent another three days in gazing. And this sparkling vision was Spain's _Copa de Plata_, the Silver Cup which has brimmed with the gold and pearls of America, with blood and flame and glory. Its riches have taken to themselves wings, but its high, free spirit and frank gayety abide. Still the Andalusians sing:-- "_Viva_ Cadiz, Silver Cadiz, Whose walls defy the sea, Cadiz of the pretty girls, Of courtesy and glee! "Good luck to merry Cadiz, As white as ocean spray, And her five and twenty cannon That point Gibraltar way!" But I am bound to add that the cannon do not look dangerous. XII MURILLO'S CHERUBS "Angels o'er the palm trees flying, Touch their waving fronds to rest. Bid them give no wind replying. Jesus sleeps on Mary's breast. Blesséd angels, hold the peeping Branches still as altar-place, For the Holy Child is sleeping Close beneath His Mother's face." --LOPE DE VEGA. Spanish love for childhood, and the precocity and winsomeness of Spanish children, impressed me from my first hour in the Peninsula. "There is no road so level as to be without rough places," and the initial days of my Madrid residence, after my artist comrade had gone back to Paris and the spring salons, might have been a trifle lonely save for baby society. I was living in a delightful Spanish household, but the very excess of courtesy reminded me continually that I was a Yankee and a heretic. As time passed, friendship ripened, and it is to-day no empty form of words when I am assured that I have "my house in Madrid." But at the outset I felt myself not only an American alien, but an Andalusian exile. The "only Court" is such a prosaic contrast to Seville that my impulse was to betake myself with books to the great park of the Buen Retiro, the magnificent gift of Olivares to his royal master, and let the Madrid world, at least the adult portion of it, go by. For while the larger Madrileños were busy with their own plays of politics, bull-fights, and flirtation, the little ones had happy afternoons in that historic park of many a tragedy, where convents, palaces, and fortifications have all made way for the children's romping ground. Resting on a rustic seat in the leafy shade, with the rich, thrilling notes of the nightingale answering the bell call of the cuckoo from the deeper groves beyond, I could watch these budding Spaniards to heart's content. It was well to observe them from a distance, however, for their young voices were of the shrillest. Among the boys, an energetic few were developing muscle by tag and leap-frog; more were flying kites, cracking whips, twirling slings, and brandishing the terrors of pewter swords; while at every turn, beside some flashing fountain or beneath some spreading oak, I would come upon a group of urchins playing _al toro_ with the cheap, gaudy capes of red and yellow manufactured for the children's sport. The girls were skipping rope, rolling hoop, teaching one another the steps of endless dances, and whispering momentous secrets in statue-guarded grottos, or thickets of flowering shrubs, or whatsoever safe, mysterious nook their fluttering search could find. Here was a school out for its daily airing, a pretty procession of rainbow-clad little damsels, marshalled by the black-veiled figures of graceful nuns, and pacing with all decorum down a crowded avenue; but the moment the troop turned into some sequestered by-path, how it would break into a shimmering confusion of butterflies, darting hither and thither in those jewel-green lights and sea-green shadows, the nuns casting their dignity to the winds and scampering with the swiftest! Wandering after I would come, perhaps, upon an open space where the smaller boys were gathered, delicate little lads riding horse-headed sticks, digging with mimic spades, and tossing big, soft, red and yellow balls, while mothers and nurses sat about in circle on the stone benches, calling out sharp-toned cautions to their respective charges. And everywhere in the park were toddling babies, clasping dolls, tugging at gay balloons, dragging wooden donkeys on wheels, and tumbling over live puppies. They were pale, engaging, persistent little creatures, with a true Spanish inability to learn from experience. I saw one aristocratic cherub, white as snow from feathered cap to ribboned shoes, take ten successive slappings because he muddied his hands. The angry nurse would make a snatch for the naughty fingers, roughly beat off the dirt, and cuff the culprit soundly. His proud little mouth would tremble; he would wink hard and fast, but there was not a tear to be seen, not a cry to be heard, and no sooner had her peasant clutch released him than back went the baby hands, grubbing deep into the mire. A gorgeous civil guard finally distracted her attention, and the last view I had of the child showed him blissfully squatted in the very middle of a puddle, splashing with arms and legs. White is almost the universal wear of the prattling age in the Buen Retiro, although now and then some lily fairy would flit by with saffron sash and harmonious saffron stockings, or costume similarly touched by pink or blue. The Scotch plaids, too, were in favor as sashes, and at rare intervals I encountered a tot sensibly attired in stout plaid frock. But the white of this childish multitude was thickly flecked with mourning suits, complete to bits of black gloves and even to jet studs in the collars. Among the sad sights of the Retiro was an epileptic boy, led and half supported between two sweet-faced, youthful ladies, both in widow's crêpe, who screened him with caresses as his fit took him and he foamed and screamed in piteous helplessness. This pathetic trio, ever seeking seclusion, was ever followed by a retinue of idlers, who, for all their intrusive staring, were silent and sympathetic. The nursemaids formed not the least attractive feature of the kaleidoscopic picture. Most wore white caps, fastened with gilded pins or knots of rose or russet; but the nurses counted the best, from the mountain province of Santander, were distinguished by bright-colored handkerchiefs twisted about the head. Here, as in the _Élysées_, baby-wagons are seldom seen. The nurses carry in arms the black-eyed infants, who bite away at their coral necklaces quite like little Yankees. But Spanish traits soon declare themselves. In the centre of the park is an artificial pond, where lads in their first teens, too old for play, lean languidly over the iron railings, and, while they throw crumbs to the flock of forlorn-looking ducks or watch the dip of the red oar-blades that impel the pleasure boats, brag of their amorous adventures and exchange the scandal of the _Prado_. Sometimes their love chat is of sweeter tenor, for many of these schoolboys have already spoken their betrothal vows, which the Church will not let them lightly break. Spaniards often marry under twenty-one, and even a recent wedding in Madrid, where neither bride nor bridegroom had reached the fifteenth year, was hardly thought amiss, in view of the fact that there was parental money to maintain them. And why had the stately city of Valladolid been under a reign of terror for half the week just past, with shutters up, doors barred, and women and children kept at home for safety, while bands of young men swayed in bloody struggle through her famous squares and streets, but because a cadet and a student must needs lose heart to the same maid? Cupid, not Santiago, is the patron saint of Spain. And Cupid, for all his mischief, has some very winning ways. Our boyish sentimentalists of the Buen Retiro, for instance, easily fall into song, and the native melodies, always with something wild and Oriental in their beat, ring across the little lake into the woods beyond till the birds take up the challenge and every tree grows vocal. One afternoon, on my way to the park, I bought from a roadside vender a handful of small, gaudily bound children's books, and had no sooner found what I fondly supposed was a sequestered seat than a tumult of little folks surrounded me, coaxing to hear the stories. These tales, so taken at random, may throw a little light on the literature of Spanish nurseries. There was the life of the Madonna, which we passed over, as the children said they had read it in school and knew it, every word, already. So we turned to the astonishing career of the great soldier, Kill-Bullet, who could easily stop a cannon-ball against his palm, and to an account of that far-off land where it rained gold in such profusion that nobody would work, until finally all the people, weary of a wealth which induced no tailor to stitch and no shoemaker to cobble, no baker to bake and no dairy-maid to churn, rose by common consent and shovelled the gold into the river. We read of hot-tempered little Ambrose, who left the gate of his garden open, so that a hen cackled in and began to scratch under a rose bush, whereupon the angry boy chased her furiously all over the garden-beds until his summer's work was trampled into ruin, and his papa came and explained to him how disastrous a thing is wrath. There was a companion moral tale for little girls, telling how Inez used to make faces until her mamma told her that she would grow up with a twisted mouth and nobody would marry her, whereat did little Inez promptly reform her manners. One favorite volume, with a cover which displayed a wild-whiskered old ogre in a fiery skullcap gloating over a platterful of very pink baby, told how good little Violet saved her bad sisters, Rose and Daisy, from his dreadful gullet, by aid of an ugly monkey, whom her promised kiss transformed into a fairy prince. I was glad to find, in that country where so little is done to train children in the love of animals, the ancient tale of the four musicians, the donkey, the dog, the cat, and the cock, who escaped in their old age from the death that threatened them at the hands of ungrateful masters and, by a free exercise of their musical talents, captured the house of a robber-band, putting its inmates to confusion and flight. Many of the stories, indeed, would have been recognized by young Americans, but the proportion of saint-lore was larger than that of fairy-lore, and, now and then, some familiar property had suffered a Spanish change, as the invisible cap which had become an invisible cape of the sort used for playing bull-fight. [Illustration: THE PAGEANT OF GETHSEMANE] The nursery rhymes, too, so far as I chanced upon them, were of the universal type with Spanish variations. A Castilian mother plays Peek-a-boo with her baby quite as an English mother does, except that the syllables are _Cú? Trás!_ The father's foot trots the child to a Catholic market. "Trot, little donkey! Donkey, trot! We must buy honey to please the pet. If San Francisco has it not, We'll go to San Benet." Baby's toes are counted as the eternal five little pigs, and also thus, with a preliminary tickling of the rosy sole:-- "Here passed a little dove. This one caught it. This one killed it. This one put it on to roast. This one took it off again. And this teeny-teeny-teeny scamp ate it all up!" Spanish patty-cakes are followed by a Spanish grace. "Patty-cakes, oh! Patty-cakes, ah! The sweetest cakes are for dear mama. Patty-cakes, oh! Patty-cakes, ah! The hardest pats are for poor papa, "Bread, O God! Bread, dear God, For this little child to-day! Because he's such a baby He cannot pay his way." The Spanish nursery seems richer in rhymes than ours. Nurse bends Baby's left hand into a rose-leaf purse, for example, and gives it little taps with one finger after another of Baby's right hand, singing:-- "A penny for Baby's purse From papa, mama, and nurse. A penny, a penny to pay! Let no thief steal it away!" And then the tiny fist is doubled tight. When the child, again, is first dressed in short clothes, he is propped up in a corner and coaxed to take his first step with the rhyme:-- "One little step, Baby-boy mine! Come, Little Man, step up! And thou shalt have a taste of wine From Godfather's silver cup." This rhyming fashion the little ones take with them out of babyhood into their later childhood. The urchin admonishes his whistle:-- "Whistle, whistle, Margarita, And you'll get a crust of bread, But if you do not whistle I'll cut off your little head." The little girl learns the scales in process of rocking her doll to sleep:-- Don't pin-prick my poor old dolly, _Do_ Respect my domestic matters. _Re_ Methinks she grows melancholy, _Mi_ Fast as her sawdust scatters. _Fa_ Sole rose of your mama's posy, _Sol_ Laugh at your mama, so! _La_ Seal up your eyes all cozy. _Si_ _La Sol Fa Mi Re Do._ With Spanish children, as with ours, Christmas Eve, or _Noche Buena_, is a season of gleeful excitement. They do not hang up stockings for Santa Claus, but they put out their shoes on the balcony for the Kings of the East, riding high on camel-back, to fill with sweets and playthings. Considerate children, too, put out a handful of straw for the tired beasts who have journeyed so far over the Milky Way. On some balconies the morning sun beholds rocking-horses and rocking-donkeys, make-believe theatres and bull-rings, with toy images of soldiers, bulls and Holy Families; but if the child has been naughty and displeased the Magi, his poor little shoes will stand empty and ashamed. The dramatic instinct, so strong in Spaniards, is strikingly manifested in the children's games. These little people are devoted to the theatre, too, and may be seen in force at the matinées in the Apolo, Lara, and Zarzuela. Afternoon performances are given only on Sundays and the other Catholic _fiestas_, which last, numerous enough, are well within reach of the Puritan conscience. At these matinées more than half the seats in the house are occupied by juvenile ticket-holders, from rows of vociferous urchins in the galleries, to round-eyed babies cooing over their nurses' shoulders. If the play is an extravaganza, abounding in magic and misadventure, the rapture of the childish audience is at its height. The close attention with which mere three-year-olds follow the action is astonishing. "_Bonito!_" lisping voices cry after each fantastic ballet, and wee white hands twinkle up and down in time with the merry music. When the clown divests himself, one by one, of a score of waistcoats, or successively pulls thirty or forty smiling dairy-maids out of a churn, little arithmeticians all over the house call out the count and dispute his numbers with him. When the dragon spits his shower of sparks, when chairs sidle away from beneath the unfortunates who would sit down or suddenly rise with them toward the ceiling, when signboards whirl, and dinners frisk up chimney, cigars puff out into tall hats, and umbrellas fire off bullets, the hubbub of wonder and delight drowns the voices of the actors. The house is never still for one single instant. Babies cry wearily, nurses murmur soothingly, mystified innocents pipe out questions, papas rebuke and explain, exasperated old bachelors hiss for silence, saucy boys hiss back for fun--all together the Madrid matinée affords a far better opportunity to study child life than to hear the comedy upon the boards. The boy king of Spain is, of course, a fascinating figure to his child subjects. We were told at San Sebastian, where the Queen Regent has a summer palace, that on those red-letter days when the king takes a sea dip, children come running from far and near to see him step into the surf, with two stalwart soldiers gripping the royal little fists. And no sooner has the Court returned to the sumptuous, anxious palace of Madrid, than the boy bathers of San Sebastian delight themselves in playing king, mincing down the beach under the pompous military escort that they take turns in furnishing one another. In Madrid, too, the sightseeing crowds that gather before the royal palace or at the doors of the _Iglesia del Buen Suceso_, where the Queen Regent, with her "august children," sometimes attends the _Salve_ on Saturday afternoons, are thickly peppered with little folks, eager to "see the king." They are often disappointed, for the precious life is jealously guarded, especially while the Carlist cloud still broods above the throne. During my stay in Madrid, a man with a revolver under his coat was arrested on suspicion in the vestibule of the theatre known as _La Comédia_, where the queen was passing the evening. Sceptical Madrid shrugged its shoulders and said: "Stuff and nonsense! When the Ministers want the queen to sign a paper that isn't to her liking, they make a great show of devotion and pounce down on some poor devil as an anarchist, to frighten her into being meek and grateful." And, in fact, the prisoner was almost immediately released for lack of any incriminating evidence. For weeks after, nevertheless, the royal movements were more difficult to forecast, and on the daily drives the kinglet was often missing from the family group. But, undiscouraged, every afternoon the children would fringe the palace side of the _Plaza de Oriente_, hoping to see the royal carriage go or come with their young sovereign, whose portrait, a wistful, boyish face above a broad lace collar, is printed in one of their school reading books over the inscription, "To the Head of the State honor and obedience are due." Expectant youngsters, in the all-enveloping black pinafores that remind the eye of Paris, with book satchels made of gay carpeting over the shoulder, would shake out their smudgy handkerchiefs, often stamped with the likenesses of famous _toreros_, and help themselves to one another's hats in readiness to salute; but the elegant landau, preceded by an escort of two horsemen, dashes by so swiftly that their long waiting would be rewarded only by the briefest glimpse of bowing bonnets and of a small gloved hand touching the military cap that shades a childish face. It is a pale and sober little face as I have seen it, but Madrileños resent this impression and insist that his youthful Majesty is "sturdy enough," and as merry as need be. They say that the buoyancy which he inherits from his father is crossed by strange fits of brooding, due to his mother's blood, but that he is, in the main, a merry-hearted child. Although he has masters for his studies now, his affection still clings to his Austrian governess, whom, none the less, he dearly loves to tease. When she is honored by an invitation to drive with the Queen Regent, for example, Alphonsito hastens to hide her hat and then joins most solicitously in her fluttered search, until her suspicion darts upon him, and his prank breaks down in peals of laughter. Madrid was especially sensitive about him last year, for he, Alfonso XIII, godson of Pope Leo XIII, was thirteen years of age--an iteration of the unlucky omen that really ought to be satisfied with the loss of the Spanish colonies. His mother, in honor of his birthday, May seventeenth, distributed five thousand dollars among orphan asylums and other charities, and held a grand reception in the Hall of the Ambassadors, where the slight lad in cadet uniform, enthroned beside the Queen Regent between the two great lions of gilded bronze, received the congratulations of a long procession of bowing ministers, admirals, captain generals, prelates, and those haughty grandees of Spain whose ancient privilege it is to wear their hats in the royal presence; but the shrinkage of his realm since his last birthday must have been uppermost in the mind of even the young lord of the festival. _Pobrecito!_ one wonders what thoughts go on behind those serious brows of his, when, for instance, he looks down from his palace windows at the daily ceremony of guard-mounting in the courtyard. It is such a gallant sight; the martial music is so stirring; the cavalry in blue and silver sit their white steeds so proudly, with the sun glistening on their drawn swords and the wind tossing their long, white, horsehair plumes, that all these tales of defeat and loss must puzzle the sore boy heart and cast confusing shadows down the path before him. Little as the Spaniards love the Queen Regent, to whom they cannot pardon her two cardinal offences of being a "foreigner" and of disliking the bull-fight, they have a certain affection for Alfonso XIII, "the only child born a king since Christ." Indeed, Spain seems to have been always sympathetic toward childhood in palaces. Enter this wonderful _Armería_ of Madrid, where those plumed and armored kings, on richly caparisoned chargers, whom we have come to know in the paintings of the _Museo del Prado_, seem to have leapt from the canvases to greet us here in still more lifelike guise, albeit not over graciously, with horse reined back and mighty lance at poise. Any fine morning they may all come clattering out into the _Plaza de Armas_--and where will the United States be then? Here stands a majestic row of them--Philip II, in a resplendent suit of gold-inlaid plate-armor; Maximilian, whose visor gives him the fierce hooked beak of an eagle; Sebastian of Portugal, with nymphs embossed in cunning work on his rich breastplate; and Charles V, three times over, in varieties of imperial magnificence. [Illustration: "JESUS OF THE PASSION"] But opposite these stern warriors is a hollow square of boy princes, and of noble _niños_ whose visors hide their identities in long oblivion. The armor of these childish figures is daintily wrought, with tender touches of ruffs and cuffs, scallops and flutings and rosettes. Often only the upper half of the body is incased in steel, the slender legs playing the dandy in puffed trousers of striped velvet--scarlet, green, and buff--silk hose, and satin slippers. Little Philip III proudly displays a diminutive round shield, with a relief of battle scenes in gold. The plate armor of little Philip IV is stamped with lions and castles, eagles and spears. And his little son, Don Baltasar Carlos, bestrides a spirited pony and wears at the back of his helmet a tuft of garnet feathers. The _Prado_ galleries abound in royal children. This same _infante_, Don Baltasar, is seen here in the foreground of a lonely landscape, with desolate blue hills beyond and driving clouds above. But all the more bright and winsome glows the form of the six-year-old horseman, the gold-fringed, pink sash that crosses his breast streaming out far behind with the speed of his fearless gallop. Supreme among the _Prado_ children, of course, is the little daughter of Philip IV, the central figure of the world-renowned _Las Meninas_. All in vain does her charming maid of honor kneel to her with the golden cup; all in vain does the dwarf tease the drowsy dog. The solemn puss, undiverted, will not stir from her pose nor alter the set of her small features until the artist, standing half disdainfully before his easel, gives the word. She has waited for it now hard upon two hundred and fifty years, but the centuries beat in vain against that inflexible bit of propriety. Even the royal burial vaults beneath the grim Escorial have in their chill grandeur of marble halls an especial Panteon for babies, princely innocents whose lives are reckoned in months more often than in years. Gold and blue and red brighten their great white sepulchre, and above the altar smiles the Christ Child, with the graven words, "Suffer the children to come unto me." But for Alfonso XIII a sombre sarcophagus waits in the haughtiest and gloomiest of all the Panteons, where only kings, and queens who were mothers of kings, may lie. It is not royal childhood alone that is dear to this strange, romantic, monstrously inconsistent heart of Spain. The cruelty of Spaniards to horses and donkeys sickens even the roughest Englishman, yet almost every voice softens in speaking to a child, and during my six months in Spanish cities I saw nothing of that street brutality toward the little ones which forces itself upon daily notice in Liverpool and London. Spanish children are too often ill-cared for, but despite the abuses of ignorant motherhood and fatherhood, such vivid, vivacious, bewitching little people as they are! Enter a Spanish schoolroom and see how vehemently the small brown hands are wagged in air, how the black eyes dance and the dimples play, what a stir and bustle, what a young exuberance of energy! They race to the blackboards like colts out at pasture. They laugh at everything, these sons of "the grave Spaniard," and even the teacher will duck his head behind the desk for a half-hidden ecstasy over some dunce's blunder or some rogue's detected trick. But their high spirits never make them unmindful of those courtesies of life in which they have been so carefully trained. There is an old-fashioned exaggeration about their set phrases of politeness. Just as the casual caller kisses the lady's feet, in words, and she reciprocates by a verbal kissing of his hand, so the school children respond to the roll call with a glib: "Your servant, sir." Ask a well-bred boy his name, and he rattles back, "Jesus Herrera y La-Chica, at the service of God and yourself." They learn these amenities of speech with their first lispings. I was much taken aback one day in Seville by a child of eighteen months. Not in the least expecting this infant, whose rosy face was bashfully snuggled into his young aunt's neck, to understand, I said to her, "What a fine little fellow!" Whereupon Master Roly-poly suddenly sat up straight on her arm, ducked his head in my direction, and gravely enunciated, "_Es favor que Usted me hace_"--"It is a compliment you pay me." I could hardly recover from the shock in time to make the stereotyped rejoinder, "_No es favor, es justicia_"--"No compliment, but the truth." To this Don Chubbykins sweetly returned, "_Mil gracias_"--"A thousand thanks," and I closed this uncanny dialogue with the due response, "_No las merece_"--"It does not merit them." Servants, neighbors, passers-by, beggars, all prompt the children in these shibboleths of good manners, adorning the precept with example. "Would you like to go with us to the picture gallery this afternoon?" I once asked a laddie of artistic tastes at a boarding-house table. "_Si, señora_," he replied, whereupon several of the boarders, greatly scandalized, hastened to remind him, but in the gentlest of tones, of the essential addition, "_con mucho gusto_" to which we were bound to reply, "The pleasure will be ours." The girls, even more than the boys, are bred in these formal fashions of intercourse. Every morning they ask if you have rested well, and express grief or gratification, according to your response. In Mrs. Gulick's school, mere midgets of six and eight, returning from class, will not close the doors of their rooms if you are in sight, though perhaps seated at a reading table in the farther end of the corridor, lest they should appear inhospitable. On our return from Italica, a thirsty child of seven, heated to exhaustion with the sun and fun of that Andalusian picnic, refused to touch the anise-seed water which some good Samaritan had handed up to the dusty carriage, until the glass had been offered to every one else, driver included, leaving, in the sequel, little enough for her. On our midnight return from the _Feria_, this same _niña_ of gentle memory, staggering and half crying with sleepiness, would nevertheless not precede any of her elders in entering the home door. "After you," she sobbed, with hardly voice enough to add, "And may you all rest well!" "The same to you," chorussed the adults, trooping by, and her faint murmur followed, "Many thanks." "Shall I give you this fan when I go away," I asked her once, "or would you rather have it now to take to the party?" She wanted it then and there, but what she answered was, "I shall be best pleased to take it when you like best to give it." You must beware of saying to a little Spanish maid, "What a beautiful rosebud in your hair!" Instantly the hand is busy with the pins. "It is at your disposal." You hastily protest, "A thousand thanks, but no, no, no! It is very well placed where it is." Off comes the flower, notwithstanding, and is fastened into your belt. For when the elder sister has insisted on giving you (until the next ball) those dancing slippers which you so rashly admired, and the sister's _novio_ went home the night before without his cloak, because you had approved its colors (although he sent his man around for it before breakfast), what can the children do but follow suit? Even their form of "Now I Lay Me" is touched with their quaint politeness:-- "Jesus, Joseph, Mary, Your little servant keep, While, with your kind permission, I lay me down to sleep." The precocity of Spanish children is a recognized fact. An educational expert, a Frenchman who holds a chair in an English university, assured us that beyond a doubt Spanish children, for the first dozen years of life, develop more rapidly than any other children of Europe. Yet, although these clever little Spaniards are so punctiliously taught to put the pleasure of others before their own, they are treated with universal indulgence. Soldiers lining the curbstones on occasion of a royal progress will let the children press in beside them and cling to their valorous legs, until the military array seems variegated with a Kindergarten. My farewell glimpse of Toledo, on Corpus Christi Day, makes a pretty picture in memory. The red-robed cardinal, who had come to the station to take his train, was fairly stormed by all the children within sight, clamoring for his blessing. In vain the attendant priests tried to scatter the throng, and ladies of high degree, planting their chairs in a circle about the prelate, acted as a laughing body-guard. It was all of no avail. The little people danced up and down with eagerness, dodged under arms, and slipped between elbows. They knelt upon the cardinal's very feet, rapturously kissing his red-gloved hand and clasping to their pinafores and blouses the sacred trinkets he distributed. And he, patting the bobbing black pates, wherever he could get a chance, smiled on the little ones and forbade them not. The affection lavished on children in the household circle is often poetic and passionate. I observed one day a brusque young fellow of twenty-four, whom we had thought rather a hard, catch-penny sort of person, suddenly gather a four-year-old nephew to his heart and cover the dimpled face with kisses, while the look in his own black eyes was the look of a St. Anthony. I stood once in a crowded cathedral and lost all sense of the service in contemplation of an ugly manikin, with coarse features and receding forehead, who held a frail baby boy tight against his breast. This was a blue-eyed, fair-haired wean, with a serious, far-away expression, and from time to time, attracted by the gilt of the ceiling, he raised a tiny pink fore-finger and pointed upward, while the father's animal face, never turned away from the child, became transfigured with love and worship. He took the baby out, when it had fallen asleep upon his shoulder, and it was good to see that dense throng open and make a lane for him, every man, however brutal or frivolous his aspect, being careful not to jostle the drooping, golden head. But Spanish children, so caressed and so adored, are nevertheless modest in their bearing, and fall shyly back before a stranger. I remember a beaming grandfather displaying to us two blushing little men, bidding them open their eyes wide that we might contrast colors, turn back to back that we might measure heights, and in various ways put their small selves on show, all which they did in mute obedience, but at the word of release flew together, flung their arms about each other's necks, rolled under the nearest table, and curled up into the least possible bunch of bashful agony. The pictures, frescos, and carvings of Spanish churches often reflect the looks of Spanish childhood. The Holy Family gives a wide range of opportunity, especially in the ministering cherubs. There is a crucifix in one of the twenty-two aisle chapels of Toledo cathedral, where three broken-hearted mites of angels, just three crying babies, are piteously striving to draw out the nails from the Sufferer's hands and feet. Many of the saint-groups admit of child figures, too, as the St. Christopher, which almost invariably appears as a colossal nave painting, "the Goliath of frescos." It would be strange, indeed, if children were not beloved in the country of Murillo. Spain has let the most of his beggar-boy pictures go to foreign collections, but she has cherished his Holy Families and cherub-peopled Annunciations. Such ecstatic rogues as those Andalusian cherubs are! Their restless ringlets catch azure shadows from the Virgin's mantle; they perch tiptoe on the edges of her crescent moon; they hold up a mirror to her glory and peep over the frame to see themselves; they pelt St. Francis with roses; they play bo-beep from behind the fleecy folds of cloud; they try all manner of aerial gymnastics. But a charm transcending even theirs dwells in those baby Christs that almost spring from the Madonna's arms to ours, in those boy Christs that touch all boyhood with divinity. The son of the Jewish carpenter, happy in his father's workshop with bird and dog; the shepherd lad whose earnest eyes look toward his waiting flock; the lovely playmates, radiant with innocent beauty, who bend together above the water of life--from these alone might Catholic Spain have learned the sacredness of childhood. But Spain first showed Murillo the vision that he rendered back to her. XIII THE YOLK OF THE SPANISH EGG "From Madrid to Heaven, and in Heaven a little window for looking back to Madrid."--_Popular Saying._ Few foreigners can understand the sentiment of Spaniards for their capital. Madrid is the crown city of Spain, not by manifest destiny, but by decree of Philip II, who, as his nature was, better loved the harsh Castilian steppe, baked by summer suns and chilled by treacherous winds, than the romantic sierras and gracious river valleys where earlier royal seats had been established. If in Madrid the desert blossoms like the rose, it is a leafless rose, for the city has no suburbs. It lacks both the charm of environment so potent in Granada and Seville and the charm of ancient story, which these share with those other bygone courts--Toledo, Valladolid, Valencia, Saragossa. It is not a vital organ of modern European civilization, like artistic Paris or strenuous London. And yet it is more cosmopolitan, and hence less distinctively Spanish than other cities of the Peninsula. It is devoted to the bull-fight and the lottery, abounds in beggars and prostitutes, does not take naturally to commerce, and is sadly behindhand with popular education. Yet Madrileños cannot be persuaded that the skies behold its equal, and even over the Anglo-Saxon stranger its fascination gradually steals. In the first place, the mirth of the home life beguiles the serious foreigner. Spanish households have a pleasantness quite their own. All the natural vivacity and kindliness of the people find free play at home, where servants sing and children prattle, ladies chatter and gentlemen jest, all in an atmosphere of ease, leisure, and spontaneous sociability. The father is not preoccupied with business, the mother has never dreamed of belonging to a woman's club, the children have little taste for reading, and few books to read. So talking is the order of the day, and, Sancho Panza! how they talk! Lingering half the morning over the _desayuno_ of thick, cinnamon-flavored chocolate, into which are dipped strips of bread, two-thirds of the afternoon over the _almuerzo_, a substantial repast of meat and vegetables, fruit and _dulces_, and all the evening over the _comida_, where soup and the national dish of _puchero_ are added to the noontide bill of fare, they chatter, chatter, chatter, like the teeth of Harry Gill. Still, as of old, Spaniards are temperate in food and drink. "It's as rare to see a Spaniard a drunkard as a German sober," wrote Middleton three centuries ago. They use more water than wine, and although they have a grand appetite for sweets, they take them in comparatively simple forms. The national lack of enterprise is conspicuous even here, for dearly as the Spaniard dotes on chocolate and sugar, Madrid does not make her own chocolate creams, but imports them from Paris to sell, when they are too hard to eat, at a price too high to pay. But smoking and talking are indulgences which Madrileños carry to excess. Lounging on the balcony, a gayly painted case of paper cigarettes at hand, they will pass hours in bantering their wives, whom they worship much as they worship the images of Mary, delighting to dress them in fine clothes and glittering trinkets, and expecting in return, it is said, their pardon for a multitude of sins. And when my lord saunters forth to "rest" in one of the iron chairs that line the promenades, or in a café window, or at an open-air table before one of the frequent stalls of cooling beverages, the women of the house flock together in some airy corner, stitching away on their endless embroideries, and receiving, with "a million kisses" and a chorus of shrill welcomes, the mantilla-veiled ladies who come to call. If the afternoon is frying hot, it is just possible that the gallivanting don will bethink himself to send home a tray of _horchata_, a snowy, chilly, puckery refreshment, eaten by aid of wafers in the form of little tubes that look and taste much like wrapping paper. This treat gives fresh animation to the emulous tongues. The slightest neighborhood incident, as recounted in such a group, takes on a poetic vividness and a dramatic intensity, and when it is all told over again at the dinner-table, excitement waxes so high that long after the dishes and cloth have been removed the family may still be found seated around the board, flashing a thousand lights of suggestion and surmise on that dull bit of scandal. The husband cannot cease from discussion long enough to read the evening paper, nor the wife to send the little ones to bed, and midnight may find the three generations, from grandfather to four-year-old, still talking with might and main. Accustomed guests come at once to the dining room, ready to contribute their share to the lively clash of voices, or to take part in one of the characteristic games of a Spanish family circle, as lottery. In this favorite pastime, victory, including a goodly handful of coppers, falls to him whose checked and numbered square of pasteboard is most quickly filled with beans. These are placed on the squares called by the bag-holder, who draws numbers haphazard from his sibylline sack. When the small hours come in, the company may adjourn to the sala for dancing and music, but conversation under cover of these gushes on more impetuously than ever--the Castilian art of arts. One of the chief graces of the _tertulias_ consists in their informality--their frank simplicity. Even on a saint day--a day consecrated to the saint whose name some member of the family bears--while all the nearer friends drop in for congratulation, with perhaps a gift of flowers, in case of a lady, or sweetmeats for a child, the _tertulia_ requires no further exercise of hospitality than an open door and a feast of words. There is more blithesomeness, for _hay santo en casa_ (there is a saint in the house), but no more parade, with its preliminary fret and fuss. The streets of Madrid, too, have a curious fascination. In the morning hours there is the picturesque confusion of the market. The donkeys are unladen here, there, and everywhere, and the sidewalks and squares promptly dotted over with bright little heaps of delicious Toledo cherries, Valencian apricots, Murcian lemons, and all the greens of the season. The peasant women, squatted among their lettuces and cucumbers, seem much more interested in gossiping with their neighbors than in securing customers. Babies tumble about, crushing the pinks and roses, and cabmen good-naturedly pick their way as best they can among these various vegetable and human obstacles. Venders of books, too, like to pave the street with rows of open volumes, whose pages are soon dimmed with dust, and artisans, especially cobblers, set up their benches just outside their doors, and add the click of their hammers to the general din. In the early afternoon the shady side of the street is lined with the outstretched forms of workingmen, taking the indispensable siesta. Some rest their black pates on arm or folded jacket or bag of tools, but plenty of bronzed laborers slumber peacefully all prone on the hot paving, with not so much as a cabbage leaf for a pillow. Beggars lie along the stone benches of the _paseos_ and parks, cabmen sleep on their cabs, porters over their thresholds, and I once turned away from a church I had come far to visit, not having the hardihood to waken the verger, who, keys in hand, was snoring like an organ, sprawled across half a dozen granite steps. As the cool of evening approaches, the overcrowded houses of the poor pour forth entire families into the street, where supper is cooked and eaten, and all manner of domestic operations carried on. Before every door is at least one black-eyed baby, in a little wooden cage something like a churn, with rim running under the armpits, so that the child, safe from straying or falling, may be left to his own devices. As darkness deepens, out come the stars and the _serenos_. These latter, in Madrid, no longer cry fair weather, but they hold the keys of the houses--an arrangement that I never learned to take seriously. Returning from visit or theatre in the evening, I found it difficult to say with requisite solemnity to the driver, "Would you be so kind as to shout for Celestino?" The driver promptly roars, "Celestino!" and twinkling lights come bobbing toward us from far and near, but no Celestino. "He's in the wineshop," suggests Isidro, whose charge begins three houses above. "He's eating iron," asserts Pedro, in the phrase describing those colloquies which a Spanish suitor carries on with his divinity through the grating. Then we all chorus, "Celestino!" and again, "Celestino!" and again, "Celestino!" At this a cloaked figure comes running across the square, waving a lantern over his head and vociferating jocund apologies: "I regret it extremely. I am stricken with sorrow. But at the first call I was wetting my lips at the fountain, and at the second I was pausing to exchange four words only with the lady of my soul, and at the third I said _Vamos!_ and at the fourth--look you, I am here." So he unlocks the door and lights the stairway with his lantern until I have ascended the first flight, when he cheerily calls out, "_Adios!_" and shuts me into darkness which I am expected to illuminate for my further climb by striking matches. Madrid streets are by no means altogether delectable. Some are broad and well kept, but others are narrow, dirty, and malodorous. Worst of all, to my own thinking, is the Madrid stare, which, hardly less offensive than the Paris stare, is more universal. It is amusing to see how fearlessly a matron of eighteen sallies forth alone, while many Madrid spinsters of fifty would not go a block unattended. Nor are annoyances confined to staring. Even in reputable shops a woman soon learns to be on her guard, when her attention is especially called to book or picture, lest it prove "a silliness." Madrid is better than the cities of Andalusia, and worse than the cities of northern Spain, in its treatment of women. A young Spanish girl cannot walk alone, however sedately, in Seville, without a running fire of salutations--"Oh, the pretty face!" "What cheeks of rose!" "Blessed be thy mother!" "Give me a little smile!" And even in Madrid, Spanish girls of my acquaintance have broken their fans across the faces of men who tried to catch a kiss in passing. In Madrid, as almost everywhere in Spain, begging is a leading industry. So many beg from laziness or greed that it is easy to lose patience, the most essential part of a traveller's Spanish outfit. The ear is wearied by the everlasting drone and whine: "Oh, dear lady, for the love of God! All day my children have had no bread. Give me five _centimos_, only five _centimos_, and Heaven will pay you back. Lady! lady! lady! lady! Five _centimos_, in the name of all the saints!" And the eye is offended by the continual obtrusion of ulcers, cripplings, and deformities. No less than Seville and Granada, Madrid abounds with child beggars. There were two jolly little cripples on the Prado, who used to race, each on his one leg, to overtake me before I should reach the Museo steps. Another boy, on whose face I never saw a smile, sat at the corner of a street I daily passed, holding out two shapeless blocks of hands. By the gate of the Buen Retiro was stationed a blind man, with a girl wean on his knee. It was pathetic and amusing to see him feeding her the supper of bread and milk, for the spoon in his groping hand and the pout of her baby mouth often failed to make connection. The prevalence of eye disease in Spain is probably due to sun, to dust, and to generations of poverty. The pounding of a blind man's stick upon the pavement is one of the most common city sounds. The charitable may often be seen leading the blind across the streets. I tried it myself once with an imperious old woman, who clung to the curbstone some twenty minutes before she could muster courage for the plunge, lecturing me fluently all the time on the dangers of a rash disposition. There are, of course, many cases of fraud--cases where, when the day's work is over, the blind see and the lame walk. One of the popular _coplas_ has its fling at these:-- "The armless man has written a letter; The blind man finds the writing clear; The mute is reading it aloud, And the deaf man runs to hear." Yet it is certain that among the beggars of Madrid is a heartrending amount of genuine misery. One day I passed an aged _ciego_, sitting on a doorstep, in the Alcalá, his white head bowed upon his breast in such utter weariness of dejection that I paused to find him a copper. But better charity than mine came to comfort that worn heart. A lame old peanut woman limped up to him, with the pity of the wretched for the wretched. She drew from her apron pocket a coin which I had rarely seen--_dos centimos_, two-fifths of a cent in value. An Austrian, who had lived in Spain four years, told me he had never once encountered that paltry piece of money. But she could not spare it all. "Hast thou one _centimo_ for change, brother mine?" she asked. And the blind man's sensitive fingers actually found in his lean leather purse that tiny metal bit, which only the poorest of the poor ever see in circulation. He gravely kissed the coin she gave and made with it the sign of the cross on brow and breast, saying, "Blessed be this gift, my sister, which thy mercy has bestowed on a man of many troubles! May our Mother Mary keep for thee a thornless rose!" "And may God, who sends the cold according to our rags, lighten all thy griefs! Rest thou in peace," she replied. "Go thou with God," was his answer. Begging was a recognized and licensed industry in Madrid a year ago, though a bill of reform, whose fate I have failed to learn, was then under consideration. A mother would gather her brood about her and go forth for her day's work. They beg up and down their accustomed beat during the morning, eat as their gains allow, lie down in the dust together for the afternoon siesta, and rise to be diligent in business during the hours of fashionable promenade. They stop pedestrians, chase carriages, press into shops to torment the customers at the counter, and reach beseeching palms through the open windows of cafés. Gentlemen escorting ladies are their peculiar victims, for well they know that many a man who never gives under other circumstances is ashamed to seem ungenerous under survey of starry eyes. There is only one phrase that will shake off the professional beggar, "May God aid you!" On hearing this he makes it a point of religious honor to fall back. But as I could not use that formula without feeling myself something between a shirk and a hypocrite, I had to get on as best I could with the ineffectual, "Pardon me, my brother," to which should properly be added _Por Dios_ (for God's sake). The Spanish mendicant knows nothing of the Anglo-Saxon feeling, "To beg I am ashamed." No Rare Ben Jonson has thundered in his ears:-- "Art thou a man? and sham'st thou not to beg? To practise such a servile kind of life? Why, were thy education ne'er so mean, Having thy limbs, a thousand fairer courses Offer themselves to thy election. Either the wars might still supply thy wants Or service of some virtuous gentleman, Or honest labor: nay, what can I name, But would become thee better than to beg?" From the Spanish point of view, on the contrary, it is manual labor, not beggary, that stains the escutcheon. A German lady of my acquaintance said to a strongly built man who was pleading for alms, "If you will carry my bag up these stairs, I will gladly pay you." Deeply insulted, he folded his cloak about him with hidalgo dignity, saying, "Madame, I am a beggar, not a laborer." Certain monasteries send out brothers, with plates and bags, on a daily begging round--brothers who may belong to the first families of Spain. The Church is often cited as indorsing mendicancy. Extolling almsgiving as a prime virtue, and itself maintaining a vast number of charitable institutions, it has not yet assimilated modern methods of relief. A favorite story for children, used as supplementary reading in the schools, is called "The Medal of the Virgin." This is, in fact, a Roman Catholic version of "Fortunatus's Purse." Its small heroine, Mary of the Angels, is an orphan, defrauded by a miser of her rich inheritance and treated with barbarity by the uncle and aunt for whom she is an uncomplaining drudge. But once, in festive hour, they give her five _centimos_, which this generous innocent promptly bestows on a beggar woman, who holds a baby in her ragged arms. In return, the beggar gives the child a queer, old-fashioned mite of a coin, which turns out to have the Wall Street quality of heaving up a little mountain of gold above itself every hour or two. Mary of the Angels sallies forth for a tour of the country, pouring handfuls of gold into the laps of the beggars who sit at the church doors and city gates, until she is escorted wherever she goes by an army of the halt and blind singing her praises. At last, having given away such Pyrenees of gold that not a beggar could be found in all the land for a century to come, the footsore little philanthropist begs the Virgin to relieve her of the coin. The Madonna descends in a beam of light, the Christ Child smiling from her arms, yet in the radiant group Mary of the Angels recognizes the objects of her earliest charity. "For I," explains the Madonna, "am the holy beggar from heaven. The poor of the earth give me their tears and prayers, and for such alms do I hold out my hand to all the sorrowful." Yet the progressive element in Spain is all the more ashamed of the beggars because they are not ashamed of themselves, and a few years may see Madrid swept as clear of mendicancy as is San Sebastian to-day. Madrid is such an easy-going city that one hardly realizes at first how well it performs certain of its functions. Its water supply, for instance, is excellent, although when one sees the picturesque groups, with those same clay water-jars over which Rebecca smiled on Jacob, lingering about the gray stone fountains, one expects a patriarchal flavor in the liquid. The tramway service of Madrid, everything radiating from the _Puerta del Sol_, is most convenient, although electricity is a little slow in coming to the relief of horse-flesh. The shops, fairly well stocked, gild commerce with Spanish graces. You accept a chair, you pass the courtesies of the day, the gentleman who serves you, often with cigar in mouth, is seldom sure as to just what goods he has on hand, and is still more rarely dogmatic as to their price. The tug of war, however, comes in getting them delivered. Ten days before quitting Madrid I bought at one of the best of the _librerias_ a number of books, including several illustrated catalogues of the Velázquez sala. These last were pretty trifles bound in white parchment, and as I intended them for gifts, I wanted fresh copies. "You wish them clean, all of them?" asked the proprietor, with an accent of surprise. I replied that I did, and would moreover be obliged if he could fit them with envelopes ready for mailing. Envelopes he had none, but he promised to tie them up in separate parcels. "And books and bill will come without fail this afternoon?" He looked pained to the heart. "This very morning, señora. You will find them awaiting you on your return." On the third day I sent a note, and on the fifth a boy arrived with the bulk of my purchase, but no catalogues nor bill. I explained to the lad, who smilingly besought me to give myself no concern, that I was on the point of leaving the city for good, and preferred not to go away in debt; but the days passed, and my inability to extort that reckoning became the jest of the household. At last, driven to desperate measures, I went through noonday heat to the store, and actually found that procrastinating bookseller scattering cigar ashes over a little heap of catalogues, while he contemplated the pictures of each copy in turn. "Behold, señora," he exclaimed, as serenely as if not ten minutes had elapsed since our parting, "here I have for you immaculate booklets, stainless, faultless, such as will rejoice those fortunate friends to whom you have the amiability to send them. And I am this instant about to prepare them for the post with inviolate security." [Illustration: "CHRIST OF THE SEVEN WORDS"] I expressed my obligations, but entreated him to draw up the account and let me settle it then and there, as I was within twenty-four hours of departure. "And in travelling," I added apologetically, "it is difficult to send back money." At the obnoxious word he flung up hands and eyebrows. "Señora!" I left the shop, feeling vaguely that I had been guilty of a flagrant indelicacy, as well as black ingratitude. The catalogues, very slightly wrapped, arrived on the morrow, just in time to be thrust into my shawl strap, and I paid the bill amid the final agitation, so unfavorable to arithmetic, of porters and farewells. I had worse fortune in trying to subscribe for a certain popular periodical. I went to the office in the designated business hours, to find that, of the three men who should have been there, one had already gone, one had not arrived, and the third had "stepped out for a little rest." The janitor left in charge, a sympathetic person who could not read nor write, thought if I would return on Sunday at my luncheon hour, there might be somebody there qualified to receive my subscription and address, but, he sagely added, "in this world we are sure of nothing." Madrid possesses the _Biblioteca Nacional_ with valuable manuscripts and something like one million books, handsomely housed, where arrangements are made for over three hundred readers, but here, as in the other Spanish cities, public libraries in the American sense of libraries largely used by the general public are practically non-existent. The bookstores, too, except for the latest Spanish publications, leave much to be desired. As a rule, one can get only the most meagre information concerning texts and editions of the national classics, and the supply of new French novels or new German plays is far less complete than the stock of Paris gloves and German cutlery. This last, so canny have the honest Teutons grown, is usually engraved _Toledo_. In variety of weather, however, Madrid surpasses all expectations, furnishing the sultriest heat, the chilliest cold, the dustiest dust, and the most prodigious crashes of thunder and lumps of hail to be found in the meteorological market, and all these within a few hours of one another. But what with fans, _braseros_, balconies, _horchaterias_, an army of street waterers, and, most essential of all, an inexhaustible fund of good humor, the Madrileño contrives to live on friendly terms with his climate, although he dares not lay aside his cloak before "the fortieth of May." Apart from bull-fights and riots, those rages of excitement that seem to indicate a periodical fevering of the southern blood, the Madrileño takes his pleasures with a dignified simplicity. The city is exceedingly rich in open squares, well-shaded parks, and long reaches of green promenade, and here, with several dozen cigarettes and a few coppers for water and _agráz_, he wiles the hours away, chatting with friends and admiring the ladies who roll past in spruce landaus. Over the gate of the social paradise of Madrid it must be written, "No admittance except in coaches," for a carriage seems essential to high life. Liveried coachman, rather than powdered butler, is the _sine qua non_. During the hot season this outdoor parade is in gay career at midnight, and whole families, babies and nurses included, may be seen gathered in festive knots around small refreshment tables, within sound of fountain spray and garden music. There are open-air concerts, and concerts in smoke-beclouded halls, greensward dances, and dances stepped on café tables among disordered clusters of bottles and glasses, and there is always the theatre, on which your Spaniard dotes. In the winter season there is opportunity to enjoy classic drama at the _Teatro Español_, where the Bernhardt of Spain, "La Guerrero," supported by her grandee husband, Mendoza, holds sway. When I saw them they were using short farces of Cervantes and Lope de Rueda for curtain raisers to a romantic drama by Tirso de Molina and a modern society play by Echegaray. I saw them, too, in Zorrilla's singular dramatic version of "Don Juan," the only play allowed in Spanish theatres on the night of All Saints. From March to November, however, the _Teatro Español_ is closed, and there is little doing at the _Teatro Real_, an aristocratic temple of Italian opera. During the summer season the theatrical opportunities of Madrid are mainly limited to the popular _zarzuelas_, or operettas, four of which are usually given in an evening. Each theatre offers a new programme of these every night, but there is little of literary interest except, now and then, a taking trifle from the pen of Hartzenbusch or Echegaray. The Madrid theatre recks naught of early risers. The opening vaudeville is seldom under way before nine o'clock; the house is cleared after each performance, and often the encores and repetitions prolong a popular _zarzuela_ quite beyond the hour limit. On the other hand, if the audience is small, the opening piece may be cut down to the merest outline. I remember one such occasion when the boxes were so empty and the farce so familiar that the orchestra fairly chaffed the actors off the stage. "Enough, enough! Thou mayst withdraw!" chanted the lyric lover to an intruding servant. "And so mayst thou," called out a voice from among the violins. "I've told my passion to the stars," continued the actor in his most mellifluous tenor, making the distant love of the Spanish stage to a lady who was smiling frankly on the audacious fiddler. "Poor stars!" interpolated this worthy so sympathetically that everybody laughed, the singer wound up his transports in the shortest possible order, and the remaining scenes were hardly more than pantomime. But such was the universal good nature and indifference to business exactitudes, that neither artists nor ticket-holders took this curtailment of their rights in umbrage. Among the excellences of Madrid must be counted her _museos_. The _Armería_, with its plumed and steel-clad warriors, all at tourney, is no mere lumber room of wicked old iron, as might have been expected, but a new canto of the "Faery Queene." The _Museo Naval_ still smells of the boundless brine and Isles of Spicery. The _Museo Arqueológico Nacional_ sweeps one, as on the magic carpet of Alhambra legend, through the entire tragedy of Spain. Here are the successive leaves of her strange picture-book--scratched, prehistoric flints, grass-woven Iberian sandals, rudely sculptured shapes in sandstone grasping wine cups that suggest whole Rubaiyats, Phoenician anchors, bronze tables of Roman laws, Moorish arabesques, mediæval altars, modern wares and fineries, while barbaric spoils of Peruvian idols, Mexican feather-shields, sacrificial stones, and figures of forest lords speak to the imagination of that vast colonial empire which rose out of a dream to melt again like very dreamstuff, leaving "not a rack behind." These I have seen, but there are twice as many more Madrid museums which I had not time to see, and which, I am told, are no less rich in rarities and no less effective in pictorial beauty of arrangement. Of the art galleries, who can say enough? The supreme _Museo del Prado_ so magnetizes pilgrim feet that it is hard to spare even a few hours for the _Académia de Bellas Artes_, with its grand Murillos and calm Zurbaráns, or the _Museo de Arte Moderno_, with its succession of canvases depicting scene upon scene of death, decay, murder, execution, starvation, battle, torture, frenzy. Whatever is most horrible in the story of the Peninsula--Juana the Mad staring at her husband's coffin, the bloody fall of the betrayed Torrijos and his band, the nobles of Portugal doing shuddering homage to the exhumed corpse of Inez de Castro, all that moves disgust, distress, dismay, seems flaunted here. The technique is French, but the subjects are Spanish. Many of the pictures have historical dignity and faithfulness, a few reproduce the modern national types, with a preference for bull-fighters and anarchists over fishermen and peasants, but one misses the spiritual beauty that went hand in hand with the spiritual terror of the older art. Do the Spanish painters of to-day derive only from Goya and Ribera? The old-time popular ceremonies are fast fading out of Europeanized Madrid. Even the Christmas mirth is waning, though still on _Noche Buena_ the _Plaza Mayor_ is close set with booths, and the Infanta Isabel, _muy Madrileña_ that she is, makes a point of driving through and heaping her carriage with fairings. On Twelfth Night, too, there are a few small boys to be seen scampering about the streets, looking for the arrival of the Magi. Every year drops something of the mediæval heritage, and it has fallen to my lot to chronicle the passing of one of Madrid's most ancient and comfortable rites. The principal saint days of June, July, and August are preceded by _verbenas_, or evening fairs, chief among these being the _Verbena de San Juan_, on Midsummer Night. Many a baby has a grand frolic this evening, rocked back and forth on his mamma's knees, laughing eyes to laughing eyes, while she dips her head to his and tickles his little neck with kisses in time to the ancient ditty:-- "Recotín, recotón! The bells of St. John! There's a festival on. Recotín, recotín, recotón!" Far along the _Prado_ gleam the busy fires over which are merrily bubbling the oiliest and brownest of _buñuelos_. The rows of lighted stalls, which have sprung up like mushrooms on either side of the promenade, present to the revelling, roving, shifting throng an amazing variety of tawdry knickknacks, ingeniously devised to meet no human want. As we drove slowly up and down, enjoying the scene, while beggars ran beside the carriage and hawkers darted out upon us with shrill cries, the "American girl" of our little group strove earnestly to find "something to buy." The most useful and convenient article for a traveller that could be discovered was a pasteboard bull's head on a long stick, but her chaperon, mindful of trunk dimensions, discouraged this purchase so effectively that Little Boston gracefully made herself amends by presenting us all with images of St. John. These scandalously represented the Baptist as a ballet girl in short cotton-wool skirts and gilt ribbons, waving a banner with one hand and leading a two-legged lamb with the other. As midnight drew near, carriages and foot-folk all pressed toward the stately Cybele fountain. It seems that there was once, in the _Puerta del Sol_, a magic spring whose waters, sprinkled at Midsummer Midnight on the most unlikely head, insured a wedding within the year. Trams and cabs, riots and bloodshed, drove the precious charm away to the _Prado_, even to this same Cybele fountain, which for many generations has continued to work bridal miracles. So recently as 1898, as soon as the clock in the tower of the stately Bank of Spain struck midnight, with wedding cadences lingering in its peal, eager feet went splashing through the broad marble basin, and the enchanted water, thrown by handfuls and cupfuls far out over the crowd, sparkled even on bald pates and wigs. But alas for Madrid and her Midsummer Night's Dream! Some prosaic person got wet and tattled to the Alcalde. So when in natural agitation, on our only Verbena of St. John, we had persuaded the compassionate coachman to drive as close as close might be to the fountain, we encountered a bristling, unromantic railing, and outside of this a grim circle of police, frowning menace on that disconcerted host. Every moment more carriages, with veiled ladies and rheumatic gentlemen, dashed up, and the indignant crowd surged forward to the very buttons of authority. But midnight chimed in vain. One desperate graybeard vaulted over the railing, only to be hustled back with contumely. In general, however, that great press of people remained as meek as the lions of Cybele's chariot--a lack of spirit only to be accounted for by remembering that this midnight company was made up of the shamefaced and rejected, such an assemblage of blighted beings as, now that the last spell is snapped, earth will never see again. Even the decorous Cybele laughed in her marble sleeve. So passes the old Madrid; but there is a new Madrid, of which a word still waits to be said. XIV A STUDY IN CONTRASTS "Here you have them, the two Spains, unlike, antagonistic, squared for conflict." --_Vida Nueva._ The world-old struggle between conservatism and advance is at its most dramatic point in Spain. The united forces of clericalism and militarism work for the continuance of ancient institutions, methods, ideas, and those leaders who do battle in the name of liberalism are too often nothing more than selfish politicians. But with all these odds against progress, it is making way. The mass of the people, kept so long in the darkness of ignorance and superstition, are looking toward the light. During my last week in Madrid I chanced upon two extreme expressions of these warring principles. The first was a royal and religious ceremony, the second a monster mass meeting,--the one intent on cherishing the past, the other clamoring at the gates of the future. I was looking over the _Imparcial_ as I took my coffee one morning, when my eye fell on an item to the effect that there would be _capilla publica en Palacio_ at ten o'clock. A traveller learns to jump at opportunity. Public service in the royal chapel promised to be of interest, and half-past nine found me waiting, with a miscellaneous company of gentles and tatterdemalions, natives and foreigners, on the palace side of the _Plaza de Armas_, the expectant throng streaming far down the paved and covered way. We were well marshalled by soldiers, who kept the crowd in form of a long troop, and banded this by military lines, with gleaming bayonets. These bands, but a few feet apart, were effectual in preventing crowding and disorder, and when at last the doors were thrown open, a double rank of soldiers closed in before the portal as often as the entering file showed any tendency to press and hurry, and thus passed us through by small divisions, so that there was no unseemly struggling on the succession of bare, plain stairways that led to the upper galleries. For "public service in the royal chapel," I was now to discover, does not mean that the public is admitted to the chapel itself. This is small, but very Spanish, with profusion of gilding, imposing altar, and frescoed saints, the characteristic splendor being tempered with a no less characteristic gloom, an effect enhanced by austere columns of gray marble. On days of public service, which are usually high feast days, three long galleries, forming three sides of a great quadrangle, are traversed by the court in passing from the royal rooms to the chapel door, and it is to these galleries only that the public is admitted. On such occasions the gallery walls are hung with richly colored tapestries from the magnificent collection of eight hundred pieces that enriches the royal _Tapiceria_. The instant I crossed the threshold these tapestries blazed upon the eye, so dazzling in their beauty that it was difficult to grasp the general situation. Civil Guards, in gala uniform, each armed with a pike taller than himself, were stationed at intervals of about six feet all along these tapestried walls, holding the carpeted way open for the passage of the royal and ecclesiastical party. The public hastened to fill in the spaces left between the guards, so that when the dignitaries paced the length of the three galleries, they walked between continuous human lines of mingled soldiery and spectators. We were of various ages, sizes, colors, and quite as picturesque, take it all in all, as the slowly stepping group on which our eyes were focussed. A division of the royal escort, marching with drawn swords, preceded the Queen Regent, a slight and elegant figure in white and heliotrope, her mantilla pinned with diamonds. She walked in royal solitude, with a bearing of majesty and grace, but her face had a hard and almost sour look, which of itself might account for her unpopularity. The King and the younger Infanta did not take part in the day's ceremony, but the Princess of Asturias followed her mother, a fresh-faced girl, charmingly dressed in white and blue, with pearls and turquoises. A respectful step or two in the rear of her niece, yet at her side rather than behind, came in rich green silk adorned with emeralds the stout, gray-puffed, easy-going Infanta Isabel, her broad, florid face beaming with affability. The guards had passed stern word down the line for all hats to be off, but there was no sign of greeting, so far as I saw, from the spectators to the royal party, except as now and then some happy Spaniard bowed him to the dust in acknowledgment of a nod, as familiar as a wink, from this popular Infanta. The occasion of this stately function was the elevation of the Papal Nuncio to the rank of cardinal. He passed in all priestly magnificence of vestments and jewels, his red hat borne before him on a cushion. He was attended by the chief clerics of Court and capital, but even these gorgeous personages were outshone by the military and naval officers, whose breasts were a mosaic of medals, and whose headgear such erections of vainglory as to hush the crested cockatoo with shame. The Gentlemen of the Palace, too, were such peacocks in their glittering coats of many colors, their plumes and sashes, gold lace and silver lace, that the plump Ladies in Waiting, for all their pride of velvet, satin, and brocade, looked like mere hens in the wake of strutting chanticleers. The American mind is ill prepared to do homage to the dress parades of European courts, and I laid by the memory to laugh over when I should have reached a place and hour where laughter would be inoffensive. As the Diplomatic Corps, in its varied costumes, came trooping on, twice a whisper ran along the gazing lines. "The Turk!" and the traditional enemy of Spain limped smilingly past, a bent, shrewd-faced old Mussulman, whose Oriental finery was topped by the red fez. "The Yankee!" and Spain's latest adversary strode by in the person of the newly arrived United States Minister, decorously arrayed in dress suit and a Catholic expression. The chapel doors closed on this haughty train, and we, the invited public, cheerily proceeded to pass a social hour or two in chat and promenade and in contemplation of the tapestries. Even the Civil Guards unbent, dancing their babies, lending their pikes to delighted urchins, and raising forbidden curtains to give their womenkind furtive peeps into the royal apartments. Most astonishing was the maltreatment of those priceless tapestries. Small boys, unrebuked, played at hide and seek under the heavy folds, old men traced the patterns with horny fingers, and the roughest fellows from the streets lounged stupidly against them, rubbing dirty-jacketed shoulders over the superb coloring. The most splendid series displayed was from a master-loom of the Netherlands, illustrating the conquest of Tunis by Charles V--marvellously vivid scenes, where one beholds the spread of mighty camps, the battle shock of great armies and navies, and, like shrill chords of pain in some wild harmony, the countless individual tragedies of war. The scimitar of the Turk flashes down on the Spanish neck, while the upturned eyes are still too fierce for terror; the turbaned chief leans from his gold-wrought saddle to scan the severed heads that two blood-stained sons of the prophet are emulously holding up to his survey, hoping to recognize in those ghastly faces enemies of rank; white-robed women on the strand, their little ones clinging to their knees, reach arms of helpless anguish toward the smitten galley of their lords, who are leaping into the waves for refuge from the Christian cannonade. I wondered how the Turkish Minister liked those tapestries, as his stooped-back Excellency passed in conference with a Chinese mandarin, who must have studied his costume from a teacup. For we had all been hustled into rows again to make that human lane through which the Royalties and the Reverends returned from their devotions. I was facing a quaint old tapestry of Christ enthroned in glory, with the beasts of the Apocalypse climbing over Him like pet kittens, and this so distracted my attention that I omitted to ask the amiable Infanta Isabel, who would, I am sure, have told anybody anything, what had taken place. But I read it all in the _Epocha_ that evening--how her Majesty with her own august hands had fitted the red hat to the Nuncio's tonsured head, and how the new-made cardinal had addressed her in a grateful oration, praising her virtues as manifested in "the double character of queen and mother, an example rich in those peculiar gifts by which your Royal Grace has won the veneration and love of the noble and chivalrous Spanish people, the especial affection of the Father of the Faithful, and the respect and sympathy of all the world." For her and for the youthful monarch of Spain he invoked the favor of Heaven, and uttered a fervent hope that the cup of bitterness which this most Catholic nation had bowed herself to drink might be blessed to her in a renewal of strength and a reconquest of her ancient preëminence among the peoples of the earth. The most significant expression of "new Spain" that I encountered in Madrid was a mass meeting--a rare and novel feature in Spanish public life. I blundered upon it as foolishly as one well could. The second day of July was the first anniversary of the founding of a daring Madrid weekly, the _Vida Nueva_, to which, attracted by its literary values, as well as its political courage, I had subscribed. The sheet is usually issued Sunday, but as I was on the point of going out one Saturday afternoon my _Vida Nueva_ arrived, accompanied by two non-committal tickets. They gave entrance to the _Frontón Central_, "only that and nothing more." I called one of the pretty señoritas of the household into council, and she sagely decided that these were tickets to _pelota_, the Basque ball game, played in one or another of the various Madrid halls almost every summer afternoon. It seemed a little too considerate in the _Vida Nueva_ to provide for the recreation of its subscribers, but I was growing accustomed to surprises of Spanish courtesy, and tucked the tickets away in a safe corner. The folded newspaper rustled and whispered, and finally fluttered to my feet, but I was eager to be off, and, after the blind fashion of mortals, put it by. It was my privilege to dine that day with two compatriots, and one of these, who knows and loves Spain better than many Spaniards do, began at once to tell me of that most unusual occurrence, a Madrid mass meeting, to take place this very evening. Of course we resolved to go, although my friend's husband was not in the city, and no other escort would countenance so harebrained an expedition. For the street to which this valiant lady led the way was choked with a flood of men surging toward an open door. The hall for the "meeting," a word which the Spanish language has fully adopted, was the _Frontón Central_, and admission was by ticket. Light dawned on my dim wits, and, while my two companions, with dignified and tranquil mien, stood themselves up against the outer wall, I besought a leisurely cabman, who insisted on waiting to pick up a little ragamuffin clamoring for a ride, to drive me in hot haste to my domicile. Here I searched out the tickets, put away only too carefully, and took a fleeting glance at the _Vida Nueva_, which urged all "men of heart" to celebrate the eve of its anniversary by their presence at this mass meeting. I had not realized that there were so many men of heart in Madrid. The street on my return was worse than before. The cabman objected strenuously to leaving us in these tempestuous surroundings, and, since there were only two tickets, we two elders of the trio agreed that the American girl was all too young for such an escapade, and forthwith despatched her, under his fatherly care, to the hotel. Then came the tug of war. We saw men fighting fiercely about the door, we heard the loud bandying of angry words, we were warned again and again that we could never get through the jam, we were told that, tickets or no tickets, ladies would not, could not, and should not be admitted; it was darkly hinted that, before the evening was over, there would be wild and bloody work within those walls. But we noticed a few other women in the throng, and decided, from moment to moment, to wait a little longer, and see what happened next. Meanwhile, we were almost unjostled in the midst of that excited, struggling crowd, often catching the words: "Stand back there! Don't press on the ladies! Leave room!" And when it came to the final dash we had well-nigh a clear passage. Our tickets gave access only to the floor of a big, oblong hall, closely packed with a standing mass of some ten thousand men; but a debonair personage in authority conducted us, with more chivalry than justice, to the reserved boxes in the gallery, where we occupied perfect seats,--for which other people probably held tickets,--in the front row, overlooking all the house. [Illustration: MARIA SANTISIMA] So much for Spanish indulgence to audacious womenfolk. But as to the meeting itself, what was it all about? In Spain one word suffices for an answer. _Montjuich_ has become a Liberal rallying cry, although the movement is not bound in by party lines. It is the Dreyfus _affaire_ in a Spanish edition. The _Castello de Montjuich_ is a strong fortress, with large magazines and quarters for ten thousand soldiers. It is built on a commanding height, the old Mountain of the Jews, just outside Barcelona, and has again and again suffered bombardment and storm. But in this latest assault on Montjuich the weapons are words that burn and pens keener than swords. It was on the seventh of June, 1896, that the famous bomb was exploded in Barcelona. It was taken for an Anarchist outrage, and over two hundred men, including teachers, writers, and labor leaders, were arrested on suspicion. Nearly two months passed, and, despite the offer of tempting rewards, no trace of the culprits had been found. In the Fortress of Montjuich the guards deputed to watch the prisoners, acting more or less under superior authority, which itself may have been influenced by Jesuit suggestion, began on the fourth of August to inflict tortures upon the accused for the purpose of extracting evidence. The trials were by military procedure, power sat in the seat of justice, and innocent men, it is believed, were condemned on the strength of those forced confessions--mere assents, wrung from them by bodily agony, to whatever their guards might dictate. But many persisted in denial, and in course of time a number were released, maimed, in certain cases, for life. Others were shot, and a score still lay in prison. The fortress dungeons are deep and dark, but little by little the cries and groans of the "martyrs of Montjuich" penetrated the dull stone and sounded throughout Spain. On the fourteenth of May, last year, the _Vida Nueva_, this bold young periodical in the van of the Liberal cause, brought out an illustrated number devoted to "The Torments of Montjuich." Other periodicals sprang to its support and kept the Government busy with denunciations, while they vehemently called for a revision of the judicial process, with the hope of releasing the men still under sentence and clearing the names of those who had perished. Mass meetings to urge such revision, which could be accorded only by vote of the Cortes, were held in Barcelona, Saragossa, Valencia, Santander, and other principal cities, all demanding revision in the sacred names of patriotism, humanity, and justice. Our Madrid mass meeting was of chief consequence in impressing the Government with the weight of popular opinion. The swaying multitude was called to order at quarter of ten by Señor Canalejas, who introduced a notable array of speakers. There were representatives of labor, of republicanism, of the press, a Catalan charged with a greeting from Barcelona, the champion of Spanish Socialism, Pablo Iglesias by name, and great men of the nation, Azcárate, Moret, and Salmeron. Spanish eloquence at its best thrills the blood to wine, and the swift succession of orators, fourteen all told, played on the vast audience like master artists on a murmurous organ. Yet there was no disorder. A generous and grateful hearing was accorded the Count of Las Almenas, who frankly declared himself a conservative in politics and an apostolic Roman Catholic in religion, but in the name of both these creeds a lover of justice and humanity. Since for these he ever held himself ready to do battle in the Cortes, he gave the meeting his pledge that he would support Azcárate in the motion for revision. But the wrath and grief of the audience could hardly be controlled when one of the released prisoners took the platform to recount the horrors of Montjuich. He told of dungeons with earth floor and one grated window, of savage guards determined to gain the crosses and pensions promised to those who should extract evidence. He told how the helpless captives, weakened by confinement, were tortured with cords, whips, sleeplessness, hunger, and thirst. Bound as they were, water was held before their parched mouths, with the sinister words, "Confess what we bid you, and you shall drink." When the famished men begged for food, they were answered with the lash, or, more fiendishly, with shreds of salt codfish, which increased their thirst a hundred fold. One man in his desperation sprang to the lamp and quaffed the dirty oil. They licked the moisture from their dungeon walls. They thrust white tongues through the grating to catch the drops of rain. Soon the guards proceeded to more violent torments, wrenching, burning, and probing the quivering flesh with a devilish ingenuity of torture, making a derisive sport of their atrocious work. One of the victims went mad while undergoing torture by compression of the head. Others, on hearing the coming steps of the guards, strove to escape their cruel hands by suicide. One drank a bowl of disinfectant found in his cell, one beat his forehead against the wall, one strove to drive a rusted nail into his heart. It was a frightful tale to hear. I looked across the hall to where a Spanish flag was hung. Yellow wax is funeral wax, and Alarcón, who sees in yellow a symbol of death and of decay, laments that it is the color of half the Spanish banner. "_Ay de la bandera española!_" But surely there is hope for Spain, while she has sons who, in grasp of a military tyranny which has rendered such crimes possible, contend in open field for the overthrow of the "black Spain" of the Inquisition, and still bear heart of hope for a white, regenerated Spain, where religion shall include the love of man. XV THE PATRON SAINT OF MADRID "Labré, cultivé, cogí Con piedad, con fe, con celo, Tierras, virtudes y cielo." Spain seems actually skied over with the wings of guardian angels. The traditional tutelar of the nation, Santiago, counts for less, especially in the south and centre of the Peninsula, than might be expected, and was long since officially superseded by the Virgin; but cities, hamlets, families, individuals, all have their protecting saints. Some are martyrs, some bishops, some apostles, while Cordova rests secure beneath the shining plumes of the angel Raphael. Towns and townlets hold festivals for their celestial patrons, honoring them with fairs, horse-races, processions, dances, and whatsoever else may be appropriate to the season and characteristic of the locality, as ball games, bull-fights, or even a miracle play. Only Seville, mirth-loving Seville, who makes holiday on the slightest provocation, can never invite her two beautiful guardians, Santa Justa and Santa Rufina, to a jubilee. These holy maidens used to keep a pottery booth in Triana, now the gypsy quarter of the city, where, refusing to worship the Roman Venus, they won the crown of martyrdom. But their industrious habits cling to them still, and, by night and by day, while the centuries pass, they uphold the Giralda. An anointed vision, like Murillo's, may see their graceful forms hovering in mid-air on either side of the famous tower, which their strong brown arms hold firm even in tempests. If the ladies should let go, the Giralda would fall, and so the Sevillians are driven to the ungallant course of ignoring these really useful patrons and gadding off to adjacent towns whose saints are at leisure to be entertained. [Illustration: A SPANISH MONK] By the eternal contradiction that prevails in all things Spanish, it has come to pass that Madrid, the elegant capital and royal residence, is under the guardianship of a peasant saint. Here, in the eleventh century, Isidro was born, say the priests, of poor but Catholic parents. If not precisely a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, he was next door to that humble estate, being a digger of wells and cellars. He dug with such piety that God aided him by miracles, causing troublesome rocks to melt like wax at the touch of his spade, and springs of healing water to leap in the pits of his fashioning. He was a tiller of the ground, besides, a hireling farm servant, whose agricultural methods, though seemingly irregular, caused his master's granaries to overflow. As he went to the fields in the fresh spring mornings, the young Isidro would scatter handfuls of seed for the birds, saying, "Eat, God's little birds, for when our Lord looks forth in dawn, He looks upon us all." And as he dropped the wheat and barley in the furrows, ever he murmured, "This for God, and this for us; this for the birds, and this for the ants." "For the ants, too?" mockingly asked the rustics who planted beside him, but Isidro steadfastly replied, "For the ants, too, since they are God's ants, and His royal bounty is for all His household." No wonder that the Almighty had Isidro's fields in special charge, sending sun and rain in due season that the harvest might suffice for every claimant. Such divine care was the more necessary, because this dreamy plough-boy spent most of his time in the churches, or on his knees in the shadow of the fruit trees, until his profane companions called him Lazybones. Isidro was no effective patron of Madrid as yet, but ran away from the Moors, when they invaded the city, finding farm service in a neighboring village. Here he married a maiden whose lovely soul, according to Lope de Vega, shone through her guileless face like a painting through its glass. She was no less devout than her husband, and went every evening to trim the altar in a lonely shrine of the Virgin. There was a stream to be crossed on the way, and in times of freshet Our Lady would appear in person and lead her by the hand over the tops of the waves. Such dainty stepping as it must have been! And once, when Isidro accompanied his wife, they both crossed in a boat suddenly improvised from her mantilla, which was not a thread the worse for the experience. The miracle-working power that developed in San Isidro was first exercised, as became a farmer, on suffering beasts and bad weather. His early influence over water grew more and more pronounced, rain refreshing the thirsty fields at his bidding, and medicinal fountains gushing from rocks at the stroke of his hoe. And when, one sunshiny morning, his wife let their baby boy slip from her arms into the depths of the well and ran in distress to her husband, the saint, who for once was working on the farm, did not scold her, as the priestly authors seem to think would have been the natural course, but calmly said, "My sister, what is there to cry about?" And when, after a season of prayer, these exemplary parents proceeded to the well, its waters had risen to the brink, lifting the little John, as on a silver-tissue cushion, safe to their embrace. Isidro still retained his youthful peculiarities as a laborer, often praying all day long in the churches, while his yoke of oxen did the ploughing just as well without him. On one occasion, when he arrived too late for mass, the gates of heaven opened to his vision, as he knelt before the closed church door, and he was permitted to witness a celestial mass, where Christ was both priest and wafer, with choirs of angels chanting the holy service. Even his charities cost him little, for when the _olla_ of vegetables and fish, that his wife made every Saturday for the poor, had all been eaten, a word from Isidro was enough to replenish the pot. If he emptied his sack of corn on the snow for a flock of hungry pigeons, the sack was full when he reached the mill; and when he threshed his master's wheat a second and a third time for the beggars, the very chaff turned into golden grain. His best quality, which almost makes his cult desirable in Spain, continued to be his love for animals, especially for birds. These sang their sweetest songs as he passed by, and often flew down from the poplar branches to brush their little wings against his blouse. And he, who had raised his master's daughter from the dead, did not disdain to work miracles of healing and of life on maltreated horses. Madrid would do well to give her guardian saint a season ticket to the bull-ring. Even the despised and cudgelled ass had a share in his protection. A sacrilegious wolf that thought to make a meal of Isidro's donkey, left to graze outside a church where the saint had gone to pray, was struck dead--perhaps by the donkey's heels. This kindly rustic, who had separated from his wife for greater sanctity, died on St. Andrew's Day and was buried in the cemetery of St. Andrew's Church in Madrid. Such sepulture was not to his liking, and twice his ghost appeared to ask that the body might be removed to the church, as was presently done, all the bells of St. Andrew's ringing of their own accord to give it welcome. The tomb immediately began to work miracles, and Isidro became such a favorite with the people that when, in 1212, a shepherd guided Alfonso VIII, lost with his vanguard in the wild passes of the Sierra Morena, to the great battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, where the armies of the Holy Cross broke forever the dominion of the Moors in Central Spain, nothing would do but the story that this shepherd was Isidro himself. Above the tomb of the saint a chapel was erected, perhaps by Alfonso, perhaps by _Isabel la Católica_. There seems to be a conflict of authorities here, but all testimonies agree that the angels used to come down and sing in the chapel Saturday afternoons. Madrid formally accepted Isidro as patron in the summer of 1232, when the labors of the husbandmen, on the point of perishing from drought, were saved by the body of the Holy Peasant, which, borne in priestly procession, called down floods of rain; but it was not until the times of Philip III, some four centuries later, that the actual canonization of Isidro was granted by Rome. On May 15, 1620, the _Plaza Mayor_, that handsome square which has been the theatre of so many tournaments, executions, and _autos de fe_, the scene, two years later, of the beatification of Loyola, was inaugurated by a splendid festival in honor of San Isidro. From that day to this his worship has not waned. The miracle-working bones, which were carried to the bitter death-bed of Philip III, and comforted the passing of the great and generous spirit of Charles III, are still held to be more potent than physicians. Churches, oratories, and chapels have been built to him all over the Peninsula, the Franciscan Friars founded a convent of San Isidro in Rome, and his name is a part of our new geography lesson in the Antilles and the Philippines. Only four years ago his urn was borne in penitential procession through Madrid, with double supplications for rain on the parched country, and for a swift and happy ending of the Cuban war. All priestly, military, civic, and governmental pomp went to make up that stately escort, the ladies of Madrid showering the train as it passed beneath their balconies with flowers, poems, and _confetti_. The saint did what he could. The procession had been so skilfully timed that the rains began that very night, but the Cuban war was a matter out of his province. His dealings had always been with water, not with blood. There is significance in this devotion of proud Castile to San Isidro. Spain is essentially as democratic as America. Her proverbs tell the story: "Many a man gets to heaven in tow breeches;" "Do what your master bids you, and sit down with him at table;" "Nobody is born learned, and even bishops are made of men;" "Since I am a man I may come to be Pope;" "The corpse of the Pope takes no more ground than that of the sacristan;" "Every man is the son of his own works." "Said the leaf to the flower: 'O fie! You put on airs indeed! But we sprang, both you and I, From the selfsame little brown seed.'" Pedler, porter, beggar treat you as social equals and expect a full return of courtesy. It is told in Madrid how a great diplomatic personage not long ago was eating his picnic luncheon in a hired carriage. The driver, lunching also, leaned back from his seat, clinked glasses, and drank the gentleman's health. The dignitary glared with astonishment and wrath. "Man! I am the Imperial Ambassador of Nation So-and-So." "What of it?" returned the driver, taking another bite of his peppery Spanish sausage; "I am the Head Hostler of Stables Such-and-Such." Again and again, in recent times as in ancient, have the rank and file of the Spanish nation asserted their dignity of manhood. An edict of Charles III, forbidding the Madrileños to muffle themselves in their beloved long cloaks and hide their faces under their big slouch hats, raised a furious riot in the capital. Should a king dictate the fashion of a man's garments? And when the stupid weakness of Charles IV and the baseness of his son Fernando had delivered Spain over to Napoleon, when French armies held her fortresses, and Murat, with twenty-five thousand troops, ruled Madrid by logic of steel and iron, it was the Spanish people who, from Asturias to Andalusia, sprang to the defence of a country abandoned by princes, councils, and grandees. The Spanish people, not the Spanish nobles, preserved the independence of the nation and actually broke the career of the Corsican conqueror. The Italian king, Amadeo, so much better than his fortunes, was welcomed at Valencia in 1871 with simple verses, spoken by a child, that breathe even from their opening stanza this native spirit of democracy:-- "The High Lord of the Heavens Created men one day, All mortal and all equal, All shapen out of clay; For God recked not of nations, Of white and black and brown, But on His human children Impartially looked down." It is not then so strange as it appears at first hearing that a Piers Plowman should be patron of Madrid. From Alfonso VIII to Alfonso XIII, a matter of some seven centuries, Isidro has been in high repute with royalty. The "Catholic Kings" made him rich gifts; Philip II, bigot of bigots, cherished an especial veneration for the ghostly protector who had brought his delicate childhood safely through smallpox and epileptic seizures; the passion-wasted Philip IV did him public homage; Charles the Bewitched made a solemn progress to his shrine to thank him for recovery from illness; even the bright young Bourbon, Philip V, had scarcely arrived in Madrid before he hastened to worship the efficacious body of San Isidro. The urn has been opened at intervals to give their successive Majesties of Spain the grewsome joy of gazing on the bones, and it has been the peculiar privilege of Spanish queens, on such occasions, to renew the costly cerements. The devotion of the present regent to these relics keeps pace with that of her predecessors. Where royalty leads, aristocracy is swift to follow, and Isidro has a gorgeous wardrobe of embroidered standards, palls, canopies, burial cloths, and everything that a skeleton could require, but "for a' that and a' that" the laboring people of Castile never forget that the Canonized Farmer especially belongs to them. His fortnight-long _fiesta_ is the May outing of the rustic population all about Madrid. We will start on this pilgrimage from the _Puerta del Sol_, because everything in Madrid starts from the _Puerta del Sol_. From this great open parallelogram in the centre of the city, surrounded by lofty hotels and Government buildings, bordered with shops and cafés, brightened with fountains, thronged with trams, carriages, people, always humming with voices, always surging with movement, run ten of the principal streets of the capital. The _Alcalá_, most fashionable of promenades, and _San Jerónimo_, beloved of wealthy shoppers, conduct to the noble reaches of parks and _paseos_ in the east; the handsome _Arenal_ and historic _Calle Mayor_ lead west to the royal palace, with its extensive gardens known as the _Campo del Moro_; _Montera_, with two less elegant avenues, points to the north, where one may find the university, the Protestant churches, and the tragic site of the _Quemadero_; and three corresponding streets open the way to the south, with its factories, hospitals, old churches, and world-famed _Rastro_, or rag fair. [Illustration: A SEVILLE STREET] But during the early days of the _Romeria_, which begins on May 15, all the throbbing tide of life pours toward the southwest, for the goal of the pilgrimage, the Hermitage of San Isidro, built over one of his miraculous wells by the empress of Charles I, in gratitude for a cure experienced by her august husband after drinking of the waters, stands on the farther bank of the Manzanares. The trams, literally heaped with clinging humanity, pass out by the _Calle Mayor_ and cross the _Plaza Mayor_. The innumerable 'buses and cabs make a shorter cut, but all varieties of vehicle are soon wedged together in the broad thoroughfare of Toledo. Here we pass the big granite church of San Isidro el Real, once in possession of the Jesuits, but on their expulsion from Spain, in 1767, consecrated to the Santo Labrador. His body was borne thither, with all solemn ceremonial, from the chapel in St. Andrew's; and his poor wife, who had also been sainted, by a courteous Spanish afterthought, under the attractive title of _Maria de la Cabeza_, Mary of the Head, was allowed to lay her celebrated skull beneath the same roof,--a greater liberty than he had permitted her during the latter half of their earthly lives. The Madrid Cathedral, hard by the royal palace, is still in slow process of building, the work being hampered and delayed for lack of funds, although her Majesty sets a devout example by contributing $300 a month. Meanwhile, San Isidro el Real serves as the cathedral church of the diocese. This _Calle de Toledo_, where Isidro dug several of his medicinal wells, is always gay with arcades and booths and drapers' shops; but now, during the _Romeria_, it is a veritable curbstone market, where oranges, sashes, brooms, mantles, picture frames, saucepans, fiddles, mantillas, china, jackets, umbrellas, fans, dolls, bird-cages, paintings of saints, and photographs of ballet dancers are all cried and exhibited, hawked and held under nose, in one continuous tumult. As we approach the bare mass of masonry known as the Gate of Toledo, we cast, for all our festival mood, a clouded glance in the direction of the barbarous slaughter-houses of Madrid. Here the stronger beasts are blinded by the thrust of darts, and also hamstrung, to render them helpless under the deliberate butchery of their tormentors, who often amuse themselves by a little bull-fight practice with the agonized creatures before striking the final blow--a place of such atrocious cruelties that even the seasoned nerves of an Austrian surgeon recently visiting it gave way, and he fainted as he looked. There is work for San Isidro here. The jam of equipages on the Bridge of Toledo gives us abundant time to observe the statue of the Holy Peasant, in a stone niche, lifting his baby from the well, and the companion statue of Mary of the Skull. And there is the Manzanares to look at, that sandy channel along which dribble a few threads of water--threads that the washerwomen of Madrid seek after like veins of silver. Small boys are wading from one bank to the other, hardly troubling themselves to roll up their trousers. It is said that Philip IV, surveying his pompous bridge across the Manzanares, was wickedly advised by one of his courtiers to sell the bridge or else buy a river. It is a curious bit of irony to hold the festival of the Water Saint beside a river bed almost as dry as his bones. But the crowd has now become so mad and merry that it distracts attention alike from architecture and physical geography. Will all the dexterity of foot-police and mounted guards ever succeed in disentangling this snarl of equipages? Who cares? Everybody is laughing. Everybody, too, is helping, so far as lungs can help. A daring Aragonese, with a blue and white checked handkerchief knotted about his head and a scarlet blanket over his shoulders, tries to dash across the bridge and rejoin his screaming children. He stumbles before a jovial omnibus, whose four horses, adorned with beribboned straw hats, gaze coyly out from under the torn brims like so many metamorphosed Maud Mullers. A distant guard roars a warning. The crowd bellows in sympathy. A liveried coachman rears his spirited pair of bays. A cock-hatted gypsy, with half his tribe packed into his cart, tries to follow suit, and tugs savagely at the stubborn mouths of mules whose heads are liberally festooned with red and green tassels. In front of these safely passes the Aragonese, only to bring up against the great wheel of a picnic wagon, whose occupants, mostly señoritas in the sunrise Philippine shawls, thrust out their pretty heads, all crowned with flowers instead of hats, and rain down saucy salutations. The crowd chimes in with every variety of voluble impudence. He catches at the long gold fringe of the nearest shawl, saves himself from falling at the price of a shriek of wrath from the señorita, plunges desperately on, is struck by a cab horse, the poor beast being half blinded by the tickling plumes that droop over eyes and nose, and amid volleys of ridicule and encouragement reels to the shelter of the sidewalk. But a very precarious shelter it is, so narrow that the lads are positively obliged to fling their arms about the lasses to hold the fluttering skirts back from peril of wheels and hoofs. Everywhere what audacity, what fun, what color, and what noise! Troops on troops of foot travellers, usually in family groups, and often stained with the dust of an all-day tramp! The wives generally carry the hampers, and the husbands sometimes shoulder the babies. Squads of young fellows frolic along, each with his supply of provisions tied up in a gaudy handkerchief. The closer the nudging the better they like it; a slap from a girlish hand is almost as good as a kiss. Isidro knew all about it in his day. But this clownish jollity grows rougher and rougher, and the crack and sting from a coachman's whip tempt a reply with the pilgrim's staff. The guards, hoarse and purple, wipe their dripping brows. It is early afternoon yet, too, and the larking and license are as nothing to what may be expected before midnight. It is a little better when, at last, the bridge is left behind. Turning to the northwest, the dusty road runs on beside the river and beneath the bluffs lined with rowdyish folk, who shout down greetings to their acquaintances and compliments to the ladies, toward the _ermita_. A certain Juan de Vargas, riding over this same route one day, lifted his eyes to the uplands to see how his farm-hand, Isidro, was getting on with the ploughing. Blessed Isidro! Before and after went two stalwart young angels, still in shining white, each driving a celestial yoke of oxen. Times have changed. The sight that greets our eyes is emphatically human--a great country fair, a pandemonium of rude, good-natured revelry. The beggars who have been chasing the carriage, the cripples outstripping the rest, thrust withered arms, ulcerous legs, and all manner of profitable deformities into our very faces as we alight, even clutching at the coins with which we pay the coachman. We make our way, as best we can in the rough press, between two rows of booths toward the church. There is the usual Spanish variety of penny toys on sale--balls, baskets, whips, kites, jumping-jacks, balloons, and every other conceivable trifle admitting of the colors red and yellow. But the great traffic is in those articles especially consecrate to San Isidro--frosted cakes, probably made after the recipe of _Maria de la Cabeza_, clay vessels of every shape and size for carrying away the healing waters, and, first and foremost, _pitos_, or whistles. The priests would have us believe that San Isidro was forever droning psalms, but ploughmen know a ploughman's music, and the sacred whistles lead the sales in the _Romeria_. It is impiety not to purchase at least one of these, and the more devout you are, the more _pitos_ will you buy. The Infanta Isabel, aunt of his Little Majesty, fills her emblazoned coach every year with these shrill pipes in all their variety of queer disguises--fans, birds, puffing grotesques, and, above all, paper flowers. He is no lover worth the having who does not bring his sweetheart a San Isidro rose with a _pito_ for a stem. The ear-torture of an immense fair-ground delighting in an infinity of whistles may be left to the sympathetic imagination. We cling to the memory of Burns, and bear for his bonny sake what we could hardly endure for any such sham laborer as Isidro. The hearing is not the only sense to do penance in this pilgrimage. The Water Saint has never thought to work a miracle of cleanliness upon his peasant votaries, and the smell that bursts out upon us from the opening doors of the church might put us to flight, were flight still possible. But, caught in the human current, we are swept on into the gilded, candle-lighted, foul-aired oratory, with its effigies of Santo Labrador and Santa Labradora. All day long the imperious ringing of the bell at the shortest of intervals has been calling one company of the faithful after another up the bare brown hill to that unventilated temple. When there is no squeezing room left for even a dwarf from the pygmy show, the doors are closed, the bell is silenced, and the rustics are marshalled in rapid procession before the altar, where they pay a penny each, receive a cheap print of San Isidro, and kiss the mysterious, glass-cased relic which a businesslike young ecclesiastic touches hastily to their lips. The frank sound of the kissing within is accompanied by the tooting of _pitos_ without. We stand at one side, looking at the priests and wondering how their consciences are put together, but half ashamed to watch with heretic eyes the tears of joy, the fervors of prayer, the ecstasies of faith, that are to be seen in many of these simple, passionate faces filing by. Here comes a little girl treading as if on air and clasping her picture of the saint to her lips, brows, and heart with such abandon of delighted adoration as one must go to Spain to see. Released from the Hermitage, we fill our lungs with sweeter breath, give skirts a vigorous shake in the vain hope that we may not carry away too many deserters from the insect retinue of our recent associates, and turn down toward the river. Our short cut leads us among heaps and heaps of bales packed with the graceful clay jars. How many an anxious mother will trudge her weary miles across this dry Castilian steppe, bearing with all her other burdens a _botija_ of the healing water to some little sufferer at home! Wonderful water, warranted to make whole the lame, the blind, the deaf, the dumb, and put to rout all ills that flesh is heir to, especially fevers, tumors, erysipelas, paralysis, and consumption! It is as potent to-day as when it first gushed from the earth at the bidding of the young Isidro, for did it not work a notable cure, as late as 1884, on the Infanta Doña Paz de Bourbon, sister of Alphonso XII? We linger a few minutes at the edge of the bluff, looking down upon the animated scene below, from which rises the hum as of an exaggerated beehive. The long green stretch of valley meadow is one wave of restless color. Thickly dotted with booths for refreshment, for sale of the San Isidro wares, for penny shows, farces, wax figures, and all manner of cheap entertainments, it still has space for dancers, wrestlers, _pelota_ players, for swings, stilts, and merry-go-rounds, and, above all, for the multitude of promenaders, sleepers, and feasters. The bright May sunshine gleams and dazzles on the soldiers' helmets, flashes out all the hues and tints of the varied costumes, and even lends a grace to the brown patches on the browner tents. The tossing of limbs in the wild, free dances, the flutter of the red and yellow flags, the picturesque grouping on the grass of families, complete to dog and donkey, around the platter of homely fare and the skin bottle of wine--all this makes a panorama on which one would gladly gaze for hours. Going down into the heart of the festivity, the interest still grows. We enter one of the cleanest _cantinas_ and invest a _peseta_ in a bottle of sarsaparilla, not for our own drinking, having seen the water in which the glasses are washed, but as a protection against the horde of beggars and the gypsy fortune tellers. It works like a charm. As we respond to the whining appeals with the civilities of social greeting and an offered glass of our innocent beverage, the ragged petitioners are straightway transformed into ladies and gentlemen. They draw themselves erect, quaff the cup to our long life and happiness, discuss in self-respecting tones the weather and the fête, and then, without another hint of solicitation, bid us courteous farewells. We mean to take out a patent on the sarsaparilla treatment of Spanish mendicancy. The tent itself is, like the rest, shabby and tumbledown, furnished with rough tables and benches, where cadets are playing dominos as they drink, and two country sweethearts are delectably eating what appears to be a sardine omelette off the same cracked plate. A clumsy lantern hangs overhead, racks of bottles are fastened up along the canvas walls, and all about the trampled earth floor stand water jars, great bowls of greens, and baskets of the crusty Spanish bread. A pale young Madrileño drops in for a glass of wine, but before indulging has the shy little rustic who serves him take a sip, languidly begging her, "Do me the favor to sweeten my drink." The yellow cigarette-stains show on his white fingers as he pats her plump bare arm. The child, for she is scarcely more, and as brown as an acorn, responds to these amenities by giving the smiling exquisite alternate bites of her hunk of goat's-milk cheese, while her mother keeps a sharp eye on them both. Comedy and tragedy are busy all about us. A newly arrived family plods wearily by in ludicrous procession, headed by a tall father carrying a baby and closed by a short child carrying a cat. A showy man of middle age, playing the gallant to an overdressed brunette, is suddenly confronted by his furious wife in boy's attire, so unluckily well disguised that, before recognizing her, he has replied to her rush of invective with a blow which bids fair to make one of her eyes, at least, blacker than those of her rival. Traditional ballads are trolled, popular songs are echoed from group to group, and, despite bad odors, fleas, and whistles, we are reluctant to leave. But the afternoon grows late, the _Arganda_ and _Valdepeñas_ are beginning to burn in the southern blood, an occasional flourish of cudgels or of fists sends the police scurrying across the field, and, being nothing if not discreet, we pay our parting respects to San Isidro. Coming home by way of the _Prado_ and passing the proud shaft of yellow-brown granite that towers far above its enclosing cypress trees, as glory above death, we are reminded that this gala month has brought another _fiesta_ to Madrid. Every second of May the capital commemorates with solemn masses, with stately civic processions, and a magnificent military review, the patriots who fell fighting in the streets on that terrible Monday of 1808, _El Dos de Mayo_, which brought to pass the war of independence. One may read of that fierce carnage in the vivid pages of Galdós or behold it in the lurid paintings of Goya. To see once is to see forever that line of French soldiery, with steady musket at shoulder, but with eyes bent on the ground, while they shoot down squad after squad of their defenceless victims. In pools of blood lie the contorted bodies, with heads and breasts horribly torn by crimson wounds, while of those who wait their turn to fall beside them some cover the eyes, one stupidly gnaws his hands, one kneels and wildly peers from under his shaggy hair into the very muzzle of the gun before him, one flings back his head with a savage grin, half of fright and half of courage, one desperately strips bare his breast and in agony of horror glares upon the guns, but the most are crouching, shuddering, sinking--and all only an item in the awful cost that the Spanish people have paid for Spanish liberties. The celebration of 1899 was no less brilliant than usual, although many of the Madrid papers spoke bitterly of the shadow that the disastrous first of May must henceforth cast on the glorious Second. It is indeed gall and wormwood to all Spain that the Manila defeat so nearly coincides with the proudest day in Spanish annals. The saint of _El Dos de Mayo_ is Saint Revolution, as democratic in one way as Saint Agriculture in another. When these two patrons of Madrid understand how to work in fellowship, when there comes a Government in Spain that cares chiefly to promote the welfare of the laboring people, the world may discover anew the vitality and noble quality of this long-suffering nation. We saw the _Romeria_ once more, driving through late in the evening, when the closed booths glimmered white on the silent meadow. "Yes, it is all a pack of lies," said a thoughtful Catholic, "but what is one to do? A man cannot believe in religion--and yet how to live without it? The more I stay away from mass the more I want and need it. Think of the comfort these peasants take with their San Isidro!" The moonlight shone serene and beautiful on those patched, shabby tents, transforming them to silver. XVI THE FUNERAL OF CASTELAR "The death of the Republic will be, for you, for us, and for all, the death of liberty. The death of liberty will be the death of the Republic, and as liberty is the only thing in the world that rises from the dead, with liberty shall rise again, in good time, the Republic."--EMILIO CASTELAR: _Inaugural Address_, 1873. The present state of Spanish politics was amusingly expounded to me by a spirited young philosopher of Cadiz. "In the north," he said, "the prevailing sentiment is for Don Carlos. Nocedal is doing all he can to fan it in Andalusia, but it finds its natural home in the northern provinces. To be sure, there is San Sebastian, where the Court summers, which consequently upholds the Queen, and there are Republican groups; but the north of Spain, broadly speaking, is Carlist. The centre favors the reigning family. Possession is a strong argument, and the royal forces hold Madrid. Barcelona is Republican. Those Catalans are always thirsty for a fight. But the middle tract of Spain, as a whole, accepts the existing monarchy. Castilians are too gallant to strike against a woman and a child. The south is Republican. For the best part of the century Cadiz and Malaga have stood for revolution. Where was the army of Isabel II defeated? And why has the Queen never seen the Alhambra? "But, let me tell you, these Carlists, these Royalists, these Republicans are all fools. If there is anything hopeless in this world, it's Spanish politics. All the uproar of the Revolution ended in murdering our best man and driving out our best king. For myself, I mean to work hard and marry soon, and have a little Spain in my own house that shall express my own convictions. My children shall be good Catholics, but not superstitious bigots. They shall be well educated, if I have to send them to France or England for it. They shall be disciplined, but under the law of liberty. And with that I propose to be content. All my politics are to be kept under my own roof, where I can work my ideas into permanent form. I am sick of the way in which Spain boils with ideas that only destroy one another." This Sir Oracle was two-and-twenty, with the prettiest of girlish photographs in his vest pocket, and the smallest of savings in the bank, but I remembered his words in the days of mourning for Emilio Castelar. The illustrious tribune, heavy-hearted with the troubles of his country, had gone to the home of friends, at a village in sunny Murcia, for the rest and comfort that nature always gave him. His almost boyish optimism, "_niño grande y grande niño_" that he was, had kept him assured of peace even after the destruction of the _Maine_, and assured of victory even after the battle of Manila. Hence the pressure of fact told on him all the more cruelly. "I die a victim of Spain's agony," he wrote in a personal letter shortly before the end, and his last article for publication, finished on the day of his death, a gloomy discussion of the outlook for the Peace Conference, contains bitter references to the national disasters and to the ravages of the "criminal troop of pirates in the Philippines." He died on Thursday, the twenty-fifth of May, within hearing of the Mediterranean waves he loved so well, with tender faces bent over him, and the crucifix at his lips. The news of his death aroused this grief-weary nation to a fresh outburst of sorrow. Some lamented him as one of the chief orators of modern Europe, recalling his eloquence in the tempestuous times of the Revolution, when he "intoned mighty hymns in praise of liberty, democracy, and the sacred Fatherland!" Some mourned the patriot, pointing proudly to the honorable poverty in which this holder of many offices, at one time almost absolute dictator, had lived and died. Some wept for the cordial, generous, noble-hearted man, the joy of his friends and idol of his household. His political sympathizers bewailed the loss of the Spanish apostle of democracy, the lifelong champion of liberty. And many not of his following nor of his faith felt that a towering national figure had disappeared and another glory of Spain vanished away. The first wreath received was from a Republican club that sent the pansies of memory. Among the five hundred telegrams and cablegrams that arrived within a few hours at the country-seat where he had died was one from over seas, which read: "To Castelar: In thy death it seems as if we had lost the last treasure left to us, the voice of the Spanish race. In thy death Spain has become mute. Yet let me believe that thou respondest, 'She will speak again.'" The coming of the body to the capital was a triumphal progress. A large escort of friends, who had made speed to Murcia from all parts of the Peninsula, accompanied it, and there were crowds at the stations, even in the mid-hours of the night, with tears, handfuls of roses, wreaths, and poems of farewell. There was often something very touching about these offerings. At one of the smaller towns a young girl hastily gathered flowers from the garden attached to the station, broke off a spray from a blossoming tree, tied these with the bright ribbon from her hair, and, clambering up, hung this simple nosegay among the costly tributes that already nearly covered the outer sides of the funeral car. In another crowded station the village priest came hurrying forward, bared his head with deepest reverence before the garlanded coach, as if before the altar, and chanted the prayers for the dead. Again, a group of workmen, allowed to enter the car, fell on their knees before the bier and prayed. The train was met on its arrival in Madrid by an immense concourse of people. Señor Silvela and other distinguished representatives of the Government were there, church dignitaries, presidents of political societies and literary academies, but, above all, the people. It was the great, surging multitude that gave the Republican leader his grandest welcome. This poor shell of Castelar, the man said to bear "the soul of a Don Quixote in the body of a Sancho Panza," lay in state through Sunday and a part of Monday in the _Palacio del Congreso_. The vestibule had been converted into a _capilla ardiente_. Masses were chanted ceaselessly at the two candle-laden altars, the perfume from the ever increasing heaps of flowers was so oppressive that the guards had to be relieved at short intervals, and the procession of people that filed rapidly past the bier, often weeping as they went, reached out from the Morocco lions of the doorway to the _Prado_ and the Fountain of Neptune. Many of the humblest clad, waiting half the day in line, held pinks or lilies, fast withering in the sun, to drop at the feet of the people's friend. Early on Monday afternoon the doors were closed, and by half-past three the funeral cortège began to form in the _Prado_ for its four-hour march by way of the _Calle de Alcalá_, _Puerta del Sol_, _Calle Mayor_, and _Cuesta de la Vega_, to the cemetery of San Isidro. By the never failing Spanish courtesy, I was invited to see the procession from the balcony of a private house in the _Alcalá_. I found my hostess, a vivacious little old lady, whose daughter had crowned her with glory and honor by marrying into the nobility, much perturbed over the failure of the Queen Regent to show sympathy with the popular grief. "There were one hundred and forty-nine wreaths sent in. The very number shows that the royal wreath was lacking. I am a Conservative, of course. Canovas was my friend, and has dined here often and often. You see his portrait there beside that of my daughter, _la Marquesa_. But Canovas loved Castelar, and would not, like Silvela, have grudged him the military honors of a national funeral. As if the dead were Republicans! The dead are Spaniards, and Castelar is a great Spaniard, as this tremendous throng of people proves. There were not nearly so many for Canovas, though the aristocracy made an elegant display; there were not so many for Alfonso XII, though all that Court and State and army could do was done, and the Queen rode in the splendid ebony coach in which Juana the Mad used to carry about the body of that handsome husband of hers. "But the people know their losses. Never in my life have I seen the _Alcalá_ so full as this. Silvela has had to give way, and the troops will come--at least a few of them. But not a word, not a flower, from the Queen! She sent a magnificent wreath for Canovas, and a beautiful letter to his widow. But for Castelar, her people's hero, nothing. Ah, she is not _simpática_. She does not know her opportunities. She does not understand the art of winning love. Only a year ago she sent a wreath to the funeral of Frascuelo, the _torero_. And everybody knows how she hates the bull-fight. But if she could drop her prejudices then to be at one with the feeling of her capital, why not now? They say she has a neuralgic headache to-day. _Ay, Dios mio!_ I should think she might." Listening to this frank chatter and watching that mighty multitude, I was reminded of one of the Andalusian _coplas_:-- "The Republic is dead and gone; Bury her out of the rain. But see! There is never a _Panteón_ Can hold the funeral train." And this, in turn, suggested another of those popular refrains:-- "The moon is a Republican, And the sun with open eye; The earth she is Republican, And Republican am I." But who can understand this ever baffling Spain? After all, what was the significance of that assembled host? How far was it drawn by devotion to the man, and how far by devotion to the idea for which he stood? How far by idle curiosity, by the Spanish passion for pomps and shows, and, above all, for a crowd, by that strange Spanish delight in _mucha gente_? So far as eye could tell, this might have been the merriest of fêtes. The wide street was a sea of restless color. Uniforms, liveries, parasols, hats, frocks, pinafores, kerchiefs, blouses, sashes, fans, flecked the sunshine with a thousand hues. Here loitered a messenger boy in vivid scarlet; there passed a waiter with a silver tray gleaming on his head; here a market woman bent beneath her burden of russet sacks bursting with greens; there stood a priest in shovel hat and cassock, smelling a great red rose; here a gallant in violet cape escorted a lady flaming in saffron; there a beaming old peasant, with an azure scarf tied over his white head, threw an orange to attract the attention of a plodding porter, whose forehead was protected from the cords binding the boxes to his back by several folds of purplish carpeting. Streets and sidewalks, balconies and windows, all were full, and everywhere such eagerness, such animation, and such stir! The children sitting on the curbstone rocked their little bodies back and forth in excitement. Young mothers danced their crying infants, and young fathers shifted the babies of a size or two larger from one shoulder to the other. A boy in a red cap climbed a small locust tree, from whose foliage his head peeped out like an overgrown cherry. The crowd indignantly called the attention of authority to this violation of the city laws. A glittering member of the Civil Guard sonorously ordered the culprit down. The laughing lad refused to budge, inviting this embarrassed arm of the law to reach up and get him. The Guard darkly surveyed the slender stem already swaying with the boy's slight weight. The fickle crowd, whose every face seemed to be upturned toward that defiant cherry, cheered the rebel and tossed him cigarettes and matches, wherewith he proceeded to enjoy a smoke. The Guard caught a few cigarettes in mid-career, pocketed them, smiled benevolently, and walked away. The lad saucily saluted, and the multitude, suddenly impartial, pelted them both with peanuts. Thus it was that the Madrid populace awaited the last coming of Castelar. Even when the funeral train was passing, the crowd showed scant respect. Not half the men uncovered for the bier, although I was glad to see the cherry cap whisked off. And one picturesque gentleman stood throughout with his back to the procession, making eyes at his novia in the gallery above our own. The Government, which had finally assumed the charges and care of the obsequies, had been remiss in not providing lines of soldiers to hold an open way for the cortège. As it was, the procession could hardly struggle through the mass of humanity that choked the street. A solitary rider, mounted, like Death, on a white horse, went in advance, threatening the people with his sword. A division of the Civil Guard followed, erect and magnificent as ever, their gold bands glittering across their breasts, but their utmost efforts could not effectually beat back the crowd. Men scoffed at the drawn blades and pushed against the horses with both hands. The empty "coach of respect," black as night, its sable horses tossing high white plumes, pressed after, and then came some half dozen carriages overflowing with wreaths and palms, and all that wealth of floral gifts. The crowd caught at the floating purple ribbons, and called aloud the names upon the cards; a monster design, with velvet canopy, from the well-known daily, _El Liberal_, a beautiful crown from the widow of Canovas, and, later in the procession, alone upon the coffin, a nosegay of roses and lilies, brought in the morning by a child of four, a little "daughter of the people," and bearing the roughly written words, "Glory to Castelar!--A workingman." The train of mourners, impeded as it was by the multitude, seemed endless. After the representatives of certain charities there walked, in gala uniform, white-headed veterans of war. A great company of students followed, their young faces serious and calm in that tempting hurly-burly of the street, and after them an overwhelming throng of delegates from all manner of commercial and craft unions. Even the press wondered that Castelar's death should move so profoundly the trading and laboring classes, almost every store and workshop in Madrid closing for the afternoon. Then came the Republican committees, and behind them the representatives of countless literary, scientific, and artistic associations. At this point in the procession a place had been made for all or any who might wish, as individuals, to follow Castelar to the tomb. Some fifteen hundred had availed themselves of the opportunity--a motley fellowship. The gentlemen preceding, those who had come as delegates from the industrial and learned bodies of all Spain, wore almost without exception the correct black coat and tall silk hat, and paced, when they could, with a steady dignity, or halted, when they must, with a grave patience, that did more to quiet the unruly host of spectators than all the angry charges of the police. But the fifteen hundred showed the popular variety of costume--capes and blouses, broad white hats and the artisan's colored cap. Some of them were smoking, an indecorum which, by a self-denial that counts for much with Spaniards, nowhere else appeared in the long array. But whatever might be the deficiencies of dress or bearing, here, one felt, was the genuine sorrow, here were the men who believed in Castelar and longed to do him honor. The impulsive onlookers responded to this impression, and more than one rude fellow, who had been skylarking a minute before, elbowed his way into the troop and fell soberly into such step as there was. Music would have worked wonders with that disorderly scene, but the bugles and cornets were all in the far rear. The representatives of the provinces, as they struggled by, were hailed with jokes and personalities. The chanting group of clergy, uplifting the same ebony cross that they had borne for Canovas, did not entirely hush the crowd, nor did even the black-plumed hearse itself, with its solemn burden. For close after came, bearing tapers, a group of political note, closed by Sagasta and Campos, and then the chiefs of army and navy, including Blanco and Weyler. Behind these walked the city fathers, the senators, the diplomats, ex-ministers,--among them Romero, Robledo,--then the archbishop, and, finally, Silvela, with his colleagues. The procession was closed by a military display and a line of empty coaches, sent, according to Spanish custom, as a mark of respect. The coach sent by Congress, a patriotic blaze of red and yellow, with coachman and footman in red coats and yellow trousers, and horses decked with red and yellow plumes, looked as if it had started for the circus and had missed its way. [Illustration: AN OLD-FASHIONED BULL-FIGHT] The sight of the politicians seemed to serve as spark to the Republican fuel. Even while the hearse was passing somebody shouted, "Long live Castelar!" but the crowd corrected the cry to "Long live the glorious memory of Castelar!" Then came a heterogeneous uproar: "Death to the friars!" "Long live the Republican Union!" "Down with Reaction!" "Down with the Jesuits!" "Down with Polavieja!" "Down with the Government!" "Up with the Republic!" "Long live Spain!" "Long live the army!" "Long live Weyler!" A woman was run over in the confusion and a man was trampled, but the procession, aided as much as possible by the Civil Guards and the police, slowly worked its way through the _Alcalá_ to the _Puerta del Sol_, where the people poured upon it like an avalanche, with ever louder cries against ministry and clergy, until the scene in front of the Government Building suggested something very like a mob. Silvela bore his silvered head erect and exerted a prudent forbearance. But few arrests were made, and the military force that sallied out from the Government Building merely stood in the gates to awe the rioters. After an hour and a quarter the transit of the square was effected. The disturbances were renewed in the _Calle Mayor_ with such violence that the ministers were advised to withdraw, but they only entered the funeral coaches, and, the Guards exerting themselves to the utmost, a degree of order was at last secured. While the cortège was descending the difficult hill of La Vega, the Queen, standing in one of the palace balconies, opera glass in hand, sent a messenger for a report of the state of affairs in her capital, and was visited and reassured by a member of the Government. After this stormy journey the cemetery of San Isidro was reached at nightfall, and the silent orator laid to rest in the patio of _Santa Maria de la Cabeza_, beside his beloved sister, Concha Castelar. Even here Republican _vivas_ were raised, and again, later in the evening, before the house of Weyler, who appeared upon the balcony in answer to repeated calls. This general, more popular with Spaniards than with us, discreetly absented himself on Tuesday from the high mass chanted for Castelar in the Church of _San Francisco el Grande_, where there was an imposing display of uniforms and decorations. While the people still talked of their lost leader and proposed monuments and medals in his honor, the Government held firmly on its course. The Royal Progress for the opening of the Cortes on the following Friday was a suggestive contrast to the procession of Monday. Soldiers lined the curbstones all the way from the Royal Palace to the Congress Hall, bands were posted at intervals, the royal escort, splendidly mounted and equipped, was in itself a formidable force, while additional troops, in gala dress, paraded all the city. The balconies along the royal route were handsomely draped, but the people looked on at the gorgeous array of coaches, gilded and emblazoned, each drawn by six or eight choice horses, with sumptuous plumes and trappings, and attended by a story-book pomp of quaintly attired postilions, coachmen, and outriders, in a silence that was variously explained to me as indicating respect, hostility, indifference. I heard no _vivas_ and saw no hats raised even for the affable Infanta Isabel, riding alone in the tortoise-shell carriage, nor for the Princess of Asturias, girlishly attractive in rose color and white, nor for the bright-faced young King, ready with his military salute as he passed the foreign embassies, nor for the stately Regent, robed as richly as if she were on her way to read a gladder message than that which the opposition journals indignantly declared "no message, but a pious prayer of resignation." And while Madrid jarred and wrangled, the flowers brought by the little daughter of the workingman drooped on the marble slab above Castelar's repose. XVII THE IMMEMORIAL FASHION "For as many auchours affirme (and mannes accions declare) that man is but his mynde; so it is to bee daily tride, that the bodie is but a mixture of compoundes, knitte together like a fardell of fleashe, and bondell of bones, and united as a heavie lumpe of Leade (without the mynde) in the sillie substance of a shadowe."--THOMAS CHURCHILL, GENTLEMAN. My Spanish hostess, brightest and prettiest of little ladies despite the weight of sorrow upon sorrow, came tripping into my room one afternoon with her black eyes starry bright under the lace mantilla. "And where have you been to get so nicely rested?" "To a _duelo_." I turned the word over in my mind. _Duelo?_ Surely that must mean the mourning at a house of death, when the men have gone forth to church and the burial, and the women remain behind to weep together, or one of those tearful _At Homes_ kept, day after day, until the mass, by the ladies of the afflicted household for their condoling friends. But such a smiling little señora! I hardly knew what degree of sympathy befitted the occasion. "Were you acquainted with the--the person?" "No, I had never seen him. He had been an officer in the Philippines many years, and came home very ill, fifteen days since. I wept because I knew his mother, but I wept much. Women, at least here in Spain, have always cause enough for tears. I thought of my own matters, and had a long, long cry. That is why I feel better. There is so little time to cry at home. I must see about the dinner now." And she rustled out again, leaving me to meditate on Spanish originality, even in grief. In any country the usages of death are no less significant than the usages of life. That grim necropolis of Glasgow, with its few shy gowans under its lowering sky, those tender, turf-folded, church-shadowed graveyards of rural England, those trains of mourners, men by themselves and women by themselves, walking behind the bier in mid-street through the mud and rain of wintry Paris to the bedizened Père Lachaise or Montparnasse--such sights interpret a nation as truly as its art and history; but the burial customs of Spain, especially distinctive, are, like most things Spanish, contradictory and baffling to the tourist view. "La Tierra de Vice Versa" is not a country that he who runs may read. The popular verses and maxims treat of death with due Castilian solemnity and an always unflinching, if often ironic, recognition of the mortal fact. "When the house is finished," says the proverb, "the hearse is at the door." Yet this Spanish hearse is one of the gayest vehicles since Cinderella's coach. If the groundwork is black, there is abundant relief in mountings of brilliant yellow, but the funeral carriage is often cream-white, flourished over with fantastic designs in the bluest of blue or the pinkest of pink. Coffins, too, may be gaudy as candy-boxes. The first coffin we saw in Spain was bright lilac, a baby's casket, placed on gilt trestles in the centre of a great chill church, with chanting priests sprinkling holy water about it to frighten off the demons, and a crowd of black-bearded men waiting to follow it to the grave. Such a little coffin and not a woman near! The poor mother was decently at home, weeping in the midst of a circle of relatives and neighbors, and counting it among her comforts that the family had so many masculine friends to walk in the funeral procession and show sympathy with the household grief. There would be, on the ninth day after and, for several years to come, on the anniversary of the death, as many masses as could be afforded said in the parish church, when, again, the friends would make it a point of duty to attend. The daily papers abound in these notices, printed in a variety of types, so as to cover from two to ten square inches, heavily bordered with black, and surmounted, in case of adults, with crosses, and with cherubs' heads for children. I take up a copy of _La Epocha_ and read the following, under a cross: "Third Anniversary. Señorita Doña Francisca Fulana y Tal died the twenty-sixth of June, 1896, at twenty-one years of age. R. I. P. Her disconsolate mother and the rest of the family ask their friends and all pious persons to be so good as to commend her to God. All the masses celebrated to-morrow morning in the Church of San Pascual will be applied to the everlasting rest of the soul of the said señorita. Indulgences are granted in the usual form." It is the third anniversary, too, of a titled lady, whose "husband, brothers, brothers-in-law, nephews, uncles, cousins, and all who inherit under her will" have ordered masses in two churches for the entire day to-morrow, and announce, moreover, that the ecclesiastical authorities grant "one hundred and forty days of indulgence to all the faithful for each mass that they hear, sacred communion that they devote, or portion of a rosary that they pray for the soul of this most noble lady." In the case of another lady of high degree, who died yesterday, "having received the Blessed Sacraments and the benediction of his Holiness," the Nuncio concedes one hundred days of indulgence, the Archbishop of Burgos eighty, and the Bishops of Madrid, Alcalá, Cartagena, Leon, and Santander forty each; while a marquis who died a year ago, "Knight of the Illustrious Order of the Golden Fleece," is to have masses said for his soul in seven churches, not only all through to-morrow, but for the two days following. May all these rest in peace, and all who mourn for them be comforted! Yet thought drifts away to the poor and lowly, whose grief cannot find solace in procuring this costly intercession of the Church for the souls they love. It seems hard that the inequalities of life should thus reach out into death and purgatory. We used, during our sojourn in Granada, to meet many pathetic little processions on "The Way of the Dead." Over this hollow road, almost a ravine, the fortress walls, with their crumbling towers, keep guard on the one side, and the terraced gardens of the _Generalife_, with their grand old cypresses, on the other. And here, almost every hour of the day, is climbing a company of four rough men, carrying on their shoulders a cheap coffin, which perhaps a husband follows, or a white-haired father, or, hand in hand, bewildered orphan boys. The road is so steep that often the bearers set their burden down in the shadow of the bank-side, and fling themselves at full length on the ground beside it, thriftily passing from man to man the slow-burning wax match for their paper cigarettes. I remember more than one such smoking group, with a solitary mourner, hat in hand and eyes on the coffin, yet he, too, with cigarette in mouth, standing patiently by. All who pass make the sign of the cross, and even the rudest peasant uncovers his head. Very shortly the bearers may be seen again, coming down the hill at a merry pace, the empty box, with its loose, rattling lid, tilted over the shoulder now of one, now of another; for the children of poverty, who had not chambers of their own nor the dignity of solitude in life, lie huddled in a common pit after death, without coffin-planks to sever dust from dust. A century ago it was usual to robe the dead in monastic garb, especially in the habit of St. Francis or of the Virgin of Carmen, and within the present generation bodies were borne to the grave on open biers, the bystanders saluting, and bidding them farewell and quiet rest:-- "'Duerme in paz!' dicen los buenos. 'Adios!' dicen los demás." But now the closed coffin of many colors is in vogue. In the Santiago market we met a cheerful dame with one of these balanced on her head, crying for a purchaser, and up the broad flights of steps to the Bilbao cemetery we saw a stolid-faced young peasant-woman swinging along with a child's white coffin, apparently heavy with the weight of death, poised on the glossy black coils of hair, about which she had twisted a carmine handkerchief. Very strange is the look of a Spanish cemetery, with its ranges of high, deep walls, wherein the coffins are thrust end-wise, each above each, to the altitude of perhaps a dozen layers. These cells are sometimes purchased outright, sometimes rented for ten years, or five, or one. When the friends of the quiet tenant pay his dues no longer, forth he goes to the general ditch, _osario común_, and leaves his room for another. Such wall graves are characteristically Spanish, this mode of burial in the Peninsula being of long antiquity. Yet the rich prefer their own pantheons, sculptured like little chapels, or their own vaults, over which rise tall marbles of every device, the shaft, the pyramid, the broken column; while a poor family, or two or three neighboring households, often make shift to pay for one large earth grave, in which their dead may at least find themselves among kith and kin. Spanish cemeteries are truly silent cities, with streets upon streets enclosed between these solemn walls, which open out, at intervals, now for the ornamented patios of the rich, now for the dreary squares peopled by the poor. Here in a most aristocratic quarter, shaded by willows, set with marbles, paved with flower beds, sleeps a duke in stately pantheon, which is carved all over with angels, texts, and sacred symbols, still leaving room for medallions boasting his ancestral dignities. A double row of lamps, with gilded, fantastically moulded stands, and with dangling crystals of all colors, leads to the massive iron door. What enemy has he now to guard against with that array of bolts and bars? Here are a poet's palms petrified to granite, and here a monument all muffled in fresh flowers. Here the magnificent bronze figure of a knight, with sword half drawn, keeps watch beside a tomb, while the grave beyond a rose bush guards as well. And here an imaged Sandalphon holds out open hands, this legend written across his marble scarf, "The tear falleth; the flower fadeth; but God treasureth the prayer." There is a certain high-bred reserve about these costly sepulchres, but turning to the walls one comes so face to face with grief as to experience a sense of intrusion. Each cell shows on its sealed door of slate or other stone the name and age of its occupant, and perhaps a sentiment, lettered in gilt or black, as these: "We bear our loss--God knows how heavily." "Son of my soul." "For thee, that land of larger love; for me, until I find thee there, only the valley of sorrow and the hard hill of hope." Most of the cells have, too, a glassed or grated recess in front of this inscription wall, holding tributes or memorials--dried flowers, colored images of saints and angels, crucifixes, and the like. Sometimes the resurrection symbol of the butterfly appears. In the little cemetery at Vigo we noticed that the flower-vases were in form of great blue butterflies with scarlet splashes on their wings. Sometimes there are locks of hair, personal trinkets, and often card or cabinet photographs, whose living look startles the beholder. Out from a wreath of yellow immortelles peeps the plump smile of an old gentleman in modern dress coat; a coquettish lady in tiara and earrings laughs from behind her fan; and a grove of paper shrubbery, where tissue fairies dressed in rose petals dance on the blossoms, half hides the eager face of a Spanish midshipman. Where the photographs have faded and dimmed with time, the effect is less incongruous, if not less pathetic. The niches of children contain the gayest possible little figures. Here are china angels in blue frocks, with pink sleeves and saffron pantalets, pink-tipped plumes, and even pink bows in their goldy hair. Here is a company of tiny Hamlets, quaint dollikins set up in a circle about a small green grave, each with finger on lip, "The rest is silence." Here are two elegant and lazy cherubs, their alabaster chubbiness comfortably bestowed in toy chairs of crimson velvet on each side of an ivory crucifix. And here is a Bethlehem, and here a Calvary, and here the Good Shepherd bearing the lamb in His bosom; and here, in simple, but artistic wood carving, the Christ with open arms, calling to a child on sick-bed to come unto Him, while the mother, prostrate before the holy feet, kisses their shadow. One cannot look for long. It is well to lift the eyes from the niche graves of Granada to the glory of the Sierra Nevada that soars beyond, and turn from the patios of San Isidro to the cheerful picture of Madrid across the Manzanares, even though, prominent in the vista, rises the cupola of _San Francisco el Grande_. This is the National Pantheon, and within, beneath the frescoed dome, all aglow with blue and gold, masses are chanted for the dead whom Spain decrees to honor, as, so recently, for Castelar. Near this church a viaduct, seventy-five feet high, crosses the _Calle de Segovia_; and, despite the tall crooked railings and a constant police patrol, Madrileños bent on suicide often succeed in leaping over and bruising out their breath on the stones of the street below. It is a desperate exit. The Seine and Thames lure their daily victims with murmuring sound and the soft, enfolding look of water, but Spaniards who spring from this fatal viaduct see beneath them only the cruel pavement. That life should be harder than stone! And yet the best vigilance of Madrid cannot prevent fresh bloodstains on the _Calle de Segovia_. Near the cemetery of San Isidro, across the Manzanares, are two other large Catholic burial grounds, and the _Cementério Inglés_. "But murderers, atheists, and Protestants are buried way off in the east," said the pretty Spanish girl beside me. "Oh, let's go there!" I responded, with heretic enthusiasm; but I had reckoned without the cabman, who promptly and emphatically protested. "That's not a pleasant place for ladies to see. You would better drive in the _Prado_ and _Recoletos_, or in the _Buen Retiro_." We told him laughingly that he was speaking against his own interests, for the Civil Cemetery was much farther off than the parks. He consulted his dignity and decided to laugh in return. "It is not of the _pesetas_ I think first when I am driving ladies. But" (with suave indulgence) "you shall go just where you like." So in kindness he gathered up his reins and away we clattered sheer across the city. Presently we had left the fountain-cooled squares and animated streets behind, had passed even the ugly, sinister _Plaza de Toros_, and outstripped the trolley track; but still the road stretched on, enlivened only by herds of goats and an occasional _venta_, where drivers of mule trains were pausing to wet their dusty throats. We met few vehicles now save the gay-colored hearses, and few people except groups of returning mourners, walking in bewildered wise, with stumbling feet. "The Cemetery of the Poor is opposite the Civil Cemetery," said our cabman, "and they have from thirty to fifty burials a day. The keeper is a friend of mine. He shall show you all about." A bare Castilian ridge rose before us, where a farmer, leaning on his scythe, was outlined against the sky like a silhouette of Death. And at last our cheery driver, humming bars from a popular light opera, checked his mettlesome old mare,--who plunged down hills and scrambled up as if she were running away from the bull-ring, where she must soon fulfil her martyrdom,--between two dismal graveyards. From the larger, on our right, tiptoed out a furtive man and peered into the cab as if he thought we had a coffin under the seat. He proved a blood-curdling conductor, always speaking in a hoarse whisper and glancing over his shoulder in a way to make the stoutest nerves feel ghosts, but he showed us, under that sunset sky, memorable sights--ranks upon ranks of gritty mounds marked with black, wooden crosses, a scanty grace for which the living often pay the price of their own bread that the dead they love may pass a year or two out of that hideous general fosse. Then the sexton reluctantly led us to the unblessed, untended hollow across the way, where rows of brick sepulchres await the poor babies who die before the holy water touches them, where recumbent marbles press upon the dead who knew no upward reach of hope, and where defiant monuments, erected by popular subscription and often bearing the blazonry of a giant quill, denote the resting-places of freethinkers and the agitators of new ideas. There were some Christian inscriptions, whether for Protestants or not I do not know, but to my two companions there was no distinction of persons in this unhallowed limbo. Our dusty guide led us hurriedly from plot to plot. "They say the mothers cheat the priests, and there are babies over yonder that ought to be here, for the breath was out of them before ever they were baptized. They say the priests had this man done to death one night, because he wrote against religion. He was only twenty-two. The club he belonged to put up that stone. They say there are evil words on it. But I don't know myself. I can't read, thanks to God. They say it was through reading and writing that most of these came here." "But those are not evil words," I answered. "They are, 'Believe in Jesus and thou shalt be saved.'" He hastily crossed himself, "Do me the favor not to read such words out loud. Here is another, where they say the words are words of hell." I held my peace this time, musing on that broad marble with its one deep-cut line, "The Death of God." "And over there," he croaked, pointing with his clay-colored thumb, "is _Whiskers_." The señorita, whose black eyes had been getting larger and larger, gave a little scream and fairly ran for the gate. Spaniards have usually great sympathy for criminals, newspaper accounts of executions often closing with an entreaty for God's mercy on "this poor man's soul," but _Whiskers_, the Madrid sensation of a fortnight since, was a threefold murderer. Passion-mad, he had shot dead in the open street a neighbor's youthful wife, held the public at bay with his revolver, and mortally wounded two Civil Guards, before he turned the fatal barrel on himself. "His family wanted him laid over the way," continued that scared undertone at my ear, "but the bishop said no. A murderer like that was just as bad as infidels and Protestants, and should be buried out of grace." I felt as if Superstition incarnate were walking by my side, and after one more look at that strangely peopled patch of unconsecrated ground, with its few untrimmed cypresses and straggling rose bushes, hillside slopes about and glory-flooded skies above, I gave Superstition a _peseta_, which he devoutly kissed, and returned to the cab, followed by the carol of a solitary bird. I remember a similar experience in Cadiz. I had driven out with one of my Spanish hostesses to the large seaside cemetery, a mile beyond the gate. This is arranged in nine successive patios, planted with palms and cypresses. In the niches, seashells play a prominent part. The little angel images, as gay as ever, with their pink girdles and their purple wings, may be seen swinging in shells, sleeping in shells, and balancing on the edge of shells to play their golden flutes. Near by is an English and German cemetery, with green-turfed mounds and a profusion of blossoming shrubs and flower beds. Not sure of the direction, as we were leaving the Catholic enclosure I asked a bandy-legged, leather-visaged old sexton, who might have been the very one that dug Ophelia's grave, if the "Protestant cemetery" was at our right. He laid down his mattock, peered about among the mausolea to see if we were quite alone, winked prodigiously, and, drawing a bunch of keys from the folds of his black sash, started briskly down a by-path and signed to us to follow. He led us through stony passages out beyond the sanctified ground into a dreary, oblong space, a patch of weeds and sand, enclosed by the lofty sepulchral walls, but with a blessed strip of blue sky overhead. "Here they are!" he chuckled. "They wouldn't confess, they died without the sacraments, and here they are." Some names lettered on the wall seemed to be those of Dutch and Norwegian sailors, who had perhaps died friendless in this foreign port. There were pebble-strewn graves of Jews, and upright marbles from which the dead still seemed to utter voice: "I refuse the prayers of all the saints, and ask the prayers of honest human souls. I believe in God." And another, "God is knowledge." And another, "God is All that works for Wisdom and for Love." "Are there burial services for these?" I inquired. If the Church of England could have seen that crooked old sexton go through his gleeful pantomime! "There's one that comes with some, and they call him Pastor! And he scrapes up a handful of dirt--so! And he flings it at the coffin--so! And then he stands up straight and says, 'Dust to dust!' I've heard him say it myself." "God of my soul!" cried the Spanish lady in horror, and to express her detestation of such a heathenish rite, she spat upon the ground. The monarchs of Spain do not mingle their ashes. Who knows where Roderick sleeps? Or does that deathless culprit still lurk in mountain caverns, as tradition has it, wringing his wasted hands and tearing his white beard in unavailing penitence? The "Catholic kings," Ferdinand and Isabella, lie, not where they had planned, in that beautiful Gothic church of Toledo, _San Juan de los Reyes_, on whose outer walls yet hang the Moorish chains struck from the limbs of Christian captives, but in Granada, the city of their conquest, where they slumber proudly, although their coffins are of plainest lead and their last royal chamber a small and dusky vault. Pedro the Cruel is thrust away in a narrow wall-grave beneath the _Capilla Real_ of Seville cathedral. His brother, the Master of Santiago, whom he treacherously slew in one of the loveliest halls of the Alcázar, is packed closely in on his left, and Maria de Padilla, for whose sake he cut short the hapless life of Queen Blanche, on his right. Pleasant family discussions they must have at the witching hour of night, when they drag their numb bones out of those pigeon-holes for a brief respite of elbow room! San Fernando, the Castilian conqueror of Castile, canonized "because he carried fagots with his own hands for the burning of heretics," is more commodiously accommodated in a silver sarcophagus in the chapel above, where Alfonso the Learned also has long leisure for thought. Another Alfonso and another Fernando, with another wife of Pedro the Cruel, keep their state in Santiago de Compostela, and still another Alfonso and two Sanchos have their splendid tombs in the _Capilla Mayor_ of Toledo cathedral, while in its _Capilla de los Reyes Nuevos_, a line descended from that brother whom Pedro murdered, sleeps the first John, with the second and third Henrys. [Illustration: BULL-FIGHT OF TO-DAY] Cordova cathedral, although this lovely mosque recks little of Christian majesties, has the ordinary equipment of an Alfonso and a Fernando, and the Royal Monastery of Las Huelgas in Burgos shelters Alfonso VIII, with his queen, Eleanor of England. In less noted churches, one continually chances on them, _rey_ or _reina_, _infante_ or _infanta_, dreaming the centuries away in rich recesses of fretted marble and alabaster, with the shadow of great arches over them and the deep-voiced chant around. But since Philip II created, in his own sombre likeness, the monastery of the Escorial, rising in angular austerity from a spur of the bleak Guadarrama Mountains, the royal houses of Austria and Bourbon have sought burial there. The first and chief in the dank series of sepulchral vaults, the celebrated _Panteón de los Reyes_, is an octagon of black marble, placed precisely under the high altar, and gloomily magnificent with jasper, porphyry, and gold. It has an altar of its own, on whose left are three recesses, each with four long shelves placed one above another for the sarcophagi of the kings of Spain, and on whose right are corresponding recesses for the queens. As the guide holds his torch, we read the successive names of the great Charles I, founder of the Austrian line; the three Philips, in whom his genius dwindled more and more; and the half-witted Charles II, in whom it ignobly perished. The coffin lid of Charles I has twice been lifted, once as late as 1871, in compliment to the visiting Emperor of Brazil, and even then that imperial body lay intact, with blackened face and open, staring eyes. The gilded bronze coffin of Philip II was brought to his bedside for his inspection in his last hour of life. After a critical survey he ordered a white satin lining and more gilt nails--a remarkable sense of detail in a man who had sent some ten thousand heretics to the torture. Looking for the Bourbons, we miss the first of them all, the melancholy Philip V, who would not lay him down among these Austrians, but sleeps with his second queen, the strong-willed Elizabeth Farnese, in his cloudy retreat of San Ildefonso, within hearing of the fountains of La Granja. His eldest son, Luis the Well-Beloved, who died after a reign of seven months, rests here in the Escorial, but Fernando VI, also the son of Philip's first queen--that gallant little Savoyarde who died so young--was buried in Madrid. Charles III, best and greatest of the Spanish Bourbons, is here, the weak Charles IV, Fernando VII, "The Desired" and the Disgraceful, and Alfonso XII, while a stately sarcophagus is already reserved for Alfonso XIII. To the cold society of these five Austrian and five Bourbon sovereigns are admitted nine royal ladies. Of these, the first three are in good and regular standing--the queen of Charles I and mother of Philip II, the fourth queen of Philip II and mother of Philip III, the queen of Philip III and mother of Philip IV. But here is an intruder. Philip IV, who had an especial liking for this grewsome vault, and used often to clamber into his own niche to hear mass, insisted on having both his French and Austrian queens interred here, although the first, Isabel of Bourbon, is not the mother of a Spanish king, the promising little Baltasar having died in boyhood. The brave girl-queen of Philip V is here, in double right as mother both of Luis and Fernando VI, and here is the wife of Charles III and mother of Charles IV. But of sorry repute are the last two queens, the wife of Charles IV and mother of Fernando VII, she who came hurrying down those slippery marble stairs in feverish delirium to scratch _Luisa_ with scissors on her selected coffin, and this other, Maria Cristina, wife of Fernando VII and mother of the dethroned Isabel, a daughter who did not mend the story. It will not be long before she returns from her French exile to enter into possession of the sarcophagus that expects her here, even as another sumptuous coffin awaits the present regent. Pity it is for Isabel, whose name is still a byword in the Madrid cafés! But she always enjoyed hearing midnight mass in this dim and dreadful crypt, and will doubtless be glad to come back to her ancestors, such as they were, and take up her royal residence with them in "dust of human nullity and ashes of mortality." XVIII CORPUS CHRISTI IN TOLEDO "A blackened ruin, lonely and forsaken, Already wrapt in winding-sheets of sand, So lies Toledo till the dead awaken, A royal spoil of Time's resistless hand." --ZORRILLA: _Toledo_. In the thirteenth century the doctrine of transubstantiation assumed especial importance. Miracle plays and cathedral glass told thrilling stories of attacks made by Jews on the sacred Wafer, which bled under their poniards or sprang from their caldrons and ovens in complete figure of the Christ. The festival of Corpus Christi, then established by Rome, was devoutly accepted in Spain and used to be celebrated with supreme magnificence in Madrid. Early in the reign of Philip IV, Prince Charles of England, who, with the adventurous Buckingham, had come in romantic fashion to the Spanish capital, hoping to carry by storm the heart of the Infanta, stood for hours in a balcony of the Alcázar, gazing silently on the glittering procession. How they swept by through the herb-strewn, tapestried streets--musicians, standard-bearers, cross-bearers, files of orphans from the asylums, six and thirty religious brotherhoods, monks of all the orders, barefoot friars, ranks of secular clergy and brothers of charity, the proud military orders of Alcántara, Calatrava, and Santiago, the Councils of the Indies, of Aragon, of Portugal, the Supreme Council of Castile, the City Fathers of Madrid, the Governmental Ministers of Spain and Spanish Italy, the Tribunal of the Holy Office, preceded by a long array of cloaked and hooded Familiars, bishops upon bishops in splendid, gold-enwoven vestments, priests of the royal chapel displaying the royal banner, bearers of the crosier and the sacramental vessels, the Archbishop of Santiago, royal chaplains and royal majordomos, royal pages with tall wax tapers, incense burners, the canopied mystery of the Eucharist, the king, the prince, cardinals, nuncio, the inquisitor general, the Catholic ambassadors, the patriarch of the Indies, the all-powerful Count-Duke Olivares, grandees, lesser nobility, gentlemen, and a display of Spanish and German troops, closed by a great company of archers. So overwhelming was that solemn progress, with its brilliant variety of sacerdotal vestments, knightly habits, robes of state and military trappings, its maces, standards, crosses, the flash of steel, gold, jewels, and finally the sheen of candles, the clouds of incense, the tinkling of silver bells before the _Santisimo Corpus_, that the heretic prince and his reckless companion fell to their knees. One Spanish author pauses to remark that for these, who could even then reject the open arms of the Mother Church, the assassin's blow and the Whitehall block were naturally waiting. Such a pomp would have been worth the seeing, but we had arrived at Madrid almost three centuries too late. Catholic friends shrugged shoulder at mention of the Corpus procession, "_Vale poco._" And as for the famous _autos sacramentales_, which used to be celebrated at various times during the eight days of the Corpus solemnity, they may be read in musty volumes, but can be seen in the city squares no more. Calderon is said to have written the trifling number of seventy-two, and Lope de Vega, whose fingers must have been tipped with pens, some four hundred. If only our train, which then would not have been a train, had brought us, who then would not have come, to Madrid in season for a Corpus celebration under the Austrian dynasty, we could have attended an open-air theatre of a very curious sort. All the way to the _Plaza_, we would have seen festivity at its height, pantomimic dances, merry music, struttings of giants and antics of dwarfs, and perhaps groups of boys insulting cheap effigies of snakes, modelled after the monstrous _Tarasca_, carried in the Corpus parade in token of Christ's victory over the Devil. At intervals along the route, adorned with flowers and draperies, and reserved for the procession and the dramatic cars, would have been altars hung with rich stuffs from the Alcázar and the aristocratic palaces; silks and cloth of gold, brocades, velvets, and shimmering wefts of the Indies. The one-act play itself might be after the general fashion of the mediæval Miracles,--verse dialogue, tuned to piety with chords of fun, for the setting forth of Biblical stories. Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, Moses feeding the Israelites with manna, the patience of Job, the trials of Joseph, David, and Daniel, were thus represented. More frequently, the _auto sacramental_ belonged to the so-called Morality type of early Christian drama, being an allegorical presentation of human experience or exposition of church doctrine. Such were "The Fountain of Grace," "The Journey of the Soul," "The Dance of Death," "The Pilgrim." Sometimes a Gospel parable, as the "Lost Sheep" or the "Prodigal Son," gave the dramatic suggestion. But these Spanish spectacles sought to associate themselves, as closely as might be, with the Corpus worship, and many of them bear directly, in one way or another, upon this sacrament. If, for instance, we had chanced on the Madrid festival in 1681, we could have witnessed in the decorated _Plaza_, with its thronged balconies, the entrance of four scenic platforms or cars. The first, painted over with battles, bears a Gothic castle; the second, with pictures of the sea, a gallant ship; the third, a starry globe; the fourth, a grove and garden, whose central fountain is so shaped as to form, above, the semblance of an altar. In the complicated action of the play, when the Soul, besieged in her fortress by the Devil, whose allies are the World and the Flesh, calls upon Christ for succor, the hollow sphere of the third car opens, revealing the Lord enthroned in glory amid cherubim and seraphim; but the climax of the triumph is not yet. That stout old general, the Devil, rallies fresh forces to the attack, such subtle foes as Atheism, Judaism, and Apostasy, and whereas, before, the Senses bore the brunt of the conflict, it is the Understanding that girds on armor now. Yet in the final outcome not the Understanding, but Faith draws the veil from before the altar of the fourth car, and there, in the consecrated vessel for the holding of the Wafer, appears the "Passion Child," the white bread from Heaven, "very flesh and very blood that are the price of the soul's salvation." That is the way Spain kept her Corpus _fiesta_ in the good old times of Charles the Bewitched; but not now. After the procession, the bull-fight; and after the bull-fight, the latest vaudeville or ballet. Last year it rained on Corpus Thursday, which fell on the first of June, and Madrid gave up the procession altogether. Some of the Opposition papers started the cry that this was shockingly irreligious in Silvela, but when the Government organs haughtily explained that it was the decision of the archbishop and Señor Silvela was not even consulted, the righteous indignation of the Liberals straightway subsided. The procession, which was to have been a matter of kettledrums and clarionets, soldiery, "coaches of respect" from the palace and the city corporation, and a full showing of the parochial clergy, did not seem to be missed by the people. Corpus has long ceased to be a chief event in the Capital. There are a few cities in Spain, however, where the Corpus fête is maintained with something of the old gayety and splendor. Bustling Barcelona, never too busy for a frolic, keeps it merrily with an elaborate parade from the cathedral all about the city, and--delightful feature!--the distribution of flowers and sweetmeats among the ladies. The procession in Valencia resembles those of Holy Week in Seville. On litters strewn with flowers and thick-set with candle-lights are borne carved groups of sacred figures and richly attired images of Christ and the Virgin. But it is in lyric Andalusia that these pageantries are most at home. Among her popular _coplas_ is one that runs:-- "Thursdays three in the year there be, That shine more bright than the sun's own ray-- Holy Thursday, Corpus Christi, And our Lord's Ascension Day." Cadiz, like Valencia, carries the _pasos_ in the Corpus procession. In Seville, where the street displays of Holy Week are under the charge of the religious brotherhoods, or _cofradias_, Corpus Christi gives opportunity for the clergy and aristocracy to present a rival exhibition of sanctified luxury and magnificence. But it is in beautiful belated Granada that the Corpus fête is now at its best. A brilliantly illustrated programme, whose many-hued cover significantly groups a gamboge cathedral very much in the background, and a flower-crowned Andalusian maiden, draped in a Manila shawl, with a prodigious guitar at her feet, very much in the foreground, announces a medley of festivities extending over eleven days. This cheerful booklet promises, together with a constant supply of military music, balcony decorations, and city illuminations, an assortment of pleasures warranted to suit every taste--infantry reviews, cavalry reviews, cadet reviews, masses under roof and masses in the open, claustral processions, parades of giants, dwarfs, and _La Tarasca_, a charity raffle in the park under the patronage of Granada's most distinguished ladies, the erection of out-of-door altars, the dispensing of six thousand loaves of bread among the poor (from my experience of Granada beggars I should say the supply was insufficient), a solemn Corpus procession passing along white-canopied streets under a rain of flowers, three regular bull-fights with the grand masters Guerrita, Lagartijillo, and Fuentes, followed by a gloriously brutal _corrida_, with young beasts and inexperienced fighters, cattle fair, booths, puppet shows, climbing of greased poles, exhibition of fine arts and industries, horse racing, polo, pigeon shoot, trapeze, balloon ascensions, gypsy dances, and fireworks galore. But even faithful Granada shared in the strange catalogue of misfortunes which attended Corpus last year. The rains descended on her Chinese lanterns, and the winds beat against her Arabic arches with their thousands of gas-lights. On the sacred Thursday itself, the Andalusian weather made a most unusual demonstration of hurricane and cloudburst, with interludes of thunder and lightning. Great was the damage in field, vineyard, and orchard, and as for processions, they were in many places out of the question. Even Seville and Cordova had to postpone both parades and bull-fights. But this was not the worst. In Ecija, one of the quaintest cities of Andalusia, an image of the Virgin as the Divine Shepherdess, lovingly arrayed and adorned with no little outlay by the nuns of the Conception, caught fire in the procession from a taper, like Seville's Virgin of Montserrat in the last _Semana Santa_. The _Divina Pastora_ barely escaped with her jewels. Her elaborate garments, the herbage and foliage of her pasture, and one of her woolly sheep were burned to ashes. In Palma de Mallorca, a romantic town of the Balearic Isles, a balcony, whose occupants were leaning out to watch the procession, broke away, and crashed down into the midst of the throng. A young girl fell upon the bayonet of a soldier marching beneath, and was grievously hurt. Others suffered wounds which, in one case at least, proved fatal. The Opposition journals did not fail to make capital out of these untoward events, serving them up in satiric verse with the irreverent suggestion that, if this was all the favor a reactionary and ultra-Catholic government could secure from Heaven, it was time to go back to Sagasta. The ecclesiastical Toledo, seat of the Primate of all Spain, is one of the Spanish cities which still observe Corpus Christi as a high solemnity, and Toledo is within easy pilgrimage distance of Madrid. I had already passed two days in that ancient capital of the Visigoths, ridding my conscience of the sightseers' burden, and I both longed and dreaded to return. The longing overcame the dread, and I dropped in at the _Estacion del Mediodía_ for preliminary inquiries. I could discover no bureau of information and no official authorized to instruct the public, but in this lotus-eating land what is nobody's business is everybody's business. There could not be a better-humored people. The keeper of the bookstand abandoned his counter, his would-be customers lighting cigarettes and leaning up against trucks and stacks of luggage to wait for his return, and escorted me the length of the station to find a big yellow poster, which gave the special time-table for Corpus Thursday. The poster was so high upon the wall that our combined efforts could not make it out; whereupon a nimble little porter dropped the trunk he was carrying, and climbed on top of it for a better view. In that commanding position he could see clearly enough, but just when my hopes were at the brightest, he regretfully explained that he had never learned to read. As he clambered down the proprietor of the trunk, who had been looking on with as much serenity as if trains never went and starting bells never rang, mounted in turn. This gentleman, all smiles and bows and tobacco smoke, read off the desired items, which the keeper of the bookstand copied for me in a leisurely, conversational manner, with a pencil lent by one bystander on a card donated by another. There is really something to be said for the Spanish way of doing business. It takes time, but if time is filled with human kindliness and social courtesies, why not? What is time for? Whenever I observed that I was the only person in a hurry on a Madrid street, I revised my opinion as to the importance of my errand. As I entered the station again on the first of June at the penitential hour of quarter past six in the morning, I was reflecting complacently on my sagacity as a traveller. Had I not bethought me that, even in the ecclesiastical centre of Spain and on this solemn festival, there might be peril for a stranger's purse? What financial acumen I had shown in calculating that, since my round-trip ticket to Toledo before had cost three dollars, second class, I could probably go first class on this excursion for the same sum, while two dollars more would be ample allowance for balcony hire and extras! And yet how prudent in me to have tucked away a reserve fund in a secret pocket inaccessible even to myself! But why was the station so jammed and crammed with broad-hatted Spaniards? And what was the meaning of that long line of roughs, stretching far out from the third-class ticket office? Bull-fight explained it all. Even reverend Toledo must keep the Corpus holy by the public slaughter of six choice bulls and as many hapless horses as their blind rage might rend. Worse than the pagan altars that reeked with the blood of beasts, Spain's Christian festivals demand torture in addition to butchery. There were no first-class carriages, it appeared, upon the Corpus train, and my round-trip ticket, second class, cost only a dollar, leaving me with an embarrassment of riches. Pursing the slip of pasteboard which, to my disgust, was stamped in vermilion letters _Corrida de Toros_, I sped me to the train, where every seat appeared to be taken, although it lacked twenty minutes of the advertised time for departure; but a bald-headed philanthropist called out from a carriage window that they still had room for one. Gratefully climbing up, I found myself in the society of a family party, off for Toledo to celebrate the saint-day of their hazel-eyed eight-year-old by that treat of treats, a child's first bull-fight. When they learned that I was tamely proposing to keep Corpus Christi by seeing the procession and not by "assisting at the function of bulls," their faces clouded; but they decided to make allowance for my foreign idiosyncrasies. The train, besieged by a multitude of ticket-holders for whom there were no places, was nearly an hour late in getting off. The ladies dozed and chattered; the gentlemen smoked and dozed; little Hazel-eyes constantly drew pictures of bulls with a wet finger on the window glass. Reminded again by my handbag literature that Toledo is a nest of thieves, I would gladly have put away my extra money, but there was never a moment when all the gentlemen were asleep at once. It was after ten when we reached our destination, the boy wild with rapture because we had actually seen a pasture of grazing bulls. A swarm of noisy, scrambling, savage-looking humanity hailed the arrival of the train, and I had hardly made my way even to the platform before I felt an ominous twitch at my pocket. The light-fingered art must have degenerated in Toledo since the day of that clever cutpurse of the "Exemplary Tales." Turning sharply, I confronted a group of my fellow-worshippers, who, shawled and sashed and daggered, looked as if they had been expressly gotten up for stage bandits. From the shaggy pates, topped by gaudy, twisted handkerchiefs--a headdress not so strange in a city whose stone walls looked for centuries on Moorish turbans--to the bright-edged, stealthy hemp sandals, these were pickpockets to rejoice a kodak. Their black eyes twinkled at me with wicked triumph, while it flashed across my mind that my old hero, the Cid, was probably much of their aspect, and certainly gained his living in very similar ways. There were a full score of these picturesque plunderers, and not a person of the nineteenth century in sight. Since there was nothing to do, I did it, and giving them a parting glance of moral disapproval, to which several of the sauciest responded by blithely touching their forelocks, I pursued my pilgrim course, purged of vainglory. At all events, I was delivered from temptation as to a questionable _peseta_ in my purse--my pretty Paris purse!--and I should not be obliged to travel again on that odious bull-fight ticket. We were having "fool weather," blowing now hot, now cold, but as at this moment the air was cool, and every possible vehicle seemed packed, thatched, fringed with clinging passengers, I decided, not seeking further reasons, to walk up to the town. And what a town it is! Who could remember dollars? So far from being decently depressed, I was almost glad to have lost something in this colossal monument of losses. It seemed to make connection. Between deep, rocky, precipitous banks, strongly flows the golden "king of rivers, the venerable Tajo," almost encircling the granite pedestal of the city and spanned by ancient bridges of massy stone, with battlemented, Virgin-niched, fierce old gates. And above, upon its rugged height, crumbling hourly into the gritty dust that stings the eye and scrapes beneath the foot, lies in swirls on floor and pavement, blows on every breeze and sifts through hair and clothing, is the proud, sullen, forsaken fortress of "imperial Toledo." Still it is a vision of turrets, domes, and spires, fretwork, buttresses, façades, but all so desolate, so dreary, isolated in that parched landscape as it is isolated in the living world, that one approaches with strangely blended feelings of awe, repugnance, and delight. On we go over the Bridge of Alcántara, wrought æons since by a gang of angry Titans--the guidebooks erroneously attribute it to the Moors and Alfonso the Learned--with a shuddering glance out toward the ruins of feudal castles, here a battlemented keep set with mighty towers, there a great, squat, frowning mass of stone, the very sight of which might have crushed a prisoner's heart. Up, straight up, into the grim, gray, labyrinthine city, whose zigzag streets, often narrowing until two laden donkeys, meeting, cannot pass, so twist and turn that it is impossible on entering one to guess at what point of the compass we will come out. These crooked ways, paved with "agony stones," are lined with tall, dark, inhospitable house fronts, whose few windows are heavily grated, and whose huge doors, bristling with iron bosses, are furnished with fantastic knockers and a whole arsenal of bolts and chains. [Illustration: THE KING OF THE GYPSIES] Gloomy as these ponderous structures are, every step discloses a novelty of beauty,--a chiselled angel, poised for flight, chased escutcheons, bas-reliefs, toothed arches, medallions, weather-eaten groups of saints and apostles gossiping in their scalloped niches about the degeneracy of the times. The Moors, whose architecture, says Becquer, seems the dream of a Moslem warrior sleeping after battle in the shadow of a palm, have left their mark throughout Toledo in the airy elegance of the traceries magically copied from cobwebs and the Milky Way. That tragic race, the Jews, have stamped on the walls of long-desecrated synagogues their own mysterious emblems. And Goths and Christian knights have wrought their very likenesses into the stern, helmeted heads that peer out from the capitals of marvellous columns amid the stone grapes and pomegranates most fit for their heroic nourishment. But all is in decay. Here stands a broken-sceptred statue turning its royal back on a ragged vender of toasted _garbanzos_. Even the image of Wamba has lost its royal nose. You may traverse whispering cloisters heaped with fallen crosses, with truant tombstones, and severed heads and limbs of august prophets. Cast aside in dusky vaults lie broken shafts of rose-tinted marbles and fragments of rare carving in whose hollows the birds of the air once built their nests. Through the tangle of flowers and shrubbery that chokes the patios gleam the rims of alabaster urns and basins of jasper fountains. Such radiant wings and faces as still flash out from frieze and arch and column, such laughing looks, fresh with a dewy brightness, as if youth and springtime were enchanted in the stone! And what supreme grace and truth of artistry in all this bewildering detail! On some far-off day of the golden age, when ivory and agate were as wax, when cedar and larch wood yielded like their own soft leaves, the magician must have pressed upon them the olive leaf, the acacia spray, the baby's foot, that have left these perfect traces. And how did mortal hand ever achieve the intricate, curling, unfolding, blossoming marvel of those capitals? And who save kings, Wambas and Rodericks, Sanchos, Alfonsos, and Fernandos, should mount these magnificent stairways? And what have those staring stone faces above that antique doorway looked upon to turn them haggard with horror? City of ghosts! The flesh begins to creep. But here, happily, we are arrived in the _Plaza de Zocodovér_, where Lazarillo de Tormes used to display his talents as town crier, and in this long-memoried market-place, with its arcaded sides and trampled green, may pause to take our bearings. Evidently the procession is to pass here, for the balconies, still displaying the yellow fronds of Palm Sunday, are hung with all manner of draperies--clear blue, orange with silver fringes, red with violet bars, white with saffron scallops. Freed from sordid cares about my pocket, I give myself for a little to the spell of that strange scene. Beyond rise the rich-hued towers of the Alcázar, on the site where Romans, Visigoths, Arabs, the Cid, and an illustrious line of Spanish monarchs have fortified themselves in turn; but Time at last is conqueror, and one visits the dismantled castle only to forget all about it in the grandeur of the view. From the east side of the _Zocodovér_ soars the arch on whose summit used to stand the _Santisimo Cristo del Sangre_, before whom the Corpus train did reverence. And here in the centre blazed that momentous bonfire which was to settle the strife between the old Toledan liturgy and the new ritual of Rome; but the impartial elements honored both the Prayer Books placed upon the fagots, the wind wafting to a place of safety the Roman breviary, while the flames drew back from the other, with the result that the primitive rite is still preserved in an especial chapel of the cathedral. A glorious _plaza_, famed by Cervantes, loved by Lope de Vega, but now how dim and shabby! On the house-fronts once so gayly colored, the greens have faded to yellows, the reds to pinks, and the pinks to browns. The awning spread along the route of the procession is fairly checkered with a miscellany of patches. I pass the compliments of the day with a smiling peasant woman, whose husband, a striking color-scheme in maroon blanket, azure trousers, russet stockings, and soiled gray sandals, offers me his seat on the stone bench beside her. But I am bound on my errand, and they bid me "Go with God." I select a trusty face in a shop doorway and ask if I can rent standing room in the balcony above. Mine honest friend puts his price a trifle high to give him a margin for the expected bargaining, but I scorn to haggle on a day when I am short of money, and merely stipulate, with true Spanish propriety, that no gentlemen shall be admitted. This makes an excellent impression on the proprietor, who shows me up a winding stair with almost oppressive politeness. A little company of ladies, with lace mantillas drooping from their graceful heads, welcome me with that courteous cordiality which imparts to the slightest intercourse with the Spanish people (barring pickpockets) a flavor of fine pleasure. Because I am the last arrival and have the least claim, they insist on giving me the best place on the best balcony and are untiring in their explanations of all there is to be seen. The procession is already passing--civil guards, buglers, drummers, flower wreaths borne aloft, crosses of silver and crosses of gold, silken standards wrought with cunning embroideries. But now there come a sudden darkness, a gust of wind, and dash of rain. The ranks of _cofradias_ try in vain to keep their candles burning, the pupils from the colleges of the friars, with shining medals hung by green cords about their necks, peep roguishly back at the purple-stoled dignitary in a white wig, over whom an anxious friend from the street is trying to hold an umbrella. The Jesuit _seminaristas_ bear themselves more decorously, the tonsures gleaming like silver coins on their young heads. The canons lift their red robes from the wet, and even bishops make some furtive efforts to protect their gold-threaded chasubles. Meanwhile the people, that spectral throng of witches, serfs, feudal retainers, and left-overs from the Arabian Nights, press closer and closer, audaciously wrapping themselves from the rain in the rich old tapestries of France and Flanders, which have been hung along both sides of the route from a queer framework of emerald-bright poles and bars. The dark, wild, superstitious faces, massed and huddled together, peer out more uncannywise than ever from under these precious stuffs which brisk soldiers, with green feather brushes in their caps, as if to enable them to dust themselves off at short notice, are already taking down. All the church bells of the city are chiming solemnly, and the splendid _custodia_, "the most beautiful piece of plate in the world," a treasure of filigree gold and jewels, enshrining the Host, draws near. It is preceded by a bevy of lovely children, not dressed, as at Granada, to represent angels, but as knights of chivalry. Their dainty suits of red and blue, slashed and puffed and trimmed with lace, flash through the silvery mist of rain. Motherly voices from the balconies call to them to carry their creamy caps upside down to shield the clustered plumes. Their little white sandals and gaiters splash merrily through the mud. A flamingo gleam across the slanting rain announces Cardinal Sancha, behind whom acolytes uplift a thronelike chair of crimson velvet and gold. Then follow ranks of taper-bearing soldiers, and my friends in the balcony call proudly down to different officers, a son, a husband, a blushing _novio_, whom they present to me then and there. The officers bow up and I bow down, while at this very moment comes that tinkling of silver bells which would, I had supposed, strike all Catholic Spaniards to their knees. It is perhaps too much to expect the people below to kneel in the puddles, but the vivacious chatter in the balconies never ceases, and the ladies beside me do not even cross themselves. The parade proceeds, a gorgeous group in wine-colored costume carrying great silver maces before the civic representation. The governor of the province is pointed out to me as a count of high degree, but in the instant when my awed glance falls upon him he gives a monstrous gape unbecoming even to nobility. The last of the spruce cadets, who close the line, have hardly passed when the thrifty housewife beseeches our aid in taking in out of the rain her scarlet balcony hanging, which proves to be the canopy of her best bed. But the sun is shining forth again when I return to the street to follow the procession into the cathedral. Already this gleam of fair weather has filled the _Calle de Comercio_ with festive señoritas, arrayed in white mantillas and Manila shawls in honor of the bull-fight. Shops have been promptly opened for a holiday sale of the Toledo specialties--arabesqued swords and daggers, every variety of Damascened wares, and marchpane in form of mimic hams, fish, and serpents. The Toledo steel was famous in Shakespeare's day, even in the mouths of rustic dandies, whose geographical education had been neglected. When the clever rogue, Brainworm, in one of Jonson's comedies, would sell Stephen, the "country gull," a cheap rapier, he urges, "'Tis a most pure Toledo," and Stephen replies according to his folly, "I had rather it were a Spaniard." But onward is the glorious church, with its symmetric tower, whose spire wears a threefold crown of thorns. The exterior walls are hung, on this one day of the year, with wondrous tapestries that Queen Isabella knew. An army of beggars obstructs the crowd, which presses in, wave upon wave, through the deep, rich portals in whose ornamentation whole lifetimes have carved themselves away. Within this sublime temple, unsurpassed in Gothic art, where every pavement slab is worn by knees more than by footsteps, where every starry window has thrown its jewel lights on generations of believers, one would almost choose to dwell forever. One looks half enviously at recumbent alabaster bishops and kneeling marble knights, even at dim grotesques, who have rested in the heart of that grave beauty, in that atmosphere of prayer and chant, so long. Let these stone figures troop out into the troubled streets and toil awhile, and give the rest of us a chance to dream. But the multitude, which has knelt devoutly while _Su Majestad_ was being borne into the _Capilla Mayor_, comes pouring down the nave to salute the stone on which--ah me!--on which the Virgin set her blessed foot December 18, 666, when she alighted in Toledo cathedral to present the champion of the Immaculate Conception, St. Ildefonso, with a chasuble of celestial tissue. The gilded, turreted shrine containing that consecrated block towers almost to the height of the nave. A grating guards it from the devout, who can only touch it with their finger tips, which then they kiss. Hundreds, with reverend looks, stand waiting their turn--children, peasants, bull-fighters, decorated officers, refined ladies, men of cultured faces. The sound of kissing comes thick and fast. Heresy begins to beat in my blood. Not all that heavenward reach of columns and arches, not that multitudinous charm of art, can rid the imagination of a granite weight. I escape for a while to the purer church without, with its window-gold of sunshine and lapis-lazuli roof. When the mighty magnet draws me back again, those majestic aisles are empty, save for a tired sacristan or two, and the silence is broken only by a monotone of alternate chanting, from where, in the _Capilla Mayor_, two priests keep watch with _El Señor_. "He will be here all the afternoon," says the sacristan, "and nothing can be shown; but if you will come back to-morrow I will arrange for you to see even Our Lady's robes and gems." Come back! I felt myself graying to a shadow already. Of course I longed to see again that marvellous woodwork of the choir stalls, with all the conquest of Granada carved amid columns of jasper and under alabaster canopies, but I was smothered in a multitude of ghosts. They crowded from every side,--nuns, monks, soldiers, tyrants, magnificent archbishops, the martyred Leocadia, passionate Roderick, weeping Florinda, grim Count Julian, "my Cid," Pedro the Cruel, those five thousand Christian nobles and burghers of Toledo, slain, one by one, at the treacherous feast of Abderrahman, those hordes of flaming Jews writhing amid the Inquisition fagots. I had kept my Corpus. I had seen the greatest of all _autos sacramentales_, Calderon's masterpiece, "Life is a Dream." "On a single one of the Virgin's gold-wrought mantles," coaxed the sacristan, "are eighty-five thousand large pearls and as many sapphires, amethysts, and diamonds. I will arrange for you to see everything, when Our Lord is gone away." But no. I am a little particular about treasures. Since Toledo has lost the emerald table of King Solomon and that wondrous copy of the Psalms written upon gold leaf in a fluid made of melted rubies, I will not trouble the seven canons to unlock the seven doors of the cathedral sacristy. Let the Madonna enjoy her wealth alone. I have _pesetas_ enough for my ticket to Madrid. XIX THE TERCENTENARY OF VELÁZQUEZ "It is a sombre and a weeping sky That lowers above thee now, unhappy Spain; Thy 'scutcheon proud is dashed with dimming rain; Uncertain is thy path and deep thy sigh. All that is mortal passes; glories die; This hour thy destiny allots thee pain; But for the worker of thy woes remain Those retributions slowly forged on high. "Put thou thy hope in God; what once thou wert Thou yet shalt be by labor of thy sons Patient and true, with purpose to atone; And though the laurels of the loud-voiced guns Are not with us to-day, this balms our hurt-- Cervantes and Velázquez are our own." --DUKE OF RIVAS: _For the Tercentenary_. The celebration, as planned, was comparatively simple, but enthusiasm grew with what it fed upon. The Knights of Santiago held the first place upon the programme, for into that high and exclusive order the artist had won entry by special grace of Philip IV. Even Spain has been affected by the modern movement for the destruction of traditions, and certain erudite meddlers, who have been delving in the State archives, declare that there is no truth in the following story, which, nevertheless, everybody has to tell. The legend runs that Velázquez became a knight of St. James by a royal compliment to the painter of _Las Meninas_. This picture, which seems no picture, but life itself, eternizes a single instant of time in the palace of Philip IV, that one instant before the fingers of the little Infanta have curved about the cup presented by her kneeling maid, before the great, tawny, half-awakened hound has decided to growl remonstrance under the teasing foot of the dwarf, before the reflected faces of king and queen have glided from the mirror, that fleeting instant while yet the courtier, passing down the gallery into the garden, turns on the threshold for a farewell smile, while yet the green velvet sleeve of the second dwarf, ugliest of all pet monsters, brushes the fair silken skirts of the daintiest of ladies-in-waiting, while yet the artist, so much more royal than royalty, flashes his dark-eyed glance upon the charming group. But if Velázquez looks prouder than a king, Philip proved himself here no uninspired painter. Asked if he found the work complete, the monarch shook his head, and, catching up the brush, marked the red cross of St. James on the pictured breast of the artist. So says the old wives' tale. At all events, in this way or another, the honor was conferred, with the result that on the three hundredth birthday of Velázquez, June 6, 1899, dukes and counts and marquises flocked to the Church of _Las Señoras Comendadoras_, where the antique Gregorian mass was chanted for the repose of their comrade's soul. By the latest theology, the "Master of all Good Workmen" would not have waited for this illustrious requiem before admitting the painter to "an æon or two" of rest, but the Knights of Santiago have not yet accepted Kipling as their Pope. On the afternoon of the same day the _Sala de Velázquez_ was inaugurated in the _Museo del Prado_, taking, with additions, the room formerly known as the _Sala de la Reina Isabel_, long the _Salon Carré_ of Madrid, where Raphaels, Titians, Del Sartos, Dürers, Van Dycks, Correggios, and Rembrandts kept the Spanish Masters company. Portico and halls were adorned in honor of the occasion; the bust of Velázquez, embowered in laurels, myrtles, and roses, was placed midway in the Long Gallery, fronting the door of his own demesne; but the crown of the _fiesta_ consisted in the new and far superior arrangement of his pictures. The royal family and chief nobility, the Ministers of Government, the Diplomatic Corps, and delegations of foreign artists made a brilliant gathering. The address, pronounced by an eminent critic, reviewed what are known as the three styles of Velázquez. Never was art lecture more fortunate, for this _Museo_, holding as it does more than half the extant works of the great realist, with nearly all his masterpieces, enabled the speaker to illustrate every point from the original paintings. A rain of aristocratic poems followed, for a Spaniard is a lyrist born, and turns from prose to verse as easily as he changes his cuffs. As Monipodio says, in one of Cervantes' "Exemplary Tales": "A man has but to roll up his shirt-sleeves, set well to work, and he may turn off a couple of thousand verses in the snapping of a pair of scissors." These Dukes of Parnassus and Counts of Helicon did homage to the painter in graceful stanzas, not without many an allusion to Spain's troubled present. If only, as one sonneteer suggested, the soldiers of _Las Lanzas_ had marched out from their great gilt frame and gone against the foe! A programme of old-time music was rendered, and therewith the _Sala de Velázquez_ was declared open. To this, as to all galleries and monuments under State control, the public was invited free of charge for the week to come. The response was appreciative, gentility, soldiery, ragamuffins, bevies of schoolgirls with notebooks, and families of foreigners with opera glasses grouping themselves in picturesque variety, day after day, before the art treasures of Madrid, while beggars sat in joyful squads on the steps of the museums, collecting the fees which the doorkeepers refused. During these seven days, artistic and social festivals in honor of Velázquez abounded, not only in Madrid, but throughout Spain. Palma must needs get up, with photographs and the like, a Velázquez exposition, and Seville, insisting on her mother rights, must arrange a belated funeral, with mass and sermon and a tomb of laurels and flowers, surmounted by brushes, palette, and the cloak and helmet of the Order of Santiago. In the capital the _Circulo de Bellas Artes_ sumptuously breakfasted the artists from abroad. The dainties were spiced with speeches, guitars, ballet, gypsy songs and dances, congratulatory telegrams, and a letter posted from Parnassus by Don Diego himself. Two valuable new books on Velázquez suddenly appeared in the shop windows, and such periodicals as _La Ilustración_, _Blanco y Negro_, _La Vida Literaria_, and _El Nuevo Mundo_ vied with one another in illustrated numbers, while even the one-cent dailies came out with specials devoted to Velázquez biography and criticism. The Academy of San Fernando rendered a musical programme of Velázquez date, the Queen Regent issued five hundred invitations to an orchestral concert in the Royal Palace, and there was talk, which failed to fructify, of a grand masquerade ball, where the costumes should be copied from the Velázquez paintings and the dances should be those stepped by the court of Philip IV. The closing ceremony of the week was the unveiling of the new statue of Velázquez. Paris owes to Fremiot an equestrian statue of the painter, who, like Shakespeare in his Paris statue, is made to look very like a Frenchman, but the horse is of the most spirited Spanish type. A younger Velázquez may be seen in Seville, at home among the orange trees, and the _Palacio de la Biblioteca y Museos Nacionales_ in Madrid shows a statue from the hand of Garcia. Still another, an arrogant, striding figure, was standing in the studio of Benlliure, ready for its journey to the Paris exposition. The tercentenary statue, by Marinas, is also true to that haughty look of Velázquez. It represents him seated, brush and palette in hand, the winds lifting from his ears those long, clustering falls of hair, as if to let him hear the praises of posterity. Little he cares for praises! That artist's look sees nothing but his task. The unveiling took place late on Wednesday afternoon, in front of the _Museo del Prado_, where the statue stands. A turquoise sky and a light breeze put all the world in happy humor. The long façade of the _Museo_ was hung with beautiful tapestries. Handsome medallions bore the names of painters associated in one way or another with Velázquez--Herrera el Viejo, his first master in Seville; Pacheco, his second Sevillian teacher and his father-in-law; Luis Tristan of Toledo, for whom he had an enthusiastic admiration; El Greco, that startling mannerist, whose penetrating portraiture of faces, even whose extraordinary effects in coloring were not without influence on the younger man; Zurbarán, his almost exact contemporary, enamored no less than Velázquez himself of the new realism emanating from the great and terrible Ribera; Murillo, whose developing genius the favored Court painter, too high-hearted for envy, protected and encouraged, and Alonzo Cano, the impetuous artist of Granada, to whom, too, Velázquez was friend and benefactor. Spanish colors and escutcheons were everywhere. In decorated tribunes sat the royal family and the choicest of Madrid society, with the members of the _Circulo de Bellas Artes_, who were the hosts of the day, and with distinguished guests from the provinces and abroad. Romero Robledo, as President of the Society of Fine Arts, welcomed the Queen, closing his brief address with the following words: "Never, señora, will your exalted sentiments be able to blend with those of the Spanish people in nobler hour than this, commemorating him who is forever a living national glory and who receives enthusiastic testimony of admiration from all the civilized world." Their Majesties drew upon the cords, the two silken banners parted, and the statue was revealed to the applauding multitude. While the royal group congratulated the sculptor, the ambassadors of Austria and Germany laid magnificent wreaths, fashioned with a due regard to the colors of their respective nations, at the feet of Velázquez. The eminent French artists, Carolus Duran and Jean Paul Laurens, bore a crown from France and delighted the audience by declaring that "the painter of the Spanish king was himself the king of painters." Nothing since the war had gladdened Spain more than the presence and praises of these two famous Parisians; the reverence of Madrid for Paris is profound. The tributes of Rome and London excited far less enthusiasm. Still more wreaths, and more and more, were deposited by a procession of delegates from the art societies of all Spain, headed by Seville, the bands playing merrily meanwhile, until that stately form of bronze seemed to rise from out a hill of laurels, ribbons, and flowers. This is the first Velázquez celebration which has had universal recognition. The painter was hardly known to Europe at large until the day of Fernando VII, who was induced by his art-loving wife, Isabel of Braganza, to send the pictures from the royal palaces, all those accumulated treasures of the Austrian monarchs, to the empty building, designed for a natural history museum, in the _Prado_. This long, low edifice is now one of the most glorious shrines of art in the world. It is a collection of masterpieces, showing the splendors that are rather than the processes by which they came to be. There is only one Fra Angelico, but there are ten Raphaels and four times as many Titians. In the Netherlands, no less than in Italy, the Spanish sway gathered rich spoils. There are a score of Van Dycks, threescore of those precious little canvases by Teniers, while as for Rubens, he blazes in some sixty-four Christian saints, heathen goddesses, and human sinners, all with a strong family resemblance. But although the Italian and Flemish schools are so magnificently represented, the wealth of Spanish painting is what overwhelms the visitor. Here are four rooms filled with the works of Goya--whose bones, by the way, arrived in Madrid from France for final sepulture a few days before the celebration. Little more heed was paid to this advent than to that of the United States ambassador, who, it may be noted, was not presented to the Queen until the Velázquez jubilee was well over. But as for Goya, this unnoised entry was appropriate enough, for he, whom De Amicis has called "the last flame-colored flash of Spanish genius," used, during his later life, to make the long journey from Bordeaux to Madrid every week for no other purpose than to gloat upon the Sunday bull-fight, coming and going without speech or handshake, only a pair of fierce, bloodthirsty eyes. This fiery Aragonese painted bull-fights, battles, executions, and Inquisition tortures with blacks that make one shudder and reds that make one sick. He painted the brutal side of pleasure as well as of pain, filling broad canvases with dancing, feasting peasants--canvases that smell of wine and garlic, and all but send out a roar of drunken song and laughter. [Illustration: GYPSY TENANTS OF AN ARAB PALACE] Goya lived in the day of Charles IV, whose court painter he was, and against whom this natural caricaturist must have borne a special grudge, so sarcastic are his portraits of the royal family; but his genius is allied to that of Velázquez's powerful contemporary, Ribera. The _Museo del Prado_ has abundant material for a Ribera _sala_, since it possesses no less than fifty-eight of his works, but the official put in charge of it would probably go mad. The paintings are mercifully scattered and, well for such of us as may be disposed to flight, can be recognized from afar by their dusks and pallors--ascetic faces gleaming out from sable backgrounds, wasted limbs of naked saints tracing livid lines in the gloom of caverns, and, against an atmosphere dark as the frown of God, the ghastly flesh of tortured martyrs, and dead Christs drooping stiffly to the linen winding-sheet. One is appalled at the entrance of the Long Gallery by the two vast, confronting canvases of Prometheus, less a Titan than a convulsion of Titanic agony, and of Ixion, crushed not only beneath the wheel, but under that cold, tremendous blackness of hell made actual. Far down one side of the hall they stretch, those paintings upon paintings of torment, emaciation, the half-crazed visionary, and the revolting corpse. But there is no escape from Ribera, he who "tainted His brush with all the blood of all the sainted." Turning back to the Spanish cabinets that open from the vestibule we come upon a piteous San Sebastian, the blanched young form bound fast and already nailed by arrows to the ebon-hued trunk of a leafless tree. Descending the staircase to the _Sala de Alfonso XII_, we must pass an attenuated old anchoress, whose sunken face and praying hands have the very tint of the skulls that form the only ornaments, almost the only furniture, of her dreary cave. We may as well brave the terrors of this first half of the Long Gallery, where El Greco's livid greens will at least divert attention, and where, opposite the collection of Riberas, wait the gracious Murillos to comfort and uplift. Yet Ribera, ruffian though he was, is not solely and exclusively a nightmare artist. He could give sweetest and most tranquil color when he chose, as his "Jacob's Dream" here testifies, with the dim gold of its angel-peopled ladder; and for all the spirit of bigotry that clouds his work, there is Catholic fervor in these pictures and masterly truthfulness up to the point where the senses need the interpretation of the soul. There is more than anatomy, too, in these starved old saints; there is the dread of judgment. Ribera depicts supernatural terror, where Goya shows the animal shock of death. Another Spanish phase appears in Zurbarán. In his most effective work we have not Goya's blood color, nor Ribera's blacks, nor the celestial violets of Juan de Joanes, but the grays of the monastic renunciation, the twilight that is as far from rapture as from anguish. His gowned, cowled, corded figures pass before the eye in the pale tints of the cloister. The shadow of cathedral walls is over them. The _Prado_ has been strangely indifferent to Zurbarán, who is far more fully represented in the galleries of Andalusia; but it has in its baker's dozen two important and characteristic works, both visions of San Pedro Nolasco. In one the entranced saint, whose figure might be carved in stone,--stone on which ray from stained-glass window never fell,--gazes upon an angel, whose vesture, crossed by a dark green scarf, is flushed with the faintest rose. In the second the sombre cell is illuminated for an instant by the apparition of St. Peter the Apostle, head downward, as in his crucifixion, his naked form dazzling against a vague redness of light like a memory of pain. One glance at a wall aglow with Madonna blues reminds us that Spanish sacred art does not culminate in Ribera nor in Zurbarán. The Christian faith has had almost as pure, poetic, and spiritual an utterance in the land of the Inquisition as in Italy itself. This is not Murillo's hour; it is the triumph of Velázquez and the realists that Spain is celebrating to-day; but none the less it is a joy of joys to walk by the Murillos on the way to the laurelled bust and the crowded _sala_. These are the pictures that are rather in heaven than earth. Where Mary, divine in her virginal loveliness, is not upborne among the golden clouds, the radiant-plumed angel kneels on her cottage floor and the wings of the descending dove beat whiteness through the air. Here is realism and more. The Mater Dolorosa has those luminous sea-blue eyes of Andalusia, but they tell of holy tears. The Crucified is no mere sufferer, but the suffering Son of God, and the crown of thorns, while dripping blood, haloes his brows with the redemption of the world. The genius of Velázquez dwelt not above the earth, but upon it, in the heart of its most brilliant life. He was no dreamer of dreams; he "painted the thing as he saw it," and with what sure eyes he saw, and with what a firm and glowing brush he painted! His _sala_ surrounds us at once with an atmosphere of brightness, beauty, elegance, variety, delight. His work is so superb, so supreme, that, like perfect manners, it puts even the humblest of us at our ease. We are not artists, but we seem to understand Velázquez. Of course we don't. No knight of the palette would admit it for an instant. What can the rabble know of the mysterious compoundings and touchings from which sprang these splendors of color that outshine the centuries? Young men with streaming hair are continually escorting awed-looking señoras about the room, discoursing with dramatic vehemence on the "periods" of the Master's work. As a youth at Seville, they explain, Velázquez had of necessity taken religious subjects, for the Church was the chief patron of art in Andalusia; but his natural bent even then displayed itself in tavern studies and sketches of popular types, as the "Water-seller of Seville" and the "Old Woman Frying Eggs." Of his early religious pieces the archbishop's palace of Seville keeps "San Ildefonso Receiving the Chasuble from the Hands of the Virgin," and the National Gallery of London secured "Christ in the House of Martha," but "The Adoration of the Kings" hangs here at our right as we enter the Velázquez _sala_. A little stiff, say these accomplished critics, with a suggestion of the dry manner of his master, Pacheco, but bear you in mind that this is the production of a youth of twenty. It is obvious, too, that Andalusians, not celestial visions, served him as models. A longing to see the Tintorets and Titians, those starry treasures of the dark Escorial, drew him to Madrid at twenty-three. Here he was fortunate in finding friends, who brought his portraits to the notice of Philip IV, a dissolute boy ruled by the Count-Duke Olivares. Youth inclines to youth. Velázquez was appointed painter to the king at the same salary as that paid to the royal barber, and henceforth he had no care in life but to paint. And how he painted! His first portraits of Philip show a blond young face, with high brow, curled mustache, the long Hapsburg chin, and eyes that hint strange secrets. Again and again and again Velázquez traced those Austrian features, while the years stamped them ever more deeply with lines of pride and sin--a tragic face in the end as it was ill-omened in the beginning. But the masterpiece of Velázquez's twenties is "The Drunkards," a scene of peasant revelry where the young are gloriously tipsy and the old are on the point of maudlin tears. Here it is, _Los Borrachos_, farther to the right. In looking on it one remembers that a contemporary realist, in the Protestant island which has often been so sharp a thorn in Spain's side, likewise crowned the achievement of his springtime by a group of topers, Prince Hal and Falstaff and their immortal crew. Not the influence of Rubens, who spent nine months in Spain in 1628-29, painting like the wind, nor a visit to the Holy Land of Raphael and Michael Angelo could make Velázquez other than he was. This "Vulcan's Forge," which we see here, painted in Italy, is mythological only in the title. Back he came at the royal summons, to paint more portraits--Philip over and over, on foot, on horseback, half length, full length, all lengths; the winsome Infante Baltasar, as a toddling baby with his dwarf, as a gallant little soldier, hunter, horseman, and in the princely dignity of fourteen, when he had but three more years to live; the sad French queen, the king's brother, the magnificent Olivares, the sculptor Montañes, counts, dukes, buffoons. Within these twenty years Velázquez produced his two most famous works of religious tenor--"Christ Bound to the Column," a "captain jewel" of the London National Gallery, and that majestic "Crucifixion" before which Spaniards in the _Prado_ bare their heads. But the crown of this period is _Las Lanzas_, or "The Surrender of Breda," which holds the place of honor on the wall fronting the door. It is vivid past all praise, and nobler than any battle scene in its beauty of generosity. The influence of Italy had told especially on Velázquez's backgrounds. The bright, far landscapes opening out beyond his portrayed figures, especially those on horseback,--and his horses are as lifelike as his dogs,--give to the _sala_ an exhilarating effect of free space and wide horizons. In 1650 he made his second visit to Rome, where he portrayed Pope Innocent X. Nine years of glorious work in Spain remained to him. Still he painted the king, even at his royal prayers, for which there was full need, and the young Austrian queen, who had succeeded the dead mother of the dead Baltasar. On that happy left-hand wall of the _sala_ shines, in all its vigorous grace, the "Mercury and Argos," but if the hundred eyes of Argos are ready to close, their place is supplied by the terrible scrutiny of a row of portraits, embarrassing the boldest of us out of note-taking. How those pairs of pursuing black eyes, sage and keen and mocking, stare the starers out of countenance! The series of pet dwarfs is here, old Æsop, and Menippus, and the sly buffoon, "Don Juan of Austria." Of these two wonder-works, _Las Meninas_, "The Maids of Honor," has a room to itself, and thus _Las Hilanderas_, "The Weavers," becomes the central magnet of this returning wall. A saint picture and even a coronation of the Virgin cannot draw the crowds from before this ultimate triumph of the actual--this factory interior, where a group of peasant women fashion tapestries, while a broad shaft of sunshine works miracles in color. And this, too, is Spanish. Cervantes is as true a facet of many-sided Spain as Calderon, and Velázquez as Murillo. With all the national propensity to emotion and exaggeration, Spaniards are a truth-seeing people. The popular _coplas_ are more often satiric than sentimental. They like to bite through to the kernel of fact, even when it is bitter. Velázquez, with his rich and noble realism, is of legitimate descent. XX CHORAL GAMES OF SPANISH CHILDREN "Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself, She turns to favor and to prettiness." --SHAKESPEARE: _Hamlet_. On one of my last afternoons in Madrid, I visited again my early haunts in the _Buen Retiro_, for a farewell sight of the children there at play. After all, it is one of the prettiest things to be seen in Spain, these graceful, passionate, dramatic little creatures dancing in tireless circles, and piping those songs that every _niña_ knows, without being able to tell when or where or from whom she learned them. Only very small boys, as a rule, join the girls in these fairy rings, though occasionally I found a troop of urchins marching to a lusty chorus of their own. One, which I heard in Madrid, but whose parrots are more suggestive of Seville, runs something like this:-- "In the street they call Toledo Is a famous school for boys, Chundarata, chundarata, Chundarata, chún-chún; Where all we lads are going With a most heroic noise, Chundarata, chundarata, Chundarata, chún-chún. "And the parrots on their perches, They mock us as we go, Chundarata, chundarata, Chundarata, chún-chún. 'I hate my school,' whines Polly, 'For my master beats me so,' Chundarata, chundarata, Chundarata, chún-chún." Another, which came to me in fragments, is sung in playing soldier. "The Catalans are coming, Marching two by two. All who hear the drumming Tiptoe for a view. Ay, ay! Tiptoe for a view. Red and yellow banners, Pennies very few. Ay, ay! Pennies very few. "Red and yellow banners! The Moon comes out to see. If moons had better manners, She'd take me on her knee. Ay, ay! Take me on her knee. She peeps through purple shutters, Would I were tall as she! Ay, ay! Would I were tall as she! "Soldiers need not learn letters, Nor any schooly thing, But unless they mind their betters, In golden chains they'll swing. Ay, ay! In golden chains they'll swing. Or sit in silver fetters, Presents from the King. Ay, ay! Presents from the King." This ironic touch, so characteristically Spanish, reappears in many of the games, as in _A La Limón_, known throughout the Peninsula and the Antilles. I should expect to find it, too, in corners of Mexico, South America, the Philippines, wherever the Spanish oppressor has trod and the oppressor's children have sported in the sun. The little players, ranged in two rows, each row hand in hand, dance the one toward the other and retreat, singing responsively. With their last couplet, the children of the first line raise their arms, forming arches, and the children of the second line, letting go hands, dance under these arches as they respond. 1. "_A la limón, á la limón!_ All broken is our bright fountain. 2. "_A la limón, á la limón!_ Give orders to have it mended. 1. "_A la limón, á la limón!_ We haven't a bit of money. 2. "_A la limón, á la limón!_ But we have money in plenty. 1. "_A la limón, á la limón!_ What kind of money may yours be? 2. "_A la limón, á la limón!_ Oh, ours is money of eggshells. 1. "_A la limón, á la limón!_ An arch for the lords and ladies. 2. "_A la limón, á la limón!_ Right merrily we pass under." Another lyric dialogue, whose fun is spent on the lean purses of students and the happy-go-lucky life of Andalusia, must have originated since the overthrow, in 1892, of the leaning tower of Saragossa. The stanzas are sung alternately by two rows of children, advancing toward each other and retreating with a dancing step. 1. "In Saragossa --Oh, what a pity!-- Has fallen the tower, Pride of the city. 2. "Fell it by tempest, Fairies or witches, The students will raise it, For students have riches. 1. "Call on the students, Call louder and louder! They've only two coppers To buy them a chowder. 2. "Chowder of students Is sweeter than honey, But the gay Andalusians Have plenty of money. 1. "The gay Andalusians Have fiddle and ballad, But only two coppers To buy them a salad. 2. "In Saragossa --Oh, what a pity!-- Has fallen the tower, Pride of the city." Unchildlike innuendoes pervade that curious game of many variants in which the priest and abbess play a leading part. Two children are chosen for these dignitaries, while the others call out the names of such flowers, fruits, or vegetables as each may decide to personate. "I'm a cabbage." "I'm a jasmine." "I'm a cherry." Then the little sinners kneel in a circle, crying:-- "Through the door, up the stairs, On the floor, say your prayers!" and chant some childish gibberish, during which no one must laugh on pain of a forfeit. After this, all sing:-- "The house of the priest it cracked like a cup. Half fell down and half stood up. Sir Priest, Sir Priest, now tell us aright, In whose house did you sleep last night? _Priest._ With the rose slept I. _Rose._ Fie, O fie! I never saw your tonsured head. _Priest._ Then with whom did you make your bed? _Rose._ With the Pink. _Pink._ I should think! I never saw your petals red. _Rose._ Then with whom did you make your bed? _Pink._ With the lily. _Lily._ Don't be silly! I never heard your fragrant tread. _Pink._ Then with whom did you make your bed? _Lily._ With the priest. _Priest._ Little beast! If I went near you, may I fall dead! _Lily._ Then with whom did you make your bed? _Priest._ With the abbess, I. _Abbess._ Oh, you lie!" But this seems to be the conclusion of the game. The most of these choral songs, however, are sweet and innocent, concerned with the natural interests of childhood, as this:-- "The shepherdess rose lightly Larán--larán--larito, The shepherdess rose lightly From off her heather seat--O. "Her goats went leaping homeward, Larán--larán--larito, Her goats went leaping homeward On nimble little feet--O. "With strong young hands she milked them, Larán--larán--larito, With strong young hands she milked them And made a cheese for treat--O. "The kitty watched and wondered, Larán--larán--larito, The kitty crept and pondered If it were good to eat--O. "The kitty sprang upon it, Larán--larán--larito, The kitty sprang upon it And made a wreck complete--O. "Scat, scat, you naughty kitty! Larán--larán--larito, Scat, scat, you naughty kitty! Are stolen cheeses sweet--O?" The baby girls have a song of their own, which, as a blending of doll-play, gymnastics, music, mathematics, and religion, leaves little to be desired. "Oh, I have a dolly, and she is dressed in blue, With a fluff of satin on her white silk shoe, And a lace mantilla to make my dolly gay, When I take her dancing this way, this way, this way. [_Dances Dolly in time to the music._ "2 and 2 are 4, 4 and 2 are 6, 6 and 2 are 8, and 8 is 16, And 8 is 24, and 8 is 32! Thirty-two! Thirty-two! Blesséd souls, I kneel to you. [_Kneels._ "When she goes out walking in her Manila shawl, My Andalusian dolly is quite the queen of all. Gypsies, dukes, and candy-men bow down in a row, While my dolly fans herself so and so and so. [_Fans Dolly in time to the music._ "2 and 2 are 4, 4 and 2 are 6, 6 and 2 are 8, and 8 is 16, And 8 is 24, and 8 is 24! Twenty-four! Twenty-four! Blesséd souls, I rise once more." They have a number of bird-games, through which they flit and flutter with an airy grace that wings could hardly better. In one, the children form a circle, with "the little bird Pinta" in the centre. The chorus, dancing lightly around her, sings the first stanza, and Pinta, while passing about the circle to make her choice, sings the rest, with the suggested action. The child chosen becomes Pinta in turn. _Chorus._ "The little bird Pinta was poising On a scented green lemon-tree spray. She picked the leaf and the blossom, And chanted a roundelay. _Pinta._ "Song in the land! While April is yet a newcomer, O mate of my summer, Give to me a hand now, Both hands I seek, O! Take a Spanish kiss, now, On the rosy cheek, O!" Equally pretty and simple is the Andalusian play of "Little White Pigeons." The children form in two rows, which face each other some ten or twelve yards apart. One row sings the first stanza, dancing forward and slipping under the "golden arches" made by the lifted arms of the second row. The second row sings and dances in turn, passing under the "silver arches" to Granada. 1. "Little white pigeons Are dreaming of Seville, Sun in the palm tree, Roses and revel. Lift up the arches, Gold as the weather. Little white pigeons Come flying together. 2. "Little white pigeons Dream of Granada, Glistening snows on Sierra Nevada. Lift up the arches, Silver as fountains. Little white pigeons Fly to the mountains." The Spanish form of "Blindman's Buff" begins with "giving the pebble" to determine who shall be the Blind Hen. A child shuts in one hand the pebble and then presents both little fists to the other children passing in file. Each, while all sing the first stanza given below, softly touches first one of the hands, then the other, and finally slaps the one chosen. If this is empty, she passes on. If it holds the pebble, she must take it and be the one to offer the hands. The child who finally remains with the pebble in her possession, after all have passed, is the Blind Hen. As the game goes on, the children tease the Blind Hen, who, of course, is trying to catch them, by singing the second stanza given below. 1 "Pebble, O pebble! Where may it be? Pebble, O pebble! Come not to me! Tell me, my mother, Which hand to choose. This or the other? That I refuse, This hand I choose." 2 "She's lost her thimble, Little Blind Hen. Better be nimble! Try it again! Who'll bring a taper For the Blind Hen? Scamper and caper! Try it again! Try it again!" Other games as well known to American children as "Blindman's Buff" are played by little Spaniards. They understand how to make the "hand-chair" and "drop the button," only their button is usually a ring. "Hide the Handkerchief" carries with it the familiar cries of _hot_ and _cold_, but our "Puss in the Corner" becomes "A Cottage to Rent." "'Cottage to rent?' 'Try the other side, You see that this Is occupied.'" In religious Seville the dialogue runs:-- "'A candle here?' 'Over there.' 'A candle here?' 'Otherwhere.' "'Candle, a candle!' 'Loss on loss.' 'Where is light?' 'In the Holy Cross.'" For all these games, common to childhood the world over, have a rhyming element in the Peninsula, where, indeed, the ordinary intercourse of children often carries verses with it. For instance, our youngsters are content with cries of "Tell-tale!" and "Indian-giver!" but under similar provocation the fierce little nurslings of Catholic Spain will sing:-- "Tell-tale! Tell-tale! In hell you'll be served right, All day fed on mouldy bread, And pounded all the night!" The other baby-curse is to the same effect:-- "He who gives and takes again, Long in hell may he remain! He who gives and takes once more, May we hear him beat on the Devil's door!" The Spanish form of tag has a touch of mythological grace. One child, chosen by lot, is the Moon, and must keep within the shadow. The others, Morning-stars, are safe only in the lighted spaces. The game is for the Morning-stars to run into the shadow, daring the Moon, who, if successful in catching one, becomes a Morning-star in turn, and passes out into the light, leaving the one caught to act the part of Moon. As the Morning-stars run in and out of the Moon's domain, they sing over and over the following stanza:-- "O the Moon and the Morning-stars! O the Moon and the Morning-stars! Who dares to tread--O Within the shadow?" Even in swinging, the little girls who push carry on a musical dialogue with the happy holder of the seat. "'Say good-day, say good-day To Miss Fannie Fly-away! At the door the guests are met, But the table is not set. Put the stew upon the fire. Higher, higher, higher, higher! Now come down, down, down, down, Or the dinner will all burn brown. Soup and bread! soup and bread! I know a plot of roses red, Red as any hero's sword, Or the blood of our Holy Lord. Where art thou, on the wing?' 'No, I'm sitting in the swing.' 'Who're thy playmates way up there?' 'Swallows skimming through the air.' 'Down, come down! The stew will burn. Let the rest of us have a turn.'" In playing "Hide and Seek," the seeker must first sit in a drooping attitude with covered eyes, while the others stand about and threaten to strike him if he peeps:-- "Oil-cruet! Don't do it! _Ras con ras!_ Pepper-pot? Peep not! _Ras con ras!_" The menacing little fists are then suddenly withdrawn. "No, no! Not a blow! But a pinch on the arm will do no harm. Now let the birdies take alarm!" And off scamper the hiders to their chosen nooks. When they are safely tucked away, the indispensable Mother, standing by, sings to the seeker that stanza which is his signal for the start:-- "My little birds of the mountain Forth from the cage are flown. My little birds of the mountain Have left me all alone." Spanish forfeit games are numerous and ingenious. In one of these, called "The Toilet," the players take the names of Mirror, Brush, Comb, Towel, Soap, and other essentials, including Jesus, Devil, and Man Alive, these last for exclamatory purposes. As each is mentioned by the leader of the game, he must rise instantly, on pain of forfeit, no matter how fast the speaker may be rattling on: "_Jesus!_ When will that _devil_ of a _maid_ bring me my _powder_ and _perfumes_?" Characteristic titles of other forfeit games are, "The Key of Rome," "The Fan," "The Fountain," "I Saw my Love Last Night." The sentences vary from such gentle penalties as "The Caress of Cadiz" to the predicament of putting three feet on the wall at once. The choral verses are often mere nonsense. "Pipe away! pipe away! Let us play a little play! What will we play? We'll cut our hands away. Who cut them, who? Rain from out the blue. Where is the rain? Hens drank it up again. Hens? And where are they? Gone their eggs to lay. Who will eat them up? Friars when they sup. What do friars do? Sing 'gori-gori-goo.'" Watching Spanish children, one may see two little girls, say White Rose and Sweetness, fly out into an open space, where White Rose carefully places the tips of her small shoes in touch with those of Sweetness. Then they clasp hands, fling their little bodies as far back as these conditions permit, and whirl round and round, singing lustily--until they are overcome by giddiness--the following rigmarole, or one of its variants:-- "Titirinela, if you please! Titirinela, bread and cheese: 'What is your father's worshipful name?' 'Sir Red-pepper, who kisses your hands.' 'And how does he call his beautiful dame?' 'Lady Cinnamon, at your commands.' Titirinela, toe to toe! Titirinela, round we go!" [Illustration: FROM THE TOWER OF GOLD DOWN THE GUADALQUIVÍR] Even in some of their prettiest games the verses have a childish incoherence. Some dozen little girls form a circle, for instance, with the Butterfly in the centre. They lift her dress-skirt by the border, and hold it outspread about her. Another child, on the outside, runs around and around the ring, singing:-- "Who are these chatterers? Oh, such a number! Not by day nor by night Do they let me slumber. They're daughters of the Moorish king, Who search the garden-close For lovely Lady Ana, The sweetest thing that grows. She's opening the jasmine And shutting up the rose." Then the children suddenly lift their hands, which are holding Butterfly's frock, so as to envelop her head in the folds. The little singer outside continues:-- "Butterfly, butterfly, Dressed in rose-petals! Is it on candle-flame Butterfly settles? How many shirts Have you woven of rain? Weave me another Ere I call you again." These songs are repeated seven times. Then comes another stanza:-- "Now that Lady Ana Walks in garden sweet, Gathering the roses Whose dew is on her feet, Butterfly, butterfly, Can you catch us? Try it, try!" With this the circle breaks and scatters, while Butterfly, blinded as she is by the folds of her own skirt wrapped about her head, does her best to overtake some one, who shall then become her successor. Many of the games are simplicity itself. Often the play is merely a circle dance, sometimes ending in a sudden kneeling or sitting on the ground, One of the songs accompanying this dance runs:-- "Potatoes and salt must little folks eat, While the grown-up people dine Off lemons and chestnuts and oranges sweet, With cocoanut milk for wine. On the ground do we take our seat, We're at your feet, we're at your feet." Sometimes a line of children will form across the street and run, hand in hand, down its length, singing:-- "We have closed the street And no one may pass, Only my grandpa Leading his ass Laden with oranges Fresh from the trees. Tilín! Tilín! Down on our knees! Tilín! Tilín! Tilín! Tilín! The holy bell of San Agustín!" A play for four weans, training them early to the "eternal Spanish contradiction," consists in holding a handkerchief by its four corners, while one of them sings:-- "Pull and slacken! I've lost my treasure store. Pull and slacken! I'm going to earn some more. _Slacken!_" And at this, the other three children must _pull_, on pain of forfeit, whereas if the word is _pull_, their business is to _slacken_. They have a grasshopper game, where they jump about with their hands clasped under their knees, singing:-- "Grasshopper sent me an invitation To come and share his occupation. Grasshopper dear, how could I say no? Grasshopper, grasshopper, here I go!" In much the same fashion they play "Turkey," gobbling as they hop. I never found them "playing house" precisely after the manner of our own little girls, but there are many variants for the dialogue and songs in their game of "Washerwoman." The Mother says: "Mariquilla, I'm going out to the river to wash. While I am gone, you must sweep and tidy up the house." "_Bueno, madre._" But no sooner is the Mother out of sight than naughty Mariquilla begins to frisk for joy, singing:-- "Mother has gone to wash. Mother'll be gone all day. Now can Mariquilla Laugh and dance and play." But the Mother returns so suddenly that Mariquilla sees her barely in time to begin a vigorous sweeping. "'What hast been doing, Mary?' 'Sweeping with broom of brier.' 'A friar saw thee playing.' 'He was a lying friar.' 'A holy friar tell a lie!' 'He lied and so do you.' 'Come hither, Mary of my heart, 'And I'll beat thee black and blue.'" After this lively exercise, the washerwoman goes away again, charging Mariquilla to churn the butter, then to knead the bread, then to set the table, but always with the same disastrous results. The Mother finally condemns her to a dinner of bread and bitters, but Mariquilla makes a point of understanding her to say bread and honey, and shares this sweetness with her sympathetic mates who form the circle. This time the beating is so severe that the children of the ring raise their arms and let Mariquilla dodge freely in and out, while they do all they can to trip and hinder the irate washerwoman in her pursuit. There is another washing game of more romantic sort, the chorus being:-- "'Bright is the fountain, When skies are blue. Who washed my handkerchief? Tell me true!' 'Three mountain maidens Of laughing look. White went their feet In the running brook. One threw in roses, And jasmine one. One spread thy handkerchief In the sun.'" Spanish children "play store," of course, but they are such dramatic little creatures that they need no broken ware for their merchandise. A row of them will squat down in the middle of the street, clasp their hands under the hollow of their knees, and crook out their arms for "handles." Then a customer wanders by, asking, "Who sells honey-jars?" The merchant disrespectfully replies, "That do I, Uncle of the Torn Trousers." The shabby customer answers with Castilian dignity, "If my trousers are torn, my wife will mend them." The merchant then opens negotiations. "Will you buy a little jar of honey?" "What's your price?" The merchant is not exorbitant. "A flea and a louse." The probabilities are, unhappily, that the customer has these commodities about him, and he inclines, though cautiously, toward the bargain. "Your little honey-jars are good?" "Very good." "Do they weigh much?" "Let's see." So they pick up an hilarious little honey-jar by its handles and tug it away between them, not letting it touch the ground, to the sidewalk. Here the merchant and customer have designated four spaces as Heaven, Limbo, Purgatory, and Hell, but on a preliminary paving-stone--let truth need no apology!--they have done some artistic spitting, with the result that four different figures in saliva are presented to the little honey-jar. These four figures bear a secret relation to the four spaces on the sidewalk, and the prisoner must make his choice. "This!" he ventures. "Hell!" scream the merchant and customer, and drag him, shrieking and struggling, to his doom. The next, perhaps, will have the luck to hit on Heaven, for every little honey-jar must take his chance in this theological lottery. Sometimes the market becomes a transformation scene. The children hold up their forefingers for candles, but embarrass the merchant by doubling these up whenever the customer is on the point of buying. Just as the bargain is about to be concluded, the little candles vanish and the children roll themselves into bunches of grapes, some proving sweet and others sour. Again, they make themselves over into pitchers, cushions, and all variety of domestic articles, becoming at last a pack of barking dogs which rush out on the customer, snap at his legs, and drive him off the premises. Again, it is a chicken-market on which the Uncle of the Torn Trousers chances, where one by one he buys all the hens and chickens, but forgets to buy the rooster, and when, by and by, this lordly fowl, waxing lonely, cock-a-doodle-doos, the hens and chickens come scurrying back to him, more to the profit of the merchant than to the satisfaction of the customer. In another of the chicken games, the Mother leaves Mariquilla in charge of the brood, with directions, if the wolf comes, to fling him the smallest. But he comes so often that, when the Mother returns, there are no chickens left. Then she and Little Mary go hunting them, hop-hop-hop through Flea Street, bow-wow-wow through Dog Street, and so on without success, until it occurs to them to scatter corn. Thereupon with peep-peep-peep and flip-flap-flutter all the chickens appear, but only to fly at the negligent Mother, who left them to the jaws of the wolf, and assail her with such furious pecks that she must run for her life, the indignant chicks racing in wild pursuit. There is a market-garden game, where one acts as gardener, others as vegetables, and others as customers. Others, still, come creeping up as thieves, but are opposed by a barking dog, which they kill. The gardener summons them before the judge. A trial is held, with much fluent Spanish argument pro and con, and the prisoners are condemned to execution for the murder of the dog. But at the last thrilling moment, when they have confessed their sins to the priests, and been torn from the embraces of their weeping friends, the dog trots cheerfully in, so very much alive that all the criminals are pardoned in a general dance of joy. The little girls have a favorite shopping game. In this the children are seated, shoulder to shoulder, in two rows that face each other. Every child takes the name of some cloth, silks and satins being preferred. The leader of the game runs around the two rows, singing:-- "Up the counter, down the counter! How can I buy enough? Down the counter, up the counter! I choose this velvet stuff." Little Velvet immediately jumps to her feet and follows the leader, who continues choosing and calling, choosing and calling, until the stock is exhausted and she can go home with all her purchases most conveniently trooping at her heels. But the plays dearest to the black-eyed _niñas_ are love plays, of which they have a countless number. Most of these consist of the dancing, singing circle, with a child in the centre who chooses a mate. Some are as simple as this:-- "Milk and rice! I want to marry A maiden nice. I may not tarry. It is not this, Nor this, nor this. 'Tis only this Whom I want to marry." [Illustration: CADIZ FROM THE SEA] _Ambó, ató_ is hardly more elaborate. When in the exchange of question and answer, the child would choose her page and touches one of the circle, the mercenary mites dance on faster than ever, until she offers whatever gift she has, a flower, apple, or any trifle at hand. Then the page runs in and kneels before her. The circle dances about the two, singing the refrain, until the first child slips out and joins them, leaving the second in the centre to begin the game over again. "_Ambó, ató, matarile, rile, rile? Ambó, ató, matarile, rile, ron?_ 1. "What do you want, matarile, rile, rile? What do you want, matarile, rile, ron? 2. "I want a page, matarile, rile, rile. I want a page, matarile, rile, ron. 1. "Choose whom you will, matarile, rile, rile. Choose whom you will, matarile, rile, ron. 2. "I choose Pedro, matarile, rile, rile. I choose Pedro, matarile, rile, ron. 1. "What will you give him, matarile, rile, rile? What will you give him, matarile, rile, ron? 2. "I'll give him an orange, matarile, rile, rile. I'll give him an orange, matarile, rile, ron. 1. "He answers yes, matarile, rile, rile. He answers yes, matarile, rile, ron." "The Charcoal Woman" requires an odd number of players. The circle dances about a little girl who stands all forlorn in the centre. The chorus sings the first stanza, the child sings the second, which has reference to the fact that Spanish charcoal is often made from laurel wood, and the chorus, in a comforting tone, the third. Then, while the child runs about and about the circle as if seeking, the chorus angrily sings the fourth stanza, accusing her of ambition, and the little charcoal woman retorts with the fifth, making her choice as she sings the last four words. At this the circle breaks, the children quickly choosing mates and dancing by pairs. The one who is left without a partner takes her place in the centre as the next Charcoal Woman. 1. _Chorus._ "Who would say that the charcoal woman, Sooty, sooty charcoal woman, In all the city and all the land Could find a lover to kiss her hand? 2. _Charcoal Woman._ "The little widow of good Count Laurel Has no one left her for kiss or quarrel. I want a sweetheart and find me none. Charcoal women must bide alone. 3. _Chorus._ "Poor little widow, so sweet thou art, If there's no other to claim thy heart, Take thy pick of us who stand Ready to kiss thy sooty hand. 4. _Chorus._ "The charcoal woman, the charcoal woman, Proud little black little charcoal woman, Goes seeking up and seeking down To find the Count of Cabratown. 5. _Charcoal Woman._ "I would not marry the Count of Cabra. Never will marry the Count of Cabra. Count of Cabra! Oh, deary me! I'll not have him,--_if you're not he!_" Just such coquettish touches of Spanish spirit and maiden pride appear in many of the songs, as, for instance, in one of their counting-out carols, "The Garden." "The garden of our house it is The funniest garden yet, For when it rains and rains and rains, The garden it is wet. And now we bow, Skip back and then advance, For who know how to make a bow Know how to dance. AB--C--AB--C DE--FG--HI--J. If your worship does not love me, Then a better body may. AB--C--AB--C, KL--MN--OP--Q. If you think you do not love me, I am sure I don't love you." Sometimes these dancing midgets lisp a song of worldly wisdom:-- "If any cadet With thee would go, Daughter, instantly Answer no. For how can cadet, This side of Heaven, Keep a wife On his dollars seven? "If any lieutenant Asks a caress, Daughter, instantly Answer yes. For the lieutenant Who kisses thy hand May come to be A general grand." And, again, these babies may be heard giving warning that men betray. "The daughters of Ceferino Went to walk--alas! A street above, a street below, Street of San Tomás. The least of all, they lost her. Her father searched--alas! A street above, a street below, Street of San Tomás. And there he found her talking With a cavalier, who said, 'Come home with me, my darling, 'Tis you that I would wed.' "Oh, have you seen the pear tree Upon my grandpa's lawn? Its pears are sweet as honey, But when the pears are gone, A turtle-dove sits moaning, With blood upon her wings, Amid the highest branches, And this is what she sings: 'Ill fares the foolish maiden Who trusts a stranger's fibs. She'd better take a cudgel And break his ugly ribs.'" The dance for "Elisa of Mambrú" begins merrily, and soon saddens to a funereal pace. "In Madrid was born a maiden--carabí! Daughter of a general--carabí, hurí, hurá!" The song goes on to tell of Elisa's beautiful hair, which her aunt dressed so gently for her with a golden comb and crystal curling-pins, and how Elisa died and was carried to church in an elegant coffin, and how a little bird used to perch upon her grave and chirp, _pio_, _pio_. Mambrú himself is the pathetic hero of Spanish childhood. This Mambrú for whom the little ones from Aragon to Andalusia pipe so many simple elegies, the Mambrú sung by Trilby, is not the English Marlborough to them, but, be he lord or peasant, one of their very own. "Mambrú is gone to serve the king, And comes no more by fall or spring. "We've looked until our eyes are dim. Will no one give us word of him? "You'd know him for his mother's son By peasant dress of Aragon. "You'd know him for my husband dear By broidered kerchief on his spear. "The one I broider now is wet. Oh, may I see him wear it yet!" At the end of this song, as of the following, the little dancers throw themselves on the ground, as if in despair. "Mambrú went forth to battle. Long live Love! I listen still for his coming feet. The rose on the rose bush blossoms sweet. "He will come back by Easter. Long live Love! He will come back by Christmas-tide. The rose on the bush has drooped and died. "Down the road a page is riding. Long live Love! 'Oh, what are the tidings that you bear?' The rose on the bush is budding fair. "'Woe is me for my tidings!' Long live Love! 'Mambrú lies cold this many a morn.' Ay, for a rose bush sharp with thorn! "A little bird is chirping. Long live Love! In the withered bush where no more buds blow, The bird is chirping a note of woe." A game that I often watched blithe young Granadines playing under the gray shadow of Alhambra walls, seems to be a Spanish version of "London Bridge is Falling Down." Two children are chosen to be Rose and Pink. These form an arch with their uplifted arms, through which run the other children in a line, headed by the Mother. A musical dialogue is maintained throughout. "_Rose and Pink._ To the viper of love, that hides in flowers, The only way lies here. _Mother._ Then here I pass and leave behind One little daughter dear. _Rose and Pink._ Shall the first one or the last Be captive of our chain? _Mother._ Oh, the first one runs too lightly. 'Tis the last that shall remain. _Chorus._ Pass on, oho! Pass on, aha! By the gate of Alcalá!" The last child is caught by the falling arms and is asked whether she will go with Rose or Pink. She shyly whispers her choice, taking her stand behind her elected leader, whom she clasps about the waist. When all the children of the line have been successively caught in the falling arch, and have taken their places behind either Rose or Pink, the game ends in a grand tugging match. Rose and Pink hold hands as long as they can, while the two lines try to drag them apart. All the while, until the very last, the music ripples on:-- "_Rose and Pink._ Let the young mind make its choice, As young minds chance to think. Now is the Rose your leader, Or go you with the Pink? Let the young heart make its choice By laws the young heart knows. Now is the Pink your leader, Or go you with the Rose? _Chorus._ Pass on, oho! Pass on, aha! By the gate of Alcalá!" Another favorite is "Golden Ear-rings." Here the Mother, this time a Queen, sits in a chair, supposedly a throne, and close before her, on the floor, sits the youngest daughter; before this one, the next youngest, and so on, in order of age. Two other children, holding a handkerchief by the corners, walk up and down the line, one on one side and one on the other, so passing the handkerchief above the heads of the seated princesses. Then ensues the musical dialogue between these two suitors and the Queen. "'We've come from France, my lady, And Portugal afar. We've heard of your fair daughters, And very fair they are.' 'Be they fair or no, señores, It's none of your concern, For God has given me bread for all, And given me hands to earn.' 'Then we depart, proud lady, To find us brides elsewhere. The daughters of the Moorish king Our wedding rings shall wear.' 'Come back, my sweet señores! Bear not so high a crest. You may take my eldest daughter, But leave me all the rest.'" The dialogue is transferred to one of the suitors and to the princess at the farther end of the line, on whose head the handkerchief now rests. "'Will you come with me, my Onion?' 'Fie! that's a kitchen smell.' 'Will you come with me, my Rosebud?' 'Ay, gardens please me well.'" In similar fashion all the daughters are coaxed away until only the youngest remains, but she proves obdurate. They may call her Parsley or Pink; it makes no difference. So the suitors resort to bribes, the last proving irresistible. "'We'll buy you a French missal.' 'I have a book in Latin.' 'In taffeta we'll dress you.' 'My clothes are all of satin.' 'You shall ride upon a donkey.' 'I ride in coaches here.' 'We'll give you golden ear-rings.' 'Farewell, my mother dear.'" In some of the many variants of this game, the Queen herself, adequate as she may be to earning her own living, is wooed and won at last. I have not met with fairy-lore among these children's carols. The only fairy known to Spain appears to be a sort of spiritualistic brownie, who tips over tables and rattles chairs in empty rooms by night. The grown-up men who write of him say he frightens women and children. He can haunt a house as effectually as an old-time ghost, and a _Casa del Duende_ may go begging for other tenants. One poor lady, who went to all the trouble of moving to escape from him, was leaning over the balcony of her new home,--so the story goes,--to see the last cartful of furniture drive up, when a tiny man in scarlet waved a feathered cap to her from the very top of the load and called, "Yes, señora, we are all here. We have moved." So the childish imagination of Spain, shut out from fairyland, makes friends with the saints in such innocent, familiar way as well might please even Ribera's anchorites. The adventurous small boy about to take a high jump pauses to pray:-- "Saint Magdalene, Don't let me break my thigh! Oh, Saint Thomas, Help this birdie fly!" The little girls express decided preferences for one saint over another. "Old San Antón, What has he done? Put us in the corner every one. "San Sebastián Is a nice young man. He takes us to walk and gives us a fan." Santa Rita is best at finding lost needles, and San Pantaleón is a humorist. "San Pantaleón, Are twenty and one Children enough for an hour of fun Slippers of iron Donkey must try on. Moors with their pages Ride in gold stages. But if you want a Girdle, Infanta, Cucurucú, 'Bout-face with you!" At this one of the children dancing in circle whirls around, remaining in her place, but with back turned to the centre and arms crossed over her breast, although her hands still hold those of her nearest neighbors. The rhyme is sung over and over, until all the little figures have thus turned about and the circle is dancing under laughable difficulties. But the dearest saint of all is San Serení. Two of the best-known games are under his peculiar blessing. One of these is of the genuine Kindergarten type, the children dancing in a circle through the first two lines of each stanza, but then loosing hands to imitate, in time to the music, the suggested action. "San Serení, The holy--holy-hearted! Thus for thee The shoemakers are cobbling. Thus, thus, thus! Thus it pleases us." Even so it pleases seamstresses to stitch, laundresses to wash, carpenters to saw, silversmiths to tap, ironsmiths to pound, and little folks to dance, all for "San Serení de la buena, buena vida." In the second game, a gymnastic exercise, whose four movements are indicated in the four stanzas, he is apostrophized as "San Serení del Monte, San Serení cortés." "San Serení of the Mountain, Our saint of courtesy, I, as a good Christian, Will fall upon my knee. "San Serení of the Mountain, Where the strong winds pass, I, as a good Christian, Will seat me on the grass. "San Serení of the Mountain, Where the white clouds fly, I, as a good Christian, Upon the ground will lie. "San Serení of the Mountain, Where earth and heaven meet, I, as a good Christian, Will spring upon my feet." With the legend of St. Katharine and her martyrdom childish fancy has played queer caprices. "In Cadiz was a wean--ah! The gentlest ever seen--ah! Her name was Catalina. Ay, so! Her name was Catalina. "Her father, Moslem cruel, He made her bring in fuel. Her mother fed her gruel. Ay, so! Her mother fed her gruel. "They beat her Tuesday, Wednesday, They beat her Thursday, Friday, They beat her Saturday, Monday. Ay, so! They beat her hardest Sunday. "Once bade her wicked sire She make a wheel most dire, Of scissors, knives, and fire. Ay, so! Of scissors, knives, and fire. "The noble Christian neighbors, In pity of her labors, Brought silver swords and sabres. Ay, so! Brought silver swords and sabres. "By noon her task was ended, And on that wheel all splendid Her little knee she bended. Ay, so! Her little knee she bended. "Then down a stair of amber She saw the cherubs clamber: 'Come rest in our blue chamber.' Ay, so! She rests in their blue chamber." Little Spaniards are not too intolerant to make a play-fellow of the Devil. In one of their pet games, the children form in line, with the invaluable Mother in charge. To each child she secretly gives the name of a color. Then an Angel comes in with a flying motion and calls, for instance, "Purple!" But there is no Purple in the company. It is then the Devil's turn, who rushes in, usually armed with a table-fork, and roars for "Green." There is a Green in the line, and she has to follow the Demon, while the Angel tries again. All right-minded spectators hope that the Angel will have the longer array at the last. The Virgin's well-beloved name comes often into the children's songs. "For studying my lessons, So as not to be a dunce, Papa gave me eight dollars, That I mean to spend at once. Four for my dolly's necklace, Two for a collar fine, And one to buy a candle For Our Lady's shrine." Even the supreme solemnity of the Wafer borne through the kneeling streets cannot abash the trustful gaze of childhood. "'Where are you going, dear Jesus, So gallant and so gay?' 'I am going to a dying man To wash his sins away. And if I find him sorry For the evil he has done, Though his sins are more than the sands of the sea, I'll pardon every one.' "'Where are you going, dear Jesus, So gallant and so gay?' 'I'm coming back from a dying man Whose sins are washed away. Because I found him sorry For the evil he had done, Though his sins were more than the sands of the sea, I've pardoned every one.'" The affairs of State as well as of Church have left their traces on the children's play. As the little ones dance in circle, their piping music tells a confused tale of Spanish history within these latter days. "In Madrid there is a palace, As bright as polished shell, And in it lives a lady They call Queen Isabel. Not for count nor duke nor marquis Her father would she sell, For not all the gold in Spain could buy The crown of Isabel. "One day when she was feasting Within this palace grand, A lad of Aragon walked in And seized her by the hand. Through street and square he dragged her To a dreary prison cell, And all that weary way she wept, The lady Isabel. "'For whom art weeping, lady? What gives thy spirit pain? If thou weepest for thy brothers, They will not come again. If thou weepest for thy father, He lies 'neath sheet of stone.' 'For these I am not weeping, But for sorrows of mine own. "'I want a golden dagger.' 'A golden dagger! Why?' 'To cut this juicy pear in two. Of thirst I almost die.' We gave the golden dagger. She did not use it well. Ah, no, it was not pears you cut, My lady Isabel." These dancing circles keep in memory the assassination of Marshal Prim. "As he came from the Cortes, Men whispered to Prim, 'Be wary, be wary, For life and for limb.' Then answered the General, 'Come blessing, come bane, I live or I die In the service of Spain.' "In the _Calle del Turco_, Where the starlight was dim, Nine cowardly bullets Gave greeting to Prim. The best of the Spaniards Lay smitten and slain, And the new King he died for Came weeping to Spain." This new king, Amadeo, is funnily commemorated in another dancing ditty, "Four Sweethearts." "Maiden, if they ask thee, Maiden, if they ask thee, If thou hast a sweetheart--_ha_, _ha_! If thou hast a sweetheart, Answer without blushing, Answer without blushing, 'Four sweethearts are mine--_ha_, _ha_! Four sweethearts are mine. "'The first he is the son of-- The first he is the son of A confectioner--_ha_, _ha_! A confectioner. Sugar-plums he gives me, Sugar-plums he gives me, Caramels and creams--_ha_, _ha_! Caramels and creams. "'The second is the son of-- The second is the son of An apothecary--_ha_, _ha_! An apothecary. Syrups sweet he gives me, Syrups sweet he gives me, For my little cough--_hack_, _hack_! For my little cough. "'The third he is the son of-- The third he is the son of The barber to the court--_ha_, _ha_! The barber to the court. Powders rare he gives me, Powders rare he gives me, And a yellow wig--_ha_, _ha_! And a yellow wig. "'The fourth? Oh, 'tis a secret, The fourth? Oh, 'tis a secret. Our new Italian king--_ha_, _ha_! Our new Italian king. He gives me silk and satin, He gives me silk and satin, Velvet, gold, and gems--_ha_, _ha_! Velvet, gold, and gems.'" Strangest of all is the dramatic little dialogue, which one with an ear for children's voices may hear any day in Madrid, telling of the death of Queen Mercedes. "'Whither away, young King Alfonso? (Oh, for pity!) Whither away?' 'I go seeking my queen Mercedes, For I have not seen her since yesterday.' "'But we have seen your queen Mercedes, Seen the queen, though her eyes were hid, While four dukes all gently bore her Through the streets of sad Madrid. "'Oh, how her face was calm as heaven! Oh, how her hands were ivory white! Oh, how she wore the satin slippers That you kissed on the bridal night! "'Dark are the lamps of the lonely palace. Black are the suits the nobles don. In letters of gold on the wall 'tis written: _Her Majesty is dead and gone_.' "He fainted to hear us, young Alfonso, Drooped like an eagle with broken wing, But the cannon thundered: 'Valor, valor!' And the people shouted: 'Long live the king!'" Spanish wiseheads say that the children's choral games are already perishing, that the blight of schools and books is passing upon the child-life of the Peninsula, and soon there will be no more time for play. The complaint of the _niñas_ is much to the same effect, yet they wear their rue with a difference:-- "Not even in the _Prado_ Can little maidens play, Because those staring, teasing boys Are always in the way. "They might be romping with us, For they're only children yet, But they won't play at anything Except a cigarette. "Now let me tell you truly: If things go on like this, And midgets care for nothing But to walk and talk and kiss, "No plays will cheer the _Prado_ In future times, for then The little boys of seven Will all be married men." XXI "O LA SEÑORITA!" "Since the English education came into fashion, there is not a maiden left who can feel true love."--ALARCÓN. During my stifling night journey from Madrid to the north I had much chat with Castilian and German ladies in the carriage about Spanish girls. Our talk turned especially on their reading, so reminding me of an incident of the past spring. On an Andalusian balcony I once found a little girl curled up in the coolest corner and poring over a shabby, paper-bound book. On my expressing interest in the volume, she presented it at once, according to the code of Spanish manners. "The book is at the disposal of your worship." But as the bundle of tattered leaves was not only so precious to her own small worship, but also greatly in demand among her worshipful young mates, whose constant borrowing seemed a strain even on Andalusian courtesy, I retained it merely long enough to note the title and general character. The next time I entered a book-shop I expended ten cents for this specimen of juvenile literature--"the best-selling book in Seville," if the clerk's word may be taken--and have it before me as I write. On the cover is stamped a picture of two graceful señoritas, perusing, apparently, this very work, "The Book of the Enamored and the Secretary of Lovers," and throughout the two hundred pages are scattered cheap cuts, never indecent, but suggesting violent ardors of passion--embracings, kissings, gazings, pleadings, with hearts, arrows, torches, and other ancient and honorable heraldry of Cupid. The title-page announces that this is a fifth edition of ten thousand copies. [Illustration: THE DIVINE SHEPHERD] The opening section is on "Love and Beauty," enumerating, by the way, the "thirty points" essential to a perfect woman. "Three things white--skin, teeth, and hands. Three black--eyes, eyebrows, and eyelashes. Three rosy--lips, cheeks, and nails." But warning is duly given that even the thirty points of beauty do not make up a sum total of perfection without the mystic, all-harmonizing quality of charm. Next in order are the several sets of directions for winning the affections of maid, wife, and widow, with a collection of edifying sentiments from various saints and wits concerning widows. Descriptions of wedding festivities follow, with a glowing dissertation on kisses, "the banquet-cups of love." After this stands a Castilian translation of an impassioned Arab love-song with the burden, _Todo es amor_. Maxims on love, culled chiefly from French authorities, are succeeded by an eighteenth-century love-catechism:-- "_Question._ Art thou a lover? _Answer._ Yes, by the grace of Cupid. _Question._ What is a lover? _Answer._ A lover is one who, having made true and faithful declaration of his passion, seeks the means of gaining the love of her whom he adores." This is the first lesson. The second treats of the five signs of love, the third of love's duties, the fourth gives the orison of lovers--a startling adaptation of the Lord's Prayer--and their creed: "I believe in Cupid, absolute Lord of Love, who gives to lovers all their joys, and in her whom I love most, for most lovable is she, on whom I think without ceasing, and for whom I would sacrifice gladly my honor and my life." There is nothing here, it will be noticed, of the Englishman's proud exception:-- "I could not love thee, Dear, so much, Loved I not honor more." Love has its own beatitudes, too. "Blessed are they who love sincerely. Blessed are they of merry mood. Blessed are lovers who have patience. Blessed are the rich, for love delights to spend." A "Divination of Dreams," "copied from an ancient manuscript found in the ruins of the convent of San Prudencio, in Clavijo," that famous battle-ground where St. James first trampled the Moors, next engages attention. To dream of a fan is sign of a coming flirtation; of a banner, success in war; of a woman's singing, sorrow and loss; of stars, fair fortune in love; of fire, good luck at cards; of a black cat, trouble from the mother-in-law; of closed eyes, your child in mortal peril; of birds, joy and sweet content; of a ghost, ill health; of scissors, a lover's quarrel; of wine, a cheating Frenchman; of shoes, long journeys; of angels, good tidings from far away. Some of these omens are a surprise to the uninitiated reader. It is bad luck to behold in a dream images of Christ and the Virgin. A church, seen from within, denotes alms; from without, death. To dream of the altar arrayed for high mass betokens grave misfortune. Other omens are significant of Spanish discontents. To dream of a Jesuit brings miseries and betrayals; of a military officer, tyranny and brutality; of a king, danger; of a republic, "abundance, happiness, honors, and work well recompensed." Often these divinations run into rhyme, as:-- "Dream of God at midnight dim, And by day you'll follow Him." The next section of this Complete Guide is given over to snatches of love-song, which Andalusian children know by heart. These five are fairly representative:-- "Mine is a lover well worth the loving. Under my balcony he cries: 'You have maddened me with your grace of moving, And the beaming of your soft black eyes.'" "Though thou go to the highest heaven, And God's hand draw thee near, The saints will not love thee half so well As I have loved thee here." "If I had a blossom rare, I would twine it in thy hair, Though God should stoop and ask for it To make His heaven more exquisite." "Such love for thee, sent forth from me, Bears on such iron gate That I, used so, no longer know Whether I love or hate." "The learnéd are not wise, The saints are not in bliss; They have not looked into your eyes, Nor felt your burning kiss." Then comes a "New Dictionary of Love," defining some two hundred doubtful terms in Cupid's lexicon, as _forever_, _no_, _unselfish_. After this we are treated to the language of fan flirtation, of handkerchief flirtation, of flower flirtation, and "the clock of Flora," by which lovers easily make appointments,--one, two, three, being numbered in rose, pink, tulip, and so on. A cut of a youth toiling at a manuscript-laden desk introduces some fifty pages of model love-letters, which seem, to the casual eye, to cover all contingencies. A selection of verses used for adding a grace to birthday and saint-day gifts comes after, and this all-sufficient compendium concludes with a "Lovers' Horoscope." A single illustration of the sort of reading that Spanish girls find in their way should not, of course, be pressed too far, and yet any one who had seen the pretty group of heads clustered for hours over these very pages on that shaded balcony would not deny the book significance. A taste for the best reading is not cultivated in Spanish girls, even where the treasures of that great Castilian literature are accessible to them. Convent education knows nothing of Calderon. As for books especially adapted to girlhood, we have just examined a sample. Love and religion are the only subjects with which a señorita is expected to concern herself, and the life of the convent is often a second choice. Even when a Spanish girl wins her crown of wifehood and motherhood, her ignorance and poverty of thought tell heavily against the most essential interests of family life. The Spanish bride is often a child in years. Pacheco's direction for painting the Immaculate Conception ran, "Our Lady is to be pictured in the flower of her age, from twelve to thirteen." This was three centuries ago, but Spain changes slowly. The girl of to-day, nevertheless, marries later than her mother married. I remember one weary woman of forty with eighteen children in their graves and the three who were living physical and mental weaklings. She told us of a friend who married at fourteen and used to leave her household affairs in confusion while she stole away to a corner to play with her dolls. Her husband, a grave lawyer in middle life, would come home to dinner and find his helpmeet romping with the other children in the _plaza_. The Spanish girl is every whit as fascinating as her musical, cloaked gallant confides to her iron-grated lattice. Indeed, these amorous serenades hardly do her justice, blending as she does French animation with Italian fervor. In Andalusia she dances with a grace that makes every other use of life seem vain. And when she bargains, there is nothing sordid about it. Her haggling is a social condescension that at once puts the black-eyed young salesman at her mercy. "But the fan seems to me the least bit dear, señor." He shrugs his shoulders and flings out his arm in protest. "Ah, señorita! You see not how beautiful the work is. I am giving it away at six _pesetas_." She lifts her eyebrows half incredulously, all bewitchingly. "At five _pesetas_, señor." He runs his hand through his black hair in chivalrous distress. "But the peerless work, señorita! And this other, too! I sacrifice it at four _pesetas_." She touches both fans lightly. "You will let us have the two at seven _pesetas_, señor?" Her eyes dance over his confusion. He catches the gleam, laughs back, throws up his hands. "_Bueno_, señorita. At what you please." It takes a Spaniard to depict a throng of Spanish ladies,--"fiery carnations or starry jasmine in their hair, cheeks like blush roses, eyes black or blue, with lashes quivering like butterflies; cherry lips, a glance as fickle as the light nod of a flower in the wind, and smiles that reveal teeth like pearls; the all-pervading fan with its wordless telegraphy in a thousand colors." In such a throng one sees not only the typical "eyes of midnight," but those "emerald eyes" which Cervantes knew, and veritable pansy-colored eyes dancing with more than pansy mischief. But the voices! In curious contrast to the tones of Spanish men, soft, coaxing, caressing, the voices of the women are too often high and harsh, suggesting, in moments of excitement, the scream of the Andalusian parrot. "O Jesus, what a fetching hat! The feather, the feather, see, see, see, _see_ the feather! Mary Most Pure, but it must have cost four or five _pesetas_! Ah, my God, don't I wish it were mine!" The speaker who gets the lead in a chattering knot of Spanish women is a prodigy not only of volubility, but of general muscular action. She keeps time to her shrill music with hands, fan, elbows, shoulders, eyebrows, knees. She dashes her sentences with inarticulate whirs and whistles, and countless pious interjections: _Gracias á Dios! Santa Maria! O Dios mio!_ The others, out-screamed and out-gesticulated, clutch at her, shriek at her, fly at her, and still, by some mysterious genius, maintain courtesy, grace, and dignity through it all. Yet it is true that the vulgar-rich variety is especially obnoxious among Spaniards. An overdressed Spanish woman is frightfully overdressed, her voice is maddening, her gusts of mirth and anger are painfully uncontrolled. This, however, is the exception, and refinement the rule. The legendary Spanish lady is forever sitting at a barred window, or leaning from a balcony, coquetting with a fan and dropping arch responses to the "caramel phrases" of her guitar-tinkling cavalier. "You're always saying you'd die for me. I doubt it nevertheless; But prove it true by dying, And then I'll answer yes." For, loving as they are, Spanish sweethearts take naturally to teasing. "When he calls me his Butterfly, I call him my Elephant. Then his eyes are like black fire, for he is ashamed to be so big, but in a twinkling I can make him smile again." The scorn of these dainty creatures for the graces of the ruling sex is not altogether affected. I shall not forget the expression with which a Sevillian belle, an exquisite dancer, watched her _novio_ as, red and perspiring, he flung his stout legs valiantly through the mazes of the _jota_. "Men are uglier than ever when they are dancing, aren't they?" she remarked to me with all the serenity in the world. And a bewitching maiden in Madrid, as I passed some favorable comment upon the photographs of her two brothers, gave a deprecatory shrug. "Handsome? _Ca!_" (Which is _no_ many times intensified.) "But they are not so ugly, either,--_for men_." The style of compliment addressed by _caballeros_ to señoritas is not like "the quality of mercy," but very much strained indeed. "Your eyes are two runaway stars, that would rather shine in your face than in heaven, but your heart is harder than the columns of Solomon's temple. Your father was a confectioner and rubbed your lips with honey-cakes." Little Consuelo, or Lagrimas, or Milagros, or Dolores, or Peligros laughs it off, "Ah, now you are throwing flowers." The _coplas_ of the wooer below the balcony are usually sentimental. "By night I go to the patio, And my tears in the fountain fall, To think that I love you so much, And you love me not at all." "Sweetheart, little Sweetheart! Love, my Love! I can't see thy eyes For the lashes above. Eyes black as midnight, Lashes black as grief! O, my heart is thirsty As a summer leaf." "If I could but be buried In the dimple of your chin, I would wish, Dear, that dying Might at once begin." "If thou wilt be a white dove, I will be a blue. We'll put our bills together And coo, coo, coo." Sometimes the sentiment is relieved by a realistic touch. "Very anxious is the flea, Caught between finger and thumb. More anxious I, on watch for thee, Lest thou shouldst not come." And occasionally the lover, flouted overmuch, retorts in kind. "Don't blame me that eyes are wet, For I only pay my debt. I've taught you to cry and fret, But first you taught me to forget." "I'll not have you, Little Torment, I don't want you, Little Witch. Let your mother light four candles And stand you in a niche." The average Spaniard is well satisfied with his señora as she is. He did her extravagant homage as a suitor, he treats her with kindly indulgence as a husband, but he expects of her a life utterly bounded by the _casa_. "What is a woman?" we heard one say. "A bottle of wine." And those few words tell the story why, with all their charm, home-love, and piety, the Spanish women have not availed to keep the social life of the Peninsula sound and sweet. "But to admire them as our gallants do, 'Oh, what an eye she hath! Oh, dainty hand! Rare foot and leg!' and leave the mind respectless, This is a plague that in both men and women Makes such pollution of our earthly being." The life of the convent is attractive to girls of mystic temperament, like the _Maria_ of Valdés, but many of these lively daughters of the sun regard it with frank disfavor. One of the songs found in the mouths of little girls all over the Peninsula is amusingly expressive of the childish aversion to so dull a destiny. "I wanted to be married To a sprightly barber-lad, But my parents wished to put me In the convent dim and sad. "One afternoon of summer They walked me out in state, And as we turned a corner, I saw the convent gate. "Out poured all the solemn nuns In black from toe to chin, Each with a lighted candle, And made me enter in. "The file was like a funeral; The door shut out the day; They sat me on a marble stool And cut my hair away. "The pendants from my ears they took, And the ring I loved to wear, But the hardest loss of all to brook Was my mat of raven hair. "If I run out to the garden And pluck the roses red, I have to kneel in church until Twice twenty prayers are said. "If I steal up to the tower And clang the convent bell, The holy Abbess utters words I do not choose to tell. "My parents, O my parents, Unkindly have you done, For I was never meant to be A dismal little nun." I came but slightly in contact with Spanish nuns. Among the figures that stand out clear in memory are a kindly old sister, at Seville, in the _Hospital de la Caridad_, who paused midway in her exhibition of the famous Murillos there to wipe her eyes and grieve that we were Protestants, and an austere, beautiful woman in _La Cuna_, or Foundling Asylum of Seville, who caressed a crying baby with the passionate tenderness of motherhood denied. The merriest Spanish _hermana_ of our acquaintance we encountered on the French side of the Pyrenees. At Anglet, halfway between Biarritz and Bayonne, is the Convent of the Bernardines, Silent Sisters. The visitor sees them only from a distance, robed in white flannel, with large white crosses gleaming on the back of their hooded capes. These, too, were originally white, and the hoods so deep that not even the profile of the features could be seen; but the French Government, disturbed by the excessive death-rate in this order, recently had the audacity to interfere and give summary orders that the hoods be cut away, so that the healthful sunshine might visit those pale faces. The mandate was obeyed, but, perhaps in sign of mournful protest, the new hoods and capes are black as night. These women Trappists may recite their prayers aloud, as they work in field or garden, or over their embroidery frames, but they speak for human hearing only once a year, when their closest family friends may visit them and listen through a grating to what their disused voices may yet be able to utter. From all other contact with the world they are shielded by an outpost guard of a few of the Servants of Mary, an industrious, self-supporting sisterhood, whose own convent, half a mile away, is a refuge for unwedded mothers and a home for unfathered children. Hither the pitying sisters brought, a few days before our visit, a wild-eyed girl whom they had found lying on one of the sea rocks, waiting for the rising tide to cover her and her shame together. The chief treasure of this nunnery, one regrets to add, is the polished skull of Mary Magdalene. That one of the Servants of Mary who showed us over the Trappist convent was a bright-eyed Spanish dame of many winters, as natural a chatterbox as ever gossiped with the neighbors in the sun. Her glee in this little opportunity for conversation was enough to wring the heart of any lover of old ladies. She walked as slowly as possible and detained us on every conceivable pretext, reaching up on her rheumatic tiptoes to pluck us red and white camellias, and pointing out, with a lingering garrulity, the hardness of the cots in the bare, cold little cells, the narrowness of the benches in the austere chapel, and, in the cheerless dining room, the floor of deep sand, in which the Bernardines kneel throughout their Friday dinner of bread and water. Longest of all, she kept us in the cemetery, all spick and span, with close-set rows of nameless graves, each with a cross shaped upon it in white seashells. The dear old soul, in her coarse blue gown, with tidy white kerchief and neatly darned black hood and veil, showed us the grave of her own sister, adding, proudly, that her four remaining sisters were all cloistered in various convents of Spain. "All six of us nuns," she said, "but my brother--no! He has the dowries of us all and lives the life of the world. Just think! I have two nephews in Toledo. I have never seen them. My sister's grave is pretty, is it not? They let me put flowers there. Oh, there are many families in Spain like ours, where all the daughters are put into convents. Spain is a very religious country. The sons? Not so often. Sometimes, when there is a conscription, many young men become priests to escape military service but it is the women who are most devout in Spain." And after the rustic gate was shut on the sleeping-place of the Bernardines, scarcely more silent and more dead beneath the sod than above it, she still detained us with whispered hints of distinguished Spanish ladies among those ghostly, far-off figures that, pitchfork or pruning knife in hand, would fall instantly upon their knees at the ringing of the frequent bell for prayers. Spanish ladies, too, had given this French convent many of its most costly treasures. We said good-by to our guide near an elaborate shrine of the Madonna, which a bereaved Spanish mother had erected with the graven request that the nuns pray for the soul of her beloved dead. "Even we Servants of Mary are not allowed to talk much here," said in parting this most sociable of saints, clinging to us with a toil-roughened, brown old hand. "It is a holy life, but quiet--very quiet. I have been here forty-four years this winter. My name is Sister Solitude." The nun whom I knew best was an exquisite little sister just back from Manila. During several months I went to her, in a Paris convent, twice or three times a week, for Spanish lessons. The reception room in which I used to await her coming shone not as with soap and water, but as with the very essence of purity. The whiteness of the long, fine curtains had something celestial about it. The only book in sight, a bundle of well-worn leaves bound in crimson plush and placed with precision in the centre of the gleaming mahogany table, was a volume of classic French sermons,--the first two being on Demons, and the next on Penance. Further than this I never read; for very punctually the slight figure, in violet skirt and bodice, with a white cross embroidered upon the breast, swept softly down the hall. A heavy purple cord and a large-beaded rosary depended from the waist. In conversation she often raised her hand to press her ring, sign of her sacred espousals, to her lips. Her type of face I often afterward saw in Spain, but never again so perfect. Her complexion was the richest southern brown, the eyes brightening in excitement to vivid, flashing black. The eyebrows, luxuriant even to heaviness, were nevertheless delicately outlined, and the straight line of the white band emphasized their graceful arch. The nose was massive for a woman's face, and there was a slight shading of hair upon the upper lip. The mouth and chin, though so daintily moulded, were strong. Not the meek, religious droop of the eyelids could mask the fire, vigor, vitality, intensity, that lay stored like so much electricity behind the tranquil convent look. We would go for the lesson to a severe little chamber, whose only ornament was a crucifix of olive wood fastened against the wall. Then how those velvet eyes would glow and sparkle in the eagerness of rushing speech! The little sister loved to tell of her Manila experience, almost a welcome break, I fancied, in the monotonous peace of cloister life. All that Sunday morning, when the battle was on, the nuns maintained their customary services, hearing above their prayers and chants and the solemn diapason of the organ, the boom, boom, boom of our wicked American cannon. For, according to this naive historian, Catholic Spain, best beloved of Our Lady among the nations of the earth, had labored long in the Philippines to Christianize the heathen, when suddenly, in the midst of those pious labors with which she was too preoccupied to think of fitting out men-of-war and drilling gunners, a pirate fleet bore down upon her and overthrew at once the Spanish banner and the Holy Cross. Tears sparkled through flame as the _hermanita_ told of her beautiful convent home, now half demolished. The sisters did not abandon it until six weeks after the battle, but as the nunnery stood outside the city walls, their superior judged it no safe abode for Spanish ladies, and ordered them away. The French consul arranged for their transport to Hongkong on a dirty little vessel, where they had to stay on deck, the twenty-seven of them, during their week's voyage, suffering from lack of proper shelter and especially from thirst, the water supply running short the second day out. But all this was joy of martyrdom. "Is not Hongkong a very strange city?" I asked. "Did it seem to you more like Manila than like Paris and Madrid?" The little sister's voice was touched with prompt rebuke. "You speak after the fashion of the world. All cities look alike to us. Ours is the life of the convent. It matters nothing where the convent stands." Stimulated by reproof, I waxed impertinent. "Not even if it stands within range of the guns? Now, truly, truly, were you not the least bit frightened that morning of the battle?" The sunny southern smile was a fleeting one, and left a reminiscent shadow in the eyes. "Frightened? Oh, no! There were no guns between us and Paradise. From early dawn we heard the firing, and hour after hour we knelt before the altar and prayed to the Mother of God to comfort the souls of the brave men who were dying for _la patria_; but we were not frightened." There were strange jostlings of ideas in that cloistered cell, especially when the dusk had stolen in between our bending faces and the Spanish page. Once we talked of suicide. That morning it had been a wealthy young Parisian who had paid its daily tribute to the Seine. "What a horror!" gasped the little sister, clasping her slender hands against her breast. "It is a mortal sin. And how foolish! For if life is hard to bear, surely perdition is harder." "It does not seem to me so strange in case of the poor," I responded, waiving theology. "But a rich man, though his own happiness fails, has still the power of making others happy." "Ah, but I understand!" cried Little Manila, her eyes like stars in the dimness. "The devil does not see truth as the blessed spirits do, but sees falsehoods even as the world. And so in his blindness he believes the soul of a rich man more precious than the souls of the poor, and tempts the rich man more than others. Yet when the devil has that soul, will he find it made of gold?" [Illustration: MADRID ROYAL PALACE] One chilly November afternoon, gray with a fog that had utterly swallowed the Eiffel Tower above its first huge uprights, which straddled disconsolately like legs forsaken of their giant, she explained in a sudden rush of words why Spain had been worsted in the war with America. "Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth. As with persons, so with nations. Those that are not of His fold He gives over to their fill of vainglory and greed and power, but the Catholic nations He cleanses again and again in the bitter waters of defeat--ah, in fire and blood! Yet the end is not yet. The rod of His correction is upon Spain at this hour, and the Faithful are glad in the very heart of sorrow, for even so shall her sins be purged away, even so shall her coldness be quickened, even so shall she be made ready for her everlasting recompense." "And the poor Protestant nations?" I asked, between a smile and a sigh. The little sister smiled back, but the Catholic eyes, for all their courtly graciousness, were implacable. She was of a titled family and had passed a petted childhood in Madrid. There she had been taken, on her seventh birthday, to a _corrida de toros_, but remembered it unpleasantly, not because of the torture inflicted on the horses and bulls, but because she had been frightened by the great beasts, with their tossing horns and furious bellowing. Horns always made her think of the devil, she said. From her babyhood she had been afraid of horns. One day a mischievous impulse led me to inquire, in connection with a chat about the Escorial, "And how do you like Philip II?" The black eyes shot one ray of sympathetic merriment, but the Spaniard and the nun were on their guard. "He was a very good Catholic," she replied demurely. "So was _Isabel la Católica_," I responded. "But don't you think she may have been a trifle more agreeable?" "Perhaps she was a little more _simpática_," admitted the _hermanita_, but that was her utmost concession. She would not even allow that Philip had a sorry end. "If his body groaned, his soul was communing with the Blessed Saints and paid no heed." At the corner of the street which led under the great garden wall to the heavily barred gate of the convent was a flower-stand. The shrewd, swift-tongued Madame in charge well knew the look of the unwary, and usually succeeded in selling me a cluster of drooping blossoms at twice the value of the fresh, throwing in an extra leaf or stem at the close of the bargain with an air of prodigal benevolence. The handful of flowers would be smilingly accepted by the little sister, but instantly laid aside nor favored with glance or touch until the close of the visit, when they would be lifted again with a winsome word of acknowledgment and carried away, probably to spend their sweetness at the marble feet of the Virgin. In vain I tried to coax from this scorner of God's earth some sign of pleasure in the flowers themselves. "Don't you care for tea-roses?" "_Ah, el mundo pasa._ But their color is exquisite." Yet her eyes did not turn to the poor posy for the two hours following. "This mignonette has only the grace of sweetness." "It is a delicate scent, but it will not last. _El mundo pasa._" She held the sprays at arm's length for a moment, and then laid them down on a mantel at the farther end of the room. "I am sorry these violets are not fresher." "But no! The touch of Time has not yet found them. Still, it is only a question of to-morrow. _El mundo pasa._" "Yes, the world passes. But is it not good while it lasts?" "The world good! No, no, and a thousand times no. Behold it now at the end of the nineteenth century,--wars and sorrows and bitter discontents, evil deeds and evil passions everywhere. Do you see the peace of Christ in the faces on the Paris streets? The blossoms of this earth, the pleasures of this world, the affections of this life, all have the taste of death. But here in God's own garden we live even now His everlasting life." "You are always glad of your choice? You never miss the friends of your childhood?" "Glad, glad, glad. Glad of my choice. Glad to see no more the faces of father and mother. And for them, too, it is great joy. For Catholic parents it is supreme delight to give up their children to the Holy Church. The ways of the world are full of slippery places, but when they leave us here, they know that our feet are set on the very threshold of heaven." Sometimes the slight form shivered in the violet habit, and the dark foreign face looked out with touching weariness from its frame of soft white folds. "You are cold? You are tired? Will you take my cloak? Were the children troublesome to-day?" It was always the same answer: "_No importa. No importa._ It matters not. Our life is not the life of flesh and blood." And indeed, as I saw her in the Christmas service among the other Spanish sisters, those lovely figures in white and violet making obeisance before the altar until their veiled foreheads almost touched the pavement, bowing and rising again with the music like a field of lilies swaying in the breeze, I felt that she was already a being of another world, before she had known this. Over her had been chanted the prayers for the dead. The strange ceremony of taking the veil had been her burial rite. The convent seemed a ghost land between earth and heaven. My _hermanita_ belonged to one of the teaching orders, and despite the strange blanks in her knowledge, for secular lore had been, so far as possible, excluded from her education, she was representative of the finer and more intelligent class of Spanish nuns. In Granada I heard of the nuns chiefly as the makers of those delicious _dulces_, sugared fruits, which were indispensable to a child's saint-day, and there I was taught the scoffing epitaph:-- "Here lies Sister Claribel, Who made sweetmeats very well, And passed her life in pious follies, Such as dressing waxen dollies." [Illustration: THE ROYAL FAMILY] To the spinster outside the nunnery Spain has little to offer. Small heed is paid to her except by St. Elias, who, on one day of Holy Week, walks about all Seville with a pen in his hand, peering up at the balconies and making note of the old maids. Since Andalusia expresses the theory of counterparts by saying, "Every one has somewhere in the world his half orange," the spinster can hardly hope for a well-rounded life. Careers are not open to her. There are "advanced women" in Spain, the most eminent being Emelia Pardo Bazan, novelist, lecturer, editor, who advocates for women equal educational and political privileges with men, but who has not yet succeeded in opening the doors. The voice of Spanish women, nevertheless, is sometimes heard by Spanish statesmen, as when delegation after delegation of señoras who had relatives held as prisoners by the Filipinos invaded the senate-house with petitions until they could no longer be ignored. A more thorough and liberal education for Spanish women is the pressing need to-day. There is, of course, great lack of primary schooling. A girl in her late teens, wearing the prettiest of embroidered aprons and with the reddest of roses in her hair, once appealed to me in Toledo for help. She had been sent from a confectioner's to deliver a tray of wheaten rolls at a given address, and she could read neither the names of streets nor the numbers of houses. But the higher education will carry the lower with it. Spain is degenerate in this regard. The Moors used to have at Cordova an academy for girls, where science, mathematics, and history were taught. Schools for Spanish girls at present impart little more than reading and writing, needle-work, the catechism, the four rules of arithmetic, and some slight notion of geography. French and music, recognized accomplishments, are learned by daughters of the privileged class from their governesses or in the convents. Missionary work in Spain has largely concerned itself with the educational question, and Mrs. Gulick's project for the establishment of a woman's college in Madrid, a college without distinction of creed, is the fruit of long experience. Little by little she has proven the intellectual ability of Spanish girls. She established the International Institute at San Sebastian, secured State examination for her _niñas_ and State recognition of their eminent success, and even won for a few of them admission to the University of Madrid, where they maintained the highest rank throughout the course. All that Spanish girls need is opportunity. But if the señoritas are so charming now, with their roses and their graces and their fans, why not leave them as they are, a page of mediæval poetry in this strenuous modern world? If only they were dolls outright and did not suffer so! When life goes hard with these high-spirited, incapable creatures, it goes terribly hard. I can see yet the tears scorch in the proud eyes of three undowered sisters, slaving at their one art of embroidery from early till late for the miserable pittance that it brought them. "We shall rest when we are dead," said the youngest. The absolute lack of future for these brave, sensitive girls, well-born, well-bred, naturally as keen as the keenest, but more ignorant, in matters of common education, than the children of our lowest grammar grade, is heart-breaking. If such girls were stupid, shallow, coarse, it would be easier; but the Spanish type is finely strung. Once I saw an impulsive beauty fly into that gust of angry passion which Spaniards term the _rabia española_. A clumsy, well-intentioned young Austrian had said a teasing word, and in the fraction of a second the girl, overwrought with secret toils and anxieties, was in a tempest of tears; but the wrath that blazed across them burned the offender crimson. The poor fellow sent for his case of choice Asturian cider, cooling in the balcony, read the evening news aloud and discoursed on the value of self-control, but not even these tactful attentions could undo, for that evening at least, the work of his blundering jest. The girl flashed away to her chamber, her handkerchief bitten through and through, and the quick fierce sound of her sobs came to me across the hall deep into the night. Wandering over Spain I found everywhere these winning, vivid, helpless girls, versed in needlework and social graces, but knowing next to nothing of history, literature, science, all that pertains to intellectual culture. Some were hungry to learn. More did not dream of the world of thought as a possible world for them. Among these it was delightful to meet, scattered like precious seed throughout the Peninsula, the graduates of the International Institute. So far as a stranger could see, education had enhanced in them the Spanish radiance and charm, while arming these with wisdom, power, and resource. XXII ACROSS THE BASQUE PROVINCES "The Oak Tree of Guernica Within its foliage green Embraces the bright honor Of all the Basque demesne. For this we count thee holy, Our ancient seal and sign; The fibres of our freedom Are interlaced with thine. "Castile's most haughty tyrants Beneath thy solemn shade Have sworn to keep the charter Our fearless fathers made; For noble on our mountains Is he who yokes the ox, And equal to a monarch The shepherd of the flocks." --_National Song of the Basques._ It did not seem to me historically respectful to take leave of Spain without having made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Santiago. A dauntless friend crossed the sea to bear me company. Hygienic pilgrim that she is, she came equipped not with cockle shells and sandal shoon, but with sleeping bags, coffee, and cereals. Many a morning, in traversing those northern provinces, where the scenery was better than the breakfast, we blessed her boxes of "grape nuts," and many a night, doomed to penitential beds, we were thankful to intrench ourselves against the stings and arrows of outrageous insects in those spacious linen bags, that gather close about the neck, or, when dangers thicken, above the head, leaving only a loophole for the breath. Our point of departure was that city of nature's fancy-work, San Sebastian. Then, in the early half of July, it was all alive with expectancy, looking every day for the coming of the Court. It is reputed to be the cleanest town of the Peninsula, and is, in truth, as bright as a wave-washed pebble. Nevertheless, it is a favorite waltz hall of the fleas, which shamelessly obtrude themselves even into conversation. The chief summer industry of San Sebastian is sea-bathing. The soldiers begin it at six o'clock in the morning, marching by regiments down to the Concha, clearing for action, and striking out into the gentle surf, all in simultaneous obedience to successive words of command. Some two hours later teams of oxen draw scores of jaunty bathing cars down near the white lip of this opalescent shell of water, and there the long day through all ages, sizes, and ranks of humanity sport in the curling foam or swim far out into the sparkling bay. San Sebastian is the capital of Guipúzcoa, one of the three Basque provinces. These lie among the Cantabrian mountains, and are delightfully picturesque with wheat-growing valleys and well-wooded heights. As the train wandered on, in its pensive Spanish fashion, we found ourselves now in Scotland, in a beautiful waste of heather and gorse, now amid the English ivy and hawthorn, hearing the song of the English robin, and now in our own New England, with the hilly reaches of apple orchards and the fields upon fields of tasselled Indian maize. The Basques are a thrifty folk, and have cultivated their scant acres to the utmost. The valleys are planted with corn, the lower hills are ridged and terraced for a variety of crops. Above are walnuts and chestnuts, and the flintiest summits serve for pasturage. It was curious to see men at work on those steep slopes that had been scooped out into a succession of narrow shelves, and more strange yet to catch glimpses of peasants ploughing the very mountain top, picturesque figures against the sky. The reaping is of the cleanest. The harvest fields have a neat, scoured look, as if the women had been over them with scrubbing brushes. Yet this utilitarian soil admits of oaks and beeches, ferns and clover, morning glories, dandelions, pimpernel, and daisies. All that sunny morning the train swung us blithely on from one charm of the eyes to another--from a ruined watch-tower, where red-handed Carlists had crouched, to a bright-kerchiefed maiden singing amid her beehives; from a range of abrupt peaks, cleft by deep gorges, to sycamore-shaded byways and poplar-bordered streams; from a village graveyard, the pathetic little parallelogram enclosed in high gray walls and dim with cypress shadows, to a tumbling, madcap torrent spanned by a time-gnawed Roman arch. Shooting the heart of some black hill, the train would run out on a mere ledge above a valley hamlet, and from pure inquisitiveness, apparently, ramble all around the circle, peering down from every point of view on the cluster of great, patriarchal houses, sometimes of timber and plaster, more often of stone, where whole clans dwell together under the same red-tiled roof. Queer old houses these, occasionally topped with blue chimneys, and now and then with a fantastic coat of arms sculptured over the door, or a fresco of saints and devils blazoned all across the front. Sometimes freshly whitewashed, these Basque houses have more often a weather-worn, dingy look, but, however black the timbers, lines of clean linen flutter airily from roofs and balconies. They are a decent, self-respecting, prosperous people, these Basque mountaineers, of whose history my companion told me stirring tales. They are supposed, though not without dispute, to be the oldest race in Europe, descendants of those original Iberians whom the westward-trooping Aryans drove into the fastnesses of the Pyrenees. They have their own language, of Asiatic type. They themselves believe that it was spoken in the Garden of Eden. There are some twenty-five dialects of the _Vascuense_, and it is so difficult for foreigners that even George Borrow spoke it "with considerable hesitation," and one exhausted student, abandoning the struggle, declared that the words were all "written Solomon and pronounced Nebuchadnezzar." The Basques attribute their hardy virtues to the crabbedness of their speech, telling how the devil, after slaving over their vocabulary for seven years, had succeeded in learning only three words, and threw up his lesson in a pet, so that to this day he remains unable to meddle with their peasant piety. What little literature there is in the Basque language is naturally of the popular cast--hero songs, dancing songs, dirges, hymns, and folk-lore. The Basques are noted for their passionate love of liberty. The sturdy peasant is lord of his own rugged farm, and insists on tilling it in his own primitive way, breaking the soil with rude mattock more often than with plough. An English engineer, laying a railroad through Alava, tried his best to make his men abandon their slow, laborious method of carrying the earth in baskets on their heads. He finally had all the baskets removed by night, and wheelbarrows left in their places. But the unalterable Basques set the loaded wheelbarrows on their heads, and staggered about beneath these awkward burdens until, for very shame, he had to give them back their baskets. The peasant drives over the mountain roads in a ponderous ox-cart, with two clumsy disks of wood for wheels. The platform is wrought of rough-hewn beams, five or seven, the middle one running forward to serve as pole. All the structure, except the iron tires and nails, is of wood, and the solid wooden wheels, as the massive axle to which they are riveted turns over and over, make a most horrible squeaking. It is a sound dear to the peasantry, for they believe the oxen like it, and, moreover, that it frightens away the devil; but once upon a time a town of advanced views voted a fine of five dollars for any man who should bring this musical abomination within its limits. Thereupon a freeborn Basque rose with the dawn, selected his best carved oaken yoke, draped the red-stained sheepskin a trifle more carefully than usual above the patient eyes of his great smooth oxen, and took his way, "squeakity-squeak, squeakity-squeak," straight to the door of the _Ayuntamiento_, city hall, where he paid his twenty-five _pesetas_, and then devoted the rest of the day to driving all about the streets, squeaking out his money's worth. This is no servile temper, and it was not until our own generation that the dearly cherished liberties of the Basques were wrested away. [Illustration: THE MANZANARES] These warders of the Pyrenees, for the Basques of Navarre and those now known as French Basques must not be forgotten, did good service in helping the Visigoths beat back the northward-pressing Moors and the southward-pressing Franks; but when the Basque provinces of Spain were incorporated with Leon and Navarre, and later with Castile, the mountaineers stood stubbornly for their _fuéros_, or peculiar rights. My comrade's lecture had reached this point, when, finding ourselves at Amorebieta, in the Province of Vizcaya, or Biscay, we suddenly descended from the train, and handed our bags to an honest Basque porter, who deposited them on the floor of an open waiting room, in full reach of an honest Basque population. For ourselves, we turned our faces toward the centre of Vizcayan glory, the famous Tree of Guernica. We entered a rustic train, that seemed entirely undecided which way to go. The station agent blew a little tin horn, green meadows and wattled fences began to glide past the car windows, and the interrupted discourse was resumed. The lawmakers of Vizcaya were duly chosen by their fellow-nobles, for every Basque held the rank of _hidalgo_, or "son of somebody." The deputies met every two years in the village of Guernica, sitting on stone benches in the open air beneath the sacred oak, and there elected the _Señores de Vizcaya_. Even the kings of Spain were allowed no grander title, but had to come to the Tree of Guernica, at first in person, later by deputy, and there swear to observe the _fuéros_. To this green shadow came the peasant from his lonely farm-house, high on the mountainside, to answer before his peers to such charges as might be brought against him; for within the sanctuary of his home the law could lay no hand on him or his. It was the Carlist wars that changed all this. The _fuéros_, of which a list dating from 1342 is still extant, granted the Basque provinces a Republican Constitution that almost realized an ideal democracy, with immunity from taxes save for their own needs, and from military service beyond their own boundaries. But when the dynastic strife broke out, the Basques put on the white cap of Don Carlos and bore the brunt of the conflict. We had already passed through Vergara, where, in 1839, Espartero ended the first Carlist war by a treaty which compelled the Basques to lay down their arms. But the cost of this rebellion was paid in blood. Their political status was practically unaffected. At the close of the second Carlist war, in 1876, Alfonso XII signalized his victory by meting out to them a terrible punishment, abrogating the precious _fuéros_ that the Tree of Guernica had guarded for so many centuries. The Government imposed, moreover, its salt and tobacco monopolies, and made the Basques subject to military conscription. At every station we saw Spain's Vizcayan soldiers, red-capped and red-trousered, with blue-belted frock coats, under which beat hearts of doubtful loyalty. The son of Alfonso XII will have to reckon with the Basques, when the third Carlist war shall be declared, but it may be doubted whether the _fuéros_, which Don Carlos, of course, promises to restore, will ever come home to nest again in the Guernica Oak. My erudite fellow-vagabond was just pointing out the typical shape of the Basque head, with its broad forehead, long, narrowing face, curved nose, and pointed chin, when we reached Guernica. Such a sweet and tranquil village as it is, set in the beauty of the hills, with the dignity and pathos of its history pervading every hushed, old-fashioned street! The guide, whom two affable ladies, sharers of our carriage in the little picnic train, had taken pains to look up for us at the station, was not, we judged, a favorable specimen of the haughty Basque _hidalgo_. He was a dull, mumbling, slouchy lad, who sunk his voice to an awed whisper as we passed the escutcheon-carved palace of a count. But he led us by pleasant ways to the modern _Casa de Juntas_, or Senate House, where we were shown the assembly room, with its altar for mass, the library and other apartments, together with the portraits of the twenty-six first _Señores de Vizcaya_, from Lope the Pirate, who forced back the invading Galicians in 840, to the Infante Don Juan, under whom the Basque provinces were finally incorporated with Castile. Close by the _Casa de Juntas_, which stands in a dreamy bit of park as fresh and trim as an English cathedral close, rises a pillared portico. There, where brown-eyed little Basque girls, their brown braids blowing in the breeze, were dangling green figs above their laughing mouths, used to sit, on those seven stone seats, the grave Basque fathers, making laws, meting out judgment, and regulating all the affairs of this simple mountain republic. The portico, bearing as joint devices the lion and castle of Spain and the three wolves of Vizcaya, was formerly enveloped in the leafy shadow of the Sacred Tree; but what rises behind it now is only the gaunt stem of a patriarchal oak, a very Abraham of plants, all enclosed in glass, as if embalmed in its casket. Before the portico, however, grows a lusty scion, for the Tree of Guernica is of unbroken lineage, shoots being always cherished to succeed in case the centuried predecessor fail. In presence of this despoiled old trunk, majestic with memories, we felt an honest awe and longed to give it adequate salute. My comrade levelled her kodak and took front views, back views, and side views with such spendthrift enthusiasm that the custodian, deeply impressed, presented her with a dried leaf from the junior, cunningly pricked out so as to suggest the figure of the tree. The national song of the Basques, a matter of some dozen stanzas, written principally in "j's," "rr's," and "tz's," takes its theme, if one may trust the Castilian translation, from this symbolic oak. The historian wished to do nothing more in Guernica but sit and gaze forever on that spectral trunk, but the reminder that piety was a hardly less marked Basque characteristic than political independence, finally induced her to follow our guide to the church. A Basque church has its distinctive features, including a belfry, a lofty, plain interior, with galleries, and often a votive ship, gayly painted and fully rigged, suspended from the ceiling. The lad bore himself with simple-minded devotion, offering us on stubby finger tips the holy water and making due obeisance before each gilded shrine. But my attention was soon fascinated by a foot-square relief on a blue ground of Santiago-- "Good Saint James upon the milkwhite steed, Who leaves his bliss to fight for chosen Spain." I had hardly anticipated such a stalwart, vigorous, not to say violent saint, with his white horse galloping, his gold-sandalled feet gripping the great stirrups, his gold-fringed, crimson robe and azure mantle streaming on the wind, his terrible sword glittering high in air. This was clearly not a person to be trifled with, and I looked about for the historian to tell her that we must be pressing forward on our pilgrimage. But she had stolen out, every sympathetic Basque image of the sculptured doorway conspiring to keep a stony silence and conceal her flight, and had sped back to the Tree of Guernica, from whose contemplation she was torn away only by a fairy-tale of supper. Of the several Basque churches which we visited, including the bridal church of Louis XIV, far-famed San Juan de Luz, whose sides and west end are portioned off by three tiers of galleries, fairest in memory is the sixteenth-century church of Begoña in Bilbao. It abounds, as coast churches should, in suggestions of that mighty, mysterious neighbor, at once so cruel and so beneficent, the sea. Instead of votive ships, the walls are hung with paintings of vessels in scenes of appalling peril. One is scudding madly before a tropical gale; one has her rigging ragged by hurricane and her decks lashed with tempest; one, careened upon her side, lies at the mercy of the billows, which are sweeping over her and tumbling her crew like ninepins into the deep. But the presence of the pictures, bold dashes of the modern brush amid dim old paintings of saints and martyrs, tells that Our Lady of Begoña succored her sailors in distress, who, on their safe return, came hither to offer thanks for their preservation and to leave these mementos of their danger and her efficient aid. "Is your Virgin so very powerful?" we asked of a chorister boy while he drew the cords to part the curtains that screened the jewelled image throned in a recess above the high altar. "I should rather think she was," answered the little fellow in a glow. "Why, let me tell you! Robbers, the accursed ones, came here on a dark midnight to steal her precious stones. They entered by a window, those sons of wretched mothers, and put up a long ladder against the altar wall. The wickedest of them all, señoras, he climbed the ladder and raised his hand to take Our Lady's crown. And in that instant the great bells overhead began to ring, and all the bells of all Bilbao pealed with them, and the people waked and came running to the rescue of Our Lady, and the robbers were put to death." Our expression did not quite satisfy his boyish ardor, and he pointed convincingly toward a handsome silver plaque. "And this, too, witnesses Our Lady's power. It was given in memory of the cholera time, when people were dying like flies in all the towns about. But after Our Lady was carried in procession through the streets of Bilbao, not one died here, except a sinful man who would not turn his head to look upon her." "That is a painting of the procession, the large picture over there on the wall?" "No, no, señoras. That picture commemorates another of Our Lady's wonderful deeds. The floods were threatening the city, but Our Lady, with many censers and candles, was borne down to the river bank, and she ordered the water to go back, and it obeyed her, and all the town was saved." We retreated to the cloisters, from which one has a superb view of the valley of the Nervion, for Our Lady of Begoña dwells high upon a hilltop. Only the afternoon before we had been in serene Guernica, a strange contrast to this mining capital of Vizcaya, this bustling, noisy, iron-grimed Bilbao, in which the Basques take such delight. It is not a city to gratify the mere tourist, who expects the people of the lands through which he is pleased to pass to devote themselves to looking picturesque. But even Spain is something more than food for the kodak, and this sooty atmosphere of smelting works and factories, traffic and commerce, means life to Spanish lungs. It is little to my credit that I took more interest in the fact that Bilbao used to supply Shakespeare's cronies with rapiers, under the name of "bilboes," than in statistics regarding those millions of tons of ore which its iron mines are now annually exporting to Great Britain. The many English in Bilbao, miners and artisans, with the influence they shed around them, make the streets rougher and uglier than in purely Spanish towns. On the other hand, they bring a spirit of religious independence, so that it is not strange to find the Spanish Protestants of Bilbao a numerous and vigorous body, counting as a pronounced element in the community. From the idle peace of the Begoña cloisters, as from the old-time world, we looked long on this Spanish city of to-day, seething with manifold activities. We seemed to understand how, to the middle-class Spaniard, hemmed in by all this mediæval encumbrance of barracks, cathedrals, castles, and thrones, such cities as Bilbao and Barcelona, pulsing with industrial energy and enterprise, are "more beautiful than Beauty's self." The Basques, like the Catalans, take readily to business. They set their mountain cascades to turning mill-wheels, they canal their little Nervion till it can give passage to ships of four thousand tons burden, they paint the night with the flare of mighty furnaces. Every year they are building more wharves, more railroads, more electric tramways, and they are so prodigiously proud of their new iron bridge, with its flying ferry, which whisks passengers over from Portugalete to Las Arenas at the rate of two hundred a minute, that they stamp it on their characteristic jewelry. That cunning Eibar work of the Basque provinces displays again and again, on locket, bracelet, brooch, this incongruous design of the _Puente Vizcaya_ beaten on chased steel in gold. We looked regretfully out over those significant reaches of land which we would have liked to explore to the last hearthstone. The Basque provinces! We had not even set foot in Vitoria, the capital of Alava, where is preserved the grim old _machete_ by which Basque governors were sworn into office. "May my head be cut off with this knife," ran the oath, "if I do not defend the _fuéros_ of my fatherland." And we longed to attend one of the peasant festivals, to see the lads play _pelota_ and the lasses step Basque dances to the music of the village pipers, to hear the wild old marches and battle tunes that have roused the Roman and the Moor to arms. The mystery plays of the Basques were famous once, and although these naive dramas are now mainly confined to Christmas and Easter, who could say that we might not chance on some saint-day fragment? There was soon to take place, too, in one of the Vizcayan hamlets a "blessing of the fields," a processional harvest rite of pagan antiquity, formerly universal in Spain, but now confined to a few rural districts. We had a hundred reasons for lingering--but what are reasons? Pilgrims of St. James must put fresh peas in their shoes and be off for Compostela. [Illustration: SPANISH CEMETERY] XXIII IN OLD CASTILE "With three thousand men of Leon from the city Bernard goes, To protect the soil Hispanian from the spear of Frankish foes; From the city which is planted in the midst between the seas, To preserve the name and glory of old Pelayo's victories. "The peasant hears upon his field the trumpet of the knight,-- He quits his team for spear and shield and garniture of might; The shepherd hears it 'mid the mist,--he flingeth down his crook, And rushes from the mountain like a tempest-troubled brook." --LOCKHART: _Spanish Ballads_. The journey from Bilbao to Santander is a continuous glory of mountain views. The train runs saucily along under beetling crags, whence the gods of the hills may well look down in wonder and displeasure on this noisy invasion of their solitude. We almost saw those ancient majesties folding themselves grandly in mantles of purple shadow, but hardly less royal in bearing were the muffled figures of the lonely shepherds tending their flocks on the very summits. The modern Province of Santander is the renowned Montaña, the mountain lair which nourished the chivalry of Old Castile, and from which they made wild sallies to the south, troop after troop, generation after generation, until the Moorish standards were beaten back from the plains about Toledo to the Sierras of Andalusia. Its capital city, Santander, named from St. Andrew, was one of the four coast towns which rendered signal service to Fernando in the conquest of Seville. These towns, lying as they did over against the Cinque Ports of England, came into so frequent conflict with British mariners as to be made in the days of Edward III the subject of a special treaty. A summer resort, however, is a summer resort the world over, and we found the historic city, which has gracefully fitted itself to the curve of its beautiful bay, crowded with idle people, elaborately dressed, who sat long at the noonday breakfast, and longer yet at the evening dinner, and then longest of all on the benches in the park, where bands clashed and fireworks flared, until the very stars began to blink for sleepiness. Spaniards have a veritable passion for pyrotechnics, and our dreams until the dawn would be punctuated by the airy report of rockets, as if, so Galdós suggests, "the angels were cracking nuts in the sky." Every now and then in those soft warm nights there rose a shout of song from the street, and peeping down from the balcony, we would see half a dozen lads and lasses leaping along through the middle of the road, all abreast and hand in hand, in one of their boisterous peasant dances. There are no fewer dangers and sorrows for girls in Spain than in the other Latin lands. In the low-vaulted, mighty-pillared, deep-shadowed crypt under the old cathedral, a crypt that is the very haunt of religious mystery and dread, we came upon a penitent kneeling before the altar, a bit of written paper pinned to her back. In a stir of the chill air this fluttered to the ground, and as she, unconscious of its loss, bowed herself before another shrine, we picked up the paper with a half thought of restoring it; but seeing in the first glance that it was a rudely written prayer, entreating the Virgin's pity and pardon for her lover and herself, we let it fall again at Mary's feet. All manner of thank-offerings, waxen limbs, eyes, and ears, were hung in these candle-lit recesses, little spaces of gold amid the gloom. We had grown accustomed to such fragments of anatomy in the shop-windows, where even votive stomachs are displayed for sale. Although Santander is a dawdler's paradise, the residents of the city to whom we had letters were no holiday makers, but Spaniards of the earnest, thoughtful, liberal type, busy with large tasks of their own, but never too busy, being Spaniards, to show unstinted kindness to the strangers within their gates. Our brief stay did not admit of a tithe of the excursions they had in mind for us, but my comrade achieved a trip to Santillana del Mar, birthplace of the doughty Gil Blas. In the latest version of her adventures, she set forth from Santander under the bluest of skies, in company with the most bewitching of señoritas. They left the train at Torrelavega, where the shade of Garci Laso, one of King Pedro's victims, would doubtless have welcomed them, had not their attention been taken up with a picturesque coachman, who was standing dreamily on the station platform. This Adonis proved a complete paragon, who, as they took their romantic course over the hills, delightedly pointed out ivied tower, broken portcullis, and the like, as tidbits for the kodak. Santillana is the shrine of Santa Juliana, a Roman martyr, whose body is said to have been carried thither in the ninth century. Her devotees among the mountain wilds built her in this green valley, overhung by a rude old fortress, a precious church, a jewel of the early Romanesque, about whose walls a thriving community soon gathered. Santillana was throughout the Middle Ages the most important place between Burgos and Oviedo, and gave name to all that part of the Montaña. The successive Marquises of Santillana were then great personages in Spain, playing a leading part at Court. One of the proudest families of Old Castile, they claimed descent from the Cid, and cherished the memory of another heroic ancestor, who, in 1385, sacrificed his life to save his king. "'Your horse is faint, my King, my Lord! your gallant horse is sick,-- His limbs are torn, his breast is gored, on his eye the film is thick; Mount, mount on mine, O mount apace, I pray thee mount and fly! Or in my arms I'll lift your Grace,--their trampling hoofs are nigh! * * * * * "'Nay, never speak; my sires, Lord King, received their land from yours, And joyfully their blood shall spring, so be it thine secures; If I should fly, and thou, my King, be found among the dead, How could I stand 'mong gentlemen, such scorn on my gray head?' * * * * * "So spake the brave Montañez, Butrago's lord was he; And turned him to the coming host in steadfastness and glee; He flung himself among them, as they came down the hill,-- He died, God wot! but not before his sword had drunk its fill." The city of Santillana, whose lords once laid claim to the sovereignty of Santander, has shrunk to a forgotten village, and the neglected church is dropping into ruins; but the inhabitants have abated not a jot of that fierce local patriotism which blinds the provincial Spaniard to all defects of his birthplace and to all excellences of rival towns. A graybeard told the stranger ladies that Santillana was the oldest city in Spain and its cathedral the most beautiful. This latter statement they were almost ready to accept, so richly carven was the yellow stone and so harmonious the proportions of nave and aisle. When they arrived at this miniature Durham they found it closed and silent, with three little boys sleeping on the steps. Through the benevolence of the ever present Spanish loafers, the sacristan was sought out and a ragged escort formed for their progress from chapel to chapel, where rare old pictures and frescos glowed across the dusk. Best of all were the venerable cloisters, weed-grown and tumble-down, but lovely as a mediæval dream with mellow-tinted arch and column, and with capitals of marvellous device. This crumbling church still keeps a dazzling hoard of treasures. All the front of the high altar is wrought of solid silver, the reredos is a miracle of art, and the paintings of old masters that moulder here unseen would long since in any other land than Catholic Spain have been the spoils of gallery and museum. The cathedral stands just outside the town, whose narrow, crooked streets daunted the carriage; but these enthusiastic sightseers were all the better pleased to foot the flagging that many a clinking tread had worn and to touch on either side, with their extended hands, the fortresslike houses built of heavy stone and dimly emblazoned with fierce armorial bearings. These grim dwellings were gladdened by the grace of vine-clad balconies, where children frolicked and women crooned quaint melodies over their needlework. "Will no one tell me what she sings? Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-off things And battles long ago." The inn was merely the customary Spanish _venta_, rough and poor, the darkness of whose long, low room clouds of tobacco smoke from clumps of gambling muleteers were making blacker yet; but lemonade was served to the ladies in the open porch with a charm of cordial courtesy far beyond Delmonico's. As they quaffed this modest refreshment and watched the shifting groups about the _venta_, which seemed the centre of the social life, there suddenly appeared upon the scene a ghost from the modern world, an everyday gentleman in a straw hat, as citified and up to date as if he had that moment stepped out of a Madrid café. All the loungers within and without the _venta_ sprang to their feet, bared their heads, and bowed low to this anachronism with so profound a deference that the tourists began to wonder if the irrepressible Gil Blas had come alive again. Not he! This was the Marquis of Santillana, bearing under his arm instead of a sword a bundle of newspapers. The first Marquis of Santillana had been a famous warrior and troubadour. This latest "inheritor of old renown," seating himself in the midst of his thronging vassals, graciously proceeded, much like a University Extension lecturer, to read aloud, with simple explanations, the news of the day. Such is the final form of _noblesse oblige_ in the feudal valley of Santillana. We were tempted to hunt out other nooks and eyries in the mountains of Santander, to see something of the famous sardine fisheries, to drive along the many-storied coast all the way to Gijon, paying our respects in passing to a noble oak of Asturias, one of the three largest trees of Europe; but always the uplifted sword of St. James drove us on. If we would reach Compostela in season for the annual _fiesta de Santiago_, there was no time to lose. So, in default of a nearer railway connection, we started due south for Palencia. Our route ran at first through a land of hills, maize, and stone walls that might have been New England, except for the women scratching away in the hay-fields, and politely saluting the train with a flourish of their pitchforks. Then more and more the landscape became Spanish. Little stone hamlets dozed in ever shallower valleys, mule trains and solitary horsemen moved slowly down poplar-bordered highways, white as chalk; there was a slumbering peasant for every speck of shade. But while the men took their siestas, often sleeping where the drowsiness had befallen them, with arm thrown about the wooden plough or with head pillowed on the thrashing roller, there were always women at work--figures clad in the very colors of the harvest, red and gold and purple, binding sheaves, sweeping the fields with stout brush brooms, tending flocks and herds by the rivers, following stray sheep over the hills, with only a handkerchief at the most to protect their heads from the terrible noonday sun. As the afternoon wore on, we found ourselves in the melancholy reaches of brown Castilian plain, with the adobe towns, the miserable mud villages, open-air threshing floors, and arid, silent, Oriental look. [Illustration: TOLEDO] The only cloud in sight was that which rested for a moment on my comrade's face. She had so newly come from our clean and wholesome fatherland that certain features of the Spanish inns still shook her high serenity of soul, and she had suddenly discovered that Baedeker significantly characterized the Palencia hotel as "an indifferent Spanish house." In the discreet language of our excellent guidebook this was no less than a note of warning, a signal of alarm. But even Baedeker is fallible, and on arriving at the _Gran Hotel Continental_, we were met by all the Castilian dignity and grave kindliness of greeting, and led to rooms whose floors shone with oil and scrubbing, whose curtains, towels, and sheeting were white as mountain snow, and whose furnishings were resplendent with two dozen chairs upholstered in orange satin. We seated ourselves in rapture on one saffron throne after another, drank fresh milk from polished glasses, and slept, for this only night of all our Santiago pilgrimage, the sleep of the unbitten. A sweet-voiced _sereno_ intoning the hours set our dreams to music. The following morning we spent in the cathedral, which, though of plain exterior, except for the many-imaged "Door of the Bishop," is all lightness, grace, and symmetry within. The organ was pealing and women were kneeling for the mass as we went softly down the high-vaulted nave, our spirits played upon now by the dignity of pointed arches and of clustered columns and now by delicate beauties in tracery and carving. Only here and there were we aware of a jarring note, as in chancing upon a great crucifix whose Christ was decked out in two elegant lace petticoats and a white silk crinoline embroidered over with silver thread. When the chant had died away, an affectionate old sacristan, in a curious red and black coat, delivered us with sundry farewell pats and pinches over to the charge of a subordinate, who proceeded to display the hidden treasures. These are far from overwhelming, after the glittering hoards of Burgos, Seville, and Toledo, but they are as odd an assortment as sacristy ever sheltered. There was an absurd portrait of Charles I, a freak of foreshortening. At first sight it seemed to be the skeleton of a fish, but on viewing it through a peephole the creature had become a human face. Even so, it was hardly a flattering likeness of the founder of the Austrian line; but as it was Charles I who stripped Palencia of her original powers and dignities, one would not expect to find him complimented here. We turned our attention to the vestments, which, though few, are peculiarly artistic, with devices, stitched in gold thread and in jewel reds and greens, of pomegranates, roses, ecclesiastical coats of arms, angels, Maries, Nativities, and Adorations. These were appropriate enough, but even our reserved conductor, a monastic youth who wore a white, openwork tunic over his black suit, smiled disdainfully as he put before us a time-yellowed ivory box arabesqued with men and lions, the jewel casket of some pet sultana. "But why should it be here?" He shrugged his shoulders. "In truth, it is not holy--a woman's thing! Nor do I know how it came to us, but what we have we keep." The sacristy certainly seems to have kept more than its share of _custodias_. Our guide first brought out a dainty structure, where grieving angels uplift the cross, and the Sufferer's halo is wrought of pearls and gems. This was replaced by another, a marvel of goldsmith's craft, turreted and crocketed with fine gold, while all about the base are figured Annunciations, Visitations, and other mysteries. Rich as they were, neither of these could compare with that famous pyx of the Escorial, inlaid with ten thousand precious stones. Then our conductor took us with a mighty turning of monster keys, pulling of rusty bolts, and fall of clanging chains, to see the supreme _custodia_ of all, one great dazzle of silver from fretted base to dome and pinnacle, save as among the Corinthian columns of the first stage glisten golden forms of the Apostles, and of the second, winged shapes of cherubim and seraphim. This shining tower, some three or four centuries old, is beheld by Palencia only on Corpus Christi Day, when, holding at its heart the golden monstrance which holds the Host, it passes as a triumphal car throughout the city. Priests walking on either side make a feint of drawing it by tasselled cords, but "little would it budge for that," said our guide, in high disdain, opening a door in the frame beneath to reveal the benches where strong men sit concealed and toil at a motor crank. He had much more to show us, including precious old tapestries of the Netherlands, and a St. Katharine by Zurbarán, with a light on the kneeling figure as pure and bright as a moonbeam; but we had to press the fee on his Castilian pride, when at last the vulgarity of luncheon summoned us away. For the historian, basking in this last smile of civilization, the afternoon passed blissfully among the orange chairs, but I sallied forth once more, attended by our benignant landlady. The rays of the sun flashed down like deadly arrows and I had pleaded for a carriage, but longed to beg its pardon when it came, so faded, rheumatic, and yet august was that fat old chariot, groaning and tottering as it rolled, but lowering the pomp of a velvet-carpeted staircase whenever we desired to alight. Our progress made a grand sensation in those drowsy streets and squares, a retinue soon gathered, and nobody seemed surprised when, after a round of Jesuit and Dominican churches, we drew up before the madhouse. I had wished to look upon this building, because it is reputed to have been a dwelling of the Cid; but the hero of Castile was as unknown to my gentle escort as to the medical priest whom she must needs call forth to meet me, or to the hapless lunatics whom he, in turn, insisted on my seeing. A town which had forgotten its chief citizen naturally fails to keep on sale photographs of its cathedral, so we packed our memories in default of anything more substantial and took the evening train to the northwest. Four hours of hushed, moonlit plain, and then Leon! This is a name of thrilling memories, and we stepped out into the midnight silence of that once royal capital whose kingdom "stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Rhone," so awed that even a rickety 'bus, and a smuggler who tried to hide his trunk behind our honest luggage, hardly broke the spell. My comrade, still new to Spanish ways, had fears that the illustrated card which I had forgotten to stamp would not have reached the hotel. She asked me why I did not telegraph; but some days later, when we sent a telegram at noon, took a way-train at five, and reached our destination at ten, simultaneously with the telegram which I might as well have brought in my pocket, she was set free from New World prejudices. The unstamped card went through without question, a picture of a pretty mountain maid being quite as acceptable to the postal clerks as the portrait of their young king. We were expected at the hotel, the best in town, but so dirty and malodorous that we would better have camped under the stars. There had been some attempt to sweep the floor of our dingy chamber, as we could see by comparing it with stairs and corridors. Sour milk and sour bread were served with a compensating sweetness of manner, but the experiences of that night belong to oblivion. The joy of the morning! Guided by a shy little scullery lad, smooched of face and ragged of raiment, but with all the instincts of a cavalier, we stepped out into those stately streets, with their haughty old houses, balconies, coats of arms, arches, and battlements, as into an animated picture book. It was Saturday, and the town was all astir with peasants come to market, every peasant as good as a romance. Such brightness of figured kerchiefs, homespun petticoats, trunk hose, jackets, sashes! The little girls were quaintest of all, dressed precisely like their mammas, even to those brilliant skirts edged with one color and slashed with another. Many of the women were carrying loads of greens, others plucked fowls, and some had indignant chickens, in full possession of chicken faculties, snuggled under the arm. As the chief city in a far reach of luxuriant plain, Leon becomes the focus, every Saturday, of flocks of sheep, droves of pigs, and herds of cattle, together with innumerable mules and donkeys bringing in grain, fruit, and all manner of garden produce. We chanced upon the market itself in the arcaded _Plaza Mayor_, under shadow of the towered court-house, with the tapering spire of the cathedral overlooking all. The great square hummed like a beehive and sparkled with shifting color like a field of butterflies. We found ourselves first in the bread market. Under wide umbrellas of canvas set on poles women were perched high on wooden benches, with their gayly shod feet supported on stools. Beside each woman, on her rude seat, was a brightly woven basket heaped with the horny Spanish loaves. Close by was the fruit market, with its piles of red and purple plums, pears, grapes, green peppers, lemons, and, beyond, patches of melons, cucumbers, cabbages, potatoes, beans, and that staff of Spanish life, chick pease, or _garbanzos_. The meat market appeared to be itinerant. A man in blue blouse, short brown breeches, and dove-colored hose adorned with green tassels, was leading a cow by its crumpled horn; an old woman, with giant silver hoops in her ears, a lavender shawl knotted about her body, her scarlet skirt well slashed so as to show the gamboge petticoat beneath, and so short for all its purple frill as to display the clockwork of her variegated stockings, was carrying a black lamb, nestled like a baby in her arms; another walking rainbow bore a live turkey; and a lad, whose rosy-hued kerchief, shawl, and sash floated like sunrise clouds about him, balanced on his erect young head an immense basket of eggs. There was a pottery section, too,--square rods of cups, plates, and jars in all manner of russet tints and graceful shapes. The various divisions were intermingled and blent into one great open-air market, the cheeriest sort of neighborhood picnic, where gossip, jest, and laughter were accompanied by the cackling of fowls, braying of donkeys, and cooing of babies. Here fluttered a colony of bantams cast, their legs well tied, down on the cobble-stones; there stood carts laden with bunches of the yellowish dried heather; here two patient oxen had laid themselves out for a snooze; there a wicked little ass was blinking at the greens; here squatted a damsel in gold kerchief, garnet bodice, and beryl skirt, weighing out fresh figs; there sat a cobbler pegging away at his stall, his patrons waiting with bare feet while he mended their shoes; stands of cheeses, coops of chickens, children sleeping among the sacks of grain, a boy waving a rod on which was strung a gorgeous assortment of garters; loitering soldiers, limping beggars, bargaining ladies attended by their maids, all gave notes to the harmony. Yet with all that trampling, small weeds were growing green amid the slippery stones that pave the square. The Leon peasantry is said to be the finest in all Spain, and surely no concourse of people could have been more honest, courteous, and dignified than this. The women wore ornamented wallets beneath the skirt, and warned us gravely against carrying money in exposed pockets; but we moved freely among the press with notebook and kodak, always the centre of curious groups, and our purses were not touched. Indeed we found it difficult to spend even a _peseta_, so modest were the prices. For as large a jar as our little squire could well carry we paid the value of three cents. The men often rebuked the children for staring and questioning, but stood themselves at gaze, and asked us frankly what we were about. When we replied that we had never seen so beautiful a market, and were taking notes and photographs that we might not forget, the peasants smilingly passed the word from one side of the _plaza_ to the other, and all, even to the chief of police, who was strutting about waving an unnecessary staff, were eager to offer information and to point out picturesque subjects. But the morning was slipping away, and we had almost forgotten the oracle of a Spanish gentleman in Palencia: "Leon has three sights for the visitor, and only three--the Cathedral, San Isidoro, and San Marcos." We proceeded to take these illustrious churches in order. The Leon Cathedral, closely analogous to the Gothic masterpieces of northern France, is far beyond all poor praises of mine. Now in process of repair and stripped of the garish shrines of modern worship, it may be enjoyed purely as architecture--a temple of high beauty. Let artists tell of its towers and finials, flying buttresses, gables, cornices, galleries, piers, façades. Yet one need not be an artist to delight in the glow of its great rose windows, or to spend fascinated hours poring over the chiselled story book of portals, stalls, and cloisters. Such inimitable glass, burning still with the fervors of the mediæval faith! And such a world of divinity and humanity, even down to childish mischief, in those multitudinous carvings! The Passion scenes are repeated over and over, creation and judgment are there, the life, death, and ascension of the Virgin, hero legends, animal fables, and folk-lore. Gothic energy is abundantly manifest. St. George smites the dragon, St. Michael tramples the devil, Samson splits the lion's jaws, and Santiago, carved in ebony on a door in the mellow-hued old cloisters, is riding down the Moors with such contagious fury that the very tail of his horse is twisted into a ferocious quirk. On angel-guarded tombs pictures of ancient battle, murder, vengeance, are graven in the long-remembering stone. But marble birds peck at the marble fruit, the ivory peasant drives his pigs, the alabaster shepherd watches his flock, the lad leads his donkey, the monk feeds the poor at the abbey gates, and plump stone priests, stowed away in shadowy niches, make merry over the wine. [Illustration: TOLEDO CATHEDRAL. DOOR OF LIONS] If we had revelled overmuch in the art values of the cathedral, San Isidoro administered a prompt corrective. This Romanesque church, dating from the beginning of the eleventh century and a forerunner of the Escorial in that it was founded by the first Fernando of Castile as a royal mausoleum, is excessively holy. Not merely are the bones of the patron saint kept on the high altar, but the Host is on constant exhibition there. Unaware of these especial sanctities, we were quietly walking toward the choir, when an angry clamor from behind caused us to turn, and there, stretching their heads out over the railing of an upper gallery, was a line of furious priests. In vain the sacristan strove to excuse us, "foreigners and ladies," who did not know that we were expected to fall upon our knees on first entering the door. We had been guilty of no irreverence beyond this omission, and even under the hail of priestly wrath did our best to withdraw correctly without turning our backs to the altar. But nothing would appease that scandalized row of gargoyles, whose violent rudeness seemed to us the greater desecration. Thus it was that we did not enter the frescoed chambers of the actual Panteon, said to be imposing yet, although the royal tombs were broken up by the French in 1808. Very wrong in the French, but unless the manners of San Isidoro's bodyguard have degenerated, the soldiers of Napoleon may have had their provocation. It was now high noon, and the market-place had poured all its peasants out upon the streets. Groups of them were lying at luncheon under the trees, passing the pigskin bottle of wine from mouth to mouth. Beggars were standing by and blessing them in return for scraps of the coarse and scanty fare. "May God repay! May the saints prosper thy harvest!" A woman riding home, sitting erect on the red-striped donkey-bag, handed a plum to her husband, who trudged beside her in gray linen trunks and green velveteen waistcoat, with a white square of cloth set, for ornament, into the middle of the back. He divided the fruit with a pleading cripple, who called after them as devoutly as a man with half a plum in his cheek well could, "May the Blessed Virgin ride forth with you and gladden all your way!" We had, because of the increasing heat, conjured up a carriage, a species of invalid stage-coach, and were therefore the envy of little schoolboys in blue pinafores. Their straw satchels bobbed on their backs as they gave chase to our clattering ark and clung to steps and door. This mode of locomotion did not save us time, for our coachman had domestic cares on his mind and drew up to bargain for a chicken, which finally mounted with a squall to the box seat; but in due Spanish season we stopped before the plateresque façade of San Marcos. This is a still unfinished convent, rich in artistic beauties and historic memories. Here, for instance, is a marvellously human head of St. Francis, a triumph of the polychrome sculpture, and here is the little cell where the poet Quevedo, "colossal genius of satire," was imprisoned for over three years by Philip IV, the patron of Velázquez. It is not so easy to cage a mocking-bird, though the satire-pencilled walls have been well whitewashed. But San Marcos was originally a hospital for pilgrims on the road to Compostela, and conch shells are the central ornamentation of arch and vault and frieze. We accepted the rebuke; we would loiter no more. Early that afternoon we took train for Coruña, after which some agency other than steam must transport us to the mediæval city of St. James. XXIV PILGRIMS OF SAINT JAMES "In Galice at Seint Jame, and at Coloigne, She koude muchel of wandrynge by the weye." --CHAUCER: _Canterbury Tales_. "Pilgrimes and palmers plihten hem to-gederes For to seche Seint Jame." --LANGLAND: _Piers Plowman_. "I am Saint Jaques' pilgrim, thither gone." --SHAKESPEARE: _All's Well that Ends Well_. From Leon to Coruña is a journey of some eighteen hours by rail. Degenerate pilgrims that we were, we had taken a first-class carriage reserved for ladies, not so comfortable as the average third-class carriage on an English road. We hoped for space, at least, and solitude, but people who choose to pry into out-of-the-way corners of Spain need not expect to find any slavish deference to rights of place and property. The conductor had planned to dine and sleep in this particular compartment, which was a shade cleaner than the rest, and removed his kit from the rack with natural disappointment. Why should ladies be going to Galicia? But the general first-class compartment, next to ours, was unoccupied, and he resignedly transferred his belongings thither. The numerous third-class carriages were crowded with raw recruits, who had all jumped down, boy fashion, on the Leon platforms, and came scrambling back at the starting bell in noisiest confusion. Just as the train was puffing out, a station official threw open our door with a smiling, "Only to the next stop, ladies!" and precipitated upon us three belated warriors. We groaned inly with dark foreboding, for third-class occupancy of a first-class carriage is apt to leave lively souvenirs behind. Our three young soldiers, each with his personal effects bundled up in an enormous red and yellow handkerchief, were of the rudest peasant type, hardly lifted above animal and clod. Only one was able to spell out anything of the newspaper we offered. He labored over a large-lettered advertisement with grimy thumb, twisting brows, and muttering lips, but soon gave it up in sheer exhaustion. The hulking fellow beyond him was continually on the point of spitting,--a regular Spanish pastime in travel; but, determined that the carriage should not suffer that offence, I kept strict watch on this chrysalis hero, and embarrassed him into stark paralysis with questions on the landscape whenever he was quite prepared to fire. The third conscript was a ruddy, fair-haired boy of seventeen, who had in rudimentary form the social instincts of a Spaniard, and in his intervals of blue-eyed staring at the tawdry splendors about him hammered our ears with some harsh dialect, his one theme being the indignities and hardships of a Spanish soldier's lot. Yet dull as they were, and ignorant of railway customs, they knew enough to prefer broad cushions, whose variety of stains did not trouble their enviable simplicity, to the rough and narrow benches of the overcrowded third-class carriages, and at the "first stop" they unanimously forgot to change. But they were not unkindly lads, and after I had explained to them a dozen times or so that my friend was suffering from a headache and needed to lie down, and had, furthermore, lawlessly suggested that they could make themselves equally comfortable in the other first-class carriage, which was not "reserved for ladies," they promised to leave us at the second station; but their slow peasant hands fumbled at the door so clumsily that the train was under way again before the latch had yielded. It was not until we had been fellow-travellers for two or three hours that they finally stumbled into the neighboring compartment. From this the conductor, who had been blind and deaf to past proceedings, promptly ejected them, having no mind to let them make acquaintance with his wine bottle, and our poor exiles cast reproachful glances at us as they were hustled off to their own place. We have sometimes talked enthusiastically of democracy, but we did not discuss such exalted subjects then. Indeed, we had enough to do in guarding our doors, often by frank exercise of muscle, from further intrusion, and in trying to provide ourselves with food and water. A struggling mob of soldier boys besieged the refreshment stalls at every station, and drained the jars of the water-venders long before these could arrive at the car windows. At last, by a union of silver and violence, we succeeded in gaining from an astounded little girl, who was racing after the departing carriages, all her stock in trade, even the great russet jar itself, with its treasure of cold spring water. The historian possesses a special genius for cooking over an alcohol lamp on a rocking mountain train, and having augmented our knapsack stores with scalded milk and knobby bread from a tavern near one of the depots, we lived like feudal barons "of our own" for the rest of that memorable journey. Reminders of the pilgrims were all along our route. Overflowing as Santiago's young knights were with martial and romantic spirit, when the brigands did not give their steel sufficient sport they would break lances for the love of ladies or on any other conceivable pretext. We passed the bridge of twenty arches, where ten companions in arms once posted themselves for ten successive days, and challenged to the tilt every cavalier who came that way in journey to the Compostela jubilee. All the afternoon we were climbing into the hill-country. The waste slopes were starred with purple clumps of heather, and crossed by light-footed maids, who balanced great bunches of bracken on their heads. The patches of green valley, walled in by those barren steeps, held each a few tumble-down old houses, while elsewhere we noticed human dwellings that seemed scarcely more than nests of mud plastered to the stone. Yet the soil appeared to be cultivated with the most patient thrift,--wheat and potatoes growing wherever wheat and potatoes might. The view became a bewildering medley of Scottish hills, Italian skies, and Gothic castles, with occasionally a tawny and fantastic rock from the Garden of the Gods. The city of Astorga, whose cathedral was founded, so the pilgrims used to say, by St. James in his missionary tour, greeted us from the midst of the flinty hills. These are the home of a singular clan known as the Maragatos. They wear a distinctive dress, marry only among themselves, and turn a sullen look upon their neighbors. As night came on, the road grew so rough that we had to cork our precious water-jar with a plump lemon. The historian was sleeping off her headache, except as I woke her at the stations to aid in the defence of our ignoble luxury. We remembered that queen of Portugal who made the pilgrimage to Compostela on foot, begging her way. In the close-packed third-class carriages it must have been a cramped and weary night, and we did not wonder that young socialists occasionally tried to raid our fortress. But we clung stoutly to the door-handles, lustily sounding our war cry of "Ladies only" in lieu of "Santiago," and early in the small hours had the shamefaced pleasure of seeing the herd of drowsy conscripts, with their red and yellow bundles, driven into another train, where they were tumbled two or three deep, the under layer struggling and protesting. One little fellow, nearly smothered in the hurly-burly about the steps, cried out pitifully; but the conductor silenced him with angry sarcasm: "Dost mean to be a soldier, thou? Or shall we put thee in a sugar-bowl and send thee back to mamma?" There was less need of sentry duty after this, but the night was too beautiful for sleep. We were crossing the wild Asturian mountains, the Alps of Spain, and a full moon was pouring down white lustre on crag, cascade, and gorge. By these perilous ways had streamed the many-bannered pilgrim hosts,--men and women of all countries and all tongues seeking the Jerusalem of the West. Each nation had its own hymn to Santiago, and these, sung to the mingled music of bagpipes, timbrels, bugles, flutes, and harps, must have pealed out strangely on many a silver night. The poor went begging of the rich, and often a mounted crusader cast his purse of broad gold pieces on the heather, trusting Santiago and his own good sword to see him through. Up and down these sheer ravines stumbled the blind and lame, sure of healing if only they could reach the shrine. Deaf and dumb went in the pilgrim ranks, the mad, the broken-hearted, the sin-oppressed; only the troop of lepers held apart. Some of those foot-sore wayfarers, most likely the raggedest of all, carried a secret treasure for the saint. Some staggered under penitential weights of lead and stone, and others bore loads of bars and fetters in token of captivity from which St. James had set them free. [Illustration: ST. PAUL, THE FIRST HERMIT] But these pathetic shapes no longer peopled the moonlight. Since it was the nineteenth century, a first-class passenger might as well lie down and watch the gracious progress of the moon across the heavens,-- "Oft, as if her head she bowed, Stooping through a fleecy cloud." But the clouds perversely made of themselves wayside crosses, urns, cathedral towers; and just as one sky-creature, "backed like a weasel" but with the face of Santiago, began to puff a monstrous cigarette, I roused my dozing senses and discovered that we were entering Lugo, the capital of Galicia, and once, under Roman rule, of all Spain. This city of tumultuous history, stormed by one wild race after another, and twice sacked in our own century, first by the French and then by the Carlists, lay very peacefully under the white dawn. While the chivalrous Spanish sun rose unobtrusively, so as not to divert attention from the fading graces of the moon, the historian made sustaining coffee, and we tried to look as if we liked Galicia. This far northwestern province is the Boeotia of Spain; its stupid, patient peasantry are the butt of all the Peninsula, and to be called a Gallego is to be called a fool. The country, as we saw it from the train, was broken and hilly, but the Alpine majesty of Asturias was gone. In the misty drizzle of rain, which soon hushed the pipings of the birds, all the region looked wretchedly poor. It was a wooded, watered, well-tilled land, with tufts of heather brightly fringing every bank; but the houses were mere cabins, where great, gaunt, dark-colored pigs pushed in and out among bedraggled hens and half-clad children. Women were working in the fields by five o'clock in the morning, their saffron and carmine kerchiefs twisted into horns above the forehead. Women were serving as porters at the stations, carrying heavy trunks and loads of valises on their heads. Women were driving the plough, swinging the pickaxe in the quarries, mending the railway tracks. Short, stout, vigorous brownies they were, and most of them looked old. It was mid-forenoon when we reached Coruña, the seaport whence sailed the Invincible Armada. We had meant to rest there for the afternoon and night before undertaking the forty-mile drive to Santiago, but the hotel was so filthy that, tired as we were, there was nothing for it but to go on. Tarrying only for bath and breakfast, we took our places in a carriage which, setting out at one, promised to bring us into Santiago in time for the eight o'clock dinner. This conveyance was a species of narrow omnibus, which an Andalusian, an Englishman, a son of Compostela returning home after a long sojourn in foreign parts, his young wife of Jewish features, and our weary selves filled to overflowing. Our Jehu had agreed to transport the six of us, with our effects, for the sum of sixteen dollars; but deep was our disgust when he piled our handbags, shawl straps, and all our lesser properties in upon our wedged and helpless forms, and crammed six rough Gallegos, with a reeling load of trunks and boxes, on the roof. Remonstrance would be futile. The places in the regular diligence were not only taken for the afternoon but engaged for several days ahead, and carriages are rare birds in Galicia. The Spanish gentlemen merely shrugged their shoulders, the Englishman had but that morning landed in Spain and could not speak a word of the vernacular, and feminine protest was clearly out of order. The four puny horses took the top-heavy vehicle at a rattling pace down the granite-paved streets of Coruña, but hardly were we under way when our griefs began. On our arrival that forenoon, a fluent porter had over-persuaded us to leave our trunk at the station, letting him retain the check in order to have the baggage ready for us when we should pass the depot _en route_ for Santiago. We had been absent scarcely three hours, but meanwhile the trunk had disappeared. A dozen tatterdemalions ran hither and thither, making as much noise as possible, all the top fares shouted contradictory suggestions, and our porter, heaping Ossa-Pelions of execration upon the (absent) railroad officials, declared that they in their most reprobate stupidity had started the trunk on that eighteen-hour journey back to Leon. They were dolts and asses, the sons of imbecile mothers; but we had only to leave the check with him, and in the course of an indefinite number of "to-morrows" he would recover our property. We had grown sadder and wiser during the last five minutes, however, and insisted on taking that soiled inch of paper into our own keeping. At this the porter flew into a Spanish rage, flung back his fee into my lap, and so eloquently expressed himself that we left Coruña with stinging ears. It was the historian's trunk, stored with supplies for the camera, as well as with sundry alleviations of our pilgrim lot, but she put it in the category of spilled milk, and turned with heroic cheerfulness to enjoy the scenery. The horses had now drooped into the snail's pace which they consistently maintained through the rest of their long, uphill way, for the city of the Apostle stands on a high plateau. As we mounted more and more, Coruña, lying between bay and sea, still shone clear across the widening reach of smiling landscape. Maize and vines were everywhere. So were peasants, who trudged along in family troops toward Compostela. But whether afoot or astride donkeys of antique countenance, they could always outstrip our lumbering coach, and we were an easy prey for the hordes of childish bandits who chase vehicles for miles along the pilgrim road, shrieking for pennies in the name of Santiago. About two leagues out of Coruña we did pass something,--a group composed of a young Gallego and the most diminutive of donkeys. The peasant, walking beside his beast, was trying to balance across its back an object unwonted to those wilds. "Strange to see a steamer trunk here!" I remarked, turning to the historian; but she was already leaning out from the window, inspecting that label-speckled box with an eagle gaze. "It's mine!" she exclaimed, and in a twinkling had startled the driver into pulling up his horses, had leapt from the coach, and was running after the peasant, who, for his part, swerving abruptly from the main road, urged his panting donkey up a steep lane. Nobody believed her. Even I, her fellow-pilgrim, thought her wits were addling with our penitential fasts and vigils, and did not attempt to join in so mad a chase. As for the scandalized Spaniards, inside and out, they shouted angrily that the thing was impossible and the señora was to come back. The coachman roared loudest of all. But on she dashed, ran down her man, and bade him, in inspired Galician, bring that trunk to the omnibus at once. He scratched his head, smiled a child's innocent and trustful smile, and, like a true Gallego, did as he was told. By this time masculine curiosity had been too much for the driver and most of the fares, and they had scrambled after, so that the few of us who kept guard by the carriage presently beheld an imposing procession advancing along the road, consisting of a Galician peasant with a steamer trunk upon his head, a group of crestfallen Spaniards, and a Yankee lady, slightly flushed, attended by an applauding Englishman. Beyond a doubt it was her trunk. Her name was there, a New York hotel mark, which she had tried to obliterate with a blot of Leon ink, and the number corresponding to the number of our check. "By Jove!" said the Englishman. As for the peasant, he said even less, but in some way gave us to understand that he was taking the trunk to a gentleman from Madrid. Thinking that there might have been a confusion of checks in the station, we gave this childlike native a _peseta_ and a card with our Santiago address in case "the Madrid gentleman" should suspect us of highway robbery. Our fellow-passengers took the tale to Santiago, however; it made a graphic column in the local paper, and none of the several Spaniards who spoke to us of the matter there doubted that the trunk was stolen by collusion between the porter and the peasant. Our next adventure was more startling yet. The coachman had been heard, at intervals, vehemently expostulating with a roof passenger who wanted to get down. "Man alive! By the staff of Santiago! By your mother's head! By the Virgin of the Pillar!" Whether the malcontent had taken too much wine, whether he was under legal arrest, whether it was merely a crossing of whims, we could not learn from any of the impassioned actors in the drama; but, apparently, he found his opportunity to slip unnoticed off the coach. For suddenly the driver screamed to his horses, and, like a bolt from the blue, a handsome, athletic fellow leapt to the ground and rushed back along the dusty road, brandishing clenched fists and stamping his feet in frenzy. In mid-career he paused, struck a stage attitude, tore open his pink shirt, gasped, and shook with rage. "Irving isn't in it," quoth the Englishman. Then appeared, lurking by the roadside, a slouchy youth, on whom our tragic hero sprang like a tiger, threw him down, and stood panting over him with a gesture as if to stab. An instant later he had seized his victim by the collar, dragged him up, and was running him back to the coach. "You hurt me," wailed the truant, "and I don't want to go." But go he must, being bundled back in short order on the roof, where harmony seemed to be immediately restored. While the men were struggling, a lordly old peasant, stalking by, surveyed them with a peasant's high disdain. We had already noted the Irish look of the Galicians, but this magnificent patriarch, with dark green waistcoat over a light green shirt, old gold knickerbockers and crushed strawberry hose, had as Welsh a face, dark and clean-cut, as Snowdon ever saw. Long sunset shadows lay across the hills; we had shared with our companions our slight stores of sweet chocolate, bread, and wine, and still we were not halfway to Santiago. It was nine o'clock before our groaning equipage drew up at a wretched little inn, incredibly foul, where it was necessary to bait the exhausted horses. Mine host welcomed the party with pensive dignity, and served us, in the midst of all that squalor, with the manners of a melancholy count. Shutting eyes and noses as far as we could, and blessing eggs for shells and fruit for rind, we ate and gathered strength to bear what St. James might yet have in store for us. The diligence had resumed its weary jog; we were all more or less asleep, unconsciously using, in our crowded estate, one another as pillows, when an uproar from the box and a wild lurch of the coach brought us promptly to our waking senses. One of the wheel horses was down, and the others, frightened by the dragging harness, were rearing and plunging. Out we tumbled into the misty night, wondering if we were destined, after all, to foot it to Compostela in proper pilgrim fashion. The poor beast was mad with terror, and his struggles soon brought his mate to the ground beside him. The coachman, so pompous and dictatorial at the outset, stood helplessly in the road, at a safe distance, wringing his hands and crying like a baby: "Alas, poor me! Poor little me! O holy Virgin! Santiago!" The top fares, who had made good speed to _terra firma_, were wailing in unison and shrieking senseless counsels. "Kill thou the horse! Kill thou the horse!" one of them chanted like a Keltic dirge. The coachman supplied the antiphon: "Kill not my horse! Kill not my horse! _Ave Maria!_ Poor little me!" "Fools! Sit on his head," vociferated the Englishman in his vain vernacular. The horses seemed to have as many legs as centipedes, kicking all at once. The coach was toppling, the luggage pitching, and catastrophe appeared inevitable, when Santiago, such an excellent horseman himself, inspired one of the roof passengers to unbuckle a few straps. The effect was magical. First one nag, and then the other, struggled to its feet; the coachman sobbed anew, this time for joy; the Spanish gentlemen, who had been watching the scene with imperturbable passivity, crawled back into the diligence, the silent wife followed with the heavy bag which her husband had let her carry all the way, and the Anglo-Saxon contingent walked on ahead for half an hour to give the spent horses what little relief we might. The clocks were striking two when we reached the gates of the sacred city, where fresh hindrance met us. The customs officials were on the alert. Who were we that would creep into Compostela de Santiago under cover of night, in an irregular conveyance piled high with trunks and boxes? Smugglers, beyond a doubt! But they would teach us a thing or two. We might wait outside till morning. [Illustration: MAIDS OF HONOR] Delighted boys from a peasant camp beyond the walls ran up to jeer at our predicament. Our coachman, reverting to his dolorous chant, appealed to all the saints. The top fares shrilled in on the chorus; the Spanish gentlemen lighted cigarettes, and after some twenty minutes of dramatic altercation, a soldier sprang on our top step and mounted guard, while the coach rattled through the gates and on to the _aduana_. Here we were deposited, bag and baggage, on the pavement, and a drowsy, half-clad old dignitary was brought forth to look at us. The coachman, all his social graces restored, imaginatively presented the three Anglo-Saxons as a French party travelling for pleasure. "But what am I to do with them?" groaned the dignitary, and went back to bed. An appalling group of _serenos_, in slouch hats and long black capes, with lanterns and with staffs topped by steel axes, escorted us into a sort of luggage room, and told us to sit down on benches. We sat on them for half an hour, which seemed to satisfy the ends of justice, for then the _serenos_ gave place to porters, who said they would bring us our property, which nobody had examined or noticed in the slightest, after daybreak, and would now show us the way to our hotel. Our farewell to the coachman, who came beaming up to shake hands and receive thanks, was cold. We had engaged rooms by letter a week in advance, but they had been surrendered to earlier arrivals, and we were conducted to a private house next door to the hotel. After the delays incident to waking an entire family, we were taken into a large, untidy room, furnished with dining table, sewing machine, and a half dozen decrepit chairs. There was no water and no sign of toilet apparatus, but in an adjoining dark closet were two narrow cots, from which the four daughters of the house had just been routed. Of those beds which these sleepy children were then, with unruffled sweetness and cheeriness, making ready for us, the less said the better. Our indoor hours in Compostela, an incessant battle against dirt, bad smells, and a most instructive variety of vermin, were a penance that must have met all pilgrim requirements. And yet these people spared no pains to make us comfortable, so far as they understood comfort. At our slightest call, were it only for a match, in would troop the mother, four daughters, maid, dog, and cat, with any of the neighbors who might be visiting, all eager to be of service. The girls were little models of sunny courtesy, and would have been as pretty of face as they were charming in manner, had not skin diseases and eye diseases told the tale of the hideously unsanitary conditions in which their young lives had been passed. But we had come to the festival of Santiago, and it was worth its price. XXV THE BUILDING OF A SHRINE (A historical chapter, which should be skipped.) That most Spanish of Spaniards, Alarcón, is pleased in one of his roguish sketches to depict the waywardness of a certain poetaster. "Alonso Alonso was happy because he was thinking of many sad things,--of the past centuries, vanished like smoke, ... of the little span of life and of the absurdities with which it is filled, of the folly of wisdom, of the nothingness of ambition, of all this comedy, in short, which is played upon the earth." Alonso Alonso would be in his very element in Santiago de Compostela. The "unsubstantial pageant faded" of the mediæval world is more than memory there. It is a ghost that walks at certain seasons, notably from the twentieth to the twenty-eighth of July. The story of the birth, growth, and passing of that once so potent shrine, the Jerusalem of the West, is too significant for oblivion. The corner-stone of the strange history is priestly legend. The Apostle James the Greater, so runs the tale, after preaching in Damascus and along the Mediterranean coast, came in a Greek ship to Galicia, then under Roman rule, and proclaimed the gospel in its capital city, Iria-Flavia. Here the Virgin appeared to him, veiled, like the mother of Æneas, in a cloud, and bade him build a church. This he did, putting a bishop in charge, and then pursued his mission, not only in the remote parts of Galicia, but in Aragon, Castile, and Andalusia. At Saragossa the Virgin again flashed upon his sight. She was poised, this time, on a marble pillar, which she left behind her to become, what it is to-day, the most sacred object in all Spain. A chip of this _columna immobilis_ is one of the treasures of Toledo. The cathedral of the _Virgen del Pilar_,--affectionately known as Pilarica,--which James then founded at Saragossa, is still a popular goal of pilgrimage, the marble of the holy column being hollowed, at one unshielded spot, by countless millions of kisses. The Apostle, on his return to Jerusalem after seven years in Spain, was beheaded by Herod. Loyal disciples recovered the body and set sail with it for the Spanish coast. Off Portugal occurred the pointless "miracle of the shells." A gentleman was riding on the shore, when all at once his horse, refusing to obey the bit, leapt into the sea, walking on the crests of the waves toward the boat. Steed and rider suddenly sank, but promptly rose again, all crusted over with shells, which have been ever since regarded as the emblem of St. James in particular, and of pilgrim folk in general. "How should I your true love know From another one? By his cockle hat and staff And his sandal shoon." The Santiago "cockle," which thus, as a general pilgrim symbol, outstripped the keys of Rome and the cross of Jerusalem, is otherwise accounted for by a story that the body of St. James was borne overseas to Galicia in a shell of miraculous size, but this is not the version that was told us at the shrine. The two disciples, Theodore and Athanasius, temporarily interred their master in Padron, two leagues from Iria, until they should have obtained permission from the Roman dame who governed that region to allow St. James the choice of a resting-place. Her pagan heart was moved to graciousness, and she lent the disciples an ox-cart, in which they placed the body, leaving the beasts free to take the Apostle's course. It is hardly miraculous that, under the circumstances, Lady Lupa's oxen plodded straight back to Iria and came to a stop before her summer villa. Since this was so clearly indicated as the choice of the saint, she could do no less than put her house at his disposal. In the villa was a chapel to the war-god Janus, but when the body of Santiago was brought within the doors, this heathen image fell with a crash into a hundred fragments. Here the saint abode, guarded by his faithful disciples, until, in process of time, they slept beside him. The villa had been transformed into a little church, so little that, when the Imperial persecutions stormed over the Spanish provinces, the worshippers hid it under heaps of turf and tangles of brier bushes. Those early Christians of Iria were slain or scattered, and the burial place of St. James was forgotten of all the world. In the seventh century, a rumor went abroad that the Apostle James had preached the gospel in Spain. The legend grew until, in the year 813, a Galician anchorite beheld from the mouth of his cavern a brilliant star, which shone persistently above a certain bramble-wood in the outskirts of Iria. Moving lights, as of processional tapers, twinkled through the matted screen of shrubbery, and solemn chants arose from the very heart of the boscage. Word of this mystery came to the bishop, who saw with his own eyes "the glow of many candles through the shadows of the night." After three days of fasting, he led all the villagers in procession to the thicket which had grown up, a protecting hedge, about the ruins of the holy house. The three graves were found intact, and on opening the chief of these the bishop looked upon the body of St. James, as was proven not only by severed head and pilgrim staff, but by a Latin scroll. The swiftest horsemen of Galicia bore the glorious tidings to the court of the king, that most Christian monarch, Alfonso II, "very Catholic, a great almsgiver, defender of the Faith." So loved of heaven was this pious king, that once, when he had collected a treasure of gold and precious stones for the making of a cross, two angels, disguised as pilgrims, undertook the work. When, after a few hours, Alfonso came softly to the forge to make sure of their honesty and skill, no artisans were there, but from an exquisitely fashioned cross streamed a celestial glory. So devout a king, on hearing the great tidings from Galicia, lost no time in despatching couriers to his bishops and grandees, and all the pomp and pride of Spain, headed by majesty itself, flocked to the far-off hamlet beyond the Asturian mountains to adore the relics of Santiago. Now began grand doings in Iria, known henceforth as the Field of the Star, _Campus Stellæ_, or Compostela. Alfonso had a church of stone and clay built above the sepulchre, and endowed it with an estate of three square miles. The Pope announced the discovery to Christendom. A community of twelve monks, with a presiding abbot, was installed at Compostela to say masses before the shrine. For these beginnings of homage the Apostle made a munificent return. A wild people, living in a wild land at a wild time, these Spaniards of the Middle Ages were shaped and swayed by two sovereign impulses, piety and patriotism. These two were practically one, for patriotism meant the expulsion of the Moor, and piety, Cross above Koran. It was a life-and-death struggle. The dispossessed Christians, beaten back from Andalusia and Castile to the fastnesses of the northern mountains, were fighting against fearful odds. They felt sore need of a leader, for although, when their ranks were wavering, the Virgin had sometimes appeared to cheer them on, hers, after all, was but a woman's arm. It was in the battle of Clavijo, 846, that Santiago first flashed into view, an invincible champion of the cross. Rameiro, successor to Alfonso II, had taken the field against the terrible Abderrahman of Cordova, who had already overrun Valencia and Barcelona and was demanding from Galicia a yearly tribute of one hundred maidens. This exceedingly Moorish tax, which now amuses Madrid as a rattling farce in the summer theatre of the _Buen Retiro_, was no jesting matter then. Not only the most famous warriors of the realm, Bernardo del Carpio in their van, but shepherds and ploughmen, priests, monks, even bishops, flocked to the royal standard. "A cry went through the mountains when the proud Moor drew near, And trooping to Rameiro came every Christian spear; The blesséd Saint Iago, they called upon his name:-- That day began our freedom, and wiped away our shame." The hosts of Cross and Crescent met in battle-shock near Logroño. Only nightfall saved the Christians from utter rout, but in those dark hours of their respite the apparition of Santiago bent above their sleeping king. "Fear not, Rameiro," said the august lips. "The enemy, master of the field, hems you in on every side, but God fights in your ranks." At sunrise, in the very moment when the Moslem host was bowed in prayer, the Christians, scandalized at the spectacle, charged in orthodox fury. Their onset was led by an unknown knight, gleaming in splendid panoply of war. Far in advance, his left hand waving a snowy banner stamped with a crimson cross, he spurred his fierce white horse full on the infidel army. His brandished sword "hurled lightning against the half-moon." At his every sweeping stroke, turbaned heads rolled off by scores to be trampled, as turbaned heads deserve, under the hoofs of that snorting steed. The Son of Thunder had found his function, which was nothing less than to inspirit the Reconquest. Henceforth he could always be counted on to lead a desperate assault, and "_Santiago y Cierra España!_" was the battle-cry of every hard-fought field. So late as 1212, at the crucial contest of Las Navas de Tolosa, the "Captain of the Spaniards" saved the day. Whatever may be thought of such bloody prowess on the part of Christ's disciple, the fisherman of Galilee, he could not have taken, in that stormy age, a surer course to make himself respected. All Europe sprang to do honor to a saint who could fight like that. Charlemagne, guided by the Milky Way, visited the shrine, if the famous old Codex Calixtinus may be believed, with its convincing print of the Apostle sitting upright in his coffin and pointing the great Karl to the starry trail. In process of time the Gran Capitan came bustling from Granada. The king of Jerusalem did not find the road too long, nor did the Pope of Rome count it too arduous. England sent her first royal Edward, and France more than one royal Louis. Counts and dukes, lords and barons, rode hundreds of miles to Compostela, at the head of feudal bands which sometimes clashed by the way. Saints of every clime and temper made the glorious pilgrimage,--Gregory, Bridget, Bernard, Francis of Assisi. To the shrine of St. James came the Cid in radiant youth to keep the vigil of arms and receive the honors of knighthood, and again, mounted on his peerless Bavieca, to give thanks for victory over the five Moorish kings. It was on this second journey that he succored the leper, inviting him, with heroic disdain of hygiene, to be his bedfellow "in a great couch with linen very clean and costly." [Illustration: DANCING THE SEVILLANA] Even in the ninth century such multitudes visited the sepulchre that a society of hidalgos was formed to guard the pilgrims from bandits along that savage route, serve them as money-changers in Compostela, and in all possible ways protect them from robbery and ill-usage. This brotherhood gave birth to the famous Order of Santiago, whose two vows were to defend the pilgrims and fight the Mussulmans. These red-cross knights were as devout as they were valiant, "lambs at the sound of the church-bells and lions at the call of the trumpet." Kings and popes gave liberally to aid their work. Roads were cut through Spain and France, even Italy and Germany, "to Santiago." Forests were cleared, morasses drained, bridges built, and rest-houses instituted, as San Marcos at Leon and the celebrated hostelry of Roncesvalles. Compostela had become a populous city, but a city of inns, hospitals, and all variety of conventual and religious establishments. Even to-day it can count nearly three hundred altars. In the ninth century the modest church of Alfonso II was replaced by an ornate edifice rich in treasures, but in the gloomy tenth century, when Christian energies were arrested by the dread expectation of the end of the world, the Moors overran Galicia and laid the holy city waste. The Moslem general, Almanzor, had meant to shatter the urn of Santiago, but when he entered Compostela with his triumphant troops, he found only one defender there, an aged monk sitting silent on the Apostle's tomb. The magnanimous Moor did not molest him, nor the ashes his feebleness guarded better than strength, but took abundant booty. When Almanzor marched to the south again, four thousand Galician captives bore on their shoulders the treasures of the Apostle, even the church-bells and sculptured doors, to adorn the mosque of Cordova. The fresh courage of the eleventh century began the great Romanesque cathedral of Santiago. Donations poured in from all over Europe. Pilgrims came bowed under the weight of marble and granite blocks for the fabric. Young and old, men and women, beggars and peasants, princes and prelates, had a hand in the building, cutting short their prayers to mix mortar and hew stone. Artists from far-off lands, who had come on pilgrimage, lingered for years, often for lifetimes, in Compostela, making beautiful the dwelling of the saint. The great epoch of Santiago was the twelfth century, when there succeeded to the bishopric the able and ambitious Diego Gelmirez, who resolved that Compostela should be recognized as the religious centre of Spain, and be joined with Jerusalem and Rome in a trinity of the supreme shrines of Christendom. He was a man of masterly resource, persistence, pluck. Not too scrupulous for success, he found all means good that made toward the accomplishment of his one splendid dream. The clergy of Santiago, who had hitherto borne but dubious repute, he subjected to instruction and to discipline, calling learned priests from France to tutor them, and sending his own, as they developed promise, to sojourn in foreign monasteries. He zealously promoted the work on the cathedral, rearing arches proud as his aspiration, and watch-towers strong as his will. He invested the sacred ceremonies, especially the ecclesiastical processions, with extraordinary pomp, so that the figure of Alfonso VI, conqueror of Toledo, advancing through the basilica in such a solemn progress, appeared less imposing than the bishop himself, crowned with white mitre, sceptred with ivory staff, and treading in his gold-embroidered sandals upon the broad stones that pave the church as if on an imperial palace floor. Gelmirez was indefatigable, too, in building up the city. Eager to swell the flood of pilgrimage, he founded in Compostela, already a cluster of shrines and hostelries, still more churches, inns, asylums, hospitals, together with convents, libraries, schools, and all other recognized citadels of culture. He fought pestilence and dirt, introducing an excellent water supply, and promoting, so far as he knew how, decent and sanitary living. He was even a patron of agriculture, bringing home from his foreign journeys, which took him as far as Rome, packets of new seed slipped in among parcels of jewels and no less precious budgets of saintly molars and knuckle-bones. But these missions abroad, having always for chief object the pressing of his petition upon the Holy See, involved costly presents to influential prelates, especially the red-capped cardinals. The revenue for such bribes he wrung from the Galician peasantry, who gave him a measure of hate with every measure of grain. Gelmirez had so many uses for money that no wonder his taxes cut down to the quick. The lavish offerings sent by sea to the shrine of Santiago, ruby-crusted crucifixes of pure gold, silver reliquaries sparkling with emeralds and jacinths, pontifical vestments of richest tissue and of rarest artistry, well-chased vessels of onyx, pearl, and jasper, all that constant influx of glistening tribute from the length and breadth of Christendom, had drawn Moorish pirates to the Galician waters. To guard the treasure-ships, repel the infidels, and, incidentally, return tit for tat by plundering their galleys, the warrior bishop equipped a formidable fleet, and kept it on patrol off the coast,--a strange development from the little fishing-boat whence James and John trailed nets in the lake of Galilee. The audacity of Gelmirez reached its height in his struggle with the Queen Regent, Urraca of unlovely memory, for the control of the child king, Alfonso VII. This boy was the grandson of Alfonso VI, "Emperor of Spain," who survived all his legitimate children except Urraca. The father of the little Alfonso, Count Raymond of Burgundy, was dead, and Urraca had taken a second husband, Alfonso the Battle-maker. The situation was complicated. The Battle-maker wore the crowns of Aragon and Navarre, Urraca was queen of Leon and Castile, while the child, by his grandfather's will, inherited the lordship of Galicia. The Bishop of Santiago, who baptized the baby, had strenuously opposed Urraca's second marriage. As that lady had, nevertheless, gone her own wilful way, setting at naught the bishop's remonstrance and inciting Galicia to revolt against his tyranny, Gelmirez had kidnapped the royal child, a puzzled little majesty of four summers, and solemnly crowned and anointed him before the High Altar of St. James, declaring himself the protector of the young sovereign. Urraca soon wearied of her Aragonese bridegroom, and, casting him off, took up arms to defend her territories against his invasion. The powerful bishop came to her aid with men and money, but exacted in exchange an oath of faithful friendship, which Urraca gave and broke and gave again. Meanwhile the popular hatred swelled so high against Gelmirez that an open insurrection, in which many of his own clergy took part, drove him and the Queen to seek refuge in one of the cathedral towers, while the rebels burned and pillaged in the church below. The bishop barely escaped with his life, fleeing in disguise from Compostela; but soon the baffled conspirators saw him at his post again, punishing, pardoning, rebuilding--as indomitable as St. James himself. The election of Diego's friend, Calixtus II, to the papacy, gave him his supreme opportunity. Money was the prime requisite, and Gelmirez, not for the first nor second time, borrowed of the Apostle, selling treasures from the sacristy. The sums so raised were carried to the Pope, across the bandit-peopled mountains, by a canon of Santiago masquerading as a beggar, and by a trusty group of particularly ragged pilgrims. This proof of ecclesiastical ripeness overcame all papal scruples, and Calixtus, despite the clamor of enemies and rivals, raised Santiago to the coveted archbishopric. The first half of his great purpose effected, Gelmirez strove with renewed energy to wrest from Toledo the primacy of Spain. He fortified Galicia, hurled his fleet against Moorish and English pirates, built himself an archiepiscopal palace worthy of his hard-won dignities, stole from Portugal the skeletons of four saints to enhance the potency of Santiago, and made much of the skull of the Apostle James the Less, which Urraca had presented in one of her fits of amity. But this time the reverend robber was not destined to success. The Archbishop of Toledo formed a powerful party against him, Calixtus died, even the king, whom Gelmirez had armed knight in the cathedral of Santiago and had crowned a second time at Leon, grew restive under the dictation of his old tutor. The smouldering hatred of Galicia again flamed out. The aged archbishop once more had to see his church polluted, its treasures plundered, its marvels of carved work, stained glass, and gold-threaded vestments spoiled and wasted by that senseless rabble which had twisted out from under his heavy foot. Faint and bleeding from a wound in his head, too white a head, for all its pride, to be battered with stones, Gelmirez had almost fallen a victim to the mob, when two of his canons snatched him back to the refuge of the High Altar, barring the iron-latticed doors of the _Capilla Major_ against those savage sheep of his pasture. The outrage was so flagrant that, for very shame, pope and king, though both had accepted the bribes of his enemies, responded to his appeal, and assisted him to resume that rigorous sway which lasted, all told, for something like forty years. Such was the man and such the process that made the shrine of Santiago the third in rank of mediæval Christendom. Under the rule of Gelmirez Compostela had become one of the principal cities of the Peninsula, a seat of arts and sciences where Spanish nobles were proud to build them palaces and to educate their sons. The mighty influx of pilgrims, which went on without abatement century after century, nearly twenty-five hundred licenses being granted, in the single year 1434, to cockle-hatted visitors from England alone, filled the place with business. Inn-keepers, physicians, money-changers, merchants were in flourishing estate, and a number of special industries developed. One street was taken up by booths for the sale of polished shells. Another bears still the name of the jet-workers, whose rosaries, crucifixes, stars, gourds, staffs, and amulets were in high demand. Souvenirs of Santiago, little crosses delicately cut and chased, mimic churches, towers, shrines gave employ to scores of artists in silver and mother-of-pearl. The enormous revenue from the sale of phials of healing oil and from the consecrated candles must needs go to the Apostle, but the cunning craftsmen who loaded their stalls with love-charms had a well-nigh equal patronage. The finished cathedral was consecrated in 1211, and in 1236 the royal saint, Fernando III, sent to Compostela a train of Mohammedan captives, bringing back on their shoulders the bells Almanzor had taken. These had been hung, inverted, in the beautiful mosque of Cordova to serve as lamps for the infidel worship, but at last St. James had his own again. Thus Santiago trampled on the Moors, and his ashes, or what had passed for his ashes, slept in peace, with nothing to do but work miracles on blind and crippled pilgrims, until, in 1589, an army of English heretics, led by the horrible Drake, landed in Galicia. These Lutheran dogs were not worthy of a miracle. The archbishop and his canons, with the enemy hammering on the gates of Compostela, hastily took up and reburied the three coffins of the original shrine, so secretly that they could not be found again. In 1879, however, a miscellany of brittle bits of bone was brought to light by a party of determined seekers, and these repulsive fragments, after scientific analysis conducted in an ecclesiastical spirit, were declared to be portions of three skeletons which might be ages old. Leo XIII clenched the matter by "authenticating" one of them, apparently chosen at random, as the body of Santiago. But although for us of the perverse sects, the contents of that magnificent silver casket, the centre of the Santiago faith, could arouse no thrill of worship, the Pilgrim City itself and its storied, strange cathedral were the most impressive sights of Spain. [Illustration: WITHIN THE CLOISTER] XXVI THE SON OF THUNDER "Thou shield of that faith which in Spain we revere, Thou scourge of each foeman who dares to draw near, Whom the Son of that God who the elements tames Called child of the thunder, immortal Saint James." --_Hymn to Santiago_, in George Borrow's translation. Fatigues of the journey and discomforts of our lodging melted from memory like shadows of the night when we found ourselves, on the morning of July twenty-fourth, before that rich, dark mass of fretted granite, a majestic church standing solitary in the midst of spreading _plazas_. These are surrounded by stately buildings, the archiepiscopal palace with its memories of Gelmirez, the royal hospital founded by Ferdinand and Isabella for the succor of weary pilgrims, ancient colleges with sculptured façades, marvellous old convents whose holy fathers were long since driven out by royal decree into hungry, homesick exile, and the columned city hall with its frontal relief of the battle of Clavijo and its crowning statue of St. James. The great, paved squares, the magnificent stairways and deeply recessed portals were aglow with all Galicia. Peasants in gala dress, bright as tropic birds, stood in deferential groups about the pilgrims, for there were actual pilgrims on the scene, men and women whose broad hats and round capes were sewn over with scallop-shells, and whose long staffs showed little gourds fastened to the upper end. They wore rosaries and crucifixes in profusion, and their habit was spangled with all manner of charms and amulets, especially the tinsel medals with their favorite device of St. James riding down the Moors. We bought at one of the stalls set up before the doors for sale of holy wares a memento of the famous old jet-work, a tiny black hand, warranted, if hung about the neck, to cure disorders of the eyes. We fell to chatting with a pilgrim who was shod in genuine sandal shoon. A large gourd was tied to his belt, the rim of his hat was turned up at one side and caught there with a rosy-tinted shell, and his long, black ringlets fell loose upon his shoulders, framing a romantic Dürer face. He talked with us in German, saying that he was of Wittemberg, and once a Lutheran, but had been converted to the true faith on a previous visit to Spain. Since then he had footed his penitential way to Jerusalem and other distant shrines. As his simple speech ran on, we seemed to see the mountains round about Santiago crossed by those converging streams of mediæval pilgrims, all dropping on their knees at the first glimpse of the cathedral towers. With that sight the fainting were refreshed, the lame ran, and jubilant songs of praise to Santiago rolled out in many languages upon the air. "Primus ex apostolis, Martir Jerusolinus, Jacobus egregio, Sacer est martirio." In those Ages of Faith all the gates of the city were choked with the incoming tide, the hostels and cure-houses overflowed, and the broad _plazas_ about the cathedral were filled with dense throngs of pilgrims, massed nation by nation, flying their national colors, singing their national hymns to the strangely blended music of their national instruments, and watching for the acolyte who summoned them, company by company, into the august presence-chamber of St. James. His shrine they approached only in posture of lowliest reverence. Even now, at the end of the nineteenth century, our first glance, as we entered the lofty, dim, and incense-perfumed nave, fell on a woman-pilgrim dragging herself painfully on her knees up the aisle toward the High Altar, and often falling prostrate to kiss the pavement with groans and tears. Mediæval pilgrims, when they had thus won their way to the entrance of the _Capilla Mayor_, and there received three light blows from a priestly rod in token of chastisement, were granted the due indulgences and, in turn, laid their offerings before the great white altar. Still there sits, in a niche above, the thirteenth-century image of St. James, a colossal figure wrought of red granite, with stiffly flowing vestments of elaborately figured gilt. His left hand grasps a silver staff, with gilded gourd atop, and his right, whose index finger points downward to the burial vault, holds a scroll inscribed, "Hic est corpus divi Jacobi Apostoli ac Hispaniarum Patroni." Once he wore a broad-brimmed hat all of pure gold, but this was melted down by Marshal Ney in the French invasion. At that time the sacred vessels were heaped like market produce into great ox-carts, until the cathedral had been plundered of ten hundredweight of treasure. It was "the end of the pilgrimage" to climb the steps behind this statue and kiss its resplendent silver cape, studded with cockle-shells and besprinkled with gems. But the pilgrims of the past had much more to see and worship,--the jewelled crown of the Apostle set upon the altar, his very hat and staff, the very axe that beheaded him, and other relics to which the attention of the modern tourist, at least, is not invited. Yet even we were conducted to the Romanesque crypt beneath the High Altar, where stands another altar of red marble, decorated by a relief of two peacocks drinking from a cup. This altar is surmounted by a bronze pedestal, which bears the sumptuous ark-shaped casket with its enshrined handfuls of dubious dust. Our latter-day pilgrims seemed well content with the measure of wealth and sanctity which Moorish sack and English piracy, French invasion and Carlist wars, had spared to the cathedral. In the matter of general relics, nevertheless, Santiago suffers by comparison with the neighbor cathedral of Oviedo, which proudly shows a silver-plated old reliquary, believed by the devout to have been brought in the earliest Christian times from Rome. This chest contains, in addition to the usual pieces of the true cross and thorns from the crown, such remarkable mementos as St. Peter's leathern wallet, crumbs left over from the Feeding of the Five Thousand, bits of roast fish and honeycomb from Emmaus, bread from the Last Supper, manna from the wilderness, a portion of Moses' rod and the mantle of Elijah. Oviedo possesses, too, that famous cross which the angels made for Alfonso II, and one of the six water-jars of Cana. But the relic chapel of Santiago makes up in quantity whatever it may lack in quality, holding bones, garments, hair-tresses, and like memorials of a veritable army of martyrs, even to what Ford disrespectfully calls "sundry parcels of the eleven thousand Virgins." Special stress is laid on a Calvary thorn which turns blood-red every Good Friday, and a drop, forever fresh, of the Madonna's milk. If pilgrims are not satisfied with these, they can walk out to Los Angeles, an adjacent village, whose church was built by the angels. Eccentric architects they were in choosing to connect their edifice with the cathedral of Santiago by an underground beam of pure gold, formerly one of the rafters in God's own house. We had speech of several pilgrims that first morning. One was a middle-aged, sun-browned, stubby little man, whom during the ensuing week we saw again and again in the cathedral, but never begging, with the most of the pilgrims, at the portals, nor taking his ease in the cloisters,--a social promenade where the laity came to gossip and the clergy to puff their cigarettes. This humble worshipper seemed to pass all the days of the festival in enraptured adoration, on his knees now before one shrine, now before another. We found him first facing the supreme architectural feature of the cathedral, that sublime and yet most lovely _Portico de la Gloria_. He was gazing up at its paradise of sculptured saints and angels, whose plumes and flowing robes still show traces of azure, rose, and gold, with an expression of naive ecstasy. He told us that he came from Astorga, and had been nine days on the way. He spent most of his time upon the road, he added, visiting especially the shrines of the Virgin. "Greatly it pleases me to worship God," he said, with sparkling eyes, and ran on eagerly, as long as we would listen, about the riches and splendors of different cathedrals, and especially the robes and jewels of the _Virgen del Pilar_. He seemed in his devout affection to make her wealth his own. One of the most touching effects of the scene was the childlike simplicity with which the poor of Galicia, coming from such vile hovels, felt themselves at home in the dwelling of their saint. Not even their sins marred their sense of welcome. In the cloisters we encountered an old woman in the pilgrim dress, her staff wound with gay ribbons, limping from her long jaunt. She told us frankly that she was "only a beggar" in her own village, and had come for the outing as well as to please the priest, who, objecting to certain misdemeanors which she had the discretion not to specify, had prescribed this excursion as penance. She was a lively old soul, and was amusing herself mightily with the Goya tapestries, and others, that adorned the cloisters in honor of the time. "You have a book and can read," she said, "and you will understand it all, but what can I understand? I can see that this is a queen, and she is very fine, and that those are butchers who are killing a fat pig. But we who are poor may understand little in this world except the love of God." Others of the pilgrims were village folk of Portugal, and, taken all together, these modern wearers of the shell were but a sorry handful as representing those noble multitudes who came, in ages past, to bow before the shrine. The fourteen doors of the cathedral then stood open night and day, and the grotesque lions leaning out over the lintels could boast that there was no tongue of Europe which their stone ears had not heard. Three open doors suffice in the feast days now, but with the new flood of faith that has set toward Lourdes, pilgrimages to Santiago, as to other Latin shrines, are beginning to revive. Mass was over at the late hour of our arrival, but nave and aisles, transepts and cloisters, hummed with greetings of friends, laughter of children, who sported unrebuked about those stately columns, and the admiring exclamations of strangers. We were often accosted in Spanish and in French and asked from what country we came, and if we "loved the beautiful church of the Apostle." When we were occasionally cornered, and driven in truthfulness to say that we were Yankees, our more intelligent interlocutors looked us over with roguish scrutiny, but increased rather than abated their courtesies. As for the peasants, their geography is safely limited. Noticing that our Spanish differed from theirs, they said we must be from Castile, or, at the most, from Portugal. At all events we were strangers to Santiago, and they merrily vied with one another in showing us about and giving us much graphic information not to be found in guide-books. Much of their lore appears to be of their own invention. The superb _Puerta de la Gloria_, wrought by a then famous architect sent from the king of Leon, but known to us to-day only as Master Mateo, was the fruit of twenty years' labor. This triple porch, which runs across the west end of the nave, being finally completed, Master Mateo seems to have symbolized the dedication of his service to the Apostle in a kneeling statue of himself, facing the east, with back to the richly sculptured pillar of the chief portal. The head of this figure is worn almost as round and expressionless as a stone ball by the caresses of generations of childish hands. The little girls whom we watched that morning as they patted and smoothed the much-enduring pate told us, kissing the marble eyes, that this was a statue of St. Lucia, which it certainly is not. In another moment these restless midgets were assaulting, with fluent phrases of insult, the carven faces of certain fantastic images which form the bases of the clustered columns. The children derisively thrust their feet down the yawning throats, kicked the grotesque ears and noses, and in general so maltreated their Gothic victims that we were moved to remonstrate. "But why should you abuse them? What are these creatures, to be punished so?" "_They are Jews_," hissed our little Christians with an emphasis that threw new light on the Dreyfus _affaire_. But an instant more, and these vivacious, capricious bits of Spanish womanhood were all absorbed in aiding a blind old peasant who had groped her way to the sacred Portico for its especial privilege of prayer. The central shaft, dividing into two the chief of the three doorways, represents the Tree of Jesse, the patriarchal figures half-enveloped in exquisitely sculptured foliage. The chiselled capital shows the Trinity, Dove and Son and Father, with adoring angels. Above sits a benignant St. James, whose throne is guarded by lions, and over all, in the central tympanum of the sublime doorway, is a colossal figure of our Lord, uplifting His wounded hands. About Him are grouped the four Evangelists, radiant with eternal youth, and eight angels bearing the instruments of the Passion, the pillar of the scourging, whips, the crown of thorns, the nails, the scroll, the sponge, the spear, the cross. Other angels burn incense before Him, and the archivolt above is wrought with an ecstatic multitude of elders, martyrs, and saints, so vivid after all these centuries that one can almost hear the blithe music of their harps. It is the Christ of Paradise, enthroned amid the blest, to whom His presence gives fulness of joy forevermore. Above the lesser doors on either side are figured Purgatory and Hell. The fresh and glowing beauty, so piquant and yet so spiritual, the truly celestial charm of this marvellous Portico which Street did not fear to call "one of the greatest glories of Christian art," was never, during this festal week, without its throng of reverent beholders, the most waiting their turn, like our old blind peasant, to fit thumb and finger into certain curious little hollows on the central shaft, and thus offer prayer which was sure of answer. Minute after minute for unbroken hours, the hands succeeded one another there,--old, knotted, toilworn hands, the small, brown hands of children, jewelled hands of delicate ladies, and often, as now, the groping hand of blindness, with childish fingers helping it to find those mystical depressions in the agate. Some of the bystanders told us that St. James had descended from his seat above the capital, and laid his hand against the column, leaving these traces, but more would have it that the Christ Himself had come down by night from the great tympanum to place His wounded hand upon the shaft. Street records that he observed several such petitioners, after removing the hand, spit into the mouths of the winged dragons that serve as base to the pillar; but that literally dare-devil form of amen must now have gone out of fashion, for we did not see it once. [Illustration: THE TRAMPLER OF THE MOORS] Toward noon we strolled out into the grand _plaza_ before the west façade and found it a multitudinous jam of expectant merrymakers. Even nuns were peeping down from a leaf-veiled balcony. We seemed to have been precipitated out of the Middle Ages into an exaggerated Fourth of July. All the city bells were pealing, rockets and Roman candles were sputtering, and grotesque fire-balloons, let off from a parapet of the cathedral, flourished bandy legs and "Sagasta noses" in the resigned old faces of the carven images. And then, amid the acclamations of all the small boys in the square, sallied forth the Santiago giants. These wickerwork monsters, eight all told, are supposed to represent worshippers from foreign lands. They go by couples, two being conventional pilgrims with "cockle-shell and sandal shoon"; two apparently Moors, with black complexions, feather crowns, and much barbaric finery; two nondescripts, possibly the French of feudal date; and two, the leaders and prime favorites, regular Punch caricatures of modern English tourists. John Bull is a stout old gentleman with gray side-whiskers, a vast expanse of broadcloth back, and a single eye-glass secured by a lavender ribbon. The British Matron, in a smart Dolly Varden frock, glares with a shocked expression from under flaxen puffs and an ostrich-feathered hat. The popular attitude of mind toward these absurdities is past all finding out. Not the children alone, but the entire assemblage greeted them with affectionate hilarity. The giants, propelled by men who walked inside them and grinned out on the world from a slit in the enormous waistbands, trundled about the square, followed by the antics of a rival group of dwarfs from the city hall, and then made the round of the principal streets, executing clumsy gambols before the public buildings. On the morning after, July twenty-fifth, the great day of the feast, anniversary of the Apostle's martyrdom, these same overgrown dolls played a prominent part in the solemn cathedral service. The Chapter passed in stately progress to the archbishop's palace to fetch his Eminence, and later to the ancient portals where the silver-workers once displayed their wares, to greet the Royal Delegate. At their head strutted this absurd array of giants. The High Mass was superb with orchestral music and the most sumptuous robes of the vestiary. The "King of Censers," the splendid _botafumeiro_ of fourteenth-century date, made so large, six feet high, with the view of purifying the cathedral air vitiated by the hordes of pilgrims who were wont to pass the night sleeping and praying on the holy pavements, flashed its majestic curves, a mighty fire bird, from roof to floor and from transept to transept. It is swung from the ceiling by an ingenious iron mechanism, and the leaping, roaring flames, as the huge censer sweeps with ever augmenting speed from vault to vault, tracing its path by a chain of perfumed wreaths, make the spectacle uniquely beautiful. Knights of Santiago, their white raiment marked by crimson sword and dagger, received from the Royal Delegate "a thousand crowns of gold," the annual state donation, instituted by Rameiro, to the patron saint. The Delegate, kneeling before the image of Santiago, prayed fervently that the Apostle would accept this offering of the regent, a queen no less devout than the famous mother of San Fernando, and would raise up Alfonso XIII to be another Fernando, winning back for Spain her ocean isles which the heretics had wrested away, even as Fernando restored to Compostela the cathedral doors and bell which the infidel Moors had stolen. His Eminence, who is said to have accumulated a fortune during his previous archbishopric in Cuba, in turn besought St. James to protect Catholic Spain against "those who invoke no right save brute force, and adore no deity except the golden calf." In most magnificent procession the silver casket was borne around the nave among the kneeling multitudes. And then, to crown these august ceremonies, forth trotted our friends, the giants, into the open space before the _Capilla Mayor_. Here the six subordinate boobies paused, grouping themselves in a ludicrous semicircle, while pompous John Bull and his ever scandalized British Matron went up into the Holy of Holies and danced, to the music of guitars and tambourines, in front of the High Altar. Every day of that festal week the cathedral services were attended by devout throngs, yet there was something blithe and social, well-nigh domestic, in the atmosphere of the scene even at the most impressive moments. Kneeling groups of peasant women caught the sunshine on their orange kerchiefs and scarlet-broidered shawls. Here a praying father would gather his little boy, sobbing with weariness, up against his breast; there a tired pilgrim woman slumbered in a corner, her broad hat with its cockle-shells lying on her knees. Rows of kneeling figures waited at the wooden confessionals which were thick set along both aisles and ambulatory. Several times we saw a priest asleep in the confessional, those who would pour out their hearts to him kneeling on in humble patience, not venturing to arouse the holy father. Young officers, leaning against the pillars, smiled upon a school of Spanish girls, who, guarded by veiled nuns, knelt far along the transept. Pilgrims, standing outside the door to gather alms, vied with one another in stories of their travels and the marvels they had seen. But at night, walking in the illuminated _alameda_, where thousands of Japanese lanterns and colored cups of flame made a fantastic fairyland, or dancing their country dances, singing their country songs, practising their country sports, and gazing with tireless delight at the fireworks in the spacious _Plaza de Alfonso Doce_, the worshippers gave themselves up to frankest merriment. Through the days, indeed, there was never any lack of noisy jollity. From dawn to dawn again cannon were booming, drums beating, bagpipes skirling, tambourines clattering, songs and cries resounding through the streets. Four patients in the hospital died the year before, we were told, from the direct effects of this continuous uproar. But the thunder height of the _fiesta_ is attained toward midnight on the twenty-fourth, the "Eve of Santiago," when rockets and fire-balloons are supplemented by such elaborate devices as the burning of "capricious trees" and the destruction of a Moorish façade built for the occasion out from the west front of the cathedral. At the first ignition of the powder there come such terrific crashes and reverberating detonations, such leaps and bursts of flame, that the peasant host sways back and the children scream. An Arabic doorway with ornate columns, flanked on either side by a wall of many arches and surmounted by a blood-red cross, dazzles out into overwhelming brilliancy, all in greens and purples, a glowing, scintillating, ever changing vision. Soon it is lustrous white and then, in perishing, sends up a swift succession of giant rockets. The façade itself is a very Alhambra of fret and arabesque. This, too, with thunder bursts reveals itself as a flame-colored, sky-colored, sea-colored miracle, which pales to gleaming silver and, while we read above it the resplendent words "The Patron of Spain," is blown to atoms as a symbol of Santiago's victory over the Moors. This makes an ideal Spanish holiday, but the cost, borne by the city, is heavy, there is distinct and increasing injury to the cathedral fabric, and all this jubilee for archaic victories over the Moslem seems to be mocked by the hard facts of to-day. The Santiago festivities, of which the half has not been told, closed on Thursday afternoon, July twenty-seventh, with a procession through the streets. We waited a weary while for it before the doors where the old jet-workers used to set their booths, amusing ourselves meantime by watching the house maids drawing water from the fountain in the square below. These sturdy Galicians were armed with long tin tubes which they dextrously applied to the spouting mouths of the fountain griffins, so directing the stream into the straight, iron-bound pails. Not far away the market women covered the flags with red and golden fruit. A saucy beggar-wench, with the blackest eyes in Spain, demanded alms, and when we had yielded up the usual toll of coppers, loudly prayed to Santiago to pardon us for not having given her more on this his holy festival. At last out sallied the band, followed by those inevitable giants, and amid mad ringing of bells and fizzing of invisible rockets, forth from the venerable portals issued standards, crosses, tapers, priests in white and gold, and platformed effigies of pilgrims, saints, and deities. Then came bishops, cardinals, and archbishop, ranks of military bearing tapers, the alcalde and his associates in the city government with antique escort of bedizened mace-bearers, a sparkling statue of St. James on horseback busily beheading his legions of Moors, a bodyguard of all the pilgrims in attendance on his saintship, and finally the _Virgen del Pilar_, at whose passing all the concourse fell upon their knees. Churches in the line of march had their own images decked and ready, waiting in the colonnaded porches to fall into the procession. The market women and the maids at the fountain threw kisses to the Christ Child, leaning in blue silk frock and white lace tucker against a cross of roses, but the boys waved their caps for St. Michael, debonair that he was with blowing crimson robe, real feather wings fluttering in the breeze, and his gold foot set on the greenest of dragons. The procession came home by way of the great west doors, opened only this once in the round year. The setting sun, bringing out all the carven beauty of that dark gray façade, glittered on the golden balls and crosses that tip the noble towers, and on the golden staff of St. James and the golden quill of St. John, where the two sons of thunder stand colossal in their lofty niches. A baby, in yellow kerchief and cherry skirt, toddling alone across the centre of the square, pointed with adoring little hand at the mounted image of Santiago, which halted at the foot of the grand stairway, his lifted sword a line of golden light, while the deep-voiced choir chanted his old triumphal hymn. John Bull and the British Matron, stationing themselves on either side as a guard of honor, stared at him with insular contempt. As the chant ceased, St. James chivalrously made way for the _Virgen del Pilar_, a slender figure of pure gold poised on an azure tabernacle, to mount the steps before him. The bells pealed out to welcome her as she neared the portals, and an ear-splitting explosion of a monster rocket, with a tempest-rain of sparks, announced the instant of her entrance beneath the chiselled arch. Behind her went the penitents, arduously climbing the long stone flights of that quadruple stairway upon their knees. These, too, were but shadows of those mediæval penitents who of old staggered after this procession, bowed under the weight of crosses, or scourging themselves until they fainted in their own trail of blood. Yet it is still strange and touching to see, long after the inner spaces of the cathedral are dim with evening, those kneeling figures making their painful progress about aisles and ambulatory, sobbing as they go, and falling forward on their faces to kiss the pavement that is bruising them. [Illustration: SANTIAGO CATHEDRAL] XXVII VIGO AND AWAY Hasta la Vista! Our plan for the summer included a return trip across Spain, _via_ Valladolid, Salamanca, and Saragossa to Barcelona and the Balearic Isles; but the bad food and worse lodging of Galicia, the blazing heat and the incessant, exhausting warfare against vermin, had begun to tell. That Spanish fever with which so many foreigners make too intimate acquaintance was at our doors, and we found ourselves forced at last to sacrifice enthusiasm to hygiene. The most eccentric train which it was ever my fortune to encounter shunted and switched us across country to Vigo in about the time it would have taken to make the journey donkeyback. Here we tarried for a week or so, gathering strength from the Atlantic breezes, and when, one sunny August day, a stately steamboat called for an hour at Vigo harbor on her way from Buenos Ayres to Southampton, we went up over the side. Our shock of astonishment at the cleanliness around us could not, however, divert our attention long from the receding shores of Spain, toward which one of us, at least, still felt a stubborn longing. They lay bright in the midday sunshine, those green uplands of Galicia, mysterious with that patient peasant life of which we had caught fleeting, baffling glimpses. Still we seemed to see the brown-legged women washing in the brook and spreading their coarse-spun, gay-bordered garments on the heather; children, with the faces of little Pats and little Biddies, tugging a bleating sheep across the stepping-stones, or boosting an indignant goat over the wall; lean pigs poking their noses out of the low, stone doorways, where babies slept on wisps of hay; girls in cream-colored kerchiefs, starred with gold, bearing loads of fragrant brush or corded fagots on their heads. As the evening should come on, and the sea-breeze stir the tassels of the maize, we knew how the fields would be dotted with impromptu groups of dancers, leaping higher and higher and waving their arms in ever wilder merriment,--a scene pastoral down to the pigs, and poetic up to those gushes of song that delight the listener. "I went to the meadow Day after day, To gather the blossoms Of April and May, And there was Mercedes, Always there, Sweetest white lily That breathes the air." "North-wind, North-wind, Strong as wine! Blow thou, North-wind, Comrade mine!" "The Virgin is spreading handkerchiefs On the rosemary to dry. The little birds are singing, And the brook is running by. "The Virgin washes handkerchiefs, And spreads them in the sun, But St. Joseph, out of mischief, Has stolen every one." It was only now and then that we had realized a touch of genuine fellowship with these Galician peasants. I remember a little thirteenth-century church, gray crosses topping its low gray towers, one of which was broken off as if a giant hand had snapped it. In the porch a white-headed woman, in a gold-edged blue kerchief and poppy-red skirt, was holding a dame-school. It took her all the morning session, she told us, to get the fifty faces washed, but in the afternoon the children learned to read and knit and play the choral games. She had ten cents a month for every child, when the parents were able to pay. From a convenient hollow in a pillar of Arabic tradition she proudly drew her library,--a shabby primer and a few loose leaves of a book of devotion. As we talked, the midgets grew so restless and inquisitive that she shook her long rod at them with a mighty show of fierceness, and shooed them out of the porch like so many chickens. Then she went on eagerly with the story of her life, telling how she was married at fifteen, how her husband went "to serve the king" in the second Carlist war, and never came back, and how her only daughter had borne nine children, of whom eight died in babyhood, "_angelitos al cielo_," having known on earth "only the day and the night." The last and youngest had been very ill with the fever, and the afflicted grandmother had promised that noble Roman maiden, the martyr saint of the little gray church, to go around the edifice seven times upon her knees, if only the child might live. The vow had been heard, as the presence of a thin-faced, wistful tot by the old woman's side attested, but so far only three of the seven circuits had been made. "It tires the knees much." But even with the words she knelt again, kissing the sacred threshold, and began the painful, heavy, shuffling journey around the church, while the baby, with wondering gray eyes, trotted beside her, clinging to the wrinkled hand. When at last, with puffs and groanings, the old dame had reached the carven doorway again, she rose wearily, rubbing her knees. "A sweet saint!" she said, "but _ay de mi!_ such gravel!" We ought, of course, to have been impressed in Galicia with its debasing ignorance and superstition, and so, to a certain extent, we were. We went to see a _romeria_, a pilgrimage to a hilltop shrine, on one of our last afternoons in Vigo, and found a double line of dirty, impudent beggars, stripped half naked, and displaying every sort of hideous deformity,--a line that reached all the way from the carriage-road up the rugged ascent to the crest. We had to run the gantlet, and it was like traversing a demoniac sculpture-gallery made up of human mockeries. We had to push our way, moreover, through scene after scene of vulgar barter in things divine, and when at last the summit was achieved, the shrine of the Virgin seemed robbed of its glory by the ugliness, vice, and misery it overlooked. Spain is mediæval, and the modern age can teach her much. But with all her physical foulness and mental folly, there still dwells in her that mediæval grace for which happier countries may be searched in vain. Yet Spain is far from unhappy. It is beautiful to see out of what scant allowance of that which we call well-being, may be evolved wisdom and joy, poetry and religion. Wearied as we two bookish travellers were with lectures and libraries, we rejoiced in this wild Galician lore that lives on the lips of the people. The written Spanish literature, like other Spanish arts, is of the richest, nor are its laurels limited to the dates of Cervantes and Calderon. The modern Spanish novel, for instance, as Mr. Howells so generously insists, all but leads the line. But Spain herself is poetry. What does one want of books in presence of her storied, haunted vistas,--warrior-trod Asturian crags, opalescent reaches of Castilian plain, orange-scented gardens of Andalusia? A circle of cultivated Spaniards is one of the most charming groups on earth, but Spaniards altogether innocent of formal education may be walking anthologies of old ballads, spicy quatrains, riddles, proverbs, fables, epigrams. The peasant quotes "Don Quixote" without knowing it; the donkey-boy is as lyric as Romeo; the devout shepherd tells a legend of the Madonna that is half the dream of his own lonely days among the hills. Where Spanish life is most stripped of material prosperity, it seems most to abound in suggestions of romance. This despised Galicia, the province of simpletons, is literary in its own way. The hovel has no bookshelf, but the children's ears drink in the grandmother's croon:-- "On a morning of St. John Fell a sailor into the sea. 'What wilt thou give me, sailor, sailor, If I rescue thee?' "'I will give thee all my ships, All my silver, every gem, All my gold,--yea, wife and daughters, I will give thee them.' "'What care I for masted ships, What care I for gold or gem? Keep thy wife and keep thy daughters, What care I for them? "'On the morning of St. John Thou art drowning in the sea. Promise me thy soul at dying, And I'll rescue thee.' "'I commend the sea to God, And my body to the sea, And my soul, Sweet Mother Mary, I commit to thee.'" And well it was for this bold mariner that he did not take up the Devil's offer, for everybody knows that those who have signed away their souls to the Devil turn black in the moment of dying, and are borne, black and horrible, to the sepulchre. In this northwestern corner of Spain are many mountain-songs as well as sea-songs. One of the sweetest tells how the blue-robed Virgin met a young shepherdess upon the hills and was so pleased with the maiden's courtesy that she straightway bore her thence to Paradise, not forgetting, this tender Mary of Bethlehem, to lead the flock safely back to the sheepfold. The love of the Galician peasantry for "Our Lady" blends childlike familiarity with impassioned devotion. "As I was telling my beads, While the dawn was red, The Virgin came to greet me With her arms outspread." Her rank in their affections is well suggested by another of the popular _coplas_. "In the porch of Bethlehem, Sun, Moon, and Star, The Virgin, St. Joseph, And the Christ Child are." With their saints these Spanish peasants seem almost on a household footing, not afraid of a jest because so sure of the love that underlies it. "St. John and Mary Magdalen Played hide and seek, the pair, Till St. John threw a shoe at her, Because she didn't play fair." Yet there is no lack of fear in this rustic religion. There is many a "shalt not" in the Galician decalogue. One must not try to count the stars, lest he come to have as many wrinkles as the number of stars he has counted. Never rock an empty cradle, for the next baby who sleeps in it will die. So often as you name the Devil in life, so often will he appear to you in the hour of death. If you hear another name him, call quickly, before the Devil has time to arrive, "Jesus is here." It is ill to dance alone, casting your shadow on the wall, because that is dancing with the Devil. But the Prince of Darkness is not the only supernatural being whom Galicians dread. There is a bleating demon who makes fun of them, cloudy giants who stir up thunderstorms, and are afraid only of St. Barbara, witches who cast the evil eye, but most of all the "souls in pain." For oftentimes the dead come back to earth for their purgatorial penance. You must never slam a door, nor close a window roughly, nor kick the smallest pebble from your path, because in door or stone or window may be a suffering soul. To see one is to die within the year. If you would not be haunted by your dead, kiss the shoes which the body wears to the burial. It is well to go early to bed, for at midnight all manner of evil beings prowl up and down the streets. Who has not heard of that unlucky woman, who, after spinning late and long, stepped to the window for a breath of air exactly at twelve o'clock? Far off across the open country she saw a strange procession of shining candles drawing nearer and nearer, although there were no hands to hold them and no sound of holy song. Straight toward her house came those uncanny lights, moving silently through the meadow mists, and halted beneath her window. Then the foremost one of all begged her to take it in and keep it carefully until the midnight following. Scarcely knowing what she did, she closed her fingers on the cold wax and, blowing out the flame, laid away the taper in a trunk, but when, at daybreak, after a sleepless night, she raised the lid, before her lay a corpse. Aghast, she fled to the priest, who lent her all the relics of the sacristy; but their united power only just availed to save her from the fury of the spirits when they returned at midnight to claim the taper, expecting, moreover, to seize upon the woman and "turn her to fire and ashes." Sometimes a poor soul is permitted to condense the slow ages of Purgatory into one hour of uttermost torment. Galicians tell how a young priest brought his serving-maid to sorrow and how, to escape the latter burning, she shut herself, one day when the priest was engaged in the ceremonial of High Mass, into the red-hot oven. On his return, he called her name and sought her high and low, and when, at last, he opened the oven door, out flew a white dove that soared, a purified and pardoned soul, into the blue of heaven. The science of this simple folk is not divorced from poetry and religion. The rainbow drinks, they say, in the sea and in the rivers. The Milky Way, the Road to Santiago, is trodden every night by pale, dim multitudes who failed to make that blessed pilgrimage, from which no one of us will be excused, in time of life. When the dust stirs in an empty house, good St. Ana is sweeping there. When babies look upward and laugh, they see the cherubs at play. Tuesday is the unlucky day in Spain, whereas children born on Friday receive the gift of second-sight, and those who enter the world on Good Friday are marked by a cross in the roof of the mouth and have the holy touch that cures diseases. It is a fortunate house beneath whose eaves the swallow builds, "For swallows on Mount Calvary Plucked tenderly away From the brows of Christ two thousand thorns, Such gracious birds are they." [Illustration: ST. JAMES] The Galicians, butt of all Spain for their dulness, are shrewd enough in fact. It is said that those arrant knaves, the gypsies, dare not pass through Galicia for fear of being cheated. Like other unlettered peasants, Gallegos whet their wits on rhyming riddles. "Who is the little pigeon, Black and white together, That speaks so well without a tongue And flies without a feather?" "A tree with twelve boughs and four nests on a bough, In each nest seven birdlings,--unriddle me now." In many of their proverbial sayings one gets the Spanish tang at its best. "A well-filled stomach praises God." "Why to Castile For your fortune go? A man's Castile Is under his hoe." And I fear if my comrade were to speak, in Spanish phrase, of our return to Galicia, she would bid St. James expect us "on Judgment Day in the afternoon." Works by Alice Morse Earle CHILD LIFE IN COLONIAL DAYS _Profusely Illustrated_ Crown 8vo. Cloth. Gilt top. $2.50 Commercial Advertiser: "Once more Mrs. Earle has drawn on her apparently inexhaustible store of colonial lore, and has produced another interesting book of the olden days.... Mrs. Earle's interesting style, the accuracy of her statements, and the attractive illustrations she always supplies for her books make the volume one to be highly prized." Buffalo Express: "Mrs. Alice Morse Earle performs a real historical service, and writes an interesting book. It is not a compilation from, or condensation of, previous books, but the fruit of personal and original investigation into the conditions of life in the American colonies." HOME LIFE IN COLONIAL DAYS Education: "Mrs. Earle has made a very careful study of the details of domestic life from the earliest days of the settlement of the country. The book is sumptuously illustrated, and every famed article, such as the spinning-wheel, the foot-stone, the brass knocker on the door, and the old-time cider mill, is here presented to the eye, and faithfully pictured in words. The volume is a fascinating one, and the vast army of admirers and students of the olden days will be grateful to the author for gathering together and putting into permanent form so much accurate information concerning the homes of our ancestors." Literature: "Mrs. Earle's fidelity in study and her patient research are evident on every page of this charming book, and her pleasantly colloquial style is frequently assisted by very beautiful illustrations, both of the houses of the colonists, from the primitive cave dug out of the hillside and made to answer for warmth and shelter, to the more comfortable log cabin, the farmstead with its adjacent buildings, and the stately mansion abiding to our own day." THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 66 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK AMONG ENGLISH HEDGEROWS By CLIFTON JOHNSON _With an Introduction by HAMILTON W. MABIE_ Illustrated. Cr. 8vo. Cloth extra. Gilt top. $2.25 "'Among English Hedgerows' is one of the most beautiful of illustrated books, containing, as it does, a great number of half-tone reproductions of Mr. Johnson's admirable photographs. "The author, as far as possible, lived the life of the people who figure in these pages, and we have delightful accounts of village characters, and glimpses of quaint old English homes. "Hamilton W. Mabie, who furnishes the introduction, well summarizes Mr. Johnson's merits as 'a friendly eye, a hearty sympathy, and a very intelligent camera, and that love of his field and of his subject which is the prime characteristic of the successful painter of rural life and country folk.'"--_Illustrated Buffalo Express._ ALONG FRENCH BYWAYS By CLIFTON JOHNSON Illustrated. Cr. 8vo. Cloth extra. Gilt top. $2.25 "A book of leisurely strolling through one of the most picturesque countries of Europe, enlivened with description and anecdote, and profusely illustrated.... Mr. Johnson is not only a delightful writer, but is one of the best landscape photographers of whom we have knowledge."--_Boston Transcript._ "This book shares the merits of Mr. Johnson's 'Among English Hedgerows': simplicity of theme and treatment, sympathy and love of nature."--_The Mail and Express._ "A book of strolling, a book of nature, a book of humble peasant life intermingled with the chance experiences of the narrator."--_The Worcester Spy._ THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 
44490	----	Every attempt has been made to replicate the original as printed. No attempt has been made to correct or normalize the spelling or anglicization of non-English words. Some typographical errors have been corrected; a list follows the text. Some illustrations have been moved from mid-paragraph for ease of reading. (etext transcriber's note) NORTHERN SPAIN _PAINTED AND DESCRIBED_ BY EDGAR T. A. WIGRAM [Illustration: colophon] LONDON ADAM & CHARLES BLACK 1906 "There is, Sir, a good deal of Spain which has not been perambulated. I would have you go thither." DR JOHNSON. "And so you travel on foot?" said Leon. "How romantic! How courageous!" * * * * * "Yes," returned the undergraduate, "it's rather nice than otherwise, when once you're used to it; only it's devilish difficult to get washed. I like the fresh air and these stars and things." "Aha!" said Leon, "Monsieur is an artist." "Oh, nonsense!" cried the Englishman. "A fellow may admire the stars and be anything he likes." R. L. STEVENSON. [Illustration: SEGÓVIA The Aqueduct.] TO W. A. W. SAEPE MECUM TEMPUS IN ULTIMUM DEDUCTO PREFACE It is ill gleaning for a necessitous author when Ford and Borrow have been before him in the field, and I may not attempt to justify the appearance of these pages by the pretence that I have any fresh story to tell. Yet, if my theme be old, it is at least still unhackneyed. The pioneers have done their work with unapproachable thoroughness, but the rank and file of the travelling public are following but slackly in their train. Year after year our horde of pleasure-seekers are marshalled by companies for the invasion of Europe: yet it would seem that there are but few in the total who have any real inkling of how to play the game. Some seem to migrate by instinct, and to make themselves miserable in the process. These ought to be restrained by their families, or compelled to hire substitutes in their stead. Others can indeed relish a flitting; but cannot find it in their hearts to divorce themselves from their dinner-table and their toilet-battery, their newspaper, their small-talk and their golf. To them all petty annoyances and inconveniences assume disproportionate dimensions, and they are well advised in checking their _razzias_ at San Sebástien, Pau, or Biarritz. But, to the elect, the very root of the pleasure of travel lies in the fact that their ordinary habits may be frankly laid aside. It is a mild method of "going _Fanti_" which rejoices their primitive instincts: and they will find both the land and the people just temperately primitive in Spain. Many of us have felt the fascination of Italy. But those who have "heard the East a-calling" tell us that her call is stronger still;--and Spain is the echo of the East. "Lofty and sour to them that love her not, but to those men that seek her sweet as summer." Even Italy, with all its charm, tastes flat to a Spanish enthusiast. He craves no other nor no better land. * * * * * It has been said of Spain, that none who have not been there are particularly desirous of going, and none who have been there once can refrain from going again. The author has not found himself exempt from this common fatality; and his notes and sketches, as embodied in this volume, are the fruit of four successive bicycle tours, undertaken sometimes alone, and sometimes in company with a kindred spirit. Of their shortcomings he believes that no one can be so conscious as himself. But in the hope that they may prove of interest to sympathisers he ventures to expose them to the public gaze. NOTE ALL Spanish names ending in vowels are pronounced with the stress on the penultimate; and those ending in consonants with the stress on the final syllable. Any exception is indicated by an accent. CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE THE NORTH COAST OF CASTILE 1 CHAPTER II COVADONGA AND EASTERN ASTÚRIAS 24 CHAPTER III ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS TO LEON 43 CHAPTER IV THE PILGRIM ROAD 64 CHAPTER V THE CIRCUIT OF GALÍCIA 89 CHAPTER VI WESTERN ASTÚRIAS 113 CHAPTER VII BENAVENTE, ZAMORA, AND TORO 132 CHAPTER VIII SALAMANCA 152 CHAPTER IX BÉJAR, ÁVILA, AND ESCORIAL 171 CHAPTER X TOLEDO 192 CHAPTER XI A RAID INTO ESTREMADURA 215 CHAPTER XII SEGÓVIA 237 CHAPTER XIII BÚRGOS 256 CHAPTER XIV ACROSS NAVARRE 278 INDEX 301 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Segóvia. The Aqueduct _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE 2. Castro Urdiáles. The Bilbao Coastline 6 3. Castro Urdiáles. The Harbour 10 4. Santoña 12 5. San Vicente de la Barquera 20 6. The Deva Gorge. La Hérmida 22 7. The Deva Gorge. Urdon 26 8. Cángas de Onís. The Bridge over the Sella 32 9. The Sella Valley. Below Arrióndas 38 10. Pasana. An Asturian Mountain Village 40 11. Llánes. The Harbour 42 12. Leon. An Old Palace Doorway 50 13. Leon. From the Pajáres Road 58 14. Leon. Church of San Isidoro 60 15. Leon. The Market Place, and Casa del Ayuntamiento 62 16. Astorga. From the South-east 68 17. The Vierzo. From Ponferrada, looking towards the Pass of Piedrafita 72 18. Lugo. The Santiago Gate 78 19. Lugo. Fuente de San Vicente 80 20. Santiago de Compostela. From the Lugo Road 82 21. Santiago de Compostela. The Cathedral from the North-east 86 22. Orense. The Bridge over the Miño 92 23. Tuy and Valencia. The Frontier Towns on the Miño 96 24. Vigo Bay. The Inner Harbour, looking out towards the Sea 100 25. Nuestra Señora de la Esclavitud 104 26. Betánzos. A Colonnaded Calle 108 27. The Masma Valley. Near Mondoñedo 110 28. Rivadeo. An Approach to the Harbour 114 29. The Návia Valley 116 30. Cudillero. The Harbour 120 31. Oviedo. A Street near the Cathedral 124 32. In the Pass of Pajáres. Near Pola de Gordon 130 33. Benavente. From above the Bridge of Castro Gonzalo 134 34. Zamora. From the banks of the Duero 140 35. Zamora. Church of Sta Maria de la Horta 144 36. A Spanish Patio 148 37. Toro. From the banks of the Duero 150 38. Salamanca. Arcades in the Plaza de la Verdura 156 39. Salamanca. Church of San Martin 160 40. Salamanca. From the left bank of the Tormes 164 41. Salamanca. The Puerta del Rio, with the Cathedral Tower 168 42. Béjar. An Approach to the Town 174 43. Béjar. A Corner in the Market-place 176 44. Ávila. From the North-west 180 45. Ávila. A Posada Patio 184 46. Escorial. From the East 188 47. Toledo. Bridge of Alcántara, from the Illescas Road 194 48. Toledo. The Bridge of Alcántara 198 49. Toledo. Puerta del Sol 200 50. Toledo. Calle del Comércio, with the Cathedral Tower 204 51. Toledo. The Gorge of the Tagus 208 52. Talavera de la Reina. From the banks of the Tagus 212 53. Plaséncia. Puente San Lazaro 216 54. Plaséncia. The Town Walls and Cathedral 218 55. Cáceres. Within the old Town Walls 222 56. Cáceres. Calle de la Cuesta de Aldana 226 57. Mérida. "Los Milagros," the ruins of the Great Aqueduct 228 58. Alcántara 232 59. Segóvia. Church of San Miguel 238 60. Segóvia. Arco San Estéban 244 61. Segóvia. The Alcázar 248 62. Segóvia. Arco Santiago 252 63. Segóvia. Church of San Estéban 254 64. Búrgos. Arco San Martin 260 65. Dueñas 264 66. Búrgos. Hospital del Rey 266 67. Búrgos. Arco Sta Maria 268 68. Búrgos. Patio of the Casa de Miranda 272 69. Búrgos. From the East 276 70. The Gorge of Pancorvo 282 71. La Rioja Alavesa. Looking Northwards across the Ebro 284 72. Miranda del Ebro. A Corner in the Town 288 73. Pamplona. From the Road to the Frontier 290 74. Olite. The Castle 292 75. Pamplona. A Patio near the Cathedral 296 _Map at end of Volume._ _The design of the Cover is adapted from the façade of the Casa de las Conchas (House of the Shells) at Salamanca._ _The device on the Title Page is taken from a wrought-iron knocker of the Cathedral at Toledo._ _The illustrations in this volume have been engraved and printed in England by Messrs Carl Hentschel, Ltd._ NORTHERN SPAIN CHAPTER I THE NORTH COAST OF CASTILE DEAR E.,--Can you manage to get off some time in May and go bicycling with me in Norway? Blank's have offered me a passage to Bergen. * * * * * DEAR W.,--I can manage your date, but don't quite feel drawn to your country. Norway is all mountains, and I want a little archæology. I had been thinking of Provence. * * * * * DEAR E.,--No objection to Provence. Blank's will give us a passage in one of their colliers to Bilbao, and we can ride in across the Pyrenees. You must allow me some mountains. * * * * * DEAR W.,--It's awfully good of Blank's. But once at Bilbao, why not stick to Spain? Toledo is no further than Toulouse, and Cantabria as mountainous as the Pyrenees. * * * * * DEAR E.,--Very good! Spain first; and Provence second string if necessary. There's a boat sailing about May 20th. * * * * * The casting vote was indisputably the collier's; but our plans were not quite so inconsequent as this conclusion might lead one to infer. Some nebulous notion of a Spanish expedition had been miraging itself before our eyes for several seasons previously; and it is the nature of such nebulous notions to materialise accidentally at the last. Hitherto we had been awed by the drawbacks; for Spain had been pictured to us as positively alive with bugbears. Travelling was difficult--nay, even dangerous; the people were Anglophobists, the country a desert, and the cities dens of pestilence. The roads were unridable, and the heat unbearable. We should be eaten of fleas, and choked with garlic; and to crown all our other tribulations, we should have to learn a new and unknown tongue. The knight who plunged into the lake of pitch had hardly a more inviting prospect; and the fairy palaces beneath it did not yield him an ampler reward. Provence still waits unvisited; neither have we now any immediate intention of going there. We still keep going to Spain. * * * * * The owners said she would sail on Thursday; but Wednesday brought down the captain in a highly energetic condition, and confident of catching the midnight tide. We had to make a bolt for the docks by the last train of the evening, and groped our way to the _Amadeo_ through a haze of coal dust, only to be met by the intelligence that the captain had gone home to bed! There was nothing for it but to camp in the cabin, where night was made constantly hideous by the coal roaring into the after-hold: and next morning found us out in the middle of the dock, sitting on our tail with our bows pointing to heaven. The coal for the fore-hold had failed us, and a luckier rival had ousted us from our berth at the staithes. The morning was occupied in resolving a general tangle; for every ship in the basin seemed to fall foul of all the others in turn. Soon a second tide was lost. And when we regained the staithes there came another break in our procession of coal trucks. "Oh! the little cargo boats that clear with _every_ tide!" We flung ashore in despair. But a more hopeful sight saluted us when we returned. The _Amadeo_ lay out by the dock gates, long and low, with her main deck but eighteen inches above the water. At last she was fully laden; and we sailed on the Friday morn. So long as we remained in Tyne Dock we had not judged ourselves conspicuously dirty; but we showed as a crying scandal when out in the clean blue sea. The mate even bewailed the calm weather. If we "took it green" once we should be clean immediately. But such heroic methods of labour-saving we very contentedly excused. Meanwhile we made leisurely progress, for the _Amadeo_ was no greyhound. "She never yet caught anything with steam in her" according to her despondent engineer. Saturday's sun set behind Dover--the great cliffs looming darkly over us, and the town lights showing like pin-holes pricked through the blackness to the glowing sky beyond. Sunday showed us the grim teeth of the Caskets; and the weird natural dolmens of Ushant were passed the following day. But Providence still continued to temper the wind to that very shorn lamb the _Amadeo_, and the dreaded Bay was as smooth as a sheet of rippled glass. About Wednesday evening the captain began to wax very bitter concerning Spanish lighthouses, and we went below better satisfied that deep water should last us till dawn! But the first rays of light showed us a long line of blue peaks high on the horizon to the southward, and within an hour our voyage was over. "In we came--and time enough--'cross Bilbao bar." It was from the sea that I had my first view of Genoa and the Italian Riviera, and the seaward approach to Bilbao deserves no meaner comparison than this. The romantic hills reared themselves from the water's edge, unwinding their veils at the touch of the early sunshine; and the sparkling villages clinging to the cliffs round the shell-shaped harbour of Portugalete made a picture which might have been borrowed from Lugano or Lucerne. A tumult of tossing peaks was piled in disorder to the eastward, above the smoke of the iron furnaces in the winding valley of the Nervion; and far away to the westward, ridge upon ridge fell sloping down into the blue waters of the Atlantic; sometimes breaking off so sheer at the finish that the ore ships could actually moor alongside to load. The beauty of the Spanish coast is a favourite theme of visitors to San Sebástien, but they know not a tithe of the truth which they are so eager to proclaim. The whole Atlantic littoral from the Bidassoa to the Miño is teeming with equal attractions, and the immediate vicinity of Bilbao is a stretch which is second to none. Neither were our first impressions of the people less favourable than those of the country. And that though they were formed in the Custom House, which is scarcely a promising beat. These hospitable officials were if anything over-considerate; for we were only anxious to pay and have done with it, while they were all intent on excusing us, if they could find any justification under the code. At last, however, we were allowed to purchase our freedom; fled to our machines amid a haze of reciprocal compliments; and a few minutes later were drifting along the road to the westward, with no more care for the morrow than flotsam on uncharted seas. [Illustration: CASTRO URDIÁLES The Bilbao Coastline.] The busy industries of Bilbao have unfortunately gone some way towards marring its lovely situation. Its valley is choked with smoky factories; and its mountains are one vast red scar from base to summit, the entire face having been flayed away for ironstone, and ladled out into the ore ships along the aërial railways to feed the blast furnaces of Sheffield and Middlesborough. Our uglier trades seem to take malicious delight in ruining the prettiest landscapes. But their dominion is but for a season, and the land will enjoy its Sabbaths in the end. We only scratch Nature skin-deep, and her wealds will devour our black countries. "After a thousand years," say the Spaniards, "the river returns to his bed." Beyond the blight of the quarries, the scenery is of the type of our own Welsh highlands--steep, rocky ridges and gullies, thickly clothed with bracken and scrub oak. Even the railway has a most charming ramble, hunting its own tail up and down the long, steep, corkscrew gradients of the inland valleys. But the road clambers along the deeply fissured coast line, and no free agent will elect to follow the rail. Our first stage, however, was but a short one, for it was evening when we quitted Bilbao. Castro Urdiales gaped for us with its cavernous little _calle_, and we dived in to seek quarters for the night. Surely a town so close to Bilbao might have been expected to be inured to visitors! Yet our modest progress through the streets of Castro created as great a sensation as though we had been "Corsica" Boswell in his costume of scarlet and gold. The children formed up in procession behind us. Their elders turned out to take stock of us from the balconies. And a voluble old pilot (whose knowledge of English was about equal to our Spanish) came bustling out of a café to conduct us to the primitive little inn. It is a fortunate thing that a traveller's needs can be guessed without much vocabulary; for our first task was to order our supper, and mistakes may be serious when you have to eat the result. The enterprise, however, is not so hazardous as one imagines. Like Sancho Panza, you may ask for what you will;--but what you get is "the pair of cow heels dressed with chick peas, onions and bacon which are just now done to a turn." After all, we did not fare badly; mine hostess was a damsel of resources, and our old pilot prompted us vigorously from the rear. It was he who suggested the "lamp-post"--a threat at which we jibbed somewhat visibly. But the girl plunged promptly into the kitchen behind her and returned displaying the "lamp-post"--which was a lobster. As to the three weird courses which followed him, our conclusions were not equally positive. They appeared in cryptic disguises;--_carne_, "meat" which defied identification. There is no declaration of origin in most of the dishes of Spain. Yet the traveller need not be nervous. He can generally trust Maritornes. Let him eat what is set before him, asking no questions for conscience sake. One might travel a long way along any coast line before finding a prettier haven than Castro Urdiales. The nucleus of the town, with the church and castle, is perched upon a rocky promontory, whose cliffs drop sheer into the deep water, and whose outlying pinnacles have been linked up to the mainland by irregular arches so as to form natural wharves. A little harbour for fishing-craft nestles under the cliff to the eastward; looking back along the coast to Bilbao, and the bold conical hill with the watch-tower (reminiscent of Barbary pirates), which guards the entrance to the harbour of Portugalete. Yet all this fair exterior hides a hideous secret, and at last we surprised it unaware. We were well acquainted with sardines in England, and it had not escaped our cognisance that sardines were commonly bereft of heads. Had it ever occurred to us that all those heads were somewhere? Well, the dreadful truth must be acknowledged; they were here. Yes, here at Castro Urdiales--a mountain of gibbous eyes and a smell to poison the heavens--awaiting the kindly wave which would eventually garner them in from the ledge upon which they were stewing, and deliver them over to the "lamp-posts" in the crevices of the rock below. Castro Urdiales is a city of ambitions. It is keeping pace with the era, and in 1901 its most antiquated alley had been already dignified by the title of "Twentieth Century Street." Since then it has developed a ponderous steel bridge in the harbour, and thrown out a massive concrete break-water from the end of the modest jetty. But its progress is not to be deprecated where it does not interfere with its beauty; and now a comfortable _Fonda_ has supplanted the humble _Venta_ which was our first lodging on Spanish soil. [Illustration: CASTRO URDIÁLES The Harbour.] Our road next day still followed the mountainous coast line, and we descended at noon upon the roofs of Laredo, a delightful little town, climbing up the steep hillside above its tiny anchorage, and facing the great mass of Santoña, the "Gibraltar of the North." This imposing fortress lies across the mouth of an immense land-locked lagoon, and in size, shape, and situation is almost a replica of the famous Rock. It has no such strategical value, but is probably equally impregnable; for it was the only northern city where the French flag was still waving at the close of that "War of Liberation" which we style the Peninsular War. At Laredo we dined, and as Spanish meals are the subject of much needless apprehension, perhaps we may pause to say a word in their defence before proceeding further upon our way. We begin with _Desayuno_ or _petit déjeuner_, and here, in a genuinely Spanish _ménage_, chocolate will generally take the place of the Frenchman's _café au lait_. It is served in tiny cups, very hot and very thick. It is really a substitute for butter, and you eat it by dipping your bread in it, washing it down with a glass of cold water, which you are expected to "sugar to taste." The peasants, however, eschew this fashion as new-fangled, and content themselves with a draught of wine or a thimbleful of "the craythur." This is not recommended by the faculty, but travellers have sometimes to be content. [Illustration: SANTONA] Dinner, or _Comida_, is served about mid-day; the nominal time varies, but it is always half an hour late. In many districts, however, this title is transferred to the supper, and then the luncheon is known as _Almuerzo_--_Déjeuner_. It is a very substantial banquet of some half-dozen courses, inaugurated (in strictly classical fashion) by an egg. Next comes a dish of haricot beans, or chick peas, or rice garnished with _pimientos_, closely pursued by another containing boiled meat, bacon, and sausages, all which you may tackle separately or simultaneously, according to your greatness of soul. Then comes a stew--the celebrated _Olla Podrida_; and then (to the great astonishment of the stranger) the belated fish. Fish seems to have methods of penetrating to all spots which are accessible by railway. Hake is the general stand-by, but in the mountains you get most excellent little trout. The solid portion of the meal is concluded by a "biftek" and salad, but there is still an appendix in case you are not satisfied yet. On Sundays, in superior _Fondas_ you will get caramel pudding, and always and everywhere cheese, accompanied by a sort of quince jelly known as _membrillo_, a very excellent institution indeed. Finally (again classically) comes the fruit; but this is usually rather inferior, considering how very cheap and excellent it is in the markets outside. Wine is, of course, supplied _ad lib._ to every diner, and water in porous earthenware bottles which evaporation keeps deliciously cool. Olives are eaten steadily at all intervals; and if you have long to wait between courses, you fill up the intervals with cigarettes! The evening meal--_cena_--is generally very similar to the mid-day, except that soup takes the place of the egg. The cooking is by no means deserving of all the strictures that have been showered upon it; for most nations know how to cook their own dishes, and only come seriously to grief when they try to imitate French. The dreaded garlic is used but sparingly; oil is a much more dominating feature. But then oil has a double debt to pay, because Spaniards make no butter. At all events the food is plentiful, and "St Bernard's sauce" will cover a multitude of deficiencies; for appetite is a blessing that is seldom lacking to the traveller in Spain! After dinner, the Café. And a Spanish café is a most noteworthy assemblage. It is comparatively empty in the evenings, for the Spaniard's homing instincts are much more strongly developed than the Frenchman's, and he seldom quits his house and his family circle after dark. But in the early afternoon it is thronged to repletion with all sorts and conditions of customers, from the general in command of the garrison to the ragged vine-dresser and muleteer. Here they sit through the long, sultry hours of siesta-tide in a roomful of shuttered twilight, chattering like a mill-wheel in flood-time, sipping their coffee and aniseed brandy,[1] and steadily consuming cigarettes. It often seems mild dissipation for such very truculent-looking desperadoes. Fancy an English navvy regaling his carnal appetites on black coffee and dominoes! Not but that dominoes (as played in a Spanish café) is an exciting, even an athletic, pastime. It entails alarming vociferation; and every piece that you play must be slammed down on the marble table top with all the force at your command. The domino volleys echo through the café like musketry on a field-day on Salisbury Plain, and if you feel at all dubious as to your direction when you chance to be seeking that edifice, you may readily succeed in locating it by listening in the street for the din. But the heat of the day is now passing, and the traveller must answer the call. His road is at least more level than hitherto; for the coast hills westward of Laredo are gradually losing their mountainous character, and over their heads to the southward we begin to catch glimpses of the great rock walls of the Cantabrian Sierras, which grow ever higher and grander as we near the Asturian march. The environs of Santander are again disfigured by quarrying; and the soil, where disturbed, is of a deep red ferruginous hue. Truly "a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass"; though "rivers and fountains of water" are not quite so common as we might desire. Santander itself, however, we will avoid altogether. Like Bilbao, it is quite a modern city; and the direct road through the mountain glens behind it brings us down to the sea again at Torrelavega by a very much pleasanter line. Meanwhile we pursued our career to an intermittent orchestral accompaniment--a tune in two keys, like M'Alpin's drone and small pipes, but far more powerful and piercing than the most brazen-lunged piper could blow. Occasionally we met the musician. He is only an ordinary ox-cart--a pair of wheels, a pole, and a plank or two, actuated by a pair of sleepy kine. In Galicia the yoke is fastened round the necks of the oxen; but more generally it is bound with thongs to their horns and finished off with a bonnet of goat-skin, or in Asturias with a fleecy busby of most imposing size. The wheels have often only a single spoke, or sometimes three arranged in the form of the letter H. Altogether it is probably the simplest, slowest, and most vociferous affair on wheels. For the amount of lamentation that can be extracted from one dry axle is a thing that is scarcely credible even when it is heard. The natives encourage it. They have one theory that it pleases the oxen, and another (far more probable) that it scares the Fiend. But at any rate it has no apparent effect upon the Spanish teamster, who lounges along in front waving his goad like a drum-major's baton; or sleeps--yes, sleeps--on the summit of his yelling load. Verily the man who first invented sleep must have been a waggoner! This evening, as we were crossing the ridge between two parallel valleys, our ears were saluted by the unmistakable long-drawn scream of an impatient locomotive. Our map showed no railway, however; and we were just beginning to plume ourselves on an important geographical discovery, when we caught sight of a single ox-cart--200 feet below and half a mile away! The hill sloped away straight and smooth before us, and we fled! We felt no shame at the time; yet perhaps it was rather faint-hearted to shirk the chance of a personal interview with the most musical axle in the world. But the bicyclist has one grievance in Spain which is not so easily avoided as ox-carts, and it is about the end of the second day that the iron of it begins to enter his soul. Thenceforward for ever he cherishes a deadly and undying rancour against the Spanish dogs. We had been partly prepared for the infliction beforehand. The captain had mentioned them, and had talked of ammonia pistols; but we spurned the suggestion with humane horror. We knew quite well that all foreign dogs were brutes, but we were confident in our own benignity and scornful of "methods of barbarism." And in these noble sentiments we persisted--for about a day and a half. Next morning we were awakened out of our beauty sleep by the yellings of some miserable cur in the _Fonda patio_;--"Hurrah! there's a dog getting hurt," was our simultaneous comment; and ere we recrossed the frontier we had registered a grim resolve that next time we would bring revolvers, and strew our path with carcases from Fuenterrabia to Cadiz. So much for the deterioration of moral fibre under the strain of Spanish dog. Well, we are not the first (nor the last) whose amiability has been ruined by "dogs barking at us as we pass by"; and when every brute in the countryside, from the toy mongrel to the wolf-hound as big as an ass-colt, dances yelling and snapping at your heels for half a mile together, it is not entirely surprising that patience should wear thin. Of course there are stones. The Guadarrama district in particular produces a beautiful white quartzose,--hard and heavy, with many sharp angles,--an excellent article to throw at a dog. But what is a pocketful among so many? Besides, you often miss them, and never hurt them enough. Truly I could feel no sure confidence in anything short of a loaded revolver. But only a very even-tempered man could trust himself with that _ultima ratio_ within reach of his fingers; and I cherish a rooted objection to "going heeled" in a civilised land. Perhaps a lion-tamer's whip with a loaded butt and a bullet at the end of the lash may prove effective enough to compromise upon. Meanwhile there is some silver lining to the cloud. There are already some convertites among the dogs of Spain. The majority pour themselves upon the cyclist, clamorous and open-mouthed, like the demons in Malebolge; but a remnant clap their tails between their legs and make a bee-line for the horizon. We humbly hope that our own modest assiduity will have effected a small but perceptible increase in the latter class. Beyond Torrelavega there is again a parting of roadways. One passes along the coast by Santillana, the birthplace of Gil Blas; and the other through Cabezon, threading the mountain glens. They reunite at San Vicente de la Barquera, another minor seaport of Cantabria, less progressive than Castro, but quite as attractive after its style. The town lies at the extremity of a tongue of land between two wide estuaries. It is the meeting-place of the two long bridges which cross them, and its precipitous acropolis and arcaded market-place afford endless studies to the lover of the picturesque. San Vicente had got a hideous secret of its own as well as Castro, only at San Vicente it was hardly a secret--in fact, they were rather booming it as a show. An old sunken coasting vessel had recently been recovered and beached in the estuary, and its hold was positively teeming with lobsters, like Sir Thomas Ingoldsby's pockets with eels. Truly it was a gruesome sight; and a novelist in search of an appropriate ending for a really desperate villain could hardly do better than have him pincered to death in that crawly inferno by the black clanking monsters which inhabited it! The Cantabrian Sierras, already sufficiently majestic, now reach their culmination in the acknowledged monarchs of the range--the Picos de Europa, the landmark of all the old navigators who once steered their Mexican argosies into Gijon or Santander. This vast mass of snow-crowned peaks forms a most imposing spectacle. They are great "cloud compellers," and are seldom entirely clear. But they are sometimes seen unveiled in the calm of the early morning, an apparently impassable barrier filling half the horizon towards the south. [Illustration: SAN VICENTE DE LA BARQUERA] Yet the road which we have taken to guide us aims right at the very heart of them, and at the little village of Unquera it bears up square to the left. A copious sea-green river (officially known as the Tina Mayor, but invariably styled the Deva by the inhabitants) comes hurrying down at this point from the mountains, and charges the great ridge of limestone which edges the coast-line like a natural sea-wall. We look in vain for the outlet: the barrier seems absolutely unbroken. But a stream that has pierced the Picos recks little of minor obstacles, and the waves are booming to welcome it but half a mile beyond. Turning our backs on the sea, we enter a noble valley, walled in by crags of Alpine grandeur, and populated by families of Imperial eagles swinging to and fro their eyries, high amid the cornices of rock; but the pastures at the foot of the steeps are everywhere level and placid, and from Unquera up to Abándames can scarcely be called an ascent. There is a waters-meet just above Abándames, and the traveller as he approaches it begins to experience considerable misgivings concerning the future of his road. If it will but condescend to follow the valley, there seems just a chance that it may emerge as a staircase; but when it bears resolutely to the left to knock its head against the precipices of the Picos, he resignedly concludes that now there's nothing for it but a lift. A deep notch in the crags lets out the river, and here the road slips in. There seems every prospect that it will be promptly confronted by a precipice and a waterfall; but beyond the first notch is a second, and beyond the second a third. At every turn the passage grows narrower and deeper, and the way is never clear before us for more than a few score yards. Yet the unhoped-for outlet is invariably forthcoming, and at last we cease to marvel at the unfailing surprise. It is the great cañon of the Deva, one of the finest passes in the world. It is but a few miles since we quitted sea level, and we have risen but little on the way. Yet the cliffs that edge the roadway make but one leap of it to the clouds, and their tops are streaked with snow. Here rises a staircase of gigantic terraces; here a fringe of crooked fingers, black and jagged against the sky; here a range of sheer bluff bastions, like the _cubos_[2] of a titanic wall; and from time to time the glittering crest of some remoter peak peers over their shoulders into the depths of the gulf below. The mountain limestone is as hard as granite, and has shed but few screes or boulders to obstruct the passage of the stream, and the road squeezes itself along whichever bank happens to be widest at the moment, crossing and recrossing as occasion requires. At one point a magnificent osprey, looking twice as large as life, came sailing slowly down the chasm, and passed but a few feet above our heads, regally indifferent to the presence of trespassers in his domain. But apart from him the passage was practically solitary--mile after mile of the same stupendous scenery, till our necks ached from craning up the precipices, and our minds seemed oppressed with a sort of hopelessness of escape. [Illustration: THE DEVA GORGE La Hérmida.] At the hamlet of la Hermida the valley makes a momentary attempt to widen; but this little ebullition is promptly squashed in the grip of the mountains, and the great beetling cliffs once more shoulder in upon the defile. The effects seemed finer than ever, for the clouds of a gathering tempest were tearing themselves to ribbons among the jagged _aiguilles_, and their streamers were pierced and illuminated by the level rays of the setting sun. Not till we had burrowed our way for some fifteen miles through the roots of the mountains did we escape at last into the upland vale of Liebana; and looking back on the snow-wreathed fangs behind us, wondered (like Ali Baba before his cavern) what had become of the crevice from which we had just emerged. CHAPTER II COVADONGA AND EASTERN ASTURIAS Far be it from me to disparage Vizcaya or Galicia, but the prize "for the fairest" must be awarded to Asturias. No other province in Spain--few even in Italy--can show such wealth of natural beauty; and it is the district around the Picos de Europa that is the crowning glory of the whole. The stranger pays his homage to its scenery, but for the Spaniard it has a more sentimental appeal. This great mountain citadel is his Isle of Athelney, the last refuge of the little band of stalwarts who never bowed the knee to the dominion of Mahound. Here the first gleam of victory broke the long darkness of disaster; and seven years after the downfall of Roderic, Pelayo began the redemption of Spain. It still remains a place of pilgrimage; for Our Lady herself fought from Heaven against the infidel upon that momentous day. Her miraculous image, in its extravagant tinsel nimbus and stiff brocaded gown, holds its state over the High Altar in the _Colegiata_,[3] and its picture adorns the walls of half the cottages in Asturias. Decidedly no tour would be complete without a visit to Covadonga. I had lingered sketching in the rocky labyrinth of the Deva till the failing light would no longer serve my turn. Darkness would be upon me ere I could emerge from its recesses; but I had not been caught unaware, for the gully can boast an occasional _venta_, and I had resolved to trust the resources of the little inn at Urdon. Urdon consists of a single house, and that, to be strictly accurate, is only half a house, for it abuts straight upon the vertical face of the precipice, and the naked rock is its inner wall. If anything disturbed that rock (quoth mine hostess airily, as she handed me my candlestick), Urdon would become an omelet. And perhaps that fate is in store for it eventually, for the rocks do drop an occasional sugar-plum into the valley at their feet. Urdon looks up a bend of the river, and faces southerly; yet for six months in the year no ray of direct sunshine falls upon that little red roof. It is only from near the zenith that the sun can peer into so deep a well. The traveller plumps upon it suddenly round an abrupt corner, and "here," thinks he, "is the most secluded nook in all the habitable globe." Yet Urdon is the hub of the universe to Tresviso--its inn, its post-office, its commercial emporium, the one link that unites it with the balance of mankind. The pathway to Tresviso struggles up the tiny gully which debouches upon the main gorge at Urdon; but Tresviso itself lies high above the cloud wreaths, a good hard three-hours climb. The Tresvisans aver that there is another village, Sontres, some hours above them. Perhaps there is something above Sontres;--but this imagination boggles at. The little shop was thronged with a company of Tresvisan women. They had been to the market at Potes to sell their cheeses,--a sort of gorgonzola, and excellent feeding for a zoophagist,--and had paused at the stair-foot of their Nephelococcygia to wipe something off the slate before returning home. Sturdy active figures, clad in patched and weather-stained garments which had once been bright-coloured, they formed a striking group which would have attracted attention anywhere. Their features were hard yet not ill-favoured, and their skins as brown as mahogany; but there was not a grey hair nor a wrinkle among them all. Perhaps they were younger than they looked, but they are a long-lived race in the mountains; and even their octogenarians are capable of running errands to Urdon. [Illustration: THE DEVA GORGE Urdon.] "'Try not the path,' the old man said." And the path in question was steep and narrow and stony, wriggling up along the brink of the torrent and the brow of the precipice; the little party had done some nine hours' journeying already, and the shades of night had fallen. Yet for them and their beasts it was but the fag end of their regular Monday tramp, and they made naught of it. Evidently when the "blue-eyed youth" flourishes off with his banner a-climbing the Picos, the maiden of Tresviso is not likely to be vastly impressed. She takes that walk with her grandfather on Sunday afternoons. The inn at Urdon may be small, but at least it is commendably early. They sped their parting guest with the twilight, and I was well clear of the gorge before I caught my first glimpse of the sun. The mists had not yet bestirred themselves to gather on the sides of the mountains; and the whole line of peaks stood out sharp and clear as I crossed the bridge at Abándames and headed westward up the left bank of the Cares, which joins the Deva at the waters-meet below the gorge. Just beyond the gash that marks the exit of the Deva, a prominent peak, like a small cousin of the Matterhorn, stands out boldly into the centre of the valley. The river circles round from behind it, and the road once more plunges in among the roots of the hills. But that the Deva cliffs still towered overwhelmingly in the memory, one would have declared it impossible for any ravine to be finer than this. Indeed, in many respects the Cares is complementary of its rival. Its rocks may be less terrific, but its slopes are more generously wooded, and its pale sea-green waters seem of ampler volume than the sister-stream. The river boils along beside the road in a deep, rocky trench--a series of rapids and pot-holes--a dangerous river for a swim; and every turn that it takes opens some new and wonderful vista--huge buttresses of precipitous limestone, and shaggy floods of pinewood pouring out of the gaps between. The Cares gorge is hardly so long as the Deva's; but it ekes out its interest in an appendix which is not much inferior to the text. The road begins to heave itself slowly upward along the face of the mountain towards the saddle at the head of the valley; and every foot that it rises seems to magnify the grandeur of the opposing heights. Now at last the upper slopes of the Picos surge into sight above their terraced pedestal; and far away into the distance behind us ridge after ridge in endless series radiates out from the great central chaos which towers close and high across the vale. This final view from the culminating point of the roadway is one of the most striking of all. In Spain it seems never permissible to travel entirely for pleasure. The gossips provide you a business if you have none ready to hand. In the Rioja district you are branded as a wine-bibber. In the Asturias you are promptly consigned to the mines. Such was my fate at Carreño, the little hamlet which sits astride the watershed. An aged crone was squatting on the hearth in the _Venta_, performing the functions of a meat-jack over the smouldering embers of the fire. She unhesitatingly diagnosed my profession, and at once began to reel off the local directory--Don Jorge, and Don Juan, and Don Jaime and his wife and family--all English mining engineers in the various villages around. Everybody seems to know everybody else in Asturias and to speak of them familiarly by their Christian names. But this latter custom is practically universal in the Peninsula; and I have surprised myself figuring as Don Edgar on the strength of a second day's stay. However, rather to "mine aunt's" bewilderment, I did not linger at Carreño. The descent to Cángas lay before me, and I was soon speeding on the way. This valley is of a less daring type of beauty than that which debouches at Abándames. It is wider, shallower, and shadier, and moulded in gentler curves. The Picos are still upon the left, but they are now growing more distant; and the most prominent feature is the parallel range upon the right, between them and the sea; a fine bold line of hills some four thousand feet high known as the Sierra de Cuera. Presently I became conscious of an ox-cart. It was grinding along the road in front of me. I overhauled it rapidly, and was close up when it arrived at the turn. But when the road straightened, behold! it was entirely empty; and a second glance showed the cart-wheels peeping over the margin, and the driver gathering himself together out of the bushes beyond. The oxen, maddened by flies, had made a dash for a pool at the roadside, and the whole equipage had incontinently turned turtle. The accident was entirely the fault of the beasts, and one would not have been surprised if the man had been angry. But this rough-looking fellow took his mishap with admirable equanimity, and thanked me most impressively for my help in righting his cart. "_Gracias a Dios_ that I was thrown clear!" said he, crossing himself, as I approached him. And he even spared some sympathy for his oxen, "Ah! but they annoy them greatly--the flies." The Spanish peasant is not usually of a surly temper, and even a double back somersault may leave his manners in working trim. Once before it had been my lot to witness a similar accident in England, where the driver, just extricated from beneath his vehicle, was indignantly demanding his hat. The incident was not without humour, and was gratifying to a student of Dickens; but it struck me that "_Gracias a Dios_" was distinctly a happier phrase. Cángas de Onis, the little town which was the goal of my day's journey, boasts that it was once the capital of Spain. And so it was--in the sense that Caerleon was of England--for here Pelayo first established his modest court when all the rest of the Peninsula was Mahommedan. The days of its greatness, however, are too remote to have left much trace. It still retains its lovely situation; but a few rude monastic fragments are the only relics left by its early kings. It boasts, however, one striking monument (more modern than Pelayo), in the grand old mediæval bridge; one of those lofty gable-shaped structures that are so typical of Southern countries, and perhaps, next to Orense, the finest example of its kind in Spain. Like most of its class, it is now little used, for the modern bridge is but a few yards distant. And, indeed, none of them could ever have accommodated wheel traffic, for they are steep and narrow, and frequently innocent of parapets. Bar archery, one can well believe that Diego Garcia de Paredes with his two-handed sword might have held such a pass against a host; though (in justice to that doughty warrior's modesty, so highly commended by the curate) I believe his autobiography never states that he actually did. [Illustration: CÁNGAS DE ONIS The Bridge over the Sella.] A most attractive-looking road leads up the Sella valley, inviting the traveller to adventure himself for Sahagun; and the view frames itself delightfully into the great arch of the bridge. It was obviously impossible to do it justice on a sketching block, and exceedingly probable that one would get sunstroke in the attempt; but there was no deferring to the promptings of prudence, and the clouds charitably came to my rescue before I was quite melted away. The natives at first watched me in horror from a distance; but they crowded in around me as soon as the sun retired, and began to volunteer information concerning the annals of the dale. "One morning in '85," said an old peasant, tapping the roadway impressively with his cudgel, "the water was over here!" _Car-r-ramba_, my brother! But that must have been an anxious day for Cángas de Onis! A twenty-five-foot spate must have wrought pretty havoc in the valley! It was no mere vaulting ambition that induced the old architects to build their bridge so high! Covadonga itself lies at the head of a little lateral valley some seven miles above Cángas de Onis. The spot is a veritable _cul-de-sac_. The steep wooded slopes are battlemented with a fringe of _aiguilles_, and over their tops one catches an occasional glimpse of the pathless Pikes beyond, their steel-grey summits streaked with wreaths of snow. A huge semi-detached rock stands out boldly in the centre of this natural auditorium, and the valley curling around its foot finishes in a hook against the isthmus which connects it to the hillside. Upon its summit is the Church of Our Lady of Covadonga, with its attendant buildings, and behind it, at the end of the hook, is a broad beetling precipice, coving itself out over its own base--the famous "Cave," sacred for ever in the legendary annals of Spain. Here it was that Pelayo and his dauntless 300 made their stand against the 300,000 who had been sent against them by the Moor; and sallying out smote them with very great slaughter, in so much that 126,000 were left dead upon the field and about half as many more killed in the course of the pursuit! Truly we deal with gorgeous round figures in these early battles against the infidel! But why should the Spanish chroniclers have modestly stopped short at 188,000? A full quarter of a million is their standard casualty list. It is a pity that the legend should have got so fantastically attired in buckram, for the facts upon which it is founded are indubitably historical, and, stripped of extravagances, they reveal a gallant episode enough. The Moorish invasion of the Peninsula seemed at the moment invincible, and the first rush of conquest had carried them even to Gijon. But the northern provinces were as yet rather overrun than subjugated; and many bands of broken men had taken refuge in the mountains, where they were carrying on a _guerilla_ warfare according to the immemorial habit of Spain. One of the most formidable of these bands was captained by Pelayo, whose stronghold was the rock of Covadonga, an ideal natural citadel for a bandit chief. Him it was resolved to suppress; and a "punitive column"--shall we say ten thousand strong?--was despatched from Gijon under command of Alxaman for that purpose. What force Pelayo had at his disposal it is impossible to guess; certainly more than three hundred, yet far too few to admit of encountering his foe in the open field. Cornered at last with his back to the wall at the head of the Covadonga valley, he drew his followers together into his rocky eyrie and prepared to fight to the death. The nucleus of his force would no doubt have been posted upon the rock itself and the neck by which it is approached; others would be scattered along the hillside, lest the foe should endeavour to crown the heights and deliver the attack from above. This last, indeed, was the only move to be dreaded. Against a _coup de main_ the position was practically impregnable. Yet the attempt was made. Some of the Moors would perhaps have pushed straight ahead to storm the neck from the valley; but the main column circled around the base of the rock to take the position in reverse. It was upon these that the great destruction fell. Their ranks were disordered by the steep and broken ground, their flanks exposed to the great rock batteries which the Asturians had prepared upon the slopes above, and a well-timed sally by the party in ambush in the cave completed their discomfiture. From such a rout there was no possibility of rally. The whole army, deeply committed in the intricate recesses of the mountains, was overwhelmed in irremediable disaster; and on the little _Campo del Rey_ at the foot of the crag, all cumbered with the bodies of the infidels, the enthusiastic victors saluted their chieftain with the title of King. The victory was indeed even more decisive than its magnitude appeared to warrant. The destruction of Alxaman rendered it impossible for Munuza to maintain himself at Gijon, and the forces of Pelayo, rapidly increasing with the prestige of success, overwhelmed his army also in the Pass of Pajáres as he was attempting to regain Leon. The Moors made no further attempt to establish themselves beyond the mountains. Their Emirs were intent upon the invasion of Aquitania; and the civil wars which succeeded their great defeat at Tours allowed ample time for the consolidation of the infant kingdom of Asturias, until it finally grew strong enough to cope with them upon equal terms. Covadonga has always been sacred to Asturians, but of late some attempt has been made to excite a more national cult. The new memorial church is one symptom of this ambition, but it is to be hoped the design will never develop sufficiently to mar the quiet retirement of this solitary glen. The church itself is a graceful little building enough, but contains nothing of antiquarian interest except the miraculous image before alluded to; and I regret to say that the feature which sticks most resolutely in my memory is an engraved bronze plate over the western door, of which the following is a literal translation:--"Out of respect for the House of God, and the Principles of Hygiene, you are requested not to enter in wooden shoes, nor to expectorate in this Sacred Edifice." At Arriondas, a little below Cángas de Onis, the Sella receives a strong reinforcement from the Pilona; and thence to the sea it is a fine copious river--broad swift shallows alternating with deep calm pools in the very best salmon-stream style. It has the repute of being an excellent fishing river, as, indeed, its appearance would warrant. Yet I fear it gets but scurvily treated; for the local piscatorial methods cannot strictly be classified as "Sport." Once upon a time, saith tradition, there came a "little Englishman" to Arriondas, and sallied forth to inveigle the _truchas_ with fragments of feather and wool. "And he caught some! Yes, he actually did! He even tried to induce us to do likewise. But we of Arriondas know better. We go angling with shot-guns and bombs." It seems characteristic of Asturian rivers that they should keep persistently running into mountains instead of away from them, and the Sella below Arriondas is no exception to the rule. The stormy hills of the Sierra de Cuera throng tumultuously across its pathway and appear to prohibit all egress. But the river slips like an eel through the tangle, and its agile windings map out a passage for the road. No one looking downstream at the view which I sketched from the banks of it would imagine that the sea was within six miles of him and the river tidal up to his feet. But at least those six miles through the glens are picturesque enough for a dozen; and they reach no unworthy conclusion when they finish at Rivadesella on the little hill-girt harbour where the Sella meets the sea. [Illustration: THE SELLA VALLEY Below Arrióndas.] All roads are charming in Cantabria: but where there are two to select from, it is generally best to bear inland in preference to following the coast. This is rather a cruel observation in connection with so pretty a ride as that from Rivadesella to Unquera; but nothing short of the Corniche road should pit itself against the route from Cángas to Abándames. If the coast-line could be adequately seen, there might be more doubt about the verdict: for the bold black limestone cliffs which front the Biscay rollers would supply as fine a spectacle as anyone need desire. But it is only here and there that the road allows us a peep at some sandy beach ensconced between its jagged breakwaters, or some more distant prospect of cliff and headland where the coast trends forward beyond the general line. For the greater part of the way the view is entirely one-sided--the high, steep slopes of the Sierra de Cuera, and the idyllic villages nestling in the meadows at their feet. How Goldsmith would have rejoiced in this series of sweet Auburns, with their rustic shrines and _Pergolas_, their skittle-alleys, and their little _Alamedas_![4] How he would have loved to haunt the road at eventide where the village athletes scatter the ninepins with their great wooden discus, and the maidens dance together under the shadow of the trees! The Corydon and Phyllis of the Eclogues still survive in these odd corners of the globe. The little town of Llanes cannot boast nearly so good a harbour as that of Rivadesella. It is but a creek in the coast-line through which a mountain burn makes its exit to the sea. The town is, however, larger and busier, and full of quaint balconied houses overhanging the harbour and the stream. Half a dozen fishing boats were unloading their catch upon the quay in the evening. Some rigged with short masts and long cross yards carrying square sails; others with two tall spars carrying lateen sails. The latter are the larger in size and more picturesque in appearance, but both types are common along the whole Atlantic coast. They carry large crews, and beside their sails they have sweeps for use in calm weather. When these are being worked the spars are lowered into a crutch above the heads of the crew. [Illustration: PASANA An Asturian Mountain Village.] Their catch consisted principally of the ubiquitous hake which forms such a persistent feature in Spanish bills of fare; but there were also a few squid, which at first I regarded as wastage, but which proved to have practical value in the _Fonda_ at _Comida_ time. They were served up complete, beak and all, with their tentacles drawn up inside themselves, and looking exactly like boiled parsnips. I tackled one on principle, having a well-broken palate, and being ambitious to do in Rome as the Romans: but it tasted of nothing in particular so far as I was able to make out. They are better stewed, however; and in this guise a gastronomical companion has pronounced them rather a delicacy; so perhaps they are yet destined to obtain recognition at Prince's and the _Maison Chevet_. There is a mail-coach which works the road between Llanes and San Vicente de la Barquera--one of those miraculous rattle-traps wherein no sane person would dream of risking his neck if he were at home. They ply in all districts whither the railway has not yet penetrated; but an extensive nodding acquaintance among the tribe has introduced me to few crazier specimens than this. The fact that its hind wheels are considerably larger than the front gives a vague resemblance to a kangaroo; and as it whoops along bounding and lurching behind its five disjointed mules, it always seems just on the point of resolving into its ultimate sparables like the deacon's one-horse shay. At our first meeting I watched it out of sight with some anxiety; but it was still holding together three years later, and so, no doubt, it is doing still. Nevertheless its days are numbered. A light railway is being constructed along the coast to link up the two dead ends at Cabezon and Arriondas, and soon the visitor to the Picos will be able to reach Unquera by train. This last stage has completed our circle and brought us again to the Deva. Our late-travelled road to Abándames turns off from the end of the wooden bridge, and again guides us through the gorges into the secluded vale of Liebana, sheltering behind its Alpine shield. At nightfall we crept into Potes like a couple of mice from the mountains, and baited at the little balconied _Fonda_, the first stage on the road to the south. [Illustration: LLÁNES The Harbour.] CHAPTER III ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS TO LEON We had penetrated the loftiest mountains in Cantabria without any ascent worth mentioning. Consequently it was somewhat disconcerting to discover that the Pass was still to win. This preliminary canter had merely admitted us into a great cup, the bed of an ancient lake. We had entered it through the outlet, but must leave it over the lip. Within its mountain pale the whole internal area of Castile and Leon consists of a lofty tableland, two thousand feet and upwards above the coast-line. It is vain to sue entry on the level: there can be no dispensation from the climb. Potes itself lies just above the mouth of the great Gorge, and the precipices of the Picos dominate it as the Wetterhorn dominates Grindelwald. The deep, narrow vale of Liebana comes winding down upon it from the southward, its slopes gay with mountain flowers, and shaggy with beech and chestnut, and dotted here and there with quaint little red-roofed villages overhanging the brawling stream. But ever across the exit the great rock wall frowns gloomy and impassive, its base in the warm green valley and its battlements in the snow. We in our sanguine ignorance had fancied ourselves upon the watershed, and thought that some two hours' collar-work would have earned us a spell of downhill. But the mountains were still thronging round us at the village of Valdeprado; and an old neat-herd, driving his cows to the pastures, unfeelingly assured us that the pass was two leagues[5] further on. We tried to hope that he was mistaken; but the Castilian peasant knows his roads well, and is annoyingly accurate in his estimates of distance. It is seldom indeed that he errs on the merciful side. Now the road began to ascend in real earnest, climbing coil on coil up the shoulders of the mountain, and marking its course far ahead at yet loftier altitudes by faint zigzags traced among the trees. A couple of easy-going ox-waggons had lost heart at the very first corner. Their drivers and cattle were all placidly slumbering, and the whole caravan had stuck fast in the middle of the road. It seemed a pity to disturb so much unanimity; and quite an hour later, looking down from the loftier terraces, we could still distinguish their figures in the same position as before. At last we emerged upon a bare and rocky saddle, just brushed by the drifting clouds--a pass by courtesy, for it was almost as high as the peaks, and the snow-wreaths lay unmelted in the shady spots by the road. A great craggy postern shot us out from the ridge into the head of an upland valley; and beneath hotter skies, through a more sunburnt country, we sped towards the plateau of Castile. The descent on the southern side of the _Puerto_ is nothing like so formidable as upon the northern; and the mountains, shorn of half their elevation by the altitude to which we have risen, look much less imposing than on the seaward side. They eventually come to an end with startling suddenness a mile or so beyond the village of Cervera; and from their feet to the southward the great treeless level sweeps away unbroken--an almost uncanny contrast to the tossing wilderness behind. We had counted upon finding a road of some kind towards Leon from Cervera, but the inhabitants evidently needed none and declined to encourage the idea. A railroad, yes;--the train would start at one o'clock to-morrow. But the only road went southward. If we followed that we might possibly find a way round. At all events it was a good road, sagging steadily down over the moors and marshes, shaded here and there by rustling poplar avenues, and musical with philharmonic frogs. It delivered us safely at nightfall in the little village of Buenavista, a collection of forlorn mud cabins, dumped disconsolately in the tawny plain. The _Fondas_ in the larger towns are generally very tolerable, and even the humbler hostels in Cantabria are presentable after their kind. But the little _Posadas_ and _Paradors_ of the villages in the interior are much more primitive institutions, and these are the lot of the traveller who ventures to take to the road. I should imagine that they have not changed one tittle since the day when Don Quixote, and the Curate, and the Barber, and the beautiful Dorothea, and the tattered Cardenio, foregathered with Don Ferdinand and Dona Lucinda at the _Venta de Cárdenas_ in the Sierra Morena; and one wonders much how the whole of that illustrious company were able to find accommodation under its roof. Externally it suggests an abandoned cowshed, and the wayfarer introduced to one for the first time will apply for quarters with something bordering on despair. The gateway admits us into a barn-like entrance-hall, disordered and unpaved. One of the four rooms opening out of it is the stable, and the mules stroll sociably through the family circle in the course of their passage to and fro. Another is the kitchen, with the hearth in the middle of the floor,[6] and the ceiling funnelled to an aperture in the apex, through which the log-reek escapes as best it can. A third (the smallest) is the guestroom, and the fourth one would call a lumberroom, if any of the others could be called anything else. The bedrooms are mere attics, reached by a crazy staircase, and the chinks in the floor communicate freely with the rooms (or stables) below. The furniture is of the scantiest, and the food of Spartan simplicity; and the family poultry cackle about between our legs picking up the crumbs which fall from the table. But at least the dishes are clean and the sheets obviously washed this very evening; and a wayworn philosopher can brook a good number of hardships so long as he is not compelled to wear them next his skin. The villagers were dancing before the door at the moment of our arrival, but the ball was at once interrupted to interview such extraordinary guests. "They came round about us like bees," wrote poor Sir E. Verney in 1623, "touching one thing and handling another, and did not leave us till we were abed!" Of course they did! But Sir Edmund was a little particular; and we suspect old James Howell had some reason for his strictures anent the stand-offishness of the members of Prince Charles' suite. Our catechising was conducted by the hostess and her daughter: What were our names? Whence were we? Whither did we go? They surveyed the bicycles with gasps of "_Madre mia!_" and I am sure their fingers itched to explore the inside of our packs. Were we married? No? The English married very little! And this depressing reflection cost them a sad little shake of the head. It grew rather wearying at last, but discourtesy was nowise intended. A stranger in these forgotten villages is as rare as a blue moon. Spain is socially the most democratic of countries; but it is an aristocratic democracy; and we must not forget that fact because our interlocutor happens to be wearing rags. He and his may have been as poor as church mice for generations;--that is his misfortune. But he is as good a gentleman as the king, and, as like as not, fully entitled to all the proud quarterings that are graven up over his door. "I'm an old Christian," quoth that powerful thinker, the Governor designate of Barataria, "a high and dry old Christian, and that's good enough for a lord." The Castilian peasant regards you as an equal, and expects to be so treated in return: and I have no doubt that a modern Sancho, if he found himself in the society of a duchess, would be fully as unembarrassed as the great original himself. In many points--even in physiognomical features--he has much in common with that other "foinest pisantry" the Irish; and it is worth noting that the original Milesians are traditionally reputed to have come from Spain. Individually he is "a very fine fellow." The verdict is the Duke of Wellington's. And probably no one in history knew their failings better than he. Spain is no "dying nationality," though her day be still rather "_Mañana_." It is idle to deny a future to so robust and prolific a race. The traveller need not look to fare sumptuously in a _Posada_. If he does not carry his own food with him he must take what comes. Mine host does not profess to find accommodation for man, only for beast; and anything he does for the beast's owner is regarded as a work of supererogation. We cannot lodge with the peasantry without sharing some few of their holiday hardships; and there can be no doubt that in many districts they are miserably poor. "There is no milk in the place," said mine hostess to me on one occasion, in answer to a request for that commonest of luxuries:--"this village is in _la ultima miseria_!" Yet even there they seemed cheerful and contented; and the common taunt of idleness certainly did not apply to them. Spanish townsfolk are by no means early risers: but the villages are stirring at cock-crow and the labourers out in the fields with the first rays of the sun. [Illustration: LEON An Old Palace Doorway.] This last is no inconsiderable advantage in a country which gets hot by eight o'clock in the morning; and the great red disk was but half clear of the horizon when we bade farewell to Buenavista, and began our long ride to Leon. Washing arrangements had no share in our _Posada's_ economy, so this mysterious British ritual was celebrated at Saldaña, on the banks of the Carrion; and being here favoured with a branch road which made a cast to the westward, we resumed our journey across the level in the direction of Sahagun. Strictly speaking this is one of those levels which slope upwards and downwards a good deal; for the streams coming down from the mountains have cut themselves good deep valleys, though they seldom supply any water except on special occasions during the autumn rains. In the dips are trees and greenery, but the general impression is that of a bleak red ploughland interspersed with wide stretches of heath. Here and there, marooned at haphazard, are the casual villages, with their umber-coloured mud walls and red-tiled roofs, rich blotches of colour against the blue of the distant hills. And the desolate aspect of the country is enhanced by the dearth of inhabitants. There is scarcely a labourer in the fallows, scarcely a traveller on the road. No! the little squared stones that we keep passing so regularly do not record the kilometres--only the ordinary roadside murders incidental to an ancient highway. Upon each is graven the simple fact of the tragedy:--_Aqui murió_,[7] with the name and date,--no more. They are generally said to have been erected as a trespass offering by the remorseful murderer: and their persistent recurrence cannot be said to make for gaiety;--a large group is even depressing at a specially desolate spot. Of course we endeavour to solace ourselves with the reflection that there is at least one similar monument in England; and we note with gratification that very few are of recent date. But then that does not prove that the murders are now less frequent, only that the murderers have less remorse. Yet, after all, the traveller may take courage; his position is not quite desperate, however unpromising it may look. Many of these untimely deaths were the result of ordinary accidents--storm or sunstroke, falls from horses ("a grave that is always open"), or drowning in the flooded streams. Sometimes a private vendetta may have reached its _dénouement_ in a chance roadside meeting; but genuine highway murders form a very small proportion of the whole. The roads in Spain are as safe as those in England. And though I have been warned that "there are men in this village who would not hesitate to cut your throat for a dollar," yet the country folk generally (as one of themselves bore me witness) are _gente muy regular_, "a very law-abiding folk." The only really reliable method of getting murdered upon a Spanish highway nowadays is to quarrel with the Arm of the Law! See,--out of one of the dips in the road before us rise the figures of two horsemen;--big men, well mounted, in white puggarees and smart blue uniforms, with sabre at saddle and carbine on thigh;--the Civil Guard of Spain. _Vayan Vs con Dios, Caballeros!_ Spain owes you a debt that is not to be readily computed. Those who have delivered her from her long tyranny of lawlessness deserve a niche beside the old knightly orders of Calatrava and Alcántara, who kept the border in the days of raiding Moors. Don Bernardo de Castel Blazo distrusted those who kept company with _Alguazils_; but it is a highly desirable privilege to be friends with the Civil Guard. _En passant_ it may be mentioned that it is imprudent to be otherwise, for they are authorised to shoot at sight, and are reputed seldom to miss. But this vexatious habit is one which they seldom indulge in, and so long as you keep the right side of them they are very good fellows indeed. Should our misguided rulers ever signalise their ineptitude by the disbandment of the Royal Irish Constabulary, we shall lose the one body in Europe which is altogether comparable to the _Guardia Civil_. Readers of Borrow may perhaps recall his description of a forlorn and melancholy township halfway between Paléncia and Leon, a hotbed of Carlism, which he discreetly alludes to as ----. But it seems somewhat superfluous reticence to throw such a very thin veil of anonymity over a name which is obviously Sahagun. Once the great Romanesque Monastery, whose massive square tower forms such an imposing landmark, was first in wealth and dignity in all the kingdom of Leon. But now it is but the wreck of its former greatness; and the crazy mud hovels and hummocky streets which surround it form an abomination of dilapidation that it would not be easy to match even in Spain. What a fit scene for disillusion it must have presented to Moore and his army as they here turned their backs upon victory and commenced their disastrous retreat! The soldiers were all spoiling for a battle, and the 15th Hussars had brilliantly opened the scoring. But just as they savoured their appetiser they were dragged off, disappointed and morose. No wonder they sulked! How were they to know the true cause of their retirement? They were thinking only of Soult at Saldaña; it was their General who had been watching for the rush of Napoleon from Madrid. There is still a Carlist at Sahagun, because we saw him. The inhabitants, recognising us as strangers, naturally assumed that we should be interested in seeing their Carlist, and he was accordingly fetched and paraded, much as a man who had been "out" in the '45 might have been shown to Dr Johnson in the Hebrides. He was a white-haired and mild-mannered old gentleman,--a greatly sobered edition of the dashing young _guerillero_ who had ranged the mountains of Biscay in 1875. And though he evidently enjoyed his repute as a fire-eater, I doubt whether he really considered that the game had been quite worth the candle after all. The Carlists of to-day seem much in the same position as the Jacobites of the reign of George III. They may defiantly show you "King Carlos'" portrait upon their parlour wall, or even exhibit it for sale in their shop windows. But all this enthusiasm is rather sentimental than active; and in their heart of hearts they must feel with Redgauntlet that a cause so much tolerated is lost. Meanwhile the road to Leon did not seem nearer realisation at Sahagun than at Cervera. There was only a "dead road," they told us, and this we should scarcely have recognised had we not been introduced. The "dead road" proved a sort of consensus of cart tracks, straying vaguely across the moorland with a general trend towards the west. It had died in a most dissipated fashion all asprawl among the boulders and heather: and as each of us soon grew fully absorbed in negotiating his own wheel rut, we frequently found ourselves drifting poles asunder, and had to regain connection by cross-country sprints. The water-courses were ineffably stony, and, of course, there were no bridges. We had good cause to congratulate ourselves on the absence of rain in the mountains, for had the streams been in spate we should have had no resource but to follow the example of the expectant rustic, and wait for them to run down. The occasional walled sheepfolds, and the spiked collars of the dogs which guarded them, hinted broadly at the inroads of wolves in winter-time; and our only way-fellows, a party of gypsies, savage-looking and half-naked, with tangled elf locks and skins of negro blackness, formed a group that to outward appearance seemed scarcely more amenable than the wolves. Fortunately, however, there was small chance of missing our direction. We could not stray many miles to our right without coming upon the railway, nor to the left without striking the high-road from Mayorga. The one thing needed was to keep our right shoulders to the mountains; and eventually we emerged sure enough at Mansilla de las Mulas, where, after twenty miles cross-country, our wilderness came to an end. Mansilla lies upon the banks of the Esla, and the mules were grazing under the ancient ramparts along the margin of the stream. A pretty picture it made as we crossed the old bridge in the twilight and entered the long colonnade of poplars that leads towards the city of Leon. The poplar pollen carpeted the road before us as thick and white as newly-fallen snow, and the whirl of our wheels flung it up on either side in little wavelets, as the foam is flung up by the bows of a racing eight. The effect was quite poetical, but we could not linger to rhapsodise, for the causeway had been broken by floods in several places, and unless we made use of the daylight we should be breaking our necks in the pits. It does not seem to occur to the authorities that there is any risk in delaying repairs for a year or so. And perhaps we have no right to grumble, for at least we got safe to our goal. Leon is a city for which I have acquired a growing affection with each successive visit, a grave old Gothic capital, all filled with memories of the past. It was founded originally by the Romans to control the Cantabrian passes; and the massive walls which surround it still bear witness to the solidity of their work. Unfortunately they are much masked by the surrounding houses; but they are of most imposing dimensions, about twenty feet in thickness, and strengthened by huge _Cubos_ or solid semicircular bastions, spaced at very frequent intervals, some two and a half diameters apart. The city is best viewed from the Pajares road to the northward, but as it is situated on the level it does not show very conspicuously from without. Its most prominent object is the delightfully elegant cathedral; obviously French by inspiration, and of extraordinary lightness of construction, more like a lantern of stained glass than a monument of stone. It is step-sister to Beauvais and Amiens; and, on the whole, it need not fear comparison. But the Spanish builders were not quite at home in dealing with the unfamiliar style. One problem evidently routed them, and they have left it still crying for an answer. How on earth was it possible to reconcile the steep French gables with the low-pitched Spanish roof? [Illustration: LEON From the Pajáres Road.] The cathedral has been recently restored (not before it was necessary, according to Street's description); but this difficult work has been admirably executed, though the newness of the stone still renders it rather conspicuous to the eye. The interior is gorgeous with carving and tapestry; and a word may be spared for the Gotho-Renaissance cloisters, and for the great western portals with the Last Judgment graven over the doors. Some of the details of the latter are not without suspicion of humour. A monarch, walking delicately like Agag towards the gates of Paradise, is remorselessly barred by St Peter, and directed to the opposite road. One blessed spirit has been set to play the organ--and another has been deputed to blow it! Truly "one star differeth from another star in glory"; but an eternity of organ-blowing must rank low in the scale of bliss! Scarcely less famous than the cathedral is the Collegiate Church of St Isidore; not the shepherd saint of Madrid, but the Doctor of Spain who compiled the Mozarabic ritual;[8] the "second Daniel" of Pope Gregory the Great. It is a queer patchwork edifice, but mostly of the eleventh century. The tower forms a bastion in the city rampart; and the little _Panteon_ Chapel beneath it is the burial-place of the early monarchs of Leon. Here in 1065 occurred the strange death scene of the founder, the warrior monarch Fernando I. of Leon and Castile. Smitten with sore disease while camping on the marches of Valencia, he had been borne back to make his dying confession before the altar of his metropolitan church. There he laid aside his crown and robes, and clad his wasted limbs in sack-cloth, and for a full day and night lay writhing in ashes on the pavement till his self-inflicted penance was at last ended by his death. We are assured that his original sickness really had been mortal from the first. [Illustration: LEON Church of San Isidoro.] Few capitals of Spain are without some memorial of Las Navas de Tolosa, the great victory won by Alfonso VIII. in 1212, which crippled the Spanish Moslems for offensive warfare, and paved the way for the conquest of Andalusia by Ferdinand III. Búrgos and Pamplona have the trophies of the fighting; but Leon has only a legend; and it is to _San Isidoro_ and King Fernando that they are indebted for having anything at all. For it came to pass on the eve of the battle that a sound was heard at midnight in the streets of the slumbering city. A sound as of the passage of a mighty army, the clang of armour and the tramp of horse and man. The priest who was keeping vigil at the shrine of St Isidore heard the phantom host halt before the portal and their thundering summons beat upon the door. "Who knocks?" he cried; and the ghostly captains answered him, "Ferdinand Gonzalez and Roderic of Bivar![9] And we are come to call King Fernando the Great, who lies buried in this holy temple, that he may rise and ride with us to deliver Spain!" The terrified monk fell fainting on the pavement, and when he revived the door stood open. The last great recruit had joined the colours, and the spirit host had passed upon their way. No doubt we may read in this legend the rebuke of the Church against the selfish policy of the Crown, for no soldier of Leon drew sword in that great battle for the deliverance of Christendom. Castile and Navarre and Aragon were the people that jeoparded their lives in the high places of the Morena. Nay, the Leonese monarch was even mean enough to seize the occasion for "rectifying his frontier" at the expense of his brother the Castilian. And this at a crisis when the very dead could rise from their graves and forget the feuds of their lifetime in the hour of national stress! The main streets of the city are overshadowed by several fine _Solares_, the mansions of the old _hidalgos_, and, beside all its churches and monasteries, the town boasts an attractive Guildhall. But perhaps its most interesting feature is supplied by the crowd that frequents them; for Leon is the metropolis of a big agricultural population, a grave and stalwart race attired in the most picturesque old-world costumes. The dresses of the women are perhaps somewhat lacking in brightness; for they have a taste for sombre shades, especially a mauve-coloured head kerchief which does not accord nearly so well with their olive complexions as the brilliant scarlets and yellows of the girls in Galicia and the south. But this quakerish tinge in the individual does not produce much effect in the aggregate, and they look bright enough in the busy market beneath their forest of umbrella-shaped booths. They are reputed to "wear _Carambas_ in their hair," but this we cannot corroborate. They kept them discreetly covered with the kerchief--perhaps from fear of the police. In any case it is to be hoped that the fashion will not spread indiscriminately. Imagine a German lady in a "_Donnerwetter_" _coiffure_! [Illustration: LEON The Market Place, and Casa del Ayuntamiento.] CHAPTER IV THE PILGRIM ROAD "HE that is minded to go to _Santiago_ may fare thither in many ways both by sea and land";--and to continue in Sir John Mandeville's vein we might add "by the heavens also," for our old friend the Galaxy--Milk Street as it has been irreverently nicknamed--masquerades in Spain as the "Santiago road." The Holy Apostle himself stranded at El Padron (after a rapid passage from Joppa in three days and in a stone coffin); and the pious pilgrims of our own land were wont for the most part to take ship to Coruña. But the main pilgrim stream poured along the old Roman road through Leon and Astorga and the Vierzo passes; and perhaps when the fame of the shrine was at its height there was no other spot in Europe which drew so great a throng. Even to this day we may catch faint echoes of its ancient celebrity:--"Please to remember the grotto!" our school-children's August refrain. They do not know what they commemorate; but their date (by the Julian calendar) and their grotto and candle-ends and cockle-shells are all the prerogatives of St James. As we thread the long poplar avenues which radiate from the gates of Leon, and climb from its fertile valley on to the bald bleak moors, we might almost persuade ourselves that the days of pilgrimage are not over even yet. The road is thronged for miles with a steady procession of country-folk, trooping into the early market in the old Gothic capital--as picturesque a medley as ever delighted the student of costume. Market-women stride-legged between their donkey's panniers, like Dulcinea del Toboso when she was enchanted; bronzed and tattered countrymen with the sun glinting on their shouldered scythes; long teams of mules jingling in gaudy trappings; and lumbering ox-carts with their prodigious loads of chaff. Here and there we met substantial yeomen well horsed and muffled, with their womenkind a-pillion; and sometimes a broad-breeched _Maragato_ tramping along beside his loaded wain. The clear crisp light of the early morning revealed all the landscape in its brightest colours. To the southward the dun plain sweeps away unbroken till it is lost in illimitable distance; and the view to the northward is bounded by the long blue line of the Cantabrian mountains, peak beyond peak in endless range, like a string of chevrons on the horizon. No wonder the Spaniards call their mountain chains _Sierras_, "saws." The wide bed of the Orbigo river is crossed by a long uneven bridge; the scene of the famous "Pass of Honour," dear to the heart of Don Quixote and all the annalists of chivalry. In the year of the great Jubilee at Santiago in 1439 Don Suero Quinones, a valiant Leonese, made a vow to maintain that bridge for thirty days against all knights who refused to admit the pre-eminent beauty of his lady-love. In token whereof an iron collar was riveted round his neck, not to be removed till he had redeemed his vow. He was a knight of the military order of Santiago, hailing from what is now the convent of San Marcos.[10] But membership of the Spanish military orders was no impediment to love-making, or even to marriage (except in the case of widowers); so that Don Suero (a Paladin of his day, who was wont to fight Moors with his right arm bare like King Pentapolin of the Garamantas), was quite in order in paying these courtesies to the fair. Now there were many knights going to Santiago for the Jubilee, and Don Suero and his nine companions enjoyed an extremely busy time. Seven hundred and thirty combats did they accomplish during those thirty days--a daily working average of two and a half apiece. Don Suero, however, duly got rid of his collar, to his eternal honour and glory; and seeing that even Philip the Prudent had his story republished as a perpetual example, perhaps it is not surprising that poor Don Quixote should have taken the pamphlet _au pied de la lettre_. The bridge itself is long and narrow, with a pronounced kink in the middle, and if the tilts were actually run upon it, it is easy to understand the challenger's success. It needed but knowledge of the ground and a little judicious timing, and he could cut into his disordered opponent broadside as he rounded the bend. But doubtless this unworthy suggestion is a libel on the gallant Suero. His lists would have been fairly pitched in the open plain. When we crossed the venerable arches they were in the state described by Mr Chucks as "precarious and not at all permanent." The ox-carts preferred fording the river. But perhaps this has been "mitigated" by now. Another stage across the moorland brings us up under the massive ramparts of Astorga, standing "four square to all the winds that blow," as it stood in the days of that Cæsar Augustus whose name it now so barbarously mis-spells.[11] "It is absurd to speak of Astorga as a fortress," wrote the impatient Duke; "it is merely a walled town." And a walled town it is, most emphatically; but the "merely" seems rather inadequate, for the walls of Astorga are a trifle of twenty-two feet thick. They are sadly battered indeed, and mercilessly plundered of their facing stones; yet their huge rugged nakedness, scowling truculently across the plain from the crest of their natural _glacis_, makes them a far more impressive spectacle than their house-encumbered rivals at Lugo and Leon. They have at all events stood two artillery sieges; for the citizens held them for two months against Junot in 1810, and the French for three against Castaños in 1812; yet the old Roman mason who built them might readily acknowledge them still. [Illustration: ASTORGA From the South-east.] My Santiago pilgrimage was not the first occasion of my visiting Astorga. I had called the previous year--and incidentally had left my heart there--but was not aware that my unobtrusive transit had sown any tender memories to sprout at my return. No sooner, however, had my nose inserted itself within the Fonda doorway than the señora swooped upon me out of the kitchen like a hospitable avalanche, and welcomed me back with as much fervour as if I had been a long-lost son. This pleasure at the sight of an old face is a very engaging feature in Spanish character. They are by no means forgetful to entertain strangers even at first sight; and often upon quitting a café I have found that my bill has been already paid by an unknown neighbour with whom I had exchanged a few commonplace remarks. Yet these earlier courtesies are formal; they are cordial to older acquaintances; and, like the Briton, they are reserved in their intimacies, and rather inclined to resent a too rapid advance. One worthy old gentleman indeed, a frequenter of the café at Astorga, proved more insistently amiable even than mine hostess herself. He would no longer have me as a guest, but wished to sign me on as a townsman; there was no need for me to go further, I might stay and be naturalised out of hand. He could even supply me with a wife, and would warrant her "very beautiful!" Had Faustina been the guerdon, I doubt whether my constancy could have endured! And Faustina: where meanwhile was Faustina? In vain had we come to Astorga if we might not have sight of its belle! I remembered her curled on the window settle, nursing her baby brother. Her raven tresses flooded her shoulders like a mantle, and her great dark eyes and Cupid's bow lips--the touchstones of Spanish beauty--were set off by the most piquant features and the clearest olive skin. Faustina was quite conscious of her attractions, and seemed by no means averse to challenging a little flirtation; but this time she was away "in the country," and the baby brother was as much aggrieved as ourselves. By now, belike, she is another's. Spanish maidens grow early to womanhood. Would that I could show future visitors how fair a sight they have missed! The broad brown moors which environ the city tilt themselves up toward the westward till they culminate at the Pass of Manzanal. Their interest is principally due to their unique population, for they are the recognised Reserve of the _Maragatos_, that strange self-centred tribe who were long such a puzzle to ethnologists, but who now seem definitely identified as direct descendants of the original Berbers who came over with Tarik and Musa twelve hundred years ago. Astorga is regarded as their centre, but they are now more readily met with in the neighbouring villages; and the little hamlet of Combarros produced quite a respectable crowd. They are carriers by caste: and their burly, big-framed men, in their wide Zouave breeches and scarlet waistcoats and garters, had already become familiar to us even on the remoter roads. But this was the only place where we caught a glimpse of the women, who were attired in short orange skirts and scarlet cross-overs, with their hair drawn tight back from their foreheads and knit into trim little buns. They wore, too, some striking jewelry in the shape of large filigree earrings. But in point of physique the ladies were scarcely a match for their lords. The ascent of the pass upon the eastern side is comparatively gentle, and its height not very much above the general level of the moors; but towards the west the ground breaks away more sharply, and the hillside is scored with deep rocky gulches, which are a source of great perplexity to the descending road. It is a savage bit of country, and a fit scene for the thrilling adventure which is furnished to Gil Blas; for near Ponferrada was the cave of the redoubtable Captain Rolando, who interfered so masterfully with his intended scholastic career. Our hero was kidnapped at Cacabellos; he reached Astorga the night after his escape; and his distressed damsel, the unfortunate Doña Mencia, was waylaid upon this very road. The robbers must have found it a more profitable beat in those days than it would be at present, for then there was no road at Pajares, and even travellers from Oviedo had to come this way to the south. The Vierzo basin into which we are now descending is one of the most interesting districts in the mountains of Northern Spain. It is a great natural saucer some twenty-five miles in diameter, considerably below the level of the plateau of Leon, and completely surrounded by a ring of mountain peaks. Geologically it is the bed of a primeval lake, long since emptied of its waters through the gorges of the Sil; and its many ancient monastic establishments, the primitive character of its peasantry, and the wild and picturesque scenery in the surrounding mountains, render it an admirable hunting-ground for the vagrant pleasure-seeker. Mere birds of passage like ourselves could see but a tithe of its attractions. It should be explored with a guide and a pack mule, a rod and a gun. And sportsmen need never complain of the lack of sufficient variety:--the Nimrod whom we encountered was combining "partridges and bears!" The hills are rugged and precipitous, the birthplace of unnumbered rivulets, their flanks flooded chin deep with oceans of white heather, and their feet hidden in primeval forests wellnigh impenetrable to man. [Illustration: THE VIERZO From Ponferrada, looking towards the Pass of Piedrafita.] At our first view the country seemed hardly in holiday humour, for the sky was dark and lowering; and though the cloud effects were magnificent, the landscape beneath them looked eerie and morose. But, like all southern landscapes, it woke up wonderfully under the witchery of the sunshine, and donned its brightest colours next morning in honour of its patroness, Our Lady of the Oak-tree, whose festival was to be celebrated that day. Ponferrada, the centre and capital of the district, is a picturesque little township, situated on a steep bank over the river Sil. Its most prominent feature is an imposing castle once a preceptory of the Knights Templar; but this was the evening of the Vigil, and the townfolk were all thronging into the portals of the church. The vast, gloomy interior was lit only by two or three tapers, which scarcely served to make darkness visible; and at first we could discern nothing but the white snoods of the women, who were kneeling in companies about the great aisleless nave. But presently the spring blind over the Altar went up with a sudden snap, and disclosed _Nuestra Señora de la Encina_ herself, the little black wooden image which is the Palladium of the whole Vierzo, clad in white satin and tinsel, and set in a halo of incandescent lamps! This startling modern _finale_ gave a queer jar to the old-world solemnity of the preliminaries; and the chant which burst out at the signal scarcely helped to restore the effect. The men's voices in Spain are frequently powerful and impressive; but here they were relying entirely on their trebles, who are always terribly shrill and grating, even to the least musical ear. The great road which passes through Ponferrada on its way across the Vierzo has been the track followed by numberless armies from the days of Rome to our own; and to Englishmen it has a special interest as being the path of the ill-fated Moore. The second and more arduous stage of the famous retreat began at Astorga, where Napoleon abandoned the command of the French armies to Soult. Moore might very possibly have checked his pursuers on the great natural _glacis_ of Manzanal; but it was the aim of his strategy to entangle them as deeply as possible in the Galician mountains, and he did not wish to make a stand too soon. Accordingly the English army, with Soult hot upon their track, swept swiftly through the Vierzo. They got abominably drunk in the wine-cellars at Bembibre and Ponferrada. They had a sharp brush with the enemy's cavalry at the hamlet of Cacabellos. Then at Villafranca they were swallowed again by the mountains, and headed for Lugo by the long and labyrinthine pass. The road across the Pass of Piedrafita is a very different thing nowadays to what it was in the time of Moore; yet even now it would be no pleasant journey in January, with the snow-drifts blocking the narrow "prison vale." Gradually ascending the left bank of the river Valcarce, we passed through several picturesque but grimy villages romantically placed amid the rocky and wooded hills. The ascent became steeper and more tortuous as the road climbed up towards the saddle; and at last, on the very summit, we reached the "fixed stone" which is the boundary of Leon and Galicia, and entered the head of the Návia valley, which guided us down the long descent. The western portal of the Pass a little above Nogales is guarded by a solitary watch-tower, perched upon the point of an isolated boulder in the centre of the V-shaped vale. This outlet, however, does not get us clear of the mountains; for another lofty ridge rises immediately beyond it, and it was at this point that some of the most terrible scenes occurred in the course of Moore's retreat. Hundreds lay dying of cold, hunger, and exhaustion; and the army treasure-chests, containing 150,000 dollars, were rolled down the hillside into the river gully, to save them from falling into the hands of the French. The closeness of the pursuit, however, was checked by Paget in a sharp action at the old Roman bridge of Constantino, which spans a rocky gorge half-way up the hill; and Moore was enabled to reach Lugo without much further loss. We spent the night at the mountain village of Becerrea, high up near the summit of the ridge--a night of the most brilliant moonlight, which showed up the distant mountains almost as clearly as the day. Next morning, however, found the village buried in clouds; and through these we laboriously groped our way, with the trained fog-craft of Londoners, till at last we succeeded in rising above them, and emerging on the summit of the ridge. The scene was such as seldom falls to the lot of a cyclist, for the vapour choked all the valleys beneath us, and the mountain peaks that reared themselves out of it showed like so many islands in a sea of cotton-wool. The gorse and bracken around us were silver with the webs of the gossamer spiders, and the moisture that still hung to the tree-twigs sparkled like jewels in the rising sun. Before us a great pale mist-bow was outlined upon a paler curtain; and it cost us some regret to desert so striking a spectacle and plunge again into the cold cloud-bath that awaited us on the other side. The series of parallel ridges which the road crosses upon its journey westward sink gradually lower and lower, till the environs of Lugo appear comparatively level. The valleys are green and well wooded with tall timber trees; and as the sun got the better of the clouds some hours before mid-day, we had good cause to remember them in a favourable light. Many of the wayside cottages were extremely pretty--irregular old stone shanties with shadowy eaves and balconies, and rude verandahs heavily draped with vines; and the distant prospect of plain and mountain forms a delightful background to the views. Lugo stands upon one of the minor ridges which help to compose what Galicia calls a plain; and the river Miño, broad and placid like the Thames at Richmond, flows far beneath it in a deep, well-wooded vale. Like many of the Galician mountain townships, Lugo is roofed with rough, grey slating, and this fact at the first glance gives it a curiously un-Spanish air; yet there is no town in all the Peninsula more thoroughly national in tone. The massive walls of the city are its greatest and most impressive feature. They are probably of genuine Roman workmanship, for they are built of square stones, instead of the random courses which were the fashion in mediæval days, and of such portentous thickness as only a Roman could conceive. At Astorga the walls are battered and incomplete: but at Lugo the facing is still practically intact; and one might drive a horse and trap round the top the full circuit of the town, without apprehending any particular difficulty if one met another horse and trap coming the other way. [Illustration: LUGO The Santiago Gate.] The cathedral is situated just inside the gate of Santiago. It is a thirteenth century building, but--like many other Galician churches--completely cased externally in late Renaissance days. Its three tall towers form a very conspicuous group from all quarters of the city; and it was a great grief of mind to my friends at the Santiago gateway that I had not included them all in my sketch. It was evidently a slight upon Lugo to insinuate that it had only one steeple. A Spaniard's idea of a "fine view" is invariably a panorama. But the true charm of Lugo consists in its squares and fountains and the picturesque Gallego peasantry eddying in the narrow streets. The fountains in particular are a perpetual delight to an artist, and it is in the last hour before dusk in the evening that they may really be seen at their best. Then the entire feminine population of the city sally forth to obtain their water supply,--a kaleidoscopic medley of colour, and a babel of chattering tongues. An unfortunate _alguazil_ is usually told off to keep order and preserve some kind of a _queue_. But no one thinks of taking the _alguazil_ seriously except himself, for the girls are all in the highest spirits, and regard the whole function as a sort of glorified game of Tom Tiddler's ground, with the _alguazil_ as a semi-official "he." The aim of every player is to slip in out of her turn. And directly she scores her first point, and the exasperated official rushes round to expel her, there is, of course, a gap left for number two. The sparkle and gaiety of the crowd is a standing reproach to us Northerners. It would be a very dour and drab-coloured assemblage if it had to be managed by us. Macaulay's artistic New Zealander will never make much of a picture out of the Hebes of Seven Dials filling their buckets in Trafalgar Square. The pitchers which are seen at the fountains would require a monograph all to themselves, for the designs are always strictly local, and in no two districts are they ever fashioned alike. The big peg-top-shaped jars of red earthenware are peculiar to Lugo itself. Vigo prefers them white, and shapes them like an exaggerated teapot, with no lid and a very rudimentary spout; their rude resemblance to a hen--(any relation, I wonder, to the "tappit hen" of Scotland?)--is an idea which is often exploited by a potter of artistic mind. The black oval keg shown in the sketch of Rivadeo is monopolised by western Asturias; Pajares boasts an elegant three-handled speciality; and the pitchers at Caceres are of "Forty Thieves" design. The little wooden buckets are less susceptible of variety, yet even of these there are several kinds. The commonest type (much wider at the base than at the top) are hooped with three metal bands about two and a half inches wide. In Asturias these hoops become very broad indeed, leaving only about half an inch of wood showing between; they are kept brightly polished, and make a very handsome show on a cottage dresser, but must be rather heavy on the head. At Pamplona the hoops are equally wide, but there are only two of them; and at Pontevedra we saw a queer jug-shaped bucket which we never encountered elsewhere. [Illustration: LUGO Fuente de San Vicente.] Next comes a great tribe of metal pitchers of various shapes and sizes, used by the inhabitants of Villafranca, Plaséncia, and Leon; and the very last ride I took on Spanish soil, in the neighbourhood of Santander, introduced me to a round-bellied, long-necked bottle of rough green glass, which opens a new vista of possibilities. Alas! that among all these delightful old vessels one should see so many outsiders in the shape of common cheap pails of galvanised and enamelled iron! One thinks with a shudder of the lean kine in the vision which eventually devoured all the rest. The three tall towers of Santiago de Compostela salute the traveller from afar off across the wild moors that flank the Lugo road. The city is deceitfully situated--for when we are once within it we imagine ourselves on an eminence; but, viewed from without, it is undeniably in a hole. Yet there is no lack of impressiveness in this first view of "the city of our solemnities." The early pilgrim used to prostrate himself at the sight of it, and many would finish the last stage of the journey upon their knees. Such thoroughgoing devotion is probably very rare nowadays, but we would not like to assert that it is yet entirely extinct. For once in the little town of Briviesca, on the furthest confines of Castile, we did indeed come across a genuine pilgrim, with his "cockle hat" and rusty gabardine, his staff, his gourd, and his "sandal shoon," all quite complete. The retinue of urchins which followed him proved that he was not altogether a common spectacle; but in what other country than Spain could one look for such a survival at all? It is consoling to think that among his own people St James is not quite without due honour even yet. [Illustration: SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA From the Lugo Road.] "Ballads are too old to lie," said Sancho Panza, and I love to think the same of legends. The mere fact that they have passed current for centuries should be a bar to further investigation of title; and a spot which has been held sacred by fifty generations of pilgrims does not need to be hall-marked by Dr Dryasdust. Nevertheless when a blind man is bent upon going into a dark room to look for a black cat, it is but charity to inform him that it isn't there, and the pedantically-minded may be glad to receive the assurance that the whole proof of Santiago's identity is entirely visionary. It is related by a monkish chronicler of the English Abbey of St Alban, how one night in the fourteenth century it was revealed in a dream to one of the brethren that the relics of Saint Amphibalus were awaiting the quest of the faithful beneath a certain barrow on the Watling Street. Which barrow being reverently opened, there were discovered (sure enough) the bones of Amphibalus, and of sundry of his disciples, and the axe where-with he was martyred, and various other articles of great interest and sanctity. Whereby it came to pass that some grim old neolithic chieftain, buried æons before amid his weapons and his wives, was piously installed as a tutelary in the Abbey Sanctuary. And much dumfoundered he must have been at it all, if he was present in spirit at the ceremony. "Oh, Bottom! how thou art translated!" It was evidently something very similar that happened in the ninth century at Santiago de Compostela. But the Spanish chroniclers have been lacking in the Englishman's regard for circumstantial detail; so whether it was an untamed Cantabrian or a Roman Centurion who was annexed as _hero eponymus_ for the basilica of Iria Flavia it is now impossible to guess. Be that as it may, the bones were certainly lost not long after they were beatified, and the authorities had to account for their disappearance by protesting that Archbishop Gelmirez had built them, for safety's sake, into the foundations of his great cathedral. This delightfully incontrovertible statement was the sole satisfaction provided for the medieval pilgrims. But we are now no longer permitted to build our faith upon such a stolid foundation. The relics were rediscovered little more than a generation ago. This, however, is, of course, rank heresy. If any had ever doubted the genuineness of the original relics, their cavilling was speedily silenced by the direct interposition of Santiago himself. Sword in hand, upon his white horse, he rallied the Christian host at the crisis of the battle of Clavijo, mowing down the astonished Moslems ten thousand to a swathe. That day made his fortune for ever: but it was by no means his only exploit. Through many generations of warfare there was hardly a battle contested without his appearance in the ranks. The warrior Saint, however, was not allowed to score all the tricks in the rubber; and one fancies that the hated infidel must have fairly wiped out the adverse balance on the day when Al Manzor, the great Vizier of Córdova, led his ever-victorious army across the Vierzo passes, and carried off the very bells from the steeple to adorn the _Ceca_[12] of Mahound. None had ventured to bar his progress, for the very name of "The Conqueror" spelt despair to the Christians of that day. The walls were unguarded, the city deserted,--man, woman, and child had escaped to the mountains lest they should be consumed. But as the Vizier spurred his charger through the cathedral portal, behold, before the tomb of the Apostle there knelt a solitary monk. "What dost thou here?" the Moor demanded. The monk raised his eyes to the terrible soldier whose face none else had dared to look upon. "I am praying," he answered. And for the sake of that one brave simple-minded man, the conqueror bade spare the shrine. Christian monarchs were not always equally scrupulous; for Gelmirez himself had to use his cathedral as a fortress; and Pedro the Cruel murdered Archbishop Suero on the very steps of the sanctuary--his motive being solely robbery, as usual with that royal ruffian. The interior of the cathedral is disappointing. It is a large and imposing Romanesque building; but the furniture is tawdry and uninteresting when judged by a Spanish standard; and the colossal image of Santiago over the High Altar, though genuinely ancient, has rather a heathenish air.[13] Externally the structure is completely cased in late Spanish Renaissance or "_Churrigueresque_" work. This is not a beautiful type,--overloaded, _bizarre_, and extravagant: but everything that can be said in its favour may be said of the cathedral of Santiago; and it must be a source of no little surprise to a purist that so poor a style can produce such a splendid result. The west front is indeed Churriguera's masterpiece; and a noble conception it is, had it but been erected elsewhere! But it is almost a blot at Compostela, for it hides the great Romanesque Portal "_de la Gloria_," which (as Ruskin might say) is the only really perfect thing of its kind in the world. [Illustration: SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA The Cathedral from the North-east.] The cathedral is most admirably situated, for it forms the central mass to four great quadrangles which keep a clear space in front of it on each of the four façades. And colleges, hospitals, and palaces are grouped around the quadrangles, like a party of lordly vassals assembled to do honour to a king. The streets of the city are narrow, paved with great slabs of granite; and in most cases arcaded, as protection against, not the sun, but the rain. For Santiago is notoriously the rainiest spot in the Peninsula, and is heartily bantered in consequence by all who are envious of its complaint. There is a tale told of a preaching friar who was making a round of the churches, and whose sermons upon the delights of Heaven drew large congregations in every country-side. Beneath the _nebulæ malusque Jupiter_ of Santiago he discoursed upon warmth and sunshine, and won all the hearts of his hearers by the tale of such fabulous bliss. But he needed a different bait when he reached the far end of his circuit. The scene and the season were altered, and the unfortunate Franciscan, _sub curru nimium propinqui solis_, was sizzling on the fiery plains of Murcia. Like Horace, he was still faithful to his text, but his reading of it had altered, and his song was now all of a Heaven that was deliciously moist and cool! Our much-maligned English climate has at all events got compensations. Let a man have a surfeit of sunshine and he learns to think tenderly of the rain. CHAPTER V THE CIRCUIT OF GALICIA LUGO is the hub of Galicia. It lies at the mouth of the Pass of Piedrafita, on the great main road which enters the province from Leon; and which at this point trifurcates southward, westward, and northward to Orense, Santiago, and Coruña. Sir John Moore had reserved his option to the last, and up to this point his pursuers could not tell for certain whether he were bound for Coruña or Vigo. Here then he paused to re-form his straggling regiments, and boldly offered battle upon the eastern front of the town. But Soult was too cautious to fight till he had concentrated his whole army; and Moore having gained his two days' rest, made a last spurt for Coruña after nightfall on the second day. We shall come across his traces later, as we work our way around the northern coast; but first we would see something further of Galicia, and turn to chase the Miño to the sea. There are many parts of Galicia in which the scenery has an English flavour, and the Miño valley at Lugo is one of the cases in point. The fields are green and well-wooded, fenced with rough stone walls or sometimes with slabs set edgewise. The hilltops, rounded and heathy, are plentifully studded with Celtic and Roman earthworks; and when we mount to their summits (an event which happens more frequently than is quite agreeable to the cyclist) it is only like straying from Dorset to Exmoor or the Yorkshire fells. The moist climate of Galicia gives the vegetation a chance that it does not obtain in the interior, and of which it avails itself enthusiastically. The trees in the village _alamedas_ are planted so thickly that they would seem doomed to suffocation. Yet they flourish luxuriantly, plaiting their branches together till the foliage forms a thick matted blanket over the whole area; and beneath them is "darkness that may be felt," so dense and solid that one feels one might dig a way in. Our first stage from Lugo brought us to Monforte--a real "strong mount," not unlike St Michael's, but standing in the centre of a great plain encircled by a ring of lofty hills. Thence we proceeded up a long, winding mountain roadway; through the vine-clad villages that covered the lower slopes, and over the bare wild moorland that rose above them to the crest of the ridge. A big Celtic camp was planted commandingly upon the summit, and here we paused like mariners out of their bearings as we peered over into the valley which yawned for us on the further side. Surely this could not be the Miño! We had parted from it yesterday at Lugo--a domesticated and navigable-looking river, quite different from the uncivilised little torrent that we now saw far beneath us, tearing along the bottom of this V-shaped glen. The map was a little ambiguous, but it offered no plausible alternative; and when, after several very crooked miles, the road at last succeeded in curling itself down alongside, behold! it was the Miño, sure enough. The Miño is undoubtedly the most beautiful of all the great rivers in Northern Spain, and the variety of its moods is, perhaps, its most attractive feature. Nothing could be wilder than the glen by which it forces the mountains, unless it be the sister-glen by which the Sil comes down to unite with it, brimming with the waters from the Vierzo springs. Yet from the confluence to Orense it flows through an Eden of fertility, its hilly banks festooned with vine and olive, and the meadows beneath them teeming with corn and maize. Then comes a sterner stretch amid the mountains along the Portuguese frontier--more majestic, yet scarcely less fertile,--till it emerges at last in the broad, rich valley of Tuy, and circling under its ramparts glides slowly onward to the sea. Orense, the capital of the district, lies a little back from the river on the crest of a slight eminence, an offshoot of the neighbouring hills. Its fine old Romanesque cathedral would of itself be enough to dignify any town; but the great lion of Orense is its magnificent bridge. This mammoth structure was the work of the mediæval bishops, whose reverence for the memory of St Christopher did not entirely expend itself in frescoes on their cathedral walls. It is the greatest of all the gable bridges, and its main central span, one hundred and fifty feet from pier to pier, is the widest of any in Spain. Neither Martorell nor Toledo can quite equal it; but Almaraz is considered superior, and it has neither the dizzy height nor the stupendous bulk that might rank it as a rival to Alcántara. [Illustration: ORENSE The Bridge over the Miño.] The bridge of Orense was the pivot of the French operations when Soult led his power from Coruña to renew the subjugation of Portugal. His earlier attempts to cross the Miño at Tuy were foiled by the flooded river, the bad watermanship of his landlubbers, and a little plucky opposition from the further shore. Orense gave him an opening, and the country was for a moment at his mercy. But the respite had been invaluable--he had now but a short time. Within two months his army was reeling back from Oporto, without hospital, baggage, or artillery, in a worse plight even than Moore's. He had wrestled his first fall with the great antagonist who was destined to beat him from the Douro to Toulouse. And while he was clutching at Portugal, and Ney at western Asturias, Galicia had slipped from their fingers and the heather was aflame. The outlying garrisons were captured, the foragers waylaid and massacred, even the camps and columns incessantly sniped from the hills. One noted _guerrillero_ assured Freire that he had personally superintended the drowning of seven hundred French in the waters of the Miño. Probably it is permissible to discount his arithmetic; but the ugly boast is a sufficient indication of the spirit in which the struggle was carried on. The invaders were finally drawn away by Wellington's advance up the Tagus valley; but indeed their whole scheme of occupation had been foredoomed to failure from the first. "It is impossible for any army to hold Galicia," wrote Soult to his imperial taskmaster. The mountains and irreconcilables were too much for any force that could be spared. The Galician methods of viniculture have at least the merit of elegance, and the Miño is still undisciplined by the stiff formal terraces of the Rhine. The vines are trained over light rustic _pergolas_, the horizontal sticks being fixed at a height of about six feet above the ground, so that there is just room for a man to walk beneath them. The whole area of the field is thus covered with a leafy awning, and in most instances the old stone cottages are half surrounded with verandahs constructed in similar style. These are certainly the prettiest vineyards with which we have yet made acquaintance, but they are seldom seen beyond the limits of Galicia. The vines of the Duero are ground vines, and the landscape gets very little profit out of them. The local _vins ordinaires_ of the Northern Provinces are generally somewhat similar to Burgundy, but their quality varies greatly in the different districts. Often they are really excellent, but sometimes exceedingly harsh and rough--attuned to the "hard stomachs of the reapers," and flavoured with the pitch which is used in dressing the pig skins in which they are stored. The most famous of all is Sancho's beloved Valdepeñas from the arid plains of La Mancha; but the Miño wines also are excellent, and our hostess had good reason for confidence when she produced "her own wine" so proudly at La Cañiza. Old James Howell refers very affectionately to the "gentle sort of white wine" which is grown at Ribadávia; and he might without any injustice have extended his approval to the red. At all events it was nobly thought of by Don Francisco de Toledo, commandant of the _Tertia_ of the Miño, who sailed in the Spanish Armada, for he shipped an ample stock of it on board the _San Felipe_. Whereby it chanced that three hundred convivial Zeelanders were carried incontinently to the bottom as they were carousing in the battered derelict. The truly accommodative traveller should drink, like the natives, _a trago_, out of the regulation glass teapot or time-honoured "leather bottle." These experts hold the vessel well above their heads, and squirt the thin jet of liquid straight into their open mouths. But the art needs a long apprenticeship, and is painfully hazardous to a novice. It should not be essayed before strangers, nor in any elaborate get-up. We had hoped that our mountaineering experiences would cease for a while at Orense--that our road would consent to abide by the Miño, and accept its guidance to the sea. We had got no further than Ribadávia, however, before we found ourselves again going up to the heavens, and the little riverside towns between Ribadávia and Tuy are only to be approached by branch roads which drop upon them from above. The hillsides are clothed with pine woods, plentifully sugared with huge boulders as big as ordinary cottages; and if (as seems probable) these are indeed _blocs perchés_, the ancient glaciers of Galicia must have been of respectable size. All over the lower slopes they are scattered in lavish profusion, and the topmost are gingerly balanced on the very summits of the _arrêtes_. [Illustration: TUY AND VALENCIA The Frontier Towns on the Miño.] The clouds were massing ominously upon the heights above us as we rose clear of the pine woods, and our further impressions of the landscape were merged in the universal deluge that swallowed us when we reached the top. But the little mountain village of La Cañiza rescued us, and fed us and dried us, and made itself agreeable to us next morning ere it set us again on our way. La Cañiza was preparing a _Fiesta_; and a fact that excited our interest was that fresh figs were selling in the market at sixteen a penny--or indeed over twenty a penny, with allowance for the rate of exchange. We hope they were favoured with fine weather, but the outlook was not altogether assuring; and we were glad when we found ourselves across the _Puerto_ and dropping once more into the summer-like climate of the deep rich vale beyond. Tuy is the frontier town of the Miño, and the Portuguese fortress of Valencia confronts it across the river like some "deadly opposite" in an interrupted duel. But its quaint old houses and cathedral do not now wear a very martial appearance; and as I was allowed to sketch uninterrupted under the very nose of a sentry, it would seem that the rival cities have agreed to differ without any unnecessary parade. Vigo (to our surprise) proved quite unknown to all the inhabitants of Tuy. "Bigo" they knew; but they rejected any other designation. And that with a firmness which would be warmly approved at "Balladolid." The consonants _b_ and _v_ seem everywhere at odds for supremacy; and it rather adds to the perplexity of the stranger that they often get written as pronounced. "_Villar_," at the first glance, is not at all suggestive of "Billiards"; and "_Aqui se bende bino_" would be so much more comprehensible if it were "spelt with a we." "'_Vivere_' is the same as '_bibere_' to a Spaniard," laughs Martial; so the provincialism is at all events of respectable antiquity. Yet it is not countenanced in the Cloisters of Toledo, where the "Sir Oracle" of classical Castilian is reputed to hold his court. At the same time we must confess that when we visited those hallowed precincts we did not hear so much as a syllable of any language at all. Vigo lies about twenty miles from Tuy, on the further side of a wall of pointed hills; and our first intimation of our approach to that famous seaport was a procession of barelegged fishwives with their big dripping baskets balanced upon their heads. Untrammelled by their burden, they came swinging down the road towards us at a good five miles an hour, the elderly and grizzled among them as upright and elastic as the girls. If ever the craze for pedestrianism should culminate in an international team race for ladies, the fishwives of Vigo would be a "very strong tip." Indeed, if we felt quite sure that they would not get disqualified for "lifting," we might even venture to pronounce them a "moral cert." A Galician woman thinks nothing of a moderate-sized haystack as her ordinary walking head-dress; and any article she may carry, from an umbrella to a harmonium, is invariably poised upon her head. No doubt they considered us extremely foolish not to do the same with our knapsacks, for the theory of equilibrium comes as natural to them as their breath. Walking or sitting, standing or stooping, they never so much as raise a hand to steady their baskets or their pails. And the lifelong habit has certainly given them a most stately carriage. A duchess who is ambitious of walking worthy of her vocation could hardly do better than go into training with them. The Spanish peasant girls may not be classically beautiful, but they are well-built, strong and active; a healthy-looking, open-air race. The chamber-maids of the hotel at Vigo seemed to spend the whole of their existence carrying buckets of water upstairs on their heads to the bedrooms. The hotel was five storeys high; and their labour was as the "Well of Ronda."[14] Yet these cheerful Danaids were quite unconcerned about their task. Even the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso, it may be remembered (upon identification), proved capable of heaving the crowbar as well as the lustiest young fellow of the village, and her remarks to the reapers could be heard at a distance of half a league. Nature has dowered Vigo with the most magnificent natural harbour in Europe; but Vigo is only a fishing port, "a place for the spreading of nets." The economist who chances to wander thither will weep his eyes out over neglected opportunities; but an artist may use his to better purpose. Seldom can he feast them upon a more delightful spectacle than that great landlocked mountain-girt firth, with its deep blue waters bosomed amid the luxuriant vegetation of the hills. My sketch was taken looking seaward from the extreme end of the inner harbour; where Admiral Rooke sank the "Silver Fleet" in 1702, and where many generations of treasure-seekers have since groped over the muddy bottom in their vain endeavours to recover the "pieces of eight." Beyond the bottle-necked entrance lies the outer harbour upon which the town is situated; and further still, out of sight in the extreme distance, the natural breakwater of the Islas de Cies repels the ocean from the bay. [Illustration: VIGO BAY The Inner Harbour, looking out towards the Sea.] But in the town itself the most attractive feature is indubitably the fishing quarter. The throng of picturesque fishing craft elbowing each other in the crowded basin; the crazy old arcaded houses that ring the harbour round; the sailors staggering up the inclines with their baskets full of gleaming silver; the women sitting along the quay and deftly decapitating sardines with their thumbs. The mess, the noise, the crowd, the bustle, the glitter, form one of the most brilliant pictures that a painter could possibly conceive. And as for the smell, we do declare upon our veracity that it is distinctly perceptible at a distance of five miles. There are many such _Rias_ as Vigo along the coast to the northward; and the road rising sharply over the intervening ridges, finds in each successive valley a fresh garden of delight. The huge mountain groynes push themselves far out into the ocean; and their precipitous headlands, Vilano, Toriñana, and Finistierra, form the mighty spur stones of the sea-borne traffic to the south. Between them lie the gleaming estuaries, each a harbour fit for a navy, and the deep verdant valleys well watered by the streams from the hills. Perhaps there is no plant in the world which could not be induced to grow here with a little attention; for the range from palms to heather is a wide one, but they flourish as if to the country born. "It is the Paradise of Spain," exclaimed an enthusiastic Astorgan. And one can well imagine how such a picture would appeal to a native of the arid plateaus of Leon. Yet Galicia has a plague of its own lest the angels should prefer it to heaven; for the Lord of that land is Beelzebub, and its children are fodder for his flies. On the dry, lofty plains of the interior these pests are less virulent than one might expect in a tropical country; but in Galicia even the ordinary house-fly thinks nothing of transfixing a worsted stocking, and our shanks were soon spotted like currant dumplings with the scars of their innumerable bites. The chief tormentors, however, are the horse-flies--the "clegs" of the Highlands of Scotland--a terror even to the thick-skinned mule and pony, and cordially anathematised by the Galician muleteer. Their only redeeming quality is a certain bull-dog tenacity, which is all in favour of the avenger; though death is no adequate penalty for such horribly venomous bites. The village granaries in this district are a very insistent feature. There is one in nearly every cottage garden--a little stone ark raised on six lofty legs. In Asturias they are much larger, built of wood and capped with a pyramidical roof. There no one could mistake them for anything but what they are; but here their shape, and their size, and the little stone crosses on their gables, are all so irresistibly suggestive of a sarcophagus, that at first we could not imagine that they had any other purpose to serve. The average Gallego's fancy seems to turn on thoughts of funerals. His peculiar local type of bullock-cart also was manifestly derived from a coffin on wheels. At El Padron we turned inland past the local shrine of _Nuestra Señora de la Esclavitud_. (_Penal_ servitude, I regret to say, for it was a noted sanctuary for criminals.) The west front is a modest imitation of that of Santiago Cathedral, and the niche under its great stairway enshrines a beautifully cool fountain, which we could recommend more confidently if it did not issue from the churchyard. At this point it was that Borrow left the main track on his weird journey to Corcuvion; but we pushed straight ahead for Santiago de Compostela; and once more threaded its arcaded _Ruas_ in search of the Coruña road. The coach that runs daily from Santiago to Coruña prides itself upon possessing the most numerous team of any vehicle in Spain. We were assured that sixteen mules were frequently requisitioned to drag it over the snowy hills in winter-time; but from our own personal observation (in August) we cannot vouch for more than ten. The passengers were just stowing themselves into it as we passed them. They had a ten hours' journey before them, and it promised to be a roasting day. Yet the "insides" were packed like sardines in a basket; and some brave spirits were even occupying the roof among the interstices of the baggage, where they were all corded down together under a general tarpaulin! We wondered what they would look like when they emerged from their travelling oven at the other end! The road is rather homelike in character, remote alike from coast-line and mountain: and more than one stage of the journey might have been borrowed from Hindhead or Rake Hill. Yet we gleaned passing hints of our latitude from the picturesque figures of the husbandmen, with their mild little cream-coloured oxen, their mattocks, and their primitive ploughs. [Illustration: NUESTRA SEÑORA DE LA ESCLAVITUD.] These last are of Adamite construction, made entirely of wood and so light that the long-suffering women can carry them upon their heads. Such was the pattern known to Hesiod and to Virgil. Such an one was Wamba using when the lords of the Visigoths came to summon their Cincinnatus to the throne of Toledo, and the haft blossomed in his hand in token that their tidings were true. We have continued gradually rising for the greater part of our journey; but the ground breaks away suddenly and sharply a few miles short of the coast. The view from the crest is delightful. A wide expanse of green undulating woodland maps itself out beneath us at the foot of the deep descent; and beyond gleam the still blue waters of the ocean, and the little saucepan-shaped city of Coruña standing out boldly in the centre of its bay. What a welcome sight it must have presented to Moore and his soldiers as they struggled over the Puerto Bello, a few miles along the ridge to the east! Barefoot, ragged, and hungry, and drenched by the pelting tempest, like Xenophon's harassed ten thousand, at last they were in sight of the sea. The long night march from Lugo had been the most trying and disastrous of any. Yet there was no slackness when they turned to bay; and near Betánzos even the stragglers proved that they retained sufficient cohesion to repulse a cavalry charge. Dropping in long steep sweeps from the heathery heights to the woodland, the road gradually settles itself down beside the banks of the Mero river; and just as the streamlet widens into an estuary we dip across the mouth of a little lateral valley, where the village of Palávia nestles between two parallel hills. The bones of three thousand men lie buried along that little valley, and the trim villas and gay gardens of the Coruña suburbanites cover the ground where French and English fought out their desperate struggle a hundred years ago. The focus of the fighting, however, was not at Palávia, but higher up the valley towards our left, where the ground was more favourable to the assailants, and where the defenders had no river to protect their flank. Here Soult made his grand attack under the fire of his great battery; here Moore fell mortally wounded on the slopes above Elviña at the very moment when he felt assurance of success. Moore's grave is in the citadel of Coruña. An unpretentious monument, but now well kept, and the centre of a charming little walled garden. Like many another faithful servant of his country, he had been set to do impossibilities, and was vilified by the impatient stay-at-homes, because they could not grasp the measure of his success. They had sent out a gallant army; and it was restored to them hungry and naked, broken by cruel marches, and reeking from a stricken field. They had never before realised what war was, and they blamed their general for revealing it. Indeed, as even Condé admitted, the details are ugly in Spain. Moore's famous victory was not the only one achieved by British arms in this neighbourhood. Over two centuries before, in the year after the Spanish Armada, Drake and Norreys landed an expeditionary force to chastise the port from which it had sailed. They captured and plundered the town, and upon the very margin of Moore's battle-field they stormed the bridge of El Burgo and defeated the Spanish militia who had assembled for its relief. Of these they slew "a thousand," while they lost but three of their own men. From which it may be inferred that Drake and Norreys had been reading the exploits of Santiago, and thought that a little local colour in their dispatches would serve as a guarantee of good faith. We had intended to make but one stage of it from Coruña, and encompass the bay to Ferrol. But our plans were all blown to the winds when we spied the little town of Betánzos clustered together upon its conical hill in a loop of the Mendo river,--far too attractive a spectacle to be skipped with a casual call. It won our hearts at first sight, as we stooped to the vale from the uplands: and our affections were confirmed the moment we entered the gates. A delightful little township, with none of its lines parallel and none of its angles right angles; and a whole population of models grouping themselves in its ramshackle arcades.[15] [Illustration: BETÁNZOS A Colonnaded Calle.] We had been commended to Betánzos by Valentina, the waitress at Santiago. Betánzos was Valentina's _pueblo_, and "a very gay place" (so said Valentina). Betánzos played up to its reputation by an improvised ball in the evening; and few set ballets in a theatre could provide so pretty a sight. The _Plaza_ is paved with cobbles, which are disadvantageous for dancing. But the fountain which stands in the centre acts as hub to a multitude of smooth flagged pathways; and up and down these, in to the centre and out again, the couples swung unwearyingly in a great vibrating star. The electric lamps (oh yes! they have electric lamps in Betánzos) only partially illuminated the area; and the patches of light and shadow gave an additional variety to the effect. The Galician peasant woman's costume is one of the prettiest in the Peninsula. As usual, it is very simple; a skirt and bodice, a kerchief tied over the head, and another crosswise over the shoulders. But the charm is in the colouring, and the Galician women wear the brightest of colours: brave reds and yellows for the kerchiefs, with something rather quieter for the skirt. They almost all go barefoot; a spendthrift use of commodities, but doubtless extremely convenient so long as the wear does not tell. The foot will grow coarsened in time; but the girls have not any misgivings,--and the beggar maid probably profited when she came before King Cophetua. It is rather humiliating to compare the square-toed natural foot with the narrow, artificially pointed article which has been evolved for us by our boot-makers. Verily we have small cause to laugh at the fashions of the Chinese! The men wear loose "white" shirts with dark-coloured breeches and stockings, and a _cummerbund_ wrapped round the loins. Sometimes there happens to be a waistcoat, or a cloak slung over the shoulder; and the costume is usually completed by a battered broad-brimmed hat. "Capital stuff, this," cried Ferdinand the Catholic, with reference to the royal jerkin, "it has worn out three pairs of sleeves!" And his highness's predilection for patching still appeals to the lieges of to-day. So piously do they practise his precept that it is often difficult to determine whether any part of their garments was original; and they all appear (justly enough) to have clung to a working hypothesis that the matching of colours is hazardous, but there is always safety in contrast. The picturesqueness of the result, however, is as obvious as its economy. Perhaps some day an English Ferdinand will revive the example for us. [Illustration: THE MASMA VALLEY Near Mondoñedo.] The beautiful bay of Coruña lay still within the curve of our advancing roadway, and every re-entering angle was filled with a gleaming creek. To our right rose rugged hills, plentifully besprinkled with farmsteads; and more than one rustic township punctuated the stages of the way. The last and most important of the inlets was the great bottle-necked lagoon of Ferrol; and the famous arsenal itself lay half concealed at the mouth of it, close under the guardian headlands that form the gateway to the bay. Ferrol surrendered to Soult without a blow after Coruña, and the pusillanimity of its governor probably robbed it of a creditable success. With half the spirit of Gerona or Zaragoza it would have proved impregnable, in the light of subsequent events. The Galicians were taken unaware when Moore drew the war into their mountains, and were stunned before they were aroused. The season, too, was winter, when a _guerrilla_ was almost impracticable. They showed a better spirit when their torpor was thawed in the spring. From Ferrol the road heaved us aloft to the crest of the great moorland plateau where the Miño hoards its fountains, and from which we looked out westward and northward over an almost limitless length of coast-line, with the dark upland ridges running out between the creeks like the ribs of a fan. How high we had risen we scarcely realised till we came to descend again, and saw the long, deep, highland glen dropping visibly before us mile beyond mile. Yet when we reached the corner, the little cathedral town of Mondoñedo still lay far below us; for what show as mountains over the Masma valley are really only the edges of the moor. We eventually came down to the sea at the estuary of Foz a little before sunset; and just as the dusk was turning to darkness we ran into the narrow streets of Rivadeo, and the arms of the motherly old hostesses who rule the "Castilian Hotel." CHAPTER VI WESTERN ASTURIAS A BUXOM old lady who was occupying the shadow of a large umbrella in the centre of Rivadeo marketp-lace greeted us volubly as we emerged from the _Fonda_ door. "A good day to your honours! It seems then that they are upon a journey? Ah! without doubt they are going to Castropol. Yes, there is a road there, but it is a long way round the _Ria_. They will save an hour,--two hours,--by taking a boat!" Our honours, indeed, had already come to the same conclusion; neither were they altogether surprised when their friend's eloquence culminated in the announcement that she herself (thank God) was a Castropolitan, and her boat in waiting at the quay below. A small black-eyed damsel was hastily installed commandant of the big umbrella, and the old lady sallied forth to rout out her boatman and steer us down to the shore. This spirited attempt to corner the entire passenger traffic was hotly resented by a partner in a rival firm; an unprincipled operator who endeavoured to gain control of the market by the most shameless rate-cutting. He would take us across for six _reals_! for five _reals_! for four!! He followed us down the street, waving his arms and gesticulating and pitching his voice a tone higher at every bid. But the old dame resolutely headed off all his attempts to get at her convoy; silenced his feebler abuse with broadsides of the bitterest sarcasm; and finally expressed her scorn for competition and equilibrium by a dance of derision executed upon the poop as the boat shoved off into the bay. It was truly a lovely morning, and the view was worthy of the sunshine. Behind were the white walls and shiny slate roofs of Rivadeo scrambling one above the other up the steeply sloping cliff; before us Castropol rose from the water's edge in a pyramid of purple shadow,--for the sun was dead behind it,--and between the two lay the glassy _Ria_, a long narrow fiord, winding away inland, reach beyond reach, till it lost itself in the bosom of the hazy hills. Evidently the path before us was at least cast in pleasant places. [Illustration: RIVADEO An Approach to the Harbour.] We had made bold to confide somewhat in fortune when we embarked on this stage of our campaign. The map gave no pledge of a road, and the guide-books were equally uncommitted. Borrow, indeed, had traversed the province, with his honest guide, Martin of Rivadeo; but Borrow made his journey on horseback, and his description did not lead one to infer that there was any opening for wheels. Yet our trust in the chapter of accidents brought a suitably generous reward. Take the mountains of the Lake District, and double their height; plant them under an Italian sky behind a Cornish coast; add plenty of old broad-eaved, balconied houses, not unlike Swiss chalets, a primitive picturesque population clad in bright colours, and draught cattle, ploughs, waggons, pack mules, and other appointments _en suite_. Such a picture is fairly typical of the scenes that awaited us upon our way. Here the road dipped to carry us past the end of a rocky inlet, where the waves were breaking upon the chesil beach some fifty yards away. Here it rose again to disclose a panorama of sea and mountain, with the thin blue smoke of the charcoal burners' fires trailing lazily across the plateau or wreathing itself around the shoulders of the hills. To Borrow's eyes it had all seemed gloomy and desolate; but he had traversed it in the mists of a stormy autumn, and beneath the halcyon skies of summer it is a veritable fairyland. The _Ria_ at Návia is scarcely worthy of the name, for it is merely the mouth of a little tidal river, not a harbour for sea-going ships, like the firth of Rivadeo. Yet it is a beautiful valley, and the queerly-cropped poplars give a very _bizarre_ effect to the view. A little further on is a more striking feature. A huge serrated ridge, known as the Sierra de Rañadoiro, flings itself out at right angles to the _cordillera_, and stands like a wall across the plateau which divides the mountains from the sea. Just before it reaches the coast it branches off into a number of smaller ridges, ravelling out like the strands of a cable; and the last group in the series are the seven _Bellotas_, which proved such formidable obstacles to Borrow and his guide. There is no chance of "shirking the fences." Each ridge terminates in a bold and lofty headland, each valley in a rocky creek; and seventy years ago those deep narrow gorges must have been ugly places enough. But Borrow's stony bridle-path is now a fine broad roadway, his "miserable venta" is a comfortable inn; and he certainly would not have troubled to push on to Muros had he found such good entertainment as did we. [Illustration: THE NAVIA VALLEY] Mine host was a stout and jovial yeoman with a loud voice and a hearty laugh. He sat very wide at the head of the table, and promised us that we should have our cutlets raw. "What! Were we not Englishmen? And should he set cooked meat before Englishmen? No, indeed; that perfectly comprehended itself. _Spaniards_ ate cooked meat, but _Englishmen_ devoured it raw." Of course (as a special concession) _we_ might have them cooked--"_á la Española_." But this without prejudice to the eternal verity that "_á la Inglesa_" was "raw." We struggled in vain to persuade him that we knew as much about England as he did. An Asturian dalesman is commonly reputed capable of driving a nail into a wall with his head. But so long as his principles were not controverted he certainly was excellent company for his guests. He regaled us with a capital white wine, "_Vino Castellano_" (I suppose from the Medina del Campo district, which is the only place where I know of white wine in Castile); he discoursed to us on the beauties of Právia and the excellence of Asturian cider; and sped us at parting with the assurance that there were very few hills on the road. But this last piece of information (as we subsequently discovered) was to be accepted in a strictly Asturian sense. Luarca and Cudillero, the two little coast towns of the district, are twin brothers in situation, but moving in different sets. Luarca is aspiring to the dignity of a watering-place:--it must have quite a dozen visitors in the season even now. Cudillero is a fishing village pure and simple, and is content to leave vanities alone. Each town lies nestling in a deep narrow notch of the lofty coast-line, with its quaint shanties spilling themselves pell-mell down the precipitous escarpments in all shapes, sizes, and positions, like rubble shot out of a cart. The brawling waters of a little brook go tumbling down the middle; and the tiny creek at the bottom is lined with a sturdy array of quays and breakwaters, where the fishing fleet can shelter itself from the tempests of the Bay. Perhaps of the two Luarca has the prettier harbour; but the unabashed raggedness and dilapidation of Cudillero, and the old-world simplicity of its people, will appeal more strongly to an artist's eye. The main road drops in to call at Luarca, but it is quite unaware of the existence of Cudillero, and but for the directions of an auspicious waggoner we might have strayed past it altogether. A break-neck descent of a mile or so eventually brought us on to the roofs of some houses; and it presently transpired that the town was "underneath." Down we plunged into it by a ricketty corkscrew street, as steep as that at Clovelly; ducked under the weather-beaten old church which is plugged like a bung in the outlet; and eventually emerged at the waterside, where the fishwives were sitting in a long parti-coloured fringe along the edge of the quay, armed with their large flat baskets, and awaiting the return of the boats. The _Fonda del Comércio_ was a poky and primitive little hostelry, but they had plenty of fresh sardines; and his lot is not entirely pitiable who sups upon fresh sardines. We slept in tiny alcoves curtained off from our dining-room; and our last recollections were connected with parties of happy fishermen in the street without, singing rollicking ditties in honour of "_amor_." I was down in the harbour early in the morning for the purpose of sketching, and so also were a goodly contingent of the townsfolk, intent on their morning dip. It is a libel on the Spanish nation to imagine that they do not wash. Perhaps it is true of the central plains,--poor people, they lack the water, but all along the coast they are much given to bathing. The women stroll unconcernedly down to the beach, armed with a huge towel and a sort of glorified sack which serves as a bathing costume. The huge towel, spread over their heads, envelopes them completely, and under cover of it they make their toilet. At Cudillero the beach where the boats were drawn up was reserved for the women, and the men bathed off the rocks a little distance away. But neither party made any pretence of privacy; and there is an air of primitive innocency about the whole proceeding which forbids all notion of offence. Another primitive sight, though of a different character, was awaiting me as I re-entered the town. It was Sunday morning, and the early Mass was being celebrated in the church at the stairfoot of the roadway. The building was crowded even beyond its utmost capacity, for a long _queue_ of kneeling worshippers had thrust itself out from the open door, like bees hanging from a hive when they are about to swarm. Whatever may be the case in the cities, it is certain that the peasantry are as devout as ever in their religious observances; and once or twice upon holy days we have found the highway itself absolutely blocked with a crowd of worshippers intent on their orisons before some wayside shrine. [Illustration: CUDILLERO The Harbour.] We regained the high road above Cudillero by a long winding ascent; and leaving far below us on our left the beautiful estuary of Muros, bore up into the mountains for the secluded vale of Právia at the confluence of the Narcea and the Nalon. "Právia is better than Switzerland," our host at Bellotas had informed us, and we do not wish to deny it. But the comparison could only be made by one who had never seen Switzerland, for there is nothing in common between the two. Our own Lake District would supply a nearer parallel; but I know nothing quite like Právia except Právia itself; a meeting-place of many valleys with vistas of mountain scenery opening out on every side. Yet the heart of the range still holds remote and invisible. It is not till we have progressed some distance up the Nalon valley, and are drawing near to Oviedo, that we get acquainted with the higher peaks. Then, indeed, the scale becomes truly Alpine, and the valleys which lie across our path would not discredit Piedmont or Savoy. Oviedo is not a town for which I have ever been able to acquire much enthusiasm. A traveller newly landed from France might find it delightfully Spanish, but to one who is fresh from the interior it has a flavour of underdone French. It lies amid beautiful scenery, but just out of sight of the best of it; and perhaps, as it is bent upon a career of commercial enterprise, this retirement is creditable to its taste. Yet its situation is by no means commonplace, its atmosphere not generally smoky, and its fine old palaces and narrow cobbled _calles_ must be allowed to weigh something in the balance against its boulevards and tram-lines and plate-glass. The cathedral is a fine building, though it hardly can rank with the finest; and it seems to be somewhat infected by the prevailing Frenchified air. Yet in sanctity it is pre-eminent; for it boasts the holiest relics in the Peninsula--all the miracle-working treasures which the kings of the Visigoths had hoarded in their temple at Toledo, and which the faithful bore away with them into the mountains when they fled from the invading Moors. Some splendid specimens of early jewellery may be seen among the caskets and monstrances; and the reredos behind the High Altar is quite in the best Spanish style. The children seem afflicted with an uncontrollable mania for getting their pictures taken. Perhaps there is thought to be luck in it, for even their elders are not entirely exempt. This fact accounts for the presence of the venerable _Sereno_ in the foreground of my drawing of the cathedral. He insisted on shaking hands with me for my kindness in putting him there, although I had conceived the obligation to be all on my side. These quaint old watchmen are a sort of hall-mark of municipal respectability. No Spanish city "of any degree of _ton_" would think of dispensing with its _Serenos_. Indeed, in some instances the _Sereno_ has survived where the city is now little more than a name. Fine picturesque old figures clad in cloaks and slouch hats, and armed with javelins and lanterns,--(the towns are all lighted by electricity, but that is a detail),--they give a deliciously old-world flavour to the deserted streets at night. It is questionable whether they would be much use in a row; for like our own late lamented "Charlies," they are often aged and infirm. But their pictorial effect is incomparable: and they are real good Samaritans to the belated reveller, for they carry the keys of all the street doors on their beat, so that the errant householder can always steal quietly to cover, after he has awakened half the parish in summoning "_Ser-êno-o!_" Light sleepers abominate the whole tribe; for they have powerful voices, and their melodious bellow, "Twelve o'clock, and all serene!"--(the refrain to which they owe their title)--is sure to arouse all the dogs that happen to have stopped barking since eleven. It sounds such gratuitous worry to make night hideous because the weather is fine. But it seems quite a passion with Spaniards to know how the time is progressing--not from any regard of its monetary value, but merely from an altruistic and dilettante point of view. They adopt at least three bases of reckoning--the local time, the Madrid time, and the Western European (by which the trains do _not_ start). All the clocks are at variance with all of them: and the whole system seems solely contrived for the bewilderment of the foreigner, for the _habitué_ impartially ignores the lot. The people of Oviedo,--and, indeed, all Asturians and Gallegans,--are esteemed an inferior race by your true Castilian. The prejudice is rather puzzling: for "the mountains" are the cradle of the oldest and bluest blood in Spain. But it is of very old standing; for even the Cid Campeador, when administering the oath to Alfonso VI. (who was suspected of complicity in King Sancho's murder[16]), could devise no more humiliating adjuration than "If you swear falsely, may you be slain by an Oviedan!" [Illustration: OVIEDO A Street near the Cathedral.] Perhaps the early warriors who sallied forth to achieve the reconquest despised those who remained quietly behind in the mountains. And when in later days royalty and chivalry made their home in the south, the simpler northerners would come to be regarded as boors. Even to this day the Asturian peasant seems to lack something of the formality of the Castilian. He is less punctilious in enquiring "how you have passed the night" of a morning; less prompt with the regular roadside greeting, "May your honour go with God!" The slurring of these little niceties may possibly be sufficient to brand him as a "bounder"; and there is no stigma more hard to obliterate than this. For all these courteous trifles are the _shibboleth_ of high breeding to a Spaniard, and a terrible stumbling-block to the blunt-spoken Englishman,--so apt to give unwitting offence. The Spanish generals always waited on Wellington to ask how he had slept, even when they knew that he had watched all night in the trenches. If they omitted the ceremony they feared he would deem himself slighted. "On the contrary," quoth Alava drily, "he will be very much obliged." The Asturian monarchs had good reason for fixing their capital at Oviedo; for it guards the main gateway of their kingdom, the chief of the passes to the south. It lies not indeed at the actual mouth of the valley, but a little on one side of it. Our road has to struggle over a couple of thousand-foot ridges ere it can lay its course straight for its goal. These two preliminary mountains we resolved to put behind us in the evening, and keep a clear day for the Pass of Pajares itself. Our overture was by no means a trifle. It was dark when we began the second descent, and the iron furnaces of Miéres glowed up out of the black profundity beneath us like little volcano craters anxious to win themselves fame. Miéres is a village of ironworkers, and rather shabby and grimy in consequence: yet we were glad to gain its shelter, for the sky had long been threatening, and the storm broke soon after our arrival--a true mountain tempest, with the rain roaring on the roof like a cataract, and incessant flashes of lightning illuminating the valley with the brightness of day. Storm succeeded storm throughout the night, and the outlook next morning was far from promising. But we took our courage in both hands and started at the first break in the downpour. The valley was choked with mist, and the road in a state of unutterable slabbiness: yet our enterprise was soon rewarded, for the weather had done its worst in the darkness, and the sunshine brought the vapours steaming up out of the meadows and banished them with the clouds across the summits of the hills. The symptoms of industrial activity do not extend far above Miéres, and Lena is but the quiet head village of a peaceful mountain glen. Lena is famous for the possession of the precious little eighth-century church of Sta Cristina, perhaps the most notable of the group for which the Oviedo district is renowned; and the scenery amid which it is situated is very similar to that of our own Welsh or Cumberland Highlands, though planned on a larger scale. Hitherto the ascent has been gradual; but now the road takes to the side of the mountain, and heaves itself up from shoulder to shoulder in a vast skein of steadily rising zigzags; while the railway which has so far accompanied it wanders off by itself into remote lateral valleys, groping for an easy gradient to help it up its four-thousand-foot climb. Twenty miles by road from Lena, and over thirty by rail, the approach to the summit is long and arduous, though redeemed by most lovely views. We have a vivid recollection of the glass of water which was bestowed upon us by the woman in charge of the level crossing at the foot of the final ascent. She was a Navarrese woman, and the water was the most delicious in the world! At the final pitch the railway takes to a tunnel; and the road scrambles alone to the saddle, rewarding its clients with the most magnificent panorama,--looking out over the abysmal valley to the wilderness of pike and fell on the westward, where the rigid outlines of the Peña Ubiña are seldom destitute of snow. A rock-climber might break his neck very satisfactorily among these savage crags. One great _aiguille_ in particular seems to challenge him by its sheer inaccessibility--a rocky splinter torn apart from its parent precipice, like another Napes Needle, but probably a thousand feet high. When the Alps have become unbearably Roshervilled, perhaps these untrodden fastnesses may solace the _blasé_ mountaineer. The step which carries us across the Pass of Pajares is one of the most decisive of any we have yet taken. It spans the frontier of Leon and Asturias, the boundary of the realms of cloud and sun. The ridge parts not merely two provinces but two climates, and we seem to enter the tropics at a stride. Behind lies the green and flowery valley, and the heathery slopes half veiled in tender haze; before are the hot bare rocks, and the parched grass toasting itself under the stare of the sunshine; and though the Atlantic clouds bank thick upon the northward, it is only an occasional straggler who ventures across to the south. The scenery is perhaps less attractive, but on the whole even more striking; for the rocks, as in all Spanish landscapes, take most daring and original forms. The most remarkable example is near the foot of the descent, just before arriving at the village of Pola de Gordon. Here the limestone strata have been tilted up absolutely vertical, hard layers alternating with soft, like the fat and lean in a piece of streaky bacon. The principal hard layer forms the precipitous face of a mountain, and stretches for a mile or more along the river, like a huge surcharged retaining wall. The complementary layers are at first buried in the mass behind; but presently the ridge dips to give passage to the river, and rises again beyond in a bold conical hill, so that all the layers become at once exposed. The soft strata at this point are entirely weathered away, and the hard remain, like huge parallel cock's-combs, rising as straight and steep as the parapets of a gigantic stairway. These razor-back limestone ridges are a very characteristic feature of Spanish mountain scenery; but nowhere else have I seen them quite so strongly marked as here. We were not to escape from the Pass without one final downpour, but luckily it caught us within reach of shelter at Pola de Gordon. A black, oily cloud glued itself onto the mountain above the village, the windows of Heaven were opened, and the deluge fell. It only lasted some thirty minutes; but by that time the village was paddling, and all the bye-lanes had converted themselves into foaming torrents which had piled great dykes of shingle at intervals across the street. Yet all the while we had been able to see the sky clear and brilliant under the fringe of the storm-rack towards the southward; and three miles away, the road was dry and dusty, and even the river that ran beside it was unconscious of the coming flood. [Illustration: IN THE PASS OF PAJÁRES Near Pola de Gordon.] We finally slipped from the valley at the village of La Robla, and mounted onto the bare, brown moorlands that slope towards the city of Leon. The mountains come to a halt behind us as abruptly as if they were toeing a line; and the vast level sweeping away from their feet to the southward is broken only by the deeply grooved valleys of the Esla's tributary streams. The effect is somewhat similar to the line of the Merionethshire mountains breaking down into the Morfa. But this remarkable emphasising of primary physical features is specially characteristic of the geology of Spain. Leon itself lies low beside the river, and only comes into view when we are close upon it; but the cathedral spires are just high enough to overtop the upland, and form a solitary landmark for several miles around. CHAPTER VII BENAVENTE, ZAMORA, AND TORO The Esla valley runs down broad and level from Leon towards the south; a monotonous umber-coloured valley, very different from the wild glens whence its waters are derived. The road is straight and featureless, though its newly-planted acacia avenues give some promise of ultimate redemption; and the mud-built wayside villages have a forlorn and collapsible air. Occasionally one lights upon a regular troglodyte settlement, a group of bee-hive cellars excavated in the hillside, with the chimneys struggling out among the sparse herbage which covers them. These caves have no windows, and are lit only through the open doors, yet they continued to be the homes of the peasantry till within comparatively recent days. Indeed, in some few instances they are still inhabited; but generally they are utilised only as storehouses and stables, while the population has migrated bodily into the more modern cottages which have sprung up to form the village at their side. The Esla itself is the most interesting item in the scenery. It flows parallel with the road some two or three miles to the left, close under the crumbling yellow cliffs which overlook the vale. Its course is marked by trees and greenery, chiefly the inevitable poplar; and its thin line of verdure, shot with flashes of sparkling water, is a welcome relief to the dun and dusty plain. The riverside hamlets plastered upon the face of the cliffs are so weather-nibbled and irregular, and so exactly the colour of the grounding, that they might be taken for some weird growth of parasitic fungus; and the whole scene has a most convincingly Nilotic air. A short distance from Benavente occurred one of the few mishaps which it was our lot to occasion. An old countryman was jogging sleepily along the road before us with a mule and a donkey, when the animals suddenly took fright at our approach. A Spaniard is commonly a good horseman--when he is riding a horse. But he does not think it worth while to ride a donkey, so he merely sits on it,--sans reins, sans stirrups, with both his legs on one side, and no more control over his mount than a sack of turnips. For a few strides our victim bounded wildly between his panniers like an animated shuttlecock; and then toppled over in ruin, while his beasts stampeded across the fields. We recaptured his fugitives for him, and purchased his broken eggs; but I fear that it somewhat soured our sympathy when we found him doing nothing but wring his hands and bewail his losses meanwhile. We could not help feeling that the "language" of an English teamster would have furnished a much more satisfactory solution of his woes. Benavente stands upon a tongue of high ground between the Esla and Orbigo valleys. The extreme tip is occupied by the old castle of the Counts of Benavente, one of whom is immortalized by Velasquez in the Prado gallery, clad in suit of armour which seems capable of reflecting your face. But his once splendid palace is now a ruin,--plundered and burnt by the stragglers of Sir John Moore's army; and the poor old town itself, though it contains some interesting churches, has grown wofully battered and threadbare since its _seigneurs_ were driven from their home. [Illustration: BENAVENTE From above the Bridge of Castro Gonzalo.] Yet Benavente is not without honour among us Englishmen. Its name figures upon a clasp of the Peninsular medal, and upon the colours of the 10th Hussars. Here the leading squadrons of Napoleon just got into touch with the rearguard of the retreating Moore;--and received a smart buffet for their forwardness, which was not at all to the Emperor's taste. The cavalry of the Imperial Guard had unexpectedly forded the river; and were wellnigh overwhelming the pickets, when Paget and his horsemen swooped upon them from behind the houses, rolled them up with the loss of half their number, and captured their general, Lefebre Desnouettes. Had Napoleon been an hour or two earlier he might himself have been an eye-witness of their discomfiture from the high ground above the Esla, the point from which my sketch was made. And it is a pity he missed the opportunity; for it was not till Waterloo that he would again see British cavalry in action, and it was the same Paget who was to lead them on that momentous day. The _mêlée_ took place on the broad poplared plain which lies between the town and the river, and the old bridge of Castro Gonzalo spans the torrent a little below the Frenchmen's ford. It is a long, uneven stone structure, with three timbered spans to remind us of the work of Moore's sappers; and the steep bank which rises above it is famed for a humbler scuffle, but one which was no less creditable to the parties chiefly concerned. Three days before the cavalry skirmish, when the French were known to be approaching, Privates Walton and Jackson of the 43rd were posted here at nightfall with orders that, if attacked, one should hold his ground and the other run back to call the picket. The night was dark and squally, and the flood of foemen poured over them before they were aware. Jackson ran back: but the horsemen were close behind him, and he was cut down even as he gave the alarm. But when the picket stormed up and the assailants were swept back into the darkness, they had not yet finished with Walton,--that sentry was still at his post. His uniform was pierced in twenty places and his bayonet was twisted like a corkscrew; but like the "brave Lord Willoughby"[17] he was scrupulously holding his ground! A finger-post and a kilometre stone stood side by side on the branch road at the summit. The former said "To Zamora," and the latter "38 kilos"; whereat we rejoiced and set our pace more leisurely, for the daylight would last us for nearly another three hours. Yet presently as the tale of _kilos_ petered out we began to experience misgivings. The bare wide plateau of the _Tierra de Campos_ still rolled away before us fold beyond fold; the sun was already close upon the horizon; and where was the Duero valley wherein Zamora lies? Three _kilos_ more,--and still no sign of our haven.--Two _kilos_,--one,--and our hopes were dashed to the ground. Our road shot us out into one of the most desolate stretches of the great highway from Madrid to Vigo; and a venerable shepherd who suddenly materialised out of the empty landscape blandly informed us that Zamora was just "four leagues." Our mistake was obvious enough. The 38 _kilos_, had of course been reckoned from the junction with the highway. But a couple of wary continental travellers should have been on their guard against so stale a trap. At the first blush it seemed as though we were destined to fare every bit as badly as we merited. The last glow was dying out of the sky behind us, and a grumbling thunderstorm was nursing its wrath for us ahead. But our good luck came to our rescue, and found us a city of refuge:--the little hamlet of Montamarta, which was ambushed in a dip of the road. By this time we had learned not to be too dainty about our quarters; yet the _Parador_ at Montamarta was so very unassuming that at first we gave it the go-by; and the landlord was an unshaven ruffian who seemed fully capable of the blackest crimes. But the dingy little den to which he ushered us was full of familiar faces:--Velasquez' jolly "Topers" beaming over their wine-cups, the matchless "Booby of Cória," and wild ragged goatherds and vine dressers, with whom Salvator Rosa might have joined in "painting _jabeques_."[18] Rough as they looked, they were all in the mildest of humours. It was a sight to see our murderous-looking landlord truculently dandling his infant; while the mother crouched upon the great hearth in the centre, supervising a multitude of pipkins which were simmering in the glowing embers of the fire. "It is good, isn't it?" she asked eagerly, as we essayed her stew: and she watched every mouthful down our throats with affectionate solicitude to be sure that we did justice to our meal. The kitchen was both dining and sitting-room, and our garret was shared with the children, but our hosts were determined to make us comfortable, and we forgot their deficiencies in their zeal. There is no gilded luxury in a _Parador_, but at least we felt sure we were welcome. One barely obtains toleration in a _Metropole_ or a _Grand_. With dawn we were again on our journey, dodging our way past the cavalcade of country-folk who were pouring along to market from the various villages around. It was an easy stage. We had nearly made port yester even. Within a few miles we were at Zamora gates. In our Protestant ignorance of times and seasons we were unaware that the day was the festival of Corpus Christi; consequently the apparition of a fifteen-foot pasteboard giant lurching deviously down the main thoroughfare occasioned us a little mild bewilderment. This wandering ogre, however, was fully entitled to liberty. All respectable Spanish cities retain a team of giants as part of their ordinary municipal outfit, and Corpus Christi day is the great occasion for parading them. The tourist should always arrange to spend that festival in some good old-established city where the choicest breeds are preserved. Zamora itself is quite old enough for the purpose. Its fine old Romanesque cathedral was built by no less a person than the Bishop Don Hieronymo, "that good one with the shaven crown," who so ably represented the Church militant among the companions of the Cid. But long before his day the old frontier fortress had made itself a name by many a desperate resistance to the Moor, and the boast that "Zamora was not won in an hour," still clings to the old dismantled ramparts which were once its justification.[19] Moreover, the story of the greatest leaguer of all, is it not written in the book of the Chronicle of the Cid, and as famous in Spanish annals as the siege of Troy? For it came to pass that in the eleventh century King Fernando the Great,[20] on his deathbed, divided his kingdoms among his children; and the immediate and obvious consequence was a five-cornered family duel which set all the said kingdoms by the ears. Sancho of Castile had quickly dispossessed his brothers Garcia and Alfonso of Galicia and Leon; and his sister Elvira had yielded to him her town of Toro. Only Urraca his elder sister still held her patrimony; and Zamora was too important a pledge to be left in any hands but his own. [Illustration: ZAMORA From the banks of the Duero.] "So King Sancho drew near and beheld Zamora how strongly it was built, upon a cliff, with many massy towers and the river Duero running at the foot thereof." It was no light task to reduce it, and he proffered Valladolid in exchange. But my lady was in no mood to barter her beautiful stronghold for commonplace Valladolid, and doubtless regarded the offer from the same standpoint as her practical councillors,--"He who assails you on the rock would soon drive you from the plain." The Castilian army lacked the aid of its champion: for Ruy Diaz had been bred up with the princess at Zamora in Don Arias Gonzalo's household, and would not fight against her in person "for the sake of old times." Yet King Sancho was very competent to manage his own battles; and though his assaults were abortive, he soon began to feel more sanguine of blockade. Zamora was reduced to the last extremity when Vellido Dolphos, a knight of the princess's, put into practice against King Sancho the old ruse of Gobryas and Sextus Tarquinius. He feigned desertion, won the confidence of the king, and assassinated him under the walls in the course of a pretended reconnaissance, escaping again to the city when the deed was done. Less fortunate than his prototypes who gained credit for their services, Vellido Dolphos has ever since been held up to execration as the very type and pattern of a traitor; and Don Diego Ordoñez gave voice to the wrath of the Castilians by issuing a formal challenge to the whole city of Zamora,--man, woman, and child, the babe unborn, and the fishes in the river:--which even Don Quixote considered was going a trifle too far. Yet the city was saved; for the heir to the throne was Alfonso, and his return from exile put an end to the civil war. It is a shame to tell the story in prose. Yet we cannot refrain from recalling how Don Arias Gonzalo, the princess' foster-father, pointed out to Don Diego Ordoñez what a very serious thing he had done in challenging a whole cathedral city. How (no doubt with a grim chuckle) he produced the Rules for such case made and provided, whereby it appeared that the challenger must meet five champions in succession, and be declared disgraced if he failed against any one;--which was considerably more than Don Diego had bargained for! Nevertheless he put a bold face on the matter and gallantly met and slew his two first antagonists. But the third contest was indecisive; so honour was declared satisfied, and all imputations withdrawn. The old chivalrous legend makes a capital sauce for our musings as we pace the still formidable ramparts from which Doña Urraca once looked down upon her foes; or gaze up from the fortified bridge at the rock-built city above us, towering over the waters of the Duero like the very embodiment of romance. But meanwhile it is still Corpus Christi day; and the giants are becoming impatient. We found them all four at the bridge-head, attended by a large retinue of loiterers, and waiting outside a church door, like camels at the eye of a needle. The show had not really begun. But as we approached to investigate, there suddenly gushed upon us out of the church itself as strange a medley as that which encountered Don Quixote on a similar anniversary in the chariot of the Cortes of Death. First, four minor giants--great goggling pumpkin-headed Prince Bulbos--and the drum and fife band of Falstaff's ragged regiment. Then the processional cross and candlesticks, and Our Lady gorgeous in a white silk frock, borne shoulder-high on a litter, with her canopy bucketting along behind her about half a length to the bad. More saints, also on litters--the boys struggling and fighting for the honour of acting as bearers, and getting cuffed into a shortlived sobriety by their indignant elders. And finally the Host itself in its silver ark surrounded by chanting priests with banners and tapers. The giants closed in behind it as it issued from the door and beamed serenely down the long procession from their commanding elevation in the rear. Whether the spectacle were a sacrament or a circus, seemed at first an open question; but it was soon resolved. At once every head was uncovered and every knee was bowed, and "_His Majesty's_"[21] progress through the kneeling throng seemed all the more impressive for its incongruous trappings. Beyond the bridge the procession received its final embellishment in the accession of a mounted guard of honour; and throughout the rest of the day it continued to parade the streets and call at the various churches, while the populace thronged the balconies, crossing themselves, and cheering, and showering their paper flowers impartially upon saints and giants and the bald heads of the accompanying priests--an attention which did not appear at all gratifying to the cavalry horses of the escort. [Illustration: ZAMORA Church of Sta. Maria de la Horta.] The last we saw of them was in the market square at evening. The giants were standing at the corners; and in the centre sat Margaret of Antioch, Virgin and Martyr, on a grand practicable dragon which could wag its own head and tail. She was understood to be an "Extra," the exclusive property of Zamora, and not to be met with in less favoured localities. But precisely what she was doing in this galley we could not ascertain. As for the giants, they are allegorical, and typify the four quarters of the globe;--concerning which explanation one can only say that it is little better than none. The very Highest of High Masses was celebrated in the cathedral in honour of the occasion. The priests were in their most gorgeous vestments; the altar almost buried under a pyramid of silver plate; and the walls of the cloisters draped with magnificent pieces of old Spanish tapestry--Corah, Dathan and Abiram going down into the pit on horseback like true _caballeros_, and Pharaoh pursuing the Israelites in a coach and four. The service as usual was rather of a go-as-you-please character; for the _Coro_ and _Capilla Mayor_[22] being completely enclosed, it is only possible to watch the proceedings from the transepts at the intersection. The congregation generally seem to treat the affair like a "Caucus Race." They look on when they like, and leave off when they like, and spend the intervals strolling round the aisles. You are of course requested not to spit, or wear wooden shoes (which seem equally obnoxious to Roman Catholics and Orangemen[23]). But otherwise there are no restrictions: and there are certainly great attractions in the side shows; for the chapels are a museum of medieval art. The silver ark in which the Host made its progress was on show in one of the aisles. All Spanish cathedral bodies are inordinately proud of this piece of furniture (which is generally modern and tawdry); and there is no nearer way to the sacristan's heart than to tell him that his specimen is a finer one than that which you saw last at some rival town--Salamanca, for instance. There is a warm neighbourly hatred between Zamora and Salamanca; and once when I incautiously admitted that the Salamanca people had told me there was nothing to see here, I thought I should have produced an _émeute_. Wherefore I would exhort future travellers not to be misled by those Salamanca people. For Zamora is not merely ancient; it is even (in some ways) up to date. It is somewhat of a shock to an antiquarian to discover that the town is fully equipped with electric light; still more so to realise that the power station is established in the old church of Sta Maria de la Horta, with the dynamos purring among the arcades, and the chimney tucked in behind the tower. But one soon gets reconciled to these little incongruities. In Spain they are really so common that one learns to expect them from the first. The town of Toro stands some twenty miles further up the river than Zamora, and makes a capital partner for its neighbour. Indeed, at first sight it seems even more imposingly situated, for it rises on a much loftier hill. But its cliffs are only of soft alluvial deposit instead of solid rock; and its walls built only of mud, which has now nearly crumbled away. In other respects they are not ill-matched, for the streets of Toro are fully as picturesque as those of Zamora, and its great collegiate church not unworthy of comparison with the cathedral. The streets, as in most Spanish towns, are empty and deserted during the heat of the afternoon; the houses closely shuttered, and the people within doors. But as soon as the shadows have lengthened across the roadway, they turn out unanimously on to the pavement, where they sit spinning, sewing, and gossiping, in a sort of semi-publicity. In unsophisticated districts the women (like mermaids) are much addicted to combing each other's hair. The operator sits on a low chair or doorstep, while her subject settles herself upon the ground at her feet, with her head thrown back upon the other's lap, and her thick black mane flooding out over her knees. A very pretty and poetical little group they make--_if you do not pry too curiously into the details_. The younger women have frequently magnificent hair; for they are quite innocent of "transformations," yet their brows are most copiously crowned. One girl at Salamanca wore a thick black pigtail that was positively tapping her heels; and the beauty of Astorga (who was also of pigtail age) was not many inches inferior. [Illustration: A SPANISH PATIO] The majority of the houses in the town are probably not more than a couple of centuries old; but amongst them are a few genuine _Solares_, once the homes of _hidalgos_ and grandees. It was to one of these that the "_Conde Duque_" of Olivares, the celebrated minister of Philip IV., retired upon his disgrace and banishment from court; philosophically busying himself with the cultivation of cabbages,--those gawky long-stalked abortions, uncannily suggestive of Encrinites, which still fill all the gardens round the town. Here he was visited by Gil Blas, his quondam secretary, who flattered him with smug allusions to Diocletian. Here also he used occasionally to entertain a more worthy guest,--the painter Velasquez, who was too high-minded to desert his old patron merely because he was under the displeasure of the king. Politically Olivares was as worthless and corrupt as any of his rivals, yet he evidently had an attractive personality. Quevedo, imprisoned four years in the Leonese dungeon for lampooning him, would probably remember him in a less amiable light! The lofty situation of the city gives it an immensely extensive outlook; for the left bank of the Duero is flat and low-lying, and but for the interposition of the high heathy ground about Fuentesauco, one would almost certainly be able to descry the spires of Salamanca itself. Doubtless Marshal Marmont used frequently to pace the terrace of the collegiate church when his headquarters were established here in the summer of 1812; gazing out over his future battleground and planning those intricate manoeuvres which were to close in disaster and disgrace. The scene of that final catastrophe is too far distant to be visible. But a scarcely less notable conflict actually takes its name from the town. This was the famous battle of Toro, which put an end to the civil war at the opening of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, and seated the Catholic kings firmly upon their throne. The rebellious nobles had fortified themselves by an alliance with Alfonso of Portugal, and both Toro and Zamora were in their hands. Alfonso's headquarters were at Toro, but Zamora was besieged by Ferdinand, and Alfonso marched to its relief. Seeing that both towns stand on the northern bank of the river, it is difficult to understand what the Portuguese king could hope to effect by advancing on the south. Perhaps he fancied that Zamora still commanded the bridge and that he would thus be able to enter unopposed. But Ferdinand's grip was too close; the bridge was in his hands, and Alfonso had no choice but to return. [Illustration: TORO From the banks of the Duero.] Ferdinand hurried his forces across the river in pursuit. His own army, as usual in medieval days, could not be maintained at fighting strength for many weeks together, and he was now nowise loth "to put it to the touch to gain or lose it all." He came up with his foe a little distance short of Toro. Mendoza was leading; and headed the charge against the troops of his brother prelate the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, with a breezy vehemence worthy of old Picton at Vitória, "Come on, you villains! I'm as good a Cardinal as he!" The weary, overmarched Portuguese were unable to sustain the onset; and their only retreat to Toro lay over the narrow patchwork bridge. Alfonso himself escaped, but there was no further fighting. The Catholic kings commemorated their victory by the erection of the great church of San Juan de los Reyes at Toledo, and the revolted nobles hastened to "come in" upon the best available terms. CHAPTER VIII SALAMANCA Spain is far poorer in lakes than in mountains: and the deficiency has compensations, as it discourages the breeding of flies. But it offers a rare opportunity for the disquisitions of a militant geologist, for the lakes must have swamped all other physical features in the days when the hills were young. Liebana and the Vierzo have been already conceded, but he regards these as drops in the ocean. Now he claims the whole basin of the Duero from the Cordillera of Cantabria to the Sierras of Grédos and Guadarrama, from the highlands of la Demanda and Moncayo to the rocky barrier on the frontiers of Portugal, through which the pent-up waters at length cleft their passage to the sea. Now the dry bed of an ancient lake is not in itself an ideal foundation for a landscape; particularly when its original conformation is remorselessly emphasised by the entire omission of fences and of trees. The mud which formed the bottom has settled unevenly; and the rivers have eroded it into yawning channels, whose steep sides (so prominent at Toro) are scarped and furrowed into myriads of wrinkles by the scouring of the winter rains. The district is not unfertile, for it is a land of corn and wine and oil-olive, and water may be found at no great depth; yet the surface soil is parched and dusty, the villages few and far between, and great tracts of the higher ground consist of untilled heaths where the ilex and cistus make their profit out of the heritage unclaimed by man. It scarcely seems an interesting district for a walking tour, yet we were barely started before we fell in with one who thought otherwise. He was English, of course:--mad as usual, despite his Spanish domicile; and we fraternised with him at a wayside fountain where he recognised us as compatriots (by our Spanish) directly we saluted him. Our programmes had something in common, but his was by far the more onerous, and none but the veriest devotee of the _Wanderlust_ could have ventured to undertake it without some inward qualms. A long solitary tramp, and mostly through desolate country, over mountain and moorland, from Toro, all the way to Valéncia del Cid. True, he was a naturalist and an antiquary, and could speak the language like a native; yet, if he was proof against boredom, he must have been very good company to himself. It is not every traveller who could rely so exclusively on his own resources. The ideal tramp, like Don Quixote's ideal knight-errant, needs to be equipped with "most of the sciences in the world." Fortunately the cyclist's self-sufficiency is not tested nearly so highly. He moves both further and faster than the pedestrian,--covering two days' march in a single morning's ride. For him the great Spanish plains are shorn of half their monotony; and if he loves Spain he may blame me for hinting at monotony even here. He finds something strangely exhilarating in the gorgeous sunshine, the dry crisp air, the unrivalled immensity of landscape, and the all-pervading silence, so grateful after London's maddening din. Spain is pre-eminently a land of ample horizons, of panoramas, and bird's-eye views. The hollow conformation of the plains gives the widest of scope to the vision, and the pale blue peaks which enclose them may be as much as one hundred miles away. Standing on the summit of the Guadarrama passes, we were wellnigh able to persuade ourselves that the peaks just above us might disclose a view extending from the Cantabrian mountains even to the Sierra Nevada;--all the kingdoms of Spain and the glory of them at a single _coup-d'oeil_. The purity of the atmosphere indeed is downright bewildering, and our first preconceptions of distances went wandering wildly astray. Even as far on our way as Madrid, a fortnight later, we found that we had not yet been schooled to credit the milestones against the evidence of our eyes. Madrid lay there before us: we could tell every house, every window. It was absurd to try and convince us that it was ten kilometres away! Yet we passed nine stony compurgators ere we reached the Toledo gateway; and even our own cyclometers professed themselves "all of a tale." The illusion is accentuated by the great distances which separate the hamlets, and the absence of any intervening landmarks on the bare red plains between. Meanwhile the details of the landscape are far from uninteresting. The heath flowers are varied and plentiful and the butterflies brilliant in the extreme. The whole air rings with the yelling of the cicadas or the croaking of the frogs in the rare and starveling streams. Little brown lizards are numerous even in the mountains, but here on the plains is a more imposing breed; great green monsters fifteen inches in length, who lie out sunning themselves in the dust of the roadway, and scuttle wildly to cover as our shadows sweep silently by. The natives eat them;--so possibly does the tourist also, for many are the unsuspected ingredients which are involved in the meshes of a Spanish stew. The birds also, such as there are, seem exclusively decorative specimens. First among these are the hoopoes, with their black and white barred plumage, and their feather crowns, the gift of Solomon the Wise. They have a strong fellow-feeling for the cyclist, and flit from tree to tree along the road beside him with the most engaging _cameraderie_. If they get too far ahead they will perch and await him, cocking their crests and _hoo-poo-pooing_ encouragement; and once more resume their swift drooping flight as soon as he draws level. Should these lines meet their eyes they are assured that their companionship was much appreciated. The little watery gullies where the frogs live are generally picketted by the storks. Magpies too are alarmingly plentiful in the wild stony districts along the feet of the mountains. Seven at a time is all very well,--at least one knows Who to expect then,--but what grislier horror is portended by thirteen? A Grand Inquisitor? [Illustration: SALAMANCA Arcades in the Plaza de la Verdura.] Men as a rule seem scarcely so numerous as magpies, and one may ride for miles at a stretch without encountering a soul; but those whom you do meet are admirably in rapport with their surroundings; and though their pursuits may be prosaic their appearance would illustrate a romance. This solitary horseman, for instance, is probably a most commonplace personage in reality. We shall sit next to him at _comida_ in an hour or two, and discover that he is an eminently innocuous bagman. But out here in the midst of the wilderness, clad in his broad-brimmed hat and his ample black cloak which muffles him up to the eyes, he might pass as a living embodiment of Roque Guinart himself, and we rather plume ourselves on our resolution in venturing to keep to the road. The Spaniard as a rule wraps himself up amazingly when he goes a-travelling; and the Scotch shepherd sallying out to visit his flock in a December snowstorm is not more jealously plaided than the Castilian carrier trudging along beside his pack mules, with his purple shadow blotting the dusty roadway at his feet. By way of contrast one may occasionally see the small children scampering about outside the cabin doors without so much as a rag of any description whatever--an infinitely more enviable costume. The greater number of the vehicles are ramshackle tilt-waggons, drawn by a goodly array of mules, five or seven in a string. These have a horrid habit of pulling _en échelon_, so that each beast has a clear view of all the road ahead of him, and can make up his mind exactly what he means to shy at. This formation occupies the whole width of the roadway, and the driver (being a driver) is of course asleep; consequently, if you have a rock wall on one side and an everlasting vertical precipice on the other, you had better be careful how you pass. Indeed, it is well to give them a wide berth in any case, for even the immortal Bayard himself, "without fear and without reproach," professed himself anxious about his shins in the neighbourhood of a Spanish mule. They are harnessed with delightful inconsequence in all sorts of gay tags and fringes, and scraps of old caparisons of yellow Cordovan leather; while all deficiencies are eked out with string. This requires great quantities of string. The waggons which they draw are equally patchworky, with their cargoes bulging out on all sides in an imminently precarious fashion. In the wine districts they generally carry an "extra" in the shape of a huge tun slung under the axle between the lofty wheels. It is worthy of remark that a Spanish "gee-upper"[24] is commonly unable to think of any worse name for a mule than its own. "Arré! Mula!!" he cries, and collapses impotently. What more can he call it? It _is_ a mule. To do him justice, however, he seldom resorts to blows to reinforce his vocabulary; and the cruelty so often inveighed against in southern countries is not very noticeable in northern Spain. The beasts are gaunt, bony, and ill-kempt, but herein they are no worse off than their drivers: they are too often worked when galled or foundered; yet this is but negative heedlessness, and positive misusage is rare. The temper of the beasts is uncertain. The ox and the ass are phlegmatic, but the horse and mule (which have no understanding) have decidedly fidgetty nerves. The mules are frequently gigantic animals, as high-standing and big-boned as an English dray-horse, though much less heavy and muscular. Mixed teams are frequently requisitioned in the mountain districts. One sample that we met had a horse for leader, then two mules tandem, a pair of oxen, and a mule in the shafts; another had a mule for shafter, with two more mules outside the shafts, a fourth ahead, and three yoke of oxen to lead the way. It is extremely fashionable to finish off the string with a diminutive donkey (generally the smaller the better) tacked on as a sort of afterthought at the head of the whole cavalcade. He looks as though meant for a tassel, but is really played as a pace-maker; for he is always the fastest walker and the most enthusiastic worker in the team. There was a real "little Benjamin" of jackasses that we met on the road near Segóvia. Two men were coming into the town in charge of a bull; and by way of getting the hulk steered with as little personal attention as might be, it had struck them to harness this trifle to the monster's spreading horns. Had the bull really resented the arrangement it would have cost him but a turn of the head to heave the whole equipage over the parapet among the tops of the poplars below. Fortunately, however, he was not actively annoyed--only rather grumpy and puzzled. Every few steps he would stop, shaking his head and bellowing; while his little pilot gathered himself together, drove in his toes, and flung himself into the collar with the exalted enthusiasm that does not reck of odds. He fairly squirmed with glee as his charge condescended to move a step or two forward, and evidently considered that every yard of progress was exclusively attributable to himself. [Illustration: SALAMANCA Church of San Martin.] We took our last look at the Cantabrian mountains from the crest of the watershed between the Duero and Tormes; and the same hill that concealed them brought us into full view of another equally imposing range to the southward--the Sierra de Grédos, whose monarch, the Plaza Almanzor, is only a few feet inferior even to the Rock of Ages which dominates Europa Pikes. But it is to the fallows around us that our first attention is owing;--a site which should stir the imagination of an Englishman as Don Quixote's was stirred on the Campo de Montiel. Over these bleak, red plough lands for six long July days in 1812 the armies of Marmont and of Wellington marched and countermarched and circled round each other like dancers in some vast quadrille or chess players fencing for an opening. Neither leader would risk a doubtful action; for the French Army of the Centre was rapidly approaching, and its junction might make or mar a victory. Almost within speaking distance, they raced for advantage in position, and scarcely once did they pause to exchange a blow. It was a repetition of the old drama enacted centuries before by Cæsar and Afranius upon the plains of Lérida. But the Cæsar of this production was playing Afranius' _rôle_. Marmont had the pace of his opponent, and Wellington pivoted round Salamanca to guard his communications with Rodrigo. Foiled on the right, Marmont dashed round to the left, forded the Tormes and thrust at Salamanca from the south. Wellington still faced him; but King Joseph was now close upon him, and within two days at furthest the English would be hopelessly outnumbered by the junction of the hostile hosts. Retreat was inevitable: had, indeed, already commenced; for the baggage was on the move, and Wellington was but waiting for nightfall to cover the withdrawal of his fighting line. "A silver bridge for a retreating enemy," saith the Spanish proverb; but Napoleon's aspiring young marshal had been trained in a more aggressive school. He knew that his troops were the speedier, that Joseph's junction would bring a winning superiority of numbers. If he could but hold the English to their position for another day the campaign might be finished at a blow;--and he eagerly pushed on his left under Maucune to command the Rodrigo road. Clausel's brigade, already wheeling in from the rear, would link the left to the centre; and his foe would be in a cleft stick. But Clausel's march was limed in the thick web of olive woods which mantles the hills towards Alba; the fatal gap yawned conspicuous behind the hurrying columns; and in an instant Wellington pounced upon Maucune. Well was it for Marmont that the day was now far spent, and that the fords of the Tormes had been left unguarded! For never was victory more rapid or more complete. In forty minutes Marmont's magnificent army of forty thousand men were a horde of disorganized fugitives; and the whole of the central provinces lay defenceless at the feet of his foe. It seems a little strange that Salamanca should contain no monument of the great battle which freed half Spain from the grasp of the invader, and which, in after years, the mighty victor himself was wont to regard as his masterpiece--the Austerlitz of his career. Its only memorials nowadays are a few forgotten tablets on the walls of the great cathedral: from the roof of which the anxious townsfolk once heard the sudden roar of the closing battle, and watched the great column of smoke and dust soaring up slowly over Arapiles into the placid evening sky. Salamanca shows itself off to best advantage when approached from the southern side. It stands upon rising ground on the right bank of the Tormes, with a fine old Roman bridge leading up to it across the stream. The river banks are lined with voluble washerwomen,--at least a quarter of a mile of them, fairly elbowing one another as they chatter over their work; and behind them the red-roofed houses of the city are piled up the slope in picturesque disarray. The most prominent object is the great cathedral, a sixteenth century Gothic building of the type that is only to be encountered in Spain. It is of imposing proportions, and lavishly ornamented with a marvellous profusion of delicate carving which could not possibly have stood the exposure to the weather in any less favourable clime. Yet it lacks the deep mouldings and majestic solidity of earlier works; and this somewhat academic pretentiousness is not nearly so impressive as the stunted strength of the old cathedral which nestles under the shadow of its more showy sister--a typical Romanesque edifice, rude, massive, and solemn, like an oak beside a poplar colonnade. [Illustration: SALAMANCA From the left bank of the Tormes.] No city suffered more than Salamanca from Napoleon's disastrous invasion; and what that implies let her fellow victims testify! The French are pleased to regard themselves as the modern Athenians;--the modern Vandals is the name that their neighbours might prefer! Gaiseric himself never systematised pillage like Napoleon; and who can wonder at the savage retaliation of the _Partidas_ when he sees the havoc which was wrought in unhappy Spain? "Twenty-five convents, twenty-five colleges, and twenty-five arches to the bridge," was the boast of the citizens of Salamanca before the days of their visitation. But no less than twenty colleges and thirteen convents (amongst them some of the noblest Renaissance monuments) were razed to the ground by the remorseless Marmont when he built his three great redoubts to fortify the town against Wellington in 1812; and a ghastly bald scar in the midst of the crowded city still marks the spot where the tyrant's hand was laid. It is but poor consolation to remember that the ramparts erected at this frightful cost crumpled up like the pasteboard helmet beneath the stroke of his mightier foe: and that Marmont himself reaped a small instalment of his whirlwind within actual sight of the city which he had marred. Perhaps it is hardly too much to assert that at the end of the eighteenth century Salamanca must have been the most magnificently housed university in the world. Even now, after all her losses, I can think of no other on the Continent which can so well stand comparison with our own. But, alas! she has fallen upon evil days. The famous Irish college had a population of seven (Dons and Students included) at the time of our visit; and the salaries of the professors are such as no master of a board school would consider adequate in England. The Augustan age of Salamanca commenced in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella; and was perhaps already declining when Gil Blas visited it with his adventurous young mistress masquerading in her doublet and hose. Then the city had more students than it has now inhabitants; and even Paris and Bologna admitted the superiority of the Salamanca schools. She was a progressive university too; and albeit she rejected Columbus, she at least accepted Copernicus--a considerable step on the way. In one respect her example might inspire present-day universities, for here it was that a lady first held a professorial chair. The great gate of the Library is now the chief relic of these bygone glories: and that gem of the early Renaissance is worthily supported by the arcaded quadrangles of some of the colleges and schools. They are built of the warm golden-brown stone which is common to most Salamancan monuments, and their richly-carved parapets and fantastically-shaped arches have an air of oriental opulence which is very taking to the eye. But even apart from its churches, convents, and colleges, Salamanca would still remain notable by reason of its palaces alone. First among these is the _Casa de las Conchas_,--spangled all over with the great stone scallop shells from which it derives its name. It is even more striking and original than its larger and lordlier rival, the famous _Palacio de Monterey_; and I owe it a special acknowledgment for the liberty which I have taken with it in pirating its façade to serve as the cover of this volume. The Castilian and Leonese _casas_ have much in common with the typical Florentine palaces; and even their cousins of Aragon only differ from them in so far as they are brick instead of stone. Towards the street they present a square and solemn façade, plain or heavily rusticated, and pierced with but few windows, which are always stoutly barred. The entrance is large and plain, and generally arched over with enormously deep _voussoirs_, which have a very imposing effect. Within is an open _patio_ surrounded by a double arcade. A fine staircase in a recess gives access to the upper tier; and the rooms which are ranged around the gallery all open direct into the air. The centre of the _patio_ is occupied by a well or fountain, and is often filled with flowers. The type seems exceptionally suitable to a semi-tropical country; yet modern builders will have none of it; and, though common in all provincial capitals, it is nowhere to be met with in Madrid. In a second and smaller type of house the great entrance doorway occupies practically the whole of the ground-floor frontage. Obviously it was generally entered on horseback, and the hall within (like that of a village _posada_) served as antechamber both to the living rooms above and to the stables behind. The family lived on the first and second floors, while the third was originally a _belvedere_. But nowadays the latter has been enclosed and the ground floor generally converted into a shop. [Illustration: SALAMANCA The Puerta del Rio, with the Cathedral Tower.] It is one of the penalties of sketching in a crowded city that everybody who has no immediate occupation of his own becomes consumingly interested in yours. There is but one spot in Salamanca where one is quite secure from surveillance, and that is opposite the porch of San Martin, perhaps the most frequented corner in the town. Here, balanced gingerly upon a narrow ledge, you overlook the heads of the bystanders, and even the most agile urchin can find no foothold in your rear. Yet the immunity is hardly worth winning. At best it is very uncomfortable; and if you submit to your heckling, the entertainment is not all on one side. At the bridge head it even secured me the offer of a commission. The Boniface of the little wine-shop was urgent with me to reproduce my sketch enlarged upon the front of his bar. My recompense was to comprise full board and lodging during the operation,--and that would have been no trifle. But he must have had considerable faith in the covering capacity of water colours to pit a little twenty-pan paint-box against fifty square feet of deal boards. But it was at the _Puerta del Rio_ that I found my _entourage_ of most practical utility. It had been snowing overnight in the mountains, and the Sierra de Grédos was draped from base to summit in a mantle of dazzling white. In spite of the brilliant sunshine the wind was incredibly bitter, and the miserable sketcher would have been frozen without his human screen. Truly "Winter is not over till the fortieth of May" within reach of those icy summits. The Duke of Wellington asserted that the coldest thing in his recollection was the wind at Salamanca in July! CHAPTER IX BÉJAR, ÁVILA, AND ESCORIAL There were "Bulls at Salamanca" (so ran the placards) on the day when we were to resume our journey towards the south; and the _Señor Patron_ seemed quite crestfallen at realising that we had no intention of deferring our departure in order to witness the fun. Bull-fighting was _not_ cruel, he protested. That was all our inexplicable British prejudice. And as patrons of prize-fights and football we ought to be the last to throw stones. We were rather expected to sympathise with the national sport of Spain. His conclusion was truer than his reasoning. There are certain thrilling forms of playing with death amiably tolerated by the British public which are logically no whit better than bull-fighting: and it is not humanity but fashion that dictates to us which to condemn. Only a few days earlier an unfortunate woman had been killed at Madrid while "looping the loop" on a motor; and the Spanish papers (those eager reporters of bull-fights) were all most properly indignant at the dangerous and degrading character of this new-fangled foreign show. Our British high-toned repugnance is distinctly less moral than squeamish. But we did not want our feelings harrowed in the midst of a holiday tour. Bull-fighting is one of the many sports that have been ruined by professionalism. In the days when the young gallants of the court encountered the bull themselves, on their own horses, before the eyes of their lady-loves in the _Plaza Mayor_, there was a spice of chivalry about the proceeding that half redeemed its brutality. It was truly a sport then, albeit a savage one; but now it is merely a show. Moreover, even our host admitted that this time the _Corrida_ would be shorn of its foremost attraction. It was to have been inaugurated by a bull-fighting _Pierrot_ who was wont to await the first rush of the monster motionless upon a tub in the centre of the arena. The bull would charge headlong upon him,--check, sniff, and turn away. No doubt he owed his immunity to his apparent lifelessness; but it was billed as the "power of the human eye." Alas! on the last occasion his programme had miscarried. Just at the critical moment a fly had settled on his nose; and for one infinitesimal fraction of a second the entire voltage of the human eye was switched upon that miserable insect. The effect on the fly was not stated, but it markedly reassured the bull. Poor _Pierrot_ had been tossed as high as a rocket, and apparently was not expected down again in time for the performance to-day. The two English visitors to Salamanca also failed to figure at the function. They had crossed the bridge very early in the morning, and were heading for the mountains of Grédos by the highway leading to Béjar. The actual battlefield was passed upon the left, about four miles distant from Salamanca, subtending the angle formed by the roads to Alba and Béjar; and the olive woods which so hampered Clausel spread wide around us over the hills behind. It was a just Nemesis which overtook the invaders on this occasion, for the destruction of olive trees for fuel had been one of their most gratuitous outrages during the war. The olive is a slow grower, and a few hours' reckless cutting might take half a century to repair. At first the road rises gradually and the country is open and undulating; but soon it gets deeply involved in a labyrinth of mountains, and tacks despairingly backwards and forwards in vain endeavours to twist itself free from the toils. Finally it extricates itself by a frantic rush up a long steep hill, and resumes its journey at first-floor level along the shoulders of the range. Some distance further west it manages to discover a passage across the main ridge into the province of Estremadura; but the town of Béjar itself lies four or five miles upon the hither side. [Illustration: BÉJAR An Approach to the Town.] Hope had told us a flattering tale concerning the attractions of Béjar. A Salamanca gentleman to whom we confided our intention of visiting it had kissed his finger-tips ecstatically at the mere mention of its name. "_Muy bonita!_"[25] he exclaimed. "_Preciosa!!_" And truly his adjectives were excusable; for a more charming situation for a mountain township it is almost impossible to conceive. A long knife-edged ridge is thrown out from the range at right angles. The one street is carried along its crest, and the houses cling to either side of it like panniers on the back of a mule. A great snowclad peak, one of the minor summits of the Sierra, towers above the head of the ridge and gravely surveys the street from end to end; while the extreme point looks out over the wild hummocky country towards Ciudad Rodrigo, with the great masses of the Sierra de Gata and Peña de Francia surging up truculently above the lower hills. Béjar is a fragment of Tyrolean scenery dropped accidentally on the borders of Estremadura. Its buildings are nothing remarkable, but its situation is irreproachably picturesque. The town was holding a little _Fiesta_ of its own upon the day of our visit, and the advent of two pedlars with knapsacks was naturally accepted as a part of the show. Several anxious enquirers stopped us in the street to ascertain "what our honours were selling"; and the prevalent notion appeared to be that we were vendors of edible snails! Many of the country-folk had come in from the remoter villages and were attired in the quaintest of costumes. The women wore very brief skirts, which gave an exceedingly squat appearance to their sturdy thick-set figures. The men had tight black breeches and jerkins adorned with polished metal buttons; enormously broad leather belts something like the cuirasses of the Roman legionaries, and forked leather aprons loosely strapped down their thighs. This weird type of dress we had already noticed at Salamanca; and for a hot climate it must be about the most unsuitable ever conceived by man. The journey from Salamanca to Ávila entails a longer spell of Duero valley scenery than that from Salamanca to Béjar; and for the best part of a day we were perseveringly reeling off league after league of the same dry red plough lands which had already wearied us in the North. It was not till towards evening that the road at last began swerving and plunging upon the great ground-swell which ripples out into the plain from the feet of the Sierra de Guadarrama; and the huge granite boulders littered about among the stunted ilex and gorse which clothed the shaggy ridges apprised us that we had drawn within reach of the derelict _moraines_. Still as we held our course each successive wave bore us higher than its predecessor, till at last we looked down into a wide upland basin, and beheld the towers of Ávila rising proudly upon their daïs in the midst. [Illustration: BÉJAR A Corner in the Market-place.] There is no other walled town of my acquaintance that flaunts its defences quite so defiantly as Ávila. Its circlet of tower and curtain crests its great natural _glacis_ like the substantialised vision of a mural crown. The walls themselves are only about twelve feet in thickness, which is, of course, a mere trifle compared to Lugo and Astorga; but it is height that tells, and their commanding situation gives them an incomparably finer effect.[26] Only on the further side has the city begun to overflow its ancient cincture; and with its core of tightly-packed houses clustering round its great cathedral-fortress which crowns the brow of the eminence, it still receives its latter-day visitors in the same garb that it donned for the Cid. Doubtless the old rebel barons had an eye to its scenic capabilities when they selected it as the theatre for their mock deposition of Henrique IV. This thing was not to be done in a corner, and the impudent pageant which they enacted under its walls must have been visible for miles round. But the chief pride and glory of Ávila is the boast that it was the birthplace of Sta Theresa, the "seraphic" lady whom a more emotional epoch has preferred to the martial Santiago, and almost matched with the Virgin herself as the modern patroness of Spain. Sta Theresa was quite a modern saint; and, like her contemporary Ignatius Loyola, much more truly saintly than hagiologists would have us infer. They would rather persist in belauding her visionary ecstasies and ascetic self-mortification. Her practical common-sense and her gentle resolution are dismissed as earthlier virtues: yet it was these that made her a power. She certainly lost no time in beginning the practice of her profession, for at the age of seven she persuaded her baby brother to run away with her to Barbary to get martyred by the Moors. Being captured and brought home by their distracted parents, they next decided upon becoming hermits. But this notable scheme was also vetoed;--poor little mites! Maybe we know other small children who have started somewhat similarly on the road to canonization; but Theresa's romantic devotion outlasted this fanciful stage. At the age of sixteen she assumed the veil--a step which in wiser years she was not so eager to advocate, but in which she found ample opportunity for the exercise of her piety and her zeal. Her reform of the Carmelite nunneries was achieved in the teeth of great opposition from the hierarchy of the day; and her literary work is of an excellence that places her high among the classical writers of Spain. It is to such as her and Loyola, rather than to Torquemada and Ximenes, that the Roman Church owes its hold upon the people. And by these she is dowered with the attributes which belong to Catherine of Siena in another land. But perhaps the most remarkable honour ever accorded to her is the fact that two hundred years after her death she was actually gazetted commander-in-chief of the Spanish armies in the Peninsula war! Certainly Louis XI. had previously honoured Our Lady of Embrun with the colonelcy of his Scottish Guards. But here was a popular assembly, in the nineteenth century, which could "see him and go one better"; a far more deliberate extravagance than the whim of a fetish-cowed king. Of course there was more method in their madness than appears on the surface. They did not really want a commander-in-chief at all. What they did want was a Name which should fire the enthusiasm of the peasantry, as the citizens of Zaragoza had been fired by the name of Our Lady of the Pillar. At the same time it must be admitted that matters seemed to move more smoothly when she was superseded by the Duke of Wellington. The cathedral is a most massive structure of stern grey granite, with its apse bulging out beyond the city walls--battlemented, loop-holed, and machicolated like the profanest bastion of them all. It looks every inch a castle, and has not served amiss when so utilised; for in the great western tower the infant King Alfonso XI. (Father of Pedro the Cruel) was kept safe from his would-be guardians during his long minority, by the Bishop and people of Ávila. The interior of the building is one of the noblest in Spain--severe, gloomy and solemn; but furnished with that surpassing magnificence which only Spanish cathedrals can boast. The old town itself is full of quaint nooks and corners, and most of its streets and houses are as unalterably medieval as the walls. A county council inspector would probably play sad havoc with them, for even if they are sanitary they are terribly out of repair. There is a smell which lingers distinctive in these old Spanish townships. Not indeed altogether unpleasant, but rather grateful from association, like the smell of the stone walls of the West country after a summer shower. It is compounded of many simples, and its leading ingredient is garlic. But it would be hard to prove its innocency before our stern courts of hygiene. [Illustration: ÁVILA From the North-west.] A Spaniard, however, takes his risks more lightly than an Englishman. Like Sancho Panza, he argues that the physician is worse than the disease. Life is a shockingly hazardous business even on wafers and _membrillo_, and perhaps, after all, roast partridge is not quite so deadly as Hippocrates supposed. Perhaps the most notable of the many monasteries and churches of Ávila is the Convent of San Tomas at the foot of the hill to the south. As in many important Spanish churches, the choir is placed in a great stone gallery at the west end, and in this instance the arrangement is balanced by a similar gallery for the High Altar at the east. The floor is occupied by the beautiful marble monument of Prince Juan, the only son of Ferdinand and Isabella. The Catholic kings, fortunate in all else, desired in vain that greatest blessing of all, the happiness of their children. Juan, the hope of their kingdom, died a few months after his marriage, and his posthumous child was still-born. Isabella, their eldest daughter, torn from the cloister to give an heir to the crown, was married to the Crown Prince of Portugal. Her young husband was killed by a fall from his horse; and though she was again married to his successor, she died in child-birth; and her infant son, heir to the whole Peninsula, did not long survive. Poor mad Juana, crazed by the neglect of her worthless husband, was the second daughter of the ill-starred family, and the youngest was Catherine of Aragon. Ávila lies at an extremely lofty elevation, three thousand feet above sea level; and both here and at Segóvia snow frequently falls as late as the middle of May. The mountains immediately behind it, however, are but the connecting link between the Sierras of Grédos and Guadarrama, and all the loftier peaks lie at some distance east and west. A road leads through the gap to Talavera de la Reyna (a circumstance, it may be remembered, which was extremely fortunate for Sir John Moore).[27] But we, being bound for Madrid, set our course along the north of the mountains, heading eastward to join the main road from Vigo at the little town of Villacastin. Our course lay over a brown and undulating moorland, with the Duero plains to the left of us and the broken ridges of the Sierra rising up boldly upon the right. The scene might well be matched in Scotland, Donegal, or Connemara; for the granite mountains are very similar in formation, and the purple hardhead which clothes them is an excellent imitation of heather, though of a deeper shade, suggestive of royal mourning. Here and there great tracts of the moorland, many acres in extent, are thickly strewn with gigantic boulders, singly or in heaps, like huge natural cairns. Doubtless these are _blocs perchés_, the relics of extinct glaciers, like the similar blocks on the road from Salamanca, or those near Ribadávia above the Miño vale. The road, as usual, was almost deserted, but conscientiously patrolled by two very large and splendid _carabineros_ mounted on humble asses, which could scarcely raise their riders off the ground. At Villacastin we struck the great royal road for which we had been making, and the mountains stretched out their arms to receive us as we turned our faces towards the south. The day had been well advanced when we quitted Ávila, and now it was nearly dusk. The mountains were of indigo darkness, and the deep, closed valley into which we were plunging was as black as the throat of a wolf. But the white road led us on surely and steadily; and we knew that somewhere in the chasm before us was the shelter upon which we were counting for the night. The _Fonda San Rafael_ is a long, low, straggling building, very similar to our own old coaching inns, but much more primitive in style. The village aristocracy were engaged at dominoes in the kitchen; and the time which we wasted in dining they attempted to utilise more profitably by mastering the English tongue. They borrowed our pocket dictionary and started their task with enthusiasm. But this laudable access of energy did not win the success it deserved. Unluckily they commenced operations among the _sn's_--a combination which no Spaniard can ever pronounce without an antecedent e. And they came such amazing croppers over "_es-na-îl_," "_es-nâ-ké_" and "_es-ne-êzé_," that their bewildered interpreters got as much at sea as themselves. [Illustration: ÁVILA A Posada Patio.] The ascent of the _Puerto de Guadarrama_ begins immediately beyond the village; a series of long steep zigzags well shaded by slender pine trees--the "spindles of Guadarrama," to which Don Quixote likened Dulcinea. The climb in itself is not particularly arduous, but no doubt it is an ugly place in a December snowstorm; and so Napoleon found to his cost, when he forced the passage in 1808, rushing northwards from Madrid to fall upon the adventurous Moore. Marbot has left us a grisly description of its snow-drifts and precipices; and the furious eddies of whirlwind which swept horse and man to destruction as they struggled up the icy paths. But probably his account is a little over-painted; for precipices should be perennial both in summer and winter; but the steepest which we could identify were about of tobogganing pitch. Viewed from the north, the pass is a saddle at the end of a long deep valley; but its southern face forms an embrasure in a great mountain wall. The whole valley of the Tagus seemed spread beneath us as we gazed down from the summit; the plains all shimmering in a sea of purple heat haze, and the blue Toledan mountains rising faint and ethereal upon the further shore. So "Lot lifted up his eyes and looked and beheld all the Vale of Jordan." The text seems singularly appropriate to many of these vistas of Spain. A little later in the day, when the haze had been lifted by the sunshine, every detail of the country would have shown up as clearly as on a map. At the foot of the descent we swung to the right along a pleasant undulating road amid trees and meadows and hedgerows. And here, as in private duty bound, let us record our gratitude to Don Fernando, who erected the noble fountain whereat we refreshed ourselves by the way. Don Fernando's fountain is a great stone cistern, with the water gushing into it from an upright pillar behind. Verily his spirit is at rest if the wayfarers' prayers may avail him; for nowhere is water more appreciated than in this land of wine. Don Fernando (_requiescat in pace_) is by no means the only benefactor who has conferred such a boon on his countrymen. Almost every village near the mountains is dowered with a tank in the _plaza_, and a generous jet of water beneath which you may seethe your hissing head. Would that we were as well off in England! For our fountains can furnish no more than a miserable trickle, and even that is frequently dry. How often have we raged unsatisfied from one faithless nozzle to another, while the yokels mocked our agonies with commendations of the beer! Beer is excellent in its way--but not when one is thirsty. Then _on revient toujours à ses premiers amours_. [Greek: ARISTON MEN UDÔR]. The famous palace of Escorial opened suddenly before us as we rounded a shoulder of the mountain, and there can be few palaces in the world which occupy so imposing a site. It is often referred to as standing upon a plain, but the description is entirely misleading. It rises upon the lap of the mountains, high above the level of Madrid. Our first view, moreover, much discounted our preconceived notions regarding its gloomy appearance; for bathed in a flood of southern sunshine, it had rather a cheerful aspect. But the very sunshine itself grew chilled as we narrowed the radius; and the bare rude walls, vast, grey, and featureless, like an enormously exaggerated Newgate, seemed to crush out all the gladness of nature with their cold, unalterable frown. "First a tomb, next a convent, last a palace," was the ideal at which the founder was aiming; and the massive asceticism of the building is an apt reflection of his mood. It boasts itself the finest of all the great monasteries: and if tested by weight or by measure, the claim could hardly be denied. But this vast gloomy prison is a thing which has nothing in common with the staid beauty of Poblet,[28] or the Aladdin-like brilliance of the Certosa at Pavia. Yet the extreme severity of its style is by no means inappropriate to the great church which forms the central feature; and none that remember its grim associations would wish to see the Escorial other than it is. The memory of Philip the Prudent is still held in honour by Spaniards, for he reigned in the days of their glory, and was probably the most powerful autocrat who ever occupied the throne. But history's more equable judgment has condemned the reign as a failure, and the monarch as one of the scourges of mankind. True, he has not lacked apologists; for there is an uncanny fascination about his grim personality; and it is not difficult to show some redeeming quality even in a Louis XI. or a Richard III. But most of us prefer our history broadly coloured, with good strong lights and shadows. We must be allowed a real villain occasionally; and, till such time as we get Iago incarnate, Philip II. will do very sufficiently well. "A rake in his youth, a monster in his manhood, a miser in his old age;"--the bitter epitaph scribbled up over his deathbed paints his character in three lines. [Illustration: ESCORIAL From the East.] And yet none who has once visited the Escorial will thereafter think of Philip without some glimmerings of respect. Our loathing for his selfish and cruel tyranny is tempered with a kind of shuddering pity for that other side of his character;--his gloomy religious mania, the taint inherent in his blood. There was something of gruesome greatness in the mind which could conceive such a building, "reserving for himself but a cell in the house he was erecting for God." The Escorial was Philip's most cherished creation. Probably he had a large share in designing it; certainly he watched it stone by stone as it grew. Here he dwelt as "Brother Philip," a monk in his own monastery, "ruling two worlds with a scrap of paper, from a cell on a mountain side." Here he was worshipping when he received the news of Lepanto, and of the destruction of the Armada. And it was with the same resolute stoicism that he learned of the victory and of the defeat. Here he died--the death of Herod Agrippa; sustaining his two months' agony with a constancy worthy of de Seso himself.[29] And all that is left of him rests in the little octagonal chapel beneath the High Altar, where his sire and his successors share his tomb. His portrait by Pantoja hangs on the walls of the library. A dreadful visage,--heartless, deceitful, obstinate,--miserable beyond the power of words to express. But no picture ever painted, no statue ever carved, could reveal his character more vividly than the great gloomy pile of hard grey granite which he himself has bequeathed as a legacy to posterity. Yet on one point the tyrant-hermit claims our unreserved approbation. He displayed a most excellent taste in the matter of selecting a site. Here we can feel no shadow of sympathy for his critics. His choice was unexceptionable: and those who impugn it are blind. Indeed, this whole range of Sierras is a region of singular beauty, and the charming old towns which lie on the foot hills beneath it,--Béjar and Plaséncia, Ávila and Segóvia,--give it an added interest which mountain districts do not often possess. Charles V. was drawn hither to Yuste, as Philip to Escorial: yet each held an ample dominion and neither was an incapable _connoisseur_. The jaded soldier and statesman could wish for no pleasanter resting-place than these grave highland solitudes which form the backbone of Spain. The road which leads plainwards from Escorial to Madrid--"that splendid road constructed regardless of cost for the gratification of a royal caprice"--seems now scarce worthy of Macaulay's eulogies. Many of the roads to the northward have had to encounter far greater engineering difficulties, and show quite excellent results. Yet this and all other Madrid roads are uniformly villanous; and when they amalgamate they produce the Madrid paving, which is a thing to remember in bad dreams. The capital itself, however, does not show up badly when approached from the northward; and the Royal Palace which dominates it, on the hill above the Manzanares, is an exceedingly imposing pile. Aránjuez (we were given to understand) considers itself equal to Windsor; but no one of our acquaintance would dare mention Buckingham Palace in competition with the _Palacio Real_ at Madrid. CHAPTER X TOLEDO There are but three reasons, that I know of, for anyone visiting Madrid. First, that the roads (which are very bad) lead there; second, that the Prado picture gallery (which was closed) is exceeding magnifical; and third, that there is a bicycle repairer--which is an unsatisfactory reason at best. Smart, well-groomed, busy cities with commodious mansions and boulevards may be found (by such as have need of them) within easier distances than this. And for those who seek old streets, historic monuments, and that delightful aroma of medievalism which is the true inward charm of the Peninsula,--are not the little crooked _calles_ of Ávila and Segóvia and Toledo better than all the _carreras_ of Madrid? To them the "Only Court" is no more than a convenient "jumping-off place"; a head office of "Cooks'"; an _entrepôt_ of the central roads. The Mecca of their pilgrimage lies fifty miles to the southward,--Toledo, the ancient stronghold of the Moor, the Visigoth, and the Roman in the days when none dreamed of such a kingdom as Castile. The map showed two roads to Toledo, and already I had sampled one of them. "The Illescas road," I argued, "was as bad as possible"; and "therefore the Aránjuez road is the best." My premise had been quite unassailable, yet after all my deduction proved fallacious. More just, and equally logical, was "therefore it has necessarily improved." The Aránjuez road, to do it justice, starts off with the most admirable intentions; and as if it were really determined to arrive (as it proposes) at Cadiz. But there is a sad slump in its prospects before it has got far on the journey. It becomes stony and bumpy and hummocky, with ruts like the furrows of a plough; and to steer a bicycle along the narrow ribbon of practicable track at the margin is an operation of some nicety, which is not at all facilitated by a heavy side wind. Presently there is a lucid interval of good smooth surface, which lasts just long enough to put the victim into good humour; and the final stage into Aránjuez is like the shingle that is upon the sea-shore. Such are the habits of a Spanish road; and in a way its eccentricities are consolatory. However bad it may be, you can always cherish the hope that it will reform itself altogether round the next turn. There is no reason why it should, but it often does. Of course, "in the alternative" the converse is equally true, but that is a point which needs glossing. Unless you foster a sanguine temperament you will make no progress at all. I have dwelt at some length on the state of the road, but, indeed, at this stage there is little else to dwell upon. A struggling avenue is pluckily endeavouring to push a line of green pickets across the dun-coloured plain; and here and there are a few miserly olives, each perched upon the little hoard of soil clutched by its hungry roots. But the only things that seem really to flourish are the gigantic six-foot thistles, and I fear that is an ill-omened fertility. It is a greener and leafier world when we descend into the Jarama valley. [Illustration: TOLEDO Bridge of Alcántara, from the Illescas Road.] Yet those who have heard Aránjuez described as a Garden of Eden in the midst of a desolate wilderness are likely to find themselves somewhat disillusioned by the reality. True, a tree is always a welcome object in verdureless Castile; but the English elms which are the boast of King Philip's oasis, "they grow best at home in the North Countree"; and though they wear a brave face, they must envy the ample glades and rich green turf which their brethren enjoy in the parks of England. That the much-vaunted palace itself should prove rather a failure need surprise no one. The Spanish nobles are town-dwellers, and a country seat such as Haddon, or Hatfield, or Burleigh, is quite beyond their ken. Aránjuez was a first attempt, and is not the right plant for the soil. Perhaps Hampton Court, enlarged and remodelled in the style of an Alexandra Palace, might convey some notion of its cheap tea-gardeny air: but even the river is uninteresting--a reproach that can seldom be levelled at the Tagus! I had been cheering my flagging spirits by the anticipation of a nice shady road down the Tagus banks to Toledo: but now an old muleteer regretfully mentioned that the road was dead, and truly it was the spectre of a road to which he introduced me. The ox-carts had been wallowing in it axle deep throughout the winter, and the spring sun had baked it into a chaos of _seracs_ and _crevasses_ which might have been practicable for a goat. It was wide and straight indeed, and it boasted a noble avenue; but its sole saving feature, from a practical standpoint, was a grassy footpath at the side. So long as the avenue continued, the track maintained some semblance of coherency; but when that also defaulted, it frankly abandoned all further interest in life. As a guide it was luckily needless; I had simply to follow the valley, and as there were no walls or hedges I could make a bee-line if I chose. Moreover, on the further side of the river a lofty detached hill, with a ruined castle on the summit, formed a prominent landmark by which to gauge my progress; and with plenty of time before me, I was bound to arrive in the end. A sympathetic bandit, who found me hauling my bicycle across a ploughed field, dispassionately suggested that I might find the railroad better. This opinion was loyally endorsed by Second Bandit a mile or so to the rearward; and Third Bandit (ever the most practical of the trio) fairly marched me up the embankment and launched me along the permanent way. They were quite right--it was better; but sleepers and ballast are not a desirable cycle track, and my well-regulated English mind revolted against the scandalous impropriety of the whole proceeding. However, it is sheer waste of one's scruples to squander them over the infraction of Spanish bye-laws. They are humoured so long as convenient; but for everything there is a season: and nobody dreams of enforcing them if they chance to be inopportune. There was a wayside station to pass before I reached Toledo; there was a train drawn up at the platform, with all the officials _en evidence_, and the passengers, as usual, profiting by the stoppage to indulge in a stroll and cigarettes. I dismounted perforce at the points; but through the station I rode unblushingly: and no one seemed to regard the circumstance as the least unusual or reprehensible. No doubt from Aránjuez to Toledo all bicyclists travel that way. Meanwhile I had been making fair progress, and my goal was nearly gained. My castellated beacon had dropped out of sight behind me; and in front, at the end of the valley, silhouetted against the western sky, rose the great rocky knoll which is the seat of imperial Toledo. A bend of the river had brought its waters within easy reach, and having washed off the dust of travel, I was indulging in a few minutes' idleness before resuming the road. Suddenly a herd of cattle plashed down into the river a few yards away from me; and their diminutive Corydon--a little brown wisp of humanity in the costume of a second-hand scarecrow--came pattering happily at their heels. An English yokel would have been hopelessly flabbergasted by such an unlooked-for encounter; but not so my little Castilian. He bowed, sat down beside me, and launched out into conversation with the most delicious confidence and self-possession, as if it were all the most natural occurrence in the world. He accepted a cigarette with becoming gravity, and made sympathetic murmurs when the matches refused to light. Our final success was acknowledged with a prim little "Blessed be God!" At the end of our chat he escorted me back to the pathway, and made his adieu with a quaint courtliness that conferred a dignity on his rags. Yet probably he had never set foot outside his village, nor set eyes on a stranger in his life. Good manners, like good looks, are sometimes bred in the bone. [Illustration: TOLEDO The Bridge of Alcántara.] Hitherto the valley has been wide and open; but now the river begins to reveal itself in its true character,--_El Tajo_, the Gash,[30]--deep and narrow between its riven walls. Across its path lies the massive granite barrier of the mountains of Toledo. The stream drives squarely into them and recoils away sullenly towards the west. But ere it turns it has bitten deep, and a great outlying bastion is held in the hollow of its curve. The sun at his creation shone first upon that rocky dais! The dignity of Toledo demands no meaner site! It is indeed an ideal situation for a medieval fortress; in plan a rough approximation to the shape of a rather square D. The curved line is formed by the gorge of the Tagus, whose steep, rocky banks would alone be an adequate defence; the straight by the landward face,--also lofty and precipitous, and crowned with the remnants of Wamba's ancient walls. And at the two corners the grand fortified medieval bridges of San Martin and Alcántara throw their lofty arches across the stream. The site is very similar to that of Durham: but the Toledo plateau is larger; and the Tagus is all unwooded, and wilder and grander than the Wear. The founder, of course, was Hercules. All Spanish cities were founded by Hercules, except a few which had been previously founded by Tubal. No doubt a large man with a club was a somewhat recurrent phenomenon; and the tale of his legendary prowess was the sole evidence of identity that an early Phoenician colonist was likely to require. After the Phoenicians came the Romans. But the glory of Toledo first reached its height in the Dark Ages which succeeded the Roman, when the Visigoth dwelled in the land. Toledo was the capital of the Visigothic kingdom; and that kingdom in the day of its power, during the reigns of Leovigild and Wamba, was probably the most potent among all the nations of the West. How dire must have been the consternation of Austrasia and Neustria and Lombardy, when, scarcely a generation later, their protagonist succumbed so utterly before the onset of the Moors!--when the Jews opened the gates of the unwary capital to admit the hordes of Tarik, and the fall of imperial Toledo set the seal on the disaster of Guadalete. Neither Christian nor Moslem underrated the catastrophe of that fatal Palm Sunday; and the meagre outline of history has been gaudily coloured by romance. Who has not heard the tale of the enchanted Tower of Hercules, wherein the self-willed Roderic sought and learned the secret of his doom? The fascinating Shahrazad won a full night's respite from her dangerous lord by her catalogue of the loot of the "City of Labtayt"--the hundred and seventy crowns of pearl and jacinth, the magical mirror, and the emerald table of Solomon! [Illustration: TOLEDO Puerta del Sol.] The Tower of Hercules is no longer alive to testify: but an old Moorish ruin down by the water's edge, under the bridge of San Martin, is still pointed out as the scene of the companion tale. Here the fair Florinda was bathing in the Tagus when her beauty caught the eye of the royal Roderic, and fired the passion which brought unnumbered woes to Spain. It is, indeed, a little hard upon poor Florinda that she should never have been forgiven for her share in the disaster. It was her father, not she, who let loose the Moors to avenge her; and even the legend describes her as more sinned against than sinning. Yet the ballads, which can spare pity for Roderic, have nothing but contumely for her. It is argued, I suppose, that all the trouble arose out of her unbridled passion for bathing. But this is a failing which we northerners regard more leniently. Arletta's ablutions were under a happier star! During the palmy days of Moslem dominion, Toledo had to yield pride of place to Córdova. But after the fall of the western Caliphate it disputed the _hegemony_ with Seville; and it was with considerable equanimity that Mohammed, the king of Andalusia, saw his formidable rival grappled by the Christians under Alfonso VI. The author of the _Poema del Cid_ bitterly deplores the fact that there was no "sacred bard" to immortalise the chivalrous incidents of that great two years' leaguer; but, at least, the result was satisfactory, and three hundred and seventy years after its capture Toledo was won again from the Moor. Its fall was wellnigh fatal to the Spanish Moslems; for Mohammed himself was now unable to resist the conqueror; and willing to live "a camel-driver in the African deserts rather than a swineherd in Castile," he despairingly summoned the Almoravides from Morocco to his aid. He had sold his kingdom to save it; yet the newcomers beat back Alfonso: and the Cid's newly-won kingdom of Valéncia went under in the flood. But Toledo, once the stronghold of Paynimry, was now the bulwark of Christendom; and against its iron ramparts the wave of Moslem reaction spent itself in vain. Now began the second period of Toledo's greatness. The city became the seat of the Spanish primate and the favourite residence of the Castilian kings. Some of its importance leaked away southward when Córdova and Seville were reconquered by Ferdinand III. in 1248. But the first great blow to its prosperity was the inhuman expulsion of the Jews by Ferdinand and Isabella at the end of the fifteenth century. Toledo had been one of their chief asylums ever since the destruction of Jerusalem; and though Goth and Moor and Christian had all alike persecuted them whenever they became rich enough to make it worth while, yet they were now a numerous colony, wealthy, honoured, and well affected to the crown. But Torquemada's savage fanaticism overbore the scruples of the queen. The whole nation was ruthlessly exiled at a bare six months' notice; and perhaps it is no exaggeration to say that nearly all of them, beggared and hopeless, perished of hardship by the way. Toledo was still important enough to play the leading rôle in the great revolt of the _Communeros_ at the beginning of the reign of Charles V. It was indeed the last city to succumb; and that resolute lady, Maria Pacheco, the widow of Padilla, held it for many months against the imperial forces before she finally abandoned the struggle and fled from the realm. The thoroughness with which this rising was suppressed is perhaps a matter for regret. The triumph of the crown was too complete; and Spain, once the most democratic of medieval monarchies, was henceforth an absolute autocracy. With this last effort Toledo's prominence upon the stage of history comes practically to an end. Henceforth it retired upon its reputation, and let the busy world go on without it as it chose. It still turns out a few of those famous sword blades, "the ice brook's temper," which Othello bore upon his thigh; but, for the rest, it is but a quiet country town, dozing placidly under the _ægis_ of the great cathedral, which now seems to furnish its only _raison d'être_. [Illustration: TOLEDO Calle del Comércio, with the Cathedral Tower.] Nearly a thousand years have elapsed since Toledo was recovered by the Christians; and, though but few of its monuments are of genuine Moresco workmanship,[31] yet to all outward appearance it remains a Moorish city still. The trade-mark of the East is stamped indelibly upon it;--steep, narrow, crooked streets; and square, sombre palaces, whose grim façades give no hint of the lovely _patios_ within. Its mazy network of _calles_ is spread all over the surface of the great domed rock upon which it stands; and the fact that the Calle del Comércio is the widest, longest and straightest of any, may serve as some indication of the character of the rest. Street frankly admits that it is one of the few cities where he could not find his way without a guide; and but that I found all ways equally fascinating, it is highly probable that I should have been in the same predicament myself. Every corner of the stage seems still set exactly as it was quitted by the heroes and heroines of Lope de Vega and Calderon. Lazarillo de Tormes might still be town crier. It might be but yesterday that the horrified Gil Blas recognised the comrades of his early escapades walking among the condemned in the procession of the _Auto-da-fé_. One little alley that I discovered in the course of my wanderings bore the remarkable title of "_Calle del Diablo pertinece al Ayuntamiento_," "The-Devil-belongs-to-the-Corporation Street." He does!--to many Corporations! But few are ingenuous enough to proclaim the fact at the street corners! And few have such slight cause to lament it;--he is generally a Devil of Unrest. The great Alcázar,[32] which is the most prominent object in the city, is too uncompromisingly cubical to be strictly picturesque; and the cathedral, which is its chief glory, is singularly unobtrusive in a general view. The houses shoulder up against it as though anxious to keep it hidden; and when, after much circumnavigation, we do manage at last to unmask it, behold! it is bare and featureless, only redeemed from meanness by its noble western tower. But the moment we pass the portal all cavilling is awed to silence. Out of the blaze of the southern sunshine we step into a vast, mysterious twilight, lit only by the jewelled pictures in the clerestory overhead. The air is heavy with the odour of incense; and the chant of the canons thunders down the aisles. The style of this great temple is the purest and most solemn of thirteenth-century Gothic. Built by the canonized king, St Ferdinand, out of the spoils of Seville, it is equal to Rheims in majesty, and ranks next to Cologne in point of size. But noble as is the edifice itself, this is but the casket for its nobler treasures. No other Cathedrals in the world can compete with the Spanish in the richness of their furniture; and here, for more than three centuries, the richest of all the great Chapters[33] lavished their wealth upon the adornment of their shrine. The skilfulest craftsmen of the Renaissance,--Copin and Rodrigo, de Arfe and Villalpando, Borgoña and Berruguete,--spent the best years of their lives upon its stalls and _rejas_ and _custodias_.[34] They were furnished with gold and silver, jasper and alabaster, with a prodigality worthy of Solomon himself; and we may well apply to them all the boast that is recorded of two of them,--that no one can ever determine who best deserves the palm. The great masterpieces of the cathedral are concentrated in bewildering profusion about the _Coro_ and _Capilla Mayor_; but each and all of the score of chapels that surround it, is stored with relics of history and gems of ancient art. Here lies Alvaro de Luna, the Cardinal Wolsey of Spanish history. The great Constable died on the scaffold in the _Plaza_ at Valladolid, and his vindictive enemies would not spare even his tomb; but his beautiful marble monument shows that his daughter's piety was respected in a later reign. Here lies the Grand Cardinal Mendoza, _tertius rex_ to the wedded "kings" who made Spain a nation; and his tomb is worthy of a king. Here lie the early monarchs of Castile,--their sarcophagi caught up in the tangle of intricate tracery which encloses the _Capilla Mayor_. And here, among all these kings and princes, are the monuments of two others;--Abu Walid the Moslem, "the good _Alfaqui_" who pled for his persecutors against the wrath of Alfonso VI.; and the humble shepherd of the Morena, who led Alfonso VIII. by the secret pass across the mountains, and died on the plains of Tolosa in the great victory which his guidance gained.[35] "They buried them in the city of David among the kings, because they had done good in Israel." The men of the thirteenth century were no respecters of persons, and could understand an honourable reward. [Illustration: TOLEDO The Gorge of the Tagus.] One of the chapels is specially reserved for the performance of the Mozarabic[36] ritual, the ancient Use of St Isidore, which had been preserved by the Toledan Christians throughout the period of their subjection to the Moors. At the reconquest the Romanizers were anxious to suppress it, and after much controversy the question was referred to ordeal by battle. Two bulls were appointed champions for the rival churches! but the defeat of the Roman representative left his clients unconvinced, and two knights took the place of the bulls. Again the Toledan was victorious, but again the argumentative Romanists refused to accept the result. The arm of the flesh was a vain thing in such a matter; "the God that answereth by fire, let Him be God!" The protests of the _Mozárabes_ were overborne, and the arbitrary bonfire was kindled in the triangular Toledan market-place. The Romanists astutely conceded the privilege of "first go." They complacently watched their antagonists commit St Isidore's precious Missal to the flames. _And, behold, it would not burn!_ Had the Romanists kept their heads it might have occurred to them that the old parchment tome, with its thick oak boards and solid metal clasps, was about as unpromising a bit of fuel as mortal bonfire could tackle. But this third defeat gave them a panic. There was only a draw to be hoped for, and they dared not expose their own volume to such an unprofitable risk. With desperate ingenuity they once more tried to revive the controversy from the beginning; but their opponents were now upon too firm ground, and their orthodoxy had to be conceded. In later years, however, the Mozarabic ritual fell into disuse, and was only rescued from oblivion by the enterprise of Cardinal Ximenes, who collated and republished it, and founded the chapel wherein it is still performed. This sounds rather a broad-minded act for a Grand Inquisitor; but Ximenes, an ascetic and a conqueror, a foe to knowledge and a patron of learning, was one of those strange complex characters whose actions seem consistent to no one but himself. One might readily fill a volume with a list of the glories of Toledo, and not a tithe of its attractions can be mentioned in these meagre notes. Its proximity to Madrid renders it somewhat better known than the majority of Castilian cities, yet most visitors appear to imagine that they can "do" it adequately in a day. A cheerful American whom I met there had come over from Madrid in the morning, and was returning the same afternoon. He was seeing Toledo in three hours, and was spending one of them in dining! A month might well prove insufficient; but a month was not to be spared. One further visit, however, is incumbent on every Englishman. A pilgrimage down the Tagus to the battlefield of Talavera is a duty that he may not ignore. The Tagus valley becomes more tame and domesticated below the grim defiles of Toledo; and its mountain fences, the Sierras of Grédos and Guadalupe, face one another at a distance of some fifty miles. Yet the intervening plains have not nearly the amplitude of the Duero's, though the ground is comparatively open and even comparatively green. It is a very interesting district; for the Tagus was long a frontier river, and its banks were as diligently fortified as those of our own Tweed. The roads from Madrid and Toledo unite at the castle of Magueda; and it was at the brook beneath it that I made the acquaintance of _El Maestre_ Pedro and his wife and family, a couple of Pyrenean bears and a Barbary ape. What an ungainly group they looked as they came scrambling down the road towards me! But they were all true Castilians (at least all the human section), and offered me a share of their food when they stopped to lunch at the water side, as all well-bred wayfarers should:--Would my honour please to eat? "Many thanks! a good meal to your honours!" is the correct reply to this courtesy: and therewith I went my way. And now the military tourist will begin to recognise that he is approaching a classic neighbourhood. His ear is caught by the names of the villages--Torrijos, Sta Olalla, Alcabon. They are humble little hamlets enough, yet their names ring vaguely familiar. They each dropped a card upon history one hundred years ago. Now, too, the landscape is pervaded by an additional feature, which was likewise important enough to win historical mention on the battlefield.[37] To wit, Pigs. Pigs and pigs and pigs. Pigs by single spies, pigs in battalions. No fat and greasy citizens, like their cousins in England, but sinewy, razor-backed racers of strong sporting proclivities, who rioted along beside the bicycle in sheer exuberance of athleticism. There was a big pig fair toward at Talavera on the morrow, and its votaries were mustering from all points of the compass like the sorcerers of Domdaniel when Eblis summoned them to doom. They were all washed beautifully clean by a tremendous thunderstorm which caught us at the bridge over the Alberche: but the streets and lanes of the city were reduced to an indescribable state. [Illustration: TALAVERA DE LA REINA From the banks of the Tagus.] Talavera de la Reyna lies upon low ground on the right bank of the Tagus, which here is comparatively wide and shallow, and is crossed by a long and very crooked bridge. The town is not strictly fortified; but it is walled, and well screened by its orchards; and as the plain is here narrowed by outlying hummocks from the mountains, it forms an effective position for disputing the passage of the road. All the main fighting in the battle took place upon the higher ground to the northward. The town itself, with its enclosures and orchards, was occupied by the Spaniards under their obstinate old Captain-General Cuesta. They had nearly come to grief two days before in retreating across the Alberche, but were now entrenched in a position too strong for assault; and Jourdan and Victor directed all their efforts against the left and centre where the English were drawn up. Here the ground is more open and more elevated, sloping up from the flats by the river till it culminates in the hill of Medellin. The position (as in most other battlefields) does not seem very formidable to a layman. But then any position that did would probably never be attacked. The battle was one of the bloodiest in the Peninsula; for the British were heavily outnumbered, and their raw militia battalions lacked three years' tempering of the Ironsides of Albuera and Badajoz. But what they lacked in warcraft they redeemed in staunchness. For two days and a night they were fighting, and then their assailants sullenly withdrew. Yet, after all, Sir Arthur Wellesley had won merely a tactical victory. His strategic position was too perilous to permit him to garner the fruits. Soult's Galician army corps, already reorganised after the _debacle_ of the Douro, was threatening his rear from Plaséncia; and it was only by an adroit retreat across the Tagus at Arzobispo that he was able to elude the stroke. One of the minor incidents of the battle was an extraordinary piece of marching. The Light Division, under General Craufurd, was far in the rear at the commencement of the fighting, and were eager to get up before the close. The task was too great, but the attempt was something Homeric. They covered sixty-two miles in twenty-six hours, all in full marching order: and lost but seventeen stragglers by the way! This was probably a record for the Peninsula; though Wellington himself thought that it might be paralleled in India; and some of Marmont's marches previous to Salamanca were not far behind. What manner of men were they who could achieve such feats in July under a Spanish sun? CHAPTER XI A RAID INTO ESTREMADURA The Estremadura road launches out boldly from the end of the Segóvia bridge at Madrid, and the fingerpost which points along it laconically observes that that way you will get to Badajos. But quite a lot of water will flow under the Segóvia bridge first, even though it is only the Manzanares which runs there. Wherefore, to avoid over-watering this narrative, we will not begin it at Madrid, nor even at Talavera, but transport ourselves at one stride right away to the other end of the long line of snowy mountains which guards the northern side of the Estremadura road. Here the Sierra de Grédos ends in a forked tail like one of its own falcons, and between the forks a long, straight valley runs up into the centre of the range. The great snow-peaks sit along either side of that long, straight valley like a Parliament of Gods, with the shaggy ilex woods wrapped around their knees; and at its mouth, on a slight eminence half encircled by the new-born waters of the Jerte, stands the ancient city of Plaséncia. I were ungrateful not to retain a warm corner in my heart for pretty little Plaséncia, for I arrived there limping and dog-wrecked, and Plaséncia was kind to me. But he would be an unimpressionable mortal who could not love her for her beauty alone; and I am not sure that even I--such is man's gratitude--would remember her as kindly had she been less fair. The crumbling walls, the solemn palaces, the quaint old streets and beautiful situation, make this little Hesperian township one of the most charming in Spain. Is she not rightly named "Pleasaunce"? Queenly Segóvia herself need not disdain so fair a cousin. But Plaséncia should not strictly be included in the Castilian family circle; she has married into Estremadura, and the mountains part her from her kind. The picturesque Estremenian peasantry lounge about her squares and _plazas_, but her site and her buildings seem still to proclaim her kinship. Like other Spanish wives, she has not quite dropped her maiden name. [Illustration: PLASÉNCIA Puente San Lazaro.] There is not much traffic in the streets of Plaséncia, neither is much expected. The workmen patching the cathedral roof were heaving over the broken tiles on to the pavement without so much as a prefatory "Heads below!" Yet the place looks far from dead, for the balconies are gay with flower-boxes, and the numerous old palaces still wear a comparatively prosperous air. The cathedral stands right upon the ancient walls, which form a sort of terrace to it upon the southern side. Internally its effect is marred by a transverse partition; but externally, though (like Mr Mantelini's countesses) it has no outline, it is decked with a fanciful miscellaneous finery which makes it inordinately picturesque. Moreover, it is an educational centre, and we are indebted to it for constant processions of demure little students, clad in black cassocks with a burning heart worked in crimson upon the breast. They are beyond comparison the best-behaved children in the Peninsula, and make most appropriate figures in the quiet and shady square. The _Fonda_ where I brought myself to anchor was situated entirely upon the first floor; and this waste of good space was gratuitous, for the ground floor was all empty vaults. My bedroom was at the back. To reach it I had to pass through the kitchen; and incidentally to make myself amiable to the cook, who was manipulating her pots over a range of strictly classical construction which might have been imported from Pompeii. Beyond was a tiny _patio_ where Maria and the Señora were busy at their household duties under the shade of the vines; and then came my room. There was no window except the glazed upper panel of the door; and no ventilation when the door was shut, so it was usually open. I could shut it without getting out of bed. Our meals were served in the little _comedor_ adjoining the kitchen. Maria waited, handing round the viands in their native earthenware pipkins, piping hot from the fire. Also she led the conversation, being a notable authority on all the latest gossip and scandal; and the cook popped her head through the serving-hatch and chimed in volubly at every suitable opening. There is a homeliness about these little hostels which is very delightful; but it is always a puzzle to me how the women get their meals. They seldom dine with their men-folk, and, so far as my observation goes, must subsist entirely on "tasters." [Illustration: PLASÉNCIA The Town Walls and Cathedral.] Of course you seldom get a bill. "This is no time o'night to use our bills! With one word of my mouth I can tell them what is to betall."[38] The Señora confined herself literally to one word when I asked her, and responded "thirty-two," but I suppose my face must have betrayed some uncertainty, for "_reals_[39] not _pesetas_!" added the Señora hastily, knocking seventy-five per cent. off my mental calculation, and bringing her charges for full board and lodging down to about three shillings a day. I wonder who was responsible for the libel that Spanish innkeepers cheat; any attempt at overcharging is an almost unprecedented event. The borderland character of Plaséncia is reflected in its surroundings. The Castilian sierras wall it in upon the east; but away to the west stretches the wilderness of Estremadura--vast rugged moors interlaced with wide belts of olive and ilex, or small rare patches of cultivated ground. The lonely road holds steadily upon its way till it reaches the lip of the Tagus ravine, and then plunges abruptly down to the level of the river. There is a marked contrast in the scenery along the two great rivers of northern Spain. The Duero valley is wide and tame, a great unfenced expanse of vineyard and cornfield, edged by low hills of petrified earth; but the Tagus rift is narrow and savage, walled in by bare black rock, and showing few traces of the hand of man. The road swings down the hill in admirable style, but startles the traveller by coming to an abrupt and untimely end about half a mile short of the river; and I had to plough my way down through the shingle to the water's edge to prospect for a continuation. Far away up stream a few shattered piers and arches testify to the neglected munificence of some old _Pontifex Maximus_ of Toledo; and overhead the great lattice girders of the railway spring from pier to pier across the gulf; but where is there a passage for a wayfaring man? "It strictly prohibits itself" to use the railway line; moreover, the sleepers are laid directly upon the naked girders, so that the passenger gets a fine bird's-eye view of the landscape between his toes; but there is neither ferry nor ford,--at least none where a stranger can see them; and why strain at the strict prohibition if you can swallow the bird's-eye view? Some little way up the further shore I stumble across the road again. It is getting along capitally, thank you, and tackles the steep ascent in a most business-like system of curves and gradients without bestowing a thought upon the lamentable _hiatus_ in the rear. Elsewhere one might reprobate such conduct, but here one accepts it as natural. "_Cosas de España_,"--It's the way with Spain. At the top is a wilderness of rocky pasture powdered with flocks of merino sheep, the great nomad hordes that migrate every winter into these southern latitudes, and are now working their way north again towards the mountains of Leon. Among them stand the cloaked figures of their shepherds, tall and motionless,--a hermit race; and the pale peaks of Almanzor and his brother giants far away in the background, survey with complacent approval a picture as antiquated as themselves. Presently this desert gives way to olive woods, and the olive woods to more cultivated ground. Thick cactus hedges, fringed round with an edging of blossom, begin to hint at a southern climate; and the peasantry are already reaping the barley harvest, though it is yet but the middle of May. At last a cluster of towers planted in the saddle of a low serrated ridge marks the goal of my day's journey, and with a wide sweep to the right, to outflank an intervening valley, I enter the town of Cáceres. The tourist who wishes to explore Estremadura will find that the inexorable laws of geography have fixed his headquarters at Cáceres. But he need have no grudge against the inexorable laws aforesaid; they might have chosen a much worse place. To begin with, Cáceres is a town of resources; there is a man in it who owns a bicycle, and who did own till recently a tube of rubber solution, but this rare and costly curio has since been acquired by a foreign collector. Moreover, it is the capital of its province, and it rejoices in a picturesque and busy little market; but the gem of the whole, to an artist's eyes, is the "old town" which crowns the rising ground in the centre, a delightful relic of antiquity all untainted by the contact of to-day. Nobody seems to go into the old town of Cáceres except the girls with their water pitchers _en route_ for the Fountain of Council on the further side. The streets are so steep that they are all stepped, and so narrow that it is impossible for two loaded mules to pass. No sound is heard in them but the clattering of the storks, and the grim old palaces which wall them in have an indescribable air of mystery and romance. I am convinced that any bold spirit who dared to penetrate into their flowery _patios_ would find them still inhabited by the old comrades of Cortes and Pizarro and Diego Garcia de Paredes, the great Estremenian warriors of yore. No mere modern mortals can dwell behind those changeless walls. The grey old ramparts which enclose them must have checked the march of time. [Illustration: CÁCERES Within the old Town Walls.] Four main roads diverge from Cáceres towards the four points of the compass. That towards the east leads to Trujillo, the birthplace of Pizarro, and the mountain sanctuary of Guadalupe, which the Estremenian conquerors enriched with the spoils of Mexico and Peru. I was scheming in vain to attain to them, but my fate was most resolutely hostile. Two sallies resulted in breakdowns, and at last I reluctantly succumbed. My first successful foray was towards the south. This road leads over a queer wild country, half common, half moor, sparsely inhabited, and fringed with the low, rugged ridges which are such a feature of the district. It was a notable haunt of robbers a couple of generations ago. Towards the south-east rises the Sierra de Montanchez, which at this point forms the watershed between the Tagus and Guadiana, and the road gradually rises to pass over its tail. The Sierra piles itself up into fine bold masses on the left of the road; and beneath it on the further side lies the hamlet of Arroyo Molinos, where three thousand French soldiers, reputed the best in Spain, were surprised and crushed by General Hill in 1811. Girard was retreating before Hill from Cáceres, and had halted here for the night, leaving pickets along the road to the northward to give warning of pursuit. But the pursuers he dreaded had already outstripped and intercepted him. Hill had followed the parallel road (which is now the main one) and lay unsuspected at Alcuesca, three miles to the south. Not a Spaniard in either village but knew of the intended _coup_; but who would betray it to a Frenchman? And no whisper of his danger reached Girard till the 71st and 92nd regiments swept the street with fixed bayonets in the grey of the stormy dawn. Estremadura was Hill's province, and his other most notable exploit, the seizing of the bridge of Almaraz, was also achieved in this locality. Two victories of which Wellington himself might have been proud. From the summit of the pass the ground sweeps away to the southward, an ocean of white-flowered cistus bushes interspersed with the vivid yellow of the broom. But this brilliant spectacle does not continue for many miles; it soon gives way to the usual jumble of rock and grass and olive; and at last from this stony upland one looks down across the sloping cornfields to the distant Guadiana and the town of Mérida. A big red-roofed village with no special feature, built beside the broad and sandy bed of a great river, Mérida from a distance looks commonplace enough. Yet the wide, smooth cornfields around it might disclose a different scene. Time was when the garrison of Augusta Emerita was fifteen-fold more numerous than her present population, when her walls were twenty miles in circumference, and even in her decay her astonished conqueror could confess that it was "impossible to enumerate" the marvels she contained. Comparing what she is with what she was, the wonder is not that so much has survived, but that so much has disappeared; and yet in good truth the remains are ample enough, "equal to Rome" say the Meridans, and who should know better than they? First the great aqueduct (the greatest of three); the bridge of sixty-four[40] arches which spans the Guadiana, and the mighty castle which guards its townward end. The theatre, still almost perfect; the ruins of the Temple of Diana, and of the massive Arch of Trajan. The amphitheatre is now but an heap, and the hippodrome can only be traced by its foundations; but the whole soil teems with coins and fragments of pottery, and if ever systematic excavation could be hoped for in this happy-go-lucky country, who can guess what treasures might be revealed? It is at least an encouraging symptom that the Meridans are very proud of their "_antiguedades_," and are always eager to act as showmen; in which capacity they are equipped with the most startling archæological heresies that have ever been foisted upon an astonished world. It was a hard-worked little room that was assigned to me for my lodging at Mérida. At night I slept there, but by day it was a tailor's shop, and between times it was borrowed by Juanita for the conduct of her little _affaires du coeur_. Its many-sidedness was the result of its situation, for it was on the ground floor, with a large French window opening direct on to the pavement, and guarded with a stout iron grille. To myself this entailed a rather embarrassing publicity, but it just suited Juanita, who could interview her lover comfortably through the bars. [Illustration: CÁCERES Calle de la Cuesta de Aldana.] Each night as I returned from the café I beheld the same little picture (it was being produced in replica in half the streets of the town); the moonlight bright upon the _Fonda_ walls, and the black cloaked figure clinging like a bat to the rails. I am proud to remember that I always tried to play the game properly, and glided off unobtrusively into a side street before I got near enough to interfere. But I doubt if I ever really escaped observation, for at my next round the pavement would be untenanted, and Juanita waiting at the street door to let me in. It might be supposed that there was no ostensible motive why she should not have kept tryst at the door instead of the window, or "gone out walking" with her lover as an English girl would have done. But no! that would not be "proper." La Señora Grundy insists upon a barred window. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why all Spanish windows are barred. "Marriage is honourable to all." But in Spain it is considered expedient to give an elaborately clandestine flavour to the indispensable preliminary of courtship; and during the whole of that period Romeo is officially tabooed by Juliet's kin. He may be a most desirable _parti_, and the bosom friend of all her brothers. But now he is remorselessly "cut." When they meet, they never see him;--neither (logically enough) do they ever notice that cryptic enigma who is "feeding on iron" at the lattice every evening soon after dark. So matters continue until the courtship has ripened and the happy lover can formally demand his lady's hand. Then he is at once received into all honour and affection, and the lovers are put on a regular footing by being formally betrothed, a ceremony scarcely less binding than marriage itself. Mérida was my southernmost limit, and detained me somewhat longer than I had intended. But, indeed, the very origin of the city seems to constitute an invitation to repose. First invaded and last subdued of all the Roman provinces, Spain was just witnessing the dawn of her early millennium when Augustus founded this home of rest for the veterans of the final campaign. If rest was his intention, it would rejoice his heart to see how diligently it is still practised by the descendants of his original colonists. But my own sojourn was not entirely voluntary. I had tried once more for Trujillo, and been forced to put back for repairs. Even a fate-compelled idleness, however, may sometimes be found opportune. [Illustration: MÉRIDA "Los Milagros," the ruins of the Great Aqueduct.] The great ruined aqueduct, the headquarters of all the storks of the Guadiana, towered over the Cáceres road to the right of me as I again bore away to the northward. It had been the first object to greet my arrival, and was the last to haunt me as I left. The huge gaunt piers and crumbling arches seem more imposing in their ruin even than the complete structure at Segóvia, though I believe actual measurements place the latter first by a short head. "The Miracles," the townsfolk call them; and the title is well bestowed. Yet Estremadura can boast one other miracle more stupendous even than these. Once more I sallied forth from Cáceres, and set my face towards the west; and surely in all the solitudes of Estremadura there are none more solitary than this. Mile after mile the straight, white road heaves its long line across the ridges of the rolling moor. Its dust is seamed with the trail of the viper, and here and there the eagle hangs poised above his hunting-ground; but other life or landmark there is none for leagues together, till one feels one has been riding there for ever, and will probably continue till the end of time. Sometimes a ruined watch-tower will afford a distant beacon; sometimes a well-ambushed hamlet, whose swine are reputed to develop a specially succulent bacon by a strict adherence to a viper dietary. They appear like the phases in a dream, and are swallowed in the immensity of their surroundings. As well seek a pin in a haystack as a homestead in this boundless waste. If there be any faith in the milestones, Alcántara cannot lie beyond that great purple combe ahead of me. Yet how can there be room for the Tagus valley on the hither side? But even as I am flouting their promise, the road dives gracefully over the lip of an unsuspected hollow, and the fragments of a crumbling rampart resolve themselves into the long-sought town. The gateway admits me to a forlorn and grimy street; the houses are ruinous and neglected; everywhere is dirt and misery and dilapidation. What went ye out into the wilderness to see? Just beyond the town, and far below the level of the moors, the Tagus has carved its deep and savage glen. Right and left, as far as the eye can reach, the bare bluff headlands stoop down into the abyss like the tors on the Devonshire coast; and at the bottom, pent between its walls of rock, the tawny river swirls down the ravine. All is vast and huge and desolate; the town itself hardly shows in such a picture; yet in the midst one object catches the eye which seems to challenge comparison even with nature itself,--the work of Titans rather than men,--THE BRIDGE--_Al Kántarah_. Spain is the land of bridges. In all Europe they have few rivals, but here they own a King. Since the day when Caius Julius Lacer finished his great work for the Emperor Trajan, and was laid to rest beside it, no other bridge has ever challenged comparison with his;--a work to vie with the pyramids of Egypt, or the Flavian Amphitheatre at Rome. It is long before the eye can learn to grasp its full dimensions; all around it is rock and mountain, there is nothing to give scale. We are warned of it first by the camera, for the lens will not look at so wide an angle; and then by the size of the archway flung across the road at the centre pier. Presently, as we peer over the parapet into the depths of the gulf below us, we realise that there is a man down there walking by the waterside, and a dog which seems to bark though we cannot hear the sound. Our eye slowly sizes up the _voussoir_ above which we are standing; it is a twelve-ton block of granite; and the huge vault with its eighty such _voussoirs_ seems to widen and deepen beneath us as we gaze; for the brook that it spans is the river Tagus, whose waters have their source three hundred miles away. Thus hint by hint we have pieced together the astonishing conclusion that the span of each of the two great central arches is rather wider, and nearly as high as the interior of the dome of St Paul's; and that the height of the railway lines above the Firth of Forth is sixty feet less than that of the road above the Tagus! What must the scene be like in winter, when the waters are foaming against the springer stones one hundred and fifty feet above their summer level! How vast the strength of these massive piers which for eighteen hundred years have defied the fury of the floods! Where now is the great _Via Lata_ that ran from Gades to Rome? Where are the famous cities which it threaded on the way? The vine and olive grow in the forum of Italica, and the Miracles of Mérida are a dwelling for the stork. But here at the wildest point of all its wild journey our eyes may still behold a memorial which nature has assailed in vain:--"Pontem perpetui mansurum in sæcula mundi,"--the monument of Caius Julius Lacer, more enduring even than Wren's. [Illustration: ALCÁNTARA] We English, I regret to say, were responsible for blowing up one of the smaller arches in 1809; and our makeshift restoration,--a suspension bridge made out of ships' cables, probably the earliest introduction of the type to Europe,--lasted till the time of the Carlist wars. Then it was again destroyed, and the Spaniards were long content with a ferry. Now, however, they have restored it in its native granite, a feat of which they are justly proud. Only, seeing that no cement at all was used in the original building, it was really a little too bad of them to insist upon pointing the joints! It seems rather farcical to make a parade of military secrecy about a structure that has been famous for eighteen centuries; but there is a sentry assigned to it to make sure of preserving its privacy, and I think I acted kindly towards him in providing one culprit for the year. Our re-arrival in the town to interview the _Teniente_ created quite a little sensation, particularly as that official was not to be found at his office, and had to be hunted through the parish by packs of importunate boys. The _Teniente_ was eventually run to earth in his bedroom, in a state of great deshabille, but as polite as if he had been attired in full court uniform. His house and his goods were at my service, and himself only too anxious to do anything in the world to oblige me; but I must not sketch within twenty-five miles of the frontier without a special permit from the Minister of War at Madrid! The travelling Englishman (when not admittedly mad) is always an object of suspicion. But it must be confessed that his vagaries are generally humoured in Spain. He only gets gently restrained in remote and inaccessible places, where the official (never having seen a stranger before) naturally feels it incumbent upon him to do something, but it is not quite certain what. I made no attempt to protest. It would, of course, have been entirely useless; and my Spanish had been already heavily strained in compliments. Moreover, in this instance the _genius loci_ had benignantly decreed that I should have got the horse before they locked the stable door. Meanwhile I had been left some consolation. The bridge is not quite the only lion at Alcántara, and the grand Benedictine convent of its old military monks rises most imposingly upon the edge of the impending moors. It is now ruinous and dismantled, its fine church perfect but empty, and its cloisters used as a cart-shed by the thrifty usurpers of its halls. Beyond this feature, however, the town has little attraction. It was mercilessly sacked in the spring of 1809 by General Lapisse,--killed three months later while striving to rally his division during the great assault at Talavera,--and since that crushing disaster it has never had spirit to raise its head. There comes a stage when ruin ceases to be picturesque and becomes only depressing. It is rather in this connection that I remember Alcántara and Sahagun.[41] It is not altogether surprising, in such an inconsequent country, to discover that by crossing Alcántara you will arrive--Nowhere! and that the only traffic across that stupendous edifice is limited to a few flocks of sheep and some casual mules. I had hoped to return to Plaséncia by way of Cória. It is no great distance. Alcántara is in Cória diocese, and there are no special obstacles beyond the river; but there is no vestige of a road. No, I must return from Alcántara to Cáceres, and from Cáceres to Plaséncia, and from Plaséncia I might find a road to Cória--perhaps. Which is the reason why Cória is now bracketted with Trujillo and Guadalupe as one of the places I hope to see some day. I returned, therefore, to Plaséncia the same way that I had come; and passing round the end of the Sierra de Grédos, took my farewell of these "extrema Durii"[42] from the summit of the Pass of Béjar. I have since learned that "nothing but a lively historical curiosity, and a keen sympathy with the lonely melancholy of the heaths, could have enabled me to endure with equanimity the privations to which I was exposed." It is astonishing how little I realised my fortitude at the time. CHAPTER XII SEGÓVIA Few streams are so mercilessly bantered as the hapless Manzanares, and it is rough on an honest little river to rag it because it is poor. It is "navigable at all seasons for a coach and six"; it is mockingly urged "to sell its bridges for water"; and it labours under a gross imputation (not to be whispered in the presence of touchy Madrilenos), that upon one occasion when it happened to be sufficiently copious to float a mule's pack-saddle, the enthusiastic citizens turned out to capture the "whale." Even its few partisans show a calculated _gaucherie_ in their compliments. "Duke of streams and viscount of rivers" is quite a preposterous flight. But perhaps the bitterest tribute is the gibe of a jealous young sportsman (a Toledan, and consequently part-proprietor of the Tagus) who had fainted from heat at a bull-fight, and to whom his neighbours were kindly proffering a pitcher of water:--"Pour it into the Manzanares," gasped the Spanish Sidney, "it needs it more than I." No one would have had an ill word to say of it had it clung to its lowlier destiny. It reaps the reward of the tuft-hunting which sent it to visit Madrid. A mile above the Iron Gate it is as pretty and secluded a little brooklet as anyone need desire;--a clean shingly bed, and broken banks fringed with brushwood and poplars, beneath whose shade we very contentedly dozed through the hot hours of siesta-time, cooling our toes in the water and restfully contemplating the distant summits of the Sierra de Guadarrama,--faint opalescent outlines above the tree-tops in the glen. We had ridden in that morning from Toledo; and to push on across the mountains the same afternoon was too heavy a task to be seriously contemplated. No; we would take matters easily during the heat, and drift on in the evening towards the foot of the pass. We should find lodging--of a sort--at some little village _posada_, and could tackle the long ascent in the cool of the early dawn. [Illustration: SEGÓVIA Church of San Miguel.] The sun was sinking as we passed las Rozas, but there was still an hour of daylight before us, and it seemed a pity to waste such a beautiful evening, so we launched out venturously on to the moors. At first we had fellow-voyagers;--a homeward ploughman with his yoke of oxen,--a shepherd with his whip--(is there any other region where shepherds use whips?)--and his droop-necked flock earing the ground towards their fold. But soon the dusk won its will, and the darkling track lay empty. The only survivor astir was the habitual belated _arriero_, with his team outspanned for the night and his waggon beached upon the margin of the road. The stars had already begun to flicker up in the heavens, and we could see that Torrelodones, the next village, must be Hobson's choice for ourselves. At Torrelodones, saith the proverb, are twenty-four burgesses and twenty-five thieves (the twenty-fifth being the curate); yet there is no innkeeper among so many. Bread and wine, however, were forthcoming at one of the cabins, and eggs at a second, which we got cooked at a third; and if anyone wanted to wash himself, was there not the fountain on the village green? Beds, however, were a different matter. A muleteer would have rolled himself up on the floor in his blanket; but we had no blankets, and did not fancy the floor. As for the reputation of the villagers, no doubt that was wholly unmerited; but we thought of the fresh air of heaven, and the scent of the clean sweet herbage was borne in to us upon the breeze. It was already dark when we quitted the hamlet, and the distant lights of Madrid were twinkling up at us from the misty plain below. But another beacon rose in sight as we breasted the surge of the moorland--a large brilliantly-lighted building, apparently right in front of us and only a few hundred yards away. What was it? Evidently no ordinary farmstead--the lights were so many and so small. But anyway it would not do to camp right under its windows, so the question was shelved unanswered. We wheeled aside from the roadway, and picked out a bedroom under the lee of a huge boulder which promised us shelter from the wind. Anyone who has ever tried the experiment must be perfectly well aware that the delights of an extemporary bivouac are better imagined than endured; but we had not bargained to take our discomfort in exactly the form that it came. The last few nights we had spent at Toledo kicking the last sheets off our beds in a vain endeavour to get reposefully cool.[43] But the boot was on the other leg up here in the lap of the mountains. In vain did we empty our knapsacks; we could not get the clothes to keep us warm. About midnight the wind veered. Our faithless boulder no longer gave us shelter; and as we rose to shift our berth, behold, there was that brilliantly lighted building still shining in front of us as steadily as before. What could it be, keeping this night-long vigil when all the rest of the world was asleep? But now the mist had cleared and our eyes had grown accustomed to the starlight, and the true solution of the riddle flashed suddenly across our minds. A dozen miles off at the least, on the further side of the intervening valley, the thousand windows of the Escorial were staring out unwinkingly into the night! The stars seemed to travel very slowly across the zenith as we dozed through the dog-watches in our chilly nest. But at last a lightening in the east heralded the approach of dawn; and no sooner was there enough light to swear by than we were again upon the road, thankful for the excuse to work some warmth into our shivering limbs. Our teeth fairly chattered as we dipped into the cold shadowy hollows; but the level rays of the rising sun caught us as we topped the ridges, and cheered us with an ample promise of a warm time to come. It was not long before our troubles were forgotten, and a big bowl of hot coffee at Villalba sent us to the pass like giants refreshed. The Puerto de Navacerrada is one thousand feet higher than that of Guadarrama, and the road, being less frequented, is unfortunately not so well kept. But for all that it can be cordially recommended to the traveller, for it boasts far finer scenery as a reward for the extra toil. To our right the shadowy dome of the Great Iron Head cut a bold arc of purple out of the glowing eastern sky, while to our front and left lay the long serrated ridge of the Seven Pikes, a prominent landmark to travellers across the northern plains. The hillsides were draped from foot to summit with the rich purple mantle of the flowering hard-head, variegated with vivid splashes of gold where the broom had ousted its hardier rival; and every here and there the slope was broken by groves of pine, or jutting crags of grey granite, with the cool blue shadows sleeping at their feet. Looking back over our left shoulders along the southern face of the mountains, our eyes were caught by the towers of the Escorial rising up nobly from the lower slopes, and scarcely dwarfed even by their mountain background; while, a little nearer, the Vigo road--a pyramid of persevering zigzags--was struggling up the face of the range to reach the Puerto de Guadarrama. Our own pass rejoices in the possession of a multitude of summits, and the sixth or seventh of these (upon which we had really pinned our faith) disappointed us bitterly by abdicating in favour of another, distant at least an hour away. This last, however, was guaranteed genuine by the inevitable hall-mark of a _caminero's_ hut, and was, moreover, on such intimate terms with the Seven Pikes that we felt there was no room for deception. The gradient of the northern face is distinctly steeper than the southern, and the road zigzags down sharply through the shadowy pine-woods which clothe all this portion of the range. Not a soul crossed our path as we threaded their silent alleys; and the only house is a solitary _Venta_ midway down the descent, which rejoices in the ominous title of Mosquito Tavern. We thought of Polonius at supper and did not risk a meal. Deep down in the dingle beneath us a mountain stream was chattering towards the plain; and as we neared the outlet of the valley, and felt that we had broken the back of our day's journey, we began to cast envious glances at the inviting waters. Our bedroom had not proved altogether a success, but our bathroom was worthy of Diana. The clear cold stream gushed smoothly over its pebbly bed, and the pines which thronged its mossy banks spread a green network against the blaze of the noonday sun. A skein of brilliant blue dragon-flies flashed to and fro across the ripples; and at the head of the glade a solitary peak rose clear and sharp against the sky. The beautiful Dorothea cooling her crystal feet in the limpid water was the sole thing lacking to complete the picture. And even she would have been an embarrassment from a practical point of view. How much they miss who travel through Spain by railway, and grumble (legitimately enough) at the difficulty of obtaining baths at their hotels! The wayfarer has happier fortune;--but not an Eresma every day! At the mouth of the valley stands the royal palace of La Granja, built by Philip IV. as a rival to Versailles. The structure is not nearly so fine, though the site and the fountains are finer. But who goes to Spain to see copies of things French? And we swung disdainfully past the gateway, and headed our course for the great cathedral tower that marks the position of Segóvia. [Illustration: SEGÓVIA Arco San Estéban.] We were drawing quite close to the city when we overtook a party of four,--two _carabineros_ and two civilians,--sauntering arm in arm along the roadway and amicably sharing cigarettes. But a hideous blight descended upon this innocent idyll when they drew up with us at the _Fielato_.[44] The _carabineros_ shouldered their rifles and gave an extra twirl to their mustachios,--the civilians meekly held out their wrists for the handcuffs,--and Law and Order with their miserable captives strutted inspiringly into public view. Evidently Segóvia demanded a certain amount of style, and we two vagabonds eyed each other dubiously. But the Eresma had given us a "clean slate." No one would have guessed from our looks that we had spent the night in the open and ridden across the mountains since the dawn. "Nevertheless," quoth one of us sententiously, "what with the bad night, and the early start, and the long ride, and the hot sun, and the bathe, and the pine-woods, and the _comida_ which we are going to eat, I expect there'll be more _siesta_ than sight-seeing for us this afternoon." There are a certain number of towns in Europe which form a class by themselves--a class of professional models for the delectation of the artist. They do not necessarily possess the most interesting monuments, but they are blessed with a certain genius for assuming graceful poses, for wearing harmonious colours, and framing themselves into pictures from whatever point they are viewed. They are a very select company,--even Florence and Nuremburg can scarcely be included,--but Venice is one, and Bruges, and Rothenburg-a-Tauber; and Segóvia ranks with them. The principal lion of the city was lying in wait at the gates thereof,--the huge granite Aqueduct, one of the wonders of Spain. Its mighty piers go striding like colossi across the valley, and the little puny houses "peep about under their huge legs." By whom it was built is a matter of some question; possibly by Augustus,--more probably by Trajan[45]; so at least say the learned, who are wofully wrong-headed about such things. The true story is that it was erected by the Devil in a single night, out of his love and affection for a fair damsel of Segóvia, to save her the trouble of going down the hill to draw water. Her townswomen unto this hour are profiting by her sumptuous love-token. But her poor suitor was not so fortunate. His Delilah found one stone a-missing, and took advantage of the flaw to repudiate her contract. Beneath its broad shadow we dived in among the crazy patchwork houses of the _Azoquejo_, the once disreputable "Little Market" where Don Quixote's rascally innkeeper had been wont to "practise knight-errantry" in his callow days. A steep crooked street led us up under the toppling balconies, past the beautiful Romanesque arcades of the Church of San Martin, and the heavily rusticated façade of the sombre Palace of Pikes. Truly this was a captivating city; we made the confession immediately. And as yet all the grounds of our verdict were a few steps inside the back door. Segóvia is Queen of Castilian cities, as Toledo is the King of them. But Segóvia does not lend her countenance to those who approach from the south. She sits with her face to the northward towering over the road from Valladolid:--an unforgettable vision, the fairy city of our dreams. Spain seems to take a delight in concentrating her fascinations. For mile after mile she will trail you over a dull and spirit-quelling country, till all your enthusiasm is properly subdued. Then she will suddenly overwhelm you with a whole cargo of accumulated perfections, an extravagance of beauty which leaves admiration aghast. And never was _coup de théâtre_ more artfully developed than this great spectacle of Segóvia. A far-distant glimpse of a little group of turrets bristling upon the base of the mountains at the foot of the Seven Pikes; a tardy approach up the valley of the Eresma, whose trees and rocks impede all further view. The valley becomes a trench; and a vision of towers and cliffs begins to stir our anticipation; while the trench narrows down to a gullet, with sides so straight and smooth that they might have been cut by hand. Then comes a sudden turn; the rock gates swing wide open, and all in a moment the marvel stands revealed. Perched upon the precipitous cliffs of a long wedge-shaped promontory between two confluent gorges, Segóvia has been aptly likened to a ship stranded sidelong on the mountains with its bows slanting towards the plain. The sharp prow and lofty forecastle are formed by the heights of the _Alcázar_; a little further aft is the "bridge,"--the high ground round the _Plaza Mayor_, where stands the cathedral, the central feature of the whole. And if one is to run the comparison to death, I suppose the funnel would be represented by the cathedral campanile, and the stern galleries by the aqueduct arcades. The likeness is undeniable, but altogether too prim and pedantic. As well might one picture a fairy in a tailor-made costume. [Illustration: SEGÓVIA The Alcázar] There is something almost life-like in the sweep of the tilted strata as the great cliff leaps above the summit of the poplars. It seems like the "station of the herald Mercury";--arrested motion rather than repose;--a great wave petrified in the act of breaking, with spires and gables for the spray upon the crest. Beneath it curves the green and fertile valley, the "terrestrial Paradise" of the Monks of El Parral[46]; and the richness, brilliance and daring of the whole wonderful composition form a theme which is the despair both of pen and pencil alike. The _Alcázar_, which is poised upon the extremity of the precipice, was gutted by fire some forty years ago, and is consequently largely a restoration; but it harmonises so admirably with the lines of nature that one hardly realises that it has not grown of its own accord. It has always been a royal stronghold, but never played any very important part in the tumultuous drama of Spanish history; our friend the enemy, with commendable discretion, having commonly preferred to gather his laurels from some less inaccessible bough. It has, however, attained a minor celebrity through the carelessness of a nursemaid. This sounds but a threadbare method of achieving greatness; but the girl who accidentally dropped an heir-apparent out of a window of the _Alcázar_ at Segóvia must be allowed to have fixed the standard at the very highest conceivable peg. But the proudest day in its annals was that upon which Isabella the Catholic (newly apprised of the death of her brother King Henry) rode forth from its gateway to claim the homage of Castile and Leon. The moment was critical, for her succession was disputed; but Segóvia stood firmly in her favour,--a worthy birthplace for the worthiest era of Spain. The site seems designed for such a pageant; but it bore its own bane in the setting: for from the little convent of Sta Cruz, below the gateway of San Estéban, Torquemada was drawn to sway his nobler Queen. Torquemada was Isabella's evil genius--the demon who was to turn all her blessings to a curse. It is but just to him to admit that he was honest in his wrong-headedness; that he believed as sincerely in the wickedness of an unauthorised conscience as in the righteousness of persecution, and would have gone to the stake himself in support of his tenets with as much resolution as any of his victims. It is the standing puzzle with such men how they could fail to recognise in their own spirit the condemnation of their own methods. Persecution they would have derided if applied to them by others. Why should they credit its efficacy when applied to others by them? And an even saner thought they might have gleaned from the old essayist[47]:--"When all is done it is an over-valuing of one's convictions by them to cause that a man be burned alive." The cruelty for which we chiefly condemn them is a crime for which they were not wholly responsible. The age was cruel,--"the most cruel of all ages," wrote the grave Montaigne:--and the Inquisition did but deal with heresy as treason was dealt with by the State. Its secrecy was its new and horrible feature and the one most deeply resented at the time. For at first, even in Spain, the Inquisition was not tamely accepted; and some of the noblest churchmen were loudest in its rebuke.[48] It sinned against the light. It was a thing of devils; an atrocity only to be paralleled by the witch-doctors of Ashanti and Benin. These grisly reflections are the inevitable Nemesis of all romantic and chivalrous associations; but they seem as sadly out of place in this sunny Eden as the trail of the serpent in its prototype. Isabella was a generous patroness to the little convent, and her own mottoes and badges figure in its delicate carving. She needed no such piety to keep her memory green. [Illustration: SEGÓVIA Arco Santiago.] The Valladolid road skirts the foot of the precipice on the larboard side and doubles back into the city, where the slope is easiest at the stern. But the straight path is taken by an irresponsible little bye-way, which rushes the steep ascent along the feet of the beetling ramparts, and succeeds in winning a footing inside the Santiago gate. Here the elegant horse-shoe arches look as if they might have been borrowed from the Alhambra; and as we issued from under their shadow we were confronted by the graceful campanile of the Church of San Estéban, a work of the thirteenth century, and unique in Spanish architecture, though it may be mated in Provence. _Were_ confronted, alas! for I fear it now stands no longer. The tower was badly cracked when first we saw it, and on the occasion of my second visit was being taken down as dangerous. As to its ultimate destiny it is quite impossible to prophesy: but Spaniards are capable restorers should they happen to think it worth while. It may be as reverently revived as the work at Leon Cathedral, or (_Di meliora!_) razed with as little compunction as the late leaning tower at Zaragoza. The gateway of San Estéban is a little abaft the church, and, like its neighbour of Santiago, has distinctly a Moorish air. Not so the Arco San Andres, the other great gate, to the starboard. That is uncompromisingly Gothic, and large and massive enough to balance both the other two. Upon this side the city is bounded by the little bourn of the Clamores, a scantier stream than the Eresma, but equally romantic and picturesque. It flows in a straight-sided gully like a natural moat, the upper reaches becoming gradually shallower and wider till they expand into the broad valley which is crossed by the aqueduct arcade. Here the most prominent feature is the cathedral, which surges up out of the medley of houses, overtopping even the pinnacles of the _Alcázar_. It is the latest important Gothic monument ever erected upon Spanish soil, a sister church to the new cathedral of Salamanca, and, like it, of imposing and elegant proportions, though its details are less elaborately ornate. We are far from exhausting the subject, but it is vain to continue the catalogue. The true fascination of the town must be felt and not described. I am afraid that even the Segóvians are not fully appreciative; for our host considered that we were wasting our time there, and wished to pack us off to la Granja to see the fountains play. "It was a shame," he said, "to spend every day in Segóvia." Segóvia!--where every street corner is worth a wilderness of fountains! [Illustration: SEGÓVIA Church of San Estéban.] When Gil Blas was imprisoned in the "tower of Segóvia," his kind-hearted gaoler assured him that he would find the view from his window very fine--when he cared to look. This casual remark gains significance from the fact that it is about the only allusion to scenery in all that veracious biography.[49] For any hint to the contrary the Cantabrian mountains might be mole-hills, and Grenada itself as commonplace as Valladolid. Le Sage dealt with men, not with scenery, and no doubt, like Dr Johnson, would have preferred Fleet Street; but Segóvia wrings a tiny tribute even from him. Gil Blas, it may be remembered, was not impressed by the prospect. He had a very bad fit of the blues, and could only observe that there were nettles by the stream. But doubtless he saw better ere leaving. His character (never much to boast of) was at least vastly improved by his involuntary sojourn, and perhaps it is not too fanciful to suggest that "the view from the window" may deserve some of the credit of the cure. "There are none of beauty's daughters with a magic like thee," sings Byron to one of his _houris_; and the same whole-hearted allegiance to Segóvia will be paid by most of those who have once come under her spell. Grenada, perhaps, may equal her. So does Albarracin, in tertio-decimo: and the situation of Cuenca is probably the grandest of all. But even Grenada herself will not steal her admirers from Segovia; and Cuenca, for all its brilliance, is a gem of fewer facets than this. CHAPTER XIII BÚRGOS Last but not the least among the merits of Segóvia is to be reckoned the fact that it pays some attention to its roads, for these are decidedly the best in all the central provinces. No doubt they owe something to their proximity to the Sierra de Guadarrama, which supplies them with their granite metalling, and even vouchsafes them an occasional shower. Yet there is a balance of credit to be shared among the worthy _camineros_,--those humble "pawns" who are posted at long intervals along the roadway (each with his donkey and his dog), diligently trimming the margins and spreading the tags of herbage over the surface of the road. The method seems somewhat original, but at least it has the merit of success; for the scraps of turf serve to catch the dews at night-time--and moisture is the chief desideratum upon every Spanish road. The wide tawny plains which spread themselves northward from Segóvia are chequered with mighty pine-forests, the homes of solitude and shade. These rich green masses form a striking contrast to the bare red earth around them, and the pale blue of the distant mountains which show faintly upon the horizon beyond. For miles at a stretch the road burrows through these colonnades of tree-stems,--all plentifully blazed for resin, and festooned with the little earthenware pipkins in which it is collected;--and seldom indeed is either man or beast encountered to give a touch of life to the shadowy depths around. At one point we passed a venerable _padre_, faithfully conning his breviary as he trudged behind his mule; at another a small brown damsel lording it over a herd of gigantic kine. But the only other living creature was a large snake dusting itself in the roadway, over whom we narrowly escaped riding, for we were right upon him before we saw what he was. Once clear of the pine-belt, the country quickly relapses into the monotony typical of the Duero vale. One may partly avoid it by taking the road to the eastward, and making straight for Búrgos by Sepúlveda and Aranda de Duero across a region of wild and lofty moors. But of the two roads to Valladolid there is little to choose between Olmedo and Medina del Campo, and we may as well follow the more direct. It is easy to understand, as we cross these great limitless levels, in what manner the Moors were so long able to maintain their supremacy against the hardier races of the North. The whole district is an ideal battle-field for the light-armed cavalry in which their strength consisted; and to set a medieval man-at-arms, cased in full panoply, to do a hard day's fighting under that roasting sun is a conception worthy of Perillus himself. The battles with which History concerns itself, however, are of a later age. The disconsolate little walled town of Olmedo (once one of the keys of Castile) has given its name to two desperate conflicts in the interminable civil wars which ravaged the peninsula in the middle of the fifteenth century. Here it was that Alvaro de Luna[50] gained his great victory over his confederate enemies in the reign of John II. Here, too, in the following reign, was fought a bloody fratricidal action between Henrique IV. and Alfonso, the brothers of Isabella the Catholic. On the eve of this latter battle, Archbishop Carillo of Toledo[51] (as usual "agin the government") sent a courteous message to his special enemy, the king's favourite, apprising him that forty knights had bound themselves by an oath to fight neither with small nor great, but only with him, the following day. Don Beltran de la Cueva, however, though he might not deserve his honours, at least knew how to wear them gallantly. He countered by remitting a full description of his horse and armour, so that the forty knights might make no mistake;--rode into battle as advertised;--and escaped unscathed. His spirit deserved no less:--perhaps even Carillo thought so. But one would like to know what became of the forty knights. Olmedo figures also in fiction, but not in so martial a vein. Hither, in fear of his life along the road from Valladolid, fled our old friend Gil Bias--ex-assistant to Dr Sangrado--with more murders on his conscience than even that seasoned article felt quite easy under, and the avenger of blood at his heels in the shape of an enraged Biscayan. We followed the track of his agitated _Hegira_, but, of course, in the reverse direction, dropping gradually down to the level of the Duero by a bare and undulating road. The broad river-basin looks comparatively green and well-wooded when viewed from the heights above Simancas; yet as one crosses it, it is arid enough; and the steep, flat-topped hills which bound it seem absolutely Saharan, whether looked at from above or below. The Duero itself at this point flows in a trench between crumbling yellow banks; and the village near it, where Gil Blas struck up acquaintance with the barber and the strolling actor, lingers in our memory as the scene of our most decisive victory over our enemies the dogs. Our pockets were fairly bulging with ammunition as we descended into the _mêlée_, and whatever we missed on the volley seemed fated to catch the _ricochet_. Our last missile was expended absolutely at random on the sound of a dog behind us. But to judge from the yell which followed it, it was none the less effective for that. Valladolid has the general unfinished air befitting a town that has made several unsuccessful attempts to establish itself as a Capital; and its failure to support that dignity is perhaps less surprising than the fact that it should have been cast for the _rôle_. It stands upon no important river, on no commanding hill. There is hardly a village in the plain around it but might equally well have drawn a prize in the lottery which decreed its eminence. [Illustration: BÚRGOS Arco San Martin.] In strategical position it is inferior to Búrgos--to Toledo in historical prestige. Its memories, too (even apart from Dr Sangrado), are none of the most cheerful; for it was one of the chief seats of the dreaded Inquisition, and no city save Seville can boast a blacker fame. The wretched Jews and Moors fill up the roll of the _Quemadero_,[52] but there were many scholars and nobles among the victims of the _Plaza Mayor_ at Valladolid. Here died the noble San Roman, the first of the Spanish reformers. His ashes were collected by the very soldiers that guarded his pyre and were brought to London by the English Ambassador,--a foretaste of evil to come. Here it was that Don Carlos de Seso, his limbs mangled by torture and disfigured by the ghastly _San Benito_, paused as he passed the royal daïs, and sternly demanded of Philip, "as one gentleman of another," how he could have the heart to tolerate such atrocities in his domain. "I would slay mine own son were he as thou art," was the bigot's answer. And so, to do him justice, he would;--on even less provocation;--as a certain grave in the Escorial can testify unto this day. But surely even Philip's conscience can not have been appeased by such a rejoinder. The memory of that awful indictment must have haunted him years afterwards in the long terrible days when he was himself meeting a yet more hideous death with equally resolute fortitude. There was one at least of the judges who sickened at his share in that day's butchery: for when, many years afterwards, Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo, himself fell under the suspicion of the Holy Office, the remorse which he felt for de Seso was imputed to him for a crime. And the spirit which such a man could inspire in his fellows may be judged from young Julian Sanchez, who suffered the same day. The flames burnt the cords which bound him, and in his agony he wrenched himself free. The friars sprang forward to hear his recantation. But Julian's eye fell upon the heroic figure of his leader, still steadfast amid his sufferings, and with the cry, "Let me die like de Seso!" he flung himself back into the flames. Nowhere in Europe had Protestantism nobler martyrs than the Spaniards: and numbers of them were men of eminence; for their very judges lamented that the learned men whom they had sent to confute foreign heretics were returning to preach the faith which they were commissioned to destroy. But against such persecutors their cause was hopeless. Philip and Valdez were men with hands of iron. Valladolid has many fine monuments, but they are scattered and lost among newer and less interesting surroundings. Even the old arcaded _plaza_ is becoming deplorably modernised; and the old-world charm of Toledo and Segóvia may here be sought in vain. The Pisuerga river (upon which the city stands) forms the eastern boundary of the _Tierra de Campos_, as the Esla forms the western.[53] And the scenery of the two valleys is so nearly identical that a traveller dropped unexpectedly in either might be puzzled to say which. There are the same wide basin, the same crumbling yellow cliffs, the same troglodyte villages, the same Nilotic-looking stream. The only speciality of the Pisuerga is the extreme dustiness of the roads. Dueñas is one of the most typical little towns of the district. Perched in full sunshine on one of the bare hills that flank the valley, it looks as thoroughly baked as a pie-crust, in spite of the poplared meadows at its feet. Here Ferdinand and Isabella first started their housekeeping, on a very modest scale indeed, with scarcely enough capital to guarantee to-morrow's dinner. "Saving a crown, he had nothing else beside," sings the Scottish lassie of her suitor in the old ballad. But the royal lovers' crowns were still in abeyance; and the then wearer of the Castilian diadem had very different matrimonial plans for his high-spirited sister. Wherefore he, whom History remembers as the austere and politic Ferdinand, stole secretly across the hostile frontier, disguised as groom to his own attendants, at the imminent risk of a broken head; and the knot was safely tied in the cathedral at Valladolid, with the connivance of a few of Isabella's staunchest partisans. [Illustration: DUEÑAS] The little cathedral town of Paléncia lies a little off the direct road; but it is most conveniently situated as a half-way house to Búrgos. The cathedral is a singularly fine one, though rather ramshackle externally; and, like a true Spanish cathedral, it is crammed with works of art. The streets are all quaintly colonnaded; but we were somewhat taken aback when we were shown the entrance to the _Fonda_, a miserable rat-hole in a blank and dirty wall. We had expected something better of Paléncia:--yet nothing quite so good as the delicious shady _patio_ which we found at the end of the passage; for the hotel is really an excellent one, and its true entrance is from a street at the back. On the whole, we have nothing but commendation for Paléncia. Only we wish that the little sisterhood, "_Siervas de Maria, ministras para los enfermos_,"[54] would mind--not their p's and q's, but their m's and n's. A little ambiguity in the final syllable is so extremely compromising! We quitted Paléncia early on midsummer morning, and soon regained the Búrgos road. The villages that lay before us were vomiting such volumes of smoke that we concluded Torquemada must be justifying its title by the celebration of an _Auto-da-fé_. But it proved to be only lime-kilns; and Torquemada is pretty enough to deserve a gentler name. Here the Pisuerga is crossed by a long crooked old bridge; and in the fields near by occurred the incident which forms the subject of Pradilla's famous picture, when poor mad Juana, escorting her husband's body from Búrgos to Grenada, elected to spend the night in the open sooner than shelter the faithless corpse in a convent of nuns. An incident worthy of Lear! Now we deserted the Pisuerga to follow the Arlanzon, a greener and narrower valley, though still somewhat dreary at times. The poppies were blazing in the brilliant sunshine with a splendour that dazzled the eye. They grow best where blood has been spilled, if we are to credit old folklore; and the Arlanzon valley may well bear out the assertion, for every stage in the journey--Torquemada, Quintana del Puente, Venta del Pozo--was the scene of some fierce skirmish during Wellington's retreat from Búrgos in 1812. His army suffered terribly hereabouts; for the roads were wellnigh impassable in that rainy autumn, and the sulky troops broke out of all control. At one time there were twelve thousand of them all drunk together in the wine-vaults at Torquemada! The result was almost disaster. But fortunately the stock of wine was a large one, and they left enough for the French. It may be urged in extenuation that the country vintages are more heady than one would think, especially for exhausted and starving men. [Illustration: BÚRGOS Hospital del Rey.] Our own difficulties arose not from rain but from sunshine, and the last few miles over the hilly ground were distinctly exhausting. But at these high levels even the sultriest sun is tempered by a crisp and bracing air. The traveller who starts early can generally ride out the morning, and the leafy avenues of Búrgos were our haven at mid-day. Búrgos shows itself off at best advantage when seen from the eastern side, but the approach from the west is not unworthy of the Capital of Old Castile. First we pass the beautiful _Plateresque_[55] gateway of the Hospital del Rey. Then the towers of Las Huelgas, the most famous Nunnery in Spain. The convent was founded by Alfonso VIII.,--a trespass offering after his great defeat by the _Miramamolin_[56] at Alarcon. And his atonement was accepted; for twenty years later he was able to hang up over the High Altar the sacred banner captured at Las Navas de Tolosa, the great victory which extinguished for ever the long domination of the Moor. Under its folds the young Prince Edward of England knelt watching his arms on the eve of his knighthood in 1254. Here he was married--a boy bridegroom--to his girl-bride, the Princess Leonora of Castile; and hence he carried her away with him to his home in his northern island, where as the "dear Queen" of the Eleanor Crosses her name is held in honour to this day. "Laws go as Kings wish," says the Spanish proverb; otherwise it is difficult to imagine how the nuns could have ever permitted such a shocking thing as a wedding in their own Conventual Church. When we peeped into it, the very effigies of the kings on the royal tombs were jealously shrouded--for propriety's sake! Formerly ten thousand dollars dowry and sixteen quarterings were indispensable to the lady who wished to renounce the vanities of the world in this exclusive cloister! But now the sisterhood is sadly reduced, and takes in "paying guests,"--to wit, another sisterhood, with whom they live (it is said) in peace and amity. I mention this because an old French curé, who visited the convent with us, seemed to regard it as the most astounding miracle that Búrgos had to boast. [Illustration: BÚRGOS Arco Sta Maria.] The main entrance to the city is formed by the magnificent Arco de Sta Maria at the head of the bridge over the Arlanzon. It was erected to propitiate Charles V. after the revolt of the _Communeros_; and that monarch's effigy consequently occupies the most conspicuous niche. He is surrounded by all the local heroes of Búrgos;--Diego de Porcelos, _Fundator noster_, whose German son-in-law erected the _Burg_,--Lain Calvo, chief of the early "Judges,"--and Fernan Gonzalez, the great count who founded the kingdom of Castile. But of course the greatest of all the city demi-gods is their "Champion Chief," my Cid Ruy Diaz of Bivar. Doubtless he would have been their patron saint if the Pope could have been induced to canonize him;--a queer type of saint perhaps;--but there are queer types in the Calendar. "My Cid" flourished about the time of our Norman Conquest, and from his youth upward was recognised as the doughtiest warrior in Spain. He was the sword-arm (according to legend) of three successive Castilian sovereigns; and his services culminated in the conquest of Toledo, where (again according to legend) he was commander-in-chief. Afterwards he fell into disgrace;--chiefly owing to his invincible ignorance of the dogma that you ought to stop killing Moors as soon as your king has made peace with them; and Alfonso VI. arranged the difficulty by banishing him from Castile,--to kill more Moors. "My Cid" now obtained letters of marque (or their equivalent) from the Moorish King of Zaragoza, and proceeded to carve out a kingdom for himself by the conquest of Valéncia. This enterprise required money, and "My Cid" raised it from the Jews, leaving in pawn a sealed chest full of gravel, which purported to contain his family gems. Apparently he was indignant with the Hebrews because they would not accept his bare word; and it never occurred to either party that they were, in fact, accepting his bare word in the matter of the sealed chest. As a commercial transaction it seems a little bewildering; but it all came right in the end; and "My Cid" loyally redeemed his chest of gravel at full face value when Valéncia was subdued. At Valéncia he reigned in great glory, reconciled to the king and victorious against all assaults of the Moors. There he made an edifying end, serenely indifferent to the gathering of the mighty host which his foes were assembling for their final effort. Thence he sallied for the last time at the head of his comrades,--a ghastly figure, stiff in death, but clad in full armour, and mounted on Bavieca, as he was wont to ride of yore; and all the Moors that beleaguered him fled at the sight of him, so that the spoil that he took at his death was more than he had ever taken in his life. Ximena, his widow, bore back his body to Búrgos, as he had bidden her; and his bones are exhibited to inquisitive strangers in the Town Hall at a _peseta_ a head! How could the Burgalese have the heart to ravish them from his own monastery of San Pedro de Cardena, where he slept with Ximena and Bavieca, like the tough old Berseker that he was? Of all the cities of Northern Spain, Búrgos is probably the best known to the average tourist; but though the English language (for which one acquires a very keen ear after a month's abstinence) may be occasionally heard in the environs of the cathedral, yet the quaint old _calles_ and palaces are still much less visited than they deserve. Many of the latter are particularly fine examples of their class, especially the stern old _Casa del Cordon_, which takes its name from the great cord of St Francis, sculptured over the portal,--a common embellishment in the palaces of that date; and the more graceful _Casa Miranda_, built (as we may surmise) by some relative of the "prudent" Don Diego, Don Quixote's hospitable host. This last is a lovely old building of Italian delicacy of ornament, but, now, alas! sadly mutilated and partitioned off into squalid tenements, not entirely innocent of fleas. "It is never hot at Búrgos," we had been told by a friendly mentor: and I can testify that it is often cold there, for the place stands high, and the mountains of la Demanda rear their snowy crests at no great distance away. Yet the local saying, "Nine months of Winter, and three of H--l"[57] is distinctly a more impartial summary, and this month was apparently one of the three. The narrow streets blazed white and scintillating under the flood of sunshine. The wayfarer edged his way gingerly along the shady margin, and picked out the narrowest point before he would venture to cross. Then, after a timid pause, he would draw a deep breath and make a bolt for it. The sun caught him in transit like the blast from the mouth of a furnace; and he scuttled gasping into shelter, and cooled off on the further side. The Spanish shade temperature may perhaps be matched on a hot day in England, but it needs the _Piazza_ at Venice to rival the fury of the sun. [Illustration: BÚRGOS Patio of the Casa de Miranda.] There are, indeed, some few Salamanders who do not appear to mind it. A party of tonsured Franciscans were unconcernedly challenging it to do its worst. But most of the saner inhabitants wisely keep indoors till the evening; and whoso wishes to see Búrgos Society taking its airing, let him seat himself after dusk in front of the Café Suizo upon the Espolon. Then all the beauty and fashion turn out to promenade upon a regulation hundred yards of pavement, under the eyes of their fathers and brothers, who sit sipping their coffee and _anis_ beneath the trees. A very handsome company they are; but, alas! their hats and frocks are mostly Parisian creations. That most graceful of all head-dresses, the _mantilla_, is reserved for state occasions, such as High Masses and Bull-fights. "Nothing is sacred to a sapper,"--nor to a milliner, unless it is new. There is a cathedral at Búrgos; and we feel ourselves justified in mentioning it, because we heard it frankly admitted that it was "a vurry fine church _for such a small town_." Our Amurrican Ruskin seemed to think it hardly class enough for Chicago; but in contests of this description the battle is not to the millionaire. The builder of the Escorial, for all his great possessions, knew that it was not for his craftsmen to rival the Cartuja tombs.[58] Indeed, there is something overwhelming about the magnificence of Búrgos. It is rather German in character, as Leon is rather French. Yet though Juan de Colónia was a Rhinelander and Archbishop Maurice an Englishman, there is too much pure Spanish at Búrgos to assign all the credit to them. The building ranks as one of the wonders of Europe:--a cathedral perhaps as large as Canterbury, but finished throughout with the delicate extravagance of the _bijou_ chapel of Roslin;--which, of course, is really Spanish also, if Scotchmen will excuse my saying so. And, moreover, the splendour of the furniture is fully in keeping with the fabric: particularly the gorgeous metal _rejas_,--for what other craftsmen in Europe could vie with the Spanish smiths? Riches which might deck out a whole church among us lovers of bare walls are here found packed within the compass of a single chapel; and little gems of carving and inlay are thrust aside like lumber into corners where they can be scarcely seen. The whole is a dream of magnificence unsurpassable even in Italy: yet it is the gorgeous gloom of Toledo which still springs first to the memory when we contrast our own chaste chilly churches with the opulence of the shrines of Spain. The cathedral stands upon steeply sloping ground well above the level of the Arlanzon. A long broad flight of steps leads up from the street to the south transeptal entrance; and from the pavement of the northern transept the noble staircase of Diego de Silöe climbs up to another street level upon the further side. Beyond it and above are piled the quaint red-roofed houses, clambering tier upon tier up the flanks of the escarpment; yet for all their aspirations the bare steep mound draws clear of them, and "Dubreton's thundering citadel" frowns alone upon the crest. This castle has rather an unsatisfactory interest for Englishmen, for it was the obstacle which checked the advance of Wellington in his great campaign of 1812. It stands at the tip of a long tongue of high ground which runs up to the river almost at right angles; and this extreme end is separated from the rest of the ridge by a deep depression, so that it forms a sort of semi-detached hillock, shaped like a gigantic mole-hill some three hundred and fifty feet high. The castle is included within the circuit of the city walls; and the cathedral is so close beneath it that it is wonderful that it escaped destruction during the bombardment. Yet even the stained glass which once adorned the clerestory was only destroyed by the explosion which occurred the following year. The castle was once the royal residence of Castile: but nothing now remains of it except a few lines of grass-grown earthworks, which are utilised as rope-walks by the peaceful Burgalese. The modern fortress is on the hill of San Miguel, on the other side of the depression. In Wellington's day San Miguel was merely an outwork. Its capture was a preliminary operation, and it was stormed early in the siege. With modern artillery such a _coup_ would have been decisive. The citadel itself would have been blown over the pinnacles of the cathedral without more ado. But in those times the old line-of-battle ships fought their thirty-two pounders muzzle to muzzle, and "three or four feet between the mouths of your pistols" was considered "as good as a mile." Wellington was, moreover, miserably provided with artillery, and the guns of the castle were far superior to his own. His troops were endeavouring to "tear down the ramparts with their naked hands"; and the conspicuous pillar which overlooks three counties from the lonely heights of Malvern, records the fate of the young heir of Eastnor who was killed while directing the approaches. A month's siege and five desperate assaults left the castle still unwon when the French armies had gathered to relieve it: and the besiegers with muffled wheels stole away over the bridges in the night-time. The campaign which began so gloriously at Salamanca[59] had ended in another retreat. [Illustration: BÚRGOS From the East.] Yet the labour and carnage were not wasted. Joseph had neither time nor money to spend upon repairing the battered fortress, and next year the tide of war rolled back like the surge of the sea. Wellington, riding at the head of his troops across the hills from the westward, was saluted by the thunder of a terrific explosion which darkened the heavens above him and shook the ground beneath his feet. Then first, with stern elation, he recognised the presage of Vitória. His foes had despaired of resisting him. The castle of Búrgos was no more. CHAPTER XIV ACROSS NAVARRE It must give some flavour of unreality to our impressions of the Peninsula that we should not allude to the beggars until the ultimate chapter of all. And our only excuse for our negligence will sound like an aggravation of the error; for we hold that the Spanish beggar has been much over-advertised and does not (on his merits) deserve any more prominent place. The number of beggars in Spain varies directly in proportion to the number of tourists. They are most persistent at Búrgos; there is a moderate superfluity at Segóvia and Toledo: but in the out-of-the-way districts there is only the fundamental residue, and that (to speak frankly) we should be rather loth to spare. "His honour the beggar, your brother"--the authorised official beggar--is a gentleman. He is frequently distinguished by a badge, like old Edie Ochiltree; and his resemblance to that worthy philosopher does not terminate with the badge. He is seldom unduly importunate. He begs "in God's name"; and when "in God's name" you implore him to excuse you, he seems to resignedly argue that such an adjuration would never be refused on insufficient grounds. His station is in the church porches; but he sometimes goes stumping the _calles_, and breathing a supplicating "_Ave Maria_" into every open door--an invocation which generally brings a very peppery blessing rattling down the staircase from the busy housewife overhead. And in fine, his entire demeanour is so eminently high-bred and dignified that it seems a privilege to oblige him. You feel as if you were conferring an obol on Belisarius, and are consequently on the best of terms with yourself for all the rest of the day. This "Lord High Vagabond of the Stocks" is, however, not quite pushing enough for the era. In be-touristed cities he is swamped by an army of interlopers. These are perhaps most frequently children; but the tribe is bewrayed by their cry,--"_Perrita por pan![60]--Señor-e-e-to! una perr-e-e-ta!_" a capital phrase for a beggar's whine! A small initiate was squatting beside me all the time I was sketching the Casa Miranda. She was engaged in coaching the baby--these were to be his first words. The baby being unresponsive, she maintained the refrain herself, at intervals of five minutes, in an uninterested semi-detached tone. If she got the _perrita_, that would be so much profit; but she would not be depressed if she didn't--she was not so keen about the _pan_. The benevolent stranger is misled by their bare feet and rags and persistency, and imagines that they are all on the brink of starvation; but if he wants to see real poverty let him penetrate to the remoter villages--and he will find no beggars there. There more than once I have been humbled to the dust at having my "tip" politely spurned by the dignified ragamuffins who have rendered me some trifling service. And lest I should ruin their self-respect with coppers, I have been forced to undermine their constitutions with cigarettes. The last beggars whom we encountered at Búrgos, however, were "right" beggars. They were clustering round the entrance of the great monastery of La Cartuja[61] de Miraflores, awaiting their daily dole. Everybody visits La Cartuja to see the marvellous tombs which Isabella erected for her father and brother--the masterpieces of _el mæstre_ Gil; yet not the least attractive feature are the white-robed Carthusian brethren themselves, and the ragged mendicants "coming for their soup" according to the immemorial usage of old. The convent stands about two miles from Búrgos, on a slight eminence to the right of the Pancorvo road, and was the last of the great monuments of the city that we passed on our departure towards the east. The road had been rising almost imperceptibly all the way from Valladolid. Gradually the fields had got greener and the trees more plentiful as we left the dun plains behind; and now a fine row of big shady elms introduced a welcome variety to the everlasting poplars and half-grown acacias which had been our only solace for many a sultry mile. The country, moreover, now begins to assume a more mountainous character. Away to the right rises the desolate Sierra de la Demanda, the northern outpost of the rugged ranges round Sória,--perhaps one of the wildest districts in all western Europe at the present day. The wolf and the boar still roam at will through its untrodden valleys, though I believe the bear now only survives in the Western Cantabrians and the Pyrenees. Here the venerable monastery of Silos lay securely hidden even from the sacrilegious Moors; and here in later years the dreaded _partidas_ of Mina the _guerillero_ were able to defy the utmost efforts of the French. Our road passes only over the merest outskirts of these mountains, and leads us on through Briviesca by a long, gradual, and monotonous descent. Yet the gates of Castile are still before us, and we do not quit that most Spanish of provinces without seeing it once more in its sternest and wildest mood. North of the road lies the long level-topped ridge of the Montes Obarenes, a range not dissimilar to our own Mendips, and, like them, cleft with an unsuspected pass. For some distance we skirt the base of the hills; and then with a sharp turn to the left we dive suddenly into the grim defile of Pancorvo, a Deva gorge in miniature, where road, river, and railway jostle each other through a maze of fantastic limestone crags. [Illustration: THE GORGE OF PANCORVO] These mountain ramparts, pierced with their deep natural posterns, are a most characteristic feature of the Castilian frontiers; and probably that "Land of Castles" owes its name as much to them as to its man-built donjons and citadels. Indeed, it requires no very vivid imagination to discover the outlines of towers and battlements among the sheer bare weather-beaten stones. One magnificent imitation overshadowed our road in the _Serranía_ of Cuenca, with keep and watch-tower and ballium as complete as a _Château Gaillard_. Another more ambiguous specimen we caught sight of in this very district;--one of those isolated conical hills crowned with a square rocky tooth, which are not uncommon in the neighbourhood of Pamplona. First it seemed that it was a rock,--then that it was a castle; and the balance of probability appeared to change every half mile. The road led straight up to our landmark and circled around the base, so that we saw it fairly close, and from three different sides; but whether it was really a rock or a castle we are not quite positive even to this day. There can be little doubt that it is to some of these _Fate Morgane_ that we owe the old proverb concerning castles in Spain. The northern face of the Montes Obarenes is much more broken than the southern; and as we run down from the pass into the pretty little town of Miranda, we may see, far away on our right, that other great notch to the eastward where the Ebro forces its passage out into the Rioja plains. The Ebro is but young up here in the Vizcayan highlands; yet it is already a fine broad river; and the massive old stone bridge of Miranda, flanked by quaint houses and churches, makes a singularly attractive sample of Spanish scenery to the tourist newly arrived from Bayonne. The river breaks through the mountains some ten miles lower, by a gap between two rocky headlands, known as the cliffs of Bilibio and Buradon; and beyond are the tawny undulating plains around Haro,--a famous wine-growing district, whose vintages usually reach the English market under the name of Bordeaux, though they taste just as good under their own. The view (given in the illustrations as La Rioja Alavesa) is one which is very typical of Spanish inland scenery. But a special local touch is given by the Navarrese villages bunched together at the tops of their conical hills, like so many hedgehogs with their bristles out. Navarre was a buffer state in medieval times, and anyone who had nothing else to do used to kill time by invading it. The Navarrese villages were always upon the defensive, and evidently acquired the habit of arranging themselves to suit. [Illustration: LA RIOJA ALAVESA Looking Northwards across the Ebro.] Meanwhile our road to Pamplona keeps still to the northward of the mountains, and, crossing the Ebro at Miranda, makes straight for the heights of Puebla and Morillas, which answer to the Montes Obarenes on the opposite side of the vale. The little river Zadora comes rippling out to meet us; and the gap from which it issues admits us into a wide level basin some ten miles in diameter, to which the Zadora itself forms a somewhat irregular chord. The ground on the left bank of the river rises considerably higher than on the right, and culminates in a little shaggy knoll which stands close beside our road. Watch for it, and do not pass it unnoticed; it is the "Englishmen's Hill." Well has it earned that name, for it has been twice baptized in the blood of our nation. Once when a detachment of the Black Prince's army, under the command of Sir Thomas Felton, fell fighting valiantly against thirty times their number on the eve of the battle of Navarrete.[62] Again when Picton's "fighting devils" came like a storm against it in the crisis of the battle of Vitória, cutting their path through the centre of King Joseph's tottering array. Salamanca was Wellington's most brilliant victory, but Vitória was unquestionably the ablest of his campaigns. This invasion was not like those that had gone before it--no mere sally from his impregnable mountain lines. At last he could wield an undivided command and an army as numerous as his opponents; and as he crossed the little frontier river Agueda, he had looked back to Portugal with a confident "adieu." Hill to the right and Graham to the left had already been slipped on their quarry; and against such a sweeping combination neither Tormes, Duero, nor Carrion could provide any adequate defence. Madrid was abandoned before him,--Búrgos was dismantled. And the retreating French convoys, with all their baggage, plunder, and munitions, were jammed in the city of Vitória at the head of the road to Bayonne. Joseph sought to bar the advance at Pancorvo, and thought the defile was impregnable. He looked for assault from the southward, but the storm broke upon him from behind. Wellington had shifted his base by sea from Lisbon to Santander; and sweeping Reille and Maucune before him, came pouring down the Ebro from the north. The stroke was a _coup de Jarnac_, as fatal as it was unexpected. The heights of Obarenes and Morillas were no longer barring the way; and Joseph hastily fell back to the hills behind the Zadora, the only remaining position which he could possibly hope to defend. As it was in the days of Las Navas de Tolosa, so was it also in this "crowning mercy" of the Peninsular War. It was a peasant who led Kempt's brigade over the unguarded bridge at Tres Pontes, and fell, like his prototype of the Morena, at the moment of the victorious attack. Clinging in desperation to each successive thicket and farmstead, the French were pushed remorselessly backward into the chaos of transport behind. And even more fatal than the frontal onset was the blow struck far to the left on the very confines of the plain. There Graham stormed the village of Gamarra Mayor, and shut off the flying army from the use of the great royal road. Nothing that ran upon wheels could go along the branch road to Pamplona. Guns, ammunition, treasure, baggage, and plunder all fell entire into the hands of the victors; and probably at the moment Joseph was very well contented that the prize was sufficiently valuable to effectually hamper the pursuit. The battle was the ruin of Napoleon, as well as of his cause in the Peninsula. The struggle had sapped his strength for years, and the catastrophe came at the very crisis of his fate.[63] Among all his enterprises there had been none more thoroughly inexcusable;--wantonly conceived, treacherously undertaken, ruthlessly carried out. As great a blunder in statecraft as it was an outrage on humanity. "The Spanish canker destroyed him"; and so in bare justice it should. Our route follows the track of the flying army along a deep green Navarrese valley between lofty and cliff-like hills. By its side runs the single line which connects Madrid with the frontier; but this turns off to the north about halfway to Pamplona, making for San Sebástien and Irun. [Illustration: MIRANDA DEL EBRO A Corner in the Town.] The villages are much devoted to _Pelota_[64]; and few are too poor to possess some species of primitive court. Those in the larger towns are most imposing erections; but any bare wall will do, and some of the churches have hoisted pathetic petitions that the parishioners will not practise against the walls _during the hours of divine service_. The houses themselves seem almost built with a view to the pastime, for they are solid square stone buildings, shouldering close up against the roadway; and their blank expanses of ashlar are persistently commandeered by the boys. _Pelota_ is exclusively a Basque game. In Castile and Leon the men are content with skittles, and the boys are generally engrossed in the enacting of miniature bull-fights--a game in which the star performer invariably elects to play bull. Dancing is, of course, an amusement which is common to all provinces and to both sexes: but a game in the English significance is an institution which seldom appeals to the southern mind. In this district, however, the cyclist provides a good deal of salutary exercise for the conscientious toll-keeper. For the Basque roads are not national but provincial, and the provinces maintain them by taking tolls. The stranger, however, is not generally aware of this custom; and as the toll-bars are quite unobtrusive, he rides innocently past them on his way. His first intimation takes the shape of a breathless and howling _caminero_ sprinting desperately along the road behind him, and smarting under the conviction that he is being wilfully bilked. Some little distance before we reach Pamplona we pass one of the most remarkable examples of rock formation that is to be met with even in Spanish hills. Here the deep glen of Larraun debouches upon the main valley, and across its mouth is drawn a huge natural wall of precipitous limestone which can hardly be less than a thousand feet high. The top is serrated, but both faces are equally sheer; and the thickness at the base is not relatively greater than one would expect in an artificial masonry dam. Probably, indeed, it was a natural dam originally, retaining a vast reservoir in the vale behind; but now it is cleft in the centre from top to base with a huge gash, clean-cut and narrow; and through this stupendous portal the little river issues from the vale. [Illustration: PAMPLONA From the Road to the Frontier.] Pamplona stands in the centre of an amphitheatre of mountains, rising out of the level arena on a sort of daïs covered with walls and spires. It is the chief of the northern frontier fortresses; but its bastions date mostly from the days of Vauban, and its strength (from a modern military standpoint) must depend on the forts which cap the neighbouring hills. The cathedral is an interesting building, and possesses a most lovely cloister; but the town generally is not very attractive to the artist, though it forms a good "jumping-off place" for exploring the country around. The bare, windy wastes that stretch away from the city towards the Pyrenean foot-hills are not altogether so tenantless as they seem to a casual view. Several of the villages still bear traces of ancient prosperity;--Estella, charmingly situated in a rocky hollow; Sangüesa, with its noble monastery; Olite, once the Windsor of Navarre. The last-named might almost rank as a working model for an antiquarian. Its lanes are packed with the decaying mansions of the long-departed courtiers, and dominated by the huge ruined castle which was the home of the warrior kings. This palatial stronghold is noted as one of the finest examples in the Peninsula: a match for our own Bamburgh or Warkworth, and consequently with few rivals in the world. As the capital of Navarre, Pamplona has, of course, been pre-eminent for its sieges; and it was in one of these that Ignatius Loyola received the wound which converted him from a dandy into an ascetic, and led to the foundation of the Order of Jesuits. But the siege which possesses the greatest interest for an Englishman is that undertaken by the Duke of Wellington after Vitória; the enterprise which led to that series of desperate struggles usually lumped together vaguely as "the Battles of the Pyrenees." The sieges of San Sebástien and Pamplona had been undertaken simultaneously; but neither made very rapid progress, and Soult was not the man to let them fall without an attempt to come to their aid. He had re-formed the wrecks of Joseph's army on the French side of the frontier; and advancing towards the passes of Maya and Roncesvalles, he assailed them both suddenly the same day. The detachments which guarded them were overpowered after a most resolute resistance, and Soult pushed down the valleys towards Pamplona, reuniting his forces on the road. Wellington had expected that the blow would be aimed at San Sebástien. He was momentarily outwitted; but he recovered just in time. Soult found his path barred at the fatal ridge of Saurauren,--just outside the Pamplona basin, and literally within sight of his goal. The beleaguered garrison heard the roar of that furious battle; they could watch the smoke-wreaths curling above the intervening ridge. But no French standards appeared in the mouth of the pass in the evening. When the battle was renewed two days later, the English were the assailants; and Soult and his beaten army could barely find safety in flight. [Illustration: OLITE The Castle.] Saurauren was Wellington's last great battle on Spanish soil. A few weeks later the two great fortresses had fallen, and--first of all the allied Generals--he carried the war into France. Five years previously he had landed in Portugal--a "Sepoy General," little more distinguished than Cornwallis or Eyre Coote. But those five years in the Peninsula had fixed his reputation for ever; and the giant who crossed the Bidassoa had but little to add to his stature on the field of Waterloo. There is a choice of two roads from Pamplona to the frontier. The _kilos_ are reckoned from Maya; but Roncesvalles bears the more historic name. In point of scenery there is little to choose between them; but perhaps Maya is the harder journey, for Maya includes Vellate, and this extra pass is the loftiest of the three. The country towards Roncesvalles is at first much less mountainous in character than that towards Vitória; for the high peaks of the Pyrenees lie in the centre of the range, to the eastward; and those immediately before us, though wild and rugged, do not show up very imposingly above the lofty levels upon the Spanish side. Near Pamplona the meadows are green and civilised, but the view becomes sterner and more barren as we draw near to the feet of the hills; and presently we enter a long, narrow, rocky gully--the bed of a mountain river--whose steep, bare sides are dotted with trim little bushes of box. How hot it was in that narrow gully! The sun's rays poured vertically into the breathless hollow, and their heat was radiated by every burning stone. Even the six-inch shadows of the box bushes were quoted at fancy values; and shedding our outer garments one after another, we eventually emerged at the further end in an almost aboriginal state. "Are you thinking of resuming the garb of civilisation?" enquired one vagabond of another, as we halted for a moment on the little bridge near the village of Burguete. "I am thinking of resuming the garb of Adam," retorted his comrade desperately, as he glared into the pool beneath. It was rather a public place for a bathe; but there are no passengers on a Spanish road at _Comida_ time. And as that meal is invariably unpunctual, we knew that the little _Fonda_ could be reached in plenty of time. Burguete stands in the centre of a little cup-like valley; and prominent upon the further lip rises a big domed hill, one of the flankers of the pass. It is a sleek, smooth mountain, upholstered with green turf, and spangled with grazing sheep; and the big round beeches and chestnuts herd together all over its crest, as domesticated as on an English lawn. Yet the little hillock beneath it was the scene of one of the greatest of tragedies; for there stood the abbey of Roncesvalles, the sepulchre of Charlemagne's slaughtered Peers. A good deal of controversial ink has been spilt over Charlemagne's famous Spanish expedition: and all the confusion of history has been worse confounded by romance. The French Epics tell of it as a glorious and successful crusade, undertaken in the cause of Christendom against the insolence of the Moors. The Emperor dictated his own terms in his enemy's palace at Córdova, and it was only the treachery of Ganelon that led to the regrettable incident at the end. Very different is the story of the Spanish ballads. Their bards were most wofully sceptical of religious and disinterested invasion; they wished to be left to fight out their own quarrels with their own infidels, and felt no sort of satisfaction at the prospect of Spain becoming a province of the Franks. It was their own native heroes, Bernardo del Carpio and the chivalry of Leon, who overthrew the Paladins at Roncesvalles. Is not Roland's "Durandal" in the armoury of Madrid to this day, to prove that the Spaniard was the better man? [Illustration: PAMPLONA A Patio near the Cathedral.] In truth the expedition was directed against the newly-established Caliphate of Córdova, in alliance with Suleiman Ibn-al-Arabi, the Moorish king of Barcelona, who was jealous of Abderahman's growing power. Charlemagne captured Pamplona (which was Christian), and obtained some acknowledgment of suzerainty from the Sheikhs of Gerona and Huesca. But Zaragoza held out against him with all its traditional obstinacy: the ill-matched allies could by no means pull together; and the campaign fizzled out abortively without any substantial gain. As for the dolorous rout which concluded it, that was the work of neither Goth nor Moor, but of the angry Basques of the mountains, a nation whom Charlemagne had not regarded, and whom he probably despised. They had seen their country pillaged, their capital Pamplona taken; and now, when the rearguard was entangled in the mountains, they at last got the chance of plunder and revenge. No doubt they trapped them in that long rocky defile--straggling, way-worn, and cumbered with plunder and baggage--a position as hopeless as Elphinstone's in the Koord Kabul. The disjointed line was toiling painfully along the gullet; the slippery screes rose unscalable on either side; and the jutting crags that frowned at every corner afforded both ramparts and missiles to the unweariable mountaineers. None but the doughtiest warriors could have succeeded in breaking out into the basin of Burguete. And here their superior arms and discipline would enable them to fight their way across to the further side. Only one short ascent still remained to be surmounted; but their active enemy was before them, and the task was beyond their power. Wounded and exhausted, they drew together in a rallying square upon the little hillock; and there, fighting desperately, they were cut down to a man. The course of that fight is retold in the very conformation of the valley, yet somehow the picture is inadequate. The drama is not quite worthily staged. The place is too homely and pastoral for the scene of that great Saga which Taillefer chanted between the embattled hosts at Hastings; and which has since thrilled the hearts of generations of warriors, as Sidney's was thrilled by the tale of Chevy Chase. We need a more rugged environment for the memory of a departed demi-god. "He who aspires to be a hero," said Dr Johnson, "should drink brandy!" And perhaps, while he is about it, he might get killed in a Deva gorge. There is a softer lay for the minstrel who would linger by the braes of Burguete; a tale of two true lovers, who, as usual, were distressingly ill-starred. Their story is even more ancient than the doughty deeds of arms that we have just been rehearsing; for it relates to the days of Charlemagne's illustrious grand-sire, Charles Martel. Othman ben Abu Neza, the Moorish warden of the marches, had espoused a Christian bride, Lampegia, daughter of Duke Eudo of Aquitaine; and fleeing with her across the mountains to seek refuge from his indignant suzerain, was overtaken in the pass of Roncesvalles, and slain in his lady's arms. The unemotional historian is convinced that the marriage was political, and hints that both Eudo and Othman were conspiring against their respective liege lords. But at least he will grant us a certificate as to the authenticity of the final catastrophe: and he flatly declines to go further even for Roland and his Peers. Battlefields lie thick in Navarre, and even the Vale of Thorns is not absolutely the last of them. A second battle of Roncesvalles was contested upon the heights of Altobiscar, at the very crest of the Pass, in 1813. Here the British had been posted for six weeks, covering the blockade of Pamplona; and had greatly vexed the soul of their general by persistently deserting in twos and threes every night. Why these seasoned soldiers, at this very hour of their triumph, should have been seized with so strange an epidemic, is a problem which might take a good deal of arguing. The only contemporary theory was the suggestion that they were finding things slow! But their fighting qualities did not seem to have got much affected. Soult finally attacked them in person with much superior numbers: and they offered a most resolute resistance, only giving ground after night-fall, when it was evident they were being outflanked. Cole, the hero of Albuera, led them stubbornly back along the mountain ridges towards Pamplona; and the act was played out at Saurauren, where he arrived just in time to seize the hill. The ascent of the Pass upon the Spanish side is but trifling. A few brisk turns in the track, and we have climbed from the abbey ruins to the summit of the _col_ behind. Before us the road to France drops coil below coil into the deep green valley, a long descent of over three thousand feet. The actual frontier is some dozen miles further, at the village of Valcarlos; where a modest little bridge, shepherded by a horde of sentries, spans the waters of the infant Nive. But the spirit of Spain lags behind us up here upon this breezy saddle. Here is the true parting of the nations; and as we turn our faces plainwards, we feel that we are taking our leave. Farewell and adieu to you, fair Spanish ladies! Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain! For we've received orders to cross the salt waters; _We hope before long we shall see you again_! INDEX PAGE Abándames, 21, 28, 30, 39, 42 Abderahman I., Caliph of Córdova, 296 Abu Walid, Alfaqui of Toledo, 208 Alarcon, Battle of, 267 Alba de Tormes, 163, 173 Albarracin, 255 Alberche, River, 212-213 ALCÁNTARA, 230-235 Bridge, 92, 231-235 Monastery, 53, 234 Alfonso VI. of Castile and Leon, 124-125, 140, 142, 202, 208, 269 Alfonso VIII. of Castile, 60, 208, 267 Alfonso XI. of Castile and Leon, 180 Alfonso V. of Portugal, 150-151 Alfonso, Prince of Castile, 258, 281 _Alguazils_, 53, 79, 80 Al Manzor, Vizier of Córdova, 85-86 Mountain, 161, 221 Almaraz, Bridge, 92, 224 _Almoravides_, 202 Altobiscar, Mountain Ridge, 299 Alxaman, Moorish Emir, 35 Andalusia, 60, 202 Aragon, 61, 168 Aránjuez, 191, 193-195 Arapiles, 164 Arlanzon, River, 266, 268, 274 Armada, The, 95, 107, 189 Arriondas, 37-38, 42 Arroyo Molinos, Battle of, 224 Arzobispo, Bridge, 214 ASTORGA, 68-71, 75, 78, 177 Asturias, Eastern, 15-16, 24-42 Western, 93, 113-131 Augustus, Emperor, 68, 228, 246 _Autos da Fé_, 205, 261-262 ÁVILA, 176-183, 190, 192 Barcelona, 296 Basques, 289, 296 Bathers, 120 Bavieca, 270-271 Becerrea, 76-77 Beggars, 278-280 BÉJAR, 173-176, 235 Bellotas, 116 Bembibre, 75 BENAVENTE, 133-136 Battle of, 134-135 Berruguete, Alonzo, Sculptor, 207 BETÁNZOS, 106, 108-110 Bidassoa, River, 6, 293 BILBAO, 5-7, 9 Birds (Wild). Eagles, 21, 229; Falcons, 213; Hoopoes, 156; Magpies, 157; Ospreys, 22-23; Partridges, 73; Storks, 157, 222, 229, 232 Biscay, Bay of, 5-7, 39 Bivar, Rodrigo Diaz de. _See_ Cid. Borgoña, Felipe de, Sculptor, 207 Borrow, George, 54, 103, 108 _note_, 115-117 Briviesca, 82, 282 Buenavista, 46, 48, 50 Bull Fights, 171-173, 208, 273, 289 BÚRGOS, 60, 257, 264-277, 280-281, 286 Castle, 275-277 Cathedral, 273-274 Monasteries, 267-268, 280-281 Palaces, 270 Siege, 275-277 Burguete, 294-295, 297-298 Cabezon, 19, 42 Cacabellos, 72, 75 CÁCERES, 81, 221-224, 229, 235 _Cafés_, 13-14, 69-70, 273 Calderon, Pedro, Dramatist, 205 Camps, Celtic and Roman, 90-91 CÁNGAS DE ONIS, 30-33, 37, 39 CANTABRIAN MOUNTAINS, 15, 19-20, 43, 66, 152, 161, 282 Cares, River, 28-29 Cardena, San Pedro de, Monastery, 271 Carillo, Archbishop of Toledo, 151, 258-259 Carlists, 54-55 Carpio, Bernardo del, 296 Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo, 262 Carreño, 29-30 Carrion, River, 51, 286 Castaños, General, 68 Castile, Kingdom, 60-61, 202, 207 Old, 7-23, 43-45, 176-185, 243-258, 266-284 New, 185-214, 237-243 Castles. Benavente, 134; Búrgos, 275-276; Magueda, 211; Mérida, 225; Olite, 291; Ponferrada, 73; Segóvia, 249-250; Toledo, 205 in Spain, 282-283 Castro Gonzalo, Bridge, 135-136 Castropol, 113-114 CASTRO URDIALES, 7-10, 19 Cathedrals. Avila, 180; Búrgos, 273-275; Leon, 58-59; Lugo, 79; Orense, 92; Oviedo, 122; Paléncia, 264; Pamplona, 290-291; Plaséncia, 217; Salamanca, 164-165; Santiago, 86-87; Segóvia, 253-254; Toledo, 205-208; Tuy, 97; Zamora, 145-146 Catharine of Aragon, Queen of England, 182 Cervera del Pisuerga, 45 Cervantes, Miguel. _See_ Quixote, Don. Charlemagne, Emperor, 295-298 Charles V., King of Spain and Emperor of Germany, 190, 203, 268 Charles, Prince of Wales (Charles I.), 48 Charles Martel, Mayor of the Franks, 298 Churriguera, Architect, 87 _Cicadas_, 156 CID, The. Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar, 61, 124-125, 140-143, 177, 202, 269-271 Cies, Islas de, 101 Clamores, River, 253 Clausel, General, 163, 173 Clavijo, Battle of, 85 Climate, 129, 170, 182, 266-267, 272, 294 Cole, General, 299 Colonia, Juan de, Architect, 274 Combarros, 71 COMMUNEROS, Revolt of, 203-204, 268 Constantino, Bridge, 76 Corcuvion, 103 Córdova, 85, 201, 295-296 Cória, 235 _Corpus Christi_, Festival of, 139, 143-146 Cortes, Hernando, 223 CORUÑA, 64, 89, 104-105, 108, 110 Battle of, 92, 106-108, 111 Costume, 49, 62-63, 65, 71, 109-110, 157-158, 175-176 Courtship, 226-228 COVADONGA, 25, 33-37 Battle of, 24-25, 34-37 Nuestra Señora de, 24-25, 34, 37 Craufurd, General, 214 _Cubos_, 22, 58 CUDILLERO, 118-121 Cuenca, 255, 283 CUERA, Sierra de, 30, 38-39 Cuesta, Captain General, 213 Cueva, Don Beltran de la, 259 Cuidad Rodrigo, 162-163, 175 Dancing, 40, 48, 108-109, 289 De Arfe, Metal worker, 207 DEVA, River, 20-21, 28, 42 Gorge, 22-23, 25-28, 42, 43, 298 Dogs, 17-19, 216, 260 Dorothea. _See_ Quixote, Don. Douro, Battle of the, 93, 214 Drake, Sir Francis, 107 Dubreton, General, 275 DUEÑAS, 263-264 DUERO, River, 94, 141, 149, 259-260 Valley, 137, 152-153, 176, 182, 211, 220, 257 Dulcinea del Toboso. _See_ Quixote, Don. Ebro, River, 284-285, 287 Edward, Prince of England (Edward I.), 267 "The Black Prince", 285 El Burgo, Bridge, 107 Eleanor of Castile, Queen of England, 267-268 Electric Lighting, 109, 147 El Padron, 64, 103 Elviña, 106 Elvira, Princess, 140 Encina, Nuestra Señora de la, 73-74 Eresma, River, 243-245, 248 ESCLAVITUD, Nuestra Señora de la, 103 ESCORIAL, 186-190, 240-242, 261 Esla, River, 57, 131, 132-135, 263 Estella, 291 Estremadura, 175, 215-236 Eudo, Duke of Aquitaine, 298 EUROPA, Picos de, 20-21, 27-29, 30, 33, 161 Felton, Sir Thomas, 285 Ferdinand I. of Leon and Castile, 60-61, 140 III. of Castile and Leon, 60, 202, 206 of Aragon (The Catholic), 110, 150, 263-264 and Isabella of Castile, "The Catholic Kings", 150, 166, 181-182, 203, 263-264 Ferrol, 108, 111 Finistierra, Cape, 101 Fishing Ports, 9-10, 19-20, 40-41, 100-101, 118-119 Rivers, 38 Fishwives, 98, 101, 119 Flies, 31, 102 Florinda (La Cava), 201 Flowers (Wild). Broom, 224, 242; Cactus, 221; Cistus, 153, 224; Hardhead, 183, 242; Heather, 73, 102; Poppy, 266 Fountains, 79-81, 108, 186, 222, 239 Foz, 112 Francia, Peña de, 175 Galicia, 15, 24, 62, 76-112, 140 Gamarra Mayor, 287 Ganelon, 295 Garlic, 13, 180 Gata, Sierra de, 175 Gelmirez, Archbishop of Santiago, 84, 86 Gerona, 111, 296 _Gigantes_, 139, 143-145 Gijon, 20, 35-36 GIL BLAS de Santillana. Birth-place, 19; Captain Rolando, 72; Dr Sangrado, 259-261; Flight from Valladolid, 259-260; Don Bernardo de Castel Blazo, 53; at Salamanca, 166; Imprisonment, 254-255; at Toledo, 205; Visit to Olivares, 149; Liria, 254 _note_ Girard, General, 224 Gonzalez, Count Fernando, 61, 269 Gonzalo, Don Arias, 141-142 Graham, General, 286-287 GRÉDOS, Sierra de, 161, 170, 173-174, 182, 211, 215, 221, 235 Grenada, 255, 265 Guadalete, Battle of the, 200 Guadalupe, Monastery, 223, 235 Sierra de, 211 GUADARRAMA, Sierra de, 18, 155, 176, 182, 238, 256 Puerto de, 184-185, 242-243 Guadiana, River, 223, 225, 229 _Guardia Civil_, 53-54, 183, 245 _Guerrilleros_, 93-94, 111, 282 Haro, 284 Henrique IV. of Castile, 177, 250, 258 Hercules (at Toledo), 199-201 Hieronymo, Bishop of Zamora, 139 Hill, General, 224, 286 Howell, James, 48, 95, 206 _note_ Huesca, 296 Illescas, 193 Inns, 8-9, 25-27, 29, 46-48, 50, 69, 138-139, 184, 217-219, 226-227, 264-265 Inquisition, 250-252, 261-263 Isabella of Castile (The Catholic), 250, 252, 281. _See also_ Ferdinand. Princess, 181 Isidoro, San, 59-61, 208-209 Jackson, Private, 136 Jarama, River, 194 Jerte, River, 216 Jews, 200, 203, 261, 270 Joseph Buonaparte, 162-163, 277, 286-288 Jourdan, Marshal, 213 Juan II. of Castile, 258, 281 Prince of Spain, 181 Juana, Queen of Spain, 182, 265 Junot, Marshal, 68 La Cañiza, 95-97 Lacer, Caius Julius, Engineer, 231-232 La Demanda, Sierra de, 152, 281-282 La Granja, 244, 254 LA HERMIDA, 23 La Mancha, 95 Lampegia, 298 Lapisse, General, 235 Laredo, 10-11, 15 La Robla, 130 Las Huelgas, Convent, 267-268 Las Rozas, 238 Lefebre Desnouettes, General, 135 Lena, 127-128 LEON Province (Old Kingdom), 43, 45-76, 89, 102, 128-176, 258-266, 296 City, 36, 45, 50, 57-65, 66 _note_, 68, 81, 131 Cathedral, 58-59 Church of San Isidoro, 59-61 Leovigild, King of the Goths, 200 Le Sage, 255. _See also_ Gil Blas. Liebana, Vale of, 23, 42-44, 152 LLANES, 40-41 Lobsters, 8-10, 19-20 Lope de Vega, Dramatist, 205 Loyola, Ignatius, 178-179, 291 Luarca, 118 LUGO 68, 75-82, 89-90, 106, 177 Luna, Don Alvaro de, 207, 258 Madrid, 190-193, 215, 238, 240 Mansilla de las Mulas, 57 _Mantillas_, 273 Manzanal, Puerto de, 70-71, 75 Manzanares, River, 215, 237-238 _Maragatos_, 65, 70-71 Marbot, General, 185 Maritornes. _See_ Quixote, Don. Marmont, Marshal, 149-150, 161-163, 165-166, 214 Martorell, Bridge, 92 MASMA, River, 112 Maucune, General, 163, 287 Maurice, Archbishop of Búrgos, 274 Maya, Puerto de, 292-293 Mayorga, 57 Meals, 8-9, 11-13, 41, 119, 138, 218 Medellin, Hill of, 213 Medina del Campo, 117, 258 _Membrillo_, 12, 181 Mendo, River, 108 Mendoza, Cardinal, 151, 207 MÉRIDA, 225-229, 232 Mero, River, 106 Mexico, 20, 223 Miéres, 126-127 Military Orders, 53, 66, 73, 234 Mina, General, 282 MIÑO, River, 6, 78, 89-97 Miraflores, La Cartuja de, 273, 280-281 MIRANDA DEL EBRO, 283-285 Casa de, 271, 280 Mondoñedo, 111 Money, 219, 279 _note_ Monforte, 90 Montamarta, 137-139 Montanchez, Sierra de, 223 MOORE, Sir John, at Salamanca, 182 _note_; at Sahagun, 54-55; assailed by Napoleon, 184-185; Benavente, 134-136; Retreat across the Vierzo, 74-75; Pass of Piedrafita, 76; Lugo, 89; March to Coruña, 105-106; Battle of Coruña, 106-107 Moors. Conquest of Spain, 200, 282; repulsed from Asturias, 34-37; Caliphate of Córdova, 201, 296; Charlemagne's Invasion, 295-296; Clavijo, 85; Al Manzor, 85-86; Sieges of Zamora, 140; Reconquest of Toledo, 202; The Cid, 269-270; Fresh irruption, 202; Battle of Alarcon, 267; Battle of las Navas de Tolosa, 60, 267; Reconquest of Andalusia, 60, 202; Persecuted, 261 Morena, Sierra, 46, 61, 208 Morillas Mountains, 285 _Mozarabes_, 208-210 _Mudejares_, 204 _note_, 208 _note_ Mules, 42, 65, 104, 158-160 Munuza, Emir, 36 Muros, 117, 121 Nalon, River, 121 Napoleon Buonaparte. Pursuit of Sir John Moore, 55, 184-185, 135, 75 Spanish War, 165, 288 Narcea, River, 121 Navacerrada, Puerto de, 242-244 Navarre, 61, 284-300 Navarrete, Battle of, 285 Navas de Tolosa, Battle of, 60-61, 208, 267, 287 NÁVIA, River, 76, 116 Nervion, River, 5 Ney, Marshal, 93 Nive, River, 300 Nogales, 76 Norreys, Sir John, 107-108 Obarenes, Montes, 282-285 Olivares, Conde Duque de, 148-149 OLITE, 291 Olmedo, 258-259 Orbigo, River, 66-67, 134 Ordoñez, Don Diego, 142 ORENSE, Bridge, 32, 92 City, 89, 91-92 Othman ben Abu Neza, Emir, 298 OVIEDO, 121-127 Cathedral, 122 Oxen, 15-17, 30-31, 44-45, 103, 105, 159 Pacheco, Doña Maria, 203 Paget, General, 76, 135 PAJARES, Puerto de, 36, 58, 80, 126-130 Palaces. Búrgos, 271; Cáceres, 222-223; Leon, 62; Olite, 291; Oviedo, 122; Plaséncia, 216-217; Salamanca, 167-169; Santiago, 87; Segóvia, 247; Toledo, 204; Toro, 148 Palávia, 106 Paléncia, 264-265 PAMPLONA, 60, 81, 283, 290-294, 296 Siege, 291-293, 298 PANCORVO, Defile, 281-282, 286 Pantoja, Painter, 189 Paredes, Don Diego Garcia de, 32, 223 Peasantry, 26-27, 31, 40, 48-50, 62, 65, 79, 99, 109-110, 120, 138, 147-148, 175-176, 197-198, 216, 280, 287 Pedro, the Cruel, of Castile, 86, 180 _El Maestre._ _See_ Quixote, Don. Pelayo, King of Asturias, 24, 31-32, 34-37 _Pelota_, 288-289 _Peones Camineros_, 243, 256 Philip II. of Spain, 67, 188-190, 194, 261-262, 273 IV. of Spain, 148, 244 Phoenicians, 199-200 Picton, General, 151, 285-286 Piedrafita, Puerto de, 75-76, 89 Pigs, 212, 229-230 Pilar, Nuestra Señora del, 179 Pilgrimages, 24-25, 64-65, 82-84 Pilona, River, 38 Pisuerga, River, 263, 265 Pizarro, 223 PLASÉNCIA, 81, 214, 216-219 Ploughs, 105 Poblet, Monastery, 187 Pola de Gordon, 129-130 Ponferrada, 72-75 Pontevedra, 81 Porcelos, Diego de, 269 Portugal, 92-93, 97, 150, 181, 286 Portugalete, 5, 9 Potes, 26, 42, 43 Právia, 117, 121 Pyrenees, Mountains, 282, 293-300 Battles of the, 292-293, 299 Quevedo, Francisco, Satirist, 149 Quinones, Don Suero, 66-67 QUIXOTE, Don. Tales of Chivalry, 2-3, 32, 66-67, 142, 161; Ideal Knight Errant, 154; Company at the Inn, 46; Innkeeper, 247; Dorothea, 244; Dulcinea del Toboso, 65, 100, 184; Sancho Panza, 8, 49, 83, 95, 181; Maritornes, 9; The Cortes of Death, 143; Don Diego Miranda, 271; _El Maestre_ Pedro, 211; Roque Guinart, 157 Rañadoiro, Sierra de, 116 Reille, General, 287 Religious Observances, 120-121, 143-146, 273 Reptiles, Frogs, 46, 156 Lizards, 156 Snakes, 229-230, 257 Ribadávia, 95-96, 183 RIOJA, The, 29, 284 RIVADEO, 80, 112-116 Rivadesella, 39-40 Rock Formations, 22-23, 28, 129-130, 282-283, 290 Roderic, King of the Visigoths, 24, 200-201 Roland, 296-298 Roman Remains. Aqueducts, 225, 228-229, 246 Bridges, 76, 225, 231-232 Camps, 90 Theatres, 225 Walls, 58, 68, 78, 164, 225 Roncesvalles. Puerto de, 292-300 Battles of, 292, 295-299 Ronda, Well of, 99 Rooke, Admiral, 100 Roque Guinart. _See_ Quixote, Don. Sahagun, 32, 54-56, 235 SALAMANCA 146-147, 149, 163-171, 176 Cathedrals, 164-165, 254 Colleges and Palaces, 165-169 Battle of, 150, 161-164, 214, 277, 286 Saldaña, 51, 55 Sanchez, Julian, 262 Sancho II. of Castile, 124-125, 140-142 Panza. _See_ Quixote, Don. Sangüesa, Monastery, 291 San Rafael, Fonda, 184 San Roman, 261 San Sebástien, 6, 288, 292 Santander, 15, 20, 81, 287 SANTIAGO (St James the Greater), 64, 83-86, 177 de Compostela, 64, 82-89, 104 Cathedral, 82, 84, 86-87, 103 Santillana, 19 SANTOÑA, 10-11 SAN VICENTE DE LA BARQUERA, 19-20, 41 Sardines, 9-10, 101, 119 Sauráuren, Battle of, 292-293, 299 SEGÓVIA, 182, 192, 216, 229, 244-257 Alcázar, 248-250 Aqueduct, 246-247 Cathedral, 253-254 SELLA, River, 32, 37-39 _Serenos_, 123-124 Seso, Don Carlos de, 189, 261 Seville, 201, 206 Shepherds, 137, 208, 221, 239 Siete Picos, Mountain, 242-243, 248 Sil, River, 72-73, 91 Silöe, Diego de, Sculptor, 275 Gil de, Sculptor, 281 Silos, San Domingo de, Monastery, 282 Simancas, 260 Somers Cocks, Major, 276 Sontres, 26 Sória, 281 SOULT, Marshal. Pursuit of Sir John Moore, 55, 75-76, 89; at Coruña, 106; Conquest of Galicia, 92-94, 111; Repulsed from the Douro, 93; Advance upon Talavera, 93-94, 214; Battles of the Pyrenees, 292-293, 299 Stage Coaches, 41-42, 104 Street, G. E., Architect, 59, 205 Suero, Archbishop of Santiago, 86 Suleiman Ibn-al-Arabi, Emir, 296 TAGUS, River, 195, 197-199, 201, 212, 214, 220, 230-232 Valley, 93, 185, 210-211, 219-220, 230-231 TALAVERA DE LA REINA, 182, 210-214 Battle of, 210-214, 235 Tarik, 71, 200 Theresa de Ávila, Sta, 177-179 Tierra de Campos, 137, 263 Tina Mayor, River. _See_ Deva, River. TOLEDO, 98, 105, 151, 192-193, 197-210, 240, 269 Bridges, 92, 199 Cathedral, 122, 205-210, 274 Toledo, Montes de, 185, 198 Don Francisco de, 95 Toriñana, Cape, 101 Tormes, River, 161-163 Lazarillo de, 205 TORO 140, 147-151, 153 Battle of, 150-151 Torquemada, 265-266 Tomas de, Inquisitor, 179, 203, 250-251 Torrelavega, 15, 19 Torrelodones, 239-240 Trajan, Emperor, 226, 231, 246 Trees. Acacia, 132, 281; Box, 294; Beech, 44, 295; Chestnut, 44, 295; Elm, 194-195, 281; Ilex, 153, 215-216, 219; Olive, 173, 194, 221; Palm, 102; Pine, 184, 242-244, 257; Poplar, 57, 65, 133, 281 Tresviso, 26-27 Troglodyte villages, 132-133, 263 Trujillo, 223, 235 TUY, 92-93, 96-98 Ubiña, Peña, 128 Unquera, 20-21, 39, 42 URDON, 25-27 Urraca, Princess, 140-143 Valcarce, 75 Valcarlos, 300 Valdepeñas, 95 Valdeprado, 44 Valdez, Inquisitor, 263 Valéncia del Cid, 60, 154, 202, 270 do Minho (Portugal) 97 VALLADOLID, 97, 141, 207, 259-264, 281 Velasquez, Painter, 134, 138, 149 Vellate, Puerto de, 293 Vellido Dolphos, 141-142 Verney, Sir Edmund, 48 Victor, Marshal, 213 VIERZO, The, 72-75, 91, 152 VIGO, 80, 97-101 Bay, Battle of, 100 Vilano, Cape, 101 Villacastin, 182-183 Villafranca, 75, 81 Villalba, 242 Villalpando, Francisco de, Metal Worker, 207 Vineyards, 94, 153, 220 Visigoths, 105, 122, 200 VITÓRIA, Battle of, 151, 277, 286-288, 292 Vizcaya, 5-7, 24 Walton, Private, 136 Wamba, King of the Visigoths, 105, 199-200 Water pitchers, 13, 80-82, 222 WELLINGTON, Duke of. Campaign of the Douro, 93; Campaign of Talavera, 93, 212-214; at Salamanca, 165-166, 170; Battle of Salamanca, 161-164; Criticises Siege of Astorga, 68; Siege of Búrgos, 275-277; Retreat from Búrgos, 266; Generalissimo of Spanish armies, 179; Campaign and Battle of Vitória, 277, 286-288; Battles of the Pyrenees, 292-293; Allusions to Spanish character, 49, 125-126 Wines, 12-13, 94-96, 266, 284 Ximena, 270-271 Ximenes, Cardinal, 179, 210 Yakub aben Yussef of Morocco, 267 Yuste, 190 Zadora, River, 285, 287 ZAMORA, 136-137, 139-147, 150 Cathedral, 139-140, 145-146 Zaragoza, 253 Sieges of, 111, 179, 296 [Illustration: MAP NORTHERN SPAIN] PRINTED BY NEILL AND CO., LTD., EDINBURGH. * * * * * BLACK'S BEAUTIFUL BOOKS ALL WITH FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR By Post. Price 20s. 6d. THE 20s. NET SERIES Size 9 x 6-1/4 ins. Algeria and Tunis Painted and Described by FRANCES E. NESBITT. 70 Full-Page Illustrations in Colour. The Alps Described by SIR MARTIN CONWAY. Painted by A. D. 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[2] Literally "Tubs", the solid semicircular bastions of Spanish town walls. [3] A collegiate church, intermediate in dignity between a parish church and a cathedral. [4] A public promenade, thickly planted with trees. [5] A Spanish league is about an hour's march, say 3-3/4 miles. [6] At one place it consisted of a huge earthenware bowl, 3 feet high and 4 feet in diameter, filled up solid with earth to within 4 inches of the rim. [7] Here died ----. [8] See p. 140. [9] See p. 140. [10] This monastery is a very notable Leonese monument, a masterpiece of _Plateresque_, somewhat similar to the _Otto Heinrichs Bau_ at Heidelberg, and formerly the property of the knights of Santiago. [11] Astorga = _Ast_urica _Aug_usta. [12] Literally the "House of Purification," _i.e._ the Great Mosque of Córdova. [13] There is something of the same flavour about the inscription on the Gates of the _Hospital del Rey_ at Burgos; "Blessed is the man that provideth for the sick and needy, St James (!) shall deliver him in the time of trouble." [14] The fate most dreaded by the Spanish prisoners in the Moorish wars. [15] Borrow stigmatises Betánzos as a filthy and evil-smelling pest-house. But then his horse broke down there. So much depends upon the point of view! [16] See page 142. [17] /p "Who would not give a foot of ground For all the Devils in Hell."--_Ballad of Lord Willoughby._ p/ [18] A cant term for knifing. The Neapolitan had a standing feud with Spain. [19] The proverb is still quite current. A carrier of whom we inquired the distance to Zamora oracularly answered that "It could never be gained in an hour." [20] See p. 60. [21] The recognised Spanish title for the Host. [22] Presbytery. [23] "Here's to the glorious, pious and immortal memory of the great and good King William, who delivered us from Popery, brass money, _and wooden shoes_!" [24] _Arriero_, from _arré_! gee-up! [25] As in Italian, the diminutive is a sort of endearing form of superlative. [26] They were built at the end of the eleventh century. A singularly fine bit of work for so early a date. [27] Moore was at Salamanca and his artillery at Talavera when Napoleon reached Madrid. [28] The burial-place of the Kings of Aragon. [29] See p. 261. [30] Such is the meaning of the word, but I would not like to vouch for the etymology. The derivation is possibly the other way. [31] The tiny mosque of _San Cristo de la Luz_ is the only genuine Moorish fragment. The _Puerta del Sol_, the church of _Sta Maria la Blanca_, etc., are _Mudéjar_ work. Cp. note on p. 208. [32] _I.e._ "Citadel," _Cæsareum_. [33] James Howell in 1620 estimates the annual income of Toledo at £100,000, a sum equivalent to nearly half a million to-day. [34] Metal screens and reliquaries. [35] He has only a statue at Toledo; but his actual grave has a scarcely less honourable site in _las Huelgas_ at Búrgos. [36] The _Mozárabes_ were Christians under the dominion of the Moors, as _Mudéjares_ were Moors under the dominion of the Christians. [37] Several such herds were seized by the hungry regiments in the course of the retreat. [38] Heywood, _Fair Maid of the West_. [39] The country people invariably reckon in _reals_--the old coinage. The piece is no longer struck, but its value is one-fourth of a _peseta_. [40] Some call it eighty-one. But this includes some arches of construction in the spandrils, and is not fair counting. [41] Cp. p. 55. [42] The province derives its name from the conquests "beyond the Duero" won in the earlier stages of the struggle with the Moors. [43] _Noche Toledana_ is proverbial in Spanish as equivalent to a sleepless night. [44] The _Octroi_ office, to receive the city tolls. [45] Trajan was a Spaniard born, and his reign an extremely prosperous period for Spain. [46] "The Vineyard," a lovely dismantled monastery planted beside the Eresma, just underneath the town. [47] Montaigne. [48] _E.g._ Talavera, first Archbishop of Grenada, and Peter Martyr, the Confessor and Biographer of Isabella. [49] The beautiful _Huerta_ of Liria is the only district actually praised. [50] Cp. p. 207. [51] Cp. p. 151. [52] The place of execution at Seville. [53] Cp. p. 132. [54] The ambiguity would not be apparent to a Spaniard. To him _Invierno_, "Winter," is the assonym to _Infierno_, "Hell." [55] The "Silversmith style," or early Spanish Renaissance. So called from the Cellini-like carving which is its leading characteristic. [56] The Emperor of Morocco; at this time the martial Yakub aben Yussef. [57] Cp. note on p. 265. [58] See p. 281. [59] See p. 161. [60] "A ha'penny for bread." The _perrita_ or "little dog" = a halfpenny, and the _perro gordo_ or fat dog = a penny. Thus "Two reals minus a little dog" is 45 _centimos_. The animal irrelevantly called a "dog" is the lion on the reverse of the coin. [61] _Certosa._ Charterhouse. [62] This incident has been utilised by Conan Doyle in his _White Company_. But that story rather exaggerates the height and steepness of the hill. [63] During the sitting of the Congress of Dresden. [64] A highly developed form of Fives. 
46485	----	by Linda Cantoni. [Transcriber's Note: Bold text is surrounded by =equal signs= and italic text is surrounded by _underscores_.] Our Little Spanish Cousin The Little Cousin Series [Illustration] Each volume illustrated with six or more full-page plates in tint. Cloth, 12mo, with decorative cover, per volume, 60 cents. [Illustration] LIST OF TITLES BY MARY HAZELTON WADE (unless otherwise indicated) =Our Little African Cousin= =Our Little Armenian Cousin= =Our Little Brown Cousin= =Our Little Canadian Cousin= By Elizabeth R. Macdonald =Our Little Chinese Cousin= By Isaac Taylor Headland =Our Little Cuban Cousin= =Our Little Dutch Cousin= By Blanche McManus =Our Little English Cousin= By Blanche McManus =Our Little Eskimo Cousin= =Our Little French Cousin= By Blanche McManus =Our Little German Cousin= =Our Little Hawaiian Cousin= =Our Little Indian Cousin= =Our Little Irish Cousin= =Our Little Italian Cousin= =Our Little Japanese Cousin= =Our Little Jewish Cousin= =Our Little Korean Cousin= By H. Lee M. Pike =Our Little Mexican Cousin= By Edward C. Butler =Our Little Norwegian Cousin= =Our Little Panama Cousin= By H. Lee M. Pike =Our Little Philippine Cousin= =Our Little Porto Rican Cousin= =Our Little Russian Cousin= =Our Little Scotch Cousin= By Blanche McManus =Our Little Siamese Cousin= =Our Little Spanish Cousin= By Mary F. Nixon-Roulet =Our Little Swedish Cousin= By Claire M. Coburn =Our Little Swiss Cousin= =Our Little Turkish Cousin= [Illustration] L. C. PAGE & COMPANY New England Building, Boston, Mass. [Illustration: FERNANDO AND HIS DONKEY. (_See page 60._)] Our Little Spanish Cousin By Mary F. Nixon-Roulet _Author of "God, the King, My Brother," "With a Pessimist in Spain," etc._ _Illustrated by_ Blanche McManus [Illustration: SPE LABOR LEVIS] Boston L. C. Page & Company _MDCCCCVI_ _Copyright, 1906_ BY L. C. PAGE & COMPANY _All rights reserved_ First Impression, July, 1906 _COLONIAL PRESS_ _Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co._ _Boston, U. S. A._ =To= PAUL AND ANTOINETTE Preface WASHED by the blue Mediterranean and kissed by the warm southern sun, the Iberian Peninsula lies at the southwestern corner of Europe. To this sunny land of Spain we owe much, for, from its hospitable shores, aided by her generous queen, Columbus sailed to discover that New World which is to-day our home. We should therefore be very friendly to the country which helped him, and American boys and girls should welcome the coming of Our Little Spanish Cousin. Contents CHAPTER PAGE I. THE CHRISTENING 1 II. SCHOOL-DAYS 10 III. A VISIT TO A HACIENDA 19 IV. AT THE ALHAMBRA 33 V. ANTONIO'S STORY 43 VI. THE HOLIDAYS 53 VII. EASTER IN SEVILLA 65 VIII. RAINY DAYS 74 IX. TO THE COUNTRY 87 X. GAMES AND SPORTS 96 XI. A TERTULIA 104 XII. VIVA EL REY! 117 List of Illustrations PAGE FERNANDO AND HIS DONKEY (_See page 60_) _Frontispiece_ "THE OWNER PULLED IT UP TO HER WINDOW AGAIN" 6 "THEY PLAYED HIDE AND SEEK THROUGH THE MARBLE HALLS" 40 "ALL THE PEOPLE OF THE TOWN WHO HAD SUCH ANIMALS DROVE THEM DOWN TO THE CHURCH TO BE BLESSED" 60 "THEIR BODIES SWAYED TO AND FRO IN TIME TO THE MUSIC" 71 "THEY WENT TO THE ALCAZAR GARDENS" 84 Our Little Spanish Cousin CHAPTER I. THE CHRISTENING ONE of the first things which Fernando remembered was the christening of his little sister. He was five years old and had no other brother or sister to play with, for Pablo, his wonderful big brother, was away at the Naval School, and his older sister, Augustia, was at school in the convent. When Fernando's nurse told him that he had a little sister he was delighted, and begged to see her; and when all his relatives on both sides of the house came to see the baby christened, he was still more pleased. Fernando was a little Spanish boy, and in his country a great deal is thought of kinsfolk, for the Spanish are very warm-hearted and affectionate. So Fernando was glad to see all his aunts and uncles and cousins and all the friends who happened to be visiting them at the time. Fernando's father, the Señor Don Juan de Guzman, was a courtly gentleman, and he bowed low over the ladies' hands, and said, "The house is yours, señora!" to each one; so, as boys generally copy their fathers, Fernando assured his little cousins that he "placed himself at their feet," and welcomed them just as politely as his father had the older folk. What a wonderful time he had that day! First came the christening in the great Cathedral which towers above Granada, and in which lie buried the king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabella, in whose reign Columbus sailed away from Spain to discover America. The Cathedral was so grand that it always made Fernando feel very strange and quiet, and he thought it was shocking that the baby cried when the priest poured water on her and baptized her, Maria Dolores Concepcion Isabel Inez Juanita. This seems a long name for such a tiny little mite, but there was a reason for every single name, and not one could be left out. Nearly all Spanish children are named Maria, whether boys or girls, because the Spaniards are devoted to the Virgin Mary, and as the baby was born on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, she was called Concepcion. Isabel was for her aunt, and Inez was for her godmother, and Juanita for her father. Her name did not seem at all long to Fernando, for his name was Fernando Antonio Maria Allegria Francisco Ruy Guzman y Ximenez. Every one called him Fernando or Nando, and his long name had troubled him but once in all his gay little life. That time he had been naughty and had run away from his _aya_, the nurse who always watches little Spanish children like a faithful dog, and he had fallen into the deep ditch beside the great aloe hedge. The aloes are stalwart plants with long leaves, wide-extending and saw-toothed, and they are often planted close together so as to make hedgerows through which cattle cannot pass. The leaves of the aloe are sometimes a yard long, and they are very useful. From them are made strong cords, and also the _alpagatas_, or sandals, which the peasants wear; and the fibres of the leaf are separated from the pulp and made into many things to wear. The central stem of the aloe grows sometimes twenty feet high, and it has a number of stems on the ends of which grow yellow flowers. The leaves are a bluish-green in colour, and look like long blue swords. The long hedgerows look very beautiful against the soft blue of the Spanish sky, but little Fernando did not see anything pretty in them as he lay at the bottom of the ditch, roaring lustily. "Who's there?" demanded an American gentleman, who was travelling in Spain, as he came along on the other side of the hedge, and Fernando replied, "Fernando Antonio Maria Allegria Francisco Ruy Guzman y Ximenez!" "If there's so many of you I should think you could help each other out," said the American, and when he finally extricated one small boy he laughed heartily, and said, as he took Fernando home: "I should think a name like that would topple you over." After that Fernando always called Americans "the people who laugh." After the baby was christened, they went home through the narrow streets of the quaint old town. All the horses wore bells, and, as they trotted along, the tinkle, tinkle sounded like sleighing-time in America. The reason for this is that in many places the streets are too narrow for two carriages to pass, and the bells give warning that a vehicle is coming, so that the one coming from the opposite direction may find a wide spot in the road, and there wait till the other carriage has passed. [Illustration: "THE OWNER PULLED IT UP TO HER WINDOW AGAIN."] As the christening party went toward the home of Fernando, it passed a man driving two or three goats, and he stopped in front of a house, from a window of which was let down a string and a pail. Into this the man looked, and taking out a piece of money which lay in the bottom, he milked the pail full from one of the goats, and the owner pulled it up to her window again. It seems a strange way to get your morning's milk, but it is sure to be fresh and sweet, right from the goat, and there is no chance to put water in it, as milkmen sometimes do in America. The houses Fernando passed were all painted in many soft colours, and they had charming little iron balconies, to some of which palm branches were fastened, blessed palms from the church at Holy Week, which the Spaniards believe will keep lightning from striking the house. Fernando's house was much larger than the rest, for his father was a noble of one of the oldest families in Spain, whose ancestors had done many splendid things for the state in the olden times. The house had several balconies, from which hung down long sprays of blossoms, for every balcony railing was filled with flower-pots. There grew vines and flowers, nasturtiums, hyacinths, wallflowers, pinks and violets, their sweet scents filling the air. When the christening party entered the house, the baby was borne off to the nursery, and Fernando, no longer a baby, but a big boy with a baby sister, was allowed to go with the rest to the _patio_, where breakfast was served. The _patio_ is one of the most charming things about the real Spanish houses. It is a court in the centre of the house, larger than an ordinary room, with a marble floor and a huge awning which protects from the sun, yet leaves the _patio_ open to the fresh air and sweet scents of the sunny out-of-doors. All the family gather in the _patio_, and it is the favourite lounging-place for old and young. In the _patio_ of the Señor Guzman's house were orange-trees and jasmine, and all colours of violets bloomed around the marble rim of the fountain, which was in the centre. What a wonderful thing that christening feast was to Fernando! There was much laughing and talking, and such good things to eat! When all were through eating, little Juanita's health was drunk, and her godfather proposed her health, and recited a poem he had composed in her honour. "Queridita Ahijada! Plague alecielo qui tu vida Sea feliz y placentera Cual arroyo cristalino Qui atra viesa la pradera Su Padrino, Francesco."[1] This very much delighted every one, and so with laughter and merriment the christening feast was over. FOOTNOTE: [1] "Please God, my little godchild, That your life as pure may be As the laughing brook which through the valley, Runneth ever limpidly. Your Godfather Francesco Wishes fervently." CHAPTER II. SCHOOL-DAYS WHEN Fernando was seven years old he began to go to school. Little Juanita cried bitterly, for she was devoted to the big brother who played such lovely games with her, and she did not like to think of his being away from her nearly all day. However, she was told that Fernando was a big boy now, and that before long she would be having a governess to teach her to read and embroider, so she stopped crying very quickly, for she was a sunny little child, and went to picking flowers in the garden quite contentedly. How grown up Fernando felt! To be a real schoolboy! His school-days were all alike. He arose at half-past seven, when the church-bells were ringing for the daily service; he had a bath, said his prayers, and dressed himself very neatly, for he had first to be looked over by his _aya_, and then inspected by his mamma, to see if he could pass muster, and was clean and neat as a little Spanish gentleman should be. Mamma being satisfied with his appearance, he gave her his morning kiss, and greeted the rest of the family. Then followed breakfast,--a simple, wholesome meal of _semula_, or gruel and warm milk, with bread and honey and eggs. After a run in the garden, the _ayo_, or preceptor, called to take him to school. Fernando skipped happily away to study until twelve o'clock, when dinner was served to the day boarders, a dinner of soup, vegetables, and dessert, with a little playtime afterward. Spanish boys do not take tea or coffee until they are grown up. At half-past four the boys are turned out of school, and then comes the delight of the day to Fernando. His _ayo_ has disappeared, and in his stead has come Manuel, his own man, who tells such delightful stories of knights and warriors and the glories of Spain, and who thinks that all his little master does is perfect. Manuel knows all about the city, and he is willing to take Fernando any place he wishes to go, provided it is a fit place for a boy of rank. He knows just where the marionettes are playing, and if there is a gay crowd on the square, a trained bear or a funny little monkey, he will be sure to have heard about it, and take Fernando to see it. If there is no special excitement, Manuel takes him to the _paseo_, where all the boys of the town gather. Here they play in mimic battles and bull-fights, and Fernando enters into everything with delight, until Manuel thinks it is time for the señora, his mother, to pass by in the carriage. How delighted the little boy is to see her, and how his tongue rattles as he tells her all the events of the day, as he rides home with her through the long soft twilight of the soft Spanish night! How good his supper tastes, a simple little supper of chocolate, rich and dark, white bread and golden honey, with some little iced cakes, which dear old Dolores, the cook, has made for the little master. All the servants love Fernando dearly, for though he has a hot temper, and sometimes is very wilful, he is so loving that they do not mind his naughtiness. After supper Fernando says the rosary with his _aya_, goes over his lessons a little, and then tumbles into bed in a happy slumber. All his days are very much alike, for Spanish children are brought up very simply, and have little excitement, though they have many pleasures. There are little visits paid to aunts and cousins, visits remembered not too pleasantly by the pet dog and parrot of his aunt. The parrot was brought from Cuba by Uncle Enrico, the priest. The bird knows Fernando well, and scolds terribly in most unchurchly language every time he approaches the cage. The French poodle, too, does not greatly care for a visit from Fernando, for the boy cannot help teasing, and the fat, stupid dog, his Aunt Isabel's darling, does nothing but lie around on silken cushions and eat comfits. Fernando likes animals, and would never really hurt one, but there is something in the calm self-satisfaction of Beppino which stirs up all the mischief in him, and Aunt Isabel has been heard to exclaim: "Fernando will be my death! He is a dear boy, and if it came to choosing between him and Beppo, I am quite sure that I would take my nephew, but, thank Heaven, I have not to choose!" Fernando's own dog was different. He found him one day close by the garden railing, a poor, ragged fellow, lean and hungry, with a lame foot, but a pair of pleading and wistful brown eyes, which, with all their misery, had yet a look of good-fellowship within them which appealed to Fernando's gay nature, as the pitiful plight of the little fellow appealed to his tender heart. The dog put a pink tongue through the railing and licked Fernando's hand, and that clinched the bargain. Henceforth the two were friends. Fernando persuaded Manuel to bathe and tie up the wounded foot, and feed the puppy. That was all the boy dared at first, but the next day he found the dog in the same place and fed him again. Every day after that the little tramp followed him to school, and when school was over his yellow-haired dogship awaited his benefactor. Manuel winked at the friendship, and allowed Mazo, as Fernando called him, to have many a good meal at the garden gate. Manuel was a great stickler for the proprieties, but he had been a boy once, and there were some things that Fernando's lady mother would not at all have comprehended, that good old Manuel understood perfectly. Mazo was far more interesting to Fernando than the thoroughbred, ladylike pets of his mother, and it was a sore subject with him that Mazo, who was so clever, who could whip the tramp dogs of any of his school friends, should be kept outside the house. His mother did not seem to realize that Mazo's fighting qualities were what made him valuable. One fatal day, when she had driven to the _paseo_ a little earlier than usual, and had seen a fight between Mazo and another little dog, equally disreputable, she had cried out: "Fernando, come away from that ferocious beast! He must be mad!" and she had seemed anything but reassured when Fernando had tried to calm her by saying: "But, mamma, he is not mad; I know him well; he is the gentlest of beings, and he can whip any dog in the _paseo_," the pride of possession getting the better of prudence. Thereafter Manuel was most careful of Mazo's appearance. He captured him and washed him, and let him sleep in a shed at night, and by degrees the little fellow lost his trampish appearance, and became a semi-respectable member of society, though still ready to follow Fernando like a shadow, to fight at his will, and to share with him an excursion into forbidden lands. It was really droll to see the different airs which Mazo could assume. He had ever an eye upon his audience, having early learned in the hard school of misfortune that his comfort depended not at all upon himself, but upon the humour of those about him. With the outside world his look was wary. With the family of his master he was apologetic. His brown eye seemed to say: "I place myself at your feet, most noble señors; I pray you excuse me for living." But with Fernando, while it was tempered with respect, his air was one of good-fellowship alone. Even the señora herself, the head of the house and authority in chief, as is the case in all Spanish households, came to regard Fernando's dog with a degree of friendliness, and finding this out, the servants treated him kindly, and Mazo decided that his lines had fallen in pleasant places. Upon this, however, he never presumed. He knew not how long it would last, but felt that he was upon good behaviour. He restrained his desire to chase Juanita's pet cat, and to bark when the parrot imitated his barking, though the restraint put upon himself must have been severe, for he made up for it when out with Manuel and Fernando. Then he was himself again, Mazo the tramp. CHAPTER III. A VISIT TO A HACIENDA ONE day in October, when the sun was shining in golden beauty, the señora said to her husband: "I should like to go to the _hacienda_ to-morrow, and take the children with me, for _la niña_ has never seen the picking, and Fernando did not go last year or the year before." "It will give me pleasure to escort you," said the Señor de Guzman, in the courtly manner which Spanish gentlemen use toward their wives. "At what hour will it please you to start?" "As early as you can," she answered. "So that we may arrive there in plenty of time to see the picking before luncheon, and after a siesta, drive back in the pleasant part of the afternoon." "We shall start at nine, then," said her husband, "and should arrive there by ten or a little after." When Fernando returned from school and heard that he was to accompany his mother next day, he was nearly beside himself with joy. "Juanita," he cried, "you have no idea how delightful it is at the fruit farm! I have not been there for two years, but I remember it well. All the oranges one can eat, and such raisins! You will much enjoy it, I am sure." He was up bright and early next day, and impatient to start long before his mother was ready, and even his father was waiting before the señora made her appearance. She was a large woman, and very slow and graceful in her movements. No one had ever seen her hurried, and every one expected to wait for her, so that it was nearly half-past nine when they started. The coachman whipped up the horses, and away they went skimming over the rough stones. Fernando sat with Diego and Manuel on the front seat of the carriage, while Dolores sat beside the señora, holding Juanita on her lap. The señor rode upon his high-stepping Andalusian horse beside the carriage, and pointed out places of interest to the children as they drove along. A gay young officer passed by them, young and slim, riding a handsome horse, and some soldiers were manoeuvring on the Plaza. One poor fellow, once a gay soldier, but now with an empty sleeve, dressed in a faded army blouse and wearing a merit medal, was begging in the street, and the señor stopped to give him a piece of silver, for Spaniards are always generous and pitiful, and cannot resist a beggar. "He had served in Cuba," said the señor to his wife, and she sighed as she thought of the many lost to Spain and their dear ones in that useless war. Fruit-venders passed along the street, and donkeys so laden with fruit and flowers that almost nothing could be seen of them but their slim little legs and their great waving ears. Water-carriers were there, carrying huge jars which looked like those used by the old Moors; and a travelling merchant, in gray garments, but with brightly dressed mules. It was not so bright a party that they passed later, for a peasant funeral passed by on its way to the cemetery. Four young men carried the bier, upon which was the body of a child, covered all but its face, which lay exposed to the sun. "Take off your hat, son," said the señora. "Always do so to a passing funeral, for maybe yours will be the last salute the dead will receive on earth." No sooner was the funeral passed than there came a straw and charcoal merchant, crying, "_Paja! Carbon! Cabrito!_" So many people in Granada have no way to warm themselves except by the _brazero_, in which charcoal is burnt, that there is great need for the charcoal man, and he drives a brisk trade. Next they saw a priest on a sick call, for he bore the Blessed Sacrament. A crowd of ragged urchins stopped in their play to kneel as he passed, and Fernando and his father raised their hats. By this time, the carriage had reached the outskirts of the city, and the road wound along the banks of the Darro, a rushing stream which gushes out of a deep mountain gorge, and passes through the town. Its banks are lined with quaint old houses, leaning far over the river, and Fernando saw women there, washing their linen in the water, and spreading their clothes on the stones to dry. Outside of the town their way lay along the beautiful Vega, which stretches beyond Granada, in green and fertile loveliness, to the far-away hills. Crossed by two rivers, the Darro and Genil, the plain is dotted with whitewashed villas, nestling like birds in the soft green of the olive and orange trees. Sloping gradually to the mountains above, the Vega is green as emerald, and truly a fair sight beneath the turquoise sky, and the mother-of-pearl of the snowy mountains. Fernando's father owned large estates upon the hillsides, and raised oranges and grapes. The last were used for raisins, the grapes from which the finest wine is made, the _Amontillado_, for which Spain is so famous, not reaching their greatest perfection in this part of the land. In an hour they reached the farm and drove down the long lane which led to the house. The _Hacienda_ of Santa Eulalia was a large, low building, with a broad porch and a tangle of vines and roses climbing over it. Huge trees spread their arms over the roof, and from the balcony one could see groves of cypress-trees, pines, oaks, and poplars, beyond the fruit-trees, and, above all, the rose-coloured peaks of the Sierras. Upon the slope of the hill, as it fell away toward Granada, were the grape-vines, with huge clusters of grapes, purple, white, and red, weighing down the vines. There were, too, terraces where the raisins dried; and nearer the house were the drying-sheds, where an army of packers pressed the raisins under boards, and carefully sorted them before packing. The vineyards were beautiful, but even more so were the orange groves, and one who has seen a grove in full fruit never forgets the beautiful sight. The trees are deep green in colour, and full of leaves, many of them bearing at the same time flowers and green and ripe fruit. The children were wild with delight, and ran about eager to see the picking and sorting of the fine fruit, for the oranges of Santa Eulalia were famous for size and quality. The trees grew rather low to the ground, and were covered with fruit which the pickers were gathering. Ladders were put up to the lower branches, and each picker carried a basket swung to his neck by a cord. He carefully picked the oranges, one at a time, and dropped them in his basket, and so expert were many of them that it seemed as if they had scarcely mounted the ladder before the basket was full. Many young girls were employed as pickers, and they were particularly skilful, vying with the men in their swiftness. Very gay were their voices, and merry jest and song enlivened the work, until it seemed as if it were not work but play. Fernando and Juanita hopped about like little rabbits, eating the fruit which rolled to the ground, for often the golden globes fell from the trees, as they were shaken by the picking. When the baskets were filled, the oranges were carried to the sheds and left overnight to harden the skins a little, when each orange was wrapped in soft tissue-paper. For this are employed young boys and girls, and very expert they grow in the wrapping of the oranges, each one being properly wrapped with but a twist of the hand. The next thing is the packing, and the oranges are stored away in wooden boxes, and are ready to be shipped to market. The children ate so many oranges that they scarcely wanted any of the luncheon prepared for them at the _hacienda_. There was an omelet with green peppers, a delicious salad, some fowl, and tiny round potato balls, all sprinkled over with chopped parsley, with a huge dish of oranges and grapes for dessert. The señora insisted upon a little siesta after luncheon, but Fernando's eyes were so wide open that he could not close them as he swung to and fro in the great hammock between two orange-trees in front of the house. He was delighted when his father sat down beside him, in one of the big easy chairs, and said: "You look to me like a boy who would like to hear a story." "Indeed I would; please tell me one," said Fernando. "Have you ever heard about the judges of Pedro the Cruel?" "No, papa," said Fernando, all interest. "A long time ago, there ruled over Andalusia a king named Pedro, and he was so disliked by his subjects, and did so many wicked things, that he was called Pedro the Cruel. He lived in the city of Sevilla, and though he was cruel, and often heartless, still he had a strong sense of justice, which would not allow the common people to be badly treated. He found out one day that four of his judges had been cheating the people and taking bribes, and he determined to teach them a lesson. He went to his favourite gardens, those of the Alcazar, and sent for the judges to come to him there. It is a wonderful place even to-day, and then it must have been very beautiful. Huge banana-trees waved their rough green leaves above the tangled beauty of the flower-beds, where jasmine and violets and roses grew in profusion. In the midst was a fountain, and Don Pedro knelt beside it, smiling wickedly as he placed upon the perfumed waters, five oranges cut in halves, and placed flat-side down. The reflection was so perfect that any one would be deceived, and think they were whole oranges floating upon the water. "'How many oranges are there here?' asked the king, smiling genially, and the judges replied: "'Ten, may it please your Gracious Majesty.' "'Nay, but it does not please my Gracious Majesty to have four fools for judges,' he said. 'Liars! Can you not see that there are but five?' and he raised two of the halves and held them together. 'Know, oh, unjust judges,' he said, sternly, 'that the king's servants must see more than the surface of things if they are to conduct that portion of the realm which it is their business to attend to, and since you cannot tell a half from a whole, perchance that is the reason of the tales I hear of your ill-dealings with the property of some of my subjects!' "He ordered them to be beheaded and their places filled with better men, and the poor people whom they had defrauded had their property restored to them. There are many other stories of King Pedro which are not pleasant to tell, and it is good to remember that he sometimes did kind things." "Thank you," said Fernando. "What is the Alcazar where the gardens were?" "It is a very remarkable place, and when you go to Sevilla you will see it. At first, hundreds of years ago, when the Romans were in Spain, it was the house of Cæsar; afterward the Moors turned it into a fortress, and it is a perfect example of Moorish work. Don Pedro rebuilt it, and spent a great deal of money upon it, making it the most beautiful palace in all Spain. All manner of things happened there, among them the murder of Don Pedro's half-brother, Don Fadrique, who he was afraid would lay claim to the throne. "But here come your mother and Juanita, and I think your rest time is about over. Go and play, and tell Manuel we return at four o'clock, so you must be on time." So Fernando spent a delightful afternoon in the orange grove, and drove home through the cool twilight, passing the _paseo_ just as the band was playing the _Marche Real_, the national song, which he hummed until he went to bed. [Illustration: Music] CHAPTER IV. AT THE ALHAMBRA "_Mi madre_," cried Fernando, rushing into the house one day in October, "to-day is the feast-day of the head master, and we have a holiday. May I have permission to go to the hill to see Antonio?" "Not by yourself, my son," replied his mother, and Fernando said, hastily, "Oh, no, _madre mia_, Manuel says that he will take me if you will permit me, and, if Juanita's nurse could be spared, we could take the _niña_, as she has never been there, and that would give her pleasure." "Let me see," his mother paused a moment, "the day is fine. This morning I am busy, but after luncheon I will drive thither with the little one, and leave you for an hour while I go on to the villa of the Señora Sanchez; but you must be a good boy, and mind Manuel." "Yes, mother, and you will see Antonio, whom I like best of all the boys at school," said Fernando, and he hastened away to make ready for the great treat. A drive with his mother in school hours was a pleasure seldom indulged in, and a visit to the great hill which crowns Granada was treat enough, but to take Juanita,--these were things so pleasant that he said to himself, "I think my guardian angel must have whispered in my mother's ear to give me all this pleasure." It was about two o'clock as they drove through the narrow streets of the city up the steep and hilly way which led to the outskirts of the town. "You are going to see the nicest boy in Granada, and the most wonderful castle in Spain, _niña_," said Fernando to Juanita, and the two children chattered merrily as the carriage went slowly up the hill. "Here is a riddle I heard at school, _niña_, see if you can guess it,-- "'Guarded in a prison strait, Ivory gaolers round her wait, Venomous snake of sanguine hue, Mother of all the lies that brew!'" "I do not know," said his little sister, wonderingly. She thought all that Fernando said and did was perfection. "What is it, Nando?" "Why, the tongue, of course," he said, pleased to have given a riddle which she could not guess; and his mother said: "That is a very good riddle, and I hope you will remember it, for it is the tongue which makes much mischief in this world. Remember that 'a stone and a word flung do not return.'" "There is Mazo following us," said Juanita, and her mother said, laughingly, "Really, Fernando, I don't see why you like that dog so much! He is uglier than Picio."[2] "He isn't handsome, but you have told me that handsome is as handsome does!" said her son, and his mother laughed again. "Oh, what is that?" cried Juanita, as the carriage made a turn, and some splendid great towers came into view. "That is the Alhambra," said Fernando. "It is the most wonderful castle in Spain. Manuel said it was begun in 1238, in the reign of the Moorish king, Ibn-l-Ahmar, and it was years and years in building. He says the Moors used to have the castle and the city of Granada, and I read in my history of how the Catholic king, Ferdinand, came here to conquer it. He fought and fought, but the Moors wouldn't give it up. I think they were a brave people, if they were beaten, don't you?" "Yes, my son, they were very brave, but they did such cruel things to the captives they took, that it is not surprising that the Spaniards wanted to conquer them," said his mother. "They captured Christian girls, and forced them to become their wives, though what they wanted with them I cannot see, for they already had many wives, and I should think one was enough for any man. Where shall we find your friend, Fernando? If you wish I will leave you with him for an hour, and continue my drive." "Oh, thank you, mother, I knew you would let me stay!" cried Fernando; and Juanita said, "Please leave me, too, mother, that I may see Antonio and the great palace." "Antonio lives within the palace, mamma," said Fernando. "He was born there, and he and his sister, Pepita, have never been away. He is to go to the English school at Gibraltar, but not until he is bigger. May we ask some one where he is?" "Certainly. He must be a nice boy to have lived always in such a place, and to have you so devoted to him. There is a guard; ask him where the apartments of the boy's father are," she said to Manuel, who sat upon the box with the coachman. Further inquiry, however, was not necessary, for, as the carriage made its way up the broad drive shaded with magnificent elm-trees, which the Duke of Wellington planted, a boy came bounding toward them. "There he is," cried Fernando. "Antonio, come here, we have come to see you." The carriage stopped, and Fernando hopped out as lightly as a squirrel, giving Antonio a good hug, for Spanish boys are never ashamed of showing that they like their friends. Antonio's cap was off in a trice and he smiled and bowed as Fernando presented him to his mother and little sister. Antonio was a handsome boy, with eyes as dark and blue as the sapphire of the Spanish skies, and fair hair tossed back from an open brow. All Spaniards are not dark, and, in Andalusia, the province in which Granada lies, there are many blonds. "I will leave Fernando and Juanita with you for a visit," said the señora, graciously. "Will you bring them here in an hour?" "_Si_, señora," said Antonio. "But if you would so honour us, the señora, my mother has prepared a little luncheon in the Garden of Lindaraya at four o'clock, and she would be most happy if you would partake of it with us." "Thank you, then I shall allow the children to remain with you until that time and I shall myself prolong my visit with my friends at the villa," she replied. "When I return I shall do myself the pleasure of meeting your mother." [Illustration: "THEY PLAYED HIDE AND SEEK THROUGH THE MARBLE HALLS."] So she drove off, and the children tripped happily away, followed closely by Manuel and Dolores, for Spanish little ones of good family are never allowed to go about alone. However, one must relax a little sometimes, and the two attendants saw a pleasant hour before them as they sat idly about while the children played in the wonderful gardens of the palace. Pepita, Antonio's sister, was but a year older than Juanita, and the two little girls were quite happy together, and the boys did not consider themselves too big to play with them. They played hide and seek through the marble halls, and tag and chaser about the flower beds. The little girls played house and made mud pies, although Dolores objected to this and told Juanita that she would be as dirty as the "_caseada de Burguillos_"[3] if she were not more careful. Juanita thought Pepita was wonderful because she had been born in a palace, and her father was custodian of the wonderful place, but it was Antonio who claimed her greatest admiration. He was even more marvellous than Fernando, she almost thought, because he was bigger, and his eyes had such a kind and merry look, and he always carried her over the rough places in his strong young arms, and lifted her over the walls as they strolled through the gardens. She had never seen such gardens as these of the Alhambra. They were full of the most beautiful flowers, and there was the most delicious scent in the air. Antonio told her it was from the wallflowers, which grew here in great profusion, and were twice as large as they were in other places. But besides them there were great trees of purple heliotrope, the blooms as large around as Juanita's big hat; and geranium-trees, taller than a man, with orange-trees in bloom, late though it was, and with the ripe fruit upon their branches also. Then the children had a charming luncheon on the grass, for Antonio's mother set forth for them all manner of good things,--a dainty salad with some cold meat, thick chocolate in tiny cups, and cakes in the daintiest of shapes. What a merry picnic it was beneath the shade of the great orange-tree which Antonio told them had been there for over a hundred years, and from which the great American, Washington Irving, had picked fruit when he lived at the Alhambra! Then when the party was over, and his mother had not come, Fernando said: "Antonio, tell us a story. You know some about the castle, I am sure." And little Juanita begged, "Do please tell us one, Antonio," and as nobody could ever resist the _niña's_ wistful, brown eyes, Antonio smilingly began the story of "The Three Sisters." FOOTNOTES: [2] Picio was a man so ugly that his name has passed into a proverb in Spain. [3] The "housewife of Burguillos," who prided herself on her neatness, yet who was seen to spit in her frying-pan to see if it was hot enough. CHAPTER V. ANTONIO'S STORY "ONCE upon a time," Antonio began, "there were in the palace of the Alhambra three princesses whose names were Zayde, Zorayde and Zorahayda. They were daughters of the Sultan, for it was in the days when the Moors reigned in Granada, and there were no Christians here but captive Spaniards. The princesses were kept in a tower called the Tower of the Infantas, one of the most beautiful towers of the Alhambra. It was fitted up in a manner befitting the home of the king's daughters. The walls of the room were hung with tapestries in cloth of gold and royal blue; the divans were heaped high with pillows, the pillars and arches which held up the roof itself, were in filigree of softest hues,--blue, terra-cotta, and gold. The Princess Zayde's chamber was the richest, all in cloth of gold, since she was the eldest Infanta; that of Zorayde was hung with steel mirrors, burnished bright, for she was most fair to look upon and loved to look upon herself; while that of the youngest, little brown-eyed Princess Zorahayda, was delicate in tone, as if some rare jewel lay in a dainty casket. Upon the princesses waited the discreet Kadiga, an elderly duenna who never let them from her sight for a moment. She watched them as a cat does a mouse, but there was one thing she could not control, and that was the eyes of the princesses. They would look forth from the windows, and, indeed, this Kadiga never forbade, for it seemed to her a pity that three such fair maidens should have so little amusement, and she thought it could not possibly hurt them to gaze into the gardens below. "One day, while the princesses were looking out the narrow windows, they saw something which made them look and look again. Yes, it was true,--could it be? it _was_! They were the very same--the three Christian princes whom they had seen at Salobrena; but here they were labouring as captives. At the tourney to which the princesses had been taken, they had seen these noble knights, and had fallen in love with them, and it was for this that their father had shut them up in a tower, for he had said no daughter of his should marry a Christian. "But the knights thought differently, and they had come to Granada in the hope of finding their princesses, and had been taken captive and were compelled to hard labour. "'It is he!' cried Zayde. 'The knight with the scarlet tunic is the one I saw!' "'Yes, but the one in blue, he is mine!' cried Zorayde. "Little Zorahayda said nothing, but she looked with all her eyes at the third knight. And this was not the last time she saw him, for the knights had come thither, bent on rescuing the maidens, and had bribed their jailer to help them to escape. So one moonlight night, when the moon was turning into silver beauty the orange-trees of the garden, and shining in fullest light into the deep ravine below the Tower of the Infantas, the knights awaited their lady-loves in the valley below, and Kadiga let them down by a rope-ladder. "All escaped in safety but little Zorahayda, and she feared to go. "'Leave me,' she cried. 'I must not leave my father!' and at last, since they could not persuade her to go, they rode sadly away without her, and her little white hand waved a sad farewell to them from the window. There she still is, so say the legends, and there are those who, walking in these gardens at midnight, tell that they have seen a white hand wave from the tower window, and a voice whisper through the murmur of the fountains, '_Ay di mi Zorahayda!_'" "Oh, Antonio! hast thou seen her?" cried Juanita, and her brother laughed, and said: "Little foolish one, it is but a story! But Antonio, tell us a tale of battle, for this is but a woman's story, and there have been splendid deeds done in this old castle." "Splendid ones, and sorry ones as well," said Antonio, who was old for his twelve years, and had lived so long in the atmosphere of romance that he seemed a part of it, in speech and manners. "Shall I tell you of the taking of the Alhambra from the Moors? It was a glorious fight, and both sides were brave men." Then he told them of the conquest of Granada, when Christian knight and Moor fought valiantly for the possession of the splendid city, with its gem, the Alhambra. He told of how the noble knight, Juan de Véga, was sent to demand tribute from Muley ben Hassan, King of Granada, and that fierce old monarch said: "Return to your sovereigns, O Spaniard, and tell them that the kings of Granada who paid tribute are all dead. My mint coins only swords!" Brave words, but it was his son, Boabdil the Unlucky, who was forced to surrender the castle to the victorious enemy, and who handed the keys to the Spaniards, as he rode through the gate of the Siete Suelos, saying: "Go, possess these fortresses which Allah has taken from me, but grant me this one boon, that none other shall pass under this gateway from which I have come out." And Ferdinand granted his request and walled up the gate, so that, from that day to this, no one has passed through that entrance. These and other tales Antonio told them, and the afternoon passed so quickly that the children were surprised when their mother's voice warned them that it was time to go home. "Oh, mamma," they cried, "must we go?" and the señora smilingly waited a little, chatting with Antonio's mother, while he picked a huge bunch of flowers for the children to carry away with them. Then the good-byes were said, and they drove away crying: "Come soon to see us, Antonio." To which he replied, in pleasant Spanish fashion: "Thank you well, and very much for your visit!" "Isn't he a nice boy?" said Juanita. "Quite a little Don," her mother answered, smiling. "Fernando, I am glad to see that you have the sense to choose your friends so well," and Fernando grinned, boylike, well pleased. "Oh, who is that?" Juanita asked, as a fantastic figure approached. "That is the gipsy king," said her mother. "You know the gipsies live all huddled together there, below the Alhambra, and they have a chief whom they call king. They are a lazy set, doing little but thieving and telling fortunes. They live in little burrows, like rabbits, set into the hillsides, and there are pigs, goats, and dogs all living together with the people." "That girl with the king is very pretty," said Fernando, "with her black hair and eyes, and her bright skirts, and the pomegranate flower behind her ear." "The pomegranate is the flower of Granada, you know," said his mother, "and it does look pretty in her dark hair. Hear her call her dogs! Gipsy dogs are all named Melampo, Cubilon, or Lubina, after the shepherd dogs who followed the shepherds, and saw our Lord at Bethlehem. Ah, Juanita, '_Jesus, Maria y Josef!_' You must not sneeze! Drive faster, Diego, and Dolores, wrap the baby in that Palencian blanket, so soft and warm. The nights grow cool quickly at this time of year." "Why do we always say '_Jesus, Maria y Josef!_' when people sneeze?" asked Fernando. "It has been the custom so long that people have almost forgotten why it is done," replied his mother; "but I remember my grandmother saying once that her mother told her the reason. Years and years ago, in 1580, there was in all Andalusia a terrible plague called the _mosquillo_. People sneezed once, and lo! they had the plague, and little could save them, though some few recovered. So it grew to be the custom, when one sneezed, for those who heard him to look pityingly upon him and say, '_Dios le ayude_,'[4] or call upon the holy names to help him, saying, '_Jesus, Maria y Josef._'"[5] "See that ragged beggar, mamma," said Juanita. "May we not give him something?" as a little boy came hopping along beside the carriage, crying, lustily: "_Una limosna por el amor de Dios,[6] señora!_" "I have no _centimos_,"[7] said the señora, "and it is not wise to give more to a beggar, but you can always give politeness, _niña_, and when you have no money say, '_Perdone me, usted_,'[8] or, '_Por el amor de Dios,_'[9] and thus you will not give offence to God's poor." FOOTNOTES: [4] "God help him." [5] "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph." [6] "An alms for the love of God." [7] Coppers. [8] "Pardon me, your Grace." [9] "For the love of God." CHAPTER VI. THE HOLIDAYS FERNANDO had been three months in school and was beginning to grow tired, when it came time for the feast of Christmas, and he was very happy in the thought of all he was to do and see during his holiday. He and Juanita were very much excited in preparing their _nacimento_, which nearly every Spanish child has at Christmas time. This is a plaster representation of the birth of Christ. There are in it many figures, a manger surrounded with greens, the Baby Our Lord, St. Joseph, and the Blessed Virgin, the Wise Men worshipping the Holy Child, and angels hovering near, as well as the patient ox and ass who were his first worshippers. Juanita was wild with excitement as these were all grouped and set in place. She was only four and did not well remember the Christmas before, so that it was all new to her. Christmas Eve there was a grand family party, all the relatives coming to the home of Fernando and partaking of a supper of sweetmeats and wine. In the morning there was, of course, early Mass in the great cathedral, where the choir sang divinely. It started way up in the loft to sing the _Adeste Fideles_, the Church's Christmas hymn for centuries, slowly coming nearer and nearer; and Juanita thought it was an angel choir until she saw it come into sight and the glorious voices rolled forth in a volume of song. Then the children had breakfast and they made their _aguinaldo_, for every servant on the place expected a present as surely as did the old darkies of Southern days. The postman, the errand boy, the porter, the _sereno_ who walks the street all night with his lantern, trying your door to see if it is locked properly, and assuring you that all is well as the hours strike,--all must be remembered. Then the señora took the carriage, and the children accompanied her, as she filled it with sweetmeats for the poor children and such of her special protégés as could not come to the house for their _aguinaldo_. It was a cold day, for Granada grows cold in the winter time, and is not like other Spanish cities, which have summer all the year. The wind sweeps down from the Sierras and brings with it a blustering hint of mountain snows; and as the houses have no furnaces and seldom good stoves to heat them, even the rich can suffer, and the poor do suffer bitterly. While the sun shines it matters not, for the sun of Andalusia is so warm and bright that it blesses all who lie beneath it; but when the dark days come or evening's mantle falls upon the town, people hover close about the _brazero_ and long for summer. With Fernando it mattered little, for he was seldom still enough to be cold, and he spent a merry Christmas, falling asleep to dream of delightful things, and waking to the happy thought that it would soon be the feast of the Circumcision. This is New Year's Day, and is celebrated with much festivity in Spain. The evening before there is a grand party for the grown-ups, and slips of paper are passed around, one being drawn by each person. They are in pairs, so that the one who draws number one must go to supper with number one, and great merriment is made over the pairing off of the guests. The gentleman has to send a bunch of flowers or sweets to the lady whose number he draws, and not a few matches have been made in Spain by this merry custom. Fernando and Juanita, however, were quite otherwise engaged. They were sent early to bed and were dreaming of the sugar-plums of the morrow, wondering whom they would first meet, for they think in Spain that what happens to you on New Year's Day will determine the course of the whole year. If you meet a pauper you will have bad luck, but if you see a man with gold in his pocket, you will have money all the year. Merrier still was the feast of the Three Kings, which is the day upon which little Spanish children have gifts made them as American children do at Christmas. This is in honour of the Wise Men having brought presents to Our Lord on that day, so that on the eve of January sixth, the feast of the Epiphany, Fernando and Juanita set their little shoes on their balcony with a wisp of straw to feed the Magi's horses, and with many surmises as to what they would find in them on the morrow. What wonderful things there were! Fernando had all the things that boys love,--tops, marbles, balls, and a fine knife; while Juanita had a wonderful dolly and all manner of dainty things for her to wear. "The Three Kings never make one feel like the governor of Cartagena," said Fernando, as he tossed his new ball and lovingly fingered his knife. "But there is still another gift for thee and thy sister," said his father, and he led them to the door. There stood a wonderful little donkey, his bridle decorated with streaming ribbons and bells, his kind eyes blinking as he turned his head and seemed to say, "Hello, Little Master, are you and I going to be great friends?" "Oh, papa, is that for us?" cried Fernando, while Juanita clapped her tiny hands with delight. It took Fernando but a moment to spring on the donkey's back, but his mother cried, warningly: "Be careful, son! Remember how the little Prince of Granada rode too fast through the streets, and fell from his pony and was killed." "Have no fear," her husband said, smiling, "the donkey will not go fast enough to hurt him; that is why I selected him." And he placed Juanita up behind her brother, bidding Manuel walk beside them, while Mazo, unbidden, jumped around. Everything else that Fernando had sank into insignificance when compared to the little donkey, which he named Babieca, and which he and Juanita rode whenever they had a chance. Babieca was a kind little beast, though something of a rogue. He seemed to know that he must play no tricks when Juanita rode him, and he behaved himself well; but when Fernando rode, it was quite another matter. Babieca would prick up his long ears and go along quietly, then stop suddenly without saying "by your leave," and, of course, Fernando would go over his head. He would not hurt himself at all, and the naughty little mule would look at him wonderingly as if to say: "Now what on earth are you doing down there?" Fernando soon grew to expect such antics and was on the lookout for them. [Illustration: "ALL THE PEOPLE OF THE TOWN WHO HAD SUCH ANIMALS DROVE THEM DOWN TO THE CHURCH TO BE BLESSED."] When St. Anthony's Day came, of course Babieca had to go with the other four-footed friends of the saint, to be blessed and insured from all harm through the year. The seventeenth of January is the day of St. Anthony, patron of mules, horses, and donkeys, and a grand parade took place. All the people of the town who had such animals drove them down to the church to be blessed and to get a barley wafer. Many of the animals were gaily decorated with streamers and ribbons, and some with flowers; and all along the streets small booths were set up containing little images of St. Anthony and barley cakes. Babieca behaved very well at his blessing, though his refractory tongue did try to nibble the priest's stole; but some of the horses kicked and neighed, and, with the braying of the many donkeys and mules, there was a din not often heard in staid Granada. There were no more fêtes for the time being, and Fernando, a trifle spoiled by all the gaiety, had to return to his studies again. It was a long month before carnival time, but his thoughts went forward to that delightful season, and it seemed to the little boy as if it would never come. However, as "all things come to him who will but wait," the great day arrived at last, and Fernando was wild with joy. Carnival time is just before the beginning of Lent, and is a season of great merriment. Under a turquoise sky, with no clouds to mar its fairness, there is a pageant almost like those of the days of chivalry, and Fernando and Juanita, attended by their faithful Manuel and Dolores, saw it all. Fernando dressed as a page, and his sister as a court lady of the days of Isabella the Catholic, and they were masked, as are all the people who throng the streets on these gay days. Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday the carnival continues, each year, and the children are asked to little dances at the houses of friends, and also to hear student choirs sing and to see plays. But what they most enjoy is mingling in the crowds upon the _paseo_, throwing _confetti_ at those who throw at them, seeing the flower-decked carriages, the wonderful costumes; monks, nuns, generals, court ladies, flowers, animals, all are represented,--all are laughing and throwing _confetti_ right and left. Children are selling _confetti_, crying shrilly, "_Confetti_, five _centimos_ a packet. Showers of a million colours! Only a _perro Chico_!"[10] Ah, how gay and delightful it all is! Juanita saw much, and Dolores lay down at night thanking the saints that carnival lasted but three days! But Fernando saw everything, and poor Manuel's legs were weary as he kept pace with his little master, now here, now there, now everywhere, laughing and jesting, the merriest lad in all the carnival. Alas, it was all over! Ash Wednesday dawned, dull and heavy, the weather as sad and sorry as the day. Fernando dragged himself to church, where his brow was marked with ashes according to custom, and gazed longingly at the _Entierro de la sardina_, a bit of pork the size and shape of a sardine, buried to show that the fast had begun, for no one in Spain eats meat on Ash Wednesday, and very little of it in Lent. Fernando looked so depressed at supper that his mother asked him: "What is the trouble, little son, are you ill?" "No, mamma," he said. "But it is so long till Easter." "Not if you do not think about it," said his mother with a smile. "Do your work with a will, and the days will pass quickly. If you are a good boy, you shall have a treat at Easter." "Oh, what will that be," he asked, and Juanita cried, eagerly, "Shall I have it, too?" "Both of you," the mother said. "Your father is going to take us to Sevilla, to see the grand Easter festival, and we shall see your brother and sister as well, and your cousins and your Aunt Isabella, so you must be good children." "Indeed we will," cried both, joyously, at the thought of so much pleasure. FOOTNOTE: [10] _Perro Chico_, little dog, name given to a five-_centimo_ piece because of the little lion upon it. CHAPTER VII. EASTER IN SEVILLA EASTER in Sevilla! What a gay and charming time it is! Flowers are everywhere, blooming in beauty, and all the people seem joyous in the thought that the long season of fasting is over. Fernando and Juanita had arrived in the city on the Saturday before Palm Sunday, and were wild with delight at seeing their cousins, Mariquita, Pepita, and Angel, and in looking forward to the delights of the week's holiday with its processions and fêtes. Beginning with the beautiful Procession of the Palms, on Palm Sunday, all through Holy Week are processions and celebrations, and the little folk thoroughly enjoy them. Their older brother and sister were there, also, and full of wonderful tales of what they had done at school. Fernando thought Pablo was a wonderful being, and that everything he did was perfect. He could hardly wait until he himself would be big enough to go away to college; and little Juanita felt quite the same way about Augustia, who had learned many things in the convent. "Indeed, _niña_," she said, "it is pleasant at school with the girls, but that Mother Justina makes one work so hard, and that the play-hours are few. I have embroidery to make, and lessons to say, and my class learns French as well as Castilian. But the other girls are charming. Most of all I like Paquita de Guiteras, an _Americana_, at least she comes from the Island of Cuba, and the girls say that she is an Indian, and that her mother was an Indian princess married to her father, a noble Spaniard. Of this I cannot say, and she herself does not relate, but she says that in Cuba the Spaniards have often married the Indians and have been kind to them, and have not destroyed them as have the _Americanos_ in the _Estados Unidos_. Well, _niña_, Paquita is the merriest of girls! She has always some prank to play upon some one, and, indeed, she cares not if it is the Mother Superior herself, so she can have her joke. Her aunt, good Sister Mercedes, is always fretting for fear lest Paquita should be in disgrace, but it worries Paquita not at all. One night she did the funniest thing. There is one girl who is very mean to the little ones, always teasing them, and they dare say nothing, as she is the niece of the Mother Superior, and she believes nothing against her. This Teresa Alcantara once found a little girl, and teased her until Paquita could stand it no longer, and flew at Teresa and bit her hand. Sister turned at that moment and saw the bite, but she had not seen what had gone before, and would not listen to what I tried to tell her, and Paquita is always too proud to try to make excuses, and just looked at Sister so fiercely from her great black eyes that the Sister was still more displeased. "'Thou art but a savage wildcat,' she said, and took her to Mother Superior for punishment. She could not have any playtime for a whole week, and she would have to apologize to Teresa, too, and I think she hated that the worst of anything. But she got even with her, as you shall hear. She found out that Teresa was terribly afraid of cats, and one night, when we were all safely tucked away in our little beds, there came from behind Teresa's curtains a terrible scream, and she jumped out of bed and rushed up and down the dormitory. Such a breach of decorum was never seen before, and the nuns were shocked to a degree. Teresa kept shrieking, 'A wild beast is in my bed! a wild beast is in my bed!' and after calming her down they went to investigate. What do you think they found? A feather duster! It was tucked under the sheets, and who could have put it there? No one knew, but every one felt that Paquita was the only one who could have thought of such mischief. But the sisters did not try to find out, for one of them had seen Teresa teasing the little girl, and knew why Paquita disliked her so much; and after that the big bully let us little ones alone." "Oh, it must be so nice," sighed Juanita, but Pablo laughed, and said that those were girl's stories, and that far more exciting things happened at the naval college, especially when they all went on a cruise. On Easter Sunday morning the children went to the cathedral to see the wonderful dances which take place but three times a year. Fernando and Juanita were struck dumb with the beautiful cathedral, so unlike the Gothic one of Granada; for this one at Sevilla is a Saracenic church, built hundreds of years ago, begun by the Moorish Sultan, Yakub al Mansour, in 1184. [Illustration: "THEIR BODIES SWAYED TO AND FRO IN TIME TO THE MUSIC."] How strange it seemed to see dancing in church! Fernando and Juanita sat beside their mother, on their little camp-stools, for there are no pews in Spanish churches. The whole centre of the church is empty, and people kneel there during the mass, or if they are too tired or too little to stand, they rent camp-stools for half a cent, and an old woman who has them in charge hobbles along with a stool, which they may keep while the service lasts. The men generally stand, and it is interesting to see them settle themselves in a comfortable position when the sermon begins, and stand there almost without moving while the preacher speaks, sometimes a half-hour, sometimes a whole hour. But the hearers do not seem to mind, for these Spanish monks are very fine preachers. As the children gazed at the beautiful altar covered with flowers, there came the sound of music,--violins, flutes, flageolets, and hautboys all making a quaint harmony,--and with the music was mingled the sound of youthful voices, fresh and sweet, and a band of boys entered the chancel, and gliding down the altar steps danced quietly, singing as they danced. Their bodies swayed to and fro in time to the music, at first slowly, then, as the time quickened, castanets click-clicked with the other sounds, and the boys moved faster and faster, still in perfect time, yet not with wild abandon, but rather with dignified respect for the place. They were quaintly dressed in the court costumes of the Middle Ages; on their heads were big Spanish hats, turned up at one side with a sweeping blue feather, a mantle of light blue was over one shoulder, their vests were of white satin, their hose and shoes of white. The boys danced on until the great bells of the Giralda rang out, and then they vanished, the music growing softer and softer, until its last strains sounded far away, like a floating wave of heavenly harmony. "How pretty the dance was," said little Juanita, as they walked home from the service. "Why do they dance in church?" "The Holy Scriptures say that David danced before the Lord," her mother answered, "so perhaps that is the reason the Sevillians think this is a form of worship, but you must ask your cousins to tell you how it was first done." "Do tell me, Mariquita," said the little girl, and her cousin said, "I do not know how it happened at first, but it has been done ever since the Moors were here in Sevilla. Only once in hundreds of years has it been stopped, and then an archbishop said it was not right to have dancing in church. He made every one very angry, for the people said, 'What our fathers did is good enough for us!' So they went to the Pope, and he said that he could not tell unless he saw the dance. So the boys and the musicians were taken to Rome, and there danced before the Holy Father, who said, 'I see no harm in this, any more than in the children's hosannas before Our Lord when He entered Jerusalem. Let them have their dance so long as the clothes which they wear may last.' Then they came back and so determined were they to continue it for ever, that they never let the clothes wear out to this day. If one piece of a suit shall be worn it is so quickly mended or repaired that no suit has ever worn out all at once, so that these are the same suits as those worn long ago." "I am so glad they still have it," said Fernando, "for I wouldn't have missed seeing it to-day for anything." CHAPTER VIII. RAINY DAYS "MAMMA, would you allow me to go to the bull-fight with father and Pablo?" asked Fernando next day. "No, indeed, my son, a bull-fight is no place for women and children," his mother replied. "I have never been to one in all my life, and Juanita shall never attend. I wish Pablo did not care to go, either, but he must do as he wishes now that he is grown. A boy cannot always be at his mother's girdle, but you must be much bigger than now before you will see such a sight." Fernando sighed, but he knew that there was no use saying more, for the word of _la madre_ was law. He was very anxious to see a bull-fight, for every boy in Spain desires that above all things. The fights are held on all holidays, but the finest one of all is at Easter. The immense amphitheatre of Sevilla holds thousands of spectators, men wild with excitement over the sport, and even women, though the most refined ladies do not frequent the _corridos_. The bull is turned loose in the centre of the huge ring and tormented until he is ready to fight. Men with sharp-pointed darts, called _banderillos_, tease him by throwing their barbs at him, and pricking his skin until he is nearly crazy. Then men mounted on horseback, the _picadores_, wave scarlet cloths before his eyes, exciting him still more, for a bull hates red worse than anything in the world. He dashes at the cruel cloth, and sometimes is too quick for the man who carries it, tossing him on his horns, but generally it is the poor horse who is killed, and the man jumps away to safety. The _matador_ is the one who slays the bull, and he is sometimes killed himself. It is a terribly cruel affair, though Spaniards say it is not so cruel as our prize-fighting. It was late that evening when Fernando went to bed, and ere he did so there was quite an excitement. They were all seated upon the piazza of the house, he and Juanita, his cousins and their elders, when there was a great cry from the street, "The toro! The toro!" and a clatter of horses' hoofs. All screamed loudly, for to have a bull escape from the pens is a frequent occurrence, and not a very pleasant one. The cries became louder, the horses' hoofs beat nearer and nearer, and as in the dusk a figure dashed down the street, the señora, screaming loudly, caught Juanita to her and tried to climb the pillar at her side. She was very stout, and the pillar was very slippery, and she could not climb with one arm, so she slid down as fast as she climbed up, squealing all the time, "_A toro, Madre di Dios! a toro!_" Fernando was frightened, too, but he was a brave boy, and he tried his best to push his mother up out of danger, boosting her as she slipped down, but not helping very much, as you might suppose. It seemed to him an hour, but it was only a minute before servants came from the house, and as they did so a horse dashed up before the pillars, and, stopped too hastily by his rider, slid along the stones on his hind feet. On his back was Pablo, waving his _sombrero_, and crying, "What a _corrido_! It was glorious! Six bulls to die, and Rosito never in such form! But, _madre mia_, what is the matter?" as he sprang from his horse and assisted his mother to a seat. The señora could not speak, but Fernando said, "We thought the noise was a bull escaped, and I was assisting my mother to a height of safety." Pablo looked at the little figure speaking so gravely, then threw back his head and shouted with laughter, but seeing Fernando's hurt expression, stopped quickly, and said: "Bravo, little brother, thou art a good knight to care for thy mother and sister!" "Better than thou!" His mother had regained her voice by this time. "Thou art still the same Pablo, and will yet be the death of thy poor mother," but Pablo kissed her hand so gallantly, and begged her pardon so amiably, that she quite forgave him. Next day, alas! it was raining, and it rained so hard all that day, and nearly all of the next, that the children were like little bears in a cage. They played with everything they could think of, but after awhile they grew restless and quarrelled so that the grown-up folk grew nervous, too. At last, Mariquita's father, gay and charming Uncle Ruy, came to the rescue. "Who wants to take a trip into the country with me?" he asked, and as each one squealed "I!" he said: "Of course we can't go, really, but we can make believe, and I shall take you to a _hacienda_ outside the old wall of Sevilla. "It lies amidst orange and olive groves, and all kinds of flowers, and many of the things we eat come from that very place. Who knows how they pickle olives?" "Are olives pickled?" asked Juanita, and Mariquita said: "How queer it seems that all the things we eat have to go through so much before they can be eaten. I did not know that olives had to be pickled." "Yes, _mi niña_, and we will play that we are visiting an olive grove, and we can see the way the olives are picked and made ready for food. See, here are the trees, and the fruit is picked from them and placed in baskets. There are two kinds of olives used, green and ripe, the green ones are picked just before they begin to turn soft. These are separated from the others, and the bitter taste is removed by soaking in fresh water for a long time, or some picklers soak them for a shorter time in a solution of potash lye. This softens the skin and extracts all bitterness, but the olives must be soaked in clear water, which is frequently changed to get all the potash off. Then they are placed in weak brine, and afterward in stronger, until they have the salty taste which we like so much. Then they are put in small barrels and taken to the bottling rooms, where they are bottled and labelled for the market." "How is the oil made?" asked Fernando. "That is harder to do, but it is very interesting to watch. The fresh olives are carefully picked, dried a little, and then crushed. Old-fashioned stone mills are used to crush the fruit, and the mass is pressed to extract the liquid which contains all the watery juice as well as the oil and pulp." "What do they do after it is pressed?" asked Fernando. "They let it stand for a month and the refuse goes to the bottom. Then the oil is poured off and allowed to stand another month, when the process is repeated. After the third time the oil is ready for use. The best oil is made in this way, as it keeps its colour and flavour better by the settling process than when it is filtered. "In some places the olives are placed on a platform and the millstone is placed over them. This is turned round and round by means of a pole to which a donkey is hitched, and the mass which is turned out is placed in rush baskets, which are put under a press which is screwed down by five or six men, so that the oil is squeezed out, but that is a very old-fashioned way of making oil, and there are better ways now. They still use this, however, when there is a big crop, and they want to get the fruit made into oil as rapidly as possible. Great care must be taken that everything is clean and that the oil does not become rancid, or it will all be spoiled." "Is everything we eat so interesting?" asked Juanita. "The things we eat and wear, too," her uncle answered, "and nothing in all Sevilla is more interesting than the way of making silk." "How is that done?" asked Fernando. "I am afraid I could not make you understand it all, unless you could go to the silk manufactory, and even then it would be hard for you. But I can tell you about the cocoons, and that is the strangest thing about it. The silkworm was first brought to Europe from India in 530, when monks brought it to the Emperor Justinian. The silkworm is a kind of a caterpillar which feeds on the leaves of the white mulberry-tree, and lays his eggs in a kind of gummy substance on the leaves in the end of June to be hatched out in the following April. The caterpillar is small at first, about a quarter of an inch long, but grows to be three inches in length. By means of a substance in their mouths the silkworms spin out silky strands which form cocoons, each fibre being about eight hundred yards long. When ready for weaving, the cocoons are placed in an oven at a gentle heat which kills the chrysalis so that the silk fibres can be removed and wound." "How do they get the silk wound? Doesn't it break?" asked Fernando. "It is rather hard to do," his uncle answered, "but they learn to be very careful, and the cocoon is soaked in warm water which loosens the little filaments. When the cocoons are reeled the first step has been taken, and the reeled silk is called raw silk, from which all silk products are made." [Illustration: "THEY WENT TO THE ALCAZAR GARDENS."] "I wish we could see it all, but perhaps we can sometime when we are here again," said Fernando. "Oh, it has stopped raining!" "Yes, indeed, and the Guadalquiver has overflowed its banks," said Pablo, coming in at that moment. "There has not been such a freshet for years. Come along with me, Nando, and we will go boating in the streets. I climbed to the top of the Giralda, and the whole country looks like a great sea." "Oh, may I go with Pablo and see?" cried Fernando, and his mother, with many injunctions to Pablo to take care of him, said "Yes." They went to the Alcazar gardens, those most wonderful gardens of Spain, and as it was early spring the flowers and insects were making merry in the sunshine, which had come back with renewed force, after its vacation. Scarcely tumbled by the rain, lovely banksia roses were climbing over the walls, the rosy, blossoming judas-trees, tinted acacias, and pink almonds were in bloom, and orange-trees were bursting into fragrant beauty. Violets and tulips, yellow oxalis, wild hyacinths, and the scarlet dragon-flower carpeted the ground, while tall white lilies, like fair maidens, and stately iris with sword-like leaves, reminding one of the knights of chivalry who once walked these paths, stood sentinel adown the walks. Fernando saw, too, the insects which flitted among the branches, beetles with bright green coats like emeralds, white and gold butterflies, birds with brilliant wings and sweet voices. But Pablo was thinking more of sport than of nature, and he hurried along until they found a man and a boat to row them, and what a gay sail they had right down the main streets of the town! Past the cathedral steps and the Golden Tower where Columbus piled up gold brought from the New World, Sevillians say, and all the other interesting sights of the city, so that Fernando came home tired and happy, to tell Juanita of the wonderful things he had seen. "I do not wonder that they say, 'He whom God loves has a house in Sevilla,'" he said. "It is so beautiful a city." "Truly,-- "'Quien no ha vista Sevilla No ha vista un maravillo.'"[11] said Mariquita boastingly, but little Juanita prattled in reply the Grenadino's favourite response-- "'Quien no ha vista Grenada No ha vista nada.'"[12] FOOTNOTES: [11] He who has not visited Sevilla Has not seen a marvel. [12] Who has not seen Granada Has seen nothing. CHAPTER IX. TO THE COUNTRY HOME again! At first it seemed to Fernando as if he could never go back to school, for after his week of fêtes and processions and fun, lessons were dull things, but he soon fell into the old ways, and there were so many pleasant things at home that he did not pine for Sevilla at all. He had a pet lamb--what boy has not in spring-time in Spain?--and he was devoted to it for awhile, trying to feed it all manner of things. "Manuel," he said one day, "I do not know what is wrong with my pet lamb. It will not eat the things I give it. I have never seen so stubborn a thing. Mazo is far different. It will eat anything at all, but the lamb stands and stares at me, and shuts its mouth, no matter what I offer him." "Lambs are always stubborn," said Manuel. "They do not eat much but milk when they are so young. But here, I have a new kite; will you fly it?" "Indeed I will," cried the boy, and in an instant the lamb was forgotten, and he was skipping down the street, his kite skimming the air like a gaily coloured bird. It was a beautiful spring in Granada, and Fernando spent every minute out of doors unless actually compelled to be in school or in bed. The family ate in the lovely _patio_ where the flowers were beginning to blossom, and the sun was not too warm to do without the awning, which in summer stretched overhead. If it was not kites in which he was interested, it was marbles and ball, or even a play bull-fight; and Fernando was very proud when he was chosen to be "toro," and put his head in a basketwork affair with points like horns, and the boys chased him with sticks, running, jumping, and dodging when he turned and charged them as he had heard that the bulls did at the real _corridos_. Best of all, it was time to have his head shaved, and of all things that was what he liked. His mother mourned, for the boy's hair was naturally curly, and in winter was as soft and pretty as black velvet. But all Spanish boys have their heads shaved in summer, and Fernando must be like the rest. It was cut so close that it made him look very funny, and his great black eyes shone like beads in his lean brown face, with no soft hair to soften its harsh outlines. Fernando and Antonio were still devoted friends. They played together after school and on the holidays, and many delightful times did the two boys have, either in the Alhambra or at Fernando's home, where there were many city sights as interesting to Antonio as the delights of the old palace were to Fernando. So devoted had they become that Fernando felt very sorry to leave his friend when the time came for him to accompany his mother and sister to their country home. Generally he had been delighted to go to the _hacienda_, and enjoyed the country school even more than the one he attended in the city, but this year he felt so badly over it that his father said: "Never mind, my son. I shall bring Antonio out to visit you when school is over, and you may have a fine time together at the _hacienda_." This made Fernando more contented, and he went away with his parents quite happily. As they started for the country on a bright May day, Juanita said, "Oh, mamma, see that strange cow! It is all dressed with flower-wreaths, and has bells around its neck and flowers on its horns. Why does that young girl lead it, and that old blind man walk behind, and blow that horn and beat the drum?" "That is a cow to be won in a lottery," said the señora. "Manuel, stop; I wish to buy a ticket. How we Spaniards do love a game of chance! See, I shall buy a ticket for each one of you, and maybe your number will win the prize." "Oh, thank you, mamma!" both children cried, for neither had ever had a lottery ticket before. "Now I wish you to stop at a cigar-store, and buy a stamp[13] for my letter to your Aunt Isabella, and then we will drive on." As they turned into the main street leading to the Alameda, Juanita asked, "Oh, _mi madre_, what are those people sitting in the streets making?" "Haven't you seen the ice-cream makers before?" said the señora. "No, I think you cannot remember last summer, can you? The gipsies go up to the Sierras in the very early morning, and get donkey-loads of snow, and the people make ice-cream in those pails with the snow in it. They sit right at their doors on the sidewalk and make the fresh cream, and any one can buy a glass of it." "Do let us have some," cried the children, and their indulgent mother ordered the horses stopped while they ate some of the delicious fresh cream. As the carriage rolled on down the steep street, so narrow that as Manuel said "one can hardly pass another after a full dinner," the swineherd was just coming out for the day, and Juanita cried: "Oh, _madre_! See that man with the pipe in his mouth; what queer music he plays! What is he?" "He is the swineherd, _niña_. See, he comes from his alley, staff in hand," the señora said. "Watch him blow his pipe without turning his head, and the pigs come after him, as if he had charmed them. Little and big, dark and light, fat and scrawny, there they come following him to pasture. Every alley we pass adds some curly tail to the procession. Now he is ready to turn out of the town into that grove, and see what an army of piggies follows him! He never looks for any of them, but they hear the music of his pipe and start because they learned long ago that it leads them to good pastures." "I think they are too funny for anything," said the little girl. "Does he bring them back at night?" "Yes, and every little piggy knows his own alley, and goes right home with a little frisk of his curly tail to say 'good night,'" said her mother, smiling. "See those oxen; are they not splendid fellows? I love to see them draw their loads so easily. Beautiful creamy creatures, with their dark points and their great, soft eyes." "What is that wooden thing over their heads?" asked Juanita. "That is the yoke to couple them together. They are the gentlest animals in the world, these great, hornèd beasts, and the driver walks in front of them with a stick over his shoulder, which he seldom thinks of using." "Oh, what a cunning little donkey!" cried the little girl, as they passed a tiny donkey laden with panniers filled with flowers, fruit, vegetables, bread, fowls, and even a water-jar. "How prettily he is clipped, all in a pattern." "Mamma," said Fernando, "some of the donkeys that the gipsies have clipped have mottoes and pictures on them. I know a boy whose donkey has '_Viva mi Amo_'[14] on his side. I don't like that, for if the donkey doesn't love his master, it is telling a story." His mother laughed. "We will hope he has a good little master, and then the donkey will care for him and not be telling a falsehood with his fur. "But here we are almost to the _hacienda_, and how short the ride has seemed. Now if two children I know are good, we shall have a delightful summer, and although you are to be in the country, and thou, Fernando, will go to a country school, remember the saying of thy fathers: "'Quando fueres par despoblado Non hagas desaquisado, Porque quando fueres per poblado Iras a lo vesado.'"[15] FOOTNOTES: [13] In Spain stamps are sold in cigar-stores, not at the post-office. [14] I love my master. [15] When you are in the wilderness do not act ill, or when you are among people you will do likewise. CHAPTER X. GAMES AND SPORTS THE _hacienda_ was more beautiful than it had been in the fall, and Fernando was soon busy as a bee. He had of course to attend school, but it was a country school, not so strict nor so large as the city one, and he enjoyed showing off his superior accomplishments to the other boys. This the others did not relish, and there was a grand fight to see which was the strongest, and when Fernando had whipped all the boys of his own size, he was happy and felt that he had not disgraced the name of Guzman. Manuel did not attend him in the country, and Fernando much enjoyed doing as he liked, roaming about, taking his own time to come home, tramping about the orange groves, or sailing boats in the brook. When school was over and Antonio came for the promised visit, what merry times there were! The boys went swimming at all hours. They ran bareheaded all over the place, Mazo after them, their constant companion. Fernando had a few lessons to do each morning, a master to teach him his French, music, and drawing,--for boys of his class in Spain are accomplished as well as educated,--but these were soon over, and then, stung by the bees, burnt by the sun, wet by the rain, eating green oranges, doing in fact what American boys, or boys all over the world will do if let alone, this was the way in which the two Spanish boys spent their vacation. Juanita, meantime, was having a very happy time. She, too, had a few lessons, and her _aya_ was giving place to a governess, but she was still too young to learn much, and the beautiful out-of-doors was a great lesson-book to her. Riding Babieca, tagging after the boys, sun-tanned and rosy, she grew strong and hearty, and was never so happy as when allowed to go with her brother and Antonio. Generally they took very good care of her, and her mother felt that she was safe with the two boys. Fernando teased her a good deal, but Antonio was of a calmer mood, and was always her gentle knight. All manner of games were played by these happy children, who, with their little neighbours of the nearest _hacienda_, made a merry group. They were simple-hearted little folk, and the boys had not reached the state described in the old Spanish rhyme of the boys of Madrid: "They should be romping with us, For they are only children yet; But they will not play at anything Except a cigarette. No plays will cheer the Prado In future times, for then The little boys of seven Will all be married men." Fernando, and even the graver Antonio, entered into all the childish sports with the rest, and an especial favourite was a play very much like our "London Bridge is Falling Down," called the "Gate of Alcala." Two children are chosen to head the lines, and called Rose and Pink. They form an arch with their arms held up and their fingers locked, and under this the other children pass headed by the mother. They sing gaily a little dialogue: _Rose and Pink._ "To the viper of love that hides in the flowers The only way lies here." _Mother._ "Then here I pass and leave behind One little daughter dear." _Rose and Pink._ "Shall the first one or the last Be captive of our chain?" _Mother._ "Oh, the first one runs so lightly, The last one shall remain." _Chorus._ "Pass on, oho, pass on, aha! By the Gate of Alcala." The last child, with squeals of delight, is caught in the falling arms, and chooses whether she shall follow Rose or Pink, taking her place behind the one of her choice. When all have been chosen, there is a grand tug of war, the merry party singing, meantime. _Rose and Pink._ "Let the young mind make its choice, As young minds chance to think; Now is Rose your leader, Or go you with the Pink? Let the young mind make its choice By laws the young heart knows. Now is Pink your leader Or go you with the Rose?" _Chorus._ "Pass on, oho, pass on, aha, By the Gates of Alcala." The boys enjoyed playing soldier, and would whittle toy swords out of sticks, and form in line, marching and singing: "The Catalans are coming, Marching two by two; All who hear their drumming, Tiptoe for a view, Aye, aye, tiptoe for a view; Red and yellow banners, Pennies very few. Aye, aye, pennies very few. "Red and yellow banners The moon comes out to see; If moons had better manners She'd take me on her knee. Aye, aye, she'd take me on her knee. She peeps through purple shutters; Would I were tall as she. Aye, aye, would I were tall as she. "Soldiers need not learn letters Nor any schooly thing; But, unless they mind their betters, In golden chains they swing. Aye, aye, in golden chains they'll swing. Or sit in silver fetters, Presents from the king. Aye, aye, presents from the king." The prettiest of all the games is that of the "Little White Pigeons," which all Andalusian children love to play. The little companions form in two rows, and, facing each other, dance forward and slip beneath the upraised arms of the opposite side. Thus they pass under the "Silver Arches" to Sevilla and Granada: "Little white pigeons are dreaming of Seville, Sun in the palm-trees, rose and revel. Lift up the arches, gold as the weather, Little white pigeons come flying together. "Little white pigeons, dream of Granada, Glistening snows on Sierra Nevada. Lift up the arches, silver as fountains, Little white pigeons fly to the mountains." Our little Spanish cousins play nearly all the same games that American children play, only their "Blind Man's Buff" is called "Blind Hen," and "Pussy Wants a Corner," is called "Cottage to Rent," and played with the rhyme: "Cottage to rent, try the other side, You see this one is occupied." Their game of tag is called the "Moon and the Morning Stars," and is played by one child being chosen as the Moon and forced to keep within the shadow. The rest of the children, being Morning Stars, are safe only where it is light. If the Moon can catch a Star in the shadow, the Star must become a Moon, and as the Stars scamper in and out of the shadow, all sing: "O the Moon and the Morning Stars, O the Moon and the Morning Stars, Who dares to tread--oh Within the shadow." "Hide and Seek" the children played, and "Forfeits," and all manner of other games, and as the sun nearly always shines in Andalusia, the summer was one long merry round of out-of-door fun. CHAPTER XI. A TERTULIA SEPTEMBER found the children at home again, and Fernando back at school, while Juanita had a governess for a part of each day, though she was not expected to learn a great deal; for the Spaniards think if their girls are sweet and gentle they need not be very learned. If a Spanish girl of sixteen knows how to read and write, simple arithmetic, a little history, and can dance and embroider well, she is quite accomplished enough to marry, which is what most of them intend to do. Things were going very quietly, when there came an excitement so great for the children that they were almost wild. This was the home-coming, in the latter part of September, of Pablo, just in from his long summer cruise, with a fortnight's leave of absence. He came home to celebrate his coming of age, and there was to be a _tertulia_ in his honour. The children were to stay up to the party, and as it was the first time that they had been permitted to stay up after eight o'clock, they were delighted. To them it was the greatest event in their lives, and they were almost afraid to breathe all day, for fear the treat would be cut off. Juanita even stood quite still to have her curls made, which was generally a performance attended with agony, and before the end of which her _aya_ was sure to say, "Hush, Mambru will certainly get you!" Mambru is to a little Spanish girl what a bogey is to an American child, and she will be very good for fear of Mambru. But the day passed off pleasantly, and the children were dressed and sent down to the _patio_ to await the arrival of the guests. The pleasant thing about a Spanish party is that there is no fuss made, and therefore everybody enjoys themselves. The hostess never tires herself out preparing for her guests so that she cannot be cheerful and agreeable when they arrive. The hospitality of Spain is perfect. A Spaniard gives his friends just what is good enough for himself, and never thinks of doing more. So there was not a great brewing and baking on the day of the party, and flushed, heated faces; but there were a few simple refreshments, much pleasant talk and hearty laughter among old and young. There were about thirty friends of the family who came in to talk and chat. The parents came with their daughters, for girls never go to parties alone in Spain, and old and young spent the evening together. Some one played on the piano and the young people danced, lovely Trinidad del Aguistanado dancing with Pablo. This Juanita watched with delight. Trinidad was the loveliest of all the girls, and she thought, of course, Pablo should have the prettiest maiden in all the world. She was as sweet as she was pretty, and said to the little girl: "What is thy name, _niña_?" and when Juanita answered, sweetly: "Juanita, to serve God and you," as all Spanish children are taught to answer, Trinidad kissed her on both cheeks, and gave her a rose from her girdle. At this Juanita was delighted, and Pablo sighed prodigiously. The older people, too, seemed well pleased with Pablo's choice, for the girl's family was as good as theirs, and the two had been friends for many years. "Juanita," said Fernando in a whisper, "I believe that Pablo will bite the iron[16] of the Señorita Trinidad. Will it not be strange to think of him beneath her window, singing of love to his guitar?" "It will be beautiful," sighed the little girl, for Spanish children are always interested in the love affairs of their older brothers and sisters, and even little girls talk about them. "How handsome Pablo looks as he talks with her." "They are as fair as the lovers of Teruel," said old Dolores, who was at the party to take care of her little charges. "Tell us about them," said Juanita, eagerly, for she dearly loved Dolores's quaint stories; and the _aya_ began: "In the town of Teruel there lived, many years ago, a Spanish knight, Don Juan Diego Martinez de Marcilla, and he loved with all his heart Doña Isabel de Segura. Alas, unhappily! for the fathers of the two lovers were enemies, and would not listen to love between them. "'Thou art but a second son,' said Don Pedro de Segura, the father of Doña Isabel. 'Moreover, thou hast not a fortune equal to that of my daughter, who possesses thirty thousand _sueldos_ in good gold, and is my sole heiress.' "'Full well I know that I am in no wise worthy of thy fair daughter,' said Don Juan, 'and upon her grace have I no claim save that she loves my unworthy self. But since this is God's truth, I pray you give me the chance to prove my devotion, and I will furnish sufficient fortune to equal hers. I go to the wars with my lord, King Sancho of Navarre. Grant me five years in which to gain this fortune, and give me your promise that for that length of time you will not force Doña Isabel to marry another.' "Doña Isabel was very young, and her father very fond, and by this he could keep her with him five long years, and, moreover, marry her to whom he pleased, for he said to himself, 'In that time both of them will forget,' and so he smilingly said: "'Your words have some reason. Go with God, and if you return, well and good. My daughter shall not marry against her will for five years to this day, but mark me, rash youth, not one day more shall she wait.' "Then the lovers bade each other farewell, and Don Juan rode to the wars. These were waged against the wicked Moors, and with knights and squires, the armies of Don Alphonso of Castile, Don Pedro of Aragon, and Don Sancho of Navarre fought long and fiercely until, at the great battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, the Moor was crushed. Many a valiant deed was done, and Don Juan was bravest of them all. He broke through the chain which guarded the tent of the Moorish king, and thereby gained great glory and won for himself the right to wear a chain around the margin of his shield in honour of the day. He gained great renown and fortune, but, alas, he was sorely wounded, and it was more than five years before he could return to his beloved. He arrived in Teruel but one short day after the time was up, and found Doña Isabel married to another, Don Pedro Fernandez de Azagra. Despairing, he desired to see his beloved once more, and climbed to her window on her wedding-night. Finding her alone and her husband sleeping, he implored her to give him one last kiss. She refused, and said, weeping, 'Alas! you came not and I thought myself forgotten. I am wedded to this good man, and to him alone belong my caresses.' "At this his heart broke, and crying, 'Farewell, beloved!' he dropped dead at her feet. "At that moment her husband awoke, and she told him straightway the truth, at which he said, 'Thou hast been cruel and unkind to this good man, but to me faithful and true, and I shall but love thee the more!' and he took the body of the poor Don Juan and bore it secretly to his father's step and laid it down and fled away. "When the body of the knight was found, there was great mourning, and he was given a grand funeral at the cathedral, to which all Teruel came to do him honour. There also came the unhappy Doña Isabel, disguised so that none might know her, and, determined to give her lover in death the kiss which she had denied him in life, she stooped to kiss his lips. Lo! the eyes unclosed, he smiled at her, and they closed again, and she fell beside him dead! All were struck dumb with horror, but Don Azagra came forward and told the mournful story, whereupon the two bodies were buried in the same grave. "'Separated in life, in death they shall be together,' said the generous knight who had been her husband but not her beloved; and this is the sad, sad story of the lovers of Teruel." "Oh, thank you, Dolores, it is a beautiful story," cried Juanita, and the young people who had gathered around to hear clapped their hands, and thanked her, too. "What think you, Señorita Trinidad, would you have kissed your lover had you been Doña Isabel?" asked Pablo of the young girl. "I should not have married the other man, señor," she said, flushing prettily. "Come, Trinidad, you must sing for us," cried one of her friends. "Sing the song of Santa Rita," and Trinidad, with a merry little glance at Pablo, sang the gay little song which Spanish girls sing in jest, asking Santa Rita to procure them a good husband. "Santa Rita, Santa Rita, Cada una de nosotros necesita, Para uso de diario Un marido milionario, Anunque sea un animal Si tal, si tal, si tal, si tal, Un marido milionario, Anunque sea un animal."[17] Everybody applauded loudly, and Trinidad, laughing and blushing, sang again. The older people sat about serenely, some talking, others playing cards or dominoes. The younger ones played sprightly games and talked like magpies, and the children listened spellbound. "Who art thou, Pablo?" laughed one, and Pablo answered, merrily: "Ole Saltero, sin vanidad, Soy muy bonito, soy muy sala!"[18] And every one laughed, and Trinidad gave him a charming glance from under her black lashes. Refreshments were passed around, very simple ones. There were trays of water, and by each glass round lumps of sugar, which the guests dipped in the water and ate, hard little cakes, cups of thick chocolate into which finger cakes were dipped and eaten, and some charming little bonbons. There was no wine, for although the finest wine in the world is made in Spain, the Spaniards are great water drinkers, and seldom have wine except at dinners. The men all smoked, but not the ladies, for while the Mexican women sometimes smoke a dainty _cigarrillo_, Spanish women do not. Later on, Pablo's health was drunk in tiny glasses of sherry, as this was a special occasion, and pleasant speeches were made to him, wishing him all success in his career. "Thou art now a man, my son," said his father, proudly and affectionately. "Remember that since the time of the Emperor Charles V., thy fathers have had the right to wear the Golden Key[19] upon their hip, and do nothing to disgrace thy name. On the sword of my grandfather was engraved the motto, 'Do not draw me without reason nor sheathe me without honour!' Let his motto be thine own, and remember that to a Spaniard honour comes first." Then the party broke up, and Fernando and Juanita were trotted off to bed, and sleepily murmured their evening prayer: "Jesus, Joseph, Mary, Your little servant keep, And with your kind permission, I'll lay me down to sleep!" and they heard through the soft moonlight the tinkle of Pablo's guitar, as he strolled along to bite the iron beneath the grating of the dainty Señorita Trinidad. FOOTNOTES: [16] Spanish lovers stand beneath the windows of their sweethearts, to serenade them every night, and, as the windows are grated with iron, this is called "biting the iron." [17] "Santa Rita, Santa Rita, send us now, We pray thee fervently, A millionaire for a husband, E'en a blockhead though he be, E'en so, e'en so, e'en so, A millionaire for a husband, A blockhead though he be." [18] "Sister Saltero, without vanity, I am lovely, I am salada," salada meaning charming, witty, gracious. [19] The noblest of the Spanish grandees wear a golden key upon the hip to indicate that they have the right to enter the king's doors at any time. CHAPTER XII. VIVA EL REY! ALL Granada was in a flutter! It was the brightest of October days, and the sun seemed to be trying to be as bright as the people, or the people to be as gay as the sunshine. Fernando and Juanita hopped out of bed and ran to the window the first minute they were awake, and squealed with delight when they saw that the day was fair. "Oh, mamma!" cried Fernando. "Is it not glorious? The fête will be a success!" and Juanita echoed her brother, "Is it not wonderfully fair!" "Come and have your chocolate quickly, like good children," returned their mother, "for you must be ready early." As soon as the children were breakfasted, they were dressed in their best clothes, Juanita all in white, with a gay sash, and Fernando in a sailor suit of blue, and they waited impatiently for their parents to be ready to start for the fête. It was a great day for Granada, for the king was coming to visit the city, and it had been many years since royalty had honoured the Andalusian town. Spaniards are nearly always devoted to their king, and in Andalusia there are very few who are not fond and proud of the young King Alphonso. In Northern Spain there are many who are called Carlists, and who believe that the descendants of Don Carlos are the lawful kings of Spain, and these have often gotten up revolutions and tried to set their own favourites up as kings. In Barcelona and some of the eastern provinces there are many who like neither King Alphonso nor Don Carlos, and these are anarchists; but Granada was heart and soul for the king, and all the people were overjoyed at his coming. Every balcony in the city was covered with flowers; flags and banners floated everywhere. The Alameda was ablaze with decorations, and every face wore a smile of welcome. The programme for the day was a simple one. The king was to be met at the station by a delegation, a band, and a mounted escort, witness a military review on the Alameda, and depart by an afternoon train. All Granada must see him, and Fernando and Juanita with it. It had been decided that the best time for the children to have a good look at the king was when he drove to the Alhambra, and Manuel and Dolores started early to take them to meet Antonio, who had promised to provide places within the Alhambra grounds, where the general multitude would be less likely to go, and where the children would have a finer view. Pablo went with them, for he was still at home, and he walked beside Babieca to see that Juanita did not fall off, on her long ride up-hill. "See there, little sister," he said. "Is not that an easy way to get milk for the day?" The goatherd was passing at the head of his procession of goats, looking neither to the right nor to the left, expecting his herd to follow him as gravely as he walked; but a peasant woman stole out of her door, and quietly milked one of the little beasts, who seemed not to object in the least, and took it so calmly that Pablo added, "That is not the first time there has been stolen milk for breakfast, I'm sure." "See the poor beggar; do give him something, Pablo," said Juanita, touched by a wretched specimen of humanity who sat with blind eyes peering up at them as they passed. Pablo threw a _perro chico_ into the beggar's outstretched hand, but he said: "You must not be too sad for all the beggars, _niña_; there is an old rhyme: "'The armless man has written a letter, The blind man finds the writing clear; The mute is reading it aloud, And the deaf man runs to hear.' They are not all so sad as they look, but one must give for fear one may slight the really needy." "Oh, Pablo, may we have some _horchata_?" cried Fernando, and his brother stopped to purchase some of the snowy, chilly, puckery stuff, and they enjoyed it greatly. Fernando ate too hastily, and his brother said: "_Quita, quita!_ You must not act so! You are as bad as the king when he was a baby and put his knife in his mouth. His governess said to him, 'Kings do not eat with their knives,' and he haughtily replied, 'This king does!'" "Indeed," said Fernando, pertly, "the king is my cousin, so it says in my history book that all Spaniards may say." "He is your cousin, that is, you must love him as your own blood; but say, rather, 'All equal below the king,' and put him ever first. Remember that your fathers have died for the Kings of Spain, and we may have a chance to show our loyalty yet," and Pablo's bright face clouded a moment. "Listen to the music; there goes the military salute! The king has come, and by the time we reach the Alhambra he will be on his way hither. Get up, Babieca," and he hurried the little donkey along until they reached the top of the hill and found Antonio waiting for them, his face flushed and eager. "He will pass here," he cried, "beneath the Gate of Justice, and my father says we may stand just behind the guard upon the wall; there could not be a better place." "How nice that will be!" cried Juanita. "And where is Pepita?" "There, awaiting you," Antonio answered. "I will take care of Babieca and return," and he led the donkey away, coming back in a few moments, and they all waited impatiently. Spaniards all love a spectacle, and the young folk could hardly restrain themselves as they heard the strains of music coming nearer and nearer. At last the cavalcade came in sight,--first a troop of soldiers, then a band playing the _Marcha Real_, then a mounted guard keeping close to His Majesty's carriage. There he sat, the young king, a tall, slight youth, with a pale, proud face and great black eyes, sad, yet merry and tender; a patrician face in every feature, yet a lovable one, and one to arouse all of love and loyalty in his subjects, as the character of Alphonso XIII. arouses their respect and affection. As the carriage paused at the entrance gate, the king looked up at the eager little group upon the wall and smiled. Juanita and Pepita flung into his carriage their huge bouquets of flowers and to the girls he threw a kiss; but Fernando and Antonio stood up very straight and saluted gravely, and with a smile in his eyes, but with grave lips, the young king raised his hand to his hat and gave them in return the military salute. Then his carriage passed on, and bore him out of sight, but a shout went up from every voice, "_Viva el rey!_" "When I grow up I shall be a nun and pray all the time for the king!" said Pepita. "I shall be a soldier and fight for him," said Fernando, proudly. "And I," said Juanita, "shall marry and have many children to fight and pray for him and for Spain!" "Indeed, little sister, perhaps thou hast chosen the better part," said Pablo, laughing heartily. "See!" cried Antonio, "there goes the carriage again, and hear how the people shout!" and as the bravas rent the air, the children shouted, too: "_Viva Espagna! Viva el rey! Dios guarda usted!_"[20] THE END. FOOTNOTE: [20] "Long live Spain! Long live the king! God guard your Grace!" THE LITTLE COUSIN SERIES The most delightful and interesting accounts possible of child-life in other lands, filled with quaint sayings, doings, and adventures. Each 1 vol., 12mo, decorative cover, cloth, with six or more full-page illustrations in color. Price per volume $0.60 _By MARY HAZELTON WADE (unless otherwise indicated)_ =Our Little African Cousin= =Our Little Armenian Cousin= =Our Little Brown Cousin= =Our Little Canadian Cousin= By Elizabeth R. Macdonald =Our Little Chinese Cousin= By Isaac Taylor Headland =Our Little Cuban Cousin= =Our Little Dutch Cousin= By Blanche McManus =Our Little English Cousin= By Blanche McManus =Our Little Eskimo Cousin= =Our Little French Cousin= By Blanche McManus =Our Little German Cousin= =Our Little Hawaiian Cousin= =Our Little Indian Cousin= =Our Little Irish Cousin= =Our Little Italian Cousin= =Our Little Japanese Cousin= =Our Little Jewish Cousin= =Our Little Korean Cousin= By H. Lee M. Pike =Our Little Mexican Cousin= By Edward C. Butler =Our Little Norwegian Cousin= =Our Little Panama Cousin= By H. Lee M. Pike =Our Little Philippine Cousin= =Our Little Porto Rican Cousin= =Our Little Russian Cousin= =Our Little Scotch Cousin= By Blanche McManus =Our Little Siamese Cousin= =Our Little Spanish Cousin= By Mary F. Nixon-Roulet =Our Little Swedish Cousin= By Claire M. Coburn =Our Little Swiss Cousin= =Our Little Turkish Cousin= THE GOLDENROD LIBRARY The Goldenrod Library contains only the highest and purest literature,--stories which appeal alike both to children and to their parents and guardians. Each volume is well illustrated from drawings by competent artists, which, together with their handsomely decorated uniform binding, showing the goldenrod, usually considered the emblem of America, is a feature of their manufacture. Each one volume, small 12mo, illustrated, decorated cover, paper wrapper $0.35 LIST OF TITLES =Aunt Nabby's Children.= By Frances Hodges White. =Child's Dream of a Star, The.= By Charles Dickens. =Flight of Rosy Dawn, The.= By Pauline Bradford Mackie. =Findelkind=. By Ouida. =Fairy of the Rhone, The.= By A. Comyns Carr. =Gatty and I.= By Frances E. Crompton. =Great Emergency, A.= By Juliana Horatia Ewing. =Helena's Wonderworld.= By Frances Hodges White. =Jackanapes.= By Juliana Horatia Ewing. =Jerry's Reward.= By Evelyn Snead Barnett. =La Belle Nivernaise.= By Alphonse Daudet. =Little King Davie.= By Nellie Hellis. =Little Peterkin Vandike.= By Charles Stuart Pratt. =Little Professor, The.= By Ida Horton Cash. =Peggy's Trial.= By Mary Knight Potter. =Prince Yellowtop.= By Kate Whiting Patch. =Provence Rose, A.= By Ouida. =Rab and His Friends.= By Dr. John Brown. =Seventh Daughter, A.= By Grace Wickham Curran. =Sleeping Beauty, The.= By Martha Baker Dunn. =Small, Small Child, A.= By E. Livingston Prescott. =Story of a Short Life, The.= By Juliana Horatia Ewing. =Susanne.= By Frances J. Delano. =Water People, The.= By Charles Lee Sleight. =Young Archer, The.= By Charles E. Brimblecom. COSY CORNER SERIES It is the intention of the publishers that this series shall contain only the very highest and purest literature,--stories that shall not only appeal to the children themselves, but be appreciated by all those who feel with them in their joys and sorrows. The numerous illustrations in each book are by well-known artists, and each volume has a separate attractive cover design. Each 1 vol., 16mo, cloth $0.50 _By ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON_ =The Little Colonel.= (Trade Mark.) The scene of this story is laid in Kentucky. Its heroine is a small girl, who is known as the Little Colonel, on account of her fancied resemblance to an old-school Southern gentleman, whose fine estate and old family are famous in the region. =The Giant Scissors.= This is the story of Joyce and of her adventures in France. Joyce is a great friend of the Little Colonel, and in later volumes shares with her the delightful experiences of the "House Party" and the "Holidays." =Two Little Knights of Kentucky.= WHO WERE THE LITTLE COLONEL'S NEIGHBORS. In this volume the Little Colonel returns to us like an old friend, but with added grace and charm. She is not, however, the central figure of the story, that place being taken by the "two little knights." =Mildred's Inheritance.= A delightful little story of a lonely English girl who comes to America and is befriended by a sympathetic American family who are attracted by her beautiful speaking voice. By means of this one gift she is enabled to help a school-girl who has temporarily lost the use of her eyes, and thus finally her life becomes a busy, happy one. =Cicely and Other Stories for Girls.= The readers of Mrs. Johnston's charming juveniles will be glad to learn of the issue of this volume for young people. =Aunt 'Liza's Hero and Other Stories.= A collection of six bright little stories, which will appeal to all boys and most girls. =Big Brother.= A story of two boys. The devotion and care of Steven, himself a small boy, for his baby brother, is the theme of the simple tale. =Ole Mammy's Torment.= "Ole Mammy's Torment" has been fitly called "a classic of Southern life." It relates the haps and mishaps of a small negro lad, and tells how he was led by love and kindness to a knowledge of the right. =The Story of Dago.= In this story Mrs. Johnston relates the story of Dago, a pet monkey, owned jointly by two brothers. Dago tells his own story, and the account of his haps and mishaps is both interesting and amusing. =The Quilt That Jack Built.= A pleasant little story of a boy's labor of love, and how it changed the course of his life many years after it was accomplished. =Flip's Islands of Providence.= A story of a boy's life battle, his early defeat, and his final triumph, well worth the reading. _By EDITH ROBINSON_ =A Little Puritan's First Christmas.= A story of Colonial times in Boston, telling how Christmas was invented by Betty Sewall, a typical child of the Puritans, aided by her brother Sam. =A Little Daughter of Liberty.= The author's motive for this story is well indicated by a quotation from her introduction, as follows: "One ride is memorable in the early history of the American Revolution, the well-known ride of Paul Revere. Equally deserving of commendation is another ride,--the ride of Anthony Severn,--which was no less historic in its action or memorable in its consequences." =A Loyal Little Maid.= A delightful and interesting story of Revolutionary days, in which the child heroine, Betsey Schuyler, renders important services to George Washington. =A Little Puritan Rebel.= This is an historical tale of a real girl, during the time when the gallant Sir Harry Vane was governor of Massachusetts. =A Little Puritan Pioneer.= The scene of this story is laid in the Puritan settlement at Charlestown. The little girl heroine adds another to the list of favorites so well known to the young people. =A Little Puritan Bound Girl.= A story of Boston in Puritan days, which is of great interest to youthful readers. =A Little Puritan Cavalier.= The story of a "Little Puritan Cavalier" who tried with all his boyish enthusiasm to emulate the spirit and ideals of the dead Crusaders. _By OUIDA_ (_Louise de la Ramée_) =A Dog of Flanders:= A CHRISTMAS STORY. Too well and favorably known to require description. =The Nurnberg Stove.= This beautiful story has never before been published at a popular price. _By FRANCES MARGARET FOX_ =The Little Giant's Neighbours.= A charming nature story of a "little giant" whose neighbours were the creatures of the field and garden. =Farmer Brown and the Birds.= A little story which teaches children that the birds are man's best friends. =Betty of Old Mackinaw.= A charming story of child-life, appealing especially to the little readers who like stories of "real people." =Brother Billy.= The story of Betty's brother, and some further adventures of Betty herself. =Mother Nature's Little Ones.= Curious little sketches describing the early lifetime, or "childhood," of the little creatures out-of-doors. =How Christmas Came to the Mulvaneys.= A bright, lifelike little story of a family of poor children, with an unlimited capacity for fun and mischief. The wonderful never-to-be forgotten Christmas that came to them is the climax of a series of exciting incidents. * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Obvious punctuation errors repaired. Page xi, "bodiess wayed" changed to "bodies swayed" (bodies swayed to and fro) Page 86, "mada" changed to "nada" (ha vista nada) 
47628	----	generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE * Obvious printer errors have been silently corrected. * Original spelling was kept, but variant spellings were made consistent when a predominant usage was found. * Italics are denoted by underscores as in _italics_. * Small caps are represented in upper case as in SMALL CAPS. * Illustrations have been slightly moved so that they do not break up paragraphs while remaining close to the text they illustrate. * Illustration captions have been harmonized and made consistent so that the same expressions appear in the text and in the List of Illustrations. * Repetitive chapter headings under some illustrations have not been kept. * Some Spanish and Galician expressions have been changed, namely: Page 31: "_Ave Maria purissima_" replaced by "_Ave María purísima_", Page 36: "_caldo Gallego_" replaced by "_caldo gallego_", Page 66: "_Vida Gallego_" replaced by "_Vida Gallega_", Page 86: "Rosaria" replaced by "Rosario", Page 90: "_gigantones_" replaced by "_gigantes_", Page 92: "Colegieta" replaced by "Colegiata", Page 119: "Antonio Palachio" replaced by "Antonio Palacios", Page 132: "Filguiera" replaced by "Filgueira", Page 144: "pi y Suñer" replaced by "Pi y Suñer", Page 188: "Bembibra" replaced by "Bembibre", and throughout the text "sereño" has been replaced by "sereno", "Hôtel" with "Hotel" and "compostella" by "compostela". A CORNER OF SPAIN [Illustration: GALICIA'S GOLDEN SANDS] A CORNER OF SPAIN BY WALTER WOOD WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MARTIN HUME ILLUSTRATED IN COLOUR AND LINE FROM PICTURES BY FRANK H. MASON, R.B.A. AND WITH NUMEROUS REPRODUCTIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS NEW YORK JAMES POTT & CO. LONDON: EVELEIGH NASH 1910 Printed by BALLANTYNE & CO. LIMITED Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, London PREFACE This book does not pretend to be a history or a complete record of Galicia. Its purpose is to show something of the life and character of a little-known part of Spain, and to deal with things seen and done by the visitor who travels under competent and comfortable guidance. I have written either of what I experienced or on the authority of prominent residents with whom I came in contact in my wanderings. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Pp. 1-21 CHAPTER I GALICIA AND ITS PEOPLE The Real Galicia : The Hundred Maidens : The Glory of the North-West : Granite Hills : Gallegans and their Lives : Pigeon-cots and Maize-barns : The Night-watchman's Chant : Civil Guards and Constables : A Modest Breakfast : Eating and drinking : The Waiter as a Gentleman : Enterprise and Open-air Life : The Blessed "To-morrow" : Cigarettes : The Unexpected : Photography : Wine and a Bibber : Across the Biscay Pp. 23-47 CHAPTER II VIGO BAY AND HILLS Sun-bound : Sharp Contrasts : Devil-fish and Ink-fish : Sardines : A Spanish Infant : Vigo's Enterprise : The Lazaretto : Treasure-ships : A Grandee's Home : A Fishing-town : _Memento mori_ : Handling Catches : Clubs and Warships : A Russian Funeral : Emigrants : A Valley Town : The Press and a Distributor : Borrow's Vigo Pp. 49-67 CHAPTER III SPAIN'S JERUSALEM Galicia's Patron Saint : Pilgrims and Pestilence : A Holy City : A Monumental History : Noisy Students : The Fascination of the Cathedral : Precious Relics : A Wealth of Silver : The _Compostela_ : St. James's Sepulchre : The Gate of Glory : The Mighty Censer : Religious Festivals : Our Lady of the Rosary : St. James's Day Festivities : The Way of Blood and Tears : Mediæval Night : From Pilgrims' Hill Pp. 69-96 CHAPTER IV THINGS SEEN More Contrasts : Bewildering Baedeker : A Galician Vineyard : Sabbath Peace : Wayside Inns : Security of Travel : Brawny Brigands : A Sonorous Tongue Pp. 97-108 CHAPTER V THE ATLANTIC COAST AND THE FRONTIER Romantic Scenery : A Blighted Town : British Enterprise : The Napoleonic Wars : A Quaint Old Place : Galicia's Fjords : A Remarkable Lighthouse : Down to Portugal : Friendly Sentries : The Glories of the Miño : Orense and its Famous Bridge Pp. 109-124 CHAPTER VI LOCOMOTION The Diligence : Railways : Galicia's Rolling-stock : The Solemnity of Journeying by Train : Motor-cars and Motor-buses : Beauty in the Saddle : Shocks in Travelling : "Drummers" of the North-West : Cycles and a Freak Pp. 125-139 CHAPTER VII MONDARIZ An Alluring Hotel : Beneficent Waters : A Noble Building : Pine Hills and Trout-streams : A Splendid Pump-room : The Logan of Arcos : Sobroso's Ruins : Creaking Bullock-carts : Peaceful Prospects Pp. 141-151 CHAPTER VIII GALICIA'S BURDEN-BEARERS The Woman with the Coffin : Women and Weights : Wages and Rent : My Pretty Maid : Hairdressing : Universal Washing : A Galician Funeral Pp. 153-163 CHAPTER IX AROSA BAY AND LA TOJA A Favourite Anchorage for British Warships : Roman Remains : Religious Prisoners : Cortegada and the King of Spain : An Attractive Workhouse : Borrow and the Bible : An Arcaded Town : Columbus and his Ships : The Haunt of the Wolf : The Island of La Toja : A Wonderful Cure : Golf Pp. 165-177 CHAPTER X CORUNNA AND ITS HERO The Most Happy and Invincible Armada : Modern Corunna : The _Miradores_ : Wellington, Napoleon, and the Gallegans : The Peninsular War : The Tragedy of Moore's Retreat to Corunna : A Butchered Rearguard : Marvellous Marching : The Last Stand : Moore's Death : His Burial on Corunna's Ramparts Pp. 179-194 INDEX Pp. 195-203 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Galicia's Golden Sands (_colour_) _Frontispiece_ A Land of Mountain and Flood 1 Peasants in their Sunday Best. Fishwives _To face_ 8 A Galician Laundry 23 A Galician Market Place (_colour_) _To face_ 25 A Granary. A Pigeon-cot _"_ 30 A Merry Roadside Group _"_ 37 A Cattle Market. An Open-air Market _"_ 41 San Simon's Island, Vigo Bay 49 Vigo, Galicia's Gateway (_colour_) _To face_ 51 Galician Children. Afraid of the Camera _"_ 54 On the Quay at Vigo. Fishermen's Cottages at Cangas _"_ 61 Santiago, from the Alameda 69 Santiago de Compostela (_colour_) _To face_ 71 One of Santiago's Twin Towers _"_ 74 Rua del Villar, Santiago (_colour_) _"_ 81 A Logan 97 A Galician Village (_colour_) _To face_ 99 A Galician Fishing-boat. Men and Women rowing up Vigo Bay _"_ 104 The Church at Bouzas, on the Coast 109 Tuy, a Hill City on the Frontier (_colour_) _To face_ 111 Ferrol, the Spanish Portsmouth _"_ 113 The Bridge at Ramallosa. The Shrine on the Bridge _"_ 118 Oxen towing a Broken-down Motor-bus 125 Pontevedra by Night: the Bull-ring (_colour_) _To face_ 127 A Diligence on the Highway. Oxen Yoked to a Diligence _"_ 128 The Hills of Mondariz 141 Mondariz (_colour_) _To face_ 143 A Peasant's Funeral in the Hills. A Peasant Woman, with her Distaff, driving a Bullock-cart _"_ 150 Gathering Firewood in the Pine Hills 153 The Fishing Town of Marin (_colour_) _To face_ 155 A Maid of Cangas _"_ 159 Carrying Water. A Woman Threshing Beans _"_ 162 Arosa Bay 165 The Island of La Toja (_colour_) _To face_ 167 The Torre de Hércules, Corunna 179 A Road in the Hills (_colour_) _To face_ 181 Elviña, where Sir John Moore was Mortally Wounded. The House, Modernised, in which he died _"_ 191 Sir John Moore's Tomb at Corunna. Corunna Bay, from the Ramparts _"_ 194 Map of Galicia 195 [Illustration: A LAND OF MOUNTAIN AND FLOOD] INTRODUCTION I stood upon the salient bastion of an ancient fortress towering high above a swift and placid river. Below and around me swept line upon line of crumbling walls and grass-grown moats, the scene of many a bloody struggle in the evil days of old. From a hundred grim embrasures peeped rusty cannon, harmless now, and dark-eyed children sported upon the battlements that once had belched defiance and destruction to the foe across the stream. For this old white town, cramped within its triple ramparts, is the last vantage ground of Portugal; and on the other side of the Miño straight before me is Galicia, the unconquered land of the Gael, a land of mountain and flood, of mist and sunlight, such as are all the western promontories in which the mysterious Celtic people have finally found a home after ages of unrecorded wanderings. The scene as I looked upon it from these old battlements of Valença is as fair as any that Europe can offer. Down in the valley on both sides of the stream the maize-fields are reddening in the autumn sun, and between them, and terraced on the hill slopes above them, vines, heavy now with great masses of black grapes, are trained over slender posts of grey granite, forming endless arcades of fruit and foliage. Then higher up, climbing the steep skirts of the mountains, vast forests of darkling pines throw into relief the majestic summits, bare and boulder-strewn, upon which the ardent southern sunlight glows and quivers, whilst deep purple shadows fleck the tints of old rose and cinnamon where the sunlight falls. Across the majestic iron bridge that spans the Miño, the one modern note in all this scene, there rises an ancient city clustered upon a rise crowned by square battlemented towers. Some old feudal fortress it would seem; but closer acquaintance proves it to be a Christian cathedral built at a time when bishops girt the sword and donned their armour to fight the infidel and defend their faith with their lives. Tuy, the first city of Galicia, is a relic of a past age. Its tortuous narrow streets, mere alleys a few feet wide, are like those of the prehistoric Celtic city of Citania in Portugal: deep channels worn in the living rock and patched where necessary with flat slabs. The city itself is as silent as the grave, and the frowning old castle-cathedral, with its tinkling bell calling to worship, almost alone indicates the presence of the living. A mediæval writer calls Tuy "lately a city of pagans," but for well upon ten centuries now the brave old Romanesque church has stood aloft unmoved like a cliff to resist the incursions of the enemies of the Church. But Tuy, quaint and suggestive of thought as it is, can hardly be considered a typical Galician city; for the best and most picturesque regions of Galicia are those which surround the glorious fjords cut deep into the land that entitles the little "Kingdom" to be called the Norway of Spain. The scenery up the Miño to Orense is, as Mr. Wood has mentioned, one of the most fascinating series of river views for fifty miles that Europe can show. Foaming and tearing its way between dark gorges, broadening here and there into smiling little valleys, the mountains terraced almost to their distant summits with mere steps upon which crops are raised, the river passes through infinite phases of beauty. But the towns, and even villages, are few and far between in these wild regions, and the suave and beautiful inland bays, with the sweet valleys and soaring sierras that surround them, will form for visitors the main attractions of Galicia. I have here little to add to Mr. Wood's glowing descriptions of many of the places he visited, except to confirm them fully and completely from long and intimate local knowledge. To come comfortably and safely from brumous England in the spring or autumn in less than sixty hours to this enchanted land is almost like a sudden change of world. This vivid light sharpening all the outlines and vivifying the colours to almost fierce intensity, can surely not emanate from the pale, misty sun we left but two short days ago; these azure seas landlocked by the eternal hills of pines and gilded summits, seem a different element from the sullen turgid grey of the Channel waves. And the chaffering folk in the markets of Vigo clad in brilliant colours, vehement in their bargaining as if life depended upon the price of the glowing fruits and glittering fish which they buy and sell; do they belong to the same human family of sad-faced people we have left behind us? Look at these hardy fisherfolk, and still more at the husbandmen and graziers in the inland valleys, and you will recognise their close resemblance with some of our own people. These, you will say, might well be Connemara folk, and in many respects besides personal appearance these Gallegos are like their brother Celts in other western lands indented by the sea. The bays of Western Ireland from Donegal to Kerry; the lochs of Scotland from Ross to Argyll; the waters that run deep into the Breton land from St. Michel round to Morbihan, all breed upon their banks and valleys men of the same race as these, though none of them are so untouched by outer influences, except in the matter of language, as these Gallegos. Wanderers are they and workers throughout their world: they have none of the Castilian's haughty assumption of superiority independent of circumstances. Throughout the Peninsula, both in Spain and Portugal, in many parts of eastern South America, wherever a poor wage may be gained by hard work; harvesting other people's crops, carrying other people's burdens, there you will find the patient Gallego, hardy, frugal, and honest, yearning like a true Celt for his own home and his own kin again: sometimes, indeed, though rarely, so overcome by the homesickness as to be unable to resist the craving for his native hill-side before even he has amassed the few crowns that will enable him to provide some little comfort for him and his. This Celtic instinct and need to wander in search of work in order to render less hard the lot of the weaker ones left behind, is the main reason for the almost universal labour of the women of Galicia in tasks elsewhere usually allotted to men. The constant drain of the best and strongest of the male population of Galicia by emigration is the saddest phase of Galician life. Something like twenty thousand Gallegos emigrate to the Argentine Republic every year. They are usually men of the soil, crowded out by a vicious system of taxation and the infinite subdivision of the soil amongst a multitude of peasants owning their tiny crofts. The soil and climate of Galicia are the best in Spain and the people are by far the most laborious; and yet it is calculated that three-quarters of the poorer classes in the province are only kept alive by remittances sent by the hardworking sons, husbands, and brothers in America. Not less than eight millions of pesetas (£280,000) thus finds its way, mostly in very small sums, annually to those who stay at home living upon the hard fare and keeping the wolf from the door as best they may by constant toil upon land or sea. But a better time, it is hoped, is dawning for this favoured land. The unrivalled fishing grounds are providing now not only food for those who live upon the shores. All along the Ria of Vigo and elsewhere factories are working, preserving and packing sardines for the markets in the world. The abundant vegetables and fruits, which according to the altitude upon the hill-sides may be gathered from early spring to late autumn, are likewise being preserved for export to countries less abundant than this. Other industries, too, are awakening after the stifled sleep of generations, and if the burden of taxation upon land and labour can be lightened in its incidence there may yet be sunshine for the humble cottages of the Galician valleys, and prosperity flowing from the labour of Gallegos in their own land rather than from remittances from abroad. The living of these poor, patient folk is incredibly frugal; and like that of their kinsmen in Western Ireland inferior in stamina. Maize bread, and _brona_, a coarse millet bread, is the staple food with potatoes, though wheat of the finest quality can be grown; and the province which provides cattle for the consumption of half Spain, and once did a splendid trade in oxen with England, feeds its own population mainly on fish, varied by an occasional meal of cow-beef too poor for export. [Illustration: PEASANTS IN THEIR SUNDAY BEST] [Illustration: FISHWIVES] Of all this the casual visitor sees nothing, and perhaps cares nothing. He drives through a smiling land greener than Kerry, more sunny than the overrated French Riviera: he lingers in abundantly supplied markets, where all the fruits of the earth and ocean seem spread in glowing heaps: he spins in a comfortable motor-car along good roads cut upon the steep sides of mountains, and at every turn of the tortuous way admiring some new enchanting prospect of far-flung valley, towering cliffs or smiling fjord. The white cottages with their attendant conical dovecots and tiny granaries, their cobs of maize hung to ripen in fringe-like rows from their verandahs, are, it is true, mean and dark within; but they form a gracious note amidst the lush green of never-failing vegetation. Not even in the depth of winter is the landscape free from flowers. In February the wallflowers are in full bloom in the crannies of ancient masonry, and the sweet-scented mimosa is bent down by the weight of its masses of yellow flowers; a few weeks later the starry white and crimson camellias grow in the open with marvellous luxuriance, and by the middle of April the cherries are ripe in the sheltered valleys. The air blows soft and moist from the sea through most of the year, tempering the ardent sun even in the height of summer; and this fact, which accounts for the marvellous verdancy and fertility of the soil, also brings with it frequent showers and mists drifting up the Rias, especially in the winter and early spring. But the rains are seldom of long continuance, and the sunshine invariably follows close upon them, drying everything with wonderful rapidity and leaving the country more sparkling and green than ever. Through such a country as this the traveller may go by motor-car or railway from one fjord to another, rarely long out of sight of blue water most of the way from Vigo to the _bellisima_ Noya, by the holy town of Padron, where the body of St. James first took harbour on its miraculous voyage from the Holy Land to the country that thenceforward was to be its home. In old times it was part of the great pilgrimage after worshipping at the shrine of the Saint at Santiago to trudge on to Padron, the Iria Flavia of the Romans, and the ancient Galician verse says: "_Quien va á Santiago E non va al Padron O' faz romeria ó non._" Through the Middle Ages a stream of pilgrims wended their way from all Christian lands to Santiago. The innumerable stars of the Milky Way are called by Spaniards "the road of Santiago," expressive of the vast concourse of the faithful that flocked to the Galician shrine. I have before me as I write a naïve relation of a German priest, the envoy, by the way, of an emperor seeking a Portuguese bride, who thought it his duty on the way to worship at the sainted tomb of Santiago. His narrative marks quaintly the immense difference that has come over the world since the mid-fifteenth century in which he wrote. On arriving at Astorga the band of pilgrims who travelled together, and of which he and his colleague formed part, were advised to go no farther for the present, as one of the great rieving territorial nobles, who afterwards gave Ferdinand and Isabella so much trouble to crush, was ravaging Galicia and making war on the all-powerful favourite of the King, Don Alvaro de Luna. The pilgrims being very numerous, decided to run the risk, confiding in the harmless and meritorious character of their journey. Not far from Pontevedra, however, they fell in with a strong force of freebooters, who at once attacked them, wounding many and stripping the whole company to the skin. On their knees, and in mortal terror, the Emperor's envoys showed their credentials and prayed for mercy, but no attention was paid to them, though they invoked Santiago and all the other saints in the calendar. They were allowed, at last, to go on the way with their companions, despoiled and, as the narrator says, "full of pain, suffering and anguish, passing through towns burnt and sacked by the marauders." At last arriving at Pontevedra some kindness was shown them, and, on foot still, the whole band trudged on to Santiago. After visiting the shrine there they walked, as in duty bound, "with certain pilgrims from Ireland," to Padron, where beneath the waves they were shown the stone ship that had brought to the port the body of the apostle. Then to another shrine at Finisterre also they went on foot, and finally, their religious duty being ended, they proceeded on their matrimonial mission to Portugal. The streets of Santiago can have changed but little since those far-off days of pious pilgrimage, when from all points of Christendom came the countless thousands to expiate sins or seek salvation. As the big omnibus from Cornes station bumps and rumbles into the streets of the ancient city, almost the only vehicle that ever invades them, a plunge is made into the centuries of long ago. Narrow slab-paved streets with dim arcades on both sides, above which houses of unimaginable antiquity are reared. Scallop shells adorn the fronts of many of them, indicating that they were formerly pilgrims' lodgings, and carved coats of arms with knightly casques above remind us that in the old days nobles, too, lived in the streets of the holy city. It looks almost an anachronism for men and women in modern garb to wander through these silent streets and to tread the very slabs worn thin by the pilgrim shoon of the centuries of faith so long ago. Though lacking its sacred associations, Pontevedra in its way is almost as quaint as Santiago. Standing at the head of its lovely Ria, just where the river Lerez joins the bay, it is surrounded by gracious hills backed by the Sierra high aloft. No words can exaggerate the luxuriant character of the vegetation all around. As elsewhere, maize and vines floor the valleys and lower slopes with abundant fruit trees and a wilderness of flowers. Above are the oaks, sycamores, and chestnuts, then higher still the grave solemn pines, crowned at last by bare rocky summits glittering and gilded in the sun. The ancient Plaza and Calle Real of Pontevedra, with arcade-arches so low that most Englishmen have to stoop to enter them, must present the same aspect as in the Middle Ages; these very houses and arcades must have stood as now when Columbus sailed in his Pontevedra ship to discover the New World. Whether the great "admiral of the ocean sea" was, as some have not hesitated to assert, of Pontevedran origin himself it is difficult now to decide; but certain it is that many of the Spanish sea-dogs who guided the _conquistadores_ into the unknown were men from Pontevedra and the adjoining port of Marin. All Galicia is historic ground for Englishmen. Its bays and harbours have been the resort of our ships in peace and war from time immemorial, and here in Pontevedra the English John of Gaunt reigned for years as so-called King of Castile in right of his wife the daughter of Peter the Cruel. Here in the country round the Sotomayors, the Sarmientos, the Fonsecas, and Montenegros fought out their endless feuds in which the warlike archbishops of Santiago took a frequent part, until the great Isabella with iron hand and virile energy crushed them all with her _hermandad_. Here in the neighbourhood was born that Sarmiento whom we in England know best, him of Gondomar, who ruled our crowned poltroon James I. by bluff and mother wit. To the Sarmientos too belonged that Maria de Salinas as she is incorrectly called in our annals, the devoted friend of Katherine of Aragon, and the ancestress of the house of Willoughby d'Eresby. From Corunna, the Groyne, as our forbears translated it, sailed those numerous futile fleets that Philip destined to bring stubborn England to her knees. From the great Armada down to the poor squadron that sailed for Ireland when Elizabeth lay dying, Corunna was the trysting-place for England's foes. Here came the Desmonds, O'Donnells and O'Sullivans, who hoped to set a Catholic Ireland under the seal of Spain. Here landed the Irish bishops and priests who went backwards and forwards from Killibegs to Spain plotting and planning for Ireland's emancipation: here Drake and Norris in 1589 avenged the Armada by a bloody but fruitless siege, greatly to Elizabeth's indignation. I have told elsewhere[A] the not too creditable story of this unauthorised siege in which the strong wine of Galicia proved a worse enemy to the English than the pikes and partisans of the brave Gallegan peasants and their womenkind led by the redoubtable heroine Maria Pita herself. [A] "The Year after the Armada." But all the blood feud has been forgotten long ago. The splendid soldier of British blood whose body lies buried upon the ramparts of Corunna died for Spain, as did thousands of our countrymen in that Titanic war to free the Peninsula from the grip of Napoleon; and Gallegos, high and low, have nothing but warm Celtic welcome for British visitors to their beautiful and long-neglected land. The British home fleet finds a frequent rendezvous in the magnificent Bay of Arosa, where Villa Garcia receives with open arms the sailors who come in peace. This beautiful Villa Garcia and its adjoining town of Carril, upon the line of railway from Pontevedra to Santiago, are destined for great things in the near future. Upon a charming wooded island, Cortegada, a few cable-lengths only from the shore, the new marine palace of the King of Spain is to be built, and the English-born Queen will be cheered by the sight of the fleets of her native land lying within hail of her summer home. Nothing more exquisite can be imagined than a trip by sailing-boat or steam launch through this lovely landlocked bay of Arosa. Defended in the entrance by the storied isles of Ons, the great inlet looks like a vast lake surrounded by mountains on all sides. The water is so clear and pellucid that the bottom can be clearly seen many fathoms deep. A lofty island, that of Arosa, occupies a position in the centre of the bay, and on the opposite side, near the sandy promontory of Grove, the pine-clad isle of La Toja, with its wonderful healing hot wells within a few feet of the sea, possesses one of the finest hotels in Spain. For, whatever happens with the rest of the country, this land of Galicia is going ahead at last. Gallegos who have returned rich from the Argentina are showing an increasing disposition to invest capital in native enterprises, and the factories that are springing up around Vigo are the result. Not only can La Toja show an hotel of which any country in Europe might be proud, but, at Mondariz, the establishment in the high valley of the Tea, which Mr. Wood so justly praises, is an hotel that will satisfy the most exacting visitor. If only the terrible exodus of the able-bodied male population can be checked by making the lot of the peasant less cruelly hard than it is, Galicia should be one of the most prosperous regions in Europe. As a proof that the present poverty and backwardness are the result of political causes it may be mentioned that thousands of Gallegos cross the Miño every summer and autumn to labour in the Portuguese fields and return with their hoarded wage to help them through the winter at home, much as the Irish harvester serves the English farmer. There are reasons for the latter, for English agricultural land is richer than Irish, and racial causes operate in this case. But the land on the south of the Miño is much the same as on the north, the climate is identical, and the Gallegos and people of North Portugal are of the same stock and speak a similar tongue. And yet the North Portuguese small farmer, well off and prosperous, can afford to hire the man in a similar position across the Spanish frontier to do his hard work, whilst in Galicia women do the work of men in their husbands' absence. The visitor whose aim is but to pass a pleasant holiday of a few weeks in Galicia, especially without a good knowledge of the language, cannot hope to study the unspoilt people in their own homes. Those whom he will meet in the seaports and along the bays are to some extent sophisticated and accustomed to deal with foreigners, but it would well repay a scholar interested in Celtic folklore to live amongst the peasants of some of the inland valleys for a time, to gather some of the traditions which are yet handed down from remote antiquity amongst these primitive folk. Like all their race, the Gallegos are shy and distrustful. Their superstitions and rites are for them almost sacred things, but with patience and tact many of their quaint beliefs may still be gathered from them, as they have been by the greatest of living Spanish women, the Countess of Pardo Bazan, whose books upon her native land of Galicia are redolent of the soil, as are those of another distinguished Gallego, the Marquis of Figueroa. The peasant cultivators of the isolated valleys and mountain slopes rarely come into the larger centres of population. Each little local town has its fortnightly market, where produce and cattle are sold for money with which to pay the tax-collector and to buy the simple necessaries not produced upon the soil. To see the Galician peasant as he is, one must study him at his local fair, and on one of his long pilgrimages to a holy shrine. On these occasions, as on similar occasions with the Irish peasantry, he is for a time boisterously gay, given to singing, dancing, and music, the latter being produced from the native bagpipes, _gaita_, and tambour. But in the long winter nights in his dark cottage, with its smoky fire of vine-cuttings and pine-cones, the Gallego, like his brother Celt elsewhere, is moody, poetical and speculatively mystic. In such surroundings as this the tale of wraiths and demons goes shuddering round, for the Señor Cura, who sternly reproves such talk when he hears it, is safe in his lonely little parsonage adjoining the village church. But not alone of malevolent spirits is the conversation around the cottage fire. Much communing there is of America, and of kinsmen and friends who are seeking a livelihood, and sometimes, but rarely, finding not only that but a fortune in far Argentina. How Tio Pedro, a returned Indiano with pockets full of money, is coming to build a fine house in his native valley; how poor Juanito has returned ill and homesick without a dollar; how the good lad Pepe sends the large sum of ten pesetas every month to his old mother, who is looked up to in consequence as quite a wealthy woman, and so on--talk not very different, indeed, from that which goes on around the turf fire of many a hill-side cottage in Western Ireland. And Galicia, like Ireland, is a land of saints and soldiers. From its mountain fastnesses and those of its neighbour Asturias, went forth those indomitable Christians who saved Europe and the world from the domination of Islam. This was the focus of mystic religious fervour which made the mediæval Spanish Christian ten times a man. Here the ecstatic visions seen by star-gazing shepherds in the night foretold the final victory of the Cross; here the blazing emblem of the redemption miraculously led the Christian hosts to combat; hither to this land of fervid faith was wafted the body of the apostle in its ship of stone, to give heart to his own people; and from time immemorial the stoutest priests and bishops of the Spanish Church have issued from the race that alone of all Spaniards held even the Roman legions at bay, and provided the spiritual fervour that finally rolled back the Moor. From Cæsar to Wellington great commanders have borne testimony to the martial valour of the Gallegos; and there are no bonnier fighters even now in Spain than the thickset, stocky little chaps who are drawn, usually much against their will, to fill Spanish regiments in distant parts of the country and in North Africa. And yet with all their fine qualities, and in spite of the fact that many of the most eminent writers, thinkers, and administrators of Spain are natives of Galicia, Gallegos are often held by Castilians in derision. To the Gallego with his half-Portuguese speech is attributed every story which requires boorish stupidity as its subject, and the "bull," which English people are fond of calling Irish, depending as it does upon the mental process being too rapid for vocal expression, is considered by Castilians as the special characteristic of the Gallego. This is the people, and this is the land, which Mr. Wood describes in the present volume, with the aid of the excellent illustrations of Mr. Mason. To those English travellers who, deserting the beaten track of tourists, are tempted to see for themselves this unspoilt pleasure-ground, a feast of new and pleasant impressions may be confidently promised. They will find a country of loch and mountain that will make the Scottish Highlands seem trivial and tame, they will find a climate as soft as Munster and as warm as Italy, a vegetation as green as that of Killarney without the chilling mists of Ireland. Drawbacks naturally there are. The country is backward, and some of the smaller hotels are lacking in the luxuries that English travellers expect. But progress in these and other respects is being made with giant strides. The great English liners that carry passengers from England to Vigo and Corunna in two days and a half are of course excellent, and the principal hotels of Vigo, Mondariz and La Toja, are all that can be desired. The hostelries of Santiago and Pontevedra are being greatly improved, and new modern hotels are in project. The new Association in Galicia with a branch in London for the purpose of rendering the province agreeable to English visitors is already hard at work stirring up local opinion in favour of the reforms in accommodation and locomotion that are needed, and every important interest and authority in Galicia, from the Cardinal Archbishop of Santiago to the local town councillors, are pledged to do their utmost to make this sweet "Corner of Spain" an attractive and fitting resort for British seekers after health and recreation. MARTIN HUME, _Chairman of the London Committee of the Galician Association_. [Illustration: A GALICIAN LAUNDRY] [Illustration: A GALICIAN MARKET-PLACE] CHAPTER I GALICIA AND ITS PEOPLE Even Spaniards are sometimes at a loss to say which part of their kingdom is Galicia, just as Londoners occasionally pause before locating Yorkshire. The Englishman confesses either that he has never heard of Galicia or does not know where the country is. He imagines vaguely that it is situated in Poland. There are, indeed, two Galicias, one north of the Carpathians and the other, of which I am writing, bounded by the Atlantic and the Bay of Biscay. Galicia includes Corunna, which is known to all good Englishmen because of the burial on its ramparts of Sir John Moore. The country, too, is associated with Columbus and the Armada, for the explorer's own ship was built at a Galician port, and the Armada finally sailed from Corunna to conquer England. Spain's holiest city, Santiago de Compostela, is in Galicia. If you consult a map of Spain you will see Galicia at the top corner, jutting boldly into the Atlantic, with a coast-line, largely formed of glorious inland bays, of two hundred and forty miles. No other part of the Peninsula presents such a wonderful and majestic frontage to the sea; nor does any other Spanish province afford greater contrasts of scenery and people. This corner of Spain has a history which goes back to the times of the Phoenicians, centuries before St. James the Elder, who is to Galicia what Christ is to Palestine, preached the Gospel on its rugged shores. Romans and Moors tried in vain to conquer Galicia, and in Santiago Cathedral there is a tablet recording the triumph ten centuries ago of Christians over Moslems at the battle of Clavijo. There is a famous legend of this celebrated fight. The Moors demanded from Galicia the tribute of a hundred virgins, from whom they meant to benefit their nation's stock, but the monstrous claim inspired the native Christians with such a warlike spirit that they slaughtered sixty thousand of the infidels and drove the Moors out of the country. Betanzos, an old-world town near Corunna, is associated with this thousand-year-old belief, and one of its quaint thoroughfares is called the Street of the Hundred Maidens. Galicia is a land of hills. They are seen as soon as the coast is observed, and no journey can be made without beholding them. The hills are not high enough to be called mountains, but their altitude in many cases gives them a noble and dignified appearance. Richard Ford called Galicia the Switzerland of Spain; but there are no hills in the province to compare with even the range on Lake Geneva, and nothing to equal the majestic Dent du Midi; yet those north-western heights have charms and beauties of their own, and in some respects are more attractive than the hills of Switzerland. The Alps allure the climber, but the day is not remote when the sierras of Galicia will irresistibly call those travellers who crave for splendid panoramas and are fascinated by the chance of sport. Wolves and wild boars still roam about the lonely hills, remote from man, and there is abundant fishing everywhere. The country is well watered, a number of rivers, of which the chief is the Miño, flowing into the bays and the Atlantic through its hills and valleys. In ordinary seasons the streams are insignificant, but after heavy rains they develop into raging torrents and thunder over their rocky beds. The rivers, too, will rise swiftly and to great heights. At the end of December 1909 Galicia, like the rest of Europe, was swept by storms, and rivers rose from twenty to twenty-five feet above their normal level, destroying bridges, buildings, animals, and human life. A Galician river in flood is a striking spectacle, especially a stream like the Miño, which even in ordinary seasons is a swift and turgid water. The Miño separates Galicia from Portugal, acting as a natural frontier from the southern extremity of the province to San Gregorio. This river has been well called the Glory of Galicia, and the tourist to the country would be fully recompensed for his visit even if he did nothing more than make the railway journey along the Miño's splendid and impressive banks. Galicia's hills abound in granite, much of which is easily accessible and workable. In many of the country districts the peasants and small farmers, for the sake of asking, are permitted to quarry for building purposes and to secure those thin upright grey posts which are such a singular feature of the vineyards. It seems strange that in a land where trees are so abundant and timber is to be had for the trouble of felling preference should be given to granite; yet the stone is easier and cheaper to work than timber, and on the hills and roadsides men and women are constantly quarrying the brittle substance. The way of working and the tools employed are very simple. Holes are chiselled at distances of about a foot; then iron or wooden wedges are driven in and the granite block is separated. The same system of wedge-driving is employed in getting the props for vineyards, and the long thin slabs come easily away. Enormous numbers of these granite supports are used, and long high walls are often seen, built of slabs placed upright in the ground and so close together that the structure looks like solid stone. Much has been written of the poverty of the Gallegans, as the people of Galicia are called, and the sparsity of food and drink for many of the two million people who compose the population of the country; but the appearance of the strong and healthy men and women does not confirm what writers in that melancholy strain have put on record. The very maize bread which forms the basis of the peasant's food has been maligned; yet no one ventures to belittle porridge as an article of diet for the conquering Scot. The comely and powerful fisher-lasses who travel the East Coast in the herring season do not live in luxury, nor do their sisters of Galicia, many of whom, in strength and figure, are their equals. Where the fisher-girl drinks coffee, tea, or cocoa, the Gallegan woman takes wine; and she can buy a tumblerful of very drinkable liquor, red or white, for a halfpenny; for another halfpenny she can get a piece of bread big enough for a sustaining meal. Even a Scotchwoman, however canny, would be hard pressed to make a midday meal at the cost of a penny. Fruit, too, is so abundant that it may be had for the picking, and vegetables are plentiful. There are grapes everywhere; and though most of the chickens and bacon go into the towns for sale, yet there are so many fowls and pigs in Galicia that the taste of poultry and pork is known throughout the country. At noon on the roadside working men and women make a far more varied meal than the rough dinner of the British labourer. In England, when the streets are fog-bound, and navvies and road-makers are content to make shift, while eating and drinking, with a warm ray or two from a neighbouring watchman's fire, the Galician worker is taking a midday meal on the shore of some glorious bay or river, or on the hill-side in romantic scenery--and in almost constant sunshine. In every part of Galicia there are quaint round pigeon-cots. Many of them are included in farm-buildings, to which they give an added picturesqueness; others are perched on summits of slopes, like lonely watch-towers. There are no buildings in England which have the appearance of these Galician pigeon-houses, but there are a few in Scotland, in the neighbourhood of Arbroath, with the same characteristics. The Gallegan cannot afford to cultivate pigeon-rearing as a hobby, and with him, as with many Englishmen, the birds are kept for eating purposes. Sentiment is vanquished by utility. Maize-barns, or granaries, are universal. The granaries are oblong, narrow structures, mostly built of granite, but sometimes of timber, and raised on walls or pillars about a man's height above the level of the ground. They are noticeable features of every landscape, and some of them are romantic-looking buildings, with a cross at one gable and a pinnacle at the other. In the autumn the granaries are filled with the maize which has been gathered from the fields and stripped and dried in the sun. On village pavements, in fields, on the beach, and in all sorts of odd corners the cereal is spread out to dry, and makes glorious golden patches in the sunshine. Women, helped by children, prepare the maize for grinding into flour. Primitive methods of grinding are employed, and crude ways of baking and cooking, as you may see by entering a Galician cottage and examining the open, chimneyless fireplace--the big stone slab on which the fuel burns. [Illustration: A GRANARY] [Illustration: A PIGEON-COT] The cry of the night-watchman, the _sereno_, is of all Galicia's old customs one of the strangest and most famous. The _sereno_ is a romantic figure, with his Spanish cloak and gleaming pike--a weapon much resembling the halberd carried by our Yeomen of the Guard. While the English policeman in the dark early hours is gloomily patrolling his beat, his fellow in Galicia is pacing the quaint streets which differ little in appearance from their aspect centuries ago, and every hour he proclaims the time or in other ways gives proof that he is about and doing his duty. The ancient town of Pontevedra is celebrated for the watchman's call. Hourly throughout the night the _sereno_ chants the time, and the sonorous notes of his "_Ave María purísima_," Gabriel's salutation to the Virgin, has a singular effect upon the stranger, awake and listening in bed. The accomplished _sereno_ will not only cry the hour, but will also, for the benefit of listeners, add interesting items of news, as, for instance, that love-making is proceeding on a neighbouring balcony. The eerie chant lingers in one's memory, and may be likened to the solemn cry from a steamer's crow's-nest in mid-ocean of "Lights are burning bright and all's well." In Santiago and elsewhere the _sereno_ still does duty in the night, but perhaps the day is near when he will be ousted by the commonplace policeman. In many of the towns the watchman whistles every hour instead of chanting. There are other cries in Galicia which will interest the visitor, and amongst them is the protracted musical announcements of the girls and women of Corunna who are selling fish. They walk along the pavement with wide, shallow baskets poised gracefully on their heads, uttering a cry which makes you marvel that human beings can maintain it without bringing on that collapse of the vocal cords which perhaps, in uncharitable moments, you desire to see accomplished. In Galicia, as on the Continent generally, the policeman differs from his English prototype. There, in addition to being a keeper of the peace, he is a fighting man, liable to be called upon for military service. The famous Civil Guard of Spain, a force which bears the highest reputation, every member being a specially selected man of thoroughly good character, has its detachments in Galicia--the striking-looking fellows with their glazed three-cornered hats, rifles, swords, and revolvers. A couple of them are on duty at the exit of every railway station of importance, and on lonely country roads, marching on each side, you will come across a pair, carrying their rifles at the slope, prepared for action. The purpose of this system of patrol is to lessen the risk of both men being surprised at once. The Civil Guards exercise a wide influence over the people, and to them is largely due the present peaceful state of the country. The total strength of the force is twenty-five thousand men, of whom five thousand are mounted. The cavalry are armed with sabres, carabines, and revolvers. Comparison has been made between them and the Royal Irish Constabulary, and it is a very proper one, although I think the Royal Irish is physically a finer body. The Civil Guards have great powers, and are entitled to take the law into their own hands in extremities, such as shooting down an escaping prisoner or a murderer caught in the act. There is perfect security in travelling throughout Galicia, either alone or in parties, and even in the remotest districts the idea of personal danger, from man or beast, does not enter the visitor's mind. Probably there is not in North-West Spain any greater risk incurred than would be experienced by pedestrians from tramps on the highways of North-West England. The ordinary Galician policeman is very much like a Spanish soldier in appearance, except in Corunna, where he wears a helmet. His sword is ready to his hand, and he often carries a revolver and a stick. He is permitted to smoke on duty; and perhaps not even the iron discipline of the Civil Guard would compel the members of the force to abandon the cigarette. A Galician policeman being at heart a _caballero_--which is "gentleman"--will spare no trouble to put a stranger on the right track, and will not only direct him to the place he wishes to reach, but will, in the friendliest manner, accompany him as far as his duties will permit, smoking contentedly and well pleased with life. I saw only one policeman on stern duty in Galicia, and that was in Vigo, where he was conducting a belligerent lady to the police-station, guiding her by a gentlemanly pressure on the arm. She was loudly and volubly giving her version of what had happened; and a crowd of bare-headed or shawled friends added their voices to the confusion. They were all probably swearing to things which they could not possibly have seen. At Vigo also I noticed a constable, old enough to be near the superannuation stage, trying to preserve the peace between an aged peasant and an ill-conditioned juvenile who might have been his grandson. At intervals the old man paused to cuff and persuade the boy, and the policemen seemed to form one of the little crowd which accompanied and watched the performers. I followed them for a short distance; then, as there was no prospect of an arrest, I walked away. The constable in every land attracts one's notice and commands respect. Much at times depends on him; also on chambermaids and waiters. Both these types of servant compel attention in Galicia, if only for their odd and interesting habits. A Galician chambermaid, who from her appearance might be anything from a respectable charwoman to the mother of a promising family, does not know the meaning of ceremony; at any rate she does not stand upon it, and will break into your bedroom with the morning coffee without warning, and derive intense amusement from any timidity or embarrassment due to her abrupt appearance. She is too primitive to be disturbed by trifles, even such as gazing upon her when she tucks up to sleep on a couch in the hall of an hotel at the foot of the main staircase--a post she occupies, apparently, to meet the necessities of belated or early-going travellers. The Galician waiter is remote from the rest of his kind. In the two palatial establishments which the country possesses he figures, during the season, either in orthodox swallow-tails or a livery approximating to the garb of club attendants at home, but generally speaking he is not so smart. In the morning he presents a slovenly appearance, because breakfast, as Englishmen understand it, is either an unimportant or a non-existent meal, and the waiter is reserving his energies for the feast that counts, the lunch. The native is content to start the day on coffee and a roll without butter--for which omission he has reason for gratitude, because Galician butter is neither good nor plentiful--or on a small cup of chocolate and bread. If he favours coffee he takes it from a basin, with which a dessert-spoon is supplied, enabling him to deal with the liquid as he would absorb soup, or he drinks it, Christian fashion, by way of the vessel's rim. The chocolate is a concoction so thick that a spoon or bread will stand upright in it; yet the preparation is delicious in the estimation of those who like it, especially when taken with a frothy sugar, which is served in a glass of water--a creation which looks like frozen beaten white of egg, and is almost large enough to fill the tumbler. With this chocolate and bread the Spaniard bears the burden of the day's battle until the real breakfast is served; then indeed he makes up for any loss he may have suffered after rising. The midday meal is heavy and bewildering, from the English point of view. _Hors-d'oeuvre_ will begin the feast--excellent olives, sardines, anchovies, appetising little salads and other oddments; then come heavier dishes, succeeded by soup and fish--all things reversed, as it seems, compared with English order and arrangements. There is a very palatable and wholesome dish called _caldo gallego_, a soup which is as peculiar to Galicia as is _bouillabaisse_ to Marseilles. Incidentally I may say that I had _bouillabaisse_ as good in a Galician hotel as in one of the best hotels of France's southern seaport where I tried it--a dish which would have moved even Thackeray, its great admirer, to expressions of applause. "_This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is-- A sort of soup, or broth, or brew, Or hotch-potch of all sorts of fishes, That Greenwich never could outdo; Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron, Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace: All these you eat at_ TERRÉ'S _tavern, In that one dish of Bouillabaisse._" You may not eat all these good things in the Galicia _bouillabaisse_ as Thackeray did at Terré's tavern in Paris; but the _caldo gallego_ is as rich and varied in vegetables as _bouillabaisse_ is in marine delicacies. The _caldo Gallego_ has the advantage of freedom from that taint of garlic which is so repellant to the English palate. [Illustration: A MERRY ROADSIDE GROUP] A peculiarity of service in Galician public dining-rooms is the piling up of plates before you. The stack is gradually lessened as you get through the courses. Free use may be made of your private cutlery to help yourself to salt and pepper, after the custom of the Continent. The wine is placed on the table either in bottles or decanters. There is a tendency to tire of the wine and crave for English beer. This is obtainable in the principal hotels and _cafés_, but only at a heavy charge, a bottle of ale costing more than a bottle of ordinary wine. Being specially brewed for export, the beer is not equal to the article which is bought at home. Very good Spanish lager can be had, especially in Vigo, at the bar in the Calle Velazquez Moreno, opposite the post and telegraph office. At that place, also, excellent afternoon tea is served. To my regret and financial loss, I did not discover this welcome retreat until two or three days before the _Antony_ bore me from Galicia. By the time _déjeuner_ is served the waiter has become himself. He has assumed a collar and a dinner-jacket, and bustles round with every wish to please his customers. He takes a real interest in them, and, given proper treatment and consideration, there is no trouble to which he will not go to meet an expressed or implied wish. He can be led like a lamb, but if any sign is shown of driving him he displays the mule's unpleasant attributes. I remember that at one hotel, into the dining-room of which I wandered early in the mornings, an elderly waiter, coatless and collarless, with a soiled napkin over his arm, ignored my existence for a day or two. He was performing the task of a _frotteur_, skating, in melancholy, meditative fashion, over the polished wooden floor, with a rag-bundle on his right foot. He would slide past with an air of almost grotesque seriousness, so intent on his work that he failed to see me; at least that was the impression made on my mind. Commands in ordinary English to produce some breakfast failed to move him; yet when, in due course, on entering the room, I greeted him as a man, a brother, and especially a _caballero_, he skated elegantly to the mysterious region where the coffee was prepared, and ceremoniously produced not only coffee and rolls, but also butter. One morning I desired Rocquefort--to his polite but palpable amazement--and thereafter he conceived that no British breakfast was complete without the cheese concomitant. At this hotel the butter was very good--a native product with a cheesy flavour; in other hotels Danish butter in tins was provided. Galicia can produce first-rate butter, yet the Gallegans go to Denmark for the article, and bring it over land or sea--or both--in tins. One of the remarkable things about Galicia is that although the country is so productive, still in many cases there are no adequate systems of making the most of natural resources. A great change, however, is taking place, and some of the richest and most enterprising public men in North-West Spain are devoting themselves with enthusiastic zeal to the task of awakening the people and making them realise the immense possibilities of the province. Energetic measures for development are being taken by the Asociación para el Fomento del Turismo en Galicia, of which prominent members are Messrs. Miguel Fernandez Lema, ex-Lord Mayor of Vigo; Manuel Olivie, the Town Clerk, who is a well-known author; Eladio de Lema, Director, _El Faro de Vigo_; Jaime Solar, Director, _Noticiero de Vigo_ and _Vida Gallega_; Manuel Borrajo, President, Asociación de Cultura; Angel Bernandez, writer and secretary of the Asociación Fomento Turismo; Guillermo de Oya, President of the Asociación, and Dr. Ildefonso Zabaleta, Medical Officer of Health for Vigo Harbour. Mr. Frederico Barreras Masso, one of Vigo's most distinguished citizens, is doing much to bring Galicia into closer union with Great Britain, and all these efforts are being zealously fostered and supported by residents like Mr. Ricardo Rodriguez Pastor, of Corunna; Mr. Thomas Guyatt, the British Vice-Consul at Corunna; and Mr. R. Walker, the British Vice-Consul at Villa Garcia. Most of Galicia's business is transacted in the open air, and much of it concerns the handling of live stock. In the larger towns, like Santiago, there is a weekly cattle market, where dealers and peasants assemble from the surrounding country, travelling by diligence, bullock-cart, pony, mule, or on foot, and making a wonderful congregation of human beings, from the pure gipsy type to the thorough Gallegan. Girls and women are everywhere, driving cattle, carrying great round baskets crammed with fowls, which are kept quiet and in place because their legs are tied, or piloting pigs. Native swine are not amenable to discipline, and the custom is to tie a rope or piece of string to one of the hind legs and let the beast go ahead. In the market the squealing animals are imprisoned by this method. Sometimes a quicker system is adopted--that of conveying pigs in sacks slung pannier-wise across the back of a mule or pony. This practice does not apply to full-grown animals; it is the smaller fry that are subjected to the indignity. [Illustration: A CATTLE MARKET] [Illustration: AN OPEN-AIR MARKET] At Santiago market a peasant drove a mule past me with two sacks from the depths of which came muffled screams. He shook the sacks, and from each a little pig was shot to the ground, uttering piercing squeals, then, after the hind leg had been secured, settling into a continuous grunt of protest. Bargaining and wrangling were going on all round me, to the accompaniment of choruses of squeals and grunts, crowing of cocks, cackling of hens, and lowing of cattle. Business was conducted on simple lines--prodding of pigs' ribs, examining of oxen's mouths and other points, and lifting and calculating the weight and general promise of table and laying birds. Prices having been arranged, payment was made; and I was surprised to see how many fat silver dollars were poured from ancient purses and money-bags by peasants whose appearance conveyed the impression that they were almost destitute. Pontevedra is a great cattle centre, and enormous markets are held there two or three times a year. Herds of cattle monopolise the roads at these seasons, making motoring and driving a slow and laborious business. This universal open-air life is in marked contrast to the dark and unwholesome dwellings of the lower classes in Galicia. The cottages in the country districts are in many cases mere hovels of the most primitive type, often enough without windows and admitting light only by the doorway. Fowls and quadrupeds share the establishments with their owners, and pigs grunt joyously in the room where the master and mistress and children take their rest--frequently on a bed as crude and dirty as that on which the porkers sleep. In this respect the Gallegan peasant somewhat resembles his prototype who is found in country places in Ireland which are remote from towns. In the principal centres of population, however, the people are much better housed and the municipalities exercise a far more rigid sanitary supervision. Most things are done in Galicia on the seductive system of _mañana_--to-morrow. It is useless to attempt to hurry people. Not even the demands of telegraphy will rouse them to robust activity. To send a telegram is a serious and impressive undertaking. First you find your telegraph office, which even in a city like Santiago is hidden in the shadow of the cathedral. Then you enter, and discover that you are in the wrong part of the premises, being in the operating office. A cigar is burning on the table, while the clerk to whom it belongs is talking with his colleague, the transmitter meanwhile tapping lazily. Even the instruments seem to be possessed with the spirit of languor. Finally an individual comes who, after showing almost pained surprise at your unseemly energy, conducts you to the proper place, and ceremoniously gives you a telegraph form and a pencil. When the message has been written and handed in, and you have put down your payment, you reasonably assume that the exhausting transaction is completed, and that you are free to depart. Not so--you are in Spain, where hurry is indecency. The change is not ready, and when it does appear the coins are accompanied by a triangular receipt torn from the message, giving details of the telegram and the price which has been paid for it. Then triumphantly you go away, blessing Spain; but the fervour of your benediction is nothing compared with your expressions on learning that the telegram has not been delivered in England because of a misread address. It is useless either to wail or to protest, since the one would be ineffective and the other too late. Stamps are bought mostly at your hotel, where the letter-box is kept to be emptied by the postman. There are no street pillar-boxes in Galicia. I saw one, a ramshackle, red-painted structure, bearing a resemblance to a rabbit-hutch, hung outside a general store-shop in a village, and gathered that the enterprise shown in displaying the receptacle was unexampled. When an ordinary post office is not available it is customary to place letters in the hotel box. It cannot be said that Galicia is rich in works of art. Some of the paintings which adorn the churches are neither very good nor interesting, nor are the examples in the castles such as to claim more than passing notice. But travellers will not journey to the country for the sake of seeing what they can get so well at the Louvre, the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery, the Wallace Collection and elsewhere. They will go to see the land and its people, and to wander through the old-world streets and squares and market-places, which have charms unrivalled in any region within such easy reach of England. Two things are inseparable from the Galician--his cigarette and his umbrella. His tobacco is cheap, and much of it is good, so that he can enjoy at little cost the weed which is as much a man's necessity as luxury. For cinco centimos, a coin which sounds imposing, but whose value is less than a halfpenny, he can get seven hand-made cigarettes. True, when I bought two packets from a dark Spanish lady in a darker shop she warned me that they were known as "men-killers," but I have smoked worse in England at a higher price. The better qualities are relatively cheap. The Galician cigarette is made of dark, dry, loose tobacco, rolled in a gumless paper, with the ends folded to keep the particles from escaping. The umbrella answers two purposes--to keep the rain off in wet weather and to serve as a shelter from the sun. I observed men with umbrellas slung at their sides under their coats, like swords, and I suppose the crook-shaped handles were suspended from hooks stitched to the waistcoats. At every turn there is something unexpected in Galicia. On going back to my hotel one night I wished to develop some films. I had neither chemicals nor means of doing the work, but learned that in the village there was a competent operator who would develop the exposures. I asked for directions as to how and where I should find the skilled performer. It was long before I learned that he lived in a house at the top of the village. A guide was needful, and he came--a waiter from the hotel, carrying a paper lantern with a candle. He led the way across a field, then up a rugged path, puddled with recent rain, and from that to the rocky, steep bed of a little stream running down the side of a hill they call the Devil's Boulders. The scene was such as may be found in Morocco, when the Moor or negro who pilots you carries his ancient lamp to light your path, or in the Catskills, or the Middle West, where the same friendly office has been performed for me in the darkness when crossing lonely fields or penetrating woods. Up the gulley for some hundreds of yards, now stumbling on a small boulder, now plunging into deep mire with a prickly, unseen bough unexpectedly touching your face or hands--then a halt at a gateway leading from the gulley, and a hail to which there was no answer. Up the gulley still farther, and a pause and rattle at another gate, through which a light could be seen, and the answering hail. Then came an elderly man with a lighted candle and begged us to enter. We descended two or three stone stairs, crossed a small flagged yard, and went into a store-room, with heaps of onions lying on the floor and other food and articles dimly outlined by the candle and the lantern. Thence we went into a comfortable living-room, where a woman who was busy with her mending smiled upon us, and a little girl gazed at me something after the manner in which in the days of our youth we believed that our forefathers, as children, would have looked upon Napoleon if they had seen him in the flesh. This was the house of the photographer--a farmer; but he had no means, he explained, of getting artificial light for developing, and must wait till daylight before he could fulfil his task. The films were left, and the farmer led us through his vineyard to the gate. Before we reached the gulley which was our homeward path he explained that a clear little stream ran through his grounds, and that in it he washed his films, plates, and prints. Vineyards are everywhere in Galicia, and some of their wines are excellent, notably those from the districts of Orense, Amandi, Valdeorras, and Rivero. On the self-contained estate of Mondariz a first-rate wine is grown which is provided free for visitors. In most places the hotel charges include wine. Occasionally the vintage is not palatable enough to suit the traveller, but at a very small cost a superior brand may be had to take the place of the unsatisfactory product. A capital red wine is served without charge at lunch and dinner on board the Booth liners. There is abundance of wine in the country; but some of the peasants do not take it, preferring the pure water from the hills. The vast majority, however, are wine-drinkers; yet there is none of that degrading drunkenness which one may see in every part of Britain. I noticed only one intoxicated person in Galicia, and that was on a Sunday afternoon at Caldas, when an aged peasant, in frilled knickers, was staggering down the road, as near the middle as he could keep, but occasionally lurching towards the gutter and the walls of the houses. He was perfectly harmless, and very affable, and occasionally paused and supported himself against a house side and reproved the juveniles who followed him and offered pointed criticisms on his state. The spectacle was rare enough to claim attention and provoke derision. In England the toper would have been unnoticed. In the principal towns there is at least one club, and the stranger has no difficulty in getting admission for the purpose of seeing the newspapers and spending a pleasant hour. The English clubman shrinks from the vulgar public gaze, but in Galicia the member loves to be as near his fellow-creatures as he can get. Usually he sits at an open window on the street level, within easy touching distance of the passer-by. The clubmen, like all the residents of the country with whom the visitor may come in contact, are most hospitably disposed towards him. The British tourist has become accustomed in his own country to hotels which are more than comfortable--they are luxurious--and when he is abroad he expects their equal. In Galicia, until recently, he could not get it; yet now, at Mondariz and La Toja, he has the choice of palatial establishments which are unrivalled in Spain. The visitor may reach Galicia by way of the Channel, spending about three days in trains, or journey direct by sea, landing at the gate of Galicia, which is Vigo. For that part of the undertaking he is thoroughly equipped by the Booth Steamship Company, Limited, whose powerful and splendid modern vessels have the reputation of being the most comfortable of all that cross the Bay of Biscay. [Illustration: SAN SIMON'S ISLAND, VIGO BAY] [Illustration: VIGO, GALICIA'S GATEWAY] CHAPTER II VIGO BAY AND HILLS Iron cliffs confront you when you first behold Galicia, for the earliest glimpse of North-West Spain, when the Biscay has been crossed, is Cape Villano, rising, stern and rugged, north of Finisterre. The coast looks grim and cheerless, yet it is the gate to one of Europe's warm and most romantic regions. Every mile of it is linked with history, and, hidden in what look like gloomy fastnesses of the Atlantic, are sun-bathed, landlocked bays, of which the best known are Vigo and Arosa, forming two of the finest natural harbours in the world. The _Ambrose_ slipped past the Cies Islands, at the seaward side of Vigo Bay, in the darkness of an early autumn morning, and steamed up the placid inland sea as day was breaking. In Galicia the dawn and twilight are briefer and more splendid than in England. The Cies Islands are some fifteen miles from Vigo, and the _Ambrose_, steaming steadily, will do the distance in an hour. Her masthead and side lights were burning brightly as she passed the lonely lumps of land which jut up like ragged teeth on Galicia's seaboard; yet when her cable rattled and her anchor dropped within a stone's-throw of the jetty the sun was shining and the day had fully broken. Through my porthole I had seen the flashing light on the islands, and I had hurried up on deck to watch the sun rise in the east, beyond the church-topped hill which forms one of the Seven Sisters. The Seven Sisters are hills in the neighbourhood of Vigo, each being crowned with a church and bearing a special name, such as Nuestra Señora de Alba. Vigo is Galicia's chief portal, and offers ready means of access to the other parts of the province. The town affords wonderful contrasts between the old and new worlds which jostle up against each other in every part of North-West Spain. You are in a quaint, strange world as soon as you have stepped ashore and are clear of the Customs and free to roam. In the steep and narrow streets of the old town people lead the primitive life of many generations or centuries ago. Amongst them are men clad in brigand fashion, with sombreros, and shawls thrown over their shoulders--shawls so showy and highly coloured that they might well do duty as table-cloths. You may pass from such a sight into the thoroughly modern technical school, which, founded by private and philanthropic enterprise, is equal to any institution of its size in any corresponding English town, and is helped by the municipality to the extent of three thousand pounds a year. In the afternoon the _señoritas_ may learn dressmaking and millinery and modelling in clay; in the evening the _caballeros_ may grapple with appropriate subjects, under competent guidance. The working classes are educated free of charge, and the better-to-do pay ten pesetas--equal to eight shillings--a year for mental culture. Just outside Vigo ploughs may be seen which are as crude as those the conquering Romans used, yet in the town there is a new flour-mill worked by electric power, where the product of the plough is turned into flour, and only a few men are needed to attend to the machinery. Vigo offers many of the contradictions between the very old and the essentially new which are to be found in Galicia. There is not much to see in the way of public buildings; but there is the fish market, best visited early in the morning, when the building is crowded with women who are buying, selling, and handling the catches which have been brought in from the bay and the Atlantic; and the vegetable market, where also the women are the principal attendants. These two places give evidence of the marvellous fecundity of land and sea. There is abundance of fish and a bewildering display of fruits and vegetables. Many of the creatures of the sea are strange to English eyes, and not agreeable to English palates. There is the revolting devil-fish, and the more repulsive ink-fish; yet both, when properly cooked, are far from unappetising, and the tourist, by way of experiment, may have the fortitude to try them. The sword-fish makes an excellent course; and there is a plentiful supply of oysters and other shell-fish. The commonest fish of all, however, is the sardine. It is larger and coarser than the sardine with which English people are familiar, being the size of a small herring, but it makes a very good dish, and the finest specimens, when cooked in oil or tomatoes, and packed in tins, are delicious. In Vigo, for breakfast, you may have a dish of big sardines, cooked to your liking, which have formed part of the previous night's catch. [Illustration: GALICIAN CHILDREN] [Illustration: AFRAID OF THE CAMERA] Vigo's Alameda skirts the glorious bay, and is a fine promenade along which one may stroll and enjoy the scenery and study something of the local life. The road is smooth and asphalted, purely modern, yet on its perfect surface an ancient bullock-cart will come, slowly drawn by oxen. I watched one of these vehicles going towards the Custom-house, pursued by an enterprising Spanish child, who watched her chance for a cheap ride. It is no hard matter, even for an infant, to overtake a bullock-cart, and the girl clambered up and experienced the fearful joy of a stolen passage. The driver was somnolent, and the journey looked promising, until he was roused to action by the raising of the Galician equivalent to the English alarm of "Whip behind!" For a moment the infant defied him, and apparently reflected unfavourably on the driver's origin; but a swish of his long driving-stick made her tumble off precipitately. But her spirit was unchecked, and, pulling herself together, she accompanied him at a safe distance and continued her taunting criticism. I took a snapshot of the fractious juvenile just before she regained the asphalt, and while she was telling her compatriot what she thought of him; but an incompetent developer spoiled the exposure, as he ruined many others. It is a comforting reflection now--such is the mellowing effect of time--that though he was unable to appreciate the technical advice I gave him in English, yet he also did not realise the force of my additional remarks when I criticised his work--indeed, when I left he raised his hat, and in the politest and most polished manner wished me, so I gathered, continued health and prosperity. The Galician who has wronged you has a wondrous gift for making you understand that you are the offender. A noble view of the surrounding scenery is obtainable from the Castillo del Castro, whose old fortifications are more than four hundred feet above the level of the bay. As the castle is in the nature of a fortress and sentries are on duty, admission is not given to the public, but the visitor may wander about freely, and the climb is worth the trouble for the sake of the panorama. Vigo has a strong and enterprising municipality, and the city is giving evidence of what can be done by earnest and united enterprise. On the opposite side of the bay, for example, is a prosperous community called Moyna. Eight or nine years ago the place consisted of only a few houses; yet to-day the green hill-side is dotted with white buildings, due to the development of the fishing industry. Near it is a little village nestling in a hollow at the foot of the mountains which rise from the bay in a fertile sweep; so sheltered is the spot and so balmy is the atmosphere, so continuous and beneficent is the sunshine, that from the water's edge to the summit of the range, palm-trees, which are rare in Galicia, flourish and orange-trees abound. On every side there are majestic views, and at the head of the bay, rising beautifully from the calm blue water, is the island of San Simon. In ordinary times this is the lazaretto, or quarantine station, but for fifteen years it has not been necessary for the buildings to be used for sickness or suspected cases. San Simon is one of Spain's three quarantine stations, the other two being at Santander, on the Biscay coast, and at Port Mahón, in the island of Minorca, in the Mediterranean. The little island overlooks the inlet in which treasure-ships were sunk two centuries ago, and the buildings upon it are being modernised and equipped with scientific apparatus at a cost of £4000. The island is State property, but it is administered from Vigo by the Director of Public Health, with the co-operation of the mayor and corporation. At the end of the war in Cuba eight thousand repatriated soldiers were treated on the island, and it speaks well for the healthiness of the place, and the devotion of the Sisters of Mercy and the skill of the doctors, that only sixty died. There is a delightful avenue of boxwood-trees, spoiled, unfortunately, by the foolishness of a former housekeeper; excellent boating is to be had; and just by the island there are first-rate oyster-beds and plentiful fishing. In the sand a small fish is found which has a habit of burying itself, and at low water the women go forth and dig the creature out of its burrow. Nothing can be more peaceful and beautiful than the sail down Vigo Bay at eventide, after spending a few hours on the island; for the sun is setting in the Western Ocean and flooding Vigo Bay with golden light, against which the seaward hills and Cies Islands stand outlined in a solemn purple. Treasure from galleons of Spain lies buried in Vigo Bay. The story goes that at the beginning of the seventeenth century allied British and Dutch ships, under Admirals Rooke and Stanhope, attacked the famous Silver Fleet, which was lying at anchor, and captured much of the gold and silver. Some of the vessels which were not taken were sunk, and their precious cargoes foundered with them. For more than two hundred years the galleons have rested at the bottom of the bay. Many efforts have been made to recover the treasure, but Vigo Bay is deep, and so far the attempts have not succeeded. But the story is not strictly true, nor is it correct to say that the treasure-ships were destroyed just at the entrance of the bay. The actual place of their ill-fortune was at the head of the bay, towards San Simon's Island, where there is a narrow channel. Two centuries ago there were fortifications on each side of the channel, which is called the Strait of Rande, and the ruins may still be seen at the foot of the hills. At that time Cadiz had the sole right to receive treasure from Spain's foreign possessions, and to that port a fleet of galleons laden with precious freight was bound. But there was war with England and Holland, and the treasure-ships, which were merchantmen, and of lighter draught than the opposing ships of war, were ordered to seek shelter at the head of Vigo Bay; and thither they scurried, finding refuge in the shallower water behind the entrance of Rande. A chain was drawn across the strait as an additional protection. For several weeks the hunted vessels lay securely at their anchorage, and meanwhile much of the treasure was taken ashore for conveyance to Madrid. Fifteen hundred treasure-laden waggons, drawn by oxen, started for the capital. There is a saying in Spain that he who handles butter will get greasy, and by the time Madrid was reached the fifteen hundred waggon-loads of gold and silver had dwindled to five hundred; so that two-thirds of the precious cargoes, having escaped the clutches of the English and Dutch, had fallen into the not less rapacious hands of Spaniards. The missing treasure does not appear to have been recovered, but in Vigo until quite lately walking-sticks and other articles could be bought which had been made from wood raised from the sunken galleons. I asked if they were still to be purchased, and was told that the supply had run out, though I gathered that I should have no difficulty in getting such a relic made to order, after the style, I suppose, of momentoes of our own _Royal George_. The hills surrounding Vigo Bay command most glorious and extensive views. On one of them is the Castle Mos, a summer residence of the Marquis de la Vega de Armijo, the head of one of the noblest families in Spain. As castles go, it is not large, but by reason of its history and association the building is amongst the most famous in Galicia. The late King of Spain, Alfonso XII., visited it three times, as a record in the castle testifies, during the residence of the late Marquis, who was Spain's Prime Minister, and died in Madrid in 1908. He was taken from the capital to the castle, where he was buried beneath the floor of the tiny private chapel in which he had so often worshipped. The chapel is part of the interior. Outside, within the walls, is a miniature theatre, in which performers and audience were either members of the family or visitors. There is a keep which was built six hundred years ago. It forms the oldest part of the castle, and the walls are so enormously thick that to look through one of the narrow windows is like gazing down a corridor. The main room is a small armoury, beneath which is a dark apartment, reached by a ladder from a trap-door in the floor. This basement, now used as a wine-cellar, was formerly a dungeon, and at one time held a bishop prisoner. The castle has been modernised inside, and in recent years restorations have been made to the exterior; but neither within nor without has anything been done to make it hard for the visitor to picture accurately the former house of a grandee of Spain. The old keep is in perfect repair, and the inner and outer walls stand as they were when wars raged fiercely in Galicia. The muzzles of some small old guns stick out of the embrasures, and you can raise and lower them slightly, for their trunnions are fixed in iron rings let into the walls, and one can realise what a slow business artillery firing was in the days when these quaint, open-breached ordnance were used for fighting. I was told that the guns were captured from the English in the days of Elizabeth. The castle grounds are beautiful and extensive, and full of charm and romance. There are some magnificent eucalyptus-trees; fine examples of the arbutus, whose fruit, something like strawberries, is rich and delicious; orange-trees, from which, in glorious November sunshine, I plucked sweet tangerines; and the botanical curiosity popularly known as the monkey-puzzler. Chestnuts abound here, as in Galicia generally. [Illustration: ON THE QUAY AT VIGO] [Illustration: FISHERMEN'S COTTAGES AT CANGAS] Across Vigo Bay, looking like a white streak at the foot of the hills, which are bare and bleak at the tops, but fresh and green at their bases, lies the little fishing town of Cangas. A small steamboat which plies regularly between the two places makes the journey across the blue water in half an hour, and on stepping ashore at the primitive pier you can realise what Vigo was like not many generations ago. There is no plan in the arrangement of Cangas; the houses are placed where they fit best, and the streets follow the houses. Oil-lamps give illumination to the straggling thoroughfares, yet inside the quaint dwellings there is electric light. Cangas has its old church, whose dimensions are out of all proportion to the size of the town to the English way of thinking, and smaller places of worship, one on the sands, built in 1711. The church, which is named after St. James, is dark and bleak inside. I visited it the morning after All Souls' Day, and saw in the middle of the floor a high structure covered with black cloth and ornamented on four sides with skulls and cross-bones in white. Rising from the gloom, after entering the church from the brilliant sunshine, the reminder of the grave looked ghastly. The air was heavy with the smell of incense, and peasants were kneeling and praying. One old man was wiping away his tears and gazing at some object in the semi-darkness which I could not clearly see. I walked up to it, and saw that a bier, black-cloth-covered, with the skull and cross-bones in white, was resting on the floor. On the bier was an open black coffin, and at the head of the rude, oblong box were two pillows covered with dark velvet. On the top pillow was a grinning skull; in the coffin was a khaki-coloured coarse robe, like a friar's habit, and from the sleeves peeped the bones that had once been arms. The grave-clothes and the side of the bier were thick with spots of candle-grease. A child came up as I bent over the coffin, and she waggled the skull to and fro with hideous effect, for it seemed to nod. She looked at me and smiled. Here was all the ghastliness of death without its glorious hope and promise, a spectacle that was meant to awe and overpower, yet a little girl was unaffected by the grim reminder of her own end. Near me was a door through which the sunshine slanted, and I walked out into the free, refreshing air, and listened to the song of another small maid who was nursing a child. She was one of the prettiest children I saw in Galicia, and was singing a song which I was told was an urgent prayer to her lover to come across the seas and rejoin her. Most of the men of Cangas are engaged in the sardine fisheries, and on the beach and afloat were many of their fine open craft, which are rowed by sixteen, eighteen, or twenty oars, and can be propelled very rapidly. At times the fishermen will contract to sell their catch, whatever it may be, at a certain price, in which case they are assured of some return for their labour; at other times they will dispose of the fish in the ordinary way, at market prices. On the north side of Vigo Bay, as on the south, there are factories where sardines and other fish are prepared and packed for home and foreign use. One of the most popular and interesting sights of Vigo is the sardine factory of Messrs. Barreras, beautifully situated at the edge of the bay, to the east of the town. It is fascinating to watch the treatment of the myriads of fishes from the time they are brought in from the sea to the moment when the soldered box is ready for packing. Only a few hours elapse, sometimes, between the catching of the fish and the exportation of the finished product. Messrs. Barreras build their own steam fishing-boats entirely, catch their own sardines, and carry out the various processes of cleaning, cooking, tinning, and packing them for home and foreign use. The sardine trade is one of the most important of Vigo's industries, and no visitor to Galicia should fail to inspect one of these busy factories. Sunday is the brightest day in the week in Vigo, for then the band plays at noon and evening in the Alameda, and the people promenade and laugh and talk incessantly; the places of amusement are open, and the theatre provides a satisfactory finish for the day's enjoyment. So excellent is the climate of the town that the band performances take place in the open air even in the winter months. For those who do not care for the public entertainments there are two or three good clubs. When ships of war visit Vigo the officers are made honorary members of clubs, and find the institutions very useful for seeing their country's newspapers. I spent many interesting days in Vigo. Often, in the darkness of the early morning, from the balcony outside my bedroom at the Hotel Continental, a stone's-throw from the bay, I watched the mail-boats, tramps, and sailing-ships come in from the sea, or the day break. A constant charm about the watching was the impossibility of foreseeing what would happen. One morning I saw a Russian cruiser squadron, grey and silent, steam up to its anchorage, and frequently afterwards, at eight o'clock, I heard the strains of the Russian National Anthem as the ensigns were hoisted. The familiar music, used sometimes in England as a hymn tune, mingled with the shore noises of bullock-carts and timber-shifting and the cries of men and women. While the Russian squadron was in Vigo Bay a seaman was killed by the explosion of some acetylene on board his ship. On the following afternoon he was buried with all the solemn rites of his Church. At the head of the procession walked a sailor carrying a basket, from which he scattered flowers on the roadway; following him were Russian priests in their white silk vestments, chaplains from the squadron, and brass eikons were borne aloft; the bandsmen from the squadron played a funeral march, and alternating with their music was the playing of a solemn dirge by the band of the 37th Regiment of the Line of Spain; there was the firing party, with fixed bayonets, the admiral and the officers from the ships and the ships' companies, and the white coffin in the white funeral car, drawn by four horses, and surmounted by a figure of the Virgin. It was all very touching and impressive--another of the unexpected sights of this corner of Spain which is so old and yet so very new. Vigo is the port from which most of the emigrants who leave Galicia sail, and at which they land on returning to their native country. Crowds of them may be seen frequently, with their baggage and household belongings, waiting on the quay for their ship to enter the bay, or going off in barges or tenders to get on board. The emigrants, mostly young men, are bound for South America, where some of them do very well, and come back to Galicia with capital enough to buy land and settle as comfortable farmers. A most enjoyable journey can be made from Vigo to Redondela, eight miles away. In situation the town is considered one of the finest in Spain, and it would be hard to picture anything more beautiful and striking than its aspect at night, as seen from either of the tall railway viaducts. The larger of these is 118 feet high and 348 yards long. The electric lamps give the place the look of an enchanted city. You can glance down the shore to Vigo itself, outlined by lamps, high on the hill-side, whilst Redondela nestles in a dike scores of feet below you as you rumble over the viaduct, thankful for once that the speed of the train is so slow. Redondela is on the road from Vigo to Mondariz. Pretty women, portly priests, and tales of war and treasure have been long associated with the lively town. Also within easy reach of Vigo is Puenteareas, a small town which is celebrated mostly for its very fine old bridge. During a brief halt at this place in the evening I entered the church in the public square just as service was beginning, and was surprised to find the interior almost crowded with worshippers, mostly women. After the manner of the country, they carried all sorts of articles with them. Vigo has an enterprising and resourceful daily press, and Galicia has its interests well represented by an admirable illustrated monthly magazine. This is the _Vida Gallega_, which gives to the matters of the province that attention which at home is bestowed upon current events by the London and provincial weeklies. One morning, leaving early for Orense, I observed a man at the first stopping-place alight and promenade the platform with copies of the _Faro de Vigo_, and at each station, during a period of five hours, he jumped down and disposed of his numbers. The train corresponded to our own newspaper specials, and the method of distribution, crude though it may be, is the beginning of a system which in time may equal ours. The journals were eagerly bought, the purchasers opening them at once on the platform, and either standing to read the news or absorbing the contents of the columns as they walked away. The journey from Vigo to Orense occupied five hours; and there was the same time spent on the return, which the newsvendor made. He started at six, and arrived at Vigo late at night. That, I was told, was his daily task; yet he seemed perfectly cheerful and contented. Vigo fascinated Borrow, who described it as a small, compact place, surrounded with low walls, with narrow, steep, and winding streets, and a rather extensive faubourg stretching along the shore of the bay. Vigo, he added, seemed to be crowded, and resounded with noise and merriment. In that respect there is little difference between the town then and now; but in other directions there have been vast changes. It can no longer be said that Vigo has only a wretched _posada_ to offer to travellers, for it has the up-to-date and thoroughly equipped Hotel Continental, facing the bay, an establishment from whose balconies you may watch the sun rise gorgeously above the hills, and see it set in a blaze of colour behind the Cies Islands. [Illustration: SANTIAGO, FROM THE ALAMEDA] [Illustration: SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA] CHAPTER III SPAIN'S JERUSALEM "Now about that time Herod the King put forth his hand to afflict certain of the church. And he killed James the brother of John with the sword." That is the Gospel story of the death of St. James the Greater, son of Zebedee, in whose memory the city of Santiago was founded, and who remains the patron saint of Spain's Jerusalem. Tradition has it that St. James journeyed through Spain and preached the Gospel; while another story states that after he was beheaded by Herod his remains were taken to Galicia, and buried at the place on which the cathedral of Santiago stands. The saint's sepulchre was not known till the ninth century, when it was revealed to a pious bishop, Theodomir of Iria, by a star of wondrous brilliance. At that time Santiago did not exist; but the marvel of the prelate's discovery spread throughout Spain, and wrought so powerfully upon the reigning monarch, Alonso II., that he commanded the immediate building of a chapel on the site of the grave. The structure was begun, but so amazing was the enthusiasm with which the holy discovery was hailed that the original design of a mere chapel developed into a scheme for a cathedral, and the building was consecrated at the end of the ninth century. News travelled laggardly in those far-distant days, yet while the cathedral was being built devout believers everywhere became acquainted with the tidings of the bishop's vision, and pilgrims hastened to pay tribute to the holy tomb. From every country in Europe the faithful travelled by horse or on foot, many of them spending months on the journey. Countless thousands worshipped at the shrine and returned to their homes; unnumbered thousands perished on the way to Santiago or back; while multitudes who reached the holy city never left it, for accommodation was limited, and pestilence swept off the pilgrims ruthlessly. At times the crowds were so enormous that the cathedral had to remain open day and night, so that they could find resting-places on its extensive floors. The primitive medical and sanitary appliances and remedies of the day were used to ward off disease, and a great censer was kept burning to purify the vitiated air of the cathedral. Santiago is a city of romance, and my own first sight of it was memorable. A night-watchman, cloaked and leaning on his gleaming pike, watched us as we stepped from the rickety diligence which had jolted us from the railway station to the Hotel Suizo, near the cathedral, and within a stone's throw of the university. It was nearly midnight, and there was driving rain, which ran in torrents down the crooked, narrow, flagged thoroughfares which serve as streets. At the station the oil-lamps dimly shone on the swimming platforms and gloomily illuminated the big bare room in which a statuesque pair of Civil Guards leaned on their rifles and the Customs officers and passengers mixed confusedly. There was an emigrant returned from South America with a ponderous trunk to open and examine. When it was passed the huge box was hoisted on to the head of a woman, and the emigrant's wife having been loaded up with miscellaneous articles, the triumphant man sallied forth, bearing no heavier burden than his umbrella. From the oil-lamped station we drove into the mediæval streets, lit by electricity, and as the bells began to chime the midnight hour the _sereno_ strolled away on his rounds and the diligence disgorged the travellers, peasants, Civil Guards, and human oddments, who had clambered into and outside it. Bells were chiming as I entered Santiago; they rang, it seemed, throughout the night, and at daybreak clanged to summon worshippers to early Mass. The population numbers less than thirty thousand, yet there are forty-six churches, containing nearly three hundred altars, with thirty-six religious and kindred institutions. If priests and churches make a city good, then Santiago must be a veritable holy of holies. There are many wonderful and fascinating buildings in this Jerusalem of Spain, but the glory of them all is that vast structure whose twin towers rise serenely to the blue sky, and whose golden crosses burn and glitter in the sunshine. Not an hour or a day, but many hours and many days must be spent in the majestic minster before its beauties can be adequately realised. Many books and innumerable articles have been written about it, but the greatest book of all is that marvellous work entitled "Historia de la Santa A. M. Iglesia de Compostela." The author is a canon, Antonio López Ferreiro, who has already produced thirteen volumes of his monumental undertaking, and is to complete his task with a fourteenth. A dozen years will have been needed for the publication, which will surely almost rank in time to come with Matteo's masterpiece, the Gate of Glory. [Illustration: ONE OF SANTIAGO'S TWIN TOWERS] You enter the cathedral and look around in the casual manner of the visitor who is pressed for time and has a long programme to get through before he starts on the home track; and not even that amazing Gate of Glory which stands unrivalled in Christendom may call for more than passing notice. You may have spent an hour in the building, and leave it thinking that you have seen all, and you wander through the quaint, narrow, twisted streets, gazing at the little shops, which are only travesties of business places; at the women, who are working ceaselessly, especially at the wells, drawing water; at the men and boys who mingle, and contrast the present with the passing, the student and the peasant. You visit that particular _café_ which, in the afternoon, is infested by students from the university when the strain of mental toil is over, and may count a hundred of them, reckless, rowdy, and full of life and carelessness, all playing dominoes, thudding the bone pieces on the marble-topped tables like little sledge-hammers working, and filling the tobacco-laden air with deafening cries. If the students in after-life put into legal and medical work anything approaching the energy they infuse into pastime, then fortunate indeed will be their patients and clients. At eventide the students become romantic and conduct their little love affairs, and occasionally even in the unemotional morning a young man may be seen hovering in the neighbourhood of his adored one's dwelling. I saw a youth at daybreak, outside my hotel, feverishly pacing the flags. He wore patent leather boots, very tight and small, and a large-checked overcoat, a flagrant tie and a ridiculous little bowler hat. For an hour he watched and waited; then from an upper window a female voice was heard, and the youth's face assumed a fatuously rapturous expression. A few minutes afterwards the owner of the voice descended, accompanied by her parents, at the sight of whom the youth scuttled round the corner, for the better-class young ladies in Galicia are closely guarded when in public. You leave the _café_ and drift, and instinctively you have made your way again to the cathedral precincts, gazing at the windows of the box-like shops in the building itself, in which the silversmiths ply their craftsmanship and produce, amongst other things, vast numbers of tiny silver scallop-shells, one at least of which, obtainable for a few coppers, the good pilgrim takes away from Santiago. Unconsciously you re-enter the cathedral, and are wandering about the vast incense-smelling nave and transepts. Even to the unguided visitor there is much to see, while the skilfully piloted stranger may leisurely examine priceless relics and treasures and behold many marvellous spectacles. I had the good fortune to be shown round the cathedral during two protracted visits by Canon Leopoldo Eijo Garay, and to have the precious relics shown and explained by Canon Martin, who has charge of the treasury. There is the beautiful Biblioteca, with its ceiling so cunningly and adroitly wrought in stone and painted and gilded that it is difficult to believe that the figures and ornamentation are not plaster. The present King of Spain himself, when visiting the apartment, declared his disbelief that the decoration was carved from solid stone, and there is pointed out a small patch of bare stonework from which the colouring was rubbed to prove to his Majesty that he was mistaken. You may enter a loft where many old and modern tapestries are hung to keep them from the ravages of moths and atmosphere; go to another loft in which are stored the grotesque giants' heads used in the procession of St. James, carefully covered to preserve them from dust, and inspect the large room in which the tapestries and trimmings of the cathedral are kept in order and repair. In another part of the cathedral, in the nave, near the treasury, is a cupboard in which clerical vestments are kept drawn on frames--vestments that look like priceless cloth of gold. Also to be seen are the ponderous silver maces which are carried at the ceremonies in the minster, and the giant censer in its sentry-box-like case. If you are favoured you may lift the maces and try to raise the top of the censer--and may succeed in moving the silver mass a few inches from its base. In a dimly lighted room the treasure of the cathedral is kept and Kings of Spain are buried. With cunningly devised keys the doors are unlocked, and the canon explains the meaning of the silver and gold possessions, the very extent of which is bewildering. Here are gifts from sovereigns and potentates, each a wonder in itself, yet so grouped as to form a perfectly harmonious whole. Centuries of religious devotion are represented in this one corner of the mighty edifice, and it would be hard to estimate more than approximately what is the value of the treasure, though an expert might guess at the metals' intrinsic worth. A small Maltese cross in the centre of the ornaments on the wall which faces the door contains a piece of the true Cross, while above it is a thorn from the Saviour's Crucifixion Crown. Golden images and goblets, carvings, pictures, fading gorgeous cushions, made by royal and noble hands, with many other gifts in various form to the Holy Mother Church from her sons and daughters, are here, and the eye almost fails to take in what the mind needs time to comprehend. More than once the treasury has been raided by invaders; and within the last two or three years sacrilegious hands have been laid on one or two of the priceless possessions of the cathedral, but the treasury is now specially protected, and an ingenious clock is used to record the movements of the watchmen who are responsible for the safety of the relics and riches. It is said that the whereabouts of some of the lost treasures are known, and that they are not far from America. From the treasury one may go to the high altar, above which is the gorgeous effigy of St. James, the object of the last attention of the Santiago pilgrims. The whole of the massive altar decoration is solid silver, wrought in Salamanca, and the candlesticks and ornaments around are of the same metal, which has been used with the lavishness of iron. In the centre is a small image of the Virgin, with a halo of precious stones, and many other gems flash as a lighted candle at the end of a long stick is held out so that they may be seen. Eleven hundred pounds' weight of solid pure silver--considerably more than half a ton--was used by Salamanca craftsmen to make the wondrous work amidst which the saint sits enshrined. At this high altar no cleric below the rank of bishop may celebrate Mass, except the canons of the cathedral, without special power being granted by the Pope. Changes are being made, even in romantic, mediæval Santiago, and it is hoped that something like five hundred thousand pesetas will be raised to carry out alterations in the cathedral. The figure of St. James adorns the centre of the altar, with the right hand pointing to that sacred little vault below in which reposes the great silver casket containing the ashes of the Apostle; and behind him is an unassuming box in which the bones were hidden when Drake swooped down on Santiago from the coast. The original figure was made in the thirteenth century, and there it is still, but with a massive silver garment clothing it, a garment wrought in modern times by cunning craftsmen of Madrid. Ford describes the original figure as being of stone, but my own impression on feeling it, which I did after the ponderous silver back had been pulled away on its castors, was that the material is wood. At the back of the Apostle is a little platform, which is approached by a few steps on each side. Up these staircases the pilgrims walk, and, placing their hands on the shoulders of the silver cape, kiss the back of it--the gem-studded _esclavina_--and return to the floor of the cathedral. Men and women of all ranks and countries have visited that tiny platform and leaned forward for a salutation, and doubtless multitudes will journey thither still. It may be that a band of the well-to-do classes will visit the figure in the company, as I saw them, of peasants who come into Santiago and make their osculation and depart. These peasants, being able to visit the sanctuary often, do not trouble to acquire and take away that coveted document which it is the wish of all true pilgrims to possess--the _compostela_. This is a parchmenty form, containing an ornamental border, headed by a figure of a pilgrim and flanked by columns of scallop-shells. The border encloses a printed Latin declaration to the effect that the pilgrim whose name is written in has duly made the pilgrimage and has received the certificate, after making confession and receiving communion. The certificate is signed by a canon, with the date of the month and the year of the pilgrimage, and is stamped with a blue seal. The acquisition of it crowns the object of the journey to the holy city of Galicia, and the _compostela_ remains as evidence that he has performed a ceremony which in other days was almost as essential as legal documents in proving a right to property. [Illustration: RUA DEL VILLAR, SANTIAGO] Two little metal doors behind the altar lead up to the platform; another, hidden in the gloom near them, gives access to that dark chamber in which the faithful pray and worship at St. James's holy shrine, and where the cardinal conducts his own devotions. Electricity has been installed in the vault, but there are days--amongst them Sundays--when it is not used, and other days when the current fails to work, and at these times candles are employed to light the cavern-like apartment, into which the sunshine never penetrates. A few steps downwards, a few more along the narrow stone passage, a turn to the right, and two or there more steps--then you are in the cold and tiny chamber which contains the famous silver coffin. The Apostle's sepulchre is about three feet long and two feet wide and the same in depth, though the top slopes somewhat after the manner of a roof. It is purely modern work, and was designed and made in the cathedral by an expert whose son is still associated with the building. There are figures round the sides of the urn, beautifully wrought images something like a foot in height, copied from the finest details in the Gate of Glory. The dim light of the candles reveals other relics in this sacred spot--amongst them Roman mosaics and various ancient fragments in glass cases. The original walls of the vault, dating from the first century, are visible. In some places the bricks and stones have been faced with granite, but those that are uncovered show little traces of the effects of the two thousand years which have passed since they were built upon each other. Just as you instinctively return to the cathedral, so, when you are in it, you wander to the Gate of Glory and begin to realise why Santiagoans claim that this masterpiece is peerless of its kind. The sculptor who created it spent twenty years in carrying out his purpose. During those two decades--1168-1188--Maestro Matteo wrought in stone that wondrous work of which a replica exists in South Kensington Museum. Unfortunately the Gate of Glory at Santiago is so placed that its real significance and majesty are not apparent at a glance, because the portico is within the building itself, standing back a little distance from the main entrance, which is opened only for important ceremonials. Nor can the replica be seen to full advantage in its present position. Other architectural works are crowded up to it, and there is no point from which the complete copy can be viewed. Admirable though the replica is, yet it falls far short of the original in beauty, because it is painted a dirty drab, while the Gate itself still bears much of the original rich colour with which it was decorated. The replica was acquired in 1866 at a cost of £2300, and now that there is so much room in the magnificent new Museum no time should be lost in removing the work. The reproduction would form a noble decoration for one of the light and splendid galleries of the extension at South Kensington. The Gate of Glory consists of three arches, the centre one of which gives the title to the whole--La Gloria. Twice life-size, the Redeemer is seated in the centre of the arch, with St. James below Him, seated also, and around Him are the Evangelists and elders and angels, the whole being symbolic of the Last Judgment and the victory of virtue over vice. It is not so much the subject as the work itself which will awe and fascinate the visitor: there is so much prodigality of labour, such lavishness of design, such an amazing whole contained in so limited a space. The wondrous and magnificent group over the central arch would in itself make Santiago's Gate of Glory unrivalled amongst kindred masterpieces. Seven hundred years have passed since Matteo finished his immortal work, yet in many ways that work appears as perfect now as it was when he put down his tools for the last time and gazed upon that figure of himself which kneels and looks towards the dim interior of the minster, as if in thankfulness for the completion of his task. In the exquisite central shaft of the Gate there are some depressions into which the extended thumb and fingers of one's right hand will fit. I was told that these indentations had been worn into the stone through contact with the hands of countless pilgrims who believed that as a result they would be physically strong for life; and that another performance which has been extensively practised is to place one's head on that of Matteo's figure; the faithful being satisfied that thenceforward they will be spared numerous mental afflictions. As there may be hidden virtues in the superstitions I went through both performances. The visitor to Santiago who is fortunate may see a spectacle which is unrivalled in the service of the Catholic Church, and that is the swinging of the largest silver censer in the world. At ten in the morning of an October Friday I entered the cathedral when High Mass was being celebrated. There was much that was imposing in the procession of the gorgeously vestmented clergy, from the two bishops downward; near me, fastened to a sculptured pillar, was the staff which was found with the body of St. James, and there were priceless articles in precious metals within view; but I had attention only for the massive urn, which is six feet high. The censer had been brought from its house in the Biblioteca and placed in position in the middle of the aisle, under the gorgeously decorated dome. It was resting on the floor, and from the ring in the top a stout rope ran upward to a combination of pulleys supported on graceful iron standards secured to four pillars. The free end of the rope was hung on a neighbouring bracket. When the time came to burn incense the rope was released and the fire was lit. Immediately the dense, sickly sweet fumes ascended and a master workman gave the signal for hoisting. The man at the rope pulled downward, and the censer swung at a height of about six feet, clear of the adjacent altar-rails; then the leader seized the silver mass and gave it a strong push, so that it began to swing to and fro with a long, steady sweep, the fumes rising and spreading in the dim interior. As the censer was swung it was hoisted higher; then, each man seizing one of the cluster of smaller ropes fastened to the main rope, a regular pulling began, and the pulleys, acting like the ropes of a church bell, caused the censer to make an immense sweep to and fro. It was fascinating to watch the growing of the sweep, until the arc described must have been equal to a hundred feet. The censer swung majestically until it seemed to strike the vaulted roof; then the pulling ceased and the great vessel was lowered. With unexpected quickness its pace decreased, and as the heavy mass swung across the railed space the master workman seized it again and with unerring judgment piloted it to the floor, a cloud of incense rising from the top and bright flames showing in the interior of the vessel. Two men, clothed like workmen, went to the censer, and, putting a pole through the ring, carried it away on their shoulders, the weight of metal being just so much as they could bear with ease. As I watched the long sweep of the enormous urn I wondered what would happen if it broke adrift and fell into the crowd of worshippers. Legend says that at one time the censer actually did leave its support and crash through the wall of the cathedral, and that on the spot where it fell a well sprang up, to the amazed joy and great comfort of the faithful, who were thirsting for water. Being a city of churches, Santiago is the home of religious celebrations--or festivals, as they may be called, for the people of the ancient city take life joyfully, and to them the church fills the place of the bull-ring and the theatre, neither of which exists in Santiago as a permanent institution. One afternoon I walked into the Church of San Martin, which has some gorgeous altars, and learned that there was to be the yearly observance of the festival of Rosario. There is no distinction of worshippers in Catholic churches, and rich and poor alike were entering, wearing little medals and bearing yard-long candles. They crossed themselves devoutly and knelt and prayed on the bare, bleak floor of the building, which is reached by descending a flight of stairs. Children, ragged and dirty, without either medal or candle, were clambering over forms, other children, prim and proper, brightly clad and clasping candles, were seated with their mothers, and _señoritas_, some of them handsome, knelt and crossed themselves and prayed--but glancing slantingly as they did so to reckon up their neighbours and the strangers. Officers and privates of a line battalion entered, and a great number of men, all bearing candles, and some hurrying as if they had just left business and were anxious to share in the ceremony. At five o'clock the procession started, headed by white-clad children bearing tiny banners, and followed by the effigy of Our Lady of the Rosary, shoulder-high, and the priests in their full vestments. The women, bearing their candles, now lighted, ranged up the sides of the open-air steps as the procession advanced, some of them, the younger, who were dressed in modern style, giggling confusedly, but others, the poorer and more primitive, very serious in their work. There was fine full, resonant singing of the _Ave María_ by the priests and two laymen, accompanied by a soldier and a civilian with bassoons; then, the image having left the church, the band of the 12th Infantry, the famous Saragossa Regiment, fell in and played as the procession at the slow march went along the ancient streets to the Church of San Domingo, where the last part of the service was conducted--an old church made garish inside with arc-lamps. It was a festival in which noise shared largely, for rockets were exploding at intervals, and the bells of every church we passed clanged madly, pulled by boys who, against the sky, looked like imps. A crowd followed the procession--a strange mixture of well-to-do and poor, of smartly dressed and shabbily clothed. Near me was a handsome Spaniard in a charming frock and Paris hat, side by side with a shawled peasant, and a Spanish captain chatted gaily with a friend and smoked a cigarette. The festival of Our Lady of the Rosary may be seen in any Catholic country, but Santiago has its own particular celebrations in connection with the cathedral, and of these by far the most famous is the ceremony which takes place on St. James's Eve, July 24. The people give themselves up to enjoyment and merriment, and begin early on the morning of the 24th. At eight o'clock bands parade the principal streets, and their music is succeeded by clanging bells and crashing rockets. Amid the growing excitement and commotion there starts that historical procession of giants which crudely represents the arrival of the pilgrims of old from all parts of the world. These giants are created largely out of the enormous artificial heads which I have mentioned. The heads are carried elevated, so that, with the garments that the bearers employ, colossal men seem to walk along the streets. The procession starts at noon, and for an hour the clock-tower bell peals constantly and it is difficult to move along the densely crowded thoroughfares. The giants are not the only curious feature of the celebration. There are also included in it a number of dwarfs--_cabezudos_, signifying big-heads, who strive, with great success, to entertain the juveniles of Santiago by their antics and quaint dances. There is constant mirth and music; and later in the afternoon, in the Plaza del Hospital, greasy poles are climbed, and country dances take place, accompanied by the Galician bagpipes, which give national and local airs--as well as they can be played on such unmusical instruments. From joy to joy and noise to noise the Santiagoan arrives at darkness, and at nine o'clock the rockets, bursting from a dozen mortars, open a brilliant display of fireworks in front of the holy basilica, accompanied by coloured illuminations of the principal buildings and the crash of bells, the shouts and laughter of the crowds and the music of the bands. St. James's Eve ends in a chorus of mirth and music, and the holiday-makers have scarcely time to recover from the excitement of the day before they are called upon to renew it. Twenty-one mortars fired in the Plaza del Hospital at seven o'clock in the morning begin the festivities of St. James's Day. Simultaneously with the crashing of the rockets all the bands in the city burst into music. Two hours later the mayor, the civil governor, the members of the corporation, and the other principal local officials go to the holy basilica, where they join the procession round the cathedral and hear Mass between the choir and the high altar, where the civil governor occupies a seat as the king's representative. By this time the cathedral, vast though it is, can scarcely hold the crowds who throng the nave and transepts. The cardinal celebrates the Mass, at which the giant censer is used; and a solemn feature of the performance is the ascent of the steps of the high altar by the civil governor, who, kneeling, offers in the name of the king a thousand _escudos_ of gold, equal to £400, an annual gift from the monarch, at the same time pronouncing a fervent prayer, which his Eminence answers. When the present King of Spain visited Santiago he personally discharged this interesting task. Mass being finished, the cardinal pronounces the Papal blessing, and to all who have officially shared in the ceremony beautiful bouquets of flowers are given. Then follows an old and remarkable act in the performance at the high altar, before the holy Apostle, of a dance by the giants. During the afternoon both giants and dwarfs--_gigantes y cabezudos_--show themselves in the streets and public squares, accompanied by bands and crowds of Santiago's populace and country people. In the evening, when the celebrations at the cathedral are ended, a procession of virgins leaves the Church of Santa Clara and enters the basilica by the northern door, which is known as the Gate of Jet, and there the cardinal, accompanied by all the dignitaries of the church, receives them. For these two days in July each year Santiago surrenders itself to revelry and enjoyment; then the city resumes its peaceful, yet always bright and interesting, life. The people have had their giants and dwarfs, bands of music and mortars, celebrations in the cathedral and their bells, and have shown that in spite of all their woes and burdens they still know how to live. Not the least pronounced feature of the festival has been the bells of Santiago. Some of them seem to be always ringing. There are the calls to early Mass at six in the morning, and the summonses to other forms of worship throughout the day; and whenever a procession passes a church the bells clang out and mingle with the bursting of the rockets. Some of the bells are mellow and melodious, but others are like the ringing of a raucous hotel gong. There is no music or method in them; a small boy is stationed by the bells--you can see him at his noisy work--and he hammers at his task, performing it with extra frenzy when service-time is reached. In the cathedral the bell-ringer and his family live near the belfry, to be ready to answer any special call, to ring a peal or sound an alarm, for the fire-bell is at the mother church; and there are other special bells, such as that which is rung only when a canon of the cathedral dies. One of the largest of the bells of Santiago was struck not long ago by lightning and was cracked. The crevice is still visible, though attempts have been made to fill it up with other metal. The bell dropped from its support to the stonework inside the balustrade, and there remains, out of action. Pilgrims of old reached Santiago by the way of blood and tears, for roads were bad and shoes and sandals vanished on the weary journeys. Nowadays pilgrims travel speedily and comfortably, and organised bands set out for Spain's Jerusalem to see its wonders and enjoy its charms. In 1909, for the first time in nearly four centuries, an English band of pilgrims, headed by the Archbishop of Westminster, visited Galicia, by the Booth Line, under the guidance of the Catholic Association, and their banner is suspended in the cloisters of the holy city's minster, while on many of their walls at home are hung the coveted certificates of pilgrimage. Modern pilgrims may visit and revisit the cathedral; and they may also wander at will about the city, visiting the old Inquisition, near the Alameda, now used for business purposes, and soon, perhaps, to be converted into an hotel, the Archæological Museum, formerly the old Convent of San Clemente, the vast Seminary, the Town Hall, the Royal Hospital, built four centuries ago for the accommodation of pilgrims, the cattle market, and the city's lesser churches, the most astonishing of which is the Colegiata de Sar, famous for its leaning columns and twisted look. The palace adjoins the cathedral. It is an unassuming building, and the audience chamber, where I had the privilege of an interview with Cardinal Herrera y de la Iglesia, makes no pretence to splendour. The Cardinal is deeply interested in the visits to Santiago of foreigners, and spoke with enthusiasm of the excellent effect of journeys to the city. Proud of its wonderful past, he is alive to the necessity of modern improvements in some respects, and doubtless some of these will be carried out without in any way affecting the city's fascination. The Museum contains many of the ancient remains of Galicia, and in the Inquisition, seldom visited or mentioned, there are relics of the torture days; the Seminary bears signs of the visit of the French under Soult in 1809, when they raided the cathedral treasures and bore off something like half a ton of precious metal-ware; and in the Hospital you may see the well-kept wards, the beautiful and extensive cloisters, and the little ancient chapel. Strange though it may seem to English people, yet you may stroll unchallenged through the wards, and see how well cared for are Galicia's sick and ailing. The Royal Hospital at Santiago claims to be amongst the very first of Spain's healing institutions. Even in November, when I visited it, there was warm sunshine in which the patients could sit or lie--different indeed from the dreary deluges of rain with which, as my home letters told me, England, and particularly London, was afflicted. I know that when, near Mondariz, I was lying on the bank of a clear stream on the hot sand, in a flood of sunshine, idly throwing pebbles in the rushing water, and watching the peasant women crossing and recrossing an old bridge near me, my countrymen in England, whose southern shore was only two days' sail away, were shivering in steely blasts and maligning the land of their nativity. I know, too, that in such unromantic and inclement weather at home, I was seated on a green hillock to the south of Spain's Jerusalem, smoking and watching the hot sun glint on Santiago's gilded crosses. In such a place you may rest and muse and gaze towards the city, which is one of the most alluring in all Christendom. Fascinating though Santiago is by day, yet its charms are not so subtle then as at night, when the day's work is done and the people are walking in the open air they love so well. There is no wheeled traffic in the streets--only an occasional bullock-cart or diligence is encountered--and the long, broad flags, with their wide crevices, worn smooth by generations of men and women and children, re-echo the footsteps of the pedestrians. The arc-lamps accentuate the quaintness of the thoroughfares, and electric bulbs show up the strange interiors of the little shops. The streets are thronged, and there is a constant chorus of talk and laughter. If the Santiagoans have cares, surely they have left them in their homes, for here you seem to come across nothing that is gloomy or depressing. The modern hat and dress are mingled with the mantilla and the coloured shawl, and the high-heeled boot adds to that chorus of sound the chief feature of which is the clank of the wooden shoe, with the softer accompaniment which comes from the thud of bare feet. Here and there inside the buildings is a simple oil-lamp, and at times you see a small acetylene lamp on a counter, showing up, perhaps, some of the enormous round maize loaves which form the basis of the poorer people's food. If you would escape from the lighted streets and be alone, you may slip down a narrow alley and find yourself in an old-world thoroughfare, whose only light comes from some open doorway, or the stars in the ragged line of gables which open to the sky. If it is near the time of full moon you may wander on--and you will abruptly reach the cathedral, and see above you the square twin towers and the gilded spires. Again you are back at that wonderful creation which for centuries has been the pride and glory of Galicia. The scallop-shell of Santiago has been mentioned. It is seen wherever you may go--on the walls of the cathedral, over the doors of numberless little houses, and in multitudes, in tiny silver representations, in the shops of jewellers. The origin of the shell as an emblem is legendary. One story goes that when the Apostle had been slain by Herod his body was taken from Joppa back to Galicia, to which it was borne by sea in a colossal shell. The version adds that a man of high rank who wished to accompany the remains to Galicia was not able to go in the vessel; accordingly he rode his horse into the sea and miraculously made his way by water. When he emerged from the sea both he and his horse were covered with scallop-shells. The legends are picturesque if not convincing; the fact remains that the scallop is the emblem of St. James's pilgrimage now as it has been since he gave his name to Spain's Jerusalem. A road, newly cut, leads from Santiago to the summit of a hill towards the west, and on the top of that eminence there is a granite monument which makes the fourteenth cross to be reached by the devout visitor who wishes to complete the pilgrimage. I do not know the name of either the road or the eminence, but the one may be called the Pilgrims' Road and the other the Pilgrims' Hill. Nothing can exceed the solemn grandeur of the prospect from the monument. If it is Sunday, and eventide, the sound of distant bells will reach you, and the golden crosses on the graceful spires will glint; beyond the city, and around it, sweeping in majestic curves, are the Galician hills, and behind you more hills, ridge beyond ridge, with darkness settling on them, so that they look like colossal rollers in the Western Ocean when a heavy gale has blown. Covering an area which seems a mere oblong speck on the enormous surface of the landscape, Santiago stands supreme. It is the only living thing in what appears to be a dead setting. There is perfect Sabbath stillness in the air, and you see the city now, when here and there a peasant slowly climbs the winding road, as old-time pilgrims must have looked upon it at the end of long and weary journeys. Behind you is Arosa Bay, one of the world's finest anchorages, where modern fleets may safely lie; near it is Finisterre, the grim promontory which is made by all cautious mariners who voyage north and south across the Biscay, and where Anson won his famous victory, and past which Nelson sailed to win his crowning triumph in Trafalgar Bay. In Elizabeth's time Drake and Hawkins, Raleigh and the other sea-dogs sailed along the rock-bound coast intent on war and pillage, and Drake reached that quaint city nestling in the hills whose golden crosses glisten in the sun by day and whose lights show clearly in the darkness after sunset; for Middle Ages and modernity are linked at Santiago, and the garish arc-lamp supplements the glimmer of the candle. [Illustration: A LOGAN] [Illustration: A GALICIAN VILLAGE] CHAPTER IV THINGS SEEN Galicia is a land of sharp contrasts, and the things seen include sights which cannot be witnessed in any other country within such easy reach of London. The bullock-cart creaks by the side of the railway, the peasant with a Roman plough turns up the soil within sound of the electrical machinery of a corn-mill, the swift motor-car rushes past the old-world diligence on the highway, and the incandescent burner or electric lamp keeps company with the ancient candle. Orange-groves abound and vineyards carpet the landscape, while the stately liner sends her bow-wave swishing at the bare feet of fishwives who are handling catches as they were handled in the days of Jesus. A peasant may prod and drag his team of oxen past a modern school in which his brother may be learning chemistry and his sister millinery, and the old man who has never learned to read and write listens to the machines which print the newspaper whose symbols are to him a mystery; the nun, a life-long prisoner in her gaol-like convent, hears the booming of guns in ships of war whose purpose is to keep and further liberty, and the friar, tonsured, girdled, sandalled, kneels on the cathedral floor beside a woman dressed in Parisian gown and hat. These are amongst things seen by the leisurely traveller, but even the hasty tourist may make a passing acquaintance with many quaint and fascinating customs and peoples. The pleasure-seeker may have constant recreation and enjoyment, the student of ancient cities and remains finds material wherever he goes, and the lover of archæological and ecclesiological memorials and structures may carry out a long tour and find at the end that he has only touched the fringe of the subject. The easy-going visitor may constantly step aside from the beaten path and encounter new aspects of Gallegan life, and learn something interesting that is not mentioned in even the best of guide-books. I think the very impossibility, as it seems to be, of getting at the real truth of some Galician matters is one of the charms of going about the country. Baedeker, omnipotent in travel, has missed many things in North-West Spain, or omitted them as being superfluous or unattractive, while details which are published in his masterpieces are at variance with other sources of information. For example, Baedeker states that the population of Pontevedra is 8500, but Murray gives the number as 21,000, a startling and bewildering difference. The discrepancy, however, is understandable, because it is one of the hardest of all things in Galicia to get reliable statistics. The Gallegan treats any demand for census details as Englishmen deal with income-tax papers. Wandering off the high road and through some vineyards and maize-fields not far from Caldas, I saw a fine old house. This was at the village of San Benito, where also I came across a quaint little church connected with the house by a small bridge. A few yards from the church, and just off the highway, was a curious open-air platform, used in connection with religious ceremonies at certain seasons of the year; for even this tiny hamlet attracts pilgrims, many of whom travel to get a saintly cure for warts and such-like unromantic ailments of the flesh. There was no difficulty in obtaining permission to inspect the house, which has a fine and well-preserved coat of arms in the stonework outside, and to visit the adjoining vineyards--indeed, I was well received, under the impression that I was a person of importance in the wine trade. The building is seven hundred years old, and certainly looks its age, both inside and outside; further, I was informed the vineyards yield from nine to twelve pipes of red and white wine yearly, according to the season; and the average price obtained is 205 pesetas a pipe. After my inspection of the house and vineyards I was pressed by the proprietor, with true Spanish hospitality, to try the new vintage, which I did, drinking the white, cider-like beverage from a tumbler just as one would take water. I had three samples, and although I was warned that pains and penalties would follow I felt no ill-effect whatever, and continued my journey stationward with every possible good feeling towards my fellow-creatures in Galicia. By that time I had left the Spanish carriage in which I had been driving, and walked in pleasant companionship along the road towards Caldas station. There was a wonderful peace in the air, for it was Sunday evening, and work had ceased. The peasants were out and about, the women sitting, the men smoking and leaning against doors or walls, and the children playing before being put into their primitive beds. The chimes from neighbouring churches mingled with the pleasant tinkle of the bells worn by the two small horses which were drawing the conveyance. Darkness was falling quickly, and the stars were shining beyond the hills and overhead. Peasants were coming towards us, young men and young women, laughing and chatting gaily, and some of them singing sweet Gallegan songs. In England, even in the villages, people of the same ages and condition would have been bellowing banalities from music-halls. The twilight was short and the road and country were soon in almost perfect darkness, for there were no lights or lamps of any sort. I reached Caldas station in company with a little diligence which dashed up in the gloom, indicated by the voices of the driver and passengers and the thudding of the ponies' hoofs and tinkle of their bells, as well as by a tiny lamp in the interior of the vehicle. There was practically no illumination in the station, on the walls of which a melancholy oil-lamp was suspended, serving just to outline the figures of the waiting passengers. Nothing came out of the vast surrounding darkness except the occasional sounds of the peasants' songs, and there was something so amazingly primitive and peaceful in the evening and the place that it gave one almost a shock to have a second oil-lamp turned up on the platform and to hear the approaching train and see the head-lights of the locomotive; yet after a few miles had been covered I looked from the carriage windows upon the bright electric lights of Redondela station, and had time to take some wine and food before re-entering a train and journeying back to Vigo. It is your duty, if only for the sake of experience, to enter one of the wayside inns of Galicia, the _fondas_ and _posadas_ at which your motor-car, motor-bus, diligence, or carriage draws up in travelling. It may be a place which is comparatively imposing, with bottles of spirits and wines ranged temptingly on shelves, and a right-angled counter containing sundry articles of refreshment, with a dining-room adjoining the bar, and all clean and attractive in appearance; it may be an appalling establishment from which you are fain to fly on swallowing your drink and in which you are grateful to your cigarette; or it may be a house which is neither good nor bad, but incorrigibly indifferent. Go into them all; there is something new and fresh in each. The first _fonda_ I entered was at Porriño, and that was on a Sunday. Next door was a barber's shop, open to the air, with a priest reading a newspaper while awaiting his turn for a shave. The sign of the trade was a brass dish dangling from a chain, in contradistinction to the impressive tonsorial pole of British facial artists, of whom it would be wrong in these levelling days to speak as barbers. Peasants were entering the _fonda_, and some, men and women, were seated at bare wooden tables, breakfasting on bread and wine. At the counter I bought for a penny an excellent aniseed liqueur, and for the equivalent of a shilling came away with a full large bottle of the spirit, which experience proved more than rivalled cocoa in its comforting and grateful qualities. Incidentally, on re-entering the motor-bus, I saw a large dead rat lying in the middle of the road. Three days later, on returning to Porriño and the _fonda_, I noticed that the carcase was still there--also a decayed and dejected diligence on the pavement, a vehicle which could, however, be galvanised into active service in case of need. Porriño, however, is not a typical Galician village, and is no more representative of the charms and beauties of the country than Wigan is of England. [Illustration: A GALICIAN FISHING-BOAT] [Illustration: MEN AND WOMEN ROWING UP VIGO BAY] The visitor will often witness sights which, if not exactly pleasant, are full of interest, as showing something of the people's lives. I saw in corners of vineyards or gardens the carcases of kids suspended; and, driving down a village street, I observed the body of an immense pig which had been killed. The animal had been placed on the stones in front of the door of a cottage, and a man and his wife, helped by children, were heaping up branches and faggots. When I returned this material was burning, and on inquiry I was told that this was the Galician method of removing the bristles. In Galicia you may travel in perfect comfort and security along many of the roads and into many of the towns which in Borrow's day, only seventy years ago, were infested with murderers and robbers, and the idea of danger and peril will never so much as enter your mind--a state of peacefulness which is largely due to those splendid fellows of the Civil Guard; yet wherever he went Borrow ran great risks to life and limb. Frequently he took advantage of a military escort, and at one time, travelling from Lugo to Corunna, he had the support of a band of picturesque ruffians who had all the appearance of banditti, and would have created a sensation in a Drury Lane drama. "They were all men in the prime of life," says Borrow, "mostly of tall stature and of Herculean brawn and limbs. They wore huge whiskers, and walked with a fanfaronading air, as if they courted danger, and despised it.... Their proper duty is to officiate as a species of police and to clear the roads of robbers, for which duty they are in one respect admirably calculated, having been generally robbers themselves at one period of their lives." Alas! these romantic ruffians have disappeared from Galician highways, and their nearest prototypes to-day are harmless peasants adorned with flowing side-whiskers, the style of decoration favoured by respectable and inoffensive British butlers. To my lasting regret I did not thoroughly re-read my Borrow until I returned from Galicia, because Galicia fascinated him, and he covered much of the ground that I personally traversed, and looked upon many awesome sights which I, in a spirit of modernity and commerce, would have photographed. At the bridge of Castellanos, "a spot notorious for robbery and murder, and well adapted for both," Borrow passed "three ghastly heads stuck on poles standing by the wayside; they were those of a captain of banditti and two of his accomplices, who had been seized and executed about two months before. Their principal haunt was the vicinity of the bridge, and it was their practice to cast the bodies of the murdered into the deep black water which runs rapidly beneath." Borrow added that the three heads would always live in his remembrance, particularly that of the captain, which "stood on a higher pole than the other two: the long hair was waving in the wind and the blackened, distorted features were grinning in the sun." All this sounds very gruesome and barbarous; yet such sights were common in England at the same time, for those were the days of public executions and gibbeting of corpses. The things seen in Galicia do not include the woeful exhibitions of ignorance of the native language which are so common on the part of the Englishman abroad, especially in France. Even the hardy British matron who in Paris will address the cabman as _cochon_ refrains from speech in Galicia, because no word of Spanish has formed part of her education. Yet a working acquaintance with the language can be easily obtained, for Spanish, though of all modern tongues the least understood by Englishmen, is the easiest to learn. Borrow declared it to be the most sonorous tongue in existence. In my own wanderings I had the constant help and guidance of an excellent interpreter, and the tourist would do well to avail himself of such skilled assistance, which leaves him free to enjoy the charms of the country and the customs and peculiarities of the people. The system also removes the need for travellers to adopt Borrow's idea of making a foreigner understand them in his own language; that method being to speak "with much noise and vociferation, opening their mouths wide." He protests that when his fellow-countrymen attempt to speak the most sonorous of all tongues they put their hands in their pockets and fumble lazily, instead of applying them (their hands, not their pockets) to the indispensable office of gesticulation. "Well may the poor Spaniards exclaim," he adds despairingly, "_These English talk so crabbedly that Satan himself would not be able to understand them._" To do my countrymen justice, I am bound to say that, with a single exception, I never heard them attempt to speak Spanish in Galicia; and as for the isolated case, I was assured that his Spanish was too bad to be intelligible. [Illustration: THE CHURCH AT BOUZAS, ON THE COAST] [Illustration: TUY, A HILL CITY ON THE FRONTIER] CHAPTER V THE ATLANTIC COAST AND THE FRONTIER If one could be high enough in air and had a sufficient range of vision, one would see Galicia's coast on the Atlantic side jutting into the ocean something after the manner of the jagged teeth of a colossal saw, from the fangs of Finisterre to the greater fangs southward between Muros, Arosa, Pontevedra, and Vigo Bays, and northward to Cape Ortegal. But it is not necessary to soar skyward to comprehend what Galicia's coast is like, for that can be done from the promenade deck of a liner and the tops of hills. The wild, romantic scenery at Ferrol, Corunna, and remoter places like Finisterre and Corcubion are in themselves enough to fascinate the visitor who seeks majestic solitude and primitive existence. Finisterre is a region in which several famous British battles have been fought. In 1747 Anson defeated a French squadron off the promontory, a victory for which he was made a peer. It was near Finisterre, too, that, three months before Trafalgar, Sir Robert Calder valiantly attacked the far superior French fleet under Villeneuve and captured two of his ships; and in these waters Sir Richard Strachan made prizes of the ships under Dumanoir which had escaped from Trafalgar. Ferrol is one of the most striking natural harbours in the world. It is best seen when entered from the Atlantic. Nature has made a canal in the iron cliffs by cutting a straight slit something like a mile in length, and through this amazing cleft vessels enter the noble sheltered basin which forms the harbour. Ferrol has one of the largest populations of Galicia's towns--over 20,000--and is famous mostly for its arsenal; the town, indeed, is Galicia's Portsmouth. Naval officers and cadets and seamen are met everywhere in the Calle Real and other streets, and splendid views of the harbour and dockyard are easily obtainable. In these days Ferrol is very different from the town which Borrow saw, for it was then suffering from the blight which fell on Spain as the result of Trafalgar. [Illustration: FERROL, THE SPANISH PORTSMOUTH] "Grass was growing in the streets, and misery and distress stared me in the face on every side ..." he wrote. "Only a few ill-paid and half-starved workmen still linger about.... Half the inhabitants of Ferrol beg their bread." But Ferrol to-day has a cheerful aspect, and vast changes are being made with the help of foreign capital and foreign engineers. Enormous modern machinery plants are being installed, and there is hope that in no very remote years Spain will be able to build all her own ships of war. She is exceptionally fortunate in the lavishness of Nature's provision of safe and beautiful harbours for her fleet's accommodation. The gigantic and costly dredgers of the Mersey and the Thames are not needed in the Galician bays. Ferrol has many attractions in its neighbourhood for antiquaries, who have found here some of the most interesting of Galicia's Celtic remains. The district, too, is reminiscent of St. James, who is credited with the founding of the ex-Colegiata de Caaveiro, a dozen miles to the east of the arsenal. This building is one of the great ancient military religious strongholds of the country, and possesses dark, damp dungeons in which captives were not able either to lie down or stand upright. Borrow would be amazed if he could revisit Ferrol and overlook that arsenal of which he gave such a depressing description. He would find, it is true, that the Spaniards proceed in the leisurely fashion of his own generation, because they retain a love of putting off for accomplishment to-morrow the disagreeable duties of to-day. They believe in the blessed _mañana_. For a long time there has been at Ferrol a desultory kind of shipbuilding, and a vessel is to be seen on which the Spaniards have been at work for fifteen years. She is still unfinished. Again _mañana_. But new life and energy have been introduced into the Atlantic arsenal, and under the guidance of three great British engineering and shipbuilding firms a very large amount of capital has been invested for the purpose of reconstructing the arsenal and the Spanish navy. The firms are Sir W. G. Armstrong, Whitworth & Co., Ltd., Messrs. John Brown & Co., Ltd., and Messrs. Vickers, Sons & Maxim, Ltd., and a general control is exercised by the Advisory Committee, who are the technical guarantors of the Sociedad Española de Construccion Naval, the Spanish company which has undertaken the work. At present about 2000 workmen are employed, more than 90 per cent. of whom are Spaniards. The chief engineers of the undertaking are mostly British. The programme of reconstitution will extend over seven years, and the total sum which is being spent is £7,000,000. All the steel which is necessary for this great new enterprise is being rolled at Bilbao. Three _Dreadnoughts_, somewhat smaller in size than our own, are being built at Ferrol, the cost of their construction being included in the £7,000,000. This Spanish arsenal has an excellent club for artisans, an institution with a large membership. The club is of a very complete character, and combines the advantages of an educational establishment with social enjoyments and sick-pay benefits. During the Napoleonic wars Ferrol was attacked by Sir James Pulteney, who in July 1800 sailed from England in command of a secret expedition of 8000 men. The objective was the coast of France; but Pulteney, finding the task too big for him, made for Ferrol. He defeated the Spaniards in two skirmishes and took possession of the heights above the harbour. Then he suddenly withdrew his forces, owing, according to one story, to the fact that the enemy had been greatly strengthened, but in reality, it seems, because of secret instructions which had been given to him to retire. In 1805, when Napoleon had thirty-eight French ships of the line and thirty Spanish, with 170,000 men, almost ready for the invasion of England, Ferrol was one of the three ports which Spain used for her fleet's requirements. Just before Trafalgar Villeneuve took refuge in the port to escape from the British, an act which threw Napoleon into a transport of fury and made him exclaim bitterly: "All hope is gone! That Villeneuve, instead of entering the Channel, has taken refuge in Ferrol! It is all over!" When Moore had fallen at Corunna and the town had been occupied by Soult he marched to Ferrol, which he took, with seven ships of the line and immense quantities of naval stores. The town was held for several months, during which Soult gave Marshal Ney the task of fighting in Galicia; but the rugged country and the valour of the Gallegans were too much for even the "bravest of the brave," and, believing that he had been deserted by Soult, Ney abandoned Corunna and Ferrol and marched away from Galicia. Within convenient access of Ferrol and only two miles from Betanzos is the strikingly situated town of Puentedeume. Formerly this place was noted for a bridge which was a mile long and possessed no fewer than fifty-eight arches; but this was destroyed in 1868, and was replaced by a modern structure. Betanzos is one of the quaintest and most beautifully situated towns in Galicia. It is full of historical charm, and in addition to its old churches possesses the ruins of a Moorish castle. The town rises from the banks of an inland bay, and on the journey by road between Corunna and Ferrol the visitor has an opportunity of seeing Betanzos from all points of view. First he beholds it from an altitude, nestling snugly in a hollow, then he passes through its old romantic streets, which are villainously paved and crooked, and sees the town again from a height as he goes towards Corunna or Ferrol. The neighbourhood of Ferrol is to the sportsman one of the most alluring parts of Galicia, for it abounds in beasts and birds and fishes. Hawks and eagles frequent the lonely valley of Caaveiro, deer are numerous, and in the autumn and winter the wild boar is hunted. Salmon and trout are caught in enormous numbers, and wood-pigeons, partridges, and other game are very plentiful. Between Ferrol and Corunna communication is maintained by steamer and diligence. The sea route is far shorter and easier than the land journey, the vessels in fair weather making the trip in an hour and a half. But sometimes for several days together the steamboats cannot run because of strong winds or rough seas, and when I visited Ferrol they had been kept in harbour for three days owing to these causes. This meant that storm-bound travellers who found it imperative to reach Corunna to embark were forced to take the diligence and make the long and tedious land journey. To the easy-going visitor, however, that journey is full of charm and interest, including as it does Betanzos, and giving an opportunity of inspecting the Castillo de Moeche, a noble old ruin on the hill-side. There can be seen also on the roadside, not far from Corunna, a modern mansion in beautiful grounds, which was built in the hope that the present King of Spain would take it as a summer residence; but the monarch was not able to accept the offer. From Corunna to Vigo the coast is bold and jagged, and though it does not present the imposing appearance of Gibraltar, in the south of Spain, or offer the majestic mountains of the east side of the Peninsula, yet it has in its bays glories and beauties which are not excelled by any of Spain's other natural attractions. One of those bays at least, Vigo, will be seen by all visitors who enter Galicia in Booth liners, and there is danger that they may omit some of the delights of the northern fjords in favour of a journey down the Atlantic coast to the point where the river Miño separates Spain from Portugal. To the frontier of Portugal there runs a carriage road alongside the Atlantic, which is irresistible to the motorist, the cyclist, the rider, and the walker. The scenery is varied and beautiful, beginning with Vigo and continuing to Guardia. On the one side, when the southernmost point of Vigo Bay has been passed, the pleasant village of Ramallosa is reached, with its extensive view across the yellow sands, and its venerable bridge with a weather-worn shrine in the middle. Seven miles farther on, and only fourteen from Vigo, is the little ancient town of Bayona, famous chiefly for its old castle on the wooded summit of the Atlantic shore. There is no difficulty in getting permission to inspect this romantic residence, which has some delightful grounds from which magnificent views are obtainable. The Atlantic billows sweep up the rocks on the west side of the estate, and overlooking the sea, on the battlements, is a curious stone table, with stone seats, in the open air, with a cross which is visible from a considerable distance over the water. [Illustration: THE BRIDGE AT RAMALLOSA] [Illustration: THE SHRINE ON THE BRIDGE] One of the most beautiful of all modern lighthouses is to be erected near Bayona. The design takes the form of a colossal figure of the Virgin, who holds in her left hand a lantern which will be lit by electricity. Her right hand supports a model of a ship, sheltering against her bosom--symbol of the protection which her friendly beams afford to craft at sea. The rocky base of this remarkable structure will have a number of steps leading from the beach to a terrace from which the visitor may get some glorious views of land and sea. The lighthouse will be known as the Virgin of Bayona, and will stand as a memorial to the creative ability of its designer, an architect of Madrid named Señor Antonio Palacios. Still with the refreshing breeze of the Atlantic meeting you--the ocean so near that the air is salt-laden--the coast journey is continued to Guardia, once a fortress of importance, but now a ruined relic; then, Galicia's most southerly point having been reached, a turn inland is made, and there comes into view the Miño, on the other side of which is Portugal. The river here is a fine stream, and there is in the neighbourhood that subtle interest and charm which characterise all frontiers. The Miño is skirted until an ancient city perched upon a hill is seen on the north bank, and on the south another city, battlemented, romantic, mediæval. The one is Tuy, an ancient Spanish country town; the other is Valença, an old Portuguese fortress. These frontier towns have been the scenes of many battles since the days when Witiza, a Gothic king, lived and ruled in Tuy. Witiza resided there in 700; a few years later the Moors swept down upon and wrecked the town; but the Spaniards recovered it, and eventually, in the twelfth century, built the cathedral which is Tuy's most striking feature. No visitor can fail to notice the uncommon iron belfry which stands out against the sky from the surrounding houses, which at this place seem to be packed exceptionally close together. Tuy has only one considerable street, called the Alameda, and offering no particular charm; indeed, the town's greatest attraction is its beautiful situation and proximity to Portugal. The two nations, friendly and harmonious, have a joint bridge across the Miño, and it is a very pleasant little excursion to cross the river for a peep at Portugal. The bridge is modern and very long--400 yards. In the centre is a carriage road, above which is the railway; and on each side of the road is a footpath, from which very fine views are had of Tuy, Valença, and the river and surrounding landscape. At Tuy you may listen to the bells of Portugal, and from the grey walls of Valença fortress you may hearken to the chimes from the iron belfry on the house-topped summit of the hill on which the Spanish town is built. Sentries allow you, being inoffensive visitors, to cross the bridge unchallenged. The Spanish and Portuguese guards take their duties easily, and are much less business-like than British or German troops. They more closely resemble the French in appearance and conduct. It is different, of course, if one attempts to take a photograph or make a sketch in the region of a fort. The use of the camera is not allowed in these places without permission, nor may drawings or sketches be made. My friend Mr. Frank H. Mason, in travelling for the purpose of illustrating this book, crossed the frontier to Valença, wishful from the battlements to sketch Tuy. Before he could proceed he found it necessary to interview the officer commanding the Portuguese guard. Permission was readily and politely given, but while the artist secured the necessary details he was watched by armed sentries who had been told off for the purpose. It was a picturesque but unnecessary proceeding, for there does not appear to be any serious military secret about the defence of either Tuy or Valença. The Atlantic coast has been left behind and is out of sight; but there is now an even more astonishing panorama than the ocean-fringe itself has offered, for the Miño runs through fertile, striking, and romantic scenery for many miles, acting as a frontier between Spain and Portugal. Guillarey, a railway junction near Tuy, enables the traveller to take train and steam along the bank of one of the most picturesque iron roads in the world. Sixty miles away is the town of Orense, and for fifty-five miles of that distance the railway hugs the bank of the Miño, so closely at times that there seems to be almost a prospect of the locomotive and its carriages going into the water. From the windows of the compartments there is an ever-changing, fascinating scene; now of the river rushing wildly over boulders, or going smoothly to the sea; now of vineyard upon vineyard, Spanish and Portuguese, rising in terraces on the slopes of the hills, and of some old ruin or towering landmark. At Salvatierra station there are the ruins of an ancient fort, seemingly on the platform itself; and across the river is Mongao, a mediæval city, which can be reached by ferry. Hereabouts is a famous wine-growing district, and so fertile is the country that it is spoken of as Galicia's granary. The river which is crossed by the iron bridge at Salvatierra is the Tea, which at this place runs into the Miño. The scenery becomes grander and grander until Arbo is passed, and then, eight miles farther on, at Friera station, Portugal's highest mountain is seen, the Outeiro Major, with an altitude of nearly 8000 feet, rising beyond the town of Melgaço, situated on its slopes. A short distance beyond this point the Portuguese frontier, indicated by a few cottages, is left behind; but the character of the scenery remains the same as far as Orense. Before Orense is reached there is a chance of seeing the old and picturesque town of Ribadavia, where the river Aria, on the banks of which it stands, joins the Miño. Ribadavia has a population of 5000, and in the convent of Los Dominicos possesses a building which was at one time a royal palace, though probably a crude one, for it was occupied by monarchs of Galicia when the country was a separate kingdom. The town is very quaint, and will form a halting-place for visitors who like to spend a few hours examining it while awaiting the return of the train from Orense. That town, however, will offer more inducement than Ribadavia, especially to those who have made a particular point of journeying along the frontier and are not disposed to go beyond. Orense is a very ancient city, celebrated for its bridge and warm baths, which for many centuries have been looked upon as marvels. These baths, or springs, have a temperature of about 150° Fahr., and as the water has practically neither taste nor smell and does not appear to possess any medicinal value, it is used for washing and all kinds of domestic purposes, even including the cleansing of slaughtered animals. There are three springs, called Las Burgas, and they yield about thirty gallons of hot water each minute. The cathedral is an imposing building, with a very gloomy interior, and although the structure dates from the sixth century, still it will scarcely call for more than passing attention from any one who is not ecclesiologically inclined. There are, however, some extensive and magnificent cloisters at Orense, which may be viewed by permission, and there is the bridge. This is a remarkable stone structure, dating from the thirteenth century, with a length of more than 1300 feet, and containing seven arches. One of these, the central, known as the Grand Arch, is 156 feet wide. It is pointed, and the crown is 135 feet above the bed of the river--a height which looks very considerable both from the bank of the river and the walls of the bridge. The Miño rises rapidly and to a great height, and it was with the object of safeguarding the bridge against the sudden inundations that the arch was made so high. The bridge ascends from each end to something of a point in the centre, and is one of the wonders of Orense. A stone in the bridge records the interesting fact that that particular spot is exactly 555 kilometres--nearly 350 miles--from Madrid. Beyond the springs, the cloisters, the cathedral, and the bridge, the town has few attractions, but whatever it may lack in the shape of bricks and stones and mortar is more than counterbalanced by the glories and the grandeur of the neighbouring scenery. [Illustration: OXEN TOWING A BROKEN-DOWN MOTOR-BUS] [Illustration: PONTEVEDRA BY NIGHT: THE BULL-RING] CHAPTER VI LOCOMOTION The diligence is still the national vehicle of Galicia. It is to be met on the high roads which run between some of the chief towns, drawn by six or nine or more mules, ponies, or horses; and no more picturesque sight can be imagined than that of the primitive conveyance in a country district lumbering on its peaceful way in the hills or valleys, crowded with men and women in peasant garb, and the top piled high with miscellaneous goods and baggage. The jingle of the bells gives the first warning of the carriage's approach; then there is the thud of the hoofs and the rumble of the wheels, and the craning of heads from doors and windows. Travellers who have spent days and nights in them, cramped and crowded in _berlina_ and _interior_ or _coupé_, suffering many miseries and inconveniences, have dwelt on the perils and drawbacks of the diligence, which has an unfriendly habit of capsizing and killing or maiming its passengers, and whose arrival at any given place is subject to the state of road and weather and other circumstances. The _berlina_ is a small compartment in front, running at right angles to the wheels, and ranks as first class; the _interior_, second class, is behind, the seats being arranged after the fashion of a London bus; and the _coupé_, third class, is the top of the vehicle in front of the baggage. In the good weather, which prevails almost throughout the year in Galicia, the _coupé_ is by far the pleasantest and cleanest of the three classes of accommodation; and, perched high in front of the diligence, the visitor has an uninterrupted view of the road, and may enjoy the scenery and look upon objects which are ceaseless in their fascination. Journeying by diligence, despite its drawbacks and discomforts, is one of the most convenient ways of seeing Galicia, and if the traveller understands Spanish there is every opportunity of learning the names of places and buildings and getting explanations of the meaning of unfamiliar customs. The driver is seldom at a loss for words or information, and what he does not know can be supplied by the conductor or a friendly passenger. Diligences, big and little, have their special names, some of which would be impressive if the vehicles were in keeping with them. Part of the system of Galician driving is to make an uproar from the box. [Illustration: A DILIGENCE ON THE HIGHWAY] [Illustration: OXEN YOKED TO A DILIGENCE] One Sunday morning I mounted a ramshackle contrivance called El Elegante, and took a seat beside the driver, a brigand-looking person who was unwashed and unshaved. Perched above me, under the canvas hood, was a small Spanish boy, bare-footed, bare-legged and bare-headed--almost, indeed, bare-bodied, for his only clothing was a remnant of shirt and precarious trousers, consisting mostly of patches. He planted his feet on my shoulders to steady himself. I would have reproved him, but he had the air of a _caballero_, and the road saved me the trouble of requesting that he should cast his burden on the diligence. His feet were jerked off their perch and we were all thrown tumultuously about. Three wild-looking little ponies were harnessed to the coach, and with a frantic shouting and stamping the driver started them on their journey, flicking his long whip and cursing and blessing them by turns. Each animal, like the coach, has a name, to which it seems to be entirely unresponsive. The ponies were in no need whatever of a fillip, yet the driver lashed out furiously, making a great pretence of flogging them, but doing no real hurt, and spending most of his time in disentangling the lash from the harness. Nor was there any occasion for him to break into frenzied shouts and lean forward in a paroxysm of affected energy; but he did both, and, judging from his looks at the end of the journey, he was satisfied that the success of the drive was due to his own exertions, and was not in any way attributable to the quadrupeds. The railway system of Galicia is imperfect. Only three lines exist--the West of Galicia Railway, worked by English capital, the system which operates from Corunna, and the track which runs along the bank of the Miño, and covers some of the most wonderful scenery in the country. In time other systems will be finished and in course of operation; but progress marches slowly in Galicia, and there is no hurry in the country. An old Spanish proverb says that by the road of By-and-by you will arrive at the town of Never; and there is the favourite promise of _mañana_, which means that certain things will be accomplished in the fulness of time. Amongst them is the completion of Galician railways. Fourteen years have been spent on one railway between Betanzos and other centres. The track is finished, but the system is not complete, and to-day, where a train should take you swiftly and smoothly across country, you jolt and jostle in a diligence, or, if you are fortunate, travel in a motor-car. Aged engines draw Galicia's rolling-stock; yet the carriages themselves are very comfortable. The first-class compartments, by which alone the Booth Steamship Company's tourists travel, are excellently adapted to the country's needs. Many of them are built on the English plan of small compartments, but others are in the form of little saloons capable of seating about a dozen passengers. Seats after the manner of an ordinary English compartment are at each end of the saloon, and seats are on each side, leaving the centre free for the baggage which Galicians cram into every railway carriage when they get the chance. These small saloons are about equal in size to two English compartments, allowing for a broader gauge rail in Spain, but there are many of the eight-seated compartments which are common to England and the Continent. In these coaches the ordinary Continental system is adopted of inserting small glass panes in the partitions, so that travellers may look from one compartment to the other. The plan has its objections in the estimation of those who seek privacy, but it gives comfort to the nervous and unprotected passenger. In England smoking-carriages are labelled; in Galicia the forbidding notice is put on the vehicle where smoking is not allowed. As a matter of fact, you may smoke anywhere and everywhere in Galicia, unless great pressure or sweetness is brought to bear on some offender against the law. Yet ladies travelling on railways may reasonably hope to escape from suffering and annoyance, for each Galician train has a first-class compartment exclusively reserved for them. Frequently, even in trains which were well filled, I observed that the compartment "_Reservado para Señoras_" was empty, the womenfolk preferring to travel with the men and the tobacco smoke. Starting a Galician train is a serious task. Before you are allowed to enter the station your _bona fides_ as a traveller must be established. The carriages are shunted to the platform perhaps half an hour before the advertised time for leaving, then at a later stage the locomotive is backed in and coupled, and in due season, with no unseemly haste, a man in a blouse perambulates the platform and chants the Spanish equivalent for "Gentlemen, please embark," which the _caballeros_ do at their leisure. The engine takes breath, as it were, and a trumpet tootles; then the driver blows the whistle, and if you are leave-taking you jump frantically on board, only to learn that five minutes pass before the train begins to move. A prolonged blast from the locomotive is the preliminary for a leisurely start--I even heard it suggested that the signal exhausted the boiler so much that a delay was needed to raise more steam. Galician trains travel slowly, and there are protracted waits at the intermediate stations--sometimes long enough to allow the passenger to view the surrounding scenery or stroll into the adjacent town or village, certainly to give him a chance of drinking a cup of coffee or glass of wine or a liqueur at the refreshment-room, if one exists. Failing that establishment, which is primitive and unattractive from the English standpoint, a drink of water may be obtained from an old woman who walks about the platform with an earthenware vessel. At Filgueira station I saw an aged dame, wearing men's boots, dispensing water to passengers; near her, on a balcony, was an unwashed but picturesque Spaniard smoking a cigarette; and two small girls came to the carriages selling a sweet cake, made in the shape of a ring. I bought two for a copper, and they proved excellent eating. Young and old people of both sexes took their duties easily, and the platelayers went about their business leisurely, stepping off the single track long before the warning signal of the whistle sounded, and gazing meditatively at the passing and departing train. There is little fear of the Galician worker on the line sustaining injuries, because he gets out of the way long before the train reaches him--and the train would be hard pressed to catch up even a retiring platelayer. The speed is very limited, and once when I was travelling by motor on a road which ran parallel with a track the chauffeur easily outdistanced the train, and shot triumphantly across the metals in front of the engine. Motor-cars are not numerous in Galicia, but there are some very fine examples in use; and despite adverse criticisms, many of the roads in the north-west of Spain are excellent. The highways, to begin with, are well made, but after heavy rains they become lumpy and are neglected; but in the neighbourhood of the large towns they are well cared for, and cars run smoothly and as fast as the driver cares to go, for except in passing through towns and villages there is no speed limit. Public motor-cars, corresponding in size, power, and appearance to the London motor-bus, run regularly between Santiago and Corunna. The _berlina_ will seat eight persons, but not more than half a dozen are booked as a rule. The accommodation is equal to that of an English first-class compartment, the entrances being at the sides, like a railway carriage. The rear and larger part of the vehicle is given to second-class passengers, who enter at the end. In front there is room for two or three people, and a passenger may sit beside the driver and enjoy the air and scenery. The roof of the conveyance is used for baggage, of which a great quantity can be stowed. Each trunk or package carried on the roof--and care is taken that the passenger shall not burden the interior with his belongings--has pasted on it a yellow label bearing a written number. These motor-buses usually cover the journey of forty miles between Corunna and Santiago in three and a half hours. A slower service, conducted by antique-looking steam vehicles, requires five or six hours--about half the time occupied by the diligence, which you will easily overtake on the highway. Occasionally the motor-bus will break down and need slight repairs. The passengers in that case may get out and stroll along the road, as I did. Blackberries were plentiful in the hedges, and I gathered and ate them, much to the astonishment of some fellow-travellers. Spaniards will not eat the fruit, but several of them gathered blackberries and insisted upon my acceptance. I consumed as many as I cared to eat, and as for the rest, I left them, unobserved by the donors, for the birds. One afternoon, near the frontier, I passed a motor which had broken down, and to which a pair of oxen had been yoked, to draw the crippled vehicle away. Railway train, diligence, and motor vehicle are used by visitors and residents in Galicia, but there are many districts, remote from towns, where the mode of locomotion is by mule or donkey, with occasional horse and pony. Everywhere the peasant woman may be seen riding on a mule or ass; and sometimes a string of mules will come along, each bearing a brightly clad, laughing woman of Galicia; or in a remote bridle-path in the hills you have to step aside into a field or hedge to make way for a handsome girl of the country who is returning to her father's farm from the nearest village, sitting contentedly on the mule which picks its way easily along the rough ground, which may be, and often is, the stony bed of a little stream. It is well to be prepared for minor shocks in travelling. Your train may have left a station at night, and you are dozing in the dimly lit compartment. Suddenly you are fully awake, and by the light of the oil-lamp see a figure outlined--a man in corduroys standing almost menacingly over you. He is not a brigand nor a hold-up; he is merely the inspector wishing to see your ticket. He has clambered to the door by way of the footboard, and has opened it and entered unseen. When he has done his task he leaves by the same way, and proceeds to startle some other unsuspecting and unready traveller. At other times a man in semi-uniform, with a cap bearing a small metal locomotive as a badge of office, will fall upon you for the same purpose, and then depart. At wayside stations you will see him leaning from the door of a first-class compartment, smoking a cigar or cigarette, and preparing to resume his footboard tricks when the train is again under way. But though the descent is as unexpected as the same performances in American trains, yet there is an entire absence of that aggressive, domineering attitude which in some of the United States railway officials is so offensive. The Galician ticket-examiner doubtless believes that, being a _caballero_, he is quite as good as you are, just as the American official does--except when he wishes you to know that he is better--but he has a gentler way of showing it than his compeer on the other side of the Atlantic. In departing from a railway station, too, at night, you may be startled by the sudden opening of the door of the hotel bus, and the bursting in upon you of a man with a lantern. He is merely an _octroi_ official, and his purpose is to see that you have not hidden upon or about you such dutiable goods as fowls and other eatables. The _octroi_ man may be seen in all parts of Galicia, his headquarters usually being some strange little abode on the roadside, roughly built of stones. Probably no men in Galicia feel more acutely the slowness and inconvenience of the locomotion of the country than the commercial travellers, most of whose time is spent in getting from place to place, and not in the actual transaction of business. That remark applies, of course, to the commercials of England and the enterprising "drummers" of America; but the business representative in Galicia has to endure many hardships to which his foreign brethren are strangers. Late one night I entered an hotel in the company of some travellers, and watched them as they took their final meal. They were preparing to make a night of it, and on asking the reason for the dissipation I was told that one of the commercials had to leave by a train which started at 2.45 A.M., that he had resolved to sit up for it, and that his comrades, in a spirit of compassion and conviviality, had agreed to keep him company until he left the hotel. One or two of them had to start at six o'clock--and these were quite usual hours for men on the road. Time after time I met the same commercials in trains, diligences, motor-buses, and hotels, and on each occasion noticed that they had long ago acquired the art of making themselves comfortable in adverse circumstances, and had cultivated a fine disregard of the feelings of others. There is something in locomotion in North-West Spain which seems to bring out the worst qualities in travellers, and I found nothing more disagreeable and exasperating than to be wedged into a sort of diligence for conveyance to and from stations. In the darkness of an early morning I was packed in the corner of an aged conveyance and jostled over the lumpy road without so much as a chance of escape, for the very doorway and outside platform were crammed with fellow-creatures, and the interior was packed with people who were mostly corpulent and unattractive. Once or twice it seemed as if the vehicle would capsize, and it was a disquieting spectacle to see a wall of feminine flesh bending forward as if with the sinister purpose of extinguishing me. In the gloom of one corner was a stout man, wearing a linen uniform and smoking. I assumed that he was a workman, perhaps a bill-poster, until, later, he was seated opposite to me in a first-class compartment, and I discovered that he was an officer. It may be that you have your cycle with you, in which case you may pedal in peace, but unless you know the region well you must keep an ever-watchful eye ahead, for many of the roads zigzag dangerously along the mountain sides, and an uncontrolled machine would bring about a swift disaster. Brakes both good and strong, and at least two of them, are necessary for the cyclist's safety and his peace of mind in Galicia. That precaution would apply especially to the ordinary visitor, man or woman. There are those in the cycling world who, even in risky and unknown neighbourhoods, neglect precautions and scoff at danger. In many parts of Galicia the scoffing may be followed by a catastrophe the victim of which would scoff no more. I saw only two or three cycles in Galicia, and one of these was a freak made of wood. The wheels were solid discs, after the fashion of the wheels of a bullock-cart, and the whole of the frame and fittings seemed to be of the same material, unpainted, as if the masterpiece had been just finished and was undergoing its trials. The work was excellently done, and was a high tribute to the patience and ingenuity of the producer, who had clearly taken as his model an ordinary safety. The machine was being ridden by a peasant lad in a country village. When I first saw him he was ahead, coasting slowly down the steep road; but he observed the motor-car approach, and by the time I passed him he had dismounted and dragged his cherished possession up the hedge side out of harm's way. As to cycling generally in Galicia, it is quite feasible, for many of the roads are suitable, but in most places the steep, rough thoroughfares make the comfortable use of one's machine impracticable. [Illustration: THE HILLS OF MONDARIZ] [Illustration: MONDARIZ] CHAPTER VII MONDARIZ There is one health and pleasure resort in Galicia which is in the nature of an earthly paradise, and that is Mondariz. The district has been long famed for its beauty, charm, and grandeur, and those curative waters on the success of which a colossal and palatial hydropathic institution is conducted by Messrs. Ramon and Enrique Peinador. This hotel claims to be the finest and best in the Peninsula; it is certainly the most remarkable in many ways, and might almost be compared with a _Mauretania_ on land, it is so complete and self-contained. In wandering through Galicia it is impossible not to be struck by the number of medicinal facilities that the country offers in the form of natural springs, and the careful attention which has been given to their development. Great labour has been spent, as well as money, in connection with some of these watering-places, and only by the application of a large capital, incessant perseverance, and a far-seeing sagacity could the Mondariz hydropathic establishment be what Messrs. Peinador have made it. Mondariz is not only a resort for those who take medicinal waters in the ordinary way, but it is also a great pleasure centre of Spain. In the season Mondariz is the most brilliant place in Galicia, and its pleasures are shared by visitors from all parts of Spain and abroad. The attractions of the institution and the district are rapidly becoming known to English travellers. The waters of Mondariz (Gandara and Troncoso, as the springs are called) contain bicarbonate of soda, and abundant medical evidence is available as to their therapeutic value. Professor Augusto Pi y Suñer, of Seville University, in an exhaustive report gives some striking facts concerning their tonic and curative effect in many forms of illness. So that visitors may take full advantage of the waters Messrs. Peinador have constructed baths of every description, and of beautiful design and admirable workmanship. Lavishness of expenditure, indeed, is one of the characteristics of the Mondariz Hydro, and only by the adoption of such a bold policy could the present great results have been attained. A handful of people a few years ago journeyed to the vale in which Mondariz nestles, to take the waters, and they found accommodation in little _châlets_ on the green slopes which abound in the locality. The results were so remarkable that the _châlets_ could no longer house the visitors, and finally the existing hotel was opened in 1897. Six hundred people can be accommodated at the hydro, yet in the season the vast establishment is taxed to its utmost capacity to provide for the visitors. The grace and beauty of the building are noticeable as soon as the main hall is entered and the grand staircase is seen. This gives access to rooms some of which, especially the chief private suites, are regal in their appointments. Mondariz can give accommodation to a king as well as to an ordinary tourist. The principal dining-room is of enormous size, and there is a very large and handsomely decorated _salon_ in which dances and theatrical performances and concerts take place. The kitchen arrangements are of the most perfect modern type, and possess the feature, somewhat unusual in hotels, of being open at all times to public inspection. But it is not merely in the hotel as a building and establishment that interest centres at Mondariz; it is in the completeness of the undertaking. The industry of bottling the water is conducted in its entirety. The neighbouring woods supply the timber needed for the packing-cases, which are all made on the estate; and so great is the demand at home and abroad for the waters that in the course of twenty-four hours 10,000 bottles are prepared. The men and women who bottle and pack work day and night in alternate shifts. The hotel has its own fancy shops in the season, for enterprising houses in Madrid send business representatives to supply the wants of visitors, delightful stalls and kiosks being arranged, bazaar-like, in the grounds. Special vineyards, wine-making premises, farms, kitchen and fruit and flower gardens, as well as sheds and sties for cattle and pigs, and great pens for poultry, are amongst the other resources of Mondariz. The estate also possesses its own printing establishment, from which a newspaper is issued specially dealing with the doings of the institution and its guests. Fishing and shooting, driving, riding, walking, and rowing--all these may be enjoyed on the hotel estate, through which the trout-teeming Tea flows. The walks in the pine-clad hills and along the bridle-paths and little lanes of Mondariz are full of charm and delight. A perfect holiday may, indeed, be spent without leaving the estate, on which, to give an atmosphere of completion, there is a chapel. From the verandah in front of the hotel, or the balcony on to which the window of your bedroom leads, or from your garden-chair under the palm-trees you may watch the women of Galicia ride past on mules or donkeys or walk to and fro with their burdens, so that the very life of the people seems to be brought to your notice without any exertion on your part. On the extensive estate long and enjoyable walks may be taken, and inspection made of numerous historical remains which Messrs. Peinador have brought together from various parts of Galicia. A museum is in course of formation in which many articles are already to be seen bearing on Gallegan life and costume. By means of the hotel motors very delightful excursions may be undertaken to neighbouring towns and villages. A regular service is maintained between Mondariz and Vigo for the convenience of tourists by the Booth Line. A pump-room is being built at Mondariz from designs prepared by the foremost of Spain's architects, and when it is finished the building, judging from the plans, will be amongst the finest in existence. It will be a beautiful ornament to the grounds and form the rendezvous for the water-drinkers, just as the old pump-rooms at Bath, Harrogate, Scarborough, and Buxton were the central meeting-places for visitors. The pump-room will be equipped with every modern appliance and luxury, and yet within a stone's-throw there are primitive cottages inhabited by something approximating primitive man. That is another of Galicia's sharp contrasts. One of the chief features of the new building will be the fine granite columns. These are made entirely on the premises and are produced from the estate. The huge granite blocks are quarried in the neighbouring hills; bullocks draw them down to the hotel grounds, where hotel workmen rough them out, and turn them in the lathe and finish and polish them. Other employés will put them in position and complete the building, the estimated time for constructing which is two years. There are larger and more imposing hotels in the world than the hydro at Mondariz; I have seen them in London, Paris, New York, Chicago, and elsewhere; but not even in America have I visited an establishment which can lay claim to that completeness of resource which characterises the concern of Messrs. Peinador. Galicia from north to south and east to west is fascinating, but there is no place in the country which leaves more abidingly pleasant memories than Mondariz. The balanced stone of Arcos is within an easy drive of Mondariz. This gigantic boulder is poised on the top of another enormous rock in such a way that it seems as if a touch or a strong wind would send the mass headlong into the rough road below. But the stone has been in that position for ages, and is one of Nature's mysteries. The journey to this wonderful logan affords a view of some of the wildest and grandest scenery in the neighbourhood of Mondariz. Much nearer the hydro, and making a very charming walk, is the little village of San Pedro, which forms one of the pleasantest sights that the pedestrian can witness. Here and there, on the banks of rushing streams, are stone-built mills, primitive and tiny, where native millers carry out their grinding operations with the water-wheel. Galicia may be visited and something seen of the people and country without going beyond the confines of the hotel, for the estate is large and wonderfully comprehensive. It possesses its own hills and dales, where you may get good sport, even its own river, the Tea, on which you may boat and fish. You may see the process of wine-making, from the growth of the grape to the bottling of the juice, and the evolution of the chicken from the egg to the _poulet rôti_ or other form of table delicacy. Fruits and vegetables in more shapes and forms than I can either remember or understand are produced on the estate, and in due season take their places on the well-appointed tables. Nay, even Galician peasant life is represented, and without much trouble you may enter a cottage and see what the life of the people really is. True, the homes are better than the sordid hovels which are common to Galicia, but the lives of the people are practically the same. I went into one house, and from the dark, primitive kitchen walked into a sleeping-room with an embrasure-like window which framed one of the most perfect landscapes I ever saw--a picture the like of which few people in England below noble rank can command from their own possessions. The ruined castle of Sobroso, which is within pleasant walking and driving distance of Mondariz, offers an exceptionally fine view of Galician landscape. The country is a wealth of fascinating colour. Hills rise up on every side--pine-clad and lonely; some, if the day is doubtful, suffused in sunshine, some a deep blue--so deep that the details of the hills are lost and the mountain ranges are smoky, mist-topped masses. The sun shines and the warm rain drops softly. Peaceful little farms nestle in the valleys, with the vineyards terracing the slopes; bullocks, resting from their labours, are browsing; goats are nibbling on the green slopes; women are in the maize-fields, and men are digging, trimming, turning, to make the bounteous earth yield its supplies. It is a scene of perfect peace and beauty, and the only sounds that break the soothing silence are the laughing voices of the women who are working in the fields, and that strange creaking of the bullock-carts which is not heard in any other part of Spain. A long mile from the wooded base of Sobroso I had watched a train of bullock-carts crawl up the white high road--a train of seven, timber-laden, making an extraordinary noise as they approached. Amongst the drivers was an old woman, bare-footed, who, as she trudged alongside her patient pair of oxen, wove wool with a distaff which she carried in her hands. Later, from Sobroso itself, I listened to the distant noises of the bullock-train--a musical creaking, groaning, and rasping--with a sudden silence when the cattle were brought up to rest. Sometimes the creaking would be like church bells, at other times the sound resembled the whistle of a locomotive. It was an uncanny medley, like, and yet unlike, both bells and whistle, and to be compared only with itself, for there is nothing else like the creaking of the bullock-cart of Galicia. They say that the noise is made deliberately, to give warning, in narrow, dangerous roads where there is no room to pass, that a bullock-cart is coming; but they do not explain how a driver, dulled and deafened by the uproar of his own conveyance, hears the noises of a rival vehicle. [Illustration: A PEASANT'S FUNERAL IN THE HILLS] [Illustration: A PEASANT WOMAN, WITH HER DISTAFF, DRIVING A BULLOCK-CART] Down in the foreground is a white, peaceful church, near it a tall, slender pillar of stone, surmounted by an effigy of the crucified Redeemer on the one side, and on the other a figure of the Virgin and Child; on the tops of neighbouring walls are crosses, emblems of that faith which all Galicians have adopted, for here, as elsewhere in Spain, there is one religion only, and it is that of the Holy Mother Church. The whole scene is wonderful and impressive, and the country has the great merit of being almost untravelled by and unknown to ordinary tourists. From Sobroso's solitude you walk back to the high road where your motor-car or Spanish cab awaits you and resume your journey, or, being untroubled by thoughts of time or vehicles, walk onward in the strangely fascinating twilight of Galicia. You pass the peasant women, and they smile and murmur "Adios," and instinctively you raise your hat in recognition of the salutation. All roads near Mondariz lead to the hydro, and an hour or two after you have descended from the ruins of Sobroso you are in the great dining-hall of the hotel or in its brilliant _salon_, or are smoking in the verandah outside, in the pine-scented air, with semi-tropical vegetation around you. It is no exaggeration to speak of this great undertaking as Mondariz the marvellous. [Illustration: GATHERING FIREWOOD IN THE PINE HILLS] [Illustration: THE FISHING-TOWN OF MARIN] CHAPTER VIII GALICIA'S BURDEN-BEARERS On the road which runs from Vigo to Mondariz I saw a woman walking with some great burden on her head. She advanced quickly, with straight and supple gait, but not till she was very near did I notice what she carried. It was a full-sized coffin, but so perfectly poised that the bearer did not seem to feel its weight. She went past, silent, heavy-eyed, and looking straight ahead, her bare feet making no sound on the gravel of the pavement. That was one of the first of Galicia's burden-bearers I saw, but the very first was when I landed at Vigo and observed a woman on the Alameda carrying an assortment of bedding on her head, a mass which almost smothered her. A man, apparently her husband, stalked in front, leading the way, like a Red Indian before his squaw, and bearing his share, according to Galician ethics, of the family possessions, for under his left arm was tucked a pillow and in his right hand he carried an umbrella. From the day when they can support any burden at all the females of Galicia are taught that to them is given the conveyance of any article, however big and clumsy, which is not too big for a human being to grapple with. Nothing more astonishing can be seen in Galicia than the size and weight of some of the loads which the women carry on their heads, and frequently a woman hurries along under a burden which a Billingsgate or Covent Garden porter would refuse to have planted on his crown. Galician women have a passion for consigning burdens to their heads. Size, shape, and weight are immaterial. The burden may be a bedstead, a coffin, a load of firewood or seaweed, an enormous trunk packed with baggage, a bucket of water, a huge basket of fish or vegetables, or some grotesque article which could be easily carried in the hand. Big or little, the method of conveyance is the same, a small protecting pad being put between the top of the head and the burden. A common, almost universal, way of preparing the pad is to take a handkerchief, usually a white one, from the pocket, roll it into a ring, and then put it on the crown of the head. The material prevents the hard basket, bucket, box, or other burden from being unduly felt, though many Galician women have bald spaces due to the wearing away of the hair by the circular pads. If the weight is not too heavy a woman will hoist it up herself, but the custom is to have the load lifted up and put in place. There is a spirit of _camaraderie_ in the burden-bearing, and frequently a woman who is hurrying along the street, flying light, will stop to hoist up a burden on to a fellow-creature's head. Small girls scurry along the pavement or roadway bearing weights that are out of all proportion to their strength and years, and to this early toil may be attributed the spoiling of Galician figures. The heavy weights and strain of carrying them cause the women to walk with a curious twisting movement of the hips, and to over-develop that part of the body; but as a rule the carriage of the Galician peasant woman is perfect, and many have remarkably fine figures. Some of the women appear to be enormously strong, and the great majority look healthy and happy. Even when near confinement they will continue their burden-bearing, and I was told that often a child will be born to a woman who has gone straight from her work, and that in an incredibly short time she will be at her task again. In this respect the Galician peasant seems to be fit sister to the Red Indian women, of whom it was said that they would fall out of the line of march, and having given birth to a son or daughter on the prairie, pick the infant up and overtake their companions. Women in Galicia work in the houses, the fields, the quarries, on the road, on the water. You may see them driving bullock-carts, and pigs and cattle. I observed a tiny girl who could not be more than three years old piloting an enormous and fractious sow, weeping copiously as she did so because the stubborn pig refused to answer steering signals, which were smart thuds on her fat sides; women were helping men to pull a boat-load of seaweed up Vigo Bay; three women and one man outside Pontevedra were road-making with pickaxes; not far away from them other women were filling corves with coal, plying their shovels like navvies, and women were unloading a stone-laden sloop, tripping up a springy gangway with their stone-filled baskets on their heads, and hurrying down another plank for further loads. I saw women stripping the husks from maize, quarrying granite in the hills, working on hats and dresses, teaching in little wayside schools, tending the sick in hospital, and doing a hundred and one odd things many of which are carried out by women in Great Britain, but most of which fall only to the lot of men. On inquiring into the rate of wages paid to women I was told that a female labourer gets sevenpence daily for her work, which lasts from sunrise to sunset, and she is as a rule supplied with wine and maize-bread, although in some places the bread has to be bought. In cold weather the women are given a little brandy. The wages seem small enough, but the cost of living is in proportion to the income. A little cottage may be had for a shilling a week, and although the dwelling is far from being a desirable human habitation from the English standpoint, still it is not worse in some respects than many of the appalling dens in which British labourers live. [Illustration: A MAID OF CANGAS] Women appeared on the railway side at every level crossing when a train was passing, and, armed with a staff as badge of office, held up the traffic, vehicular and pedestrian. As a rule there was neither, but the conscientious female went through the solemn ceremony of standing sentry over the gate or chain which separated the single track from the highway until the train had passed, and then lowering the sign of authority and opening the gate or releasing the chain to indicate that carts and human beings were at liberty to cross the metals. Often enough this motherly protection was witnessed only by a dilapidated Spanish infant, who had nothing better to do than stroll down to the railway and watch the train go past. These remarkable children are everywhere, and some of them are very pretty, and as shy as they are attractive. At the old bridge of Ramallosa I wished to take a photograph of a little Spanish maid who was hurrying towards me over the arches, but her coyness was unconquerable, and in spite of all allurements she refused to be a party to the picture, and at last turned and fled precipitately. At Cangas, on the north side of Vigo Bay, I craftily secured a shot at a beautiful maid who was hugging a fat and placid infant on the shore. Being only a few feet away, I feigned deep interest in a neighbouring sardine-boat, then, unexpectedly confronting the little nurse, so that she should not have time to pose, I secured her for the film. It was not until I strolled away that the subtlety of the performance struck her; then, for some reason best known to herself, she burst into screams of laughter. One of the charms of snapshots in Galicia is that the subjects are quite unconscious. They do not pose, because they do not understand. Some of the Galician peasant women have a strange way of dressing their hair. This consists of plaiting a length of material of exactly the same colour as the hair into the pig-tail or tails to give the finished article a more generous and impressive appearance. At first sight the custom strikes one as tending to vanity; yet it is as nothing, if men are to believe all they read, compared with one's own countrywomen's practice of enriching their own locks by adding to them, not a piece of stuff or ribbon, but other people's shorn tresses. Women do most things--nearly, it seems, all things--in this corner of Spain, but in no respect are they more in evidence than in connection with washing. Laundry work in England is synonymous with everything that is hard and sordid, but in Galicia it reaches something approaching a fine art. Washing seems to be the national recreation of Galicia. All day long and every day the womenfolk are on the banks of streams and rivers, standing, bending, or kneeling at their work, or in public washhouses, such as Corunna possesses, just below the place where Sir John Moore is buried, or in some open ground in towns. At Ferrol there is a huge trough around which the women stand to their work. This is in the open air. Vigo has a covered building near the bay for laundry operations, but by far the greater part of the work is done in sunshine, near the running water by the side of glorious fields or at the edges of green woods, and though the task may be laborious the conditions of the toil are perfect. There is incessant talk and laughter--one of the brightest and most hilarious groups of women that I saw in Galicia was at Ferrol, round the public wash-tub. There were a score or so of them, busy at work, but not too busy to turn and laugh at the stranger; merry, but not so merry that they could not find energy to break into joyful screams at some playful jest from a passer-by. The spectacle was one on which Samuel Pepys would have dwelt with rapture, and the joke would have been recorded with minute precision in his diary. There are many odd things in Galicia which savour of the England of the Restoration. The washing is a simple task. The clothes are taken to the water's edge, mostly in flat baskets, such as those which are used for fish. The women kneel over the running water, thoroughly soaking and soaping the garments, which are then placed on stones to be rubbed. After the rubbing there is a careful rinsing and wringing. The articles are then spread on the nearest hedges or grass or stones to dry. A mother may bring her baby with her, and leave the little creature sitting or sleeping in the basket near her; the young boys and girls will give a hand with the work; and if it is after dinner an old woman may come up with her tin and earthenware utensils and wash them in the running water, which carries all impurities towards the sea. There is in most of us that faculty for enjoyment which comes from watching, at our ease, fellow-creatures toiling, and I will confess to the keen satisfaction I felt at the quaint bridge of Marin, a pleasant little run from Pontevedra, as I leaned over the parapet smoking and watching the washers in the stream below. The sun was shining hotly, the sky was a clear blue, the little white houses dotted the yellow sands, and the brown nets hung to dry from the fishing-boats and fences. The women sang at their labour, and the children sang as they frolicked or helped their elders. It seemed like a universal washing-day. Yet even washing in Galicia is a romantic and picturesque performance, completely free from the steamy, squalid smells of laundry days in British homes and institutions. [Illustration: CARRYING WATER] [Illustration: A WOMAN THRESHING BEANS] At Marin I leaned over the bridge and gazed long at the workers by the stream, then turned towards Pontevedra, walking up the road in the hot sunshine. Ahead the road was filled with people, moving slowly, and in their midst a banner and some trappings flashed in the strong bright light, and there came the strains of solemn music and the wails of grief, for this was a Galician funeral. The coffin was borne shoulder-high, with several priests near it, and with them a man, like a peasant in his Sunday clothes, playing a bassoon, on which he accompanied some of the responses to the priests' prayers. Women, mostly in black, of the poorest class, with shawls on their heads, followed the coffin closely. There were but few men present. A halt was made for a few moments to rest and change the bearers, and a peasant woman hurried from her cottage with a small table on which they could rest their burden. All the time there were the prayers and the responses, mingled with the strangely sweet and solemn music of the great reed instrument, until the procession reached a spot at which a branch of the road led to a little church on the shore, whose bell was tolling and in whose ground the burial was to take place. It was a simple ceremony, shorn of pomp and circumstance, and in perfect keeping with the wondrous peace and beauty of the sun-bathed hills and water. [Illustration: AROSA BAY] [Illustration: THE ISLAND OF LA TOJA] CHAPTER IX AROSA BAY AND LA TOJA British warships have made Arosa Bay their headquarters for many years, and have found the landlocked stretch of sea and the surrounding hills a glorious and delightful region for sport and pleasure. It is remarkable that the three great bays on the coast of Galicia--Arosa, Pontevedra, and Vigo--have their entrances protected by islands which break the force of the Atlantic waves. The Isle of Salvora is in the very mouth of Arosa Bay, with small islands to the north of it as satellites. There is a fine stretch of bay between Salvora and Arosa Island, which is in the middle of the bay itself. The warships anchor between Arosa and the mainland, close to Villa Garcia, Carril, and Cortegada. Villa Garcia is renowned for its bathing and fishing, and on its shore an excellently appointed and large bathing establishment has been built. The town is the headquarters of a British Vice-Consul, whose residence is one of the most striking features of the place. It is the old castle of the Marquis of Villa Garcia, modernised, and abounding in historical and antiquarian associations. Roman remains have been discovered in recent years on the estate by the present Vice-Consul, who has formed a very interesting private collection, and has contributed some valuable objects to the Archæological Museum at Santiago. On the other side of the road, only a few feet from the Consulate, is a convent, with a church adjoining in which the nuns worship. These religious prisoners go to and from the church by way of a private passage, and are never seen in public. The barred windows of their cells frown on the Consulate like the windows of a gaol. Pilgrims in bygone years took this road to Santiago, coming from Portugal; but to-day British officers and sailors use it largely when they are ashore for recreation. Perhaps from behind some rusting bars sweet, pale-faced nuns may watch them as they drive or walk, and may wonder what sort of life it is that these men of the waters lead--the fighters to whom the world is free and open, while the silent watcher never gets beyond the convent's narrow boundary. The nun's bed consists of rough boards which, when she dies, are turned up and nailed together to form her coffin. A pleasant walk from Villa Garcia is to Carril, only a mile away, with a population of 3000 and a very busy harbour. A short sail is to Cortegada, the beautiful island which the King of Spain has chosen as his summer residence. Villa Garcia, indeed, is a centre from which many excursions may be made, either for sport in the hills or the bay and rivers. From the little town it is an easy train journey to Caldas de Reyes, where, for three months in the year, July to September, visitors take the warm mineral baths at the excellent Hotel Acuña, delightfully situated at the end of the bridge which crosses the river Umia. The town is small, but very quaint. It has a public hot spring, where the family washing may be conducted or the family hot water obtained, but the laundry work is done mostly on the river-side by the bridge. You may lean over the bridge and see in the limpid water the fish disport themselves. The scenery in the locality is beautiful, especially from the summits of the surrounding hills. The waters of Caldas have neither taste nor colour, and have a wonderful effect upon the skin. At Cuntis, three miles from Caldas, in the hills, are warm baths which at the Grand Hotel attract many thousands of visitors yearly; while the little town is picturesque and interesting, especially on Sundays, when the peasant women crowd the market-place, buying and selling and congregating outside the business places which serve as general stores. Caldas is associated in my mind with the only drunken man I saw in Galicia; also with a peasant's funeral in the hills, and a charmingly situated workhouse on the banks of the river. I do not suppose that in Galicia they have old age pensions, but as a last home few places could rival in situation this white-walled building on the grassy slopes of Umia. The romantic and the practical are typified just outside Caldas, where, amid impressive rocky scenery, the Umia thunders in a fine cascade. It is fascinating to sit or stand on the rocks and watch the waterfall and listen to its roar; and for those who do not greatly appreciate the charms of nature there is at the side of the falls a modern structure with a thorough electrical equipment which is reminiscent of Niagara's power-houses, and supplies light for many miles around. The country is beautiful and varied, and from Cuntis very fine views are obtainable, although in this respect the neighbourhood has not the same attractions as some of the hills near Vigo. From the hills at Cuntis a view of the Portuguese mountains is obtainable; but most of the tourists to Galicia will postpone their inspection of the Portuguese landmarks until they are nearer the frontier. Easily reached from Villa Garcia is El Padron, a town of 10,000 inhabitants, at the head of the bay, and full of historical associations. El Padron (meaning "The Saint") is a very ancient little city--older, indeed, than Santiago, and also imperishably connected with St. James, for it was here that his body was landed on being brought from the Holy Land, and El Padron formerly shared some of Santiago's glory as a city for pilgrims, but is no longer a pilgrim city, nor, as it used to be, a sanctuary for criminals flying from what passed for justice. Borrow visited El Padron, and found it a flourishing little town with an extensive commerce, sending small vessels not only across the Bay of Biscay, but also as far as London River. He dwelt with satisfaction on a story which he heard in Santiago concerning El Padron skippers and the Scriptures. The English had presented Bibles to the skippers, who happened to be in London, and on their return to Galicia it was observed that these enterprising mariners had become very dogmatic in argument concerning Holy Writ. Finally the cause of their wisdom was discovered, and the Testaments were taken from them and burnt, and the disputants were punished and reprimanded. St. James preached at El Padron, and on a spot where he spoke a hermitage was built to which pilgrims went in the days when the town attracted them. According to the legend, when the Apostle's body reached the town the miraculous boat containing it found anchorage at the base of a Roman statue, an event which is commemorated in El Padron's coat of arms. Though there is not much in El Padron to induce the visitor to stay there, yet the town's situation and romantic history make it an attractive excursion centre. Pontevedra, however, a few miles from Villa Garcia, offers many inducements to the stranger to linger. The arcaded streets are full of charm and history and many of the old houses are admirably preserved. There are about 20,000 inhabitants in Pontevedra, and, like all other Galicians, they get into the open air whenever they can and disport themselves on the well-wooded Alameda, or, in the season, at the bull-ring, a building which is a conspicuous feature of the town. There is good hotel and _café_ accommodation, and many quaint sights are to be witnessed. But the most pronounced memory of Pontevedra is the _sereno's_ haunting night-chant, of which I have written elsewhere. The vessel in which Columbus crossed the Atlantic and discovered America was built at Pontevedra. She was named the _Santa Maria_, and was decked. The _Pinta_ and the _Niña_, her little consorts, were open, without decks amidships, but with high bows and sterns, where cabins were built for the accommodation of the crews. Some of the ships of the Armada were assembled at Pontevedra before the complete fleet sailed for England. On the Carril road stand the ruins of the Convent of San Domingo. The building has been turned into an open-air archæological museum, but enough of the original structure remains to give a good idea of the convent in the days of its glory. It was here that, rather more than a century ago, a desperate battle took place between the French troops and the peasants. The convent was founded in the thirteenth century, and the ivy-clad remains, on a typical sunny day, make a beautiful object to inspect. Pontevedra has its modern institutions, like Vigo, but the arcaded streets and the ancient houses are the great charms. The Church of San Francisco is a prominent feature of the town, occupying a commanding position, and a very pleasant walk across the bridge to the other side of the water may be taken, a point being reached from which a striking view is obtained. The country around Pontevedra is remarkably picturesque and fertile, and has long been famous for its grapes and oranges and citrons. In Borrow's day the town was surrounded by a wall of hewn stone, of which parts remain, although there is nothing left of the turrets which formerly stood for purposes of defence and observation. The river Lerez runs into Pontevedra Bay, and a few miles outside the town, forming an extensive enclosure, is an estate, with the Hotel Mendez Nuñez, where the Lerez waters are bottled for home and foreign use. In the summer time marine excursions are run from Pontevedra to the estate, the river being a pleasant and enjoyable mode of travel. At that season the stream is low and placid, but in time of storm and heavy rains the Lerez swells rapidly and becomes a roaring torrent. The Lerez rises in the Candan Sierra, and in those wild and lonely hills the wolf still roams, although he is seldom seen. In this region, as well as on other parts of the coast, the Benediction of the Sea is celebrated on May Day. At that festival the parish priests bless the waters which give such a rich harvest of fish, and the fishermen and fishwives in large numbers share in the religious ceremony. There is one attraction of outstanding interest to visitors to Arosa Bay, and that is the island of La Toja. This beautiful little place stands like a gem in the sheltered nook on the south side of the bay, and from the mainland, the Grove Peninsula, only two or three hundred yards distant, it presents a scene which is almost fairy-like in its enchantment. Most of the island is covered with pine-trees, and nearly in the centre is a walk, from shore to shore, through pine plantations, whilst a boulevard flanked by pines runs almost parallel with the walk. On every side there is the entrancing Galician landscape, and that placid stretch of clear blue water which is one of the British Fleet's most famous foreign anchorages. If you go from Villa Garcia by the steam-yacht belonging to the hotel of La Toja there is an hour's run across the bay between the mainland and the Isle of Arosa, in sheltered waters--you may, if you choose, take your own Spanish fishing-boat, and your own time--or half an hour's ferry from the old-world village of Cambados, with its three-cornered castle. If you do not favour sail or steam there is the road from Villa Garcia to Cambados, through plane-lined avenues and fascinating scenery, across the strikingly impressive long Bridge of the Ferry over the Umia. Skirting the shores of the cove in which La Toja nestles, you reach a point from which a boat can row in a few minutes to the island, and from which it will soon be possible to drive or walk by a fine bridge that is well advanced towards completion. Between the pine-woods and the sea a great white building rises, looking in the distance something like a Moorish palace. This is the Grand Hotel, built of stone, brick, and iron, and facing the sea and a delightful frontage which has been called the Grand Avenue. Already the structure is of imposing dimensions, but it is rapidly being enlarged, and when finished will contain no fewer than 750 bedrooms, ranging from the ordinary comfortable sleeping apartment to the luxurious room which forms one of a suite, with private bathing accommodation. Galicia is advancing rapidly, and one of the most notable signs of the country's progress is the development of such an institution as the Grand Hotel at La Toja. A famous Spanish architect designed the buildings, and one of the most renowned artists in Spain was commissioned to execute some mural decorations in the interior. Bizarre and unique paintings on the walls are amongst the first things that command the visitor's attention. It is strange, in such a quiet and sequestered spot, to enter an hotel which in its domestic appliances, decorations, bathing and sanitary arrangements, and situation can hold its own with any kindred institution in Europe--indeed, an eminent medical authority declared recently that the island and its hotel are unrivalled even on the Riviera. There are hot and cold springs at La Toja, the supply from which is so copious that a daily output of mineral waters is possible of nearly 700,000 gallons. From the mud emanating from the hot springs and the salts extracted _in vacuo_ from the waters a very efficacious soap is made, and this is one of La Toja's best-known products. Tourists in growing numbers, especially from Spain and South America, visit La Toja yearly during the season, which is brilliant and wonderfully recuperative, for, in addition to the beauty and health-giving qualities of the island's situation, the natural mineral waters, muds, and salts have established themselves in the medical world as remarkable therapeutic agents. Sufferers from even the most acute forms of skin and kindred diseases have benefited so miraculously from visits to the island that La Toja might almost seem to be, in the estimation of some people, a second Lourdes. So thorough and complete are the arrangements that it is not necessary for the ordinary tourist to see anything of the curative methods which are adopted, and many visitors make prolonged stays without being aware of the existence of the purely medicinal aspect of La Toja. Sportsmen at La Toja find in the wide sweep of hill and dale and sea and river every chance of satisfying gun and rod. Plover, snipe, and wild duck are amongst the bags, and trout is good and plentiful. Wild boar is to be had in the neighbouring sierras, and it sometimes figures in the _menu_ at La Toja. I crossed from Cambados to the island in a little Spanish fishing-boat, and a revolver shot, fired by a Galician in the craft, sent a swarm of wild birds skyward in a cloud. Not the least of La Toja's glories are the gorgeous sunsets--pictures so wondrous that at least one traveller returns each year for the special purpose of enjoying them. There are fishing, shooting, and sailing expeditions in abundance, and while some members of a party of visitors may be enjoying these outings others are quietly undergoing a cure as a result of treatment by La Toja products. There are many other attractions and amusements on the island for visitors, amongst them being tennis, croquet, and other English games seldom found in Spanish resorts, and in addition excellent nine-hole golf-links have been laid out and are now available for players. These are the only links in Spain, where the game has been practically unknown. [Illustration: THE TORRE DE HÉRCULES, CORUNNA] [Illustration: A ROAD IN THE HILLS] CHAPTER X CORUNNA AND ITS HERO A century has passed since Sir John Moore, mortally wounded on the heights of Corunna, was carried from the battlefield and buried on the ramparts. Corunna to-day is a busy, thriving seaport, and has much that will attract the visitor's attention. There are the quaint old twisted streets, typical of Galician towns, where you may imagine yourself back in the days of that immense Armada which sailed from the deep, wide harbour to vanquish England, and can picture Drake's swoop on the Galician coast ten years after the British navy had shattered the fleet which had been so proudly called Most Happy and Invincible. When the Armada left Lisbon it consisted of nearly 130 ships, with an aggregate tonnage of 58,000, carrying 2400 guns, about 20,000 soldiers, 8000 mariners, and over 2000 rowers--30,000 in all. Some of the ships proved leaky and were badly found, and owing to heavy weather the Armada was forced to put into Corunna for shelter. Enormous quantities of provisions had been thrown overboard because they were bad, and there was not enough water to drink. Pestilence, too, had carried off many of the sailors and soldiers. The huge fleet finally left Corunna on July 12, 1588, and by that time death and sickness had reduced the strength of the fighters to 24,000. Modern Corunna has its great tobacco factory, employing several thousands of women and girls, fine ornamental grounds, statues, and public buildings. These may command only passing notice, though greater attention will be given to the mule-drawn trams and the diligences which run regularly between Corunna and the surrounding towns and villages. Nothing can more clearly give an idea of what primitive travelling in Galicia means than to watch the diligence from Ferrol, Finisterre, or Santiago drive up with jingling bells and cracking of whips, to put down weary passengers, and, the horses having been unharnessed, to see the oxen draw the coach to its departure-place. There are to be seen, too, the _miradores_, glazed frontages for which Corunna is celebrated. These vast stretches of windows protect the houses from the strong winds in winter and form bright and warm interior verandahs. Most of the modern houses in Galicia have these glass-protected verandahs in the top story, where, in winter, the greater part of the inhabitants' spare time is spent. The glazed exterior allows the heat of the sun to be retained, and compensates for the absence of fires. Corunna differs from other Galician towns in having not only many more modern buildings, but also in providing all the stories with the _miradores_. The streets are lively and busy, and some of the shops are very interesting. There are several good _cafés_. There is the harbour, with its shipping, the magnificent scenery, the cemetery--worth a visit by those who wish to compare the Spanish mode of burial with the English--and the famous lighthouse which is called La Torre de Hércules. Corunna exports great quantities of onions and sardines, chiefly to America, and in the streets you may see enormous loads of the vegetable being taken to the quays for shipment. But to the ordinary visitor the ramparts and the heights of Elviña are the great attractions, for on the one Sir John Moore is buried, and on the other he made his last stand in that retreat which for sufferings and horror was not equalled by any of the Peninsular campaigns. It was at Corunna that the Duke of Wellington, then Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Wellesley, landed on July 20, 1808, when he entered the Peninsula to begin and see to a triumphant finish the war which lasted six years and gave to England an unparalleled series of victories. The French by that time were masters of Spain, and it was Wellesley's purpose to free the country from Napoleon's tyranny. The Spaniards had risen against their conquerors, and Wellesley found that "no one dared to show that he was a friend to the French." The Gallegans, brave and patriotic, clamoured for arms, and Wellesley furnished the Junta of Galicia with £200,000 and promised the immediate despatch of military stores. He sailed from Corunna on the night of the 21st, and joined the fleet of transports and convoys next day. On the 24th he reached Oporto in the _Crocodile_. A few days later the troops landed, "each with one shirt and one pair of shoes besides those on them, combs, razor, and a brush, which are to be packed up in their greatcoats." The men landed with three days' bread and two days meat, cooked. Three weeks after leaving Corunna Wellesley won his first victory over the French, at Roleia, with a loss on his own side of nearly 500 killed and wounded and on the French of 1500. The opening shots of the war were fired by riflemen of the 60th, now the King's Royal Rifle Corps, and the 95th, now the Rifle Brigade. The Rifle Corps has no fewer than sixteen Peninsular battle honours, won by the famous 5th, or Jäger, Battalion--foreigners, mostly Germans, who were in British pay. Since its origin in 1800 the Rifle Brigade has been composed entirely of British troops. Throughout the war Wellington found these riflemen of the utmost service, and he frequently spoke of them in terms of praise. Moore's retreat to Corunna was a tragedy from start to finish. Spain was in what appeared to be a hopeless state, and of all its provinces none was more severely harassed than Galicia. War had impoverished an already poor and burdened country, and there were none of the resources available which are needed for the successful conduct of a great campaign. In 1807 the French army entered Spain, and early in the following year Madrid was captured by the conquering legions of the Emperor. For a few weeks only the visitors remained in peaceful possession; then there was a rising in the capital, which began the long and bloody fight to master Bonaparte. On May 2, 1808, the French troops and the Spanish populace came into conflict, and for nearly three hours there was incessant firing and slaughter, and many acts were done which have become famous amongst many famous deeds. A musket had been fired from one of the houses, and a mameluke dashed into the building. He was slain by a beautiful girl, and she, in turn, was instantly cut down by the assailant's comrades. A huntsman, who was celebrated as a marksman, fired twenty-eight cartridges against the French, bringing down a man with each. He maintained his deadly fire until his ammunition was finished; then, arming himself with a dagger, he hurled himself against his foes, and was killed as he struck at them. That outrage in Madrid let loose the pent-up passions of the Spaniards. They had, in the lonely hills and valleys of their country, many chances of retaliation, and they showed no mercy to the Frenchmen who became their prisoners. Even the sick and the medical attendants were butchered, and some were done to death with incredible barbarity. A French officer was returning from a peaceful mission into Portugal, unconscious of the fact that hostilities had broken out. He was unarmed and unattached to a military force; but he was a Frenchman, and that was looked upon by his captors as proof sufficient for his doom. The Spaniards seized and mutilated him; then, having secured him, still living, between two planks, they sawed him asunder. In the autumn of 1808 Moore had taken command of the army in Portugal, and had marched into Spain to drive out Napoleon, who had sworn that he himself would become the king of that country. Unexpectedly encountering overwhelming forces under Marshal Soult, Moore recognised that his only hope of salvation lay in retreat, and accordingly he resolved to fall back on Vigo and embark his army in the transports which had been ordered to assemble there to meet him. Circumstances compelled him to alter his plans, and finally to resolve to get on board ship at Corunna. Moore had rapidly covered 400 miles on his way from Portugal to Spain, and found himself in Galicia. There he learned that his allies, the Spaniards, had been routed and dispersed. Anxious to avoid confusion and unnecessary calls on an impoverished country, he entreated the Spaniards not to fall back in the same direction as himself; but they did not accede to his wishes, and the result was a hopeless overcrowding of the houses on the line of retreat, and a call on the resources of the land which could not be met. Officers and men who fought in the Peninsula and shared in the sufferings of that appalling retreat to Corunna have put on record vivid pictures of the terrible state of Moore's army. When he reached Benavente he sent General Crauford with 3000 men by way of Orense, nearly a hundred and forty miles away, which offered a shorter but harder road to the coast. Moore's purpose was to prevent the French from securing an advantage over him by employing a light column. He himself took the longer but better road which led through Astorga and Villa Franca. At Astorga he was joined by Baird's division, and Moore ordered the destruction of everything which could check his retreat. The rainy season had been succeeded by heavy falls of snow, for Moore was high in the hills, and the cold was intense, while the roads and fields by which he had to march were almost impassable. By that time the condition of the army was pitiful. Typhus fever swept through the ranks, and the roads were dotted with dead and dying men and women and children. In those days women were allowed to accompany British soldiers to war, and Moore had even a larger proportion than usual with him. The privations of the women and children remain as the most terrible feature of a retreat which stands almost unparalleled for suffering and loss. There was no ammunition for the guns, none for the muskets, and the soldiers were almost unshod and in rags. In this respect there was little difference between the pursuing French and the retreating English. At the beginning of December Moore had 20,000 men under him, and he was relentlessly followed by an enemy in overwhelming force. Men and horses fell and died on the march, and day by day the flying army had had its strength reduced by death and desertion. Whole regiments forsook their colours and defied authority, in spite of the punishment of death which was imposed for disobedience and drinking. Whenever a wine-house was reached the soldiers raided it, and forgot their misery in debauchery. The main body of the army kept a day's march ahead of the reserve and the rearguard. On New Year's morning 1809 the main body reached Bembibre, and immediately assailed the wine-shops. So hopelessly drunk were many of the troops when the rearguard came up that it was impossible to arouse them to a sense of their peril from the French cavalry who were harassing their rear, and they had to be left behind in great numbers. By that time the opposing armies had been marching within sight of each other for many miles, and the French horsemen swept on the drunken mob and butchered it. Soult's dragoons thundered in amongst the helpless crowd of British troops and shrieking women and children, and without distinction of sex or age put them to the sword. A few soldiers, mangled and bleeding, escaped from the massacre, and Moore ordered that they should parade through the ranks and show their wounds--a stern warning to the army of the effect of drink and disobedience. Believing that Astorga would be a resting-place, the retreating army had kept up something like order, and had been inspired by the hope of battle; but there was no rest. Again everything that was burdensome was abandoned, and the terrible withdrawal was continued. "From that hour," said Lord Londonderry, "we no longer resembled a British army. There was still the same bravery in our ranks, but it was only at moments, when the enemy was expected to come on, that our order and regularity returned, and except in that single point we resembled rather a crowd of insubordinate rebels in full flight before victorious soldiers than a corps of British troops moving in the presence of an enemy." Moore himself, in the last despatch he ever wrote, said he could not have believed that such complete demoralisation could have overtaken a British army. Marvellous distances were traversed, notwithstanding the difficult country and the bitter weather. Villa Franca was reached on January 2, after sixty miles had been covered in two days. One march alone represented forty miles, but that was continued by night as well as day, and was marked by the abandonment of the dying and the dead. The troops dropped by whole sections on the road and died. "Not men only," wrote Lord Londonderry, "but women and children were subject to this miserable fate. Moore's army had carried along with it more than the too large proportion of women allotted by the rules of the service to armies in the field, and these poor wretches now heightened the horror of passing events by a display of suffering even more acute than that endured by their husbands. Some were taken in labour on the road, and in the open air, amid showers of sleet and snow, gave birth to infants which, with their mothers, perished as soon as they had seen the light. Others, carrying, some of them, two children on their backs, toiled on, and, when they came to look to the condition of their burdens, they would probably find one or both frozen to death." [Illustration: ELVIÑA, WHERE SIR JOHN MOORE WAS MORTALLY WOUNDED] [Illustration: THE HOUSE, MODERNISED, IN WHICH SIR JOHN MOORE DIED] Guns, waggons, and even treasure were abandoned on that fatal road. Dollars to the value of twenty-five thousand pounds, which were in two bullock-carts, could not be drawn any farther by the exhausted oxen, and the casks containing the coins were stove in, and the money thrown over a precipice. Some of the ragged, starving soldiers lagged behind to seize the money, and perished either by the French sabres or the winter's cold. Sick and wounded were abandoned in the waggons; and at last, on January 11, the worn and famishing survivors of the flying army reached the village of Elviña, on the heights of Corunna, about two miles from the town. Moore went into Corunna and took up lodgings in a little house facing the bay, and directed the embarkation of his fugitives in the transports, which arrived from Vigo on the 14th. The French did not molest the embarkation for two days, but on the 16th they advanced, 20,000 strong, to assault the 14,000 who alone remained of Moore's worn-out troops. He had done his best to bring his sorry remnant to the coast, and he had triumphed. Now, at the end of his retreat, he showed the superior French force that as a fighter he was as dangerous as ever. He destroyed bridges and ammunition, and blew up 4000 barrels of gunpowder--an explosion which wrecked all the windows in Corunna--and used every artifice he knew to prevent either his men or his _matériel_ from falling into the hands of his foe. It seemed as if even now, at the end of his tribulation, the British chief would get away from Spain; but Soult forced him at the very last to give battle, and on January 16, 1809, the worn and harassed leader, from a piece of rocky ground at Elviña, just beyond the village, directed the battle which, beginning at about two o'clock in the afternoon, continued furiously till darkness fell. Time after time the Frenchmen charged the shattered remnant of the hero's force; but as often as they advanced they were driven back and broken by the men who, with all their faults of drink and insubordination, knew how to fight and conquer. All through the terrible retreat the British soldier's prayer had been for a battle, and now that his supplication was answered he proved himself a true son of his country. Not even Soult's genius and the valour of his overwhelming forces could master the stubborn, sullen troops who held the little church and streets of Elviña. Napoleon's veterans were driven back, and when the day gave place to night his famous marshal knew that the army which he had harassed and pursued for so many bitter days would escape. Twice, with frantic valour, the French had taken the village, and twice they had been hurled out of it at the point of the bayonet by the Guards, Highlanders, and linesmen under Moore. He had covered his amazing retreat with a triumphant victory; but in the very moment of success he was struck down by a cannon-ball, which shattered his left shoulder. Moore fell from his horse, his arm hanging only by a piece of skin, and his breast bared to the lungs. Some soldiers took him up and put him, conscious still, into a blanket, and bore him from the field of battle to his lodgings. He knew that the French were beaten, and, turning to an old friend, he said: "You know that I always wished to die this way." He lingered for a few hours at his lodgings, and just before he passed away he murmured: "I hope the people of England will be satisfied. I hope my country will do me justice." It was almost a repetition of the glorious death of Nelson in Trafalgar Bay, 600 miles below Corunna, on the Atlantic Coast, only three years earlier. The embarkation was still in progress and the French guns were booming as the valiant British rearguard filed in silence to the beach. The victorious general died while the transports were receiving the troops, and, wrapped only in his military cloak, he was borne by men of the 9th Foot, now the Norfolk Regiment, to the hastily dug grave on the ramparts, where he was buried, his farewell volleys coming from the distant artillery. The officers' silk sashes with which the body of the beloved commander was lowered into the grave, and the prayer-book used at the hasty funeral service, are preserved in the Royal United Service Institution Museum, Whitehall. When Moore was first laid to rest the ramparts were little more than a wilderness. Soon after the burial the body was exhumed and placed where it now is. The grave is made of Galician granite, the urn above is of white stone, and common stone was used in the construction of the enclosure. The British victors sailed from Corunna, having spiked their guns and buried them in the sand, and when the French at last entered the town even the sick and wounded had been taken safely off to sea. Corunna cost Moore nearly a thousand men. The French suffered far more heavily. During the retreat the British casualties were 6000, including deserters and stragglers, of whom 800 escaped into Portugal. Three hundred men were drowned in the wrecks of two transports off the English coast, and many died of disease after landing. Moore wished to be buried near the spot where he died, and his grave is only a short walk from his last quarters. The brave and noble Soult paid homage to the hero who had perished in the hour of triumph. A French gun is planted, muzzle downward, in each corner of the enclosure, and palm-trees rise gracefully from the soil. A few yards away you may look through the ruined embrasures and see the heights of Elviña and the Atlantic into which the survivors of the great retreat were sailing while their fallen leader was being lowered to his resting-place upon Corunna's ramparts. [Illustration: SIR JOHN MOORE'S TOMB AT CORUNNA] [Illustration: CORUNNA BAY, FROM THE RAMPARTS] [Illustration: MAP OF GALICIA] INDEX ALFONSO XII., 59 Alps, The, compared with Galician Hills, 27 _Ambrose_, The R.M.S., 51 Animals, Wild, in Galicia, 27 _Antony_, The R.M.S., 37 Arcos, Balanced stone of, 148 Argentina and Gallegans, 18 Armada, The Spanish, and Corunna, 14, 25 Arosa Bay, 15, 167 Art, Works of, in Galicia, 43 BAYONA, 118 Betanzos, 26, 116, 130 Booth Steamship Co., Ltd., The, 47, 91, 117, 130 Borrow and Vigo, 67 his remarks on robbers, 105 his advice with regard to Spanish, 107 his description of Ferrol, 112 _Bouillabaisse_, 36 Breakfast in Galicia, 35 CAAVEIRO, Valley of, 116 _Caballero_, The, 33, 38, 53, 136 Caldas, 169 _Caldo Gallego_, 36 Cambados, 174 Cangas, The fishing-town of, 61 ghastly festival at, 62 Castillo del Castro, 55 Castle Mos, 59 Cattle markets, 41 Censer, The Giant, 84 Cies Islands, The, 51, 57, 67 Civil Guard, The, 32, 105 Clavijo, The battle of, 26 Climate, 9 Clubs in Galicia, 47 Columbus and Galicia, 13, 25, 172 Commercial travellers, 136 Convent, A, 168 Cortegada, 15, 168 Corunna, Fishwives of, 32 Corunna, Modern, 182 Moore's retreat to, 184 privations during the retreat, 184 battle of, 191 losses during the retreat, 194 Cottages of Galicia, 41 Cuntis, 169 Cycling, 138 DANISH butter, Use of, in Galicia, 38 Déjeuner in Galicia, 36 Diligence, The, 127 Drake and Galicia, 79, 96 Dwarfs, Dance of, 90 ELVIÑA, 183, 191 Emigration from Galicia, 7, 65 FERROL, description of, 112 British enterprise at, 114 Finisterre, Battles off, 111 Fish and vegetable markets, 53 Flowers in Galicia, 9 Ford, Richard, 26 Frontier, The, 120 Funeral, A Russian sailor's, 64 a peasant's, 163 GALICIA an historic ground for Englishmen, 13 the progress of, 15 hotel accommodation in, 20 the coast-line of, 25 floods in, 27 security of travel in, 33 chambermaids and waiters of, 34 Gallegans, The, 6 shyness of, 17 character of, 18 their martial valour, 19 their alleged stupidity, 19 food and drink of the, 29 Gallegans and Portuguese farming, 16 Gate of Glory, The, 81 Giants, Dance of, 90 Gold, Annual gift of, by King of Spain, 89 Golf-links, 177 HAIR, strange mode of dressing the, 160 INNS of Galicia, 103 Ireland, Galicia compared with, 18 JUNTA of Galicia, The, 184 KING'S Royal Rifle Corps, The, 184 LAGER beer, Spanish, 37 La Toja, The Island of, 15, 174 the Grand Hotel at, 16, 175 the mud and springs of, 176 Lerez, The River, 173 Londonderry, Lord, and Corunna, 189, 190 Los Dominicos, Convent of, 122 MADRID, The rising in, 185 Maize, drying of, 30 maize-bread, 8, 29 maize-barns, 30 Marin, 162 Mass, High, celebration of, 84 Miño, The River, 1, 4, 5, 27 the bridge over the, 120 _Miradores_ at Corunna, The, 182 Mondariz, the hotel at, 16, 145 the waters of, 144 new pump-room at, 147 Moore, Sir John, death of, 192 burial of, 193 Moors, The, and Galicia, 26 Motor-cars, 133 NIGHT-WATCHMEN, The, 31 ORENSE, 123 PARDO BAZAN, The Countess of, 17 Phoenicians, The, and Galicia, 26 Photography, 44 Pigeon-cots, 30 Pigs in Galicia, 40 Pilgrims and Freebooters, 11 Policemen of Galicia, The, 32, 33 Ponies, 129 Pontevedra, 12, 13 the _sereno_ of, 31 the people of, 172 Porriño, 104 Press of Galicia, The, 66 Puenteareas, 66 Puentedeume, 116 Pulteney's expedition, 114 RAILWAYS in Galicia, 129 Ramallosa, 118 Rande, The Strait of, 58 Redondela, Bridges at, 65 Ribadavia, 122 Roleia, The Battle of, 184 Romans, The, and Galicia, 26 Roman ploughs, 53 Roman remains, 168 Rosary, The Festival of Our Lady of the, 86 SAINT JAMES and El Padron, 10, 171 killed by Herod, 71 his staff, 84 and military stronghold, 113 Salvatierra, 122 San Benito, The village of, 101 San Domingo, The Convent of, at Pontevedra, 172 San Simon, The Island of, 56 Santiago, The road of, 10 the streets of, 12 scallop-shells at, 12, 95 founding of, 71 pilgrims to, 72, 91 the bells of, 73, 90 history of, 74 students at, 75 the Cathedral of, 76 the treasury, 77 St. James's figure, 79 the _compostela_, 80 the sepulchre of St. James, 81 the Gate of Glory, 81 the giant censer, 84 the Church of San Martin, 86 St. James's Festival, 88 the Royal Hospital, 92 the Cardinal's Palace, 92 Sardines, 54 Messrs. Barreras and the sardine industry, 63 Scenery in Galicia, 149 Scottish Highlands, Galicia compared with, 20 _Sereno_, The, 31 Seven Sisters, The, 52 Smoking-carriages, 131 smoking in Galicia, 43 Sobroso, The Castle of, 149 Soult, Marshal, 186, 191, 194 Sport in Galicia, 27, 176 Street of the Hundred Maidens, The, 26 Sunday evening in Galicia, 102 TEA, The River, 146, 148 Telegraphy in Galicia, 42 Thackeray and _Bouillabaisse_, 36 Tourists and Galicia, 39 Trains, slowness of Galician, 132 Travel, security of, 105 Treasure ships and Vigo, 57 Tuy, 4, 119 UMIA, The River, 170 VALENÇA, 1, 3, 119, 121 Vigo, 67 Galicia's chief portal, 52 the Alameda, 54 the municipality of, 55 warships at, 63 Villa Garcia, 167 Villeneuve, Admiral, 115 Vineyards, granite posts in, 28 WAITER, The Galician, 37 Washing in Galicia, 161 Wellington and Corunna, 183 Wines of Galicia, The, 46 Women of Galicia as workers, 156 Printed by BALLANTYNE & CO. LIMITED Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, London 
45471	----	Every attempt has been made to replicate the original as printed. Although some of the unusual spellings of the original have been retained (i.e. Cotemporary, Portugueze, encreases, Uraguay, vinilla, recal), several typographical errors have been corrected; a list follows the text. (etext transcriber's note) THE HISTORY OF THE REVOLUTIONS OF PORTUGAL. BY THE ABBÉ VERTOT. CONTINUED TO THE PRESENT TIME, _With historical and critical Notes, a chronological Table of the Kings of Portugal, and a Description of_ BRAZIL. BY LOUIS DE BOISGELIN, CHEVALIER DE MALTHE. _Hos Viriathus agit, Lusitanumque Remotis Extractum Lustris, primo Viriathus in ævo Nomen Romanis factum mox nobile Damnis._ SILIUS Ital. _de Bell. Pun._ Lib. 3. LONDON: Printed by and for R. Juigné, No. 17, Margaret-street, Cavendish-square. Sold by LONGMAN, HURST, REES, and ORME, Paternoster-row. 1809. PREFACE. The study of modern history has been, during a long course of years, greatly neglected in the generality of public schools; but it now begins to be regarded (as indeed it ought always to have been) as an object of the greatest importance. In England, particularly, it constitutes one of the principal branches of both public and private education. The abbé de Vertot's History of the Revolutions of Portugal has been always esteemed equally entertaining and instructive; and as such more especially calculated for the use of young people. The late events in that country has made it doubly interesting, and nothing now seems wanting to complete so excellent a performance, but to continue the narrative to the present period. This, however, if accurately given, would greatly exceed the limits we propose to ourselves in this little Work: to others, therefore, must we leave so laborious a task, and merely content ourselves with presenting to the public the _annals of Portugal_, from the war which the Portugueze term that of the _acclamation_, to the battle of Veimera. We cannot even pretend to take notice of several of the principal events which happened during that space of time, though we have been particularly attentive in investigating _those_ which have given rise _to_, and ended _in_ revolutions. We have also endeavoured to give a just idea of the character of the different kings of Portugal, with the talents of the ministers who have defended the royal authority, and the qualities of those who have attacked it. In regard to the revolution which lately threatened the total annihilation of the throne of Portugal; the events which occasioned it, and those which have happily stopped its progress, are so recent, and so known, that we thought it needless to enter upon the subject. Such has always been our respect for Vertot, that we have never presumed to interrupt the course of his narrative; except, indeed, the very few notes we have ventured to add, may be liable to such an interpretation. This celebrated author having passed over in silence many of the monarchs who reigned in Portugal, previous to the revolution he so particularly described, we have added a chronological and historical Table of the different kings from Henry of Burgundy, count of Portugal, to John the IVth, duke of Braganza. We have likewise joined an accurate, historical and critical Catalogue, not only of the works of the greater part of the authors quoted by Vertot in his notes, (whose _names_ he only mentions) but of all the most important books since published relative to Portugal and its colonies. The recent departure of the family of Braganza from Lisbon, and their arrival in Brazil, has called for the attention, and interested the minds of every one. We have therefore been tempted to give a slight sketch of a country which is now become an object of no small curiosity: to which we have added, for the satisfaction of those readers who may be desirous of a more minute description, a list of the principal authors who have made this beautiful, though remote part of the new world, the particular object of their attention. AN ACCURATE, HISTORICAL, AND CRITICAL CATALOGUE _Of the principal Works published relative to the History of Portugal._ _Résendius_ (Andrew, or Louis Andrew). John the IIId appointed him to superintend the education of his two brothers. He published two works, which are much esteemed: the first entitled, _de Antiquitatibus Lusitaniæ_, (printed in folio at Evora, in 1593); and the second, _Deliciæ Lusitano-Hispanicæ_. His brother Garcias published a folio History of John the IIId, in Portugueze. _Vasconcellos_ (Antonio) has published different works. One of the most esteemed is entitled, _Anacephalosis id est summa Capita actorem regum Lusitaniæ_. _Texeira_ (Joseph) embraced the cause of the king, don Antonio, and followed him to France, where he was greatly favoured by Henry the IIId, and Henry the IVth. His work, called _Portugaliæ Ortu_, is not in very great repute. _Faria_ (de Sousa Emmanual) was born in 1610, and died in 1659. His narratives are more eloquent than historical; he exhausts himself in harangues and reflexions, treating the greatest and the most trifling events with the same degree of importance. His principal characters are always _heroes_, and never _men_. His most celebrated work is divided into three parts; the first, containing the ancient history of Lusitania; the second, the conquests made by the Portugueze in Asia, and the eastern parts of Africa; and the third, the wars which took place in that part of Africa which is opposite to Andalusia, and the kingdom of Algarva. This work is curious and accurate, and has been translated into Italian, French, and English. The same author has published a history of Portugal, terminating at the reign of cardinal Henry. It has gone through several editions; the best of which was printed in folio, in 1730, and is continued to a later epoch. _Brito_ (Bernard de) a cistercian monk, historiographer of Portugal, was born in 1569, and died in 1612. He published the _Monarchia Lusitana_, 7 vols. in folio, Lisbon, 1597, and 1612. This is a history of Portugal which goes back as far as count Henry, and is elegantly written. Father Antonio, and father Francisco Brandhamo, members of the same society, have continued this history to the reign of Alphonso the IIId. The two first volumes alone were written by Brito, who, however, was the author of the _Panegyrics of the Kings of Portugal, with their Portraits_; and also of the _Ancient Geography of Portugal_. There is likewise another _Brito_, (Francisco) who wrote _Guerra Brasilica_, in 2 vols. folio, printed at Lisbon in 1675. _Brandhamo_, and his continuator, have only given a description of the events which took place in Portugal from the usurpation of Philip the IId to the revolution, with the consequences which attended it in the reign of Philip the IVth. _Birago_, of the order of Malta, has written on the same subject. _Brandhamo_ wishing to adopt great simplicity of style, becomes very dry, and sinks into a mere newspaper writer; whilst _Birago_ writes with more spirit, his style is more equal, his reflexions lively and ingenious, and his characters and descriptions interesting. This work was translated, on its first appearance, into all the European languages. The works of Birago and Brandhamo, were originally in Italian, and tinctured with a degree of bombast, even in the most trifling relations. They likewise introduced _concettis_ (puns) on several occasions; than which nothing can be more ridiculous, particularly in history. _D'Eryceira_ (don Fernando Louis de Menesés, count) wrote _Portogallo restorado_, which contains the causes, progress, and consequences of the revolution, till the peace which Castille was forced to make with Portugal in 1668. This work is written in Portugueze, and with all the delicacy, strength, and energy of which that language is capable. He is sometimes, however, too minute, since he enters into particulars, which, though very interesting to his cotemporaries, and countrymen, are but little so to foreigners: his book may, therefore, more properly be termed a selection of excellent materials for writing a history, than a regular history in itself. The Foreign Journal for 1757 contains a catalogue of the numerous works of this author. _Alegrette_ (count de) wrote the life of John the IId, in Latin, and in so pure and elegant a style, that an author of the Augustan age need not have blushed to acknowledge. His mode of writing is compact, though clear; copious, but not diffuse. During the whole course of the work, his principal heroes are constantly in view, whilst the characters and different personages who play a part in the scene are perfectly natural and varied. _Barros_ (John de) born in 1496, died in 1570, was an author who was reputed the _Livy_ of Portugal. He lived at the period when the Portugueze first extended their conquests into Asia. His style is simple, but he does not possess that noble and nervous simplicity of expression by which d'Alegrette is so particularly distinguished. Barros's work is divided into decades, the whole of which, has never been printed. The greater part of the authors who have written on the Indies, since Barros, have merely translated his work, and that in a very inferior style. They are indeed very poor copies of a tolerably good original. Possevin, and the president de Thou, are warm in their encomiums on Barros, whilst la Boulaye le Goux represents him as a paltry scribbler, whose history of Asia and India is not worth the pains of reading. Both the praise and censure are certainly much exaggerated: several authors, however, have continued this work, and likewise divided their continuation into decades. Barros published the 1st in 1552, and the second in 1563; the 4th never appeared till 1615, when it was published by the command of Philip the IIId, who gave orders for purchasing the manuscript from Barros's heirs. The succeeding decades, from the 5th to the 13th, are not written by Barros. The best edition of this work was printed at Lisbon, in 1736, in 3 vols. in folio. It has been translated into Spanish by Alphonso Ulloa. _Father du Tarry_, (a Jesuit) has copied less from Barros, than any of the authors who have treated on the same subject. His history of the East Indies contains several extraordinary and curious facts, of which Barros, either from ignorance or inattention, has never made mention. The principal subject of the Jesuit's history, is the progress of Christianity amongst the idolaters. This author wants order and taste; but his descriptions are lively, and his reflexions strong. _Lafitau_ (Joseph Francis) published _Histoire des Découvertes, et des Conquêtes des Portugais dans le nouveau Monde_. Printed at Paris, 1733, 2 vols. in quarto; and in 1734, 4 vols. duodecimo. This work is accurate, and not ill written: which is not the case with the history, by Abbé Raynal. _Mariana_ (John) died in 1634, aged 87. His history of Spain may be said not only to comprise that of Portugal, but that of the whole world. Notwithstanding the minute, and indeed sometimes inaccurate relations contained in his history of Spain, his imagination is so lively, fertile, and varied; his style so smooth and pithy, that he has ever been regarded one of the first writers of his time and nation. The best Spanish edition of this history is that of Madrid, 1698, 2 vols. in folio. _Quien de la Neufville_, born in 1647, died in 1728, wrote the history of Portugal, in 2 vols. quarto, published in 1700, by Anisson, royal printer. This work is carried on no farther than the year 1521. The author has neglected mentioning several very important facts, and taken but very slight notice of many others: his work, however, in other particulars, is an estimable one, and entitled him to a place in the academy of inscriptions in Paris; it also procured him a pension for life from the king of Portugal, of 1500 French livres. _La Clede_ (Mr. de) was secretary to the maréchal de Coigny. He published the _Nouvelle Histoire de du Portugal_, in 2 vols. quarto, in 1730; and the same work in 1735, in 9 vols. in duodecimo. This history finishes at the peace between the Portugueze and Spaniards in 1668: to which is added, a simple recapitulation of the principal facts taken place from that epoch to the year 1713. La Clede reproaches Mr. le Quien de la Neufville in his preface, with (as has been already mentioned) passing over, or slightly taking notice of several important circumstances. He also accuses the Abbé Vertot of having written his account of the celebrated revolution of 1640, more agreeably than faithfully. The greatest encomium we can possibly bestow on la Clede, is, that the Portugueze esteem his history of their country, the best which ever appeared in a foreign language. Those of our readers who wish to be more particularly acquainted with the authors who have written on Portugal, may consult _Méthode pour étudier l'Histoire_, of Langlet de Fresnoi, and likewise that volume of the universal history which treats of Portugal; the notes of which contain the names and works of those authors, from whose authority they have taken their facts. This history unfortunately terminates at the peace of Utrecht. Two works relative to the history of Portugal have lately been published by two authors of that country. The English, who have written their travels into Portugal, viz. Springel, Murphy and Link, have given some very curious accounts of that country, and their works are very deservedly esteemed. We also particularly recommend the perusal of Dumourier's _Etat du Portugal_; this book is, generally speaking, an excellent one; and we have consulted it on several occasions; it must, however, be read with caution; nor must the reader entirely trust even to the quarto edition, printed at Hamburgh, in 1797: since the author must now be too well acquainted with the English and their resources, to believe[1] "that the descent on England, so often prepared by the French government, and so often prevented by the gold and intrigues of the cabinet of St. James's, could not fail of success, if the French seriously attempted it; and that a peace alone can possibly ward off a blow, which must crush the English, and bring forward a revolution of the same nature as that which has taken place in France." The same author being likewise at this present moment equally, nay still more acquainted with the _generosity_ than with the _resources_ of the British nation, we flatter ourselves he will no longer be of opinion,[2] "that the English _insult even when they seem to oblige_;" and that he, however, will be the last who will verify what he advances, "_that their manner of conferring favours, has caused nothing but ingratitude_." * * * * * _Names of the principal Authors who have written on Brazil._ PORTUGUEZE. _Vandelli_ (Dominicus). Natural History. Botany. _Andrada_ (D.) Natural History. Mineralogy. Diamonds.[3] _Vasconcellos._ General History. _Bérredo_. General History. _Da Cunha de Azérido Continho_, bishop of Fernamburo. History, and Commerce with England. GERMANS. _Faber_ (Ulicus). General Description, and Travels. _Schmidel_ (Hulderivus). General Description, and Travels. _Staduis_ (Joanes). General History, and Travels. _Nicuhof_ (Johan). General Description, and Travels. _Shneider_ (Johan Gottlop). Natural History. Zoology. _Marcgraf_ (George). Saxon. Natural and General History. FRENCH. _Lérius_ (Joanes). General Description, and Travels. _Condamine_ (Charles Marie de la). Partial Description, and Travels. _Froger_ (F.) Partial Description, and Travels. DUTCH. _Baro_ (Roulex). Partial Description, and Travels. _Piso_ (Guileilmus). Natural History. Botany. ENGLISH. _Knivet._ General Description, and Travels. _Lindley_ (Thomas). Partial Description, and Travels. _L'Histoire générale des Voyages_, contains several interesting particulars relative to Brazil. We have consulted the last edition, published by M. de la Harpe, for our account of animals and plants. Our division of Brazil is taken from Pinkerton, and more especially from Mantele; we have also the same authorities for what we say on the governments, population, towns and commerce of that country. D'Andrado's _Mémoire sur les Diamants de Brésil_, has been useful to us on the subject of the diamond mines; and we have likewise consulted l'abbé Raynal and Dumourier. A CHRONOLOGICAL HISTORICAL TABLE OF THE KINGS OF PORTUGAL, _From Henry, duke of Burgundy, count of Portugal, to John IV, duke of Braganza, and king of Portugal._ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- KINGS AND QUEENS | The Year of their | |-----------------------------| CHILDREN. |birth |mar- |coronat. |death| | |riage| | | --------------------+-------+-----+---------+-----+------------------- Henry of Burgandy, |towards|1094 |made |1112 |Alphonso 1st king count of Portugal. |1060 | or |count | |Theresa, Theresa, the naturel| |1095 |the day | | daughter of Alphonso| | |of his | |Urraca. the VI, king of | | |marriage.| | Castille. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Alphonso Enriquez, | | |1112 |1185 |Henry died young 1st king, reigned | | | | |Sancho, king, with his mother | | | | |John, Theresa till the | | | | |Mafalda, year 1128. | | | | | Mafalda, or | | | | |Urraca. Mathilda, daughter | | | | | of Amadeus, count of| | | | | Maurienne and Savoy.| | | | | | | | | | | | | | |Theresa, afterwards | | | | |called Mathilda. | | | | | | | | | | --------------------------------------------------------------- | ALLIANCES. | PRINCIPAL EVENTS. | --------------------------+--------------------------------------- | Henry was count of the canton Ferdinand Nuguez, a |of Lusitania, situated between the Portugueze nobleman. |Douro and the Minho. He fixed Bermond Paez, count |his residence at Guimaraez, on the of Trasmare, a natural |banks of the river Ave. Henry entered son. |Spain to assist Alphonso IV, |king of Castille and Leon, against |the Moors, who rewarded his services |by giving him his natural |daughter Theresa in marriage, together |with the county of Lusitania. |Henry afterwards took from |the Moors Viseo, Lamego, Braga |and Coimbra. | 1139, the battle of Campo Ourique, |since called Cabeza de Reis |or (head of the king). Alphonso, in The first wife of Alphonso|commemoration of the victory obtained II, king of Arragon. |that day over five Moorish Married first to Philip, |kings, added five small escutcheons count of Flandres, and |to his arms. secondly to Eudes III, | In 1143 or 1147, the states assembled duke of Burgundy. |at Lamego, confirmed the |title of king, which his army had |bestowed on the field of battle at |Campo Ourique, and established |the fundamental laws relative to the |succession of the crown. (See |Vertot.) | 1147 the institution (according to |some authors) of the two military |orders of the Wing and of Avis; the |latter was not worn as at present |till the year 1162. ___________________________________________________________________________ | | | The Year of their | KINGS AND QUEENS | | | | | CHILDREN. |birth |marriage | coronat | death | _______________________|______|_________|_________|________|_______________ | | | | | Sancho I. |1154 | | 1185 | 1211 |Alphonso, king, Donna Dulcia, daughter | | | | |Ferrand or | | | | La | Ferdinand, of Raymond Bérenger | | | | Clede. | IV, count of | | | | | Barcelona and king | | | | 1212 |Pedro, of Arragon. | | | | Fer- | | | | | reras. |Theresa | | | | |Mafalda or | | | | | Mathilda, | | | | |Sancha, abbess | | | | | of Lorvam, | | | | |Blanca, | | | | |Berengara. | | | | | Alphonso II, surnamed |1185 | 1207 | 1211 | 1223 |Sancho, king, _the fat_. | | | | |Alphonso, king, Urraca, daughter of | | | | |Ferdinand, Alphonso III, king of | | | | |Vincent, Castille. | | | | |Leonora. | | | | | Sancho II, surnamed |1208 | | 1223 | 1248 | _Sancho with the hood_,| | | | | because his mother had | | | | | dedicated him to St. | | | | | Augustine, and had | | | | | him educated amongst | | | | | the canons regular. | | | | | | | | | | Alphonso III. |1210 | 1238 | 1248 | 1279 |Denis, king, Mathilda Dammartin, | | | | |Alphonso, countess of Boulogne- | | | | |Ferdinand, on-the-sea, and widow | | | | |Vincent, of Philip Huspel, son | | | | |Blanch, of king Philip | | | | |Constance, Augustus. She was | | | | |Blanche. repudiated in 1254. | | | | | Beatrix de Gusman, | | | | | natural daughter of | | | | | the king of Castille. | | | | | ---------------------------+-------------------------------------- ALLIANCES. | PRINCIPAL EVENTS. ---------------------------+-------------------------------------- |1147 or 1148. Capture of Lisbon: |The royal residence was at |that time at Coimbra. | |1203, capture of Elvas. Joanna, daughter of | Baldwin, emperor of | Constantinople. | | Aurembiax, countess of | Urgel. | | Alphonso IX, k. of Leon. | Waldemar, king of Denmark. | |1217. A great victory gained |over the Moorish kings of Cordova |and Badajos. Waldemar, prince of | Denmark. | | He married, or as it is |1245. King Sancho was excommunicated generally thought, had |by the pope, and quitted for a concubine donna |the kingdom. He died in 1248, at Mencia, daughter of don |Toledo. Lopez Dias de Haro, by | donna Urraca, the natural | daughter of Alphonso III, | king of Castille. | |1267. The king of Castille gave |up the kingdom of Algarve to Alphonso, |of which, however, he still |continued the usufructuary. -----------------------+----------------------------------+----------------- | The Year of their: | KINGS AND QUEENS +---------+--------+--------+------+ CHILDREN. | birth |marriage|coronat.|death | -----------------------+---------+--------+--------+------+----------------- Denis, surnamed _the | 1261 | 1282 | 1279 | 1325 |Alphonso, king, liberal, and the father| | | | |Constance. of his country_. | | | | | | | | | | Elisabeth, daughter of | | | | | don Pedro III, king | | | | | of Arragon. | | | | | | | | | | Alphonso IV, surnamed | 1291 | 1309 | 1325 | 1357 |Alphonso } died _the brave_ or _the | or | | | |Denis } young proud_. | 1290 | | | |Pedro, king, Beatrix, daughter of |new hist.| | | |Mary, Sancho IV, king of | of | | | | Castille. |Portugal | | | |Leonora. | | | | | Pedro I, surnamed | 1320 | 1339 | 1357 | 1367 |By the queen _the justician_ or _the| | | | | Constance, severe_. | | | | |Lewis died | | | | | young. Constance, daughter | | | | | of John Emmanuel, | | | | |Ferdinand, king of Castille. | | | | |and Maria. | | | | | Inez de Castro, | | | | | By his concubine. | | | | |Inez de Castro, | | | | |Alphonso died | | | | | young. | | | | |Denis. | | | | | | | | | |John, duke of | | | | | Valencia, | | | | | | | | | |John, natural son | | | | |by Theresa de | | | | |Lorenzo, | | | | |who afterwards | | | | |became | | | | |king of Portugal. ----------------------------+---------------------------------------- ALLIANCES. | PRINCIPAL EVENTS. ----------------------------+---------------------------------------- | 1290. A university founded at Ferdinand IV, king of |Lisbon, which was transferred to Castille. |Coimbra in 1308. The Portugueze |language underwent several improvements; |and the celebrated romance |of _Amadis de Gaul_ was written |by Vasco Lobeira. The French |have endeavoured, though in vain, |to attribute it to one of their nation. | 1319, institution of the ordre of |Christ. | 1340. Famous battle of _Tarisa_ |or _Celdona_, in which, according |to the Spanish historians, more than Alphonso XI, king of |200,000 Moors were slain. Castille. | 1355, the king causes the celebrated Second wife of Pedro IV, |Inez de Castro to be put to king of Arragon. |death. | | 1361. Don Pedro gave orders for |the body of Inez de Castro, to be |taken up, and removed with all the |pomp due to royalty, to the royal |monastery of Alcobaça, there to be Ferdinand of Arragon, |interred under a white marble Marquis of Tortosa. |monument, on which she is represented |with a crown on her |head. | Jane, natural daughter of | Henry II, k. of Castille. | Maria Tellez, and, secondly,| Constance, natural | daughter of Henry | II, king of Castille. | -------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------- | The Year of their | KINGS AND QUEENS +-----+--------+--------+-----+ CHILDREN. |birth|marriage|coronat.|death| -------------------------+-----+--------+--------+-----+--------------------- Ferdinand. | 1340| 1372 | 1367 | 1383|Beatrix, Leonora Tellez, wife | | | | | L. da Cunha. | | | | | | | | | | | | | Regent | | John I, surnamed the | 1357| 1387 | 1383 | 1433|Edward, _great_, and _ather of | | | King | |Pedro, duke of his country_. | | | 1385 | |Coimbra, Philippa, the daughter | | | | |Henry, duke of of the duke of Lancaster.| | | | | Viseu, | | | | |Ferdinand, | | | | |Juan, | | | | |Isabella, | | | | | | | | | |and a natural son. | | | | | | | | | | Edward. | 1391| 1428 | 1433 | 1438|Alphonso, king, Leonora, daughter of | | | | |Ferdinand, duke Ferdinand, king of | | | | |of Viseu. Arragon and Sicily. | | | | |Philip died | | | | | young, | | | | |Leonora, | | | | |Catherine, | | | | | | | | | | Alphonso V, surnamed | 1432| 1446 | 1438 | 1481|Jane or Joanna, _the African_. | | | | | Isabella, his cousin. | | | | |a natural son, | | | | |called John Emmanuel. | | | | | ---------------------------+------------------------------------------ ALLIANCES. | PRINCIPAL EVENTS. ---------------------------+------------------------------------------ Don Juan I, of Castille. | 1381, the English, under the |command of the earl of Cambridge, |brother to the duke of Lancaster, |came to the assistance of the king. | 1385. Battle of d'Aljubarotta |against the king of Castille. A |convent built on the field of battle, |which afterwards became the burying |place for the kings of Portugal. |Ferdinand Nugno Alvarez Perreyra, |constable of Portugal, was made Philip _the good_, duke of |duke of Braganza, as a reward for Burgundy. |his great services. His heiress afterwards |married Alphonso of Portugal, |the natural son of John I, from |which marriage sprung the family |of Braganza now reigning in Portugal. | 1415, capture of Ceuta in Africa. | 1420, discovery and conquest of |Madeira. | 1422, the Christian era first in |general use throughout Portugal. | Frederic III, Emperor. | | | 1459. Alphonso V instituted Henry IV, king of Castille.|the order of the sword. | 1476. The battle of Toro gained |by Ferdinand, king of Castille, |against Alphonso, who goes to |France to demand assistance from |Louis XI, whom he met at Tours. |He embarked the next year at |Houfleur, in Normandy, for Portugal, |where he arrived Nov. 15. ________________________________________________________________________ KINGS AND QUEENS | The Year of their | | CHILDREN. |birth| marriage| coronat.|death| _____________________|_____|_________|_________|_____|__________________ Don Juan or John II, | | | | | surnamed | | | | | _the perfect._ |1455 | | 1481 |1495 |Alphonso died | | | | |12th July, 1491. Emmanuel, surnamed | | | | | _the fortunate_. |1469 | | 1495 |1521 | | | | | |By ISABELLA; Isabella of Arragon, | | 1497 | | |Michel, died at stiled of Castille, | | | | |the age of two widow of the infant | | | | |years, don Alphonso. | | | | | | | | | |By MARIA; Maria of Castille, | | 1500 | | |John III, king, Isabella's sister. | | | | |Louis, | | | | |Ferdinand, Eleanor of Austria, | | 1519 | | |Alphonso, cardinal, sister of Charles V, | | | | |Henry, cardinal afterwards married to| | | | |and king, Francis I. | | | | |Edward, | | | | |Anthonio, | | | | |Maria died in her | | | | |infancy, | | | | |Elisabeth. ____________________________________________________________ ALLIANCES. | PRINCIPAL EVENTS. ___________________|________________________________________ | 1482, John II, erected Fort St. | George on the coast of Guinea. | | 1483. The duke of Braganza beheaded | for conspiring with the king | of Castille against the state. | | 1486. The Cape of Good Hope | discovered by Bartholomew Diuz, | who gave it at first the name of | _Capo Tormento_. | | 1492. Discovery of the kingdoms | of Congo and Benin. | | 1493, The Pope fixes the line | of demarcation which limits the | navigation of the two crowns of | Spain and Portugal in the new | hemisphere. This line was afterwards | changed by pope Alexander | VI. | | 1496. Emmanuel banished the | Jews. | | 1497, Vasguez and Paul Gama | doubled the Cape of Good Hope, | for the first time; they discovered | the whole of the eastern coast of | Ethiopia, and in | | 1498 arrived at Calcutta. | | 1500, Pedro Alvarez Capral or | Cabral, discovered Brazil. | | 1506, Francisco d'Almyda formed | several settlements in the kingdoms | of _Norsinque_, _Quito_, _Cananor_, | and _Cochin_. His son Lorenzo | took possession of the Maldiva | islands, and the island of Ceylon. | | 1507, Ormus taken by Francisco | Alburquerque. | | 1510, Jaquez Signeira entered Emperor Charles V. | the island of Sumatra. Alburquerque | took Goa by surprise. ------------------+-------------------------------------+---------------- KINGS AND QUEENS | The Year of their | CHILDREN. | birth | marriage | coronat. | death | ------------------+-------+----------+----------+-------+---------------- | | | | | Maria Beatrix. | | | | | | | | | | By ELEONOR; | | | | | A Prince and | | | | | Princess. | | | | | | | | | | John III. | 1502 | | 1521 | 1557 | Alphonso, Catherine of | | | | | Emmanuel, Austria. | | | | | Philip, | | | | | Denis, | | | | | John, | | | | | Anthonio, | | | | | Maria, | | | | | | | | | | Isabella, | | | | | Beatrice. | | | | | | | | | | Sebastian, son of | 1554 | | 1557 | 1578 | the infant John V,| | | | | son of John III. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Henry I, cardinal.| 1512 | | 1578 | 1580 | See History of | | | | | Spain. Anthonio, grand | 1531 | | 1580 | 1595 | prior of Crato, | | | | | natural son of | | | | | Louis II, the son | | | | | of Emmanuel. | | | | | | | | | | --------------------------------------------------------------------- ALLIANCES. | PRINCIPAL EVENTS. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Charles III, duke of | 1511, Capture of the island of Savoy. |Malacca. | | 1517, Ferdinand Peres Auduade |landed in China, and obtained permission |to build the town of Macao. | | 1520, Anthonio Correa discovered |Pegu. | | A modern author takes notice |of earthquakes which happened in |the beginning of John IIId's reign, |but we know not on what authority |he founds his information. | | 1526, The inquisition instituted |in Portugal. | Phillip II, king of Spain. | 1541. Introduction of the Jesuits. |The king takes the habit of |that order, and submits himself to |the superior, though by permission |of the Holy See he still preserved |his crown. | | 1548. Orange trees first brought |from China, and planted in Portugal. | | 1578. Sebastian defeated by the |Moors in the battle of Alcacer. |For particulars of this unfortunate |expedition into Africa, (see Vertot.) | Sebastian was the first king of |Portugal who bore the title of majesty |bestowed upon him by Philip |II, of Spain. | | 1580. Anthonio defeated at Alcantara |by the Spaniards. He flew |for refuge to France, where he |died in 1595, and having made |Henry IV his heir, he particularly |recommended his two sons to his |protection. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- | The Year of their | KINGS AND QUEENS | [------------------] | CHILDREN. |birth|marriage|coronat.|death| ---------------------------+--------------------------------------------- SPANISH KINGS. | | | | | Philip II of Spain, | | | 1580 |1598 | and Philip I of Portugal. | | | | | | | | | | Philip III, and II of | | | 1621 |1640 | Portugal. | | | | | | | | | | Philip IV, and III of | | | 1640 | | Portugal. | | | | | | | | | | John IV, duke of Braganza, |1604 | | 1640 |1656 | Alphonso VI. k. the grandson of | | | | | Pedro, king, Catherine, who was | | | | | Maria, the daughter of the infant | | | | | Catherine, Edward, the son | | | | | of king Emmanuel. | | | | | ------------------------------------------------------------------- ALLIANCES. | PRINCIPAL EVENTS. ----------------------------------+--------------------------------- | 1581. States general of Portugal | held at Tomar. Philip II acknowledged | as king, provided Portugal | might ever be regarded as a | separate and independent kingdom, | of which Lisbon should be | the capital. So many persons | were thrown into the Tagus, that | the inhabitants would not eat the | fish, whereupon the archbishop of | Lisbon, solemnly, and with the | accustomed rites, absolved and | blessed the river. | | Vertot commences his relation | of the Revolution at this epoch, | which we continue till the departure Charles II, king of | of the family of Braganza for England. | Brazil, or, more properly speaking | till the battle of Veimera. | | The title of prince of Brazil was | first confered on the presumptive | heir to the crown during the reign | of John IV. * * * * * BOOKS, _Published by R. JUIGNÉ, 17, Margaret Street, Cavendish-Square._ And sold by Messrs. B. DULAU and CO. Soho-Square; LONGMAN, HURST, REES, and ORME, Paternoster-Row; BOOSEY, 4, Old Broad-Street; LAW, 13, Ave-Maria-lane, and other Booksellers. A GENERAL TABLE of all the French Verbs, Regular and Irregular, by which their Conjugation may be immediately found. One Sheet, folio, colored, 3s. 6d. "This Method, which Mr. Juigné has adopted for this Table of the French Verbs is very clear and distinct, and we are inclined to think that it will be found of great Service to the Pupil, as soon as he is familiarised to the Method of consulting it."--MONTHLY REVIEW. A GENEALOGICAL TABLE of the different Parts of Speech, adapted to the French Language. One Sheet, folio, coloured, 4s. 6d. A CONCISE TREATISE of the FRENCH TONGUE; or, A Short Exposition of the General Principles of that Language, being an Explanation of the GENEALOGICAL TABLE of the different Parts of Speech, for the use of Schools as well as Private Families. Bound 2s. 6d. "Conciseness accompanied with Clearness is a strong Recommendation of an Elementary Treatise, and those Qualities seem to be possessed by the present Grammar of Mr. Juigné. It is undoubtedly very desirable to Foreigners to have a convenient and adequate Rule for finding the Gender of such Nouns in French as are Neuter in English. This is promised in the Preface, and is thus executed, for the benefit however of those who understand Latin.... The Author promises also, in his Preface, an accurate Genealogical Table of the Parts of Speech.... He further promises Rules for distinguishing clearly the Imperfect, and the two Preterits, definite and indefinite; and as the Method of the Author is in general Clear, we doubt not that it will be practically found useful."--BRITISH CRITIC. A GENERAL TABLE of all the Italian Verbs, regular and irregular, by which their Conjugation may be immediately found. One Sheet, folio, colored, 3s. 6d.--This Table, composed by R. Juigné, on the same Plan as his Table of the French Verbs, being revised by Mr. Zotti, was printed under the name of Zotti. GERUSALEMME LIBERATA di TORQUATO TASSO, con note, ossia Spiegazioni de' luoghi più oscuri, dilucidazioni Grammaticali ed imitazioni dai Classici Antichi. Il tutto riveduto da Romualdo Zotti, ad uso degli Studiosi della Lingua Italiana. 2 vols. 12mo. boards, 10s. Ditto, fine paper, 15s. Ditto, superfine paper, 8vo. 1l. 1s. OPERE SCELTE DELL'ABATE METASTASIO, rivedute da L. Nardini, ad uso degli Studiosi della Lingua Italiana, 2da Edizione, riveduta da R. Zotti. 2 vol. 12mo. boards, 10s. Ditto, fine paper, 15s. HISTOIRE DES REVOLUTIONS DE PORTUGAL, par l'Abbé de Vertot, continuée jusqu'au _temps présent_, enrichie de Notes Historiques et Critiques, d'une Table Chronologique des Rois de Portugal et d'une Description du Brésil, par Louis de Boisgelin, Chevalier de Malthe. 12mo. bound, 5s. 6d. LA CHAUMIERE INDIENNE (par Bernardin de St. Pierre,) 18mo. sewed, 2s. LA DUCHESSE DE LA VALLIERE, par Madame de Genlis, 2 vol. 12mo. sewed, 8s. ABRÉGÉ DE L'HISTOIRE DE FRANCE faisant partie du Cours d'études, imprimé par Ordre du Roi, à l'Usage de L'ECOLE ROYALE MILITAIRE, NOUVELLE EDITION contenant _l'Histoire de la Révolution_ jusqu'à la Mort de Louis XVI, avec un Abrégé, en vers, des Epoques les plus intéressantes de l'Histoire de France, 12mo. bound, 5s. HISTORY OF THE REVOLUTIONS OF PORTUGAL. The kingdom of Portugal makes part of the great extent of country called Spain;[4] most of its provinces bear the names of the different kingdoms into which it is divided: that of Portugal lies to the West of Castille, and on the most western coast of Europe; it is only a hundred and ten leagues in length, and its greatest breadth does not exceed fifty. The soil is fertile, the air wholesome, and the heat of the climate is tempered by refreshing breezes and fruitful showers. The crown is hereditary, and the monarch absolute. The formidable tribunal of the Inquisition is regarded by this prince as the safest and most useful means of forwarding his political views, and as such, employed by him with the greatest success. The Portugueze are naturally fiery, proud, and arrogant, greatly attached to their religion, though more superstitious than truly devout; they regard almost every event as a prodigy, and not only persuade themselves, but endeavour to persuade others, that they are the peculiar favourites of Providence, which never fails to protect them in the most extraordinary manner. The original inhabitants of this country have never been justly ascertained. Some historians make them the descendants of _Tubal_, and it would be scarcely possible for the most fabulous accounts to trace their origin farther back; every nation, indeed, has some chimerical notions on this head; there is not, however, the smallest doubt, that these provinces belonged successively to the Carthaginians and the Romans; but towards the beginning of the fifth century the whole of Spain became the prey of the Alains, the Sueves, the Vandals, and the rest of the barbarous nations generally termed Goths, when Portugal was sometimes governed by its own appropriate kings, and sometimes subjected to the Castilian monarchs. During the reign of Roderick, last king of the Goths, in the beginning of the eighth century, the Moors, or more properly speaking the Arabs, subjects of the calif Valid-Almanzar, crossed from Africa into Spain, and conquered a great part of that country, to which they were invited by count Julien, a Spanish nobleman, whose resentment towards Roderick, for the violation of his daughter, induced him to forward by every possible means the designs of the enemy, who extended their dominions from the straits of Gibraltar to the Pyreneans; they could not, however, pierce into the Asturian mountains, where the Christians flew for refuge, and were governed by prince Pelagio, who founded the kingdom of Leon or Oviedo in that spot. Portugal shared the fate of the other Spanish provinces, and became subject to the Moors, who established a variety of different governments, which on the death of the Great Almanzar became independant, and were transformed into small principalities; these, however, did not long exist, they were disunited by emulation and clashing interests, whilst luxury and indolence completed their ruin. Henry, count of Burgundy[5], descended from Robert, king of France, succeeded in driving the Moors from Portugal towards the beginning of the twelfth century. This prince, animated by the same zealous spirit of religion which caused the Crusades of those times, entered Spain, decided to signalize himself against the infidels, and began his military career under Roderick de Bivar, that celebrated general, distinguished in history by the name of the _Cid_. He displayed such extraordinary valour in these religious wars, that Alphonso the VIth, king of Castille and Leon, gave him the command of his army. This French prince is said to have defeated the Moors in seventeen pitched battles, and to have driven them from the northern part of Portugal. The king of Castille, anxious to attach so great a general to his service, united him to his daughter the princess Theresa, and at the same time presented him with all the provinces he had conquered as a marriage portion. These the count considerably augmented by fresh victories: he besieged, and took the cities of Lisbon, Viseu, and Coimbra: he succeeded equally in the three provinces situated between the Douro and Minho, which Henry formed into a considerable sovereignty, and though he never took the title of king, he was the original founder of the kingdom of Portugal. His son, the prince Alphonso, inherited his father's valour, and succeeded him in his possessions, which he even augmented by new conquests. Thus heroes lay the foundation of empires, whilst the weak and cowardly disgracefully lose them. The soldiers of count Alphonso proclaimed him king, after having gained a great victory over the Moors, and the states general, assembled at Lamego, confirmed this august title, which justly descended to his successors. It was in this assembly, composed of the principal persons of the nation, that the fundamental laws, relative to the succession to the crown, were established. The first article commences as follows:--_May King Alphonso live amongst us, and reign over us!_ If he has male issue they shall be our kings; the son shall succeed his father, who in his turn shall be succeeded by his son, afterwards by his grandson; and so on to the end of time. ARTICLE II. If the king's eldest son die before his father, the second son shall succeed to the crown; in case of his death, he shall be replaced by the third, who shall be succeeded by the fourth, and, in the same manner, by all the remaining sons of the king. ARTICLE III. If the king die without male issue, and should have a brother, he shall be our king; but he shall not be succeeded by his son, unless the said son should be elected by the bishops and states, in which case, but in no other, we will acknowledge him for our sovereign. ARTICLES IV AND V. If the king of Portugal should leave no male issue, his daughter shall be our queen, provided she marry a Portugueze nobleman; who, however, shall not bear the title of king till after the birth of a male child. In presence of the queen, he shall always be placed on her left hand, and shall not be permitted to wear the regal crown. ARTICLE VI. This last law shall always be strictly observed, and the king's eldest daughter shall never espouse any but a Portugueze nobleman, lest the kingdom should become subject to a foreign prince. Should the king's daughter infringe this article and become the wife of a prince or nobleman of another country, she shall not be acknowledged queen; and this, because we will not suffer our people to be ruled by a king who was not born a Portugueze, since it is to our subjects and countrymen alone, without any foreign aid, who shed their blood in our service, and by their valour raised our country to regal dignity. * * * * * By the strict observance of the above wise laws, the crown of Portugal remained for several centuries in the possession of the royal family of Alphonso. His successors have since added greatly to the splendour and power of the kingdom, by the important conquests gained in Africa, India, and afterwards in America. The Portugueze have displayed a degree of courage and skill in the conducting these distant and wonderful enterprises, which justly entitles them to the warmest eulogiums. They have also had the glory of introducing the Christian religion into these conquered countries, where the Portugueze missionaries have greatly succeeded in making known the worship of the true God to the most idolatrous and barbarous nations. Such was the situation of Portugal about the year 1557, when the king, don Sebastian came to the throne. He was the posthumous son of don John, who died before his father, king John the IIId, who succeeded his father the great king Emanuel. Don Sebastian was scarcely three years old when he became king. His grandmother, Catherine of Austria, was appointed regent during his minority. This princess was the daughter of Philip the Ist, king of Castille, and, the sister of the emperor Charles the Vth. Don Alexis de Menezes, a nobleman who professed the strictest piety, was named governor to the young prince; and the literary part of his education was confided to the care of father don Louis de Camara, a member of the society of Jesuits. Nothing was omitted on the part of these wise and learned preceptors which could possibly contribute to the instruction of the young prince; his mind was early formed to piety, and at the same time he was inspired with every elevated sentiment worthy of royalty. But these noble and Christian principles were carried too far. Menezes continually dwelling on the conquests gained by his predecessors in India, and on the coasts of Africa, whilst the Jesuit never ceased representing to his pupil, that as kings held their crowns from God alone, their only object in government should be, not only to cause him to be worshipped at home, but in the most distant countries, in which even his name was hitherto unknown. Such a mixture of pious and warlike ideas made too strong an impression on a youthful prince naturally lively and impetuous. His every thought was turned towards conquests: he talked on no other subject; and no sooner had he taken the reins of government into his own hands, than he meditated attacking Africa in person. He accordingly held continual conferences, both with officers and missionaries, and seemed decided on adding the title of apostle to the glorious one of conqueror. The civil war lately broken out in the kingdom of Morocco, seemed a favourable opportunity of signalizing his zeal and courage. Muley Mahamet had succeeded his father Abdala, the last king of Morocco, but his paternal uncle, Muley Moluc, pretended that he had usurped the crown, which according to the law of the _Cherifs_, fell successively to the king's brothers in preference to his own children. This dispute occasioned a bloody war between the uncle and nephew. The former, a valiant prince, a profound politician, and a great general, having formed a powerful party in the kingdom, defeated Mahamet in three different battles, and finished by driving him not only from his dominions, but even out of Africa. The vanquished prince sought an asylum in the court of Portugal, and represented to Sebastian, that though he had been driven from Morocco, he had still many secret friends in that country, who only waited his return to declare themselves in, his favour: that he had also learnt Moluc was suffering by a lingering malady, which in the end must prove fatal; and that his brother Hamet was too little esteemed by the nation to have any hopes of succeeding him. If, therefore, at so critical a moment, he could be enabled to appear at the head of a small body of troops on the frontiers, he doubted not but his former subjects would replace him on the throne; which, should he recover by the inference of Portugal, he would in future acknowledge himself vassal to that power; into the possession of which he would rather yield his crown, than permit it to remain on the head of an usurper. Don Sebastian, ever alive to impressions of glory, and whose every idea turned to important conquests, engaged in this affair with more eagerness than prudence, and instantly determined on marching in person to Morocco. He treated the Moorish king in the most distinguished manner, and promised to reinstate him in his dominions at the head of the whole army of Portugal. He, indeed, flattered himself with shortly hoisting the banner of the cross on all the mosques in Morocco; and it was in vain the most prudent members of his council used every persuasive argument to dissuade him from so precipitate a measure. His courage, his Christian zeal, the presumption natural to youth, and frequently the companion of royalty, joined to the voice of flattery, so constantly heard in a court, made him regard this victory as easy as glorious. Thus obstinate in his opinions, and convinced of his superior abilities, as if sovereign knowledge must necessarily attend on sovereign power, he refused listening to the voice of his ministers and council, he crossed the sea, and undertook with an army of scarcely thirteen thousand men, to dethrone a powerful monarch, esteemed the greatest general in Africa. Moluc being informed of the designs and landing of the king of Portugal, waited his arrival at the head of his whole army. His cavalry consisted of forty thousand, most of whom were old and experienced soldiers, even still more formidable from the conduct and capacity of their leader, than from their personal valour. As to the infantry, it was only composed of ten thousand regular troops; and he placed very little dependance on the crowds of Arabs and militia which had hastened to his assistance. These, indeed, were much more inclined to pillage than conquer, and were always ready to fly or to declare in favour of the victorious party. Moluc, however, employed these troops to harrass the Christian army, and being spread throughout the country, they were constantly skirmishing in sight of the camp. They had secret orders to fly from the Portugueze; with a view of drawing them from their intrenchments on the sea-shore, and at the same time keeping up the blind confidence of don Sebastian by affected marks of fear. That prince, more brave than prudent, daily perceiving the Moors unable to stand before his troops, commanded them to quit their intrenchments, and marched against Moluc with the certainty of success. The barbarian monarch seemed at first to retreat, as wishing to avoid a decisive battle; few of his troops appeared in sight, and he even made different proposals to don Sebastian, as if he mistrusted his forces and feared for the event of the war. The king of Portugal, from the idea that the difficulty consisted, not in conquering, but in coming up, to the enemy, continued the pursuit. But no sooner did Moluc perceive the Portugueze sufficiently distant from the shore, and consequently from their fleet, than he collected his army in the plain, and formed his cavalry in the form of a crescent to enclose the whole of the Christian forces. His brother Hamet commanded this corps; but having no great idea of his courage, he took care to inform him, that he owed this distinction to his rank alone, assuring him at the same time, that should he be cowardly enough to fly, he would strangle him with his own hands, and that he had no choice left but conquest or death. The state of his own health was such, and his weakness was so great from the effects of his long consuming illness, that he expected every moment to be his last; he therefore determined that the day of his death should be the most glorious of his existence. He himself arranged the order of battle, and gave his commands with as much clearness and presence of mind as if in perfect health. He even looked forward to the events which would probably take place after his death, and gave particular orders to the officers around him, that should it happen during the heat of the combat, the news should not be suffered to transpire; that to keep up the confidence of his soldiers, his aid-de-camp should approach his litter as usual, and appear to take orders as if he was still in existence. Such courage and magnanimity can never be sufficiently admired. It seems, indeed, that this barbarian prince had so arranged his designs, and given his orders in his last moments, that even death itself could not rob him of victory. After having taken these measures, he was carried through the ranks, where his presence, gestures, and discourse, all tended to exhort the Moors to fight for the defence of their religion and country. The battle commenced on each side by a discharge of cannon, when the two armies moved forward and charged furiously. Presently the combat became general, and the Moorish infantry, principally composed, as has been already mentioned, of Alarbs and other vagrants, easily gave way to the Portugueze, whose courage was animated by the presence of their king. The duke d'Aveiro even succeeded in driving back a corps of cavalry to the quarters of the king of Morocco; who, on perceiving his soldiers in confusion, and shamefully flying, jumped from his litter, and burning with rage and indignation, decided, though almost in the agonies of death, to drive them back to the charge, his officers vainly opposed his design, and he forced a passage through the ranks with his sword; but this effort entirely exhausted his little remaining strength, and he fainted in the arms of his equerries, who bore him back to his litter; when, putting his finger on his mouth to enjoin secrecy, he immediately expired; but though his death was so sudden, that there was no time to convey him to his tent, both armies remained ignorant of his fate. Hitherto success seemed to attend the Christians; but the Moorish cavalry having formed a large circle, drew together by degrees, and closing their ranks, entirely surrounded don Sebastian's little army. The Moorish cavalry then proceeded to charge the Portugueze cavalry on every side, whilst the latter, overpowered by numbers, fell back on the infantry, and falling amongst them, overwhelmed the whole with confusion and dismay. The infidels immediately took advantage of the open and disordered state of the battalions, and rushing amongst them with their scymitars, easily obtained a complete victory over troops already more than half subdued by astonishment and terror. The field of battle then became a scene of slaughter; nothing but carnage presented itself on every side; wretches on their knees begging for life, whilst others sought their safety in flight, but, so hemmed in were they, that it was impossible to escape, and death attended them from every quarter. The rash Sebastian fell a victim to his imprudence: but whether from ignorance of his rank he was killed in the general flight, or whether he sought death sooner than survive the numerous persons of distinction murdered by the Moors, whom he had himself led to destruction, has never been ascertained. Muley Mahamat, the original author of the war, endeavoured to save himself by flight, but was drowned in passing the river Mucazen. Thus perished, in one fatal day, three great princes. Their deaths indeed were different, Moluc losing his life by illness, Mahamet by water, and Sebastian by the fate of arms[6]. Sebastian was succeeded on the throne of Portugal by his great uncle cardinal don Henry, the brother of his grandfather, John the IIId, and the son of king Emmanuel. But this prince being a priest, in an infirm state of health, and more than sixty-seven years of age, all those who had any pretensions to the crown, regarded him merely as the guardian of their rights, each individual therefore endeavoured to prepossess him in his or her favour. The candidates on this occasion were numerous, and the greatest part were descendants, though in different degrees, from king Emmanuel, Philip the IId, king of Spain, Catherine of Portugal, the wife of don Jacques, duke of Braganza, the duke of Savoy, the duke of Parma, and Anthony, knight of Malta, and grand prior of Crato, were all equally solicitous to bring forward and establish their pretensions. Different publications appeared in the name of these princes, and the civilians employed in the cause, endeavoured to regulate the order of succession in favour of their respective clients. Philip the IId, was son to the infanta Isabella, the eldest daughter of Emmanuel. The duchess of Braganza was descended from don Edward, son of the same Emmanuel. The duke of Savoy was the son of princess Beatrix, the empress's sister. The mother of the duke of Parma was Mary of Portugal, daughter of prince Edward, and the eldest sister of the duchess of Braganza. The grand prior was a natural son of don Louis de Beja (second son of Emmanuel,) and Violante de Gomez, surnamed the _Pelican_, one of the most beautiful women of the age she lived in, and to whom, Anthony affirmed, his father was secretly married. Catherine de Medicis also entered the lists, and grounded her pretensions to the crown on being descended from Alphonso the IIId, king of Portugal, and Mathilda, countess of Boulogne. Even the pope himself endeavoured to reap some benefit from the king's being a cardinal, as if the crown in that case must necessarily be guarded as a benefice devolving on the court of Rome. These foreign claimants were not very formidable, the greater part being not in a situation to support their pretensions. The succession therefore laid principally betwixt the king of Spain, and the duchess of Braganza. The latter was greatly beloved; and her husband, though not in a direct line, was descended from the kings of Portugal. She, however, claimed the crown in her own person, being born a Portugueze, and all foreign princes, as mentioned in the beginning of this work, being excluded from the dignity of king, by the fundamental laws of the nation. Philip agreed to this principle, as far as it tended to the exclusion of the dukes of Savoy and Parma; but he would never accede to a king of Spain being deemed a foreigner in Portugal, particularly as this small kingdom had been more than once subject to the kings of Castille. Each party had it separate supporters. The cardinal king was beset with constant solicitations; but he could not venture to decide in an affair of such importance; neither was he too well pleased with hearing eternally of his successor. He was desirous of living long, and reigning quietly: he therefore referred the discussion of the candidates' claims to a junta, who was not to decide the succession till after his demise. The death of this prince, who only enjoyed the regal dignity seventeen months, involved the country in disputes and confusion. The friends of the different claimants were warm in their exertions in their favour; even the most indifferent felt anxious for the decision of the junta appointed by his late majesty in his last will and testament. In the mean time, Philip the IId, well aware that causes of such importance were not terminated by the opinions of civilians, sent a powerful army into Portugal: this was commanded by the celebrated duke of Alba, who presently decided the affair, in his master's favour. It does not appear in history that the duke of Braganza took up arms to support his claims to the crown. The grand prior alone employed every possible means to oppose the Castillians; he had been proclaimed king by the populace, and took the title, as if it had been bestowed on him by the states general of the nation. His friends raised a military force in his behalf, but it was presently cut to pieces by the duke of Alba: the superior skill, indeed, of the Spanish general, surmounted every obstacle; and the Portugueze, disunited among themselves, without generals to command them, destitute of regular troops, and with nothing to support their courage but their natural animosity to the Castillians, were defeated on many different occasions. The greater part of the cities and towns entered into separate treaties, from the dread of being given up to plunder. Philip was acknowledged legitimate sovereign, and took possession of the kingdom as great nephew and heir of the deceased king; he, however, regarded the right of conquest as his securest title, and both he and his successors regulated their conduct on the same principle, since Philip the IIId, and Philip the IVth, his son and grandson always treated the Portugueze much more as a conquered people, than as natural subjects. This kingdom therefore became, as formerly, a mere province of Spain; and that without the Portugueze ever being in a situation even to attempt freeing themselves from the Castillian yoke. The grandees of the nation never ventured to appear with a magnificence suitable to the dignity of their birth, lest they should excite suspicion in the breast of the Spanish ministers; since, at that epoch, riches, birth, or superior merit, were sure to entail mistrust and persecution on their possessors. The nobility might be said to be confined in their country houses, whilst the people were oppressed by taxes. The count-duke d'Olivares, prime minster to Philip the IVth, king of Spain, was of opinion, that newly conquered countries could never be too completely reduced: he was very well aware, that notwithstanding all his efforts, the old and natural antipathy between the nations was such, that the Spanish dominion must ever be odious to the Portugueze, who could never behold, without indignation, important posts and governments filled either by foreigners, or by men raised from the lowest situations, whose only merit consisted in being entirely subservient and devoted to the court. The count-duke therefore thought he could not more effectually secure the authority of his sovereign, than by preventing the nobility from taking any share in public affairs, and so completely impoverishing the people that they could have neither the courage nor the power to take any steps towards a change of situation: he also took care to employ all the younger part of the nation, and indeed all others capable of bearing arms, in foreign service, and that from the politic motive of removing dissatisfied and turbulent spirits, lest they should be tempted to disturb the peace of the government. This plan, if followed to a certain degree, might probably have succeeded, but the state of affairs at the court of Spain, and the severe and inflexible disposition of the prime minister having carried matters too far, it produced a contrary effect. They no longer kept any terms with the Portugueze, and did not even condescend to make use of the usual pretences to extort money from the people, but enforced payment more in the style of contributions from a conquered enemy, than taxes lawfully levied from faithful subjects. The Portugueze therefore, having nothing more to lose, and perceiving no hopes of either ending or mitigating the misery of their situation, without a change of government, began to reflect on means of freeing themselves from a dominion, which always appeared unjust, and was now become tyrannical and intolerable. Margaret of Savoy, duchess of Mantua, was at that time governess of Portugal, but though dignified with the title of vice-queen, her power was very limited; and the secrets of the state, with indeed an almost unbounded authority, were entrusted to Michel de Vasconcellos, a Portugueze, who, though entitled secretary of state to the vice-queen, was in reality an absolute and independant minister. This man received his instructions directly from the count-duke, whose creature he was, and to whom he had made himself not only agreeable, but necessary, by skilfully obtaining frequent and considerable supplies of money from Portugal; and by a spirit of intrigue, which facilitated the execution of his most secret intentions, he also created dissensions amongst the nobility, which he artfully fomented by affecting to shew particular marks of favour to one party, to which such distinctions were still more grateful from the resentment and jealousy it caused in the other. Such divisions amongst the first families of the nation, were calculated to ensure the safety and quiet of the minister, who had good reason to believe, that whilst the heads of those families were employed in planning schemes of private revenge, they would never be tempted to undertake any thing inimical to the government. The duke of Braganza alone, throughout the whole of Portugal, was in a situation to cause the Spaniards the smallest uneasiness. This prince was of a mild and amiable disposition, but rather inclined to indolence; his understanding was more solid than lively; in business he constantly attended to the main point, and presently made himself acquainted with every thing that he thought worth the pains of acquiring, though in general he was an enemy to application. His father, don Theodorius, on the contrary, was impetuous and fiery, and had left no means untried to transmit to his son his natural antipathy to the Spaniards; whom he always regarded as usurpers of a crown which properly belonged to himself: he therefore endeavoured to inspire the young prince, not only with sufficient ambition to desire the possession of that crown, but with spirit and courage to undertake so great and dangerous an enterprize. Don John, indeed, had imbibed all the sentiments of his father, but tempered by the natural gentleness and moderation of his character, he undoubtedly detested the Spaniards, though not sufficiently to induce him to make any great exertions to punish their injustice. He was not devoid of ambition, and always cherished hopes of one day filling the throne of his ancestors; he, however, waited that event much more patiently than his father, and, though decided not to lose sight of so important an object, he was careful how he risked the loss of a most delightful existence and the possession of immense riches, for the uncertain prospect of a crown. This conduct, though very different from the views of don Theodorius, was the most prudent; for had he pursued the plans of his father, his designs would certainly have been frustrated. The count-duke watched him so narrowly, that had his inactivity and love of pleasure been merely a mask to cover deeper views, he would presently have been discovered, and his fortune ruined for ever; for it never could be supposed the court of Spain would have suffered so powerful an enemy to remain quietly in the bosom of his country. The most refined politician could not have acted more prudently in regard to the Spaniards, than don John; and this, merely by following the bent of his own inclinations. He was, indeed, perfectly convinced, that though his birth, riches, and claims to the crown, could not justly be imputed to him as crimes, they would be esteemed as such by political judges, in whose eyes the most powerful must ever be the most criminal. He therefore decided on adopting a line of conduct which should banish all suspicion from the breasts of the Spaniards: fortunately this plan was not only the most prudent, but the most agreeable to his feelings; which led him to avoid entering into public affairs, and devoting himself entirely to pleasure. Villa Vicosa, the usual residence of the dukes of Braganza, became the seat of every social amusement; the hours were passed in sporting and feasting, and the society composed of people whose taste led them to enjoy the pleasures of the country, whilst they diffused mirth and happiness to all around. Thus nature and fortune conspired to favour don John; the first endowed him with qualities suitable to the temper of the times, whilst the latter enabled him to employ those qualities to the greatest advantage; though not sufficiently brilliant to alarm the Spaniards with the idea of his one day attempting the throne, they were solid enough to make the Portugueze look forward to a mild, wise, and just government, should they themselves be induced to rise up in his favour. Notwithstanding the uniform prudence of his conduct, an affair afterwards took place which made him in some degree suspected by the prime minister, though don John had not the smallest share in the business. The people of Evora, made desperate by fresh taxes, rose in arms, and in the fury of seditious rage, some of the most violent declaimed against the tyranny of the Spaniards, and publicly breathed forth wishes in favour of the house of Braganza. It was then perceived, but too late, how greatly Philip the IId. had erred, in permitting so rich and powerful a family to remain in a newly conquered country, over which their right of reigning was but too clearly proved. So circumstanced, the Spanish council decided on removing the duke of Braganza from the kingdom; he was accordingly offered the government of the Milaneze, which he refused, alledging that neither his health, nor his acquaintance with Italian affairs, would allow of his accepting so important and difficult an appointment. The minister appeared to acquiesce in these reasons, whilst he endeavoured to hit upon another method to engage him to visit the court. The king's projected journey to the frontiers of Arragon, to punish the rebellious Catalonians, was a plausible pretence for his joining the party; he therefore wrote earnestly to exhort him to join the Castillian troops at the head of the nobility of his country in an expedition which must end gloriously, and in which the king commanded in person. The prime minister, with a view of weakening the power of the Portugueze nobles, had already published an edict of Philip the IVth, commanding all hidalgos to repair immediately to the army raised against the Catalonians, on pain of losing their fiefs dependant on the crown; he therefore hoped, that the duke of Braganza, as hereditary constable of Portugal, could not be dispensed from marching on the occasion. The duke, however, mistrusting all propositions on the part of the court, and seeing through the artifice of its proceedings, entreated the minister to induce the king to accept his excuses, on account of the enormous expences which must be incurred by a person of his dignity, and which he declared he was entirely unable to support. Such repeated refusals began to alarm the minister; he was, indeed, perfectly well acquainted with the mild and peaceable disposition of the duke, yet he could not help fearing, that his claims to the throne having been forcibly held up to his view, the temptation of reigning might in the end have surmounted the natural indolence of his character. Securing the person of the duke was an object of so very great importance to the king his master, that he was determined on using all possible means to succeed in his design; but so great was the attachment of the Portugueze to the family of Braganza, that open force could not be attempted; he therefore sought to seduce him by the most flattering caresses, and to draw him from his retreat by professions of the sincerest friendship, and marks of unlimited confidence. War having broken out between France and Spain, and some French vessels having appeared off the coast of Portugal, the minister thought it a favourable opportunity for the execution of his plan. A general being necessary to command the Portugueze troops dispatched to prevent the French from landing on the coast, Olivarez conferred this appointment on the duke of Braganza, with full power to fortify towns, increase or remove garrisons, dispose of vessels in all the different ports, and, in short, to act as if the whole kingdom of Portugal was subjected to his authority alone. In the mean time, he sent secret orders to don Lopez Ozorio, who commanded the Spanish fleet, to put into the same port as don John, on pretence of distress of weather; and having induced the latter to accept an entertainment on board, to weigh anchor, and make sail immediately for Spain. Fortune, however, did not smile on the minister; for the Spanish admiral being overtaken by a violent tempest, which destroyed some of his vessels, and dispersed the rest, found it impossible to approach the coast of Portugal. These different disappointments did not, however, discourage the count-duke; who attributed to chance alone the failure of his plan; since, had don Lopez once entered the port, don John must inevitably have been taken. Another scheme soon presented itself to the artful minister, who wrote to the prince in the most affectionate and confidential terms: he even appeared to regard him as a coadjutor in the ministry and government of the state; deploring the misfortune befallen the Spanish fleet at a moment when the enemy was particularly formidable, and adding, that the coasts of Portugal being left unguarded, the king wished him to visit in person, those places and ports throughout the kingdom, which might probably be insulted by the French; sending him at the same time an order for forty thousand ducats, for the purpose, if necessary, of levying additional troops, and defraying the expences of his journey. The minister did not neglect, in the interim, to direct the governors of the different citadels, most of whom were Spaniards, to secure, if possible, the person of the duke, and send him off instantly to Spain. Such marks of confidence, and such exaggerated professions of regard, were too little comformable to the character of the minister, and to his usual mode of conduct, for the duke of Braganza to believe them sincere; this prince therefore mistrusted his design, and contrived to draw him into the very snare which had been laid for himself. He wrote to the count-duke that he accepted with the greatest pleasure and gratitude the appointment of general, that he flattered himself his conduct would justify his majesty's choice, and prove him worthy of so honourable a mark of distinction. He now, however, began to entertain hopes of the possibility of regaining the throne of his ancestors; he accordingly took advantage of his situation to bestow places and employments on those of his friends who might hereafter be useful to his cause, and disposed of the money received from Spain in gaining new partizans, and securing them in his interest. He also took care to be accompanied by such a numerous retinue on visiting the different places and forts, that not the smallest shadow of hope remained to his enemies of ever succeeding in making themselves masters of his person. The supreme authority with which he had been invested, did not fail to excite the jealousy of the whole court of Spain; every one expressed his disapprobation in the highest terms, and the king alone being in the secret of the prime minister, attempts were made to injure him in the opinion of that prince, to whom he was represented as a favourer and ally of the house of Braganza. His enemies warmly accused him of imprudence in giving the command of the Portugueze troops to a man, whose claims to the throne of Portugal were of a very serious nature, and who, being thus armed with power to assert his right, might probably be tempted to turn those very arms against his sovereign. The king, however, was still more confirmed in his resolution of adhering to the prime minister's plan, on perceiving that no one had the smallest suspicion of the motive of his conduct. These circumstances were all very favourable to the designs of the duke of Braganza, whose high employment authorised him to travel throughout the whole of Portugal, and it was in this journey he laid the foundation of his future grandeur. The magnificence of his equipage and attendants dazzled the eyes of all beholders, and he listened with the most obliging attention and affability to every one who addressed him. He curbed the insolence of the soldiery, whilst he bestowed the most flattering praises on the officers, whom he engaged in his interest by rewarding them to the utmost of his power. Such suavity of manners charmed the nobility, whom he received with the distinction due to their different degrees of rank and merit; he, in short, did so much good wheresoever he passed, and acted with such kindness and generosity, that he gained still more friends, from the hopes they entertained of his future favours, than from those he actually bestowed: thus every one who beheld him, thought to insure their own happiness by offering up vows to Heaven for his restoration to the throne of his ancestors. The friends and followers of this prince were equally anxious to support his reputation, and neglected nothing which could possibly establish it on the most solid foundation. On this occasion none was more active than Pinto Ribeiro, the steward of his household; he indeed, took the most efficacious steps towards putting the machine in motion, and forming a regular plan for the aggrandisement of his master. Naturally active, vigilant, and a consummate politician, he burned with impatience to see the prince on the throne of Portugal, when he, no doubt, flattered himself he should have no small share in a government which he had so greatly contributed to establish. The duke, indeed, had frequently confessed to him, that he should be happy to take advantage of any opportunity that might offer itself to become master of the crown; but that he could not possibly decide on undertaking so great an enterprise, like a needy adventurer who had nothing to lose. He, however, consented that Pinto should sound the disposition of the people, and gain friends to his cause, provided he made no engagements for his master, who was to appear entirely ignorant of every thing which passed on the occasion. Pinto had long been very assiduous in finding out, and adding to the number of mal-contents in Lisbon. He never failed whispering complaints of the present government throughout the city, and expressed himself with more or less warmth, according to the character and rank of those with whom he conversed: these precautions, indeed, were scarcely necessary, for such was the general hatred of the Portugueze towards the Spaniards, that there was no danger of any secret being betrayed by the former which might tend to the destruction of the latter. Pinto never failed remarking to the nobility, the high and honourable employments held by their respective families when Portugal was governed by its legitimate sovereigns; but nothing affected and offended that class equally with the arriere-ban convoked by the king for serving in Catalonia; this expedition was represented by Pinto, as an exile, from which there would be great difficulty in returning; that, independantly of the enormous expence, they would be treated with the greatest haughtiness by the Spaniards, whose secret interest it was to expose the bravest of the Portugueze to the most imminent danger; and that, without affording them an opportunity of sharing in the glory. Whenever chance led him into a society of merchants and citizens, he exclaimed against the injustice of the Spaniards, who had ruined Lisbon, and indeed the whole of Portugal, by the transfer of the India trade to Cadiz. His conversation constantly turned on the extreme misery to which they were reduced by so tyrannical a government, and of the happiness of those people[7] who had so gloriously emancipated themselves from such servility. To the clergy he represented the frequent violation of the immunities and privileges of the church, and that the most considerable benefices and dignities were become the prey of foreigners, instead of the just reward due to the merit and learning of the natives of Portugal. With those whom he knew to be already discontented, he dwelt on the excellent qualities of the duke, his master, purposely to sound their inclination on the subject, deploring at the same time the indolent character of that prince, and expressing his sorrow that the only person who could effectually remedy such grievances, should be so little attached to his country, and so indifferent to his personal aggrandisement. Whenever this conversation appeared to make an impression on his hearers, he flattered one party with the glorious title of deliverer of his country, whilst he excited the indignation of those who had more particularly suffered by the ill treatment of the Spaniards; and held forth to the rest the most advantageous prospect from a change of government. Thus, having succeeded in stirring up the minds of the people in general, and in securing a particular party in his interest, he at last assembled a numerous body of nobility, at the head of which was the archbishop of Lisbon[8], of one of the first families of the kingdom[9]. This prelate was learned, skilful in business, a favourite of the people, and hated by the Spaniards; whom he in his turn equally detested, from the preference they shewed to the archbishop of Braga[10], a creature of the vice-queen, on whom they had bestowed the dignity of president of the chamber de Paço, and whom they even allowed to take a share in the affairs of the government. Amongst the people of distinguished rank, who composed this assembly, don Michel d'Almeida claims particular notice; this venerated old nobleman had ever been peculiarly esteemed for the superior merit of his character; he gloried in preferring the honour and happiness of his country, to his own personal interests; he was afflicted and enraged at seeing it thus reduced to servitude by an usurper, and had constantly and courageously persevered in these noble sentiments; nor could the entreaties of his family, nor the advice of his friends, ever induce him to go to the palace, or pay his court to the ministers of Spain, to whom such uncommon firmness did not fail to make him an object of suspicion. Pinto therefore did not scruple declaring himself more openly to a man of whose principles he was so perfectly well assured, and whose sentiments, if in favour of his party, would be of the greatest weight with the rest of the nobility. Don Antonio d'Almada, the intimate friend of the archbishop, with don Lewis his son, made part of this assembly; as did also, don Lewis d'Acugna, that prelate's nephew, who was married to the daughter of don Antonio d'Almada. Mello, grand huntsman, don George, his brother, Peter de Mendoça, the grand chamberlain, don Rodrigo, with several other officers of the royal household, whose hereditary posts were mere useless titles, since the kingdom of Portugal had become the prey of a foreign power. The archbishop, naturally eloquent, addressed the assembly, and drew a most frightful picture of the distressed state of the nation, since it had been subject to the dominion of the Spaniards: he represented in strong colours the cruelty of Philip the IId, in destroying a great number of the nobility, in order to ensure his conquest; adding, that he had not even spared the clergy; witness the celebrated brief of absolution[11] obtained from the pope for having put to death two thousand priests and friars who stood in the way of his usurpation; that, since those dreadful times, the Spaniards still persevered in the same system of politics, that they had condemned to death, on various pretences, several persons of superior merit, whose only crime was their attachment to their country: that neither the life nor property of a single person in the present assembly was in safety; that the nobility were treated with every mark of contempt, and never allowed any share in the government, or named to any employments; that the clergy had been composed of the most unworthy members, since Vasconcellos had taken upon him to bestow benefices as rewards for the services of his creatures; that the people were loaded with taxes, the country destitute of husbandmen, and the towns deserted by soldiers, who were forcibly carried off to Catalonia; that the late orders received for the nobles to repair to that country, on pretence of arriere-ban, was the finishing stroke of the prime minister's politics, who wished by these means to rid himself of the principal persons of the nation, whom he regarded as the only obstacles to his pernicious designs; that the least evil they had to apprehend was, a tedious banishment; that they would thus grow old, miserable, exiles in the interior of Castille, whilst a new colony would take possession of their property as a right of conquest; that as to himself, the frightful prospect of such accumulated misfortunes, would make him pray for a speedy death, sooner than behold the total destruction of his country, were it not for the hope that so great a number of distinguished persons as were then present, would never have assembled in vain. This harangue greatly affected the assembly, and revived the recollection of former miseries. Every individual brought forward some instance of cruelty in Vasconcellos. Some had been deprived of their property by his injustice, whilst others complained of being dispossessed of hereditary employments and governments, in favour of his friends and followers. Several had been unjustly imprisoned as suspected persons, and others regretted their fathers, brothers, and friends, who were either detained in Madrid, or sent to Catalonia as hostages for the fidelity of their countrymen. In short, there was not one amongst them who, in the general cause, had not likewise some private injury which called for vengeance. The Catalonia business was an object of universal indigustion; since nothing could be more clear, than that their complete destruction, and not the want of this aid, was the motive which induced the court of Spain to send them so far from home. All these considerations, joined to the flattering hope of revenging such repeated injuries, decided them on taking effectual measures to throw off so heavy a yoke; and foreseeing no possible means of mitigating their misery, they reproached themselves for their patient submission, which they began to regard as mean and cowardly, whilst all agreed in the pressing necessity of driving out the Spaniards, though they differed in the mode of government they should afterwards adopt. One part of the assembly lent towards a republic[12], nearly on the same model as that established in Holland; whilst the other preferred a monarchy. Of the latter, some proposed the duke of Braganza, others the marquis de Villa-Real, and a third party the duke d'Aveiro, all three princes of the blood royal of Portugal. Each gave his opinion on this occasion according to the affection he bore these different princes, and his own private interest; but the archbishop, ever devoted to the family of Braganza, skilfully took advantage of his sacred character to represent in the most energetic terms, that the choice of government was not arbitrary, since they could not in conscience break their oath of allegiance to the king of Spain in favour of any other than the lawful heir to the crown, which was universally known to be the duke of Braganza; they had therefore no choice left, but to acknowledge him as king, or patiently remain for ever under the government of Spain. He next proceeded to set forth the great power, immense riches, and considerable number of vassals belonging to that prince, from whom nearly one-third of the kingdom held their lands; adding, that there could be but little hopes of driving the Spaniards out of Spain, unless they chose him for their chief; and to induce him to accept so important a post, it would be necessary to offer the crown to his acceptance, even were it not his incontestable right as first prince of the blood. The archbishop did not fail expatiating on the amiable qualities of the duke, dwelling particularly on his prudence, wisdom, and the mildness and goodness which distinguished all his actions: he, in short, made so strong an impression on the minds of his hearers, that the universal voice was in favour of Braganza; and they decided, before they parted, to leave no means untried to engage him in their project. The assembly then broke up, after having fixed particular days and hours for future meetings, in order to deliberate on the best steps to be taken for the speedy and happy execution of this design. Pinto no sooner perceived this favourable turn of affairs, than he wrote to his master, entreating him to move towards Lisbon, where his presence would so greatly tend to animate the conspirators, and where he would be enabled to concert with them the proper measures for succeeding in so arduous an undertaking. This truly able man was indeed the master spring which set in motion the whole machine, and that without appearing to have any private interest in the business, or any other motive than zeal for the public good: he even expressed his doubts whether his master could ever be induced to enter into a plot so repugnant to his natural disposition, which led him to avoid all hazardous enterprizes, or indeed any thing which required attention and perseverance; thus raising difficulties, which prevented all possible suspicion of any secret intelligence between him and the duke, and were at the same time of a nature to be easily over-ruled; exciting, rather than otherwise, the spirit of the people to pursue their design with redoubled ardour. The duke, in a few days after receiving Pinto's letter, quitted Villa Vicosa, and arrived at Almada, a castle in the neighbourhood of Lisbon, from which indeed it is only separated by the Tagus. This journey was not calculated to raise suspicion, and appeared taken in the course of his other visits to the different fortresses in the kingdom. He was escorted on this occasion by so many people of distinction and officers of the army, and his equipages were in such a style of magnificence, that he appeared much more like a sovereign taking possession of his dominions, than a mere governor visiting the places committed to his charge. On arriving so near the capital of Portugal, he judged a visit to the vice-queen absolutely indispensable. The great court of the palace, and all the avenues leading towards it, were on this occasion thronged with people, anxious to see him pass, and the whole body of the nobility waited upon him to accompany him to the vice-queen; the whole city, indeed, wore the appearance of a public festival, and such was the joy his presence inspired, that nothing appeared wanting to place him on the throne, but a herald to proclaim him king, or sufficient resolution in himself to claim that title as his due. This prince, however, was much too wise and prudent to trust the completion of so great a design to the transports of a light and inconstant people, who generally gave way to first emotions, very different from that persevering approbation so necessary in an enterprise of so momentous a nature. He, therefore, after taking leave of the vice-queen, returned to Almada without passing through the town, or even visiting the palace of Braganza, lest he should give umbrage to the Spaniards, who were already but too much alarmed at the testimonies of joy expressed by the people. Pinto did not fail remarking to his friends the cautious, nay, timid conduct of his master on this occasion, representing that they ought not to neglect the opportunity of his visit to Almada, to enter into a full explanation of their design, and even to insist on his accepting the crown, as the only means of redeeming his country from utter ruin. This advice being approved by the conspirators, Pinto was entreated to use his influence with his master, to give them an opportunity of explaining their intentions in person, a commission he joyfully accepted. The duke of Braganza was prevailed upon to consent to the interview, on condition that only three of the deputies should be admitted to his presence at the same time, not chusing to explain his sentiments before a more numerous society. Michel d Almeida, Antoine d'Almada, and Mendoça being chosen for this purpose, were secretly admitted in the night to the prince's closet; when Almada represented to him, in the strongest colours, the miserable situation of the kingdom, in which all ranks of people were equal sufferers, from the cruelty and injustice of the Castillians; that even the duke himself, notwithstanding his princely dignity, was not safe from their malice, since he could not possibly be blind to the various plans formed by the prime minister to effect his ruin; that in order to escape such deep laid schemes, he had no other resource than mounting the throne of his ancestors, and that to assist him in achieving so great a design, he was deputed by a great number of the most distinguished persons in the kingdom, who made an offer of their services, and were ready to sacrifice their lives and fortunes to promote his interest, and to revenge the cause of Portugal on the tyrannical and usurping Spaniards. Almada then proceeded to prove, that the situation of Spain was greatly changed since the days of Charles the Ist and Philip the IId, when that country gave the law and spread terror throughout the whole of Europe, that the same monarchy, which at that time formed such extensive views of empire, could now scarcely preserve its own domains from the frequent and successful attacks of France and Holland, with which it was then at war. That the greatest part of its forces were employed in Catalonia; that it was in want of troops and money, and was governed by a weak prince, who himself was governed by a minister universally and deservedly detested by the whole of the kingdom. He next set forth the alliances the duke might reasonably expect to form with the greatest part of the princes of Europe, who, as natural enemies of the house of Austria, would assuredly grant him their protection; that Holland and Catalonia ought to teach him what may be expected from a great minister[13], whose sublime and elevated genius seemed wholly bent on the complete destruction of the same family: that the vicinity of Portugal to the sea would enable him to receive all necessary assistance; in short, that the greatest part of the Spanish garrisons having left the country to augment the army in Catalonia, he could never have so favourable an opportunity to prove his right to the crown, to secure his property, life, and family, and deliver the nation from slavery and oppression. The duke of Braganza, though inwardly charmed with this discourse, replied with his usual calmness and moderation, and though he did not absolutely refuse the proposal of the deputies, he said nothing which could make them believe he was decided on accepting it. He, indeed, assured them, that he was convinced as well as themselves of the deplorable state of the nation, and that his own situation was far from secure: he praised their zeal for the good of their country, and expressed the high sense he had of their views in his favour; but that he could not help doubting the time was not yet come for such violent measures, which, if not taken effectually, were ever attended by the most dreadful consequences. This answer, the only one they could possibly obtain, was accompanied by such amiable and caressing manners, and by such polite acknowledgments to each deputy, that they had every reason to believe their commission was far from disagreeable to the duke; but that the only steps he could be induced to take in the business, would be to give his consent, when, through their endeavours, the success of the enterprise should be no longer doubtful. The duke, after this interview, arranged fresh plans with his faithful Pinto, and returned to Villa Vicosa oppressed by feelings he had never before experienced, and which prevented the enjoyment of those pleasures he had formerly tasted in his retired situation. His first care on arriving at home, was to communicate all which had occurred to his wife. This princess, who was a Spaniard, and the sister of the duke de Medina Sidonia, a grandee of Spain, and governor of Andalusia, discovered from her cradle the most elevated sentiments, which by degrees became an immoderate passion for every thing noble and glorious. Her father, having early perceived that her understanding was equal to her courage, neglected nothing which could possibly contribute to the cultivation of such striking qualities. Her education was superintended by persons of the first abilities, who did not fail to inspire her with those sentiments of ambition which are esteemed by the world the index of a noble mind, and as such judged the first of qualities in a prince[14]. She had applied herself from her earliest youth to the discrimination of characters, and could discover by the most ingenious and delicate means, the secret sentiments of those with whom she conversed: she was indeed become so skilful and penetrating, that even the designs of the most artful courtier could not escape her observation. In short, she was not only possessed of sufficient courage to undertake the most difficult enterprise, if it appeared to her great and glorious, but endowed with abilities to ensure its success. Her manners were dignified, yet easy, and her sweetness joined with majesty, inspired all who beheld her with love and respect. She easily acquired the manners of the Portugueze, and might very well have been mistaken for a native of Lisbon. Her first care on her marriage was to obtain the esteem and confidence of her husband, and she succeeded perfectly in her design, by her exemplary conduct, solid piety, and obliging compliance with his favourite pursuits. Indifferent to all the pleasures natural to her age and quality, she passed every leisure hour in cultivating her understanding, and adding fresh force to the natural strength and justness of her judgment. The duke of Braganza felt himself happy in the possession of so truly accomplished and amiable a woman; his esteem for her qualities, and confidence in her judgment, were unbounded; and he never could have been prevailed upon to take any decisive steps in so momentous an affair as the one in question, without her knowledge and advice. He therefore informed her of every particular relative to the conspiracy, the names of the conspirators, their ardour in the cause, and every thing which had passed, both at Lisbon and at the conference at Almada; adding, that immediately on the news of the Catalonian expedition he had foreseen that the nobles were resolved to rebel sooner than quit the kingdom, and that should he refuse the proffered dignity, it was to be feared they would chuse another chief; yet still he could not help owning that the greatness of the danger filled him with apprehensions. The idea of ascending the throne of his ancestors, when viewed at a distance, had indeed dazzled, and agreeably flattered his imagination, but now, when the moment was arrived for trying his fortune, and risking so perilous an undertaking, he could not look forward without fear to an event which might terminate in the destruction of himself and family: that very little dependance could be placed on the temper of an inconstant people, whom the smallest difficulty discourages, and that it was not sufficient to have the nobles of his party, unless they were supported by the grandees of the kingdom; but so far from flattering himself with their interest in his favour, he had every reason to believe they would prove his most cruel enemies, since the jealousy natural to mankind would never allow them to submit to the authority of one who had hitherto been their equal. These considerations, joined to the great power of the king of Spain, and the very little confidence to be placed in the assistance of foreign princes, nearly overbalanced in the mind of the duke the desire of royalty; but the duchess, possessed of more firmness, and fired with ambition, entered immediately into the whole design of the conspiracy. The prospect of so great an enterprise excited the natural courage of her character, and awakened every aspiring sentiment in her bosom. She asked Braganza[15] in what manner he would act, in case his refusal of the crown should end in Portugal's becoming a republic, and how he would conduct himself between that new form of government and the king of Spain? to which the duke replied, that he should ever remain inviolably attached to the interests of his country. Your resolution then, returned the duchess, dictates to me the answer I ought to make, and the one you yourself should give to the deputies; and since you are thus willing to expose yourself to the greatest dangers as a subject of the republic, surely it will be much more advantageous and glorious to take up arms in defence of a crown, which is your lawful right, and which the people and nobles burn with impatience to place on your head. She next proceeded to represent in the most forcible manner his incontestable claims to the throne of Portugal, remarking, that in the miserable situation to which that country was reduced by the Castillians, it was criminal in a man of his power and rank to remain inactive, and that his children and latest posterity would have cause to reproach his memory, for having thus, through weakness and timidity, neglected so favourable an opportunity. She dwelt particularly on the charms of royalty, and the delight of reigning over a country where now he was a mere subject, continually exposed to danger; that nothing could be more easy than possessing himself of the crown, and even without foreign assistance; since he was sufficiently powerful in Portugal to drive out the Spaniards, especially at the present fortunate juncture of the rebellion in Catalonia. She, in short, held up such brilliant prospects to his view, that he was determined to be guided by her advice, and decided upon joining the party: but the duchess, equally with himself, was of opinion it was more prudent to wait till the number of conspirators should be increased, before he made a positive declaration of his sentiments; and that he should not appear openly in the affair, till the plot was ripe for execution. The court, in the mean time, was not a little alarmed by the joy expressed by the Lisbonians at the presence of Braganza, and which had made no small impression on the mind of the minister, who began to suspect the holding of private meetings in that city; certain reports also, which generally are whispered about on the eve of great events, considerably increased his apprehensions. The king called several councils on the occasion, and resolved on crushing all hopes of a revolution in Portugal, by immediately summoning the duke of Braganza to Madrid, as the only chief of a party to be dreaded in that country. The count-duke, therefore, sent off a courier to that prince, informing him that his majesty required his presence, being desirous of learning from his own mouth the precise state of the troops and fortresses in Portugal; adding, that his friends were anxious to see him at court, where he might be assured he would be received with every distinction due to his birth and merit. A thunder-bolt could not have more dreadfully dismayed the duke than this intelligence. The earnest intreaties and different pretences which had hitherto been employed to entice him from his native country, confirmed him in the idea that he was obnoxious to the government, and his destruction certain. But now the case was still more desperate; proffered employments, and feigned caresses were now changed to absolute orders, which, if disobeyed, would be enforced by violence. Apprehensions of his designs having been betrayed took possession of his mind; and as all those who form great projects believe the whole world employed in watching their motions, and diving into the secret recesses of their hearts, this able, though in some respects timid and suspicious prince, believed himself involved in the greatest of all possible calamities. He, however, wishing to gain time, dispatched, by the advice of the duchess, an intelligent and faithful gentleman belonging to his household, to assure the prime minister of his immediate attendance on his majesty, giving him at the same time secret orders to endeavour as much as possible to invent different excuses for the arrival of his master being so long delayed; the duke hoping by these means to avert the storm hanging over his head, and to accelerate the success of the conspiracy. Immediately on the gentleman's reaching Madrid, he acquainted the king and prime minister that he only preceded his master, who would instantly follow him; and hiring a large hotel, he furnished it magnificently, engaged a great train of domestics, whose liveries he had already provided, lived at a considerable expence, in short, neglected nothing to prove that the duke's arrival was hourly expected, and that he intended appearing at court with a splendour suitable to the dignity of his birth. In a few days afterwards, this gentleman pretended to have received an account of the duke's being seriously indisposed; but this excuse being soon worn out, he next presented a memorial to the prime minister, requesting, in the name of his master, that his majesty would be pleased to regulate the rank he was to hold in the court of Spain; and he flattered himself this affair might take some time in deciding, from the opposition it was natural to suppose would be made by the grandees in support of their claims; but the prime minister, who suspected such frequent delays, and who burned with impatience to see him at Madrid, quickly surmounted all these difficulties, by engaging his majesty to decide in favour of the duke, and that in the most honourable and distinguished manner. No sooner had the conspirators learned the orders received by the duke, than, fearing he might take alarm too suddenly, they dispatched Mendoça to revive his drooping spirits, and to determine him at once on nobly and courageously joining their party. The choice fell preferably on this nobleman, as being governor of a fort near Villa Vicosa, which would prevent the Spaniards from suspecting the secret purpose of his journey. The duke being engaged in the pleasures of the chace, was joined by Mendoça, and taking an opportunity of riding together into the thickest part of a wood, the latter represented the perils he would inevitably encounter should he venture to the court of Spain; that by thus putting himself into the hands of his enemies, he would for ever blast the hopes of the nobility and people; that considerable numbers of the first gentry were decided to sacrifice their lives and fortunes in his cause, and only waited for the avowal of his sentiments, to shew themselves; that the moment was at length arrived, when he had no choice left him but death, or a crown; that all farther delays were dangerous, and that he must be aware an affair of such importance, confided to such a variety of people, could not long be kept secret from the Spaniards. The duke no longer hesitated, but agreed in the sentiments of Mendoça, and commissioned him to declare to his friends, that it was his fixed resolution to place himself at their head. Mendoça returned immediately home, to prevent any suspicions of the cause of his journey on the minds of those who might probably have seen him with the duke; and merely wrote to the conspirators that he had been on a hunting party, and had found the game for a long time very shy, but that at last he had had good sport. In a few days afterwards he returned to Lisbon, where he acquainted his friends with all that had passed; and the duke wishing to see Pinto, he set off immediately, having first received the necessary instructions for informing his master of the nature of their plan, and the means of putting it into execution. Pinto also acquainted him with the divisions which had taken place at the court of Lisbon, where the vice-queen complained in the bitterest terms of the pride and insolence of Vasconcellos; declaring that she could no longer permit the dispatches from the court of Spain being first addressed to him, whilst dignified by a vague title, she remained wholly powerless. Her complaints indeed were the more justly founded, as being a princess of superior merit, she was in every way capable of exercising the authority committed to her charge. This she perfectly knew, but she did not so easily perceive that the distinguished qualities of her head and heart were the principal reasons of her being allowed so small a share in the government. Pinto did not fail to remark on this occasion, that nothing could be more favourable to his master's designs than this misunderstanding, since the disputes in the palace would take up the attention of the Spanish ministers, and not allow them time to attend to his proceedings. The duke of Braganza, on the departure of Mendoça, sunk once more into his usual indecision; the more the plot advanced towards its execution, the more his uncertainty increased. Pinto used every possible endeavour to prevent his wavering, and even added threats to argument and entreaty, declaring he should be proclaimed king in spite of himself, and that the consequences of his irresolution would be risking greater perils, and suffering still more considerable losses. The duchess joined with this faithful domestic in reproaching him with the mean cowardice of preferring the security of a frail existence to regal dignity; till at last the duke, blushing at being surpassed in courage by a woman, yielded to her arguments. He was, indeed, pressed by continual letters from his agent at Madrid, who declared, that he could no longer invent excuses for his absence, nor would the prime minister any longer accept them. Perceiving, therefore, no time was to be lost, he determined on commencing his operations without delay. He, however, sent an answer to Madrid, desiring his gentleman to try to gain time, by representing to the count-duke d'Olivarez, that he should already have been in Spain, had he not wanted money for the journey, and for appearing with the splendour suitable to his rank in the country; but that the moment he should be able to procure a sufficient sum for such purposes, he would set off immediately for court. His next care was to consult with the duchess and his faithful Pinto, on the properest methods to be taken for securing the success of his enterprise; and the duke at last decided that his first attack should be on Lisbon, which being the capital, would, when once secured in his interest, naturally influence the rest of the kingdom, and that the moment Lisbon declared in his favour, he should cause himself to be proclaimed king in all towns within its jurisdiction; that those of his friends who were governors of forts and strong places should do the same; and that the conspirators should stir up the people of the small towns and villages in their different lordships, so that in so general and sudden a commotion, the few Spaniards remaining would be at a loss on which side to turn their arms; that he would send his own regiment into Elvas, the governor of which was wholly in his interest; but that he was as yet uncertain in what manner he should possess himself of Lisbon, a great deal depending on the opportunities which might offer themselves when he should commence his attack; he was, however, of opinion, that their first attempt should be on the palace, in order to secure the person of the vice-queen, together with the whole of the Spaniards, who might serve as hostages to enforce the surrender of the citadel, which might otherwise greatly annoy the city, when once in their possession. The duke then gave Pinto credential letters for Almeida and Mendoça, in which he informed them that the bearer being perfectly well acquainted with his intentions, he merely wrote to express his hopes that they would remain faithful to their promise, and be firm and vigorous in the moment of its execution. This done, the duke immediately dispatched Pinto to Lisbon, after having bestowed upon him such marks of confidence and esteem, as gave him no room to doubt, that whatever might be the future grandeur of his master, he should always preserve the same place in his favour. On arriving at Lisbon, his first care was to present his letters to Almeida and Mendoça; he also sent for Lemos and Correa, whom he had long secured in the interest of his master. These were rich citizens, who had served all the principal offices of the city, employed a considerable number of artificers, and were highly esteemed by the people. They had busied themselves for some time past in keeping up the resentment of the citizens towards the Spaniards, by secret reports of new taxes to be laid on in the beginning of the following year: they even purposely discharged several of their workmen, particularly the most discontented amongst them, on pretence, that trade being ruined, they were no longer able to maintain them, and this with a view that poverty, and its attendant, hunger, might induce them to an insurrection; relieving them, however, from time to time, in order to secure them more firmly in their interest. They also kept up a secret correspondence with the principal persons in each quarter of the town, which enabled them to assure the conspirators, that provided they were made acquainted with their plan the evening before it was to be put into execution, they would engage to stir up the greater part of the people, and that at the hour they should judge most convenient for this purpose. Pinto having thus secured the artificers in his cause, neglected nothing to keep the other conspirators firm to their purpose; exhorting every one separately to hold himself in readiness against the signal of attack; begging them at the same time to engage the assistance of their own particular friends, on pretence of some private quarrel, without letting them into the true state of the business; judging, truly, that there are many people endowed with great courage sword in hand, who, in cold blood, are very unfit to be trusted with a great and important secret. Pinto having reason to be satisfied with the firmness and courage of those to whom he addressed himself, every one of whom breathed forth the most ardent wishes, and the greatest impatience to be revenged of the Spaniards; he held a conference with Almeida, Mendoça, Almada, and Mello, and nothing appearing wanting for the execution of their design, they unanimously fixed on Saturday the first of December to commence their operations. Notice was immediately sent to the duke of Braganza, in order that he might cause himself to be proclaimed king on the same day throughout the province of Alentejo, the whole of which was immediately under his dependance. It was then resolved they should assemble once more, to take the final measures for ensuring the success of their enterprise. This last meeting took place on the 25th of November, in the Braganza palace, when they found their party consisted of nearly a hundred and fifty gentlemen, most of whom were the heads of families, with the whole of their domestics, and about two hundred citizens and artificers, all active trusty men, so greatly esteemed in the city, that they could not fail of engaging the generality of the people in their cause. The death of Vasconcellos was unanimously decided upon, as a victim offered up to the resentment of the whole kingdom of Portugal; some amongst them proposed the archbishop of Braga's sharing the same fate, representing that his superior genius rendered him a most formidable enemy; and that it could not be supposed he would view their attempt with indifference, or without putting himself at the head of the Spaniards, and any other of his creatures resident in the city. That whilst they were endeavouring to possess themselves of the palace, he might either throw himself into the citadel, or come to the relief of the vice-queen, to whose interest he was particularly devoted; that in an affair of such importance it was the height of imprudence to spare an enemy who would most probably give them cause to repent their false pity, and ill-timed compassion. These reasons had great weight with most of the assembly, and the prelate would certainly have perished with Vasconcellos, had not don Michel d'Almeida[16] spoke in his defence, and represented to the conspirators, that the death of a man of the archbishop's character and dignified situation, would draw upon them universal indignation; that the clergy and inquisition, ever to be dreaded by the most powerful princes, would be highly incensed against the duke of Braganza, whom they would regard not only as a rebel and usurper, but as being excommunicated and shut out from the communion of the faithful; and that the prince himself would be deeply hurt that his accession to the crown should be stained by so inhuman an action. He then offered to keep so strict a watch over every action of the prelate on the day appointed for the execution of their purpose, that it would be impossible for him to undertake any thing contrary to the public good. In short, he pleaded so forcibly in his favour, that his friends, unable to refuse a man of such superior merit, agreed to spare his life. Nothing more now remained to be done than to arrange the order of attack; and it was resolved to form themselves into four bands, that by entering into the palace by four different avenues, the passages would be too effectually stopped for the Spaniards to be able to communicate together, or afford each other any relief. Don Michel d'Almeida was appointed to attack the German guards at the entrance of the palace, whilst his brother Mello, (grand huntsman,) and don Estevan d'Acugna should surprise a Spanish company, which constantly mounted guard at a part of the castle called the fort. Mello de Menezes, the grand chamberlain, Emmanuel de Sáa, and Pinto were to force into the apartment of Vasconcellos, and dispatch him; whilst don Antonio d'Almada, Mendoça, don Carlos de Norogna, and Antonio de Saldanha, should possess themselves of the person of the vice-queen, together with those of all the Spaniards at that time in the palace, to serve as hostages in case of necessity. Whilst they were thus employed in taking these different posts, some officers were to be dispatched, attended by the principal citizens, to proclaim don John, duke of Braganza, king of Portugal, throughout the city; and that the people thus assembled in the streets should be employed as auxiliaries, in case of resistance. The conference then broke up, after having decided on meeting on Saturday the first of December, at the respective houses of don Michel d'Almeida, Almada, and Mendoça, where the conspirators were to arm for the occasion. Whilst the friends of Braganza were thus warmly promoting his interest at Lisbon, and he himself was employed in gaining partisans in the country, the prime minister, all anxiety at such repeated delays, dispatched a courier with positive orders for his immediate appearance at court; and that the duke might no longer plead want of money as an excuse for his absence, he at the same time sent him an order on the royal treasury for ten thousand ducats. His message was so clear, and so absolute, that the duke could no longer defer his departure without giving rise to the justest suspicions. No possible reason could now exist for his disobedience, which it was to be apprehended would be punished in such a manner as must inevitably crush all his ambitious prospects, and render his plan abortive; he therefore immediately sent off the greatest part of his household, with orders to take the road to Madrid; and in the presence of the courier appeared busied in arranging every thing relative to his government, as if on the point of taking a long journey. He also dispatched a gentleman to the vice-queen, to inform her of his departure; and wrote to the prime minister, that he might depend on his arrival at Madrid not being delayed beyond eight days. He next presented the courier with a handsome sum of money, on pretence of defraying the expences of his journey, and as a gratuity for bringing him the commands of his sovereign; but in reality to court his favour, and induce him to speak confidently of his intended departure. In the mean time he took care to inform the conspirators of all that had happened, representing the strong necessity of executing their design on the appointed day, lest measures should be taken by the Spaniards to prevent its success. They, however, were at that moment in such a state of perplexity, as gave them but little hopes of so shortly commencing their intended operations. A certain man of quality[17], an inhabitant of Lisbon, had ever been particularly forward in expressing his detestation of the Spaniards and their government; he never bestowed on them any other epithet than that of tyrants, or usurpers, complaining publicly of their injustice, and inveighing particularly against the Catalonian expedition, which he prognosticated would be followed by the most fatal consequences. Almada having frequently conversed with him on this topic, had every reason to think that there was not a more zealous and better affected Portugueze in the city of Lisbon: he therefore believed he would be enchanted with the plan formed for the emancipation of his country; but how great was his astonishment, when having conducted him to a retired spot to inform him of the conspiracy, this man, so daring and violent in expression, but mean and cowardly in reality, declared he would take no part in the transaction; objecting, the tottering foundation on which they had built their hopes of success! All the pride and courage he had displayed whilst the danger appeared at a distance, sunk into the most abject fear at the idea of partaking it. Where, cried he to Almada, can you possibly obtain a sufficient body of troops to enable you to undertake so vast an enterprise? What army can you oppose to the Spanish troops, which will be spread throughout the country on the first attempt you make towards the execution of your design? Who are the grandees at the head of this affair? and are they sufficiently rich to support the expence of a civil war? I fear, continued he, that so far from revenging our cause on the Spaniards, and liberating our country from their tyranny, you will contribute to its ruin, by giving them a pretext they have long been seeking, for completing the destruction of Portugal. D'Almada, who had so little reason to expect the avowal of such sentiments, was in despair at his ill-placed confidence, and not deigning to reply, he grasped his sword, and with eyes darting fire, rushed towards him; nothing remains, cried he, to be done, but to take my life with my secret, or to receive thy punishment for having drawn it from me by thy false professions. His mean-souled opponent, ever anxious to avert impending danger, and terrified at the appearance of a naked sword, immediately consented to every proposal of Almada's; he offered to join the conspirators, and even contrived to contradict every thing he had hitherto advanced; binding himself by the most solemn oaths to keep the secret, and neglecting nothing to induce Almada to believe that the disinclination he had at first shewed to the plan, was not the effect of fear, or want of resentment towards the Spaniards. These oaths and protestations were, however, far from relieving the anxiety of Almada, who kept a strict watch on all the actions of this person, whilst he acquainted the conspirators with every thing which had happened. The alarm became general, and when they reflected on the variable and inconsiderable character of the man in question, they had but too much reason to apprehend, that either the approach of personal danger, or the hope of a rich reward, might induce him to betray them; they therefore decided on deferring the execution of their plan, and insisted on Pinto's writing to his master not to commence his operations till he heard farther from them; but Pinto, well aware of the danger of procrastination in affairs of such a nature, when the delay of a single day might be attended by fatal consequences, wrote secretly to the prince to entreat him to pay no attention to the other letter, which was merely dictated by the panic of a moment, which would be passed even before the courier could possibly arrive at Villa Vicosa. The event proved the truth of his assertion, for on the following day, finding every one continued firm to his purpose, they felt ashamed of their sudden alarm; and the suspected person giving no fresh cause of apprehension, having indeed repeated his assurances of fidelity, either from a change of sentiments, or from the fear of an ill-judged accusation of so many people of distinction, they determined on pursuing their original plan: but no sooner were they relieved from one dilemma, than they fell into another equally perplexing. The prudent Pinto, ever on the watch, took care to place several of the conspirators as spies in different parts of the palace: these men walked to and fro unheeded, and were regarded merely as making part of the idle throng who generally flock about a court. On the eve of the day intended to commence by the death of Vasconcellos, they perceived that minister embark on the Tagus; this circumstance, which would have passed unnoticed by indifferent spectators, who could never have believed themselves interested in his crossing the river, spread universal alarm amongst the conspirators, and they were instantly convinced that this artful and able minister had not only discovered their project, but was gone to the opposite shore for the purpose of collecting together the troops which were quartered in the neighbouring villages. Tortures and death immediately presented themselves in the most dreadful colours to their terrified imagination; they fancied their dwellings already surrounded by the officers of justice, and some amongst them were even on the point of escaping the cruelty of the Spaniards, by flying to England or Africa. Thus passed the greatest part of the night, in all the agonies of fear and despair; but joy soon succeeded to terror, on being informed by those of their friends who had remained at the port to make observations, that the minister was just returned, hautboys gayly playing, from a grand festival, to which he had been invited. Satisfied that no suspicion was entertained in the palace, where all was buried in sleep, unconscious of the danger of the morrow, they retired at a very late hour. Short as was the time now remaining before the execution of their project, the conspirators had still another subject of alarm; so true it is that enterprises of such a nature are always uncertain, and frequently dangerous, more especially when the dread of punishment, and hope of reward, may cause cowardice and treachery. George de Mello, the brother of the grand huntsman, usually resided at a relation's in a distant suburb of the city; and the conspiracy being on the point of taking place, this nobleman was of opinion, that a relation, whom he had also long regarded as a friend, would have reason to complain of his want of confidence, should he conceal from him an affair in which the love of his country must equally interest him with himself; he therefore decided on inducing him to join the confederacy, and accompany him in the morning to the rendezvous. Accordingly, on returning from the assembly, he retired with him to his closet, unfolded the whole business, exhorted him to be of the party, and to conduct himself as became a man of his quality and a true Portugueze. Surprised at such extraordinary intelligence, he, however, affected to be greatly delighted at the speedy prospect of his country's freedom; and thanking Mello for such honourable proofs of confidence, he declared himself happy in exposing his life with so many honest men, in so just and glorious a design. This conference ended, they retired to rest for a few hours before they set off for the rendezvous; but no sooner was Mello returned to his room, than his conscience smote him for his imprudent confidence; he reproached himself for having so inconsiderately placed the fate of such numbers of respectable people in the hands of a man of whose honour he was not sufficiently assured, and in whose countenance he thought he descried marks of secret uneasiness, joined to surprise and terror at the prospect of so perilous an enterprise. In short, he could not help trembling lest the dread of torture, or the certainty of reward, should induce him to betray his secret. A prey to these heart-rending reflections, he traversed his chamber, till roused by a confused noise of people, speaking low, as if fearful of discovery, he opened his window, to listen more attentively to what was passing, and perceived by a glimmering light his relation at the door, going to mount his horse. Furious with rage, he flew down the stairs, and drawing his sword, fiercely demanded whither he was going? and what important affairs could induce him to quit his house in the midst of the night? The other, extremely astonished, endeavoured to alledge some bad reasons for his departure; but Mello threatening to put him to death, forced him to return to his chamber, and taking possession of the keys of the house, he watched his motions till the hour appointed for the rendezvous, whither he induced him to accompany him. The day at last broke forth which was to raise Braganza to the dignity of king, and bestow on him the honourable title of deliverer of his country, or brand him with the name of rebel, and enemy of the state. At an early hour the conspirators repaired to don Michel d'Almeida's, and to the other houses, where it was agreed the nobles should put on their arms. Certainty of success, courage and resolution brightened every countenance; and it is not a little remarkable, that in a conspiracy formed of such numbers of priests, citizens, and gentlemen, the greatest part animated by opposite interests, not one amongst them proved a traitor to the cause. Every one appeared as eager to begin the attack, as if he himself was leader of the enterprise, and was destined to wear the crown in reward of his services. Even the women were desirous of taking an active part in the glory of the day; and history memorably records of donna Philippa de Villena, that having herself armed her two sons, and given them each his cuirass, she addressed them as follows: "Go forth, my children, extinguish tyranny, revenge our cause on our enemies; and rest assured, that should fortune fail to smile upon your hopes, your mother will not survive a moment the disastrous fate of so many brave and honest men![18]" Every one being armed, they repaired to the palace through different streets; the greater part being conveyed thither in litters, the better to conceal their numbers and arms. They were divided, as agreed upon, into four bands, and thus waited with inexpressible impatience the hour of eight, the time appointed for the assault: every moment added to their apprehensions, lest so many people appearing at so unusual an hour at the palace, should awaken suspicion in the breast of the minister; but at last the clock struck, and Pinto having given the signal by the discharge of a pistol, they immediately rushed to their different posts; Don Michel d'Almeida and his band fell on the German guards, who being taken by surprise, and the greater part unarmed, were presently defeated, and almost without resistance. In the mean time, the grand huntsman, with his brother Mello, and don Estevan d'Acugna, attacked the Spanish company on guard, on the right of the palace called the fort; they were followed by the greater part of the citizens engaged in the enterprise, who sword in hand forced the guardhouse, in which the Spaniards had entrenched themselves. No one on this occasion distinguished himself in a more gallant manner than a priest of Azambuja, who marched at the head of the conspirators, holding in one hand a crucifix, whilst he brandished a sword in the other, and in a loud and terrible voice exhorted the people to destroy their enemies, at the same time furiously charging the Spaniards, who flew before him; such indeed was the reverence inspired by the sacred object with which he was armed, that no one presumed to attack him, or even defend himself; so that after a very slight resistance the Spanish officer and his men were forced to yield; and, to save their lives, join in the general cry of "Long live the duke of Braganza, king of Portugal!" Pinto having forced his way into the palace, placed himself at the head of those destined to attack Vasconcellos, and marched with so assured and resolute an air, that one of his friends, whom he met in his passage, panic-struck, tremblingly asked, whither he was going with such numbers of armed men; and for what purpose they were designed? To which he replied, with a smile, "Only to change your master, and by delivering you from the power of a tyrant, place you under the government of a lawful sovereign!!" On entering the apartments of the secretary of state, they were met at the foot of the stairs by the civil judge[19], Francisco Soares d'Albergaria, who had just quitted Vasconcellos, and imagining the tumult to proceed from some private quarrel, was about to interpose his authority, but his ears being saluted by repeated shouts of long live the duke of Braganza! he thought himself bound in honour, and by the duties of his charge, to cry, long live the king of Spain and Portugal! This expression cost him dear, one of the conspirators immediately shooting him with a pistol, and by so doing, claimed the merit of having punished an act of loyalty, which now began to be regarded as a crime. The secretary's first clerk, Antonio Correa, being alarmed by the report of the pistol, instantly flew to the spot. This man, the inflictor of his master's cruelties, and who had ever treated the nobles with marked contempt, was no sooner perceived by don Antonio de Menezes, than he plunged his poinard into his bosom; but even this stroke was not sufficient to convince the miserable wretch that his power was at an end, for not believing it possible that any one would dare to attack him, he supposed himself mistaken for another, and turning haughtily towards Menezes, "What!" cried he, "dost thou dare to wound me?" To which he was only answered by repeated stabs, till he sunk exhausted on the floor. His wounds, however, did not prove mortal; and he escaped that time with life, to perish still more ignobly some time afterwards, by the hand of the executioner. The conspirators having thus got rid of the clerk who had impeded their passage up the stairs, flew to the apartment of the secretary. He was accompanied by Diego Garcés Palha, a captain of infantry, who on perceiving a body of armed men furiously advancing, presently guessed they aimed at the life of Vasconcellos; and though he owed no particular obligation to that minister, he generously opposed, sword in hand, their entrance at the door, hoping, by so doing, to favour the secretary's escape; but being wounded in the sword arm, and oppressed by numbers, he threw himself from a window, and was fortunate enough to be but little hurt by the fall. A crowd of conspirators instantly rushed into the chamber, and eagerly searched for Vasconcellos, every one burning with impatience to strike the first blow; but after having in vain overset beds, tables, and peeped into chests, they gave way to despair that he should thus escape their vengeance; when an old female servant, being threatened with immediate death, pointed to a press contrived in the wall, where he was found concealed under a quantity of papers. The certainty of his fate deprived him of speech; and the grand chamberlain, don Rodrigo de Sáa, having first fired at him with a pistol, the others stabbed him repeatedly with their swords, and throwing him out of the window, shouted, "The tyrant is dead; liberty for ever; long live don John, king of Portugal!" These shouts were joyfully re-echoed by the populace, on seeing the body drop amongst them. They instantly seized it, and seemed to vie with each other in revenging the public wrongs, and putting a finishing stroke to the reign of tyranny. Thus fell Michel de Vasconcellos, who, though born a Portugueze, was ever the sworn enemy of his country, and the friend of the Spaniards. Endowed with a superior genius for the management of affairs, quick, attentive, and inconceivably laborious in business, fruitful in expedients for extorting money from the people, consequently obdurate, a stranger to pity, and capable of acts of the most refined cruelty. With such a disposition, and having neither relations nor friends, the person existed not who had the smallest influence over his mind. To the seductions of pleasure he was perfectly insensible, and being never troubled by the stings of conscience, he had amassed immense treasures in the discharge of his employment, the greatest part of which were now pillaged by the incensed people, who claimed a right to administer justice, and to repair the losses they pretended they had suffered during the course of his administration. Pinto, without loss of time, proceeded to join the rest of the conspirators appointed to take possession of the palace, and seize the person of the vice-queen. On arriving at the spot, he found that plan had been already executed, and that they had been every where equally successful. No sooner, indeed, had they reached the door of the princess's apartment, which the people furiously threatened to set on fire unless opened immediately, than the vice-queen, attended by her maids of honour, and the archbishop of Braga, made her appearance at the entrance of her chamber, flattering herself that her presence would appease the nobles, and restrain the violence of the populace; advancing then towards the principal persons amongst the conspirators, she addressed them as follows: "I cannot pretend to deny, gentlemen, that the secretary has justly incurred the indignation of the people by the cruelty and insolence of his conduct, but his death having now freed you from so odious an administration, your resentment ought surely to be appeased; I therefore advise you to reflect, that though these commotions may at present be attributed to the hatred of the public towards the secretary, they will, if persevered in, be regarded as acts of rebellion; nor will it be possible for me to exculpate your conduct or plead in your favour to the king." Don Antonio de Menezes, in reply to this discourse, declared, that such an assembly of distinguished persons had not taken up arms merely to destroy a detestable wretch, who ought to have perished by the hands of the executioner, but that they had met together to place the crown on the head of this duke of Braganza; a crown which had been usurped from his family, to which he alone had lawful claim, and which they were decided on restoring him, though their lives should be the sacrifice. The vice-queen attempted to answer, by interposing the authority of the king; but Almeida fearing a longer conversation might tend to discourage his party, abruptly interrupted her, by exclaiming, that the Portugueze would no longer acknowledge any other sovereign than the duke of Braganza. In the same moment the conspirators unanimously shouted, "Long live don John, king of Portugal!" The vice-queen, on perceiving they had broken through all restraint, believed it possible she might be more successful in the city, where her presence would probably have some influence on the citizens and people, when no longer supported by the conspirators; she therefore was preparing to go down stairs; but don Carlos de Norogna entreated her to return to her apartment, assuring her that she should be treated in the same respectful manner as if she still continued governess of the country; but that it was highly improper a great princess should expose herself to the insults of a people in the first moments of a revolution, and whose breasts beat high with the desire of liberty. These words but too clearly proved she might regard herself as a prisoner: bursting with indignation, she haughtily asked, "And what then have I to fear from the people?" "Nothing more, madam," furiously answered Norogna, "than that they might throw your highness out of the window." The archbishop of Braga, trembling with passion at the expressions of Norogna, snatched a sword from a soldier who stood near him, and endeavoured to force his way through the conspirators, to revenge the insults offered to the vice-queen. This effort was on the point of costing him his life, when don Michel d'Almeida closely embracing him, earnestly begged him to reflect on the danger to which he exposed himself; and forcibly tearing him away, represented in very strong terms, that his life hung by the slenderest thread, that he had had the greatest difficulty to preserve it from the rage of the conspirators, to whom his person was sufficiently odious, without irritating them still farther, by acts of unavailing bravery, very unbecoming a man of his sacred character. These remonstrances forced him to retreat, and even to dissimulate his rage; hoping, however, that time would afford him a favourable opportunity of wreaking his vengeance on Norogna, and proving his attachment to the interests of Spain. All the remaining Spaniards, both in the palace and city, were secured by the conspirators. The marquis de la Peubla major-domo to the vice-queen, and eldest brother of the marquis de Leganez; don Didace de Cardenas, general of the cavalry; don Fernando de Castro, comptroller of the navy; the marquis de Bainetto, an Italian, and master of the horse to the vice-queen, with several navy-officers, then in the port, were made prisoners; and that with as little difficulty, and as quietly, as if taken up by order of the king of Spain. The greater part, indeed, were unable to make any resistance, being in bed, and no one attempting to exert himself in their favour. Antonio de Saldanha, at the head of his party, and followed by crowds of people, proceeded next to the sovereign tribunal of _Relaçaon_, where he harangued the company on the happiness awaiting the Portugueze from the restoration of their lawful king, the destruction of tyranny, and the re-establishment of the laws of the country, under the government of a just and wise prince, laws which had been so long set at defiance. This discourse was received with general applause, and answered by the most lively acclamations, in favour of the new king. Gonçalo de Sousa, first president of this sovereign court, and the father of the historian of the same name, whom we have frequently consulted in the course of this work, immediately pronounced his decrees in the name of don John, king of Portugal. Whilst Antonio de Saldanha was thus employed in disposing the tribunal of _Relaçaon_ to acknowledge the duke of Braganza for their sovereign, don Gaston Coutinho set free the prisoners confined by the cruelty of the Spanish ministers. These miserable wretches, so suddenly removed from a frightful dungeon, with the fear of a speedy death continually in their thoughts, and restored to the participation of the liberty now to be enjoyed by their country, were so grateful to their deliverers, and so apprehensive of falling once more into the hands of their tormentors, that they formed another company of conspirators, not less solicitous to secure the throne to the duke of Braganza, than the body of nobility who originally planned the revolution. Great as was the joy of the conspirators at the success of their enterprise, Pinto and the chiefs were not free from uneasiness. The citadel still remained in the possession of the Spaniards, who might from thence easily fire on the town, and make the people severely repent the inconsiderate joy they had testified on this occasion. It might also afford an entrance to the king of Spain, and enable him to re-establish his authority. It was therefore agreed, that without they could make themselves masters of this place, their former success would avail them nothing; they accordingly repaired immediately to the vice-queen, and demanded an order for the governor to evacuate the citadel, and deliver it into their possession. This proposal she instantly rejected, and reproaching them as rebels, indignantly asked whether they intended to make her an accomplice in their crimes. Almada, enraged at her refusal, with fire flashing from his eyes, swore vehemently that unless she that moment signed the order, he would directly stab the whole of the Spanish prisoners to the heart. The princess, terrified at his violence, and trembling for the lives of so many persons of distinction, flattered herself that the governor knew his duty too well to comply with an order, which he must be assured was forced from her; she therefore signed the paper, which, however, produced a very different effect from what she had reason to expect. The governor, don Louis de Campo, a Spaniard by birth, and naturally timid and irresolute, on perceiving the armed conspirators at the gates of the citadel, followed by an immense concourse of people, who threatened to cut him to pieces with the rest of the garrison, if he did not instantly surrender, thought himself but too happy to escape so easily, and with so plausable an excuse for the cowardice of his conduct. He accordingly delivered up the citadel; and the conspirators having thus surmounted every obstacle, dispatched Mendoça and the grand huntsman to acquaint the duke of Braganza with their success; and to assure him on the part of the citizens, that nothing was now wanting to complete their happiness but the presence of their sovereign. This presence, however, was not equally desired by all: the grandees of the kingdom regarded his advancement with secret jealousy, and those nobles who were not engaged in the conspiracy, kept a profound silence, which proved their uncertainty of the event of so extraordinary a business. Some amongst them even ventured to declare that they were far from assured the duke would approve so bold an enterprise, which must inevitably be followed by the most dreadful consequences. The favourers and creatures of the Spaniards were still more cruelly alarmed; and, not daring to shew themselves to a people, who, intoxicated with their newly-acquired liberty, would not fail to insult them, they remained constantly shut up in their apartments, waiting in the greatest agitation of mind the duke's answer, which would determine their fate, and teach them what they had to hope or to fear from the completion of his designs. In the mean time the duke's party, perfectly well acquainted with his intentions, continued their operations, and assembled in the palace to issue out orders for conducting public affairs till the arrival of his majesty. The archbishop of Lisbon was unanimously declared president of the council, and lieutenant-general for the king. The prelate at first declined this honour, objecting that the present situation of the city, and indeed of the whole kingdom, demanded an able general more than a man of his sacred character. He, however, at last, on pretence of yielding to the solicitations of his friends, consented to sign the orders, provided the archbishop of Braga might act as his colleague in all affairs and dispatches necessary to be expedited before the arrival of the king. Thus this artful and prudent churchman flattered himself, that by pretending to divide the authority with him, the archbishop of Braga would become his accomplice, consequently criminal in the eyes of the Spaniards, and more particularly so, if he accepted the post of governor, which he was decided should be merely a nominal dignity: and should he refuse it, he would not only lose himself for ever with the duke, but become odious to all Portugal, and regarded as the declared enemy of his country. The archbishop of Braga was perfectly aware of the snare laid for him; but his attachment to the vice-queen having bound him to the Spanish interest, he absolutely refused taking the smallest share in the government. The whole weight of affairs therefore fell on the archbishop of Lisbon; don Michel d'Almeida, Pierre de Mendoça, and don Antonio d'Almada were appointed counsellors of state. The new government began its operations by taking possession of three large Spanish gallions riding in the port of Lisbon. Several armed vessels were sent out on this occasion, which were fitted by the younger part of the inhabitants, who were eager to signalize themselves in so important an affair; but their zeal had no opportunity of shewing itself, the gallions being incapable of resistance, the officers and greater part of the men having been made prisoners on the first breaking out of the conspiracy. Couriers were dispatched the same evening into all the provinces, to engage the people to offer public thanksgivings to Almighty God for the restoration of their liberty; to proclaim the duke of Braganza king of Portugal, and to secure the persons of all Spaniards throughout the whole of the kingdom. Magnificent preparations were made in Lisbon for the reception of the new monarch, whose arrival was hourly expected; and the archbishop acquainted the vice-queen that it was necessary she should quit the palace, which must now be occupied by the king and his household. An apartment was prepared for her in the royal palace of Xabregas, at the other extremity of the city, whither she repaired on receiving the archbishop's message, and passed through the town with an air of haughtiness, without uttering a single syllable; the scene indeed was entirely changed, and far from the train of courtiers which usually waited on her footsteps, she was accompanied by scarcely any domestics. The archbishop of Braga alone gave proofs of his constant attachment, which he publicly testified at a moment when his life might probably have been the forfeit of his zeal for her interest. The duke of Braganza, in the mean time, was a prey to the most torturing uncertainty: alternate hopes and fears took possession of his mind. The impossibility of receiving early intelligence at Villa Vicosa, thirty leagues from Lisbon, added to his anxiety, which became intolerable, on reflecting that his fate depended on the event of the present moment. His first intention, as has been already mentioned, was to cause an insurrection in all the towns under his dependance, on the very day the conspirators were to commence their operations at Lisbon; but he afterwards thought it more prudent to wait for intelligence from that city, in order to secure a retreat in case of ill success, either in the kingdom of Algarves, or the town and citadel of Elvas, which properly belonged to himself; he even believed it possible to persuade the Spaniards, should the event make it necessary, that he had no share in the conspiracy; particularly as the interest of that nation would naturally induce them to wish him innocent. In this perturbed state of mind, he sent off different couriers on the road to Lisbon, but though he was in hourly expectation of news, the whole of the day, and part of the night, passed in the same dreadful suspence; till at last Mendoça and Mello, who had travelled with all possible expedition, made their appearance, and respectfully throwing themselves at his feet, with the most lively expression of joy beaming forth in their countenances, convinced him more forcibly than by words, that he might now regard himself as king of Portugal. These noblemen were beginning an account of all that had happened, but the prince impatiently interrupting them, led them into the duchess's apartment, where they saluted her with the same respect as if already seated on the throne of Portugal, assuring her of the fidelity and attachment of her new subjects; and as a proof of her being acknowledged sovereign, addressed her by the title of majesty, which was still more grateful to her ear, from the kings of Portugal having formerly been only dignified by that of highness. It is easy to judge of the transports of this prince and princess, at being thus relieved from a state of the most cruel anxiety, and so happily raised to such a pitch of greatness. The castle resounded with joyful acclamations, and the glorious intelligence was presently communicated throughout the environs. He was the same day proclaimed king in all the towns under his dependence; and Alphonso de Mello had the same ceremony performed in the city of Elvas. Crowds from these different places flocked to pay homage to their new sovereign; and these first marks of duty and affection, though hastily and confusedly given, spoke more feelingly to the heart of the prince, than what he afterwards received in all the blaze of state and ceremony. The archbishop regent, impatient for the arrival of the new king, dispatched courier after courier, to represent the great importance of his immediate appearance at Lisbon. The last of these couriers met him on the Monday, on the plain of Montemor, half way from Villa Vicosa, where this timid prince, to conceal the real cause of his journey, pretended to be engaged in a hawking party; but no sooner had he opened the regent's dispatches, than he set off post for Aldea-Galega, ten leagues from the spot where he then was: and finding, on his arrival, a boat and two fishermen, he embarked and crossed the Tagus, at that place three leagues in breadth, to Lisbon. Mr. d'Ablancourt, envoy from Lewis the XIVth to the court of Portugal, relates in his memoirs, that the duke of Braganza landed in the court of the palace, which forms a long square enclosed on three sides by the Alfandega palace, and different private houses, whilst the fourth is open to the Tagus, from which it is separated by a terrace guarded by a wall, that this very spacious square was crowded by people of every description, who for the last two days had been in constant expectation of the prince, with their faces continually turned towards Aldea-Galega; but not one amongst them, adds this author, had the smallest suspicion that the little fishing-boat which was making towards the shore contained their king, who passed unnoticed across the square, and was not made known to the people, till he mounted a kind of scaffolding, on which was placed the throne, when he was saluted and proclaimed king with every testimony of joy by the Portugueze. Magnificent fire-works were displayed that night in the most public parts of the city, and bonfires blazed, particularly before the citizens' houses, every one of which was so brilliantly illuminated with wax lights and flambeaux, that the whole of the city wore the appearance of a general conflagration. This circumstance caused a Spaniard to remark, that this prince was indeed fortunate, thus to purchase a fine kingdom for a bonfire. A general insurrection throughout Portugal was the immediate consequence of the one at Lisbon; and the revolution was so quickly completed, that it appeared as if every town in the kingdom waited for nothing more than an example from the capital to take up arms in favour of the duke. Couriers were dispatched daily to that prince, with intelligence of the Spaniards being driven from the different provinces and towns, all of which were ready to acknowledge him as their king. The governors of forts and other strong places displayed as little resolution as the commander of the citadel at Lisbon, and whether from want of troops, courage or ammunition, they shamefully surrendered; the greatest part without a single shot being fired. Every one appeared apprehensive of sharing the fate of Vasconcellos, and trembled at being exposed to the fury of an enraged populace. They indeed quitted Portugal with all the haste and trepidation of criminals escaped from prison; and in less than a fortnight not a single Spaniard remained in the kingdom. Don Fernando de la Cueva alone, who was governor of the citadel of St. Joam, at the mouth of the Tagus, seemed resolutely bent on opposing the general revolution, and preserving the place committed to his charge for the king his master. His garrison was composed of Spaniards, who fighting under the command of brave officers, vigorously resisted the first attack of the Portugueze. It was then judged necessary to commence a regular siege, and cannon being sent for from Lisbon, they opened the trenches, and broke through the counterscarp, notwithstanding the continual fire and frequent sallies of the besieged; but negociations being always the safest, and generally the shortest method of terminating affairs of this nature, the king offered such advantageous terms to the governor, that he found himself no longer able to resist; he was, indeed, so dazzled by the tempting promises of a considerable sum of money, and a commandery in the order of Christ, that he concluded the treaty, and surrendered the citadel, on pretence of the insufficiency of his troops to defend it, though the principal officers of the garrison refused to sign the capitulation. The king judging it improper to delay his coronation, which would give a sanction to the regal dignity, and render his person more sacred in the eyes of his people, fixed the ceremony for the fifteenth of December, when it took place with all possible magnificence[20]. The duke d'Aveiro, the marquis de Villa-Real, with his son the duke de Caminha, the count de Monsam, and all the other grandees of the kingdom were present. His majesty was received at the gate of the cathedral by the archbishop of Lisbon, at the head of the clergy, and by several other bishops; and he was solemnly acknowledged king of Portugal by the states-general of the nation, all of which immediately took the oath of allegiance. In a few days afterwards the queen, attended by a numerous retinue, arrived at Lisbon. She was met at some distance by the whole court, and she had already in her train the officers appointed to compose her household. The king himself went out of Lisbon to receive her; he indeed wished not only to treat her with all the magnificence due to her new dignity, but to prove to her by every action, that he thought himself in a great measure indebted to her for his crown. This princess was endowed with so much native dignity, and displayed such majesty and sweetness, that she seemed born to grace the throne she now so happily filled. Thus terminated an enterprise, which was conducted with a degree of secrecy that appears almost miraculous, considering the number and different descriptions of persons to whom it was confided. It was, however, the natural consequence of the aversion so long, and so generally felt to the Spanish government; an aversion which took place on the first establishment of the monarchy, owing to the frequent wars between these neighbouring nations; which was greatly increased by commercial disputes, and the rivalship occasioned by the discovery of America; and which, since the Portugueze became subject to the dominion of Castille, was changed into the most deadly hatred. The news of this sudden revolution soon reached the court of Spain. The prime minister was inexpressibly afflicted, and reduced to despair at having been thus circumvented in his designs. The king, his master, was at that moment in so unpleasant a situation, that he needed nothing new to add to his embarrassments; he had sufficient employment in defending himself against France and Holland, and the pernicious example set by the rebellious Catalonians, filled his mind with the most painful apprehensions. The king alone, of all his court, remained in ignorance of this important event, no one daring to speak to him on the subject, from the fear of incensing the minister, who would not easily have forgiven such officious zeal. The affair, however, began to be spoken of so publicly, that all hopes of longer concealment were vain; and the count-duke fearing some of his enemies might reveal the business in a manner disadvantageous to his interest, decided on being the first to communicate it to his majesty; but being perfectly well acquainted with the character of that prince, he contrived to represent the affair in so artful a manner, that the king was not at first aware of the extent of his misfortune: "Sire," said he, addressing him with an assured air and open countenance, "I come to congratulate you on a fortunate event, your majesty has just obtained a considerable dutchy, and some very fine estates." "By what means, count?" replied the king, all astonishment at this discourse. "The duke of Braganza," resumed the minister, "has madly suffered himself to be seduced by the populace, who have proclaimed him king of Portugal; his estates are therefore forfeited, and become the property of your majesty; who, by the total annihilation of this family, will in future reign securely and peaceably over that kingdom." This prince, however, notwithstanding the weakness of his character, was not sufficiently dazzled by the magnificent prospects laid before him, to believe it probable such brilliant hopes could be realised without the greatest difficulty; but having long been accustomed to regard objects in the same point of view as his minister, he simply answered, that it would be necessary to suppress, as soon as possible, a rebellion, which might otherwise be attended by the most dangerous consequences. The king of Portugal, in the mean time, was particularly active in disposing every thing in such a manner, as to secure his newly acquired throne, and place it on the firmest foundation. Immediately on his arrival at Lisbon, he appointed governors to all the frontier towns, and took care to make choice of faithful, brave, and experienced men, who set off directly for their respective governments, attended by a sufficient number of the military, and lost no time in fortifying and putting in the best state of defence the different places committed to their charge. His majesty also gave out numerous commissions for the levying of troops, and convened the states-general of the nation immediately after his coronation. He then caused his claims to the crown to be strictly examined, that not the smallest doubt might remain in the breasts of the Portugueze on that subject. A solemn act then took place, by which he was acknowledged lawful king of Portugal, as descendant, by the princess, his mother, of the infant Edward, son of the king Emmanual; thus excluding the king of Spain, who was descended from a daughter of the said Emmanual; which daughter having espoused a foreign prince, was, by the fundamental laws of Portugal, rendered incapable of reigning over that kingdom[21]. His majesty declared in this assembly, that the produce of his own patrimonial estates being sufficient for the maintenance of his household, he should reserve all the royal demesnes, or crown lands, for the use of the kingdom in general; and to prove to the people what they had to expect from the mildness and justice of his government, he abolished all the taxes so heavily imposed upon them by the Spaniards. The principal places and employments of the state were bestowed on those of the conspirators who had displayed the greatest zeal in his cause. Pinto, however, had no share in these different promotions, the king prudently judging, that his authority was not yet sufficiently established, to enable him to raise one of his domestics, of an ignoble birth, to a great and important employment; but this did not prevent his having the greatest ascendance over the mind of his majesty, and indeed over the whole kingdom; for though he could not boast the title of minister, or secretary of state, yet such was the intimate confidence in which he was held by his master, that he performed all the functions of those two great offices. Having thus arranged every thing to his satisfaction in the interior of his kingdom, he applied himself assiduously to form a strict alliance with all the enemies of the king of Spain; and even, if possible, to raise himself up new ones. He therefore endeavoured to induce his brother-in-law, the duke of Medina Sidonia, who was governor of Andalusia, to make himself independent in that province, or in other words, to follow his example, and take upon himself the sovereign authority. The marquis d'Aïamonte, a Spanish nobleman, related to the queen of Portugal, was employed in this negociation, the success of which will be made known in the sequel of this work. The new king of Portugal sent ambassadors to all the courts of Europe, to engage them to acknowledge his sovereignty. He farmed a league, offensive and defensive, with the Dutch and Catalonians; ad he was assured of the protection of France[22]. The king of Spain gave the greatest proof of his want of power, by never making a forcible attack on the frontiers of Portugal during the whole course of the campaign, owing most probably to the rebellion in Catalonia having employed all his forces; whatever indeed he attempted, was always unsuccessful, and his troops never gained the smallest advantage. Sometime afterwards, intelligence was received that Goa, and every other country subjected to the Portugueze government, whether in India, Africa, or Peru, had joined in the revolution of the mother country. Thus all things appeared to combine to ensure the king of Portugal a succession of good fortune, a peaceable reign at home, and victory abroad; when in the midst of such seeming happiness, he was on the point of losing his sceptre with his life, by means of a detestable conspiracy, secretly formed, not only in Lisbon, but even in the centre of his court. The archbishop of Braga was, as has been already mentioned, the creature of Spain. He was one of the ministers of that country in Portugal, and had no hopes of being reinstated in his employment, unless the Spanish government should be re-established. He was indeed apprehensive, that though the new king had hitherto appeared to respect his sacred character, by forbearing to make him share the prison to which he had condemned the Spaniards, he would most probably be included in the same disgrace, when once the king felt himself assured of the solidity of his government. But what principally induced him to make a serious attempt in favour of Spain, was his uniform attachment to the vice-queen: he was in despair at the idea of her being a prisoner in a country, over which he thought she had a right to reign; and his resentment was raised to a still higher pitch from not being allowed to see her. Indeed not only he, but every other person of distinction who was at first permitted to attend her, had received the same prohibition; it having been sufficiently proved that the princess had abused the indulgence granted her by his majesty, and had taken every opportunity of instigating the Portugueze to rebel against his authority. The archbishop regarded this conduct as insupportably tyrannical. This princess, in his mind's eye, seemed to look up to him alone for protection, and to solicit her liberty from his hands, in return for the favours she had so continually bestowed upon him; the remembrance of her kindness added fuel to the flame which consumed him, and made him decide on attempting all and every thing to prove his gratitude, and revenge her injuries; but it being scarcely possible either to surprise or bribe the guards who attended her, he was resolved to strike at once at the root of the evil, and, by the king's death, liberate the princess and re-establish her authority. Having taken this resolution, he reflected in what manner he could best and soonest execute his design: he had every reason to believe that he should not long enjoy the place of president of the palace, and that he should most probably be obliged to retire to Braga. Such was the hatred borne by the people towards the Spaniards, that he very well knew it would be impossible to engage them in his party, consequently he could not adopt the measures so successfully taken by his majesty; nor would the nobles accede to his proposal, they having been the principal means of placing him on the throne. His only resource then was in the grandees; the greatest part of whom, so far from having contributed to the revolution, submitted with a very ill grace to the elevation of the house of Braganza. Having therefore secured the protection of the Spanish minister, he addressed himself to the marquis de Villa-Real, to whom he represented that the new king; naturally timid and suspicious, would never fail seeking occasions to humble his family, lest his successor should suffer from such powerful subjects: that the duke d'Aveiro and himself, though both princes of the blood, were not employed in any of the great offices of the state, such distinctions being all bestowed, as rewards, on a tribe of rebels: that all well thinking people were shocked that a prince like the marquis de Villa-Real should meet with such contemptuous treatment, and languish in shameful inactivity in the centre of his province: that his high birth and great riches placed him above submitting to the authority of a petty king; and that he had lost in the Spanish monarch the only sovereign, who, having so many different kingdoms and governments to bestow, could place him in a situation conformable to the dignity of his birth. The archbishop, on perceiving that his harangue had made no small impression on the mind of Villa-Real, proceeded to inform him, that he had received orders from the king of Spain to promise him the vice-royalty of Portugal, in reward for his fidelity; he was, however, far from intending to bestow on him that dignity, having no other view than to procure the liberty of the duchess of Mantua, and reinstate her in her former situation; but it was necessary to seduce Villa-Real by the most brilliant prospects, and he succeeded so well, that he consented to place himself, together with his son, the duke de Caminha, at the head of this conspiracy. Being once secure of the support of these two princes, his next care was to engage his particular friend, the grand inquisitor, in his interest. The acquisition of such a man to the party was of the greatest importance, since his example would be certainly followed by all the officers of the inquisition; a body of men who are still more formidable to the good than to the wicked, and who possess the greatest influence over the minds of the Portugueze. The archbishop alledged reasons of conscience to induce them to join in his enterprise; and reminded them of their oath of allegiance to the king of Spain, which ought never to be violated in favour of a rebel: to these arguments he added the more powerful one of self interest, representing, that _not one_ amongst them could reasonably expect to enjoy his present post for any length of time under a prince who never failed filling all employments with his own particular friends and favourites. Several months passed on in increasing the number of conspirators; amongst whom the leading ones were the commissary de la Cruzada; the count d'Armamar, the nephew of the archbishop; the count de Ballerais; don Augustin Emmanuel; Antonio Correa, Vasconcellos' clerk, who was stabbed by Menezes at the first breaking out of the conspiracy which placed don John on the throne; and Laurent Pires de Carvalho, keeper of the royal treasury; all of whom were creatures of Spain, who owed their places and fortunes to that country, and who could have little hopes of preserving them but by the restoration of the Castilian government. The Jews, who reside in great numbers at Lisbon, and conform outwardly to the Christian religion, were likewise engaged in this conspiracy. They had lately offered immense sums to his majesty, to engage him to put a stop to the persecutions of the inquisition, and to allow them the public exercise of their religion: these offers had been refused, and the resentment they felt on the occasion was an excellent ground-work for the archbishop to build his hopes on of inducing them to join his party. He therefore contrived private meetings with some of the principals, who were in the greatest trepidation at having so unseasonably declared themselves; which act of imprudence could not fail of exposing them to all the malice and cruelty of the inquisition. The artful prelate took advantage of their fears, and promised them the protection of the grand inquisitor, whom they well knew to be at his disposal, if they would consent to his plan; alarming them at the same time with the probability of their being banished from Portugal by a prince so devoted to the Catholic faith; whilst, if they could be prevailed upon to assist in re-establishing the old government, he would venture to engage in the name of the king of Spain, that they should not only be allowed liberty of conscience, but a synagogue, and every other indulgence they could possibly require. Such indeed was the violence and malignancy of this priest, that he did not blush to league himself with the enemies of Christ to dethrone his lawful sovereign. This instance may, perhaps, be quoted as the only one, of the inquisition and synagogue's acting in concert, and joining heartily together to promote the same cause. The conspirators, after having deliberated on several different plans, for ensuring the success of their enterprise, at last adopted one proposed by the archbishop, who had consulted the principal Spanish minister on the occasion. It was, therefore, unanimously agreed, that on the fifth of August, the Jews should not only set fire to the four corners of the palace, but to several other houses in the city, by which means the people would be sufficiently employed in their different quarters, without attending to what passed in the palace, whither the conspirators were to repair immediately, on pretence of endeavouring to extinguish the flames; but, in the midst of the hurry and confusion occasioned by so dreadful an event, they were to seek an opportunity of approaching the king, and stabbing him to the heart, whilst the duke de Caminha should secure the person of the queen, together with those of the young princes, her sons, in order to take the same advantage of their situation, which had been taken of the princess of Mantua, to enforce the surrender of the citadel. Fire-works were at the same time to be employed in burning the fleet; and the archbishop, together with the grand inquisitor, and the officers of the holy brotherhood, were to parade through the streets, to prevent any commotions amongst the people; who would never venture to take an active part in the business, from their natural dread of drawing upon themselves the indignation of the inquisition. The marquis de Villa-Real was to be appointed governor of the kingdom, till the Spanish monarch should make known his intentions relative to the measures to be taken on so important an occasion. There was, however, no certainty of the people declaring in their favour: it was, therefore, deemed necessary to be provided with troops to enforce their obedience. They, accordingly, decided on applying to the count-duke to engage him to send a considerable fleet on the coast; which would then be in readiness to enter the port on the first breaking out of the conspiracy; and immediately on receiving intelligence of their success, he was to be requested to march troops to the frontiers, to subdue all, and every one, who should be tempted to make any further resistance. This plan, however, was easier imagined than executed, it being extremely difficult for the conspirators to hold any secret correspondance with the prime minister; the king having placed guards on the frontiers, in consequence of the discovery he had made of the princess of Mantua's having written to Madrid, with the strictest orders not to allow any one to quit the kingdom, without his express permission. Any attempt to corrupt these guards might be attended with danger, since those who betrayed their sovereign, might likewise betray them, and deliver up their letters, relating, at the same time, the methods employed to tempt them from their duty. The absolute necessity of speedily acquainting the prime-minister with their intentions, without whose assistance their plot must infallibly fall to the ground, induced them to confide in a rich Lisbon merchant, who was treasurer to the custom-house, and whose extensive trade throughout the whole of Europe caused his majesty to grant him the particular privilege of corresponding with Castille. This man, whose name was Baëse, publicly professed the Christian religion; but being one of those who in Portugal are termed _new_ Christians, he was generally suspected of secretly observing the rites of the Jewish church. A very large sum was offered to engage him in the conspiracy, which, joined to the exhortations of those amongst the Jews who were in the secret, prevailed upon him to accept their proposals, and to undertake conveying their letters to the count-duke d'Olivares.[23] Baësa being charged with the pacquet, directed it to the marquis d'Aïamonte, governor of the first frontier town in Spain, in the full persuasion that, being once safely out of Portugal, there could be no farther cause of apprehension; but, the marquis who was nearly related to the queen of Portugal, and was actually carrying on a negociation with the new king, no sooner perceived the great seal of the inquisition of Lisbon, than he broke open the letters, dreading lest they should contain something relative to his secret correspondence with the king and queen of Portugal; and on discovering the plan of a conspiracy on the point of breaking out, which was to destroy the king and the whole of the royal family, he immediately sent back the pacquet to his majesty, whose astonishment was inexpressible, when, on perusing these letters, he perceived that the princes of his blood, an archbishop, and several grandees of his court, all of whom had demonstrated the greatest joy on his advancement, were conspiring not only to deprive him of the crown, but to put an end to his existence. His privy council was immediately summoned and the resolutions taken therein were, in a few days afterwards, put into execution. Eleven o'clock in the night of the fifth of August being, according to the intercepted letters, appointed by the conspirators to commence their operations, his majesty, under pretence of a general review in the great court of the palace, called in all the troops quartered in the neighbourhood, at ten o'clock that same morning. He also gave with his own hands, and in secret, several sealed notes to those of his courtiers whom he knew to be the most attached to his person, with strict orders not to open their respective billets till twelve at noon, when the commands contained therein must be punctually and immediately obeyed. About the same hour, the king, pretending business, sent for the archbishop and the marquis de Villa-Real into his cabinet, where their persons were instantly seized; whilst the captain of the guard arrested the duke de Caminha in the public market-place at the same moment. The sealed billets being then opened, the persons to whom they were addressed, in obedience to their contents, separately seized on a conspirator, and conveyed him to prison, there to be strictly guarded till farther orders; and such was the prudence of the measures taken on this occasion, and so faithfully were they executed, that, in less than an hour the forty-seven conspirators were secured, without even the smallest effort being made towards effecting their escape. The people, on the first report of the conspiracy, crowded tumultuously to the palace, and loudly demanded that the traitors should be instantly delivered up to them. But, though the king was delighted with the affection displayed by his subjects, he felt uneasy at such a multitude, being thus suddenly assembled; fearing such commotions might become habitual, and end, as is always the case, in sedition. He, therefore, after expressing his acknowledgments for their solicitude for the welfare of his person, and assuring them the traitors should meet with the punishment due to their crimes, gave orders to the magistrates to disperse them. This prince, however, lest the resentment of the people should abate, and, as it frequently happens, their furious rage towards the criminals turn to sentiments of commiseration, on reflecting on their wretchedness, thought proper to make public that the design of the conspirators was not only to assassinate him, with the whole of the royal family, but to set fire to the city, when every thing which escaped the fury of the flames must naturally become the prey of the rebels: that Spain, to prevent any future conspiracies, and to wreak its vengeance on the Portugueze, had resolved on peopling the town with a colony of Castilians, and to transport all the citizens to the mines in America, where they would be buried alive in those dreadful abysses, in which they had already destroyed so many miserable human beings. Judges were next appointed for the trial of the conspirators; these were chosen from the sovereign chamber, but on account of the archbishop of Braga, the marquis de Villa-Real and the duke de Caminha, it was thought proper to give them two grandees of the kingdom as coadjutors. The commissaries on this occasion received orders from his majesty, not to produce the intercepted letters, unless absolutely necessary to the conviction of the criminals, lest the court of Spain should suspect the manner by which he had obtained possession of those letters, and discover his correspondence with the marquis d'Aïamonte. Fortunately, however, such proofs were not requisite, Baësa having contradicted himself so palpably in his answers to the principal interrogatories, that he was put to the torture, and the miserable wretch no sooner felt the first pangs, than his courage failed him, and he confessed all the particulars of the plot. He owned the design of assassinating the king; declared that the office of the inquisition was well stored with arms, and that they only waited for an answer from the count-duke to put their plan into execution. The greater part of the other conspirators, on being put to the torture, confirmed the deposition of the Jew; but the archbishop, the grand inquisitor, the marquis de Villa-Real and the duke de Caminha, in order to avoid so dreadful a punishment, confessed their guilt. The two latter were condemned to lose their heads, and the rest to be hanged and quartered; whilst his majesty himself was to pronounce sentence on the ecclesiastics. The king thereupon assembled his council, and addressing his ministers, declared, that he had reason to fear the execution of so many people of distinction might be attended by dangerous consequences: that the principal conspirators being of the first families in the kingdom, their relations would naturally become secret enemies, and that the passion of revenge would naturally give birth to another conspiracy: that the execution of the comte d'Egmont in Flanders, and that of the Guises in France, had been fatal to the causes in support of which they had been employed; but that the generous pardon he thought of granting to some amongst them, together with a punishment, perhaps more severe than death, which he should inflict on others, would interest every heart in his favour, and force even the conspirators, their relations and friends, to look up to him in future with gratitude. His majesty, however, added, that though his inclinations led him to pursue lenient measures, he had, nevertheless, assembled his council, to be informed of their opinion, and to follow that which should appear to be the best. The marquis de Ferreira first spoke on this occasion, and voted for the speedy execution of the criminals; alledging in the strongest terms that sovereigns, in cases of this nature, should be guided by justice alone; that clemency might probably be attended by dangerous consequences, since the pardon of traitors would be much sooner attributed to weakness of character in a prince than to real goodness; that a government which permitted such crimes to pass off with impunity, would infallibly be despised, and would likewise encourage the relations of the delinquent not only to attempt to liberate them from prison, but to carry their designs still farther; that an example of severity was absolutely necessary on his accession to the crown, were it only to intimidate others from forming plots of the same nature; in short, that these men were not only traitors to the king himself, but to the state, which they were on the point of overturning; and that his majesty ought sooner to consider the justice he owed to his people, by bringing them to condign punishment, than attend to the dictates of his own feeling heart, in a case where the preservation of his majesty's person and the public security must ever be inseparable. This opinion being unanimously supported by all the members of the council, the king gave up his judgment to theirs, and the sentence was put in execution on the following day. The archbishop of Lisbon being anxious to preserve the life of one of his friends, addressed himself to the queen to obtain his pardon, and asked this favour in full confidence that the services he had rendered to the house of Braganza were of such a nature, that no demand of his could possibly be refused. But her majesty, who was perfectly convinced of the necessity, and indeed the justice of punishing such traitors, and who clearly perceived how much a distinction in favour of one would irritate the friends and relations of the remaining conspirators (since in this case, and indeed in many others, clemency would become injustice) was decided on this occasion to make the natural gentleness of her disposition yield to the superior motives of impartial justice; and turning towards the prelate, with an air and tone of voice which forbad all reply, "Archbishop," said she, "the only favour you can possibly expect from me is, that I should forget you have ever spoken to me on the subject." The king, however, out of respect to the clergy of Portugal, and indeed to obtain the favour of the court of Rome, which from regard to the house of Austria, had hitherto refused to receive his ambassadors, mitigated the sentence pronounced on the archbishop of Braga and the grand inquisitor, and condemned them to perpetual imprisonment. The arch-bishop's illness and death were soon after announced to the public: such events, it is well known, frequently happen to certain state prisoners, who, from political motives, are not suffered to perish on a scaffold. The manner by which the king of Portugal became acquainted with this conspiracy, was for a long time unknown to the court of Spain, nor did the Spanish monarch discover the person who dispatched the archbishop's letters to Lisbon, till another conspiracy was forming against himself. The king of Portugal, as has been already mentioned, kept up a constant correspondence with the enemies of Spain; his ports were open to the French and Dutch fleets; he had a resident both at Barcelona and with the insurgents in Catalonia; and he left no means untried to cause confusion in the very heart of Spain, in order to occupy the mind of Philip the IVth, in a way to give him no time to attend to the affairs of Portugal. The new monarch had already partly succeeded in sowing the seeds of rebellion in the breast of his brother-in-law, the duke de Medina-Sidonia; and their mutual confident the marquis d'Aïamonte, a Castilian nobleman, had completed his seduction. This latter was nearly related to the queen of Portugal and the duke; and the situation of his estate at the mouth of the Guadiana, near the frontiers of Portugal, greatly favoured his secret correspondence with that court. Naturally ambitious, he wished to raise his fortunes, and flattered himself his own elevation would be the consequence of that of the two houses of Braganza and Medina-Sidonia. He was a man of a daring, enterprising character, discontented with the conduct of the prime minister, and possessed of that perfect indifference for life so necessary to all those who engage in great and difficult undertakings. Immediately on the discovery of the archbishop of Braga's conspiracy; the marquis d'Aïamonte wrote secretly to the duke de Medina-Sidonia to congratulate him on the escape of his sister the queen of Portugal, and the rest of the royal family; insinuating at the same time, how nearly it concerned him, that the new monarch should preserve a crown, which must necessarily descend to his own nephews; and that Portugal, from its vicinity to Castile, would ensure him a retreat on any emergency; especially during the ministry of the count-duke whose arrogance and despotic system of politics had no other object than to seek occasions of humbling the grandees. He added, too, it was far from certain that the minister, though his relation, would long permit him to enjoy the government of so large a province in the neighbourhood of Portugal; that this subject was worthy his serious reflections; and that if the duke was willing to be more fully acquainted with his sentiments on the occasion, he would immediately send him a faithful friend, to whom he might safely confide his most secret thoughts. The duke de Medina-Sidonia, naturally proud and vain, and whose jealousy had been secretly raised by the regal dignity of his brother-in-law, presently perceived that the marquis's letter was only a cover for much deeper designs; he therefore instantly sent off a certain Louis de Castille, his confident, to confer with him on the subject. The marquis on opening his credentials, did not scruple to unbosom himself; and after having reminded him of the ease with which the duke of Braganza had mounted the throne of Portugal; he added, that it was impossible for the duke of Medina-Sidonia to make choice of a more favourable juncture to secure the fortunes of his house, and to render it for ever independent of the crown of Spain. He next represented, that the long war with France and Holland had nearly exhausted the king's forces, the greater part of which were necessarily employed in Catalonia; that this was the favourable moment for stirring up a rebellion in Andalusia, and carrying the war into the very centre of the kingdom; that the people, ever lovers of novelty, and loaded with taxes, would submit with pleasure to a change of government; and that the duke de Medina-Sidonia was not less beloved in Castille, than Braganza in Portugal. It would, however, be necessary to engage his lieutenant-governors in his interest, though without entrusting them with his secret; that he had nothing to do, but to place his partizans in the most important posts; he would then have no difficulty in securing the galleons which were daily expected from India; and that the king of Portugal would aid and assist him in his design, by sending a great fleet into Cadiz, consisting not only of his own vessels, but those of his allies, having on board land forces, which would presently subdue all and every one ill-advised enough to make impotent efforts in support of their allegiance to the king of Spain. The account of this conversation fired the duke with ambition, and his head grew giddy at the idea of a crown. His post of lord high admiral, and governor of Castille, placed the sea and land forces under his command. He was the proprietor of considerable towns, and extensive domains, all of which invested him with almost absolute power; and he was thus induced to believe, in the first effervescence of his ambitious projects, that it depended on himself alone to become master of a crown, and to own no superior in the province of Andalusia. Louis de Castille was immediately sent once more to the marquis d'Aïamonte, with assurances of his entering perfectly into his views; and also to consult with him on the measures to be pursued relative to the court of Portugal. The duke, in the mean time, employed himself in securing the interest of his friends and followers, and increasing their number: he frequently let drop hints unfavourable to the government, and expressed sentiments of compassion for the soldiers, who did not receive their pay, and for the people, who were sinking under the burthen of taxes. The marquis d'Aïamonte was no sooner informed of the duke's determination, than he was anxious to form a regular plan of operations. A conference with the king of Portugal was absolutely necessary, but the marquis was too well known on the frontiers to venture into that kingdom: he therefore decided on entrusting this delicate negociation to an intriguing friar, who had long been attached to his interest, and whose sacred habit would give him free admittance into that inquisitorial country. This friar, who was named father Nicolas de Velasco, was of the order of St. Francis. He proceeded immediately to Castro Marino, the first town in Portugal, where he pretended he came only to settle the ransom of a Castilian prisoner confined in that place. The king of Portugal, who was in the secret of the marquis d'Aïamonte, gave orders to arrest him as a spy, and he was conveyed to Lisbon loaded with chains, and there examined by the ministers themselves, who sent him to prison, where he was for some time strictly guarded, and treated with apparent severity; but he was soon after set at liberty, on pretence of its having been proved, that his visit to Portugal was merely to obtain the freedom of a Spanish officer, and he was even allowed to attend at the palace to plead his cause, which gave him an opportunity of conferring with the ministers, without being suspected by the spies employed by the court of Madrid. He had also frequent interviews with his majesty, who promised him a bishopric in reward of his services; and the franciscan was so elated at such brilliant prospects, that he became a constant attendant at court, where he visited the queen, beset the ministers, and even entered into the different intrigues of the courtiers, merely with a view to shew his own consequence, and the degree of favour in which he stood with the king. Thus, without absolutely revealing the secret of his mission, he betrayed himself by his imprudent and ostentatious conduct.--Courtiers are ever on the watch, and cast a jealous eye on every new favourite, they therefore presently discovered his imprisonment to be a mere pretext for introducing him at court. Different conjectures were formed relative to his business in Portugal, and a Castilian, at that time prisoner in Lisbon, soon unravelled the mystery. This man, whose name was Sancho, was a creature of the duke de Medina-Sidonia, and was treasurer of the army before the last revolution. The new king of Portugal had thrown him into prison, together with all the Castilians then at Lisbon, and he was treated with peculiar severity. He no sooner, therefore, learnt that a Spanish franciscan enjoyed so much favour at court, than he suspected some secret intrigue, and on this idea founded his hopes of liberty. He wrote to the friar to implore his protection, and expressed himself so respectfully, that he could not fail to interest his vanity in his behalf; complaining at the same time of the king of Portugal's having so long imprisoned, and hardly treated, a servant and friend of his own brother-in-law, the duke of Medina-Sidonia. To prove the truth of his assertions, he sent the franciscan several letters from that nobleman, in which he charged him with the execution of different affairs, in a style of confidence and superiority suitable to his rank, and the protection with which he honoured him. The franciscan's answer was short, but expressive of the interest he took in every one belonging to the duke de Medina-Sidonia. He assured him that he would neglect nothing to obtain his liberty, only entreating him to observe the strictest secrecy during the whole of the affair. The artful Castilian, not to give cause of suspicion, waited some time the effect of his promises; till growing impatient, he at last wrote again, representing that he had languished seven months in a loathsome prison; that the Spanish minister seemed to have forgotten his situation, since neither ransom nor exchange had hitherto been proposed, and that his only hopes of liberty centered in him. The franciscan, ever happy to raise himself in the opinion of the duke de Medina-Sidonia, applied to his majesty in favour of Sancho, and obtained his liberty. He went in person to deliver him from prison, and offered to include him in the passport granted by the king to some domestics of the duchess of Mantua, who were returning to Madrid. To this the cunning Castilian replied, that he now considered the city of Madrid as a foreign land, and that he could not possibly appear at court, without risking another imprisonment, since the severe and inexorable prime minister would not fail to insist on an exact account of the receipts of his office, though the cash had been pillaged during the revolution, and not even the register remained; artfully adding, in order to probe the franciscan, that the first wish of his heart was to return to his patron, the duke of Medina-Sidonia, that nobleman being sufficiently powerful to make his fortune, without being obliged to quit Andalusia. The franciscan, who was in want of a confidential person to acquaint the marquis d'Aïamonte with the success of his negotiation, and to bring him fresh directions for his future conduct, thought he could not possibly fix upon a safer man than the devoted servant of the duke de Medina-Sidonia. He therefore detained the Castilian some time, on pretence of procuring him a passport, but in reality to make his observations, and to try his fidelity. Frequent meetings produced strict intimacy, and the more the politic Castilian took advantage of the franciscan's vanity, to draw his secret from him. The friar wishing to convince him of the credit and consideration he enjoyed at the court of Portugal, could not abstain from saying, that he should soon appear in another habit, being certain of a bishopric, and that he even flattered himself he should one day be raised to the dignity of cardinal. Sancho affected to disbelieve him, in order to force him to avow his design, and the friar was so much piqued at his apparent incredulity, that he could not help exclaiming "What then will you say, when you shall see the duke de Medina-Sidonia seated on a throne?" Sancho thus drew him on by repeated doubts of the truth of his assertions, till he at last became master of every secret of his heart; and the franciscan confessed that he was charged with a negociation in which the king was concerned; that the duke de Medina-Sidonia would shortly be the sovereign of Andalusia; that the marquis d'Aïamonte, to whom the king of Portugal owed the discovery of the late conspiracy, was at the head of this business; that the affairs of Spain were on the point of assuming another aspect; and that it rested with him alone to become master of considerable riches, if he would only consent to convey his letters to the marquis and the duke de Medina-Sidonia. Sancho, delighted with the possession of so important a secret, eagerly accepted the proposal, and renewed his professions of attachment to the duke. He took charge of the letters, and offered, if it were judged adviseable, to return himself with the answers. He then set off immediately for Andalusia, but the moment he reached the Spanish territories, he took the direct road to Madrid; and on arriving in that city, went directly to the prime minister's, who he desired might be made acquainted that Sancho, the treasurer of Portugal, lately escaped from the prisons of the usurper, requested to see him on an affair of great importance. The count-duke, naturally haughty, and difficult of access, refused to admit him to his presence, ordering him to return on the usual audience day; but Sancho, though thus rudely repulsed, was still importunate, declaring that he must see him, since the intelligence he brought related to the safety of the state, and calling God to witness his good faith, and the diligence he had employed to warn the minister of the impending danger. The warmth of these expressions being reported to the count-duke, orders were given for his admittance; when Sancho, throwing himself at the minister's feet, exclaimed, that the safety of the state was now secured, since he was allowed to present himself before him. He then related his situation during the last revolution; the conspiracy formed by the duke de Medina-Sidonia; explaining the plan of his intended operations, his correspondence with the king of Portugal; the plot for taking possession of the galleons, for delivering up Cadiz to the enemy, and employing the armed forces under his command throughout his government of Andalusia, against his lawful sovereign. To prove the truth of his declarations, Sancho next produced the franciscan's letters, written in cypher, to the marquis d'Aïamonte, and the duke de Medina, and containing the whole plan of the conspiracy. The count-duke was struck with surprise and consternation at such extraordinary intelligence, and remained some time speechless: but on recovering himself, he threw aside his natural haughtiness, and assuming a gracious air, praised Sancho for his loyalty, adding, that he deserved to be doubly rewarded, not only for having discovered so pernicious a design, but for not having scrupled to reveal it to the nearest relation of the principal conspirator. He was then conveyed to a private apartment, with strict orders to prevent his seeing or conversing with any one; and the minister immediately hastened to the king, whom he informed of every thing that had passed, presenting him at the same time with the franciscan's letters. The discovery of so black a conspiracy deeply affected Philip, who had indeed for a long time feared and detested the extraordinary pride of the Guzmans; and when he reflected on the recent loss he had sustained of the kingdom of Portugal, which he attributed to the ambitious character of the duchess of Braganza, he could not refrain from remarking to the minister, in a reproachful accent, that all the misfortunes of Spain proceeded from that family. This prince neither wanted penetration nor genius, but he was immersed in pleasures, and hated business; every exertion which required attention gave him pain, and he would willingly have sacrificed part of his dominions to the indulgence of his natural indolence. The first emotions of his anger being, therefore, passed, he returned the franciscan's letters to the count-duke, without even breaking the seals; and gave orders to have them examined by three counsellors of state, who were to give their opinions on the contents. This conduct vested the management of the affair entirely in the prime minister, who employed three of his creatures to draw up a brief statement of the case, and decypher the friar's letters. Sancho was frequently interrogated, and endeavours were used to make him acquit the duke of Medina de Sidonia, whom the prime minister was anxious to save: he accordingly sent for Sancho, before he was questioned by the commissaries, and affecting those confidential manners so frequently put on by the great, to seduce and flatter those with whom they have business to transact. "In what manner, my dear Sancho," said he, "can we possibly justify the duke de Medina from an accusation, which is grounded merely on the letters of an obscure friar, who most probably has been bribed by our enemies, to make us suspect the fidelity of a man who has hitherto rendered such services to his majesty in the province of Andalusia." Sancho, perfectly convinced of the truth of his deposition, and fearing, that should he waver, or endeavour to soften his evidence, he might forfeit his expected reward, persisted in asserting that a conspiracy was actually formed against the state, of which the duke was the chief, and the marquis d'Aïamonte the principal negociator; that he had himself seen their letters in the possession of the franciscan, and that an insurrection in Andalusia would infallibly take place, if speedy precautions were not taken to prevent the evil designs of the governor of that province. The minister, who was unwilling to dive too deeply into this business, took an opportunity of informing the king, that the Franciscan's letters had been decyphered, and that, according to all appearance, he had been suborned to seek the ruin of the duke de Medina; adding, that Sancho himself might very probably have been deceived by this artful friar, since neither any of the duke's own letters, nor witnesses of any sort could be produced against him, and that the whole of this accusation turned on letters, which might very well be the off-spring of calumny. It would, however, be adviseable, in an affair of such great importance, to take all possible precautions, and to contrive to entice the duke to quit his government, in which it would be difficult to secure his person; and then to send a supply of troops to Cadiz, making sure at the same time of the marquis d'Aïamonte, and if on enquiry they were proved guilty, they might afterwards be delivered up to all the severity of the law. The advice of the prime minister was a still more imperious law to Philip the IVth than to any of his subjects. He was naturally mild, indolent, and an enemy to sanguinary measures, he therefore readily confided the whole of the business to the management of the count-duke, who immediately dispatched his nephew, don Louis de Haro, with orders to acquaint the duke de Medina, that whether innocent or guilty, he must repair directly to court; assuring him, however, that should the accusation be proved against him, he might depend on his pardon, but that his ruin would be inevitable, should he delay obeying the commands of his sovereign. Another courier was also sent off to secure the person of the marquis d'Aïamonte; and the duke de Ciudad-Real, at the head of five thousand men, entered Cadiz at the same moment. The duke de Medina was thunderstruck at this intelligence. No alternative remained but implicit obedience, or flight into Portugal: but the idea of passing the whole of his existence as an outlaw, in a foreign country, was too humiliating, and too unworthy of a man of his superior rank; and there was no situation in Portugal equal to that rank to which he could possibly lay claim. The count-duke's influence over the king was well known, he therefore determined on confiding in the promises of that minister, and set off immediately for Madrid, flattering himself that his ready obedience would dispose his majesty to believe him innocent, and even to grant him a pardon, should he be proved guilty. The duke proceeded directly to the prime minister's, and on receiving reiterated promises of forgiveness, disclosed the whole plan of the conspiracy, which he attributed entirely to the marquis d'Aïamonte. After this confession, the minister introduced him privately into the king's closet, where the duke cast himself at his feet, which he bathed with his tears, and in that humble posture owned his guilt, and solicited forgiveness in the most affecting expressions of sorrow and repentance. The gentle heart of the king was moved with compassion, and melting into tears, he granted him his pardon, telling him at the same time, that he owed it to his remorse, and to the solicitations of the count-duke. He then dismissed him his presence; but it being not thought expedient to expose him to fresh temptations at so critical a juncture, he received orders to remain at court. Part of his great property was also confiscated, as having in some degree contributed to inspire him with sentiments of independence; and the king placed a governor, with a garrison, in Saint Lucar de Barameda, the usual residence of the dukes de Medina-Sidonia. So anxious was the prime minister to convince the king of the sincerity of his relation's repentance, that he tried to engage that nobleman to challenge the duke of Braganza, (as he termed him) to single combat. Medina-Sidonia was greatly surprised at this extraordinary proposal, and could not help reminding the minister, that the practice of duelling was forbidden by all laws, both human and divine; but on perceiving the count-duke still persisted in his design, he added, that it would be very difficult to proceed to such extremities with his brother-in-law, unless his majesty could procure a _bull_ from the pope, to shield him from the dreadful excommunications pronounced by the church against duellists. The minister replied, that in a moment like the present one, such scruples of conscience were unseasonable, and that it was his duty, by some striking action, to prove himself worthy the gracious pardon he had received, and at the same time remove every possible suspicion of his having any secret intelligence with the rebels. "But if," continued he, "you are absolutely decided against fighting, all I require is, that you will not disavow the challenge I will take upon myself to publish in your name." The duke, who plainly perceived that the whole of this business was intended to amuse the people, consented to the proposal of the challenge; the form of which was drawn up by the minister himself. Several copies were distributed throughout Spain, Portugal, and most of the courts in Europe. We will also insert it here, as a singular composition, much more worthy the pen of a knight errant, than that of a grandee of Spain, possessed of the first dignities of the kingdom. DON GASPAR ALONÇO PEREZ DE GUSMAN, _duke of Medina-Sidonia, marquis, count, and lord of Saint Lucar de Barameda, captain-general of the sea, ocean, coasts of Andalusia, and armies of Portugal, gentleman of the bedchamber to his catholic majesty_, WHOM GOD PRESERVE. "Whereas the treason of John (formerly duke) de Braganza, is a fact of the utmost notoriety; now I wish to make alike public his detestable intention of accusing the trusty house of Guzman of disloyalty, a house which has remained for centuries back, and will remain for ever obedient to its king and master; and this it has proved by the blood of all its relatives and dependants shed in his cause. This tyrant has poisoned the minds of foreign princes, and likewise those of the misguided Portugueze, who have embraced his party; and in order to give credit to his own wickedness, to animate them in his favour, and (although in vain) to injure me in the opinion of my master, (whom God preserve,) he has persuaded them that I am of his party; founding and establishing his preservation on the report he had himself circulated, and with which he had infected the minds of every one; thus flattering himself, that could he succeed in making the king of Spain suspect my loyalty, he should not meet with so much opposition from me in the execution of his designs, as he has done elsewhere. For this purpose he has made use of a franciscan friar, sent from the corporation of the town of Aïamonte, to Castro-Marin in Portugal, to obtain the liberty of a Spanish prisoner, which friar, being himself sent prisoner to Lisbon, has been worked upon to declare me of his party, and to that end has even published some letters which confirm his assertions, and accuse me of intending to favour the entrance of all foreign troops which might approach the coast of Andalusia, for the purpose of facilitating the means of obtaining the supplies he had demanded from the said foreign princes. And would to God it had been the case! since I should then have called the world to witness my zeal by destroying their fleet, a fate they must have experienced, according to the orders I had issued in case of such an attempt. The above are some of my motives for this appeal; but the principal subject of my griefs is his wife's being allied to me by blood, which blood, being corrupted by this rebellion, I am desirous of shedding, thinking myself bound to prove to my king and master, by this action, the grateful sense I have of his having expressed himself satisfied of my loyalty; and also to remove from the minds of the public, the suspicions they most probably had imbibed, from the false impressions made upon them by the traitor. "I therefore challenge the said John (formerly duke) de Braganza, as having broken his faith to his God and to his king; and I defy him to single combat, hand to hand, with or without seconds, at his choice, which I also give him of weapons. The place of combat to be near Valentia d'Alcantara, which serves as boundary to the two kingdoms of Portugal and Castille, and there will I wait for him eighty days, beginning from the first of October, and ending on the nineteenth of December of this present year. The twenty last days I will appear in person, in the market-place of the said Valentia, and on the day he shall appoint, I will wait for him on the limits. This space of time, although very long, I grant to the said tyrant, that the affair may be made known, not only to him, but to the greater part of the countries in Europe; nay, indeed, to the whole world: and on condition that he will grant a safeguard to the cavaliers whom I shall send forward a league into Portugal, as I will grant one to those of his party a league into Castille, when I promise myself to make known in the fullest manner the infamous action he has committed. "If he fail to obey this call upon him as a gentleman, and refuse to comply with my challenge, as the only means left me to exterminate this phantom; and I should perceive that he is not hardy enough to meet me in single combat, to prove how I and all my friends do, and ever have served our sovereigns, whilst he and his, on the contrary, are traitors; I hereby do offer (under the pleasure of his catholic majesty, whom God preserve) my town of Saint Lucar de Barameda, the principal seat of the dukes de Medina-Sidonia, to whomsoever shall kill the said John de Braganza: and prostrating myself at the feet of his said majesty, I humbly entreat him not to entrust me with the command of his army on this occasion, which requires a degree of prudence and moderation, that the excess of my wrath would prevent my exercising, but only to permit me to serve in person at the head of a thousand horse, from amongst my proper subjects; so that depending alone on my own courage, I shall not only contribute to the restoration of Portugal, and the punishment of this rebel, but in case he refuse my challenge, I may then be enabled, by the aid of my troops, to throw him dead or alive at the feet of his said majesty: and to omit nothing which may prove my zeal. I also offer one of the finest towns in my domains to the first Portugueze governor or captain who shall surrender a place in Portugal, whether of great or small importance to the service of his catholic majesty; but after doing all I possibly can, I shall never have done enough for his said majesty; since all I possess, I hold from, and owe to him and his glorious ancestors."--Given at Toledo, this 29th of September, 1641. The duke de Medina, conformably to his challenge, did not fail to appear on the field of battle. He was armed _cap-a-pee_, and escorted by don John de Garray, colonel-commandant of the Spanish troops. Parleys were beaten, and defiances published in the usual form; but no one appeared on the part of the king of Portugal. That prince was indeed much too prudent to act a part in so ridiculous a comedy; and even had the affair been of a more serious nature, it would have been highly improper in a sovereign thus to expose his person with a subject of his enemy. The prime minister, whilst amusing the people with this idle puppet shew, did not neglect turning the whole of his sovereign's indignation on the marquis d'Aïamonte, and giving him up to the utmost rigour of the law. This nobleman had been put under arrest, and it was requisite to induce him to make a full confession of his guilt; he was therefore flattered with the hope of pardon, and assured that it depended on him alone to experience the same mercy from the best of kings, as had been already shewn to the duke of Medina: but that sovereigns, like the Almighty, whose representatives on earth they were, granted pardon to those only who sincerely repented, and who confessed their guilt. The marquis, seduced by these promises, and particularly by the acquittal of his accomplice, the duke de Medina, signed every thing which was required of him, and this very confession was brought against him. He was accordingly arraigned, tried, and condemned to lose his head. He listened to this sentence, which was passed upon him in the evening, with the most surprising composure, and without breathing a single complaint against the duke, or the prime minister. He afterwards supped with his usual appetite, and slept so soundly the whole of the night, that his judges were obliged to awaken him to convey him to the place of execution, whither he walked in profound silence, and died with a degree of firmness worthy a better cause. Thus ended a conspiracy, to which the king of Spain must inevitably have fallen a victim, without the intervention of the luckiest chance; or, more properly speaking, without the interference of Providence, which will not always permit such crimes to prosper. The king of Portugal having failed in this attempt, turned all his thoughts to the support of his crown, not only by open force, but by the assistance of his allies. France afforded him all possible aid, and piqued itself on thus protecting the most ancient branch of its last race of kings. This foreign war was likewise useful in causing a diversion, and giving employment to part of the Spanish forces. The Portugueze gained several advantages at different times over the Spaniards, and thus prevented them from approaching the frontiers. The king of Portugal might even have penetrated into Castille, had his generals been more able, or his body of regular troops more considerable. The greater part of his army being composed of militia, was much fitter to make incursions than to keep the field: he was frequently destitute even of means to pay his troops, and having abolished most of the taxes on his first accession to the crown, in order to gain the favour of his people; it would have been a dangerous experiment to have re-established them under so new a government. With all these disadvantages, however, he contrived to support the war against Spain, very nearly seventeen years. That country could not boast of greater generals than Portugal; each nation gained more by the weakness of its opponent, than by its own strength; and the exhausted treasury of Philip the IVth, at the latter end of his reign, supplied the place of riches to the new king of Portugal. This prince departed this life on the 6th of November, 1656; and the Portugueze, unable to call forth the attention of posterity to the most striking qualities of their king, confine their praises to his moderation and piety; whilst impartial historians accuse him of want of courage, diffidence of himself, mistrust of others, reserve towards the nobles, who found it difficult to approach his person, whilst he conversed openly and familiarly with his ancient domestics alone, and more especially with the friend and companion of his confessor. The only inference to be drawn from this conduct is, that this prince, naturally peaceable, and given up to his devotions, might be said to possess the good qualities of a private individual, though never the splendid virtues of a great king. His accession to the crown of Portugal must then be solely attributed to the hatred borne by the people of that country to the Spaniards, and to the adroit management of his queen, who made use of this national animosity to raise her to the regal dignity.[24] The king, her husband, in his last will, appointed her regent of the kingdom, rightly judging, that the same conduct and courage which had placed the crown on her head, would not fail to preserve it during the minority of his children. He left behind him two sons and one daughter; the eldest of which, don Alphonso, was nearly thirteen years of age when he succeeded his father. This young prince was of a melancholy disposition, and was deprived of the use of one side: his brother, the infant, don Pedro, was only eight years old; and the infanta, donna Catharine, who was the eldest of the family, was born before the revolution. Don Alphonso being shewn to the people, was proclaimed king, according to the usual forms, and the queen took upon herself, the same day, the regency of the state. The princess was very ambitious to signalize the commencement of her government by some brilliant action; but her generals could boast more bravery as soldiers, than conduct as captains, and there was not one throughout the whole of Portugal capable of either fortifying a town, or conducting a siege. Neither was her council much better composed; some of her ministers attending more to displaying their eloquence in proving the necessities of the state, than in endeavouring to relieve them; whilst others, without attending to the low state of the army in Portugal, amused themselves by proposing plans of conquests: thus the debates of these supreme councils generally ended in schemes as ill-concerted as unsuccessful. The considerable losses sustained by the Portugueze at Olivença and Badajos, where they were obliged to raise the siege, may, in a great measure, be attributed to the above causes. They had also embroiled themselves with Holland, on account of the India trade; and France, ever after the peace of the Pyrenees, appeared no longer interested in their favour. The queen, thus deprived of foreign allies, without either disciplined troops or able generals, had no resource left but in the greatness of her courage, which, indeed, supplied to her every other loss. The weight of affairs could not shake her steady soul; the extent of her genius, and the prudence of her conduct were equal to every thing; and the agitated state of the country in the commencement of her regency, served only to display in more striking colours the brilliant qualities of this all-accomplished princess, who began her operations by vesting the authority of the council in her own person: she constantly read all the dispatches; nothing escaped her attention and foresight, and she directed her views to all those European courts from which she could possibly hope for assistance. Such noble efforts, and constant application, succeeded in putting Portugal in a state of defence against Spain; but being perfectly aware of the necessity there would be in future of employing foreign troops to form her own, and particularly the want she stood in of an able general for that purpose, she cast her eyes on Frederic count de Schomberg, whose valour and capacity were already known and distinguished. The regent was very desirous of appointing him commander in chief of the army, but she was fearful of giving umbrage to the _governors of arms_, whose pride would not very readily have consented to act under the orders of a foreign chief: she found it, therefore, necessary to employ the count de Soure, her ambassador at the court of France, to treat with the count de Schomberg, and propose his appearing at first in Portugal only as colonel commandant of the army, promising him, however, that in case of the death or resignation of the present _governor of arms_, he should immediately be appointed commander in chief. The count set off for Lisbon attended by eighty officers, partly captains, and partly subalterns, together with more than four hundred troopers, all experienced soldiers, capable of forming and commanding new forces. In compliance with secret orders from the regent, the count passed through England, where Charles the IId was newly restored to the crown, and where he was to endeavour to discover whether that protestant prince would object to an alliance with the infanta of Portugal. The count acquitted himself of this commission with great nicety, and succeeded in making both the king, and the lord chancellor Hyde, solicitous for the marriage. The queen was no sooner secure of their approbation, than she dispatched the marquis de Sande to England, to carry on the negociation. The king of Spain, who trembled at this alliance, used every possible endeavour to prevent its taking place; he did not even scruple offering three millions of French livres to Charles the IId, to induce him to espouse a protestant princess; and his ambassador proposed to him the princesses of Denmark, Saxony and Orange, assuring him that the king his master would adopt as his daughter whichever of these princesses he should honour with his choice, and as such, bestow her on him in marriage. The chancellor Hyde, however, represented in such forcible terms, the great necessity of supporting the family of Braganza on the throne of Portugal, and the danger of that country being united to Spain under the government of one prince, that Charles decided on accepting the hand of the infanta. Thus, we see, a protestant minister, engaging his sovereign to form an alliance with a catholic, whilst a prince of the latter religion, particularly distinguished by the title of catholic king, offered immense sums to induce him to marry a protestant. So true it is, that reasons of state are the basis on which crowned heads form their religion; since princes, in cases of this nature, are usually guided by motives of self-interest alone. The king of England, through this alliance, contrived to make a treaty of commerce between the States-General and Portugal; and afterwards sent a considerable body of troops, under the command of the earl of Inchinquin, into that kingdom. This nobleman was soon recalled, and the English commanded to act under the orders of the count de Schomberg, who presently after his arrival in Portugal had the troops of three different nations at his command. The Portugueze, indeed, had a separate general of their own country, but this distinction was a vague title, intended only to flatter the ambition of the grandees, since the count enjoyed the unlimited confidence of the queen; who, in fact, gave him absolute power over the army, which he employed in establishing the strictest discipline. He taught the Portugueze the order to be observed on a march; with the art of encamping to the greatest advantage; and erected regular fortifications on most of the frontier posts, which had hitherto been left in an undefended state. The regent, thus happy in so experienced a general, carried on the war with the greatest vigour. Her arms were almost always successful. Her troops had never before been in so flourishing a state, or so perfectly well disciplined; the poor blessed her government; and the grandees, impressed with sentiments of fear and respect, were all submission to her will; but alas! this happy state of affairs soon underwent a painful alteration, and domestic troubles, joined to different intrigues, gave a new turn to every thing at court; for whilst this great princess was constantly and successfully employed in securing the crown to her son, that prince, by the irregularity of his conduct, was proving himself unworthy of so dignified a situation. His mind was low and sordid, his temper gloomy and savage: he could not support the idea of submitting to the authority of his mother, and contemptuously rejected the advice of his ministers. The society of the noblemen appointed to attend him, was odious to a prince who delighted only in that of negroes and mulattoes, with other young men chosen from the very dregs of the people; and of these wretched beings he had contrived to form a little court, notwithstanding every effort of his governor to prevent it. He termed them his _bravoes_, and thus escorted, passed the night in ranging through the streets of Lisbon, insulting every one who had the misfortune to meet him. The disordered state of his intellects was supposed to be occasioned by a paralytic stroke, which attacked him at the age of four years. The impressions it caused were terrible; but his defects were left uncorrected in his earliest youth, from the fear of his weakness being increased by severity; hopes were also entertained, that time, by strengthening his body, might also temper his mind: this indulgence, however, only added to his natural indocility: his health, indeed, improved by age and medicine; he was equal to the strongest exercise, and fenced and rode remarkably well; but his disposition still continued savage; he acted more from violence than judgment; and when the passions of youth took place of those of childhood, he did not scruple introducing the vilest strumpets into the palace; nay, he even frequently passed his nights in the most notorious brothels, where he gave way to all kinds of shameful debauchery. The regent, deeply grieved at such conduct, rightly judged that it must inevitably end in the loss of his crown, and that it would finally destroy the work it had cost her such pains, and so many years to complete. She was frequently tempted to imprison him for life, and place the infant his brother on the throne; but the fear of creating a civil war, of which the Spaniards would not fail to profit, alone prevented her taking so bold a step. She also flattered herself with the possibility of reclaiming the king, by depriving him of a certain Conti, a tradesman's son, who was his favourite, and the secret agent of his debaucheries. She therefore gave orders to have him secured, and sent to the Brazils, from whence he was forbidden to return on pain of death. The king at first appeared thunderstruck at the loss of his favourite, but he soon affected great calmness, and even became more tractable. This alteration delighted the queen, who congratulated herself, and was congratulated by the courtiers and ministers on the success of her scheme: but the king's apparent tranquillity proved to be merely put on, to cover designs of a deeper nature than the queen thought him capable of forming; and this sagacious princess, who could penetrate into the most secret recesses of a courtier's heart, became the dupe of an absolute idiot. The king, in the first moments of his grief for the loss of Conti, had bewailed his misfortunes to the count de Castello Melhor, a Portugueze nobleman of very high extraction, who, though an ambitious and artful courtier, was much more capable of carrying on a court intrigue, than conducting a state affair. Such a mark of confidence appeared a fair opening for the count, to replace the favourite in his master's affections, by pretending to pity his disgrace, and by contriving methods to restore him to the king. He therefore began his operations, by representing to his majesty, that he was himself the sole cause of Conti's misfortunes, since being the sovereign, and having been long of age, he had nothing to do but to exert his authority, throw off that of the regent, and recal his favourite, who would then return, not only triumphant over his enemies, but even over the queen herself. The king, delighted with advice so conformable to his natural disposition, let him into every secret of his heart. Their intimacy, however, was carried on in a mysterious manner; and his majesty bestowed no public marks of favour on the count, who was fearful of incurring the suspicions of the regent; but this princess was too clear sighted not to perceive his influence over her son; and meeting him one day in the train of that prince, she caught him by the arm, and fixing her eye upon him, with that dignified aspect which made her equally respected and feared by all her subjects, "Count," said she, "I am well informed of your credit with the king; and should he commit any action contrary to my will, your life shall be the forfeit." The count made no reply to this discourse, but profoundly bowing, followed the king, who at that moment called him. He was, however, no sooner alone with his majesty, than he related all that had passed; adding, that he was very well aware of the danger of his situation, being on the eve of sharing the fate of Conti; but he would submit to it with pleasure, could he once see his master freed from the yoke of an imperious regency, which, whilst it subsisted, must ever keep him in the back ground, with no other distinction than the title of king, without either authority or consideration. This artful speech irritated the monarch to a degree little short of madness, and he was on the point of insisting on the regent's delivering into his own hands the great seals of the state, which are always regarded as the mark of sovereign authority: but the count was too well acquainted with the queen's empire over her son, to permit him to take such a step; he therefore advised him to retreat to Alcantara, without seeing her, and from thence dispatch couriers to the magistrates of Lisbon, and the governors of the provinces, to make known his determination of taking the reins of government into his own hands. In compliance with this advice, the prince, in disguise, attended alone by the count and his friends, arrived in the night at Alcantara. The next morning he wrote to the secretaries of state, commanding them to attend him immediately; he also sent for the Spanish guards, and published throughout the kingdom, that the term of the queen-mother's regency expired with his minority. The greater part of the courtiers obeyed his majesty's summons, and the queen was soon deserted; she indeed had presently reason to know, that borrowed authority can never subsist, when it ceases to be supported by the legitimate power. This princess, however, always herself behaved with her usual dignity; and the noble and generous manner with which she gave up the sovereign authority, sufficiently proved how deserving she was to reign still longer, and that her only motive for having prolonged the regency beyond the usual term, was to ensure the happiness of the nation. She immediately wrote to the king, that it little became him to act the part of an usurper, and to employ clandestine measures to gain possession of a throne, which was his lawful right; inviting him at the same time to return the following day to his palace, when in an assembly composed of the grandees, and principal magistrates of the city, she would herself present him with the seals, and give up to him the government of the kingdom. The king accordingly went back to Lisbon, where the queen, true to her promise, convened the grandees of the kingdom, together with those dignified with titles, and the heads of orders, and in their presence gave the purse which contained the seals to his majesty: "Here," said she, "are the seals which were confided to me as regent of your kingdom, by virtue of the last will of my lord the late king. I commit them most willingly into the hands of your majesty, and I heartily pray God, that the prosperity of your government may equal the wishes I form in your favour." The king, taking the seals, presented them to the secretary of state; after which, the infant, his brother, and all the grandees, kissed his majesty's hand, and acknowledged him a second time their lawful sovereign. The queen declared her resolution of retreating into a convent at the expiration of six months; and she delayed thus long, merely to have an eye on the measures pursued by government. The favourite, dreading the exalted genius of this princess, and the natural influence of a mother over a son, prevailed on the king to treat her on several occasions with great disrespect, in order to hasten her retreat. The proud and haughty spirit of the queen could not submit to such indignities, and she retired immediately into a convent, where, perfectly convinced of the vanity of worldly grandeur, she passed her whole time in preparing for _that_, of which no human means could ever deprive her. She did not survive her departure from court quite a twelvemonth, dying on the 18th of February, 1660. This princess was possessed of a most superior genius: to the virtues of the softer sex, she added those by which the other is particularly distinguished. Seated on a throne, she displayed the splendid qualities of a great sovereign; and when retired into a convent, she seemed to have banished from her memory the regal diadem which had once graced her brow. The king, no longer restrained by the authority of this wise princess, gave way openly to the natural ferocity of his disposition, attacking by night, accompanied by his bravoes, every one he met, and even assailing the watch, and all others appointed to attend to the security of the city. Whenever he indulged himself in these nocturnal rambles, the next morning never failed bringing to light some tragical history, of which he was the hero; and the people felt as much dismayed on meeting him in the streets, as at the appearance of a savage beast escaped from his den. The count de Castello Melhor endeavoured to conceal excesses to which he owed his authority. A true courtier, though a weak unskilful minister; he was arrogant and proud when success crowned his wishes, but dismayed and helpless on a reverse of fortune. Portugal, thus governed, must inevitably have perished, had not the weakness of Spain secured its safety. The king, don Alphonso, whose authority did not extend beyond the walls of his palace, gave up the whole charge of the government to the care of his favourite, reserving no other part of the sovereign power, than the privilege of committing every species of extravagance with impunity. The Spaniards thought this a favourable opportunity to attack Portugal, which they flattered themselves would be easily subdued, whilst governed by an idiot and madman. They therefore raised a considerable army, which was commanded by don John of Austria, a natural son of Philip the IVth. The count de Schomberg headed the Portugueze troops, though the title of general belonged to the count de Villaflor; and it was to the valour and conduct of the former alone, the king of Portugal owed the preservation of his crown. That great officer gained several different victories over the Castilians; and those with less difficulty than he conquered the obstinacy of the Portugueze general; whose jealousy of his glory was so great, that he was continually thwarting every plan which he feared might increase it. The French general, however, possessed the full confidence, not only of the court, but more especially of the troops, who were eager to follow a commander whom victory always crowned with success. The minister attributed to his own management the glory of this good fortune, though his only share in the business was his being the first to receive the intelligence; thus his credit daily increased, and he was in possession of the sovereign authority; under the name of the king, whom he directed as a mere machine, the springs of which he employed according to his will and interest; taking advantage of the violent passions of his master to prejudice him against all those whom he mistrusted; by which means he presently removed the greater part of the ministers who acted during the regency, and replaced them by creatures of his own, in every respect devoted to his pleasure. The council, and indeed the whole court, underwent a thorough change; nor did these new members remain longer in office than whilst they were either useful or agreeable to the minister; who even contrived to banish Conti a second time from Portugal. The king, anxious for the presence of his first favourite, had given orders for his return from the Brazils; but no sooner did the count hear of his landing, than he forbad his appearing at court, and sent this imperious message by the same courier who had been dispatched by the king to express the joy he felt at his arrival. This wretched prince, impressed with the most slavish fear of his minister, never ventured to see Conti in public; and the count dreading the effect these secret meetings might have on his credit, decided on breaking off the connexion, by accusing Conti of being engaged in a conspiracy against his majesty; an accusation void of proofs, witnesses, or even the shadow of probability, but which was sufficient to complete the ruin of his unfortunate rival. The minister, thus relieved from the presence of Conti, turned his whole attention towards the infant, don Pedro, the brother of the king. This young prince, now no longer a child, appeared noble and generous: he was esteemed and looked up to by the Portugueze, who could not fail to approve and admire the regularity of his conduct, and still more so, from the comparison they naturally made between him and their monarch. The count, not satisfied with the empire he had gained over his master, was desirous of having the two brothers equally at his disposal, he therefore placed his own brother in the household of the infant, flattering himself that he would soon obtain his confidence. The young prince received this brother most obligingly, and even treated him with particular attention, but never admitted him into his intimacy or esteem. His friendship and confidence were indeed much more worthily bestowed; for the regent, who had always regarded don Pedro as the principal support of the royal family, had early taken care to place men of the first abilities about his person. These prudent governors, and faithful friends, represented to this young prince the probability of his one day mounting the throne, should the king continue his disorderly course of life, or should he have no children, which they hinted was not very likely to be the case; whilst on the other side, they put him on his guard against the artful designs of the minister, whose interest was so deeply concerned in prolonging the reign of Alphonso. Views of so different a tendency, naturally formed two parties as different at court: that of the minister was the most considerable, since it was composed of those who constantly attend at the fountain-head of places and preferments: but the old ministers, who foresaw the short duration of so violent a government, and the first nobility of the kingdom, who could not patiently submit to the authority of the favourite, paid their court to the infant, don Pedro, as to the presumptive heir to the crown. The minister perceiving that the hopes of the opposite party were entirely founded on the reported impotence of the king, determined on his immediate marriage. Proposals were therefore made to the court of France, for Mary Elizabeth Frances, of Savoy, the daughter of Charles Amadeus, duke de Nemours, and of Elizabeth de Vendôme. These proposals being accepted, the princess was conducted into Portugal by her uncle, (_à la mode de Bretagne_[25]) Cæsar d'Estrées, bishop and duke de Laon, so well known throughout the whole of Europe by the illustrious title of cardinal d'Estrées. This prelate was accompanied by the marquis de Ruvigné, ambassador extraordinary from the court of France, together with a numerous train of gentlemen and persons of distinction, who were either friends or domestics of the house of Savoy, or attached in different manners to those of Vendôme and d'Estrées. The marriage ceremony was performed with the magnificence usually displayed on such occasions. The extraordinary beauty of the young queen caused universal admiration; don Pedro appeared enchanted with her perfections, but the king still remained insensible; and the world soon began to suspect that the quality of queen, and wife to the king, were vain titles, and merely intended as a veil to conceal the natural infirmities of that prince. The minister had flattered himself with gaining the same empire over the mind of the young princess, as he had so long possessed over that of his sovereign; he consequently treated her, at first, with the profoundest respect, but he soon perceived that she was endowed with too much sense, courage, and proper pride, to suffer herself to be governed by a subject. Fired with revenge, he took every opportunity to make her feel his power. All state affairs were most carefully concealed from her; and if ever she chanced to interest herself in private concerns, she as constantly failed in her designs; since a recommendation from her was a sufficient title of exclusion with the minister. He next proceeded to stop the payment of her pension, and those of her household, on pretence of the necessities of the state, and the expences of the war having exhausted the royal treasury; and the king, whom the favourite sometimes _let loose_ on the objects of his hatred, behaved with such rude violence to don Pedro and the queen, that the latter was frequently seen retiring from his apartment bathed in tears, and in the deepest distress. Her beauty, her misfortunes, the complaints of the ladies and officers of her court, who no longer received their salaries, contributed to render her an object of compassion to all who were not immediately the tools of the favourite. Thus a third party was formed at court, where nothing was talked of but the barrenness of the queen, though a twelve-month had not yet elapsed since her marriage. Strange[26] reports were assiduously circulated relative to a door which the king had ordered to be made close to the queen's bed-side, and of which he alone kept the key. The queen appeared alarmed at this circumstance, which was alike injurious to her virtue and her reputation: and her friends and favourers publicly declared, that the minister, being decided on procuring heirs for his majesty, (no matter by what means) flattered himself with the hopes of concealing, through the medium of this mysterious door, the natural infirmities of his master, though at the price of the queen's honour. This princess disclosed her apprehensions to her confessor, who advised her to communicate them to the confessor of don Pedro. Two religious men, though apparently attached to different interests, decided on acting in concert in a circumstance not only extremely delicate, but of the highest consequence to them both. Their friends were of opinion that it would be very possible to reconcile these said interests, by pursuing the original designs formed by the regent. The two factions, once so different, soon formed but one party. The queen contrived to engage the count de Schomberg, commander of the forces, to favour her plan, and the infant, who knew no bounds to his hopes and desires, secured in his interest the principal magistrates of the city, together with every person who stood high in the opinion of the people. The king in his own person was regarded as a mere cypher, and as such would have been easily set aside; but he was supported by an artful and ambitious minister, who knew how to make the august name of sovereign respectable in the eyes of the people. The first step, therefore, to be taken, was to remove this artful favourite from the post he held in the palace, and they were well aware it would be no easy task to make him resign the government of the kingdom. For this purpose, they secretly tampered with one of his most intimate friends, whom they engaged to represent to him, that don Pedro attributed the ill treatment he received from his brother to him alone; and that the prince having sworn to complete his ruin, his safety depended on his quitting the court. Naturally timid, the minister immediately published this intelligence, and doubled the number of guards usually attendant on his person. He also armed all the officers of the household, and endeavoured to persuade the king to place himself at their head, and thus attended, arrest don Pedro in his own apartment: but the king, mad and violent as he was in his nightly rambles, when no one dared to oppose him, would not consent to a plan which he foresaw could not be executed without resistance and danger; he accordingly contented himself with writing to the infant, and commanding his immediate attendance. The prince excused his disobedience, on account of the injurious reports published against him by the minister; representing, that the count being sole master in the palace, he could not possibly enter it till he should be removed. Several letters passed between his majesty and the infant on this occasion, all of which were made public. The king at last made offers of sending the count to sue for pardon at his brother's feet; but the infant, whose views soared much beyond the poor triumph of revenging himself for reports of which he himself was the secret author, would accept of no other alternative than the minister's dismissal from the palace. This affair caused universal disorder; the court and city were in continual agitation, and every thing seemed preparing for a civil war. The minister was sensibly affected at having lost the support of the count de Schomberg. The greater part of the grandees openly declared in favour of the prince don Pedro; and to add to the minister's distress, his own friends, nay, even his relations, refused risking their safety in his behalf, alledging, that they were not sufficiently in force to resist the infant's party, supported as it was by that of the queen. The count, thus abandoned by the creatures who had hitherto basked in the sunshine of his favour, lost all courage, and quitting the palace at night, and in disguise, retired to a monastery seven leagues from Lisbon; and from thence proceeding to Italy, sought an asylum in the court of Turin. The infant immediately attended at the palace, on pretence of paying his devoirs to his majesty; but his presence inspiring universal submission, he presently discarded all the remaining tools of the minister. The king, thus deprived of his usual advisers, was entirely at the mercy of his brother, who dared not, however, possess himself of the crown; well aware that such conduct would brand him with the odious epithet of usurper. He had indeed no pretence for so bold an action, nor could he possibly obtain the sovereign power, but from an act of legal authority which must take place in a general assembly of the states. The king alone having the power of convening this assembly, he was recommended to adopt a measure, which it was pretended the necessities of the state made requisite, since such necessities could not be relieved without the concurrence and assistance of his subjects. Naturally weak as was this prince, he soon perceived the intention of this meeting was to conspire against his authority; he consequently evaded for a long time attending to the several petitions, which, at the instigation of the infant, were presented to him by the different bodies of the people; but at last the council drew up a resolution, which they obliged him to sign, making thus this wretched prince the instrument, and even the promoter of his own destruction. The assembly by this act was convened for the first of January 1661. [27] Don Pedro having succeeded in an enterprise, on which he founded his hopes of future grandeur, the queen acting in concert with him, next appeared upon the stage. She began her operations by retiring into a convent, from whence she immediately wrote to the king, that her conscience would no longer permit her remaining in the palace; and since no one knew better than himself that he had never lived with her as her husband, she only requested that he would be pleased to return her dowry, and permit her to seek an asylum in her own country, and under the protection of her own family. The king, on receiving this letter, flew in a transport of rage to the convent, to force back his queen; but don Pedro, who foresaw what would happen, and whose authority in the capital was already greater than his brother's, appeared at the gates of the convent, accompanied by the nobles of his party, and obliged the king to return to the palace, where he called upon his different mistresses to vouch for his virility; and broke forth into violent threats against the queen and don Pedro; the latter, far from regarding the resentment of a king destitute of counsellors and strength, was resolved on putting a finishing stroke to his power; he therefore repaired the following morning to the palace, followed by the whole of the nobility, magistrates, corporation, and an immense multitude of people, all anxious to know the event of so serious an affair. On entering the palace, he was met by all the counsellors of state, who waited his arrival, and after a short conference, he sent orders to have the king put under arrest in his own apartment; which done, he was soon obliged to sign his abdication. The infant, however, did not venture to assume the title of king, but that of regent was bestowed upon him by the states-general, who took the oath of allegiance accordingly. Peace with Spain was the first object which engaged the attention of the new regent; the king of England acted as mediator in the business, and the king of Spain, by a solemn treaty, acknowledged the crown of Portugal henceforward independent on that of Castille. Nothing was now wanting to complete the happiness of the regent, but to obtain the hand of his sister-in-law in marriage. The queen, on entering the convent, had presented a petition to the chapter of the cathedral church, (the see being vacant) demanding the dissolution of a marriage, which could never be consummated during nearly fifteen mouths cohabitation. The chapter pronounced it null and void, _without any other juridical formalities, than the negation of the proctor, and the non-appearance of the party complained against; the impediment_, as the sentence imports, _being reduced to a moral certainty, without any necessity of farther proofs, or longer delay_. The regent thus, by means of formalities which the generality of judges very willingly accommodate to the wishes of those possessed of sovereign authority, found himself at liberty to espouse the queen: he was advised, however, out of respect to public decency, to obtain a dispensation from the pope, which dispensation, Mr. de Verjus, from a fortunate concurrence of circumstances, happened[28] to bring from France at this very juncture. This brief was obtained from the cardinal de Vendôme, at that time the pope's legate à Latere, who had been invested with that temporary dignity, for the purpose of assisting, in the name of his holiness, at the baptism of the dauphin. The bishop of Targa, coadjutor to the archbishop of Lisbon, bestowed the _nuptial benediction_ on the regent and queen, by virtue of this brief, which was afterwards confirmed by that of pope Innocent the IXth, which was thought necessary, not only to calm their consciences, but to ensure peace and tranquillity in the kingdom. King Alphonso was banished to the islands of Tercera, which make part of the Portugueze dominions. The people, ever deeply interested for the unfortunate, openly declared, that he was sufficiently punished in the loss of his crown and consort, without depriving him of the liberty of breathing his native air: but, alas! a dethroned prince seldom finds friends or protectors. Not a single grandee dared to espouse his cause, or plead in his favour, being well aware that the regent would never forgive an instance of compassion, which might in the end prove fatal to his government. Don Alphonso remained in exile till the year 1675, when he was recalled by the regent, who suspected him of having formed a party to assist him in his escape from the islands of Tercera, and to re-establish him on the throne. This prince died in the neighbourhood of Lisbon[29] in 1683, leaving his brother the liberty of assuming the title of king, the only right of which he had not already despoiled the unfortunate monarch. The death of Alphonso the VIth, having removed all apprehensions from the breast of don Pedro, he remained in future unrivalled possessor of a throne, which, flattering as it was to his ambition, most probably cost him some moments of remorse. This sunshine of prosperity was in the first year of his reign overclouded by the death of the queen, an event sincerely deplored by his majesty; who, however, having paid the just tribute of his tears to her memory, employed his every thought in alleviating the misery of a people who had sympathised in his misfortunes, and whose love towards a sovereign, whom they regarded as a father, made them deeply regret his being left without male heirs. He therefore, in compliance with their solicitations, consented to form a second marriage, and on the 2d of July, 1682, espoused Mary Elizabeth, the daughter of William, elector palatine of the Rhine. This princess, one of the most accomplished women of the age she lived in, bore him several children, and died on the 4th of August, 1699. The great affection felt by the Portugueze for this monarch, will not appear extraordinary, if we trace back the whole of his conduct from the commencement of his administration as regent, and the situation of Portugal at the moment he took into his own hands the reins of government. Having settled every thing relative to the abdication of the king, with the states-general, his next care was to convince the people, that his true and only motive for taking upon himself the sovereign authority, was the good of the public. Those Portugueze who had presumed to attribute this action to personal interest were most severely punished: nothing, however, contributed so much to silence the clamours of the friends and favourites of the deposed monarch, as the plan of conduct adopted by his successor; a plan from which he never departed during the whole course of his life. Don Pedro, during his regency, and even after he became king, instead of increasing the expence of his household, introduced the practice of the strictest oeconomy; and so far from being surrounded by a pompous train of attendants, he was waited upon by a single domestic. He very frequently eat alone, seated upon a piece of cork on the floor, and neither drank wine himself, nor permitted any one who did to approach him. He passed the greatest part of his time with his ministers, and often negociated affairs himself with foreign ambassadors, when his penetrating eye saw through their deepest designs, and disconcerted their best combined projects. He placed the greatest confidence in his relation, the duke de Cadaval, and had never any reason to repent his choice. He renewed the treaties entered into with England and Holland, and took care they should insert no clause contrary to his views, which were to preserve the strictest neutrality with his neighbours. He rejected the pressing solicitations of Louis the XIVth, to join with him against Spain, and was proof against the most brilliant proposals made him by that monarch, at a time too when Louis had subdued the Low Countries, invaded Holland, conquered Franche Comté, crossed the Pyrenees, and penetrated into Catalonia. The Spanish government may be said to have acted a most villainous part at this juncture, if it indeed be true, as has been asserted, that it was then secretly contriving the assassination of so firm and faithful an ally. The court of Portugal being at the baths of _Obidos_, received intelligence that a most dreadful plot was formed to massacre the regent, his consort, the infanta his daughter, and replace Alphonso the VIth on the throne. The criminals were presently discovered, seized, tried, and condemned to die. Don Francisco Mendoça, don Antonio de Cavida, and their accomplices were accordingly publicly executed. The inquest taken on this trial had been carefully concealed; yet still it transpired that the Spanish ambassador was not unacquainted with this horrible conspiracy. The coolness subsisting between him and the court increased the suspicions of the public; but the dignity of the diplomatic character secured his person. The Portugueze minister at the court of Madrid was very soon after most grossly insulted in his own house, and not being able to obtain redress, returned to Lisbon. Affronts which it was impossible to revenge were passed over in silence by the prudent regent; who, however, did not neglect taking every precaution which the situation of his affairs made necessary. He caused the frontiers to be put in a proper state of defence, and sent a well armed squadron to the Terceres (or Azores) islands, to fetch back his brother Alphonso, who, it had been purposely reported, was improperly treated in that place. The war between France and Spain was still carried on, though to all appearance it was drawing towards an end; and the very moment don Pedro became acquainted with the overtures for peace made at Nimeguen, he offered to act as mediator between the two powers. This proposal was received by Louis the XIVth with a degree of haughtiness and contempt which drew upon himself the never-ending resentment of a prince, to whom he was very soon afterwards forced to sue for succour. Let us now take a cursory view of the situation of Portugal at that critical juncture. The pains taken by the regent to put the finishing stroke to a war which had lasted twenty-six years, have been already remarked; but great as were the miseries it had caused, they were much less distressing, and much easier repaired than those suffered by Portugal, whilst under the dominion of Spain: such indeed were those calamities, that time itself has been unable to repair them. During the sixty years this unhappy country groaned under the Spanish yoke, the navy was almost entirely destroyed; more than 200 large merchantmen were lost. The arsenals and forts were robbed of above 2000 brass cannons, with an infinite number of iron ones; and the great square at Seville was at one time filled with 900 pieces of cannon, all marked with the arms of Portugal. Two hundred millions of golden crowns were taken out of the country between the years 1584 and 1626; and the finest estates and richest domains were bestowed on Spanish subjects. The Dutch deprived them too of the islands of Ceylon, Ternate, and Tidor; they forced Malacca to surrender after a long siege, took possession of the ports of Mina and Arguin on the coast of Guinea, and formed different settlements in Brazil; in short, such were the losses sustained by the Portugueze during these sixty years, that all their efforts have been hitherto inadequate entirely to repair them. The spice and East India trade which they had carried on exclusively during a whole century, then fell into the bands of the Dutch and English; and the Portugueze government finding it impossible to regain this valuable branch of commerce, turned all their thoughts towards Brazil, from which they had no small difficulty in driving the Dutch. Don Pedro likewise, on his first accession to the crown, made this important colony one of the principal objects of his attention, and spared no pains to extend it to the utmost of his power. It became necessary at this time to increase the authority of the missionaries, who, from their first entrance into the interior parts of America, had defended their proselites against the armed savages, with no other weapons than the gospel of Christ in one hand, and a crucifix in the other. An ordinance was therefore published on the 21st of December, 1686, which declared that the _holy fathers of the society of Jesus should not only be invested with the spiritual government, as before, but also the political and temporal one, over the towns and villages under their administration_. Some years after the publication of this edict, which, though it opened a passage for the Portugueze to the gold and diamond mines in Brazil, had nearly been attended by the most fatal consequences in Paraguay, the richest fleet which ever sailed from Brazil entered the port of Lisbon. It contained more than a ton and a half of gold, and came most opportunely to relieve the exigencies of don Pedro, who, foreseeing the events that would most probably follow the death of Charles the IId of Spain, was preparing a considerable armament, which was attended by so great an expence, that the royal treasury being nearly exhausted, he was under the necessity of having recourse to the _cortes_, from whom he obtained a supply of 600,000 crowns. Louis the XIVth, deeply interested in the motions of Portugal, was presently informed of this new subsidy, and the apparent motives alledged by the king to induce its being speedily granted. This intelligence did not at first appear to make much impression on the French monarch, but he soon after took umbrage at it, and still more particularly on hearing that the Spanish ambassador continued living in a great style at Lisbon, had an opera performed in his own house, gave the most magnificent entertainments, and had succeeded in gaining the favour of the king of Portugal. The court of France was very well aware, that don Pedro had legitimate claims on the crown of Spain, that his vicinity to Madrid would facilitate his views, and that he might easily find allies to support his pretensions; it was therefore thought expedient to dispatch an envoy extraordinary with orders to sound the intentions of the court of Lisbon on this subject. The nearer Charles the IId approached towards his end, the more were the powers of Europe employed in forming plans for dividing his inheritance. Different treaties had been formed during the course of his illness between France, England, and the United Provinces; but these were presently annulled, when on the demise of that prince, his will declared Philip, duke d'Anjou, heir to the crown of Spain. The new king was at first acknowledged by all the powers in Europe, except the Empire: he took upon himself the title of Philip the Vth, and departed immediately for Spain. It was this occasion which gave rise to the following memorable speech of Louis the XIVth; "_My son, there are now no longer any Pyrenees_;" a speech which unhappily was but too soon forgotten, since the first war undertaken by France, after that of the _succession_, was against the Spaniards. Philip the Vth entered his new dominions without the smallest opposition; he was received with much solemnity, and with every testimony of joy, on the 14th of April, 1701, at Madrid, where the people took the oath of allegiance, and expressed an attachment to his person, which neither time, nor reverse of fortune, had ever the power to weaken. Destitute of troops sufficient to oppose the united forces of France and Spain, and without allies to furnish him with supplies, don Pedro gave up for the present all idea of bringing forward the claims of the house of Braganza to the crown of Spain, and hastened to form an alliance with Louis the XIVth and Philip the Vth, as the properest means of preventing the kings of Spain from renewing their pretensions to that of Portugal. This alliance was greatly approved by the public; the Portugueze still bearing in mind the misery of their situation, whilst under the dominion of the house of Austria, and remembering with pleasure and gratitude the signal services rendered them by that of Bourbon. Their great disinclination to war, also added to their satisfaction, since they had now every reason to flatter themselves they might be suffered to remain neuter; but this hope, alas! was presently destroyed, for England, having on the 7th of September, 1701, formed a league with the Empire and Holland against France and Spain, immediately on war being declared, commanded her fleet to commence hostilities on the coast of Portugal. Don Pedro directly gave orders to the duke de Cadaval to assemble a sufficient body of troops to secure the sea-ports from the insults of the English; and at the same time informed his allies of his situation, and the danger with which he was threatened, unless speedily assisted. Neither France nor Spain were in a condition to equip a fleet capable of standing against the attacks of the English, and yet these powers insisted on Portugal's taking an active part in the war. Spain, in particular, treated the Portugueze ambassador with insupportable insolence, and on his urging the necessity of his master's remaining neuter, he was answered by the cardinal Portocarrero, "_that no other conduct could be expected from the rebel duke of Braganza_." The king of Portugal, whose love of peace had even induced him to pass over in silence the intelligence he had received from his minister at the Hague, that by a private treaty between France and Spain, his kingdom was to become a province of the last-mentioned country, now thought himself justified in breaking with allies, who not only gave him up to the power of his enemies, but were even employed in contriving his destruction, he therefore on the 6th of May, 1703, entered into the league styled the _grand alliance_, and obtained the most favourable conditions; the emperor promising to keep in pay 14,000 Portugueze, and the queen of England engaging herself to maintain a fleet ready at all times to defend Portugal and its colonies. There were also secret articles in this treaty, which treaty itself was not to be made public till the archduke Charles arrived at Lisbon, by which don Pedro was to be put into possession of Badajos, Alcantara, Albaquerque, Valentia in Estremadura; Bayonne, Vigo, Tuy, and Gardia, in Gallicia. Louis the XIVth was presently made acquainted with this convention, and gave orders to his ambassador to demand an explanation, which he was constantly refused. On the 9th of May, 1704, an English fleet appeared off Lisbon, and landed the archduke Charles, together with 10,000 men. A very few months after his arrival, the court of Portugal was plunged into the deepest distress by the death of the infanta, a child of eight years old, who was betrothed to the archduke. It being of the greatest importance to lose no time in commencing hostilities, the troops were scarcely landed before they were employed in actual service. Nothing decisive occurred during the first campaign; good and ill success equally attended their arms; and the English alone gained a conquest, which they have constantly preserved. The Spaniards, from the most unpardonable negligence, having left Gibraltar with only a garrison of a hundred men, it was taken on the 4th of August by the English, who fought under the command of the prince of Darmstadt, and admiral Rooke. The second campaign in 1705 was of very little importance; and the advantages obtained in that of the following year, were much more brilliant than solid. On the 16th of June, lord Galway and the marquis de Minas entered Madrid without resistance, and caused the archduke Charles to be proclaimed king of Spain: the greater part of the people, however, faithful to their first engagements, ventured even on the same day to shout out "Long live Philip the Vth, our lawful sovereign." Such marks of affection, testified by the Spaniards, and at such a moment, were a certain presage that the triumph of the archduke would be but of short duration. The English and Portugueze armies quitted Madrid on the 1st of August, and prudently avoided engaging the Spanish and French troops, commanded by marshal Berwick, having been informed, that they had recently received a powerful reinforcement from France. The English and Portugueze generals were on this occasion condemned or excused, according to the dictates of party spirit, for not having taken greater advantage of so fortunate a beginning. The Portugueze troops being returned to their winter quarters, the king gave orders for the levying of twelve thousand men, being determined to carry on the war with the greatest spirit and activity; but unfortunately for Portugal and its allies, don Pedro departed this life, after a very short illness, on the 9th of December, 1706. An historian of merit[30] has ventured to blame this prince for not remaining neuter in the _war of the succession_; but we have already seen that he was forced into hostile measures, by the conduct of the different parties. Other historians, still more severe, accuse him of not attending sufficiently to the important objects of agriculture and commerce. Nothing can be more unjust in most particulars than these reproaches, since it was during his reign that vegetables, and the most delicious fruits first flourished in Portugal,[31] and that the famous treaty was made with England, by which the latter power entered into engagements to take Portugueze wines in exchange for English manufactures. Cotemporary writers have done more justice to the merits of this sovereign, and allowed him not only the eminent virtues which ought to adorn a great monarch, but the superior talents of a wise administrator. Posterity has gone still farther, attributing to him the double merit of having, by his first alliance with Spain, gloriously terminated a dangerous revolution in the state, and of having carried his point, by quietly effecting another revolution in his own family. John the Vth, the son of don Pedro (or Pedro the IId) succeeded to the throne on the 9th of December, 1706, but was not solemnly proclaimed king till the 1st of January, 1707. This young prince, aged only seventeen years, continued faithful to the engagements taken by his father with the allied powers, against France and Spain, and put every thing in order to carry on the war with the greatest vigour. Success, however, did not wait upon his arms, for Philip the Vth having returned to his capital on the 8th of October, 1706, gave the command of the army destined to act against Portugal to marshal Berwick, who on the 15th of April, 1707, gained a complete victory over the allied armies, under the command of lord Galway, at the celebrated battle of Almanza, where the greater part of the Portugueze present on the occasion were either killed or taken prisoners. An extraordinary circumstance, and the only one of the kind to be met with in history, took place at this battle, where the English, under the command of a French general,[32] were beaten by an English one who commanded the French army. The year 1708, though it affords nothing very interesting relative to the actions which took place between Spain and Portugal, must always recal to our memory the noblest victory ever obtained by humanity over the ravages of war; since the kings of those two countries, by mutual agreement, prevented hostilities of any kind being committed against husbandmen and vine-dressers. John the Vth, in the same year, united himself by still closer ties to the house of Austria; and on the 8th of October formed an alliance with the second daughter of the emperor Leopold. The joy occasioned by this marriage was greatly augmented by the arrival of a fleet of merchantmen, consisting of a hundred sail, from Brazil, having on board to the amount of six millions sterling in gold, diamonds and tobacco. Nothing could be more timely than this supply; the subsidies promised to the Portugueze being very ill paid, and their army having suffered considerably, on the 7th of May, 1709, when the Portugueze were defeated on the banks of the _Caya_, by the marquis de Bay, in the campaign of Gudina.[33] The king was also obliged to withstand the instances of his allies, in an affair which he was decided not to give up; and the ambassadors from the Empire and England, together with the States-General, having remonstrated in the strongest manner about the franchises of foreign ministers, which his father had abolished twenty years before, he resisted all their arguments with a firmness they little expected, and, forced them to lay aside their claims. The year 1709, which began so prosperously for the archduke Charles, ended in the most disastrous manner for him and for Portugal. General Stanhope on the 27th of July, defeated the French and Spanish armies at Almenara, and afterwards greatly contributed to gaining the great victory of Saragossa; on this occasion the marquis de Bay was so completely beaten by the count de Staremberg, that Philip the Vth was obliged to quit Madrid, and the archduke entered the capital without striking a blow. No monarch, however, ever met with a worse reception from his subjects; they treated him with every possible mark of aversion, avoiding his sight, shutting themselves up in their own apartments, and even disdaining to pick up the money he threw into the streets. All his endeavours were fruitless to extort the oath of allegiance from several of the nobility, and having commanded the marquis de Mancera,[34] president of the council of Castille, an old man turned of a hundred years of age, to come and kiss his hand, he received the following reply: "I have but one faith and one king, which is Philip the Vth to whom I have sworn allegiance. I acknowledge the archduke as a great prince, but not as my sovereign, and having lived a hundred years without failing in any of my duties; I will not, for the short space of time I have yet to pass in this world, blast my spotless reputation by a dishonourable action." The archduke, irritated at such opposition, proposed giving up the town to be pillaged, but the generous Stanhope representing the cruelty as well as impolicy of such vengeance, "Well," replied Charles, "if we cannot plunder the city, let us at least quit it." If, indeed, the approach of the duke de Vendôme had not made this retreat necessary, circumstances alone must, sooner or later, have forced the archduke to take this step; since both he and his partizans began to perceive the impossibility of preserving a crown, which the people were decided, at the risk of their lives and properties, to replace on the head of him whom they had acknowledged as its lawful possessor. The reverse of fortune which Philip had experienced, far from weakening the attachment of the Spaniards, had very much contributed to increase it; so great, indeed, was the affection they bore him, that they preferred burning their provisions to selling them to his enemies. Such conduct gave rise to Stanhope's remark, "that a victorious army might indeed march through Spain, but that it required a still stronger one to keep possession of it." If a retreat through a country so ill disposed towards Charles, was in itself so dangerous, how infinitely more so must it be on the arrival of such an enemy as the duke de Vendôme, who, having reconducted Philip to Madrid, on the 3d of December, went immediately in pursuit of the archduke and Stanhope, who were making every possible effort to regain Portugal. Vendôme, having swam his troops across the Tagus, attacked general Stanhope, who was shut up in _Briguegua_, and on the 9th of December forced him to surrender himself prisoner, together with 5000 English. His success did not stop here, for having joined the count de Staremberg the same day at Villaviciosa, he, the following one, gave the battle which is known in history by the name of the above-mentioned place. Philip the Vth, who had not hitherto joined his generals in the field of battle, commanded, on that day, the right wing of his army, whilst the duke de Vendôme appeared at the head of the left: and thus a victory was obtained which ended all conflicts, and put him in the unrivalled possession of the crown of Spain. It was after this engagement that Philip, being unprovided with a bed, Vendôme exclaimed, "I will presently form you the most glorious bed on which a sovereign ever slept;" and he gave orders that a mattress should be made of the standards and colours taken from the enemy. The defeat at Villaviciosa having placed the Portugueze in a most critical situation, it was thought highly necessary, in 1711, to defend their own frontiers as much as possible, without ever attempting to attack those of their neighbours. The intelligence received of the capture of Rio Janeiro by Guy Trouin, cut off every hope of carrying on the war any longer. This place surrendered after eleven days siege, on the 23d of September, and the loss on this occasion was estimated at twenty-five millions of French livres; which made it impossible for Brazil (for some time at least) to furnish supplies to the mother country: a circumstance the more to be regretted, as Portugal never stood in greater need of assistance. A peace was now their only resource, and an unexpected event took place, which not only gave them an opening to make propositions, but accelerated the negociations. The emperor Joseph dying, the archduke Charles succeeded him in the imperial dignity; and from that moment it became contrary to the interest, not only of the allies, but of the whole of Europe, to place the crown of Spain upon his head. To preserve the _balance of power_ had been the _pretext_ alledged for the war, which could certainly never have been maintained, had the vast possessions of the emperor Charles the Vth been once more united under the dominion of one and the same person. The real and only motive, however, for this war, appears to be the ancient hatred entertained against the name of Louis the Great. In the course of this same year (1711) France began to enter into correspondence with England: the duke of Marlborough had been recalled by the court of St. James's, whose views tended towards peace, in as high a degree as his led towards war. In this situation of affairs the Portugueze had the prudence to attach themselves more closely than ever to the interests of Great Britain: they were accordingly admitted to the conferences held at Utrecht, on the 29th of January, 1712, and on the 11th of April, in the same year, France made peace by five different treaties; the first with England, signed at _three_ o'clock in the afternoon; the second with the duke of Savoy, at _four_ o'clock; the third with the king of Portugal, at _eight_; the fourth with the king of Prussia, at _midnight_; and the fifth with the States-General, at a _quarter past one_ the next morning. By the treaty with Portugal, France engaged that Spain should lay no claim to any part of that country; and at the same time renounced her pretensions on the river of the Amazons. Nothing now remained for the tranquillity of John the Vth, but to conclude peace with Philip the Vth, and all difficulties being done away by the mediation of the court of Versailles, it was at last signed at Utrecht, on the 13th of February, 1715. The people of Portugal, thus delivered from the horrors of war, remained in the greatest tranquillity during the reign of John the Vth, who never took the smallest part in any war, except that which arose between the Ecclesiastical States, the Venetians, and Turks, shortly after the peace of Utrecht. On this occasion the king of Portugal sent out a squadron to assist the former; and the pope, in acknowledgment of so essential a service, divided the archbishopric of Lisbon into two dioceses, and raised the royal chapel to the dignity of a metropolitan, patriarchal church: since which time the city of Lisbon has been separated into two great districts, distinguished by the name of eastern and western. The patriarch received permission from the pope to officiate habited like his holiness; whilst the canons of his church had the privilege of wearing habits resembling those of cardinals. The king immediately caused a most superb patriarchal church to be erected, and greatly beautified the fine palace of his predecessors: he also constructed an aqueduct, which was still more useful than magnificent, Lisbon having been hitherto very ill supplied with water; whilst on the other hand he built the sumptuous convent of Mafra, which may be termed with equal justice more _magnificent_ than _useful_.[35] The taste displayed by his majesty for architecture, did not divert his attention from the cultivation of arts and sciences. On the 8th of December, 1720, he issued a decree for the institution of the _Royal Academy of the History of Portugal_.[36] He gave orders for the purchasing of a variety of curious and valuable articles from foreign countries, such as pictures, statues, books, and manuscripts. He encouraged and rewarded artists of every description, and succeeded in inspiring them with that noble emulation so necessary to the progress of talents; but he did not sufficiently interest himself about artificers, and the means of improving the industry of his people, and making it turn out to the greatest advantage: this neglect may probably be attributed to lord Tyrawley, the English ambassador, who had obtained a very great ascendance over the mind of this prince; who, however, paid the strictest attention to every other branch of the administration. He was possessed of much firmness of character, was a rigorous observer of justice, and knew much better than any of his predecessors how to maintain the necessary subordination between the people and the nobles, who had formerly been very absolute, nay, indeed almost independant. He proved his strict adherence to justice on several occasions; especially in the following instance; when Cæsar de Ménézes, the son of the viceroy of Bahia having, with the assistance of several other gentlemen, forcibly rescued one of his attendants from the hands of the corregidor, the king immediately deprived the latter of his employment, as a punishment for his want of firmness; banished Ménézes to Africa, and either exiled or imprisoned all the gentlemen concerned in the business. This monarch, though slavishly attached to the fair sex, still retained the inflexible justice of his character, even in moments when the greatest men have sometimes yielded to the seductions of beauty. The relations of a gentleman condemned to work in the mines, contrived to interest the king's mistress in his favour: but this prince presently put a stop to her entreaties, by observing, "that the pardon she solicited depended on the king of Portugal, who resided in the _Terreiro de Paco_: but that in her house he appeared in no other character than that of her lover." The convents, and different houses of the grandees, which had hitherto served as sanctuaries for criminals, were in this reign deprived of that privilege, which indeed had only served to screen the most notorious villains from the punishments due to their crimes. His humanity was equal to his justice, for during an epidemical malady in Lisbon, which in the year 1723 carried off a thousand persons in a month, he gave audience three times a week to every description of his subjects, whether blacks or whites, freemen or slaves; he also forbid the nobles who composed his court to quit the capital, and insisted on their seconding his benevolence, and aiding him in the distribution of his charities. A dreadful tempest, in the following year, destroyed more than a hundred vessels in the Tagus: immediately the beneficent hand of this humane monarch, was stretched forth, to repair, to the utmost of his power, the cruel losses sustained on this fatal occasion. The great abuses which had for a long time taken place in the administration of the holy office, called for the attention of a just and merciful sovereign. John the Vth succeeded in making a most important reform. Before his reign, the prisoners detained in the inquisition were never allowed counsel to plead their cause; so great an abuse of power sensibly affected the king, who obtained a bull from pope Benedick the XIIIth, in 1725, by which these unhappy prisoners were granted every assistance that justice made necessary in their situation: this was followed up by a decree, obliging the inquisitors to communicate the sentences they pronounced to the king's council, before they were put in execution. Such was the conduct of John the Vth, that he was equally beloved and feared by his people. The grandees, indeed, viewed him with sentiments of fear rather than of love; a truth of which he was so well convinced, that he is said to have declared, that though his grandfather feared the grandees, and his father both loved and feared them, that he himself neither feared nor loved them. These sentiments are supposed to have arisen in his bosom, from the untoward conduct of the nobles, who, on several years being passed without the queen's having children, neglected paying their court to his majesty, and attached themselves very particularly to his brother, don Francisco: a prince, who is represented of so savage a disposition, that it appears extraordinary any one should wish to approach his person. One author,[37] in particular, mentions him as cruel, constantly delighting in fighting, and infesting the streets of Lisbon, at the head of a set of armed men, who nightly rambled through the city in search of adventures. These bands of gentlemen were termed _ranchos_; their amusement consisted in attacking and insulting passengers of every description, and such was the force of example, that several personages of the first nobility vied with don Francisco in the commission of these dreadful disorders. The duke de Cadaval, the marquis de Marialva, de Cascaes, the Aveiros, and the Obidos, had each their separate _rancho_. No night ever passed without people being wounded or murdered by this illustrious banditti; hatred, revenge, and a sort of civil war throughout the city, unrestrained by the presence of the king, were the natural consequences of such horrid barbarity. Foreigners also formed offensive and defensive treaties; and a body of sailors left their vessels on pretence of attacking the bravoes of Lisbon, whom they plundered, whenever their party happened to be the strongest. A personage likewise acted a part in these nocturnal scenes, who afterwards made a very different and still more celebrated figure in the page of history. Carvalho, possessed of extraordinary strength, and invincible courage, with a form nearly gigantic, seemed decided to surpass every other bravo of the age. He chose for his companion a man of a mind and person resembling his own, who, with himself, was habited in a white Spanish capotte, with shoes and hat of the same colour: thus accoutered, they were easily distinguished in the night, when, without any other assistance, they attacked the different _ranchos_, which they frequently conquered; though never without being exposed to the most dangerous resistance, nor without receiving several wounds. All the endeavours of his majesty to prevent such dreadful disorders, proved fruitless: they were thought, indeed, to proceed in some degree from a spirit of chivalry, which suited the national taste, and which the people did not wish to extinguish. The justice which always distinguished the character of the king, was about that time put to a severe and singular test, by a very unexpected claim, and one which had all the appearance of being well founded. In the year 1724, the chevalier _Porta_, a gentleman of Lausanne, arrived in Portugal, and was presented at court, where he demanded a private audience of his majesty, on a very particular occasion; no less than to lay claim to the possessions of don Antonio, who had been proclaimed king of Portugal in 1580, and from whom he alledged his wife was lineally descended. The king having granted him several audiences, and received him with great distinction, did not, however, venture to give judgment either for or against his claim, but left the decision to two juntas or councils. These were immediately assembled, and the opinions of the most celebrated civilians taken on the occasion. The result of their deliberations was, that the Swiss gentleman's claims were not legal, since don Antonio had been proscribed by Philip the IId of Spain, as a traitor to his country, and his property justly confiscated to the crown. This decision of the civilians was approved and confirmed by the two juntas. That Philip the IId, who himself usurped the crown of the Braganzas, should pronounce such a sentence, is not extraordinary. Philip the IVth likewise pronounced one of the same nature against that family: but surprising indeed must it appear in the eyes of posterity, that a grandson of the duke of Braganza should acknowledge and admit such a judgment as just and legal. Whilst the Portugueze looked up with gratitude and blessings to a prince, under whose reign they had enjoyed all the comforts of peace, and whilst his paternal hands were ever open to bestow fresh marks of his bounty, they were on the eve of receiving a blow to their happiness, as dreadful as it was unexpected. John the Vth, who was above the middle size, very well made, and so extremely strong, that his great delight in the bullfights was to seize the furious animal by the horns, and bring him to the ground, was attacked by a lingering illness, which, during the last eight years of his reign, reduced him to a state of inactivity, very fatal to the interests of his kingdom. So great was his devotion after this attack, that he neglected all public affairs, which were entirely confided to the care of brother Gaspard, a _récollet friar_. From that moment the revenues of the state were employed in building or endowing convents and churches, and causing masses to be said: this last piece of devotion was carried to such an excess, that it arose to a degree of madness; and it became necessary to conceal from his majesty the deaths which took place in Lisbon; for no sooner did any one expire, were it the meanest of his subjects, than he caused at least a hundred masses to be said on the occasion. This gave rise to the following expression: "_that John sent the living to hell, to pray the dead out of purgatory_." During the course of this fatal malady, which terminated in death on the 31st of July, 1750, every branch of the administration became relaxed, and the state was in the end not only destitute of money, but charged with a debt of a hundred millions of French livres. John the Vth, as has been already observed, was of a fine height; his figure was noble, and his countenance agreeable, though his complexion was rather dark and thick. His dress was magnificent, and he sent for all his cloaths from Paris. As for his character, it is not very easy to delineate; he was particularly jealous of the dignity of his throne and his quality as king; and sought more to inspire his grandees with fear, than with love. He bore, in many particulars, a great resemblance to Louis the XIVth; their tastes were the same, except indeed in the article of war, which the Portugueze monarch always wished to avoid. The French, and some other nations, have reproached this prince with his partial attachment to the English, into whose hands he gave up the whole of the commerce both of Portugal and its colonies. Joseph the Ist succeeded his father at a most unfavourable juncture: the deplorable state of the government and finances, required not only his strictest attention, but the assistance of the most able ministers. Diego de Mendoça was the first entrusted with the care of public affairs; but his majesty soon perceived that his choice had fallen on an improper person. Carvalho, who has been already mentioned as destined to play a great part on the stage of Portugal, and who, in future, will make the most conspicuous figure in this history, had displayed very great talents in his embassies to London and Vienna: he had also shewn himself so superior to all who composed the council held on the death of John the Vth, that he was fixed upon to replace Mendoça, who was afterwards banished to Mazagan, in Africa. The new minister was born in 1699, of a gentleman's family from Soure, near Coimbra; in the university of which he was educated: after having made a great proficiency in his studies, he entered into the service, which his levity and misconduct obliged him to quit. Launched into the pleasures of the great world, his gallantry and spirit of chivalry seduced the affections of a young heiress, of the illustrious house of Almada. He succeeded in carrying her off, and married her in spite of her family, whose resentment he braved with impunity, notwithstanding all their efforts to cause his destruction: fortunately for him, brother Gaspard, who was the uncle of the duke d'Aveiro, and the favourite of John the Vth, was particularly his friend, and sent him off immediately; first to London, and afterwards to Vienna, as secretary to the embassy. During his residence in the last mentioned city, he received intelligence of the death of his wife. He very soon was happy enough to captivate the heart of a relation of the celebrated count de Daun, and having received letters patent of nobility from the court of Lisbon, all the numerous objections made at first to this alliance were immediately removed. Thus fortunate in a foreign country, let us now examine the different qualities and talents which paved the way for the brilliant post he was destined to fill on his return to his native land. The page of history scarcely furnishes a man possessed of so fine an understanding, and so strong a mind; or who could assume such a variety of forms, with a character so strikingly contrasted. He, indeed, displayed successively the lively wit and fascinating manners of a finished man of fashion; the cultivated understanding of the most learned scholar; the supple humour of the most artful courtier; the ready genius of the most consummate man of business; and the subtle spirit of the most able negociator. With his friends, Carvalho was sometimes open, and perfectly unreserved; whilst at other times he treated them with the same profound dissimulation he practised towards his enemies. The services he received were always rewarded, and the injuries he suffered were never forgiven. His manners towards foreigners were as easy and obliging as they were stiff and reserved towards his countrymen. Such, indeed, was the extent of his capacity, and his profound knowledge in politics, that he has ever been equally celebrated as a minister of state, and a manager of foreign affairs. The great similarity existing between Carvalho, marquis de Pombal, and the cardinal de Richelieu, has given rise to the following comparison.[38] These two great personages had each been elevated from the middling station of life to the highest dignities. Each governed by terror, and re-established the sovereign authority, by cutting off the heads, and humbling the arrogance of a turbulent nobility. Each had the ridiculous pretension of being esteemed wits, and possessed of universal knowledge. Each was a profound politician, an imperious master, an irreconcileable enemy, and yet withal of amiable manners. Each rose to dignities by honourable means, and though alike disdaining to bend the knee at the shrine of fortune, each became possessed of immense riches. It would greatly exceed the limits of this work, were we to attempt to enter minutely into the long administration of the marquis de Pombal; we shall therefore only take notice of some important particulars, and the most remarkable events, which took place during the reign of his master. The respective domains of Spain and Portugal on the continent of South America, had never been properly divided; but in the year 1751, commissaries were sent thither to settle this affair, and on their report the limits were fixed, and a line of separation traced between the possessions of these two powers; this was approved and confirmed by treaties signed in the month of April in the same year; these treaties, however, were not easily put into execution, being strongly opposed by the Indians of Para and Marignan, and still more violently by those who inhabited the countries near the rivers d'Uraguay and Parana. Whatever may be the motives alledged in favour of the war then declared against these Indians, the principle on which it was founded was certainly unjust; for even on the supposition that one power has a right to insist on the neighbouring states adopting the form of government most conformable to the views of that power; it surely can never have that of attacking their independence; particularly after their having conformed to the new established laws, lived happily under them; and desiring nothing more than to be allowed the quiet enjoyment of the blessings of peace. The Portugueze, who dreaded the approach of the Spaniards towards Brazil, and still more particularly towards the mines of St. Paul, and their settlements on the river Parana; and the Spaniards, who were equally apprehensive that the Portugueze, by posting themselves on the Uraguay and Rio de la Plata, should come too near the colonies of Buenos Ayres, Chili, and the mines of Potosi, had by mutual agreement ceded the tract of country lying between their different settlements, to the Jesuits who acted as missionaries in that distant quarter of the globe. If the grant of these lands, the length of which had never been ascertained, though the breadth had been determined, became clearly void on the part of those who ceded it, it could not possibly be valid on the part of those who signed it; unless, indeed, it was acknowledged as such by the parties concerned; and this was the ground on which the missionaries built all their pretensions. This society of holy men, to the disgrace of the other colonies,[39] had by constant attention and assiduity greatly humanized Paraguay and the other countries in the circle of their mission: villages were built in every part, Christianity triumphed over infidelity and idolatry; the savages became civilized, and lived happy under a wise government; no people, indeed, ever appeared more truly blessed; the produce of their labour was distributed in common; there were neither rich nor poor; no distinctions of high and low, consequently no avarice, ambition, or jealousy: all took an equal share in the labours of the day, and all were equally rewarded. The Jesuits distributed in the different towns and villages, treated the people with paternal tenderness, and reigned over the whole of Paraguay like the patriarchs of old, surrounded by a numerous and affectionate family. The authority they had established, by a system of politics very different from that of the generality of earthly governments, was founded on a perfect union of public utility and private happiness; and this astonishing republic existed some time in peace; for the missionaries, from moderation, and a wish to avoid all disputes with Spain and Portugal, paid a reasonable tribute to those powers, without murmuring at the illegality of such a demand on a free people, who, though now formed into a commonwealth, was not on that account to be esteemed either Spanish or Portugueze. The courts of Lisbon and Madrid, jealous of the great population and rapid civilization of countries situated so near to their most important colonies, united to rob the Jesuits of the fruit of their labours, and to divide the spoil between them. In vain these holy fathers represented their lawful claim to lands, which had been particularly granted to them, and the injustice of committing such an outrage on a free people, who, though they had embraced the Christian religion, and adopted European manners, never intended bowing their necks to the yoke of foreign powers. The just reasons alledged by the Jesuits were treated as acts of rebellion, and an armed force immediately invaded their colonies. The Indians made all the resistance in their power, but were presently overcome by the superior skill and experience of European troops. A small number amongst them submitted to their new masters, whilst the rest, accompanied by their holy comforters, went farther up the country, and formed another settlement. _The war of the missionaries_ bore a very serious aspect at Lisbon; and Carvalho dispatched his brother to terminate it as soon as possible. The effects of this war proved in the end very fatal to the Jesuits, for it prejudiced the king strongly against them, and certainly prepared the way for their destruction. A very short time afterwards, Joseph the First not only banished all father confessors of that order from the court of Lisbon, but every other Jesuit who held employments of whatsoever nature.[40] Such about this time became the distressed state of the finances of Portugal, that the gold of Brazil became an object of the greatest importance to the minister. The usual annual importation of gold from that country he knew to amount to forty millions of French livres, whilst he also knew, that there were not more than fifteen millions, and those too not without alloy, in circulation throughout the whole of Portugal. He accordingly published an edict, forbidding the exportation of gold out of the kingdom. England was greatly alarmed at this intelligence; and government thought the affair of too much importance to trust to the common mode of representation; lord Tyrawley was therefore sent ambassador to Lisbon, with the strictest injunctions to prevent the effect of this edict; but neither his repeated expostulations, nor the threatened hostilities of his court, were of any avail to cause its revocation. The establishment of several new manufactories in Portugal, occasioned fresh complaints on the part of the English, which were treated with as little attention as the former one.[41] In the mean time Portugal was on the eve of sinking under a blow which no human prudence could possibly foresee or avert, and which was still more dreadful, from its not being preceded by any of those signs which usually presage such awful events. Never did the horizon appear more clear, nor the sun shine more bright than on the 1st of November, in the year 1755, and never did the Portugueze prepare to celebrate All-Saints' Day under more favourable auspices; when, near the hour of ten, invited by the beauty of the weather, and the solemnity of the festival, the people with religious haste flocked towards the churches, the earth suddenly shook under their feet; clouds of dust darkened the sun; the musical instruments, which invited them to partake of the holy mysteries, sounded no more; repeated and violent shocks of an earthquake were felt; houses with terrific noise fell to the ground on every side; the most solid edifices were thrown down; the magnificent palace of the kings of Portugal was entirely destroyed, and scarcely could those who inhabited it, find time to escape from being buried under the ruins. Such of the inhabitants of Lisbon who were fortunate enough to avoid being crushed by the rubbish of their fallen dwellings, knew not where to seek a place of refuge. Some amongst them flew to the churches, which presently became their tombs, whilst others, dreading to be swallowed by the earth, which seemed gaping to receive them, rushed impetuously towards the sea. The magnificent quays on the banks of the Tagus were thronged with people; when, in the twinkling of an eye, the element towards which they looked for safety, rose to a prodigious height, and threatened them with, if possible, a still more horrid death than that they sought to escape. The waves of the sea rose several fathoms above the ordinary level, and dashing towards a shore they were never destined to overflow, drove in vessels, some of which arrived in safety, whilst others were entirely shattered to pieces, and swallowed up the unhappy wretches, who had escaped being buried in the bosom of the earth. Earth and water were not the only elements which fought against the miserable Portugueze; fire and air contributed likewise to their destruction: the former, in particular, caused the most dreadful catastrophes: for though, at first, apparently smothered amongst the rubbish, it presently forced itself a passage, and burst forth with such fury, as baffled every attempt to stop its progress. The public storehouses, and private magazines were soon reduced to ashes: the immense riches they contained were entirely consumed; for such was the violence of the flames, and the excess of heat, that it was impossible to approach the burning tenements, or assist the wretched inhabitants, whose piercing cries struck to the heart. But, dreadful to relate, in the midst of scenes of so much horror, men (if such they can be called) of different nations and complexions, whose lives had hitherto been spared, in this awful moment took advantage of the confusion which reigned throughout the city, to commit the most horrible depredations. These wretches, dispersed in every quarter, braved the greatest dangers; not alas! to succour a distressed fellow-creature, but to rob and murder him; since whosoever discovered a hidden treasure, or delivered up the keys to these merciless invaders, was sure to pay the forfeit with his life. Such atrocious crimes, however, remained not long unpunished; for the moment the government was able to act, the strictest search was made for the savage monsters, who, to the disgrace of humanity, still continued to commit them. Those who escaped the sword of justice, were strongly fettered, and never relieved from the weight of their chains, but whilst employed in burying the dead, the numbers of which so infected the air, and caused such putrid exhalations, that the plague seemed to threaten this miserable city with still another, and equally dreadful calamity. The greater part of these atrocious villains survived but a very few days their accomplices; thus finding a speedy punishment from the effects of their own diabolical actions; since many amongst them were struck dead by the putrid vapours issuing from the very bodies of those they had so inhumanly butchered. The intelligence of this dreadful event was presently circulated throughout Europe; and the English displayed on the occasion a degree of humanity and generosity superior to all praise. All causes of discontent given them by the Portugueze were, at this calamitous moment, nobly forgotten; and they alone afforded them more assistance than they received from the united efforts of all their neighbours and allies. Justice is also due to the conduct of Carvalho, who during several days carried on business, eat, and slept in his carriage, which conveyed him continually from place to place, and whithersoever his presence was particularly required. Such was his activity, that he published more than a hundred ordinances in the space of eight days. He advised the king to wear nothing but undyed woollen cloth, manufactured in the country; and his example was followed by the court, and every other description of persons: he also engaged his majesty to sign an edict, by which all foreign merchandize was obliged to pay an additional duty; and this he enforced, notwithstanding the representations of the foreign ministers, and more particularly those of the English ambassador. By the effects of his zeal, Lisbon was soon cleared of all rubbish, and wide strait streets built, with new houses on each side. Such indeed were the signal services he rendered the state on this disastrous occasion, that he became the idol of the people, and was appointed prime minister by his majesty. He was not, however, so elated by his good fortune, as not to be perfectly aware that he had great and dangerous enemies, whose hatred was still increased by his new dignities; but he was far from suspecting the extent of their malice, or the dreadful precipice on which he stood. The attack meditated against him, was still more formidable, from the profound secrecy with which it was concealed, and from the parties concerned in it being of the first consideration in the state. The duke d'Aveiro, one of the greatest men in the kingdom, was the ostensible chief of this conspiracy; whilst the marchioness de Tavora, a most distinguished character at court, was in fact the principal agent; and the whole was conducted by father Malagrida, a member of the most powerful religious order in the Christian world. The union of persons so differently situated, and of such opposite characters, was the effect of a concatenation of circumstances of the most extraordinary nature. The duke d'Aveiro was descended from the younger branch of the family of Mascarenhas, which, though one of the most ancient houses in Portugal, was not one of the most noble, and he certainly had no claim to the distinguished rank he afterwards held, which he owed entirely to his uncle, brother Gaspard, a mere Portugueze gentleman; he himself being incapable of pushing his fortune, or aspiring to favour through his personal merit. His figure was greatly against him, for he was short, and far from handsome; add to this, he was ignorant, obstinate, deranged in his fortune, and capable of every crime; meanly servile towards Carvalho, whom he secretly detested; and so proudly vain of his birth, as openly to declare, that his family, being descended from _George_ (_the natural son of John the IId, surnamed the Great_) _he was but one degree removed from the crown_. Stung to the quick at being no longer treated with the same distinction as during the reign of John the Vth, he formed the terrible design of assassinating his successor; and his pride giving way to his resentment, he indiscriminately attached himself to every one who had, or who thought he had, reason to complain of the court; particularly to the Jesuits, and the family of Tavora. To the former he had always testified the greatest aversion during the administration of his uncle, brother Gaspard, but he now sought their society, frequently visiting them, and receiving them night and day in his own apartments. After some little time, he judged them worthy of his confidence, and revealed his shocking design to father Malagrida. The Jesuit having succeeded in bringing about a reconciliation between the duke and the Tavoras, who had long resented his having deprived them of several domains formerly belonging to their family, prevailed upon him to open his heart to the old marchioness de Tavora, whose confessor he was. The duke the more readily consented to this plan as he knew the implacable hatred borne by the marchioness to the king, and his minister, who had refused her solicitations in favour of her husband, for whom she wished to procure the title of duke. This lady was in every respect widely different from her brother-in law, the duke d'Aveiro. Nature had bestowed on her the most striking beauty, the most imposing carriage, and the most seductive graces. She was endowed with a genius capable of conceiving the most extensive plans, with judgment to ripen, and talents to execute them. The strength of her body fitted her to support the greatest fatigue, the temper of her mind to brave the greatest dangers, whilst the firmness of her character made her disdain to submit to the king or to his minister. Nature had also planted in her bosom the shoots of the noblest passions--passions, alas! which, as they are well or ill directed, form the greatest men, or the most atrocious villains. Mistress of immense riches, her liberal spirit induced her to bestow them freely; whilst her superior judgment taught her to set bounds to her generosity. Thus endowed with qualities both of body and mind, so infinitely above those of the duke d'Aveiro, the marchioness soon became the life and soul of the conspiracy, which she conducted with the most wonderful skill and address. Her principal accomplices were chosen from the members of her own family, but her insinuating manners gained her several partizans, not only in the highest, but even in the lowest ranks of the people. Her conduct, in the mean time, was of a very extraordinary nature, since she never endeavoured to conceal from the prime minister the hatred she bore him, nor failed speaking of him openly, in terms of the greatest contempt. The sovereign himself was not treated with more indulgence; he became the subject of the most poignant satire, and the bitterest sarcasms; whilst the queen and princesses were the constant objects of her ridicule. Inspired by the most diabolical sentiments, she put on the mask of religion to effect her purpose, and by her feigned devotion deceived the most clear-sighted. Whilst her thoughts were employed in forming plans of the blackest treason, she frequented the churches, made one in the different processions, went on pilgrimages, and practised all the external forms of religion with the greatest ostentation. Her confessor, father Malagrida, was an Italian Jesuit, sent by the general of the society on a mission to Portugal. Zealous, eloquent, and enthusiastic, he presently became the most fashionable spiritual director: people of every description made choice of him for their confessor: he was regarded as a saint, and consulted as an oracle. More than two hundred and fifty persons of consequence were concerned in this conspiracy, and nothing now seemed wanting but to fix the day for putting their design into execution. The hearts of kings are not invulnerable; their passions are frequently strong, and their means of satisfying them easier than those of other men; this facility ought, in fact, to put them on their guard, and teach them to curb the violence of their inclinations, since their elevated rank, and the crowd by which they are constantly surrounded, make it impossible that their actions should long remain concealed. Joseph the 1st made frequent visits to the young marchioness of Tavora; these gave rise to suspicions of an affair of gallantry being carried on between them, which, whether just or unjust, served as a plausible pretext for attempting his life. On the 3d of September, his majesty visited the marchioness, and remained with her, contrary to custom, till eleven o'clock at night. We dare not investigate the reasons of this visit being so unusually prolonged, lest it should implicate other persons in this horrid transaction, without diminishing the enormous guilt of the regicides. The king was on that night attended by only one domestic, who went with him in his calash, drawn by two mules, and driven by a postilion. The conspirators, perfectly well acquainted with the road he would take in returning to Belem, placed themselves in the most convenient spots for the execution of their dreadful project. To secure their success, they divided into different parties; the first of which let the carriage pass quietly on, till it arrived in the midst of the assassins, who consisted of a hundred and fifty persons. Some of these immediately fired, and the pannels of the calash were shivered to pieces by balls of different sizes: the king received several wounds; whilst his valet de chambre, whose name was _Taxera_, with a degree of courage, and a sublime devotion to his master, worthy of the greatest encomium, prevailed on the king to sink to the bottom of the carriage, and seating himself upon him, screened his sovereign from the impending danger. The postilion (called _Castodio da Costo_) at the same moment, with the greatest presence of mind and intrepidity, whipping his mules with violence, gallopped forwards, and in the midst of continual firing, forced them down a steep precipice, and dashing over wide fields, and through bye roads, reached Belem in safety.[42] The king, on alighting from his carriage, wrapped himself in a large cloak, belonging to one of the guards, and sent immediately for Carvalho, for whom he waited with such impatience that he remained at the gate of the palace, without suffering his wounds to be dressed, and without either breathing a complaint, of expressing the smallest signs of apprehension. The prime minister hastened to attend his sovereign, and listened to all that had passed without change of countenance. He then entreated the king to keep the affair secret, and gave orders to the valet de chambre and guards to be equally silent; thus prudently deciding on concealing for some time the punishment awaiting the regicides, with as much art as they had employed in forming so treasonable and bloody a design; for it must be allowed that no conspiracy was ever kept more secret, or was so near being successful; but the attempt being once made, and by so considerable a number of persons, it was scarcely possible the original authors of the plot could long remain concealed. Notwithstanding all the above-mentioned precautions, a report was presently circulated throughout Lisbon, that the king had been assassinated. Crowds of people assembled before the palace, and eagerly demanded to see his majesty, who immediately complied with their request, and declared aloud, that the hurts he had received were occasioned by being overturned in his calash. He afterwards engaged the nobles more particularly attached to his person, and who had eagerly flown to attend him, to leave no means untried to remove every suspicion from the minds of the public, of an attempt having been made against his life. The duke d'Aveiro, who had been the first to propose pursuing the assassins at the head of the horse guards on duty that night at the palace, seemed unwilling to consent to the plan of secrecy adopted by the king: but Carvalho, who began to entertain some suspicions of his being concerned in the conspiracy, was not the dupe of his zeal: he therefore pretended to entrust him with some particular secrets, whilst he insisted upon his entering into the views, and complying with the injunctions of his majesty. Difficult as it appears to keep secret an affair of this nature, it, however, never transpired; and the king, even before his wounds were closed, appeared in public, and took his usual exercise. The conspirators also put on a calm appearance, and began to believe all danger over. One man only amongst the number, named Polycarpe, who was a domestic in the Tavora family, mistrusted such mysterious inactivity on the part of government, and taking alarm, quitted the kingdom. Every thing now appeared quiet; the public mind was re-assured; the conspirators thought themselves in safety, and the attempt on the king's life seemed forgotten. Carvalho, however, had been constantly and secretly employed in diving to the bottom of this dreadful transaction: the principal contrivers of it were already known to him, when, by the effect of the most extraordinary chance, he became acquainted with the whole of their accomplices. The conspirators, once relieved from all apprehensions of discovery, without the smallest compunction for the enormity of their crime, turned their thoughts towards a second attempt, and the means of making it a successful one. The spot chosen for their private meetings, was a garden belonging to Tavora, which also served as a place of rendezvous to a foreign servant, who carried on a clandestine correspondence with a woman in the house: she, one night, failing in her appointment, her lover concealed himself in the garden, near the very spot where the conspirators held their assembly. Not one word which passed escaped the ears of the attentive listener, who, by that means, became acquainted not only with every particular relative to the first attempt, but with the plan laid for the execution of the second. This man, no sooner contrived to quit the garden, than he flew to the prime minister, and related with the utmost precision every thing which had passed. Carvalho instantly perceived the imminent danger to which he was exposed; and having now the most convincing proofs, of what before he only suspected, nothing remained to be done but to deliver up the criminals to the severity of the law: he, however, still continued to dissemble; and the duke d'Aveiro, either from his own apprehensions, or by the advice of his friends, having asked leave of absence for three months, it was immediately granted, and that in the most obliging and flattering manner. The marquis de Tavora was at the same time appointed to a commandery, which he had solicited during several years. Favours thus repeatedly conferred on the principal conspirators, completely put an end to the apprehensions of their friends, relations, and accomplices. The public was likewise deceived; every thing which had passed was buried in oblivion; and nothing was talked of but the intended marriage between the daughter of Carvalho, and the comte de Sampayo, with the entertainments which would naturally take place on so brilliant an alliance. The king himself signed the contract of marriage, promised to defray the expences of the wedding, and invited all the grandees of the kingdom to be present on the occasion. The duke d'Aveiro no sooner received this intelligence, than he left the country, and repaired with all possible haste to Lisbon; where every thing around him wore the face of joy and pleasure; but on the very day when the court and city were busily employed in preparing for two balls, the one at the prime minister's at Belem, and the other in Lisbon, at the _long room_;[43] intelligence was brought that troops, composed both of horse and foot, had unexpectedly entered the city, and that great numbers of persons of all ranks and descriptions had been taken into custody. Never was there a transition so sudden from the greatest joy to the deepest sorrow; never were wedding garments so shortly changed to mourning habits; never were criminals so speedily brought to trial, nor sentences so quickly executed. Scarcely ten days had elapsed since their first imprisonment, before the duke d'Aveiro was drawn and quartered; the marquis de Tavora, his wife, his two sons, and his son-in-law, the count d'Atouguia, beheaded, and four other persons of inferior rank burnt alive. Dreadful as is the spectacle of punishments, so repugnant to the feelings of humanity; let us, however, take a view of the fatal spot, where the minister, far from listening to the impulse of compassion, but too frequently injurious to the interests of both king and state, delivered up to the hand of the executioner the noble and ignoble, whose blood was suffered to flow indiscriminately in the same channel. The duke d'Aveiro, on approaching the scaffold, shewed every symptom of the most abject fear, and by his cowardice lost that interest in the hearts of the spectators, which a contrary conduct, even in the greatest criminals, never fails to inspire; whilst the old marchioness of Tavora was all herself, never losing sight of the character by which she had constantly been distinguished, and preserving to the last moment of her existence an heroic firmness, and an unalterable presence of mind. The sentence which condemned her to death having been read to her, she ordered her breakfast as usual, and seated herself at her toilette, where she dressed herself in her accustomed manner. Her confessor having hinted that her moments ought to be otherwise employed, she calmly answered, _that there was time enough for every thing_. She afterwards breakfasted with her female attendants, and conversed without the smallest emotion. On arriving at the foot of the scaffold, she refused all assistance, and addressing herself in a loud voice to those who had offered it, _I am very well able to mount it by myself; for I have not been put to the torture like the others_. She accordingly went up with a firm step, but on reaching the platform of the scaffold, her constancy was put to the most cruel proof; for meeting her husband, the marquis de Tavora, he reproached her in the bitterest terms for having caused the destruction of her family. Looking towards him with a serene countenance, she only replied, _Well, then! bear your misfortunes as I do, and do not reproach me with them_. The executioner coming towards her, she bound her eyes herself, begged him to dispatch his business quickly, spoke a very few words to her confessor, and with her handkerchief gave the fatal signal. The second son of a woman, whose greatness of mind makes her criminality the more severely to be regretted, displayed a degree of courage equal to that of his mother: he was only nineteen years of age, but his youth did not exempt him from the torture. The severest torments, however, lost their effect; not a groan, not an avowal of any kind escaped him; till at last the executioner hoping that filial affection might draw from him a confession, which the most excruciating tortures could not extort, brought his father to him, who exhorted him in the most pathetic terms not thus uselessly to prolong his sufferings, since not only he himself, but all the accomplices had made an ample confession. Scarcely could the marquis finish his discourse, before he was interrupted by his son, who briefly answered, _Father, it was you who gave me life, and you are at liberty to deprive me of it_. The sword of justice hung some time longer suspended over the three Jesuits, Malagrida, Alexander, and Matos, who had been taken up as _instigators and principal chiefs of the conspiracy._[44] Their execution was daily expected; but unfortunately the common modes of justice had not been allowed to take their course, and to the astonishment of all the world, it was not till some years after their imprisonment, that Gabriel Malagrida was alone condemned by an extraordinary court of justice, to be burned alive, (the 21st September, 1761) and then not as a conspirator and regicide, but as a heretic and impostor.[45] Carvalho, now made count d'Oeyras, had not, however, waited the execution of Malagrida, to banish the Jesuits from Portugal.[46] That a religious order, which causes disturbances in the state, and enters into conspiracies, deserves banishment, and even capital punishment, no one will pretend to deny; but, on the other hand, may it not be alledged that the religious order which had rendered the most essential services to the state, and indeed to Christian countries in general, by instructing youth, and civilizing colonies, might better have been reformed, than entirely destroyed. A conspiracy, which had been preceded by a revolution in America, attended by circumstances capable of overturning the mother country, and which was followed by the expulsion of the Jesuits, ended at last in a state of tranquillity, which it had cost too many sacrifices to obtain, not to employ every possible means to ensure its duration: but notwithstanding all the endeavours of the king and his minister, the Spaniards and French were determined to disturb it. A Spanish army, composed of forty thousand men, entered Portugal in 1762; their progress, however, through that country was but very short; and by the assistance of the English, and the count de la Lippe, to whom the former had given the command of the Portugueze troops,[47] an honourable peace was signed on the 10th of February in the following year: after which their quiet was only disturbed by some hostilities in America, which terminated very much in the same manner as the former ones, without the powers of Europe being engaged in the quarrel. The count d'Oeyras, afterwards created marquis de Pombal, never lost sight, even in the midst of all his difficulties, of his original plan of reforms and ameliorations. The greatest obstacles he had to encounter proceeded from Brazil, and the town of Oporto, from the inhabitants of which he had but little reason to expect opposition, since the measure to which they so strongly objected was shortly followed by an increase of their wine trade, which became twice as considerable as before. Portugal being much more fruitful in vines than in corn, the king published an edict in 1765, commanding all the vines in the environs of the Tagus, Mondego and Vecha, to be rooted up, and the land sown with wheat. The vineyards in the neighbourhood of Lisbon, Oeyras, and some other places, were, however, suffered to remain. By a former edict, of the month of October, 1761, twenty-two thousand writers or clerks employed in the different tribunals were reduced to only thirty-two persons. The minister, by a salutary law, which took place on the 25th of May, 1773, _for ever_ abolished the odious distinction formerly existing in Portugal, between the _old_ and _new_ christians. The latter, composed of converted Jews and Moors, were always suspected of insincerity, and regarded in the kingdom _as marked with infamy, and for ever separated from the other Christians, and incapable of acting in any capacity, either ecclesiastical or civil_. The progress of learning also was a principal object in the marquis de Pombal's system of improvement: he reformed the university of Coimbra; he converted on the 19th of May, 1766, the college occupied by the novices of the order of Jesus, and which was esteemed one of the finest buildings in Lisbon, into a school for the nobility: he likewise established other schools for children of all descriptions; and published a plan of public education, which, if properly followed, could not fail of restoring science and good morals throughout the whole of Portugal. He left no means untried to wrest from the hands of the English the different branches of commerce, of which they were become exclusive possessors. He set just bounds to the despotic authority of the holy office, which, by an edict of the 20th of May, 1769, became merely a royal tribunal, invested with no other power than what was transmitted to it by the sovereign, thus depriving it of all its odious privileges and pretensions; such as the form of its proceedings, and the absurd idea of uniting the authority of the pope and bishops to that of the king; whilst at the same time, it acknowledged no supreme chief but the pope alone. He patronised the arts, and caused a statue of Joseph the Ist to be erected to him. It was on the very day of its exhibition to the public eye, the day he justly esteemed the happiest of his life, that he discovered it had been marked for his destruction. The last melancholy satisfaction, in attending his master's dying moments, together with the sixty millions of cruzadoes found in the royal treasury after his decease, formed a sufficient proof of the uprightness of his administration. The reigning queen of Portugal, who was married in 1760, to her uncle, don Pedro,[48] signalized her accession to the throne, by throwing open the prison gates, and causing the proceedings against the criminals concerned in the conspiracy of the 3d of September, 1758, to be revised; after which the greater part were restored to their former rights; though the examination which had taken place, rather confirmed their guilt, than proved their innocence. Far different was the action commenced against the marquis de Pombal, by the enemies of that able minister; for the proceedings which _declared him criminal, and deserving of condign punishment_, so evidently proved his innocence, and the injustice of such a sentence, that he was suffered to die quietly in his bed, at his country seat, whither he had some time retired, on the 5th of May, 1782.[49] The health of the queen, on the demise of her husband, in 1786, was so much deranged, that the prince of Brazil took into his own hands the reins of government. This enlightened and prudent prince has neglected nothing to promote the national industry; he has encouraged literature, made commerce flourish, and even sometimes caused the Brazil gold to circulate again from England to Portugal. He has established so strict a police in Lisbon, that it is impossible for an assassin or conspirator, should such still exist, to escape the punishment due to his crimes. He has augmented the land forces, and invited the most experienced foreign officers to command them; and he has attended particularly to the navy, for which he has been justly rewarded. Pacific, and faithful to his allies, he has followed as exactly as possible the system of neutrality traced by his mother, who has ever been at peace with her neighbours, and never engaged in any of their wars, till she joined them in that declared against France at the commencement of the revolution: since which, the fate of Portugal has so entirely depended on that of Spain, that the fall of the one must necessarily be succeeded by the destruction of the other. How noble an instance of generosity then does the conduct of England afford, thus to fly to the relief of a country, which, though an ally, had so lately declared war against her? At a moment when the royal family had been forced to quit Lisbon, when the French entered that capital, and indeed every other town and fortress in the kingdom; whilst the provinces of Portugal were dismembered by the same usurping hand which had disposed not only of the country, but of the crown of Spain, and whilst every thing seemed to announce to the Portugueze that they must no longer look up to the same masters, submit to the same laws, or form a separate state; at such a moment, I say, the victorious British arms came to their aid, changed their destiny, and opened a new field of glory to the descendants of Viriatus, and the fellow-soldiers of Sertorious; and who can doubt that success must attend their arms, if constantly faithful to their generous allies, they never cease to remember, that it was in the plains of Lusitania, where the first standard of a free people was displayed against the masters of the universe; that they, in their turn, and in the same country, planted the last colours of their expiring liberty, and that one and both fell a sacrifice to perfidy,[50] but never were conquered by the force of arms! DESCRIPTION OF BRAZIL. Nos patriæ fines et dulcia linquimus arva, Nos patriam fugimus.... _Virg._ I. _Eclog._ Brazil, which from a variety of circumstances, has ever been regarded an interesting country, is now become doubly so, from being the present residence of the court of Portugal; and as such, we are induced to give a description of it, which, from the nature and size of this work, must necessarily be a short one. _Cabral_, in the year 1500, first landed on the coast of Brazil, and immediately gave notice to the court of Lisbon of the discovery he had made. The Portugueze, however, were for a length of time very indifferent to the acquisition of so fine a country. This negligence may in a great degree be attributed to the want of civilized inhabitants, and opulent towns, which the Portugueze had been accustomed to meet with in Africa and Asia; whilst the natives of Brazil consisted of different colonies of savages, dwelling in miserable huts, situated either in forests, on the banks of rivers, or on the sea-coast; and subsisting entirely on the produce of the chace, or on fish caught by themselves. The heat of the climate made cloathing not only unnecessary, but absolutely superfluous. The men and women equally painted their bodies, ornamented their necks and arms with necklaces and bracelets of white bones, and adorned their heads with feathers. The Brazilians are nearly of the same stature as the Europeans, but in general not so robust. Their principal arms consisted of clubs and arrows; their wars were not frequent, but cruel; and dreadful was the fate of those prisoners who fell into their hands without being wounded, since they constantly served as a repast to their merciless conquerors. The French, Dutch, and Portugueze successively formed settlements on the coast; but, in the end, the latter became masters not only of the coast, but of the interior of the country. Let us now take a cursory view of the manner in which the inhabitants have been treated, and the laws by which they have been governed. The Brazilians have not always experienced the same fate; and several years elapsed, and many contests took place before the rigour of their situation was in the smallest degree softened. King Sebastian was the first who bestowed a thought on mitigating the sufferings of so interesting a part of his subjects. He prohibited their being publicly sold in the markets, and sent as slaves to the plantations. Prisoners of war were indeed excepted, but not unless the war in which they were taken was proved to be a just one. Philip the IId published different ordinances in the years 1595, 1605, and 1606, by which he declared Indians of every description perfectly free; but this sovereign being informed that his statutes had been of no avail, confirmed and strengthened them by a new one in 1611, whereby he decreed that the severest punishments should be inflicted on whosoever should presume to infringe them. This edict, unhappily, was equally ineffectual with the former ones; as was also another, given by the court of Lisbon in 1647, at the repeated and pressing solicitations of the Jesuit missionaries at Brazil, by which the prohibition of enslaving the Brazilians was again formally renewed; but that people never were really emancipated till the year 1755, when the Portugueze government publicly declared them _citizens_, invested with the same rights and privileges as their conquerors, capable of aspiring to the same distinctions, allowed to be educated at the same schools, and even to the university of Coimbra. This event, however, was far from inspiring those sentiments of joy and gratitude, which might naturally have been expected from a people thus raised from the degrading state of servitude, to all the advantages of freedom: this may probably be, in a great measure, attributed to their expectations having been so frequently raised and disappointed, that they could not yet place any confidence in the declarations of the Portugueze. It was therefore necessary, to complete so great a revolutionary operation, that the captainships, and the extensive domains in possession of different individuals, who were in fact so many petty sovereigns, should be taken out of their hands, and placed in those of government. This being effected, a new partition took place. A particular governor was appointed for every captainship or government; and the whole of the Brazils was under the command of a lord lieutenant, or viceroy. Though these different governors are obliged to submit to the general laws enacted by the viceroy; there are some amongst them, particularly those whose governments are situated near the gold and diamond mines, who receive their orders immediately from Lisbon. These appointments are only for three years, but they are seldom changed in less than six; and during that time, they are not allowed to marry in the country, to enter into any branch of commerce, or to accept presents on any pretence whatsoever; their salary being from twelve to twenty thousand crusadoes, which are thought sufficient to answer every possible expense. On quitting their employments, commissaries appointed by the mother country examine into their administration; and colonists, with citizens of every description, are allowed to carry in their complaints, and bring forward their accusations against them. If it so happens, that they die during their office, their governments are committed to the joint care of the bishop, the officer who holds the highest rank in the army, and the first magistrate. It may indeed be said, with the greatest truth, that such is the vigilance with which the administration of men in power in Brazil is observed at present, that few, if any, succeed in making great fortunes. The jurisprudence of this country is precisely the same as in Portugal. Each district has its separate judge; from whose sentence appeals may be made to the tribunals of Bahia, Rio Janeiro, or even to that of Lisbon. The provinces of Para and Maragnhon are the only ones not subject to the jurisdictions of Bahia and Rio Janeiro; their causes being submitted on appeal to the tribunal of Lisbon: in criminal cases, indeed, the process is rather different. Trifling offences are punished, without appeal, by the judges of each captainship; but crimes of a deeper dye come under the cognizance of the governor, who is assisted by assessors nominated by legal authority. A particular tribunal is appointed to receive and take charge of the property of all deceased persons, whose heirs may be _beyond seas_ at the time of their death; for which they receive five per cent. of the said property. This establishment, though an excellent one, is subject to a great inconvenience; since creditors in Brazil can only be paid in Europe, which not only occasions delay, but is frequently very prejudicial to the affairs of the parties concerned. Every town, and indeed every large village, has a municipality, which attends to the small concerns entrusted to its care, and regulates (under the inspection of the governor, indeed) the trifling taxes necessary to be laid on. This municipality has the very essential privilege of complaining to the king himself against the conduct of the chief of the colony, the governor, and the four magistrates appointed to manage the finances in each government. The accounts are given in every year to the royal treasury at Lisbon, where they undergo a very strict examination. The army is on the same footing in Brazil as in Portugal. The mulattoes and negroes are distinguished by particular standards; but the native Indians serve in battle with the whites. In the year 1780, the forces consisted of 15,899 regular troops, and 21,850 militia. On the late arrival of the queen, she found the regulars augmented to 20,000, and the militia might very easily be raised to 40,000. The colonists have, equally with the Portugueze, preserved the privilege of having slaves on their estates; but the masters are enjoined by the law to find them in provisions; this, however, is attended by very little expense; a small portion of land being consigned to them, which they cultivate themselves, and which not only supplies them with necessaries, but very frequently with conveniences. The laws in favour of slaves have been carried still farther; since those possessed of a certain sum of money are allowed to purchase their liberty; and in this case they can oblige their masters to accept the proffered sum; but they are seldom forced to proceed to such lengths, since nothing can be more rare than a master's refusing to comply with the terms prescribed by the law. There cannot be a stronger proof of the present mild treatment of slaves in Brazil, treatment so different from what they experience in the other European colonies, than the very few who think of escaping from that immense country. The blacks, when once freed from slavery, are allowed the rights of citizens, in the same manner as the mulattoes; neither the one nor the other can enter the order of priesthood, or municipality: if they become soldiers, they cannot rise to the rank of officers, unless in their own particular batallions. They have, however, the privilege of intermarrying with white women. It is impossible to take a view of the situation of Brazil, its extent, climate and production, without perceiving that no colony ever merited more particularly the attention and protection of the mother country. Brazil, thus happily situated, is 875 leagues in length, from north to south, and 425 broad, from east to west. The Portugueze settlements are scattered on the coast, and extend in a circuit of nearly 1500 leagues; they seldom penetrate more than 50 or 66 leagues into the interior of the country; except, indeed, down some rivers, on the banks of which they sometimes advance more than 400 leagues from the sea shore. The limits of this Work will not permit us to enter into a minute description of the various productions of so extensive a country, and so fertile a soil; nor, indeed, of the different settlements successively formed by the Portugueze, we must therefore refer the curious reader to the adjoining account, which we flatter ourselves will not be thought uninteresting, and as such meet with the approbation of an indulgent public. NAMES OF THE DIFFERENT GOVERNMENTS IN BRAZIL, WITH THEIR _Boundaries, Population, and Commerce_. I. PARA. The most northern government in Brazil, comprising that part of Guiana which belongs to Portugal, together with that course of the river of the Amazons from confluence of the two rivers Madera and Mamora; it also contains to the east the whole of the country which extends to the river Tocantin. This province is the most barren and the most unwholesome of any in that part of the world. POPULATION. 4,108 Whites;--9,919 Blacks and Mulattoes:--34,844 Indians. PRINCIPAL TOWNS. Belem, on the banks of the Amazon, is twenty leagues from the main ocean. The port is called Para, and is of difficult access. The vessels, on entering the harbour, anchor in a muddy bottom, where the water is four, five, or six fathoms deep. This town is situated thirteen feet above the level of the sea; and was founded by Caldeira in 1615: it is defended by a strong fort, named Notre Dame de las Merces, erected at the mouth of the Muja river. The town contains near ten thousand inhabitants, besides the garrison, consisting of about eight hundred men. On descending the river of the Amazones, at forty leagues from Para, there is a large neck of land, which advances into the water and forms several islands, the most considerable of which is Joannes; it is defended by a small fort, and is very populous. The town of St. Georges dos Alamos is situated in the same government, and has a regular fortress. COMMERCE. In 1755, thirteen or fourteen vessels arrived in this government from Lisbon, but since that time their number has been diminished to four or five. The usual exportation from Para does not consist of articles amounting to more than six hundred thousand French livres (25,000l. sterling), such as wild cocoa, vinilla, tortoise and crab-shells, sarsaparilla, different kinds of balsams, cotton, &c. The district of Para, properly so called, produces but a very small quantity of cotton, and some sugar canes, but so few in number that they are converted into brandy. The inhabitants cultivate rice, cocoa, and coffee, for exportation. The cattle bred in the island of Marajo used formerly to be exported; but at present the quantity of these animals is scarcely sufficient for home consumption. II. MARANHAO. This government is separated from Para towards the north by the river Tocantin; from Gojas towards the south by the cordillera called Guacucaguia; and from Fernambuca towards the east by the Ypiapaba mountains. POPULATION. 8,993 Whites;--17,843 Blacks and Mulattoes, freedmen and slaves;--38,937 Indians, either dispersed about the country or inhabiting the ten different hamlets. PRINCIPAL TOWNS. St. Louis is the principal town in Maranhao; all commercial business is transacted in this place, which is situated in an island of the same name, and was built by the French in 1612. It is defended by a citadel and several forts, and has an excellent port. The island of St. Louis is very fertile, and is twenty-six leagues in circumference. The captainship of Siara is annexed to the government of Maranhao; the principal town bears the same name as the captainship, and contains about ten thousand inhabitants. It is defended by a small fort, and the port, which is likewise small, will only admit very little vessels. COMMERCE. The exportation of this government is not answerable to the number of its inhabitants, amounting only on an average to six or seven hundred thousand French livres (25,000 or 29,166l. 13s. 4d.) The finest Brazil amotto grows in Maranhao, which also produces the best cotton in America. Rice succeeds very well in this soil; but all endeavours have been fruitless to naturalize silk-worms. There is a great breed of horses and horned cattle in Pauchy, a country annexed to this government, in which, however, the sheep degenerate as well as in the rest of Brazil, except, indeed, in the Coritibe. Mines of sulphur, alum, copperas, iron, lead, and antimony are very common in the mountains; but though they are not deep, they have never yet been opened. There are likewise silvermines, which, in 1752 the court had given permission to be worked; this permission was, however, soon after retracted, but for what reason was never yet known. III. FERNAMBUCA, Is at this present bounded by the river St. Francesco, and different chains of cordilleras. The coast of this government towards the sea extends sixty-five leagues. POPULATION. 19,665 Whites;--39,132 Negroes and Mulattoes;--83,728 Indians. The island of Fernando de Norronha is in the dependance of the above-mentioned government. PRINCIPAL TOWNS. Olinda, the capital of Fernambuca is built upon an eminence on the sea-shore; it contains several fine fountains, and is situated in a beautiful country. The inhabitants are computed at twelve thousand. There is a manufactory of sword blades in this town, which, equally with St. Antoine de Receif, has a good port, and is defended by several fortresses. The island of Fernando de Norronha has two good open harbours, in which ships of the greatest burthen may ride in safety, unless the wind blows from the north or west. COMMERCE. The coast of Fernambuca, in an extent of sixty-five leagues, produces a small quantity of cotton. The plains are filled with plantations of fine sugar canes, and the mountains are covered with broods of horned cattle, the hides of which are very productive. The principal branch of commerce in this government is that fine sort of Brazil wood employed in dyeing red. This wood is of so superior a quality that it is not necessary to employ half the quantity which would be required of campeche wood for the same purpose. The annual consumption of this excellent wood in Europe, amounted during a long time to from twenty to thirty thousand quintals. In 1783, two English merchants contracted with the Portugueze government for the exclusive sale of this wood, on condition that the said government was at the expence of felling it. These merchants purchased the wood for eight hundred thousand French livres (33,333l. 6s. 8d.), sold it at Lisbon for a million (41,666l. 13s. 4d.); their expenses amounted to a hundred and twenty-eight thousand livres (5,333l. 6s. 8d.); consequently they made a profit of seventy-two thousand French livres (3,000l.). IV. BAHIA, or TODOS SANTOS, Is bounded on the north by the river St. Francesco, on the south by the river Dolce, and on the east by the river Preto, one of the branches of the river Verde. POPULATION. 39,784 Whites;--49,693 Indians;--68,024 Negroes. PRINCIPAL TOWN. The capital of Bahia is St. Salvador; the entrance to which is through the bay of Todos Santos: this bay is two leagues and a half wide. There is a fort on each side of the entrance, intended rather to prevent landing on the coast, than to impede the passage through the bay, which is thirteen or fourteen leagues in length, and full of little islands, containing cotton-trees. The bay is narrow towards the town, which overlooks it, and is built on the side of a steep hill; it is, however, a very good port, safe, and capable of containing a great fleet. St. Salvador contains more than two thousand houses, the greatest part of which are magnificent buildings. COMMERCE. Sugar and cotton make but a small part of the Bahia trade. Tobacco and the whale-fishery are the principal. The annual product of the latter amounted, twenty years since, to 3,530 pipes of oil; which, at the price of a hundred and seventy-five French livres each (7l. 5s. 6d.), amounted to six hundred and seventeen thousand seven hundred and fifty French livres (25,739l. 11s. 8d.); and two thousand and ninety quintals of whalebone, which, at a hundred and fifty livres (6l. 5s.) a quintal, make three hundred and thirteen thousand five hundred livres (13,062l. 10s.). Total of the two sums, nine hundred and thirty-one thousand two hundred and fifty French livres (38,802l. 1s. 8d.), of which the persons employed in this commerce paid three hundred thousand livres (12,500l.) to the government; the expenses did not exceed two hundred and sixty-eight thousand seven hundred and fifty livres (11,197l. 18s. 4d.), consequently they had a profit of three hundred and sixty-two thousand five hundred livres (15,104l. 3s. 4d.). Tobacco, though cultivated throughout the whole of Brazil, makes but a very unimportant object of commerce any where but in Bahia. It succeeds extremely well in a spot of ground extending 90 leagues, and is particularly fine in the district of _Cachoeira_. Ten thousand quintals of an inferior kind of tobacco are sent every year from Brazil to the coasts of Africa, which being sold for eighteen French livres the hundred weight, amount to a hundred and eighty thousand livres (7,500l.); fifty-eight thousand five hundred quintals are also sent annually to Portugal, and sold, on entering that country, at forty livres (1l. 13s. 4d.) the hundred weight, which amount to two millions three hundred and forty thousand French livres (97,500l.). Total of the two sums, two millions five hundred and twenty thousand livres (105,000l.). The finest tobacco is exported to Genoa, that of the second quality to Spain and Portugal, and a still inferior sort to France and Hamburgh. The consumption of this Article at Madeira and the Azores does not exceed 740,000 cwt. for smoaking; and 528,000 cwt. when made into snuff. The sale of these different kinds of tobacco does not bring in more than five millions four hundred and eighty-one thousand two hundred and fifty livres (228,383l. 18s. 4d.) to government. The profit arising from the sale of snuff in the East Indies and in Africa, belongs to the queen of Portugal. The quantity usually sent to the abovementioned countries amounts to about a hundred and fifty quintals, bringing in four hundred and fifty thousand livres (18,750l.). The golden mines of Jacobina and Rio-das-Contas have been worked, and are situated in Bahia. V. RIO JANEIRO. This government extends nearly the whole length of the coast from the river Dolce to the river Rio Grande de San Pietro. The inland country is bounded by the enormous chain of mountains which extend from Una to Minas Geraes. POPULATION. 46,290 Whites;--54,091 Negroes;--32,126 Indians. PRINCIPAL TOWNS. Rio Janeiro is the capital of Brazil, and the residence of the viceroy. The plan of this city is well engraved in the quarto edition of Gai Trouin's Memoirs. It is well known that this author captured Rio Janeiro in 1711. Though the fortifications have been since greatly augmented, the city is not more difficult to take, because the approach to it on the other side is easy of access, and a landing soon effected. The greater part of the houses consist of two stories, and are either of free-stone or brick; the roofs are of fine tiles, and each house is ornamented by a balcony, surrounded by a lattice. The streets are wide and straight, and terminated by chapels. The mint, and the great aqueduct which furnishes the city with water, are the only two public edifices worthy of notice. The haven is one of the finest in the world; it is narrow at the mouth, but becomes wider by degrees. Vessels of all sizes enter this safe and spacious harbour without difficulty, from ten or twelve o'clock at noon till the evening, by means of a regular and moderate sea-breeze: they anchor in an excellent muddy bottom five or six fathoms deep. Cabo-Frio is a rich town, owing to its salt-trade. St. Catherine is an island which is important from its situation: it enjoys a continual spring, and the climate is very pure everywhere but in the port, which being surrounded by hills, the circulation of air is not so free; consequently it is damp and unwholesome. COMMERCE. Rio Janeiro is the great staple for all the riches brought from Brazil to Portugal; and the most considerable fleets charged with supplies for the new world, put into this port. The expenses of the government amount annually to three millions of French livres (125,000l.), except when it is thought a political measure to build men of war, which is a great increase to the expense. Cultivation was for a long time much neglected in this fine province, but it now becomes every day an object of more and more attention. Though tobacco has not succeeded particularly well, sugar canes have been extremely prosperous, especially in the plains of Guatacazes. There were twelve plantations of indigo, of the finest sort, in the year 1783; these are now much increased in number. Coffee succeeds very well. The southern districts, as far as Rio Grande, furnish a great many hides, some flour, and good salt-meat; and the forests contain fourteen or fifteen different kinds of wood for dyeing, with four or five sorts of gum. The commerce of cochineal has been introduced for some years past into the island of St. Catherine's. VI. ST. PAUL. This province is bounded to the north by the river Sapucachy, and by mountains; to the south by the river Parnagua, and by other mountains, which extend to the source of the river Ygassu; to the west by the Parana, Rio Grande, and Rio dans Mortes; and to the east by the sea. POPULATION. 11,093 Whites;--8,987 Negroes and Mulattoes;--32,126 Indians. PRINCIPAL TOWN. St. Paul, the capital of the government of that name, is at thirteen miles from the sea, in a delightful climate, and in the midst of country, the soil of which is equally favourable to the productions of both hemispheres. COMMERCE. This government has no other trade with Europe than that of a small quantity of cotton: and its only interior commerce consists in supplying Rio Janeiro with flour and salt-meat. Flax and hemp succeed very well in St. Paul's, as would also silk-worms, with proper attention. St. Paul contains abundance of iron and tin mines, situated between the rivers Thecte and Mogyassu: and also in the cordillera of Paranan and Piacaba, four leagues from Sorocoba. The golden mines of Parnagua and Tibogy are worked in this government. VII. MINAS GERAES. This government, and the two following ones, extend from east to west, from the 319th degree of western longitude, to the 334th degree of the same latitude. They occupy, in the centre of Brazil, that immense and elevated surface, from which issue all the rivers which fall into the Paraguay, the river of the Amazons, and the ocean. This is the highest land in Portugueze America. POPULATION. 35,128 Whites;--103,406 Slaves;--26,075 Indians. PRINCIPAL TOWN. The capital of Minas Geraes is Villa-Rica. COMMERCE. Minas Geraes is the most important of the three governments in which the mines are situated. Mountains, in different directions intersect the whole of these three districts, which are called the Mine Country, from gold being found in every part of it. The inhabitants of St. Paul first discovered gold mines near the mountain Jaquara, in the year 1577. Other mines of the same metal were also discovered in 1588, on the heights of Jacobina, in the district of Rio del Velhas. Permission was obtained, though with some difficulty, from the king of Spain, in 1603, to work some of them; and in 1699, some enterprising persons found out very great treasure in the province of Minas Geraes. Three years afterwards the court of Lisbon formed the necessary establishments to render them profitable. The names of the place where gold has been found, and where, indeed, it continues at present to be found, are as follows, _Sabara_, _Rio das Mortes_, _Cachoeira_, _Paracatu_, _Do-Carmo_, _Rio-dal-Velhas_, _Rio-Dolce_, and _Ouro-Prato_. VIII. GOJAS. POPULATION. 8,931 Whites;--34,104 Negroes;--29,622 Indians. PRINCIPAL TOWN. Villa-Boa is the capital of Gojas. COMMERCE. The mines of the government of Gojas were not discovered till 1726, and are situated in the districts of _San-Felix_, _Meia-Ponta_, _O-Fanardo_, _Mocambo_ and _Natividade_. IX. MATOGROSO, or MATTO-GROSSO, Is the most western part of the Portugueze possessions, and is bounded by the Chiquites and the Moxos. These people are submitted to the Spanish yoke, through the indefatigable labours of the Jesuits acting as missionaries in that part of the world. POPULATION. 2,035 Whites;--7,351 Slaves;--4,335 Indians. PRINCIPAL TOWN. The capital of Matogroso, called Villa-Bella, is merely a large village. COMMERCE. In 1735, mines were discovered in the government of Matogroso, in _St. Vincent's Chapada_, _St. Anne's Cuiada_, _and in Araes_. OBSERVATIONS. It is worthy of remark, that the extraction of gold in the New World is neither dangerous nor laborious, since the purest, finest kind is frequently found near the surface of the earth. They often dig for it three or four fathoms, but seldom, if ever, deeper; since when the miners meet with a bed of sandy earth, they know it to be unnecessary labour to search to a greater depth. The veins which run the most regular, and in the same direction, are the richest; yet, it has been remarked, that those which yielded the greatest quantity of gold are usually in spaces where the surface is the most spangled with crystals. Larger pieces are found in mountains and stony barren rocks than either in vallies or on the banks of rivers; but, from whatever place it be taken, it is of three and twenty carats and a half in its pure state, on coming out of the mine, except indeed, it should happen to be mixed with iron, silver, mercury, or sulphur, which, however, is seldom the case, unless at Araés or Gojas. Every person on discovering a mine is bound to declare it to government. Should the vein be found to be trifling, on being examined by those appointed to estimate its value, it becomes the property of the public; but should it prove a rich one, the revenue officers take care to reserve one share for themselves, whilst another is given to the commandant, a third to the intendant, two more to the original discoverer of the mine, and the remainder to the miners of the district. This latter part is divided according to the different fortunes of these people, which is determined by the number of slaves they possess. The miners are obliged to pay the king of Portugal a fifth part of the net profit arising from the gold extracted, which formerly amounted to a considerable sum; and even now produces on an average 300,000l. sterling, annually. In 1781, the whole of the metals, whether coined or in bars, in circulation at Brazil, were not estimated at quite a million sterling, and what is still more remarkable, there was not more than a third of the above sum in circulation in Portugal in 1752[51] and 1754, and even that was in alloyed silver money. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF BRAZIL. _Quadrupeds used as Food._[52] _Tapiierete_, the (P. 101, M. 229), is nearly the size of a heifer aged six months, but is without horns. The flesh resembles in taste that of an ox. The Brazilians dress it in the same manner as the Buccaneers arrange their meat or fish. _Cuquaçu-Eté_ (P. 98). This animal is a kind of stag, called by _Léry_ an _Ass-cow_. It is less than the European stag, has shorter horns, and the hair about the length of a goat's. _Tajaçu_ (P. 89, M. 229), is the wild boar of the country; he has an opening on his back, through which he breathes; in other respects he is like the European boar. The cry which he makes through his extraordinary orifice is (according to an author, who _certainly_ never heard it) most dreadful. _Aguti_, or _Acuti_ (P. 102), is a red-haired animal about the size of a pig a month old. The flesh is very good to eat. There is another species of the same animal, called _Tapeti_. _Rat._ The woods abound with a kind of rat of the size of a squirrel, its flesh is very delicate. _Paca_ (P. 101, M. 224). This animal is as large as a middle-sized dog. The flesh tastes like veal. _Jacaré_ (P. 282, M. 242). A small species of _Cayman_. The Brazilians are particularly fond of eating them. _Teiuguacu_, or _Teju_ (P. 283, M. 273). A grey lizard, four or five feet long. _Léry_, who has eaten them, says, that when properly dressed, they are as tender, as white, and have as good a taste as the wing of a capon. It is necessary to observe that the Brazilians not only eat lizards, and some kind of serpents, but also large toads, broiled in the Buccaneer fashion, with the heads and entrails. _Domestic Fowls used as Food._ _Turkeys._ The Brazilians bred them formerly more for their feathers, particularly the white ones, than for the purpose of eating them. They reproached the Europeans with gluttony for eating their eggs. _Ducks_, of which there are various species; but the Brazilians never eat them, from an idea that the slow manner of walking of these birds, might make those who fed upon them heavy, and unable to run with a proper degree of activity. For the same reason they refrained from eating all animals which moved slowly; and even some sorts of fish, particularly the skate, which does not swim so fast as others. _Nota._ European fowls, transported to the Brazils, live very well in that climate, though growing larger than in their own country, their taste gets less delicate; on the contrary, geese and ducks become still finer. _Wild Fowl used as Food._ _Jacupema_ (P. 81, M. 198). A species of pheasant, of which there are three kinds. The plumage of every one of these birds is black and grey; the only difference between them is in the size. The Brazilians declare that it is impossible for any country to produce any thing more delicate than the flesh of these birds. _Mutu-Mitu_ (P. 80, M. 194) is excellent to eat, but not so common as the _Jacupema_. M. le comte de Buffon classes it amongst the _Hocco_. _Jambu_, (P. 81. M. 192). A species of partridge as large as our geese. _Mangouris_, _Pegassous_, _Pecacaous_ (_Hist. Gen. Voy._). These three birds may be also classed amongst the partridges. They are of different sizes; the first is the size of a common partridge, the second of a wood-pigeon, and the third of a turtle dove. _Fish used as Food._ _Manatus_ (_Hist. Gen. Voy._), is particularly good in Brazil. _Skate_. Those in the rivers _Janeiro_ and _Marevescona_, which Thévet names _Inevouana_, are of a much larger size than ours. The entrails are equally good with the rest of the fish. _Acarapeba_ (P. 69 and 161) is a large flat fish, which _Léry_ declares to be wonderfully delicate and fine. He gives it the name of _Acarapep_. _Beyupira_ or _Ceixupira_ (P. 48, M. 158). The Europeans compare this fish to the sturgeon. It is in high estimation in Brazil. It is said to be fat and in season all the year. _Boopes_ (_His. Gen. Voy._). This name has been given to it by the Portugueze, because its eyes are like those of an ox. The size and shape are not very different from those of the tunny fish; but the taste is not the same, and it is of a much fatter nature; its grease affording a kind of oil or butter. _Camaripuguaçu_ or _Camarupi_ (P. 65, M. 179). This fish is much esteemed: its body is full of thorns, and it is so large that two men can scarcely lift it. _Piraumbu_ (P. 70, M. 167) is very much the same kind of fish as the _Carpio_, but the taste is better. There are two stones in the jaws, which it employs for breaking the shells which serve it for food. _Amayaen_ (_His. Gen. Voy._) is a kind of sea frog, with a short body of various colours. It is very good to eat, but it must be first carefully skinned, and cleared of a poison which lies under the skin. There are two other species of Amayaens, one of which is armed with thorns, and though much more venomous than the former, is equally eaten. The other is called by the Brazilians _Itaëca_. It is of a triangular form; and contains poison not only in the skin, but in the liver and intestines: this, however, does not make it more dangerous when once the venomous parts are extracted. _Nota._ All the fish on the coast of Brazil is reputed so wholesome, that it is given to people in fevers as a remedy. At all events it may always be eaten without danger to the sick person. Sharks, however must be excepted; of which there are great numbers in this sea, and even in the rivers. The coast of Brazil abounds also in shellfish, amongst which the _Apula_ is particularly esteemed. (_Hist. Gen. Voy._) There are several kinds of crayfish, the most esteemed of which is the _Uca_. It is the principal food of the Portugueze and negroes, who find it very good and wholesome, if they drink cold water after eating it. _Plants and Vegetables used as Food._ _Mangaiba_ (P. 156, M. 76 and 122). A very large tree, which seldom grows any where but in the environs of _Todos-Santos_ bay. This fruit is eaten at two different epochs in the year: first when it is only in bud, and afterwards when the fruit is come to perfection. It contains stones, the kernels of which are good to eat. The flavour of this fruit is delightful, and it is so wholesome, that it may be eaten in the greatest abundance without danger. It falls from the tree before it is ripe, consequently it is necessary to keep it till it is sufficiently sweet to be eaten. The Brazilians make a kind of wine of it; and they extract a bitter, viscous, milky liquor from the leaves, and the fruit before it is ripe. _Murucuja_ (P. 274, M. 106 and 70) resembles the wild pear-tree. The fruit is gathered green, but becomes excellent as it ripens, and easy of digestion. Incisions being made in the trunk of this tree, it yields a milky liquor, which, when once coagulated, becomes of a consistance like wax. _Araca-Iba_ (P. 152, M. 74 and 105). A species of pear-tree, which bears abundantly at all seasons in the year. There are several kinds of this tree, the fruit of which is red, green, and yellow, and of an excellent flavour. _Umbu_ (P. 167). A short thick tree, bearing a round fruit of a yellowish hue, and very like our white plumb, with this difference, that it is so injurious to the teeth, that the savages, who eat great quantities of it, soon become toothless. The root is sweet, wholesome, and refreshing. _Jaçapucaya_ (P. 135, M. 128). The fruit of this tree, when eaten raw, is said to cause baldness; but if roasted it is no longer dangerous. _Araticu_ (P. 141, M. 93). This tree bears a fruit of the size of a walnut, and is as pleasant to the smell as to the taste. There are several species of this tree, amongst which the one called _Aratieupanauia_ bears a fruit of so very cold a nature, that, eaten to excess, it has all the effect of poison. _Poupekia_ (P. 141). There are two species of this tree, one bears a fruit like an orange, the juice of which is like honey, and as sweet as sugar: it also contains some seeds. The other species, called by the Portugueze _Setis_, is esteemed the hardest wood in Brazil, and regarded as incorruptible. _Cabureiba_ (P. 119, M. 56) is an extremely large tree, very common in the ancient captaincies of St. Vincent, and exceedingly scarce elsewhere. The balm which distils from it is excellent. _Pines._ In the interior parts of Brazil, beyond St. Vincent's and towards Paraguay, are forests entirely of pines, bearing a fruit resembling those in Europe, only rounder, larger, and more wholesome. _Nota._--There is no country where roots and vegetables are more plentiful than in Brazil. Beans in that part of the world are more wholesome than in Portugal; in short, every thing the Portugueze have transplanted to Brazil have succeeded remarkably well. A particular species of yucca-root grows in that country, called _Aypi_; it may be eaten raw with impunity. The Brazilians make use of the common yucca-root in two ways; the one boiled till it becomes hard is called _Ouïenta_, and the other less boiled, consequently softer, _Ouipou_. Brazil may be justly regarded as the mother country of pine apples, which grow in such abundance, that the savages fatten their hogs with that delicious fruit, which in that country is distinguished by three particular qualities; _first_, the rind is so hard that it absolutely blunts the edge of a knife: _secondly_, the juice is used as a kind of soap to take spots out of cloths: _thirdly_, the fruit itself is regarded as a preservative against sea-sickness. _Clusius_ makes mention of twelve different kinds of pepper, the produce of Brazil. In short, _Léry_ remarks, that Brazil produces very few animals similar to those in Europe: nor does it, indeed, any plants of the same nature; except purslane, sweet basil, and heath, which grow in some spots exactly in the same manner, and in the same shape, and with the same qualities, as in Europe. _Medicinal Plants._ _Copaiba_ (P. 118, M. 56) resembles a fig-tree, only straighter, thicker, and of a greater height. It contains a very great quantity of oil, as clear as that produced from the olive-tree. This oil requires only a very slight incision to procure great abundance: it is said not only to cure wounds, but to prevent them from leaving scars. _Ambayba_ (P. 147, M. 91) resembles also the fig-tree, and the interior pellicle, under the rind, is said to be as efficacious in the speedy cure of wounds, as the most celebrated balsam. The leaves of this tree are of so hard a nature, that they are employed for polishing the hardest wood. _Ambaygtinga_ (P. 148, M. 92). This tree is of the same species as the former one, and grows in the above-mentioned pine forests. It bears on the top a kind of small bladder, which, on bursting, distils, drop by drop, an admirable liquor, which has all the qualities of balsam, and is employed for closing wounds, curing scrofulous humours, and pains in the stomach; for the latter complaint it is taken mixed with a little wine. _Ighucamici_ (_Hist. Gen. Voy._) grows abundantly in the environs of St. Vincent, and bears a fruit like a quince, but filled with seeds, which is a powerful remedy for a dysentery. _Icicariba_ (P. 122, M. 59). This tree produces a sort of mastick of an excellent smell. On beating the rind in a mortar, a white liquor issues from it, which, when condensed, is employed as incense, and is found to be an efficacious application for any part of the body affected with the king's evil. _Cururu-Ape_ (P. 250, M. 114). The leaves are like those of the peach-tree, and produce a whitish liquor, regarded as a sovereign remedy for wounds and pimples. _Caaroba_ (P. 143, M. 70). The wood of this tree, which is very common in Brazil, is reputed to possess the same virtue as Guiacum wood, for the cure of a particular disorder. _Jaborandi_ (P. 215, M. 97). This tree is also called by the Brazilians _Bétélé_, and generally grows on the banks of a river; the leaves are a specific remedy in liver complaints. Another species of Bétélé, less than the former, and with round leaves, possesses the same virture in the root; which is as great a caustic as ginger, and when applied to the gums, removes any complaint in that part. _Anda_ (P. 148, M. 110). The Americans extract an oil from this great tree, with which they rub themselves. Water in which the rind has been soaked for some days, acts as a soporific on any kind of animal. _Ajuratibira_ (_Hist. Gen. Voy._) is merely a shrub, bearing a red fruit, from which the Brazilians extract an oil of the same colour, with which they likewise anoint themselves. _Janipaba_ (P. 138, M. 92) is one of the most beautiful trees in Brazil, and of the finest green; it changes its leaves every three months, and bears a fruit resembling an orange, but tasting like a quince, and is esteemed an excellent remedy for the dysentery. _Caapeba_ (P. 261, M. 94) is a plant, which is an almost certain cure for the bite of all venomous animals, particularly for that of a serpent; and is usually termed the _serpent plant_. The root, or rather the knot which divides it, is supposed to possess this virtue: the knot is bruised and taken in water; and is likewise thought an excellent specific for the wounds caused by poisonous arrows. _Gobaura_ (_Hist. Gen. Voy._). This plant when reduced to powder, and applied to the most inveterate ulcers, dries them up, and makes them skin over. _Guaraquima_ (_Hist. Gen. Voy._) resembles the Portugueze myrtle. It possesses several virtues, particularly that of curing worms; and requires no other preparation than making choice of the best leaves. _Tyroqui_, or _Tiroqui_, or _Tereroqui_ (_Hist. Gen. Voy._). This plant has leaves like the cinqfoil, and the root divided into several cods, with very slender branches. It grows abundantly every where, and its principal virtue is curing dysenteries. The Brazilians inhale the smoke of this plant in all their different complaints, and it is thought an efficacious remedy for worms; a very common malady in that country. AN ACCOUNT OF THE DIAMONDS OF BRAZIL.[53] _Principal Districts wherein Diamonds are found._ The province of Brazil, which produces diamonds, is situated inland, between 22-1/2 and 16 degrees of south latitude. Its circumference is near 670 leagues. On the east it is limited by the captaincy or province of Rio Janeiro; on the south by that of St. Paul; on the north by the _Sertoens_, or interior part of the maritime province of the Bay of All Saints, and part of that of the mines of Goyarel; on the west, lastly, by another part of the last-mentioned province, and by those deserts and forests which are inhabited by the savages, and extend to the frontiers of Paraguay. On the side nearest St. Paul there are vast uncultivated plains; the interior is divided by chains of mountains and hills, with superb vallies and luxuriant fertile plains. It abounds with wood, and is watered by a great number of rivers and brooks, that facilitate the working of the mines of gold, which is obtained by washing in spangles from the river sands, or in veins open to the day. This province is divided into four _comarcas_ or districts, which, reckoning from north to south, are, _Santo Joao del Rei_, _Villa-Rica_, _Sabara_, and _Sero-Dosrio_, or Cold Mountain, called in the language of the savages _Yritauray_. The diamonds are found in this last district. The whole province is very rich in the ores of iron, antimony, zinc, tin, silver, and gold. There are also diamond mines in the other districts of Brazil; particularly in Cuiaba, in the country of Guara-Puara, and in the government of St. Paul; but these mines have never yet been explored.[54] _Discovery of the Mines._ The Paulists and inhabitants of the ancient captaincy of St. Vincent were the first who discovered these mines, and peopled, in great part, the whole of this rich province, as well as those of _Matto-Grosso_, _Cuiahe_, _Goyares_, and _Rio Grande de San Pedro_. Anthonio Soary, a Paulist, who gave his name to one of these mountains, was the first who discovered and visited the _Sero-Dosrio_. Gold only was sought for, but at last diamonds were discovered in the _Riacho Fundo_, whence they were first obtained, and afterwards in the _Rio de Peire_; a great number were likewise obtained from the _Giguitignogna_, a very rich stream; and, lastly, in the end of 1780, and beginning of 1781, a gang of nearly three thousand interlopers, called _Grimpeiros_, discovered diamonds, and obtained an immense quantity from the _Terra de Santo Antonio_; but they were forced to abandon this spot to the royal farm, who took possession of it. Then it was that the suspicion was confirmed, that the mountains are the true _matrices_ of diamonds; but as the work in the beds of rivers and on their banks is less tedious, can be conducted on a larger scale, and affords larger diamonds, the farm abandoned the mountains, and formed great establishments in the river of _Toucanbirnen_, which flows through the valleys of this chain, and is near ninety leagues in length. It was found by examination and digging, that the whole surface of the ground, immediately beneath the vegetable stratum, contained more or less of diamonds, disseminated and attached to a matrix ferruginous and compact in various degrees, but never in veins, or in the division of geodes. _Figure of the Diamonds, and manner of exploring them._ The figure of the diamonds of Brazil varies. Some are octoedrical, formed by the union of two tetraedrical pyramids. This is the _Adamas octoëdrus turbinatus_ of Wallerius, or the octoedrical diamond of Romé de l'Isle. These are almost always found in the crust of the mountains; others are nearly round, whether by a peculiar crystallization or by rolling. They resemble those Oriental stones, which the Portugueze and natives of India call _reboludos_, which signifies rolled. Lastly, others are oblong, and appear to me to be the _Adamas hexaëdrus tabellatus_ of Wallerius. The two last are usually found in the beds of rivers and broken places in their banks. Diamonds are also found, as I have remarked, in the crust or external covering of mountains. These masses are formed of a bed of ferruginous sand, with rolled flints, forming an ochreous pudding-stone, from the decomposition of emery and muddy iron-ore; it is called _cascalho_, and the beds, or strata, _taboleiros_. These _taboleiros_ have different names, according to their situation or their nature. When the stratum is horizontal, and in the plane of the bed of the river, it is properly called a _taboleiro_; but if it rises in banks, it is called _gopiara_: lastly, if the pudding-stone contains much emery, it is then denominated _tabanhua cauga_ in Brazilian, that is to say, black-stone or iron-stone. In some places the _cascalho_ is uncovered, in others, it lies beneath a kind of vegetable muddy earth, _humus damascena_, _Linn_, or beneath a reddish fat sand, which sometimes contains roundish flints. This happens in the returns of the mountains, or upon the banks of great torrents. This sand is called _pisarra_. The bank, or stratum beneath the _cascalho_, is either shistus, rather sandy, or the solid bog-ore of iron. It is likewise in the _cascalho_ that gold in spangles and in pyrites is found; the former of which is, in my opinion, afforded by the decomposition of the auriferous pyrites; for the gold in veins has another form, and its matrix is either fat quartz, or fine grained tender _cos_, micaceous gneis, or the quartzose ore of iron, _tophus ferreus_. Linn. The exploring of diamonds is performed by changing the beds of streams, in order that the sand or gravel may be washed, and the diamonds selected; or by breaking the _cascalho_ with large hammers, and afterwards washing it in troughs. This washing differs from that of gold, because it requires a small quantity of very clear water, and very little of the _cascalho_ at a time; proportions, which are precisely contrary to those required in washing gold. Black slaves are employed in this business, entirely naked, excepting a cloth round their middle, in order that they may not embezzle any of the diamonds; but in spite of every precaution, and the vigilance of numerous inspectors, they nevertheless find means of concealing them, which they sell at a very low price, to the interlopers, for tobacco and rum. _An estimate of the Sums produced to the Portugueze Government from the Brazil Diamonds._ The diamond mines in Brazil, have at different times brought in different sums to the Portugueze government. Towards the middle of the last century such great quantities of the Brazil diamonds came to Europe; that the value of diamonds of every description was so much decreased, that the London jewellers refused to buy them at any price. The author of the _Treatise on Diamonds_ seems to doubt the existence of the diamond mines in Brazil, and to believe that the great profusion of those stones sold by the Portugueze in the different markets of Europe, were not the produce of their American, but Asiatic colonies. It will be easy to judge of the amount of the profit arising to the Portugueze government, during several years, from the sale of these diamonds, by the following statement. At the epoch of the dreadful earthquake in Lisbon; some English merchants had a contract with those Portugueze who had the direct management of the diamond mines in Brazil, to pay them 120,000l. sterling. The principal conditions of the above contract (according to the account given me by an English gentleman who signed it) were as follows:--the Portugueze directors engaged to secure to the English merchants the exclusive sale of the Brazil diamonds; the latter engaged on their part to take 40,000 carats of rough diamonds, for which they were to pay at the rate of 3l. a carat; making the sum total of 120,000l. sterling. An agreement was also made relative to the purchase and choice of the diamonds. On the cases which contained them being brought from Brazil, they were not to be opened but in presence of the English merchants, which being done, the diamonds were spread on a large table; and a person skilled in precious stones being appointed by the said merchants, he made choice of the most valuable diamonds, excepting those above twenty carats (very few in number), which were reserved for the crown of Portugal. The original contractors being succeeded by others, the price was reduced to 2l. 1s. 8d. sterling a carat; but for some time past this branch of trade has been taken out of the hands of the English, and is in the exclusive possession of the king. The exact sum resulting from this new arrangement is not known, but we have reason to believe it amounts on an average to about 60,000l. sterling, annully. _An Estimate of the Value of Brazil Diamonds_, &c. The white diamonds of Brazil when they weigh only from four to five carats, are of equal value with the Oriental ones of the same weight; but when of a larger size, the latter are much more esteemed, on account of the fineness of the water. The Brazil topaz is esteemed the most valuable next to the Oriental one: it is of a fine yellow, with an orange tint, and takes a very good polish. This topaz, weighing only one carat, is valued, if perfect, at six French livres (5s.), and encreases in value according to its weight, which is determined by the following calculation, as made for the Oriental topaz. Mr. Dutens esteems the Oriental topaz, when perfect, at sixteen French livres (13s. 4d.) the first carat. To know the value of one weighing three or four carats, it is requisite to multiply the one by the other, and to multiply the product by 16; the same rules to be observed for topazes of a greater weight; so that an Oriental and perfect topaz, valued at sixteen livres (13s. 4d.) the first carat, weighing sixteen grains, or four carats, would be worth two hundred and fifty-six French livres (10l. 13s. 4d.), whilst a Brazil topaz weighing likewise four carats, would be only worth ninety-six French livres[55] (4l.). There is also another sort of topaz in Brazil, of a very particular nature: it is of a very variable and extraordinary hue, and, being put into a small crucible, filled with ashes, on a slow fire, and taken off when the crucible becomes red, loses its yellow orange colour, and changes to that of the real Balas ruby, the tinge of which is generally beautiful. This topaz is frequently of a dark, smoky, dirty yellow, and was very little esteemed till a jeweller by chance discovered the abovementioned process, which was kept a profound secret, till Mr. Dumelle, goldsmith and working jeweller, disclosed it to the Academy of Sciences of Paris, by the means of Mr. Guettard.[56] Many people are of opinion, that the rubies at present brought from Brazil are merely topazes, which have undergone the said operation. The fine crystallization of the Oriental ruby is octoedrical equally with the diamond. That of Brazil crystallizes in prismes, of unequal planes, terminating in pyramids, there are likewise other rubies of a rounder form, owing to their having been rolled in the water. This stone is supposed to take its red colour from iron. The most esteemed rubies come from the island of Ceylon, and are thought more valuable than even those from Pegu. The _rubacelle_, or small ruby, very common in Brazil, is of a pale red, with a yellow cast; and is the cheapest and least esteemed of any stones of that description; they, however, take a very good polish; and the most perfect amongst them are sometimes passed off for _Balas_ rubies. This last stone may be estimated at thirty French livres (1l. 5s.) one carat; those of two carats at sixty French livres (2l. 10s.), those of three carats at ninety livres (3l. 15s.), and those of four carats at one hundred and twenty livres (5l.), &c. The mines of Brazil also produce emeralds, which are _striated_, and terminate in an obtuse pyramid. They are found in oblong prismes of 6, 8, 9, 10, and 12 unequal planes; they are of a dark green colour, with a brownish tinge, and of a very fine water. A fine emerald, weighing a carat and a half, may be estimated at 5l. sterling: those of two carats at 10l. sterling; but over and above this weight, the value of the emerald does not augment in proportion to its size, and even those of the largest kind, if perfect, are still subject to an arbitrary valuation. Brazil produces two sorts of chrysolites; the one nearly resembles in colour the stone called by the French jewellers Oriental _Peridot_,[57] except that it is a little darker, and mixed with yellow; this chrysolite being not so hard as the _peridot_, the polish is not quite so brilliant. The other Brazil chrysolite is straw coloured, with a tinge of beautiful green, producing a very fine effect: it is extremely hard, and takes an excellent polish. These chrysolites, when of an apple green, or straw colour with a greenish hue, may be estimated at 1l. sterling the carat: 2l. sterling those of two carats; 3l. sterling those of three carats; and so on, always at the rate of 1l. the carat. NOTE. Since this Work has been in the Press, Mr. Grant's History of Brazil has been published; and I have much pleasure in remarking, that his account of the Civil Government, and situation of the Country, is frequently drawn from the same sources as my own. I flatter myself this truly estimable author will pardon my taking notice of an error which has crept into his Work relative to Villegagnon, whom he mentions in the 42d page of his History as having retired (after his return from Brazil) into a monastery of his own order, and spent the remainder of his life in writing against the protestants.[58] The fact is, that there were never any monasteries for men in the order of Malta, and that Villegagnon, soon after he came back from his expedition, was named ambassador from his order to Paris, which post he occupied from 1568 to 1570, when he quitted his embassy on account of ill-health, and died on the 9th of February (and not in the month of December, as said by _Léry_), 1571, at his commandery of Beauvais. FINIS. R. Juigné, Printer, 17, Margaret-st. Cavendish-sq. FOOTNOTES: [1] Preface to l'Etat du Portugal, page 17. [2] Etat du Portugal, p. 267. [3] In the 37th volume of the philosophical transactions, No. 421, pages 199 and 201, there is a letter concerning diamonds, lately found in Brazil, by _Jacob de Castro Sarmento_. [4] The dominions of Spain are denominated Old and New Spain. [5] Theodore Godefroy, in his treaty on the origin of the kings of Portugal. [6] There is a vulgar tradition relative to don Sebastian, whom some Portugueze believe to be still alive. This gave rise to lord Tyrawley's laughable speech of "what can one possibly do with a nation, one half of which expect the Messiah, and the other half their king, don Sebastian, who has been dead two hundred years?" This tradition also caused another piece of pleasantry, which was attended by very dreadful consequences. The queen of Portugal, standing at the window, attended by her court, perceived a great water-spout rise in the air. "Ah!" laughingly exclaimed she, "here is the king, don Sebastian, returned amongst us." "That cannot be, madam," replied the counte d'Obydos, one of the first noblemen in Portugal, "since don Sebastian reigns over us at present;" alluding to don Sebastian Carvalho, the prime minister. Two hours after this ill-timed jest, the counte was imprisoned in the dungeon of St. Julian's tower.--(_See Dumouriez, Etat du Portugal._) [7] The Dutch and Catalonians. [8] The first assembly took place on the 12th of October, in the garden of Antonio d'Almada. The archbishop of Lisbon was not present at the opening of it, and the conspiracy was in a state of great forwardness before he made his appearance. Vertot is not always very accurate in his account of these different assemblies. [9] d'Acugna. [10] Don Sebastian de Mattos de Norogna. [11] Connestagio. [12] The conspiracy once formed, there was never any question of a republican government, nor of bestowing the crown on any other than the duke of Braganza. [13] Cardinal de Richelieu. [14] _Ad hæc politicas artes, bonos et malos regiminis dolos, dominationis arcana, humani latibula ingenii non modò intelligere mulier, sed et pertractare quoque ac provehere; tam naturâ quam disciplinâ mirificè instructa fuit._ Caetan. Passar. de Bello Lusitan. [15] Some authors say this question was asked by Paes, the duke's secretary. [16] Sousa de Maceda mentions Almada as the preserver of the archbishop. [17] Don Juan da Costa. [18] Donna Maria de Lancastro spoke to the same purpose, though in still stronger language, to her two sons, don Ferdinand Teller, and Antonio Teller de Silva: "Go forth, my sons, go forth and fight for your country; and be assured, that did not the weakness of my sex prevent me, I would myself accompany you to the place of action, and either conquer or perish in so glorious a cause." [19] Corregedor do Civel. [20] The king, kneeling down, took the coronation oath, in the following terms:-- "I here promise and make oath, to rule and govern this kingdom, and to administer justice to the utmost of my power, with prudence, wisdom, and moderation; and to maintain the usages, customs, privileges, and rights of the nation, as they were granted and confirmed by the kings my predecessors, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost!" The three estates, composed of the nobility, clergy, and people, then took the oath of allegiance. This ceremony was commenced by the archbishop of Lisbon:-- "I swear," said he, placing his hand on the new testament, "that I receive and acknowledge for my true and lawful lord and sovereign, the high, mighty, and great king, don John the IVth, to whom I pay homage as such, in the name of the whole body of the clergy." The other members of the assembly took the same oath. [21] The king and the three estates took the same oath as had before been taken at the coronation; and the states-general acknowledged don Theodosius, the son of the duke of Braganza, as prince of Portugal, and lawful successor to the crown. [22] Mello, whom the king of Portugal sent into France on this occasion, was witty and intelligent; and speaking to the queen of France, the sister of Philip the IVth, he expressed his fear that his embassy must be painful to her majesty, since it tended to deprive the king her brother of a kingdom: to which the queen replied, "It is indeed a truth that I am the sister of his catholic majesty; but am I not at the same time the mother of the dauphin?" The queen, conversing afterwards with different noblemen who accompanied the ambassador, in the Castilian tongue, Mello took the liberty of asking why she had not addressed him in the same language? "From the fear of giving you pain," answered the queen. "That would have been the case," replied Mello, "had I regarded you as a Castilian, but as a great queen the effect would have been different." [23] Olivares was perfectly well acquainted with this _Baëse_, who having been extremely serviceable to him on different occasions, he had invested him with the honourable order of Christ. The Portugueze nobility, offended at seeing the order so degraded, could not help observing, "that the duke ought either to raise him still higher, or condemn him to the gallows." [24] John the IVth was of the middle size, but not very well shaped. His hair was light, his eyes sparkling, his complexion ruddy and animated, and his countenance particularly pleasing. He was surnamed the _fortunate_, but he scarcely ever appeared at the head of his army; it may therefore be said of him, as Edward the IIId of England said of the French king Charles the Vth, sirnamed the wise, "that no monarch ever appeared so seldom in arms, or gained so many victories." [25] Her _Welch_ uncle, _i. e._ her father's or mother's first cousin. [26] See Memoirs of Fremont d' Ablancourt. [27] Memoirs of Fremont d'Ablancourt. [28] This event was not quite believed to be the effect of chance. [29] At Cintra, on the 12th of September. [30] Mr. Ferrand. See Esprit de l'Histoire, tom. IV. p. 181. [31] L'Art de vérifier les dates. [32] Henry, marquis de Ruvigny, who acted as general agent to the protestant nobility in France, went to England on the revocation of the edict of Nantes, where he was naturalized, and was made earl of Galway, which title he bore ever afterwards. James Fitzjames, duke of Berwick, was the natural son of king James the IId, by Arabella Churchill, the sister of the famous duke of Marlborough. Montesquieu observes, that the family of Churchill produced two men, one of whom was destined to _shake_, and the other to _support_, at the same time, the two greatest monarchies in Europe. [33] This defeat was partly attributed to the marquis de Frontera and lord Galway, having refused to admit the French refugees as officers in the Portugueze regiments, which obliged them to have recourse to foreign officers, for the regiments of cavalry and dragoons, which had been newly levied, to recruit the great losses sustained by the army. [34] This reply calls to remembrance the noble answer made by the cardinal de Fleury, (when bishop of Fréjus) to the duke of Savoy, who having passed the Var, at the head of a considerable army, entered Provence, and tried to induce the bishop to swear allegiance to him. "Your royal highness," said he, "must be convinced that I shall never fail in my duty to Louis the Great, my lawful, and only sovereign; besides it is scarcely worth the pains to acknowledge your royal highness, for the very short time you will remain in Provence." This proof of attachment being represented to Louis the XIVth, laid the foundation of M. de Fleury's future grandeur. [35] He, however, took care to place a great collection of books in this convent; but Mafra being four leagues from Lisbon, this library could be but of little advantage to that city. [36] Quien de la Neufville, author of a well-written history of Portugal, being at that time at Lisbon in the suite of the abbé Mornay, ambassador from France, was consulted on this occasion by his majesty. [37] Dumourier's Etat de Portugal. [38] See Dumourier's Etat de Portugal. [39] See Dumourier. [40] In justification of so great an act of severity, the minister published a work, entitled, _A summary Account of the Conduct and late Actions of the Jesuits in Paraguay; and their Intrigues in the Court of Lisbon_. [41] The minister having strictly examined into the state of the manufactories, found wanting more than twenty very necessary ones. Those he afterwards established, of cotton, silk, and glass, occasioned the most violent disputes between the courts of London and Lisbon. See the administration of the marquis de Pombal, vols. 2 and 3. [42] This affair, we well know, has been differently related; but we prefer following the example of the author of _L'Etat de Portugal_, and giving the same account of this transaction, which was transmitted by Monsieur Favier to the court of France. [43] A house of public entertainment, belonging to the foreign merchants, who that evening gave a ball in honour of the marriage of the prime minister's daughter. [44] These were the terms employed in the warrant for securing their persons. See _administration of the marquis de Pombal_. [45] He was condemned as author of two books, the production of a disordered imagination, which he wrote in the royal prison. The first, in Portugueze, was entitled, _The Heroic and admirable Life of the glorious St. Anne_; and the second, written in Latin, was called, _Tractatus de vitâ et imperio Antichristi_. [46] The royal edict for the banishment of the Jesuites is dated on the 3d of September, 1759. [47] Those who wish to be more particularly informed of the military operations of this campaign, and the reforms made by the German prince, count de la Lippe, may consult _L'Etat du Portugal_, _by Dumourier_. [48] The king having no male issue, the infanta Mary Frances Elizabeth, his eldest daughter, born on the 17th of September, 1734, became, according to the fundamental laws of the kingdom, heir to the crown. Several foreign princes wished to obtain her hand; but the king, desirous of pleasing his people, bestowed her on his brother, don Pedro. See _l'art de vérifier les dates_. [49] The marquis de Pombal was on the point of going to London, where a house was already prepared for him; but the queen objected to his departure, and promised to protect him against the power of his enemies. On his death she bestowed all his titles and possessions on his son, together with the commanderies given him by Joseph the Ist. We are happy to find he has not proved ungrateful, the marquis de Pombal having attended her majesty to Brazil. [50] It is a known fact, that the Romans, unable to subdue Viriatus, caused him to be basely assassinated in the year 140 before Christ; and that 70 years before the Christian era, Sertorius was killed at table, by Perpenua. [51] Etat du Portugal, p. 216. [52] This slight sketch of the natural history of Brazil, is taken from _l'Histoire générale des Voyages, par M. de la Harpe_. The letter P. is the abbreviation of _Pison_, and the Letter M. of _Marcgraf_; the figures mark the page in the Works of the said authors, entitled as follows:--_Guill._ _Pisonis de Indiæ utriusque re naturali_, _Amst. Lud. et Dan. Elzev. in fol._ 1658: _Georg. Marcgravii_, _Hist. Naturalis Brasiliæ_, _edit. in fol. Lugd. Batav. et Amst._ 1648. [53] This part of the account of the diamonds of Brazil is taken from Nicholson's translation of Andrado's Mémoirs, read at the Society of Natural History, in Paris. [54] The richest and finest diamond mines, however, are not the American ones; but are situated in Asia, in the kingdoms of Golconda and Visiapour, on the shore of the Ganges, in Pegu, and in the island of Borneo. [55] According to the above rule, the king of Portugal's diamond, weighing 11 ounces, 5 gros, 24 carats, would, if perfect be worth 224,500,000l. sterling; but this diamond has many flaws, and is of a yellowish water. [56] See Journal Econ. 8 Oct. 1751. [57] This name is given by the French jewellers to a precious stone of a yellowish green. Mr. Lehman has given a curious and learned dissertation on this stone, inserted in the Mem. of the Acad. of Berlin. See the year 1755, p. 202. [58] See Bayle's Dictionary. * * * * * Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber: In-Indiæ=> In-Indiæ {pg 290} Inez de Casto=> Inez de Castro {pg xxiv} surpise=> surprise {pg xxiv} Viscu=> Viseu {pg 5} reigns of government=> reins of government {pg 9} disuade=> dissuade {pg 11} conqering=> conquering {pg 13} enevitably=> inevitably {pg 31} prefering=> preferring {pg 28} Peter de Mendoca=> Peter de Mendoça {pg 40, 48} indispensible=> indispensable {pg 46} atchieving=> atchieving {pg 49} citizens=> citizens' {pg 101} independant=> independent {pg 110} Estevarn d'Acugna=> Estevan d'Acugna {pg 70} duke of Braganzá=> duke of Braganza {pg 94} banished Portugal=> banished from Portugal {pg 118} fidelity of of a man=> fidelity of a man {pg 144} Cindad-Real=> Ciudad-Real {pg 146} ideot=> idiot {pg 167} for the purchasing a variety=> for the purchasing of a variety {pg 214} garrsion=> garrison {pg 272} in in this town=> in this town {pg 276} particulary=> particularly {pg 293} are are oblong=> are oblong {pg 306} 
43378	----	Etext transcriber's note: The footnotes have been located after the etext. Corrections of some obvious typographical errors have been made (a list follows the etext); the spellings of several words currently spelled in a different manner have been left un-touched. (i.e. chesnut/chestnut; sanatory/sanitary; every thing/everything; hords/hoards; visiters/visitors; her's/her;s negociation/negotiation.) The accentuation of words in Spanish has not been corrected or normalized. [Illustration: _On Stone by T. J. Rawlins from a Sketch by Capt C. R. Scott._ _R. Martin lithog., 26, Long Acre._ THE GENERALIFE, PALACE AND VALLEY OF THE DARRO. FROM A WINDOW IN THE ALHAMBRA. _Published by Henry Colburn, 13, G.t Marlborough St._] EXCURSIONS IN THE MOUNTAINS OF RONDA AND GRANADA, WITH CHARACTERISTIC SKETCHES OF THE INHABITANTS OF THE SOUTH OF SPAIN. BY CAPTAIN C. ROCHFORT SCOTT, AUTHOR OF "TRAVELS IN EGYPT AND CANDIA." "_Aqui hermano Sancho, podemos meter las manos_ _hasta los codos, en esto que llaman aventuras._" DON QUIJOTE. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON: HENRY COLBURN, PUBLISHER, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET.--1838. LONDON: F. SHOBERL, JUN. 51, RUPERT STREET, HAYMARKET. DEDICATION. To the Valued Friends who witnessed, and whom a congeniality of taste led to _enjoy_ with me, the scenes herein described--whose wearied limbs have sought repose upon the same hard floor--whose spoons have been dipped in the same _Gazpacho_, I dedicate these pages. In the course of our perigrinations we have often observed to each other, "Hæc olim meminisse juvabit." C. ROCHFORT SCOTT. Woolwich, 26th October. CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. PREFATORY CHAPTER. Containing little more than an Invocation--A Dissertation--A Choice of Miseries--A Bill of Fare--And a Receipt for making a Favourite Spanish Dish.....1 CHAPTER I. Gibraltar--Forbidden Ground--Derivation of the Name--Curious Provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht--Extraction of Saints without a Miracle--Demoniacal Possessions--Beauty of the Scenery--Agremens of the Garrison--Its Importance to Great Britain, but Impolicy of making it a Free Port to all Nations--Lamentable Changes--Sketch of the Character of the Mountaineers of Ronda--English Quixotism--Political Opinions of the Different Classes in Spain.....21 CHAPTER II. San Roque--Singular Title of "the City Authorities"--Situation--Climate--The late Sir George Don, Lieutenant Governor of Gibraltar--Anecdote Illustrative of the Character of the Spanish Government--Society of Spain--The Tertulia--The Various Circles of Spanish Society Tested by Smoking--Erroneous Notions of English Liberty and Religion--Startling Lental Ceremonies.....41 CHAPTER III. Country in the Vicinity of San Roque--Ruins of the Ancient City of Carteia--Field of Battle of Alphonso the Eleventh--Journey to Ronda--Forest of Almoraima--Mouth of the Lions--Fine Scenery--Town of Gaucin--A Spanish Inn--Old Castle at Gaucin--Interior of an Andalusian Posada--Spanish Humour--Mountain Wine.....59 CHAPTER IV. Journey to Ronda Continued--A Word on the Passport and Bill of Health Nuisances, and Spanish Custom-House Officers--Romantic Scenery--Splendid View--Benadalid--Atajate--First View of the Vale of Ronda--A Dissertation on Adventures, to make up for their absence--Ludicrous Instance of the Effects of Putting the Cart before the Horse.....83 CHAPTER V. The Basin of Ronda--Sources of the River Guadiara--Remarkable Chasm through which it flows--City of Ronda--Date of its Foundation--Former Names--General Description--Castle--Bridges--Splendid Scenery--Public Buildings--Amphitheatre--Population--Trade--Smuggling--Wretched State of the Commerce, Manufactures, and Internal Communications of Spain, and Evils and Inconvenience resulting therefrom--Rare Productions of the Basin of Ronda--Amenity of its Climate--Agremens of the City--Excellent Society--Character of its Inhabitants.....99 CHAPTER VI. Ronda Fair--Spanish Peasantry--Various Costumes--Jockeys and Horses--Lovely view from the New Alameda--Bull Fights--Defence of the Spanish Ladies--Manner of Driving the Bulls into the Town--First Entrance of the Bull--The Frightened Waterseller--The Mina, or Excavated Staircase--Ruins of Acinippo--The Cueva del Gato--The Bridge of the Fairy.....121 CHAPTER VII. Legend of the Fairy's bridge.....150 CHAPTER VIII. Departure for Malaga--Scenery on and Dangers of the Road to El Burgo--Fine View from Casarabonela--An Independent Innkeeper--A Spanish Battle, attended with more Decisive Results than usual--Description of Casarabonela--Comeliness of its Washing Nymphs--Road to Malaga--River Guadaljorce--Sigila of the Romans--Cartama.....178 CHAPTER IX. Unprepossessing Appearance of Malaga--Dread of Yellow Fever--The Alameda--Derivation of the City's Name, and Sketch of its History--The Gibralfaro and Alcazaba--Cathedral--Cigar Manufactory--Calculation of the Supply and Consumption of Cigars in Spain--Malaga Figures--Population--Trade--Wine Harbour--Society--Visit to El Retiro--The Fandango and Cachuca.....199 CHAPTER X. Choice of Routes between Malaga and Granada--Road to Velez--Malaga--Observations on that Town--Continuation of Journey to Granada--Fertile Valley of the River Velez--Venta of Alcaucin--Zafaraya Mountains--Alhama--Description of that Place and of its Thermal Baths--Cacin--Venta of Huelma--Salt-pans of La Mala--First View of Granada and its Vega--Situation of the City--Its Salubrity--Ancient Names--Becomes the Capital of the Last Moslem Kingdom of Spain--Fine Approach to the Modern City--It is the most purely Moorish Town in Spain--Cause of the Decadence of the Arts under the Moors of Granada, and of the easy Conquest of the City--Destruction of the Moorish Literature on the Capture of the City by the Spaniards.....217 CHAPTER XI. The Alhambra and Generalife--Other Reliques of the Moors contained within the City--The Cathedral of Granada--Chapel of the Catholic Kings--Antiquity of the Church of Eliberi--Tomb of Gonzalvo de Cordoba--Churches of San Juan De Dios and San Domingo--Carthusian Convent--Hermita De San Anton.....239 CHAPTER XII. Granada continued--The Zacatin--Market Place--Bazaar--Population--The Granadinos-Their Predilection for the French Costume--Love of Masked Balls--Madame Martinez de la Rosa's Tertulia--An English Country Dance metamorphosed--Specimen of Spanish Taste in fitting up Country Houses--The Marques de Montijo--Anecdote of the Late King and the Conde de Teba--Constitutional Enthusiasm of Granada--Ends in Smoke--Military Schools--Observations on the Spanish Army--Departure for Cordoba--Pinos de la Puente--Puerto de Lope--Moclin--Alcala la Real--Spanish Peasants--Manner of computing Distance--Baena--Not the Roman Town of Ulia--Castro el Rio--Occupied by a Cavalry Regiment--Valuable Friend--Curiosity of the Spanish Officers--Ditto of our New Acquaintance--Influence of "Sherris Sack"--He relates his History--Continuation of our Journey to Cordoba--First View of that City.....265 CHAPTER XIII. Blas el Guerrillero.--A Bandit's Story.....300 CHAPTER XIV. Blas el Guerrillero--_continued_.....333 CHAPTER XV. Blas el Guerrillero--_continued_.....364 CHAPTER XVI. Blas el Guerrillero--_continued_.....396 CHAPTER XVII. Cordoba--Bridge over the Guadalquivir--Mills--Quay--Spanish Projects--Foundation of the City--Establishment of the Western Caliphat--Capture of Cordoba by San Fernando--The Mezquita--Bishop's Palace--Market Place--Grand Religious Procession--Anecdote of the late Bishop of Malaga and the Tragala.....410 APPENDIX.....431 ILLUSTRATIONS. VOL. 1. The Generalife, Palace, and Valley of the Darro. From a window in the Alhambra _Frontispiece._ VOL. II. The Castle of Ximena, and distant view of Gibraltar _Frontispiece._ ERRATA. VOLUME I. (corrected by the etext transcriber. On page 433, line 1 emboyó [not emboyo] was changed to embozó) Page 27, line 20, for _far more_, read _few_. Page 151, line 18, for _lightly_, read _slightly_. Page 161, line 30, for _Aguagils_, read _Aguazils_. Page 190, line 28, for _Higa_, read _Hija_. Page 213, line 2, for _nuevos_, read _huevos_. Page 216, line 14, for _Cachuca_, read _Cachucha_. Page 370, line 14, for _Higo_, read _Hijo_. Page 402, line 14, for _Valga mi_, read _Valgame_. Page 433, line 1, for _emboyo_, read _embozo_. VOLUME II. Page 171, line 26, for _surveyors_, read _purveyors_. Page 271, line 8, for _suda_, read _sua_. Page 288, line 28, for _provechosos_, read _provechosas_. Page 432, line 16, for _hagged_, read _haggard_. EXCURSIONS IN THE MOUNTAINS OF RONDA AND GRANADA. PREFATORY CHAPTER. CONTAINING LITTLE MORE THAN AN INVOCATION--A DISSERTATION--A CHOICE OF MISERIES--A BILL OF FARE--AND A RECEIPT FOR MAKING A FAVOURITE SPANISH DISH. Spain! region of romance! of snow-capped mountains, dark forests, and crystal streams!--Land of the olive and the vine--the perfumed orange and bright pomegranate!--Country of portly priests, fierce bandits, and dark-eyed donzellas--the lively castañet and gay Fandango! And thou, fair Boetica! favoured province of a favoured clime, whose purple grape tempted Hercules to arrest his course--whose waving corn-fields and embowelled treasures have ever since excited the cupidity of the various ambitious nations that have in turn disputed the empire of the world! Is it indeed true that ye are "now chiefly interesting to the traveller for the monuments which a foreign and odious race of conquerors have left behind them?"[1] Yes, you might proudly answer, we admit such is the case. Spain is chiefly interesting to the stranger on account of the monuments left by her turbaned conquerors; but she is so simply, because, in no other country, are they to be seen in so perfect a state; because, in no other part of the world subjected to Moslem sway, did the arts ever reach to such perfection. But, whilst Spain lays especial claim to the attention of the stranger on account of the relics of the Moors that are strewed over her surface, she possesses, in common with other countries of Southern Europe, the usual attractions that excite the interest of travellers. Can she not boast of owning monuments of the demi-god Hercules,[2] and other conquerors of the most remote antiquity? Are not her shores studded with ruins of the Phoenicians, Carthagenians, and Romans? Has she not noble works of art of yet more recent times than her Moorish palaces to boast of? May she not proudly point to the splendid gothic edifices raised since her release from the Mussulman yoke? to the incomparable paintings of the divine Murillo? to the statuary of a Cano? Is not the Spanish peninsula one of the most beautiful as well as richest countries in the world? Such is the answer that Spain and her beauteous daughter, Boetica, might make to the accusation which the words of the accomplished Author I have quoted may be construed to bear. I will venture to add further, that Spain, in her present fallen state, excites, perhaps, yet more intensely, the curiosity and interest of the Traveller, than she could have done even in the days of her greatest glory: for, the contemplation of the wreck of such an Empire--an Empire "on whose wide dominions the sun never set;" whose resources were deemed inexhaustible--cannot but be highly interesting and instructive. At every step the stranger takes whilst wandering over Spain's neglected though still fertile plains, some trace is observable of her former wealth and power, some proof is manifest of her present poverty and impotence. Let him cast a glance at the ruins of the magnificent arsenals of Cadiz, Vigo, and Barcelona[3]--let him mark the closed door of the Tower of Gold,[4] at Seville--let him observe the use to which the sumptuous _Lonja_[5] has been converted--the dilapidated condition of the gorgeous palace of Charles the Fifth. Let him notice the crumbling state of all the public buildings throughout the kingdom, even to the actual residences of its monarch--track the remains of once magnificent roads--explore the deep recesses of abandoned mines. Let him, in fine, observe the commerce of the country destroyed, its manufactures ruined, its Army disorganized, and its Treasury penniless; and, whilst he learns what Spain _has been_, he will see to what a lamentable state she is reduced. Nor to the Traveller alone is the contemplation of Spain, in her fallen greatness, a source of interest and instruction. The Philosopher, the Statesman, the Philanthropist, and the _Patriot_, may all draw from it serious matter for reflection. Who amongst them could have foreseen, but half a century back, that Spain would, in the course of a few years, be reduced to her present abject condition? Who can _now_ foresee the day that, phoenix-like, she may arise from her ashes? Who can fully answer the yet more simple questions--What _led_ to the downfall of Spain? What keeps her--gifted as she is by nature with all the germs of prosperity--in her present state of degradation? Did the extraordinary influx of the precious ores, consequent on the discovery of America, occasion her gradual downfall? Did the impolitic expulsion of the Jews and Moors from her territory lead to it? Does the blighting influence of Popery reply to the two-fold query? Does the vacillating rule of Despotism solve the problem? All, probably, have had a share in effecting this lamentable change. The great influx of money led to the neglect of the resources of Spain herself, and induced habits of indolence in all classes of society. The expulsion of the Jews deprived the country of its principal capitalists--that of the Moors, of its most industrious inhabitants. The bigotry and intolerance of its Church have kept its population in ignorance, whilst most other nations of Europe have become enlightened. The numerous religious houses, endowed with the richest lands in the country, and swarming with unprofitable inmates, have preyed upon its resources. The rule of a weak and bigoted race of sovereigns--themselves governed in turn by profligate favourites and ambitious priests--has sapped the monarchy to its foundation; finally, the crude and hasty innovations of wild theorists are undermining its remaining strength, and preparing to effect its utter downfall. But, whilst many of these causes still operate most fatally in keeping the country in its present state of degradation, the last named is that which is likely to inflict upon it the greatest amount of _misery_. Catholicism--such as it is in Spain at least--is incompatible with free institutions; and Catholicism has too firm a hold of the _mass_ of the Spanish people to be easily eradicated. _Atheism_, it is true, has made great progress in some quarters; and between it and Popery lies the contest now carrying on. Many persons are apt to think that the struggle is between _Superstition_ and "_liberal Catholicism_"--between a Despotism and a limited Monarchy. But those who know Spain intimately, are aware that such is far from being the case; they know, on the contrary, that the contest must end (_when_ it would be difficult to say) either in the restoration of an absolute throne, or the establishment of a Democratic Republic. The limited Monarchy Party--or _Moderados_--though the most respectable in talents, consists but of a few educated Nobles, and a small portion of the Mercantile and learned Professions--some few even of the clergy; but amongst the mass of the people it has no supporters whatever; for amongst the lower orders the term is not understood. The leaders of this party--like the _Gironde_ in France--were carried away by the breakers of reform, as they swept onwards with increasing volume; and the unprincipled men who have since usurped the direction of affairs,--with all the vanity of a Mirabeau, but without one spark of his talents,--imagine they shall be listened to, when they bid the flowing tide to advance no further:--but, though they would not object to, nay, though they _desire_, the establishment of a Republic, yet they too will find Spanish Robespierres and Talliens to dispute their power. To others, however, I abandon the wide field of inquiry these questions open; the following pages, whatever glimmerings of light they may throw upon the subject, being devoted to the description of but a small portion of this ill used, ill governed, but most interesting country. The part I have selected--namely, Andalusia--whilst it differs very materially from the rest of the Spanish peninsula, claims in many respects the first place in the estimation of the traveller, whatever may be his _taste_ or the direction of his inquiries. If the Moorish monuments be the object of his research, he will find they have been scattered with a more profuse hand throughout Andalusia than in any other part of the peninsula; the lofty mountain chain which forms the northern boundary of the province[6] having for some considerable time arrested the Christian arms, after the rest of Spain had been recovered from the Mohammedans; whilst the yet more rugged belt that encircles Granada presented an obstacle which retarded the entire reconquest of the kingdom, for upwards of two centuries and a half. During that long period, therefore, the Moslems, driven within the limits of so diminished a circle, were necessarily obliged to enlarge and multiply their towns, to cultivate with greater care their fields and orchards, and to strengthen, in every possible way, the natural defences of their territory; and thus, their remains, besides being more numerous _there_ than in other parts of Spain, furnish specimens, of the latest as well as of the earliest date, of their peculiar style of architecture. Should matters of more general interest have drawn the Traveller to Spain, he will still find Andalusia laying especial claim to his attention; History ascribing to each mountain pass and every crumbling ruin the fame of having been the scene of some desperate conflict between the various ambitious nations that, before the Saracenic invasion, successively sought the possession of this fertile region. The peculiar manners and character of its dark inhabitants afford yet another source of interest to the Stranger; although the swarthy race may almost claim to be classed amongst its _Arabic remains_; for so deep-rooted was the attachment of the Moors of Granada to the country of their adoption, that neither the oppressive tyranny of their masters, nor the sacrifice of their religion, nay, not even the establishment of the "_holy_" inquisition, (which extirpated them by thousands) could induce them to abandon it. Broken in spirit, replunged in ignorance, their industry unavailing, their language corrupted, they bent the knee to the blood-stained cross presented to them, and assumed the name of Spaniards: but as a Spanish nobleman once observed to me in speaking of these wild mountaineers, his dependants, "They are to this day but Moors who go to Mass." Again, should the beauties of nature have attracted the Traveller's footsteps to Spain, he will find the scenery of Andalusia of the most magnificent and varied kind; presenting alternately ranges of lofty mountains and broad fertile plains--boundless tracts of forest and richly cultivated valleys--picturesque towns and mountain fortresses--winding rivers and impetuous torrents. It may indeed be said to combine the wild beauties of the Tyrol with the luxuriant vegetation and delightful climate of Southern Italy. Well might the last of the Alhamares[7] weep, on taking his final leave of the lovely Vega,[8] over which it had been his fortune to be born the ruler, whence it was his "luckless" fate to be driven forth, a wanderer! Even to this day, the Moors of Barbary preserve the title-deeds and charters by which their ancestors held their estates in Spain, and offer up daily prayers to _Allah_, to restore to them their lost Granada; and one might almost suppose, from the nomadic life still led by many of their tribes, and the unsettled habits which distinguish them all, that they consider their actual country as but a temporary abode, and live in the hope and expectation that their oft-repeated prayer will eventually be heard. Nor is the present inhabitant of this fair region less sensible than his Moorish ancestor of the value of his inheritance. It is not in his nature to express himself in the passionate language of the Neapolitan,--whose well known exclamation, _Vedi Napoli e poi mori!_ might be applied with better reason to a hundred other places;--but, with an equal degree of hyperbole though a somewhat less suicidical feeling, the _Granadino_ declares with calm dignity, that "_Quien no ha visto à Granada_ _No ha visto nada._"[9] But, apart from all other considerations, there is a charm in travelling in Spain, which renders it peculiarly attractive to most persons possessing the locomotive mania, namely, the charm of _novelty_. Every thing in that country is different from what is met with in any other; every thing is proverbially _uncertain_;[10] and the traveller is thus kept in a constant state of excitement, from his fancy being ever busy guessing what is to come next. There can be little doubt but that the uncertainty attendant on all mundane affairs greatly enhances our enjoyment of life. Take the duration of our existence itself as an instance: did we know the precise moment at which it was to terminate, we should be miserable during the whole period of its continuance. So, in like manner, does the uncertainty attendant on such trifling matters as getting a bed or a supper give a peculiar zest to _touring_ in Spain. You have there no "_Itineraire des Voyageurs_," to mark the spot to a _millimetre_, where a relay of post-horses is to be found; no "Hand-book for Travellers," with a list of the best inns on the road, to spoil your appetite by anticipation; no dear pains-taking Mrs. Starke,[11] to beat up quarters and sights for you, and determine beforehand the sum you have (or rather ought) to pay for bed and "_pasto_." No--you travel with a bad map of the country in your pocket over a stony track that is _not_ marked upon it--and which you are at times disposed to believe is rather the bed of a torrent than a road. Before you is the prospect of passing the night on this villanous king's highway; or, should you be fortunate enough to reach the shelter of a roof, the doubt, whether a comfortable bed, a truss of straw, or a hard floor, will receive your wearied limbs; and whether you will have to go supperless to bed, or find a savoury _olla_, perfuming the whole establishment. It must, I think, be admitted, that there is a certain charm in this independent mode of travelling--this precarious manner of existence. It carries the wanderer back to the days of chivalry and romance--of the _Cid Campeador_ and _Bernardo del Carpio_; dropping him at least half a dozen centuries behind the Liverpool and Manchester Railroad. Nevertheless,--as the Spaniards say--_Hay gustos que merecen palos_;[12] and many will perchance think that _mine_ is in that predicament, a settled order of things being more to their fancy:--_par exemple_, the five mile an hour clattering _en poste_ over a French _pavé_--all conversation drowned in the horrible noise made by the heavy horses' heavy tramp, or the yet more abominable clacking of their monkey jacketed driver's whips.--Then the certain comforts of a _grand Hotel meublé_!--the spacious whitewashed room, adorned with prints of Arcola, Jena, and Friedland! (which I have always thought would look much better if worked in the pattern of a carpet): the classically canopied bed!--that certainly would not be less comfortable, if a foot or two longer.--Others again may be found who would give up the charm of uncertainty, for the fixed pleasure of sitting behind the pipes and "_sacraments_" of German postboys, listening to the discordant notes of their bugles, and looking forward to the sudorific enjoyments (stoves and duvets) of the _Gasthof_, and the dyspeptic delights (grease and _sauerkraut_) of its _Speisesaal_!--Some even--but these I trust are few--may like to listen to the melodiously rounded oaths of an Italian _vetturino_, addressed to his attenuated horses in all the purity of the _Lingua Toscana_; by dint of which, and an unceasing accompaniment of merciless _sferzatone_, he provokes the wretched animals into a jog-trot, that, with _rinfresco_ and _rinforzo_, kills the whole day and them by inches, to get over a distance of forty or fifty miles. For my own part, I freely confess, that not even our English modes of "getting over the ground" have such charms for me, as the tripping and stumbling of one's horse over a Spanish _trocha_[13]--I take no delight in being dragged through the country at the rate of a mile a minute, powdered with soot, (pardon the bull) suffocated with steam, and sickened with grease. Neither does our steady ten mile an hour stage-coach travelling find much favour in mine eyes; though I grant it is now most admirably conducted, the _comforts_ of the old "slow coaches" being so happily blended with the accelerated _speed_ called for in this progressive age, that a change of horses is effected in less than one minute, and a feed of passengers in something under ten!--But I always pity the victims of this unwholesome alliance of comfort and celerity.--Observe that fidgety old gentleman, muzzled in a red worsted _comforter_, and crowned with a Welsh wig. Having started without breakfast, or at most with but half of one, he counts impatiently the minutes and milestones that intervene between him and the dining-place; arrived there, if five minutes before the appointed time, every thing is underdone; if five minutes after, a deduction of equal amount is made in the time allowed for despatching the viands. Swallowing, therefore, in all haste the indigestible roast pork and parboiled potatoes that are placed before him, he resumes his seat in or upon the vehicle, declaring--whilst the unwholesome food sticking in his throat nearly chokes him--that he "_feels all the better_" for his _dinner!_ soon after which, with a flushed face and quickened pulse, he drops into a feverish slumber, dreaming of mad bulls and carniverous swine, sloe juice and patent brandy. Towards midnight, the announcement of "a quarter of an hour, gentlemen" (meaning something less than half that time), relieves him from these painful reminiscences, affording an opportunity of washing them down with some scalding liquid, which, though bearing the name of tea or coffee, is a decoction of some deleterious plant or berry, that certainly never basked under the sun of China or Arabia Felix. At last, however, he arrives at the end of his long journey--he has got over a distance of a hundred and ninety-five miles in nineteen hours and thirty-five minutes! The hour of arrival is inconveniently early it is true, but, even at 3 o'clock A.M., he finds a comfortable hotel open to receive him; an officious "boots" sufficiently master of his drowsy senses to present the well or rather the ill-used slippers--a smirking chambermaid sufficiently _awake_ to make him believe that the _warming_-pan, with which she precedes him up three pair of stairs, contains _hot_ coals; and impudent enough, whilst presenting him with a damp, once white, cotton nightcap, to ask at what o'clock he would _like_ to be awakened--she well knowing, all the time, that the stir of passengers about to depart by an early coach will to a certainty effect that object for him in the course of an hour, whether he _likes_ it or not. These rapid proceedings have, as I before confessed, no charms for me, and such as cannot dispense with the comforts I have slightly sketched, must abstain from travelling in Spain, for very different is the entertainment they are likely to meet with at an Andalusian _posada_.[14] _There_, in the matters of "Boots," Hostler, and Chambermaid, no uncertainty whatever exists, and the traveller must therefore be prepared to divide with his attendant the several duties of those useful personages. Nor should he, amidst his multifarious occupations, neglect the cooking department; for, if he have not an _arriero_[15] power of consuming oil and garlic, he must watch with vigilant eye, and restrain with persuasive words, the too bountiful hand of Our Lady of the _Olla_.[16] It is to be understood that I speak here of the South of Spain only, and more especially of the mountainous country encircling the fortress of Gibraltar,--from whence, in due time, I purpose taking my departure. I ought here perhaps to give notice, that it is not my intention, in the following pages, to conduct my reader, town by town, kingdom by kingdom, through every part of Andalusia; giving him a detailed account of its statistics, productions, resources, &c.; in fact, spreading before him a regular three course banquet of travels; but rather to present him with a light and simple dish of the country, seasoning it with such tales and anecdotes as were picked up in the course of many excursions, made during a period of many years; a _Gazpacho_, as it may be called, whereof the country furnishes the principal part, or bread and water; and to which the tales--so at least I hope it may be found--give the _gusto_, imparted to this favourite Andalusian dish, by the addition of oil, vinegar, and pepper. I may as well premise, also, that I do not intend to mark with precise date the time at which any of the incidents about to be narrated occurred, excepting when the correctness due to matters of history renders such specification necessary, but to transcribe the notes of my various rambles as they come most conveniently to hand; stating generally, however, that they were written during the period comprised between the years 1822 and 1830, (the greater portion of which I belonged to the Garrison of Gibraltar) and have been "revised and corrected, with additions and improvements" from the journal of an extended tour made several years subsequently. Considering the small number of my countrymen to whom the Spanish language is familiar, I may possibly be accused of having unnecessarily retained many of the proverbs and idioms of the country in their original garb, referring my readers to an English version of them at the foot of each page. But as the caustic, and, in general, quaintly rhymed sayings for which the _Andaluz_ is celebrated cannot but lose much of their _Bætic salt_ on being translated, I am led to hope that such of my readers as do _not_ understand Spanish will pardon the trouble I have thus imposed on them, for the sake of those who do. In conclusion, I have but to express a hope that the Spanish dish I now offer to the public may not be displeasing to the English taste, though I can hardly expect it should be _devoured_ with the relish of the unsophisticated Sancho; who assigned as one of his principal reasons for resigning his government of _Barateria_, that he preferred to "_hartarse de Gazpachos_"[17] than be subjected to a regimen more befitting his exalted situation. CHAPTER I. GIBRALTAR--FORBIDDEN GROUND--DERIVATION OF THE NAME--CURIOUS PROVISIONS OF THE TREATY OF UTRECHT--EXTRACTION OF SAINTS WITHOUT A MIRACLE--DEMONIACAL POSSESSIONS--BEAUTY OF THE SCENERY--AGREMENS OF THE GARRISON--ITS IMPORTANCE TO GREAT BRITAIN, BUT IMPOLICY OF MAKING IT A FREE PORT TO ALL NATIONS--LAMENTABLE CHANGES--SKETCH OF THE CHARACTER OF THE MOUNTAINEERS OF RONDA--ENGLISH QUIXOTISM--POLITICAL OPINIONS OF THE DIFFERENT CLASSES IN SPAIN. Before mounting my impatient steed--not Pegasus, but my faithful Barb "_Almanzor_,"--the companion of most of my wanderings; the partaker of many of my fastings and perils; and whom--such is the mutability of horse dealing affairs--I saw for the last time curvetting under a monstrous weight of whisker and mustaches in Hyde Park;--I will detain my readers a brief space, to cast a glance at the celebrated place on which we are about to turn our backs. Let him not take fright, however, at this announcement. It is not my purpose to lead him the round of all the _sights_ contained within the walls of this remarkable fortress; albeit they are well worthy of his notice. Nor shall I, with professional prolixity, point out to his wondering eyes its crested batteries where 700 cannon bid defiance to the enemies of Great Britain; still less expose the _arcana_ of its famed excavated citadel, its interminable galleries, spacious chambers, &c. which must be as cautiously approached by the pen and ink of the discreet traveller, as by the pickaxe and shovel of the wary sapper: a mysterious veil being drawn over them, which it would ill become any of her Majesty's loyal subjects to remove. The attempt at concealment is, to be sure, rather absurd; and, as the late Earl of Chatham drily observed, (on being informed that the plans of the Fortress could only be sent to him from the Engineer's Office, under an escort,) reminded him of the delusion of the ostrich, which, concealing his head in a bush, fancies his whole body is hid from the sight of his pursuers--since, though we carefully lock up _our_ plans of the works in a strong box, others, equally good, may be procured for a shilling any where. To return to my premised glance at the famed rock, I will say a few words of the _unde derivatur_ of the name it now bears--Gibraltar--which is generally supposed to be a compound of the Arabic words Gibel (Mountain) and Tarik, the name of the Moslem general, who first landed in Spain, and with whom originated the idea of making it a place of arms. For though the mount, under the name of Calpe, held a distinguished place in ancient history, as one of the pillars of Hercules, yet it is difficult to imagine that it was ever thought of as a site for a _town_; otherwise, the city of Carteia would hardly have been built in its immediate vicinity. With respect, however, to the origin of its Moorish name, it is but natural to suppose that this remarkable promontory had some distinguishing appellation in the Arabic dialect, _before_ it was seized upon and fortified by _Tarik ben Zaide_; and if therefore it was called after him, it could only have been as indicative of the spot he had fixed upon for effecting his descent upon the Spanish shore. But this can hardly be the case, since he did _not_ land there, but near where the town of Tarifa now stands (which place he founded and gave his name to); and the rocky peninsula of Gibraltar was only seized upon by _Tarik_ on his subsequently becoming aware of its great natural strength, and the advantages its possession consequently held out, for keeping up the communication with Barbary, and furthering his ulterior projects against Spain. It seems, on the other hand, much more probable, that the victorious Saracens, arriving at the northern extremity of Africa, and finding how small a space there separated them from Europe, would, whilst eagerly examining the whole line of coast presented to their longing eyes, have naturally given names of their own to the most prominent landmarks observable along it. Now the remarkable head-land that stretched into the sea towards them, its bold outline rendering, to all appearance, the limited space that divided them from their prey yet narrower than it really is,--could not fail to attract their attention; and it may reasonably enough be supposed that its singular form and apparent isolation led to its being designated Gibel-thar--(Gibel--mountain, and thar, or tar--Sp. tajar--Eng. to cut or sever[18])--the severed mountain,--in allusion to its actual separation from the mountainous country behind. The Spanish historian, Lopez de Ayala, notices this derivation of the name Gibraltar, but prefers the more improbable one of _Gibel Tarik_--or even _Gibel Phatah_--_Phatah_ signifying both key and victory; whereas, the key by which Spain was laid open to the Moors was Tarifa; the victory that made them masters of the country was gained at _Xeres de la Frontera_. The castle of Gibraltar (or _Calahorra_) was not built until thirty years (A.D. 742) after the mountain had been occupied by Tarik; and the fortress remained in the undisturbed possession of the Moors for upwards of five centuries and a half, when it was captured by Don Alonzo Perez de Guzman; though it was afterwards recovered by the Moslems, and again remained in their possession upwards of a century.[19] By the treaty of Utrecht, which confirmed this valuable possession to Great Britain, it was particularly stipulated that no Turkish vessels should be allowed to anchor under the protection of the fortress;--so great even at that late period was the dread the Spaniards entertained of Mohammedan invasion. It was also stipulated that no _Jews_ should be permitted to domiciliate themselves within the garrison;--an article of the treaty which has been most glaringly infringed upon. The archives, &c. were transported to San Roque, whither also most of the Spanish inhabitants removed with their goods and chattels. The church property does not, however, appear to have been suffered to be carried off; and an old Spanish historian gives with pious exultation a very amusing account of the contraband extraction of the saints from the different churches, after the fortress had been finally ceded to heretical England. The passage cannot but lose in the translation; as indeed every thing in the Spanish language must. But, even in an English garb, its ludicrous seriousness may excite a smile. "A statue of St. Joseph, which, from its extreme corpulence, could not be secretly transported, was carried away by a good Catholic--by name Joseph Martin of Medina--placed on the back of a horse as if _he_ were a person riding. The Saint having been well balanced, enveloped in a cloak, and his head covered with a _montera_,[20] a person mounted _en croupe_ to aid in supporting him, and accompanied by some friends to create confusion and distract attention, they issued forth by the main street without being discovered."[21] The fat Saint was lodged with other valuables at San Roque, where he may be seen to this day. A thinner Saint Joseph supplies his place in the "Spanish Church" at Gibraltar, and I dare say Joseph Martin has been canonized, and may be heard further of at Medina Sidonia. I entirely forget what Saint in particular--or if any--is now charged with the protection of the "town and territory" of Gibraltar; but the intervention of one seems highly necessary, for the devil has obtained a great footing in the place, claiming as his own a Tower--a Bowling-green--a Bellows--a Gap, and--last, not least--a tremendous tongue of fire. Perhaps these offerings have been made to the black gentleman by some good Catholics,--like Joseph Martin,--on the same principle that the old Italian lady presented him with a costly pair of horns,--observing--"_Sta bene far' amicizia, anche col' Signor Santo Diavolo._" Most persons who have not visited Gibraltar entertain very curious notions respecting it; picturing to themselves a mere rock, bristling with cannon, and crowded with Barracks, Furnaces for Red-hot shot, and Powder-magazines. But, in reality, there are few places of the same limited extent that can lay claim to greater and more varied natural beauties. The Road which leads from the picturesque old Moorish castle to the southern extremity of the rocky peninsula (a distance of upwards of two miles) presents a complete change of objects at every turn,--of hanging gardens, impending rocks, and distant vistas of the Spanish and African coasts. On gaining the flats at Europa Point, few views, finer than that which opens upon you, are any where to be met with; none more grand than, as inclining to the eastward, the back of the singular mountain bursts upon your sight, its peaked summits rising precipitously near 1400 feet above the Mediterranean, which, lashing in impotent rage its rocky base, ofttimes dashes a shower of spray over the cottage of the Governor, situated under the lofty cliff, but at least 200 feet above the angry ocean. Again, ascending to the northernmost peak of the rocky ridge, what can exceed the beauty of the panoramic view?--a wide expanse of sea, studded with countless vessels of all kinds and nations, but so penned in by distant mountains as to assume the appearance of a vast lake, is spread out beneath you:--its glassy surface reflecting the richly wooded or vine-clad hills of Spain, on one side, the savage and sterile mountains of Barbary on the other. Casting the eye beyond the sandy isthmus which to the north separates the isolated rock from the mountains of Spain, it rests upon successive ranges of sierras, (marked by a most pleasing variety of tints,) that seem to convey you into the very heart of the country; and indeed the view is closed only by the Alpujarra range, which is upwards of a hundred miles distant from the point of view. Within the Fortress, the hand of man has not neglected to deck out nature, where art could effect improvement. The Red Sands, formerly an unsightly burying ground, have been converted--without disturbing the dust of the tenants of the soil--into public walks and gardens. The rugged tracks, which not long since were dangerous for a horse to travel, have been rendered practicable for carriages, and sheltered from the sun by avenues of trees. The western side of the Rock, which formerly presented a bare and rugged limestone surface, is now clothed with a variety of trees and shrubs, that afford cover to numerous partridges and rabbits, as well as to the aboriginal apes, which have obtained, and not undeservedly, no small share of celebrity; and this belt of verdure, besides being refreshing to the sight, tends probably to lessen the heat of the place and increase its salubrity. As a place of residence, I know of no town--being a garrison--that possesses so many agrémens. The society is composed of persons of all nations and pursuits, and is varied by the passing visits of numerous strangers, who willingly devote a few days to the examination of the wonders of the celebrated "rock," and of the beauties of the neighbourhood. The resident English merchants were, in my day, a most hospitable body, whose society afforded a grateful variation to the but too prevalent "our's" and "your's" conversation of a mess table. The _table_, by the way, possesses great attractions to the _Bon vivant_; offering him the enjoyment of most of the gastronomic luxuries of the world at a very cheap rate, and champagne and claret well iced and free of duty. Finally, to the Sportsman, the neighbourhood affords the pleasures of hunting, fishing, shooting, and horse-racing; and to the studious is presented the resource of an excellent library. I regret to say, however, that I remained at Gibraltar long enough to witness lamentable changes in many things;--to see the commerce of the place gradually decline, first from the jealousy of the Spanish government at its being made a rendezvous for a worthless and ungrateful gang of refugees; secondly, from various impolitic acts emanating from the Colonial office; and lastly, from an awful visitation of the yellow fever, which swept off a third of its dense population, and, for a time, (Cadiz having about this epoch been also declared a Free port) directed the smuggling trade into another channel. The value of Gibraltar to Great Britain has been questioned by a recent writer on Spain,[22] who doubts whether it be worth preserving at the cost of a garrison of 4,000 (3,000 at most) troops, and the stones and mortar required for keeping its defences in repair. "The command of the Mediterranean," he observes, "belongs to the strongest fleet." This--albeit a debateable proposition--I will not stop to dispute; since what Gibraltar claims is simply the command of the _entrance_ to the Mediterranean; and that clearly belongs to the power which can most readily keep a force near at hand to prevent all ingress and egress. Now, Gibraltar is so situated as to enable Great Britain to do this, with very small naval means; whereas it would require a fleet of any other nation to watch the Straits, because that power would have also to blockade the port of Gibraltar. This any one at all acquainted with the localities,--the prevailing winds, &c.--will readily admit to be at times an impossibility; and on every occasion that the blockading squadron might be driven from its cruising ground, the command of the Straits would again be possessed by Gibraltar, should its batteries shelter but a few gunboats. The importance of Gibraltar will increase tenfold in the event of a _steam war_, as every thing will then depend upon the vicinity of the contending parties to their _coal depôts_. But, besides the advantage Gibraltar gives Great Britain, by the command of the entrance of the Mediterranean, it affords a secure port at which her ships can refit, reprovision, &c. without incurring the expense and loss of time attendant on a long voyage to England. And, with respect to the expense of its maintenance, the benefit accruing to the nation at large by the disposal of her manufactured and other produce to an immense amount, far more than counterbalances the cost of the few thousand troops required for its defence, and which troops may also be looked upon as a kind of support to our advanced posts, Malta, Corfu, &c. To furnish a proof of the value of Gibraltar to Great Britain, as a market, it will be only necessary to state, that of British manufactured _cotton_ goods alone the "barren little rock" takes annually to the value of nearly half a million sterling;--an amount very nearly equal to that which is exported from the mother country to _all_ her North American colonies--whilst the kingdom of Portugal (_favouring_ us in return for benefits conferred) takes of the same articles to the amount only of £800,000; and all the other ports of Spain together, but to the value of £13,000. Now though the government gains but a trifling increase of revenue by the vast amount of goods exported to Gibraltar, yet the _good_ that is effected by thus keeping our manufacturers at work may certainly be put down as benefiting the country at a cheap rate, when the cost is but of a few thousand troops;--the civil servants, &c., being paid out of the crown revenues of the place itself. On one point, I admit our government appears to be in error; namely, in making Gibraltar "a free port to _every_ flag;" by which "other nations enjoy the benefit of the establishment, without paying any portion of the expense:"[23] and it is more particularly to be blamed, for opening it to the produce of the _United States of America_, which, unlike France, Tuscany, Sardinia, and Austria, give our commerce no reciprocating advantage, and whose _tobacco_, imported in immense quantities, pays as aforesaid no portion of the expense of the establishment, but is the article of all others that occasions Spain to watch the transit trade of Gibraltar with such excessive jealousy. The Spanish government knows full well, that salt fish, manufactured goods of all sorts, and indeed most of the productions of Great Britain, _must_ be introduced into the country, and would take but little trouble to check the contraband trade of Gibraltar, if it were confined to such articles; but the introduction of Tobacco, Cocoa, Sugar, Spices, and other productions of Spain's own colonies, which the British Free port affords other nations the means of pouring into the country, to the detriment of her transatlantic possessions, naturally occasions a greater degree of watchfulness to be adopted, and excites much jealousy and ill will. At one time, indeed, the combination of untoward circumstances before alluded to, added to the loss of our extensive trade with Oran and Algiers--(occasioned by the imposition of prohibitory duties since the North of Africa became a French Colony)--and the vigilance of the _farmer_ who _rented_ the preventive cordon--himself an old smuggler--threatened annihilation to the trade of Gibraltar. But, at the present day, it once more "looks up:" smuggling, thanks to the lawless state of Spain, having again furnished occupation to the hardy mountaineers of Ronda and Granada, who, careless what may be the _form_ of Government at Madrid provided its authority does not extend to Andalusia, so as to prevent their having free access to the Calicoes and Tobacco of "_La Plaza_",[24]--have been alternately crying _Viva la Constitucion_ and _Viva el Rey absoluto_, for the last eighteen years. Having now, for the present, concluded my remarks upon Gibraltar, I will embrace the opportunity,--though "Almanzor" has already been kept an unconscionable time ready saddled--of saying a few words of these rude _Serranos_,[25] ere I take my reader amongst them. Smugglers by birth, education, and inclination, it could hardly be expected that they should be distinguished by the possession of any very resplendent virtues. Nevertheless, they are characterized by temperance, honesty, (apart their profession) hospitality, and noble-mindedness. Hardy and enduring, though generally averse to the occupation of husbandry, they can scarcely be termed indolent, since their favourite pursuit is one which exposes them to great fatigue. Proverbially vain, and supremely ignorant, they look upon their country as the first in the world, themselves as its bravest inhabitants: in the latter supposition, being perhaps nearly as far from the truth as in the former; their courage, such as it is, being rather of the tiger kind. Superstitious beyond all belief, and priest-ridden to the last degree, still their naturally caustic and witty temperament cannot be so bridled as to deter them from indulging in jokes and pleasantries, even at the expense of the ceremonies of their church, or the peccadilloes of their ghostly fathers. As I have stated before, they concern themselves but little with politics; but, having a most radical distaste for every species of taxation, the government that troubles them least in this particular--that is, which has the _least power_ of levying its dues--is naturally the most popular. In the eventful period in Spanish History, during which I mixed constantly with the natives of all classes, I found the _Serranos_ by turns _Realistas_,--_Constitucionalistas_,--_Serviles_,--_Liberales_, --_Moderados_,--and _Exaltados_: their opinions invariably changing for or against the existing [dis]order of things, according to the strength of the preventive cordon drawn round Gibraltar, and the support given to the local authorities in exacting the payment of taxes. The only change that I ever perceived Liberalism to work in their habits was, that it induced a freer circulation of the pig-skin; thus leading to inebriety and its concomitants, brawling, insubordination, and depravity; and though this departure from the sober dignity that characterizes the Spaniard was most observable in the troops, yet the pernicious example set by these lawless bands could not but be of bad omen. Of the _Serranos_ I may in conclusion say, that, considering their ignorance and superstition, and above all the demoralizing nature of their occupation; considering also the wild impracticable country they inhabit; the distracted state of the kingdom; the lamentably ill-enforced condition of the laws, and the sad venality of all Spanish Authorities; they are a wonderfully moral and well-behaved race. Assassinations,--when the country is not, as at present, disturbed by political dissensions--are of very rare occurrence; and the same unhappy state of things has naturally led to the perpetration of numerous personal outrages and increased the number of highway robberies: but larceny and housebreaking are even now rarely heard of; and Incendiarism, Infanticide, and some other heinous crimes that disgrace more civilized communities, are unknown. The condition of this singular race presents, therefore, the anomalous spectacle of the co-existence of rare moral qualities with ignorance, lawlessness, and superstition; and, by instituting a comparison between the condition of the inhabitants of Spain and those of better governed and more enlightened nations, the Philanthropist cannot but entertain a doubt whether a very high degree of education is, in all cases, conducive to the happiness of Mankind. The experiment now in progress of sending Liberty, armed Cap-a-pee, to take Spain by storm, ere Truth and Wisdom have battered Bigotry and Ignorance in breach, is one that cannot fail to entail the utmost misery upon that unhappy country for a long space of years. No _class_ of Spaniards is, at the present moment, prepared for the great organic changes in the government and institutions of their country that _we_ are pressing upon them. There are doubtless some enlightened men in the upper ranks, who, with the welfare of their country at heart, wish for a change; but their previous life has unfitted them from taking the lead in effecting it. There are also many learned men with heads full of metaphysicks and moral and political theories, who fancy they have but to lecture on forms of government to have their views adopted; and in the mass of the people there is a great deal of intelligence sparkling through a dense cloud of ignorance and bigotry; but vanity is the besetting sin of all Spaniards; they cannot bring themselves to think they are behind the rest of Europe; and consequently they do not see that the more liberal institutions of other countries have followed, and not preceded, the "_march of intellect_." The various Constitution builders, who, set after set, have succeeded to the direction of affairs, in this luckless country, have invariably found themselves in the situation of a man who, having pulled down his old house to erect another on the spot, after the model of one he had _read_ of, discovered, that though slate, bricks, and mortar, were all at hand, he could not meet with workmen who understood his plan, so as to put his projected structure together; and thus he was driven to seek shelter in an outhouse. But, besides the absolute want of knowledge of the world that all the ministers of Spain have evinced, from Manuel Godoy to the present day, there is yet another want that has been almost equally conspicuous during the same period--namely, the want of _honesty_. One of the best patriots that the country has produced, since the light of liberalism first broke upon it, declared that this want was the source of all Spain's misfortunes.--"_Somos todos corrompidos_"[26] was his painful confession; and without going to the _full_ extent of that assertion, it seems more than probable this rottenness at the core will not be cured, until Spain produces some great tyrant like Napoleon. A Despot, though not over-scrupulous himself, generally makes his subordinates honest;[27] but I doubt the possibility of any _set_ of men, who have been brought up on plunder, divesting themselves of the habit of _self-appropriation_ when possessed of the distribution of the loaves and fishes. I must no longer, however, delay taking my departure from Gibraltar, or the gates of the fortress will be closed upon me for the night, and frustrate my intention of sleeping at San Roque. CHAPTER II. SAN ROQUE--SINGULAR TITLE OF "THE CITY AUTHORITIES"--SITUATION--CLIMATE--THE LATE SIR GEORGE DON, LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR OF GIBRALTAR--ANECDOTE ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE CHARACTER OF THE SPANISH GOVERNMENT--SOCIETY OF SPAIN--THE TERTULIA--THE VARIOUS CIRCLES OF SPANISH SOCIETY TESTED BY SMOKING--ERRONEOUS NOTIONS OF ENGLISH LIBERTY AND RELIGION--STARTLING LENTAL CEREMONIES. San Roque is the nearest town to the British fortress, and distant from it about six English miles. A mere village at the period of the last siege of Gibraltar, it has gradually increased, so as at the present day to cover a considerable extent of ground, and to contain a population of upwards of six thousand souls. The title of _City_ has even been vicariously bestowed upon it; all public acts, &c., emanating from its different authorities, being headed in the following singular manner,--"The President and Individuals of the Board of health of the _City of Gibraltar_, which, from the material loss of that place, is established in _this of San Roque_ within its territory, &c."[28] The Corregidor, Alcalde, and other authorities, are also designated as of Gibraltar, and not of San Roque. The town is pleasantly situated on an isolated knoll, the houses entirely covering its summit, and extending some way down its Northern and Western slopes; but towards Gibraltar and to the East, the ground falls very abruptly, so as to form a natural boundary to the town. Though quite unsheltered by trees, and consequently exposed to the full power of the sun, San Roque possesses great advantages over Gibraltar in point of climate; for, whilst its elevation above all the ground in the immediate vicinity secures to it a freer circulation of air than is enjoyed by the pent-up fortress, it is sheltered from the damp and blighting levant wind that blows down the Mediterranean, by a low mountain range, known as the Sierra Carbonera, or Queen of Spain's Chair, which is distant about a mile from the town, and stretches in a North and South direction, between it and the sea. The baneful _Khamseen_ of the desert is not more dreaded by the nomad Arab, than is this pestiferous wind by the desk-bound inhabitant of the Fortress. No sooner does it set in, than a dense cloud gathers round the isolated mountain, and, clinging with mischievous pertinacity to its rugged peaks, involves the Town in a damp, unwholesome atmosphere during the whole period of its continuance. At the same time, the breeze, repelled by the precipitous cliff that bounds the rock to the Eastward, sweeps in furious blasts round both its flanks, driving clouds of sand, flies, and blue devils into every dwelling, and Rheumatism, Asthma, and Lumbago, into the bones, chests, and backs, of their inmates. San Roque, being free from this intolerable nuisance, is looked upon as a sort of Montpelier by the Gibraltarians, and, at the period of which I write, was very much resorted to by the mercantile classes, who fitted up comfortable "boxes" there, that afforded them an agreeable retreat after their daily labours at the desk were concluded. The late Sir George Don, whilst Lieut. Governor of the Fortress, invariably passed several months of the year at San Roque; and his noble hospitality, his ever open purse, and constant employment of the poor in works of utility, secured to him the love and respect of all classes of its inhabitants. Indeed, such was the gallant Veteran's influence in the place, that I may literally say, not a stone could be turned nor a tree planted without "His Excellency's" being first consulted as to the propriety of the measure. My duty requiring me to be in frequent attendance upon the Lieut. Governor, I generally made one of Sir George's party, whenever he fixed his Head-quarters at San Roque; and on one of these occasions a circumstance occurred that throws such a light upon the extraordinary character of the Spanish Government, that I am tempted to relate it before proceeding further. I was seated one morning tête-à-tête with the General, waiting the arrival of the Messenger with letters, &c. from the Fortress, when we observed a guard of Spanish soldiers pass by the window, headed by an officer on horseback, and having a prisoner in charge; and to our astonishment they stopped at the General's door. We were waiting with some little curiosity to learn the cause of this extraordinary visit, and were lost in conjectures as to whom the delinquent could be, when the door of the apartment was thrown open, and in rushed the prisoner himself, exclaiming with great excitement and the volubility of his nation--"General, you doubtless know me--I am Prince Napoleon Lucien Murat--I throw myself upon and claim your protection--I have been entrapped by the vile Spanish government" (this was soon after the restoration of the "_inclito_" Ferdinand). "Invited by the Commandant of San Roque to pay him a visit, I was seduced to leave Gibraltar, and on arriving at the Spanish lines was seized upon and hurried off under an escort, to be imprisoned at Algeciras, where I should have been murdered, but that fortunately I succeeded in persuading the officer charged with my safeguard to pass through San Roque on his way and allow me to speak to you. He unwittingly acceded to my request, and I now place myself under the protection of the British flag." "Monsieur," replied the General, with no slight astonishment, "this is indeed a very extraordinary, and apparently most unjustifiable proceeding; but I am sorry to inform you that I can afford you no _protection_. The British flag does not fly at San Roque; and I myself reside here only by permission of the Spanish government. My good offices,--as far as they can be of service in liberating you,--shall not be wanting; but, in the mean time, pray let me hear further particulars of this plot against your liberty; and Scott,"--turning to me--"have the goodness to go to the Spanish Commandant, and request he will favour me with a few minutes' conversation." I proceeded as directed to the quarters of the Colonel of the Regiment of Granada, which at that time formed the garrison of San Roque, and was ushered in to the Commandant, whom I found at his toilet, and not a little surprised at my early visit. Now _Don Alonzo del Pulgar Apugal_--for such were the Colonel's patronymics--was the least likely man in the world to be employed in a case of abduction. He was a soft, open-hearted, honeycomb-headed, fat, good-natured man, of about five and forty, without two military ideas, and not half a dozen on any other subject. What little knowledge he did possess, was of dogs, guns, charges, and wadding. But, at the same time, I knew the Don to be a gentleman, and incapable of acting the part with which he was charged. When, therefore, I explained the circumstances that had led to my waiting upon him, ere his unnameables were yet finally braced round his portly person, he was most excessively astonished, and repelled with indignant warmth the vile accusation of being the abbettor--indeed, the principal mover--in the infamous plot that had placed Prince Lucien's body at the tender mercies of six Spanish bayonets, and his neck in jeopardy of the _garrote_[29]--"_Valgame Dios!_" he at length exclaimed, "surely the poor young man cannot have deceived himself by taking _al pié de la letra_, our usual Spanish compliment;--for now I recollect, when he was introduced to me at the _dog-meeting_" (he meant at the fox-hunt) "some time back, we had some conversation about shooting, and I said my dogs and guns were at his disposition[30] whenever he wished for a day's sport.--_Pobrecito!_--it is possible I may thus unconsciously have been the cause of this unfortunate affair." Such, however, did not turn out to be the case, for the Prince had presented himself at the Spanish lines, provided with both dogs and gun, and accompanied by a sportsman to show him the country. The kind-hearted Colonel hurried down to Sir George, buckling his sword on as he went, and was immediately on his arrival taken into a private room to consult as to what could be done in the business, as well as to hear the officer of the escort's edition of the story. Mons. Murat meanwhile remained in the study with one of the general's Aides de Camp (my friend Budgen of the Royal Engineers) and myself, and to us, who were yet unacquainted with the heinous nature of the crime of which he was accused by the Spanish government, appeared to be most unnecessarily alarmed, and to rely but little on the friendly interference of Sir George; on which indeed he had as little claim as upon the protection of the British flag, beyond the jurisdiction of which he had voluntarily placed himself:--for, considering perhaps that such a step would have been beneath his dignity as an ex-prince of the Two Sicilies, he had neglected to pay the customary compliment of calling upon the Governor on arriving at the Fortress, and was consequently unknown. After sundry exclamations of regret at having suffered himself to be made a prisoner without a struggle, he asked if there was a door of communication with the street running at the back of the house; and, on my replying in the affirmative, he proposed that I should lend him my military frock coat, and ask an English officer who had accompanied him and remained outside to meet him there with his horse--"_alors_"--said he--the reckless valour of the father showing itself--"_avec le sabre de Tupper[31] je m'en--de ces laches d'Espagnols_." This of course was out of the question; as however unfairly he might have been kidnapped--and of which we had yet to be convinced--it was clear that Sir George's honour, on the faith of which he had been permitted to enter and remain in the house, would have been compromised by our connivance at his escape from it. We did all we could to quiet his apprehensions until the return of Sir George, who informed him that it appeared from the statement of the officer of the escort, that orders had been received from the general officer commanding at Algeciras to arrest him, should he, on any pretence, again pass the limits of the British garrison. The kind-hearted old General expressed the utmost regret at his having been so imprudent as to trust himself a second time in Spain (for only a month before he had been conducted to Gibraltar under an escort from Malaga)--and hoping that his own consciousness of innocence would relieve him from any fear as to the result of the affair, gave him a letter to General José O'Donnell, who commanded in the _Campo de Gibraltar_; in which letter he requested, as a favour to himself, that every respect and attention might be paid to the young Frenchman:--a favour he had every right to ask, from one who had received so many more important ones at his hands.-- General O'Donnell, in his reply, stated that he had but acted in conformity with instructions received from Madrid--that Monsieur Murat had some months previously landed at Malaga from a vessel which, when on its passage with him to America, had been obliged to put into that port to repair some slight damage experienced in a gale of wind--that, during his stay there, he had publicly expressed his hostility to the king's government, and, instead of proceeding to his destination when the vessel again put to sea, he had appeared rather disposed to establish himself in that (not over-loyal) city.--The Spanish government viewed these circumstances with a very suspicious eye; particularly as his elder brother had, but a few years before, been one of the _aspirans_ to the constitutional crown of Spain;--and he had consequently been sent with a _guard of honour_ to Gibraltar, from whence opportunities for America are more frequent than from Malaga. In compliance with Sir George Don's request, General O'Donnell promised that every attention should be paid to the youth's comfort, consistent with his safe custody, until instructions as to his disposal should be received from the capital. The cause of the violent proceedings adopted by the Spanish government turned out eventually to be, that this scion of Despotism had sung _Riego's hymn_ all the way from Malaga to Gibraltar; some of his _guard of honour_ even joining in chorus! and that at Estepona he had, through the influence of a _colonato_,[32] persuaded an old barber who had shaved him--he being the ex-trumpeter of the _Nacionales_--to play the forbidden tune to the astonished fishermen of the place! The sequel of this state affair was, that Monsieur Murat remained in durance at Algeciras, until a vessel bound to the United States offered him the means of crossing the Atlantic. I used to find that an occasional visit to San Roque made a very agreeable break in the monotony of a garrison life; for what place, let its attractions be ever so great, does not become dull when one is _per forza_ obliged to make it a residence? Even London, Paris, or Vienna, would not stand the test. The society of San Roque was not of a very _exclusive_ kind; for but little of the _sangre azul_[33] of Spain flowed in the veins of its inhabitants. Nevertheless, there, as elsewhere, some families were to be met with who looked upon themselves as of a superior order to the rest of the community; condescending, however, to mix with them on the most friendly footing at their nightly _Tertulia_. This is a kind of "at home," announced to be held sometimes once or twice a week, sometimes nightly, at the houses of the leading families of a town; the _reunion_ taking place after the theatre--should there be one.[34] In large towns it frequently happens that several houses are open to receive company on the same night. But, although it is considered rather a slight to neglect showing yourself at those to which you have the entrée, it is by no means necessary to do more than that; it being optional with you to pass the evening at whichever house you find most attractive, after going the round of all. Even the ladies who open their houses for _Tertulias_ consider it necessary to send some of the members of their family to the rival assemblies; always with a message of regret at not being able to go themselves, their own party being _so very crowded_ that they could not possibly absent themselves from it, without giving offence to their numerous guests. It must be confessed that the Tertulia is a very agreeable mode of associating; that it offers great variety, without being attended with the least formality, and entails but slight expense on the entertainers; iced water and _sospiros_[35] being, excepting on gala nights, the only refreshment offered to the company. There is very little difference observable in the various grades of Spanish society. The same incessant loud talking amongst the females distinguishes the whole; dancing, singing, cards, and games of forfeits, are the amusements of all. Even dress, until of late years, did not furnish a distinction, excepting, in a slight degree, by the costliness of the materials. But French taste, with its monstrous and ever-varying eccentricities, has corrupted that of the upper ranks of Spain, and occasioned the graceful and becoming national costume to be in a great measure laid aside. The great distinction that marks the various grades of Spanish society, is the latitude given to _smoking_. In the first circles, it is altogether prohibited. In the second, it is confined to a back room, or suffered in the patio.[36] In all others it is freely permitted. It is a positive libel on the ladies of Spain to say that they smoke under any circumstances; though the disgusting habit prevails amongst the females of Mexico and other transatlantic states that formerly were included in the empire of _both worlds_. A good letter of introduction insures a foreigner admission into the best Spanish society. He is taken the round of all the tertulias, and, on receiving from the lady of any house the assurance that it is _at his disposition_, may present himself there as often as he pleases. Should this form be withheld, he may take it for granted--despite the whisperings of self-love--that his future attendance is not wished for. The need of some little acquaintance with the Spanish language caused but few English officers to enter into the society of San Roque; but living there as much as I did, and being often placed in communication with the authorities, I derived from it a source of great amusement. Indeed, to Lady Viale[37] and her amiable family I am indebted for many agreeable evenings; her house uniting the pleasing informality of Spanish with the solid hospitality (I use the term in our eating and drinking sense of it) of English society. It would be an error to depict the manners and customs of the inhabitants of San Roque, as those of the natives of Andalusia generally; since, in their various pursuits, the former are so frequently thrown in contact with Englishmen and other foreigners settled at Gibraltar, that they cannot but have acquired some of their habits, and imbibed some of their ideas. Nevertheless, there is a self-conceit about all Spaniards, that makes them particularly slow in throwing off their nationality; and the difference is consequently not so great as might naturally be expected. A proof of this is afforded by the circumstance of the English language not being spoken, nor even understood, by fifty of the inhabitants of San Roque; although it is evidently so much their interest to acquire it. Their intercourse, on the other hand, (and this is observable in all the sea-port towns of Spain) has given them strangely ill defined notions of _English liberty_, and equally extraordinary opinions of our religious tenets; and has filled their minds with highly constitutional ideas of the iniquity of taxation, and most conscientious scruples as to the propriety of supporting a national church. I fear, indeed, that deistical, nay I believe I should say Atheistical, opinions prevail to a great extent amongst the upper orders of Spaniards, though they still continue to observe--if not the penances--all the superstitious ceremonies and absurd fooleries of the Romish church. One of their extraordinary lental ceremonies I became acquainted with under very _alarming_ circumstances. I was awaked one fine April morning, during one of my earliest visits to San Roque, by a most furious fusillade, which, considering the unsettled state of Spain at that particular juncture, I naturally enough concluded was occasioned by some popular commotion. The appearance of my servant in answer to a hasty summons of the bell immediately quieted my apprehensions on that score, however; the broad grin that distended his round Kentish countenance plainly bespeaking the absence of all danger;--though what occasioned his unwonted merriment puzzled me to divine. In reply to my inquiries touching the firing, the only answer I could obtain was, "They're a shooting of Hoodah."--"And who the deuce is Hoodah?" said I, "and what has he been about?"--But on these points he was quite as ignorant as myself; so dressing with all possible despatch--the astounding rolls of musketry, and as it appeared to me of field artillery also, continuing the whole time I was so occupied, seeming indeed to spread to all parts of the town--I issued forth, armed up to the teeth, and on turning the corner of the street saw, to my horror, a human figure suspended in the air, and reduced almost to a bundle of rags by the incessant firing of--as I supposed--a party of soldiers posted in a cross street. This surely is "making assurance doubly sure," thought I. Why the poor devil can't have an inch of sound flesh in his body after all this peppering. The bang, bang continued incessantly, however, accompanied by roars of laughter, until at length the ill-fated Hoodah was in a blaze. A crowd of men and boys, armed with guns, pistols, and blunderbusses, now rushed from the cross street, (where they had been concealed from my view) rending the air with _vivas_. At this same moment a loud peal of music burst upon me from a neighbouring church, and from its portal issued a long train of priests preceded by the Host. With these came the recollections of its being Easter Sunday, and of the guttural pronunciation of the Spanish _J_; and quite ashamed of my war-like demonstration, I retreated to my house yet quicker than I had issued from it. The distant firing continued some time longer; and I afterwards learnt that the effigies of no less than seven _Judases_ had that morning been severally hanged, shot, and burnt, to satisfy the holy rage of the devout inhabitants of San Roque. CHAPTER III. COUNTRY IN THE VICINITY OF SAN ROQUE--RUINS OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF CARTEIA--FIELD OF BATTLE OF ALPHONSO THE ELEVENTH--JOURNEY TO RONDA--FOREST OF ALMORAIMA--MOUTH OF THE LIONS--FINE SCENERY--TOWN OF GAUCIN--A SPANISH INN--OLD CASTLE AT GAUCIN--INTERIOR OF AN ANDALUSIAN POSADA--SPANISH HUMOUR--MOUNTAIN WINE. The country in the immediate vicinity of San Roque is tame and uninteresting; but, within the distance of an hour's ride, in whatever direction you may turn your horse's head, it becomes agreeably varied,--presenting wide, cultivated valleys, shady forests of cork, oak, and pine, and wild and cragged mountains. In the neighbourhood are many objects well deserving the attention of the antiquary; amongst others, the ruins of the ancient city of Carteia, situated on the sea-shore, within the bay of Gibraltar, and near the mouth of the River Guadaranque. The walls may be traced very distinctly; they enclose an amphitheatre, in a tolerable state of preservation, reliques of baths and other edifices, and the remains of a small temple of Corinthian architecture and most exquisite and elaborate workmanship. This last has only recently been discovered. It was built of beautiful white marble, and its columns, though lying prostrate, appeared to have suffered little by their fall; but such is the want of antiquarian taste in the Spaniards of the present day, that it is to be feared this fine specimen of the arts has already disappeared, and is now only to be met with in detached blocks, scattered throughout the neighbouring farm-houses and walls. The learned Mr. Francis Carter, whose interesting "Journey from Gibraltar to Malaga" has, it is much to be regretted, been long out of print, states, that Carteia was built on the ruins of a "most antique" city called Tartessus, or Tarsis, from whence, "once in three years," the fleets of King Solomon "brought gold and silver, ivory and _apes_ and peacocks."[38] The Greeks afterwards called this city Heraclea,[39] and in yet more recent times it received the name of Carteia. The Carthagenians (on the authority of Justin) made themselves masters of this place, about 280 years B.C., and retained possession of it until they were finally expelled from Spain by Scipio Africanus, B.C. 203. It was one of the cities most devoted to the cause of the Pompeys, and that to which Cneus fled for refuge after his defeat at Munda. On the margin of the River Guadaranque, at a short distance from the walls of the city, may be seen some remnants of its ancient quays, and about a mile higher up the stream, other vestiges of antiquity present themselves, which are supposed to be the remains of a Dock or Arsenal. They consist of several moles constructed of stone and brick intermixed, and held together by a very durable cement. The Guadaranque (River of Mares) discharges itself into the bay of Gibraltar, three miles N.W. of the fortress; and some distance further to the westward, the Palmones, another mountain stream, also empties itself into the bay. In the bed of this latter river may be seen the piers of a ruined bridge, said to be a work of the Romans. It is evident from these remains, that a great change has taken place in the character of the two rivers: since the first can now be entered only by boats of the very lightest draught, and the other is fordable immediately above the ruins of the Roman bridge. The plain between the two rivers is not devoid of interest, being celebrated as one of the battle fields of the heroic Alphonso XI. (A.D. 1333) whose exploits, independent of his having been the most chivalric monarch of the Castillian race, are particularly interesting to Englishmen, from the circumstance of many of our countrymen having fought under his banner against the Moslems, and particularly at the siege of Algeciras: which place, notwithstanding the destructive weapons[40] there for the first time employed against the Christian army, was captured after a twenty months' siege, and in spite of the repeated attempts of the allied kings of Granada and Gibraltar to relieve it, A.D. 1344. In these various endeavours to raise the siege, the plain extending between the Guadaranque and Palmones again became the scene of fierce contention; of which a most interesting account will be found in Villasan's Chronicles of Alphonso XI. Numerous other points in the neighbourhood of San Roque are equally worthy of observation; but these I shall not detain my reader longer to particularise, as other opportunities will present themselves for doing so more conveniently, in the course of our travels; it being my purpose to make San Roque a kind of "base of operations," upon which I shall from time to time retire, for a fresh supply of notes and sketches. I shall now therefore direct my steps due north, through the lonely and almost boundless forest of Almoraima, towards Ximena. The forest consists principally of cork, oak, and ilex; but, in the marshy parts of it, (called _sotos_,) ash, willow, and other trees to which such localities are favourable, grow very luxuriantly. The owner of this vast domain is the Marquis of Moscoso,--who derives from it a revenue totally disproportioned to its value and extent; and what little he does get, he squanders nightly at the gaming-table. The principal source of revenue arises from the numerous herds of swine and other cattle, that are driven from all parts of the country to feed upon the acorns, herbage, and underwood, scattered throughout the forest; the fine, well grown trees with which it abounds being turned to no better account than to furnish bark and charcoal. This is entirely owing to the want of means of conveying the timber to a market; for not even to Gibraltar--in which direction the country is level--is there a road capable of bearing the draught of heavy weights. Of course the ruinous passion that swallows up all the proprietor's resources prevents any attempt at improvement in the management of the estate; and thus, whilst huge trees, stript of their bark, lie rotting in some parts of the forest, in others, the underwood is set on fire by the peasantry--to the great detriment of the larger trees--to improve the pasture for their cattle. The ride through the forest is delightful, even in the most sultry season, the wide-spreading branches of the gnarled cork-trees screening the narrow paths most effectually from the sun's rays. The gurgle of the tortuous Guadaranque,--which, escaped from the mountain ravines that encircle its sources, here wends its way more leisurely to the sea,--may be heard distinctly on the left, and now and then a glimpse may even be caught of its dark blue stream, winding under a perfect arbour of woodbine, clematis, and other creepers, and spanned here and there by a rustic bridge. The single stem of a tree of which these bridges usually consist is readily enough crossed by the practised feet and heads of the swineherds and foresters; but to strangers unskilled in the art of slack rope dancing, the passage of the stream, like that of the bridge leading to the Mohammedan's paradise, is a feat of no very easy achievement. Occasionally, wide, open glades, carpeted with a rich greensward, present themselves in the very heart of the forest, to diversify the scenery--giving it quite the character of an English park; and from these breaks in the wood a view may generally be obtained of the far-distant towers of Castellar; the mountain fortress of the master of this princely domain, now inhabited by his _Administrador_, or Agent, his gamekeepers, and other dependents. The forest abounds in deer, wild boars, and wolves; but, excepting the first named, these animals seldom venture to descend into the level parts of the forest in open day, but confine themselves to the thickly wooded glens, that furrow the mountain range bordering the right bank of the Guadaranque. Permission to shoot in the forest is never refused to the British officers and inhabitants of Gibraltar. Indeed, excepting for the _caza mayor_,[41] the ceremony of asking leave is not considered necessary; and in the winter season the _sotos_ afford good sport, woodcocks, ducks, and snipes, being very plentiful. Turning now away from the Guadaranque, and leaving a spacious convent that gives its name to the forest, about half a mile on the left, the road inclines to the eastward, and soon reaches a large solitary building, the Venta _del Aqua del Quejigo_, but known more commonly amongst the English by the name of the Long Stables, and distinguished as the scene of many a festive meeting, and many a bacchanalian orgie, being a favourite place of rendezvous for a _Batida_.[42] My head aches at the very recollection of the nights passed within its walls. We will therefore pass on, and again plunge into the forest. After proceeding about a mile, the road divides into two branches. That on the right hand is the most direct way to Gaucin, whither I am bending my steps; but the other, though little known, is the best, and offers more attractions to the lover of the picturesque. I will therefore take it, in the present instance, and advise all who may follow in my wake to do the like. Continuing two miles further through the impervious forest, the road at length arrives at the brink of a deep ravine on the right, when a lovely view breaks upon the traveller, looking over a rich valley watered by the river Sogarganta, and towards the mountain fortress of Casares and lofty Sierra Bermeja. The road, hemmed in by steep banks, and still overshadowed by the forest, descends rather rapidly towards the before named river; and this narrow pass, being the only outlet from the forest in this direction, has, from its celebrity in days past as a place of danger, received the name of the _Boca de Leones_--mouth of the lions. On emerging from the pass, a wide and carefully cultivated valley presents itself. The river which fertilizes it, here makes a considerable elbow; the chain of hills clothed by the Almoraima forest checking its southerly course, and directing it nearly due east towards the Mediterranean. To the north, the valley extends nearly ten miles, appearing to be closed by a conical mound that is crowned by the old castle of Ximena; the town itself being piled up on its eastern side. The road to that place (eight miles) keeps along the right bank of the Sogarganta, which winds gracefully through the wide, flat-bottomed valley; but the track to Gaucin crosses by a ford to the opposite side of the stream, and, after advancing about four miles, inclines to the right, traverses a low range of hills, and comes down upon the river Guadiaro. This is crossed by means of a ferryboat, and leaving its bank, and proceeding in a northerly direction, the road passes over a gently undulated country for several miles, and then begins to ascend a high wooded ridge on the right hand. The ascent is long and tortuous, but tolerably easy, and the view, looking towards Ximena (distant about five miles) is very grand and imposing. The castellated crag, so proudly conspicuous an hour before, is now, however, shorn of all its importance; the superior elevation of the point from whence it is viewed, as well as the magnificence of the mountains that rise to the westward of Ximena--which now first burst upon the sight--making it appear but a pebble at their feet. But scenery of a more varied and yet more magnificent kind awaits the traveller, at the pass by which the road traverses the ridge that he has now been nearly an hour ascending. The lovely valley of the Genal[43] is there spread out to his enraptured gaze. On the left, embosomed in groves of orange, citron, and pomegranate trees, and shadowed with clustering vines, stands the picturesque town of Gaucin,--its boldly outlined castle perched on the crest of a rough ledge of rock that rises abruptly behind. Stretching some way down the eastern side of the cragged mound, the advanced battlements of the Moorish stronghold terminate at the brink of a frightful precipice, which not only forbids all approach to the town in that direction, but threatens even some day to close up the narrow valley it overhangs. Of the little stream that flows in the deep and thickly wooded ravine, an occasional glimpse only can be caught, as it turns coquettishly from side to side; but its general direction is marked by a succession of water-mills, as well as by a belt of orange and lemon groves, whose dark green foliage is easily distinguished from, and offers a pleasing variety to, the more brilliant tints of the surrounding forest. Beyond, however, where the valley becomes wider and more open, the stream may be distinctly traced lingering over its pebbly bed, and finally forming its junction with the Guadiaro. The steep but graceful slopes of the mountain ridge that bounds the valley to the east are thickly clothed with cork, oak, chesnut, and ilex; whilst the rugged peaks of the Sierra Cristellina, in which it terminates towards Gibraltar, rise so precipitously as seemingly to defy even a goat to find footing. Over this chain may be seen the distant Sierra Bermeja, celebrated in Spanish history as the last refuge of the persecuted Moslems, and the eastern roots of which are washed by the Mediterranean. Half an hour's ride brings the traveller from the pass to Gaucin,--the descent being but short, and very gradual. Gaucin is a long straggling town, of semi-circular form, and is built partly under the rocky eminence occupied by the castle, partly on the southern slope of a narrow gorge that connects this stronghold with the more elevated _Sierra del Hacho_. The principal street, which traverses the place from west to east, is wider than most one is accustomed to see in old Moorish towns, and cleaner than any I have met with in modern Spanish cities. But nature has all the merit of endowing it with the latter virtue; having supplied it with copious springs, which, in their downward course, carry off all the usual impurities of Andalusian streets. The houses, though not good, are clean, and are decorated with a profusion of flowers of all sorts, that give out a delicious perfume; and in various parts of the town, a vine-clung trelliswork of canes is carried quite across the street, affording at the same time an agreeable shade and a pleasing vista. The first impression made by the town is therefore decidedly favourable. We--(I ought by the way to have stated before now, that the party with which I travelled on this occasion consisted of _four_)--we therefore, I repeat, had to traverse the town from one end to the other, to arrive at the _posada_; which was indicated only by the short, inorthographical, but otherwise satisfactory and invigorating announcement, painted in large black letters on the whitewashed wall of the building--"_Aqui se bende vuen bino_."[44] A cockney could not have managed to make more mistakes between his _v's_ and _w's_, than our _Andaluz Posadero_[45] had succeeded in compressing into this pithy advertisement;--hoping, however, that he held his plighted word in greater respect than the rules of Castillian grammar,[46] we spurred our horses through the half-opened _porte cochère_, and, _à l'Espagnole_, rode at once into the principal apartment of the hostelry. The interior was far from giving the same cheering assurance that good entertainment was to be had for money, as was announced externally of the sale of good wine. I was as yet (I speak of my first visit to Gaucin) but a novice in Spanish travelling, and thought I had never seen a more wretched, uncomfortable, and in every way unpromising, place. But the day was already far spent, and the chance of our finding better accommodation by proceeding further on our journey was against us;--moreover, we had been assured (which by experience I afterwards learnt to be the case) that this was the only _Parador_ fit for _Caballeros_ between San Roque and Ronda. It consisted of one long, windowless apartment, that from the number and variety of its inmates gave no bad idea of Noah's ark. Three fourths of the dark smoky space served as a stable, wherein four rows of quadrupeds were compactly tethered; and, impatient for their evening meal, were neighing, braying, and bleating, with all the powers of their respective lungs. Amidst the filth and litter that covered the pavement, lay numberless pigs of all sizes, and every condition of life; some squeaking for mere squeaking's sake, others grunting in all the discomfort of repletion. On the rafters overhead some scores of gallinaceous animals had congregated for the night; adding, nevertheless, their quota of noise to that of the lower region, whenever one of their number was abducted from the roost, to be hurried out of its peaceful existence, into a greasy olla. The remaining portion of the apartment served both as a refectory and a dormitory for the _arrieros_,--owners of the tethered quadrupeds--and also as a kitchen, where their various odoriferous suppers were preparing. The mistress of the mansion--as wrinkle-visaged an old harridan as ever tossed off a bumper of _aguadiente_--assisted by her two daughters, was busily employed, plucking, drawing, dissecting, and otherwise preparing, divers rabbits, chickens, and other animals, to satisfy the craving appetites of her numerous guests; and cats innumerable were in close attendance, clawing and squabbling for the offal, which, to save all further trouble, was thrown to them on the floor. The prospect was any thing but inviting; but, as I have said before, there was no alternative;--so, begging the _Posadera_ to draw near, we requested she would inform us whether we could be accommodated with a lodging for the night. Having deliberately scanned the party, and ascertained to her satisfaction that it consisted entirely of Englishmen,--whose pockets Spaniards are apt to consider as inexhaustible as the mines of Mexico and Peru,--the old beldame, oiling her iron features into a species of smile, assured us we could be lodged _con toda comodidad_;[47] and screeching to her daughter _Mariquita_, she desired her to hand over the rabbit she was skinning to her _hermanita_[48] _Frasquita_, and show the _Caballeros_[49] to the _Sala_.[50] Mariquita led us forthwith up a narrow rickety staircase, which, situated in a dark corner of the room, had escaped our observation; and into a small room, or rather loft, where she assured us we should be very quiet and comfortable; adding that it was always reserved for _gente de pelo_[51] like ourselves. The only comfort apparent was the undisturbed possession of a space twelve feet square, enclosed by four bare walls: for of bedding or furniture of any sort it was quite destitute. We submitted with as good a grace as possible, but, after some persuasion, succeeded in procuring four mattresses to spread on the clay floor; as many pairs of clean sheets and pillows; and some pie-dishes to serve as wash-hand basins. We then descended, to have some further conversation with our hostess concerning supper. The landlady's reply to our first question, "what can we have?" was gratifying in the extreme--viz. "_lo que ustedes gusten_"--"just what you please." But, discovering by our next, more explicit demand, "what can you give us?" that we depended upon the resources of the _posada_ for our evening meal, her astonishment knew no bounds, and her doubts of the Potosi state of our purses became very evident. Leaving, therefore, the delicate affair to be explained and settled by one of our servants, who, being an old traveller, understood how to negociate these matters, we proceeded to examine the ruined castle, ere the sun had sunk below the horizon. A rugged zig-zag pathway--along which, at stated intervals, are represented the various sufferings and indignities endured by our Saviour on his way to Mount Calvary--leads to the summit of the rocky ledge. The fortress that crowns it must, in the days of the Moors, have possessed great military importance, as it completely commands the valley, and consequently all the roads leading through it, towards the coast. It is now merely a picturesque ruin; its Artillery being dismounted, its wells choked up, and its battlements overgrown with ivy. A chapel dedicated to the _Niño Dios_[52] is apparently the only thing within its precincts deemed worthy of preservation. The view from this spot is very extensive and beautiful, but hardly so fine as one (which will be hereafter noticed) that presents itself some miles higher up the valley, when the castle itself becomes one of the principal features of the landscape, whilst the distant scenery remains the same. Returning to the Posada, we lighted our cigars; and, feeling sensibly the change in the temperature of this elevated region, we joined the natives assembled round the fireplace, who, with the courtesy natural to all Spaniards, immediately rose and offered us the seats of honour. The portion of the apartment allotted to the human kind had now become crowded with persons of all sorts and conditions; for the animals being peacefully engaged at their evening repast, their owners thought it time to be looking after their's. Some, indeed, had already satisfied the cravings of nature from their own wallets and _pig_-skins, and, taking time by the forelock, were stretched full length on the floor; their _Mantas_ and _Capas_ serving them for mattresses and coverlets, their saddles and _alforjas_ for bolsters and pillows. Others, seated on low stools composed of junks of cork, had resolved themselves into committees, to discuss the merits of a _Gazpacho caliente_,[53] or direct their inquiries into the hidden treasures of a savoury _olla_. Some were assisting the hostess and her somewhat pretty daughters, in their culinary operations; and many were assembled round the wide chimney piece, drinking, smoking, manufacturing _papelitos_ for the morrow's consumption, and relating their adventures. Here also were seated several of the village magnates, who repair nightly to this convenient rendezvous, as well to indulge a natural propensity to gossip, as to hear the news from _La Plaza_, and negotiate with the arrieros for their contraband cottons and tobacco. The whole presented an interior quite suited to the pencil of a Teniers. A bright wood fire sparkled on the wide hearth, shedding a brilliant red light upon the group of animated figures assembled in its immediate vicinity, and here and there also picking out some conspicuous figure from the more distant parties. The back ground was in deep Murillo shade, excepting on one side; where the flickering flame of a solitary lamp, contrasting its pale light with that of the fire, cast a yellow tinge on the squalid features of the hostess and her helpmates, round whom the eyes of some dozen of cats danced like monster fireflies. A well polished _batterie de cuisine_; sides of bacon; ropes of onions; platters; goblets and tobacco smoke, were not wanting to fill up the picture. But it was perfect without the aid of such accessories; the spirit and expression of each actor in the Spanish scene, and the diversity of costume, giving it a decided superiority over a picture of the "_Flemish School_;" in which foaming pots of beer, and a melting _frau_, must needs be introduced, to extract animation from the stolid features of the assembled boors. The lower order of Spaniards have a great deal of racy humour which renders them admirable _raconteurs_. The _arrieros_ assembled round the fire on the present occasion were relating some story of the barbarous treatment received by a good Capuchin friar, at the hands of some wicked _ladrones_,[54] who, finding he possessed nothing worth being plundered of, had bastinadoed his feet until he could not walk, tied his hands together, enveloped him in a goat skin, fastened a pair of ram's horns on his head, a bell to his rosary, and suspending that from his neck, had left him to crawl as he best could, to the nearest village. This tale, though not addressed to him, was evidently intended for the ears of a monk of the same mendicant order, who, pale and trembling, sat in one corner of the chimney place, listening, with open-mouthed attention, to every word the _arrieros_ said; at the same time counting his beads without intermission, and crossing himself devoutly at the relation of each fresh act of barbarity practised on his unfortunate brother. From the significant glances that from time to time passed between the narrators,--for several of the assembled group came forward to vouch for the truth of the story,--and latterly between them and ourselves, when they saw we were aware of the drift of their joke; it was evidently all fiction; but the tale was told with such minute details, and its veracity maintained by so many asseverations, that any one, not seeing the by-play, might easily, like the unhappy monk, have been made the victim of the hoax. "_Caramba!_" at length exclaimed the _Alcalde mayor_[55] of Gaucin, who occupied one corner of the fireplace--"_Caramba!_ this is a strange story! and it is most extraordinary, that in my official capacity"--this was said with a certain magisterial air--"I should not have been made acquainted with it. Pray tell me; _when_ did this happen? and what became of the pious man?"--"With respect to the time," said another muleteer, taking up the story, "I cannot precisely inform you; but that matters little; be satisfied that, in the narration of the story, _no se salga un punto de la verdad_.[56] As for the friar, he crawled to the nearest village, driving before him all the cattle he encountered on the road, like mad things--asses braying--dogs barking; and cows with their tails in the air as erect as palm trees. The inhabitants took the alarm; and, snatching up their _niños_ and _rosarios_, scampered off without listening to what the _Padre_ was crying:--indeed the louder he hallooed to them to stop, the faster they ran; for they all thought it was the devil that was at their heels."--"And I believe think so to this day," joined in another arriero, taking his cigar from his mouth, and rolling forth a long cloud of smoke--"for at last, the village priest, seizing upon a crucifix in one hand, and an _escopeta_[57] in the other, and repeating a heap of _Ave Marias_, _Pater nostres_, and _credos_, went out to meet the beast. On getting within gunshot, he presented the _escopeta_ (for I saw it myself, though he said afterwards it was the crucifix,) upon which the figure fell prostrate on the ground. So then the _Cura_ went up to it, and, after a few minutes, beckoned the people forward, and told them how he had cast a devil out of a good Capuchin, and showed the skin and horns he had kept as trophies. The skin was cut up and sold to the bystanders for charms against the evil one; and the friar was placed on an ass, and conveyed to the _Cura's_ dwelling, where he remained until his feet were healed. He then returned to his convent, telling every body that he had been assailed by devils in the form of contrabandistas, and that a miracle had been wrought in his favour." Here all crossed themselves--arrieros inclusive. Others of the muleteers were bandying compliments with the crabbed old landlady; one swearing that her wine was as sweet as her face; another that her breath was more savoury than a _chorizo_;[58] a third that his chocolate was less clear than her complexion: all which jokes she bore with stoical indifference, returning generally, however, a Rowland for an Oliver. At length our supper was announced, and we betook ourselves to the loft, where we found four chairs and a low table had been added to the furniture. Our meal consisted of a stewed fowl, that had been pulled down from the roost before our eyes, not an hour before; an omelet abounding in onion and garlic; and, what we found far more palatable, ham and bread and butter, which we had taken care to come provided with. I must not, however, omit to do justice to the Gaucin wine, which is excellent, and has much the flavour of a _sound_ Niersteiner. The best is grown on the side of the _Hacho_, or peaked mountain above the town. All the wine of the Serrania is good, when not _flavoured_ with aniseed; but it must be "drunk on the premises;" for the vile habit of carrying it in pig-skins is sure to give it some bad taste--either of the skin itself, if new, or of its preceding contents, (probably aniseed brandy) if old. I tried in vain to get some pure Guacin wine conveyed to Gibraltar, but it had always a "smack" of the unclean animal's skin. CHAPTER IV. JOURNEY TO RONDA CONTINUED--A WORD ON THE PASSPORT AND BILL OF HEALTH NUISANCES, AND SPANISH CUSTOM-HOUSE OFFICERS--ROMANTIC SCENERY--SPLENDID VIEW--BENADALID--ATAJATE--FIRST VIEW OF THE VALE OF RONDA--A DISSERTATION ON ADVENTURES, TO MAKE UP FOR THEIR ABSENCE--LUDICROUS INSTANCE OF THE EFFECTS OF PUTTING THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE. "_A quien madruga, Dios le ayuda_,"[59] is a common Spanish saying; and though our hard beds took off much from the merit of our early rising, it nevertheless brought its reward, by enabling us to witness a sunrise scene of most surpassing beauty. Partaking of a cup of chocolate,--a breakfast that every Arriero indulges in,--a slice of bread fried in hog's lard--which is a much better thing, and quite as wholesome, as _breakfast bacon_--we lit our cigars, paid our bill--a little fortune to the lady of the hostel--and bestrode our horses without more delay. In this part of Spain passports are not included amongst the drags upon travelling. You should be provided with one, in case of getting into trouble of any kind; but, excepting during the prevalence of the cholera, I never, in any of my numerous peregrinations, was even asked to produce it. I happened at that particular period (1833) to have undertaken the journey from Gibraltar to Madrid. The disease was raging with fatal violence on the banks of the lower Guadalquivir, and, spreading Eastward, had appeared in various towns and villages at the foot of the Serranía de Ronda. At the same time, reports were rife of its existence at Malaga, Estepona, and other places situated on the shores of the Mediterranean. I had therefore to thread my way to Cordoba, (where I hoped to fall in with the diligence from Seville to the capital) through the heart of the Serranía, and was obliged in some cases to avoid particular towns lying in the direct route, because--though no suspicion existed of their being infected with the dreadful disease--they chanced to be within the limits of the kingdom of Seville, which was placed, _in toto_, under the ban of quarantine. My passport, or, more properly speaking, my bill of health--for the political importance of the former yielded to the sanatory consequence of its more humble-looking adjunct--was then in great request; the entrance to every little village being interdicted, until the constituted authority had come forward to see that all was right. On one of these occasions, I found a beggar officiating as inspector of health and passports, and I must do him the justice to say, that he performed his duty in the most honourable manner, not asking for "_una limosnita par el amor de Dios_"[60] until he had carefully examined every part of the lengthy document, and pronounced it to be _corriente_.[61] On another occasion, a swineherd was decorated with the yellow cockade and sword of office. In this instance, I thought the bill of the inn at San Roque (which I happened to have in my pocket-book) would answer every purpose, and save time. He examined it most gravely; turned it over and over--for it was rather a long and a very illegible MS.--said it was perfectly correct, (a point on which we differed most materially) and dismissed me with a _vaya usted con Dios_.[62] On my present tour, however, we experienced no obstructions of any sort; for custom-house barriers, though now and then met with at the large towns, occasion no longer delay than a turnpike in England, and are as regularly paid; the _Aduanero_[63] holding out his hand as openly and confidently for the bribe, as the gatekeeper does for his toll. It is scarcely possible to imagine more romantic and, at the same time, more varied scenery than that which presents itself between Gaucin and Ronda. For the greater part of the first three leagues[64] (full fourteen English miles) to Atajate, the road winds along the summit of a low mountain chain, (I speak only as compared with the height of the neighbouring Sierras) the western side of which slopes gracefully to the clear and tortuous Guadiaro, whilst the eastern falls abruptly to the dark and rapid Genal. In some places, the width of the mountain ridge exceeds but little that of the road itself; enabling the traveller to embrace the two valleys at one glance, and compare their respective beauties. The difference between them is very remarkable; for whilst the sides of both are clothed with the richest vegetation, yet the more gentle character of the one has encouraged the husbandman to devote his labour principally to the culture of corn, hemp, and the vine; whereas, the steep and broken banks of the other, being less accessible to the plough, are mostly planted with groves of fig, olive, chesnut, and almond trees; though vineyards are also pretty abundant. For the same reason, though both valleys are studded with villages, yet those along the sloping banks of the Guadiaro are large, and distant from each other; whilst, in the more contracted valley of the Genal, almost every isolated crag is occupied by a group of houses, or a dilapidated fortilage, mementoes of the Saracenic occupation; as the names, Benarrabá, Benastépar, Algatocin, Genalguacil, Benalhauría, Benadalid, &c. sufficiently attest. Beyond the valleys on either side, rise chains of rugged mountains; some covered to their very peaks with dark forests of pine and ilex; others rearing their pointed summits beyond the bounds of vegetation. The eastern chain is that which borders the Mediterranean shore between Estepona and Marbella; the western is the yet more lofty Sierra that divides the waters of the Guadiaro and Guadalete; directing the former to the Mediterranean, the latter to the Atlantic; and terminating in the ever-memorable headland of Trafalgar. Through the passes between the huge peaks that break the summit of this bold range, an occasional glimpse may be caught of the low and far distant ground about Cadiz and Chiclana; but the view that most excites the traveller's admiration is obtained from a knoll on the road side, about three miles from Gaucin, looking back on that place, and down the verdant valley of the Genal. The ruins of the old Moorish fortress occupy the right of the picture, the cragged ridge on which it is perched jutting boldly into the valley, and (uncheered by the sun's rays) standing out in fine relief from the bright, vine-clad slope of the impending _Sierra del Hacho_, and yet more distant mountains. To the left, the view is bounded by the rugged peaks of the Sierra Cristellina, from the foot of which a dense but variegated forest spreads entirely across the valley, wherein may here and there be traced the snake-like course of the impatient Genal. Further on, the valley presents a wider opening; but the little stream still has to struggle for a passage amongst the wide spreading roots of the retiring mountains, which, overlapping each other in rapid succession, present, for many miles, a most singularly furrowed country. Calpe's fantastic peaks rear themselves above all these intermediate ridges, marking the boundary of Europe: whilst, to the left of the celebrated promontory, Ceuta may be seen, stretching far into the glassy Mediterranean, and to the right, the huge Sierra Bullones, (Apes hill) falling perpendicularly to the Straits of Gibraltar. In the extreme distance, the African mountains rise in successive ranges, until closed by the chain of the lower Atlas, the faint blue outline of which may be distinctly traced in this transparent atmosphere, although at a distance of at least one hundred miles. It is a scene that amply repays the traveller for all the désagrémens of his night's lodging, and one which, numerous as were my visits to Gaucin, I always turned my back upon with regret. I do so even now, and proceed on to Ronda, leaving the villages of Algatocin and Benalhauría, situated on the side of the mountain, to the right of the road, and about pistol-shot from it; and in a few miles more, descending by a rough zig-zag track (something worse than a decayed staircase) towards the little town of Benidalid; which, with its picturesque castle, stands also somewhat off the road, and immediately under a lofty tor of decomposed rock, distinguished by the name of the _Peñon de los Frailes_,[65] and seems doomed, some day or other, to have the holy mound upon its shoulders. The next and last village on the road is Atajate, distant about ten miles from Ronda. It is nestled in a narrow pass, overhung on one side by the mountain chain along which the road has hitherto been conducted, (and which here begins to rise considerably above it) and on the other, by a conical crag, whose summit is occupied by the picturesque ruins of a Moorish fortress. In former ages, the houses of the hardy mountaineers, clustered round the base of the little fastness, must have been secure from all attack; and even now the pass, which here cuts the direct communication between Gibraltar and Ronda, (and consequently Madrid) might be held against a very superior force. Immediately after passing Atajate, the character of the scenery undergoes a complete change. The mountains become more rugged and arid, rising in huge masses some thousand feet above the road, and are tossed about in curious confusion. Patches of corn and flax are yet here and there to be seen, and the valley beneath is still clothed with cork and ilex; but the vineyards, olive grounds, and chesnut groves, have altogether disappeared, and the villages are far apart, and distant from the road. On advancing some little way further, all traces of cultivation cease. The road,--if a collection of jagged blocks of granite can be so called,--traverses a succession of perilous ascents and descents; sometimes being conducted along the brink of an awful precipice, at others carried under huge masses of crumbling rock. Here and there may, nevertheless, be traced the remains of a paved road, that, in the days of Spain's pride, was made for the express purpose of transporting artillery and stores to the siege of Gibraltar. It is now--so sadly is Spain fallen!--purposely suffered to go to decay, lest it should offer facilities for making irruptions from that same fortress! On drawing near the head of the valley, several narrow cut-throat passes present themselves, bringing forcibly to mind Don Quijote's speech to his faithful squire, on reaching the Puerto Lapice, "_Aqui, hermano Sancho, podemos meter las manos hasta los codos en esto que llaman aventuras._"[66] But, on gaining the summit of the chain, the country becomes more open, and the traveller again breathes freely. A few meagre crops of corn are scattered here and there between the rocks, and the bells of the fathers of a herd of goats are heard tinkling amongst the gorse and palmeta that fringe the feet of the impending tors, bespeaking the vicinity of fellow man, and giving the traveller a pleasing consciousness of security, whilst he checks his horse to gaze on the splendid scene before him: for here the lovely basin of Ronda first bursts upon his view, rich as Ceres and Pomona can make it. In the centre of the verdant plain, but crowning the summit of an isolated rocky eminence, stands the shining city,--its patched and crumbling walls telling of many a protracted siege and desperate assault. Beyond, the view is bounded by a range of wooded mountains, that forms the western barrier of the secluded basin, and up the rough sides of which, the roads to Cadiz, Seville, and Xeres, may be traced, winding their tedious way. The descent to Ronda is long, and, from the badness of the road, extremely wearying. The whole distance from Gaucin (about 25 miles) occupied us seven hours. I regret much that my reader should have had to accompany me over this savage and romantic country--the reputed _head-quarters_ of banditti--without encountering a single adventure; but the truth is, they are by no means so plentiful as people have generally been led to believe. I may speak with some confidence on this point; since, independently of my long residence in the immediate vicinity of this wild tract--during which every well authenticated case of outrage and robbery came to my knowledge--I have by personal experience been able to form a pretty correct estimate of the amount of danger incurred by the traveller. I have traversed the country, however, in all directions, and at all seasons; in all characters, and in all dresses. I have gone on foot, on horseback, _en calesa_, (where the roads admitted of my so doing) alone, attended by a single servant, in parties of four, six, and eight:--as a sportsman, _en militaire_, as a peasant, as a _Majo_: and yet I never "met with an adventure." It is true, I have had many very narrow escapes--that is to say, judging from the information I invariably received--for never did I leave a _venta_, that I was not mysteriously told the road I was about to take was the most dangerous in the whole Serranía; that I should be sure to encounter _mala gente_; and that it was but a few days before, a robbery--perhaps murder--had taken place, on that very road, attended with most heart-rending and appalling circumstances! But a little cross-questioning soon convinced me that my informant knew nothing of the who, the when, and the where, to which his tale referred; and the story was always reduced to a shrug of the shoulders and a _se dice_.[67] The plain truth is, that almost every one the traveller comes in contact with is, in some way or other, interested in spreading these reports to create alarm. The _Ventero_[68] has a natural disinclination to part with a good customer, and hopes either to persuade his guest to hire additional horses and guides, or to detain him whilst he seeks for further information. The guide finds it his interest to alarm his employer, if only _pour faire valoir ses services_ in piloting him clear of these reported Scyllas and Charybdises. The Contrabandista tries to frighten the stranger, that he may learn which road he is travelling and what is his business; the Arriero simply for his amusement. The peasant alone has no purpose to serve in deceiving the traveller, neither has he any intention of so doing; for he himself implicitly believes all the stories he hears, and repeats them with the usual notes and addenda of a second edition. He never stirs out of a circle of a league and a half from his dwelling--that is, beyond the range of his herd of goats, or the nearest market town--and he hears these tales repeated night after night, at the venta chimney-piece--each arriero trying to outdo his brother in the marvellous and horrible--until he becomes convinced of their veracity, and repeats them as well authenticated facts. The state of the country is also such, that when a robbery actually is committed--and such crimes will be perpetrated in the best regulated countries--the traveller hears of it from so many different people, but related with such various attendant circumstances, and stated to have occurred in so many different places, that he naturally multiplies it into a dozen at least. It is in this way that foreigners, who in general know but little of the language, and still less of the topography, of the country, become dupes to this system of deception, and adopt in consequence a most unfavourable opinion of Spanish honesty; regarding every fierce-looking fellow, with piercing black eyes, a three days' beard, and a long knife stuck in his sash, as a robber; and every Cross on the road side as the _memento mori_ of some waylaid traveller. Whereas, in point of fact, if this mountainous and intricate tract were peopled by our own more highly educated and civilized countrymen, I fear--in spite of our vigilant and, it must be confessed, admirable police--we should be liable to have our pockets picked in a much less delicate and unobtrusive manner, than is now practised in the streets of London. That robberies and murders have taken place in this part of Spain, and sometimes been attended with most revolting cruelty, is most true; but they have almost always been perpetrated at a time that some unusual political excitement agitated the country, unnerving the arm of power, and even--as has often been the case--placing the civil authorities at the mercy of a ruffian band of undisciplined soldiers. I regret, however, as before said, that though I courted adventure in every possible way, (as I think must be admitted) yet my suit was always unsuccessful; and since I cannot interest my reader with any account of my own personal risks, I will endeavour to amuse him, with the imaginary dangers of some of my countrymen, which at the same time will serve to show how easily a few simple words may, through ignorance of the language of the country, be made to tell a tale of direful import. The occurrence to which I allude took place not many years since, when the country round Gibraltar was infested by a band of robbers, headed by a notorious miscreant named _José Maria_. Moving about from place to place with extraordinary rapidity, these scoundrels completely baffled all pursuit, but of course gave a wide berth to the garrisons of San Roque and Algeciras; so that the English officers were not deterred from sallying forth from Gibraltar with their fox-hounds, and pursuing the favourite national sport. On one occasion, however, Renard had led them close upon the border of the Almoraima forest, and some of the party--perhaps a little "_thrown out_"--were making a short cut across a field of young barley, when, the owner of the thriving crop, perceiving the mischief the horses' hoofs were doing, and unconscious of the value of the words "_'ware corn_," cried lustily out to the red-coated gentry, in his own vernacular--"_Fuera!--Jesús! María! Josef! mi cibada! mi cañamo! todo, se echarà à perder!_"[69] The wave of the arm that accompanied this exclamatory "_Fuera!_" clearly implied, _be off_; and the sportsmen, full of the exploits of the dread bandit, translating the words "_Jesus, Maria José_," "_By the Lord, here's José Maria_;" naturally concluded that the remainder of the sentence, (pronounced with much gesticulation) could mean nothing but save yourselves, or you'll be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Not waiting, therefore, to lose time in questions, they set spurs to their horses, and rode _ventre à terre_ into the English garrison. Now the wonderful echo of Killarney is a joke compared to the reverberation that a story is sent back with, from the "four corners" in the High Street of Gibraltar. Accordingly, a report was soon spread, that _José Maria_ had come down close to the Spanish lines, and made a capture of the "whole field,"--hounds, huntsmen, and whipper-in inclusive! A statement of the case was instantly forwarded by an express boat to the Spanish General commanding at Algeciras; who, rejoicing at the opportunity of capturing the miscreant band which had so long eluded his vigilance, forthwith despatched "horse, foot, and dragoons," to scour the country in all directions. Of course their search was fruitless; but the laughable mistake that had occurred, from simply making José and Maria change places, was discovered only on the return of the other sportsmen, who, after "a capital run," had secured Master Renard's services for another occasion. CHAPTER V. THE BASIN OF RONDA--SOURCES OF THE RIVER GUADIARO--REMARKABLE CHASM THROUGH WHICH IT FLOWS--CITY OF RONDA--DATE OF ITS FOUNDATION--FORMER NAMES--GENERAL DESCRIPTION--CASTLE--BRIDGES--SPLENDID SCENERY--PUBLIC BUILDINGS--AMPHITHEATRE--POPULATION--TRADE--SMUGGLING--WRETCHED STATE OF THE COMMERCE, MANUFACTURES, AND INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS OF SPAIN, AND EVILS AND INCONVENIENCE RESULTING THEREFROM--RARE PRODUCTIONS OF THE BASIN OF RONDA--AMENITY OF ITS CLIMATE--AGREMENS OF THE CITY--EXCELLENT SOCIETY--CHARACTER OF ITS INHABITANTS. The basin of Ronda is situated in the very heart of a labyrinth of rough and arid sierras, which, distinguished, _par excellence_, by the name of the _Serranía de Ronda_, may be described as the gnarled and wide-spreading roots of the great mountain ridge, that, traversing Spain diagonally, divides the affluents to the Mediterranean from those to the Atlantic, and finally unites with, and becomes a branch of, the Pyrenean chain. This singularly secluded and romantic valley is about eight miles in length and five wide, and, though sunk deep below the mountain ridges that girt it in on every side, is at least 1500 feet above the level of the Mediterranean. Its soil is rich, and is rendered peculiarly fertile by the numerous sources of the Guadiaro, which traverse it in all directions. The name of this river--composed of the Arabic words, _Guada al diar_--signifies, water of the houses; an appellation it probably obtained, from the number of habitations that are said to have lined its productive banks in former days. The principal branch of this mountain stream takes its rise to the eastward of Ronda, amongst some curiously jagged and fantastic peaks, on which have most appropriately been bestowed the name of the "Old Woman's Teeth," (_Dientes de la Vieja._) Escaped from their fangs, the gurgling rivulet, increased by numerous tributary streams, directs its course more leisurely through the vale, winding its way amongst luxuriant vineyards, orchards, olive grounds, and corn-fields, until it reaches the foot of the crag, on which, as has before been stated, stands the city of Ronda. Here it would appear that nature had, in early ages, presented a barrier to the further progress of the stream; as a rocky ledge stretches quite across the bed of this portion of the valley, and, most probably, by damming up the waters poured down from the mountain ravines, formed a lake on its eastern side. But, gathering strength from resistance, the little mountain torrent eventually worked itself an outlet, and now rushes foaming through a deep, narrow chasm, leaping from precipice to precipice, until, the rocky barrier forced, it once more reaches a level country. On either side of the fearful chasm--or _Tajo_, as it is called in the language of the country--which the persevering torrent has thus worked in the rocky ledge, stands the city of Ronda; one portion of which, encircled by an old embattled wall, that overhangs the southern cliff of the fissure, is distinguished as the Old Town, and as the site of a Roman city; whilst the more widely spread buildings on the opposite bank bear the name of _El Mercadillo_,[70] or New Town. The present walls of the old town were evidently raised by the Saracens, and no traces are perceptible of any others having occupied their place. Nevertheless, it can hardly be supposed that so eligible a site for a station would have been overlooked by the Romans; and the Spanish antiquaries have accordingly determined it to be the position of _Arunda_ (one of the cities mentioned by Pliny as situated in that part of Boetica inhabited by the _Celtici_)--a conclusion which both its present name and the discovery of many ancient Roman inscriptions and statues in its vicinity tend to confirm. Some, however, maintain that Ronda is the site of the Munda, under whose walls was sealed the fate of the sons of Pompey. But the adjacent country ill agrees with the description of it handed down to us; and the little town of Monda, situated near the Mediterranean shore, is more generally admitted to have been the scene of Julius Cæsar's victory[71]. However the case may be, this city, under the domination of the Moors, became one of their principal strongholds; for having, with various other cities, been ceded by Ishmael King of Granada to the Emperor of Fez--whose aid against the storm gathering in Castille (A.D. 1318) he deemed essential for the preservation of his newly-acquired throne--it was some few years afterwards, with Algeciras, Ximena, Marbella, and Gibraltar,[72] formed into a kingdom for that emperor's son, _Abou Melic_; and this prince, passing over into Spain, (A.D. 1331) established his court at Ronda; building a splendid palace there, and, according to the usual custom of the Moors, erecting a formidable castle on the highest pinnacle of the rocky mound. The natural defences of the city were also strengthened by a triple circuit of walls, rendering it almost impregnable. The Moorish name given to the place was _Hisnorrendi_, the laurelled castle; but, on returning to the hands of the Spaniards, (A.D. 1485) it assumed its present mongrel appellation; in which its etymological claims upon the Celtic and Arabic languages are pretty equally balanced, as the following old couplet partly illustrates;-- _Y con el tiempo se ha desbaratado_ _El Hisna Randa, y Ronda se ha llamado._[73] The existing circumvallation is very irregular, and embraces little more than the mere summit of the rocky ledge on which the city stands; confining it consequently within very narrow limits. Its length, however, is considerable; and at its southern extremity, where the ground slopes more gradually to the narrow gorge that connects it with the neighbouring mountains, a triple line of outworks continues yet to supply the want of the natural walls which elsewhere render the place so difficult of access. On the crest of the ridge overlooking these advanced works, stands the shell of the capacious castle; or Royal Palace, as it is called. Its solid walls and vaulted chambers denote it to have been a work of great strength. It is now, however, but a vast heap of ruins; the French, on finally evacuating Ronda in 1812, having destroyed the principal part of it. The only entrance to the city, from the country, is through a succession of gates, in the before-mentioned outworks, the last of which is immediately under the walls of the old palace. From this gate, a long and narrow, but tolerably straight street, traverses the city from south to north, terminating at the upper or new bridge, and being nearly three quarters of a mile in length. This street is lined with handsome shops, and from it, numerous alleys (for they deserve no better name) lead off right and left, winding and turning in all directions, and communicating with numberless little courts, crooked passages, and _culs de sac_; quite in the style of an eastern city. In wandering through this labyrinth, the perplexed topographer is astonished to find a number of remarkably handsome houses. In fact, it is the _Mayfair_ of Ronda--the aristocratic location of all the _Hidalguía_[74] of the province;--who, proud of the little patch of land their forefathers' swords conquered from the accursed Moslems, would as soon think of denying the infallibility of the Pope, as of taking up their abode amongst the mercantile inhabitants of the mushroom suburb. The New Town, however, I must needs confess,--despite all aristocratic predilections,--is by far the most agreeable place of residence. The principal streets are wide, and tolerably straight; it contains some fine open _plazas_ or squares; and although the houses are thus more exposed to the influence of the sun, yet, from the same cause, they enjoy a freer circulation of air. The absence of an enclosing wall tends also, in point of coolness, to give the _Mercadillo_ an advantage over the city; leaving it open to receive the full benefit of the refreshing breezes that sweep down from the neighbouring mountains. But, though destitute of battlements, the New Town is nearly as difficult of approach, and as incapable of expansion, as the walled city itself; for, bounded on its south side by the deep _Tajo_, and to the west, by an almost equally formidable cliff that branches off from it, its eastern limits are determined by a rocky ledge that extends diagonally towards the Guadiaro; thus leaving the access free only on its north side. The ground in all directions falls more or less rapidly inwards; and the town, thus spread over it, assumes the form of an amphitheatre, looking into the rocky bed of the Guadiaro. There are three bridges across the river, communicating between the two towns: the first--a work of the Moors--connects the suburb of San Miguel, situated at the lowest part of the New Town, with some tanneries and other buildings standing outside the walls of the ancient city. It is very narrow, and being thrown over the stream just before it enters the dark fissure, does not exceed forty feet in height. The second crosses the chasm at a single span, where its banks have already attained a considerable elevation, and affords an entrance to the Old Town by a gateway in the N.E. corner of its present walls. The last and principal bridge is a noble, though somewhat heavy structure of much more recent date than the others, and furnishes an excellent specimen of the bold conception and peculiar taste of the Spaniards of the last century. It is thrown across the chasm where its precipitous banks have attained their greatest elevation, and its parapet is 280 feet above the stream that flows beneath, and nearly 600 above the level of the plain to which it is hastening. A bridge was erected at this same spot a hundred years back,[75] which spanned the frightful fissure in one arch, and must have been one of the boldest works of the kind, ever (up to that time) undertaken; since its diameter could not have been less than 150 feet. Unfortunately, the workmanship was in some way defective, (or more probably the foundation,) and it fell down but a few years after its completion. The present structure was then commenced, which, if not so airy and picturesque as the former must have been, possesses the more solid qualities of safety and durability. This bridge also spans the lower portion of the fissure in one arch, springing from solid buttresses that rest on the rocky bed of the torrent. But, as the chasm widens rapidly, this first arch is merely carried sufficiently high to admit of the free passage of the stream at all seasons, and is then surmounted by a second, of the same span but much greater elevation; and the massive buttresses on either side are lightened in appearance by being pierced with arches to correspond--thus making the bridge consist of three arches above and one below. The view from the parapet of this bridge is quite enchanting. The sensation of giddiness that seizes the spectator on first leaning over the yawning abyss, leaves a feeling of pleasureable excitement, similar to that produced by a slight shock of a galvanic battery. The distant roar of the foaming torrent also warns him of his perilous height; but the solid nature of the bounding wall quickly removes all feeling of insecurity, and allows him, whilst he rests against it, to enjoy at his leisure the noble view before him, in which are combined the rich and varied tints of a southern clime, with the bold outlines and wild beauties of an Alpine region. The view looking over the Eastern parapet of the bridge is of a more gloomy character than that from the opposite side, but is equally grand and imposing. In the bottom of the dark fissure--which here the sun's rays seldom reach--the transparent rivulet may be tracked, winding its way leisurely through the tortuous channel; here and there interrupted in its course by masses of fallen rock, and partially overshadowed by trees and creepers; whilst its precipitous banks, from whose rugged surface it might be supposed no vegetation could possibly spring, are thickly covered with the _higo chumbo_,[76] (prickly pear) amongst whose thorny boughs numerous ragged urchins may be seen--almost suspended in air--intent on obtaining their favourite fruit. Beyond the dark tajo, the sun shines on the green fields and vineyards of the fertile plain; and yet further behind are the low wooded sierras that bound the vale of Ronda to the north. The City can boast of few public buildings to excite the interest of a stranger. The churches are numerous, and gaudily fitted up; but they contain neither paintings nor statuary of any merit. In the New Town, on the other hand, are the Theatre--a small but conveniently fitted up edifice--the Stables of the _Real Maestranza_;[77] and the _Plaza de los Toros_; which latter, though not so large as those of the principal cities of the Province, is certainly one of the handsomest in Spain. It is built of stone, and nearly of a circular form, and is capable of containing 10,000 persons. The roof is continued all round; which is not the case in most amphitheatres; and it is supported by a colonnade of 64 pillars of the Tuscan order. The greatest diameter of the _Arena_ is 190 feet, which is precisely the _width_ of that of the Flavian Amphitheatre at Rome. The internal economy of the bull-fighting establishment is well worthy the observation of those who are curious in such matters; being very complete and well ordered, though not now kept up in the style of by-gone days. The two towns together contain about 16,000 inhabitants, who are principally employed in agricultural and horticultural pursuits; though there are several manufactories of hats, two or three tanneries, and numerous water-mills. Ronda is a place of considerable commerce; its secluded and at the same time central situation adapting it peculiarly for an emporium for smuggled goods; in which, it may be said, the present trade of Spain entirely consists. The vicinity of Gibraltar and Cadiz; the impracticable nature of the country between those ports and along the Mediterranean shore; the difficult and intricate mountain paths that traverse it (known only to the smugglers); and the wretched state of the national army and Navy; all tend to favour the contraband trade; and more especially that of Ronda, where the same facilities present themselves for getting smuggled goods _away from_ the place, as of bringing them from the coast to it. It is lamentable blindness on the part of the Spanish government,--considering the deplorable state of the manufactures of the country; of the "shipping interest;" of the roads and other means of inland communication; and, to crown all, I may add, of the _finances_,--not to see the advantage that would accrue from lowering the duties on foreign produce; on tobacco, cocoa, and manufactured goods in particular, which may be considered as absolute necessaries to all classes of Spaniards. By so doing, not only would the present demoralising system of smuggling be put an end to,--since it would then be no longer a profitable business,--but the money which now clings to the fingers of certain venal authorities of the Customs, or finds its way into the pockets of the Troops[78] and Sailors employed on the preventive service, in the way of bribes, would then stand some chance of reaching the public treasury. The sums thus iniquitously received (and willingly paid by the smugglers) amounts to a charge of 15 per cent. on the value of the prohibited articles; a duty to that amount, or even something beyond, would therefore readily be paid, to enable the purchaser to take his goods openly into the market. The trade would thus fall into more respectable hands; competition would increase; and the sellers would be satisfied with smaller profits. This would naturally lead to an increased demand, and the revenue would be proportionably benefited. The obsolete notions that wed the Spaniards to their present faulty system are, first, that, by opening the trade to foreign powers, their own country would be drained of its specie, in which they seem to think the riches of a nation consist; and secondly, that the national manufactures would be ruined, if not protected by the imposition of high duties on those of other countries. The fallacy of these ideas is evident; for it would not be possible to devise any plan by which money could be kept in a country, when the articles that country stands in need of are to be bought cheaper elsewhere; and it is futile to suppose--as, however, is fondly imagined--that Spain's doubloons go only to her colonies, to be brought back in taxation, or for the purchase of the produce of the mother country. As well might _we_ imagine that Zante alone could furnish England with her Christmas consumption of Currants, as that Cuba and the Philippine Islands (all the Colonies worth enumerating that Spain now possesses) could supply her with tobacco, cocoa, and cinnamon. And, as the above-mentioned articles are as much necessaries of life in Spain, as tea and sugar--not to say the aforesaid currants--are in England, the deficiency, _coute qui coute_, must be made good somewhere; and consequently Spanish money will have to be expended in procuring what is wanting. A much greater evil than this, however, is occasioned by the enormously high duty placed by the Mother Country on these very articles, the produce of her dependencies; so that even her own colonial produce is smuggled to her through the hands of foreigners! With respect to the favour shown and encouragement given to her own manufactures, by the prohibitory duties imposed on those of other nations, it must be evident to any one at all acquainted with the state of the inland communications of Spain, that the country is not in a sufficiently advanced state of civilization to warrant its engaging in such undertakings with any prospect of success. The Factories that are already in existence cannot supply clothing for one fourth part of the population of the country; to which circumstance alone are they indebted for being able to continue at work; for if the number were increased, all would inevitably fail. The same cause, therefore, here also exists, to encourage smuggling, as in the case of the consumable articles, tobacco, spices, &c.--viz. the necessity of finding a supply to meet the demand. It is quite surprising that, for such a length of time, and under so many different administrations, Spain should have continued thus blind to her own interest. But, without going the length I have suggested, much good might be effected, by merely giving up the farming out the taxes and various monopolies, and by putting a stop to sundry other abuses, such as the sale of places, by which the Crown revenues are principally raised. If the present faulty system were abandoned,--by which a few individuals only are enriched to the prejudice of the rest of the community,--numerous speculators would be found ready to embark their capitals in mining operations, in the construction of railroads, canals, &c. which would be productive of incalculable benefit to the country; for, by such means, the produce of the fertile plains in the interior of Spain would be able to come with advantage into the foreign market; whilst the varied productions of this fruitful country, by being distributed throughout its provinces with a more equal hand, would be within the reach, and add to the comforts of all classes of its inhabitants. At the present day, such is the want of these means of communication, that it frequently happens an article which is plentifully produced in one province is absolutely difficult to procure in another. One province, for instance, has wine, but wants bread; another has corn, but not any wood; a third abounds in pasture, but has no market for its cheese, butter, &c., thus rendering the cattle it possesses of comparatively little value. From the same cause, large tracts of land lie waste in many parts of Spain, because the crops they would yield, if cultivated, would not pay the cost of transport, even to the adjoining province; and a prodigious quantity of wine is annually destroyed, (a cruel fate from which even the divine _Val de Peñas_ is not exempt!) because the casks and pig-skins containing it are of more value, on the spot where the wine is grown, than is the wine itself. What remains unsold, therefore, at the end of the year, is frequently poured into the street, in order that the casks may be available for the new wine.--Such would also be the fate of all the _light_ wines grown on the banks of the Guadalete, but that the vicinity of Port St. Mary and Cadiz makes it worth the grower's while to prepare them with brandy and stronger bodied wines, to bear the rolling over the Bay of Biscay. In an article of produce so readily transported as barley, I have known the price of a _fanega_[79] vary no less than four _reales vellon_[80] on the opposite sides of the same chain of mountains; and I have seen Barbary wheat selling at Gibraltar, for one third less than corn of Spanish growth could be purchased at San Roque. This certainly would not be the case, if the riches of Spain could be distributed more easily over the whole face of the country; and since the demand for exportation would thereby be greatly increased, more industrious habits would be engendered, and an important step would thus be made towards civilization. I must not, however, enlarge on this subject; otherwise, (besides peradventure wearying my reader) I shall certainly incur the displeasure of my quondam acquaintances of the Serrania; since any thing that may be suggested to induce the Spanish government to place the commerce of the country on a more liberal footing, would be most unfavourably viewed by the rude inhabitants of the Ronda mountains; who--their present profitable occupation ceasing--would be obliged to take to their spades and pruning-knives, and labour for a livelihood in their fields and olive groves. The inhabitants, however, of the favoured basin of Ronda, would rather benefit by the change; the produce of their orchards being so rare, as to be in great request all over the country. It is also worthy of remark, that, whilst the sugar-cane succeeds on the plains about Malaga, this elevated mountain valley, situated under the same parallel of latitude, enjoys a climate that enables it to produce apples, cherries, plums, peaches, and other stone fruits, that are more properly natives of central Europe, but which can hardly be excelled either in England or France. The climate is also considered so favourable to longevity, that it has become a common saying in the country-- _En Ronda los hombres_ _de ochenta años son pollones._[81] But although, even on such tempting terms, one would hardly consent to pass one's entire life at Ronda, yet I scarcely know a place where a few weeks may be more agreeably spent. The Inns are not good; though that bearing the name of the _Holy Trinity_--to which in my various visits I always bent my steps, until I could find a suitable lodging--is clean, and its keepers are honest and obliging. Lodgings are abundant, and, for Spain, very good; the great influx of strangers during the period of the fair having induced the inhabitants to fit up their houses purposely for their accommodation, and given them also some notion of what English travellers require, besides four bare walls, a roof overhead, and a mattress on the floor; the usual sum total of accommodation furnished at Spanish inns and lodging-houses. The society of this place is particularly good; a number of the most ancient families of Andalusia having congregated here; who, with all the polish of the first circle of Spanish society, are exempt from the demoralizing vices which distinguish that of Madrid and other large cities. It was only on the occasion of my second visit to the little Capital of the _Serranía_, that I was so fortunate as to be the bearer of letters of introduction to the principal families; and nothing could possibly exceed the kind attentions they pressed upon me. Their friendly hospitality was even extended, on my account, to all the English officers who, like myself, had been attracted to Ronda by the fame of its cattle fair and bull fights, and whom I was requested to invite to the balls, &c., which at that festive period were given nightly at their different houses. Nor did their kindness cease there; for I afterwards received pressing invitations to visit them, as well at Ronda as at the neighbouring _watering-places_, to which they are in the habit of resorting during the summer months; for the Spanish fashionables--like those of other climes--deem it essential to their well being to migrate periodically to these rendezvous for dancing and dosing. One of the most _remarkable_ as well as most delightful families of Ronda, is that of _Holgado y Montezuma_. It is lineally descended from the last Cacique of Mexico, whose name it bears, and whose character and features I almost fancied were to be recognized in the somewhat haughty eye, and occidental cast of countenance, of the present head of the family. The lower orders of inhabitants have, amongst travellers, the credit of being a fierce, intractable race; but this character is by no means merited, and belongs altogether to the savage mountaineers of the Serranía. Indeed, these latter hold the industrious artizans, and the peasants of the city and plain, in great contempt, and it is a common maledictory expression amongst them-- _En Ronda mueras_ _acarreando zaques._[82] This saying originated in the occupation of bringing up skins of water from the bed of the river,--to which labour the christian captives were condemned, when the city was possessed by the Moslems--and still continues to be made use of, in allusion to the ignoble life of labour led by the peaceful inhabitants. CHAPTER VI. RONDA FAIR--SPANISH PEASANTRY--VARIOUS COSTUMES--JOCKEYS AND HORSES--LOVELY VIEW FROM THE NEW ALAMEDA--BULL FIGHTS--DEFENCE OF THE SPANISH LADIES--MANNER OF DRIVING THE BULLS INTO THE TOWN--FIRST ENTRANCE OF THE BULL--THE FRIGHTENED WATERSELLER--THE MINA, OR EXCAVATED STAIRCASE--RUINS OF ACINIPPO--THE CUEVA DEL GATO--THE BRIDGE OF THE FAIRY. The fair which is held annually at Ronda, in the month of May, collects an astonishing concourse of people from all parts of the country, and offers an excellent opportunity for seeing the peculiar costumes of the different provinces, as well as for observing the various shades of character of their respective inhabitants. The national costume, (speaking generally of it) is, without dispute, extremely becoming; for, not only does it set off to advantage such as are naturally well formed, but it conceals the defects of those to whom Dame Nature has been less kind; making them appear stout, well built fellows--in their own expressive words, "_bien, plantado_"[83]--when, in point of fact, it ofttimes happens that their slender legs have enough to do to bear the weight of the spare and ill-formed bodies placed upon them. This is very perceptible when, deprived of their broad-brimmed _Sombreros_ and stout leather _botines_, the peasantry come to be capped and trousered in a military garb. To a stranger, indeed, it must appear that the Spanish troops are collected from the very refuse of the population of the country; so miserable is their look. But the truth is, the conscription (by which the Army is raised) is levied with great fairness; and to the change of dress alone, therefore, must the falling off in their appearance be attributed. The Spanish peasant, moreover, is the only one in Europe,[84] whose _tenue_ is not improved by the drill serjeant; which may be accounted for by his not, like those of other countries, having been accustomed in his youth to carry burthens upon his _shoulders_. He consequently bends under the new weight of a musket and knapsack, which, so placed, he cannot but find particularly irksome. To return, however, to the crowded city; whilst Ronda fair thus periodically furnishes the occasion for a general muster of the natives of all classes, the _Fair_ of Ronda may claim the merit of holding out to them the inducement to display their figures and wardrobes to the best advantage; and strange are the ways, and various the means, by which the Andaluz _Majo_[85] seeks to win the sweet smiles or dazzle the bright eyes of his tinsel-loving countrywomen. Amongst the numerous varieties of the genus _Majo_, that claiming the first rank may be readily known, by the _seeming_ wish to avoid rather than to court admiration. Thus, the rich waistcoat of bright silk or costly velvet, studded with buttons innumerable of the most exquisite gold or silver filigree, is partially concealed, though rendered more brilliant, by the jacket of dark cloth simply ornamented with black braid and tags, which is worn over it; whilst the plain white kerchief that protrudes from either side-pocket requires to be closely examined, to make the extreme delicacy of its texture apparent. Others, of more gaudy and questionable taste, hold peagreens and lavenders to be more becoming; and here and there an ultra dandy may be seen, aping the bull-fighter, and bedizened with gold and silver lace; but he is of an inferior caste, and may generally be set down as a _Chevalier d'Industrie_. Another class of the genus is distinguished by the glossy jacket of black goat-skin. The wearers of this singular costume are the _Ganaderos_, or cattle owners; whilst those satisfied with the more humble dresses, of brown or white sheep-skin--by no means the least picturesque of the motley crowd--belong to the shepherd tribe. The breeches and gaiters undergo as many varieties as those above specified of the upper garments; but almost all who thus appear in the national costume wear the _sombrero_, or broad-brimmed hat with a high conical crown; the _Montera_--a low flat cap, made of black velvet, and ornamented with silk tassels--being now used only by the bull-fighters, and some elderly sticklers for old hats as well as old habits. Many scowling fellows, enveloped in capacious cloaks, seemed to have no object in view but to examine with searching eyes the persons of the assembled multitude, and to conceal as much as possible their own from counter observation; and some of the savage mountaineers,--whom nothing but a bull fight, or perhaps the hope of plunder, could draw from their mountain fastnesses,--gave evident signs of never before having seen the British uniform. I may observe here, _en passant_, that a few robberies are generally _heard of_, at the breaking up of the fair; the temptation of well filled pockets and bales of merchandize drawing all the _ladrones_ of the surrounding mountains down to the high roads. The cattle fair is held on a rocky plain beyond the northern limits of the New Town. It is not so celebrated as some others held on the banks of the Guadalquivir; the narrow stony tracts across the mountains being both inconvenient for driving cattle, and injurious to their feet. Nevertheless, it offers a good opportunity for swapping "a _Haca_,"[86] though Spanish jockeys--like all others--must be dealt with according to their own proverb--_à picaro, picaro y medio_.[87] The horses of the South of Spain are small, hardy animals, well suited to the mountain roads of the country, but possessing no claims to beauty, beyond a lively head and a sleek coat. The Spaniards, by the way, have a strange prejudice in favour of _Roman-nosed_ horses. They not only admire the _Cabeza de Carnero_, (sheep's head) as they call it, but maintain that it is a certain indication of the animal being a "good one." I presume, therefore, the protuberance must be the organ of _ambulativeness_. I was much mortified to find that "Almanzor," whose finely finished head, straight forehead, sparkling eye, and dilated nostril, I certainly thought entitled him to be considered the handsomest of his kind in the fair, was looked upon as a very ordinary animal. _No ai vasija que mida los gustos, ni balanza que los iguale_,[88] as Guzman de Alfarache says; and my taste will certainly be disputed in other matters besides horseflesh by all Spaniards, when I confess to having frequently retired from the busy throng of the fair, or abstained from witnessing the yet more exciting bull fight, to enjoy, without fear of interruption, the lovely view obtained from the shady walks of the new _Alameda_.[89] This delightful promenade is situated at the further extremity of the modern town, overhanging the precipice which has been mentioned as bounding it to the west. The view is similar to that obtained from the parapet of the bridge; but here, the eye ranges over a greater extent of country, commanding the whole of the southern portion of the fertile valley, and taking in the principal part of the mountain chain that encompasses it. For hours together have I sat on the edge of the precipice, receiving the refreshing westerly breeze, and feasting my eyes on the beauteous scene beneath; tracing the windings of the serpent streamlet, and watching the ever-changing tints and shadows, cast by the sun on the deeply-furrowed sides of the mountains, as he rolled on in his diurnal course. All nature seemed to be at rest; not a human being could be seen throughout the wide vale; not a sound came up from it, save now and then the bay of some vigilant watch dog, or the call of the parent partridge to her infant brood. Its carefully irrigated gardens, its neatly trimmed vineyards, and, here and there, a low white cottage peeping through blossoming groves of orange and lemon trees, bore evidence of its being fertilized by the hand of man: but where are its inhabitants? nay, where are those of the city itself, whose boisterous mirth but lately rent the air! All is now silent as the grave: the cries of showmen have ceased. The tramp of horses and the lowing of cattle are heard no longer; the Thebaic St. Anthony himself could not have been more solitary than I found myself.--But, hark. What sound is that? a buz of distant _vivas_ is borne through the air!--It proceeds from the crowded circus--the _Matador_ has made a successful thrust--his brave antagonist bites the dust, and he is rewarded with a shower of _pesetas_,[90] and those cries of triumph!--I regret not having missed witnessing his prowess! but the declining sun tells me that my retreat is about to be invaded; the glorious luminary sinks below the horizon, and the walk is crowded with the late spectators of the poor bull's last agonies. "_Jesus!_[91] _Don Carlos_"--would exclaim many of my bright-eyed acquaintances--"why were you not at the Bull fight?"--"I could not withdraw myself from this lovely spot."--"Well, _no ai vasija que mida los gustos_.... You might see this at any other time." There was no replying to such an indisputable fact, but by another equally incontrovertible--viz.--"The sun sets but once a day." The Bull-fights of Ronda are amongst the best of Spain; the animals being selected from the most pugnacious breeds of Utrera and Tarifa; the _Picadores_ from the most expert horsemen of Xeres and Cordoba; the _Matadores_ from the most skilful operators of Cadiz and Seville; and the whole arrangement of the sports being under the superintendence of the Royal _Maestranza_. During the fair there are usually three Corridas,[92] at each of which, eight bulls are slaughtered. A Bull-fight has been so often described that I will content myself with offering but very few remarks upon the disgusting, barbarous, exciting, interesting sport,--for such it successively becomes, to those who can be persuaded to witness it a second, third, and fourth time. In the first place, I cannot admit, that it is a bit more cruel than an English bull-bait (I speak only from hearsay of the latter), or more disgusting than a pugilistic contest; which latter, whatever pity it may occasion to see human nature so debased, can certainly possess little to _interest_ the spectator, beyond the effect its termination will have upon his _betting-book_. Oh!--I hear many of my countrymen exclaim--"I do not complain so much of the cruelty practised on the bulls, or the dangers incurred by the men. The former were made to be killed for our use; the latter are free agents, and enter the arena from choice. I feel only for the poor horses, exposed to be gored and tortured by an infuriated animal, without a chance of ultimate escape." Doubtless, the sufferings endured by the poor horses are very disgusting to witness; but it is merely because _we see_ their agonies, that we feel so acutely for them. Before we condemn the Spaniards, therefore, let us look again at the amusements of our own country, and _consider_ how many birds every sportsman dooms to linger in the excruciating torments of a broken leg or wing, or some painful bodily wound, for each one that he kills!--"But recollect," rejoins my Interlocutor, "recollect the difference between a bird and such a _noble animal_ as a horse!"--Certes, I reply, a horse is a nobler looking beast than a pheasant or a wild duck; but just observe the wretchedness of our own decayed equinine nobility, standing in Trafalgar Square and other rendezvous of cabs and hackney coaches!--Would it not be comparative charity to end their sufferings by half an hour's exposure in the Arena? I must next throw my gauntlet into the arena in behalf of the Spanish Ladies, who I maintain are vilely aspersed by those who have represented them as taking pleasure in the tortures inflicted on the unfortunate horses, and as expressing delight at the jeopardy in which the lives of the bull's human persecutors are sometimes placed. On such occasions, I have on the contrary remarked, that they always retired to the back part of their box, or, if they could not do that, turned their heads away in disgust or alarm. It may be said, that they have no business at such exhibitions. Very true--but surely some allowance is due, considering their want of such breakneck sights as horse-races and steeple-chases? And,--apart the cruelty to the animals,--I see no greater harm in the Spanish Lady's attendance at a Bull-fight, than our fair country-woman's witnessing such national sports.--The _Toreadores_[93] are certainly not exposed to greater risks than the jockeys and gentlemen whom taste or avocation leads daily to encounter the dangers of the field, for the entertainment of the public! At the numerous bull-fights I have witnessed--for I must plead guilty to having become an _aficionado_[94]--I saw but four men hurt, and who can say as much, that has hunted regularly throughout the season with a pack of fox-hounds? or, that has walked the streets of London for a week, since cabs and omnibuses have been introduced? Certainly, it is not unusual to hear female voices cry, "_Bravo toro!_" when some fierce bull has, at his first sweep round the circle, borne down all the horsemen opposed to him; and then, maddened with pain, and flushed with victory, but unable to attain his human tormentors, (who, in spite of the ponderous weight of cuirasse, boot leather, and padding that encumbers them, always manage to hobble off to a place of refuge) rushes upon the poor blindfold, abandoned horses; which, with just sufficient strength to get upon their legs, stand trembling in the centre of the Arena, quite conscious of their danger, but not knowing which way to avoid it, and thus, one by one, fall victims to the rage of their infuriated enemy.--On such occasions, I repeat, I have heard such encouraging cries proceed from female lips; but he who asserts that they have been uttered by a Spanish _Lady_ can be classed only with _Monsieur Pillet_, (I think that was the _quinze jours à Londres_ gentleman's name) who stated that all English Ladies _boxed_ and drank brandy. The most amusing part of the sport afforded by the Bulls is the driving them into the town. This is done at night, and the following is the method adopted. The animals, having been conducted from their native pastures to the vale of Ronda, are left to graze upon the sides of the mountains, until the night preceding the first day's _corrida_; when a number of persons--of whom a large proportion are amateurs--proceed from the city, armed with long lances, to drive them into their destined slaughterhouse. The weapons, however, are more for show than use; since the savage animals are decoyed, rather than goaded, into the snare prepared for them. To effect this, some tame animals are intermixed with the new comers on their first arrival; and these, trained by human devices in all the ways of deceit, lead them off to slake their thirst at the purest rill, and point out to them the tenderest pasture wherewith to satisfy their hunger. The unsuspecting strangers, trusting to the _pundonor_ of their new friends, abandon themselves to a Cupuan enjoyment of the delights of this fertile region, and perceive not the host of human foes that, under shelter of the night, are stealthily encircling them. The investment completed, a horseman rides forward to attract the attention of their treacherous brethren, who trot off after him, followed by the whole herd. The rest of the horsemen now close upon their rear, urging the bulls forward with loud shouts and blazing torches; and, following close upon the heels of their leader, the wonder-struck animals enter the town at a brisk pace and in compact order. The cross streets having been strongly barricaded, the _avant courier_ of the _Calbalgada_ proceeds straight to the court-yard attached to the amphitheatre, the entrance to which alone has been left open, and forthwith ensconces himself in a stable. The savage brutes, bewildered by the strangeness of the scene, the blaze of lights and din of voices, make no attempts either at escape or resistance, but, blindly following his track, enter the court-yard, the gate of which is immediately closed upon them. A number of doors are now thrown open, which communicate with a large apartment boarded off into narrow stalls. Into these but one bull at a time can enter, and each of the decoy animals, selecting a separate entrance, is quickly followed by two or three of the strangers. The tame animal is permitted to pass through the narrow passage and escape at the other end; but the unhappy victims of his toils, in attempting to follow his footsteps, find their progress impeded by stout bars let down from above, and are thus finally and securely installed. Under this unpleasant restraint they continue until their services are required in the arena; and during this brief period they are open to the inspection of the curious, who can examine them at their ease from the apartment above, the planking of the floor being left open for the express purpose. When the hour of the bull is come, the front bar of his prison is withdrawn, a goad from above urges him forward, and, rushing from his dark cell into the broad daylight, the astonished animal finds himself at once in the _Arena_ and within a few paces of a _Picador's_ lance, couched ready to receive his attack. Some rush upon their enemy without a moment's hesitation; and I have not unfrequently seen a valiant bull overthrow the four _picadores_ placed at intervals round the circus, in less than that number of minutes. But, in general, the animal pauses ere making his first onset--looks round with amazement at the assembled multitude--paws up the dusty surface of the arena--appears bewildered at the novelty of the sight and by the din of voices,--and is undecided where to make the first attack. At length, his eye rests on the nearest picador, and it is seldom withdrawn until he has made his charge. He rushes on his enemy with his head erect, lowering it only when arrived within a few paces. The picador gives point to receive him on the fleshy part of the neck above the right shoulder; and, if his horse be steady, he generally succeeds in turning the bull off. But should the bull, regardless of his wound, return immediately to the attack, the man has not time to resume his defensive position, and his only safety is in ignominious flight. If his steed be quick in answering the spur, he is soon removed from danger, but, if otherwise, nine times in ten both horse and rider are laid prostrate. Whilst in confinement, the bulls are decorated with the colours of their respective breeders (a bunch of ribbon, attached to a dart, which is forced into the animal's shoulder); and such as appear tame, and hold out small promise of sport, are often "ingeniously tormented" previously to being turned into the arena. I have heard also that it is not unusual, when the circus is small, and the _Toreadores_ are not very expert, to weaken the animal's powers by letting a weight fall upon his back, so as to injure the spine; but this refinement of cruelty is certainly not practised at Ronda. It doubtless requires the possession of some courage to be a bull-fighter; though at the same time it is to be recollected, that the people who devote themselves to the profession have been brought up, from their earliest youth, amongst the horns of these animals, and have thus acquired a knowledge of all their peculiarities; they are consequently aware, that the bull's furious onset requires but a little activity to be readily avoided, and they have by long habit become quick-sighted to take advantage of his blind rage, for striking their blow. But, above all, their confidence is increased by knowing with what ease the attention of the bull is drawn off; and no Picador or Matador ever ventures into the arena unattended by one _Chulo_,[95] at least; who, provided with a gaudy coloured flag or cloak, stands near at hand to occupy the bull's attention, should his opponent have met with any accident. I once witnessed a laughable instance--as it turned out--of the ease with which a bull's attention may be diverted. An _Aguador_, or water-seller, had taken post in the narrow passage which serves as a retreat for the bull-fighters when hard pressed, between the front row of seats and the Arena, and, unconscious of danger, was vending his iced liquid to the thirsty spectators--pouring it with singular dexterity from a huge jar made fast to his back into their outstretched goblets--when a bull, following close upon the heels of a _Chulo_, leapt the five-foot barrier, and came with his fore legs amongst the front row spectators, but, unable to make good his footing, fell back into the narrow passage. The _Chulo_, by vaulting back into the Arena, readily escaped from the enraged animal, which, not having space to turn round, face and re-leap the barrier, found himself a prisoner within the narrow passage. Very different, however, was the situation of the venturous _Aguador_, who, labouring under his weighty liquid incubus, could not possibly have clambered over the fence, even had time permitted of his making the attempt. But, so far from that being the case, the bull having instantly recovered his legs, was coming trotting and bellowing towards him, with the most felonious intentions. The spectators shouted with all their might to the luckless water-seller, _to save himself_; alas! how was he to do so?--a single glance over his right shoulder convinced him of the vainness of the admonition! Instinct prompted him to run; but escape appeared impossible; for the horns of the rabid animal were within a few feet of him, and every barrier was closed! In this awful predicament, fright made him take the only step that could possibly have saved him--namely, a _false one_. He stumbled, groaned, and fell flat upon his face. The bull, without slacking his speed, stooped down to give him his _quietus_; when a peasant--one of the spectators--having tied his pocket-handkerchief to the end of his _porra_,[96] dangled it before the animal's eyes just as he reached the fallen _Aguador_. The enraged bull, making a toss at the new object thus placed before him, bounded over the prostrate water-carrier, without doing any other injury than breaking his jar with his hind feet, and proceeded on to complete the tour of the circus. The fright of the fortunate vender of water was excessive, and _now_ most ludicrous. The liquid poured in torrents over his shoulders and down his neck, leading him to believe that he had been most desperately gored, and that it was his life's blood which was--not oozing out of, but--absolutely deluging him. He screamed most lustily that he was a dead man; and the spectators, highly amused at the scene, cried out in return, "Get up--get up, or you'll be drowned!" But, until some of the _Chulos_ came to his aid, and put him on his legs, he could not be persuaded that he had escaped without even a scratch. He lost no time, however, in putting the power of his limbs to the proof, running off as fast as they could carry him, to escape from the jeers of the crowd, who, amidst roars of laughter, shouted after him, "What a gash!"--"I can see right through his body."--"The Bull is swimming after you!"--"_Toro! Toro!_" &c. We will now leave the Amphitheatre, and proceed to visit one of the most interesting sights of the ancient city--namely, an extraordinary staircase, or _Mina_ as it is called by the natives, which, sunk close to the edge of the chasm dividing the two towns, communicates with the rocky bed of the river. It is said to have been a work of Abou Melic, the first king of Ronda, and was clearly undertaken to ensure a supply of water to the city in the event of a siege;--the want of this indispensable article being, in those early days, the only dread the inattackable fortress had to guard against. The entrance to the _Mina_ is in the garden attached to a gentleman's house at a little distance from, and to the east of, the principal bridge. The descent, according to our Cicerone's information, was formerly effected by 365 steps, cut in the live rock; but, at the present day, it would defy the powers of numbers to reckon them, the greater part of the staircase being in so ruinous a condition as to be barely practicable. I should suppose, however, the depth of the _Mina_, from its mouth to the bed of the river, is about 250 feet. It pierces the solid rock, in short and very irregular zig-zags, for about two thirds the distance down, when, entering a natural rent in the cliff, the remaining portion is built up from the bottom of the chasm with large blocks of stone; advantage having been taken of a lateral projection, to cover this artificial facing from an enemy's projectiles. At various levels, passages lead off from the staircase into spacious and curiously arched apartments, to which light is admitted by narrow casements opening into the chasm or tajo. This subterranean edifice is supposed to have been a palace of the Moorish kings. On the side walls of the narrow, crooked staircase, are numerous rudely engraved crosses, which our conductor assured us were wrought by the hands of the Christian captives who, during the last siege of the place, were employed in bringing up water for the use of the garrison, and whose oft-repeated signs of faith, thus lightly marked by their passing hands, had miraculously left these deep impressions on the hard stone. "Nor"--added he--"did such proofs of their devotion go unrewarded even in this world, for their liberation quickly followed; the until then unconquered city having been wrested from the Mohammedans after only a few weeks' siege."--The chains of these good Christians were sent to Toledo, in one of the churches of which city they may yet be seen. Various other remarkable legends are related of this wonderful place; which, however, I will pass over, to say a few words of other objects worthy of observation in the vicinity of the city. Of these, the most interesting to the Antiquary are the ruins of the Roman city of Acinippo,[97] which lie scattered on the side of a mountain on the left of the road to Seville by way of Olbera, and distant about ten miles N.W. from Ronda. Some of the Spanish Geographers persist in calling it _Ronda la vieja_, (old Ronda,) but certainly on no good grounds, since no place bearing the comparatively modern name of Ronda could well be of older date than the present city itself. In the time of Carter, the venerable ruins of Acinippo could boast of containing an Amphitheatre and the foundations of several spacious temples, all in tolerable preservation; but these are now barely perceptible; and the statues, pavements, in fact, every thing considered worth removing, has long since been carried to Ronda. Numerous Roman coins are daily turned up by the plough, as it passes over the streets of the ancient city, and Cameos, intaglios, and other more valuable relics, may be procured occasionally from the peasants dwelling in the neighbourhood. But, though scarcely one stone of Acinippo now rests upon another, still the view from the site is of itself a sufficient reward for the trouble of scrambling to the summit of the mountain; whence, on a clear day, it is said that even Cadiz may be seen. Deep in the valley, on the opposite or eastern side, flows the principal source of the Guadelete, (water of _Lethe_) which the Spaniards maintain is the _real_ river of _Oblivion_ of the ancients. Where the fertilizing stream flows amongst the vineyards of Xeres, it probably has often proved so without any fable. On the bank of this rivulet stands the little castellated town of Setenil; famous in Moorish history, as having defied all the efforts of the Christians to subdue it, until the ponderous lombards of Ferdinand and Isabella were brought to bear with unerring aim upon its rock-based battlements. A.D. 1484. Within another morning's ride from Ronda is a very remarkable cavern, in the side of a lofty mountain, about five miles to the S.W. of the city, and known by the name of the _Cueva del Gato_ (Cat's cave). The entrance to it is some way up the face of a scarped wall of rock, that falls along the right bank of the Guadiaro, and can be gained only by those whose heads and feet are proof against the dizzy and slippery perils to be encountered; the ascent being over a pile of rough granite blocks, moistened by the spray of a foaming torrent that gushes out of the narrow cavity. These difficulties surmounted, the cavern itself is tolerably practicable, and the stream flows more tranquilly, though still here and there obstructed by blocks of stone. After penetrating some way into the interior, an opening of considerable width presents itself, where a ruined building of very ancient date is observable. It is said to owe its foundation to the Romans, and to have been a temple dedicated to the infernal deities. Rumour alleges that in later times it has served as a refuge for banditti. To proceed further, it is necessary to be well supplied with torches: with their aid I was informed the cavern is practicable for a great distance. The stream to which this cavern gives a passage, takes its rise in a wooded basin, situated on the opposite side the mountain ridge, from whence the waters of all the other valleys are led off in a northerly direction to the Guadalete. This eccentric little rivulet directs its course, however, to the south, reaches the foot of a high-peaked mount that overlooks the village of Montejaque, and there, its course being obstructed by the solid rock, betakes itself once more to the earth, filtering its way for upwards of a mile through the mountain, and finally discharging itself into the Guadiaro[98] by the mouth of the _Cueva del gato_. The Cavern is said to have received its name from the wonderful feat of a cat, which, put into the fissure by which the stream disappears from the surface of the ground, reached the other entrance with one of its lives yet unexhausted. Numerous other delightful excursions may be made from Ronda, up the ravines in the surrounding mountains; and, should the sports of the field possess attractions, the country is noted for its abundance of game of all kinds; from quails and red-legged partridges, to wild boars, deer, and wolves. In following this pursuit, chance one morning directed my footsteps along the edge of the precipice, that (as I have already mentioned,) bounds the New town to the west, and which, describing a wide circle, and gradually losing something of its height, once more closes upon the Guadiaro, about a mile below the city. The space that nature has thus singularly walled in, and sunk beneath the rest of the vale of Ronda, is richly clad with gardens and vineyards; and the little stream, having disengaged itself from the dark chasm that divides the two towns, here once more slackens its pace, to luxuriate under refreshing groves of orange, citron, and pomegranate trees. Arrived, however, at the southern extremity of this basin, the rocky ledge on which I found myself standing again presents an obstacle to the tranquil flow of the crystal stream, and it hurries fretfully through a narrow defile, of the same wild character as that in which it received its birth; the banks being thickly clothed with the endless varieties of the cistus, and shadowed by the dense and sombre foliage of the ilex and wild olive. Beyond this, a glen of somewhat more easy access presents itself, and the river is spanned by a light but firmly-knit arch, that bears the romantic name of the _Puente del Duende_, or, the Bridge of the Fairy. So sequestered is this spot--for it is some distance from any public road--that the little bridge, though well known to the country people, is seldom visited by strangers; and indeed its leafy canopy is so impervious, that, until arrived at the very brink of the precipice overlooking the dell, it is not possible either to discover the bridge or to trace the further progress of the river itself, which, by its tortuous course, seems loth to leave the lovely valley that has grown rich under its fostering care. The mountains beyond appear equally unwilling that the beauteous basin should lose its benefactor; presenting themselves in such confused and successive masses, and in such intricate forms, as seem to preclude the possibility of the little stream ever finding its way through them to the Mediterranean. Conspicuous above all the other points of this serrated range, is the _Pico de San Cristoval_,--said in the country to be the first land made by Columbus on his return from the discovery of the New World. Certain it is, that this peak,--called also _La Cabeza del Moro_ (Moor's head)--can be seen at an immense distance. I myself, from the blue Atlantic, have traced its faint outline reaching far above the horizon, when the low land about Cadiz, though comparatively near, could not even be discerned. In following the course of the stream, however, I have been carried far below the Fairy's Bridge, to which it is time I should retrace my steps. The narrow little structure serves, at this day, merely as a point of passage to a mill, situated on the left bank of the rivulet; from whence long trains of pig-skin laded mules convey almost as constant, if not so copious a stream, of oil and wine, _over_ the bridge, as that of water which flows beneath it. The hills that rise at the back of the mill--and which in our more level country would be called mountains--are clad to their very summits with vineyards and olive groves--the sources of this gladdening and fattening stream. There was, nevertheless, an air of solitude, and even of mystery, about the spot, that greatly excited my curiosity. The reckless muleteers devoutly crossed themselves ere they ventured to pass over the little bridge; some even prostrated themselves before a crucifix rudely carved in wood that stood overhanging it. The more timid goatherds drove their flocks far away from the holy spot; and those whom I questioned concerning it gave me to understand, that the less they said and I inquired on the subject, the better for all parties. The owner of the mill, without being quite so reserved, was equally mysterious; saying that, though in this sceptical age many persons were disposed to regard the wonderful things related of the place as mere _cuentas de viejas_--i. e. old women's tales--yet that he could vouch for their truth, and, whilst it would be unbecoming in him (as Herodotus said before him) to disclose _all_ he knew, this much he _could_ say,--that it would be dangerous for most people to dwell as near the enchanted spot as he did. "But," added he, throwing open his shirt and exposing what I learnt was a piece of a black dog's skin, that he wore suspended from a rosary at his breast, "this is a sovereign charm against all manner of witchcraft." I afterwards discovered that the olive-grinding rogue was a notorious smuggler, and kept his contraband goods concealed in what are supposed to be haunted caverns, under his habitation, secure from the search of superstitious _Aduaneros_.[99] My curiosity still further excited by the difficulty experienced in gratifying it, I applied for information touching the Fairy's Bridge to my friend Don ---- ----, who referred me to _El Padre Canonigo, Don Apodo Fulano_, adding laughingly, "You will be amused at the worthy father's serious manner of relating the story; but I can assure you,--divesting it of the marvellous,--it is not _todo cisco y carbon, como tesoro de duende_."[100] To the _Padre_ I forthwith bent my steps; and the following chapter contains his account of the _Puente del Duende_, which I give as nearly as possible in his own words. CHAPTER VII. LEGEND OF THE FAIRY'S BRIDGE. "_My companions said to me, 'Do you visit her monument?' but I answered, 'Where but in my heart should she have a tomb?'_" ARABIC ELEGY. You must know, Don Carlos, commenced the worthy Padre, "_con voz reposada y clara_"[101]--You must know, that the bridge you have just visited has usurped the name it bears, which was given to a much more extraordinary structure--if such it may be called--that formerly occupied its place; or, I should rather say, that was situated near the present edifice; for the supernatural bridge of which I am about to speak was thrown across the ravine somewhat lower down the stream; where, as you may have observed, the cliff on the left bank falls quite perpendicularly along the river, and is at this day entirely overgrown with ivy. This bridge was formed of a single tree; a huge _acebuche_[102]--a tree often employed as an agent in working miracles--which, having grown for ages on the brink of the precipice, was one night marvellously felled to the earth. That it had been prostrated by supernatural means was evident; for the trunk bore no marks of the axe; and though still adhering to the stump by the bark and some slight fibres, yet it had been most curiously blackened and charred; whilst a wild vine, which (having entwined itself gracefully round its wide-spreading branches) had accompanied it in his fall, remained unscorched, and seemed to have been purposely left unhurt, to serve as a hand-rope to steady the footsteps of the venturous passenger over the tremulous bridge. The further extremity of the tree rested on a ledge that projected slightly from the opposite cliff; above which, a fissure in the rock appeared to lead into a dark cavern. But so curiously was the rustic bridge balanced, that as sure as any mortal attempted to cross by it to the opposite side of the river, so sure was he to be precipitated into the abyss below. It is supposed that this chink in the cliff had served to admit light and air to some spacious caverns which, in remote times, had been formed in the rocks, and from which a rude staircase had communicated with a _quinta_, or country house, situated in the midst of the vineyards and olive grounds that clothe the hill side. But of these, Don Carlos, no vestige now remains; indeed all traces of them were lost soon after the occurrence of the events I am about to relate. The last possessor of this villa was a wealthy Moor--Abenhabuz by name--of the tribe of the Ganzules, and one of the most distinguished _Alfaquies_ of the proud city of Ronda. To the treachery of this Moor the capture of the Moslem stronghold by the Catholic kings[103] was mainly attributed; for the bravery of its _Alcaide_, the strength of its garrison, and the triple circuit of walls by which in those days its assailable points were defended, rendered it too formidable a post even for such indomitable spirits as Ferdinand and Isabella to think of attacking. But Hamet Zeli, surnamed _El Zegri_, the fierce governor of Ronda, dreamed not of treason, and least of all did he suppose that Abenhabuz, his bosom friend, could betray him. But what will not envy stoop to do? He was persuaded by his deceitful confidant that the Spaniards were laying close siege to Malaga, and that a most favourable opportunity thereby was presented for making a foray in their country. Sallying forth, therefore, with his brave _Gomeles_--the principal strength of the garrison--El Zegri crossed the mountains to the westward of the city, and fell upon the unprotected country round Arcos and Xeres de la Frontera. Ferdinand and Isabella were quickly informed of his departure from Ronda, and, breaking up their camp before Malaga without loss of time, pressed forward through the rugged and now unguarded defiles of El Burgo, to seize upon their prey. El Zegri, loaded with plunder, and breathing further vengeance, bent his steps also towards his sequestered fortress; little, however, anticipating the blow that awaited him. It was only at his bivouac in the dark cork forest under the lofty _Sierra del Pinar_ that the thunder of the Castillian artillery burst upon his astounded ear.--He mounted his courser in all haste, and, dashing forward with mad speed, stopped not until he had gained the pass of _Montejaque_. You see it there, Don Carlos, (said the Padre, pointing to a deep gap in the summit of the serrated ridge that bounds the basin of Ronda to the west) it is still known in the country as _El Puerto del Pasmo del Moro_.[104]--What a sight there met his eager, searching eye! The proud city entrusted to his care, hemmed in on all sides by Christian lances!--the sumptuous mosques and stately palaces of his ancestors, crumbling to dust, under the all-destroying projectiles of the implacable enemies of his creed!--A cry of rage burst from him; but his prudence even in that trying moment did not forsake him. Checking his advancing troops, so as to keep them out of sight of the beleaguering army, he sent forward a trusty messenger, who, gaining admission to the Fortress, cheered its feeble garrison with the news of his being at hand, and of his intention to force his way into the city during the night. But Abenhabuz took care to have this information conveyed to the besiegers; and El Zegris' bold attempt was consequently foiled. The inhabitants, seeing all hope of relief now cut off, their store of provisions nearly exhausted, and large gaps formed in the walls of their until-now unconquered city, deemed it prudent to negotiate for a capitulation; and the sagacious Ferdinand, aware that El Zegri was still in the field--that the place could yet hold out some weeks--that his own supplies might be cut off,--and that to carry the city by storm would be attended with immense loss of life,--willingly granted most favourable terms; the garrison and inhabitants were permitted to depart with all their effects; such of them as chose to remain in Spain having even lands assigned to them, and being permitted the free exercise of their religion. But whilst the wily Ferdinand hesitated not to grant these liberal terms, yet, as in duty bound, he forthwith transmitted to Rome a formal declaration of his resolve to extirpate the abominable heresy of Mohammed from his dominions, whenever a fitting opportunity should occur; thus piously reserving to himself the right of infringing the terms of capitulation, wherever his doing so should seem most conducive to the interests of our holy religion. The traitor Abenhabuz, besides the indulgences granted by the terms of the surrender, was, as the price of his treason, permitted to reside within the city, and to retain possession of his estates. But some years after, (when, by the capture of Granada, the Catholic Monarchs were relieved from all apprehension of evil consequences ensuing from carrying their long meditated plans into effect) he, as well as the other Moslems who had chosen to remain in Spain, was offered the alternative of Christianity or expatriation. He balanced not in the choice; but forthwith repairing to the altar of Our Lady of griefs, declared himself a convert to the true faith. In consequence of this act--with the piety and generosity which have at all times distinguished the Spanish nation above all others--the Moor was graciously allowed to keep possession of the lovely _quinta_ and its surrounding vineyards; the rest of his vast estates being made over--for the good of his soul--as an expiatory offering to the chivalric brotherhood of Santiago. Abenhabuz retired to his country retreat, accompanied only by his daughter, the beauteous Hinzára; for his sons--true scions of an Arabic stock--chose rather to seek a home on the parched shores of Africa, than abandon the accursed dogmas of their Prophet. Hinzára was the youngest of the Moor's children, and the sole issue of a Christian maiden who had been captured in a foray some time previous to the fall of Ronda, and who--meditating his future treason--Abenhabuz had considered it conducive to his interest to marry. At the period of his expulsion from the city, his wife had been dead some time, and his daughter had just reached the age when a maiden's footsteps most require the guidance of a mother's care. But Hinzára was a being of no common order. The rosebud bursting through the petals of its mossy calyx, spreading its delicious fragrance to the summer breeze, exceeds not more in loveliness every other flower of the field, than the beauty of Hinzára surpassed that of all the maidens of the neighbourhood. To you, Don Carlos, whose eyes are daily feasted on the charms of our comely Andalusians, it will suffice to say, that in the daughter of Abenhabuz were combined the regular features and soft expression of the dark-eyed _Malagueña_; the blooming cheek and polished brow of the fair _Serrana_[105] of Casarabonela; and the form and carriage of the graceful _Gaditana_![106] Her person, in fact, was a bouquet, of the choicest flowers culled from this our Hesperian garden; whilst her mind might be likened to a book, in which, as in the pages of our incomparable Cervantes, were to be found united the most brilliant wit, the soundest discretion, the purest sentiment, and the nicest judgment. Courted by all the principal chieftains of the day--Spaniards as well as Moriscoes--Hinzára appeared alike regardless of their adulation, and unmoved by their importunity. But the Moorish maiden was not insensible, and--unknown to all besides--had pledged her hand to a noble Biscayian youth, long the possessor of her guileless heart. The ancestors of Don Ramiro--for such was her lover's appellation--though rich in deeds of renown, had left him little else than an untarnished sword, to support the glorious names of Segastibelza y Bigorre which he inherited from them. And besides his poverty, Hinzára had other reasons (which will be stated as I proceed with my tale) to fear that her father's consent to their union would not be easily obtained. Abenhabuz was, to all appearance, fully sensible of the generosity that had been so manifestly shown to him; and though now the possessor of but the few vineyards and olive grounds that encircled his _quinta_, he was nevertheless generally considered a wealthy man:--a reputation for which he was as much indebted to his imagined knowledge of Alchymy, as for the hords he was supposed to have collected during a long life of rapine and plunder. This character for wealth, whilst it excited the cupidity of many, secured to him the protection of the governor of Ronda, Don Guiterre Mondejar; who, captivated by the charms of the beauteous Hinzára, hoped, together with her hand, to obtain, what he coveted yet more, the imaginary treasures of the Alchymist. The crafty Moor readily promised him the immediate possession of the one, and the inheritance of the other; but he had no intention of fulfilling his engagements. The protection of a powerful friend was needful for a time, to screen his proceedings from a too-vigilant observation; particularly, since the establishment of the Holy Inquisition by Ferdinand and Isabella of blessed memory (here the worthy Father crossed himself most devoutly) was a thorn in the side of these backsliding Christians that obliged them to be extremely circumspect; but the implacable Abenhabuz cherished hopes of wreaking vengeance on those by whom he chose to conceive he had been wronged; and the Spanish governor was one of his marked victims. In the prosecution of his horrible designs, the Moor was prepared to immolate even his own daughter to satisfy his revenge; though this was an extremity to which he hoped not to be driven. It may, however, be readily imagined that his stock of parental affection was not very great, and that he concerned himself but little in his daughter's affairs. He enjoined her to be strict in the outward observance of her religious duties, the better to conceal his own delinquency; but of her actual conversion to Christianity, and her acquaintance with Don Ramiro, he was altogether ignorant. For a considerable time, Abenhabuz succeeded, under various pretences, in deferring the fulfilment of his contract with Don Guiterre; but, at length, finding his projects of vengeance not yet ripe for execution, and that the amorous Spaniard was becoming every day more urgent for the possession of Hinzára, he determined to overcome the few weak qualms of conscience that had hitherto withheld him from sacrificing his daughter, and intimated to her that she was shortly to become the wife of the abhorred Guiterre. To his surprise, however--for it was for the first time in her life--Hinzára refused obedience to his will. Commands and entreaties were alike unavailing:--to the first she opposed a calm but resolute refusal; to the latter a flood of tears. But when the infuriated father employed threats, and assailed her with invectives,--"Hold!" exclaimed the daughter of the cross. "Though, in casting off the execrable heresy of Mohammed, I cast not off my Moslem father, yet in embracing this," and she drew from her bosom a small gold crucifix, "I obtained a Protector against all outrage; and should he at the cost of my plighted word,--my word, for the observance of which I have pledged my belief in a crucified redeemer--persist in exacting obedience to his will; amongst the Holy Sisterhood of Santa Ursula shall I seek, and readily find, a refuge from his tyranny." The Infidel was thunderstruck--his rage unbounded. Scarcely admitting that a woman had a soul to be saved, he had thought it mattered little whether his daughter was a Mohammedan or a Christian; conceiving that, in either case, her duty to him prescribed passive obedience. But he had always imagined that Hinzára's abjuration of Islamism, like his own, was a mere mockery, and that he should find in her a willing instrument to work his purpose of taking vengeance on his Christian rulers. Awakened now to a sense of his error,--and as he considered of his danger--he feared that she might, on the contrary, prove an insuperable bar to the execution of his plans; and he determined to lose no time in removing her. Dissimulation was, however, necessary. Smothering, therefore, his anger, he affected to be moved by her tears. He alluded no more to the marriage contract entered into with Don Guiterre; and, treating her with more than wonted kindness, lulled her into forgetfulness of his former harshness, whilst he matured the most hellish plot that ever was conceived by man, to render her subservient to his designs. Informing the governor of Hinzára's determined opposition to their wishes, he imparted to him the diabolical scheme he contemplated to force her into compliance; and in the vile Spaniard he unfortunately found a too willing abettor of his infamous project. The cavern under the Moor's habitation contained numerous chambers opening into each other, the innermost of which was known only to Abenhabuz himself; the entrance being concealed by tapestry, and closed by means of secret springs. On the plea of having some repairs executed to the quinta, Hinzára and her father retired to the subterranean apartments; Abenhabuz occupying that which communicated with the staircase, Hinzára the one from which the secret chamber opened; the intermediate chamber serving as their common refectory. One afternoon, as the sun was closing his diurnal course, an officer of the Holy Inquisition, accompanied by numerous Aquazils and masked attendants, appeared suddenly before the abode of the renegade Moor. The terrified domestics fell on their knees, repeating their _Pater nosters_, too much alarmed to give notice of the approach of the visiters; and the officer, followed by his satellites, proceeded straight to the entrance of the Souterrain, and demanded instant admission. "Who is he," inquired Abenhabuz from within, "that thus unannounced requires entry? If his business be of worldly affairs, let him choose some more fitting time, nor disturb a good Christian at his evening devotions; but, if aught else, enter--the latch is now raised." The party immediately rushed forward, but the superior stopped short at the scene before him--Abenhabuz, clothed in sackcloth, stretched prostrate on the bare floor before an image of the blessed Virgin! Beside him lay a scourge, with which he had evidently been inflicting self-punishment! "What want ye of me?" demanded the Moor, without rising from the rocky floor.--"With _you_ we have _now_ no further business, good Abenhabuz," replied the officer. "We must however see your daughter--for such is our duty--though doubtless she follows the example of her pious father."--"Hinzára," said the Moor, "is within that second chamber," pointing to the door--then raising his voice, he called out in Spanish--"Hinzára, my child, open, that these worthy Señores may bear witness to the piety of Abenhabuz' daughter;" but Hinzára answered not. "What is this?" exclaimed the Moor--"the heat of the summer sun has surely overcome her.--Hinzára, my beloved, open quickly"--but still Hinzára replied not. "Force open the door, then," said the officer, "but quietly--disturb not her sleep, if such be the cause of her silence. Excuse this apparent rudeness, worthy _Alfaqui_; our orders are imperative." Admittance was quickly gained, and disclosed to the spectators the lovely form of Hinzára, extended on a divan, her eyes closed in profound sleep. Her right arm, passed across her gently heaving bosom, hung over the side of the couch, and on the floor beneath it lay a book, which to all appearance had fallen from it.--That book was the _Koran_! The exclamations of the astonished spectators, but, above all, the wailings of old Abenhabuz, soon brought the sleeper to her senses. But not to detain you, Don Carlos, with superfluous details: suffice it to say, that further search was made; the secret doorway was discovered, and exposed to view a small apartment furnished with the _Mehrab_,[107] denoting it to be a Mohammedan place of worship. No one of the assembled group was, or rather appeared to be, so much shocked as Abenhabuz.--"Father! Father!" exclaimed the frantic Hinzára in tones of the most piercing anguish:--but, overcome by the intensity of her emotion, she could utter no more, and fell senseless to the ground. Happy had it been for the wretched Hinzára had this insensibility to mundane ills been the perpetual sleep of death! But inscrutable, my friend, are the ways of Providence! The innocent victim of this fiendish plot woke only to the torments of the Inquisition!--Oh that an institution, ordained to effect so much good, should in this instance have been the means of inflicting such unmerited anguish! But what human works are all perfect? I must not attempt, Don Carlos, to raise the veil that covered the events which followed. The disappearance of Hinzára, whose virtues yet more than her beauty caused her to be universally beloved, excited much solicitude. But time swept on; and at length all, save _one_, seemed to have forgotten the existence of the ill-fated maiden. That _one_, however, persisted in his endeavours to trace her out; and, dangerous as was the attempt, to penetrate even the secrets of the Holy Inquisition. But all his efforts were unavailing. Still, however, Ramiro clung to the idea that she had not been removed from Ronda; and despising the alluring prospects of wealth and distinction, at that time held out by the discovery of a new world, he remained rooted to the spot. At length his sad presentiment was but too truly realized. A mysteriously-worded billet, left by an unknown hand, warned him of approaching calamity; shortly after, public notice was given that an execution of heretics was about to take place; and on the appointed day, headmost of the wretched criminals, and clothed in a dress of surge, representing flames and demons,--indicative of her impending fate,--was the hapless daughter of Abenhabuz. The frantic Ramiro soon distinguished her from the rest. The pile that was to immolate his lovely, innocent Hinzára was already lighted--the criminals destined for execution were about to be given over to the secular power--when, rushing to the feet of the Grand Inquisitor, the proud descendant of the bluest blood in Spain, on his bent knees, supplicated for mercy. With the eloquence of despair, he pleaded her youth, her virtues, her piety;--but, alas! he pleaded in vain!--"Let me at least," said he at length, "make one effort to induce her to confess?--my known loyalty--my birth--my station--entitle me to this boon." The Inquisitor was moved;--Ramiro's entreaties were seconded by a faint murmur that ran through the crowd; and his request was granted, despite the frowns of Don Guiterre, into whose hands, as governor of the city, the condemned were about to pass. A passage was quickly opened for Ramiro through the dense multitude, and, amidst loud _vivas_, he flew to his Hinzára. The maiden's countenance brightened at the approach of her long separated lover. Starting from the posture of prayer, in which she was devoutly attending to the exhortations of one of the holy brotherhood appointed to the sad office of attending her in her last moments--yet not without first raising her eyes in gratitude to the great disposer of all things--"Thanks, beloved Ramiro," said she, "for this last, convincing proof of affection! I almost fear, however, to ask--didst thou receive my message?"--"I did," replied her lover; "but let me implore thee, adored Hinzára, to change thy purpose--alas! beloved of my soul, hope not that thy silence will aught avail thy father. Be assured his fate is sealed--nay--I know not but that he may already have been sacrificed; for, during many weeks past, I have in vain sought to gain tidings of him.--Declare then all thou knowest, and at least save thyself, and me--who cannot survive thy loss--from the fate that hangs over us."----"No, Ramiro," replied the maiden, in slow but steady accents, "my resolve is fixed. Since there is yet a _chance_ of saving my father, _we_ must part--let us hope to meet again hereafter.--I trust thou hast been able to comply with my desire?"--He motioned assent.--"Then Heaven bless thee, dearest Ramiro! as thou lovest me, obey my last injunctions--return not evil for evil--there is another and a better world--risk not our chance of possessing in it the happiness denied to us here." One moment of human weakness succeeded--it was but one--Hinzára's head fell upon her lover's breast--her bloodless lips met his for the first--the last time. Recovering herself quickly, "Now, beloved," she exclaimed, "thy promise!--and thou, oh blessed Saviour, before whose holy image I now, on bended knees, offer up my last supplication!--who seest the pile already laid to torment with infamous publicity thy too weak servant!--plead, oh plead forgiveness for this act, which hastens me, by but a few short moments, into the presence of an omnipotent, all-merciful creator!" Ramiro listened to the words of the prostrate maiden with intense and agonised attention, and at the conclusion of her short but earnest prayer drew from his breast a glittering poignard--Hinzára snatched it hastily from his hand,--and the next moment fell a corpse at his feet! The horror of the spectators, at this unlooked-for termination of Ramiro's interference--the consternation of the officials of the Holy Inquisition--the rage and invectives of the Governor--were such that, amidst the general confusion which ensued, Ramiro, snatching the poignard from the reeking body of his mistress, darted through the crowd, and effected his escape.--Don Guiterre vented his impotent rage on the lifeless body of his victim, by having it burnt, amidst the groans and indignant cries of the assembled multitude. Every attempt to trace the flight of Don Ramiro failed; but information was eventually received, that an individual answering his description had embarked at Malaga, in a vessel bound to some Italian port. The excitement caused by this tragic affair gradually subsided. Years rolled on--Abenhabuz was never again seen--and the fate of his daughter was nearly forgotten;--when one morning the Governor of Ronda was no where to be found. Diligent search was of course made, and at length his corpse was discovered in the rocky bed of the Guadiaro, immediately beneath the miraculous bridge, which was now seen for the first time!--On examining the body, it was found to be much bruised and mutilated, as if--which indeed was evident--Don Guiterre had fallen in an attempt to cross the hazardous bridge, and although one deep wound seemed to have been inflicted by some sharp instrument, yet it might have been given by the pointed rocks with which the bed of the rivulet is strewed, and there was no other reason to suppose that he had fallen by the hands of bandits; since nothing had been taken from his person. His sword was found lying near him, but it might have dropt from its scabbard. The cause of the Governor's visit to this secluded spot nobody could divine; but the general astonishment on this head was still further increased, when, a few days after, the body of a near relative of Don Guiterre--one of the principal officers of the Holy Inquisition--was discovered at the very same spot, and bearing marks of having met with a similar death. A clue to the solution of these mysterious and appalling events was at length, however, obtained; though it still left many of the particulars open to conjecture. An old and faithful servant of the late Governor was, not many days after, found in the bed of the stream, having also, as it appeared, fallen from the enchanted bridge. Life, however, was not extinct. He was conveyed to a neighbouring monastery, where every attention was paid to his wounds, though without the slightest hope of his ultimate recovery. The excessive pain, caused by a severe wound in the head, brought on delirium; so that little information could be gathered from him; but in his paroxysms he raved of a brilliant light that shone constantly before his eyes, which, with piercing cries for mercy, intermixed with frightful imprecations on Don Guiterre, he fervently invoked.--But in the last moments of his wretched existence, he became somewhat more tranquil; and the monk who attended him, (a brother of one of my distant ancestors) collected at intervals the following particulars of his melancholy story. His master it appeared had willingly entered into the plot--already alluded to--projected by the old Moor. The inquisitorial visit, planned by these two fiends in human form, was brought about by information secretly furnished to the Holy Tribunal, by the wretched maniac himself. Their _professed_ object in procuring Hinzára's incarceration was, to frighten her into a marriage with Don Guiterre, whose influence over the Inquisitor, his relative, was to be employed in procuring her liberation, on condition that she gave proof of her innocence by consenting to marry him.--Each of these miscreants imagined, however, that he was making a dupe of his confederate; for each breathed only vengeance on the innocent Hinzára. Don Guiterre could not forgive her contemptuous rejection of his suit; and, his ungovernable passion continuing unabated, he hoped, by acceding to the terms on which only it was proposed, she should obtain her liberation,--to have her in his power to satisfy his revenge, after he had gratified his yet more hateful passion: or, should she, contrary to his expectations, continue obdurate, to feast his eyes on the tortures of his hapless victim. Abenhabuz, on the other hand, knew his daughter too well to imagine she would consent to purchase life on the terms proposed. His sole object was to procure her death,--which, as he conceived, was merited as much by her disobedience to his commands, as by the unpardonable sin of deserting the faith of her forefathers;--and, as he himself could not inflict the punishment without exciting suspicion, he hit upon the plan of making Don Guiterre a tool to effect his purpose. But, in the words of the Roman Fabulist, "_Vindictæ cupidus sibi malum accersit_." Each of these monsters reaped the just fruit of his crime. Whether the terms of liberation before alluded to were ever proposed to the daughter of Abenhabuz, I cannot inform you, Don Carlos:--most probably not, however.--Don Guiterre doubtless overrated his influence with the Holy Tribunal,--the vast powers and inaccessible character of which were at that early period of its establishment not known even to Spaniards themselves. At all events, the governor, finding that the doom of his victim was irrevocably fixed, and--ignorant of the secret wishes of the Moor--fearing that the full weight of Abenhabuz's resentment would fall upon him on the discovery of the failure of their scheme,--resolved, ere the _Auto da fé_ was announced to take place, to prevent the possibility of the Moor's attempting to save his daughter, by confessing the plot, and making known the share he--Guiterre--had taken in it. The wretch, who, in his dying moments, confessed these atrocities, was an accomplice in the crime by which this object was attained.--The foul deed committed, the corpse of Abenhabuz was destroyed by quick lime, and his papers were minutely examined, lest any proof should be furnished by them of the plot against Hinzára. Letters were then found from the sons of the murdered Moor, (who it appeared had joined the discontented inhabitants of the Alpujarras, at that time about to take up arms against the government,) which brought to light a project on the eve of being carried into execution, to seize upon the city of Ronda. These, after being made up in a sealed parcel, were dropt, by the governor's faithful agent, on the road to Marbella, and, being picked up by a chance traveller, were brought to Don Guiterre. The importance of their contents caused them of course to be forwarded to the seat of government, accompanied by a statement, that diligent but unavailing search having been made for Abenhabuz, it was supposed he had escaped to the mountains, and must, in the hurry of his flight, have lost these papers, containing indubitable proofs of his treason. The policy of keeping these events secret was suggested by the artful Guiterre, on the plea, that it might lead to the detection of other persons engaged in the conspiracy; which recommendation, having been approved of, it soon came to be believed that the missing Abenhabuz was, as well as his daughter, an inmate of the dungeon of the Inquisition. By what means Don Guiterre met with his death still remained a matter of mystery.--By his servant's statement it appeared that he had fallen in an attempt to pass over the rustic bridge, leading to the cavern under the _quinta_ of the deceased Moor; whither by an anonymous communication he had been invited to repair unattended, under the promise of having the spot shown to him where the Alchymist's riches were buried.--The wretched Lopez, who had followed his master at a distance, saw a bright light shining to point out the passage made across the deep chasm, and heard his cries on falling; but, overcome by fear, he immediately took to flight, and for obvious reasons had not given any information on the subject. Whatever further particulars--if any--were gathered from him ere his death, never became public. Sufficient, however, was known to cause the spot to be held in great awe; so much so, indeed, that, after the miraculous abstraction of various goats, sheep, &c., from the flocks grazing in the neighbourhood, not a soul would venture near it; the common opinion being, that some vindictive fairy had taken up his abode in the cavern, and amused himself by playing off his malicious pranks upon mankind. After a lapse of some years, a Hermit applied to the owner of the property, for permission to make the haunted cavern his cell; and, trusting that his prayers would be instrumental in laying the troublesome Sprite, his request was readily granted. The holy man who thus proffered his good offices, though bent down and infirm, had not the eye of one stricken in years; neither did his flowing beard, though white as the undrifted snow on the surrounding mountain tops, appear to have been blanched so much by time, as by privations and sufferings. He went out but seldom, and then only to attend upon the sick and poor. Within the city walls he was never known to enter. He had travelled much--had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and visited the Holy house at Loreto--was known to carry on a correspondence with some of the first dignitaries of the Pontifical City,--and never wanted money. By his piety, munificence, and benevolence, Father Anselmo at length attained such celebrity throughout the country, that his prayers were considered nearly as efficacious as those of most saints.--He sunk gradually and quietly to his grave. Not having been seen for several days, those to whose wants he was in the daily habit of administering consulted together as to the steps to be taken to ascertain his fate. They determined to enter his cell, and, as he would never permit a soul to cross the bridge, procured a long ladder to enable them to effect their purpose. On gaining admission, they discovered Anselmo's body, stiffened unto death, in the attitude of prayer. His knees were bent before an Altar, on which stood a small gold crucifix, of exquisite workmanship; but his head had fallen forwards on his clasped hands.--By his side lay a poignard. Its point was corroded with the deep rust of years; but every other part of the shining blade bore evidence of the peculiar care which has been taken of its preservation. Its hilt was a glittering mass of costly diamonds. From the deceased hermit's neck a small packet was suspended, containing a lock of auburn hair, and on the envelope, the following words were written, in Anselmo's hand. "For thee have I passed a life of celibacy and seclusion!--for disobeying thy sacred injunctions have I been sorely chastened!--Sainted Virgin! plead for me with our Heavenly Father, that the sins I have committed in this world may be forgiven in that which is to come!" It was evident,--said the worthy Padre, concluding his long story,--it was evident, Don Carlos, that his prayer could be addressed to no other than the Holy Virgin, Mother of our blessed Saviour,--and, consequently, that the lock of hair must have been her's. It was accordingly sent to Toledo, and deposited in the church of _San Juan de los Reyes_,--where a magnificent urn--now probably melted down into some atheistical French Marshal's soup tureen--enclosed for many years the precious relic. What became of the poignard I know not. The pious Anselmo was buried with great pomp, and numberless miracles have been wrought at his grave;--the mischievous fairy feared to return to a place purified by so holy a person;--the passage leading to the subterranean apartments has long been filled up;--and the miraculous bridge decayed and was carried away by the stream. We have put up a cross to scare away evil spirits; but they nevertheless say, that strange noises are yet heard, and flickering lights occasionally seen in the vicinity. I do not attach much credit to such tales. "_Fallax vulgi judicium_," (the good Father loved a scrap of Latin) and--producing from his pocket a white cambric handkerchief, and wiping his forehead with it, as if to show he had some notion of the use to which the cavern was at the present day applied, he added--"I dare say you are equally sceptical."--I will now, Don Carlos, wish you a pleasant _Siesta_--"_Dios guard' usted._"[108] CHAPTER VIII. DEPARTURE FOR MALAGA--SCENERY ON AND DANGERS OF THE ROAD TO EL BURGO--FINE VIEW FROM CASARABONELA--AN INDEPENDENT INNKEEPER--A SPANISH BATTLE, ATTENDED WITH MORE DECISIVE RESULTS THAN USUAL--DESCRIPTION OF CASARABONELA--COMELINESS OF ITS WASHING NYMPHS--ROAD TO MALAGA--RIVER GUADALJORCE--SIGILA OF THE ROMANS--CARTAMA. Bidding adieu to Ronda,--its fruitful groves, crystal springs, snow-white bread, and jet-black eyes,--we will take the road to Malaga. At about a mile and a half from the town, the road arrives at and passes under a long aqueduct, by means of which a stream is conveyed across the valley, for the supply of the fountains of the Mercadillo; thereby saving to its inhabitants the expense of sinking deep wells in the rocky hill. At the end of another half league, the road having gained a slight acclivity, commands a fine view of the venerable old city and its fertile plain; but diving thence into a dark and narrow ravine, a contrast of the wildest character presents itself, and the road winds for many miles amongst the rugged roots of the _old women's teeth_, already noticed.--These have certainly not had the effect of grinding the path smooth--for a more execrable _trocha_ it never has been my fate to ride over. Part of it is so bad,--resembling a petrified honeycomb of Brobdignag dimensions,--that our horses had to pause at every step, and consider into which of the holes presented to their choice they should next venture to put their feet. The scenery is splendid. It consists of terrific precipices and impending mountains--foaming torrents and rustic bridges--umbrageous oaks and wide-spreading cork trees. But our enjoyment of these wild beauties was considerably diminished, as well by the torrents of rain that fell without ceasing from the time of our entering the mountains, as from the attention it was necessary to give our horses. Our progress, necessarily slow over this _camino de perdices_,[109] was yet further retarded by numberless trains of loaded mules, which, having left Ronda with the earliest dawn, had gained an advance upon us over the plain, and, labouring under the bulky produce of the fair, were filing slowly along the same narrow track as ourselves, restricting our pace to an average rate of something less than three miles an hour. Vain were all our endeavours to gain the head of the lengthened column;--for though we seized every opportunity the rugged road presented of pushing on with our less burthened animals, yet no sooner had we succeeded in passing one string of mules, than we found ourselves in contact with the tail of another. Gradually, however, the _Cafilas_[110] became wider and wider apart; and on arriving within a few miles of the town of El Burgo, an open and comparatively level space presenting itself, unobstructed by man or beast, we began to indulge the hope that our perseverance had earned its reward, and that thenceforth a clear road lay before us. Our impatient steeds gladly availed themselves of the permission to quicken their pace; but five minutes' canter carried us across the verdant glade, when we again found ourselves immured within a rocky ravine, shadowed by the dark forest, and--to our disappointment--in contact with yet another string of mules and _boricos_. The pass was more rugged than any we had hitherto met with, and the sure-footed animals, with noses almost touching the stony path, were scrambling down the rough descent with caprinine agility; though sometimes--thrown off their equilibrium by the size rather than the weight of their burthens,--they would stagger from side to side, so as to make their destruction appear inevitable. Righting themselves, however, in the most scientific manner, and making a short pause, as if to recover their self-possession, they would resume their perilous undertaking, without further incitement than an "_arre!_"[111] glad enough not to _feel_ the usual accompaniment on their houghs or ribs. Considering it advisable to follow the muleteers' example, we too allowed our beasts to use their own discretion in the selection of their stepping-places by giving them their heads; and, folding our cloaks about us, so as to afford the utmost possible protection against the pelting storm, we resigned ourselves to fate; there being nothing for it, as the philosophic Sancho says, but patience and a shrug of the shoulders. Whilst proceeding with our necks thus in chancery--sliding, stumbling, and dripping along, in rear of the closely formed column--we came most unexpectedly upon a peasant, mounted on a sleek mule, who, taking advantage of a favourable spot, had drawn up on the road side to allow the train to pass. The circumstance of his being the only person we had met journeying towards Ronda, would of itself have caused us to notice him, but there was something in the man's deportment that peculiarly attracted observation. In the first place, he suffered all his fellow-countrymen to pass without deigning to return their usual courteous salutation; in the next, he was smoking a _tabaco_[112] instead of a _papelito_; and, lastly, he was muffled up so completely in his _manta_ that every part of his dress was concealed, and of his face little more than the eyes could be seen. These were dark, piercing, and inquisitive, and their sidelong glances, evidently following their owner's thoughts, were directed with searching scrutiny on the tempting bales that passed successively before him. So thoroughly was the attention of this person devoted to this interesting examination, that, concealed as we were by the moving mountains of Manchester goods which preceded us, our military cortège, bringing up the rear of the column, took him completely by surprise. For the moment all presence of mind forsook him. His left arm, by an instinctive jerk, removed the hat from his head; disclosing a most sinister countenance, and a brace of pistols stuck in his worsted sash; whilst, with the other, he hurriedly made the _cruz de admirado_,[113] muttering, at the same time, the usual passing benediction. With the flurry of a person exerting himself to _appear_ composed, he then, to our great amusement and astonishment, began singing one of the peculiar ditties of the _arrieros_, at the very extent of his voice. These sudden transitions, first from arrogance to servility, then from alarm to merriment, struck us all very forcibly; and each was pondering to himself,--for it rained too hard to render talking agreeable,--what could possibly have given rise to them, when, reaching the bottom of the descent, a sharp turn in the road brought us in view of a party of some twelve or fifteen persons, who, partially concealed in a thicket of underwood, were assembled under the shelter of a huge cork tree, about fifty paces off the road. Though habited as _Contrabandistas_, they were armed up to the teeth, and had a far more offensive than defensive appearance. Most of the party were grouped round the stem of the huge tree, under protection of which a fire was struggling for existence against the storm and rain; but some of the men were scattered amongst the brushwood, and seemed to be girthing up and preparing their horses for a start. All eyes were anxiously fixed upon us the moment we came in sight, showing that the muleteer's song had not been a spontaneous outbreak of hilarity; and the examination of our persons was evidently productive of some little distrust and apprehension; for though the folds of our capacious cloaks screened our persons most effectually from view, yet the glazed caps that protruded above, and the steel scabbards that peeped out below, sufficiently showed our military calling. A short and hurried consultation was the result of their scrutiny. That ended, one of the party, who seemed to be its chief, stepped a few paces towards us, whilst the rest, as if wishing to avoid observation, resumed their interrupted occupation at the fire. The person who thus put himself forward was a handsome, jolly-looking fellow, who, despite the heat of some fifty Andalusian summers, was bordering on corpulency. Richly dressed and well armed (as well with assurance as with blunderbuss and pistols), he was, in every sense of the word, _un hombre de bigote_;[114] and, saluting our party most courteously, he requested our knightships would alight and warm ourselves at their fire; and, if we could put up with road-way fare, partake of their poor breakfast. Treating this invitation as--that which no doubt it was meant to be,--a mere _compliment d'usage_, we politely, but with the brevity which the Spanish language admits of, excused ourselves (for the weather was anti-ceremonious), and passed on without even exchanging a single word amongst ourselves. That fatal effects are frequently the consequence of too great _loquacity_, no one will venture to dispute; but that similar results should spring from over-_taciturnity_, many may be disposed to controvert. Voltaire (I think) relates a ludicrous story of some drowning Dutchmen, who would not part with their _pipes_ to cry help; but the fact may be doubted. In the present case, however, several luckless wights were actually throttled for want of one saving word of English!--But I am anticipating the catastrophe of our adventure, if so it deserve to be called. We had no sooner passed beyond hearing of the suspicious-looking troop, than a peasant, who had stuck close to our heels all the morning, rode up to inform us that the persons we had just met were _muy mala gente_,[115] and that we had had a most fortunate escape.--We too were pretty well convinced that the party had halted at that retired spot with the intention of taking something more substantial than breakfast; but we did not feel surprised at their allowing us to pass without molestation, since our party was strong and our baggage light. On our arrival at Malaga next day, we learnt that a sharp affair had taken place near El Burgo, between some of the government troops and a gang of robbers; and the following afternoon, when riding on the Alameda, whom should we meet but our quondam friend, and two of his companions, proceeding under an escort to the city gaol. He recognized us immediately, but his breeding was by no means improved by the air of the city;--the friendly greeting of the Sierra being changed into a torrent of maledictions. Curious to learn the particulars of the case, and cause of his abuse of the _malditos Ingleses_, we made particular inquiries on the subject, and learnt, to our surprise, that we had ourselves been mainly instrumental in causing the apprehension of the robbers. Deceived by our being muffled up in our cloaks, they had taken us for one of the detachments of Spanish troops, which, at the breaking up of the fair, are sent from Ronda to patrole all the principal roads leading through the Serranía. The vidette whom we came upon so unexpectedly had not been able to give the bandits sufficient time, either to prepare for action, or to conceal themselves; which accounted for the confusion so perceptible when we first discovered them; as, expecting to have easy work with the muleteers, they had secured their horses in the thicket, to have all hands ready for the ransack. Trusting that our suspicions had not been excited, and relieved from all apprehension of encountering another patrole for some hours, they had stopped, and were in the act of plundering one of the richly-laden trains that we had passed in the morning, when the real _gens d'armes_ came to the rescue. In their fancied security, the robbers had gone so deliberately to work, that the notice of their scout had not given them time to regain their tethered horses; and in the scuffle that ensued, three of the gang were captured, whose necks, as we were afterwards informed, were in the due course of justice submitted to the _garrote_. I must now return to El Burgo,--which place we were five hours in reaching, although its distance from Ronda is scarcely eleven miles; indeed, in the measure of the country, it is reckoned but two leagues. El Burgo de Ronda (as it is generally called) is a miserable village, containing about 200 _Vecinos_; but it is most romantically situated, in a fertile plain encompassed with magnificent woods and mountains, and watered by numerous springs. We arrived thoroughly drenched, and were glad to halt for a short time, to breathe our horses and dry our cloaks. Towards noon, the weather becoming more propitious, we continued our journey to Casarabonela. The road is very bad all the way, though somewhat better than we had gone over in the morning. The scenery is not by any means so fine. The direct road to Malaga avoids Casarabonela, leaving it, perched on the side of a steep mountain, some thousand feet above, and about half a mile off, on the right; but the view from the summit of the ridge overlooking the town is so grand, that I would strongly recommend all travellers to ascend the rugged mountain, even at the cost of an hour's delay, and risk of a displaced collar-bone. The little town, embosomed in groves of fruit-trees, lies about half way down the southern side of the mountain. On its right, and somewhat overlooking it, an old Moorish fortress occupies a cragged eminence; its smoked and shattered walls seeming, after the manner of its founders, to be mourning with dirt and ashes the loss of the rich plain spread out beneath; over which, in former days, they held despotic dominion. This vast plain stretches south, to where the winding Guadaljorce discharges itself into the ocean; the Sierra Gibalgalía rising "like a huge incumbrance" from its centre, and sheltering the mouldering walls of the famed city of Cartáma. Along the eastern side of the valley, the mountains of Alhama, the Alpujarras, and snowy ridge of Granada, successively overtop the rugged ramifications of the Sierra of Almoxia, which bound it in that direction. To the west, the Sierras of Alhaurin and Mijas present themselves, rising abruptly from the plain. Between these two masses of mountains, and beyond the plain, a wide expanse of the blue and glassy Mediterranean is visible, studded with white sails, bearing the rich produce of Malaga to every part of the world. The descent to the town is good, but tedious,--winding through luxuriant vineyards and orchards. The vines are here trained on frames raised about five feet from the ground; a method by no means general in Spain, and which, though certainly more pleasing to the eye, is not considered so favourable to the fruit as that usually adopted. The Inn looked dirty and comfortless, and its keeper was so imbued with the constitutional doctrines of liberty and equality,--then much in vogue,--that he would hardly condescend to answer our questions concerning accommodation, and was perfectly indignant at our suggesting the expediency of his rising from his seat, and showing us the way to his stable.--"There was the door of his house if we chose to enter; if not, we had but to suit ourselves elsewhere." Aware that the town did not possess another _posada_, and that the nearest _Venta_ on the road was at a distance of several leagues, the dignified innkeeper trusted, from the lateness of the hour, that we should necessarily be obliged to place ourselves at his mercy. We, on the other hand, determined, if possible, to obtain accommodation elsewhere, and seeing the lady-owner of the adjoining house standing at her door, asked her if she knew any one who, for a handsome consideration, would furnish us with a night's lodging. After a short parley, it was agreed that her house and stable should be placed at our "_disposicion_" for the night, and sundry of our hard dollars at her's in perpetuity. The publican--who, pending the negociation, sat at his portal puffing a cigar, affecting the utmost indifference to its result, but in reality listening impatiently to every word that passed--no sooner found how good a thing had slipped through his fingers, than he started up in the most ungovernable passion, venting his rage upon our buxom hostess, somewhat in the following strain--"_Mala Pascua te dé Dios! Hija de puta ruin!_[116]--May you be burnt for a witch before the year's over, for taking the bread out of a neighbour's mouth!--May the ghost of your cuckold husband appear at your bedside this night, you shameless wanton!--May"--"_Que chusco es el tuerto!_"[117] interrupted the incensed fair one, in a scream that completely drowned the rest of his good wishes, to whatever extent they may have been carried--"Look at home, _Cabron_,[118] ere you call an honest man cuckold, and a virtuous woman wanton."--"Virtuous woman, indeed!" resumed he of the Venta; "and admits four smooth-chinned _Ingleses_ into her house, to say nothing of their two stout grooms, and that monkey-faced Portuguese, their guide; whom I know right well, though he has grown fat under English feeding; and whom, fat or lean, no virtuous woman would suffer within reach of her nostrils." This unlooked-for attack on "lazy Antonio" drew a furious cross-fire upon the irritated _Ventero_; for whilst our hostess flinched not one inch from his direct and somewhat scandalous assault--_par pari referens_--"_Vosse mercé_" opened a fire of loud, nasal Portuguese-Spanish upon his flank, that exceeded in noise the braying of a whole troop of asses. This, in its turn, unkennelled the publican's _Cara Sposa_. The combat recovered its equilibrium, and seemed likely to be terminated only by the coming night; for all our endeavours to withdraw the valorous Antonio proved unavailing. But, in the words of the Manchegan Knight, "_siempre deja la ventura, una puerta abierta_."[119] The publican and his wife, though proof against the reputation-killing batteries of their open enemies, could not stand before an insidious covert attack that was now about to open upon them. The town's people, amongst whom the liberal _ventero_ did not appear to be in good odour, flocked in crowds to the scene of action, and, though professing to take no part in the fray, yet, by whooping, hollowing, and laughing, whenever the widow and her Portuguese ally fired a successful shot at their adversaries, they gave the former a "moral support," that, in its results, proved quite as efficacious as an active interference. The Innkeeper--who hitherto had manfully confronted his opponents--now saw that victory was no longer attainable, and abandoned the field; leaving his light-tongued helpmate to cover his retreat. This task she performed with consummate ability, supporting her nearly exhausted volleys of words by screams of defiance, and various offensive gesticulations. The last distinguishable turn of reproach that reached our ears, was _Alarbes!_[120] which she seemed to consider the _ne plus ultra_ of vituperation, and certainly was the very last epithet we had any right to expect would be applied to fair-skinned mortals like ourselves, by such a bronze-complexioned semi-morisco. The battle over, and stable door unlocked,--the key of which, firmly grasped in her right hand, had been the standard under which our hostess had fought and conquered,--we led our tired horses in, leaving her to fire a round of taunts in celebration of the victory. Casarabonela is a clean and well-paved town. For the former quality, it is principally indebted to a stream of limpid water that, issuing from the side of the mountain, rushes down the steep streets, carrying every thing offensive before it. Its supply is so bountiful that, besides doing the scavenging duty of the town, and turning a number of mill-wheels, it is led off in irrigating channels through all the gardens and orchards in the neighbourhood. The inhabitants are celebrated for their comeliness, and I willingly bear witness to the truth of common report in this particular instance; having seldom seen more lovely faces than amongst those of the bright-eyed, fair-complexioned damsels of this mountain town. Nor are their figures unworthy of note, albeit, their limbs are something too muscular for Naiades and Oreades. It is meet, by the way, that I should explain _how_ I became acquainted with this latter fact relating to their secret history, lest scandal should blight the fair fame of the Casarabonelian maidens. The truth is, then, we arrived at the town upon a _washing day_, and in taking our evening stroll, chanced to come upon the congregated village nymphs engaged knee-deep at their lavatory vocation in the mill stream; jumping and stamping with all their might upon the soiled garments of the preceding week; and certainly displaying more of their fair skins than might reasonably have been expected to meet the eyes of strangers. So they appeared to think also; for our sudden advent created an extraordinary sensation amongst them. Some had sufficient presence of mind to get on dry ground ere they loosened the bandage that confined their petticoats at the knee; others, regardless of consequences, let them drop in the water; and some few were so completely bewildered as to fancy their only chance of obtaining concealment was by squatting down, even in the midst of the stream.--All laughed, but there was nothing either immodest or rude in their merriment. They were evidently ashamed that their bare legs (albeit not to be ashamed of) had been exposed to our gaze; but, at the same time, they could not but be amused at the various extraordinary expedients resorted to to conceal them. As we could not accuse ourselves of any indiscreet curiosity in this matter--for we had followed a beaten path leading to the old castle--we had but to compliment them on their fair skins and sound understandings, and pass on. Indeed, I suspect it was merely our being strangers that had occasioned their modesty to be so put to the blush; for their own countrymen must have been passing to and fro the whole day, in proceeding to their work in the fields. Such is the force of habit. The view from the Old Castle, looking towards Malaga, is nearly equal to that from the top of the mountain; and in the opposite direction, the outline of the Sierra itself is very bold, and is set off to great advantage by the rich foliage of well-grown forest trees that clothe its rough side. Our landlady's will was better than her accommodation. Our beds, which (so careful was she of her reputation) were all in one small room, looked well enough; but the somnifugeous animals domesticated therein were so numerous, so vigorous, and so insatiable, that we gladly hailed the dawn of day to escape from their persevering attentions. The road down the side of the mountain (in its windings upwards of a mile) is far from good, and it is only tolerable after gaining the plain, until it passes by a ford to the left bank of the Guadaljorce, when it becomes practicable for carriages all the way to Malaga. The course of this river (_Guada al jars_--River of the Guard) is most eccentric. It rises considerably to the eastward of the city of Antequera, almost, it may be said, on the margin of the Genil, and running, during the early part of its course, nearly parallel to that river, seems, like it, to be directing itself to the Guadalquivír. But, after following this westerly course for upwards of thirty miles, it turns abruptly from the level country, in a southerly direction; pierces its way through a most intricate country to Alora; washes the base of the rock on which that ancient city is perched; and then, entering the vale of Malaga, winds round to the eastward, fertilizing that spacious plain; and discharges itself into the Mediterranean:--thus, from its source to its mouth, describing a perfect semicircle. In the centre of the extensive vale of Malaga, the volume of the Guadaljorce is increased by the junction of the Rio Grande--a far less considerable stream, which comes down from the mountains encircling Toloz, Monda, and other Roman-Moorish fortresses, that guard the passes on the western side of the plain. Carter, describing this latter river from its source to its embouchure, states it to be the _Sigila_ of the Romans. Should this be the case, (though it seems probable that the larger stream of the two would have carried its name to the sea) we have yet to learn by what name the Guadaljorce was known in former days.--I mention this, as I shall hereafter refer to the subject in speaking of the _Salsus_, which, it strikes me forcibly, was the name given formerly to the _upper_ portion of the Guadaljorce--_i. e._ before it was lost in the rocky defiles to the north of Alora. The Guadaljorce--jore--joz--and--quivirejo, (for it is equally known by all those names) runs in a wide, pebbly bed, and is readily enough forded at all seasons, excepting when heavy rains happen to have caused it to overflow its banks. Under any circumstances, however, Malaga may be reached by making a détour to the westward; crossing the Rio Grande at Casa Palma, and from thence, following the road by Cartama, down the right bank of the Guadaljorce, until arrived abreast of the village of Aljaurinejo, where a bridge presents itself. The direct Road from Casarabonela crosses the River, previous to its confluence with the Rio Grande; and about a mile beyond the ford, reaches the _Venta de Cartáma_. This is often made the resting-place between Ronda and Malaga. Now, as I write with the view of tempting others to ride after me, I feel called upon, despite the poor accommodation of Casarabonela, to advise future travellers to put up with it; for certainly a more wretched hovel than the Venta of Cartáma I never looked into. A single glance produces an irritation of the skin, and a sympathetic restlessness of the fingers. Proceeding onwards, a view of the town of Cartáma is obtained on the right. It lies somewhat removed from the bank of the Guadaljorce, upon the north side of the Sierra Gibalgalía. The harvest of statues, pavements, coins, &c. gathered amongst the ruins of this ancient Roman city, has been very abundant. A few years back it possessed a Forum, Porticoes, and Temples, in a very perfect state. But, though the Spaniards talk much of their antiquities, they trouble themselves but little about their preservation; and Cartáma contains now scarcely any thing worthy of note. From the _Venta de Cartáma_ to Malaga the road is practicable for carriages to an extent of thirteen miles and a half; making the total distance from Casarabonela twenty-five miles;--from Ronda, forty-five. CHAPTER IX. UNPREPOSSESSING APPEARANCE OF MALAGA--DREAD OF YELLOW FEVER--THE ALAMEDA--DERIVATION OF THE CITY'S NAME, AND SKETCH OF ITS HISTORY--THE GIBRALFARO AND ALCAZABA--CATHEDRAL--CIGAR MANUFACTORY--CALCULATION OF THE SUPPLY AND CONSUMPTION OF CIGARS IN SPAIN--MALAGA FIGURES--POPULATION--TRADE--WINE--HARBOUR--SOCIETY--VISIT TO EL RETIRO--THE FANDANGO AND CACHUCHA. The appearance of Malaga on a near approach is mean and unprepossessing; nor is this an optical deception, for the suburbs are miserably poor and excessively dirty. This last, indeed, is a fault that the city may be charged with generally; and such is the contempt in which the virtue of cleanliness is held by the inhabitants, that, though the little river _Guadalmedina_[121] winds its way through the heart of the city, requiring only to be properly husbanded to keep the place sweet and clean; yet, from mismanagement, it is itself suffered to become a nuisance; the scanty stream left after supplying the fountains being in summer so obstructed by heaps of filth, brought out from the city, and thrown into its wide bed, that not having sufficient power to carry off the accumulated mass of corruption, it serves only (by keeping it constantly moist) to render the process of putrefaction more fetid and deadly. The calm indifference with which the inhabitants of Malaga endure the intolerable nuisance thus generated by their improvidence and indolence, and the patience with which they look forward to the winter torrents to rid them of it, contrast singularly enough with the immoderate alarm occasioned by the arrival of a vessel from the Habana, and the haste with which they send it from their port to undergo purification at Minorca. Thus, whilst dreading most unwarrantably the importation of the yellow fever from a place which, at the time, perhaps, was perfectly free from it, they disregard altogether the little forcing-bed of miasmatic diseases, situated under their own immediate noses. The city, it is true, has suffered so severely from visitations of this terrible disease, that the inhabitants may well dread its recurrence; but since they are aware that Coin, Alhaurin, and other places in the neighbourhood, situated in a purer atmosphere, are beyond its influence; surely they ought to look at home for the causes of its fatal virulence, if not of its actual production. The winter torrents come down in great force, and, from the proximity of the mountains, the Guadalmedina rises very suddenly; rendering a wide bed quite necessary to carry it off, as well as strong walls to resist and direct it in its course. But, in spite of these precautions, the lower portions of the city are frequently inundated. A wooden bridge, on stone piers, keeps up the communication between the two parts of the city during _sweet winter_; but the bed of the river, which is eighty yards wide, may be crossed dry-foot the greater part of the year. The principal portion of the city is on the left bank of the Guadalmedina. Indeed, the part situated on the western side is, properly speaking, only a large suburb. The change on passing the bridge is most agreeable; the first object that presents itself being the Alameda, a fine open space, lined on three sides with handsome houses, and on the fourth open to the refreshing westerly breezes. A shaded carriage drive goes round the quadrangle; and down its centre, a broad gravel walk, furnished with seats, and planted with flowers and shrubs, affords the public a delightful promenade. On a Sunday evening this _Paseo_ is crowded with all classes of the inhabitants; and the dark voluptuous Malagueña, as, with mincing step, she threads the motley throng, fails not to display her skill in _fanning_ signals to her various acquaintances. The stranger, whilst following, with admiring eyes, the graceful movements of the fluttering parchment,[122] little suspects that he is himself the subject matter of its telegraphic communications. Besides the Alameda, there are several fine open spaces in the city, but certainly not one good street, although some few pretend to the convenience of a _trottoir_. The inns are tolerably good. That which is dignified by the name of "_Los tres Reyes_" was the best, at the period of my last visit. Malaga is said by some to have received its name from the Hebrew work _Malach_, (signifying to reign) and to have been founded by the Phoenicians, eight centuries before the advent of our Saviour. Others, on the contrary, maintain that its name is derived from the Phoenician language; the same word _Malach_ signifying in it _to salt_; and that the city was so called from the quantity of fish taken and cured there. The learned Florez, who inclines to this latter opinion, states that the cured fish of Malaga was so esteemed at Rome that a body corporate of merchants was established in that Capital of the world, under the name of _Malacitani_, as proved by an inscription found in the _Campo di Flora_. By the Romans the city was called Malaca; and became one of their _confederates_, (of which there were but three in Boetica) as well as the great emporium for their Spanish trade; although Pomponius Mela speaks slightingly of its importance.[123] It was captured by the Moors under Tarik, A.D. 715; and probably such portions of the walls as still exist were built about that period; but the fortress on the _Gibralfaro_, and the _Alcazaba_, or Royal Palace, are said to have been erected only towards the end of the thirteenth century; when the Moors, by the rapid progress of the Christian arms, (which had already wrested from them both Cordoba and Valencia) saw the necessity of strengthening the towns of their diminished territories. Malaga had become a separate kingdom, however, as early as the beginning of the eleventh century; when the Caliphat of Cordoba ceased under the imbecile Haccham II. The first who mounted the throne of Malaga was Ali Aben Hameth. But it does not appear that the crown was regularly handed down in one family; it seems rather to have been a constant object of strife; and its power over other states seems to have varied according to the talents of him who wore it; for sometimes we find the sovereign of Malaga owning obedience to the Princes of Seville and Cordoba; at others claiming dominion over those kingdoms; and generally, over the city of Granada. Ishmael, a prince of the house of Alhamares, was the last king who dwelt within the walls of the _Alcazaba_. From the time of his being called to the throne of Granada, (A.D. 1313), Malaga was governed by a prince of the royal blood. Malaga was one of the last cities that fell to the Christian arms, Ferdinand and Isabella having succeeded in capturing it, after an obstinate siege, only five years prior to the conquest of Granada, viz., A.D. 1487. The _Gibralfaro_ is, or rather has been, a fortress of great strength and considerable extent. Its ruins occupy the crest of a rugged mountain, from which, and a signal tower that formerly stood on the summit, it receives its present name, _Gibel al faro_. The rocky ridge stretches east and west along the Mediterranean shore, falling precipitously towards the beach, and roughly and rapidly in the opposite direction, but less abruptly as it approaches the city, which it partially shelters to the S.E. A narrow, walled passage connects the castle with the _Alcazaba_, which, standing on a plateau near the termination of the rocky tongue, has a better and more immediate command over the city and harbour than even the _Gibralfaro_ itself. The walls of the fortress were evidently constructed at the cost of some proud Roman temple, and were probably run up in great haste, as numerous fragments of columns, capitals, &c., are built in with the more suitable bricks which the Moors generally used when they bestowed pains upon their works. The walls of the Alcazaba, like those of the fortress, are studded with these venerable fragments, and are in an equally ruinous condition. The principal gateway is, however, tolerably perfect, and affords a fine specimen of Moorish architecture. The Alcazaba answered the triple purpose of a royal palace, an advanced work of the more elevated citadel, and a dock or arsenal for the city galleys. The docks were situated under its north wall; but they have long since been buried under the ruins of the impending building, and are now covered over with houses. The Cathedral of Malaga, commenced about the middle of the sixteenth century, is a handsome building; but, from one only of its towers having been finished, its appearance is much injured. How frequently has it happened, and how much is it to be regretted, that edifices, dedicated to the worship of the Deity, have, as in this instance, been planned and partly executed on a scale of magnificence totally disproportioned to the means possessed for completing them according to the original design. Besides the deformities that offend the eye in these patched-up buildings, and the unpleasant feeling to which the contemplation of an unfinished Christian church ever gives birth, a deplorable conviction is forced upon the mind, that these splendid piles were erected rather with a view to commemorate their _founders_ than to promote the well-being of mankind; and that large sums of money have thus been vainly squandered, or, at best, lain profitless for ages; which might have been otherwise beneficially employed in the interests of Christianity. Let me not lead my reader to suppose, however, that I dislike to see stately temples raised for the worship of our Creator. On the contrary, the lofty towers, high vaulted aisles, and gorgeous windows of many of our Christian churches are well calculated to predispose the mind to devotion; since, wonderful as they are, considered as works of man, how contemptible do they appear, compared with the mighty works of _our_ Maker! and, viewed in this light, they cannot but impress us with a sense of His power and our utter insignificance. With such feelings I have ever regarded the splendid cathedrals of Antwerp, Cöln, Rheims, Ratisbon, Vienna, &c., which are amongst the number of those that remain to this day in a more or less unfinished state, though, in other respects, they are some of the finest specimens of Gothic architecture extant. The cathedral of Malaga is of noble proportions, but of a heavy, over-ornamented, composite style of architecture; and it is disfigured in an extraordinary degree with gilt chapels, carved saints, and votive offerings. It contains little worthy of notice besides the carved wood-work of the seats in the choir, the jewels, dresses, &c., in the _Tesoreria_[124], and one good painting by Alonzo Cano, in the chapel of the _Rosario_. The tower of the cathedral is 300 feet in height, and commands a fine view, though not equal to that obtained from the _Gibralfaro_, since this latter includes the whole city, as well as the extensive plain of the Guadaljorce, and the various ranges of mountains that stretch along the Mediterranean shore between Monda and Marbella. Immediately under the _Alcazaba_ stands an immense and rather handsome edifice, built not many years since for a custom-house; but, meeting with few customers in that line of business, it has recently been converted into a Royal cigar manufactory, and is now in a thriving condition. Previous to the establishment of this assistant, the Royal manufactory of Seville had imposed on it the _impossible_ task of supplying cigars and snuff for the whole of Spain; and even now, with such additional means of production, the demand is _ten times_ greater than the two factories have the power of furnishing, as the following statement will, I think, pretty clearly show. The manufactory of Malaga employs 700 persons (women and children) in making cigars. A good pair of hands at the work may furnish three hundred a day; but (as the children cannot make half that number), taking the average at two hundred, gives a daily supply of 140,000. The manufactory of Seville employs 1,000 men and 1,600 women. These 2,600 persons may be calculated as furnishing, on an average, 250 each per diem; or, altogether, 650,000. Add to this number the 140,000 made at Malaga, and we have 790,000 as the "total of the whole" manufactured daily in Spain. But, as there are but six working days in the week, and seven smoking--indeed the lungs ought to be calculated as doing double work in Spain on Sundays and Saints' days, whilst the hands are quite idle--we must reduce that amount by one seventh, to obtain the average number of cigars furnished for each day's consumption throughout the year, which amounts therefore but to 677,143. Now, taking the population of the country at 11,000,000 of souls, and supposing (which is a moderate computation) that but one million and a half of that number are consumers of tobacco, it is evident that Spain, with her present means, can supply her smokers with but _seven sixteenths_ of a cigar _per ora, per diem_; and, consequently, as my proposition advanced, with less than one tenth part of the demand. It follows, as a corollary, that great encouragement is given to the pernicious habits of smuggling and smoking _papelitos_[125]. The persons employed in the manufacture of cigars are paid at the rate of one _real vellon_ for fifty, which enables even a first-rate maker to earn but fifteen pence a day. The best cigars are made entirely of Habana tobacco, and are sold at the factory at the rate of thirty _reales vellon_ a hundred, or about three farthings, English, each. The second quality, composed of mixed tobaccoes, (that is, the interior of Habana leaf, and the outside of Virginia) cost eighteen _reales vellon_ per hundred, or something under a half-penny each. It may be seen, from this statement of the cost of cigars of the Royal Manufactory, that smuggling cannot but prosper; since, at the Habana, the very best cigars are sold for twelve dollars a thousand (or a trifle above a half-penny each), whilst those of inferior quality may be had for one fourth that price. One of the most interesting sights of Malaga is the _Studio_ of Señor Leon, the most renowned of the numerous modellers in clay, for which the city is celebrated. His figures are admirably executed, as well as strikingly characteristic; and, from first to last, are the work of himself and family. His sons form them by hand of a very ductile clay; he goes over such parts as require the finish of an experienced artist; and they are then passed over to his daughters, who give them life by their exquisite taste and skilful management of the pencil. The price is high, the most simple figures costing four dollars (about seventeen shillings) each. A group of nine equestrian figures that Señor Leon had just executed for the _Infante_ Don Francisco de Paula, when I last visited Malaga, he valued at nine thousand _reales vellon_, or ninety four pounds! The population of Malaga is estimated at sixty thousand souls. It was formerly much greater, and, not many years since, considerably less, having been reduced from 80,000 to 40,000, by repeated visitations of the yellow fever, about the commencement of the present century. But the city has been exempted from any very severe infliction of this scourge for some years past, and the amount of its population, and, consequently, its commercial prosperity, are rapidly increasing. The place is celebrated for its manufactures of silk, linen, and hats; but the quantity of these articles now made is trifling, the greater portion of the inhabitants being employed in the more profitable occupation of preparing wines and dried fruits for the foreign markets. Upwards of 18,000 butts of wine--sweet and dry--are annually shipped from Malaga, of which the chief part is taken by the Americans; but a vast quantity of the latter, under the name of _Malaga Sherry_, finds its way also into the cellars of "_the trade_" in England; whence, after undergoing a simple metonymical process, it flows down the public throat under its new name of "old brown," or, perchance, "curiously old dry _Sherry_." The cured fish of Malaga, though not so celebrated as in the gastronomic days of ancient Rome, continues nevertheless to be a profitable branch of its trade; anchovies being annually exported from thence, to the amount of 20,000 quintals. The export of olive oil is also very great, the average quantity being about 10,000 _arrobas_ per annum. But, perhaps, the most profitable article of produce shipped from Malaga is fruit--almonds, oranges, and raisins; the preparation of which costs little, whilst they are always sure to find a market and fetch a good price. The quantity exported is enormous. The harbour of Malaga is artificially formed by a stone pier, that, protruding upwards of a quarter of a mile into the sea, screens it perfectly from the prevailing easterly gales. In the opposite direction it is nearly as effectually sheltered by the coast itself, which bends for some distance to the S.W. So that, in fact, the anchorage is exposed only to a due south wind, which, besides being one that seldom blows in this part of the Mediterranean, cannot, from the proximity of the African shore, occasion a heavy swell. The depth of water inside the mole is not sufficient to allow line of battle ships to lie there; and the port is otherwise inconvenient, from the difficulty of "making" it, when the wind is blowing strong on shore. But it is an excellent place of refuge for steamers, which need not apprehend so much the danger of getting on a lee shore. A light-house stands on the pier head, and the entrance of the harbour is guarded by several batteries. The society of Malaga is very changeable. During the constitutional frenzy, the principal inhabitants were extremely liberal in their entertainments, as well as in their ideas; were fond of bull-fights, dancing, singing, _ponch y huevos_,[126] and even, because it was English, of bottled porter. But a sad change afterwards came over them. These festive meetings were, on the return of absolutism, deemed vulgar, democratical, and _illegitimate_; and a more dull and gloomy city than Malaga, after the star of liberty had set, can hardly be imagined. I speak, of course, of the Spanish portion of the inhabitants only. The foreign merchants of the place have at all times been, and still continue to be, noted for hospitality. Most of the leading men of the city have country houses, to which they retire with their families during the heat of summer. One of the most delightful of these _sin cuidados_,[127] is "_El Retiro de San Tomas_," situated at the foot of the mountain range that bounds the vale of Malaga to the west, and distant about eight miles from the city. This charming retreat is said to occupy the site of a villa built by one of the Moslem sovereigns of Malaga, and destroyed by the Spaniards in one of the devastating inroads made upon the fertile valley of the Guadaljorce, in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. The present edifice, erected shortly after the kingdom of Granada was annexed to the crown of Spain, was also a royal seat, and so continued to be until the time of Philip V., who bestowed it upon an illegitimate son, then bishop of the diocese; from whom, he being of the order of San Domingo, it received its present name, _El Retiro de San Tomas_. At his death it went to the Dominican convent, of which he was a member, but has since passed into other hands, and, at the period of which I write, was occupied by Mr. Roose, the consulgeneral of Prussia, who, in favour of a letter of introduction with which I had been furnished, gave my friends and self a most courteous reception. The _Retiro_ is celebrated for the rare productions and luxuriance of its gardens, the fragrance of its orange and citron groves, the splendour of its _jets d'eau_, and the beauty of the scenery it commands in all directions. After seeing all the external sights of the place, we were introduced to one of a much more novel character in Spain, viz., a large circle of ladies, assembled round a steaming urn, in the fragrant enjoyment of a "cup of tea." We needed but little pressing to join in the imbibition of the refreshing beverage, at all times acceptable, but especially in this country, where, excepting in an apothecary's shop, the cherished leaves of the invaluable shrub are seldom to be seen. From the _salon_ we were conducted to a secluded part of the grounds, where another agreeable surprise awaited us, the peasantry of the neighbourhood, decked out in their holiday suits, having been assembled there, to do honour to the patron saint of the village, by belabouring the _gazon vert_ with an interminable _fandango_. The natives of the south of Spain are passionately fond of this dance, which, like a Scotch reel, is usually kept up as long as fingers or lungs can be found to mark time for the exhibitors. A few notes thrummed on the guitar are quite sufficient to set a _fandango_ on foot; or, in default of that instrument, a monotonous ditty chaunted by one of the bystanders answers the purpose. Sometimes, when the vocalist is a _gracioso_,[128] his part of the performance is by far the most entertaining, as he will improvise couplets on the various gymnasts, who, from time to time, relieve each other at the laborious amusement, seasoning his verses plentifully with Andalusian wit. This dance is certainly of Oriental parentage. It is the same, in fact, as that of the Ghawazies of Egypt, but clothed with _South of Europe_ decency. The balancing movements of the arms are precisely the same in both, and the contortions of the body differ but slightly, though the Spanish dancers have more regard for decorum than the tattoued-faced jezebels of the East. In the Fandango also, the co-operation of the feet is at times much more active, affording a wide field for the display of personal activity, if offering but small opportunity for the exhibition of grace. In the end it becomes a most fatiguing affair, either to witness or take part in; and no one, without personal experience, can form an idea of the serious engagement he enters into, by inviting a fair _Malagueña_ to stand up to _un poquito de Fandango_; the _Caballero_ exposing himself to much _badinage_ should he be forced to give in before the lady. The _Cachucha_ is a refined species of _Fandango_; but it is seldom witnessed in Spain, except on the stage. It is doubtless a very graceful dance, but, as performed in its native land, _tant soit peu libre_. CHAPTER X. CHOICE OF ROUTES BETWEEN MALAGA AND GRANADA--ROAD TO VELEZ MALAGA--OBSERVATIONS ON THAT TOWN--CONTINUATION OF JOURNEY TO GRANADA--FERTILE VALLEY OF THE RIVER VELEZ--VENTA OF ALCAUCIN--ZAFARAYA MOUNTAINS--ALHAMA--DESCRIPTION OF THAT PLACE AND OF ITS THERMAL BATHS--CACIN--VENTA OF HUELMA--SALT-PANS OF LA MALA--FIRST VIEW OF GRANADA AND ITS VEGA--SITUATION OF THE CITY--ITS SALUBRITY--ANCIENT NAMES--BECOMES THE CAPITAL OF THE LAST MOSLEM KINGDOM OF SPAIN--FINE APPROACH TO THE MODERN CITY--IT IS THE MOST PURELY MOORISH TOWN IN SPAIN--CAUSE OF THE DECADENCE OF THE ARTS UNDER THE MOORS OF GRANADA, AND OF THE EASY CONQUEST OF THE CITY--DESTRUCTION OF THE MOORISH LITERATURE ON THE CAPTURE OF THE CITY BY THE SPANIARDS. Several roads present themselves between Malaga and Granada, each (as the Dover-packet skippers of the olden time were wont to say of their vessels) possessing a peculiar claim to the traveller's preference. One is good, but very long; another is short, but very bad; a third is both circuitous and bad, but across a most interesting and picturesque country. We made choice of this last, which proceeds by way of Velez, Malaga, and Alhama. Of the other two above-mentioned, the first is an excellent carriage road, that is directed in the first instance upon Loxa, and will be travelled over hereafter; the second (a mere mountain track) leaves the coast at once, and proceeds straight to Alhama. The distance from Malaga to Velez, although reckoned six leagues of Spain, is only about eighteen English miles. For the greater part of the way, the road is conducted along the Mediterranean shore; sometimes ascending and crossing the low, rocky promontories by which the coast is indented, but seldom stretching inland more than a quarter of a mile. It is tolerably well kept, and is at all seasons passable for carriages. The coast is rugged, and thickly set with towers and _casa fuertes_,[129] but is marked by no picturesque features until arrived within a short distance of Velez, when the road, turning away from the sea-shore, enters a flat and verdant valley, wherein stands the old town, shrouded in groves of orange and lemon trees, and backed by hills, clad to their summits with vines. A fine stream, bearing the same name as the town, serpentines through the valley, fertilizing it by a deposit of rich soil, swept from the sides of the Sierras of Loxa and Alhama. A kind of delta has thus been formed at the river's mouth, stretching some way into the sea; so that Velez, which probably, in former days, stood upon or near the coast, is now upwards of three miles from it. The town is slightly elevated above and on the left bank of the stream, and is commanded by the neighbouring hills. The streets are wide, clean, and well paved; but the thriving commerce, and abundant market, naturally looked for in a place once so noted for the productiveness of its orchards and extent of its export trade, are no longer to be seen; and the number of inhabitants has either decreased very rapidly, or has been greatly exaggerated of late years, when stated to amount to twelve thousand souls. There can be little doubt but that Velez is the town of Menoba, mentioned both by Pliny and in the Itinerary of Antonius, though there is a slight discrepancy in the two accounts; for, whilst both place Menoba to the eastward of Malaca, the latter states the distance between the two places to be only twelve Roman miles, and the former says it is on a _river_. Now, there is no stream that can be called a "river" between the two towns, excepting that of Velez itself, and it is full eighteen _Roman_ miles from Malaga. In the days of the Moslems, Velez was a place of considerable strength, as well as commercial importance, and only fell into the hands of the Spaniards in the spring of the same year that the "catholic kings" possessed themselves of Malaga, A.D., 1487. The investment of the fortress was attended with much risk to the army of Ferdinand, which at one period of the siege was cut off from its communications with the interior. The king himself also--for he personally directed the operations against the beleaguered city--incurred great danger in repulsing an attempt made by the Moors to relieve the place; his life having been saved only by the devotedness of his attendants. The armorial bearings of the town commemorate this event. We had been informed that the only thing for which Velez Malaga is at the present day celebrated, is its breed of _fleas_; and certainly we could not in this instance say, "_nunquam ad liquidum fama perducitur_;" for never in my life--and one retains a lively recollection of these matters--did I see a more active, nor feed a more insatiable race than that which is perpetuated in the floors, walls, and bedding, of the _Venta Nueva_. The camphor bags, with which, at the recommendation of our Malaga friends, we had come provided, were thrown away as useless. Nothing loth, we started for Alhama with the earliest day. The road ascends very gradually along a fine, open, and highly cultivated valley, all the way to the venta of Vinuela, distant about eight miles from Velez. For the first few miles the road is good, but afterwards it is so cut across by water channels as to offer serious impediments to quick travelling; for these aqueducts are formed by high banks, composed of mud and fascines, which, though bridged across and kept in good repair during the winter season, when the mountain torrents come down with great force, yet in summer are suffered to get out of order, and must, therefore, be scrambled over as the traveller best can. The valley is admirably irrigated, however, from other sources, and the crops it produces are remarkably fine and very various. They consist of fruits and vegetables of all sorts, maize, corn, and sugar-canes. On the right hand, but at some distance, rises the lofty _Sierra de Tejeda_; on the left are visible the rugged peaks of the mountains of Antequera; whilst in front, the road continues to be directed towards the elevated passes of Zafaraya, which serrate the great mountain-chain of Alhama. About four miles beyond the venta of Vinuela--that is, twelve miles from Velez, and half way between it and Alhama--is the venta of Alcaucin.[130] Beyond this the ascent becomes much steeper, and the road, reaching the summit of the mountain range, enters a narrow and difficult pass, that soon shuts out the view of the sea. In exchange, however, it opens to the north, into a lovely and singularly secluded valley, which is walled in on all sides by barren and rugged tors, and carpeted with the richest vegetation; and, proceeding a short distance onwards, we were yet further gratified by obtaining an imposing view of the famed _Sierra Nevada_. The road from hence is tolerably good nearly all the way to Alhama, which is not seen until one arrives immediately _over_ it. The descent is abrupt and bad. Alhama stands on the brink of a stupendous _tajo_, or fissure, through which the river _Marchan_ forces its way towards the great plain of Granada. Encompassed on all sides by wild, impracticable sierras, it commands the only tolerable road that, for the distance of nearly forty miles, presents itself to traverse the lofty mountain spine, which stretches east and west, along the Mediterranean shore; that is to say, the portion of this chain which extends between the pass of Alfarnate--where the great road from Malaga to Loja crosses it; and the sources of the river Durcal--round which winds the road from Almuñecar to Granada. From this circumstance, the Moors ever regarded this mountain fortress as a place of first-rate importance, calling it, indeed, the key of Granada; and it was not without reason they did so, since the fall, first of Malaga, and then of their beloved city itself, was mainly attributable to the capture of this place, by Don Rodrigo Ponce de Leon, who took it by surprise, A.D., 1481. Even in the present day, it is a formidable port; but artillery has now been brought to such perfection, and is made to traverse such difficult country, that its defenders would soon be buried beneath its ruins. Alhama seems to occupy the site of the Roman town of Artigi, mentioned by Pliny as one of the cities lying inland between the upper Guadalquivír and the Mediterranean Sea. But no vestiges of walls of greater antiquity than the time of the Moors are any where visible. Its present name is evidently derived from the Arabic, _Al Hamman_ (the Bath). Besides the fame enjoyed by Alhama, from its bygone strength and strategical importance--its numerous sieges and obstinate defences--the place is in high repute from the curative properties of its thermal springs; and it derives yet further celebrity from the various laurel wreaths twined round it by the poets and romancers of all ages. The translation of one of its plaintive legends has not been thought unworthy even of the pen of Byron.[131] Divest Alhama, however, of its historical recollections, of its hot water, its poetry, and romance, and it is one of the dullest, dirtiest, and most sultry towns of southern Spain. The streets are narrow, houses poor, and churches and convents dilapidated. It is supplied with water by means of an aqueduct, and the stream is sufficiently abundant to keep it clean and sweet, but for some filthy dyers; who first turn it to their own purpose, and then into the public streets. Although so little ground in the vicinity of Alhama is susceptible of cultivation, and the place contains but a few inconsiderable manufactories of woollen clothes, yet the population is said to amount to 10,000 souls. I have great doubts, however, whether it would not be over-rated at half that number. In the bottom of the fissure--which is 600 feet below the town--are numerous picturesque water-mills; and, viewed from thence, Alhama furnishes an excellent subject for the painter: The situation of the crumbling old fortress is romantic; the sides of the hills rising behind it are clad with vines, and their summits clothed with forest trees; whilst beyond are seen the distant peaks of the Zafaraya passes. The hot springs are about a mile from the town, on the left of the road leading to Granada. The source which supplies the baths is very copious, and its heat is about 110° of Fahrenheit. The water contains various salts and a considerable quantity of sulphur, smells rather offensively, and certainly does _not_ taste like chicken-broth, as some people maintain that of Wiesbaden does; though, for my own part, I confess I never could discover any chicken flavour in the scalding liquid of the fashionable _koch brunnen_, unless it was of the eggs, from which, after three weeks' incubation, the chickens had not been released. The mineral water of Alhama has been found very efficacious in obstinate cases of rheumatism, dyspepsia, and hypochondriasis, and is considered infallible in the cure of gun-shot wounds. Its virtues were doubtless known to the Romans; indeed, one of the baths is said (and appears) to be, the work of that people. But the vaulted building which now encloses the principal source is evidently of Moorish workmanship. The reservoir, or bath, that first receives the beneficent stream, is built at the foot of a scarped rock, from a narrow crevice in the face of which the streaming water gushes, whilst the base of the same rock is washed by the icy-cold current of the Marchan. After visiting the baths, we returned to Alhama to pass the night--to sleep I cannot say, since not an eye could any one of the party close, during the half dozen tedious hours that, stretched on our cloaks, (having very soon been driven from the wool-stuffed mattresses afforded by the house) we lay alternately invoking Morpheus and Phoebus, and exclaiming, "Woe is me, Alhama!" We left the wretched _venta_ as soon as the light was sufficient to enable us to follow the winding road down the steep side of the mountain, and, reaching once more the bed of the Marchan, crossed to its right bank, and took the road to Granada, by way of La Mala. In about two hours we passed within gunshot of the village of Cacin, leaving it on our left; and then, fording a stream of the same name which runs towards the village, proceeded, by a villanously stony road, over a very broken, but not mountainous country, to the solitary venta of Huelma, which, though distant only about fifteen miles from Alhama, took us four hours and a half to reach. We were glad, and at the same time surprised, to find that the house, miserable as its exterior bespoke it, could furnish materials for a human breakfast, as well as a feed of barley for our famished horses; an invigorator which the _mozo_ of the posada at Alhama had certainly forgotten to give the poor animals at cock-crow, according to his plighted word. From the venta of Huelma to La Mala is six miles of very bad road, and very uninteresting country. La Mala contains a royal salt manufactory, and appears to be a thriving village. The water from which the salt is extracted is pumped up from wells sunk in all directions round the place, and is conducted by pipes and channels into extensive pans, where, exposed to the action of the sun and air, the process of evaporation is soon completed. All the hills in the vicinity contain so much salt, that even the little stream which runs through the village, and supplies its inhabitants with this necessary of life, is strongly impregnated with it, and it is difficult to procure drinkable water any where in the neighbourhood. About two miles beyond La Mala (the road having reached the summit of a hill of some height), the far-famed city, and its glorious _vega_--which we had all the morning been looking for on gaining each succeeding eminence--at length burst upon our impatient sight. It is a magnificent view; though the city is at too great a distance (full seven miles) to be a striking object in a prospect of such vast extent; and the unvarying olive-green tint of the plain, and the total want of (perceptible) water, give a sameness to the scene that somewhat disappointed us. The mountains, too, that rise to the northward of the Genil, dividing that river from the Guadalquiver, appeared tamely outlined, after those we had so lately traversed. On a nearer approach, however, Granada has an imposing appearance. Its elevated citadels, hanging gardens, and wooded hills, form a fine background to the shining city; and the splendid Sierra Nevada, which is now again seen on the right, makes the picture almost perfect. The descent is very gradual towards Gavia el Grande, which stands on the edge of the plain--the road from thence to Granada being on a perfect level. The luxuriance of the vegetation exceeds any thing I ever beheld. The wheat, though not yet ready for the sickle, was upwards of seven feet high, and the crops of flax, clover, &c. were gigantic in proportion. The whole plain, as we rode along, appeared to be one vast cultivated field; and the want of water we had complained of, in looking down upon the vega, was readily accounted for on observing the innumerable irrigating channels into which the Genil and its various affluents are directed, and in the distribution of which, the most rigid frugality is perceptible. The plain is all watered "by the foot," as practised in the East. The city of Granada is situated at the eastern extremity of the celebrated _vega_, where the golden Darro and the crystal Genil--long pent in amongst the tortuous ravines of the _Sierra Nevada_--first pour their fertilizing streams of melted snow upon the verdant plain. The greater part of the city stands within the fork of the two rivers, sheltered to the southward and eastward by the _Cerro de Santa Elena_--a rugged hill, crowned by the lofty towers of the Alhambra--and connected by several bridges with the other portion of the city, which extends along the right bank of the Darro. This quarter, or _Barrio_, still retains its ancient Moorish appellation, _Albaycin_, and is screened to the north by a steep ridge, once crowned by another formidable castle, but of which the ruined foundations alone remain to attest its strength and magnitude. Granada, whilst thus sheltered on three sides from the piercing blasts that in winter sweep over the snowy summits of the _Sierra Nevada_, is yet sufficiently elevated to command an extensive view over the fertile _vega_, stretching far away to the west, and to receive the refreshing breezes wafted from its perfumed orange groves. The climate, consequently, is at all seasons delightful, and the shade of its ever-verdant groves, and freshness of its inexhaustible springs, might well be regretted by the sensual Moslems, driven from it to seek a shelter on the parched shores of Africa. The coins, monuments, inscriptions, and statues which have been discovered here, leave no doubt that the Roman city of _Illiberris_ stood upon or near the site of the present city; though some antiquaries have imagined they discovered in the name of the Sierra _Elvira_ that of the ancient city. The word Elvira, however, is merely a corruption of the Arabic words _Al Beyrah_--the unprofitable--which is quite the character of the droughty arid mountain in question; and as not a vestige of a town is to be met with in its vicinity, it may fairly be concluded that so unlikely a site was never selected for one. Pliny calls the city "_Iliberi, which is also Liberini_;" the latter name being apparently formed from that which it bore previously to the arrival of the Romans in the country, namely, Liberia, a city founded, according to the Spanish chronologists, 2000 years before the Christian era. By the Goths the name was changed to Eliberi, as proved by numerous coins of that people, yet extant. The last of these bears the date A.D., 636, from which it may be inferred that the place had fallen to decay prior to the irruption of the Saracens; particularly as little notice is taken of it in the early annals of the Moors of Spain, under its new name of Granada. Florez conjectures--and I think not unreasonably--that the name Granada may be derived from the Arabic words _Garb_, west; and _nata_, the name of a mountain overlooking the city of Damascus, from whence came the band of Arabs that conquered Eliberi. Thus, we may suppose, that on first discovering it from the Sierra of Alhama, they designated it, from a resemblance to the bright city and its splendid vale in their native land, the western Nata. The surpassing beauty of the wooded eminences overhanging the Darro and Genil, not less than the delightful temperature and excessive fertility of the outstretched _vega_, could not fail to have soon induced many of such earthly paradise-seekers as the Mohammedans to settle there; and doubtless, Granada, at an early date after the Saracenic conquest, again became a large and populous city; though not until the power of the crescent was on the wane; in fact, not until Cordoba and Valencia had fallen to the Christians, and Seville was threatened with destruction, did she assume a proud pre-eminence, by becoming the capital of the diminished, though scarcely weakened, dominions of Mohammedan Spain. The first great augmentation the city had received was occasioned by the capture of the towns of Alhambra and Baeza, by Ferdinand III, (A.D. 1224) the inhabitants of which, driven to the southern side of the Guadalquivír, sought shelter behind the rugged mountains of Jaen, establishing themselves at Granada. The exiles of the former town there built a fortress, overhanging the left bank of the Darro, to which they gave the name of their regretted home; whilst those of the latter erected an equally formidable citadel on the opposite side of the river, which was called after them Al Bayzin, and eventually gave its name to the large and populous district of the city that, in the course of a few years, was clustered round its base. The city, thus strengthened and augmented, was shortly afterwards (A.D. 1236) selected as the capital of a new kingdom, founded by Mohammed Abou Said, or, as from the name of his family he is generally called, Mohammed Alhamar;[132] and the throne continued in the family of that prince until A.D. 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella planted the cross upon the towers of the Alhambra; a period of upwards of two centuries and a half. The new kingdom erected by Mohammed Alhamar might have presented as impassable a barrier to the Christian arms as Turkey has offered, from the conquest of Constantinople to the present day, had not anarchy and dissension pervaded the other provinces of the Spanish peninsula, yet subject to the Moslems. But, jealous of each other, and differing in their views, they fell successively before the two enterprising sovereigns who, at that period, occupied the thrones of Castile and Aragon. Thus Cordoba, which had already ceded the pre-eminence to Seville, fell, unaided, into the hands of the Castillian in the very year that Granada became the capital of a formidable Mohammedan kingdom; and Valencia, only two years later, was also finally added to the conquests of the Christians. Even the city of Jaen, though fiercely contested for by Mohammed Alhamar, was at last ceded by treaty to his better-supported antagonist, _San Fernando_, who then, with consummate policy, forming an alliance with the king of Granada, induced him to assist in the subjugation of Seville. This important city, which, a short time previously, had adopted a Republican form of government, and, with democratic jealousy, had kept aloof whilst the Christians were crippling the growing power of the neighbouring kingdom of Granada, now reaped the fruits of its short-sighted policy; being obliged, after a short but obstinate struggle, to bend the neck to the Castillian yoke. Murcia on one side, and Algarbe on the other, were soon afterwards added to the conquests of the allied sovereigns of Castile and Aragon. So that, before the first monarch of Granada had closed his reign, all the Mohammedan states and cities, which had repudiated his alliance, fell in detail to the Christian arms. The kingdom of Mohammed Alhamar, which thenceforth had to contend single-handed against the Christians, was respectable in size, though but a fragment of the vast dominions of the Caliphs of the West. It extended far beyond the limits of the modern kingdom of Granada, and comprised all the mountainous portions of those of Jaen, Cordoba, Seville, and Murcia; thus stretching along the sea-shore from Cape Trafalgar to Cape de Gatte, and forming a compact and very defensible territory. Its population, too, was great beyond all proportion to its extent; the inhabitants of the various cities captured by the Christians having, by an inconceivable act of barbarity and impolicy, been driven from their homes to seek shelter within the mountain-girt kingdom of Granada. So enormous, indeed, is the amount of population said to have been, that the Capital alone could furnish an army of 50,000 fighting men. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Moors, thus concentrated, should have been able to maintain their independence for so extended a period; especially, when we consider the want of unanimity that prevailed amongst the Christian princes, from the death of St. Ferdinand until the union of the crowns of Castile and Aragon, in the persons of Ferdinand V. and Isabella. The city still covers a considerable extent of ground, though certainly far less than it must have occupied when swarming with half a million Mohammedans. The approach to it, on the Malaga side, is particularly fine; a handsome stone bridge (built by the French during their occupation of the province in the "war of independence") spans the sparkling Genil--the _Singilis_ of the Romans. Immediately beyond this bridge rise crenated walls, and terraced gardens, domes, minarets, and shining steeples, reaching to the base of the dark rocks that bear the yet darker towers of the proud Alhambra. The precincts of the city gained, every thing bears the marks of Moslem hands. The narrow streets and gushing fountains, the lofty, flat-roofed houses, and heavy projecting balconies, are all quite oriental; whilst, here and there, the entrance of some old mosque, or ruined bath, bears, in its horse-shoe arch, the peculiar stamp of the Morisco. Granada may certainly lay claim to the title of the _most Moorish_ city of Spain. Some few, whose glories had passed away ere it rose to distinction, may have surpassed it in wealth, extent, and even population; and others were doubtless more distinguished for the cultivation of those arts and sciences which were cherished with such peculiar care by the Arabian conquerors of Spain. But, when the Moslem rule was drawing towards its close, and Granada had to contend alone with the Christians for existence, her monarchs, in their distress, naturally turned for help to their uncivilized brethren of Mauritania; and, as each fresh graft was taken from the original savage stock, the character of the people of Granada became more decidedly Moorish; until, at last, from the frequency of these calls, they came to differ but little from the wild nomad tribes, whose assistance they had invoked. At its commencement, however, the new kingdom founded on the ruins of Cordoba, Seville, and Valencia, gave promise of reviving the brilliant days of the early Mohammedans--its sovereigns of rivalling the fame of the Abdalrahmans and Almanzors. The countless minarets of the renovated city selected for its capital resounded with the _Muezzeem's_ cries, awakening the dozing fanaticism of "the faithful;" and the bright watch-tower[133] of its proud Alhambra served as a beacon to point out where what remained of wealth and learning, in the wreck of Musa's mighty empire, would find a safe place of refuge. But the crimes which soon soiled the throne of Alhamar, the fierce contentions of the Princes of the Royal house, and the interminable civil wars to which their pretentions led, so exhausted Granada's strength, that, stripped one by one of her bulwarks, cut off from external succour, and torn by intestine dissension, she at length fell an easy prey to her persevering enemies; and, at her fall, expired the flickering light of Mohammedan civilization;--a civilization, which, considering the withering tendency of the Arabian impostor's scheme of religion, furnishes much greater cause for surprise, than even the rapid propagation and wide spread of the pernicious creed itself. The decadence of the arts kept pace with that in the manners of the inhabitants of this fair region;--both being natural consequences of the internal struggles by which it was agitated. The olive tree could not thrive in soil moistened only with the blood of its cultivators. During this period of progressive deterioration were erected most of the Moslem buildings, whose remains are yet scattered throughout the city; and, whilst in some points of character these monuments exhibit a marked difference from the Arabian structures of the East, they are more purely _Moorish_ than any other Saracenic edifices to be met with in Spain, and are infinitely superior, in every respect, to such as were erected in Barbary at a yet more recent date. The literature of the Moors of Spain would doubtless have exhibited a similar decadence and peculiarity of character; but on these points we have not the means of judging, the fanatic destroyer of the celebrated library of the Ptolemies having, seven centuries afterwards, found an unworthy imitator in Cardinal Ximenes--at whose instigation every scrap of Mohammedan literature found within the captured city of Granada was, with intolerant fury, committed to the flames. CHAPTER XI. THE ALHAMBRA AND GENERALIFE--OTHER RELIQUES OF THE MOORS CONTAINED WITHIN THE CITY--THE CATHEDRAL OF GRANADA--CHAPEL OF THE CATHOLIC KINGS--ANTIQUITY OF THE CHURCH OF ELIBERI--TOMB OF GONZALVO DE CORDOBA--CHURCHES OF SAN JUAN DE DIOS AND SAN DOMINGO--CARTHUSIAN CONVENT--HERMITA DE SAN ANTON. The famed Alhambra[134] was the first object to which we bent our steps, after depositing our effects at the _Fonda del Comercio_, and sending our horses to the _Posada de las Tablas_. It is perched on the summit of a steep but narrow ridge, which, falling precipitously to the north, along the left bank of the Darro, terminates in a rugged point, overhanging the city, to the west; and, as I have already noticed, is supposed to have been erected by the exiled inhabitants of a town of the same name in La Mancha, captured by _San Fernando_ about the year of our Lord 1224. The walls of the fortress follow the various sinuosities of the scarped cliffs that bound the rocky ledge on three sides, and enclose a plateau, 770 yards in length, and 200 wide in its greatest breadth. But the form of the enceinte is very irregular, and its ground plan bears a strong resemblance to the elongated leaf of the prickly pear; the numerous towers studding the walls of the Moorish stronghold having all the appearance of the _inattackable_ fruit that grows round the edge of the Spanish vegetable monster. The principal entrance is by the gate of judgment, situated in one of the towers on the southern front of the fortress. The approach to this gate is by a wide and well kept carriage road, which, shadowed over by luxuriant forest trees, winds up a narrow ravine, that, on this side, divides the Alhambra hill from another steep mound, which projects, in like manner, towards the city, and is occupied by the ruins of other old Moorish fortifications, called _Las Torres bermejas_. Both hills form part of the _Cerro de Santa Elena_. On gaining the interior of the fortress, the first object that catches the eye, standing towards the centre of the plateau, and looking somewhat contemptuously down upon its Moorish rival, is the gorgeous palace of the Emperor Charles V. It is a large quadrangular building, enclosing a spacious circular court, and its four fronts, constructed entirely of cut stone, have a handsome appearance, albeit, the heterogeneous mixture of the orders of architecture they exhibit, is of rather questionable taste. Though of so much more recent date than the palace of the Moorish kings, the stately pile of Spain's mighty monarch seems doomed, like the throne of his successors, to fall to the ground e'en sooner than the tottering fabric of Mohammedanism itself. Indeed it is even now a mere shell, and the few remaining bolts and bars that hold together its shattered walls will, I have no doubt, shortly find their way to the same furnace that has already converted the bronze rings and ornaments with which it was formerly embellished, into the more useful form of _maravedis_.[135] The celebrated palace of the Moslem princes, to which our conductor now led the way, was commenced by Mohammed Al Fakir, son of Mohammed Abou Said, the founder of the kingdom of Granada, A.D. 1275. It rests against the north wall of the fortress, and its low and irregular brick walls, overshadowed by the stone palace of the Spanish kings on one side, and by the huge tower of Comares on another, have a mean and very unpromising appearance. It looks like the dilapidated stables and _remises_ attached to a French chateau of the "old school," the walls of which only have withstood the levelling system of the revolution. This unpretending exterior being common to all Moorish buildings, did not occasion disappointment. Not so, however, the interior; of which, for I was a young traveller then, I had conceived a much more exalted idea. Indeed, the disappointment was general, for all of us had expected to see, if not a palace on a grand scale and of magnificent proportions, one, at all events, containing suites of courts and apartments, which, on the score of costliness and luxury, would not cede the palm to any erected even in these days of refinement and extravagance. When, therefore, after following our guide through several long dirty passages, we were ushered into a small quadrangular court, laid out like a Dutch garden, but, unlike it, overgrown with sunflowers, larkspurs, and marigolds, so little idea had we of being within the precincts of the royal apartments, that my companions were about to pass on with eager haste, until I called out, "Do stop a moment to look at this, it is so _pretty_." "_Este es el patio de los Leones,_"[136] said our cicerone, describing a wide circle with his stick, to draw our attention to the light and elegant colonnade that encompassed us, adding, after a short but effective pause, and pointing at the same time to a basin in the centre of the court, supported on the backs of twelve nondescript animals which were half concealed in the flowery jungle, "and those are the _lions_, celebrated in every part of the known world, which have given the name to this terrestrial paradise!" This grandiloquent burst was evidently occasioned by our apparent _insousiance_. We stood corrected, but not the less disappointed. On paper--in type as well as in pencil--the Alhambra has generally been represented in too glowing colours. In defence of the painter it may be said that he labours under a peculiar disadvantage, as far as _truth_ is concerned; for, whilst the utmost effort of his art will never enable him to do justice to the lovely tints of nature, he cannot, with all his skill, avoid conveying too favourable an idea of works of art, especially in delineating architectural subjects. It follows, that, in drawings of the building now before us, the elaborately ornamented walls, the delicately wrought arcades, the spouting lions, the flowery parterres, every thing, in fact, connected with it, appears fresh, perfect, and beautiful; the dirt, weeds, cobwebs, and scribbling that disfigure the _reality_, being omitted as unnecessary adjuncts to the _picture_; and the palace is thus represented to us (embellished a little, perhaps, according to the artist's fancy) rather such as it _may have been_ in the days of the Moors, than what it _is_ at the present time;--this leads to one source of disappointment. On the other hand, whilst travellers have given the dimensions of the various courts and apartments with tolerable accuracy, they certainly have misapplied their epithets in describing them. The _reader_ is apt, therefore, to lose sight of the scale in picturing to himself these gorgeous halls, which the _spectator_, at the first glance, _sees_ are neither grand nor magnificent. We, at all events, having, from what we had previously read and seen, formed most erroneous conceptions, both as to the size of the building, and of its state of preservation, made the circuit of, and quitted the too celebrated palace, disappointed with every thing within its walls. The false impression once removed, however, and a few days given to mourn over the sad destruction of our long cherished fancies, we again ascended the wall-girt hill; and, having now brought our visual rays to bear at a proper focus, and allowed greater scope to the imagination--in other words, changing the adjectives grand and magnificent for tasteful and elaborate, and, in some matters, suffering fancy to supply the place of reality--we received much greater pleasure from our second visit to the crumbling pile; a gratification that became less alloyed at each succeeding visit. I should here observe that, at the period of which I write, A.D. 1822, the Alhambra, like every thing else in Spain at that epoch, was in a deplorable state of dilapidation. No steps had yet been taken to repair the damage done by the French on evacuating the fortress ten years previously; and the Royal Palace, rent and shaken by the same explosions that had thrown down the towers of the Moorish stronghold, was still strewed with ruins, partially unroofed, and exposed to the destructive influence of wind and rain. That it is yet standing we have to thank General Sebastiani, who was governor of the province during a considerable part of the late war, and bestowed great pains upon its preservation. Perhaps, indeed, but for his interference, as well as the repairs he caused to be executed, this _chef d'oeuvre_ of Moorish art would have shared the fate of the walls of the fortress. I am happy, for the sake of future travellers, to be able to add that, on visiting Granada many years after, I found the Alhambra in a much improved state, notwithstanding that it had in the meanwhile suffered severely from the shock of an earthquake. The government seemed at length to have decided that the Royal Palace was worthy of preservation, though the work of infidels. An officer of rank had accordingly been appointed to its guardianship, whose permission it was requisite to obtain ere the stranger could enter its gates; and an old woman was lodged therein as his deputy, to pocket the fees and do the honours. Under the watchful eye and ever busy broom of this vigilant personage, the place is now kept in excellent "_inspection order_." The white marble pillars of its corridors have, under the influence of soap and water and a scrubbing brush, been cleansed of the names, doggrel verses, and maudlin sentiment, with which, from time immemorial, travellers have thought proper to disfigure them; the rubbish of another description that concealed its mosaic pavements has been removed; the weeds with which its courts were overgrown are eradicated; and, in the words of an Arabian poet, "The spider is no longer the chamberlain at the gate of Koshrew." Still, however, even in its improved condition, the future visitor must not go prepared to walk through stately courts and suites of magnificent apartments, else, like me, will he be sadly disappointed. The novelty in the style of architecture, the delicacy and variety of its enrichments, the tasteful patterns of its tesselated floors, and the laboured workmanship of its vaulted ceilings, constitute its chief merits, and are, I willingly admit, masterpieces of their respective kinds. These have been so well and minutely described in Murphy's work on the Moorish antiquities of Spain, that I shall confine my observations on the Royal Palace to the state in which I found it at the period of my last visit, in the autumn of 1833. The female Cicero who, as aforesaid, was then charged with the exhibition of "the Lions," happened to be one of those mechanical, dogmatical persons, who not only dislike, above all things, to leave the beaten track, but will insist upon regulating all tastes by their own. Finding, therefore, that she had laid down a "grand tour" of the premises from which nothing could persuade her to deviate, and had determined in her own mind the precise number of minutes that should be devoted to the admiration of each object, we requested she would save herself further trouble, and us annoyance, by leaving us to the guidance of _Mateo Ximenes_ (a name rendered classic by the pen of Washington Irving), who, as a kind of Director General of English travellers in Granada, had attached himself to us in the capacity of _fac totum_. Mateo being now, from the emoluments of his self-created appointment, one of the inhabitants _de mas tomo_[137] of the Alhambra; from his eloquent dissertations and learned disquisitions, an acknowledged dilettante and antiquary; and, as the "Minister of Grace and Justice" of most visitors, a person of considerable influence with the deputy governor of the palace, our conductress, on payment of certain dues, made not the least scruple of acceding to our proposal, giving Mateo, nevertheless, strict injunctions to have us constantly in sight, and to keep our hands from picking and stealing. For our future visits we obtained a written permission from the commandant to make sketches, in virtue of which we were enabled to wander about wherever and as long as we pleased; a privilege which I would recommend all travellers to obtain immediately on their arrival at Granada, for, besides that this permit saves both trouble and expense, they will find no more delightful retreat during the heat of the day, than within the shaded courts and cool and airy halls of the Moorish palace. The _Patio de la Alberca_, to which, following the Itinerary laid down by the _Tia Manuela_, I will first conduct my readers, is an oblong court, ornamented at the two ends with light colonnades, and having a long pool of water, or tank (_Al Borkat_, whence its name is derived), in the centre. Above, but a little retired from the northern arcade, the huge square tower of Comares rises to the height of 142 feet; and in it, on the level of and communicating with the court, is the grand hall of audience of the ambassador's. This, however, being the principal show-room of the palace, I will, following the discreet example of our guide, keep in reserve, and proceed to the Hall of the Baths, into which a passage leads from the eastern side of the _Patio de la Alberca_. Art seems to have exhausted itself in the embellishment and fitting up of this luxurious establishment. Its floors are laid with a mosaic of porcelain. Its walls, faced also with glazed tiles to a certain height, are finished upwards with the most elaborate moresques, moulded in stucco to correspond with the basement. The roof of the royal bathing apartment is arched with solid blocks of stone, bidding defiance to the sun's rays, and is pierced with numerous starry apertures, admitting ventilation. The basins wherein the royal couple performed their ablutions are of white marble, and placed in separate alcoves, at the north end of the principal saloon. The windows open upon a garden without the palace walls, conveying perfumed breezes from its fragrant shrubs and orange trees to the epicurean bathers within. Another apartment, communicating with the saloon of the royal baths, is called a _concert_ room. Music room would, perhaps, be a more correct name for it, since I think it may be fairly doubted whether the Arabs ever cultivated music to such an extent as to warrant our using the term _concert_ in speaking of it. Numerous Arabic ballads, some of considerable merit, have, it is true, been handed down to the present generation, and are yet chaunted by public singers in the east, but without the slightest attempt to attune either their voices or the instruments on which they sometimes strike an accompaniment. The natives of Morocco, on the other hand, who may be considered as the "nearest of kin" to the Moors of Spain, have not the slightest notion of _music_. A diabolical noise, made by a _zambomba_[138] and a reed pipe, which not even a civilized dog can hear without howling, is the only attempt at a _concert_ that I ever knew them to be guilty of executing. This discordant clamour appears, nevertheless, to afford them unalloyed satisfaction. The court of the Lions, which, proceeding from the baths, is entered on its north side, is a rectangular peristyle, 100 feet long, (east and west) and 50 wide. The pillars are of white marble, extremely light and beautiful, and they support a fantastic but elegant series of arches, the superstructure of which is covered with an elaborate fretwork of stuccoed mouldings, representing moresques, and flowers, interspersed with sentences from the Koran, &c. The pillars, I should observe, are perfectly plain; and, though methodically arranged, yet, from being disposed in corresponding groups of two, three, and four, produce a very bizarre effect. In the centre of the court is a handsome fountain. The basin, into which the water rises, is of oriental alabaster, as are also the twelve animals that support it on their backs, and which, by some strange zoological blunder, have been called _lions_, for panthers would be more proper. The reservoir that receives the stream they disgorge is of black marble. It is not improbable that, on the decadence of Cordoba, this fountain was brought from the famous palace of Zehra, built by the Kaliph Abdalrahman III. as a country retreat for his favourite sultana; which, embellished, according to common report, with the works of Grecian artists, is said to have contained numerous sculptured animals; and, amongst others, some golden (meaning probably gilt) lions, that spouted water into a basin of alabaster, are particularly mentioned by Moorish historians. On the north side of the Court of the Lions is the Hall of the Two Sisters; so called from two large slabs of delicately white marble that occupy the centre of its floor. This apartment looks upon the fountain in the centre of the court, and directly facing it, on the south side, is the Hall of the Abencerrages, to which the legend of the cruel massacre of the chieftains of that noble race has given a mournful interest. If the tale be true, (and from the distracted state of Granada under its two last kings there is every reason to believe it is) there can be little reason to doubt that the stains, yet visible in the white marble pavement, were occasioned by the blood of Boabdil's unfortunate victims. On the same side the Court of the Lions as the Hall of the Abencerrages is a small apartment, wherein, in former days, the Moslem sovereigns sought the _Kiblah_,[139] and made their private prostrations. It was the burial place of Ishmael Farady, fifth king of Granada, one of the most enterprising monarchs that occupied the throne, but whose voluptuous excesses led to his assassination, A.D. 1322. The Hall of Judgment is situated at the upper end of the court, and at the eastern extremity of the palace. All these apartments are almost equally beautiful, though differing from each other in size, shape, and every part of their elaborate decorations. If any one can claim pre-eminence over the others, it is the Hall of the Two Sisters, the ceiling of which is composed of delicate stalactites in stucco, and the colouring and gilding are perhaps fresher and more gaudy. The windows in the back, or north, wall of this apartment look upon the garden of Lindaraja, which is now laid out with some little taste and care. From this garden, or, by retracing our steps through the baths, we gain a small and exquisitely finished apartment, upon which the Spaniards have bestowed the name of _El Tocador_, or Dressing Room of the Sultana. It is situated in a kind of tower, or buttress, that projects beyond the walls of the fortress, and commands a lovely view in every direction. The mosaic pavement of this little room is of extreme beauty. The situation of the Hall of the Ambassadors, or "Golden Saloon," to which we will now proceed, has already been described. It is a square of 36 feet, and occupies the whole space enclosed by the walls of the tower of Comares which are of extraordinary thickness. The height of this apartment is 60 feet, and its ceiling, vaulted in a singularly graceful manner, is inlaid with a mosaic of mother of pearl. This hall is certainly the pride of the Alhambra. Its proportions are more just, its stuccoed walls more highly finished, and the colouring and gilding of its ornaments more brilliant, than those of any of the other apartments. The tower in which it is situated projects far beyond the curtain wall of the fortress; so that, whilst it looks into the refreshing court of the _Alberca_ on one side, from windows in the other three, it commands extensive views over the city, and the dark valley of the Darro. It is the only one of the principal apartments of the palace that possesses this advantage, and it was therefore peculiarly well adapted to the purpose of a hall of audience; since, the wide circumvallated city spread out below, the fertile plain over which, as far as the eye can range, it commands a view, and the fearful height of the massive walls, upon which its casements look down, could not but impress visitors with a sense of the wealth and power of the ruler of this fair realm, and of the strength of his proud mountain citadel. The windows too of this audience hall, elevated some hundreds of feet above the rocky banks of the Darro, afforded every facility for disposing--after the wonted manner of the Mohammedans--of any contumacious heir presumptive, or other troublesome friend or relative, whose journey to paradise might require hastening. The view from the eastern window, looking up the valley of the Darro, embraces several objects of much interest; on the right, projecting boldly into the valley, is the tower surmounted by the Sultana's _Tocador_, which, seen almost to its base, gives a good idea of the height of the Alhambra's walls above the crouching city. Beyond, but situated on the same bank of the river as the fortress, is seen the Palace of the Generalife, and, above it, the _Silla de los Moros_,[140] a scarped rock, whereon the Moslems were in the habit of watching the setting sun, as he cast his gorgeous rays upon their beloved Vega. On the opposite side of the valley is the _Sacro Monte_ convent, an immense pile, now crumbling to the dust. The _bassi relievi_ of the stuccoed compartment round this window are very curious, and I should say they represented groups of fishes intermixed with arabesques, but that several great authorities have declared, that in all the decorations of the Alhambra there are no traces of animal or vegetable life. There are many other objects well worthy of notice within the Royal Palace. Amongst others, the cicerone does not forget to point out the apartments wherein the Sultana _Ayxa_ and her unfortunate son Mohammed Abi Abdilehi, or Boabdil, were confined by the licentious Muley Hassan,and the window in the tower of Comares, whence the young prince,--who thus early, even in a father, deserved the surname of _El Zogoybi_,[141] afterwards bestowed upon him,--was lowered down and escaped from Granada. The palace contains also a very handsome porcelain vase, said to be of Moorish manufacture. Another, which was discovered at the same time in the vaults under the royal apartments, was taken away by Count Sebastiani. The _Granadinos_ abuse the French general in most unmeasured terms, for what they term this _theft_; but, if he carried off nothing else from the city, it must be admitted he charged them moderately enough for his guardianship of what he left behind--treasures on which, at that time, they seemed to set no value. Independent of the interest with which the traveller explores the abode of Granada's Moslem sovereigns, his attention is called, in no slight degree, to the examination of the crumbling ruins of the fortress enclosing it; over every nook of which a fresh charm has been thrown by the delightful tales of Washington Irving, whose _fidus Achates_, "Mateo," stoutly maintains that the accomplished writer has drawn but slightly on the stores of his imagination. The views from the walls and lofty towers of the fortress are most extensive and varied. The most comprehensive is from the _Torre de la Vela_,[142] situated at the western extremity of the Alhambra, whence, besides the view over the city and plain, the eye embraces the whole range of the magnificent _Sierra Nevada_, the peaks of which are several hundred feet higher than the loftiest points of the Pyrenees; and though not, as is usually supposed, covered with _perpetual_ snow, are generally capped with it during nine months of the year. The highest points of the range are the _Cerros de Mulahacen_ and _de la Veleta_, bearing S. E. from Granada, and both computed to be upwards of 11,000 feet above the level of the Mediterranean. On my last visit to Granada, in the month of October, the mountains were perfectly free from snow, and "Mateo" had succeeded in persuading me to mount to their summit under his guidance; a journey of twenty-four hours from the city. The day was fixed accordingly, but, during the night preceding our intended scramble, the whole ridge put on its winter covering, and rendered the undertaking impracticable. Leaving the fortress by a low sally-port on its north side, we will proceed to visit the Generalife, or summer palace of the Moorish kings, situated rather above, but on the slope of the same ridge as the Alhambra, and separated from it by a deep ravine. The path is perfumed with groves of myrtle, orange, and other odoriferous trees; and is shaded with eglantine, woodbine, and wild vines, whose red autumnal leaves, entwined in the evergreen boughs of the overhanging carobs and ilexes, offer an impenetrable shield against the mid-day sun. The chief attraction of the _Generalife_, (House of Love) are the refreshing coolness of its courts and apartments, the sweetness and abundance of its crystal waters, the luxuriance of its flowers and fruits, and the beauty of the views that its impending balconies command. The stucco fretwork and porcelain mosaics, with which the apartments are ornamented, are in the same style as those of the Alhambra; but with the highly finished and gorgeous decorations of the Royal Palace yet fresh in the recollection, those of the _Generalife_ appear far inferior. In the opinion of Mr. Murphy, however, the mosaic work in the portico of the _Generalife_ not only surpasses any other specimen of Moorish workmanship, but "for variety of execution and delicacy of taste is fully equal, if not superior, to any Roman mosaics which have come down to our times." I should have been unwilling to admit this, even at the time he wrote; but the late discoveries at Pompeii have brought to light mosaic pavements far exceeding, as well in boldness of design as in beauty of execution and colouring, any thing of the kind that has ever been produced in modern times; and which, whilst causing us to estimate more highly than heretofore the proficiency of the ancients in the art of _drawing_, make us regard the mosaics of the Moors as mere pieces of mechanism. The wood-work in the roofs of the various apartments of the _Generalife_ is worthy of remark, not only from the beauty of the workmanship, but from its state of preservation. Murphy has fallen into error in translating _Nogal_ (of which they are composed) _chesnut_--he should have said _walnut_. The walls of one of the apartments are decorated with portraits of some of the most renowned warriors who figured in the siege of Granada; amongst others of _Gonzalvo_, "the great Captain;" _Ponce de Leon_, the captor of Alhama; _El Rey Chico_, Boabdil; and Ferdinand and Isabella. They are all said to have been "taken from life," and the work of one individual. The gardens of the _Generalife_ are more pleasing from the luxuriant growth of their flowers and fruits, than for the manner in which they are laid out. One must taste the _pomegranate_ of the Generalife to appreciate fully the value of that refreshing fruit; and he who has eaten of its muscatel grapes can have no doubt of the wine house, from whence Ganymede supplied the cups of the thirsty olympics. At a certain cypress-tree that grows within the walled court of the palace, "_Mateo_" mysteriously wags his head; and should any curiosity be evinced at this intimation of a tale that he could unfold, will open a budget of Royal scandal, purloined from Florian, and other romancers, which furnishes him with the means of displaying his historic lore for the rest of the evening. Descending from the _Generalife_, and crossing the "golden" Darro ere it enters the city, we will mount the rough streets of the Albayzin. The hill side is perforated with numerous caverns, many of which are tenanted by a singularly savage race of beings, who, differing in character from either Moors or Spaniards, appear to be descended from the aborigines of the country. Several curious wells, arches, and other Moorish remains, are to be seen in the quarter of the Albayzin; and the view it commands is one of the finest in Granada, embracing the greater part of the city, and the richly wooded bank, whereon are perched the bright _Generalife_, and the sombre _Alhambra_, backed by the snow-clad ridge of _Nevada_. Amongst the numerous Moorish reliques that the city contains, the most perfect, perhaps, are the baths. But, at every turn, a ruined bridge, a dilapidated gateway, or some other memento of the Saracens, presents itself, giving Granada peculiar interest in the eyes of the seeker after Moorish antiquities. Neither in modern sights does it fall short of other more populous and flourishing cities. The Cathedral is not so large nor so handsome as that of Malaga. The interior is heavy, excessively gaudy, and fitted up in the worst possible taste. The architecture is Corinthian, but of a very spurious sort. Some good paintings are to be found distributed in the various chapels; the best are in that of the _Santissima Trinidad_, viz.--the Trinity, by _Cano_, and a Holy Family by _Murillo_--the latter a masterpiece. The pillars round the _Altar Mayor_--above which rises the Dome--are richly gilt; and the light admitted by painted windows, above and behind, has a fine effect. Some paintings by _Cano_, under the Dome, are very good, and the Cathedral is ornamented with two busts of great merit, (Adam and Eve) by the same master, whose talented hand directed the chizel with the same success as the pencil. The _Capilla de los Reyes Catolicos_ communicates with the Cathedral, but is under a separate roof. It is of Gothic architecture, and celebrated for a flat arch of remarkable boldness, which supports its roof. The remains of Ferdinand and Isabella, and their immediate successors, Philip and Joanna, are deposited in this chapel. Their tombs, executed by order of the Emperor Charles V., are superbly sculptured. That of the "Catholic Kings" is the most elaborately wrought and highly finished; but the other is lighter, and displays more elegance of design. The recumbent figures of Ferdinand and Isabella are remarkably well carved;--the repose in the queen's countenance is incomparably expressed. The same cannot be said of the manner in which the "mad" Joanna and her Austrian husband have been sculptured; with the latter of whom, at all events, the artist could not offer the usual excuse, that crowned heads are difficult _subjects_ to manage, since the Spaniards themselves surnamed Philip "_El Hermoso_."[143] In ascending rather too hastily and unguardedly from the tomb of the conquerors of Granada, I struck my head against the iron grating above, and was laid prostrate and senseless at the foot of the altar. It required a good pint of the church wine--which our worthy, priestly cicerone insisted upon administering, both internally and externally--to set me up again; and, as a reward for my patience under suffering, he showed us the splendidly illuminated missal, used by the "Catholic Kings," and deposited with the crown, sword, and sceptre of the great Ferdinand, in the sacristy of the Cathedral. The church of San Geronimo is one of the oldest in Granada--which city boasts of being the first in Spain that embraced Christianity--_San Cicilio_, one of the seven apostles ordained by Peter and Paul, having founded a church at Eliberi, in the first century.[144] It contains some paintings said to be by Murillo, but is more celebrated as being the burial-place of _Gonzalvo de Cordoba_. A plain white marble slab, let into the pavement at the foot of the principal altar, and bearing the following simple inscription, is all that marks the spot where the remains of the greatest captain Spain ever produced were interred. Gonzali Fernandez de Cordova Sui propriâ virtute magni ducis nomen proprium sibi fecit ossa perpetua tandem luci restituenda huic interea loculo credita sunt gloria minime consepulta. The church of _San Juan de Dios_ is well worthy a visit; though its decorations are rather gaudy than handsome. It contains a few small, but very good paintings by _Cano_, and a valuable silver urn, embossed with gold, wherein are deposited--so the Spaniards assert--the bones of our Saviour's favourite disciple, who died at Granada. There are many other churches deserving of the traveller's notice, but it would be tedious to enumerate them. To the lovers of Rossini's music, however, I would recommend a visit to that of _San Domingo_ during _High Mass_. I once heard there the whole of the airs from _Mosé in Egitto_, besides various _pezzi scelti_ from the _Gazza ladra_, to which, in England, we dance quadrilles. The Carthusian Convent (_extra muros_) is noted for its riches, and collection of paintings. We could not gain admission on our first visit; as, after toiling up the eminence on which it is situated, we found the grating in the portal closed by a board, announcing "_Hoy se sacan animas_"--To-day souls are extracting from purgatory;--a praiseworthy occupation, from which it would have been sinful to take the worthy friars; although it was gently hinted to us, that a few _pesetas_ would remove any scruples _they_ might entertain. The day following, however,--the funds for suborning the devil having been exhausted,--we were admitted to inspect the interior of the convent. It contains numerous paintings, some few said to be by Murillo, others by Cano; but I doubt whether either of those great masters ever touched them. The rest are mere daubs, representing the persecutions of the monks by Henry VIII, by the Moors, and by the German Lutherans. The _Hermita de San Anton_ is a small edifice on the outskirts of the city, which, on a certain day in the spring of the year, is endowed with the singular power of curing horses of the _cholic_; all that is required being to ride them nine times, at a brisk pace, round the exterior of the church--_ni mas ni menos_. CHAPTER XII. GRANADA CONTINUED--THE ZACATIN--MARKET PLACE--BAZAAR--POPULATION--THE GRANADINOS--THEIR PREDILECTION FOR THE FRENCH COSTUME--LOVE OF MASKED BALLS--MADAME MARTINEZ DE LA ROSA'S TERTULIA--AN ENGLISH COUNTRY DANCE METAMORPHOSED--SPECIMEN OF SPANISH TASTE IN FITTING UP COUNTRY HOUSES--THE MARQUES DE MONTIJO--ANECDOTE OF THE LATE KING AND THE CONDE DE TEBA--CONSTITUTIONAL ENTHUSIASM OF GRANADA--ENDS IN SMOKE--MILITARY SCHOOLS--OBSERVATIONS ON THE SPANISH ARMY--DEPARTURE FOR CORDOBA--PINOS DE LA PUENTE--PUERTO DE LOPE--MOCLIN--ALCALA LA REAL--SPANISH PEASANTS--MANNER OF COMPUTING DISTANCE--BAENA--NOT THE ROMAN TOWN OF ULIA--CASTRO EL RIO--OCCUPIED BY A CAVALRY REGIMENT--VALUABLE FRIEND--CURIOSITY OF THE SPANISH OFFICERS--DITTO OF OUR NEW ACQUAINTANCE--INFLUENCE OF "SHERRIS SACK"--HE RELATES HIS HISTORY--CONTINUATION OF OUR JOURNEY TO CORDOBA--FIRST VIEW OF THAT CITY. Granada is the see of an archbishop, and the seat of one of the two high courts of Chancery of Spain. It is not a place of much trade, its inhabitants being chiefly employed in horticultural pursuits; but it contains manufactories of gunpowder, of silk and woollen goods on a small scale, and numerous tanneries. The busiest part of the city is a narrow crooked street, which still retains its corrupted Moorish name, _El Zacatin_,[145] the little market. But the square where the market is now held (likewise a relique of the Moors,) presents also, at certain times, a scene of considerable bustle. The houses encompassing it are very lofty, and, at each successive story, have wide projecting galleries, wherein dwell the lowest classes of Granada's inhabitants. The arches of these galleries are patched up with old pieces of board, canvas, and other materials, of all sizes and shapes, between the chinks, and crevices, and rents of which, smoke issues in every direction. Towards the centre of the city is a _bazaar_, constructed, not like our London toy fairs so called, but on the oriental plan, each little gloomy stall being boarded off from the rest. The goods, also, as in the east, are offered for sale by smoking men, instead of being, as with us, handed to you by smiling houries. The modern merchants, however, enter their shops by a door, instead of clambering over the counter; and they occupy chairs instead of sitting in the cross-legged fashion of the founders of this remnant of Mohammedanism. At a certain hour in the evening the bazaar is closed, and given over to the care of three or four large dogs, which, shut into the building for the night, will not suffer any one to enter but him whose office it is to feed them, and to unlock the gates. The population of Granada may be reckoned at 60,000 souls; and I think the female portion of it the _least good looking_, not to speak harshly, of all the dark complexioned natives of southern Spain. The _Granadinas_ have not the carriage of either the _Sevillanas_, or _Gaditanas_, nor even of the _Malagueñas_, who are celebrated rather for beauty than _gracia_; and, consequently, the lovely _Alameda_, on the banks of the Genil, has no attraction for strangers beyond that of its own intrinsic beauty. The ladies of Granada lose somewhat, perhaps, in the comparison with the fair of other places, from having adopted, in a greater degree, a harlequin French costume, that but ill becomes them,--or, more correctly speaking, perhaps, that they do not become. Thus, the admirable _set_ of their well poised heads is lost under a huge silk _chapeau_ and groves of _Roses de Meaux_, clematis, and woodbine; their lustrous eyes no longer range, _en barbette_, as it were, over three quarters of a circle, but, pointed through a narrow embrasure, can only carry destruction in one direction. Their fans, too,--telegraphs of their slightest wishes or commands,--can no longer be flirted with the wonted effect; and their stately, though somewhat peculiar gait, does not receive its just tribute of admiration, unless set off by the black silk _basquiña_, under whose graceful folds their well tutored limbs have been accustomed to move. The _Granadinas_ of all classes are passionately fond of masked balls; which circumstance may partly be accounted for by one of the above-named disadvantages under which they labour-want of beauty; and all the masquerades at which I "assisted" seemed expressly got up for carrying on intrigues. No _character_, in any sense of the word, appeared to be maintained; and the whole amusement seemed to consist in the ladies going about to the gentlemen, who were almost all unmasked, and asking in a screaming voice, "_mi conoces?_"[146] Although every body went to these balls, which were held at the theatre, yet, amongst the _elite_, it was deemed _fashionable_ (now quite a Spanish word) for the ladies to have a box and receive masks. But the temptation of the waltz was too strong to be resisted, and all, I observed, descended occasionally, putting on a mask and domino, to join in its fascinating circumgyrations. A letter of introduction to Madame _Martinez de la Rosa_,[147] equally noted for her accomplishments and her hospitality, gave us an opportunity of seeing the best society of Granada. The same want of beauty was observable amongst the _beau monde_ at her _Tertulia_, as on the _paseo_ on the banks of the river; but, to make amends, the music and waltzing were particularly good. The Spaniards may certainly be reckoned the best waltzers in Europe, now that the Germans have converted that graceful dance into a mere bear's hug. I afforded some amusement in the course of the first evening passed at Madame Martinez' house, by asking a Spanish gentleman the name of a most laborious performance, which all appeared to be engaged in with great delight, to the total sacrifice of the graces. He started back with astonishment. "What description of dance? why it is an _English country dance_!" He thought it too good a joke to keep to himself, and, the performance concluded, went about telling all the ladies they had so disguised an English country dance that one of its countrymen did not recognise it. This information occasioned great dismay, _contra danzas Inglesas_ being, at that particular juncture, "_muy facionables_;" and all the _Señoritas_ crowded round with exclamatory "_Jesuses!_" to gather the appalling truth from my own lips, and ask instructions as to their future proceedings. I explained, in the best manner I could, that, though the ladies and gentlemen in our national dance were deployed in two long opposing lines; in the same way that their sexes had respectively been drawn up, yet that various preliminary evolutions were performed by us, ere the parties began racing up and down the middle at full speed, in which their imitation entirely consisted; and, moreover, that we did not hurry the matter over, by beginning at _both ends_, as they did. Before leaving Granada, a favourable opportunity presenting itself, I will enable my readers to form some idea of the taste and style in which the Spanish aristocracy fit up their country houses, taking as my pattern that of the _Marques de Montijo_, which, combining the comforts of the English with the classic taste of the French, I was assured I should find a very choice specimen. It is situated on a slightly elevated hill, rising from and commanding a lovely view over the wide _vega_. For the selection of the site, small praise is due, however, to the Marquis, as he would have had difficulty in fixing on any spot within the same distance of the city, that did not afford equally as fine a view. But the embellishments of the house and grounds are "all his own;" to these, therefore, I shall confine my description. The grounds are laid out in stiff parterres, intersected with twisting footpaths, "_à la Inglesa_," as they call it; a portion being hedged off as a labyrinth, which is thickly studded with rustic arbours, furnished with modern sofas. On the summit of an artificial hillock is a shallow fish-pond, from the centre of which rises a cave, or grotto (built, I believe, in imitation of the Giant's Causeway), composed of fragments of stalactites, brought at a great expense from a cavern in a distant mountain. A whirligig, with two horses and two _coches_--such as may be seen at Bartholomew fair--weathercocks of all sizes and devices, sun-dials innumerable, hedge-rows of zoophytes, &c. are scattered tastefully about, and in fact nothing is wanting but "the sucking pig in lavender," and "Adam and Eve in juniper," of the inimitable Mr. Drugget, to complete the long catalogue of absurdities. The show-suite of apartments consists of a succession of small carpetless rooms on the ground-floor, each furnished with a bed, a few shabby gilt chairs, a sofa, some yet more Monmouth-street-looking chintz window curtains, a profusion of miserly little mirrors, and two or three old family pictures. In the library, which contained some hundreds of ill-bound books, chiefly French, sat the Marquis himself--the genius of the place--a grandee of Spain of the first class, a reputed scholar, dilettante, and patron of the fine arts; a distinguished statesman, and at one time a pretender to the regency of Spain; now, alas! the victim of paralysis, disappointed intrigues, inordinate vanity, and insane ambition.[148] Whilst at Malaga I had become slightly acquainted with the Marquis's brother, the _Conde de Teba_, who, by turns, a violent _Legitimista_, _Afrancesado_, and _Exaltado_, was then, in the latter character, doing duty as corporal in the _City Light Horse_, and bore about on his crippled person the just reward of his treason to his country, having received a wound which disfigured him for life, whilst serving in the French ranks. The _Conde_ married a Miss K----, "the beautiful and accomplished daughter" (as the newspapers say) of one of the first British merchants of Malaga. His union with this lady had been forbidden by the late king of Spain, on the grounds that the pure blood of a Spanish grandee was not to be contaminated by admixture with the grosser current flowing in plebeian veins. To overcome this objection, reference was made to the heraldic records of Scotland (the country of the lady's family), and a genealogical tree was shipped off to Spain, which proved without flaw, cross-bar, or blemish, that the family of K---- was an offset from the great Fingal himself. Ferdinand, who, morose as he has usually been represented, enjoyed a joke as much as most people, burst into a hearty laugh on this document being placed before him, exclaiming at length, "In God's name, let Teba marry the Scotch king's daughter!" This speech, though made in perfect good humour, was not soon forgotten by the lady, who, when I had the pleasure of meeting her, wore round her king-hating person (forgetting her high descent) the terrific words, _constitucion ò muerte_, embroidered on a green sash ribbon. Granada, by the way, is reckoned a most constitutional city. I first visited it a few months previous to the invasion of the Duc d'Angoulême, when every one breathed the most deadly hate against the French, and every thing promised a most sanguinary struggle. The streets of Granada, if the vile _Gavachos_ ever got so far, were to be their burial place; the city was to be another Zaragoza; the contest another "_guerra hasta el cuchillo_."[149] I pictured to myself the beauteous groves of the Generalife formed into abattis to defend the town; the pure streams of the Darro and Genil reddened with the gore of its brave inhabitants; the tottering towers of the elevated Alhambra pounded into dust; the venerable deputy-governor[150] of the royal palace exposed to the insults of a licentious soldiery! Happily, however, all my anticipated fears were groundless. The French troops marched quietly into the city long after the garrison had left it by an opposite gate, and the invaders were received by the inhabitants with every outward mark of neighbourly esteem and affection. During the first days of the constitutional portion of the reign of Ferdinand "the beloved," military schools were established in most of the principal cities of the kingdom. That of Granada was on a scale proportioned to the "_exaltacion_" of the place, 90 students being maintained at it. A large monastery, which, ever since the expulsion of the Moslems, had been under the protecting care of St. Jerome, was handed over to the more bellicose _Santiago_,[151] for the purpose of training up the youthful _Granadinos_ to deeds of arms; and if the saint-militant attended to their studies as well as he did to their feeding and clothing, no complaint could possibly be brought against him. The attempt to regenerate the national army by the infusion of a body of _educated_ officers, whose advancement should depend entirely upon their own conduct and acquirements, was a praiseworthy effort to break through the barriers of presumption, ignorance, and vice, with which the pampered nobles of Spain had, until then, closed the door of promotion against every kind of merit; reserving for themselves all the most influential and lucrative posts, and placing in the inferior, the illegitimate branches of their houses, their numerous hangers-on and menials, and, even yet worse, the debased panders to their vices. But venality is so strictly entailed upon all public departments in Spain, that the same gross corruption and glaring favouritism continued, as before, to regulate the distribution of favour and promotion. The patronage had passed into other hands, but the new hands were not more delicate than the old; "_aunque vistan à la mona de seda, mona se queda_."[152] Legitimists and liberals were both equally corrupt; their object was the same, namely, to fill their pockets from the public purse. The difference between them consisted merely in the means by which they effected their purpose. The intrigues that had formerly been employed to manage the _court_ were now directed to influence the _political clubs_, and, under their dictation, the constitutional ministers (to retain their places) were obliged to nominate the noisiest braggarts to the command of their armies, and select for all the minor posts such as were most vociferous in their cries of "constitution or death." These, as might naturally have been expected, were, for the most part, lawyers' clerks, tavern waiters, and barbers' apprentices--self-imagined _Gracchi_ and _Bruti_, who thought they would be doing a great public good by bettering their own particular condition. The youths, who, under the _new system_, crowded the military schools, were all chosen under the same influence, and mostly from the same class. But whatever germs of future Cids and Gonzalvos these seminaries may have cherished, not any were destined to reach maturity, for, Santiago not being so quick in his operations as San Anton, the French army cut up the tree of liberty, root and branch, ere these seeds of military greatness had even sprung up. The extraordinary deterioration that has taken place in the Spanish army, since the days of Philip II., is only to be accounted for by the demoralized state of the upper ranks of society, and the consequent corruption that pervades every department of the state. The soldiers, who now _run away_, are chosen from the same race of men, that fought so gallantly under the Dukes of Alba and Parma; the religion they profess is the same that it was then, nay is stript in some slight degree of its bigotry and superstition. The last king to whom they swore obedience, was not a whit more despotic than any of his predecessors; so that it is futile to say, that tyranny or liberty had any weight in the matter. Could any sway be more absolute than that of the Spanish sovereigns of the House of Hapsburg? and yet under them the Spaniards behaved most nobly. Would it be possible to frame a more liberal constitution than that of 1820? and yet no troops ever conducted themselves more shamefully than those ranged under its standard. Nor can this marked change be attributed to any inferiority of theoretical military knowledge on the part of the Spanish nation; for their schools of artillery and engineers are indisputably good, and their military writers by no means behind the age. Indeed, the "_reflexiones militares_" of the _Marques de Santa Cruz_ may be traced throughout the scientific pages of Jomini and Dumas, and are, in fact, the groundwork of some tactical compilations of recent date in our own language. The experience of the _War of Independence_ proved, however, that very few officers of superior rank in the Spanish army were qualified to command;[153] and, at the same time, one cannot but be struck at the very small number amongst the inferior grades, who rose to distinction during the long period of its continuance. The civil war that followed brought forward no new men of military talent; and the invasion of the French, in 1823, proved the utter incapacity of all the leaders who had been transformed into generals under the constitutional government. The bombast of these latter worthies rendered their imbecility the more ridiculous. I heard one say to the late Sir George Don, just before the entry of the Duc d'Angoulême into Spain, "If _we Spaniards_ drove the French across the Pyrenees, like a flock of sheep (!) when commanded by Napoleon's best generals, with how much greater ease shall we now do so, being led only by a despotic Bourbon!" Not very long after, I witnessed an act of imbecility yet more laughable. In ascending the staircase of the government house at Gibraltar one morning, I saw, on the landing place, a Spanish general officer (then, as _at this moment_, holding a most important command) explaining to an officer of the governor's staff how, by "_una grande combinacion_," he, Riego, and other "_inclitos heroes_," proposed cutting off Marshal Molitor's division of the French army, then marching on Granada. As the success of their combined operations depended entirely upon the _secrecy_ and celerity with which they were to be conducted, it could not but be extremely amusing to hear the gallant general explain the "whole progress" of the affair, before a host of orderly serjeants, messengers, and servants; who, attracted to the spot by his loquacity and gesticulations, were listening with open-mouthed astonishment, to the elucidation of his cunningly devised plan. Ere I passed on, I too was fortunate enough to witness the hypothetical termination of "his marchings and counter-marchings," in the most complete success; as, suiting the action to the word, he described a wide circle with his outstretched arms and gold-headed cane, and enclosed the outmanoeuvered French marshal and his entire _corps d'armée_. The result of this "_grande combinacion_" turned out, however, to be that the Marshal effected the passage of the mountains between Guadiz and Granada, ere the Spanish captain general had yet fully explained the impossibility of his escaping from the strategical toils _about to be_ spread for him. Return we now to Granada--from which city, having announced at Madame Martinez' tertulia that it was our intention to depart on the following morning, taking the road to Cordoba, certain symptoms of uneasy curiosity were manifested, attended with sundry mysterious hints, that led us to fancy some extraordinary perils were to be encountered on that particular road. Less communicative than the Spanish captain general, however, the utmost we could elicit from our various acquaintances was, that the country round about the city whither we were about to proceed, was in a very _volcanic_ state, and that a political explosion might be daily expected. As none of our party had professed an over-boiling admiration of the existing state of things, I believe we were set down as aiders and abettors in the revolt of the troops which shortly afterwards took place--though not until we had safely returned to the shelter of the British fortress. We left Granada as proposed, taking the direct road to Cordoba, by Alcalà la real. As far as that town, the road, at the period of which I write, was the only carriage route leading from Granada towards Madrid. Another by way of Jaen has been opened within the last few years. If ocular demonstration of this first-named road being practicable for carriages had not, however, been afforded us, we should certainly have doubted the possibility of any thing less fragile than a bullock's cart getting over some parts of it; but as far as Piños de la Puente, that is, for the first twelve miles, it is tolerably good, traversing the north-eastern portion of the _Vega_, and leaving the Sierra de Elvira at some little distance on the right. The village of Piños stands on the right bank of the river Cubillas, and inscriptions, which have been found and are preserved there, prove it to have been the town of Ilurco, mentioned by Pliny. It is celebrated, in more recent times, as a spot where many a fierce struggle took place between the Moors and Christians; for, in their forays into each other's country, the bridge of Piños was generally the point chosen for effecting a passage across the impracticable little stream that, in this direction, bounds the _Vega_. The hilly country begins immediately on leaving Piños de la puente, and a fine view is obtained from the heights above the village: Granada, and the line of mountains beyond, are seen to great advantage, and to the right lies the rich _vega_, stretching westward as far as Loja. The _Soto de Roma_[154] occupies the very heart of the fruitful plain; appearing from hence to be thickly wooded. Such, however, is not the case, although some well grown timber is upon one part of it. Proceeding onwards, over a very hilly country, and crossing the little river Moclin, in an hour and a half we reached the _Venta del puerto Lope_, (pass of Lopez) distant six miles from _Piños de la puente_. About three miles beyond the _Venta_, a view of the most romantic kind presents itself. The _Sierra Nevada_, and part of the plain of Granada, are seen through a tremendous rent that intersects the lofty mountains which now encircle the traveller; the entrance of the rugged defile being defended by two towers, standing on bold, and almost inaccessible, rocks. Some miles up this impracticable _tajo_, is situated the crag-based fortress of Moclin, which, from the command it possessed of the principal pass through this mountain range, was called by the Moors, "the Shield of Granada." The celebrated _Conde de Cabra_ experienced a signal defeat in attempting to surprise this fortress; which, a few years after, (A.D. 1487) fell into the hands of Ferdinand the Catholic, by the accidental explosion of its powder-magazine. About a league from the _Puerto de Lope_, the town of Illora, erroneously placed _on_ the road in most maps, is seen two miles off, on the left. It stands on a rocky eminence, crowned by an old castle, and overlooking a fertile plain. The ancient name of the place is lost; but it was one of the strongholds of the Moors, and fell to the Christian arms only a few weeks prior to the capture of Moclin, when the renowned _Gonzalvo_ was appointed its _Alcaide_. The country henceforth becomes more open and cultivated, but the soil looks cold and ungrateful after that of the plain of Granada. The hills bordering the road are studded with towers at the distance of about a league asunder, which, in the days of the Moslems, must have formed a very perfect line of telegraphic communication between the capital and the northern frontier towns of the kingdom of Granada. The old castle of _Alcalà la real_, situated on an eminence, is seen at a considerable distance, and, on a near approach, some modern works thrown up by the French give it rather an imposing appearance. The town is so pent in by hills as not to be seen until one has passed under the triumphal arch by which it is entered. It was called by the Moors _Alcalà Abenzaide_, the Castle (_Al Kala_) of Abenzaide, and received its present distinguished name on falling to the victorious arms of Alfonzo XI. A.D. 1340. From this date it became the principal bulwark of the Christian frontier, and the base of most of the offensive operations undertaken against Granada. A remarkable brick tower, built by the _Conde de Tendilla_ as a night beacon, to assist the erring footsteps of the Christians in escaping from captivity, still stands on an elevated knoll, clear of all the other hills, on the opposite side of the town to the castle. Antiquaries are at issue as to what Roman town stood in this important position. Some imagine it to be the situation of the _Agla menor_ of Pliny; whilst others--as it appears to me with more reason, considering the order in which that methodical writer enumerated the cities of note lying between Boetis and the Sea--are of opinion that it is the site of _Ebura Cerealis_. Alcalà la real has always been considered a military post of importance, and many a desperate conflict has been witnessed from its walls. The last (not a very desperate one, however) was in January, 1810, between a division of the French army, commanded by General Sebastiani, and a disorganized mob of Spaniards, under Areizaga,--by turns the most rash, and most desponding, and always the least successful, of all the Spanish generals. By the defeat of the Spanish host, the road to Granada was thrown open to the invaders. The Old Castle, called _La Mota_, is a Moorish work, which the French strengthened by some interior retrenchments. The city, though sunk in a deep hollow, stands high as compared with the surrounding country; the springs on the opposite sides of the chain on which it is situated falling to the Guadalquivir and Genil respectively. The streets are tolerably wide and well paved, but steep; the _plaza_ is spacious, and rather handsome; the Alameda is shady, and abounding in fountains; and the _Posada_ vile, and overrun with vermin. The population may be estimated at 4000 _vecinos escasos_,[155] or 20,000 souls, including the inmates of six large convents. On our next day's journey, to _Castrò el Rio_, we were most disagreeably convinced of the little dependence that can be placed on the information of the peasantry respecting distance. They invariably compute space by _time_; an hour's ride being reckoned one league. As, however, the rate at which their animals travel is by no means the same, their computation of distance varies accordingly; so that a man possessed of a good mule reckons that distance seven leagues, which the owner of the more tardy _burro_ estimates at nine. To exemplify this by our own case--we set out from Alcalà under the impression, received overnight from information obtained from a party of _arrieros_--that the distance to _Baena_ was seven leagues. After riding _an hour_ we overtook two peasants, mounted on sorry animals, who told us it was still seven leagues. Ten minutes after, (fancying we must have taken a wrong road) we questioned a priest, bestriding a sleek mule, and learnt that it was four leagues to Baena, _or five_ from a knoll some _hundred yards_ behind us. In another hour the distance had increased to four leagues and three quarters; but for the next hour and a half, we proceeded in the proper descending progression, until we had reduced the distance to three leagues, and a shrug of the shoulders, implying good measure. With this radius, and Baena as a centre, we were doomed to describe the arc of a circle for two tedious hours; and at length, by a figure which it would be difficult to explain geometrically, found ourselves suddenly within a league and a half of our destination. From this stage, our journey diminished pretty regularly to its end, excepting that we were a quarter of a league from that desideratum before we were half of one! I think the real distance may be reckoned twenty-four English miles; for it occupied us seven hours to accomplish. The country is rough and intricately broken, without being elevated; and it is devoid of much interest. The road is a mere mule track, (for from Alcalà the Madrid road proceeds to Alcaudete) and must be almost impassable in winter, as well from the stiff, clayey nature of the soil, as from the depth of the mountain rivulets which have to be forded, and which are very numerous. The plains, which here and there present themselves, are well, that is generally, cultivated; producing corn chiefly. The line of beacon-towers is continued along the points of the distant hills. The town of _Alcaudete_ (distant three leagues from Alcalà) lies about six miles off the road on the right; and _Luque_ (some little distance farther on) stands on a slight eminence, about a mile and a half off, on the left. On drawing near _Baena_, the country becomes wooded with olives, and the hills lose somewhat of their asperity. It is a large town, containing 1000 _Vecinos_, and stands on the side of a rugged mound, overhanging the right bank of the little river _Marbella_. The summit of the crag, in the usual Moorish fashion, is crowned by an old castle, the enceinte of which is rather extensive. The walls of the town are also standing, and, within the last few years, have been plastered up and loop-holed, to enable them to resist a _coup de main_, or an attack of cholera. Baena is another town to which antiquaries are puzzled to affix a Roman name. By some it is imagined to be _Ulia_; but this I do not think at all likely, for, in the first place, the Itinerary of Antoninus makes _Ulia_ distant but eighteen Roman miles from Cordoba, whereas Baena is, at least, thirty two; and, in the next, because Cæsar, who, on his second coming to Spain, found his own army assembled at _Obulco_, (Porcuna) and that of his adversaries besieging _Ulia_,[156] would scarcely have ventured to make a flank movement on _Cordoba_, to draw Cneus Pompey from the siege of _Ulia_, leaving his own magazines exposed to the enemy within half a day's march of that place. Had he been strong enough to act in the bold manner this would imply, it seems more probable that he would have marched at once with his whole army to the relief of the beleaguered fortress. It strikes me, as being more probable, that _Baena_ is the _Baebro_ of Pliny, enumerated by that author (amongst the towns of note on the left bank of the Guadalquivir) next in order to _Castra Vinaria_, now _Castrò el Rio_. The last Moslem King of Granada, the "luckless" _Boabdil_, made prisoner at the battle of Lucena, (A.D. 1483), was confined for some time in the castle of _Baena_; in which also the banners and other trophies, taken on the field of battle, were deposited by the victor, the enterprising _Conde de Cabra_. The accommodation of the Posada we found very _hard_; so, after exploring the place, and attempting to take a _Siesta_, we proceeded on to _Castrò El Rio_. The distance from _Baena_ to this place is two very short leagues--scarcely more than six miles. The road, during the greater part of the way, is along the confined valley of the _Marbella_; but, on approaching Castrò, the bounding hills gradually lose themselves in an extensive plain, that stretches along the winding course of the River _Badajocillo_. _Castrò El Rio_ has all the appearance of a very ancient place, and almost all accounts agree in placing at this spot the Roman city of _Castra Vinaria_, called, in some authors, _Castra Postumii_.[157] It is now an insignificant and thinly populated place, having little or no trade; and most of the land in its vicinity is laid out in pasture. The River _Badajocillo_, or _Guadajoz_, washes its walls, and, by many, is supposed to be the _Salsus_, so frequently mentioned in the "Spanish war" of Hirtius; but without any reason, that I have been able to discover, if we are to place reliance in that author's description of the river and adjacent country. We found Castrò occupied by the head-quarters and greater part of one of the royal regiments of Carbineers; and every stable in the place being crowded with the troopers' horses, we had the greatest difficulty in obtaining accommodation for our own wearied animals. Indeed, but for the interference of a _Caballero_, muffled up in a capacious cloak (who seemed to possess extraordinary influence over the Innkeeper), we should have been obliged to proceed on, or bivouac outside the walls of the town. His interference, however, caused a small shed, crowded with mules and _borricos_, to be cleared for the reception of our horses, into which, after some little trouble, they were all squeezed. A room for ourselves we were assured was quite out of the question;--and, as for beds, every mattress, bolster, _manta_, and blanket, that the _posada_ afforded, had been secured by the Spanish officers. The same civil and influential personage again, however, befriended us, for, after a short time, whilst we were consulting where we should spread our cloaks for the night, the Innkeeper came to acquaint us that "_ese Caballero Español_"[158] had resigned in our favour "_una pequeñissima sala_,"[159] which had been reserved for his use; and that he had further directed it to be furnished with four sacks of chopped straw for our accommodation. The Spanish officers, who had entered into conversation with us whilst standing at the portal of the posada, evinced great curiosity to know whence we had come, whither we were going, and what was the motive for our travelling, and very civilly invited us to pass the evening with them at some house where they were in the habit of assembling nightly. But being both hungry and weary, we made the latter an excuse for declining their invitation. They then plied us with questions touching the state of Granada; asked our opinion of the political condition of the kingdom in general; and, complaining of the difficulty experienced in obtaining news of any kind that could be relied on, begged to be informed if we had recently heard of any thing stirring at Madrid, and whether we purposed visiting that capital. To all these queries we replied that, our object being merely amusement, we had not troubled ourselves much by inquiring into the state of parties--that every thing seemed to be quiet wherever we had been--and that our future plans were undetermined. With numerous offers of service, they then wished us good night, and we betook ourselves to the _Sala_, sending a message to the _Caballero_, who had so kindly given it up, to request he would do us the pleasure of joining his smoke with our's; an invitation that did not require pressing. Our visitor, whom we now had an opportunity of inspecting more closely and critically, was a tall, powerful man, with marked but good features, though the general expression of his countenance was decidedly bad. His brows were dark and shaggy, his cheeks covered with a forest of whisker, and his fierce, uneasy eyes intimated that he was one who had stopped and would stop at nothing to effect his purpose. His curiosity concerning the object of our travels was not less, though more guardedly expressed, than that of the Spanish officers; and, by degrees, a kind of distrust, with which at first he evidently regarded us, wore off, and he expressed his unbounded love for and admiration of the English nation, collectively and individually. "I have seen much of your compatriots," he proceeded, filling himself a bumper of wine, "though of late years my opportunities of mixing with them have been but few. I have ever found them to be true lovers of liberty--ever ready to lend a helping hand to neighbours in distress; yes, yes! whenever an oppressed people stand up for their rights, _carajo!_[160] an Englishman has a G--d--n in his mouth, and a musket on his shoulder in a _credo_.--_Pardiez, Señores!_ but these are excellent cigars! They are indeed _legitimos_,[161] and, entre nous, they are the only things being _legitimas_ that I have any great taste for. To you Englishmen I may say as much. You, like myself, are lovers of constitutional liberty--detesters of absolutism, of a domineering aristocracy, of religious bigotry, and priestly mummery. These things are all very well for the ignorant; but we, who have read, and studied, and reflected, know the just value to set upon them." We gave a ready assent. "This wine is sad trash," he continued, after a flask of execrable black strap had been disposed of, "and I know that you English like a good glass of _Xeres seco_. I will therefore take the liberty, _con licencia_, of sending for some that I think will please your palate." Upon which, calling the _mozo_ charged with the care of the stables, he directed him to go to the house of a certain Don Hilario, and request _su merced_ to send some bottles of wine. "Say it is for _me_, Juan," added our guest, or rather our host, with a marked emphasis on the personal pronoun; "say it is for _me_, and he will be sure to give you the right sort; but _cuida'o_![162] Tell him I have some friends with me--English _officers_; is it not so?" turning interrogatively to us, "and that half a dozen bottles will not be too many." Juan took his departure with a knowing glance at our friend, and in less than the "_fumar de un cigarro_,"[163] returned with the wine. It was excellent--the real "Sherris sack." Bottle after bottle was drained, and every draught of the "fertile" liquor seemed, in the words of Shakspeare's droughty knight, to have a "two-fold operation" upon our convivial entertainer; "drying him up the crudy vapours" that environed his suspicious brain concerning us, and rendering him extremely communicative respecting his own affairs: so that long before even the second bottle was emptied, he had pronounced us to be _gente_ with whom he saw he could converse "_con toda confianza_,"[164] and had awakened much curiosity on our parts, with regard to himself. Although he had appeared to us to be on a friendly footing with the officers of Carbineers, he now abused them in most unmeasured terms; asking if they had not evinced very impertinent curiosity, (how much sooner are the faults of others seen than our own!) to know all about our movements. "Those _alacranes_,"[165] said he, "are all traitors to their country, enemies to our glorious charter of liberty, and--whatever professions they may make to the contrary--have as little liking for a free-born Englishman as Sancho Panza had for unadulterated water." "Indeed," we replied;--truly enough, though somewhat jesuitically perhaps, wishing to draw him out;--truly, "from some observations they let fall, it is evident they are no great admirers of the present constitutional government." "Admirers!" he exclaimed; "no, indeed, it brings them down to their proper level. But, _carajo!_ if I had my way I would bring them down something lower; for I'd shoot every mother's son of them, without the benefit of a dying confession. I'll tell you how _I_ would set about establishing a constitutional government, _caballeros_. I would first hang up the king; then give the _garrote_ to all your dukes, marquisses, and _condes_; and lastly, to make things sure, root every bishop, priest, _cura_, and _fraile_, out of their snug hiding-places. That would be----" "But your religion?" interrupted we. "_Qu ... e Religion! disparate!_[166] That would be the way to keep the French on their own side the Pyrenees! But let them come! they will find us ready to receive and able to beat them, in spite of the defection of our dastardly nobles. As for these carbineer officers, they are a set of _fanfarrones_, who are only fit to _pavonearse por las calles_.[167] I have done more service to my country than the whole of them put together. Look here," he added, removing the handkerchief bound across his forehead,[168] and exhibiting a formidable scar; "this was not obtained in a brothel brawl; nor this," showing a mutilated hand. "No, no, caballeros, my skin would not serve to carry wine in." "You have seen much service then," we observed.--"Wherever any was to be seen," he replied. A fresh supply of cigars was brought, another cork drawn, and before the bottle was finished, we had persuaded our visitor to give us his whole history. The narration occupied the best part of the night, and will consequently require a proportionate space in these pages. Not therefore to detain my readers in a miserable country venta, and break the thread of my journey, I will reserve it for future chapters, concluding this with a brief description of the remaining portion of the road between Granada and Cordoba. We left Castrò at dawn, (minus the curb chains, valise straps, and divers other little detachable articles of our equipment, which are serviceable to cavalry soldiers); taking leave of our new acquaintance, who, though he had impressed us with no great feeling of admiration for his character or principles, had, nevertheless, greatly interested us by the narration of his adventures. The road to Cordoba is dreary in the extreme; being principally across extensive plains of pasture, uninterrupted by a single tree, uncheered by a solitary cottage, or even _rancha_, and after leaving the banks of the _Guadajoz_, unrefreshed by a single drop of water. It does not, however, leave the river immediately on quitting Castrò; on the contrary, so eccentrically does the stream wind, that it is twice crossed (by fords) within a very short distance of the town, and then continues for a considerable distance along its right bank. Indeed, until arrived within a league and a half of Cordoba, the road does not altogether lose sight of the winding river. The quality of the route depends upon the season. In summer it is _carriageable_;[169] in winter, knee-deep in mud, and liable to be flooded. The distance between the two towns is reckoned six _leguas regulares_, i. e. about 24 miles. On reaching some high table land, about five miles from Cordoba, the glorious capital of the western caliphs, and the splendid valley of the Guadalquiver, first burst upon the sight. The view is less extensive, perhaps, but far more striking than that on approaching Granada from Alhama; and when arrived at the edge of the range of hills bordering the rich valley, it becomes perfectly enchanting. The bright city, with its venerable cathedral, its Moorish bridge, its castle and royal palace, is offered to the spectator's close inspection. The gracefully winding Guadalquiver, bathing its mouldering walls, may be traced for miles along the spacious plain that stretches to the East; its flat and fertile banks covered with the varied foliage of the olive, pomegranate, and citron. Beyond the city, a range of wooded mountains, studded with numerous _cortijos_, convents, and _quintas_, rises abruptly from the plain; presenting a fine relief to the sun-lit edifices of the city; and behind this, again, successive ranges of wild mountains show themselves, terminating at length in the cloud-capped ridge of the _Sierra Morena_. CHAPTER XIII. BLAS EL GUERRILLERO. A BANDIT'S STORY. "_La murmuracion, como Hija natural del odio y de la enbidia, siempre anda procurando como manchar y escurecer las vidas y virtudes agenas. Y assi en la gente de condicion vil y baja, es la salsa de mayor apetito, sin quien alguna viando no tiene buen gusto, ni està sazonada._" "GUZMAN DE ALFARACHE." The tale which occupies this and the succeeding chapters interested us, however unworthily, so deeply, that the following day--whilst its details, as well as the peculiar phrases of the narrator, were yet fresh in our memories--was chiefly devoted to transmitting them to our journals, in as regular order as the case would admit of. By a strange coincidence, however, (which will be noted in the course of my wanderings) an opportunity was some years afterwards afforded me of revising and correcting my MS. under the eye of the hero of the tale himself; who, besides adding many minor details that had escaped our recollection, explained various circumstances which had struck us as somewhat obscure and unaccountable. I leave the tale, however, so far in its original state, as to make our acquaintance himself relate THE ADVENTURES OF BLAS EL GUERRILLERO, Who, having first carefully examined the outer apartment, which was used as a kind of granary, and then closed the door of that we occupied, thus commenced his story. My name, _caballeros_, is Blas Maldonado; my present office, that of _Corregidor_[170] of the neighbouring town of ----.[171] The place of my birth was M----, a small _pueblo_[172] on the other side of the _Serranía de Ronda_, of which my father and mother were natives. I believe, notwithstanding the somewhat Italian sound of my _appellido_,[173] that there is a tolerable proportion of the red blood of the Moors in my veins, and that my name is corrupted from the Arabic. My parents were both of respectable, though humble, birth, and owned a small _pacienda_ in the vicinity of Utrera, which, from time immemorial, had been in possession of my mother's family. Devoid alike of pride, education, and ambition, they lived in monotonous contentment on the proceeds of their miserable farm, which I, as their only child who had reached maturity, was destined to inherit. I was beloved by my parents, but especially by my mother, with the most unbounded affection; and from my earliest youth was accustomed to have every wish gratified, every whim indulged. As I advanced in years, I soon showed that I possessed a spirit which soared above the pruning of vines and gathering of olives; and my kind mother checked not this rising ambition; for, though unaspiring herself, she was anxious that her child should be distinguished above the common herd of mankind. My father, however, was desirous of bringing me up to the occupation of my forefathers; saying to my mother, that they themselves had always been happy in the state to which it had pleased their maker to call them;--a condition which, if humble, was one of independence, and placed them, in point of worldly wealth, above the most part of their associates; and that, if they consulted their child's welfare, they should not bring him up above his calling; for he would only thereby lose the friendship and esteem of his neighbours, without increasing their respect; and might, by idleness and pride, be led to his perdition here and hereafter. These old-fashioned notions were fortunately overruled; though I must needs confess, that in the early part of my career, I often thought my father had been endowed with the gift of prophecy. My more tender-hearted parent declared, that I had a mind above the direction of a plough, even if my bodily frame had been strong enough to bear the fatigue of a life of labour; and closing her arguments with a flood of tears, she reminded my father of the children they had lost in early life, and begged that I, their last hope, might not also be sacrificed. I was accordingly sent to Seville, to be educated for the church; that being the only profession my well-intentioned father would hear of my embracing. My fond mother paid me constant visits, to convince herself that my health was not suffering from too close an application to study; supplying me with money saved by her household economy, to enable me to purchase books, and whatever else I might stand in need of. Her fears were not perhaps so groundless as, judging from my present strength and health, you might imagine; for, following the natural bent of my inclination, a thirst for knowledge, I gave up the whole of my time to reading; despising the amusements of my schoolfellows, to whom I felt myself as superior in intellect, as they prided themselves on being in the accidental matter of birth. I soon, however, wearied of the lives of the saints, and other good books placed in my hands; and leaving them for such as wished to learn how to merit canonization, I sought for more worldly knowledge in the pages of Guzman de Alfarache, Gil Blas, and other adventurers, who, like myself, had had their fortunes to seek; and, whilst I considered the last-named _hero_ a mere driveller, devoid of all honourable ambition, I adopted his code of morality, as the only one to be followed by one who has to push his way through the selfish crowd that throngs every avenue to wealth and power. My parents, informed by those to whose care I was entrusted, that I was by no means likely to become an ornament to the church, were at length persuaded to allow me to make trial of the law. But though at the outset I applied very diligently to the dry study to which my mind was now directed, yet I soon found it suited my taste as little as that of divinity. Of the two, indeed, I think I preferred the lives of the Holy Fathers to the _Siete Partidas_ of _Alfonzo el Sabio_; for the former, at all events, contained ample matter for satire and ridicule, for which I had a natural turn; whereas the latter formed a mass of heavy reading, replete with incongruities, and clogged with technicalities, which ill-suited my peculiar humour. During the latter years of my residence at Seville, however, my reading was altogether diverted into another channel. I became acquainted with a French youth, by name Louis Xavier le Bas, who, intended for the mercantile profession, had been sent to our commercial capital, where some of his mother's relatives were settled, for the purpose of acquiring a knowledge of the Spanish language. Though this person was several years my senior in age, a similarity of tastes soon warmed into the closest friendship an acquaintance that had been commenced merely with a view to our mutual advantage. I initiated him in all the mysteries of Spanish life, and he, in return, undertook _à me decrasser_, as he termed it, and render me fit to _jouer un rôle distingué_ on the theatre of the world. In short, we became inseparable; and our despised and despising fellow-students thence designated us Don Cleofas and Asmodeus. This valuable friend, devil or not, was the means of my acquiring a tolerable knowledge of the French language, (which has proved of infinite service to me,) and of my understanding being enlarged by the writings of Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, and other enlightened materialists of his nation, whose depth of reasoning and witty satires were, at that period, effecting such beneficial changes in France; removing from the eyes of the _people_ the bandages of ignorance and bigotry that had so long blinded them to their state of slavery and debasement. These works, though forbidden by the despot government of Spain, were surreptitiously obtained for me by my kind friend; and their perusal opened my eyes also to the deplorable state of degradation in which my own country was plunged. I accordingly became a philosopher, and, I may say, even a _liberal_, long before the term was heard or understood in this enslaved and priest-ridden land. Our school companions, unable to comprehend the elevated principles by which we were governed, shunned us as plebeian democrats and blasphemous free thinkers. But we soon collected around us a set of more congenial spirits, and became the founders of a secret political association, that has since spread widely throughout the whole kingdom. I had nearly completed the fifth year of my sojourn at Seville, when an unwelcome summons from my father bade me repair forthwith to M----. His letter briefly stated, that, concluding I must by this time have thoroughly digested the contents of _all_ the law books ever published in the universe--my father, as you may perceive, was very ignorant in such matters--he had embraced a most favourable opportunity that presented itself of establishing me in the world agreeably to my desire; and, accordingly, was about to place me, together with a handsome bonus, in the hands of Don Benito Quisquilla, the village attorney, to be by him initiated into all the practical quirks and chicaneries of the law; with the view, if I gave promise of becoming a useful co-operator in the work of litigation, of being eventually admitted to a share of his daily increasing profits. This prospect of settling down as a country attorney was, as my friend and counsellor Le Bas said, quite insufferable to one of my intellectual powers, cultivated mind, and honourable ambition. If I had finally determined on following the profession of the law, he observed, the only fit field for one of my abilities was the capital. _There_, he had no doubt, I should soon rise to distinction; whereas, in a country town, my pursuit of fame would be as vain as that of partridges _en campo raso_.[174] This opinion tallied exactly with my own; for, feeling myself as superior in mental endowments as in physical powers to the decrepit piece of nobility who owned the vast plains surrounding the miserable inheritance to which I was born, I saw no reason why I should be inferior to him in worldly wealth and consideration. With these and various other arguments, therefore, I replied to my father, urging him to break off with Don Benito, and furnish me with the means of accompanying my friend, Le Bas, to Madrid, where he was about to establish himself as a merchant. My father, however, would not listen to reason. He replied, that the Duke of Medina Celi was born a grandee of Spain, and I a peasant; and, with respect to a reflection I had cast upon the justice of Providence in distributing so unequally the good things of this world, he maintained that, though my life was doomed to be one of labour, yet it was as sweet, probably even sweeter, than that of him whose lot I seemed so much to envy. Finding that it was _predicar en el desierto_[175] to argue with my father, and that my mother did not give me the support on which I had reckoned, I had no alternative but to acquiesce in the proposed plan, and wait for the favourable moment of relieving myself from the paternal yoke. I, therefore, took a most affectionate leave of Le Bas, who promised to summons me to the capital as soon as he had an opportunity of serving me, and, with a very bad grace, obeying my father's commands, proceeded to M----. My parents were delighted with the improvements that had taken place in my health, person, and deportment, and not less proud of the superiority my education and accomplishments had given me over the companions of my childhood. I was now, my fond mother declared, entitled to _llamar de vos_[176] the first _hidalgo_ in the land; and, I believe, _Caballeros_, that, without vanity, I may say, my coming caused some little sensation in my natal town. I was not long in discovering, however, that the place contained no fit associate for one of my stamp. Those few amongst the inhabitants whose professions had rendered some little education necessary, were, from morning to night, occupied at their respective vocations, and affected rather to treat me as a _parvenu_. The youths of my own age, on the other hand, were ignorant clowns, of whom I could not possibly make companions; and, with pain I make the admission, even on the authors of my being I could not now avoid looking down with some slight feeling of contempt. They were all kindness, however, and my father spared not the means of enabling me to continue the same expensive manner of life to which I had so long been accustomed. Deprived as I now found myself of associates of my own sex--for I believe every boor in the place hated me most thoroughly--my time was exclusively devoted to the society of the other; and I need not, therefore, tell you--for most young men are aware of the expenses attendant on such intimacies--that my father's purse was drawn heavily upon to meet my increasing exigencies. Meanwhile my legal studies were prosecuted with no great assiduity. Don Benito, who, whilst my father's money was fresh in his pocket, had, for the sake of appearances, treated me with affected kindness, soon threw off the mask of hypocrisy, and neglected no occasion of making me aware of the little interest he took in my welfare. The soft and speaking eyes of his fair daughter told me, however, that she entertained a kindlier feeling towards me; an avowal which was quickly followed by the admission that I was the sole possessor of her affections. I must make the ungallant confession, _Caballeros_, that _expediency_ was the only incentive I had for encouraging the passion of the lovely girl. My life had been too dissolute to admit so pure an affection as her's readily to take root within my breast; but I saw in it the only sure stepping-stone to greatness--money; for Don Benito was a wealthy man, Alitéa his only daughter. Whilst yet undecided as to the best means to be adopted for the accomplishment of my purpose (for it was a matter requiring some consideration, since I was perfectly aware the crafty old lawyer would never _consent_ to our union, my dissipated mode of living having involved me in pecuniary difficulties of which he could not well be ignorant), events occurred which, by opening other prospects to me, for a time drove Alitéa altogether out of my thoughts. The trifling sum that my father's frugal habits had enabled him to lay by, had been entirely swallowed up in placing me with Don Benito; and to meet my increasing expenditure, which he fully believed was merely money put out to interest, he conceived that increased exertions on his part were necessary. Against this--since in replying to my mother's objections to my following the plough, he had ever maintained that agricultural pursuits were of all others the most healthy--I could have nothing to say. But these exertions soon proved too much for the old man's strength, and he contracted a painful disorder, from which, after a tedious confinement, it became a mercy to be relieved. I mention these circumstances, _Caballeros_, not for the purpose of repelling the charge brought against me by my kind fellow-townsmen, of having wilfully accelerated my parent's death, a crime of which, God be praised, my conscience is quite clear, but to show the ill will they entertained towards me; a feeling to which, in the course of my story, I shall again have occasion to refer. I had always expected, on the death of my father, to find myself in the possession of a comfortable independence, as he had ever represented to me that such would be the case. But, during his protracted illness, every thing had gone wrong at the farm: the cattle died; those of our neighbours intruded upon our crops; the vines remained unpruned; the olives rotted upon the ground; the property, in fact, had become a perfect wilderness; and, to obtain money to defray the expenses of my parent's funeral, I was obliged to sell the implements of husbandry upon the farm; those being the only property which could be immediately rendered available. Before proceeding to this extremity, however, I had applied to Don Benito for assistance. The pettifogging rascal in reply said, that he had every disposition in the world to befriend me, and, with that view, felt called upon to say, that the further study of a profession for which I had neither the requisite talent nor application, would be merely a waste of time and money; and to advise me to apply myself to the healthful occupation of my forefathers, for which, on the other hand, my bodily strength peculiarly fitted me. "On this condition only," he concluded, "can I render you assistance. Give me your promise to devote your best energies to this honest calling, and I am ready at once to return the sum advanced by your father, though not called upon to do so, either by law or equity." I spurned his offer with the contemptuous indignation it merited, withdrew from all further intercourse with the miserly wretch, and, as I have already said, sold every thing that I could lay my hands upon. Could I have acted otherwise? impossible! But the blow inflicted on my mother by this sudden destruction of her long-indulged hopes was too heavy for her to bear up against. Staggering already under her late loss, and now with the dread of penury and want added to her sufferings, she sank broken-hearted to the grave. I can ill describe my feelings on the heart-rending occasion. I had loved my mother with the fondest affection; yet had it been my _fate_ to drug the cup that agonised her last moments! With pleasure would I have laid down my own life to prolong her's; yet had it been my unlucky destiny to inflict the blow that hurried her to the tomb! She nevertheless felt more for me than for herself, even in her last moments; and her dying breath was spent in calling down a blessing on my head. _Ya està en el cielo._[177] To meet the fresh expenses my mother's illness and death had brought upon me, as well as to liquidate my former debts, I was now under the necessity of raising more money. I tried in vain to effect a mortgage on my property: nobody would advance a _maravedi_ upon it! To obtain a few paltry doubloons, therefore, I had no alternative left but to sell the patrimony handed down to me by a long line of ancestors. My _hacienda_ was accordingly put up to public auction; and--deteriorated in value as it was represented to be, by every one but the auctioneer--sold for something less than one third of its real value. The purchaser was Don Benito Quisquilla. The proceeds of the sale, after paying the customary expenses, were barely sufficient to satisfy the various demands made upon me; and I was left a bankrupt in wealth as well as expectations; a being without a relative in the wide world to speak comfort to him; without a friend to advise him; without a home; without even the means of subsistence! Was life any longer worth preserving? I weighed its value in the scales of experience--fleeting joys on the one side, rankling injuries on the other; and the preponderating weight of the latter had well nigh determined me to rid myself of the burthen of existence, when the sweetness of revenge, cast into the opposing balance, turned the scale, and decided me to live--to live to be revenged on _mankind_. The purchaser of my property, or rather the swindler who had obtained possession of it, again outraged my wounded feelings by the repetition of his humiliating offer of assistance. Thus insulted and scorned by the specious villain whose robberies had rendered me a beggar, I swore to let fall on him the first stroke of my revenge. I kept my oath! I tore from his arms his daughter, his darling Alitéa--the solace of his widowed hearth--the prop of his declining years. She fled from the paternal roof, and became my--mistress! Ignorant of all that had passed between her father and myself, and but too ready to lend a favouring ear to my tale, few persuasions were necessary to induce Alitéa to comply with my proposal. I assured her that I had sounded Don Benito on the subject of a marriage, and that he objected only on account of the disparity of years: she who was then entering her twenty-third year, being two years older than myself. But as this objection, trifling as it could not but be considered, was nevertheless one which would always exist, I convinced her that it could only be overcome by the step I proposed, a step which would readily be forgiven by an indulgent father. She trusted to my honour and her father's kindness, and became my victim. We fled to the mountains, and sought a refuge amongst the lawless bandits of Olbera, a place proverbial for sheltering the outcasts of society. There we remained for several months, subsisting on the few _onzas_ that remained in my purse from the sale of my patrimony, and by disposing of various trinkets that Alitéa had brought away with her. But our funds were soon exhausted, and it became necessary to take some steps to procure the means of maintenance. On matters reaching this stage, it had originally been my intention to abandon Don Benito's daughter to her fate, and seek my fortune in America; for, as I have already said, Alitéa had awakened no feeling of love within my breast, and the idea of making her my wife, though entertained previous to my rupture with her father, had never once entered my thoughts on taking her from the paternal roof. Revenge alone had instigated me to an act, by which I purposed bringing everlasting disgrace on Don Benito, and his vaunted high connexions. But, besides that Alitéa possessed great personal attractions, and had given proof of loving me with the most boundless affection, which naturally disposed my feelings to warm towards her, she, even now, on discovering the deceit I had practised; that I was a libertine; a beggar; nay, even when I told her she was the mere instrument of my revenge, did not reproach me with one bitter word.--"Blas, Blas, I trust to your honour," was the only appeal made to her seducer's feelings. Was it in human nature to spurn so confiding, so affectionate a being? For my _punishment_ (so a confessor would, probably, have told me) it was ordained, that the cold admiration with which I first regarded Alitéa should gradually warm into the most fervent, the most ardent love, to make me feel more poignantly the wrong I had done, the misery I had brought on this admirable being! Bitterly as I upbraided _fate_, and curst the author of my misfortunes, more bitter still were my self-reproaches at having exposed the object of my adoration to the hardships and privations we were doomed to suffer; for we were now obliged to labour from daylight to dark to earn a miserable pittance, barely sufficient to procure the necessaries of life, and to be satisfied with the humblest lodging, the coarsest garments, and the poorest food. At length, urged by my love for Alitéa, and yet more by the prospect of a family, I determined on opening a communication with Don Benito, which I did by proposing to marry his daughter, and thus save the blighted honour of her family. This proposal was, of course, coupled with a stipulation--for it was now my turn to dictate terms--that a handsome settlement should be made upon us. The medium I selected for carrying on this delicate negociation was one of the villagers, a smuggler, with whom I had become intimate, and whose avocation afforded the opportunity of communicating with Don Benito, without furnishing a clue, by which our place of concealment could be discovered. On the fidelity of my friend--having exacted a promise of the most inviolable secrecy--I thought the fullest reliance might be placed; but "honour and profit will not both keep in one sack," as the saying is. The scoundrel had not enough virtue to resist a bribe of a few dollars, and he acquainted Don Benito with every thing concerning us. This abominable piece of treachery, whilst it served to increase the hatred I bore mankind, had a considerable influence in stamping my future character, for I became habitually wary and distrustful. But, to resume my narrative, on returning one evening from my daily work, I found Don Benito at my Alitéa's bed-side, and that she had prematurely given birth to a male child--an _illegitimate_ child. I pass over the scene of mutual recrimination that ensued. What might have happened, but for the precarious state in which Alitéa was lying, I know not. Enraged beyond measure at the circumstance, which, for the moment, had caused the failure of his project to recover his daughter, Don Benito took his departure, calling down upon me every possible malediction, and declaring to the village authorities his firm resolve to return without loss of time, armed with power to lodge me in a gaol, and place his daughter in a convent; but I baulked his purpose, by making Alitéa my wife that very night. Her father had dropped his purse upon the floor, and I scrupled not to employ its contents in so legitimate a purpose. I soon found an obsequious priest, ready to do my bidding. They are not over-scrupulous in religious matters at Olbera, neither are the laws very rigidly enforced there[178]; so that on my _father-in-law's_ return, a few days after, with the _justicia_, I set him at defiance. I had, some time previously, made up my mind to perform this tardy act of justice to my Alitéa, but had delayed it with the view of exacting favourable terms from her father, who, I thought, as our Spanish saying has it, would rather see _La hija mal casada que bien abarraganada_.[179] Having failed in this, it became necessary to marry her for my own sake; since, though Don Benito might still send me to prison, I could now insist on my _wife_ accompanying me. He was outrageous on finding that his revengeful intention was thwarted; but, seeing that menaces had no effect upon me, changed his tone, and proposed that I should resign his daughter for a sum of money. This I resolutely declined, whilst Alitéa, on her knees, implored his forgiveness. How the monster could refuse I know not; but he did, and they parted, to meet no more. A few days after this scene, a letter was delivered to Alitéa from her unnatural parent. In it, after declaring that he would no longer hold communion with the villain who had brought misery on her, and disgrace on the name she bore, and who, but on her account, he would pursue with the utmost vengeance of the outraged laws of our country, he proceeded to state, that still prompted by the recollection of the unbounded affection he had borne her mother, he had determined to make an allowance sufficient for our bare support, and that a certain sum would, for that purpose, be lodged periodically in the hands of the superior of the convent of _San Pablo de la Breña_, in our vicinity; where he charged her, if the religious precepts he had implanted in her breast were not entirely eradicated, to make the frequent confessions necessary for the salvation of her soul. The money indeed, he added, was to be paid only on these conditions, and into her own hands, and so long as he was assured that she experienced proper treatment from me. Convinced, however, he pursued, that I was actuated solely by the vilest of motives, and not influenced by any regard for _her_ in refusing to give her up, he once more repeated the offer made at our last interview; or even offered to settle on me alone the sum he purposed to allow us jointly, if I would formally resign his daughter, and allow the marriage to be annulled. In conclusion, he informed her, that though his door would ever be open to admit a repentant daughter, it was closed for ever against that daughter's seducer, and the offspring of our criminality. My wife perused the letter, and, with a steady countenance, but brimful eye, placed it in my hands. "Well, Alitéa," said I, "will you return to your father and luxury, or remain to share the poverty of your husband? I pledge you my word it shall be as you may choose--decide."--"I have already decided," she replied: "I remain." I sent a scornful reply to Don Benito's letter, returning, with usurious interest, the opprobrious terms he had lavished upon me. "Villain," indeed, from him who was the source of all my misfortunes!--Nevertheless, he was as good as his word; the allowance was regularly paid into the hands of Alitéa; and, added to the profits arising from the cultivation of a vineyard, it enabled us, without much labour, to live in comfort, if not luxury. But short, alas! was this period of happiness; the cup of life appeared only to have been sweetened for a brief space, to render more bitter the long draught of misery that was in reserve for me. My Alitéa had never entirely recovered from the effects of the shock occasioned by her father's sudden visit; and, as if fate took pleasure in mocking our tardy marriage, the illegitimate Fernando was doomed to be the only issue that proceeded from it. Suffice it to say, my wife fell at length a victim to her father's rash act, and I was once more alone in the world, and a beggar. Even now, _Caballeros_, though two-and-thirty years have elapsed since my Alitéa was torn from me, I cannot speak of her loss with composure. Judge then of my frantic rage at the time. In my ungovernable frenzy, I rushed into the open air, to upbraid the Almighty Being who had given me existence; I invoked his utmost wrath, I defied his utmost power, but in vain! I was fated to live on, to endure yet greater wretchedness. Fool that I was, to repine at what was written in the book of _Fate_! I returned to the house of death, to obtain the means of ridding myself of an existence that I abhorred. I was about to snatch my knife from its sheath to execute my purpose, when, casting my eyes yet once more on my adored Alitéa, I saw my child, my helpless Fernando, extended in violent convulsions at her side. A sense of the duty I owed the dear pledge of my Alitéa's love checked my upraised arm. I determined to live for that boy--that boy thenceforth became my all. The allowance made by Don Benito was immediately stopped on the death of his daughter, without his condescending even to inquire after her child. It became necessary, therefore, to adopt some course of life better suited to me than that of a field labourer, to earn wherewith to support us; and I accordingly joined a band of Contrabandistas, and, in the lawless life I thenceforth led, found an occupation well suited to my adventurous, and now reckless disposition. During several years that I devoted to this precarious profession, I made frequent visits to Cadiz, where my knowledge of the French language threw me in constant communication with the various merchants of that nation, who were, at that period, established there. Amongst these, to my inexpressible delight, I discovered my old friend Le Bas--though now glorying in the virtuous republican appellation of Publius Manlius Niveleur. Our intimacy was, of course, renewed, and, as he had the means of throwing a great deal of business into my hands, I soon drove a thriving trade. Through him, also, I became _au fait_ as to the state of affairs in France, and, consequently, aware of the great benefits that had accrued to the people by the change from a Despotic to a Republican government; and of other events, which our rulers took every possible pains to prevent reaching the ears of the Spanish people. I am speaking now of as distant an epoch as the year 1796, when France, having emancipated herself from the thraldom of a tyrannical king, a vicious nobility, and a corrupt priesthood, was basking in the sunshine of liberty;--when each had his rights, and was equal to his neighbour. Need I say, _Caballeros_, that I longed for the day to arrive when my own country should be relieved from the ravages of similar birds of prey and devouring locusts? My early hatred of our abominated tyrants and oppressors had been fostered by numerous persecutions; for, since entering on my new vocation--a vocation made necessary for the _people_, by the infamous monopolies enjoyed by those termed _noble_--I had been twice imprisoned, and no less than three times afterwards relieved from that punishment solely by dint of bribery. Once, also, I had been subjected to a heavy fine for barking trees in a forest, belonging to a worthy brotherhood of _Capuchinos Descalzos_;--a swarm of lazy drones, who, gaining an easy livelihood by begging impudently from door to door, could ill brook seeing others turn that to account, which, if not neglected by themselves, would render their alms-seeking unnecessary. However, I had now an excellent business, and money, I calculated, would bring me out of all further difficulties; for, by this time, I had acquired a knowledge of its value in obtaining immunity for all sorts of crimes. In an unlucky hour, however, I was detected shooting deer in a forest belonging to the _Conde de Aguila_; and one of the keepers, who owed me a grudge, refused the proffered bribe. The Count himself proved beyond my price, though I made him a handsome offer; and, affecting great indignation at this attempt to corrupt the pure course of justice, he prosecuted me most vindictively. The consequence was, I was found guilty, and sentenced to ten years' transportation to Ceuta, with chains and hard labour. Who will deny that these things called for a change in the institutions of my country? Was the luxury of tobacco to be placed beyond the reach of the peasant, whilst the noble _con pierna tendida_[180] spent his whole life involved in a cloud of smoke? Was the industrious husbandman to be contented with rags and tatters, whilst lazy priests were clothed in silks and brocade? And, surely, even if the neglected bark of the forest trees was sacred, the wild beasts, that sheltered in that forest, were the property of all! The most severe pang the banishment from my native land caused me, was the separation from my beloved Fernando, at that time a boy of eight years old. During my frequent short absences from home, I had always left him in charge of an old crone, the widow of one of our gang, and receiver of our smuggled cargoes. But I dreaded lest, on the news of my sentence reaching her ears, she should send my poor boy adrift to beg his bread--perhaps, to starve--in this wide, uncharitable world. For the ten long years that I was doomed to exile, did this dread weigh upon me yet heavier than the chains that bound me to my task. I constantly wrote, and sent repeated messages by convicts returning to our native land, at the expiration of their term of punishment, and who invariably promised to inform me of the result of their inquiries; but never did any tidings of my boy arrive, to cheer me in my tedious captivity! The day of my release at length arrived; the shackles were struck from my emaciated limbs; and, ere I left the African shore, I registered a vow--which has been most truly kept--that the tyrants should rue the day on which Blas Maldonado had been condemned to labour like a highway robber, or midnight assassin. I seized the first opportunity of proceeding to Gibraltar. Had the means of quitting the sea-girt prison[181] not quickly presented itself, I verily believe I should have attempted to swim across the wide channel that separated me from my country, so painful had my restraint become. The communication with the English fortress was then open. On landing there, I learnt that our imbecile old king and his hopeful son had both been persuaded to leave their country; which, distracted by parties, and without a government, was at the mercy of an ambitious priesthood, and an ignorant, perfidious nobility. The opportunity of wreaking vengeance on my oppressors was most favourable. I hastened first, however, to Olbera, to obtain tidings of my son--my long estranged Fernando. Alas! no one could give me any information concerning him. The _Tia Dorotea_, in whose charge I had left him, had been dead several years; but the boy had, "it was said," absconded from her, long before her death. It was not a matter to interest the savages who had been my associates. I cursed them all from the bottom of my heart, and proceeded on to M----. My inquiries there were not more successful. Don Benito had long since left the place, and no one could, or _would_, give me any information concerning my son. I included the whole population in my sweeping malediction, and, with a heart panting for revenge, proceeded to Seville, where I had ascertained that one of my oppressors, at all events, was within reach of my knife. Reckless of life, and fearless of consequences; with a ready flow of words, and a breast full of wrongs, I soon acquired an extraordinary ascendency over the ignorant and volatile mob of that turbulent city. A riot was the consequence; and by the knife of _one of those_ engaged in it, fell the Conde de Aguila! For some months after this I went about exciting feelings of distrust against the nobility, and of hatred against the hypocritical monks, that eat up the produce of our fertile fields. But the battle of Beylen having again restored, in some measure, the influence of these rapacious vultures, I was arrested as a seditious person, on information lodged by one of my own followers. A mockery of justice took place in the way of a trial; I was found guilty, and sentenced to death. The day of my execution was fixed; but I had a purse full of money, and managed to escape from the place allotted for my prison; and thinking that the constitution at this period, promulgated by the intrusive king, held out great promise of relieving my unhappy country from its state of degradation--as well by opening all professions to every _class_ of Spaniards as by making promotion the reward of merit--I determined to seek distinction in the ranks of our liberators. Accordingly, I proceeded to the north of Spain, and joined the French army at the moment it was about to resume offensive operations on the banks of the Ebro. My acquaintance with the invaders' language made me a valuable recruit, and I was attached as an orderly and interpreter to General----. With all my wrongs fresh rankling in my breast, I burned to bathe my sword in the blood of my base countrymen, fighting in the ranks of slavery and despotism. And too soon, alas! was the opportunity afforded me. The first operations of the French army, in the campaign which now opened, were crowned with the most brilliant success. Army after army disappeared before them, like chaff before the wind. A last effort to resist the invaders was made by Palafox and Castaños, in the plains of Tudela; and here, again, I drew my sword for those whom I hoped were to be the liberators of my country. I need not describe more of that scene of slaughter than is necessary for my tale. The Arragones, posted on the Spanish right, shamefully abandoned their position, after a feeble resistance. The gallant old Castaños flew to the left, where the Andalusian troops, whom he had led to victory at Baylen, were stationed, and attempted to restore the battle; but his efforts were vain; all he could effect was to withdraw this wing of his panic-struck army with some kind of order. It is impossible for me to describe the irresistible thirst for blood which impelled me forward on that fatal day. I have since--as you will hear in the sequel--fought against these very French, whose bread I was then eating; but never was my sword edged with the same temper that now sharpened it. The moment of revenge had, I conceived, at length arrived--the long invoked opportunity of wreaking vengeance on my perfidious, abject countrymen. I thought of my wife, hurried to an untimely grave--of my child, left to perish for want--of my ignominious chains and treacherous associates; and I became frantic with rage. I had quitted the side of my general, whose division was posted towards the centre of the line, that I might be opposed to the vile _espadachines_ of my native province. I arrived at the moment that the general confusion was spreading amongst their ranks; and, seizing a lance from a Frenchman, who fell wounded at my side, I rushed impetuously upon my flying countrymen. Trampling down the common herd, for others who came after me to despatch, I pushed madly forward in pursuit of nobler game, and marked as my victim a young cavalry officer, who was vainly endeavouring to rally his fugitive troopers. I rode at him with my lance _en joue_, and, being an able _toreador_, had little fears of the result of the contest, though he awaited my onset with perfect self-possession. Before I came within his reach, however, he was struck from his horse by a musket-ball, and fell, apparently lifeless, at my feet. I do not know what prompted me--certainly not the love of gold, for at that moment my thoughts were bent entirely on blood--not a feeling of mercy, for that was yet further from my mind than wealth; but some unaccountable impulse, perhaps the agency of the devil, persuaded me to alight, and strip the youth of his bright gold epaulettes. I found that he had been shot in the head, the ball having entered at one eye, and seemingly passed out at the other. His face was suffused with gore, but he was not dead. I was about to finish his short career with a thrust of my lance, when it struck me it would be less merciful to allow the blind wretch to eke out his miserable existence. Stripping him, therefore, of his epaulettes, "You may live, young _hidalgo_," said I, "unless you are lucky enough to find some Frenchman more charitably disposed towards you than myself. You will yet serve for an _espantajo_!"[182] "What!" exclaimed the youth, "is it a Spaniard who pillages a dying countryman? Is it a vile renegade that taunts me with the disfigurement of an honourable wound? Then may my dying curse be upon him; may it ring perpetually in his ears, as a foretaste of torments to be endured, should my arm fail in sending him at once to eternal punishment!" So saying, he snatched a pistol from his breast, and, ere I could arrest his hand, fired in the direction he judged me to be. The ball--would it had been more surely aimed!--merely grazed my left cheek, leaving the mark you may see through my bushy whisker. Provoked beyond endurance by this act, I seized my adversary by the throat, and, forcing my knife into his mouth, cut out the tongue that had so lately cursed me; and then, after watching some moments the wreathings of my tortured victim, sheathed it in his breast. I felt in so doing that it had struck against something hard--I thought, perhaps, a watch; and, tearing open his jacket, discovered, oh God!--that I was the murderer of my son! CHAPTER XIV. BLAS EL GUERRILLERO--_continued_. The worthy Señor Blas having quaffed a bumper of _Xeres seco_, by way of drowning his sorrow, thus continued his story:-- I fell senseless on the mangled corpse of my beloved Fernando. How long I remained in this state I know not, but I was aroused by the jeers of some French soldiers, who, tearing me rudely from the now cold body of my son, asked if I had fairly earned my compatriot's epaulettes; at the same time very unceremoniously transferring them from my sash, into which I had hastily thrust them, to their own havre-sacks. I offered no resistance; but, when they were about to rob me as unceremoniously of the chain and locket, proofs of my son's identity, which my damp and blood-stained hand yet held in its convulsive grasp, I checked their insolence by a look at my gory knife, taking at the same time from my breast, and throwing towards them, the _carte de protection_ of their general. They passed on, carrying off the epaulettes, and laughing at and mimicking the grief and anger depicted in my countenance. I was again awakened to a sense of my misfortunes. At first I tried to fancy it was all a dream; then, that I might still be mistaken in the locket of my departed Alitéa; but a pocketbook, which, on further search, I discovered on the person of my ill-fated son, established the appalling fact, beyond the possibility of doubt. I hastily dug a grave for my boy, but, ere returning the corse to its native clay, I vowed to revenge his death upon the heartless foreigners, who, having led me to commit this crime, and brought a dying curse upon my head, had scoffed at my grief and misery. I accordingly took the first opportunity of quitting the French army, and falling in with a gang of lawless freebooters, who, under the pretext of fighting the enemies of their country, robbed and plundered indiscriminately friend and foe, I enlisted, a willing recruit, into the _quadrilla_.[183] In the matter of plunder, I believe that the _best_ of the _guerrilla_ bands, which now began to be formed throughout the country, were as little scrupulous as that of which I became a member, though they had not the honesty to admit it. Many, certainly, were the acts of atrocity committed by our band. We scoured the whole of Old Castile and Leon, levying contributions wherever we moved; we hung upon the flank of the English army in its retreat to Coruña, filling our pockets with doubloons, and our pouches with ammunition; we slaughtered any luckless, wearied, or wounded French straggler that came across our path, but sought not for opportunities of exchanging shots with our invaders. In this latter respect, the plan of our leader was too timid for me, and I sometimes managed to join the red-coats in a skirmish with the common enemy. On one of these occasions my life was saved by one of your countrymen. From that day I have known how to value an Englishman, and have never neglected an opportunity of evincing my gratitude to the fellow-countrymen of my brave deliverer. I had straggled away from our _quadrilla_, accompanied by two of my comrades, to take part in a skirmish which was going on at the passage of a small river, between the rear-guard of the English and their pursuing enemies. The object in view was, of course, merely to retard the advance of the French; since your army was in full retreat; and just as the signal was given for the skirmishers to retire, I received a carbine ball in my thigh which unhorsed me. My frightened charger galloped off, as did also my two companions, leaving me to the tender mercies of the advancing enemy. One of your countrymen happened, however, to look round, and seeing me doomed to destruction, though doing my best to hobble off, rode back amidst a shower of bullets to render me assistance. "John," said he, "you're a brave fellow; give me your hand and jump up behind me." I did the first part of his bidding; but whilst in the act of climbing up in obedience to the second, a shot disabled his left arm. The gallant lad immediately seized me with his right hand, by the help of which I scrambled on his horse's back, when another shot brought him to the ground. Poor fellow! one groan alone escaped him. I was obliged to fly, but did not do so until I had convinced myself that his life was extinct. My own wound was but slight; and soon after this affair, thinking your army had thrown away all its treasure, we betook ourselves to the mountains of Asturias, returning along the northern coast of Spain into Navarre, and thence into Catalonia, where we commenced a more decided guerrilla warfare against the enemy; embracing every opportunity of attacking him when _profit_ was to be gained without much risk. I soon distinguished myself above the rest of the quadrilla by my daring and unscrupulousness; and my influence, particularly amongst the most reckless of the band, increased daily; so great, indeed, did it become, that the chief and his chosen associates regarded me with extreme jealousy. I was always urging them to leave the north of Spain, where we had numerous competitors in the field, and proceed to the less devastated province of Andalusia; for I longed for the opportunity of settling my outstanding accounts with divers priests, _alcaldes_, _hidalgos_, and others, for various little acts of _kindness_, shown me during my contrabandista career; and I was anxious also to pay off a debt of more serious amount, due to Don Benito; to explain which I must go back a little in my story. The pocket-book which I had found on the person of my unfortunate Fernando contained several letters addressed to him by Don Benito, from which, together with information they led me to seek by making a short visit to Madrid, I learnt that my son had been removed from the care of _Tia_ Dorotea, very soon after my transportation to Ceuta. About the same period, it appeared, Don Benito had been suddenly called to Madrid, from whence he had been sent as _Corregidor_ to some town in Galicia. None of the various letters I wrote to my boy had been permitted to meet his eye; and to his anxious inquiries after the fate of his convict father, answer was made, that I had fallen a sacrifice to the unhealthy climate of Africa. On his removal from Olbera, Fernando had at once been sent to Salamanca for his education, and was yet studying at the celebrated university of that city, when the French invasion called the country to arms. With the enthusiasm natural to youth, he burned to join the ranks of the _Patriots_--as the ill-organized, worse directed, and in too many cases shamefully betrayed bands of peasantry were called--and Don Benito, whom it appeared had conceived a tardy affection for his grandson, had long combated this desire. After vainly attempting, however, to turn him from his purpose; and fearful, probably, by prolonged opposition, of being himself denounced as an _Afrancesado_, he at length acceded to Fernando's wishes, and procured for him a commission in a regiment of cavalry, where he thought he would be less exposed to fatigue and hardships than as a foot-soldier. My gallant boy, as appeared as well by the letters found upon him, as by a decoration at his breast, had already distinguished himself in the field, when fate directed a father's hand to close his promising career. Don Benito, I further learned, overwhelmed with grief by the death of his grandson, had retired from Madrid to his native town. There, clothed with power, I longed to beard him in his fancied security; to tell him that his vile deceit had caused a son to raise his arm against a father--had caused that father, in ignorance, to become the murderer of his son; to tell him, in fine, that all his property, his ill-gotten property--his life even--was at my disposal, to take and destroy as I thought fit. To accomplish this was now the ruling desire within my breast; my country's wrongs were but the pretence for acquiring power amongst my companions. Esteban, the leader of our _quadrilla_, was an overbearing, avaricious, craven-hearted Catalan, who, fearful of venturing far from his own mountain retreats, resolutely and effectually opposed my project of making a dash at Andalusia. As a first step towards effecting my purpose, therefore, it became necessary to dispose of him. I have before stated that I had many friends in the troop, and by an assumed generosity,--my share of plunder, unless consisting of arms, horses, &c., being generally left to be divided amongst my comrades,--I gradually succeeded in increasing the number of my adherents; thus paving the way for becoming, one day, the leader of the band. In this I but adopted the maxim of my favourite _Guzman de Alfarache_, who says, "_ganar amigos es dar dinero a logro y sembrar en regadio_."[184] I valued wealth, however, only as the means of obtaining _power_; and at that moment, to give money was to gain friends, and to gain friends, to attain power. The friends I gained were very uncertain ones, it may be said. They were such, nevertheless, as I could depend upon whilst fortune favoured me; and what is friendship after all? a flimsy veil thrown over the double face of mutual interest, which the slightest breath of adversity blows aside! a mere footstep to the seat of power, which is trodden upon the moment that seat is gained! Friendship! I have never in my eventful life known it last when once the bond of interest was broken! Strong, however, as my party had become, by the means I have stated, it was not yet sufficiently so to warrant my coming to an open rupture with Esteban, even had that been advisable. On the contrary, as the band consisted principally of his countrymen, whose services I did not wish to lose, it was desirable, in the step I meditated taking, to avoid even the _suspicion_ of treachery. With this view, I arranged a plan with three of my most faithful supporters, which was crowned with complete success. Esteban had obtained information, that, on a certain day, a convoy, conveying treasure and ammunition for the use of the French division employed at the siege of Gerona, would be sent from Figueras. The escort, on account of the value of the convoy, would of course be strong; but the avarice of our chief serving as a fillip to his courage, we succeeded in persuading him to make an attempt to capture it. Taking post, therefore, in a deep ravine, situated in the heart of a forest through which the enemy must necessarily pass, a council was called to consider the best mode of making the attack. Contrary to my usual custom, I recommended the adoption of the most cautious proceedings. I hinted that we must have been misinformed respecting the strength of the escort; as, doubtless, so enormous a sum as that the enemy was sending would be protected by a very strong body of troops. In fact, whilst feeding Esteban's cupidity, I succeeded so completely in frightening him, that he asked me to propose a plan for the attack. I readily acquiesced; and my project meeting with unanimous approval, was immediately acted upon. It was as follows. Two thirds of our force were concealed in a hollow some distance from and to the right of the road, beyond the pass. Their horses were muzzled to prevent detection by their neighing, but were provided with slip knots to release them at a moment's notice. The rest of the troop took post on foot on the left side of the defilé, immediately over the road, three of the men retiring some distance into the forest with the horses of this party, and keeping them ready to bring up to the spot at the concerted signal. The first party was placed under the command of the lieutenant of the troop, the bosom friend of Esteban, who, screening his men carefully from observation, was to allow the enemy's advanced guard to pass unmolested until it had gained a comparatively open space clear of the ravine, and then to charge it _à cierra ojos_,[185] for the purpose of drawing to its support the main body of the escort, and so leave the mules with the treasure but slightly protected. This done, he was to retire, or not, according to circumstances. Meanwhile, Esteban concealed himself in the thick foliage of an evergreen oak that grew on the summit of an isolated crag, which, standing out from the bank of the hollow way, protruded into and commanded a perfect view of the road. From this elevated spot he was (should he deem it advisable) to make the signal for a general attack by liberating a huge eagle, which we always kept for this purpose; a signal that, instead of exciting suspicion, we found rather tended to throw the enemy off his guard. Our rendezvous was given for the night at a village some ten miles from the scene of action. As much of the detail of these arrangements had been left (out of compliment) to me, I had no difficulty in selecting the _three men_ who were to take charge of the horses of the dismounted party. As to myself, to avoid suspicion, I volunteered joining the lieutenant's division, which was likely to have the warmest work. Every thing happened as I expected, if not altogether as I could have wished; for the treasure was too well guarded to give us any chance of attacking the escort with success. The enemy also advanced with great caution; halted at the entrance of the pass, sent forward a cavalry piquet to reconnoitre the road in advance, and detached infantry _en eclaireurs_ up both banks of the hollow way. Having taken these precautions, and closed up the train, they renewed their march. Our scout gave timely notice of what was passing. We unmuzzled our steeds, whose impatient neighing gave the enemy the first notice of our vicinity, and that we had thrown ourselves between their main body and somewhat compromised advanced guard. Our charge was like the swoop of an eagle upon his prey, whilst the enemy's hurried notes of recall resounded through the forest like the screams of a flight of terrified plover. But the order for their return arrived too late. We fell upon them ere they had time to make any disposition to receive our unlooked for rear-attack, and sabred them to a man. Whilst this was going forward, some slight confusion manifested itself in the enemy's main body, but the commandant quickly restored order. Sending forward all his horsemen to secure the head of the ravine, and rally, as he hoped, his advanced guard, he reinforced his rear guard with infantry, and then, recalling his tirailleurs to the edge of the defilé, pushed on as quickly as possible to get through the pass, and gain a field where discipline would resume its advantage over numbers. The party with which I served was again drawn up, anxiously waiting for the signal to renew the attack. We watched in vain, however, for the rising of the bird of Jove. We heard a few scattered shots, which our lieutenant very justly observed augured no good, and saw a formidable body of cavalry deploying rapidly at the issue of the ravine, and preparing to charge us. It was evident, therefore, that Esteban deemed it hopeless to attack, and that it was high time for us to be off. Indeed, had we been briskly attacked, the half of our party would most certainly have been captured, but the good face we put upon it probably led the enemy to suppose we were well supported, and they contented themselves with firing a volley, as, putting spurs to our horses, we dispersed in all directions. On reassembling at the appointed rendezvous, the only person missing was Esteban. As soon as prudence admitted, we returned to the late scene of action to make search for our absent chieftain, and found his body lying in the hollow way, but so hacked and disfigured as to render it impossible to tell what had been the manner of his death. It was the general opinion, therefore, since the shots we had heard could in no other way be accounted for, that the enemy's tirailleurs must have discovered him in the tree, and that the Frenchmen, enraged at their severe loss, had thus cruelly mutilated him. I did not attempt to combat this opinion, and the three men who had _charge of the horses_ were quite silent in the matter, though they could, perhaps, have told a different tale. I see, _Caballeros_, that you are shocked at the little hesitation I showed in taking this caitiff's life; but I can assure you no scruples of conscience troubled me in the matter, for I had previously learnt that the cowardly rascal had engaged the very men to shoot me, whom I employed to perform that kind action towards him. Esteban's death being thus placed beyond a doubt, it became necessary to elect a new leader. Rodriguez (the lieutenant) and myself were the only two competitors. I had, as I have already stated, many supporters in the band; and some money which, no matter how, came at this time into my possession, was liberally distributed to increase the number; but, nevertheless, the Catalans and Biscayans, of whom the _quadrilla_ principally consisted, could not be brought over to my side, and Rodriguez was preferred by a majority of votes. A separation was loudly advocated by my friends; but to this, with affected humility, I refused to listen. "No," said I, "we are all one family; let us not weaken our strength by dissension. For my own part, I have no wish to command, and will willingly yield obedience to Rodriguez." The bait took; my friends stood out for a separation; and the supporters of my competitor, charmed by my moderation, proposed (as a division would probably lead to the destruction of both parties) that Rodriguez and I should command alternately. This proposal was adopted with general acclamation, for, whilst the Catalans acknowledged my superior talents for command in the field, they thought the counsel of a Nestor like Rodriguez would temper with prudence my somewhat venturesome projects; besides which, he was better acquainted with the country where they wished to act. I knew that my coadjutor, though a brave old man, possessed no one other quality to fit him for the leader of a band of guerrillas, who should be decisive as well as courageous, full of resources as well as cautious, and whose eye should be quick to turn ground to the best advantage, as well as to acknowledge it as an old acquaintance. In order, therefore, to let the band see his incompetency, and that he might become convinced of it himself, I gave in to all his plans, without offering an objection, and so effectually succeeded in my own, that, after experiencing several severe checks, and reducing our _military chest_ to a very small _box_, it became the general wish to change the scene of operations, and proceed to a less devastated, and, consequently, less protected country. It was accordingly determined to make an experimental excursion into the kingdom of Valencia, with which, whilst following the _contraband_ life, I had become well acquainted. Our _debût_ was most successful, for so unprepared was the enemy for our sudden irruption that we captured a rich convoy under the very walls[186] of the capital city, without the loss of a man. But a large force being immediately despatched in pursuit, I (happening to be in command for the day) directed the retreat upon Murcia, thereby enabling the enemy to prevent our return to Catalonia. This was a hazardous step, for the country to the north was not of a nature to afford us either shelter or resources; whilst, to the south, all the towns between us and the sea were occupied by French garrisons, which, if we were not quick in our movements, or happened to meet with any check, might easily cut short our further advance, and oblige us to disperse. To hesitate under these circumstances was to be lost; so, pushing on _à cierra ojos_, we hardly drew rein until we had passed Guadix, when the vicinity of the impracticable Alpujarra mountains secured us from attack on the left, and, at the same time, assured us a safe retreat in the event of being hard pressed. The enemy, however, seeing that further pursuit would be unavailing, stopped short at Guadix; and, embracing the opportunity of giving our wearied horses a few days' rest, we established ourselves at the Fuente de la Gitana, the principal sources of the little river Fardes, which, winding through a sequestered dell, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, is bordered with the richest pasturage. The spot thus selected for our bivouac held out also the advantage of enabling us to watch the high road from Guadix to Granada, one of the principal lines of communication of the French army. Whilst refreshing our horses in this secluded spot, numerous opportunities of attacking the enemy presented themselves. But without a certain prospect of obtaining booty, we were not to be tempted to give the alarm by showing ourselves. Allowing, therefore, various parties to pass to and fro without molestation, we succeeded in leading the enemy to believe that we had crossed the sierra, and thrown ourselves upon the stores of arms and gunpowder in the mining district of Adra. No sooner were their fears allayed, and confidence restored, than we seized the favourable occasion to pounce upon them. This was afforded us by the march of a convoy, with provisions and money, from Guadix to Granada. As soon as we had received certain advice of its having left the first named city, and reached Diezma (its first day's march), we broke up our camp, and, riding all night, took post in the Sierra Jarana, where we commanded both the roads which, from Diezma, are directed on Granada. The enemy, wishing to keep as far as possible from the Sierra Nevada, chose the upper or northern road, which was by far the most favourable for our project, there being a difficult pass to get through, which must unavoidably oblige a convoy to lengthen out and straggle. We accordingly permitted the greater portion of the loaded animals to pass unmolested, and then, falling suddenly upon the rear division, succeeded in capturing and carrying off no less than thirty mules. We did not, however, escape without loss; for Rodriguez was left dead upon the field, and several of the band were severely wounded. I drew the party off by a rugged pathway that leads round the sources of the Darro; crossed the Genil below Guejar; and, by a rapid march, gained Huelma that same night, ere the news of our exploit had well reached Granada. We had now got upon the high road from Granada to Alhama, and, proceeding along it for some miles, struck off to the left, and established our bivouac in a wooded sierra, above the village of Agron, from whence we commanded both the great road we had left, and that from Granada to Almuñecar and Motril. Having eluded all pursuit, and gained a point which, whilst it favoured our future operations, was in the vicinity of some of the most intricate mountain country in Andalusia, but with which I was thoroughly acquainted; I determined, if possible, to obtain possession of the French governor of Granada's despatches to his subordinates commanding the towns upon the sea-coast, with the view of ascertaining how his forces were distributed, their strength, &c., as well as the steps he purposed taking to interrupt or pursue my band. Appointing, therefore, one of my most devoted adherents to the command of the troop during my absence, I doffed my old contrabandista dress, and, accompanied by one only of my men, proceeded to the ventas de Huelma, where I understood the French orderlies were in the habit of baiting their horses for half an hour when journeying to and from Alhama. The place consists only of two wretched _ventas_, and half a dozen _ranchas_. We reached it about mid-day, and, as luck would have it, just in time to see two French Dragoons ride in at the door of one of the inns. After waiting a few minutes to make sure that they had not merely called for their _goutte_, we also rode up to the venta, and alighted at the portal, and, securing our horses to the stakes in the wall, entered, as the saying is, _santamente en la casa_.[187] The inn was crowded with people, and the two Frenchmen, having given their horses a feed of barley, were holding forth to the _arrieros_ and villagers grouped round them; who, with eager, though silent, interest, were listening to their discourse. Our _Ave Maria purissima_ hardly attracted notice, an old crone, seated in the chimney corner at her spindle, being the only person to mumble in return the usual "_sin pecado concebida_."[188] Addressing myself to the _ventero_, I begged he would furnish me with a slice of bread, some oil, vinegar, and the other ingredients requisite for making a _gazpacho_. "_Caramba!_" exclaimed my host, looking inquisitively at me, "these are not the cooling _alimentos_ Blas Maldonado used formerly to ask for!" "They are _not_, good Pacheco," said I, finding that the number of years which had elapsed since our last meeting had not prevented his recognizing me,--"They are not, good Pacheco; but as the proverb says, "'_Ajo crudo y vino puro_ _hacen andar al mozo seguro._'"[189] And I gave a significant glance at the Frenchmen. "Is it so!" replied he; "then to answer you with another proverb--'_à perro viejo no has tus tus_'[190]--how can I serve you?" "Tell me first," said I, "do you know those _gavachos_?"[191] "I do; they have stopped here several times to bait their horses on the way backwards and forwards to Alhama; but they are likely to send their despatches under a more numerous escort for the future, if the news be true that a band of _guerrillas_ has made its appearance close to Granada; though they have, as _they_ say, cut it to pieces. But let us draw near, and hear their story--of which I had only caught a few words when you called me away." "I can probably give you a better account of it than _they_," said I; "therefore, tell me first what sort of men are they? Think you a couple of resolute fellows could master them readily?" "For the matter of that," replied Pacheco, "the _Cabo_ is, I suspect, a determined dog; but the young fellow, who accompanies him, seems, like most of his countrymen, to have _mas viento que fuego_[192] about him." "Do they smoke?" "Like two _Carboneras_."[193] "That will do; now let us go and hear what the braggarts have to say;" and, drawing my _Capa_ round so as to conceal the lower part of my face, I joined the circle of _gobemouches_. The younger of the two Frenchmen, with much gesticulation, and in very bad Spanish, was giving an account of the action between my band and his countrymen. It was well I had been there, otherwise, I certainly should never have recognized it for the same affair; since he maintained that we had been completely worsted--our chief and upwards of half the band left dead upon the field, and the remainder dispersed in all directions! "Were no prisoners made?" said I--having first ascertained by a glance all round that no old acquaintances were in the group of listeners. "Prisoners, _mon brave_," replied he; "_pas un seul_--_Sacristie_! we speared them like wild boars, without giving them time to translate _quartel_[194] into French." "You have prudently taken care to have ready the Spanish translation of the French," I observed.--"And so you were yourself in the _melée_, then?" "_Je le crois bien! Sacrebleu!_" said the boaster, regardless of the signs of his corporal to be less communicative, "I believe you! _Sacrebleu!_ I, myself, spitted half a score of the _sacré gueux_, and I think I should know the rest of the _canaille_ by their backs, if ever my eyes lighted upon them again; for I pressed them hard enough; but my horse was too tired to overtake them all." "_A quien tanto ve, con un ojo le basta_,"[195] said I, adding, lest the laugh my sarcasm had caused amongst my countrymen should excite the corporal's suspicions, "however, I am glad you have given so good an account of the scoundrels, and hope any other factious bands that may attempt to disturb the tranquillity of our province may be similarly dealt with. You must, however, I fear, be ill provided with cavalry, since you have been so soon sent again on duty after such sharp service?" "Why, we are rather short of cavalry, no doubt," continued the loquacious _gascon_; "but, I rather think, our despatches contain an order for such as can be spared from Malaga to be sent to join us at Granada; and then we shall serve them out in good style." "Why, I thought you had dispersed them altogether?" said I. "_Allons, allons!_" cried the corporal to his companion, "_à cheval!_" adding, in the same language, which, doubtless, he conceived none of us understood--"I like not that inquisitive _embossé_--what the d--l makes you so communicative?" "Communicative!" exclaimed the young dragoon; "why you know I have not told them a word of truth, excepting about the order for the cavalry to come and join us; and the sooner that piece of news is spread through the country the better." My attendant had not been an idle listener to the conversation I have just narrated; but, having glided unobserved amongst the horses, had quietly occupied himself in taking a fore shoe off the foot of one of the dragoons' chargers. He now joined the circle, making me a sign that all was right, and whispering a few words in the ear of the landlord, whilst, despatching our _gazpacho fresco_, we mounted our horses and rode off toward Alhama. Before we had proceeded a mile, the two Frenchmen overtook us, and were about to pass on at a brisk trot, when I called out that one of their horses had thrown a shoe. It was that of the corporal. He dismounted, and, after sundry _sacrés_, proposed to his companion that they should return to the _venta_ for a smith. I said, if they had a spare shoe, I could furnish them with a hammer and nails, which would, possibly, save time. My offer was thankfully accepted, and the dragoon, dismounting and placing himself between the two horses, so as to hold both their heads, the corporal forthwith proceeded to work. I waited, of course, to receive back my hammer, and, to pass the time, struck a light and commenced smoking. "_Gasta usted tabaco?_"[196] asked I, addressing myself to the young dragoon, presenting him at the same time with a Frenchified looking cigar with a straw inserted at one end. "Volontiers," said he, taking it and a piece of burning _yesca_,[197] that I offered him on the flat side of my flint.--"_Volontiers!_ I am a true dragoon." In receiving the flint back, I purposely let it fall, and, begging he would not trouble himself, dismounted to pick it up, drawing near to the corporal, as if to see how he got on with his work. My companion now, also, alighted to tighten the girths of his saddle, and, at the instant, an explosion took place, the young dragoon was thrown on his back, and the two horses, disengaged from his hold, started off in a fright, pitching the corporal forward on his head. I instantly pinned him to the earth with my knee, and plunged my knife into his neck; whilst my comrade despatched the young dragoon--asking him how it was he had not recognized us by our _backs_, and what he thought of _un cigarro bomba_.[198] We secured the despatches and horses, and made off for our bivouac with all speed. On our arrival, I found the band at _Toros y cañas_;[199] the followers of my late coadjutor, Rodriguez, insisting that another captain should be joined with me in the command. Having had sufficient experience of the inconveniences attending this divided form of government, and being now so situated as to insist on having my own way, I determined to cut the matter very short, exclaiming "_à otro perro con ese hueso!_"[200] "Let those who choose turn back, and God be with them! and I think--judging from the despatches that have this day fallen into my hands--they will stand in great need of his protection! Those who prefer following my fortunes shall obey no orders but mine." Alarmed at what I had hinted about the despatches, all but the _aspirant_ to the joint dictatorship and two of his relatives, joined my standard. These three _desgraciados_ determined to leave the band. In vain I pointed out the danger of such a proceeding--the impossibility of their making their way across a country with which they were unacquainted, and that was now beset with enemies. They, sneeringly, replied that the same road they had followed in coming would conduct them back. This, however, for a reason which I shall hereafter explain, I determined that it should _not_ do. Detaining them, therefore, until the morrow, on the plea of receiving their due proportion of the booty we had made, I despatched a trusty messenger to Granada, who, presenting himself to the French governor, informed him that the greater part of my troop had passed close under the walls of Alhama, directing its march towards Velez, after having killed the two dragoons bearing his despatches to the commandant of that town; but adding, that he had heard, on very good authority, a detachment of three men, conveying important communications from me, was to return, on the following day, into the eastern provinces of the kingdom, and that he had come to offer himself as a guide, to intercept the party. On the following morning, our seceders took their departure, having, I may truly say, "_el despeñadero a los ojos, y lobos à las espaldas_."[201] The next day my messenger returned, and informed me of the result of his mission, giving out, however, that he had obtained intelligence that a valuable convoy was about to proceed immediately from Granada to Motril. The temptation was irresistible, and a rapid counter-march on Alhendin was determined on that very night. We reached our destination by dawn, where I was told (what I was already fully informed of) that the convoy had already passed by, and that our quondam companions had been seized and hung up on the road-side. There they were, sure enough, dangling from the trees like _espata-lobos_,[202] and on the forehead of each was nailed the following notice in the French language. "The undersigned, Lieutenant General of the Imperial French Army, and governor of Granada for his Catholic majesty Joseph Napoleon, &c. &c. &c., hereby gives notice, that the band of _factieux_, under the infamous traitor Blas Maldonado, having appeared in the military division under his command, all persons who may be persuaded to join, harbour, or furnish information or provisions to the same, will, on conviction thereof, be deemed equally traitors to their country, as the aforesaid Blas and his band, and will meet with the condign summary punishment due to their crimes; in witness whereof, he has this day caused to be hanged the rebel hereunto annexed. RIGHT "---- ----." This exceeded my hopes: the Basques of my party did not fail to give a very literal translation of this notice to their comrades, who longed for an opportunity of taking vengeance on our inhuman enemies. But it was not with the motive of keeping alive the inextinguishable hate that already existed between the _guerrillas_ and the French that I had got up this melo-drama; but rather to deter the remaining Catalans of my band from depending on themselves, should our interests jar on any future occasion, and they be inclined to throw off their allegiance. They were now made sensible how completely their want of acquaintance with the country rendered them dependent upon me. On my own countrymen I knew reliance might be placed, and I generally entrusted them with the out-post duty. I affected, nevertheless, to be much enraged at the treatment the _Pobrecitos_, so lately our companions in arms, had experienced, and, a chapel being at hand, readily acquiesced--for I liked to encourage superstitious habits in my followers--in the proposal of offering up masses for their souls; concluding our pious work with a vow not to spare any French_man_, woman, or child, that should fall into our hands for the next six months. "Al hierro caliente machacar de repente,"[203] as the saying is. Having satisfied myself, from information collected from the peasantry, that all the disposable French cavalry at Granada had been laid upon the false scent I had furnished the governor, I thought the opportunity favourable for enabling my men to keep their pious vow, and, at the same time, fill their _fajas_[204] with _onzas_. Descending, therefore, boldly into the fertile _Vega_ of Granada, we made a dash at Santa Fé, reaching the little walled town at the very moment a party of French soldiers were busily occupied in loading some bullock carts with contributions raised in the surrounding district. So scared were they by our sudden appearance, that, instead of shutting the gates in our faces, and _haciendo la higa_,[205] as they might have done, they took themselves off _à bride abattue_, and never stopped until they had placed the Genil between us. So sudden, indeed, was our arrival, and so precipitate their departure, that we caught two luckless French commissaries, who, being busily engaged in taking an account of barrels of flour stored in one of the churches at the further end of the town, had not heard the alarm. My troopers were anxious to _dar quito_[206] for their comrades hanged at Alhendin; and I was far from being disposed to baulk their fancy, but thought we would do it with _éclat_. Having, therefore, first plunged the two caitiffs "_patos arriba_"[207] in one of their flour casks, we took them to the city gate facing Granada; which, being old, and hanging loosely upon its hinges, we were enabled, by cutting two small notches in the side posts, to force their heads through, and so throttle them by closing the gate upon its centre, leaving their heads sticking out, like the mock-guns of a smuggler's _xebeque_.[208] This done, I wrote with some chalk the following notice on the outside of the gate. "The undersigned, Principal Ratcatcher to his Catholic Majesty _Fernando Septimo_, charged by an act of the _Junta_ of government now established at Cadiz with the duty of clearing the province of Andalusia of the rats and other vermin with which it is at this moment overrun, to the destruction and undermining of the glorious fabric of our independence, hereby gives notice, that any persons who may henceforth feed, harbour, or encourage the same, will themselves be considered equally as detrimental to the country as the aforesaid rats, and will, on conviction, meet with the same condign summary punishment. "In witness whereof, I have this day throttled the two weasels hereunto made fast. RIGHT "BLAS MALDONADO." I was ever afterwards called _El Ratonero_. CHAPTER XV. BLAS EL GUERRILLERO--_continued_. That the French might be sure to see their comrades, we drove all the inhabitants before us out of the place; a matter of no great difficulty, since _Santa Fé_, though dignified by its pious founders[209] with the title of _city_, is but a small walled village, the principal streets of which form a Greek cross; so that, standing in the centre of the place, its four gates may be seen by merely turning round, and are all within pistol-shot. Carrying off all the plate, money, &c., that we could find, I determined now, whilst the country was clear, and a direct road open, to visit the place of my nativity; the thirst for revenge on my enemies and detractors increasing, as the opportunity of gratifying it appeared more within my reach. We directed our march, therefore, down the _vega_, towards Osuna, demanding rations in the king's name wherever we had occasion to halt, and levying contributions whenever the least hesitation was shown in complying with our demands. In this way we picked up considerable booty, besides carrying off all the good horses we met with on the route; for the French, in consideration of the quietness with which Andalusia had submitted to the yoke, had hitherto dealt very leniently with its inhabitants. Avoiding Loja and Antequera, which were occupied by French garrisons, we struck into the mountains again on approaching Osuna, proceeding by way of Saucejo and Villa Martin de San Juan, to the _venta_ of Zaframagon, on the road between Ronda and Seville. I selected this spot, as being at a convenient distance from my native town, and as affording, at the same time, good shelter to my band during my purposed short absence. Lodging two of my men, therefore, disguised as peasants, in the _venta_, and bivouacking the rest of the troop in the adjacent forest, I proceeded, accompanied only by one trusty attendant, to M----; deeming it most prudent to reconnoitre the place, ere carrying my plan of revenge into execution. It was now upwards of two years since I had paid my last hasty visit to the place, twenty-one since I had seen Don Benito. In that long period I had changed from youth to manhood,--to old age, I may almost say, as far as appearance went; for ten years of hard labour on the parched rock of Ceuta had marked my face with the deep lines of grief and suffering; and the scar left by my son's hand had as completely changed the expression of my countenance, even since my last visit to M----, as scenes of blood and strife had changed my natural character. Fancy not, however, by what I now say, that it was my purpose to take the life of the wretched old man whose presence I sought, though his deceit had been the cause of all my misfortunes. No! on my soul I swear it, I meant only to upbraid him with the wrongs he had heaped upon me, to ----. Señor Blas here broke off with some little sign of emotion; but, swallowing a bumper of wine, he presently continued in a calmer tone. But, to proceed with the thread of my story.--Wrapping an old cloak about me, and leaving my horse in charge of my attendant at the entrance of the town, I proceeded on foot to the principal _posada_, in full confidence that, changed and disguised as I was, no one could possibly recognise me. Many persons, but chiefly old men (for those capable of bearing arms had been called to the armies), were assembled round the fire. I immediately joined the circle, and entered into conversation, representing myself as a stranger to the province. After some little time I ventured to ask if Don Benito Quisquilla still resided at the place; and, being answered in the affirmative, by way of allaying any suspicions, asked if his grandson, Fernando Maldonado, yet lived? "No," replied an old man, whom I recognised as the town-crier, "he is dead; he fell gloriously in the battle-field, fighting for his country's liberty!" "What!" I exclaimed, "did he not join the French army with his father?" "With his father!" cried half a dozen voices in concert. "What! did that miscreant add to his crimes by joining the ranks of the vile enemies of our country? No: Fernando died like a true-born _Andaluz_; he fell, covered with the blood of our oppressors, in the fatal field of Tudela. But how know you, _Tio_, that his father joined the French?" I stated that I had been so informed on very good authority, and had indeed come expressly to M---- to make a communication concerning Blas to his father-in-law, Don Benito. "Go not near the old man if you have aught to say of that miscreant Blas," replied the town-crier, "unless it be to inform him that the devil has carried him off in a hurricane." I rose, and left the house choking with rage. "What!" I ejaculated, "does the old villain attempt to clear his own conscience by accusing me, who have been the innocent victim of his crimes? Did he not blast my earliest hopes, drive me to desperation, bring my wife to the grave, rob me of my son, and, finally, send that son to fall by my hand!--miscreant in his teeth." With these excited feelings, I proceeded straight to Don Benito's house, and rang the bell. The door flew open; and, in answer to my inquiry if Don Benito was within, a female servant from the gallery informed me that I should find him in one of the apartments on the ground-floor, opening into the _patio_.[210] It was well I had been told that it was Don Benito I should find there, otherwise I never could have supposed that the wretched, withered being whom I beheld, enveloped in a grey flannel dressing-gown, with slipshod feet, and a black _montera_ cap on his head, was the once personable father of Alitéa. He did not attempt to rise from the _silla poltrona_[211] in which he was seated; but, removing the spectacles from his eyes, and wiping them with his pocket-handkerchief, desired me to approach and state my business. For a moment I felt inclined to turn away and leave the house; a feeling of pity crept into my heart, and bade me spare him. Though I owed him little mercy for myself, he had intended to be kind to my boy; he had never entirely cast off my Alitéa; and he seemed so thoroughly wretched, that it appeared impossible to add more to his misery. I wish I had followed this first impulse, but a second thought determined me to try if his unforgiving nature remained unchanged. I began by simply asking if I was addressing Don Benito Quisquilla. "What! can it be!" he exclaimed, starting upon his legs, as if newly invigorated with the breath of life; "is it my Fernando? Approach. No, no! I see--_he_ was in the bloom of youth, but you, like myself, have, it appears, bent to the gusts of many a tempest. Still, that voice--that figure! Say, I beseech you, stranger, who are you?" The old man's emotion nearly choked him. I was half tempted to throw myself at his feet, when he continued, without waiting for my answer: "But the wretched, misguided being, who begot him, had the same----. Excuse this emotion; you have touched a chord----." "Wretched being, indeed!" I exclaimed, interrupting him, "you know then the fate of the _wretched_ Blas, and half my business is already executed." "His _fate_? No," said the old man. "Has he then met the punishment so repeatedly due to his crimes? Has his last act of disloyalty to his king and country--of which I have had tidings--brought him to the gallows?" "No, no!" I replied--all my rage returning at the old scoundrel's vindictiveness--"He lives, wretched, indeed, as you have said, for by your instrumentality he became the _murderer of his son_!" "_Jesus! Hijo de Dios!_ what do I hear!" ejaculated Don Benito; "has the infamous villain crowned all his iniquities by so horrible a crime?" "Vindictive old dotard!" I replied, throwing back my cloak, which had hitherto partially concealed my face, and clenching at him my right hand, "this hand, given at the altar, before all the saints of heaven, to your daughter--this very hand, through your accursed machinations, directed the point of the knife which drew the life's-blood from a son's heart!" "Monster! hardened, damned, incorrigible monster!" screamed Don Benito, "may every curse----!" But my fiery temperament would not allow me to listen patiently to the old man's imprecations. We had approached close to each other; I raised my hand to drive the curse down his blasphemous throat--nothing more, for my knife was in my girdle, had I wished to use it--when the infatuated old man seized me by the collar, and called for help. It was the last sound that escaped from his lips--he fell dead at my feet. Señor Blas here paused a moment to make choice of a fresh cigar, and then thus continued his story. I left the house without a moment's delay, hurried through the town, and, mounting my horse, rode "_à toda priesa_" to rejoin my troop. I had intended to march it on M----, which was quite defenceless, and lay a heavy contribution upon the inhabitants, but a foolish weakness made me decide on keeping to myself the fatal result that had attended my visit; so, framing an excuse for the non-execution of my project, I drew my band off into another part of the Serranía de Ronda. We remained in this intricate country several months, watching the different approaches to Ronda, which, being one of the depôts for storing the supplies collected for the siege of Cadiz, afforded us abundant opportunities of making booty. During that period I became acquainted with one Alonzo Bazan, the chief of another guerrilla. He was a gallant young fellow, though affecting the Royalist rather too much to please me. However, we joined our bands together on several occasions, to attack the common enemy, when a greater force than we respectively commanded was necessary. My intimacy with Alonzo brought me acquainted with his sister, now my wife. She was at that time a blooming girl of eighteen, and over head and ears in love with a young _majocito_ of some substance, named Beltran Galindiz, who was the sworn friend of her brother, and had, at his persuasion--for I do not think he had a natural calling that way--raised a band of guerrillas amongst his relatives and dependents. I confess to you, _Caballeros_, that I never felt the same love for Engracia, for such is my _esposa's_ name, that I had for my long-lost but ever-regretted Alitéa. The passion, indeed, to which her youth and beauty gave birth, might, perhaps, have passed away like many others, without leaving any impression, but for the very indifference with which my advances were received, and the passionate fondness that she evinced for the contemptible Beltran. In vain I practised every art to supplant him in her affections; and, what maddened me yet more than the thought of this beardless boy being preferred to myself, was that, as if confident of his influence over her, _he_ regarded my rivalry with the most perfect indifference. It happened, soon after my acquaintance with Engracia commenced, that her brother Alonzo, during a visit to Ronda, was arrested as a spy, and the French commandant of that fortress, thinking it would have a beneficial effect in putting down the insurrection to have him publicly executed at the place of his birth, directed him to be taken on the following day to Utrera for that purpose. Having obtained notice of this, I determined, short as the time was to make arrangements, to attempt a rescue. Accordingly, I proceeded without delay to Alfaquime (a village over-looking the road by which the escort would have to march), and, sending the horses of my party to the convent of _N. S. de los Remedios_, about half a league further on towards Olbera, took post with my dismounted troopers at the head of a steep and very narrow _defilé_, which the road enters after winding round the base of the rocky mound, whereon the little town of Alfaquime is strewed like a stork's nest. Making my men conceal themselves in the gorse and underwood that clothed the banks of the narrow pass, and giving them orders not on any account to pull a trigger until they received the word, and then with deliberate aim, I picked out two good marksmen, whom I directed to fire at the _horse_ rode by Alonzo; and, finally, selecting a bold rider, posted him as a decoy on a conspicuous knoll beyond the pass, but overlooking the approach from Ronda, giving him my own horse (which I knew would outstrip any pursuers, should he have to gallop for it), and directing him to mount only when he was quite sure the enemy had seen him, and then ride off, _ventre a terre_, as if taken by surprise. My plan succeeded _à merveille_. Two French dragoons, who were pushed on in advance, as the party approached Alfaquime, soon discovered my scout, and seeing him mount his horse in great haste, and ride off as if to carry information to others beyond, spurred after him up the ravine. The main body of the escort, seeing their comrades gain the table land at its head without obstruction, took it for granted the coast was clear, and hastened up the ravine to keep them in view. At the word, "_fuego_,"[212] Alonzo and six of the twelve Frenchmen composing the escort rolled to the dust; those who were so fortunate as to escape unhurt turned their horses' heads, and fled back to Ronda. Alonzo was only stunned by the fall, but his horse was killed. We secured the chargers of the dead men, and rode in pursuit of the two dragoons who had given chace to our scout. We met them returning yet faster than they had gone, having discovered that we had sold them _gato por liebre_.[213] They were two gallant fellows, and attempted to cut their way through us in spite of the fearful odds against them. This, _Caballeros_, (showing his mutilated hand) is a _souvenir_ of their proficiency in the sabre exercise. _Carajo!_ the hard-mouthed French brute I bestrode would not answer the bit so as to enable me to parry the blow; but my pistol brought the donor to the ground just as he had cut down one of my men, and was flattering himself he had got clear off. The other Frenchman made a desperate resistance also, but was sabred after wounding two of my _quadrilla_. This exploit was followed by several others, wherein the _Gavachos_ were equally maltreated, but, into the details of which, it would be wearisome to enter. Suffice it to say that at length my name was so constantly _en la boca de la fama_,[214] that a large reward was offered for the body of _Blas el Ratonero_, dead or alive. Whether the bribe thus publicly offered, or merely the intrigues of Beltran, led to an adventure, which--seeing you are not disposed to sleep--I will now relate, I never could satisfactorily learn. Perhaps both had a hand in it, with a little envy to boot; for, as our _refran_ says, _donde reyna la enbidia, no puede vivir la virtud_;[215] and I must needs confess that some of my followers were villains quite capable of _saccando los dientes de un ahorcado_,[216] if they would gain but the price of a bottle of wine by it. I must, however, go back a little in my story, to inform you that, in gratitude for his deliverance from the French, my friend Alonzo (who considered that Beltran had rather held back on that occasion) declared himself in favour of my suit to his sister. But she, still infatuated with my smooth-tongued rival, whilst admitting my claims upon her esteem, said it was out of her power to regard me with a more tender feeling. My _love affair_ remained in this state, when one morning Alonzo repaired to my bivouac in the neighbourhood of Ubrique, and, telling me that a spy, on whose fidelity he could perfectly rely, had sent him information that the enemy's garrison at Ronda had been so reduced by draughts for the siege of Cadiz that the defence of the place was intrusted almost entirely to a small detachment of cavalry, proposed that we should make a combined attack upon it; he undertaking to engage Beltran in the project by making a diversion in our favour to draw off part of the garrison in an opposite direction. My own accounts of the state of the garrison of Ronda coinciding perfectly with that of Alonzo, I readily agreed to his proposal; and it was decided that, after he had given the necessary instructions to Beltran, with whom, notwithstanding their little coolness, he still continued on friendly terms, a messenger should be sent to me, to fix the day for our _rendezvous_ at Grazalema, a small but strongly situated town, on the line of communication between Ronda and Cadiz, from which the French had recently been driven. After waiting impatiently for several days without receiving any further intelligence, a letter from Alonzo at length reached me, accounting for the delay by informing me he had been seized with a bad _Tertiana_, which kept him a prisoner at Gaucin, and, he regretted to say, would prevent his taking an active part in the projected attack on the enemy; but that every thing had been arranged as agreed between us, excepting that Beltran had preferred joining me with his troop, being but little acquainted with the country about El Burgo (whither it was proposed to decoy the enemy), and would cross the Guadiaro with his band at _La Torre del Paso_ on the third day after the date of this communication, and remain there until he heard from me. Meanwhile, Alonzo said, his own band had proceeded to El Burgo, under the command of his brother Melchor. On the receipt of this letter, I immediately quitted my bivouac, and proceeded to Grazalema, so timing my movements as not to reach that town until the sun had sunk beneath the wide horizon of the Atlantic ocean; and, after establishing myself in the house of an old _compadre_,[217] I sallied forth to post the requisite videttes at the different outlets of the town. On returning to my quarters, I found a billet lying upon the table, containing the following mysterious warning, written in a female hand. "BLAS MALDONADO. "There are traitors in your band. Take care how you move from Grazalema, and, above all, beware of _Pépé el Alamin_.[218] Act with your wonted decision and circumspection, and you may yet escape the snare that is laid for you; but scorn not the advice of one who watches over you with the devoted affection that a woman's heart alone is capable of feeling." I was lost in amazement; and who my fair _inamorata_ could be was not the least part of the mystery. That there was treason of some sort stirring was evident, but where to seek for it was the difficulty. Could Alonzo's illness be feigned? and his intention to betray me? Could it be a mere device of the French to detain me in the _guet à pans_ of Grazalema, whilst they surrounded me? But how should _they_ know of my arrival? Was it possible that my own secretary--the son of my adoption--Pépé el _Alamin_--was it possible that _he_ would betray me? My first impulse was to send for this worthy, and tax him with his treason; but circumspection was pointed out as necessary; I had no proofs to convict him, and the danger to be apprehended from others engaged in the plot would still be hanging over my head. I determined, therefore, to adopt another course, and endeavour if possible to trace the dark conspiracy to the fountain-head. My plan arranged, I sent for _Jacobo_, my lieutenant, and telling him that I was about to proceed secretly to El Burgo, with a view of ascertaining that every thing was going on _corriente_,[219] gave him a sealed packet containing instructions how to act, in the event of my absence being prolonged beyond eight and forty hours; until which time had expired, however, it was not to be opened. They were very brief, _à saber_[220]--Hang Pépé, and save yourself by a rapid flight to Zahara. I then summoned Pépé to my presence, and informing him that the receipt of a very important communication, rendering it expedient that I should without loss of time consult my confederates Alonzo and Beltran, I was about to proceed forthwith to Gaucin; but, as it was essentially necessary that my absence should not be known to any one but himself, I directed him to meet me at a certain spot on the outskirts of the town in half an hour, bringing with him a fleet and sure-footed mule. Stealing forth at the appointed time, I found Pépé at his post with every thing ready. He muttered something as I threw my leg across the saddle, about having lost my confidence; hoped I was not periling myself unnecessarily, and would be prudent, as without me the quadrilla would be like an _olla sin tocino_.[221] "As to personal danger, Pépé," I made answer, "dismiss your fears for me. As I told you before, I am only going to see my friends Beltran and Alonzo; but unless I see them this very night, our project to surprise Ronda must be abandoned." "Can you not," he rejoined, "communicate this to them by letter? your presence here may be very necessary; I will be the bearer." "Impossible," said I; "it may be necessary to alter the whole of our arrangements. Good night, my faithful Pépé; be assured you have my full confidence. Should my non-appearance to-morrow excite surprise, say I am unwell, and have given orders not to be disturbed; but if my absence exceed forty-eight hours, go to Jacobo, and tell him all you know of my movements. He is aware of the value I set upon you; and your head--in the situation in which he will then be placed--will be required by him. Once more _adios y Pesetas!_ with this stout mule I trust I shall be able to reach Gaucin before midnight;" and putting spurs to the animal's sides, I urged him rapidly down the steep acclivity of the _Sierra Endrinal_, taking the _trocha_ to _Cortes_. The dark shadows of the lofty impending mountain soon concealed my movements from observation, and quitting the beaten track, I struck into a path on the left hand, which is used only by the goatherds, and leads through a dense forest to _Montejaque_. Putting my animal to the utmost speed the bad road would admit, I reached that village in two hours. Every inmate of the little Eagle's nest was at my command. I found no difficulty, therefore, whilst a barber was robbing me of my mustaches and eyebrows, in getting my mule exchanged for a stout _burro_, my military costume for a tattered _zamarra_;[222] and thus metamorphosed, issued forth from the village. Descending by a rugged footpath to the river Guadiaro, and fording the stream a little above where a remarkable cavern, called the _Cueva del Gato_, overhangs its right bank, I made a wide circuit round Ronda, until I had gained the high road from that place to Gaucin; and then turning to the left (directing my ass's head towards the French garrison), proceeded quietly along the road, until, on arriving at the commencement of the long suburb, which extends beyond the walls on the south side of the town, I fell in with an enemy's piquet. My business being demanded, I desired to be forthwith conducted to the commandant of the fortress, stating that I had information of the utmost consequence to communicate. "You have the look of one who has important _disclosures_ to make," observed the corporal of the party, pointing to a large rent in my cloak, whilst examining me from head to foot with a lantern; at which _bon mot_ his men, as in duty bound, laughed very heartily. "You wish no doubt to make a clean breast before you are shot for a _Judas_!" "Wit without discretion, my friend," said I, "is like a sword in the hands of a fool. Great ends are sometimes gained by small means; so lead me to your officer without further parley, otherwise your shoulders will have to bear a heavy responsibility." "I have half a mind to handcuff the fellow for his self-importance," said the Frenchman to his companions, not supposing I could understand his language; "and would too, only that there _does_ appear to be something stirring; for one of his cut-throat _compatriots_ has already been admitted to make '_important disclosures_,' within the last twenty-four hours. _Eh bien mon vieux_, you shall be forwarded, but let us first see what you have about you." So saying, my person was strictly searched; but I had only a few _ochavos_ about me, half a dozen doubloons, which I had brought in case of need (for "_quien no trahe soga se ahoga_,"[223] as we Spaniards say), being tied to the rope passed through my _borrico's_ mouth. Another short delay took place at the gate of the fortress; but an order was finally brought from the commandant to conduct me to his presence. The information I had gained, that another of my countrymen had been recently admitted to the fortress on a similar errand as myself, tended to confirm the anonymous warning of treachery, and made my position rather alarming; since, if brought face to face with the other informer, I should indubitably be recognised, and as certainly be hanged, drawn, and quartered. However, my motto was ever _a lo hecho buen pecho_.[224] It was too late to recede; so muffling myself up in the old cloak to avoid being recognised by any of my countrymen, and taking the doubloons from their hiding-place, I left my _monture_ at the town gate, and, accompanied by a file of soldiers, proceeded on foot to the governor's abode. His excellency had just returned from his nightly _tertulia_, and, attended by a single _aide-de-camp_, or secretary, was awaiting my arrival in his dressing-room. The governor was a wizen-faced elderly man, short, thin, and phthisical, with quick grey eyes, thick bushy eyebrows, a high forehead, and a nose made expressly for taking snuff. He appeared to be, and I believe was, one of the _emigrés rentrés_, whom, about this time, the Emperor Napoleon was imprudently admitting into his service. The secretary, on the other hand, had all the appearance of _un vieux caporal_; his pockmarked full face, shaggy black hair, _coiffé à la Brutus_, and affected _brusque fránchise_, denoting him clearly to be _un homme du peuple_. _Haciendo la Zalama_,[225] and then looking round at my escort, I said, that the information I had to impart might better, perhaps, be communicated as privately as possible. "_Q'uest ce qu'il dit?_" asked the governor, turning to his aide-de-camp. This having been duly translated to him, "_Bien!_" he replied, in a sharp querulous key; and asking the corporal if my person had been searched, ordered him to withdraw with the escort. This done, addressing me in very bad Spanish, he begged to be made acquainted with the nature of my communication, desiring his secretary, who, I soon found out, conversed fluently in the Castillian language, to pay attention to what I said. I briefly stated, that a plan had been laid by some guerrilla chieftains, assembled in the neighbouring Sierras, to entice him from Ronda, whilst a large body of _facciosos_, collected at El Burgo, was to pounce upon the fortress; that I was master of all the details of the project, and was willing to lend him my services in frustrating it. He listened attentively until I had concluded, and my harangue had been translated into French; and then, compressing his eyebrows, and looking earnestly at me, repeated, "Collected at El Burgo, you say?" "Si, Señor." "And in what force?" I stated a very exaggerated number. "And how many of the _facciosos_ may there be at Grazalema?" "Some forty or fifty." "This appears to be an intelligent rascal, _Leboucher_," said his excellency, now addressing his aide-de-camp; who, standing at the fireplace, had been attentively perusing a paper hanging against the wall, from which, however, he from time to time turned round, to take a look at me. "This appears to be an intelligent rascal, but his information differs _in toto_ from that furnished by _the other_. Keep your eye upon him, therefore, whilst I put a few more questions, but do not let him perceive that you are watching him." "I have _had_ my eye upon him," replied _Mr. Butcher_, "and, strange to say, the fellow corresponds in many respects with the description I have before me of _El Ratonero_." "_Diable!_" exclaimed the governor, "give it me;" and he cast his eye hastily over the paper handed to him, without once looking up at me. This was most fortunate; for, from the dangerous situation in which I found myself placed, my countenance would, probably, have betrayed me, notwithstanding all my efforts to appear unconcerned, had one glance been directed towards me, especially had any questions been put to me at the moment. Fortunately, I say, however, the governor did not look up, nor say a word to me, until he had perused the paper which his aide-de-camp presented, and drew his attention to; but then, suddenly fixing his quick little eyes upon me, he asked rapidly, as if to throw me off my guard, "Do you know one _Blas Malditado_?" "Blas who, did your excellency say?" asked I, affecting not to know whom he meant. "Blas el Ratonero," he rejoined. "Oh, Blas _Maldonado_!" I exclaimed. "Ay, that I do! I know him as well as I know my right arm, and have a long account to settle with him some day; for I owe him all my ills, and, _por quien Dios es_,[226] he shall have honest payment!" "No, Leboucher," said the governor, now turning to his _factotum_, "no; you are certainly mistaken--he is, decidedly, _not_ the rat-catcher. I think I am a sufficient judge of human nature to pronounce, that no man could act the part of the _injurié_ so well. This fellow's hate is heartfelt, be assured, but I will probe him a little more;" and, again addressing himself to me, he asked, "Do you know where this Blas now is?" "Not exactly," I replied, "for he moves about like a ball of quicksilver. One day he is at _Zeca_, another at _Meca_. There is no catching him." "Where does he say?" asked the governor, addressing his secretary--"_à Meca? où diable donc est Meca?_" "Allow me to question him," said Señor Leboucher, with an ill-suppressed smile, a request to which the governor gave a pettish assent. "_Allons, mon brave! sans phrases!_ you know this Blas well?" commenced my new interrogator. "Right well." "And is he a man of such determination as report says?" "He is a bold fellow," I replied, "one who is not to be trifled with. He is always as good as his word, and his promises are engraved with the knife's point." Fixing his eyes now upon me with a penetrating glance, whilst, at the same time, a kind of smile played about his sarcastic mouth, implying, "now you understand perfectly what I mean," he very deliberately and significantly asked, "Is he to be ... _bought_?" "No, _señor_," said I, "I think not. He hates your nation from the bottom of his soul; and, if you have any dealings with him, be assured you will find but a _nest_ where you think to get _birds_." "And what is _your_ name, friend?" "Jacobo Vargas," I replied, giving him the name of my lieutenant. "Can you write?" "I can." "Then do me the favour to write your name on this paper." I did so. "Do you know one Beltran Galindiz?" continued my interrogator. "Yes, by character." "Is _he_ faithful to your cause, think you?" "Not to my cause, certainly." (Here the governor smiled, as much as to say to his assistant, you are not so clever as you think yourself.) "_I_ am a good Spaniard, and loyal subject of Joseph Napoleon; _he_ is a friend of the _despotic Bourbon_." The secretary smiled in return at the old aristocrat, and continued his cross-questioning. "And where did you leave this redoubtable Blas?" "I have not yet said that I was with him." (Another smile from the governor.) "True, true; but it would appear that you have lately seen him." "I saw him last at Grazalema." "When?" "This very night." "_Sacrebleu!_ he is already netted then," exclaimed he, turning round and addressing the governor, "and we have, therefore, no occasion for this fellow's services, except to stretch a rope; for, take my word, he is a spy--a spy of this very Blas, if not the rascal himself; who, with all due deference to your superior discernment, I still think he is. Suppose, however, as their accounts differ so widely, we first have our two spies confronted?" "Perhaps it would be as well," replied the governor; "but we must not break faith with the _other_ either. So, show him first this fellow's name; ask if he knows him; and, then, whether he objects to see him face to face. We shall then, I think, find out whether El Burgo or Grazalema be the real point of concentration of the _canaille_." The foregoing questions had led me to _suspect_ who this _other_ was; the concluding speech of the governor, like the sun dispersing the _mirage_ on the Guadalquivir's banks, made every thing clear. The information he possessed _could_ only have been given by one of my confederates, and if he and I were confronted my fate was sealed. It was a trying moment for me; the slightest hesitation would have been my ruin; the gibbet, I might say, was prepared; but I determined not to be hanged, without making an effort to shift the rope round the neck of my betrayer. I collected myself, therefore, for the coming crisis, and, as soon as the secretary had left the room, addressing the governor in his own language, said, "Your excellency is so perfect a master of the Castillian tongue, that it would be presumption in me to stammer out the few words of French with which I am acquainted, only that I wish to avoid all appearance of deceit and----." "_Bon Dieu de la France! mais vous parlez parfaitement!_" interrupted the governor. "_Pourquoi diable! ne m'avez vous pas dit cela auparavant?_" "Because I was never asked the question, please your excellency." "_Vrai, vrai_--that fellow, Leboucher, _will_ always be cleverer than every body else! But, since you _do_ speak French, and well too, pray have the goodness to make all further communications in that language." "Willingly," I replied, "since such is your excellency's wish; and, to speak the truth, it is much more satisfactory to me to go to the fountain-head. I have ever found, with blood as with water, that the higher the stream the clearer it runs." His excellency took a pinch of snuff with unequivocal satisfaction, and begged me to proceed with what I was going to state when he interrupted me. "I was about to observe," said I, "that I might claim the same exemption from being brought before any of my countrymen, as has been granted to this _other_; but I am no secret informer--on the contrary----." Here Señor Leboucher re-entered the apartment, and, giving the governor back the paper on which I had written my (or, rather, my lieutenant's) name, said, "The other knows this person well, but on no account will----." "Hush, hush!" exclaimed the governor, "our friend here speaks French." "The devil he does!" ejaculated the secretary. "Then hang him up at once for a spy! what further proof is required of his being so? Depend on it, he is El Ratonero, and not the person he represents himself to be." "_Un moment_," said the governor, taking him aside, and whispering for some time in his ear, by which, however, whatever it may have been, the secretary did not appear at all convinced. "I am not surprised, Señor," said I, addressing Monsieur Leboucher as soon as their consultation appeared to flag, "I am not surprised at your continuing in the mistake of supposing me to be _El Ratonero_. It requires less clear-sightedness than I am sure you possess, to discover a likeness, which (in spite of all my endeavours to conceal it) has frequently been observed. But I here solemnly swear, _por Dios y todos los Santos_, (and I crossed myself most devoutly) that Blas Maldonado has been through life my greatest enemy." Was not that true, Caballeros? "To put all your doubts at rest, however," I continued, "bring forth this _other_--this Beltran, for well I know who your informer is. As regards me, have no scruples; for, as I have said before, I am no secret informer, but an open and faithful friend of the brave nation that has come to release my country from her fetters. As it affects the matter I have come about, however, our meeting will render abortive the whole plan I was about to propose to you. _He_ will at once see that his machinations are discovered, and you will have to hang him--a poor devil that never has and never can do you any harm;--whereas, by his absence from his confederates at El Burgo, _they_ will be aware that their project to entrap you has miscarried, and you will consequently miss the glorious opportunity of taking them in their own toils." "Nay," said the governor, "I think, since you say that you left Blas at Grazalema this night, our plan has already succeeded without your assistance. By to-morrow night the pass in his rear will be occupied by a body of troops moved up from Cadiz; and our arrangements are made to give him a warm reception, should he attempt to escape on this side." "And now, Señor," added the secretary, "since his excellency has thought fit to make you acquainted with so much of our plans, I believe you must remain our prisoner, until they have been fully carried into execution." "That will be as his excellency pleases," I replied. "But I have yet a communication to make that may induce you to view the matter differently. Blas Maldonado left Grazalema this night; he sleeps at Gaucin, and from thence, in conjunction with the band of this very Beltran, is to attack your fortress as soon as ever you have been induced to move upon Grazalema, and thus...." An orderly here entered the room, and delivered a packet to the governor. It was short, and seemed to confound him. He handed it to his secretary without a word of comment, who also seemed perplexed. After another whispered consultation, the governor turned to me and said, "Your information is correct--Blas is now at Gaucin. Leboucher, reseal that letter, and carry it to the worthy Señor Beltran, and ask him if it contains any thing to be communicated to me. Say we have imprisoned Jacobo as he recommended." In a few minutes the secretary returned, and stated that Beltran, having perused the letter, was desirous of departing immediately, as he feared something had gone wrong--that Jacobo (meaning me) must on no account be lost sight of. "His impudence shall not save him," exclaimed the governor; "I'll have him before me this instant, and...." "_Mon General_," I interrupted, "reap yourself the fruit of his perfidy; affect to place perfect reliance in him--allow him to depart, and I pledge you my word, before eight and forty hours are passed, you shall have _his ears_, if not the head of _Blas el Ratonero_." My real earnestness and assumed frankness, the opportune arrival of the traitor Pépé's despatch to Beltran, announcing my sudden departure for Gaucin (for no one _but_ Pépé knew I was going there), and, lastly, Beltran's anxiety to get away, caused the general, and even Monsieur Leboucher, to place perfect confidence in me, and the rest of the night was passed in arranging a plan to circumvent Beltran; a plan, which, offering no great risks, (for my object now was rather to be revenged on my traitorous associates than to occasion loss to the French) was readily adopted, and before dawn I had left the town to perform my part in the drama; Beltran having been suffered to depart some hours previously. CHAPTER XVI. BLAS EL GUERRILLERO--_continued_. Every thing, thus far, had succeeded to the utmost of my wishes. I had now but to frame an excuse to Beltran for my unexpected visit to his quarters, and for my delay in reaching them; lull his suspicions; and wreak my vengeance upon him and his accomplices. A good horse had been provided for me, and I soon reached Gaucin. I found Alonzo and Beltran in deep consultation: the former was much surprised and pleased at my unexpected visit; the latter pretended to be so. Having expressed their hopes that nothing had happened to thwart our projected plans, and assured me that every thing on their parts was going on prosperously, Alonzo asked me jokingly what had occasioned my unlooked for visit, for he thought I had merely come to see his sister. I told him (keeping my eye upon Beltran all the time) I had received information that a force had been moved from the French camp before Cadiz, towards the mountains, as if for the purpose of reopening the communication with Ronda, which had been closed by the recent capture of Grazalema; and I had, therefore, come to say, that either I must abandon that post, and consequently our concerted project, (since I should find myself between two fires,) or, that we must carry our plans into execution without further delay. Beltran looked very blank; and to my proposal of proceeding to work immediately, stammered out some objection about want of time. But this Alonzo overruled,--observing that his brother Melchor and myself were the two who would feel inconvenience on that score, since our bands were the most distant from the field of action; and as Melchor was then at Gaucin,--having, Alonzo observed to me, arrived unexpectedly, "as if sent by Providence," the preceding night,--the whole affair might be at once settled. Accordingly, a messenger was despatched for his brother; whilst waiting for whom, I took the opportunity of stating that I had met with an accident on the road, which had retarded me considerably; having, I said, in consequence of the fall of my mule soon after leaving Grazalema, been obliged to proceed to Cortes on foot, and, arriving there in the dead of the night, had experienced great delay in procuring a horse. Beltran's countenance brightened on hearing this little explanation, and he then, with affected carelessness, asked after his old friend Jacobo. I replied, that I had left him quite well at Grazalema; a piece of information that seemed to puzzle him amazingly. Melchor did not keep us long waiting, and our final dispositions were soon made. It was settled that he should proceed with all speed to join his band at El Burgo, and at daybreak on the following morning make the projected foray into the eastern part of the vale of Ronda, to draw upon him a portion of the garrison of the fortress. Beltran, meanwhile, was to march immediately with his troop, (which was already assembled at Gaucin) and gain the valley of the Guadiaro below Montejaque; whilst I should post back to Grazalema, to conduct my _quadrilla_ to the pass in the chain of Sierra to the left of that same village. Our two bands would thus be so situated as to be able to form a junction, and fall upon the defenceless city, the moment the favourable opportunity presented itself. Although, as chieftain of the largest band, the direction of the operations devolved upon me, yet, out of compliment to Beltran, I invited him to meet me at the village of Montejaque, as soon as he had conducted his troop to its assigned position; whence we could watch the movements of the enemy in the plain below, and put the necessary "_ensemble_" in our movements. I then remounted my horse, and lost no time in rejoining my band. My first care, on regaining Grazalema, was to send for Pépé. The scoundrel confessed every thing. Beltran, Melchor, and himself, had entered into a plot to betray me into the hands of the French. Alonzo, he declared, knew nothing of it. A French force was, that very night, to occupy the narrow pass between the lofty Sierras of Endrinal and San Cristoval, in our rear, to intercept me, when--on discovering that our plan to entrap the enemy had failed--I should attempt to escape by that issue to Ubrique. Alarmed at my sudden determination to visit my coadjutors at Gaucin, and yet more at the hint I had thrown out of the possible disarrangement of our plans, Pépé rightly conjectured that I had received some hint of impending danger, and had despatched a hurried epistle to Beltran, (who, he knew, was then at Ronda, making final arrangements with the enemy,) acquainting him with my proceedings. My _faithful_ Pépé furnished me, moreover, with a list of six of my own men, who were engaged in the plot. It was, however, with the greatest difficulty I brought him to confess what had moved him to engage in this treacherous plot; the more unpardonable on his part, since, in all our intercourse, he had received nothing but benefits at my hands. At length, he acknowledged that he had been worked upon by that strongest and strangest of all human passions, _jealousy_--that uncontrollable phrenzy, which, of all our weaknesses, is the only one that fails not with our declining years, and that--strange to say--ofttimes causes the very feeling, the suspicion alone of which gave it birth! Such was the case in the present instance. The wife of Pépé was a dark _Gitana_,[227] in the full bloom of woman's beauty; and, with a form as graceful, and passions as unrestrained, as those of the wild deer that bounded through her native forests, she possessed, as I soon discovered, a spirit that ill assorted with the clownish and imbecile character of her husband. The source whence the mysterious warning sprung was now evident; but, until that moment, I had not even been aware that Pépé's wife had accompanied him to Grazalema. I solemnly protested to him that I had never looked upon _Paca_ with the eyes of love, and that his jealousy was, consequently, quite unfounded--a declaration which, at that time, was not more solemn than true; and Pépé's jealousy ceased precisely at the moment when cause for it commenced. For his unreserved confession of the plot I granted the wretch his life on one condition; a condition which I will hereafter specify, and to the performance of which he bound himself in the most solemn manner. I knew him sufficiently to trust to his superstition, what I no longer could to his honour. Without taking any further notice of this conspiracy, I assembled my troop, and, towards nightfall, put it in motion for its allotted position; which we reached towards midnight. I now sent for Jacobo, and, communicating to him my secret, directed him to proceed on, whilst yet the shadows of night would conceal his movements, towards Ronda, and, with the earliest dawn, to make the demonstration _I_ had arranged with the French Governor of the fortress. This done, I proceeded myself to Montejaque, to give the meeting to my confederate Beltran. He came about an hour before day-break, armed up to the teeth, but was evidently very nervous and uneasy, which I remarked to him, and asked, jestingly, if he had a presentiment of death. He affected to laugh too, but his teeth chattered in the vain attempt; and, to take off my attention, he remarked that it was time we should be on the alert. We accordingly left the village, which is nestled between two cragged peaks, that protrude from the mountain like the tusks of a _javali_,[228] and, ascending to the summit of the northernmost pinnacle, stationed ourselves on the look out. The sun had not yet risen above the eastern mountains ere we heard some distant straggling shots. "That firing must be the skirmishing of Melchor's party," observed Beltran; "had we not better move on?" "Our attack would be premature," I replied; "Let him draw the garrison off some distance further, and then we shall.... _Valgame Dios!_ the sounds appear to come nearer! there must indeed be some treason here!" "Treason!" he exclaimed, shuddering. "Ay, treason, _Carajo_!" I repeated. "See! do you not distinguish the blue jackets of the French dragoons!" By this time a slight mist, which hung over the course of the Guadiaro, had gradually dispersed under the influence of the rising sun, and we were enabled distinctly to perceive Jacobo's party, scattered amongst the olive groves, retiring slowly before a detachment of about equal strength of French dragoons. At the same moment we heard the distant roar of artillery; and _Beltran_, starting back from the edge of the precipice, exclaimed, "There is indeed, treason somewhere; I shall forthwith rejoin my band, and there await your orders." "Do so," I replied quickly; "but the way through the village is circuitous. Here, Pépé--Andres,--show my good friend Beltran a shorter way down to the river:--but let me have his ears first." At my first word, Pépé and another stout fellow, darting from behind a rock, seized Beltran by the arms, and, holding the traitor whilst I robbed him of his ears, then pitched him headlong down the precipice. I now hastened to my troop. Jacobo and his party had by this time reached the spot where the Guadiaro, leaving the fertile basin of Ronda, enters a narrow, tortuous valley; and, crossing to the right bank, kept down the stream; thereby passing along the front of my position, and drawing the enemy on towards the spot where Beltran's troop was posted. The enemy imprudently suffered themselves to be enticed into the trap thus laid for them, and, when sufficiently advanced for my purpose, I rushed down the side of the mountain, cutting off their retreat by the road along the edge of the river, whilst, at the same moment, Jacobo's detachment, reinforced by the whole of Beltran's band, attacked them vigorously in front. They did not attempt to resist such fearful odds, but, plunging into the stream, endeavoured to escape amongst the vineyards that clothe the rough hills bordering its left bank. Few, however, escaped. One prisoner only (according to my orders) was made. He happened to be the very corporal who commanded the piquet which had stopt me on going into Ronda two nights before. I congratulated him on his lucky escape. "Your saint takes good care of you," said I, "to throw you into the hands of so generous an enemy. You threatened to handcuff _me_--now I am about to liberate _you_. You must, however, be the bearer of some more _important disclosures_, which I have to communicate to your governor. They are contained in this letter and parcel;--as you value your life, deliver them safely." I then sent him about his business. The letter was as follows:-- "_Mon General_, "When recently honoured with an interview, I pledged my word that, within eight-and-forty hours, your excellency should have the ears of Beltran Galindiz, _if not_ the head of Blas El Ratonero. "In performance of this promise, I herewith send the _former_; for I find that I have still further occasion for the services of the _latter_. "Pray assure Monsieur Lavater (your sagacious secretary) of the high consideration in which I hold his extraordinary penetration; and, for yourself, accept the assurance of my earnest desire, that one so talented "may live a thousand years," to command the forces opposed to "BLAS MALDONADO." I will not weary you, _Caballeros_, with any further account of my military adventures, except to tell you that some eighteen months after this affair, whilst pursuing the enemy on his retreat from before Cadiz, a French officer was captured by my troop, and brought up for judgment. "Monsieur," said he, addressing me in his native tongue, and not without some little surprise in his countenance, "_il me parait que votre figure me revient_." "Very likely, _Monsieur Leboucher_," I replied in Spanish; "probably you again recognise _Blas el Ratonero_, and have come for your reward. Here, _compañeros_," I continued, addressing my attendants; "pay this worthy gentleman the thousand crowns reward due to his penetration. Let them be put up in a bag, the bag tied to his heels, and he by the neck to the next tree." "Savage!--Monster!"--exclaimed my old acquaintance, as my orders were carrying into execution; "order your ruffians at all events to shoot me, that I may die like a French soldier." "You are a bold fellow," said I, "to beard the tiger in his lair; and I like a brave fellow although an enemy; so get ye gone, and read a lesson on humanity to your generals, for many of them stand much in need of it." He thanked me like a brave man, without expressing such extravagant gratitude as his nation is wont to do; and I felt an inward satisfaction at having spared him. Nevertheless, I had my reasons for it, be assured; for, since the Ronda affair, I knew not what dependence to place on my fellows, and thought I might perchance have need, some time or other, of a friend in the enemy's camp. I must now, _caballeros_, hurry on to the conclusion of my tale; for though the day is not yet dawning, the cocks are giving notice of its approach, and, like yourselves, I purpose being on horseback by sunrise. The true manner of Beltran's death was never known, and his corpse was left to furnish a meal to the vultures. I knew I could depend on the secrecy of my Montejaque bravo, Andres; and Pépé swore that he had seen Beltran fall dead from his horse, whilst attempting to rejoin his troop after leaving me. Not the slightest suspicion, therefore, fell upon me. It was some years, however, ere Engracia could be persuaded to become my wife. She has since told me that it was her brother Melchor who always dissuaded her from it; but he was killed in a skirmish with the French in the Pyrenees, and her brother Alonzo never recovered from the _Tertiana_ that laid him up at Gaucin. _Paca_, on her side, opposed my marriage, with all her most impassioned rhetoric; but its influence was no longer felt, and our intimacy broke off with a violent explosion. I have never seen her since, but understand she absconded from her disconsolate Pépé soon afterwards. On the termination of our glorious war of independence, and the elevation of Ferdinand the Seventh to the constitutional throne, as established by the National Cortes, in 1812, I proceeded to Madrid to swear allegiance to the sovereign for whose return I had fought and bled, and claim the reward of my long services. But instead of surrounding himself with the valiant chieftains who had driven the vile _gavachos_ across the Pyrenees, and placed the crown of the two worlds upon his head, the imbecile monarch had hedged himself round with the same impotent old grandees, intriguing priests, and other parasites and _bribones_, who, but for the in-born valour of the Spanish _people_, would have been now fawning with the same abject _servilism_ at the feet of the usurper Josef. At length, however, by dint of perseverance, I obtained an audience. The king received me in his usual graceless, gracious manner--regretted my wounds--presented me with a cigar--referred me to his ministers--and wished me good morning. His ministers--true jacks in office--had the impudence to tell me, that my services, like those of the _Empecinado_, and so many other gallant _guerrilla_ chieftains, amounted to little more than highway robberies, and that my proper reward, if I had it, would be the gallows. Was it astonishing, _caballeros_, that such black ingratitude should meet with a heavy punishment? The favourable opportunity for inflicting it did not, however, as you know, occur for several years. But the mine which was for ever to lay the throne of absolutism prostrate, was preparing, and at length the explosion took place. I need not tell you that I was amongst the first to declare for the constitution, and my patriotism was rewarded by the lucrative post I now hold. The miserable serviles and _anilleros_[229] are still contriving plots to subvert the glorious fabric we liberals have raised. But they will find us too strong for them; and the vigour we shall exhibit will effectually deter the French from effecting their long talked of intervention. Indeed, as our old Spanish _refran_ says, "_Olla que mucho hierve, mucho pierde_;"[230] and I suspect they will find their army assembling to watch Spain, fritter away by desertion, until nothing but its well-paid _Etât-Major_ remains.[231] _Pues!_[232] _Señores_, added our _hero_, after a short pause; I have now related all the most remarkable events of my eventful life. You must, I think, admit that I have had much to contend against in raising myself to my present prosperous condition, and that what little _peccadillos_ I have committed were--if not purely accidental--forced upon me by uncontrollable circumstances. _Conque, amigos!--le beso las manos._ I will now leave you for a few moments to see to the feeding of my horse, who has a long journey before him, and I will take the opportunity of desiring our hostess to prepare us some chocolate. _Si se oferece algo..... ustedes no tienen que mandar_,[233] and if you can be persuaded at any future time to visit ----, be assured, _mi casa, mi muger, mis criados--todo está a lá disposicion de ustedes_.[234] With this most liberal invitation, Señor Blas left us. CHAPTER XVII. CORDOBA--BRIDGE OVER THE GUADALQUIVIR--MILLS--QUAY--SPANISH PROJECTS--FOUNDATION OF THE CITY--ESTABLISHMENT OF THE WESTERN CALIPHAT--CAPTURE OF CORDOBA BY SAN FERNANDO--THE MEZQUITA--BISHOP'S PALACE--MARKET PLACE--GRAND RELIGIOUS PROCESSION--ANECDOTE OF THE LATE BISHOP OF MALAGA AND THE TRAGALA. The grandeur of Cordoba, like the effect of stage scenery, ceases on a near inspection. The city, as has already been noticed, stands in the midst of a vast plain, bounded by ranges of distant mountains; but, on entering within the gates, the prospect of the smiling valley and darkly wooded sierras is altogether excluded, and, in exchange, the traveller finds his view confined to the white-washed walls of the low and poverty-stricken houses that line the narrow, crooked, jagged streets of the once proud capital of the Abdalrahmans. From the painful glare of this displeasing contrast, the eye in vain seeks relief by turning towards the winding Guadalquivír; for, the bridge once passed, not a glimpse of its dark blue current can be obtained from any part of the city. There is a suburb of some extent on the southern bank of the river; but the city, properly so called, is altogether situated on the opposite side. An old Saracenic castle, modernised and kept in a defensible state, interdicts the approach to the bridge, which edifice is also a work of the Moors. It is a solid structure of sixteen irregular arches, 23 feet in width, and 860 in length. Its erection is usually attributed to the Caliph Hassim (son of the first Abdalrahman), towards the close of the eighth century; and, according to Florez, that enlightened sovereign was himself the planner and director of the work. I can see no reason to doubt this respectable authority, although some English writers have stated the bridge to be of Roman construction. It is very possible that the present edifice may have been raised on an old foundation, though the bridge built by the Romans is generally supposed to have been higher up the river. The summer stream of the Guadalquivír scarcely warrants its being distinguished by so grandiose a name as the _Great River_--_Guad-al Kibeer_, for its volume of water is but small, and, from being led off into numerous irrigating conduits and mill-races, is reduced to so inconsiderable a current that, during nine months of the year, the greater part of the river's wide sandy bed is left perfectly dry. Some of the mills "below bridge" are Moorish, and very picturesque; as are also the crenated, ivy-clustered towers of the city walls overhanging the river. On the right bank of the stream, above the bridge, a handsome quay is (1833) constructing; but, as the "great river" is navigable only for small boats, the sum expended on this costly work appears to be an absolute waste of money, which ought rather to have been laid out in sinking a channel, so as to render the river practicable for barges and trading vessels down to Seville. If this were done--and it was effected to a certain extent by the French, during their occupation of the country from 1810 to 1812--a quay would soon be constructed from the profits arising from the increased commerce of the place. But the Spaniards generally begin things at the wrong end, and in this, as well as most of their projects, they might derive great advantage from the study of Mrs. Glasse's well known recipe for making hare soup, beginning, "first catch a hare." The precise date of the foundation of Cordoba is unknown. By Strabo, who calls it the first colony of Roman citizens established in Boetica, it is attributed to Marcellus, but which individual of that name is meant it would be difficult to determine. It must, however, have been founded very soon after the Romans obtained possession of Spain, since the city is mentioned by Appian in the war of Viriatus, as well as by Polybius in the expedition of Marcus Claudius against the Lusitanians. We may suppose, therefore, that it was built by the Romans, to secure their dominion over the country on the expulsion of the Carthagenians, that is, about 200 years before the Christian era. By Hirtius, Cordoba is spoken of as the capital of the country at the period of Julius Cæsar's second visit to Spain; and, from that time, it seems ever to have been a rich and powerful city, and the residence of many noble Roman families. But the most glorious epoch in the annals of Cordoba dates from the arrival of the renowned Abdalrahman, sole surviving male descendant of Mohammed in the Ommiad line, who, being forced to seek shelter from the enemies of his race in the deserts of Africa, was called over to Spain, became sovereign of the country, and, fixing his residence at Cordoba, assumed the title of Caliph of the West, A.D. 755. Abdalrahman repaired, strengthened, and extended the walls with which the Romans had already encircled the city; built a splendid palace, and commenced the celebrated mosque; and, during his long reign, so firmly did he establish his sway over the rest of Spain, as even to force a tribute from the hardy descendants of Pelayo, entrenched within the wild recesses of the Asturian mountains. The western caliphs continued to exercise great power for upwards of two centuries, and, indeed, the prosperity of Cordoba was at its acmé during the reign of Abdalrahman III., who flourished in the middle of the tenth century. The days of its glory ceased, however, with the life of Mohammed Almanzor, the celebrated vizier of the weak Hassim II., A.D. 998; and, not long afterwards, the caliphat of Cordoba finished, and several small kingdoms were founded on its ruins. The kingdom of Cordoba, in its diminished and enfeebled state, continued to exist until A.D. 1236, when its proud capital fell an easy conquest to Ferdinand III. of Castile, who, to merit the saintly title which Spanish history has conferred upon him, drove the turbaned inhabitants from their homes, and rendered the beautiful city a wilderness of brick and mortar. Cordoba never recovered the effects of this cruel and impolitic act; and its population, which, during the caliphat, is reputed to have amounted to upwards of a million of souls, at no after period reached a tenth, and can now, at the utmost, be estimated at a twentieth part of that number. The circumvallation of the city is still very perfect, and embraces a considerable space; but many parts of the enclosure are not built upon, and the houses generally are low and but thinly inhabited. The once flourishing trade of the place is now confined to some trifling manufactures of leather, called _Cordovan_, which ill deserves the celebrity it even yet enjoys. We took up our abode at the Posada _del Sol_, than which a more wretched place of accommodation, either for man or beast, the sun never shone upon. Nevertheless, it was represented to us as being (and I believe at that time was) the only eligible lodgment for _Hidalgos_ which the city contained.[235] One advantage it did hold out, however, namely, that of being immediately in front of the great and only _lion_ of the place, the famed cathedral, or _Mezquita_, as it still continues to be called. This remarkable pile has evidently been raised upon the ruins of some gothic edifice, which again is generally supposed to have stood upon the site of a yet more ancient Roman temple of Janus. The _Mezquita_, in fact, may be said to be made up of the reliques of those two nations, its architecture alone being Moorish. It was finished by Hassim (son of Abdalrahman, its founder), towards the close of the eighth century; but subsequent caliphs made great additions to it. The exterior of the building is extremely gloomy and unprepossessing; its dark and windowless walls, and low engrailed parapets, giving it the appearance of a prison, rather than of a place of worship. The horse-shoe arches over the doors are nevertheless well worthy of notice, and the principal gate is covered with bronze plates of most exquisite workmanship. Of the four and twenty entrances that formerly gave admission to the holy shrine of the prophet's descendant, but five are now open, which may in some degree account for the gloom that pervades the interior. Never did the feeling of astonishment so completely take possession of my senses, as on first entering this most extraordinary edifice. You step at once from the hot and sun-bleached street into a cool and sombre enclosure, of vast extent, which has not inaptly been likened to a forest of marble pillars; and, indeed, to carry out the simile, the arches, springing in all directions from these polished stems, present a vaulted covering which, at first sight, appears as complicated in its construction, as even a forest canopy of nature's own formation. One soon discovers, however, that the thickly planted pillars are aligned so as to divide the dark interior into regular avenues or aisles, and that the arches springing from and connecting each column with the four adjacent pillars (thus spanning both the main and transverse intercolumniations) form arcades, extending the whole length and breadth of the building. These arches are mostly of the Moorish, or horse-shoe form, but some few are of the pointed gothic, and seem to me to be the remains of a building of more ancient date than the time of the Moors. The interior of the mosque is nearly a square, its dimensions being 394 English feet from east to west, and 356 from north to south. But on attentive examination it becomes evident that the side which, correctly speaking, must now be considered the width of the mosque, was originally its length, an addition having been made on its eastern side, which has given it greater extent in that direction than in the other, so that its original interior dimensions were 356 feet from north to south (the same as at present), but only 240 feet from east to west. This space was divided by ten lines of columns into eleven aisles, extending north and south through the building; the centre avenue, which was directed straight from the great gate of entrance to the _Maksurah_, or sanctuary, situated in the middle of the south wall of the mosque, being (as it continues to this day) two feet wider than the others. Each of these ten rows contained thirty-one columns, placed about ten feet apart, from centre to centre; but they did not extend the whole length of the building, a small space at the south end being partitioned off for the apartments of the Imans. By the addition which was afterwards made to the Mosque, (doubtless rendered necessary by the increasing veneration with which it came to be regarded) it gained 154 feet in width, and eight aisles were added to the eleven already formed; and, as no part of this was reserved, it required thirty-four columns in each row to fill up the space. These, however, were not _throughout_ placed so as to align transversely with those of the original portion of the building; which circumstance has probably occasioned the discrepancies observable in the accounts given of this singular building by different writers. Swinburne, whose descriptions are generally very accurate, has fallen into error by stating that the mosque was divided into but seventeen aisles, having apparently overlooked the fact, that an avenue on each side has been taken off since it became a Christian church, for the erection of chapels dedicated to the divers saints of the Cordoban Calendar. The mosque may, therefore, be considered as having formerly been divided longitudinally into nineteen principal aisles or avenues of columns, and transversely into thirty-five. But it is to be observed that the line of columns which marks the division between the old and modern parts of the building differs from the rest; being rather a series of clusters of pillars (four in each pier), than isolated columns: and two similar lines divide the interior also, transversely; so that in making a calculation of the number of columns it formerly contained, these must be duly taken into the account; and it will then be found that the total number did not fall far short of the thousand it is rumoured to have contained. Although, as I have observed, the cross alignments of the columns in the old and new portions of the building do not exactly correspond, yet in some parts of the interior the arrangement of them is so perfect, that the spectator looks down eight avenues from the spot where he stands; four being at right angles with the walls of the building, the other four bisecting these, and extending diagonally across the mosque. The columns are of polished jasper, marble porphyry, and granite, and offer as much variety in their architectural as in their geological character; some rising doric-like from the pavement, others resting on low bases; many swelling in the shaft in the early style of the Egyptians, and some few ascending spirally, bespeaking the vitiated taste of the middle ages. Many are capped with Corinthian, others with grotesque, and some with purely Gothic, capitals. All these varieties of colour, shape, and ornament, have, after a time, a displeasing effect; but on first entering the building the spectator's attention is so riveted by the novelty of its character, and the vastness of its dimensions, that these violations of the prescribed rules of taste are overlooked. The columns, which are mostly eighteen inches in diameter, rise only nine feet above the pavement; and even with the additional height of their capitals, and of the arches springing from them, the roof is elevated but thirty-five feet above the floor; a height totally disproportioned to the extent of the building. On advancing further into the interior, however, this defect is less conspicuous; for the roof is found to be there raised in a singular manner--in steps, as it were--by a second series of horse-shoe arches, that spring from square pillars raised on the columns which support the lower arches; and thus--the space between the two series of arches being left open--forming a kind of double arcade, of a peculiarly light and fanciful kind. In different parts of these raised portions of the roof, small cupolas are erected, which admit the only light that the interior receives. The distribution of light is, consequently, very unequal. But the effect produced is remarkably well suited to the character of the building; as the partial gleams of sunshine thus scattered throughout the complicated architecture of the roof, by gradually diminishing in strength as the long lines of columns recede from view, leaves them at last in a distant gloom, which makes the avenues appear interminable. The appearance of the interior is much spoilt by the erection of an enormous Gothic choir, in the very centre of the building; for it intercepts the view of nearly one half the columns, (the long vistas between which constitute the great beauty and wonder of the place) and offers nothing to compensate for the injury thus inflicted but some carved wood-work, representing subjects taken from the Scriptures, executed by one Pedro Cornejo. The life of the artist is said to have been miraculously preserved until the very day on which he had completed his pious undertaking. This Gothic pile was erected so late as the time of Charles the Fifth, who seems to have taken a pleasure in disfiguring every thing Moorish that his predecessors had not laid their intolerant hands upon. When in its pristine state, despite all its sins against good taste, the interior of the _Mezquita_ must have presented a superb _coup d'oeil_. The roof, composed of wood, and wonderfully well put together, was richly painted and gilt; the walls were covered with elaborate stuccoes, and the floor was paved with gaudy mosaics. But of all this splendour little now remains. The all-destroying hand of Time has long since robbed the vaulted aisles and graceful cupolas of their brilliant tints; the not less destructive hand of Bigotry has stript the walls of their tasteful arabesques and inscriptions; and to the fragile mosaic pavement the change from slippers to shoes has been equally fatal; for, excepting here and there, round the foot of some column, scarcely a fragment of the bright glazed tiles with which it was originally laid can now be discovered, amidst the bricks of which it is composed, and dust with which it is covered. From this sweeping destruction one small recess has most fortunately been preserved, to afford the means of judging what the _whole_ must have been in its original state. This little compartment is situated at the south end of the mosque, near the sanctuary, and must have been included within the portion of the building set apart for the Imans. It was brought to light only in 1815, by the removal of some bookshelves and a slight brick wall, which had, probably, been put up purposely to screen it from the eyes of the superstitious multitude, and save it from mutilation. By the Spaniards it is called the Chapel of the Moorish Kings. Within it was found a tomb, containing the sword, spurs, and bones, of one of the principal chieftains who accompanied San Fernando to the siege of Cordoba, and at whose request, we were told, this beautiful little nook has been permitted to retain its Mohammedan decorations. In lightness and elegance of design it equals any portion of the Alhambra, and from its high state of preservation may be looked upon as the best specimen of Moorish workmanship extant. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine any thing more beautiful of its kind, such is the perfection of its mosaic pavement, the sharpness of the fretwork and brilliancy of the colouring on its walls, and the dazzling splendour of the gilt stalactites pendant from its roof. Adjoining this invaluable little casket is the _maksourah_, or, as it is called by the Spaniards, _el zancarron_[236] (the heel-bone): a name which favours the supposition that it was the place of burial of the founder or finisher of the mosque, rather than the sanctuary of the Koran, as is generally supposed, although, indeed, it might have been both. The architecture and ornaments of this sanctum differ from those of the rest of the mosque, being even yet more complicated and richly finished; but it is by no means in so good a state of preservation as the recess just described. The face of the arch that spans the entrance of the _zancarron_ is elaborately worked in crystals of various hues, and encompassed with moral precepts from the Koran. The interior is an octagon, only fifteen feet in diameter, and is domed over by a single block of white marble, carved into the form of a scollop-shell. Another huge slab of the same material forms its floor. The shrine of the caliph, descendant of the prophet, probably occupied the centre of this recess; round which the feet of the numberless pilgrims who visited the holy place have worked a groove in the hard marble. It is situated _now_ towards the south-west angle of the building, but in the original mosque it stood, as I have already stated, exactly in the centre of its south wall, facing the grand entrance. On each side were the apartments of the Imans; and in front, extending east and west, across the building, a space of the width of two intercolumniations was set apart as a chancel or _mikrab_, wherein the officiating priests performed their mysterious ceremonies before the people, to whom different portions of the rest of the building were appropriated, according to their rank in life. At the north end of the mosque is a spacious court, encompassed on three sides by an open colonnade, and furnished with copious fountains. Here, when occasion required, the Mussulmans purified their bodies by ablutions ere entering the holy place, and, leaving their slippers under the arcades, proceeded barefoot to the shrine of Mohammed's descendant, making divers prostrations in the course of their short journey. This court, now called the _Patio de los Naranjos_,[237] is the same width as the mosque, and adds 200 feet to its length; making the exterior dimensions of the building 574 (English) feet from north to south, and 416 from east to west. From the north wall of the court rises the _campanilla_, or belfry, from the summit of which a fine view is obtained of the city. Beneath it is an archway of more recent date than the mosque, called the Gate of Mercy, through which a flight of steps leads from the street into the court. This gate faces the principal entrance into the _Mezquita_. The cathedral is rich in silks, jewels, candlesticks, and brocades; and the altar of the chapel of Villa Viciosa is splendidly furnished. The sacristy contains also some tolerable paintings, said to be by Murillo, and other first-rate Spanish artists, but I doubt whether any of them are originals; for the French, who have a nice discrimination in these matters, twice sacked the city, and were on both occasions so little expected, that the priests had barely time to carry off the plate, and reliques of the churches, to places of greater security. Besides which, the Spaniards are prone to call every black, tarnished old painting a Murillo or a Velasquez. The bishop's palace is an immense, and rather handsome pile, standing a little removed from the cathedral, towards the river. The very face of it shows, however, that of late years the prelates have appropriated the revenues of the see to some other, perhaps more _legitimate_, though less orthodox, purpose, than that of setting their house in order, for it is in a very neglected state. The interior, which is not better looked after, exhibits, in an eminent degree, that mixture of splendour and misery so conspicuous in all things Spanish. A spacious, costly, and particularly dirty marble staircase ascends to the first floor, whereon are the state apartments; they consist of a suite of long, narrow, whitewashed rooms, communicating one with another the whole extent of the building, and each furnished with a prodigious number of shabby old chairs, an antediluvian sofa, and some daubs of paintings in poverty-stricken gilt frames. The principal apartment, or _sala de la audienca_, is hung with portraits of all the goodly persons who have worn the episcopal mitre of Cordoba, from the days of _San Damaso_ (who flourished about the middle of the third century) to the present time. Some of these paintings have much merit; but, if they are _likenesses_ of those for whom they were drawn, a disciple of Lavater or Spurzheim must either abandon his faith, or admit that most of the beetle-browed, low-crowned originals, deserved a gibbet rather than a bishop's cap. Nevertheless, several of these peculiarly "ill-favoured" ecclesiastics are--so our conductor solemnly assured us--now saints in heaven. One old gentleman, who was not exalted to the episcopal see until he had attained a very advanced age, by way of giving a sarcastic reproof to his patron, had his portrait taken, with a grim figure of death placing the mitre on his head. Another painting represents death holding the mitre in one hand, whilst with the other he is directing a dart at his victim's breast; leaving us to infer, that the bishop died whilst the pope's diploma was yet on its way to him from Rome. At the head of the bench is suspended a very good painting, and admirable likeness, of the truly amiable Pius VII.; and over the fireplace hangs an execrable daub, but an equally striking resemblance, of the detestable Ferdinand VII. The most noble part of the episcopal palace is the kitchen; which, whether the bishop be at his residence or not, daily furnishes food for 2000 poor persons.[238] The garden is laid out with taste, and contains some rare transatlantic plants. There is little else worth noticing in Cordoba. The king's palace is not occupied; the royal stud-house, where, in former days, the best breeds of Spanish horses were reared, is empty; the fine alameda, outside the city gates, is unfrequented; there is not a handsome street, I may almost say an edifice, in the place; and idleness, penury, and depravity, meet one at every step. The market is held in the _Plaza Real_, or _de la Constitucion_ (the name varying according to circumstances), and the houses encompassing it, like those in the market-place of Granada, are lofty, and furnished with rickety wooden galleries, that have a very picturesque _Prouty_ appearance. Some of the old buildings, in the narrow Moorish streets, possess the same kind, of sketchy beauty; but the houses of the other parts of the city seldom exceed two stories in height, from which circumstance Cordoba is, perhaps, the most sultry place in Andalusia. The inhabitants are a diminutive race, and the most ill-looking I have seen in Spain. During our stay at Cordoba we witnessed the grand procession of Corpus Christi, at the commencement of Lent, which is considered one of the most holy and imposing exhibitions of the Hispano-Roman church. It was a lamentably splendid sight; for a more heterogeneous, heterodoxical mixture of bigotry and liberty, superstition and constitution, wax candles and fixed bayonets, it never fell to my lot to witness. It moved through the streets, preceded by a military band of music, which played Riego's Hymn and the _Tragala_ alternately, with sacred airs and mournful dirges. This was only in keeping with the rest of the absurdities of the ceremony; but it was a crying sin to compel the poor old bishop to parade through the streets, in his full canonicals, at a _pas de valse_. The _Cordobeses_ of all classes are held to be very religious, and particularly "_servil_;" and this degrading exhibition was, probably, got up by the _exaltado_ party, then in the ascendant, to bring the prelate and priestly office into contempt. On my return to Gibraltar soon after witnessing this indecent ceremony, the Bishop of Malaga, then a refugee within the walls of the British fortress, was publicly insulted by a shameless countrywoman (the _prima donna_ of an operatic company then performing in the garrison), who, placing herself opposite to him whilst seated on one of the benches in the public gardens, sung the _Tragala_;[239] applying most emphatically to him the word _perro_ (dog), with which each verse of the constitutional ditty concludes. The venerable prelate listened most patiently until her song was concluded, and then very composedly said, "_Gracias hija mia, muchissimas gracias_;[240] in good truth, it is a bone fit only for the mouth of a _perra_."[241] The laugh was rather against the chaste Rosina, who, I should not omit, however, to mention, received a hint, that if the bishop were favoured with any more such gratuitous proofs of her vocal powers, she would herself have a disagreeable _bone_ to pick at the town-major's office. APPENDIX. A. The following brief notice of the numerous sieges and attacks, that the celebrated fortress of Gibraltar has sustained, may possess some interest in the eyes of many of my readers. It is extracted principally from Don Ignacio Lopez de Ayala's "Historia de Gibraltar," which dates the first arrival of the Saracens, and occupation of the rocky promontory by Taric ben Zaide, A.D. 710, and attributes the erection of the _Calahorra_, or castle, to Abdul Malic, A.D. 742. The Fortress (which in early days must have comprised little more than the enceinte of the present ruined castle,) appears to have remained in the undisturbed possession of the Mussulmans for six entire centuries. But Ferdinand the Fourth, at length, breaking through the mountain barrier that defended the diminished territory of the Moors, laid siege to Algesiras, and despatched a force under Don Alonzo Perez de Guzman to 1. attack Gibraltar, which very unexpectedly fell into his hands, A.D. 1309. 2. The Moslems, under Ishmael, King of Granada, failed in an attempt to recover it in 1315. 3. It fell, however, to the powerful army brought over from Africa by Abdul Malik (Aboumelic), son of the Emperor of Fez, who thenceforth assumed the title of King of Gibraltar, 1333. 4. It was besieged the same year by King Alphonso XI.; and again, with as little success, by the same heroic monarch, 5. who died of the plague under its walls, 1349. It now again remained in the undisputed possession of the Moslems for a considerable period, though it was wrested from the 6. hands of the King of Fez by Jusef, King of Granada, 1411. 7. The Spaniards again ineffectually attempted to possess themselves of it, under Don Henrique de Guzman, Conde de Nicbla, 1436. 8. But it was finally taken from the Moors by Alonzo de Arcos, Alcayde of Tarifa, 1462. 9. From him it was taken by Don Juan de Guzman, Duke of Medina Sidonia, 1468. It remained in the possession of the House of Guzman, until the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, who claimed it for the crown, but, on their demise, Don Juan de Guzman attempted again to 10. make himself master of it, 1516. 11. The town was sacked by a Turkish squadron, 1540; 12. and bombarded by the French, when affording shelter to an English fleet, 1693. 13. The fortress was captured by Sir George Rooke, 1704; 14. and besieged the same year, by a combined French and Spanish force, under the Conde de Villadarias and Monsieur de Tessé. By the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), it was ceded to England, but, immediately on the renewal of the war, was 15. besieged by the Spaniards, under the Conde de las Torres, when the lines across the isthmus were constructed, 1727. 16. The last and most celebrated siege was undertaken by the Spaniards and French in 1779, and lasted until 1783. B. "_Una estatua de San Josef, que por su corpulencia no se podia sacar oculta la extrajo un catolico llamado Josef Martin de Medina, colocado sobre un caballo à imitacion de una persona que lo montaba; la afianzó bien, la embozó con una capa i la cubrió con una montera. Otro montado à la gurupa ayudaba à sostener al Santo, i agregandose algunos combidados para mayor confusion i disimulo salieron por la calle real sin ser descubiertos._" RIGHT _Ayala, Hist. de Gibraltar._ C. I suspect the _apes_ tempted Mr. Carter to jump to the conclusion that Carteia was the Tarshish of Sacred History. Nevertheless, few places have furnished more food for conjecture than this famed city: some antiquaries, indeed, not content with Tarshish as a mere port, or even country, maintaining that the vast continent of Africa was so called; whilst others, differing _toto coelo_, imagine that the word implies the wide or open ocean! In spite of the great authorities arrayed against the vulgar opinion, that Tarshish is the self-same city as that situated on the southern coast of Asia Minor, and known in after ages as Tarsus, I cannot but subscribe to it. The difference in character between the Hebrew and Greek languages may, not unreasonably I think, be supposed to have led to the change in the mode of spelling and pronouncing the name of the place; (which in point of fact is not greater than between Dover and Douvres,) for most Jews of the present day would still pronounce Tarsus, Tarshish; whilst modern Greeks would as certainly call Tarshish, Tarsis. That _both_ were ports of the Mediterranean sea will hardly, I think, admit of dispute; since Jonah[242] embarked at Joppa (Jaffa,) to proceed to Tarshish; and Tarsus was the birth-place of St. Paul,[243] and must have been situated on the coast, but a short distance to the northward of Antioch. The chief difficulty in determining _what_ and where Tarshish was, arises from a discrepancy in the two accounts given of the building of _Jehosaphat's_ fleet, in the Books of Kings and Chronicles: the first stating, that the King of Judea "made ships _of_ Tarshish to go to _Ophir_ for gold,"[244] which ships were destroyed at Ezion Geber on the Red Sea; the latter, mentioning that the ships were built at Ezion Geber to "_go to Tarshish_."[245] Josephus makes the matter still more perplexing by saying, that "these ships were built to sail to _Pontus_, and the traffic cities of Thrace," but were destroyed from being so unwieldy, without mentioning _where_ they were either built or destroyed; thus differing from the account in Kings, which says they were made to go to Ophir, and, by implication, from the account in the Book of Chronicles, which states that they were made on the shores of the Red Sea; since vessels to trade with Pontus and Thrace would certainly have been built at the ports of Syria. Now it is quite evident, that _two_ of these three accounts must be incorrect; and it is more natural to conclude that the mistake originated in careless writing than from ignorance; since, little as the Jews (being neither sailors nor travellers) may be supposed to have known of foreign countries, they could not, even with their limited knowledge of geography, have imagined that a fleet sailing from Tyre, in the Mediterranean, was destined to the _same_ country as another fleet built on the shores of the Red Sea. And, if they were not destined to the _same_ country, the two places to which they were proceeding would certainly have been distinguished by different names. It is not, I think, unwarrantable therefore to suppose, that the Hebrew writers, in alluding to a fleet which all accounts agree was destroyed at the very port where it was built, may (supposing always our translations to be perfectly correct,) have fallen into a mistake in stating the _destination_ of that fleet, and hence that, in the Book of Chronicles, Tarshish has been written for Ophir. This appears the more likely when we bear in mind that the Jews, after the destruction of Jehosaphat's fleet, do not appear to have ever again engaged in any naval enterprises, and consequently were careless, or had no opportunity, of correcting this mistake in their histories. In support of this supposition, it may be farther observed that, throughout the Scriptures, wherever the commodities brought by the fleets from Tarshish and Ophir are mentioned, the former is stated to have come laden with the productions of Europe and Northern Africa; whilst the latter brought only gold and precious stones, and algum trees. On the discrepancy above pointed out--where there is evidently a mistake--is grounded, however, the hypothesis, that in early ages two cities or countries bore the name of Tarshish; for such a supposition is not at all borne out by the accounts previously given in the same Books of Kings and Chronicles of the fleets built by Solomon; it being particularly specified in _both_[246] that that king made (or more properly, perhaps, _launched_) a navy of ships at Ezion Geber, on the Red Sea, which, piloted by Tyrian sailors, proceeded to _Ophir_ for gold. The mention which is afterwards made[247] of Tarshish, seems merely to have been introduced to account for the vast riches of Solomon; shewing that he had other sources whence he procured gold and other valuables, besides Ophir. A slight discrepancy of a similar kind to that already noticed occurs, however, in the two accounts, in speaking of the voyage of Solomon's fleet to Tarshish; the Book of Kings stating, that he "had at sea _a navy of Tarshish_ with the navy of Hiram,"--the Book of Chronicles, that the King's ships "_went to Tarshish_ with the servants of Huram." The difference in this case is immaterial. The probability seems to be, that Solomon built a fleet on the Red Sea to go to Ophir, because he could not otherwise procure one: but that he _hired_ vessels to trade in the Mediterranean; which vessels, placed under the charge of Tyrian pilots, proceeded with his own servants (or supercargoes) to Tarshish, or Tarsus, on the coast of Cilicia, whither, once in three years, returned the fleet of that port,[248] bearing the produce of the more distant countries--Spain, Barbary, the Cassiterides, and England. And Tarsus, we may suppose, was chosen as the entrepôt for the produce of those countries, in preference to Tyre--firstly, on account of its being a more commodious port; and, secondly, as being better situated for the inland trade of Asia Minor. END OF VOL. I. LONDON: F. SHOBERL, JUN. 51, RUPERT STREET, HAYMARKET. FOOTNOTES: [1] Hallam.--Europe during the Middle Ages. [2] The causeway that connects the city of Cadiz with the Isla de Leon is said to be a _fragment_ of a work undertaken by Hercules; the castle of Santi Petri (built on a rocky island about five miles to the east of the city) to be constructed from the ruins of a temple built by that celebrated hero, and in which his bones were deposited.--Traces of this temple may be seen at low water, near the mouth of the San Pedro river. [3] That of Cadiz is literally a ruin. [4] The _Torre del Oro_, in which the precious metals brought from Mexico were formerly deposited. [5] The Lonja was built (as the word in fact implies) for an exchange, but, from the fallen state of Spanish commerce, it is now used as a depôt for the American Archives. [6] The Province of Andalusia comprises, strictly speaking, only the three kingdoms of Seville, Cordoba, and Jaen; but that of Granada is generally included by modern Geographers. [7] The kingdom of Granada was founded by Mohammed Abou Said, of the family of Alhamares, A.D. 1236. [8] The Vale of Granada is, _par excellence_, termed La Vega. _Vega_ signifies a plain. [9] He who has not seen Granada--has seen _nothing_. [10] _Cosas de España!_ is a common mode of expressing the uncertainty of every thing connected with Spain. "_Affairs of Spain._" [11] Far be it from me to disparage the information or undervalue the exertions of this most estimable lady, to turn the precious time of my _all-seeing_ countrymen to the best account: on the contrary, I can with perfect truth and from much personal experience say, that I never met with a better General Itinerary than that she has given to the public: and though, as regards Spain, the amount of information is scanty, yet it is nevertheless far more correct than that contained in works I have met with, devoted exclusively to the description of that country. [12] There are tastes which deserve a stick. [13] A mountain road. [14] It may be as well, ere I start on my travels, to explain that there are three words in Spanish by which houses of entertainment are designated, exclusive of _Parador_, which may be considered a generic term, implying a _place to stop at_.--The first in rank is the _Fonda_, whereat travellers are furnished with board and lodging, but which does not extend its accommodation to horses. Next comes the _Posada_, which accommodates man and beast, but does not always profess to supply nourishment to either.--The _Venta_ is a kind of roadside public house, where bad accommodation, and whatever else the place contains, may be had for money. [15] A muleteer. [16] _Olla_--an earthenware vessel. The well known cognominal mess is so called from being cooked therein. [17] Fill himself with gazpachos. [18] The word tar signifies also a ridge either of a house or mountain, and might with great propriety have been applied to the strongly-marked outline of the rock of Gibraltar as compared with the mountains in the neighbourhood. [19] See Note A in the Appendix. [20] Peculiar Spanish cap. [21] The original Spanish is given in the Appendix B. [22] A Year in Spain, by a young American. [23] Young American. [24] _The Place_--the name, par excellence, by which the Spaniards distinguish Gibraltar. [25] Mountaineers. [26] "We are all corrupt." Such were the words of Merino Guerra, at his parting interview with the late Sir George Don at Gibraltar, on proceeding--an exile--to South America. [27] Napoleon certainly succeeded in making his Satraps honest. In his latter days, Massena would not have dared to repeat the witty reply made to the _First Consul_ before all the Republican Generals, on his accusing him of being "_un voleur_." "_Oui, mon General, je suis un voleur, tu es un voleur, il est un voleur--nous sommes des voleurs, vous êtes des voleurs, ils sont tous des voleurs._" [28] "_El Presidente e Individuos de la Junta de Sanidad de la Ciudad de Gibraltar, que por la material pérdida de su plaza reside en esta de San Roque de su Campo, &c._"--Such was the heading of the Bill of health, with which I travelled when last in Spain. [29] The punishment of death by strangulation is so called, from the _short stick_, by turning which an iron collar, that goes round the criminal's neck, is brought so tight as to cause instant death. [30] The usual complimentary mode of expression amongst Spaniards, which has no more meaning than the "Obedient humble Servant" at the bottom of an English letter. [31] He had fallen in with Capt. Tupper of the 23d Fuzileers (with whom he was well acquainted) on his way to Algeciras, who had accompanied him to San Roque. Poor Tupper! led away by a somewhat quixotic love of strife, he was persuaded in an unlucky moment to throw up his company in one of the first regiments in the British service, to become the _Colonel_ of a regiment of adventurers, and was killed whilst gallantly leading on his men at the first attack on _Hernani_ of fatal memory. [32] A Spanish _pillared_ dollar. [33] Blue blood. [34] The term _Tertulia_ was originally applied to an assembly of _Literati_, which met to discuss the opinions held by _Tertulian_, and even to this day those who attend these, now festive, meetings, are called _Tertulianos_. The following lines contain a biting satire on the _Tertulians_ of the olden time, (for they can hardly be applied to those of the present) and might perhaps not inaptly be addressed to other self-appointed literary judges in various parts of the world. _Y entraron los Tertulianos--rigidissimos jueces, que sedientes de Aganipe, se enjuagan; pero no beben._ which may be thus freely translated.--Thirsting, the Tertulians arrive at Aganippe's fountain; infallible judges!--They rinse their mouths, but drink not. [35] Lit:--_a sigh_--a kind of puff made principally of sugar, which dissolves immediately on being dipped in water. [36] An open court. Most Spanish houses are built so as to enclose a court or garden--which in summer is much used by the family, being protected from the sun by a canvass awning. [37] Widow of Sir Emanuel Viale--Roman Consul in Gibraltar. [38] 1st Book of Kings, ch. 10. v. 22. See Note C in Appendix. [39] According to Strabo, however, the original founder of this city was Hercules, from whom it received the name of Heraclea. [40] Pieces of Artillery. [41] Large game. [42] The Spanish term for a shooting party, where beaters are employed to drive the game. [43] This must not be confounded with the more celebrated _Genil_. [44] _Aqui se vende buen vino_--Here good wine is sold. [45] Posadero--keeper of a Posada--Innkeeper. [46] Spaniards never say the Spanish grammar, the Spanish tongue, &c.--but _La Gramatica Castellana_--_La Lingua Castellana_, &c. [47] With every convenience. [48] Little sister. [49] Strictly speaking, _Knights_, but applied to all gentry. [50] Parlour. [51] Literally translated--people of _hair_, but here evidently meaning people of _substance_. [52] Infant God. [53] A _hot_ Gaspacho, which consists of the same materials as the _Gazpacho fresco_, but, when an evening meal, is usually heated at the fire. [54] Thieves. [55] Chief magistrate, where there is no _Corregidor_. [56] One does not depart a point from the truth.--Don Quijote. [57] Fowling-piece. [58] Black pudding. [59] God assists him who rises early. [60] A little charity, for the love of God. [61] Quite correct. [62] God go with you. [63] Custom-house officer. [64] There are various league measures in Spain.--1st. The _Legua geografica_, of which there are 17-1/2 in a degree of the meridian; 2ndly, the _Legua de Marina_, or of "an hour's journey;" and 3rdly, the _Legua legal_. Of the two last, a degree contains 20 and 26-1/2 respectively. The leagues on the _post-roads_ of Andalusia must be calculated at the second of these measures; that is, at three British statute miles, and 807 yards each: but on the cross roads the measurement depends upon whether the leagues are specified as being _largas_, _cortas_, or _regulares_, which may be computed at 5, 3, and 4 miles respectively, whilst that of "_una hora_" (an hour) may be reckoned like a post league, at 3-1/2 very nearly. [65] Friar's rock. [66] Here, brother Sancho, we may thrust our hands (arms?) up to the elbows in what are called adventures. [67] So it is said. [68] Publican. [69] Off!--Jesus! Maria! Joseph!--my barley! my hemp! every thing will be destroyed! [70] Little market. [71] On this subject see further at Chapter XV., vol. II. [72] Gibraltar was recaptured from the Spaniards by Abou Melic, the year following his arrival in Spain; and he assumed the title of King of Ronda, Algeciras, and Gibraltar.--He fell at the battle of Arcos, where his army was completely routed by that of Alphonso the Eleventh, commanded by the Grand Master of Calatrava, A.D. 1339. [73] And, in the course of time, the _Hisna_ trimming (Randa) has been torn off, and the place called Ronda. [74] Gentry--from _Hidalgo_ (_Higo de algo_). _Son of Somebody._ [75] A.D. 1735. Part of this bold arch is yet visible. [76] Ficus indicus. [77] A body corporate of the nobility, whose province is chiefly to encourage the breed of horses.--The present male competitor for the crown of Spain was Grand Master of the R. Maestranza of Ronda, during the lifetime of Ferdinand VII. [78] It was no unusual thing to send Regiments, that were very much in arrears of pay, to garrison the lines in front of Gibraltar; and so well was the reason of their being sent there understood, that sometimes they would take the settlement of accounts _into their own hands_. I recollect the Regiment of _La Princesa_ refusing--Officers and Men--to embark for Ceuta, because they had not been allowed to remain long enough before Gibraltar to pay themselves. The regiment was permitted to remain three months longer, and at the expiration of that time embarked perfectly satisfied: a rare instance of _moderation_. [79] A bushel nearly. [80] A real vellon is equal to 2-1/2 pence. [81] At Ronda even an Octogenarian is a Chicken. [82] May you die at Ronda, bearing pig-skins. [83] Well planted. [84] The Greek peasant may also perhaps be excepted. [85] The word _Majo_ originally signified Bravo, or Bully, but is now applied to such as court distinction by an extravagant style of dress. It is almost confined to the South of Spain. [86] _Haca_--a Pony--though the term is applied to horses of all sorts. Our word _hack_ is evidently derived therefrom, and Hackney from _Hacanea_, the diminutive of Haca. [87] To a rogue, a rogue and a half. [88] There is no vessel to measure tastes, nor scales, by which they can be tried. [89] The public walk of every Spanish town is so called.--The word is derived from _Alamo_, a poplar. [90] A small silver coin. [91] Revoltingly as this exclamation from a lady's mouth would sound to "ears polite" in England, yet it is in common use, even in the first circle of Spanish Society. The different manner of pronouncing the J, making it _Hèsus_, mitigates in some degree the disgust with which it cannot but be heard by Englishmen: the word appearing to have a different import, as it were, until the ear becomes accustomed to its use. The vulgarisms of one nation are often thus passed over by another,--most fortunately in some instances,--for with married couples it frequently happens this "ignorance is bliss." [92] Literally--Courses. [93] Bull-fighters. [94] An Amateur. [95] Literally, _Jester_.--The term has probably been applied to the bull-fighter's _assistant_, from the part he acts in drawing the animal's attention. [96] A long club stick, with which the shepherds and others keep their flocks in order, and bring to the Bull-fights to signify their impatience and displeasure, by striking it against the wood-work. [97] Acenipo, according to Ptolemy. The ruined city was discovered A.D. 1650, and the coins, inscriptions, and statues, that have been found there, leave no doubt of its being the Acenippo mentioned by Pliny as one of the cities of _Celtica_, (Lib iii.) the situation of which country had long been matter of dispute; some supposing it to have been on the banks of the Guadiana. [98] Carter, who it is clear never visited the spot, fancied it was the Guadiaro itself that issued from the _Cueva del Gato_. [99] Custom-house officers. [100] All ashes and coal, like a fairy's treasure. [101] With a clear and tranquil voice.--_Don Quijote._ [102] Wild olive. [103] _Los Reyes Catolicos_--the title by which Ferdinand and Isabella are invariably distinguished. [104] The Pass of the horror-struck Moor. [105] Mountaineer. [106] Native of Cadiz. [107] The niche which marks the direction of Mecca. [108] _Dios guarde à usted_--God preserve you. [109] _Road of partridges._ Any particularly wild and stony track is so called in Spain, from such localities being the favourite resort of that bird. [110] A train of men and beasts, from the Arabic, _Kafel_. [111] The cry by which muleteers keep their animals on the move. This word is the root of the term _arriero_, applied generally to the drivers of beasts of burthen. [112] A cigar, made entirely of tobacco (in the usual way), is so called by the country people, who very seldom consume "the weed" in that form. [113] _The cross of astonishment_--meaning the hurried cross which a devout Romanist describes upon his person, whenever unexpectedly exposed to danger. [114] Literally, a _man of whisker_--but meaning a bold fellow. [115] Very bad people. [116] God give you a bad Easter--_desunt cætera_. [117] How droll the squint-eyed fellow is! [118] He-goat--which, in allusion to his horns, is used as a term of reproach. [119] Fortune always leaves a door open. [120] A corruption of the word _Arabes_. [121] River of the city. [122] The fans mostly used are made of kid-skin, richly gilt at the back, and painted on the other side.--A Spanish belle does not hesitate to expend thirty or forty dollars on her fan, though she should have to live on _Gazpacho_ for a month, to make up for her extravagance. [123] De situ Orbis: Lib. 2. Cap. 6. [124] Treasury. [125] The name given to cigars composed of chopped tobacco rolled up in _paper_, the latter item furnishing by far the greater portion of the _smoke_. [126] Punch and eggs. [127] Without cares. [128] Buffo. [129] Literally, _strong houses_. They are brick forts of small dimensions, presenting, generally, a bastioned front on the land side, and a semi-circular battery, en barbette, to the sea. [130] The _village_ of Alcaucin, erroneously placed in Lopez' and other maps _on_ the road, is situated about half a mile from it, on the right hand. [131] Woe is me, Alhama! [132] The accounts of the founder of the kingdom of Granada differ materially.--Florez says that he was but a common ploughman, and that the surname of Alhamar was given him from his ruddy complexion.--Others, however, (and I think with greater appearance of truth,) maintain that he was a distinguished inhabitant of _Arjona_, of which place he made himself Lord previous to founding the kingdom of Granada, and that he belonged to the tribe of Alhamars, from Couffa, on the Red Sea. [133] _Torre de la Vela_--the loftiest tower of the Alhambra. [134] Al Hamara--the red. [135] A small Spanish coin. [136] This is the court of the Lions. [137] Of most volume--meaning importance. [138] A kind of drum, having a small hole in the parchment at one end, through which a close fitting stick is worked up and down so as to produce a noise like that made by a wheel requiring grease. [139] The point to which Mohammedans turn when praying. [140] Seat of the Moors. [141] The _little_ unfortunate, in allusion rather to the size of his person than the extent of his misfortunes. [142] Watch Tower. [143] The handsome. [144] Florez--España Sagrada. [145] From the Arabic word _suk_, a place of sale. [146] Dost thou know me? [147] The husband of this lady was at the time of which I write, as he has lately again been, Prime Minister of Spain. Though universally admitted to be a man of great talent, his views are considered too "_confined_" for "the circumstances of the country;" and he has each time been obliged to make way for more "_stirring men_." [148] I have already warned my readers, that in publishing the journal of my various wanderings, it did not form part of my plan to specify dates with any precision. I should perhaps state, however, that it was _not_ on the occasion of my first visit to Granada that I saw the Marquis of Montijo, nor, indeed, do I think he had then retired from public life. But, at all events, if his so doing be considered a matter of history, it is so unimportant a one, as to excuse my here describing him eight or ten years older, and much more infirm, than he really was at the time of which I write. [149] War to the knife. [150] I certainly am right in calling the old lady gover_nor_, since we pray in our churches for "our most gracious queen and governor." [151] St. James; the patron saint of Spain. [152] Though you dress up a monkey in silk, a monkey he remains. [153] I speak only of the officers of the _Regular_ army, not of the _Guerrilla_ chieftains, who, without performing the prodigies of valour _stated by themselves_, often behaved most gallantly, manoeuvered with great skill, and did good service to the general cause. [154] The name of an estate granted to the Duke of Wellington.--See Chap. xiii., Vol. 2. [155] The amount of population in Spanish towns is calculated by vecinos; the term in a literal sense meaning neighbours, but in this case implying _hearths_, or _families_. Each _vecino_ is computed at six souls, unless they are specified as being _escasos_, (scanty) when five only are reckoned for each. [156] _Hirtius--de Bello Hisp._ [157] The Eton Atlas, however, places _Ulia_ on the spot where _Castrò el Rio_ now stands, and gives the name of _Silicense_ to the River Guadajoz. [158] _That_ Spanish gentleman. [159] A very small parlour. [160] A common ejaculation of all Spaniards. [161] Real Habana cigars are so called, though those made at the Royal Manufactories in Spain more properly deserve the _lawful_ distinction. [162] _Cuidado_--care! meaning be careful. The Andalusians invariably slur over, or altogether omit, the _d_ in the final syllable, which forms the past participle of most of the Spanish verbs. I once heard of a dispute between an Irish and a Scotch soldier, touching the _true_ pronunciation of the name, _Badajos_,--one maintaining that it was _Bi Jadus_, the other _Baddyhoose_. The question was finally referred to an Andaluz contrabandista in company to decide. The Spaniard, after gravely listening to both modes, declared that, of the two, Sandy's was the nearer approach to the _real Castillian_, which he pronounced to be _Ba'jos_, Anglice _Bah-hose_. [163] The smoking of a cigar. [164] With perfect confidence--and it is astonishing and highly flattering to our national character what confidence all Spaniards place in us on a very slight acquaintance. A remarkable instance of this occurred to my friend Budgen (whose name I have once before taken the liberty of mentioning in these pages), when returning home alone one afternoon, from shooting in the Almoraima forest. A well dressed and well mounted Spaniard, who had trotted past and eyed him very hard several times, addressing some common-place observation to him on each occasion, at length, having ascertained to his satisfaction that, in spite of a half Spanish costume, he was an Englishman, reined his horse up alongside, and said he had a particular favour to ask. "It is granted, if in my power," was the reply. "I have here, then," added the Spaniard, "a number of doubloons," mentioning a very considerable sum, "which I want to smuggle into _La Plaza_, for the purchase of various goods. Your person will not be examined by the custom-house officers at _the Lines_, whereas mine is sure to be. Will you, therefore, oblige me by carrying them in for me, and lodging them at the house of ---- and Co.?" "Did you ever _see_ me before," demanded my astonished friend, "that you ask me to do this?" "No," replied the other; "but I see _you are an Englishman_." Thanking him for the compliment paid to the national character by this proof of trust, our countryman added, that he must nevertheless decline doing what was asked of him, as the confidence shown by the Spanish government in suffering Englishmen to pass into Gibraltar without examination would be badly returned by such an act. The Spaniard (fully appreciating the high sense of honour that dictated this answer) expressed a hope that he had not given offence, wished him good day, and rode forward. [165] Scorpions. [166] "_What about Religion? stuff!_" Many of my readers may suppose, that this sanguinary and summary mode of establishing a constitutional government is an _original_ project of my own, put into the mouth of _Tio Blas_; but I can assure them it is _word for word_ a _translation_. [167] To strut the streets like peacocks. [168] The Andalusian peasants usually wear a handkerchief round the head, under the _sombrero_, to absorb the perspiration. [169] In England the state of the roads is such, as to enable us to dispense with an adjective signifying _passable_ for a carriage; the Spaniards have not an equally good excuse for this deficiency in their vocabulary: I venture therefore to translate the expressive Italian word _carrozzabile_. [170] Chief magistrate of a town, who is never a native of the place. [171] The names of these places, though communicated to me in the first instance, are now withheld, at the narrator's particular request. [172] Something between a town and a village. [173] Surname. [174] In an open country. [175] To preach in the desert. [176] Address as _you_. [177] She is now in heaven. [178] It is a common saying amongst the _Serranos_, "Kill your man, and fly to Olbera for safety." [179] The daughter badly married than well maintained. [180] Literally, with outstretched foot--at his ease. [181] I can fancy some hypercritical persons quarrelling with this expression of the worthy Señor Blas; since Ceuta is not actually an island. But it is cut off from the main land by so wide a salt water ditch, that I think he was almost warranted in using the word sea-girt. [182] Scarecrow. [183] Band. [184] To gain friends is to put money out to interest, and sow on irrigated soil. [185] With closed eyes--i. e. without hesitation. [186] I interrupted the Señor Blas here, asking him if Valencia was not an _open city_? "Yes, _Señor Critico_," he replied, "but have not houses walls?" [187] Holyly into the house. [188] Conceived without sin--the invariable _acknowledgment_ of the _Ave Maria_ which a devout Spaniard pronounces on crossing the threshold of a house, be it even to commit murder. [189] Raw garlic and pure wine make one travel safely. [190] To an old dog you need not say _tus tus_. [191] A nickname for Frenchmen. [192] More wind than fire. [193] Charcoal furnaces. [194] Quarter. [195] For him who sees so well, one eye is enough. [196] Literally, _do you expend tobacco_? [197] Punk made of a dried fungus that grows round the roots of the cork tree. [198] Bomb-cigar. [199] Literally, bulls and canes--i. e. high words. [200] Throw that bone to another dog. [201] A precipice before, wolves behind. [202] Scare _wolves_. [203] Strike the iron whilst it is hot. [204] Sash--The Spanish peasants carry their money wrapped up within the folds of their wide sashes. [205] Literally, _make the fig_, that is, thrust the thumb between the fore and middle fingers in sign of contempt. [206] Give a quittance. [207] Feet uppermost. [208] Peculiar sailing boat. [209] It was founded by Ferdinand and Isabella, whilst laying siege to Granada. [210] Most Spanish houses are built in a square form, enclosing an open court, or _patio_. A servant "answers the door," by raising the latch, by means of a pulley, and demanding your business from the gallery of the first floor, a plan which would be attended with _considerable inconvenience_ in London. [211] Arm-chair. [212] Fire. [213] Cat for hare. [214] In the mouth of fame. [215] Where envy reigns, there virtue cannot live. The lines of Burns, "O wad some pow'r, the giftie gie us, To see oursels as others see us!" often occurred to me in the course of Señor Blas's story. [216] Of extracting the teeth from one who has been hanged. [217] Old crony. [218] _Pépé_, short for Josef.--_Alamin_, faithful. [219] Without stoppage. [220] To wit. [221] An olla without _bacon_--an essential ingredient for its well-being. [222] Dress worn by the herdsmen, made of sheepskins. [223] He who neglects to take a rope may be drowned. [224] To the deed with a good heart. [225] Making the salaam. [226] Literally, by who God is. [227] Gipsy. [228] Wild boar. [229] The _moderates_ were distinguished by wearing a ring--whence the term. [230] An olla that boils long loses much. [231] This was the general opinion amongst the Spanish _liberales_. [232] "_Well then_"--a conjunctional expression with which, and sundry _conques_ (with which), a Spaniard takes up and links together the different portions of a _cuenta_, the narration of which is generally interrupted by the necessity for lighting a fresh cigar, striking a fresh light, or getting rid of a superabundant supply of smoke. I have been purposely chary of these expressions, not to prolong a story which, even without them, many may think is somewhat tediously spun out. [233] Which may be thus literally translated (_si se ofrece algo_) if any thing occurs, ( ...) a hiatus that is filled up with a shrug of the shoulders; an expansion of the hands, palms outwards, and corresponding contortion of the muscles of the cheeks; all of which, like Lord Burleigh's shake of the head, has a wonderfully comprehensive meaning--viz., in which I can in any way serve you, (_ustedes no tienen que mandar_,) you have but to give me your orders. [234] My house, my wife, my servants--every thing I possess is at your disposal. [235] A much better, indeed a very good inn, has since been established. See chapter 2, vol. ii. [236] _Zancarron de Mahoma_ is a contemptuous way of speaking amongst Spaniards of the bones of the prophet, which the Mussulmans go to visit at Mecca. [237] Court of the Orange-trees. [238] This was previous to the present civil war. [239] "Swallow it;" the substance of the song being, if you do not like it (the constitution), you must swallow it, dog! [240] Thanks, my daughter, many thanks. [241] A female dog. [242] Jonah, ch. i., v. 3. [243] Acts. ch. ix., v. 11. [244] 1st Kings, ch. xxii., v. 48. [245] 2nd Chron., ch. xx., v. 36. [246] 1st Kings, ch. ix., v. 26., and 2nd Chron., ch. viii., v. 17 and 18. [247] 1st Kings, ch. x., v. 22, and 2nd Chron., ch. ix., v. 21. [248] Ezekiel, ch. xxvii., v. 12. * * * * * Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber: Zefaraya Mountains=> Zafaraya Mountains {pg v contents} An English Conntry Dance=> An English Country Dance {pg vi contents} Occnpied by a Cavalry Regiment=> Occupied by a Cavalry Regiment {pg vi contents} the commerce of the country detroyed=> the commerce of the country detroyed {pg 4} vous etes des voleurs=> vous êtes des voleurs {pg 40 n.} They rince their mouths=> They rinse their mouths {pg 52 n.} eluded his viligance=> eluded his vigilance {pg 98} bright eyed-acquaintances=> bright-eyed acquaintances {pg 128} the first days _corrida_=> the first day's _corrida_ {pg 133} the stangers=> the strangers {pg 134} answering his decription=> answering his description {pg 168} that protuded above=> that protruded above {pg 184} by the rapid progress of the christian arms=> by the rapid progress of the Christian arms {pg 203} Genaralife=> Generalife {pg 259} encicle the traveller=> encircle the traveller {pg 282} have given orders not be disturbed=> have given orders not to be disturbed {pg 381} foothpath to the river=> footpath to the river {pg 382} I solemly protested=> I solemnly protested {pg 400} 
43705	----	Etext transcriber's note: The footnotes have been located after the etext. Corrections of some obvious typographical errors have been made (a list follows the etext); the spellings of several words currently spelled in a different manner have been left un-touched. (i.e. chesnut/chestnut; every thing/everything; Our's/Ours; Codoba/Cordoba; sanitory/sanitary; your's/yours; janty/jaunty; visiters/visitors; negociation/negotiation.) The accentuation of words in Spanish has not been corrected or normalized. [Illustration: CASTLE OF XIMENA, AND DISTANT VIEW OF GIBRALTAR _On Stone by T. J. Rawlins from a Sketch by Capt C. R. Scott_ _R. Martin lithog 26, Long Acre_ _Published by Henry Colburn, 13 Great Marlborough St._] EXCURSIONS IN THE MOUNTAINS OF RONDA AND GRANADA, WITH CHARACTERISTIC SKETCHES OF THE INHABITANTS OF THE SOUTH OF SPAIN. BY CAPTAIN C. ROCHFORT SCOTT, AUTHOR OF "TRAVELS IN EGYPT AND CANDIA." "_Aqui hermano Sancho, podemos meter las manos hasta los codos, en esto que llaman aventuras._" DON QUIJOTE. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. II. LONDON: HENRY COLBURN, PUBLISHER, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET. 1838. LONDON: F. SHOBERL, JUN. 51, RUPERT STREET, HAYMARKET. CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME. PAGE CHAPTER I. Departure from Cordoba--Post Road to Cadiz--Carlota--Ecija--Carmona--Road from Ecija to Gibraltar--Locusts--Osuna--Saucejo--An Olla in perfection--Ronda--Splendid Scenery on the road to Grazalema--Distant View of Zahara--Grazalema--Extensive Prospect from the Pass of Bozal--Secluded Orchards of Benamajama--Pajarete--El Broque--Ubrique--Difficult Road across the Mountains to Ximena--Our Guide in a rage--Fine Scenery--Ximena--Strength of its Castle--Road to Gibraltar 1 CHAPTER II. Departure for Cadiz--Road round the Bay of Gibraltar--Algeciras--Sandy Bay--Gualmesi--Tarifa--Its Foundation--Error of Mariana in supposing it to be Carteia--Battle of El Salado--Mistake of La Martiniere concerning it--Itinerary of Antoninus from Carteia to Gades verified--Continuation of Journey--Ventas of Tavilla and Retin--Vejer--Conil--Spanish Method of Extracting Good from Evil--Tunny Fishery--Barrosa--Field of Battle--Chiclana--Road to Cadiz--Puente Zuazo--San Fernando--Temple of Hercules--Castle of Santi Petri--Its Importance to Cadiz 33 CHAPTER III. Cadiz--Its Foundation--Various Names--Past Prosperity--Made a Free Port in the hope of ruining the trade of Gibraltar--Unjust Restrictions on the Commerce of the British Fortress--Description of Cadiz--Its vaunted Agremens--Society--Monotonous Life--Cathedral--Admirably built Sea Wall--Naval Arsenal of La Carraca--Road to Xeres--Puerto Real--Puerto de Santa Maria--Xeres--Its Filth--Wine Stores--Method of Preparing Wine--Doubts of the Ancient and Derivation of the Present Name of Xeres--Carthusian Convent--Guadalete--Battle of Xeres 64 CHAPTER IV. Choice of Roads to Seville--By Lebrija--Mirage--The Marisma--Post Road--Cross Road by Los Cabezas and Los Palacios--Difficulty of Reconciling any of these Routes with that of the Roman Itinerary--Seville--General Description of the City--The Alameda--Display of Carriages--Elevation of the Host--Public Buildings--The Cathedral--Lonja--American Archives--Alcazar--Casa Pilata--Royal Snuff Manufactory--Cannon Foundry--Capuchin Convent--Murillo--Theatre of Seville--Observations on the State of the National Drama--Moratin--The Bolero--Spanish Dancing--The Spaniards not a Musical People 90 CHAPTER V. Society of Seville--Spanish Women--Faults of Education--Evils of Early Marriages, and Marriages de Convenance--Environs of Seville--Triana--San Juan De Alfarache Santi Ponce--Ruins of Italica--Italica not so ancient a City as Hispalis--Young Pigs and the Muses--Departure from Seville--The Marques De Las Amarillas--Weakness, Deceit, and Injustice of the Late King of Spain--Alcala De Guadiara--Utrera--Observations on the Strategical Importance of this Town--Moron--Military operations of Riego--Apathy of the Serranos during the Civil War--Olbera--Remarks on the Itinerary of Antoninus 123 CHAPTER VI. Ronda to Gaucin--Road to Casares--Difficulty in Procuring Lodgings--Finally Overcome--The Cura's House--View of the Town from the Ruins of the Castle--Its Great Strength--Ancient Name--Ideas of the Spaniards regarding Protestants--Scramble to the Summit of the Sierra Cristellina--Splendid View--Jealousy of the Natives in the matter of Sketching--The Cura and his Barometer--Departure for the Baths of Manilba--Romantic Scenery--Accommodation for Visiters--The Master of the Ceremonies--Roads to San Roque and Gibraltar--River Guadiaro and Venta 154 CHAPTER VII. The Baths of Manilba--A Specimen of Fabulous History--Properties of the Hedionda--Society of the Bathing Village--Remarkable Mountain--An English Botanist--Town of Manilba--An Intrusive Visiter--Ride to Estepona--Return by way of Casares 179 CHAPTER VIII. A Shooting Party to the Mountains--Our Italian Piqueur, Damien Berrio--Some Account of his Previous Life--Los Barrios--The Beautiful Maid, and the Maiden's Levelling Sire--Road to Sanona--Reparation against Bandits--Arrival at the Caseria--Description of its Owner and Accommodations--Fine Scenery--A Batida 202 CHAPTER IX. Luis de Castro 226 CHAPTER X. Don Luis's Narrative is interrupted by a Boar--The Batida resumed--Departure from Sanona--Road to Casa Vieja--The Priest's House--Adventure with Itinerant Wine-Merchants--Departure from Casa Vieja--Alcala De Los Gazules--Road to Ximena--Return to Gibraltar 249 CHAPTER XI. Departure for Madrid--Cordon drawn round the Cholera--Ronda--Road to Cordoba--Teba--Erroneous Position of the Place on the Spanish Maps--Its Locality agrees with that of Ategua, as described by Hirtius, and the Course of the River Guadaljorce with that of the Salsus--Road to Campillos--The English-loving Innkeeper and his Wife--An Alcalde's Dinner spoilt--Fuente De Piedra--Astapa--Puente Don Gonzalo--Rambla--Cordoba--Meeting with an old Acquaintance 267 CHAPTER XII. History of Blas El Guerrillero--_continued_ 294 CHAPTER XIII. Unforeseen Difficulties in Proceeding to Madrid--Death of King Ferdinand--Change in our Plans--Road to Andujar--Alcolea--Montoro--Porcuna--Andujar--Arjono--Torre Ximeno--Difficulty of Gaining Admission--Success of a Stratagem--Consternation of the Authorities--Spanish Adherence to Forms--Contrasts--Jaen--Description of the Castle, City, and Cathedral--La Santa Faz--Road to Granada--Our Knightly Attendant--Parador de San Rafael--Hospitable Farmer--Astonishment of the Natives--Granada--El Soto de Roma--Loja--Venta de Dornejo--Colmenar--Fine Scenery--Road from Malaga to Antequera, and Description of that City 325 CHAPTER XIV. Malaga--Excursion of Marbella and Monda--Churriana--Benalmania--Fuengirola--Discrepancy of Opinion respecting the Site of Suel--Scale to be adopted, in order to make the measurements given in the Itinerary of Antoninus agree with the Actual Distance from Malaga to Carteia--Errors of Carter--Castle of Fuengirola--Road to Marbella--Tower and Casa Fuertes--Disputed Site of Salduba--Description of Marbella--Abandoned Mines--Distance to Gibraltar 363 CHAPTER XV. A Proverb not to be lost sight of whilst travelling in Spain--Road to Monda--Secluded Valley of Ojen--Monda--Discrepancy of Opinion respecting the Site of the Roman City of Munda--Ideas of Mr. Carter on the Subject--Reasons adduced for concluding that Modern Monda occupies the Site of the Ancient City--Assumed Positions of the Contending Armies of Cneius Pompey and Cæsar, in the Vicinity of the Town--Road to Malaga--Towns of Coin and Alhaurin--Bridge over the Guadaljorce--Return to Gibraltar--Notable Instance of the Absurdity of Quarantine Regulations 382 CHAPTER XVI. The Knight of San Fernando 410 APPENDIX 439 EXCURSIONS IN THE MOUNTAINS OF RONDA AND GRANADA. CHAPTER I. DEPARTURE FROM CORDOBA--POST-ROAD TO CADIZ--CARLOTA--ECIJA--CARMONA--ROAD FROM ECIJA TO GIBRALTAR--LOCUSTS--OSUNA--SAUCEJO--AN OLLA IN PERFECTION--RONDA--SPLENDID SCENERY ON THE ROAD TO GRAZALEMA--DISTANT VIEW OF ZAHARA--GRAZALEMA--EXTENSIVE PROSPECT FROM THE PASS OF BOZAL--SECLUDED ORCHARDS OF BENAMAJAMA--PAJARETE--EL BROQUE--UBRIQUE--DIFFICULT ROAD ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS TO XIMENA--OUR GUIDE IN A RAGE--FINE SCENERY--XIMENA--STRENGTH OF ITS CASTLE--ROAD TO GIBRALTAR. On leaving Cordoba, we turned our horses' heads homewards, taking the _arrecife_, or high road, to Seville and Cadiz. This appears to follow the _direct_ Roman military way given in detail in the Itinerary of Antoninus; the distances from station to station, on the modern road, agreeing perfectly with those specified in the Itinerary, which, as it runs very straight as far as Ecija, would not be the case if the Roman road had diverged either to the right or left, as some are disposed to make it, placing _Adaras_ (one of the intermediate stations) on the margin of the Guadalquivír. Several monuments, bearing inscriptions alluding to this military way, are preserved at Cordoba. They all describe it as being from the temple of Janus _to_ the Boetis, (meaning, it must be presumed, the _mouth_ of the river) and to the ocean. The road is no longer paved, as it is described to have been in those days; but, nevertheless, it is good enough to enable a lumbering diligence to pulverize the gravel daily on its tedious way between Madrid and Seville. It is also furnished with relays of post horses,[1] but the posting establishments being, as in most other countries of Europe, under the direction of the government, is a satire upon the term _post haste_. From Cordoba to Ecija is ten leagues.[2] The road, on reaching the river _Badajocillo_, or Guadajoz, which is crossed by a lofty stone bridge, commanding a fine view of Cordoba, leaves the rich alluvial valley of the Guadalquivír, and enters upon an undulated tract of country, that extends nearly all the way to Ecija. At three leagues is the scattered village and post-house of Mango-negro, and three leagues beyond that again, the settlement of Carlota. The ride is most uninteresting; as, besides being tamely outlined and thinly peopled, the country is nearly destitute of wood, and, in the summer season, of water; though, judging from the extraordinary number of bridges, especially on drawing near Carlota, there must be a superabundance in winter. Carlota is one of the numerous villages which Charles the Third colonized from the Tyrol. It consists principally of isolated cottages, standing some hundred yards apart, and the same distance from the road; but there is a small congregation of houses round the chapel, post-house, and _Casa del Ayuntamiento_,[3] and a _Gasthof_, which I can say, from personal experience, would do no discredit to Innsbruck itself. The parish contains 250 houses, and a population of 1500 souls. The fields round Carlota certainly appear to be better tilled than those in other parts of the country, and there is a German tidiness about its white cottages, as well as a platterfacedness about the little white-headed urchins assembled round the doors, that are quite anti-Spanish. We obtained an excellent dinner at the _Tyroler Adler_, and, in the afternoon, taking a by-road that struck off from the post route to the right, cantered through plantations of olives nearly all the way to Ecija,--four leagues. In the whole of the distance we did not see a drop of running water, until we arrived on the brow of the hill overlooking the river Genil. From this spot there is a fine view of the city of Ecija, situated on the opposite bank. The volume of the Genil increases but little between Granada and Ecija; for its principal feeders, though falling into it below Granada, are expended in irrigating the _vega_; and the _salados_, on the western side of the _Serranía de Ronda_, are mostly dry during the summer. In winter, however, the Genil is so increased, that the bridge at Ecija (a solid stone structure of eleven arches,) is carried quite across the valley, although the bed of the river is not above 100 yards wide. Ecija is the Astigi of the Romans. It stands on a gentle acclivity, some little distance from the Genil, and bears evident marks of antiquity. Almost all traces of its walls have disappeared, however; and what little remains of its tapia-built castle shows it to have been a work of the Moors. The principal streets are wide, and contain many good houses; and the _plaza_ is particularly well worth a visit from the lovers of the picturesque. The city contains sixteen convents, and two hospitals, with churches in proportion. None of them offers much to interest the protestant traveller; but, I believe, several boast of possessing valuable relics. The Royal stud-house is fast going to decay. The population of Ecija is estimated at 30,000 souls; a number that appears totally disproportioned to the size of the city; particularly, as it contains but a few tanneries, and trifling manufactories of shoes, saddlery, &c. But, from the extreme fertility of the soil in its neighbourhood--considered the most productive and best cultivated in Andalusia--it is very possible this amount may not be exaggerated; for in Spain the agriculturalists do not scatter themselves about in small villages and hamlets over its surface, as in other countries, but assemble together in large towns; so that those places which are situated in fertile districts are as densely populated as our manufacturing towns. The distance that a Spanish peasant sometimes travels daily, to and from his work, is truly surprising, in a people that, generally speaking, like to save themselves trouble. Whilst getting in the harvest, however, they erect _ranchas_, or rush huts, to shelter them from the midday sun and night dews, and dwell in these temporary habitations until their work is completed. The crops of corn in the neighbourhood of Ecija are remarkably fine, yielding forty to one, and though not so tall, perhaps, as those of the _vega_ of Granada, the grains are larger and better ripened. I must not omit to say a good word for the _Posada_,--the Post-house,--which I do the more willingly from being so seldom called upon to speak in terms of commendation of Spanish "houses of entertainment." Suffice it to observe, that, provided the traveller be very hungry, and moderately fatigued, he may reckon on getting a supper that he will be able to eat, and a bed whereon--albeit hard--he may obtain some hours' unmolested repose. The remainder of the post road to Seville is so perfectly uninteresting, that, reserving the Andalusian capital for a future tour, I shall take a more direct route back to Gibraltar, through the _Serranía_ de Ronda; merely offering a few remarks on the town of Carmona, which is situated about two thirds of the way between Ecija and Seville, and referring my readers to the Itinerary in the Appendix for any further details as to the distances from place to place along the road. Carmona is one of the few Roman towns of Boetica of whose identity there is scarcely a doubt; its name having undergone little or no change. It is mentioned by most of the ancient writers, and called by them, indifferently, Carmo and Carmona, and by Julius Cæsar was esteemed one of the strongest posts in the whole country. Its position, considered relatively with the adjacent ground, is, indeed, most commanding; being on the edge of a vast plateau of very elevated land, which, stretching many miles to the south, falls abruptly along the course of the river Corbones. The Roman name for this river is, I think, doubtful. Florez, and most antiquaries, suppose it to be the _Silicensis_. Some, and, as it appears to me, with better reason, give that name to the Badajocillo. Be that as it may, the Corbones is but an inconsiderable stream, and is now crossed by a stone bridge of three arches. The ascent to Carmona is very steep and tedious. The city is entered through a triumphal Roman arch, which was repaired and spoilt by order of Charles III. Another Roman gateway stands at the southern extremity of the town, by which the road to Seville leaves it; and various parts of the walls which yet encompass the place are the work of the same people. The castle, however, is a relique of the Moors, and in a very ruinous condition. This stronghold was wrested from the Moors by San Fernando, after a six months' investment. It was a favourite place of residence of Peter, surnamed the Cruel, who, looking upon it as impregnable, left his children there in fancied security when he took the field for the last time against his brother. Soon after Peter's death, however, it fell into the hands of his rival, who, according to some accounts, caused the children (his nephews) to be put to death in cold blood. The streets of Carmona are wide, clean, and well-paved; and the alameda is enchanting, commanding a superb view of the ruined fortress, and over the rich vales of the Corbones, and more distant Guadalquivír, and embracing, at the same time, the whole chain of the Ronda mountains to the eastward. The population of the place is about 10,000 souls. The inn is execrable. The post road to Cadiz is directed from Carmona on Alcalà de Guadiara, where a branch to Seville strikes off, nearly at a right angle, to the east, thereby making a considerable détour. But in summer, carriages even may proceed to Seville by a cross road, which not only lessens the dust, but reduces the distance from six _long_ to the same number of _short_ leagues; or, in other words, effects a saving of about three miles. I now return to Ecija, and take the road from that city to Osuna; which is tolerably good, and practicable for carriages during the greater part of the year. The distance is five (very long) leagues. The country presents a slightly undulated surface, and, excepting round the edges of some basins wherein extensive lakes have been formed, is altogether under the plough. At a little distance from the road, on the left hand, a stream, called _El Salado_, flows towards the Genil. It does not communicate with these lakes, nor has the name it bears been given from its being impregnated with salt. During our ride, we observed a number of men advancing in skirmishing order across the country, and thrashing the ground most savagely with long flails. Curious to know what could be the motive for this Xerxes-like treatment of the earth, we turned out of the road to inspect their operations, and found they were driving a swarm of locusts into a wide piece of linen spread on the ground at some distance before them, wherein they were made prisoners. These animals are about three times the size of an English grasshopper. They migrate from Africa, and their spring visits are very destructive; for in a single night they will entirely eat up a field of young corn. The _Caza de Langostas_[4] is a very profitable business to the peasantry; as, besides a reward obtained from the proprietor of the soil in consideration for service done, they sell the produce of their _chasse_ for manure at so much a sack. Osuna is generally admitted to be the Urso,[5] Ursao, and Ursaon, of the Roman historians; though it agrees in no one particular with the description given of that place by Hirtius; for it is not by any means "strong by nature;" it is in the vicinity of extensive forests--rendering it perfectly absurd to suppose that Cæsar's troops "had to bring wood thither all the way from Munda;"--and, so far from "there being no rivulet within eight miles of the place,"[6] a fine stream meanders under its very walls. The town is situated at the foot of a hill that screens it effectually to the eastward, and the summit of which is occupied by an old castle of considerable strength and size, but now fast crumbling to decay. The streets are wide and well paved, the houses particularly good;--indeed, some of the palaces of the provincial nobility (with whom it was formerly a favourite place of residence) are strikingly handsome; in particular, that of the Duke who takes his title from the city; and notwithstanding that the streets are overgrown with grass, and the houses covered with mildew, I am, nevertheless, disposed to call Osuna the best built and handsomest city in Andalusia, it contains a university, fourteen convents, for both sexes, and a population of 16,000 souls; but has little or no trade--in fact, though on the crossing of two high roads, (viz., from Gibraltar to Madrid, and from Granada to Seville) it has all the dullness of a secluded country village. The vicinity is very fruitful in olives and corn; the soil is a whitish clay. To the S.E. the country is tolerably level all the way to Antequera, and to the west is nearly flat to Seville; but at about a mile southward from the city, shoot up the entangled roots of the mountains of Ronda, presenting on that side a belt of very intricate country. There are two roads to that place, the distance by the better, which, I think, is also rather the shorter, of the two, is nine leagues. It leaves Osuna by the gate of Granada, and, crossing the before-mentioned stream (which is one of the sources of the Corbones), advances some distance along a wide olive-planted valley. It then quits the great road to Granada (which continues along the valley), and ascends a steep and very long hill, from the crest of which, distant about three miles from Osuna, there is a splendid view of the city, and of the spacious plains extending to and bordering the distant Guadalquivír, studded with the towns of Marchena, Fuentes, Palmar, and Carmona. The road continues along the summit of the elevated range of hills which it has now attained, for about five miles, winding amongst some singularly mammillated hummocks, that have very much the appearance of the tumuli left in an exhausted mining country. A succession of strongly marked and peculiarly rugged ravines present themselves along the eastern side of the ridge, and the ground falls also very abruptly in the opposite direction; but to the south, whither the road is directed, the descent is much more gradual; and from the foot of the hill, which is bathed by a rivulet wending its way to the Genil, the country is tolerably level, and the road extremely good the remaining distance to Saucejo. In former days, this route was practicable for carriages throughout, and with very little labour it might again be made so; but, though the high road from the capital to Algeciras and Gibraltar, it is but little travelled. The other road from Osuna to Ronda joins in here on the right. The village of Saucejo is a post station three leagues from Osuna, and six from Ronda. It contains some eight hundred inhabitants, great abundance of stabling, but not one decent house. The posada is a peculiarly unpromising establishment, and the landlady's face such as to shut out all hope of any sound wine being found within its influence. We had left Osuna so late in the day, however, that it would have been vain to attempt reaching Ronda ere nightfall. We, therefore, reluctantly took possession of the _sala_, and, presenting our sour-faced hostess with a rabbit and some partridges that we had purchased on the road, asked if she could furnish the other requisites for the concorporation of an _olla_, and whether it would be possible to let us have our meal ere midnight; to both of which questions, with sundry consequential nods of the head, she replied severally, _en casa llena, presto se guisa la cena_.[7] Notwithstanding this assurance, our supper was long in making its appearance, for the operations of an _olla_ cannot be hurried. But, when it did come, it bespoke our landlady to be a _cordon bleu_ of the first class; the _pimento_[8] had been administered with judgment; the _berza_[9] had duly extracted the flavour from the rabbit and partridges; the _chorizo_[10] had imparted but the desirable smack of garlic to the other ingredients; and the nutty savour of the _tocino_[11] was beyond all praise. Nor was her wine such as we had expected; though somewhat too light to have much influence on the digestion of the unctuous mess placed before us. From Saucejo the road again branches into two, one route proceeding by way of Almargen, the other by the Venta del Granadal. Both are _reckoned_ six leagues; but the last mentioned is better than the other, as well as shorter by several miles. It crosses a considerable stream (here called the Algamitas, but which is, in fact, the main source of the Corbones) by a ford, about three miles from Saucejo. The descent to the stream is very bad, and, after keeping along its bank for another mile, the road mounts to some elevated table land, from which the view to the westward is obstructed by the rocky peaks of two detached mountains about a mile off. These may be considered the outposts of the Serranía in that direction; and, on the rough side of the more considerable of the two, is the _Hermita de Caños Santos_. The country becomes very wild as the road advances, and rugged tors, partially covered with wood, rise on all sides. At nine miles from Saucejo is the lone venta of Grañadal, and beyond it the mountains rise to a yet greater height, but their slopes are less abrupt, and are covered with forests of oak and cork. At twelve miles a track branches off to the right, proceeding to the little town of Alcalà del Valle, which, though distant only about half a mile, is not visible from the road. Soon after, a wide valley opens to the view, at the bottom of which, encased by steep rocky banks, flows the river _Guadalete_. This river is by some considered the _Lethe_ of the ancients; but, if it be so, our long-cherished notions of the beauty of the Elysian fields have been wofully faulty, for the country is rather tame, and the soil stony and ungrateful. Thus far, however, it answers the description of Virgil, that you "Breathe in ample fields the soft Elysian air." The town of Setenil is perched on a crag overhanging the left bank of the Guadalete, and distant about three miles from the road, which keeps under the broad summit of the hills forming the northern boundary of Elysium. The sides of these are partially cultivated, and, from time to time, a low cottage is met with as the road proceeds; but it soon enters a cork-forest, and, threading its dark mazes for about four miles, gradually gains the crest of the chain of hills overlooking the vale of Ronda to the north, whence a splendid view is obtained of the fertile basin, its rock-built fortress, and jagged sierras. The descent on the southern side of the hills is rather rapid, and, after proceeding downwards about a mile, the road is joined on the left by the other route from Saucejo. From hence to Ronda is two short leagues. The road still continues descending for another mile; and, in the course of the two following, it crosses three deep ravines, watered by copious streams, and planted with all sorts of fruit-trees. In the bottom of one of these dells is ensconced the village of Arriate. The last is a deep and very singular rent that extends, east and west, quite across the basin of Ronda. Immediately after crossing this fissure, the road begins to ascend the range of hills whereon Ronda is situated, and, after winding for three miles amongst vineyards, olive grounds, and corn-fields, enters the city on its north side. We were seven hours performing the journey, although the distance is but six _leguas regulares_. I have already given so full a description of Ronda, that I will pass on without further remark. To vary the scenery, and moved by curiosity to visit some of the scenes of our acquaintance Blas's exploits, we determined to take a somewhat circuitous route homewards, by way of Grazalema and Ubrique. The distance to the first named town is three long leagues. The road descends gradually to the south-western extremity of the basin of Ronda, where the Guadiaro, forming its junction with the Rio Verde, enters a rocky defile, and is lost sight of amidst the roots of the rugged sierras that spread themselves in all directions towards the Mediterranean. Crossing the last named stream just before its confluence with the Guadiaro, the road at once begins ascending towards a deeply marked gap, that breaks the ridge of the mountains which rise along the right bank of the stream. The pass is about four miles from Ronda, and commands a splendid view of the fruitful valley, which lies, like an outspread _cornucopia_, at its foot. On the other side, too, the scenery is not less fine, though of a totally different nature. There a singular double-peaked crag rises up boldly and darkly on the left hand, casting its shadow on the bright foliage of an oak forest, which, deep sunk below the rest of the country, spreads its verdant covering as far to the eastward as where the huge Sierra Endrinal raises its cloud-enveloped head above all the other mountains of the range. High seated on the side of this, a white speck is seen which, in the course of time, proves to be the town of Grazalema, whither we are bending our steps. Proceeding onwards, from the pass about a mile, the little village of Montejaque shows itself, peeping from between the two peaks of the mountain on the left, and, seemingly, quite inaccessible, even to a goat. It is inhabited by a horde of half-tamed Saracens, who pride themselves greatly on having foiled all the attempts of the French to make themselves masters of the place;[12] and, as this elevated little village is but three quarters of a mile from the high road, (which is the principal communication between Malaga and Cadiz) it must have possessed the means of annoying the enemy considerably. For the next two miles our way lay along the spine of a somewhat elevated ridge; whence we looked down upon the before-mentioned wooded country on one side, and on the other into a well cultivated valley. From the bed of this, but at several leagues' distance, the rock-built town of Zahara rears its embattled head. This little fortress is very noted in Moorish history; its capture by Muley Aben Hassan, during a period of truce, having provoked the renewal of the war which led to the loss of the crown, not only to himself first, but to his race afterwards. One of the sources of the Guadalete flows in this valley, bathing the walls of Zahara, which stands on the site of the Roman town of Lastigi.[13] The present name, I should imagine, (considering the locality) is derived rather from the Arabic word _Zaharat_ (mountain top) than _Z[=a]hara_, (flowery) as supposed by Mr. Carter; for the streets are cut out of the live rock on which the place is built. The road to Grazalema, now mounting another step, enters a dark forest, and, continuing for five miles along the top of a narrow ridge, descends into a vine-clad valley, that spreads out at the foot of the rough sierra on the side of which Grazalema is seated. The ascent to the town is very bad, and is rendered worse than it otherwise would be by being paved--for a paved road in Spain is sure to be neglected. We scrambled up with much difficulty, and alighting at the posada, remained for an hour or two, to procure some breakfast, and examine the place. It is a singularly built town, the streets being heaped one above another, like steps; and in several instances they are even worked out of the native rock. There is, nevertheless, a fine open market-place, which we found well supplied with fruit, vegetables, and game, including venison and wild boar; and the town possesses several manufactories of coarse cloths and serges. From its situation, immediately over the mouth of a deep ravine, by which alone access can be obtained to one of the principal passes in the Serranía, Grazalema occupies a very important military position, and may be considered almost inassailable; for, whilst at its back a perfectly impracticable mountain covers it from attack, it is protected to the north and east by the precipitous ravine it overlooks; up the side of which, even the narrow road from Ronda has not been practised without much labour. The only side, therefore, on which it has to apprehend danger, is that fronting the pass above it--i.e. to the westward. But it has the means of offering an obstinate resistance, even in that direction. Commanding, as it thus does, so important a passage over the mountains, there can be but little doubt that Grazalema stands upon, or near, the site of some Roman fortress; and, for reasons which I shall hereafter mention, I feel inclined to place here the town of Ilipa.[14] The inhabitants amount to about 6,000, and are a savage, ruffianly-looking race. During the "War of Independence," assisted by their brethren of the neighbouring mountain fastnesses, they frequently rose against their invaders, driving them out of the place; and on one occasion they repulsed a French column of several thousand men, which was sent to dispossess them of their stronghold. On leaving Grazalema, the road enters the narrow, rock-bound ravine leading up to the pass, down which a noisy torrent rushes, leaping from precipice to precipice, and lashing the base of the crag-built town, whence we had just issued. A newly-built bridge, whose high-crowned arch places it beyond the anger of the foaming stream, gives a passage to the road to Zahara, which winds along the eastern face of the Sierra del Pinar. Our route, however, continues ascending yet a mile and a half along the right bank of the torrent, ere it reaches the long descried gap in the mountain chain, the name of which is _El Puerto Bozal_. This is considered one of the most elevated passes in the whole Serranía de Ronda, and must be at least 4,000 feet above the level of the sea. The mountains on either side rise to a far greater elevation; that on the right, distinguished by the name of _El Pico de San Cristoval_, is said (as has already been stated) to have been the first land made by Columbus on his return from the discovery of the "New World." The views from this pass are truly grand. At our backs lay the beautifully wooded country we had travelled over in the morning--Ronda and its vale, and the distant sierras of El Burgo and Casarabonela. Before us, a wild mountain country extended for several miles; and beyond, spreading as far as the eye could reach, were the vast plains of Arcos, through which the gladdening Guadalete, winding its way past Xeres, turns to seek the bay of Cadiz, whose glassy surface the white walls of its proud mistress, and the deep blue ocean, could be seen distinctly on the left, though at a distance of more than fifty miles. From the Puerto Bozal, a _trocha_, directed straight upon Ubrique, strikes off to the left; but the saving in point of distance which this road offers, is counterbalanced by its extreme ruggedness. We, therefore, took the more circuitous route to that place by El Broque, which, for the first five miles, is itself sufficiently bad to satisfy most people. The views along it, looking to the south, are very fine; but the lofty barren range of San Cristoval, on the side of which it is conducted, shuts out the prospect in the opposite direction. At length, crossing over a narrow tongue that protrudes from the side of the rugged mountain, we entered a dark, wooded ravine, and began to descend very rapidly, and, to our astonishment, by a very good road. After proceeding in this way about a mile, the valley gradually expanding, we emerged from the wood, and found ourselves in a sequestered glen of surpassing loveliness. A neat white chapel, with a picturesque belfry, stood on a sloping green bank on our right hand, and, scattered in all directions about it, were the trim, vine-clad cottages of its frequenters, each screened partially from the sun in a grove of almond, cherry, and orange trees. A crystal stream gurgled through the fruitful dell, which was bounded at some little distance by high wooded hills and rocky cliffs. This secluded retreat is called _La Huerta[15] de Benamajáma_,--the peculiarly guttural name proving it to have been a little earthly paradise of the Moors. The road, which had thus far been nearly west, here, continuing along the course of the little river Posadas, turns to the south; and, keeping under a range of wooded hills on the left hand, in about an hour reaches El Broque. This portion of the road is very good, and from it, looking over the great plain bordering the Guadalete, may be seen the lofty tower of _Pajarete_, perched on a conical mound, at about a league's distance. The justly celebrated sweet wine called by this name was originally produced from the vineyards in its vicinity, but it is now made principally at Xeres. El Broque is a small clean town, abounding in wood and water, and containing from 1500 to 2000 inhabitants. To the east it is overshadowed by a range of lofty, wooded hills, which may be considered the last buttresses of the Serranía; for the road to Cadiz, which here branches off to the right, crossing the Posadas, traverses an uninterrupted plain all the way to Arcos. The route to Ubrique, on the other hand, again strikes into the mountains; though, for yet two miles further, it follows the course of the little river and its impending sierra. Arrived, however, at the mouth of a ravine, which brings down another mountain-torrent to the plain, it turns to the north, keeping along the margin of the stream, until the bridge of Tavira offers the means of passage; when, crossing to the opposite bank, it once more enters the intricate belt of mountains. The name of the stream which is here crossed is the Majaceite; and on its right bank, close to the bridge, is a solitary venta. The scenery is extremely beautiful. The mountains of Grazalema, which we had traversed in the morning, form the background; the ruined tower of Alamada, perched on an isolated knoll, stands boldly forward in middle distance; and close at hand are the rough, coppiced banks and crystal current of the winding Majaceite. From hence to Ubrique the country is very wild and rugged. The town is first seen (when about a league off) from the summit of a round-topped hill, six miles from El Broque. It is nestled in the bottom of a deep valley, hemmed in by singularly rugged mountains. The first part of the descent is gradual, but a steep neck of land must be crossed ere reaching the town; and, as if to render the approach as difficult as possible, the road over this mound has been paved. Amongst the rude masses of sierra that encompass Ubrique, numerous rivulets pierce their way to the lowly valley, where, collected in two streams, they are conducted to the town, and, fertilizing the ground in its neighbourhood, cause it to be encircled by a belt of most luxuriant vegetation. The mountains in the vicinity abound also in lead-mines, but they are no longer worked. "Where are we to find money? Where are we to look for security?" were the answers given to _my_ question, "Why not?" The streets of Ubrique are wide, clean, and well paved; the houses lofty and good; but the inn, alas! affords the wearied traveller little more than bare walls and a wooden floor. The population of the place may be estimated at 8000 souls. It contains some tanneries, water-mills, and manufactories of hats and coarse cloths. It does not strike me as being a likely site for a Roman city. We were on horseback by daybreak, having before us a long ride, and, for the first five leagues (to Ximena), a very difficult country to traverse. For about a mile the road is paved, and confined to the vale in which Ubrique stands by a precipitous mountain. But, the westernmost point of this ridge turned, the route to Ximena (leaving a road to Alcalà de los Gazules on the right) takes a more southerly direction than heretofore, and, entering a hilly country, soon dwindles into a mere mule-track. Ere proceeding far in this direction, another road branches off to Cortes, winding up towards some cragged eminences that serrate the mountain-chain on the left. The path to Ximena, however, continues yet two miles further across the comparatively undulated country below, which thus far is under cultivation; but, on gaining the summit of a hill, distant about four miles from Ubrique, a complete change takes place in the face of the country; the view opening upon a wide expanse of forest, furrowed by numerous deep ravines, and studded with rugged tors. The road through this overshadowed labyrinth is continually mounting and descending the slippery banks of the countless torrents that intersect it, twisting and winding in every direction; and, on gaining the heart of the forest, the path is crossed and cut up by such numbers of timber-tracks, and is screened from the sun's cheering rays by so impervious a covering, that the difficulty of choosing a path amongst the many which presented themselves was yet further increased by that of determining the point of the compass towards which they were respectively directed. The guide we had brought with us, though pretending to be thoroughly acquainted with every pathway in the forest, was evidently as much at a _nonplus_ as we ourselves were; and his muttered _malditos_ and _carajos_, like the rolling of distant thunder, announced the coming of a storm. At length it burst forth: the track he had selected, after various windings, led only to the stump of a venerable oak. Never was mortal in a more towering passion; he snatched his hat from his head, threw it on the ground, and stamped upon it, swearing by, or at--for we could hardly distinguish which--all the saints in the calendar. After enjoying this scene for some time, we spread ourselves in different directions in search of the beaten track; and, at last, a swineherd, attracted by our calls to each other, came to our deliverance; and our guide, after bestowing sundry _malditos_ upon the wood, the torrents, the timber-tracks, and those who made them, resumed his wonted state of composure, assuring us, that there was some accursed hobgoblin in this _hi-de-puta_ forest, who took delight in leading good Catholics astray; that during the war an entire regiment, misled by some such _malhechor_,[16] had been obliged to bivouac there for the night, to the great detriment of his very Catholic Majesty's service. Soon after this little adventure we reached a solitary house, called the _Venta de Montera_, which is something more than half way between Ubrique and Ximena; _i.e._ eleven miles from the former, and nine from the latter. A little way beyond this the road reaches an elevated chain of hills, that separates the rivers Sogarganta and Guadiaro; the summit of which being rather a succession of peaks than a continuous ridge, occasions the track to be conducted sometimes along the edge of one valley, sometimes of the other. The mountain falls very ruggedly to the first-named river, but in one magnificent sweep to the Guadiaro. The views on both sides are extremely fine; that on the left hand embraces Gibraltar's cloud-wrapped peaks, the mirror-like Mediterranean, Spain's prison-fortress of Ceuta, and the blue mountains of Mauritanía; the other looks over the silvery current of the Sogarganta, winding amidst the roots of a peculiarly wild and wooded country, and towards the rock-built little fortress of Castellar. The road continues winding along this elevated heather-clad ridge for four miles, and then descends by rapid zig-zags towards Ximena. The town lies crouching under the shelter of a rocky ledge, that, detached from the rest of the sierra, and crowned with the ruined towers of an ancient castle, forms a bold and very picturesque feature in the view, looking southward. The town is nearly a mile in length, and consists principally of two long narrow streets, one extending from north to south quite through it, the other leading up to the castle. The rest of the _callejones_[17] are disposed in steps up the steep side of the impending hill, and can be reached only on foot. The old castle--in great part Roman, but the superstructure Moorish--is accessible only on the side of the town (east), and in former days must have been almost impregnable. The narrow-ridged ledge whereon it stands has been levelled, as far as was practicable, to give capacity to this citadel, which is 400 yards in length, and varies in breadth from 50 to 80. It rises gently, so as to form two hummocks at its extremities; and the narrowest part of the inclosure being towards the centre, it has very much the form of a calabash. A strongly built circular tower, mounting artillery, and enclosed by an irregular loop-holed work of some strength, occupies the southern peak of the ridge; and a fort of more modern structure, but feeble profile, covers that in which it terminates to the north. An irregularly indented wall, or in some places scarped rock, connects these two retrenched works along the eastern side of the ridge; but, in the opposite direction, the cliff falls precipitously to the river Sogarganta; rendering any artificial defences, beyond a slight parapet wall, quite superfluous. Numerous vaulted tanks and magazines afforded security to the ammunition and provisions of the isolated little citadel; but they are now in a wretched state, as well as the outworks generally; for the fortress was partially blown up by Ballasteros, (A.D. 1811) upon his abandoning it, on the approach of the French, to seek a surer protection under the guns of Gibraltar. In exploring the ruined tanks of this old Moorish fortress, chance directed our footsteps to an unfrequented spot where some smugglers were in treaty with a revenue _guarda_, touching the amount of bribe to be given for his connivance at the entry of sundry mule loads of contraband goods into the town on the following night. We did not pry so curiously into the proceedings of the contracting parties, as to ascertain the precise sum demanded by this faithful servant of the crown for the purchase of his acquiescence to the proposed arrangement, but, from the elevated shoulders, outstretched arms, and down-stretched mouth, of one of the negociators, it was evident that the demand was considered unconscionable; and the roguish countenance of the custom-house shark as clearly expressed in reply, "But do you count for nothing the sacrifice of principle I make?" From the ruined ramparts of Fort Ballasteros (the name by which the northern retrenched work of the fortress is distinguished) the view looking south is remarkably fine. The keep of the ancient castle, enclosed by its comparatively modern outworks, and occupying the extreme point of the narrow rocky ledge whereon we were perched, stands boldly out from the adjacent mountains; whilst, deep sunk below, the tortuous Sogarganta may be traced for miles, wending its way towards the Almoraima forest. Above this rise the two remarkable headlands of Gibraltar and Ceuta; the glassy waterline between them marking the separation of Europe and Africa. That Ximena was once a place of importance there can be no doubt, since it gave the title of King to Abou Melic, son of the Emperor of Fez; and that it was a Roman station (though the name is lost,) is likewise sufficiently proved, as well by the walls of the castle, as by various inscriptions which have been discovered in the vicinity. At the present day, it is a poor and inconsiderable town, whose inhabitants, amounting to about 8000, are chiefly employed in smuggling and agriculture. On issuing from the town, the road to Gibraltar crosses the Sogarganta, having on its left bank, and directly under the precipitous southern cliff of the castle rock, the ruins of an immense building, erected some sixty years back, for the purpose of casting shot for the siege of Gibraltar! The distance from Ximena to the English fortress is 25 miles. The road was, in times past, practicable for carriages throughout; and even now is tolerably good, though the bridges are not in a state to drive over. It is conducted along the right bank of the Sogarganta; at six miles, is joined by a road that winds down from the little town of Castellar on the right; and, at eight, enters the Almoraima forest by the "Lion's Mouth," of which mention has already been made. The river, repelled by the steep brakes of the forest, winds away to the eastward to seek the Guadiaro and Genil. Here I will take a temporary leave of my readers, to seek a night's lodging at a cottage in the neighbourhood, which, being frequented by some friends and myself in the shooting season, we knew could furnish us with clean beds and a _gazpacho_. CHAPTER II. DEPARTURE FOR CADIZ--ROAD ROUND THE BAY OF GIBRALTAR--ALGECIRAS--SANDY BAY--GUALMESI--TARIFA--ITS FOUNDATION--ERROR OF MARIANA IN SUPPOSING IT TO BE CARTEIA--BATTLE OF EL SALADO--MISTAKE OF LA MARTINIERE CONCERNING IT--ITINERARY OF ANTONINUS FROM CARTEIA TO GADES VERIFIED--CONTINUATION OF JOURNEY--VENTAS OF TAVILLA AND RETIN--VEJER--CONIL--SPANISH METHOD OF EXTRACTING GOOD FROM EVIL--TUNNY FISHERY--BARROSA--FIELD OF BATTLE--CHICLANA--ROAD TO CADIZ--PUENTE ZUAZO--SAN FERNANDO--TEMPLE OF HERCULES--CASTLE OF SANTI PETRI--ITS IMPORTANCE TO CADIZ. Hoping that the taste of my readers, like my own, leads them to prefer the motion of a horse to that of a ship, the chance of being robbed to that of being sea-sick, and the savoury smell of an _olla_ to the greasy odour of a steam engine, I purpose in my next excursion to conduct them to Cadiz by the rude pathway practised along the rocky shore of the Straits of Gibraltar, and thence, "_inter æstuaria Bætis_," to Seville, instead of proceeding to those places by the more rapid and now generally adopted means of fire and water. From the last named "fair city" we will return homewards by another passage through the mountains of Ronda. To authorise _me_--a mere scribbler of notes and journals--to assume the plural _we_, that gives a Delphic importance to one's opinions (but under whose shelter I gladly seek to avoid the charge of egotism), I must state that a friend bore me company on this occasion; our two servants, with well stuffed saddle-bags and _alforjas_, "bringing up the rear." Proceeding along the margin of the bay of Gibraltar, leaving successively behind us the ruins of Fort St. Philip, which a few years since gave security to the right flank of the lines drawn across the Isthmus in front of the British fortress; the crumbling tower of _Cartagena_, or _Recadillo_, which, during the seven centuries of Moslem sway, served as an _atalaya_, or beacon, to convey intelligence along the coast between Algeciras and Malaga; and, lastly, the scattered fragments of the yet more ancient city of Carteia, we arrive at the river Guadaranque. The stream is so deep as to render a ferry-boat necessary. That in use is of a most uncouth kind, and so low waisted that "Almanzor," who was ever prone to gad amongst the Spanish lady Rosinantes, could not be deterred from showing his gallantry to some that were collected on the opposite side of the river, by leaping "clean out" of the boat before it was half way over. Fortunately, we had passed the deepest part of the stream, so that I escaped with a foot-bath only. The road keeps close to the shore for about a mile and a half, when it reaches the river Palmones, which is crossed by a similarly ill-contrived ferry. From hence to Algeciras is three miles, the first along the sea-beach, the remainder by a carriage-road, conducted some little distance inland to avoid the various rugged promontories which now begin to indent the coast, and to dash back in angry foam the hitherto gently received caresses of the flowing tide. The total distance from Gibraltar to Algeciras, following the sea-shore, is nine English miles; but straight across the bay it is barely five. Algeciras, supposed to be the Tingentera of the ancients, and by some the Julia Traducta of the Romans, received its present name from the Moors--_Al chazira_, the island. In the days of the Moslem domination, it became a place of great strength and importance; and when the power of the Moors of Spain began to wane, was one of the towns ceded to the Emperor of Fez, to form a kingdom for his son, Abou Melic, in the hope of presenting a barrier that would check the alarming progress of the Christian arms. From that time it became a constant object of contention, and endured many sieges. The most memorable was in 1342-4, during which cannon were first brought into use by its defenders. It, nevertheless, fell to the irresistible Alfonso XI., after a siege of twenty months. At that period, the town stood on the right bank of the little river Miel (instead of on the left, as at present), where traces of its walls are yet to be seen; but its fortifications having shortly afterwards been razed to the ground by the Moors, the place fell to decay, and the present town was built so late as in 1760. It is unprotected by walls, but is sheltered from attack on the sea-side by a rocky little island, distant 800 yards from the shore. This island is crowned with batteries of heavy ordnance, and has, on more occasions than one, been found an "ugly customer" to deal with. The anchorage is to the north of the island, and directly in front of the town. The streets of Algeciras are wide and regularly built, remarkably well paved, and lined with good houses; but it is a sun-burnt place, without a tree to shelter, or a drain to purify it. Being the port of communication between Spain and her _presidario_, Ceuta, as well as the military seat of government of the _Campo de Gibraltar_, it is a place of some bustle, and carries on a thriving trade, by means of _felucas_ and other small craft, with the British fortress. The population may be reckoned at 8,000 souls, exclusive of a garrison of from twelve to fifteen hundred men. The Spaniards call the rock of Gibraltar _el cuerpo muerto_,[18] from its resemblance to a corpse; and, viewed from Algeciras, it certainly does look something like a human figure laid upon its back, the northernmost pinnacle forming the head, the swelling ridge between that and the signal tower, the chest and belly, and the point occupied by O'Hara's tower the bend of the knees. The direct road from Algeciras to Cadiz crosses the most elevated pass in the wooded mountains that rise at the back of the town, and, from its excessive asperity, is called "_The Trocha_," the word itself signifying a _bad_ mountain road. The distance by this route is sixty-two miles; by Tarifa it is about a league more, and this latter road is not much better than the other, though over a far lower tract of country. On quitting the town, the road, having crossed the river Miel, and passed over the site of "Old Algeciras," situated on its right bank, edges away from the coast, and, in about a mile, reaches a hill, whence an old tower is seen standing on a rocky promontory; which, jutting some considerable distance into the sea, forms the northern boundary of a deep and well sheltered bay. The Spanish name for this bight is _La Ensenada de Getares_; but by us, on account of the high beach of white sand that edges it, it is called "Sandy bay." It strikes me this must be the _Portus albus_ of Antoninus's Itinerary, since its distance from Carteia corresponds exactly with that therein specified, and renders the rest of the route to Gades _intelligible_, which, otherwise, it certainly is not. But more of this hereafter. Within two miles of Algeciras the road crosses two mountain torrents, the latter of which, called _El Rio Picaro_[19] (I presume from its occasional _treacherous_ rise), discharges itself into the bay of Getares. Thenceforth, the track becomes more rugged, and ascends towards a pass, (_El puerto del Cabrito_) which connects the _Sierra Santa Ana_ on the right with a range of hills that, rising to the south, and closing the view in that direction, shoots its gnarled roots into the Straits of Gibraltar. The views from the pass are very fine--that to the eastward, looking over the lake-like Mediterranean and towards the snowy sierras of Granada; the other, down upon the rough features of the Spanish shore, and towards the yet more rugged mountains of Africa; the still distant Atlantic stretching away to the left. The former view is shut out immediately on crossing the ridge: but the other, undergoing pleasing varieties as one proceeds, continues very fine all the way to Tarifa. The road is now very bad, being conducted across the numerous rough ramifications of the mountains on the right hand, midway between their summits and the sea. At about seven miles from Algeciras it reaches the secluded valley of Gualmesi, or Guadalmesi, celebrated for the crystaline clearness of its springs, and the high flavour of its oranges; and, crossing the stream, whence the romantic dell takes its name, directs itself towards the sea-shore, continuing along it the rest of the way to Tarifa; which place is distant twelve miles from Algeciras. The stratification of the rocks along this coast is very remarkable: the flat shelving ledges that border it running so regularly in parallel lines, nearly east and west, as to have all the appearance of artificial moles for sheltering vessels. It is on the contrary, however, an extremely dangerous shore to approach. The old Moorish battlements of Tarifa abut against the rocky cliff that bounds the coast; stretching thence to the westward, along, but about 50 yards from, the sea. It is not necessary, therefore, to enter the fortress; indeed, one makes a considerable détour in doing so; but curiosity will naturally lead all Englishmen--who have the opportunity--to visit the walls so gallantly defended by a handful of their countrymen during the late war; and those who cannot do so may not object to read a somewhat minute description of them. The town closes the mouth of a valley, bound by two long but slightly marked moles, protruded from a mountain range some miles distant to the north; the easternmost of which terminates abruptly along the sea-shore. The walls extend partly up both these hills; but not far enough to save the town from being looked into, and completely commanded, within a very short distance. Their general lines form a quadrangular figure, about 600 yards square; but a kind of horn work projects from the N.E. angle, furnishing the only good flanking fire that the fortress can boast of along its north front. Every where else the walls, which are only four feet and a half thick, are flanked by square towers, themselves hardly solid enough to bear the _weight_ of artillery, much less its blows. At the S.W. angle, but within the enceinte of the fortress, and looking seawards, there is a small castle, or citadel, the _alcazar_ of its Moorish governors; and immediately under its machicoulated battlements is one of the three gateways of the town. The two others are towards the centre of its western and northern fronts. In the attack of 1811, the French made their approaches against the north front of the town, and effected a breach towards its centre, in the very lowest part of the bed of the valley; thus most completely "taking the bull by the horns;" (and Tarifa bulls are not to be trifled with--as every Spanish _picador_ knows,) since the approach to it was swept by the fire of the projecting _horn_-work I have before mentioned. When the breach was repaired, a marble tablet was inserted in the wall, bearing a modest inscription in Latin, which states that "this part of the wall, destroyed by the besieging French, was re-built by the British defenders in November, 1813." When the French again attacked the fortress, in 1823, profiting by past experience, they established their breaching batteries in a large convent, distant about 200 yards from the walls on the west front of the town; and, favouring their assault by a feigned attack on the gate in its south wall, they carried the place with scarcely any loss. The streets of Tarifa are narrow, dark, and crooked; and, excepting that they are clean, are in every respect Moorish. The inhabitants are rude in speech and manners, and amount to about 8000. From the S.E. salient angle of the town, a sandy isthmus juts about a thousand yards into the sea, and is connected by a narrow artificial causeway with a rocky peninsula, or island, as it is more generally termed, that stretches yet 700 or 800 yards further into the Straits of Gibraltar. This is the most southerly point of Europe, being in latitude 30° 0' 56", which is nearly six miles to the south of Europa Point. The island is of a circular form, and towards the sea is merely defended by three open batteries, armed _en barbette_; but to the land side, it presents a bastioned front, that sweeps the causeway with a most formidable fire. A lighthouse stands at the extreme point of the island, which also contains a casemated barrack for troops, and some remarkable old tanks, perhaps of a date much prior to the arrival of the Saracens. The foundation of the town of Tarifa is usually ascribed to Tarik Aben Zaide, the first Mohammedan invader of Spain; who probably, previous to crossing the Straits, had marked the island as offering a favourable landing-place, as well as a secure depôt for his stores, and a safe refuge in the event of a repulse. Mariana, however, imagined, that Tartessus, or Carteia--which he considered the same place--stood upon this spot; and, under this persuasion, he speaks of the admiral of the Pompeian faction retiring there, after his action with Cæsar's fleet, and drawing a chain across the mouth of the port to protect his vessels; a circumstance which alone proves that Carteia was not Tarifa; since it must be evident to any one who has examined the coast attentively, that no port could possibly have existed there, which could have afforded shelter to a large fleet, and been closed by drawing a chain across its mouth. Others, again, suppose Tarifa to occupy the site of Mellaria. But I rather incline to the opinion of those who consider it doubtful whether _any_ Roman town stood upon the spot; an opinion for which I think I shall hereafter be able to assign sufficient reason. As Tarifa was the field wherein the Mohammedan invaders of Spain obtained their first success, so, six centuries after, did it become the scene of one of their most humiliating defeats; the battle of the _Salado_, gained A.D. 1340, by Alphonso XI., of Castile, having inflicted a blow upon them, from the effects of which they never recovered. Four crowned heads were engaged in that sanguinary conflict--the King of Portugal, as the ally of the Castillian hero; Jusuf, King of Granada; and Abu Jacoob, Emperor of Morocco. The last-named, according to the Spanish historians, had crossed over from Africa, with an army of nearly half a million of men, to avenge the death of his son, Abou Melic; killed the preceding year at the battle of Arcos. The little river, which gave its name to that important battle gained by the Christian army on its banks, winds through a plain to the westward of Tarifa, crossing the road to Cadiz, at about two miles from the town.[20] The valley is about three miles across, and extends a considerable distance inland. It is watered by several mountain streams that fall into the Salado. That rivulet is the last which is met with, and is crossed by a long wooden bridge on five stone piers. The term _Salado_ is of very common occurrence amongst the names of the rivers of the south of Spain; though in most cases it is used rather as a term signifying a _water-course_, than as the name of the rivulet: thus _El Salado de Moron_ is a stream issuing from the mountains in the vicinity of the town of Moron; _El Salado de Porcuna_ is a torrent that washes the walls of Porcuna; and so with the rest. As, however, the word in Spanish signifies salt, (used adjectively) it has led to many mistakes, and occasioned much perplexity in determining the course of the river _Salsus_, mentioned so frequently by Hirtius; but to which, in point of fact, the word _Salado_ has no reference whatever, being applied to numerous streams that are perfectly free from salt. On the other hand, it might naturally be supposed that the word _Salido_ (the past participle of the verb _Salir_, to issue) would have been used if intended to signify a source or stream issuing from the mountains. It seems to me, therefore, that the word _Salado_ must be a derivation from the Arabic _S[=a]l_, a water-course in a valley; which, differing so little in sound from _Salido_, continued to be used after the expulsion of the Moors; until at length, its derivation being lost, it came to be considered as signifying what the word actually means in Spanish, viz. impregnated with salt. At the western extremity of the plain, watered by the _Salado de Tarifa_, a barren Sierra terminates precipitously along the coast, leaving but a narrow space between its foot and the sea, for the passage of the road to Cadiz. Under shelter of the eastern side of this Sierra, standing in the plain, but closing the little Thermopylæ, I think we may place the Roman town of Mellaría,[21] eighteen miles from Carteia, and six from Belone Claudia, according to the Itinerary of Antoninus; and mentioned by Strabo as a place famous for curing fish. Tarifa, which, as I have said before, is supposed by some authors to be on the site of Mellaría, is in the first place rather too near Calpe Carteia to accord with that supposition; and in the next, it is far too distant from Belon; the site of which is well established by numerous ruins visible to this day, at a _despoblado_,[22] called Bolonia. It may be objected, on the other hand, that the position which I suppose Mellaría to have occupied, is as much too far removed from Carteia, as Tarifa is too near it: and following the present road, it certainly is so. But there is no reason to take for granted that the ancient military way followed this line; on the contrary, as the Romans rather preferred straight to circuitous roads, we may suppose that, as soon as the nature of the country admitted of it, they carried their road away from the coast, to avoid the promontory running into the sea at Tarifa. Now, an opportunity for them to do this presented itself on arriving at the valley of Gualmesi, from whence a road might very well have been carried direct to the spot that I assign for the position of Mellaría; which road, by saving two miles of the circuitous route by Tarifa, would fix Mellaría at the prescribed distance from Carteia, and also bring it (very nearly) within the number of miles from Belon, specified in the Roman Itinerary, viz. six; whereas, if Mellaría stood where Tarifa now does, the distance would be nearly _ten_. The city of Belon appears to have slipped bodily from the side of the mountain on which it was built (probably the result of an earthquake), as its ruins may be distinctly seen when the tide is out and the water calm, stretching some distance into the Atlantic. Vestiges of an aqueduct may also be traced for nearly a league along the coast, by means of which the town was supplied with water from a spring that rises near Cape Palomo, the southernmost point of the same Sierra under which Belon was situated. In following out the Itinerary of Antoninus--according to which the total distance from Calpe to Gades is made seventy-six miles[23]--the next place mentioned after Belon Claudia is Besippone, distant twelve miles. This place, it appears to me, must have stood on the coast a little way beyond the river Barbate; and not at Vejer, (which is several miles inland) as some have supposed; for the distance from the ruins of Bolonia to that town far exceeds that specified in the Itinerary. Vejer (or Beger, as it is indifferently written) may probably be where a Roman town called Besaro stood, of which Besippo was the port; the latter only having been noticed in the Itinerary from it being situated on the direct military route from Carteia to Gades; the former by Pliny,[24] as being a place of importance within the _Conventus Gaditani_. From Besippone to Mergablo--the next station of the Itinerary--is six miles; and at that distance from the spot where I suppose the first of those places to have stood, there is a very ancient tower on the sea side, (to the westward of Cape Trafalgar) from which an old, apparently Roman, paved road, now serving no purpose whatever, leads for several miles into the country. From this tower to Cadiz--crossing the Santi Petri river _at its mouth_--the distance exceeds but little twenty-four miles; the number given in the Itinerary. The distances I have thus laid down agree pretty well throughout with those marked on the Roman military way; which, it may be supposed, were not _very exactly_ measured, since the fractions of miles have in every case been omitted. The only objection which can be urged to my measurements is, that they make the Roman miles too long. Having, however, taken the Olympic stadium (in this instance) as my standard, of which there are but 600 to a degree of the Meridian, or seventy-five Roman miles; and as my measurements, even with it, are still rather _short_, the reply is very simple, viz. that the adoption of any _smaller_ scale would but _increase the error_. From the spot where I suppose Mellaría to have stood--which is marked by a little chapel standing on a detached pinnacle of the _Sierra de Enmedio_, overhanging the sea--the distance to the Rio Baqueros is two miles; the road keeping along a flat and narrow strip of land, between the foot of the mountain and the sea. The coast now trends to the south west, a high wooded mountain, distinguished by the name of the Sierra de _San Mateo_, stretching some way into the sea, and forming the steep sandy cape of _Paloma_, a league on the western side of which are the ruins of Belon. The road to Cadiz, however, leaves the sea-shore to seek a more level country, and, inclining slightly to the north, keeping up the _Val de Baqueros_ for five miles, reaches a pass between the mountains of San Mateo and Enmedio. The valley is very wild and beautiful. Laurustinus, arbutus, oleander, and rhododendron are scattered profusely over the bed of the torrent that rushes down it; and the bounding mountains are richly clothed with forest trees. From the pass an extensive view is obtained of the wide plain of Vejer, and _laguna de la Janda_ in its centre. Descending for two miles and a half,--the double-peaked Sierra _de la Plata_ being now on the left hand, and that of _Fachenas_, studded with water-mills, on the right--the road reaches the eastern extremity of the above-named plain, where the direct road from Algeciras to Cadiz falls in, and that of Medina Sidonia branches off to the right. The Cadiz route here inclines again to the westward, and, in three miles, reaches the _Venta de Tavilla_. From hence two roads present themselves for continuing the journey; one proceeding along the edge of the plain; the other keeping to the left, and making a slight détour by the _Sierra de Retin_; and when the plain is flooded, it is necessary to take this latter route. Let those who find themselves in this predicament avoid making the solitary hovel, called the _Venta de Retin_, their resting-place for the night, as I was once obliged to do; for, unless they are partial to a guard bed, and to go to it supperless, they will not meet with accommodation and entertainment to their liking. We will return, however, to the _Venta de Tabilla_, which is a fraction of a degree better than that of Retin. From thence the distance to Vejer is fourteen miles. The first two pass over a gently swelling country, planted with corn; the next six along the low wooded hills bordering the _laguna de la Janda_; the remainder over a hilly, and partially wooded tract, whence the sea is again visible at some miles distance on the left. In winter the greater part of the plain of Vejer is covered with water, there being no outlet for the _Laguna_; which, besides being the reservoir for all the rain that falls on the surrounding hills, is fed by several considerable streams. A project to drain the lake was entertained some years ago; but, like all other Spanish projects, it failed, after an abortive trial. In its present state, therefore, the whole surface of the plain is available only for pasture; and numerous herds are subsisted on it. The gentle slopes bounding it, being secure from inundation, are planted with corn. Vejer is situated on the northern extremity of a bare mountain ridge, that stretches inland from the coast about five miles, and terminates in a stupendous precipice along the right bank of the river Barbate. Towards the sea, however, it slopes more gradually, forming the forked headland, for ever celebrated in history, called Cape Trafalgar. When arrived within half a mile of the lofty cliff whereon the town stands, the road enters a narrow gorge, by which the Barbate escapes to the ocean; this part of its course offering a remarkable contrast to the rest, which is through an extensive flat. A stone bridge of three curiously constructed arches, said to be Roman, gives a passage over the stream; and a venta is situated on the right bank, immediately under the town; the houses of which may be seen edging the precipice, at a height of five or six hundred feet above the river. The road to Cadiz, and consequently all others,--it being the most southerly,--avoids the ascent to Vejer, which is very steep, and so circuitous as to occupy fully half an hour. But the place is well worth a visit, if only for the sake of the view from the church steeple, which is very extensive and beautiful; and taken altogether, it is a much better town than could be expected, considering its truly out-of-the-way situation. That it was a Roman station, its position alone sufficiently proves; but whether it be the Besaro, or Belippo, or even Besippo of Pliny, seems doubtful. It occupies a tolerably level space; though bounded on three sides by precipices, and is consequently still a very defensible post, notwithstanding its walls are all destroyed. The streets are narrow, but clean and well paved; and the place contains many good houses, and several large convents. The inns, however, are such wretched places, that on one occasion, when I passed a night there, I had to seek a resting-place in a private house. The Barbate is navigable for large barges up to the bridge; but the difficulty of access to the town prevents its carrying on much trade. The population amounts to about 6,000 souls. There is a delightful walk down a wooded ravine on the western side of the town, by which the road to Cadiz and the valley of the Barbate may be regained quicker than by retracing our footsteps to the Venta. Of this latter I feel bound to say--after much experience--that there is not a better halting-place between Cadiz and Gibraltar; albeit, many stories are told of robberies committed even within its very walls. Let the traveller take care, therefore, to show his pistols to mine host, and to lock his bedroom door. We resumed our journey with the dawn. The road keeps for nearly a mile along the narrow, flat strip between the bank of the river, and the high cliff whereon the town is perched. The gorge then terminates, and an open country permits the roads to the different neighbouring places to branch off in their respective directions. From hence to Medina Sidonia is thirteen miles; to Alcalà de los Gazules, twenty; and to Chiclana--whither we were bound--fifteen;--but, leaving these three roads on the right, we proceeded by a rather more circuitous route to the last mentioned place, by Conil and Barrosa. The distance from Vejer to Conil is nine miles; the country undulated and uninteresting. Conil is a large fishing town, containing a swarming population of 8,000 souls. The smell of the houses where the tunny fish (here taken in great abundance) are cut up and cured, extends inland for several miles; but the inhabitants consider it very wholesome; and to my animadversive remarks on the filth and effluvium of the place itself, answer was made, "_no hay epidemia aqui_;"[25]--quite a sufficient excuse, according to their ideas, for submitting to live the life of hogs. We arrived just as the fishermen had enclosed a shoal of Tunny with their nets; so, putting up our horses, we waited to see the result of their labours. The whole process is very interesting. The Tunny can be discovered when at a very considerable distance from the land; as they arrive in immense shoals, and cause a ripple on the surface of the water, like that occasioned by a light puff of wind on a calm day. Men are, therefore, stationed in the different watch towers along the coast, to look out for them, and, immediately on perceiving a shoal, they make signals to the fishermen, indicating the direction, distance, &c. Boats are forthwith put to sea, and the fish are surrounded with a net of immense size, but very fine texture, which is gradually hauled towards the shore. The tunny, coming in contact with this net, become alarmed, and make off from it in the only direction left open to them. The boats follow, and draw the net in, until the space in which the fish are confined is sufficiently small to allow a second net, of great strength, to circumscribe the first; which is then withdrawn. The tunny, although very powerful, (being nearly the size and very much the shape of a porpoise) have thus far been very quiet, seeking only to escape under the net; and have hardly been perceptible to the spectators on the beach. But, on drawing in the new net, and getting into shallow water, their danger gives them the courage of despair, and furious are their struggles to escape from their hempen prison. The scene now becomes very animated. When the draught is heavy--as it was in this instance--and there is a possibility of the net being injured, and of the fish escaping if it be drawn at once to land, the fishermen arm themselves with harpoons, or stakes, having iron hooks at the end, and rush into the sea whilst the net is yet a considerable distance from the shore, surrounding it, and shouting with all their might to frighten the fish into shallow water, when they become comparatively powerless. In completing the investment of their prey, some of the fishermen are obliged even to swim to the outer extremity of the net, where, holding on by the floats with one hand, they strike, with singular dexterity, such fish as approach the edge, in the hope of effecting their escape, with a short harpoon held in the other. The men in the boats, at the same time, keep up a continual splashing with their oars, to deter the tunny from attempting to leap over the hempen enclosure; which, nevertheless, many succeed in doing, amidst volleys of "_Carajos!_" The fish are thus killed in the water, and then drawn in triumph on shore. They are allowed to bleed very freely; and the entrails, roes, livers, and eyes, are immediately cut out, being perquisites of different authorities. The flesh is salted, and exported in great quantities to Catalonia, Valencia, and the northern provinces of the kingdom. A small quantity of oil is extracted from the bones. Some years since, the Duke of Medina Sidonia enjoyed the monopoly of the tunny fishery on this part of the coast, which was calculated to have given him a yearly profit of £4000 sterling. But, at the time of my visit, he had been deprived of this privilege, much to the regret of the inhabitants of Conil; for the nets and salting-houses, being the property of the duke, had to be hired, and as there were no capitalists in the place able to embark in so expensive a speculation as the purchase of others, the "company" that engaged in the fishery was, necessarily, composed of strangers to Conil, whose only object was to obtain the greatest possible profit during the short period for which they held the duke's property on lease. They, consequently, drove the hardest bargain they could with the poor inhabitants, who, accustomed all their lives to this employment, could not turn their hands to any other, and were forced to submit. I do not mean to defend monopolies in general, but what I have stated shows, that in the present state of Spain they are almost unavoidable evils. The inhabitants of Conil, at all events, complained most bitterly of the change. The fishery lasts from March to July, and the season of which I write (then drawing to a close,) was considered a very successful one, 1300 tunny having been taken at Conil, and 1600 at Barrosa. Each fish is worth ten dollars, or two pounds sterling. The falling off has, however, been most extraordinary, as in former days we read of 70,000 fish having been taken annually. From Conil the road keeps along the coast for twelve miles, to Barrosa, a spot occupying a distinguished place in the pages of history, but marked only by an old tower on the coast, and a small building, called a _vigia_, or watch-house, situated on a knoll that rises slightly above the general level of the country. This was the great object of contention on the celebrated 5th March, 1811. Never, perhaps, were British soldiers placed under greater disadvantages than on this glorious day, through the incapacity or pusillanimity, or both, of the Spanish general who commanded in chief. And though far more important victories have been gained by them, yet the cool bearing and determined courage that shone forth so conspicuously on this occasion, by completely removing the erroneous impression under which their opponents laboured, as to the fitness of Englishmen for soldiers, produced, perhaps, better effects than might have attended a victory gained on a larger scale, under _more favourable_ circumstances. I have met with Spaniards who absolutely shed tears when speaking of this battle, in which they considered our troops had been so shamefully abandoned by their countrymen, or rather by the general who led them. Nor is it surprising that the English character should stand so high as it does in this part of the Peninsula, when, within the short space of a day's ride, three such names as Tarifa, Trafalgar, and Barrosa, are successively brought to recollection. The walls of the watch-house of Barrosa still bear the marks of mortal strife, and the hill on which it stands is even yet strewed with the bleached bones of the horses which fell there; but so slight is the command the knoll possesses--indeed in so unimportant, pinched-up a corner of the coast is it situated--that those who are not aware of the unaccountable events which led to the battle, may well be surprised at its having been chosen as a military position. Striking into the pine-forest, which bounds the field of battle to the west, we arrived in about half an hour at the bridge and mill of Almanza, and proceeding onwards, in four miles reached Chiclana; first winding round the base of a conical knoll, surmounted by a chapel dedicated to _Santa Ana_. Chiclana is the Highgate of the good citizens of Cadiz, and contains many "genteel family residences," adapted for summer visiters; but the place is disgracefully dirty, so that little benefit can be expected from _change of air_. The gardens in its vicinage offer agreeable promenades, however; and there is a fine view from the chapel of _Santa Ana_, whence may be seen "Fair Cadiz, rising o'er the dark blue sea." Chiclana contains a population of about 6000 souls, and boasts of possessing a tolerably good _posada_, whereat _calesas_, and other vehicles, may be hired to proceed to the neighbouring towns; the roads to all, even the direct one to Vejer, being open to wheel carriages. A rivulet bathes the north side of the town, dividing it from a large suburb, and flowing on to the Santi Petri river. The Cadiz road, crossing this stream by a long wooden bridge, proceeds for three miles and a half (in company with the routes to _Puerto Santa Maria_, _Puerto Real_, and _Xeres_,)[26] along a raised causeway, which keeps it above the saltpans and marshes that render the _Isla de Leon_ so difficult of approach. Arrived at a wide stream, a ferry-boat affords the means of passage; and, on gaining the southern bank, the great road from Cadiz to Madrid (passing through the towns above mentioned) presents itself. Taking the direction of Cadiz, our passports were immediately demanded at the entrance of a fortified post, called the _Portazgo_,[27] the first advanced redoubt of the multiplied defences of the _Isla de Leon_. From thence the road is conducted, for nearly a mile, through bogs and saltpans, as before, to the _Puente Zuazo_, a bridge over the river _Santi Petri_, or _San Pedro_. This, by the way, is rather an arm of the sea than a river, since it communicates between the bay of Cadiz and the ocean, and forms the _Isla_ (island) _de Leon_, which otherwise would be an isthmus. The channel is very wide, deep, and muddy; the bridge has five arches, and was built by a Doctor _Juan Sanchez de Zuazo_ (whence its name), on the foundation of one that existed in the days of the Romans, and is supposed to have served as an aqueduct to supply Cadiz with water from the _Sierra de Xeres_. It is protected by a double tête de pont; and has one arch cut, and its parapets pierced with embrasures, to enable artillery to fire down the stream. Soon after reaching the right bank of the San Pedro, the long straggling town of the Isla, or, more properly, _San Fernando_, commences. The main street is upwards of a mile in length, wide, and rather handsome. The population of this place is estimated at 30,000 souls; but it varies considerably, according to the date of the last visitation of yellow fever. At the southern extremity of the city a low range of hills begins, which stretches for a mile and a half towards the sea. The causeway to Cadiz, however, is directed straight upon the _Torre Gorda_, standing upon the shore more to the westward, and three miles distant from the town of _San Fernando_. Here commences the narrow sandy isthmus that connects the point of land on which Cadiz is built with the _Isla_. It is five miles long, and in some places so narrow, that the waves of the Atlantic on one side, and those of the bay of Cadiz on the other, reach the walls of the causeway. About half way between the _Torre Gorda_ and Cadiz, the isthmus is cut across by a fort called the _Cortadura_, beyond which it becomes much wider. At five miles to the eastward of the _Torre Gorda_, or Tower of Hercules, as it is also called, is the mouth of the Santi Petri river, and four miles only beyond it is the _Vigia de Barrosa_; so that the distance from thence to Cadiz is almost doubled by making the détour by Chiclana. It is more than probable, therefore, that the Romans had a military post, commanding a _flying bridge_, at the mouth of the river; for, in the Itinerary of Antoninus, the coast-road from _Calpe_ to _Gades_ was not directed from _Mergablo_ "_ad pontem_," as in the route laid down from _Gades_ to _Hispalis_ (Seville), but "_ad Herculem_;"--that is, it may be presumed, to the temple of Hercules,[28] situated, according to common tradition, on a part of the coast near the mouth of the Santi Petri river, over which the waves of the Atlantic now roll unobstructed; and the supposed site of which temple is the same distance from Cadiz as the bridge of Zuazo, thereby agreeing with the Roman Itineraries. At the distance of 1200 yards from the river's mouth a rocky islet rises from the sea, bearing on its scarped sides the inapproachable little castle of _Santi Petri_, the bleached walls of which are said to have been built from the ruins of the famed temple of Hercules. Contemptible as this isolated fortress appears to be, as well from its size as from any thing that art has done for it, the fate of Cadiz, nevertheless, depends in a great measure upon its preservation; since, from the command the castle possesses of the entrance of the river, an enemy, who may gain possession of it, is enabled to force the passage of the stream under its protecting fire, and take in reverse all the defenses of the _Isla de Leon_. Cadiz would thereby be reduced to its own resources; and strong as Cadiz is, yet, like all fortresses defended only by art, it must eventually fall. The surrender of the castle of _Santi Petri_ to the French, in the siege of 1823, occasioned the immediate fall of Cadiz, its defenders seeing that further resistance would be unavailing; whereas, the capture of the _Trocadero_, about which so much was thought, did little towards the reduction of the place. Indeed, the _Trocadero_ was in possession of the enemy during the whole period of the former siege, 1810-12. CHAPTER III. CADIZ--ITS FOUNDATION--VARIOUS NAMES--PAST PROSPERITY--MADE A FREE PORT IN THE HOPE OF RUINING THE TRADE OF GIBRALTAR--UNJUST RESTRICTIONS ON THE COMMERCE OF THE BRITISH FORTRESS--DESCRIPTION OF CADIZ--ITS VAUNTED AGREMENS--SOCIETY--MONOTONOUS LIFE--CATHEDRAL--ADMIRABLY BUILT SEA WALL--NAVAL ARSENAL OF LA CARRACA--ROAD TO XERES--PUERTO REAL--PUERTO DE SANTA MARIA--XERES--ITS FILTH--WINE STORES--METHOD OF PREPARING WINE--DOUBTS OF THE ANCIENT AND DERIVATION OF THE PRESENT NAME OF XERES--CARTHUSIAN CONVENT--GUADALETE--BATTLE OF XERES. The date of the foundation of Cadiz is lost in the impenetrable chaos of heathen mythology. One of the numerous conquerors, distinguished by the general name of Hercules, who, in early ages, carried their victorious arms to the remotest extremities of Europe, appears to have erected a temple at the westernmost point of the rocky ledge on which Cadiz now stands; and round this temple, doubtless, a town gradually sprung up. But the place came only to be known and distinguished by the name _Gadira_, when the commercial enterprise of the Phoenicians led them to make a settlement on this defensible island; and the foundation of the temple dedicated to Hercules, which Strabo describes as situated at the eastern extremity of the same island, "where it is separated from the continent by a strait only about a stadium in width," is ascribed to Pygmalion, nearly nine centuries before the Christian era. Gadira, or Gades, to which the name now became corrupted, was the first town of Spain forcibly occupied by the Carthagenians, who, throwing off the mask of friendship, took possession of it about the year B.C. 240. It was the last place that afforded them a refuge in the war which shortly followed with the Romans, into whose hands it fell, B.C. 203. From the Romans it afterwards received the name of Augusta Julia, probably from its adherence to the cause of Cæsar, who restored to the temple of Hercules the treasures of which it had been plundered during the civil wars that had previously distracted the country. But its old name, altered apparently to its present orthography by the Moors, seems always to have prevailed. Under the Moslems, Cadiz does not appear to have enjoyed any very great consideration; and it was wrested from them without difficulty by San Fernando, soon after the capture of Seville. On the discovery of America, Cadiz became, next to Seville (which was endowed with peculiar privileges), the richest city of Spain. Its imports at that time amounted annually to eleven millions sterling. But since the loss of the American colonies, its prosperity has been rapidly declining; and some years back, when the intestine troubles of Spain rendered it impossible for her to afford protection to her commerce, the trade of Cadiz may be said to have ceased. A _fillip_ was, however, given to its commerce, for it would be absurd to call it an attempt to restore it--about nine years since, by making it a free port. But this apparently liberal act, not having been accompanied by any reduction of the duties imposed on foreign produce introduced for consumption into the country, was merely a disgraceful contrivance on the part of the king and his ministers to obtain money. On the promulgation of the edict constituting Cadiz a free port, it became at once an entrepôt for the produce of all nations; the goods brought to it being subjected only to a trifling charge for landing, &c. The proceeds of this pitiful tax went to the coffers of the municipality, which had paid the king handsomely for the "act of grace" bestowed upon the city; and no source of revenue was opened to the public treasury by the grant of this special privilege, since the goods landed at Cadiz could only be carried into the interior of the country on payment of duties that amounted to an absolute prohibition of them, and they were, consequently, introduced surreptitiously by bribing the city authorities and custom-house officers; who, in their turn, paid large sums for their respective situations to the ministers of the crown! Such is the way in which the commercial concerns of Spain are conducted. The whole affair was, in fact, a temporary expedient to raise money by selling Cadiz permission to smuggle. At the same time, the Spanish government--by offering foreign merchants a mart which, at first sight, seemed more conveniently situated for disposing of their goods than Gibraltar--hoped to give a death-blow to the commerce of the British fortress, which it had found to thrive, in spite of all the iniquitous restrictions imposed upon it; such, for instance, as the exaction of duties on goods shipped from thence, double in amount to those levied on the _same articles_, if brought from the ports of France and Italy; the depriving even Spanish vessels, if coming from, or touching at, Gibraltar, of all advantages in regard to the rate of duty otherwise granted to the national flag;[29] and various other abuses, to which it is astonishing the British government has so long quietly submitted. The scheme, however, though successful for a time against Gibraltar, did no permanent good to Cadiz; and the trade of the place has relapsed into its former sickly state. "Cadiz! sweet Cadiz," has been so extolled by modern authors, that I am almost afraid to say what I think of it. It strikes me, that the very favourable impression it usually makes on my countrymen is owing to its being, in most cases, the first place they see after leaving England; or, perchance, the first place they have seen out of England; to whose gloomy brick-built towns its bright houses and battlements offer as agreeable a contrast, as the picturesque costume of its inhabitants does to the ill-cut garments of the natives of our island. Under any circumstances, however, the first impression made by Cadiz is favourable, unless you enter by the fish-market. The streets are straight, tolerably well lighted, and remarkably well paved, many of them having even the convenience of a _trottoir_. There is one handsome square, and the houses, generally, are lofty, and those which are inhabited are clean. But many are falling rapidly to decay, from the diminished population and prosperity of the place. On the other hand, the city does not contain one handsome public building; and, if one leaves the principal thoroughfares, its boasted cleanliness and "sweetness" turn out to be mere poetical delusions. In fact, the vaunted _agrémens_ of the city to me were undiscoverable. There is but one road to ride upon, one promenade to walk upon, one sheet of water to boat upon. The Alameda, on which much hyperbolical praise has been bestowed, is a dusty gravel walk, extending about half a mile along the ramparts. It is lined--not shaded--with stunted trees, and commands a fine view of the marsh-environed bay when the tide is in, and a disagreeable effluvium from it when the tide is out; and, I must say, that I never could perceive any more "harmony and fascination" in the movements of the pavonizing _gaditanas_ who frequent it, than in those of the fair promenaders of other Spanish towns. The _Plaza de San Antonio_ is a square, situated in the heart of the city, which, paved with large flag-stones, and lighted with lamps, may be considered a kind of treadmill, that fashion has condemned her votaries to take an hour's exercise in after the fatigues of the day. The society of Cadiz is now but second rate; for it is no longer inhabited as in bygone days, when the nobility from all parts of the kingdom sought shelter behind its walls. At the Tertulias of the first circle, gaming is the principal pastime, and I have been given to understand that the play is very high. The public amusements are few. There is a tolerable theatre, where Italian Operas are sometimes performed; but, for the great national diversion, the bull-fight, the inhabitants have to cross the bay to Puerto Santa Maria. In fine, for one whose time is not fully occupied by business, I know of few _less_ agreeable places of residence than Cadiz. The transient visiter, who prolongs his stay beyond two days, will find time hang very heavy on his hands; for having, in that short space, seen all the place contains, he will be driven to wile away the tedious hours after the usual manner of its inhabitants, viz., by devoting the morning to the _cafés_ and billiard-rooms, the afternoon to the _siesta_, evening to the Alameda, dusk to the Plaza San Antonio and its _Neverias_,[30] and night to the Tertulias--for such is the life of a Spanish _man of pleasure_! The hospitable mansion of the British Consul General affords those who have the good fortune to possess his acquaintance a happy relief from this monotonous and wearisome life; and, besides meeting there the best society the place affords, the lovers of the fine arts will derive much gratification from the inspection of Mr. Brackenbury's picture gallery, which contains many choice paintings of Murillo, and the best Spanish Masters. What few other good paintings Cadiz possesses are scattered amongst private houses. The churches contain none of any merit. In one of the Franciscan convents, however, is to be seen a painting that excites much interest, as being the last which occupied the pencil of Murillo, though it was not finished by him. Our conductor told me that a most distinguished English nobleman had offered 500 guineas for it, but the pious monks refused to sell it to a heretic!--Perhaps, His Grace did not know before on what _conscientious_ grounds his liberal offer had been declined. The old Cathedral is not worth visiting. The new one, as it is called, was commenced in the days of the city's prosperity; but the source from whence the funds for building it were raised, failed ere it was half finished; and there it stands, a perfect emblem of Spain herself!--a pile of the most valuable materials, planned on a scale of excessive magnificence, but put together without the slightest taste, and falling to decay for want of revenue![31] The walls of the city--excepting those of its land front, which are remarkably well constructed, and kept in tolerable order--are in a deplorable state of dilapidation, and in some places the sea has undermined, and made such breaches in them, as even to threaten the very existence of the city, should it be exposed to a tempest similar to that which did so much mischief to it some seventy years since. This decay is particularly observable, too, on the south side of the fortress, where the sea-wall is exposed to the full sweep of the Atlantic; and here the mischief has resulted chiefly from the want of timely attention to its repairs, for the wall itself is a perfect masterpiece of the building art. Regarding it as such, I venture to devote a small space to its description, conceiving that a hint may be advantageously taken therefrom in the future construction of piers, wharfs, &c. in our own country; and I am the more induced to do so, since so small a portion of the work remains in its pristine state, that it already must be spoken of rather as a thing that _has been_, than one which _is_. The great object of the builder was to secure the foundation of his wall from the assaults of the ocean, which, at times, breaks with excessive violence upon this coast. For this purpose, he formed an artificial beach, by clearing away the loose rocks which lay strewed about, and inserting in the space thus prepared and levelled, a strong wooden frame-work formed of cases dovetailed into and well fastened to each other. These cases were filled with stones, and secured by numerous piles. The surface was composed of beams of wood, placed close together, carefully caulked, and laid so as to form an inclined plane, at an angle of eight degrees and a half with the horizon. This beach extended twenty-seven yards from the sea-wall; and its foot, by resting against a kind of breakwater formed of large stones, was saved from being exposed, vertically, to the action of the sea. The waves, thus broke upon the artificial beach, and running up its smooth surface without meeting the slightest resistance, expended, in a great measure, their strength ere reaching the foot of the wall. To avoid, however, the shock which would still have been felt by the waves breaking against the ramparts, (especially when the sea was unusually agitated) had the planes of the beach and wall met at an angle, the upper portion of the surface of the artificial beach--for about fifteen feet--was laid with large blocks of stone, and united in a curve, or inverted arch, with the casing of the walls of the rampart; and the waves being, by this means, conducted upwards, without experiencing a check, spent their remaining strength in the air, and fell back upon the wooden beach in a harmless shower of spray. So well was the work executed, that many portions of the arch which connected the beach with the scarped masonry of the rampart are yet perfect, and may be seen projecting from the face of the wall, about twenty feet above its foundation; although the beach upon which it rested has been entirely swept away. Another cause, besides neglect, has contributed greatly to the destruction of this work; namely, the injudicious removal of the stones and ledges of rock which formed the breakwater of the beach, for erecting houses and repairing the walls of the city. The ride round the ramparts would be an agreeable variety to the _eternal paseo_ on the _Camino de Ercoles_,[32] but for the insufferable odours that arise from the vast heaps of filth deposited on one part of it. To such an extent has this nuisance reached, that, without another river Alpheus, even the hard-working son of Jupiter (the city's reputed founder) would find its removal no easy task. The arsenal of the _Carracas_ is situated on the northern bank of the Santi Petri river, about half a mile within the mouth by which that channel communicates with the bay of Cadiz, and at a distance of two leagues from the city, to which it has no access by land. Its plan is laid on a magnificent scale, and it may boast of having equipped some of the most formidable armaments that ever put to sea; but it is now one vast ruin, hardly possessing the means of fitting out a cockboat. A fire, that reduced the greater part of it to ashes some five and thirty years since, furnishes the national vanity with an agreeable excuse for its present condition. The road from Cadiz to Port St. Mary's is very circuitous, and offers little to interest any persons but military men and salt-refiners. I will, therefore, pass rapidly over it--which its condition enables me to do--merely observing that, from the branching off of the Chaussée to Chiclana at the _Portazgo_, it makes a wide sweep round the salt marshes at the head of the bay of Cadiz, to gain _Puerto Real_ (eighteen miles from Cadiz); and then leaving the peninsula of the _Trocadero_ on the left, in four miles reaches a long wooden bridge over the Guadalete--here called the river San Pedro. Two miles further on it crosses another stream by a similar means; and this second river, which is connected with the Guadalete by a canal, has become the principal channel of communication between Xeres and the bay of Cadiz. A road now turns off to the right to Xeres; another, on the left, to Puerto Santa Maria; and that which continues straight on proceeds to San Lucar, on the Guadalquivír. Puerto Real is a large but decayed town, possessing but little trade,[33] and no manufactories. Its environs, however, are fertile--enabling it to contend with Port St. Mary's in supplying the Cadiz market with fruit and vegetables;--and a good crop of hay might even be taken from its streets after the autumnal rains!--The population is estimated at 12,000 souls. Puerto Santa Maria is a yet larger town than Puerto Real, and is computed to contain 18,000 inhabitants. It is situated within the mouth and extending along the right bank of the river, into which the Guadalete has been partly turned. The entrance to the harbour is obstructed by a sand bank, which is impassable at low tide; and at times, when the wind is strong from the S. W., this bar interrupts altogether the water communication with Cadiz.[34] The distance between the two places, across the bay, is but five miles; by the causeway, twenty-four. The main street of Puerto Santa Maria is of great length, wide, and rather handsome; and the place has, altogether, a very thriving look; for which it is indebted, as well to the great share it enjoys of the Xeres wine trade,[35] as to the fruitfulness of its fields and orchards. The country, to some considerable extent round the town, is perfectly flat; and the soil (a dark alluvial deposit,) is rich, and highly cultivated; it is, in fact, the market-garden of Cadiz, the inhabitants of which place would die of scurvy, if cut off for six months from the lemon-groves of Port St. Mary. The position of Puerto Santa Maria seems to correspond pretty well with that of the Portus Gaditanus of Antoninus, viz., 14 miles from the Puente Zuazo, (_Pons_;) the difference being only that between English and Roman miles. But, besides that there is every appearance of the Guadalete having altered its course, and consequently swept away all traces of the Roman port, (or yet more ancient one of _Menesthes_, according to Strabo,) a fertile soil is, of all things, the most inimical to the _preservation_ of _ruins_; for gardeners will have no respect for old stones when they stand in the way of cabbage-plants. It would, therefore, be vain to look for any vestiges of the ancient town, in the vicinity of the modern one. To proceed to Xeres, we must retrace our steps, along the chaussée to Cadiz, for about a mile; when, leaving the two roads branching off to Puerto Real and San Lucar on the right and left, our way continues straight on, traverses a cultivated plain for another mile, and then ascends a rather steep ridge, distinguished in this flat country by the name of _Sierra de Xeres_, though scarcely 500 feet high. The view from the summit of this ridge is, nevertheless, remarkably fine. It embraces the whole extent of the bay of Cadiz; the bright towns which stand upon its margin; the curiously intersected country that cuts them off from each other; and the winding courses of the Guadalete and Santi Petri. The slope of the hill is very gradual on the side facing Xeres, and the view is tame in comparison with that in the opposite direction. The road, which traverses a country covered with corn and olives, is _carriageable_ throughout; but there is a better route, which turns the Sierra to the eastward, keeping nearer the marshes of the Guadalete. The distance from Puerto Santa Maria to Xeres, by the direct road, is nine miles; by the post route, ten. Xeres is situated in the lap of two rounded hillocks, which shelter it to the east and west; and it covers a considerable extent of ground. The city, properly so called, is embraced by an old crenated Moorish wall, which, though enclosing a labyrinth of narrow, ill-built, and worse drained streets, is of no great circuit, and is so intermixed with the houses of the suburbs, as to be visible only here and there. The limits of the ancient town are well defined, however, by the numerous gateways still standing, and which, from the augmented size of the place, appear to be scattered about it without any object. Some of the old buildings and narrow streets are very sketchy, and the number of gables and chimneys cannot fail to strike one who has been long accustomed to the flat-roofed cities of Andalusia. The principal merchants of the place reside mostly in the suburbs; where, besides having greater space for their necessarily extensive premises, their wine stores are better situated for ventilation; a very important auxiliary in bringing the juice of the grape to a due state of perfection. The numerous clean and lofty stores, interspersed with commodious and well-built houses, gardens, greenhouses, &c., give the suburbs an agreeable, refreshing appearance. But it is needful to walk the streets with nose in air, and eyes fixed on things above; for, though much wider, and consequently more freely exposed to the action of the sun and air, than those of the circumvallated city, they are yet more filthy, and quite as nauseating. Now and then, indeed, a generous brown sherry odour salutes the third sense, counteracting, in some degree, the unwholesome effects of the noxious cloacal miasms. But the bad scents prevail in the proportion of ten to one; and, like the far-famed distilling city of Cologne, Xeres seems to have bottled up, and hermetically sealed, all its sweets for exportation. The population of the place is enormous--being estimated at no less than 50,000 souls. But the amount is subject to great variations, dependant on the recentness of the last endemic fever, generated in its pestiferous gutters. The inhabitants are all, more or less, connected with the wine trade--which is the only thing thought of or talked of in the place. The store-houses are all above ground. They are immense buildings, having lofty roofs supported on arches, springing from rows of slender columns; and their walls are pierced with numerous windows, to admit of a thorough circulation of air. Some are so large as to be capable of containing 4000 butts, and are cool, even in the most sultry weather. The exhalations are, nevertheless, rather _overcoming_, even unaided by the numerous _samples_, of which one is tempted to make trial. The number of butts annually made, or, more correctly speaking, _collected_, at Xeres, amounts to 30,000. Of this number, one half is exported to England, and includes the produce of nearly all the choicest vineyards of Xeres; for, in selecting their wines for shipment, the Xeres houses carefully avoid mixing their first-growth wines with those of lighter quality, collected from the vineyards of Moguer, San Lucar, and Puerto Real; or even with such as are produced on their own inferior grounds. The remaining 15,000 butts are in part consumed in the country; where a light wine, having what is called a _Manzanilla_[36] flavour, is preferred--or sold to the shippers from other places, where they are generally mixed with inferior wines. The total number of butts shipped, annually, from the different ports round the bay of Cadiz, may be taken at the following average-- From Xeres 15,000 almost all to England. " Puerto Santa Maria 12,000 chiefly to England and the United States. { principally to the Habana, " Chiclana 3,000{ the Ports of Mexico, and " Puerto Real 500{ Buenos Ayres. ------- Total 30,500 ------- But, besides the above, a prodigious quantity of wine finds its way to England from Moguer and San Lucar, which one never hears of but under the common denomination of Sherry. Most of the principal merchants are growers, as well as venders of wine; which, with foreign houses, renders it necessary that one partner of the firm, at least, should be a Roman Catholic; for "_heretics_" cannot hold lands in Spain. Those who are growers have a decided advantage over such as merely make up wines; for the latter are liable to have the produce of the inferior vineyards of San Lucar, Moguer, and other places, mixed up by the grower of whom they purchase. All Sherries, however, are _manufactured_; for, it would be almost as difficult to get an unmixed butt of wine from a Xeres merchant, as a direct answer from a quaker. But there is no concealment in this mixing process; and it is even quite necessary, in order to keep up the stock of old wines, which, otherwise, would soon be consumed. These are kept in huge casks--not much inferior in size to the great ton of Heidelberg--called "_Madre_"[37] butts; and some of these old ladies contain wine that is 120 years of age. It must, however, be confessed, that the plan adopted in keeping them up, partakes somewhat of the nature of "_une imposture delicate_;" since, whenever a gallon of wine is taken from the 120 year old butt, it is replaced by a like quantity from the next in seniority, and so on with the rest; so that even the very oldest wines in the store are daily undergoing a mixing process. It is thus perfectly idle, when a customer writes for a "ten-year old" butt of sherry, to expect to receive a wine which was grown that number of years previously. He will get a most excellent wine, however, which will, probably, be prepared for him in the following manner:--Three-fourths of the butt will consist of a three or four year old wine, to which a few gallons of _Pajarete_, or _Amontillado_,[38] will be added, to give the particular flavour or colour required; and the remainder will be made up of various proportions of old wines, of different vintages: a dash of brandy being added, to preserve it from sea-sickness during the voyage. To calculate the age of this mixture appears, at first sight, to involve a laborious arithmetical operation. But it is very simply done, by striking an average in the following manner:--The _fond_, we will suppose, is a four-years' old wine, with which figure we must, therefore, commence our calculations. To flavour and give age to this foundation, the hundred and twenty years' old "_madre_" is made to contribute a gallon, which, being about the hundreth part of the proposed butt, diffuses a year's maturity into the composition. The centiginarian stock-butt next furnishes a quantity, which in the same way adds another year to its age. The next in seniority supplies a proportion equivalent to a space of two years; and a fourth adds a similar period to its existence. So that, without going further, we have 4+1+1+2+2=10, as clear as the sun at noon-day, or a demonstration in Euclid. This may appear very like "_bishoping_," or putting marks in a horse's mouth to conceal his real age. But the intention, _in the case of the wine_, is by no means fraudulent, but simply to distribute more equally the good things of this life, by furnishing the public with an excellent composition, which is within the reach of many; for, if this were not done, the consequence would be, that the Xeres merchant would have a small quantity of wine in his stores, which, from its extreme age, would be so valuable, that few persons would be found to purchase it, and a large stock of inferior wines, which would be driven out of the market by the produce of other countries. The quality of the wine depends, therefore, upon the quantity and age of the various _madre_ butts from which it has been flavoured; and the taste is varied from dry to sweet, and the colour from pale to brown, by the greater or less admixture of _Pajarete_, _Amontillado_, and _boiled_ sherry. I do not think that the custom of adding boiled wine obtains generally, for it is a very expensive method of giving age. It is, however, a very effectual mode, and one that is considered equivalent to a voyage across the Atlantic, at the very least. I have heard of an extensive manufacturer (not of wine) in our own country, who had rather improved on this plan of giving premature old age to his wines. He called one of the steam-engines of his factory _Bencoolen_, and another _Mobile_; and, slinging his butts of Sherry and Madeira to the great levers of the machinery, gave them the benefit of a ship's motion, as well as a tropical temperature, without their quitting his premises; and, after a certain number of weeks' oscillation, he passed them off as "East and West India _particular_." The sweet wines of Xeres are, perhaps, the finest in the world. That known as _Pajarete_ is the most abundantly made, but the _Pedro Ximenes_ is of superior flavour. There is also a sweet wine flavoured with cherries, which is very delicious. The light dry Sherries are also very pleasant in their pure state, but they require to be mixed with brandy and other wines, to keep long, or to ship for the foreign market. Those, therefore, who purchase _cheap Sherry_ in England may be assured that it has become a _light_ wine since its departure from Spain. The number of _winehouses_ at Xeres is quite extraordinary. Of these, as many, I think, as five-and-twenty export almost exclusively to England. The merchants are extremely hospitable; they live in very good style, and are particularly choice of the wines that appear at their tables. The Spanish antiquaries have by no means settled to their satisfaction what Roman city stood on the site of modern Xeres. The common opinion seems to be, that it occupies the place of _Asta Regia_, mentioned by Pliny as one of the towns within the marshes of the Guadalquivír. Florez, however, labours to prove that it agrees better with _Asido_. But I do not think his arguments get over the difficulty arising from the expression "_in mediterraneo_," applied to that city; which agrees better with _Medina Sidonia_ than Xeres, the latter being close upon the flats of the Guadalquivír, whereas the other is decidedly _inland_ with reference to them. The medals of Asido, Florez describes as having sometimes a bull, and at others a "fish of the _tunny_ kind," upon them. Now this latter emblem is, most certainly, more applicable to Medina Sidonia than Xeres, since no fish of the "tunny kind" ever could have frequented the shallow muddy stream of the Guadalete. And though the city of Medina Sidonia is situated on the summit of a high hill, sixteen miles from the sea, yet we may take it for granted that its jurisdiction extended as far as the coast, to the eastward of the Isla de Leon; since it does not appear that any town of note intervened between Cadiz and Besaro, or Besippone. The same author derives the name Xeres from the Persian _Zeiraz_ (Schiras); supposing it may have been so called from that having been the country of the Moslem chief who captured Regia. The word assimilates with our mode of pronouncing the name of the existing town; and the wine of Schiraz was not less esteemed of old amongst the easterns, than Sherry is now by us, and appears ever to have been by the ancients; for tradition ascribes to Bacchus the foundation of Nebrissa, in the vicinity of Xeres. May not, therefore, the celebrity of its vineyards have led the Arabs to call the town Schiraz, or Xeres, rather than the country of the chief who conquered it? Xeres was captured from the Moors by San Fernando, and, becoming thenceforth one of the bulwarks of the Christian frontier, changed its name from _Xeres Sidonia_ to _Xeres de la Frontera_, by which it continues to be distinguished from others. The Guadalete does not approach within a mile and a half of Xeres. This river is the Chryssus of the Romans; and the Spaniards, ever prone to boast of the ancient celebrity of their country, maintain it to be the mythological Lethe of yet more remote times. On its right bank (about three miles on the road to Medina Sidonia) stands a Carthusian convent of some note. The pious founders of this edifice--as indeed was their wont--located themselves in a most enviable situation. The "_elisios xerexanos prados_" were spread out before them, covered with fat beeves, and herds of high caste horses, belonging to the order. The perfume of the surrounding orange-groves penetrated to the innermost recesses of this house of prayer and penance. The juice of the luscious grape, and the oil of the purple olives that grew upon the sunny bank whereon it stands, found their way, with as little obstruction, into its cells and cellars. But still, with this Canaan in their possession, these austere disciples of St. Bruno affected to despise the things of this world, and held not communion with their fellow-creatures! The edifice is fast falling to decay; the brotherhood is reduced to a score of decrepit old men; and--what alone is to be regretted--the celebrated breed of horses has become extinct. The Guadalete winds through the valley overlooked by the _Cartuja_,[39] and is crossed by a stone bridge of five arches. On gaining the southern bank of the river, roads branch off in all directions. That to the left--keeping up the valley--proceeds to Paterna (sixteen miles from Xeres), and _Alcalà de los Gazules_ (twenty-five miles). Another, continuing straight on, goes to Medina Sidonia (eighteen miles); and a third, that presents itself to the right, is directed across the country to Chiclana, reducing the distance to that place from twenty-six miles (by the post-road) to sixteen. About four miles below the bridge are some store-houses, a wharf, and ferry, called _El Portal_, from whence the river is navigable to Port St. Mary's. _El Portal_ may be considered the port of Xeres, to which place (distant about three miles) there is a good wheel-road. The fatal battle which gave Spain up to the dominion of the Saracens (A.D. 714) was fought on the southern bank of the Guadalete, about five miles from Xeres, on the road to Paterna. The robes and "horned helmet" of Roderick, which he is supposed to have thrown off to facilitate his escape, were found on the bank of the river, where a small chapel, dedicated to Our Lady of _Leyna_, now stands. The sanguinary fight is stated--with the customary Spanish exaggeration--to have lasted eight days! and then only to have been decided in favour of the Mohammedans by treason. But however much we may admire the valour displayed by the Gothic monarch, in thus obstinately defending his crown, yet the rashness he was guilty of, in drawing up his forces on such a field (in a country abounding in strong positions, where the enemy's superiority of numbers would not have availed them), proves him to have been as little fitted to command an army as to govern a kingdom. CHAPTER IV. CHOICE OF ROADS TO SEVILLE--BY LEBRIJA--MIRAGE--THE MARISMA--POST ROAD--CROSS ROAD BY LAS CABEZAS AND LOS PALACIOS--DIFFICULTY OF RECONCILING ANY OF THESE ROUTES WITH THAT OF THE ROMAN ITINERARY--SEVILLE--GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE CITY--THE ALAMEDA--DISPLAY OF CARRIAGES--ELEVATION OF THE HOST--PUBLIC BUILDINGS--THE CATHEDRAL--LONJA--AMERICAN ARCHIVES--ALCAZAR--CASA PILATA--ROYAL SNUFF MANUFACTORY--CANNON FOUNDRY--CAPUCHIN CONVENT--MURILLO--THEATRE OF SEVILLE--OBSERVATIONS ON THE STATE OF THE NATIONAL DRAMA--MORATIN--THE BOLERO--SPANISH DANCING--THE SPANIARDS NOT A MUSICAL PEOPLE. The traveller who journeys on horseback has the choice of several roads between Xeres and Seville. The shortest is by the marshes of the Guadalquivír, visiting only one town, Lebrija, in the whole distance of eleven leagues. The longest is the post route, or _arrecife_, which makes a very wide circuit by Utrera and Alcalá de Guadaira, to avoid the swampy country bordering the river. From this latter road several others diverge to the left, cutting off various segments of the arc it describes; and in summer these routes are even better than the highway itself, though heavy and much intersected by torrents in winter. On the first-named or shortest road, the town of Lebrija alone calls for observation. It is about fifteen miles from Xeres, and stands on the side of a slightly-marked mound, that stretches some little way into the wide-spreading plain of the Guadalquivír. The knoll is covered with the extensive ruins of a castle--a joint work of Romans and Moors--which during the late war was put into a defensible state by the French. Most writers agree in placing here the Roman city of Nebrissa;[40] in which name that of the modern town may readily be distinguished. It is distant about five miles from the Guadalquivír, and contains three convents, and a population of 4,000 souls. The Posada is excellent. The country from Xeres to Lebrija presents an undulated surface, which is clothed with vines and olives; but thenceforth the banks of the "_olivifero Boetis_" are devoted entirely to pasture, and the road is most uninterestingly flat: so flat, indeed, that there is scarcely a rise in the whole twenty-eight miles from Lebrija to Seville. It is not passable in winter, and but one wretched hovel, called the _Venta del Peleon_, offers itself as a resting-place. The river winds occasionally close up to the side of the road, and from time to time a barge or passage boat, gliding along its smooth surface, breaks the wearisome monotony of the scene; but in general the tortuous stream wanders to a distance of several miles from the road, and is altogether lost to the sight in an apparently interminable plain, that stretches to the westward. The misty vapour, or _mirage_, which rises from and hangs over the low land bordering the river, produces singular deceptions; at times giving the whole face of the country in advance the semblance of a vast lake; at others, magnifying distant objects in a most extraordinary manner. On one occasion, we were surprised to see what had every appearance of being a large town rise up suddenly before us; and it was only when arrived within a few hundred yards of the objects we had taken for churches and houses, that we became convinced they were but a drove of oxen. These imaginary oxen proved in the end, however, to be only a flock of sheep. The _Marisma_,[41] for such is the name given to this low ground, affords pasturage for immense herds of cattle of all sorts, and the herbage is so fine as to lead one to wonder what becomes of all the _fat_ beef and mutton in Spain. The post road from Xeres to Seville, as I have already mentioned, is very circuitous, increasing the distance from forty-three to fifty-six miles--reckoned fifteen and a half post leagues. For the first thirteen miles, that is, to the post house of _La Casa real del Cuervo_, the road traverses a country rich in corn and olives, but skirting for some considerable distance the western limits of a vast heath, called the _llanura de Caulina_, whereon even goats have difficulty in finding sustenance. The first league of the road is perfectly level, the rest hilly. A little beyond the post house of El Cuervo, a road strikes off to the left to Lebrija. The _arrecife_, proceeding on towards Utrera, crosses numerous gulleys by which the winter torrents are led down from the side of the huge _Sierra Gibalbin_, which, here raising its head on the right, stretches to the north for a mile or two, keeping parallel to the road, and then again sinks to the plain. This passed, the remainder of the road to Utrera is conducted along what may be termed the brow of a wide tract of low table land, which, extending to the foot of the distant _Serranía de Ronda_ on the right, breaks in the opposite direction into innumerable ramifications, towards the plain of the Guadalquivír. In the entire distance to Utrera, (twenty-four miles from _El Cuervo_) there is not a single village on the road, and but very few farms or even cottages scattered along it. It is plentifully furnished with bridges for crossing the various _barrancas_[42] that drain the mountain ravines in the winter, and by means of these bridges the chaussée is kept nearly on a dead level throughout. About midway there is another post house. This road is so perfectly uninteresting, that, availing myself of the earliest opportunity of quitting it and proceeding to Seville by a more direct, if not a more diversified route, I will strike into a well-beaten track that presents itself, edging away to the left, about three miles beyond _El Cuervo_, and is directed on Las Cabezas de San Juan, distant about six miles from the post road. Las Cabezas de San Juan is a wretched little village, which inscriptions found in its vicinity have decided to be the _Ugia_[43] of the Romans. It is situated on a knoll, commanding an extensive view over the circumjacent flat country, and some years since contained a population of a thousand or twelve hundred souls. But, having been the hotbed wherein Riego's conspiracy was brought to unnatural maturity, it was razed to the ground during the short contest that restored Ferdinand to a despotic throne, and "all its pleasant things laid waste." From hence to _Los Palacios_ is ten miles. The country is flat, and but partially cultivated. A short league before reaching _Los Palacios_, a long ruined bridge, called _El Alcantarilla_, is seen at a little distance off the road on the right. In the time of Swinburne, this bridge appears to have been passable, and an inscription was then sufficiently perfect to announce its Roman origin. It was probably raised to carry a road from Lebrija to Utrera across a marshy tract, which in winter is apt to be flooded by the _Salado de Moron_; or perhaps the road over it may have been directed on _Dos Hermanos_, which is known to be the Roman town of Orippo. Los Palacios is a clean compact village, of about 1,000 inhabitants. A plain extends for many miles on all sides of it, but a slight, perhaps artificial, mound rises slightly above the general level of the place on its eastern side, and bears the weight of its ruined castle: the walls of the village itself are also fast crumbling to the dust. The inns are miserable; but a Spanish nobleman, with whom we had become acquainted at Xeres, had obligingly furnished us with a letter of introduction to a gentleman of the place, who entertained us most hospitably, and very reluctantly--for he wished much to detain us--gave orders to the _dueña_ of his household to have the usual breakfast of chocolate and bread fried in lard prepared for us by daybreak on the following morning. From Los Palacios to Seville the distance is reckoned five "_leguas regulares_," but it is barely fifteen miles. The country to the north of the village is very fruitful, and becomes hilly as one proceeds. At about nine miles there is a solitary venta, on the margin of a stream that comes down from _Dos Hermanos_; which village is situated about a league off on the right. It is a matter of some little difficulty to make any of the roads between Cadiz and Seville (that is, from Port St. Mary's onwards) agree with the route laid down in the Itinerary of Antoninus. The distance of the _Portus Gaditanus_ from _Hispalis_ is therein stated to be seventy-six Roman miles,[44] or, according to Florez, sixty-eight;[45] which miles, if computed to contain eight _Olympic_ stadia each, are equal to seventy, and sixty-three British statute miles respectively; the actual distance from Puerto Santa Maria to Seville being, by the chaussée, sixty-six miles; by Lebrija and the marshes, fifty-two. On comparing these distances, therefore, one would naturally be led to suppose that the Roman military way followed the circuitous line of the existent chaussée, but that monuments and inscriptions, which have been found at Las Cabezas de St. Juan and Dos Hermanos, prove those places to be the towns of _Ugia_ and _Orippo_, mentioned in the Itinerary as lying upon the road. We are under the necessity, therefore, of adopting a line which reduces the distance from the _Portus Gaditanus_ to _Hispalis_ far below even that given by Florez. The only way of meeting all these difficulties and premises seems to be by taking a smaller stadium than the _Olympic_. That of 666-2/3 to a degree of the meridian[46] I have generally found to agree well with the actual distances of places in Spain, and it is a scale which we are warranted in adopting, since it is sometimes used by Strabo on the authority of Eratosthenes, and Pliny admits that no two persons ever agreed in the Roman measures. Taking this scale, therefore (though a yet smaller would agree better), I fix the first station, _Hasta_, at a small table hill, even now called by the Spaniards _La Mesa de Asta_, lying N.N.W. of Xeres;[47] making the distance from the _Portus Gaditanus_ sixteen miles, as in the Itinerary, instead of eight, as altered by Florez: a number, by the way, which scarcely agrees better with the actual distance from Port St. Mary's to Xeres--at which latter place he fixes Hasta--than the sixteen miles of the original. The next place mentioned in the Itinerary is _Ugia_; determined, as has been already stated, to have stood where Las Cabezas de San Juan is now situated; and the distance from the _Mesa de Asta_ to this place, passing through _Nebrissa_ (Lebrija--omitted in the Itinerary, as not being a convenient halting-place for the troops), agrees tolerably well with that specified, viz., twenty-seven Roman miles. The remaining distances, viz., twenty-four miles to _Orippo_ (Dos Hermanos), and nine to _Hispalis_ (Seville), agree yet better, though still somewhat below the scale I have adopted. The appearance of Seville, approaching it on the side of the _Marisma_, is by no means imposing. Stretching as the city does along the bank of the Guadalquivír, its least diameter meets the view; and, from its standing on a perfect flat, the walls by which it is encircled conceal the most part of the houses, and take off from the height of the hundred spires of its churches--the lofty _Giralda_ being the only conspicuous object that presents itself above them. The wide avenue which, after crossing the river _Guadaira_, leads up to the city gate, is, however, prepossessing; a spacious botanical garden is on the left hand, and, in advance of the city walls, are the Amphitheatre, the Royal Snuff Manufactory, and several other handsome public buildings. Seville is generally considered,--at all events by its inhabitants,--the largest city of Spain. It is of an oval shape, two miles long, and one and a quarter broad; and, washed by the Guadalquivír on the eastern side, is enclosed on the others by a patched-up embattled wall, the work of all ages and nations. The city is tolerably free from suburbs, excepting at the Carmona and _Rosario_ gates on its western side; but numerous extramural convents, hospitals, barracks, and other public edifices, are scattered about in different directions, which, with the town of Triana, on the opposite bank of the river, materially increase the size of the place, and swell the amount of its population to at least 100,000 souls. Seville cannot be called a handsome city, for it contains but one tolerable street; the houses, however, are lofty, and generally well built, the shops good, and the lamps within sight of each other, which is not usually the case in Spanish towns. Most of the houses in the principal thoroughfares are built with an edging of flat roof overlooking the street. This part of the house is called the _Azotea_, and, with the lower orders, serves the manifold purposes of a dormitory in summer, a place for washing and drying clothes in winter, and a place of assignation at all seasons. In hot weather awnings are spread from these _azoteas_ across the streets, rendering them delightfully cool and shady; the canvass covering, fanned by the breeze, sending down a refreshing air, whilst it serves at the same time as a shelter from the sun. Even in the most sultry days of summer, I have never found the streets of Seville _impracticable_. There are several spacious squares in various parts of the city; in the largest, distinguished by the extraordinary, though, perhaps, not _unsuitable_ name of _La Plaza de la Incarnacion_, the market is held. This is abundantly supplied with bread, meat, fish, poultry, and all sorts of vegetables and fruits, and is, perhaps, the cheapest in Andalusia; it certainly is the cleanest. The _Alamedas_, of which there are two, are equally as well taken care of as the market, though in point of beauty they are not quite deserving of the praise which has been bestowed upon them. One is in the interior of the city, and becomes only a place of general resort when the weather is unsettled. The other more commonly frequented walk is between the walls of the town and the Guadalquivír, extending nearly a mile along the bank of the river, from the _Torre del Oro_ to the bridge of boats communicating with Triana. It is well sheltered with trees, and furnished with seats, and is indeed a most delightful and amusing promenade, being nightly crowded with all descriptions of people, from the grandee of the first class to the goatskin clad swineherd, who visits the city for a _sombrero_ of the _ultima moda_, or a fresh supply of _bacallao_. The carriage drive round the walk is generally thronged with equipages of all sorts and ages, any one of which, shown as a _spectacle_ in England, would most assuredly make the exhibitor's fortune. The _blazon_ on the pannels, and venerable cocked hats and laced coats of the drivers and attendants, bespeak them, nevertheless, to belong to _sons of somebody_; and the wives and daughters of somebody seated therein, seem not a little proud of possessing these indubitable proofs of the antiquity of their houses. Few of these distinguished personages, however, excepting such as labour under the infliction of gout, rheumatism, or the indelible marks of old age, are satisfied to remain quiet spectators of the gay scene; but, after driving once or twice round the _paseo_ to see _who_ has arrived, alight, and join the flutter of their fans, and, with grief I say it, their loud laugh and conversation to the already over-powering din of the "promiscuous multitude." This scene of gaiety is prolonged until long after the sun has ceased to gild the mirror-like surface of the Guadalquivír. The walk, indeed, is still in its most fashionable state of throng, when a tinkling bell, announcing the elevation of the Host, marks the concluding ceremony of the vesper service in a neighbouring church. At this signal the motley crowd appears as if touched by the wand of an enchanter. Each devout Romanist either reverentially bends the knee, or stands statue-like on the spot where the homage-commanding sound first reached the ear. The men take off their hats--the ladies drop their fans. The coachmen check their hacks--the hacks hang down their heads--not a whisper is heard, not an eye is raised. The bell sounds a second time, and animation returns, the breast is marked with repeated crosses, the dust brushed off the knees, "_conques_" innumerable take up the interrupted conversation, and once more "Soft eyes look love to eyes which speak again." So ludicrously observant are the Spaniards of this ceremony, that, on the ringing of the bell, I once remarked a water-carrier stop in the midst of his sonorous cry, "_A...._" and devoutly uncovering his head, and crossing himself, wait until the second tinkle permitted him again to open his mouth; when, with most comical gravity, he finished the wanting syllable "_gua!_ _Agua fres--ca!_" The Guadalquivír is about 200 yards wide at Seville, where it forms a kind of basin, and is navigable for vessels of 150 tons burthen. It is so liable to be swollen by the freshes poured down from the mountains in the upper part of its course, that a permanent bridge has never been attempted; and the banks are so low, that the floods have frequently reached to the very gates of the city. The influence of the tide is felt some little distance above Seville, rendering the water of the river unfit for general purposes. The water of the wells, on the other hand, is considered unwholesome, so that the city is, in a great measure, dependent for its supply of this most necessary article on an aqueduct, that brings a stream from _Alcalà de Guadaira_, a distance of about nine miles. The populous town of Triana is still worse off than Seville, for, as the expedient of a leather pipe has not yet been thought of, the "essential fluid" has to be carried across the river on men's or asses' backs, rendering it a most expensive article of consumption; a circumstance that accounts, in a great measure, for the very Egyptian complexion of the inhabitants. The public buildings of Seville fully entitle the city to its boasted title of the Western Capital of Spain. It contains no less than sixty convents and nunneries, besides numerous other religious establishments and hospitals. The Archiepiscopal Church is the largest in Spain,[48] its dimensions being 450 feet by 260; and it is one of the most splendid piles in the universe. The architecture of the exterior is heavy and tasteless, so that one is but little prepared for the striking change which meets the eye on drawing aside the ponderous leathern curtain that closes the portal, and entering the vast vaulted interior. It is built in the gothic style, not of a florid kind, however, but simple, aërial, and imposing. The colour of the free stone used in its construction is a subdued white; the pavement is laid in squares of black and white marble, and the stained glass windows, which are of extreme beauty, shed a warm, variegated glow throughout the building, that produces an effect well suited to its character. Indeed, no cathedral that I have any where seen either presents a more striking coup d'oeil, or draws forth, in a greater degree, that instinctive feeling of devotion implanted in the human breast. The walls, too, are not so disfigured with tawdry chapels, as those of most Roman Catholic churches, and the few paintings with which they are decorated are _chef d'oeuvres_ of the best Spanish masters. One modern painting has, however, been admitted to the collection, rather, I should think, out of compliment to the ladies of Seville, than on account of its own merit. It represents two maidens of this saintly city, who, "_mucho tiempo hay_,"[49] to use our conductor's expression, having been accused of some heretical practices, were exposed to be devoured by a ferocious lion. The gallant sovereign of the woods and forests, instead, however, of making a meal of these tempting morsels of human flesh and imagined frailty, "_se echó à sus pies_," and began caressing them after his feline fashion, to the great astonishment of all beholders! This miraculous want of appetite on the part of the lion, making the innocence of the damsels evident, led, of course, to their liberation, and their names are now enrolled upon the long list of saints of Seville. The tower of the cathedral, commonly called _La Giralda_, from a colossal statue of _Faith_, at its summit, which, with strange inconsistency of character, wheels about at every change of wind, is by no means a handsome structure. It was built by the Moors, about 250 years before the city was captured by San Fernando, and originally was only 280 feet in height; but a belfry has since been added, which makes it altogether 364 feet high. The tower is fifty feet square, and the ascent is effected by an inclined plane, by means of which, some queen of Spain is rumoured to have ridden on horseback to the gallery under the belfry. The view from the summit of the tower fully repays one, even for the labour of ascending it on foot, and I am not quite sure but that the inclined plane rather increases than lessens the fatigue of mounting. From hence alone can a correct idea be formed of the size and splendour of Seville. The eye, from this elevation, embraces the whole extent of the city, its long narrow streets, wide circuit of walls, its gateways, magnificent public buildings, and spacious plazas, its verdant orangeries, and its house-top flower-gardens. Beyond the busy city, a fruitful plain extends for several miles in every direction; on one side bearing luxuriant crops of corn and olives, on the other, giving pasture to countless herds of cattle; the lovely Guadalquivír winding through and fertilizing the whole. The Archiepiscopal palace occupies one side of a small square, that is immediately under the _Giralda_; the façade of this building is handsome, but we had not an opportunity of seeing the interior, as its worthy occupier was unwell. Near the cathedral, but on the opposite side to the Archbishop's residence, is the _Lonja_; a splendid edifice, which (as the name implies) was originally built for an exchange. But, though the lower suites of apartments are still set apart for the use of the merchants, the building is so inconveniently situated, that no commercial business is transacted there, and the whole of the upper story has been fitted up as a repository for the "American archives." These records are most voluminous, and are preserved with as much care, and ticketed with as great regularity, as if Spain shortly intended to resume the sovereignty over her former vast transatlantic possessions. As a mark of especial favour, the tip of my little finger was permitted to rest upon the edge of the first letter written from the _other world_; the keeper of the archives requesting me, at the same time, not to press too hard upon the valuable MS., and assuring us, that most persons were obliged to be satisfied with looking at the precious document bearing the signature of the adventurous Columbus, in its glass case. The whole of the shelves, drawers, &c., are of cedar; a wood which has the property of preserving the papers committed to their charge from all descriptions of insects. The floors are laid in chequers of red and blue marble, and the grand staircase is composed of the same, which is highly polished and remarkably handsome. One of the apartments of the vast quadrangle contains two original paintings of Columbus and Hernan Cortes. A little removed from the _Lonja_, is the _Alcazar_, or Royal Palace. This is kept up in a kind of half-dress state, and has a governor appointed to its peculiar charge, who usually resides within its precincts. It is built in the Moorish style, and is generally supposed to have been the work of Moorish hands, though raised only--so at least a Gothic inscription on its walls is said to state--by "the puissant King of Castile and Leon, Don Pedro." There is probably some little exaggeration in this, and, in point of fact, perhaps, the mighty monarch only repaired and added to the palace of the Moorish kings, which the neglect of a hundred years had, in his time, rendered uninhabitable. It is a very inferior piece of workmanship to the Alhambra, but, nevertheless, contains much to admire, particularly the ceilings of the apartments (of which there are upwards of seventy), and the walls of one of the courts. The different towers command very fine views over the city and adjacent country, and the gardens are delightful, though of but small extent. The walks are laid with tiles, between which little tubes are introduced vertically, that communicate with waterpipes underneath, and, by merely turning a screw, the whole of the valves of these tubes are simultaneously opened, and each shoots forth a diminutive stream of water. This plan was adopted, as being an improvement on the tedious method usually practised in watering gardens. It affords the facetiously disposed a glorious opportunity of inflicting a practical joke upon unwary visiters to the Alcazar; who, conducted to the garden, and then and there seduced, out of mere politeness, to join in the complaint expressed of a want of rain, suddenly find themselves _over_ a heavy shower, and under the necessity of laughing at a piece of wit from which there is no possibility of escape. The _Casa Pilata_ is another of the sights of Seville. It is a private house, said to be built on the exact model of that of the Roman governor of Jerusalem. It is fitted up with much taste, but its chief beauty consists in a profusion of glazed tiles, which give it actual coolness, as well as a refreshing look. Most of the other subjects worthy of the traveller's notice are situated without the walls of the city. The first in order, issuing from the Xeres gate, is the _Plaza de los Toros_, or amphitheatre, an immense circus, one half built of stone, and the other half of wood, and capable of accommodating 14,000 persons. The next remarkable object is the _Royal Tobacco Manufactory_, (the term seems rather absurd to English ears,) a huge edifice, so strongly built, and jealously defended by walls and ditches, as to appear rather a detached fort, or citadel, raised to overawe the turbulent city, than an establishment for peacefully grinding tobacco leaves into snuff, and rolling them into cigars. The manufactory employs 5000 persons, and of this number 2600 are occupied solely in making cigars. But, as I have elsewhere shown, even with the assistance of the Royal Manufactory lately established at Malaga, the supply of _lawful_ cigars is not equal to one-tenth part of the consumption of the country. The demand for snuff may probably be fully met by the Royal Manufactory; for the Spaniards are not great consumers of tobacco through the medium of the nose; and most of the snuffs prepared at Seville are extremely pungent, so that "a little goes a great way." There is a coarse kind, however, called, I think, "Spanish bran," which is much esteemed by _connoisseurs_. The Royal Cannon Foundry is in the vicinity of the Tobacco Manufactory, and though this establishment for furnishing the means of consuming powder is not in such activity as its neighbour employed in supplying food for smoke, yet it is in equally good order, and, on the whole, is a very creditable national establishment. The brass pieces made here are remarkably handsome, and very correctly bored, but they want the lightness and finish of our guns--qualities in which English artillery excels all others. Two of the "monster mortars," cast by the French for the siege of Cadiz, are still preserved here. The Cavalry Barracks, Royal Saltpetre Manufactory, Military Hospital, and various other edifices, planned on a scale proportioned to Spain's _former_ greatness, together with numerous convents, equally disproportioned to her present wants, follow in rapid succession in completing the circuit of the walls. The most interesting amongst the religious houses is a convent of Capuchins, situated near the Cordoba gate. It contains twenty-five splendid paintings by Murillo, "any one of which," as a modern writer has justly remarked, "would suffice to render a man immortal." Murillo was certainly a perfect master of his art. His style is peculiar, and in his early productions there is a coldness and formality that partake of the school of Velasquez; but the works of his maturer age are distinguished by a boldness of outline, a gracefulness of grouping, and a depth and softness of colouring, which entitle him to rank with Rubens and Correggio. The paintings of Murillo, though met with in all the best collections of Europe, where they take their place amongst the works of the first masters, are, nevertheless, valued by foreigners rather on account of their rarity than of their execution. The fact is, those of his paintings which have left Spain are nearly all devoted to the same subject--the Madonna and Child; and, even in that, offer but little variety either in the disposition, or in the colouring of the figures. The Spanish artist is, consequently, accused of want of genius and self-plagiarism. Nor does Murillo receive due credit for the pains he took in finishing his paintings; for, amongst those of his works which have found their way into foreign collections, there are few which have not received more or less damage, either in the transport from Spain, or by subsequent neglect; and, in many instances, the attempts made to restore them by cleaning or retouching have inflicted a yet more severe injury upon them. Those persons only, therefore, who have visited Spain, and, above all, Murillo's native city--Seville--can fully appreciate the merits of that wonderful artist. The vast number of master-pieces which he has there left behind him, and the variety of subjects they embrace, sufficiently prove, however, that, whilst in versatility of talent he has been equalled by few, in point of _industry_ he almost stands without a rival. Besides the twenty-five paintings in the Capuchin convent, already noticed, the _Hóspital de la Caridad_ contains several of Murillo's master-pieces; two, in particular, are deserving of notice--the subjects are, the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and Moses striking the rock. The great size of these two paintings saved them from a journey to Paris, but the French, in their zeal for the encouragement of the fine arts, stripped the chapel of all the other works of Murillo that enriched it--only a few of which were restored at the peace of 1815. Other paintings of the Spanish Rafael are to be found in the various churches of Seville, and every private collector (of whom the city contains many,) prides himself on being the possessor of at least one _original_ of his illustrious fellow-citizen. The theatre of Seville has ever held a comparatively distinguished place in the dramatic annals of Spain; and, lamentable as is the condition to which the national stage has been reduced, the capital of Andalusia may still be considered as one of the most _playgoing_ places in the kingdom. This may, perhaps, partly be accounted for by the number of dramatic authors to whom the city has given birth, partly by the peculiar disposition of the inhabitants of the province, who are deeper tinged with romance, and have more imagination than the rest of the natives of the Peninsula. The deplorable atrophy under which the drama has of late years been languishing in every part of Europe[50] had, aided by various predisposing circumstances, long been undermining the at no-time very robust constitution of the Spanish theatre; which, like a condemned criminal, existed only from day to day, at the will and pleasure of a despotic sovereign; and had, moreover, constantly to combat the hostility of the priesthood: a bigoted race, prone at all times to discourage an art, which, by enlarging the understandings of the community, tended to diminish the respect with which their own profane melo-dramatic mysteries were regarded. The priests, in fact, have always been, and ever will be, averse to their flock being fleeced by any other shears than their own. Considering, therefore, the obstacles which the Spanish theatre has had to contend against, obstacles which were yet more formidable in that country in times past than they are at the present day, it cannot but be admitted that the drama was cultivated in Spain with a degree of success which could little have been expected. Our own early dramatists, indeed, drew largely from the prolific sources opened by Lope de Vega, Calderon, and other Spanish writers of the sixteenth century; and, perhaps, to the example set by those authors is our stage indebted for its release from the thraldom in which others are yet held, by a preposterous, though _classic_, adherence to the preservation of the unities. The drama (in the strict sense of the term) never, however, became a popular amusement with the Spaniards generally. The legal disabilities imposed upon the performers by the intrigues of the Romish church brought the profession of an actor into disrepute, and, as a natural consequence, checked the progress of the histrionic art. The stage had no door opening to preferment, and the knight of the buskin (to whom, by the way, the _Don_ was interdicted), though endowed with the talents of a Talma or a Kemble, of a Liston or a Potier, ranked below the lowest of the train of bullfighters, and could never expect to amass a fortune, or hope to be considered otherwise than as a "diverting vagabond." A Spanish actress was yet more discouragingly circumstanced, as, however irreproachable her character, she held only the same grade in society as the frail Ciprian whose beauty gained her livelihood. Labouring under such disadvantages, it is not surprising, therefore, that Thalia and Euterpe should eventually have been driven from the Spanish stage, and a licentious monster--the illegitimate offspring of Comus and Impudicitia--have been crowned with the palm-wreath snatched from the brows of the immortal Parnassides. The modern Spanish dramatic authors--if it be not profanation so to call them--pandering to the vitiated taste of the day, indulge in all the licence of Aristophanes, without varnishing their obscenities with the brilliancy of his wit. They write, in fact, for auditors, who, whilst endowed with a quick perception of the ridiculous, are too ignorant to discriminate between right and wrong, and cannot perceive where legitimate satire ends, and libertinism commences; who, possessing a vast stock of native wit, inherit with it a coarse, degenerate taste. The human frailties of the monastic orders are, consequently, the favourite subjects now held up to ridicule on the stage, as if to prove the truth of Voltaire's lines, _"Les prêtres ne sont point ce qu'un vain peuple pense, _Notre credulité fait toute leur science_;"_ and no modern _saynete_[51] is considered perfect, unless some member of their church is brought forward to serve as a recipient for the ribald jokes of an Andalusian _majo_, or to become the amatory dupe of an intriguing _graciosa_. These pieces are not suffered to appear in print; or rather, I should say, perhaps, would not _sell_ if they were printed, for the press of the day has far exceeded the bounds of decorum in giving light to many of the somewhat less objectionable productions of _Sotomayor_, _Comella_, and other prolific scribblers of Vaudevilles. The only modern dramatic writers who have been at all successful in obtaining public favour on worthier grounds, are _Iriate_, _Martinez de la Rosa_, and _Moratin_, but their writings are by no means numerous. The plays of the last-named (who is considered the Terence of Spain) are always well received at Seville, where the dramatic taste is somewhat more refined than in the minor provincial towns. They are full of incident, without being encumbered with plot, like those of the old Spanish school; and the dialogue is natural and sprightly, without falling into licentiousness or vulgarity. This author's translation of Shakspeare's Hamlet is lamentably weak, however, for his language is not sufficiently elevated for tragedy. To Molière he has done more justice. The Spanish language is remarkably well adapted to the stage, being not less melodious than emphatic and dignified; and there is a raciness about it well suited to comedy, though, on the whole, I should say, it is better adapted for tragedy. The national taste is, however, in favour of comedy, which, besides being more congenial to the character of the people, speaks more intelligibly to their uncultivated understandings. And, indeed, it must be confessed, that but for the infinite superiority of the language, the long speeches of the heroes of Spanish tragedy would be yet more wearying to listen to, than even the jingling, rhymed declamations of the French drama. It is not surprising, therefore, that the impatient _Andaluzes_,--whose whole thoughts are bent upon the coming Bolero and laughter-causing farce,--should complain of the interminable "_platicas importunas_" of their tragedies, and even of their _serious_ comedies; especially since they are delivered in a diction which to the lower orders is almost unintelligible, the dialogue being generally carried on in the second person plural, _vos_: a style which is never now heard in common parlance, and is, therefore, quite unnatural to them. I will, however, draw the curtain upon Spanish tragedy, and bring the graceful _Baylarinas_ upon the stage; at the first click of whose castañets, whilst even yet behind the scenes, every bright eye sparkles with animation, and every tongue is silenced. The Bolero, which is the favourite national dance, admits of great variety as well of figures as of movements, for it may be executed by any number of persons, though two or four are generally preferred. It is a purified kind of _Fandango_, and, when danced by Spaniards, is as graceful and pleasing an exhibition as can be imagined. It is altogether divested of those dervish-like gyrations, and other wonderful displays of limbs and under-petticoats, that are so much the vogue on the boards of London and Paris, and on which, in fact, the reputation of a _Ballerina_ seems to depend. In Spain the taste in dancing has not yet reached this pitch of refinement; for, even in the _Cachucha_, when the dancer turns her back upon the spectators, a Spanish lady deems it necessary to turn her face from the stage. The castañets, though furnishing but little to the entertainment in the way of music, afford the performers the means of displaying their figures to advantage; and are yet further useful, by giving employment to the hands and arms; which, with most dancers, public as well as private, are generally found to be very much in the way. There are other dances of a less _modest_ character than the _Bolero_, which are performed at the minor theatres; but it may be said of Spanish public dancing generally, that it is light, spirited, and _poetic_, and admits of the display of considerable grace without being _indecent_. Although of all modern languages--that of dulcet Italy alone excepted--the Spanish is the best adapted to song, yet the Spaniards have little or no relish for musical entertainments. The truth is, they are not a musical nation. In expressing this opinion, I am aware that I declare war against a host of preconceived notions; but in proof of my assertion I will ask, what country possesses so little national music as Spain? Has a single _known_ opera ever been produced there? Is not her church music all borrowed? Is not the trifling guitar the only instrument the Spaniard is really master of? Is not the _Sostenuto_ bellow of the _arriero_ almost the only approach to melody that the peasant ever attempts? Spanish music consists of a few simple airs, which are probably heir-looms of the Saracens; and a medley of _Boleros_, that may be considered mere variations of one tune. Neither their vocal nor instrumental performances ever reach beyond mediocrity, and in concert they invariably sing and play _a faire casser la tête_. A fine climate and a gregarious disposition lead the peasantry to assemble nightly, and amuse themselves by dancing and singing to the monotonous thrumming of a cracked guitar; and this habit has earned for the nation the character of being musical--a character to which the Spaniards are little better entitled than the _Tom Tom_-loving black _apprentices_ of our West India islands. There are exceptions to every rule, and I willingly admit that I have heard an opera of Rossini very well performed by Spanish "_artists_." But that they do not _pride themselves_ on being a musical nation is evident from their always preferring Italian music to their own, though they like to sing Spanish words to an Italian opera. The Theatre is a place of fashionable resort at Seville. It fills up a vacuum between the Paseo and the Tertulia. And when the times are sufficiently quiet to warrant the outlay, a sufficient sum is subscribed to bribe a second-rate Italian company to expose their melodious throats to the baneful influence of the sea breezes. The house is large and rather tastily decorated, but so ill-shaped that, unless one is close to the stage, not a word can be heard; and if there, the prompter's voice completely drowns those of the performers. The fall of the curtain at the conclusion of the _Bolero_ is generally the signal for the _beau monde_ to retire, leaving the highly seasoned _Saynete_ to the enjoyment of the "_gente baja y desreglada_."[52] This breaking up is not the least amusing part of the play. The antediluvian carriages are again put in requisition; and now, besides the cocked-hatted attendants, each vehicle is accompanied by two or more torch-bearers on foot; so that the blaze of light on first issuing from the Theatre is most dazzling and astounding,--astounding, because it is only on walking into the gutter, or over a heap of filth in the first cross street one has occasion to enter, that the want of lamps in these minor avenues renders the utility of this extraordinary illumination apparent. Each carriage, after "taking up," moves majestically off, its torch-bearers running ahead to show the way, scattering long strings of sparks, like comets' tails, amongst the humble pedestrians. The Tertulias commence after the families have supped at their respective houses, that is to say, at about eleven o'clock; and are generally kept up until a late hour. CHAPTER V. SOCIETY OF SEVILLE--SPANISH WOMEN--FAULTS OF EDUCATION--EVILS OF EARLY MARRIAGES, AND MARRIAGES DE CONVENANCE--ENVIRONS OF SEVILLE--TRIANA--SAN JUAN DE ALFARACHE--SANTI PONCE--RUINS OF ITALICA--ITALICA NOT SO ANCIENT A CITY AS HISPALIS--YOUNG PIGS AND THE MUSES--DEPARTURE FROM SEVILLE--THE MARQUES DE LAS AMARILLAS--WEAKNESS, DECEIT, AND INJUSTICE OF THE LATE KING OF SPAIN--ALCALA DE GUADAIRA--UTRERA--OBSERVATIONS ON THE STRATEGICAL IMPORTANCE OF THIS TOWN--MORON--MILITARY OPERATIONS OF RIEGO--APATHY OF THE SERRANOS DURING THE CIVIL WAR--OLBERA--REMARKS ON THE ITINERARY OF ANTONINUS. The society of Seville is divided into nearly as many circles as there are degrees in the Mohammedans paradise. In former days, the bounds of each were marked with _heraldic_ precision, and those of the innermost were guarded as jealously from trespass as the precincts of a royal forest, but of late years politics have materially injured the fences. The fine edged bridge of _Sirat_ is no longer difficult of passage, and a foreigner, in especial, provided some mufti of the Aristocracy but holds out his hand to him, may reach the seventh heaven without the slightest chance of stumbling over his pedigree. The English, above all other foreigners, are favourably received at Seville, for the nobles of the South of Spain, not being so much under court influence as those of the provinces lying nearer the capital, are by no means distinguished for their love of _absolutism_. With some few, indeed, the want of courtly sunshine has engendered excessive liberalism; but the nobles of Andalusia generally may be considered as favourably disposed towards a limited monarchy--that is, are of moderate, or what they term _English_, politics. Of persons of such a political bias is the first circle of the society of Seville composed, and it is, perhaps, in every respect, the best in the kingdom. It is adorned by many men of highly cultivated talents, and much theoretical information, who, with a sincere love of country at their hearts, are yet not arrogantly blind to the faults of its former and present institutions; and who, removed to a certain extent from the baneful influence of a corrupt court, are proportionably free from the demoralising vices which distinguish the society of the upper classes in the capital. The ladies of the _exclusive_ circle are, it must needs be confessed, deficient in education: but they possess great natural abilities, a wonderful flow of language, and--excepting that they will pitch their voices so high--peculiarly fascinating manners. The morals of Spanish women have usually been commented upon with unsparing severity; it strikes me, however, that the moral _principle_ is as strong in them as in the natives of any other country or climate. The constancy of Spanish women, when once their affections have been placed on any object, is, indeed, proverbial, and if they are but too frequently faithless to the marriage vow, the source of corruption may be traced, _first_, to the lamentable religious education they receive--since the demoralizing doctrines of the efficacy of penance and absolution in the remission of sins furnish them at all times with a ready palliative; and, _secondly_, to the habit of contracting early marriages, and, especially, _marriages de convenance_, by which, in their anxiety to see their daughters well established, parents--and above all Spanish parents--are apt to sacrifice, not only their children's happiness, but their honour. Of all the evils under which Spanish society labours, this last is the most serious as well as most apparent. A marriage of this kind, in nine cases out of ten, tends to demorality. It is followed by immediate neglect on the part of the husband, whose affections were already placed elsewhere when he gave his hand at the altar; and is soon regarded by the wife merely as a civil compact, to which the usages of society oblige her to subscribe. With _her_, however, this state of things had not been anticipated. The innate, all-powerful feeling, _love_, had, up to this period, lain dormant within her breast--for in Spain, if the extremely early age at which females marry did not of itself warrant this supposition, the little intercourse which, under any circumstances, an unmarried woman (of the upper classes of society) has with the world, naturally leads to the conclusion that her affections had not previously been engaged; she expects, therefore, to receive from her husband the same boundless affection that her inexperienced heart is disposed to bestow on him;--and what is the inevitable consequence? Disappointed in her cherished hope of occupying the first place in her husband's affections, her innocence is tarnished at the very outset, by thus acquiring the knowledge of his turpitude; she turns from him with disgust; and her better feelings, seared by jealousy and wounded pride, seeks out some other object on whom to bestow the love slighted by him, who pledged himself to cherish it. Thrown thus at an early age upon the world, without the least experience in its ways, with strong passions to lead, and evil examples to seduce her, is it surprising that a Spanish wife should wander from the path of virtue, and that she should hold constancy to her lover more sacred than fidelity to a husband who quietly submits to see another possess her affections? The understanding once established, however, that jealousy is not to disturb the ménage, the parties live together with all the outward appearances of mutual esteem, and inflict the history of their private bickerings only upon their favoured friends. The Spaniards of all classes have great conversational powers, but even those of the upper are sadly deficient in general information. Their knowledge of other nations is picked up entirely from books, and those books mostly old ones; for few works are now written in their own language, and still fewer are translated from those of other countries; so that what little knowledge of mankind they possess is of the last century. Cards help out the conversation at the Tertulias of the first circle. Dancing, forfeits, and other puerile games, are the resources of the rest. Balls and suppers are _funciones_ reserved for great occasions, and dinner parties are of equally rare occurrence. In the entertainments of the nobility, the French style prevails even to the wines, but the national dish, the _olla_, generally serves as a prelude, and may be considered the "_piece de resistance_" of the interminable dinner. Toothpicks (!!) and coffee are handed round, and the party breaks up, to seek in the _siesta_ renewed powers of digestion. To those, however, who think exercise more conducive to health, the environs of Seville hold out plenty of attractions; and, if the weather be too hot for either walking or riding, the city contains hackney coaches and _calesas_ without number, by means of which (most of the roads in the vicinity being level) the various interesting points may be reached without difficulty or inconvenience. The places most deserving of a visit in the immediate environs of Seville, are the villages of _San Juan de Alfarache_ and _Santi Ponce_; near the latter of which are the ruins of Italica. Both these places are situated on the right bank of the Guadalquivír; the former, about three miles below Seville, the latter a little more distant, up the stream. The road to both traverses the long town of Triana, which contains nothing worthy of observation but a sombre gothic edifice, where the high altar of Popish bigotry, the Inquisition, was first raised in the Spanish dominions. It has long, however, been converted to another purpose, never, let us hope, to be again applied to that which for so many ages disgraced Christianity. By many Triana is supposed to be the Osset of Pliny, but I think without sufficient reason, as it does not seem probable that a place merely divided from Seville by a narrow river should have been distinguished by him as a distinct city. The words of Pliny, "_ex adverso oppidum Osset_," imply certainly that Osset stood on the opposite bank of the river to Hispalis, but not that it was situated _immediately opposite_, as some authors have translated it. It is yet more evident that Alcalà de Guadaira cannot be Osset, as supposed by Harduin, since that town is on the _same_ side of the Guadalquivír as Seville. Florez imagines Osset to have been where San Juan de Alfarache now stands,[53] near which village traces of an ancient city have been discovered; and the position occupied by an old Moorish castle, on the edge of a high cliff, impending over the river, and commanding its navigation, seems clearly to indicate the site of a Roman station, since the Saracens usually erected their castles upon the foundations of the dilapidated fortresses of their predecessors. The village of San Juan de Alfarache stands at the foot of the before-mentioned cliff, compressed between it and the Guadalquivír; which river, making a wide sweep to the north on leaving Seville, here first reaches the roots of the chain of hills bounding the extensive plain through which it winds its way to the sea, and is by them turned back into its original direction. Of the Moorish fortress little now remains but the foundation walls; the stones of the superstructure having probably been used to build the church and convent that now occupy the plateau of the hill. The view from thence is quite enchanting, embracing a long perspective of the meandering Guadalquivír and its verdant plain, the whole extent of the shining city, and the distant blue outline of the Ronda mountains. The hills rising at the back of the convent are thickly covered with olive trees, the fruit of which is the most esteemed of all Spain: and, indeed, those who have eaten them on the spot, if they like the flavour of olive rather than of salt and water, would say they are the best in the world. The fruit is suffered to hang upon the tree until it has attained its full size, and consequently will not bear a long journey. For the same reason, it will not keep any length of time, as the salt in which it is preserved cannot penetrate to a sufficient depth in its oily flesh to secure it from decay. Let no one say, however, that he dislikes _olives_, until he has been to San Juan de Alfarache. Retracing our steps some way towards Seville, we reach the great road leading from that city into Portugal by way of Badajoz; and, continuing along the plain for about five miles, we arrive at the priory of Santi Ponce, situated on the margin of the Guadalquivír, and close to the ruins of Italica. So complete has been the destruction of this once celebrated city, the birth-place of three Roman Emperors, that, but for the vestiges of its spacious amphitheatre, one would be inclined to doubt whether any town could possibly have stood upon the spot; the more so as the vicinity of Seville seems, at first sight, to render it improbable that two such large cities would have been built within so short a distance of each other. Opinions on the subject of the relative antiquity of these two cities are, however, very various; for, whilst some Spaniards are to be found, who maintain that Hispalis was founded long before Italica, and some who, declaring, on the other hand, that the two cities never existed together, insist on calling Italica, _Sevilla la Vieja_;[54] others there are who suppose that the two cities flourished contemporaneously for a considerable period, and that Hispalis (the more modern of the two) eventually caused the other's destruction. This last hypothesis might readily be received, since, from the influence of the tide being felt at Seville and not at Santi Ponce, the situation of the former is so much more favourable for trade than that of the latter; but that, setting aside the traditionary authority of Seville having been founded by _Hispalis_, one of the companions of Hercules, we have the testimony of several writers to prove that Hispalis was a place of consequence when Italica must have been yet in its infancy. For the antiquity of this latter is never carried further back than the 144th Olympiad, i.e. 200 B.C. Now, Hispalis is mentioned by Hirtius, at no very great period after that date, as a city of great importance; whereas, Italica is noticed by him (proving it to have been a _distinct_ place) merely as a walled town in the vicinity.[55] The two places are again mentioned separately by Pliny; the one, however, as a large city, giving its name to a vast extent of country--the _Conventus Hispalensis_--the other as one of the towns within the limits of that city's jurisdiction. The foundation of Italica being fixed, therefore, about two hundred years before the Christian era, and attributed to the veteran soldiers of P. C. Scipio; that is to say, immediately after the expulsion of the Carthagenians from the country; it may naturally be concluded that the Romans, who had not come to Spain merely to drive out their rivals, would, with their usual foresight, have planted a colony of their own people to overawe the _principal city_ of a country they intended to bring under subjection; and hence, that Seville existed long before Italica was founded. The amphitheatre, which alone remains to prove the former grandeur of Italica, is of a wide oval shape. The dimensions of its arena are 270 feet in its greatest diameter, 190 in its least. It rests partly against a hill, a circumstance that has tended materially to save what little remains of it from destruction; but, nevertheless, only nine tiers of seats have offered a successful resistance to the encroachments of the plough. Few of the vomitorios can be traced, but it would appear that there were sixteen. Some of the caverns in which the wild beasts were confined are in tolerable preservation. From the ruined amphitheatre we were conducted to a kind of pound, enclosed by a high mud wall, and secured by a stout gate, wherein we were informed other reliques of Italica were preserved. There was some little delay in obtaining the key of this _museo_, the _custodio_ being at his _siesta_; and, hearing the grunting of pigs within, we began to doubt whether it could contain any thing worth detaining us under a broiling sun to see. Unwilling, however, to be disappointed, we clambered with some little difficulty to the top of the wall, and, _horresco referens!_ beheld an old sow rubbing her back against that of the Emperor Hadrian, whilst the profane snouts of her young progeny were grubbing at the tesselated cheeks of Clio and Urania, the only two of the immortal Nine whose features could be distinctly traced in an elaborate mosaic pavement that covered the greater part of the court. Several fragments of statues were strewed about; but all were in too mutilated a state to excite the least interest. The feeling with which we contemplated the beautiful, outraged pavement, was one of unmitigated disgust; for the workmanship of such parts of it as remained intact was of the most delicate description, the stones not being more than one fifth of an inch square, and, as far as we could judge, put together so as to form a picture of great merit. I fear that this valuable specimen of the art has long since been altogether lost, for, at the time of which I write, the stones were lying in heaps about the yard, and the pavement seemed likely to be subjected to a continuance of the mining operations of the "swinish multitude," as well as to exposure to the destructive ravages of the elements. I could not refrain from expostulating with the owner of the piggery (when he at length made his appearance) at this, in the words of Don Quijote, _puerco y extraordinario abuso_. He was a wag, however, and answered my "Why do you keep your pigs here?" precisely in the words that an Irish peasant replied to a very similar question, viz., "But am I to have the company of the pig?" put to him by a friend of mine, who had a billet for a night's lodging on his cabin: to wit, "_No hay toda comodidad_?" "Isn't there every convey'nance?" We then attempted to persuade him that the pigs being young and inexperienced would probably kill themselves by swallowing the little square stones piled up against the walls, when the supply of Indian corn failed them. "No, Señor," he replied; "_el Puerco es un animal que tiene mas sesos que una casa_." "The hog is an animal that has more (sesos) brains (or bricks) than a house." And, indeed, the discrimination of the animal is wonderful, for, whilst we were yet arguing the case, one of the little brutes grubbed up the entire left cheek of Calliope, to get at a grain of corn that had fallen into one of the numerous crow's feet with which unsparing Time had furrowed the Muse's animated countenance. Without further observation, therefore, we abandoned the chaste daughters of Mnemosyne to their ignominious fate, remounted our horses, and bent our steps homewards. The foreigner who visits Seville, under any circumstances, cannot but find it a most delightful place, and our short sojourn at it was rendered particularly agreeable by the kindness and hospitality of the _Marques de las Amarillas_, who, independent of the pleasure it at all times affords him to show his regard for the English, whom he considers as his old brothers in arms, was pleased to express peculiar gratification at having an opportunity of evincing his sense of some trifling attentions that it had been in my power to pay his only son, when, as well as himself, driven by political persecution to seek a refuge within the walls of Gibraltar. The life of this distinguished nobleman, now Duke of Ahumado, has been singularly varied by the smiles and frowns of fortune, and furnishes a melancholy proof of the little that can be effected by talents, however exalted, and patriotism, however pure, in a country writhing, like Spain, under the combined torments of religious and political revolution. For, the more sincere a lover of his country he who puts himself forward, _having aught to lose_, may be, the more he becomes an object of distrust and envy to _the many_, who seek in change but their own aggrandizement. To him who would take the helm of affairs in times of revolution, an unscrupulous conscience is yet more necessary than the possession of extraordinary talents. The Marques de las Amarillas, well known in the "Peninsular War" as General Giron, was appointed minister at war in the first cabinet formed by Ferdinand VII. after he had sworn to the Constitution. A sincere lover of rational liberty, and a strong advocate for a mixed form of government, the Marques, himself a soldier, saw the danger of permitting the very existence of the government to be at the mercy of the undisciplined rabble army, that, seduced by its democratic leaders for their own private ends, had effected the revolution; and had projected a plan for its partial reduction and entire reorganization. The _Exaltados_, however, fearful lest the establishment of a _rational_ form of government should result from a project which certainly would have had the effect of allaying the existing agitation, accused the Marques of a plot to subvert the constitution, and restore Ferdinand to a despotic throne; and he was obliged to save himself from the impending danger by a rapid flight, and to take refuge within the walls of Gibraltar. There he remained during the period of misrule that preceded the invasion of the country by the Duc d'Angoulême in 1823; suffering, during the feeble struggle that ensued, from the most painfully conflicting feelings that could possibly enter a patriot's breast. For, aware that his unhappy country had but the sad alternative of a continuance in anarchy and misery, or of bending the neck to foreign dictation, and receiving back the cast-off yoke of a despot, he could take no active part in a struggle which, end as it would, was fraught with mischief to his native land. It ended, as he had always foreseen, in the restoration of the despicable monarch, who possessed neither the courage to draw the sword in defence of what he conceived to be his _rights_, nor the virtue to adhere to the word pledged to his people; who by his contemptible intrigues exposed, and by his vacillating plans sacrificed, his most devoted adherents; who with his dying breath bequeathed the scourge of civil war to his wretched country; whose very existence, in fine, was as hurtful to Spain, as is the odour of the upas-tree to the incautious traveller who rests beneath its shade. The contemptible Ferdinand, restored to his throne, forbade the _Marques de las Amarillas_ to present himself in the capital--the crime of having held office in a constitutional cabinet being considered quite sufficient to warrant the infliction of such a punishment. Some ten years afterwards, however, he was, through the influence of his relatives, the Dukes of Baylen and Infantado, appointed captain-general of Andalusia, and on the death of Ferdinand was called to Madrid, to form one of the Council of Regency. He again held a distinguished post in the Torreno administration, and again fell under the displeasure of the anarchists--his talents had less influence than the halbert of Serjeant Gomez. These are not merely "_cosas de España_," however, but have been, and will be, those of every country where the hydra, democracy, is cherished. God grant that our own may be preserved from the many-headed monster! We quitted Seville only "upon compulsion" (our leave of absence being limited), making choice of a road which, though, by visiting Moron and Ronda, it proceeds rather circuitously to Gibraltar, traverses a more romantic and picturesque portion of the Serranía than any other. The most direct of the numerous roads that offer themselves between Seville and the British fortress, is by way of Dos Hermanos, Coronil, Ubrique, and Ximena. The first place lying upon the road we selected is Alcalà de Guadaira. This town is distant about eight miles from Seville (though generally marked much less on the maps), and is the first post station on the great road from Seville to Madrid. For the first five miles from Seville the road traverses a gently undulated country, that is chiefly planted with corn; but, on drawing near Alcalà, the features of the ground become more strongly marked, and are clothed with olive and other trees; and amongst the hills that encompass the town rise the copious springs which, led into a conduit, supply Seville with water. Alcalà administers to yet another of the great city's most material wants, for it almost exclusively furnishes Seville with bread, whence it has received the agnomen of "_de los panaderos_" (of the bread-makers), as well as that of "_de Guadaira_," which it takes from the river that runs in its vicinity. The numerous mills situated along the course of this stream, by furnishing easy means of grinding corn, probably led the inhabitants of Alcalà to engage in the extensive kneading and baking operations which are carried on there. The immediate approach to the town is by a narrow gorge between two steep hills; that on the right, which is the more elevated of the two, and very rugged and difficult of access, is washed on three sides by the Guadaira, and crowned with extensive ruins of a Moorish fortress. The town itself is pent in between these two hills and the river, and, there can be but little doubt, occupies the site of some Roman city, its situation being quite such as would have been chosen by that people. That it is not on the site of Osset is, as I have before observed, quite evident, and its present name, being completely Moorish, furnishes no clue whatever to discover that which it formerly bore. Some have supposed it is Orippo; but inscriptions found at Dos Hermanos determine that place to be on the ruins of the said Roman town. Possibly--for such a supposition accords with the order in which the towns of the county of Hispalis are mentioned by Pliny--Alcalà may be Vergentum. It is a long dirty town, full of ovens and charcoal, and contains a population of 3000 souls. The chaussée to Madrid, by Cordoba, here branches off to the left; whilst that to Xeres and Cadiz, crossing the Guadaira, is directed far inland upon Utrera, rendering it extremely circuitous. A more direct road strikes off from it immediately after crossing the river, proceeding by way of Dos Hermanos. We still continued to pursue the great road, which, after ascending a range of hills that rises along the left bank of the Guadaira, traverses a perfectly flat country, abounding in olives, that extends all the way to Utrera, a distance of eleven miles. Utrera thus stands in the midst of a vast plain, that may be considered the first step from the marshes of the Guadalquivír, towards the Ronda mountains, which are yet twelve miles distant to the eastward. A slight mound, that rises in the centre of the town, and is embraced by an extensive circuit of dilapidated walls, doubtless offered the inducement to build a town here; and these walls, some parts of which are very lofty, and in a tolerably perfect state, appear to be Roman, though the castle and its immediate outworks are Moorish. What the ancient name of the town was would, without the help of monuments or inscriptions, be now impossible to determine, but it certainly did not lie upon either of the routes laid down in the Itinerary of Antoninus, between Cadiz and Cordoba, though some have imagined it to be Ilipa.[56] Others have supposed it to be Siarum; but adopting Harduin's reading of Pliny--"Caura, Siarum," instead of Caurasiarum--it seems more likely that Utrera was Caura, and that Moron, or some other town yet more distant from Seville, was Siarum. By its present name it is well known in Moorish history, its rich _campiña_ having frequently been ravaged by the Moslems, after they had been driven from the open country to seek shelter in the neighbouring mountains. At the present day, it is celebrated only for its breeds of saints and bulls, the former ranked amongst the most devout, the latter the most ferocious, of Andalusia. The town is large, and not walled in; the streets are wide and clean, and a plentiful stream rises near and traverses the place--remarkable as being the only running water within a circuit of several miles. It contains 15,000 inhabitants, mostly agriculturists, and a very tolerable inn. Utrera, as has already been observed, is situated on the _arrecife_, or great road, from Cadiz to Madrid, which _arrecife_ makes two considerable elbows to visit this place and Alcalà. Now from Utrera there is a cross-road to Carmona (which town is also situated on the great route to the capital), that, by avoiding Alcalà, reduces the distance between the two places from seven to six leagues; and from Utrera there is also another cross-road (by way of Arajal) to Ecija, which, by cutting off another angle made by the _arrecife_, effects a yet greater saving in the distance to that city, and consequently to Cordoba and Madrid. From these circumstances, Utrera becomes, in military phrase, an important _strategical_ point; and as such, the French, when advancing upon Cadiz in 1810, attempted to gain it by the cross-road from Ecija, ere the Duke of Albuquerque, who had taken post at Carmona, with the view of covering Seville, could reach it by the _arrecife_. The duke, however, with great judgment, abandoned Seville to what he well knew must eventually be its fate, and by a rapid march saved Cadiz, though not without having to engage in a cavalry skirmish to cover his retreat. What important consequences hung upon the decision of that moment; for how different might have been the result of the war, had the important fortress of Cadiz fallen into the enemy's hands, and given them 30,000 disposable troops at that critical juncture![57] On issuing from Utrera, we once more quit the chaussée (which is henceforth directed very straight upon Xeres), and, taking an easterly course, proceed towards a lofty mountain, that, seemingly detached from the serrated mass, juts slightly forward into the plain. At the distance of six miles from Utrera, the ground, which thus far is quite flat and very barren, begins to be slightly undulated, and is here and there dotted with _cortijos_ and corn fields; and, at eight miles from Utrera, a road crosses from Arajah to Coronil; the first-named town being distant about two miles on the left, the latter half a league on the right. For the next league the country is one waving corn-field. At the end of that distance we reached the steep banks of a rivulet, which here first issues from the mountains, and is called _El Salado de Moron_. The road crosses to the right bank of this stream, on gaining which it immediately turns to the north (keeping parallel to the ridge of the detached mountain, upon which, as I have already noticed, it had previously been directed), and ascends very gradually towards Moron. The country, during this latter portion of the road, is partially wooded. The total distance from Utrera to Moron is about sixteen miles. Moron is singularly situated, being nestled in the lap of five distinct hills, the easternmost and loftiest of which is occupied by an old castle, a mixed work of the Romans and Moors. According to La Martinière, Moron is on the site of Arunci; and this opinion seems to rest on a better foundation than that of other authors, who maintain that Arcos occupies the position of the above-named ancient city; for it is natural to suppose that the territory of the _Celtici_ (amongst whose towns _Arunci_ is enumerated by Pliny) did not extend beyond the intricate belt of mountains known at the present day as the _Serranía de Ronda_. Now, Moron commands one of the principal entrances to the Serranía, whereas Arcos is situated far in the plains of the Guadalete towards Xeres, and would seem rather to have been one of the cities of the "county of Cadiz." Moron is a strong post, for though raised but slightly above the great plain of Utrera, it commands all the ground in its immediate neighbourhood; and, standing as it does in a mountain gorge, by which several roads debouch upon Seville from various parts of the _Serranía_, it occupies a military position of some consequence. The French guarded it jealously during the war, and placed the castle in a defensible state. Since those days its walls have again been dismantled; but the strength of its position tempted Riego (1820) to try the chances of a battle with the royal army, commanded by General Josef O'Donnel, ere he finally abandoned the mountains. In vain, however, Riego pointed out to his men the far distant hill of _Las Cabezas_, where they had first raised the cry of "Constitution, or death;" their _exaltacion_ had abandoned them, and they in turn abandoned their exaltation, leaving their strong position after a very slight resistance. A few days afterwards, at _Fuente Ovejuna_, they were entirely dispersed. The successful general, ready to march either against the insurgents of the Isla de Leon, or upon the capital, wrote to the king, announcing that the army of Riego was no more, and requesting to know his commands: but "_eheu! quam brevibus pereunt ingentia causis!_" a few weeks after this letter was penned, the victor was a prisoner at Ceuta, and the vanquished general (without doing any thing in the meanwhile to retrieve his character) had become the hero of hymns and ballads! The imbecile Ferdinand, fearful lest, by further delay in accepting the Constitution he should lose his crown, had despatched orders to those generals who remained faithful to him, to give up their respective commands, just as the tide of affairs seemed to be turning in favour of a continuance of his despotic reign. The dispersion of the constitutional army proved two things, however; the first, that Riego was no general; the second, that he and his party had deceived themselves as to the political feeling of the inhabitants of the province. In the course of his rambling operations, Algeciras and Malaga were the only places where Riego was at all well received. In vain he tried to maintain himself in the latter city; driven out of it at the point of the bayonet, he attempted to regain Cadiz, the head-quarters of the revolt; but, closely pressed by the royal army on his retreat through the Serranía, was obliged, as I have stated, to receive battle at Moron, where the disorganization of his force was completed. Moron contains a population of 8,000 souls, and is a well built town, with wide streets, and good shops. There is a mountain road from hence to Grazalema (seven leagues) by way of Zahara. The road from Moron to Ronda passes by Olbera. The distance between the two places is thirty-one miles. The country, immediately on leaving Moron, becomes rough and desolate, and the road, (a mere mule-track,) traverses a succession of strongly marked ridges, which, though not themselves very elevated, are bounded on all sides by bare and rocky mountains. The numerous streams which cross the stony pathway all flow to the south, uniting their waters with the _Salado de Moron_. On penetrating further into the recesses of the _Serranía_, the valleys become wider, and are thickly wooded, and the luxuriant growth of the unpruned trees, the absence of houses, bridges, and all the other signs of the hand of man, offer a picture of uncultivated nature that could hardly be surpassed even in the interior of New Zealand. At nine miles from Moron is situated the solitary venta of _Zaframagon_, and, a mile further on, descending by a beautifully wooded ravine, we reached an isolated rocky mound, under the scarped side of which, embosomed in groves of orange and pomegranate trees, stands a picturesque water-mill. From hence to Olbera is seven miles. The country is of the same wild description as in the preceding portion of the route, but gradually rises and becomes more bare of trees on drawing near the little crag-built town. An execrable pavé, which appears to have remained intact since the days of the Romans, winds for the last two miles under the chain of hills over whose narrow summit the houses of Olbera are spread, rising one above another towards an old castle perched on the pinnacle of a rocky cone. By some Spanish antiquaries, Olbera has been supposed to be the _Ilipa_ mentioned in the Roman Itinerary, as being on the _second_ route laid down between Cadiz and Cordoba, passing by Antequera. This route, by the way, is not a less strange one to lay down between the two cities, than a post road from London to Dover _by way of Brighton_ would be considered by us; but the fancy of winding it through the least practicable part of the mountains of Ronda, from Seville (if, as some imagine, it first went to that city) to Antequera, is even yet more strange, since a nearly level tract of country extends between those two cities in a more direct line. Considering it, however, merely as a military way, made by the Romans to connect the principal cities of the province, and serving in case of need as a communication between Cadiz and Cordoba, _avoiding Seville_; a much more probable line may be laid down, on which the distances will be found to agree infinitely better.[58] Olbera is a wretched place, containing some 3,000 or 4,000 of the rudest looking, and, if report speak true, of the least scrupulous, inhabitants of the Serranía. Their lawless character has already been alluded to, and, in Rocca's Memoirs, a most interesting account is given of their reception of him, when, with a party of dragoons, he was on the march from Moron to Ronda. His description of the rickety old town-house, wherein he saved his life from an infuriated mob by making a fat priest serve as a shield, is most correctly given, and, in the present dark, suspicious-looking, cloak-enveloped inhabitants, one may readily picture to one's-self the descendants of the men who skinned a dead ass, and gave it to the French troopers for beef; ever after jeering them by asking "_Quien come carne de burra en Olbera?_ Who eats asses'-flesh at Olbera?" Carula (Puebla de Santa Maria) 24 Ilipa (Grazalema) 18 Ostippo[59] (La Torre de Alfaquime) 14 Barba (Almargen) 20 Anticaria (Antequera) 24 Angellas 23 Ipagro 20 Ulia 10 Cordoba 18 ---- Total 294[60] ---- The view from the old castle is very commanding; the outline of the amphitheatre of mountains is bold and varied, and the valleys between the different masses are richly wooded. To the south may be seen the rocky little fortress of Zahara, sheltered by the huge _Sierra del Pinar_; and only about two miles distant from Olbera to the north, is the old castle of Pruna, similarly situated on a conical hill that stands detached from a lofty impending mountain. Olbera is fourteen miles from Ronda. At the distance of rather more than a mile, a large convent, _N. S. de los Remedios_, stands on the right of the road, and a little way beyond this, the road descends by a narrow ravine towards _La Torre de Alfaquime_, and, after winding round the foot of the cone whereon that little town is perched, reaches and crosses the Guadalete. This point is about four miles from Olbera. The stream issues from a dark ravine in the mountains that rise up on the left of the road, and serves to irrigate a fertile valley, and turn several mills that here present themselves. A road to Setenil is conducted through the narrow gorge whence the little river issues, but that to Ronda, ascending for three quarters of an hour, reaches the summit of a lofty mountain on whose eastern acclivity are strewed the extensive ruins of Acinippo. The view is remarkably fine; to the westward, extending as far as Cadiz, and in the opposite direction looking down upon a wide, smiling valley, watered by the numerous sources of the Guadalete, and upon the little castellated town of Setenil, perched on the rocky bank of the principal branch of that river. This place was very celebrated in the days of the Moslems, having resisted every attack of the Christians,[61] until the persevering "_Reyes Catolicos_" brought artillery to bear upon its defences. The road to Ronda descends for two miles, and then keeps for about the same distance along the banks of the Guadalete, crossing and recrossing it several times. The surrounding country is one vast corn-field. Leaving, at length, this rich vale, the road ascends a short but steep ridge, whence the first view is obtained of the yet more lovely basin of Ronda, which, clothed with orchards and olive grounds, and surrounded on all sides by splendid mountains, is justly called the pride of the Serranía. A good stone bridge affords a passage across the _Rio Verde_, or of Arriate, about a mile above its junction with the Guadiaro; and the road falls in with that from Grazalema on reaching the top of the hill whereon the town stands. CHAPTER VI. RONDA TO GAUCIN--ROAD TO CASARES--FINE SCENERY--CASARES--DIFFICULTY IN PROCURING LODGINGS--FINALLY OVERCOME--THE CURA'S HOUSE--VIEW OF THE TOWN FROM THE RUINS OF THE CASTLE--ITS GREAT STRENGTH--ANCIENT NAME--IDEAS OF THE SPANIARDS REGARDING PROTESTANTS--SCRAMBLE TO THE SUMMIT OF THE SIERRA CRISTELLINA--SPLENDID VIEW--JEALOUSY OF THE NATIVES IN THE MATTER OF SKETCHING--THE CURA AND HIS BAROMETER--DEPARTURE FOR THE BATHS OF MANILBA--ROMANTIC SCENERY--ACCOMMODATION FOR VISITERS--THE MASTER OF THE CEREMONIES--ROADS TO SAN ROQUE AND GIBRALTAR--RIVER GUADIARO AND VENTA. Ronda and the road from thence to Gaucin have been already fully described; I will, therefore, pass on, without saying more of either than that, if the road be one of the _worst_, the scenery along it equals any to be met with in the south of Spain. The road was formerly practicable for carriages throughout, but it is now purposely suffered to go to decay, lest it should furnish Gibraltar with greater facilities than that great commercial mart already possesses, for destroying the manufactures of Spain--such, at least, is the excuse offered for the present wretched state of the road. From the rock-built castle of Gaucin we will descend--by what, though called a road, is little more than a rude flight of steps practised in the side of the mountain--to the deep valley of the Genal, and, crossing the pebbly bed of the stream, take a path which, winding through a dense forest of cork and ilex, is directed round the northern side of the peaked mountain of _Cristellina_, to a pass between it and the more distant and wide-spreading _Sierra Bermeja_. The scenery, as one advances up the steep acclivity, is remarkably fine. I do not recollect having any where seen finer woods; and the occasional glimpses of the glassy Genal, winding in the dark valley below; the numerous shining little villages that deck its green banks; the outstretched town of Gaucin and ruined battlements of its impending castle covering the ridge on the opposite side, and backed by the distant mountains of Ubrique, Grazalema, &c., furnish all the requisites for a perfect picture. Soon after gaining the summit of the wooded chain, the road branches in two, that on the left hand proceeding to Estepona, the other to Casares. Taking the latter, we emerged from the forest in about a quarter of an hour, and found ourselves at the head of a deep and confined valley, which, overhung by the scarped peaks of Cristellina on one side, is bounded on the other by a narrow ridge that, stretching several miles to the south, terminates in a high conical knoll crowned by the castle of Casares. The road, which is very good, keeps under the crest of the left-hand ridge, descending for two miles, and very gradually, towards the town. The view on approaching Casares is remarkably fine, embracing, besides the picturesque old fortress, an extensive prospect over the apparently champaign country beyond, which (marked, nevertheless, with many a wooded dell and rugged promontory,) spreads in all directions towards the Mediterranean; the dark, cloud-capped rock of Gibraltar rising proudly from the shining surface of the narrow sea, and overtopping all the intervening ridges. Before reaching Casares, the mountain, along the side of which the road is conducted, falls suddenly several hundred feet, and a narrow ledge connects it with the conical mound more to the south, whereon the castle is perched. The town occupies the summit of this connecting link--which in one part is so narrow as to afford little more than the space sufficient for one street--but extends, also, some way round the bases and up the rude sides of the two impending heights, thus assuming the shape of an hour-glass. Having reached the _Plaza_,--and a tolerably spacious one it is considering the little ground the town has to spare for embellishments,--we looked about for the usual signs of a _venta_, but, failing in discovering any, applied to the bystanders for information, who, pointing to a wretched hovel, on the wall of which was painted a shield, bearing, in heraldic language, gules, a bottle sable, told us it was the only _Ventorillo_[62] in the town. Now, though it is a common saying that "good wine needs no bush," we had yet to learn that dirty floors need no broom; and, unwilling to be the first to gain experience in the matter, we determined, after a minute examination of the house, to present ourselves to the _Alcalde_, and, in virtue of our passports, ask his "aid and assistance" in procuring better quarters. The unusual sight of a party of strange travellers had brought that important personage himself into the market-place, who, collecting round him the principal householders of the town, forthwith laid our distressing case before them, and, in his turn, asked for aid and assistance in the shape of advice. Our papers were accordingly handed round the standing council, and, having been minutely inspected, turned upside down, the lion and unicorn duly admired, the great seal of the Governor of Gibraltar examined with eyes of astonishment, and the question asked "_Son Ingleses?_"[63] (which was excusable, considering the absurdity of giving passports in _French_ to English travellers in _Spain_) a shrug of the shoulders seemed all that the _Alcalde_ was likely to get in the way of advice, or we in the lieu of board and lodging. Guessing at last, by the oft-repeated question concerning our nationality, "_De que pie cojeaba el negocio_";[64] we took occasion to signify to the conclave, that a few dollars would most willingly be paid for any inconvenience the putting us up for the night might occasion. Our prospects immediately brightened; each had now "_una salita_," that he could very well spare for a night or so ... "we had our own _mantas_, so that we should require but mattresses to lie down upon--and as for stabling, that there was no loss for"--in fact, the only difficulty appeared to be, how the Alcalde should avoid giving offence to a dozen, by selecting _one_ to confer the favour of our company upon. He saw the delicacy of his position, and hesitated--"he himself, indeed, had a spare room, but ..." here a portly personage, clothed in a black silk cassock, and sheltered by an ample shovel hat, stepped forward to relieve the embarrassed functionary from his dilemma; and giving him a nod, and us a beckon, drew his _toga_ up behind, and walked off at a brisk pace towards the castle hill. The claims of _El Señor Cura_--for such our conductor proved to be--no one presumed to dispute; so making our bow to the _Alcalde_, who assured us that _Quien a buen arbol se arrima_ _buena sombra le cobija_,[65] we followed the footsteps of the worthy member of the Church Hospitaliar, without further colloquy. Our conductor stopped not, and spoke not, until we had reached the very top of the town, and then, leading our horses into a commodious stable, he ushered us into his own abode; wherein he assured us, if the accommodation he could offer was suitable, "we had but to _mandar_." It consisted of a large _sala_ and an _alcoba_, or recess, for a bed; the latter scrupulously clean, the former lofty and airy. We, therefore, expressed our entire satisfaction, requesting only that a couple of mattresses might be spread upon the floor; a friend, who had joined us at Gaucin, rendering this increase of accommodation necessary. Having given instructions to that effect, Don Francisco Labato--for such our host informed us were his _nombre y appellido_,[66] not omitting to add, that he was a _clerigo beneficiado_[67]--proposed to accompany us, to cast an ojeada[68] upon the curious old town, from the ruined battlements of its ancient fortress; observing that there was yet abundance of time to do so, "ere Phoebus took his evening plunge into the western ocean." We gladly accepted the proffered ciceroneship of our classical host, and, mounting the rugged pathway up the isolated crag, in a few minutes reached the plateau at its summit. It would be hardly possible to select a less convenient site for a town than that occupied by Casares. Pent in to the north and south between impracticable crags, and bounded on the other two sides by deep ravines; it can, in fact, be reached only, either by describing a wide circuit to gain the mountains, rising at its back; or, by ascending a rough winding path, practised in the side of the castle hill. The principal part of the town is clustered round the base of the old fortress, the houses rising one above another in steps, as it were, and occupying no more of the valuable space than is necessary to give them a secure foundation. The streets, which are barely wide enough to allow a paniered donkey to pass freely, are formed out of the live rock, and, here and there, are cut in wide steps, to render the ascent less difficult and dangerous. These flat slabs of native limestone, when heated by a summer sun, though passable enough by unshod animals, afford but a precarious footing to a horse's iron-bound hoofs. The castle can only be approached through the town, and although its walls have long been in ruins, yet, so strong are its natural defences, that the muzzles of a few rusty old guns, propped up by stones, and protruded from the prostrate parapets, were sufficient to deter the French from making any attempt upon the place during the war of independence:--such, at least, is the version of the inhabitants. That Casares was a Roman town is almost proved by the name it yet bears; but the matter is placed beyond a doubt on examining the old foundations of the castle, which are clearly of a date anterior to the occupation of Spain by the Saracens. The name it anciently bore strikes me as being equally obvious, viz., _Cæsaris Salutariensis_; so designated from the mineral waters in its neighbourhood, which, though _now_ known by the name of the modern town of Manilba, are within the _termino_ of Casares. For, not only were the valuable properties of these springs well known to the Romans, but, according to the common belief in the country, they performed a wonderful cure on one of the emperors--Trajan, I think. _Cæsaris Salutariensis_ is mentioned by Pliny, amongst the Latin towns of the _conventus gaditanus_; the limits of which country may, at first sight, appear to be somewhat stretched to include Casares; but Barbesula, which stood at the mouth of the river Guadiaro, at an equal distance from Cadiz, (as is clearly proved by inscriptions found there,) is also mentioned by that excellent authority as one of the stipendiary towns of the same county; and the order in which they are enumerated, viz., those first which were nearest to the capital, tends to confirm my supposition. On our return from the old castle, which commands a splendid view, we were not displeased to find that our host was no despiser of the good things of this world, much as he gave us to understand that all his thoughts were directed towards the never-ending joys of that which is to come. Every thing bespoke a well-conducted _ménage_; the house, besides being clean and tastily decorated with flowers, was provided with some solid comforts. The _Cura's niece_--his housekeeper, butler, and factotum--was pretty, as well as intelligent and obliging. His _cuisine_ was tolerably free from garlic and grease, his wine from aniseed. Our horses were up to their knees in fresh straw; and three clean beds were prepared for ourselves. Our host excused himself from partaking of our meal, he having already dined, and, whilst we were doing justice to his good catering, paced up and down the room pretending to read, but in reality watching our movements, and, as it at first struck us, looking after his silver spoons: but divers testy hints given to his bright-eyed niece that her constant attendance upon us was unnecessary, soon made it evident that _she_ was the object of his solicitude; as, judging from the occasional direction of our eyes, he rightly conjectured what was the subject of our conversation. Anon, however, he would approach the table, thrust the volume of Homilies under his left arm, and, taking a pinch of snuff, (which he said was "_bueno para el estudio_"[69]) ask our way of thinking on various subjects, political and theological, always prefacing his interrogatories by some observation, either on his passion for study, the cosmopolitan bent of his mind, or the superiority his learning gave him over the vulgar prejudices of the age. And, at length, when the table was cleared, the niece gone, and he had elicited from us that we were all three _English_, he observed, without further circumlocution, "_Pues Señores_, you are not members of the _Santa Iglesia, Catolica Romana_?" "No," we replied, "_Catolica_ but not _Romana_." "That is to say, you are heretical Christians." "That is to say, we differ with you as regards the corporeal nature of the elements partaken of in the Eucharist; we deny the efficacy of masses; the power of granting indulgences; and the necessity for auricular confession:--and so far certainly we are heretics in the eyes of the church of Rome." The worthy _Cura_--much as he had studied--was by no means aware that our pretensions to Catholicism were so great as, on continuing the controversy, he discovered them to be.[70] He made a stout stand, however, for the absolute necessity of auricular confession; maintaining that we, by dispensing with it, deprived the poor and ignorant of a friend, a counsellor, and an intercessor;--stript our church of the power of reclaiming sinners, and checking growing heresies;--and our government of the means of anticipating the mischievous projects of designing men. It was in vain we urged to our host that, in our favoured country, education had done away with the necessity for strengthening the hands of government by such means; that the poor were provided for by law; and that the clergy were ever ready to counsel and assist those who stood in need of spiritual consolation. But, before leaving us for the night, the _Padre_ admitted that _we_ were certainly Christians, and that many of the mysteries and practices of the Church of Rome were merely preserved to enable the clergy to maintain their influence over the people;--an influence which we deemed quite necessary for the well-being of the state. Rising betimes on the following morning, we set off on foot to clamber to the lofty peak of the _Sierra Cristellina_; and regular climbing it was, for all traces of a footpath were soon lost, and we then had to mount the precipitous face of the cone in the best way we could. The magnificence of the view from the summit amply repaid us for the fatigue and loss of shoe-leather we had to bear with; for, though scarcely 2000 feet above the level of the sea, the peak stands so completely detached from all other mountains, that it affords a bird's eye view which could be surpassed only by that from a balloon. The entire face of the country was spread out like a map before us. To the north, penned in on all sides by savage mountains, lay the wide, forest-covered valley of the Genal, its deeply furrowed sides affording secure though but scanty lodgment to the numerous little fastnesses scattered over them by the persecuted _Mudejares_, when expelled from the more fertile plains of the Guadalquivír and Guadalete; and on which castellated crags the swarthy descendants of these "mediatised" Moors still continue to reside and bid defiance to civilization. These little strongholds stand for the most part on the summit of rocky knolls that jut into the dark valley; and round the base of each a small extent of the forest has in most cases been cleared, serving, in times past, to improve its means of defence, and, at the present day, to admit the sun to shine upon the vineyards, in the cultivation of which the rude inhabitants find employment, when, obliged for a time to lay aside the smuggler's blunderbuss, they take to the axe and pruning-knife. Behind, serving as a kind of citadel to these numerous outworks, rises the huge _Sierra Bermeja_, which afforded a last refuge to the persecuted Moslems; and at its very foot, about five miles up the valley of the Genal, are the ruins of _Benastepar_; the birth-place of the Moorish hero, _El Feri_, whose courage and address so long baffled the exterminating projects of the Spaniards. Turning now round to the south, a totally different, and yet more magnificent, view meets the eye. Gibraltar,--its lovely bay,--the African mountains, rising range above range,--and the distant Atlantic, successively present themselves: whilst, from the height at which we are raised above the intermediate country, the courses of the different rivers, that issue from the gorges of the sierras at our back, may be distinctly followed through all their windings to the Mediterranean, the features of the intervening ground appearing to be so slightly marked as to lead to the supposition that the country below must be perfectly accessible;--but, as one of our party drily observed, those who, like himself, had followed red-legged partridges across it could tell a different story. We returned to Casares by descending the eastern side of the mountain, which is planted with vines to within a short distance of the summit. In fact, wherever a little earth can be scraped together, a root is inserted. The wine made from the grapes grown on this bank is considered the best of Casares; it is not unlike Cassis--small, but highly flavoured. The town, looked down upon in this direction, has a singular appearance, seeming to stand on a high cliff overhanging the Mediterranean shore, though, in reality, it is six or seven miles from it. We amused ourselves during the rest of the afternoon in taking sketches of the town from various points in the neighbourhood, and excited the wrath of some passers-by to a furious degree. They swore we were _mapeando el pueblo_,[71] and that they would have us arrested; but we were strong in our innocence, and turned a deaf ear to their menaces. It is, however, a practice that is often attended with annoying consequences; for I have known several instances of English officers having been taken before the military authorities for merely sketching a picturesque barn or cork tree--so great is the national jealousy. At our evening meal, our host, as on the former occasion walked book-in-hand up and down the room, but was evidently less watchful of his pretty niece and silver spoons. His attention, indeed, appeared to be entirely given to the state of the mercury in an old barometer, which, appended to the wall at the further end of the room, he consulted at every turn, putting divers weatherwise questions to us as he did so. And at last, he asked in plain language, whether our church ever put up prayers for rain, and if they ever brought it. The occasion of all this _pumping_ we found to be, that the country in the neighbourhood having long been suffering from drought, the husbandmen, apprehensive of the consequences, had for some days past been urging him to pray for rain, but the state of the barometer had not hitherto, he said, warranted his doing so, and he had, therefore, put them off, on various pretences. "Yesterday, however," he observed, "seeing that the mercury was falling, I gave notice that I should make intercession for them; and, I think, judging from present appearances, that my prayers are likely to be as effectual as those of any bishop could possibly be." And off he started to church, giving us, at parting, a very significant, though somewhat heterodoxical grin. Nevertheless, not a drop of rain fell that night; the barometer was at fault; and the only clouds visible in the morning were those gathered on the brow of the _Cura_. They dispersed, however, like mist under the sun's rays; when, bidding him farewell, and thanking him for his hospitable entertainment, we slipped a _doublon de à ocho_ into his hand; which, pocketing without the slightest hesitation, he assured us, with imperturbable gravity, should be applied to the services of the _church_--"as, doubtless, we intended." Threading once more the rudely _graduated_ streets of the town, we took the stony pathway, before noticed, which winds down under the eastern side of the castle hill, and in rather more than half an hour were again beyond the limits of the Serranía, and in a country of corn and pasture. At the foot of the mountain two roads present themselves, one proceeding straight across the country to San Roque and Gibraltar (nineteen and twenty-five miles), the other seeking more directly the Mediterranean shore, and visiting on its way the sulphur-baths and little town of Manilba. The _Cura_ had spoken in such terms of commendation of the _Hedionda_ (fetid spring)--claiming it jealously as the property of Casares--that we were tempted to lengthen our journey by a few miles to pay it a visit. The road to it follows the course of the little stream that flows in the valley between the Cristellina mountain and Casares, which, escaping by a narrow rocky gorge immediately below the town, winds round the foot of the castle crag, and takes an easterly direction to the Mediterranean. The country at first is open, and the stream flows through a smiling valley, without encountering any obstacle; but, at about two miles from Casares, a dark and narrow defile presents itself, which, the winding rivulet having in vain sought to avoid, finally precipitates itself into, and is lost sight of, under an entangled canopy of arbutus, lauristinus, clematis, and various creepers. So narrow and overshadowed is the chasm, so high and precipitous are its bank--themselves overgrown with coppice and forest-trees, wherever the crumbling rocks have allowed their roots to spread--that even the sunbeams have difficulty in reaching the foaming stream, as it hurries over its rough and tortuous bed; and the pathway, following the various windings of the narrow gorge,--now keeping along the shady bank of the rivulet, now climbing, by rudely carved zig-zags, some little way up the precipitous sides of the fissure,--is barely of a width to admit of the passage of a loaded mule. So wildly beautiful is the scenery, so free from artificial embellishments,--for the low moss-grown water-mills which are scattered along the course of the stream, and here and there a rustic bridge, owe their beauty rather to nature than art--so _romantic_, in fine, is the spot, that, if in the vicinity of a fashionable _baden_, it could not fail of being a little fortune to all the ragged donkey-drivers within a circuit of many leagues, and of proving a mine of wealth to the surveyors of _tables d'hôtes_, and _restaurans_, and keepers of billiard and faro tables. The amusements of the frequenters of the humble _Hedionda_ are, however, very different, and the sequestered dell is visited only by chanting muleteers, driving their files of laded animals to or from the mills; or, perchance, by some sulphurated old lady, who, ensconced in a pillowed _jamuga_,[72] is bending her way, with renovated health, towards Casares or Ximena: to which places the narrow fissure offers the nearest road from the baths. After proceeding about a mile down the dark ravine, its banks, crumbling down in rude blocks, recede from each other, and a huge barren sierra is discovered rising steeply along the southern bank of the stream, to which the road now crosses. It greatly excited our surprise how this lofty and strongly marked ridge could have escaped our observation from Casares, for it had seemed to us, that on descending from thence we should leave the mountains altogether behind us. From the base of this barren ridge issues the _Hedionda_; still, however, about a mile from us; and ere reaching it, the hills retiring for a time yet more from the stream, leave a flat space of some extent, and in form resembling an amphitheatre, which is planted with all kinds of fruit-trees, and dotted with vine-clung cottages. This spot is called _La Huerta_--the orchard; and these comfortless looking little hovels--pleasing nevertheless to the eye--we eventually learnt are the lodging-houses of the most aristocratic visiters of the baths. Traversing the fruitful little dell, and mounting a low rocky ledge that completes its enclosure to the east, leaving only a narrow passage for the rivulet, we found ourselves close to the baths; our vicinity to which, however, the offensive smell of the spring (prevailing even over the strong perfume of the orange blossoms) had already duly apprized us of. The baths are situated almost in the bed of the pure mountain stream, whose course we had been following from Casares; and a short distance beyond, and at a slight elevation above them, stands a neat and compact little village. The season being at its height, we found the place so crowded with visiters, that it would have been impossible to procure a night's lodging, had such been our wish. All we required, however, was information concerning the place; for which purpose we repaired to the _Fonda_,--a kind of booth, such as is knocked up at fairs in England for the sale of gin, "and other cordials,"--and ordered such refreshment as it afforded, asking the _Moza_[73] if she could tell us whether any of the houses were vacant, &c. She replied, that the Fonda was provided with every thing necessary for travellers of distinction, being established on the footing of the hotels "_de mas fama_" of Malaga and San Roque; and that _El Señor Juan_, the "_intendente_"[74] of the place,--who, doubtless, on hearing of our arrival, would forthwith pay his respects to us,--could furnish every sort of information respecting it. Oh! a master of the ceremonies, with his book, thought we--well, this will be amusing: some urbane "captain," no doubt, all smiles to all persons!--and whilst we were yet picturing to ourselves what this Spanish Beau Nash could possibly be like, a tall ungainly personage, with a considerable halt in his gait, a fund of humour in his long leathern countenance, and a paper cigar screwed up in the dexter corner of his mouth, presented himself, and placed his services at our disposition. He held a huge pitcher of the fragrant water in one hand, which, when he was in motion, gave him a "lurch to starboard;" a stout staff in the other, by means of which he established an equilibrium when at rest. His body was coatless, his neck cravatless, his shirt sleeves were rolled up to the elbow, leaving his brown sinewy arms bare; his trowsers hung in braceless negligence about his hips; his large bare feet were thrust into a pair of capacious shoes; and his head was covered with a high-crowned, narrow-brimmed, Frenchified hat, which had evidently browned under the heat of many summers, and bent to the storms of intervening winters. Round his neck hung a stout silver chain (which the fumes of the sulphur-spring had turned as black as Berlin iron), whence was suspended a ponderous master-key. "He must be the prison-keeper," said we, "carrying the daily allowance of water to the incarcerated malefactors!" "This is _Señor Juan, el intendente_," said our smirking attendant, placing a bottle of wine upon the table before us. "Oh! this is _Señor Juan_, the master of the ceremonies!--Then pray be seated, _Señor Juan_; and bring another wine-glass, _Mariquita_." Our requests were instantly complied with; and in half an hour we had disengaged from the numberless "_por supuestos, conques_," and "_pues_," with which Señor Juan interlarded his conversation, and from the smoky exhalations in which he enveloped it, all the information we required concerning the baths, though by no means so full an account of them as the gossip-loving _Tio_ seemed disposed to give us. So pleased were we, however, with his description of the amusements of the place, and of the valuable properties of its waters, that, assuring him we should take an early opportunity of renewing his acquaintance, and commending him to the care of _San Juan Nepomaceno_, we arose, and took our departure. I was not long in performing my promise. Indeed, I became an annual visiter to the baths for a few days during the shooting season; and will devote the following chapter to a more particular description of the _Hedionda_, and the manner of life at a Spanish watering-place. The mule-track from the baths to Gibraltar--for during the first few miles it is little else--keeps down the valley for some little distance, and then, ascending a steep hill, joins at its summit a road leading to Casares from Manilba; which latter little town is seen about three-quarters of a mile off, on the left. This road to Casares turns the _sierra_ overhanging the baths on its western side, where it meets with some flat, nearly table-land; but our route to Gibraltar, after keeping along it a few hundred yards, strikes off to the left, and, traversing a wild and very broken country, in something more than three miles forms its junction with the road from the town of Manilba to San Roque and Gibraltar, which again, half a mile further on, falls into the road from Malaga to those two places. This spot is distant five miles from the baths, and rather more than two from the river Guadiaro. Near some farm-houses on the left bank of this river, and about a mile from its mouth, are ruins of the Roman town of _Barbesula_. Some monuments and inscriptions found here, many years since, were carried to Gibraltar. The bed of the Guadiaro is wide but shallow, and offers two fords, which are practicable at most seasons. There is a ferry-boat kept, however, at the upper point of passage, for cases of necessity. A venta is situated on the right bank of the stream, whereat a bevy of custom-house people generally assemble to levy contributions on the passers-by. It is a wretched place of accommodation, though better than another, distant about a mile further, on the road to Gibraltar, and well known to the sportsmen of the garrison by the name of _pan y agua_--bread and water--those being the only supplies that the establishment can be depended upon to furnish. Its vicinity to some excellent snipe ground occasions it to be much resorted to in the winter. At the first-named venta, two roads present themselves, that on the right hand proceeding to San Roque, (eight miles,) the other seeking the coast and keeping along it to Gibraltar--a distance of twelve miles. The country traversed by the former is very rugged, but the path is, nevertheless, unnecessarily circuitous. In various places--but a little off the road--are vestiges of an old paved route, which, it is by no means improbable, was the Roman way from _Barbesula_ to _Carteia_, of which further notice will be taken, when the coast road from Malaga to Gibraltar is described. CHAPTER VII. THE BATHS OF MANILBA--A SPECIMEN OF FABULOUS HISTORY--PROPERTIES OF THE HEDIONDA--SOCIETY OF THE BATHING VILLAGE--REMARKABLE MOUNTAIN--AN ENGLISH BOTANIST--TOWN OF MANILBA--AN INTRUSIVE VISITER--RIDE TO ESTEPONA--RETURN BY WAY OF CASARES. The baths of Manilba lie about seventeen miles N.N.E. of Gibraltar, and four, inland, from the sea-fort of Savanilla. The town, from which they take their name, is about midway between them and the coast; and, standing on a commanding knoll, is a conspicuous object when sailing along the Mediterranean shore. The virtues of the sulphureous spring have long been known; but it is only within the last few years that the increasing reputation of the medicated source led a company of speculators to build the village which now stands in its vicinity; the scattered cottages of the _Huerta_ having been found quite incapable of lodging the vast crowd of valetudinarians, annually drawn to the spot. The same parties have yet more recently erected a chapel, and also the _Fonda_, mentioned in the preceding chapter. The little village is built with the regularity of even Wiesbaden itself, but nothing can well be more different in other respects than it is from that, or any other watering-place, which I have ever visited. It consists of five or six parallel stacks of houses, forming streets which open at one end upon the bank overhanging the now sulphurated stream, that flows down from Casares; and which abut, at the other, against the side of the lofty mountain whence the medicated spring issues. These streets are covered in with trellis-work, over which vines are trained, rendering them cool, as well as agreeable to the sight. The houses are all built on a uniform plan, namely, they have no upper story, and contain but _one room each_; which room is furnished with the usual Spanish kitchen-range--that is, with three or four little bricked stoves built into a kind of dresser. By this arrangement, every room is, of itself, capable of forming a _complete establishment_; and in most cases, indeed, it does serve the triple purposes of a kitchen, a refectory, and a dormitory, to its frugal inmates. When a family is large, however, an entire lareet must be hired for its accommodation. The principal speculator in the joint-stock village is a gentleman of Estepona; and _El Señor Juan_--or _Tio Juan_, as he is familiarly called by those admitted to his intimacy--is a poor relative, who, for the slight perquisites of office, readily undertook the charge of the infant establishment. The choice of the _Tio_ was, in every respect, a judicious one; for, having drunk himself off the crutches on which he hobbled down to the baths, he has become a kind of walking advertisement of the efficacy of the waters. He is not, however, like the unsightly fellows who perambulate the streets of London with placards, a silent one; for I know of no man more thoroughly versed in the art of _viva voce_ puffing than _Tio Juan_; and then he has stored his memory with such a fund of useful watering-place information, that he is a perfect guide to the _Hedionda_ and its environs. The _Tio_ and I soon became wonderful cronies; I derived great amusement from his _cuentas_--he, much gratification from my nightly whisky-toddy. In fact, the two dovetailed into each other in a most remarkable manner; for, when once the _Tio_ had attached one of his long stories to a (_pint_) bottle of "poteen," there was no possibility of separating them--they drew cork and breath together, and together only they came to a conclusion. He knew every body that visited the baths, and every thing about them; could point out those who came for health, and those who were allured by dissipation; could tell which ladies and gentlemen were looking out for matrimony, which for intrigue; whether the buxom widow had fruitful vineyards and olive grounds with her weeds; whether the young ladies had shining _onzas_ to recommend them as well as sparkling eyes. Then the Tio knew where every medicinal herb grew that was suited to any given case--could point out the haunt of every covey of red-legged partridges in the vicinity--could tell to an hour when a flight of quail would cross from the parched shores of Africa--when the matchless _becafigos_ would alight upon the neighbouring fig-trees--and, as the season advanced, he would mark the time to a nicety when the first annual visit of the woodcocks might be looked for to the wooded glens beyond the baths. As the historian of the wonder-working spring, the _Tio_ was not less valuable; though, it must be confessed, the terms in which he conveyed the idea of its vast antiquity were any thing but prepossessing; viz., "_Pues! saben ustedes, que esa hedionda es mas vieja que la sarna._" "Know then, gentlemen, that this fetid spring is older than the itch." In other respects, however, the information he had collected, besides being most rare, possessed a freshness that was truly delightful; "_Siglos hay_,[75]" he would continue, "the spring was _endemoniado_, for _Carlomagno_, or some other great hero of the most remote antiquity, drove an evil spirit into the mountain, which said spirit, to be revenged on mankind, poisoned the source whence the stream flows. Saint James, however, arriving in the country soon after--having taken Spain under his especial protection--determined to expel this imp of Satan. This was done accordingly, and the devil went over into Barbary, (where he eventually stirred up the Moors against the adopted children of _Santiago_--the story of _Don Rodrigo_ and _La Cava_ being all a fable,) leaving nothing but his sulphur behind." "The good saint, to perpetuate the fame of the miracle he had wrought, next determined to endue the spring with extraordinary curative properties; not depriving it, however, of the unusually bad smell left by the devil, that the marvellous work he was about to perform might be the more apparent to future generations." "Some years after this, the baths were visited by '_muchos emperadores de Roma_;'[76] amongst others, Trajan and Hercules; as also by the famous Roland; and, '_segun dicen_,' by _un Ingles, llamado Malbrù, y otra gente muy principal_."[77] "In those days," continued the Tio, "there were _palathios, posa'a, y to'o_,[78] but then came the Moors (with the devil in their train), and laid every thing waste. They had not the power, however, to deprive the stream of its virtues; and great they are, and most justly celebrated _por todo la España_."[79] In detailing the wonderful properties of the spring committed to his charge, _Tio Juan_ would enter with all the minuteness of an Herodotus. By his account, there was no ailment to which suffering humanity is exposed that it would not reach. It was a "universal medicine"--a Hygeian fountain that bestowed perpetual youth--a Styx that rendered mankind invulnerable. It gave strength to the weak, and ease to those who were in pain--rendered the barren fruitful, and the splenetic, good-humoured--made the fat, lean, and the lean, fat. By it the good liver was freed from gout, and the bad liver from bile. The sores of the leper were dried up, and the lungs of the asthmatic inflated--it made the maimed whole, and patched up the broken-hearted. He had known many instances of its curing consumption, and had seen it act like a charm in cases of tympany. "In fact," said old Juan--"_para todo tiene remedio_.--_Mir' usted_[80]--I, who on my arrival here could not put a foot to the ground, now, as you may perceive, walk about like a _Jovencito_;[81] and, under proper directions, I have no doubt it would make a man live for ever."[82] Nor did the long list of the water's valuable qualities end here. It was good for all the common purposes of life--for stewing and for boiling--for washing and for shaving;--and, to wind up all, as we go on sinning, until, by constant repetition, crime no longer pricks one's conscience, so, the _Tio_ declared, one went on drinking this devilish water until it positively became palatable. "_Jo no bebo otra_," he concluded, "_nunca bebo otra--guiso y to'o con ella_."[83] Now, though the Tio painted the yellow spring thus _couleur de rose_, and his account of its wonderful properties, like his system of chronology, must be received with caution, yet I must needs confess that the _Hedionda_ seemed to perform extraordinary cures; and, even in my own case, I ever fancied that after a few days passed at the baths, I returned to Gibraltar with invigorated powers of digestion. I could by no means, however, bring myself to submit to the _Tio's_ discipline, and he was wont to shake his head very seriously, when, returning from a hard day's shooting, I used to request him to open a bath for me after sunset--Hercules, himself, he thought could not have stood that. That this spring was known to the Romans there can be no manner of doubt, since the public bath, which still exists, is a work of that people. The source is very copious, and the water of an equal temperature throughout the year, viz., 73 to 75 degrees of Fahrenheit's thermometer. On analysis it is found to contain large quantities of hydrogen and carbonic acid gases, and the following proportions of fixed substances in fifty pounds of water, viz., six grains of muriate of lime; fifty-six of sulphate of magnesia; thirty-five of sulphate of lime; ten of magnesia; and four of silica. The quantity of sulphur it holds in solution is so great, that the vine-dressers in the neighbourhood make themselves matches, by merely steeping linen rags in the waste water of the baths. The use of the bath has been found very efficacious in the cure of all kinds of cutaneous diseases, ulcers, wounds, and elephantiasis; and taken inwardly, the water is considered by the faculty as extremely beneficial in cases of gout, asthma, scrofula, rheumatism, dyspepsia, and, as the Tio said, in fact, in almost every disorder that human nature is subject to. The season for taking the waters is from the beginning of June to the end of September; and it is astonishing during those four months what vast crowds of persons, of every grade and calling, are brought together. Nobles, priests, peasants, and beggars--the gouty, hypochondriac, lame, and blind--all flock from every part of the kingdom to the famed Hedionda. It was ever a matter of surprise to me where such a host can find accommodation. The same regimen is prescribed at this as at other watering places; viz., plenty of the spring, moderate exercise, and abstemious diet; and in this latter item, at least, the injunctions are as generally disregarded at Manilba as at the Brunnens of Nassau: that is, comparatively speaking, for it must be borne in mind that a German's daily food would support a Spaniard for a week. The principal bath is open to the public, and, being very large and tolerably deep, is by far the pleasantest, when one can be sure of its entire possession. Those which have been built by the company of speculators are too small, though convenient in other respects. The charge for the use of these is moderate enough, viz., one real and a half each time of bathing; which includes a trifling gratuity to _Tio Juan_. The source from which the drinkers fill their goblets is open to all comers, and any one may bottle and carry off the precious water _ad libitum_. A considerable quantity is sent in stone jars to the neighbouring towns; but Tio Juan maintained--and I believe not without good reason--that it lost all its properties on the journey "_amen del mal olor_."[84] The situation of the new village would have been more agreeable had it been built somewhat higher up the side of the sierra, instead of on the immediate bank of the rivulet, where it is excluded from the fine view it might otherwise command, and is sheltered from every breath of air. It is not, however, so sultry as might be expected, considering its confined situation; for the mountain behind screens it from the sun's rays at an early hour after noon, and the opposite bank of the ravine, by sloping down gradually to the stream, and being clothed to the water's edge with vines, fig, and other fruit-trees, throws back no reflected heat upon the dwellings. The manner of life of the visiters of the _hedionda_ is not less different from that of the watering places of other countries, than the place itself is from Cheltenham or Carlsbad. They rise with the sun; drink their first glass of water at the spring on their way to chapel; a second glass, in returning from their devotions; and then take a _paseito_[85] in the _huerta_: but not until after the third dose do they venture on their usual breakfast of a cup of chocolate. The bath and the toilette occupy the rest of the morning. Dinner is taken at one or two o'clock; the _Siesta_ follows, and before sunset another bath, perhaps. The _Paseo_ comes next--that is quite indispensable--and the _Tertulia_ concludes the arrangements for the day. This, at the baths, is a kind of public assembly held in the open air, and generally in one of the vine-sheltered streets of the modern village. A guitar, cards, dancing, and games of forfeit, are the various resources of the _réunion_; which breaks up at an early hour. _Tio Juan_, in his shirt-sleeves and slippers, is a constant attendant at the _Tertulia_, usually looking on at the sports and pastimes with becoming gravity, but occasionally taking a hand at _Malilla_,[86] or joining the noisy circle playing at _El Enfermo_;[87] in which, when the usual question is asked, "What will _you_ give the sick man?" he invariably answers, "_El Agua--nada mas que el agua--que no hay cosa mas sano en el mundo_,"[88] puffing away at his paper cigar all the while with the most imperturbable gravity, and casting a side glance at me, as much as to say--"not a word of our nightly _symposium_, if you please." The company on these occasions is, as may be supposed, of a very mixed kind. Let it not be imagined, however, that because "_Señor Juan_" presents himself with bare elbows, that it is altogether of a secondary order--far from it--for such is the caprice of fashion, such the love of change, that even the noblest of the land are ofttimes inmates of the little inconvenient hovels that I have described; but _Tio Juan_ is a privileged person--every body consults him, every one makes him his or her confidant. And so curiously is Spanish society constituted, that though considered the proudest people in the world, yet, on occasions like this, Spaniards lay aside the distinction of rank, and mix together in the most unceremonious manner. Indeed, no people I have ever seen treat their inferiors with greater respect than the Spanish Nobles. They enter familiarly into conversation with the servants standing behind their chair; and, strange as it may appear, this freedom is never taken advantage of, nor are they less respected, nor worse served in consequence. The custom of kneeling down in common at their places of public worship may have a tendency to keep up this feeling, warning the rich and powerful of the earth that, though placed temporarily above the peasant in the world's estimation, yet that he is their equal in the sight of the Creator of all; an accountable being like themselves, and deserving of the treatment of a human being. The Spanish nobles certainly find their reward in adopting such a line of conduct, for they are served with extraordinary fidelity; and the horrors which were perpetrated _through the instrumentality of servants_, during the French revolution, is little to be apprehended in this country; perhaps, indeed, this good understanding between master and man has hitherto saved Spain from its reign of terror. The chapel of the bathing village is generally thronged with penitents; for people become very devout when they have, or fancy they have, one foot in the grave. The little edifice may be considered the repository of the _archives_ of _the Hedionda_, for countless are the legs, arms, heads, and bodies, moulded in wax, or carved in wood, and telling of wondrous cures, that have been offered at the shrine of Our Lady of _Los Remedios_. Leaving the good Romanists at their devotions within the crowded chapel, and _Tio Juan_, with one knee and his pitcher of water on the ground, and his staff in hand, offering a passing prayer behind the throng collected outside the open door, we will devote the morning to a scramble to the summit of the steep mountain that rises at the back of the baths. The _Sierra de Utrera_, by which name this rugged ridge is distinguished, is of very singular formation. Its eastern base (whence the _hedionda_ issues) is covered with a crumbling mass of schist, disposed in laminæ, shelving downwards, at an angle of 25 or 30 degrees with the horizon. This sloping bank reaches to about one third the height of the mountain, when rude rocks of a most peculiar character shoot up above its general surface, rising pyramidically, but assuming most fantastic forms, and each pile consisting of a series of huge blocks (sometimes fourteen or fifteen in number), resting loosely one upon another, and seemingly so much off the centre of gravity as to lead to the belief that a slight push would lay them prostrate. At first these detached pinnacles rise only to the height of fifteen or twenty feet, but, on drawing near the crest of the ridge, they attain nearly twice that elevation. The general surface of the mountain, above which these piles of rocking stones rise, is rent by deep chasms, as if the whole mass of rock had, at some distant period, been shaken to its very foundation by an earthquake. In these rents, soil has been gradually collected, and vegetation been the consequence; but the general character of the mountain is arid and sterile. The ascent becomes very difficult as one proceeds, and, in fact, it requires some little agility to reach the crest of the singular ridge. Its summit presents a very rough, though nearly horizontal surface, varying in width from 300 to 400 yards; and, looking from its western side, the spectator fancies himself elevated on the walls of some vast castle, so precipitously does the rocky ledge fall in that direction, so level and smiling is the cultivated country spread out but a couple of hundred feet below him. This rocky plateau appears to have been covered, in former days, with the same singularly formed pyramids that protrude from the eastern acclivity of the mountain; but they have probably been hewn into mill stones, as many of the rough blocks strewed about its surface are now in process of becoming. The plateau extends nearly two miles in a parallel direction to the rock of Gibraltar, that is, nearly due north and south by compass; and, when on its summit, the ridge appears continuous; but, on proceeding to examine the southern portion of the plateau, I found myself suddenly on the brink of a chasm, upwards of a hundred feet deep, which, traversing the mountain from east to west, cuts it completely in two. This cleft varies in width from 50 to 100 feet; and in winter brings down a copious stream, being the drain of a considerable extent of country on the western side of the ridge. It is partially clothed with shrubs and wild olive-trees, and a rude pathway leads down the dark dell to the _hedionda_, which issues from the base of the mountain, about 200 yards to the north of the opening of the chasm. This remarkable gap, though not distinguishable from the baths situated immediately below it, is so well defined, and has so peculiar an appearance at a distance, that it is an important landmark for the coasting vessels. The southern portion of the Sierra is far less accessible than that which has been described; in fact, access to its summit can be gained only by means of a ramped road, which, piercing the rocky precipice on its western side, has been made to facilitate the transport of the millstones prepared there. In other respects, this part of the plateau is of the same character as the other. Wonderful are the tales of fairies, devils, and evil spirits, told by the goatherds and others who frequent this singular mountain; and _Tio Juan_, who never would suffer himself to be outdone in the marvellous, told us that "_un Ingles_," who, about two years before, had been on a visit to the baths, had disappeared there in a most mysterious way. A goatherd of his acquaintance had seen him descend into a cleft in search of some herb, but out of it he had never returned. "_Se dicen_," he concluded, "_que era uno de esos Lores, de que hay tantos en Inglaterra_;[89] but I can hardly believe, if he had possessed such '_montones de oro_'[90] as was represented, that he would have been going about like a pedlar, with a basket slung to his back, picking up all sorts of herbs, and drying them with great care every day when he returned home, spreading them out between the leaves of a large book. '_A me mi parece_,'[91] that he was gathering them to make tea with; but I know an herb which grows on that Sierra, which is worth all the medicines[92] in the world: ay! and in some cases it is yet quicker, though not more effectual, in its cure, than even the waters of the _hedionda_; and some day, _Don Carlos_, I will walk up and show you the cleft wherein it grows." The _Tio's_ occupations were, however, too constant to allow of his accompanying me in search of this wonderful plant, and, consequently, my curiosity concerning it was never gratified. The district of Manilba is celebrated for the productiveness of its vineyards, and the undulated country between the baths and the southern foot of the _Sierra Bermeja_ is almost exclusively devoted to the culture of the grape. That most esteemed is a large purple kind. It is highly flavoured, and makes a strong-bodied and very palatable wine, though, in nine cases out of ten, the wine is spoilt by some defect of the skin in which it has been carried. The husks of the Manilba grape, after the juice has been expressed, enjoy a reputation for the cure of rheumatism, scarcely less than that of the sulphureous spring itself. The sufferer is immersed up to the neck in a vat full of the fermenting skins, and, after remaining therein a whole morning, comes forth as purple as a printer's devil. I have met with persons who declared they had received great benefit from this vinous bath; but I question whether interment in hot sand (a mode of treatment, by the way, which has been tried with great success) would not have been found more efficacious, without subjecting the patient to this unpleasant discoloration. Several interesting mornings' excursions may be made from the baths. The village of Manilba (about two miles distant) is situated on a high, but narrow ridge, that protrudes from the south-eastern extremity of the Sierra de Utrera. It is a compactly built place, and commands fine views: towards the mountains on one side, and over the Mediterranean on the other. The population amounts to about 3000 souls, principally vinedressers and husbandmen. On one occasion--having found all the lodging-houses at the _hedionda_ occupied, I established myself for a few days at the posada at Manilba, where a singular adventure befel me. Mine host entered my room on the evening of my arrival, and very mysteriously informed me, that a certain person--a friend of his--a Spanish officer "_por fin_," who had distinguished himself greatly under the constitutional government, and was a _caballero de toda confianza_,[93] wished very much to have the honour of paying me a visit, if I were agreeable, which, hearing I was alone, he thought it possible I might be; and, before I had time fully to explain that I was quite tired from a long day's shooting, and must beg to be excused, the _Lismahago_ himself walked in--as vulgar, off-handed, free-and-easy a gentleman as I ever came across. Having expressed unbounded love for the English nation, and stated his conviction--drawn from his intimate knowledge of the character of British officers--that they were, one and all, well disposed to assist in the grand work of regenerating Spain, he proceeded to state, that the "friends of liberty," in various towns of that part of the Peninsula, had entered into a plot to subvert the existing government of the country, and having many friends in Gibraltar, wished, through the medium of an officer of that garrison, to communicate with them; that, understanding I was, &c. &c. &c. I had merely acknowledged that I comprehended what he was saying, by bowing severally to the numerous panegyrics on liberty, and compliments to myself and nation, with which he interlarded his discourse--for the above is but the skimmed milk of his eloquent harangue; but, finding that he had at length concluded, I expressed the deep regret I felt at not being able to meet his friendly proposal in the way he wished, from the circumstance of my time being fully occupied in preparing a deep-laid plot against my own government--nothing less, in fact, than to give up the important fortress of Gibraltar to the Emperor of Morocco, until we had established a republic in England. When this grand project was accomplished, I added, I should be quite at leisure, and would most willingly enter into any treasonable designs against any other government; but, at present, he must see it was quite out of the question. My visiter gazed on me "with the eyes of astonishment," but I kept my countenance. He rose from his seat--I did the same. "Are you serious?" asked he. "Perfectly so," I replied; "but, of course, I reckon on your maintaining the strictest secrecy in the matter I have just communicated," I added earnestly. "You may rely in perfect confidence upon me." "Do you smoke? Pray accept of a Gibraltar cigar. I regret that I cannot ask you to remain with me, but I have letters of the utmost importance to write, which must be sent off by daybreak." He accepted my proffered cigar, begged I would command his services on all occasions, and walked off. I made sure he was a government spy, and in a towering rage sent for the innkeeper. He protested such was not the case, adding, "but, to confess the truth," he was a poor harmless fellow,--a reduced officer of the constitutional army,--who was very fond of the English, not less so of wine; talked a great deal of nonsense, which nobody minded; and hoped I would take no notice of it. I reminded mine host, that he had said he was a "_distinguished officer_," and had called him "_his friend_."--"_Si, señor, es verdad_;[94] but the fact is, he followed me up stairs, and I knew he was at the door, listening to what I might say." I very much doubted the truth of his asseverations, and my doubts were confirmed by my never afterwards seeing the constitutional officer about the premises; but, to prevent a repetition of such introductions, I begged to be allowed the privilege of choosing my own associates, telling him, indeed, that my further stay at his house would depend upon it. I still, however, continued to look upon the fellow as a spy, until the mad attempt made by Torrijos to bring about a revolution, not very long afterwards, led me to think that my visiter's overture might really have been seriously intended. Manilba is distant about seven miles from Estepona. The first part of the road thither lies through productive vineyards; the latter along the sea-shore, on reaching which it falls into the road from Gibraltar to Malaga. Not many years since Estepona was a mere fishing village, built under the protection of one of the _casa fuertes_ that guard the coast; but the fort stands now in the midst of a thriving town, containing 6000 inhabitants. The fish taken here finds a ready sale in the Serranía, whither it is conveyed in a half-salted state, on the backs of mules or asses. The _Sardina_ frequents this coast in great numbers; it is a delicious fish, of the herring kind, but more delicately flavoured. The environs of Estepona are very fruitful; and oranges and lemons are exported thence to a large amount--the greater portion to England. The place is distant twenty-five miles from Gibraltar (by the road), and sixteen from Marbella. To the latter the road is very good. A most delightful ride offers itself to return from hence to the baths of Manilba, by way of Casares. The road, for the first few miles, keeps under the deeply seamed and pine-clad side of the _Sierra Bermeja_, and then, leaving the mountain-path to Gaucin (mentioned in a preceding chapter) to the right, enters an intersected country, winding along the edge of several deep ravines, shaded by groves of chesnut-trees, and reaches Casares very unexpectedly; leaving a large convent, situated on the side of a steep bank, on the left, just before entering the narrow, rock-bound town. The road from Casares to the baths has already been described, but two other routes offer themselves from that town to reach Manilba. The more direct of these keeps the fissure in which the _hedionda_ is situated on the right; the other makes a wide circuit round the _Sierra de Utrera_, and leaves the baths on the left. By the former the distance is five and a half, by the latter seven miles. CHAPTER VIII. A SHOOTING PARTY TO THE MOUNTAINS--OUR ITALIAN PIQUEUR, DAMIEN BERRIO--SOME ACCOUNT OF HIS PREVIOUS LIFE--LOS BARRIOS--THE BEAUTIFUL MAID, AND THE MAIDEN'S LEVELLING SIRE--ROAD TO SANONA--PREPARATIONS AGAINST BANDITS--ARRIVAL AT THE CASERIA--DESCRIPTION OF ITS OWNER AND ACCOMMODATIONS--FINE SCENERY--A BATIDA. In the wildest part of the mountainous belt that, stretching in a wide semicircle round Gibraltar, cuts the rocky peninsula off, as it were, from the rest of Spain, is situated the _Casería de Sanona_; a lone house, now dwindled down to a mere farm; but, as both its name implies, and its appearance bespeaks, formerly a place of some consequence. It was brought to its present lowly state during the last war, when its inhabitants were so reduced in number, as well as circumstances, that hands and means are still equally wanting for the proper looking after, and attending to, the vast herds and extensive _dehesas_[95] and forest-lands belonging to it. The consequence is, that the wolves and wild boars, from having been so long permitted to roam about in undisputed possession of the woods, have in their turn, from being the persecuted, become the aggressors, and are now in the habit of making nightly predatory visits to the cattle folds and plantations of the _Casería_, carrying off the farmer's sheep and heifers, and destroying his winter stock of vegetables, whenever, by any neglect or remissness of the watch, an opportunity is afforded them. Besides the animals above mentioned, deer, and, in the winter, woodcocks, find the unfrequented ravines in the vicinity of the _Casería_ equally well suited to their secluded habits; and, tempted by the promising account of the sport the place afforded, a party was formed, consisting of three of my most intimate friends, myself, and a piqueur, to proceed thither for a few days' shooting. Sending forward a messenger to the Casería, as well to go through the form of asking its proprietor to "put us up," during our proposed visit, as to request him to have a sufficient number of beaters collected--on which the quality of the sport mainly depends--we provided ourselves with a week's consumption of provisions and ammunition, and, leaving Gibraltar late in the afternoon, proceeded to Los Barrios; whence, we could take an earlier departure on the following morning than from the locked-up fortress. The _Piqueur_ who usually accompanied us on these shooting excursions was a personage of some celebrity in the Gibraltar _sporting world_, and his name--Damien Berrio--will doubtless be familiar to such of my readers as may have resided any time on "the rock." By birth a Piedmontese, a baker by profession, Damien's bread--like that of many persons in a more elevated walk of life--was not to his taste. At the very mention of a _Batida_, he would leave oven, home, wife, and children; shoulder his gun, fill his _alforjas_--for he was a provident soul, and, though a baker, ever maintained that man could not live on bread alone--borrow a horse, and, in half an hour, "be ready for a start." Possessing a perfect knowledge of the country, a quick eye, an unerring aim, and a nose that could wind an _olla_ if within the circuit of a Spanish league, Damien was, in many respects, a valuable acquisition on a shooting party. And to the aforesaid qualifications, befitting him for the _staff_, he added that of being an excellent _raconteur_. In this he received much assistance from his personal appearance, which, like that of the inimitable Liston, passed off for humour that which, in reality, was pure nature. His person was much above the common stature, erect, and well-built, but his hands and feet were "prodigious." His face--when the sun fell directly upon it, so as to free it from the shadow of his enormous nose--was intelligent, and bespoke infinite good nature, though marked, nevertheless, with the lines of care and sorrow. His costume was that of a French sportsman, except that he wore a high-crowned, weather-beaten old hat, placed somewhat knowingly on one side of his head, and which, of itself alone, marked him as "_a character_." To those who have not had the pleasure of his acquaintance, a _precis_ of his early history may not be unacceptable; those who already know it will, I trust, pardon the short digression. Born on the sunny side of the Alps, some fifteen years before the breaking out of the French revolution, Damien, at a very early age, was called upon to defend his country against the aggression of its Gallic neighbours. He was draughted accordingly to a regiment of grenadiers of the Piedmontese army commanded by General Colli; and, in the short and disgraceful campaign of 1796, was made prisoner with the brave but unfortunate Provèra, at the Castle of Cosséria. On the formation of the Cisalpine republic soon afterwards, our grenadier, released, as he fondly imagined, from the necessity of any further military service, purposed returning to his family and regretted agricultural pursuits; but, on applying for his discharge, he found that he had quite misunderstood the meaning of the word _freedom_. "What!" said the regenerator of his oppressed country; "what! return home like a lazy drone, when so much still remains to be done! No, no, we cannot part with you yet; we are about to give liberty to the rest of Italy; you must march; can mankind be more beneficially or philanthropically employed? _Allons! en avant! vive la liberté!_"--"And so," said Damien, "off we were marched, under the tail of the French eagle, to give freedom to the _Facchini of Venice_, and _Lazzaroni_ of Naples; and to spoil and pillage all that lay in our way." This marauding life was ill-suited either to our hero's taste or habits, and accordingly he embraced the first favourable opportunity of quitting the service of the "Regenerator of Italy." How he managed to effect his liberation I never could find out, it being one of the very few subjects on which Damien was close; but I suspect--much as he liked shooting--that the love of the smell of gunpowder was not a _natural_ taste of his. Be that as it may, he made his way to Spain--took to himself a Spanish wife--and settled at Gibraltar. His language, like the dress of a harlequin, was made up of scraps,--French, Spanish, English, and Italian, joined in angularly and without method or regularity; and all so badly spoken, as to render it impossible to say which amongst them was the mother-tongue. Nevertheless, Damien got on well with every body, and his _bonhommie_ and good nature rendered him a universal favourite. In other respects, however, he was not so favoured a child of fortune; for, though no idle seeker of adventures, in fact, he was wont to go a great way to avoid them, yet, as ill luck would have it, adventures very frequently came across him. And it generally happened, as with the famed Manchegan knight, that Damien, in his various encounters, came off "second best." That is to say, they usually ended in his finding himself _minus_ his gun, or his horse, or both, and, perhaps, his _alforjas_ to boot. By his own account, these untoward events invariably happened through some want of proper precaution--either whilst he was indulging in a _Siesta_, or taking a snack by the side of some cool stream, his trusty gun being out of his immediate reach, or when committing some other imprudent act. So it was, however, and these "_petits malheurs_," as he was in the habit of calling them, had generated a more than ordinary dread of robbers, which, in its turn, had produced in him a disposition to be gregarious whenever he passed the bounds of the English garrison. In travelling through the mountains, we always knew when we were approaching what Damien considered a likely spot for an ambuscade, by his striking up a martial air that he told us had been the favourite march of the regiment of grenadiers in which he had served; giving us from time to time a hint that it would be well to be upon the look-out by observing to the person next him, "_Hay muchos ladrones par ici, mon Capitaine--el año pasado (maledetti sian' ces gueux d'Espagnols!) on m'a volé une bonne escopète en este maldito callejon_[96]--_Il faut être preparé, Messieurs!_" and then the Piedmontese march was resumed with increased energy, growing _piu marcato e risoluto_, as the banks of the gorge became higher and the underwood thicker. On regaining the open country, the air was changed by a playful _Cadenza_ to one of a more lively character, and, after a _Da Capo_, generally ended with "_n'ayez pas peur, Messieurs--questi birbánti Spagniuoli_"[97] (he seldom abused them in their native language, lest he should be over-heard) "_n'osent pas nous attaquer à forces égales_." Poor _Damien!_ many is the good laugh your fears have unconsciously occasioned us--many the joking bet the tuning up of the Piedmontese grenadiers' march has given rise to--and every note of which is at this moment as perfect in my recollection as when we traversed together the wild _puertas de Sanona_. The town of Los Barrios, where we took up our quarters for the night, is twelve miles from Gibraltar. It is a small, open town, containing some 2000 souls, and, though founded only since the capture of Gibraltar, already shows sad symptoms of decay. Being within a ride of the British garrison, it is frequently visited by its inmates, and two rival _posadas_ dispute the honour of possessing the _golden fleece_. One of them, for a time, carried all before it, in consequence of the beauty of the _Donzella de la Casa_:[98] but beauty _will_ fade, however unwillingly--as in this case--its possessor admits that it does; and the "fair maid of Los Barrios," who, when I first saw her, was really a very beautiful girl, had, at the period of my last visit, become a coarse, fat, middle-aged, _young woman_; and, as the charges for looking at her remained the same as ever, I proved a recreant knight, and went to the rival posada. Nothing could well be more ludicrous than the contrast, in dress and appearance, between the beauty's mother and the beauty herself--unless, indeed, the visiter arrived very unexpectedly,--the one being dirty, slatternly, and clothed in old rags; the other, _muy bien peynado_,[99] and pomatumed, and decked in all the finery and ornaments presented by her numerous admirers. The old lady was excessively proud of her daughter's beauty and wardrobe; and in showing her off always reminded me of the _sin-par_[100] Panza's mode of speaking of his _Sanchita, una muchacha a quien crio para condesa_.[101] The father of "the beauty" was a notorious _liberal_; and, having outraged the laws of his country on various occasions, was executed at Seville some years since. He was, I think, the most thorough-going leveller I ever met with--one who would not have sheathed the knife as long as any individual better off than himself remained in the country. Boasting to me on one occasion of the great deeds he had done during the war, he said that in one night he had despatched eleven French soldiers, who were quartered in his house. He effected his purpose by making them drunk, having previously drugged their wine to produce sleep. He put them to death with his knife as they lay senseless on the floor, carried them out into the yard, and threw them into a pit. The monster who could boast of such a crime would commit it if he had the opportunity; and though I suspect the number of his victims was exaggerated, yet I have no doubt whatever that he did not make himself out to be a murderer without some good grounds; and, I confess, it gave me very little regret to hear, a year or two afterwards, that he had perished on the scaffold. The road to Sanona enters the mountains soon after leaving Los Barrios, ascending, for the first few miles, along the bank of the river Palmones. The scenery is very fine; huge masses of scarped and jagged sierras are tossed about in the most fantastic irregularity, whilst the valleys between are clad with a luxuriance of foliage that can be met with only in this prolific climate. Looking back, the silvery Palmones may be traced winding between its wooded banks towards the bay of Gibraltar, which, viewed in this direction, has the appearance of a vast lake; the African shore, from Ape's Hill to the promontory of Ceuta, seeming to complete its enclosure to the south. After proceeding some miles further, the road becomes a mere mule-track, and the country very wild and barren. The Piedmontese march had been gradually _crescendo_ ever since leaving the cultivated valley of the Palmones, and Damien, as he rode on before us, had already given sundry yet more palpable intimations of impending danger,--firstly, by examining the priming of his old flint gun,--secondly, by trying whether the balls were rammed home,--and, lastly, by producing a brandy bottle from his capacious pocket; when, arrived at the foot of a peculiarly dreary and rocky pass, pulling up and dismounting from his horse, under pretence of tightening the girths of his saddle, he exclaimed, "_à present, Messieurs, es preciso cargar--ces lâches d'Espagnols viennent toujours a l'improviste, et se non siamo apparecchiati sarémo tutti inretati come tanti uccellini.--Somos todos muy bien armados con escopetas à dos cañones; y con juicio, no tendremos que temer--ma ... bisogna giudizio!_"[102] and in accordance with his wishes thus clearly expressed, we all loaded with ball, and, pushing on an advanced guard, boldly entered the rugged defile, joining our voices in grand chorus in the inspiriting grenadier's march. On emerging from this rocky gorge, we entered a peculiarly wild and secluded valley, which, so completely is it shut out from all view, one might imagine, but for the narrow path under our feet, had never been trodden by man. The road winds round the heads of numerous dark ravines, crosses numberless torrents, that rush foaming from the impending sierra on the left, and is screened effectually from the sun by an impenetrable covering of oak and other forest-trees, festooned with woodbine, eglantine, and wild vines; whilst the valley below is clothed, from end to end, with cistus, broom, wild lavender, thyme, and other indigenous aromatic shrubs. At the end of about three leagues, we reached the head of the valley, where one of the principal sources of the Palmones takes its rise. The neck of land that divides this stream from the affluents to the Celemin, is the pass of Sanona. From hence the _Casería_ is visible, and a rapid descent of about a mile brought us to the door of the lone mansion. Our arrival was announced to the inmates by a general salute from the countless dogs that invariably form part of a Spanish farmer's establishment. The horrid din soon brought forth the equally shaggy-coated bipeds, headed by a venerable-looking old man, who, with a slight recognition of Damien, stepped to the front, and, in a very dignified manner, announcing himself as the owner of the _Casería_, begged we would alight, and consider his house our own. "My habitation is but a poor one, _Caballeros_; the accommodation it affords yet poorer. I wish for your sakes I had better to offer; but of this you may rest assured, that every thing _Luis de Castro_ possesses, will ever be at the service of the brave nation who generously aided, and by whose side I have fought, to maintain the independence of my country."--"_Bravo, Don Luis!_" ejaculated Damien, which saved us the trouble of making a suitable speech in return. We were much pleased with our host's appearance: indeed the shape of his cranium was itself sufficient to secure him the good opinion of all disciples of Spurzheim; but this feeling of gratification was by no means called forth by his _Casería_, from the outward inspection of which we judged the organ of accommodation to be wofully deficient. The house and out-buildings formerly occupied a considerable extent of ground, but at the present day they are reduced to three sides of a small square, of which the centre building contains the dwelling apartments of the family, and the wings afford cover to the retainers, cattle, and farming implements. A stout wall completes the enclosure on the fourth side, wherein a wide folding gate affords the only means of external communication. The _Casería_ has long been possessed by the family of its present occupant, but, losing something of its importance at each succeeding generation, has dwindled down to its present insignificant condition. Don Luis strives hard, nevertheless, to keep up the family dignity of the De Castros, though joining with patriarchal simplicity in all the services, occupations, and pastimes, of his dependents. The portion of the house reserved for himself and family consists but of two rooms on the ground-floor. The outer and larger of these serves the double purpose of a kitchen and refectory; the other is appropriated to the multifarious offices of a chapel, dormitory, henroost, and granary. In this inner room we were duly installed,--the lady de Castro, and other members of the family, removing into a neighbouring _choza_ during our stay: and a sheet having been drawn over the Virgin and child, the cocks and hens driven from the rafters, and the Indian corn swept up into a corner, we found ourselves more _snugly_ lodged than outward appearances had led us to expect. Leaving our friend Damien to make what arrangements he pleased as to dinner--a discretional power that always afforded him infinite gratification--we proceeded to examine the "location," with a view of obtaining some notion of the country which was to be the scene of our next day's sporting operations. The situation of the _Casería_ is singularly romantic; to the north it is backed by a richly wooded slope, above which, at the distance of about half a mile, a rocky ledge of sierra rises perpendicularly several hundred feet, its dark outline serving as a fine relief to the rich and varied green tints of the forest. In the opposite direction, the house commands a view over a wide and partially wooded valley, along the bed of which the eye occasionally catches a glimpse of a sparkling stream, that is collected from the various dark ravines which break the lofty mountain-ridges on either side. A wooded range, steep, but of somewhat less elevation than the other mountains that the eye embraces, appears to close the mouth of this valley; but, winding round its foot to the right, the stream gains a narrow outlet to the extensive plain of Vejer, and empties itself into the _Laguna de la Janda_--a portion of which may be seen; and over this intermediate range rise, in the distance, the peaked summits of the _Sierra de la Plata_, whose southern base is washed by the Atlantic. The beauty of the scenery, heightened by the broad shadows cast upon the mountains, and the varied tints that ever attend upon a setting sun in this Elysian atmosphere, had tempted us to continue roaming about, selecting the most favourable points of view, without once thinking of our evening meal; and when, at length, the sun disappeared behind the mountains, we found we had, unconsciously, wandered some considerable distance from the _Casería_. We forthwith bent our steps homewards, and, on drawing near the house, were not a little amused at hearing Damien's stentorian halloos to draw our attention, which were sent back to him in echoes from all parts of the _Serranía_. He was right glad to see us, though vexed at our extreme imprudence in wandering about the woods without an _escopeta_, or defensive weapon of any sort amongst us. "_Messieurs, quand vous connoitrez ces gens çi aussi bien que moi----!_" We referred to Don Luis (who had come out with the intention of proceeding in search of us), whether there were any _mala gente_ in the neighbourhood. A faint smile played about the old man's mouth as he looked towards Damien, as if guessing the source from which our interrogation had sprung, and, then waving his right hand to and fro, with the forefinger extended upwards, he replied, "_Por aqui Caballeros no hay mala gente alguna; esa Canalla conoce demasiado quien es Luis de Castro!_"[103] On entering the house, we found a large party assembled round the charcoal fire, preparing to take their evening _gazpacho_[104] _caliente_; and, hot as had been the day, we gladly joined the circle, until our own more substantial supper should be announced. The group consisted of the wife, son, and daughter-in-law of our host, and several of his friends, who, living at a distance, had come overnight, to be ready to take part in the _batida_ on the following morning. A _batida_ bears so strong a resemblance to the same sort of thing common in Germany, and indeed in some parts of Scotland, that a very detailed account of one would be uninteresting to most of my readers. We turned out at daybreak, and, recruited by the neighbouring peasantry, found that we mustered twenty-three guns, and dogs innumerable, mostly of a kind called by the Spaniards _podencos_, for which the most appropriate term in our language is lurcher; though that does not altogether express the strong-made, wiry-haired dog used by the Spaniards on these occasions. As the _camas_[105] about Sanona are very wide, and require a number of guns to line them, only eleven of the men could be spared for beaters. These were placed under the direction of Alonzo, our host's son, whilst Don Luis himself took command of the sportsmen in the quality of _capitan_; and his first order was to prohibit all squibbing off of guns, by which the game might be disturbed. The two parties, on leaving the house, took different directions. Our's, after proceeding about a mile, was halted, and enjoined to form in rank entire, and keep perfectly silent. We then ascended a steep, thickly coppiced hill, and were placed in position along its crest, at intervals of about a hundred yards, with directions to watch the openings through the underwood in our front--to screen ourselves from observation as well as we could--not to stir from the spot until the signal was made to retire--and to observe carefully the position of our fellow sportsmen on either side, to prevent accidents. We were much amused at the manner in which Don Luis--to whom we were all perfect strangers--selected us to occupy the different approaches to the position. Scanning us over from right to left, and from head to foot, he seemed to pick and choose his men as if perfectly aware of the peculiar qualities each possessed, befitting him for the situation in which he purposed placing him; and, beckoning the one selected out of the rank, without uttering a word he led him to the assigned post, pointed out the various openings in the underwood, and gave his final instructions in a low whisper. On leaving me he pointed to a narrow passage between two huge blocks of rock, and in a low voice said "_Lobo_;"[106] which, I must confess, made me look about for a tree, as a secure position to fall back upon, in the event of my fire failing to bring the expected visiter to the ground. The position we occupied had a deep ravine in front, a wide valley on one flank, and a precipitous wall of rock on the other; but, as the event proved, it was far too extended. Thus posted, we remained for a considerable time, and I began to think very meanly of the sport, especially as I did not much like to withdraw my eyes from the rocky pass where the wolf was to be looked for; but at length the distant shouts of the beaters resounded through the mountains, and a few minutes after, the faint but true-toned yelp of one of the hounds put me quite on the _qui vive_; and when, in a few seconds, other dogs gave tongue, and several shots were fired by the beaters (who are furnished with blank cartridge), giving the assurance that game had been sprung, a feeling of excitement was produced, that can, I think, hardly be equalled by any other description of sport. The first gun from our own party almost induced me to rush forward and break the line; but, just at the moment, a rustling in the underwood drew my attention, and, looking up, I saw a fine buck "at gaze," as the heralds say, about thirty yards off, and exactly in the direction of the spot where I had seen my friend G---- posted. The animal, with ears erect, was listening, in evident alarm, to the barking of the dogs; yet, from the shot just fired in his front, scarcely knowing on which side danger was most imminent. I was so screened by the underwood that he did not perceive me, and I could have shot him with the greatest ease--that is to say, had my nervous system been in proper trim,--but that the fear of killing my neighbour withheld me; so there I stood, with my gun at the first motion of the present, and there stood the deer, in just as great a _quandary_. At length, losing all patience, I hallooed to my neighbour by name, hoping by his reply to learn whereabouts he was (for that he had moved from his post was evident), and, if possible, get a shot at the deer as he turned back, which I doubted not he would do. But, alas! my call produced no response, and the fine animal bounded forward, breaking through our line, and rendering it too hazardous for me to salute him with both barrels, as I had murderously projected. Soon after the horn sounded for our reassembly. The _cama_[107] had been very unsuccessful. One deer only, besides that which visited me, had been driven through our line; the rest of the herd, and several wild boars, turned our position by its right, which was too extensive for the small number of guns. One of the Spaniards had shot a fox, which was all we had to show; and his companions shook their heads, considering it a bad omen, and that it was, indeed, likely to turn out "_una dia de zorras_."[108] On my relating the tantalizing dilemma in which I had been placed, old _Luis_, who felt somewhat sore at the signal failure of his generalship, declared we should have no sport if I stood upon such ceremony; adding, with much energy of manner, and addressing himself to the assembled party, "As soon as ever you see your game, _carajo! candela!_"[109]--a speech that reminded us forcibly of Suwarrow's reply to his Austrian coadjutor, when urging the prudence of a _reconnoissance_ before undertaking some delicate operation, viz.--"_Poussez en avant--chargez à la bayonette--voilà mes reconnoissances._" The beaters were now directed to make a "wide cast," and, if possible, head the game that had escaped us, whilst we moved off to a fresh position, about half a mile in rear, and perpendicular to the former. This plan was pretty successful: we killed a wolf and two deer, but Don Luis was by no means satisfied. It was now noon-day, and, ascending a rocky ledge that projects into the wide valley, already described as lying in front of the house, we obtained a splendid panoramic view of the whole wooded district of Sanona. We found, on gaining the summit, that the provident Damien had directed a _muchacho_ to meet us there, with a mule-load of provender, which he was pleased to call "_un petit peu de rafraichissement_." We were quite prepared to acknowledge our sense of his foresight and discretion in the most unequivocal manner; for the exertion of climbing the successive mountain-ridges, and forcing our way through the underwood, as well as the excitement of the sport, had given a keen edge to our appetites. Whilst seated in a convivial circle, smoking our cigars at the conclusion of our repast, we observed that poor Alonzo--who, though a stoutly built, was a very sickly-looking man--appeared to be quite exhausted from the heat and fatigue of the day, and that poor old Luis looked from time to time on his son, as he lay full-length upon the ground, with a heart-rending expression of grief. One of our party remarked to him, that Alonzo did not appear to be well, and suggested that he had better not exert himself further. Don Luis shook his head. "Alas! señor!" he replied, "my poor Alonzo is as well as ever he again will be. But do not suppose that he is a degenerate scion of the De Castros; nor even that I regret seeing him in his present state. No: much as I once wished to see the family name handed down to another generation--of which there is now no chance--I would rather, much rather, that he should have sacrificed his health--his life indeed--for his country, than that any vain wish of mine should be gratified." Our curiosity excited by the words, and yet more by the manner of the old man, we ventured, after some little preamble, to ask what had occasioned the change in his son that his speech implied. "It is a long story, _caballeros_," he answered; "but, as the sun is now too powerful to allow us to resume our sport, I will, if you feel disposed to listen to a garrulous old man, relate the circumstances that led to my son's being reduced to the lamentable state in which you see him." We contracted the circle round Don Luis, the Spaniards, apparently, quite as intent on hearing the thrice-told tale as ourselves; and Damien, though still busily occupied at his "_rafraichissement_," also lending an attentive ear. The fine old man was seated on a rock, elevated somewhat above the rest of the party, holding in his right hand his uncouth-looking fowling-piece, whilst the other rested on the head of a favourite dog, that came, seemingly, to beg his master to remonstrate with Damien for using his teeth to tear off the little flesh that remained on a ham-bone. Don Luis, after patting the impatient favourite on the head and bidding him lie down, thus began his story. CHAPTER IX. LUIS DE CASTRO. "_Tiene este caso un no sé que de sombra de adventura de Caballeria._"--DON QUIJOTE. I need not tell enlightened Englishmen--commenced Don Luis--that the name I bear is no common one. The Casería which you there see, and all the shady glens we here look down upon, were granted to the renowned De Castro, whose valour so materially aided the Catholic kings, of blessed memory, in the pious work of extirpating the vile followers of the Arabian Impostor from the soil of Spain; and the patrimony thus acquired by my ancestor's sword has been handed down from generation to generation to me,--too likely, alas! to be the last of the race to inherit it. I married early in life, and was blessed with several children. Alonzo, the first-born, was the only one permitted to reach maturity,--but I repine not. They were all healthy, and every thing a parent could wish. Years rolled on unmarked by any events of importance. Our days were passed in attending to our herds; our evenings, in singing and dancing to the notes of the wild guitar. Our festivals were devoted to the exhilarating sport we have this morning been following; nor did we, amidst our happiness, neglect to offer up our thanks to the Omnipotent Deity, who,--through the propitiating influence of our patron saints--was pleased to pour his blessings upon us. But a storm arose, which, for a time, shook our happy country to its foundation. Spain became the object of a vile tyrant's insatiable ambition. The perfidious Corsican, under the specious plea of friendship, marched his licentious legions into our devoted country: and having, by shameless deceit, first possessed himself of all our strongholds, threw off the mask, and treated us as a conquered nation. This favoured province was, for some considerable time saved from the desolation that wasted the rest of Spain, by the heroism of one of her sons:--the brave Castaños hastened to place himself at the head of the national troops, and in the defiles of the Sierra Morena, captured a whole French army. But jealousy and intrigue--the greatest enemies our country had to contend against--caused his services to be requited with ingratitude. Another French army advanced, but we had not another Castaños to oppose it. The enemy forced the barriers with which nature and art had defended the province, and, like a swarm of locusts, spread over and consumed the rich produce of its fertile fields. The mountaineers of Ronda and Granada, engaged in the vile contraband trade which the disorganized state of the country favoured, were slow to take up arms against the invaders, but "_Io y mi gente_" (I and my people) were early in the field, harassing their parties conveying supplies to the siege of Cadiz, as well as protecting the surrounding country from their predatory visits; and our secluded _Casería_ afforded a secure retreat to the inhabitants of the plain, when forced to abandon their hearths. I will not take up your time with the account of the various encounters we had with the enemy--they are well known throughout the Serranía--but will confine my narrative to what more particularly concerns my son. On one occasion, fortune presented him with an opportunity of saving a party of the king's troops, who had got entangled in the intricacies of the Serranía; his knowledge of the country having enabled him to lead them clear of their pursuers, and bring them safely to the _Casería_. Disappointed of the prey they had so confidently calculated upon, and uneasy at a body of disciplined troops being added to our _guerilla_, and established so close to them, the enemy determined on sending a large force to root us out of our fastness. We, on our parts, hoping that the French were unconscious of the place where the troops had found a refuge, were meditating an attack upon their post of Alcalà, when the storm burst suddenly upon our heads, and, but for the devotedness and presence of mind of my gallant son, would have involved us all in one common destruction. Alonzo had gone off to reconnoitre in the direction of Tarifa, a rumour having reached us that the enemy had invested that place; and we were anxiously awaiting his return to decide upon our plans, when, soon after nightfall, a lad belonging to the _Venta de Tabilla_ arrived at the _Casería_ on my son's horse, and in hurried words, informed me that a large body of French troops was advancing upon the house. The enemy had forced this lad,--who alone had been left in charge of the _Venta_,--to be their guide, and he had already conducted them across the swamps at the head of the _Laguna de la Janda_, and was within a hundred yards of the road leading from Tarifa to Casa Vieja--by keeping along which to the left, he purposed gaining the shortest road into our sequestered valley--when Alonzo crossed the path immediately in front of them. From what we learnt afterwards it appeared, that he had been for some time watching the enemy's movements, and, guessing from the direction they had finally taken, whither they were bound, had thus purposely thrown himself in their way; resolved--cut off as he found himself from the shortest road to the _Casería_--to take this hazardous step to save us from a surprise. On being questioned as to his knowledge of the country, he at once offered to guide them to the _Casería_. "This is your way," he said, pointing in the direction, whence he had just come, "but yonder is my house," motioning with his head towards the _Cortijo de le las Habas_; which, though about half a mile off, was yet visible in the dusk; "I will send my jaded horse home by the boy, and accompany you on foot." The commanding officer, to whom this was addressed, made no objection; in fact, he probably thought that their guide would be more in their power without his horse. Alonzo gave his beast to the lad, saying significantly, "_Juanillo_, tell my father I have fallen in with some friends and shall not be at home for some little time; be quick; make your way back to the venta without delay, as soon as you have delivered my message; and, as you value your life,--no babbling." My son then turned off to the right, taking the best but far the most circuitous route into the valley of Sanona, whilst _Juanillo_, putting his horse into a canter, proceeded in the direction of the _Cortijo de las Habas_, but, ere reaching it, struck into the difficult pass you see below there, whence a rude foot-path leads direct to the _Casería_, and by which he had intended to conduct the enemy. It seemed to us--what indeed proved to be the case--that my son's message was intended to hint to us the necessity for flight, and _Juanillo's_ account of the number of the enemy, would fully have warranted our avoiding an encounter; but, thinking Alonzo's life would surely pay the forfeit of our escape, we determined to anticipate their attack and give him a chance of saving himself. Prudence suggested the propriety of sending away our women and children. Mounting them, therefore, on _borricos_, we hurried them off by the mountain path to the _Casa de Castañas_, or _de las Navas_, as it is otherwise called, from the name of its proprietor--a solitary house, situated in a wooded valley, several miles to the north of Sanona. The women had scarcely left the _Casería_, ere we heard the distant tramp of horses in the valley below. Leaving a part of the soldiers to defend the house, I led the rest, and my own people, out as silently as possible, and posted them on the upper side of the path by which the French were advancing. The enemy halted directly under the muzzles of our guns, and a corporal and two dragoons were sent on to the house to ask for a night's lodging. Nothing could be more favourable than the opportunity now presented for attacking them, but I hesitated to give the word until I had discovered my son, anxious as well to give him a chance of escape, as to save him from our own fire. At last I recognised him: he was standing at the side of the commander of the party, who, with a pistol in his hand, was questioning him in a low tone of voice. The corporal now thundered at the gate of the _Casería_. "_Quien es?_" demanded the soldiers from within. I listened to no more; for, observing that the commander's attention was for the moment attracted to the proceedings of his advanced guard, and that Alonzo, in consequence, was comparatively out of his reach, "_Candela!_" I cried out to my people, directing, at the same time, my own unerring rifle at the head of the French captain. Twenty guns answered to the word. The commander of the enemy fell headlong to the earth; his horse sprung violently off the ground, reared, staggered, and fell back; a dozen Frenchmen bit the dust; the rest turned and fled, ere we could reload our pieces. I pressed forward to embrace my brave son, but saw him not. I called him by name, but a faint groan was the only reply I received. I turned in the direction of the sound, and found the Frenchman's horse, struggling in the agonies of death, upon the bleeding body of my Alonzo. He had been wounded in the breast by the Frenchman's pistol, the trigger of which had, apparently, been pressed in the convulsive movement occasioned by his death-wound. The horse had been shot by one of our men, had fallen upon Alonzo, and broken several of his ribs. We conveyed him to the house, without a hope of his recovery. In the excess of my grief, I thought not of sending after the women. Alonzo was the first to bring me to a sense of my remissness, by enquiring for his wife and child. I expressed my joy at hearing him speak, for he had lain many hours speechless. He pressed my hand, and added, "Father, I wish to see them once again before I die--to have a mother's blessing also--for I feel my end approaching." I instantly despatched four of my people to the _Casa de Castañas_ to escort them back, for I recollected that the three Frenchmen who had been sent forward to demand admission to the house, had effected their escape, and must be, wandering about the mountains. The sun had risen some hours, and yet no tidings reached us of them. I began to feel very uneasy. A terrible presentiment disturbed me. I went to the iron cross that stands on the mound in front of our house, whence a view is obtained of the pass leading to _Las Navas_. I heard a wild scream, that pierced my very soul, and the moment after, caught a glimpse of a female figure, hastening with mad speed down the rocky path leading to the _Casería_. It was my daughter-in-law, Teresa! "See," she exclaimed, with frantic exultation, showing me her hands stained with blood, "see--I killed him! my knife pierced the heart of the murderer of my child! I killed the vile Frenchman! The wife of a De Castro ever carries a knife to avenge her wrongs--to defend her honour!" That some terrible catastrophe had happened was too evident, but from the unhappy maniac it was impossible to gather any thing definite. I mounted my horse, and rode with the speed of desperation towards the _Casa de Castañas_, but had not proceeded far ere I met my people returning, bearing my wife on a litter, and accompanied by two only of the women who had accompanied her, mounted on _borricos_. "Dead?" I asked. It was the only word I could utter. "No, Luis," replied one of my faithful followers, "not dead, and, we hope, not even seriously hurt; but evil has befallen your house--your three young children and your grandson are lost to you for ever." "Lost! murdered? This is, indeed, a heavy blow, a severe trial. Perhaps I am now childless;--God's will be done." "Proceed gently to the _Casería_ with your burthen; I will hasten forward, and send assistance, and such cordials as may be required to restore my Ana." On my return I was surprised to see Alonzo sitting up, and his wife at his bedside. I cannot describe the joy of that moment; but there was a fearful expression of determination in my son's contracted brows, that almost led me to fear for his mind. He turned to me for explanation, but as yet I could give him none. The party shortly arrived, however, and the women gave us a full account of the overwhelming disaster that had befallen us. On leaving the _Casería_ they had proceeded with such speed as the darkness of the night permitted, towards the _Casa de Castañas_, and had reached within a quarter of a league of the house, when the trampling of horses behind them, spread the greatest alarm amongst these defenceless females. It was clear that those who were in pursuit could not be their friends, otherwise they would call to them to return; and concluding therefore, that the enemy had prevailed at the _Casería_, naturally considered their danger imminent. My wife and daughter-in-law, with their children, and three of the women, being well mounted, pressed forward to the solitary house for shelter; the others, finding the Frenchmen--whom they could now hear conversing--gaining rapidly upon them, with more good fortune took to the woods; and, as we eventually learnt, reached Los Barrios in safety. On arriving at the _Casa de Castañas_, it was found to be totally abandoned. They had barely time to close the outer gate, and shut themselves up in a loft,--that could be ascended only by a ladder, and through a trap-door, which they let fall--before their pursuers rode up to the house. At first the Frenchmen civilly demanded admission; but this being refused, they--guessing, probably, how the case stood, from none but female voices replying to their demands--proceeded to threaten to force an entrance. My daughter-in-law, who speaks a few words of French, then appeared at the window; told them it was an abandoned house, and contained absolutely nothing, not even refreshment for their horses; that, by keeping down the valley to the left, they would, in less than an hour, reach the _Hermita of El Cuervo_, where they would find all they might stand in need of. The beauty of her who addressed them--for in those days my daughter-in-law was a lovely young woman of eighteen--awakened the most lawless of passions in these ruthless profligates. Affecting, however, to disbelieve her statement of the unprovided condition of the house, they forced open the outer gate, and, after vainly endeavouring to persuade the terrified females to descend from their place of refuge, collected all the straw and other combustible articles that were scattered about the premises, in the apartment beneath, and threatened to set fire to the house. In vain was appeal made to their clemency, to the boasted gallantry of their nation, to every honourable feeling that inhabits the breast of man. And at length, exasperated at the determination of these devoted women, and possibly--it is a compliment I am willing to pay human nature--thinking that a little smoke would soon induce them to descend, the reckless monsters fired the straw. The whole building was quickly enveloped in flames. For some minutes the unhappy beings above thought that the straw, being damp, would not ignite so as to communicate with the wooden rafters of the floor which supported them, and hoped that they were free from danger; but the smoke which ascended soon, of itself, became intolerable. Two of my children dropped on the floor from the effects of suffocation; and one of women, taking her infant in her arms, jumped from the window and was killed on the spot. My daughter-in-law, seeing that for herself there was but a choice of death,--for the flames had now burst through the crackling floor,--determined to make an effort to save her child. Pressing him to her bosom, and covering him with her shawl to protect him from the flames in her descent, she lifted the trap-door and placed her foot upon the ladder. The fire had yet spared the upper steps, but ere she reached the bottom the charred wood gave way, and she fell. The child escaped from her arms and rolled amongst the blazing straw; she started upon her feet to save him, but the rude hand of one of the ruffians seized and dragged her from the flames into the court-yard. Vainly she implored to be allowed to go to the rescue of her helpless infant; the monster--even at such a moment looking upon his victim with the eyes of lust--would not listen to her heart-rending appeals. The agonizing screams of her writhing offspring gave her superhuman strength; she seized her knife; plunged it deep in the Frenchman's breast; and, released from his paralyzed arms, rushed back into the flames. Alas! it was too late--nothing but the blackened skeleton now remained of her darling child. She darted, with the fury of a tigress robbed of its young, upon one of the other Frenchmen, but he disarmed her, and, with a returning feeling of humanity, forbore inflicting any further injury upon the frantic woman; and, after some apparent altercation with his companion, both mounted their horses and rode away. They were just in time to make their escape, as the four men I had despatched rode up to the front gate of the house, as they went off by the other. One of my people was an inhabitant of the _Casa de Castañas_, and knowing the premises, quickly brought a ladder from a place of concealment, and applied it to the window of the burning portion of the building. My wife and the other two women were brought down safely, though all more or less scorched, but the floor gave way before the children, who were lying in an insensible state from suffocation, could be removed. I despatched an indignant remonstrance to the French general, on the inhuman conduct of his troops towards helpless women and children; and threatened, if the perpetrators were not signally punished, to hang every one of his countrymen that might fall into my hands, but he never deigned to answer my letter. Some weeks elapsed after these events, ere Alonzo could leave his couch; and the enemy seemed now so fully occupied in pressing the siege of Cadiz, that we were led to believe they entertained no idea of paying the _Casería_ a second visit. Want of provisions, and still more of ammunition, had hitherto prevented our being of much service, in harassing the enemy during their operations; but, having obtained supplies from Algeciras, I determined to follow up my remonstrance with a blow, and mustering all our strength, to make an attempt to carry the enemy's post at _Casa Vieja_. For this purpose I fixed on the _Casa de Castañas_ for the general rendezvous; that spot being more conveniently situated than Sanona, for those who were to join our ranks from Castellar, Ximena, and other places, and equally as near the projected point of attack. At the appointed day, I proceeded with my people to the place of concentration. Alonzo had insisted on accompanying us, though yet hardly able to cross a horse; but he thirsted for the blood of the destroyers of his child and brothers. On reaching the _Casa de Castañas_, however, his strength failed him, and he was obliged to remain there. Leaving _Pepito_, who sits there, then a beardless boy, to tend upon Alonzo, and accompany him back to Sanona on the morrow, we departed on our expedition. The chapel and few houses which compose the village of _Casa Vieja_, are situated on the brow of a high hill overlooking a wide plain, watered by the river Barbate. Not a bush interrupts the view for several miles in any direction, so that to approach the place some circumspection was requisite. I halted my men in the woods bordering the Celemin--on the very spot, perhaps, where Muley Aben Hassan, King of Granada, fixed his camp, when he sallied forth from Malaga to plunder the estates of the Duke of Medina Sidonía--and sent one of my most trustworthy followers on to reconnoitre, purposing, if a favourable report was received, to make an attack at the point of day, trusting to the shadows of night to conceal our march across the open plain. Our scout returned only a couple of hours before dawn. He had experienced much difficulty in fording the Barbate, which was swollen by recent rains. He brought us the startling news, that a considerable French force had left Alcalá de los Gazules, the preceding day, to penetrate into the mountains, and was now probably in our rear, either at the _Casa de Castañas_ or at Sanona. It was necessary to fall back immediately. We were at the fork of the roads leading from those two places to _Casa Vieja_, but on which should we direct our march? My heart whispered, to the former, where my Alonzo, the last of my race, was left defenceless; but the wives and families of my companions were all at Sanona, and duty bade me hasten thither for their protection. The struggle of my feelings was severe, but short. I sent a trusty friend on a swift horse to save Alonzo, if time yet permitted, and hurried the march of my troop to the _Casería_. We reached it in three hours. We found every thing as we had left it. Those who had remained there had neither seen nor heard anything of the enemy, but my son had not returned home. I now regretted not having proceeded to the _Casa de Castañas_, and proposed to my wearied men to march on and attack the _Gavachos_ in their passage through the passes, fully expecting they would now direct their steps to the _Casería_. They acceded to my proposal with _vivas_. A cup of wine and a mouthful of bread were given to each, and we were off. We had not yet gained the pass yonder, at the back of the house, when we met the man I had sent to the _Casa de Castañas_, coming towards us at full speed. He informed us that he had encountered the French when on his way to _Las Navas_, directing their march towards _Casa Vieja_. Fortunately escaping their observation, he had concealed himself in a thicket whilst they passed. _Pepito_--whom, it will be recollected, I had left with Alonzo--was walking by the side of one of their officers, undergoing a strict examination respecting our movements, &c. They had several other prisoners in charge, who were tied together in couples, but he could not distinguish Alonzo amongst them. My son's favourite dog, _Hubilon_, however, brought up the rear, led by one of the marauders; and the faithful creature's oft-averted head and restive attempts to escape, sufficiently proved that his master had been left behind. Under this conviction, he had pushed on to the _Casa de Castañas_ as soon as the enemy were out of sight, and had thoroughly searched every part of the building; but not a living being did it contain. The pigeons even had deserted it, or, more probably, had been sacrificed, for feathers and bones were scattered about on all sides, the smoke of numerous fires darkened the white-washed walls, and the stains of wine were left on the stone pavement, proving that the house had lately been the scene of a deep carouse. From this account, it was evident that the Frenchmen had marched upon our track in the hope of taking us between two fires, and it was most fortunate we had returned to Sanona, instead of falling back upon the _Casa de Castañas_; for the superiority of their number, in a chance encounter, would have given them every advantage. It was probable that the enemy would now continue their pursuit in hopes of taking us by surprise at Sanona; we countermarched immediately therefore, and passing the _Casería_, took up a strong position about two miles beyond it, on the road to _Casa Vieja_, where we waited for the enemy. We were not mistaken in our supposition, for scarcely were my men posted, when the French advance appeared in sight. I allowed them to approach to within pistol shot, and gave them a volley. My men were scattered among the bushes, so that the extent of our fire made our force appear much larger than it was in reality. We killed and wounded several. The enemy paused, and seeing by their numbers that if they pushed boldly on, resistance on our parts would be vain, I determined to try and intimidate them; and taking for this purpose eight or ten active fellows, we made our way through the brushwood which covered the hill side on our left, and opened a flank fire upon the main body of the enemy; who, imagining a fresh column had come to take part in the action, fell back in some confusion to a place of greater security, and one where they had more space to deploy their strength. We had effectually succeeded in frightening them, however, and no further attempt was made to force our position; but it was not until the next day that they finally left the mountains and retired to their fortified posts of Casa Vieja and Alcalà. No sooner had I seen them fairly out of the Serranía, than I retraced my steps with all possible speed to Sanona; still indulging the fond hope that Alonzo might have made his escape and reached home; but, disappointed in this expectation, I proceeded on without loss of time to the _Casa de Castañas_. I had scarcely entered the house ere I was greeted by "_Hubilon_,"--ay, my good dog, said Don Luis, caressing his pet, your grandsire--who evidently had come on the same errand as myself. But our search was fruitless. The well, the vaults, the lofts and out-houses, every place, was ransacked, but I discovered nothing to lead to the belief that Alonzo had either been left there or been murdered. I mounted my horse to return home, and had proceeded some little way, when I heard the howl of _Hubilon_. Thinking I had inadvertently shut him in the house, I sent back one of my companions to release him, but he returned, saying that the dog would not leave the spot. I returned myself, but the sagacious animal was not to be enticed away; he gave evident signs of pleasure at seeing me, and began scratching furiously at the boarded floor of one of the interior apartments. I approached to see what it was that excited his attention, and discovered a trap door. With some little difficulty I raised it up, and _Hubilon_ instantly leapt into the dark abyss. His piteous whining soon informed me that he had found the body of his master; a light was struck; I let myself down, and on the stone floor of the cold, damp vault lay the body of my unfortunate son; his hands were tied behind his back, and a handkerchief was drawn across his mouth to stifle his cries! To me it appeared that the spirit of my Alonzo had long left its earthly tenement, but the affectionate brute, by licking his master's face, proved that life was not yet entirely extinct. Assisted by my companions, I lifted my son out of the noxious vault, and, by friction, a dram of _aguadiente_, and exposure to the sun and a purer atmosphere, animation was gradually restored; and in the course of a few days he was able to bear the journey home; but from the effects of this confinement he has never recovered. He had no recollection of any of the circumstances which preceded his incarceration. A raging fever, brought on by fatigue and exposure to the sun in his previously weak state, had affected his brain, as well as deprived him of all strength. But _Pepito_ (who rejoined us a few days after,) stated, that Alonzo himself, in his delirium, had declared to the French on their arrival, who he was, and had besought them to put an end to his sufferings. The superior officer of the party had directed, however, that he should not be ill-treated; "what if he be the son of the _old wild boar_?" (the name by which they honoured me,) said he to his men; "we came not to murder our enemies in cold blood--carry him into the house and let him die in peace." _Pepito_ guessed by the malignant glance of one Italian-looking scoundrel--"I ask your pardon, Señor Damien," said Don Luis, in a parenthesis; "_servitore umilissimo_," replied he of the _Val d'Aosta_.--_Pépé_ guessed, I say, by the look that he who stepped forward to execute the orders of his officer gave one of his companions, whom he invited to assist him, that their superior's humane intentions would not be fulfilled; he begged hard, therefore, to be allowed to remain and wait upon his young master. "Impossible," replied the officer, "you must be our guide." The two men were absent but a few minutes, and then came out of the house and informed the officer that they had placed the rebel chief in the coolest place they could find; probably their fear of Alonzo's cries had deterred them from killing him outright. The abominable cruelties of these dastards exasperated every one. The expedition which was at this time undertaken to raise the siege of Cadiz promised to afford us a favourable opportunity of taking vengeance; but the cowardice of a Spaniard--the cowardice, if not treason, of a Spanish general--marred our fair prospects. The glorious field of Barrosa decked with fresh laurels the brows of our brave allies; but, to this day, the very name fills the breast of every loyal Spaniard with shame. Oh! that I and my people had been thereto share the danger and glory of that day; but we fulfilled with credit the part allotted to us. In the plan adopted by the allied generals it was settled that the _Serraños_, should make a diversion in the direction of _Casa Vieja_ and _Alcalà de los Gazules_, to draw the enemy's attention on that side, whilst their combined forces should proceed along the coast to Chiclana; accordingly _io y mi gente_.... CHAPTER X. DON LUIS'S NARRATIVE IS INTERRUPTED BY A BOAR--THE BATIDA RESUMED--DEPARTURE FROM SANONA--ROAD TO CASA VIEJA--THE PRIEST'S HOUSE--ADVENTURE WITH ITINERANT WINE-MERCHANTS--DEPARTURE FROM CASA VIEJA--ALCALA DE LOS GAZULES--ROAD TO XIMENA--RETURN TO GIBRALTAR. The old man, excited by the stirring recollections of the eventful times to which his narrative referred, his eyes sparkling with animation, and his words flowing somewhat more rapidly than in their wonted even current, had risen from his rocky seat, and, having transferred his fowling-piece to the left hand, was standing with his right arm extended in the direction of the scene of his former exploits, when he suddenly dropt his voice, and, after slowly, and, as it appeared to us, abstractedly, repeating his favourite expression, "_Io y mi gente_," he ceased altogether to speak, and appeared transfixed to the spot. His right arm remained stretched out towards Cadiz, and his head was turned slightly to one side, but the only motion perceptible was a tightening of the fingers round the barrel of his long gun. As if from the effect of sympathy, Damien's jaws--which for the last hour had been keeping _Hubilon_ in a state of tantalization, threatening to produce St. Vitus's dance--suddenly became equally motionless; his huge proboscis was turned on one side for a moment to allow free access to his left ear, and then starting up he exclaimed, "_Javali! cospetto!_"[110] "_Quiet ... o!_" said Don Luis, in an undertone, at the same time motioning Damien to resume his seat, "_Si, es una puerca_."[111] And then making signs to his men, they rose without a word, and went stealthily off down the hill. We now distinctly heard the grunting of a pig, and were hastily distributed in a semicircle, along the crest of the steep ridge we had selected for our resting-place. We had scarcely got into position before the cries of the beaters, and several shots fired in rapid succession, gave us notice that they had come in sight of the chase; but the sounds died away, and we were beginning to speak to each other in terms of disappointment, when a loud grunt announced the vicinity of a visiter. Hearing our voices, however, he went off at a tangent, and attempted to cross the ridge lower down; but this was merely, as the Spaniards say, "_Escapar del trueno y dar en el relampago_:"[112] a sharp fire there opened upon him, and after various trips he was fairly brought to the ground. Our _couteaux de chasse_ were instantly brandished, but the grisly monster, recovering himself quickly, once more got into a long trot, and, most probably, would have effected his escape, but that he was encountered and turned back by some of the dogs. Finding himself thus pressed on all sides by enemies, he again attempted to force the line of sportsmen, and a second time was made to bite the dust. He managed, nevertheless, to recover himself once more, and might, even yet possibly, have got away from us but for the dogs, which hung upon and detained him until some of the beaters came up and despatched him with their knives; not, however, until he had killed one dog outright, and desperately gored two others. The dogs showed extraordinary _pluck_ in attacking him. On examining the huge monster, we found he had received no less than four bullets: two in the neck, and two in the body. A fire was immediately kindled, and, having been singed, to destroy the vermin about him, he was decorated with laurel and holly, placed on the back of a mule, and, with the rest of our spoils, sent off to the _Casería_. The beaters informed us, that they had seen the wild sow and four young ones, which Don Luis had sent them after; but that they had made off through the wooded valley to the right, ere they could succeed in heading and turning them up the hill. It was decided that we should proceed immediately after them, and leave the conclusion of Don Luis's tale for the charcoal fire-circle in the evening; but, as the rest of his story related principally to events that are well known, and was all "_Santiago y cierra España_,"[113] I will spare my readers the recital. The rest of the day's sport was poor, but the grand and ever-varying mountain scenery was of itself an ample reward for the fatigue of scrambling up the steep braes. Towards sunset we retraced our steps, thoroughly tired, to the _Casería_. Damien, mounting a stout mule, rode on to prepare dinner, saying, "_Messieurs, sans doute, désireront goûter du chevreuil de Sanone; vado avanti con questo motivo, e subito, subito, all red-dy"_;[114] and, digging his heels into the animal's side, he thereupon started off at a jog-trot, his huge feet sticking out at right angles, like the paddle-boxes of a steamer, the smoke of a cigar rolling away from his mouth, like the clouds from the steamer's tall black funnel. On the following morning we departed from Sanona, taking the road to Casa Vieja, and sending our game into Gibraltar. Don Luis would on no account receive any remuneration for the use of his house, &c.; and a very moderate sum satisfied the beaters he had engaged for us. The distance to Casa Vieja is about twelve miles, the country wild and beautiful; but the view, after gaining a high pass, about three miles from Sanona, is confined to the valley along which the road thenceforth winds, until it reaches the river Celemin. This stream is frequently rendered impassable by heavy rains. Emerging now from the woods and mountains, the road soon reaches the Barbate, which river, though running in a broad and level valley, is of a like treacherous character as the Celemin. The little chapel and hamlet, whither we were directing our steps, now became visible, being situated under the brow of a high hill on the opposite bank of the river, and distant about a mile and a half. The road across the valley is very deep in wet weather, and the Barbate is often so swollen, as to render it necessary, in proceeding from Casa Vieja to the towns to the eastward, to make a wide circuit to gain the bridges of Vejer or Alcalà de los Gazules. We "put up" at the house of the village priest, which adjoins the chapel. Indeed the portion of his habitation allotted to our use was under the same roof as the church, and communicated with it by a private door; and I have been credibly informed that, on some occasions, when the party of sportsmen has been large, beds have been made up within the consecrated walls of the chapel itself, whereon some of the visiters have stretched their wearied heretical limbs and rested their _aching_ heads. In our case there was no occasion to lead the _Padre_ into the commission of such a sin, since the small apartment given up to us was just able to contain four stretchers, in addition to a large table. The priest was another "_amigo mio de mucha aprec'ion_"[115] of Señor Damien. Their friendship was based upon the most solid of all foundations--mutual interest; for, it being an understood thing that the accommodation, and whatever else we might require, was to be paid for at a fixed rate, both parties were interested in prolonging our stay: the _Padre_, to gain wherewith to shorten the pains of purgatory, either for himself or others; Damien, simply because he liked shooting better than even baking in this world. To us also this was an agreeable arrangement, since it granted us a dispensation from all ceremony in ordering whatever we wanted, and gave us also the privilege of making the Padre's house our home as long as we pleased. Accordingly, finding the sport good, we passed several days here very pleasantly. The snipe and duck shooting in the marshes bordering the Barbate is excellent; francolins, bustards, plover, and partridges, are to be met with on the table-lands to the westward of the village; and the woods towards Alcalà and Vejer abound, at times, in woodcocks. An adventure befel me during our short stay at Casa Vieja, which I relate, as affording a ludicrous exemplification of the power of flattery--an openness to which, that is to say, vanity, is certes the great foible of the Spanish character. I had devoted one afternoon to a solitary ride to Vejer, (which town is about eleven miles from Casa Vieja,) and had proceeded some little distance on my way homewards, when, observing a very curious bird on a marshy spot by the road-side, I dismounted--knowing my pony would not stand fire--to take a shot at it. The gun missed fire, as I expected it would; for, in consequence of its owner not having been able to discharge it during the whole morning, I had lent him mine to visit the snipe-marsh, and taken his to bear me company on my ride. The explosion of the detonating cap was enough, however, to frighten my pony; he started--jerked the bridle off my arm--and, finding himself free, trotted away towards Casa Vieja. I ran after him for some distance, fondly hoping that the tempting green herbage on the road-side would induce him to stop and taste, but my accelerated speed had only the effect of quickening his; from a trot he got into a canter, from a canter into a gallop; and, panting and perspiring, I was soon obliged to abandon the chase, and trust that the animal's natural sagacity would take him back to his stable. I had long lost sight of the runaway--for a thick wood soon screened him from my view,--and had arrived within four miles of Casa Vieja, when I met a party of very suspicious-looking characters, who, under the pretence of being itinerant _wine-merchants_, were carrying contraband goods about the country. They were all very noisy; all, seemingly, very tipsy; and most of them armed with guns and knives. The van was led by a fat Silenus-looking personage, clothed in a shining goatskin, and seated on a stout ass, between two well-filled skins of wine; who saluted me with a very gracious wave of the hand, evidently to save himself the trouble of speaking; but his followers greeted me with the usual "_Vaya usted con Dios_;" to which one wag added, in an undertone, "_y sin caballo_,"[116]--a piece of wit that put them all on the grin. Regardless of their joke, I was about to make enquiries concerning my pony, which it was evident they knew something about, when I discovered a stout fellow, bringing up the rear of the party, astride of the delinquent. Considering the disparity of force, and aware of the unserviceable condition of my weapon, I thought it best to be remarkably civil, so informing the gentleman riding my beast that I was its owner, and extremely obliged to him for arresting the fugitive's course, I requested he would only give himself the further trouble of dismounting, and putting me in possession of my property. This, however, he positively refused to do. "How did he know I was the owner? It might be so, and very possibly was, but I must go with him to Vejer, and make oath to the fact before _la Justicia_." This, I said, was out of the question: it was evident that the horse was mine, since I had claimed him the moment I had seen him; and as, by his own admission, he had found the animal, he must have done so out of my sight, since we were now in a thick wood. If, I added, he chose to return with me to Casa Vieja, the _Padre_, at whose house I was staying, would convince him of the truth of my statement, and I would remunerate him for his trouble. But I argued in vain! "If," he replied, "I felt disposed to give him an _onza_,[117] he would save _me_ further trouble, but otherwise justice must take its course." I remarked that the _haca_ was not worth much more than a doubloon. "No!" exclaimed one of the party, jumping off his mule, thrusting his hand into his belt, and producing _two_, "I'll give you these without further bargaining." This occasioned a laugh at my expense. I turned it off, however, by telling my friend, that if he would bring his money to Gibraltar we might possibly deal; but, as I had occasion for my pony to carry me back there, I could not at that moment conveniently part with him. There seemed but slight chance, however, of my recovering my pony without trudging back to Vejer; and, probably, they would have ridden off, and laughed at me, after proceeding half way; or by paying a handsome ransom, which I was, in fact, unable to do, having only the value of a few shillings about me. The dispute was getting warm, and my patience exhausted; for vain were my representations that the _haca could_ belong to no one else--that the saddle, bridle, and even the very _tail_ of the animal, were all English. The Don kept his seat, and coolly asked, whether I thought they could not make as good saddles, and cut as short tails, in Spain? The party had halted during this altercation, and old Silenus, who, by his dress and position, seemed to be the head of the _firm_, had taken no part in the dispute. He appeared, indeed, to be so drowsy, as to be quite unconscious of what was passing. I determined, however, to make an appeal to him, and summoning the best Spanish I could muster to my aid, called upon him as a Spanish _hidalgo_, a man of honour, and a person of sense, as his appearance bespoke, to see justice done me. He had heard, I continued, in fact he had _seen_, how the case stood; and was it to be believed that a foreigner travelling in Spain--perhaps the most enlightened country in the world--and trusting to the well-known national probity, should be thus shamefully plundered? An Englishman, above all others, who, having fought in the same ranks against a common enemy, looked upon every individual of the brave Spanish nation as a brother! Could a people so noted for honour, chivalry, gratitude, and every known virtue, be guilty of so bare-faced an imposition? Oh, "flattery! delicious essence, how refreshing art thou to nature! how strongly are all its powers and all its weaknesses on thy side!" "_Baj' usted!_" grunted forth Silenus to the man mounted on my pony, accompanying the words with a circular motion of his right arm towards the earth. "_Baj' usted luego!_"[118] repeated the irate leader in a louder tone, seeing that there was a disposition to resist his commands. "Mount your horse, caballero," he continued, turning to me, "you have not over-estimated the Spanish character." I did not require a second bidding, but, vaulting into the vacated saddle, pushed my pony at once into a canter, replying to the man's application for something for his trouble, by observing, that I did not reward people for merely obeying the orders of their superiors; and, kissing my hand to the fat old Satyr, rode off, amidst the laughter occasioned by the discomfiture of the dismounted knight. On the morning fixed for our departure from Casa Vieja, Damien came to us at a very early hour--a smile breaking through an assumed cloudy expression of countenance--to report that the Barbate was so swollen by the rain which had fallen without cessation during the night, as to be no longer fordable: "_Nous pouvons demeurer encore trois ou quatre jours_," he added, "_car il nous reste de quoi manger--du thé, du sucre, du jambon, un bon morceau de bouilli de rosbif, et autres bagatelles; et comme il fait beau temps à présent, puede ser que havra una entrada de gallinetas esta noche--no es verdad Señor Padre?_"[119] turning to the priest, who had followed him into the room. We were prepared for this contingency, however, and, stating that we _must_ go, signified our intention of returning home by way of Alcalà de los Gazules. Damien was horror-struck. "_Corpo di Bacco! Messieurs, celle là est la plus mauvaise route du pays! è infestata di cattivissima gente, ad ogni passo. No es verdad, Don Diego, que esa trocha de Alcalà allà 'se llama el camino del infierno!_" "_Si, si_," replied the priestly lodging-house keeper with a nod, "_tan verdad como la Santa Escritura._"[120] Finding, however, that we were bent on departing, Don Diego went to make his bill out; and Damien, now truly alarmed, proposed that, at all events, we should take the shorter and more practicable route homewards, by way of Vejer. But the name of the other had taken our fancy, and orders were given accordingly, our departure being merely postponed until the afternoon; for, as it would be necessary to sleep at Alcalà, which is but nine miles from Casa Vieja, we agreed to have another brush at the snipes ere leaving the place. In the afternoon we set out. At two miles from Casa Vieja the road crosses a tributary stream to the Barbate, which reached up to our saddle-girths, and then traverses some wooded hills for about an equal distance. The rest of the way is over an extensive flat. Little is seen of Alcalà but an old square tower, and the ruined walls of its Moorish castle, in approaching it on this side. The town is built on a rocky peninsulated eminence, which, protruding from a ridge of sierra that overlooks the place to the east, stretches about a mile in a southerly direction, and, excepting along the narrow neck that connects it with this mountain-range, is every where extremely difficult of access. A road, however, winds up to the town by a steep ravine on the south-eastern side of the rugged eminence; and a good approach has also been made, though with much labour, at its northern extremity. The river Barbate washes the western side of the mound, and across it, and somewhat above the town--which is huddled together along the northern crest of the ridge--a solid stone bridge presents itself, where the roads from Casa Vieja, Medina Sidonia, and Xeres, concentrate. The ascent from the bridge, as I have mentioned, is good, but very steep. The position of the town is most formidable; its walls, however, are all levelled; and, of the castle, the square tower, or keep, alone remains. The streets are narrow, but not so steep as we expected to find them, and they are remarkably well paved. The houses are poor, though some trifling manufactories of cloths and tanneries give the place a thriving look. Its population amounts to about 9000 souls. _This_ Alcalà receives its distinctive name of "_los Gazules_" (i.e. the Castle of the Gazules), from a tribe of Moors so called; but what Roman city stood here is a mere matter of conjecture. The inn afforded but indifferent accommodation; but our host and hostess were obliging people, and very good-naturedly made over to us the olla prepared for their own supper. It was a fine specimen of the culinary art; the savoury odour alone, that exuded from the bubbling stew, drew a smile from Damien's unusually lugubrious countenance; and, on afterwards witnessing the justice we did to its merits, he kindly wished--with a doubt-implying compression of the lips--that we might have as good an appetite to enjoy as good a supper on the following night. We set out at daybreak, accompanied by a guide, though, I think, we could have dispensed with his services. The road enters the Serranía, immediately on leaving Alcalà, taking an easterly direction, and ascends for five miles by a rock-bound valley, partially under cultivation, and watered by several streams, along which mills are thickly scattered. On leaving them behind, the country becomes very wild and desolate; the mountains ahead appear quite impracticable; and, long ere we reached their base, the Piedmontese march had several times resounded through the rocky gorges that encompassed us. At length we began to scramble up towards a conical pinnacle, called _El Peñon de Sancho_,[121] which presents a perpendicular face, to the south-west, of some hundreds of feet, and whose white cap, standing out from the dark sierra behind, is a landmark all along the coast from Cipiona to Cape Trafalgar. We soon attained a great elevation, crossing a pass between the _Peñon de Sancho_ and the main sierra on our left. The view, looking back towards Cadiz, is magnificent, and the scenery for the next four miles continues to be of the most splendid kind, the road being conducted along the side of the great sierra _Monteron_, and by the pass of _La Brocha_ to the sierra _Cantarera_. The road is by no means so bad as, from the name it bears, we were prepared to expect; in fact, there are many others in the Serranía of a far more infernal character. After riding about four hours--a distance of twelve miles--we reached a verdant little vale, enclosed on all sides by rude mountains, wherein the Celemin takes its rise, and whence it wends its way through a deep and thickly wooded ravine to the south. This gullet is called the _Garganta de los Estudientes_, from the circumstance, as our guide informed us, of some scholars having ventured down it who never afterwards were heard of--to which story Damien listened with great dismay. We halted at this delightful spot for half an hour, as well to breathe our horses as to examine the contents of Damien's _alforjas_, who took his meal, pistol in hand, for fear of a surprise. Continuing our journey, we had to traverse some more very difficult country, the views from which were now towards Ximena, Casares, Gibraltar, and the Mediterranean; including an occasional peep of Castellar, as we advanced to the eastward. At four miles and a half from our resting-place, the road branches into two, the left proceeding to Ximena (five miles and a half), the other leading toward Estepona, and the towns bordering the Mediterranean. Taking the latter path, in about two hours we reached the river Sogarganta, along the right bank of which is conducted the main road from Ximena to Gibraltar. Damien's countenance brightened on his once more finding himself in "_un pays reconnu_," and, turning joyfully into the well-known track, he struck up one of his most _scherzosa_ arias; the heretofore dreaded _Boca de Leones_ and Almoraima forest (which we had yet to pass), being robbed of their terrors by the superior dangers we had safely surmounted; and, in the words of the favourite poet of his country, _"Dopo sorte si funesta_ _Sarà placida quest alma_ _E godrà--tornata in calma--_ _I perigli rammentar."_ CHAPTER XI. DEPARTURE FOR MADRID--CORDON DRAWN ROUND THE CHOLERA--RONDA--ROAD TO CORDOBA--TEBA--ERRONEOUS POSITION OF THE PLACE ON THE SPANISH MAPS--ITS LOCALITY AGREES WITH THAT OF ATEGUA, AS DESCRIBED BY HIRTIUS, AND THE COURSE OF THE RIVER GUADALJORCE WITH THAT OF THE SALSUS--ROAD TO CAMPILLOS--THE ENGLISH-LOVING INNKEEPER AND HIS WIFE--AN ALCALDE'S DINNER SPOILT--FUENTE DE PIEDRA--ASTAPA--PUENTE DON GONZALO--RAMBLA--CORDOBA--MEETING WITH AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE. The next and last excursion of which I purpose extracting some account from my notebook, was commenced with the intention of proceeding from Gibraltar to Madrid, late in the autumn of the year 1833; at which time, the cholera having broken out in various parts of the kingdom of Seville, it was necessary to "shape a course" that should not subject my companion and self to the purifying process of a lazaret; a rigid quarantine system having been adopted by the other kingdoms bordering the infected territory. We hired three horses for the journey; that is to say, for any portion of it we might choose to perform on horseback: two for ourselves, and one to carry our portmanteaus, as well as the _mozo_ charged with their care and our guidance. We found, on enquiry, that by avoiding two or three towns lying upon the road, we could reach Cordoba without deviating much from the direct route to that city, whence we purposed continuing our journey to the capital by the diligence. We proceeded accordingly to Ronda, which place being in the kingdom of Granada, was open to us; and thither I will at once transport my readers, the road to it having already been fully described. After sojourning a couple of days at the little capital of the Serranía, comforting my numerous old and kind friends with the opinion (which the event, I was happy to find, confirmed), that the new enemy against which their country had to contend--the dreaded cholera--would not cross the mountain barrier that defended their city; we proceeded on our journey, taking the road to Puente Don Gonzalo, on the Genil, thereby avoiding Osuna, which lay upon the direct road to Cordoba, but in the infected district. In an hour from the time of our leaving Ronda, we crossed the rocky gulley which has been noticed as traversing the fertile basin in which the city stands, laterally, bearing the little river Arriate to irrigate its western half, and in the course of another hour reached the northern extremity of this fruitful district. The hills here offer an easy egress from the rock-bound basin; but, though nature has left this one level passage through the mountains, art has taken no advantage of it to improve the state of the road, for a viler _trocha_ is not to be met with, even in the rudest part of the Serranía. The view of the rich plain and dark battlements of Ronda is remarkably fine. After winding amongst some round-topped hills, the road at length reaches a narrow rocky pass, which closes the view of the vale of Ronda, and a long deep valley opens to the north, the mouth of which appears closed by a barren mountain, crowned by the old castle of _Teba_. The path now undergoes a slight improvement, and, after passing some singular table-rocks, and leaving the little village of _La Cueva del Becerro_ on the left, reaches the _venta de Virlan_. We, however, had inadvertently taken a track that, inclining slightly to the right, led us into the bottom of the valley, and in about four miles (from the pass) brought us to the miserable little village of _Serrato_. The proper road, from which we had strayed, keeps along the side of the hills, about half a mile off, on the left; and upon it, and three miles from the first venta, is another, called _del Ciego_. Yet a little further on, but situated on an elevated ridge overlooking the valley, is the little town of _Cañete la Real_. From Serrato our road led us to the old castle of Ortoyecar, ere rejoining the direct route; which it eventually does, about a mile before reaching the foot of the mountain of Teba. This singular feature is connected by a very low pass with the chain of sierra on the left, and, stretching from west to east about three-quarters of a mile, terminates precipitously along the river _Guadaljorce_. The road, crossing over the pass, and leaving on the right a steep paved road, that zig-zags up the mountain, winds round to the west, keeping under the precipitous sides of the ridge, and avoiding the town of Teba, which, perched on the very summit, but having a northern aspect, can only be seen when arrived at the north side of the rude mound; and there another winding road offers the means of access to the place. The base of the mountain is, on this side, bathed by a little rivulet that flows eastward to the Guadaljorce, called the _Sua de Teba_. It is erroneously marked on the Spanish maps as running on the south side of the ridge, but the only stream which is there to be met with, is a little rivulet that takes its rise near Becerro and waters the valley by which we had descended; and it does not approach within a mile of Teba, but sweeps round to the eastward a little beyond the old castle of Ortoyecar, and discharges itself into the river Ardales. The deep-sunk banks and muddy bottom of the _Suda de Teba_, render it impassable excepting at the bridge. This rickety structure is apparently the same which existed in the time of Rocca, who, in his "Memoirs of the War in Spain," gives a very spirited account of the military operations of the French and _serranos_ in this neighbourhood. The locality of Teba is most faithfully described by that author; indeed I know no one who has given so graphic an account of this part of Spain generally. The ascent to the town on this (the northern) side, is yet more difficult than that in the opposite direction; but the place will amply repay the labour of a visit, for the view from it is extremely fine, and the extensive ruins of its ancient defences, evidently of Roman workmanship, are well worthy of observation. The position of Teba, with reference to other places in the neighbourhood, and to the circumjacent country, is so inaccurately given in all maps which I have seen, that the antiquaries seem quite to have overlooked it as the probable site of _Ategua_, so celebrated for its obstinate defence against Julius Cæsar. Morales--without the slightest grounds, as far as the description of the country accords with the assumption--imagined _Ategua_ to have stood where he maintains some ruins, "called by the country-people _Teba la Vieja_," are to be seen between Castrò el Rio and Codoba; but, as I pointed out in the case of Ronda, and Ronda _la Vieja_, it is absurd to suppose that an _old Teba_ could ever have existed, since Teba itself is a Roman town, and its present name a mere corruption of that which it bore in times past. Other Spanish authors place _Ategua_ at Castro el Rio, some at Baena, some elsewhere; but almost all appear anxious to fix its site near the river Guadajoz, which they have determined, in their own minds, must be the _Salsus_ mentioned by Hirtius. La Martinière, with his usual _inaccuracy_, says, that the Guadajoz falls into the _Salado_: he should rather have said, that it is _formed_ from the confluence of _various salados_; for, as I have elsewhere observed, salado is a general term for all water-courses, and not the name of a river.[122] It seems, however, probable, that the Romans gave the name _Salsus_ to some river impregnated with salt, which many streams in this part of Spain are; and since there is an extensive salt-lake still existing near Alcaudete, on the very margin of the Guadajoz, that river has hastily been concluded to be that of the Roman historian. But, it appears strange, if the Guadajoz be the Salsus of Hirtius, that Pliny, when describing the course of the Boetis, and the principal streams which fell into it, should have omitted to mention that river, as being one of its affluents; for the Salsus, from the recentness of the war between Cæsar and the sons of Pompey, must have been much spoken of in Pliny's time. But what, to me, proves most satisfactorily that the _Guadajoz_ is _not_ the Salsus, is, that it so ill agrees with the minute description given of the river by Hirtius himself;--for, in speaking of the Salsus he says,[123] "It runs through the plains, and _divides_ them from the mountains, which all lie upon the side of Ategua, at about two miles' distance from the river;" and again, "But what proved principally favourable to Pompey's design of drawing out the war, was the nature of the country, (i. e. about Ategua) full of mountains, and extremely well adapted to encampments;"[124] and, from what again follows, it is evident that Ategua stood upon the summit of a mountain. Now the Guadajoz nowhere runs so as to _divide_ the plains from the mountains. It _issues from_ the mountains of Alcalà Real, many miles before reaching Castrò el Rio, and between that last-named town and Cordoba, there is no ground that can be called mountainous. The country bordering the Guadajoz, in the lower part of its course, differs as decidedly with the statement that the neighbourhood of Ategua was "full of mountains," if we suppose the town to have stood anywhere _below_ Castrò el Rio. It is again improbable that Ategua could have stood on the site of the supposed _Teba la Vieja_, or any place in that neighbourhood, since it is mentioned[125] as being a great provision dépôt of the Pompeians; which would scarcely have been the case had it been within twenty miles of the city of Cordoba. And again, it is not likely that Cæsar would have commenced the campaign by laying siege to a place within such a short distance of Cordoba, since the invested town might so readily have received succour from that city, and his adversary would, by such a step, have had the advantage of combining all his forces to attack him during the progress of the siege. Again, another objection presents itself, namely, that Ategua is represented as a particularly strong place,[126] which, from the nature of the ground in that part of the country--that is, between Castrò el Rio and Cordoba--no town could well have been; situation, rather than art, constituting the strength of towns in those days. We will now return to Teba, the locality of which agrees infinitely better with the account of Ategua given by Hirtius, whilst the River _Guadaljorce_, which flows in its vicinity, answers perfectly his description of the Salsus; for, along its right bank a plain extends all the way to the Genil; on its left, "at two miles' distance," rises a wall of Sierra; and the whole country, beyond, is "full of mountains, all lying on the side of" Teba. That is to say, the mountain range continues in the same direction, and possesses the same marked character, although the Guadaljorce breaks through it ere reaching so far west as Teba; for, by a vagary of nature, this stream quits the wide plain of the Genil to throw itself into a rocky gorge, and after describing a very tortuous course, gains, at length, the vale of Malaga. Now this very circumstance strikes me, on attentive consideration, as tending rather to strengthen than otherwise the supposition that Teba is Ategua; for Cæsar's army is not stated to have _crossed_ the Salsus on its march from Cordoba to Ategua; from which we must conclude that Ategua was on the _right_ bank of the river; whilst other circumstances prove that the town was some distance from the river, and encompassed by mountains. Pompey, however, following Cæsar from Cordoba, and proceeding to the relief of Ategua, _crosses the Salsus_, and fixes his camp "on these mountains (i. e. the mountains 'which all lie on the side of Ategua') between Ategua and Ucubis, but within sight of both places," being, as is distinctly said afterwards, separated from his adversary by the Salsus. Thus, therefore, though his camp was on the same range of mountains as Ategua, yet he was separated from that town by a river: a peculiarity, in the formation of the ground, which suits the locality of Teba, but would be difficult to make agree with any other place. The only very apparent objection to this hypothesis is, that Cæsar's cavalry is mentioned as having, on one occasion, pursued the foraging parties of his adversary "almost to the very walls of Codoba." But this was when Pompey (after his first failure to relieve Ategua) had drawn off his army towards Cordoba. It does not follow, therefore, that Cæsar's troops pursued his adversary's parties from Ategua, though he was still besieging that place, but it may rather be supposed that his cavalry was sent after the enemy to harass them on their march, and watch their future movements. One might, indeed, on equally good grounds, maintain that Ategua was _within a day's march of Seville_; since, on Pompey's finally abandoning the field, Hirtius says,[127] "the same day he decamped, (from Ucubis, which was within sight of Ategua) and posted himself in an olive wood over against Hispalis." With respect to this knotty point of distance it is further to be observed, that on Cæsar's breaking up his camp from before Cordoba, his march is spoken of as being _towards_ Ategua, implying that the two places did not lie within a day's march of each other; and the supposition that they were more than a few leagues apart is strengthened by the place, and order in which Ategua is mentioned by the methodical Pliny; viz., amongst the cities lying between the Boetis and the Mediterranean Sea, and next in succession to _Singili_,[128] which, doubtless, was on the southern bank of the Genil, towards Antequera. The Guadaljorce has as good claims to the name of _Salsus_, as any other river in the country, since the mountains about Antequera, amongst which it takes its rise, were in former days noted for the quantity of salt they produced; and though the river Guadaljorce now carries its name to the sea, yet, in the time of the Romans, such was not the case; for, in those days, by whatever name that river may have been distinguished, it was dropt on forming its junction with the Sigila, (now the Rio Grande) in the _vega_ of Malaga, although, of the two, the latter is the inferior stream. The fort of Ucubis, stated by Hirtius to have been destroyed by Cæsar, we may suppose stood on the side of the mountains overlooking the Salsus or Guadaljorce, towards Antequera; and it does not seem improbable that that city is the _Soricaria_ mentioned by the same historian; for _Anticaria_, though noticed in the Itinerary of Antoninus, is not amongst the cities of Boetica enumerated by Pliny. Teba was taken from the Moors by Alphonso XI., A.D. 1340. The inhabitants are a savage-looking tribe, and boast of having kept the French at bay during the whole period of the "war of independence."[129] There is a tolerable venta at the foot of the hill, near the bridge, at which we baited our horses. The distance from Ronda to Teba is 21 miles; from hence to Campillos is about six; the country is undulated, and road good, crossing several brooks, some flowing eastward to the Guadaljorce, others in the opposite direction to the Genil. Campillos is situated at the commencement of a vast track of perfectly level country, that extends all the way to the river Genil. By some strange mistake it is laid down in the Spanish maps due east of Teba, whereas it is nearly north. It is four leagues (or about seventeen miles) from Antequera, and five leagues from Osuna. It is a neat town, clean, and well-paved, and contains 1000 _vecinos escasos_;[130] which may be reckoned at 5000 souls, six being the number usually calculated per _vecino_. Campillos lies just within the border of the kingdom of Seville, and was, therefore, on forbidden ground; since, had we entered it, our clean bills of health would have been thereby tainted. We were consequently obliged to skirt round the town at a tether of several hundred yards. I regretted this much, for the place contains an excellent _posada_, bearing the--to Protestant ears--somewhat profane sign of "_Jesus Nazarino_," and its keepers were old cronies of mine, our friendship having commenced some years before under rather peculiar circumstances, viz., in travelling from Antequera to Ronda, my horse met with an accident which obliged me to halt for the night at Campillos. Leaving to my servant the task of ordering dinner at the inn, I proceeded on foot to examine the town, and gain, if possible, some elevated spot in its vicinity whence I could obtain a good view of the country, being desirous to correct the mistake before alluded to, in the relative positions of Teba and Campillos on the maps. Having found a point suited to this purpose, from whence I could see both Teba and the _Peñon de los Enamorados_, (a remarkable conical mountain near Antequera,) I drew forth a pocket surveying compass, and took the bearings of those two points, as well as of several other conspicuous objects in the neighbourhood. These ill-understood proceedings caused the utmost astonishment to a group of idlers, who, at a respectful distance, but with significant nods and mysterious whisperings, were narrowly watching my operations. These concluded, and the result of my observations committed to my pocket-book, I took a slight outline sketch of the bold range of mountains that stretches towards Granada, and returned to the inn. On my first arrival there, I had merely addressed the usual compliment of the country to the innkeeper and his wife, and now, repeating my salutation to the lady--who only was present--I seated myself at the fire-place of the common apartment, and began writing in my pocket-book, replying very laconically to her various attempts at conversation; and at length obtaining no immediate answer to another endeavour to _draw me out_, she said, addressing herself, "_no entiende_,"[131] and offered no further interruptions to my scribbling. I confess to the practice of a little deceit in the matter, as my answers certainly must have led her to believe that I was a very _tyro_ at the Spanish vocabulary--a fancy in which I used often to indulge the natives when I wished to shirk conversation. Soon afterwards the _Posadero_ came in, and a whispered communication took place between him and his spouse, which gradually acquiring _tone_, I at length was able to catch distinctly, and heard the following conversation. "You are quite certain he does not understand Spanish?" said mine host. "Not a syllable," replied his helpmate. "He is about no good here, wife, that I can tell you." "There does not appear to be much mischief in him." "We must not trust to looks; I was at the chapel of the Rosario just now, and he walked up there, took an instrument from his pocket, marked down all the principal points of the country, and then drew them in that little book he is now writing in ... are you quite sure he does not understand Spanish?--I observed him smile just now." "_No tienes cuidado_,"[132] replied the wife; "I have tried him on all points." "Depend upon it he is _mapeando el pais_,"[133] resumed the husband. "I think you ought forthwith to give notice of his doings to the _Justicia_," answered the lady. "Ay, and lose a good customer by having him taken to prison!" rejoined the patriotic innkeeper; "time enough to do that in the morning after he has paid his bill; but as to the propriety of giving information wife, I agree with you perfectly." "He must be one of the rascally _gavachos_ from Cadiz," (a French garrison at this time occupied that fortress,) "but what right has he to take his notes of our _pueblo_?[134] I thought of questioning the servant, who does speak a few words of Spanish, before he took the horses to the smithy, but Don Guillelmo came in and put it out of my head. Suppose I make another attempt to find out from himself what brings him here?" "Do so," said her lord and master; and, with this permission, she advanced towards me with a very gracious smile, and _articulating_ every syllable most distinctly, in the hope of making her interrogation perfectly intelligible, "begged to know if my worship was a Frenchman." "_Yo_," said I, pointing to myself, as if I did not clearly understand her; "_nix_." "_Ingles?_" demanded she, returning to the charge. "_Si_," replied I, with a nod affirmative. "_Valga mi Dios!_" exclaimed she, turning to her husband; "he is English! how delighted I am! what a time it is since I saw an Englishman! how can we make him comfortable?" "_Poco a poco_,"[135] observed the inn-keeper--"English or French he has no business to be _mapeando_ our country, and the Alcalde ought to know of it." "_Disparate!_"[136] exclaimed the wife; "what does his _mapeando_ signify if he is an Englishman? are they not our best friends?[137] Is it not the same as if a Spaniard were doing it, only that it will be better done?" "Very true," admitted mine host; "they have, indeed, been our friends, and will soon again, I trust, give us a proof of their friendship, by assisting to drive these French scoundrels across the Pyrenees, and allowing us to settle our own differences." Pocketing my memorandum book, I now rose from my seat and addressing the landlady, "_con gentil donayre y talante_,"[138] as Don Quijote says, asked, in the best Castillian I could put together, when it was probable I should have dinner, as from having been the greater part of the morning on horseback, I was not only very hungry, but should be glad to retire early to my bed. Never were two people more astonished than mine host and his spouse at this address. Had I detected them in the act of pilfering my saddlebags, they could not have looked more guilty. They offered a thousand apologies, but seemed to think the greatest affront they had put upon me was that of mistaking me for a Frenchman. "I ought at once to have known you were no braggart _gavacho_," said the landlord, "by your not making a noise on entering the house--calling for every thing and abusing every body--How do you think one of these gentry, who came into Spain as _friends_, to tranquillize the country, behaved to our _Alcalde_? The Frenchman wanted a billet, and finding the office shut, went to the _Alcalde's_ house for it. The _Alcalde_ was at dinner with a couple of friends; he begged the officer to be seated, saying he would send for the _Escribano_ and have a billet made out for him--'And am I to be kept waiting for your clerk?' said the Frenchman; 'a pretty joke, indeed.' 'He will be here in an instant,' said the _Alcalde_; 'pray have a little patience, and be seated.' 'Patience, indeed!' exclaimed the other; 'make the billet out directly yourself, or I'll pull the house about your ears.' '_Juicio!_ señor,' replied the Mayor; 'do you not see that I am at dinner?' 'What are you at _now_?' said the Frenchman; and, laying hold of one corner of the tablecloth, he drew it, plates, dishes, glasses, and every thing, off the table. This is the way our French _friends_ behave to us!" I now satisfied the worthy couple that their fears of mischief arising from my "_mapeando el pais_," were quite groundless; and mine host showed great intelligence in comprehending what I wished to correct in the Spanish map; the error in which he saw at once, when I pointed to the setting sun; his wife standing by and exclaiming "_que gente tan fina los Ingleses_!"[139] No advantage was taken of the knowledge of _my_ country in making out _the bill_, and I departed next morning with their prayers that I might travel in company with all the saints in the calendar. The direct road from Campillos to Cordoba is by way of La Rodd; but, in the present instance, it was necessary to avoid that town, and proceed to _La Fuente de Piedra_, which is situated a few miles to the eastward, and without the sanitory circle drawn round the cholera. The distance from Campillos to this place is two long leagues, which may be reckoned nine miles. _La Fuente de Piedra_ is a small village, of about sixty houses, surrounded with olive-grounds, and abounding in crystal springs. The medicinal virtues of one of these sources (which rises in the middle of the place) led to the building of the village; and the painful disease for which in especial this fountain is considered a sovereign cure, has given its name to the place. We arrived very late in the evening, and found the _posada_ most miserable. On leaving _La Fuente de Piedra_ we took the road to _Puente Don Gonzalo_, and at about three miles from the village crossed the great road from Granada to Seville, which is practicable for carriages the greater part, but _not all_ the way; a little beyond this the _Sierra de Estepa_ rises on the left of the route, to the height of several hundred feet above the plain. The town of Estepa is not seen, being on the western side of the hill; it is supposed to be the Astapa of the Romans, the horrible destruction of which is related by Livy. The inhabitants, on the approach of Scipio, aware of the exasperated feelings of the Romans towards them, piled all their valuables in the centre of the forum, placed their wives and children upon the top, and leaving a few of their young men to set fire to the pile in the event of their defeat, rushed out upon the Roman army. They were all killed, the pile was lighted, and a heap of ashes was the only trophy of their conquerors. The Roman historian says, the people of Astapa "delighted in robberies." I wonder if he thought his countrymen exempt from similar propensities! In three hours we reached Cazariche. The road merely skirts the village, being separated from it by an abundant stream, which, serving to irrigate numerous gardens and orchards, renders the last league of the ride very agreeable, which otherwise, from the flatness of the country to the eastward, would be uninteresting. This rivulet is called _La Salada_; but its volume is far too small to make one suppose for a moment that it is the _Salsus_. At five miles from Cazariche, keeping along the left bank of the Salada the whole distance, but not crossing it, as marked on the maps, the road reaches Miragenil. This is a small village, situated on the southern bank of the Genil, and communicating, by means of a bridge, with _Puente Don Gonzalo_. The river here forms the division between the kingdoms of Seville and Cordoba; and the two governments not having agreed as to the superior merits of wood or stone, one-half the bridge is built of the former, the other half of the latter material. Puente Don Gonzalo stands on a steep acclivity, commanding the bridge and river. It is a town of some consideration, containing several manufactories of household furniture, numerous mills, and a population of 6000 souls. Florez, on the authority of a _stone_ found _near_ Cazariche (which he calls Casaliche), whereon the word VENTIPO was inscribed, supposed _Ventisponte_,[140] to have been situated somewhere in the vicinity of Puente Don Gonzalo. But if this stone had been _carried_ to Cazariche, it may have been taken there from any other point of the compass as well as from that in which Puente Don Gonzalo is situated. Other authorities suppose this town to be on the site of Singilis; but that place, as already stated, has been pretty clearly proved to have been nearer Antequera. The "_provechasos aguas del divino Genil_,"[141] after cleansing the town of Puente Don Gonzalo, are turned to the best possible account, in irrigating gardens and turning mill-wheels; and the road to Cordoba, after proceeding for about a mile along the verdant valley that stretches to the westward, ascends the somewhat steep bank which pens in the stream to the north, and for four hours wanders over a flat uninteresting country to Rambla; passing, in the whole distance of fifteen miles, but two running streams, three farm-houses, and the miserable village of Montalban. This latter is distant about a mile and a half from Rambla. We saw but little of this town, having arrived late at night, and departed from it at an early hour on the following morning; but it is of considerable size, and situated on the north side of a steep hill. We found the inn excessively dirty and exorbitantly dear; indeed it may be laid down as a general rule with Spanish as well as Swiss inns, that the charges are high in proportion to the _badness_ of the fare and accommodation. The ground in the vicinity of Rambla is planted chiefly with vines, and but two short leagues to the eastward is situated Montilla, where, in the estimation of Spaniards, the best wine of the province is grown. It is extremely dry; and, as I have mentioned before, gives its name to the Sherry called _Amontillado_. Rambla is just midway between Puente Don Gonzalo and Cordoba, viz. sixteen miles from each. The country is hilly, and mostly under tillage, but where its cultivators reside puzzles one to guess, as there is not a house on the road in the whole distance, and but two towns visible from it, viz. Montemayor and Fernan Nuñez, both within six miles of Rambla. The first-named of these places disputes with Montilla the honour of being the Roman city of _Ulía_, the only inland town of Boetica that held out for Cæsar against the sons of Pompey, previous to his arrival in the country.[142] It appears doubtful[143] whether _Ulía_ is mentioned by Pliny, but it is noticed in the Roman Itinerary (_Gadibus Cordubam_) as eighteen miles from Cordoba, a distance that agrees better with Montilla than Montemayor; indeed the former almost declares itself in the very name it yet bears, _Montilla_; the double _l_ in Spanish having the liquid sound of _li_, making it a corruption of _Mont Ulía_. At about four miles from Cordoba the Guadajoz, or river of Castro, is crossed by fording, and between it and the Guadalquivír the ground is broken by steep hills. The road falls into the _Arrecife_ from Seville, on reaching the suburb on the left bank of the river. We took up our abode at the _Posada de la Mesangería_; a particularly comfortable house, as Spanish inns go, that had been opened for the accommodation of the diligence travellers since my former visit to the city. The _patio_, ornamented with a bubbling fountain of icy-cold water, and shaded with a profusion of all sorts of rare creepers and flowering shrubs, afforded a cool retreat at all hours of the day; which, though we were in the month of October, was very acceptable. Whilst seated at breakfast, under the colonnade that encompasses the court, the morning after our arrival, the master of the inn waited upon us to know if we required a _valet de place_ during our sojourn at Cordoba, as a very intelligent old man, who spoke French like a native, and was in the habit of attending upon _caballeros forasteros_[144] in the above-named capacity, was then in the house, and begged to place his services at our disposition. I replied, that having before visited his city, I considered myself sufficiently acquainted with its _sights_ to be able to dispense with this, otherwise useful, personage's attendance; but our host seemed so desirous that we should employ the old man, "We might have little errands to send him upon--some purchases to make; in fact, we should find the Tio Blas so useful in any capacity, and it would be such an act of charity to employ him,"--that we finally acceded to his proposal, and the _Tio_ was accordingly ushered in. He was a tall, and, though emaciated, still erect old man, whose tottering gait, and white and scanty hairs, would have led to the belief that his years had already exceeded the number usually allotted to the life of man, but that his deep-sunk eyes were shaded by dark and beatling brows, and yet sparkled occasionally with the fire of youth; proving that hardships and misfortunes had brought him somewhat prematurely to the brink of the grave. It struck me at the first glance that I had seen him before, but when, and under what circumstances, I could not recall to my recollection. After some conversation, as to what had been his former occupation, &c., he remarked, addressing himself to me, "I think, _Caballero_, that this is not the first time we have met--many years have elapsed since--many (to me) most eventful years, and they have wrought great changes in my appearance. And, indeed, some little difference is perceptible also in yours, for you were a mere boy then; but, still, time has not laid so heavy a hand on you as on the worn-out person of him who stands before you, and in whom you will, doubtless, have difficulty in recognizing the reckless _Blas Maldonado_!" Time had, indeed, effected great changes in him, morally as well as physically; for not only had the powerful, well-built man, dwindled into a tottering, emaciated driveller, but the daring, impious bandit, had become a weak and superstitious dotard. My curiosity strongly piqued to learn how changes so wonderful had been brought about, we immediately engaged the _Tio_ to attend upon us; and, during the few days circumstances compelled us to remain at Cordoba, I elicited from him the following account of the events which had chequered his extraordinary career since we had before met. CHAPTER XII. HISTORY OF BLAS EL GUERRILLERO--_continued._ "_La rueda de la fortuna anda mas lista que una rueda de molino, y que los que ayer estaban en pinganitos, hoy estan por el suelo._"[145]-- DON QUIJOTE. It was at Castrò el Rio that we last met Don Carlos; it is now eleven years since,--rather more, but still I have a perfect recollection of it. My memory, indeed, is the only thing that has served me well through life. Friends have abandoned--riches corrupted--success has hardened--ambition disappointed me; and now, as you see, my very limbs are failing me, but memory--excepting for one short period, when my brain was affected--has never abandoned me. I cannot flee from it--it pursues me incessantly: it is as impossible to get rid of, as of one's shadow in the sun's rays, and seems indeed, like it, to become more perfect, as I too proceed downward in my rapidly revolving course. Alas! it often brings to mind the words of my good father, addressed, whilst I was yet a child, to my too-indulgent mother:--"If we consult the happiness of our son, we must not bring him up above the condition to which it has pleased Providence to call him." It was my unhappy lot, however, to become an _educated pauper_. I grew up discontented, and became a profligate: I coveted riches, to feed my unnatural cravings, and became criminal: I scoffed at religion, and came to ridicule the idea of a future state of rewards and punishments. And as I thus brought myself to believe that I was not an accountable creature, nothing thenceforth restrained me from committing any act which gratified my passions. What is man, I argued, that I should not despoil him, if he possess that which I covet? What should deter me from taking his life, if he stand between me and that which I desire? _Crime_ is a mere word,--a term for any act which certain _men_, for their mutual advantage, have agreed shall meet with punishment. But what right have those men to say, this is just, and that is unlawful? Such were my feelings at the time I met and related to you the adventures of my early life; adventures of which I was then not a little proud, though, nevertheless, I slurred over some little matters that I thought would not raise me in your opinion. Well was it for me that I was not cut off in the midst of my iniquitous career, but have, on the contrary, been allowed time, by penance and prayer, to make what atonement is in my power for my former sinful life. My journey to Castrò had been undertaken at the desire of the political chief of ----, for the purpose of watching the proceedings of the Royal Regiment of Carbineers, which, as you may remember, was at that time quartered there. I soon, under pretence of being a stanch royalist, wormed myself into the confidence of the officers, and learnt that they were in communication with the King's Guards at Madrid, and were plotting a counter-revolution, to reestablish Ferdinand on a despotic throne. The advice I gave them, and the information I furnished the government, led to the unconnected and premature developement of their treason, and to the vigorous steps which were taken by the executive to meet and put it down. These, however, are matters of history, on which it is unnecessary to dwell; suffice it, therefore, to say, that my good services on the occasion were rewarded by promotion to a more lucrative _corregimiento_. I did not long enjoy this new post, for, on the French columns crossing the Pyrenees the following spring, I threw up my civil employment, and, collecting a small band of _guerrillas_, flew to the defence of my country; joining the traitor Ballasteros, then entrusted with the command of the army of the south. The deplorable events which followed deprived me of a home; but, leaving my wife and infant son (the only child, of three, whom it had pleased Providence to spare us) at the secluded little town of Cañete la Real, perched high up in the Sierra de Terril, I wandered about the country with a few adherents, seeking opportunities of harassing the French during their operations before Cadiz. They afforded us no opportunities, however, of attacking their convoys with any chance of success, and my followers could not be brought to engage in any daring enterprise without the prospect of booty. The feeling of patriotism appeared, indeed, to be extinct in the breasts of Spaniards, and after a few weeks my band, which was nowhere well received, having been induced to commit excesses in some of the villages situated in the open country about Arcos, several parties of royalist volunteers were formed to proceed in quest of us; and so disheartened were my followers, that I shortly found my band reduced to a dozen desperadoes, who, like myself, had no hopes of obtaining pardon. We betook ourselves, therefore, to the innermost recesses of the Ronda mountains, moving constantly from place to place, as well to harass our pursuers, as to avoid being surrounded by them; and such is the intricacy of the country, and so numerous are the rocky fastnesses of the smugglers (from whom we were always sure of a good reception), that we readily baffled all pursuit, and exhausted the patience of our enemies; and, at length, seizing a favourable opportunity of inflicting a severe loss upon one of their parties, the patriotic zeal of these gentry so completely evaporated, that we were left in the undisturbed command of the Serranía. All hope of being serviceable to our country at an end, we were compelled, as a last resource, to adopt the only calling to which we were suited, viz., that of highway robbers; and for several months every road between Gibraltar and Malaga, and the inland towns, was, in turn, subject to our predaceous visits. On one occasion a dignitary of the church, whose name and particular station it would not be prudent of me to mention, fell into our hands. His attendants, who were of a militant order, defended their master with great obstinacy. They were eventually overpowered, however, but several of my men having been badly wounded in the scuffle, were so exasperated, that they determined to shoot all those who had fallen into our hands, as well as the ---- himself; who, though he had not taken an active part in the combat, had made no attempt to restrain his pugnacious adherents. As soon as our prisoners had been secured, therefore, the portly ecclesiastic was directed to descend from his sleek mule, deliver up his money, and prepare for death. He inveighed in eloquent terms at our barbarity, pointed out to us the iniquity of our proceedings, the probability of a speedy punishment overtaking us in this life, and the certainty of having to endure everlasting torments in that which is to come. But it was to no purpose; indeed, it only tempted my miscreants to prolong his misery; and, having tied him to a tree, they insisted upon his blessing them all round, ere they proceeded to shoot him. "My children," said the worthy ----, "my blessing, from the tone in which you ask it, would serve you little. My life is in the hands of my Maker, not in your's; and if it be His pleasure to make you the instruments of his divine will, so be it. I am prepared; death has no terrors for me; and may you obtain _His_ forgiveness for the sin you are about to commit, as readily as I grant you _mine_. Now, I am ready;" and, looking upwards to the seat of all power and grace, he paid no further attention to their scoffing. "Now Señor Bias," said one of my men, "since he will give us no more sport, give the word, and let us finish his business." "Hold!" exclaimed one of the ----'s suite, addressing me, "Is your name Blas Maldonado?" "It is: wherefore?" "Because, if such be the case, in his Excellency's _portefuille_ you will find a letter addressed to you." I forthwith proceeded to examine its contents, and, true enough, found a letter bearing my address. It was from my old friend _Jacobo_, requesting, should the ---- fall into my hands, that I would suffer him to pass without molestation, in return for services conferred on him, which would be explained at our next meeting.[146] _Jacobo_, though we had not met for many months, I knew was in that part of the country, following the honest calling of a _Contrabandista_, and I felt, in honour, bound to grant this request of my old friend and ever faithful lieutenant. My followers, however, objected strongly to spare either the ----, or his attendants, and a violent altercation ensued; for, I declared that my life must be taken ere that of any one of our prisoners. Four only of the band sided with me, and we had already assumed a hostile attitude, when the ---- called earnestly upon me to desist. "Peril not your sinful souls!" he exclaimed, "by hurrying each other, unrepented of your manifold sins, into the presence of an offended Maker.--Take our gold--take every thing we possess; and if those misguided men cannot be satisfied without blood, let mine flow to save the lives of these, my followers, who have stronger ties than I to bind them to this world." My hot temper, little used to contradiction, would listen, however, to no terms; my word was pledged that the ---- and his attendants should go free, and my word was never given in vain. I persisted, therefore, in declaring that those must pass over my body who would touch a hair of the ----'s head, or take a m_aravedi_ from his purse.... If he chose to make them a present after he had been released, he was his own master to do so. This delicate hint was eagerly seized by the worthy dignitary's attendants, and a large sum of money was distributed amongst the gang, in which I declined sharing. The ----, meanwhile, remounted his mule, and, calling me to his side, placed a valuable ring upon my finger. "I am indebted to you for my life, Blas Maldonado," he said, with the most lively emotion; "but that is little; I owe to you--what I value infinitely more--the safety of these faithful attendants, whose attachment had led them, like Simon Peter, to defend their Pastor. Such debts cannot be cancelled by any gift I can bestow, and it is not with that view I offer you this bauble, but a day may come when you may need an intercessor--if so, return this ring to me by some faithful member of our holy church, and let me know how I can serve you: or--which is probable, considering my age and infirmities--should I, ere that comes to pass, have been called from this world to give an account of my stewardship; then, fear not to lay it at the foot of Fernando's throne, and, in the name of its donor, beg for mercy. I trust you may not have occasion to require its services, for my prayers shall not be wanting for your conversion from your present evil ways--my blessing be upon you--farewell." How powerful is the influence of religion! Whilst listening to the worthy ----'s words, my head, which since the days of my childhood no act of devotion had ever led me to uncover, was bared as if by instinct; and, to receive the blessing he had called down upon me, I humbled myself to the earth! Although those of the band who had so vehemently opposed sparing the ----'s life had finally been satisfied with the _donation_ bestowed upon them, yet their disobedience made me determine on ejecting them from my band, and accordingly, accompanied only by my four supporters in the late dispute, I proceeded to my old rendezvous, Montejaque, hoping to pick up some recruits. I purposed, also, availing myself of the first favourable opportunity to remove my wife and child to that place, it being more conveniently situated, and offering greater security than even Cañete la Real. We had been there but a few days, when I received a letter without a signature, but in the well-known characters of my bosom friend, Miguel Clavijo, under whose protection I had placed my wife and child, giving warning of impending danger to them. There was yet time to avert it, my correspondent concluded, but in twenty-four hours from the date of this communication, their fate would probably be sealed. It was within two hours of sunset when I received this letter, and eight hours had already elapsed since it had been written. Not a moment, therefore, was to be lost. I procured a pillion, and, placing it on an active horse, set off with all possible haste for Cañete, keeping along the course of the river Ariate to avoid the town of Ronda, and traversing at full speed the village bearing the name of the stream, in order to escape recognition. I reached the rounded summit of the chain of hills which forms the northern boundary of the cultivated valley of Ronda, just as the sun was sinking behind the western mountains; and, checking my horse to give him a few moments' breath ere commencing the rugged descent on the opposite side, I turned round to see if all were quiet in the wide-spread plain I had just traversed, and that no one was following my traces. At this moment the last ray of the glorious luminary lit upon the distant town of Grazalema. The remarkable coincidence of the warning of treason I had received there on this very day, twelve years before, came vividly to mind, and with it the recollection of my extraordinary escape from the snare laid for me--the debt of gratitude due to her who had risked her life, and sacrificed her honour to save me--the cruelty with which my preserver had been treated. Poor abandoned Paca! From the moment of our angry separation, never had I once taken the trouble of enquiring what had been her fate. Scarcely, indeed, had I ever bestowed a thought upon her. I resumed my way down the rough descent, pondering, for the first time in my life, on the ingratitude I had been guilty of, and had reached some high cliffs that border the road beneath the village of La Cuera del Becerro, when a pistol was discharged within a few yards of me, and, looking up, I saw a witchlike figure standing on the edge of the precipice overhanging the path--It was Paca! Had my eyes wished to deceive me, she would not have allowed them, for, with a wild, demonaical laugh, she screamed out "_Adelante, Adelante, embustero desalmado!_[147]--You will yet be in time to dig the grave for your child, though too late to snatch your _wife_ from the arms of her paramour. Forward, forward; recollect the old saying, '_no hay boda, sin tornabóda_;'[148] you may have forgotten Paca of _Benaocaz_, but I shall never forget Blas Maldonado. The creditor has ever a better memory than the debtor. I have paid myself now, however--ride on, and see the receipt I have left for you at Cañete--ha, ha, ha!" There was something perfectly fiendish in her laughter. A horrible presentiment possessed me.--With a hand tremulous with passion, I drew forth a pistol and fired. Paca staggered, and fell backwards; but, not waiting to see if she were killed, I put spurs to my horse, and hurried forward to Cañete. I rode straight to the house where I had left my wife, but it was uninhabited. I turned from it with a shudder, and proceeded to the abode of my faithful friend Clavijo, who was confined to his bed with ague. He received me with a face foreboding evil. "Where is my wife?" I hastily demanded--"my child, where is he?" "Alas!" he replied, "why came you not earlier?" "Earlier! how could that be? It is but twelve hours since your summons was penned! Tell me, I implore you--what horrible misfortune has befallen?" "But twelve hours, say you?" exclaimed Clavijo; "It is now _three days_ since I intrusted my letter to Paca to convey to you! she it was who informed me of the plot to carry off your wife, (which has been but too truly effected,) and offered to be herself the bearer of my letter to you at Montejaque, where she assured me you were. I have not seen her since, and fancied she had not succeeded in finding you." I stood stupified whilst listening to this explanation--for such it was to me; the truth, the horrible truth, at once flashing upon me--and then, without waiting to obtain further information from the bed-ridden Miguel, hastened to the late residence of my wife, which one of his domestics pointed out to me. In few words, I explained to its owner the object of my visit, begging for information concerning my child. "This will explain all, Señor Blas," she replied, taking a letter from a cupboard, and placing it in my hands; "would to God it had been in my power to prevent what has happened." The letter was in my wife's hand-writing, I tore it open, and to my astonishment read as follows. "Monster of iniquity! The veil that has but too long concealed thy unequalled crimes from the eyes of a confiding woman, has been rudely torn aside. Murderer of my brother! Apostate! Traitor! Adulterer! receive at my hands the first stroke of the Almighty's anger. The illegitimate offspring of our intercourse lies a mangled corpse upon our adulterous bed! Yes, unparalleled villain; my hand, like thine own, is stained with the blood of my child--_our_ child. But on thy head rests the sin. In a moment of delirium, produced by the sight of my husband, and the knowledge of thy atrocious crimes, the horrid deed was committed. I leave thee to the pangs of remorse. I cannot curse thee. Even with the bleached corpse of my poor boy before me, I cannot bring myself to call down a heavy punishment upon thee. We shall never meet again; but fly instantly and save thyself if possible; and may the Almighty Being, whose every command thou hast violated, extend the term of thy life for repentance; and may a blessed Saviour and the holy saints, whose mediation thou hast ever derided, intercede for the salvation of thy sinful soul." My first feeling on reading this epistle was incredulity! _I_, who had stopped at no crime to gratify any evil passion; even I could not persuade myself that it was not a forgery, nor believe that one so gentle, so affectionate, as Engracia, could be guilty of so diabolical an act. I took up a lamp and walked composedly to the adjoining chamber, to satisfy my doubts. With a steady hand I drew aside the curtain of the bed--nothing was visible. A thrill of delight ran through my veins. I tore off the counterpane, and--horrible revulsion of feeling!--discovered my boy, my darling boy, with anguish depicted in every feature, and every muscle contracted with excessive suffering; a cold--black--fetid--putrid corpse! Until that moment I had not known the full extent to which the chords of the human heart are capable of being stretched. All my love of life had centred in that child. Each of his infantile endearments came fresh upon my memory. The pangs of jealousy and hate, too, had never before been so acutely felt; and, lastly, I thought of my Fernando's dying malediction! It seemed as if a poisoned dart had pierced to the very innermost recess of the heart, and that my envenomed blood waited but its extraction, to gush forth in one irrepressible flood. I stood speechless--awe-struck--motionless; but not yet humbled. I thought of Paca, and a curse rose to my throat; but ere I had time to give it utterance, a noise, as of many persons assembled at the door of the house, attracted my attention, and I heard an unknown voice say, "This, _Tio_, you are sure is the house? Then in with you, comrades, without ceremony, and bring out every soul you may find there, dead or alive." In another moment the door was broken open and a party of armed men rushed in. My precaution of extinguishing the lamp was vain, as several of them bore blazing torches. I rushed to a back window of the inner apartment, and drew forth a pistol to keep them at bay whilst I effected my escape by it. It had the desired effect. Not one of the dastard crew would approach to lay his hand upon me. The shutter was already thrown open; the strength of desperation had enabled me to tear down one of the iron bars of the _reja_; and one foot rested on the window-sill; when, rushing past the soldiers, a ghost-like female figure, whose face was bound up in a cloth clotted with gore, seized me in her convulsive grasp, and in a half-articulate scream cried, "Wretch! you shall not so escape me!"--It was Paca! I tried in vain to shake her off; she clung to me with the pertinacity of a vampire, I placed the muzzle of my pistol to her temple, and pulled the trigger; but, in my hurry, I had drawn that which I had already fired at her. I attempted to snatch another from my belt, but the soldiers taking courage rushed forward and overpowered me, just as Paca, from whose mouth I now perceived blood was rapidly issuing, fell exhausted upon the floor. The commander of the party was now called in, who gave directions for a priest and a surgeon to be instantly sent for, and that I should be bound hand and foot with cords. They took the bedding from under the corpse of my son to form a rest for Paca, whose life seemed ebbing rapidly. In a few minutes the surgeon arrived, and shortly after a tinkling bell announced the approach of the Host. The doctor having examined Paca's wounds, pronounced them to have been inflicted by the discharge of some weapon loaded with slugs, one of which had fractured her jaw-bone, whilst another had inflicted a wound that occasioned an inward flow of blood which threatened immediate dissolution, and consequently the services of the church were more likely to be beneficial than his own. The priest then approached, and offered the last and cheering consolation that our holy religion offers to a dying penitent. Paca opened her now lustreless eyes, and with a motion of impatience, putting aside the proffered cup, pointed to me. "There is my murderer," she muttered in broken accents; "Villain! monster! my vengeance is at length complete. I leave you in the hands of justice, and die ... happy." An agonized writhe belied her assertion. She never spoke after, but continued groaning whilst the worthy priest attempted to call her attention to her approaching end. I have not much more to add to my history. It appeared, by what I learnt afterwards, that Beltran had most miraculously escaped death, when thrown from the rock of Montejaque, and having been discovered by some French soldiers who made an attack upon the place a few days afterwards, was conveyed to Ronda, when the loss of his ears led to his being recognised by the French governor, who had, in the meanwhile, received my _present_, and discovered the trick I had played him. Beltran's tale thus proved to have been the true one, he was well-treated, and sent with a party of prisoners to France, where he remained until the conclusion of the war. He was then on his way back to his native country, in company with several other Spaniards, when he was arrested as being an accomplice, "_sans préméditation_," in a robbery, attended with loss of life, and was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment; but, before this term was fully completed, he obtained his release, returned to Spain, and proceeding immediately to his native province, there first learnt that Engracia had become my wife. I think, by the way, that in the former part of my narrative I omitted to mention--for fully persuaded as I _then_ was of Beltran's death, it was a matter of no moment--that previous to Engracia's becoming my wife, she informed me of her having, at the urgent instances of her brother Melchor, consented to a private marriage with my rival; and from this circumstance she had expressed the greatest anxiety to ascertain his fate with certainty, and had delayed for so long a period bestowing her hand upon me. This marriage with Beltran had taken place at Gaucin within an hour of my departure from that town, after making the arrangements for our combined attack on Ronda; and had been strongly advocated by Melchor, from an apprehension that, should any thing happen to him in the approaching conflict, his elder brother, Alonzo, who was kept in perfect ignorance of this proceeding, would abandon his friend Beltran, and insist on their sister's marrying me, whom he (Melchor) detested. I, however, as you are aware, had every reason to believe that Beltran had been killed by his fall from the rock of Montejaque; and therefore, on eventually eliciting from Engracia the reason of her reluctance to marry me, I had no scruple in declaring that Beltran's dead body had been seen rolling down the shallow pebbly bed of the Guadiaro, after our action with the French. The crime I had led her to commit was consequently unintentional. Would I could as easily acquit myself of another her letter accused me of, namely, that of being the murderer of her brother: for, through my machinations was his death brought about. Whilst the crop-eared traitor, Beltran, (the _Tio's_ revengeful feelings were not so entirely allayed as to prevent his bestowing an occasional term of reproach on those who had thwarted his prosperous career of iniquity) was skulking about the mountains, endeavouring to obtain tidings of his re-married wife, chance threw him in the way of Paca, engaged in a similar pursuit, but with a very different purpose. This wretched woman had, for many years after our separation, been the inmate of a mad-house; but, at length, her keepers finding that, excepting on the subject of her supposed wrongs, she was perfectly tractable, became careless of watching her, and she effected her escape. The sole object of this vindictive creature's life appears now to have been to wreak vengeance upon me. But not satisfied with the mere death of her victim, she sought first to torture him with worldly pangs; and informed that Engracia lived, and had given birth to a son, whom I loved with a more fervent affection than even the mother, she determined _they_ should first be sacrificed to her revenge. On discovering Beltran alive, however, a scheme yet more hellishly devised entered her imagination; in the execution of which he became a willing agent, though in some degree her dupe. Well acquainted with all my haunts, she soon got upon my track; and that discovered, had little difficulty in finding out the hiding-place of Engracia. Making a shrewd guess at the person under whose protection I had placed my wife and child, she forthwith presented herself to Don Miguel, and informed him that a plot was laid, and on the eve of execution, to carry them both off; adding, that it might yet be frustrated if I could but arrive at Cañete within twenty-four hours--that she knew where I then was, and would undertake to have any warning conveyed to me which his prudence might suggest--that her messenger was sure, but still the utmost caution, as well as despatch, was necessary. Miguel, quite taken by surprise, and unable from illness to leave his bed, wrote the short note which has already been given; and this point gained, Paca proceeded to the nearest town to give information to the authorities that the bandit Blas, whom they were seeking in every direction, was to be at Cañete la Real on a certain night; and proposed, if a detachment of troops was sent quietly to the neighbouring village of El Becerro, that she would repair thither at the proper time, and conduct the soldiers to the traitor's very lair. This proposal was readily acceded to, and Paca then repaired to Cañete, to tell Miguel not to be uneasy as to the result of his message to me, as, since sending it, she had ascertained on good authority that something had occurred to postpone the elopement of Engracia for a day or two. Bending her steps thence to where Beltran was anxiously awaiting her return, she told him that after much difficulty she had discovered Engracia was at Cañete; he had therefore but to proceed there after dark, provided with the means of carrying her off. But this, she informed him, must be done with the utmost celerity and circumspection, as the inhabitants of the place were so desperate a set, and so attached to me, that, if they got the slightest inkling of what was going forward, they certainly would handle him very roughly; and the authorities, unless backed by a body of troops, would be afraid to interfere in his behalf. If, however, she pursued, he preferred waiting until an escort could be procured, that he might avoid all personal risk--but delays were dangerous, for frequently _"De la mano a la boca_ _se cae la sopa._"[149] The law, too, was uncertain.--He thought so also, and they proceeded together to Cañete. Beltran, imagining that Paca had informed Engracia of his being alive, conceived that no intimation of his coming was requisite; but such was not the case, and the shock given by his unexpected visit caused the aberration of mind which led the hapless Engracia to commit the horrid crime of infanticide; and, in the state of inanition that followed, she was carried out of the town. The letter to me was written afterwards, and delivered to the old woman of the house by Paca, the last act of whose fiendish plot now commenced. Altering the date of Miguel's letter, so as to make it correspond with the time arranged for the arrival of the troops at _La Cueva del Becerro_, she forwarded it to me at Montejaque--what followed has already been stated. These details became known on my trial, which took place shortly afterwards. I was condemned to suffer death by the _garrote_. The day was fixed; I sent for a priest, and entrusting to him the ring given me by the ----, begged he would forward it without delay to Madrid. This was done, but day after day passed without bringing any answer to my appeal. At first I had been so sanguine as to the result, that I was affected but little at my position, for I knew how easily a pardon is obtained in Spain, when application is made in the proper quarter; but, as the fatal time approached, the darkest despair took possession of my soul. I cannot indeed convey to you, Don Carlos, an adequate idea of the horrible torments I endured during the last few days preceding that fixed for my execution. The pious father Ignacio--he has since (sainted soul!) been taken from this earth, and is now, I trust, my intercessor in heaven--was unremitting in his endeavours to bring me to repentance; but Satan was yet strong within me, and my heart remained hardened. The pardon came not, and I exclaimed against the justness of the Most High: I, whom no considerations of justice had influenced in any one action of my life--who had recklessly transgressed each of His commandments! "We must not ask for _justice_ at the hands of the Almighty," urged Ignacio; "We are all born in sin, in sin we all live; _mercy_ is what we must pray for." "Mercy!" I exclaimed; "_Why_ was I born in sin? Why led to commit crime? Why...." "Your unbridled passions led you to transgress the laws of your Creator," replied Ignacio; "be thankful that you were not cut short in your mad career, and that time has been allowed you for repentance." "Repent!--I cannot--I have ever denied, I cannot now believe in the existence of a Maker." "Unhappy man!" ejaculated the worthy priest; "unhappy, impious, inconsistent man! You deny the existence of the Being against whose justice your voice was raised e'en now in reproaches! Do you not look forward to behold again to-morrow the bright luminary round which this atom of a world revolves? Look on that pale moon, which perhaps you now see rising for the last time--Observe that fiery meteor which has this moment dashed through the wondrous, boundless firmament; and ask yourself if this admirable system can be the effect of accident? Do the trees yearly yield us their fruits by chance? Is the punctual return of the seasons a mere casualty? If so, how is it that this accidental atom--this globe we inhabit, has so long held together _without_ accident? Has any work of man, however cunningly devised, in like manner withstood the effects of time? Is not the protecting hand of the Deity clearly perceptible in the unvarying continuance of these phenomena? "My son, had you studied the Holy Scriptures more, and the philosophy of Voltaire and other infidels less, you would not have been brought to this strait; neither would you have shocked my ears with a confession, which, a few years since, would have consigned you to the dungeons of the Inquisition. Repent! unhappy man, repent! and save your soul--there is still time. Nay, an omnipotent Maker may even yet think fit to prolong your life here below, for the perfection of this good work, if you will but pray to him in all sincerity." The pious father saw that I was touched, and, pouring in promises of future happiness, brought me to reflect. I begged him to be with me early on the following morning. He came; I had passed the night in prayer; and now unburdened my mind, by making to him a full confession of my sins. Ignacio remained comforting me, until the hour of the arrival of the post, when he repaired, as usual, to the _Corregidor_, to ascertain whether any pardon had reached him. He returned not, however. Eleven o'clock was the hour fixed for my execution; it came, but still Ignacio did not appear. Hours passed away, and not a soul visited me; the sun again sank below the horizon, and I yet lived. It was evident--so, at least, I thought--that a pardon had arrived, and my spirits rose accordingly. At length, towards nightfall, Ignacio entered my cell. "Blas," he said, "though it would appear there is no longer a chance of your receiving a pardon, yet your life has been miraculously spared this day, to give you time for repentance. I trust you have turned it to good account." "How!" I exclaimed, "have I not been pardoned? What, then, has occasioned this delay?" "You owe your life," he replied, "to a rumour, that a band of robbers had appeared in the vicinity--some of your old friends, it was thought--which caused all the troops to be sent out in pursuit. They have but now returned, and to-morrow you will be executed." A pang of withering disappointment ran through me, for I had confidently imagined that the delay had been the consequence of the arrival of a pardon, and Satan once more obtained dominion over me. Ignacio read in my overcast countenance the change his information had wrought in my feelings. "Your repentance is not sincere, my son," he observed. "Alas! when death is in sight, how fondly do we cling to this earth. And yet you have braved death in the field a thousand times!" "Father," I replied, "it is not death I fear--it is the disgrace of a public execution." "What absurd sophistry is this?" said he. "Can one, who but yesterday denied the existence of a future state, care for one moment _how_ he quits this world, or regard the opinion of those he leaves behind in it?--as well might he be fearful of losing the good opinion of a herd of swine. Away with such fine-spun subtilties--it is the prospect of meeting your Maker face to face that makes you quail. You are yet but ill prepared, I see. Oh! may He yet mercifully extend your life, if but a short span." The morrow came, but the pious Ignacio's prayer remained apparently unheard. He repaired to my call soon after the arrival of the post, to exhort and prepare me. Alas! I was as much in want of his assistance as ever, for I had all along clung to the hope of obtaining a pardon through the influence of the ----, and was more inclined to rail than to pray. A party of soldiers at length arrived, and I was led off in chains to the place of execution. A vast crowd was assembled from all the neighbouring towns to witness my punishment. Ignacio addressed the multitude on our way, saying, I was a repentant sinner, and implored the prayers of all good Christians. For myself I said not a word, and the crowd gave no signs of either gratification or commiseration. I mounted the scaffold, the fatal instrument was placed round my throat, a curse was yet on my lips, when a distant shout attracted the Father's attention. Laying a hand upon the arm of the executioner to stay his proceedings, he watched with eager eyes the signs of some one who was approaching at a rapid pace, holding a paper high in the air. The paper was handed to Ignacio by the breathless messenger. "It is a pardon," he exclaimed; "your life is miraculously spared--it has been sent express from the Escurial! Return your thanks, to Him, who has been pleased thus to extend his mercy towards you." I had already sunk on my knees--I prayed earnestly for the first time in my life. Marvellously, indeed, had my life been preserved. But for the rumoured appearance of the band of robbers, I should have suffered death the day before; again, this day, but for Ignacio's presence, the pardon would have arrived too late. I was immediately released, but a fever, caused, probably, by my previously excited feelings, confined me to my bed for many weeks. I became delirious, and my life was despaired of. Ignacio tended me like a brother. A second time he saved my life; but, alas! he himself contracted the contagious disorder, and fell a victim to his warm and disinterested friendship. I expended all I was worth in masses for his soul, and was once more thrown upon the world to seek a livelihood. I thought of applying to the ---- to procure me some employment, but learnt that he too had closed his mortal career. The fever had given such a shock to my constitution, that old age, I may say, came suddenly upon me, and to gain a livelihood by hard labour was out of the question. I had no relations; my friends were all new; so that I had no claims on any one: my present occupation presented itself, as the only one I was fit for; and, thank God, it enables me to earn my bread without begging, and even to lay by a little store for pious purposes:--for much of my time is devoted to the performance of penances and austerities, to expiate the sins of my past life. Thrice, on my knees, have I ascended to the _Ermita_ you see there peeping through the clouds gathered round the peaks of the Sierra Morena. Once, too, have I walked barefoot to prostrate myself before the _Santa faz_[150] of Jaen; and this winter (God willing!) I purpose visiting the most holy shrine of _Sant' Iago de Compostela_. It is a long journey, and will, probably, be my last pilgrimage, for I feel myself sinking fast. You have now had the history of my whole life, Don Carlos--I wish it could be published. It might, probably, warn my fellow-creatures to rest contented with the lot to which it has pleased God to call them; and, if so, I may have lived to some purpose. CHAPTER XIII. UNFORESEEN DIFFICULTIES IN PROCEEDING TO MADRID--DEATH OF KING FERDINAND--CHANGE IN OUR PLANS--ROAD TO ANDUJAR--ALCOLEA--MONTORO--PORCUNA--ANDUJAR--ARJONA--TORRE XIMENO--DIFFICULTY OF GAINING ADMISSION--SUCCESS OF A STRATAGEM--CONSTERNATION OF THE AUTHORITIES--SPANISH ADHERENCE TO FORMS--CONTRASTS--JAEN--DESCRIPTION OF THE CASTLE, CITY, AND CATHEDRAL--LA SANTA FAZ--ROAD TO GRANADA--OUR KNIGHTLY ATTENDANT--PARADOR DE SAN RAFAEL--HOSPITABLE FARMER--ASTONISHMENT OF THE NATIVES--GRANADA--EL SOTO DE ROMA--LOJA--VENTA DE DORNEJO--COLMENAR--FINE SCENERY--ROAD FROM MALAGA TO ANTEQUERA, AND DESCRIPTION OF THAT CITY. I found Cordoba the same dull, sultry, loyal city as at the period of my former visit; after devoting a day, therefore, to the incomparable _Mezquita_, we repaired to the police office to redeem our passports, and have them _visé_ for Madrid, purposing to proceed to the capital by _Diligence_. We there learnt, however, that our route from Gibraltar, having passed _near_ the district wherein the cholera had appeared, the public safety demanded that our journey should be continued on horseback, and, moreover, that each day's ride should not exceed eight leagues! The prospect of a fortnight's baking on the parched plains of La Mancha and Castile, which this preposterous precaution held out, was, of itself, enough to make any one _crusty_; but the additional vexation of finding that all our precautions had been unavailing, all our information erroneous, made us return to the _posada_, thoroughly out of humour with _Las Cosas de España_. Our landlord comforted us, however, by engaging--if we would but wait patiently for a few days, and leave the business entirely in his hands--to get matters arranged so that we might yet proceed on to Madrid by the diligence; and, knowing the wheels within wheels by which Spanish affairs of state are put in motion, we willingly came to this compromise, and remained quietly paying him for our breakfasts and dinners during the best part of a week, receiving each day renewed assurances that every thing was proceeding "_corriente_." The second day after our arrival at Cordoba, the inhabitants were moved to an unusual degree of excitement, in consequence of an _estafette_ having passed through the city during the night, bearing despatches from Madrid to the Captain General of the Province, and rumours were afloat that the king was so seriously ill as to occasion great fears for his life; and, on the following day, public anxiety was yet further excited by a report that the Captain General had passed through Cordoba on his way to the capital; leading to the general belief that Ferdinand was actually dead. In the evening our host came to us with a very long face, and informed us, confidentially, that such was the case, though, for political reasons, it had been deemed prudent not to make the melancholy news public; adding, that, in consequence of this unforeseen and unfortunate event, he regretted to say the authorities had been seized with such a panic, that he had altogether failed in his endeavour to have the stain effaced from our bill of health. Nevertheless, he said, he hoped yet to be able to arrange matters so as to ensure our being received into the diligence, _without any questions being asked_ at Andujar, if we would but remain quietly where we were for a few days longer, and then proceed to that place on horseback. The news received from Madrid had, however, decided us to give up the plan of continuing our journey thither. I knew enough of Spain to foresee what would be the result of all the intrigues which had been carried on behind the curtains of the imbecile Ferdinand's death-bed. "You are quite right, Señor," said Blas, to whom I made known our change of plans, "we shall now have a disputed succession, for, be assured, Don Carlos is not the man to forego his just rights without a struggle.--Alas! this only was wanting to fill my unhappy country's cup of misery to overflowing." Although thus unwillingly forced to abandon the project of crossing the Sierra Morena, we determined, whilst the country yet remained quiet, to extend our tour further to the eastward, and, by proceeding along the _arrecife_ to Madrid as far as Andujar, gain the road which leads from thence to Jaen; a city, which the want of practicable roads leading from it to the south has, until late years (during which that deficiency has been remedied), been very rarely visited by travellers. Recommending Señor Blas to postpone his projected barefoot pilgrimage into Gallicia, until the rainy season had set in, and made the roads soft, we departed from Cordoba by the great post route to the capital, which, as far as Alcolea, is conducted along the right bank of the Guadalquivír, and is a fine, broad, and well-kept gravel road. Alcolea is seven miles from Cordoba. It is a small village of but twenty or thirty houses, and, in the opinion of Florez, occupies the site of the ancient town of Arva. The _arrecife_ here crosses to the left bank of the river by a handsome marble bridge, of eighteen arches, built in 1788-92. The passage of this bridge was obstinately contested by the Spaniards, in the campaign of 1808, but a party of the French, which had crossed the river at Montoro, falling upon its defenders in flank, forced them to retreat. From hence to Carpio is ten miles. The country is undulated, and the road--along which there is not a single village, and scarcely half a dozen houses--keeps within sight of the Guadalquivír the whole way, affording many pleasing views of the winding stream and its overhanging woods and olive groves. The town of Carpio is left about a quarter of a mile off, on the right. It is situated on a hill, and by some is supposed to be the ancient city of Corbulo. Pliny, however, distinctly says that place was _below_ Cordoba, and Florez fixes it in the vicinity of Palma. From Carpio to Aldea del Rio is twelve miles, the country continuing much the same as heretofore. At three miles, the road reaches the small town of Pedro Abad (or Perabad) in the vicinity of which is a _despoblado_,[151] where various medals and vestiges have been found that determine it to be the site of Sacili, mentioned by Pliny. Proceeding onwards, the town of Bujalance may occasionally be seen on the right, distant about a league and a half from the Guadalquivír; and at seven miles from Carpio, we passed Montoro, a large town situated on the margin of the river, and about three quarters of a mile to the left of the _arrecife_. This town has been determined by antiquaries to be Ripepora. The country about Aldea del Rio is rather pretty, and the place has a thriving look compared with the miserable towns we had lately seen; its population is about 1,800 souls. We halted here for the night, and found the _posada_ most wretched. At a distance of nine (geographic) miles from Aldea del Rio, in a south-east direction, is the town of Porcuna; its situation, Florez justly observes, agreeing so well with that of Obulco, as given both by Strabo[152] and Pliny,[153] as to leave no doubt of their identity. Inscriptions, monuments, coins, &c., which have been found there, quite confirm this opinion, and an important point is thus gained in tracing the operations of Cæsar in his last campaign against the sons of Pompey; since Obulco, which he is mentioned as having reached in twenty-seven days from Rome, may be considered the advanced post of the country that was favourable to his cause. The present ignoble name of the town--Porcuna,--appears to have been bestowed upon it from the extraordinary fecundity of a _sow_; an inscription, commemorative of the birth of thirty young pigs at one litter, being preserved to this day in the church of the Benedictine friars, and is thus worded:-- C. CORNELIVS. C. F. CN. GAL. CÆSO. AED. FLAMEN. II. VIR MVNICIPII. PONTIF C. CORN. CÆSO. F. SACERDOS. GENT. MVNICIPII SCROFAM CVM PORCIS XXX IMPENSA IPSORVM. D. D. From Aldea del Rio to Andujar is fourteen miles, making the whole distance from Cordoba to that place forty-three miles. The country is very gently undulated, and principally under tillage; the ride, however, is dreary, there being but one house on the road. Andujar stands altogether on the right bank of the Guadalquivír, which is crossed by a bridge of nine arches. The town is reputed to contain a population of 12,000 souls, but that number is a manifest exaggeration. It is encompassed by old Roman walls, and defended by an ancient castle, and is celebrated for its manufacture of pottery. It is, nevertheless, a dilapidated, impoverished looking place. By some Andujar is supposed to be the Illiturgi,[154] or, as it is otherwise written, Illurtigis of the ancient historians; but Florez fixes the site of that city two leagues higher up, but on the same bank of the Guadalquivír, and imagines Andujar to be Ipasturgi. The locality of the existing town certainly but ill agrees with the description of Illurtigis given by Livy, for no part of Andujar is "covered by a high rock."[155] The _arrecife_ to Madrid leaves the banks of the Guadalquivír at Andujar, striking inland to Baylen, and thence across the Sierra Morena by the pass of _Despeña Perros_. After devoting a few hours to exploring the old walls of the town, we recrossed the river, and bent our steps towards Granada, taking the road to Jaen. We proceeded that afternoon to Torre Ximena, twenty miles from Andujar. The country is undulated, and mostly under cultivation. The road is--or, more properly, I should say, perhaps, the places upon the road are--very incorrectly laid down on the Spanish maps; for, instead of being scattered east and west over the face of the country, they are so nearly in line, as to make the general direction of the road nearly straight. Though but a cross-country track, it is tolerably good throughout. The first town it visits is Arjona, said to be the ancient Urgao, or Virgao.[156] It is a poor place, of some twelve or fifteen hundred inhabitants, and distant seven miles from the Guadalquivír. Five miles beyond Arjona, but lying half pistol shot off the road to the right, is the miserable little village of Escañuela; and three miles further on, the equally wretched town of Villa Don Pardo. From hence to Torre Ximeno (five miles) the road traverses a vast plain, but, ere we had proceeded half way, night overtook us, and on reaching the town we found all the entrances most carefully closed. After making various attempts to gain admission--groping our way from one barricade to another, until we had nearly completed the circuit of the town--we perceived a light glimmering at some little distance in the country, and hoping it proceeded from some _rancha_, where we might obtain shelter from an approaching storm, if not accommodation for the night, we spurred our jaded animals towards it as fast as the ruggedness of the ground would admit. It proved, however, to be only the remains of a fire made for the purpose of destroying weeds; but a peasant lad, who was warming his evening meal over the expiring embers, pointed out a path leading to one of the town gates, at which, he said, we might, perhaps, gain admission. Following his directions, we found the gate without much trouble; but a difficulty now arose that promised to be of a more insuperable nature, namely, that of _awaking the guard_, for the combined efforts of our voices proved quite inadequate to the purpose. It was very vexatious, but irresistibly ludicrous; and, prompted by this mixed feeling of wrath and merriment, we determined to try what effect would be produced by a general discharge of our pistols, and, accordingly riding close up to the gate, fired a volley in the air. A tremendous discharge of _carajos!_ responded to our _salvo_, and soldiers, policemen, custom-house officers, and health-officers, sallied forth, helter skelter, from the guard-house and adjacent dwellings, making off "with the very extremest inch of possibility," under the impression that the place was attacked. One _aduanero_, however, more enterprising and valiant than the rest, ventured to peep through the bars of the stockade and demand our business; on learning which he encouragingly invited the _urbanos_ to return to their _military duty_, whilst he despatched a messenger to the _Alcalde_ to request instructions for their further proceedings. We were subjected meanwhile to a most vexatious detention, occasioned by various causes. Firstly, because the village dictator was nowhere to be found. He had--so it eventually turned out--started from his comfortable seat at the fire of the _posada_ (where, surrounded by a knot of politicians, he was discussing the justice of abrogating the Salique law), at the first report of our fire-arms, and, wrapping his cloak around him, had rushed into the street, declaring his intention of meeting death like the last of the Palæologi, rather than be recognised and spared, to grace the triumph of a victorious enemy. Then we had to wait for the key of the gate, which had been carried off in the pocket of one of the runaway soldiers; and, lastly, for a light, the guard-lamp having been overturned in the general confusion, and all the oil spilt. During the half hour's delay occasioned by these various untoward circumstances, we were subjected to a long verbal examination, touching the part of the country whence we had come; for having wandered round the town in our attempts to gain admission, until we had reached a gate at the very opposite point of the compass to that which points to Andujar, the account we gave seemed to awaken great doubts of our veracity in the minds of these vigilant functionaries; and, even after a lantern had been brought, and our passports delivered up, we underwent a minute personal examination, ere being permitted to repair to the posada. The Spaniards say, that we English are "_victimas de la etiqueta_;" and, certes, we may compliment them, in return, on being the most complete _slaves to form_. Instances in proof thereof,--which, though on a smaller scale, were scarcely less laughable than the foregoing,--occurred daily in the course of our journey. _Par example_, on leaving the _venta_ at Fuente de Piedra, where our sleeping apartment was little better than the stable into which it opened, the hostess insisted on serving our morning cup of chocolate on a table partially covered with a dirty towel, saying, it would not be "_decente_" to allow us to take it standing at the kitchen fire. Here again, at Torre Ximeno, the landlord was conducting us into what he conceived to be a befitting apartment, when his better half cried out, "_à la sala! à la sala!_"[157] We pricked up our ears, fancying we were to be in clover. The _sala_, however, proved to be a room about ten feet longer than that into which we were first shown, but in every other respect its _fac simile_; that is to say, it had bare white-washed walls and a plastered floor, was furnished with half a dozen low rush-bottomed chairs, and ventilated by two apertures, which at some distant period had been closed by shutters. The floor presented so uneven a surface, and was marked with so many rents, that, until encouraged by the landlord's "_no tiene usted cuidado_,"[158] I was particularly careful where I placed my feet, taking it to be a highly finished model of the circumjacent sierras and water-courses. After more than the usual difficulties about bills of health and passports, we received a very civil message from the _Alcalde_, to say, that his house, &c. &c., were at our disposal; but our host and his helpmate seemed so well inclined to do what was in their power to make us _comfortable_, that we declined his polite offer. Our landlady was still remarkably pretty, though the mother of four children--a rare occurrence in Spain, where mothers, however young they may be, usually look like old women. We had some little difficulty in persuading her that we did not like garlic, and that we should be satisfied with a very moderate quantity of oil in the _guisado_[159] she undertook to prepare for our supper, and on which, with bread and fruit, and some excellent wine, we made a hearty meal. Contrasts in Spain are most absurd. We slept on thin woollen mattresses, spread upon the before-mentioned mountainous floor--the serrated ridges of which we had some little difficulty in fitting to our ribs--and in the morning were furnished with towels bordered with a kind of thread lace and fringe to the depth of at least eighteen inches; very ornamental, but by no means useful, since the serviceable part of the towel was hardly get-at-able. On asking our hostess for the bill, we were referred to her husband, which, as the Easterns say, led us to regard her with the eyes of astonishment; for this reference from the lady and mistress to her helpmate, is the exception to the rule, and it was to save trouble we had applied to her, experience having taught us that the landlady was generally the oracle on these occasions; _invariably_, indeed, when there is any intention to cheat. This, without explanation, may be deemed a most ungallant accusation; I do not mean by it, however, to screen my own sex at the expense of the fairer, for the truth is, the man adds duplicity to his other sins, by retiring from the impending altercation. This he does either from thinking that imposition will come with a better grace from his better half, or, that she will be more ingenious in finding out reasons for the exorbitance of the demand, or, at all events, words in defending it; for any attempt at expostulation is drowned in such a torrent of whys and wherefores, that one is glad, _coute qui coute_, to escape from the encounter. And thus, whilst the lady's volubility is extracting the money from their lodger's pocket, mine host stands aloof, looking as like a hen-pecked mortal as he possibly can, and shrugging his shoulders from time to time, as much as to say, "It is none of my doing! I would help you if I dare, but you see what a devil she is!" On the present occasion, however, we had no reason to remonstrate, for, to a very moderate charge, were added numerous excuses for any thing that might have been amiss in our accommodation, in consequence of their ignorance of our wants. Torre Ximeno is situated in a narrow valley, watered by a fine stream; its walls, however, reach to the crest of the hills on both sides, and apparently rest on a Roman foundation. It contains a population of 1,800 souls. From hence a road proceeds, by way of Martos and Alcalà la Real, to Granada, but it is more circuitous than that by Jaen. From Torre Ximeno to that city is two long leagues, or about nine miles. The road now takes a more easterly direction than heretofore, and, at the distance of three miles, reaches the village of Torre Campo. The rest of the way lies over an undulated country, which slants gradually towards the mountains, that rise to the eastward. Jaen is situated on the outskirts of the great Sierra de Susana, which, dividing the waters of the Guadalquivír and Genil, spreads as far south as the vale of Granada. The city is built on the eastern slope of a rough and very inaccessible ridge, whose summit is occupied by an old castle, enclosed by extensive outworks. The ancient name of the place was Aurinx, and it appears to have stood just without the limits of ancient Boetica. It is now the capital of one of the kingdoms composing the province of Andalusia, and the see of a bishop in the archbishoprick of Toledo. Its population amounts to at least 20,000 souls. Jaen is in every respect a most interesting city. It is frequently mentioned by the Roman historians, was equally noted in the time of the Moors, from whom it was wrested by San Fernando, A.D. 1246, and of late years has held a distinguished place in the pages of military history. Its situation is picturesque in the extreme, the bright city being on the edge of a rich and fertile basin, encased by wild and lofty mountains. The asperity of the country to the south is such indeed, that, until within the last few years no road practicable for carriages penetrated it, and Jaen has consequently been but very-little visited by travellers; for Granada and Cordoba, being the great objects of attraction, the most direct road between those two places was that which was generally preferred. A direct and excellent road has now, however, been completed, between Granada and the capital, passing through Jaen. This route crosses the Guadalquivír at Menjiber, and, directed thence on Baylen, falls into the _arrecife_ from Cordoba to Madrid, ere it enters the défilés of the Sierra Morena. The castle of Jaen stands 800 feet above the city, and is still a fine specimen of a Moslem fortress, though the picturesque has been sacrificed to the defensive by various French additions and demolitions. It crowns the crest of a narrow ridge much in the style of the castle of Ximena, to which, in other respects, it also bears a strong resemblance. Its tanks and subterraneous magazines are in tolerable preservation, but the exterior walls of the fortress were partially destroyed by the French, in their hurried evacuation of it in 1812. The view it commands is strikingly fine. An extensive plain spreads northward, reaching seemingly to the very foot of the distant Sierra Morena, and on every other side rugged mountains rise in the immediate vicinity of the city, which, clad with vines wherever their roots can find holding ground, present a strange union of fruitfulness and aridity. The city contains fifteen convents, and numerous manufactories of silk, linen and woollen cloths, and mats, and has a thriving appearance. The streets are, for the most part, so narrow, that, with outstretched arms, I could touch the houses on both sides of them. The cathedral is a very handsome edifice of Corinthian architecture, 300 feet long, and built in a very pure style; indeed every thing about it is in good keeping for Spanish taste. The pavement is laid in chequered slabs of black and white marble; the walls are hung with good paintings, but not encumbered with them; the various altars, though enriched with fine specimens of marbles and jaspers, are not gaudily ornamented; the organ is splendid in appearance and rich in tone. Some paintings by Moya, particularly a Holy Family, and the visit of Elizabeth to the Virgin Mary, are remarkably good; and the _Capilla sagrada_ contains several others by the same master, which are equally worthy of notice: their frames of polished red marble have a good effect. The only specimens of sculpture of which the cathedral can boast, are some weeping cherubim, done to the very life. The greatest curiosity it contains is the figure of Our Saviour on the cross, dressed in a kilt; but the treasure of treasures of the holy edifice, the proud boast of the favoured city itself, in fact, is the _Santa faz_--the Holy face. The _Santa faz_--so our conductor explained to us--is the impression of Our Saviour's face, left in stains of blood on the white napkin which bound up his head when deposited in the sepulchre. This cloth was thrice folded over the face, so that three of these "_pinturas_," as the priest called them, were taken. That of Jaen, he said, was the second or middle one, the others are in Italy--where, I know not, but I have some recollection of having heard of them when in that country. This miraculous picture is only to be viewed on very particular occasions, or by paying a very considerable fee; but we were perfectly satisfied with our cicerone's assurance of its "striking resemblance" to Our Saviour, without requiring the ocular demonstration he was most solicitous to afford. Attached to the cathedral is a kitchen for preparing the morning chocolate of the priests, and which serves also as a snuggery, where-unto they retire to smoke their _legitimos_ during the breaks in their tedious lental services. The _Parador de los Caballeros_, in the Plaza _del Mercado_ is remarkably good, and the view from the front windows, looking towards the castle is very fine. The distance from Jaen to Granada, by the newly made _arrecife_, is fifty-one miles. It descends gradually into the valley of the Campillos, arriving at, and crossing the river about two miles from Jaen. The valley is wide, flat, and covered with a rich alluvial deposit; and extends for several leagues in both directions along the course of the stream, encircling the city with an ever-verdant belt of cultivation. For the succeeding three leagues, the road proceeds along this valley, at first bordered with gardens, orchards, and vineyards, amongst which numerous cottages and water-mills are scattered, but, after advancing about five miles, overhung by rocky ridges, and occasionally shaded with forest-trees. On a steep mound, on the right hand, forming the first mountain gorge that the road enters, is situated the _Castillo de la Guarda_, and, at the distance of three leagues from Jaen, is the _Torre de la Cabeza_, similarly situated on the left of the road. Beyond this, another verdant belt of cultivation gladdens the eye, extending about a mile and a half along the course of the Campillos. In the midst of this, is the _Venta del Puerto Suelo_, on arriving at which our _mozo_, who for several days had been suffering from indisposition, came to inform us "_que no podía mas_,"[160] requested we would leave him there to rest for a couple of days; when he hoped to be able to rejoin us at Granada by means of a _Galera_ that travelled the road periodically. We could not but accede to his request, and as we purposed reaching Granada on the following day, the loss of his attendance for so short a period was of little importance; the only difficulty was, who should lead the baggage animal.--Fortune befriended us. On our arrival at the inn we had been accosted by a smart-looking young fellow, in the undress uniform of a Spanish infantry soldier, who, seeing the disabled state of our Esquire, volunteered his services to lead our horses to the stable, and minister to their wants; and now, learning from our _mozo_ how matters stood, he again came forward, and offered to be our attendant during the remainder of the journey to Granada, to which place he himself was proceeding. We gladly accepted his proffered services, and, after a short rest, remounted our horses, and pursued our way; the young soldier--like an old campaigner--seating himself between our portmanteaus on the back of the baggage animal. Whilst jogging on before us, I observed, for the first time, that he carried a bright tin case suspended from his shoulder by a silken cord, and curious to know the purpose to which it was applied, asked what it contained. Without uttering a word in reply, he took off the case, produced therefrom a roll of parchment, and, spreading before us a long document concluding with the words _Io el Rey_,[161] offered it for my perusal. If my surprise was great at the length of the scroll, it was not diminished on finding, after wading through the usual verbose and bombastic preamble, that it dubbed our new acquaintance a knight of the first class of _San Fernando_, and decorated him with the ribbon and silver clasp of the same distinguished order. On first addressing him at the Venta, I had noticed a bit of ribbon on his breast, but, aware that the very smell of powder, even though it should be but that of his own musket, often _entitles_ a Spanish soldier to a decoration; and, indeed, that it is more frequently an acknowledgment of so many months' pay due, than of so much good service done,[162] I had abstained from questioning him concerning it; but that the first class decoration of a military order should have been bestowed on one so low in rank as a corporal, I confess, surprised me; and I concluded that its possessor was either the brother of the mistress of some great man, or that he was passing off some other person's _honors_ as his own. Being a very young man, it was evident he could not have seen much service; my suspicions were, therefore, excusable, and I took the liberty of cross-questioning him concerning the fields wherein his laurels had been gathered. The result gave me such satisfaction that I feel in justice bound to make the _amende honorable_ to the gallant fellow for the foul suspicions I had entertained, by giving my readers his history. As, however, it is somewhat long, I will postpone it for the present--as, indeed, not having arrived at its conclusion for several days, it is but methodically correct I should do--merely premising in this place, that, besides the _Diploma_, the tin case contained a statement of the particular services for which he obtained his knighthood, drawn up and attested by the officers of his regiment. About a mile beyond the Venta where we had fallen in with our new attendant, the country again becomes very wild and broken, and the hills are covered with pine woods. The valley of the Campillos gets more and more confined as the road proceeds, and is bounded by precipitous rocks; and, at length, on reaching the _Puerta de Arenas_, the passage, for the road and river together, does not exceed sixty feet, the cliffs rising perpendicularly on both sides to a considerable height. This is a very defensible pass, looking towards Granada, but not so in the opposite direction, as it is commanded by higher ground. It is about eighteen miles from Jaen. On emerging from the pass, an open, cultivated valley presents itself; towards the head of which, distant about four miles, is Campillos Arenas, a wretched village, containing some fifty or sixty _vecinos_. We were stopt at the entrance by an old beggarman, who was officiating as _health_ officer, and demanded our passports, which, on receiving, he ceremoniously forwarded to Head Quarters by a ragged, barefoot urchin, with the promise of an _ochavo_[163] if he used despatch in bringing them back to us. Our passports had now become a serious nuisance, from being completely covered with _visés_ both inside and out; for, of course, the curiosity of the natives was proportioned to the number of signatures they contained, and their astonishment was boundless that we should be travelling south at such a moment. At length, our papers were returned to us, and the boy gained his promised reward by running with all his might, to prove that the tedious delay we experienced was not attributable to him. Proceeding onwards, in three quarters of an hour, we reached the _Parador de San Rafael_, a newly built house of call for the diligence, recently established on this road. It is about twenty-four miles from Jaen, and twenty-seven from Granada, though, as the crow flies, the distance is rather shorter, perhaps, to the latter city than to the first named. It is a place of much resort, and we were happy to find that San Rafael presided over comfortable beds, and good dinners, though rather careless of the state of the wine-cellar. We started at an early hour next morning, our knightly attendant, with his red epaulettes, and janty foraging cap, together with a _de haut en bas_ manner assumed towards the passing peasantry and arrieros, causing us to be regarded with no inconsiderable degree of respect. The road, for the first eight miles, is one continuation of zig zags over a very mountainous country, and must be kept up at an immense expense to the government, for there is but very little traffic upon it. The hills are principally covered with forests of ilex, but patches of land have recently been taken into cultivation in the valleys, and houses are thinly scattered along the road. At ten miles and a half, we passed the first village we had seen since leaving Campillos Arenas. It is about a mile from the road on the left. The country now becomes less rugged than heretofore, though it continues equally devoid of cultivation and inhabitants. We were much disappointed at not finding a good _posada_ on the road, as we had been led to expect. We passed two in process of building on a magnificent scale, but nothing could be had at either. At last, after riding four long leagues--at a foot's pace, on account of our baggage animal--a farmer took compassion upon us, and, leading the way to his _Cortijo_, supplied our famished horses with a feed of barley, and set before ourselves all the good things his house afforded--melons, grapes, fresh eggs, and delicious bread. We arrived at the farmer's dinner hour, and a wide circle, comprising his wife, children, cowherds, ploughboys, and dairymaids, was already formed round the huge family bowl of _gazpacho fresco_, of which we received a general invitation to partake. It was far too light a meal, however, to satisfy the cravings of our appetites, and politely declining to dip our spoons in their common mess, we commenced making the usual preparations for an English breakfast, by unpacking our travelling canteen and placing a skillet of water upon the fire. The curiosity of the peasantry on these occasions amused us exceedingly. In this instance the spectators, who probably had never before come in such close contact with Englishmen, watched each of our movements with the greatest interest. The beating up an egg as a substitute for milk, excited universal astonishment; and the production of knives, forks, and spoons, took their breath away; but when our travelling teapot was placed on the table, their wonderment defies description; many started from their seats to obtain a near view of the extraordinary machine, and our host, after a minute examination, venturing, at last, to expose his ignorance by asking to what use it was applied, exclaimed in raptures, as if it was a thing he had heard of, "_y esa es una tepà!_"[164] "_Una tepà!_" was repeated in all the graduated intonations of the three generations of spectators present; "_una tepà! caramba! que gente tan fina los Ingleses!_" We now carried on the joke by inflating an air cushion, but the use to which it was applied alone surprised them; for our host with a nod signifying "I understand," took down a huge pig-skin of wine, and made preparations to transfer a portion of its contents to our portable _caoutchouc_ pillow. On explaining the purpose to which it was applied, "_Jesus! una almohada!_"[165] exclaimed all the women with one accord--"_Que gente tan deleytosa!_"[166] Our percussion pistols next excited their astonishment, and by ocular demonstration only could we convince them that they were fired without "una piedra;"[167] but when I assured our host that, in England, _diligences_ were propelled by steam at the rate of ten leagues an hour, his amazement was evidently stretched beyond the bounds of credulity. "_Como! sin caballos, sin mulas, sin nada, sino el vapor!_"[168] he ejaculated; and his shoulders gradually rising above his ears, as I repeated the astounding assertion, he turned with a look, half horror, half amazement, to his assembled countrymen, saying as plainly as eyes could speak--either these English deal largely with the devil, or are most extraordinary romancers. If our equipment surprised them, we were not less astonished at the number of cats, without tails, that were prowling about the house; and asking the reason for mutilating the unfortunate creatures in this unnatural way, our host replied, "These animals, to be useful, must have free access to every part of the premises; but, when their tails are long, they do incredible mischief amongst the plates, dishes, and other friable articles, arranged upon the dresser, or left upon the table; whereas, docked as you now see them, they move about without ceremony, and, even in the midst of a labyrinth of crockery, do not the slightest damage. All the mischief of this animal is in his tail." We had great difficulty in persuading our hospitable entertainer to accept of any remuneration for what he had furnished us, and only succeeded by requesting he would distribute our gift amongst his children. From his farm, which is called the _Cortijo de los Arenales_, to Granada, is nine miles. The country, during the whole distance, is undulated, and mostly covered with vines and olives. On the right, some leagues distant, we saw the town and _tajo_ of Moclin; and at three miles from the _Cortijo_ crossed the river Cubillas, which, flowing westward to the plain of Granada, empties itself into the Genil. A little way beyond this the Sierra de Elvira rises abruptly on the right, and thenceforth the ground falls very gradually all the way to Granada. Our sojourn at Granada was prolonged much beyond the period we had originally intended, by the difficulty of ascertaining the truth of a report that the cholera had appeared at Malaga; but, at length, it was officially notified by a proclamation of the captain-general, that in answer to a despatch sent to the governor of Malaga, he had been assured that city was perfectly free from the disease; and a caravan, composed of numberless _galeras_, _coches_, and _arrieros_, that had been detained at Granada for a fortnight in consequence of this rumour, forthwith proceeded to the sea-port. Sending our baggage animal forward, directing the mozo--whose indisposition had abated so as to allow of his rejoining us, and resuming his duty--to proceed along the high road to Loja until we overtook him, we set off ourselves at mid-day to visit the _Soto de Roma_.[169] The road thither strikes off from the _arrecife_ to Loja, soon after passing the city of Santa Fé,[170] and traversing Chauchina, after much twisting and turning, reaches Fuente Vaquero, a village belonging to the Duke of Wellington, where his agent, General O'Lawler, has a house. From thence a long avenue leads to the _Casa Real_, which is situated on the right bank of the Genil. The avenue, both trees and road, is in a very bad state. On the left hand there is a wood of some extent; the forest-trees it contains are chiefly elms and white poplars, but there are also a few oaks. The ground is extremely rich, and was covered with fine crops of maize and hemp; and, on the whole, it struck me the estate was in better order than the properties adjoining it. The house, however, which at the period of my former visit to Granada was in a tolerable state of repair, I now found in a wretched plight. The court-yard was made the general receptacle for manure; the coach-house and stables were turned into barns and cattle-sheds; the garden was overgrown with weeds; and, basking in the sun, lay young pigs amongst the roses. From having been the favourite retreat of the Minister Wall, it has degenerated, in fact, into a very second-rate description of farmhouse. This change, however, was inevitable; for, besides that the taste for country-houses is very rare amongst Spaniards, and that the difficulty of procuring a tenant who would keep it in order would, consequently, be very great, the situation of the house is not such as a lover of fine scenery would choose in the vicinity of Granada. The estate of the Soto de Roma has suffered great damage within the last few years, from the Genil having burst its banks, laid waste the country, and formed itself a new bed; and the stream not being now properly banked in, keeps continually "_comiendo_"[171] the ground on both sides. This evil should be corrected immediately, or, in the event of another extraordinary rise in the river, it may lead to incalculable mischief. The best and cheapest plan of doing this, would be to force the stream back into its old channel. The elm woods on the estate would furnish excellent piles for this purpose, and, by being cut down, would clear some valuable ground which at present lies almost profitless. After recrossing the Genil we arrived at another village, inhabited by the peasantry of the Soto de Roma, and soon after at a wretched place called Cijuela. The country in its vicinity was flooded for a considerable extent, and we had great difficulty in following the road, and avoiding the ditches that bound it. At length we got once more upon the _arrecife_, and reached Lachar; a vile place, reckoned four leagues from Granada. From thence to the Venta de Cacin is called two leagues, but they are of Brobdignag measurement. The road is heavy, and the country becomes hilly soon after leaving Lachar. A league beyond the Venta de Cacin is the Venta del Pulgar, situated in the midst of gardens and olive plantations. It was 11 P.M. when we arrived, for, having missed our way in fording the wide bed of the river Cacin (which crosses the road just beyond the Venta of that name), we had wandered for two hours in the dark; and might have done so until morning, but that our progress was cut short by the river Genil. We thought the wisest plan would be to return to the venta, and endeavour to procure a guide, which we fortunately succeeded in doing. The _ventero_ had previously informed us that he had seen our _mozo_ pass on with the baggage animal towards Loja, which made us rather anxious for its safety, otherwise we should have rested at his house for the night. On arriving at the Venta del Pulgar, we found our attendant established there, and in some little alarm at our prolonged absence. Indeed the faithful fellow was so uneasy, that he was about proceeding on a fresh horse in search of us. The night was excessively cold, and we duly appreciated the fire and hot supper his providence had caused to be prepared. This venta is but a short league from Loja, the ride to which place is very delightful, the rich valley of the Genil (here contracted to the width of a mile) being on the right, a fine range of mountains on the left, whilst the river frequently approaches close to the road, adding by its snakelike windings to the beauty of the scenery. The town of Loja stands on the south side of a rocky gorge, by which the Genil escapes from the fertile _Vega_ of Granada. The mountains on both sides the river are lofty, and of an inaccessible nature, so that the old Moorish fortress, though occupying the widest part of the défilé, completely commands this important outlet from the territory of Granada, as well as the bridge over the Genil. It was a place of great strength in times past, and Ferdinand and Isabella were repulsed with great loss on their first attempt to gain possession of it. The second attack of the "Catholic kings," made some years afterwards (i. e. in 1487), was more successful, and the English auxiliaries, under the Earl of Rivers, particularly distinguished themselves on the occasion. Loja is proverbially noted for the fertility of its gardens and orchards, the abundance and purity of its springs, and the loose morals and hard features of its inhabitants. Its situation is peculiarly picturesque, the town being built upon a steep acclivity, unbosomed in groves of fruit trees and overlooked by a toppling mountain. The view of the distant _Sierra Nevada_ gives additional interest to the scenery. It contains a population of 9000 souls. From Loja to Malaga is forty-three miles. The country throughout is extremely mountainous, but the road, nevertheless, is so good as to be traversed by a diligence. Soon after leaving Loja, a road strikes off to the right to Antequera, four leagues; and this, in fact, is the great road from Granada to Seville, and the only portion of it that is interrupted by mountains. The _arrecife_ to Malaga, leaving the village of Alfarnate to the left, at sixteen miles, reaches the solitary venta of the same name; and two miles beyond, the equally lonely venta of Dornejo, considered the half-way house from Loja. The view from hence is remarkably fine, and we enjoyed the scenery to perfection, having remained the night at the venta, and witnessed the splendid effects of both the setting and rising sun. This is the highest point the road reaches, and is, I should think, about 4000 feet above the level of the Mediterranean. From the Venta de Dornejo the road proceeds to El Colmenar, eight miles. The mountains that encompass this little town are clad to their very summits with vines, and from the luscious grapes grown in its neighbourhood is made the sweet wine, well known in England under the name of Mountain. From El Colmenar the road is conducted nine miles along the spine of a narrow tortuous ridge, that divides the Gualmedina, or river of Malaga, from various streams flowing to the eastward, reaching, at last, a point where a splendid view is obtained of the rich vale of Malaga, encircled by the boldly outlined mountains of Mijas, Monda, and Casarabonela. The _coup d'oeil_ is truly magnificent; the bright city lies basking in the sun, on the margin of the Mediterranean, seemingly at the spectator's feet; but eight miles of a continual descent have yet to be accomplished ere reaching it. The engineer's pertinacious adherence to his plan of keeping the road on one unvarying inclined plane, tries the patience to an extraordinary degree, but the work is admirably executed. In the whole of these last eight miles there is not one house on the road side, though several neat villas are scattered amongst the ravines below it, on drawing near Malaga. This difficult passage through the Serranía has been effected only at an enormous cost of money and labour; but, as a work of art, it ranks with any of the splendid roads lately made across the Alps. The scenery along it, especially after gaining the southern side of the principal mountain-chain, when the Mediterranean is brought to view, surpasses any thing that is to be met with in those more celebrated, because more frequented, cloud-capped regions. Another very fine road has been opened through the mountains between Malaga and Antequera. The scenery along this is very grand, though inferior to that just described. The distance between the two places is about twenty-eight miles, reckoned eight leagues. The road is conducted along the valley of Rio Gordo, or Campanillos; and, it is alleged, through some private influence was made unnecessarily circuitous, to visit the Venta de Galvez. This, and two other ventas, are almost the only habitations on the road. About four miles from Antequera, the road reaches the summit of the great mountain-ridge that pens in the Guadaljorce, which falls very rapidly on its northern side. Antequera is situated near the foot of the mountain, but in a hollow formed by a swelling hill, which, detached from the chain of sierra, shelters it to the north. It is a large, well-built, and populous city, contains twenty religious houses, numerous manufactories of linen and woollen cloths, silks, serges, &c., and 40,000 souls. An old castle, situated on a conical knoll, overlooks the city to the east. It formerly contained a valuable collection of ancient armour, but the greater part has been removed. The city of _Anticaria_ is mentioned in the Itinerary of Antoninus; but, as no notice is taken of it by Pliny, it probably was known in his day by some other name. Some antiquaries have imagined Antequera to be Singilia; but this is very improbable, as it is nearly four leagues distant from the Singilis (Genil). Even the Guadaljorce does not approach within a mile of the city, which depends upon its fountains for water; for though a fine rivulet flows down from the mountains at the back of the city, washing the eastern base of the castle hill, and sweeping round to the westward, where it unites with the Guadaljorce, yet it merely serves to render the valley fruitful, and to turn the wheels of the mills which supply the city with flour and oil. At a league north-east from Antequera a lofty conical mountain, distinguished by the romantic name of _El Peñon de los Enamorados_ (Rock of the Lovers), rises from the plain; and a league beyond it is the town of Archidona, on the great road from Granada to Seville. CHAPTER XIV. MALAGA--EXCURSION TO MARBELLA AND MONDA--CHURRIANA--BENALMAINA--FUENGIROLA--DISCREPANCY OF OPINION RESPECTING THE SITE OF SUEL--SCALE TO BE ADOPTED, IN ORDER TO MAKE THE MEASUREMENTS GIVEN IN THE ITINERARY OF ANTONINUS AGREE WITH THE ACTUAL DISTANCE FROM MALAGA TO CARTEIA--ERRORS OF CARTER--CASTLE OF FUENGIROLA--ROAD TO MARBELLA--TOWERS AND CASA FUERTES--DISPUTED SITE OF SALDUBA--DESCRIPTION OF MARBELLA--ABANDONED MINES--DISTANCE TO GIBRALTAR. We found Malaga a deserted city, for the dread of cholera had carried off half its inhabitants; not, however, to their last home, but to Alhaurin, Coin, Churriara, and other towns in the vicinity, in the hope of postponing their visit to a final resting-place by a temporary change to a more salubrious atmosphere than that of the fetid seaport. Our zealous and indefatigable consul, Mr. Mark, still, however, remained at his post, and his hospitality and kindness rendered our short stay as agreeable as, under existing circumstances, it well could be. Understanding that a vessel was about to proceed to Ceuta in the course of a few days, we resolved to take advantage of this favourable opportunity of visiting that fortress--the Port Jackson of Spain; and having already seen every thing worthy of observation in Malaga (of which due notice has been taken in a former chapter), we agreed to devote the intervening days to a short excursion to Marbella, Monda, and other interesting towns in the vicinity. Leaving, therefore, the still hot, but no longer bustling city, late in the afternoon, we took the road to the ferry near the mouth of the Guadaljorce, and leaving the road to _El Retiro_ to the right on gaining the southern bank of the river, proceeded to Churriana. We were disappointed both in the town and in the accommodation afforded at the inn, for the place being much resorted to by the merchants of Malaga, we naturally looked forward to something above the common run of Spanish towns and Spanish posadas, whereas we found both the one and the other rather below par. The town is quite as dirty as Malaga, but, perhaps, somewhat more wholesome; for the filth with which the streets are strewed _not_ being watered by a trickling stream, to keep it in a state of fermentation throughout the summer, is soon burnt up, and becomes innoxious. The town stands at a slight elevation above the vale of Malaga, and commands a fine view to the eastward. We left the wretched venta betimes on the following morning, and proceeded towards Marbella, leaving on our left the little village of Torre Molinos, situated on the Mediterranean shore (distant one league from Churriana), and reaching Benalmaina in two hours and a half. The road keeps the whole way within half a mile of the sea, and about the same distance from a range of barren sierras on the right. No part of it is good but the ascent to Benalmaina (or, as it is sometimes, and perhaps more correctly written, Benalmedina), is execrable. This village is surrounded with vineyards, and groves of orange and fig trees; is watered by a fine clear stream, which serves to irrigate some patches of garden-ground, as well as to turn numerous mill-wheels; and, from the general sterility of the country around, has obtained a reputation for amenity of situation that it scarcely deserves. In something less than an hour, descending the whole time, we reached the Mediterranean shore, and continuing along it for a mile, arrived at the Torre Blanca--a high white tower, situated on a rugged cliff that borders the coast, and in the vicinity of which are numerous ruins. Some little distance beyond this the cliffs terminate, and a fine plain, covered with gardens and orchards, stretches inland for several miles. Nature has been peculiarly bountiful to this sunny valley, for the river of Mijas winds through, and fertilizes the whole of its eastern side; whilst the western portion is watered by the river Gomenarro, or--word offensive to British ears--Fuengirola. The plain is about two miles across, and near its western extremity; and a little removed from the seashore is the fishing village of Fuengirola. It is a small and particularly dirty place, but contains a population of 1000 souls. The distance from Malaga is reckoned by the natives five leagues, "three long and two short," according to their curious mode of computation; but, I think, in reducing them to English miles, the usual average of four per league may be taken. The last league of the road is very good. The town of Mijas, rich in wine and oil, is perched high up on the side of a rugged mountain, about four miles north of Fuengirola. A _trocha_ leads from thence, over the mountains, into the valley of the Guadaljorce, debouching upon Alhaurinejo; and to those in whose travelling scales the picturesque outweighs the breakneck, I would strongly recommend this route from Malaga in preference to the tamer, somewhat better, and, perhaps, rather shorter road, that borders the coast. The old and, alas! too celebrated castle of Fuengirola, or Frangirola, occupies the point of a rocky tongue that juts some way into the sea, about half a mile beyond the fishing village of the same name. It is a work of the Moors, built, as some say, on an ancient foundation, imagined to be that of Suel; whilst others maintain, that the vestigia of antiquity built into its walls, were brought there from some place in the neighbourhood. That _Suel_ did not stand here appears to me very evident; for though the actual distance from Malaga to Fuengirola exceeds but little that given in the Itinerary of Antoninus from Malaca to Suel, viz., twenty-one miles--calculating seventy-five Roman miles to a degree of the meridian;--yet, as the Itinerary makes the whole distance from Malaca to Calpe Carteia eighty-nine miles,[172] whereas, even following all the sinuosities of the coast, it can be eked out only to eighty (of the above standard), it seems clear that the length of the mile has been somewhat overrated. That I may not incur the reproach of "extreme confidence," in venturing to publish an opinion differing from that of various learned antiquaries who have written on the subject, I will endeavour to show that my doubt has, at all events, some reasonable foundation to rest upon. Supposing that the distances given in the Itinerary between Malaca and Calpe Carteia were respectively correct, but that the error--which, in consequence, was evident--had been made by over-estimating the length of the Roman mile in use at the period the Itinerary was compiled, I found, by dividing the _actual_ distance into eighty-nine parts (following such an irregular line as a road, considering the ruggedness of the country, might be supposed to take), that it gave a scale of eighty-three and a third of such divisions to a degree of the meridian; a scale which, as I have observed in a former chapter, is mentioned by Strabo, on the authority of Eratosthenes, as one in use amongst the Romans. Now, by measuring off twenty-one such parts along the indented line of coast from Malaga westward, to fix the situation of Suel, I find that, according to this scale, it would be placed about a mile beyond the Torre Blanca; that is, at the commencement of the fertile valley, which has been mentioned as stretching some way inland, and at the bottom of the bay, of which the rocky ledge occupied by the castle of Fuengirola forms the western boundary; certainly a much more suitable site, either for a commercial city, or for a fortress, than the low, rocky headland of Fuengirola, which neither affords enough space for a town to stand upon, nor is sufficiently elevated above the adjacent country, to have the command that was usually sought for in building fortresses previous to the invention of artillery. Proceeding onwards, and measuring twenty-four divisions (of this same scale) from the point where I suppose Suel to have stood, along the yet rugged coast to the westward of Fuengirola, the site of Cilniana, the next station of the Itinerary, is fixed a little beyond where the town of Marbella now stands; another most probable spot for the Phoenicians or Romans to have selected for a station; as, in the first place, the proximity of the high, impracticable, Sierra de Juanel, would have enabled a fortress there situated to intercept most completely the communication along the coast; and, in the second, the vicinity of a fertile plain, and the valuable mines of Istan (from whence a fine stream flows), would have rendered it a desirable site for a port. The next distance, thirty-four miles to Barbariana, brings me to the _mouth_ of the Guadiaro, (which _can be_ no other than the Barbesula of the Romans, if we suppose that the road continued, as heretofore, along the seashore); or, carries me across that river, and also the Sogarganta, which falls into it, if, striking inland, _as soon as the nature of the country permitted_, we imagine the road to have been directed by the straightest line to its point of destination. Now, in the first case, the discovery of numerous vestigia, and inscriptions at a spot two miles up from the mouth, on the eastern bank of the Barbesula, (i. e. Guadiaro) have clearly proved that to be the position of the city[173] bearing the same name as the river. We must not, therefore, look in its neighbourhood for Barbariana; especially as the vestiges of this ancient town are twelve _English_ miles from Carteia, whereas the distance from Barbariana to Carteia is stated in the Itinerary to be but ten _Roman_ miles. In the second case, having crossed the Sogarganta about a mile above its confluence with the Guadiaro, we arrive, at the end of the prescribed thirty-four miles from Cilniana, at the mouth of a steep ravine by which the existing road from Gaucin and Casares to San Roque ascends the chain of hills forming the southern boundary of the valley, and this spot is not only well calculated for a military station, but exceeds by very little the distance of ten miles to Carteia, specified in the Itinerary. I suppose, therefore, that Barbariana stood here, where it would have been on the most direct line that a road _could take_ between Estepona and Carteia, as well as on that which presented the fewest difficulties to be surmounted in the nature of the country. I will now follow the Roman Itinerary as laid down by Mr. Carter, in his "Journey from Gibraltar to Malaga."[174] The first station, Suel, he fixes at the Castle of Fuengirola; the second, Cilniana, at the ruins of what he calls Old Estepona. These he describes as lying _three leagues_ to the eastward of the modern town of that name, and upwards of a league to the westward of the Torre de las Bovedas, in the vicinity of which he assumes Salduba stood; but this very site of Salduba (i. e. the Torre de las Bovedas) is little more than _two leagues_ from modern Estepona, being just half way between that place and Marbella--the distance from the one town to the other scarcely exceeding four leagues, or sixteen English miles--so that, in point of fact, he fixes Cilniana at _four miles_ to the eastward of Estepona, instead of three leagues. Passing over this error, however, and allowing that his site of Cilniana was where _he wished it to be_, Mr. Carter, nevertheless, still found himself in a difficulty; for he had already far exceeded the greater portion of the _actual_ distance between Malaga and Carteia, although but half the number of miles specified in the Itinerary were disposed of; so that twenty-five miles measured along the coast now brought him within the prescribed distance of Barbariana from Carteia (ten miles), instead of thirty-four, as stated in the Itinerary! To extricate himself, therefore, from this dilemma, he carries the road, first to the town of Barbesula, situated near the mouth of the river of the same name, and then _eight miles up the stream_ to Barbariana. The objections to this most eccentric route are, however, manifold and obvious. In the first place, had the road visited Barbesula, that town would assuredly have been noticed in the Itinerary of Antoninus, because it would have made so much more convenient a break in the distance between Cilniana and Carteia, than Barbariana. In the next,--had the road been taken to the mouth of the Guadiaro, it would _there_ have been as near Carteia as from any other point along the course of that river, with nothing in the nature of the intervening country to prevent its being carried straight across it: every step, therefore, that the road was taken up the stream would have unnecessarily increased the distance to be travelled. Thirdly,--had Barbariana been situated _eight miles_[175] up the river, the road from Barbesula must not only have been carried that distance out of the way to visit it, but, for the greater part of the way, must actually have been led back again towards the point of the compass whence it had been brought; and the town of Barbariana would thereby have been situated nearly eighteen miles from Calpe Carteia, instead of ten. Mr. Carter probably fell into this error, through ignorance of the direction whence the Guadiaro flows, for though the last four miles of its course is easterly, yet its previous direction is due south, or straight upon Gibraltar; and, consequently, taking the road up the stream beyond the distance of _four miles_, would have been leading it away from its destination. And if, on the other hand, we suppose that Mr. Carter's mistake be simply in the name of the river, and that, by two leagues up the Guadiaro, he meant up its tributary, the Sogarganta;[176] still, so long as the road continued following the course of that stream, it would get no nearer to Carteia, and was, therefore, but uselessly increasing the distance. It is quite unreasonable, however, to suppose that the Romans, who were in the habit of making their roads as straight as possible, should have so unnecessarily departed from their rule in this instance, and not only have increased the distance by so doing, but also the difficulties to be encountered; for, in point of fact, a road would be more readily carried to the Guadiaro by leaving the seashore on approaching Manilba, and directing it straight upon Carteia, than by continuing it along the rugged and indented coast that presents itself from thence to the mouth of the river. Objections may be taken to the sites I have fixed upon for the different towns mentioned in the Roman Itinerary, from the absence of all vestiges at those particular spots; but when the ease with which all traces of ancient places are lost is considered, particularly those situated on the seashore, I think such objections must fall to the ground: and, indeed, Carter himself, who found fault with Florez for supposing the town of Salduba[177] _could_ have entirely disappeared, furnishes a glaring instance of the futility of such objections, when he states that not the least remains of Barbesula were to be traced, whereas, _now_, they are quite visible. The castle of Fuengirola--to which it is time to return from this long digression--has lately undergone a thorough repair; the whole of the western front, indeed, has been rebuilt, and the rest of the walls have been modernised, though they still continue to be badly flanked by small projecting square towers, and are exposed to their very foundations, so that the fortress _ought not_ to withstand even a couple of hours' battering. From hence to Marbella is four leagues. During the first, the road is bad enough, and, for the remaining three, but indifferently good. The last eight miles of the stony track may, however, be avoided by riding along the sandy beach, which, when the sun is on the decline, the breeze light and westerly, and, above all, when the _tide is out_, is pleasant enough. I may as well observe here, that the Mediterranean Sea really does ebb and flow, notwithstanding anything others may have stated to the contrary. The whole line of coast bristles with towers, built originally to give intelligence by signal of the appearance of an enemy. They are of all shapes and ages; some circular, having a Roman look; others angular, and either Moorish, or built after Saracenic models; many are of comparatively recent construction, though all seem equally to be going to decay. These towers can be entered only by means of ladders, and such as are in a habitable state are occupied by Custom-house guards, or, more correctly, Custom-house defrauders. Here and there a _Casa fuerta_ has been erected along the line, which, furnished with artillery and a small garrison of regular troops, serves as a _point d'appui_ to a certain portion of the _peculative_ cordon, enabling the soldiers to render assistance to the revenue officers in bringing the smugglers to _terms_. Marbella has ever been a bone of contention amongst the antiquaries; some asserting that it does not occupy the site of any ancient city; others, that it is on the ruins of _Salduba_. Of this latter opinion is La Martinière, who certainly has better reason for maintaining than Carter for disputing it. For if that city "stood on a steep headland, between which and the hill" (behind) "not a beast could pass," it could not possibly have been on the site where our countryman places it, viz., at the ruins near the _Torre de las Bovedas_ (seven miles to the westward), where a wide plain stretches inland upwards of two miles. In fact, there are but two headlands between the river Guadiaro and Marbella, where a town could be built at all answering the foregoing description; namely, at the _Torre de la Chullera_ and the _Torre del Arroyo Vaquero_, the former only three, the latter ten miles from the Guadiaro: and a far more likely spot than either of these is the knoll occupied by the _Torre del Rio Real_, about two miles to the _eastward_ of Marbella.[178] Marbella stands slightly elevated above the sea, and its turreted walls and narrow streets declare it to be thoroughly Moorish. Its sea-wall is not actually washed by the waves of the Mediterranean, so that the town may be avoided by such as do not wish to be delayed by or subjected to the nuisance of a passport scrutiny; and the Spanish saying, "_Marbella es bella, pero no entras en ella_,"[179] significantly, though mysteriously, suggests the prudence of staying outside its walls; but this poetical scrap of advice was perhaps the only thing some luckless _contrabandista_ had left to bestow upon his countrymen, and we, being in search of a dinner and night's lodging, submitted patiently to the forms and ceremonies prescribed on such occasions at the gates of a fortress. To do the Spaniards justice, they are not usually very long in their operations, the first offer being in most instances accepted without haggling; and accordingly, the _peseta_ pocketed, and every thing pronounced _corriente_, we proceeded without further obstruction to the _Posada de la Corona_, which, situated in a fine airy square, we were agreeably surprised to find a remarkably good inn. Marbella, though invested with the pomp and circumstance of war, is but a contemptible fortress. An old Moorish castle, standing in the very heart of the town, constitutes its chief strength; for, though its circumvallation is complete and tolerably erect, considering its great age, yet, from the inconsiderable height of the walls, and the inefficient flanking fire that protects them, they could offer but slight resistance to an enemy. A detached fort, that formerly covered the place from attack on the sea side, and flanked the eastern front of the enceinte of the town, has been razed to the ground, so that ships may now attack it almost with impunity. The town is particularly clean and well inhabited, the fishing portion of the population being located more conveniently for their occupation in a large suburb on its eastern side. The fortress encloses several large churches and religious houses, besides the citadel or Moorish castle, so that within the walls the space left for streets is but small; the inhabitants of the town itself cannot therefore be estimated at more than five thousand, whilst those of the suburb may probably amount to fifteen hundred. The trade of Marbella is but trifling; the fruit and vegetables grown in its neighbourhood are, it is true, particularly fine, but the proximity of the precipitous Sierra de Juanal limits cultivation to a very narrow circuit round the walls of the town; and, on the other hand, the valuable mines in the vicinity, which formerly secured Marbella a prosperous trade, have for many years been totally abandoned: so that, in fact, there is little else than fish to export. There is no harbour, but vessels find excellent holding ground and in deep water, close to the shore; the landing also is good, being on a fine hard sand, and I found a small pier in progress of construction. It seems probable that in remote times numerous commercial towns were situated along the coast, between Malaca and Calpe, whence a thriving trade was carried on with the East, for the whole chain of mountains bordering the Mediterranean abounds in metallic ores, especially along that part of the coast between Marbella and Estepona; and it is evident that mining operations on an extensive scale were formerly carried on here, since the tumuli formed by the earth excavated in searching for the precious metals are yet to be seen, as well as the bleached channels by which the water that penetrated into the mines was led down the sides of the mountains. The metals contained in this range of mountains are, principally, silver, copper, lead, and iron; of the two former I have seen some very fine specimens. The richness and comparative proximity of these mines led the Phoenicians and Romans, by whom there is no doubt they were worked, to neglect the copper mines of Cornwall; for, whilst necessity obliged them to come to England for tin, it is observable that in many places, where, in working for that metal, they came also upon lodes of copper, they carried away the tin only; a circumstance that has rendered some of the recently worked Cornish copper mines singularly profitable, and leads naturally to the supposition that the ancients procured copper at a less expense from some other country. In the same way that the old Roman mines in England, from our knowledge of the vast power of steam, and of the means of applying that power to hydraulical purposes, have been reopened with great advantage, so also might those of Spain be again worked with a certainty of success. Capital and security--the two great wants of Spain--are required however to enable adventurers to embark in the undertaking. Marbella is four leagues from Estepona, and ten from Gibraltar; but though the first four may be reckoned at the usual rate of four miles each, yet the remaining six cannot be calculated under four and a half each, making the whole distance to Gibraltar forty-three miles, and from Malaga to Gibraltar seventy-nine miles.[180] CHAPTER XV. A PROVERB NOT TO BE LOST SIGHT OF WHILST TRAVELLING IN SPAIN--ROAD TO MONDA--SECLUDED VALLEY OF OJEN--- MONDA--DISCREPANCY OF OPINION RESPECTING THE SITE OF THE ROMAN CITY OF MUNDA--IDEAS OF MR. CARTER ON THE SUBJECT--REASONS ADDUCED FOR CONCLUDING THAT MODERN MONDA OCCUPIES THE SITE OF THE ANCIENT CITY--ASSUMED POSITIONS OF THE CONTENDING ARMIES OF CNEIUS POMPEY AND CÆSAR, IN THE VICINITY OF THE TOWN--ROAD TO MALAGA--TOWNS OF COIN AND ALHAURIN--BRIDGE OVER THE GUADALJORCE--RETURN TO GIBRALTAR--NOTABLE INSTANCE OF THE ABSURDITY OF QUARANTINE REGULATIONS. "_Mas vale paxaro en mano, que buytre volando_"--_Anglicè_, a bird in the hand is worth more than a vulture flying--is a proverb that cannot be too strongly impressed upon the minds of travellers in Spain; and, acting up to the spirit of this wise saw, we did not leave our comfortable quarters at the _Posada de la Corona_ until after having made sure of a breakfast. For, deeming even a cup of milk at Marbella worth more than a herd of goats up the sierra, there appeared yet more reason to think that no venta on the unfrequented mountain track by which we purposed returning to Malaga could furnish anything half so estimable as the _café au lait_ promised overnight, and placed before us soon after daybreak. We commenced ascending the steep side of the _Sierra de Juanal_ immediately on leaving Marbella, and, in something under an hour, reached a pass, on the summit of a ridge, whence a lovely view opens to the north. The little town of Ojen lies far down below, embosomed in a thicket of walnut, chesnut, and orange trees; whilst all around rise lofty sierras, clothed, like the valley, with impervious woods, though with foliage of a darker hue, their forest covering consisting principally of cork and ilex. Numerous torrents, (whose foaming streams can only occasionally be seen dashing from rock to rock amidst the dense foliage) furrow the sides of the impending ridges, directing their course towards the little village, threatening, seemingly, to overwhelm it by their united strength; but, wasting their force against the cragged knoll on which it stands, they collect in one body at its foot, and, as if exhausted by the struggle, flow thenceforth tranquilly towards the Mediterranean, meandering through rich vineyards, and under verdant groves of arbutus, orange, and oleander. Excepting by this outlet, along the precipitous edge of which our road was practised, there seemed to be no possibility of leaving the sylvan valley, so completely is it hemmed in by wood and mountain. The descent from the pass occupied nearly as much time as had been employed in clambering up to it from the sea-coast, but the road is better. The situation of the little town, on the summit of a scarped rock, clustered over with ivy and wild vines, and moistened by the spray of the torrents that rush down on either side, is most romantic; the place, however, is miserable in the extreme, containing some two hundred wretched hovels, mostly mud-built, and huddled together as if for mutual support. An ill-conditioned _pavé_ zigzags up to it, and proceeds onwards along the edge of a deep ravine towards Monda. The woods, rocks, and water afford ever-varying and enchanting vistas, but, from the vile state of the road, it is somewhat dangerous to pay much attention to the beauties of nature. In something more than an hour from Ojen, we reached a pass in the northern part of the mountain-belt that girts it in, whence we took a last lingering look at the lovely valley, compared to which the country now lying before us appeared tame and arid. The fall of the mountain on the western side is much more gradual than towards the Mediterranean, and the road--which does not however improve in due proportion--descends by an easy slope towards the little river Seco. The valley, at first, is wide, open, and uncultivated; but, at the end of about a mile, it contracts to an inconsiderable breadth, and the steep hills that border it give signs of the husbandman's toils, being every where planted with vines and olive trees. Arriving now at the margin of the _Seco_, the road crosses and recrosses the rivulet repeatedly, in consequence of the rugged nature of its banks, and, at length, quitting the pebbly bed of the stream, and crossing over a lofty mountain ridge that overlooks it to the east, the stony track brings us to Monda, which is nestled in a deep ravine on the opposite side of the mountain, and commanded by an old castle situated on a rocky knoll to the north-west. The view from the summit of this mountain is very extensive, embracing the greater portion of the _Hoya_ de Malaga, the distant sea-bound city, and yet more remote sierras of Antequera, Alhama, and Granada. The descent to Monda is extremely bad, though by no means rapid. The distance of this place from Marbella is stated in the Spanish Itineraries to be three leagues, but the incessant windings of the road make it fourteen miles, at least. The houses of Monda are mostly poor, though some of the streets are wide and good. The population is estimated at 2,000 souls. It is to this day a mooted question amongst Spanish antiquaries whether Monda, or Ronda _la Vieja_, (as some of them call the ruins of Acinippo), or any other of several supposed places, be the Roman _Munda_, where Cneius Scipio gave battle to the Carthaginian generals, Mago and Asdrubal, B.C. 211, and near whose walls Julius Cæsar concluded his wonderful career of victory by the defeat of Cneius Pompey the younger, B.C. 42. From this discrepancy of opinion, and the inaccuracy of the Spanish maps, I am induced to offer the following observations (the result of a careful examination of the country), touching the site of this once celebrated spot. And, first, with respect to Ronda and Ronda _la Vieja_, I may repeat what I have already stated in a former chapter, that neither the situation of those places, nor the nature of the ground in their vicinity, agrees in any one respect with the description of Munda and its battle-field, as given by Hirtius;[181] nor, from discoveries that have recently been made, does there appear to be any ground left for doubting that those places occupy the sites of Arunda and Acinippo. Of the other positions which have been assigned to _Munda_, that most insisted upon is a spot "three leagues to the _west_ of the present town of Monda,"[182] and here Carter, adopting the opinion of Don Diego Mendoza, confidently places it, stating that bones of men and horses had, in former days, been dug up there; that the peasants called the spot _Monda la Vieja_, and averred they sometimes saw squadrons of apparitions fighting in the air with cries and shouts! Such a host of circumstantial and phantasmagorical evidence our countryman considered irresistible, and concluded, accordingly, that this spot could be no other than that whereon the two mighty Roman armies contended for empire. He admits, however, that, even in the days of his precursor, Don Diego, "scarcely any ruins were to be found, the _whole_ having by degrees been transplanted to modern Monda and other places." Why they should have been carried three leagues across some of the loftiest mountains in the country, to be used merely as building stones, he does not attempt to explain, but, believing such to be the case, one wonders it never struck him as being somewhat extraordinary that these pugnacious ghosts should continue fighting for a town of which not a stone remains. But, leaving Mr. Carter for the present, I will retrace my steps to modern Monda, where it must be acknowledged some little difficulty is experienced in fitting the Roman city to the spot allotted to it on the maps, as well as in placing the contending armies upon the ground in its neighbourhood, so as to agree with the order in which they were arrayed on the authority of Hirtius. Still, with certain admissions, which admissions I do not consider it by any means unreasonable to beg, all apparent discrepancies may be reconciled and difficulties overcome; and, on the other hand, unless these points be granted, Ronda, Gaucin, or Gibraltar agree just as well with the Munda of the Roman historian as the little town of Monda I am about to describe. It will be necessary, however, for the perfect understanding of the subject,--and, I trust, my endeavour to establish the site of Cæsar's last battle-field will be considered one of sufficient interest to warrant a little prolixity,--to take a glance at the country in the vicinity of Monda, ere proceeding to describe the actual ground whereon, according to my idea, the contending armies were drawn up; as it is only from a knowledge of the country, and of the communications that intersected it, that the reasons can be gathered for such a spot having been selected for a field of battle. The old castle of Monda, under the walls of which we must suppose--for this is one of the premised admissions--the town to have been clustered, instead of being, as at present, sunk in a ravine, stands on the eastern side of a rocky ridge, projected in a northerly direction from the lofty and wide-spreading mountain-range, that borders the Mediterranean between Malaga and Estepona. This range is itself a ramification of the great mountain-chain that encircles the basin of Ronda, from which it branches off in a southerly direction, and under the names of Sierras of Tolox, Blanca, Arboto, and Juanal, presents an almost impassable barrier between the valley of the Rio Verde (which falls into the Mediterranean, three miles west of Marbella), and the fertile plains bordering the Guadaljorce. This steep and difficult ridge terminates precipitously about Marbella; but another branch of the range, sweeping round the little town of Ojen, turns back for some miles to the north, rises in two lofty peaks above Monda, and then, taking an easterly direction, juts into the Mediterranean at Torre Molinos. The towns of Coin and Alhaurin are situated, like Monda, on rocky projections from the north side of this range, overhanging the vale of Malaga; and the solitary town of Mijas stands upon its southern acclivity, looking towards the sea. The rugged ramification on which Monda is situated stretches north about two miles from the double-peaked sierra above mentioned; and though completely overlooked by that mountain, yet, in every other direction, it commands all the ground in its immediate neighbourhood, and, without being very elevated, is every where steep, and difficult of access. The summit of the ridge is indented by various rounded eminences, and, consequently, is of very unequal breadth, as well as height. The castle of Monda stands on one of these knolls, but quite on the eastern side of the hill, the breadth of which, in this place, scarcely exceeds 400 yards. At its furthest extremity, however, the ridge, which extends northward, _nearly a mile_, beyond the town, sends out a spur to the east, following the course of, and falling abruptly to the Rio Seco; and the breadth of the hill may here be said to be increased to nearly two miles. Between the river Seco and the Rio Grande (a more considerable stream, which runs nearly parallel to, and about seven miles from the Seco), the country, though rudely moulded, is by no means lofty; but round the sources of the latter river, and along its left bank, rise the huge sierras of Junquera, Alozaina, and Casarabonela, closing the view from Monda to the north. From the description here given it will be apparent, that the communications across so mountainous a country must not only be few, but very bad. Such, indeed, is the asperity of the sierras west of Monda, that no road whatever leads through them; and, to the south, but one tolerable road presents itself to cross the lateral ridge, bordering the Mediterranean, between Marbella and Torre Molinos, viz., that by which we had traversed it. Even on the other half circle round Monda, where the country is of a more practicable nature, only two roads afford the means of access to that town, viz., one from Guaro, where the different routes from Ronda (by Junquera), El Burgo, Alozaina, and Casarabonela, unite; the other from Coin, upon which place, from an equal necessity, those from Alora, Antequera, and Malaga, are first directed. Monda thus becomes the point of concentration of all the roads proceeding from the inland towns to Marbella; the pass of Ojen, in its rear, offering the only passage through the mountains to reach that city. The road from this pass, as has already been described, approaches Monda by the valley watered by the river Seco; which stream, directed in the early part of its course by the Sierra de Monda on its right, flows nearly due north for about a mile and a half beyond where the road to Monda leaves its bank, receiving in its progress several tributary streams that rise in the mountains on its left. On gaining the northern extremity of the ridge of Monda, the rivulet winds round to the eastward, still washing the base of that mountain, but leaving the hilly country on its left bank, along which a plain thenceforth stretches for several miles. The stream again, however, becomes entangled in some broken and intricate country, ere reaching the wide plain of the Guadaljorce, into which river it finally empties itself. The situation of Monda, with reference to the surrounding country, having now been fully described, it is necessary, ere proceeding to shew that the ground in its neighbourhood answers perfectly the account given of it by Hirtius, to offer some remarks on the causes that may be supposed to have led to a collision between the hostile Roman armies on such a spot, since the present unimportant position of Monda seems to render such an event very improbable. Cæsar, it would appear, after the fall of Ategua, proceeded to lay siege to Ventisponte and Carruca--two places, whose positions have baffled the researches of the most learned antiquaries to determine--his object, evidently, having been to induce Pompey to come to their relief. His adversary, however, was neither to be forced nor tempted to depart from his politic plan of "drawing the war out into length;" but, retiring into the mountains, compelled Cæsar, whose interest it was, on the other hand, to bring the contest to as speedy an issue as possible, to follow him into a more defensible country. With this view, leaving the wide plain watered by the Genil and Guadaljorce on the northern side of the mountains, Pompey, we may imagine, retired towards the Mediterranean, and stationed himself at Monda; a post that not only afforded him a formidable defensive position, but that gave him the means of resuming hostilities at pleasure, since it commanded the roads from Cartama to Hispalis (Seville), by way of Ronda, and from Malaca, along the Mediterranean shore, to Carteía,[183] where his fleet lay; and, should his adversary not follow him, the situation thus fixed upon was admirably adapted for carrying the war into the country in arms against him, the two opulent cities of Cartama and Malaca (which there is every reason to conclude were attached to the cause of Cæsar), being within a day's march of Monda. Here, therefore, Pompey occupied a strategical point of great importance; and Cæsar, fully aware of the advantage its possession gave his opponent, determined to attack him at all risks. The hostile armies were separated from each other by a plain five miles in extent.[184] That of Cæsar was drawn up in this plain, his cavalry posted on the left; whilst the army of Pompey, whose cavalry was stationed on _both_ wings, occupied a strong position on a range of mountains, protected on one side by the town of Munda, "_situated on an eminence_;" on the other, by the nature of the ground, "_for across this valley_" (i.e. that divided the two armies), "_ran a rivulet, which rendered the approach to the mountain extremely difficult, because it formed a morass on the right_." Now although the town of Munda is here described as protecting Pompey's army on one side, yet from what follows it must be inferred that it was some distance in the rear of his position, since, not only is it stated that "_Pompey's army was at length obliged to give ground and retire towards the town_," but it may be taken for granted that, had either flank rested upon the town, the cavalry would _not_ have been posted on "_both wings_." Moreover, it is stated that "_Cæsar made no doubt but that the enemy would descend to the plain and come to battle_," the superiority of cavalry being greatly on Pompey's side--"_but_," Hirtius proceeds to say, "_they durst not advance a mile from the town_," and, in spite of the advantageous opportunity offered them, "_still kept their post on the mountain in the neighbourhood of the town_." It may therefore be fairly concluded, that Pompey's position was on the edge of a range of hills, some little distance in advance of the town of Munda, having a stream running in a deep valley along its front, and a morass on one flank. Now the question is, Can the ground about Monda be made to agree with these various premises? Certainly not, if, as is generally assumed, the battle was fought on the eastern side of the town; for Pompey's position must, in that case, have extended along the ridge, so as to have the peaked Sierra, above Monda, on its right, and the river Seco on its left, whilst Monda itself would have been an advanced post of the line; and so far from there being a plain "_five miles_" in extent in front, the country to the east of Monda--though for some way but slightly marked--is, at the distance of _two_ miles, so abruptly broken as to render the drawing up of a Roman army impossible. In addition to these objections it will be obvious that the half of Pompey's cavalry on the right, would have been posted on a high mountain, where it could not possibly act, whilst the whole of Cæsar's (on his left), would have been paralyzed by having to manoeuvre on the acclivity of a steep mountain and against a fortified town, instead of being kept in the valley of the river Seco, ready to fall upon the weak part of the enemy's line as soon as it should be broken. What, however, seems to me to be fatal to the supposition that this was the side of the town on which the battle was fought is, that Cæsar's army would have occupied the road by which alone the small portion of Pompey's army, that escaped, could have retired upon Cordoba. Against the supposition that the battle took place on the _western_ side of the ridge on which Monda is situated, the objections, though not so numerous, are equally insurmountable; since there is nothing like a plain whereon Cæsar's army could have been drawn up; the valley of the river Seco being so circumscribed that, for Pompey's army to have "_advanced a mile from Monda_," it must not only have crossed the stream, but mounted the rough hills that there border its left bank; whereas Cæsar's army is stated to have been posted in a plain that extended five miles from Monda. The half of Pompey's cavalry on the _left_ would, in this case also, have been uselessly posted on an eminence. In other respects the supposition is admissible enough, since Monda would have been in the rear of the left of Pompey's position, but still a support to the line, and the whole front would have been "_difficult of approach_," and along the course of a rivulet. We will now examine the ground to the north of the town, to which it strikes me no insuperable objections can be raised. We may suppose that Pompey took post with his army fronting Toloz and Guaro, the only direction in which his enemy could be looked for, and where the ground is so little broken, as certainly to allow of its being called _a plain_, as compared with the rugged country that encompasses it on all sides; and his position would naturally have been taken up along the edge of the last ramification of the ridge of Monda, which extends about two miles from west to east along the right bank of the river Seco. The town would then have been half a mile or so _in rear_ of the left centre of Pompey's position; _a rivulet_, "_rendering the approach of the mountain difficult_," would have run along its front. His cavalry would naturally have been disposed on _both flanks_, where, the hills terminating, it would be most at hand either to act offensively, or for the security of the position; and the cavalry of Cæsar, on the contrary, would _all_ have been posted on _his_ left, where the access to Pompey's position was easiest, and where, in case of his enemy's defeat, its presence would have produced the most important results. We may readily conceive, also, that in times past _a morass_ bordered the Seco where it first enters the plain, since several mountain streams there join it, whose previously rapid currents must have experienced a check on reaching this more level country. The industrious Moslems, probably, by bringing this fertile plain into cultivation, drained the morass so that no traces of it are now perceptible, but twenty years hence there may possibly be another. Every condition required, therefore, to make the ground agree with the description given of it by Hirtius, is here fulfilled; and, occupying such a position, the army of Pompey seemed likely to obtain the ends which we cannot but suppose its general had in view. The objections of Mr. Carter to modern Monda being the site of the Roman city are, first, the want of space in its vicinity for two such vast hosts to be drawn up in battle array; and, secondly, the little distance of the existing town from the river Sigila and city of Cártama, which, according to an ancient inscription, referring to the repairs of a road from Munda to Cártama, he states was twenty miles. In consequence of these imaginary discrepancies, he suffered himself to be persuaded that the spot where the apparitions are fighting "three leagues to the westward of the modern town," is the site of the Roman _Munda_. In which case it must have been situated in a _narrow valley_, bounded on all sides by lofty mountains, and _twenty-eight_ Roman miles, at least, from the city of Cártama! With respect to his first objections, however, it may be observed, that the _want of space_ can only apply to the army posted on the mountain, for, on the level country between its base and the village of Guaro, an army of any amount might be drawn up. And as regards the mountain, as I have already stated, its north front offers a strong position, nearly two miles in extent, and one in depth. Now, considering the compact order in which Roman armies were formed; the number of lines in which they were in the habit of being drawn up; and making due allowance for exaggeration[185] in the number of the contending hosts; such a space, I should say, was more than sufficient for Pompey's army. In reply to the second objection urged by Mr. Carter, I may, in the first place, observe, that the inscription whereon it is grounded-- * * * * * A MVNDA ET FLVVIO SIGILA AD CERTIMAM VSQVE XX M.P.P.S. RESTITVIT.[186]-- seems to have no reference to the actual distance between Munda and Cártama, since, by attaching any such meaning to it--coupled as Munda is with the river Sigila--the inscription, to one acquainted with the country, becomes quite unintelligible. Thus, if translated: "From Munda and the river Sigila, he (i. e. the Emperor Hadrian) restored the twenty miles of road to Cártama," any one would naturally conclude that Munda was upon the Sigila, and Cártama at a distance of twenty miles from it; whereas, whatever may have been the situation of Munda, Cártama certainly stood upon the very bank of the river. It must, therefore, either have been intended to imply that the Emperor restored twenty miles of a road which from Munda and the sources,[187] or upper part of the course of the Sigila, led to Cártama, and various traces of such a Roman road exist to this day on the road to Ronda by Junquera; or, that the road from Munda was conducted along part of the course of the Sigila ere it reached Cártama: and such, from the nature of the ground, undoubtedly was the case, since Cártama stood at the eastern foot of a steep mountain, the northern extremity of which must (in military parlance) have been turned, to reach it from Monda, and the road, in making this détour, would first reach the river Guadaljorce, or Sigila. In this case it must be admitted that the _twenty miles_ refer to the actual distance between the two towns, and this tends only more firmly to establish modern Monda on the site of the Roman town, since the distance from thence to Cártama, measured with _a pair of compasses_ on a _correct_ map,[188] is fourteen English miles, which are equal to fifteen Roman of seventy-five to a degree, or seventeen of eighty-three and one third to a degree; and considering the hilly nature of the country which the road must unavoidably have traversed, the distance would have been fully increased to twenty miles, either by the ascents and descents if carried in a straight line from place to place, or by describing a very circuitous course if taken along the valley of the Rio Seco. Carter further remarked upon the foregoing inscription that "it seems to place" Munda to the _west_ of the river Sigila, which ran _between_ that town and Cártama; but this, he said, does not agree with the situation of modern Monda, which is on the same side the river as Cártama. I suppose for _west_ he meant to say _east_, but, in either case, his assumed site for Munda, "three leagues to the west of the present town," is open to this very same objection, and to the yet graver one, of being--even allowing that he meant English leagues--_twenty-three English miles_ in a _direct_ line from the town of Cártama, and in a contracted and secluded valley, to the possession of which, no military importance could possibly have been attached. On the whole, therefore, I see no reason to doubt what, for so many years was looked upon as certain, viz., that the modern town of Monda is on the site of the ancient city. I must nevertheless own that in following strictly the text of Hirtius, an objection presents itself to this spot with reference to the relative position of Ursao; that is, if Osuna be Ursao; since, in allusion to Pompey's resolve to receive battle at Munda, he says that Ursao "served as a sure resource _behind_ him."[189] This objection holds equally good with the position Carter assigns to Munda; but that there is some error respecting Ursao is evident, for, if Osuna be Ursao, then Hirtius described it most incorrectly by saying it was exceedingly strong by nature, and eight miles distant from any rivulet.[190] And, on the other hand, it is clear that Ursao did _not_ serve as a _sure_ resource to Pompey, since no part of his defeated army found refuge there. We must read this passage, therefore, as implying rather that Pompey _calculated_ on Orsao as a place of refuge, but that, by the able manoeuvres of his adversary, he was cut off from it. Now a town placed high up in the mountains like Alozaina, or Junquera, and like them distant from any stream but that which rises within their walls, answers the description of Orsao, much better than Osuna;[191] and, supposing one of these, or any other town in the vicinity, similarly situated, to have been Orsao, Pompey might have flattered himself that he could fall back upon it in the event of being defeated at Monda. Cæsar, however, by moving along the valley of the Seco, and, taking post in the plain to the north of Pompey's position, effectually deprived him of this resource. The modern town of Monda contains numerous fragments of monuments, inscriptions, &c., which, though none of them actually prove it to be on the site of the ancient place of the same name, satisfactorily shew that it stands near some old Roman town, and that, therefore, to call it _new_ Monda, in contradistinction to _Monda la vieja_, is absurd. The road to Coin traverses a succession of tongues, which, protruding from the side of the steep Sierra de Monda on the right, fall gradually towards the Rio Seco, which flows about a mile off on the left. For the first three miles the undulations are very gentle, and the face of the country is covered with corn, but, on arriving at the Peyrela, a rapid stream that rushes down from the mountains in a deep rocky gully, the ground becomes much more broken, and the hills on both sides are thickly wooded. The road, nevertheless, continues very good, and in about two miles more reaches Coin. The approach to this town is very beautiful. It is situated some way up the northern acclivity of a high wooded hill, and commands a splendid view of the valley of the Guadaljorce. Coin is supposed to be of Moorish origin, and, from the amenity of its situation, abundance of crystal springs and fruitfulness of its orchards, was, no doubt, a favourite place of retreat with the turbaned conquerors of Spain. Nor are its merits altogether lost upon the present less contemplative race of inhabitants, for they flee to its pure atmosphere whenever any endemic disease frightens them from the close and crowded streets of filthy Malaga. During the last few years that the divided Moslems yet endeavoured to struggle against the fate that too clearly awaited them, the fields of Coin were doomed to repeated devastations, though the city itself still set the Christian hosts at defiance; but at length the artillery of Ferdinand and Isabella reduced it to submission, A.D. 1485. The population of Coin is estimated by the Spanish authorities at 9000 souls, but I should say it is considerably less. The houses are good, streets well paved, and the place altogether is clean and wholesome. The posada, except in outward appearance, is not in keeping with the town. It is a large white-washed building, with great pretensions and small comfort. We left it at daybreak without the least regret, carrying our breakfast with us to enjoy _al fresco_. At the foot of the hill two roads to Malaga offer themselves, one by way of Cártama (distant ten miles), which turns the Sierra Gibalgalía to the north, the other by Alhaurin, which crosses the neck of land connecting that mountain with the more lofty sierras to the south. The distance is pretty nearly the same by both, and is reckoned five leagues, but the _leguas_ are any thing but _regulares_, and may be taken at an average of four miles and a half each. The first named is a carriage road, and the country flat nearly all the way; we therefore chose the latter, as likely to be more picturesque. In about an hour from Coin, we reached a clear stream, which, confined in a deep gulley, singularly scooped out of the solid rock, winds round at the back of Alhaurin, and tumbles over a precipice on the side of the impending mountain. The crystal clearness of the water and beauty of the spot, tempted us to halt and spread the contents of our alforjas on the green bank of the rivulet, though the white houses of Alhaurin, situated immediately above, peeped out from amidst trelissed vines and perfumed orange groves, seeming to beckon us on. But appearances are proverbially deceitful all over the world, and more especially in Spanish towns, as we had recently experienced at Coin. Our repast finished, we remounted our horses, and ascended the steep acclivity, on the lap of which the town stands. The environs are beautifully wooded, and the place contains many tasteful houses and gardens, wide, clean, and well-paved streets, abundance of refreshing fountains, and groves of orange and other fruit trees, and, in fact, is a most delightful place of abode. The view from it is yet finer than from Coin, embracing, besides the fine chain of wooded sierras above Alozaina and Casarabonela, the lower portion of the vale of Malaga, and the splendid mountains that stretch into the Mediterranean beyond that city. Nevertheless, in spite of these advantages, the scared _Malagueños_ consider Coin a more secure retreat from the dreaded yellow fever than Alhaurin, perhaps because from the former even the view of their abandoned city is intercepted. Alhaurin contains, probably, 5000 inhabitants. The road from thence to Malaga is _carriageable_ throughout. It winds along the side of the mountain, continuing nearly on a dead level from the town to the summit of the pass that connects the Sierra Gibalgalía with the mountains of Mijas; thence it descends gradually, by a long and rather confined ravine, into the vale of Malaga. Arrived in the plain, it leaves the little village of Alhaurinejo about half a mile off on the right, and at thirteen miles from Alhaurin reaches a bridge over the Guadaljorce. This bridge, commenced on a magnificent scale by one of the bishops of Malaga, was to have been built entirely of stone; but, before the work was half completed, either the worthy dignitary of the church came to the last of his days, or to the bottom of his purse, and it is left to be completed, "_con el tiempo_"--a very celebrated Spanish bridge-maker. Forty-four solid stone piers remain, however, to bear witness to the good and liberal intentions of the bishop; and the weight of a rotten wooden platform, which has since been laid down, to afford a passage across the stream when swollen by the winter torrents, for at most other times it is fordable. A road to the Retiro and Churriana continues down the right bank of the river; but that to Malaga crosses the bridge, and on gaining the left bank of the river is joined by the roads from Casarabonda and Cártama. From hence to Malaga is about five miles. On arriving at Malaga we found the dread of cholera had attained such a height during our short absence, that the _Xebeque_, for Ceuta, had sailed, whilst clean bills of health were yet issued. We also thought it advisable to save our passports from being tainted, and, without further loss of time, departed for Gibraltar by land. Our haste, however, booted us but little; for, amongst the absurdities of quarantine be it recorded, on reaching the British fortress, on the morning of the third day from Malaga, admittance was refused, until we had undergone a three days' purification at San Roque. Thither we repaired, therefore; and there we remained during the prescribed period, shaking hands daily with our friends from the garrison, until the dreaded _virus_ was supposed to have parted with all its infectious properties. Our _decorated_ attendant had left us on reaching Malaga, promising to take the earliest opportunity of acquainting us with the result of an ordeal, to which the little blind God, in one of his most capricious moods, had been pleased to subject two of his votaries. The circumstances attending this trial of _true love_, will be found related in the following chapter, which contains also a sketch of the previous history of the hero of the tale, the knight of San Fernando. CHAPTER XVI. THE KNIGHT OF SAN FERNANDO. _Don Fernando Septimo, por la gracia de Dios, rey de Castilla, de Leon, de Aragon, de las dos Sicilias, de Jerusalem, de Navarra, de Granada, de Toledo, de Valencia, de Galicia, de Mallorca, de Sevilla, de Cerdeña, de Cordoba, de Corcega, de Murcia, de Jaen, de los Algarbes, de Algeciras, de Gibraltar, de las islas de Canaria, de las Indias Orientales y Occidentales, islas y tierra ferme del Mar Oceano; archiduque de Austria; duque de Borgoña, de Brabante y de Milan; conde de Absparg, Flandes, Tirol y Barcelona; señor de Viscaya y de Molina,[192] &c._ Such was the heading of the document which conferred the honour of knighthood (silver cross of the first class of the royal and military order of St. Ferdinand), upon _Don_ Antonio Condé, a soldier of the light company (cazadores) of the Queen's, or second regiment of the line, in acknowledgment of his distinguished services against the _revolutionarios_ of the _isla de Leon_, who surrendered at Bejer on the 8th March, 1831. The bearer of this _certificate_ of gallant conduct--for the gratification that its possession afforded his vanity was the only sense in which it could be considered a _reward_--was in person rather below the usual stature of the Andalusian peasantry; but his square shoulders, open chest, and muscular limbs, bespoke him to be possessed of more than their wonted strength and activity. In other respects too he differed somewhat from his countrymen, his hair being light, even lighter than what they call _castaños_, or chestnut, his chin beardless, and his eyes hazel. His manners were those of a frank young soldier, rather, perhaps, of the French school, with a dash of the _beau garçon_ about him, but, on the whole, very prepossessing. In his carriage to us, though rather inquisitive, he was at all times respectful; but towards his fellow countrymen, not of _the cloth_, a certain hauteur was observable in his deportment, which clearly showed that he prided himself on the "_Don_." The document, encased with the brevet of knighthood, of which mention has before been made, briefly, but in very honourable terms, described the gallant conduct of the young soldier, and forms the groundwork of the following _memoir_; a circumstance I feel called upon to mention, lest my hero should be wrongfully accused of vain-gloriously boasting of his achievements; and this also will explain why his story is not, throughout, told in the first person. The secluded little village of Guarda, which has been noticed in the course of my peregrinations, as lying to the right of the high road from Jaen to Granada (about five miles from the former city), was the birth-place of Antonio Condé. His parents, though in a humble station of life, were of _sangre limpio_;[193] and never having heard of Malthus, had married early, and most unphilosophically added a family of seven human beings to the already overstocked population of this wisdom-getting world. Five of these unfortunate mortals were daughters, and our hero was the younger of the two masculine lumps of animated clay. His brother, who was many years his senior, had joined the army at an early age, and at the conclusion of the war had proceeded with his regiment to the Habana, where he still remained; their parents, therefore, now declining in years, were anxious to keep their remaining son at home, to assist in supporting the family. Such, however, was not to be the case, for, on the _quintos_ being called out in 1830, it fell to Antonio's lot to be one of the quota furnished by the district that included his native village. To purchase a substitute was out of the question--the price was quite beyond his parents' means; and though his brother had, at various times, transmitted money home, which, with praiseworthy foresight, had been hoarded up to make some little provision for his sisters, but was now urgently offered to buy him off, yet Antonio would not listen to its being so applied. To confess the truth, indeed, he secretly rejoiced at his lot, having always wished to be a soldier, though he could never bring himself voluntarily to quit his aged parents. Now, he maintained, there was no alternative; and accordingly, with the brilliant prospect of making a fortune, which the military life opened to him, he marched from his native village, and joined the Queen's regiment, then quartered at Seville, to the cazador company of which he was shortly afterwards posted. Antonio's zeal, and assiduous attention to his duties, as well as his general good conduct and intelligence, made him a great favourite with his officers; whilst his youth, good humour, and gay disposition, endeared him equally to his comrades, in whose amusements he generally took the lead. In fact, he soon became the pattern man of the pattern company, and attained the rank of corporal. Early in the month of March, 1831, the Queen's regiment received orders to proceed by forced marches to Cadiz, where the _soi-disant_ "liberals," having again raised the standard of revolt, commenced the work of regeneration by murdering the governor of the city in the streets at noon day. The cold-blooded, calculating miscreants, who committed this act, excused themselves for the premeditated murder of a man _universally_ beloved and respected, by saying it was necessary for the success of their plans to commence with a blow that should strike terror into the hearts of their opponents. They killed, therefore, the most virtuous man they could select, to show that no one would be spared who thenceforth ventured to entertain a doubt, that the constitution they upheld was the _beau idéal_ of liberal government; and, I regret to say, Englishmen were found who applauded this atrocious doctrine, and considered the subsequent punishment inflicted on Torrijos, and the other abettors and instigators of this barbarity, as an act of unprecedented cruelty on the part of the "tyrant Ferdinand" and his "_servile_" ministers. Antonio's regiment proceeded to the scene of revolt by way of Utrera and Xeres, and on reaching Puerto Santa Maria received orders to continue its march round the head of the bay of Cadiz, and occupy, without delay, the Puente Zuazo, with the view of confining the rebels to the isla de Leon, their attempt to gain possession of Cadiz having failed, through the loyalty and firmness of the troops composing its garrison. The rebels, however, effected their escape, ere the Queen's regiment reached its destined position, and had marched to Chiclana, in the hope of being there joined by another band of "_facciosos_," under an ex-officer, named Torrijos; which, long collected in the bay, and protected by the guns of Gibraltar, was to have effected a landing on the coast to the westward of Tarifa, and marched thence to support the ruffians of the isla. The royal troops were instantly sent in pursuit of the rebels, who, abandoning Chiclana, fell back successively upon Conil and Vejer. The strength of the position of this latter town induced them to make a stand, and await the momentarily expected reinforcement under Torrijos; and the King's troops having assembled in considerable force at the foot of the mountain, determined on attempting to dislodge them from the formidable post, ere they received this accession of strength; a sharp conflict was the consequence, which terminated in the royalists being repulsed with severe loss. Antonio, who was well acquainted with the ground, now respectfully hinted to the captain of his company, that the retreat of the rebels might be effectually cut off by taking possession of the bridge over the Barbate, which--all the boats on the river having been destroyed--alone offered the rebels the means of reaching Tarifa, or Torrijos that of coming to the assistance of the blockaded town. The captain communicated our hero's plans to the commander of the expedition, who immediately adopted it, wisely abstaining from wasting further blood to obtain a result by force, which starvation, sooner or later, would be sure to bring about. In pursuance, therefore, of Antonio's project, the Queen's regiment received orders to take possession of the bridge, and the _cazador_ company was pushed on with all speed, to facilitate the execution of this rather difficult operation. The bridge, as I have described in a former chapter, is situated immediately under the lofty precipitous cliff whereon the town of Vejer is perched, and the road to it is conducted, for nearly half a mile, along a narrow strip of level ground, between the bank of the Barbate and the foot of the precipice. In their advance, therefore, the _cazadores_ were exposed to a most destructive shower of bullets, stones, &c. from above, and, of the whole company, only Corporal Condé, and seven of his comrades, made good their way, and threw themselves into the venta; which stands on the right bank of the stream, close to the bridge. They instantly opened a fire from the windows of the inn upon the rebels in the town overhead, who, at first, returned it with interest; but after some time Antonio was beginning to flatter himself, from the slackening of their fusillade, that he was making their post too hot for them, when, looking round, he perceived the whole force of the _facciosos_ descending from the town in one long column, by the road which winds down to the bridge, round the eastern face of the mountain, their intention evidently being to force a passage _à todo precio_.[194] Antonio's comrades were daunted; they had no officer with them; there was no appearance of support being at hand; and the odds against them were fearful. Prudence suggested, therefore, that they should shut themselves up in the venta, and let the enemy pass. Our hero, however, saw how much depended on the decision of that moment. If the rebels succeeded in crossing the bridge, nothing could prevent their forming a junction with the band of Torrijos, and in that case the country might, for many months, be subjected to their outrages and rapine, and Gibraltar would afford them a sure retreat; he determined, therefore, to make an effort to intimidate them, and knowing the weight his example would have upon his comrades, rushed out of the venta, calling upon them to follow; and taking post behind some old walls, that formed, as it were, a kind of _tête de pont_, opened a brisk fire upon the advancing column of the enemy. The boldness of the manoeuvre intimidated the rebels, who, thinking that this handful of men must be supported by a considerable force, hesitated, halted for further orders, and, finally, threw out a line of skirmishers to cover their movements, between whom and Antonio's party a sharp fire was kept up for several minutes. In this skirmish one of Antonio's companions was killed, another fell badly wounded by his side, and he himself received a wound in his head, which, but that the ball had previously passed through the top of his chako, would, probably, have been fatal. The rebels, discovering at length that the small force opposed to them was altogether without support, again formed in column of attack to force the bridge. The word "forward" was given, and Antonio feared that his devotion would prove of no avail, when, at the critical moment, the remainder of his company advanced from behind the venta at the _pas de charge_, rending the air with loud cries of "_Viva el Rey_," and opening a fire which took the enemy in flank. The rebels saw that the golden opportunity had been missed, and, seized with a panic, retired hastily to their stronghold, closely pressed by the _cazadores_, who hoped to enter the town pêle mêle with them. The commander of the king's troops, who had galloped to the spot where he heard firing, determined, however, to adhere to the plan of reducing the rebels to starvation; which now, by Antonio's gallantry, he was certain of eventually effecting; and ordered, therefore, the recall to be sounded as soon as he saw the enemy had regained the town. Unfortunately for our hero, who, attended by a single comrade, was at the extreme left of the extended line of skirmishers, and had taken advantage of one of the deep gullies that furrow the side of the mountain to advance unobserved on the enemy; he neither heard the signal to retire, nor saw his companions fall back; continuing, therefore, to advance, it was only on gaining the head of the ravine that he suddenly became aware of the extreme peril of their situation, and that a quick retreat alone could save them. It was, however, too late; his comrade--his bosom friend, Gaspar Herrera--fell, apparently dead, a dozen paces from him, and he, himself, in the act of raising up his brave companion, was brought to the ground by a ball, which splintered his ankle-bone. He managed, with great difficulty, to crawl to some palmeta bushes, having first sheltered the body of his friend behind the stem of a stunted olive tree, which would not afford cover for both; and, lying flat on the ground, waited for some time in the hope that his company had merely moved round to the left to gain a more accessible part of the mountain, and would speedily renew the attack. At length, his patience becoming exhausted, he thought it would be well to let his comrades know where he was, and once more levelling his musket, resumed the offensive by attacking a pig, which, unconscious of danger, came grunting with carniverous purpose towards that part of the gory field where the body of his friend Gaspar lay extended. This drew a heavy fire upon Antonio, but, as he was much below the rebels, who had all retired into the town, and was tolerably well sheltered by the friendly palmetas, he escaped further damage. In the meanwhile, Antonio and Gaspar had had been reported as killed to the captain of the _cazadores_, who, whilst deploring with the other officers the loss of the two most promising young men of his company, heard the renewed firing in the direction of the late skirmish. "_Corajo!_" he exclaimed, "that must be Condé and Herrera still at it." "No, Señor," replied the serjeant, "they were both seen to fall as we retreated from the hill; that firing must be an attack upon our friends posted on the other side of the town; the rebels are probably attempting to force a passage in that direction." "Well then, I cannot do wrong in advancing," said the captain, "so let us on. Nevertheless, I still think it is the fire of Condé and his comrade, and I know, my brave fellows," he continued, addressing his men, "I know that if it be possible to bring them off, you will do it." They advanced, accordingly, in the direction of the firing, and, as the captain had conjectured, there they found Condé continuing the combat _à l'outrance_, extended full length upon the ground under cover of the palmeta bushes, with his head and ankle bandaged, and his ammunition nearly exhausted. They fortunately succeeded in bearing him off without sustaining any loss, though Condé insisted on their first removing the seemingly lifeless body of his friend Gaspar, which he pointed out to them. The detachment at the venta had now been reinforced by some cavalry and artillery, and the remainder of the Queen's regiment, whilst the rest of the Royalist force took post on the opposite side of the town, in a position that covered the roads to Chiclana, Medina, Sidonia, and Alcalà de los Gazules, thereby depriving the beleaguered rebels of all chance of escape. Towards dusk that same evening, one of Torrijos's troopers was brought in a prisoner. Unconscious of the state of affairs, he had mistaken a cavalry piquet of the king's troops for the advanced guard of the _facciosos_, and had not even discovered his error in time to destroy the despatches of which he was the bearer. By these it was learnt that Torrijos, apprized of the failure on Cadiz and subsequent escape of the rebel-band from the Isla de Leon, had not budged from the spot where he had effected his landing; but he now sent to acquaint his coadjutors that he had collected a sufficiency of boats to take them all off, and that the bearer would be their guide to the place of embarkation. This information was forwarded to the rebels at Vejer, who, not giving credit to it, continued to hold out until the third day, when their provisions being exhausted and no Torrijos appearing, they agreed to capitulate, and were marched prisoners to the Isla, where, but a few days before, "_Quantam est in rebus inane!_" they had styled themselves the liberators of Spain. The queen's regiment was now marched in all haste towards Tarifa, in the hope of surprising and capturing Torrijos and his band, ere the news of what had passed at Vejer could reach him, but he had taken the alarm at the prolonged absence of his messenger, and, re-embarking his doughty heroes, regained the anchorage of Gibraltar without having fired a shot to assist their friends. The regiment, therefore, proceeded to Algeciras, and from thence marched to San Roque, where it remained stationary for several months. Here Antonio rejoined it, accompanied by his friend Herrera, who, thanks to the timely surgical aid his comrade had been the means of procuring him, yet lived to evince his gratitude to his preserver. Here, also, our hero received the distinction which his gallant conduct had so well earned, as well as the grant of a--to-this-day-unpaid--pension of a real per diem. Promotion, too, was offered, but he chose rather to wait for a vacancy in his own regiment than to receive immediate rank in any other. Our hero's military career was shortly, however, doomed to be brought to a close. He had resumed his duty but a few days, when an order arrived for the queen's regiment to proceed to Seville. The wound in Antonio's ankle, though apparently quite healed, had been suffered to close over the bullet that had inflicted it, and the first day's march produced inflammation of so dangerous a character as to threaten, not only the loss of his shattered limb, but even of life itself. In this deplorable state Antonio was left behind at Ximena, where, fortunately, an aunt of Gaspar resided. The good Dame Felipa required only to hear the young soldier's name--his noble act of friendship having long made it familiar to her ear--to receive him as her son. "Never can I forget her kindness," said Antonio; "my own mother could not have tended me with more unremitted attention, and--under the Almighty--I feel that my recovery is entirely their work." Here an "_Ay!_" drawn seemingly from the innermost recess of his heart, escaped from the young soldier's lips, which, appearing quite out of keeping with the terms in which he spoke of Dame Felipa's _maternal_ solicitude, induced me, after a moment's pause, to ask, "But who are _they_, Antonio?" "The aunt and sister of Gaspar," he replied, with some little confusion. "And you find the wounds of Cupid more incurable than those of Bellona?" said I, jestingly--"_Vamos_, Don Antonio! As Sancho says, '_Gusto mucho destas cosas de amores_,'[195] so let us have the sequel of your story by all means." "I shall not be very long in relating it," continued our hero. "For three months I remained the guest of Doña Felipa. A fever, produced by my intense sufferings, rendered me for many days quite insensible to the extraordinary kindness of which I was the object; at length it was subdued, leaving me, however, so reduced, that for weeks I could not quit my couch. Indeed, the most perfect repose was ordered on account of my wound, the cure of which was rendered far more tedious and troublesome from former mismanagement. During this long period, the sister of my friend Gaspar was my constant attendant. She read to me, sang to me, or touched the guitar to break--what she imagined must be--the wearisome monotony of my confinement. I have even, when consciousness first returned, on the abatement of the fever, heard her, thinking I was sleeping, _pray_ for the recovery of her brother's preserver. "It was impossible to be thus the object of Manuela's tender solicitude, without being impressed with the most ardent love and admiration for one so pure, so engaging, and so beauteous! Had she indeed been less lovely and captivating, had she even been absolutely plain, still her assiduous and disinterested attention could not but have called forth my warmest gratitude and regard; but I trust you will one day see Manuela, and then be able to judge if I could resist becoming the captive of such _enganchamientos_[196] as she possesses. "Vainly I endeavoured to stifle the rising passion at its birth. Alas! the greater my efforts were to eradicate it, the deeper it took root in my heart. I hoped, nevertheless, to have sufficient self-control to conceal my passion from the eyes of all, even of her who had called it into existence, for gratitude and honour equally forbade my endeavouring to engage the affections of one whose family, placed in a walk of life far above mine--that is in point of _wealth_, added the K. S. F. somewhat proudly--I had little right to hope, would consider a poor soldier of fortune a suitable match for the daughter of the rich Don Fadrique Herrara. Nor did I know, indeed, how Manuela herself would receive my addresses, for I scarcely ventured to attribute the soft glances of her love-inspiring eyes to any other feeling than that of compassion for the sufferings of her brother's friend. "The day of separation came, however, and the veil which had so long concealed our mutual feelings was gently and unpremeditatedly drawn aside. Manuela's father and her brother Gaspar came to Ximena to pass a few days with Doña Felipa, and finding that, though still a prisoner to my room, I was now declared to be out of all danger, Don Fadrique announced his intention of taking his daughter home with him--her visit having already been prolonged far beyond the time originally fixed, in consequence of my illness, and the fatigue which, unassisted, the attendance upon me would have imposed on her aunt. "When the dreaded hour of departure arrived, my lovely nurse came to the side of my couch, to bid her last farewell. A tear stood in her bright eye; the silvery tones of her voice faltered; her hand trembled as she placed it in mine, and a blush suffused her cheeks as I pressed it to my lips. But that soft hand was not withdrawn until her own lips had confessed her love, and had sealed the unsolicited promise, never to bestow that hand upon another! "The difficulty now was to make known our mutual attachment to her father, who I dreaded would think but ill of me, for the return thus made for all the kindness of his family. My pride pinched me, also, lest allusion should be made to my poverty, for, though poor, the blood of the Condé's is pure as any in the Serranía. "I had but little time for consideration, for Don Fadrique was about to mount his horse, and I thought the best channel of communication would be my friend Gaspar. He listened attentively to my tale, which was not told without much embarrassment, and then, to my confusion, burst into a loud laugh. "'Pretty _news_, truly, _amigo_ Antonio,' he at length exclaimed. '_My_ eyes, however, have not been so exclusively occupied with one object for this week past--like your's and my sister's--as to render the communication of this wonderful secret at all necessary. But be of good cheer; I have seen how the matter stood, and, on the part of my sister, encouraged it; and I hope to be able to overcome all difficulties, so leave the affair in my hands:--on our way homewards I will talk the matter over with my father, and you shall hear the result shortly.' "Nor did he disappoint me. In a few days a letter came from Gaspar: the result of his interference exceeded my expectations: Don Fadrique had received his communication very calmly, and told him that before returning any definite answer, he should take time to fathom Manuela's feelings. "Not long after this, I received a letter, of a less satisfactory kind, however, from Don Fadrique himself. It simply stated that he could not at present give his consent to his daughter's accepting me; that he had no objections to urge on the score of my rank in life, or the way in which I had acted in the matter, but that his daughter's expectations entitled him to look for a wealthier son-in-law, and that, in fact, it had long been a favorite plan of his, to unite her to the son of an old and intimate friend, when they should be of a proper age. "Nevertheless--his letter concluded--provided I would abstain from seeing, writing to, or holding _in any way_ communication with his daughter for the space of two years, he would, at the expiration of that period, consent to our union, should we both continue to wish it. "This chilling letter was accompanied by a hastily written billet from Manuela. It was as follows:--'I know my father's conditions--accept them, and have full confidence in the constancy of your Manuela.' "I accordingly wrote to Don Fadrique, subscribing to the terms he proposed, and, from that day to this, have neither seen nor communicated with either Manuela or any member of her family." "But have you not heard from time to time of the welfare of your Manuela?" I asked; "are you sure she is yet unmarried?" For it struck me that the young son of "an old and intimate friend" was a dangerous person to have paying court to one's mistress during a two years' absence; especially in Spain, where _love matches_ are rather scouted. A story that one of Manuela's countrywomen related to me of herself, recurring to me at the same time. This lady had, early in life, formed an attachment to a young officer, whom poverty alone prevented her marrying. His regiment was ordered to Ceuta, and she remained at Malaga, consoling herself with the hope that brighter days would dawn upon them. Her friends laughed at the idea of such interminable constancy, especially as a most advantageous _parti_ presented itself for her acceptance. The proposer--it is true--was neither so handsome nor so youthful as the exile, but then he was also an officer, and "_in very good circumstances_." She could not forget her first love, however--indeed, she _never_ could--and long turned a deaf ear to the tender whisperings of her new admirer; but, at length, her relations became urgent, as well as her lover; the mail boat from Ceuta gradually came to be looked for with less impatience; and, "_por fin_," she observed, "_como era Capitan por Capitan (!!)_,[197] I had no great objections to urge, and we were married!" She confessed to me, however, that this exchange was not effected "_without paying the difference_," as the treatment she experienced from her rich husband, caused her ever after to regret having given up her poor lover. But to return to Antonio--"I have had but few opportunities of hearing from Manuela," he replied, "for my native village is removed from any high road, and the close attendance required by my aged parents--my wound having incapacitated me from further military service--has been such, that I seldom could get as far as Jaen to make enquiries amongst the _contrabandistas_ and others who visit the neighbourhood, of her place of residence; but about a month since I met an _arriero_ of Arcos, who knew Don Fadrique well, and from him I learnt that Manuela is still unmarried, has lost all her beauty, is wasted to a shadow; and said to be suffering from some disease that baffles the skill of the most eminent physicians of the place. "This intelligence has made me the more anxious to see her, and claim her promised hand, for no change in her personal appearance--even if the account be true--can alter the sentiments I entertain for her; but, at the same time, it has placed a weight upon my spirits which in vain I endeavour to throw off. "The morning it was my good fortune to fall in with you, Caballeros, I had set out from my home to proceed to Ximena, whither I understand Manuela has been removed for change of air. For the term of my probation, though not yet expired, is fast drawing to a close, and having some business to transact with the military authorities at Granada and Malaga respecting my pension (of which not a _maravedi_ has ever been paid), I have timed my movements so as to reach Ximena by the day on which I may again present myself to Manuela, and receive, I trust, the reward of my constancy." Antonio's narrative was here brought to a conclusion, but ere he left us, I exacted the promise mentioned in the preceding chapter, that he would acquaint us with the result of Don Fadrique's essay in experimental philosophy. Circumstances, however, occurred to prevent our meeting him at the place of appointment, and I had almost given up the hope of hearing more of Antonio and his love story, when, to my surprise, he one morning presented himself at my breakfast table at San Roque. I saw, at the first glance, that the course of true love had not run smooth--he was pale and hagged--flurried, yet dispirited. "My good Antonio," said I, unwilling to give utterance to a doubt of his fair one's constancy, "I fear Don Fadrique has not proved to be a man of his word." "_Perdon usted_," he replied--"he has been faithful to his word"--worse and worse, thought I--"And Manuela not less constant in her affection," he continued; guessing at once the suspicion that flitted across my mind--"Alas! I could even wish it were not so, if all otherwise were well; but fate has ordered differently. A calamity has befallen Manuela; compared to which, death would be a mercy. She is in a state that is heart-rending to behold. Her sufferings are almost beyond the power of bearing. Oh, Caballero! it is fearful--it is awful to see her. She has the best advice that money can procure, but nothing can be done to give us a hope of her recovery." "Mad?" I exclaimed, with a shudder--"Oh, cursed love of riches...." "_Nada, nada_,"[198] interrupted Antonio, "she is as sensible as ever. Alas! I could even bear to see her insane, for then I might hope that time would effect a change." "Is it _Etica_?" I asked, knowing that the Spaniards consider consumption both incurable and highly infectious. A mournful shake of the head was his reply. "What then, my good Antonio, _is_ the nature of her malady?" "_Ojala_[199] that it could be called a malady, Don Carlos," ejaculated the silver cross of San Fernando; "it might not then be beyond the reach of the physician's art. But _Dios de mi vida!_ there is no hope for her, unless a miracle can be wrought. It is to have a consultation on that point, I am come to San Roque." "What," said I, my patience thoroughly exhausted, "has she embraced Mohammedanism?" "Not far from it, Don Carlos--she is possessed of a devil!" "Friend Antonio," said I, "congratulate yourself;--such discoveries are seldom made _before_ marriage. Let me, however, persuade you, instead of consulting with priests, to allow an heretical English doctor to meet this devil face to face; his simple nostrums may perchance be found more efficacious than the exorcisms of the most pious divines. But explain to me the signs and symptoms of the presence of this imp of darkness; and pardon my making light of so serious an affair, for, rest assured, the evil one is not now permitted to torment the human frame with bodily anguish; his toils are spread for catching _souls_; and worldly pleasures, not personal sufferings, are the means he employs to effect his purpose." Antonio then entered into a detailed account of his betrothed's ailment, as well as of the mode of treatment that had been adopted; but, ignorant, superstitious, and bigoted, as I knew the campestral Spanish _faculty_ to be, I had yet to learn how far they could practise on the credulity of their infatuated _patients_. Manuela, it appeared, had, one day during the preceding Lent, been so imprudent as to taste some chicken broth that had been prepared for her sick father; and it was supposed, that the devil, assuming the appearance of the egg of some insect, had gained admission to her throat and settled in her breast, where he had ever since been nurtured and was gradually "_comiendo su vida_!"[200] The Doctors assured her friends that the only way of appeasing the monster's appetite, was by the constant application of thick slices of raw beef to the exterior of the part affected--but this remedy was daily losing its effect. My astonishment knew no bounds.--Was it possible such gross ignorance could exist, or such horrible imposition be practised in the nineteenth century! After much persuasion, Antonio promised to bring his betrothed to San Roque, to have the advice of an English doctor; my proposal of taking one to see her, at Ximena, having at once been negatived on the grounds that it would cause great irritation amongst the people of that town; and, accordingly, on the day appointed for the meeting, Manuela, borne on a kind of litter, and accompanied by her aunt, came to San Roque on the pretence of its being her wish to offer a wax bust at the shrine of one of the Emigré Saints of Gibraltar "now established in the city of _San Roque de su Campo;_" which said saint, having taken a very active part in expelling the Moors from Spain, it was naturally concluded might feel an interest in driving the devil out of Manuela's breast. Antonio's mistress had evidently been a lovely creature. Her features were beautifully outlined, but her white lips and bloodless cheeks, her sunken eyes and wasted figure, declared the ravages making by some terrible inward disease. She was suffering excessive pain from the effects of the journey, but received us with a faint smile. "I fear, sir," she said, with some emotion, addressing herself to my friend, Dr. ----, "I fear, sir, that I have given you unnecessary trouble in coming to see me, for I am told that my disorder is beyond the reach of medical skill; but my friend here," pointing to her lover, who, with brimful eyes, stood watching alternately the pain-distorted countenance of his mistress and that of the Doctor, hoping, if possible, to discover his thoughts, "my friend here requested me so earnestly to come and meet you, that, as we shall be so short a time together on this earth, I could not, as far as concerned myself, refuse him so slight a favour, and I hope you will pardon the inconvenience to which we have put you." Antonio and myself now withdrew, leaving Manuela and Doña Felipa with Dr. ----, who, in a short time rejoined us, and, to Antonio's inexpressible delight, informed him that the case of his betrothed was not by any means hopeless, though she would have to submit to a painful surgical operation, and then turning round to me, he added, "the poor creature is suffering from a cancerous affection, which, fortunately, is just in the state that I could most wish it to be. But no time must be lost." The nature of the case having been fully explained to Antonio, it was left to him to persuade Manuela to submit to the necessary operation, and to inform her, that though it might be performed with safety _then_, yet death must inevitably be the consequence of delay. The prejudices we were prepared to encounter were numerous, but they were propounded chiefly by Manuela's aunt, she herself agreeing without hesitation to every thing Antonio suggested. At length, however, the old lady said a positive answer should be given after consulting with a priest, and I forthwith accompanied Antonio to Don ---- ----, and requested his attendance. Antonio was present at the consultation, and gave us an amusing account of it. The main objection of the Doña Felipa was to the heretical hand that was to direct the knife; but the worthy _Padre_--who had good reason to know the superior skill of the English faculty over those of his own country, and was himself _spelling_ for a little advice on the score of an over-strained digestion--took the case up most zealously, and eventually overcame all their scruples. "Fear not," said he, winding up his arguments, "Fear not, good dame, to trust the maiden in his hands. Like as the Lord opened the mouth of Balaam's ass to admonish her master, so has he put wisdom into the heads of these heretical doctors for the good of us, his faithful servants. Quiet your conscience, Señora Felipa, I myself have been physicked by these semi-christian _Medicos_." The case was not much in point, but it served the purpose. Doña Felipa was convinced; her niece submitted; the operation was successfully performed; the colour in a short time returned to the cheeks of the truly lovely and loveable Manuela; the smile of health once again lighted up her intelligent countenance. And, ere I left the country, the small share it had fallen to my lot to take in producing this happy change, was gratefully acknowledged by the expressive, though downcast glance that gleamed from Manuela's bright and joyous eyes, on my addressing her as the bride of the knight of San Fernando. THE END. APPENDIX. _Itinerary of the principal Roads of Andalusia, and of the three great Routes leading from that Province to the Cities of Madrid, Lisbon, and Valencia._ N.B. The measurements on the Post Roads are given in Spanish leagues, conformably with the Government Regulations by which Postmasters are authorized to charge for their horses. On these, therefore, the distances from stage to stage cannot be calculated with much precision; but a Spanish _Post_ league may generally be reckoned 3½[201] English miles. On the other roads the distances are more accurately specified in English miles. No. 1. BAYLEN TO MADRID. (A Post Road, travelled by Diligences.) Leagues. From Baylen to Guarroman 2 thence to La Carolina 2 Santa Elena 2 La Venta de Cardenas 2 Visillo 2 Sta. Cruz de Mudela 2 Val de Peñas 2 N. S. de la Consalacion 2 Manzanares 2 La Casa nueva del Rey 2½ Villaharta 2½ Vta. del Puerto Lapice 2 Madridejos 3 Caña de la higuera 2 Tembleque 2 Guardia 2 Ocaña 3½ Aranjuez 2 Espartinas 2½ Los Angeles 3 Madrid 2½ --- Total leagues 47½ --- 47½ leagues = 164 English miles. No. 2. SEVILLE TO LISBON. (Post road, travelled by Carriages.) Leagues. From Seville to Santi Ponce 1 thence to La Venta de Guillena 3 Ronquillo 3 Santa Olalla 4 Monasterio 4 Fuente de Cantos 3 Los Santos de Maimona 4 Santa Marta 5 Albuera 3 Badajos 4 Elvas (Portugal) 3 Lisbon 30 -- Total leagues 67 -- 67 leagues = 232 miles. No. 3. GRANADA TO VALENCIA. (Post road, no Diligence.) Leagues. From Granada to Diezma 6 thence to Guadiz 3 From Guadiz to Baza 7 thence to Lorca 18 Murcia 12 Alicante 13 San Felipe 9 Valencia 14 -- Total leagues 82 -- 82 leagues=284 miles. No. 4. CADIZ to MADRID. (Post road travelled by carriages.) Leagues. From Cadiz to San Fernando 3 thence to Puerto Sta. Maria 3 Xeres de la Frontera 2½ de Casa Real del Cuervo 3½ Ventllo de la Torre de Orcas 3½ Utrera 3½ Alcalà de Guadaira 3 Mairena del Alcor 2 Carmona 2 da Venta de la Portugueza 2½ Luisiana 3½ Ecija 3 La Carlota 4 Cortijo de Mangonegro 3 Cordoba 3 Alcolea 2 Carpio 3 Aldea del Rio 3½ Andujar 3½ La Casa del Rey 2½ Baylen 2½ By No. 1, from Baylen to Madrid 47½ ---- Total leagues 109½ ---- 109½ leagues=378 miles No. 5. CADIZ to SEVILLE. (Post and carriage road.) Leagues. From Cadiz to Alcalà de Guadaira, by Route No. 4 22 Thence to Seville 2 -- Total leagues 24 24 leagues=83 miles. No. 6. CADIZ to SEVILLE, by the MARISMA. (Direct road, passable for carriages in summer only.) Miles. From Cadiz, by boat, to El Puerto de Santa Maria 5 Thence to Xeres 9 Lebrija 15 Seville 28 -- Total miles 57 -- No. 7. CADIZ to LISBON. (Post road.) Leagues. From Cadiz to Seville, by No. 5. 24 Seville to Lisbon, by No. 2. 67 -- Total leagues 91 -- 91 leagues = 315 miles. No. 8. GIBRALTAR to CADIZ. (Bridle road.) Miles. From Gibraltar to Los Barrios 12 Thence to La Venta de Ojen 9 La Venta de Tabilla 11 La Venta de Vejer 14 (Town of Vejer ½ a mile on left.) Chiclana 16 El Puente Zuazo 4½ Cadiz 9 --- Total miles 75½ --- No. 9. GIBRALTAR to CADIZ. (Another bridle road.) Miles. From Gibraltar to Algeciras[202] 9 Thence to La Venta de Ojen 10 by No. 8 54½ ---- Total miles 73½ ---- No. 10. GIBRALTAR to XERES. (Bridle road.) Miles. From Gibraltar to San Roque 6 Thence to La Venta la Gamez 4½ La Casa de Castañas 15 Alcalà de los Gazules 13 (The town left ½ a mile to the right.) Paterna 9 Xeres 16 --- Total miles 63½ --- No. 11. GIBRALTAR to SEVILLE. (Bridle road.) Miles. From Gibraltar to Ximena 24 thence to Ubrique 20 El Broque 10 Villa Martin 8 Utrera 21 Dos Hermanos 8 Seville 7 -- Total miles 98 -- No 12. GIBRALTAR to LISBON. (Bridle road to Seville, from thence a carriage road.) Miles. From Gibraltar to Seville, by Route No. 11 98 From Seville to Lisbon, by Route No. 2 232 --- Total miles 330 --- No. 13. GIBRALTAR to MADRID. (A post, but only bridle road to Osuna, from thence a carriage route.) Miles. From Gibraltar to San Roque 6 thence to Gaucin 25 Atajate 14 Ronda 10 From Ronda to Saucejo 21 thence to Osuna 11 Ecija 20 By Route No. 4, from thence to Baylen, 27 leagues = 93 By Route No. 1, from Baylen to Madrid, 47½ leagues = 164 --- Total miles 364 --- No. 14. GIBRALTAR to MADRID. BY BENEMEJI. (A bridle road only as far as Andujar.) Miles. From Gibraltar to Ronda, by Route No. 13 55 From Ronda to La Venta de Teba 21 (Town of Teba ½ mile on the right) thence to Campillos 6 Fuente de Piedra 9 Benemeji 16 Lucena 12 Baena 18 Porcuna 24 Andujar 14 Baylen 17 By Route No. 1, to Madrid, 47½ leagues = 164 --- Total miles 356 --- No. 15. GIBRALTAR to MALAGA. (Bridle road.) Miles. From Gibraltar to Venta Guadiaro 12 thence to Estepona 15 Marbella 16 Fuengirola 16 Benalmedina 6 Malaga 14 -- Total miles 79 -- No. 16. GIBRALTAR to GRANADA. (Bridle road.) Miles. From Gibraltar to Malaga, by Route No. 15 79 From Malaga to Valez 18 thence to La Venta de Alcaucin 12 Alhama 12 La Venta de Huelma 15 La Mala 6 Granada 9 ---- Total miles 151 ---- No. 17. GIBRALTAR to VALENCIA. (Bridle road.) Miles. From Gibraltar to Granada, by Route No. 16 151 Thence to Valencia, by Route No. 3 284 ---- Total miles 435 ---- No. 18. MALAGA to SEVILLE. (Bridle road.) Miles. From Malaga to Venta de Cartama 13½ (leaves town of Cartama 1 mile on left.) Venta de Cartama to Casarabonela 11½ (the ascent to this town may be avoided, keeping it to the left) Casarabonela to El Burgo 9 thence to Ronda 11 Zahara 15 (Town half a mile off, on the left.) thence to Puerto Serrano 7 Coronil 10 Utrera 8 Dos Hermanos 8 Seville 7 ---- Total miles 100 ---- No. 19. MALAGA to CORDOBA. (Practicable for Carriages.) Miles. From Malaga to Venta de Galvez 15¾ thence to Antequera 12¼ Puente Don Gonzalo 27 Rambla 16 Cordoba 16 --- Total miles 87 --- No. 20. MALAGA to MADRID. (Post road, travelled by a Diligence.) Miles. From Malaga to El Colmenar 17 Thence to Venta de Alfarnate 10 Loja 16 Venta de Cacin 8 Lachar 9 Santa Fé 8 Granada 8 Venta de San Rafael 27 Jaen 24 Menjiber 14 Baylen 10 To Madrid by Route No. 1 164 ---- Total miles 315 ---- No. 21. MALAGA to MADRID. (a more direct road, but in part only practicable for carriages.) Miles. From Malaga to Loja, by Route 43 Thence to Montefrio 12 Alcalà la real 14 Alcaudete 11 Martos 12 Arjona 17 Andujar 7 Baylen 17 ---- Madrid by Route No. 1 164 No. 22. MALAGA to VALENCIA. (Bridle road.) Miles. From Malaga to Granada, by Route No. 16 72 Thence to Valencia, by Route No. 3 284 ---- Total miles 356 ---- No. 23. GRANADA to CORDOBA. (A wheel road as far as Alcalà.) Miles. From Granada to Pinos de la Puerte 12 thence to Alcalà la Real 18 Baena 24 Castro el Rio 6 Cordoba 24 --- Total miles 84 --- No. 24. GRANADA to MADRID. (Diligence road.) Miles. From Granada to Baylen, by Route No. 20 75½ Thence to Madrid by Route No. 1 164 ----- Total miles 239½ ----- No. 25. GRANADA to SEVILLE. (Not a wheel road throughout.) Miles. From Granada to Santa Fé 8 thence to Lachar 8 La Venta de Cacin 9 Loja 8 Archidona[203] 18 Alameda 11 Pedrera 12 Osuna 11 Marchena 14 Maraina del Alcor 14 Alcalà del Guadiaro 7 Seville 8 ---- Total miles 128 ---- No. 26. SEVILLE to MADRID. (Post and Diligence road.) Miles. From Seville to Alcalà de Guadaira 8 Thence to Beylen, by Route No. 4 138 Baylen to Madrid, by Route No. 1 164 ---- Total miles 310 ---- No. 27. SEVILLE to VALENCIA. Miles. From Seville to Granada, by Route No. 25 128 From Granada to Valencia, by Route No. 3 284 ---- Total miles 412 ---- * * * * * _Just Published_, In 2 vols., 8vo. with Illustrations, CAPTAIN SCOTT'S TRAVELS IN EGYPT AND CANDIA; With Details of the MILITARY POWER And Resources of those Countries, and Observations on the Government, Policy, and Commercial System of MOHAMMED ALI. "One of the most sterling publications of the season. We have recently had no small supply of information on Egypt, but there is a freshness in Captain Scott's narrative that affords a new desire respecting the events of this most interesting country. The narrative is throughout light, and amusing; the habits and customs of the people are sketched with considerable spirit and talent, and there is much novelty in the gallant Author's details."--_Naval and Military Gazette._ "We do not recollect to have read a better book of travels than this, since Slade's able publication on Turkey. The field of African and Egyptian investigation has been variously trodden, but Captain Scott, trusting to a shrewd observation and a sound understanding, has struck out new lights and improved upon the information of others."--_United Service Journal._ HENRY COLBURN, Publisher, 13, Great Marlborough Street. To be had of all Booksellers. _In a Few Days will be Published_, A TRAVELLING MAP OF PART OF THE SOUTH OF SPAIN, INCLUDING THE GREATER PORTION OF THE KINGDOMS OF SEVILLE, CORDOBA, JAEN, AND GRANADA. Compiled from the best Authorities, and Corrected from his own Notes and Sketches, By CAPTAIN C. ROCHFORT SCOTT, AUTHOR OF "EXCURSIONS IN THE MOUNTAINS OF RONDA AND GRANADA, &c. &c. &c." To be had of Mr. NEW, Mapseller and Publisher, No. 11, Strand, price 2_s._ 6_d._ FOOTNOTES: [1] See the Posting Itinerary in the Appendix. [2] The post league has already been stated to contain 3 English miles, and 807 yards. [3] Town-hall. [4] Lobster-hunting--such is the name for Locust in Spanish. [5] Or Genua urbanorum.--Pliny. [6] Hirt. Bel. Hist. Cap. LXI. [7] In an abundant house supper is soon cooked. [8] Red pepper. [9] Cabbage. [10] A kind of sausage, resembling those made at Bologna. [11] Bacon.--Spanish bacon is certainly the best in the world, which may be accounted for by the swine being fed principally on acorns, chesnuts, and Indian corn. [12] No vain boast--the fact being established on the testimony of Rocca. [13] Florez Medallas de las Colonias, &c. [14] Mentioned in the Itinerary of Antoninus--not the Ilipa of Strabo and Pliny, situated on the river Boetis, and in the county of Seville. [15] The orchard. [16] Evil doer. [17] Alleys. [18] The dead body. [19] Roguish. [20] La Martinière fell into a strange error in describing this river and the battle field on its bank; making the stream fall into the bay of Cadiz, and the scene of Alfonso's victory some fifty miles from Tarifa. This mistake has been followed by several modern authors. [21] Not the Mellaria of Pliny, which was a city of the Turduli, within the county of Cordoba. [22] A ruined town, no longer inhabited. [23] By Strabo ninety-four miles, following the coast: i.e. 750 Stadia. [24] Lib. III. Some editions enumerate two cities called _Besippo_, thus, "Bæsaro Tauilla dicte Bæsippo, Barbesula, Lacippo, Bæsippo, &c.;" but Holland and Harduin give only one, calling the first "_Belippo_." [25] There is no Epidemic here. [26] There are more direct cross-roads to these places, but they are not always passable in winter. [27] _Toll-house._ [28] Strabo. [29] This one amongst the various restraints laid on the trade of Gibraltar has very lately been removed on the remonstrance of our government. [30] Shops where ice is sold. [31] I understand this Cathedral is now being patched up in an economical way to render it serviceable. [32] Road of Hercules. The causeway connecting Cadiz with the Isla de Leon is so called, and supposed to be a work of the Demi-god. [33] 400 or 500 butts of Wine are shipped yearly from this place. [34] The old mouth of the Guadalete is obstructed by a yet more impracticable bar. [35] 10,000 butts of Wine are collected annually from the vineyards of Puerto Santa Maria. The exports amount to 12,000. [36] Camomile. [37] Mother. [38] So called from the town of _Montilla_, whence the grape, that originally produced this description of dry, light-coloured wine, was brought to Xeres. [39] Carthusian convent. [40] Strabo and Pliny. [41] A Fen, subject to the inundations of the sea. Such, however, is not the case here. [42] Water-courses, which are dry in summer. [43] Written _Vrgia_ by Pliny--_Vcia_ by Ptolemy. [44] Itin. Anton. [45] España Sagrada. [46] This supposes the earth's circumference to have been reckoned 240,000 stadia, giving 83-1/3 miles to a degree of the meridian. By the calculation of Eratosthenes, the circumference of the earth was 252,000 stadia, which gives exactly 700 stadia, or 87½ miles to a degree. [47] Mariana (lib. 3. cap. 22) has quite mistaken the situation of this place, which he describes as two leagues from Xeres, _on the banks of the Guadalete_. It is two leagues from Xeres, certainly, but nearly three from the Guadalete, and but one and a half from the Guadalquivir. [48] The area of the Mezquita at Cordoba, taken altogether, is larger, but not the enclosed portion of Gothic architecture, which is, properly speaking, the Episcopal church. [49] A long time since. [50] In England, however, it must be the taste of the nation that is suffering from disease, rather than its drama, if, with such writers as Sheridan Knowles, Talfourd, and Bulwer, the theatre does not once more become a popular place of resort. [51] Farce; but, literally, goût, highly seasoned dish. [52] Low and disorderly people. [53] Florez Medallas descubiertas, &c. [54] Old Seville. [55] De Bell. Civ. [56] Hollond--intending, of course, the Itipa of the Itinerary, since the city of that name, mentioned by Pliny, was on the right bank of the Guadalquivír; and from medals discovered of it, whereon a fish is borne, may be concluded to have stood on the very margin of the river. [57] The gallant and talented author of the "History of the Peninsular War" has fallen into some slight topographical errors (caused, probably, by the extraordinary inaccuracy of the Spanish maps) in describing the movements of the contending armies. He describes, for instance, the French as obliging the Duke of Albuquerque to abandon his position at Carmona (where he had hoped to cover both Seville and Cadiz), by moving from Ecija upon Utrera (i.e. in rear of the Spanish army), along "a road by Moron, shorter" than that leading to the same place through Carmona. But so far from this road by Moron being "_shorter_," it is yet more circuitous than the chaussée; and, moreover, by skirting the foot of the Ronda mountains, it is both bad and hilly. He furthermore represents the Duke of Albuquerque as falling back from Utrera upon Xeres, with all possible speed, and, nevertheless, taking Lebrija in his way, which town is, at least, eight miles out of the direct road. A French account (_La Pène, Campagne de 1810_) says, the Spanish army fell back from Carmona "par le chemin _le plus direct, Utrera et Arcos sur Xeres_,"--an error equally glaring, for the chaussée is the shortest road from Utrera to Xeres;--in fact, it is as direct as a road can well be, and leaves Arcos some twelve miles on the left! We may suppose, in attempting to reconcile these discrepant accounts, that the main body of the duke's army retreated from Utrera to Xeres by the chaussée; the cavalry by Arcos, to cover its right flank during the march; and that the road by Lebrija was taken by the troops withdrawn from Seville, as being the most direct route from that city to Xeres. [58] Don Maldonado Saavedra viewed it in this light, imagining that, in the Itinerary of Antoninus from Cadiz to Cordoba, two distinct roads were referred to; one proceeding direct, by way of Seville, whence it was taken up by another road, afterwards described, to Cordoba; the other (starting again from Cadiz) traversing the Serranía de Ronda to Antequera, and proceeding thence to Cordoba by Ulía. Florez, however, disputes this hypothesis, conceiving that but one route is intended, and that from Seville onwards it was given, not as a direct road, but merely as one by which troops might be marched if occasion required. But why, if such were the case, a road should have been made that increased the distance from Seville to Antequera from 85 to 121 miles, he does not explain; and I confess, therefore, it seems to me, that Don Maldonado Saavedra's supposition is the more probable. The distances, however, between the modern places which he has named as corresponding with those mentioned in the Itinerary do not at all agree; and he also, in laying down the road from Cadiz to Antequera, has made it unnecessarily circuitous. The following towns will be found to answer much better with those mentioned in the Roman Itinerary, and the line connecting them is one of the most practicable through the Serranía. _Iter a Gadis Corduba, milia plus minus 295 sic._ Roman miles. Ad pontem (Puente Zuazo) m. p. m. 12 Portu Gaditano (Puerto Santa Maria) 14 Hasta (near La Mesa de Asta) 16 Ugia (Las Cabezas de San Juan) 27 Orippo (Dos Hermanos) 24 Hispali (Seville) 9 (returning now to the Puente Zuazo, we have to) Basilippo (a rocky mound and ruins between Paterna and Alcalà de los Gazules) 21 [59] Olbera, according to Saavedra. [60] This disagreement with the heading is in the original. [61] Cura de los Palacios. [62] The diminutive of Venta. [63] Are they English? [64] Literally--on which foot the business was lame. [65] He who shelters himself under a good tree, gets a good shade. [66] Name and surname. [67] Beneficed clergyman. [68] Glance--from ojo, eye. [69] Good for study. [70] The lower orders of Spaniards, generally speaking, imagine that Protestantism implies a denial of the Godhead in the person of Our Saviour, and consider that but for our eating pork, like _Christianos Viejos_, we should be little better than Jews. For the whole seed of Israel, they entertain a most preposterous dislike; so deep rooted is it, indeed, that I once knew an instance of a young Spanish woman--far removed from a _low_ station in life, however--who was perfectly horrified on being told by an English lady that Our Saviour was a Jew. Her exclamation of "Jesus!" was in a key which seemed to express wonder that such a blasphemous assertion had not met with the summary punishment of Annanias and Sapphira. I have no doubt but that the bad success which has attended the _Cristina_ arms is attributed by the lower orders less to the incapacity of Espartero and Co. than to the Jewish blood flowing in the veins of Señor Mendizabel. [71] Mapping the town. [72] A Spanish side-saddle; or, more properly, an _arm-chair_, placed sideways on a horse's back, with a board to rest the feet upon. [73] Female attendant. [74] Managing person. [75] Ages ago. [76] Many Roman Emperors. [77] As it is said, by an Englishman named Marlborough, and other very distinguished persons. [78] Palacios, posadas, y todo--i.e., palaces, inns, and _every thing_. [79] Throughout Spain. [80] For every thing it has a cure--look you, &c. [81] Youngster. [82] The poor old Tio could not have acted under "proper directions," as I am informed that he died the year following my last visit to the _Hedionda_. [83] I drink no other--never any other--I cook and every thing with it. [84] Even to its bad smell. [85] Little walk. [86] A game that bears some resemblance to Boston. [87] The Invalid. [88] The water--nothing but the water--there is nothing in the world more salutary. [89] They say that he was one of those lords, of whom there are so many in England. [90] Heaps of gold. [91] To me it appears. [92] The Spaniards considered tea a medicine. [93] A gentleman in whom perfect confidence might be placed. [94] Yes, sir; that is true. [95] Pastures. [96] There are many robbers hereabouts--last year (accursed be these rascally Spaniards!) a good fowling-piece was stolen from me in this confounded narrow pass, &c. [97] These beggarly Spaniards, &c. [98] Young lady of the house. [99] Very well _combed_, literally--her hair well dressed. [100] Unequalled. [101] A young girl I am bringing up for (_i. e._ to be) a countess. [102] Now, gentlemen, it is necessary to load--these cowardly Spaniards always fall suddenly upon one; and, if we are not prepared, we shall be all netted, like so many little birds.--We are all well armed with double-barrelled guns, and, with prudence, we shall have nothing to fear--but ...! prudence is necessary. [103] In these parts, no evil-disposed persons whatever are to be met with; that sort of _canaille_ know too well who Louis de Castro is. [104] A gazpacho, eaten hot. [105] Literally, _beds_--spots frequented by the deer. [106] Wolf. [107] The position taken up by the sportsmen is called the _cama_, as well as the haunt of the game. [108] A day of foxes--an expression amongst Spanish sportsmen, signifying an unlucky day. [109] Literally, light--here used as "_fire!_" [110] A wild boar! zounds! [111] Yes, it is a sow. [112] To escape from the thunder, and encounter the lightning. [113] The war-cry of the Spaniards. [114] I precede you with this motive, and in the shortest possible time _all will be ready_. [115] Very dear friend of mine; aprec'ion, abbreviation of apreciacion; esteem. [116] Go you with God ... and without a horse. [117] An ounce; i. e. a doubloon. [118] Get down directly. [119] Perhaps a flight of woodcocks will arrive to-night. Is it not true, good father? [120] "It is infested with banditti at each step. Is it not true, Don Diego, that that rocky path beyond Alcalà is called the road to the infernal regions?" "Yes, yes--as true as holy writ." [121] Rock of Sancho. [122] The little stream that empties itself into the sea, near Tarifa, is called _El_ Salado, _par excellence_, in consequence of the great victory gained on its banks by Alfonso XI.; but, properly speaking, it is El Salado _de Tarifa_. [123] Hirtius, Bel. Hisp. cap 7. [124] Ibid. cap. 8. [125] Dion--Lib. 48. [126] Dion and Hirtius. [127] Cap. 27. [128] _Singilia Hegua_, corrected by Hardouin to Singili Ategua.--The ruins of Singili are on the banks of the Genil (Singilis) to the north of Antequera. [129] It is a mere boast, however, for, according to Rocca, the French entered the town and levied a contribution. [130] Scanty _vecinos_--a _vecino_, used as a _statistical_ term, implies a hearth or family, though literally a neighbour. The Spanish computation of population is always made by _vecinos_. [131] He does not understand. [132] Have no anxiety. [133] Mapping the country. [134] Town. [135] Fair and softly. [136] Nonsense. [137] Should this good woman be yet living, I suspect her opinion on this point will have undergone a material change--like that of most Spaniards. [138] With polite mien and deportment. [139] What a rare people are these English! [140] Mentioned by Hirtius--Bell. Hisp. Cap. XXVII. [141] The salutary waters of the divine Genil.--DON QUIJOTE. [142] Dion and Hirtius. [143] Zurita and Hardouin maintain, that it is not in the old editions of Pliny. [144] Foreign gentlemen. [145] The wheel of fortune revolves more rapidly than that of a mill, and those who were elevated yesterday, to-day are on the ground. [146] These _Salvo conductos_ were by no means uncommon in those days. A friend of mine offered to procure me one to ensure me the protection of the celebrated _José Maria_. [147] Forward, forward, heartless deceiver! [148] There is no wedding without its morrow's festival. [149] Between the hand and the mouth the soup falls [150] Holy face. [151] Uninhabited place. [152] Distant from Cordoba 300 stadia. [153] Distant fourteen miles from the Guadalquivír. [154] _Illiturgi quod Forum Julium._--PLINY. [155] Titus Livius, lib. 28. [156] Pliny. [157] To the parlour! to the parlour! [158] Be not afraid. [159] Stew. [160] Literally, that he could no more. [161] I, the king. [162] With us, I am sorry to say, "the honour of knighthood" has, in too many instances, become rather an acknowledgment of so many years' _good salary received_, than of any meritorious service performed. [163] A very small copper coin. [164] And this is a teapot! [165] A pillow! [166] What voluptuous people! [167] A stone--a flint. [168] How! without horses, without mules, without any thing, save steam! [169] The estate, so called, was bestowed on the Duke of Wellington, as a slight acknowledgment of the distinguished services rendered by him to the Spanish nation. [170] Santa Fé, built by Ferdinand and Isabella during the siege of Granada, and dignified by them with the title of _city_, is a wretched little walled town, of some twelve or fifteen hundred inhabitants; and, excepting two full-length portraits of the Catholic kings contained in the church, possesses nothing worthy of notice. [171] Eating; to use the expression of one of the peasants we conversed with. [172] _Itinerary of Antoninus._ Malaca to Suel 21 m. p. m. To Cilniana 24 " To Barbariana 34 " To Calpe Carteia 10 " -- Total 89 miles. Pomponius Mela has made sad confusion of the itinerary from Malaca to Gades (of which the above is a part), by introducing Barbesula and Calpe, and mentioning Carteia twice; but, on attentive observation, it is evident he intended to imply that the road bifurked at Cilniana, one branch going straight to Carteia by Barbariana, the other making a detour by Barbesula and Calpe, and rejoining the former at Carteia; the distance from Malaga to Cadiz, by the first route, being 155 miles, by the latter 186. [173] Pliny. [174] Published in 1765. [175] "Two leagues" are his words--meaning Spanish measure, or eight miles English; since he estimates the league at four miles. [176] Otherwise called Horgarganta. [177] Florez fixes Salduba where I suppose Cilniana to have stood, i. e. on the eastern bank of the Rio Verde, about two miles to the westward of Marbella. Cilniana he places at the Torre de Bovedas, a site to which the objections above stated apply equally as to the position assigned to that place by Mr. Carter. [178] Pliny places Salduba between Barbesula and Suel. [179] Marbella is a fine place, but do not enter it. [180] This may appear at variance with what I have said in computing the distance from Malaca to Calpe Carteía in Roman miles--viz., only eighty of eighty-three and one third to a degree of the meridian: but, besides that the distance from Malaga to Gibraltar is at least three English miles greater than to Carteía, the measurement I here give is along a winding pathway, that makes the distance considerably more than it would have been by a properly made road, even though it had followed all the irregularities of the coast. [181] Bell. Hisp. cap. xxix. [182] Journey from Gibraltar to Malaga. [183] Traces of the first-named of these Roman roads may yet be seen about Tolox. The latter was one of the great military roads mentioned in the Itinerary of Antoninus, and, doubtless, existed long before that work was compiled. [184] Hirtius, de Bell. Hisp. xxix. et seq. [185] Great allowance must be made for exaggeration in enumerating the strength of contending armies in those early times, since even in these days of despatches, bulletins, and Moniteurs, it is so extremely difficult to get at the truth. The battle of Waterloo offers a remarkable instance of this, for no two published accounts agree as to the respective numbers of the belligerents, and one which I have read--a French one, of course--swells the force under the Duke of Wellington, on the 18th June, to 170,000 men!!! [186] The inscription is given at length in Florez España Sagrada. [187] The source of the Sigila, now called El Rio Grande, is twenty-five English miles from Cartama, following the course of the river. [188] Certainly _not_ Mr. Carter's, than which I never saw a more complete caricature. Not one of the rivers is marked correctly upon it, and the towns are scattered about where chance directed. [189] Hirtius Bell. Hisp. xxviii. [190] Ibid. xli. [191] An account of which place has already been given in Chapter I. of this volume. [192] "Don Ferdinand the Seventh, by the grace of God, king of Castile, Leon, Aragon, the Two Sicilies, Jerusalem, Navarre, Granada, Toledo, Valencia, Gallicia, Majorca, Seville, Sardinia, Cordoba, Corsica, Murcia, Jaen, the Algarves, Algeciras, Gibraltar, the Canary Islands, the East and West Indies, islands and terra firma of the Great Ocean; archduke of Austria; duke of Burgundy, Brabant, and Milan; Count of Hapsburg, Flanders, the Tyrol, and Barcelona; Lord of Biscay and Molina, &c."--The seeming wish to avoid prolixity, implied by this "&c." is admirable. [193] _Clean_ blood. [194] At any price. [195] These love affairs are much to my taste. [196] Attractions--literally, _hooking_ qualities. [197] In fine--as it was captain for captain. [198] Not a bit. [199] Would to God! [200] Eating her life. [201] A Post league is equal to 3 British statute miles and 807 yards. [202] To Algeciras, by boat, saves 4 miles. [203] This is the only stage that is not perfectly practicable for a carriage. * * * * * Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber: Adventnre with Itinerant=> Adventure with Itinerant {pg v} gradully hauled=> gradually hauled {pg 54} rocky islot rises=> rocky islet rises {pg 62} in the joint-stock vilstge=> in the joint-stock village {pg 180} he exclaimed=> he ex-exclaimed {pg 212} It was necessry=> It was necessary {pg 241} the chace, and trust=> the chase, and trust {pg 256} addressiug me=> addressing me {pg 300} extarordinary=> extraordinary {pg 331} woollen mattrasses=> woollen mattresses {pg 337} too many intances=> too many instances {pg 346} decsends=> descends {pg 384} considered irresisitble=> considered irresistible {pg 387} acccordingly=> accordingly {pg 421} to unite her to to the son=> to unite her to the son {pg 429} long turned a a deaf ear=> long turned a deaf ear {pg 430} 
46301	----	[Every attempt has been made to replicate the original as printed. Some typographical errors have been corrected; a list follows the text. Misspelled Spanish has not been corrected or normalized. Archaic usages in English (i.e. fulfil, etc.) have been retained. (note of etext transcriber)] _Toledo_ _The Story of an Old Spanish Capital_ _The Mediæval Town Series_ *ASSISI. By LINA DUFF GORDON. [_5th Edition._ +BRUGES. By ERNEST GILLIAT-SMITH. [_3rd Edition._ +BRUSSELS. By ERNEST GILLIAT-SMITH. +CAIRO. By STANLEY LANE-POOLE. [_2nd Edition._ +CAMBRIDGE. By the Rt. Rev. C. W. STUBBS, D.D. [_2nd Edition._ +CHARTRES. By CECIL HEADLAM, M.A. [_2nd Edition._ *CONSTANTINOPLE. By WM. H. HUTTON. [_3rd Edition._ +DUBLIN. By D. A. CHART, M.A. +EDINBURGH. By OLIPHANT SMEATON, M.A. +FERRARA. By ELLA NOYES. +FLORENCE. By EDMUND G. GARDNER. [_9th & Revised Edition._ +LONDON. By HENRY B. WHEATLEY. [_2nd Edition._ +MILAN. By ELLA NOYES. *MOSCOW. By WIRT GERRARE. [_3rd Edition._ *NUREMBERG. By CECIL HEADLAM. M.A. [_5th Edition._ +OXFORD. By CECIL HEADLAM. M.A. +PADUA. By CESARE FOLIGNO. +PARIS. By THOMAS OKEY. *PERUGIA. By M. SYMONDS AND LINA DUFF GORDON. [_6th Edition._ +PISA. By JANET ROSS. *PRAGUE. By COUNT LÜTZOW. [_2nd Edition._ +ROME. By NORWOOD YOUNG. [_5th Edition._ +ROUEN. By THEODORE A. COOK. [_3rd Edition._ +SEVILLE. By WALTER M. GALLICHAN. [_2nd Edition_ +SIENA. By EDMUND G. GARDNER. [_2nd Edition._ *TOLEDO. By HANNAH LYNCH. [_2nd Edition._ +VENICE. By THOMAS OKEY. [_3rd & Revised Edition._ +VERONA. By ALETHEA WIEL. [_3rd Edition._ _The price of these marked (*) is 3s. 6d. net in cloth, 4s. 6d. net in leather; +, 4s. 6d. net in cloth, 5s. 6d. net in leather._ _All rights reserved_ _First Edition_, _August 1898_ _Second Edition_, _July 1903_. _Third Edition_, _May 1910_. [Illustration: _Antonio de Covarrubias._] Toledo. _The Story of an Old Spanish Capital by Hannah Lynch Illustrated by Helen M. James_ [Illustration: colophon] _London, 1910_ _J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd._ _New York: E. P. Dutton & Co._ "_Anda el tiempo y anda y todo se acaba._" ROMANCERO GENERAL. CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE _Earliest History of Toledo_ 1 CHAPTER II _Under Goth Rule_ 26 CHAPTER III _Under the Moslems_ 64 CHAPTER IV _Her latest History_ 81 CHAPTER V _The Old Capital, once and now_ 115 CHAPTER VI _The Cathedral_ 150 CHAPTER VII _Domenico Theotocopoulos, "El Greco"_ 193 CHAPTER VIII _San Juan de los Reyes, Santa Maria la Blanca, El Transito_ 216 CHAPTER IX _Vanished Palaces_ 243 CHAPTER X _Minor Churches, Convents, and Hospitals_ 266 CHAPTER XI _Bridges and Gates_ 292 APPENDIX _Practical Information_ 305 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE _Portrait of Antonio de Covarrubias, from the painting by El Greco_ _Frontispiece._ _Puente de Alcántara_ 4 _Puente de Alcántara_ 41 _The Cathedral_ 83 _Puente S. Martino_ 97 _Moorish Arch leading to Zocodover_ 121 _House Cervantes stayed in, Toledo_ 123 _The Zocodover_ 125 _The Tagus_ 135 _Mill on the Tagus_ 137 _Toledo from Left Bank of Tagus_ 141 _Puente S. Martino of Bano de la Cava_ 145 _A Street Corner, Toledo_ 147 _Interior of Cathedral_ 153 _North Transept Door of Cathedral_ 160 _Interior of Cathedral Coro from S. Aisle_ 163 _Detail of Reja to Capilla Mayor, Cathedral, Toledo_ 167 _Detail, Tomb of King, Gospel Side of High Altar, Cathedral, Toledo_ 170 _Tomb of Cardinal Mendoza_ 171 _Capitular Door in Toledo Cathedral_ 177 _Tombs of Count Alvaro de Luna and Wife, the Cathedral, Toledo_ 183 _The Cathedral Tower_ 191 _"The Burial of the Count of Orgaz," from the painting by El Greco_ 202 _Detail of Ornament, Interior of S. Juan de los Reyes_ 221 _Cloister, S. Juan de los Reyes_ 223 _S. Luke Angle of Cloister, S. Juan de los Reyes_ 227 _Detail of Ornament, El Transito_ 233 _Santa Maria la Blanca_ 241 _Remains of Palace, said to be that of Don Pedro el Cruel_ 251 _Casa Fuensalida_ 256 _Moorish Window in Casa de Mesa_ 259 _The Castle of San Servando_ 263 _San Tomé_ 267 _Santiago, Toledo_ 272 _Santo Pablo_ 273 _Cristo de la Luz_ 277 _Door of Santa Cruz_ 285 _Tomb of Cardinal Tavera_ 290 _Puerta Visagra (Antigua)_ 297 _Puerta del Sol_ 300 Toledo The Story of an Old Spanish Capital CHAPTER I _What is Known of Toledo's earliest history_ What more stupefying contrast than that of cheap commonplace Madrid (cheap alas! only in the artistic sense) and the legendary still visage of Toledo? The capital you leave abustle with modern movement, glaring, gesticulating, chattering, animated in its own empty and insignificant fashion, with its pleasant street of Alcala, so engagingly unhistoric, its shop-fronts full of expensive and second-rate articles from other capitals, the vulgar vivacity of the Puerta del Sol thronged with everlasting gossips in trousers and wide-brimmed hats; with its swindling hotel-keepers and insolent drivers. The train sweeps you past the wide empty bed of the Manzanares, covered here and there with a film you understand by courtesy to represent a river, and the city behind is a gay compact picture, slightly waving upward from its bridges, white and flourishing above the broad yellow plain. The tones of the land are rough and crude, red striking hotly against brown and greyish purple. Here and there a solitary hill, burnt and defoliaged, with a glimpse of ruined ramparts, a mule-path along which a file of peasants pass, the women lost in roomy saddles, with feet dangling in the air, and red or yellow handkerchiefs tied under their chins. Carts move slowly along the old diligence road, guided by heavy-browed males. The swallows' flight reveals the exquisite limpidity of the air and the height of the unstained heaven, azure in the infinite depths of aërial sapphire, blue beyond blue, translucent almost to the furthest reach of vision. And the light shines broadly upon an incomparable mingling in landscape of insensate ardour and changeless moroseness. So still, so brilliant, so burnt and empty! revealing the national traits of mournful hopelessness and unembittered, unregretful resignation. The rays lie in a luminous quietude upon the red-brown land, while the breath of fresh day just touches the leaves of the scant olives and shows them silver. Then midway the desert swims behind, and the eye is mildly refreshed with little signs of pastoral life, ineffectual efforts at gaiety amid tyrannous sadness. Imagination leaps at sight of a cheering bit of verdure, not for the beauty of it, though beauty is not altogether absent, but for the old familiar eloquence of trees and grassy spaces, the twinkling brightness of rills and flashing water and wooded fringes, with a hint of shadow along the horizon. Between the poplared banks of the river, yellow and waveless as befits a river of dead romance, the eye lingers on glimpses of emerald islets, with reedy edges against the fuller foliage of elm. Above, exposed on a rocky throne, belted by the sombre Tagus, sits Toledo. "The landscape of Toledo and the banks of the Tagus," writes M. Maurice Barrès, with singular felicity, "are amongst the saddest and most ardent things of this world. Whoever lives here has no need to consider the grave youth, the _Penseroso_, of the Medicis Chapel; he may also do without the biography and the _Pensées_ of Blaise Pascal. With the very sentiment realised by these great solitary works, he will be filled, if he but give himself up to the tragic fierceness of the magnificences in ruins upon these high rocks. "Toledo, on its hillside, with the tawny half circle of the Tagus at its feet, has the colour, the roughness, the haughty poverty of the sierra on which it is built, and whose strong articulations from the very first produce an impression of energy and passion. It is less a town, a noisy affair yielding to the commodities of life, than a significant spot for the soul. Beneath a crude illumination, which gives to each line of its ruins a vigour, a clearness by which the least energetic characters acquire backbone, at the same time it is mysterious, with its cathedral springing towards the sky, its alcázars and palaces that only take sight from their invisible patios. Thus secret and inflexible, in this harsh overheated land, Toledo appears like an image of exaltation in solitude, a cry in the desert." The train leaves you at the foot of the town before the quaint fortressed bridge of Alcántara. In these days of unpretentious exits and entrances, when we scarcely detect the outskirts of a city from the open way, or the suburbs from the heart of urban movement, these two castellated bridges, by which you enter and leave Toledo, have a strange and insistent air of feudality that at once captures fancy, and resembles the flourish of trumpets in martial dramas. Civilisation instantly waves backward, and leaves imagination thrilled upon the shores of legend. At a bound memory is at the core of troubled Spanish history, a sad and spectral ghost, in the thrall of wonderment and admiration. Surely never was town, with all our modern needs of bread-winning and competition, of commerce and politics, of cheap ambition and every-day social intercourse, so curiously, magnificently faithful to its past. So precisely must Toledo have looked, barring the electric light, when the last page of its intimate history was written. Just so brown and barren, with its front of unflinching austerity, its stern wealth of architecture, the air of romantic elegance and charmed slumber it breathes upon sadness, with its look of legendary musing and widowed remembrance. So, unchanged, must it have been in its great day of hieratic glory, of Gothic rule, of Saracen triumph and of feudal revolt. [Illustration: PUENTE DE ALCANTARA] From the bridges, the road winds up the steep rock, upon whose summit this unique old city is built. The views at every turn of the winding path are entrancing. There is every strange effect to gratify the eager eye in search of the picturesque: an unsurpassed boldness of site, from the wide zone of the Tagus to the point of the Cathedral tower pinnacled against the upper arch of heaven. Project high rocks upon which odd and delightful passages, neither street nor lane, full of colour and curve and varied line, are cut like sharp upward and downward strokes, over frowning ravines, and swelling by swift ascent from the yellow band of water below, that imprisons the town like a moat, and along with the martial bridges, give the impression of being cut off from the big lively world, a prisoner in a city of dreamland. At once you yield yourself to the gracious grip of your enchanter and gaoler. The eye rests in ineffable contentment upon the violent line of empty hills, yellow and brown and rose, turned violet by the sun's retreat, and you feel no longing for the vulgar and bustling present you have left behind. Here to sit awhile and dream, not days but unending months, in the shadow of a mighty cathedral, in what a Spanish writer with Iberian imagery, has called "a case of mediæval jewels." It is a fitting note of environment that the landscape should be stamped by an ardent and ineffaceable desolation, incessantly exposed to devastating winds, swept by fierce rains and blinding dust and remorseless sunfire. Nature is neither instigated by contrast, nor softened by charm. Unsmiling in its arid austerity, it is grand by the magic of its simplicity. The audacity with which it reveals its nakedness in the glare of unshaded light that has burnt its flanks a peculiar reddish-brown hue, sinks all impression of crudity, and becomes the supreme effect of natural art. It makes no pretence to shield the peril of its broken precipices with the beguilement of verdure, but lets them hack their murderous way to the river-brim without shrub or any vigorous sign of vegetation. Heavy and still, like the glittering light that fatigues the eye, it has nevertheless its secret, matchless captivation, such as Venice, its sister-town in strangeness (though of softer and more alluring beauty, feminine to its stern masculine), and casts the mind, conquered, into the mazes of reverie. You may have come by a train into this mausoleum of petrified memories, you may sit at the usual table d'hôte, but you cannot feel modern: the present slips away, and forgotten is the march of centuries. * * * * * Of the town's earliest history knowledge is merely the wildest assumption, and we have no reason to believe any of the legends handed down to us by historians as tradition. For instance, that obscure if venerable voice, asserts, that when God made the sun he placed it over Toledo (previously made, of course) and planted the foot of Adam, first King, beneath it at that particular spot of the globe. This is at least a fine testimony of the Spaniard's lofty faith in the antiquity of Toledo. A less sweeping assertion connects the first light of the town with Tubal, the grandson of Noah, who is supposed to have come hither after the deluge, and this view is naïvely supported by the verses of Gracia Dei, the chronicler of King Pedro: "Tubal, nieto de Noé,[1] Alphonsus the Learned, in his _Cronica General_, maintains and is supported in his no less extravagant opinion by Diego Mossem Valera, Isabel the Catholic's historian, that Toledo was founded by Pyrrhus, captain of the army of Cyrus, and son-in-law of King Hispan, father of Iberia. It is imagined that Iberia, Pyrrhus's wife, was in need of the freshness and verdure of the leafy banks of the Tagus, and that her husband brought her hither to taste the air and delights of the gardens around. But we are not told how there came to be gardens and foliaged places along the silent Tagus, nor who fashioned them, nor how Pyrrhus heard of them. The wife, Iberia, and the father-in-law appear as adequate explanations of the subsequent history of Spain, since both furnish the names of the land that Europe is familiar with. Once upon the banks of the Tagus, the gardens did not content Pyrrhus, so he began to enlarge the spot he had chosen. He discovered two towers, one at San Roman, and the other at the Alcázar, called _Los Dos Hermanos_, (The Two Brothers), built, tradition then told him, by the two sons of King Rocas in defence against the enemies of Rocas and his father Tartus. But whence came Rocas and Tartus and the two brothers? Why should Alphonso the Learned choose Pyrrhus and his wife, those remote tourists, as the founders of Toledo, rather than Rocas and Tartus? Rufo Festo Avieno regards Hercules as the founder of the Carpetanian city, and celebrates the achievement in verse: "Et Carpetanos inter proverbe sub Auras Toletum labor Alcide præclareque gentes Metropolis in gente Tajo ses undique iactat In qua tardi gradus conspectat parte Trionis Haud Pater Alcides (ut dicunt) condidit urbem, Mor ubi ter gemina victor gerione perempto, In latium meditatus iter Dionysii quondam, Prium dicta fuit de fundatoris honesto Nomine; Toletum alii dixere coloni." This version explains the name of Toledo as Ptoliethron, signifying important race, bestowed by Hercules. Honour is also awarded to a certain Greek astrologer, Ferecio, who came to Galicia with Teucer, Ulysses and Diomedes, after the siege of Troy, and having killed one of his companions, flew from the anger of the others into the heart of the Peninsula, until the security of the high rocks on which Toledo is built, tempted him to seek shelter amid these altitudes, which he at once consecrated to Hercules. As the natives gathered round him, and the town spread, he initiated them in the mysteries of magic and astrology, arts until then unknown in Spain, and for this reason called _arta Toledana_. Less wild and improbable is the last legend, that the Jews came hither when Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem, and created the town they called Toledoth, "city of generations." From this period is supposed to date the synagogue Santa Maria la Blanca. The explanation of the fact that under Christian rule the Jews of Toledo were permitted to have their synagogues and worship unmolested according to their rites, is based on the tradition that the Jews of Jerusalem consulted them before condemning Christ to death. They withheld their consent, and pronounced the sentence both heedless and imprudent, but their letter arrived too late for consideration. The mere belief that this letter had been sent, however, secured them for some centuries from insult or persecution.[2] The famous archbishop, Don Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada, rejects all these theories, and goes to Rome in search of founders, which he discovers in two consuls, Tolemon and Brutus, 108 years before Cæsar's time, when Ptolemy Evergetes was reigning. But this seems no nearer truth, since there exists no vestige of any domination anterior to the Roman Conquest, and there are no data on which to found a definite statement. The most convenient way of disposing of the question, up to the day of Livy's emphatic description of Toledo as "parva urbs, sed loco munita," is to say with the old-fashioned writers that its beginning is "lost in the night of ages." For lost it most certainly is, and the ancient Spanish historians are not to be trusted. It is probable that the first start of the race was a Celtic group of shepherds, wild and rude, whose wanderings led them to the leafy and verdant banks of the Tagus, and here, finding abundance of water, and rich and fertile land between Aranjuez and Toledo, they agreed to settle. Gradually the little town, pitched high above the river upon its unattackable rocky seat, spread itself; the number of huts grew into streets and lanes, the vague and wandering groups became more dense, and attracted others within their dominating influence, until the capital of Carpetania was formed. The shepherds left their flocks to build themselves walls and strong places, and thus bring upon their little city the imperious and conquering eye of Rome. Here again we have nothing but untrustworthy generalities to guide us, and no prehistoric remains on which to base conclusions about this vanished race. Alcocer, the old historian of Toledo, asserts that the very mystery and obscurity of the city's earliest days is proof of its antiquity and nobility, "since a race is all the more ancient by the less that is known of its origin and beginning." In a pleasing concession to this naïve statement, we need feel no shame in allowing to Toledo all the nobility and antiquity our unenlightened ignorance permits it to claim. The first dim figure in its history that shows out upon a vague and discutable background is that of Tago, a governor of the town in the days of Carthagenian domination. Before the second punic war, the Carthagenians sought to strengthen their forces by alliance with the Carpetanians, whom they had already partially subjugated. According to Rasis, the Moorish writer, there were then eleven governors in Carpetania, one of whom was Tago, at Toledo. Hasdrubal had succeeded Hamilcar, and reversing his mild policy, entertained his fancy with every kind of ferocious injustice and cruelty. The Carpetanians were handy, half allies, half conquered subjects, and the account of Tago's assassination, for Hasdrubal's mere pleasure, is one of unmitigable barbarity, one of those incidents that leave us stunned and stupefied by the revelation of an inexplicable instinct of cruelty in uncivilised man. Not content with repeatedly stabbing the unfortunate governor with his own hand, Hasdrubal ordered the body to be crucified, then drew his sword across the throat, severing the head, exposed the headless trunk, and forbade it decent burial. One of Tago's slaves revenged his master by assassinating Hasdrubal, and the infuriated Carpetanians rose up in revolt against Carthagenian oppression. They joined neighbouring tribes, and determined to resist Hannibal. Hannibal marched against them, and met them near ancient Oresia, eight leagues from Toledo, and here a long and fierce battle was fought, equal on both sides in losses, endurance, courage and fury. Night fell before either side had obtained the slightest advantage, and when day came, the confederates had the wild joy of forcing the world's greatest general to retreat. This obscure and miserable little people, a handful of raw Celtiberians, had no means of measuring the extent of their forgotten glory. Hannibal to them was no more than Hasdrubal, and they little suspected the kind of hero they had to do with. So they feasted and shouted and sang in their rash triumph, while Hannibal, who had folded his tent before their impetuous charge, grimly looked on, and planned to take advantage of their unbuckled hour. In the midst of their feasting and pleasuring, he bore down unexpectedly upon the victors, and all the confederates, struck at their brightest moment in the full flush of pride, were broken on the remorseless wheel of Carthagenian rule. From this onward, light begins to gather over Toledan history, dimly, of course, and by the very necessity of its vicissitudes, intermittent and dubious. After the fall of Carthage, we find, 191 years B.C., Marcus Fulvius Nobilior directing the Roman forces against the capital of Carpetania, and as besieger occupying the opposite bank of the Tagus. The reigning king of the Celtiberians was Hilermo. Fulvius defeated him in the plain, and then laid siege to the town and took it with ease. But though now subject to Rome, the Romans never appear to have dominated this stolid and sturdy Celtic race. Under whatever sway, Toledo ever wears its unwearying face of sullen independence. Rome itself could stamp no permanent impression on such a wilful and indomitable subject. Her armies might sweep it off the field of rebellion, but could neither chain it nor secure its sympathy. It remained obstinately neutral in all the successive Roman strifes; took no notice whatever of Viriate's imperious call from the foot of its walls to join him on the bank of the Tagus below, and wage war with him against the Praetor, Caius Plancius. What was Viriate to the aloof and self-centred Toledans more than a man of another country fighting a personal battle with which they had no concern? Toledo willingly opened its gates to Sylla's victim, Sertorius, and allowed him to shelter and nourish his hate and burning sense of injury behind its walls, but it flatly declined to help him in his plan of vengeance. He might stay there and win, as he did, the people's esteem and a kind of grudging affection, but war was his own affair, and if he stayed it should be as one of themselves, content with an inactive recognition of wrongs. To these wild and independent Celtiberians it mattered nothing whether Rome ran herself to ruin in her fierce quarrels and dissensions. So Sertorius stayed on in protected exile, almost as a ruler adopted by those who sheltered him, who yielded him admiration and sympathy, while sturdily declining to grant him troops or subsidies, and would not hear of marching under his leadership against the great Republic. This same haughty indifference Toledo maintained throughout the civil wars between Cæsar and Pompey, and showed the same coldness in the fortunes of Augustus. Her voice was not heard in the chorus of enthusiasm when the Temple of Janus was closed, and the Augustan peace affected her as little as had the previous disorders and rivalries and battles. Silent and sullen vassals Rome ever found these Toledans, holding themselves persistently aloof from all her interests. The single Roman ruler they appear to have favoured with some measure of homage was Marcus Julius Philippicus, who, to win his way with them probably granted them unrecorded favours or some special privilege. This rare mood of gratitude to Rome was expressed on a marble slab which Maestro Alvar Gomez, the chronicler of Cisneros, the great Cardinal, found in the porch of a door where it served as an ordinary seat: Imp. Caes. M. Julio Philippo Pio Fel. Aug. Pont. Max. Trib. Pot. P. P. Consul. Toletam Devotes Sini Nuninis Maestati Que Eius D. D. The gratitude was apparently of modified value if we may judge by the unceremonious treatment of its monument. Though Toledo must have had a distinct existence under the Romans, since Pliny calls it the Metropolis of Carpetania, there is not to be found definite evidence of the precise nature of that existence. The few coins that have come down to us in various collections, said to belong to that period, are of dubious origin; the inscriptions are not a whit more authentic. So little is clear or authentic that Alcover may continue to delight in the mystery and obscurity of its history as proof, according to his cherished phrase, of the town's antiquity and nobility. We are hardly justified in supposing anything, and imagination is barely assisted in its effort to penetrate its inhospitable walls. For we know that there were walls in those days, since Viriate is depicted standing under them, and calling on the citizens to join his forces below and march behind the standard of civil war. It is pretty certain that the town was extensive and populous, or Viriate would not have troubled to clamour for its assistance; and assuredly of some importance, else would Pliny have described it as the Capital of Carpetania? But what was the measure and nature of its civilisation, of its customs, dress? Did it adopt any of the Roman ways? We may assume from its rude and central position that in progress it was far behind the Mediterranean towns. But it undoubtedly had its place along the great Roman roads, and was connected with Tarragona and Carthagena, of which superior and more notable centres it was a dependency. While Tarragona has remained to this day pre-eminently an old Roman town, the very physiognomy of the race a kind of diminished Roman, and Cordova and Granada are as romantically and faithfully Moorish, Toledo has swept from off its face nearly every vestige of Roman domination but a few miserable stones, and is as insistently Gothic. So obscure and unrevealed is this period of transition that beyond the indication of the _Circo Romano_ and portion of the Puente de Alcántara outside the town, there are no remains to prove the passage of the world's conquerors and civilisers, nothing to suggest their imperishable influence. Of its position under Roman rule it is difficult to form an exact opinion. Its rank at first was probably that of a stipendary town, left to the despotic will of centurions without a responsible governor. It was merely regarded as an insignificant source of tribute. In this period of partial servitude it would have contracted the habit of idleness, the most prominent curse of slavery. Later on it was raised to municipal rank, had its own coin and commerce, and developed a racial preference for the arts of war rather than for those of peace. Finally, when Augustus came to reign, he raised Toledo to the rank of a colony, and transmitted to the town the privileges of Merida, making the Carpetanian capital the centre for the collection of tribute. But whatever difference these honours may have made in the town's private history, whatever amount of added prosperity they may have brought it, we are not permitted by the historians to obtain a clearer or more striking figure of Toledo as a colony of Rome than we had of Toledo in its first stage of stipendary town. Here and there an inscription exists as testimony of her advanced rank, such as. L. Terentius Gn. pomp. F. P. P. Bassino Totelano Quaestori Q. Q. Redidili Primo Flamini perpetuo Toleti Et Totius Hispanae Quod hic Termas et viam. Of the baths and the Roman way nothing now remains. Cristobal Lozano, in his _Reyes Nueves de Toledo_, devotes a chapter to the Roman glories of the town, speaks of the Circo Maximo, the temple of Hercules, the Naumachia and amphitheatre, and tells us that the bullfights of Spain date from this period. The temple he describes as being 300 feet in length and 200 feet in width; it was situated in the Vega, and was an object of devotion to the entire province of Carpetania. The celebrated cave of Hercules into which Rodrigo, the last of the Gothic kings, is supposed to have penetrated before the fatal battle of Guadalete, Lozano describes at greater length. The cave is as legendary as Rodrigo's sombre experience therein. It covered the prodigious extent of three leagues, and was composed of thousands of arches, pillars and columns. It was said to have been used as a secret treasury, but was built by Hercules as a royal subterranean palace, and here in prehistoric days the arts of magic were studied. The Romans enlarged it, and during the persecutions it served the Christians as church and oratory and cemetery. Part of it lay under the spell of enchantment by the order of Hercules, and when Spain was flooded with barbarians, and the Goths swept the classic Romans out of Toledo, Hercules hermetically sealed the doors, and tradition asserted that whoever should succeed in bursting open these doors would learn his doom and wed calamity. No Gothic king, until Rodrigo, was strong-minded enough to risk such dreadful peril, and the doors remained sealed. But the unfortunate Rodrigo was as brave as he was curious. He burst through the magic doorway, on which was written in Greek letters: _The King who opens this cave and discovers the wonders it holds, will discover good and evil_. Those who preceded him into the mysterious palace speedily fell back in a state of shuddering alarm and fear, shouting that they had seen an awful vision. Instead of staying to learn the nature of the vision, Rodrigo, angry and impatient, pushed his way in before his cowardly followers. He encountered an immense bronze statue in a beautiful frame work, highly sculptured. It held a wooden hammer, and struck fierce blows with it against the earth, thus moving the air and causing a terrible noise which bewildered and frightened Rodrigo's courtiers. It stopped its movements as Rodrigo approached, and on the wall of a closed arch beside it was written: _Whoever opens this arch will find wonders_. The King ordered his men to break open a passage, and instead of the treasures he expected to find, there was a picture of Arabian troops, some afoot, some on horseback, turbaned and armed, and underneath written: _Whoever reaches this spot and opens this arch, will lose Spain, and will be beaten by this race_. "The King," writes Lozano, "with sorrow in his heart and such sadness as we can understand, though carefully hiding it, ordered the door to be closed again." All those present also dissimulated their feelings, not to increase the affliction of the King. And while they went about seeking if among so many misfortunes they might find some consolation, lifting their eyes, they saw on the wall, on the left hand of the statue, other lines of writing: _Sorry King for thy doom hast thou entered here_. And on the right lines saying: _For foreign nations wilt thou be dispossessed, and thy people will be heavily punished_. Behind the statue they read: _I call upon the Moors_, and on its breast was written: _I fulfil my task_. That same night in the roar of many voices and loud battle cries, the earth opened and swallowed up in a clap of thunder the enchanted palace and every vestige of it. The legend is an excellent one, and has well served the poets, but unhappily it is only a legend of no historic value whatever. Rodrigo no more penetrated this mythical cave than he kissed Florinda, who never existed. Cardinal Siliceo is said to have explored what remained of the part without the vanished enchanted part of the palace, and after penetrating half a league inward, found bronze statues on the altar; and while examining one of them, the statue fixed him with a grave and austere glance, while a loud noise was heard, which filled the explorers with terror, and Lozano naïvely suggests that nothing of the sort possibly happened, for fear is a great inventor, and "they were filled with fear to the eyes." They fled without King Rodrigo's courage to go further. Though it was summer time, most of them died immediately afterwards from cold and fright, and the "good" archbishop, who had caused this devastation among his flock, ordered the mouth of the cave to be built up and covered with mud, 1543. Antonio Ponz, commenting on this prodigious and serious account given by Lozano of a fabulous cave and an impossible tale, makes merry over the naïve Spaniard's accuracy of description and facts. "One would really believe he had seen it all," writes the unenthusiastic Ponz, "the statue, the bronze, the _admirable_ sculpture, and had measured the extent of the cave." The same may be said of Lozano's grandiose description of the Roman buildings of which hardly a vestige remained in his time, 1666. The Circo Maximo, Gamero asserts, was built to hold a hundred thousand persons, from which we might infer that Toledo under the Romans had an important population. Approaching less apocryphal days, we learn that Toledo was one of the earliest towns of Spain to embrace Christianity. It is even said that St Peter and St James passed here, and some add St Paul, preaching the Gospel and creating bishops. St Eugenius, of Greek or Roman origin, was the first. The Spanish historians decline to accept the tradition that St Denis of Paris sent Eugenius to Spain, preferring to keep him in company with the Apostles. But it allows that he went to Paris to see St Denis, and here was martyred near the city by the prefect, Fescenino Sicino, his headless body being flung into a filthy lagoon so that his disciples and admirers should never be able to find it. Two hundred years later the lake gave up its dead, uncorrupted. One Ercoldo, being ill, saw St Denis in sleep, who told him to rise cured, and go to the lake, where he would find the body of the illustrious martyr awaiting burial. At the same time he promised for the sake of Eugenius, great health to the neighbourhood and the honour of many miracles. Pisa records this tale at some length with unction and faith. Several centuries later the emperor, Alfonso VII., grandson of the victor of Toledo, obtained from his son-in-law, Louis of France, the right arm of Eugenius as a relic, and the arm was brought to Spain in all pomp by the Abbot of St Denis in person. Later, Philip II. obtained the entire body from Charles IX., with the consent of the Cardinal, Duke of Lorrain, Abbot of St Denis. The town prepared a magnificent reception for the remains of the founder of its cathedral. Antonio de Rivera, the choir-master, gives a detailed description of the triumphal arches, the Latin and Castillian poems, the dances and other diversions of the hour. The King was present as well as his unfortunate son, Don Carlos, the princes of Hungary and Bohemia, Rodolpho and Hernesto, sons of Maximilian, the bishops of Cordova, Siguenza, Segovia, Palencia, Cuenca, Osuna, Lugo and Gerona. Francisco Bayeu painted a fine fresco of the scene for the cathedral cloisters, representing the entrance of the remains under the Puerta de Visagra. The next saint connected with the Christian history of the town, and its real patron, is St Leocadia. She was of noble birth, beautiful, young and gifted. She is depicted a kind of Spanish St Elisabeth of Hungary, succouring the poor and sick, speaking words of wisdom to the weak, of sympathy to the suffering. Her father, Leocadio, was governor under Dacian, and her uncle was Melancius the archbishop. While yet a child she vowed herself to maidenhood and the service of the needy and those in trouble, and her doors like her compassionate heart were open to all. On his arrival at Toledo, Dacian heard of the wonderful maid, and learnt that her influence spread far and wide. He ordered her to appear before him, and she came surrounded by friends and admirers. The Roman in the interview is painted as brutal and inexorable, the girl-saint as mild but firm. She would change neither her faith nor her ways, and valiantly announced herself as ready for death. We hear of flagellations, of chains, of torture, of every form of explosion of Roman fury, till finally unable to invent further atrocities, Dacian flung her into a dark dungeon, where she died a natural death, some assert, others preferring the more ghastly version of Dacian in person ordering her to be flung down a steep rock into the Tagus. But this, I imagine, has been tacked on to the legend as a more picturesque conclusion for a martyr than a natural death in a prison. Gamero does not endorse it, and his history is admitted to be the most accurate of any that deals with Toledo. This is how Pisa writes of Dacian:--"Dacian, haughty, famished for blood, drunk with the blood of French martyrs, came to accomplish a like butchery in Spain. He inflicted terrible tortures on St Folia and St Cucufato and St Eulalia at Barcelona, and went like a mad lion through Zaragoza, with the blood of martyrs ever flowing behind him. This minister of Satan came to the town of Alcala, where he shed the blood of the children, Justo and Pastor, so young that their blood was yet partly milk. Then he came to this famous city of Toledo, where the people received him with honour. He sat on the tribune to receive recognizance and vassalage to the Emperor's published edict, and commanded the public to adore the idols of his gods. He ordered an inquisition among the Toledan Christians to torture them and then destroy their bodies." Good Dr Pisa had not humour enough to perceive the irony of Spanish history, since these are the very proceedings of the Castellian monarchs to heretics in later centuries. One wonders at the censorious use of the ominous word "inquisition" from a Spanish pen. "Tell me, young lady," Dacian suavely enough addresses Leocadia summoned before him, "for such is the exceeding beauty of thy face that nobody born has ever beheld one more fair, and being well-born and of pure and noble lineage, how is it thou canst so lightly be deceived by such vanities, despising thus the ancient ceremonies and worship of our gods and preferring to follow the new sect of the Crucified." Methinks, so might some urbane cardinal have addressed a pretty heretic some centuries later as much a martyr, albeit uncanonised, as Leocadia. And such a desperate wrath would the maiden's answer have provoked as that which sent Leocadia to imprisonment and death. Certainly the early Christians were not courteous to the Pagans they defied. The gods Leocadia contemptuously called "miserable," and the polite and flattering Dacian came in for a share of her impassioned vituperation with the consequences she naturally desired. At so early a period dawns the celebrated hieratic fame of Toledo, which for centuries made it less subject to the sovereign than to the archbishop. Melancius was raised to the bishopric in the year 283, and after him, under the domination of Rome, may be said to have reigned over the Celtic citizens, ten important bishops, whose portraits can be studied in the Sala Capitular of the Cathedral. Gothic rule in Toledo is little else but the story and development of Gothic Christianity. More than on kings and their battles and doings does the town's early fame rest upon those councils of the church in its midst. They send the name of Toledo as far as Rome in a warning note of independence and power. This primitive church had its own rite, its own customs, its emphatically racial way of viewing matters, and for centuries no high-handed effort of Rome could smooth the angles of its stubborn individuality, or Latinise the tone of its worship and faith. It remained for France and French influence to accomplish what Rome had vainly striven to achieve, and it is to be deplored that France should have succeeded in the defacing task. The first of these councils took place in the year 396, and the second in 400, to consider the election of Dictinius to the bishopric of Astorga, one of the sect of Priscilianists. This deliberate battle waged by Toledo against the Priscilianists took place in September, and its minutes are preserved intact in the Toledan Collection. Nineteen bishops assisted at it, and the Bishop of Merida, Patriuno, presided over it, as the oldest present. The meeting took place in the church of Toledo, the bishops seated, and the deacons and congregation admitted, standing. In a long address the president exposed the scandals and vicissitudes of the times, and then discussed in ten different points various details connected with the church. Woman seems to have been the victim of austere episcopal reprobation. She must not presume to chaunt antiphones whether nun or widow, in the absence of the bishop, neither with her confessor nor his attendant. Such communion of the sexes under the banner of religion the Council held as pernicious and a snare. It fulminated against the _frail_ sex, but for whose existence man were a sage and a saint. What a pity the Almighty did not consult the Fathers before casting this fatal and corrupting instrument of misfortune upon the world! However, woman must not complain. To quote one of the delightful and ironical sayings of Renan, the Fathers of the Church increased her power by making her a sin. As a mere woman she is only a human being, like her feeble and fugitive mate. But as a combustible engine requiring the reunion of hoary Fathers from time to time to drown and extinguish her beneath the founts of holy water set to play upon her wickedness and peril, she really becomes something diabolical and magnificent, a creature to inspire alarm and excite curiosity. It is not improbable that the saintly sages and modest deacons, as they issued from the church into the rocky and tortuous streets of Toledo, on the September day of the council in the year 400, gazed in a fresh instinct of fearful wonder and shuddering attraction at the first skirted fiend that crossed their path. However plain or beautiful she might be, they would be greatly more preoccupied with the thought of her sex than her looks. Yet the clergy still might marry, and they had full rights over their wife except death. They could beat her, tie and lock her up, give her all "salutary" punishment that was not mortal, deprive her of food, and forbid her to sit at table. Never mind, she had her revenge. She felt her power be sure, and was conscious that she was a _sin_. Before the Council of Nice, Toledo adopted the belief that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and Son, which doctrine only became universal several centuries later. This is the Toledan Credo of the fifth century: "We believe in one sole and true God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, maker of all things visible and invisible, by whom were created all things in heaven and on earth; that this sole God and this sole Trinity are of divine substance; that the Father is not the same as the Son, but has a Son who is not the Father; that, the Son is not the Father, but is the Son of God from the nature of the Father; that the Spirit is the Paraclete, and is neither the Father nor the Son, but proceeds from both. The Father was not engendered but the Son, but not the Paraclete which proceeds from the Father and Son. The Father is He who was heard from the heavens, crying: _This is My Son in whom I am well pleased. Hearken to Him._ The Son is He who said: _I left the Father and came from God to this world_; and the Paraclete it is of whom the Son said: _If I went not to the Father, the Paraclete would not come to you._ That this Trinity is distinct in three persons, and is a substance united by virtue and indivisible by power and majesty, beyond this we do not believe there is any divine nature, nor of angel, nor of spirit, nor of any virtue that believes itself God. This Son of God, born of God the Father, before all beginning, sanctified the womb of the Virgin Mary, and became real man in her, _sine virili generatum semine_; uniting both natures, that is divine and fleshly, in one sole person, who is our Lord, Jesus Christ; neither was His body imaginary or any phantasm, but solid and real; He ate, was thirsty, endured pain, wept and suffered the injuries of the body; ultimately was crucified by the Jews, and buried, rose again the third day; spoke afterwards with His disciples, and the day of quadragesimo, after the resurrection ascended to heaven. This Son of Man also called Himself Son of God, and the Son of God also called Himself God, Son of Man. We believe in the future resurrection of human flesh, and maintain that the soul of man is not a divine substance, or part of God, but a creature formed by divine will." Among the singular subjects of excommunication of this Toledan Council are three worthy of notice: Vegetarians are excommunicated, it being decided by the Fathers that birds and beasts were intended to be eaten by man. Mathematicians are excommunicated, unfortunately we are not told why. Those who execrate marriage are excommunicated. Surely this last sentence is inconsistent with the Fathers' professed execration of the "frail sex"! But the triumphs and severities of the Fathers were soon interrupted by the invasion of the terrible north barbarians. The Goths were pouring across the Pyrenees, soon to make Toledo their capital and "Royal city." Fire, ruin, pillage, and death, Lafuente describes as the traces of their path. Fields, orchards, cities, and woods were swept by their ferocity. The horrors of famine and pest succeeded, calamity stalked the earth, and the Toledan sages sat and talked in the desert. The Vandals were already in the beautiful southern province of Betica, which they called Vandalusia. Rome had fallen, and the conquering Visigoth, unsettled in the north since Ataulfo's assassination at Barcelona, turned his eyes upon the strong-walled city perched up above on its seven rocks. Toledo had successfully resisted the Vandals; it succumbed to the Goths, and Euric took it by force. She was momentarily extinguished after her first little hour of sacerdotal pride and power. Euric died at Arles, and the Gothic Court for a time drifted to Sevilla. But a brighter day dawned when Atanagildo was elected king. Married to Gosuinda, the bishop of Toledo's sister, he had formed a liking for the place, and brought hither the Court, making Toledo the capital of his kingdom. CHAPTER II _The Gothic Kings of Toledo_ Here may be said to begin the real history of Toledo, from this until the fatal battle of Guadalete, the capital of Spain, since it was the heart of Gothic rule. The backward pages of its story are blurred and insignificant, judged by their traces, though we may imagine, if it were possible to build up the effaced picture of Toledo under Roman power, we should find a very superior civilisation. Instead of a flourishing Roman colony, Atanagildo's choice of this "strong place" was merely the establishment of a rough barbaric camp. It is doubtful if, until Wamba's time, the Goths had the art of profiting by such heritage as the decadent vanquished had left them. As a race they inspire even less interest than their brethren east and north. Family love was no strong element in the development of the Royal House, as the quaintly heartless story of San Hermengildo proves. Leovigildo was reigning then, and he, an Arian, committed the imprudence of marrying his eldest son, Hermengildo, to a French Goth, Ingundus, the niece of Saint Leander of Seville. With such powerful interests on the side of Rome, it is not surprising that the Arian prince speedily abjured his heresy, to the anger and dismay of his father. Unfortunately, his conversion did not imply the practice of any of the Christian virtues. Religion accomplishes the very thing we should have thought its mission to forbid: it arms the son against his father. The two sects, oddly enough representing the doctrine of peace and goodwill on earth, meet outside the walls of Seville in armed encounter. Hitherto the spectacle had been war and persecution and their attendant horrors on the side of Pagan against the noble and martyred Christian. From this we were to learn that Christian _versus_ Christian could show quite as pretty a figure in atrocities as ever the persecuting worshipper of the gods. Here we have an infuriated father and a rebellious son ready to cut one another's throat, and of the two it can hardly be said that the Catholic saint shows to better advantage. Indeed, in their correspondence both reason and dignity are on the side of Leovigildo, who writes to his son: "I associated you with my power from earliest years, not that you should arm strangers against me. Thou dost blunt thy conscience, and cover thyself with the veil of religion," he acutely adds, while Hermengildo's reply is an inflated and pragmatical attack on the baseness of his father's creed and the superiority of his own.[3] Hermengildo is beaten, his forces scattered, and thanks to the intercession of his brother, Recaredo, instead of the expected death sentence, his father sentences him to exile at Valencia. As a Christian, a martyr, and a canonised saint, Hermengildo presents an original figure. Even the harsh wisdom of Moses condemns him, and the worst Pagan would hardly condone his unprovoked assault on his father, by way of converting him to a belief in Christ's divinity; while instead of quietly enduring the consequences of his abortive rebellion and his inappropriate expression of faith, he went about the coast, begging the assistance of the Greeks in another attempt to proselytise by the sword, and seize his father's throne by the same stroke. The Spanish historians, to whom this method of conversion is particularly sympathetic and of unquestionable logic, disregard the side question of revolt, and delight in weighing upon Hermengildo's lofty efforts in behalf of truth. His object they accept as the laudable extirpation of error. Indifferent to his natural relations to the king he desired to dethrone, Gamero says: "Perhaps, like Alaric, within his breast, a secret voice had commanded him to go forth and destroy the power of Arianism in Spain; to establish upon the ruins of paganism and false sects the immortal throne where the god of Sabahot is worshipped, and on which shines with eternal splendour the immaculate purity of Mary." And so he complacently follows the unfilial prince on his bellicose mission through Estremadura, now occupying Merida, again attempting to take Seville and his former court, seeking support in France with the hope of arming his brother-in-law, Sigeric, against his father. All Gamero laments is his unsuccess. The Arian father did precisely what Hermengildo would have done in his place; he seized his son, flung him into a dungeon, first at Toledo, then at Tarragona, where he was beheaded after stoutly refusing to accept communion from the hands of an Arian bishop. His form of refusal is proudly recorded by St Gregory of Tours as an admirable one: "As a minister of the devil, only to hell couldst thou guide me. Away and go, coward, to the punishment prepared for thee, and which thou deservest." We hardly detect the influence of Christian mildness and sweetness in this address. However, all saints cannot resemble St Francis of Assisi, and even St Fernando of Castille boiled his enemies alive in great pots of water over huge fires. This is Gamero's admiring epitaph: "Thus on the 13th April, 584, ended with glorious martyrdom the life of this hero of the Spanish Church, whose blood effaced any faults as a man he may have committed, and was a perennial source of happiness and fortune to our country." Morality is, after all, like criticism, only a matter of existing convention and national temperament. Believe the right thing, and one's vices are a matter of small account. In the mediæval times, with a proper amount of faith, one might with impunity, boil one's enemies or roast them before a fire, and be duly canonised and offered to posterity as a saint and a just man. But be as virtuous and as austere as Marcus Aurelius, believing the wrong thing, and the orthodox historian will manage to be blind to your virtues, and offer you for public contumely. So we have a legend of sanctity centred round this extremely unedifying prince, who took up arms against a father not convicted of any particular injustice or enormity, plotted with France to dethrone him, and after an unnatural career, died furious and unresigned, breathing curses upon his enemies. Behold him one of the glories of that curious medley of Pagan qualities and unchristian vices, Mediæval Catholicism. The historians will not even permit the poor father to grieve and regret his own harshness in peace. His sorrow and remorse are not accepted as the natural sentiments of a man whom a just anger had carried beyond the endurance of nature. We are forced to regard them as the tardy recognition of his own iniquity and error. We are told in triumph that the monarch died weeping and repentant in the arms of St Leander of Seville, the friend and uncle by marriage of his exiled son. Could anything be more natural than this touching and piteous picture of an old man, doubtful of himself, turning in his grief to the one great friend of his son? The action in its simple humanity is worth all the grandiloquent insolence of the saint and martyr Leovigildo mourned, in whose story virtue and sanctity are equally unevident. Recaredo, his son and successor, solemnly abjured Arianism before the third Toledan Council, as the inscription on his statue outside the Alcázar records. We may imagine this unhappy son and brother weary for the moment of bloodshed and strife, and anxious to put an end to dissension in his kingdom. It would suffice to explain the wise and eloquent speech he addressed to his subjects, exhorting all to be of one faith, to enter the bosom of the Church, and accept its dogmas as he had done. His speech must have been miraculously persuasive, and his influence over his people almost magnetic, since nearly all to a man yielded to the earnest prayer of a tired and suffering heart, and consented to make his religion theirs. And thus it might be hoped, after the terrible domestic tragedy Recaredo had been obliged to witness, powerless to prevent it, the reign of violence, persecution, and discord was over, and the religious power of Toledo permanently established upon tolerant lines. But this was to count without the spirit of the times. After the first shock of misery and bereavement had passed, the turbulent sense of revolt on one side, and determination to crush it on the other, broke out in all its malignant force. The Arian bishops, goaded on by Leovigildo's widow, hurled their vote of resistance to the establishment of Roman influence. Here we have another instance of the charming inconsistency of the prolix Spanish historians. Leovigildo was nothing less than a monster, because he punished conspiracy and rebellion, and his Catholic son, condemned justly by the laws of the day to death, was a haloed martyr. Recaredo remains a just and magnanimous sovereign when he cuts off the heads and hands of the Arian conspirators; and the premature death of the queen dowager, Gosvintha, is deeply lamented, because her step-son was thus deprived of the duty of cutting off her rebellious head. Why was she less of a saint, one asks, than Hermengildo? She, too, rebelled on behalf of principle, and surely a step-son is a more natural antagonist in the field than a father! But for the historian conspiracy against a legitimate heretical sovereign may be an article of faith and duty, whereas the heretic who conspires against the monarch of the right faith is a fiend. It is this hopeless lack of logic and sense that renders so dreary and unillumined a task the reading of Spanish history. The humorists, alas! wrote dramas and novels, and history was left to the terrible Mariana, the credulous Masdeu, and the one-sided Gamero. At the next Toledan Council, Recaredo presided in all pomp, accompanied by his queen, Baddo. The sovereigns first, then all the converted Arians, bishops, priests, deacons, and lords and leaders, read aloud this act of allegiance to Rome. Recaredo was the first to swear: "I, Recaredo, King, maintaining with my heart, and affirming with my word, this true and holy confession, which alone the Catholic Church professes all over the globe, have subscribed with my right hand, God protecting me." Baddo, his wife, then swore: "I, Baddo, glorious queen, have subscribed with my hand and all my heart to that faith I believe in and have admitted." Followed the oath of each bishop and priest; and then came the turn of the nobles. Imagination readily enough evokes the scene from such dry details, and pictures one of exceptional solemnity, with a touch of barbarism, beginning to borrow undreamed of luxury from a departed civilisation, without taste or tact to render that luxury beautiful. We have only to visit the Musée de Cluny to form some notion of Gothic gold-work by inspection of the Gothic votive crowns discovered in Toledo, and it is easy to picture this rough humanity, from monarch to knight, in their flowing cloaks, grave, impressed, all in deadly earnest, and the mitred and mighty prelates forming an inner circle, in gold and silvered embroideries, bejewelled, and full of glory and contentment. The importance of the nobles we gather from a list of Gothic dignitaries. First came the dukes, counts, palatines of the royal house. Then came the first count, the count of the drinking-cup, _Escansias_; the chamberlain, Count _Cubiculario_; the chief groom, Count _Estabulario_; then the major domos, counts of the patrimony, the counters-in-chief, Count _Numerario_, the count of the viands, Count _Silonario_; knight of the youths, Count of the _Espartarios_, captain of the guard; Count of the _Sagrarios_, keeper of sacred things; Count of the _Sargentarios_, keeper of the treasure. The grandees or _ricos hombres_ were governors of the territories and kingdoms. St Isidor has painted Recaredo as a model of all the Christian virtues, which is decidedly excessive praise in the face of such accentuated vices against the mild sublimity of that scarce practised creed as an inflexible spirit of vengeance and cruelty, and a bigotry in his new religion as hard and determined as that of his Arian fathers, once the early lesson in adversity had been learnt and forgotten. However, in spite of defects rather belonging to his barbarous times, few natures being able to resist the forces of environment and general feeling, than to the man himself perhaps, he remains unquestionably one of the wisest and strongest of Gothic kings, and his personality is all the more marked by contrast with that of his feeble son, Luiva II., who was dethroned by Viterico, a senseless usurper, shortly afterwards assassinated at table by his own servants and cast into the street, where the infuriated populace seized the corpse and dragged it up and down the hilly streets and lanes of Toledo, eventually flinging it into a filthy hole as unfit for decent burial. Gundmar's short reign furnished no reason to doubt his well-meaning intentions. He quelled a rising among the Vasco Navarrese and the Imperial troops, and convened a council at Toledo to decide in the town's favour against the sacerdotal pretensions of Carthagena. But his successor is a figure worth noting, and in his reign takes place the first of those unfortunate outbreaks against the Jews, for which dismantled and impoverished Spain still pays so heavy a price. Before the Moors came, Toledo's source of prosperity and wealth sprang from her Hebrew colony, and the anti-Semitic movement, started by Sisebuth, had probably no other object than the barbarians' desire to appropriate Jewish gold. Sisebuth himself is spoken of in history as the father of the poor, and is extolled for his compassionate heart and his liberality. His horror of suffering and blood was so great that he sent his own doctors to tend the stricken enemy when he was compelled to go to war, and paid out of his own purse to his soldiers the ransom of their captives. Servitude and blood-shedding were equally abhorrent to him. The annalist Frêdégaire tells of him, as an example of exquisite sensibility in those rude times, which would be no less rare in our own, that in the thick of battle with the Imperial army, seeing the Greek soldiers fall in numbers under the savage blow of his men, he rushed into their midst, shouting: "Woe to me whose reign should see the flowing of so much human blood," and frantically drove away his soldiers from the wounded Byzantines. The pity was such excellent sentiments were not cultivated on behalf of the Jews. Having twice defeated the Byzantine army, Cesario only procured a treaty of peace on condition the Jews were expelled from Spain. And in 616, Sisebuth published his famous edict against the children of Israel, offering them the harsh alternative, within the year, of professing the Christian faith, and accepting baptism, or being publicly flogged a hundred whip-strokes, shaven and shorn, robbed of their goods, and expelled from the kingdom. One hardly understands why the shaving and flogging should have been ordered, since appropriation and expulsion ought to have sufficed. Even the Fathers of the Church had the grace to protest against the needless inhumanity of this edict, though the Toledan bishops in a council upheld it. Yet history accepts him as a mild and upright judge, a magnificent prince, a valiant and humane captain, the friend of the poor, the protector of letters. He himself dabbled in literature, wrote in the swollen and exaggerated Gothic manner, composed several earnest and dogmatic letters in refutation of Arianism, which he addressed to the King and Queen of Lombardy, severely reprimanded Bishop Eusebius for the disorders of his existence, and commanded Bishop Caecilius to return to his diocese, which he had forsaken for the monastery. Clearly a monarch not to be trifled with even by the bishops, whom he kept in check, and whose public and private life he insisted on regulating. He conquered the Asturians and the Vascons, and overthrew the Byzantine power in Spain, seizing most of the Imperial towns and weakening the Imperial forces at Cadiz. At home he built the church of St Leocadia. But of the growth of the town we learn little. Literature in those days was more moral than descriptive, and the Gothic kings of Toledo, when not fighting the Byzantines and Vascons, seem chiefly to have been engaged in discovering elegant flowers of speech, and cultivating the very finest obscurity of expression. Suinthila, looking from the seven rocky hills of his martial town, could tell himself that the kings of Toledo ruled from Cadiz to the Pyrenees, from Atlantic to Mediterranean shores, while Chindasvinthe, in his semi-Roman palace, looked peacefully across the vega and along those foliaged banks of the quiet Tagus that had beguiled Pyrrhus and his mate from the East, and recreated himself with the art of letters. St Eugenius and St Braulion of Zaragoza were the honoured recipients of his royal epistles, in which he writes of "an eloquence adorned with the most flowery words and girdled with all the harmonies of fine language," and plunging further into unlucid intricacies hymns an "eloquence suggesting a royal clemency, an observation wherein shines the zeal displayed in the travail of literary composition." When he led his troops to battle, it is to be hoped that his military addresses to them revealed less fearfully the travail of literary composition. Surely the harmonies of fine language so admired by him were never more inappropriately "girdled" against the encroachments of ordinary sense. He speaks of someone "who will not succumb from a need of understanding" and "who is not meagre through poverty of spirit." His successor, Recesvinthus, displayed the same Gothic tendencies and rhymed in the highest obscurity, in proof of the "fatness" of his wisdom, which verses he dedicated to the grateful Fathers of the VIIth Council, who being Gothic, probably understood and relished them. But Recesvinthus deserves the recognition of bibliophiles, for he had a passion for collecting old manuscripts, and was extremely particular about their authenticity and corrections. He too persecuted the Jews, and his morals were doubtful. The most famous archbishop of Toledo under Gothic rule was San Ildephonso. His parents, Stephen and Lucy, were noble Goths of almost royal blood, distantly related to the King Atanagildo. Ildephonso was educated by his uncle, St Eugenius III. At an early age he developed a passion for learning, and was sent to Seville to the care of the famous Doctor St Isidor. It would be astonishing if breathing so much sanctified air the young Ildephonso did not become himself a saint, or the reverse. His saintly master grew so attached to his pupil that when Ildephonso expressed a wish to return to his parents at Toledo, St Isidor locked him up. After a considerable while he yielded to his disciple's prayer, and allowed him to depart. The youth, after a short stay at his father's house, left it for the monastery of Agalia outside Toledo. Stephen flew into a violent rage upon the discovery, and attacked the monastery with armed followers. The monks hid the lad, while Stephen and his band searched the building from roof to cellars, and departed swearing profusely. His mother was more reasonable, and besought St Eugenius to intervene and obtain her son's permission to follow his vocation. Shortly before his death, St Eladio consecrated him and gave him holy orders (632). He was first abbot of the monastery of St Cosmos and St Damian, and on the death of Adeodato, became abbot of the monastery of Agalia where he had received orders. Inheriting from his parents, he devoted the inheritance to the foundation of a convent for nuns, and on his uncle's death, 659, he was raised to the vacant archbishopric of Toledo. Heretics began to discuss the perpetual virginity of Our Lady, and Ildephonso wrote his first notable book, _De Virginitate perpetua Sanctae Mariae adversus tres infideles_, the three infidels being Elvidio, Theudio, and Eladio, natives of Narbonne. The saint's triumph in polemics was immediate, and the infidels were pronounced as completely crushed. The whole court followed the King and the Archbishop to the church of Saint Leocadia to give loud thanks. Kneeling at the saint's tomb, suddenly a group of angels appeared through clouds and sweet scents; the clouds fainting, the young martyr was revealed in the midst of the group, and smiling graciously upon Ildephonso, said, _Ildephonse per te vivit domina mea_. The astounded archbishop, rapidly recovering his bewilderment, held out his hand to grasp the saint's veil, and the King Recesvinthus, kneeling beside him, passed him his knife, with which Ildephonso cut off a piece of the veil, which, together with the knife, is now kept among the Cathedral treasures. The mass of St Leocadia, composed by the archbishop, was then solemnly sung, and this was the first inauguration of a feast since adopted by the Church of Rome, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Thanks from heaven did not rest with Mary's messenger, St Leocadia. Nine days after entering the church to recite matins, the archbishop saw a strange flame upon the wall. Approaching, he discovered the queen of heaven seated on his own marble chair enveloped in heavenly radiance, who thus addressed him: _Propera, serva dei charissime, in occursum, et accipe munusculum de manu mea, quod de thesausus filii sevi attuli_. The present she brought him from heaven was a splendid chasuble wrought by angels, in which the Virgin with her own hands vested him, while the celestial choir chanted around him. The vision faded in a faint smoke, and only the perfumes and the vague echo of remote music remained, while St Ildephonso lay prostrate in ecstasy, kissing the spot the Virgin's feet had touched, _ubi steterum pedes ejus_. He was found in this attitude by the clergy and multitudes, and his fame, owing to this second miracle, spread far and wide, till Rome dispatched two legates to inquire into the legend. Thus it was that the Pope and the King of Spain came to be canons of the Cathedral of Toledo, which took precedence of all others in the land. In a few weeks St Ildephonso returned the Virgin's visit in heaven, and he was buried in all pomp beside the patron of the city, St Leocadia. But of all these Gothic sovereigns, the most important for Toledo was Wamba, the only one now gloriously remembered. Wamba it was who built the great walls, traces of which to-day remain. Most of the Gothic inscriptions were in honour of Wamba, though these have nearly all disappeared. His defaced statue it is that greets you welcome to his ancient citadel and capital. One of these vanished inscriptions is preserved in the _Chronique rimée des rois de Tolède_ by the anonymous writers of Cordova.[4] It was traced on Wamba's famous walls: _Erexit factore Deo rex inclitus urbem, Wamba suæ celebrem protendedens, gentis honorem. Vos sancti domini, quorum hic præsentia fulget. Hunc urbem et golebem solito salvate favore._ For the Toledans, Wamba remains a personage of fabulous virtue and merit. We first meet him at the funeral of Recesvinthus, when by general election he was proclaimed king. He was an old warrior, neither ambitious nor over-confident, it would appear, and he humbly declined an honour he did not feel fitted to accept. So frantic was the sense of disappointment that a duke walked up to him angrily and threatened to kill him on the spot if he persisted in his refusal, and confronted with a crown and a formidable Toledan blade, the humblest sage that ever drew breath would naturally choose the crown. Wamba bowed to spontaneous choice, and made his triumphal entry into the capital, Sep. 20, 672, nineteen days after his compulsory acceptance of the throne. It was no easy seat, and all his prowess, his undoubted genius and his popularity could not keep him thereon unmolested, though Bishop Quiricus had anointed him amid universal rejoicings. Lope de Vega assumes that this really remarkable man was of peasant origin, but later historians agree that he was of good blood, a much more likely fact, as the barbarous Goths were sticklers for aristocratic prestige, and the law kept very distinct the _nobiles_ and the _vilidies_. However virtuous the man of obscure origin might be, it is doubtful if a fierce Gothic duke would have threatened to murder him if he declined so stupendous an honour as the right of ruling that duke and his fellow-nobles. The start of Wamba's brief but glorious reign was marked by treachery and revolt. His general, of Greek origin, Count Paul, in conspiracy with the Count of Nîmes and the Bishop of Maguelonne, rose against him in Narbonese Gaul. Wamba was then fighting the eternal Vascon, the hereditary enemy of the Kings of Toledo, but he left the Basque country and marched into Gaul, capturing the Pyrenean fortresses, attacking Narbonne by land and sea, and seizing Béziers, Agde, Maguelonne, and then he fell upon Nîmes. Never were French prisoners treated with greater courtesy and consideration. Not only did he free them but sent them off with splendid gifts. For Count Paul alone was he adamantine. He condemned the rebel to walk barefooted between two dukes on horseback, who led him in leash by the hair of his Greek head through the Gothic ranks at Nîmes. Then Wamba on horseback coldly surveyed the ignoble procession, while poor Paul was forced to prostrate himself before his outraged master. In public the King rebuked him, and then we are sorry to record of so great a man, publicly kicked him and ordered his head to be shaved. The shaving and the kick might fittingly have been suppressed with dignity added to the picture of stern Wamba on horseback. To see his enemy grovelling at his feet ought to have contented even a Goth. But no. When Wamba made his triumphal entry into Toledo, the unfortunate Paul and his accomplices walked behind--shaven, forlorn, barefooted, robed in camel's hair, and instead of graceful, superfluous locks, Paul wore a mock crown of laurel. He was not without a certain grim humour King Wamba, you perceive, and one would like to have seen his Gothic visage as his glance fell upon the laurel crown. Not benignant of a surety, possibly sardonic. But it is not in connection with Count Paul that Wamba's name reaches us to-day and like that of the fatal Rodrigo, is permanently attached to Toledo. Forgotten the long list of Gothic sovereigns, forgotten the councils they presided over, the battles they lost and won, their achievements, follies and virtues, their epistolary flowers of speech and decrees. Only Wamba and Rodrigo remain, one a historic fact, the other vaguely and unveraciously defined through legend and romance. As I have said, coming up from the station, the traveller is greeted upon the dusty curving road by the noseless statue of King Wamba, who built upon the Roman remains a magnificent wall round the city, raised ramparts, towers, and chapels, and for eight years was the untiring benefactor of the city and the people, till treachery rewarded his splendid services by deposition in the hour of illness and condemned him to claustral reclusion. In his days, the Bridge of Alcántara still existed with its marvellous Roman arch, one of the most finished and graceful Roman monuments of Spain. For the Goths had the virtue not to destroy any of the Roman remains, though they were incapable of profiting by what they found. They it was who, at Wamba's orders, built the walls and palaces of Toledo, and gave [Illustration: PUENTE DE ALCANTARA.] the city its definite note of architecture, a note the Moors were careful not to efface, all in adding their own ineffaceable stamp, for the Moors were great artists and had the secret of utilising what they influenced. If the Spanish Goths began by modelling their architecture on the Roman remains in their capacity of imitators and not inventors, the Moors, inventors and assimilators, forced the Goths to modify their style by the famous mudejar order. Violence must be a rudimentary instinct of humanity, since the milder and less florid mudejar remains a single feature in Spanish architecture, while the rough Goths have the secret of impressing their individuality on all the entire Peninsula, and so with their flowers of speech, vapid, empty, and void of sincerity which to this day have entered the language of the country, unaltered by the march of centuries, ornate and unintelligent, untouched by modern civilisation, of which the Spaniards take no heed. The ruins of this dead Gothic art are best studied at Toledo. Here you have it purest, the fourth century style with its coarse and pointed leafage, its laboured workmanship, its ornamentation, symbols, and figurative caprices, then so new and bold, and which are never repeated in the Arabic or Byzantine architecture later. Fragments of this art of Wamba's days may be seen in the ruined church of San Genes, in the bath of the Cava, never a bath, where never the legendary Florinda bathed, and in the wall of a house in the _calle Lechuga_, as well as in the façade of the Bridge of Alcántara. In the beginning of Gothic rule it was chiefly architecture that flourished, but Wamba's immediate predecessors, we have seen, preferred literature and libraries, cultivated poetry, the epistolary art, and such research as the obscure times afforded, which they called science, and founded colleges. Their costume was half Roman, since they borrowed what they knew of civilisation from the Romans. They wore silk embroidered cloaks, let their hair grow long, like their Merovingian brethren, to mark their superiority to the short-cropped Celt-Iberians they had conquered; the women wore costly habits and splendid jewels, and all the nobles drank from golden cups and washed in silver basins. The value and beauty of their goldsmiths' work are abundantly testified by the nine great votive crowns in the Musée de Cluny, where the famous treasure of Guarrazar is preserved. These magnificent gold crowns of the seventh century were discovered near Toledo in 1858 by a French officer who owned the property _La Fuente de Guarrazar_ where these historic crowns were buried. They were probably buried at the time of Tarik's invasion, and remained nearly eight centuries underground. The most important, as well as the largest and most beautiful, is the crown which bears the inscription in letters of gold cloisonné and incrusted, RECCESVINTHUS REX OFFERET. To show the value of the workmanship of this crown, I cannot do better than quote here in full its official description in the catalogue of the Musée Cluny by M. du Sommerard: "King Recesvinthus' crown is composed of a large and massive golden band. It opens with a double hinge, and is richly framed by two borders of gold cloisonné, and incrusted with red Carian stones, those which Anastasius calls _gemmis alabandinsis_, and in relief has thirty Oriental sapphires of the greatest beauty set in golden borders, mostly of considerable dimension. Thirty-five pearls of a no less notable size alternate with the sapphires on a golden ground incrusted with the same stones, and twenty-four little gold chains, starting from the lower circle of the crown, suspend large letters in gold cloisonné and incrusted, whose disposition form the words: RECCESVINTHUS REX OFFERET. Each of these letters ends with a pendant of gold and fine pearls holding a pear of rose sapphire. The king's crown is suspended by a quadruple chain of beautiful workmanship which attaches it to a double gem of massive gold enriched with twelve pendants in sapphire, and this gem, whose branches are open, is surmounted by a capital in rock-crystal, finely wrought; then comes a ball of the same material, and then a golden stem which forms the starting point of the suspension. The cross which occupies the centre of the crown and is attached to the gem by a long golden chain, is not less remarkable for its elegance of form and richness of material. It is in massive gold relieved by six lovely sapphires and eight big fine pearls, each jewel is set in relief in open claws, and behind is still the fibula that hooked it to the royal mantle. The diadem is of plain gold within, but the exterior, which the sapphires and fine pearls set in relief ornament, has another particular decoration, which consists in a set of palm leaves in open cutting whose leaves are filled with blades of the same red material which looks like cornelian stone at first sight, of which we have already spoken. The sapphires which decorate the band, and whose setting is largely treated, are, we have said, thirty, all of the finest water, and many of them show traces of a natural crystallisation by facets; the two principal ones, which are placed in the centre of each face, are not in diameter less than thirty millimetres. The pearls are also of an exceptional size, and only a few have been affected by time. The suspension chains are composed each of five fine gems cut in open work, and the stem that supports the whole is of massive gold. The number of sapphires that ornament this crown, the cross and the gem are not less than seventy, of which thirty are of matchless size, the pearls the same. The pendants which terminate the letters of the diadem are, as well, decorated with enamel enchased in golden borders. So much to prove that the charge of luxury against the Toledan Goths is not unfounded. A people so enamoured of gold and jewels and embroidered silks as they at this time were, would naturally be disposed to forget the rude lessons of war and camp. Wamba had improved their town and made it a fair and comfortable place to dwell in, and the barbarians without the gates were quieted now by frequent defeat. And so, the wise and virtuous Wamba once deposed by trickery and smuggled off the throne in a cataleptic fit, garbed in the monk's gown of renouncement, the period of Gothic decadence set in. Its day of triumph and ordered rule had been a brief if brilliant one, and it had by patient effort evolved its own rude and unstable civilisation out of rough-shod conquest. From Ataulfo and his horde of barbarians, pouring, famished and athirst, across the Pyrenees, to lettered Recesvinthus and austere Wamba, who would make an effective figure even in our own times, the range in humanity is long, the dividing sea is wide and deep. But if swift had been the triumph, swifter still and more inexplicable was the decline. A more unhappy and reckless descent to oblivion history does not record. Towards the end of the seventh century, the glory of Toledo had so sensibly diminished that a haze lies upon its subsequent history to the lurid fame of the doomed day of Guadalete. We hear dimly of deplorable vices, of a demoralised clergy, of effaced and degraded sovereigns, of a people given up to every shameful pleasure and wrapped in effeminacy and indolence. The private story of King Egica is a curious and an unedifying one, told at length by Lozana in his _Reyes Nuevos_ and by the Conde de Mora in his History of Toledo. Egica fell violently in love with his niece, Doña Luz, who, on her side, loved more passionately than wisely her other uncle, Don Favila. Favila seems a disreputable enough fellow, since he took the last advantage of his niece's passion, and left her to face the most atrocious troubles that might have ceased by manly behaviour on his part. It is one of those complicated and incomprehensible episodes in history that leave us aghast. Favila is elsewhere supposed to have murdered his brother by a blow on the head for the sake of that brother's wife. At any-rate he pursued Doña Luz and, as Lozana naïvely asserts, with her permission entered her bedroom one night, and there kneeling before the statue of the Virgin (exquisite absence of all sense of the ludicrous revealed even in modern Spanish plays where the same sort of thing happens), they proclaim themselves man and wife with the usual results. In a little while the watchful and suspicious king perceives that his niece, Doña Luz, is _enceinte_. The lady understands her own and the coming infant's danger, so she has an ark made, and after a secret delivery, places the infant in it like another Moses, with quantities of linen, jewellery and money, and her women float it down the Tagus, where, by a miracle, it is found by her uncle, Grafeses, who lives at Alcántara. Not knowing whose is the child, Grafeses takes it home. At Toledo the king suspects what has happened, but can find out nothing definite, so, still true to biblical tradition, he decides to tackle the new-born infants. He sends for a list of all the children born in and without Toledo during the past three months, with the name of each father, hoping thus to discover an unfathered babe with which to charge Doña Luz. The number of babies born during the three months in the city of Toledo reached 10,428, and in the suburbs surpassed 25,000. What a different story from that of to-day! One wonders where there was room for the immense population of olden times. Alas for the vindictive king! All the babies had authentic fathers and mothers, and there was no reaching Doña Luz by this device. There remained another and less primitive vengeance. He ordered one of his gentlemen, Melias, to attack her publicly as "a lost woman." Because she refused to become _his_ mistress, and became somebody else's (his brother's), he decided she should be burnt for impurity. Excellent logic of man! On Doña Luz's first appearance at Court Melias charged her with impropriety, and the king fiercely ordered her to reply to the accusation. "My Lord," said Luz, with much dignity, "how would you have me reply to such a charge? God knows, and you, my lord, see that I cannot give him the reply he merits, since he is a cavalier and yet accuses me, a woman, of evil." The king, base churl, not touched by this admirable reply, mockingly assures her that he is uncertain whether to address her as dame or maid, and defies her to find a defender, having previously forbidden his courtiers to take up her cause. At all times the picture of a disappointed lover vindictively pursuing the woman who has refused to listen to him is particularly hideous, but never more than here, where the insulted lady is so noble and patient and he such a ruffian. Without a defender, he adds, she is destined to burn for her lack of chastity. She asks for a delay, and this is surlily granted. Just as the fire is being prepared for the unfortunate Doña Luz, Don Favila arrives from the Asturias. It is not made clear to us why he did not remain and provoke a duel with Melias at once, but the historians unctuously assure us that he kissed his wife (in the eyes of God) wept over her, told her to hold her soul in patience, and returned to the Asturias in search of money. The delay must have been unendurably long, and one wonders at Egica's unnatural command of temper, when even now, as I, alas! too well know, it takes a long time, even with the aid of steam, to get from Toledo to the Asturias. In hot haste, however, Don Favila returned to Toledo, challenged Melias, and all the court assembled in the Vega beneath the archbishop's palace, to watch the fight. Doña Luz remained in her chamber, full of sorrow and fear for Favila. The king ordered the Duke of Cabra and Count of Merida with three hundred cavaliers to guard the Vega, and, under pain of death, prevent anyone from assisting the combatants. His fierce desire, not even concealed, was that Favila should be killed, and Doña Luz thus placed more utterly at his mercy. The knights met with a terrible shock of steel, so that both were unhorsed and nearly killed. This report reached Doña Luz and prostrated her. She hurried out to see for herself; and Favila, recovered from his faint, looked up and gave her a glance of reassurance and love. He was only dizzy as was proved by his alert spring to his feet and quick rush upon his lady's enemy, through whose slanderous mouth he thrust his sword inflicting thus a death wound. He coolly drew out his sword, wiped it, and advancing to the royal seat, he bowed before the king and queen, and haughtily hoped that Doña Luz's reputation now was cleared. Not satisfied, Egica sent another knight, Bristes, (what unutterable cads those Gothic knights were!), to challenge the lady's innocence, and Bristes went gaily forth on his base sovereign's behalf to meet Favila to whom he shouted: "I will kill you and have Doña Luz burnt." Favila wisely replied: "deeds not words weigh" and ran his sword through the braggart's body. Much to his grief and disappointment Egica was forced to admit the lady's vindication, but demanded her lover's sword, which provoked a fresh onslaught. Grafeses stayed the clash of steel by coming to court to learn the meaning of all these wild doings, and, on passing through his niece's room, on his way to the queen's chamber, recognised a handkerchief which resembled those folded round the infant of the ark he had picked up on the banks of the Tagus at Alcantara. Questioning his niece, he discovered the nature of her relations with Favila, and instantly insisted on their marriage. The king was still bent on another duel, and sent Longaris to fight Favila about the sword, when a hermit comes to court and, in the name of heaven, stops the duel by revealing, as a divine message from above, the secret loves of Doña Luz and Don Favila. Both the cavaliers were wounded, and Doña Luz flung herself on her knees before the king and begged for mercy for her lover. After long hesitation, impelled by the hermit's command from heaven to accept the inevitable, Egica gives in, signals the end of the third duel against Doña Luz's happiness, and permits, gracelessly of course, after Favila's recovery, his public marriage with the thrice unfortunate Doña Luz. He and the queen were witnesses, and Grafeses, a kind of _deus ex machina_, proclaimed the infante Childe Pelayo, the future hero and victor of Covadonga. Egica's other feat was to persecute anew the Jews for an imaginary conspiracy to convert Spain into a Hebrew kingdom. He pronounced them slaves, took their children from them, and forebade them to intermarry. Two figures stand out in this prolonged and monotonous legend in exaggerated, it may even be said, in false relief. Witiza and Rodrigo are charged with the ruin of the Toledan kingdom. No less than four archbishops, in no moderate language, have recorded the tale of Witiza's iniquities, Sebastian of Salamanca, Isidor Pacense, Lucas of Tuy, and Rodrigo of Toledo. None of these writers were contemporaries of Witiza, and they wrote in days when research was nigh impossible, and when we may doubt if a premium was put upon accuracy. How much even of our own history is a matter of hearsay? and does there exist a man so fortressed by virtue as to live without the range of slander if he be so unfortunate as to excite enmity or jealousy; above all, if he tread on the susceptible toes of prejudice? This is what Witiza precisely did. And the prejudice he wounded was ecclesiastical, and ecclesiastical rancour we know at all times has proved the bitterest man can provoke. But we also find the notable figure of the Archbishop of Toledo, Julian, a fluent and accomplished writer, and a saint. The anonymous chronicler of Cordova tells us that his origin was Jewish, a fact suppressed by the anti-semitical Spanish historians. He succeeded Quiricus and wrote the history of Wamba's reign, all in proving himself a model pastor. His accomplishments were varied. He was a historian, an orator, theologian, polemist, poet, and musician. So much genius and sanctity in a Goth was little short of an impertinence. The list of his writings is vast, but only a few remain. Some are in Greek, most are in Latin, and their matter is hardly of general interest. He wrote the _Apology of Real Faith_ in reply to the heresies of Apollinarius, and sent it to Pope Leo II. It reached Rome after the pope's death. The succeeding pope, Benedict, replied to it, and two years later the reply reached the Archbishop of Toledo. It provoked a learned treatise to prove that the writer was in accord with Isidor of Seville, Fulgence, Ambrose, Augustine and Cyril of Alexandria. Three ecclesiastics were dispatched with the precious document, and it took them fourteen months to reach Rome. Meanwhile three other popes had succeeded Benedict, and the fourth called a council to consider the matter. All Spain hung on the decision; the king was worried and alarmed, not knowing if he should regard his erudite archbishop as a heretic or one of the faithful. At last the messengers from Rome arrived, bringing praise and admiration from a pope to whom the document had not been addressed, while between him and Leo, the original disputer of Julian's orthodoxy, four popes placidly lay in their tombs. Julian died three years after this triumph, having ruled during ten brilliant years of primacy, 690, and was buried with St Ildefonso in the church of St Leocadia. This is the incongruous legend of Witiza. During his father's life-time, he ruled at Tuy in Galicia, and proved himself pious, mild, just and generous. His morals were unimpeachable, and while humane to all, he was indulgent to his personal enemies, and freely granted pardon and favours to malcontents. Such a man seems a fitter subject for canonisation than San Hermengildo. Then this excellent monarch, in middle life, with character and habits formed, comes down to Toledo, and without rhyme or reason, we hear of him suddenly as a blind and bloody-minded scoundrel. From sage and saint he turns into an historic ogre, not content with libertinage in himself but constraining his subjects to follow his example, and for sheer viciousness' sake, commanding an austere and chaste clergy to marry. No villany, no crime seems too base and preposterous for the archbishops to lay to his account. For the benevolence of Tuy we have rank injustice, for the mildness envenomed cruelty, and every anterior virtue is replaced by its pendant vice. Yet Witiza's power at Tuy was no less than his power at Toledo. He had his court and his throne in both towns, and there was no reason on earth why he should act the wise man in the north, and the unreasoning reprobate in the south. We suspect his first act of clemency on reaching Toledo, in annulling Sisebuth's edict against the Jews, had much to do with the joint vituperation of the archbishops and the subsequent historians. Not only did he recall them, but, misplaced generosity in mediæval eyes, he restored to the unfortunates their appropriated property and wealth, and permitted them to live and earn unmolested in his kingdom. Witiza's defence has been ingeniously undertaken by the Père Tailhan in his interesting notes to the rhyming chronicler of Cordova, a contemporary of Witiza. Here we meet the clement Prince of Tuy, whose mildness, in spite of a natural impetuosity held in check, was his greatest crime in the eyes of immediate posterity, unswervingly kind to all who approached and addressed him, described by his enemies, the Moors, as the most just and pious of all the Christian kings of his time, and a man of blameless life. Count Fernando Gonzalez refers to him as "a powerful king, of indomitable courage and of noble heart." The anonymous writer of Cordova, who was in a position to judge, writes of his reign as one of peace and prosperity and universal happiness. Was the devil incarnate the invention of the four respectable archbishops? Of course the dull and bigoted Mariana follows in their footsteps. Don José Godoz Alcantara is of a different opinion:--"Witiza," he writes, "initiated his reign by the most ample act of generosity. He restored to the destitute their dignities and wealth, publicly burnt all proofs and denunciations of conspiracy; wishing to cure a degenerate aristocracy of the passion of power, and direct their spirit of sedition to the arts of peace, he knocked down Wamba's famous walls, and according to the picturesque phrase of the Archbishop Don Rodrigo, 'pretended to turn arms into spades.'"[5] The only crime the traveller in Spain will find it difficult to forgive, is this act of vandalism in knocking down Wamba's walls. He could have exhorted his subjects to practise the arts of peace, all in leaving these great walls untouched in their monumental beauty. But this is what the reformers of humanity never will do. They are never happy until they have sacrificed the picturesque on the altar of utility. Witiza, we see, was in advance of his age. He was a "modern" man, a creature of fads and fantasies. This was how he came by his quaint notion of refining the deplorable morals of Toledo. He could think of no other way of steming the tide of general sensuality but in legalising polygamy. So fierce a race fallen into bad habits was hardly to be sermonised with success. The legal state of polygamy he regarded, along with Oriental sages, as preferable to indiscriminate and wide-spread libertinage. It is still a nice question unsolved in civilised Europe whether several legitimate wives or their unrecognised substitutes constitute a higher or lower state of morality. Witiza was only less hypocritical than civilised Europe, that is all. But to pretend that bigamy is more scandalous than private disorder is absurd. Witiza's notion of reform may have been primitive and instructive, but it does not justify the legend of his own evil life. To begin with, if he had been the degraded sensualist the archbishops and Mariana describe him, he would not have troubled about reform at all, and he may have had sound reason for requesting the clergy to marry since historians are agreed that they had become utterly demoralised. The same haze of legends blurs for us the figure of his unfortunate successor, Roderick of the Chronicle. On one side we hear of him as ascending the throne an octogenarian, on another as the impassioned lover of the beautiful Florinda, the brilliant president of a brilliant court; carried to battle in a litter, and riding thither on a legendary steed, fulgent and valiant; disappearing from the field and disgracefully hiding in a monastery; fighting like a hero and falling in the fray. We are told that he was a coward by the pen that depicts him valorously and recklessly approaching the unknown terrors of the enchanted palace of Hercules, though Florinda's charming leg is not more vaporous upon research than the vanished walls of this palace. It matters little now whether the archbishop Rodrigo's ivory-carven car drawn by mules carried his unhappy namesake to the fatal field of Guadalete or the legendary steed flashing its way through mailed ranks. However he comported himself, he lost his kingdom, and his resting place is forever unknown. But the tale of the great tournament with which he started his disastrous reign, must be told at length as one of the most resplendent pages of courtly history. Whatever may have been the end of his reign, he certainly began it in the most sumptuous spirit of hospitality and generosity yet recorded. Was ever such a tournament given before? Princes and lords and their followers came in swarms from all parts of Europe to high Toledo, upon her seven steep hills. Hearken only to the names, and say if they do not make a page in themselves as delightful as any of Froissart's. The lords of Gascony, Elmet de Bragas, with a hundred cavaliers; Guillamme de Comenge, with a hundred and twenty; the Duke of Viana, with four hundred cavaliers; the Count of the Marches, with a hundred and fifty; the duke of Orleans, with three hundred cavaliers; and four other Dukes of France, with four hundred. Then came the King of Poland, with a luxurious train, and six hundred gentlemen of Lombardy; two marquises, four captains, with twelve hundred cavaliers. Rome sent three governors and five captains, with fifteen hundred cavaliers. The Emperor of Constantinople, his brother, three counts, and three hundred cavaliers came, as well as an English prince, with great lords, and fifteen hundred cavaliers. From Turkey, Syria, and other parts, nobles and princes to the number of five thousand came, without counting their followers and servitors, and different parts of Spain alone furnished an influx of fifty thousand cavaliers. What a poor affair our modern exhibitions and sights, even the Queen's Jubilee, seem after reading of such a brilliant and stupendous gathering of guests at King Roderick's court of Toledo. He was, as I have said, a King to visit, with nothing of Spanish inhospitality about him. He ordered all the citizens to sleep without the city walls in the ten thousand tents he had fixed in the wide Vega, and give up their houses to his foreign guests. Be sure he paid them for the sacrifice in princely style, for out of Eastern fable never was such a prince as Don Rodrigo, the last of the Goths. All the expenses of the foreigners, including their mounts and armour, were his, for they were not permitted to use their own lances, swords, armour or horses. Never were guests entertained with such prodigious splendour. He ordered palaces to be built for them, and laid injunctions on builders, furnishers and purveyors to spare neither expense nor luxury. The whole Peninsula was scoured in search of armourers and iron-workers, and over fifteen hundred master armourers with their apprentices and under-hands were hastily gathered together in Toledo in more than a thousand[6] improvised iron-shops, working for six busy months at shields and lances and exquisitely wrought damascene armour for every lord and knight, the guest of their king. Each guest on arriving received, as well as house and board, his horse, full armour, shield and lance. The tourney opened on a Sunday, and presented such a scene as imagination alone can depict. We are not told the precise spot, but we may suppose the quaint three-cornered, the ever irresistible Zocodover. Rasis el Moro records each guest's formal reply when asked if he desired to fight? "For this we have come from our lands; firstly, to serve and honour these feasts; secondly, to see how they are carried out; thirdly, to prove your body, your strength, and learn what you are worth in arms." Hearing of these great feasts, the Duchess of Lorraine, persecuted by her brother-in-law, Lembrot, came to Toledo to implore Rodrigo's protection. Rodrigo received her with cordiality, and lodged her in the royal palace, and as official defender charged Sacarus with her cause. Lembrot was called to Toledo to meet the Duchess's knight, and came with a great train. He, too, was generously entertained, and pending the clash of steel which was to decide the quarrel between Lembrot and the Duchess, the Queen gave a sarao, which was even a more brilliant and gorgeous spectacle than the tourney. Fifty ladies danced with fifty of the greatest lords, and never was such a constellation of European titles joined in a single diversion. The ladies' names are not recorded, but there were in the first dance the King of Poland, the French prince, the Emperor of Constantinople, the son of the King of England (simply called _el hijo del Rey de Inglaterra_), the Spanish infante, the Duke of Viana, the Duke of Orleans, the Count of the Marshes, the Marquis of Lombardy, and Count William of Saxony. This enchanting moment preceded bloodshed, for on the next day the two uncles of Lembrot were killed by Sacarus, thus proclaiming the innocence of the Duchess to whom Lorraine was then restored, and, along with other fallen knights, lay the King of Africa. The dead were buried with great pomp at the expense of their splendid host, and thus ended a tournament surely without equal as a spectacle in history. The chronicle of Don Rodrigo devotes nearly a hundred pages to this picturesque event. The most prominent episode in the life of the legendary Rodrigo is his famous intrigue with Florinda. We are told that Count Julian, Governor of Ceuta, sent his daughter to be brought up at Court, where she was in a sense the King's ward. Nothing remains in history to support this tradition, for it is now asserted it was never the Gothic habit to have the daughters of absent noblemen brought up at court as the sovereign's wards. Then we hear of the Cava's baths, where Rodrigo, from his palace windows, overhanging the river outside the Puenta de San Martin, beheld her bathing. Inspection proves these ruins to be the old foundation of a bridge, nothing more. The story of the Cava dates from the fourteenth century, when an Arabian writer, Aben-en-Noguairi, in a volume called _El Limita de la prudencia en las reglas de la prudencia_, gives the legend. The historian Gamero thus defines the word _Cava_ as applied to Florinda in explanation of her condition of violated maiden. Caba proceeds from Caat, an Arabian tribe that came to Spain in Wamba's reign, descended from Heber of Jewish origin. When the Jews at the seventeenth Council of Toledo, under Egica, were ordered to be destituted and sold as slaves, while their children were to be taken from them and forcibly brought up as Christians, the saying was that the _Caba was violated_, that is, that this entire tribe, forced to become Christian in preservation of its wealth and property, had prostituted itself. From the current phrase, the historians applied the word to a particular woman, and poetically named her Florinda. From Eve downward all her daughters have had to share her fate in supporting all the blame of human disasters. Neither war, defeat, nor blunder nor wreckage of nations or of individuals is accepted by man as properly and adequately explained, if some woman is not the man's or the nation's evil genius. Unprompted by woman, man is a serene and prudent animal, and but for Florinda, who never existed (though the historians gravely reproduce a touching and eloquent letter of hers to her father recording in fine and dignified phrases the story of her wrongs, and beseeching her father to vindicate her outraged honour and punish the unworthy King), the last of the Toledan sovereigns might have ended his days in his bed, and, undesirable fate for Spain! the Moors might never have crossed the narrow strait. As Gamero says: "Ultimately the story of Rodrigo's guilty love for a lady of the palace was created." A lady's name once introduced, it followed a fatal and romantic legend should be invented, and what prettier than conversion of the broken bridge on the enchanting marge of yellow Tagus into a syren's bath, with Rodrigo, the inflammable warrior, fresh from his encounter with dethroned gods and their emissaries in an enchanted palace, looking down on the maiden as she disported in the water from the windows of his luxurious Gothic palace? The legend once started, it is inevitable that the traitor should follow, and hence the elusive and mysterious figure of Count Julian, who advances into the picture on a mission of paternal vengeance, and treacherously opens the gates of Spain to the predatory Berbers. The Turks had entered Spain, and it needed some other explanation than national pluck, enterprise and determination to account for their almost unopposed approach towards Toledo; and what so likely an instrument of misfortune as the mythical father of the fabulous Florinda? So history was written, in all faith in those naïve days. Don Faustina de Bourbon remarks that this fable was not heard of before the dominion of the Asturian monarchs in southern Spain; not until the Cid took Valencia, and Alonzo basely seized Toledo, the kingdom of his Moorish protector and host. Such fables accord with the childish, superstitious yearning and need to associate the land's misfortunes with the personal iniquities of those who rule it. Roderick may have been no saint, and small blame to him in those grossly immoral times, but we need not attach to his shoulders the packet of national sins and disorders. Because the abuses among the clergy and the nobles had reached a repulsive depth of infamy, and public morals were in a lamentable state, is no reason to insist on his violation of Florinda, or refer as the Viscount Palazuelos does in his modern guide-book of Toledo, in an excess of unromantic austerity and disdain "to the guilty loves of Rodrigo and Count Julian's daughter."[7] There is no proof whatever that Rodrigo was the wretched sensualist the historians delight to paint. His crime was (and that the Gothic race shares with him) that he unworthily lost a large kingdom to a small invading force, and his shame lies in his inexplicable defeat. But for traitor there was never any need to invent Count Julian (whom the Père Tailhan insists was a certain Roman Urban who accompanied Tarik, and whose name was distorted into Julian), nor Florinda. Treachery existed nearer home in Witiza's family. Rodrigo had deposed Witiza, and the usurper was repaid by the treachery of Witiza's sons and his brother, Oppas, foolishly thinking the Berber raid would only prove a transient panic which would permit them to dispossess the usurper, and claim Witiza's throne. Instead of a mere raid, the invasion turned out one of the most astonishing conquests of history. Rodrigo's army was immense; Tarik's only numbered twelve thousand men. The battle took place on the banks of the Wadi-becca; it lasted a week, beginning on July 19th, 711. Two wings of the Spanish army were commanded by Witiza's worthless sons, chiefly manned by malcontents and their serfs. So when the commanders ordered their men to give their backs to the enemy, there was no difficulty on the question of obedience. The centre, commanded by Rodrigo, stood its ground valiantly, but unassisted, at length gave way, and the Turks literally hacked the Christians to pieces. It was an appalling massacre. Rodrigo's fate, as I have said, remains unknown. Did he fly, was he killed? Did he sink into the marsh where his embroidered saddle and silken cloak were found? We hear on one side that Roderick disappeared mysteriously from the battle-field; on the other, that he fought valiantly and when forced to retreat, did so, fighting his way step by step, sword in hand, and fell with his face to the enemy as befits a soldier. He was supposed in this version to have been buried at Visein, and 160 years later, Alfonso the Great, in reconstituting that fallen town, discovered the dust of the defeated monarch with the inscription on a stone--_Hic requiescit Rudericus (ultimus) rex Gothorem_.[8] It is idle now to ask what is true in all these conflicting accounts, or stop to ask which statement is the right one, that Rodrigo was a gallant prince in the prime of life when he began his short reign of one year, or, as an Arabian historian has asserted, a sick and feeble old man of over eighty. His defection or disappearance completed the catastrophy, the most fatal and final in the record of any land, and Tarik profited by the circumstance. Both malcontents and Jews joyfully received him and threw wide open the gates of Toledo to his advance. Hither he came with fresh laurels gathered at Ecija, surrounded with the flower of his army, while he sent around detachments against Cordova, Archidme, and Elvira. To the Jews he owed his easy conquest of Toledo, and the Goths alone were to blame for this. It was only natural the unhappy and persecuted Jews should welcome any foreign invasion that helped to deliver them and sweep their brutal oppressors into obscurity. Witiza's clemency was too isolated a fact in Gothic rule to be remembered by them or to inspire the faintest hope for continued tolerance. The next monarch might even prove worse than Sisebuth or Egica. It was safer to rely on the Moor, who would probably remember their good-will, and would hardly maintain a prejudice against them in favour of the Christians. As for the nobles and prelates, they lost their heads and flew northward. The city was speedily emptied of all the Goths who had the means of flight. Most of the patricians emigrated to Galicià; the archbishop retreated to Rome, and in payment for their treachery, Witiza's sons claimed land to the extent of three thousand farms, which Tarik granted them. Oppas, Witiza's brother, was named governor of Toledo, until Tarik's splendid victory brought over from Africa Musa, infuriated and jealous. Instead of thanking his lieutenant, he acknowledged his services by publicly horsewhipping him when the dismayed victor came submissively to meet him at the city gates. CHAPTER III _Toledo under Moslem Rule_ "It must not be supposed that the Moors," writes Mr Lane Poole in his "History of the Moors in Spain," "like the barbarian hordes who preceded them, brought desolation and tyranny in their wake. On the contrary, never was Andalusia so mildly, justly, and wisely governed as by her Arab conquerors.... All the administrative talent of Spain had not sufficed to make the Gothic domination tolerable to its subjects. Under the Moors, on the other hand, the people were on the whole contented--as contented as any people can be whose rulers are of a separate race and creed--and far better pleased than they had been when their sovereigns belonged to the same religion as that which they nominally professed.... What they wanted was not a creed, but the power to live their lives in peace and prosperity. This their Moorish masters gave them.... The Christians were satisfied with the new regime, and openly admitted that they preferred the rule of the Moors to that of the Franks or the Goths." Toledo alone, true to its character of rebel, met the Moors in an attitude of violent resistance. The Jews had opened her gates to the invaders, but the exact date of the fall of Toledo into Saracen hands is unknown. Historians differ, but keep within the dates 712 and 719. The town capitulated with considerable advantages. She maintained her right to hold arms and horses, and all the citizens who remained were secured perfect freedom, but those who left the city forfeited their property and rights. The citizens were inviolable in their houses, their orchards, and farms, and the annual tribute levied by the Moors was a very moderate one. The free exercise of religion was permitted, and the Christians were allowed seven churches by the State, Santa Justa, Santa Eulalia, San Sebastian, San Marcos, San Lucas, San Torcuato, and Santa Maria de Alficin. But they were not allowed to build others without permission, nor were processions or public ceremonies allowed. They were left to the observance of their own laws and customs, subject to sentence at the hands of their own judges, but were exempted of Christian punishment if they chose to accept their conqueror's creed. Tarik, entering Toledo, found it almost empty, but for the Jewish colony. Most of the inhabitants had taken refuge among the steep and rocky mountain-passes outside the city. Only a few noble families had decided to remain and make the best of Moslem rule. In the royal palace Tarik seized twenty-five golden and jewelled crowns, and amongst the vast Gothic treasure, the psalms of David, written upon gold leaf in water made of dissolved rubies, and Solomon's emerald table wrought in burnished silver and gold, which the Arabian chronicler describes as "the most beautiful thing ever seen, with its golden vases and plates of a precious green stone, and three collars of rubies, emerald, and pearls." This sumptuous table is said to have been one of the causes of quarrel between Tarik and Mûsa, the latter holding his brilliant lieutenant as responsible for the missing golden leg. Whither have this emerald table and the psalms of David written in dissolved rubies on gold leaf been spirited? We have the crowns of the Gothic kings still; why not the table of Solomon fashioned of material just as enduring? The first quaint episode after the conquest of Toledo is the marriage of Mûsa's son, Belacin, with King Roderick's widow, Blanche. Mûsa decided upon the marriage in his high-handed way, and Doña Blanche bitterly complained in Belacin's presence of the indignity offered her in this incongruous union. "Good mistress," said Belacin, in protesting affability, "do not fret, for by the law we are permitted to have seven wives. If it can be settled, I would have you for my wife as each one of these; and all the things that your law commands a man to do to his wife, will I do unto you. And for this, do not lift your voice in complaint, for it will be to my honour that all who wish me well shall serve you well if you will consent to be the lady of all my wives."[9] The poor wives, we may imagine, had the worst of the bargain. Blanche naturally could not forget that she had been sole Christian queen, the president of the greatest tourney of the age, and her first exaction was that the Moorish Court should kneel to her. Belacin yielded to her every wish, and bade his nobles cheerfully humble themselves. He went so far as to order the palace gates to be closed to those who refused to prostrate themselves before Doña Blanche as she sat in foolish state awaiting their obedience in a lofty chamber, with a crown on her head and a royal mantle about her. How wild and strange this must have seemed to the Moorish wives in their latticed harem, fugitive and hidden articles of pleasure, and what a preposterous innovation in the eyes of the astounded courtiers! This haughty attitude on the part of a captive Christian raised to the Moorish throne by the good nature and affection of a Moor, who might have condemned her to servitude and indignity, so angered the Moors that Isyed, the ruler's son-in-law, spread the report that Belacin had become a Christian, and then murdered the unfortunate as he knelt to pray in the Mezquita. For a time, Toledo was a secondary town under the Saracens, infatuated as they were with Seville and Cordova. The latter town was chosen as the Khalif's residence and thus became one of the wonders of the world. Meanwhile Toledo stormily sulked. Abandoned to herself, she grew to be a thorn in the Moslem side. No sooner conquered by one chief, she rose up furiously against the next, and in 763, we find Cassim, her Moorish ruler, so far impregnated with Toledan principles of independence, that he declined to recognise the sovereignty of Cordova. So that Abderraman, when he came to rule over the Spanish Arabs, found himself confronted with the necessity of conquering Toledo anew, and was compelled to send a fresh army to besiege it. The old city was by this wearied of Cassim's tyranny and gladly capitulated to the more distant sovereign in 766. When Abderraman came to visit the town in person, he left behind him as wali, his son, Suleiman. But his conquest was an unstable one. Toledo's history at this time is a monotonous tale of broken peace and futile revolt. She yielded to one Moor only to rise up against the next. An Arabian chronicler has asserted that no subjects were ever so mutinous and unruly. But the Moors respected her, not only for her formidable strength, for her ramparts and fortresses, but also for her renown and prestige, for the learning of her prelates and the kingly authority of her great archbishops. And so the old Gothic capital remained for them "the royal city." The popular poet, Gharbib, kept the new Sultan in awe and terror, and was careful to maintain the revolutionary fires blazing in constant menace. As long as he lived, the Sultan did not dare to complain of the haughty and intolerable Toledans, but when he died Hakam summoned up courage to address them as their sovereign, and try a policy of conciliation. He chose for their governor a renegade Christian, one Amron of Huesca, the worst choice he could have made. "You alone can help me to punish these rebels who refuse to acknowledge a Moor for their chief, but who will perhaps submit to one of their own race," he said to Amron, who was officially recognised as governor of Toledo in 807. The Sultan wrote to the Toledans: "By a condescension which proves our extreme solicitude for your interests, instead of sending you one of our own subjects, we have chosen one of your compatriots." The Toledans were speedily to receive immortal proof of the special delicacy of this attention. There exists no more shameless and inconceivable barbarity in the blood-stained pages of history than this same Amron's horrible method of cowing a haughty people. He began with the arts of beguilement, and left nothing undone to win the confidence and affection of the Toledan nobles. He feigned with them an implacable hatred of the Sultan and their conquerors, mysteriously asserted his faith in the national cause--that is Toledo's independence--and by this was able, without exciting suspicion, to quarter soldiers in private houses. Without difficulty he obtained the town's consent to build a strong castle at its extremity as a barrack for his troops, and then, to show their confidence in him, the nobles suggested the very thing he wanted, that the castle should be raised in the middle of the town. When the fortress was built, Amron installed himself therein with a strong guard, and then sent word to the Sultan, whose heart by this was well hardened against the sullen and untameable Toledans. Troops were speedily gathered from other towns, and set marching upon the royal city. The young prince, Abderraman, commanded one wing, and the others were commanded by three vizirs. Amron then persuaded the unfortunate nobles to accompany him to meet the Sultan's son outside the walls. The nobles plumed themselves on their power and value, and gaily set out to visit the young prince, who received them splendidly. After a private consultation with the vizirs, Amron came back to the nobles, whom he found enchanted with the prince's kindness and courtesy, and proposed that they should invite Abderraman to honour the town with his visit. The Toledans applauded the proposition to entertain a prince with whom they were so satisfied in every way. They had a governor of their own nationality, they enjoyed perfect freedom, and Abderraman had personally won them. In their innocence they besought an honour now desired. Abderraman acted the part of coy visitor, delicately apprehensive of giving trouble, but finally yielded to the persuasion of such genial hospitality. He came to the fortified castle, and ordered a great feast to which all the nobles and wealthy citizens of Toledo were invited. The guests came in crowds, but they were only permitted to enter the castle one by one. The order was that they should enter by one gate, and the carriages should round the fortress to await them at another. In the courtyard there was a ditch, and beside it stood the executioners, hatchet in hand, and as each guest advanced, he was felled and rolled into the ditch. The butchery lasted several hours, and the fatal day is ever since known in Spanish history as the _Day of the Foss_. In Toledan legends it has given rise to the proverb _una noche Toledana_, which is lightly enough now applied to any contrariety that produces sleeplessness, headache, or heartache. But only conceive the horrible picture in all its brutal nakedness! The gaily-apparelled guest, scented, jewelled, smiling, alights from his carriage, looking forward to pleasure in varied form; brilliant lights, delicate viands, exquisite wines, lute, song, flowers, sparkling speech. Then the quick entrance into a dim courtyard, a step forward, perhaps in the act of unclasping a silken mantle; the soundless movement of a fatal arm in the shadowy silence, the invisible executioner's form probably hidden by a profusion of tall plants or an Oriental bush, and body after body, head upon head, roll into the common grave till the ditch is filled with nigh upon five thousand corpses. Not even the famous St Bartholomew can compete with this in horror, in gruesomeness. Compared with it, that night of Paris was honourable and open warfare. It is the stillness of the hour, the quickness of doing, the unflinching and awful personality of the executioners, who so remorselessly struck down life as ever it advanced with smiling lip and brightly-glancing eye, that lend this scene its matchless colours of cruelty and savagery. Beside it, few shocking hours in history will seem deprived of all sense of mitigation and humanity. The place of this monstrous episode is said to have been the famous _Taller del Mora_, now a degraded ruin. Suspicion was first aroused by a doctor, who had strolled out to watch the arrival of all these distinguished citizens come to the feast of the Moorish prince. Having time to kill, he decided to stay and see the departure, but as the hours went by, and no one came out by the door so many had gone in by, while report carried him the fact that the other door had not yet opened for the exit of a single guest, he began to express his fears to the loungers gathered round him to watch for the end of the entertainment. Alarm was quickly spread. Who, after all, were these brilliant strangers but the enemy armed, unscrupulous and powerful? Apprehension was strained to its utmost tension, when the doctor shouted, as all began to perceive the rising of a heavy vapour: "Unfortunates, I swear to you that that vapour is never the smoke of a feast, but that of the blood of our butchered brethren." Never was a town so completely stupefied by a moment's blow before. Not a single voice was lifted in protest. Toledo, on ordinary occasions, so resentful, proud, rebellious, was simply prostrate from emotion and horror; and in her stunned and terrorised condition the Turk might have done what he willed with her. She was bereft of tears, bereft of reproaches, of will and force. The remaining citizens dared hardly speak of the dreadful occurrence in whispers among themselves, so heavily gripped were they by the nightmare of reality. Now, whether the young prince or the sultan was aware of the Wali's atrocious design remains for ever a mystery. How far were they accomplices? To what extent did they reprove the action? We are told that Amron took Abderraman into his confidence before the feast, and protested loudly in upholding his design as a justifiable measure, since the Toledans were such a harsh and unmanageable race, and its nobles so insupportable and dangerous, and that the young prince demurred to such ruthlessness of method, and begged the Wali to be prudent and not bring unnecessary odium upon Moslem rule. This precisely would seem the deep design of Amron's double treason. Did he wish to accumulate fresh odium on his adopted race, or pay off old scores by one fell blow on his forsaken people? Anyhow, we are glad to learn that he was deservedly punished. After a while the town woke up from its stunned resignation. The Toledans shook themselves out of their trance of horror; met once more in the Zocodover, talked fiercely together, and remembered that they too could be ferocious with less provocation than this last outrage, and from the Zocodover the murmur broke out and travelled along the outlying streets and remote little markets, and down by the river among the armourers and silversmiths. The people rose up, and swooped willingly down upon Amron, and burnt him and his castle. And surely never was vengeance more holy. But in spite of siege, insurrection, and temporary surrender, which were the constant conditions of public life in Toledo, the town increased, and Moorish influence began to show itself triumphantly in architecture and in horticulture. Gardens spread along the Vega, and Arabian palaces brightened the sombre landscape. Both Jews and Christians were becoming enormously rich, and the Wali, Aben Magot ben Ibraham, decided to raise the tribute of the Christian merchants and persons of means. This was quite enough to quicken the slumbering fires of revolt, and a young Toledan, Hacam, nicknamed _El Durrete_, striker of blows, resolved to expend his great wealth in assisting to fan the flames. Like every other Toledan, he thirsted for an excuse for sedition, and called his fellow-conspirators together in the market-place. There it needed nothing but a judicious use of strong language to induce the people to fling stones and shower blows on the unfortunate palace guard, so handy to the Zocodover, and from blows was only a step to the massacre of all the officials and seizure of the Alcazar. Reprisals naturally followed, and Hacam, routed for the moment, retired to devise a fresh attack. He sent abroad the report that he had gone off to make a raid upon Catalonia, and kept his spies on the look-out for the first signs of relaxed supervision. The instant he found the town-gates unlocked, he poured his men silently into the city at night, and recovered Toledo without a blow, and set fire to the greater part of the upper town. In 834 the sultan sent Omaiga to besiege the seditious town, but the Toledans repulsed him triumphantly, and Hacam was practically the uncrowned king of the city. Skirmishes continued with success, now on one side, now on the other, but always leaving Toledo unsubdued. Maisara, a renegade Spaniard in command of Moslem troops, routed the Toledans outside the walls, and died shortly after his victory, of remorse and shame, when the soldiers, according to a hateful custom, presented him with the heads of the slain. In 873 discord broke out anew between the renegades and the Christians. A Toledan chief, Ibn Mohâdjir, offered his services to the commander of Calatrava, and Walid, the sultan's brother, was charged to direct the siege, which lasted a year. An envoy of Walid stole secretly into the town, and discovered the famished and weakened state of the inhabitants, urged capitulation, which advice was rejected. But the envoy's report of the people's misery induced Walid to press on a vigorous assault, and once more was Toledo tamed and taken, and Amron's fatal castle rebuilt. Later fresh troubles hailed from Cordova, whither came Eulogius burning for martyrdom, and exciting the Christians to exasperate the Moslems into persecution. We know that left alone the Spanish Arabs were not in the least given to religious persecution. The Christians were free to practice their religion, and in Toledo lived tranquilly under Mozarabe law. Only the condemned Christian might always appeal from the Mozarabe tribunal to the Moslem Judge, who could grant him immunity. This was no very great hardship, for in general mediæval law made it too easy to kill and too difficult to reprieve. No masters have ever been more tolerant than the Moors, and it needed all the blind and unreasoning fanaticism of Eulogius to discover persecution and a means of forcing martyrdom. The surest method naturally was to revile the False Prophet in public, and insult every instinct and prejudice of the conquerors. This was to prove oneself a saint in those far-off days, while now we should pronounce a distinctly different opinion on such proceedings. So Eulogius, with his lamentable tales, fresh from his romantic parting with the martyred Flora, fired the Toledans with indignation, and again they took up arms under Sindola, arrested their Moorish governors, and sent word to the Sultan at Cordova that his life would answer for that of their fellow-Christians. They declared war, took Calatrava, which the Sultan retook in 757, filed through the Sierra Morena, and defeated the Moors at Andujar. Mohammed assembled his troops and marched against Toledo in June 854, when Sindola turned to Ordoño, king of Leon, for help. The Christian king sent a large army to Toledo under Gaton, Count Bierzo. The Moors, by a false assault and retreat, drew Gaton and the Toledan troops into an ambush, where girdled by Moslem forces, they were massacred to a single man. Over 8000 Christian heads were stuck on the walls of different towns, and for a time was Toledo again cowed. But she took her revenge in electing as archbishop, on Wistremir's death, the Sultan's impassioned enemy, Eulogius, and this time to punish the rebels the Sultan resorted to a stratagem worthy of Amron of the Foss renown. He began to undermine their bridge while his own troops occupied it, and before the operation was completed, he withdrew his men, thus inveigling after them the rash Toledans. The bridge split, and the unfortunate rebels were drowned in a heap in the deep and sullen Tagus. An Arabian poet triumphantly sings the infamy: "The Eternal could not allow a bridge to exist built for the squadrons of miscreants. Deprived of her citizens, Toledo is mournful and desolate as a grave." But a people that could shake off the nightmare stun of the day of the Foss could rise above this blow. Toledo had resisted for twenty years, and she was not yet conquered. Leon was at her back, and its king was her proclaimed knight. In 873 she forced from the Sultan a treaty acknowledging her as an independent Republic under annual tribute, and concluded an alliance with the famous Beni Casi of Aragon, a great Visigoth family converted to Islamism, who sent Lope, the chief's son, to Toledo as consul. Then came to the throne of Cordova the great Khalif, Abd-ar-Rahman III., and Toledo was to discover that here was a very different enemy from the incapable generals that had hitherto striven in vain to subdue her. Here was a mighty commander who was not to be daunted by her frowns and her wild spirit, and whose patience and dogged determination she was to find the match of her own. Genius alone could quell her, and genius came in the handsome and valiant young monarch who would win her or die. First he sent a royal order, commanding her to surrender to him her rights as a free and independent Republic, and humbly acknowledge him as liege lord. This Toledo roughly and proudly declined to do. Her reply was couched in terms of evasive menace, for eighty-four years of freedom, under the protection of the Beni Casi of Aragon and the King of Leon, had taught her to regard herself as an enemy to be duly reckoned with. Then the Sultan sent his general vizier, Said-ibn-Moudhir in May 930 to open the siege, and in June he joined him with the flower of his army, and encamped on the banks of Algodor near the Castle of Mora. Here he forced the commander to evacuate, and placed his own garrison in the fortress before advancing on Toledo. He began by camping in the cemetery and burning the outlying villages, and then, in order to show the Toledans the kind of man they had to deal with, he proceeded to build a town on the opposite bank of the Tagus, exactly fronting the royal city, on a mountain side as high as hers. Here he and his troops dwelt for eight years, persistent and unswerving, calling the town he built "Victory" in anticipation of the inevitable result. A siege of eight years! what a tale of magnificent determination and stupendous force of will and endurance on both sides. Which to praise most, wonder most at, the Toledans or Abd-ar-Rahman? What a town, what a Sultan! With such a watchful power outside the walls, the marvel is that famine so long delayed its fatal presence; but it came at last, and stalked the gaunt dim streets and humbled the city of the Goths as no other force or persuasion could have done, and after years of accumulated sufferings and privations, bereft of pride and strength and dignity, she yielded her haggard front to the Sultan's swift assault, as soon as he knew her power undermined, her patience at bay, and by nightfall the heads of her insurgent chiefs were grinning lividly over the Puerta de Visagra. After the great Khalif's death, the town recovered a partial independence, and remained, until the Christian Conquest, a kingdom apart under the rule of tolerated Arabian princes, independent of Cordova. Successive feeble efforts to win her prove ever unavailing, and she continues to glower above the river in unquiet and mutinous temper, while the princes make believe to rule and do but obey, proud but fearful of so uneasy a charge. Her rulers during the unsatisfactory eleventh century were: Yaîch-ibn-Mohammed-ibn Yaîch, till 1036; Ismail Dhafir, till 1038; Abou-I-Hassan Yah[^y]r Mamon, till 1075; and Yah[^y]a ibn Ismaïl ibn Yah[^y]a Câdir, till the conquest. The most picturesque episode is that which leads to the downfall of the demoralised Moslems. Alphonso of Leon, escaping from the monastery of Sagahun, fled to Toledo and besought the hospitality and protection of the Moorish King Almamon. The generous and courteous Moor gave him considerably more than shelter; affection and all the outward show of his rank. Persecuted by a Christian brother, he was nobly befriended by a loyal enemy, whose generosity he ill repaid by treachery and ingratitude. Almamon gave him the Castle of Brihuega, and constituted him the chief of the Mozarabes, that is the Christians of Toledo under Moorish rule. Furthermore, he bestowed on him farms and orchards outside the town on the bank of the Tagus, and a residence within the walls near his own Alcazar. At the Moorish court of Tolaitola, as the Arabs called Toledo, the proscribed prince was granted all the honours of his rank. Alcocer tells us that in return Alphonso swore to be loyal, not to leave Toledo without permission, and to fight all men of the world for the Moorish king. Almamon, on his side, swore to treat Alfonso well and faithfully; to pay him and all his people. Alcocer, with quaint garrulity, describes the king's fondness for hunting, and his delight in fresh green places and luxuriant foliage, and his great sadness in looking across from Brihuega to Toledo, and contemplating the possibility of such a strong and beautiful town falling once more into the hands of the Christians. The story runs that one day Almamon visited his guest at Brihuega, and in the gardens the courtiers began to discuss the marvels and attractions of Tolaitola, "that pearl placed in the middle of the necklace, that highest tower of the empire."[10] From this the talk fell upon the probabilities of its being attacked, and at this point Alphonso, lounging beneath a tree, feigned sleep. The Moorish prince described at length the only way of taking the town, and his plan of siege was well remembered by his treacherous guest. The courtiers glancing anxiously at the sleeping prince asked themselves if his sleep were real, and to try him began to pierce one of his hands with shot. Still unconvinced, they begged the king to order him to be killed, but, says Alcocer naively: "Our lord kept him for his greater good, and would not hear of this." When Sancho was murdered by Bellido Dolphos at the foot of the walls of Zamora, Alphonso left this friendly court with the blessings of its sovereign, who offered him money, arms, and horses, and escorted him part of the way as far as Monuela, separating with embraces and vows of eternal friendship on both sides. Both swore never under any circumstances to war on opposite sides, but each to assist the other in all difficulties with hostile powers. Alfonso returned to Toledo, and sent messengers to invite his former host to dinner. The king came, and found himself surrounded by armed men. Demanding the reason of such a strange reception, Alfonso replied, "When you held me in your power you made me swear to assist you against all men, and be your loyal friend." The Moorish king assented, whereupon Alfonso sent for the gospels, and swore upon them again, with Almanon in his power, never to fight against him _or his son_, and to assist him against all the world. Alfonso's word, it will be seen, was strangely flexible. This spontaneous and solemn promise to a friend and ally could, with honour, be broken, while elsewhere his word, compromised by wife and friend, demanded their instant death by fire. Shortly after Almamon died, and Toledo returned to its normal condition of disquiet. Flying kings, invading powers, rivalries and skirmishes, overtures between Moor and Moor, and between Moor and Christian, all terminated by Alphonso's deliberate baseness in laying siege to the town ruled incapably by the incapable son, Yahya, of his late friend and guest, who should have been sacred to him. He followed the plan of siege so unguardedly suggested by Almanon in the gardens of Brihuega, and took the town on the 20th May 1085. Yahya and his court left Toledo, their hardly won and deeply loved Tolaitola, with their treasure, and went towards Cuenca, mournful and silent, eaten by regrets and humiliation. So Toledo, after three and a half centuries of roughly and persistently disputed Moslem sovereignty, returned to Christian rule. True, she was always less of a Moorish centre than Cordova, Sevilla, Valencia and Granada, and glowed less than these in the bloom of its brilliant civilisation. Her temper was too obstinate and harsh for such flowery development. But she had so far profited as to gather charm to her austere beauty. The aspect of her walls had suffered modification and improvement, and the Moors had built handsome bridges, which alas! have since disappeared, both the bridge near Santa Leocadia, and that across the old Roman waterway. In Dozy, a quotation from the Arabian chronicle, Abou-l-Hasan, tells us how "Alphonso, the tyrant of the Galicians, that infidel people (that God may cut it in pieces!), seized the town of Toledo, that pearl of the necklace, that highest tower of the Empire in this peninsula." He describes Toledo as "a softbed" for Alphonso, and the people "henceforth resembling docile camels." For docility the people were not more remarkable than before, and as for the softness of Toledo as a royal bed, its quality of ease and security never wavered, whoever wore the crown and wielded the sceptre. Alphonso residing "up among her high walls," had his own troubles to face, just as had Cadir, Yahya ibn-Dzin, who gave her up to him. "May God renew her past splendour," cries the Arabian chronicler, "and write her name again on the register of Mussulman towns!" The weak and unfortunate Yahya accepted Valencia in exchange, which he was not destined long to keep, thanks to that magnificent hero, el mio Cid, the Campeador. CHAPTER IV _The Last Period of Toledo's Story_ The start of Spanish rule in Toledo was clouded and stormy. The Cid was named the first Alcalde, and the Castillians expressed their dissatisfaction with Mozarabe law, which was the Gothic law of Toledo. They clamoured for Castillian Judges and the Castillian _fueros_ or privileges. The King granted their request in all civil cases, but in criminal cases decided that every citizen should be subject to the Mozarabe Alcalde, and in case of death the first application for burial had to be made to the Mozarabe authorities, who gave permission to the Castillians to consult their own. But slowly the word Castillian came to be employed in Toledo in place of the more picturesque designation Mozarabe. After the conquest, Alfonso left his French wife, Constance and the French archbishop, Bernard of Cluny, as regents in Toledo, and hurried off on the usual business of war to Leon. Now one of the conditions on Yahya's surrender of the city was that the Mezquita, formerly the Christian Cathedral, should remain in the hands of the Moors, as their place of worship. But neither the queen nor the archbishop approved of this clause, and could not conceive that a promise given to the reprobate Moslem should be held as binding. So the King once gone, the queen gave orders, and the archbishop headed his followers, and took the mosque by force. Great, naturally, were Moorish outcries against Christian perfidy, and word of the atrocious deed was instantly conveyed to Alfonso, who hurried back from Leon, sending word before him that his intention was nothing less than to burn alive the queen and the archbishop. For a King who had scandalously broken the laws of hospitality, and who had no intention of helping to maintain Yahya on his throne in Valencia, according to his solemn engagement, this was making a mighty mountain of a smaller offence, and placing a disproportionate price on so fragile and fugitive a thing as his honour. The Moors were so dismayed by this assurance, that their indignation evaporated and gave way to pity and terror for the delinquents. The Alfaqui went out beyond the city walls to meet the irate monarch, and plead their cause. Seeing him from afar, Alfonso, misinterpreting his purpose, cried out: "Friends, this injury is not done to you but to me, since my word is compromised, which I have ever guarded with all my power. But I will so act that neither she nor others will again dare to commit such audacities." The Alfaqui, kneeling to the Spaniard, exclaimed in the name of his co-religionists: "My lord, we well know that the queen is your wife, and if she should die for our cause, we should be abhorred of all men. And the same should the archbishop die, who is the prince of your law. We of our will beseech you to forgive them both, and we freely relieve you of the oath by which we hold you, so that in all things else you are true to it." Thanks to Moorish generosity, neither the queen nor the French archbishop was burnt alive, and the Mezquita became the Christian Cathedral we may see to-day. As a mark of gratitude, "the good Alfaqui's" statue was ordered to be placed in the _Capilla Major_, an honour [Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL] shared with the mysterious pastor _de las Navas_, a shepherd, supposed to be the instrument of that victory. The Church was solemnly consecrated in 1087, and then it was that Toledo had the misfortune to fall completely under French influence. To Bernard of Cluny's ill-judged introduction of the Roman liturgy may be traced the Inquisition. The quaint old Gothic rite was ordered to be abolished in favour of the Roman Breviary. Aragon and Navarre yielded at once, but Castille held out for the Isidorian ritual, and excitement ran high in Toledo, the very heart and head of the Gothic rite. Nothing could make her willingly faithless to the severe and simple Mozarabe service, inherited from the early Christians. Hers was the primitive form of worship of Christians when Christianity was still fresh and unformed, before Rome had introduced its dazzling magnificences of ceremony. Both the clergy and the people ignored the decree forbidding the Mozarabe ritual, and steadily rejected the Latin. Then the French archbishop resolved to put the matter to the test of the sword, and if that did not settle it, to that of fire. He called these tests "the Judgment of God." A duel was fought consequently, under the eyes of all Toledo, which left the Judgment of God on the side of the Mozarabe ritual. This did not satisfy the archbishop, who found that the Almighty had erred, so he lit a big fire on the public place, the precursor of the terrible fires that were to follow, in which Spain was to burn out all her glory and greatness. The historians do not agree in their reports. The Archbishop Rodrigo says, "_exustus ibi fuit liber Gallicus; rumansitque ibi toletanus illæsus_." Alfonso the learned says: "both books were cast into the flames, and the French office struggled with the fire that endeavoured to devour it, and then gave a leap over all the flames, and jumped out of the bonfire, seeing which, all gave praise to God for the great miracle He had deigned to work; and the Toledan office fell into the flames without any harm, so that no part of it was touched by the flames, and no injury was done to any part of it." This appears to have settled the dispute: the Toledans were allowed to preserve their ritual in six parishes reduced now to two. Cisneros, a century later, founded the Mozarabe Chapel of the Cathedral, and ordered the printing of the ancient office with its queer primitive chaunt, and in the eighteenth century, Cardinal Lorenzana had another edition of the text printed. The traveller curious to know how the old Goths prayed in the days of Recesvinthus and Wamba, of St Isidor and St Ildefonso, may hear the old service any morning in the Mozarabe Chapel. The rite was probably more impressive in the days of the great councils of Toledo than in ours. Though first Castillian Alcalde of Toledo, the Cid is not associated with the town by any picturesque or splendid deed. His great achievements belong to the story of other towns. Here is only recorded of him a sordid domestic quarrel. Alfonso convened the Cortes to consider the Challenger's differences with his miserable sons-in-law, the infantes of Carrion, and the meeting took place in the beautiful palace of Galiana-- "La mora mas celebrada De toda la moreria." The Cid came with his kinsmen, Alvar Fañez, and twelve hundred cavaliers. The king rode two leagues beyond the city gates to meet him, and when the Cid had kissed his hand, embraced him. When informed that he was to dwell in the royal palace, the Cid protested against the excessive honour, and asked for himself and his suite the castle of San Servando. The king and the Cid together rested at the posada, and then rode on to the palace. Here carpets and gold brocade lay along the walls, and in the middle of the great chamber the splendid and richly-wrought throne; close by it was the Cid's celebrated marble bench brought from Valencia, and round it a hundred shields of hidalgos. Day and night, while the case lasted, this bench was guarded, and in the _Cronica del Cid_, it is described as "a very noble and subtle work." It was covered with the richest of gold cloth. When the king, followed by the Infantes of Carrion, and all the court, entered the palace chamber, the uncle of the Infantes began to cast ridicule upon the Cid's famous bench, whereupon the king sternly rebuked him: "You who are jeering, when have you ever sent me such a present?" Instead of wasting their time in jealousy of the Challenger, why did not the rest of his subjects accomplish such noble deeds as his, he wondered. The Cid was then called, and when he entered the chamber, the king rose up and welcomed him. Amidst profound attention, the Cid solemnly pleaded his case. He demanded that the Infantes should give up to him their dishonoured swords, Tolada and Tizona. This the Infantas haughtily refused to do, upon which the king ordered the swords to be taken from them, and given to the Cid. The Cid kissed the king's hand, and both sat down, the king on his throne, and the Cid on his marble bench. The Cid then, a passionate father, eloquently told the roll of his wrongs and his daughters' injuries. He reminded the king that he it was who had made these lamentable marriages. "It was you, señor, who married my daughters, and not I, because I could not say you nay. But you did it for their good, not for their doom." He demanded the return of his money from the Infantes and an explanation of their evil conduct to his daughters. He became so violent from grief and indignation that the king thought fit to interfere, and while recognising the justice of his most bitter complaints, urged him to respect his children in their husbands, and, in a word, be less personal in public. He then commanded the Infantes to salute their father-in-law, and the court to pronounce sentence. The Infantes, worthless scamps, stood and insolently proclaimed themselves the social superiors of their wives, whom the choice of princes had inordinately honoured. "Then why," sensibly asks the king, "did you press me to obtain for you their hands in marriage?" and proceeds to give the ladies' pedigree to the affronted Cid's delight. The wretched Infantes were very properly disgraced, when their discomfort was accentuated by the appropriate arrival of hot messengers from the kings of Aragon and Navarre, begging in marriage Doña Elvira and Doña Sol for their sons, Don Sancho and Don Ramiro. In those odd and delightful times, divorce seems to have been a matter of royal judgment or caprice. Spanish sovereigns, unlike Henry VIII., never had any difficulty in arranging those little affairs without scandal, or war, or revolution, either in their own case or in that of their vassals. Alfonso stoutly advised the Cid to accept proposals that gave his outraged and forsaken daughters kingdoms instead of obscure retreats, and bestowed the last affront on the miscreants who had offended him and them. So the scandal terminated, and the chronicler tells us that "the Infantes left the palace very sorrowful, and hastened with all speed back to Carrion." Alfonso's reign was no quiet one. He had to contend with the fierce Yussuf and his son, and grief pierced him through his young son, Sancho, whom he sent to war with Count Garcia of Cabra, when only eleven. Twenty thousand Christians, along with the brave little prince, lay dead on the battlefield, and the king's anguish, when the news reached Toledo, was overpowering. He died soon afterwards, and his body was exposed for twenty days, for the towns-people to come and gaze upon the remains of the Christian monarch. Toledo still remained the centre of Castillian rule. Here the Cortes was held; here was each Christian monarch proclaimed in a quaint ceremony that merits description, said to have been transmitted to the Castillians by the Goths. As soon as the municipality received the new king's letter, they announced that the royal standard would be raised, and opened all the rooms of the town hall. Soon the building was crowded with magistrates, jurors, pleaders, cavaliers and citizens. The streets and the plazas overflowed with the people in holiday array, all laughing and excited. The buildings were decorated, hung with beautiful silks and stuffs, and illuminated pretty much as in our own days. Balconies were covered with brocade, and from each window fell pieces of rare tapestry. At eight o'clock in the morning the town was gathered near the Ayuntamiento to hear the chief scriviner read the deposition, and watch the lifting of the royal Standard and the new king's banner. The city then named four commissioners, two officers and two juries, and despatched them to the Ensign's house, telling him to bring instantly the royal standard to the town hall. The Ensign took the standard and went forth, followed by a large crowd of cavaliers, of archers and of troops, all in full uniform, while the bells rang, and music played, and the populace shouted. A joyous moment hugely enjoyed by this fierce, excitable race of Toledans. At the town hall the standard was placed on an altar, and the commissioners and jurors took their places. Then the order of the day was read, and all swore allegiance to the new king as loyal and faithful vassals, and in the kingdom's name the banners were lifted. The magistrate then kissed the paper and put it on his head, likewise the rest present, and all shouted response in a single voice. The bells rang anew, the trumpets blew, and deafening roars of applause rent the air. Then the chief magistrate thus addressed the citizens: "Imperial and most illustrious city, kingdom of Toledo, seated at the head of the monarchy of Spain, would that my brief eloquence could match my desire--not to repeat your obligations to the king, our lord, since you are better aware of them than I, which compels us to recognise in him his most high father and grandfather, of eternal memory, most worthy kings and our lords, whom your highness always canonised with your tongue, and forced the remotest nations to obey, fearing your sword of iron, which is the head of this spotless city, whose arts and letters are of the first class, and whose cathedral is above all others. But to be able to weigh and tell your highness on this occasion, that as thus, by direct succession come to and remain with the king our lord, these kingdoms and seigneuries, so by the same are due to him, and constitute part of his heritage, obedience for being as he is, a prince of the best promise any kingdom has ever had; affable, benign, generous, upright, Catholic, and gifted with many other virtues. That all this your highness deserves, and that you may enjoy much happiness, with all prosperity. Such a king deserves such a kingdom, and such a city deserves such a king. May his majesty live a thousand years and may your highness live them with exceeding multiplication." When one remembers such amiable sovereigns of Castille as Pedro the Cruel, who happily died in the thirties, this hope of Toledo's chief magistrate seems a peculiarly grim one. A thousand years of Pedro's reign would have decimated the entire Spanish kingdom, and left none to-day to tell the tale. The Alferez (ensign) then replied in the name of Toledo, and the standard was lifted and carried to the Alferez, who received it standing, while every head was uncovered. Then the Alferez carried the standard, followed by a group of officers, and swung it flying from the balcony, crying in a loud voice: "Hear, hear, hear! Know, know, know; that this pendant and royal is raised for the king, Don ----, whom God preserve many and happy years. Amen. Spain, Spain, Spain; Toledo, Toledo, Toledo, for the king, Don ----, our lord, whom God keep many and happy years. Amen." The populace shouted 'Amen'; the trumpets blew, and shrill rough music rent the air. Three times was this address repeated, the citizens each time shrieking 'Amen' with intervals of triumphant music, and the banners remained waving until sunset, the Alferez and the municipality all those long hours mounted guard over the royal and civic colours. At sunset the standard was solemnly carried to the cathedral to be blessed, and the entire city walked behind the Alferez and the magistrates. Trumpeters, minstrels and archers went before, and awaited the colours at the gate of Pardon, where all the dignitaries of the church were gathered to receive them. The archbishop, the canons, the dean, the chaplains and priests, in their richest brocades and lace surplices, and all the representatives of the town parishes, were there in state. The dean advanced outside the cathedral gates, surrounded by deacons, and in a circle behind stood the chaplains and canons with precious relics. After ceremonious salutations exchanged, the Alferez followed the dean into the church, and then began the procession of the chapter and the parishes up the immense central nave to the chapel of Our Lady of the Star, while the organs rolled their thunderous sound and the choir solemnly chanted. At the High Altar the dignitaries passed inside, and Toledo, with the chief magistrate, remained in the wide space between the altar and the choir, only the standard-bearer entering the choir with the prelates. Here a chaplain offered him a brocaded cushion, on which he knelt, while the choir chanted the psalm _Deus Judicium tuum Regi da_. The standard was blessed, and then the Te Deum was sung. With the same brilliancy and impressiveness of ceremony, the standard was afterwards borne down to the brightly hung and festive Zocodover, and then up the narrow hilly street to the imposing Alcazar. All the balconies and windows were filled with lace-wreathed women's heads, and the excitement and enthusiasm were intense. At the gates of the Alcazar the standard-bearer knocked thrice loudly, and called out: "Alcalde, Alcalde, Alcalde! are you there? Hear, hear, hear!" Within a voice as loudly demanded: "Who calls without the gates of the royal Alcazar?" To which the standard-bearer haughtily replied: "The king." The gates were opened, revealing an immense and picturesque concourse of splendidly apparelled knights and men in gleaming armour, a blaze of brocade and damascene. The standard-bearer cried again: "Alcalde, Alcalde, Alcalde; hear, hear, hear; Toledo to-day has lifted this royal pennon for the king, Don ----, our lord, whom God preserve for many and happy years. And, accompanied by its municipality, it has sent me, its standard-bearer, to bring it to you as the Alcalde of those royal palaces, that you may receive it in his majesty's name, and place it in the tower, which is called the tower of the Atambor." The palace doors were then closed, and as soon as the pennon floated above the high tower wall, the Alcalde shouted thrice the same formula as that of the standard-bearer when he raised the standard above the balcony of the town hall, and the people below each time responded 'Amen.' The procession returned to the town hall, and this ended the picturesque ceremony. The greatest Toledan figure of this period is the mitred figure of the conqueror of the battle that virtually demolished the Moor in Spain, Las Navas de la Tolosa. Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada was more than an illustrious archbishop at a time when archbishops were rulers of men, and when the archbishop of Toledo might be said to be the practical sovereign of Spain. He was a valiant soldier, a commander of genius on the battlefield, a zealous prelate and an erudite man of letters and historian. Conqueror of _Las Navas de Tolosa_, no mean victory, since the Moors were in tremendous excess, conqueror of Quezada, of Cazuola and Cordova, the honoured friend and adviser of two kings, first of his day in all things by right of genius, industry and merit, Toledo owes him something more than Christian victory over the Moor, something far more immortal and magnificent than that dull and prejudiced monument his history, so often quoted--La Historia de España--which he wrote in 1215. It owes him her great, her unique, her matchless cathedral. To have won the most glorious of Spanish battles--a victory so stupendous, considering the odds and the results that the great archbishop himself insisted it was nothing less than due to the intervention of heaven--and to have built the cathedral of Toledo! What epitaph needs a man who accomplished two such deeds in a single life? His epitaph, as befits so illustrious a personage, is simplicity itself: _Mater Navarra, metrix Castilla Tolatum_ _Sedes Parisius studium, mons Rhodams Horta,_ _Mausoleum, coelum requies, nomen Rodericus._ What a dazzling achievement the lives of these Toledan archbishops, martial, learned, literary, eloquent, and artistic; every facet of multiple genius. Now they build ships, then cathedrals, colleges or palaces. They print rare editions, collect rare MSS., debate in councils, rule the land, vociferate magnificently from the pulpit, decide on all questions of education and civil law, advise their sovereign, guide foreign politics, voyage in foreign lands, win glorious battles, and write histories and verse! What modern life can match theirs? Even Mr Gladstone has neither built a great cathedral nor won a great battle! This Archbishop of Toledo, a mighty chancellor of Castille, was as charitable a pastor as Victor Hugo's bishop. Indeed, nothing remains to his discredit as a great and simple nature, but the unavoidable bigotry and injustice of his history. He died on his last voyage back from Rome, and was buried, as his quoted epitaph indicates, in the monastery of Huesta, June 10th, 1247. Alfonso's crusade against the Moors was followed by dreadful dearth, by famine and sickness, and the entire ruin of villages and farms. Public misfortune habitually forges fresh unexpected miseries for man, and bands of armed robbers and assassins, called _golfines_, descended in hordes from the mountains of Toledo, of Ciudad Real and Talavera. They pitched their tents in the outlying woods, and in self-defence the Toledans formed their celebrated _Hermandad_, a brotherhood of citizens sworn to persecute robbers and assassins. This brotherhood was so successful that in 1223 it was qualified as "holy," and was conceded as a right one head of every flock and cattle that crossed the mountains. The Society held its feast on St Pedro Advinada's day, 1st August, and consisted of sixty Toledan proprietors and hidalgoes, whose sons inherited their office; two governors, a squadron, archers and minor subalterns elected by the two alcaldes. The uniform was green, with collar and cuffs of vivid scarlet trimmed with gold, and pointed caps. The inferior officers wore a loose green garment suitable for the road, and capes and bonnets of green, without the bright touch of scarlet and gold, and their uniform may still be seen on a stone station above a sixteenth century porch in a laneway opposite the Calle de la Tripería, where the ancient prison of the Hermandad is. They rode in procession, preceded by timbrals and clarinets, and carried a green banner with the arms of Castille. It was this brotherhood that Philip II. presented with a magnificent camp of green cloth which to-day may be seen in the Museum of Artillery in Madrid, and here the Hermandad received their sovereigns when they visited Toledo. The success of this brotherhood provoked the creation of minor fraternities and another Toledan order was started against robbers, _San Martin de la Montiña_, with similar privileges granted by royal decree as those of the more famous _Hermandad_. Later, the Catholic kings instituted the _Hermandad nueva_, of disastrous memory, formed of one thousand horse and foot with a captain, general, and a supreme council, whose duties and functions were multiplied and extended beyond the province all over the unhappy Peninsula. This brotherhood we know, alas! played a terrible part in the terrible Inquisition, and hunted down bigger and more historic game than mere robbers and assassins. The hum of the Moorish wars ever accompanied the interior war of discord and turbulent dissensions. When St Fernando entered Toledo as the new sovereign, he found the town groaning under the tyranny of the wicked governor, Fernandez Gonzalo. Two girls, one a young lady and the other a girl of the people, flung themselves before the saintly young monarch to complain of seduction under promise of marriage. San Fernando, who did not trifle in these matters, expressed his horror and demanded the name of the seducer. The instant the governor, Fernandez Gonzalo, was mentioned, he turned furiously to his men and cried, "Cut me off that rascal's head this very moment." Within an hour the gallant governor's livid features were fixed above the Puerta del Sol. Here was a man without any of the freemasonry of his sex. Death itself was the penalty he unhesitatingly meted out without debate for wrong done to women. Not a word of blame for the girls, no compliance to the conventional theory of gallantry. The man who betrays a woman is a blackguard; then off with his head, and space for cleaner souls. A little drastic, perhaps, but conceive our civilised world in the eyes of a San Fernando. Conceive him presiding over one of our Courts of Justice for the settlement of breaches of promises! So wise his judgment in the esteem of Toledo that to-day the historic scene is in relief on the glorious Puerta del Sol. Under Castillian rule Toledo's supremacy could not continue without rivalry. First, Santiago had disputed her right to hold her celebrated councils, and a furious quarrel raged between the Pope, Calixtus, and the King, Alfonso, as to whether the councils should be held at Toledo or at Santiago in the north. The pope took the part of Diego the Galician archbishop, and, for a while, Santiago was regarded as the primacy of Spain. But, under Honorius, Toledo and her archbishop, Raymond, recovered their prestige with this time the king against them. In 1129 a council was held at Palencia. Here Toledo sat at the feet of Compostella. Charlemagne, himself, is said to have broken a lance in favour of Santiago which, one knows not by what right, he proclaimed the head of Spain. Beside the question of the primacy, Burgos put in her claim for the Cortes, which she held should meet within her walls, and not on the banks of the Tagus. Here the king was the stout defender of Toledo. At the great meeting convened to discuss this rivalry, the king entered the Council Chamber, and haughtily cried: "Let Burgos speak, I will reply for Toledo." The rivalry of the great families of the Castros and Laras nearly became a civil war, Toledo fighting on the side of the Laras, whose chief, Don Manrique, was a character after her heart: intrepid, dominating and fierce, unequalled in war, untameable in peace. The little king's uncle settled the dispute by killing Don Manrique de Lara, and to avenge him Toledo violently conspired through her great citizen, Stephen Illan, a descendant of the illustrious Byzantine family, the Paleologos. These animosities were quieted for a while by the terrible plague and famine that followed quick upon the heels of victory, and avenged the defeated Moors of Las Navas de Tolosa. Misery implacably stalked Castille. Seeds bore no fruit for one entire year; trees were dead and leafless, the land was sterile and the people, wild with hunger, forsook their dead, their orchards and meadowland. Of Toledo's private story we get no glimpse. The thunder of battle and strife roars ever down the pages of her history in the succeeding centuries, and we continually hear of new breaches in her magnificent walls, while the trumpets blow their noisy defiance from her mutinous ramparts. That Toledo was no comfortable place to dwell in then (or now) we gather from the acrid description of the streets, rivers of mud in winter, and in summer, waves of dust, full of filth, evil odours, foul sights and breathing mortal disease. Alfonso the Learned in 1278 ordered the streets to be cleansed and the plazas to be kept free of dead beasts. The chapter gave ten thousand ducats for paving the street, but this was not done until Fernando the Catholic ordered the work in 1502. Alas! these sanitary improvements heralded the hour of her decline. She bartered her prestige for improved paths down to the river, and lost the greater part of her greatness along with her rugged incivility. And for all her progress she never shook off the old sway of Goth and Moor. She built churches, but persistently gave them a quaint Moorish aspect, and when she adopted printing, it was to print the Isidorian office. True, she exhaled her martial contempt of women in her first profane print, _El Tratado contra las mujeres_, by Alfonso Martinez de Toledo in 1499. [Illustration: PUENTO S. MARTINO] Nobody contributed more than the magnificent Cardinal Tenorio, Commendador and Master of Santiago, to beautify the town. He built the cathedral cloisters, and the chapel of St Blas, liberally endowed the church, built the bridge of St Martin and the castle of San Servando as well as several convents, the archbishop's bridge, the Hospital of St Catherine, and a splendid palace at Talavera, which he gave to the monks of St Hieronymo. He constructed several fortresses along the Moorish frontiers. Of him is told the legend that once at Burgos he gave such a princely feast to the nobles of that town, that when the king returned from the chase there was nothing to be had to eat but a few quail and bread and wine. The great Tenorio had cleared Burgos of all its provisions for his banquet. Toledan laws, which were stringent, were based upon the _fueros_, a Castillian modification of the Gothic code. Nothing could be more precise, more minute, more searching in detail of offence and punishment of all that relates to private and civic life. The very dress of women, Mozarabe and Castillian, was regulated according to their social status, the expenses of marriages, baptisms, and funerals regulated; the expenses of fathers and husbands limited by their income to prevent injury to the family. The Moors and Jews had their own judges unless Christian interests were at stake, when they were judged before Mozarabe tribunals. The Mayor's jury consisted of five nobles and five citizens. Each court had its magistrate and official staff, and the municipality met twice a week, Tuesday and Friday, to judge the decisions in block. The people might assist, but could not vote or question. The magistrates were salaried, and could not leave the city unless sent for by royal command. The municipal constitution was composed of two bodies: _cabildo de regidores_, cavaliers and citizens, to deliberate; the other, _cabildo de jurados_, sworn to observe the _fueros_, and to administer justice. The privileges of nobles and plebeians were distinctly defined and maintained. The _regidores_ were paid annually 1000 maravedis, and the _jurados_ 1500. Assistance at the councils was voluntary for the former, obligatory for the latter; a fine of 20 maravedis being imposed in case of absence, which fines were at the end of the year divided between the rest of the jurados who had not once been fined. A juror could not be imprisoned for debt, nor forced to lend his mules for public service, and his widow and children partook of his privileges if he died in office. Toledo was always strongly garrisoned, but its military decline began with the reign of Pedro the Cruel. The inexplicable and monstrous tale of Pedro's cruelties need not be told here. He has become one of the legends of universal history, one of the nursery terrors of civilisation. That such a monster ever lived out of a fairy tale, where giants for pure pleasure spend their days consuming human flesh and marrying wives for the gratification of decorating secret chambers with hanging corpses, seems incredible. His palace at Toledo is now a miserable ruin, near the ruin of the Trastamare palace, of which now only remains the door with the huge Toledan iron nails, so charming and distinctive a feature along the city streets. Here was the theatre of many of his stupefying iniquities, as well as of the single redeeming sentiment of a senseless life, his love for the unfortunate and beautiful Maria de Padilla, the one pale flower of romance in a stony and stormy period. Kings' mistresses are not usually admirable or sympathetic figures, and their mission is not infrequently fraught with direst results. But this pale little Maria, with lovely hands and large sad eyes, is the one ray of light and sweetness amidst violence, cruelty, and perfidy. Such good as love could work amidst such elements she wrought. When she could she interposed between Pedro and his victims, and even the outraged wife reveals no traces of vindictiveness towards her. At the other side of the town, in the big Alcázar, was imprisoned Blanche of Bourbon, under the care of Maria's uncle, Juan Fernandez de Hinestrosa, and all that now remains of her high chamber is the window overlooking a superb landscape. It is to the credit of Toledo that the citizens were the first to rise up against Pedro's iniquities. The queen, accompanied by Hinestrosa, entered the cathedral to pray, and to the dismay of everyone called out "Sanctuary," and refused to leave it. Word flew round the town, and all the ladies and women of the people gathered round the unhappy woman. The knights and hidalgoes could do no less than follow the lead of their courageous women folk. They drew their swords, made a circle round her, and walking thus escorted the queen to the palace gates. The flag of revolt was instantly raised, and the people called the infante, Don Fadique, to come and take command. He came with 700 men, and Doña Blanca was proclaimed free and sovereign. Toledo then sent a commission to the king, bearing the town's orders: that Maria de Padilla and her relatives should be banished, and the queen occupy her rightful place. The king made short work of the commission, and laughed in the face of his rebellious town. His morals were his own affair, and if they did not suit his people they must hold their tongues until he had time to cut off their heads. Meanwhile Henry of Trastamare and Don Fadique had taken the town by the bridge of St Martin. They sacked and pillaged, robbed Samuel Levi, Pedro's great and wealthy treasurer, and murdered 1200 Jews. Then came Pedro, and the Trastamares fled, leaving what remained of the town to the mercies of the ruthless royal troops. Toledo paid a heavy price for her chivalrous defence of the discarded queen. The unhappy woman was again locked up in the Alcázar, and like the wicked ogre of story, Pedro, entertained himself by hacking off the heads of those around him. Twenty men were decapitated in a single day by this mild monarch, whom Philip II. called _El justiciero_, and of whom the _Cronica_ writes: "El gran rey, Don Pedro, que el vulgo reprueva, Pos serle enemigo quien hizo su historia, Fue digno de clara y muy digna memoria." These verses quotes the prelate of Jaen, Juan of Castro, who rehabilitated Pedro, by asserting that he only "wrought justice upon rebels," and who laments the baseness of his assassination at the hand of the worthless Trastamare, a vile termination of a vile life, in which one regrets to see as accomplice one of the old heroes of our youth, Du Guesclin. The list of Pedro's cruelties and assassinations is stupendous. He married women and cast them aside at will, without even the troubles of our English Henry. Shortly after his marriage with the unfortunate Blanche of France, he married Juana de Castro, sister of the Portuguese King, yet neither France nor Portugal went to war, and the Church did not interfere. He instantly abandoned Juana, and returned to Maria de Padilla, whom he always acknowledged as his sole wife, and whose children he named his heirs. There can be no doubt that he passionately loved these little girls of Maria, taking them with him as his most precious treasure when he travelled, and leaving in their behalf a will, so tender and precise, so burthened with anxiety for their welfare, that his life becomes a greater enigma than ever after reading it. Beatrice he named queen, to the detriment of his legitimate son by Juana de Castro. His love for Maria de Padilla was no less deep and lasting. She was buried with royal honours, and at the Cortes convened after her death, he publicly, and it must be admitted with a manly devotion and courage that does him credit, acknowledged her as his wife. Here his wilfulness becomes a virtue, and we are touched by his unswerving love for the woman, of whom the churchman, Lozano, writes, "in her little body heaven had placed great qualities and merits of the highest order." His real love for Maria is all the more extraordinary, since he was one of the vilest libertines, who burnt women alive for refusing his addresses, and in his conduct to his unfortunate French wife, he showed himself nothing less than insane. The hero of Mr Meredith's modern novel, "The Amazing Marriage," is a model of conventional behaviour to a bride beside Don Pedro the Cruel. After torturing her he murdered her, which explains the attitude of France towards him, and the sorry figure of the great Du Guesclin at the tragedy of Montiel. Toledo only roused herself out of stupor in the first gaieties of Juan II.'s reign. This prince preferred song and dance to bloodshed. He heard of the people of Toledo as insupportable, haughty and rebellious, and came to conquer them by luth and feast. Never was Toledo so gay before. The great Alvaro de Luna, the Constable of Castille, was beside him, and the city danced and sang, and feasted itself into oblivion of terror and disaster. Even a war with the Moors was an added and pleasurable excitement. King John prayed and watched in the cathedral all night like a knight, and there was a solemn ceremony next day, when Vasco de Guzman, before the magnificently apparelled king and constable, kissed the royal standard and banners. Still grander feasts on their return fresh from conquests at Granada and Cordova; there was the great Te Deum in the cathedral, and the bullfights by torchlight on the Zocodover, and by day feasts and tourneys in the brilliant Vega. Here begins the rivalry of the celebrated Toledan families, the Ayalas and the Silvas, and the quarrels of the Constable of Castille and Pedro Sarmiento, in which the meaner figure wins. The Jews, too, were persecuted in a monstrous crusade provoked by the bigoted and atrociously unchristian eloquence of that most unsympathetic of saints, Vicente Ferrer. Under his lead, the Christians seized the beautiful little synagogue, Santa Maria La Blanca, an act of injustice it would be difficult to explain by any pronouncement of Christ, himself a Jew. But all was not black at this period, despite perfidy, cowardice, betrayal and persecution. Juan II. was fond of rivalry and bright apparel, and his splendid victim, Alvaro de Luna, remains one of the finest figures of Castillian history. John himself dabbled in poetry, and patronised letters. He instituted a kind of Provençal Court, and one of his contemporaries was the celebrated Marquis of Villena, Henry, the man in advance of his time, man of science and scholar, mathematician and reader of the stars. Later, alas, his valuable library and his writings, treasures of erudition and memory, were publicly burnt at Madrid, by order of Fray Lope Barriento, a Dominican, who accused him of witchcraft, and Juan de Mena wrote his famous "Coplas" to the memory of the great and learned marquis: "Aquel que te ves estar contemplando En el movimiento de tantas estrellas, La fuerza, la bra, el orden de aquellas, Que mide los cursos de cómo y de cuando, Y ovo noticia filosofando Del movedos, y de los comovidos De fuego, de razos, de son de tronidos, Y supo las causas del mundo velando: Aquel claro padre, aquel dulce fuente, Aquel que en el Cástalo monte resuena. Es Don Enrique, Señor de Villena, Honra de España y del siglo presente. O inclito sabio, autor muy sciente! Otra y aun otra vegado te lloro, Porque Castillo perdio tal tesoro No conveido delante la gente Perdio los tus libros sin sea conveidos Y como en exequias te fueron ya luego Unos metidos al avido fuego, Y otros sin orden no bien repartidos. Cierto en Atenas los libros fingidos Que de Protagoras se reprobaron Con armenia mejor se quemaron Cuando al senado le fueron leidos." Here as elsewhere the nobles and people of Toledo were constantly at loggerheads, though it would be difficult to say on which side reason preponderated. Now it was the Silvas who sided with the rebels, then the Ayalas who opened the city gates to them. One Ayala, mayor of the town, rode to meet an invading infante; the infante reproached him insolently, on which Ayala flung back his words, and turning rode into Toledo to shut the gates in his face. They were not to be trifled with, these haughty Toledans. In a measure their prince was their valet, and was subject to insult upon provocation. The same may be said of the artisans. There exists a Toledan proverb: "Soplaré el odrero alborazarse ha Toledo." Let the ironmonger (or pot-maker) blow and Toledo will rise up. This proverb dates from the time of John II., who begged the Toledans to supply him with a certain amount of maravedis towards the expenses of his wars with Aragon and Navarre. The people indignantly refused, and the first to hiss the Toledan note of revolt was a maker of iron pots. Previously someone had discovered a Gothic inscription which proved that the ironmongers of Gothic days were the centre of urban revolution, hence the proverb proving their traditional contumelious disposition. King John's love of poetry produced two Toledan poets, praised by Dr Pisa, Antonio de Heredia, a poet who "added rare glory to the Castillian muse" (probably an ancestor of the French academician, Jose Maria de Heredia) and a woman, Aloysia de Sigea, whose portrait may be seen in the Biblioteca provincial de Toledo. The fame of her erudition travelled to Portugal, and she is said to have written fluently in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabian, though with so inconceivable a lack of decency that her muse to-day is not translateable in modern tongue. Doña Luisa Sigea of Toledo, and her witty daughter Doña Angela, were called "women philosophers," and their depraved works are supposed to be founded on the traditions of a mysterious association discovered under John II. at Sevilla, "a bizarre school whose immorality is understood by the terms of the law that prescribes it."[11] Alvaro de Luna found the Toledans no easy subjects to deal with. Pedro Sarmiento constituted himself chief of the revolution against the mighty Constable, and instead of a great lord the people had to do with a mean and avaricious hound. Don Alvaro appointed captains his sons, Pedro de Luna and Fernando de Rivadeneira, and ordered them to cross the river and besiege the town by the Puente de Alcantara. Sarmiento sent 50 horses and 500 foot out by the Puerta del Cambron under his son to surprise the Constable's forces near the river. A fierce battle ensued, and the King himself had to make conditions for the Constable with the violent and haughty citizens. Sarmiento demanded that the Constable should be given up or the King resign, and roundly accused his sovereign of weakness and favouritism. The King demurred, upon which Sarmiento invited his son to come and reign, but Henry soon found that he was only a tool in Sarmiento's hands, and left the city in dudgeon, to return speedily at the head of an army to crush the too powerful Sarmiento. Ordered to leave Toledo, Sarmiento loaded two hundred beasts with gold, silver, jewels, carpets, brocade, silk, and linen he had robbed of the citizens he oppressed, and to the prince's shame the impudent thief was permitted to carry off his treasure unmolested. The execution of the great Constable, infamously abandoned by his friend and sovereign, did not secure peace and content to rebel Toledo. The state of the town in the succeeding years was so terrible that the citizens sent the Bachelor Fernan Sanchez Calderon to supplicate the king's interference, and enable them to possess in security their goods and products of those who had beaten, robbed, and ruined the town. The King declined to interfere himself, and expressed surprise that a man of such marvellous learning and science as the bachelor should come on such an errand. To the King's rebuke, the bachelor replied: "God forfend, illustrious lord, that I should hold as worthy of your majesty's attention such things, but I accepted this embassy to make manifest to your excellency the evil things that are being done." The King retorted: "It is my duty to punish evil, not to reward it." Temporary peace came with the union of the two powerful houses of Ayala and Silva, in the marriage of Doña Maria de Silva and Pero Lopez de Ayala. But King Henry's entry into Toledo aroused the old lion. The alarm bells rung, and the citizens rushed armed to the bishop's palace, where the King was. Fearing bloodshed, a squadron of cavaliers rode hot haste to the palace and begged the King to leave the city, and he went forth surrounded by the reconciled Ayalas and Silvas. To all the troubles that followed between Isabel and Henry, Toledo added more than her share. One moment the nobles held the town, and then the people, both parties ever opposed in interests, allegiance, and both in reality caring greatly more for their own archbishop, their real sovereign, than the throned king who ruled all Castille. With two parties contending for the crown of Castille, Isabel and the _Beltranaje_, Henry's acknowledged heiress, his wife's but not his own daughter, sympathy ran high in Toledo on both sides. The Marquis of Villena attempted to capture the Princess Isabel, but was defeated by the vigilant archbishop, who collected a body of horse, and carried her off to Valladolid. Never were betrothal and marriage solemnised under more romantic and thrilling circumstances than were those of Isabel, Shakespeare's "queen of earthly queens," the sole majestic and perfect sovereign of Spain, and Ferdinand her unworthy husband, whose single virtue lay in the admirable way during her lifetime in which he seconded her rule. In gratitude for Toledo's sympathy, the great queen visited the town immediately after her marriage, but the scenes of her triumphs and glory lie elsewhere. There is but one blot on them, due to her husband and the terrible Torquemado, the introduction of the Inquisition into Castille. This was shortly before the great Cortes held at Toledo, 1480, where the salutary measures of reform instituted by her were such to leave her subjects awestruck in admiration of her genius. But there were the Portuguese and the Moors calling her attention, with blare of trumpet and shock of steel, while Toledo's true sovereign was the great Cardinal, the Cardinal of Spain, Mendoza. Gallant, learned and liberal, a _grand seigneur_, he was in every way in contrast with his austere successor, Cisneros. He was not unfamiliar with illicit love and its complications, and acknowledged two sons, Iñigo de Mendoza, and Diego, Count of Melito. His gifts to various cities in the shape of palaces, churches, colleges, jewels and rich church ornaments, were incredible, while Toledo possesses his most beautiful Hospital of Santa Cruz. He left all his wealth to this hospital, appointing Queen Isabel his executor. He it was who waved the royal standard from the highest tower of the Alhambra after the taking of Granada, and, better still, counselled Isabel to lend a friendly and helpful hearing to Columbus. His library was the most magnificent of mediæval Spain. Philip II. was in treaty to purchase this rare collection for the Escorial, and a correspondence exists between his secretary and the vicar of Toledo, Maese Alvar Gomez. It afterwards fell into the hands of Cardinal Loaysa, and was valued at twenty thousand ducats. Mendoza employed a staff of writers in copying and transcribing rare MSS., the chief of whom was a Greek, Calosynas, a pupil of Darmarius. We approach the last hours of Toledan history. The great queen's death revealed the worthlessness of her husband, and the unfortunate Juana became the victim of the vilest conspiracy between the three men to whom she should have been most sacred. First her father, not willing to step down from the throne of Castille to make way for his daughter, decided to proclaim her mad. Then her husband, won over by promises of Fernando, consented to accept the situation, but was cut off suddenly, after the agreement, poisoned it is said, by Fernando's orders. Then the heartless young prince, her son, resolved to carry on the infamous persecution, in order to reign in her stead, and kept the poor woman nearly fifty years in a dark comfortless chamber, ill-treated by her keepers, the Marquis and Marchioness of Denia, with no communication with the outer world. The story of Juana _la Loca_, to whose perfect sanity Cisneros and her confessor, Juan de Avila, testify, is one of the saddest of history. In 1505, the Marquis of Villena received orders to place Toledo under Flemish rule. The town murmured rebelliously, and as soon as Philip died at Burgos, declared itself independent. The nobles, headed by Silva and Ayala, met and swore that under no consideration should the sword or any artillery be employed to keep the peace. The Silvas held the gates and bridges, but the Ayalas, exasperated by the dominance of their old rivals, talked the townspeople into a rising, and bloodshed ensued. The Silvas conquered, flung the magistrate and his party out of the city, and the streets were strewn with wounded and dead. On Fernando's death, Cisneros became the regent of Castille, with Adriano of Utrecht and Armestoff. Cisneros filled the town with militia, and the ramparts glittered with steel. Now Toledo's pet aversion was a uniform. She liked to fight, but in her own rough, free-lance style. So she rose up against the cardinals, and after a futile rebellion, in which neighbouring towns engaged, was speedily quelled. But the insurgents within her gates kept muttering of treachery on Charles' side and of his unhappy mother. So Toledo, "the crown of Spain and light of the whole world, ever free since the high reign of the Goths," decided to fight for the queen, and depose the tyrannical young Charles. Insolent verses rang round the town, jeering at Xebres the favourite:-- "Doblon de à dos horabuena estedes, Que con vos no topó Xebres." "Señor ducado de à dos No topó Xebres con vos." "Salveos Dios, ducado de à dos Que Monsieur de Xebres no topó con vos." The favourite had to fly from the city, and when his nephew, William of Croy, was appointed to the great see of Toledo, there was a frantic explosion. Everything combined to excite indignation. Austrian fashions were adopted to please Charles, goods were imported from every foreign port to the detriment of home productions, and Toledo, that employed over ten thousand workmen in silk factories, was nearly ruined by the royal decree limiting the use of silk, and forbidding the use of Spanish embroideries of gold, and silver, and rich brocade. This tyranny brought about the famous rising of the _Comuneros_, under Juan de Padilla. Padilla is the greatest figure of mediæval Toledo. Historians delight in him as a true hero, brave, gallant, honourable, wise, a perfect hidalgo, as romance paints him, punctillious, unaffected and pious. The worst his bitterest enemies ever said of him was, that he played second fiddle to his heroic wife, Maria de Pacheco, and coveted the mantle of Master of Santiago. His influence over the citizens and people was immense. For a single word of his, 20,000 workmen armed themselves, and stood round him. They named him captain-general of the combined forces of the _Comuneros_, with Francisco Maldonado in command at Salamanca, and Juan Bravo in command at Segovia. Toledo seized all the outlying towns and villages, and her voice of command reached to the Portuguese frontier and as far north as Valladolid. The cruelty and treachery practised by the Imperial army, with the prince of perfidy at its head, were such to send all Castille vigorously marching behind the heroic Padilla. War once set a-going, Padilla went down to Tordesillas to see the queen. Toledo remembered that the outraged sovereign had been born within her walls, and despatched her gallantest son with words of sympathy and allegiance. At a sign from Juana, he was ready to translate the junta from Toledo to Tordesillas, and make a rampart of his men for her protection. He forced the gates, and learnt the miserable tale of the queen's compulsory detention and sufferings, and found that "she was in her right senses, and quite as capable of governing as her mother, Isabel." To every urgent prayer to sign the decree proclaiming her inviolable rights, and her son's base usurpation, she answered "that all that she has is her son's." "The queen," wrote Hurtado de Mendoza to Charles, "spoke nobly to the rebels," and adds that he regards her as "perfectly sane." While Padilla was being worshipped as a popular idol at Valladolid, jealousy and disunion were working against him at Toledo. Great men had joined the people and Padilla, the Duke of Infantado, the Marquis of Villena, Juan de Avila, and many prelates and knights. They had imprisoned the King's messengers and ministers in the Chapel of St Blas, and forced the governor to swear fealty to the _Commindad_. The mayor defending the Bridge of St Martin had fallen, and the Silvas, guarding the Alcázar against 4000 men, were forced to evacuate when the insurgents burnt down the gates and walls, and were masters of all the fortifications. They made canons of the church bells, stopped up every entrance by the river, and defied the Imperial army. Such a proud and congenial hour for Toledo. All the citizens went about puffed up with glory and addressed one another as "Brutus," swaggering abroad, and ready to ring the bells as soon as word came from Tordesillas that the queen had signed.[12] Padilla hurried back, hearing his wife was ill, and in his absence the Imperial army sacked Tordesillas. Jealousy as usual had weakened the force of the Comuneros, though Padilla's gallant presence impelled them to some brilliant skirmishing. But their fate was sealed at Villalar, where the Conde de Haro defeated them, and took prisoners to the Castle of Villalar, the infamous Ulloa's property, three noble gentlemen of old Castille, Padilla, Maldonado and Bravo, whose names are writ upon the walls of the parliament house of Madrid, and printed large upon the hideous page of Charles Quint's early reign. Padilla's noble letters of farewell to his wife, Maria de Pacheco, and to Toledo, may be seen in the archives of Simancas, letters full of stately sentiment, of dignified tenderness and virile pathos. History proudly records his rebuke to Bravo's last lament as they walked to the gallows: "Señor Juan Bravo, yesterday it befitted us to fight like cavaliers; to-day it befits us to die like Christians." Their heads were exposed over the gates of Toledo, and then flung into the river. Maria de Pacheco, "the great widow," as a Spanish poet calls her, still held the town against the Imperial army. She was found praying at the foot of the cross when her servants brought her the news of Padilla's defeat and death. She rose, robed herself in black, and walked to the Alcázar between her husband's lieutenants, Davalos and Acuña, who bore a standard representing Padilla's execution. They named her captain of the insurgents, and found her implacable and violent, but still a sovereign commander. She took gold from the churches without any compunction, ordered the massacre of her enemies and their bodies to be flung over the castle walls, but could liberally admire gallantry in an enemy too. Pedro de Guzman, wounded, was carried into her presence. He had fought magnificently, and she ordered him to be treated well. When cured, she offered him the command of the _Comuneros_ which he indignantly refused, whereupon she gave him freedom and paid for his carriage, only asking him to free any Toledan who should fall into his hands. A generous if a ruthless enemy! Her influence over the town was extraordinary. The Imperialists and _Comuneros_ met in a violent clash upon the Zocodover. On one side shouts of _Viva el rey_; on the other, _Padilla y Commindad_. Too ill to walk, Maria was carried out in a chair into the midst of the conflict, and cried out loudly, "Peace! Peace!" Her cry was enough. There was no need of eloquence, of menace, of adjuration. One single word and a look, and swords were sheathed as by magic, and both parties, in pacific rivalry, enthusiastically escorted her back to the Alcázar where she was throned a queen. She it was who interposed between Charles and Toledo, and obtained the town's pardon. But the dead remained unforgiven, and Padilla's palace, by royal decree, was levelled to the ground, and the place is now an ugly little square planted with acacias, without even the tablet that used to mark the spot where the house stood. The great widow died in exile in Portugal. Her flight from Toledo was worthy of her romantic career. Dressed as a villager, by dead of night, she stole out of the town to join her knights in the silent Vega. Here a horse awaited her, and the little band, gallantly guarding a brave woman and the baby son she clasped in her arms, Padilla's proscribed heir, made for the Portuguese frontier. With this heroic figure vanishes the last gleam of Toledo's greatness. Charles V. came here, and had some liking for the town, since he rebuilt the Alcázar with its magnificent staircase, but did not live to enjoy it, and his wife, Doña Isabel, died here. To him Toledo owed the great water works of Juanelo Turriano, the wonder of the times, a machine composed of tin cases pinned together and rising in file from the river to the castle. The water entering the first case was pushed into the second by wheels, and thus up to the castle, where it fell into a reservoir. This _artificio_ is written of in Paris in 1615 in "L'Inventaire général des plus curieuses recherches des Royaumes d'Espayne": "Là tu verras le grand, fort et mémorable Alcázar, où l'eau monte en grande abondance par un artifice admirable, qui rejaillit de la rivière du Tage. A ceste invention est semblable celle que fit faire Henry le Grand d'heureu mémoire sur le Pont Neuf de cette bonne ville de Paris où il y a deux belles figures de bronze, l'une de Jésus Christ, et l'autre de la Samaritáine. Il n'y a que cette différence que l'eau de Tolède monte deux fois plus haut que l'autre, et jette aussi gros que le corps d'un boeuf." But henceforth Toledo is an effaced figure among Spanish towns. She is no longer the Imperial city or the Royal town, and is only a great historic memory. CHAPTER V _The old Spanish Capital, once and now_ The tale of Toledo's rough and broken history, ending as I have shown with the last struggle of the _Comuneros_, will have amply prepared the reader for the town's present physiognomy. Few cities in Europe that for so long were accustomed to opulence and power, have known a reverse so instantaneous, so complete, an extinction against which all effort, all hope, all aspiration have proved vain, as that which Toledo was crushed beneath, when Felipe Segundo chose miserable, ugly, undistinguished Madrid for his country's capital. Until then the vicissitudes, the fortunes of Toledo were those of all Spain. Even now in her ruin, the violent and imperious character of the race remains imperishably stamped on the harsh, sad mixture of beauty and ugliness of her conservative features. But the country itself takes no note of her. She has lived, she lives no more, except in the memory of historians, for the fugitive admiration of the traveller. Unchanged I have said she is in all respects; a perfect mediæval picture in high relief against the background of civilised Europe. Nothing less civilised will you find along the least traversed byways of our modern world. Of her ancient splendours she presents such vestiges as to shame all that the ages have done for us. In beauty, alas, we have not progressed. That remains behind along with many other divine things, the portion of this sadly-used old world's bright morning. Such vast centres as London and Paris are mean enough compared with what such a town as Toledo must have been when her semi-royal archbishops flourished and kings were proud and delighted if she but smiled upon them, more used as they were to her frowns and her visage of haughty revolt; when the Jews throve, great capitalists, and ruled the Exchange, when the Muezzin was heard over her narrow streets and the crescent floated from her towers, and her weekly markets in the Zocodover were so thronged that magistrates had to preside at the coming and going of strangers, such was the influx on all sides. If the town wears so unique and imposing an aspect after centuries of silence and decay, what must it not have been in each of its great hours of domination, under Goth, Moor, and Christian? Would that Toledo were but the mausoleum of regrets and memories. There is a dignity and charm in noble widowhood, a grandeur in unobtrusive poverty. But such is not her portion. She has become the home of the most shameless and persecuting beggary it has been my lot to see. All over Italy and Spain beggars thrive in the sun of winter and in the shade of summer. But here they are worse than a plague of mosquitoes. Castillian good-nature, a grand manner in money matters, and courtesy, vanish at Toledo, where a sullen discourtesy and importunate mendicity reign. The people reverse every notion travels in North Spain and Old Castille had led me to form of the Spaniards, of their kindliness, of distinguished honesty, and of disinterestedness. The Toledans regard the foreigner with the eye of the bird of prey. The instant his foot touches their ground they pounce upon him, and he knows neither rest nor freedom from their mercenary and dishonest attentions till the train carries him away from their mean little station. It is not safe to ask a question of even a well-dressed Toledan. If he tells you to take the right instead of the left, he is sure to ask you either for a tip or alms. But you may rest assured he regards himself entitled to one or the other. All the boys of whatever class, bourgeois or artizan, coming out from the Institute with sachels slung over their shoulders, or running errands, well-shod and clothed, along the streets, at the sight of a foreigner shriek out "Un canki sou" if they imagine they know French, and "cinco centimes" when they are content with Castillian. If you take no notice, they will pursue you in a vituperative procession, and not scruple to fling their caps, ay, even stones at you. Other Spanish towns are proud and noble in their decay, Toledo is unhappily degraded and brutalised. She has no commerce, no stir, no money. She has no communication with the outer world except through the travellers who briefly pass her way, and upon whose exploitation she lives. She has no standard of civilisation. Her object is to make every foreigner pay for every step he takes along her rude and inhospitable pavements. The people have no desire whatever to make a good impression, no pride in the hope that the stranger shall go away and speak them fair in remote parts. They neither want his good opinion nor his sympathy; but they want as much of his money as they can get. The ill-will is general. Canons, citizens, sacristans, guides, interpreters--all appear to be in a secret league to multiply difficulties and exact tips. Only the common women, all over Spain the cream of the race, retain something of Spanish good-nature and courtesy. If Spain should ever be redeemed and lifted once again to her old position as a nation of the earth--for now she is but a squalid and disorderly province--it will be due to the persistent amiability and kindliness of the women of the people. These want nothing but intelligence to make them the equals of the French, and here the intelligence is only dormant. It would take so little to develop it, and they are so unconsciously the better half, in such pathetic and humble ignorance of their superiority to their pretentious mates. So little love have the people for anything that is graceful, or charming or pleasant, that the guitar-players would not dream, as they wander down the dark romantic streets at night, of thrumming their guitar for mere pleasure. They must be paid a real (2-1/2d.) before they will play a single air, and then of the shortest, and if you wish them to continue you must continue producing reals at intervals. I have not heard any good playing here, and the music is of the vulgarest, but such as it is, in a dead town without a single distraction or break in the night's monotony, one would gladly pay a peseta to hear undisturbed a little Toledan music. But no. They have no artistic desire to please before receiving payment. Their mean terror is of playing a bar that shall go unpaid for, and for this reason they stop in the middle of an air and spoil their effect. But perhaps we should not grumble, great a blot on an impressive landscape and down streets that have not altered since the spurred and belted centuries, as this grasping and mendicant race is.[13] With a different people Toledo must surely have changed her physiognomy, and taken on a more civilised and prosperous air. And though this would be her gain, it would assuredly be our eternal loss. The city as it stands is one of the oldest and most interesting of Europe. Coming straight to it from Nuremberg, a painter has told me that Nuremberg seemed new and artificial beside it. The streets, so terrible for the modern shod foot, could not well be other than they are, taking into consideration the fact that the town is built upon seven rocky peaks 1820 feet above the sea. Perched so high, one has no right, even in the face of electric light, with which we could better dispense, to expect comfortable circulation. As a matter of fact, you do not circulate. You tumble down, and you climb up; you twist round high-walled passages the natives call streets and seem to understand, and your walk is little better than an undignified limp. The feet of the people through the influence of centuries, no doubt, appear to be impervious to the lacerating effect of pointed stones, and you have nothing to do but rise superior to the sensation of pain if you can; if not, to groan in private. But you are so well repaid by every step you take, that you have no claim upon sympathy. Was ever city so strongly placed, so superbly fortressed as Toledo must have been in Roman, Gothic and Moorish days? We need nothing but her gates to tell us this, though all her great successive walls have been thrown down. Let us gather from her historian of the beginning of the last century, Dr Francisco Pisa, some idea of the town's features after the Christian conquest, since we can only hope to seize fragmentary notions of the splendours of Moorish rule, and the rudest suggestion of Gothic sway. The life of the city then, as now, spread from the Zocodover, word of inexplicable charm, said to be Arabian and to signify "Place of the Beasts." To-day even it offers us quite a fresh and startling study of the famous picaresca novel. Down the picturesque archway, cut in deep yellow upon such a blue as only southern Europe can show at all seasons, a few steps lead you to the squalid ruin where Cervantes slept, ate and wrote the _Ilustre Fregona_. So exactly must it have been in the days Cervantes suffered and smiled, offering to his mild glance just such a wretched and romantic front. In the courtyard muleteers and peasants sit about, and above runs a rude wooden balcony, in the further corner of which was Cervantes' room, where he sat looking down upon the beasts being fed and watered, cheerfully writing, we may imagine, in the din of idle clatter, in the dense and evil atmosphere of an age and land when the nose was not an inconvenience. If he were no more comfortable than I presume the guests must be to-day, he cannot have suffered more in the prison of Argamasilla, or in slavery to the Turk. Stepping upon the Plaza, there would not now be much that is novel to shock his eye beyond the dress. The Plaza has preserved its old triangular form, two sides straight, and the third curved, with the single broad path that leads to the Alcázar. The shops still run inside the rough arcade that makes the circuit of the place, and loafers and gossips loll upon the stone benches, while water-laden mules amble by, and girls, effective and unimaginably graceful, with well-dressed heads and brilliant eyes, in groups saunter into view, carrying on their hips earthen amphoras, which they have filled at the public fountain. These are features that have not changed since the grave sweet humourist trod this broken pavement. Visit it in the dropping twilight, when the early stars are out, and you will find it alive with promenaders, uniforms in excess among the males. Priests, soldiers and beggars abound, and dwelling on the dulness of Toledo, it can be no [Illustration: MOORISH ARCH LEADING TO ZOCODOVER] [Illustration: HOUSE CERVANTES STAYED IN, TOLEDO] wonder to us that the spruce young officers of Madrid detest being quartered here. What have they to do in a town where there is not even a decent café, and social existence is not partially understood? And the pleasures of walking round a romantic city cannot be offered them as adequate distraction. For us, of course, it suffices as long as taste keeps us at Toledo, and each walk has its fresh surprise, if not a fresh enchantment. Impossible to find a more intricate, maze-like arrangement of streets, and some of the passages behind the Alcázar, and round by the Cathedral look so dreadful and perilous that the marvel is there are to be found persons with sufficient courage to dwell in such places. One is disposed to agree with Robida the French artist, who attributes the excellence of Toledan steel in bygone ages to the desperate danger of the streets, since nobody then but a citizen armed to the teeth would be insane enough to leave his house. But if the main features of the Zocodover have not changed, the fulness of its life has diminished. In the sixteenth century the Tuesday markets of the place were widely famous. Don Enrique IV. granted the citizens a free market every Tuesday in return for Toledo's gracious reception of him. For Toledo, as I have shown, did not spoil her rulers, and like all ill-tempered persons, she received a disproportionate acknowledgment of her rare soft moods. Fruit, flowers, provisions of every kind, birds, fish, oil, honey, bacon and cheese were sold, and the exceeding moderation of the prices, owing to the untaxed sales, attracted crowds from all parts. The influx of trade even at this period, though the Jews and Moors, source of her wealth, art and civilisation, had been destituted and expelled, was enormous, so that the magistrates held audience every Tuesday to judge the cases of purchase and sale, and see that the peace was kept. Trade was then so important an affair in Toledo, that priests and magistrates kept the interests of the traders in view in the settlement of church and legal matters, and mass was celebrated over the archway leading to Cervantes' inn and Cardinal Mendoza's most beautiful hospital (see façade of Santa Cruz) in a little chapel dedicated to The Precious Blood, expressly set aside for the market people, at the earliest hour of day to suit them, and the audience chamber timed its hearing of civil cases at an hour in the interest of the same class, so that business should not be interfered with. There was a smaller market up near Santo Tomé, ruled and protected like that of the Zocodover, with also a high chapel for service for [Illustration: THE ZOCODOVER] the market folk. One side was given over to the butchers' shops, above which was inscribed: "Reigning in Spain the most high and powerful Felipe II., he has ordered in the town of Toledo these butchers' shops with the concurrence of Perafande Ribera, his magistrate. Year MDLXXXIX." There was another little meat market down in the old place of Sanchez Minaya, near the hospital of the Misericordia. The slaughter-houses were in the wide place close to the Puertas del Cambron and San Martin, where, as Pisa says, "The air of the open country came to cleanse away the evil odour of the dead remains." Grain and wheat were sold near the Alcázar, down by the Cardinal's hospital. The Exchange of Toledo was the most important of Spain. It was founded by Martin Ramirez, in the parish of St Nicholas, near San José. Near here the gilders and silversmiths worked, and their work was as prized as it was costly; while the tanners, leather-cutters and dyers were relegated to the barriers above the river, between the mills of the Hierro and San Sebastian. The potters lived at the top of the town, under San Isidro, and spread everywhere were countless weavers of cloth, and silk and fine embroiderers. Running from the Zocodover to the Puerta de Perpiñan was the famous street of arms where the sword-makers, the armourers, the iron and damascene-workers lived, and in the wide street opposite (now the _calle del Comercio_) the shoemakers and jewellers had their shops. The Jews had their own barrier before their expulsion, one of the wealthiest and most important of the city. The four streets on the further side of the Cathedral were called the _Alcayzerias_, and here dwelt the silk-sellers, the hosiers, the linen-sellers, the clothiers and haberdashers. These shopkeepers did an enormous trade with Valencia, Xativa, Murcia; with Medina del Campo, Medina del Rioseca, Sevilla, Cádiz and Ecija, even as far as Portugal. After the discovery of America all the ships that went out laden with Spanish goods purchased these at Toledo. The scriveners dwelt round the Ayuntamiento. In early days the Ayuntamiento was an insignificant body, and all the power lay between the sovereign and the mighty archbishop. But after the conquest of the Saracens, the kings of Castille found their realm too large and complicated for anything so minute as mere civic rule, and gradually the magistrature increased in power, till this Ayuntamiento, with its president, came to be the important body it was, and rivalled the Archbishopric in semi-royal powers. Pedro the Cruel was the first to grant it the privilege of the arms of Castille, and it was to the famous Corregidor, Gomez Manrique, who had his namesake's famous inscription painted on the staircase, that Isabel the Catholic, on her first visit, gave the castles and gates of the city. Under the Corregidor were four mayors, who judged civil cases, one of whom sat only in the Zocodover to settle disputes between the traders. These magistrates were usually powerful nobles, such as the Toledos--the present dukes of Alba--the Castillas, the Silvas, the Ayalas, Montemayors and Fuensalidas, all great historic names. The city jury, half Latin, half Mozarabe, in religion, was furnished by all the parishes. As well as the Ayuntamiento, there was the Santa Hermandad behind the Plaza Mayor, with its prison and officers. To-day it is a muleteer's inn, the _Posada de la Hermandad_, and the big kitchen, once the judgment chamber of the Inquisition, and the wooden benches around have not been changed, nor the dark-beamed ceiling within the Gothic façade, with the royal arms and the statues of the archers and members of the brotherhood. The town prison was situated at San Roman, and was rebuilt and improved in 1575 by one of Toledo's most enlightened corregidors, Juan Guttierrez Tello. Less joyous and profitable than the Tuesday fairs of the Zocodover were the terrible autos-da-fé, and, indeed, so agreeably wedded is the memory of this quaint little triangular plaza to the picture of heroes of _capa_ and _espada_, to betitled loafers and dinnerless dons, that the mind with difficulty conceives it made over to gloomy and flaming images of the most solemn and atrocious hour of Spanish cruelty. More in keeping with the bright and busy scene are the bull-fights that used to be held here, when there were no seats or trees in the middle as now. A curious document is the charter to Toledo of Alfonso the Emperor, after the conquest of the Moors: "In the name of God and His Grace, I, Aldefonso, by the will of God, Emperor of Spain, conjointly with my wife, the Empress, Doña Berenguela, with an agreeable spirit, and of our own will, without being forced by anyone, give this letter of donation and confirmation to all Christians who to this day have come to people Toledo, or will come, Mozarabe, Castillian and French, that they may pay toll neither on entering nor on leaving the city, nor in any part of my lands. They shall be free of duty on all the things they purchase and sell, except those who carry to or bring from the land of the Moors articles of trade, which shall be taxed according to their weight and value." This little touch of spite against the vanquished Moor is the more intolerable when we remember the old relations of Alfonso's predecessor with that same generous enemy; remember that the man he had conquered and exiled was the son of his benefactor and host when he was himself conquered and exiled by an unnatural brother; that the king, on whose throne he sat, had been his loyal and kindly comrade, and that the conquest his successor so grandiloquently recalls in this charter was the basest act of ingratitude perpetrated in the record of Castillian treachery. From such slight indications it will be seen that the commerce of Toledo flourished upon a large scale. There is something stately and commanding about this method of confining each trade and business to its own quarter. How dearly now one would like to evoke the street of arms, and follow some slim young knight down from the royal Alcázar on the higher hill-point, with slashed sleeves, cloak flung jauntily from shoulder, and plumed cap, on his way to this deadly and interesting street to purchase a "trusty Toledo," and linger over an exquisitely-wrought poniard. Or earlier still, and more delightful, accompany a turbaned Turk, wonderfully arrayed, and gaze with him in ecstasy upon the rows of damascened scimitars. Toledo was used to travellers in the days of her greatness for, near all the gates, Pisa tells us, there were inns for strangers. Not strangers only, but the bishops and great lords, and sovereigns even, seem to have patronised the inns of Toledo. Alfonso the Perfidious stayed at a posada near the town gates when he came to visit his old protector and host, Almenor, whom he invited to dinner here. More astonishing still than this hospitable provision for travellers, is the fact we learn that there was not only a foundling hospital for unclaimed children, but also several homes for lost or strayed animals. Spain was more advanced in this respect centuries ago than now, for it is pretty certain the race shows no concern that we know of on behalf of forlorn and unprotected brutes. If you would have some dim notion of the castellated and walled aspect of Toledo in Pisa's days, you have only to thread your way through his prolix geographical history of the town. He begins with the magnificent Puerta de Visagra, and when we examine this double gate in its present battered and defaced condition, we cannot carp at the word "sumptuous" which he applies to it. Sumptuous it must have been then, if now it is magnificent. It holds the imperial arms, two eagles and a crown, with castles and lions of middle size gilt, and an inscription. Outside this gate, which, Pisa tells us, was shut at night, there was a broad space, and another entrance without. Entering the city on this side, you came by the parish of Santiago and San Isidro, and the barrier of La Granja. The ascent was made by the old hermitage of the Cross to the Zocodover. Here were two gates in a strong wall, probably half Roman and half Gothic, and this was the entrance to the town. Pisa calls these gates intermediary. Between the Puerta de Visagra and this latter gate in the great tower, he describes another, smaller and less important, which was always closed, and was called the gate of Almohada. Beyond this was another called the gate of the twelve stones, descending from the monastery of the Carmen by the Bridge of Alcántara. Before Pisa's time, this gate was lower, and the twelve stones around obtained it the odd name of _Doce Cantos_, there being supposed twelve fountains once here. Another gate anciently called _Adabazim_, and afterwards _Hierro_, was near the bridge and the mills, on the limits of the lovely gardens of Alcurnia. Above the old hermitage of the Cross were the tower and gate of King Aquila, and above Santo Domingo el Real, the tower of Alarcon, with another intermediate between it and the Zocodover. From this ran round a castellated wall, and here you entered the street of arms by the Puerta de Perpiñan. The gardens of the Alcurnia were famed all over Spain, as beautiful as any of Valencia or Granada, or Cordova, laid down by the Moors between the bridges of St Martin and Alcántara. The Tagus was used here as the Turia is used still at Valencia, for purposes of irrigation, so that fruit and flowers and trees abounded. At the time of the conquest, these lovely grounds became the property of the Christian monarchs, until King Alonso the Good, in 1158, granted them to the Archbishop Rodrigo, who built the mills and greatly improved the grounds. The name is said to signify "horn-shaped," on account of the curves the river takes as it runs under the bridge of Alcántara. But a fierce inundation swept away all this loveliness from the eyes of the dismayed Toledans in Cardinal Tavera's time. The ungrateful waters of the Tagus laid waste this green and flowery paradise upon a burnt and rocky hill-side, and Tavera died before he could carry out his project of restoring it. True, even then, the Cigarrales beyond the town walls were noted spots of refreshment, whither the jaded citizens and nobles betook themselves to their country houses for the enjoyment of orchards, gardens and trees. The apricots of the Cigarrales have always been famous. But they constituted small comfort for the loss of such radiance and perfume, such oriental splendour as the _Huerta de Alcurnia_. They spread still from the river bank up among the cool hill breezes, and make a charming walk towards sunset. In the huerta del Rey was one of the palacios de Galiana, known through the legend of Galafre's fair daughter and Charlemagne, the other having served as Wamba's palace or _prætorium_, and later still as the palace in which the Cortes sat to judge the case between the immortal Cid and his wretched sons-in-law. Westward from Santa Leocadia ran a long, broad space of foliaged and flowered land, vines, and pleasant country houses. The rich cigarrel of Cardinal Quiroga was here, and the dean and chapter of the Cathedral possessed on the other side gardens and orchards nearly as beautiful. When you left all this cultivated brilliance of nature, that showed the passage of the Moors, narrow and stony streets and lanes confronted you in your upward road from the bridges and gates. Then as now! _Cuestas_ and harsh passages, built upon peaks of rock and iron, Pisa calls them; twisted and narrow laneways. He accuses the Moors of having spoiled the town, of having obliterated the lustre and loveliness Roman and Goth bestowed upon it. This is an ill-tempered charge. The Moors gave in Spain everywhere more than the Christians lost, and the trial is, seeing the sad use the Christians made of what they received, to hold one's soul in patience, and not cry out against their philistinism. He believes that in Christian hands, "fine places, wide and noble streets, churches and hospitals will spread." Churches and convents, yes. But the streets remain the same, an expiation of the sins of civilisation, as twisted, as narrow, as stony as ever, good Dr Pisa, after eight centuries of Christian rule. The present Alcázar, which dominates the city, was first built by the Cid's sovereign, Alfonso, while the Moorish palace stood on the site of the monastery of St Augustine. In the parish of San Martin was the Alcázar of the infante Fadique, Sancho the Brave's uncle, within a magnificent view of the river and the Vega, its walls running as far as the Puerta del Cambron. It fell into the hands of Maria de Molina, Sancho's widow, and she gave the property to Gonzalo Ruiz de Toledo, lord of Orgaz, tutor of King Alonso and the infanta Beatrix. Gonzalo Ruiz, on his death, bequeathed it to the Augustines. In the time of Gothic rule the councils of Toledo were held in this Alcázar. A wall ran then from the Alcázar to the Palacio de Galiana, and continued from the Zocodover to the gate of Perpignan to separate the dwellings of the Moors from those of their conquerors. The Christians lived between the arch under the Chapel of the Precious Blood and the bridge of Alcántara. Later on Isabel and Fernando embellished the royal Alcázar, which was guarded by a thousand castillian hidalgoes, and Carlos V. built the great staircase, one of the most regal of the world, while a superb salon, richly wrought in arabesque, was the introduction of the Constable of Castillo, Alvaro de Luna, at an earlier period. All these glories are departed, negligently burnt. The first subject to occupy the Alcázar in state was the Cid, Ruiz Diaz, whom Alfonso named first governor of Toledo after its capture from the Moors. But the Cid chose to build his own house near it, and installed a cavalier therein in his place. The Cid's house is now San Juan de los Caballeros. True, Rasis el Moro, in the beautiful copy of his Arabian manuscript,[14] translated into Castillian by Ambrosio de Morales from the Portuguese translation ordered by King Denys of Portugal, of Maestre Mahomed and Gil Perez, says that Caesar was the first governor of Toledo, and built the bridge over the Tagus, and Caesar, he tells us, came hither upon his tour in Spain, and in a quarrel with the praetor, Aulus, was beaten and departed "feeling a great weight on his heart, and longed for great power to come back and vanquish Aulus, and revenge himself of his wrongs." Rasis also mentions "the marvellous bridge of Toledo" at the time of the Moorish conquest, "most subtly wrought, that in truth he saw nothing to equal it in all Spain." The town he describes as "a very good city, extremely pleasant, and very strong and well fortified." Every man was well off, and the workmen were paid. The air was so sanative and dry that wheat could remain ten years in cover without rotting. Alcocer describes Toledo, the head of Spain, as a town mightily privileged by nature, placed in the centre of the land "like the heart in the human body"; a city, "high, rough, most firm and inexpugnable, founded upon a high mountain and on brave and hard rocks, round which turns the most famous Tagus, which forms a horse shoe, the town thus being nearly an island." He waxes eloquent on the theme of the land's fertility and freshness, the abundance of fruit trees, the mines of various metals, the quantities of stone, lime, wood, and every facility for building. Theodoric, the King of Italy, he tells us, came to Toledo to see for himself if report had not exaggerated its wonders, if it really were the strong and noble city rumour described it. So delighted with both town and people was this Ostrogothic sovereign that he took for second wife a wealthy lady of Toledo, Sancha, and was married in great pomp in the city. But we are less inclined to believe Alcocer when he assures us that Toledo declined from the hour of Moorish conquest, "for those barbarians knew nothing of architecture(!), and laid out narrow, little streets, and built vile little houses, no less ugly and filthy." O worthy Alcocer, if he could but know that now the very Spaniards themselves, in the interests of art and loveliness, lament the expulsion of the Moors, and humbly admit that all they learnt of civilisation came from those same adorable "barbarians!" The Tagus then, as now, was always the great natural charm of the town. Like the Arno, it takes on every hue; some mornings just after dawn, it is the palest blue, again is a still sleepy jade, or silver like a curled mirror, and as stirless as it gives back the ardent flash of the sunrays; or after sunset, when all the rich hues have faded from sky and earth, and crimson and russet gold have waved into an indigo dusk, you will see a white mist rise and travel in flakes from the bosom of the enazured water over the dim landscape. Capricious as these cold or fervent hours may be, the permanent colour of the tranquil untravelled Tagus is yellow. All poets and writers see but the yellow in it, as in the Tiber, though its blue and green and silvered hours are much more beautiful. "Del dorado Tago ausente," sings the old _Romancero General_, as far back as 1605, and continues to describe Toledo above her golden river: "Dize ay cristal del Tago Que con murmurio entre arenas Vais regando amenos sotos de Agradable primavera. [Illustration: THE TAGUS] Hasto do bates los muros de aquella cuidad soberbio, tans alebrada en el mundo Por tu artífio y nobleza. Que entre peñas levantada de inexpugnable firmeza, Y de torres coronada compitos con las estrellas. Y luego vañas los prados de tu elana y ancha vega, Que de ninfas adornada es nueva gloria en la tierra." The most witching element in the enchantment of this river is its stillness, its unfathomable, unbroken quietude. In the sixteenth century it was navigable as far as Toledo, but the mills upon its banks are now for ever silent; no traffic has deflowered its legendary charms; neither boat nor barge cuts a way along its inactive waters. In an age when every resource of nature is feverishly applied to the service of commerce or luxury, there is something majestic in such uselessness. When the wherry that plies sleepily from bank to bank floats into view, the sight is a positive shock to artistic sensibilities. It seems an idle desecration. Only the gold-seekers--symbol of eternal illusion, ever nourished and ever elusive to the grasp of man, who builds fresh illusions of the ashes of past deceptions--may continue to trouble its wild untamed depths. So from time to time these children of tradition, believing in the tale of its golden sands, go down to the reedy banks, after an inundation, with sifters, and industriously gather up the sand the river has flung from its bottom. They pour water over it, shake it well, and then hungrily examine the grains that remain in the vain hope of finding gold. Before Ponz's time the dean of the Church of the Infantas was said to possess a piece of gold cast up by the Tagus, and the complaint then was that many another piece had been carelessly broken and scattered by the silversmiths. But Ponz doubts the golden legend even so early as the last century. To explain the undoubted fact that the river had at different times cast up treasure, he assumes that in each reversal and exodus of race brought about by the evolution of Toledo's history, Roman, Gothic, Moorish, Hebrew, and Christian, the fugitives had the habit of burying near the river treasure in provision for the expected return. Even this is no supposition to be scorned, and adds to the romantic interest of the deserted Tagus. [Illustration: MILL ON THE TAGUS] Garcilaso de la Vega has chanted the golden charms of the Tagus, and Cervantes writes of "the delicate works wrought by the four nymphs who, from their crystal dwelling, lifted their heads above the waves of the Tagus, and sat on the green meadow to work at those rich stuffs which the ingenious poet paints for us, and which were fashioned of gold and silk and pearls." Now, as then, like Lope the Asturian, aquadores descend to the river-brink with their donkeys laden with water-jars, which they fill below, and bridge the upward rocky paths shouting: _Agua fresca_. The plays of Cervantes were acted at Toledo, which permitted Lope de Vega, who lived then in the royal city, to make an ill-natured reference to the great biographer of the ingenious Hidalgo in his correspondence, and jeering at his plays, call him a "nescio."[15] Lope little dreamed in his bitterness and jealousy that the "nescio" would forever stand before posterity as the sole representative of Castillian genius, and that the miserable little inn he dwelt in at Toledo would be forever a spot of pious pilgrimage. A more substantial source of wealth than the gold of Tagus was the valuable lead and mineral mines of the Montes de Toledo, forty leagues distance. In the bright days of civic power they belonged to the municipality. King Fernando, the saint, sold them to the town for the sum of 400,000 golden ducats, but the city little by little disposed of a considerable part of this property to private individuals for exploitation, and, like everything else, here the mines to-day have lost in value. In his few succinct pages on Toledo, Mr Street gives us a very excellent bit of sober impressionism, which merits quotation: "The road from the famous bridge of Alcántara, passing under the gateway which guards it into a small walled courtyard, turns sharply to the right under another archway, and then rises slowly below the walls until, with another sharp turn, it passes under the magnificent Moorish Puerta del Sol, and so on into the heart of the city. "The Alcázar is the only important building seen on entering on this side; but from the other side of the city, where the bridge of San Martin crosses the Tagus, the cathedral is a feature in the view, though it never seems to be so prominent as might be expected with a church of its grand scale.[16] From both these points of view, indeed, it must be remembered that the effect is not produced by the beauty or grandeur of any one building; it is the desolate sublimity of the dark rocks that bound the river; the serried phalanx of wall, and town, and house that line the cliffs; the tropical colour of sky and earth, and masonry; and finally the forlorn, decaying and deserted aspect of the whole that makes the views so impressive and so unusual. Looking away from the city walls towards the north, the view is much more _riant_, for there the Tagus, escaping from its rocky defile, meanders across a fertile vega, and long lines of trees, with here a ruined castle, and there the repose of the curious Church of the Cristo de la Vega, and there again the famous factory of arms, give colour and incident to a view which would anywhere be thought beautiful, but is doubly grateful by comparison with the sad dignity of the forlorn old city." Toledo's finest hour is at sunset, especially in the month of October. Nowhere have I seen the setting sun cast such a rich and lovely flush over the earth. The brown visage of the town for one intense moment is made radiant by the deep crimson flames, and the red light sheds a glorious beauty upon empty hill-sides and river-washed plains. Magic enfolds city and land, and space is so abridged by the matchless purity of the atmosphere that the eye is tricked into the belief that distant objects are quite close. Painters complain of this singular deception, which makes it so difficult to seize and reproduce the features of town and landscape. But the mere observer will naturally rejoice in an attraction the more. Sunset is the hour for a divine walk along the jagged and broken precipices above the river. You follow the steep Calle de la Barca behind the Cathedral down to the ferry, where a few lazy oar strokes take you across the narrow Tagus. The effect midway is surprising. Looking towards the bridge of Alcántara and San Servando, the waters seem to force their way between the immense brown rocks from the castle ruins, and lie steep and still like a mountain tarn. Little splashes of green and flowery bloom high up among the rocks give a pretty touch to the grim picture, and over the harsh remains of the city walls you will note a common but bright little suggestion of garden life. On the road above, rounding the superb curve of Antiquerela, a boy on mule-back is a slight silhouette of vanishing grace, and the evening bells in the upper air sound thin and ethereal above the sea-like roar of the water breaks below the silent Moorish mills. Not even the modern hint of existence and the squalid little galleries, with linen hanging out to dry over a broken bit of castellated wall, will disturb your feeling of reverie among the forgotten ages. Nor will the living light upon the trees, flashing rose and yellow through their branches and across the reeds along the river, nor the quaint figures moving lazily up the mule-path that cuts its crooked way over the naked rocks to the Valle, in the least disturb your bemused sensation of enchanted negation. The beauty of the hour and scene will trouble you less than its strangeness and quietude. Go further up, until you reach Nuestra Señora de la Valle, and from this point the old city will show you its most admirable grouping. At your feet, far down the precipitous shore line, a broken mirror of jade or muddy gold, zig-zagged by lines of foam along the breakwaters, and above the opposite bank, mapped upward, roof against roof, in [Illustration: TOLEDO FROM LEFT BANK OF TAGUS] pale brown, with spaces of green here and there where the gardens show, the town reveals itself in all its magnificent eccentricity. Here some notion of the Cathedral from outside may be gathered. The Gate of Lions directly fronts you, and the apse stands out from its crowd of buildings, while the bell tower dominates the scene in all its majestic isolation. From the flat roofs rise a mass of upper domes and mudejar towers that add an Arabian note to the great Gothic picture, and the immense square of the Alcázar with its three towers, bold, undecorated, and monotonous, is perched in odd supremacy above the girdling path that now runs under the mutilated wall. The hills lie backward, reddish-purple, silent, perfumed, and sombre, and the Vega with its broad bright smile of verdure and bloom travels beyond the famous bridge of San Martin. Between the rocky shore and the ruins of a Roman bridge are big sandy reaches, and every step you take among the brushwood scents the air with the strong aromatic odours of the herbs. About here Perez Bayen tells us,[17] the Roman Cañeria ran, carrying water from San Servando by the bridge of San Martin. The little tower, _el horno del Vidro_, near the monastery of La Sisla, he suggests, was a Roman _Castellum Aquarium_. The steep waterway of La Sisla, called the Valle de la Desgollada (in honour of the customary legend of a lover's broken neck for love's sake), was probably used for the aqueduct, as the ruins of the arches below, along the old road of La Plata, indicate. The water must have been conducted into the city by the gate of the twelve stones, where the bridge was high. Now, alas, the aqueduct, like the wonderful artifice of Juanelo Turriano of Cremona, in Charles V.'s reign, has vanished. The water-works of Toledo nowadays are sadly deficient after the Roman, Moor, and even early Castillian, though the glory of this period belongs to Lombardy and not to Castille. Juanelo, as well as giving his name to his famous "artifice," was the means of bestowing a quaint and striking name on a street below the cathedral, so-called to-day, _Hombre de Palo_ (man of wood) where he lived. He fabricated a wooden statue that went from his house to the archbishop's for bread and meat, bowing and nodding, first in gracious overtures and then in obsequious thanks, and carried back the offerings to Juanelo's house. Few Toledanos, dawdling in and out of this little curved street, now remember why it is so oddly named, or bestow a thought upon the ingenious Italian who dwelt there in the sixteenth century, and whose fame drew admiring travellers even from remote Oxford. [Illustration: FUENTE S. MARTINO OF BANO DE LA CAVA] Entering the city by the striking bridge of San Martin, you pass the picturesque ruin of the _Baño de la Cava_, where the too charming Florinda is supposed to have bathed for the doom of Don Rodrigo and the ruin of Gothic Spain. Rodrigo's castle, of which not a trace now remains, was built on the high rock above, and indiscreet eyeshot sent down upon this sacred spot is said to have revealed to him a seductive vision of a beautiful bare limb. The ruin is probably that of a towered bridge, suggested by the big grey stone on the opposite bank. The spot is, however, romantic enough for any legend, and those who prefer tradition to fact will say, if Florinda did not bathe there, she ought to have done so. The view on this side is more beautiful than even on the other. A Spanish friend, whose privilege it is to paint Toledo in all her wild and sad enchantment, in a big house above the Puerta del Cambron, overlooking the wavy water-line from the bridge of San Martin and the exquisite diversity of orchard and meadow-land, has offered me many delightful moments of contemplation of this unique view from his broad terrace. It combines in the rarest form a light and smiling charm with a superb and matchless melancholy. From this point of entrance you twist up and down through the most mysterious streets of the world. Who designed them, who fashioned them? How came any town to be so built? Streets so narrow that hand may touch hand from either side, and soft converse be held through opposite windows; so rounded that an enemy advancing might fall upon you unperceived. How many lovely façades, alas! eaten away, a sullen magnificent protest against modern times, with divine arches showing here and there through miserable plaster! Everywhere Moorish faience, and curious Toledan doors in Arabian or Gothic porches, for all the world like the doors of palaces in fairyland, ornamented with huge carved iron nails. And when the doors stand open, glimpses of bright clean patios, with their gleaming bands of _azulejos_, their centre well and little stunted trees. All so dull, so still, so silent. Now and then you may chance to meet a woman following a mule laden with fruit and vegetable, which she sells from house to house, or a water-carrier, or an itinerant pedlar shouting the value and nature of his wares up to the balconies. Some of the street effects of grouping and colouring are of an indescribable witchery. Where will you match such a corner as that of the old palace of the Cardinal D. Pascual de Aragon, now a convent? Words are useless to convey an idea of its quaintness, the effect of pink and green, of iron balcony, of wrought stone, of broken façade and charming variety of line. These are things that even a painter can hardly hope to reproduce. And such corners abound in Toledo. The foot treads the very pavement of romance and legend, where everything is a gratification for the eye, and the dream of the mourner of departed centuries is remorselessly realised. Of commerce hardly a hint. Here and there an offer to supply daily wants of the simplest kind, and, in the Calle del Comercio, a few shop-fronts with belated appointments. The most interesting is that of Alvarez, the best maker of damascene. Murray's guide-book recommends travellers to purchase this famous Toledo work at the Fabrica de Armas, the Government enterprise. This is wrong advice. The Fabrica produces inferior work, and charges twenty-five per cent. more than the private factories. Some of the work in Alvarez's shop is exquisite, and, when you have entered his workshop behind, and watched the men slowly and carefully produce this minute art, [Illustration: A STREET CORNER, TOLEDO] the wonder is not that it should be so expensive, but that it should not cost more. The Fabrica outside the town is only interesting to the lovers of steel. It is quite a vulgar and modern institution, dating from the days of Charles III., the bourgeois monarch, whom a Spanish writer contemptuously described as "an excellent mayor." In the middle ages, the armourers worked in their own houses, and each master had a band of apprentices. They formed a corporation, and were exempt from taxes and duties in the purchase of materials for this art. The sword-makers of Toledo were a company of European importance, and even the mere sellers of daggers and blades were privileged citizens, whom the very sovereigns and archbishops respected. Toledan steel was renowned in France and England, as well as in Italy. On his way to captivity in Madrid, Francis of France cried, seeing beardless boys with swords at their sides, "Oh! most happy Spain, that brings forth and brings up men already armed." The steel used by the _espaderos_ of Toledo came from the iron mines of Mondragon in the Basque provinces. Palomario explains its peculiar excellence by the virtues of the sand and water of the Tagus. When the metal was red-hot, it was covered with sand, and, the blade then formed, it was placed in a hollow of sixty centimetres, and red-hot, was plunged into a wooden tank full of Tagus water. The most celebrated _espadero_ of Toledo was _Guiliano el Moro_, a native of Granada, in the fifteenth century. He became converted after the surrender of Boabdil, and King Ferdinand being his sponsor, was also called Guiliano _el rey_. Cervantes mentions his mark, which was a little dog. Other great _espaderos_ were--Joannes de la Horta, Tomás de Ayala, Sagahun, Dionisio Corrientes, Miguel Cantera, whose motto was _opus laudat artificem_, Tomás Ghya, Hortensio de Aguerre and Menchaca Sebastian Hernandez. The decline of Toledan steel is traced to the introduction of French costume; and though attempts have been made to revive it, the old art, in all its unrivalled beauty, has forever vanished. Gone forever, too, all traces of the great Toledan palaces, except a wall, a doorway here and there, or maybe the degraded remains of a beautiful chamber or courtyard, or, as in the case of the house of the great family of the Toledos (to-day, the Dukes of Alba), just an impressive façade. But of the Villena palace nothing, of the Fuensalida nothing to give us to-day a definite notion of its former splendour. Nothing of the great houses of the Montemayors, the Ayalas, the Silvas, Maqueda, Cifuentes, Count Orgaz, and so many others who rivalled the mighty archbishops in power, and whose followers clashed steel so noisily once in these dim, deserted streets. Sadder still, beyond what remains of the Palacios de Galiana, in the king's garden, little of Moorish beauty, nothing of their sway but floating, vaporous impressions and cherished suggestions, never absent, though ever vague and full of the mystery and charm of the uncertain and the elusive. CHAPTER VI _The Cathedral_ The monument which dominates Toledo, and which is not only the most prominent feature in a town whose every feature is so marked and significant, so unlike all the travelled eye is most familiar with, but is the centre of its changes and vicissitudes, of its triumphs and humiliations, is the Cathedral. Writing of the high terrace on which it stands, M. Maurice Barrès says: "c'était toujours le même sublime qui jamais ne rassasie les âmes, car en même temps qu'elles s'en remplissent il les dilate à l'infini." Who is to seize and express with any adequacy or even coherence the first swift and stupefying impression of this superb edifice? There are many things in this world more beautiful--no one for instance would dream of speaking of it in the same breath as the Parthenon--but nothing more sumptuous; nothing in all the treasures of Spain to match its magnificence. It is simpler and more majestic than that of Burgos, and before heeding the instinct of examination, or noting its mass of detail, the first imperious command is to yield in charmed surrender to its spirit. We are silenced and held by the general effect long before we come to admire the exquisite sculpture of Berruguete and of Philip of Burgundy, and the splendours of chapels and treasury. And should time be short for detailed inspection, it is this general effect of immense naves, of a forest of columns and of jewelled windows that we carry away, feeling too small amidst such greatness of form and incomparable loveliness of lights for the mere expression of admiration. At sunset, should you have the fortune to be alone among its pillars and stained-glass windows, you will find nothing on earth to compare with the mysterious eloquence of its silence; you will feel it a place not for prayer but for a salutary conception of man's insignificance. Castillian genius has nowhere imprinted a haughtier effigy of its invincible pride and fanaticism, insusceptible to the humiliations of decay and defeat, impervious to the encroachments of progress and enlightenment. It is the vast monumental note of Spanish character and Spanish history. It tells the eternal tale of ecclesiastical domination and triumph, and is the fitting home of portraits of warlike cardinals and armoured bishops, of princes of the Church who wore the purple and ruled with the sword. It is a superb and majestic harmony of marvellous stone-work and painted glass. The foundation of this most gorgeous temple is attributed to Saint Eugenius, the first bishop of Toledo, and on the conversion of Recaredo from Arianism, was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, April 12th, 587. When the Moors took Toledo, the Cathedral was converted into a mosque, which it remained for nearly three centuries. Then when Alfonso VI. won back the town from the Moors, one of the conditions we know in the treaty for surrender was that the Cathedral should continue as a mosque, and remain in the hands of the conquered, upon which stipulation, solemnly ratified, the Moors gave up the Alcázar, the city gates and bridges. Alfonso intended that this condition should be fulfilled, but the queen and the French archbishop, sorely troubled by the monstrous continuance of heretical service in the consecrated temple of St Eugenius, decided to cast out the Saracen, which injustice furnishes us with a pretty evidence of Moorish magnanimity. Alfonso's was an exceedingly grim interpretation of the chivalrous sentiment, "I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more." However, the Moors gallantly tore up the treaty and resigned all right to the Cathedral. The least they might have expected from their enemies is a full and fine recognition of their generosity, first in pleading for those who had insulted them, and then in foregoing their own advantage in order to procure the pardon of their insulters. But no. The Moors, in this matter, are regarded as having simply done their duty. One would hesitate to credit their conquerors with a like behaviour in similar circumstances. The Alfaqui's statue in the Capilla Major is regarded as adequate thanks, and perhaps it is. In the thirteenth century, Ferdinand III. and the Archbishop Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada, decided to rebuild the Cathedral and efface all remembrance of Saracen occupation. Pedro Perez was chosen for the immense work, which he continued for forty-nine years, beginning in 1227. The names of his successors have not reached us. It took two and a half centuries to conclude, and as the building went on, naturally gathered into its entire expression more than one mood of Spanish history and art. One needs only to contrast the rudeness of the _Puerta de la Feria_, built in the thirteenth century, with the finish and grace of the _Puerta de los Leones_, one of the most beautiful specimens of Gothic architecture, the work of the fifteenth century. Egas, Fernandez and Juan Aleman wrought it, and in 1776 Salvatierra restored part of it. The temple stands upon eighty-eight pillars, each one composed of sixteen light columns, and seventy-two vaults above the five wide naves, forming a cross over the centre nave which is higher than the rest. The side aisles rise gradually to [Illustration: INTERIOR OF CATHEDRAL] the height of 160 feet, the height of the central nave. Its length is 404 feet, its width 204. The whole is lit up by 750 glorious stained windows, whose effect is best seized just before sunset. Broad patches of ruby, amethyst, emerald, topaz, and sapphire lie upon the pillars and flags, and above the light seems to strike through irridescent flashes of jewels. How fresh and full imagination must have been in those grand ages of art to have devised such permanent triumphs of colours, such witchery of hue upon such majesty of form, the greatness of the one tempered by the delightful loveliness of the other. The patient uplifted glance will at length be rewarded by learning to decipher from such a distance the legend of these matchless windows, which are wonderfully vivid scenes from the New Testament. A Spanish painter, who has devoted his life to the study of his beloved Toledo, tells me that when you penetrate up to these far-off heights, you will find the scenes in finish and detail and drawing as perfect as paintings, some of the German and Flemish school, some of the richer and suaver Italian. The principal artists were Dolfin, Alberto de Holanda, Maestro Christobal, Juan de Campos, Luis, Pedro Francès, and Vasco Troya. Dolfin's work, begun in 1418, was continued after his death by Nicolás de Vergara, assisted by his two sons. The principal façade on the west side is composed of three doors, diversely named _del Infierno_ or _de la Torre_; _del Perdon_, and _de Escribanos_ or _del Juicio_. The middle door is the Pardon, the largest and richest of the three. It forms a magnificent arch, covered with Gothic ornaments and figures, and is divided in two smaller arches by a column on which rests the figure of Christ, while above are twelve statues of the apostles. In the centre of the arch a fine bas-relief represents the Virgin in the act of bestowing the chasuble on St Ildefonso, who is kneeling at her feet. It is an imposing specimen of Renaissance work. Amador de los Rios complains that there is too much of the stiffness of Dürer in the studied attitudes, while Antonio Ponz remarks that the statues and the folds have that excellence and largeness of treatment so often lacking even in the best Renaissance work. The two other doors on either side are smaller and of equal size. They are formed of a single, undivided arch, delicately sculptured, rich in figures of angels and patriarchs in mediæval costume, which belong to a later date than the principal work. Seven steps lead down to the church, and above the arch of the _Torre_ is a painting of the Resurrection of some merit, and above the _Escribanos_ is a long inscription commemorating the taking of Granada by the Catholic sovereigns, Cardinal Mendoza being then archbishop of the Cathedral, and the expulsion of the Jews from the kingdoms of Castille, Aragon, and Sicily. Over the _Pardon_ is a splendid rose window, with glazed arcade beneath. The façade was restored, and not too well, by Durango, a Toledan artist, during the last century. The little square towers that separate the doors are chiselled like jewels, but the effect of the whole is perhaps effaced by the more insistent beauty of the great tower. The south door, _Los Leones_, is a particularly beautiful piece of Gothic work, of finished elegance and profusion of detail. Ponz describes the statues and ornaments as the most perfect of their kind. The portal forms a deep recess richly sculptured, full of delicate fancy in figure and leafage. The Assumption is by Salvatierra of the last century, inferior to the rest of the façade, and below it are two bas-reliefs with charming little figures representing scenes from the Old Testament. The six columns of the atrium, on which are seated six carved lions, give its name to the door. Each lion holds a shield. On the centre shields are repeated in bas-relief the eternal legend of Our Lady and St Ildefonso, while the four others show sculptural crosses and eagles. The bronze doors, attributed by Ponz to Berreguete, because they recall the work of his master, Michael Angelo, were wrought by Francisco Villalpando and Ruy Diaz del Corral in 1559, the carving having been done by the famous sculptor, Aleas Copin. Their great artistic work is sufficiently indicated by Ponz's error in attributing them to the magnificent genius of Berreguete. As a fact, many masters were engaged upon these bronze gates: Velasco, Troyas, Lebin, Cantala, the two Copins as well as Villalpando, and Diaz del Corral, the payment divided between all being 68,672 maravedis. It would seem that the supreme excellence of artistic achievement in those days was due to the modesty of remuneration, if we are to judge by the results of exorbitant payment to-day. In his accurate (if for the general reader perhaps somewhat technical) pages on the interior, Street says: "The original scheme of the church is only to be seen now in the choir and its aisles. These are arranged in three gradations of height--the choir being upwards of a hundred feet, the aisle round it about sixty feet, and the outer aisle about thirty-five feet in height. The outer wall of the aisle is pierced with arches for the small chapels between the buttresses. The intermediate aisle has in its outer wall a triforium, formed by an arcade of cusped arches, and above this quite close to the point of the vault, a rose window in each bay. It is in this triforium that the first evidence of any knowledge on the part of the architect of Moorish architecture strikes the eye. The cusping of the arcade is not enclosed within an arch, and takes a distinctly horse-shoe outline, the lowest cusp near to the cap spreading inwards at the base. Now it would be impossible to imagine any circumstances which could afford better evidence of the foreign origin of the first design than this slight concession to the customs of the place in a slightly later portion of the works. An architect who came from France, bent on designing nothing but a French church, would be very likely, after a few years' residence in Toledo, somewhat to change in his views, and to attempt something in which the Moorish work, which he was in the habit of seeing, would have its influence. The detail of this triforium is, notwithstanding, all pure and good. The foliage of the capitals is partly conventional, and in part a stiff imitation of natural foliage, somewhat after the fashion of the work in the Chapter House at Southwell; the abaci are all square; there is a profusion of nail-head used in the labels; and well-carved heads are placed in each of the spandrels of the arcade. The circular windows above the triforium are filled in with cusping of various patterns. The main arches of the innermost arcade (between the choir and its aisle) are of course much higher than the others. The space above them is occupied by an arcaded triforium reaching to the springing of the main vault. This arcade consists of a series of trefoil-headed arches on detached shafts, with sculptured figures, more than life-size, standing in each division; in the spandrels above the arches are heads looking out from moulded circular openings, and above these again, small pointed arches are pierced, which have labels enriched with the nail-head ornament. The effect of the whole of this upper part of the design is unlike that of northern work, though the detail is all pure and good. The clerestory occupies the height of the vault and consists of a row of lancets (there are five in the widest bay, and three in each of the five bays of the apse) rising gradually to the centre, with a small circular opening above them. The vaulting-ribs in the central division of the apse are chevroned and increased in number, this being the only portion of the early work in which any, beyond transverse and diagonal ribs, are introduced. There is a weakness and want of purpose about the treatment of this highest portion of the wall that seems to make it probable that the work, when it reached this height, had passed out of the hands of the original architect. In the nave the original design (if it was ever completed) has been altered. There is now no trace of the original clerestory and triforium which are still seen in the choir, and in their place the outer aisle has fourteenth century windows of six lights with geometrical tracery, and the clerestory of the nave and transepts great windows, also of six lights, with very elaborate traceries. They have transomes (which in some degree preserve the recollection of the old structural divisions) at the level of the springing of the groining. The groining throughout the greater part of the church seems to be of the original thirteenth century work, with ribs finely moulded, and vaulting cells slightly domical in section. The capitals of the columns are all set in the direction of the arches and ribs they carry, and their abaci and bases are all square in plan." Street is of the opinion, based upon the singular purity of this vigorous specimen of Gothic of the thirteenth century, that the architect must have been French, or at least a Spaniard who had lived for years in France, and studied the best French churches. The architect, we learn, was Pedro Perez, whose name we gather from the Latin epitaph: _Aqui: jacet: Petrus Petri: magister_ _Eclesia: Sete: Marie: Toletani: fama:_ _Per exemplum: pro more_: huic: bona: _Crescit: qui presens: templem: construxit:_ _Et hic quies cit: quod: quia: tan: mire:_ _Fecit_: vili: sentiat: ire: ante: Dei: _Vultum: pro: quo: nil: restat: inultum:_ _Et sibi: sis: merce: qui solus: cuncta:_ _Coherce: obiit: X dias de Novembris:_ _Era: de m: et CCCXXVIII._ (_A.D. 1290_). Street suggests that Petrus Petro may more probably have meant the French Pierre, son of Pierre, than the Spanish translation of Pedro Perez, but putting one uncertainty against another, the Toledans are perfectly right to hold out for their dubious compatriot, Pedro Perez. [Illustration: NORTH TRANSEPT DOOR OF CATHEDRAL] In spite of the enormous height of the Cathedral, the spectator is not at first impressed with this fact, owing to the immensity of its dimensions and the vastness of the columns that support the vaults. But the impression of spaciousness is, on the contrary, insistent, and this by the beautiful simplicity and classical uniformity of the whole. When you have recovered the first stupendous shock of admiration, you will wonder where to begin in your exploration. If you enter by the north door, which is the first you will meet coming from the Zocodover, you will at once be confronted with the wonderfully wrought screen of the Coro. Inside and out this choir is rich in interest. First there is the railed entrance to examine. Before the Napoleonic war, this railing, as well as the _Reja_ of the Capilla Major, opposite, was silver-plated and heavily gilt, but at the time of the French invasion, it was designed to save it from ruthless hands by concealing its value under an iron coating. The inventor of this stain succeeded so well that never since has anyone been able to clean the railings, which now only show here and there a gleam of the covered plate. Domingo de Céspedes, aided by Fernando Bravo, designed this handsome work. Nothing finer than the ornamentation could be imagined. The arms of Cardinal Siliceo and those of Diego Lopez de Ayala, one of the great Toledan families of the Middle Ages, are worked into the design, along with the inscriptions: _Pro cul esto prophani_ and _Psale et psile_. To attempt anything like a detailed description of so much elaborate work as the impressive screen round the choir, or the interior multiplied creations of Berruguete and Philip of Burgundy, of Vergara and Rodrigo, would demand an entire book upon the Cathedral alone. The sculptures of the screen are most varied and beautiful, and repay careful study. The subjects are separated by light arches and supported on jasper columns. Above are fifty-eight reliefs of biblical scenes, and the whole forms an admirable combination of decorative richness and delicacy, unfortunately spoiled by later and incongruous additions and improvements. Of the famous choir seats everybody has heard. The thirty-five upper seats on the gospel side are the work of Philip of Burgundy, the seats on the epistle side are Berruguete's work. It is a matter of taste which of the two is the better. Some foreign critics prefer Vigarny's sculpture as more delicate and more finished; while all Spaniards give their preference to Berruguete, one of the national idols, and delight in his more exuberant genius. Writing of the three ranks of stalls of this truly marvellous choir, Théophile Gautier says: "l'art Gothique, sur les confins de la Renaissance, n'a rien produit de plus parfait ni de mieux dessiné." Antonio Ponz in the last century wrote of it: "The sculpture of the choir has been and always will be the great admiration of the intelligent and those who understand this noble art, as much for the quantities of figures and adornments, which seem innumerable, as for the elegance, taste, and greatness of the style with which Alonzo Berruguete and Philip of Burgundy have executed them." In his _Toledo Pintoresca_, Amador de los Rios thus begins his description of the stalls: "Portent of Spanish art, in which two great geniuses of our golden century competed, the victory to our own times, remaining undecided; and astounded the judges who have endeavoured to give their opinion on this matter." The stalls are of two ranks, upper and lower, both of different periods, fifty years lying between the work of each rank. The upper stalls are unquestionably more beautiful and of a purer style. The rich and splendid influence of Italian art is visible in all Berruguete's work, who himself was a disciple of Michael Angelo. He has something of the large and virile touch of his master, something of his nervous strength, of his intensity. But he lacks the exquisite grace and soft, subtle finish of Philip Vigarny. So that in the eternal rivalry of these great artists, hand-in-hand, as it were before posterity, with the unsolved question [Illustration: INTERIOR OF CATHEDRAL CORO FROM S. AISLE] of superiority upon their combined production of the best wood sculpture of Spain, it will always be in the spectators' choice a matter of temperament and tendency. The more delicate art of Vigarny will appeal to one, while another will unhesitatingly pronounce for the sweep and force of Berruguete's touch. The reliefs represent scenes from the Old and New Testament, and the single statues are prophets and saints. The stalls are of walnut, separated by jasper and alabaster pillars. In the middle is the arch-episcopal throne. The lower portion is formed of seventy-one arches, supported by seventy-two columns of red jasper, with white marble capitals; within each arch is a vault of red jasper with gilt decorations. In the panels above are sixty-eight superbly sculptured figures. The lower stalls are fifty years earlier and less beautiful work. They were wrought under the direction of Maese Rodrígo in the time of Cardinal Mendoza. They are composed of fifty stalls, with three stairs, two of which are used by the canons and the third only by the archbishop, the dean of the chapter, and the high priest. The reliefs are none the less remarkable and interesting because of their inferiority to those of the upper stalls. They tell with delightful and seizing brevity the romantic, if deplorable, tale of the Conquest of Granada, from the taking of Alhama by Rodrigo Ponce de Leon to the surrender of the Moorish citadel. They belong to a less finished school; reveal an imagination more simple and limited, with a certain naïve stiffness and monotony of line that provoke contrast with the finer work above. Battles, assaults, armed knights, Moors, horses, fortresses and fanciful introductions of inappropriate animals are repeated in each relief. Street prefers them to Berruguete's work, which he abhors, but in this he is alone. It is a prejudice with him. The reading-desks are most lovely, the work of the two Vergaras, father and son, who finished them in 1570. The ornamented friezes of gilt bronze are things to marvel at. Each desk possesses three bas-relief exquisitely wrought. On the epistle side are the stories of David and Saul, the Virgin bestowing the chasuble on St Ildefonso, and the Seven Seals and Lake of Fire of the Apocalypse; on the Gospel side, St Ildefonso, the Holy Ark carried by the priests behind David, and other figures dancing and playing various instruments, and the crossing of the Red Sea. There is not anything among the extraordinary splendours of this Cathedral more perfect and remarkable than these two masterpieces of the Vergaras. The great eagle on its pinnacled pedestal is truly a magnificent work. The Gothic pedestal was wrought in 1425, and the eagle and desk in 1646 by Vicente Salinas. When you leave the Cora, you naturally cross the space in front to the Capilla Major. Portion of this chapel was originally the _capilla de los reyes viejos_, and the rest was added by the great Cardinal, Cisneros. The railing, one of the best specimens of Spanish wrought iron, is the work of Francisco Villalpando. Gorgeous is the adjective that best describes it. Exquisite chiselling, capricious and varied designs, gilt and plated portions here and there showing out from the more sombre whole, make this _grilla_ one of the striking objects among massed treasures. To Villalpando also are due the rich gilt pulpits beside it, made from the bronze tomb the Constable of Castille, Alvazo de Luna, had fashioned for himself and his wife before his death. In a less sumptuous setting, these pulpits would excite enthusiastic admiration, but the whole here is so great that it takes days for the blunted senses to realise the full value of details. The reliefs are admirable, and give a [Illustration: DETAIL OF REJA, CATHEDRAL, TOLEDO] brilliant note to the resplendent face of the chapel. All inside maintains the same insistent look of artistic wealth. The marble altar shines like a gigantic agathe, the highly-wrought tabernacle, the bronze candlesticks, the jasper and the marvellous _retablo_ are, to my poor thinking, excessive claims upon attention. So many masters co-operated in the production of all this accumulated art that the effect of excess is not surprising: Philip and John of Burgundy, Maestre Petit Jean, Egas, Pedro Gumiel, Copin of Holland, Sebastian de Almonacid, all sculptors and artists of renown; Francisco of Antwerp and Fernando del Rincòn, famous painters and gilders. The details are innumerable, and elsewhere would merit separate and full attention. The scenes are mostly taken from the New Testament, terminating with a colossal Calvary. The fine tombs on either side are the work of Copin of Holland (1507), and the gilding and painting were done by Juan de Arevalo. They were erected by order of Cisneros for the kings buried in the old chapel. They are highly decorated and imposing monuments, worthy of the great man who commanded them and of the great artists who wrought them under his inspiration, worthy of century and temple that created and shelter them. Classical elegance and Gothic fancy, exuberant imagination and austere repose, are the complex qualities of these superb tombs. There are two figures among those of the lateral pillars that divide the vaults it is customary to bestow extra attention upon: the Alfaqui, who went out to meet Alfonso VI. on his furious return to Toledo to burn his wife and the French archbishop, to intercede on behalf of those who had so grievously injured his people, and who, in order to obtain their pardon, resigned Moorish rights to the Cathedral; and the _Pastor de las Navas_, a legendary shepherd who is supposed to have indicated to Alfonso VIII. the way of winning the battle of Navas de Tolosa. The sculpture is coarse and heavy, and indicates an earlier period than the rest of the work, Alfonso himself supposed to have been the designer of his shepherd assistant in war. The Cardinal of Spain, as Mendoza was called, won the distinction of a place in the royal chapel by order of Isabel, his friend and sovereign. To make room for his tomb, she had the wall between the two pillars near it knocked down. Ponz calls this tomb a _maquina suntuosa_, but where there is so much to admire, it may be passed by with merely a nod. [Illustration: DETAIL, TOMB OF KING, GOSPEL SIDE OF HIGH ALTAR, CATHEDRAL, TOLEDO] [Illustration: TOMB OF CARDINAL MENDOZA] Not so the too famous and too horrible _Trasparente_ behind the High Altar. What such a thing can possibly mean surpasses the average understanding. In the midst of all that one must venerate, in the home of majesty and loveliness, where beauty in stone and wood and colour takes its supreme form and hues, what effect but that of artistic scandal can such a monstrous creation have? One stares, one wonders, one could even weep for such inexplicable desecration, but one remains mystified and disheartened. Ponz a century ago wrote: "It is marble, an enormous affair in which it would have been better to have forever in the bowels of the hills of Carrara than to have brought it here to be a real blot in the Cathedral." This celebrated atrocity is the work of Narciso Tomé, a native of Toledo, who, if he were useful for nothing else to posterity, offers an exceptional opportunity of measuring the frightful depths into which the dignity of Spanish art was plunged in the beginning of the last century. The degraded art of Churriguera may be bad enough elsewhere; here only does it stand out a gilt, magnificent marble nightmare, which cannot even be criticised, so awed is imagination by an ugliness that defies classification and repels reason. The man who paid 200,000 ducats for this blot upon a perfect temple, were he pope or bishop, merited at least a strait-waistcoat. Instead, he and the artist, and the thing itself, evoked, on its conclusion, national triumph and rejoicings, processions, illuminations, fire-works and bull-fights. Consistency is not a virtue we have a right to expect from races any more than from persons, so the massacre of horses and the idle torture of bulls, the encouragement of the brute instinct of cruelty, the destruction of which is admittedly the object of the mild and tolerant religion of Christ, may be regarded as nothing inordinately outrageous in ecclesiastical feastings. A modern Spanish critic is proud to own that for his part "he would not touch a hair of the smallest statue of this sumptuous fabrication," and regards it as an interesting page in the history of Spanish architecture. There are of course curious natures who find interest in corruption and a certain majesty in madness. To these Churrigueresque masterpieces may be left, and with so many stupendous demands upon our admiration as the Cathedral holds, such a flaunting provocation of the contrary feeling may by the wise and grateful be accepted as a pause, a rest in interjectional contentment. In the dim subterranean chapel of the sepulchre, there are sculptures and paintings worthy of inspection if there were light enough to see them by. One can see, however, that the sculptural group representing the burial of Christ by Copin of Holland is remarkable, but the paintings remain vague and blurred in the partially illuminated obscurity. But however interesting each of the chapels may be, it is the general view that remains the loveliest thing about the Cathedral. Before you enter the space between the Coro and the Capilla Major, on looking up to the circular pierced arches between the curving line of columns, you will perceive a clear and charming evidence of Moorish influence in the architecture. The delicate pillars and horse-shoe arcade are familiar and welcome, and may again be seen running across the outer aisles. Nothing more graceful could be imagined than this light foreign touch in the sombre austerity of Gothic art. Again you are reminded of the Moors by a rich arch covered with lace-work in the chapel of Santa Lucia, mudejar rather than wholly Moorish, which looks quite oriental in front of the Renaissance arch of the other side of the chapel. It is such a variety in beauty that lends perpetual freshness to this monumental glory of Toledo. It has a face for every tone of reverie and musing. The light is always softly brilliant, and shadow not dense but suggestive; the very silence has the penetrative quality of mysticism, so that already on your second visit you will have ceased to feel a mere tourist, so intimate and instantaneous is its possession of you. Each day I have dwelt in the old imperial city, I have unconsciously wended my way to its doors. No matter what direction I started to take, it almost became a necessity to begin or end my daily wanderings by a pause in this spiritualised immensity of stone. I have never found its wonderful charm diminished by familiarity; on the contrary, the coloured rays of light from above, striking upon the brown shade of stone, seem ever more and more witching; the delicate tones of shadow more and more mysterious, and the unrivalled grandeur of long forested perspectives of aisles and of spacious naves, with the multiplicity of arches and windows, ever a greater testimony of Toledo's departed glory. Space forbids anything like a detailed account of the chapels and cloisters of the Cathedral. These latter are not to be compared with most of the other Spanish cloisters,--with, for instance, those of Segovia, of Santiago, of Burgos or Oviedo. There is the inevitable felicitous contrast of foliage and columned arch, and here, certainly, the note is more joyous than elsewhere, with the deep yellow light striking radiantly upon this large, airy square of sun-shot leafage open to the heavens. The cloisters were built by Cardinal Tenorio, and Blas Ortiz, a contemporary Toledan of Philip II. describes them in his beautiful caligraphy, preserved in the _Biblioteca Provinciale_, as "sumptuous." This is a favourite adjective with the Spaniards who write about Toledo. It saves a multiplicity of explanations. The frescoes on the walls, painted by Bayeu after the manner of Vanloo, represent scenes from the life of St Eugenius and the famous legend of the _Niño perdido_. They are decorative but not interesting, and Gautier pronounces them out of keeping with the austere elegance of the architecture. It must be earlier paintings, since effaced, that Blas Ortiz describes as _perfectissime_. The fine door of the Presentation, a good specimen of _plateresca_ work, was wrought by Pedro Castañeda, Juan Vasquez, Toribio Rodriguez, Juan Manzano, and Andréz Hernandez. The design and the reliefs are well worth careful examination. The _portada de Santa Catalina_ commands attention. It is excessively decorated, and bears the arms of Spain and of the Tenorios; one of the finest details of the façade is the statue of St Catherine holding in one hand the wheel and in the other the sword, emblems of her martyrdom. Historical value is attached to Bayeu's frescoe representing the reception at Toledo of the bones of St Eugenius, 1565. Philip II. and his son are there, as well as the archdukes Rudolph and Ernest, and there is a view of the Puerta Visagra through which the procession entered. Other frescoes treat of the Moorish saint Casilda, and on the north side is the chapel of St Blaise, built also by Tenorio as his coat of arms indicates. On a pedestal within a railing is a fragment found near St John of the Penetencia testifying to the date of the consecration of the Cathedral. Near the cloister entrance is the chapel of St John or the Canons, as mass can only be said here by the chapter. The old Tower chapel here used to be called the _Quo Vadis_, and was dedicated to St Peter. Cardinal Tavera, designing it for his sepulchre, consecrated it to St John. The fine _artesonado_ ceiling is picked out in gold and black, with carved flowers and figures; the altars are richly wrought and painted. Antonio Ponz in the last century greatly praises Luiz Velasco's three pictures here. On the opposite side of the great gates is the Mozarabe chapel, set apart by Cisneros for the famous Gothic rite; the porch is Gothic; the doors of good renaissance style, were wrought in 1524 by Juan Frances; and the frescoes, painted by John of Burgundy, representing the conquest of Oran and triumph of the founder have no great value. There is a retablo of St Francis placed by Dr Francisco of Pisa, the historian of Toledo, who is buried outside. The chief interest of the Mozarabe chapel is centred in its quaint old ritual which may be heard here every morning at 9 A.M., and will be found extremely puzzling to follow. The canons behind, in a sombre, flat monotone, chant responses to the officiating priest at the altar. The sound combines the enervating effect of the hum of wings, whirr of looms, wooden thud of pedals, the boom and rush of immense wings circling round and round. After the first stupefaction, I have never heard anything more calculated to produce headache, nervous irritation, or the contrary soporific effect. In summer it must be terrible. In an old MS. of the Biblioteca in the last century there is a grave complaint made that the Gothic Mozarabe rite had already fallen from its beautiful solemnity, and that it was to be deplored that it should now be performed with such little decency and so little in accord with the founder's idea. The writer naïvely hopes that the advent of Carlos III., which promised such general reform, would lift up again a degraded ritual and "that it would be placed in the rank of decency and splendour that a vestige so singular and worthy of appreciation deserves." A hope not realised if I may judge from my assistance at the service. There was neither quaintness nor piety that I could see, but the canons looked and gabbled as if their thoughts were several miles away, staring roundly at the foreigners, and exchanging smiles as they altered their places. There are many minor chapels and offices one must overlook in a general description. The wood-work of the _Sala capitular_ and the _Anté sala_ was wrought by Copin of Holland and Antonio Gutierrez. The ceiling of the _Anté sala_ is most charming, a brilliant moresque style, admirably painted and of quite regal magnificence, one of the best specimens of artesonada. The long carved [Illustration: CAPITULAR DOOR IN TOLEDO CATHEDRAL] cupboards on either side are Copin's and Durango's work. Copin's especially is delightful, simple, dignified, not over elaborated. Both are divided in panels which are covered with reliefs, exquisitely designed. Vases, heads, figures, masks, and every kind of mediaeval fancy abound. A Moorish doorway executed by Bonéfacio in 1510, leads into the _Sala capitular_, one of the loveliest of Spain. The doors are of a rich renaissance, full of busts, leafage, and gilt reliefs. The painted arms of Cisneros and of Lopez de Ayala are worked into the garlands above, and the archiepiscopal choir below is another good specimen of Copin of Holland, who did so much for this cathedral. Round the walls are the portraits of the archbishops, beginning with St Eugenius. The old series ends with Cisneros, and the second begins with William of Croy. Most of the recent portraits are wretched daubs. There are paintings here by John of Burgundy on a level with those of the Mozarabe chapel, while the effect of the Giordano ceiling is striking. The light seems to fall in perpendicular rays. In the matter of paintings the Cathedral would be poor enough but for a Titian and the splendid picture of El Greco in the sacristy. When you have gazed at that virile, majestic figure of Christ, felt the charm of its lofty expression, of its wonderful suggestion of aloofness and fatality, marvelled at the colouring, the splendid boldness of design and grouping, the vigour and naturalness of the figure of the first plan bent forward to bore a hole in the cross at his feet previous to inserting the nails, you may ask yourself in dismay what gave rise to the legend of El Greco's madness. Stay a moment. This is unfortunately not the last word of El Greco. This grave and lovely _Expolio de Jesus_, hardly second to that other astounding masterpiece, "The burial of Count Orgaz" in Santo Tomé, has its lamentable sequel in the St John the Baptist of the _Hospital de Afuera_, which lets you into the secret. Whether or no El Greco ever went mad we have no means now of knowing, though he undoubtedly gives the impression in the St John of genius labouring under some wild and extraordinary influence. But the Expolio is as perfect and sane a masterpiece as artist ever produced. All the tones are cold and subdued, as if a brilliant imagination purposely steadied and held itself in check to realise the highest and simplest expression of repose. The agony is past, transient revolt is over, and here stands the Son of Man in the hands of his ruthless enemies, insusceptible to personal indignity, greater than death, the supreme ideal of resignation, of its majesty rather than its sweetness. No wonder the lovers of El Greco regard him as the precursor of Velasquez, and will have it that Velasquez studied him as master, and from him learned the secret of his own immortal dignity and cold majestic grace. When you look long at this great picture, you wonder how an artist like Théophile Gautier came to write the flippant nonsense he did about El Greco. Even if the legend of the painter's madness were true, it is certainly not apparent in this canvas. What is apparent is a complete want, felt everywhere in El Greco's work, of sensibility of the more subtle and penetrative kind, an inaptitude that made the limitation of his art to conceive or paint emotion on a woman's face. The three Maries are present, so close as to touch the robe of Jesus. Well, the three faces express nothing stronger in feeling than curiosity, in the case of the middle figure more slightly depressed by a vague instinct of passive grief; in the case of the younger women such a curiosity as a passing incident might excite, with neither a touch of terror nor abhorrence much less that of martyred love. The dark and lovely head behind of the third woman, said to be the painter's daughter, with the superb hand and arm, is that of a young Toledan girl placidly watching some street procession and looking for the appearance of her lover. The smile is not far from the shadowed eyes and sweet, grave mouth, and the whole suggests soft, young romance. A rash youth, passing at that moment, if his eyes fell first upon her in the tragic scene, would greet her with an eloquent smile, and probably fling her a kiss through the air, but he would never suppose she was looking on at barbarous men as they bored holes in a cross and tore the garments from the form of her Lord and Saviour about to be crucified. The same curious indifference to appropriate form and expression is shown in his St John the Evangelist. The last of the row of apostles on the right of the sacristy, a pallid, lean young man enveloped in the peculiar tints of dull green and faded pink, one soon learns to recognise as El Greco's hues of predilection, which are more than once reproduced elsewhere in the figures of St Joseph, the infant Jesus and Mary. This is not the dreamy and loving youth of the New Testament, full of tenderness and mystical reverie. The face is delicately hard, long, pointed and intellectual, its cold ardour clouded with a suggestion of impatience and contempt. Opposite the _Trasparente_ is the chapel of San Ildephonso. Painted on a vault outside is an armed cavalier bearing a standard in one hand and an emblazoned shield in the other. This is the famous Estevan Illan, descended as we have seen from Don Pedro Paleologus, of imperial Greek origin, and founder of the powerful family of the Toledos, since the Dukes of Alba. The general effect of this chapel is costly rather than beautiful. It is impossible not to be oppressed by the sensation of display, not that it is in the least gaudy; it is too solidly wealthy and artistic in its elaboration for that. The mouldings are rich, the decorations are rich, and rich beyond calculation are the tombs. Grander and less elaborate is the really great chapel of Santiago, better known perhaps as the Constable's Chapel. This was built by Alvaro de Luna as a vast mausoleum for himself and his wife. It is astonishingly bright when you remember its dimensions and its imposing height; of sober taste notwithstanding its flowered ogival style, subdued, while what the Spaniards delight to call everything here, "sumptuous." The word indeed may not be grudged in this instance, where it is sonorous and appropriate. To do honour to this edifice, Don Alvaro de Luna commanded truly miraculous tombs for himself and his wife, on which lay their full-length figures in gilt-bronze, so fashioned that whenever mass was recited, these life-sized figures rose from their recumbent attitudes, and knelt during the service. On its conclusion, they quietly lay down again. Such tombstones, had they remained, would speedily have turned into a form of local entertainment for the townsfolk. But the great Constable fell into his sovereign's disgrace, he poor, sorry, feeble king, hounded into the basest ingratitude by the clamouring populace and the Constable's jealous foes. So in the hour of his fall, the infante, Don Enrique of Aragon, had the wonderful tombs with the gilt moving statues, broken up, on which the Constable sarcastically addressed him in verse: "Si flota vos combatió En verdad, señor infante Mi bulto non vos prendió Cuando fuistes mareante; Porque ficiesedes nada A una semblante figura, Que estaba en mi sepultura Para mi fui ordenada." [Illustration: TOMBS OF COUNT ALVARO DE LUNA AND WIFE, THE CATHEDRAL, TOLEDO] The tombs that have replaced these were ordered by the Constable's daughter, and erected, with Queen Isabel's permission, in 1489, to the memory of a king's great servant and friend scandalously abandoned by his master. For this Isabel had nearly all the virtues, barring, alas! religious tolerance. She could be trusted to prove true to her own friends, and not meanly condone betrayal of a subject in a fellow-sovereign. But the Constable has fared all the better because of the Infante's petty spite. I doubt if we should have been much impressed--except as children are by dolls that squeak and walk, or as the child in most of us is delighted with every kind of mechanical spring, from the wheels of watches to cuckoo clocks and German town-clocks, that send dear, quaint little men and women in and out with the day's revolution--by these gilt tombs, and they serve a wiser and nobler purpose as the exquisitely-wrought pulpits of Villalpando, outside the _reja_ of the Capilla Major. Now Don Alvaro and Doña Juana repose in sculptured marble between life-size kneeling figures of singular impressiveness. Nothing could be grander and more massive than the simple effect of both tombs. There are more beautiful ones, even in Spain--the splendid Italian tomb of Cisneros at Alcala de Henares, tombs in the Cathedral and Cartuja of Burgos, the grand and lovely tomb of Tavera, Berruguete's last work, in the _Hospital de Afuera_--but, nevertheless, these great sculptures of an obscure artist, Pablo Ortiz, are worthy of the crowned and castellated mausoleum built for them. The reliefs are gracious, the treatment fluent, large and sober. The noble statues are unfortunately much mutilated, but the flow of folds, the finish and delicacy of detail, are quite Italian. In the retablo are the painted portraits of Don Alvaro and Doña Juana, painted by Juan of Segovia, and on either side of the altar, under canopied tombs, lie other figures. The _artesonado_ ceiling of the Chapel of the New Kings is similar to that of St John the Baptist. The Gothic retablo is one of the best of the Cathedral. A passage leads to it, and the interior is extremely gilt and ornate. The sovereigns are buried on either side of the chapter, the first being Henry of Trastamare, the founder of the chapel. Rich as it is in gilding, wrought-iron, marble and paintings, it looks small and unimposing after the great chapel of St Jago. Mass is celebrated here every morning at nine. An official in ragged and embroidered finery, at the end of the chapter, stands, holding the crowned and jewelled mace with the arms of Spain. There is small space to dwell upon the incredible value of the church treasures, only shown at stated periods. Seven canons open the seven doors, each with a separate key. The hour for showing these matchless splendours is 3 P.M., a bad one on account of the light, and the miserable candle the sacristan carries is of small use. Here will you see pearl and precious stones, embroidered mantles, such jewels and gold and silver brocade as surely the eye of man never elsewhere beheld--the rarest of wrought cloaks and robes and laces--all royal presents, or the gifts of cardinals to the Virgin of the Sagrario. The Custodia is, for sheer magnificence, a thing to gape at. It is the work, rather the monument, of a German silver-smith, Henry of Arfe, and his son and grandson. The guide-book describes it as of an unheard-of wealth in jewels, gold work and chiselling. To attempt its description would involve me in another chapter on the Cathedral. Perhaps the most precious thing of all among so many treasures is the sad and mystical wood statue of St Francis of Assisi, by Alonso Cano, some say, by his pupil, Pedro de Mena, later critics aver. Unfortunately, it is vilely placed in a corner, and as well, just in the middle of the face, the glass cover is broken, so that it is difficult to obtain a real view of the head without some portion of the features distorted. The object of the devotion of the Chapel of the Treasury is a statue of the Virgin, which Our Lady is said to have kissed on her descent from heaven to bestow the chasuble on St Ildefonso. Hence the astounding mantle embroidered by Felipe Corral, made of gold, pearls, rubies, sapphires and emeralds. Other notable treasures are the charming specimens of silver repoussé--one, the Rape of the Sabines, so beautifully wrought as for years to have been attributed to Benvenuto Cellini. To-day, the Flemish artist, Mathias Méline, is recognised as the creator. It was the gift to the church of Cardinal Lorenzana. The big silver figures on four globes, with belts and sandals all gleaming with jewels, belong to the time of Felipe II. They command attention, even in all this magnificence of precious metal, precious stones, silk, lace and art; but I do not know who made these statues that represent the four parts of the world. Two hundred and fifty ounces of seed pearls, 85,000 pearls, as immense a number of diamonds, rubies and amethysts, were expended alone on the Virgin's celebrated mantle. As for the reliquaries of gold, silver and rock-crystal, the church plate, the incensors, only an auctioneer's list could do them justice. One hails them marvels of their kind, and passes by. In staring, with an abashed modern gaze, unfamiliar with such sights, at Arfe's masterpiece, the Custodio, that weighs its weight in precious metal over 10,900 ounces, note the gold cross on the top, said to have been wrought of the first piece of gold brought from America by Columbus, and was raised by Mendoza over the surrendered walls of the Alhambra in the same year.[18] Historic interest is still more attached to the modest sword shown as that of Alphonso VI., worn by this monarch on his triumphal entry into Toledo, and to the original letter in Latin of St Louis of France to the chapter of Toledo, on sending some sacred relics for the church. It runs: "Luys, by the grace of God, King of the French, to his beloved in Christ, the canons and all the clergy and church of Toledo, salutations and love. Desiring to adorn your church with a precious gift, by the hand of our beloved John, the venerable archbishop of Toledo, and at his prayer, we send to you some precious parts of our venerable and excellent sanctuaries that we had from the treasure of the Empire of Constantinople as follows: some wood of our Lord's cross, a thorn of our Lord's holy crown, some of the glorious Virgin's milk, some of our Lord's crimson garment, worn by Him; of the napkin He wound round Him when He washed His disciples' feet, of the sheet in which His body was wrapped in the sepulchre, and some of the Saviour's swaddling clothes. We beg and pray of your friendship in the Lord to accept and guard these sacred relics, and in your masses and offices to keep us in benign memory. Given at Etampes, the year of our Lord, 1248, month of May." This document is stamped with a golden seal. The _Ochavo_ is like everything here, an impressive chamber, the home of vast treasure. It is a monument of bronze and marble, containing massive silver coffins wonderfully wrought for the bones of St Leocadia and St Eugenius, statues of silver and ivory, and priceless reliquaries. Behind are guarded the church vestments. Nowhere are such embroideries and brocades to be seen. The hundred altar-pieces are works of art to set the mouth of the collector awatering. The older they are the more lovely, and beside the early Gothic brocade-embroidery, the finest effort of the last century seems poor and vulgar, though seen apart would cause the beholder to exclaim at its loveliness. Whence did these rude Goths obtain their secret of such exquisite work? and how has it died from amongst us? Were the sacristan willing, and human nature capable of such a prolonged effort of admiration, one might spend days among these gold and silver embroidered brocades, and complacently dream of impossible times. But when the sacristan has shown you a dozen chasubles and a dozen altar-pieces, he thinks it quite enough--and so do you, wearied from excess of strain upon admiration and ravenous envy. The beautiful and massive tower which lends majesty to an exterior not nearly so impressive as the interior of the Cathedral, was begun by Rodrigo Alfonso in 1380, but the work went on very slowly until the Archbishop Contreras put it into the hands of the architect, Alvar Gomez, who finished it (1440). There have been changes since, especially in 1660, when the capital was burnt and rebuilt. It is worth while to ascend the interminable stairs to the belfry, not to marvel at the largest bell, I believe, of the world, whose terrible note reaches as far as Madrid, but to revel in the view. You seem to look down upon the earth from Alpine heights. Below, through incredible depths of space, flows the Tagus, with its broad horse-shoe curve that makes almost an island of the town, and with charming little breaks in joyous verdure and soft little dashes of blue shade and white mist, the sombre and austere hills of Toledo make an upper and more violent rampart against the world beyond. Such is the sense of imprisonment here, that the eye instinctively seeks, as a chance of escape, the long white way of Madrid. It is good to breathe a moment in so exalted an atmosphere, to behold so vast and wonderful a scene, in which all remembrance of human miseries vanishes, and our very joys drop into relative significance. Nature has nowhere else attained a note of beauty harsher, more intense, more indifferently sublime. Elsewhere you feel that an effort has been made to captivate you, a deliberate combination of effects to win your admiration. Not so here. The Moors never succeeded, during their long sovereignty, in stamping the place with their voluptuous charm, as they did in Granada, Cordova, and Valencia. They left it as they found it, the stern home of revolt, the nest of mailed warriors and hardy artisans, so hard and quarrelsome that not even their loves furnish us with a soft legend, nor their literature a witching profile, or any hint of seductive grace in their womanhood. [Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL TOWER] CHAPTER VII _Domenico Theotocopulos_ El Greco There is but one great painter permanently and almost exclusively associated with Toledo, _El Greco_. All the notable pictures of the town are his, and so vast is his work here, that the Toledan churches possess at least fifty pictures of his, a dozen of which are nothing less than masterpieces, and the rest the work of a master in weaker and more erratic moments. Masters are so rare in the history of this world that one would gladly know something of this tardily recognised great one; learn the secret of his preposterous defects in the second stage of his development, and the no less enigmatic secret of his occasional reach to supreme perfection. How came the man who could paint the glorious under picture of the Burial of Count Orgaz (see illustration), to draw and paint the inconceivable picture of St John the Baptist in the _hospital de Afuera_? How, in fact, rose the absurd legend of his madness, since no details of the man's life has reached us on which to base such an idea? Théophile Gautier, with lamentable flippancy, gives echo in France to the ill-natured supposition of Palomino, the least trustworthy of guides. Nearly every fact given by Palomino concerning _El Greco_ is false. He states the painter's age, though no mortal being, contemporary of _El Greco_, or researcher of our own times, has the faintest ground for any such statement. The registrar of his death, which a Spanish painter, an impassioned student of all that concerns _El Greco_, has seen, proves that the artist's age was uncertain, since nobody about him knew the date of his birth. Furthermore, Palomino tells us triumphantly that _El Greco_ was buried in the parish of San Bartolomé, "and instead of a slab they placed a railing over his grave to indicate that nobody else should be buried there." The church fell down years afterwards, he assures us, and the place of _El Greco's_ burial was no longer known. This is all mere supposition, just as Palomino's statement of _El Greco's_ age, seventy-seven, and more innocent in the way of loose statements than his information that Theotocopulos went mad with rage from hearing himself compared with Titian, and purposely distorted his work to extinguish a similarity that did him honour. Such is the flimsy tale so genial and witty a writer as Gautier lightly spreads. To begin with, it is now denied that _El Greco_ ever was Titian's pupil. It is admitted that he studied under Tintoretto, and however much he may preserve (and wisely!) of the noble Italian school, there can be no doubt to the least discerning that he has brought to its interpretation his own forcible individuality and cold temperament. Great he often is, supreme sometimes, but never voluptuous or charming. You admire him with your head; your heart he leaves always untouched, unless we make an exception in the solitary instance of the delightful figure of St Martin in the Chapel of San José. Here you have a touch of romantic pathos and charm in the slim young knight, which evokes reverie and remembrance of warm soft legendary love such as _El Greco_ is elsewhere persistently blind to. We accept his own word for it, that he came from Crete, but when, why, how, we know not. We hear of him in Italy, but at no fixed spot, and he blazes unexplained upon the horizon of Spanish art, first known by one of the masterpieces of Spain. Pacheco, earlier than Palomino, tells us that he was a curious student, a philosopher, an architect, a sculptor, as well as a painter. Of his studies, his philosophy, no proof has come down to us; but of his sculpture, his wood-carving, his architecture, Toledo possesses many a sample as evidence of the man's versatility. He is said to have left behind him, as a monument of industry in a life so full and varied, a complete copy in clay of everything he wrought or painted. The only faint hint of the man himself that we get is a reference Pacheco makes to a conversation he had with _El Greco_ in Toledo, when the great painter told him that in his opinion colour alone was of value, and form and drawing quite secondary considerations in the art of painting. It was this feeling that made El Greco so persistently cold to the work of Michael Angelo, says Palomino. Michael Angelo, he said to Pacheco, was a very good fellow, but a very poor painter. Beyond two legal squabbles, we learn nothing of the man's life at Toledo. He is said to have painted his own visage in the Burial of Count Orgaz: lean, hard, nervous, exceedingly dark and striking, the face of a man in whom energy was an unsleeping disease, who worked with his mind concentrated upon the accomplishment of an ideal achievement, not as an idealist, as a materialist rather with an ideal object in view. There is the same curious modern expression in this dark, impassioned face that I noticed in the desperate portrait of the Italian novelist, M. Gabriel d'Annunzio, whom the face strangely resembles; an eager, ravenous, cruel sensuality which knows neither rest nor satiety, and which gives meaning to the charge of habits of harsh gallantry and deliberate ostentation. He is said to have kept a band of musicians to play during his carefully-prepared and selected repasts. Yet nothing could be less sensual than the work of El Greco. He is colder than Velasquez, and only understands feminine emotion in a certain austere intensity, passion fed upon the perfume of incense and saintly legend, as in the striking head of St Agnes in his great Virgin and Child of San José. But this statement also is untrustworthy. It is incredible that a man, who left so much behind him, whose life was so active, and whose achievement was so important for a town in which he lived for so many years, should be merely a name, leaving no evidence of social or civic existence, no word of friend or foe in the annals of that town, nothing in its contemporary letters to guide us to any knowledge of the man himself. Pacheco in three lines reports a conversation with him, that is all. We do not know even where he lived in Toledo, how he lived, who his wife was, if he loved her, who his friends were, what manner of father and citizen he was. We know that he painted pictures, that he built churches, carved statues, and, since he was well paid for his work, that he must have possessed considerable means, and was probably an influential personage as well as a great master. Sir William Stirling Maxwell possesses a portrait said to be that of El Greco's daughter by him, but this, too, is regarded as doubtful. Of a son's existence, however, we are certain, and the charming figure of the delicate and pensive St Martin on horseback, as well as that of the dreamy youth in the plan of Toledo of the Museum, are the portraits of George Manuel Theotocopulos, architect, like his father. It is now certified that he was buried in the church, built by himself, of the Dominican convent, _Santo Domingo el Antiguo_. I have said that an impenetrable obscurity lies upon the personal life of El Greco, though here his artistic existence is one of the most insistent facts about us. He seems first to have come to Toledo about 1575 to build the church of _Santo Domingo el Antiguo_, and paint the fine Assumption, the original of which was bought by Don Sebastian de Bourbon, and is now the property of the Infanta Cristina, the picture of the Retablo being only a copy, from which we may infer that his name in the world of Italian art was already known. How else could he have come to Toledo upon direct invitation, unless he came upon chance, hearing of Toledo as a flourishing city, where art was more appreciated and better remunerated than anywhere else in Spain. Then the chapter of the Cathedral ordered the most beautiful Expolio of the sacristy. When the ordered picture was painted, with the group of three women in the foreground, the canons were shocked by the audacious innovation, sent it back to the painter, and refused to pay for it. There was no justification, they asserted, for the presence of the three Maries at the Crucifixion, and they could only consent to receive it if the figures were rubbed out. This El Greco haughtily and properly declined to do. Having painted his picture, he announced himself ready to stand by it, good or ill, as it was, without the slightest alteration. But he demanded his money, whether the chapter took the picture or not. This, too, the chapter refused, whereupon the irate and humiliated artist went to law. It was a long case, lasting for years, during which time El Greco whiled away his enforced leisure at Toledo by marching off to Illescas, where he found time to build the church and paint some noble pictures. His defence against the chapter was a naïve and lame one. He asserted that the presence of the women did not matter, "as they were a long way off," which is not true. But the main fact was true, "it did not matter," any more than radically matters the mediaeval knight in armour behind them. Such inaccuracies and discrepancies leave the artist's genius undiminished. So apparently thought the judges and jury, for El Greco won his case, gained his price, and maintained his artistic dignity without offensive concession to his pride. The women remained, the picture was hung in a frame of jasper and marble, the wood-work wrought by El Greco, which cost the chapter considerably more than the painting, and El Greco himself lived to die an old man in the town he had started in so stormily. His next proceedings were at Illescas where, having built the Church of Our Lady of Charity, painted retablos and carved statues, it was seriously proposed to tax his pictures as common merchandise. El Greco went to law again, and this time, too, won his case. Only this was not merely a personal triumph, it was a big justice wrung in these far-off days from the stupid bourgeois to art. Palomino, commenting on it, writes: "Immortal thanks are due to El Greco for having broken a lance for art and thus forced the proclamation of its immunities." He compelled the court to accept his theory that art was a thing apart from merchandise, not like mere fabrications, subject to the control of taxes or to the law of duty. While the process went on, El Greco refused to sell any of his pictures, but simply hired them out for a certain sum, as the good counsellors of Illescas only proposed to tax _sold_ pictures. As the case with the chapter of Toledo was concluded before that of Illescas, he only accepted a loan on account of the future sum, from the canons for the Expolio. His fame now was spreading through Spain, and that on no common unattuned voice. His superb portrait of the monk, Felix de Artiaga, won from that distinguished poet the first of the two celebrated sonnets to El Greco. "Divino Griego de tu obrar yo admira Que en la imagen exceda a el ser el arte" it begins, and having descanted on the superiority of the artist's creature to God's, wittily ends: "Y contra veinte y nueve años de trato Entre tu mano y la de Dios, perplexa Qual es el cuerpo, en que ha de vivir duda." The second sonnet was brought forth by El Greco's tomb of Queen Margarita, when Fray Felix de Artiaga addresses him: _Huesped curioso, a qui la pompa admira_ _De este aparato real_, MILAGRO GRIEGO! _No lugubres Exequias Juzgues ciego,_ _Ni marmol fiel en venerable pyra_ _El sol que Margarita estable mira_ _Le arraneo del fatal desassossiego_ _De esta vana Region, y en puro fuego_ _Vibrantes luces de su rostro aspira_ _A el Nacer que vistió candido, pone_ _Toledo agradecido_ POR VALIENTE MANO _en aquesta caxa peregrina._ _Tosca piedra la maquina compone_ _Que ya su grande Margarita ausente_ _No le ha quedado si España piedra fria_. We know that El Greco had disciples, since his two most famous, Fray Bautista Maino and Luis Tristan, were considerable artistes, whose work in Toledo is only second to his own. But had he a school such as had the great Italian masters? Was he beloved, admired, followed through the town? What was his influence upon the young men around him? Was his personality intense and commanding? Strong, yes, else he would never have dabbled in litigation. We may imagine too some intemperateness of character to explain the intemperate blemishes of his work. The strange obscurity of so successful a career as his must have been, if the most important commissions of the time mean anything, leaves us in doubt of the man's personal attractiveness. He can scarcely have formed strong friendships, or some testimony, some facts would have reached us through these. A wilful, obstinate, self-centred nature is revealed in all his works, and a curious lack of temperament and charm in it would explain to some extent the man's lack of personal magnetism and influence to account for the century's indifference to the creator of work it seems to have appreciated so thoroughly. We find him again at loggerheads with Felipe Segundo. The Escorial was built, and the morose Philip ordered El Greco to paint a picture of the martyrdom of St Maurice for the chapel. He had by this entered into his last period of accentuated eccentricity, of which the St John the Baptist of the _Hospital de Afuera_, beyond the Puerta de Visagra, is a sufficiently exasperating example. The St Maurice I have not seen, but if the saint's legs in any way resembled those of St John the Baptist, small blame to the astounded king when he refused to accept the picture. The sacristan of the _Hospital de Afuera_ explains the outrageous anatomical contortions in the blunt good-natured fashion of the people: "Picture by El Greco when he went mad." But as El Greco never went mad, we rest dissatisfied with the information. There can be no doubt that every strongly-marked nature reveals excess of some sort in whatever direction development may tend. Neither men nor things, nor colour nor line, can appear the same to all. The same sex and nation produced Rossetti's women and Romney's. Greuze and Puvis de Chavannes see Frenchwomen with a different eye, though woman herself is the eternally unchanged, the same variously-imaged enigma of the beginning, rather reflected and modified through the glance that scans her than seriously altered or influenced by environment and impression. Humanity was not an elegant affair for Hogarth, and viewed through El Greco's imagination, it ceased to possess proportion, and man became absurdly tall and grotesquely contorted. He bestows the finished hand of twenty on a child of ten, and shoots his saints up to such a height as would make them ridiculous in Frederick's famous Potsdam regiment of giants. But this is no indication of madness, any more than any other exaggeration of a natural tendency. Even in the _Expolio_, his first known great picture, painted when he was a young man, his predilection for excessive height is visible in the tall figure of Christ, and as the years go on this predilection accentuates itself, till his figures cease to be natural. The same tendency to distort the human limbs reveals itself in his magnificent picture in the little church of Santo Tomé, in the upper portion of which one notes extraordinary figures of angels out of drawing, with twisted limbs over clouds. Philip, in his dissatisfaction with his bargain was, however, as befits a prince, more honourable than the chapter of Toledo. He paid El Greco the price of his work, and only with difficulty did the unhappy artist obtain, for his reputation's sake, a grudging admission of the picture into the _Sala de Capitular_, while Philip ordered for the chapel, in its stead, another picture of Romulo Cincinnato. But these rebuffs were few in a truly brilliant career. The wonder is how he found time, as well as physical strength, for all the commissions he received. He built the extremely elegant façade of the Ayuntamiento, which makes an odd and formal note in its Gothic and semi-Moorish environment, in Greco-Roman style, but has a fine and dignified effect against an appropriate depth of azure to carry out the classical intention of a son of Greece. The side towers give lightness to the solidity of the immense base, and if the columns and arches do not succeed in producing a general impression of grace--a quality absent in nearly all El Greco's work--there is no sin anywhere against harmony. The interior is worth a visit if it were only for the pleasure of reading on stone Manrique's sententious and noble lines, with their indubitable ring of the plumed, dramatic ages and the hidalgo's studious search for the fitting word, the fitting gesture, that shall send him down to posterity in the worthiest form: "Nobles, discretos varones, Que gobernais à Toledo, En aquestas escalones Desechad las aficiones, Codicio, temor, y miedo. Por los comunes provechos Dejad los particulares; Pues vos fizo Dios pilares De tan riquisimos techos, Estad firmes y derechos." When the Toledans wore their famed steel, and damascene armour was the fashion and not a curiosity, the "discreet and noble males" Manrique so magnificently addresses, may have lived up to the high civic ideal of these verses, but it is much to be doubted if the modern Toledans, who no longer seek distraction in the excitement of excellent steel, and fashion paper-knives for books they never read, of damascene instead of exquisite armour, maintain this level of austere civic virtue. To our lasting gratitude, Cardinal Quiroga, at the instance of the Augustines, ordered El Greco's immortal and glorious picture of the "Burial of Gonzalo Ruiz, Count of Orgaz." It is no exaggeration to describe this picture as one of the greatest of Spain. One puts it only immediately below the [Illustration: THE BURIAL OF THE COUNT OF ORGAZ] masterpieces of Velasquez. The Toledans went wild with admiration, and writing of it a century ago, Antonio Ponz describes their admiration as still unabated. At the time part of the excitement was due to the superb portraits of well-known personages, which the townspeople contemplated with ever fresh delight. We, who have not this interest in the picture, may wisely, nay, must enforcedly, follow their example to-day. "Since its appearance," writes Ponz, "the city has never tired of admiring it, visiting it continually, always finding new beauties in it, and contemplating the life-like portraits of the great men of Toledo." How modern, how seizing, what a subtle, magnificent impressionist the man was! is the first surprised exclamation when confronted with all these living, speaking faces of old Spain. Faces so Spanish, so delicately and forcibly varied and individual in their maintenance of a rigid, racial type. Every shade of national character stands out separate and in union with the general expression: harsh pride, insane wilfulness, stupendous fanaticism, exalted and untender mysticism, a sensuality so dominant as to tread on cruelty, a delicate humour, an inflated self-consciousness, exquisite kindliness, morose indifference, the very genius of selfishness and a sterile sensibility. Did ever a canvas before so perfectly gather all the fugitive moods, all the underlying currents, all the grace and charm, the vices and defects of a single race, and give them complete stability in their wavering expression? This is to carry portraiture to the rarest perfection. Among these twenty or so living faces, there is not one that is insignificant or mediocre, not one that apart would not make a superb picture, not one that does not carry the enveloping stamp of moment, race and environment. In some the type is so unchanged that to-day in Spain such faces may be seen looking precisely as they did then; unaltered even by costume, so marked is the individuality, so seemingly imperishable the large strong utterance of the Castillian physiognomy. This picture has something of the eternal freshness of "Don Quixote." There is the simple, unconscious stroke of Cervantes in the fashioning of these hidalgoes' heads, something of his mild incomparable humour, something of his nobility and the underlying depth of sadness in his easy wit. No painter who was not both witty and humorous could observe so deeply, so wisely, with such an obvious kindliness of regard; could accentuate so suggestively, so delicately, national traits, and yet not break the consistent harmony of a solemn scene; could tell posterity so much with the most charming air of telling it nothing. "The Burial of the Count of Orgaz" proves El Greco something more than a complete artist; it proves his intellectual force, for here he brings all the distinguished qualities of the brain to the very different qualities of the painter's eye and hand. Of these latter it would be difficult to say too much. Look at the wonderful shadow of death in the livid grey of the corpse, and then at the brilliance of St Augustine's episcopal robes! Examine above all the lovely head of the boy, St Stephen, not in the least Spanish, a dream of sweet and stainless youth, with warm-hued beauty to thrill the glance, and just enough of heaven about the young brown head to suggest the absent aureole. And from these fresh-tinted cheeks, so purely rounded, look at the two emaciated and pallid monks behind, and then down at little Acolyte, who has much more of the air of a proud and charming little princess, with a practised grace of gesture and an inherited dignity of glance than a church lad. Is it possible to paint more supremely four such different hours and moods of life--dawn, radiant morning, dull twilight, and cold night,--to unite in a higher degree the skill and power of a master? No wonder the enthusiastic sonneteer addressed him as "Miraculous Greek" and "Divine Greek." This picture has indeed genius's rare and inimitable touch of divinity. All else, with patience and talent, may be acquired but this, and had El Greco never painted anything else, by the "Burial" of Santo Tomé alone he would stand apart in the history of Spanish art, with the world's select few. It is a singular fact, as I have pointed out, that such a painter's influence on the town he lived in should not be more marked in every way than references to the period would lead us to assume. He had pupils certainly, but we only hear of two, Luis Tristan, his favourite, and Fray Bautista Maino. Tristan has left a good deal of work in Toledo which is often taken to be El Greco's in decline. Apart from the master's, it is notable in its way, still and rather colourless; but a story told of master and pupil bears retelling as an excellent trait in El Greco. The one characteristic we are permitted to gather from the obscurity that envelopes the man, is a haughty conviction of the value of his art. There was no lack of confidence here, no feeble self-depreciation, no meek concern for the judgment of others. In all altercations between him and the purchasers, the purchasers were naturally the blockheads, and in no circumstance whatever could he possibly err, not even when he was convicted of wilfully contorting and dislocating the human body. He only went on seeing more and more crooked by a natural perversity. Now, not content to worship art and its rights in his own emphatic work, he taught his disciples to do likewise in theirs. This is his uncompromising method of teaching such a lesson. The monks of La Sisla, a vanished powerful monastery of the middle ages, ordered of young Tristan a picture for their chapel. Tristan painted the picture and brought it to the abbot, claiming in payment two hundred dollars. The abbot, noting the painter's youth, objected to the price, and said it was far too high. Tristan modestly protested, and referred the abbot to his master, who shortly called on El Greco at an hour when Tristan was working in his studio. He opened the interview by remarking that he believed there was a mistake in the terms demanded by Tristan. "What were they?" dryly asked El Greco. The abbot blandly named two hundred dollars. "A mistake," cried El Greco, "I should think so indeed." He jumped up and flung himself violently on the astounded youth, and began to thump him. "How comes it, you rascal, you could make such a mistake? How dare you ask such a sum as two hundred dollars for a picture worth five hundred? This will teach you to go about the world asking such prices and proving yourself an ass." Thump, thump, and the unfortunate abbot looked on while the blows hailed on the shoulders of the too humble artist. "I buy that picture for five hundred dollars," said El Greco to the abbot, when he had finished Tristan's castigation, whereupon the abbot, who knew his man and was glad enough to get off quietly by the immediate payment to Tristan of five hundred instead of two, politely requested permission to keep the picture. Here was a master worth having. If he did use physical violence to his pupils, he paid a lordly price for the privilege, and in the reckoning it may be said the pupils were more than compensated for affront or wound. In space so limited, it is not to be hoped to find room for mention of all El Greco's pictures in Toledo. All I can endeavour to do is to indicate the best, and thus, perhaps, provoke in the reader by whom his work is ignored, a desire for fuller knowledge than I am able to impart. The first picture he painted here, the "Assumption" of _Santo Domingo el Antiguo_, was purchased by Don Sebastian of Bourbon, and though the copy in its place is not good, a fair idea of the picture might be obtained if the nuns had not the bad taste to place a large and unutterable atrocity in the shape of a hideous tabernacle in front of it. Whatever virtues the ladies of St Dominick may possess, an understanding of art is not among them. Before all their painted retablos, they place offensive dressed statues and tawdry ornaments, out of keeping with the cold severity of this beautiful church of El Greco's. The pictures on either side of the "Assumption," all Greco's, are fine; St John the Baptist and St Paul below, St Benedict and St Bernard above. The Annunciation at the end of the church is by Carducci, and the St Ildefonso opposite by Luis Tristan, neither equal to the master's strong, harmonious work, which they show out in greater relief. Interest is attached to this church by the curious fact that not only did El Greco build it, and build it so well with such cold and classical correctness and simplicity, but here he lies at rest forever in his own large temple. The precise spot of his grave is not known, and it is quite an accident that such indication has been found. All the writers have been content with the loose statement that he was buried either in Santo Tomé or San Bartolomé, without a word of regret that he who wrought such lasting monuments with his hand has found no reverent hand to carve a slab above his dust. It was only quite lately that the Spanish landscape painter, Señor de Berruete, to whose kindness I owe the information and a copy of the registrar of the death, by sheer dint of perseverance and conviction, brought to light the definite and correct knowledge at last of El Greco's resting-place. He lies in some obscure corner of this church, forgotten by the nuns on whose business he first came to Toledo, and the record of his death and burial dryly runs:--_Libro de entierros de Santo Tomé de 1601-1614, en siete del Abril del 1614 falescio Dominico Greco. No hizo testamento, recibio los sacramentos, enterose en Santo Domingo el Antiguo. Dio velas._ And that is all we know of his illness and death. He made no will, he received the sacraments, he died on the 7th of April 1614, and left tapers for his funeral. Under some stone of Santo Domingo he lies forever ignored and unhonoured! Many of the convents that possessed pictures of El Greco have disappeared, amongst them the old convent of the Visitation called the Queen's, which contained a superb Crucifixion. Of the figures at the foot of the cross, Palomino wrote: "They are very Titian-like, and how superior to anything else here!" We are told of a certain Magdalen, a lovely bit of colouring, painted while the influence of the Venetian school was still marked in his work, but this has become private property. Some of his best pictures were painted for the little town of Bayona near Cienpozuelos. The scenes from the dramatic life of Magdalen were so beautiful that Cardinal Portocarrero offered 5000 pesos (about a crown piece) and the same quantity of Giordanos to replace them to the church, which were indignantly refused. In the College of Atocha and the monastery of La Sisla there were considerable collections of some of the best Grecos. Into whose hands have they since passed? and in how many obscure parts of Spain may not these treasures lie hidden and unrecognised? Palomino tells us of "an unapproachable Judgment." Alas! nobody to-day knows anything about it. Three other great pictures, however, remain. In the little chapel of San José, opposite the Exchange of Carlos III., a painted insignificant edifice that has fallen into deserved decay, there are five or six Grecos, two of which arrest immediate attention. On the left is the singularly beautiful figure of St Martin, a portrait of the painter's son, a delicate high-bred and dreamy young knight in armour, inappropriately cutting his mantle in two with Toledan steel to bestow half on the beggar standing beside his white horse. No Roman soldier this conception of Martin of Tours, making a gift of half of his single cloak, but a charming youth who is playing at charity as he rides out beyond the town, while above the river, in some Gothic-Arabian palace, he has his choice of variously-hued satin cloaks as well as damascene armour, and as he cuts his mantle, he has the dainty and sentimental air of one who muses tristefully on the absent or perfidious beloved, and hugs despair as the more graceful part of passion, the while anxiously asking himself if he shall meet her glance as he rides past her lattice. Except the lovely girl's head of the _Expolio_, also said to be a family portrait, and if so proving, along with the St Martin, that El Greco was the father of beautiful children, El Greco has done no more witching and romantic work than this boyish figure of St Martin. The colouring is extraordinarily cold, and grey of an exquisite tone, with shadows of a dull silvered blue. It suggests the pale borderland where dream and reality meet and merge. When El Greco first came to Spain, he was fresh from the warm voluptuous school of Venice. Nothing proves more than the rapid alteration of his style, the invading influence of atmosphere. The austere and hieratic capital of Spain developed a racial coldness, till his art became like the city that remained its temple, something aloof from and above the gusts of temperament, an art unmoved by passion or the senses, too violent to be called serene, too reflective and intellectual to touch the heart. One would look in vain for the exquisite sweetness of Andrea del Sarto, for a particle of the delight and radiance the Italians had the secret of gathering into their canvases, for any of the superlative charm of da Vinci or the surpassing tenderness of Raphael. El Greco has much of the modern hardness, much of its quick impressionability, much of its accentuated indifference to mere loveliness, much of its cold force and deliberate self-cultivation. Instead of learning from error, he cultivated error as part of his individuality, a thing that was right in him since it defined his peculiar perception of things. Even in this fine picture, the horse is out of drawing, since it is a settled thing that no large work of his can utterly satisfy, can come to us without some distinguished blemish and oddness by which we recognise our Greco all in greeting him. Opposite the St Martin is a Virgin and child, with two angels on either side, and below two saints. The angel, on the left hand, almost confronts me with inaccuracy in denying El Greco warmth. Nothing could be warmer, even on a Murillo canvas, than the soft brown head and shadowed cheek and eyes bent over the infant with an ineffable inward curve that suggests, but does not reveal, the hidden smile. There is a melting sweetness about this drooped visage that El Greco has not accustomed us to expect from him. Underneath, St Agnes strains upwards a very different cast of countenance: dark, severely outlined, intense, and full of pain and yearning, the brows are tragically marked, and the expression of the mouth is that of scornful resignation. By no means the legendary Saint Agnes, meek and mild, but vigorously individual and passionate, with a soul and intellect inconveniently above the little joys of maidenhood. The Virgin, too, as are all El Greco's Madonnas, is off the beaten track. This maiden-mother has none of the bland and unintelligent sweetness of the Italian Madonna. The face is long and pointed, and about the brow and eyes there is something Greek, a scarce perceptible imperiousness, an intellectual quality in the expression of reverie, more marked still in the Virgin of San Vicente. As a whole, the picture is one of commanding interest. The sacristan will assure you, despite the conviction of your eyes and senses, that the altar picture is a Murillo. Nowhere have I found sacristans so stupid and so ignorant as in Toledo. For that matter, stupidity reigns over the town. For a home of relics, never were relics more densely guarded, and there is not a single intelligent or recommendable guide to be had. One remembers a delicate little masterpiece of sensibility and pathos by Mr Henry James, "The Madonna of the Future," with yearning, and wishes some learned monomaniac would start across one's path, like the neo-Florentine hero of that story, to guide one wisely through Toledo's forlorn treasures. But Toledo does not seem to have inspired disinterested love in any human breast. Those who know her decline to share their knowledge, and those in care of her inheritance, from the canons of the Cathedral to the sacristans and keepers of the Museum, are, without exception, wrapped in an impenetrable fog of ignorance, accentuated by indifference. The Murillo of the sacristan of San José is a very striking Greco--one would recognise it a long way off by the stupendous height of St Joseph, the hand of twenty of the infant Jesus, and the flowing wealth of drapery in dull green, dim yellow, and faded pink, with the big deep folds so peculiarly the master's. The sacristan also denied El Greco to be the painter of a grey mystical St Francis, an emaciated, spiritualised head, in a dim twilight, livid grey, half shadow, and ghostly white, blurred with faint yellow. The hands show out whitely in the intensity of gloom, and the expression in this grey atmosphere is mystic and serene. Not one of the best examples, but good enough to suggest that there may be some truth in the supposition that El Greco was the sculptor of the famous little statue of St Francis of Assisi in the Cathedral Treasury, and not Alonzo Cano or Pedro de Mena. But doubtful of my sacristan's knowledge, I struck a match, mounted a chair, and convinced him by reading out the half obliterated Greek letters of Theotocopulos's signature. Nothing but the patronymic could be deciphered, but the signature of the picture of the Escorial M. Demetrius Bikelas deciphered more fully: [**Greek: Domênichos Theotochoulos Kpês, 'epoíe], which is our sole assurance of his birthplace. There remains another great picture of El Greco to draw attention to, overlooking, as I am compelled to, the very names of so many others. The Assumption of San Vicente is no less magnificent than singular. Most rare is its realistic impression of a scene mid air. You feel about it the very hurricane of the upper air, the dizzy velocity of flight. This is no image of calm soaring through space, the idea of dreamy swim most painters of the Assumption are content to convey. The very modernity and the violent realism of El Greco's genius forced him to forsake in all things the notion of simple reverie. He seeks to convey distinct impressions; veracity as far as possible must stamp these. He does not delight in pampering the spectator with sentimental musings or the inanely beautiful. Ugliness, too, has its beauty when accompanied by strength. You must understand to enjoy, must bring the brain as well as the senses to the contemplation of his work. Like all preoccupied artists, he inevitably sins by excess, and overtaxes the bewildered spectator. Something of his spirit went into our own Browning. His drawing is often like Browning's verse, inexplicably rough and out of gear. But nothing could change either genius. One leaves you to make what you can of his volumes; the other leaves you for ever exasperated by eccentricities of pencil and brush it is now no use seeking to understand. For instance, in this picture, shocking and glorious at the same time, who is to account for the profile of the angel in yellow with the grand beating wings of shaded purple and grey that support the lifted Virgin through the rushing air? The limbs are grotesque, the pointed nose almost stands away from the face, the ears protrude in graceless deformity, and the chin is nearly rugged in its absurd upward curve. A more painful presentment of an angel sane man never painted. Yet look away, and you will see two exquisite slender limbs and feet, pointed downward in the air, to show that El Greco knew a lovely thing as well as any other painter. And yet higher still, examine the Virgin with her dark, oval, intellectual, modern visage, beautiful with the beauty of our own troubled and eager times, half spiritual, half poetical, but partaking not in the least of the old-fashioned ideal of maiden-mother, the mild benignant Madonna of Italy, the soulless Virgin of Spain, Eastern peasant women painted from the mistresses of Italian artists or from the pretty dancing girls of the Spanish people. Here is an innovation, here is originality: a mournful Mary, leaving earth with doubt and pain in her expression rather than rapture; with small refined face and intense brows; a Mary who bears the mark of our fugitive common suffering, the deep, enigmatic impress of life accompanied by thought, and not the stereotyped dolorous brand of the seven times stabbed mother Catholic art accepts. He boldly rejects the old ideal both in maiden and in mother, and paints a Mary who is neither sweet nor quiet. How tall she is too, and slenderly outlined beneath the superb green-blue drapery that bears her on its floating folds, as it waves down from the rich pink garment that covers the slim bust. Surely, in spite of defects so monstrous as to provoke laughter, angel's limbs like gnarled trees, such biceps as no athlete ever possessed, hands to fell the heaviest beast, this picture for composition, for the vivid impression of intense velocity of upward flight, for the grand treatment of drapery and colour, for the vigorous reality of those outspread wings, and above all for that beautiful, delicately-strong grieved face of Mary, with the soft dark cloud of hair marking its most charming oval, this original conception of the Assumption may be reckoned as one of El Greco's triumphs of art. It does not enchant, or captivate, but it seizes. Elsewhere you must look for delight. Here your satisfaction is disturbed by deliberate and deplorable defections, but you have boundless compensations. El Greco's portraits have none of the defects of his large compositions. The best perhaps is the admirable portrait of Cardinal Tavera in the _Hospital de Afuera_. This is in the full sense of the word a masterpiece. No blemish to irritate, no deliberate eccentricity to recall his wrong-headed theory that in painting colour alone is of importance and drawing of no value whatever. Here is a square of canvas of sober and solid worth, which might be the work of any of the best Italian masters for suavity and restraint, and has no fraternity whatever with the extraordinary St John the Baptist so near it, and so preposterously offensive. The other superb portraits by El Greco that Toledo holds are those of Antonio Covarrubias and Juan de Alava in the Provincial Museum at San Juan de los Reyes. The rest are chiefly at Madrid, and hold no inferior place in that glorious assembly. They stand out, individual, insistent, and seem to assure you with all the eloquence of so violent and marked a personality as El Greco's, that in spite of the general Venetian tone that so vividly recalls Titian and Tintoretto, with whom proximity invites contrast, it is no imitator who has painted these magnificent portraits of lean Castillian gentlemen, with their austere pride of regard, their air of imperturbable breeding and beautiful hands. They are the work of one of the world's masters, who himself created a school to which we owe Velasquez. CHAPTER VIII _San Juan de los Reyes, Santa Marta la Blanca, El Transito_ RELIGION and revolt are the chief features in Toledo's story. When her sons were not quarrelling within or warring without, they were building churches and convents, and none more famous than San Juan de los Reyes, built in fulfilment of a vow by the Catholic kings after the victory of Toro, gained over the Portuguese sympathisers with the _Beltraneja_, Henry's luckless heiress. The architect was Juan Guas, master builder of the Cathedral, and the church was finished in 1476, and given over by Isabel to the order of St Francis, magnificently endowed. It stands high above the bridge of San Martin and the Puerta del Cambron, the portico facing north and the lovely cloisters south. Writing of it, Señor Amador de los Rios in his _Toledo Pintoresca_, says: "This sumptuous monument belongs to the class of architecture known as _gotica-gentil_, and is indubitably one of the most famous of Toledo. Raised at the most flourishing period of the Castillian monarchy, it awakens before the vision of the enthusiastic traveller, memories of lofty and difficult enterprises, happily concluded by our elders, so that the vandalism of the present century stands sharply out with all its rubbish, and still more the envy of a neighbouring nation, that, while it was in the act of flinging the most unjust charges at the Spanish people, destroyed with steel and fire the most precious jewels of its art. I refer to the burning of San Juan de los Reyes by the French on their invasion. It would seem false that the armies of the Marshals, whose culture and value nobody may dare doubt, could display such rage against a few edifices, whose only wrong in their estimation was that they were erected by the victors of Cirinola and Pavia; false would it seem that Napoleon's soldiers came to Spain to react the scenes of Attila and Genserico. But for our misfortune it is only too true." One cannot blame the Spaniards for their bitterness towards the French. No invading nation ever behaved more shamelessly, comported itself with a more inexcusable barbarity than the French in the Peninsula. But on the other hand, the Spaniards themselves in reality care so little about the beautiful things they have inherited from bygone times, are so calamitously indifferent to their own historic glories, that we may well hesitate to credit the French with all the ruin we see about us in Spain. An archaeological body was appointed for the maintenance of public monuments, and see for yourself in Toledo and elsewhere what these gentlemen have been able to achieve. It is not money alone that is lacking, but competence and the great important instinct _that it matters_. The canons, those hopeless autocrats of ruined Toledo, who stand so deliberately on the brink of oblivion and the dark abyss of ignorance, have covered the beautiful bronze doors of the cathedral _Puerta del Reloj_ with a hideous wooden screen. When I asked one of them the meaning of this disfigurement, he blandly assured me that it was to ward off draughts in winter, when the big stone forest is mighty cold. And so the lovely works of Zurreño and Dominguez might just as well have been riddled with French shot for all the pleasure they are permitted to give us to-day. So with everything in the hands of these terrible canons, who care for nothing on earth but their ease and their leisure. The famous archiepiscopal library which the Republic had wisely made state property, was given back to the canons by Alfonso XII., on the distinct understanding that it should remain open to the public. But the canons locked the doors, and whenever you ask to see it, you are informed that the librarian has the keys and is away at Madrid, where he expects to remain another fortnight. During the month I stayed at Toledo, to collect material for this volume, I was sent from one canon to another, all of whom "deeply sympathised," but assured me in dull, indifferent tones that it was impossible for me to see the library. The Penetenciario was at Madrid. And for anything the canons cared, he might stay away six months, and keep the library keys with him all that time. I asked one canon what the rest did, if in the absence of their singular librarian, there happened to present itself a rare necessity for the chapter to open this hermetically sealed door. He smiled deprecatingly, but did not enlighten me. Not requiring information themselves, the search for it is a form of insanity not to be encouraged in others. And Señor Amador de los Rios and all other Spanish writers lament, and justly, the French invasion, but forget to note their own cruel inertia, the disastrous results of indifference and indolence. There is nothing remarkable about the exterior of San Juan de los Reyes. Alonso de Covarrubias completed the portico in 1610. The effect of the rusty chains, the famous chains of the Christians of Granada round the walls, is hideous. The Spaniards are extremely moved by the sight of this queer ornament, one wonders why, and Amador de los Rios nearly weeps with rage because some of them have been removed. He solaces himself with drawing an elaborate picture of the awed and reverential attitude of emotional foreigners gazing upon them. The sculpture outside is very rough. Many will find the interior of this renowned edifice a distinct disappointment. One misses the mystery, the charm of aisled perspectives. There are here no long reaches of shadow and brilliant variations of light. The effect is bold, free, ample, but curiously short. The altar recess is shallow, the nave is broad and open, ending in a semi-circle and six lateral arches. The body of the church is divided by two light pillars, richly decorated. The beauty of the church consists in the extraordinary magnificence of its sculpture. Pillars and walls are extravagantly overlaid with the richest Gothic ornamentation, and the impression is rather bewildering than beautiful. It seems a bold thing to say of one of the most admired and renowned monuments of Toledo, that it is ugly from excess of sculptural splendour. It is too wide, too short, too solid and heavy, too open, above all too florid. I can think of no fitter comparison than a stout, low-sized, middle-aged woman, excessively bejewelled, carrying gracelessly garments too heavy and too gorgeous. It lacks the elusive charm of shadow, the subtlety of simplicity. San Juan de los Reyes is a church to visit and to wonder at, but not a place to muse in. You will admire the octagonal vault, the pinnacles, the gallery running out of the clerestory in front of the south window, pierced parapet and highly-wrought choir; you will marvel at the statues, the foliage, the rich Gothic fancies, the shields, all the magnificent elaboration of detail, the rarest to be found anywhere, and still will all this leave you cold and unimpressed. It is like an admirably finished poem, that appeals to the head and leaves the heart untouched. From immemorial time the principal entrance has been covered with plaster, which only permits us to see the great Gothic window in the centre. The workmanship of the interior of the church leads us to infer that this entrance was more in keeping with the whole than the present façade of Covarrubias, which is decadent Gothic, constructed many years later, and only finished in the reign of Philip III. The length of this single nave is 200 feet, its width in the transept is over 70, and in the body of the church 43. There are seven chapels, four on one side and three on the other, all insignificant. The tomb of Don Pedro de Ayala, bishop of the Canaries, is a fine specimen of renaissance sculpture. The cupola rests on four admirably wrought pillars, its form is octagon, with an ogival dome and a window in each face. Nothing could be richer or more effective than the elaborately decorated sides of the transept. Such a splendid prodigality of Gothic sculpture was surely never lavished on so small a space. To give anything like a detailed account of it would require an art and a knowledge nothing less stupendous than the imagination that devised such work. The retablo, painted by Francis of Antwerp in the sixteenth century, that Ponz praised so enthusiastically, disappeared in the time of the fatal French occupation, when the church was the stables of Napoleon's soldiers, and along with it the life-sized portraits of the founders, Fernando and Isabel. Hardly any of the old stainglass remains, to which fact is due the glaring effect of crude light upon the white stone. But this light permits you to examine at ease the superlative magnificence of the transept sides and the sculptured pillars. Everywhere the initials F and I, with the yoke and the arrows of both sovereigns. Letters and inscriptions are exquisitely finished, and nothing could be more graceful than the general effect of arches and capitals. The high broad nave forms a Latin cross, composed of apse, transept and the body of the church, all the most prodigious and exuberant specimen of florid renaissance. The choir is situated over a low, broad, painted vault. The pillars that support the four domes of the naves are richly sculptured and adorned with statues, and a fine frieze runs above the chapels on either side, with a window above each arch divided by graceful Gothic pillars. The inscriptions are many, and surprisingly clear and beautiful in finish. Here is one of the most elaborate in Gothic letters: [Illustration: DETAIL OF ORNAMENT, INTERIOR OF S. JUAN DE LOS REYES] "Este monasterio è églesia mandaron hacer los muy esclarecidos Principes è señores D. Hernando è Doña Isabel, Rey y Reina de Castilla, de Leon, de Aragon, de Sicilia, los cuales señores por bienaventurado matrimonio y untaron los dichos Reinos, seyendo el dicho rey y señor natural de los reinos de Aragon y Sicilia, y seyendo la dicha señora Reina y señora natural de los Reinos de Castilla y Leon; el cual fundaron à gloria de nuestro señor Dios, y de la bienaventurado Madre suya Nuestra señora la Virgin Maria, y por especial devocion que le ovieron." The few pictures are quite worthless, but pictures are not needed in such a wealth of stone-work. What are needed to make San Juan de los Reyes less crude in its frank over-decoration are, shadow, the dim luminosity of stained glass, the softened glow of bejewelled light, the tender mystery and charm of pillared aisle, the grace of length to give majesty to solidity. It totally lacks the essential quality of reverence, that elusive and unanalysable suggestion of the beyond, the supreme, the intangible, of that inexplicable aspiration that ever stirs the soul of primitive and civilised man, and has taught him to seek its expression in the building of church and temple; in the white splendour of the Parthenon, the very soul of Greek genius in stone, in the grey dimness of Gothic cathedral, in which Christian fervour finds almost an immaterial beauty of definition, the quality of lofty distinction which belongs to the highest poetry and eloquence. Here you are not assailed by a sense of the melancholy loveliness of death, as when you stand beside some canopied tomb of greatness in the softened gloom of an old cathedral. There is none of the lingering charm of legend and peopled shade, none of the obscurity of deep recess, the chill shiver of vaulted solitude, the vibrant ache of other days, that serene and bewitching [Illustration: CLOISTER, S. JUAN DE LOS REYES] misery we feel whenever we travel backward by the road of strange and wonderful experience that has moulded and developed humanity. For San Juan de los Reyes reveals to us nothing of that past whose enigma forever tortures the curious mind, nothing but the admirable skill of some unknown sculptors, provokes neither musing nor aspiration, nor instils the poisonous enchantment of artistic sadness. For this reason the lovely cloisters, despite the defacing stamp of restoration and the preposterous glare of white plaster, win you to fervour and lure you to reverie. Ruined, monstrously ill-treated, they yet preserve a delicate freshness, an incomparable grace that give us some notion of the mediaeval paradise they must have been when flower and verdure bloomed between their fretted arches, and the statues in their canopied niches stood fresh from each master's hands. Not melancholy cloisters these, but gay and charming, with their supreme elegance, their matchless distinction, an airiness and lightness, a gaiety not in the least ecclesiastical or claustral. They were built to harbour the measured mirth of breeding, the sweet and elegant piety of romance, the charity, the contentment that knows naught of suffering or revolt, all the placid and decorous joys of religion. Beautiful flowers and delicate foliage grew thickly in the broad sunny space between the double row of exquisite galleries, and branches spread and swayed against the arched columns of the upper cloisters. Truly it must have been delightful to have worn the habit of the Franciscan monk in the days of Isabella the Catholic, and the great Cisneros, the first novice of this convent, can have found no more vivid satisfaction in the hours he was busy making Spanish history than in the radiant peace of these most beautiful cloisters. The architecture is superb; the richest specimen of florid ogival with twenty-four vaults, windows cut and chiselled with the fine perfection of the sonnet, pillars delicate enough and daintily wrought for some vision of dreamland, with once fifty-six statues of Franciscan monks between (the number now is sadly diminished, and some of the statues that have not been rashly replaced are in a state of most lamentable mutilation), and charming friezes. The whole effect is that of an exquisite harmony, a harmony that not even the profane and degrading hand of the modern restorer has been able to obliterate. Vulgarised certainly, since vulgarity is, alas! the fatal, the inevitable price we must pay for modern comforts and improvements, for the refining process of our material progress and the pleasures of civilisation. The cloisters are composed of four double galleries, supported on twenty-four vaults between the upper and lower cloisters and a flat roof above. The pillars, like those of the church, are miraculously sculptured; not a space an inch big, without its Gothic fancy of animal and leaf, its finely-wrought crowd in flowing fold, grotesque and lovely forms and multiplied foliage of every kind. The pillars spread like palms above to sustain the arches that divide the vaults, with an indescribable grace of effect. Inscriptions vary the legend of frieze and ornament. Gothic windows between frail arches look into the airy and delightful gardens, where green southern growths have the curled droop of plumes and the very grass seems to smile through the golden wave along its green. If only the restorers had spared the white-wash. If only this joyous little poem of Gothic architecture were less vulgarly, remorselessly white; less, as Murray's guide-book aptly remarks, like the frosted top of wedding-cake. In a corner, fastened into the wall, is a fragment [Illustration: S. LUKE ANGLE OF CLOISTER, S. JUAN DE LOS REYES] of stucco arabesque from the ancient palace of King Rodrigo, restored by the Moors, afterwards given by Maria de Molino, the widow of Sancho el Bravo, to Gonzalo de Ruiz, Count of Orgaz. I have never seen a more beautiful specimen of azulejo. This vanished palace of King Rodrigo is one of the few the Moors deemed worthy of preservation. Very little of the Visigothic remains, for the Moors had no fancy to profit by what they found after their conquest, and what has been left us is rude and unimportant enough to make their sparing use of Visigothic inspiration no matter of regret. The capitals of the Cristo de la Luz, the arcades of San Roman, and some fragments of the patio of Santa Cruz, are the most notable examples, and are only of significance as a slight indication of the transitional period between two great civilisations, the Roman and Saracen. All over Toledo, in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, the Moorish note in architecture prevailed, and, except Granada and Cordova, no other town of Spain possesses so much of the work of the Moors, is so strongly stamped with their individuality. This is due to the fact that even after the Christian Conquest most of the workmen employed were Moors, for the tolerance between Moors and Christians in Toledo under both rules seems to have been admirable. They fraternised here on both sides, whether Khalif or Castillian sovereign wielded the sceptre, hence the undisputed preponderance of mudejar architecture in the hieratic city of the Goths. On the east side a portion of the monastery has been converted into a museum. Never was a collection more insignificant than that of the _Museo Provincial_ of Toledo. The ground floor displays a quantity of wood carvings, of Moorish azulejo, which is always a delight for the eye, of bits of ancient monuments, of inscriptions, Arabic brims of walls, with inscriptions and Moorish work, ever worth examining. Most of the pictures and statues are exceedingly mediocre. But there is a superb bust of Juanelo by Berruguete, and two portraits of El Greco, Juan de Alava and Covarrubias, as well as his famous plan of Toledo, with the slim and musing youth, his poetic-looking son, who was the charming model of his St Martin as well. There is a Holy Family by Spagnoletto, St Vicente Ferrer by Giordano, some saints by Carreño, and an original canvas of Juan de Sevilla. Here, by examination of fourteen pictures of Luis Tristan, you may test the absurdity of the statement by more than one foreign art critic, that the disciple was greater than the master. If Tristan was more sane and sound than _El Greco_, he was certainly less distinguished and less great. There is a crucifix of Ribalta, a St Jerome of Carducci, some fine subjects from Holy Scripture by Frank, and a remarkable Christ of Morales, and a number of Flemish imitations. The saloon above, where most of these pictures are preserved, was the cell of the great Cisneros. The most interesting relic of all the collection of inscriptions and stones is the mutilated slab taken from the roof of the church of the Capucine Friars near the Alcázar, and found among the materials used for building the patio of this palace, whose broken letters show it to be a fragment of King Wamba's tomb: VS Rex Wamba LXX LXXXIIIIIII HUNC EGIONIS IV which Antonio Ponz recomposes thus: En tumulatus jacet inclitus Rex Wamba; Regnum contempsit anno DCLXXX Monachus obiit anno DCLXXXIIIIIII A Cænobio translatus in Hunc locum Ab Alphonsus X. Legionis Castellae autem IV. Reye. In the now forsaken ghetto, where, in King Wamba's days, stood a strong fortress called the _Castillo de la Juderia_, and which then was the centre of Toledo's wealth and commerce, a flourishing quarter, full of the activities of business, of intelligence, of industry, where riches and science and the treasures of the King were gathered, where the money-changers clinked golden promise in the face of reckless and needy nobles, and rabbis read out the law in their beautiful temples to the prosperous and numerous descendants of the exiles of Babylon, to-day may be seen the lovely little synagogues, _El Transito_ and _Santa Maria La Blanca_. Writing several centuries ago to his fellow-Jews of Amsterdam, Hassadrin, a Jewish traveller, thus mentions _El Transito_, one of the marvels of Toledo: "I find in this town, with other antiquities, Roman, Gothic and Arabian, a spacious temple which, since 1355, with King Pedro's permission, was built in this town for the Jewish people by Samuel Levi, his treasurer and private friend, which temple remains substantially intact, with all the early ornamentation seen on its four principal walls since its foundation, and thus its two atriums, its temple for women and other corresponding offices. All this I have drawn with as much care as possible, and with the expression of the smallest ornamentation, and have even copied three lines of Hebrew, which run along each of the walls, south, north, and west, without interruption; and here also four Hebrew inscriptions, the shortest in verse and rhythm, the two longest in prose; six others on the east wall." But he bitterly complains that "they have white-washed the temple so thickly that, even though the letters were originally in relief, they are entirely obliterated, and much of the ornamentation remains hopelessly confused." Those unwhitened above, that are left coloured and solid, he describes as "most beautiful."[19] When Samuel Levi built this lovely temple of semi-Moorish design, which the restorers are slowly relieving of its execrable load of whitewash that the venerable Hassadrin complained of to his fellow-townspeople of Amsterdam, the Jews were at their highest point of fortune in Toledo. They stood at the bedside of the sovereign in sickness, they counselled him in all difficulties; they filled his purse, kept his city flourishing. They might have known that they would soon pay dearly for all this power and glory. The anti-Semitic feeling has ever been the same, since the first Christian days to our own time. It breaks out in waves, like an epidemic, and always, it must be remarked, when the Jews are most prosperous and wealthy. So it has broken out in France at the end of this enlightened century, with all the virulence and spite and shameless injustice of the primitive centuries. It is no exaggeration to say, in the year 1898, that the French, if they dared, would gladly wreck--as, in the days of Samuel Levi, the Spaniards wrecked Levi's palace and all the great Jewish houses of the Toledan ghetto--the Jewish centre, if the Jews still congregated in any particular part of Paris. It is not unjust to say that it is Jewish gold, Jewish power, Jewish subtlety and intelligence that inspire to-day, as then, this bitter and vindictive hate. For if the Jews remained poor, insignificant, ignorant, they would never have suffered persecution, which is proof sufficient that the war is rather one of race than of religion, rather one of base and brutal envy [Illustration: DETAIL OF ORNAMENT, EL TRANSITO] on the Christian side than of anything resembling a religious crusade. In all periods of its history, Toledo was subject to these sudden and inexplicable outbursts against the Jews, in spite of the historic legend that Toledo was first peopled and created by the Jews sent adrift by Nebuchadnezzar--a legend that should have entitled the unfortunates to regard themselves as at home upon her seven hills. Not so at any time. First the Carthaginians, then the Romans, then the Arians, the Christians, the Saracens, again, the Christians. Hideous persecution, continually and intermittently, of the chosen people, the followers of Moses and the prophets, the brethren of Christ, the apostles and Mary! One Toledan law against the Jews was a righteous one: the money-lenders were not allowed to exceed thirty-five per cent. on monies lent. Many a beggared scamp and spendthrift to-day would be the better off if such a law in usury had always existed. But there was no inducement to conversion, for the converted Jew was never recognised by his adopted brethren. He always wore a piece of coloured stuff on his shoulder as the _señal de Judio_. The Inquisition started the final and worst persecution of all, and the Catholic Isabel publicly banished them from the kingdom. Abhorrence of the race has never died, never even diminished, in the Peninsula. A grandee once married the granddaughter of a converted Jew, and, even a hundred and fifty years later, his descendants could not hope to marry into their own rank. He might have hoped for pardon and oblivion if he had married a ballet-dancer or a courtesan. In the Cathedral, a host is preserved, supposed to have been traversed by a Jewish spear which pierced it in three places, the sacrilege having taken place in Holland. The legend runs that the light from the holes was so intense that the Jew instantly became converted. There is also a legend of a highroad cross near the town having been struck by a Jewish sword, bleeding humanly as it fell upon the sacrilegious slayer, the drops of blood as he carried it home revealing to the Toledans his crime, which was naturally the motive of a fresh persecution of the race. So that God, finding the Christians too pacific and lukewarm, used this dumb instrument of painted wood to provoke an onslaught, and redden the streets of Toledo with Hebrew blood. These things you must read seriously when you take to study of the Spanish historians. So they explain to you the legend of the Cathedral gate, the _Puerta del Niño perdido_. In 1490, a Jew of Quintana went to Toledo to witness the edifying sight of an _auto-da-fé_. He stood on the brilliant and thronged little Zocodover, and watched the sombre flare of the torches, listened to the lugubrious chants. Turning to a neighbour, he exclaimed: "I know something that will drive these people wild, and will, at the same time, proclaim the triumph of the law of Moses." He appointed a meeting with his neighbour at Tembleque, and settled to carry off a child of three or four. He stole the child from Toledo, and brought it to the village of La Guardia. At Passiontide, they met at a grotto outside La Guardia, and submitted the baby to a repetition of the insults and outrages Christ had endured; then lanced him, tore out his heart, and buried the little body. The child's mother was blind, and at this instant miraculously recovered her sight. Not content with this, they bribed a recently converted Jew, Juan Gomez, to steal a host, paying him thirty reals for the sacrilege, and sent him off with the child's heart to Zamora. Thus the crime was traced to Juan Gomez, who, opening his prayer-book in the cathedral of Avila, on his return, attracted attention by the wonderful projection of bright rays from the leaves. He was instantly seized, examined, papers were found on him, and he and the gang of Jewish torturers of babies were burnt by the Inquisition. This charming little temple was built for Levi by the Jew, D. Meir Abdeli, a rabbi to whom an elaborate Hebrew inscription on one wall does honour as a man of transcendent virtue. The architecture is _Morisco_. Slowly the restorers are unveiling the admirably-wrought stucco walls, where the sculpture is as fine and delicate as the most exquisite lace, and has lain for centuries under a degrading coat of whitewash. You must mount the high scaffolding with lighted wax or lamp, and here you may examine at your leisure the inexhaustible delights of the Moorish-Andalusian style in its most florid period. The prodigality of ornament is as amazing as the Gothic wealth of sculpture of San Juan de los Reyes, but I confess this pleases far more. It is much more charming, more fairy-like, with that delicately-sensual note which forms the eternal witchery of the East. The friezes are magnificent, and nothing could be prettier than the effect of the semi-horseshoe windows and their frail pillars and arches. Above the famous Hebrew inscriptions, quotations from the Psalms mostly, run a row of arches, highly decorated, resting on slim columns fancifully wrought. Here the extreme elegance of design and finish touches upon preciosity. The Moorish windows are most lovely, perfect little poems in stone, of a marvellous fragility and grace. From their dainty lines and traceries, you look in stupor up at the massive _artesonado_ ceiling, with its geometrical figures, its infinitude of design carven in heavy wood--blurred, it is true, and brutally defaced by time and neglect. Here and there the woodwork is discoloured, here and there hopelessly degraded; but some notion of its pristine magnificence may be gathered even yet. _El Transito_ was seized by Isabel the Catholic, on her expulsion of the Jews from her kingdom, and handed over to the Knights of Calatrava, whose arms are stamped on every corner of the temple. The Knights did what every other religious body in all ages and lands has done on taking possession of the temple of the dethroned gods. They marred the harmony of Eastern architecture by the erection of Christian altars, less flagrantly, of course, than the great Mosque of Cordova was marred. But still the false note is there: it greets us with singular bad taste in the fifteenth century retablo, in a _plateresca_ altar, in mediocre sixteenth century paintings that represent scenes from the New Testament, oddly unsuitable to the walls of a synagogue, and out of keeping with the long Hebrew inscriptions in relief above the frieze. Some of these meritless canvases are attributed to John of Burgundy. There is a choir neither decorative nor impressive, and a plateresca door, a tolerable specimen of that Spanish architecture. These are mere blots upon a graceful whole. The Jews under Moorish influence, built this lovely little temple, and its spirit, its essence, its genius, remain Jewish after more than four centuries of dispossession. The origin of the name _Santa Maria la Blanca_ dates from the fourth century, when Our Lady, in a miraculous vision, is said to have chosen the spot for the erection of a church in her honour, which was covered with snow. Pope Liberius then ordered the church to be built and consecrated to the White Lady--_Nuestra Señora la Blanca_. Later, the church became the property of the Jews, who rebuilt above its ruins the imposing synagogue we see to-day, in the Moorish ninth century style. Unhappily for them St Vicente Ferrer, a mediaeval fanatic who to-day would be called a demagogue, came to Toledo in 1405, on his famous crusade against the unfortunate race. You may see the highly sculptured pulpit half Moorish, half Gothic, he preached his frantic sermons from to the inflammatory Toledans in the little church of Santiago below the Puerta del Sol, now closed up with a wooden statue of the saint in the middle, holding in one hand a wooden crucifix, and flourishing the other in exhortation to the populace to destruction and cruelty. The Man of Sorrow, who preached peace and goodwill to all men, love of enemies, forgiveness of injuries, himself a Jew, son of a Jewess, is held up to excite the furious passions of the mob, to urge them to crime and infamous injustice. How much fatal misery humanity in all ages, even in our own, might have been spared by the prevalence of so small a quality as a sense of humour! The Valencian saint himself died in bleak far-off Vannes, in Brittany. But there was no humour then in grim and blood-saturated Toledo. The mob rushed from the church to the synagogue, tore the obnoxious Jews limb from limb, thrust them into the streets and the highways, robbed, tortured, wounded, took possession of their beautiful temple, sacked their houses, carried off their money-bags, (naturally), hooted, hissed, and kicked them precisely as it would to-day in Paris, for all our enlightenment and progress, if it dared. All this in the pacific name of Christ! Centuries after the synagogue became a Magdalen's Asylum, under Cardinal Siliceo, until 1791, when it was converted into a barrack and military stores. It was only rescued from this ignoble use thirty years ago, and restored by public subscription. Nothing could be more miserable than the exterior of _Santa Maria la Blanca_; nothing more squalid than its surroundings. A deserted quarter, mean little laneways, towzled babies, unfortunate beggars. "As soon as you descend the steps that lead to it," writes Quadrado, "you are arrested by the surprise of this singular mingling of magnificence and nakedness, of capricious strangeness of lines, the exquisite taste of the ornaments; you fancy yourself transported to a fantastic pagoda. The glance is lost in the midst of this forest of great octagonal pillars, which from the point of view of proportion, lack half of their height. They are seven in a line, forming five naves, and holding Moorish arches of a bold curve. The capitals in stucco are of different forms, composed of branches, of leaves and garlands, mixed with fir-cones, reminiscences of the old Byzantine style. Varied ornaments, arabesques, lovely rose windows along with arches, and prominent above the central nave a frieze in slight relief, formed of lines crosswise and intermingling, and even still of a remarkable precision and purity. No dome, not even a ceiling; a roof of wood, of miserable aspect, descending from the height of the central nave to the two lateral extremities, gives to the whole edifice an appearance of ruin and abandonment." The restorers, with customary clumsiness, have coated the whole temple in plaster, like the cloisters of San Juan de los Reyes, with a result almost facetious, taking into consideration the name of the building. It is now white with a sorry vengeance. The ceiling is said to have been made from beams of the cedars of Lebanon, and the soil the synagogue is built upon to have been brought from Mount Zion. The Moorish and Byzantine style mingle most artistically, with the accumulated delicate and artistic effects of both and the enchanting azulejos, here of an admirable beauty of colour and design; but arabesque, tiles and horse-shoe arches are sadly out of harmony with the Gothic altars of the chancel. One finely sculptured, is supposed to be by Berruguete or one of his pupils. Elsewhere it would show to better advantage than here. Curious detail, the wells may still be seen where the Jews and Jewesses performed their ablutions. [Illustration: SANTA MARIA LA BLANCA] For grace and a certain note of distinction and wealth in its beauty, _Santa Maria la Blanca_ cannot compare with _El Transito_, which in the days of its splendour, must have been a gem of the most delicate perfection. But as a religious temple, as the expression of solemn worship rooted in the strange and mysterious East, the former is by far the more imposing, the more earnest and harmonious. Prayer in the _Transito_ seems a matter of graceful and artistic dilletantism; here it appears a great racial cry of the soul. CHAPTER IX _Vanished Palaces_ Coming out from the station, instead of taking the road up to the town, you may cross the fields, and thus into the famous _Huerta del Rey_, where old Arabian splendours and romance once were castled in the legendary palace of Galiana. Now alas! beauty and legend in disgraceful abandonment. All this rich land of the Vega is the property of the ex-Empress of the French, Doña Eugenia de Guzman and Condesa de Teba. To bear a glorious name (beside which the title of French Empress is but a trumpery decoration) and inherit land so crowded with historic interests, inherit above all the ruins of a palace of fairyland, and treat her inheritance as the Empress Eugenie has done, is adequately to explain the reason of Spain's irretrievable decadence and slow death. The palace of legend is let out in miserable tenements to muleteers and peasants, who little heed the damage done to wrought Arabian wall and ceiling by their smoky lamps, wood fires in unventilated chambers, by beasts and meal-bags housed in a princess's boudoir, in a dismantled reception chamber. The Empress Eugenie may receive a few pesetas quarterly for this desecration, and we lose a few hours of inestimable musing, while the entire world is the poorer by a dainty monument the less. Even thirty years ago the palace of Galiana was still a constructable dream. The lovely staircase was half preserved, the lace-work was less and less obliterated, the arches still undegraded. But Mlle. de Montijo, seated afar on a foreign throne, was too busy with intrigues destined to ruin France less permanently than her neglect of property she never visits has ruined an historic poem. Calderon, in his drama, _Cado uno por se_, speaks of this palace, and its heroine has been immortalised by Moratin in verses forever quoted: "Galiana de Toledo Muy hermosa y maravilla! La Mora la mas celebrada De toda la Moreria. Boca de claveles rojas, Alto pecho que palpita, Frente eburnea que adorno Oro flamante de Tyras."[20] The story runs that Galafre, the kingling of Toledo, under the great Khalif of Cordova, Abd-er-Rahman I., built a wonder of human dwelling for his beautiful and bewitching daughter, the infanta Galiana. Part of the palace already existed in the eighth century, and was Visigothic. To this he added the ineffaceable Moorish note, the horse-shoe arches, the ajimez windows, still admirably defined despite decay, the Moorish trickery of brickwood, the arabesques and tiled roofs and the square towers of the East. To-day we can trace the ajimez windows, the horse-shoe arches, and even the beautiful arabesques of the walls are faintly discernible through their deplorable coating of smoke-stain. But within the past thirty years the exquisite tiled roof of the tower has disappeared, along with the lovely staircase. The degradation of the Moorish patio, which must have been a thing divine, leaves us in our vulgar modern days, stupefied by man's indifference to the eternal eloquence of beauty. The mystery of this Arabian genius is forever sealed. Nothing we can strive, nothing we can hope to do, will reveal it to us, will unlock the doors of an enchanted past. Whence it sprung is just as inexplicable to us as how it vanished, but alas! vanished it is like the mysterious city of enchantment and of a civilisation that since has never been equalled--the outlying town of Cordova, built by a mighty Moorish emperor in honour of a loved wife, and but a memory of superlative witchery and delight. In those days the waters of the Tagus ran high, and water here was abundant. The Moors, those subtle hydraulists, alone possessed the secret of drawing from river and well their full value, and irrigating plentifully a thirsty land. To this day Valencia is a garden of flowers and an orchard of fruit, because the Moors passed by there. Of all this Toledan Vega they made a paradise of leaf and bloom and rill. It sparkled and scented the air afar, and such was the over-powering beauty of the gardens of Galiana that Lozano, in his _Reyes Nuevos_, forgets that he is writing of the nameless one, and bursts into high-phrased enthusiasm. One would think the learned doctor of the church was describing the conventional heaven of his imagination. The river then flowed further inward than it does now, and ran along one side of the palace, forming a broad moat. The gardens were a spiced and many-hued paradise, and the palace a wonder of terraces and arches, with halls of arabesques and Moorish inscriptions, pillared patios and dainty boudoirs, with broad-beamed ceilings. Imagination easily fills in all the omitted details of silks and couches, and marble and silver and gold, of flowing water and music, of musked solitude and towered reverie, of the glamour of guarded romance peeping through high arched windows over the silence of the flowery Vega, and adown the quiet course of the curved Tagus. No wonder legend makes Charlemagne, from the blighting disasters of Roncevalles, pass down to this magic spot to fall enamoured of the lovely Galiana, _la Mora la mas celebrada de toda la Moreria_, and on her behalf challenge the Moorish prince Bradamante, who persecuted her with his addresses, cut off his head in a single-handed encounter, and carry away to France the exquisite creature, when she was baptised, and reigned picturesquely over a grateful and admiring France. Spanish legend is not awed by Charlemagne's fame. Either it blows his armies to pieces at Roncevalles, or it lures him beyond the Guadarrama, like a mere knight errant in the protection of damsels, caught by ordinary love, and riveted to its chain. Under Castillian rule, the Palace of Galiana became the property of the Guzmans, whose arms may be seen upon its dismantled front, and who, like most Spaniards, have so ill appreciated a priceless inheritance. One of the most famous attractions of this palace in olden times was the _clepsydras_, or water-clocks, made by the celebrated astronomer, Abou-l'-Casem, Abdo-er-Rahman, better known as Az-Zarcal. In a description of Toledo a curious Arabian document gives us a quaintly vague idea of these clepsydras, or ponds, whose waters rose and fell with the moon. "One of the greatest towns of Spain is Toledo, and Toledo is a large and well-populated city. On all sides it is washed by a splendid river called the Tagus.... Among the rare and notable things of Toledo is that wheat may be kept more than seventy years without rotting, which is a great advantage, as all the land abounds in grain and seed of all kinds. But what is still more marvellous and surprising in Toledo, and what we believe no other inhabited town of all the world has anything to equal, are some clepsydras or water-clocks. It is said that Az-Zarcal, hearing of a certain talisman, which is in the city of Arin, of Eastern India, and which Masudi says shows the hours by means of _aspas_ or hands, from the time the sun rises till it sets, determined to fabricate an artifice by means of which people could know the hour of day or night, and calculate the day of the moon. He made two great ponds in a house on the bank of the Tagus, not far from the gate of the tanners, making them so that they should be filled with water or emptied according to the rise and fall of the moon." We are told that the movements of these clepsydras were thus regulated, that as soon as the moon became visible by means of invisible conducts, the waters began to flow into the ponds, and by day-rise the ponds were filled four-sevenths. At night another seventh was added, so that by day or night the ponds continued to increase in water a seventh every twenty-four hours, and were quite full by the time the moon was full. On the 14th of the month, when the moon began to fall, the ponds fell too in like proportion. On the 21st of the month they were half empty, and on the 29th completely so. King Alfonso the Learned, desiring to master the secret of these clepsydras, sent one of his bungling astronomers to examine them, which he did so well, that he broke the delicate machinery, and the Moors, to comfort their wounded pride in the loss of so unique a Moorish monument, called the bungler a Jew, one Houayn-Ben-Rabia. Another palace in ruins belonging to the ex-Empress of the French is all that remains to-day of the magnificent _Casa de Vargas_. It was built by the celebrated architect, Juan de Herrera, and Antonio Ponz describes it at length as one of the architectural splendours of Toledo, as late as the War of Independence, when Bonaparte's soldiers laid it waste with shot and shell. "The façade," writes Ponz, "is perfect Doric, of exquisite marble, with fluted columns on either side, and the pedestals have military emblems in bas-relief. The frieze consists of helmets, heads of bulls and goblets. The coat-of-arms above the cornice is most beautiful, and the women's forms seated on each side are life-size. Nothing could be finer than the details as well as the whole of this façade, and for sure it is the most serious, the most lovely, and most finished of all I have seen in Toledo. You enter a spacious courtyard, with lofty galleries running round it, above and below, the lower gallery sustained by Doric pillars, and by the upper Ionic columns. The staircase is truly regal, and likewise the various inner chambers. They contain different chimney-pieces, ornamented with graceful fancies, executed in bas-relief; and thus in the lower quarters as in the principal, are other galleries with columns like those of the courtyard, with delicious views of the meadows and the Tagus." Nothing of all this remains but a mere unsightly ruin called the _Casa de la Direccion_, the property of the Counts of Mora. The list of these vanished palaces of Toledo is a long one, and is the subject of most melancholy musing. In the old forsaken quarter once known as the _Juderia_, the prosperous and magnificent ghetto of mediaeval Toledo, where the Transito, Samuel Levi's synagogue, stands, was the great palace of the Villenas. Henry of Aragon, lord of Villena, was a famous figure in those remote ages. Of royal blood, uncle of King Juan II., he was an erudite scholar, a mathematician, a man of science in advance of his times, a splendid prince, a collector of books, the possessor of a library as famous as Mendoza's, a wizard, a man of evil odour, of the black craft, who was gravely charged with putting his enemies alive into bottles, and of holding intercourse with the Evil One. All his valuable library, and in special his own manuscript tomes, for he was an indefatigable writer, were publicly burnt at Madrid by order of Fray Lope Barrientos, a Dominican, on the solemn accusation of witchcraft. Juan de Mena, in his celebrated _coplas_, protested against ecclesiastical iniquity, and lifted his voice in the learned prince's glory: "Aquel que tu ves estar contemplando En el movimento de tantas estrellas, La fuerza, la obra, el orden de aquellas Que mide los cursos de cómo, y de quando, Y ovo noticia filosofando Del movedor, y de los comovidos, De fuego, de razos, de son de tronidos, Y supo las causas del mundo velando: "Aquel claro padre, aquel dulce fuente, Aquel que en el Castalo monte resuena Es don Enrique, Señor de Villena, Honra de España, y del siglo presente. O inclito sabio, autor muy sciente, Otra y aun otra vegada te lloro, Porque Castilla perdio tal tesoro No conveido delante la gente. "Perdio los tus libros sin sea conveidos Y como en exeginas le fueron ya luego, Unos metidos al avido fuego, Y otros sin orden no bien repartidos. Cierto en Atenas los libros fingidos Que de Protagoras se reprobaron Con armonia mejor se quemaron Cuando el senado le fueron leidos." The quantity of subterranean chambers and passages of this immense palace were supposed to have been used by Don Enrique for his parliaments of witches and wizards, and his awful meetings with the Horned One and his sulphureous satellites. Afterwards the palace fell into the hands of Samuel Levi, Pedro the Cruel's treasurer, the wealthy Jew who built the Transito close by. Then the Master of Santiago's haunts of witchcraft were used as Levi's treasury, until Pedro, in want of money, seized his treasurer's person, and the town sacked his palace. Henry IV. afterwards gave the palace to his minion, Juan Pacheco, with the titles of Duke of Escalona and Marquis of Villena. Neither title nor palace now exist. In a miserable part of the town, high up above the river, you may see a few broken arches and formless vaults and great blocks of stone. That is all. It was destroyed by fire in the reign of Charles Quint under circumstances of exceptional and romantic interest. Charles appointed the Casa de Villena as the residence of the great Constable of France, the treacherous Bourbon. The second Duke of Escalona, indignant at the thought that the French traitor should cross the threshold of his house, informed his sovereign that a house so polluted should prove the grave of such an insult to his family, and threatened to burn it in the event of the Constable's visit. Charles never believed in such an extravagant menace, and the Constable arrived. Diego Lopez de Pacheco, with all his family and servants, left Toledo for ever, and in a few days the stained house was burned to the ground as henceforth unworthy the habitation of honest men. In the little plaza of Santa Isabel there is another, supposed to have been one of the palaces of King Pedro, now the property of the Duke of Frias. One of the half-obliterated Arabian inscriptions has been traced by the late D. Pascual de Gallangos as meaning: "Lasting prosperity and perpetual glory to the master of this edifice." There are many Moorish [Illustration: REMAINS OF PALACE SAID TO BE THAT OF DON PEDRO EL CRUEL] traces about it, the highly decorated wall-work, the horse-shoe arches and fine relief. Of the palace of the Trastarmares little now remains but the door with the big Toledan nails. Somewhere about here was the house Hernan Cortes was married from, when the bride's page stabbed himself at her feet as the procession left the courtyard for the church. I cannot indicate the precise spot, as I was shown it vaguely one lovely moonlit night, when Toledo takes on its spectral and fantastic aspect of white shadow-worked dream, a thing of elusive radiance, wherein reality is lost in mysterious beauty. One walks knee-deep in the sadness and enchantment of "old, unhappy, far-off things," and the petulant little page, stabbing himself in the folds of the bride's white satin, as she crosses the threshold of her father's house, is just the kind of picture one is prompted to evoke. Alas, and alas! if we were only so fortunate as to possess some clue by which we could hope to evoke the bride's face, some faint perfumed trace of Toledan dame and damsel of those days. But the Toledan school of painters has only left us an interminable gallery of cavaliers, proud austere heads, with the mild, cold and implacable regard of Spain. Of poetry, of womanhood, of soft sensuous charm, not a hint. The exquisite Maria de Padilla, with her little white visage and passionate, sad eyes, is only a name now; but such was her gentle sorcery that she is still a dominating memory. We cling to her the more as she is the single woman's form that floats above this past of hard-featured and imperious knights, who ever jostled and fought in these murderous streets and lanes, conspired, rebelled and fashioned the roughest and strangest history written. Near Santa Ursula is the façade of the famous house of the Toledos. The founder of this great family, since known in history as the Dukes of Alva, was a member of the Imperial house of Paleologus, Pedro, a Byzantine prince of the days of Gothic rule. His immediate descendants were the Illans; Stephen Illan, for whom was built the beautiful Casa de Mesa, and whose portrait on horseback may be seen in the Cathedral, behind the hideous _Trasparente_, was one of the greatest figures of mediaeval Toledo, great citizen, unruly noble, defender of the town, and lord of the people. It was after his day that the family was honoured with the significant private name of Toledo, the present family name of the house of Alva. The palace of the Toledos was like that of Villena, an immense edifice covering all the square. Now only the façade remains as a triumphal assertion of vanished splendour; a disfigured Gothic porch and a couple of ajimez windows in the north wall in front of Santa Ursula. Time has laid a heavy hand on the arches, the slim columns, the cornices, the shields, the stone sculptures and friezes; but the Latin inscription is still visible: _Dominus custodiat introitum tuum et exitum tuum_ _Ex hox nunc et usque in sæculum._ We need only look at the single chamber of the _Casa de Mesa_ to reconstruct the interior of this dismantled palace, its exquisite Moorish walls and azulejos or tile-work, its arches, ajimez windows and lofty galleries, its sumptuous _artesonado_ ceilings. The house itself began to decline with the disgrace of the great Duke of Alva, whom Philip struck so brutally on the trivial pretext of his son's love affairs. Don Fadique, the heir of the house of the Toledos, fell in love with the daughter of the Guzmans, the unfortunate Magdalena. They became engaged without Philip's permission, and instantly both were imprisoned, Don Fadique at Medina del Campo, Magdalena in the Convent of Santa Fé at Toledo (also known as Santiago). On his release, the Duke of Alva decided to marry Don Fadique to his cousin, Maria de Toledo. The King feigned to approve of the marriage, and afterwards made it a pretext of persecution. Magdalena de Guzman, from her conventual retreat, was summoned to lay her claim to Don Fadique's hand; the Duke and Duchess of Alva were exiled, and Don Fadique and his bride were literally ruined. The Toledos once humiliated, Magdalena de Guzman was ordered back to her convent and to silence, Philip's minister advising her to write no more letters to the King. "What would you do at Court?" he asks Philip's unhappy victim, who, at a king's extraordinary caprice, had wasted twelve years in the cloisters. "You are too young to be a duenna, too old to be a maid of honour. Since you have spent twelve years in the convent, stay there altogether." And to the King he writes: "May God give her good sense. One can't make a step without finding a letter from her." A melancholy time for youth and romance, when a vicious and sour-tempered old king and his corrupt ministers pulled the strings that made its amiable puppets dance. A man with the care of the two Spains, the Netherlands, and all the intrigues of Europe, finds time to glance down at Toledo, and enter into miserable battle with innocent young hearts, mar and make marriages for their doom! The palace of Fuensalida, the property of the Duke of Frias, never seems to have been an edifice of any particular architectural claim. All history records of it is the fact that Charles Quint's wife, the Empress Isabel, died here while Charles was building the Alcázar for her reception. The house was built by Lopez de Ayala early in the fifteenth century, whose tomb may be admired in the Church of San Pedro Martir. The origin of the famous _Casa de las Tornerias_ is disputed. Some regard it as an ancient mosque, because of its emphatic mark of Saracen architecture, contemporaneous with that of the little mosque, _El Cristo de la Luz_. The whole is now too hopelessly built round with vulgar stone and too terribly dilapidated and mutilated for a proper estimate to be formed of its earliest origin and form. It is still, and must always be, mere matter of conjecture whether it was originally built for a mesquita or a Moorish palace. [Illustration: CASA FUENSALIDA] In the Calle del Barco, which runs from the Cathedral down by a breakneck slant to the river (here you can take the ferry for Our Lady _del Valle_) is the Casa de Munarriz, so called from a canon who a century ago dwelt there a full hundred years. In the days of Toledo's greatness it was a fine mansion of some importance with double galleries round the immense courtyard, a handsome staircase of beautifully wrought stone, each storey supported by sixteen arches and thirty-two delicate marble columns with graceful capitals, shields, and sculptured subjects in frieze. The windows are half Arabian, and the emblazoned doorway, between its huge columns, is most imposing. Here and there quantities of beautifully wrought façades speak eloquently of departed days, but it is not possible now to discover the forgotten history of these signs of degraded palaces. The Gothic ornamentation will guide you as to date, or mayhap an exquisitely carven Moorish inscription in the wood-work of a half-ruined wall. Ponz called Toledo the city of fine inscriptions, and Latin and Moorish inscriptions everywhere abound. Here is one still quite distinct in the old House of the Templars, near San Miguel: "Blessings come from God. Let us adore Him. Power is God's the only one. Abundance, wealth, and perfect security assist the master of this house. Power is God's. Let God's blessing complete it. God is eternal. His is power. Blessing." Round these walls are verses from the Koran. In close neighbourhood were two historic and important palaces, that of Juan de Padilla, which occupied the whole ugly square to-day of his name, and down the steps which lead to it by a narrow street, the palace of Garcilaso de la Vega. To-day we have no means of forming the faintest notion of what these famous houses were like. Juan de Padilla's was razed to the ground by order of Charles Quint after the unfortunate hero's execution. We judge it to have been large from the size of the empty square it stood upon above the Puerta del Cambron, commanding a full view of the Vega and the river; and necessarily splendid from the fact that Isabel and Fernando occupied it as guests at the time of their daughter's marriage with the King of Portugal. Garcilaso de la Vega's mansion is now a mere mud wall sheltering several tenement houses. Here the King of Portugal stayed, and with royal guests in such close vicinity, it is easy to imagine the picturesque hum of life in this now silent and insignificant quarter four centuries ago. Alas! not a stone, not a page to help us to reconstrue one bright scene, to relive one vivid hour. Humble walls below the pretty modern little garden of the Miradero, as you approach from the Puente de Alcántara, indicate where Gerardo Lobo, _el Capitan Coplero_, so nick-named by Philip V. to avenge a satire on the French, lived and wrote _El Triunfo de las Mugeres_, and in the Calle del Refugo, near the hospital of that name, dwelt the poet Moreto. I have left for the last the two most important remains of mudejar palaces in Toledo: the Casa de Mesa, the mansion of Estevan de Illan, and the _Taller del Moro_, supposed to have been the palace where the terrible massacre of the _Noche Toledana_ took place. All that remains of the Casa de Mesa is a single chamber with a charming little boudoir at the top. It is Granadine-Arabian style, highly and marvellously ornamented; quite the most beautiful specimen of mudejar architecture of Toledo. The chamber is sixty feet by twenty-two, and thirty-six in height, and every detail of its delicate and complicated Moorish decoration is a delight. One hardly knows what to marvel most at, the fineness or the extraordinary wealth of relief upon the walls, which is the most enchanting kind of lace-work imaginable. Fairies seem to have wrought it, and its perfection even to-day is nothing less than a mystery and a miracle. And then the arches, the foliage, the inscriptions, the lovely ajimez windows, the friezes and gorgeous _artesonado_ ceilings of chamber and boudoir, stellar-shaped to recall the stars of heaven. Here are points of exclamation and pain enough to think that the secret of so much beauty is lost to us forever. The Christian arms everywhere on the azulejo border [Illustration: MOORISH WINDOW IN CASA DE MESA] demonstrate that the house was built after the Christian Conquest by Moorish builders, but one may ask oneself, was the rest of the mansion in keeping with this glorious chamber? Who designed it, wrought it? What sort of life was lived therein? What the fashion of the garments that swept it, the dreams dreamed within its fabulous walls? Why should this single jewel remain in a sordid setting, and nothing to tell us how the rest came to vanish, why this alone was preserved? All we know is that Cardinal Siliceo turned the house into a college for young ladies in the sixteenth century, and placed his own arms above the exquisite ajimez window between the chamber and the boudoir, and the chamber served the Carmelites as a chapel for many years. The _Taller del Moro_ is probably earlier by four centuries than the _Casa de Mesa_. Here we have the influence of the Cordovese-Arabian architecture, of an art less delicate and fairy-like than the Granadine-Arabian. There is every reason to believe that this palace was built after the Gothic downfall for a Saracen magnate. The street was called the Street of the Moor to prove that an illustrious Moor dwelt there, and its resemblance to the Alcázar of Sevilla indicates that the owner was in every probability a ruler of some kind, a governor or viceroy. It may be on this slight ground that it has been hinted it was here all the nobles of Toledo were invited to a banquet to meet the Khalif's son, and as each one entered the dusky garden, his head, with a single stroke, was sent rolling into the ditch near the gate. There is nothing now about it to bear out this shuddering suggestion. The long Moorish chamber is turned into a vulgar workshop. The wooden door from the street opens into a squalid yard, with carts and wheelbarrows about, and placid Christians, for a couple of pence, receive you without any hint of knife or blood, or lugubrious ditch. Not even the ghost of a turbaned Moor to disturb your musing as you stand in the degraded workshop, where the light is dim, and vex your soul with mutterings against the damp and smoke. The chamber is a hundred feet long by twenty-four. It is of a singularly rich and splendid design, with Moorish inscriptions running along the walls, with delicate friezes, and all the Oriental luxury of red and gold and blue. The artesonado ceiling is superb, and it requires no very violent effort of imagination to evoke a vague picture of this banqueting hall in the days of Moorish revelry, when passion and policy wrapped themselves in the magic charm of colour, and mere civilisation was an inexhaustible enchantment, a pure and indolent delight. The _Corral_ of Don Diego is an extensive courtyard near the church of the Magdalena, said to have been the property called the _Barrio del Rey_, which Alfonso, after the Conquest, gave to Don Pedro Paleologus, who came to Toledo to fight the Moor, and remained to found the great house of the Toledos. The arms of the Toledos may still be seen above the gates, and Henry of Trastamare, we are told, bestowed the palace upon his auxiliary, Bertrand de Guesclin, with the title of Trastamare, which has since fallen to the Duke of Montemar. Nothing now remains of the palace but the courtyard, and a magnificent Moorish archway of horse-shoe shape, and arabesques recalling the style of the Alcázar of Seville, but we may gather some notion of its size and importance from the ruin. There are indications miserably faint and buried away under plaster, that the palace was richly ornamented in the mudejar style. Inscriptions, Moorish arches, and ajimez windows are dimly discoverable beneath the broken plaster-work and the primitive roughness of modern repairs. An impression of splendid halls and chambers, of delicately ornamented Moorish alcoves and boudoirs and inscriptions, of artesonado ceilings and emblazoned doors, is seized under the frost of neglect, through the mildew of centuries, the wood-work, design, and gilt of the octagonal ceilings now almost hopelessly obliterated, and the friezes mere shapeless dilapidation. The Castillo de San Servando or Cervantes, just outside the Bridge of Alcántara, is an impressive looking ruin, that seems mysteriously to have become inter-penetrated with the burnt and arid tones of the landscape. It has no historic or architectural interest whatever, is not even beautiful, but impresses the eye in its decay, with its rough, battlemented, and scarred visage, the ancient note of its barbican and square rude towers. It is indubitably Mozarabe, built by the Moors as a fortress, and employed as such by Alfonso after the Conquest. Calderon makes mention of it in _Cado uno por se_, and in the civil war of Pedro and Henry of Trastamare, having been abandoned by the Knights Templars, whose property it had become, it resumed its use as a strong place. The Archbishop Tenorio ordered its repair, and many of the arches and vaults date from this period. Tramps now sleep comfortably in its shadow, and scare you in your moonlit walks by midnight. Though the Alcázar can by no means be described as a _vanished_ palace, since it is the most substantial and dominating feature of the town, as an illusion it may be classed with these. A wide pathway leads to it from the Zocodover. It was twice burnt, and now all that remains of it are the imposing facades, the three towers, the glorious patio, large enough to hold an army, and the magnificent staircase, up which an army might march abreast. It stands upon the ruins of Wamba's walls, in full command of the city, and in Roman days was the prison where St Leocadia suffered martyrdom. Under Alfonso VI. it was a strong fortress, guarded by the Cid. Don Alvaro de Luna first, and the Catholic kings afterwards, had some hand in adorning it, but Charles Quint, designing to reside in Toledo, may be said to have rebuilt it altogether. He gave the commission to the best Spanish architects of the century--Covarrubias, Vergara, Villalpando, Jaspar de Vega, Gonzalez de Lara, and the great Herrera, with a host [Illustration: THE CASTLE OF SAN SERVANDO] of minor artists. He built it for the empress, who, like himself, died before it was finished. Philip II. sent to Brussels, to London and Italy, in search of other artists to help to complete the colossal edifice, and it stood for long the most splendid palace of Spain. Came Staremberg and his troops in 1710, who turned it into a barrack, burnt the superb woodwork as fuel, broke the windows, tore down the _artesonado_ ceilings, the carved doors, and set fire to the palace on leaving it. Spain has never been fortunate in her allies--English, French, or Austrian; they invariably found their entertainment in spreading ruin among her grandeurs. Carlos III. attempted to restore the Alcázar, but the French then came in 1810 and set fire to it again. The fire lasted three days, and now only the walls remain. The regal staircase, surely the widest of the world, ends in the void. You are shown the window at which the unfortunate Blanche sat in her solitary misery, but there are no walls to indicate the size of the chamber. You can see the lovely view from the window by picking your way across the scaffolding, but there is nothing else to see. For years the restorers have been busy with the roof of the galleries that run round the immense patio, only the _artesonado_ will be reproduced in iron instead of wood, and the imitation is good. It may be completed, at the rate of modern work in Spain, in a couple of hundred years. The façade is _plateresca_, sober, and cold. Indeed, I cannot say that there is anything about this palace except its immensity calculated to provoke admiration. It towers imperiously above the town, crowded beneath it--a gigantic illusion; substantial without, void within; dreary and featureless in all its futile ostentation of measureless space. CHAPTER X _Minor Churches, Hospitals, and Convents_ To write of all the churches and convents of Toledo would be to burthen the reader with a needless and confusing fatigue. It is enough to know that the city was pre-eminently a hieratic centre to understand that both were once innumerable. To-day they are still too many to remember and certainly more than are worth visiting. Some, like San José, are of no architectural value whatever, only known as a poor little hall which contains some of El Greco's finest pictures. The fame of others, like San Roman, rests upon their mudejar towers, which give so quaint and individual an air to the general aspect of Toledo from the hills or the river. Others again, like San Tomé, combine both attractions in a pure mudejar tower and El Greco's most wonderful masterpiece, the Burial of Count Ruiz de Orgaz, as well as Alonzo Cano's Prophet Elia in sculptured wood, a marvellous specimen of Spanish wood-sculpture. Of _Santo Domingo el Antiguo_ nothing here need be said since I have already written about it in my chapter on El Greco. Perhaps one of the finest of the minor churches is San Andrès. It was transformed after the conquest by order of Alonso VI. from a mosque into a Christian church as the remains of Moorish inscriptions as late as the sixteenth century would indicate. In the lateral nave above the transept there [Illustration: SAN TOMÉ] are still traces of Arabian architecture in the vaults and stucco ornamentation of the same period. But the general appearance of the edifice is more modern, of a sober Gothic style, less highly decorated, but to my thinking more graceful in form than San Juan de los Reyes. The three long naves appear to be of a more recent date than the transept and _capilla major_. The pillars that sustain the dome are extremely graceful, and there is a bold freshness about the arches between that give the whole an air of distinction which none of the other minor churches of Toledo possess. The general effect is delightfully harmonious. In each of the chapels of the aisles there is something to examine. The founder of the restored temple, as the long inscription in Gothic letters along the friezes of the transept tells us, was Francisco de Rojas, commendador and ambassador at the court of Maximilian I., buried here in 1523. The high altar is of wrought wood of the sixteenth century, with paintings of that period of some merit. The shafts of the transept are in excellent taste, and on one of the lateral altars, under the retablo of painted wood, is a little sculptured Mater Dolorosa by an unknown artist, exquisitely touching and life-like. It has the beauty of a profound and tremulous sensibility and a vivid sweetness that reminded me of a lovely St Scholastica of painted wood by Pereira I saw at Santiago de Compostello, but the Spanish painter who accompanied me to San Andrès assures me that it is not a Pereira. The hand that wrought this symbol of gracious grief remains unknown to fame like that which sculptured the symbol of divine sweetness in the head of St Francis of Assisi above the cloister door of Burgos Cathedral. There are two Grecos here badly placed. With the aid of a chair and a candle even in the early afternoon you can barely distinguish them, so high do they hang in the dim light. One is St Peter of Alcántara and the other St Francis. Visibly Grecos, but of their merits it would be impossible to write, because of the squinting view you get of them. There is a Calvary of the Genoese painter, Semini, and an Adoration of the Kings by Antonio Vanderpere, with the unedifying legend of Lot and his daughters, a copy of Guido. The church of San Pedro Martir, attached to the monastery of that order, and affiliated to St John of Latran in Rome since 1773, is as black and chill as a colossal vault. Señor Parro in _Toledo en la Mano_ writes of this dull and unbeautiful edifice in terms of flatulent praise, several pages long. He calls it the Pantheon of Toledan glory. It is certainly an excellent tomb if nothing else. The coldest churches I have ever set foot in are this and San Benito of Valladolid, both warranted to provoke pneumonia on a summer's day. In winter I should imagine the rash traveller would remain therein embalmed in ice. The architecture is of the Greco-Roman style, bewilderingly spacious without any majesty of effect in its immense proportions. Señor Parro tells us that the façade is "most lovely." My expectations were not realised. I found the corinthian columns, the cornices, the "grandiose" central arch, the pilasters perfectly insignificant, but there are two marble statues on either side, sometimes mistakenly attributed to Berruguete, extremely fine, and also a life-size statue of St Peter effective in a lesser degree. The frescoes have disappeared, and the high altar is now defaced with commonplace modern pictures of no value whatever. But the gilt wood and sculpture remain. Once the degraded squares were filled with paintings of Fray Bautista Maino, the distinguished master of Felipe IV., Velasquez's friend and patron. These vanished pictures were excellent imitations of Paul Veronese, so good that they were seized for the Musée of Madrid, and to fill up the horrid vacancy modern monstrosities, mere daubs, were ordered, which to-day grotesquely offend the eye. The celebrated _Virgen del Rosario_, an object of special devotion to the Toledans, may be seen in one of the chapels. The _plateresca_ iron-railing of the sanctuary would be remarkable in any other land, but the railings of Spain are so sumptuous that one hardly notices this one. Still it is worth inspection, being a rich and profusely gilt specimen of that special work, with a fine centre cross and a rich frieze. Attached to the cross is the standard of the great Cardinal of Spain, Pedro Gonzalez de Mendoza, pale blue damask, with four Jerusalem crosses in each corner, and in the centre an oval figure of St Helena holding the cross, before which kneels the great Cardinals. At the foot of the middle nave, below the choir, are a group of wooden statues representing the saints of the preaching orders and a scarce distinguishable fresco of Maino. The choir is large and free, with a fine reading-desk and sculptured seats, an inferior imitation of those of the Cathedral. Off the sacristy, a large but insignificant chamber, with an imposing marble table worthy a nobler setting, there is a little Gothic chapel dedicated to St Agnes, part of the primitive building, and here you may see an ancient retablo of extreme interest. Alonzo Carrillo of Toledo and Don Alvaro de Guzman were buried here as early as 1303, as the half-effaced Gothic characters tell us. Among the great men of Toledo buried in the church are the Counts of Cifuentes, above whose arms Fray Maino painted a fresco. In the chapel of the Virgin of the Rosary is buried the famous poet Garcilaso de la Vega, whose statue, life-size in marble kneeling, is encased in armour, interesting rather as an historic figure than for any intrinsic merit of art. The Fiscal of Holy Office and Prior of Santillana, Pedro Soto Cameno, has also his statue as founder of the chapel; he was buried in 1583. In this same chapel is the impressive Gothic tomb of the _Malograda_, a surpassingly beautiful young woman, magnificently apparelled, lying upon a marble couch above the funeral urn that contains her ashes. Historians disagree as to the identity of this romantic figure. Some say she was Doña Maria, the bride of Don Lorenzo Suarez de Figueroa, Master of Santiago in 1389, whose despair on losing a loved young wife is thus immortalised. Others identify the _Malograda_ with Doña Estefania de Castro, mysteriously done to death in the days of Alonso the Emperor. The tomb rests on superb marble lions, and angels as usual hold the shields, in Gothic fashion. The ample folds of the dead girl's garments are charmingly graceful, and to the beauty of art is added the mystery of romance. Bride or mistress, this fair girl, asleep for six centuries, holds in the stillness of her delicate sculptured visage the enigma of her broken destiny. Sorrow or remorse built her splendid monument. The tombs of the Fuensalidas in the transept are notable works of art. The statues representing the mighty and turbulent Ayalas and their wives are of alabaster, and close by, brought from ruins of the Augustine Convent, is a double tomb of _plateresca_ style, highly sculptured and divided by two arches on delicate pillars, crowned with an intricate frieze in really fine relief, belonging to Diego de Mendoza, a great figure in the sixteenth century, and his wife, Ana de la Cerda. A niece of St Theresa also is buried here, Doña Marina de Rivadeneira y Cepeda. The purest mudejar steeple of Toledo is that of San Roman. This Moorish steeple, with its arcaded windows and ingenious brickwork, was erected by the famous Esteban de Illan, chief of the Toledos. Formerly the church was a mosque remodelled from the original Gothic chapel, as the remains of Arabic inscriptions indicate. After the Conquest it was refashioned again into a Christian temple, and has since undergone frequent restoration. Here St Ildefonso, after St Leocadia, the patron of Toledo, was baptised in remoter centuries. In the sixteenth century the _plateresca_ capilla major was built. Four wide arches, the two in front of the central nave open, and the others wrought into the lateral walls, with their graceful pillars and reliefs are extremely effective, and are regarded, with the florid sculpture and half-orange cupola, as constituting one of the finest specimens of plateresca architecture of Toledo. The light, however, is imperfect for full inspection. The retablo belongs to the same debased form of renaissance, an excess in sculpture, legends in relief and medallion, every kind of architectural fancy a combination of Gothic and classic could suggest. Nearly all evidence of its earlier form has vanished, but for a defaced Arabian inscription and a few horse-shoe arches, and a line of blocked arcades with the cusped arches above, bold and large, while a simple ceiling covers the primitive artesonado. In a little chapel on the Epistle side, are a few forsaken specimens of old Spanish painting, before it blossomed out into our European school. They are stiff and dull enough, and their subject the conventional scenes from the New Testament, but interesting as a development of Spanish art. [Illustration: SANTIAGO, TOLEDO] From the Moorish windows of its tower the flag of Castille waved in 1166, while the little king downstairs, in the safe keeping of the mighty Illans was proclaimed, _Toledo, Toledo, Toledo por el rey Don Alonso VIII._, and the town, in one of its customary phases of turbulent revolt, was divided between the followers of the great families of the Illans, the Laras, and the Castros. The tower is of plain reddish-brown stone, the brick-work rough and unmoulded of a supremely singular and distinguished effect, in perfect keeping with the rude, strange aspect of the city. Among the smaller mudejar steeples is a good example in that of Santa Magdalena. This is rougher and simpler than the rest. It has only two arched windows above, while the lower part is perfectly plain and solid. The bells hang in the window, adding thus to the picturesque rudeness of the general effect, so unfamiliar to the northern eye, so quaintly barbaric, so distinguished in its freedom from the curse of modern banality or vulgarity. [Illustration: SANTO PABLO] A double interest is attached to the little church between the _Puerta del Sol_ and the _Puerta Bisagra_, the _Cristo de la Luz_. It remains still a perfect mosque, where to-day a Mohammedan might pray and proclaim Allah the only God and Mohammed his prophet, and here the conquering Castillian, entering the city, stopped and ordered mass to be said, hanging up his shield upon the wall in memory of the first mass celebrated after the defeat of the Moors, 1035. There are traces of anterior occupation in Visi-Gothic days, and nothing more quaint, more curious, exists in Toledo. Legends are naturally attached to it. In the time of Atanagildo, there hung over the door a crucifix much venerated by the Toledanos, and it entered the minds of two foolish Jews, Sacao and Abisain, to outrage it. They pricked a lancet hole in the side, and instantly blood gushed forth. In consternation they carried off the cross to hide it in their dwelling, and the Christians, hunting everywhere for their stolen crucifix, traced it by the blood-marks to the house of these stupid Jews. The Jews were torn to pieces, of course, and a solemn procession led back the insulted image to its revered spot. Then the incorrigible Jews, to avenge the deaths of Sacao and Abisain, are said to have poisoned the feet of the statue, so that the Christians prompted to kiss them should be destroyed. A woman knelt to perform this pious action, when to her surprise and terror, the statue withdrew its foot from her kiss. The name Christ of the light comes from Moorish days. When the Moors took Toledo, the sacred image was hidden by an outer wall, with space enough to permit of a burning lamp being placed before it. This lamp, unreplenished, burnt the entire 370 years of Moorish dominion, and was discovered still aflame on May 25th, when Alonso VI. entered the town. Passing the hidden spot as he rode along the Valmardones, the king's horse suddenly knelt, some say; some say it was the Cid's. A warrior's horse that performed such an action nowadays would receive the whip. In those days, everyone seems to have been on the look-out for miracles as natural events. The king and the Cid dismounted, the wall was instantly broken down, and discovered the crucifix and the burning lamp fixed in the wall of a Moorish mosque. Mass was said on the spot by the Archbishop Bernardo, and there being no cross above the altar, the king offered his shield, on which a large cross was painted, and there it hangs to-day, a fine martial offering. At that time the church lay beyond the town walls, at the vanished gate of Valmardon, whereas now the town entrance from the Vega begins at the Puerta Bisagra. The architecture is Moorish-Byzantine, quite the oldest and most perfect specimen of Moorish architecture in Spain, and, for that reason, one of the most interesting monuments of the Peninsula. The body of the church is 22 feet by 25, while the outside is 22 by 19 only. The whole building is white-washed, and gives an amazing impression of strength for so limited a space. It looks so small and simple, and yet is so fantastic, of an Oriental art so complete and finished. The six short naves cross each other under nine vaults, and in the middle are four strong low columns with sculptured capitals and twelve heavy horse-shoe arches. The walls above are pierced with arcades cusped in Moorish fashion and supported on shafts, each division crowned with a little vault. The forest of naves and arches of the mosque of Cordova is an enlarged and magnificent reproduction of this Oriental style. Above are smaller semicircular arches, some double resting on smaller pillars. Varied little cupolas complete the design, with the centre inevitable half-orange, and above the central arch is the shield of Don Alfonso (which may or may not be authentic) a white cross on a crimson ground with the inscription below: _Esto es el escudo que dejo en esta ermita el Rey Don Alonso VI. cuando ganó à Toledo y se dijo aqui la primera misa_. The Cristo de la Luz makes an admirable contrast with the later Arabian work, the more decorative period of the brilliant Morisco Granadian architecture of which it is a foil. Another notable church is the oldest and most celebrated of Toledo, the basilica of Santa Leocadia, now called the Cristo de la Vega. Before King Sisebuth's days it was a prætorian temple, and this monarch converted it into a Christian chapel in the sixteenth century. Here prelates and monarchs met to hold the earlier of the famous Councils of Toledo. It is said, I know not if upon authentic fact, that some of the wealth of this ancient church has been carried off to adorn the Cathedral choir, some to the School of Infantry which now oddly desecrates the Hospital of Santa Cruz. As early as the eleventh Council, an abbot of Santa Leocadia was named, which proves its early importance; and consecration for ever came with the apparition of the saint, in the reign of Recesvinthus. Juana le loca carried part of the body of the saint to Flanders, to a monastery in Hainault. The Archbishop of Sevilla paid 1000 ducats to the Flemish monastery for the return of these relics, which, in an explosion of universal joy, occurred in 1583. Philip II. sent troops to Cambrai under Miguel Hernandez, where they were met by a procession of abbesses and holy persons. Letters went between Cardinal Quiroga and Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, on the subject, and the matter was almost one of European importance. The relics were said to have been stolen by the Count of Hainault when he came to Spain to [Illustration: CHRISTO DE LA LUZ] help the Castillians against the Moors; but Ambrosio de Morales is of opinion that they were taken to Oviedo, which would have been at the date of the Moorish conquest, when Favila and Pelayo, with their Asturian followers, were at Rodrigo's court. For their reception at Toledo, all the town went out in procession under triumphal arches, banners flying, trumpets blowing. A throne was erected at the Puerta Bisagra, and a chapel, where eight dignitaries and canons received the relics; and the procession turned back, with music, singing and dancing. Every parish had its banner wrought for the occasion, and each child carried a flag. More than a thousand monks walked behind; and, as well as fifteen hundred priests of the town, there were all the canons, the Brotherhood of the Hermandad, foreign priests, and every order of the Catholic Church was present. Then came all the officers and ministry of the Inquisition, more than seven hundred and forty doctors and masters, fifty-five juries, thirty-three magistrates, the mayor, the Duke of Maqueda, the Count of Fuensalida and Pedro de Silva, the city standard-bearer. All the grandees of Castille followed--six dukes, nine marquises, six counts, quantities of minor noblemen, and a regiment of cavaliers and lords. The procession went by all the principal streets from the Puerta Bisagra to the Cathedral. All were gaily decorated with tapestries and silks, and arches were built everywhere, with Latin inscriptions and elegant verses among their bright flowers. At the Cathedral doors, Philip II., his two children, Don Carlos and Doña Ysabel Clara, his sister, Doña Maria de Austria, and the Princes Rodolph and Ernest of Hapsburg stood in the porch to receive the relics. The majesty of the ceremony here becomes so dazzling that our prolix friend, Dr Pisa, lays down his pen and weeps from emotion. He cannot hope to trace such a picture, nor can we. But we strive to imagine the splendour of Cardinal Quiroga in his sumptuous pontifical robes, a blaze of gold, brocade and jewels, such as not to be beheld out of Eastern legend; the dignitaries with their jewelled mitres; the King, infantas and princes, all hardly less resplendent, and the laity rivalling them as far as possible, in the gemmed lights of Toledo's glorious cathedral. A picture one would gladly have seen, if it could be seen at a price less terrible than that of Philip's contemporary or subject. The church is situated under the ruins of the old city walls, below the Puerta del Cambron. It is rough and simple enough, and derives its name from the wooden crucifix over the altar, to which legend attaches a romantic interest. Becquer and Zorilla have told the tale in thin and sentimental prose, and in thinner and more sentimental verse. A gallant pledged his word to marry a maid within sight of this crucifix: afterwards he forgot his promise and denied the pledge, on which the broken-hearted maid flung herself at the foot of the crucifix, and addressed it as the witness of violated vows. The crucified held out a wooden arm, and a voice from above exclaimed, "_I testify_." There is one lovely thing in this quaint old basilica, the statue of St Leocadia by Berruguete, originally sculptured for the gate of Cambron. Nothing more sweet and delicate was ever wrought by that famous hand; no more fitting expression of brave and beautiful maidenhood was ever conceived in stone; and Italian influence in its best form is here visible, and Berruguete's strength is subtilised by an exquisite and penetrative charm. As well as St Leocadia and St Ildefonso, an Arabian inscription in relief tells us that the first Moorish King of Toledo, Mahomad Ben-Raman, was buried here. Some of the convents of Toledo have been famous. That of San Pedro de las Dueñas, in the reign of Henry the Impotent, created quite a scandalous interest. Tired of his mistress, Doña Catalina de Sandoval, he insisted on naming her abbess of this convent, and with this object ordered the public expulsion of the abbess, the Marquesa de Guzman. In his pretence lies the humour of the situation: he found the convent needed a purifying influence, and that the ladies were not sufficiently scrupulous in the maintenance of their vows. Spanish convents, before St Theresa's time, were not harsh abodes. Indeed, I fancy they were freer and pleasanter dwellings than the home of father or husband. Cavaliers thronged the parlours, and there was much thrumming of lute and guitar, much singing of soft sequidilla between belted knights and veiled ladies, who only left off these gentle recreations when the bell summoned them to meal or prayer. However, St Pedro so exceeded the limit of ecclesiastical tolerance that the Archbishop Alonzo of Carrillo placed it under interdict, and forbade any priest to cross its threshold. The scandal only ended with the austere and lofty presence of Queen Isabel upon the scene. Santa Fé was originally a royal Moorish palace beautifully situated on the north edge of the Zocodover, which Alonso VI., the conqueror, at the instance of his French queen Constance, bestowed upon a French order for noble ladies. A charming and perfect suggestion of its antique moresque beauty may be had from the view of its wall in an old garden above the river where you see the Moorish apse and brick arcading. The ground covered by the palace must have been enormous, since in the time of Alfonso VIII. the priory of the Knights of Calatrara was established here. Nothing now remains but the Moorish choir and arcaded wall, and the best of it is to be seen from the wild patch of garden outside the convent walls. It is another case of senseless destruction, a monument we are only permitted to rebuild in imagination with the help of a few Moorish arches and brown brickwork half-hidden by exuberant foliage. A stately dream, if mournful and evanescent, San Juan de la Penitencia ineffectively situated below the Cathedral in a broken and dilapidated quarter, is a Franciscan convent founded by Cisneros for poor girls, where after six years' free schooling they may remain as nuns, and if they prefer marriage the convent dowers them with about £15, with a life-seat in the choir. The church is one of the minor sights of Toledo. It was finished by the secretary of Cisneros, who lies buried here, Francisco Ruiz, Bishop of Avila. About the convent halls and corridors are still traces of Moorish ornamentation in which the Castillian conquerors delighted quite as much as the Moslem. The chapel ceiling is a good specimen of artesonado in terrible decay alas, and the architecture is a medley of Gothic, Moorish, and renaissance. Above the porch are the arms of Cisneros. Within it is of a gloomy and depressing simplicity: a single nave, a high altar, a tribune. True the plateresca frieze of the tribune is graceful, and the iron railing of the high altar is quite the best of the minor churches, and admirably decorative, while the tomb of the Bishop of Avila brought from Palermo is a most beautiful work of art. Writing of it, Ponz says:--"Above a large stone divided by three pilasters to form three pedestals, there are an equal number of statues seated, almost life-size, representing Faith, Hope, and Charity. Between the pilasters are the arms of the Bishop, five castles. In a framed niche are contained the urn, couch, and recumbent statue. In front of the urn there are two weeping children, and in the depths of the niche four angels hold up the curtains. On either side are two Doric pillars sustaining the architecture, frieze, and cornices, and along the frieze runs: _Beato mortui, qui in Domino moriuntur_. On the edge are two wrought columns of a very antique taste, excellently executed.... Between these columns and pilasters on either side is a statue, St James and St Andrew, and above the figures of children. Over the whole is a bas-relief of the Annunciation, with the statues of St John the Baptist and St John the Evangelist, half the size of the Virtues below." Ponz is of opinion that this magnificent work of art is of two distinct periods, the frame work having been wrought later by Toledan sculptures after the tomb within had been brought from Palermo, and revealing the delicacy, the finish and unerring taste of the finer Italian school. Nothing could be more graceful, more effective than the curtains held apart by the angels, or more delightfully touching than the slight shadow thus cast upon the recumbent statue, lending it something of the immediate stillness and impressiveness of recent death. Santa Isabel is worth a visit. Some good azulejo and the artesonado ceiling testify to Moorish influences and a queen and a royal princess, daughter of Isabel the Glorious, were buried here, and the whole forms an agreeable note of quaintness and dimness without however any special attraction in architecture or decoration or art. Not so San Clemente. The façade is what my Spanish friends call _una preciosidad_, the strong and beautiful work of Berruguete. The architecture rests on two Ionic pillars, and above is the statue of the titular saint. The reliefs of the porch are exquisite, and the frieze abounds in all the wild and exuberant fancies of the Spanish renaissance, every caprice in figure, in leafage, in image, and phantasmal suggestion. Like Santa Fé the convent prides itself upon aristocratic traditions. In the church is buried the infante, Don Fernando, son of the founder, Alonso VII., the emperor, the tomb a restoration by order of Felipe II. in 1570. The interior is pleasing with an air of sober wealth, but has nothing to show in the way of art that can compare with the noble façade. It is stated that the archives contain 500 Arabian manuscripts, but these statements the intelligent foreigner must take on trust. _Santo Domingo el Real_ is another aristocratic convent of historical interest. It was founded by an illegitimate daughter of Pedro the Cruel, Doña Maria de Castilla, who was its first abbess. Two sons of Pedro were buried here, results of the thousand vagabond caprices of this crowned Blue-Beard; the infanta of Aragon, Queen of Portugal, hence the qualification, St Dominick the Royal, the Guzmans, the Silvas, and Ayalas reconciled first by marriage and then by death. There is a fine retablo if there were only light enough to see it by. * * * * * Of the many hospitals of Toledo, two alone are famous, one what the Spanish guides very properly call "a sumptuous work of art." Descending the steps through the Moorish archway of the Zocodover, you leave Cervantes' inn on the right, and a little lower down on the left is the Hospital of Santa Cruz, the hospital of Mendoza, "The Cardinal of Spain," now incongruously enough a school of infantry. The traveller, enamoured of the picturesque, in awed surrender to the charm of noble ruins, grows to loathe the military all over Europe. They take up their quarters so profanely in monuments one hardly dares to lift one's voice in. They sprawl in their motley uniforms over the loveliest homes of romance and memories, and burthen the silence with their futile miseries, labours, and tyrannies. In times of war the army makes a gallant figure. Then each man is a hero, and we willingly tend his wounds. But in times of [Illustration: DOOR OF SANTA CRUZ] peace the soldier is frankly an anachronism and a nuisance. He desecrates ruins and spoils the view; he vulgarises the atmosphere of legend, and cheapens the majesty of dismantled walls. There is, of course, no reason but a sentimental one why the sabred heroes of Spain should not sleep within the walls of a magnificent monument, and exercise their muscles in the lovely chapel of Mendoza, now their gymnasium, but what will you?--a traveller is necessarily sentimental. The great cardinal of Spain designed to build an hospital for foundlings, and had engaged the architect, Enrique Egas, and with him traced the plan, when death overtook him at Guadalajara in 1495, and he bequeathed his idea, with over 75,000 ducats for its completion, to Queen Isabel and his relative the Duke of Infantado. The Queen chose the spot on account of the wide view of the hills rolling upward from the opposite river banks, and the hospital was called Santa Cruz because of the founder's devotion to the Holy Cross. It was originally a royal Gothic palace, converted later into a Moorish palace, it is said, the town residence of Galiana's father, Galafré. Possibly here may have dwelt Casilda, the King's daughter, who from her earliest years, loved the Christians and pitied them, and carried food to the Christian prisoners. She vowed to devote herself to the poor and live a maid, to King Almenor's dismay, who proposed one after another brilliant match to her in vain. Standing at the palace gate one day he found her carrying a basket of provisions to the prisoners, and asked her what the basket contained. "Roses," said Casilda like St Elisabeth of Hungary, and opening the basket, to her surprise discovered it full of red and white roses. There, too, may have taken place that strange bridal of Doña Theresa, sister of the King of Leon and the Moorish king Abdallah, when, it is said, an angel interposed to prevent the union of Christian princess and Moorish monarch, and the King thus convinced of the sacrilege, sent his bride away with camels loaded with gold and silver and jewels, which she carried to the convent of St Pelayo, where she became abbess. When Alfonso reigned over Toledo, he gave the property to the nuns of San Pedro de las Dueñas, and in 1504 the building of the cardinal's hospital was begun. It is the first sample of plateresque architecture then introduced into Spain by Covarrubias. The façade is superb, one of the many glories of Toledo. Impossible to conceive anything more charming than all this wonder of chiselled stone, with its delicate arches and most exquisite reliefs. One represents St Helena holding the cross, and kneeling in front of her, Cardinal Mendoza; behind the cardinal is St Peter, and behind the empress is St Paul; a suite of pages hold mitre and hat. The decoration of leafage, flower and cross is rich and fanciful. One particularly lovely relief represents Charity, with statues on either side, while the architecture, the friezes and cornices are elaborately wrought in every Gothic fancy, bucklers, arms, and armour mingling with flower and foliage, and the cardinal's arms held reverently by little angels. Between the magnificent columns are the four cardinal virtues, and above are other reliefs whose general effect is beautiful enough, but whose details it is difficult to follow at such a height (one is supposed to represent St Joachim and St Anne embracing, and is somewhat crudely defined by the Spanish guidebooks), while the whole is surmounted by the cardinal's favourite Jerusalem cross. The large windows are extremely harmonious, with their Toledan railings so grimly artistic, with all the sombre beauty of a taste more largely decorative than prettily fanciful. On entering you face three sculptured doors leading to the chapel, now the gymnasium, and to the splendid patios, to-day fallen into a scandalous state of neglect and decay. The superb staircase, despite the fact that all the wealth of its beautiful ornamentation is half defaced, gives some indication of what a work of art it once was in its mingling of arabesque and plateresque note, and something of the delicate finish of details may still be seized. The chapel forms a Greek cross, degraded, too, like the rest of the edifice, showing remains of what was once a singularly fine specimen of the artesonado ceiling. The heavy Gothic pillars are richly wrought in an incredible variety of reliefs, and we have no difficulty in believing that this was once one of the architectural gems of the Gothic capital. But what is still more impressive, as unique as the great staircase, is the immense empty patio, with its long galleries and pillars of Italian marble, its reliefs and armorial bearings. I know nothing in Toledo that seizes the imagination so vividly with the tragic sensation of vanished magnificence as this great courtyard. Not a courtyard surely, but an esplanade enclosed within arcaded marble galleries, where a prince might hold a review for his private satisfaction. The Hospital of San Juan Bautista or Afuera is another remarkable building it behoves us to mention. This was founded by one of the noblest of Toledo's archbishops, Tavera, who died after his journey to Valladolid to baptise the infant, Prince Carlos, of unfortunate renown, and to bury the queen, and was buried here. Berruguete wrought his tomb in the chapel, a monument as noble as the cardinal it honours. The hospital lies beyond the Puerta de Bisagra in the Covachuelas, with a little public garden in front, and a view of all the Vega on either side. The spot takes its name, Plazuela de Marchan, from one of the earliest Corregidors, Pedro de Navarra, marshal and marques de Cortes, who owned it. The Emperor Charles Quint bestowed it on Tavera for his hospital in 1540. The primitive plan was Bustamente's, but the building was concluded by the two Vergaras. Many grandees and bishops were connected with the work before its termination in 1599, while the outer portal dates from the eighteenth century. The two patios are superb, and the general effect of the building is imposing. In one of the south rooms, under the big clock, Berruguete died in 1561, after having finished Cardinal Tavera's tomb, his last work, the fitting termination of a fruitful and laborious existence. Not a Spanish town, hardly a church, but has something from the hand of this stupendous worker, who seems to have crowded as much production into a single lifetime as might easily have supported an entire century. His death is dryly recorded, without any details, and of the man himself we are not permitted to gather any impression. We obtain no glimpse of him at work, or abroad taking his pleasures. Like El Greco, he is a name without any distinct personality for us, attached to Toledo in glowing evidence. If there were nothing else in Toledo but this monument of Cardinal Tavera in the hospital chapel, it would be worth while to travel from remote parts to see it. The church is fine, composed of a single large and lofty nave, paved with white and black marble, and the impression it makes is one of seizing quietude. Here you may examine El Greco at his worst and best: the appalling eccentricities of vision and manner revealed in the St John the Baptist, lurid, livid, with gnarled limbs and swollen muscles, and the noble and dignified portrait of Cardinal Tavera, [Illustration: TOMB OF CARDINAL TAVERA] one of the most beautiful portraits El Greco ever painted. But all your admiration is claimed by Berruguete's monument before the altar. As the work of an old and dying man, it confounds minute and modern talent. It has the virility, the freshness, the superb strength of youth; it has the serenity, the stillness, the awful majesty of death. Mount the steps beside this marble tomb, and you will look on such a picture of death in all its restful sublimity as the hand, the imagination of man have rarely seized. Nothing like that old man's head under the mitre has Berruguete himself ever done. It is the supreme attainment of genius on the eve of eternal night, the culmination of a magnificent art, when the great strong hand is about to lay down the chisel forever, and gathers in a supreme moment all that is best in a life's work, to give it a noble ending. You should examine all the splendid details, the large gracious statues at either corner, the shields, the eagles, the urns and masterly mouldings, before looking at the dead cardinal's visage, for after that you will have no mind left for any emotion but awe. Here so cheap a thing as praise melts into stupefied silence. The aged sculptor began this monument in 1559 and finished it in 1561, the year of his death, and it was his sons who received the payment due to him, 993,764 maravedis. It seems extraordinary that anyone should dare to put a price on such work, or even offer vulgar coin for it. There are things that lie without the radius of commerce and competition, and this is surely one of them. One is almost content to think that Berruguete was never actually paid for such an inspiration, but dropped into immortality before the revolting 993,764 maravedis unworthily touched a hand so honoured. CHAPTER XI _Bridges and Gates of Toledo_ I have said there are but two bridges guarding the wide sweep of the Tagus round Toledo, the Puente de Alcántara and the Puente de San Martin. These bridges are unimaginably picturesque and fine. The first you enter from the railway station, with an excellent view of the double line of walls, broken by towers built upon the rugged rocks. No more superb and impressive scene is to be found elsewhere than that the old city makes behind this castellated bridge. The bridge in its actual state was built by Alfonso X., on the ruins of the Moorish bridge, of which Rasis el Moro wrote: "It was such a rich and marvellous work and so subtly wrought, that never man with truth could believe there was any other such fine work in Spain." The Moors in 866 constructed this in turn upon the ruins of the old Roman bridge, of which some traces still remain, and which the Goths repaired in 687, and it was destroyed in 1257. Since Alfonso's time, the vicissitudes of Spanish history have wrought damage enough to this noble monument. In 1380 Tenorio restored it, and in 1484 the interior arch was repaired at the town's cost by Andrès Manrique, in 1575 the entrance from the city was repaired, in 1721 the outer towers had to be restored, and in 1786, as well as in 1836, the entire bridge was submitted to general repairs. These alterations are all carefully noted by various inscriptions. In Philip II.'s reign was placed under the statue of St Ildefonso by Berruguete-- S. ILDEFONSO DIVO TUTELARI TOLET, D.D., ANNO DOM. MDLXXV., PHILIPPO II., HISP. REGE. A longer one of that period was: _Año DCLXXIIII._ _Wamba Rey godo restauró los muros des esta cuidad y los ofreció en versos latinos a Dios y los santos patrones de ella_: _los Moros los quitaron y pusieron letreros_ arabigos de blasfemias _y errores_--_el rey D. Felipe II._ con zelo de religion y de conservas las memorias de los reyes pasados, mandó, a Jo. Gutierrez Tello, Corregidor de la cuidad los quitase y pusiere como antes estaten los santos patrones con los versos del Rey Wamba. Ano de MDLXX.[21] Another tells us of a great deluge that lasted for five months, from August to December, and carried off portions of the bridge, which was rebuilt by Alef, son of Mohamed Alameri, Mayor of Toledo, in the time of Almanzor. On one of the inner vaults are sculptured the arms of the Catholic Kings, Isabella and Fernando, and the inevitable relief of St Ildefonso receiving the chasuble from Our Lady. The entrance arch was constructed under Felipe V. instead of the Moorish tower that stood there. These restorations are insignificant. What one notes is the general impression, which is magnificent. The bridge of San Martin is early thirteenth century work, built in 1203 after a terrible inundation that carried off the old bridge, which was probably a little lower down, where the _Baño de la Cava_, as this broken tower and the broken pillar opposite would indicate. In the Civil War of Pedro the Cruel and Henry of Trastamare, the principal arch was cut in two, and the Archbishop Tenorio had to restore the whole bridge almost in order to repair the damage. One of the legends of Toledo relates to this restoration. The architect to whom Tenorio confided the work miscalculated, and while the woodwork and scaffolding still enveloped the central arch, he discovered to his horror that the instant these supports were removed the bridge would fall. This would mean nothing less than ruin and disgrace, and the unfortunate architect confided his despair to his wife. Without a word, at the dead of night, she went down to the bridge and set the scaffolding on fire. Nobody saw her, and the accident was believed in and deplored. While the arch was being rebuilt, this time happily with the error rectified, the woman, finding the burden of remorse greater than she could bear, went to the Archbishop and told her tale. Tenorio was so delighted with her ingeniousness that he congratulated her fortunate husband and ordered her figure to be sculptured on the keystone of the central arch. Señor Parro doubts if the little figure on the north side is that of a woman, and after careful examination is inclined to believe that it is meant for a bishop, probably Tenorio himself. One would prefer to believe in the woman, of course, as legends are always pretty and graceful, but facts are facts, and if the headgear be really a mutilated mitre and not a woman's cap? The bridge is narrow and extremely high above the river, as here the thunderous rush of water down the rocky gorge comes often with the menace of flood, and beside this splendid central arch that gave rise to the legend Tenorio's arch, 140 feet wide and 95 above the water level, most lofty and grand, there are four smaller arches. At either end, like the Alcántara Bridge, there is a tower and gateway, with Moorish arches and battlements, and vaulted arches for the passengers; inscriptions and reliefs abound, a statue of St Julian by Monegro and of Alfonso VII. the Emperor. Across the southern hills, among their bare scented folds, beyond silent gorge and wild waterway, lie the famous Cigarrales, the villas, the gardens, the orchards, where the apricots grow as they grow nowhere else. Tirso de Molina sings their charms, and the aubergines of the Cigarrales were famous even in the days of Guzman de Alfarache. Here towards evening the townsfolk wander out to taste the air of the hills and revel in cool leafage, and the walk back in the gathering shade, when the town is getting ready its feeble electric illumination, and the stars are out, and the streets are dim and silent. Then more than ever will Toledo appear to you as something too beautiful for reality, the imagined city of wild romantic legend, an intangible evocation that surely the morning lights must disperse, that the reality of day must vulgarise. It is not in the nature of modern eyes to gaze with security upon a picture so mysteriously strange, so solemnly sad in its grandeur, so complete a surprise. To-day there are three gates in the outer walls of Toledo, the _Puerta Visagra_, the _Puerta del Cambron_ and the _Puerta Nueva_. Entering the city by the Bridge of San Martin, you front the gate of the Cambron here, so called from the brambles that grew about that small, charming, pinnacled edifice, built upon the spot of Wamba's old gate in Alfonso VI.'s time, and was then completely Moorish in style. In 1576 it was restored and took on its present half renaissance, half classical aspect, with its four towers, its centre court and columns. Berruguete's lovely statue of St Leocadia used to stand in the niche above the lines in her honour from the Mozarabe ritual sculptured below: _In Nostra civis inclita_ _Tu es patrona vernul[ae]_ _Ab urbis hujus termino_ _Procul reptile tedium._ Gutierrez Tello, we know, was ordered by Philip II., iniquitous Vandal, to break up all the beautiful Moorish inscriptions on the bridges and gates, but one of these inscriptions still remains on the fragment of a column; the finest have disappeared. This was one: "There is but one God on earth, and Mohamad is his messenger. All the faithful who believe in our prophet, Mohamad, and continue to kiss the hands and feet of Murabito Muley abda Alcadar every day, will be without stain, will not be blind, nor deaf, nor lame, nor wounded; and receiving his benediction, when the time of his death comes, will only be three days ill, and dying, will go with open eyes to Paradise forgiven of all sins." Who would not willingly kiss the hands and feet of Murabito Muley every day in return for such promises? There was another interesting inscription to the same Muley on an old gateway: "Prayer and peace over our Lord and Prophet Mohamad. All the faithful, when they went to lie down in their beds, mentioning the Alfaqui Murabito Abdala, and recommending themselves to him, will enter no battle out of which they will not come victorious, and in whatever battle against Christians they may stain their lances with Christian blood, dying that same day, will go alive and whole with eyes open to Paradise, and his descendants will remain till the fourth generation forgiven." Evidently a man to have on one's side in the struggle for existence and in the hope of joys to come in a better world. Small wonder Ponz called Toledo the city of magnificent inscriptions. You are greeted everywhere with grandiloquent or heroic utterances. [Illustration: PUERTA VISAGRA (ANTIGUA)] The old Puerta Visagra is now blocked up. Through it Alphonso VI. entered Toledo. The work is entirely Moorish, of the first period, heavy and simple, with the triple arches so delightfully curved in horseshoe shape, and the upper crenelated apertures. The meaning of the name is still disputed. Some give it a Latin origin, signifying _Via-Sacra_, others an Arabian origin, _Bab_, gate, and _Shara_, meadow, as it leads into the stony fields without, in the Vega. This seems to be the more probable one, since the _Puerta Visagra_ distinctly dates from the time of the Moors. The new gate faces the highroad of Estremadura, and was built under Charles Quint, 1550. It forms two edifices, joined by a large square courtyard with high turreted walls on either side. The outer arch and tower are magnificent; the whole is impressive. On the south front is the shield with the arms of Spain, and the Emperor's eagles, in sculptured granite, with a Latin inscription below. There is another front behind the vaulted entrance, with two graceful square towers, adorned with balconies and elegant capitals narrowing to a pyramidal point, roofed with white and green tiles, which make an odd and not-unpleasing note against the brown rampart running upward. These gleaming _azulejo_ tower-roofs dominate the plain, and, seen from above, the effect of this little dash of brightness amidst all these brown tones of earth and stone is indescribably gay. Within, on the doorway, is the inscription of the Senate's dedication of the gate to Charles Quint, and beyond the patio, in a niche in the central arch, is an exceedingly fine statue of St Eugenio, either by Berruguete or Monegro. Both these artists were engaged by Toledo to make statues for the gates and bridges, and confusion now rests upon all the statues except that of St Leocadia (now in the Hermitage of the Cristo de la Vega), which is assuredly a Berruguete, and perhaps the most exquisite thing he has ever done. Monegro's work will be sufficiently appreciated by the fact of this confusion. Here, again, are finely sculptured, in large relief, the arms of the Emperor, and a life-size angel guards the city with unsheathed sword. This statue and the shield were originally gilt, but time has worn the gilt away; in either tower-front, on both sides of the shield, are two statues of Gothic kings. But a mere description of the details of this splendid gate can really give no impression of its general effect. If there were not the _Puerta del Sol_--one of the world's masterpieces--so near, one would be tempted to call it the finest on earth. But to write of the _Puerta del Sol_--Moorish gem against a Spanish sky, miracle of loveliness upon a rough and naked rampart! A thing of bewildering beauty, even among crowded enchantments! It is to pick one's way through superlatives and points of exclamation, and call in vain on the goddess of sobriety to subdue our tendency to excess and incoherence. Put this matchless gate in the middle of the desert of Sahara: it would then be worth while making the frightful voyage alone to look at it. However far you may have journeyed, you would still be forever thankful to have seen such a masterpiece--incontestably a work of supreme art, perhaps the rarest thing of the world. Is there a flaw in it? Mine were not the eyes to detect it. I could only look on and worship. The last evening of my stay in Toledo, I went out to make my farewell visits by dusk to the town, accompanied by my friend, the Spanish painter. Into that lovely walk I gathered too many impressions to disengage them, but I still see the _Puerta del Sol_ in the blue twilight, with a big star--like a lamp--trembling on the edge of it, in the fluid luminosity of a fading sunset. "_Una preciocedad_," murmured my Spanish friend, familiar with its witchery for more than fifteen years; and we stood there for a half hour in dead silence, making our prayer of thanks to the strong, great hands, the commanding genius, that wrought for our delight, so long ago, a work which defies the banality of description. This impressive Moorish monument is fashioned of rough stone, above the brilliant Vega, with the arid hills around. The towers are of brown granite, and above span the vaulted entrance. The sides form a semi-circular and a half square tower, and the interior is divided into three compartments. There is a great centre ogival arch, resting on two columns with Moorish [Illustration: PUERTA DEL SOL] inscriptions; from the zones of ornamental arches enlaced, bayed above and horseshoe-shaped beneath, break away other architectural flourishes of raised ogival, the zones divided by angles with the points inward. Behind the great arch, there is another horseshoe arch, and above it is a round medallion, with a relief, of the Virgin offering the chasuble to St Ildefonso; beyond are two simple ogival arches, united to form the rising line of the portcullis, and then another horseshoe arch in the back façade forms the same design. Above are three similar little arches, with railings, and in the semi-circular tower below are three apertures for barbaric hostilities, in each façade joining the central compartment. Each aperture, in front, has an ornamental bayed arch, placed above three corbels crowned with towers turreted in pyramidal capitals. Within, a series of Arabian arches--the quadrangular tower only adorned with little Moorish arches. The age of this most exquisite gate is uncertain. It is believed to be of the second period of Moorish architecture in Toledo, that is, tenth century, with alterations as far as the thirteenth. While the architecture is perfectly Moorish, there is some indication of Christian influence--in the use of a stone not generally used by the Moors, and also in the reliefs of the Virgin and St Ildefonso, and in the little marble relief of the two women and the man, supposed to perpetuate the tale of the Governor Fernando Gonzalez, Lord of Yegros, whom San Fernando, that uncompromising king, sentenced to death for betraying two women: by some believed to represent St John the Baptist, Herodias and her mother. The simple traveller, who loves righteousness and truth, will stick to the avenging sovereign sentencing thus summarily the rascal governor. But it is like the figure in the central arch of the Bridge of San Martin. Believe what you like best. Fernando may have boiled his enemies in pots of water over huge logs, or roasted them alive before roaring fires. He himself was such an admirable fellow in his private life that we are constrained to believe his enemies merited such treatment. He died during the third period of Moorish architecture in Spain, and left all he possessed to the Hospital of Santiago. It was perhaps a little excessive on the part of St Fernando, after chopping off the governor's perfidious head, to confiscate all his property and bestow it on the poor. The governor's relations might justly have regarded themselves as defrauded. But those were the happy days when subjects had no rights, and only breathed by divine permission of the sovereign. Young people who fell in love without the king's leave were dispatched to prison or a nunnery. In the leisure that war and revolt occasionally allowed him, the king made and unmade marriages; and if, glancing from his palace windows, he chanced to see a man pass by who looked as if, at some future date, he might be tempted to commit a crime, he ordered his instant execution, in the interests of humanity. Sure, indeed was it worth while to be a King in those delightful days, a life never monotonous for the lack of surprises, never empty of vicissitudes and every odd and stupendous stroke of fortune. A word must be said about the legendary _Baño de la Cava_. The probability is that this celebrated and picturesque ruin was portion of a turreted bridge that existed before the construction of San Martin, and was swept away in one of the inundations that wrought at periods so much damage to the town. The ruin is undoubtedly Moorish, and Moorish letters may be traced on one of the broken columns, which would prove it posterior to the Berber invasion under Tarik. The height of the old bridge is sufficiently indicated to show us that a wild rush of water from the upper rocky defile as it thunders down the gorge would quickly carry off the stoutest construction so lowly placed, hence the exceeding height of the central arch of Tenorio's bridge, through which the Tagus in its most turbulent hour can gush at will. The ruin is a delightful one, and nothing could be more romantic than its situation. Graceless facts that so ruthlessly demolish poetic legends! The walls and ramparts are dismantled now, but there are considerable traces of the Visigothic walls of 711, while the twelfth century walls of Alfonso, the conqueror, are naturally more distinct. Quite recent is the easy sloping road that winds up from the bridge of Alcántara to the Zocodover. If one regrets the old double walls that used to guard the city on this side, it must be admitted that there are agreeable compensations. The town is more open to the breezes of the Vega; the new road itself is a comfortable invention as a substitute for the battlemented and rocky altitude it was once to climb, and the pretty _Miradero_ makes a graceful modern note in a mediæval picture. But giving your back to San Servando, and mounting the road of _Nuestra Señora de la Valle_, you may trace on the other side the broken ramparts in their extreme age and admirable preservation. And leaving the town by the _Puerta de Visagra_, wander round by the Vega, and here beyond the _Puerta Lodada_, you will admire the martial aspect of what remains of Wamba's jagged walls within and the outer walls of Alfonso that run from the Puerta Nueva to the Lunatic Asylum. _Appendix_ The traveller to Toledo will be glad, perhaps, of some practical information. A guide for a short stay is indispensable. I did not claim the services of any, so cannot speak from personal experience, but the proprietor of the Hotel Castilla assures me that his German guide can be recommended. His charge is ten pesetas a day, nominally eight shillings, but often considerably less owing to the rate of change. My friend and guide, the Spanish painter, who came fifteen years ago to Toledo lo sketch and has since never been able to leave the witching city, highly recommends a young Italian guide, G. Borraino, who speaks several languages and knows his Toledo to the last stone. His charge, I imagine, is less, and he dwells up in the little Plaza de las Carmelitas, above the Puerta del Cambron, with amiable Italians who make and sell plaster casts. There are four hotels in Toledo; the Castilla, the Norte, the Lina, and the Imperial. The Castilla is the best hotel of Spain, admirably situated, overlooking, behind, the broad Vega and the long serpentine Tagus curled upon the landscape. The table is French and good, the rooms are fine, the service quite modern, the whole fitted up with luxury and taste. The building is extremely handsome and spacious, with every modern comfort, and cost the marquis who built it a fortune. He rashly spent his money, but he is the benefactor of travellers to Toledo, and such is now the reputation of this first-class hotel that newly married couples from Madrid, and embassadors in search of distraction, come here instead of going abroad. Murray's guide-book describes it as dear, which is not true, for such accommodation and service are cheap enough at fifteen pesetas a day. Older travellers who have had to put up with the older hotels give appalling accounts of their experience, so that for the sake of a few shillings it is the height of folly to be miserable while sight-seeing, when for very little more, you may enjoy comfort, harmony, and an excellent table, with the most scrupulous cleanliness. The churches should be visited early; tips are everywhere indispensable but small. A plan of Toledo will be found very useful. [Illustration: TOLEDO 1 _Santiago Apostolo del Arrabal._ 2 _Domingo el Real (Sto) Dominicas._ 3 _Domingo el Antiguo._ 4 _San Vicente_: _Anejo_. 5 _San Juan Bautista._ 6 _Pantheon Provincial._ 7 _Biblioteca Publica._ 8 _Palazio Arzobiscal._ 9 _San Marcos_: _Muzarabe_. 10 _Fabricia de Utensilios Militaires._ 11 _Santo Tomé._ 12 _Casos de los Templarios._ 13 _El Salvador_: _Anejo_. 14 _Taller del Moro._ (_Palacio Arabe_) 15 _San Andrés._ 16 _Posada de la Sangre_ (_donde residio Cervantes_) 17 _Plazueta Santa Isabel._ 18 _San Clemente._ 19 _San Pedro._ 20 _San Roman._ 21 _Santa Fé._ 22 _San Pablo._ ] INDEX A ABDERRAMAN, Moorish sovereign, 67. ABD-AR-RAHMAN III., the Great Khalif, 75, 76. ABDULLA, 288. ABEN-EN-NOGUAIRI, 58. ALCÁZAR, 91, 100, 112, 113, 132, 133, 262. ALCOCER, historian, 10, 77, 133, 134. ALCURNIA, 130. ALFAQUI, the generous Moor who pleaded for his Christian enemies and whose memory is honoured by a statue in the Cathedral, Ayuntamiento, 82, 88, 89, 90, 126, 202. ALFONSO, the Learned, _Cronica General_, origin of Toledo, 6, 76. ALFONSO VI., 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 85, 86, 87, 151, 152, 262, 266, 274. ALFONSO VII., 19, 93, 283. ALFONSO VIII., 95, 96, 128. ALFONSO MARTINEZ DE TOLEDO, 97. ALMAMON, Toledan king, 77, 78, 79. ALOYSIA DE SIGEA, woman poet of Toledo, 104. ALVARO DE LUNA. Great Constable, 102, 105, 182, 262. ALVAR GOMEZ, Chronicler of Cisneros, 13, 108. ALVAREZ, modern damascene worker, 146. AMADOR DE LOS RIOS, 162, 216. AMBROSIA DE MORALES, 279. AMRON, of Huesca, slaughter of the terrible _Day of the Foss_, 68, 69, 70. ANGELA SIGEA, woman philosopher, 104. ANTONIO DE HEREDIA, Toledan poet, 104. ATANAGILDO, first Gothic sovereign of Toledo, 25, 274. AUGUSTUS, 15. AVIENO, 8. AYALA, great Toledan family, rival of the Silvas, 103, 104, 106, 108. B BADDO, Gothic Queen, renounces Arianism, 31. BAÑO DE LA CAVA, 302. BAYEU, Spanish painter, 19, 174. BELACIN, Mûsa's son, who married Rodrigo's widow after the Conquest, 66. BELTRANAJE, illegitimate daughter of Henry the Impotent, cause of Portuguese War with Isabel, 106. BERNARD OF CLUNY, French archbishop of Toledo, who took the Cathedral from the Moors and introduced the Latin rite, 84. BERRUGUETE, 150, 161, 162, 280, 290, 291, 293, 296, 298. BLANCHE, Rodrigo's widow, 66. BLANCHE OF BOURBON, Pedro the Cruel's ill-treated wife, 99, 100. BLAZ ORTIZ, 174. BRISTES, legend of Doña Luz, 49. BURIAL OF COUNT ORGAZ, El Greco's masterpiece, 203. C CAIUS PLANCIUS, 12. CALDERON, 244, 262. CARLOS III., 263. CASA de Mesa, 254, 258. CASA de las Tornerias, 256. CASILDA, 287. CASSIM, Toledan Moorish ruler, 67. CATHEDRAL, 81, 83, 90, 91, 150, 275. CAVA, origin of the word, 58. CERVANTES, 120, 138. CHARLES QUINT, 108, 109, 113, 262, 290. CHAPEL of the New Kings, 186. CHILDE PELAYO, conqueror of Covadonga, and son of Doña Luz, 50. CHINDASVINTHE, Gothic King, 35. CHRONIQUE rimée des rois de Tolède, 38, 53. CID, el Campeador, 81, 85, 86, 87, 133. CIGARRALES, 131, 295. CISNEROS' great Cardinal, 107, 108, 109, 282. CLEPSYDRAS of Az-Zarcal, 247. CLOISTERS of Cathedral, 174. CLOISTERS of San Juan de los Reyes, 225. COMUNEROS, the rising under Juan de Padilla, 110. COPIN of Holland, 169, 173, 176, 179. CORO of Cathedral, 161, 162. CORRAL of Don Diego, 261. CORTES of Toledo, 107. COUNCILS of Toledo, 22. CREDO of Toledo, 23. CRISTO de la Luz, 274. CRISTO de la Vega, 276. D DACIAN, persecution and death of Leocadia, 19, 20, 21. DIEGO MOSSEM VALERA, historian, 6. DOZY, historian, 79. DENIS, ST, 18, 19. E EGICA, 47. EL GRECO, 193; his quarrel with the Chapter of Toledo, 197; his quarrel with Philip II, 201; his "Assumption," 212. ENRIQUE of Aragon, 182. EUGENIUS, first bishop of Toledo, 18, 35, 151. EXPOLIO of El Greco, 179, 197. F FABRICA DE ARMAS, 146. FAUSTINA DE BOURBON, historian, 60. FAVILA, 47, 48, 49, 50. FELIX DE ARTIAGA, sonnets on El Greco, 199. FERECIO, one of the many supposed Greek founders of Toledo, 8. FERNANDO of Aragon, husband of Isabel and unnatural father of Juana, called _La Loca_, 106, 108. FERNANDO GONZALEZ, 53. FERNANDO, ST, Castillian monarch, 94, 95, 301. FERNAN SANCHEZ CALDERON, 105, 106. FLORINDA, 43, 55, 58. FRANCISCO DE ROJAS, 267. FRANCISCO RUIZ, bishop of Avila, 282. FRAY BAUTISTA MAINO, 199, 269, 270. FRÊDÉGAIRE, annalist, 33. FUENSALIDAS, 271. FUENTE DE GUARRAZAZ, where the famous Gothic votive crowns were discovered, 44. G GALAFRE, 244, 287. GAMERO, historian, 18, 20, 28, 58, 59. GARCILASO DE LA VEGA, 137. GATON, Toledan ally sent by Ordoño, King of Leon, against the Sultan in 854, 74. GERARDO LOBO, 258. GHARBIB, revolutionary poet, 67. GOSUINDA, wife of Atanagildo, 25. GOSVINTHA, widow of Leovigildo, who revolts against her step-son, Recaredo, 30. GOTHIC Tournament, 55, 56. GOTHIC votive crowns, 44, 45, 46. GRACIA DEI, chronicler of Don Pedro; note, 6. GRAFESES, 47, 50. GUADALETE, famous battle, 26, 61, 62. GUNDMAR, 33. GUTIERREZ TELLO, 293, 296. H HACAM, Moorish sovereign, 68. HACAM, _El Durrete_, insurgent, 72, 73. HANNIBAL, conquers Toledo, 11. HASDRUBAL, 10; his assassination, 11. HASSADRIN, Jewish writer, 231. HENRY THE IMPOTENT, 105, 106, 124. HENRY of Trastamare, 100. HENRY of Villena, 249. HERMANDAD, famous brotherhood founded 1223, 93, 94, 129. HERMENGILDO, prince and martyr, 26, 27, 28, 29. HILERMO, King of Carpetania, 11. HINESTROSA, uncle of Maria de Padilla, 99, 100. HOSPITAL of Santa Cruz, 107, 284. HOSPITAL of San Juan Bautista or Afuera, 289. HOTEL CASTILLA, 305. HUERTA DEL REY, 243. I ILDEPHONSO, St, 35. ISABEL, the great Queen, 106, 107, 185. ISIDOR, St, 32, 35. J JOSÉ GODOZ ALCÁNTARA, 53. JUAN II., 102, 104. JUAN GUTTIERREZ TELLO, Toledan Magistrate, 127. JUANA, unfortunate daughter of Isabel the Catholic, 108, 110, 111. JUANA DE CASTRO, one of Pedro the Cruel's wives, 101. JUAN DE MENA, poet; _see_ his famous _Coplas_ on Henry of Villena, 103. JUAN DE PADILLA, 109, 110, 111, 112. JUANELO TURRIANO, _see_ description of his _artificio_, 113, 143, 144. JULIAN, Archbishop, 51. JULIAN, Florinda's father, and Governor of Ceuta, 58, 60. L LEANDER of Seville, 26, 29. LEGEND of Puerta del Niño Perdido, 236. LEMBROT, _see_ great tournament, 57. LEOCADIA, St, 19, 20, 21, 37, 38, 296. LEOCADIA, St, basilica, 34, 52. LEOVIGILDO, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30. LOAYSA, Cardinal, 108. LOPE DE VEGA, 39, 138. LORENZANA, Cardinal, 85. LOUIS, St, of France, 19. LOZANO, author of the _Reyes Nueves de Toledo_, 15, 16, 17, 18, 47, 48, 49, 50, 101, 245. LUCY, mother of San Ildephonso, 34. LUISA SIGEA, woman philosopher, 104. LUIVA, 32. LUZ, DOÑA, 47, 48, 49, 50. M MAESE RODRIGO, 163. MAGDALENA, 273. MAISARA, Spanish renegade, 73. MALOGRADA, 270. MARCUS FULVIUS NOBILIOR, 11, 12. MARCUS JULIUS PHILIPPICUS, 13. MARIA DE MOLINA, widow of Sancho el Bravo, 132. MARIA DE PADILLA, 99, 100, 101. MARIANA, historian, 53. MARIA PACHECO, the great widow, 110, 112, 113. MELANCIUS, Bishop of Toledo, 19, 21. MELIAS, _see_ tale of Doña Luz, 48. MENDOZA, Cardinal of Spain, 107, 108, 270, 287. MIRADERO, 303. MOHAMMED, Sultan, 74. MONTIEL, tragedy of Pedro Cruel's death, 102. MORATIN, 244. MORETO, 258. MOZARABE chapel, 175. MUSA, 61, 62, 63. MUSEO PROVINCIAL, 229. N NARCISO TOMÉ, author of celebrated _Trasparente_, 172. NUESTRA, Señora de la Valle, 140, 303. O OCHAVO, 188. OPPAS, _see_ battle of Guadalete, 61. P PACHECO, 195. PALACE of Fuensalida, 255. PALACE of Galiana, 243. PALACE of Garcilaso de la Vega, 257. PALACE of Juan de Padilla, 257. PALACE of King Pedro, 250. PALAZUELOS (Viscount), modern historian of Toledo, 60. PALOMINO, 193, 194, 198, 208. PARRO, _Toledo en la Mano_, 269, 294. PASCUAL DE GALLANGOS, 250. PAUL, rebel under Wamba, 39, 40. PEDRO THE CRUEL, 98, 99, 100, 101, 281. PEDRO DE LAS DUEÑAS, 281, 284. PEDRO DE NAVARRE, 290. PEDRO PEREZ, 152, 159. PEREZ BAYEU, 143. PERSECUTION of the Jews, 232. PHILIP II., 19, 107, 263, 276, 284, 293. PHILIP of Burgundy, 161, 162. PISA, historian, 19, 20, 129, 131, 279. PLAZUELA DE MARCHAN, 290. PONZ, traveller in the last century, 18, 136, 156, 162, 170, 172, 203, 230, 248, 282. PRISCILIANISTS, 22. PUENTE DE ALCÁNTARA, 3, 14, 40, 105, 130, 292. PUERTA DEL CAMBRON, 144, 295. PUERTA DE SANS MARTIN, 58, 144, 292, 293. PUERTA DEL SOL, 95, 299. PUERTA VISAGRA, 129, 279, 289, 295, 297. PYRRHUS, 6, 35. Q QUADRADO, 240. QUIRICUS, Bishop, 38. QUIROGA, 276, 280. QUIROGA, Archbishop, 131. QUO VADIS chapel, 175. R RASIS EL MORO, 57, 133, 292. RECAREDO, 30, 31, 32. RECESVINTHUS, 35. RETABLO of Cathedral, 169. RIVERA, choir-master of Toledo, 19. RODRIGO, last of Gothic Kings, 16,, 40, 51, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62. RODRIGO JIMENEZ DE RADA, 9, 54, 84, 91, 92, 93, 130, 152. S SALA CAPITULAR, 179. SAMUEL LEVI, 250. SAN ANDRÈS, 266. SAN CLEMENTE, 283. SAN GENES, church, 43. SAN ILDEPHONSO (chapel), 182. SAN JOSÉ, 209. SAN JUAN DE LA PENITENCIA, 282. SAN JUAN DE LOS REYES, 216. SAN PEDRO MARTIR, 267. SAN ROMAN, 266, 271. SAN SERVANDO, 261. SAN TOMÉ, 266. SAN VICENTE, 212. SANCHO, Alfonso VI.'s little son, died on the battlefield at eleven, 87. SANTA CRUZ, 284. SANTO DOMINGO EL ANTIGUO, 207. SANTO DOMINGO EL REAL, 284. SANTA FÉ, 281. SANTA ISABEL, 283. SANTA MARIA LA BLANCA, 238. SANTIAGO (chapel), 182. SARMIENTO, revolutionary chief and tyrant, 105. SERTORIUS, 12. SILICEO, Cardinal, 17. SILVAS, great Toledan family, 103, 106, 108. SISEBUTH, 33. SOLOMON'S table, 65. STAREMBERG, 265. STEPHEN, father of San Ildephonso, 34. ST JOHN THE BAPTIST of El Greco, 180, 291. ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST of El Greco, 181. ST MARTIN by El Greco, 209. ST VICENTE FERRER, 239. STREET quoted in chapter on the Cathedral, 157, 158, 159, 160. SUINTHILA, 34. SWORD makers of Toledo, 148. T TAGO, Governor of Toledo, 10, 11. TAILHAN, the _père_, 53, 61. TALLER DEL MORO, Moorish palace, said to be where the tragic _day of the Foss_ took place, 70, 260. TARIK, 61, 62, 65. TAVERA, Cardinal, 131, 289, 290. TENORIO, Cardinal, 97, 174, 262, 294. TOLEDAN laws, 97, 98. TOWER, 189. TRANSITO, 231. TRASPARENTE, 171. TREASURY, 186. TRISTAN, El Greco's favourite pupil, 199, 205. V VALLE DE LA DESGOLLADA, 143. VERGARA, 161, 166. VILLALAR, where the great _Comuneros_, Juan de Padilla, Maldonado, and Bravo were taken and beheaded, 111, 112. VLLLALPANDO, 166. VILLENA, Marquis of, astronomer and celebrated scholar, 103. VIRGEN DEL ROSARIO, 269. VIRIATE, 12, 14. VITERICO, 32. W WALLS of Toledo, 302. WAMBA, the greatest Gothic King, 38, 39, 40, 41, 46, 293. WITIZA, 51, 52, 53, 54. Y YAHYA, the last Moorish sovereign of Toledo, 80. Z ZOCODOVER, 57, 112, 116, 119, 120, 127, 281, 284. ZORILLA, 280. PRINTED BY TURNBULL AND SPEARS, EDINBURGH FOOTNOTES: [1] Tubal, grandson of Noah, son of Japhet his son, peopled Spain, that I know for sure. And he was the first King from whom the name of Tubalia. And this first King through fright, made his seat in Toledo, because of the waters he did not dare to settle in the plain, but chose the rocky heights. This was forty and three and a hundred years more after the great and savage deluge. And after Tubal reigned Ibero, from whom is said Iberia. Entered Tago with courage, who peopled the South, and much enlarged Toledo and the Tagus, and in conclusion, to his kingdom gave the name of Taja. Hijo, de Japhet su hijo, Poblo à España, cierto sé, Y es el primer rey que fué, Por quien Tubalia se dijo. Y esto primer rey de miedo Hizo su assiento en Toledo Que pon las aguas no ha ossado En lo llano hacer poblado Sino en alto y en roquedo. "Esto fué a quarenta y tres Y mas cien años despues Del diluvio grande, y fiero, Y tras Tubal reyno Ibero, Por quien dicha Iberia es, Entra Tajo, con denuedo, Que poblo en el meridion, Y aumento mucho a Toledo, Y al Tajo y su reyna ledo Nombro Taga en conclusion." [2] A document exists purporting to be the original letter sent by the Jews of Toledo to their co-religionists of Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion. It is addressed: _Levi archisinagogo é Samuel Joseph, omes bonos de la aljama de Toledo à Eleazar mint gran sacerdote é à Samuel Ecaniet, Annas y Caiphas, omes bones de la aljama de la terra sancta, salud en el Dios de Israel_. It is signed: De Toledo à XIV. dais del mes de Nizan era del César XVIII. y de Augusto Octaviano LXX. But the "omes bonos" of the Holy Land had settled the question before the lengthy epistle of the "good men" of Toledo reached them. [3] Conde de Mora: "Historia de Toledo." [4] "Bib. Nat.," p. 16, v. 21 [5] It was chiefly in other Gothic towns that Wamba's fortifications were demolished. Toledo comparatively escaped. [6] My notes from the Chronicle says _a hundred thousand workshops_, but this in revision seems a slip of the pen. Such a number of workshops even at so flourishing an hour would have encumbered Toledo very seriously, I imagine. [7] Dozy regards Count Julian as an authentic historical figure though both his rank and authority are undefined. He believes he was neither a vassal nor a Spanish subject, and consequently no traitor. But was he a Berber, a Greek, an independent prince or tributary of Spain or of the Emperor of Constantinople? Dozy suggests he may have been an Arabian governor of Ceuta, under the Byzantine emperor, while Arabian authors describe him as a mere merchant. [8] Mr Stanley Lane Poole in his "Moors in Spain" (wherein he accepts the old-fashioned but improbable legend of Julian or Florinda as history) suggests that Rodrigo was drowned and washed out by the great ocean, and describes the last of the Goths as a kind of legendary Arthur, enfolded in mystery and awaited by his mourning subjects like the Irish Knights who in mediæval times were expected to return from some dim region of rest to take up again the burden of our life, and lead their followers to victory and prosperity. [9] Rasis el Moro, Spain, MS. Bib. Pro.--Toledo. [10] Abou-l-Hasan: Dozy, _Recherches sur l'histoire et la littérature d'Espagna_. [11] "Histoire de Philippe II." by H. Fornaron. [12] The Archbishop of Zamora, Antonio de Acuña, a fierce _comunero_, commanded in the absence of Padilla, and was mighty profane in his method of war for an archbishop. After leading his troops against the King's Castle of Aguila, he resolutely stormed the Cathedral gates and maltreated the resident canons. The insurgents held the cloisters and prevented the celebration of any church office during their stay. The unfortunate chapter was kept for three entire days and nights from sleeping or eating. What an incredible scandal in hieratic Toledo! [13] Complaining at the Hotel Castilla to a Spanish painter of my daily persecution at the hands of the beggars of Toledo, I threatened to visit the Governor and make my plaint. The artist, something of a humorist, gravely said, "His Excellency the Governor will listen to you with all courtesy and attention, and when you have finished, he will hold out his hand with a graceful gesture, and say: _Da mi una limosna tambien_ (Give me also alms). [14] Bibliotica provincial de Toledo. [15] MS. correspondence of Lope de Vega in possession of Señor Menendez y Pelayo. [16] Street's visit to Toledo was unfortunately hurried, or he would have been forced to change many of his views. Had he seen the cathedral from Nuestra Señora de la Valle, considerably above the bridge of San Martin, he would have found it prominent. [17] _De Toletano Hebraeorum Templo_, MS. Bib. Pro. Toledo. [18] MS. correspondence of Lope de Vega, in possession of Señor Menendez y Pelayo. [19] MS. _De Toletano Hebraeorum Templo_, Bib. Provincial, Toledo. [20] Galiana of Toledo Most beautiful and marvellous! The Moor the most celebrated Of all the Moorish race. Mouth of rosy pinks, High bosom that palpitates, Ivory forehead adorned with The flaming gold of Tyre. [21] Wamba, Gothic King, restored the walls of this city, and offered them in Latin verses to God and the saints, its patrons; the Moors effaced them and placed instead blasphemies and errors in Arabian letters. King Philip II., in religious zeal and to preserve the memory of the departed Kings, ordered Gutierrez Tello, city magistrate, to efface them and place, along with the patron saints, the verses of King Wamba. * * * * * Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber: Gamera=> Gamero {pg 18} Toleda is mournful=> Toledo is mournful {pg 74} Almamon=> Almanon {pg 79} Abon l. Hasan=> Abou-l-Hasan {pg 79} Gonzala Ruiz=> Gonzalo Ruiz {pg 132} Toribio Rodrignez=> Toribio Rodriguez {pg 174} fomnder's=> founder's {pg 176} Hospital de Afuero=> Hospital de Afuera {pg 200} The facade=> The façade {pg 245} vegado te lloro=> vegada te lloro {pg 249} ofrció en versos latinos=> ofreció en versos latinos {pg 293} ALFONSO VII., 19. ALFONSO VII., 93, 283.=> ALFONSO VII., 19, 93, 283. {pg 307} 
41593	----	Every attempt has been made to replicate the original book as printed. Some typographical errors have been corrected (a list follows the text). No attempt has been made to correct or normalize the printed accentuation or spelling of Spanish names or words. (etext transcriber's note) UNEXPLORED SPAIN ABEL CHAPMAN'S WORKS =BIRD-LIFE OF THE BORDERS=. First Edition, 1889; ---- ----, Second Edition, 1907. =WILD SPAIN=. (WITH W. J. B.) 1893. =WILD NORWAY=. 1897. =ART OF WILDFOWLING=. 1896. =ON SAFARI= (IN BRITISH EAST AFRICA). 1908. =UNEXPLORED SPAIN.= (WITH W. J. B.) 1910. [Illustration: H.M. KING ALFONSO XIII SPEARING A BOAR.] UNEXPLORED SPAIN BY ABEL CHAPMAN AUTHOR OF 'WILD SPAIN,' 'WILD NORWAY,' 'ON SAFARI,' ETC. AND WALTER J. BUCK BRITISH VICE-CONSUL AT JEREZ AUTHOR OF 'WILD SPAIN' WITH 209 ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOSEPH CRAWHALL, E. CALDWELL, AND ABEL CHAPMAN AND FROM PHOTOGRAPHS NEW YORK LONGMANS, GREEN & CO. LONDON: EDWARD ARNOLD 1910 INSCRIBED BY GRACIOUS PERMISSION TO THEIR MAJESTIES KING ALFONSO XIII. HIMSELF AN ACCOMPLISHED SPORTSMAN AND QUEEN VICTORIA EUGENIA OF SPAIN WITH DEEP RESPECT BY THEIR MAJESTIES' GRATEFUL AND DEVOTED SERVANTS THE AUTHORS Preface The undertaking of a sequel to _Wild Spain_, we are warned, is dangerous. The implication gratifies, but the forecast alarms not. Admittedly, in the first instance, we occupied a virgin field, and naturally the almost boyish enthusiasm that characterised the earlier book--and probably assured its success--has in some degree abated. But it's not all gone yet; and any such lack is compensated by longer experience (an aggregate, between us, of eighty years) of a land we love, and the sounder appreciation that arises therefrom. Our own resources, moreover, have been supplemented and reinforced by friends in Spain who represent the fountain-heads of special knowledge in that country. No foreigners could have enjoyed greater opportunity, and we have done our best to exploit the advantage--so far, at least, as steady plodding work will avail; for we have spent more than two years in analysing, checking and sorting, selecting and eliminating from voluminous notes accumulated during forty years. The concentrated result represents, we are convinced, an accurate--though not, of course, a complete--exposition of the wild-life of one of the wildest of European countries. No, for this book and its thoroughness neither doubt nor fear intrudes; but we admit to being, in two respects, out of touch with modern treatment of natural-history subjects. Possibly we are wrong in both; but it has not yet been demonstrated, by Euclid or other, that a minority even of two is necessarily so? Nature it is nowadays customary to portray in somewhat lurid and sensational colours--presumably to humour a "popular taste." Reflection might suggest that nothing in Nature is, in fact, sensational, loud, or extravagant; but the lay public possess no such technical training as would enable them to discern the line where Nature stops and where fraud and "faking" begin. At any rate we frequently read purring approval of what appears to us meretricious imposture, and see writers lauded as constellations whom we should condemn as charlatans. Beyond the Atlantic President Roosevelt (as he then was) went bald-headed for the "Nature-fakers," and in America the reader has been put upon his guard. If he still likes "sensations"--well, that's what he likes. But he buys such fiction forewarned. In the illustration of wild-life our views are also, in some degree, divergent from current ideas. Animal-photography has developed with such giant strides and has taught us such valuable lessons (for which none are more grateful than the Authors), that there is danger of coming to regard it, not as a means to an end but as the actual end itself. While photography promises uses the value of which it would be difficult to exaggerate, yet it has defects and limitations which should not be ignored. First as regards animals in motion; the camera sees too quick--so infinitely quicker than the human eye that attitudes and effects are portrayed which we do not, and cannot see. Witness a photograph of the finish for the Derby. Galloping horses do not figure so on the human retina--with all four legs jammed beneath the body like a dead beetle. No doubt the camera exhibits an unseen phase in the actual action and so reveals its process; but that phase is not what mortals see. Similarly with birds in flight, the human eye only catches the form during the instantaneous arrest of the wing at the end of each stroke--in many cases not even so much as that. But the camera snaps the whirling pinion at mid-stroke or at any intermediate point. The result is altogether admirable as an exposition of the mechanical processes of flight; but it fails as an illustration, inasmuch as it illustrates a pose which Nature has expressly concealed from our view. Secondly, in relation to still life. Here the camera is not only too quick, but too faithful. A tiny ruffled plume, a feather caught up by the breeze with the momentary shadow it casts, even an intrusive bough or blade of grass--all are reproduced with such rigid faithfulness and conspicuous effect that what are in fact merest minute details assume a wholly false proportion, mislead the eye, and disguise the whole picture. True, these things are actually there; but the human eye enjoys a faculty (which the camera does not) of selecting its objective and ignoring, or reducing to its correct relative value each extrinsic detail; of looking, as it were, through obstacles and concentrating its power upon the one main subject of study. The portrayal of wildfowl presents a peculiar difficulty. This group differs in two essential characters from the rest of the bird-world. Though clad in feathers, yet those feathers are not "feathery." Rather may they be described as a steely water-tight encasement, as distinct from the covering, say of game-birds as mackintosh differs from satin. Each plume possesses a compactness of web and firmness of texture that combine to produce a rigidity, and this, it so happens, both in form and colour. For in this group the colours, too, or patterns of colour, are clean-cut, the contrasts strong and sharply defined. The plumage of wild-fowl, in short, is characterised by lack of subdued tints and half-tones. That is its beauty and its glory; but the fact presents a stumbling-block to treatment, especially in colour. The difficulty follows consequentially. Subjects of such character and crude coloration defy accustomed methods. That is not the fault of the artist; rather it reveals the limitations of Art. Just as in landscape distance ever demands an "atmosphere" more or less obliterative of distinctive detail afar (though such detail may be visible to non-artistic eyesight miles away), so in birds of sharply contrasted colouring the needed effect can only (it would appear) be attained by processes of softening which are not, in fact, correct, and which ruin the real picture as designed by Nature. No wild bird (and wildfowl least of all) can be portrayed from captive specimens--still less from bedraggled corpses selected in Leadenhall market. In the latter every essential feature has disappeared. The ruffled remains resemble the beauty of their originals only as a dish-clout may recall some previous existence as a damask serviette. Living captives at least give form; but that is all. The loss of freedom, with all its contingent perils, involves the loss of character, the pride of life, and of independence. Once remove the first essential element--the sense of instant danger, with all that the stress and exigencies of wild-life import--and with these there vanish vigilance, carriage, sprightliness, dignity, sometimes even self-respect. Not a man who has watched and studied wild beasts and wild birds in their native haunts, glorified and ennobled by self-conscious aptitude to prevail in the ceaseless "struggle for existence," but instantly recognises with a pang the different demeanour of the same creatures in captivity, albeit carefully tended in the best zoological gardens of the world. * * * * * To Mr. Joseph Crawhall (cousin of one author) we and our readers are indebted for a series of drawings that speak for themselves. Further, we desire most heartily to thank H.R.H. the Duke of Orleans for notes and photographs illustrative both of Baetican scenery and of the wild camels of the marisma; also the many Spanish and Anglo-Spanish friends whose assistance is specifically acknowledged, _passim_, in the text. Should some slight slip or repetition have escaped the final revision, may we crave indulgence of critics? 'Tis not care that lacks, but sheer mnemonics. In a work of (we are told) 150,000 words the mass of manuscript appals, and to detect every single error may well prove beyond our power. We have lost, moreover, that guiding eye and pilot-like touch on the helm that helped to steer our earlier venture through the shoals and seething whirlpools that ever beset voyages into the unknown. A. C. W. J. B. BRITISH VICE-CONSULATE, JEREZ, _December 1910_. Contents CHAP. PAGE I. UNEXPLORED SPAIN: INTRODUCTORY 1 II. " " " (_Continued_) 17 III. THE COTO DOÑANA: OUR HISTORIC HUNTING-GROUND (A FOREWORD BY SIR MAURICE DE BUNSEN, P.C., G.C.M.G., G.C.V.O., BRITISH AMBASSADOR AT MADRID) 30 IV. THE COTO DOÑANA: NOTES ON ITS PHYSICAL FORMATION, FAUNA, AND RED DEER 35 V. ANDALUCIA AND ITS BIG GAME: STILL-HUNTING 54 VI. " " " WILD-BOAR 70 VII. "OUR LADY OF THE DEW": THE PILGRIMAGE TO THE SHRINE OF NUESTRA SEÑORA DEL ROCÍO 82 VIII. THE MARISMAS OF GUADALQUIVIR 88 IX. WILDFOWL-SHOOTING IN THE MARISMAS 105 X. WILD-GEESE IN SPAIN: THEIR SPECIES, HAUNTS, AND HABITS 114 XI. WILD-GEESE ON THE SAND-HILLS 125 XII. SOME RECORDS IN SPANISH WILDFOWLING 133 XIII. THE SPANISH IBEX 139 XIV. SIERRA MORÉNA: IBEX 147 XV. " " RED DEER AND BOAR 158 XVI. PERNALES 174 XVII. LA MANCHA 183 XVIII. THE SPANISH BULL-FIGHT 192 XIX. THE SPANISH FIGHTING-BULL 200 XX. SIERRA DE GRÉDOS 208 XXI. " " : IBEX-HUNTING 216 XXII. AN ABANDONED PROVINCE: ESTREMADURA 225 XXIII. LAS HURDES (ESTREMADURA) AND THE SAVAGE TRIBES THAT INHABIT THEM 234 XXIV. THE GREAT BUSTARD 242 XXV. " " (_Continued_) 256 XXVI. FLAMINGOES 265 XXVII. WILD CAMELS 275 XXVIII. AFTER CHAMOIS IN THE ASTURIAS 283 XXIX. HIGHLANDS OF ASTURIAS 294 XXX. THE SIERRA NEVÁDA 301 XXXI. " " (_Continued_) 311 XXXII. VALENCIA 321 XXXIII. SMALL-GAME SHOOTING IN SPAIN 328 XXXIV. ALIMAÑAS, OR THE MINOR BEASTS OF CHASE 337 XXXV. OUR "HOME-MOUNTAINS": THE SERRANÍA DE RONDA 347 XXXVI. " " " " (_Continued_) 360 XXXVII. A SPANISH SYSTEM OF WILDFOWLING: THE "CABRESTO" OR STALKING-HORSE 371 XXXVIII. THE "CORROS," OR MASSING OF WILDFOWL IN SPRING FOR THEIR NORTHERN MIGRATION 376 XXXIX. SPRING-TIME IN THE MARISMAS 381 XL. SKETCHES OF SPANISH BIRD-LIFE 392 APPENDIX 407 INDEX 413 List of Plates H.M. KING ALFONSO XIII. SPEARING A BOAR _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE TYPICAL LANDSCAPE IN COTO DOÑANA 30 EGRET HERONRY AT SANTOLALLA, COTO DOÑANA 32 RED DEER IN DOÑANA. From a Drawing by Joseph Crawhall 36 THREE VIEWS IN COTO DOÑANA: (1) SAHARAN SAND-DUNES; (2) TRANSPORT; (3) A CORRAL, OR PINEWOOD ENCLOSED BY SAND 40 RED DEER. From Drawings by Joseph Crawhall 46 INSPIRING MOMENTS 51 GUNNING-PUNT IN THE MARISMA 90 WILD-GOOSE SHOOTING ON THE SAND-HILLS 90 VASQUEZ APPROACHING WILDFOWL WITH CABRESTO-PONY 90 STANCHEON-GUN IN THE MARISMA--DAWN 106 WILD-GEESE IN THE MARISMA 122 SPANISH IBEX IN SIERRA DE GRÉDOS 140 HEADS OF SPANISH IBEX 152 RED-DEER HEADS, SIERRA MORÉNA 156 WOLF SHOT IN SIERRA MORÉNA, MARCH 1909 158 HUNTSMAN WITH CARACOLA, SIERRA MORÉNA 158 PACK OF PODENCOS, SIERRA MORÉNA 158 WILD-BOAR, WEIGHING 200 LBS. 162 THE RECORD HEAD (RED DEER), SIERRA MORÉNA 162 RED DEER. From Drawings by Joseph Crawhall 166 RED DEER. From Drawings by Joseph Crawhall 170 WILD-BOAR. From Drawings by Joseph Crawhall 170 RED-DEER HEADS, SIERRA MORÉNA 172 BULL-FIGHTING. From a Drawing by Joseph Crawhall 194 BULL-FIGHTING. From a Drawing by Joseph Crawhall 198 AFTER THE STROKE. From a Drawing by Joseph Crawhall 202 SCENES IN SIERRA DE GRÉDOS 212 "AT THE APEX OF ALL THE SPAINS" 216 TWO SPANISH IBEX SHOT IN SIERRA DE GRÉDOS, JULY 1910 220 GREAT BUSTARD 250 SLENDER-BILLED CURLEW 250 GREAT BUSTARD "SHOWING OFF" 260 FLAMINGOES ON THEIR NESTS 272 WILD CAMELS 276 CAPTURING A WILD CAMEL IN THE MARISMA 280 THE HOME OF THE CHAMOIS 286 PEAKS OF SIERRA NEVÁDA 306 NEST OF GRIFFON 306 ROYAL SHOOTING AT THE PARDO, NEAR MADRID 334 Illustrations in the Text PAGE Lammergeyer (_Gypaëtus barbatus_) 3 Woodchat Shrike (_Lanius pomeranus_) 7 Griffon Vulture (_Gyps fulvus_) 9 Wooden Plough-share 12 Cetti's Warbler (_Sylvia cettii_) 14 Dartford Warbler (_Sylvia undata_) 16 Fantail Warbler (_Cisticola cursitans_) 17 Rock-Thrush (_Petrocincla saxatilis_) 18 A Village _Posada_ 20 Serin (_Serinus hortulanus_) 23 Bonelli's Eagle (_Aquila bonellii_) 26 Black Vulture (_Vultur monachus_) 27 White-Faced Duck (_Erismatura leucocephala_) 28 Spanish Imperial Eagle 31 Spanish Lynx 33 Greenshank (_Totanus canescens_) 34 Sketch-Map of Delta of Guadalquivir 35 Marsh-Harrier (_Circus aeruginosus_) 38 "Silent Songsters" 39 Blackstart (_Ruticilla titys_) 39 Great Spotted Cuckoo (_Oxylophus glandarius_) 41 "Globe-Spanners" 42 "Confidence" 43 Abnormal Cast Antler 44 Egret 45 "Suspicion" 49 Altabaca (_Scrofularia_) 51 Tomillo de Arena 51 "What's This?" 52 Antlers 56 Stag "taking the Wind" 57 _Sylvia melanocephala_ 60 Reed-Climbers 61 Great Grey Shrike (_Lanius meridionalis_) 62 Spanish Green Woodpecker (_Gecinus sharpei_) 63 Tarantula 64 Stag--as he fell 67 Hoopoes at Jerez, March 19, 1910 69 "Room for Two" 71 Wild-Boar--at bay 73 Wild-Boar--"Bolted past" 79 Wild-Boar 81 Praying Mantis 87 Avocet 88 Samphire 90 Greylag Geese 92 White-Eyed Pochard (_Fuligula nyroca_) 94 "Flamingoes over" 95 Pochard (_Fuligula ferina_) 96 Flight of Flamingoes 97 Wild-Geese alighting 98 Wildfowl in the Marisma 101 Flamingoes 102 Stilt 105 Godwits 113 Root of Spear-Grass 115 System of driving Wild-Geese 117 Shelters for driving Wild-Geese 118 Godwits 124 Wild-Geese alighting on Sand-Hills 129 Wild-Geese 133 Godwits 134 Sketch-Map of the _Nucléo Central_ of Grédos 141 Grey Shrike 162 Azure-Winged Magpie 163 Sardinian Warbler 164 Griffon Vulture 166 Pair of Antlers 167 Stag--"picking his way up a Rock-Staircase" 168 "The Hart bounced, full-broadside, over the Pass" 169 Pernales 175 Sparrow-Owls (Athene noctua) and Moths 182 Hoopoes 183 Woodchat Shrike and its "Shambles" 184 Desert-loving Wheatears 185 Red-crested Pochard (_Fuligula rufila_) 186 Red-crested Pochards 190 "Minor Game" 210 Southern Grey Shrike 212 Griffon Vulture and Nest 215 "The Way of an Eagle in the Air" (_Lammergeyer_) 218 Black Vulture (_Vultur monachus_) 222 Roller (_Coracias garrula_) 226 Trujillo 227 "Scavengers" 228 Wolf-proof Dog-Collar 231 Woodlark 232 Sketch-Map of Las Hurdes 234 White Wagtail 238 Wolf-proof Sheepfold 239 The Great Bustard 243 Well on Andalucian Plain 244 Calandra Lark 246 Spanish Thistle and Stonechat 248 Bustards--"Swerve aside" 252 Bustards passing full broadside 254 Imperial Eagle--"Hurtling through Space" 258 Draw-Well with Cross-Bar 259 "_Hechando la Rueda_" 260 Tail-Feathers of Great Bustard 261 Little Bustard 263 Stilts in the Marisma 265 Flamingoes 266 Stilts disturbed at Nesting-Place 268 Flamingoes and their Nests 269 Flight of Flamingoes 270-1 Head of Flamingo 273 Little Gull and Tern 274 Flamingoes 277 "The Camels a-coming" 281 Chamois 283 A Chamois Drive--Picos de Europa 288 Hoopoe 293 Lammergeyer (_Gypaëtus barbatus_) 303 "Unemployed": Bee-eaters on a Wet Morning 311 Woodlark (_Alauda arborea_) 313 Lammergeyer 314 Soaring Vulture 315 Golden Eagle Hunting 317 Rock-Thrush 318 Spanish Sparrow 320 Imperial Eagle Passing Overhead 342 Pinsápo Pine (_Abies pinsapo_) 347 Rock-Bunting (_Emberiza cia_) 348 Pinsápo Pines 350 Crossbill 351 Lammergeyer Overhead 353 Golden Eagle Hunting 354 Vultures 356 Lammergeyer entering Eyrie 358 Lammergeyer 361 Griffon Vultures 368 Reed-Bunting 378 Grey Plover 381 Head of Crested Coot 384 Avocets Feeding 385 White-Faced Duck (_Erismatura leucocephala_) 387 Purple Heron (_Ardea purpurea_) 389 Grey Plovers 390 Orphean Warbler 391 Savi's Warbler (_Sylvia savii_) 393 Unknown Insect 394 Bonelli's Eagles 395 Great Spotted Cuckoo (_Oxylophus glandarius_) 400 Crossbills (_Loxia curvirostra_) 402 CHAPTER I UNEXPLORED SPAIN INTRODUCTORY The Spain that we love and of which we write is not the Spain of tourist or globe-trotter. These hold main routes, the highways from city to city; few so much as venture upon the bye-ways. Our Spain begins where bye-ways end. We write of her pathless solitudes, of desolate steppe and prairie, of marsh and mountain-land--of her majestic sierras, some well-nigh inaccessible, and, in many an instance, untrodden by British foot save our own. Lonely scenes these, yet glorified by primeval beauty and wealth of wild-life. As naturalists--that is, merely as born lovers of all that is wild, and big, and pristine--we thank the guiding destiny that early directed our steps towards a land that is probably the wildest and certainly the least known of all in Europe--a land worthy of better cicerones than ourselves. Do not let us appear to disparage the other Spain. The tourist enjoys another land overflowing with historic and artistic interest--with memorials of mediæval romance, and of stirring times when wave after wave of successive conquest swept the Peninsula. Such subjects, however, fall wholly outside the province of this book: nor do they lack historians a thousand-fold better qualified to tell their tale. * * * * * The first cause that differentiates Spain from other European countries of equal area is her high general elevation. This fact must jump to the eye of every observant traveller who books his seat by the Sûd-express to the Mediterranean. Better still, for our purpose, let him commence his journey, say at the Tweed. From Berwick southwards through the heart of England to London: from London to Paris, and right across France--all the way he traverses low-lying levels; fat pastures, fertile and tilled to the last acre. His aneroid tells him he has seldom risen above sea-level by more than a few hundred feet; and never once has his train passed through mountains--hardly even through hills; he can scarce be said to have had a real mountain within the range of his vision in all these 1200 miles. Now he crosses the Bidassoa ... the whole world changes! At once his train plunges into interminable Pyrenees, and ere it clears these, he has ascended to a permanent highland level--a tawny treeless steppe that averages 2000-feet altitude, and sometimes approaches 3000, traversed by range after range of rugged mountains that arise all around him to four, five, or six thousand feet. Railways, moreover, avoid mountains (so far as they can). Our traveller, therefore, must bear in mind that what he actually sees is but the mildest and tamest version of Spanish sierras. There are bits here and there that he may have thought anything but tame--only tame by comparison with those grander scenes to which we propose guiding him. For the next 500 miles he never quits that austere highland altitude nor ever quite loses sight of jagged peaks that pierce the skies--peaks of that hoary cinder-grey that shows up almost white against an azure background. Never does he descend till, after leaving behind him three kingdoms--Arragon, Navarre, and Castile--his train plunges through the Sierra Moréna, down the gorges of Despeñaperros, and at length on the third day enters upon the smiling lowlands of Andalucia. Here the aneroid rises once more to rational readings, and fertile _vegas_ spread away to the horizon. But our traveller is not even now quite clear of mountains. Whether he be booked to Malaga or to Algeciras, he will presently find himself enveloped once more amidst some fairly stupendous rocks--the Gaëtánes or Serranía de Ronda respectively. Spain is, in fact, largely an elevated table-land, 400 miles square, and traversed by four main mountain-ranges, all (like her great rivers) running east and west. The only considerable areas of lowland are found in Andalucia and Valencia. Naturally such physical features result in marked variations of climate and scene, which in turn react upon their productions and denizens, whether human or of savage breed. We take three examples. [Illustration: TYPES OF SPANISH BIRD-LIFE LAMMERGEYER (_Gypaëtus barbatus_) Whose home is in the wildest Sierras--a weird dragon-like bird-form; expanse, 9 feet. [Formerly reputed to carry off _babies_ to its eyrie.]] The central table-lands, subject all summer to solar rays that burn, in winter shelterless from biting blasts off snow-clad sierras, present precisely that landscape of desperate desolation that always results from a maximum of sunshine combined with a minimum of rainfall. A desiccated downland, khaki-colour or calcareous by turn, but bare (save for a few weeks in spring) of green thing, naked of bush or shrub, innocent even of grass. Not a tree grows so far as eye can reach, not a watercourse but is stone-dry and leaves the impress that it has been so since time began. Oh, it is an unlovely landscape, that central plateau. 'Twere ungrateful, nevertheless (and unjust too), to forget that here we are journeying in a glory of atmosphere, brilliant in aggressive radiance that annihilates distance and revels in space. Though patches of vine-growth be lost in the monotony of tawny expanse, mud-built hamlet and village church indistinguishable amidst a universal khaki, yet this is, in truth, a kingdom of the sun. The great bustard maintains a foothold on these arid uplands, but the fauna is best exemplified by the desert-loving sand-grouse (_Pterocles arenarius_). Precisely the reverse of all this is Cantabria--the Basque provinces of the north, with Galicia and the Asturias. There, bordering on the Biscayan Sea, you find a region absolutely Scandinavian in type--pinnacled peaks, precipitous beyond all rivals even in Spain, with deep-rifted valleys between, rushing salmon-rivers and mountain-torrents abounding in trout. Here the fauna is alpine, if not subarctic, and includes the brown bear and chamois, the ptarmigan, hazel-grouse, and capercaillie. Cantabria is a region of rock, snow, and mist-wraith; of birch and pine-forest--the very antithesis of the third region, that next concerns us, the smiling plains of Andalucia and Valencia nestling on Mediterranean shore. Here for eight months out of the twelve one lives in a paradise; but the summer is African in its burden of heat and discomfort. Every green thing outside the vineyard and irrigated garden is burnt up by a fiery sun, a sun that changes not, but, day following day, grips the land in a blistering embrace. Climatic conditions such as these reacting on a race already infused with Arab blood naturally conduce to Oriental modes of life. Yet even here we have examples of the curious contradictions that characterise this _pays de l'imprévu_. Thus within sight of one another, there flourish on the _vega_ below the date-palm and sugar-cane, while the ice-defying edelweiss embellishes the snows above--arctic and tropic in one. * * * * * Such extremes of climate react, as suggested, upon the character of the human inhabitants of a land which includes within its boundaries nearly all the physical conditions of Europe and North Africa. From the north, as might be expected, comes the worker--the sturdy laborious Galician, disdained and despised by his Andalucian brother, regarded as lacking in dignity--the very name _Gallego_ is a term of reproach. But he is a happy and contented hewer of wood and drawer of water, that Gallego: throughout Spain he carries the baskets, bears the burdens, cleans the floors; and finally returns, a rich man, to his barren hills of Galicia. The Andalucian will condescend to tend your cattle or garden, to drive your horses or ponies: and such offices he will perform well; but anything menial, or what he might regard as derogatory, he prefers--instinctively, not offensively--to leave to the Galician. From Castile and Navarre comes a different caste, stately and aristocratic by nature, yet with fiery temperament concealed beneath subdued exterior--honestly, we prefer both the preceding exemplars. The Catalan comes next, pushing and effervescent, all for his own little corner, his factories and his trade--impregnated, every man, with a sort of cinematograph of advanced views on social and political questions of the day--borrowed mostly from his up-to-date neighbours beyond the Pyrenees, yet grafted on to old-world _fueros_, or franchises, that date back to the times of the Counts of Barcelona.[1] Perhaps the most perfect example of contemporary natural nobility is afforded by the peasant-proprietor of pastoral León; then there is the Basque of Biscay, Tartar-sprung or Turanian, Finnic, or surviving aboriginal--let philologists decide. Among Spain's manifold human types, we suggest to ethnologists (and suggested before, twenty years ago) the study of a surviving remnant that still clings secreted, lonely as lepers, in the far-away mountains of Northern Estremadura--the Hurdes. These wild tribes of unknown origin (presumed to be Gothic) live apart from Spain, four thousand of them, a root-grubbing race of _homo sylvestris_, squatted in a land without written history or record, where all is traditional even to the holding of the soil. Not a title-deed or other document exists; yet this is a region of considerable extent--say fifty miles by thirty. A recent pilgrimage to these forgotten glens enables us to give, in another chapter, some contemporary facts about "Las Hurdes." Throughout Spain the people of the "lower orders"--the peasantry--strike those who leave the beaten tracks by their independence and manly bearing. North or south, east or west, an infinite variety of races differing in habit and character, even in tongue, yet all agreeing in their solid manliness, in straight-forward honesty, in what the Romans entitled _virtus_--fine types save where contaminated by _empléomania_, call that "officialdom" (one of the twin curses of Spain). Largely there exists here ground-work for the rebuilding of Spanish greatness--such a land awaits but the wand of a magician to recall its people to front rank. Neither by despotic methods nor by the power that is only demonstrated by violence will the change be brought about, but by the enlightenment that has learnt to leave unimitated the follies of the past, and unused the forces of coercion. Such a leader, we believe, to-day wields that wand. May he be spared to restore the destinies of his country. It was in Spain, remember, that, more than 2000 years ago, the fate of Carthage and, later, that of Rome was decided. To the latter Imperial city Spain had given poets, philosophers, and emperors. It was in Spain that there dawned the earlier glimmerings of popular liberties, as such are now understood. Self-government with municipal rights were recognised by the Cortes of León previous to our Magna Charta. Individual guarantees, freedom of person and contract, and the inviolability of the home were granted by the Cortes of Zaragoza in 1348--more than three centuries before our Habeas Corpus was signed in 1679. A land with such traditions and achievements, with its twenty millions of inhabitants, cannot long be held back outside the trend of liberal expansion. The pursuit of game, alike with other aspects of Spanish things, is not exempt from startling surprises. A ramble through the cistus-scrub, with no more exciting object than shooting a few redlegs, may result in bagging a lynx; or a handful of snipe from some cane-brake be augmented by the addition of a wild-boar. It is not that game abounds, but that the country is wide and wild, abandoned to natural state and combining conditions congenial to animal-life. Of the big-game that is obtained or of its habitats, there is no approximate estimate, nor do precise knowledge or records exist. Each village in the sierra or higher mountain-region lives its own life apart. Communication with other places is rare and difficult, nor is it sought. One must go oneself to the spot to ascertain with any sort of accuracy what game has been, or may be obtained thereat. This means finding out every fact at first-hand, for no reliance can be placed on reports or hearsay evidence. Nor does this remark apply to game alone: it applies universally in wilder Spain. The Englishman straying in these lone scenes finds himself amongst a kindly but independent people where sympathy and a knowledge of the language carry him further than money. Where all are _Caballeros_, neither titles nor wealth impress or subdue. The wanderer is free to join his new-made friends in the chase, taking equal chance with keen sportsmen and on terms of equality. He will find his nationality a passport to their liking, and soon discover that Arab hospitality has left an abiding impress in these wild regions; as, indeed, Moorish domination has done on every Spanish thing. That last sentence sums up an ever-present and essential factor. In any description of this country, however superficial, this Oriental heritage must always be borne in mind as an influence of first importance. Previous to the Arab inrush, Spain had enjoyed practically no organic national existence. The Peninsula was occupied by a cluster of separate kingdoms, not united nor even homogeneous, and usually one or another at war with its neighbour. Neither Roman nor Goth had fused the Spanish races into a concrete whole during their eight centuries of overlordship. In A.D. 711 occurred a decisive day. Then, on Guadalete's plain, below the walls of Jerez, that impetuous Arab chieftain Tarik overthrew the Gothic King Roderick and with him the power of Spain. Like an overwhelming flood, the Arabs swept across the land. Within two years (by 713) the insignia of the Crescent floated above every castle and tower, and Moslem rule was absolute throughout the country--excepting only in the wild northern mountains of Asturias, whence the tenacity of the mountaineers, guided by the genius of Pelayo, flung back the tide of war. [Illustration: TYPES OF SPANISH BIRD-LIFE WOODCHAT SHRIKE (_Lanius pomeranus_)] Spanish history for the next seven centuries (711-1492) records "Moorish domination." Now history, as such, lies outside our scope; but we become concerned where Arab systems, and their methods of colonisation, have altered the face of the earth and left enduring marks on wilder Spain. And we may, beyond that, be allowed to interpolate a remark or two in elucidation of what sometimes appear popular misconceptions on these and subsequent events. Thus, during the period denominated "domination," the Arab conquerors enjoyed no peaceful or undisputed possession. During all those centuries there continued one long succession of wars--intermittent attempts, successful and the reverse, at reconquest by the Christian power. Here a patch of ground, a city, or a province was regained; presently, perhaps, to be lost a second or a third time. Never for long was there a final acceptance of the major force. But during the interludes, the periods of rest between struggles, the two contending races lived in more or less friendly intercourse, exchanging courtesies and even maintaining a stout rivalry in those warlike forms of sport which in mediæval times formed but a substitute for war. It was thence that the custom of bull-fighting took its rise. If not fighting Arabs, fight bulls, and so prepare for the more strenuous contest. Such conditions could not but have tended towards greater coherence among the various elements on the Christian side, except for the incessant internecine rivalries between the Christians themselves. A Spanish knight or kinglet would invoke the aid of his nation's foe to consolidate or establish his own petty estate. Christians with Moslem auxiliaries fought Moslems reinforced by Christian renegades. The Moorish invader had to fight for his possession--every yard of it. Yet despite that, this energetic race found time to colonise, to develop and enrich the subjugated region with a thoroughness the evidence of which faces us to-day. We do not refer to their cities or to such monuments in stone as the Mezquita or Alhambra, but to their introduction into rural Spain of much of what to-day constitutes chief sources of the country's wealth, and which might have been enormously increased had Moorish methods been followed up. The Koran expressly ordains and directs the introduction of all available fruits or plants suitable to soil that came, or comes, under Moslem dominion. "The man who plants or sows the seed of anything which, with the fruit thereof, gives sustenance to man, bird or beast does an action as commendable as charity"--so wrote one of their philosophers. "He who builds a house and plants trees and who oppresses no one, nor lacks justice, will receive abundant reward from the Almighty." There you have the religion both of the good man and the good colonist. These precepts the Moors habitually and energetically carried out to the letter. Arboriculture was universal: the provinces of Valencia, Cordoba, and Toledo they filled with trees--fruit-trees and timber. In the warm valleys of the coast and in the sheltered glens of the mountains they acclimatised exotic fruits, plants, and vegetables hitherto restricted to the more benign climes of the East or to Afric's scorching strand. Sugar-cane flourished in such luxuriance as to leave available a heavy margin for export. The fig-tree and carob, quince and date-palm, the cotton-plant and orange, with other aromatic and medicinal herbs, together with aloes and the anachronous-looking prickly-pear (_Cactus_), its amorphous lobes reminiscent of the Pleistocene, were all brought over for the use and benefit, the delight and profit of Europe. Of these, the orange to-day forms one of Spain's most valuable exports, representing some three millions sterling per annum. [Illustration: TYPES OF SPANISH BIRD-LIFE GRIFFON VULTURE (_Gyps fulvus_) Abounds all over Spain: sketched while drying his wings after a thunderstorm, in the Sierra de San Cristobal, Jerez.] Silk and its manufacture represented another immense source of wealth and industry introduced into Spain--to-day extinct. The Moors covered Andalucia with mulberry-groves: in Granada alone ran 5000 looms for the weaving of the fibre, and the streets of the Zacatin and the Alcarcería became world-markets, where every variety of costly stuffs were bought and sold--tafetans, velvets, and richest textures that surpassed in quality and brilliancy of tint even the far-famed products of Piza, Florence, and the Levantine cities which since Roman days had monopolised the silk-supply of the world. These now found their wares displaced by Spanish silks; even the sumptuous "creations" of Persia and China met with a dangerous rivalry. Such was the technical skill and success of the Moors in agriculture and acclimatisation that, on the eventual conquest and final expulsion of their race from Spain, overtures were made with a view of inducing a certain proportion to remain, lest Spain might lose every expert she possessed in these essential pursuits. Six families in every hundred were promised amnesty on condition of remaining, but none accepted the offer. Deep as was their love for Spain--so deep that the departing Moors are related to have knelt and kissed its strand ere embarking, broken-hearted, for Africa--yet not a man of them but refused to remain as vassals where, for centuries, they had lived as lords. Such were the Moors--strong in war, yet equally strong in all the arts and enterprises of peace, filled with energy, an industrious and a practical race. It is safe to say that under their regime the resources of this difficult land were being developed to their utmost capacity.[2] Of the final expulsion of the Moors (and that of the Jews was analogous) 'tis not for us to write. Yet, for Spain, both events proved momentous, and, along with the antecedent practices of the Moriscos, provide side-lights on history that are worth consideration.[3] The subjoined statistics give the state of Spanish agriculture at the present day, the total acreage being taken as 50,451,688 hectares (2-1/2 acres each):-- Hectares. Cultivated 21,702,880 Uncultivated:-- Pasture, scrub, and wood 24,055,547 Unproductive 4,693,261 ___________ Total 28,748,808 __________ Grand Total 50,451,688 These figures demonstrate precisely the extent of the authors' condominium in Spain--well over one-half the country! With the area under cultivation (say 43 per cent), we have but one concern--the Great Bustard. The remaining 57 per cent pertain absolutely to our province--Wilder Spain. The term scrub or brushwood (in Spanish _monte_), though by a sort of courtesy it may be ranked as "pasture"--and parts of it do support herds of sheep and goats--implies as a rule the wildest of rough covert and jungle, rougher far than a Scottish deer-forest; and this _monte_ clothes well-nigh one-half of Spain. Such figures may appear to infer considerable apathy and lack of effort as regards agriculture. 'Twere, nevertheless, a false assumption to conclude that Spanish mountaineers are an idle race--quite the reverse, as is repeatedly demonstrated in this book. In the hills every acre of available soil is utilised, often at what appears excessive labour--maybe it is a patch so tiny as hardly to seem worth the tilling, or so terribly steep that none save a _serrano_ could keep a foothold, much less plough, sow, and reap. The main explanation of the immense percentage of waste lies in the fact first set forth--the high general elevation of Spain; and, secondly, in her mountainous character. Whether these or any other extenuating circumstances apply to the corn-lands, we are not sufficiently expert in such subjects as to express a confident opinion. But we think not. So antiquated, wasteful, and utterly inefficient have been Spanish methods of agriculture, that a land which might be one of the granaries of Europe is actually to some extent dependent on foreign grain, and that despite an import-duty! A distinct movement is, nevertheless, perceptible in the direction of employing modern agricultural machinery, chemical manures, and such-like. Irrigation in a land whose head-waters can be tapped at 2000 feet and upwards could be carried out on a larger scale and at cheaper rates than in any other European country--yet it is practically neglected; no considerable extension has been made to the two million acres of irrigated lands that existed when we last wrote, twenty years ago, although the ruined aqueducts of Roman, Goth, and Moor are ever present to suggest the silent lesson of former foresight and prosperity. [Illustration: WOODEN PLOUGH-SHARE (As still commonly used.)] One incidental circumstance of rural Spain, the fatal effects of which are all-penetrating (though it will never be altered), is absenteeism on the part of landowners. Not even a tenant-farmer will live on his holding. No, he must have his town-house, and employ an administrator or agent to superintend the farm, only visiting it himself at rare intervals. Oh! that hideous nightmare, the hireling, how his dead-weight of apathy and dishonesty at secondhand crushes out every spark of interest and enterprise, and breeds in their stead a rampant crop of all the petty vices and frauds that prey on industry. But that evil can hardly be eradicated. What we British understand by the expression "country life" totally fails to commend itself to the more gregarious peoples of the south. Rich and poor alike, from grandee to day-labourer, the Spanish ignore and disdain the joys of the country. They call it the _campo_ and the _campo_ they detest. Each nightfall must see every man of them, irrespective of class, assembled within the walls of their beloved town or city, irresistibly attracted to street-girt abode--be it humblest cot or sumptuous palace (and one stands next door to the other). Even suburban existence is eschewed. There are no outer fringes to a Spanish town. No straggling "villa residences," no Laburnum Lodge or River-View "ornament" the extramural solitude. Back at dusk all hie, crowding to the _paséo_, to club or casino, to social gathering and games of chance or (more rarely) of skill. That ubiquitous term "_animacion_," which may be translated gossip, chatter, light-hearted intercourse, fulfils the ideals of life. Its more serious side--reading, study, scientific pursuit--have little place; seldom does one see a library in any Spanish home, urban or rural. None can accuse the authors of desiring to use a comparison (proverbially odious) to the detriment of our Spanish friends. The above is merely a record of patent facts that must quickly become obvious to the least observant. It is but a definition of divergent idiosyncrasies as between different human genera. And remember that we in England have recently been told that our rural system is fraught with unseen and unsuspected evil. Into those wider questions we have no intention of entering. But at least our impressions are based upon personal experience of both lines of life, while much of the vituperation recently poured upon rural England is derived from a view of but one, and not a very clear view at that. Where the owner--big or little, but the more of them the better--lives on the land, that land and the country at large benefit to a degree that is demonstrated with singular clearness by seeing the converse system as it is practised in Spain to-day. Here no one, owner or tenant--still less the hireling--takes any living interest (to say nothing of pride) in his possession or occupation beyond that very short-sighted "interest" of squeezing the utmost out of it from day to day. Ancient forests are cut down and burnt into charcoal, and rarely a tree replanted or a thought given to the resulting effects on rainfall or climate. As to beauty of landscape--what matter such æsthetic notions when the owner lives a hundred miles away? The collateral fact that, to a great extent, nature's beauty and nature's gifts are analogous and interdependent is ignored. Such simple issues are too insignificant, and too little understood, for frothy rhetoricians to reflect upon: the latter, moreover, like Gallio (and Pontius Pilate) care for none of these things. A characteristic that differentiates the Spaniard, north or south, from other (more modern) nationalities, is a comparative indifference in money matters. Now a Spaniard requires money for his daily needs as much as the others; yet he never sinks to the level of total absorption in his pursuit of the dollar. Put that down to apathy, if you will--or to pride; at least there is dignity in the attribute. The leading Spanish newspapers quote the various market fluctuations and changes in value from day to day. Sometimes, possibly, the report may read _sin operaciones_, but never will you see conspicuously protruded, as a main item in the morning's news, the headline "Wall Street." There is (or was) dignity in commerce, and there may yet be readers in England who silently wish that such matters were relegated to their proper position--the monetary columns. [Illustration: TYPES OF SPANISH BIRD-LIFE CETTI'S WARBLER (_Sylvia cettii_) A winter songster, abundant but rarely seen, skulking in densest brakes.] The chief financial flutter that interests is the Government lottery which is held every fortnight, and at which all classes lose their money; but the National Treasury profits to the tune of three millions sterling yearly. Spain is the home of "chance": that element appeals to Spanish character. Thus in bull-fighting (the one popular pastime) the name applied to each of its formulated exploits is _suerte_--chance. * * * * * SPAIN is frequently accused of being a land of _mañana_. Hardly can we call to mind a book on the country in which some play on that word does not figure. But procrastination is not confined to any one country, and in this case the accusers are quite as likely to be guilty as the accused. A characteristic that strikes us as more applicable is rather the reverse--that of taking no thought for the morrow. Let us take an example or two. It is not the custom to repair roads. When, from long use, a road has gradually passed from bad to worse, till at length it has virtually ceased to exist, then it is "reconstruction" that is the remedy. Annual repairs, one may presume, would cost, say half the amount, would preserve continuous utility, and avoid that slowly aggravated destruction that ends finally in a hiatus. But that is not the Spanish way. "Reconstruction" is preferred. The ruthless cutting down of her forests without replanting a single tree has already been quoted. Next take an example or two of the things that lie most directly under the authors' special view, such as game. The ibex--a unique asset, restricted to Spain, and of which any other country would be proud--has been callously shot down without thought for to-morrow, extirpated for ever in a dozen of its former habitats. The redleg--under the murderous system of shooting, year in and year out, over decoy-birds--would be exterminated within three or four years in any other country save this. It is merely the incredible fecundity of the bird and the vast area of waste lands that preserves the breed. Partridge in Spain are like rabbits in Australia--indestructible. The trout affords another example. Everywhere else on earth the trout is prized as one of nature's valued gifts--hard to over-appreciate. Fully one-half of Spain is expressly adapted to its requirements. Trout were intended by nature to abound over the northern half of Spain--say down to the latitude of Madrid, and even in the extreme south where conditions are favourable, as in the Sierra Neváda. Trout might abound in Spain to the full as they abound in Scotland or Norway, adding value to every river and a grace to country life. But what is the treatment meted out to the trout in Spain? No sooner is its presence detected than the whole stock--big and little alike, even the spawn--is blown out of existence with dynamite, poisoned by quicklime, or captured wholesale (regardless of season or condition) in nets, cruives, funnel-traps, and every other abomination. Kill and eat, big or little, breeding female or immature--it matters not; kill all you can to-day and leave the morrow to itself. True, there are game-laws and close-seasons, but none observe them.[4] [Illustration: TYPES OF SPANISH BIRD-LIFE DARTFORD WARBLER (_Sylvia undata_) Resident. Frequents deep furze-coverts, seldom seen (as we are constrained to represent it) in separate outline.] We have selected these examples because we know and can speak with absolute authority. Presumption and analogy will naturally suggest that the same intelligence, the same blind improvidence will apply equally in other and far more important matters. Not one of our Spanish friends with whom we have discussed these subjects time and again but agrees to the letter with the above conclusions and most bitterly regrets them. CHAPTER II UNEXPLORED SPAIN (_Continued_) ON TRAVEL AND OTHER THINGS Travel in all the wilder regions of Spain implies the saddle. Our Spain begins, as premised, where roads end. For us railways exist merely to help us one degree nearer to the final plunge into the unknown; and not railways only, but roads and bridges soon "petter out" into trackless waste, and leave the explorer face to face with open wilds--_despoblados_, that is, uninhabited regions--with a route-map in his pocket that is quite unreliable, and a trusty local guide who is just the reverse. [Illustration: TYPES OF SPANISH BIRD-LIFE FANTAIL WARBLER (_Cisticola cursitans_) Resident: builds a deep purse-like nest supported on long grass or rushes.] Riding light, with the "irreducible minimum" stowed in the saddle-bags, one may traverse Spain from end to end. But it is only a hasty and superficial view that is thus obtainable, and except for those who love roughing it for roughness' sake, even the freedom of the saddle presents grave drawbacks in a land where none live in the country and none travel off stated tracks. In the _campo_, nothing--neither food for man nor beast--can be obtained, and no provision exists for travellers where travellers never come. The little rural hostelry of northern lands has no place; there is instead a _venta_ or _posada_ which may too often be likened to a stable for beasts with an extra stall for their riders. It is a characteristic of pastoral countries everywhere that their rude inhabitants discriminate little between the needs of man and beast. But even towns of quite considerable size--when far removed from the track--are totally devoid of inns in our sense. Inns are not needed. The few Spanish travellers who, greatly daring, venture so far afield, usually bespeak beforehand the hospitality of some local friend or acquaintance. [Illustration: TYPES OF SPANISH BIRD-LIFE ROCK-THRUSH (_Petrocincla saxatilis_) A beautiful spring-migrant to the highest sierras. Colours of male: opal, orange, and black, with a white "mirror" in centre of back. Female, yellow-brown barred with black.] Incidentally it may be added that a visit to one of these out-of-the-world cities--asleep most of them for the last few centuries--is a pleasing and restful change amidst the racket of exploration. One breathes a mediæval atmosphere and marvels at the revelation, enjoying prehistoric peeps in lost cities replete for the antiquary with historic memorial and long-forgotten lore. No one cares. Yet in those bygone days of Spain's world-power these somnolent spots produced the right stuff,--a minority, no doubt, belonged to the type satirised by Cervantes,--but many more strong in mind as in muscle, who went forth, knights-errant, Paladins and Crusaders, to conquer and to shape the course of history. Is the old spirit extinct? Our own impression is that the material is there all right ready to spring to life like the stones of Deucalion, so soon as Spain shall have shaken off her incubus of lethargy and the tyranny that clogs the wheels of progress. Nor need the interval be long. * * * * * That sound human material continues to exist in rural Spain we have had recent evidence during the calling-out of levies of young troops ordered abroad to serve their country in Morocco. None could witness the entrainment at some remote station of a detachment of these fine lads without being struck by their bearing, their set purpose, and above all their patriotism. With such material, with a well cared-for, contented, and loyal army and a broadening of view, wisely graduated but equally resolute, Spain moves forward. Alfonso XIII. is a soldier first--No! Above that he is a king by nature, but his care for his army and its well-being has already borne fruits that are making and will make for the honour, safety, and advancement of his country. * * * * * To resume our interrupted note on travel: whether you are riding across bush-clad hills, over far-spread prairie, or through the defiles of the sierra, as shadows lengthen the problem of a night's lodging obtrudes. There is a variety of solutions. At a pinch--as when belated or benighted--one may, in desperate resort, seek shelter in a _choza_. Now a _choza_ is the reed-thatched hut which forms the rural peasant's lonely home. Assuredly you will be made welcome, and that with a grace and a courtesy--aye, a courtliness--that characterises even the humblest in Spain. The best there is will be at your disposal; yet--if permissible to say so in face of such splendid hospitality (and in the hope that these good leather-clad friends of ours may not read this book)--the open air is preferable. There exists in a _choza_ absolutely no accommodation--not a separate room; a low settee running round the interior, or a withy frame, forms the bed; those kindly folk live all together, along with their domestic animals--and pigs are reckoned such in Spain. Let us gratefully pay this due tribute to our peasant friends--but let us sleep outside. At each village will usually be found a _posada_. These differ in degree, mostly from bad downwards. The lowlier sort--little better than the _choza_--is but a long, low, one-storeyed barn which you share with fellow-wayfarers, and your own and their beasts, or any others that may come in, barely separated by a thatched partition that is neither noise-proof nor scent-proof. We can call instances to mind when even that small luxury was lacking, and all, human and other, shared alike. There are no windows--merely wooden hatches. If shut, both light and air are excluded; if open, hens, dogs, and cats will enter with the dawn--the former to finish what remains of supper. The cats will at least disperse the regiment of rats which, during the night, have scurried across your sleeping form. Here we relate, as a specific example, a night we spent this last spring in northern Estremadura:-- [Illustration: A VILLAGE _POSADA_] Owing to a miscalculation of distance, it was an hour after sundown ere we reached our destination, a lonely hamlet among the hills. Our good little Galician ponies were dead-beat, for we had been in the saddle since 5 A.M., and it was past eight ere we toiled up that last steep, rock-terraced slope. We were a party of three, with a local guide and our own Sancho Panza--faithful companion, friend, and servant of many years' standing. At a dilapidated hovel, the last in the village and perched on a crag, we drew rein, and after repeated knocks the door was opened by a girl--she had set down a five-year-old child among the donkeys while she drew the bolt, the ground-floor being (as usual) a stable. To our inquiry as to food--and the hunger of the lost was upon us--our hostess merely shrugged her shoulders, and with an expressive gesture of open hands, answered "Nada"--nothing! Sancho, however, was equal to the occasion. Within two minutes, while we yet stood disconsolate, he returned with a cackling cockerel in his arms. "Stew him quick before he crows," he adjured the girl, and turned to unload the ponies. What an age a cockerel takes to cook! It was midnight ere he smoked on the board and, hunger satisfied, we could turn in. In an upper den were two alcoves with beds, or rather stone ledges, ordinarily used by the family, and which were assigned to us, the luckless No. 3 by lot having to make shift (in preference to sleeping on a filthy floor) with three cranky tables of varying heights, and whose united lengths proved a foot too short at either end! Oh, the joy of the morning's dawn and delicious freshness of the mountain air, as we turned out at five o'clock for yet another ten-league spell to our next destination. Two nights later we slept in the gilded luxury of Madrid! But how we abused our previous neglect in not having brought a camp-outfit. The above, however, presents the gloomier side of the picture, and there is a reverse, even in _posadas_. We cannot better describe the latter side than in our own words from _Wild Spain_:-- A NIGHT AT A _POSADA_ (ANDALUCIA) The wayfarer has been travelling all day across the scrub-clad wastes, fragrant with rosemary and wild thyme, without perhaps seeing a human being beyond a stray shepherd or a band of nomad gypsies encamped amidst the green palmettos. Towards night he reaches some small village where he seeks the rude _posada_. He sees his horse provided with a good feed of barley and as much broken straw as he can eat. He is himself regaled with one dish--probably the _olla_ or a _guiso_ (stew) of kid, either of them, as a rule, of a rich red-brick hue, from the colour of the red pepper or capsicum in the _chorizo_ or sausage, which is an important (and potent) component of most Spanish dishes. The steaming _olla_ will presently be set on a table before the large wood-fire, and with the best of crisp white bread and wine, the traveller enjoys his meal in company with any other guest that may have arrived at the time--be he muleteer or hidalgo. What a fund of information may be picked up during that promiscuous supper! There will be the housewife, the barber, and the padre of the village, perhaps a goatherd come down from the mountains, a muleteer, and a charcoal-burner or two, each ready to tell his own tale, or to enter into friendly discussion with the "Ingles." Then, as you light your _breva_, a note or two struck on the guitar falls on ears predisposed to be pleased. How well one knows those first few opening notes: no occasion to ask that it may go on: it will all come in time, and one knows there is a merry evening in prospect. One by one the villagers drop in, and an ever-widening circle is formed around the open hearth, rows of children collect, even the dogs draw around to look on. The player and the company gradually warm up till couplet after couplet of pathetic _malagueñas_ follow in quick succession. These songs are generally topical, and almost always extempore; and as most Spaniards can--or rather are anxious to--sing, one enjoys many verses that are very prettily as well as wittily conceived. But girls must dance, and find no difficulty in getting partners to join them. The _malagueñas_ cease, and one or perhaps two couples stand up, and a pretty sight they afford! Seldom does one see girl-faces so full of fun and so supremely happy as they adjust the castanets, and one damsel steps aside to whisper something sly to a sister or friend. And now the dance begins; observe there is no slurring or attempt to save themselves in any movement. Each step and figure is carefully executed, but with easy, spontaneous grace and precision both by the girl and her partner. Though two or more pairs may be dancing at once, each is quite independent of the others, and only dance to themselves; nor do the partners ever touch each other.[5] The steps are difficult and somewhat intricate, and there is plenty of scope for individual skill, though grace of movement and supple pliancy of limb and body are almost universal, and are strong points in dancing both the _fandango_ and _minuet_. Presently the climax of the dance approaches. The notes of the guitar grow faster and faster; the man--a stalwart shepherd-lad--leaps and bounds around his pirouetting partner, and the steps, though still well ordered and in time, grow so fast that one can hardly follow their movements. Now others rise and take the places of the first dancers, and so the evening passes; perhaps a few glasses of _aguardiente_ are handed round--certainly much tobacco is smoked--the older folks keep time to the music with hand-clapping, and all is good nature and merriment. What is it that makes the recollection of such evenings so pleasant? Is it merely the fascinating simplicity and freedom of the dance, or the spectacle of those weird, picturesque groups, bronze-visaged men and dark-eyed maidens, all lit up by the blaze of the great wood-fire on the hearth, and low-burning oil-lamps suspended from the rafters? Perhaps it is only the remembrance of many happy evenings spent among these people since our boyhood. This we can truly say, that when at last you turn in to sleep you feel happy and secure among a peasantry with whom politeness and sympathy are the only passports required to secure to you both friendship and protection if required. Nor is there a pleasanter means of forming acquaintance with Spanish country life and customs than a few evenings spent thus at a farm-house or village inn in any retired district of laughter-loving Andalucia. For rough living we are of course prepared, and accept the necessity without demur or second thought while travelling. But when more serious objects are in hand--say big-game or the study of nature, objects which demand more leisurely progress, or actually encamping for a week or more at selected points--then we prefer to assure complete independence of all local assistance and shelter. [Illustration: TYPES OF SPANISH BIRD-LIFE SERIN (_Serinus hortulanus_) A true European canary, but its song is harsh and hissing.] An expedition on this scale involves an amount of care and forethought that only those who have experienced it would credit. For in Spain it is an unknown undertaking, and to engineer something new is always difficult. Quite an extensive camping-trip can be organised in Africa, where the system is understood, with less than a hundredth part of the care needed for a comparatively short trip in Spain where it is not. The necessary bulk of camp-outfit and equipment requires a considerable cavalcade, and this mule-transport (since no provender is obtainable in the country) involves carrying along all the food for the animals--the heaviest item of all. Naturally the cost of such expeditions works out to nearly double that of simple riding. But, after all, it is worth it! Compare some of the miseries we have above but lightly touched upon--the dirt and squalor, the nameless horrors of _choza_ or _posada_--with the sense of joyous exhilaration felt when encamped by the banks of some babbling trout-stream or in the glorious freedom of the open hill. Casting back in mental reverie over a lengthening vista of years, we certainly count as among the happiest days of life those spent thus under canvas--whether on the sierras and marismas of Spain, on high field or dark forest in Scandinavia, or on Afric's blazing veld. Should some remarks (here or elsewhere in this book) appear self-contradictory the reason will be found rather in our inadequate expression than in any confusion of idea. We love Spain primarily because she is wild and waste; but, loving her, are naturally desirous that she should advance to that position among nations that is her due. Such material development, nevertheless, need not--and will not--imply the total destruction of her wild beauties. Development on those lines would not consist with the peculiar genius of the Spanish race, and, while we trust the development will come, we fear no such collateral results. Take, for instance, the corn-lands. There the great bustard is alike the index and the price of vast, unwieldy farms unfenced and but half tilled, remote from rail, road, or market. That condition we neither expect nor hope to see exchanged for smug fields with a network of railways. For "three acres and a cow" is not the line of Spanish regeneration; it is rather a claptrap catch-word of politicians--a murrain on the lot of them! True, the plan seems to answer in Denmark, and if the Danes are satisfied, well and good--that is no business of ours. But no such mathematical and Procrustean restriction of vital energies and ambitions will subserve our British race, nor the Spanish. In Spanish sierra may the howl of the wolf at dawn never be replaced by blast from factory siren, nor the curling blue smoke of the charcoal-burner in primeval forest be abolished in favour of black clouds belching from bristling chimneys that pierce a murky sky. Either in such circumstance would be misplaced. Similarly, when the engineer shall have been turned loose in the Spanish marismas, he can, beyond all doubt, destroy them for ever. His straight lines and intersecting canals, hideous in utilitarian rectitude, would right soon demolish that glory of lonely desolation--those leagues of marshland, samphire, and glittering _lucio_. And all for nothing! Since the desecration will not "pay" financially--the reason we give in detail elsewhere--and you sacrifice for a shadow some of the grandest bits of wild nature that yet survive--the finest length and breadth of utter abandonment that still enrich a humdrum Europe. Should "progress" only advance on these lines no scrap of that continent will be left to wanderer in the wilds--no spot where clanging skeins of wild-geese serry the skies, and the swish of ten thousand wigeon be heard overhead; or that marvellous iridescence--as of triple flame--the passing of a flight of flamingoes, be enjoyed.[6] That national progress and development may come, for Spain's sake, we earnestly pray. But does there exist inherent reason why progress, in itself, should always come to ruin natural and racial beauties? Progress seems nowadays to be misunderstood as a synonym for uniformity--and uniformity to a single type. Disciples of the cult of insensate haste, of self-assertion and advertisement, have pretty well conquered the civilised world; but in Spain they find no foothold, and we glory to think they never will. Spain will never be "dragooned" into a servile uniformity. There remain many, among whom we count our humble selves, who bow no knee to the modern Baal, and who (while conceding to the "hustling" crowd not one iota of their pretensions to fuller efficiency in any shape or form) are proud to find fascination in simplicity, a solace in honest purpose and in old-world styles of life--right down (if you will) to its inertia. Yes, may progress come, yet leave unchanged the innate courtesy, the dignity and independence of rural Spain--unspoilt her sierras and glorious heaths aromatic of myrtle and mimosa, alternating with natural woods of ilex and cork-oak--self-sown and park-like, carpeted between in spring-time with wondrous wealth of wild flowers. There is nothing incongruous in such aspiration. Incongruity rather comes in with misappreciation of the fitness of things, as when a coal-mine is planked down in the midst of sylvan beauties, to save some hypothetic penny-a-ton (as per Prospectus); where pellucid streams are polluted with chemical filth and vegetation blasted by noisome fumes; or where God's fairest landscapes are ruined by forests of hideous smoke-stacks. If vandalisms such as these be progress then we prefer Spain as she is. A NOTE ON THE SPANISH FAUNA After all, it is less with the human element that this book is concerned than with the wild Fauna of Spain; a brief introductory notice thereof cannot, therefore, be omitted. [Illustration: BONELLI'S EAGLE (_Aquila bonellii_) A pair disturbed at their eyrie.] As head of the list must stand the Spanish Ibex (_Capra hispánica_), a game-animal of quite first rank, peculiar to the Iberian Peninsula, and whose nearest relative--the Bharal (_Capra cylindricornis_)--lives 2500 miles away in the far Caucasus. In Spain the ibex inhabits six great mountain-ranges, each covering a vast area but all widely separated. After a crisis that five years ago threatened extermination, this grand species is now happily increasing under a measure of protection and the ægis of King Alfonso. Next--a notable neighbour of the ibex (and practically extinct in central Europe)--we place the lone and lordly Lammergeyer. A memorable spectacle it is to watch the huge _Gypaëtus_ sweeping through space o'er glens and corries of the sierra in striking similitude to some weird flying dragon of Miocene age--a vision of blood-red irides set on a cruel head with bristly black beard, of hoary grey plumage and golden breast. Watch him for half an hour--for half a day--yet never will you discern a sign of force exerted by those 3-yard pinions. With slightly reflexed wings he sinks 1000 feet; then, shifting course, rises 2000, 3000 feet till lost to sight over some appalling skyline. You have seen the long cuneate tail deflected ever so slightly--more gently than a well-handled helm--but the wide lavender wings remain rigid, not an effort that indicates force have you descried. Yet the power (so defined as "horse-power") required to raise a deadweight of 20 lbs. through such altitudes can be calculated by engineers to a nicety--how is it exerted? That the power is there is conspicuous enough, and at least it serves to explain fabled traditions of giant lammergeyers hurling ibex-hunter from perilous hand-hold on the crag, to feast on the remains below; or, in idler moment, bearing off untended babes to their eyries--alas! that the duty of nature-students involves dissipating all such romance. [Illustration: TYPES OF SPANISH BIRD-LIFE BLACK VULTURE (_Vultur monachus_) Nests in the mountain-forests of Central Spain, and winters in Andalucia. Sketched in Cote Doñana--"Getting under way."] Spain, as geologically designed, being, as to one-half of her superficies, either a desert wilderness or a mountain solitude, naturally lends congenial conditions of life to the predatory forms that rely on hooked bill, on tooth and claw, fang and talon, to ravage their more gentle neighbours. Savage raptores, furred and feathered, characterise her wilder scenes. Wherever one may travel, a day's ride will surely reveal huge vultures and eagles circling aloft, intent on blood. Throughout the wooded plains the majestic Imperial Eagle is overlord--you know him afar in sable uniform, offset by snow-white epaulets. Among the sierras a like condominium is shared by the Golden and Bonelli's Eagles--and they have half-a-dozen rivals, to say nothing of lynxes and fierce wolves (we give a photo of one, the gape of whose jaws exceeds by one-half that of an African hyaena). Then there patrol the wastes a horde of savage night-rovers, denominated in Spanish _Alimañas_, to which a special chapter is devoted. [Illustration: TYPES OF SPANISH BIRD-LIFE WHITE-FACED DUCK (_Erismatura leucocephala_) Bill much dilated, waxy-blue in colour. Wings extremely short; a sheeny grebe-like plumage, and long stiff tail, often carried erect.] In Estremadura, where man is a negligible quantity, and along the wild wooded valley of the Tagus, roams the Fallow-deer in aboriginal purity of blood--whether any other European country can so claim it, the authors have been unable to ascertain. In Cantabria and the Pyrenees the Chamois abounds. Of the big game (the list includes red, roe, and fallow-deer, wild-boar, ibex, chamois, brown bear, etc.), we treat in full detail hereafter. As regards winged game, this south-western corner of Europe, is singularly weak. There exists but a single resident species of true game-bird--the redleg. Compare this with northern Europe, where, in a Scandinavian elk-forest, we have shot five kinds of grouse within five miles; while southwards, in Africa, francolins and guinea-fowl are counted in dozens of species. True, there are ptarmigan in the Pyrenees, capercaillie, hazel-grouse, and grey partridge in Cantabria, but all these are confined to the Biscayan area. Nor are we overlooking the grandest game-bird of all, the Great Bustard, chiefest ornament of Spanish steppe, and there are others--the lesser bustard, quail, sand-grouse, etc.--but these hardly fall within our definition. As for the teeming hosts of wildfowl and waterfowl that throng the Spanish marismas (some coming from Africa in spring, the bulk fleeing hither from the Arctic winter), all these are so fully treated elsewhere as to need no further notice here. Spain boasts several distinct species peculiar to her limits. Among such (besides the ibex) are that curious amphibian, the Pyrenean musk-rat (_Myogale pyrenaica_), not again to be met with nearer than the eastern confines of Europe. Birds afford an even more striking instance. The Spanish azure-winged magpie (_Cyanopica cooki_) abounds in Castile, Estremadura, and the Sierra Moréna, but its like is seen nowhere else on earth till you reach China and Japan! CHAPTER III THE COTO DOÑANA: OUR HISTORIC HUNTING-GROUND A Foreword by SIR MAURICE DE BUNSEN, G.C.M.G., British Ambassador at Madrid. Among my recollections of Spain none will be more vivid and delightful than those of my visits to the Coto Doñana. From beginning to end, climate, scenery, sport, and hospitable entertainment combine, in that happy region, to make the hours all too short for the joys they bring. Equipped with Paradox-gun or rifle, and some variety of ammunition, to suit the shifting requirements of deer and boar, lynx, partridge, wild-geese and ducks, snipe, rabbit and hare, nay, perhaps a chance shot at flamingo, vulture, or eagle, the favoured visitor steps from the Bonanza pier into the broad wherry waiting to carry him across the Guadalquivir, a few miles only from its outflow into the Atlantic. In its hold the first of many enticing _bocadillos_ is spread before him. Table utensils are superfluous luxuries, but, armed with hunting blade and a formidable appetite, he plays havoc with the red mullet, _tortilla_, and _carne de membrillo_, washed down with a tumbler of sherry which has ripened through many a year in a not far distant _bodega_. In half an hour he is in the saddle. Distances and sandy soil prohibit much walking in the Coto Doñana. [Illustration: SAND WASTE IN COTO DOÑANA.] [Illustration: LANDSCAPE IN COTO DOÑANA, WITH MARISMA IN BACKGROUND. FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY H.R.H. PHILIPPE, DUKE OF ORLEANS.] [Illustration: SPANISH IMPERIAL EAGLE] Marshalled by our host, the soul of the party, the cavalcade canters lightly up the sandy beach of the river. Thence it strikes to the left into the pine-coverts, leading in five hours more to the friendly roof of the "Palacio." A picturesque group it is with Vazquez, Caraballo, and other well-known figures in the van, packhorses loaded with luggage and implements of the chase, and lean, hungry _podencos_ hunting hither and thither for a stray rabbit on the way. The views are not to be forgotten, the distant Ronda mountains seen through a framework of stone-pines, across seventy miles of sandy dunes, marismas, and intervening plains. After a couple of hours we skirt the famous sandhills, innocent of the slightest dash of green, which for some inscrutable reason attract, morning after morning, at the first tinge of dawn, countless greylag geese to their barren expanse and on which, _si Dios quiere_, toll shall be levied ere long. The marismas and long lagoons are covered here and there with black patches crawling with myriads of waterfowl, to be described after supper by the careful Vazquez as _muy pocos, un salpicon_--a mere sprinkling. Their names and habits, are they not written, with the most competent of pens, in this very volume? We stop, perhaps, for a first deer-drive on our line of march. How thrilling that sudden rustle in the brushwood! Stag is it, or hind, or grisly porker? As we approach the "Palacio" we see the spreading oak on which perched, contemptuous and unsuspecting, the imperial eagle, honoured this year by a bullet from King Alfonso's unerring rifle. As we ride through the scrub the whirr of the red-legged partridge sends an involuntary hand to the gun. They may await another day. At dusk we ride into the whitewashed _patio_, just in time to sally forth and get a flighting woodcock between gun and lingering glow of the setting sun. For no precious hours are wasted in the Coto Doñana. Next day at early dawn, maybe, if the lagoon be our destination, or at any rate after a timely breakfast, off starts again the eager cavalcade, be it in quest of red deer or less noble quarry. Then all day in the saddle, from drive to drive, dismounting only to lie in wait for a stag, or trudge through the sage-bushes after partridge, or flounder through the boggy _soto_, beloved of snipe, with intervening oases for the unforgotten _bocadillo_. If Vazquez be kind, he will take you one day to crouch with him behind his well-trained stalking-horse, drawing craftily nearer and nearer to where the duck sit thickest, till, straightening your aching back, you have leave to put in your two barrels, as Vazquez lays low some twenty couples with one booming shot from his four-bore, into the brown. [Illustration: EGRET-HERONRY AT SANTOLALLA, COTO DOÑANA. (THE FOREGROUND IS SAND.) FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY H. R. H. PHILIPPE, DUKE OF ORLEANS.] But one morning surely a visit must be paid to the sandhills. Caraballo will call you at 4 A.M., and soon after you will be jogging over the six or eight miles which separate the "Palacio" from that morning _rendezvous_ of the greylag. The stars still shine brightly as you dismount at the foot of the long stretch of dunes. A few minutes' trudge will deposit you in a round hole dug deep in the dazzling white expanse the day before; for a hole too freshly dug will expose the damp brown sand from below, staining the spotless surface with a warning blotch, and causing the wary geese to swerve beyond the range of your No. 1 shot. It is still dark as you drop into your hole. Gradually the sky grows greyer and lighter, till the sun rises from the round yellow rim of the blue morning sky. Who shall describe the magic thrill of the first hoarse notes falling on your straining ear? The temptation to peep out is strong, but crouching deep down, you wait till the mighty pinions beat above you, and the first wedge of eight or ten sails grandly away in the morning sun. You judge them out of shot. But surely this second batch is lower down? Are they not close upon you? Why then no response to your two barrels? Was the emotion too great, or have you misjudged the speed of that easy flight or its distance through the crystal air? All the keener is the joy when, with heavy thump, your first goose is landed on the sand amid the tin decoys. When three or four lie there, Vazquez will send his fleet two-legged "water-dog" to set them up with twigs supporting their bills, to beguile more of their kind into line with the barrels. If the day be propitious, the sky will be dotted at times with geese in all directions. Now and again they will give you a shot, the expert taking surely three or four to the tyro's one. It is half-past eight, and you have sat in your hole close on two hours before Vazquez comes to gather the slain, to which he will add two or three more, marked down afar, and picked up as dead as the rest. Never have two of your waking hours passed so quickly. What would you not give to live them over again and undo some of those inexplicable misses? But one goose alone would amply repay that early start. Even four or five are all you can carry, and the twenty or thirty that our expert [who must be nameless] would have shot, will live to stock the world afresh. [Illustration: SPANISH LYNX] Among the fauna of the Coto Doñana, a word must be given to the lynx. Never can I forget sitting one afternoon, Paradox in hand, on the fringe of a covert. I was waiting for stag, rather drowsily, for the beat was a long one and the sun hot, when my eyes suddenly rested on a lynx standing broadside among the bushes, beyond a bare belt of sand, some fifty yards off. Fain would I have changed my bullet for slugs, but those sharp ears would have detected the slightest click; so I loosed my bullet for what it was worth. The lynx was gone. When the beat came at last to an end, I thought I would just have a look at his tracks. He lay stone-dead behind a bush, shot through the heart. The eventful days are all too soon over. But the recollection remains of happy companionship and varying adventure, of easy intercourse between Spaniard and Englishman, with the echo of many a sporting tale, mingled with sage discourse from qualified lips on the habits of bird and beast. Who can tell you more about them than that group of true sportsmen and lovers of nature whose names, Garvey, Buck, Gonzalez, and Chapman, are indissolubly linked with the more modern history of the famous Coto Doñana? MAURICE DE BUNSEN. BRITISH EMBASSY, MADRID, _July 1910_. [Illustration: GREENSHANK (_Totanus canescens_)] CHAPTER IV THE COTO DOÑANA NOTES ON ITS PHYSICAL FORMATION, FAUNA, AND RED DEER The great river Guadalquivir, dividing in its oblique course seawards into double channels and finally swerving, as though reluctant to lose all identity in the infinite Atlantic, practically cuts off from the Spanish mainland a triangular region, some forty miles of waste and wilderness, an isolated desert, singular as it is beautiful, which we now endeavour to describe. This, from our having for many years held the rights of chase, we can at least undertake with knowledge and affection. [Illustration] Its precise geological formation 'twere beyond our power, unskilled in that science, to diagnose. But even to untaught eye, the existence of the whole area is obviously due to an age-long conflict waged between two Powers--the great river from within, the greater ocean without. The Guadalquivir, draining the distant mountains of Moréna and full 200 miles of intervening plain, rolls down a tawny flood charged with yellow mud till its colour resembles _café au lait_. Thus proceeds a ceaseless deposit of sediment upon the sea-bed; but the external Power forcibly opposes such infringement of its area. Here the elemental battle is joined. The river has so far prevailed as to have grabbed from the sea many hundred square miles of alluvial plain, that known as the marisma; but at this precise epoch, the Sea-Power appears to have called checkmate by interposing a vast barrier of sand along the whole battle-front. The net result remains that to-day there is tacked on to the southernmost confines of Europe a singular exotic patch of African desert. This sand-barrier, known as the Coto Doñana, occupies, together with its adjoining dunes on the west, upwards of forty miles of the Spanish coast-line, its maximum breadth reaching in places to eight or ten miles. The Coto Doñana is cut off from the mainland of Spain not only by the great river, but by the marisma--a watery wilderness wide enough to provide a home for wandering herds of wild camels. (See rough sketch-map above.) Sand and sand alone constitutes the soil-substance of Doñana, overlying, presumably, the buried alluvia beneath. Yet a wondrous beauty and variety of landscape this desolate region affords. From the river's mouth forests of stone-pine extend unbroken league beyond league, hill and hollow glorious in deep-green foliage, while the forest-floor revels in wealth of aromatic shrubbery all lit up by chequered rays of dappled sunlight. Westward, beyond the pine-limit, stretch regions of Saharan barrenness where miles of glistening sand-wastes devoid of any vestige of vegetation dazzle one's sight--a glory of magnificent desolation, the splendour of sterility. To home-naturalists the scene may recall St. John's classic sandhills of Moray, but magnified out of recognition by the vastly greater scale, as befits their respective creators--in the one case the 100-league North Sea, here the 1000-league Atlantic. Rather would we compare these marram-tufted, wind-sculptured sand-wastes with the Red Sea litoral and the Egyptian Soudan, where Osman Digna led British troops memorable dances in the 'nineties--alike both in their physical aspect and in their climate, red-hot by day, yet apt to be deadly chilly after sundown. Resonant with the weird cry of the stone-curlew and the rhythmic roar of the Atlantic beyond, these seaward dunes are everywhere traced with infinite spoor of wild beasts, and dotted by the conical pitfalls dug by ant-lions (_Myrmeleon_). [Illustration: IN DOÑANA.] Between these extremes of deep forest and barren dune are interposed intermediate regions partaking of the character of both. Here the intrusive pine projects forest-strips, called _Corrales_, as it were long oases of verdure, into the heart of the desert, hidden away between impending dunes which rear themselves as a mural menace on either hand, and towering above the summits of the tallest trees. Nor is the menace wholly hypothetic; for not seldom has the unstable element shifted bodily onwards to engulf in molecular ruin whole stretches of these isolated and enclosed _corrales_. Noble pines, already half submerged, struggle in death-grips with the treacherous foe; of others, already dead, naught save the topmost summits, sere and shrunk, protrude above that devouring smiling surface, beneath which, one assumes, there lie the skeletons of buried forests of a bygone age. All along these lonely dunes there stand at regular intervals the grim old watch-towers of the Moors, reminiscent of half-forgotten times and of a vanished race. Arab telegraphy was neither wireless nor fireless when beacon-lights blazing out from tower to tower spread instant alarm from sea to sierra, seventy miles away. In contrast with the scenery of both these zones, shows up the landscape of a third region, on the west--that of scrub. Here, one day later in geological sense, the eye roams over endless horizons of rolling grey-green brushwood, the chief component of which is cistus (_Helianthemum_), but interspersed in its moister dells with denser jungle of arbutus and lentisk, genista, tree-heath, and giant-heather, with wondrous variety of other shrubs; the whole studded and ornamented by groves of stately cork-oaks or single scattered trees. All these, with the ilex, being evergreen, one misses those ever-changing autumnal tints that glorify the "fall" in northern climes. Here only a sporadic splash of sere or yellow relieves the uniform verdure. Obviously regions of such physical character can ill subserve any human purpose. As designed by nature, they afford but a home for wild beasts, fowls of the air, and other _ferae_ which abound in striking and charming variety. For centuries the Coto Doñana formed, as the name imports, the hunting-ground of its lords, the Dukes of Medina Sidonia, and to not a few of the Spanish kings--from Phillip IV. in the early part of the seventeenth century (as recorded by the contemporary chronicler, Pedro Espinosa) to Alfonso XII. in 1882, and quite recently to H.M. Don Alfonso XIII. For five-and-twenty years the authors have been co-tenants, previously under the aforesaid ducal house; latterly under our old friend, the present owner. The sparse population of Doñana includes a few herdsmen (_vaqueros_) who tend the wild-bred cattle and horses that in semi-feral condition wander both in the regions of scrub and out in the open marisma. Nomadic charcoal-burners squat in the forests, shifting their reed-built wigwams (_chozas_) as the exigencies of work require; while the gathering of pine-cones yields a precarious living to a handful of _piñoneros_. Lastly, but most important to us, there are the guardas or keepers, keen-eyed, leather-clad, and sun-bronzed to the hue of Red Indians. There are a dozen of these wild men distributed at salient points of the Coto, most of them belonging to families which have held these posts, sons succeeding fathers, for generations. Of three such cycles we have ourselves already been witnesses. Briefly to summarise a rich and heterogeneous fauna is not easy; a volume might be devoted to this region alone. Elsewhere in this book some few subjects are treated in detail. Here we merely attempt an outline sketch. [Illustration: MARSH-HARRIER (_Circus aeruginosus_)] Throughout the winter (excepting only the wildfowl) there exists no such conspicuous ornithic display as appeals to casual eye or ear--those, say, of the average traveller. Ride far and wide through these wild landscapes in December or January, and you may wonder if their oft-boasted wealth of bird-life be not exaggerated. You see, perhaps, little beyond the ubiquitous birds-of-prey. These are ever the first feature to strike a stranger. Great eagles, soaring in eccentric circles, hunt the cistus-clad plain; the wild scream of the kite rings out above the pines, and shapely buzzards adorn some dead tree. Over rush-girt bogs soar weird marsh-harriers--three flaps and a drift as, with piercing sight, they scan each tuft and miss not so much as a frog or a wounded wigeon. All these and others of their race are naturally conspicuous. But, though unseen, there lurk all around other forms of equal beauty and interest, abundant enough, but secretive and apt to be overlooked save by closest scrutiny. That, however, is a characteristic of winter in all temperate lands. Birds at that season are apt to be silent and elusive, but their absence is apparent rather than real. [Illustration: "SILENT SONGSTERS"] All around you, in fact, forest and jungle, scrub, sallow, and bramble-brake abound with minor bird-forms--with our British summer visitors, here settled down in their winter quarters; with charming exotic warblers and silent songsters--all off work for the season. Where nodding bulrush fringes quaking bog, or miles of tasselled cane-brakes border the marsh, there is the home of infinite feathered amphibians, crakes and rails, of reed-climbers and bush-skulkers, all for the nonce silent, shy, reclusive. [Illustration: BLACKSTART (_Ruticilla titys_) Abundant in winter; retires to the sierra to nest.] Their portraits, roughly caught during hours of patient waiting, may be found (some of them) scattered through these chapters. But the present is not the place for detail. The land-birds in winter you hardly see, for they "take cover." Diametrically different--in cause and effect--is the case of wildfowl. These, by the essence of their natures and by their economic necessities, are always conspicuous, for they inhabit solely the open spaces of earth--the "spaces" that no longer exist at home: shallows, wastes, and tidal flats devoid of covert. Wildfowl, for that reason, have long learnt to discard all attempt at concealment, to rely for safety upon their own eyesight and incredible wildness. No illusory idea that security may be sought in covert abuses their keen and receptive instincts. Probably it never did. Nowadays, at any rate, they openly defy the human race with all its brain-begotten devices. There, in "waste places," wildfowl sit or fly--millions of them--conspicuous and audible so far as human sense of sight and sound can reach, and there bid defiance to us all. Much of these wastes are not (in the cant of a hypocritical age) "undeveloped," but rather, as means exist, incapable of development. Such spectacles of wild life as these Andalucian marismas to-day present are probably unsurpassed elsewhere in Europe--or possibly in the world. In foreground, background, and horizon both earth and sky are filled with teeming, living multitudes; while the shimmering grey monotony of the marisma, tessellated with its grey armies of the _Anatidae_, is everywhere brightened and adorned by rosy battalions of flamingoes. And out there, far beyond our visible horizon, there wander in that watery wilderness the wild camels, to which we devote a separate chapter. Flamingoes ignore the limits of continents, and shift their mobile headquarters between Europe and Africa as the respective rainfall in either happens to suit their requirements. Hence, whether by day or night, the sight or sound of gabbling columns of flamingoes passing through the upper air is a characteristic of these lonely regions, irrespective of season. Cranes also in marshalled ranks, and storks, continually pass to and fro. The African coast, of course, lies well within their range of vision from the start. [Illustration: (1) SAHARAN SAND-DUNES.] [Illustration: (2) TRANSPORT.] [Illustration: (3) A CORRAL, OR PINE-WOOD ENCLOSED BY SAND. THREE VIEWS IN COTO DOÑANA.] Then as winter merges into spring--what time those clanging crowds of wild-geese and myriad north-bound ducks depart--there pours into Andalucia an inrush of African and subtropical bird-forms. The sunlit woodland gleams with brilliant rollers and golden orioles, while bee-eaters, rivalling the rainbow in gorgeous hues, poise and dart in the sunshine, and their harsh "chack, chack," resounds on every side. Woodchats, spotted cuckoos, hoopoes, and russet nightjars appear; lovely wheatears in cream and black adorn the palm-clad plain. With them comes the deluge--no epitomised summary is possible when, within brief limits, the whole feathered population of southern Europe is metamorphosed. The winter half has gone north; its place is filled by the tropical inrush aforesaid. Warblers and waders, larks, finches, and fly-catchers, herons, ibis, ducks, gulls, and terns--all orders and genera pour in promiscuously, defying cursory analysis. [Illustration: GREAT SPOTTED CUCKOO (_Oxylophus glandarius_)] A single class only will here be specifically mentioned, and that because it throws light on climatic conditions. Among these vernal arrivals come certain raptores in countless numbers--all those which are dependent on reptile and insect food. For even in sunny Andalucia the larger reptiles and insects hibernate; hence their persecutors (including various eagles, buzzards, and harriers, with kites and kestrels in thousands) are driven to seek winter-quarters in Africa. Another phenomenon deserves note. Weeks, nay months, after this great vernal upturn in bird-life has completed its revolution, and when the newcomers have already half finished the duties of incubation, then in May suddenly occurs an utterly belated little migration quite disconnected from all the rest. This is the passage, or rather through-transit, of those far-flying cosmopolites of space that make the whole world their home. They have been wintering in South Africa and Madagascar, in Australia and New Zealand, and are now returning to their summer breeding-grounds in farthest Siberia, beyond the Yenisei. Thus some morning in early May one sees the marismas filled with godwits and knots, curlew-sandpipers and grey plovers, all in their glorious summer-plumage. But these only tarry here a few days. A short week before they had thronged the shores of the southern hemisphere--far beyond the zodiac of Capricorn. A week hence and they are at home in the Arctic. Andalucia possesses a feathered census that approaches 400 species; but of these hardly a score are permanently resident throughout the year. [Illustration: "GLOBE-SPANNERS" Rest twelve hours in Spain on the journey--Australia to Siberia.] Four-footed creatures are less difficult of diagnosis than are birds. By nature less mobile, they are infinitely less numerous specifically. Relatively the Spanish census is long, and includes, locally, quite a number of interesting beasts that are "lumped together" as _Alimañas_--to wit, lynxes, wild-cats, genets, mongoose, foxes, otters, badgers, of which we treat separately. The two chief game-animals of the Coto Doñana are the red deer and the wild-boar. These two we here examine from the sportsman's point of view as much as from that of the naturalist. The Spanish red deer are specifically identical with those of Scotland and the rest of Europe, and are distributed over the whole southern half of the Iberian Peninsula--say south of a line drawn through Madrid. Their haunts, as a rule, are restricted to the mountain-ranges--especially the Sierra Moréna, where they attain their highest development. That red deer should be found inhabiting lowlands such as the Coto Doñana is wholly exceptional. In Estremadura, it is true, there are wild regions (in Badajoz and Cáceres) where deer are spread far and wide over wooded and scrub-clad plains, all these, however, being subjacent to neighbouring sierras, which refuges are available for retreat in case of need. Nowhere else in Spain, save here in the Coto Doñana only, are red deer restricted exclusively to lowlands. [Illustration: CONFIDENCE] This South-Spanish race (the southernmost of all if we except the distinct but limited breed that yet maintains a foothold in North Africa, the Barbary stag, which is white-spotted) differs from Scotch types in their longer faces and slim necks unadorned with the hairy "ruff" of harsher climes. Beyond a doubt, when our species-splitting friends arrive in Spain, they will differentiate her red deer (and ibex also) in various species or subspecies, each with a Latin trinomial. Such energies, however, may easily be superfluous, even where not actually mischievous. For practical purposes there exists but one European species, though it has, even within Spain, its local varieties; while, further afield, geographical and climatic divergencies naturally tend to increase.[7] We cannot claim for our lowland deer of Doñana a high standard of comparative quality; they are, in fact, the smallest race in Spain, almost puny as compared with her mountain breed--smaller also than the Barbary stag. Clean weights here rarely exceed 200 lbs., while a 30-in. head must be accounted beyond the average. The general type, both of horn and body, is illustrated by various photos and drawings in this book. Deer-shooting in Spain takes place in the winter. The rutting season commences at the end of August, terminating early in October, and stags have recovered condition by the end of November. The habits of red deer being, here as elsewhere, strictly nocturnal, and the country densely clad with bush, it follows that these animals are seldom seen amove during daylight. Hence deer-stalking, properly so called, is not available, nor is the method much esteemed in Spain. In Scotland one may detect deer, though it be but a tip of an antler, when couched in the tallest heather or fern. Here, where heather grows six or eight feet in height with a bewildering jumble of other shrubbery of like proportions, no such view is possible. Hence "driving" is in Spain the usual method of deer-shooting, whether in mountain or lowland. [Illustration: ABNORMAL CAST ANTLER (Picked up in Doñana.)] [Illustration] There is, nevertheless, one opportunity of stalking which (though not regarded with favour) has yet afforded us delightful mornings, and to which a few lines of description are due. The plan is based upon cutting-out the deer as they return from their nocturnal pasturages at daybreak. As the last watch of night wears on towards the dawn, the deer, withdrawing from their feeding-grounds on open strath or marsh, slowly direct a course covertwards, lingering here and there to nibble a tempting genista, or to snatch up a bunch of red bog-grass on their course. We have reached a favourite glade, often used by deer. It is not yet light--rather it might be described as nearly dark--when the splashing of light hoofs through water puts us on the alert. A few moments suffice to gain a bushy point beyond; whence presently six or eight nebulous forms emerge from deceitful gloom. Of course there is not a horn among them, bar a little yearling, for good stags never come thus in troops, and with all due caution, so as to avoid alarming these, we hurry away to try another likely spot. Time is of the essence of this business, for light is now strengthening, and in another half-hour the deer will all have gained their coverts and the chance will be past. Again groups of hinds and small beasties meet our gaze; but some distance beyond are a couple of stags. It is light enough now, by aid of the glass, to count their points--only eight apiece, no use. While yet we watch, a pack of graceful white egrets alight close around the nearer deer--some dart actively between the grazing animals picking flies and insects from their legs and stomachs; two actually perching, cavalier-like, on their withers to search for ticks--magpies, on occasion, we have observed similarly employed. The sun's rim now peers from out the watery wastes in front; nothing worth a bullet has appeared, and our morning's work looks as good as lost when my companion, Pepe, detects two really good stags which, though already within the shelter of fringing pines, yet linger in a lovely glade, tempted for fatal minutes by a clump of flowering rosemary. The wind demands a considerable detour; yet the pair still dally while we gain the deadly range, and a second later the better of the two drops amidst the ensnaring blue blossoms. Pepe's half-soliloquising comment precisely interprets the Spanish estimate of stalking:--"The first stag I ever saw shot with his head down!" Other countries, other standards; but there is a ring of sterling chivalry in it too. The idea conveyed is that the noble stag should meet his death, only when duly forewarned of danger and bounding in wild career o'er bush and brake. Without unduly trespassing on our Spanish friends' susceptibilities, we have nevertheless enjoyed such mornings as this. To begin with, that hour of breaking day is ever delicious to spend afield. Therein one observes to best advantage the wild beasts, undisturbed and following their secret, solitary lives--one learns more in that hour than in all the other twenty-three. One seems almost to associate with deer, so near can the troops of hinds and small staggies be approached; and, moreover, there may be afforded the advantage of selecting some splendid head afar, and thus commencing a stalk which, believe me, does not always prove easy. Yonder comes a fox, trotting straight in from his night's hunting in the distant marisma. Let him come on within fifty yards, and then give him a bit of a fright--it is a wild goose he drops as he turns to fly! A single glint of something ruddy catches the eye; this the glass shows to be a sunray playing on the pelt of a prowling lynx, hateful of daylight and hurrying junglewards. Rarely are these nocturnals seen thus, after sun-up, and not for many seconds will the spectacle last; for no animal is more intensely habituated to concealment, or hates so much to move even a few yards in the open. Following are two or three incidents selected as illustrative of this matutinal work:-- ...A really fine stag--already against the glory of the eastern light, I have counted thirteen points and there may be more. Half an hour later we have gained a position--not without infinite manoeuvres, including a crawl absolutely flat across forty yards of bog and black mire--a position that in five more minutes should secure to us that trophy. The five hinds that, before it was fully light, had been in the Royal company, have already, long ago, passed away in the scrub on our right, and give us now no further concern. Never should hinds be thus lightly regarded! The slowly approaching stag stops to nibble a golden broom. He is already almost within shot--seconds must decide his fate--when a triple bark, petulant and defiant, breaks the silence behind. Those five hinds, sauntering round, have gone under our wind, and now ... the landscape is vacant. [Illustration: APRIL.] [Illustration: JUNE.] "Hinds only bark at a _persona_," remarks Dominguez, as we turn homewards, "never at any other _bicho_." The stag knew that too. But it was a curious way of putting it. ...We are too early; it is still pitch-dark; no sign of dawn beyond a slight opalescence low on the eastern horizon. Moreover, an icy wind rustles across the waste, and for dreary minutes we seek shelter, squatting beneath some friendly gorse. Presently a strange sound--a distinct champing, and close by--strikes our ears. "Un javato comiendo" = "a boar feeding," whispers Dominguez, and creeping a few yards towards an open strath, we dimly descry a dusky monster. At the moment his snout is buried deep in the soil, up to the eyes, and the tremendous muscular power exerted in uprooting bulbs of palmetto arrests attention even in the quarter-light. Now he stands quiescent, head up, and the champing is resumed--a rare scene. The distance is a bare fifteen yards, and all the while my companion insists on hissing in my ear, "tiré-lo, tiré-lo" = "shoot, shoot." Presently up goes the boar's muzzle; straight and steadfastly he gazes in our direction, but his glance seemed to pass high over our heads. I don't think he saw us; yet a consciousness of danger had got home--in two bounds he wheeled and disappeared, headlong, amid the bush beyond. ...Far and wide the bosky glade is furrowed with sinuous trenches, and infinite turrets stand erect as where children build sand-castles on the beach. Last night a troop of wild-pig have sought here for mole-crickets--small fry, one may think; yet even worms they don't despise, for we have seen masses of these reptiles (some still alive) in the stomach of a newly-shot boar. Follow the spoor onwards, and where it enters a pine-grove, you notice splintered cones and scattered seed. Thus wild-beasts are assisting to fulfil nature's plan, and if you care to advance it another stage, turn some soil over those overlooked pine-nuts, and some day forest-monarchs will result to reward another generation. * * * * * Such matutinal forays are, however, but an incident. The main system of dealing with the deer is by driving. For this purpose both the fragrant solitudes of pine and far-stretched wilds of bending cistus are mentally mapped out by the forest-guards into definite "beats," each of which has its own name; though to a casual visitor (since guns are necessarily placed differently day by day according to the wind) the actual boundaries may appear indefinite enough. On lowlands such as the Coto Doñana, which is more or less level and open, the use of far-ranging rifles is necessarily restricted by considerations of safety. Obviously no shot, on any pretext whatever, may be fired either into the beat or until the game has passed clear of and well outside the line of guns. In every instance, as a gun is placed, the keeper in charge indicates by lines drawn in the sand or other unmistakable means the limits within which shooting is absolutely prohibited. The result, it follows, not only increases the prospective difficulty of the shot, but gives fuller scope to the instinctive intelligence of the game. For deer, unlike some winged game, do not, when driven, dash precipitately straight for illusory safety, but retire slowly and with extreme circumspection; all old stags, in particular, fully anticipate hidden dangers to lie on their line of flight, and narrowly scrutinise any suspicious feature ahead before taking risks. The gunner will therefore be wise to occupy the few minutes that remain available in so arranging both himself and his post as to be inconspicuous; and also in an accurate survey of his environment with its probable chances, thereby minimising the danger of being taken by surprise. The cunning displayed by an old stag when endeavouring to evade a line of guns at times approaches the marvellous. Thus, on one occasion, the writer was warned of the near approach of game by a single "clink"--a noise which deer sometimes make, probably unintentionally, with the fore-hoof--yet seconds elapsed, and neither sight nor sound were vouchsafed. Then the slightest quiver of a bough beneath caught my eye. A big stag with antlers laid flat aback, and crouching to half his usual height, though going fairly fast, was slipping, silent and invisible, through thick but low brushwood immediately beneath the little hillock whereon I lay. On examining the spot, the spoor showed that he had passed thus through openings barely exceeding two feet in height, though he stood himself forty-six inches at the withers. The feat appeared impossible.[8] [Illustration: SUSPICION] In thick forest or brushwood that limits the view it may be advisable to sit with back towards the beat, relying on ears to indicate the approach or movements of game. While sitting thus, it will occur that you become aware of the arrival of an animal, or of several animals, immediately behind you. The natural inclination to look round is strong; but 'twere folly to do so--fatal to success. This is the critical moment, when a few seconds of rigid stillness will be rewarded by a shot in the open. But that stillness must be statuesque, as of a stone god. For piercing eyes are instantly studying each bush and bough, and analysing at close quarters the least symptom of danger ahead. Should a good stag break fairly near, it is advisable to allow it to pass well away before moving a muscle. For should the game be prematurely alarmed--say by your missing exactly upon the firing-line, or otherwise by its detecting your movement of preparation--that stag will instantly bounce back again into the beat. Then, assuming that the sportsman is a tyro, or subject to "emotions" or buck-fever, there is danger of his forgetting for one moment his precise permitted line of fire; in which case a perilous shot must result. Once allowed to pass _well outside_, the stag will usually continue on his course. In this, as in every form of sport, "soft chances" occasionally occur. More often, the rifle will be directed at a galloping stag crashing through bush that conceals him up to the withers; or, it may be, bounding over inequalities of broken ground or brushwood, or among timber, at any distance up to 100 yards, sometimes 150, while, should he have touched a taint in the wind, his pace will be tremendous. Although to casual view a plain of level contours this country is undulated to an extent that deceives a careless eye--the more accentuated by the monotone of cistus-scrub that appears so uniform. In reality there traverse the plain glens and gently graded hollows the less apt to be noticed, inasmuch as the scrub in moister dell grows higher. Far through the marish green and still the watercourses sleep. Inspiring moments are those when--before the beat has commenced--your eye catches on some far-away skyline the broad antlers of a stag. This animal has perhaps been on foot and alert, or maybe has taken the "wind" from the group of beaters wending a way to their points far beyond. For three seconds the antlers remain stationary, then vanish into some intervening glen. A glance around shows your next neighbour still busy completing his shelter--meritorious work if done in time--and you have strong suspicion that the man beyond will just now be lighting a cigarette! Such thoughts flash through one's mind; the dominant question that fills it is: "Where will that great stag reappear?" But few seconds are needed to solve it. Perhaps he dashes, harmless, upon the careless, perhaps upon the slow--lucky for him should either such event befall! On the other hand, those moments of glorious expectancy may resolve in a crash of brushwood hard by, in a clinking of cloven hoofs, and a noble hart with horns aback is bounding past your own ready post. What proportion, we inwardly inquire, of the stags that are killed by craftsmen has already, just before, offered first chance to the careless or the slovenly? [Illustration: "INSPIRING MOMENTS." (NEITHER CAUGHT NAPPING.)] We may conclude this chapter with an independent impression. Lying hidden in one of these lonely _puestos_--writes J. C. C.--ever induces in me a powerful and sedative sense of contemplation and reflection, though fully alert all the time. While thus waiting and watching, I can't but marvel, first at nature's wondrous plan of waste--a scheme here without apparent object or promise of fulfilment. Where I lie the prospect comprises nothing but melancholy and unutterably silent solitudes of sand, droughty wastes with but at rare intervals some starveling patch of scant weird shrub destined either to shrivel in summer's sun or shiver in winter's winds. But, lying in that environment, one marvels yet more at the extreme caution displayed by wild animals; one has exceptional opportunity of admiring the exquisitive gifts bestowed by nature upon her _ferae_. Here is a young stag coming straight along, down-wind, ere yet the beat has begun, and in a desolate spot which to human sense could betray absolutely no feature or taint of danger. Suddenly he becomes rigid, arrested in mid-career--sniffing at a pure untainted air, yet conscious somehow of something wrong somewhere! It is a miraculous gift, though one cannot but feel grateful that we humans are devoid of senses that ever keep nerves in highest tension. Here is a sketch of a non-shootable stag thus suddenly statuetted thirty yards from me snugly hidden well down-wind, and so intensely interested that _something else_ (a very old pal) well-nigh escaped notice. [Illustration: ALTABACA (_Scrofularia_) The starveling shrub that grows in sand.] [Illustration: TOMILLO DE ARENA Another sand-plant (in spring has a lovely pink bloom like sea-thrift).] That something was our good friend Reynard--_Zorro_ they style him out here--whose proverbial cunning exceeds all other cunnings. He has come down to my track and there stopped dead, expressing in every detail the very essence of doubly-distilled subtlety and craft. At those footprints he halts, sniffs the wind, curls his brush dubiously--as a cat will do when pleased--but not sure yet of his next move. One second's consideration decides him and it is executed at once--he is off like a gust of wind. But a Paradox ball at easy range in the open broke a hind-leg, and it was curious to note his evolutions--he, poor fellow, not realising what had occurred, flung himself round and round in rapid gyrations, the while biting at his own hind-leg. Needless to say not an instant passed ere a second ball terminated his sufferings. To observe the beautiful traits in the habits of wild beasts is to me quite as great a joy as adding them to my score and immensely augments the enjoyment of a big-game drive. [Illustration: "WHAT'S THIS?"] RED DEER HEADS--_COTO DOÑANA_. This list is neither comprehensive nor consecutive, but merely a record of such good and typical heads as we happened to have within reach. _For Table of Heads of Mountain-Deer see Chapter on Sierra Moréna._ ---------------+---------------+--------------+--------+-------+-------------- | | Widest. | | | | Length. |--------------|Circum- |Points.| Remarks. | (Inches.) |Tips. |Inside.|ference.| | ---------------+---------------+------+-------+--------+-------+-------------- W. I. B. |32-1/4 |30 |... | ... | 13 | Do. |31 + 30-1/4 |32-5/8|... | ... | 10 |No bez. P. Garvey | 31 |28 |... | 4-5/8 | 15 | Col. Brymer |30-1/2 + 28 |27 |23 | 4-1/4 | 10 |No bez. Col. Echagüe |30-1/8 + 28-1/2|20 |18 | 4-1/2 | 14 |4 on each top. Villa-Marta, |29-3/4 + 29-1/2|31-1/4|... | 4-1/2 | 13 |4 on each top, Marquis | | | | | | but 1 bez | | | | | | wanting. Segovia, | | | | | | Gonzalo[9] |29-3/4 + 29-1/2|39-1/2|... | 5-1/4 | 10 |No bez. Arión, Duke of |29 + 28 |30 |... | ... | 14 | A. C. |29 + 28-1/4 |25 |... | 5 | 12 | Do. |28-1/2 |26-1/2|... | 5-1/8 | 13 | P. N. Gonzalez |28-1/2 |25 |22 | 5 | 12 | Arión, Duke of |28-1/4 |23 |21-1/2 | 4-1/8 | 10 |No bez. F. J. Mitchell |28 + 27 |30-1/2|... | ... | 14 |4 on each top. A. C. |27 + 26-3/4 |24 |24 | 4-1/4 | 10 | Do. |25-1/2 |28-1/4|24 | 4-1/5 | 11 |At British | | | | | | Museum. Williams, Alex.|25-1/2 |27-3/4|23-1/4 | 4-1/4 | 12 | B. F. B. |25-3/4 + 24 |27-1/4|22-3/4 | 4-1/4 | 12 | De Bunsen, | | | | | | Sir M. |25-1/2 + 25 |27 |... | 4-1/2 | 11 | B. F. B. |24-1/2 + 24-1/2|27-1/2|... | 4-1/2 | 12 | J. C. C. | 23 |29-1/2|22-1/2 | 4-1/8 | 12 | B. F. B. |22-1/2 |21-1/2|19 | 4-1/4 | 12 | ---------------+---------------+------+-------+--------+-------+------------- Ordinary Royals (by which we mean full-grown stags in their first prime) average 24 or 25 inches in length of horn. Heads of 26 to 28 inches belong to rather older beasts which have continued to improve. Anything beyond the latter measurement is quite exceptional, and is often due, not so much to fair straight length of the main beam as to an abnormal development of one of the top tines--usually directed backwards. There are, however, included in our records two or three examples of long straight heads which fairly exceed the 30-inch length. CHAPTER V ANDALUCIA AND ITS BIG GAME STILL-HUNTING (RED DEER) The line of least resistance represents twentieth-century ideals--maximum results for the minimum of labour or technical skill. In the field of sport, wherever available, universal "driving" supersedes the arts of earlier venery--the pride of past generations. In Spain, more leisurely while no less dignified, there survive in sport, as in other matters, practices more consonant with the dash and chivalry popularly ascribed to her national character. Such, for example, is the attack, single-handed, on bear or boar with cold steel--_á arma blanca_, in Castilian phrase. Here we purpose describing the system of "Still-hunting" (_Rastreando_) as practised in Andalucia with a skill that equals the best of the American "Red Indian," and is only surpassed, within our experience, by Somalis and Wandorobo savages in East Africa. Before day-dawn we are away with our two trackers. Maybe it is a lucky morning, and as the first streaks of light illumine the wastes, they reveal to our gaze a first-rate stag. In that case the venture is vastly simplified. It is merely necessary to allow time for the stag to reach his lie-up, and the spoor can be followed at once. But barring such exceptional fortune, it is necessary to find, or rather to select from amidst infinity of tracks crossing and recrossing hither and thither in bewildering profusion the trail of such a master-beast as clearly is worthy the labour of a long day's pursuit. Twice and again we follow a spoor for 100 yards or more over difficult ground before finally deciding that its owner is not up to our standard of quality, and the interrupted search is resumed. Once found, there is rarely room for mistake with a really big spoor. The breadth of heel, the length and deep-cut prints of the cloven toes attest both weight and quality. The ground is open, soft, and easy. The big new track, with its spurts of forward-projected sand, are visible yards ahead. We follow almost at a run--how simple it seems! But not for long. Soon comes check No. 1. A dozen other deer have followed on the same line, and the original trail is obliterated. The troop leads on into a region of boundless bush, shoulder-high, where the ground is harder and the trackers spread out to right and left, backing each other with silent signals. Their skill and patience fascinate; but it is to me, in the centre, that after a long hour's scrutiny, falls the satisfaction of rediscovering that big track where it diverges alone on the left. Half a mile beyond, our erratic friend has passed through water. For a space a broken reed here or displaced lilies there help us forward; then the deepening water, all open, bears no trace. The opposite shore, moreover, is fringed by a 200-yard belt of bulrush and ten-foot canes, and beyond all that lies heavy jungle. You give it up? Admittedly these are no lines of least resistance, but we will cut the unpopular part as short as may be and merely add that it was high noon ere, after three hours' work--puzzling out problems and paradoxes, now following a false clue, anon recovering the true one--that at last the big spoor on dry land once more rejoiced our sight. More than that, it now bears evidence--to eyes that can read--that our stag is approaching his selected stronghold. He goes slowly. Here he has stopped to survey his rear--there he has lingered to nibble a genista, and the spoor zigzags to and fro. Now it turns at sharp angle, following a cheek-wind, and a suggestive grove of cork-oaks embedded in heavy bush lies ahead. One hunter opines the stag lies up here: the other doubts. No half-measures suffice. We turn down-wind, detouring to reach the main outlet (_salida_) to leeward; here I remain hidden, while my companions, separating on right and left, proceed to encircle the _mancha_. Two hinds break hard by, and presently Juan returns with word that the stag has passed through the covert--better still, that a second big beast has joined the first, and that the double spoor, moving dead-slow and three-quarters up wind, proceeds due north. Another mile and then right ahead lies heavy covert, but long and straggling, and the halting trail indicates this as a certain find. The strategic position is simple, but tactics, for a single gun, leave endless scope for decision. Our first rule in all such cases is to get _close in_, risk what it may. Hence, while my companions separated, as before, to encircle the covert from right and left, the writer crept forward yard by yard till a fairly broad and convenient open suggested the final stand. Not ten minutes had elapsed, nor had a sound reached my ears, when as by magic the figure of a majestic stag filled a glade on the left--what a picture, as with head erect he daintily picked his unconscious way! Clearly he suspected nothing _here_; but, having got sense, sight, or scent of Juan far beyond, was astutely moving away, with intelligent anticipation, to safer retreat. The shot was of the simplest, and merely black antlers crowned with triple ivory tips marked the fatal point among deep green rushes. Now when two big stags fraternise, as they frequently do, it usually happens that, when pressed, both animals will finally seek the same exit, even though a shot has already been fired there. I had accordingly instructed the keepers that in the event of my firing, each should discharge his gun in the air, at the same time loosing one dog. The expected shots now rang out, presently followed by a crashing in the brushwood. This proved to be caused by a handful of hinds with, alas! the loose dog baying at their heels. The adverse odds had fallen to zero, till Juan, divining what had occurred, fired again and slipt the other dog. Anxious minutes slowly passed while my two biped sleuth-hounds on the other side gradually, yard by yard, made good their advance; for the wit and wiles, the practised cunning of an old stag when thus cornered, need every scrap of our human skill to out-general, and nothing to spare at that. But that skill was not at fault to-day, and in the thick of the _mancha_, Manuel presently "jumped" the recusant hart from almost beneath his feet, and his view-halloa reached expectant ears. [Illustration] Then, within a few yards of the spot where No. 1 had silently appeared, out bounced No. 2, but in widely different style. In huge bounds, with head and neck horizontal and antlers laid flat aback, he covered the open like a racer. The first shot got in too far back, but the second went right, and the two friends lay not divided in death. Both were _coronados_ (triple-crowned), indeed the second carried four-on-top in double pairs as sketched--a not uncommon formation--but being very old, lacked bez tines. Very nearly five hours had elapsed since we had first struck the spoor, five hours of concentrated attention, crowned by the final assertion of human "dominion." And during these moments of permissible expansion, there was impressed on our minds the fact that such success involves mastery of a difficult craft. [Illustration: "TAKING THE WIND" (A stag, on recognising human scent, will give a bound as though a knife had been plunged into his heart.)] Illustrative of how astutely a cornered stag will exploit every device and avenue of escape, an excellent instance is given in _Wild Spain_, p. 434. Skilled deer-driving is a different undertaking from the _force majeure_ by which pheasants and such-like game may be pushed over a line of guns. For deer do not act on timid impulse, but on practical instinct. Scent is their first safeguard when danger threatens and their natural flight is up-wind. But as it is obviously impossible to place guns to windward, the operation resolves itself into moving the game--dead against its instinct and set inclination--down-wind, or at least on a "half-wind." The latter is easier as an operation, but less effective in result: since the guns must be posted in echelon--otherwise each "gives the wind" to his next neighbour below. Consequently the firing-zone of each is greatly circumscribed. In practice, therefore, the game has to be moved or cajoled--it can hardly be said to be "driven"--into going, at least so far, down-wind by skilled handling of the driving-line and by intelligent co-operation on the part of each individual driver. In the great mountain-drives of the sierras (elsewhere described) packs of hounds, being carefully trained, perform infinite service. Always under control of their huntsman, they systematically search out thickets impenetrable to man and push all game forward. In the Coto Doñana, our scratch-pack of _podencos_ and mongrels of every degree, run riot unchecked at hind, hare, or rabbit, giving tongue in all directions at once, and probably do as much harm as good. Our mounted keepers, however, expert in divining afar the yet unformed designs of the game ahead, are quick to counter each move by a feint or demonstration behind; and when desirable, to forestall attempted escape by resolute riding. The Spanish are a nation of horsemen, and a fine sight it is to see these wild guardas galloping helter-skelter through scrub that reaches the saddle--especially the way they ride down a wounded stag or boar with the _garrocha_--a long wooden lance. Despite it all, however, many stags break back. Riding with the beaters it is instructive to watch the manoeuvres of an old stag as, sinking from sight, he couches among quite low scrub on some hillock, or stands statuesque with horns aback hiding behind a clump of tall tree-heaths--alert all the while, stealthily to shift his position as yapping _podencos_ on one side or the other may suggest--and watching each opportunity to evade the encompassing danger. Now a stretch of denser jungle obstructs the advancing line. The beaters are forced apart to pass it, and a gap or two yawns in the attack. Instantly that introspective wild beast realises his advantage--he springs to sight, ignores Spanish expletives that scorch the scrub, and in giant bounds breaks back in the very face of encircling foes. Within thirty seconds he has regained security amid leagues of untrodden wilds. Some years ago we tried the plan of placing one (or two) guns with the driving-line; but the experiment proved impracticable. Obviously only the coolest and most reliable men could be trusted in an essay which otherwise involved danger. Unfortunately--and it is but human nature--every one considers himself equally cool and reliable. Hence the breakdown and abandonment of the practice. For the long line of beaters, struggling at different points through obstacles of varying difficulty, necessarily loses precise formation; it becomes more or less broken and scattered. Here and there a man may get "stuck" and left a hundred yards behind the general advance. The risk in "firing back" is obvious. The writer remembers being one of two guns with the beaters, when a pair of stags, jumping up close ahead, bolted straight back, passing almost within arm's length. As the second carried a fairly good head, I dismounted and shot it, but was then horrified to discover that my companion-gun had (contrary to all rules) gone back in that very direction to shoot a _woodcock_! DRIVING BIG GAME On "driving" as such we do not propose to enlarge. The system is simple though the practice is subject to variation. On the gently undulated levels of Doñana, for example, the latter (as already indicated) is widely differentiated from the systems practised in mountainous countries--whether in Scotland or the Spanish sierras--where shots can safely be accepted at incoming or at passing game. Guns are there protected from danger by intervening ridges, crags, and piled-up rocks that flank each "pass." Here the game must be left to pass well through and outside the line of guns before a shot is permissible. Our "drives," whether in forest or scrub, seldom exceed a couple of miles in extent; but in wild regions where isolated patches of covert are scattered, inset amid wastes of sand, the area may be extended to half a day's ride. These long scrambling drives gain enhanced interest to a naturalist in precisely inverse ratio with their probability of success. In a big-game drive the first animals to come forward are, as a rule, foxes and lynxes--creatures which move on impulse, and instantly quit a zone where danger threatens. Both, however, will certainly pass unseen should there be any scrub to conceal their retreat. The lynx especially is adept at utilising cover, however slight. Should open patches or sandy glades occur among the bush, foxes will be viewed bundling along, to all appearance quite carelessly. Here in Spain foxes are merely "vermin"; but it is a mistake to shoot them, owing to the risk of thereby turning back better game. Neither lynx nor fox, by the way, are accounted _caza mayor_ unless killed with a bullet. [Illustration: _SYLVIA MELANOCEPHALA_ (Sardinian warbler; conspicuous by its strong colour-contrasts.)] As elsewhere mentioned, there is always a considerable possibility at the earlier period of a "drive" (and even _before_ the operation has actually commenced) of some old and highly experienced stag attempting to slip through the line in the calculated hope (which is often well founded) that he will thereby take most of the guns by surprise and so escape unshot at. Never be unready. Although in "driving," that element of ceaseless personal effort, observation and self-reliance that characterise stalking, still-hunting, or spooring, is necessarily reduced, yet it is by no means eliminated. Nor are there lacking compensating charms in those hours of silent expectancy spent in the solitude of jungle or amid the aromatic fragrance of pine-forest. Every sense is held in tension to mark and measure each sign or sound; 'tis but the fall of a pine-cone that has caught your ear, but it might easily have been a single footfall of game. The wild-life of the wilderness pursues its daily course around unconscious of a concealed intruder in its midst. Overhead, busy hawfinches wrestle with ripening cones, swinging in gymnastic attitude. These are silent. You have first become aware of their presence by a shower of scales gently fluttering down upon the shrubbery of genista and rosemary alongside, amidst the depths of which lovely French-grey warblers with jet-black skull-caps (_Sylvia melanocephala_) pursue insect-prey with furious energy--dashing into the tangle of stems reckless of damage to tender plumes. There are other bush-skulkers infinitely more reclusive than these--some indeed whose mere existence one could never hope to verify (in winter) save by patience and these hours of silent watching. Such are the Fantail, Cetti's, and Dartford warblers, while among sedge and cane-brake alert reed-climbers beguile and delight these spells of waiting. Soldier-ants and horned beetles with laborious gait, but obvious fixity of purpose, pursue their even way, surmounting all obstruction--such as boot or cartridge-bag. Earth and air alike are instinct with humble life. [Illustration: REED-CLIMBERS] To a northerner it is hard to believe that this is mid-winter, when almost every tree remains leaf-clad, the brushwood green and flower-spangled. Arbutus, rosemary, and tree-heath are already in bloom, while bees buzz in shoulder-high heather and suck honey from its tricoloured blossoms--purple, pink, and violet. Strange diptera and winged creatures of many sorts and sizes, from gnat and midge to savage dragon-flies, rustle and drone in one's ear or poise on iridescent wing in the sunlight, and the hateful hiss of the mosquito mingles with the insect-melody. Over each open flower of rock-rose or cistus hovers the humming-bird hawk-moth with, more rarely, one of the larger sphinxes (_S. convolvuli_), each with long proboscis inserted deep in tender calyx. Not even the butterflies are entirely absent. We have noticed gorgeous species at Christmas time, including clouded yellows, painted lady and red admiral, southern wood-argus, Bath white, _Lycaena telicanus_, _Thäis polyxena_, _Megaera_, and many more. On the warm sand at midday bask pretty green and spotted lizards,[10] apparently asleep, but alert to dart off on slightest alarm, disappearing like a thought in some crevice of the cistus stems. [Illustration: GREAT GREY SHRIKE (_Lanius meridionalis_)] Hard by a winter-wandering hoopoe struts in an open glade, prodding the earth with curved bill and crest laid back like a "claw-hammer"; from a tall cistus-spray the southern grey shrike mumbles his harsh soliloquy, and chattering magpies everywhere surmount the evergreen bush. Where the warm sunshine induces untimely ripening of the tamarisk, some brightly coloured birds flicker around pecking at the buds. They appear to be chaffinches, but a glance through the glass identifies them as bramblings--arctic migrants that we have shot here in midwinter with full black heads--in "breeding-plumage" as some call it, though it is merely the result of the wearing-away of the original grey fringe to each feather, thus exposing the glossy violet-black bases. [Illustration: SPANISH GREEN WOODPECKER (_Gecinus sharpei_) (1) Alighting. (2) Calling. ] Birds, as a broad rule, possess no "breeding-plumage." They only renew their dress once a year, in the autumn, and breed the following spring in the worn and ragged plumes. It's not poetic, but the fact.[11] This is not the place to enumerate all the characteristic forms of bird-life, and only one other shall be mentioned, chiefly because the incident occurred the day we drafted this chapter. One hears behind the rustle of strong wings, and there passes overhead in dipping, undulated flight a green woodpecker of the Spanish species, _Gecinus sharpei_. With a regular thud he alights on the rough bark of a cork-oak in front, clings in rigid aplomb while surveying the spot for any sign of danger, then projects upwards a snake-like neck and with vertical beak gives forth a series of maniacal shrieks that resound through the silences.[12] By all means watch and study every phase of wild-life around you--the habit will leave green memories when the keener zest for bigger game shall have dimmed--but never be caught napping, or let a silent stag pass by while your whole attention is concentrated on a tarantula! [Illustration: A TARANTULA] By way of illustrating the practice of "driving," we annex three or four typical instances:-- LAS ANGOSTURAS, _February 5, 1907_.--The writer's post was in a green glade surrounded by pine-forest. A heavy rush behind was succeeded (as anticipated) by the appearance of a big troop of hinds followed by two small staggies. A considerable distance behind these came a single good stag, and already the sights had covered his shoulder, when from the corner of an eye a second, with far finer head, flashed into the picture, going hard, and I decided to change beasts. It was, however, too late. Half automatically, while eyes wandered, fingers had closed on trigger. At the shot the better stag bounded off with great uneven strides through the timber, offering but an uncertain mark. Both animals, however, were recovered. The first, an eleven-pointer, lay dead at the exact spot; the second was brought to bay within 300 yards, a fine royal. LOS NOVARBOS, _January 9, 1903_.--My post was among a grove of pine-saplings in a lovely open plain surrounded by forest. Two good stags trotted past, full broadside, at 80 yards. The first dropped in a heap, as though pole-axed, the second receiving a ball that clearly indicated a kill. While reloading, noticed with surprise that No. 1 had regained his legs and was off at speed. A third bullet struck behind; but it was not till two hours later, after blood-spooring for half a league, that we recovered our game. The first shot had struck a horn (at junction of trez tine) cutting it clean in two. This had momentarily stunned the animal, but the effect had passed off within ten seconds. Both were ten-pointers, with strong black horns, ivory-tipped. During that afternoon I got & big boar at Maë-Corra; and B., who had set out at 4 A.M., twenty-three geese at the Cardo-Inchal. FAR NORTH, _January 31, 1907_.--First beat by the "Eagles' Nest" (in the biggest cork-oak we ever saw, the imperial bird soaring off as we rode up). Brushwood everywhere tall and dense, giving no view. On placing me the keeper remarked, "By this little glade (_canuto_) deer _must_ break, but amidst such jungle will need _un tiro de merito_!" Four stags broke, two were missed, but one secured--seven points on one horn, the other broken. So dense is the bush here that a lynx ran almost over the writer's post, yet had vanished from sight ere gun could be brought to shoulder. In the next beat, La Querencia del Macho (again all dense bush), B. shot two really grand companion stags, but again one of these had a broken horn. This animal while at bay so injured the spine of one of our dogs that it had to be killed two days later.[13] A third beat added one more big stag, and the day's result--four stags with only two "heads"--is so curious that we give the detail:-- +--------------------------------------------------------+ | | Length. | Breadth. | Points. | +--------------------------------------------------------+ | W. E. B.[14] | 23-1/2" | (One horn) | 7 × 2 | | W. J. B. (No. 1) | 28" | Do. | 6 × 2 | | W. J. B. (No. 2) | 25" × 25" | 25" | 7 × 6 = 13 | | A. C. | 26" × 24" | 20-1/2" | 6 × 5 = 11 | +--------------------------------------------------------+ Amidst forest or in dense jungle (such as last described) where no distant view is possible, it is usually advisable to watch outwards--that is, with back towards the beat, relying on _ears_ to give notice of the movements of game within. But in (more or less) open country where a view, oneself unseen, can be obtained afar, the situation is modified. The following is an example:-- CORRAL QUEMADO, _February 1, 1909_.--The authors occupied the two outmost posts on a high sand-ridge which commanded an introspect far away into the heart of the covert. Already before the distant signal had announced that the converging lines of beaters had joined, suddenly an apparition showed up. Some 300 yards away a low pine-clad ridge traversed the forest horizon, and in that moment the shadows beneath became, as by magic, illumined by an inspiring spectacle--the tracery of great spreading antlers surmounting the sunlit grey face and neck of a glorious stag. For twenty seconds the apparition (and we) remained statuesque as cast in bronze. Then, with the suddenness and silence of a shifting shadow, the deep shade was vacant once more. The stag had retired. It boots not to recall those agonies of self-reproach that gnawed one's very being. Suffice it, they were undeserved; for five or six minutes later that stag reappeared, leisurely cantering forward. Clearly no specific sign or suspicion of danger ahead had struck his mind or dictated that retirement. But his course was now, by mere chance and uncalculated cunning, 300 yards outside the sphere of your humble servants, the authors. That stag was now about to offer a chance to gun No. 3, instead of, as originally, to Nos. 1 and 2. Eagerly we both watched his course, now halting on some ridge to reconnoitre, gaze shifting, and ears deflecting hither and thither, anon making good another stage towards the goal of escape. A long shallow _canuto_ (hollow) concealed his bulk from view, but we now saw by the bunchy "show" on top that this was a prize of no mean merit. Then came the climax. Rising the slope which ended the _canuto_, in an instant the stag stopped, petrified. Straight on in front of him, not 100 yards ahead, lay No. 3 gun, and the fatal fact had been discovered. It may have been an untimely movement, perhaps a glint of sunray on exposed gun-barrel, or merely the outline of a cap three inches too high--anyway the ambush had been detected, and now the stag swung at right angles and sought in giant bounds to pass behind No. 2. It was a long shot, very fast, and intercepted by intervening trees and bush--the second barrel directed merely at a vanishing stern. Yet such was our confidence in the aim--in both aims--that not even the subsequent sight of our antlered friend jauntily cantering away down the long stretch of Los Tendidos impaired by one iota its self-assurance. For a mile and more we followed that bloodless spoor, far beyond the point whereat the keeper's solemn verdict had been pronounced, "No lleva náda--that stag goes scot-free." As usual, that verdict was correct. [Illustration] An incident worth note had occurred meanwhile. On the extreme left of our line, a mile away, two stags out of four that broke across the sand-wastes had been killed; and these, while we yet remained on the scene (though a trifle delayed by fruitless spooring) had already been attacked and torn open by a descending swarm of vultures. That, in Africa, is a daily experience, but never, before or since, have we witnessed such unseemly voracity in Europe. MAJADA REAL.--This is the one lowland covert where shots are permissible at incoming game. Being flanked on the west by gigantic sand-dunes, the guns (under certain conditions) may be lined out a couple of miles away, along the outskirts of the next nearest covert--the idea being to take the stags as they canter across the intervening dunes. The conditions referred to are (1) a straight east wind, and (2) reliable guns. Obviously the element of _danger_ under this plan is vastly increased, and as the keepers are responsible for any accident, they are reluctant to execute the drive thus save only when their confidence in the guns is complete.[15] A careless man on a grouse-drive is dangerous enough; but here, with rifle-bullets, a reckless shot may spell death. The "in-drive," nevertheless, is both curious and interesting. A spectacle one does not forget is afforded when the far-away skyline of dazzling sand is suddenly surmounted by spreading antlers, and some great hart, perhaps a dozen of them, come trotting all unconscious directly towards the eager eyes watching and waiting. The effect of a shot under these conditions is frequently to turn the game off at right angles. The deer then hold a course parallel with the covert-side, thus running the gauntlet of several guns, and the question of "first blood" may become a moot point--easily determined, however, by reference to the spoor. Boar naturally are averse to take such open ground; but when severely pressed, we have on occasion seen them scurrying across these Saharan sands, a singular sight under the midday sun. To introspective minds two points may have showed up in these rough outline illustrations. First, that the best stags are ever the earliest amove when danger threatens. These not seldom escape ere a slovenly gunner is aware that the beat has begun. The moral is clear. Secondly, as these bigger and older beasts exhibit fraternal tendencies, it follows that a first chance (whether availed or bungled) need not necessarily be the last. Besides deer, it is quite usual that wild-boar, as well as lynxes and other minor animals, come forward on these "drives." The divergent nature of pig, however, renders a more specialised system advisable when wild-boar only are the objective. For whereas the aboriginal stag seeking a "lie-up" wherein to pass the daylight hours was satisfied by any sequestered spot that afforded shelter and shade from the sun, that was never the case with the jungle-loving boar. To the stag strong jungle and heavy brushwood were ever abhorrent, handicapping his light build and branching antlers. Clumps of tall reed-grass or three-foot rushes, a patch of cistus or rosemary, amply fulfilled his diurnal ideals and requirements. Nowadays, it is true, the expanded sense of danger, the increasing pressure of modern life--even cervine life--force him to select strongholds which offer greater security though less convenience. The wild-boar, on the reverse, with lower carriage and pachydermatous hide, instinctively seeks the very heaviest jungle within his radius--the more densely briar-matted and impenetrable the better he loves it. Many such holts--some of them may be but a few yards in extent--are necessarily passed untried both by dogs and men when engaged in "driving" extended areas, sometimes miles of consecutive forest and covert. The somnolent boar hears the passing tumult, lifts a grisly head, grunts an angry soliloquy, and goes to sleep again, secure. Another day you have returned expressly to pay specific attention to him. In brief space he has diagnosed the difference in attack. Instantly that boar is alert, ready to repel or scatter the enemy, come who may, on two legs or four. [Illustration: HOOPOES On the lawn at Jerez, March 19, 1910.] CHAPTER VI ANDALUCIA AND ITS BIG GAME (_Continued_) WILD-BOAR From one's earliest days the wild-boar has been invested with a sort of halo of romance, identified in youthful mind with grim courage and brute strength. Perhaps his grisly front, the vicious bloodshot eyes, savage snorts, and generally malignant demeanour, lend substance to such idea. But even among adults there exists in the popular mind a strange mixture of misconception as between big game and dangerous game--to hundreds the terms are synonymous. Thus a lady, inspecting our trophies, exclaimed, "Oh, Mr.----, aren't these beasts very treacherous?" which almost provoked the reply, "You see, we are even more treacherous!" In sober truth, nevertheless, a big old boar when held up at bay, or charging in headlong rushes upon the dogs, his wicked eyes flashing fire, and foam flying from his jaws as tushes clash and champ, presents as pretty a picture of brute-fury and pluck as even a world-hunter may wish to enjoy. Yet among hundreds of boars that we have killed or seen killed (though dogs are caught continually, and occasionally a horse), there has never occurred a serious accident to the hunter, and only a few narrow escapes. As an example of the latter: the keeper, while "placing" the writer among bush-clad dunes outside the Mancha of Majada Real, mentioned that a very big boar often frequented some heavy rush-beds on my front. "Should the dogs give tongue to pig at that point, your Excellency will at once run in to the function." Such were his instructions. [Illustration: ROOM FOR TWO] At the point indicated the dogs bayed unmistakably, and seizing a light single carbine, ·303 (as there was a stretch of heavy sand to cover) I ran in. Arriving at the covert and already close up to the music, suddenly the "bay" broke, and I felt the bitter annoyance of being twenty seconds too slow. I had entered by a narrow game-path, and was still hurrying up this when I met the flying boar face to face. By chance he had selected the same track for his retreat! As we both were moving, and certainly not six yards apart, there was barely time to pull off the carbine in the boar's face and throw myself back against the wall of matted jungle on my left. Next moment the grizzly head and curving ivories flashed past within six inches of my nose! The spring he had given carried the boar a yard past me, and there he stopped, stern-on, champing and grunting, both tushes visible--I could see them in horrid projection, on either side of the snout! I had brought the empty carbine to the "carry," so as to use it bayonet-wise, to ward the brute off my legs; but he remained stolidly where he had stopped, and, as may be imagined, I stood stolid too. As it proved, the bullet, entering top of shoulder, had traversed the vitals--hence the cessation of hostilities. A few moments later the arrival of the dogs terminated an untoward interval. On another occasion at the Veta de las Conchas, amidst the lovely _pinales_, just as the beat was concluded, there dashed from a small thicket a troop of a dozen pig, making direct for the solitary pine behind which the writer held guard. Passing full broadside, at thirty yards the biggest dropped dead on the sand, and, just as the troop disappeared in a donga, a second, it seemed, was knocked over. On the beaters approaching I walked across to see, and there, in the hollow, lay the second pig apparently dead enough. Having picked up my field-glasses, cartridge-pouch, etc., I stood close by awaiting the keeper's arrival. Three or four dogs, however, following on the spoor, arrived first; and on their worrying the deceased, it at once sprang to its feet, gazed for one instant, and charged direct. Never have I seen an animal cover twenty yards more quickly! Dropping the handful of _chismes_ aforesaid, I pulled off an unaimed cartridge in my assailant's face and a lucky bullet struck rather below the eyes. This is not a dead shot, but the shock at that short distance proved sufficient. An amusing incident, not dissimilar, occurred at Salavar. A youthful sportsman was approaching a boar which had fallen and lay apparently dead, when it, too, suddenly sprang up and charged. Our friend turned and fled; but, tripping over a fallen branch, fell headlong amidst the green rushes. There, face-downwards, he lay, preferring, as he explained later, "to receive his wound behind rather than have his face messed about by a boar!" Luckily the animal, on losing sight of its flying foe, pulled up and stood, grunting surprise and disapproval. A similar experience befell King Alfonso XIII. in this Mancha of Salavar, December 29, 1909. We need not tell English readers that His Majesty proved equal to this, as to every occasion, and dropped his adversary at arm's length. When one reads (as we do) descriptions of big-game hunting, a recurring expression gives pause--that of "charging." A recent discussion in a sporting paper turned on the question of "the best weapon for a charging boar." Now such a thing as a "charging boar" has never, in a long experience, occurred to the authors--that is, a boar charging deliberately, and of its own initiative, upon human beings; and we do not believe in the possibility of such an event. Of course should a boar (or any other savage animal) be disabled, or in a corner, that is a different matter--then a wild-boar will fight, and right gallantly too. The nearest approach to a "charge" (though it wasn't one really) occurred at the Rincon de los Carrizos. Towards the end of the beat the dogs ran a pig, and, seeing it was a big one, the writer followed, and after a spin of 300 yards overtook the boar at bay in a deep water-hole. The place was all overhung with heavy foliage and thick pines above, giving very poor light. Though the boar's snout pointed straight towards me about ten yards away, I imagined (wrongly) that his body stood at an angle--about one-third broadside: hence the bullet (aimed past the ear), splashed harmlessly in the water, and next moment the pig was coming straight as a die, apparently meaning mischief. When within five yards, however, he jinked sharply to right, passing full broadside, when I killed him _á-boca-jarro_, as the phrase runs, "at the mouth of the spout." [Illustration] That idea of "charging at large" is so splendidly romantic, and fits in so appropriately with preconceived ideas, that we almost regret to disturb its semi-fossilised acceptance. But, in mere fact, neither boars nor any other wild beasts "charge" at sight--always and only excepting elephant and rhinoceros, either of which _may_ (or may not) do so, though previously unprovoked. It would, at least, be unwise entirely to ignore the contingency of either of these two so acting. There exist, nevertheless, old and evil-tempered boars that are quite formidable adversaries. We have many such in our Coto Doñana--boars that, having once overmastered our hounds, practically defy us. Each of these old solitary tuskers occupies some densely briared stronghold--it may be but an isolated patch of jungle, scarce half an acre in extent, or alternatively, a little sequence of similar thickets, each connected by intervals of lighter bush. Such spots abound by the hundred, but once the lair of our bristled friend is found, then there is work cut out for man, horse, and hound. For long-drawn-out minutes the silence of the wilderness re-echoes with doubly concentrated fury--frantic hound-music mingled with lower accompaniment of sullen, savage snorts and grunts and the champing of tusks; then a sharp crunch of breaking boughs ... and the death-yell of a _podenco_ tells that _that_ blow has got home. But the seat of war remains unchanged--the same rush and the same fatal result are repeated. Presently some venturous hound may discover an entry from behind. The enemy's flank is turned, and with a crash that seems to shake the very earth, our boar retreats to a second stronghold only twenty yards away. All this is occurring within arm's length; one hears, can almost feel, the stress of mortal combat, but one sees nothing inside the mural foliage, nor knows what moment the enemy may sally forth. Such moments may even excite what are termed in Spanish phrase "emotions." In his second "Plevna" our boar is secure, and he knows it. With rear and flanks protected by a _revêtement_ of gnarled roots and a labyrinth of stems, he fears nothing behind, while the furiously baying hounds on his front he now utterly despises. Blank shots fired in the air alarm him not, nor will Pepe Espinal--in a service of danger--succeed in dislodging him with a _garrocha_, after a perilous climb along the briar-matted roof. That boar is victor--master of a stricken field. One human resource remains, to go in _á arma blanca_--with the cold steel. There are dashing spirits who will do this--in Spain we have seen such. But to crawl thus, prostrate, into the dark and gloomy tunnels that form a wild-boar's fortress, intercepted and obstructed on every side, there to attack in single combat a savage beast, still unhurt and in the flush of victory, pachydermatous, and whose fighting weight far exceeds your own--well, _that_ we place in the category of pure recklessness. Courage is a quality that all admire, though one may wonder if it is not sometimes over-esteemed, when we find it possessed in common, not only by very many wild-beasts, but even by savage races of human kind--races which we regard as "lower," yet not inferior in that cherished quality of "pluck." Before you crawl in there, stop to think of the annoyance the act may cause not merely to our hunt, but possibly to a wife, otherwise to sisters, friends, or hospital nurses, even, it may be, to an undertaker--though he will not object. Once victorious over canine foes, it will be a remote chance indeed that that boar, unless caught by mishap in some carelessly chosen lair, will ever again show up as a mark for the fore-sight of a rifle. After one such rout, we remember finding our friend the Reverend Father, who had sallied forth with us for a mild morning's shooting, perched high up among the branches of a thorny _sabina_ (a kind of juniper), whence we rescued him, cut and bleeding, and badly "shaken in nerve!" We add the following typical instances of boar-shooting:-- SALAVAR, _February 1, 1900_.--A lovely winter's morn, warm sun and dead calm. The distant cries of the beaters (nigh three miles away) had just reached my ears, when a nearer sound riveted attention--the soft patter of hoofs upon sand. Then from the forest-slope behind appeared a pig--big and grey--trotting through deep rushes some forty yards away. Already the fore-sight was "touching on" its neck, when a lucky suspicion of striped piglings following their mother arrested the ball. Next came along a gentle hind with all her infinite grace of contour and carriage. At twenty-five yards she faced full round, and for long seconds we stared eye to eye. Curious it is that absolute quiescence will puzzle the wildest of the wild! Hardly had she vanished 'midst forest shades, than once again that muffled patter--this time an unmistakable tusker. But, oh! what an abominable shot I made--too low, too far back--and onwards he pursued his course. By our forest laws it was my _deber_ (bounden duty) to follow the stricken game. All that noontide, all the afternoon--through bush and brake, by dell and dusky defile--patiently, persistently, did Juanillo Espinal and I follow every twist and turn of that unending spoor. There was blood to help us at first, none thereafter. Through the thickets of Sabinal, then back on the left by Maë-Corra, forward through the Carrizal, thence crossing the Corral Grande, and away into the great _pinales_ beyond--away to the Rincon de los Carrizos, three solid leagues and a bit to spare! That was the price of a bungled shot. Here at last we have tracked him to his lair. Within that sullen fortress of the Rincon lies our wounded boar. How to get him out is a different problem. Though wounded, he is in no way disabled, and is ready, aye "spoiling," to put up a savage fight for his life. Having precisely located him in a dense tangle of lentisk and briar, our single dog, Careto, a tall, shaggy _podenco_, not unlike a deerhound, but on smaller scale, is let go. Up a gloomy game-path he vanishes, and in a moment fierce music startles the silent woods. The boar refused to move. But one resource remained. We must go in to help Careto, crawling up a briar-laced tunnel. It was horribly dark at first, and I began to think of ... when, fortunately, the light improved, and a few yards farther in a savage scene was enacting in quite a considerable open. Beneath its brambled roof we could stand half upright. In its farthest corner stood our boar at bay, a picture of sullen ferocity. Upon Juanillo's appearance the scene changed as by magic--there was a rush and resounding crash. Precisely what happened during the three succeeding seconds deponent could not see, it being so gloomy, and Juanillo on my front. Ere a cartridge could be shoved into the breech the great boar was held up, Careto hanging on to his right ear, and Juanillo, springing over the dog, had seized the grisly beast by both hind-legs--at the hocks--and stepping backward, with one mighty heave flung the boar sidelong on the earth. Next moment I had driven the knife through his heart. Though the method described is regularly employed by Spanish hunters to seize and capture a wounded or "bayed" boar--and we have seen it executed dozens of times--yet seldom in such a spot as this, cramped in space, handicapped by bad light and intercepting boughs and briars. It was a dramatic scene, and a bold act that bespoke cool head and brawny biceps. The head of this boar hangs on our walls to commemorate an event we are not likely to forget. We remember following a wounded lynx into a similar spot--a deep hollowed jungle. A pandemonium of savage snarling and spitting, barks and yowls greeted our ears as we crawled in, while on reaching the cavern the green eyes of the lynx flashed like electric lights from a dark recess. Though one hind-leg had been broken and the other damaged by a rifle-ball, yet she held easy mastery over five or six dogs. Sitting bolt upright, she kept the lot at bay with sweeping half-arm blows. Not a dog dared close, and the brave feline had to be finished with the lance. MANCHA DEL MILAGRO, _February 4, 1908_.--The covert, we knew by spoor, held a first-rate boar, and his most probable _salida_ (break-out) was at the foot of a perpendicular sand-wall, within fifty yards of which the writer held guard. Within brief minutes the music of the pack corroborated what had been foretold by spoor. Twice the boar with crashing course encircled the _mancha_ within, passing close inside my post. Each moment I watched for his appearance at the expected point on the right. Then, without notice or sound of broken bough, suddenly he stood outside on the left--almost beneath the gun's muzzle--not eight feet away. Luckily (as he stood within my firing-lines) the boar steadfastly gazed in the opposite direction, nor did I seek by slightest movement to attract attention to my presence. For some seconds we both remained thus, rigid. Then with sudden decision the boar bounded off, flying the gentle slope in front, and ere he had passed a yard clear of the firing-line, fell dead with a bullet placed in the precise spot. Weight, 164 lbs. clean, and grey as a donkey. * * * * * A wounded boar should always be approached with caution. Remember he is a powerful brute, very resolute, and furnished with quite formidable armament, which, while life remains, he will use. One of the biggest, after receiving a bullet slightly below and behind the heart, went slowly on some fifty yards, when he subsided, back up, among some green iris. Half an hour later the writer silently approached from directly behind. At ten yards the heaving flanks showed that plenty of life remained, and beautiful scimitar-like tushes were conspicuous enough on either side. I therefore quietly withdrew. On a keeper presently riding up, the boar at once dashed on a dog, flung him aside (laying open half his ribs), and charged the horse. The latter was smartly handled and cleared, when the boar instantly turned on me. The dash of that onset was splendid to watch. Luckily he had a yard or two of soft bog to get through, but it was necessary to stop him with another bullet. Impressive is the mental sensation aroused when any savage wild-beast--normally the object of pursuit--suddenly turns the tables and becomes the aggressor. The actual incident is necessarily but momentary, yet its effect remains graven on the tablets of memory. Pity 'tis so rare. Again we conclude with an independent impression by J. C. C.:-- Never a visit to the Coto Doñana but brings some separate experience--possibly more pleasurable in retrospect than reality! I will instance my first interview with wild-boars. Now, of course, I know more about them and can almost regard them with serenity; but at that time, believe me, it was not so. That first encounter at really close quarters occurred at the close of a long day's work. My post was behind a twelve-inch pine on an otherwise bare hill, the reverse slope of which dipped down to dense bamboo-thickets just out of my sight, though close by. Within a few minutes commenced and continued the hullabaloo of hounds. Close glued to my pine-trunk I listened in tense excitement. Suddenly, ere I had quite realised such possibility, there rushed into view on the ridge, not twenty paces distant, a great shaggy grey boar. He had dashed up the steep bank beyond and was now making direct for my legs. This is not the confession of a nervous man, but it did occur to me that truer safety lay in the _fork_ of my tree! but B. was the next gun, only sixty or seventy yards away, and keenly interested. In a moment I was myself again; but the interval had been, to say the least, painfully enthralling. I had, of course, to wait till the great "Havato" had crossed my "firing-lines." He certainly saw _something_, for he paused momentarily, took rapid counsel, and bolted past. Nerves were steady now, and once across the line the boar had my right in the ribs, left in flank. I actually saw blood spurt--hair fly--at each shot, yet the boar followed on his course unmoved. Pachydermatous pig! I pondered while reloading. Ten seconds later on my boar's sleuth follows _Boca-Negra_, a veritable Beth Gelert. Utterly ignoring me, he passes away into gloom and silence; but shortly I see him coming back, blood-stained and satiated, and my self-respect returns. Ten minutes later, a second tusker gallops along the hollow behind. Him also my right caught fair in the ribs--only a few inches left of the heart, yet again without visible result. The second bullet, however, broke his spine as he ascended the sand-bank beyond, and he fell stone dead. When the beat was over we followed No. 1. He also lay still, 200 yards away--a pair of first-rate tuskers. I remember, during the gralloch, some dreadfully poor charcoal-burners appearing on the scene to beg for food. This, of course, was gladly conceded; but so famished were those poor creatures that old women filled their aprons with reeking viscera, while it was with difficulty that children could be prevented from starting at once on raw flesh and liver. Truly it was a grievous spectacle, and filled the homeward ride with sad reflections on the awful hardships such poor folk are destined to endure. [Illustration: BOLTED PAST] In days of rapid change, when, in our own generation, sporting weapons have been at least thrice utterly metamorphosed, it is unwise to be dogmatic. Yet we may summarise our personal experience that the most efficient weapon for all such purposes as here described is that known as the "Paradox," or at least of the Paradox type. The old "Express rifle" (the best in its day, less than a score of years ago, but now mere "scrap") was also useful. But it always fell second to the Paradox, as the latter (being really a shot-gun, equally available for small game, snipe, duck, or geese) came up quicker to the eye for snap-shooting with ball. The invention of the Paradox type of gun has practically introduced a third style of shooting where there previously existed only two, to wit:-- (1) Gun-shooting with _shot_ where any "aim" or even an apology for an aim is fatal to modern maximum success. (2) Rifle-shooting proper, which must be mechanical and deliberate--the more so, the more effective. (3) Thirdly, we have this new system intermediate between the two--"gun-shooting with ball." Using the Paradox as a rifle, an alignment _must_ be taken; but it may be taken as with a _gun_, and not necessarily the deliberate and mechanical alignment essential with a rifle, properly so called. In short, with a Paradox, always glance along the sights. You will nearly always find that some "refinement" of aim is required. More words are useless. One word as to the "forward allowance" needed after the rough alignment (as explained) has been effected. At short snapshot ranges none is required. At a galloping stag at 50 yards, the sights should clear his chest; at 100 yards, half-a-length ahead, and double that for 150 yards. At these longer ranges one instinctively allows for "drop" by taking a fuller sight. For standing shots, of course, the back-sights can be used. BOAR-HUNTING BY MOONLIGHT (ESTREMADURA) "_Caceria á la Ronda._" This picturesque and altogether break-neck style of hunting the boar--a style perhaps more consonant than "driving" with popular notions of the dash and chivalry of Spanish character--still survives in the wild province of Estremadura. No species of sport in our experience will compare with the _Ronda_ for danger and sheer recklessness unless it be that of "riding lions" to a stand, as practised on British East African plains.[16] Years ago we described this system of the _Ronda_ in the "Big-Game" volumes of the Badminton Library, and here write a new account, correcting some slight errors which had crept into the earlier article. This sport is practised by moonlight at that period of the autumn called the _Montanera_, when acorns and chestnuts fall from the trees, and when droves of domestic swine are turned loose into the woods to feed on these wild fruits. At that date the wild-boars also are in the habit of descending from the adjacent sierras, and wander far and wide over the wooded plains in search of that favourite food. When the acorns fall thus and ripe chestnuts strew the ground in these magnificent Estremenian forests, the young bloods of the district assemble to await the arrival of the boars upon the lower ground. Two kinds of dog are employed: the ordinary _podencos_, which run free; and the _alanos_, a breed of rough-haired "seizers," crossed between bull-dog and mastiff--these latter being held in leash. Sallying forth at midnight, so soon as the _podencos_ give tongue, the _alanos_ are slipped in order to "hold-up" the flying boar till the horsemen can reach the spot. Then for a while hound-music frightens the darkness and shocks the silence of the sleeping woods; there is crashing among dry forest-scrub, a breakneck scurry of mounted men among the timber, until the furious baying of the hounds and the noisy rush of the hunters converge towards one dark point among the shadows, and in the half-light a great grisly tusker dies beneath the cold steel, but not before he has written a lasting record on the hide of some luckless hound. A stiff neck and bold heart are essential to these dare-devil gallops, where each horse and horseman vie in reckless rivalry, flying through bush and brake, and under overhung boughs difficult to distinguish amid moon-rays intercepted by foliage above. Accidents of course occur--an odd collar-bone or two hardly count, but what does annoy is when by mistake some wretched beast of domestic race is found held up by the excited pack. [Illustration] CHAPTER VII "OUR LADY OF THE DEW" THE PILGRIMAGE TO THE SHRINE OF NUESTRA SEÑORA DEL ROCÍO Pilgrimages by the pious to distant shrines are a well-known phase in the faith both of the Moslem and of the Romish Church, and require no definition by us; but one that is yearly performed to a tiny and isolated shrine not a dozen miles from our shooting-lodge of Doñana deserves description. First as to its origin. Twelve hundred years ago when Arab conquerors overran Spain much treasure of the churches, with many sacred emblems, relics, etc., were hurriedly concealed in places of safety. But not unnaturally, since Moorish domination extended over 700 years, all trace or record of such hiding-places had long been lost, and it was merely by chance and one by one that, after the Reconquest, the hidden treasures were rediscovered. The story of the recovery of our Lady of the Dew is related to have occurred in this wise. A shepherd tending his flocks in the neighbourhood of Almonte was induced by the strangely excited barking of his dog to force a way into the dense thickets known as La Rocina de la Madre (a wooded swamp, famous as a breeding-place of the smaller herons, egrets, and ibises), in the midst of which the dog led him to an ancient hollowed tree. Here, half-hidden in the cavernous trunk, the shepherd espied the figure of "a Virgin of rare beauty and of exquisite carving," clothed in a tunic of what had been white linen, but now stained dull green through centuries of exposure to the weather and dew (_rocío_). Overjoyed, the shepherd, bearing the Virgin on his shoulders, set out for Almonte, distant three leagues; but being overcome by fatigue and the weight of his burden, he lay down to rest by the way and fell asleep. On awakening he found the Virgin had gone--she had returned to her hollow tree. Having ascertained this, and being now filled with fear, he proceeded alone to Almonte, where he reported his discovery. At once the Alcalde and clergy accompanied him to the spot, and finding the image as related, a vow was then and there solemnised that a shrine, dedicated to N. S. del Rocío, should be erected at the very spot. On its being discovered that this Virgin was able to perform miracles and to grant petitions, her fame soon spread afar, and religious fervour waxed strong. Thus during the plague of 1649-50, the Virgin having been removed to Almonte as a safeguard, the inhabitants of that place were immune from the pestilence, though every other hamlet was decimated. A second miracle was attributed to the Virgin. Hard by the shrine at Rocío was a spring of water, but of such poor supply that ordinarily a single man could empty it within two hours: yet during the three days of the pilgrimage thousands of men and their horses could all assuage their thirst. Owing to these manifestations devout persons endowed the Virgin of Rocío with considerable sums of money, with which a larger shrine was built, while sumptuous garments, laces, and embroidery, with jewelry and precious stones, were provided for her adornment. In addition to this, Replicas of the original effigy were made and distributed around the villages of the neighbourhood, particularly the following:-- Kilos. Palma, distant 32 Moguer " 30 Umbrete " 45 Huelva " 65 Triana " 76 Rota " 55 San Lucar " 45 Villamanrique " 18 Pilas " 23 Almonte " 17 Coria " 44 At each of these and other places, "Brotherhoods" (_Hermandades_), affiliated to the original at Rocío, were established to guard these effigies; and it is from these points that every Whitsuntide the various pilgrim-fraternities journey forth across the wastes towards Rocío, each Brotherhood bringing its own carved replica to pay its annual homage to its carved prototype. * * * * * In the spring of 1910 the authors attended the _Fiesta_. Already, the night before, premonitory symptoms--the tuning-up of fife and drum--had been audible, and during the twelve-mile ride next morning fresh contingents winding through the scrub-clad plain were constantly sighted, all converging upon Rocío. It was not, however, till reaching that hamlet that the full extent of the pilgrimage became apparent, and a striking and characteristic spectacle it formed. From every point of the compass were descried long files of white-tilted ox-waggons--hundreds of them--slowly advancing across the flower-starred plain; the waggons all bedecked in gala style, crammed to the last seat with guitar-touching girls, with smiling duennas and attendant squires; the ox-teams gaily caparisoned, and escorted by prancing cavaliers, many with wife or daughter mounted pillion-wise behind, while younger pilgrims challenged impromptu trials of speed--a series of minor steeplechases. There were four-in-hand brakes, mule-teams and donkey-carts, pious pedestrians--a motley parade enveloped in clouds of dust and noise, but all in perfect order. The following quaint description was written down for us by a Spanish friend who accompanied us:-- It is at the entry of the various processions that the most striking and picturesque effects are produced by the cavalcade. Here one sees displayed the grace and ability of the Amazon--the robust and comely Andalucian maiden, carried _á ancas_ (pillion-wise) at the back of his saddle by gallant cavalier proud of his gentle companion, and exhibiting to advantage his skill in horsemanship. The noble steed, conscious of its onerous part, carries the double burden with care and spirit, being trained to curvet and rear in all the bravery of mediæval and Saracenic age. About 4 P.M., while the converging caravans were yet a mile or so afield, all halted, each to organise its own procession, and each headed by the waggon bearing its own Virgin bedecked in gorgeous apparels of silk and silver braid. Then to the accompaniment of bands and bell-ringing, hand-clapping and castanets, drum, tambourine, and guitar, with flags flying and steeds curvetting, this singular combination of religious rite with musical fantasia resumed its advance into the village. Despite the dust and crush not a unit but held its assigned position, and thus--one long procession succeeding another--the whole concourse filed into the village, crossed its narrow green, and sought the shrine where, within the open doors, the Virgin of Rocío, removed from the altar, was placed to receive the homage of the Brotherhoods. As each Replica reached the spot, its bearers halted and knelt, while expert drivers even made their ox-teams kneel down in submission before the "Queen of Heaven and Earth." There was but a moment's delay, nor did castanets and song cease for an instant. Later in the evening came the processions of the Rosario, when each of the visiting Brotherhoods make a ceremonious call upon the Senior Brother--that is, the Hermit of Rocío--after which each confraternity, with less ceremony but more joviality, visited the camps of the others. This last was accompanied by bands, massed choirs, and _fireworks_. Then the festival resolved itself, so far as we could judge, into a purely secular affair--feasting, merry-making, dancing, till far on in the night. Rain had set in at dusk and was now falling fast. Rocío is but a tiny hamlet--say two score of humble cots--yet to-night 6000 people occupied it, the womenfolk sleeping inside their canvas-tilted ox-waggons, the men lying promiscuously on the ground beneath. Sunday is occupied with religious ceremonies, beginning with High Mass. These we will not attempt to describe--nor could we if we would. The Spanish friend who at our request jotted down some notes on the _Fiesta_ uses the following expressions:-- The days of the Rocío are days of expansion, merry-making, animation. Never, throughout the festival, ceases the laughter of joyous voices, the clang of the castanets, the melody of guitar and tambourine. Dances, song, and music, with jovial intercourse and good fellowship, all unite to preserve unflagging the rejoicing which is cultivated at that beautiful spot. At this festival many traders assist with different installations, including jewellers in the porch of the church, vendors of medallions, photographs, coloured ribbons, and other articles dedicated to the patroness of a festival which is well worthy a visit for its originality and bewitchment. On the Monday morning, after joint attendance of all the Brotherhoods at Mass, followed by a sermon, the image of the Virgin is formally replaced upon the altar (the feet resting upon the same hollow trunk in which the figure was first found), then the processions are reformed and the long homeward journey to their respective destinations begins. Although many thousands of people yearly attend this festival, all entirely uncontrolled by any authority, yet quarrels and disturbance are unknown. The mere cry of "viva la Virgen" suffices at once to appease incipient angers, should such arise. Thousands of horses and donkeys, moreover, are allowed to roam about untended and unguarded, as there is no danger of their being stolen. * * * * * The Virgin of the Rocío, it appears, specialises in accidents, and many votive pictures hung within the shrine illustrate the nature of her miracles. One man is depicted falling headlong from a fifth-storey window, another from a lofty pine, a third drowning in a torrential flood; a lady is thrown by a mule, another run over by a cart, a lad caught by an infuriated bull; a beatific-looking person stands harmless amidst fiery forked lightning--apparently enjoying it. From all these and other appalling forms of death, the survivors, having been saved by the Virgin's miraculous interposition, have piously contributed pictorial evidence of the various occurrences. A somewhat gruesome relic records the incident that a mother having vowed that should her daughter be restored to life, she should walk to Rocío in her grave-clothes--and there the said clothes lie as evidence of that miracle. The festival above described is celebrated each spring at Pentecost. There is, however, a second yearly pilgrimage into Rocío which originated in this wise. In 1810 when the French occupied this country, the village of Almonte was held by two troops of cavalry who were engaged in impressing recruits from among the neighbouring peasantry. These naturally objected to serve the enemy, but many were terrorised into obedience. Bolder spirits there were, however, and these, to the number of thirty-six, resolved to strike a blow for freedom. Having assembled in the thick woods outside Almonte, at two o'clock one afternoon they fell upon the unsuspecting French and, ere these could defend themselves, many were killed and others made prisoners. Finally the French commander was shot dead on his own doorstep. "The villagers of Almonte were horrified at what had occurred, for, although they had had no hand in the matter, they felt sure they would have to bear the blame"--so runs a Spanish account. The few French troopers who had escaped fled to Seville, reported the affair, and (wrongly) incriminated the villagers of Almonte--precisely as those worthies had foreseen. The General commanding at Seville ordered that Almonte should be razed to the ground and its inhabitants beheaded--that being the penalty decreed by Murat for any shedding of French blood. A detachment of dragoons, despatched to Almonte, had already taken prisoner the mayor, the priests, and all the chief inhabitants preparatory to their execution. In this grave situation they bethought themselves to pray to the Virgin of Rocío, promising that if she would rescue them from their deadly peril, they would institute a new pilgrimage to her shrine for thanksgiving. Already the detachment of French soldiers detailed to carry out the executions had reached Pilas, a village within six leagues of Almonte, when, by mere coincidence, a handful of Spanish troops flung themselves against the French positions at Seville. The French, thinking that their assailants must be the forerunners of a larger army, hurriedly recalled all their outposts, including those commissioned to destroy Almonte! Thus the wretched Alcalde and his fellow-prisoners were saved; for, their innocence of the "crime" being presently established, the town was let off with a fine. Since then, in accordance with the promise made 100 years ago, the whole of Almonte repairs every 7th of August to the shrine of Nuestra Señora del Rocío. [Illustration: PRAYING MANTIS (_Mantis religiosa_)] CHAPTER VIII THE MARISMAS OF GUADALQUIVÍR THE DELTA From Seville to the Atlantic the great river Guadalquivír pursues its course through seventy miles of alluvial mud-flats entirely of its own construction. The whole of this viewless waste (in winter largely submerged) is technically termed the marisma; but its upper regions, slightly higher-lying, have proved amenable to a limited dominion of man, and nowadays comprise (besides some rich corn-lands) broad pasturages devoted to grazing, and which yield _Toros bravos_, that is, fighting-bulls of breeds celebrated throughout Spain, as providing the popular champions of the Plaza. [Illustration: AVOCET] It is not of these developed regions that we treat, but of the Lower Delta, which still remains a wilderness, and must for centuries remain so--a vast area of semi-tidal saline ooze and marsh, extending over some forty or fifty miles in length, and spreading out laterally to untold leagues on either side of the river. This Lower Delta, the marisma proper, while it varies here and there by a few inches in elevation, is practically a uniform dead-level of alluvial mud, only broken by _vetas_, or low grass-grown ridges seldom rising more than a foot or two above the flat, and which vary in extent from a few yards to hundreds of acres. The precise geological cause of these _vetas_ we know not; but the calcareous matter of which they are composed--the debris of myriad disintegrated sea-shells, mostly bivalves--proves that the ocean at an earlier period held sway, till gradually driven backwards by the torrents of alluvial matter carried down by the river, and finally forced behind the vast sand-barrier now known as the Coto Doñana--the buffer called into being whilst age-long struggles raged between these two opposing forces. The fact is further evidenced by the salt crust which yearly forms on the surface of the lower marisma when the summer sun has evaporated its waters. In summer the marisma is practically a sun-scorched mud-flat; in winter a shallow inland sea, with the _vetas_ standing out like islands. There are, as already stated, slight local variations in elevation. Naturally the lower-lying areas are the first to retain moisture so soon as the long torrid summer has passed away and autumn rains begin. Speedily these become shallow lagoons, termed _lucios_--similar, we imagine, to the _jheels_ of India--and a welcome haven they afford to the advance-guard of immigrant wildfowl from the north. Plant-life in the marismas is regulated by the relative saltness of the soil. In the deeper _lucios_ no vegetation can subsist; but where the level rises, though but a few inches, and the ground is less saline, the hardy samphire (in Spanish, _armajo_) appears, covering with its small isolated bushes vast stretches of the lower marisma. The _armajo_, which is formed of a congeries of fleshy twigs, leafless, and jointed more like the marine _algae_ than a land-plant, belongs to three species as follows:-- (2) _Arthraenimum fruticosum_} } in Spanish, _Armajo_. (3) _Suaeda fruticosa_ } All three belong to the natural order _Chenopodiaceae_ (or "Goose-foot" family). The _armajo_ is the typical plant of the marisma, flourishing even where there is a considerable percentage of salt in the soil. This aquatic shrub increases most in dry seasons, a series of wet winters having a disastrous effect on its growth. The _Sapina_, above mentioned, has a curious effect when eaten by mares (which is often the case when other food is scarce) of inducing a form of intoxication from which many die. Indeed, the deaths from _Ensapinadas_ represent a serious loss to horse-breeders whose mares are sent to graze in the marismas. Cattle are not affected. [Illustration: SAMPHIRE] Formerly the _Sapina_ possessed a commercial value, being used (owing to its alkaline qualities) in the manufacture of soap. Nowadays it is replaced by other chemicals. Here and there, owing to some imperceptible gradient, the marisma is traversed by broad channels called _caños_, where, by reason of the water having a definite flow, the soil has become less saline. The _armajo_ at such spots becomes scarce or disappears altogether, its place being taken by quite different plants, namely: Spear-grass (_Cyperus_), _Candilejo_, _Bayunco_, the English names of which we do not know. Efforts have been made from time to time to reclaim and utilise portions of the marisma by draining the water to the river; but failure has invariably resulted for the following reasons: (1) The intense saltness of the soil. (2) That the marisma lies largely on a lower level than the river banks. (3) The river being tidal, its water is salt or brackish. There are vast areas of far better land in Spain which might be reclaimed with certainty and at infinitely less cost. The only human inhabitants of the marisma are a few herdsmen whose reed-built huts are scattered on remote _vetas_. There are also the professional wildfowlers with their _cabresto_-ponies; but this class is disappearing as, bit by bit, the system of "preservation" extends over the wastes. Though the climate is healthy enough except for a period just preceding the autumn rains, yet our keepers and most of those who live here permanently are terrible sufferers from malaria. Quinine, they tell us, costs as much as bread in the family economy. We quote the following impression from _Wild Spain_, p. 78:-- [Illustration: GUNNING-PUNT IN THE MARISMA. (NOTE THE HALF-SUBMERGED SAMPHIRE-BUSHES.)] [Illustration: WILD-GOOSE SHOOTING ON THE SANDHILLS. (NOTE TIN DECOYS, ALSO SOME NATURAL GEESE.)] The utter loneliness and desolation of the middle marismas call forth sensations one does not forget. Hour after hour one pushes forward across a flooded plain only to bring within view more and yet more vistas of watery waste and endless horizons of tawny water. On a low islet at farthest distance stand a herd of cattle--mere points in space; but these, too, partake of the general wildness and splash off at a gallop while yet a mile away. Even the wild-bred horses and ponies of the marisma revert to an aboriginal anthropophobia, and become as shy and timid as the _ferae naturae_ themselves. After long days in this monotony, wearied eyes at length rejoice at a vision of trees--a dark-green pine-grove casting grateful shade on scorching sands beneath. To that oasis we direct our course, but it proves a fraud, one of nature's cruel mockeries--a mirage. Not a tree grows on that spot, or within leagues of it, nor has done for ages--perhaps since time began. Such is the physical character of the marisma, so far as we can describe it. The general landscape in winter is decidedly dreary and somewhat deceptive, since the vast areas of brown _armajos_ lend an appearance of dry land where none exists, since those plants are growing in, say, a foot or two of water--"a floating forest paints the wave." The monotony is broken at intervals by the reed-fringed _caños_, or sluggish channels, and by the _lucios_, big and little--the latter partially sprinkled with _armajo_-growth, the bigger sheets open water, save that, as a rule, their surface is carpeted with wildfowl. Should our attempted description read vague, we may plead that there is nothing tangible to describe in a wilderness devoid of salient feature. Nor can we liken it with any other spot, for nowhere on earth have we met with a region like this--nominally dry all summer and inundated all winter, yet subject to such infinite variation according to varying seasons. It is not, however, the marisma itself that during all these years has absorbed our interest and energies--no, that dreary zone would offer but little attraction were it not for its feathered inhabitants. These, the winter wildfowl, challenge the world to afford such display of winged and web-footed folk, and it is these we now endeavour to describe. By mid-September, as a rule, the first signs of the approaching invasion of north-bred wildfowl become apparent. But if, as often happens, the long summer drought yet remains unbroken, these earlier arrivals, finding the marisma untenable, are constrained to take to the river, or to pass on into Africa. Should the dry weather extend into October, the only ducks to remain permanently in any great numbers are the teal, the few big ducks then shot being either immature or in poor condition, from which it may be inferred that the main bodies of all species have passed on to more congenial regions. About the 25th September the first greylag geese appear. These are not affected by the scarcity of water in any such degree as ducks, since they only need to drink twice a day, morning and evening, and make shift to subsist by digging up the bulb-like roots of the spear-grass with their powerful bills. [Illustration: GREYLAG GEESE] But so soon as autumn rains have fallen, and the whole marisma has become supplied with "new water," it at once fills up with wildfowl--ducks and geese--in such variety and prodigious quantities as we endeavour to describe in the following sketches. WILDFOWL--'TWIXT CUP AND LIP Wildfowl beyond all the rest of animated nature lend themselves to spectacular display. For their enormous aggregations (due as much to concentration within restricted haunts, as to gregarious instinct, and to both these causes combined) are always openly visible and conspicuous inasmuch as those haunts are, in all lands, confined to shallow water and level marsh devoid of cover or concealment. Thus, wherever they congregate in their thousands and tens of thousands, wildfowl are always in view--that is, to those who seek them out in their solitudes. This last, however, is an important proviso. For the haunts aforesaid are precisely those areas of the earth's surface which are the most repugnant to man, and least suited to his existence. In crowded England there survive but few of those dreary estuaries where miles of oozy mud-flats separate sea and land, treacherous of foot-hold, exposed to tide-ways and to every gale that blows. Such only are the haunts of British wildfowl, though how many men in a million have ever seen them? To wilder Spain, with its 50 per cent of waste, and its vast irreclaimed marismas, come the web-footed race in quantities undreamt at home. We have before attempted to describe such scenes, though a fear that we might be discredited oft half paralysed the pen. An American critic of our former book remarked that it "left the gaping reader with a feeling that he had not been told half." That lurking fear could not be better explained. A dread of Munchausenism verily gives pause in writing even of what one has seen again and again, raising doubts of one's own eyesight and of the pencilled notes that, year after year, we had scrupulously written down on the spot. The Baetican marisma has afforded many of those scenes of wild-life that, for the reason stated, were before but half-described. With fuller experience we return to the subject, though daring not entirely to satisfy our trans-Atlantic friend. The winter of 1896 provided such an occasion. It was on the 26th of November that, under summer conditions, we rode out, where in other years we have sailed, across what should have been water, but was now a calcined plain. November was nearly past; autumn had given place to winter, yet not a drop of rain had fallen. Since the scorching days of July the fountains of heaven had been stayed, and now the winter wildfowl from the north had poured in only to find the marisma as hard and arid as the deserts of Arabia Petraea. Instinct was at fault. True, each to their appointed seasons, had come, the dark clouds of pintail, teal, and wigeon, the long skeins of grey geese. Where in other years they had revelled in shallows rich in aquatic vegetation, now the travellers find instead nought but torrid plains devoid of all that is attractive to the tastes of their tribe. For the parched soil, whose life-blood has been drained by the heats of the summer solstice, whose plant-life is burnt up, has remained panting all the autumn through for that precious moisture that still comes not. The carcases of horses and cattle, that have died from thirst and lack of pasturage, strew the plains; the winter-sown wheat is dead ere germination is complete. In such years of drought many of the newly arrived wildfowl, especially pintails, pass on southwards (into Africa), not to return till February. The remainder crowd into the few places where the precious element--water--still exists. Such are the rare pools that are fed from quicksands (_nuclés_) or permanent land-springs (_ojos_) and a few of the larger and deeper _lucios_ of the marisma. Riding through stretches of shrivelled samphire we frequently spring deer, driven out here, miles from their forest-haunts, by the eager search for water. [Illustration: WHITE-EYED POCHARD (_Fuligula nyroca_)] Approaching the first of the great _lucios_, or permanent pools, a wondrous sight lay before our eyes. This water might extend for three or four miles, but was literally concealed by the crowds of flamingoes that covered its surface. For a moment it was difficult to believe that those pink and white leagues would really be all composed of living creatures. Their identity, however, became clear enough when, within 600 yards, we could distinguish the scattered outposts gradually concentrating upon the solid ranks beyond. Disbelieve it if you will, but four fairly sane Englishmen estimated that crowd, when a rifle-shot set them on wing, to exceed ten thousand units--by how much, we decline to guess. The nearer shores, with every creek and channel, were darkened by masses of ducks, huddled together like dusky islets; while further away several army-corps of geese were striving, with sonorous gabble, to tear up tuberous roots of spear-grass (_castañuela_) from sun-baked mud. It was a rifle-shot at these last that finally set the whole host on wing--an indescribable spectacle, hurrying hordes everywhere outflanked by the glinting black and pink glamour of flamingoes. Then the noise--the reverberating roar of wings, blending with a babel of croaks and gabblings, whistles and querulous pipes, punctuated by shriller bi-tones, ... we give that up. [Illustration: "FLAMINGOES OVER"] A long ride in prospect precluded serious operations to-night, but towards dusk we lined out our four guns, and in half an hour loaded up the panniers of the carrier-ponies with nearly three score ducks and geese. An hour before the morning's dawn we were in position to await the earliest geese. Experience had taught the chief flight-lines, and these, over many miles of marsh, were commanded by lines of sunken tubs. These, however, the exceptional conditions had rendered temporarily useless. Our tubs lay miles from water; hence each man had to hide as best he could, prostrate behind rush-tuft or twelve-inch samphire. This morning, however, the greylags flew wide and scattered, in strange contrast with their customary regularity. We noticed the change, but knew not the cause. The geese did. The barometer during the night (unnoticed by us at 4 A.M.) had gone down half an inch, and already, as we assembled for breakfast at ten o'clock, rain was beginning to fall--the first rain since the spring! The wind, which for weeks had remained "nailed to the North--_norte clavado_," in Spanish phrase--flew to all airts, and a change was at hand. By eleven there burst what the Spanish well name a _tormenta_; lightning flashed from a darkened sky, while thunder rolled overhead, and rain drove horizontal on a living hurricane. An hour later the heavens cleared, and the sun was shining as before. That short and sudden storm, however, had marked an epoch. The whole conditions of bird-life in the marisma had been revolutionised within a couple of hours. [Illustration: POCHARD (_Fuligula ferina_)] In other years, under such conditions as this morning had promised, we have records of sixty and eighty greylags brought to bag, and it was with such anticipation that we had set out to-day. The result totalled but a quarter of such numbers. Ducks came next in our programme, and the writer, being the last gun by lot, had several miles to ride to his remote post at El Hondón. The scenes in bird-life through which we rode amazed even accustomed eyes. At intervals as we advanced across mud-flats clad in low growth of rush and samphire, rose for a mile across our front such crowds of wigeon and teal that the landscape ahead appeared a quivering horizon of wings that shimmered like a heat-haze. Crouching behind a low breastwork, before me lay a five-acre pool which no amount of firing ever kept quite clear of swimming forms, so fast did thirsty duck, teal, and geese keep dropping in, since behind for twenty leagues stretched waterless plain. Merely to make a bag under such conditions means taking every chance, firing away till barrels grow too hot to hold. Here, however, that nature-love that overrides even a fowler's keenness stepped in. With half the wildfowl of Europe flashing, wheeling, and alighting within view--many, one fondly imagined, likely to be of supreme interest--the writer cannot personally go on taking single mallards, teal, or wigeon, one after another in superb but almost monotonous rapidity. For the moment, in fact, the naturalist supplants the gunner. True, this may be sacrificing the mutton to the shadow, and this afternoon no special prize rewarded self-denial in letting pass many a tempting chance. [Illustration] For gratifying indeed to fowler's pride it is to pull down in falling heap the smart pintails and brilliant shovelers, to bring off a right-and-left at geese, though, it may be, one had first to let a cloud of wigeon pass the silent muzzle. Such is individual taste, nor will the memory of that afternoon ever fade, although my score, when at 3.30 P.M. I was recalled, only totalled up to seventy-four ducks and four greylag geese. The recall was imperative, and I obeyed, though not without hesitation and doubt. Could earth provide a better place? "Yes," replies Vasquez, "in one hour the geese will be streaming in clouds up the Algaidilla and Caño Juncero. Come! there's no time to lose." Within an hour we had reached the spot. The water was four inches deep, with low cover of rushes. The revolving stool stood too high, so I knelt in the shallow, and within three minutes the first squad of geese came in quite straight. One I took kneeling, but had to jump for the second. Just as No. 2 collapsed, No. 1 caught me full amidships, knocking me sidelong and, rebounding, upset the stool and the bag of cartridges thereon! A nice mess, occurring at the very outset of one of those ambrosial half-hours seldom realised outside of dreams. Quickly I dried the cartridges as well as circumstances would admit, for pack after pack of geese hurled themselves gaggling and honking right in my face, and during the few brief minutes of the southern twilight, I reckoned I had twenty-three down--seven right-and-lefts--though in the darkness only seventeen could be gathered, the winged all necessarily escaping. [Illustration: WILD GEESE ALIGHTING AT FIFTEEN YARDS (Take the upper pair right-and-left, leaving the nearer geese for second gun.)] Within thirty-six hours we had secured sixty-two geese and over two hundred ducks. For four guns, under favouring conditions, this would have been no very special result; but to-day the fowl were all alert and restless at the prospect of a coming change. The keynote had already been sounded that first day, when the _tormenta_ burst, and when the long drought ended on the very morning we had selected to commence our operations. Had the weather held for a single week ... but why dwell on it? The point must be clear enough. No more geese were got that year. Let us conclude with a few ornithological observations made during succeeding days. On November 30, after three days of stormy weather, with tremendous bursts of rainfall, there commenced one of the most remarkable bird-migrations we have witnessed. From early morn till night (and all the following day) cloud upon cloud of ducks kept streaming overhead from the westward. Frequently a score of packs would be in view at once--never were the heavens clear; and all coming from precisely the same direction and travelling in parallel lines to the east. Their course seemed to indicate that these migrants (avoiding the overland route across Spain which would involve passing over her great cordilleras, say 10,000 feet) had travelled south by the coast-line as far as the latitude of Cape St. Vincent. Thence they "hauled their wind" and bore up on an easterly course which brought them direct into the great marismas of the Guadalquivir.[17] LAS NUEVAS We had acquired this waste of marsh and mud-flat and were keen to "go and possess it." Initial difficulties arose to confront us. Though the whole region now belonged to us (_i.e._ the rights of chase, and it boasts but little other value) yet our possession was to be met by some opposition. It was all very natural, delightfully human, and despite the annoyance, captivated our sympathy. Local fowlers, accustomed from immemorial times to earn a scant living by shooting for market the wildfowl of the wilderness, resented this acquisition of exclusive rights. Our scattered guards were overawed, our reed-built huts were burned, and threats reached us--not to mention a casual bullet or two ricochetting in wild bounds across the watery waste. That one quality, however, above mentioned--sympathy--is the passport to Spanish hearts, and thereby, together with courtesy and fair-dealing, the erstwhile insurgents in brief time became the best of friends. For the moment, however, we found ourselves hutless, and constrained to encamp two leagues away on the distant _terra firma_, this involving an extra couple of hours' work in the small dark hours. As before 4 A.M. we rode, beneath a pouring rain, "path-finding," in blind darkness across slimy ooze and shallow--not to mention deeper channels that reached to the girths,--a nightjar circled round our cavalcade--true, a very small event, but recorded because it is quite against the rules for a nightjar to be here in December. Only three guns braved this adventure, and by 5.45 we occupied each his allotted post. These could not be called comfortable, since the positions in which we had to spend the next six or eight hours were quite six inches deep in water, and the only covert a circle of samphire-bush barely a foot above water-level--that being the utmost height allowed by the keen sight of flighting fowl. Each man had an armful of cut brushwood to kneel on, besides another bundle on which cartridge-bags might be supported clear of the water.[18] Rain descended in sheets. Before it was fully light--indeed the average human being of diurnal habit would probably swear it was still quite dark--the swish of wings overhead foretold the coming day. Then with a roar the whole marisma bursts into life as though by clock-work. Thrice-a-minute, and oftener, sped bunches of duck right in one's face, at times a hurricane of wings. Not seeing them till quite close in, but one barrel can be emptied each time, yet soon a score of beautiful pintail and wigeon formed the basis of a pile. Behind, in the gloom to westward, a sense of movement has developed. At first it might have been but the drift of night-clouds, but as light broadens, form and colour evolve and the phenomenon shapes itself into vast bodies of flamingoes, sprawling, as it were, on the face of heaven in writhing, scintillating confusion. After infinite evolutions, the amorphous mass resolves itself into order; files and marshalled phalanxes serry the sky--those weird wildfowl, each with some six foot of rigid extension, advancing direct upon our posts. Their armies have spent the night on the broad _lucios_ of El Desierto, and now head away towards feeding-grounds outside. Arrayed line beyond line in echelon, ten thousand pinions beat, in unison--beat in short, sharp strokes from the elbow. The fantasy of form amazes; the flash of contrasted colour as the first sun-rays strike on black, white, and vermilion. One may have witnessed this spectacle a score of times, yet never does it pall or leave one without a sense that here nature has treated us to one of her wildest creations. No rude sketch of ours--possibly not the best that art can produce--will ever convey the effect of these quaint forms in vast moving agglomeration. Long after they have vanished in space, one remains entranced with the glamour of the scene. [Illustration: WILDFOWL IN THE MARISMA] The flamingoes have passed away, but the lightening skies are still streaked and serried. Most numerous are the wigeon, millions of them in hurrying phalanxes, white specks flanged with dark wings, too well known to describe; pintails (this wet winter hardly less numerous), readily distinguishable by their longer build and stately grace of flight; the dark heads and snowy necks of the drakes conspicuous afar. The arrow-like course of the shoveler, along with his vibrant wing-beats and incessant call, "zook, zook, tsook, tsook," identify that species; while gadwall, more sombre in tone than the mallards, "talk" in distinctive style; and mob-like masses of teal and marbled ducks sweep along the open channels. Then there are the diving-ducks with harsh corvine croaks, pochards, ferruginous, and tufts, just as swift as the rest, though of apparently more laboured flight; occasionally a string of shelducks, conspicuous by size and contrasted colouring, and among them all, swing along with leisurely wing-beats but equal speed, wedge-like skeins of great grey-geese. A single morning's bag may include seven or eight different species, sometimes a dozen. Now the rim of the sun shows over the distant sierra, and one begins to see one's environment and to realise what Las Nuevas is like. Of Mother Earth as one normally conceives it not a particle is in sight, beyond such low reeds and miles of samphire-tops as break the watery surface, and a vista of this extends to the horizon. [Illustration] Behind our positions stretched a _lucio_ of open water. Upon this, a mile away, stood an army of flamingoes, whose croaks and gabblings filled the still air. During a quiescent interval I examined these with binoculars. Thereupon I discovered that the whole _lucio_ around them and stretching away, say a league in length, was carpeted with legions of duck, which had not been noticed with the naked eye. The discovery explained also a resonant reverberation that, at recurring intervals, I had noticed all the morning, and which I had attributed to the gallant Cervera's squadron at quick-firing gun-practice away in Cádiz Bay. Now I saw the cause; it was due to the duck-hawks and birds-of-prey! Twice within ten minutes a swooping marsh-harrier aroused that host on wing--or, say, half-a-mile of them--to fly in terror; but only to settle a few hundred yards farther away. The harrier's hope was clearly to find a wounded bird among the crowd--the massed multitude none dared to tackle. It is nine o'clock, the pile of dead has mounted up, but the "flight" is slackening. Already I see our mounted keepers (who have hitherto stood grouped on an islet two miles away) separate and ride forth to set the ducks once more in motion. At this precise moment one remembers two things--both that wretched breakfast at 3 A.M., and the luxuries that lie at hand, almost awash among the reeds. Ducks pass by unscathed for a full half-hour, while such quiet reigns in "No. 1" that tawny water-shrews climb confidingly up the reeds of my screen. Meanwhile the efforts of our drivers were becoming apparent in a renewal of flighting ducks; but we would here emphasise the fact that these second and artificially-produced flights are never so effective from a fowler's point of view as the earlier, natural movements of the game. For the ducks thus disturbed come, as the Spanish keepers put it, _obligados_ and not of their own free-will. Hence they all pass high--many far above gunshot--and not even the attraction that our fleet of "decoys" (for we have now stuck up the whole of the morning's spoils to deceive their fellows) will induce more than a limited proportion, and those only the smaller bands, to descend from their aërial altitude. The "movement" of these masses nevertheless affords another of those spectacular displays that we must at least try to describe. For though none of their sky-high armies will pass within gunshot--or ten gunshots--yet one cannot but be struck with amazement when the whole vault of heaven above presents a quivering vision of wings--shaded, seamed, streaked, and spotted from zenith to horizon. Then the multiplied pulsation of wings is distinctly perceptible--a singular sensation. One remembers it when, perhaps an hour later, you become conscious of its recurrence. But now the heavens are clear! Not a single flight crosses the sky--not one, that is, within sight. But up above, beyond the limits of human vision, there pass unseen hosts, and _theirs_ is that pulsation you feel. The passage of these sky-scrapers is actuated by no puny manoeuvre of ours. They are travellers on through-routes. Perhaps the last land (or water) they touched was Dutch or Danish; and they will next alight (within an hour) in Africa. Already at their altitude they can see, spread out, as it were, at their feet, the marshes and meres of Morocco. Although nominally describing that first day in Las Nuevas (and, so far as facts go, adhering rigidly thereto), yet we are endeavouring to concentrate in fewest words the actual lessons of many subsequent years of practical experience. Thus the pick-up on that day (though it may have numbered a couple of hundred ducks) we refrain from recording in this attempt to convey the concrete while avoiding detail. Back again, splash, splosh, through mud and mire, two hours' ride to our camp-fire--a picturesque scene with our marsh-bred friends gathered round, their tawny faces lurid in the firelight as flames shoot upwards and pine-cones crack like pistol-shots; and over the embers hang a score of teal each impaled on a supple bough. Away beyond there loom like spectres our horses tethered when silvery moonlight glances through scattered pines. Things would have been pleasant indeed had the rain but stopped occasionally. True we had our tents; but our men slept in the open, each rolled in his cloak, beneath some sheltering bush. CHAPTER IX WILDFOWL-SHOOTING IN THE MARISMA ITS PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE Vast as their aggregations may be, yet wildfowl do not necessarily--merely by virtue of numbers--afford any sort of certainty to the modern fowler. Half-a-million may be in view day by day, but in situations or under conditions where scarce half-a-score can be killed. This elementary feature is never appreciated by the uninitiated, nor probably ever will be since Hawker's terse and trenchant prologue failed to fix it.[19] What "the Colonel" wrote a century ago stands equally good to-day; and _mutatis mutandis_ will probably stand good a century hence. [Illustration] Long before the authors had appeared on the scene with breech-loaders--even before the epoch of Hawker with his copper-caps and detonators--the Spanish fowlers of the marisma had already devised means of their own whereby the swarming wildfowl could be secured by wholesale. As a market venture, their system of a stalking-horse (called a _cabresto_) was deadly in the extreme and interesting to boot, affording unique opportunity of closely approaching massed wildfowl while still unconscious of danger. We have spent delightful days crouching behind these shaggy ponies, and describe the method later. But this is not a style that at all subserves the aspirations of the modern gunner, and we here study the problem from his point of view. The essence of success lies in ascertaining precisely the exact areas where fowl in quantity are "strongly haunted," by day and night, together with their regular lines of flight thence and thereto. Obviously such exact knowledge in these vast marismas, devoid of landmarks, demands careful observation, and it must be remembered that these things change with every change of weather and water. Having located such well-frequented resorts or flight-lines, the degree of success will yet depend on the _strength_ of the "haunt." It may happen (despite all care) that the partiality of the fowl for that special spot or route is merely superficial and evanescent. A dozen shots and they have cleared out, or altered their course. In the reverse case, so strong may be their "haunt" that no amount of disturbance entirely drives them away, and even those that have already been scared by the sound of shooting will yet return again and again. * * * * * By night ducks feed in the slobby shallows and oozes, but concealed by the samphire-growth which flourishes in such places. Hence the use of the stancheon-gun is not here available as in the case of bare, plant-free, tidal flats at home and elsewhere. In the dusk the ducks have arrived at these feeding-grounds in quite small trips or bunches. But as the stars pale towards the dawn, they depart in larger detachments, often numbering hundreds in a pack. Still, such are their enormous numbers that, even so, their shifting armies form an almost continuous stream in the direction whither they take their course. But where is that? That is the problem on the solution of which the fowler's success depends. We will presume that you have so solved it. In that case, you will have witnessed, between an hour before sun-up and half-an-hour thereafter, as marvellous a procession as the scheme of bird-life can afford. Let us follow the fowl throughout that matutinal flight. Away through leagues of empty space they hold their course, now high in air where vistas of brown samphire loom like land and might conceal a lurking foe, anon lowering their flight where sporadic sheets or lanes of open water break the tawny monotony. Beyond all this, stretching away in open waters like an inland sea, lies a big _lucio_. That is their goal. One by one, or in dozens and scores, the infinite detachments re-unite to splash down upon that glassy surface. Within brief minutes the whole expanse is darkened as with a carpet. [Illustration: THE STANCHEON-GUN IN THE MARISMA--DAWN.] Upon this _lucio_ the assembled ducks command a view for miles around. Hardly could a water-rat approach unseen. If the fowl persisted in passing the entire day thereon, no human power would avail to molest them--they could bid defiance to fowlers of every race and breed. Two circumstances, however, favour their human foes. The first is the perpetual disturbance created among those floating hosts by birds-of-prey. These--chiefly marsh-harriers, but including also the great black-backed gulls--execute perpetual "feints" at the swimming ducks, sections of which (often thousands strong) are compelled to rise on wing by the menacing danger. The dominant idea actuating the raptores (since they are unable to attack the main bodies) is to ascertain if one or more wounded ducks remain afloat after their sound companions have cleared--the cripples, of course, affording an easy prey. The disturbed fowl will not fly far, perhaps half-a-mile, unless indeed they happen during that flight to catch sight of an attractive fleet of "decoys" moored in some quiet creek a mile or so away. The second favouring circumstance arises from a difference in habit between ducks in Spain and their relatives (even con-specific) inhabiting British waters. For whereas the latter, as a rule, will remain quiescent in their selected resting-places the livelong day, in Spain, on the contrary, by about 11 A.M., the force of hunger begins visibly to operate--not in all, but in sections, which, rising in detachments, separate themselves from the masses and commence exploratory cruises among the smaller and shallower _lucios_ where food may be found.[20] This intermittent flight slackens off for an hour or so at midday, is renewed in the afternoon, and stops dead one hour before sun-down. To exploit the advantage offered by these habits it is necessary to ascertain to which of the innumerable minor _lucios_ these "hunger-marchers" are resorting. Observation will have decided that point, and our expert gunner now (at 11 A.M.) be concealed with scrupulous care, and his fleet of, say, fifty decoys set out in lifelike and (or) attractive attitudes, exactly in the centre of the particular lagoon, whither, of recent days, the ducks have been observed to resort in greatest abundance from noon onwards. The gunner lies expectant on the cut rushes which strew the bottom-boards of his _cajon_--a box-shaped punt some 7 feet long by 2-1/2 broad, which is concealed by being thrust bodily in the midst of the biggest samphire bush available. The craft nevertheless is still afloat and, though flat-bottomed, is yet terribly crank, and any sudden movement to port or starboard threatens to capsize the entire outfit. To allay the tense suspicion of flighting wildfowl, several of the adjacent bushes for fifty yards around have been heightened by the addition of a cut bough or two--the idea being to induce a theory among passing ducks merely that this particular spot seems peculiarly favourable to samphire-growth--that and nothing more. In setting up decoys, while many are posed in lifelike attitudes, it is advisable to hang a few (especially white-plumaged species, such as pintail, shoveler, and wigeon-drakes) in almost vertical positions, in order to induce a belief among hungry incomers that these birds are "turning-up" to feast on abundant subaquatic plants beneath. This intermittent flight is naturally irregular, hunger affecting greater or less numbers on different days; but when it comes off in force affords the cream of wildfowling from before noon till the sun droops in the west. During the last hour before he dips not a wing moves. Duck-shooting thus resolves itself into two main systems: (1) intercepting the fowl on flight at dawn, and later (2) awaiting their incoming at expected points. A good shoot may sometimes be engineered by cutting a broad "ride" through the samphire along some flight-line, thereby forming an open channel between two _lucios_. Ducks which have hitherto flown sky-high in order to cross the danger-zone will now pass quite low along the new waterway, and even prefer it to crossing the cover at hazard, however high. A typical day's fowling in mid-marisma may be described. The night has been spent in a reed-built hut charmingly situate on a mud-islet half-an-acre in extent, and commanding unequalled views of flooded and featureless marisma. At 4 A.M. we turn out and by the dim light of a lantern embark in a _cajon_ (punt), serenaded by the croaks and gabbling of flamingoes somewhere out in the dark waters. My wild companion, Batata, kneeling in the bows and grasping a punt-pole in either hand, bends to his work, and away we glide--into the unknown. A weird feeling it is squatting thus at water-level and watching the wavelets dance by or dash over our two-inch free-board. We make but three miles an hour, yet seem to fly past half-seen water-plants. A myriad stars are reflected on the still surface ahead, and it is by a single great _Lucero_ (planet) that our pilot is now steering his course. Batata presently remarks that we have "arrived." One takes his word for this. Still that verb does conditionally imply some place or spot of arrival. Here there was none--none, at least, that could be differentiated from any other point or spot in many circumambient leagues. But this was not an hour for philological disquisition, so we mentally decide that we have reached "nowhere." A few hours later when daylight discovers our environment, that negation appears sufficiently proved. There are visible certain objects on the distant horizon. One--that behind us--proves to be the roof of the _choza_ wherein we had spent the night--"hull-down" to the eastward. The others a lengthened scrutiny with prism-binoculars shows to be a trio of wild camels feeding knee-deep in water. Now where you see such signs you may conclude you are nowhere. We skip a few hours, since we have no intention of inflicting on the reader the details of a morning's flight-shooting. Suffice that at 9 A.M. B. reappears poling up in his punt, the spoils are collected (forty-nine in all, mostly wigeon and teal, with a few pintail and shoveler and one couple of gadwall), and the plan for the day discussed. To remain where we were (as this _lucio_ had yesterday attracted a fairly continuous flight of ducks) had been our original idea. But a shift of the wind had rendered a second _lucio_, distant two miles, a more favourable resort for to-day, and thither accordingly we set out. Here a new _puesto_ is promptly prepared and the forty-nine decoys deftly set out, each supported by a supple wand stuck in the mud below. Hardly had these preparations been completed, than the intermittent (or secondary) flight had commenced, file after file of ducks heading up from distant space, wheeling over or dashing past the seductive decoys. At recurring moments during the next three or four hours (with blank intervals between) I enjoyed to the full this most delightful form of wildfowling, so totally different in practice to all others. Such is the speed of flighting fowl, such their keenness of vision and instant perception of danger, that but a momentary point of time--say the eighth of a second--is available fully to exploit each chance. Should the gunner rise too quick, the ducks are beyond the most effective range; yet within a space not to be measured by figures or words, they will have detected the fraud, and in a flash have scattered, shooting vertically upwards like a bunch of sky-rockets. Two features in the life-history of the duck-kind become apparent. The first points to the probability that adults pair for life, and that the mated couples keep together all winter even when forming component units in a crowd. For when an adult female is shot from the midst of a pack, the male will almost invariably accompany her in her fall to the very surface of the water, and will afterwards circle around, piping disconsolately, and even return again and again in search of his lost partner. This applies chiefly to wigeon, but we have frequently observed the same trait in pintail and occasionally in other species. It is only the drakes that display this constancy; a bereaved female continues her flight unheeding. The feature is most conspicuous when awaiting ducks at their feeding-grounds (_comederos_), but it also occurs when shooting on their flight-lines (_correderos_) between distant points. The second singular habit is the custom, particularly among wigeon, to form what are termed in Spanish _magañonas_--little groups of four to a dozen birds consisting of a single female with a bevy of males in attendance, flying aimlessly hither and thither in a compact mass, the drakes constantly calling and the one female twisting and turning in all directions as though to avoid their attentions. The _magañonas_ appear blind to all sense of danger, and will pass within easy range even though a gunner be fully exposed. Not only this, but a first shot may easily account for half-a-dozen, and should the hen be among the fallen, the survivors will come round again and again in search of her. We have known whole _magañonas_ to be secured within a few minutes. Other species also form _magañonas_, but more rarely and never in so conspicuous a manner as the wigeon. The habit certainly springs from what we have elsewhere termed a "pseudo-erotic" instinct (see _Bird-life of the Borders_, 2nd ed., pp. 208, 234-5), and is probably the first pairing of birds which have just then reached full maturity. * * * * * From mid-February to the end of March ducks are constantly departing northwards whenever conditions favour, to wit, a south-west wind in the afternoon, which wind is a feature of the season. Their vacant places are at once filled by an equally constant succession of arrivals from the south (Africa), easily recognised by rusty stains on their lower plumage (denoting ferruginous water) which they lose here within a few days. Ducks at this season can find food everywhere in the _manzanilla_, or camomile, which now grows up from the bottom and in places covers the shallows with its white, buttercup-like flowers. Having food everywhere there is less necessity to fly in search of it. It is, however, a curious feature of the season that, after the morning-flight (which is shorter than in mid-winter), ducks practically suspend all movement from, say, 8 A.M. till the daily sea-breeze (_Viento de la mar_) springs up about 1 P.M. During these five hours not a wing moves, but no sooner has the sea-breeze set in than constant streams of ducks fly in successive detachments from the large open _lucios_ to the shallower feeding-grounds. Thus we have known a late February "bag," which at 2 P.M. had numbered but a miserable half-score, mount up before dusk to little short of a hundred. * * * * * Wigeon arrive from the end of September onwards, the great influx occurring during the first fortnight of November. They commence leaving from mid-February, and by the end of March all (save a few belated stragglers) are gone. The same remarks apply equally to pintail, shoveler, and teal, though, as before remarked, pintail often appear exceptionally early--in September,--and are again extremely conspicuous (after being scarce all winter) on their return journey--_de vuelta paso_, as it is called--in February. Gadwall, preferring deep waters, are not numerous in the shallow marisma. A big bag therein, nevertheless, will always include a few couples of this species. Shoveler are so numerous that we have known over eighty bagged by one gun in a day. Garganey chiefly occur in early autumn and again _de vuelta paso_ in March. They winter in Africa. Marbled duck breed here, and in September large bags may be made; but in mid-winter (when they have retired to Africa) it is rare to secure more than half-a-dozen or so in a day. They are very bad eating. Shelduck only occur in dry seasons. They fall easy victims to any sort of "decoy" provided it is _white_. A local fowler told us he had killed many by substituting (in default of natural decoys) the dry bones and skulls of cattle! Ruddy shelduck do not frequent the marisma, preferring the sweeter waters and shallows adjoining Doñana. Diving-ducks avoid the marisma except only in the wettest winters. * * * * * An hour before sun-down, as above stated, all bird-movement ceases. For a brief space absolute tranquillity reigns over the illimitable marisma. The dusky masses that cover the _lucios_ seem lulled to sleep and silence. But the interlude is very temporary. Hardly has night thrown her mantle across the wastes, than all that tremendous, eager, vital energy is reawakened to fresh activities. A striking and a memorable experience will be gained by awaiting that exact hour at some favourite feeding-ground. Within a few minutes, as darkness deepens, the ambient air fairly hisses and surges with the pulsation of thousand strong pinions hurtling close by one's ear, and with the splash of heavy bodies flung down by fifties and hundreds in the shallows almost within arm's-length--the nearest approximation that occurs to us is a bombardment of pompoms. Yet, for all that, night-flighting in the marisma (having regard to the quantities concerned) produces but insignificant results. The ducks come in so low and so direct--no preliminary circling overhead--and at such velocity that this flight-shooting may be likened to an attempt to hit cannon-balls in the dark. Our expert shots score, say, eight or ten, but what is that? The nocturnal disturbance, moreover, may be (and usually is) prejudicial to the next day's operations, and it is clearly not worth the risk, for half-a-dozen shots in the twilight, to discount a hundred at dawn. The fewer shots ducks hear, the better. Never disturb them unless you have every reasonable prospect of exacting a proportionate toll. [Illustration] CHAPTER X WILD-GEESE IN SPAIN THEIR SPECIES, HAUNTS, AND HABITS To Spain, as to other lands that remain unaltered and "unimproved," resort the greylag geese in thousands to pass the winter. In our marismas of the Guadalquivir they appear during the last days of September, but it is a month later ere their full numbers are made up, and from that date until the end of February their defiant multitudes and the splendid difficulties of their pursuit afford a unique form and degree of wild sport perhaps unknown outside of Spain. Ride through the marisma in November; it is mostly dry, and autumn rains have merely refreshed the sun-baked alluvia and formed sporadic shallows, or _lucios_ as they are here termed. That _lucio_ straight ahead is a mile across, yet it is literally tessellated with a sonorous crowd. With binoculars one distinguishes similar scenes beyond; the intervening space--and indeed the whole marisma--is crowded with geese as thickly as it is on our immediate front. To right and left rise fresh armies hitherto concealed among the _armajo_, till the very earth seems in process of upheaval, while the air resounds with a volume of voices--gabblings, croaks, and shrill bi-tones mingled with the rumble of beating wings. Amid the islands of the Norwegian Skaargaard one can see geese in bulk, but there their numbers are distributed over a thousand miles of coast. Here we have them all--or a large proportion--concentrated in what is by comparison but a narrow space. In their life-habits these geese are strictly diurnal, that is, they feed by day--chiefly in the early morning and again towards afternoon, with a mid-day interval of rest. The night they spend asleep on some broad _lucio_ or other bare open space. That habit, however, is subject to modification during the periods of full moon, when many geese avail themselves of her brilliant light to feed in even greater security than they can enjoy by day. Their food consists exclusively of vegetable substances--at first of the remnants of the summer's herbage, such as green ribbon-grass (_canaliza_), and other semi-aquatic plants; their main sustenance in mid-winter consists of the tuber-bearing roots of spear-grass (_Cyperus longus_ and _C. rotundus_) which they dig up from the ground. [Illustration: ROOT OF SPEAR-GRASS] When autumn rains are long delayed, their voracious armies will already have consumed every green thing that remains in the parched marismas long before the "new water" from the heavens shall have furnished new feeding-grounds. In such cases the geese are forced to depart, and do so--so far as our observation goes--in the direction of Morocco; returning thence (within a few hours) immediately after rain has fallen. Their entry, on this second arrival, is invariably from the south and south-west--that is, from the sea. There are three methods of shooting wild-geese in the Spanish marismas which may here be specified, to wit:-- (1) Morning-flight, when the geese habitually come to "take sand" at the dawn. See next chapter. (2) "Driving" during the day (available only in dry years). (3) Awaiting their arrival at dusk at their _dormideros_, or sleeping-places, see pp. 97, 98. An all-important factor in their pursuit arises from an economic necessity with wild-geese constantly to possess, and frequently to renew, a store of sand or grit in their gizzards. To obtain this they resort every morning to certain sandy spots in the marismas (hereinafter described, and which are known as _vetas_); or failing that, when the said _vetas_ are submerged, to the sand-dunes outside. Although great numbers of geese resort each morning to these spots, yet those numbers are but a small proportion of their entire aggregate, for no individual goose needs to replenish his supply of sand or grit more often than perhaps once a week, or even less frequently. Hence at each dawn it is a fresh contingent of geese that comes in _para arenárse_ = to "sand themselves," as our keepers put it. One other quality in the natural economy of wild-geese requires mention--that is, their sense of scent. This defence wild-geese possess in equal degree with wild-ducks and most other wild creatures; but each class differ in their modes of utilising it. For whereas ducks on detecting human scent will take instant alarm and depart afar on that indication alone; yet geese, on the other hand, though their nostrils have fully advised them of the presence of danger, will not at once take wing, but remain--with necks erect and all eyes concentrated towards the suspect point--awaiting confirmation by sight what they already know by scent. That such is the case we ascertained in the days (now long past) when we ventured to stalk geese with no more covert than the low fringe of rush that borders the marisma. "_Gatiando_" = cat-crouching, our keepers term the method--laborious work, creeping flat for, it may be, 200 yards, through sloppy mud with less than two-foot of cover. Should it become necessary during the stalk to go directly to windward of the fowl, one's presence (though quite unseen) would be instantly detected. The geese, ceasing to feed or rest, all stood to attention, while low, rumbling alarm-signals resounded along their lines. But they did not take wing. Presently, however, one reached a gap in the thickly growing rushes--it might not extend to a yard in width, yet no sooner was but a glimpse available to the keen eyes beyond, than the whole pack rose in simultaneous clatter of throats and wings. They had merely waited that scintilla of ocular confirmation of a known danger. "DRIVING" (IN A DRY SEASON) For four months no rain had fallen. The parched earth gaped with cavernous cracks; vegetation was dried up; starving cattle stood about listless, and every day one saw the assembled vultures devouring the carcases of those already dead. From the turrets of our shooting-lodge one's eye surveyed--no longer an inland sea, but a monotone of sun-baked mud; inspection through binoculars revealed the fact that this whole space was dotted with troops of ... well, a friend who was with us thought they were sheep; but which, in fact, were bands of greylag geese. The fluctuations of Spanish seasons--varying from Noachian deluge to Saharan drought--necessarily react upon the habits of wildfowl. These changes are one of the charms of the country; at any rate, they "stretch out" the fowler to devise some new thing. Those battalions of greylags posted out there on a vantage-ground where a mouse might be a prominent object at 100 yards, how can they be reduced to possession? Our friend aforesaid replies that the undertaking appears humanly impossible. We have, nevertheless, elaborated a system of driving, by which in dry years the greylag geese may be obtained with some degree of certainty. This morning (the last of January) we rode forth, four guns and four keepers, across that plain. Upon approaching the pack of geese selected, one keeper rides to a position rather above the "half-wind" line, and there halts as a "stop." The remaining seven ride on till, at a silent signal, No. 1 gun, without checking his horse, passes the bridle forward and rolls out of the saddle with gun and gear, lying at once flat as a flounder on the bare dry mud. At intervals of eighty yards each successive gun does the same, the four being now extended in a half-moon that commands nearly a quarter-mile of space. The three keepers (leading the other horses) continue riding forward in circular course till a second "stop" is placed in the right flank corresponding with the one already posted on the left. The last pair now complete the circuit by riding round to windward of the game, separating by 200 yards as that position is attained. (See diagram.) [Illustration] How are these four guns to conceal themselves on perfectly bare ground from the telescopic sight of wild-geese? Occasionally, some small natural advantage may be found--such as tufts of rushes--and these are at once availed of. But this morning there is no such aid. Not a rush nor a mole-hill breaks that dead-level monotone for miles; and in such condition a human being, however flat he may lie, is bound to be detected by the keen-eyed geese long ere they arrive within shot.[21] A dozen twigs of tree-heath, dipped in wet mud and then allowed to dry, so as to harmonise in colour with the surroundings, may be utilised; but the annexed sketch shows better than words a portable screen we have devised and which fulfils this purpose. It consists of four bamboo sticks two feet long, sharpened at the point, and connected by four or five strings with one-foot intervals. This when rolled up forms a bundle no thicker than an umbrella. On reaching one's post the bundle unrolls of itself, the sharpened points are stuck into the ground at an angle sloping towards the prostrate gun, a few tufts of dead grass (carried in one's pocket) are woven through the strings and the shelter is complete. Needless to say, these preparations must be carried out with the minimum of movement in face of such vigilant foes. Some assistance, however, accrues from the geese continuing to watch the moving file of horsemen while the prostrate gunner erects his screen. [Illustration: SHELTERS FOR DRIVING WILD-GEESE] Well, the circle being complete, all four drivers (distant now, say, 1000 yards) converge on the common centre. The watchful geese have ceased grubbing up the spear-grass, and now stand alert with a forest of necks erect, while an increasing volume of gabbling attests their growing suspicion. Presently, with redoubled outcry, they rise on wing, and now commences the real science of our Spanish fowlers. The guns, after all, command but a small segment of the circle--anywhere else the geese can break out scathless--and this mischance it is the object of our drivers and flankers to avert. No sooner does the gaggling band shift its course to port or starboard than the "stop" on that side is seen to be urging his horse in full career to intercept their flight, yet using such judgment as will neither deflect their course too much or turn them back altogether. Sometimes both flankers and drivers are seen to be engaged at once, and a pretty sight it is to the prostrate gunners to watch the equestrian manoeuvres. Presently the whole band head away for what appears the only available outlet, and should they then pass directly over one or other of the guns, are seldom so high but that a pair should be secured right-and-left. In strong gales of wind the geese, on being driven, are apt, instead of taking a direct course, to circle around in revolving flight, gaining altitude at each revolution; and in such case not only come in very high but at incredible speed--_mas lejeros que zarcetas_--swifter than teal, as Vasquez puts it. The first essential of success in driving wild-geese (and the same applies to great bustard and all large winged game) is to instal the firing-line as near as may be without disturbing the fowl. The more remote the guns the greater the difficulty in forcing the game through the crucial pass. To manoeuvre single bands of geese as above, three or four guns at most, with the same number of drivers, are best. A great crowd of horsemen (such being never seen in these wilds) unduly arouses suspicions already acute enough. With any greater number of guns, it is advisable to extend the field of operations to, say, two or three miles, thereby enclosing several troops of geese--this requiring a large force of drivers. It does not, however, follow that each of these enclosed troops will "enter" to the guns; for should one pack come in advance, the firing will turn back the others. This mischance--or rather bungle--may be averted (or may not) by the leading driver firing a blank shot behind so soon as the first geese are seen to have taken wing. Needless to remark, once a shot has been fired ahead, it becomes tenfold harder to force the remaining geese to the guns. Each gun should hold his fire till the main bodies of geese are well on wing and seen to be heading in towards the shooting-line. The "best possible" chances are thus secured, and not for one gun only, but quite possibly for all, as several hundred geese pass down the line. A premature shot, on the contrary, will ruin the best-planned drive, and bring down merited abuse from the rest of the party with scathing contempt from the drivers. Taking single troops at a time, as many as six or eight separate drives may be worked into a long day. Our first drive to-day produced three geese, the second was blank, while five greylags rewarded the third attempt. In the last instance three of the guns received welcome aid from a string of _ojos_, or land-springs, around which grew a fringe of green rushes, affording excellent cover. By four o'clock we had secured, in five drives, eleven geese and a wigeon. We then, on information received, changing our plan, rode off to a point which the keeper of that district had noted was being used by the geese as a _dormidero_, or sleeping-place; and here, as dusk fell, an hour's "flighting" added six more greylags to that day's total. The above may be put down as a fair average day's results in a dry season. From a dozen to a score of driven geese (and occasionally many more) represent, with such game as greylags, a degree and a quality of sport that is ill-represented by cold numerals. There are spots in the marisma where the configuration of the shore-line enables the flight of the geese, when disturbed, to be foretold with certainty. For geese will not cross dry land: their retreat is always to the open waters. In such situations excellent results accrue from placing the gun-line at a _right angle_ to the expected line of flight, while all the "beaters," save one or two to flush the fowl, are stationed as "stops" between the geese and their objective. On rising, the birds thus find themselves confronted by a long line of horsemen who intercept their natural retreat, and, in effect, force them back towards the land. Should the operation be well executed, the landmost gun will probably be the first to fire; while the geese thereafter pass down the entire line of guns, possibly affording shots to each in turn. Two guns can then be effectively brought into action. Needless to add, the second must be handled with the utmost rapidity. In wet winters, when the marisma is submerged, "driving" is not available. Obviously you cannot place a line of guns, however keen, in six inches of water, much less in half-a-yard. My first impression of wild-goose driving (writes J.) was one of wonder that such intensely astute and wide-awake fowl would ever fly near, much less over so obvious a danger as the little loose semicircle of rosemary twigs behind which I lay prone on the barest of bare mud. Peering through between their naked stalks, I could plainly see the geese some half-mile away, and it seemed incredible that I should not be equally visible to them. Possibly the brown leaves on top of the twigs may have concealed me from the loftier anserine point of view, and the equestrian manoeuvres beyond no doubt greatly aided the object. Anyway, the whole pack--three or four hundred, and proportionally noisy--_did_ come right over me, and a wildly exciting moment it was, I can assure you! We had six or seven drives that day, and bagged twenty-eight splendid great grey geese, of which eight fell to my lot. I may perhaps be allowed to add (since such details are taken for granted, or regarded as unworthy of note by regular gunners of the _marisma_) that to-day we had no less than six times to cross and recross a broad marsh-channel called the _Madre_--floundering, splashing, slithering, and stumbling through 100 yards of mud and water full three-foot deep. It may be nothing (if you're used to it), yet twice I've seen horses go down, and their riders take a cold bath, lucky if they didn't broach their barrels! To follow Vasquez about the _marisma_ is a job that requires special qualities that not all of us possess or (perchance fortunately?) require to possess. The following instructions may be worth the attention of new beginners:-- (1) Never fire till you are fairly certain to kill at least one. (2) Never rise or even move in your "hide" till the beat is entirely finished. (3) Reload at once; when big lots are being moved, two, three, or more chances may offer quite unexpectedly. (4) Wear suitably coloured clothes and head-gear, and never let the sun glint on the gun-barrels. (5) After firing, watch the departing geese till nearly out of sight. Though apparently unhurt, one of their company may turn over, stone-dead, in the distance. "FLIGHTING"--AN INCIDENT OF A DRY SEASON The day above described was selected, not only because it affords a typical illustration of our theme, but also because there had occurred during its course an extraneous incident which serves to amplify this exposition of the pursuit of the greylag goose. Riding across the marisma, certain signs at once filled both our minds with fresh ideas. All around the ground was littered with cast feathers and other evidence proclaiming that this special spot was a regular resort of geese. We were crossing one of those slightly raised ridges of sand and grit which here and there intersect the otherwise universal dead-level of alluvial mud, and which ridges are known locally as _vetas_--tongues. Now the nutritive economy of wild-geese, as already explained, requires a frequently replenished store of sand or grit. In wet seasons (the marisma being then submerged) the geese resort to the adjoining sand-dunes of Doñana to secure these supplies. But in dry winters they are enabled to obtain the necessary sand from these _vetas_; and it was to this particular spot that, to the number of many hundreds, the geese were evidently resorting at this period. At once the measure of opportunity was gauged, and the arrangements necessary for its exploitation were made. Within three minutes a messenger was galloping homewards to summon a couple of men with spades and buckets to prepare a hole wherein one of us might lie concealed at daybreak. A pannier-mule to carry away the excavated material was also requisitioned, since the least visible change in the earth's surface would instantly be recognised by the geese as a danger-signal. Within a few minutes we had resumed our course, to continue the day's sport. [Illustration: WILD-GEESE IN THE MARISMA.] Next morning half an hour before dawn the writer reached the spot. It was pitch-dark and a dense fog prevailed. By what mental process my guides directed an unerring course to that lonely hole in the midst of a pathless and practically boundless waste passes understanding. Such piloting (without aid of compass or even of the heavenly bodies--the usual index on which marshmen rely) seems to indicate a point where intellect and instinct touch; or perhaps rather a survival of the latter quality which, in modern races, has become obsolete through disuse. Among savage races that faculty of instinct is markedly prominent, indeed the master-force; but there it has been acquired (or retained) at the cost of intellect, which is not the case with our Spanish friends--they possess both qualities. But place the best intellects of Madrid, or Paris, or London in such conditions--in darkness, or fog, or in viewless forest--and not one could hold a straight course for half-a-mile. Within ten minutes each man would be lost, devoid of all sense of direction. That is part of the price of the higher civilisation--the loss of a faculty which need not clash with any other. Of course where people live with a telephone at their ear, with electric trams and "tubes" close at hand, where a whistle will summon an attendant hansom and two a taxi-meter--or, as _Punch_ suggested, three may bring down an airship--well, in such case, those modern "advantages" may be held to outweigh the loss of a primitive natural faculty. Hardly had a tardy light begun to strengthen to the dawn than the soft, soliloquising "Gagga, gagga, gagga," with alternatively the raucous "Honk-honk," resounded afar through the gloom. From seven o'clock onwards geese were flying close around--so near that the rustling of strong wings sounded almost within arm's-length; but that opaque fog held unbroken and nothing could be seen. Long before eight I resolved to quit and leave the fowl undisturbed for another morning rather than open fire at so late an hour. Having a compass, I steered a good line to the point where the horses awaited me, a mile away. The following morning again broke foggy, though not quite so thick; still I had only five geese at eight o'clock, when three packs coming well in, in rapid succession, afforded three gratifying doubles. Total, eleven geese. Leaving the geese a few mornings' peace, on February 5 the authors together occupied that hole at dawn. It proved a brilliant morning with a fine show of geese. As each pack came in, we took it in turns to give the word whether to fire or not. In the negative case, our eyes sank gently below the surface of the earth, and crouching down we heard the rush of wind-splitting pinions pass over and behind--probably to offer a fairer mark when they next wheeled round. Then two, and often three, great geese came hurtling downwards, to fall with resounding thuds behind. Few mistakes occurred this morning and scarce a chance was missed. But never could we succeed in working-in the two doubles at once! The cramped space forbade that. The hole, having been dug for one, gave no freedom of action for two guns; its floor, moreover, had now become a compound of sticky glutinous clay a foot deep, and that further hampered movements. Only one gun could work the second barrel. After each shot, one of us jumped out and propped up the fallen geese as decoys. To leave them lying about all-ends-up has a disastrous effect. Ere the "flight" ceased we had five-and-twenty greylags down around our hide, besides several others that had fallen at some distance, duly marked by the keepers who now galloped off to gather these--say two mule-loads of geese. The discovery of that lonely "sanding-place" had had a concrete reward. [Illustration] CHAPTER XI WILD-GEESE ON THE SAND-HILLS Flanking the marisma and separating it from the dry lands of Doñana, there rises rampart-like a swelling range of dunes--the biggest thing in the sand line we have seen on earth. For miles extend these mountains of sand, unbroken by vestige of vegetation or any object to relieve one's eyesight, dazzled--aye, blinded--by that brilliantly scintillating surface, set off in vivid contrast by the azure vault above. Should a stranger, on first seeing those buttressed dunes, be seriously informed that their naked summits constitute a favourite resort of wild-geese, he might reasonably suspect his informant's sanity, or at least wonder whether his own credulity were not being tested. Yet such is the fact--one of the surprises that befall in Spain, the _pays de l'imprévu_. The paradox is explained by the stated necessity in wild-geese to furnish their gizzards with store of grit or sand for digestive purposes. This supply, so long as the marisma is dry, they are able to obtain from those raised ridges of calcareous debris (already described, and known locally as _vetas_) which here and there outcrop from the alluvial wastes. But when winter rains and floods have submerged the whole region and thus deprived the fowl of that local resource, they are forced to rely upon the sand-dunes aforesaid and to substitute pure sea-sand for their former specific of calcareous grit or disintegrated shells. To the sand-dunes, therefore, in the cold bright mornings between October and February, the skeins of greylag geese may be seen directing their course in successive files, in order, as the Spanish put it, "to sand themselves" (_arenárse_). A notable fact (and one favourable to the fowler) is that, though these dunes extend for miles, yet the geese select certain limited areas--or, to be precise, the summits of two particular hills--for alighting, and this despite their being regularly shot thereat, year after year. With the first sign of dawn the earlier arrivals will be heard approaching; but the bulk of the geese come in about sun-up and onwards till 9 A.M. Geese arriving high (having come presumably from a distance) will sometimes, after a preliminary wheel, suddenly collapse in mid-air, diving and shooting earthwards in a score of curving lines--as teal do, or tumbler-pigeons; but with these heavy fowl the manoeuvre is executed with surprising grace and command of wing. Their numbers vary on different mornings without any apparent cause; but it may be laid down as a general rule that more will come on clear bright mornings than when the dawn is overcast, while rain proves (as in all wildfowling) an upsetting factor. Sometimes, even on favourable mornings, no geese appear. Occasionally, in small numbers, they may visit the sand in afternoon. To exploit the advantage afforded by this habit of the geese, it is necessary that the fowler be concealed before dawn in a hole dug for the purpose in the sand--care being taken to utilise any natural concealment, such as a depression flanked by a steep sand-revetment; so that, at least from one quarter, the geese may perceive no danger till right over the gun. The hole (or holes, but _one_ is best) must be dug at least twelve hours before, or the newly turned sand will show up dark. Were it not for the risk of wind filling them up with driving sand (a matter of an hour or two), the holes might well be prepared two or even three days beforehand. The excavated material is piled up around the periphery and flattened down smooth, thus forming a raised rampart which screens the suspicious darkness of the interior. Needless to say, the fewer human footprints around the spot, the better. Such is the inability exhibited by many sportsmen (not being wildfowlers) to conceal their persons--or even to recognise the virtue of concealment--that, for such, the holes are apt to be made too big, and the geese swerve off at sight of those gaping pits. This indeed is a form of sport that none save wildfowlers need essay--others merely succeed in thwarting the whole enterprise. However carefully prepared and skilfully occupied, these holes (dug in naked sand) must obviously be visible enough to the keen sight of incoming greylags. One such hole (when backed up by well-placed decoys) the geese may almost ignore; two they distrust; while three inspire something approaching panic. Consequently a single craftsman who knows his business and bides his time will shoot, under the most favourable circumstances, at almost every successive band of geese that means alighting. Two guns, in _full sympathy_ with each other, may effectually combine by occupying holes dug at some fifty yards apart and with a single set of decoys set midway between for mutual use. Thus there can be secured fair, frequent, and almost simultaneous shots. It is essential to bear in mind the fact that the geese have come with the intention (unless prematurely alarmed) of _alighting_. Hence, as they often circle two or three times around before finally deciding, a judicious refusal of all uncertain chances has a concrete reward when, a few seconds later, the pack sweep overhead at half gunshot. The first element of success lies in concealment; the second in ever allowing the geese to come in to such close quarters as renders the shot a certainty. Greylag geese are, of course, huge birds, very strong, and impenetrable as ironclads. But to tyros (and many others) in the early light they are apt to appear much larger, and consequently much nearer, than is actually the case. All this has, the night before, been impressed upon our friend, the tyro, in solemn, even tragic tones. The urgency of the thing seems to have been graven deep on the very tissues of his brain, and he promises with earnest humility to bear the lesson in mind when the vital moment shall arrive; to deny himself all but point-blank shots well within thirty yards, whereby he will not only himself assist to swell the score, but enable his companion to do likewise. Words fail to describe that companion's frame of mind at the dawn, when, despite over-night exhortations and assurances, he sees to his horror pack after pack of incoming geese (some of which he has himself let pass within forty yards) "blazed at" at mad and reckless ranges by that wretched scarecrow who never ruffles a feather and afterwards tries to excuse his failure by enlarging on "the extreme height the geese came in at!" These goose-hills, it may here appropriately be stated, lie midway between our two shooting-lodges and distant between two and three hours' ride from either. Thus every morning's goose-shooting presupposes some fairly arduous work. It means being in the saddle by 4 A.M. with its resultant discomforts and a long scrambling ride in the dark. Hence the disgust is proportionate when all that work is thrown away in such insane style. Never again for any tyro on earth, though he be our clearest friend, never will the authors turn out at 3 A.M., abusing with clattering hoof the silence and repose of midnight watch and the hours designed for rest--never again, unless alone or with a known and reliable companion. A word now as to the "decoys." These, in design, are American--first observed and brought across from Chicago--cut out of block-tin, formed and painted to resemble a grey-goose. Geese being gregarious by nature are peculiarly susceptible to the attractions of decoys. Hence these tin geese have a marvellous effect when silhouetted on the skyline of a sand-ridge, being conspicuous for enormous distances and the only "living" objects on miles of desert. They are _most_ deadly before sunrise, after which they are apt to glint too much despite a coating of dried mud. As daylight broadens, incoming geese are apt to be disconcerted at losing sight of their supposed friends, which event must occur as each decoy falls end-on--one can interpret the hurried queries and expletives of the puzzled phalanx at that mysterious disappearance! For these reasons it is desirable as soon as possible to supplement the decoys with, and finally to substitute for them, the real article, that is, the newly shot geese, set up in life-like attitudes by aid of twigs brought for the purpose. Fallen birds must, in any case, be set up as fast as gathered; if left spread-eagled as they fell, inevitably the next comers are scared. The more numerous and life-like the decoys, the more certain are the geese to come in with confidence and security. Naturally great care must be used in getting into and out of one's hide to avoid breaking down its loose and crumbling substance. But it is of first importance quickly to gather and prop up the dead. A winged goose walking away should be stopped with a charge of No. 6 in the head. As illustrating the life-like effect produced by our tin decoys, on one occasion a friend, after firing both barrels, was watching a wounded goose, when a strange sound behind attracted his attention. On looking round, a fox was seen to have sprung upon one of the tin geese! That a fox, with his keen intuition and knowledge of things, should have considered it worth his while to stalk wild-geese (even of flesh and blood) on that naked expanse seems incredible. The fact remains that he did it! Strange indeed are the sensations evoked by that silent watch before day-dawn, in expectation of what truly appears incredible! Buried virtually in a desert of sand the fowler has nothing in sight beyond the dark dunes and a star-spangled sky overhead. For his hide is cunningly hidden in a slight depression with a hanging buttress on two sides. [Illustration: WILD-GEESE ALIGHTING ON THE SAND-HILLS] Several hundred yards away, concealed under stunted pines, stand our horses, while the men cower round a small fire, for we have had a biting cold two-hours' ride, and freezing to boot. Half-a-mile away on the other side--the east--begins the marisma, though hidden from view by the waves of rolling sand that intervene. Now a faint glint of light gleams on the tin decoys and foretells the coming dawn. Five more minutes elapse, and then ... that low deep-toned anserine call-note, instinct with concentrated caution--"Gagga, gagga, gagga, gagga"--sets pulses and nerves on fuller stretch. This pack proves to be but an advance-guard; for this is one of those thrice-blessed mornings for which we pray! The geese come in thick and fast in successive bands of six or eight to a score, and all beautifully timed, with exactly the correct interval between. The fowler is a craftsman, a master of his art, and, moreover, he is all alone. Hence he can to-day await the psychological moment with patience and absolute confidence. Rarely in such circumstances is trigger touched in vain; not seldom has the second gun been brought into action with good, thrice with double effect. No simple achievement is this, when fowl vanish swift and ghost-like into space; for, remember, guns must be exchanged with due deliberateness else shifting sand in an instant fills the breech and clogs the actions. Thrice has the double _carambola_ been brought off, and now comes the prettiest shot of all--five geese swing past, head up for the decoys, and pass full broadside at deadliest range; they are barely twenty yards away. In all but simultaneous pairs fall four of their company on the sand--all four stone dead; and but a single survivor wings away to bear news of the catastrophe to his fellows in the marisma! It is 8 A.M., and the tin decoys are now entirely replaced by geese of flesh and feather, with the fatal result that each successive pack now enters with fullest confidence, so that by doubles and trebles the score mounts fast during the fleeting minutes that yet remain. Before nine o'clock the flight has ceased. It only remains to gather those birds which have fallen afar--and which have been marked by the keepers from their points of vantage--and to follow by their spoor on the sand such winged geese as may have departed on foot. Some of these will be overtaken, those that have concealed themselves in the nearest rush-beds; but should any have passed on and gained the stronghold of the marisma, they are lost. Such is an ideal morning's work, one of those rare rewards of patience and skill that occur from time to time. Far differently may the event fall out. There are mornings when scarce once will that weird forewarning note, "Gagga, gagga," rejoice the expectant ear with harsh music, when no chain-like skeins dot and serry the eastern skies, or ever a greylag appears to remember his wonted haunts. We do not complain, much less despair. Such are the underlying, fundamental conditions of wildfowling in all lands. To a nature-lover the wildness of the scene, with its unique conditions and environment are ever sufficient reward. Roughly speaking, from a dozen to a score of geese may be reckoned as a fair average morning's work for one gun. The following figures, selected from our game-books, indicate the degree of success that rewards exceptional skill. In each instance they apply to but one fowler, though two guns (12-bores) may have been employed. 1903. Remarks. Dec. 4. 29 geese. Later in day, shot 46 ducks in the _marisma_ close by. Dec. 5. 51 geese. Later, shot 25 ducks, 16 snipe.--B. F. B. 1904. Nov. 27. 27 geese. (A second gunner shot but three.) Nov. 30. 52 geese. 1903. Jan. 9. 23 geese. Westerly gale kept filling hole with sand; half my time spent in new excavation.--W. J. B. 1908. Dec. 7. Three guns on sand-hills, 4 + 7 + 22 = 33 geese. Dec. 10. 42 geese. Shots fired, 44. Later in day, shot 55 ducks, 3 snipe = 100 head.--B. F. B. 1909. Jan. 8. 38 geese. Jan. 19. 59 geese. The record.--(B. F. B.) Dec. 29. H.M. King Alfonso XIII., 6 geese; Marq. de Viana, 5 = 11 geese (an unfavourable morning). 1910. Jan. 7. Two guns (second at Caño de la Casquera), 12 + 28 = 40 geese. Jan. 8. 23 geese. Possibly the larger totals are unsurpassed in the world's records. By way of contrast we append what may perchance be discovered in the note-book of the veracious tyro:-- Went out three mornings at three, emptied three cartridge-bags at ridiculous ranges, fluked three geese, and scared three thousand. INSTRUCTIONS IN SHOOTING WILD-GEESE Where the main object is _close quarters_, ordinary 12-bore guns suffice. But since geese are very strong and heavily clad, large shot is a necessity, say No. 1. Thirty to thirty-five yards should be regarded as the outside range, with forty yards as an extreme limit. The latter, however, should only be attempted in exceptional cases, and never when shooting in company. Should two guns be employed, the case of the second is, of course, different. It may be loaded with larger shot--say AAA--which is effective up to fifty yards. The speed of geese (like that of bustards) is extremely deceptive--as much so as their apparent nearness when really far out of shot. When in full flight geese travel as fast as ducks or as driven grouse, though their relatively slow wing-beats give a totally false impression thereof. It is a safe rule for beginners to allow _double_ that forward swing of the gun that may appear needful to inexpert eyes. Even when geese are slowing down to alight, the impetus of their flight is still far greater than it appears. It is a mistake to suppose (as many urge) that geese cannot be killed coming in, that the shot then "glances off their steely plumage," or that you "must let them pass over and shoot from behind," etc., etc. The cause of all these frequent misapprehensions is--the old, old story--_too far back!_ Hold another foot ahead--or a yard, according to circumstance--and this dictum will be handsomely proved. Never deliberately try to kill two at one shot; it results in killing neither. But by shooting well ahead of _one_ goose that is seen to be aligned with another beyond, _both_ may thus be secured. CHAPTER XII SOME RECORDS IN SPANISH WILDFOWLING [Illustration] [Illustration] El Travierso, _February 9, 1901._--An hour before dawn we (five guns) lay echeloned obliquely across a mile of water, the writer's position being the second out. No. 1 squatted (in six inches of water) between me and the shore; but, being dissatisfied, moved elsewhere shortly after day-break, leaving with me two geese and about a dozen ducks. These, with thirty-six of my own, I set out as decoys. Shortly thereafter I heard the gaggle of geese, and two, coming from behind, were already so near that there was only time to change _one_ cartridge to big shot. The geese passed abeam, quite low and within thirty yards, but six feet apart--impossible to get them both. Held on; upon seeing that the decoys were a fraud, the geese spun up vertically, and that _one_ cartridge secured both. The incident gives opportunity to introduce two rough sketches pencilled down at the moment. During this day there were recurrent periods when for ten or fifteen, minutes ducks flew extremely fast and well--_revoluciones_, our keepers term these sporadic intermittent movements; then for a full hour or more might follow a spell of absolute silence and an empty sky. Almost the whole of these successive flights concentrated on No. 2--such is fowler's luck,--so that by dusk I had gathered 105 ducks, 3 geese, 3 flamingoes, and 4 godwits; total, 115. The next gun (J. C. C.), though only 200 yards away, in No. 3, had but 30 ducks; while the others had practically had no shooting all day. Bertie, however, two miles away at the Desierto, added 65--bringing the day's total to 268 ducks, 8 geese, etc. Three guns left to-night. Next day at the Cañaliza, Bertie and I had 70 ducks by noon, when (by reason of intense sun-glare at the point) I shifted back to my yesterday's post--two hours' tramp through sticky mud and water, with a load of cartridges, ducks, etc. Thereat in one hour (4 to 5 P.M.) I secured 56 ducks, bringing my total for the two days--a record in my humble way, but surpassed threefold, as will be seen on following pages--to over 200 head, and for the party, to precisely 500 (491 ducks and 9 geese), besides flamingoes, ruffs, grey-plover, etc. [Illustration: GODWITS] * * * * * A curious incident occurred on February 11 (1907). But few ducks--and they all teal--had "flighted" early, and a strong west wind having "blown" the water, my post was left near dry. Just as I prepared to move 300 yards eastward, a marvellous movement of teal commenced. On the far horizon appeared three whirling clouds, each perhaps 100 yards in length by 20 in depth, and all three waltzing and wheeling in marshalled manoeuvres down channel towards me. To right and left in rhythmical revolutions swept those masses, doubling again and again upon themselves with a precision of movement that passes understanding. Each unit of those thousands, actuated by simultaneous impulse, changed course while moving at lightning speed; and with that changed course they changed also their colour, flashing in an instant from dark to silvery white, while the roar of wings resembled an earthquake. All three clouds had already passed along the deeper water beyond my reach when there occurred this strange thing. A peregrine falcon had for some time been hanging around studying with envious eye the dozen or two dead ducks stuck up around my post; now he swept away, as it were, to intercept that feathered avalanche on my right, with the result that the third and last cloud, being cut off, doubled back in tumultuous confusion right in my face--what a spectacle! The puny twelve-bore brought down a perfect shower of teal--probably 30 or more fell all around me. I gathered 18 as fast as the sticky mud allowed; others fluttered here and there beyond reach; how many in all escaped to feed marsh-harriers none can tell. Another incident with peregrine:--I had just taken post for night-flighting at the Albacias, when, as dusk fell, a big bird appeared in the gloom making, with laboured flight, directly towards me. Thinking (though doubtfully) that it was a goose, I fired. The stranger proved to be a beautiful adult peregrine, carrying in its claws a marbled duck, and the pair are now set up in my collection. * * * * * Figures such as the following are apt to provoke two sentiments: (1) that they are not true, or that (2), being true, such results must be easy of attainment. The first we pass over. As regards the second, the assumption ignores the nature and essential character of wildfowl. These, being cosmopolitans, remain precisely the same wherever on the earth's surface they happen to be found. It is their sky they change, not their natural disposition or their fixed habits, when wildfowl shift their homes. The difficulty is that not half-a-dozen men in a thousand understand wildfowl or the supreme difficulty which their pursuit entails, whether in Spain, England, or elsewhere. In England, it is true, such results are out of the question, simply because the country is highly drained, cultivated, and populous. Were it desired to recover for England those immigrant hosts--the operation would not be impossible--break down the Bedford Level and flood five counties! Then you might enjoy in the Midlands such scenes as to-day we see in Spain. As a matter of simple fact--and this we state without suspicion of egotism, or careless should such uncharitably be imputed--the results recorded below represent even for Spain something that approaches the human maximum alike in wild-fowling skill, in endurance, and in deadly earnest. That test of individual skill has, it may go without saying, been demonstrated during all these years times without number. There are not, within the authors' knowledge, a score of men who have fairly gathered to their gun in one day 100 ducks in the open marisma. Again, while one such gun, who is thoroughly efficient, will secure his century, others (including excellent game-shots) will fail to bag one-tenth of that number. There can be no question here of "luck" in that long run of years. A feature, more valuable than the figures themselves, is the light they throw upon the varying distribution of the _Anatidae_ (both specifically and seasonably) in the south of Spain. 1897. _November 10._--ONE GUN (W. J. B.) Dawn at El Puntal 6 geese Forenoon at Santolalla 128 ducks Afternoon " " 2 stags 1897. _November 25._--LAS NEUVAS (C. D. W. and B. F. B.) 307 ducks, 53 geese (Geese, all the afternoon, came well in to decoys) 1898. _January_ 29, 30, and 31.--TWO GUNS (W. D. M. and W. J. B.) 437 ducks, 17 geese 1903._January 18._--FLIGHT-SHOOTING WITH 12-BORE AT CAÑO DULCE (ONE GUN) 139 Wigeon 32 Pintail 20 Teal 22 Shovelers 10 Gadwall 1 Mallard 3 Greylag Geese Total, 224 ducks and 3 _geese_. About one-half shot on natural flight before 11 A.M.; the rest later, over "decoys." Nice breeze all day. 1903. _February._--THREE CONSECUTIVE DAYS' FLIGHTING (ONE GUN) February 22. February 23. February 24. Pintaila 49 39 68 Wigeon 17 18 5 Shovelers 41 70 2 Teal 10 17 2 Gadwall 1 0 3 Marbled Duck 1 0 0 Garganey 1 1 0 Mallard 0 0 1 --- --- --- 120 145 81 = 346 On the 24th a succession of pintails came in, all _in pairs_. Almost the entire bag of that species was made in double shots. 1903. _March 4._--BEYOND DESIERTO, FLIGHTING (ONE GUN) 124 Teal 7 Pintail 2 Mallard 4 Shovelers Put away many thousands of teal early. These kept coming back in small lots all day. But the wind held wrong all through, and the _Viento de la mar_ (= sea-breeze) did not blow up till 5 P.M. Nine camels passed close by. 1904. _November 8._--LAGUNA DE SANTOLALLA (ONE GUN) 102 Teal 14 Pochard 3 Gadwall 7 Mallard 3 Shovelers 6 Ferruginous Duck 25 Marbled Duck --- Total 159 Ducks 1905. _November 8._--(P. GARVEY, C. D. W., and B. F. B.) Santolalla 264 ducks 1905. _December 3._--CAÑO DULCE (ONE GUN) 3 Greylag Geese 121 Wigeon 47 Teal 3 Pintail 3 Shovelers 1 Flamingo --- Total 178 1905-6. TWO DAYS AT CAÑO DULCE (ONE GUN) Dec. 17, 1905. Feb. 17, 1906. Wigeon 235 47 Shovelers 10 13 Pintail 18 62 Gadwall 6 0 Teal 2 6 Marbled Duck 1 0 Geese 1 2 ---- ---- 273 130 The total on December 17 represents the "Record," and was made (as was that with geese, see p. 131) by B. F. B. The whole of the above records refer to flight-shooting with a 12-bore gun. Following is a list of the different ducks shot by one gun during two consecutive seasons:-- 1902-3. 1903-4. Wigeon 277 230 Pintail 267 28 Mallard 9 42 Gadwall 21 36 Shovelers 195 32 Teal 276 269 Garganey 2 1 Marbled Duck 4 51 Pochard[22] 1 0 Pochard, Crested 1 0 Tufted Duck 0 1 White-faced Duck 0 1 Unenumerated 191 0 ---- --- 1244 726 CHAPTER XIII THE SPANISH IBEX In the Spanish ibex Spain possesses not only a species peculiar to the Peninsula, but a game-animal of the first rank. Fortunate it is that this sentence can be written in the present tense instead of (as but a few years ago appeared probable) in the past. Since we first wrote on this subject in 1893 the Spanish ibex has passed through a crisis that came perilously near extirpation. Up to the date named, and for several years later, none of the great landowners of Spain, within whose titles were included the vast sierras and mountain-ranges that form its home, had cherished either pride or interest in the Spanish wild-goat. Some were dimly conscious of its existence on their distant domains: but that was all. Not a scintilla of reproach is here inferred. For these mountain-ranges are so remote and so elevated as often to be almost inaccessible--or accessible only by organised expedition independent of local aid. Their sole human inhabitants are a segregated race of goat-herds, every man of them a born hunter, accustomed from time immemorial to kill whenever opportunity offered--and that regardless of size, sex, or season. That the ibex should have survived such persecution by hardy mountaineers bespeaks their natural cunning. Their survival was due to two causes--first, the antiquated weapons employed, but, more important, the astuteness of the game and the "defence" it enjoyed in the stupendous precipices and snow-fields of those sierras, great areas of which remain inaccessible even to specialised goat-herds, save only for a limited period in summer. But no wild animal, however astute or whatever its "defence," can withstand for ever perpetual, skilled human persecution. During the early years of the present century the Spanish ibex appeared doomed beyond hope. Private efforts over such vast areas were obviously difficult, if not impossible. We rejoice to add that at this eleventh hour a new era of existence has been secured to _Capra hispánica_ at that precise psychological moment when its scant survivors were struggling in their last throes. The change is due to graceful action by the landowners in certain great mountain-ranges; and if our own explorations and our writings on the subject have also tended to assist, none surely will grudge the authors this expression of pride in having helped, however humbly, to preserve not only to Spain, but to the animal-world, one of its handsomest species. This new era took different forms in different places. In certain sierras--those of less boundless area--the owners have undertaken the preservation of the ibex partly from their realising the tangible asset this game-beast adds to the value of barren mountain-land, and partly in view of the legitimate sport that an increase in stock may hereafter afford. But the main factor which has assured success (and which in itself led up to the private efforts just named) took origin in the great Sierra de Grédos. This elevated region is the apex of the long cordillera of central Spain, the Carpeto-Vetonico range, which extends from Moncayo, east of Madrid, for some 300 miles through the Castiles and Estremadura, forming the watershed of Tagus and Douro. It separates the two Castiles, and passing the frontier of Portugal is there known as the Serra da Estrella, which, with the Cintra hills, extends to the Atlantic sea-board. Along all this extensive cordillera there is no more favoured resort of ibex than its highest peak, the Plaza de Almanzór, of 2661 metres altitude (= 8700 feet) above sea-level. In 1905, when the ibex were about at their last gasp, the proprietors of the _Nucléo central_, which we may translate as the _Heart_ of Grédos, of their own initiative, ceded to King Alfonso XIII. the sole rights-of-chase therein, and His Majesty commissioned the Marquis of Villaviciosa de Asturias to appoint an adequate force of guards. Six guards were selected from the self-same goat-herds who, up to that date, had themselves been engaged in hunting to extermination the last surviving ibex of the sierra, and whom we had ourselves employed during various expeditions therein. [Illustration: ON THE RISCO DEL FRAILE. SPANISH IBEX IN SIERRA DE GRÉDOS..] The ceded area comprised all the best game-country, defined as the "Circo de Grédos"--including the gorge of the Laguna Grande, the Risco del Fraile, Risco del Francés, and that of Ameál de Pablo, together with the wild valley of Las Cinco Lagunas--as shown on rough sketch-plan annexed. [Illustration: SKETCH-MAP OF THE _NUCLÉO CENTRAL_ OF GRÉDOS (A. _Alto del Casquerázo._ B. _Riscos del Fraile_, with the Hermanitos in front.)] In 1896 we estimated the stock of ibex at fifty head, and during the following years it fell far below that--by 1905 almost to zero. In 1907, after only two years of "sanctuary," it was computed by the guards that the total exceeded 300 head. In July 1910 we inquired if it were possible to estimate the present stock. In a letter (the composition of which would cost some anxiety) the Guarda of the Madrigal de la Vera--one portion only of the "sanctuary"--reports: "It is difficult to count the ibex. Sometimes we see more, sometimes less. Yesterday on the Cabeza Neváda we counted 39 rams and 22 females together. On the other side we counted 29 in one troop, 19 in another, 12 in another, besides smaller lots. We probably saw 160 or 170, and we could not see all. Some of the old rams are very big, and it would be advisable that some be shot." Another report (at same date) from the "Hoyos del Espino," estimates the ibex there to exceed 200 head. The two reports go to show that the continuity of the race is fairly secured. [A similar cession of sole hunting-rights to the King was simultaneously made by the owners of the "Central Group" of the Picos de Europa in Asturias. There are no ibex in that Cantabrian range; the graceful act was there inspired by a desire to preserve the chamois, animals with which we deal in another chapter.] The Spanish ibex is found at six separate points in the Peninsula, each colony divided from its fellows as effectually as though broad oceans rolled between. The six localities are:-- (1) The Pyrenees--which we have not visited. (2) Sierra de Grédos, as above defined, and as described in greater detail hereafter. (3) Sierra Moréna, a single isolated colony near Fuen-Caliente, now preserved (see next chapter). (4) Sierra Neváda and the Alpuxarras (cf. _infra_). (5) The mountains along the Mediterranean, which are properly western outliers of Neváda, but which are usually grouped as the "Serrania de Ronda," some lying within sight of Gibraltar. Several of the most important ranges are now preserved by their owners (cf. _infra_). (6) Valencia, Sierra Martés. This forms a new habitat hitherto unrecorded, and of which we only became aware through the kindness of Mr. P. Burgoyne of Valencia, who has favoured us with the annexed photo of an ibex head killed (along with a smaller example) at Cuevas Altas in the mountain-region known as Peñas Pardas in that province, February 22, 1909. The dimensions read as follows:-- Length along front curves 21-3/4 inches Circumference at base 7-7/8 " Widest span 16-3/8 " Tip to tip 17 " Our informant has reason to believe that ibex also exist (or existed within recent years) in the rugged mountains of Tortosa, farther east in Catalonia. In the form of its horns the Spanish ibex differs essentially from the typical ibex of the Alps--now, alas, exterminated save only in the King of Italy's preserved ranges around the Val d'Aosta. In the true ibex the horns bend regularly backwards and downwards in a uniform, scimitar-like curve. In the Spanish species, after first diverging laterally, the horns are recurved both inward and finally upward. That is, in the first case they follow a simple semicircular bend, while in the Spanish goats they form almost a spiral. A minor point of difference lies in the annular rings or notches which in the true ibex are rectangular, encircling the horn in front like steps in a ladder, while in _Capra hispánica_ they rather run obliquely in semi-spiral ascent. These annulations indicate the age of the animal--one notch to each year--but the count must stop where the spiral ends. Beyond that is the lightly grooved tip, which does not alter. The horns of old rams (which are often broken or worn down at the tips) average 26 to 28 inches, specially fine examples reaching 29 inches or more. The females likewise carry horns, but short and slender, only measuring 6 or 7 inches. The six isolated colonies of ibex, separated from each other during ages, live under totally different natural conditions. For while some, as stated, exist at 8000, 10,000, or 12,000 feet altitude, others occupy hills of much more moderate elevations--say 4000 to 6000 feet, some of which are bush-clad to their summits. Under such circumstances there have naturally developed divergencies not only in habits, but in form and size. Particularly does this apply to the horns, and for that reason we give a series of photos of typical examples from various points. The ibex of the Pyrenees is certainly the largest race, and has been entitled by scientists _Capra pyrenaica_; those of the centre and south of Spain being differentiated as _C. hispánica_. We attach less importance to specific distinctions, but leave the illustrations of specimens to speak for themselves. It may, however, be remarked that examples from the two outside extremes (Pyrenees and Neváda) most closely assimilate in their flattened and compressed form of horn. Neither in Grédos nor Neváda are the rock-formations so precipitous as in the Picos de Europa in Asturias--described later in this book. They present, nevertheless, difficulties possibly insuperable to mere hunters unskilled in the technique of climbing. Rock-climbing forms a recognised branch of "mountaineering," but of that science the authors (with sorrow be it confessed) have never been enamoured. To us, mountains, merely as such, have not appealed. But they form the home of alpine creatures, the study and acquisition of which were objects that no terrestrial obstacle could entirely forbid, and we enjoy retrospective pride in having so far surmounted those antecedent terrors as to have secured a few specimens of this, the most "impossible" of European trophies--the Spanish ibex. An awkward situation is a subrounded wall of rough granulated granite blocking our course and traversed obliquely by an up-trending fissure barely the breadth of hempen soles, its inclination outward, and the "tread" carpeted with slippery wet moss still half frozen. It is seldom what one can _see_ that gives pause, but the fear of the unseen. Here we hesitate by reason of the uncertainty of what may confront beyond that grim curve. The fissure might cease; to turn back would clearly be impossible. Impatient of delay our crag-born guide--a _homo rupestris_, prehensile of foot--seized the gun, and with a muttered ejaculation that might have included scorn, in three strides had skipt around the dreaded corner--of course we followed. Snow-slopes tipped at steep angles never inspire confidence in the unaxed climber, especially when the surface is half melted, revealing green ice beneath, and when the disappearing curve conceals from view what dangers may lurk below. Again a suddenly interrupted ledge--say where some great block has become disintegrated from the hanging face--necessitates a sort of nervy jump quite calculated to shorten one's days, even if it does not precipitately terminate them. The ibex is always nocturnal. On the great cordilleras it spends its day asleep on some rock-ledge isolated amidst snow-fields, its security doubly assured by sentinels, whenever such are deemed necessary: or, lower down, in the caves of a sheer precipice. Only after sun-down do the ibex descend, and never, even then, so far as timber-line. On these loftier sierras their home by day is confined to rock and snow; by night to that zone of moss, heath, and alpine vegetation that intervenes between the snow-line and topmost levels of scrub and conifer. * * * * * Such are the ibex of the loftier ranges--Grédos and Neváda. But in the south, wild-goats are found on mountains of inferior elevation, 4000 to 6000 feet, many of which are jungled--some even forested--to their summits, and there they cannot disdain the shelter of the scrub. We have hunted them (within sight of the Mediterranean) in ground that appeared more suitable to roe-deer, and have seen the "rootings" of wild-pig within the ibex-holding area. In such situations the wild-goats take quite kindly to the scrub, forming regular "lairs" wherein they lie-up as close as hares or roe. Amidst the brushwood that clothes the highland--heaths and broom, genista, rhododendron, lentiscus, and a hundred other shrubs--they rest by day and browse by night without having to descend or shift their quarters at all. On these lower hills the ibex owe their safety, and survival, to the vast area of covert, and, in less degree, to their comparatively small numbers. So few are they and so big their home, they are considered "not worth hunting." During summer the ibex feed on the mountain-grasses, rush, and flowering shrubs which at that season adorn the alpine solitudes; later, on the berries and wild-fruits of the hill. By autumn they attain their highest condition--the beards of the rams fully developed and their brown pelts glossy and almost uniform in colour. At this period (September to October) the rutting season occurs and fighting takes place--the champions rearing on hind-legs for a charge, and the crash of opposing horns resounds across the corries of the sierra. Even in spring memories of the combative instinct survive, for we have watched, in April, a pair of veterans sparring at each other for half an hour. The young are born in April and soon follow their dams--graceful creatures with unduly large hind-legs, like brown lambs. One is the usual number, though two are not infrequent. The kid remains with its dam upwards of a year--that is, till after a second family has been born. At that season (April to May) the ibex are changing their coats. The males lose the flowing beard and assume a hoary piebald colour, contrasting with the dark of legs and quarters. The muzzle is warm cream colour and the lower leg (below knee) prettily marked with black and white. On the knee is a callosity, or round patch of bare hardened skin. The horns of yearling males are thicker and heavier than those of adult females. Though the hill-shepherds in summer drive out their herds of goats to pasture on the higher sierra, where they may come in contact with their wild congeners, yet no interbreeding has ever been known; nor can the wild ibex be domesticated. Wild kids that are captured invariably die before attaining maturity. The horns of the herdsmen's goats differ in type from those of the ibex, which can never have been the progenitor of the race of goats now domesticated in Spain. Though the personal aroma of an ibex-ram is strong--rather more offensive than that of a vulture--yet no trace of this remains after cooking. The flesh is brown and tough, but devoid of any special flavour or individuality--that is, when subjected to the rude cookery of the camp. CHAPTER XIV SIERRA MORÉNA IBEX The tourist speeding along the Andalucian railways and surveying from his carriage-window the olive-clad and altogether mild-looking slopes of the Sierra Moréna, will form no adequate, much less a romantic, conception of that great mountain-system of which he sees but the southern fringe. Yet, in fact, the train hurries him past within a few leagues of perhaps the finest big-game country in Spain--of mountain-solitudes and a thousand jungled corries, wherein lurk fierce wolves and giant boars, together with one of the grandest races of red deer yet extant in Europe. True, the Sierra Moréna lacks both the altitudes and the stupendous rock-ridges that characterise all other Spanish sierras--from Neváda and Grédos to the Pyrenees. It consists rather of a congeries of jumbled mountain-ranges of no great elevations, but of infinite ramification, and lacking (save at two points only) those bolder features that most appeal to the eye. Were the Spanish ranges all of the contour of Moréna, the name "Sierra" would not have applied. It is, moreover, a unilateral range--a buttress, banked up on its northern side by the high-lands of La Mancha, resembling in that respect the well-known Drakensberg of the Transvaal. The Sierra Moréna, typical yet apart, divides for upwards of 300 miles the sunny lowlands of Andalucia from the bare, bleak uplands of La Mancha on the north. And in vertical depth (if we may include the contiguous Montes de Toledo) the range extends but little short of 150 miles. As a homogeneous mountain-system, Moréna thus covers a space equal to the whole of England south of the Thames, with a central northern projection which would embrace all the Midland Counties as far as Nottingham! [In any survey of the Sierra Moréna, it is appropriate to include the adjoining Montes de Toledo. They, as just stated, form a north-trending pyramidal apex based on the main chain and presenting identical characteristics, both physical and faunal, though of lower general elevation. The Montes de Toledo, in short, are an intricate complication of low subrounded hills--rather than mountains--tacked on to the north of Moréna, all scrub-clad and inhabited by the same wild beasts. Toledan stags exhibit the same magnificent cornual development, and there is evidence of seasonal intermigration as between two adjacent regions only divided by the valley of the Guadiana--a shortage in one area being sometimes found to be compensated by a corresponding increase in the other. Roe-deer are more abundant in the lower range; but the sole clean-cut faunal distinction lies in the presence of wild fallow-deer in the Montes de Toledo--these animals being quite unknown in Moréna.[23]] May we digress on a cognate subject? The Sierra Neváda, though so near (at one point the two ranges are merely separated by a narrow gap yclept Los Llanos de Jaén), yet presents totally divergent natural phenomena. There are points in Moréna--say from the heights above Despeñaperros--whence the two systems can be surveyed at once. Behind you, on the north, roll away, ridge beyond ridge, the endless rounded skylines of Moréna--colossal yet never abrupt. In front, to the south--apparently within stone's-throw--rise the stupendous snow-peaks of Neváda--jagged pinnacles piercing the heavens to nigh 12,000 feet. These peaks may appear within stone's-throw, or say an easy day's ride, though that is an optical illusion. But narrow as it is, that gap of Jaén divides two mountain-regions utterly dissimilar in every attribute, whether as to the manner of their birth in remote ages and the landscapes they present to-day. Faunal distinctions are also conspicuous. In Neváda there are found neither deer of any kind (whether red, roe, or fallow) nor wild-boar, whereas it forms the selected home of ibex and lammergeyer, both of which are conspicuous by their absence from Moréna, save for a single segregated colony of wild-goats near Fuen-Caliente. * * * * * Although the Sierra Moréna partakes rather of massive than of abrupt character, yet there occur at a couple of points outcrops of naked rock of real grandeur. Such, for example, is Despeñaperros, through whose gorges the Andalucian railway threads a semi-subterranean course. The very name Despeñaperros signifies in that wondrously adaptive Spanish tongue nothing less than that its living rocks threaten to hurl to death and destruction even dogs that venture thereon. Another interpretation suggests that in olden days, such were the pleasantries of the Moors, it was not dogs, but Christians (since to a Moor the terms were synonymous) that were hurled to their death from the _riscos_ of Despeñaperros. These rock-formations are superbly abrupt. Great detached crags, massive and moss-marbled, jut perpendicular from ragged steeps, or vast monoliths protrude, each in rectilineal outline so exact that one wonders if these are truly of nature's handiwork, and not some fabled fortalice of old-time Goth or Moor. Despite its striking contour, however, its crags and precipices are too scattered and detached (with traversable intervals between) to attract such a rock-lover as the ibex, and no wild-goat has ever occupied the gorges of Despeñaperros. A similar rock-region, but more extensive and continuous, is found near Fuen-Caliente--by name the Sierra Quintána. This range, though its elevations barely exceed 7000 feet, forms the only spot in the Sierra Moréna at which the Spanish ibex retains a foothold. Thereat the writer in 1901 endured one of those evil experiences which from time to time befall those who seek hunting-grounds in the wilder corners of the earth. It was in mid-February that, forced by bitter extremity of weather, we fain sought refuge in the hamlet of Fuen-Caliente clinging at 5700 feet on the steep of the sierra, as crag-martins fix their clay-built nests on some rock-face. Fuen-Caliente dates back to Roman days. Warm springs, as its name implies, here burst from riven rock, and stone baths, built by no modern hand, attest a bygone enterprise. To this day, we are told, the baths of Fuen-Caliente attract summer-visitors; we trust their health benefits thereby. Surely some counter-irritation is needed to balance the perils of a sojourn within that unsavoury eyrie. We write feelingly, even after all these years, and after suffering assorted tribulations in many a rough spot--Fuen-Caliente is bad to beat. Having tents and full camp-outfit, we had thought to live independent of the village _posada_. One night, however, as we climbed the rising ground that leads to the higher sierra there burst in our faces an easterly gale (_levante_), with driving snow-storms that even a mule could not withstand. Nothing remained but to seek shelter in the village below. Here my bedroom measured twelve feet by four, with a door at each end. The door proper was reached by a vertical ladder; the second might perhaps be differentiated as a window, but could only be distinguished as such by its smaller size--both being made of solid wood. Thus, were the window open, snow swirled through as freely as on the open sierra; if shut, we lived in darkness dimly relieved by the flicker of a _mariposa_, that is, a cotton-wick reposing in a saucer of olive-oil. Under such conditions, with other nameless horrors, we passed three days and nights while gales blew and snow swirled by incessant. On the fourth morning the wind fell, and snow had given place to fine rain. These _levantes_ usually last either three or nine days; so, thinking this one had blown itself out, we packed the kit and set out in renewed search of ibex, Caraballo, with accustomed forethought, buying a bunch of live chickens, which hung by their legs from the after-pannier of the mule. On the limited area of Quintána, ibex offer the best chance of stalking. Mules are marvellous mountaineers. The places that animal surmounted to-day passed belief. Two donkeys that belonged to the local hunters, Abad and Brijido, who accompanied us, soon got stuck, and had to be left below. By three o'clock we, mule and all, had reached the highest ridge of Quintána, and encamped within a few hundred feet of its top-most _riscos_. To set up a tent among rocks is never easy; even specially made iron tent-pegs find no hold, and guy-ropes have to be made fast, as securely as may be, to any projecting point. Hardly had the sun gone down, than the easterly gale blew up again with redoubled force. All night it howled through our narrow gorge and around its pinnacled rock-minarets, with the result that at 11 P.M. the ill-secured guys gave way, and down came our tent with a crash. Two hours were spent (in drenching rain) remedying this; and when day broke, an icy _neblina_ (fog) enveloped the sierra, shutting out all view beyond a few yards. The cold was intense, and a little dam we had engineered the night before was frozen thick. The fog held all that day and the next. Nothing could be done, though we persisted in going out each day, as in duty bound, for a few hours' turn among the crags--how we prayed for _one_ hour's clear interval that might have given that glorious sight we sought! At dusk the second night snow fell heavily, and later on a thunderstorm added to our joys. Frequent and vivid flashes of lightning lit up the darkness, and caused the surviving chickens (which in common charity we had had tethered inside the tent) to crow so incessantly that sleep was impossible. Presently we noticed a sharp fall in temperature--the men had brought in a cube of ice, the solidified contents of one of our camp-buckets, which they proposed to melt at a little fire kept burning in the tent! But this was too much, even though it meant "no coffee for breakfast." The frost and fog continuing, on the third morning the men proposed we should move lower down the hill, to some _cortijo_ they knew of, thereat to await milder weather. By this time, however, the cold had penetrated deep into throat and chest, which felt raw and inflamed, leaving the writer almost speechless. We therefore decided to abandon the whole venture, and struck camp, still wrapt in that opaque shroud of driving sleet. Crossing over the highest ridge of the sierra, between crags of which only the bases were visible, we descended on the south side; here we organised a "drive" amid the jungles that clothe the lower slopes. Two lynxes and three pigs were reported as seen by the beaters. Only one of the latter, however, came to the gun, and proved to be a sow, bigger by half than any wild-pig we had then seen in Spain. We regretted having no means of weighing this beast, which we estimated at well over 200 lbs. clean. A remarkable cast antler picked up at this spot carried four points on the main beam, as well as four on top--length 34-1/8 inches, by 5-3/4 inches basal circumference. The "defences" of the ibex in the Sierra Quintána lie among some fairly big crags forming the eastern and southern faces of the range. The shooting at that time was free; hence the goats were never left in peace by the mountaineers, who all carried guns, and used them whenever a chance presented itself. The result was that the few surviving goats had become severely nocturnal in habit, spending the entire day in caves and crevices in the faces of sheer and naked precipices. Some of their eyries appeared absolutely inaccessible to any creature unendowed with wings. One cave, though it had no visible approach, was situate only some eight or ten feet above a ledge in the perpendicular rock-face. One morning at dawn two ibex having been seen to enter this cave, at once a couple of the wiry goat-herds thought to reach them from the ledge below, one lad actually climbing on to the other's shoulders as he stood on that narrow shelf. In its rush to escape, however, the leading ibex upset the precarious balance, and the poor lad was precipitated among the tumbled rocks in the abyss below. Riding homewards through inhospitable brush-clad hills towards the railway (forty miles away), we put up one night at a village named, with unconscious irony, Cardeña Real. In the small hours broke out another terrific disturbance--shrieks, squeals, barking--all the dogs gone mad. The night was pitch-dark with rain falling in torrents; but next morning we ascertained that a pack of wolves had carried off the landlord's pigs from their stye, not fifteen yards away--indeed, three mangled porkers lay piled up against the wall of our hovel. The contingency of pigs being worse off than ourselves had not previously occurred to us. Thus ended, in a cycle of catastrophe, our first wrestle with _Capra hispánica_ in Moréna; but initial failure only served to stimulate further efforts later on. Winter, moreover, is no season for camping in these high sierras; May is more favourable, but the early autumn is best of all. At this period (1901) the surviving ibex had fallen to a mere handful. Fortunately here, as elsewhere in Spain, there was aroused, within the next five years, the tardy interest of Spanish landowners to save them. [Illustration: HEADS OF SPANISH IBEX. (A) SIERRA DE GRÉDOS--MADRIGAL DE LA VERA. Length 26-1/2 in. Circum. 10-1/8 in. Tips, 22-1/8 in. (B) SIERRA NEVADA. Length 29-3/4 in. Circum. 8-1/8 in. Tips, 20-7/8 in. (C) SIERRA DE GRÉDOS, BOHOYO. 29-1/8 in. (D) VALENCIA, SIERRA MARTES. 21-3/4 in.] The owner of the sierras above mentioned (the Marquis del Mérito) has favoured us with latest details respecting both the ibex and other wild beasts therein. The wild-goat (he writes) is the most difficult of all game to shoot, proof of which is afforded by the fact that in the lands which I hold in the Sierra Quintána (although until recent years these were unpreserved and in the neighbourhood of a village where every man was a hunter) yet the local shooters had not succeeded in exterminating the species. Its means of defence, over and above its keen sight and scent, consist chiefly in the inaccessible natural caves of those mountains, in which the wild-goats invariably seek refuge the moment they find themselves pursued. In these caves the goats were accustomed to pass the entire day, never coming out to feed except during the night. To-day (since free shooting has ceased) they begin to show up a little during daylight, and in other ways demonstrate a returning confidence. Nevertheless they display not the slightest inclination to abandon their old tendency to betake themselves, immediately on the appearance of danger, to the vast crags and precipices which lie towards the east of the sierra, and which crags afford them almost complete security. The most effective method of securing a specimen to-day is, as you know, by stalking (_resécho_). For this animal, when it finds itself suddenly surprised by a human being, is less startled than deer, or other game, and usually allows sufficient time for careful aim to be taken--indeed, it seems to be the more alarmed when it has lost sight of the intruder. The rutting season occurs in November and December, and the kids, usually one or two in number, are born in May, the same as domestic goats. These kids have a terrible enemy in the golden eagles, since their birth coincides with the period when these rapacious birds have their own broods to feed, and when they become more savage than ever. To reduce the damage thus done, I am now paying to the guards a reward for every eagle destroyed, and this last spring took myself a nest containing one eaglet, shooting both its parents. The dimensions of horns I am unable to put down with precision, but there was killed here an ibex (which was mounted by Barrasóna at Córdoba) measuring 85 centimetres in length (= 33-1/2 inches). Of the last, which was killed by Lord Hindlip, as shown in photo I send, the length of horns was 68 centimetres (= 26-3/4 inches). The dimensions of the best ibex head obtained by us in this sierra were: Length, 28 inches; basal circumference, 8-1/4 inches. WOLVES These animals, which perpetrate incredible destruction to game, are very abundant in Moréna, yet rarely shot in the _monterías_ (mountain-drives). This is not due to any special astuteness of the wolf, but simply because, while waiting for deer, sportsmen naturally lie very low, thus giving opportunity to wolves to pass unseen; while, on the other hand, when boars only are expected, and sportsmen therefore remain less concealed, the wolf is apt to detect the danger before arriving within shot. In May and June the she-wolves produce their young; but it is difficult to discover these broods, since at that period they betake themselves to remote regions far away from the haunts frequented in normal times. There is, however, one method of discovering them which is known to the mountaineers as the _otéo_, or watching for them over-night, thus noting precisely where each she-wolf gives tongue. If on the following morning the howl is repeated at the same spot, it is a practical certainty that that wolf will have her brood in that immediate neighbourhood. Thereupon at daybreak the hunters proceed to examine every bush and brake in the marked spot, which invariably consists either of strong brushwood or broken rocks. All around the actual lair for a hundred yards the ground is traced with footprints and scratchings, which usually lead to its discovery; but should it not be found that day, it is completely useless to seek for it on the following, since the moment that a she-wolf perceives that her whelps are being sought, she at once removes them far away. To exterminate wolves, strychnine is extensively used, giving positive results.[24] At the same time it is always better to supplement its use by searching out with practical men the broods of wolf-cubs at their proper season. The photo facing p. 158 shows a magnificent old dog-wolf, scaling 93 lbs. dead-weight, which we obtained in the Sierra Moréna, near Córdoba, in March 1909. LYNX, OR _GATO CERVAL_ This animal breeds in April and May, and the number of young is generally two. If captured, the majority of the young lynxes die at the period when they change from a milk diet to solid food, and one may imagine that the same thing happens in the case of the wild lynxes, since otherwise it is difficult to explain why an animal, whose only enemy is mankind, should remain so scarce. Their food consists of partridges, rabbits, and other small game. RED DEER With the red deer of these mountains, as elsewhere in Spain, the rut (_celo_) depends upon the autumn, which season may be earlier or later; but the _celo_ always takes place between mid-September and mid-October. The calves are born at end of May or early in June, and suckled by their mothers till the following autumn. The casting of the horns, together with the change of hair, varies in date, depending on the state of health in each individual. It generally occurs in May, but in very robust animals we have seen cases in April, and in the _barétos_, or stags of one year, in March. The development of the new horn is complete by the end of July, and in August occurs the shedding of the velvet. The horn at first is of a white bone-colour, but gradually darkens, the final colour depending on the nature of the bush frequented, the blackest being found in those stags which inhabit the gum-cistus (_jarales_). Although it is currently believed among country folk that the age of a stag can be determined by the number of his points, this is incorrect, the horn development depending solely on the robustness of the animal. It frequently happens that a stag carries fewer points than he did the year before. When the hinds are about to bring forth, they isolate themselves, seeking spots where the brushwood is less dense, and leaving the calf concealed in some bush. The habits of a hind when giving her offspring its first lessons in the arts of concealment and caution are interesting to watch. Shortly after daybreak the mother suddenly performs a series of wild, convulsive bounds, leaping away over the bush as though in presence of visible peril, thus alarming the youngster and teaching it to seek cover for itself. This performance is repeated at intervals until the calf has learnt to lie-up, when the hind will do the same, but at some distance, although in view. She only allows her progeny to accompany her when it has acquired sufficient strength and agility to follow, which is the case some twenty or thirty days after birth. Having noted the spoor of a single hind at the breeding-time, one may follow to the spot where she is suckling her young. But so soon as one observes the prints of these spasmodic jumps with which the mother instils into her offspring a sense of caution (as above described), one may then begin leisurely to examine every bush round about. In one of these the calf will be found lying curled up without a bed and with its nose resting on its hip.[25] It will at first offer some slight resistance, but once captured, may be set free with the certainty that it will not make any attempt to escape. The only enemies the full-grown stag has to fear are mankind and the wolf, but chiefly the latter, since not only do single wolves destroy in this sierra large numbers of the newly born calves, but, worse still, when a troop of wolves have once tasted venison they commence habitually to hunt both hinds and even the younger stags, which they persistently follow day after day till the deer are absolutely worn out. They then pull them down, the final scene usually occurring in some deep ravine or mountain burn. The calves of red deer, as happens with ibex kids, are also preyed upon by golden eagles. DEER-SHOOTING As regards sport, the best results are only attainable by _monterías_, or extended drives, assuming that the district is thickly jungled, and generally of elevated situation. There is also a system of shooting at the "roaring-time," but that is uncertain owing to the rapidity of the stag's movements, the thick bush, and the risk of his getting the wind. Practised trackers are in the habit of hunting _á la greña_, which consists in observing the deer at daybreak, selecting a good stag, and afterwards following his spoor at midday (at which hour deer, while enjoying their siesta, are quite apt to lie close) and shooting as he springs from his lair (_al arrancár_). [Illustration: RED DEER HEADS, SIERRA MORÉNA. ZAMUJAK, JAËN. Points 16. Length 38-3/4 in. VALDELAGRANA. Points 16. Length 40-5/8 in.] SIERRA QUINTANA. Points 15. Length 37-1/2 in. RISQUILLO. Points 14. Length 36-3/4 in.] A really big stag is nearly always found alone, or should he have a companion, the second will also be an animal of large size. Such stags are never seen with hinds, excepting in the autumn (_celo_). The system of the _montería_, or mountain-drive, is described in detail in the following chapter. TABLE OF SPANISH IBEX HEADS Measured by the Authors, or other stated Authority. +------------+---------+-------------------+----------+----------------+ | | | Width. | | | | Locality. | Length. +---------+---------+ Circum- | Authority. | | | | Tips. | Inside. | ference. | | +------------+---------+---------+---------+----------+----------------+ | | ins. | ins. | ins. | ins. | | | Moréna | 33-1/2 | ... | ... | ... | Marq. Mérito | | | | | | | (p. 158).| | Pyrenees | 31 | 26-1/2 | ... | 8-3/4 | Sir V. Brooke. | | Neváda | 29-3/4 | 22-1/4 | 20-7/8 | 8-1/4 | At Madrid. | | Grédos[26] | 29-1/4 | 23-1/4 | ... | 9-1/2 | Authors. | | Do. | 29-1/8 | 23-1/8 | 21 | 9-7/8 | M. Amezúa. | | Do. | 29 | 22-1/2 | ... | 9-1/4 | Authors. | | Pyrenees | 29 | 23 | ... | 10 | Sir V. Brooke. | | Neváda[26] | 29 | 23 | 18-3/4 | 9 | Authors. | | Do. | 28-1/4 | 24-1/2 | 22 | 9-1/16 | Do. | | Moréna | 28-1/2 | ... | ... | 8-1/4 | Do. | | Bermeja | 28 | 19 | ... | 8-1/4 | Do. | | Moréna | 26-3/4 | ... | ... | ... | Lord Hindlip. | | Grédos | 26-1/2 | ... | 22-1/8 | 10-1/8 | At Madrid. | | Pyrenees | 26 | 21 | ... | 10 | Sir V. Brooke. | | Sa. Blanca | 26 | ... | ... | 8-3/4 | P. Larios. | | Grédos | 24-1/8 | ... | ... | 8-1/4 | Authors. | | Pyrenees | 22-3/4 | 18-3/4 | ... | 9-1/2 | E. N. Buxton. | | Sa. Blanca | 22 | ... | 14 | 7-3/4 | P. Larios. | | Valencia | 21-3/4 | 16-3/8 | 17 | 7-7/8 | P. Burgoyne. | +------------+---------+---------+---------+----------+----------------+ CHAPTER XV SIERRA MORÉNA (_Continued_) RED DEER AND BOAR The mountain deer of the Sierra Moréna are the grandest of their kind in Spain, and will compare favourably with any truly wild deer in Europe.[27] The drawings, photographs, and measurements given in this chapter prove so much, but no mere numerals convey an adequate conception of these magnificent harts, as seen in the full glory of life bounding in unequal leaps over some rocky pass, or picking more deliberate course up a stone stairway. Massive as they are in body (weighing, say, 300 lbs. clean), yet even so the giant antlers appear almost disproportionate in length and superstructure. The whole Sierra Moréna being clad with brushwood and jungle, thicker in places, but nowhere clear, shooting is practically confined to "driving" on that extensive scale termed, in Spanish phrase, _montería_. Before describing two or three typical experiences of our own in this sierra, we attempt a sketch of the system of the _montería_ as practised throughout Spain. [Illustration: WOLF SHOT SIERRA MORÉNA. March, 1909--weight 93 lb.] [Illustration: HUNTSMAN WITH CARACOLA, SIERRA MORÉNA.] [Illustration: PACK OF PODENCOS, SIERRA MORÉNA. (COUPLED IN PAIRS.)] The area of operations being immense and clad with almost continuous thicket, it is customary to employ two or three separate packs (termed _reháles_, or _recóbas_), counting in all as many as seventy or eighty hounds. The extra packs--beyond that belonging to the host--are brought by shooting guests, and each pack has its own huntsman (_perréro_), whom alone his own hounds[28] will follow or recognise. The huntsmen (though not the beaters) are mounted, and each carries a musket and a _caracóla_, or hunting-horn formed of a big sea-shell. The forelegs of the horses, where necessary--especially in Estremadura--are enveloped in leather sheaths (_fundas de cuero_) to protect them from the terrible thorns and the spikes of burnt cistus which pierce and cut like knives. The best dogs are _podencos_ of the bigger breeds, also crosses between _podencos_ and mastiffs, and between mastiffs and _alanos_, the latter a race of rough-haired bull-dogs largely used in Estremadura for "holding-up" the boar. The huntsmen with their packs, and the beaters, usually start with the dawn, sometimes long before, dependent on the distance to be traversed to their points, which may be ten or twelve miles. Till reaching the cast-off, hounds are coupled up in pairs: a collar fitted with a bell (_cencerro_) is then substituted, and the alignment being completed--each pack at its appointed spot--at a given hour the beat begins. On every occasion when a game-beast is raised a blank shot is fired to encourage the hounds, and the who-hoops of the huntsmen behind resound for miles around. Should the animal hold a forward course (as desired), the hounds are shortly recalled by the _caracólas_, or hunting-horns aforesaid, and the beat is then reformed and resumed. Meanwhile--far away at remote posts prearranged--the firing-line (_armáda_) has already occupied its allotted positions; the guns most often disposed along the crests of some commanding ridge, sometimes defiled in a narrow pass of the valley far below. Should the number of guns be insufficient to command the whole front, the expedient of placing a second firing-line (termed the _travérsa_), projected into the beat, and at a right angle from the centre of the first line, is sometimes effective. It may occur to those accustomed to deal with mountain-game on a large scale that the chance of moving animals with any sort of accuracy towards a scant line of guns scattered over vast areas must be remote. True, the number of guns--even ten or twelve--is necessarily insufficient, but here local knowledge and the skill of Spanish mountaineers (by nature among the best _guerrilleros_ on earth) comes effectively into play. In practice it is seldom that the best "passes" are not commanded. In the higher ranges skylines are frequently pierced by nicks or "passes" (termed _portillas_) sufficiently marked as to suggest, even to a stranger possessed of an eye for such things, the probable lines of retreat for moving game. But "passes" are not always conspicuous, nor are all skylines of broken contour. On the contrary, there frequently present themselves long summits that to casual glance appear wholly uniform. Here comes to aid that local intuition referred to, nor will it be found lacking. Many a long hill-ridge apparently featureless may (and often does) include several well-frequented passes. Some slight sense of disappointment may easily lurk in one's breast in surveying one's allotted post to perceive not a single sign of "advantage" within its radius--or "jurisdiction," as Spanish keepers quaintly put it. Yet it may be after all--and probably is--the apex of a congeries of converging watercourses, glens, or other accustomed _salidas_ (outlets), all of which are invisible in the unseen depths on one's front; but which salient points in cynegetic geography are perfectly appreciated by our guide. The brushwood of Moréna consists over vast areas--many hundreds of square miles--of the gum-cistus, a sticky-leaved shrub that grows shoulder-high on the stoniest ground. Wherever a slightly more generous soil permits, the cistus is interspersed and thickened with rhododendron, brooms, myrtle, and a hundred cognate plants. On the richer slopes and dells there crowd together a matted jungle of lentisk and arbutus, white buck-thorn and holly, all intertwined with vicious prehensile briar and woodbine, together with heaths, genista, giant ferns, and gorse of a score of species. Watercourses are overarched by oleanders, and the chief trees are cork-oak and ilex, wild-olive, juniper, and alder, besides others of which we only know the Spanish names, quejigos, algarrobas, agracejis, etc. Naturally, in such rugged broken ground as the sierras, where the guns are protected by intervening heights, shooting is permissible in any direction, whether in front or behind, and even sometimes along the line itself. A survival of savage days, when beaters didn't count, is suggested by a refrain of the sierra:-- Más vale matár un Cristiano Que no dejár ir una res-- (Rather should a Christian die Than let a head of game pass by.) A word here as to the game and its habits. The lairs of wild-boar are invariably in the densest jangle and on the shaded slope where no sun ever penetrates. There is always at hand, moreover, a ready _salida_, or exit, along some deep watercourse or by a rocky ravine or gully--rarely do these animals show up in the open, or even in ground of scanty covert. It is usually the strongest arbutus-thickets (_madronales_) that they select for their quarters. It is seldom that wild-boar are "held-up" by the dogs during a beat--the old tuskers never. Deer, on the contrary, avoid the denser jungle, lying-up in more open brushwood and invariably on the sunny slope. Though their "beds" (_camas_) may be on the lower ground, they invariably seek the heights when disturbed, and then select a course through the lighter cistus-scrub or across open screes, knowing instinctively that thus they can travel fastest and best throw off the pursuing pack. Owing to the wide areas of each beat, a _montería_ in the sierras is confined to a single drive each day, the guns usually reaching their posts about eleven o'clock, and remaining therein till late in the afternoon. In the lowlands, as already described, four, five, and even six _batidas_ (drives) are sometimes possible during the day. A _MONTERÍA_ AT MEZQUITILLAS (PROVINCE OF CÓRDOBA) A glorious ride amid splendid mountain scenery all lit up with southern sunshine--the narrow bridle-track now forms a mere tunnel hewn out of impending foliage; anon it descends abrupt rock-faces, in zigzags like a corkscrew, apt to make nerves creep, when one false step would precipitate horse and rider into a half-seen torrent hundreds of feet below. Some eight miles of this, and by eleven o'clock we have reached our positions at Los Llanos del Peco. These positions extend for over a league in length (there are twelve guns), occupying the crests and "passes" of a lofty ridge whence one enjoys a bird's-eye view of a world of wild mountain-land. My own post commanded a panorama of almost the whole day's operation, excepting only that on my immediate front there yawned a deep ravine (_cañada_) into the full depth of which I could not see. Already within a few minutes one had become aware, by a far-distant shot, and by the echoing note of the bugle faintly borne on a gentle northerly breeze, that the beat had begun. At dawn that morning the four huntsmen, each with his pack, had left the lodge, and are now encircling some seven or eight miles of covert on our front, two-thirds of which lay beneath my gaze. For five hours I occupied that _puesto_ sitting between convenient rocks, and hardly a measurable spell of the five hours but I was held alert, either by the actual sight of game afoot--far distant, it is true--or by the shots and bugle-calls of the hunters and the music of their packs--all signs of game on the move. [Illustration] It is instructive, though rarely possible, watch wild game thus, when danger threatens, and to observe the wiles by which they seek escape--doubling back on their own tracks till nearly face to face with the baying _podencos_, and then, by a smart flank-movement, skirting round behind the pack, till actually between the latter and the following huntsmen; then lying flat, awaiting till perchance the latter has gone by! That is our stag's plan--bold and comprehensive--yet it fails when that huntsman, biding his time, perceives that his pack have overrun the scent and recalls them to make quite sure of that intervening bit of bush--poor staggie! Rarely indeed, even in mountain-lands, do such chances of watching the whole play (and bye-play) occur as those we enjoyed to-day on the Llanos del Peco. Shots are apt to be quite difficult, as all bushes and many trees are in full leaf (January) and the _rayas_, or rides cut out along the shooting-line, barely twenty yards broad. To-day, moreover, the wind shifting from north to east operated greatly to our disadvantage--practically, in effect, ruined the plan. [Illustration: WILD-BOAR--WEIGHT 200 LBS., CLEAN.] [Illustration: THE RECORD HEAD--43 INCHES--LUGAR NUEVO, NOV. 14, 1909. SIERRA MORÉNA.] The first stag that came my way had already touched the tainted breeze ere I saw him--being slightly deaf (the effects of quinine) I had not heard his approach. Instantly he crossed the _raya_, 100 yards away, in two enormous bounds. There was just time to see glorious antlers with many-forked tops ere he dived from sight, plunging into ten-foot scrub. I had fired both barrels, necessarily with but an apology for an aim and the second purely "at a venture." Three minutes later resounded the tinkling _cencerros_ (bells) of the _podencos_, and when two of these hounds had followed the spoor ahead, all _mute_, then I knew that both bullets had spent their force on useless scrub. [Illustration: AZURE-WINGED MAGPIE] Fortune favoured. Half an hour afterwards, a second stag followed. This time a gentle rustle in the bush, and one clink of a hoof on rock had caught my faulty ear. Then coroneted antlers showed up from the depths below, and so soon as the great brown body came in view, a bullet on the shoulder at short range dropped him dead. This was an average stag, weighing 255 lbs. clean, but although "royal," carried a smaller head than that first seen. Later, two other big stags descended together into the unseen depths on my front, but whither they subsequently took their course--_quien sabe?_ I saw them no more. The only other animal that crossed my line during the day was a mongoose, but objects of interest never lacked. Close behind my post, a huge stick-built nest filled a small ilex. This was the ancestral abode of a pair of griffons, and its owners were already busy renewing their home, though my presence sadly disconcerted them. Hereabouts these vultures breed regularly _on trees_, a most unusual habit, due presumably to the lack of suitable crags which elsewhere form their invariable nesting-site. Cushats and robins lent an air of familiarity to the scene, while azure-winged magpies--a species peculiarly Spanish--hopped and chattered hard by, curiosity overcoming fear. There were also pretty Sardinian warblers, with long tails and a white nuchal spot like a coal-tit. Other birds seen in this sierra include merlin and kestrel, green woodpecker, jay, blackbird, thrush, redwing, woodlark, and chaffinch; and on off-days we shot a few red-legged partridges. The two packs employed to-day numbered forty--twenty-four big and sixteen small _podencos_, all yellow and white, the larger having a cross of mastiff. That evening two of the best in the pack were missing--"Capitan," killed by a boar in the _mancha_; the other returned during the night, fearfully wounded, one foreleg almost severed. [Illustration: SARDINIAN WARBLER] The head-keeper told us that these _podencos_ fear the he-wolf. They will run keenly on his scent, but never dare to close with him as they do with boar. Yet curiously they have been known to fraternise with the she-wolf, and in no case will they attack, but rather incline to caress her. It was estimated by the drivers that eighty head of big-game (_reses_) were viewed to-day. Thirty-two shots were fired, but only my one stag was killed. Had the wind held steady, much better results were probable.[29] Included among the guests at Mezquitillas--and they represented rank and learning, arms, State, and Church--was a genial and imposing personality in the poet laureate of Spain, Sr. D. Antonio Cavestany, who celebrated this delightful if somewhat unlucky day in a series of graceful couplets. We are wholly unequal to translate, but copy two or three which readers who understand Spanish will appreciate:-- Del Poeta al arma no dieron Las Musas mucha virtud: Cuatro ciervos le salieron ... Y los cuatro se le fueron Rebosantes de salud! Suya fue la culpa toda: Con la escopeta homicida Á apuntar no se acomoda ... Si les dispara una oda No escapa ni uno con vida! Sin duda no plugo á Dios Que del ganado cervuno Fueran las Parcas en pos Total; tiros, treinta y dos Yvenados muertos, uno!!! ¿Quien realizó tal hazaña? Verguenza de humillacion, Mi frente al decirlo baña. Fue el Ingles ... la rubia Albion Quedó esta vez sobre España!! Resumen: luz, embeleso, Panoramas, maravillas, Bosques, arroyos, cantuéso ... Lo dice junto todo eso Solo al decir "Mezquitillas." Y bondad, afecto, agrado, Gracia que ingenio revela, Hospitalidad, cuidado ... Todo eso esta compendiado Condecir "Juan y Carmela." The next day's operations precisely reversed those of to-day, the guns being placed along the depths of a valley, while the beaters brought down the whole mountain-slopes above. Thus each post, though it commanded a "pass," gave no such wonderful view beyond as had been the feature of yesterday's _montería_. It will, in fact, be obvious that in a big mountain-land no two beats are ever alike nor the conditions equal. Every day presents fresh problems. That is one of the charms. To-day, several stags and a pig were killed, besides one roe-deer and an enormous wild-cat that scaled 7-3/4 kilos (over 17 lbs.). [Illustration: GRIFFON VULTURE] Towards noon, the sun-heat in the gorge being intense, I had cautiously shifted my post to the banks of a mountain-burnlet that, embowered in oleanders,[30] gurgled hard by. In those glancing streams, while I sat motionless, a pair of water-shrews were also busied with their lunch--dipping and diving, turning over pebbles, and searching each nook and cranny of the crystal pool. Lovely little creatures they were--velvety black with snow-white undersides, which showed conspicuously on either flank; but the curious feature was the silver sheen caused by infinite air-bubbles that still adhered to the fur while they swam beneath the surface. They recalled a similar scene in an elk-forest of distant Norway; but never in Spanish sierras have we noticed water-shrews except on this occasion. While yet watching the water-fairies, another movement caught the corner of one eye; with slow sedate steps, a grey wild-cat was descending the opposite slope. She saw nothing, yet the foresight of the ·303 carbine was recusant, it declined to get down into the nick, and a miss resulted. But what a bound the feline gave as an expanding bullet (at 2000 feet a second velocity) shattered the sierra half an inch above her back! [Illustration: ROARING SEPTEMBER.] [Illustration: "HABET."] An incident occurred near this point (though in another year) with a stag. Two shots had been fired on the left, when the slightest sound behind and above inspired a prepared glance in that direction--and only just in time, for three seconds later a glorious pair of antlers showed up on the nearest bush-clad height, and the easiest of shots yielded a 35-inch trophy. [Illustration] The annexed drawing shows a 14-pointer, which was killed here the following year by our host, Sr. Don Juan Calvo de León of Mezquitillas. In mere inches the measurements may be surpassed by others, but no head that we have seen excels this in extraordinary boldness of curve and symmetry of form. This stag was shot on the Puntales del Peco, January 17, 1908, and in the same beat Sr. Juan Calvo, Junr., secured another fine 14-pointer, as below:-- +-----+-------+-------+------------+--------------+----------------+ | |Points.|Length.|Widest Tips.|Widest Inside.|Circ. above Bez.| +-----+-------+-------+------------+--------------+----------------+ |No. 1| 14 |38-3/4"| 39-1/4" | 33-1/4" | 6-1/4" | |No. 2| 14 |36-1/4"| ... | 25-3/4" | ... | +-----+-------+-------+------------+--------------+----------------+ Less rosy on that occasion was the writer's own luck. My post in Los Puntales was in a narrow neck or "pass" in the knife-edged ridge of a mountain-spur, the rock-strewn ground, overgrown with cistus shoulder-high, falling sharply away both before and behind. In front I looked into a chasm probably 1500 feet in depth, the hither slope being invisible, so sharp was the drop; the opposite side, however (probably 2000 feet high), lay spread out as it were a perpendicular map. From leagues away beyond its apex the beaters were now approaching. From early in the day great fleecy cloud-masses had rolled by, and these gradually grew denser till the whole sierra was enveloped in viewless fog. Hark! some animal is escalading my fortress; one cannot see fifteen yards--tantalizing indeed. Yet so well has the _puesto_ been chosen that presently the intruder gallops almost over my toes--a yearling pig or _lechon_, not worth a bullet. [Illustration: PICKING HIS WAY UP A ROCK STAIRCASE (A 40-inch head.)] [Illustration] Later, during a clearer interval, I descried a stag picking a slow and deliberate course down the opposite escarpment. In the abyss below he was long lost to sight but presently reappeared, coming fairly straight in. Seldom have I felt greater confidence in the alignment than when I then fired. Yet the result was a clean miss. While pressing trigger, another shot rang out half-a-mile beyond and the stag swerved sharply; still I had another barrel, and the second bullet "told" loudly enough as the hart bounced, full-broadside, over the pass. Then he swerved to take the rising ground beyond and, crossing the skyline, displayed the grandest pair of antlers I have seen alive--the great yard-long horns with their branching tops seemed too big even for that massive body. On examination blood was found at once, and on both sides--that is, the bullet had passed right through. In the fog I had under-estimated the distance and the hit was low and too far back. With two trackers I followed the spoor while daylight served and through places that any words of mine must fail to describe; but from the first the head-keeper had foretold the result: "Eso no se cobra--va léjos"--"that stag you will not recover; he goes far, but wherever he stops, he dies. See here! the dogs have run his spoor all along, but have not yet brought him to bay." The indications left by the stag on brushwood and rock conveyed to the trackers' practised eyes, as clear as words, the precise position of the wound; and, as foretold, those coveted antlers were lost, to perish uselessly. The pack of Mezquitillas was on this occasion reinforced by those of the Duke of Medinaceli and of the Marquis of Viana--bringing the total up to seventy hounds. Thus, in Spain, do the Grandees of a big land, when guests at a _montería_, bring with them their huntsmen, kennelmen, and their packs of hounds--a system that breathes a comforting sense of space. Next day being hopelessly wet, I took opportunity of measuring three of the trophies which adorn the hall at Mezquitillas:-- +-------+-------+---------+------------+------------+-------------+ | |Points.| Length. |Widest Tips.|Circ. above | Circ. below | | | | | | Bez. | Corona. | +-------+-------+---------+------------+------------+-------------+ |A | 15 | 38-1/4" | 38-3/4" | 6-1/2" | ... | |B | 14 | 38" | 29-1/2" | 6-1/4" | 7-1/2" | |C | 14 | 37-3/4" | 33-1/2" | ... | ... | |Roebuck| ... | 8-1/2" | 3-1/4" | | | +-------+-------+---------+------------+------------+-------------+ It will be observed that the stag shot a day or two before, and illustrated above (p. 167), tops the best of these by half an inch. The somewhat abnormal curve, however, partly explains this. [Illustration: JULY.] [Illustration] We must record yet one more memorable day on this estate of Mezquitillas. This _montería_ (in January 1910) covered the region known as the Leoncillo. Upwards of twenty big stags passed the firing-line, and every gun enjoyed his chance--several more than one. In the result, six stags were killed--three by our host, one by his son. Though carrying 12, 11, 10, and 10 points respectively, none of these four were of exceptional merit, and the best, a 14-pointer, fell to the Duke of Medinaceli. The clean weight of these, the largest stags, is usually between 11-1/2 and 12 arrobas, or 287 to 300 lbs. English. One exceptionally heavy stag killed by our host's son, Juan Calvo, Junr., and which had received some injury in the _testes_, resulting in a malformation of the horn, weighed no less than 16-1/2 arrobas, or 412 lbs. English. Full-grown wild-boars at Mezquitillas average about 7 arrobas, or 175 lbs., clean--one specially big boar reached 8 arrobas, or 200 lbs. Wolves, though abundant, are but rarely shot in _monterías_ for the reasons already given. During the period covered by these notes only two were killed in _monterías_--one by Sr. Calvo, Junr., the other by Colonel Barrera. Wild-pigs breed as a rule in March, and to some extent _gregatim_, or in little colonies, which is supposed to be as a protection against the wolves; the lair _(cama)_ being a regular nest made among thick scrub, and roofed over by the foliage. Lynxes, like wolves, are rarely seen. This year, four (a female, with three full-grown cubs) were held-up by the dogs, and all killed in one thicket. Mongoose and genets are numerous on these brush-clad hills, and martens _(Mustela foina)_ breed in the crags. Stags roar from mid-September, chiefly by night. Their summer coat is darker rather than redder than that of winter. Farther east in Moréna, near Fuen-Caliente, already mentioned, very fine heads are also obtained. The same systems prevail, and the following measurements have been given us by the Marquéz del Mérito, taken from two stags shot at Risquillo in his forests of the Sierra Quintána, season 1906-7. +-----+---------+---------+----------+-------------+--------------+ | | Length. | Widest | Circ. at | Circ. above | Brow-Antler. | | | | Inside. | Burr. | Bez. | | +-----+---------+---------+----------+-------------+--------------+ |No. 1| 36-3/4" | 35" | 8-3/4" | 5-1/2" | 12" | |No. 2| 40-1/4" | ... | 8-3/4" | 6" | 12" | +-----+---------+---------+----------+-------------+--------------+ No. 1 carried 7 + 7 = 14 points, and weighed 224 lbs. clean. No. 2 carried 8 + 7 = 15 points, besides several knobs. Both are shown in photos annexed. In the extreme east of the Sierra Moréna another culminating point of excellence appears to be attained--at Valdelagrana and Zamujar in the neighbourhood of Jäen--at least it is from that region that two of the largest examples came that we have yet seen in Spain. Both the magnificent heads below described were carefully measured by ourselves:-- +-----+-------+-------+-------+--------+--------+-----------+-----------+ | |Points.|Length.| Widest| Widest |Circ. at|Circ. above|Circ. below| | | | | Tips. | Inside.| Base. | Bez. | Corona. | +-----+-------+-------+-------+--------+--------+-----------+-----------+ |No. 1| 16 |40-5/8"|40-1/2"| 31-1/2"| 7-1/2" | 5-5/8" | 7-1/4" | |No. 2| 16 |38-3/4"|33-1/2"| 28-1/2"| ... | 5-3/4" | 7-1/8" | +-----+-------+-------+-------+--------+--------+-----------+-----------+ No. 1 was shot at Valdelagrana, Jäen, by Sr. D. Enrique Parladé, has five on each top, all strong points, brow-antler 14-1/4 inches. Both horns precisely equal, 40-5/8 inches. No. 2 shot at El Zamujar, Jäen, by the Marquéz de Alvéntos, the whole head massive and rugged, and all the sixteen points well developed. The only Spanish stag within our knowledge which exceeds these dimensions was shot at Ballasteros in the Montes de Toledo by Sr. D. I. L. de Ybarra, the measurements of which, though not taken by ourselves, we accept without reserve as follows:--Length, 41 inches; breadth, 36-1/2 inches; circumference below corona, 8-1/4 inches. (See photo.) Since writing the foregoing, a head much exceeding the above records has been obtained at Lugar Nuevo, near Andujar, in the eastern sierra, and which measures no less than 43 inches. Photographs, with measurements taken by Messrs. Rowland Ward (both of this and another good head secured at Fontanarejo), have been sent us by the fortune-favoured sportsman, Mr. J. M. Power of Linares, and will be found subjoined. For convenience of reference we put the whole record in tabular form. [Illustration: RED DEER HEADS, SIERRA MORÉNA. RISQUILLO. Points 15, plus knobs. Length 40-1/4 in. MARMOLEJOS. A Twenty-four Pointer. FONTANAREJO. Points 16. Length 32-1/2 in. MONTES DE TOLEDO. Points 14. Length 41.] RECORD OF RED DEER HEADS--SIERRA MORÉNA +----------------+-------+---------------+--------+-------+---------------+ | | | |Circum- | | | | |Length | Widest. |ference | | | | |outside+------+--------+ above |Points.| Locality. | | |Curve. | Tips.| Inside.| Bez. | | | +----------------+-------+------+--------+--------+-------+---------------+ | | in. | in. | in. | in. | | | |J. M. Power |43 |35 | 33-1/2 | 5-1/2 | 6 + 6 |Lugar Nuevo. | |I. L. de Ybarra |41 |36-1/2| ... | ... | ... |Ballasteros, | | | | | | | | Montes | | | | | | | |de Toledo. | |E. Parladé |40-5/8 |40-1/2| 31-1/2 | 5-5/8 | 8 + 8 |Valdelagrana. | |Marq. Mérito |40-1/4 |... | ... | 6 | 7 + 7 |Risquillos. | |Authors |40 |36-1/2| 32 | 5-1/4 | 9 + 8 |(_Wild Spain_.)| |Marq. Alvéntos |38-3/4 |33-1/2| 28-1/2 | 5-3/4 | 8 + 8 |Zamujar, Jäen. | |J. Calvo de León|38-3/4 |39-1/4| 33-1/4 | 6-1/4 | 7 + 7 |Mezquitillas. | | Do. |38-1/4 |38-3/4| ... | 6-1/2 | 8 + 7 | Do. | | Do. |38 |29-1/2| ... | 6-1/4 | 7 + 7 | Do. | | Do. |38 |33-1/2| ... | ... | 7 + 7 | Do. | |Authors ... |37-1/2 |34-1/2| 29-1/4 | 5 | 8 + 7 |(_Wild Spain_.)| |Marq. Mérito |36-3/4 |... | 35 | 5-1/2 | 8 + 7 |Risquillos. | |J. Calvo, hijo |36-1/4 |... | 25-3/4 | ... | 7 + 7 |Mezquitillas. | |Authors |35 |32-1/2| 28 | 5-3/4 | 6 + 6 | Do. | | Do. |34-1/8 | (cast antler) | 5-3/4 | 8 + 0 |Sa. Quintána. | |J. M. Power |32 1/2 |... | ... | 5-1/2 | 8 + 8 |Fontanarejo. | +----------------+-------+------+--------+--------+-------+---------------+ CHAPTER XVI PERNÁLES A country better adapted by nature for the success of the enterprising bandit cannot be conceived. The vast _despoblados_ = uninhabited wastes, with scant villages far isolated and lonely mountain-tracts where a single desperado commands the way and can hold-up a score of passers-by, all lend themselves admirably to this peculiar form of industry. And up to quite recent years these natural advantages were exploited to the full. Riding through the sierras, one notes rude crosses and epitaphs inscribed on rocks recording the death of this or that wayfarer. Now travellers, as a rule, do not die natural deaths by the wayside; and an inspection of these silent memorials indicates that each occupies a site eminently adapted for a quiet murder. Fortunately, during the last year or two, the extension of the telegraph and linking-up of remote hamlets has aided authority practically to extinguish brigandage on the grander scale. Spain to-day can no longer claim a single artist of the Jack Sheppard or Dick Turpin type; not one heroic murderer such as José Maria (whose safe-conduct was more effective than that of his king), Vizco el Borje, Agua-Dulce, and other _ladrones en grande_ whose life-histories will be found outlined in _Wild Spain_. The two first-named represent a type of manhood one cannot but admire--admire despite oneself and despite its inconvenience to civilisation. These were men ignorant of fear, who, though themselves gentle, were yet able, by sheer force of iron will, to command and control cut-throat gangs which set authority at defiance, and who subjected whole districts to their anarchical aims and orders. The outlaw-overlords ever acted on similar lines. Respecting human life as, in itself, valueless, they commandeered real value by an adroit combination of liberally subsidising the peasantry while yet terrorising all by the certainty of swift and merciless retribution should the least shade of treachery befall--or rather what to the brigand-crew represented treachery. Human life was otherwise safe. Two points in this connection demand mention. Besides direct robberies, the brigands battened upon a tribute exacted from landowners and paid as a ransom to shield themselves and their tenants from molestation. Secondly, their safety and continued immunity from capture was largely due to that secret influence--quite undefinable, yet potent to this day--known as "Caciquismo." That influence was exerted on behalf of the outlaws as part of the ransom arrangement aforesaid. Neither for robber-chieftains of the first water, such as these, nor for brigandage as a scientific business, is there any longer opportunity in modern Spain, any more than for a Robin Hood at home. Lesser lights of the road, footpads and casual _sequestradores_, will survive for a further space in the wilder region; but the real romance of the industry ceased with the new century. [Illustration: PERNALES] Its first decade has nevertheless produced a brace of first-rate ruffians who, though in no sense to be compared with the old-time aristocracy of the craft, at least succeeded in setting at naught the civil power, and in pillaging and harassing rural Andalucia during more than two years. The original pair were known as Pernáles and El Vivillo, the latter a man of superior instincts and education, who, under former conditions, would doubtless have developed into the noble bandit. Vivillo on principle avoided bloodshed; not a single assassination is laid to his charge during a long career of crime. Pernales, on the contrary, revelled in revolting cruelties, and rated human life no higher than that of a rabbit. At first this repulsive ruffian, as hateful of aspect as of character,[31] acted as a sort of lieutenant to Vivillo, but the partnership was soon renounced by the latter consequent on a cowardly crime perpetrated by Pernales in the Sierra of Algamita. At a lonely farm lived an elderly couple, the husband an industrious, thrifty man, who had the reputation of being rich among his fellows. Their worldly possessions in actual fact consisted of some 2000 reales = £20. Pernales was not likely to overlook a hoard so ill-protected, and one night in November 1906 insisted, at the muzzle of his gun, on the savings being handed over to him. A lad of fourteen, however, had witnessed the transaction, and on perceiving him (and fearing he might thus be denounced) Pernales plunged his knife in the boy's breast, killing him on the spot. Vivillo, on hearing of this insensate murder by his second, insisted on the restitution of their money to the aged pair, expelled Pernales from his gang, and threatened him with death should he dare again to cross his path. Pernales now formed a fresh partnership with a desperado of similar calibre to himself, a soulless brute, known as the Niño de Arahál, whose acquaintance he had made at a village of that name. This pair, along with a gang of ruffians who acclaimed them as chiefs, were destined to achieve some of the worst deeds of violence in the whole annals of Spanish _Bandolerismo_. For two years they held half Andalucia in awe, terrorised by the ferocity of their methods and merciless disregard of life. None dared denounce them or impart to authority a word of information as to their whereabouts, even though it were known for certain--such was the dread of vengeance. Innumerable were the skirmishes between the forces of the law and its outragers. An illustrative incident occurred in March 1907. A pair of Civil Guards, riding up the Rio de los Almendros, district of Pruna, suddenly and by mere chance found themselves face to face with the men they "wanted." A challenge to halt and surrender was answered by instant fire, and the outlaws, wheeling about, clapped spurs to their horses and fled. Now for the Civil Guards as brave men and dutiful we have the utmost respect; but their marksmanship on this occasion proved utterly rotten, and an easy right-and-left was clean missed twice and thrice over! The fugitives, moreover, outrode pursuit, and the fact illustrates their cool, calculating nonchalance, that so soon as they reckoned on having gained a forty-five minutes' advantage, the pair paid a quiet social call on a well-to-do farmer of Morón, enjoyed a glass of wine with their trembling host, and then (having some fifteen minutes in hand) rode forward. Now comes a point. On arrival of the pursuers, that farmer (though not a word had been said) denied all knowledge of his new-gone guests. Pursuit was abandoned. For eight days the bandits lay low. Then Pernales presented himself at a farm in Ecija with a demand for £40, or in default the destruction of the live-stock. The bailiff (no farmer lives on his farm) despatched a messenger on his fleetest horse to bring in the ransom. As by the stipulated hour he had not returned, Pernales shot eight valuable mules! Riding thence to La Coronela, a farm belonging to Antonio Fuentes, the bull-fighter, a similar message was despatched. Pending its reply our outlaws feasted on the best; but instead of bank-notes, a force of Civil Guards appeared on the scene. That made no difference. The terrified farm-hands swore that the bandits had ridden off in a given direction, and while the misled police hurried away on a wild-goose chase, our heroes finished their feast, and late at night (having loaded up everything portable of value) departed for their lair in the sierra. During the next two months (May and June 1907) only minor outrages and robberies were committed, but that quiescence was enlivened by two feats that set out in relief the coolness and unflinching courage of these desperados. In May they moved to the neighbourhood of Córdoba, and among other raids pulled off a good haul in bank-notes, cash, and other valuables at Lucena, an estate of D. Antonio Moscoso, following this up by a report in their "Inspired Press" that the brigands had at last fled north-wards with the view of embarking for abroad at Santander! A few days later, however (May 31), they had the effrontery to appear in Córdoba itself at the opening of the Fair, but, being early recognised, promptly rode off into the impending Sierra Moréna. On their heels followed the Civil Guard. Finding themselves overtaken, our friends faced round and opened fire, but the result was a defeat of the bandit gang. One, "El Niño de la Gloria," fell dead pierced by three bullets; two other scoundrels--Reverte and Pepino--were captured wounded, while in the mêlée the robbers abandoned four horses, a rifle, and a quantity of jewelry--the product of recent raids. Pernales himself and the rest of his crew escaped, and found shelter in the fastnesses of the Sierra Moréna--thence returning to their favourite hunting-grounds nearer Seville. Riding along the bye-ways of Marchena, disguised as rustic travellers, on June 2 they demanded at a remote farm a night's food and lodging. Half-concealed knives and revolvers proved strong arguments in favour of obedience, and, despite suspicion and dislike, the bailiff acceded. This time the Civil Guard were on the track. At midnight they silently surrounded the house, communicated with the watchful bailiff, and ordered all doors to be locked. The turning of a heavy key, however, reached Pernales' ear. In a moment the miscreants were on the alert. While one saddled-up the horses, the other unloosed a young farm mule, boldly led him across the courtyard to the one open doorway, and, administering some hearty lashes to the animal's ribs, set him off in full gallop into the outer darkness. The police, seeing what they concluded was an attempted escape, first opened fire, then started helter-skelter in pursuit of a riderless mule! The robbers meanwhile rode away at leisure. Five days later, on June 7, both bandits attacked a _venta_, or country inn, near Los Santos, in Villafranca de los Barrios, carrying off £200 in cash, six mules, with other valuables, and leaving the owner for dead. This particular crime, for some reason or other, was more noised abroad than dozens of others equally atrocious, and orders were now issued jointly both by the _Ministro de Gobernacion_, the Captain-General of the district, and the Colonels commanding the Civil Guard throughout the whole of the harassed regions, that at all hazards the murderous pair must be taken at once, dead or alive. This peremptory mandate evolved unusual activities; the whole of the western sierra was reported blockaded. Pernales, nevertheless, receiving warning through innumerable spies of the police plans, succeeded in escaping from the province of Seville into that of Córdoba, where the pair pursued their career of crime, though now under conditions of increased hazard and difficulty. Sometimes for days together they lay low or contented themselves with petty felonies. Then suddenly in a new district--that of Puente-Genil--burst out a fresh series of the most audacious outrages. Big sums of money, with alternative of instant death, were extorted from farmers and landowners. These exploits, together with an odd murder or two, spread consternation throughout the new area, and in all Puente-Genil, Pernales and the Niño de Arahal became a standing nightmare. So soon as checked here by the police, the robbers once more moved west, again "inspiring" the press with reports of a foreign destination--this time viâ Cádiz. A few days later, Málaga was named as their intended exit. Yet on July 16 they were to the north of Seville, and had another rifle-duel with the Guards, again escaping scatheless at a gallop. Persecution was now so keen that the wilds of the Sierra Moréna afforded their only possible hope, and by holding the highest passes the outlaws reached this refuge, being next reported at Venta de Cardeñas, 160 miles north of Córdoba. A cordon of police was now drawn along the whole fringe of the sierra from Vizco del Marquéz to Despeñaperros. The position of the hunted couple became daily more precarious, their scope of activity more restricted, and robberies reduced to insignificant proportions. Nevertheless, on July 22, with consummate audacity and dash, they raided the farm of Recena belonging to D. Tomas Herrera, carrying off a sum of £160, with which they remained content till August 18, when they attacked the two farms of Vencesla and Los Villares, but, being repulsed, fled northwards towards Ciudad Real. On September 1 they entered the province of La Mancha, apparently seeking shelter in the deep defiles of the Sierra de Alcaráz, for that morning a Manchegan woodcutter was accosted by two mounted wayfarers who inquired the best track to Alcaráz. The woodman innocently gave directions which, if exactly followed, would much shorten the route. While thanking his informant, Pernales--apparently out of sheer bravado--revealed his identity, introducing himself to the astonished woodcutter as the Fury who was keeping all authority on the jump and the country-side ablaze. Straightway the man of the axe made for the nearest guard-station, and a captain with six mounted police, reinforced by peasants, followed the trail. As dusk fell the pursuers perceived two horses tethered in a densely wooded dell, while hard by their owners sat eating and drinking--the latter imprudence perhaps explaining why the brigands were at last caught napping. To the challenge "Alto á la Guardia Civil!" came the usual prompt response--the vibrant whistle of rifle-balls. Pernales managed to empty the magazine of his repeater, killing one guard outright and wounding two more. Though himself hit, he yet stood erect, and was busy recharging his weapon when further shots brought him to earth. On seeing his chief go down the Niño de Arahal sprang to the saddle, but the opposing rifles were this time too many and too near. The bandit, fatally wounded, was pitched to earth in death-throes, while the poor beast stumbled and fell in its stride a few paces beyond. An examination of the bodies showed that Pernales had been pierced by twenty-two balls, his companion by ten. CACIQUISMO Doubtless the thought may have occurred to readers that some interpretation is necessary to explain how such events as these (extending over a series of years) are still possible in Spain--in a country fully equipped not only with elaborate legal codes bristling with stringent penalties both for crime and its abettors, but also with magistrates, judges, telegraphs, and an ample armed force, competent, loyal, and keen to enforce those laws. Without assistants and accomplices (call their aiders and abettors what you will) the Pernales and Vivillos of to-day could not survive for a week. The explanation lies in the existence of that inexplicable and apparently ineradicable power called Caciquismo--fortunately, we believe, on the decline, but still a force sufficient to paralyse the arm of the law and arrest the exercise of justice. Ranging from the lowest rungs of society, Caciquismo penetrates to the main-springs of political power. A secret understanding with combined action amongst the affiliated, it secures protection even to criminals with their hidden accomplices, provided that each and all yield blind obedience to their ruling Cacique, social and political. The Cacique stands above law; he is a law unto himself; he does or leaves undone, pays or leaves unpaid as may suit his convenience--conscience he has none. At his own sweet will he will charge personal expenses--say his gamekeepers' wages or the cost of a private roadway--to the neighbouring municipality. None dare object. Caciquismo is no fault of the Spanish people; it is the disgrace of the Caciques, who, as men of education, should be ashamed of mean and underhand practices that recall, on a petty scale, those of the Tyrants of Syracuse. Should any of these sleek-faces read our book, they may be gratified to learn that no other civilised country produces parasites such as they. Not a foreign student of the problems of social life in Spain with its conditions but has been brought to a full stop in the effort to diagnose or describe the secret sinister influence of Caciquismo. Our Spanish friends--detesting and despising the thing equally with ourselves--tell us that no foreigner has yet realised either its nature or its scope. Certainly we make no such pretension, nor attempt to describe the thing itself--a thing scarce intelligible to Saxon lines of thought, a baneful influence devised to retard the advance of modern ideas of freedom and justice, to benumb all moral yearnings for truth and honesty in public affairs and civil government. Caciquismo may roughly be defined as the negation and antithesis of patriotism; it sets the personal influence of one before the interest of all, sacrificing whole districts to the caprice of some soul-warped tyrant with no eyes to see. * * * * * A word in conclusion on Vivillo. Neither ignorance nor necessity impelled Joaquin Camargo, nicknamed El Vivillo (the Lively One), to embark, at the age of twenty-five, on a career of crime. Rather it was that spirit of knight-errantry, of reckless adventure, that centuries before had swept the Spanish Main, and that nowadays, in baser sort, thrives and is fostered by a false romance--as Diego Corrientes, the bandit, was reputed to be "run" by a duchess, as the "Seven Lads of Ecija" terrorised under the ægis of exalted patronage, and José Maria, the murderer of the Sierra Moréna, was extolled as a melodramatic hero by novelists all over Spain. On such lines young Camargo thought to gather fresh glories for himself. He early gained notoriety by a smart exploit in holding-up the diligence from Las Cabezas for Villa Martin just when the September Fair was proceeding at the latter place. The passengers, mostly cattle-dealers, were relieved of bursting purses--no cheques pass current at Villa Martin--to the tune of £8000. After that, for several years, Vivillo ruled rural Andalucia, and his desperate deeds supplied the papers with startling head-lines. When pursuit became troublesome he embarked for Argentina, and soon his name was forgotten. His retreat, however, was discovered, and Vivillo was brought back, landing at Cádiz February 19, 1908. Since that date he has lived in Seville prison--a man of high intelligence, of reputed wealth, and the father of two pretty daughters. For reasons unexplained (and into which we do not inquire) his trial never comes on. Vivillo keeps a stiff lip and enjoys ... nearly all he wants. [Illustration: A SUMMER EVENING--SPARROW-OWLS (_Athene noctua_) AND MOTHS] CHAPTER XVII LA MANCHA THE LAGOONS OF DAIMIEL Immediately to the north of our "Home-Province" of Andalucia, but separated therefrom by the Sierra Moréna, stretch away the uplands of La Mancha--the country of Don Quixote. The north-bound traveller, ascending through the rock-gorges of Despeñaperros, thereat quits the mountains and enters on the Manchegan plateau. A more dreary waste, ugly and desolate, can scarce be imagined. Were testimony wanting to the compelling genius of Cervantes, in very truth La Mancha itself would yield it. [Illustration] Yet it is wrong to describe La Mancha as barren. Rather its central highlands present a monotony of endless uninteresting cultivation. League-long furrows traverse the landscape, running in parallel lines to utmost horizon, or weary the eye by radiating from the focal point as spokes in a wheel. But never a break or a bush relieves one's sight, never a hedge or a hill, not a pool, stream, or tree in a long day's journey. Oh, it is distressing, wherever seen--in Old World or New--that everlasting cultivation on the flat. True, it produces the necessary fruits of the earth--here (to wit) corn and wine. Farther north, where the Toledan mountains loom blue over the western horizon, La Mancha refuses to produce anything. The unsympathetic earth, for 100 miles a sterile hungry crust, stony and sun-scorched, obtrudes an almost hideous nakedness, its dry bones declining to be clad, save in flints or fragments of lava and splintered granite. Wherever nature is a trifle less austere, a low growth of dwarf broom and helianthemum at least serves to vary the dreariness of dry prairie-grass. There, beneath the foothills of the wild Montes de Toledo, stretch whole regions where thorn-scrub and broken belts of open wood vividly recall the scenery of equatorial Africa--we might be traversing the "Athi Plains" instead of European lands. Evergreen oak and wild-olive replace mimosa and thorny acacia--one almost expects to see the towering heads of giraffes projecting above the grey-green bush. In both cases there is driven home that living sense of arid sterility, the same sense of desolation--nay, here even more so--since there is lacking that wondrous wild fauna of the other. No troops of graceful gazelles bound aside before one's approach; no herds of zebra or antelope adorn the farther veld; no galloping files of shaggy gnus spurn the plain. A chance covey of redlegs, a hoopoe or two, the desert-loving wheatears--birds whose presence ever attests sterility--a company of azure-winged magpies chattering among the stunted ilex, or a woodchat--that is all one may see in a long day's ride. [Illustration: WOODCHAT SHRIKE AND ITS "SHAMBLES" (Sketched in La Mancha)] Another feature common to both lands--and one abhorrent to northern eye--is the absence of water, stagnant or current. Never the glint of lake or lagoon, far less the joyous murmur of rippling burn, rejoice eye or ear in La Mancha. Alas, that to us is denied the synthetic sense! In vain we scan Manchegan thicket for compensating beauties, for the Naiads and Dryads with which Cervantes' creative spirit peopled the wilderness; no vision of lovely Dorotheas laving ivory limbs of exquisite mould in sylvan fountain rewards our searching (but too prosaic) gaze--that may perhaps be explained by the contemporary absence of any such fountains. Nor have other lost or love-lorn maidens, Lucindas or Altisidoras from enchanted castle, aided us to add one element of romance to purely faunal studies. Castles, it is true, adorn the heights or crown a distant skyline; nor are Dulcineas of Toboso extinct or even in the _posada_ at Daimiel, while excellent specimens graced the twilight _paséo_ of Ciudad Real or reclined beneath the orange-groves of its _alameda_. [Illustration: DESERT-LOVING WHEATEARS] We have animadverted upon the absence of water in La Mancha. Yet there is no rule but has its exception, and it is, in fact, to the existence of a series of most singular Manchegan lagoons, abounding in bird-life, that this venturesome literary excursion owes its genesis. In the midst of tawny table-lands, well-nigh 200 miles from the sea and upwards of 2000 feet above its level, nestle the sequestered Lagunas de Daimiel extending to many miles of mere and marsh-land. These lakes are, in fact, the birthplace of the great river Guadiana, the head-waters being formed by the junction of its nascent streams with its lesser tributary the Ciguela. In the confluence of the two rivers mentioned it is the Guadiana that chiefly lends its serpentine course to the formation of a vast series of lagoons, with islands and islets, cane-brakes and shallows overgrown by reeds, sedge, and marsh-plants, all traversed in every direction by open channels (called _trochas_), the whole constituting a complication so extensive that none save experienced boatmen can thread a way through its labyrinths. Isolated thus, a mere speck of water in the midst of the arid table-lands of central Spain, yet these lagoons of Daimiel constitute not only one of the chief wildfowl resorts of Spain, but possibly of all Europe. Upon these waters there occur from time to time every species of aquatic game that is known in this Peninsula, while in autumn the duck-tribe in countless hosts congregate in nearly all their European varieties. Those which are found in the greatest numbers include the mallard, pintail, shoveler, wigeon, gargany, common and marbled teal, ferruginous duck, tufted duck, pochard, and (in great abundance) the red-crested pochard or _Pato colorado_. Coots also frequent the lagoons, but in smaller numbers. There also appear at frequent intervals flamingoes and black geese (_Ganzos negros_), whose species we have not been able to identify, sand-grouse of both kinds, sea-gulls, duck-hawks, grebes, and occasionally some wandering cormorants. Herons and egrets in their different varieties haunt the shores and the shallows. [Illustration: RED-CRESTED POCHARD (_Fuligula rufila_)] Lest any far-venturing fowler be induced by this chapter to pack his 12-bore and seek the nearest Cook's office, it should at once be stated that the rights-of-chase (as are all worth having, alike in Spain, Scotland, or England) are in private hands--those of the Sociedad de las Lagunas de Daimiel, a society which at present numbers five members, all of ducal rank, and to one of whom we are indebted for excellent descriptive notes. The lakes are guarded by keepers who have held their posts for generations--the family of the Escudéros. To claim for these far-inland lagoons a premier place among the great wildfowl resorts of Europe may seem extravagant--albeit confirmed by facts and figures that follow. But the lakes, be it remembered, are surrounded by that cultivation afore described--100 mile stubbles and so on. Another fact that well-nigh struck dumb the authors (long accustomed to study and preach the incredible mobility of bird-life) was that ducks shot at dawn at Daimiel are found to be cropful of _rice_. Now the nearest rice-grounds are at Valencia, distant 180 miles; hence these ducks, not as a migratory effort, but merely as incidental to each night's food-supply, have sped at least 360 miles between dusk and dawn. As autumn approaches (we quote from notes kindly given us by the Duke of Arión), so soon as the keepers note the arrival of incoming migrants, their first business consists in observing the points which these select for their assemblage. Then with infinite patience, tact, and skill, the utmost advantage is seized of those earlier groups which have chosen haunts nearest to points where guns may be placed most effectively. These favoured groups are left rigorously alone to act as decoys, while by gentleness and least provocative methods, the keepers induce other bands which have settled in less appropriate positions to unite their forces with the elect. Thus within a few days vast multitudes, scattered over wide areas, have been unconsciously concentrated within that "sphere of influence" where four or five guns may act most efficaciously. The supreme test of the keepers' efficiency is demonstrated when this concentration is limited to some particular area designated for a single day's shooting. The night preceding the day fixed for shooting, so soon as the ducks have already quitted the lagoons and spread themselves afar over the surrounding cornlands on their accustomed nocturnal excursions in search of food, the posts of the various gunners are prepared. This work involves cutting a channel through some islanded patch of reeds situate in the centre of open water. The channel is merely wide enough to admit the entrance of the punt from which the gunner shoots, the cut reeds being left to remask the opening so soon as the punt has entered. Somewhere between three and four o'clock in the morning the sportsmen sally forth from the shooting-lodge (situate on the Isla de los Asnos), each in his punt directing a course to the position he has drawn by lot. In the boat, besides guns, cartridges, and loader (should one be taken), are carried thirty or forty decoy-ducks fashioned of wood or cork and painted to resemble in form and colour the various species of duck expected at that particular season. Each of these decoys is furnished with a string and leaden weight to act as an anchor. A fixed plummet directly beneath the floating decoy prevents its being blown over or upset. Generally speaking, the sportsman awaits the dawn in the same boat in which he has reached his position, but should shallow water prevent this, either a lighter punt, capable of being carried by hand, or some wooden boards are substituted as a seat. Having set out his decoys, and arranged his ammunition, each gunner awaits in glorious expectancy the moment when the first light of dawn shall set the aquatic world amove. Singly they may come, or in bands and battalions--soon the whole arc of heaven is serried with moving masses. Should the day prove favourable, firing continues practically incessant till towards ten o'clock. From that hour onwards it slackens perceptibly, ducks flying fewer and fewer and at increasing intervals up to noon or thereby, when spoils are collected and the day's sport is over. There are at most but four or five _puestos_, or gun-posts, at Daimiel, and that only when ducks are in their fullest numbers. Under such conditions, and when all incidental conditions are favourable, a bag of over 1000 ducks in the day has not infrequently been registered. On such occasions it follows that individual guns must gather from 200 to 300 ducks apiece. Almost incredible as are the results occasionally obtained under favouring conditions, yet the duck-shooting at Daimiel is nevertheless subject to considerable variation in accordance with the sequence of the season. The biggest totals are usually recorded during the months of September, October, and November in dry years. The bags secured at such periods are apt to run into extraordinary numbers, but with this proviso, that quality is then sometimes inferior to quantity. For the chief item at these earlier shoots consists of teal, with only a sprinkling of mallard, wigeon, and shoveler, and, in some years, a few coots. But at the later _tiradas_ (shootings), although game is usually rather less abundant, it is then entirely composed of the bigger ducks--beyond all in numbers being the mallard, pintail, wigeon, and red-crested pochard, while an almost equal number of shovelers and common pochards are also bagged. At these earlier _tiradas_ a good gun should be able, with ease, to bring down, say, 400 ducks, although this number dwindles sadly in the pick-up, since but few of those birds will be recovered that fall outside the narrow space of open water around each "hide." One may say roughly that at least one-fourth are lost. For, although each post be surrounded by open water, yet many ducks must fall within the encircling canes, while even those that fall in the open, if winged and beyond the reach of a second barrel, will inevitably gain the shelter of the covert, and all these are irrecoverable. Others, again, carrying on a few yards, may fall dead in open water, but at a distance the precise position of which is difficult to fix by reason of intervening cane-brakes. Thus between those that are lost in the above ways and others that may be carried away by the wind or the current (besides many that are devoured by hawks and eagles under the fowler's eye but beyond the range of his piece) it is no exaggerated estimate that barely three-fourths of the fallen are ever recovered. To the above description another Spanish friend, Don Isidoro Urzáiz, adds the following:-- In the year 1892 I fired at ducks in a single morning at Daimiel one thousand and ten cartridges. This was between 6.30 and 10.30 A.M. I gathered rather over two hundred, losing upwards of a hundred more. I shot badly; it being my first experience with duck, I had not learnt to let them come well in, and often fired too soon. In subsequent _tiradas_ I have never enjoyed quite so much luck, although never firing less than 400 to 500 cartridges. In spite of the difficulty of recovering dead game, I have always on these occasions gathered from one hundred upwards--the precise numbers I have not recorded. Some of the _puestos_ have a very small extent of open water around them, and in these a greater proportion of the game is necessarily lost. For example, in a single quite small clump of reeds I remember marking not less than thirty ducks fall dead, yet of these I recovered not one. The sharp-edged leaves of the sedge (_masiega_) cut like a knife, and the boatman who entered the reeds to collect the game returned a few minutes later without a bird, but with hands, arms, and legs bleeding from innumerable cuts and scratches, which obliged him to desist from further search. This is but one example of the difficulty of recovering fallen game. As examples of the totals secured individually in a day may be quoted the following. At the first shooting in 1908 the Duke of Arión gathered 251 ducks, and at the second shoot, 245, the Duke of Prim, 197. The record bag was made some ten or twelve years ago by a Valencian sportsman, Don Juan Cistel, who brought in no less than 393 ducks in one day! His late Majesty, King Alfonso XII., comes second with 381 ducks shot in three hours and a half. On his second visit, on hearing that he had secured his century, His Majesty stopped shooting, being more interested to watch the fowl passing overhead. His total was 127. King Alfonso XIII. had an unlucky day here--rain and storm--hence he only totalled ninety odd. Many years ago, our late friend, Santiago Udaëta, was credited with 270 ducks to his own gun in one day. These bags are truly enormous, for, big as it is, Daimiel is not a patch in size as compared with our own marismas of the Guadalquivir. There is here, on the other hand, abundant cover to conceal the guns, which is not the case with us. [Illustration: RED-CRESTED POCHARD--AN IMPRESSION AT DAIMIEL] It was at Daimiel that we first made acquaintance with the red-crested pochard--a handsome and truly striking species, smart in build, colour, action, and every attribute. A bushy red head outstretched on a very long neck contrasts with the jet-black breast, while the white "speculum" on the wings shows up conspicuous as a transparency, especially when a band passes over-head in the azure vault, or splashes down on reed-girt shallow--one actually seems to see through the gauzy texture of their quills. These ducks breed in numbers at Daimiel, as do also mallards, garganey, and ferruginous ducks, together with stilts, grebes, and herons of all denominations. Greatly do we regret that our experience at Daimiel does not include the spring-season with all its unknown ornithological possibilities. An unfortunate accident prevented our spending a week or two at Daimiel in May of the present year. Ospreys visit the lakes in autumn, preying on the abundant carp and tench; and wild-boars, some of great size, coming from the bush-clad Sierra de Villarubia on the south, frequent the cane-brakes. Shelducks of either species appear unknown; but grey geese (as well as flamingoes) make passing calls at intervals, a small dark-coloured goose (possibly the bernicle) is recorded to have been shot on two or three occasions, and wild swans once. The little country-town of Daimiel, situate six or eight miles from the lakes, was recently the scene of an extraordinary tragedy. We copy the account from the Madrid newspaper, _El Liberal_, February 20, 1908:-- Telegraphing from Daimiel, it is announced that yesterday a gang of masked men forced their entrance into the Council-Chamber while the Council were holding a meeting under the presidency of the Mayor. The masked men, who numbered six or eight, came fully armed with guns and rifles which they discharged in the very face of the Mayor, who fell dead, riddled with bullets. The assembled Councillors, seized with panic, fled. The murdered Mayor was a Conservative, and the only member of that party who held a seat in the Corporation. It is believed that the assassination was perpetrated in obedience to political motives. CHAPTER XVIII THE SPANISH BULL-FIGHT ITS ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT Perhaps no other contemporary spectacle has been oftener and more minutely described by writers who--censors and enthusiasts alike--possess neither personal nor technical qualification, for the work. Impressions, once the Pyrenees are passed, grow spontaneously deeper and stronger in inverse ratio with experiences. And the majority of descriptions confessedly prejudge the scene in adverse sense--the writer (sometimes a lady) going into wild hysterics after half-seeing a single bull killed. We have not the slightest intention of entering that arena of ravelled preconceptions and misconceptions, nor are we concerned either to uphold or to condemn. A greater mind has satirised the human tendency to "condone the sins we are inclined to, by damning those we have no mind to," and we are content to leave it at that. In this chapter we purpose to glance at the subject from three points of view. (1) The origin of bull-fighting, 500 years ago, and its subsequent development. (2) The modern system of breeding and training the fighting bull. (3) The "Miura question"--an incident of to-day. As a Spanish institution, bull-fighting dates back to the Reconquest or shortly thereafter. When that abounding vigour and virility that had animated and sustained Spanish explorers and warriors--the sailors and adventurers who, following in the wake of the caravels of Columbus, opened up a new world to Spain and carried the purple banner of Castile to the ends of the earth--when that vigour had spent its fiery force and grown anæmic, there still remained (as always) a residue of bold spirits who, scorning decadent circumstance, turned intuitively to that virile and dangerous exercise left them as a heritage by the vanished Moors. For it was the Arab conquerors, the so-called Moors, who first practised this form of vicarious warfare. It was, however, in no sense as a sport--far less as a popular pastime--that the fierce Arab had risked equal chances with the fiercest wild beast of the Spanish plain. No, it was strictly as a substitute and a preparation for the sterner realities of war that, during the intervals of peace, the Moors "kept their hands in" by fighting bulls. The object was to keep themselves and their chargers fit, their eyesight true, and muscles toughened for the further struggles that all knew must follow. But during those intervals of peace, the rival knights, Christian and Moslem, met in keen competition with lance and sword on the enclosed arena of the bull-ring. The conclusion of a truce was frequently celebrated by holding a joint _fiesta de toros_. No trace, however, exists in Arab writings to show that these people possessed any innate love of bull-fighting as a sport, or ever practised it save only as an accessory to the art of war. No other people of ancient race have had exhibitions of this kind--that is, where the skill of man was invoked to incite a beast to attack in certain desired modes; while the performer escaped the onset, and finally slew his adversary, by preconceived forms of defence governed by set rules--a spectacle wherein the assembled crowd could, each according to his light, estimate both the skill of the man and the fighting quality of the beast. That the blood of many a gladiator dyed the Roman arena at the horns of bulls is certain: but no artistic embellishments of attack or defence added to the joy of the Roman holiday. The mere mechanical instinct of self-preservation may inadvertently have suggested to individual combatants certain combinations in the conflict that in later days have been utilised by modern matadors; but it seems hardly possible to suppose that Roman gladiators saved themselves by methods of prescribed art. Contemporary records, together with the scenes depicted on coinage, represent rather a mere massacre of men by brute force; and such cannot bear any relation to the conditions that govern the national _fiesta_ of Spain to-day. The actual origin in Spain of the _Corrida de Toros_ must thus be traced to the Spanish Arabs, who, to exercise themselves and their steeds during intermittent periods of peace, adopted this dangerous pastime with the view of fortifying and invigorating personal valour, so necessary in times of constant strife. The Arab's spear and charger were opposed to the wild bull of the Spanish plain under conditions many of which are analogous to these in vogue to-day. In those earlier ages it was permitted to an unhorsed cavalier to accept protection from the horns of his enemy at the hands of his personal retainers, who not infrequently sacrificed their own lives in devotion to their chief. At this period (during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) the knight who, lance in hand, had been hurled from the saddle might draw his sword and kill the bull, his vassals being allowed to assist in placing the animal (by deft display of coloured cloaks) in a position to facilitate the death-stroke. Here, doubtless, originated the art of "playing" the bull, and incidentally sprang the professional bull-fighter. For as these servants became experts, and by reason of their prowess gained extra wages, so proportionately such skill became of pecuniary value. Mercenaries of this sort were, nevertheless, despised--to risk their lives in return for money was regarded as an infamous thing. But at least they had inaugurated the regime of the highly paid matador of to-day. During the first century after the Reconquest bull-fighting was opposed by several powerful influences, but each in turn it survived and set at naught. Isabel la Católica, horrified by the sight of bloodshed at a bull-fight which she personally attended, decided to prohibit all _corridas_; but that, she found, lay beyond even her great influence. Next, in 1567, the power of the Papacy was invoked in vain. Pope Pius V., by a _bula_ of November 20, forbade the spectacle under pain of excommunication, the denial of Christian burial, and similar ecclesiastical penalties; but he and his _bula_ had likewise to go under in face of the national sentiment of Spain. A noble bull fell to the lance of Isabel's grandson, H.M. the Emperor Charles V., in the Plaza Mayor of Valladolid amidst acclamation of countless admirers. This occurred during the festivals held to celebrate the birth of his eldest son, afterwards Phillip II. [Illustration: BULL-FIGHTING. From a Drawing by Joseph Crawhall] In 1612 bull-fighting first assumed a financial aspect. Phillip III. conceded to one Arcania Manduno the emoluments accruing during the term of three lives from the _corridas de toros_ in the city of Valencia. Charities and asylums benefited under this fund, but the bulk went in payment for professional services in the Plaza. During the reign of Phillip IV.--that king being skilled in the use of lance and javelin (_rejón_), and frequently himself taking a public part--the _fiesta_ advanced enormously in national estimation. English readers may recall the sumptuous _corrida_ which marked the arrival of Charles I., with the Duke of Buckingham, at Madrid. Later, during the reigns of the House of Austria, to face a bull with bravery and skill and to use a dexterous lance was the pride of every Spanish noble. Phillip V., however, would have none of the spectacle, and then the nobility held aloof from the _corridas_; but their example proved no deterrent. For the hold of the national pastime on the Moro-hispanic race was too firm-set to be swept aside by alien influence, however strong; and when thus abandoned by the patricians, the hidalgos and grandees of Spain, the sport of bull-fighting (hitherto confined exclusively to the aristocracy) was taken up by the Spanish people. A further impulse was generated later on under Ferdinand VII., who obtained a reversal of the anathema of the Church on condition that some of the pecuniary profits of the _corridas_ should swell the funds of the hospitals. It was, however, during the first half of the eighteenth century that bull-fighting on a popular basis, as understood and practised at the present day, took its start. Then there stepped upon the enclosed arena the first professional _Toréro_ amidst thrilling plaudits from tier above tier of encircling humanity. Never before had the bull been taken on by a single man on foot armed only with his good sword and scarlet flag--with these to pit his strength and skill against the weight and ferocity of a _toro bravo_--alone and unaided to despatch him. Such a man was Francisco Romero, erewhiles a shoemaker at Ronda--A.D. 1726--first professional _lidiador_. On his death at an advanced age, he left five sons, all craftsmen of repute, who, in honour of their sire, formed a bull-fighting guild still known as the Rondénean School--distinguished from the later Sevillian cult by its more serious and dignified attack as compared with the prettiness and "swagger" of the Sevillano. In that generation Francisco's son, Pedro Romero, appeared in rivalry with PEPE-ILLO, the new-risen star in the Sevillian firmament. It was, by the way, the master-mind of the latter which completed and perfected the reorganisation on popular lines of the national _fiesta_ after Bourbon influence had alienated the aristocracy from their ancient diversion. The rivalry between these competing exponents of the two styles commenced in 1771, the pair representing each a supreme mastery of their respective schools, and only terminated with the death of Pepe-Illo in the Plaza of Madrid, May 11, 1801. The Sevillian style has since attained pre-eminence, appealing more to the masses by its nonchalance and apparent disregard of danger. When the best features of both schools are combined--as has been exemplified in more than one brilliant exponent of the art--then the letters of his name are writ large on the _cartels_. One other famous name of that epoch demands notice--that of Costillares, who introduced the flying stroke distinguished as the _suerte de volapié_. Hitherto all _lidiadors_ had received the onset of the bull standing--the _suerte de recibir_. In the _volapié_ the charging bull is met half-way, an exploit demanding unswerving accuracy, strength of arm, and exact judgment of distance, since the spot permissible for the sword to enter, the target on the bull's neck, is no bigger than an orange. The normal difficulty of sheathing the blade at that exact point on a charging bull is great enough; but is vastly increased in the _volapié_, or flying stroke, and the effect produced on the spectators emotional in the last degree. Costillares also formalised the costumes of the different classes of bull-fighters. He flourished in 1760, and died of a broken heart owing to his right arm being injured, which incapacitated him from further triumphs. About that period Martinho introduced the perilous pole-jump, and José Candido stood out prominent for skill and extraordinary resource. Intermediate episodes of minor importance we must briefly note. Thus Godoy in 1805 stopped bull-fights, but Joseph Bonaparte in 1808 re-established the spectacle, in vain hope--a sop to Cerberus--of attaching sympathy to his dynasty. On the return of Fernando VII. in 1814, he also prohibited the shows, only to re-authorise them the following year, while in 1830 he founded a school of Toromaquia in Seville. One famous _toréro_, matriculating thereat, inaugurated a new epoch. Francisco Montes carried popular enthusiasm to its highest apex. Joy bordering on madness possessed the Madrilenean ring when Montes handled the _muleta_. Yet as a matador he had serious defects. In 1840 Cuchares appeared on the scene, and two years later the great disciple of Montes, José Redondo. The rivalry of these notable contemporaries lifted the _toréo_ once more to a level of absorbing national interest. It will have been seen that whenever two brilliant constellations flash forth simultaneously, their very rivalry commands the sympathy and supreme interest of the Spanish people. From 1852 El Tato stood out as a type of elegance and valour, the idol of the masses, till on June 7, 1859, a treacherous bull left him mutilated in the arena. Antonio Carmóna (El Gordito), commenced his career in 1857, alternating in the ring with El Tato and later with Lagartijo, the latter a brilliant _toréro_ (or player of bulls) as distinguished from a matador. Consummate in every feint and artifice, Lagartijo could befool the animals to the top of his bent, yet as a matador, the final and supreme executor, he failed. For twenty years (1867-87) the Spanish public were divided in their keen appreciation of contemporaneous masters, Lagartijo and Frascuelo. The latter, whose iron will and courage made amends for certain personal defects in the lighter role, had marvellous security in the final stroke. Lagartijo and Frascuelo accentuate an era well remembered by enthusiasts in the Classic School of the _Toréo_. In their day all Spaniards were devoted, aye, passionate adherents of one or the other: all Spain was divided into two camps, that of Lagartijo and that of Frascuelo. The actual supporters of the ring were probably no more numerous then than to-day; but toreadors breathed that old-fashioned atmosphere in which a love of the profession was supreme--an heroic unselfishness, personal skill, and valour were the ruling motives. Pecuniary interest was a thing apart. The career of the bull-fighter to-day is absolutely wanting in such virtue. Lagartijo and Frascuelo staked their lives each afternoon, through a love of their art, by the impress of honest nature, perhaps by inspiration of a woman's eyes. Into their calculations, ideas of lucre did not enter, money had no value. Then came on the scene (1887) that bright particular star, Rafael Guerra (Guerrita) celebrated and admired--and with justice. But his coming destroyed for ever the legend of the disinterested _toréro_. The lover of the art for its own sake was no more, Guerrita was a mercenary of the first water. Admittedly first of modern bull-fighters, the aspiration of his soul was the possession of bank-notes, to be the clipper of many coupons! Neither passion, nor blood, nor favour of the fair inspired his sordid soul. At the supreme moment of danger, money, only money, was the motive which actuated him. In his desire for wealth, he succeeded. His unexpected retirement from the arena in the very apogee of his glory, and carrying away the accumulation of his thrift, was a shock to this warm-hearted people. Every vestige of the romantic halo with which personal prowess and graceful presence had surrounded him was destroyed. Guerrita as a player of bulls (_toréro_) was the first in all the history of the ring. As a "matador" also he was the most complete and certain. Unlike the majority of his compeers, he was reserved in his habits, and lived apart from the bizarre and tempestuous life of the ordinary bull-fighter, with its feminine intrigues and excitements. For that reason he had many enemies amongst his set; but of his claim to be in the very first rank there has never been a question. To see Guerrita wind the silken sash around his ribs of steel, as he attired himself for the arena, was a sight his patrons considered worth going many a mile to witness.[32] Since his retirement, the show has fallen greatly, in the quality of the bull-fighter. Luis Mazzantini created a temporary revolution in the annals of toromaquia (1885), lighting up anew the enthusiasm for the _fiesta_. He came not of the usual low, half-gipsy caste, but of the class which entitled him to the _Don_ of gentle birth. Don Luis Mazzantini, the only professional bearing such a prefix, acquired at an unusually late period of life sufficient technical knowledge of bull-fighting to embolden him to enter the lists in competition with professionals. He was thirty years of age when the heavy pay of the matador induced him to risk his life in the arena. [Illustration] [Illustration] Whatever may be said of his failing as an artistic exponent of the art of Cucháres, he killed his bulls in a resolute manner, and re-animated the interest in the _corrida_, but his example was a bad one. Several men emulating his career have endeavoured to become improvised _toréros_, and, like him, to avoid the step-by-step climb to matador's rank. All have been failures. They wanted to begin where the bull-fighter of old left off. Mazzantini has retired, unscathed, from his twenty years of perilous experience in the arena, and is now a civic light in the local government of the city of Madrid. Since Guerrita, not a single matador of leading light has arisen. Reverte (1891), Antonio Fuentes (1893), and Bombita (1894) all attracted a numerous public; and after them we arrive at the lesser lights of the present day, Bombita II. and Machaquito. Notwithstanding its present decadence in all the most essential qualities, yet the _fiesta de toros_ is still, if not the very heartthrob of the nation, at least the single all-embracing symbol of the people's taste as distinguished from that of other lands. Racing has been tried and failed; there are no teeming crowds at football, nor silent watchers on the cricket-field. _La Corrida_ alone makes the Spanish holiday. CHAPTER XIX THE SPANISH FIGHTING-BULL HIS BREEDING AND TRAINING The normal British idea of a bull naturally derives colour from those stolid animals one sees at home, some with a ring through the nose, and which are only kept for stud purposes, but occasionally evince a latent ferocity by goring to death some hapless herdsman. Between such and the Spanish _Toro de Plaza_ there exists no sort of analogy. The Spanish fighting-bull is bred to fight, and the keen experience of centuries is brought to bear on the selection of the fittest--that, moreover, not only as regards the bulls, for the cows also are tested both for pluck and stamina before admission to the herd-register. The result, in effect, assures that an animal as fierce and formidable as the wildest African buffalo shall finally face the matador. The breeding of the fighting-bull forms in Spain a rural industry as deeply studied and as keenly competitive as that of prize-cattle or Derby winners in England. At the age of one year preliminary tests are made, and promising youngsters branded with the insignia of the herd. But it is the completion of the second year that marks their critical period; for then take place the trials for pluck and mettle. The brave are set aside for the Plaza, the docile destroyed or gelded; while from the chosen lot a further selection is made of the sires for future years. At these two-year-old trials, or _Tentaderos_, it is customary for the owner and his friends to assemble at the sequestered _rancho_--the event indeed becomes a rural fête, a bright and picturesque scene, typical of untrodden Spain and of the buoyant exuberance and dare-devil spirit of her people. Nowhere can the exciting scenes of the _Tentadero_ be witnessed to greater advantage than on those wide level pasturages that extend from Seville to the Bay of Cádiz. Here, far out on spreading _vega_ ablaze with wild flowers, where the canicular sun flashes yet more light and fire into the fiery veins of the Andaluz--here is enacted the first scene in the drama of the _Toréo_. For ages these flower-strewn plains have formed the scene of countless _tentaderos_, where the young bloods of Andalucia, generation after generation, rival each other in feats of derring-do, of skill, and horsemanship. The remote _estancia_ presents a scene of unwonted revelry. All night long its rude walls resound with boisterous hilarity--good-humour, gaiety, and a spice of practical joking pass away the dark hours and by daylight all are in the saddle. The young bulls have previously been herded upon that part of the estate which affords the best level ground for smart manoeuvre and fast riding, and the task of holding the impetuous beasts together is allotted to skilled herdsmen armed with long _garrochas_--four-yard lances, with blunt steel tip. All being ready, a single bull is allowed to escape across the plain. Two horsemen awaiting the moment, spear in hand, give chase, one on either flank. The rider on the bull's left assists his companion by holding the animal to a straight course. Presently the right-hand man, rising erect in his stirrups, plants his lance on the bull's _off-flank_, near the tail, and by one tremendous thrust, delivered at full speed, overthrows him--a feat that bespeaks a good eye, a firm seat, and a strong arm. Some young bulls will take two or more falls; others, on rising, will elect to charge. The infuriated youngster finds himself faced by a second foe--a horseman armed with a more pointed lance and who has been riding close behind. This man is termed _el Tentador_. Straightway the bull charges, receiving on his withers the _garrocha_ point; thrown back thus and smarting under this first check to his hitherto unthwarted will, he returns to the charge with redoubled fury, but only to find the horse protected as before. The pluckier spirits will essay a third or a fourth attack, but those that freely charge _twice_ are passed as fit for the ring. Should a young bull _twice_ decline to charge the _Tentador_, submitting to his overthrow and only desiring to escape, he is condemned--doomed to death, or at best to a life of agricultural toil. Not seldom a bull singled out from the _rodéo_ declines to escape, as expected; but, instead, charges the nearest person, on foot or mounted, whom he may chance to espy. Then there is a flutter in the dovecotes! Danger can only be averted by skilled riding or a cool head, since there is no shelter. Spanish herdsmen, however (and amateurs besides), are adepts in the art of giving "passes" to the bull--a smart fellow, when caught thus in the open, can keep a bull off him (using his jacket only) for several moments, giving time for horsemen to come up to his rescue. Even then it is no uncommon occurrence to see horseman, horse, and bull all rolling on the turf in a common ruin. Seldom does it happen that one of these trial-days passes without broken bones or accidents of one kind or another. For four to five more years, the selected bulls roam at large over the richest pasturages of the wide unfrequented prairies. Should pasture fail through drought or deluge, the bulls are fed on tares, vetch, or maize, even with wheat, for their début in public must be made in the highest possible condition. The bulls should then be not less than five, nor more than seven years old. The _tentadero_ at the present day brings together aristocratic gatherings that recall the tauromachian tournaments of old. Skill in handling the _garrocha_ and the ability to turn-over a running bull are accomplishments held in high esteem among Spanish youth. Even the Infantas of Spain have entered into the spirit of the sport, and have been known themselves to wield a dexterous lance. At length, however, the years spent in luxurious idleness on the silent plain must come to an end. One summer morning the brave herd find grazing in their midst sundry strangers which make themselves extremely agreeable to the lordly champions, now in the zenith of magnificent strength and beauty. These strangers are the _cabrestos_ (or _cabestros_, in correct Castilian), decoy-oxen sent out to fraternise for a few days with the fighting race preparatory to the _Encierro_, or operation of convoying the latter to the city whereat the _corrida_ is to take place. Each _cabresto_ has a cattle-bell suspended round its neck in order to accustom the wild herd to follow the lead of these base betrayers of the brave. Thus the noble bulls are lured from their native plains through country tracks and bye-ways to the entrance of the fatal _toril_. [Illustration: AFTER THE STROKE.] An animated spectacle it is on the eve of the _corrida_ when, amidst clouds of dust and clang of bells, the tame oxen and wild bulls are driven forward by galloping horsemen and levelled _garrochas_. The excited populace, already intoxicated with bull-fever and the anticipation of the coming _corridas_, line the way to the Plaza, careless if in the enthusiasm for the morrow they risk some awkward rips to-day. Once inside the lofty walls of the _toril_ it is easy to withdraw the treacherous _cabestros_, and one by one to tempt the bulls each into a small separate cell, the _chiquero_, the door of which will to-morrow fall before his eyes. Then, rushing upon the arena, he finds himself confronted and encircled by surging tiers of yelling humanity, while the crash of trumpets and glare of moving colours madden his brain. Then the gaudy horsemen, with menacing lances, recall his day of trial on the distant plain--horsemen now doubly hateful in their brilliant glittering tinsel. What a spectacle is presented by the Plaza at this moment!--one without parallel in the modern world. The vast amphitheatre, crowded to the last seat in every row and tier, is held for some seconds in breathless suspense; above, the glorious azure canopy of an Andalucian summer sky; below, on the yellow arena, rushes forth the bull, fresh from his distant prairie, amazed yet undaunted by the unwonted sight and bewildering blaze of colour which surrounds him. For one brief moment the vast mass of excited humanity sits spell-bound; the clamour of myriads is stilled. Then the pent-up cry bursts forth in frantic volume, for the gleaning horns have done their work, and _Buen toro! buen toro!_ rings from twice ten thousand throats. We have traced in brief outline the life-history of our gallant bull; we have brought him face to face with the matador and his Toledan blade--there we must leave him.[33] In concluding this chapter, may we beg the generous reader, should he ever enter the historic precincts of the Plaza, to go there with an open mind, to form his own opinion without prejudice or bias. Let him remember that to untrained eyes there must ever fall unseen many of the finer "passes," much of the skilled technique and science of tauromachian art. The casual spectator necessarily loses that; he perceives no more difficulty in the perilous _suerte de vol-á-pié_ than in the simpler but more attractive _suerte de recibir_, and a hundred similar details. Finally, before crystallising a judgment, critics should endeavour to see a few second-or third-rate _corridas_. It is at these that the relative values of the forces opposed--brute strength and human skill--are displayed in truer and more speaking contrast. At set bull-fights of the first-class, the latter quality is often so marked as partly to obscure the difficulties and dangers it surmounts. Watch _toréros_ of finished skill and the game seems easy--as when some phenomenal batsman, well set, knocks the best bowling in England all over the field. Yet that bowling, the expert knows, is not easy. Nor are the bulls. At second-rate fights the forces placed face to face are more evenly balanced; and there it is often the bull that scores. THE MIURA QUESTION A raging controversy, illuminative of Tauromachia, has recently split into two camps the bull-fighting world and agitated one-half of Spain. The breeding of the fighting-bull is in this country a semi-æsthetic pursuit, analogous to that of short-horns or racehorses in England, and the possession of a notable herd the ambition of many of the grandees and big landowners of Spain. Among the various crack herds that of Don Eduardo Miura of Sevilla had always occupied a prominent rank; while during recent years the power and dashing prowess of the _Miureno_ bulls had raised that breed almost to a level apart, invested with a halo of semi-mysterious quality. Captures occurred at every _corrida_; man after man had gone down before these redoubted champions, and the minds of surviving matadors--saturated one and all with gipsy-sprung superstition--began to attribute secret or supernatural powers to the dreaded herd. Not a swordsman but felt unwonted qualm when meeting a _Miureno_ on the sanded arena. Showy players with the _capa_ and the banderillos proved capable of giving attractive exhibitions, but it was another matter when the matador stood alone, face to face with his foe. Even second-class _toréros_ can, with almost any bull, show off their accomplishments in these lighter séances; but in the supreme rôle--that of killing the bull as art demands--there is no room for half-measures or deceptions. To valour, ability must be united. When those two qualities are not both coupled and balanced, then one of two things happens: Either the scene becomes a dull one, a mixture of funk and feebleness made patent all round; or disaster is at hand. This one hears forecast in the strange cries of this meridional people--from all sides come the shouts of "_Hule! Hule!_" Now _Hule_ is the name of the material with which the stretchers for the killed and wounded are covered! At this period (summer of 1908) a combination of the bull-fighting craft attempted a boycott of the Miura herd, or at least double pay for killing them. This was done secretly at first, since neither would open confession redound to the credit of the "pig-tail," nor did it promise favourable reception by the public. At this conjuncture a notable _corrida_ occurred at Seville--six _Miurenos_ being listed for the fight. Ricardo Torres (Bombita II.) despatched his first with all serenity and valour; with his second, a magnificent animal worthy of a royal pageant, he would doubtless have comported himself with equal skill but for an extraneous incident. Upon rushing into the arena this bull had at once impaled a foolhardy amateur named Pepín Rodriguez who (quite against all recognised rule) had madly sprung into the ring. The poor fellow was borne out only in time to receive the last religious rite. At the precise moment when Ricardo stepped forth to meet his foe, the murmur reached his ear--Pepín was dead, and his superstitious soul sank down to zero at that whisper from without. When the critical moment arrived--the popular matador stood pale, nerveless, incapable. Then the scorn of the mighty crowd burst forth in monstrous yells. Ricardo Torres had fallen from the pinnacle of fame to the level of a clumsy beginner. In a moment he was disgraced, his increasing reputation ruined for ever under the eyes of all the world--and that by a _Miureno_ bull. From that moment the fallen star organised his colleagues in open rebellion against the victorious breed. The line of action adopted was to abuse and libel the incriminated herd. It was urged that the bulls lacked the true qualities of dash and valour and only scored by treachery; and especially insinuated that the young bulls were expressly taught at their _tentaderos_, or trials on the open plains, to discriminate between shadow and substance--in other words, to seek the man and disdain the lure--this naturally making the rôle of matador more dangerous, and double pay was demanded. To outsiders it would appear that on the day when bulls learn this, bull-fighting must cease. A storm burst that raged all winter--all classes taking part. Spain was rent in twain; press and people, high and low, joined issue in this unseemly wrangle. We cannot here enter into detail of the various schemes, fair and unfair, whereby the bull-fighters' guild sought to justify their action and their demands and to prejudice the terrible _Miurenos_ in the public eye. They were seconded by most professionals of renown, and soon all but seven had joined the league. But the squabble with its resultant lawsuits and sordid financial aspect finally disgusted the public. Needless to add, a counter-association of bull-breeders had been forced into existence, which eventually, despite varied and particular personal interests unworthy of definition, united the opposition. Oh! it was a pretty quarrel and one in its essence peculiar to Spain. But it held the whole country engaged all winter in the throes of a semi-civil war! At the first _corrida_ of the following season--held at Alicante January 18, 1909, and graced by the presence of King Alfonso XIII. in person--the public delivered their verdict, filling the Plaza to overflowing, although the whole of the six champions were of the condemned Miura breed and the matadors, Quinito and Rerre, belonged to the recalcitrant Seven. The bull-fighters' guild had received a fatal blow. Such was the situation, the mental equilibrium between the fiercely contending factions, as the crucial period approached--the Easter _corridas_ at Seville. The _impresarios_ of that function, having full grip of the circumstance, engaged matadors of minor repute--Pepete, Moréno de Alcalá, and Martin Vasquez. All three, although but of second rank, were popular and regarded as coming men. Flaming posters announced that six champions of the Miura breed would face the swordsmen. The occasion was unique, and D. Eduardo Miura rose to meet it, presenting six bulls of incomparable beauty, magnificent in fine lines, in dash, brute-strength, and valour, yet utterly devoid (as the event proved) of guile or lurking treachery. Such animals as these six demanded a Romero, a Montes, or a Guerrita as equals; instead, these young _Toréros_ who faced them, courageous though they were, lacked calibre for such an undertaking. This _corrida_ marked an epoch, but it acquired the proportions of a catastrophe. The bye-word that "where there are bulls there are no matadors" became that afternoon an axiom. A _gettatura_, or atmosphere of superstition, surrounded the bulls and unnerved or confounded their opponents. Pepete was caught by the first bull, Moréno de Alcalá by the fourth, while Martin Vasquez (already thrice caught) succumbed to the fifth. The sixth bull thus remained unopposed champion of the Plaza--not a matador survived to face him, and it became necessary to entice an unfought bull (by means of trained oxen) to quit the arena--an event unprecedented in the age-long annals of Tauromachy! A typical incident, trivial by comparison, intervened. A youthful spectator, frenzied to madness by the scene, had seized a sword, leapt into the ring, and ... promptly met his death. * * * * * Every contention of the bull-fighters' guild had been falsified, and the association collapsed. A Sevillian paper summed up the event thus:-- The six bulls were each worthy to figure in toromaquian annals for their beautiful stamp, their lines, weight, bravery, and caste. We witnessed a tragedy when, on the death of the fifth bull, not a matador remained. But had that tragedy been caused by malice, wickedness, or treachery on the part of the bulls, surely a declaration of martial law in this city would have been demanded by not a few! But that was not so; each of the six competed in the qualities of bravery, nobility, and adaptability--such bulls are worthy of better swordsmen. CHAPTER XX SIERRA DE GRÉDOS We met, our trio, on the platform of Charing Cross--not classic but perhaps historic ground, since so many notable expeditions have started therefrom, with others of less importance. The heat in Madrid towards the end of August (1896) was not excessive--less than we had feared. We enjoyed, that Sunday, quite an excellent bull-fight, although the bulls themselves had been advertised as of "only one horn" apiece (_de un cuerno_). There was no sign, however, of any cornual deficiency as each magnificent animal dashed into the arena, although with binoculars one could detect a slight splintering of one horn-point, a defect which had caused the rejection of that animal from the herd-list. For these bulls were, in fact, of notable blood--that of Ybarra of Sevillian _vegas_--and none bearing that name appear in first-class _corridas_ save absolutely perfect and unblemished. The point illustrates the keen appreciation of quality in the fighting-bull, which in Spain goes without saying, yet may well deceive the casual stranger. Thus an American party who breakfasted with us (always keen to get the best, but not always knowing where to find it) despised the "Unicorns" and reserved themselves instead for the opera. We enjoyed an excellent fight with dashing bulls--two clearing the barrier and causing a fine stampede among the military, the police, and crowds of itinerant fruit-and water-sellers who occupy the _Entre-barreras_. These "Unicorns" proved really better bulls than at many of the formal _corridas_. Three young and rising matadors despatched the animals--two each. They were Galindo, Gavira, and Parrao--both the latter excellent. Gavira looked as if he might take first rank in his order, while Parrao displayed a coolness in the _lidia_ such as we had seldom before seen--even to stroking the bull's nose--while in the final scene he went in to such close quarters, "passing" the animal at half arm's-length, that the whole 10,000 in the Plaza held their breath. Parrao will become a first-flighter, unless he is caught, which certainly seems the more natural event. That evening we were hospitably entertained at the British Embassy, where our host, the Chargé d'Affaires, regretted that the short fourteen-days' Ortolan season had just that morning expired. Thus, quite unconsciously, was an ornithological fact elucidated. Next morning we were away by an early train, and after five hours' journey joined our staff, as prearranged. But here we committed the mistake of quartering in a country-town on the banks of the Tagus, instead of encamping in the open country outside. Bitterly did we regret having allowed ourselves to be thus persuaded. Long summer heats and parching drought had destroyed what primitive system of natural drainage may have existed in Talavera de la Reina and produced conditions that we revolt from describing. Oh! those foul effluvia amidst which men live, and feed, and sleep! With intense delight, but splitting headaches, we left the plague-spot at earliest dawn and set out for the mountain-land. For thirty odd miles our route traversed a highland plateau; a group of five great bustard, gasping in the noon-day heat, lay asleep so near the track that we tried a shot with ball. Farther north, near Medina del Campo, we had also observed these grand game-birds feeding on the ripening grapes in the vineyards. Packs of sand-grouse (_Pterocles arenarius_) with musical croak flew close around. Spanish azure magpies abounded wherever our route passed through wooded stretches, and we also observed doves, bee-eaters, stonechats, crested and calandra larks, ravens, and over some cork-oaks wheeled a serpent-eagle showing very white below. Towards evening the track began to ascend through the lower defiles of the great cordillera that now pierced the heavens ahead. Presently we entered pinewoods, resonant at dusk with the raucous voices of millions of wingless grasshoppers or locusts (we know not their precise name) that live high up in pines. Never before had we heard such strident voice in an insect. At 4000 feet we encamped beneath the pines by a lovely trout-stream. This was the rendezvous whereat by arrangement we met with our old friends the ibex-hunters of Almanzór--savage perhaps to the eye, yet beyond all doubt radiantly glad to welcome back the foreigners after a lapse of years. No mere greed of dollars inspired that enthusiasm, but solely the bond of a common passion that bound us all--that of the hunter. It was, however, but sorry hearing to listen to the reports they told us around the camp-fire. Everywhere the ibex were yearly growing scarcer, dwindling to an inevitable vanishing-point, former haunts already abandoned--or, we should rather say, swept clean. Where but a score of years before, 150 ibex had been counted in a single _montería_, our friends reckoned that exactly a dozen survived. One remark especially struck us. "There remained," with glee our friends assured us, "one magnificent old goat, a ram of twelve years, out there on the crags of Almanzór." _ONE!_ To _one_ sole big head had it dwindled? [Illustration: "MINOR GAME"] The valley of the Tagus divides two geological periods, and perhaps at one time divided Europe from a retiring Africa. Marked differences distinguish the fauna on either side of the river, and that of the north (with its 10,000 feet altitude) promised reward worthy the labours of investigation. Not a yard of that great mountain-land of Grédos has been trodden by British foot (save our own) since the days of Wellington. Hence it was an object with us to secure, not only ibex heads, but specimens of the smaller mammalia that dwell in those heights. Our mountain friends assembled round the camp-fire--twenty-five in all--each promised to take up this unaccustomed quest and to regard as game every hitherto unconsidered _bicho_ of the hills, whether feathered, furred, or scaled. If ibex failed us, at least a harvest in such minor game we meant to assure.[34] Three o'clock saw us astir, bathing in the dark burn while moonlight still streamed through sombre pines. Camp meanwhile was broken up; tents and gear packed on ponies and mules, breakfast finished--we were off, heavenwards. Then, just as the laden pack-animals filed through the burn, there rode up a man--he had ridden all night--and bore a message that changed our exuberant joy to grief--bad news from home. There could be no doubt--the writer must return at once. Within five minutes I had decided to make for a point on the northern railway beyond the hills and distant some sixty miles as the crow flies. Baggage and battery were abandoned; a handbag with a satchel of provisions and a wine-skin formed my luggage, and, leaving my companions in this wild spot, I set forth in the grey dawn on a barebacked mule devoid of saddle, bridle, or stirrups, and accompanied by two of our hill-bred lads, one riding pillion behind or running alongside in turn. Where the grey ramparts of the Risco del Fraile and the Casquerázo frown on a rugged earth below I parted with my old pals, they to continue the ibex-hunt, I on my mournful homeward way. Bee-eaters poised and chattered, brilliant butterflies (whose names I forgot to note), abounded as we rode along those fearful edges and boulder-studded steeps. Six hours of this brought us to a rock-poised hamlet of the sierra. The landlord of the _posada_ was also the _Alcalde_ (mayor) of the district, and even then presiding over a meeting of the council (_ayuntamiento_). Amidst dogs, children, fleas, and dirt, along with my two goat-herd friends, we made breakfast. Thence over the main pass of Navasomera--no road, not the vestige of a track, and a tremendous ravine stopped us for hours, and for a time threatened to prove impassable. By patience and recklessness we lowered mule and ourselves down scrub-choked screes, and after some of the roughest work of my life gained a goat-herd's track which led upwards to the pass. After clearing the reverse slope we traversed for twenty miles a dreary upland (6000 feet) till we struck the head-waters of the Albirche river, where my lads tickled half-a-dozen trout and a _frog_! Kites beat along the stony hills, where wheatears and stonechats fluttered incessant, with dippers and sandpipers on the burn below. We halted at a lonely _venta_ (wayside wine-shop), where assembled goat-herds courteously made room, and passed me their wine-skin. Presently one of them asked whither I went, remarking, "Your Excellency is clearly not of this province." Three or four skinny rabbits hung on the wall, and the landlord, after inquiring what his Excellency would eat, assured me he had plenty of everything, was yet so strong in his commendation of _rabbit_ that I knew those wretched beasties were the only food in the place. Presently with my two lads, and surrounded by mules, cats, dogs, poultry, wasps, and fleas, we sat down to dine on trout, rabbits-_á-pimiento_, and _chorizo_ (forty horse-power sausage). I believe my boys also ate the frog! Two hours after dark we were still dragging along the upland, while the outlines of the jagged cordillera behind had faded in gathering night. I could scarce have sat much longer on that bony saddleless mule when a light was descried far below, and, on learning that we were still twenty miles from our destination, I decided to put up for the night at that little _venta_ of Almenge, sleeping on bare earth alongside my boys, and close by the heels of our own and sundry other mules. [Illustration] At breakfast there sat down, besides ourselves and hostess, sundry muleteers, all sympathetic and commiserate since my mission had become known. I was hurrying homewards to distant Inglaterra--so Juanito had explained--because my brother was _poco bueno_--not very well. The hostess looked hard, and said, "Señor, it must be _muy grave_ (very serious), or they would not have telegraphed for the _caballero_ to return." Many more hours of tedious mule-riding followed ere at last from lowering spurs we could see the end of the hills and the white track winding away till lost to view across the plain below. Here in the highest growth of trees were grey shrikes (_Lanius meridionalis_), adults and young, besides missel-thrushes, turtle-doves, etc. On the level corn-lands below, which we now traversed for miles, we observed bustards (these, we were told, retired to lower levels in September)--nothing else beyond the usual larks and kestrels common to all Spain. [Illustration: SCENES IN SIERRA DE GRÉDOS. MOREZÓN. CUCHILLAR DE NAVÁJAS. ALMANZÓR. THE CIRCO DE GRÉDOS. LAGUNA DE GRÉDOS. A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW--SHOWS THE AMEÁL AND CUCHILLAR DEL GUETRE.] LOOKING SOUTH ACROSS LAGUNA. HERMANITOS-- CASQUERÁZO.] It was past noon ere the long ride was completed, and we entered the ancient city that boasts bygone glories, splendid temples, and memories of mediæval magnificence, but which is now ... well, Avila. But one feature of Avila demands passing note--its massive walls, withstanding the centuries, full forty feet in height by fifteen feet broad. An hour later the Sûd-express dashed up whistling into the station, to the genuine alarm of my leather-clad mountain-lads, who recoiled in fear from an unwonted sight. They, noticing that the officials of the train also spoke a foreign tongue (French), asked me if such things (_i.e._ railway trains) were "only for your Excellencies"--meaning for foreigners, _vos-otros_. At Paris a reassuring telegram filled me with joy indescribable, but in London and at York further messages intensified anxiety. On August 29 I reached home, and on the evening of September 3 doubts were resolved, and the silver cord was loosed. * * * * * The Plaza de Almanzór, with its immediate environment, presents a panorama of mountain-scenery unrivalled, not only in the whole cordillera of Grédos, but probably in all Spain--it may be questioned if the world itself contains a more striking landscape than that known as the "Circo de Grédos." Briefly put, a vast central amphitheatre of rock--really four-square (though known as the "Circo") in the depths of which nestle an alpine lake--is enclosed by stupendous rock-walls and precipices of granite; some of these smooth and sheer, others rugged and disintegrated or broken up by snow-filled gorges of intricacies that defy the power of pen to describe. Three of these vast mural ramparts stand almost rectangular, the fourth shoots out obliquely, traversing the abysmal _enclave_ and all but closing the fourth side of its quadrilateral. The rough sketch-map at p. 141 shows the configuration better than written words, while the photos convey, so far as such can, some idea of the scenery.[35] The actual peak of Almanzór which dominates the whole "Circo," as viewed from the north, culminates in a flattened cone, the summit being split into two huge rock-needles or pinnacles separated by an unfathomed fissure between. Only one of these needles--and that the lower--has yet been scaled. The loftier of the pair, though it only surpasses its fellow by a few yards in height, is so sheer, its surface so devoid of crevice or hand-hold, that the ascent (without ropes and other appliances) appears quite impracticable. Will the reader seat himself in imagination at the spot marked (*) on the map. Surveying the scene from this point, the whole opposite horizon is filled by the Altos de Morezón--a jagged and turreted escarpment pierces the sky, while its frowning walls dip down, down in endless precipices to the inky-black waters of the Laguna far below. Towards the left one's view is interrupted by an extraordinary mass of upstanding granite, disintegrated and blackened by the ages, known as the Ameál de Pablo--in itself a virgin mountain, as yet untrodden by human foot. This colossus, glittering with snow-striæ, surmounts the oblique ridge aforesaid, that of the Cuchillar del Guetre, which traverses two-thirds of the "Circo," leaving but a narrow gap between its own extremity and the opposite heights of Morezón. Continuing towards the right, there rises to yet loftier altitudes the black contour of the Risco del Fraile, beloved of ibex; while adjacent on the north-west, but on slightly lower level, uprear from the snow-flecked skyline three more unscaled masses--rectangular monoliths like giant landmarks. This trio is distinguished as Los Hermanitos de Grédos, their abruptness of outline almost appalling as set off by an azure background. Farther to the right (in the angle of the square) two more mountain-masses--knife-edged, jagged, and embattled along the crests--frown upon one another across a gorge rent through their very bowels. These two are the Alto del Casquerázo and the Cuchillar de las Navájas, while the interposed abyss--the Portilla de los Machos--cuts clean through the great cordillera, forming a natural gateway between its northern and its southern faces. As the name implies, this gorge is the main route of the ibex from their much-loved Riscos del Fraile to their second chief resort, the Riscos del Francés, which occupy the southern face of the sierra whose snowfields defy even the heats of August. From our present standpoint the southern wall of the Circo--the Cuchillar de las Navájas--is not visible. This section of the quadrilateral is equally abrupt and intricate, dropping in massive bastions towards the level of the lake. Just beyond the Plaza de Almanzór a second deep gorge or "pass"--the Portilla Bermeja--unites the northern and the southern faces. Behind where we sit lies yet another panorama of terrible wildness, again dominated by rock-walls of fantastic contour--the valley of Las Cinco Lagunas. But right here our rock-descriptive powers give out--we can only refer to the map. [Illustration: GRIFFON VULTURE AND NEST] CHAPTER XXI SIERRA DE GRÉDOS (_Continued_) IBEX-HUNTING Why try to describe the distress of that morning or the efforts it cost, during fourteen hours, to gain the summits of Grédos? Again and again what we had taken for our destination proved to be some intervening ridge with another desperate gorge beyond. Suffice it that it was an hour after dark ere we finally lifted the cargoes from the dead-beat beasts. Presently the moon arose, and against her pale effulgence towered the gnarled and pinnacled peaks of Almanzór, piercing the very skies--a lovely but to me an appalling scene. Their altitude is 8800 feet. Our whole plan and ambitions in this expedition were to find and stalk the ibex--the very undertaking which had proved beyond our powers during two strenuous efforts in former years as readers of _Wild Spain_ already know. Now in all stalking it must be obvious even to non-technical readers that the first essential is to bring under survey of the binoculars a very considerable extent of game-country every day; but here, in the chaotic jumble of perpendicular or impending precipice or smooth rock-faces inclined at angles that we dare not traverse, any such extensive survey is a sheer impossibility. Alpine climbers or others in the fullest enjoyment of youth and activity might get forward at a reasonable speed. To us, already past that stage, the feat was impossible, _i.e._ by our own sole exertions. That we, of course, knew in advance; but our plan was to supplement our own powers by availing the splendid rock-climbing abilities of our friends, the goat-herds of Almanzór, on whom we relied for at least finding the game in the first instance. [Illustration: "AT THE APEX OFF ALL THE SPAINS." (IBEX ON THE PLAZA DE ALMANZÓR.)] Ramón and Isidóro were away by the first glint of dawn, disappearing in opposite directions so as to encompass both the surrounding rock-ranges and to mark ibex in stalkable positions. We awaited their return in camp, not only with anxiety, but with some impatience, since the temperature had fallen so low that no wraps or blankets served to keep us warm while inactive. After a fruitless search of four hours, the scouts returned; no better results attended a second morning and a third--nor our impatience. Clearly the second resource, that of "driving," must now be tried. It was only ten o'clock that third morning, and already the drivers, who had left at dawn so as to reach agreed positions in case of the failure of resource No. 1, would be approaching the fixed points four miles away on the encircling heights, whereat, by signal, they would know whether to proceed with the "drive" or to return by the circuitous route they had gone. Meanwhile we have ourselves to reach the "passes" in the heights above, and the scramble and struggle which that ascent involved we must leave readers to imagine. Bertram gets through such work fairly well, but the writer, a generation older, is fain to choose a lower place, reputed a likely "pass." Here, after waiting an hour, we descried the drivers showing-up at different points of those encircling Riscos de Morezón, climbing like flies down perpendicular faces, disappearing in gorges, and doing all that specialised hunters can. But not an ibex came our way. When we reassembled, it proved that three goats had been seen, one a ram. Thus ended that day--cruel work amidst lovely though terrible scenery--and never a wild-goat within our sight. On the morrow our selected positions were to be yet nearer the heavens above than those of yesterday--along the highest skylines of Grédos, between the Plaza de Almanzór and the Ameál. From our camp my own post was pointed out, a niche in that far-away impossible ridge. How long, I asked Ramón, do you imagine it will take me to reach it? Our friends, who, lean and lythe of frame, a specialised race of mountaineers, mock mountain-heights and appreciate too little (though they recognise) our relative weakness, reply, "Two hours." But at that precise moment, while I yet scanned with binoculars the scene of this supreme effort, examining in a species of horror that infinity of piled rock-masses, their details cruelly developed in a blazing sunlight, just then, across the field of the glass soared a single lammergeyer. Now I know that these giant birds-of-prey span some ten feet from wing to wing, and the tiny speck that this one, reduced by distance, appeared on the object-glass helped me to gauge what lay before us. A black point that from camp I had mentally noted as a landmark proved to be a mass of dolomite seamed with interjected striæ of glistening felspar, big as a village church! [Illustration: "THE WAY OF AN EAGLE IN THE AIR" (LAMMERGEYER--_Gypaëtus barbatus_)] I had demanded four hours, and precisely within that period reached my celestial pinnacle. Bertram was beyond and higher still--where, I could not see. But my own post seemed to me as sublime as even an ibex-hunter could desire, at the culminating apex of the Spains and the centre of dispersal of four giant gorges each bristling with bewildering chaos of crags and rock-ruin, while above, to right and left, towered yet loftier _riscos_. At these serene altitudes life appeared non-existent. The last signs of a cryptogamic vegetation we had left below, and I could now see eagles or vultures soaring almost perpendicularly beneath and reduced by distance to moving specks. Yet shortly before reaching our posts, along one of those awesome shelves with a 500-feet drop below, a touch from Ramón drew my attention to a truly magnificent old ibex-ram in full view, quietly skipping from crag to crag some 300 yards above. So slow and deliberate were his movements, with frequent halts to gaze, that time was allowed to gain a rational position and to enjoy for several minutes a glorious view through binoculars. Twice he halted in front of small snow-slopes, against which those curving horns were set off in perfect detail. Then with measured movements, making good each foot-hold, alternated by marvellous bounds to some rock-point above, the grand wild-goat vanished from view. His course led into a rock-region that already our drivers were encompassing, hence we had strong hopes that we might not have seen the last of him. Two herds of ibex, it transpired, were enclosed in this beat; one comprising nine females and small beasts, the second two with a two-year-old ram; but our big friend was seen no more. I had, however, enjoyed a scene that went far to compensate for the tribulations it had cost. Late that night the two lads who had accompanied A. returned to camp. After riding fifteen hours on Wednesday, he could do no more, slept at a _venta_, and reached Avila (which he considers twenty leagues from Ornillos, the spot where he left us) at noon on Thursday, where he caught the Sûd-express, and to-night will be in Paris. He sent us a few pencilled words, urging us to utmost endeavours with the wild-goats, as this will be in all probability our _last chance_. I agree, for the natives kill off male and female alike, only a few wily old rams remain, a mere fraction of the stock which formerly existed. The shepherds who come to these high tops to pasture their herds for a few weeks each summer have chances to kill the ibex which they do not neglect. When Don Manuel Silvela, the statesman, was here twenty years ago, some 150 ibex were driven past his post above the Laguna de Grédos. Not a quarter of that number now survive in all the range. _August 26._--Everything outside the tents was frozen solid last night, but with sunrise the temperature goes up with a bound. We had trout for breakfast, caught by hand from the burn below. To-day the work was easier, for the two beats were both small and more or less on the same level as our camp. The first lasted five hours, but gave no result. We then moved to the west, always rising till we found ourselves on the summit of another ridge looking down into a mighty gorge and upon the mysterious rock-cradled Cinco Lagunas de Grédos. The plains of Castile lay beneath us like a map, towns and villages distinguishable through the glass though not without. Bertram was placed in a "pass," about 100 yards wide, piercing the topmost peaks, myself in a similar _portilla_ rather lower down. An hour later Dionýsio, who had climbed the crag above me, whence he could see into the abyss beneath, signalled as he hung over the edge of his eyrie that something was coming. Then he slid down to my side to tell me that three goats were moving slowly up the gorge. Dionýsio returned to his ledge, and for half an hour I enjoyed that state of breathless suspense when one expects each moment to be face to face with a coveted trophy. The three goats, I perceived, must pass through this _portilla_ on one side or the other of the rock behind which I lay expectant. At last there caught my ear the gentle patter of horned hoofs on rocks, but oh!... it was succeeded by the bang of a gun. Dionýsio had fired from his ledge twenty yards above me. The three ibex had come on to within ten yards of where I lay, looking, as it were, down a tunnel. The wind had been right enough, but it appeared an erratic puff had elected to blow straight from us to them. They caught it, and in a flash disappeared down the ravine, Dionýsio, as he hung from the ledge, giving them a parting shot. That was friend Dionýsio's version of the event. What actually occurred, all who are experienced in this wild-hunting will divine without our telling. I ran from my post along the lip of the abyss--luckily there was a bit of fairly good going--hoping to get a chance as the game turned upwards again; for at once, on hearing a shot, the beaters far below joined in a chorus of wild yells to push them upwards. This they succeeded in doing, but the goats passed beyond my range. I now saw there were four in all--three females and a handsome ram. Dionýsio made a further effort to turn them, which so far succeeded that the ram separated and bounded up the rocks towards the higher pass, where he ran the gauntlet of Bertram within thirty yards. Now the whole stress and burden of a laborious expedition fell upon the youngest shoulders, for B. was barely out of his teens, and more skilled with shot-gun than with ball. The responsibility proved almost too great--almost, but not quite; for one bullet had taken effect, and the rocks beyond the little "pass" were sprinkled with blood. The late hour, 4 P.M., and the long scramble campwards forbade our following the spoor that night, but the ram was recovered some two miles beyond the point where we had last seen him--horn measurements 24-1/8 inches, by 8-1/4 inches basal circumference. [Illustration: TWO SPANISH IBEX SHOT IN SIERRA DE GRÉDOS, JULY, 1910. MARQUÉS DE VILLAVICIOSA DE ASTEREAS. MARQUÉS DE VIANA. TWO SPANISH IBEX SHOT IN SIERRA DE GRÉDOS, JULY, 1910.] The beaters reported having seen several ibex during this drive, two small rams, females, and kids--thirteen in all. We devoted a couple more days to this section of the sierra, but both proved unsuccessful so far as regards the one grand ibex-ram which we had seen. Here, on the Riscos del Fraile, and later on at Villarejo, we each spared small beasts; but at last were fain to be content with a three-year-old goat, whose head adorns our walls. Before daylight we were aroused by the breaking-up of camp, and by seven o'clock had taken a downward course from that lofty eyrie which we had occupied for ten days. It was a lovely ride with bright sunlight lighting up every detail of the mountain scenery, while every mile brought evidence of the lowering altitude--first, in green herbage, then in brushwood and stunted trees, till at mid-day we reached the region of pines in the cool valley of the river Tormes. Here we halted, and while lunch was being prepared, enjoyed a swim in those crystal torrents. That afternoon was devoted to trout, but with meagre results. The stream gleamed like polished steel, everything that moved in the waters could be seen, and doubtless its denizens enjoyed a similar advantage as regards things in the other element. At any rate, none save the smaller trout would look at a fly; so we continued our journey, following the river-side in the direction of the mountains of Villarejo. Dionýsio and Caraballo had gone to a hamlet lower down for bread and wine. There was no bread, and having to wait till it was baked, delayed the march. Meanwhile, we wandered on through pine-woods with the beautiful stream fretting and foaming, and collecting a few bird-specimens, though none of much interest. We did, however, come across two gigantic nests of the black vulture, flat platforms of sticks, each superimposed on the summit of a lofty pine. Even in these uplands the black vulture nests in March, when the whole land is yet enveloped in snow, and while frequent snowstorms sweep down the valleys. So closely does the parent vulture incubate, that she allows herself to be completely buried on her nest beneath the drifting snow. On these hanging steeps the eyries are overlooked from above, yet not a vestige of the sitting vulture can be seen until she is disturbed by a blow from an axe on the trunk, or by a shot fired--then off she goes, dislodging a cloud of snow from her three-yard wings as she launches into space. [Illustration: BLACK VULTURE (_Vultur monachus_)] The black vulture lays but one huge egg, often boldly marked and suffused with dark-brown and rusty blotches and splashes, in contrast with the eggs of the griffon vulture, which are usually colourless or, at most, but faintly shaded. The latter, so abundant in Andalucia, is remarkably scarce in Grédos, where we saw rather more eagles than vultures. The chief bird-forms of the high sierra were ravens and choughs, ring-ouzels, rock-thrush and black-chat (_Dromolaea leucura_). The alpine accentor (_Accentor collaris_) and alpine pipit (_Anthus spipoletta_) also reach to the highest summits; the blue thrush lower down. In the valley of the Tormes and among the pines many British species were at home, such as blackbirds and thrushes, redstarts, nuthatches, and Dartford warblers; besides the two southern wheatears, since found to be but _one_ dimorphic form! THE RISCOS DE VILLAREJO Three hours later the mule-train overtook us, and we pursued the track upwards towards the Riscos de Villarejo till darkness obliged us to encamp. The jagged outline ahead, marking our destination, looked far away; we could go no nearer to-night, and outspanned on a tiny lawn on the mountain-slope. Once more we had left tree and shrub far below, but the dry _piorno_-scrub made fire enough to cook a frugal supper. The hunters, with their stew-pots balanced on stones, sat round us in a circle. Next morning we were alert, as usual, before the dawn--called at 4 A.M.--and off again on another terrible climb towards the summits. It is no mild trudge through turnips this 1st of September, but one more effort to interview in his haunts the Spanish mountain-ram. At 6000 feet we reached a point beyond which no domestic beast can go. Here, leaving our own men to encamp, the upward climb with the hunters begins. This day and each of the two following were devoted solely to stalking, each of us separately with his guide taking a diverging course along two of the lower ridges of the sierra. Two female ibex were descried in a position which might without difficulty have been stalked. These, however, we left in peace; though, as it proved, they were the only animals seen before we regained camp, an hour after dark, tired out and empty-handed once more. On the fourth day we drove this same rock-region, but without success, only two goats, both small males, being seen. The entire failure of this venture was a disappointment, as ibex were known to frequent these reefs. An explanation was suggested that a herd of domestic goats had approached too near their exclusive wild congeners, which had fled to a neighbouring mountain. That mountain, we arranged, should be explored at daylight on the morrow by two of our hunters. The cold at night in camp was intense, and our Andalucian retainers complained bitterly, although they kept an enormous fire going; yet during the day the heat had been excessive, and the sun burns terribly at these altitudes. The following morning we tried a comprehensive drive encompassing two gorges composed of sublimely grand rocks. As I look over the edge of the black pinnacle that forms my post the sheer drop below is appalling, and above me tower similar masses in rugged and frowning splendour. But not a goat was seen till quite late in the afternoon, when two females slowly approaching were descried. For a mile we watched them, so deliberate was their progress, till they disappeared through the very "pass" where A. had shot his some five years before. _September 6._--Our scouts returned last night, having failed to locate ibex on the opposite mountain; so we made a final effort on the Riscos of Villarejo--again blank. Well! we have done our best for six days on those terrible rocks, on which we must now turn our backs for the present. At the village of Arénas de San Pedro we bade good-bye to all our people; even their wives (clad in the same short skirts of greens and other brilliant hues we had noticed in '91, for fashions change slowly in the sierra) came down from Guisando to say farewell to the Ingléses. Here Ramón brought in the head of Bertie's ibex shot the week before; Ramón presented me with his powder-horn and bullet-pouch as a keepsake, and Juanito with a mountain-staff. Our visit had marked an epoch in the simple annals of the sierra and of its honest and primitive inhabitants. * * * * * To-day we rejoice to add that, as already fully set forth at pp. 141-142, wild-goats may be counted in troops on the erewhiles ibex-denuded crags of Almanzór. CHAPTER XXII AN ABANDONED PROVINCE (ESTREMADURA) Can this really be Europe--crowded Europe? For four long days we have traversed Estremenian wilds, and during that time have scarce met a score of folk, nor seen serious evidence of effective human occupation. At first our northward way led through rolling undulations, the western foothills of the long Sierra Moréna, clad with the everlasting gum-cistus, with euonymus, a few stunted trees, and the usual aromatic brushwood of the south. Only at long intervals--say a league or two apart--would some tiny cot, of woodcutter perhaps, or goat-herd, gleam white amidst the rolling green monotone. Here and there wild-thyme (_cantuéso_) empurpled the slopes as it were August heather, but the chief beauty-spot was the rose-like flower of the cistus, now (May) in fullest bloom--waxy white, with orange centre and a splash like black velvet on each petal. Next, for a whole day we ride through open forest of evergreen oak and wild-olive, the floor carpeted with tasselled grasses, tufty broom, and fennel. We encamp where we list and cut firewood, none saying us nay or inquiring by what authority we do these things. One evening while we investigated an azure magpie's nest in an ilex hard by the tents, four donkey-borne peasants appeared. Though they rode close by, yet they showed no sign, passing silent and incurious. The few natives we met hereabouts all seemed listless, apathetic, uncommunicative, in striking contrast with their sprightly southern neighbours beyond the hills in Andalucia. We read that Estremadura is a "paludic" province and unhealthy; possibly the malarial microbe has sapped energy. To forest, next day succeeded more rolling hills with ten-foot bush and scattered trees. From a crag-crowned ridge, the culminating point of these, there fell within view three human habitations--_three_, in a vista of thirty miles--two tall castles perched in strong places, the third apparently a considerable farm. The landscape is often lovely enough, park-like, with infinite sites for country halls; yet all, all seems abandoned by man and beast. The few wild creatures observed included common and azure magpies, hoopoes, and bee-eaters, rollers, doves, kestrels, with a sprinkling of partridge and an occasional hare. A landowner in this province (Badajoz) endeavoured to preserve the game on his estate. At first all went well. As their enemies decreased, partridge rapidly multiplied. But thereupon occurred an influx of extraneous vermin (foxes and wild-cats) from adjacent wilds, and Nature restored her former exiguous balance of life. [Illustration: ROLLER (_Coracias garrula_)] The scene changes. For the next twenty miles there is not a tree or a bush, hardly a living thing on those dreary levels save larks and bustards. The hungry earth shows brown and naked through its scanty herbage, stript by devouring locusts. Travelling by rail the abandonment seems yet more striking, since thus we cover more ground. True, along the line cluster some slight attempts at cultivation elsewhere absent; but these amount to nothing--a few patches of starveling oats, six to eighteen inches high, with scarce a score of blades to the yard! Two men are reaping with sickles. Each has his donkey tethered hard by, and at nightfall will ride to his distant village, a league away maybe, hidden in some unnoticed hollow. Scarce a village have we seen. The monotony wearies. The abject barrenness of Estremadura, its lifelessness, is actually worse, more pronounced and depressing, than we had anticipated. Now the far horizon on the north bristles with battlements, towers, and spires--that is Trujillo, an old-world fortress of the Caesars, crowning a granite koppie in yon everlasting plain. The ten leagues that yet intervene recall, in colour and contour, a mid-Northumbrian moor, wild and bleak--here the home of bustards, stone-curlew, sand-grouse, ... and of locusts. From the topmost turrets of Trujillo let us take one more survey of this Estremenian wilderness ere yet we pronounce a final judgment. [Illustration: TRUJILLO] Ascend the belfry of Santa Maria la Mayor and you command an unrivalled view. Spread out beneath your gaze stretch away tawny expanses of waste and veld to a radius averaging forty miles, and everywhere girt-in by encircling mountains. To the north Grédos' snowy peaks pierce the clouds, 100 kilometres away, with the Sierra de Gata on their left, Bejar on the right. To the eastward the Sierra de Guadalupe,[36] far-famed for its shrine to Our Lady of that ilk, closes that horizon; while to westward the ranges of Sta. Cruz and Montánches shut in the frontier of Portugal. What a panorama--a circle eighty miles across! Yet in all that expanse you can detect no more evidence of human presence than you would see in equatorial Africa--surveying, let us say, the well-known Athi Plains from the adjoining heights of Lukénia. We are aware that already, in describing La Mancha, we have employed an African simile; but here, in Estremadura, the comparison is yet more apposite and forceful than in the wildest of Don Quixote's country. We will vary it by likening Estremadura rather to the highlands of Transvaal--the land of the back-veld Boer--than to Equatoria. Here, as there, rocky koppies stud the wastes, and (differing from La Mancha) water-courses traverse them, with intermittent pools surviving even in June, stagnant and pestilent. Such in Africa would be jungle-fringed--worth trying for a lion! Here their naked banks scarce provide covert for a hare. [Illustration: "SCAVENGERS"] An index of the poverty-stricken condition of Estremadura is afforded by the comparative absence of the birds-of-prey. Never do the soaring vultures--elsewhere so characteristic of Spanish skies--catch one's eye, and very rarely an eagle or buzzard. A province that cannot support scavengers promises ill for mankind. In his mirror-like "Notes from Spain," Richard Ford suggested that the vast unknown wildernesses of Estremadura would, if explored, yield store of wealth to the naturalist, and each succeeding naturalist (ourselves included) followed that clue. Therein, however, lurked that old human error, _ignotum pro mirabili_. Deserted by man, the region is equally avoided by bird and beast. We write generally and in full sense of local exceptions--that wild fallow-deer, for example, find here one, possibly their only European home;[37] that red deer of superb dimensions, roe, wolves, and wild-boars abound on Estremenian sierra and _vega_. Then, too, there may well be isolated spots of interest in 20,000 square miles, but which escaped our survey. Yet what we write represents the essential fact--Estremadura is a barren lifeless wilderness and offers no more attraction to naturalist than to agriculturist. The cause of all this involves questions not easily answered. In earlier days the case may have been different. Obviously the Romans thought highly of Estremadura and meant to run it for all it was worth. The Caesars were no visionaries, and such colossal works as their reservoirs and aqueducts at Merida, the massive amphitheatre and circus at the same city (a half-completed bull-ring stands alongside in pitiful contrast), besides their construction of a first-class fortress at Trujillo, all attest a matured judgment. After the Romans came the Goths, and they, too, have left evidence of appreciation (though less conspicuous) alike in city and country. Four hundred years later the Arabs overthrew the Goths on Guadalete (A.D. 711), and within two years had overrun two-thirds of Spain. But the Moor (so far as we can see) despised these barren uplands, or perhaps assessed them at a truer value--a single strong outpost (Trujillo) in an otherwise worthless region. Much or little, however, each of those successive conquerors found _some_ use for Estremadura. A totally different era opened with the fall of Moslem dominion. After the _Reconquista_ and subsequent extermination of the Moors (seventeenth century), Estremadura was utterly abandoned, by Cross and Crescent alike, till the highland shepherds of the Castiles and of León, looking down from its northern frontier, saw in these lower-lying wastes a useful winter-grazing. Then commenced seasonal nomadic incursions thereto, pastoral tribes driving down each autumn their flocks and herds, much as the Patriarchs did in Biblical days--or the Masai in East Africa till yesterday. Though the land itself was ownerless, shadowy prescriptive rights gradually evolved, and under the title of _Mestas_ continued to be recognised by the pastoral nomads till abolished by Royal Decree in the sixteenth century. From that date commenced the subdivision of Estremadura into the present large private estates--again recalling the back-veld Boers, who hate to live one within sight of another, except that here owners are non-resident. All this may explain superficially the existing desolation. The essential causes, however, are, we believe, (1) barrenness of soil; and (2) an enervating climate, fever-infected by stagnant waters, dead pools, and ubiquitous shallow swamps that poison the air and produce mosquitoes in millions. Gazing in reflective mood upon those magnificent memorials of Roman rule at Merida, one is tempted to wonder whether, after all, the silent ruins (with a stork's nest on each parapet) do not yet point the true way to Estremenian prosperity--IRRIGATION (plus energy--a quality one misses in Estremadura). TRUJILLO Founded 2000 years back (by Augustus Caesar), this out-of-the-world city has a knack of periodically dropping out of history--skipping a few centuries at a time--meanwhile presumably dragging on its own dreamy unrecorded existence, "by the world forgot," till some fresh incident forces it on the stage once more. There were stirring times here while, for near a thousand years, the upland vegas were swept and ravaged by three successive waves of foreign invasion. Then Trujillo relapsed into trance, skipped the middle ages, and awoke to find at its gates another foreign foe--this time the French. And the city reflects these vicissitudes. The Roman fortress, magnificent in extent and military strength, completely covers the rugged granite heights, imposing still in crumbling ruin. Forty-foot ramparts with inner and outer defences, bastions and flanking towers, machicolated and pierced for arrow fire, crown the whole circuit of the koppie. Signs of ancient grandeur everywhere meet one's eye; but contrasts pain at every turn. For filthy swine to-day defile palaces; donkeys are stalled in sculptured _patios_ whence armoured knight on Arab steed once rode forth to clatter along the stone-paved ravelins that led to the point of danger. From mullioned embrasures above, whence the Euterpes and Lalagés of old waved tender adieux, now peer slatternly peasants; crumbling battlements form homes for white owls and bats, kestrels, hoopoes, and a multitude of storks such as can nowhere else be seen congregated in a single city. The sense of desolation is accentuated by finding such feathered recluses as blue rock-thrush and blackchat actually nesting in the very citadel itself. The citadel marks the era of war. The Goths followed and despised fortifications. Their ornate palaces, enriched with escutcheons and sculptured device, lie below, outside the Roman walls. After the Goths and after the Moors, Trujillo enjoyed a transient awakening when Pizarro, son of an Estremenian swine-herd, with Cortez (also born hard by), swept the New World from Mexico to the Andes, and the glory of her sons, with the gold of the Incas, poured into the city. Thereafter destiny altered. Instead of consolidating new-won dominions by fostering commerce, exploiting their resources by establishing forts and factories, plantations, harbours, and the like, Spain directed her energies to missionising. Instead of commercial companies with fleets of merchantmen, she sent out sacred Brotherhoods, friars of religious orders, and studded the New World with empty names, all acts right enough and laudable in their own proper time and place. * * * * * Trujillo boasts an industry in the manufacture of a rough red-brown earthenware, chiefly tall water-jars, amphora-shaped, which damsels carry upright on their heads with marvellous balance; and iron-spiked dog-collars as here represented. These are not suitable for lap-dogs, but for the huge mastiffs employed in guarding sheep and which, without such protection, would be devoured by wolves! [Illustration: WOLF-PROOF DOG-COLLAR (Six-inch diameter.)] Hitherto our journeys have led us chiefly through the Estremenian plain, but after passing Plasencia the country changes. We enter the outliers of those great sierras that shut out Estremadura from León and Castile, from Portugal--and the world! Here one quickly perceives signs of greater prosperity, due in part to the heavier rainfall from the hills, to a slightly richer soil, but mainly to the superior energy of hill-folk. Wherever the soil warrants it, cultivation is pushed right up amidst the jungled slopes of the hills. In the folds of the sierra grow magnificent woods of Spanish chestnut with some walnut trees, and among these we observed many fresh species of birds, including:--nuthatch (not seen elsewhere in Spain), green woodpecker, common (but no azure) magpies, golden orioles, pied and spotted fly-catchers, grey and white wagtails (breeding), whitethroats and nightingales, longtailed tits, woodlarks, corn-buntings, rock-sparrows, and quite a number of warblers (spectacled, rufous, and subalpine, Bonelli's and melodious willow-warblers), besides the usual common species--serins, chaffinches, robins, wrens, and so on. On the sterile upland plateaux, both here and in Castile, the black-bellied sand-grouse breeds, as well as stone-curlew, bustard, and the usual larks and chats. [Illustration] GRANADILLA At the extreme northern verge of the plain one encounters a singular survival of long-past and forgotten ages, the "fenced city" of Granadilla, so absolutely unspoilt and unchanged by time that one breathes for a spell a pure mediæval air. Granadilla is mentioned in no book that we possess; but it stands there, nevertheless, perched on a rocky bluff above the rushing Alagón, and entirely encompassed by a thirty-foot wall. Not a single house, not a hut, shows up outside that rampart, and its single gate is guarded by a massive stone-built tower. This tower, we were told by a local friend, was erected after the "Reconquest" (which here occurred about 1300), but the bridge which spans the Alagón, immediately below, is attributed to the Romans--more than a thousand years earlier! and the town itself to the Moors--a pretty tangle which some wandering archaeologist may some day unravel.[38] That the Moors established a settlement here, or hard by, we are confident owing to the existence of extensive _huertas_ (plantations) a few miles up the banks of Alagón. This is just one of those _enclaves_ of rich soil for which the Arabs always had a keen eye; and ancient boundary-walls, with evidence of extreme care in irrigation and cultivation, all bespeak Moorish handiwork. These _huertas_ are planted with fig, pomegranate, cherry, and various exotic fruit-trees, besides cork-oak and olive; every tree displaying signs of extreme old age--though that strikes one in most parts of Spain. Never have we seen more luxuriant crops of every sort than in those ancient _huertas_. Yet they are inset amid encircling wastes! Granadilla (its name surely suggests cherished memories in its founders of the famous Andalucian _vega_) lies at the gate of that strange wild mountain-region called Las Hurdes. CHAPTER XXIII LAS HURDES (ESTREMADURA) AND THE SAVAGE TRIBES THAT INHABIT THEM Isolated amidst the congeries of mountain-ranges that converge upon León, Castile, and Estremadura, lies a lost region that bears this name. The Hurdes occupy no small space; they represent no insignificant nook, but a fair-sized province--say fifty miles long by thirty broad--severed from the outer world; cut off from Portugal on the one side, from Spain on the other; while its miserable inhabitants are ignored and despised by both its neighbours. [Illustration: SKETCH-MAP OF LAS HURDES] Who and what are these wild tribes (numbering 4000 souls) that, in a squalor and savagery incredible in modern Europe, cling, in solitary tenacity, to these inhospitable fastnesses? Possibly they are the remnants of Gothish fugitives who, 1200 years ago, sought shelter in these hills from Arab scimitars; other theories trace their origin back to an earlier era. But whether Goths or Visigoths, Vandals or other, these pale-faced Hurdanos are surely none of swarthy Arab or Saracenic blood; and equally certainly they are none of Spanish race. The Spanish leave them severely alone--none dwell in Las Hurdes. Being neither ethnologists nor antiquaries, nor even sensational writers, the authors confine themselves to their personal experience, stiffened by a study of what the few Spanish authorities have collated on the subject. Whatever their origin may have been, the Hurdanos of to-day are a depraved and degenerate race, to all intents and purposes savages, lost to all sense of self-respect or shame, of honesty or manliness. Too listless to take thought of the most elementary necessities of life, they are content to lead a semi-bestial existence, dependent for subsistence on their undersized goats and swine, on an exiguous and precarious cultivation, eked out by roots and wild fruits such as acorns, chestnuts, etc., and on begging outside their own region. First, as to their country. Picture a maze of mountains all utterly monotonous in uniform configuration--long straight slopes, each skyline practically parallel with that beyond, bare of trees, but clad in shoulder-high scrub. On approaching from the south, the hills are lower and display delightful variety of heaths (including common heather); but as one penetrates northwards, the bush is reduced to the everlasting gum-cistus, and elevations become loftier and more precipitous till they culminate in the sheer rock-walls of the Sierra de Gata. Here, in remote glens, one chances on groves of ilex and cork-oak, whose gnarled boles attest the absence of woodcutters, while huge trunks lie prostrate, decaying from sheer old age. Here and there one sees an ilex enveloped to its summit in parasitic growths of creepers and wild-vine, whose broad, pale-green leaves contrast pleasingly with the dusky foliage and small leaf of its host. In the deep gorges or canyons of these mountains are situate the settlements, called _Alquerías_, of the wild tribes, most of them inaccessible on horseback. That of Romano de Arriba, for example, is plunged in such an abyss that from November to March no ray of sunshine ever reaches it. A similar case is that of Casa Hurdes, which, as seen from the bridle-track leading over the Sierra de Portéros into Castile, appears buried in the bottom of a crevasse. Others, in the reverse, are perched on high, amidst crags that can only be surmounted by a severe scramble up broken rock-stairways. These _alquerías_--warrens we may translate the word--consist of den-like hovels straggling without order or huddled together according as the rock-formation may dictate--some half-piled one on another, others separate. Many are mere holes in the earth--lairs, shapeless as nature left their walls, but roofed over with branches and grass held in place by schistose slabs that serve for slates. Hardly, in some cases, can one distinguish human dwellings from surrounding bush, earth, or rock. As our companion, a civil guard, remarked of one set of eyries that adhered to a cliff-face, they rather resembled "the nests of crag-martins" (_nidos de vencéjos_) than abodes of mankind. Within are two tiny compartments, the first occupied by goats or swine, the second littered with bracken on which the whole family sleep, irrespective of age or sex. There is no light nor furniture of any description; no utensils for washing, hardly even for cooking. True, there is in some of the lairs a hollowed trunk which may serve as a bed, but its original design (as the name _batane_ imports) was for pressing the grapes and olives in autumn. No refuse is ever thrown out; even the filthy ferns are retained for use as manure for the orchards--in a word, these poor creatures habitually sleep on a manure-heap. Even wild beasts, the wolves and boars, are infinitely more attentive to domestic cleanliness and purity. Another _alquería_ visited by the authors, that of Rubiáco, consisted of a massed cluster of sties embedded on the slopes of a low ridge bordered on either side by crystal-bright mountain streams. So timid and shy are the natives that several were descried actually taking to the hill on our appearance. A distribution of tobacco, with coloured handkerchiefs for the women, restored a measure of confidence, and we succeeded in collecting a group or two for the camera. The day, however, was dull and overcast, and rain, unluckily, fell at that precise moment. These people, clad in patch-work of rags, leather and untanned skins, were undersized, pallid of complexion, plain (though we would scarce say repulsive) in appearance, with dull incurious eyes that were instantly averted when our glances met. The men, otherwise stolid and undemonstrative, affected a vacuous grin or giggle, but utterly devoid of any spark of joy or gladness. Many (though by no means all) displayed distinctly flattened noses, somewhat of the Mongolian type; and not even among the younger girls could a trace of good looks be detected. All went bare-foot, indeed bare-legged to the knee. On opening the door of a den--an old packing-case lid, three feet high, secured by a thong of goatskin--two pigs dashed forth squealing, and at the first step inside the writer's foot splashed in fetid moisture hidden beneath a litter of green fern. It being dark within, and too low to stand upright, I struck a match and presently became aware of a living object almost underfoot. It proved to be a baby, no bigger than a rabbit, and with tiny black bead-like eyes that gleamed with a wild light--never before have we seen such glance on human face. While examining this phenomenon, a sound from the inner darkness revealed a second inmate. We crept into this lair, scrambling up two steps in the natural rock, and from the fern-litter arose a female. She stood about three feet high, had the same wild eyes, unkempt hair, encrusted brown with dirt, hanging loose over her naked shoulders--a merciful darkness concealed the rest. She appeared to be about ten years old, and dwarfed and undersized at that; yet she told us she was fourteen, and the mother of the rabbit-child, also that its father had deserted her a month ago--ten days before its birth. The lair contained absolutely no furniture, unless dead fern be so styled. Can human misery further go? The next hovel did contain a _batane_, or hollowed tree, in which lay some scanty rags like fragments of discarded horse-cloths. So lacking are these poor savages in any sufficient clothing, whether for day or night, that the children, we were assured, were habitually laid to sleep among the swine, in order to share the natural warmth of those beasts. In one abode only did we discover such convenience as a wooden chest. It contained a handful of potatoes, some chestnuts, and a broken iron cooking-pot. We examined another den or two--practically all were alike. If anything was there that escaped our attention we had an excuse--the aroma (personal, porcine, and putrid) was more than the strongest could endure for many minutes on end. We turned away. Mingled feelings of loathing, of pity, and of despair at the utter hopelessness of it all filled our minds. There, not a hundred yards away, a contrasted sight met our eyes, one of humbler nature's most perfect scenes: a fledgeling brood of white wagtails tripped gaily along the burnside--types of pure spotless beauty, overflowing with high spirits and the joy of life. A few minutes later, and a pair of ring-plovers (_Aegialitis curonica_) on the river accentuated the same pitiful contrast. Such small cultivation as exists in the Hurdes is carried on under supreme difficulty. The hills themselves are uncultivable, and the only opportunities that present themselves are either chance open spaces amidst interminable rock, or such rare and narrow strips of soil as can exist between precipitous slopes and the banks of the streams. Here little garden-patches, thirty or forty feet long by a dozen in width, are reclaimed; but the very earth is liable to be swept away by winter-floods pouring down the mountain-sides, and has to be replaced by fresh soil carried--it may be long distances--on men's shoulders. Here a few potatoes may be raised and in the broader valleys scant crops of rye. The few fruit trees are neglected, and therefore give short yield, though what little is produced is of exquisite flavour, comprising figs, cherries, a sort of peach (_pavia_), olives, and vines. All crops are subject to the ravages of wild-boars, which roam in bands of a dozen to a score, fearless of man and molested by none; while wolves take toll of the flocks. [Illustration: WHITE WAGTAIL] Red deer also wander freely and unpreserved over these ownerless hills--possibly the only place in Europe where such is the case. We inquired whether many were shot, but were told that such an event occurred rarely, though the Hurdano gunner might often approach within close range. "We are not _enseñados_ [instructed] in the arts of chase," explained our informant. A few partridges and hares are found, with trout in the upper waters. Despite their degradation, the Hurdanos, we were assured, display no criminal taint such as is inherent among Gipsies. As regards the habits and customs of these people, we here roughly transcribe from the work of Pascual Madoz[39] some selected extracts that appear to be as accurate to-day as when they were written some sixty years ago. The food of the Hurdanos is as noxious as it is scanty. The potato is the general stand-by, either boiled or cooked with crude goat's suet; sometimes beans fried in the same grease, and lastly the leaves of trees, boiled; with roots, the stalks of certain wild grasses, chestnuts, and acorns. Bread is practically unknown--all they ever have is made of coarse rye and such crusts as they obtain by begging outside their district. Only when at the point of death is wheaten bread provided. Their clothing consists of a shapeless garment reaching from the hip to the knee, a shirt without collar, fastening with one button, and a sack carried over the shoulder. They have no warm clothing and all go bare-foot. The women are even less tidy and dirtier than the men. Never have they a vestige of anything new--nothing but discarded garments obtained by begging, or in exchange for chestnuts, at the distant towns. Their usual "fashion" is never to take off, to mend, or to wash any rag they have once put on--it is worn till it falls off through sheer old age and dirt. They never wash nor brush their hair, and go bare-legged like the men. [Illustration: A WOLF-PROOF SHEEPFOLD ON THE ALAGÓN, NORTH ESTREMADURA Walls 10 feet high: note the shepherd's dwelling alongside. Within are sheep.] These, moreover, are the richest; the majority being clad in goatskins (untanned) that they kill or that die. These skins the men fix round their necks, girt at waist and round the knees with straps; the women merely an apron from the waist downward. Men and women alike are dwarfed in stature and repugnant in appearance, augmented by their pallor and starveling look. On the other hand, they are active and expert in climbing their native mountains. There is no outward difference in the sexes as regards their lives and means of subsistence. All their environment tends to make them untractable and savage (_sylvaticos_), shunning contact with their kind, even fleeing at sight and refusing to speak. They have no doctors nor surgeons, relying on certain herbs for medicines; yet they live long lives. They only recognise the passing seasons by the state of vegetation and of the atmosphere. They sow and reap according to the phases of the moon, of which they preserve an accurate observation. Religion and schools alike are unknown. They glory in their freedom from all moral suasion, and rejoice in the most brutal immorality and crime--including parricide and polygamy. There are _alquerías_ wherein no priest has set foot, nor do they possess the faintest sense of Christian duties. It seems incredible that in the midst of two provinces both wealthy and well reputed there should exist a plague-spot such as we have painted, unknown as the remotest kraals of Central Africa. Thus Pascual Madoz in 1845, and but little external change has become apparent in sixty-five subsequent years.[40] Churches, it is true, have been erected, priests and schoolmasters appointed. Amelioration, however, by such means can only come very slowly--if at all. The physical and domestic status of these poor savages must first be raised before they are mentally capable of assimilating the mysteries of religion. Spain, however, owes them something. They are heavily taxed--beyond their power to pay in cash. Thus they are cast into the power of usurers. In each _alquería_, we were told, is usually found one man more astute than the rest, and he, in combination with some sordid scoundrel outside, exploits the misery of his fellows. A species of semi-slavery is thus established--in some ways analogous to the baneful system of _Caciquismo_ outside. The Hurdanos are also subject to the conscription and furnish forty to fifty recruits yearly to the Spanish army. Curiously, time-expired men all elect to return to their wretched lot in the mountains. On our asking one of these (he had served at Melilla), "Why?" his reply was, "for liberty."[41] There is a villainous custom in vogue that hurls these poor wretches yet farther down the bottomless pit. This abomination rages to-day as it did a hundred years ago: we therefore again leave old Pascual Madoz to tell the tale in his own words:-- Many women make a miserable livelihood--it is indeed their only industry--by rearing foundling infants from the hospitals of Ciudad Rodrigo and Placencia. So keen are they of the money thus obtained that one woman, aided by a goat, will undertake to rear three or four babes--all necessarily so ill-tended and ill-fed as rather to resemble living spectres than human beings. Cast down on beds of filthy ferns and lacking all maternal care, the majority perish from hunger, cold, and neglect. The few that reach childhood are weaklings for life, feeble and infirm. This repulsive "industry" continues to-day, a sum of three dollars a month being paid by the authorities of the cities named to rid themselves of each undesired infant. The effect--direct and incidental--upon morals and sexual relationship in the _alquerías_ of the Hurdes may (in degree) be deduced--it cannot be set down in words. Thus the single point of contact with civilisation serves but to accentuate the degradation. CHAPTER XXIV THE GREAT BUSTARD Over the vast expanse of those silent solitudes, the corn-growing steppes of Spain--all but abandoned by human denizens--this grandest and most majestic of European game-birds forms the chief ornament. When the sprouting grain grows green in spring, stretching from horizon to horizon, you may form his acquaintance to best advantage. And among the things of sport are few more attractive scenes than a band of great bustards at rest. Bring your field-glass to bear on the gathering which you see yonder, basking in the sunshine in full enjoyment of their mid-day siesta. There are five-and-twenty of them, and immense they look against the green background of corn that covers the landscape--well may a stranger mistake the birds for deer or goats. Many sit turkey-fashion, with heads half sunk among back-feathers; others stand in drowsy yet ever-suspicious attitudes, their broad backs resplendent with those mottled hues of true game-colour, their lavender necks and well-poised heads contrasting with the snowy whiteness of the lower plumage.[42] The bustard are dotted in groups over an acre or two of gently sloping ground, the highest part of which is occupied by a single big _Barbudo_--a bearded veteran, the sentinel of the pack. From that elevated position he estimates what degree of danger each living thing that moves on the open region around may threaten to his company and to himself. Mounted men cause him less concern than those on foot. A horseman slowly directing a circuitous course may even approach to within a couple of hundred yards ere he takes alarm. It was the head and neck of this sentry that first appeared to our distant view and disclosed the whereabouts of the game. He, too, has seen us, and is even now considering whether there be sufficient cause for setting his convoy in motion. If we disappear below the level of his range, he will settle the point negatively, setting us down as merely some of those agricultural nuisances which so often cause him alarm but which his experience has shown to be generally harmless--for attempts on his life are few and far between. [Illustration: THE GREAT BUSTARD] Another charming spectacle it is in the summer-time to watch a pack of bustard about sunset, all busy with their evening feed among the grasshoppers on a thistle-clad plain. They are working against time, for it will soon be too dark to catch such lively prey. With quick darting step they run to and fro, picking up one grasshopper after another with unerring aim, and so intent on pursuit that the best chance of the day is then offered to a gunner, when greed for a moment supplants caution and vigilance is relaxed. But even now a man on foot stands no chance of coming anywhere near them. His approach is observed from afar, all heads are up above the thistles, every eye intent on the intruder; a moment or two of doubt, two quick steps and a spring, and the broad wings of every bird in the pack flap in slowly rising motion. The tardiness and apparent difficulty in rising from the ground which bustards exhibit is well expressed in their Spanish name _Avetarda_[43] and recognised in the scientific cognomen of _Otis tarda_. Once on the wing the whole band is off with wide swinging flight to the highest ground in the neighbourhood. The chase of the great bustard presents characteristics and attractions peculiar to itself and differing from that of all other winged game. Rather it resembles the scientific pursuit of big game; for this is a sport in which the actual shot becomes of secondary importance, merely a culminating incident--the consummation of previous forethought, fieldcraft, and generalship. Success in bustard-shooting--alike with success in stalking--is usually attributable to the leader, who has planned the operation and directed the strategy, rather than to the man who may have actually killed the game. We here refer exclusively to what we may be permitted to call the scientific aspect of this chase, as practised by ourselves and as distinguished from other (and far more deadly) methods in vogue among the Spanish herdsmen and peasantry. Before describing the former system, let us glance at native methods of securing the great bustard. During the greater part of the year bustard are far too wary to be obtained by the farm-hands and shepherds who see them every day--so accustomed are the peasantry to the sight of these noble birds that little or no notice is taken of them and their pursuit regarded as impracticable. There is, however, one period of the year when the great bustard falls an easy prey to the clumsiest of gunners. [Illustration] During the long Andalucian summer a torrid sun has drunk up every brook and stream that crosses the cultivated lands; the chinky, cracked mud, which in winter formed the bed of shallow lakes and lagoons, now yields no drop of moisture for bird or beast. The larger rivers still carry their waters from sierra to sea, but an adaptive genius is required to utilise these for purposes of irrigation. All water required for the cattle is drawn up from wells; the old-world lever with its bucket at one end and counterpoise at the other has to provide for the needs of all. These wells are distributed all over the plains. As the herdsmen put the primitive contrivance into operation and swing up bucketful after bucketful of cool water, the cattle crowd around, impatient to receive it as it rushes down the stone troughing. The thirsty animals drink their fill, splashing and wasting as much as they consume, so that a puddle is always formed about these _bebideros_. The moisture only extends a few yards, gradually diminishing, till the trickling streamlet is lost in the famishing soil. These moist places are a fatal trap to the bustard. Before dawn one of the farm-people will conceal himself so as to command at short range all points of the miniature swamp. A slight hollow is dug for the purpose, having clods arranged around, between which the gun can be levelled with murderous accuracy. As day begins to dawn, the bustard will take a flight in the direction of the well, alighting at a point some few hundred yards distant. They satisfy themselves that no enemy is about, and then, with cautious, stately step, make for their morning draught. One big bird steps on ahead of the rest; and as he cautiously draws near, he stops now and again to assure himself that all is right and that his companions are coming too--these are not in a compact body, but following at intervals of a few yards. The leader has reached the spot where he drank yesterday; now he finds he must go a little nearer to the well, as the streamlet has been diverted; another bird follows close; both lower their heads to drink; the gunner has them in line--at twenty paces there is no escape; the trigger is pressed, and two magnificent bustards are done to death. Should the man be provided with a second barrel (which is not usual), a third victim may be added to his morning's spoils. Comparatively large numbers of bustard are destroyed thus every summer. It is deadly work and certain. Luckily, however, the plan enjoys but a single success, since bands, once shot at, never return. A second primitive method of capturing the great bustard is practised in winter. The increased value of game during the colder months induces the bird-catchers, who then supply the markets with myriads of ground-larks, linnets, buntings, etc., occasionally to direct their skill towards the capture of bustard by the same means as prove efficacious with the small fry--that is, the _cencerro_, or cattle-bell, combined with a dark lantern. As most cattle carry the cencerro around their necks, the sound of the bell at close quarters by night causes no alarm to ground-birds. The bird-catcher, with his bright lantern gleaming before its reflector and the cattle-bell jingling at his wrist, prowls nightly around the stubbles and wastes in search of roosting birds. Any number of bewildered victims can thus be gathered, for larks and such-like birds fall into a helpless state of panic when once focussed in the rays of the lantern. When the bustard is the object of pursuit, two men are required, one of whom carries a gun. The pack of bustard will be carefully watched during the afternoon, and not lost sight of when night comes until their sleeping-quarters are ascertained. When quite dark, the tinkling of the _cencerro_ will be heard, and a ray of light will surround the devoted bustards, charming or frightening them--whichever it may be--into still life. As the familiar sound of the cattle-bell becomes louder and nearer, the ray of light brighter and brighter, and the surrounding darkness more intense, the bustards are too charmed or too dazed to fly. Then comes the report, and a charge of heavy shot works havoc among them. As bands of bustards are numerous, this poaching plan might be carried out night after night; but luckily the bustards will not stand the same experience twice. On a second attempt being made, they are off as soon as they see the light approaching. [Illustration: CALANDRA LARK A large and handsome species characteristic of the corn-lands.] The third (and by far the most murderous) means of destruction is due, not so much to rural peasantry as to _cazadores_--shooters from adjoining towns--men who should know better, and whom, in other respects, we might rank as good sportsmen; but who, alas! can see no shame in shooting the hen-bustards with their half-fledged broods in the standing corn during June and July--albeit the deed is done in direct contravention of the game-laws! Dogs, especially pointers, are employed upon this quest when the mother-bustards, being reluctant to leave their young, lie as close as September partridges in a root-crop; while the broods, either too terrified or too immature to fly, are frequently caught by the dogs. We regret that there are those who actually descant with pride upon having slaughtered a dozen or more of these helpless creatures in a day; while others are only restrained from a like crime by the scorching solar heats of that season. More bustards are killed thus than by all the other methods combined--a hundred times more than by our scientific and sportsmanlike system of driving presently to be described. Except for this unworthy massacre of mothers with their broods in summer, and the two clumsy artifices before mentioned, the bustards are left practically unmolested--their wildness and the open nature of their haunts defy all the strategy of native fowlers. The hen-bustard deposits her eggs--usually three, but on very rare occasions four--among the green April corn; incubation and the rearing of the young take place in the security of vast silent stretches of waving wheat. The young bustards grow with that wheat, and, ere it is reaped (unless prematurely massacred), are able to take care of themselves. A somewhat more legitimate method of outwitting the great bustard is practised at this season. During harvest, while the country is being cleared of crops, the birds become accustomed to see bullock-carts daily passing with creaking wheel to carry away the sheaves from the stubble to the _era_, or levelled threshing-ground, where the grain is trodden out, Spanish fashion, by teams of mares. The loan of a _carro_ with its pair of oxen and their driver having been obtained, the cart is rigged up with _estéras_--that is, esparto-matting stretched round the uprights which serve to hold the load of sheaves in position. A few sacks of straw thrown on the floor of the cart save one, in some small degree, from the merciless jolting of this primitive conveyance on rough ground. Two or three guns can find room therein, while the driver, lying forward, directs the team with a goad. This moving battery fairly resembles a load of sheaves, and well do we remember the terrible, suffocating heat we have endured, shut up for hours in this thing during the blazing days of July and August. The result, nevertheless, repays all suffering. We refer to no mere cynegetic pride but to the enduring joy of observing, at close quarters and still unsuspicious, these glorious game-birds at home on their private plains. The local idea is to fire through a slit previously made in the _estéras_; but somehow, when the cart stops and the game instantly rises, you find (despite care and practice) that the birds always fly in a direction you cannot command or where the narrow slit forbids your covering them. Hence we adopted the plan of sliding off behind as the cart pulled up, thus firing the two barrels with perfect freedom. We have succeeded by this means in bringing to bag many pairs of bustard during a day's manoeuvring. [Illustration: SPANISH THISTLE AND STONECHAT] We now come to the system of bustard-driving, which we regard as practically the only really legitimate method of dealing with this grand game. From the end of August onwards the young bustards are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. The country is then cleared of crops, and while this precludes the birds being "done to death" as in the weeks immediately preceding, yet the ubiquitous thistles (often of gigantic size, ten or twelve feet in height), charlock, and _viznagas_ provide welcome covert for concealing the guns, while the heat still renders the game somewhat more susceptible to the artifices of the fowler. This is the easiest period. As the season advances the hunter's difficulties increase. The brown earth becomes daily more and more naked, while files of slow-moving ox-teams everywhere traverse the stubble, ploughing league-long furrows twenty abreast. These factors combine to aid the game and stretch to its utmost limit the venatic instincts of the fowler. Let us now attempt to describe a day's bustard-driving on scientific lines. The district having being selected, it is advisable to send out the night before a trustworthy scout who will sleep at the _cortijo_ and be abroad with the dawn in order to locate precisely the various _bandadas_, or troops of bustard, in the neighbourhood. The shooting-party (three or four guns for choice, but in no case to exceed six[44]) follow in the morning--riding, as a rule, to the rendezvous; though should there be a high-road available it is sometimes convenient to drive (or nowadays even to motor), having in that case sent the saddle-horses forward, along with the scout, on the previous day. Arrived at the _cortijo_, the scout brings in his report, and at once guns and drivers, all mounted, proceed towards the nearest of the marked _bandadas_. Not only are the distances to be covered so great as to render riding a necessity, but the use of horses has this further advantage that bustard evince less fear of mounted men and thus permit of nearer approach. The drivers should number three--the centre to flush the birds, two flankers to gallop at top speed in any direction should the game diverge from the required course or attempt to break out laterally. Ten minutes' ride and we are within view of our first _bandada_ still a mile away. They may be feeding on some broad slope, resting on the crest of a ridge, or dawdling on a level plain; but wherever the game may be--whatever the strategic value of their position--at least the decision of our own tactics must be clinched at once. No long lingering with futile discussion, no hesitation, or continued spying with the glass is permissible. Such follies instil instant suspicion into the astute brains on yonder hill, and the honours of the first round pass to the enemy. For this reason it is imperative to appoint one leader vested with supreme authority, and whose directions all must obey instantly and implicitly. Needless to say, that leader must possess a thorough knowledge both of the habits of bustard and the lie of a country--along with the rather rare faculty of diagnosing at a glance its "advantages," its dangers, and its salient points over some half-league of space. None too common an attribute that, where all the wide prospect is grey or green, varying according to ever-changing lights, and the downlands so gently graded as occasionally to deceive the very elect. Much of the bustard-country appears all but flat, so slight are its folds and undulations; while even the more favouring regions are rarely so boldly contoured as Salisbury Plain. The leader must combine some of the qualities of a field-marshal with the skill of a deer-stalker, and a bit of red-Indian sleuth thrown in. Luckily, such masters of the craft are not entirely lacking to us. The thoughts revolving in the leader's mind during his brief survey follow these general lines: First, which is (_a_) the favourite and (_b_) the most favourable line of flight of those bustards when disturbed; secondly, where can guns best be placed athwart that line; thirdly, how can the guns reach these points unseen? A condition precedent to success is that the firing-line shall be drawn around the bustards fairly close up, yet without their knowledge. Now with wild-game in open country devoid of fences, hollows, or covert of any description that problem presents initial difficulties that may well appear insuperable. But they are rarely quite so. It is here that the fieldcraft of the leader comes in. He has detected some slight fold that will shelter horsemen up to a given point, and beyond that, screen a crouching figure to within 300 yards of the unconscious _bandada_. Rarely do watercourses or valleys of sufficient depth lend a welcome aid; recourse must usually be had to the reverse slope of the hill whereon the bustards happen to be. Without a halt, the party ride round till out of sight. At the farthest safe advance, the guns dismount and proceed to spread themselves out--so far as possible in a semicircle--around the focal point.[45] At 80 yards apart, each lies prone on earth, utilising such shelter (if any) as may exist on the naked decline--say skeleton thistles, a tuft of wild asparagus, or on rare occasion some natural bank or tiny rain-scoop. [Illustration: GREAT BUSTARD--YOUNG. (1) AS HATCHED. (2) AT TWENTY DAYS OLD. (3) AT ONE MONTH.] [Illustration: SLENDER-BILLED CURLEW (NUMENIUS TENUIROSTRIS). [See Chapter on "Bird-life," _infra._]] Having now succeeded in placing his guns unseen and within a fatal radius, the leader may congratulate himself that his main object has been achieved. On the nearness of the line to the game, and on his correct diagnosis of the bustards' flight depends the issue. [It may be added that bustard are occasionally found in situations that offer no reasonable hope of a successful drive. It may then (should no others be known within the radius of action) become advisable gently to "move" the inexpugnable troop; remembering that once these birds realise that they are being "driven," the likelihood of subsequently putting them over the guns has enormously decreased. There accrues an incidental advantage in this operation, for after "moving" them to more favouring ground, it will not be necessary to line-up the guns quite so near as is usually essential to success. For bustards possess so strong an attachment to their _querencias_, or individual haunts, that they may be relied upon, on being disturbed a second time, to wing a course more or less in the direction of their original position. We give a specific instance of this later. Each pack of bustard has its own _querencia_, and will be found at certain hours to frequent certain places. This local knowledge, if obtainable, saves infinite time and vast distances traversed in search of game whose approximate positions, after all, may thus be ascertained beforehand.] * * * * * Now we have placed our guns in line and within that short distance of the unsuspecting game that all but assures a certain shot. We cannot, let us confess, recall many moments in life of more tense excitement than those spent thus, lying prone on the gentle slope listening with every sense on stretch for the cries of the galloping beaters as in wild career they urge the huge birds towards a fatal course. Before us rises the curving ridge, its summit sharply defined against an azure sky--azure but empty. Now the light air wafts to our ear the tumultuous pulsations of giant wings, and five seconds later that erst empty ether is crowded with two score huge forms. What a scene--and what commotion as, realising the danger, each great bird with strong and laboured wing-stroke swerves aside. One enormous _barbon_ directly overhead receives first attention; a second, full broadside, presents no more difficulty, and ere the double thuds behind have attested the result, we realise that a third, shying off from our neighbour, is also "our meat." This has proved one of our luckier drives, for the _bandada_, splitting up on the centre, offered chances to both flanks of the blockading line--chances which are not always fully exploited. [Illustration: SWERVE ASIDE TO RIGHT AND LEFT] We have stated, earlier in this chapter, that among the various component factors in a bustard-drive the actual shot is of minor importance. That is so; yet truly remarkable is the frequency with which good shots constantly miss the easiest of chances at these great birds. Precisely similar failures occur with wild-geese, with swans--indeed with all big birds whose wing-action is deliberate and slow. Tardy strokes deceive the eye, and the great bulk of the bustard accentuates the deception--it seems impossible to miss them, a fatal error. As the Spanish drivers put it: "Se les llenaron el ojo de carne," literally, "the bustards had filled your eye with meat"--the hapless marksmen saw everything bustard! Yet geese with their 40 strokes fly past ducks at 120, and the bustard's apparently leisured movement carries him in full career as fast as whirring grouse with 200 revolutions to the minute. To kill bustard treat them on the same basis as the smaller game that appears faster but is not. Bustards being soft-plumaged are not hard to kill. As compared with such ironclads as wild-geese, they are singularly easily killed, and with AAA shot may be dropped stone-dead at 80 and even at 100 yards. A pair of guns may thus profitably be brought into action. Bustards seldom run, but they walk very fast, especially when alarmed. Between the inception of a drive and the moment of flushing we have known them to cover half a mile, and many drives fail owing to game having completely altered its original position. Instances have occurred of bustards walking over the dividing ridge, to the amazement of the prostrate sportsmen on the hither slope. Strange to say, when winged they do not make off, but remain where they have fallen, and an old male will usually show fight. Of course if left alone and out of sight a winged bustard will travel far. In weight cock-bustard vary from, say, 20 to 22 lbs. in autumn, up to 28 to 30 lbs. in April. The biggest old males in spring reach 33 and 34 lbs., and one we presented to the National Collection at South Kensington scaled 37 lbs. The breast-bone of these big birds is usually quite bare, a horny callosity, owing to friction with the ground while squatting, and the heads and necks of old males usually exhibit gaps in their gorgeous spring-plumage--indicative of severe encounters among themselves. Hen-bustard seldom exceed 15 lbs. at any season. Bustard are usually found in troops varying from half-a-dozen birds to as many as 50 or 60, and in September we have seen 200 together. Bustard-shooting--by which we mean legitimate driving during the winter months, September to April--is necessarily uncertain in results. Some days birds may not even be seen, though this is unusual, while on others many big bands may be met with. Hence it is difficult to put down an average, though we roughly estimate a bird a gun as an excellent day's work. A not unusual bag for six guns will be about eight head; but we have a note of two days' shooting in April (in two consecutive years) when a party of eight guns, all well-known shots, secured 21 and 22 bustard respectively, together with a single lesser bustard on each day. This was on lands between Alcantarillas and Las Cabezas, but it is fair to add that the ground had been carefully preserved by the owner and the operation organised regardless of expense. A minor difficulty inherent to this pursuit is to select the precise psychological moment to spring up to shooting-position. This indeed is a feature common to most forms of wild-shooting--such as duck-flighting, driving geese or even snipe; in fact there is hardly a really wild creature that can be dealt with from a comfortable position erect on one's legs. Imagine partridge-shooters at home, instead of standing comfortably protected by hedge or butt, being told to hide themselves on a wet plough or bare stubble. Here, in Spain, it may also be necessary to conceal the gun under one's right side (to avoid sun-glints), and that also loses a moment. [Illustration: BUSTARDS PASSING FULL BROADSIDE] All one's care and elaborate strategy is ofttimes nullified through the blunders of a novice. Some men have no more sense of concealment than that fabled ostrich which is said to hide its head in the sand (which it doesn't); others can't keep still. These are for ever poking their heads up and down or--worse still--trying to see what is occurring in front. We may conclude this chapter with a hint or two to new hands. Never move from your prone position till the bustard are in shot, and after that, not till you are sure the whole operation is complete. There may yet be other birds enclosed though you do not know it. Never claim to have wounded a bustard merely because it passed so near and offered so easy a shot that you can't believe you missed it. You did miss it or it would be lying dead behind. All the same keep one eye on any bird you have fired at so long as it remains in view. Bustards shot through the lungs will sometimes fly half a mile and then drop dead. Wear clothes suited, more or less, to environment--_greenish_, we suggest, for choice--but remember that immobility is tenfold more important than colour. A pure white object that is quiescent is overlooked, where a clod of turf that _moves_ attracts instant attention. In spring, when bustards gorge on green food, gralloch your victims at once, otherwise the half-digested mass in the crop quickly decomposes and destroys the meat. * * * * * Here is an example of an error in judgment that practically amounted to a blunder. Before our well-concealed line stood a grand pack, between thirty and forty bustard beautifully "horseshoed," and quite unconscious thereof. Momentarily we expected their entry--right in our faces! At that critical moment there appeared, wide on the right flank and actually behind us, three huge old _barbones_ directing a course that would bring them along close in rear of our line. No. 4 gun, on extreme right, properly allowed this trio to pass; not so No. 3. But the culprit, on rising to fire, had the chagrin to realise (too late) his error. The whole superb army-corps in front were at that very moment sweeping forward direct on the centre of our line! In an instant they took it in, swerved majestically to the left, and escaped scot-free. That No. 3 had secured a right-and-left at the adventitious trio in no sort of way exculpated his mistake. CHAPTER XXV THE GREAT BUSTARD (_Continued_) The following illustrates in outline a day's bustard-shooting and incidentally shows how strongly haunted these birds are, each pack to its own particular locality. On reaching our point (a seventeen-kilometres' drive), the scouts sent out the day before reported three bands numbering roughly forty, forty, and sixteen--in all nearly a hundred birds. The nearest lot was to the west. These we found easily, and B. F. B. got a brace, right-and-left, without incident. Riding back eastwards, the second pack had moved, but we shortly descried the third, in two divisions, a mile away. It being noon, the bustards were mostly lying down or standing drowsily, and we halted for lunch before commencing the operation. During the afternoon we drove this pack three times, securing a brace on first and third drives, while on the second the birds broke out to the side. Now bustards are, in Spanish phrase, _muy querenciosos_, _i.e._ attached to their own particular terrain; and as in these three drives we had pushed them far beyond their much-loved limit, they were now restless and anxious to return. Already before our guns had reached their posts for a fourth drive, seven great bustards were seen on the wing, and a few minutes later the remaining thirty took flight, voluntarily, the whole phalanx shaping their course directly towards us. The outmost gun was still moving forward to his post under the crest of the hill, and the pack, seeing him, swerved across our line below, and (these guns luckily having seen what was passing and taken cover) thus lost another brace of their number. The bustards shot to-day (January 16), though all full-grown males, only weighed from 25-1/2 to 26-1/2 lbs. apiece. Two months later they would have averaged over 30 lbs., the increased weight being largely due to the abundant feed in spring, but possibly more to the solid distention of the neck.[46] This wet season (1908) the grass on the _manchones_, or fallows, was rank and luxuriant, nearly knee-deep in close vegetation--more like April than January. Already these bustards were showing signs of the chestnut neck, and all had acquired their whiskers. The following winter (1909) was dry and not a scrap of vegetation on the fallows. Even in February they were absolutely naked and the cattle being fed on broken straw in the byres. The quill-feathers are pale-grey or ash-colour, only deepening into a darker shade towards the tips, and that only on the first two or three feathers. The shafts are white, secondaries black, and bastard-wing lavender-white, slightly tipped with a darker shade. In _Wild Spain_ will be found described two methods by which the great bustard may be secured: (A) by a single gun riding quite alone; and (B) by two guns working jointly, one taking the chance of a drive, the other outmanoeuvring the game as in plan (A). We here add a third plan which has occasionally stood us (when alone) in good stead. On finding bustard on a suitable hill, leave your man to ride slowly to and fro attracting the attention of the game till you have had time, by hard running, to gain the reverse slope. The attendant then rides forward, the whole operation being so punctually timed that you reach the crest of the ridge at the same moment as the walking bustards have arrived within shot thereof. Needless to add, this involves, besides hard work, a considerable degree of luck, yet on several occasions we have secured as many as four birds a day by this means. * * * * * [Illustration: "HURTLING THROUGH SPACE"] The great bustard, one imagines, has few enemies except man, but the following incident shows they are not entirely exempt from extraneous dangers. In October, some years ago, the writer purposed spending a couple of nights at a distant marsh in order to see whether any snipe had yet come in. Our course led us through good bustard-country, and by an early start I had hoped to exploit this in passing. Hardly had we entered upon the corn-lands than we espied fifteen bustard, a quarter-mile away on the right. The rough bridle-track being worn slightly hollow and no better cover appearing, I decided to "flatten" on the spot, sending my two men to ride round beyond the game, which, being in a dip, was now below my range of sight. In due course the bustards appeared, winging directly towards me, but alighting in front when already almost in shot. Feeling practically certain of them now, since I could hear the shouts of the beaters beyond, I raised myself slightly, only to see, to my utter chagrin, the bustards flying off in diametrically the opposite direction while simultaneously a hissing sound from behind and overhead caused me to glance upwards. A black object hurtling earthward through space, shot diagonally past me--this I mistook as merely a peregrine pursuing some hare that had been disturbed by the beaters. But on hastening forward over the ridge, I perceived one of the beaters riding up with a dead bustard across his saddle--a female, with a great gaping gash in her side. The beaters reported that just as they flushed the bustard a second time an eagle had swept down upon them, knocked down this one, and sent the rest, scattered in wild disorder, over their heads. Paco had then galloped up to within a few yards before the eagle reluctantly abandoned its prize and sailed aloft. Continuing our interrupted journey, half a mile ahead another pack of bustard was descried, and while rapidly surveying the situation, yet another lot appeared on wing, flying from the right. These last, we instantly concluded both from their direction and also by the curiously unsettled style of their flight, were a part of the band which had recently been attacked by the eagle. Under such circumstances I realised that (though I was mounted and in full view) they might yet pass within shot, so, jumping from the horse, I fired at the nearest old cock-bustard and distinctly saw blood spirt from his snow-white breast. He flew slowly away with ever lowering flight, finally disappearing over a crest close by the scene of our first drive. Confident of gathering him, we rode back, and on gaining the ridge witnessed this amazing spectacle. In the hollow, 300 yards away, was a well with the usual cross-bar and pulley for drawing water, and on the cross-bar sat an eagle. Below on the ground stood the wounded bustard, facing-up to a second great eagle, which kept flapping around him, apparently reluctant to attack so huge a bird on the ground and in its then aggressive attitude, and endeavouring to force it to fly. So absorbed were both eagles on their quarry that I rode up unnoticed to within 100 yards, and was making ready to fire when the two great birds rose, that from the cross-bar flying away, while the other, not content to resign his prize, circled overhead. In hope that he might descend I concealed myself behind the well, always keeping one eye on the wounded bustard, but presently the eagle had become a mere speck in the heavens. The bustard all this time had remained standing close by, but on my approach it rose quite strongly on wing, and had I not been loaded, might yet have escaped. [Illustration: DRAW-WELL WITH CROSS-BAR] The aggressors were imperial eagles, and in their second attack had no doubt realised that the quarry was already wounded. The first victim had been knocked down, stone-dead, when absolutely sound and strong. During summer these birds practically subsist on grasshoppers, especially those in the heavy wingless stage known as _Cigarras panzonas_. These disappear after July, being replaced by smaller and more active varieties, which are equally relished. Once the females commence laying among the spring corn (in April), the cock-bustards assemble in widower packs (_toradas_) on the fallows, and especially on _marismas_ adjacent to corn-land. By September both sexes, with the young, reunite on the stubbles, where we have seen as many as 200 together. It is in April that the old _barbones_ attain their full glory and pride of sexual estate--resplendent in fierce whiskers and gorgeous chestnut ruffs all distended with the seasonal condition. Courtship begins in March, when the weird eccentric performances of the males, flashing alternately white and rich orange against their green environment, lend a characteristic touch to the vernal _vegas_--white specks that appear and disappear as the lovelorn monsters revolve and display, somewhat in the frenzied style of the blackcock on our own northern moorlands. _Hechando la rueda_ the Spanish call it, as an old _barbon_ majestically struts around turning himself, as it were, inside out before an assembled harem that, to all appearance, takes no manner of interest in his fantastic performance--perhaps the gentler sex dissemble their depth of feeling? Then occur ferocious duels between rival paladins. Long sustained are these and conspicuous afar, albeit not very deadly. No life-blood may flow, but feathers fly ere the point of honour is settled and the victor left in proud possession. [Illustration: "HECHANDO LA RUEDA"] These combats occur chiefly at break of day while tall herbage yet remains soaked by nocturnal dews, and it occasionally happens that some luckless champion, damaged and bedraggled, and with plumage saturated through and through, when thus encountered, is found unable to fly and so captured. Several such instances came under our notice years ago and--rare though they may be--misled us in _Wild Spain_ to conclude that the incapacity arose from a spring-moult--similar to that of wild-geese and of some ducks. That, however, was an error. The loss of flight-power arises, as stated, from the damaged and dew-saturated state of the primaries, as is concisely set forth in a letter from our friend D. José Pan Elberto as follows:-- Many persons undoubtedly believe (owing to bustards being captured in spring unable to fly) that these birds moult all their quills at once. That is not the case; but since in spring, when the male-bustards engage in continuous fighting, the corn-growth is already quite tall, and in the early mornings all vegetation is saturated with night-dews, it occasionally happens that a bustard may be met with incapable by this cause of taking wing--that is, that some of the flight-feathers are lost or broken and all dew-soaked (_rociadas_). The bustard moults gradually and never loses the power of flight. [Illustration: Great Bustard "SHEWING-OFF"--FROM LIFE. FIRST ATTITUDE. SECOND ATTITUDE. THE SAME, BUT LOOKING UP AT A PASSING BIRD. FINAL POSITION.] [Illustration: TAIL-FEATHERS OF GREAT BUSTARD] While never attaining the size of wild birds, yet bustards thrive well in captivity--always assuming that they have been caught young. Old birds brought home wounded never survive twenty-four hours, dying not from the wound (which may be insignificant) but from _barinchin_, which may be translated chagrin or a broken heart. Young bustards reared thus become extremely tame, coming to call and feeding from the hand, though when old the males are apt to grow vicious in spring, attacking savagely children, dogs, and even women, especially those whom they see to be afraid.[47] Tame as they are, they are always subject to strange alarms, seemingly causeless. Suddenly they raise their wings, draw in their heads, and dance around, jumping in air, and ever intently regarding the heavens--sometimes dashing off under cover of bushes. One may connect this exhibition with some speck in the sky, some passing eagle, more often no motive is discernible. Bustard-chicks emit a plaintive whistle so precisely similar to that of the kites that (when hatched out under a domestic hen) the foster-mother has been so terrified as to desert her brood. When adult, bustards are usually quite silent, save for a grunting noise in spring--that is, in captivity. But on a hot day we have heard the old males, when passing on a drive, utter panting sounds, and (as already mentioned) a winged _barbon_ will turn to attack with a sort of gruff bark--wuff, wuff--as his captor approaches. So retentive is their memory that each year as May comes round our tame bustards keep constantly on the look-out for the first cart-load of green cut grass brought into the stable-yard for the horses. They even follow it right into the loose-box where it is stored, in order to feast on the grasshoppers it conceals, climbing all over the mountain of grass, but never scratching as hens or pheasants would do. THE LITTLE BUSTARD (_OTIS TETRAX_--SPANISH, _SISÓN_) The little bustard may fairly claim the proud distinction that it alone of all the game-birds on earth can utterly scorn and set at naught every artifice of the fowler--modern methods and up-to-date appliances all included. Here in Spain, though the bird itself is abundant enough (and its flesh delicate and delicious), it so entirely defies every set system of pursuit that no one nowadays attempts its capture. Practically none are killed save merely by some chance or accidental encounter. True, during the fiery noontides of July and August even the little bustard enjoys a siesta and may then be shot. It will, in fact, "lie close" before pointers and cackle like a cock-grouse as it rises from those desolate _dehesas_ which form its home--vast stretches of rolling veld where asphodel, palmetto, and giant thistles grow rampant as far as eye can reach. But that scarce comes within our category of sport, since a solar heat that can (even temporarily) tame a _sisón_ is quite likely to finish off a Briton for good and all. And with the advent of autumn and a relatively endurable temperature, in a moment the _sisón_ becomes impossibly wild. Any idea of direct approach is simply out of the question, but beyond that, this astute fowl has elaborated a scheme--indeed a series of schemes--that nullifies even that one remaining resource of baffled humanity, "driving." You may surround his company, "horse-shoe" them with hidden guns--do what you will, not a single _sisón_ will come in to the firing-line. You cannot diagnose beforehand his probable line of flight, for he has none, nor can you influence its subsequent direction. For the little bustard shuts off all negotiation at its initiation by springing vertically in air, soaring far above gunshot, and there indulging in fantastic aerial evolutions more in the style of wigeon or other wildfowl than of a true game-bird as he is. Thus from that celestial altitude he spies out the country and all terrestrial dangers, finally disappearing afar amidst the wastes of atmospheric space. Frequently we have noticed the high-flying band, after, say, twenty minutes of such display of wing-power, descend directly to their original position at a safe interval after the drivers had passed forward thereof! Thus do they scorn our efforts and add insult to injury. [Illustration: LITTLE BUSTARD Summer plumage.] In practice no _sisónes_ whatever are killed in set drives, and for twenty years we have abandoned the attempt as impossible. They nevertheless--alike with every other fowl of the air--must, by occasional mischance, fly into danger, and at such times, owing to their habit of flying in massed formation, a heavy toll may be levied at a single shot by a gunner who is alert to exploit the happy event. We have ourselves, in this casual way, dropped from five to eight _sisónes_ with the double charge. Though frequenting the same open terrain as their big cousins, the _sisónes_ distinctly prefer the rough stretches of palmetto, thistles, and other rank herbage to corn-land proper--in short, they prefer to sit where they can never be seen on the ground. Conspicuous as their white plumage and resonant wing-rattle makes them in air, we can hardly recall a dozen instances of having detected a pack of little bustard at rest--and then merely in quite accidental and exceptional circumstances. And even then (as indicated) the knowledge of their precise position has seldom availed to their undoing. By April the males have assumed a splendidly handsome breeding-dress. The neck, swollen out like a jargonelle pear, is clad in rich velvet-black, the long plumes behind glossy and hackle-like, and adorned with a double gorget of white. All this finery is lost by August. Thenceforward the sexes are alike save for the larger size and brighter orange of the males, the females being smaller and yellower. They are strictly monogamous, yet the males "show-off" in the same fantastic way as great bustard and blackcock. About mid-May the female lays four (rarely five) glossy olive-green eggs in the thick covert of thistles or palmettos. In summer the food of the little bustard consists of snails and small grasshoppers, and on the table they are excellent, the breast being large and prominent and displaying both dark and white flesh--the latter, however, being confined to the legs. CHAPTER XXVI FLAMINGOES THE QUEST FOR THEIR "INCUNABULA" [Illustration: A TYPICAL SIGHT IN THE MARISMA] The flamingo stands in a class apart. Allied to no other bird-form--hardly so much as related--it may be regarded almost as a separate act of creation. Its nesting habits, and the method by which a bird of such abnormal build could incubate its eggs, formed for generations a "vexed question" in bird-life. The story of the efforts made by British naturalists to solve the problem ranks among the classics of ornithology. The marismas of Guadalquivir were early known to be one of the few European _incunabula_ of the flamingo; but their vast extent--"as big as our eastern counties," Howard Saunders wrote--and the irregularity of the seasons (since flamingoes only remain to nest in the wettest years) combined to frustrate exploration. First in the field was Lord Lilford--as early as 1856; and both during that and the two succeeding decades he and Saunders (who appeared on the scene in 1864) undertook repeated journeys--all in vain. The record of these makes splendid reading, and will be found as follows:-- Lord Lilford, "On the Breeding of the Flamingo in Spain," _Proceedings Zoological Society of London_, 1880, pp. 446-50; Howard Saunders, _ibid._, 1869, and the same authority in the _Ibis_, 1871, pp. 394 _et seq._ The late Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria, who visited Spain in May 1879, likewise failed to reach the nesting spot--apparently through the usual cause, not going far enough--though a few eggs were found scattered on the wet mud of the marisma. (Recorded by Lord Lilford as above.) Thus the question remained unsettled till 1883, when a favouring season enabled the present authors to succeed where greater ornithologists had striven in vain. [Illustration] A venerable apologue attaches to the nesting habit of the flamingo. Owing to the length of its legs, it was assumed that the bird could not incubate in the ordinary manner of birds, and that, therefore, it stood astraddle on a nest built up to the requisite height--a combination of unproved assumption with inconsequential deduction. 'Twere ungracious to be wise after the event, yet, in fact, this fable passed current as "Natural History" for precisely two centuries--from 1683, when Dampier so described the nesting of flamingoes on the Cape de Verde Islands,[48] till 1883, when the present authors had opportunity of observing a flamingo-colony in southern Spain. Flamingoes do not nest every year in the Spanish marismas. Their doing so depends on the season, and only in very wet years is the attempt made. Rarely, even then, are young hatched off, so persistently are the wastes raided by egg-lifters, who sweep up by wholesale every edible thing, and to whom a "Flamingo City," with its hundreds of big eggs all massed together--a boat-load for the gathering--represents an El Dorado. As early as 1872 eggs were brought to us--taken by our own marshmen on May 24--but it was not till 1883 that we enjoyed seeing an occupied nest-colony ourselves. More than a quarter-century has sped since then, yet we cannot do better than substantially transcribe the narrative as recorded in _Wild Spain_. During the month of April we searched the marismas systematically for the nesting-places of flamingoes, but, though exploring large areas--riding many leagues in all directions through mud and water varying from a few inches to full three feet in depth--yet no sign of nests was then encountered. Flamingoes there were in thousands, together with a wealth of aquatic bird-life that we will not stop here to describe. But the water was still too deep, the mud-flats and new-born islets not yet sufficiently dried for purposes of nidification. The only species that actually commenced to lay in April were the coots, purple herons, peewits, Kentish plovers, stilts, redshanks, and a few more. April was clearly too early, and the writer lost nearly a week through an attack of ague, brought on by constant splashing about in comparatively cold water while a fierce sun always beat down on one's head. In May the luck improved. Far away to the eastward flamingoes had always been most numerous, and once or twice we observed (early in May) signs that resembled the first rude beginnings of architecture, and encouraged us to persevere in what had begun to appear an almost hopeless quest. _May 9_ (1883).--The effects of dawn over the vast desolations of the marisma were specially lovely this morning. Before sunrise the distant peaks of the Serranía de Ronda (seventy miles away) lay flooded in a blood-red light, and appearing quite twice their usual height. Half an hour later the mountains sank back in a golden glow, and long before noon had utterly vanished in quivering heat-haze and the atmospheric fantasies of infinite space. Amidst chaotic confusion of mirage effects we rode out across the wilderness: at first over dry mud-flats sparsely carpeted with dwarf scrub of marsh plants, or in places bare and naked, the sun-scorched surface cracked into rhomboids and parallelograms, and honeycombed with yawning cattle-tracks made long ago when the mud was moist and plastic; then through shallow marsh and stagnant waters gradually deepening. Here from a patch of rush hard by sprang three hinds with their fawns and splashed away through the shallows, their russet pelts gleaming in the early sunlight. Gradually the water deepened; "mucha agua, mucho fango!" groaned our companion, Felipe; but this morning we meant to reach the very heart of the marisma, and before ten o'clock were cooking our breakfast on a far-away islet whereon never British foot had trod before, and which was literally strewn with avocets' eggs, while nests of stilts, redshanks, pratincoles, and many more lay scattered around. [Illustration: STILTS DISTURBED AT THEIR NESTING-PLACE] During this day we discovered two nests of the slender-billed gull (_Larus gelastes_), not previously known to breed in Spain; also, we then believed, those of the Mediterranean black-headed gull (_L. melanocephalus_), though the latter were afterwards ascribed by oological experts (perhaps correctly) to the gull-billed tern (_Sterna anglica_), a species whose eggs we also found by the dozen. The immense aggregations of flamingoes which, in wet seasons, throng the middle marismas can scarce be described. Our bird-islets lay so remote from the low-lying shores that no land whatever was in sight; but the desolate horizon that surrounded them was adorned by an almost unbroken line of pink and white that separated sea and sky over the greater part of the circle. On examining the different herds narrowly through binoculars, an obvious dissimilarity was discovered in the appearance of certain groups. One or two in particular seemed so much denser than the others; the narrow white line looked three times as thick, and in the centre gave the idea that the birds were literally piled upon each other. Felipe suggested that these flamingoes must be at their _pajeréra_, or breeding-place, and after a long wet ride we found that this was the case. The water was very deep, the bottom clinging mud; at intervals the laboured plunging of the mule was exchanged for an easier, gliding motion--he was swimming. The change was a welcome relief to man and beast; but the labours undergone during these aquatic rides eventuated in the loss of one fine mule, a powerful beast worth £60. [Illustration: FLAMINGOES AND THEIR NESTS] On approach, the cause of the peculiar appearance of the flamingo city from a distance became clearly discernible. Hundreds of birds were sitting down on a low mud-island, hundreds more were standing erect thereon, while others stood in the water alongside. Thus the different elevations of their bodies formed what had appeared a triple or quadruple line. On reaching the spot, we found a perfect mass of nests. The low, flat mud-plateau was crowded with them as thickly as its space permitted. The nests had little or no height above the dead-level mud--some were raised an inch or two, a few might reach four or five inches in height, but the majority were merely circular bulwarks of mud barely raised above the general level, and bearing the impression of the bird's legs distinctly marked upon the periphery. The general aspect of the plateau might be likened to a large table covered with plates. In the centre was a deep hole full of muddy water, which, from the gouged appearance of its sides, had probably supplied the birds with building material. [Illustration] Scattered round the main colony were many single nests, rising out of the water and evidently built up from the bottom. Here and there two or three of these were joined together--"semi-detached," so to speak. These isolated nests stood some eight inches above water-level, and as the depth exceeded a foot, their total height would be two feet or thereabouts, and their width across the hollowed top, some fifteen inches. None of the nests as yet contained eggs, and though we returned to the _pajeréra_ on the latest day we were in its neighbourhood (May 11), they still remained empty. On both occasions many hundreds of flamingoes were sitting on the nests, and on the 11th we enjoyed excellent views at close quarters. Linked arm-in-arm with Felipe, and crouching low on the water to look as little human as possible, we had approached within seventy yards before the sentries first showed signs of alarm; and at that distance, with binoculars, observed the sitting flamingoes as distinctly as one need wish. The long red legs doubled under their bodies, the knees projecting slightly beyond the tail, and the graceful necks neatly curled away among their back feathers like a sitting swan, some heads resting on the breasts--all these points were unmistakable. Indeed, as regards the disposition of the legs in an incubating flamingo, no other attitude was possible since, in the great majority of cases, the nests were barely raised above the level of the mud-plateau. To sit _astride_ on a _flat_ surface is out of the question. Inexplicable it seems that the flamingo, a bird that spends its life half knee-deep in water, should so long delay the period of incubation. For long ere eggs could be hatched, and young reared, the full summer heats of June and July would already have set in, water would have utterly disappeared, and the flamingoes be left stranded in a scorching desert of sun-baked mud. [Illustration] Being unable ourselves to return to the marisma, we sent Felipe back on May 26, when he obtained eggs--long, white, and chalky, some specimens extremely rugged. Two is the number laid in each nest. In 1872 we had obtained six eggs taken on May 24, which may therefore, probably, be taken as the average date of laying. There remains, nevertheless, the bare possibility that eggs had been laid before our visit on May 9, but swept up meanwhile by egg-raiders. The flamingo city "in being" above described was the first seen by ornithologists, and the observations we were enabled to make settled at last the position and mode of incubation of the flamingo.[49] Science is impersonal, the impulsion of a naturalist springs from devotion to his subject, and from no extrinsic motive--such as personal kudos. Nevertheless, we make this categoric claim for ourselves simply because the credit, _quantum valeat_, has since been (not claimed straight away, but rather) insinuated on behalf of others who didn't earn it--analogous with the case of Dr. Cook and the North Pole. Where do these thousands of Spanish flamingoes breed, and how do they maintain their numbers, when Spain, three years out of five, is _too dry_ for nesting purposes? The only obvious answer is, Africa. And, though incapable yet of direct proof, that answer is clearly correct. For flamingoes are essentially denizens of the tropic zone. The few that ever overlap into southern Europe are but a fraction of their swarming millions farther south. During our own expeditions into British East Africa, we found flamingoes in vast abundance on all the equatorial lakes we visited--Baringo, Nakuru, Elmenteita, Naivasha, and, especially, Lake Hannington, where, during past ages, they have so polluted the foreshores as to preclude human occupation. These were the same flamingoes, a few of which "slop over" into Europe; we shot two specimens with the rifle in Nakuru to prove that.[50] Flamingoes are not migratory in an ordinary sense--birds born on the equator seldom are. Their movements have no seasonal character, but depend on the rainfall and the varying condition of the lagoons at different points within their range. Here, in Spain, we see them coming and going, to and fro, at all seasons according to the state of the marisma--and a striking colour-study they present when pink battalions contrast with dark-green pine beneath and set off by deepest azure above. In 1907 flamingoes attempted to establish a nesting-colony at a spot called Las Albacias in the marisma of Hinojos. A mass of nests was already half built, then suddenly abandoned. "If the shadow of a cloud passes over them, they forsake," say the herdsmen of the wilderness. [Illustration: FLAMINGOES ON THEIR NESTS.] Quantities of drift grass and weed are always found floating where a herd has been feeding, which at first led us to suppose that their food consisted of water-plants (as with geese), but that is not the case. The floating grasses are only incidentally uprooted by the birds while delving in the mud. The Spanish marshmen say flamingoes "live on mud," and truly an examination of their crops appears to confirm this. But the mud is only taken in because of the masses of minute creatures (_animalculae_) which it contains, and which form the food of the flamingo. What precisely these living atoms are would require both a microscopical examination and a knowledge of zoophites to determine. The tongue of a flamingo is a thick, fleshy organ filling the whole cavity of the mandibles, and furnished with a series of flexible bony spikes, or hooks, nearly half an inch long and curving inwards. Flamingoes' tongues are said to have formed, an epicurean dish in Roman days. However that may be, we found them, on trial, quite uneatable--tough as india-rubber; even our dogs refused the "delicacy." This bird's flesh is dark-red and rank, quite uneatable. In the New World the mystery of the nesting habits of the flamingo (_Phoenicopterus ruber_) was solved just three years later, and in a precisely similar sense. [Illustration: HEAD OF FLAMINGO Showing the spikes on tongue and lamellae on mandibles. [The beak had to be forced open.]] We will close this chapter with a reference to a recent and most complete demonstration of our subject--that of our namesake, Mr. Frank M. Chapman, of the American Museum, New York, in his _Camps and Cruises of an Ornithologist_. Therein is set forth, in Chapter IV., the last word on this topic. In America, as in Spain, the final solution of the problem was only attained after years of patient effort and many disappointments. With the thoroughness of thought and honesty of purpose that marks our transatlantic progeny while treating of natural phenomena, this book sets forth the life-history and domestic economy of the flamingo, from egg to maturity, illustrated by a series of photographs that are absolutely unique.[51] We conclude by quoting our bird-friend's opening sentence: "There are larger birds than the flamingo, and birds with more brilliant plumage, but no other large bird is so brightly coloured, and no other brightly coloured bird is so large. In brief, size and beauty of plume united reach their maximum development in this remarkable bird, while the open nature of its haunts and its gregarious habit seem specially designed to display its marked characteristics of form and colour to the most striking advantage. When to these superficial attractions is added the fact that little or nothing has hitherto been known of its nesting habits, one may realise the intense longing of a naturalist, not only to behold a flamingo city--itself the most remarkable sight in the bird-world--but to lift the veil through which the flamingo's home-life has been but dimly seen." [Illustration] CHAPTER XXVII WILD CAMELS It was during these aquatic rides in search of the nesting-places of the flamingo that we first fell in with wild camels. Vague yarns, more or less circumstantial, that such animals wandered over the farther marismas, we remember as early as 1872. The thing, however, had appeared too incredible for consideration--at any rate, we gave it none. But in that spring of 1883 we one day found ourselves face to face with two unmistakable camels. They stood gazing intently about half a mile away--a huge, shaggy, hump-backed beast, accompanied by a second not half its size. The pair wheeled and made off ere we had approached within 400 yards, and something "game-like" in their style prompted our first and last attempt at pursuit. The camels simply ran away from us, splashing through slippery mud and water, two feet deep, at double our horses' speed, and raising in their flight a tearing trail of foam as of twin torpedo-boats. Since then we have fallen in with camels on very many occasions, singly, in twos and threes, or in herds of a dozen to twenty and upwards, old and young together. It is, in fact, only necessary to ride far enough into the marisma to make sure of seeing some of these extraordinary monsters startling the desolate horizon, and silhouetted in incongruous juxtaposition with ranks of rosy flamingoes and flotillas of swimming waterfowl. The whole story of these wild camels and their origin has been narrated in _Wild Spain_. Briefly summarised, the animals were introduced to Spain in 1829 by the Marquis de Villafranca (House of Medina-Sidonia) with the object of employing them in transport and agriculture, as they are so commonly used on the opposite shores of Africa. But local difficulties ensued--chiefly arising from the intense fear and repugnance of horses towards camels, which resulted in numerous accidents--and eventually the bactrians were set free in the marisma, wherein they have since lived at large and bred under wholly wild conditions for well-nigh a century. We admit that a statement of the existence of wild camels in these watery wildernesses of Spain--flooded during great part of the year--is difficult to accept. The camel is inseparably associated with the most arid deserts of earth, with sun-scorched Sahara, Arabia Petraea, and waterless tropical regions. Its physical economy is expressly adapted for such habitats--the huge padded feet and seven-chambered stomach that will sustain it for days without drinking. Yet the reader was asked to believe that this specialised desert-dweller had calmly accepted a condition of life diametrically reversed, and not only lives, but breeds and flourishes amidst knee-deep swamp. At the period of which we write the camel was not known to exist on earth in a wild state, and physical disabilities were alleged which would have precluded such a possibility. During historic times it had never been described save only as a beast of burden, the slave of man--and a savage, intractable slave at that. A little later, however, the Russian explorer, Préjevalsky, met with wild camels roaming over the Kumtagh deserts of Turkestan, and in Tibet Sven Hedin has since shown the two-humped camel to be one of the normal wild beasts of the Central Asian table-lands. Wild camels in Europe represented a considerable draft upon the credulity of readers; and a chorus of ridicule was poured upon the statement. Men who had "lived in Spain for years"--a foreign consul at Seville, engineers employed in reclaiming marismas (somewhere else)--all rushed into print to attest the absurdity of the idea. Limited experience was mistaken for complete knowledge! Similar treatment was accorded to our observation of pelicans in Denmark. Ornithologists of Copenhagen insinuated we did not know pelicans from seagulls; yet the Danish pelicans are as well known to the Jutlander fisher-folk as are the Spanish camels to the herdsmen and fowlers of the marisma. Knowledge is no monopoly of high places. [Illustration: WILD CAMELS.] The Spanish camels spend their lives exclusively in the open marisma, pasturing on the _vetas_, or higher-lying areas, and passing from islet to islet, though the intervening water be three feet deep. We have watched them grazing on subaquatic herbage in the midst of what appeared miles of open water; and, in fact, during wet winters there is no dry land to be seen. Yet they never approach the adjacent dunes of Doñana, though these would appear so tempting. By night, however, the camels sometimes pass so near to our shooting-lodge that their scent, when borne down-wind, has created panic among the horses, though the stables are situate within an enclosed courtyard. [Illustration] Antonio Trujillo, formerly head-keeper of the Coto Doñana, some years ago chanced on a camel that was "bogged" in a quicksand (_nuclé_). These places are dangerous, and it was not till six days later that he was enabled, by bringing planks and ropes, to drag the poor beast to firm land. All round the spot where the camel had laid he found every root, and even the very earth, eaten away. Yet the animal when set free appeared none the worse, for it strolled away quite unconcerned, and shortly commenced to browse while still close by. Young camels are born early in the year, about February, though whether that is the exclusive period we have no means of knowing. A curious incident occurred one winter day when we had ridden out into the marisma expressly in search of camels. It was an intensely cold and dry season, almost unprecedented for the severity of the frost. When several leagues from anywhere, a keen eye detected in the far distance a roving fox. All dismounted, and letting the horses graze, hid behind them and awaited his approach. Then with only a single _podenco_, or hunting-dog, _Frascuelo_ by name, after a straight-away run of five or six miles over the sun-dried plain, we fairly rode bold Reynard down and killed him. Six months after the publication of _Wild Spain_ we received the following letter from H.R.H. the late Phillippe, Comte de Paris, the owner of the adjoining Coto del Rey:-- _June 17, 1893._ Having read with the greatest pleasure and interest your description of the wild camels, it struck me that you may appreciate a photograph taken from nature of one of these independent inhabitants of the shores of Guadalquivir. I found that one could only look at them from a distance, and therefore the enclosed photographs may be of interest. They were taken three months ago by my nephew, Prince Henry of Orleans. My keepers had in the early morning separated this single animal from the herd, but it escaped from them about Marilopez at noon, and when we met with him near the Laguna de la Madre, and about a mile from the Coto del Rey, we had only to give him a last gallop to catch him. These camels spend great part of the year on ground of which I am either the owner or the tenant, and I do my best to protect them from the terrible poachers coming from Trebujena. In order to be able to do this more effectually, I bought yesterday from the heirs of the landowners who turned them out some seventy years ago, I think, all the claims they can have on these animals. We have recently been favoured by the present Comte de Paris with the latest details respecting the camels. In a note dated August 1910, H.R.H. writes:-- For some time their numbers have been decreasing, and we no longer see great troops of them as we used to do eighteen years ago. The cause of their diminution is certainly the bitter war waged against them by poachers. The parts of the marisma frequented by the wild camels lie between the Coto del Rey on the north, the Coto Doñana on the west, and the Guadalquivir on the south-east. The long deep channels of La Madre, however, interfere with their reaching the Coto Doñana, and they chiefly graze in the marismas of Hinojos and Almonte. The plan pursued by the poachers is as follows:--Coming down from some of the little villages, they cross the river in small flat-bottomed boats in which they can creep along the shores to points where they have seen either the spoor or the animals themselves during the day. Then drawing near to the camels, under cover of the waning light, they are able to kill one or sometimes two, which they skin and disembowel on the spot. The flesh is cut up into pieces, sewn up in the skin, and, on returning to the riverbank, secreted beneath the flat bottom-boards of the boat, thereby evading detection by Civil Guards and douaniers. The men then sail down the river and sell the meat at San Lucar as venison. When in the marisma in 1892 I met one day a troop of forty animals--some old males, their huge bodies covered with thick hair like blankets; there were also females followed by their young--fantastic of appearance, owing to the disproportionate length of their legs, but galloping and frisking around their mothers as they had done since birth. Next day my companion and I took lassoes; we encountered a huge old male, singly, which trotted and galloped round our horses, terrifying the poor beasts to such an extent that we could not come near the camel. At length after a fifty-minutes' chase, in crossing a part where the mud was soft and the surface much broken up by cattle coming to drink, we overtook him. Thanks to my horse having less fear than the other, I was presently able to throw a lasso around the camel, my companion hauling taut the rope to hold the prisoner fast. The great brute proved very active, defending himself with his immense flat feet, which he used as clubs, and, moreover, he bit, and the bite of a camel is venomous. Ultimately I succeeded in getting a second rope around him and dragging him to the ground, where he lay like the domestic camel. The photographs illustrate this episode. Old males frequently have the hair very ragged and scant, especially on hind-quarters, and on their knees are great callosities. The truly wild camels of the marisma are fast disappearing. A friend has furnished me with the approximate number now remaining absolutely wild, viz. fifteen or sixteen near La Macha fronting the Palace of Tisana, besides five enclosed in the Cerrado de Matas Gordas, near the Palacio del Rey, and belonging to Madame La Condesa de Paris. It was owing to the rapid decrease in their numbers, and in order to save them from extinction, that the Condesa had these enclosures, known as Matas Gordas, prepared. They contain excellent pasturage, besides some extent of brushwood; yet the enclosed camels do not flourish, nor have they ever bred. Big as the enclosures are, yet the area may be too restricted for them; or it may be the disturbance due to the presence of cattle and herdsmen (since the cerrados are let for grazing) that explains this failure; or possibly the camels resent being enclosed at all. At any rate the spectacle of troops of camels rushing wildly forward in all directions is passing away all too quickly, and soon nothing but the legend will remain. Truly it is melancholy that the wild camels should be allowed utterly to disappear, representing, as they do, so extraordinary a fact in zoological science. Our friend Mr. William Garvey tells us that in the summer of 1907, while returning from Villamanrique, crossing the dry marisma in his automobile, he saw three camels. He drove towards them, and when at 500 or 600 yards, they turned and fled, he put on full speed (sixty miles an hour), and within some ten minutes had all three camels completely beaten, tongues hanging out, unable to go another yard! This will be the first occasion when wild camels have been run down, in an open desert, by a motor-car! _February 9, 1903._--This morning, shortly after daybreak, a big single bull camel passed my "hide" in the Lucio de las Nuevas within easy ball-shot. He was splashing through water about two feet deep overgrown with samphire bushes, and "roared" at intervals--a curious sort of ventriloquial "gurgle," followed by a bellow which I could still distinguish when he had passed quite two miles away. With the binoculars I distinguished at vast distance five other camels in the direction the single bull was taking. Here we insert a note received from the co-author's brother, J. Crawhall Chapman:-- Oh, yes! I remember that camel-day--it's never likely to die out of my memory, for never did I endure a worse experience nor a harder in all my sporting life. It promised to be a great duck-shoot on the famous "Laguna Grande"; but for me, at any rate, it began, continued, and ended in misery! At 3.30 A.M., on opening my eyes, I saw Bertie already silently astir--probably seeking quinine or other febrifuge, for we were "housed" (save the mark) in Clarita's _choza_, a lethal mud-and reed-thatched hut many a mile out in the marisma. Nothing whatever lies within sight--nothing bar desolation of mud and stagnant waters, reeds, samphire, and BIRDS, relieved at intervals by the occasional and far-away view of a steamer's funnel, navigating the Guadalquivír Sevillewards. Well, we arose, looked at what was intended for breakfast, and groped for our steeds. I was to ride an old polo-pony named _Bufalo_, an evil-tempered veteran with a long-spoilt "mouth" that ever resented the Spanish curb. Cold and empty we rode for two long hours in the dark, always following the leader since otherwise inevitable loss must ensue--splosh, splosh, through deep mud and deeper water, never stopping, always stumbling, slipping, slithering onwards. I feared it would never end; and, in fact, it never did--that is, the bog. For when I was finally told "Abajo" (which I understood to mean "get down"), and to squat in a miry place so much like the rest of the swamp that it didn't seem to matter much where it really was--well, it was then only 6 A.M. and horribly cold and desolate. [Illustration: WILD CAMELS OF THE MARISMA. PHOTOS BY H.R.H. PHILIPPE, DUKE OF ORLEANS. CAPTURING A WILD CAMEL. THE CAPTIVE.] An hour later the sun began to rise. I had not fired a shot--nor had any of us. As a duck-shoot it was a dismal failure. By eight o'clock the sun was quite hot, so I tried to find a stomach--for breakfast. Failed again; but drank some sherry, and then lay down till noon in decomposing and malodorous reed-mush and mud. Never a duck came near, so shifted my stye to an old dry ridge--apparently an antediluvian division between two equally noisome swamps. Here I tried to sleep, but that was no good, for a headache had set in--possibly the effects of sun and sherry combined! I felt the sweeping wind of a marsh-harrier who had found me too suddenly and was half a mile away ere I could get up to shoot. At four o'clock I signalled for _Bufalo_ to take me back to our hut, distant eight miles, the only guide being that morning's outward tracks. It was on this ride that there occurred the incident of the day--thrilling indeed had it not been for the headache that left me cheaper than cheap. Having traversed some three miles of mud and water, suddenly I saw ahead the "camels a-coming!"--eleven of them in line, the last a calf, and what a splash they made! Knowing how horses hate the smell and sight of camels, and _Bufalo_ being a rearing and uncomfortable beast at best, I felt perhaps unduly nervous. The camels were marching directly across my line of route and up-wind thereof. If only I could pass that intersecting point well before them, _Bufalo_, I hoped, might not catch the unwholesome scent. I tried all I could, but the mud was too sticky. The camel-corps came on, splashing, snorting, and striding at high speed. _Bufalo_ saw them quick enough, I can tell you--he stopped dead, gazed and snorted in terror, spun round pirouetting half-a-dozen times, reared, and would certainly have bolted but that he stood well over his fetlocks in mud and nigh up to the girths in water. I could not induce him to face them anyhow; but remember, please, that I was handicapped by the mass of accoutrements and luggage slung around both me and my mount, to wit:--Several empty bottles and bags, remains of lunch, some 500 cartridges, three dozen ducks, a Paradox gun, waders, and brogues! [Illustration] Meantime the camels passed my front within 100 yards and then "rounded up." Having loaded both barrels with ball, I felt safer, and pushed _Bufalo_ forwards--to fifty yards. Then the thought occurred to me, "Do camels charge?" _Bufalo_ reared, twisted, and splashed about in sheer horror, and then--thank goodness--the corps, with a parting roar, or rather a chorus of vicious gurgling grunts, in clear resentment at my presence on the face of the water at all, turned and bolted out west at full speed. I was left alone, and much relieved. The adult camels were of the most disreputable, not to say dissolute appearance, great ugly tangled mats of loose hair hanging from their shoulders, ribs, and flanks, their small ears laid viciously aback, and with utterly disagreeable countenances. I half wish now that I had shot that leading bull--he would never have been missed! I don't suppose that any one has been nearer to these strange beasts than I was that day; certainly I trust never to see them so near again--never in this world! * * * * * While preparing these pages for press we are grieved to hear of the death of our friend Mr. William Garvey, whose adventure with the camels is narrated above (p. 279). Mr. Garvey, who was in his eightieth year, was a _Gentil Hombre de la Camara_ to King Alfonso and had on various occasions, with his nephew, Mr. Patrick Garvey, entertained the monarch on his splendid domain. CHAPTER XXVIII AFTER CHAMOIS IN THE ASTURIAS PICOS DE EUROPA At the château of Nuévos, hidden away amidst Cantabrian hills, hard by where the "Picos de Europa" form the most prominent feature of that 100-mile range, we were welcomed by the Conde de la Vega de Sella, whom we had met the previous year in Norway, and his friend Bernaldo de Quirós. Our host was a bachelor and the menage curiously mixed; there was a wild Mexican-Indian servant, but more alarming still, a tame wolf prowled free about the house--none too tame either, as testified by a half-healed wound on his master's arm. The bedrooms in the corridor which we occupied had no doors, merely curtains hanging across the doorway, and all night long that wolf pattered up and down the passage outside. My own feelings will not be described--there was an ominous mien in that wolf's eye and in those immense jaws. [Illustration] Beyond patches of maize and other minute crops grown in infinitesimal fields divided by stone walls and surrounded by woods of chestnut and hazel, the whole landscape surrounding the château was composed of towering grey mountains. It was from this point that with our kind host we had projected an expedition to form acquaintance with chamois, and to see the system of a _montería_ as practised in the Biscayan mountains. The month was September. The first stage--on wheels--brought us to the village of Arénas de Cabrales, where a gipsy fair or _Romería_ was raging, affording striking display of local customs and fashion. The girls, handsome though somewhat stalwart, wearing on their heads bright-coloured kerchiefs (instead of, as in Andalucia, flowers in the hair), danced strange steps to the music of a drum and a sort of bagpipe called the _Gaita_. Cider here replaced wine as a beverage, and wooden sabots are worn instead of the hempen sandals of the south. Maize is the chief crop, and women work hard, doing, except the ploughing, most of the field labour. The hill-country around belonged chiefly to our host, who was received with a sort of feudal respect. Ancient rights included (this we were told, but did not see enforced) the privilege of kissing all pretty daughters of the estate. The region is primitive enough even for the survival of so agreeable a custom. Such detail in a serious work must appear frivolous by comparison, yet it reflects the _genius loci_. This was the point at which we had to take the hill. Our outfit was packed on ponies, and being joined by three of the chamois-hunters, we set out, following the course of the river Cares. This gorge of the Cares, along with its sister-valley the Desfiladero de la Deva, form two of the most magnificent canyons in all the Asturias, and perhaps have few equals in the wider world outside. The bridle-track led along rock-shelves on the hanging mountain-side, presently falling again till we rode close by the torrent of the Cares, here swirling in foaming rapids with alternations of deep pools of such crystalline water that trout could be discerned swimming twenty feet below the surface. The water varied between a diamond-white and an emerald-green, according as the stream flowed over the white limestone or rocks of darker shade. Approaching Bulnes, the track became absolutely appalling, zigzagging to right and left up an almost perpendicular mountain. Riding was here out of the question. It was giddy work enough on foot, rounding corners where the outer rim overhung a sheer drop of hundreds of feet to the torrent below, and with no protection to save horse or man in the event of a slip or false step. Not without mental tremors we surmounted it and reached Bulnes, a dozen stone, windowless houses clustered on an escarpment. This is facetiously called the "Upper Town," and we presumed that another group of hovels hidden somewhere beneath our sight formed Lower Bulnes. We entered the best looking of these stone-age abodes, and discovered that it formed the presbytery of the Cura of Bulnes, a strange mixture of alpine hut with Gothic hermitage. Slabs of rough stone projecting from unhewn walls served as tables, while rudely carved oak-chests did double duty as seats or wardrobes in turn. The Cura's bed occupied one corner, and from the walls hung gun and rifle, together with accoutrements of the chase--satchels, belts, and pouches, all made of chamois-skin. At first sight indeed the whole presbytery reeked rather of hunting than of holiness--it is scarce too strong to say it smelt of game. An inner apartment, windowless and lit by the feeble flicker of a _mariposa_, that recalled the reed-lights of mediaeval history (and to which, by the way, access was only gained past other cells which appeared to be the abode of cows and of the cook respectively), was assigned to us. The Padre himself was away on the cliffs above cutting hay, for he combines agriculture with the care of souls, owns many cows, and makes the celebrated cheese known as "Cabrales." Presently he joined us in his stone chamber, and at once showed himself to be, by his frank and genuine manner, what later experience proved him, a true sportsman and a most unselfish companion. His Reverence at once set about the details of organising our hunt, sent his nephew to round-up the mountain lads, some being sent off at once to spend that night, how, we know not, in crags of the Peña Vieja, while others were instructed to join us there in the morning. While we dined on smoked chamois and rough red wine he busied himself arranging weapons, ammunition, and mocassins for a few days' work on the crags. Our arrival having been prearranged, we were soon on our upward way, by sinous tracks which lead to the summits of the Picos de Europa, some altitudes of which are as follows: Peña Vieja, 10,046 feet; Picos de Hierro, 9610 feet; Pico de San Benigno, 9329 feet. All heavy baggage was left below; there only remained the tent, rugs, guns, and cartridges, and these were got up, heaven knows how, to about half the required height on the backs of two donkeys. For provisions we relied on the milk and bread of the cheese-makers who live up there, much in the style of the Norwegian peasants at their _saeters_, or summer sheilings on the fjeld. Hard by the _cabaña_, or cabin, of these honest folks, our tent was pitched--altitude, 5800 feet. With the first of the daylight, after a drink of milk, we started upwards, our host, the Cura, Bertie, and ourselves. With us were ten goat-herds who had to flank the drive; the others would already be occupying allotted positions, we knew not where. Three hours' climbing--the usual struggle, only worse--took us to the first line of "passes," far above the last signs of vegetation and amidst what little snow remains here in summer. This "drive" had been reckoned a certainty, and four animals were reported seen in the mist, but no chamois came in to the guns, and yet another two-hours' climb had to be faced ere the second set of posts was reached. This bit, however, definitely stopped for the moment my career as a chamois-hunter, such was the slippery, perpendicular, and utterly dangerous nature of the rocks. A fortnight before I had climbed the Plaza de Almanzór in the Sierra de Grédos, but these pinnacles of the Picos proved beyond my powers. The admission, beyond any words of mine, bespeaks the character of these Cantabrian peaks. Here on a dizzy ledge at 8000 feet I remained behind, while the rest of the party, filing up a rock-stair, were lost to sight within fifteen yards. Before me stretched away peak beyond peak in emulating altitudes the whole vast cordillera of Cantabria--a glory of mountain-forms. ...the things which tower, which shine, Whose smile makes glad, whose frown is terrible. In majestic array, pinnacles and crannied summits, flecked and streaked with glistening snows, enthral and subdue. The giants Peña Vieja, Urriales, Garnizo, lift their heads above the rest, piercing the blue ether--fancied spires in some celestial shrine. This smiling noontide an all-pervading spirit of peace reigns; the sublimity of solitude generates reverence and awe, the voice of the Creator seems audible amidst encompassing silence. Far away below, as in another world, lie outspread champaigns; sunlit stubbles, newly stripped of autumnal crops, form chequers of contrasted colour that set off with golden background the dark Asturian woods, while fresh green pastures blend in harmony with the riant foliage of the vine. Presently, following my companion, a goat-herd, who had been left with me, by slow degrees we reached the spot appointed to await our party's return. [Illustration: THE HOME OF THE CHAMOIS. CHAMOIS FROM LIFE ON LA LLOROSA, PEÑA VIEJA. EL CORROBLE, PICOS DE EUROPA, ASTURIAS.] Hours went by and six o'clock came before, on the skyline above, they appeared, five of the _monteros_ each bearing a chamois on his shoulder. Then, in the 2000-feet ravine towards the north, a third drive was attempted for my special benefit; but the day was far spent, and during the crucial half-hour snow-clouds skurrying along the crests shut out all chance of seeing game. The beaters reported enclosing quite forty chamois, some of which broke downwards through the flankers, the rest passing a trifle wide of the guns. This beat is termed "El Arbol." Long and weary was the descent, and fiendish places we had to pass ere the welcome camp-fires loomed up through gathering darkness. Those who wish to shoot chamois should commence the undertaking before they have passed the half-century. The successful drive that was thus missed by No. 1 is hereunder described by No. 2. We give the narrative in detail, inasmuch as this day's operation was typical of the system of chamois-shooting as practised in the Asturian mountains. After leaving No. 1 as mentioned, and while proceeding to our next position, a number of chamois were viewed scattered in three groups on the hanging screes of a second gorge, a mile beyond that which we had intended to beat. After consultation held, it was decided to alter the plan and to send the guns completely round the outer periphery of encircling heights so as to command the passes immediately above the game. This involved two hours' climbing and incidentally three detours, scrambling each time down the precipitous moraine to avoid showing in sight of the chamois. Upon reaching the reverse point, the Conde and I were assigned the most likely posts; and these being also the highest, a final heart-breaking climb up a thousand feet of loose rocks succeeded. Chamois, like ibex, when disturbed instinctively make for the highest ground, hence our occupation of the topmost passes. Cheered on by the Conde, himself as hard as steel, the effort was accomplished, and I sank down, breathless, parched, and exhausted, behind a big rock that was indicated as my position. The lower passes had meanwhile been occupied by the Padre and by sundry shepherds armed with primitive-looking guns. On recovering some degree of breath and strength, I surveyed my surroundings. We were both stationed on the topmost arête, in a nick that broke for 80 or 100 yards the rim of a knife-edged ridge that separated two stupendous gorges. On my right, while facing the beat, and not 30 yards away, the nick was terminated by a rock-mass perpendicular and four-square as a cathedral tower, that uprose some 100 feet sheer. On the left also rose cliffs though not quite so abrupt. The position was such that any game attempting to pass the nick must appear within 50 or 60 yards--so, in our simplicity, we thought. [Illustration: A CHAMOIS DRIVE--PICOS DE EUROPA Diagram illustrative of text. Our positions on arête marked (1) and (2); "Cathedral" on right. Valley beyond full of driving mist (passing our power to depict).] Behind us dipped away the long moraine of loose rocks by which we had ascended; while in front, by stepping but a few paces across the narrow neck, we could look down into the depths of the gorge whence the quarry was to approach, as we feebly attempt to show in diagram annexed. The panorama from these altitudes was superb beyond words. We were here far above the stratum of mist which enshrouded our camp and the sierra for some distance above it. We looked down upon a billowy sea of white clouds pierced here and there by the summits and ridges of outstanding crags like islands on a surf-swept coast. Of bird-life there was no sign beyond choughs and a soaring eagle that our guides called aguila pintada (_Aquila bonellii_, immature). There are wild-boar in the forests far below, with occasional wolves and yet more occasional bear. Hark! the distant cries of beaters break the solemn silence and announce that operations have begun. Almost instantly thereafter the rattle of loose stones dislodged by the feet of moving chamois came up from beneath our eyrie. So near was the sound that expectation waxed tense and eyes scanned each possible exit. Then from the heights on the left, and already above us, sprang into view a band of five chamois lightly skipping from ledge to ledge with an agility that cannot be conveyed in words. The Conde and I fired simultaneously. The beast I had selected pulled himself convulsively together, sprang in air, and then fell backwards down the abyss whence he had just emerged. So abrupt was the skyline that no second barrel was possible; but while we yet gazed into space the rattle of falling stones right _behind_ attracted attention in that direction, and a chamois was bounding across that loose moraine (or "canal" as it is here called) by which we had ascended. He flew those jumbled rocks as though they were a ballroom floor, offering at best but a snapshot, and the bullet found the beast already protected by a rock. Hardly, however, had cartridges been replaced than three more _Rebecos_ followed along precisely the same track, and this time each gun secured one buck. Note that all these last four animals had come in from our _right_, that is, they had escaladed the "cathedral"; though by what earthly means they could surmount sheer rock-walls devoid of visible crack or crevice passes human comprehension. For myself, having regarded the cathedral as impassable, I had kept no watch on that side. For the next half-hour all was quiet. Then we heard again the rattle of hoofs somewhere down under, and on the sound ceasing, had gently raised ourselves to peer over into the eerie abyss in front, when a chamois suddenly poked his head over the rocks within fifteen yards, only to vanish like a flash. From this advanced position, in the far distance we could now distinguish the beaters, looking like flies as they descended the opposite circle of crests, and could hear their cries and the reverberation of the rocks they dislodged to start the game. An extra burst of clamour denoted game afoot, and a few seconds later another chamois (having once more mocked the cathedral barrier) darted across the moraine behind and fell within a score of yards of the previous pair, though all three were finally recovered several hundred feet below, having rolled down these precipitous screes. The first chamois I had shot had fallen even farther--at one point over a sheer drop that could not be less than 100 feet. His body was smashed into pulp, every bone broken, but curiously the horns had escaped intact. We were much struck by the clear emerald-green light in the eyes of newly killed chamois. The beaters being now close at hand, we scrambled down to rejoin the Padre who had occupied the _puesto_ next below ours. We found that worthy man very happy as he had succeeded in putting two slugs into a chamois-buck, to which the _coup de grâce_ had been given by Don Serafin lower down. A curious incident occurred as we made our way to the next beat where "No. 1" was to rejoin us. Suddenly the rugged stones that surrounded us were vivified by a herd of bouncing chamois--they had presumably been disturbed elsewhere and several came our way. A buck fell to a long shot of our host; while another suddenly sprang into view right under the Padre's feet. This, he averred, he would certainly have killed had he been loaded with slugs (_postas_) instead of ball. The six chamois brought into camp to-night included four bucks and two does. We had not ourselves found it possible to distinguish the sexes in life, though long practice enabled the Conde to do so when within moderate distance. All six were of a foxy-red colour, and the horns measured from seven to eight inches over the bend. Chamois are certainly very much easier to obtain than ibex. Not only are they tenfold more abundant, but, owing to their diurnal habits, they are easily seen while feeding in broad daylight (often in large herds) on the open hillsides. They never enter caves or crevices of the rocks as ibex habitually do. Chamois might undoubtedly be obtained by stalking, though that art is not practised in Spain. The excessively rugged nature of the ground is rather against it; for one's view being often so restricted, there is danger while stalking chamois, which have been espied from a distance, of "jumping" others previously unseen though much nearer. Driving, as above described, is the method usually adopted. Few beaters comparatively are required; the positions of flankers and stops are often clearly indicated by the natural configuration of the crests. Dogs are occasionally employed. The game, in their terror of canine pursuers, will push forward into precipices whence there is no exit; and then, rather than attempt to turn, will spring down to certain death. The best foot-gear is the Spanish _alpargata_, or hemp-soled sandal. They will withstand two or three days' wear on the roughest of rocks and only cost some eighteenpence a pair. Nailed boots are useless and dangerous. Similar days followed, some more successful, others less, but all laborious in the last degree. Both limbs and lungs had well-nigh given out ere the time arrived to strike camp and abandon our eyrie. During the descent to Bulnes we noticed a goat which, in feeding along the crags, had reached a spot whence it could neither retreat nor escape, and by bleating cries distinctly displayed its fear. Now that goat was only worth one dollar, yet its owner spent a solid hour, risking his own life, in crawling along ledges and shelves of a fearful rock-wall (_pared_) to save the wretched animal. We looked on speechless, fascinated with horror--at times pulses well-nigh stood still; even our hunters recognised that this was a rash performance. Yet that goat was reached, a lasso attached to its neck, and it was drawn upwards to safety. This incident occurred on the Naranjo de Bulnes, a dolomite mountain which stands out like a perpendicular and four-square tower, in the central group or _massif_ of the Picos--that known as Urriales. The actual height of the Naranjo is given as 9424 feet, which is exceeded by those of either of the other two groups to east and west respectively. But its abrupt configuration gives the Naranjo by far the most imposing, indeed appalling appearance, far surpassing all its rivals, while its lateral walls of sheer rock, some of which reach 1500 to 2000 feet vertically, long lent this peak the reputation of being absolutely unscalable. That feat has, however (after countless failures), been accomplished, in the first instance by Don Pedro Pidal, Marquis de Villaviciosa de Asturias, who was accompanied in the ascent by Gregorio Perez, a famous chamois-hunter of Caïn. At Arénas de Cabrales we bade farewell to our kind host, despatched Caraballo with the baggage to Santandér, thence to find his way to Jerez as best he might, by sea; and ourselves drove off through the hills forty miles to the railway at Cabezón de la Sal, there to entrain for Bilbao, Paris, and London. * * * * * On August 19, 1881, at a royal _montería_ above Aliva and Andara H.M. Don Alfonso XII. recovered the same evening (lying dead around his post) no less than twenty-one chamois. Thirteen more, which had fallen into the abyss beneath, were brought in next morning, and nine others later, making a total of forty-three chamois actually recovered, besides those that had lodged in such inaccessible spots that their bodies could not be reached. At another royal shoot held 1st and 2nd September 1905 H.M. King Alfonso XIII. killed five chamois, the total bag on that occasion being twenty-three. THE PICOS DE EUROPA DECLARED A ROYAL PRESERVE In 1905 the freeholders of those villages in the three provinces of Santandér, León, and Asturias, which lie encircling the Picos de Europa, offered to H.M. King Alfonso XIII. the exclusive rights of hunting the chamois throughout the whole "Central Group." His Majesty was pleased to accept the offer, and in the following year commissioned the Marquis of Villaviciosa de Asturias (the intrepid conqueror of the Naranjo) to appoint guards to preserve the game. Five such guards were appointed in 1906, their chief being the aforementioned Gregorio Perez, representing the region of Caïn, the other four representing those of Bulnes, Sotres, Espiñama, and Valdeón. The chamois in the four regions named can be counted in thousands. [Illustration: TYPES OF SPANISH BIRD-LIFE HOOPOE (_Upupa epops_) The crest normally folds flat, backwards (as shown at p. 69), but at intervals flashes upright like a halo.] CHAPTER XXIX HIGHLANDS OF ASTURIAS (1) THE TROUT IN SPAIN The Asturian Highlands--a maze of mist-wreathed mountains forested with birch and pine, the home of brown bear and capercaillie, and on whose towering peaks roam herds of chamois by hundreds--form a region distinct from the rest of Spain. Rushing rivers and mountain-torrents coursing down each rent in those rock-ramparts attracted our earliest angling ambitions. Some of those efforts--with rod and gun--are recorded in _Wild Spain_, and we purpose attempting no more--whether with pen or fly-rod. For the Spanish trout is given no sort of sporting chance, and lovely streams--a very epitome of trouting-water--that might make the world a pleasanter planet (and enrich their owners too) are abandoned to the assassin with dynamite and quicklime, or to villainous nets, cruives, and other engines of wholesale destruction with which we have no concern. Never since the date of _Wild Spain_ have we cast line on Spanish waters, nor ever again will we attempt it. Spain which, from her French frontier in the Pyrenees right across to that of Portugal on the west, might rival any European country in this respect stands well-nigh at the foot of the list. Not in the most harassed streams of Norway, nor in her hardest-"ottered" lakes, have the trout so damnable a fate dealt out to them as in northern Spain, and for twenty years we have abandoned it as an angling potentiality--or, to put it mildly, there are countries infinitely more attractive to the wandering fisherman. The case of the Spanish trout as it stands to-day is summed up in the following letter, dated April 1910, from our friend Capt. F. J. Mitchell:-- I have tried a great many of the best rivers in northern Spain, and have come to the conclusion that for angling purposes they have been hopelessly ruined--by dynamite, cloruro, lime, coca, and various other things. There may be deep pools here and there where fish have escaped, but they are very few. If your book is not finished you can put this in, as it is accurate, and may save many a disappointment to the free fisherman. Farther south, in León and northern Estremadura, are also rivers of first-rate character. The Alagón, for example, with its tributaries, is well adapted for trout--dashing streams with alternate stretches of pool and rapid. These still hold trout in their head-waters among the mountains; but lower down the speckled beauties are well-nigh extirpated. In this region one frequently observes, not without surprise, evidence of the introduction and acclimatisation of exotic products by old-time Moors--often in most outlandish nooks, wherever their keen eyes had spotted some fertile patch: probably, ere this, that energetic race would have preserved and cultivated the trout! The success of such enterprise in New Zealand and South Africa (it is even promising to succeed under the Equator in B.E. Africa), and indeed in Spain itself (at Algeciras), attests how easily these Iberian waters might be endowed with a new interest and a new value. Such, however, is existent apathy that, although the local natives (N. Estremadura) were aware of the presence of fish in their rivers, and told us that some ran to 10 or 12 lbs. in weight (these were barbel), yet they knew no distinctive names for the various species. All fish, big or little, were merely _pesces--Muy buenas pesces_. None could describe them, whether as to appearance or habit, nor did they know whether some species were migratory or otherwise. The only angling we have seen practised in this province was at Trujillo, where in some lakes adjoining that old-world city _Tencas_ (we presume tench) up to 5 or 6 lbs. are taken with bait. (2) SALMON To such an extent used these to abound in Asturian streams that maid-servants stipulated on entering domestic service that they should not be given salmon more than twice a week. At the present day the pollution of rivers by coal-mining and other impurities has in some cases banished the salmon entirely, in others greatly reduced their numbers. There yet remain, nevertheless, rivers in Asturias (such as the Deva and Cares) where salmon abound, and where numbers are still caught--chiefly by net, though rod-fishing is gradually extending its popularity, "owing to the glorious emotions it excites." A local method deserves a word of description. In the crystal-clear waters of N. Spain salmon are regularly captured by expert divers. Its exact position having been marked, the diver, swimming warily up from behind, slips a running noose over the salmon's head. The noose draws tight as the fish begins to run; an attached line is then hauled upon by a second fisherman on the bank. The Marquis de Villaviciosa de Asturias writes us:-- It is a common practice with the fishermen to dive and capture salmon in their arms (_á brazo_). My grandfather, the Marquis de Camposagrado, caught twelve thus in a single morning in the river Nalon in Asturias. (3) BEAR-HUNTING IN ASTURIAS To the same nobleman (one of the first sportsmen of Spain) we are indebted for the following note:-- As regards the chase of the bear in Asturias, where I have killed four, I may say that it commences in September, at which period the bears are in the habit of descending nightly from the higher mountain-forests to the lower ground in order to raid the maize-fields in the valleys. Expert trackers, sent out at daybreak, spoor the bear right up to whichever covert he may have entered, and from which no further tracks emerge beyond. The locality at which the animal has laid up being thus ascertained, a _montería_ (mountain-drive) is organised--the beaters being provided with crackers, empty tins, hunting-horns, and every sort of ear-splitting engine--even the services of the bagpiper[52] are requisitioned! Three or four guns are usually required, and are posted along the line where the bear is most likely to break--such as where the forest runs out to a point; or where it is narrowed by some projecting spur of precipitous rocks; or a deep valley where the covert is flanked by a mountain-torrent that restricts and defines the probable line of escape. The bear (which is in the habit of attacking and destroying much cattle) comes crashing through the brushwood, breaking down all obstacles, and giving ample notice by the noise of his advance. If wounded he will attack the aggressor; but otherwise bears only become dangerous when they have young or are hurt in some way. The picturesque nature of these mountain-forests lends a further fascination to the chase of the bear in Asturias. From twenty to thirty bears are killed here every year. The following quaint paragraphs we extract from Spanish newspapers:-- FIGHT WITH A BEAR.--In the mountains of the Province of Lerida (Catalonia) a bear last week attacked and overpowered a muleteer, intending to devour him. A shepherd who happened to be in the neighbourhood, though at some little distance, witnessed the occurrence. Hastening with his utmost speed to the spot, he threw himself between the bear and its victim; and after a prolonged and strenuous combat (_lucha larga y esforzada_), the shepherd succeeded with his lance (_garrocha_) in killing the savage beast (_fiera_). In his gratitude, the muleteer desired to present the shepherd with the best horse of his cavalcade, but this the latter declined.--_November 24, 1907._ INCURSION OF A BEAR.--In the outskirts of the village of Parámo in the Province of Oviedo (Asturias) there has within the last few days made its presence felt an immense bear which continued to execute terrible destruction among the cattle belonging to the villagers. Fortunately the parish-priest, who is an expert shot, succeeded in killing the depredator. It weighed 140 kilograms (= 300 lbs.).--_April 25, 1908._ [Two others are recorded to weigh 400 and 440 lbs.] CHASE OF A SHE-BEAR--SANTANDÉR, _February 1909_. From Molledo an assemblage of the local peasantry, mustered for the purpose, and bearing every kind of weapon, sallied forth, to give battle to a bear which for some weeks had been working havoc among their flocks and herds. After traversing the mountains in all directions without result, they were already returning, dead-beat and disappointed, towards their village, when they suddenly descried the bear standing in the entrance to a cave. On observing the presence of hunters, the animal disappeared within. A shepherd named Melchor Martinez at once followed, penetrating the interior of the cavern which extends far into the mountain-side. Presently on indistinctly perceiving (_divisando_) the beast, Melchor gave it a shot--flying out himself with hair all standing on end (_encrespados_) at the roaring of the wild beast (_fiera_). Melchor, nevertheless, at once entered the den again and fired a second shot--jumping out immediately thereafter. After a short interval, the roars of the _fiera_ within having ceased, the hunters in a body entered the cavern and found an enormous she-bear lying dead, together with four young, alive, which they carried away. (Bravo, Melchor Martinez!) (4) GAME-BIRDS OF CANTABRIA Alike in its game-denizens with other physical features, Cantabria is differentiated from the rest of Spain, approximating rather to a north-European similitude. Thus the capercaillie is spread along the whole Biscayan range though nowhere numerous, and in appearance less so than in fact, owing to the density of these mountain-forests. During our long but fruitless rambles after bear we raised but four; that, however, was in spring when these birds are apt to lie close. In the Pyrenees (where the capercaillie is known as _Gallo de Bosque_) a certain number are shot every winter along with roebuck and pig in mountain-drives (_monterías_); but in the Asturias the pursuit of the _Gallo de Monte_ is effected (as in Austria and northern Europe) during its courting-season in May. The system is well known. The opportunity occurs at dusk and dawn, the stalker advancing while the lovelorn male sings a frenzied epithalamium, halting instantly when the bird becomes silent. Ptarmigan are found in the Pyrenees, but seem to extend no farther west than the Province of Navarre, which area also coincides roughly with the southern distribution of the hazel-grouse (_Tetrao bonasia_) though we had some suspicion (not since confirmed) that the latter may extend into Asturias. Our common grey partridge, unknown in S. Spain, occurs all along the Cantabrian highlands up to, but not beyond, the Cordillera de León. Here it descends to the foothills in winter, but is never found on the plains. A bird peculiar to this region, though not game, deserves remark, the great black woodpecker, a subarctic species which we have observed in the Picos de Europa. ANGLING IN RIVER AND SEA[53] Nearly all the Spanish rivers when they leave the sierras and dawdle through the plains degenerate into sluggish mud-charged streams; but most of them are well stocked with barbel, which may be caught by methods similar to those in vogue on the Thames, _i.e._ by float-fishing or ledgering with fine but strong tackle, as the first rush of a barbel is worthy of a trout. These fish average about one pound in weight, but in favourable spots, such as mill-tails, run up to 10 lbs. and upwards. The Spanish barbel has developed one trait in advance of its English cousins, for it will rise to a fly, or at least to a grasshopper. Owing to the abundance of these insects and of crickets along the river-banks in summer, the barbel have acquired a taste for such delicacies, and a hot June afternoon in Andalucia may be worse spent than in "dapping" beneath the trees that fringe the banks of Guadalete and similar rivers. The _Boga_, a little fish of the roach or dace family, seldom exceeding a quarter pound, will afford amusement in all the smaller trout-streams of Spain and Portugal when trout are recusant. The _boga_ is lured with a worm-tail (on finest gut and smallest hook) from each little run or cascade, whence five or six dozens may be extracted in an afternoon. The Grey Mullet (Spanish, _Lisa_) is a good sporting fish ranging from half a pound up to four pounds weight, and caught readily in tidal rivers as it comes up from sea on the flood. Native anglers are often very successful, using long roach-poles and gear similar to that of the roach-fisher at home. The bait is either lugworm or paste, and on favouring days as many as two dozen mullet are landed during the run of the flood-tide. The Shad (Spanish, _Sabalo_), though not only the handsomest but also the best-eating of all tidal-river fish, is of no concern to the angler, since it refuses to look at lure of any kind. The Tunny (Spanish, _Atun_) frequents the south-Spanish coasts and comes in millions to the mouths of the big rivers (especially the Guadalquivír) to spawn. The usual method of capture is by a huge fixed net called the _almadrava_, extending three miles out to sea, and placed at such an angle to the coast-line that the fish, on striking it, follow along to the inshore end, where they enter a _corral_ or enclosed space about an acre in extent. Here the fishing-boats lie waiting, and when as many as 500 huge tunnies (they average 300 lbs. apiece) are enclosed at once, a scene of wild excitement and bloodshed ensues, the great fish darting and splashing around their prison, sending spray flying mast-high, while the fishermen yell and gaff and harpoon by turns. The most successful _almadrava_ is situate at Rota, some seven miles south of the mouth of Guadalquivír, the average catch for the season (May 1 till August 1) being about 20,000 tunnies. A canning factory stands on the shore hard by, where the fish are boiled, potted, and shipped to Italy, whence (the tins being labelled "Italian Tunny") they are exported to all parts of the world! The flesh resembles veal, and is much appreciated in South America. ROD-FISHING FOR TUNNY At this period, when the tunny go to spawn (exclusively larger fish), they travel, as the Spaniards say, with their mouths shut, and nothing will induce them to look at a bait. There occurs, however, in winter (November to February) another "run" of smaller fish averaging 50 to 150 lbs. apiece, and these are amenable to temptation. Tarifa, in the Straits of Gibraltar, is a favourable point from which to attempt this sport. The system is to cruise about in a falucho, or sailing-boat, carrying a plentiful supply of sardines, mackerel, and other small fish to serve as bait. These, on arrival at likely waters, are thrown overboard one by one till at length they attract a roving tunny. The operation is repeated till the quarry is enticed close up to the vessel. A similar fish, impaled on a two-inch hook, is then offered him, dangling on the surface, and will probably be seized. The tunny on finding himself held, makes off in a bee-line at a mile a minute. Needless to say, the strongest tackle must be used, together with some hundreds of yards of line, and the fight will be severe and prolonged, for the tunny is one of the swiftest and most active of fish, and he weighs as much as an average man. Few amateurs have hitherto attempted this sport; but as large numbers of tunny are caught thus by professional fishermen with extremely coarse hand-lines, there seems to be no reason why "big-game fishing" in Spain, if scientifically pursued, might not rival that of California. The Bonito is another fine game-fish which may be caught at sunrise at nearly any point on the Andalucian sea-board by trolling with a white fly. CHAPTER XXX THE SIERRA NEVÁDA The Sierra Neváda with its striking skylines, crisp and clean-cut against an azure background, is yearly surveyed by thousands of tourists in southern Spain. The majority content themselves with the distant view from the battlements of Alhambra or from the summer-palace of Generalife. Few penetrate the alpine solitude or scale peaks that look so near yet cost some toil to gain. We are not ashamed to admit that these glorious sierras have in themselves possessed for us attractions that transcend in interest the accumulated art-treasures, the store of historic and legendary lore that illumine the shattered relics of Moslem rule--of an Empire City where during seven centuries the power and faith of the Crescent dominated south-western Europe and the focal point of mediaeval culture and chivalry. None, nevertheless, can long sojourn in Granada wholly uninfluenced by its stirring past, by the pathetic story of the fall of Moorish dominion, and the words graven on countless stones till they seem to represent the very spirit of this land, the words of the founder, King Alhama: LA GALIB ILLA ALLAH = Only God is Victor. Abler pens have portrayed these things, and we will only pause to touch on one dramatic episode--since its scene lies on our course to the "high tops"--when Boabdil, last of the Caliphs, paused in his flight across the _vega_ to cast back a final glance at the scene of his former greatness and lost empire. "You do well," snarled Axia, his mother, "to weep over your kingdom like a woman since you could not defend it like a man." That the maternal reproach was undeserved was proved by Boabdil's heroic death in battle, thirty years later, near Fez.[54] From this spot--still poetically called El Ultimo Suspiro del Moro--the Sierra Neváda stretches away some forty miles to the eastward with an average depth of ten miles, and includes within that area the four loftiest altitudes in all this mountain-spangled Peninsula of Spain. The chief points in the Pyrenees, nevertheless, run them fairly close, as shown in the following table:-- GREATEST ALTITUDES IN FEET _Sierra Neváda._ Mulahacen 11,781 Picacho de la Veleta 11,597 Alcazába 11,356 Cerro de los Machos 11,205 Col de la Veleta 10,826 _Pyrenees._ Pico de Nethou 11,168 Monte de Posets 11,046 Monte Perdido 10,994 By way of comparison it may be added that the next greatest elevations in Spain are:-- Picos de Europa (described in Chap. XXVIII.) 10,046 feet Sierra de Grédos (already described) 8,700 " Curiously all the loftiest elevations occur outside the great central table-lands of Spain, the highest point of which latter is the last-quoted Sierra de Grédos. Adjoining the Sierra Neváda on the south, and practically filling the entire space between it and the Mediterranean, lie the Alpuxarras, covering some fourteen miles by ten. The Alpuxarras are of no great elevation (4000 to 5000 feet), and are separated from their giant neighbours by the Valle de Lecrin, the entrance to which bears the poetic name of El Ultimo Suspiro del Moro, as just described. Here is a Spanish appreciation of Neváda:-- Compare this with northern mountains--Alps or Pyrenees: the tone, the colours, the ambient air differentiate this southern range. Snow, it is true, surmounts all alike, but here the very sky flashes radiant (_rutilante_) in its azure intensity contrasted with the cold blue of glacier-ice. Here, in lower latitude, the rocks appear rather scorched by a torrid sun than lashed by winter rain and hibernal furies. The valleys present a semi-tropical aspect, resulting from the industry of old-time Moors, who, ever faithful to the precepts of the Koran, introduced every such species of exotic fruit or herb as was calculated to flourish and enrich the land.[55] The main chain of the Sierra Neváda constitutes one of the strongholds of the Spanish ibex; and, curiously, the ibex is the solitary example of big game that these mountains can boast. Differing in geological formation from other mountain-systems of southern Spain, the Sierra Neváda shelters neither deer of any kind--red, fallow, or roe--nor wild-boar. The ibex, on the other hand, must be counted as no mean asset, and though totally unprotected, they yet hold their own--a fair average stock survives along the line of the Veleta, Alcazába, and Mulahacen. This survival is due to the vast area and rugged regions over which (in relatively small numbers) the wild-goats are scattered; but even more so to the antiquated muzzle-loading smooth-bores hitherto employed against them. That moment when cheap, repeating cordite rifles shall have fallen into the hands of the mountain-peasantry will sound the death-knell of the ibex. [Illustration: LAMMERGEYER (_Gypallus barbatus_) A glorious denizen of Sierra Neváda.] While writing the above we hear (from two sources) that the "Mauser" has at last got into the hands of at least one local goat-herd, who last summer killed four out of a band of five ibex--all sexes and sizes. There is no mistaking the import of this. It signifies that the end is in view unless prompt measures are taken to save the ibex of Neváda from extirpation. So long as local hunters were restricted to their old ball-guns, the contest was fairly equal and the game could hold its own. But neither ibex nor any other wild beast on earth can withstand _FREE_ shooting (unlicensed and unlimited) with 1000-yard "repeaters." Personally the writer regards the use of repeating-rifles on game as sheer barbarism. These are military weapons, and should be excluded from every field of sport. A precisely analogous case is afforded by Norway and her reindeer. The Mauser first appeared there in 1894. Three years later we pointed out, both to the Norwegian Government and also in _Wild Norway_, that unless steps were taken to regulate and limit the resultant massacre, the wild reindeer would be extinct within five years. Our warnings passed unheeded; but the prediction erred only on the side of moderation. For only four years later (in 1901) the Norsk Government was forced to _prohibit absolutely_ all shooting for a period of seven years, and to impose, on the expiry of that time, both licence-duties and limits, alike on native as well as on foreign sportsmen. Free shooting, unregulated and unlimited, means with modern weapons instant extermination--a matter of a few years. Then, after some creature has perished off the face of the earth, we read a gush of maudlin regret and vain disgust. It is too late; why do not these good folk bestir themselves while there is time to safeguard creatures that yet survive, though menaced with deadly danger? Warnings such as ours pass unnoticed, and platonic tears are bottled-up for posthumous exhibition. * * * * * In winter the ibex are driven downwards by the snow. They first descend southwards to the Trevenque--one of those abruptly peaked mountains that "stretch out" even skilled climbers to conquer. A long knife-edged ridge is Trevenque, culminating in a sheer pyramidal aiguille, its flanks scarred by ravines with complication of scarp and counter-scarp, upstanding crags and steep shale-shoots that defy definition by pen or pencil. A main winter resort is supplied by the Alpuxarras, and, beyond the dividing Valle de Lecrin, ibex are distributed along the whole series of mountain-ranges that lie along the Mediterranean as far as the Sierras Bermeja and Ronda. Among those subsidiary ranges, the following may here be specified as ibex-frequented, to wit: the Sierras de Nerja and Lujar near Motril, Sierra Tejáda lying south of the Vega de Granada (especially the part called Cásulas, which, with most of the range, is private property and preserved), Sierras de Competa and Alhama, and, nearer the sea, the Sierra Frigiliana belonging to the late Duke of Fernan Nunez, who secured trophies thereon exceeding thirty inches in length. Westward, in the Province of Malaga, lie the Sierra de Ojen, Sierra Blanca, and Palmitera (a great area of these being now preserved by Mr. Pablo Larios), and last the Sierra Bermeja, described in _Wild Spain_. Several of these ranges are of bare rock, while others are covered to their summits with gorse and other brushwood. * * * * * The most enjoyable season for ibex-shooting (and on preserved ground the most favourable) is during August and September, when the snow has practically disappeared, except the permanent glaciers and stray patches in some northern ravines. Camp-life is then delightful and exhilarating and, given sound lungs and limbs, the game may be fairly stalked and shot. The photo shows a typical trophy--a grand ibex ram shot years ago on the Alcazába, horns 28-1/4 inches--another specimen measuring 29 inches is figured in _Wild Spain_. Our own experiences with ibex, however, are now rather remote and might appear out-of-date. We therefore content ourselves with the following extract from our work quoted. On a bitterly cold March morning we found ourselves, as day slowly broke, traversing the outspurs of the sierra--on the scene of the great earthquake of 1884, evidences of which were plentiful enough among the scattered hill-villages. Already many mule-teams, heavily laden with merchandise from the coast town of Motril, were wending their laborious way inland. It is worth noting that in front of five or six laden mules it is customary to harness a single donkey. This animal does little work; but always passes approaching teams on the proper side, and, moreover, picks out the best parts of the road. This enables the driver to go to sleep, and the plan, we were told, is a good one. At Lanjarón (2284 feet) we breakfasted at the ancient _fonda_ of San Rafael, where the bright and beautifully polished brass and copper cooking utensils hanging on the walls were a sight to make a careful housewife envious. We watched our breakfast cooked over the charcoal-fire, and learned a good deal thereby. We were delayed here a whole day by snow-storms. There is stabling under the _fonda_ for 500 pack-animals, for Lanjarón in its "season" is an important place, frequented by invalids from far and near. Its mineral springs are reputed efficacious; but the drainage arrangements are villainous in the extreme, and altogether it seemed a village to be avoided. Sad traces of the cholera were everywhere visible, many doors and lintels bearing the ominous sign: it was curious that in so few cases had it been erased. We left before daybreak, and a few leagues farther on the ascent became very steep and abrupt, the hill-crests whither we were bound within view but wreathed in mist. Only one traveller did we meet in the long climb from Orjiva to Capileira, and he bringing two mule-loads of dead and dying sheep, worried by wolves just outside Capileira the night before. Expecting that the wolves would certainly return, we prepared to wait up that night for them; but were dissuaded, the argument being "that is exactly what they will expect! No, those wolves will probably not come back this winter." But return they did, both that night and several following. The night before we left Capileira on the return journey (a fortnight later) they came in greater numbers than ever and killed over twenty sheep. Capileira is the highest hamlet in the sierra and is celebrated for its hams, which are cured in the snow. Here we put up for the night, sleeping as best we could amidst fowls and fleas, after an amusing evening spent around the fire, when one pot cooked for forty people besides ourselves. The cold was intense, streams of fine snow whirling in at pleasure through the crazy shutters, so we were glad to go to bed--indeed I was chased thither by a hungry sow on the prowl, seeking something to eat, apparently in my portmanteau. [Illustration: THE PEAKS OF SIERRA NEVADA. ALCAZÁBA. MULAHACEN. ] [Illustration: NEST OF GRIFFON.] Heavy snow-falls that night and all next day prevented our advance; but at an early hour on the following morning we were under way--six of us--on mules, though I would have preferred to walk, the snow being so deep one could not see where the edges of the precipices were. No sooner had I mounted than the mule fell down while crossing a hill-torrent, and I was glad to find the water no deeper. After climbing steadily upward all the morning, the last two hours on foot, the snow knee-deep, we at length sighted the cairn on the height to which we were bound. Before nightfall we had reached the point, but few of the mules accomplished the last few hundred yards. After bravely trying again and again, the poor beasts sank exhausted in the snow, and we had to carry up the impedimenta ourselves in repeated journeys. The deep snow, the tremendous ascent, and impossibility of seeing a foothold made this porterage most laborious, but we had all safely stowed in our cave before sundown. The overhanging rock, which for the next ten or twelve days was to serve as our abode, we found a mass of icicles. These we proceeded to clear away, and then by a good fire to melt our ice-enamelled ceiling, fancying that the constant drip on our noses all night might be unpleasant. The altitude of our ledge above sea-level was about 8500 feet, and our plateau of rest--our home, so to speak--measured just seven yards by two. Early next morning we proceeded to erect snow-screens at favourable "passes," wherein to await the wild-goats as they moved up or down the mountain-side at dawn and dusk respectively, their favourite food being the rye-grass which the peasants from the villages below contrive to grow in tiny patches--two or three square yards scattered here and there amidst the crags. It is only by rare industry that even so paltry a crop can be snatched at such altitudes, and during the short period when the snow is absent from the southern aspects. At present it enveloped everything--not a blade of vegetation nor a mouthful for a wild-goat could be seen. Although during the day the snow was generally soft--the sun being very hot--yet after dark we found the way dangerous, traversing a sloping, slippery ice-surface like a huge glacier, where a slip or false step would send one down half a mile with nothing to clutch at, or to save oneself. Such a slide meant death, for it could only terminate in a precipice or in one of those horrible holes with a raging torrent to receive one in its dark abyss, and convey the fragments beneath the snow--where to appear next? Each step had to be cut with a hatchet, or hollowed--the butt of a rifle is not intended for such work, but has had to perform it. Every day we saw ibex on the snow-fields and towering rocks above our cave. They were now of a light fawn-colour, very shaggy in appearance, some males carrying magnificent horns. One old ram seemed to be always on the watch, kneeling down on the very verge of a crag 500 or 600 yards above us, and which commanded a view for miles--though _miles_ read but paltry words! From where that goat was he could survey half a dozen provinces. These ibex proved quite inaccessible, and nearly a week had passed away ere a wild-goat gave us a chance. One night shortly after quitting my post, little better than a human icicle, and not without fear of scrambling caveward in absolute darkness along the ice-slope, a little herd of goats passed--mere shadows--within easy shot of where, five minutes before, I had been lying in wait. On another morning at dawn the tracks of a big male showed that he, too, must have passed at some hour of the night within five-and-twenty yards of the snow-screen. But it was not till a week had elapsed that we had the ibex really in our power. Just as day broke a herd of eight--two males and six females--stood not forty yards from our cave-dwelling. The fact was ascertained by one Estéban, a Spanish sportsman whom we had taken with us. Silently he stole back to the cave, and without a word, or disturbing the dreams of his still sleeping employers, picked up an "Express" and went forth. Then the loud double report at our very doors--that is, had there been a door--aroused us, only to find ... the spoor of that enormous ram, the spot where he had halted, listening, above the cave, and the splash of the lead on the rock beyond--_eighteen inches_ too low! an impossible miss for one used to the "Express." Oh, Estéban, Estéban! what were our feelings towards you on that fateful morn! Life in a mountain-cave high above snow-level--six men huddled together, two English and four Spaniards--has its weird and picturesque, but it has also its harder side. Yet those days and nights, passed amidst majestic scenes and strange wild beasts, have left nothing but pleasant memories, nor have their hardships deterred us from repeating the experiment. These initial campaigns were too early in the season (March and April). The only birds seen were choughs and ravens; ring-ouzels lower down. There were plenty of trout, though small, in the hill-burns. On one occasion a circular rainbow across a deep gorge perfectly reflected in the centre our own figures on passing a given point. The ice-going abilities of the mountaineers were marvellous--incredible save to an eye-witness. Across even a north-drift, hard and "slape" as steel and hundreds of yards in extent, these men would steer a sliding, slithering course at top speed, directed towards some single projecting rock. To miss that refuge might mean death; but they did not miss it, ever, in their perilous course, making good a certain amount of forward movement. At that rock they would settle in their minds the next point to be reached, quietly smoking a cigarette meanwhile. How such performances diminish one's self-esteem! How weak are our efforts! Even on the softer southern drifts, what balancing, what scrambling and crawling on hands and knees are necessary, and what a "cropper" one would have come but for the friendly arm of Enrique, who, as he arrests one's perilous slide, merely mutters, "Ave Maria purissima!" * * * * * Now we have left the ice and snow and the ibex to wander in peace over their lonely domains. To-night we have dined at a _table_; there is a cheery fire in the rude _posada_ and merry voices, contrasting with the silence of our cave, where no one spoke above a whisper, and where no fire was permissible save once a day to heat the _olla_. Now all we need is a song from the Murillo-faced little girl who is fanning the charcoal embers. "Sing us a couplet, Dolóres, to welcome us back from the snows of Alpuxarras!" _Dolóres._ "With the greatest pleasure, _Caballero_, if José will play the guitar. No one plays like José, but he is tired, having travelled all day with his mules from Lanjarón." _José._ "No, señor, not tired, but I have no soul to-night to play. This morning they asked me to bring medicine from the town for Carmen, but when I reached the house she was dead. I find myself very sad." _Dolóres._ "Pero, si ya tiene su palma y su corona?" ... = but as she already has her palm and her crown? _José._ "That is true! Bring the guitar and I will see if it will quit me of this _tristeza_!" Next morning the snow prevented our leaving; and the day after, while riding away, we met some of the villagers carrying poor Carmen to the burial-ground on the mountain-side. The body, plainly robed in white, was borne on an open bier, the hands crossed and head supported on pillows, thus allowing the long unfettered hair to hang down loose below. It was an impressive and a picturesque scene, and as I rode on, the rejoinder of Dolóres came to my mind, "Ya tiene su palma y su corona." CHAPTER XXXI IN THE SIERRA NEVÁDA (_Continued_) ITS BIRD-LIFE IN SPRING-TIME The long snow-lines of the sierra had vanished behind whirling cloud-masses, black and menacing. The green avenues of the Alhambra seemed gloomier than ever under a heavy downpour, while troops of rain-soaked tourists belied the glories of an Andalucian springtide. [Illustration: "UNEMPLOYED" Bee-eaters on a wet morning.] Serins sang in the elms, and wrynecks noisily courted, as we set forth with a donkey-team for the sierra. On former occasions we had explored northwards up the Darro towards Jaën, another year up the Genil, this spring we had selected the valley of the Monachil. Hardly had we entered the mountains than thunder crackled overhead, and then a rain-burst drove us to shelter in a cave. Next day broke ominous enough, but we rode on up the wild gorge of the Monachil, and after seven hours' hill-climbing reached the alpine farm of San Gerónimo, to the guarda of which we had a recommendation. The house nestles beneath the serrated ridge of the Dornájo, 6970 feet. With some dismay we found assembled at this outlandish spot quite a small crowd of men, women, and children who, with dogs, pigs, hens, and an occasional donkey, all appeared to inhabit a single smoke-filled room. We were bidden to take seats amidst this company, and watched the attempt to boil an enormous pan of potatoes over a green brushwood fire, while domestic animals (including cattle) passed freely through to the byres beyond. These being on higher ground had created in front a sort of quagmire, which was crossed by a plank-bridge. Rain was falling smartly, and the writer's spirits, be it confessed, sank to zero at the prospect of a week or two in such quarters. Worse situations, however, have had to be faced, and usually yield to resolute treatment. Thus when a separate room--albeit but a dirty potato store--had been assigned to us, trestle-beds and a table set up, the quality of comfort advanced in quite disproportionate degree. Now the Sierra Neváda with its league-long lines of unbroken snow, accentuated by the mystery of the towering Veleta, massive Mulahacen, and the rest, presents an alpine panorama that is absolutely unrivalled in all the Peninsula. But immediately below those transcendent altitudes, in its middle regions the Sierra Neváda is lacking in many of those attributes that charm our eyes--naturalists' eyes. Over vast areas and on broad shoulders of the hills the winter-snows linger so long that plant-life, where not actually extinct, is scant and starved; while these dreary inchoate stretches are strewn broadcast with a debris of shale and schist that resembles nothing so much as one of nature's giant rubbish tips. True, there exists a sporadic brushwood, exiguous, dwarfed, and intermittent; there are scattered trees, ilex and pinaster (_Pinus pinaster_), up to about 7000 feet. But all seems barren by comparison. One's eye hungers for the deep jungles of Moréna, for the dark-green _pinsapos_ of San Cristobal, or the stately granite walls of Grédos. Here all is on a big scale, the biggest in Spain; but size alone does not itself constitute beauty, and the adornments of beauty are lacking. We write of course not as mountaineers, but as naturalists. It boots not to tell of days when rain fell in sheets and an icy _neblina_ swept the hills, shrouding their summits from view. A single ornithological remembrance shall be recorded--the abundance of certain northern-breeding species on the middle heights, especially common wheatears and skylarks. After watching these carefully, we were convinced by their actions (their song, courting, and fluttering flight) that both intended to nest here at 7000 feet, and dissection confirmed that view. Time alone prevented our settling the point; but a month later (say early in June) an ornithologist could easily verify the fact. May the 1st broke bright and clear, not a cloud in the azure firmament. The songs of hoopoes, serins, and a cuckoo resounded hard by, and from our paneless window we watched three glorious rock-thrushes "displaying" before their sober mates--as sketched at p. 18. Within sight among the tumbled boulders were also a pair of blue thrushes, with a woodlark or two, several black-starts, and rock-buntings. [Illustration: WOODLARK (_Alauda arborea_) Nests in Neváda up to 5000 feet, and in the pine-forests of Doñana at sea-level.] We bathed in an ice-cold burn with temperature little above freezing--at dawn, indeed, the backwaters were ice-bound. Then, mounted on a donkey, the writer alternately scrambled up the stony steeps or dragged the sure-footed beastie behind. The gentler slopes were fairly clad with yellow daffodil or narcissus, now just coming into bloom, and above 7000 feet we entered a zone of dwarf-arbutus and ilex-scrub. The warm sunshine brought out numerous butterflies--it seemed strange to see these frail creatures fluttering across open snows! Most of those recognised were tortoise-shells, rather paler than our own. Alas, before noon the icy mists once more swept up. In a crevice among some rocks where we sought shelter at 8000 feet the skeleton of a wheatear attested the cruel conditions of bird-life--death by starvation. Here we separated, the writer going for a snow-scramble, following the dwindling Monachil to its source, where the nascent river trickles in triple streamlets down black rock-walls mantled by impending snow-fields. Here snow lay in scattered patches dotted with the resurgent unkillable "pincushion" gorse (_Buphaurum spinosum_) and a spiny broom that later develops a purple blossom, and separated by intervals where the melting mantle had left Mother Earth viscous and inchoate, heart-broken at the indignity of eight months in the arctic. Higher up the snow became continuous, but seamed by innumerable rills, each laughing and dancing as in delight at a new-found existence, or converging to join streams in buoyant exuberance. Some leapt forward through fringing margins of emerald moss; others ploughed sullen ways beneath an overhung snow-brae. But no chirp or sound of bird-life broke the silence, the only living creatures were ants and a bronze-green beetle! (_Pterostichus rutilans_, Dej.)--not a sign of those alpine forms we had specially come to seek. [Illustration] From 8500 feet the snow stretched upwards unbroken (save where some sheer escarpment protruded), covering in purest white the vast shoulder of the Veleta. The Picácho itself was to-day hidden amidst swirling clouds, and only once did we enjoy a momentary glimpse of its great scarped outline. Yet in three short weeks, say by May 20, all these leagues of solid snow will have vanished. Facing this gorge of the Monachil, the opposite slope is crowned by the conspicuous turreted crags known as the Peñones de San Francisco, 8460 feet. To these L. had climbed, and though we both failed in finding the chief of our special objects (the snow-finch) yet L. had enjoyed a glimpse of another alpine species, new to us, and we decided to revisit the spot on the morrow. That morning again broke fine, the precursor of a glorious day. Hardly had we left our quarters than a lammergeyer soared overhead, then, gently closing his giant wings, plunged into a cavern above. Five minutes later he reappeared and, after several aerial evolutions, suddenly checked and, with indrawn pinions, swept downwards to earth. Ere we could surmount an intervening ridge, the great dragon-like _Gypaëtus_ swept into view, his golden breast gleaming in the early sunlight, and bearing in his talons a long bone with which he sailed across the valley towards Trevenque; we watched to see the result, but, so far as prism-glasses could reach, that bone was never dropped. Probably he had some special spot habitually used for bone-breaking. Later a griffon-vulture (a species rarely seen in Neváda) passed overhead, and then a second lammergeyer sailed up the gorge of Monachil. [Illustration: SOARING VULTURE] 'Tis a long up-grade grind to the Peñones, but repaid by magnificent views of the Picácho de la Veleta--its scarped outline gloriously offset against the deepest azure and its 1000-foot sheer drop vanishing to unseen depths in the mysterious "corral" beneath--an inspiring scene. Beyond to the eastward towered the mountain-mass, Mulahacen--perpetuating the name of that Moslem chief whose remains, so tradition records, yet lie in some unknown glacial niche in this the loftiest spot of all the Spains. There they were laid to rest by the fond hands of Zoraya, at the dying request of her husband the penultimate Moorish king, Muley-Hacen. Our upward course led through beds of dwarf-juniper, thick strong stems all flattened down horizontally by the weight of winters' snows, precisely as one sees them on the high fjelds of Norway. Here, both to-day and yesterday, we observed ring-ouzels, doubtless nesting amid the dense covert. We soon picked up our friends of yesterday--small hedge-sparrow-like birds with blue-grey throat, striated back, and red patches on either flank, the alpine accentor. At first they were fairly tame, allowing us to watch and sketch them perched on lowly shrub or rock, warbling a sweet little carol (louder, but otherwise resembling that of our hedge-sparrow), or darting to pick up a straying ant. After a while that confidence, though wholly unabused, vanished; they became wild and cautious, refusing to allow us a single specimen! These birds were evidently paired, but showed no signs of nesting. Alas, that a drawing by Commander Lynes depicting the scene with the Picácho de la Veleta in the background refuses to "reproduce"! These were the only accentors we saw, nor did we see to-day or any other day a single snow-finch. * * * * * _An Alpine Farm._--The lands of San Gerónimo (where we were quartered) extend up the Monachil to either watershed--a length of 4-1/2 leagues, while the breadth cannot average less than two. The acreage we leave to be calculated by those who care for such detail. At this date (early May) certainly one-half lay under snow, which still encumbered the higher patches of cultivation--to-day we saw men unearthing last autumn's crop of potatoes well above the snow-line. At lower levels some corn already stood six inches high, but many "fields" were necessarily, as yet, unploughed. Fields, by the way, were separated not, as at home, by hedges, but sometimes by a sheer drop of 500 or 1000 feet, elsewhere by perpendicular rock-faces or by shale-shoots. But the laborious cultivation missed not one level patch--nor unlevel either, since we saw ox-teams ploughing where one wondered if even a cat could maintain a footing. This is the highest farm in Neváda, possibly in all Spain. The house stands at 6000 feet and the lands extend to the Veleta, 11,597 feet. It provides grazing for goats and sheep, as well as a small herd of cattle, and thus affords permanent employment to several herdsmen. But at seed-time and harvest it employs as many as twenty or thirty men who, with their dependents, live in rude esparto-thatched huts scattered over the whole fifteen miles, and it was the numbers of these (assembled for pay-day) that had caused us some consternation on our first arrival! The value of the farm, we were told, is put at £8000 Spanish, representing some £400 as yearly rental. Two years before, wolves had become such a pest to the flocks that strychnine was universally resorted to, with the result that to-day not a wolf is to be seen in the whole sierra. Foxes also perished, and the guarda, Manuel Gallegos, told us that he had thus obtained several wild-cats (_Gatos montéses_) whose skins fetched 20 pesetas apiece as ladies' furs. The following day we chanced on a dead marten-cat, evidently killed by poison; and on showing it to Manuel with the remark that that was _not_ a _gato montés_, he replied: "No, señor, that is a _garduño; pero lo mismo da_" = "it's all the same!" Accuracy in definition is not a strong point with Manuel, nor indeed is it with any of our Spanish friends. Martens are the commoner animal in Neváda; there may, nevertheless, be a few true wild-cats, and there certainly are some lynxes. The four-footed fauna of Neváda is sadly limited. There are neither deer of any kind--red, roe, or fallow--nor wild-boar. Bare rocks afford no covert for these: there is, of course, one compensating equivalent in the ibex. Small game is equally conspicuous by its absence. Local _cazadores_ (each of whom, of course, possesses a decoy-bird--_reclamo_) enlarge on the abundance of partridge and hares, yet we saw hardly any game whether here on the Monachil, on the Genil, Darro, or at any of the points whereon we have explored the Sierra Neváda. There must, however, be a sprinkling to maintain the golden eagles and peregrines, both of which birds-of-prey we observed. [Illustration: GOLDEN EAGLE HUNTING] There were small trout in the Monachil; but in Genil and Dilar (which latter springs from the alpine Laguna de las Yeguas just under the Picácho de la Veleta) trout ran up to a quarter-pound or thereby: the method of capture is dynamite. Ibex at this season (May) frequent the southern slopes of the main chain--looking down upon the Alpuxarras--a favourite resort being the wild rocks of Alcazába, east of Mulahacen; but in summer they are distributed along the whole of the "high tops" and are still maintaining their numbers as usual. We had cherished the hope of meeting with ptarmigan and other alpine forms in these high sierras, especially during our earlier expeditions after ibex. We are satisfied that ptarmigan at least do not exist, having seen no trace of them at any point; but we never saw the snow-finch either, and it is reported to exist in numbers. Oh! the wearying monotony of that long down-grade ride--the infinity of vast subrounded mountains, all alike, all ugly, all sprinkled rather than clad with low gorse and spiky broom, like millions of pincushions with all points outwards. Then the shale--the very earth seemed disintegrated. Red shale and blue, cinder-grey and lemon-yellow; some schistose and sparkling, the bulk dull and dead. Here and there, amid oceans of friable detritus, stand out great rocks of more durable substance--solitary pinnacles, towers and turrets of fantastic form. Six hours of this ere we reach the _Vega_ of Granada. ORNITHOLOGY For ornithologists the following notes on birds observed and not already mentioned may here be inserted:-- [Illustration: ROCK-THRUSH] _Blue_ and _Rock-thrushes_.--Neither abundant, but the former most so in the rock-gorges of lower Monachil, nesting in "pot-holes" and horizontal crevices of the crags. The rock-thrush is more alpine and confined (here as elsewhere) exclusively to the higher sierra. _Missel-thrushes_ among ilex-trees at 7000 feet, apparently nesting: a few _woodchats_ observed at same points. _Blackstart._--Plentiful, though less so than on San Cristobal in Sierra de Jerez (5000 feet). A nest in the crag over-hanging our bathing-place in the burn at San Gerónimo contained five eggs on April 28. We found others on Monachil, and _grey wagtails_ were also breeding at both places. _Bonelli's Warbler._--Arrived, and preparing to nest, end of April: a few _white-throats_ and _rufous warblers_ early in May. Robins and wrens nesting, and _nightingales_ abundant in lower river-valley. _Eared_ and _Black-throated Wheatear_.--Ubiquitous but not abundant. In both these forms (as well as in the Common Wheatear) the males displayed a dual stage of plumage; some being completely adult, while others retained an immature state somewhat resembling their first dress (May). _Stonechat._--Four eggs, April 29. _Blackchat_ and _Crag-martin_.--Both conspicuous by their absence. [This applies to the higher sierra--both were observed in the lower Monachil--say 4000 feet.] _Ortolans_ (apparently just arriving during early days of May), with _cirl_ and _rock-buntings_, were frequent up to the limits of scrub-growth, say 7500 feet. _Rock-sparrow._--Breeding in crags on lower slopes. _Woodlark._--Lower hills: young on wing, end April. _Short-toed Lark._--Lower hills: about to nest here. _Crested Lark._--Lower hills: common. _Tawny Pipit._--Plentiful, scattered in pairs over the arid hills: males singing tree-pipit fashion, soaring downwards with tail spread overhead. _Great_, _Blue_, and _Cole-tits_.--Common, the latter only among the open woods of pine (_Pinus pinaster_). _Raven_ and _Chough_.--A few. _Hoopoe_, _Kestrel_, and _Little Owl_.--A few. _Partridge_ (redleg).--Scarce: a pair and a single bird observed at 8000 feet among snow-patches and junipers. _Chaffinches_ and _Serins_.--First broods on wing, end April; nests for second broods building early in May. _Linnets._--Common up to scrub-limit. _Dippers._--Observed on Genil, Darro, Monachil, and all the rivers visited. _Pied Flycatcher._--A male observed on migration, April 30. In the stupendous rock-gorges which enclose the lower course and outlet of Monachil (3500-5000 feet) are situate the breeding-places of the few griffon-vultures which inhabit this sierra. With them nest some Neophrons, and there is a "Choughery" at 4000 feet, while crag-martins and blackchats (not observed elsewhere), with many blue thrushes, find a congenial home among these giant crags. While lunching, our goat-herd guide was pointing out rock-crannies where wolves, from lack of brushwood, used to lie up by day, and complaining that he could not keep poultry by reason of the marten-cats. Suddenly he broke out in shrill and altered tones: "Tell me, Caballero," he exclaimed, "tell me _why_ you come here from lands afar to suffer discomfort and hardship and to undergo all these labours--why do you do this?" We endeavoured to explain. "You see, Gregorio, that God created all manner of animals different one from another. So also He created mankind in many different races--all brothers, yet differing as brothers do. You Spanish belong to the Latin race. You have many fine qualities, some of which we lack. But you rather concern yourselves with material things and disregard platonic study. We of British race are imbued with desire to learn all that can be traced of Nature and her ways. Some examine the earth itself, its formations and transformations; others the birds or the beasts. There are those who devote their lives to studying the beetles and ants, even the mosquitoes. Now in Spain you find none who are interested in such matters." Gregorio sat silent and seemed impressed; but Caraballo interjected: "Why waste time? These people are not concerned (_entrometidos_) in such matters." True; but Gregorio had appeared interested and intelligent? "Si! but when folk spent lonely lives among the mountains and never see but a petty hill-village once or twice a year, then intelligence goes to sleep (_se pone dormido_)." Certainly five minutes later they were both hammering away again at the customary small-talk of the by-ways. [Illustration: TYPES OF SPANISH BIRD-LIFE SPANISH SPARROW (_Passer hispaniolensis_ [_sic_], Temm.) A bird of the wild woods, never seen in towns; builds in foundations of kites' and eagles' nests. Note that Temminck's Latin seems a bit "rocky." The specific name might be _hispanicus_, or perhaps _hispaniensis_, but _hispaniolensis_ never. That adjective must date from a newer era and from a world then unknown.] CHAPTER XXXII VALENCIA TWO NOTABLE WILDFOWL RESORTS (1) THE ALBUFERA For centuries this marine lagoon--the largest sheet of water in Spain--has, along with the forests and wastes that formerly adjoined it, been a stronghold of wild animal-life. As early as the thirteenth century King James I., after wresting the Kingdom of Valencia from the Moors, and dividing its castles and estates among his nobles and generals, selected, with shrewd appreciation, the Albufera for his personal share of the spoils of war. For not only did the great lake with its wild appanages form a truly regal hunting-domain, but the broad lands intervening between the Grao of Valencia, Cullera, and the lake-shores possessed a fabled fertility. For six centuries the lands and waters of Albufera belonged to the Spanish Crown. Though by edict in A.D. 1250 James I. granted free public rights of fishing (reserving, however, one-fifth of the catch for royal use), yet both he and succeeding monarchs ever continued to extend and improve the amenities of the Crown Patrimony. In State-papers of James I.'s time, where reference is made to the game, there are expressly specified: "Deer, wild-boar, ibex, francolins, partridges, hares, rabbits, otters, and wildfowl, besides the wealth of fish" in the lake itself. Again, more than four centuries later, an edict of October 31, 1671, expressly specified among resident game, "deer, boar, ibex, and francolin." Now the francolin, although to-day extinct in Spain, is known to have existed on the Mediterranean till quite within modern times, and the other animals named might well have abounded in the wild forests of those days. But the specific mention of ibex (_twice_, with an interval of 400 years) appeared inexplicable; for it was inconceivable that a wild-goat should ever have occupied the low-lying _dehesas_ of Albufera. The discovery of the actual existence of ibex in the sierras of Valencia, however (as recorded above, p. 142), explains the paradox and also throws light on the breadth of mediæval ideas in hunting-boundaries; since the Sierra Martés lies some forty miles inland of Albufera. Lying about seven miles south-east of Valencia, the lake has a water-area some fourteen miles long by six or seven wide, its circumference being over nine leagues. On the south, it is shut off from the Mediterranean by a strip of pine-clad dunes--the deep green foliage broken in pleasing contrast by intervals of bare sand, forming splashes of gold amidst dark verdure. On all other sides the limits of the lake are marked by yellow reeds which fringe its shores. Its waters, dotted with the white sails of _faluchos_, present the appearance of a small sea, a resemblance which is accentuated in stormy weather by the height of the waves. The lake connects by canals with various adjacent villages; while two canals (Perillo and Perillonet) communicate with the sea, though their mouths are blocked by locks. These locks are closed each year from November 1 till January 1--thereby retaining the whole of the river-waters from inland, in order to raise the interior water-level and so flood the surrounding rice-fields. This artificial inundation--by disseminating alluvial matter brought down by autumnal rains over the adjacent lands--has greatly extended the area of rice-cultivation, and, of course, equally reduced the original water-surface. The result has been, nevertheless, immensely to augment the enormous numbers of wildfowl which had always made the Albufera their winter home; for no food is so attractive to ducks as rice, while, despite its reduction, the water-area is yet ample. During the direct tenure of the Crown, all taking of fish or fowl was carried on subject to the regulations of successive kings and their administrators. Ancient methods of fowling, however quaint, do not concern us as natural historians; but two methods described in multitudinous records throw light on altered conditions and sharpened instincts. The first was to "push" the fowl by a line of boats towards sportsmen in concealed posts among reeds, the ducks either swimming complacently forward or breaking back over the encircling flotilla, when, in each case, large numbers were killed with crossbows. To celebrate the nuptials of Phillip III., no less than 300 boats were thus employed. The second plan involved persuading hosts of quietly paddling ducks to swim forward into reed-beds through which winding channels had been cut, and over which nets were spread. Needless to add, neither method would nowadays serve to outwit twentieth-century wildfowl. By the beginning of last century (about 1830), owing to the destruction of forests and reclamation of land for grazing or rice-cultivation, the bigger game had already disappeared; but the flights of winter wildfowl actually increased in proportion to the extended area of rice. The Albufera continued to be the property of the Crown of Spain from 1250 till May 12, 1865, when the Cortes decreed, and Queen Isabella II. confirmed, its transference to the State. At the present day the shooting on Albufera is conducted on purely commercial and up-to-date principles. The whole area is mapped out into sections like a chessboard, and each considerable gun-post (or _replaza_, as it is called) is sold by auction. These specially selected _replazas_ number thirty, and are sold for the entire season, the prices varying from £150 for No. 1 down to about £6 for No. 30. These thirty "reserved stalls" having been disposed of in public competition, the remaining mid-water positions (for which the charge is a dollar or two per day) are then apportioned by drawing lots. Finally, licences are issued at a few pesetas to shoot from the foreshores or from small launches stationed among the reeds at specified spots, but which the licensee must not quit during the shooting. The sum that finally filtered through to the State during forty years varied between 7500 and 23,000 pesetas (say £300 to £900), a record price being obtained in 1868, namely, 40,000 pesetas. The municipality of Valencia is seeking to obtain the cession of the Albufera from the State. The gun-posts used are either flat-bottomed boats which can be thrust into a sheltering reed-bed; or, should no cover be available, sunken tubs masked by reeds or rice-stalks. The posts are fixed nominally at a rifle-shot (_tiro de bala_) apart--say 200 yards. Regular fixed shoots take place every Saturday throughout the season, with, however, certain small exceptions, aimed partly at securing to the fowl a period of rest and quiet on their first arrival, and partly due to the festivals of St. Martin and St. Catherine being public days and free to all. The species of ducks obtained on Albufera do not differ from those at Daimiel. On these deeper waters pochards and the various diving-ducks are more conspicuous than on the shallower rice-swamps of the Calderería. (2) THE CALDEREÍA In contrast with the Albufera (and with Daimiel) the Calderería is not a natural lagoon, but simply the artificial inundation of rice-grounds (_arrozales_), such inundation being necessary for the cultivation of that grain. The rice-grounds of the Calderería belong to the three adjacent communes of Sueca, Cullera, and Sollana--held in a joint peasant-proprietorship. The flooding of the _arrozales_ was commenced in 1850, the original object being the cultivation of rice, combined with the taking of wildfowl in nets (_paranses_). It was, however, early seen that the enormous quantities of wild-ducks attracted to the spot were of almost equal value with the grain-crop, and the fame of the Calderería attracted troops of sportsmen from all parts of Spain. This influx, for some years, the local authorities endeavoured to check, with a view to securing the sport for local residents--who, by the way, wanted to enjoy this good thing at the price of a dollar a year! In 1880 it was decided to put up to auction the different shooting-posts, or _replazas_, without any restriction. The whole of the _arrozales_ are accordingly divided into defined sections called _replazas_, each perhaps 500 or 600 yards square, forming roughly, as it were, a gigantic chessboard, though the various _replazas_ are quite irregular in shape and size. These are sold by public auction at a fixed date. The best positions realise as much as, say, £80 to £100. A large rental is thus obtained yearly, some villages receiving as much as 6000 dollars. Since the whole shooting area is their common property, every peasant and villager is personally interested in the value and success of the shooting, and each thus becomes virtually a game-keeper. Hence trespass is impossible. During autumn and up to the first shoot never a human form intrudes upon the deserted rice-grounds; and the enormous assemblages of wildfowl which at that season congregate thereon enjoy uninterrupted peace and security up to mid-November. More favourable conditions it is impossible to conceive--on the Albufera, for example, the fowl are liable to constant disturbance by passing boats, etc. The first shoot of the year takes place about the date just named, November 15, and is repeated every eighth day thereafter up to the middle of January, when the rice-grounds are run dry. Upon the completion of the auction sales there is announced a definite day and hour at which (and at which _only_) the lessor is permitted to enter the rice-grounds, in order to prepare his shelter. Should he omit or neglect this opportunity, he is not afterwards allowed to touch it until the actual morning of the shooting. Since there grows on rice-grounds no natural cover whatever, it is essential to prepare some form of screen or shelter, and the reeds or sedges required for the purpose must be brought from elsewhere. Across each _replaza_, or conceded space, is erected a double line of screens, two yards apart and carefully masked by a fringe of reeds or rice-stalks. In the intervening "lane" are fixed two or more sunken tubs wherein the shooters can sit concealed. Hardly has midnight struck on that eventful morn than the world is amove. Highways and byways, on land and water, are crowded by mobilising forces; across the dark waters move forth whole squadrons of boats, punts and launches, each one steering a course towards some far-away _replaza_. Absolute silence reigns. No lights are allowed and no sound shocks the mystery of night save the creaking of punt-pole or lapping of wave--no human sound, that is, for "the night is filled with music"; the pall overhead, the unseen wastes on every side are vocal with wildfowl cries. Continuously the still air is rent and cleft by the rush of myriad pinions. From right and left, before and behind, pass hurrying hosts, their violent flight resonant as the wash of an angry sea. But never a shot is fired. That is against the rules. Shortly before sunrise the note of a bugle announces to hundreds of impatient ears the signal "Open fire," and in that instant the fusillade from far and near rages like a battle. For a solid hour, nay, for two and sometimes three, fire continues incessant. First to become silent are the distant guns along the shores; the minor _replazas_ slacken down next, and by noon all save two or three of the best posts are reduced to a desultory and dropping fire. Then a second signal indicates that the "pick-up" may begin--up to that moment not a gunner is permitted to leave his place. This gathering of the game, stopping cripples, etc., induces a short renewal of the fusillade; but soon all is silent once more, and at three o'clock a third signal rings out, and at once every sportsman must quit the shooting-ground. Besides the lessees of the auction-sold _puestos_ (many of whom come from Madrid and distant parts of Spain), there foregather on these occasions all the local gunners; and far away beyond those sacred areas secured by purchase there form up league-long lines of fowlers by the distant shore; so that, between the private and privileged _puestos_ and the free public lines outside, there may assemble in all some 3000 gunners. Hence these _tiradas_ partake of the character of a popular festival. Yet in spite of such numbers there is not the slightest confusion or danger, so perfect are the rules and so scrupulously are they observed. With so many guns scattered over wide areas no precise record of the exact numbers secured are possible; but, according to the estimates of those best calculated to judge, as many as 22,000 to 23,000 head (ducks and coots) are obtained in a single morning. The records of individual guns in the best _replazas_ run from 100 to 200 ducks gathered, and occasionally exceed those figures. At the first shoot of the year fully 25 per cent of the spoil are coots; but at the later shoots ducks are obtained in greater proportion, as coots then quit the rice-grounds. These later shoots do not produce quite such stupendous totals; but still immense numbers are bagged--ten or twelve thousand in a morning. As the majority of purchasers come from a distance and usually only remain for one, or perhaps two, of the fixed shooting days, such prices as £80 to £100 represent a fairly stiff rent. Few mallards are obtained at the first shoot, but their numbers increase as the winter advances. The chief species are pintail, wigeon, teal, and shoveller, together with a few shelducks and many common and red-crested pochards. Flamingoes and spoon-bills frequent the shallows in small numbers. As individual instances; from a _replaza_ that cost 900 pesetas (say £40), and which was the _ninth_ in point of price that year, one gun fired 700 cartridges in a single morning. The best _replaza_--at least the most expensive (it cost 1500 pesetas)--was tenanted last winter by friends from whose experiences, not too encouraging, we gather: At the first shoot (November 13) the post was occupied by a single gun, who, after firing 400 shots, was compelled to desist owing to injury to his shoulder. "I believe," he writes, "I might have fired 1500 cartridges had I continued all day, but was obliged to leave early. The boatmen had then gathered ninety--sixty ducks, thirty coot--and expected to recover more." On November 28 the post was occupied by three guns: "No day for duck, a blazing sun so hot that the reflection from the water blistered our faces. The ducks mounted up high in air and mostly cleared early in the proceedings, though some were attracted by our 100 decoys. We killed ninety-six, mostly wigeon and pochard, a few mallard and teal, besides twenty snipe. The desideratum is a really rough day, but that at Valencia is past praying for." The _arrozales_ are run dry (and of course the shooting stopped) by the middle of January. The water, in fact, is only kept up so long solely for the sake of the shooting. So soon as its level has fallen a couple of inches the fowl all leave directly. CHAPTER XXXIII ON SMALL-GAME SHOOTING IN SPAIN Hardly will one enter a village _posada_ or a peasant's lonely cot without observing one inevitable sign. Among the simple adornments of the whitewashed wall and as an integral item thereof hangs a caged redleg. And from the rafters above will be slung an antediluvian fowling-piece, probably a converted "flinter," bearing upon its rusty single barrel some such inscription--inset in gold characters--as, "Antequera, 1843." These two articles, along with a cork-stoppered powder-horn and battered leathern shot-belt, constitute the stock-in-trade and most cherished treasures of our rustic friend, the Spanish cazador. Possibly he also possesses a _pachón_, or heavily built native pointer; but the dog is chiefly used to find ground-game or quail, since the redleg, ever alert and swift of foot, defies all pottering pursuit. Hence the _reclamo_, or call-bird, is almost universally preferred for that purpose. Red-legged partridges abound throughout the length and breadth of wilder Spain--not, as at home, on the open corn-lands, but amidst the interminable scrub and brushwood of the hills and dales, on the moory wastes, and palmetto-clad prairie. On the latter hares, quail, and lesser bustard vary the game. Thither have ever resorted sportsmen of every degree--the lord of the land and the peasant, the farmer, the Padre Cura of the parish, or the local medico--all free to shoot, and each carrying the traitor _reclamo_ in its narrow cage. The central idea is, of course, that the _reclamo_, by its siren song, shall call up to the gun any partridge within hearing, when its owner, concealed in the bush hard by, has every opportunity of potting the unconscious game as it runs towards the decoy--two at a shot preferred, or more if possible. 'Twere unjust to reproach the peasant-gunner for the deed; flying shots with his old "flinter" would merely mean wasted ammunition and an empty pot--misfortunes both in his _res angustae domi_. We have ourselves, on African veld, where dinner depends on the gun, meted out similar measure to strings of cackling guinea-fowl without compunction; but in Spain we have never tried the _reclamo_, nor wish to. That the race of redlegs should have survived it all--year in and year out--bespeaks a wondrous fecundity, and has inspired new-born ideas of "preservation," which have been initiated in Spain with marked success. To this subject we refer later. Though we have ourselves (maybe from "insular prejudice") systematically refused to see the _reclamo_ work his treacherous rôle, yet many Spanish sportsmen are enthusiastic over the system, which they describe as _una faena muy interesante_, and are as proud of their call-birds as we of our setters. The _reclamos_ may be of either sex. The cock-partridges become past-masters of the art of calling up their wild rivals from afar; and by a softer note the wild hen is also lured to her doom--for the dual influences of love and war are both called into play. The male hears the defiant challenge of battle and, all aflame, hurries by alternative flights and runs to seek the unseen challenger. As distance lessens the fire of each taunt increases, and, blind with passion, the luckless champion dashes on to that fatal opening where he is aligned by barrels peeping from the thicket. The female, with more tender purpose, also draws near--the seductive love-note entices; but, oh! the wooing o't--a few pellets of lead end that idyll. It is then--when either rival or lover, it matters not which, lies low in death alongside his cage--that the well-constituted _reclamo_ shows his fibre. So overcome with savage joy, the narrow cage will scarce contain him as he bursts into exultant pæons of victory. On the other hand, sullen disappointment is exhibited by the decoy when his exploit has only resulted in a missed shot. In the spring the female call-note is more effective than that of the male. Well-trained _reclamos_ may be worth anything from £2 up to £10. Recently a yearly licence of ten shillings per bird has been levied. This has either reduced their numbers, or perhaps caused them to be kept more secretly. Formerly a _cicada_ in a tiny cage and a _reclamo_ in its conical prison were contiguous objects in almost every doorway. Ground-game is the special favourite of the Spanish cazador. He will search hundreds of acres for a problematical hare, and a long day's hunt with his trusty _pachón_ is amply rewarded by a couple or two of diminutive rabbits about half the weight of ours, but whose speed verily stands in inverse ratio. For the life of the Spanish rabbit is passed in the midst of alarms; supremely conscious of soaring eagles and hawks overhead, he never willingly shows in the open by daylight, or if forced to it, then terror lends wings to his feet. The death of a hare, however, represents to the cazador the climax of terrestrial triumph. In those ecstatic moments the animal (average weight 4-1/2 lbs.) is held aloft by the hind-legs, a subject for admiration and self-gratulation; mentally it is weighed again and again to a chorus of soliloquising ejaculations, "Grande como un chivo" = as big as a kid! The quail, though extremely abundant at its passage-seasons (when in September the Levante, or S.E. wind, blows for days together, blocking their transit to Africa, Andalucia is crammed with accumulated quails), yet represents but a small morsel in a culinary sense, and is swift of wing to boot. Neither of these attributes commend its pursuit to our friend with the rusty single-barrel; and similar reasons bear, with increased force, on the case of snipe. These game-birds are left severely alone--that is, with the gun. Bags of twenty brace of quail (and in former years of forty or fifty brace) may then be made where, on the wind changing next day, never a quail will be found. In spring, again, great numbers pass northward, but many remain to nest on the fertile _vegas_ of Guadalquivir and on the plains of Castile. At that season quail are chiefly taken by nets; but on systems so cunning and elaborate that we regret having no space for descriptive detail. Put briefly, in Andalucia the fowler spreads a gossamer-woven fabric loosely over the growing corn; then, lying alongside, by means of a _pito_ (an instrument that exactly reproduces the dactylic call-note of the quarry) induces every combative male within earshot either to run beneath or to alight precisely upon the outspread snare. So perfect is the imitation that quail will even run over the fowler's prostrate form in their search for the adversary. In Valencia living call-birds (hung in cages on poles) are substituted for the _pito_, and the net is more of a fixture--small patches of the previous autumn's crop being left uncut expressly to attract quail to definite points. The Andalucian quail frequents palmetto-scrub and is very local--rarely can more than two or three couple be killed in a day, and that only in September. Some appear then to retire to Africa, along with the turtle-doves--the latter a bird that surely deserves passing note, since few are smarter on wing or afford quicker snap-shooting while passing by millions through this country every autumn. The conditions above indicated prevail over a vast proportion of rural Spain, which thus presents small attraction to wandering gunner, however humble his ideals. There are other regions where the landowners, though in no sense "preserving," yet prohibit free entry on their properties owing to damage done--such as disturbing stock, stampeding cattle on to cultivation in a land where no fences exist, and so on. Naturally such ground carries more game, and subject to permission being received, fair and sometimes excellent sport is attainable. Thus, on one such property the tangled woods of wild olive abound with woodcock, though difficulties are presented by the impenetrable character of the briar-bound thickets. Were "rides" cut and clearings enlarged quite large bags of woodcock might be secured. The rough scrubby hills adjoining carry a fair stock of partridge, and we have often killed forty or fifty snipe in the marshy valleys that intervene. The following will serve as an example of three consecutive days' shooting on such unpreserved ground (two guns--S. D. and B. F. B.):-- +--------------------------------------------------------------+ | | Nov. 13. | Nov. 14. | Nov. 15. | Total. | +-------------------+----------+----------+----------+---------+ | Snipe | 101 | 32 | 155 | 288 | | Ducks and Teal | 2 | 9 | 3 | 14 | | Wild-Geese | 3 | ... | ... | 3 | | Sundries | ... | ... | 4 | 4 | | +----------+----------+----------+---------+ | | 105 | 41 | 162 | 309 | +--------------------------------------------------------------+ Three days in February on similar ground, but in an unfavourable season, yielded 79 snipe, 5 woodcock, 19 golden plovers, 3 lesser bustard, a hare, and a few sundries. LEBRIJA, _December_ 1897.--TWO GUNS, C. D. W. AND B. F. B. (HALF-DAY) 117 snipe (mostly driven) LEBRIJA, _November_ 16, 1904.--SAME TWO GUNS 112 snipe, 2 mallard, 1 curlew CASAS VIEJAS, _November_ 19, 1906.--THREE GUNS (S. D., C. D. W., AND B. F. B.) 123 snipe, 1 mallard, 5 teal PARTRIDGE-SHOOTING Passing from the use of the _reclamo_, of which we have no personal experience, we turn to the system practised in the Coto Doñana. Here we always have the marisma bordering, as an inland sea, our northern frontage. Upon that fact the system known as "_averando_" is based. A line of six or eight guns, with sufficient beaters between, and mounted keepers on either flank (the whole extending over, say, half-a-mile of front), is formed up at a distance of a mile or two inland from the marisma. On advancing, with the wings thrown forward, and mounted men skirmishing ahead, a space comprising hundreds of acres of scrub is thus enclosed. The partridge, running forward among the cistus or rising far beyond gunshot, are gradually pushed down towards the water; then, as the advancing line approaches the marisma, with the belts of rush and sedge that border it, the work begins. The game, unwilling to face the water, perforce come swinging back over the shooting-line. Naturally on seeing encompassing danger in full view behind and barring their retreat, the partridge spin up heavenwards--higher and yet higher, till they finally pass over the guns at a height and speed and with a pronounced curve that ensures the maximum of difficulty in every shot offered. In this final stage of the operation grow cork-oaks whose bulk and evergreen foliage add further complexity for the gunner. It illustrates the exertions made by the partridges to attain an altitude and a speed sufficient to carry them safely over the clearly-seen danger below, that should a bird which has succeeded in thus running the gauntlet happen to be found after the beat is over, it will often be too exhausted to rise again. Such tired birds are often caught by the dogs. As many as six or eight _averos_, as they are termed, may be carried out during a winter's day. The walking in places is apt to be rough, through jungle and bush--chiefly cistus and rosemary, but intermixed with tree-heaths, brooms, and gorse--intercepted with stretches of water which must be waded without wincing, for it is essential that each man (gun or beater) maintains correctly his allotted position in the advance. Naturally in a sandy waste, devoid of corn or tillage of any kind, partridge cannot be numerous. They are, moreover, subject to terrible enemies in the eagles, kites, and hawks of every description; while lynxes, wild-cats, foxes, and other beasts-of-prey take daily and nightly toll; then in spring their eggs are devoured by the big lizards, by harriers, mongoose, and magpies in thousands. We have recently endeavoured to increase their numbers by grubbing up 300 acres of scrub and cultivating wheat. But here again Nature opposes us. Deer break down the fences, ignore our guards armed with lanterns and blank cartridge, trample down more than they eat, and the rabbits finish the rest! Moreover, in wet seasons the ground is flooded, the crops destroyed; while, if too dry, the seed will not germinate, and all the time the unkillable brushwood comes and comes again. Forty or fifty brace represent average days; though it is fair to add that they are but few who fully avail the fleeting opportunities at those back-swerving dots in the sky. RABBITS The cistus plains abound with rabbits. One sees them by scores moving ahead, but just beyond gunshot range, which they calculate to a nicety. Others dart from underfoot to disappear in an instant in the cover. Few are shot while walking; but some pretty sport is obtainable by short drives, say a quarter-mile. The line of keepers and beaters ride round to windward, encircling some well-stocked bush; then slowly and noisily, with frequent halts, advance down-wind--the rabbit is as susceptible of scent as a deer. Meanwhile the dogs are having a rare time of it hustling the bunnies forward. The guns are placed each to command some clear spot, for where scrub grows thick nothing can be seen. A momentary glimpse is all one gets, and snap-shooting essential. The most favourable spots are where a strip of open ground lies immediately behind the guns. The rabbits fairly fly this, a dozen at a time, and at speed that suggests some one having set fire to their tails. In days of phenomenal bags, our Spanish totals read humble enough. We frequently kill a hundred or more rabbits in two or three short drives, besides such partridge as may also have been enclosed. Were a whole day devoted to rabbits alone, much greater numbers would of course result. But having such variety of resource at disposal (to say nothing of difficulty in disposing of large quantities), the _conejete_ rarely receives more than an hour or two's attention. Hares (_Lepus mediterraneus_), common all over Spain, are rather more numerous in the marisma than on the drier grounds. They have indeed developed semi-aquatic habits, in times of flood swimming freely from island to island and making arboreal "forms" in the half-submerged samphire-bush. Should the whole become submerged, the hares betake themselves to the main shore, and on such occasions, with two guns, we have shot a dozen or so on a drive. These small Spanish hares are marvellously fleet of foot, especially when an almost equally fleet-footed _podenco_ is in full chase over ground as flat and bare as a bowling-green. In these hares the females are larger and greyer in colour than the males. Their irides are yellow, with a small pupil, whereas in the male the eye is hazel and the pupil large. The fur of the latter is bright chestnut in hue, especially on hind-quarters and legs, which frequently show irregular splashes of white. The lower parts are purest white, and along the clean-cut line of demarcation the colour contrasts are the strongest. Long film-like hairs grow far beyond the ordinary fur on their bodies, and the tails are longer and carried higher than in our British species. WEIGHTS OF TEN SPANISH HARES, KILLED JANUARY 30, 1908 Males 4-1/2 4-1/2 4-1/2 4-1/2 4-1/2 lbs., deadweight Females 4-3/4 5 5-1/2 5-1/2 5-1/2 lbs., deadweight WEIGHTS OF SPANISH RABBITS (IN COUPLES) Ten couples 3 3 3 3-1/4 3-1/4 3-1/4 3-1/4 3-1/2 3-1/2 3-3/4 lbs., clean These rabbits differ from the home-breed not only in their smaller size, but in the colder grey of their fur and large transparent ears. [Illustration: READY TO CAST OFF. THE PACK OF PODENCOS IN COUPLES.] [Illustration: THE DAY'S RESULTS. ROYAL SHOOTING AT THE PARDO, NEAR MADRID.] Hitherto shooting over great areas of rural Spain has been practised under conditions absolutely natural--almost pristine. The game on mountain, moor, or marsh is not only free to any hunter who possesses the skill to capture it, but it is left to fight unaided its struggle for existence against hosts of enemies, feathered, furred, and scaled, the like of which has no equivalent in our crowded isles; and which work terrible havoc, each in its own way, among the milder members of creation. The presence of so many fierce raptorials, however (though it ruin the "bag"), adds for a naturalist an incomparable charm to days spent in Spanish wilds. Alas! that even here those pristine conditions should already appear to be doomed, that every savage spirit must be quenched, till nothing save the utilitarian survive! The following notes on game-preservation in Spain indicate the beginning of the change. ON SOME GREAT SPORTING ESTATES OF SPAIN Game-preservation, in the stricter sense in which it is practised in England, was unknown in Spain till within our own earlier days. But now many great estates yield bags of partridge that may challenge comparison with results obtained elsewhere. Whether those results equal the best of the crack partridge-manors in England or not we do not inquire. It is immaterial and irrelevant. No comparison is either desirable or possible where natural conditions and difficulties differ fundamentally. But the result at least throws a ray of reflected light upon the energy and capacity of the Spanish gamekeeper, who, under extraordinary difficulties, has aided and enabled his employers to produce conditions which only a few years ago would have appeared impossible. It should be added that these estates which now realise surprising results have, in most instances, belonged to the same owners during generations, though not till towards the end of last century was any special care bestowed upon the game. * * * * * The estate of Mudéla, in La Mancha, the property of the Marquis de Mudéla, Count of Valdelagrana, stands unrivalled in a sporting sense. Its extent is approximately 80,000 acres, and the whole abounds with red-legged partridge, rabbits, and hares. A dozen consecutive driving-days can be enjoyed, each on fresh ground, and 1000 partridges are often here secured by seven guns, driving, in a day. There is here quite a small proportion of corn-land or tillage, the greater portion consisting of the rough pasturage, interspersed with patches of scattered brush and palmetto, which is characteristic of southern Spain. The great results achieved (for 1000 partridges a day, all wild-bred birds, can only so be described) are due to systematic preservation, including the trapping of noxious animals, furred or feathered, and the payment of rewards to the peasantry for each nest hatched-off--in short, by efficient protection of the game, with the destruction of its enemies. In hot dry summers it is necessary to provide both water and food to the game. Next to Mudéla, the most celebrated sporting properties include those of Lachár and Tajarja, both in the province of Granada, and belonging to the Duke of San Pedro de Galatino; Trasmulas in the same province belonging to the Conde de Agrela, and Ventosilla, the property of the Duke of Santona in the province of Toledo. There should also be named Daranézas in the last-named province, the Marquis de la Torrecilla; and Daramezán (Toledo), the Marquis de Alcanices. At Malpica in Toledo, the estate of the Duke of Arión, there were killed, on the occasion of a visit of King Alfonso XIII., a total in one day of 1655 head (partridges, hares, and rabbits), of which His Majesty was credited with 600. We extract the following from the Madrid newspaper _La Epoca_, January 22, 1908:-- At El Rincon, Navalcarnero, near Madrid, the King, with thirteen other guns, were the guests of the Marquesa de Manzanedo on January 20. Eight drives were completed, 350 beaters being employed. The total recovered numbered 1400 head, of which 241 fell to the King's gun. His Majesty continued shooting with astonishing brilliancy even while darkness was already setting in, and wound up with four consecutive right-and-lefts when one could scarce see even a few yards away. King Alfonso killed 97 partridge, 31 hares, 98 rabbits, and 15 various--double the number that fell to the next highest score. Most of the places named are capable of yielding from 500 to 800 and even 1000 partridge in a day's driving, besides other game. CHAPTER XXXIV ALIMAÑAS THE MINOR BEASTS OF CHASE We have no British equivalent for this generic term, applied in Spain to a group of creatures, chiefly belonging to the canine, feline, and viverrine families, that deserve a chapter to themselves. The Spanish word _Alimañas_ includes the lynxes and wild-cats, foxes, mongoose, genets, badgers, otters, and such like. It might therefore be rendered as "vermin," but surely only in the benevolent sense--as it were, a term of endearment. We have preferred the expression "minor beasts of chase," though it may be objected that such are not, in fact, beasts of chase. We reply that hardly any wild animals are harder to secure in fair contest or more capable of testing the venatic resource of the hunter. For these animals are beasts-of-prey, and that fact alone implies nothing less than that in their very nature and life-habits they must be more cunning, more astute, than those other creatures (mostly game) on which they are ordained to subsist. Moreover, being nocturnals, their senses of sight, scent, and hearing all far exceed our own, and they possess the enormous advantage that they see equally well in the dark. Wild Spain, with her 56 per cent of desert or sparsely peopled regions, is a paradise for predatory creatures--alike the furred and the feathered--and _alimañas_ abound whether in the bush and scrub of her torrid plains, or amid the heavier jungle of her mountain-ranges. Numerous as they are, yet these night-rovers rarely come in evidence unless one goes expressly in search of them. In regular shooting, with organised parties, they are more or less ignored, or rather they pass unseen through the lines, moving so silently and stealthily and always choosing the thickest covert. With guns from 100 to 200 yards apart and upwards, each intent on the larger game, the secretive _alimañas_ easily get through--indeed, wolves and even big boars, though the crash of brushwood may be heard, often pass unseen. Many unconventional days have the authors enjoyed in express pursuit of these keen-eyed creatures--call them vermin if you will. There are four methods which we have found effective: 1. Short drives of individual jungles where sufficient open spaces occur to leeward to enable the game to be seen. 2. Long drives of extensive jungles, converging on guns placed at points that either command the probable lines of retreat, or cover some other favourite resort wherein the quarry is likely to seek refuge. 3. Calling--in Spanish, _chillando_. 4. Watching at dawn or dusk, either with or without a "drag." * * * * * 1. The first plan is, of course, the simplest; but it must be borne in mind that this is essentially close-quarters' work--hence the utmost silence is necessary. Horses must be picketed at least a mile back, for the clank of hoof on rock or the clashing of the bucket-like Spanish stirrups in bush will awaken even a dormouse. All proceed on foot; and the whole plan having been arranged beforehand, not a word need now be spoken, each gun taking his allotted place in silence. Guns may be as far as 100 yards apart (since mould-shot is effective up to nearly that range) and each man should station himself looking into the beat, so as to command the intervening "opens," while himself absolutely concealed and still as a stone god, since he is now competing with some of the keenest eyes on earth. All the cats, moreover, come on so stealthily, making good their advance yard by yard, that quite possibly a great tawny lynx may be coolly surveying your position ere your eye has caught the slightest movement ahead. Nothing emphasises the amazing stealth of these silent creatures more than such incidents: when suddenly you find, within twenty yards, a wild beast, standing nearly two feet at shoulder, slowly approaching through quite thin bush; how, in wonder's name, did it get so near unseen? Foxes, as a rule, come bundling along with far less precaution and no such vigilant look-out ahead, though they will instantly detect the least _movement_ in front. A fox will often appear so deep in thought as to be absolutely thunderstruck when he finds himself face to face with a gun at six yards distance. In direst consternation he fairly bounds around, describing a complete circle of fur; whereas a cat in like circumstance merely deflects her course with coolest deliberation and never a sign of alarm or increase of speed. But within six more yards she will have vanished from view--covert or none. Adepts all are the cats, alike in appearing one knows not whence, and in disappearing one knows not how. Yonder goes a fox, slowly trotting along below the crest, in his self-sufficient, nonchalant style. His upstanding fur, long bushy brush, and swollen neck appear to double his bulk and lend him quite an imposing figure. But let a rifle-ball sing past his ears or dash up a cloud of the sand below--what a transformation! One hardly now recognises the long lean streak that whips up and over the ridge. A handsome trophy is the Spanish lynx, especially those more brightly coloured examples sparsely spotted with big black splotches arranged, more or less, in interrupted lines. The ear-tufts--indeed in adults the extreme tips of the ears themselves--point inwards and backwards; and the narrow irides are pale yellow (between lemon and hazel), the pupil being full, round, and black, nearly filling the circle. In the wild-cat the pupil is a thin upright, set in a cruel pale-green iris. We have tried FIRE as a means of securing the smaller _alimañas_, such as mongoose, but it is seldom a thicket or _mancha_ can be so completely isolated as to leave no line of escape. The animals, moreover, are astute enough to retire under cover of the clouds of smoke that roll away to leeward. 2. LONG DRIVES, extending over, say, a couple of miles of brush-wood (which may contain half-a-dozen patches of thicker jungle, all separate), give wide scope for skilled fieldcraft and demand no small local knowledge. The first essential is "an eye for a country." There are men to whom this faculty is denied; some seem incapable of acquiring it. Others, again, appear correctly to diagnose even a difficult country, with its chances, almost at a first experience. The favoured haunts of game, together with their accustomed lines of retreat when disturbed, must be studied. Each day, though engaged on other pursuit, one's eye should be reading those lessons that are written in "spoor," and noting each commanding point and salient angle or other local "advantage" in the terrain. Such drives necessarily occupy more time; moreover, the precise lines of entry along which game may approach are less restricted--hence follows an even greater demand on that vigilance already emphasised. But to the hunter the mental gratification, the sense of dominion achieved, is ample reward when his deep-laid plans succeed and when along one or more of his ambushed lines the cunning carnivorae pursue an unsuspecting course. Nature herself may assist by signs which set the expectant hunter yet more instantly alert. A distant kite suddenly swerving or checking its flight has seen _something_. The chattering of a band of magpies may only mean that they have struck a "find," say a dead rabbit--_tacitus pasci si posset corvus_, etc. But it may easily indicate a moving nocturnal, and such signs should never be ignored. Similarly a covey of partridges springing with continued cackling is a certain token of the presence of an enemy; while a terrified-looking rabbit, with staring eye and ears laid back, means that an interview is then instantly impending. It may be necessary (as where a desert-stretch flanks the beat) to place "stops" far outside. These are as important as in a grouse-drive, but quite tenfold more difficult to array. In these more extensive operations the lynx, in evading the guns, is sometimes intercepted by the advancing pack behind. Then, if by luck the cat can be forced into the open, she goes off at fine speed in great bounds, as a leopard covers the veld, and (the horses in this case being picketed close by) may sometimes be "tree'd" or run to bay in some distant thicket. In that case the assistance of the hunters is needed, for a lynx at bay will hold-up a whole pack of _podencos_, sitting erect on her haunches with her back to the bush and dealing half-arm blows with lightning speed. These _podencos_, it should be explained, are not intended to close, since all high-couraged dogs, we find, meet a speedy death from the tusks of wild-boars. When pressed in the open, we have seen a lynx deliberately pass through deep water that lay in her line of flight. 3. CALLING.--The coney was ever a puny folk, yet in Tarshish he thrives and multiplies amidst numberless foes aloft and alow. From the heavens above fierce eyes directing hooked beaks and clenched talons survey his every movement; on the earth lynxes, cats, and foxes subsist chiefly on him; while below ground foumart and mongoose penetrate his farthest retreats year in and year out. He seems to possess absolutely no protection, yet he endures all this, supports his enemies, and increases, ever, to appearance, gaily unconscious of the perils that beset him. Once, however, let misfortune overtake the rabbit, and his cry of distress brings instant response--from scrub and sky, from thicket and lurking lair, assemble the fiercer folk, each intent on his flesh. It is upon this fact that the system of calling, or, in Spanish, _chillando_, is based. The instrument is simple. A crab's claw, or the green bark of a two-inch twig slipped off its stalk, will, in the lips of an adept, produce just such a cry of cunicular distress. Armed with this, and observing the wind, one takes post concealed by bush but commanding some open glade in front. The most favourable time is dawn and dusk--the latter for choice, since then predatory animals are waking up hungry. The first "call" by our Spanish companion almost startles by its lifelike verisimilitude. At short intervals these ringing distress-signals resound through the silent bush; if no response follows, we try another spot. First, a distant kite or buzzard, hearing the call, comes wheeling this way, but naturally the birds-of-prey from their lofty point of view detect the human presence and pursue their quest elsewhere. The rabbits themselves, from some inexplicable cause, are among the first to respond. Within that opposite wall of jungle you detect a furtive movement; presently with jerky, spasmodic gait a rabbit darts out; it sits trembling with staring eyes and ears laid aback; another rolls over on its side and performs strange antics as though under hypnotic influence. In two minutes you have a _séance_ of mesmerised rabbits. My companion touches me on the arm; away beyond, and half behind him (almost on the wind), stands a fox intently gazing. Before the gun can be brought to bear it is necessary to step round the keeper's front, and one expects that that first movement will mean the instant disappearance of the vulpine. Not so! There he stands, statuesque, while the manoeuvre is executed. Is he, too, hypnotised? On one occasion the authors, standing shoulder to shoulder with the keeper behind them, were only concealed by a single bush in front. At the third or fourth call a wild-cat sprang from the thicket beyond, fairly flew the intervening thirty yards at a bound, and landed in the single bush at our feet (precisely where the "rabbit" should have been) before a gun could be raised. What a marvellous exhibition of wild hunting! In this case, too, we had had notice in advance by the noisy rising of a pair of partridges sixty yards away in the bush. That cat scaled 12-1/2 lbs. dead-weight. * * * * * All the beasts-of-prey can be secured in this manner. February is their pairing-season; but the best time for "calling" is a month or so later--in March and April--when young rabbits appear and when the _alimañas_ themselves have their litters to feed. [Illustration: IMPERIAL EAGLE PASSING OVERHEAD (The spectator is presumed to be lying on his back!)] Feathered raptores, such as eagles, kites, and buzzards, can also be obtained by "calling," but, as above indicated, their loftier position enables them to see the guns, and it is necessary in their case to prepare a covered shelter in which one can stand, concealed from above. 4. WATCHING.--The fourth and last system brings one face to face with wild nature in her nocturnal aspects. Such aspects (to the majority of mankind) are unknown; but night-work, whether at home, in Africa, or in Spain, has always strongly appealed to the writers. Wild creatures do not go to bed at night like lazy men; on the contrary, night is the period of fullest activity for a large proportion of God's creation, whether of fur or feather. To form an intimate personal acquaintance (however imperfect) with these, the comfort of the blankets must be sacrificed. Where stretches of open country border or intersect jungle, or lie between the nocturnal hunting-grounds of carnivorae and the thickets where they lie-up by day, there one may enjoy hours of intense interest in watching what passes under the moon. In the Coto Doñana we have many such spots, some within an hour or two's ride of our shooting-lodges. Here, when the moon shines full, and the soft south wind blows towards the dark leagues of cistus and tree-heath behind us, we line-out three or four guns, each looking outwards across glittering sand-wastes on his front. There, on smooth expanse, one may detect every moving thing. Those shadowy forms that seem to skim the surface without touching it are stone-curlews, and beyond them is a less mobile object, whose identity none would guess by sight. That is a _tortuga_, or land-tortoise, tracing its singular double trail. Across the sand passes a bigger shadow--rabbits and the rest all vanish. What was that shadow? A strange growl overhead, and you see it is an eagle-owl that has scattered the ghost-like groups. Now there is something on the far skyline ahead--something that moves and puzzles--four mobile objects that were not there five seconds ago. These prove to be the ears of two hinds; presently the spiky horns of a stag appear behind them, and the trio move slowly across our front, stopping to nibble some tuft of bent. None of these are what we seek, but as dawn approaches you may (or may not) detect the form of some beast-of-prey making for its lair in the jungle behind you. Foxes, as their habit is, trot straight in; the lynx comes with infinite caution. Should some starveling bush survive a hundred yards out, she may stop, squatting on her haunches, half-hidden in its shade. You can see there is something there, but the distance is just beyond a sure range, and seldom indeed will that cat come nearer. However low and still you have laid the while, she will, by some subtle feline intuition, have gleaned (perhaps half unconsciously even to herself) a sense of danger. When day has dawned, you will find the retiring spoor winding backwards behind some gentle swell that leads to an unseen hollow beyond--and to safety. Truly you agree when the keeper says, "Lynxes see _best_ in the dark." * * * * * In a wide country it is of course purely fortuitous should any of these animals approach within shot. To assure that result with greater certainty we have adopted the plan of a "drag." Two or three hours before taking our positions (that is, shortly after midnight), a keeper rides along far outside on the sand, trailing behind his horse a bunch of split-open rabbits. Upon arriving outside the intended position of each gun, he directs his course inwards, thus dragging the bait close up to the post. Then taking a fresh bunch of rabbits, he repeats the operation to each post in turn. Thus every incoming beast must strike the scented trail at one point or another. Occasionally one will follow the drag right into the expectant gun, more often (the animals being full at that hour) it will leave the trail after following it for a greater or less distance. Some ignore it altogether. This applies to all sorts. The sand, as day dawns, forms a regular lexicon of spoor. One can trace each movement of the night. There go the plantigrade tracks of a badger, and hard by the light-footed prints of mongoose, mice, and an infinity of minor creatures. * * * * * Foxes most frequently capture their prey in fair chase, running them down, as shown by the double spoor ending in blood. Lynxes never chase; they kill by stalking, and a crouching spoor ends in a spring. Both these habitually carry away or bury all they do not devour on the spot. From the end of January onwards (that being the pairing-season) foxes may often be seen abroad by daylight in couples, and in such case, provided _they_ are _seen first_, are easily brought-up by "calling." Lynxes never show-up so by daylight, but an hour or two before dawn their weird wailing cries may be heard in the bush from mid-February onwards. * * * * * The mongoose is perhaps the least easily secured, being absolutely nocturnal and running so low (like a giant weasel) as to be almost invisible, however slight the covert. It is, moreover, an adept at concealment, and will scarcely be detected even at thirty yards if stationary. The best way to secure specimens of badger and mongoose is by digging-out their breeding-earths or warrens. An initial difficulty is to find the earths amid leagues of scrub or rugged mountain-sides; and even when located it may be necessary to burn off half an acre of brushwood before the spade can be brought into action. From one set of earths we have succeeded in digging out five big mongoose alive. That night, though confined in strong wooden cases, they gnawed their way out, and were never seen more, albeit their prison was on board a yacht anchored in mid-stream and half-a-mile from shore. * * * * * A few such days and nights as these teach that wild Spain cherishes other animals besides the game, to the full as interesting and even more difficult to secure. If we are asked (as we often have been before) why we molest creatures which have no value when killed, we reply that almost without exception our Spanish specimens have gone to enrich one collection or another, public or private, and that during the year in which we write this the authors spent a fortnight in obtaining a series of these animals for our National Museum at South Kensington, with the following results:--[56] Four lynxes--two males, 30-1/4 and 31 lbs.; two females, 18-1/2 and 23 lbs.--representing both types, namely, (1) that with many small spots, and (2) the handsomer form with fewer large and conspicuous blotches. One wild-cat (an exceptional specimen)--a male of 15 lbs., with yellow irides instead of the usual cold, cruel, pale-green eyes like an unripe gooseberry. This cat was what the Spanish keepers describe as _rayado_ = banded, _i.e._ the spots are arrayed in regular series or interrupted bands rather than scattered promiscuously. This race is distinguished as _gato clavo_, the ordinary wild-cat being known as _gato romano_. Several other wild-cats (_Gatos romanos_)--males weighing from 10-3/4 to 12-1/2 lbs.; females weighing from 7-1/2 to 8-1/4 lbs. In the sierras wild-cats run heavier than this, for we have killed in Moréna a wild-cat that scaled 7-3/4 kilos, or upwards of 17 lbs. Two badgers--male, 17-1/2 lbs.; female, 14-1/2 lbs. These Spanish badgers are blacker in the legs than British examples, and their fore-claws are more powerfully developed, possibly in this case through living in sand. Really big males weigh nearly double the above. Ten foxes (_Vulpes melanogaster_)--six males weighing 13-3/4, 14, 15 16-1/2, 16-1/2, 17 lbs.; four females weighing 11, 11-3/4, 13-1/2, 14 lbs. Besides "small deer," such as rats and mice, voles, moles, and dormice, to say nothing of a whole red-stag and a whole wild-boar! [POSTSCRIPT] _March 2, 1907._--_Chillando_ this evening at the Oyillos del Tio Juan Roque, a big grey sow with numerous progeny came trotting up to within a few yards--whether to devour the supposed rabbit or merely from curiosity was not apparent. On realising the situation, she turned and dashed off with an indignant snort, followed by her striped brood, but did not go far before stopping (like Lot's wife) to listen and look back. Later, at the Sabinal, just upon dusk, a fox appeared about 120 yards away, down-wind. Though quite aware of our presence, both by scent and sight, he deliberately sat down on his haunches to watch; but no charm of the _chillar_ would induce a nearer approach, and a rifle-ball whistling within an inch or two of his ears broke the spell. On May 16, 1910, a mongoose responded with unusual alacrity to the first "call," running up within twenty yards. This was an adult male and weighed 8-1/2 lbs. * * * * * We have endeavoured to rear some of these animals in captivity. The young wild-cats are by far the most intractable--perfect fiends of savage fury, quite unamenable to civilisation. The lynx at least affects a measure of subjection, but remains always unreliable and treacherous in spirit. The story of how one of our tame lynxes attacked and nearly killed a poor _lavandera_ is told in _Wild Spain_, p. 447. CHAPTER XXXV OUR "HOME-MOUNTAINS" THE SERRANÍA DE RONDA I. SAN CRISTOBAL AND THE _PINSÁPO_ REGION This mountain-system may be regarded as an outlying eastern extension of the Sierra Neváda. Except at the "Ultimo Suspiro del Moro" there is no actual break, and both in physical features and in fauna the two ranges coincide, while differing essentially from the Sierra Moréna, their immediate neighbour on the north. The Serranía de Ronda, nevertheless, displays distinctive characters which entitle it to a place in this book; it forms, moreover, our "Home-mountains," lying within a thirty-mile ride eastward of Jerez. [Illustration: PINSÁPO PINE] The outstanding feature is the _massif_--or, in Spanish, _Nucléo Central_--of San Cristobal, which rises to 5800 feet, and stands head and shoulders above its surrounding satellites, an imposing pile of cold grey rock and perpendicular precipice.[57] Nestling beneath its western bastions lies the Moorish hamlet of Benamahoma, whence, housed in friendly quarters, we have oft explored this hill. The route to the summit (which may almost be reached on donkey-back) is by the southern face; for summits, however, merely as such, we have no sort of affection, and never expend one ounce of energy in gaining them, unless they chance to aid a main objective. As to "views," we are sure to enjoy these from other points quite as effective. New-fallen snow powdered the ground and mantled the surrounding peaks as we rode out of Benamahoma on March 20. But the sun shone bright, and from a poplar softly warbled a rock-bunting--with pearl-grey head, triple banded. Serins and kitty-wrens sang from the wooded slopes, and we observed long-tailed tits, with cirl-buntings and woodlarks. A grey wagtail by the burnside was already acquiring the black throat of spring. [Illustration: ROCK-BUNTING (_Emberiza cia_)] The tortuous track writhes upwards through sporadic cultivation--the angles at which these hill-men can work a plough amaze, beans and _garbanzos_ grow on slopes where no ordinary biped could maintain a foothold. The industry of mountaineers (here as elsewhere in Spain) is remarkable. Each tillable patch, however small or abrupt, is reduced to service, its million stones removed and utilised to form the foundation for a tiny era, or threshing-floor (like a shelf on the hillside), whereon the hard-won crop is threshed with flails. Higher out on the hills rude stone sheilings are erected to serve as shelters during seed-time and harvest. Not even the hardy Norseman puts up a tougher tussle with nature to wrest her fruits from the earth. Presently one enters forests of oak and ilex with strange misshapen trunks, stunted and hollow, but decorated with prehensile convolvulus and mistletoe--many three-fourths dead, mere shells with cavernous interior, sheltering tufts of ferns. Here, instead of destroying the whole tree, charcoal-burners pollard and lop; huge lateral limbs are amputated as they grow, and the result, during centuries, produces these monstrosities, rarely exceeding twenty feet in height and surmounted by a delicate superstructure of branches totally disproportionate. No more fantastic forms can be conceived than these bloated boles, wrestling, as it were, with death, yet still able to transmit life to the superstruction above. They recall the Baobab trees of Central Africa. In neither case is the effect absolutely displeasing, albeit grotesque. Both may be described as deformed rather than disfigured. On rounding the northern shoulder of the mountain, suddenly the whole scene changes. Instead of limb-lopped trunks, one is faced by the dark foliage of the pinsápo pine--a forest monarch whose stately growth strikes one's eye as something conspicuously new. And new indeed it is. For the range of this great Spanish pine (_Abies pinsapo_) is limited not merely to Spain, but actually to this one mountain-range, the Serranía de Ronda--there may exist more remarkable examples of a restricted distribution, but none certainly that we have come across. The pinsápo, moreover, affects even here but three spots: first, San Cristobal itself; secondly, the Sierra de las Nieves, a mountain plainly visible some thirty miles to the eastward (all its northern corries darkened by pinsápos); and, lastly, the Sierra Bermeja on the Mediterranean, distant thirty to thirty-five miles S.S.E. On each of the three the pinsápo grows in forests; on adjacent hills we have observed one or two scattered groups--otherwise this pine is found nowhere else on earth. A curious character of the pinsápo is that it only grows on the northern faces of the hills. The tree possesses remarkable personality. Though one sees a chance specimen grow up straight as a spruce, yet its normal tendency is to "flatten out" on top, whence three, four, even a dozen independent "leaders" spring away, each with equal vigour, and finally form as many distinct vertical trunks, say six or eight separate pines all arising from a common base. To see the pinsápo in its pristine majesty and massiveness, one must ascend beyond the range of charcoal-burners; up there flourish gigantic specimens, some of which we measured (by rough pacing) to encompass ten to fifteen yards of base. These trees grow from screes of broken rock--great blocks of white dolomite; but the deep-searching tap-roots penetrate to black alluvia beneath. Other huge pines found roothold in walls of living rock. The three sketches, made from individual trees (presumed for the purpose to be divested of foliage), illustrate the singular multiple growth described. The foliage of the pinsápo differs from ordinary pine-needles, being rather a series of stiff outstanding spines analogous to those of the Araucaria. They display a crimson efflorescence in March, developing into clusters of red cones by April, and ripening in August to September.[58] [Illustration: PINSÁPO PINES (_Abies pinsapo_) Diagram to show trunk-plan, divested of foliage. Girth at base 30 to 45 feet.] The pinsápo-forests are subject to terrible destruction alike by hatchet and fire, tempest and avalanche. Forest-fires sweep whole glens; while rock-slides overwhelm and uproot even the biggest trees by scores. Few scenes that we have witnessed are more eloquent of nature's violence than these traces of an avalanche. Mammoth skeletons, weird and weather-blanched, protrude by the hundred from chaotic rock-ruin--some still upright, others overthrown or half submerged in debris, yet stretching great white arms heavenward, as though in agonised appeal. The distant roar of an avalanche is a not infrequent sound throughout the mountain-land. The pinsápo-forests of San Cristobal present one of the most striking mountain-landscapes in Andalucia. For some three miles they cover in a semicircle the whole scooped-out amphitheatre of the mountain-side. Their dark-green masses, contrasted against the white rocks on which they grow--and in winter with yet whiter snow--cluster upwards, tier above tier, from below the 3000-feet level away to the extreme summit of the knife-edged ridge above, say 5500 feet. Would that we could depict the beauty of the scene. [Illustration: CROSSBILL Wrestling with pine-cone.] Through these dark forests a track winds, and here again the evident industry of the mountaineers surprised. At intervals along this pathway lay great baulks of pine-timber (sleepers, planks, and poles), dressed and piled ready for transport. That such loads could be carried hence on donkey-back, or, were such possible, that the labour could be repaid, appeared incredible--so distant are markets and so heavy the cargo.[59] We had hoped to find in these forests a home of the Spanish crossbill, but not a sign of it rewarded our search. To avail the ripe fruit, the crossbill would need to nest in autumn, and that (wide as is the latitude of its breeding-season) is too much even for the _Pico-tuerto_. An interesting species found here in March was the cole-tit (_Parus pinsapinensis?_), which climbed around us, swinging from twigs within a yard as we sat at lunch. Blackstarts abounded, also firecrests. The latter have a pretty habit of engaging in aërial struggle--whether for love or war--both falling locked together to earth, as blue-tits do. On one such occasion a male, ere taking wing, spread out his flaming crown fanlike, as it were a halo. Beyond the pinsápo-forests succeeds a region of wiry esparto-grass, up which we climbed to yet more sterile zones above. Here cruel rocks are adorned with a dwarf sword-broom, steel-tipped, a thorny berberis, and vicious pin-cushion gorse that protects its newer growths (not that there is anything tender about it at any stage) by a delicate grey tracery that deceives a careless eye. For that subtle tracery is, in fact, the indurated malice of last year's spikey armour. No handhold does nature here vouchsafe. Curiously, we noticed woodlarks up here, while blackstarts abounded as titlarks on a Northumbrian moor. In an ivy-clad gorge at 4200 feet we found two nearly completed nests in rock crevices: one occupied a vertical fissure that needed quite twelve inches of packed moss to provide a foundation, the cup-shaped nest being superimposed. But it was not till a month later (April 24) that these birds were laying in earnest. At 5000 feet the "Piorno" (_Spartius scorpius_) began to grow, a red-stemmed shrub, known locally as _Leche-interna_, and on breaking it, the twigs are found to be filled with a milky fluid that justifies the name. The piorno we have never found growing except on the high tops of Grédos and other lofty sierras, where it forms a chief food of the Spanish ibex, its presence being, in fact, always associated with that of the wild-goat. Alas! that here, on San Cristobal, that association has been severed--another instance of the heedless improvidence that marks the Spanish race. Fifteen years ago they destroyed the last ibex; fifteen years hence they will have destroyed the last pinsápo! Once for brief moments a broad-horned head, peering over the topmost crags, lent joyous hope that after all an ibex or two might yet survive. But the intruder proved to be one of the dark-brown rams of _Ovis bidens_ that, in semi-feral state, roam these peaks. San Cristobal itself now holds no big game; though ibex are found but a few leagues to the eastward, and, we rejoice to add (on certain sierras where protection is afforded them), begin to increase. The Serranía de Ronda, like Neváda, of which it is an extension, has never held either boar or deer; both are too rocky and precipitous to shelter those animals, though both boar and roe are found in the lower hills towards Jerez. * * * * * Just below the highest peak, the Cumbre de San Cristobal, lies a curious little alpine meadow. It is only forty yards square, and while we rested, lunching, on unaccustomed level a golden eagle swept overhead, chased and hustled by a mob of choughs that colonise these crags. Ten minutes later a lammergeyer afforded a second glorious spectacle, speeding through space on pinions rigidly motionless, but strongly reflexed, as is usual on a descending gradient. Only once, as far as eye could follow, was one great wing gently deflected, and that merely from the "wrist." [Illustration: LAMMERGEYER OVERHEAD Gliding high on down-grade with rigid reflexed wings, outer primaries in-drawn, fan-wise.] On reaching a crest above, two lammergeyers appeared, the first carrying a long stick or thin bone athwart his beak; the second held a course direct to where L. sat on the ridge, coming so near that the rustle of huge wings sounded menacingly and the white head, golden breast, and hoary shoulders showed clear as in a picture. We expected to find the eyrie somewhere hard by, but in this we were mistaken--once more. It was not on that hill, nor the next; but on a third![60] We discovered the nest of our friends, the golden eagles. It was situate quite two miles away, in a vertical pulpit-shaped rock-stack, that stood forth in a terribly steep scree. From a cavern in the face of this (prettily overhung by a clump of red-berried mistletoe) flew the male eagle. From below, the eyrie was accessible to within a dozen feet; but that interval proved impassable. In the evening we returned with the rope, and having made this fast above, L. was about to ascend from below, when the man left in charge at the top (probably misunderstanding his instructions) let all go, and down came the rope clattering at our feet! It was too late to rectify the blunder that night, and a month elapsed ere we would revisit the spot. Then this curious result ensued. The eagles, we found, had so bitterly resented the indignity of a rope having been (even momentarily) stretched athwart their portals that they had abandoned their stronghold, leaving two handsome eggs, partly incubated. Their eyrie was eight feet deep, its entrance partly overgrown with ivy and (as above mentioned) overhung by red-berried mistletoe growing on a wild-cherry--the nest built of sticks, lined with esparto, and adorned with green ivy-leaves and twigs of pinsápo. [Illustration: GOLDEN EAGLE HUNTING (1) The "stoop"--quite vertical. (2) "Got him." ] The golden eagle is still common, ornamenting with majestic flight every sierra in Spain. For eagles are notoriously difficult to kill, and, when killed, cannot be eaten; so the goat-herd, with characteristic apathy and Arab fatalism, suffers the ravages on his kids and contents himself with an oath. Only once have we found a nest in a tree; it was a giant oak, impending a ravine so precipitous that from the eyrie you could drop a pebble into a torrent 200 feet below. Usually their nests are in the crags, vast accumulations of sticks conspicuously projecting, and generally in pairs, perhaps 100 yards apart, and which are occupied in alternate years. Eggs are laid by mid-March, but the young hardly fly before June. It was in this sierra that we made the sketches of golden eagles from life, here and at p. 317. Bonelli's eagle is another beautiful mountain-haunting species, but of it we treat elsewhere. * * * * * From the knife-edged ridge above our eagle's eyrie (height 5500 feet) we enjoyed a memorable view. Due south, 50 miles away, beyond the jumbled Spanish sierras, lay Gibraltar, recognisable by its broken back, but looking puny and inconsiderable amidst vaster heights. Beyond it--beyond Tetuan, in fact--rose Mount Anna, an 8000-feet African mountain; to the right, Gebel-Musa and all the Moorish coast to Cape Spartel, the straits between showing dim and insignificant. To the eastward, beyond the Sierra de las Nieves aforesaid, stands out boldly the long white snow-line of Neváda, its majesty undimmed by distance and 140 miles of intervening atmosphere. To the west we distinguish Jerez, 40 miles away, and beyond it the shining Atlantic. From one point there lies almost perpendicularly below, the curious mediæval village of Grazalema, jammed in between two vast cinder-grey rock-faces--its narrow streets, white houses, and india-red roofs resembling nothing so much as a toy town. No space for "back-streets," each house faces both ways; yet Grazalema is one of the cleanest spots we have struck--how they manage that, we know not. Immediately beneath Grazalema is a bird-crag that contains a regular "choughery," hundreds of these red-billed corvines nesting in its caves and crevices. As neighbours they had lesser kestrels and rock-sparrows (_Petronia stulta_), while the roofs of the caverns were plastered with the mud nests of crag-martins. We also noticed here alpine swifts, and a great frilled lizard escaped us amid broken rocks. Within the limits of a chapter even the more notable spots of a great serranía cannot all find place; but the rock-gorge known as the Yna de la Garganta will not be overpassed, though no words of ours can convey the stupendous nature of this place, a chasm riven right through the earth's crust till its depths are invisible from above; and overshadowed by encircling walls of sheer red crags, broken horizontally at intervals, thus forming, as it were, tier above tier, and flanked by a series of bastions and flying buttresses apparently provided to support the vast superstructure above. [Illustration] By climbing along the rugged central tier, one overlooks from its apex, as from the reserved seats of a dress-circle, the whole domestic economy of a vulture city in being. Every ledge in that abyss was crowded; many vultures sat brooding, their heads laid flat on the rock or tucked under the point of a wing. Elsewhere a single grey-white chick, or a huge white egg, lay in full view on the open ledge, nestled, apparently, on bare earth; and behind these each niche or cavern had its tenant. The rocks around a nest were often stained blood-red, and one vulture arrived carrying a mass of what appeared carrion in its claws. Another brought a wisp of dry esparto-grass athwart her beak and deposited it in her nest.[61] While we watched this scene a smart thunderstorm passed over, with the result that shortly afterwards the vultures spread their huge wings to dry, displaying attitudes some of which we endeavour to sketch--see also p. 9. [Illustration: "WING-DRYING"] The descent into the unseen depths beneath was rewarded, despite a terrible scramble--part of the way on a rope--by discovering a fairy grotto filled with pink, azure, and opalescent stalactites and stalagmites. The bed of the canyon, which from above had appeared to be paved with sand, now proved to consist of boulders ten feet high. After threading a devious course through these for half-a-mile we reached the mouth of the grotto. Its width would be nearly 200 feet and height about half that, the form roughly resembling the quarter of a cocoa-nut. The dome, in delicate colouring, passes description--the apex bright salmon-pink, changing, as it passed inwards, first into clear emerald, then to dark green, and finally to indigo; while the reflected sunlight filtering down between the rock-walls of the canyon caused phantasmagoric effects such as, one thought, existed only in fairyland. The cavern was backed by pillars of stalactites resembling the pipes of a mighty organ, and of so soft and feathery a texture that it was surprising, on touching them, to find hard rock. The floor also was composed of great smooth stalagmites, deep brown in colour. From outside, one saw the sky as through a narrow rift between the perpendicular walls which towered up 300 feet; and above that level there again uprose the vultures' cliffs already described. * * * * * One evening we detected afar a cavern which showed signs of being the present abode of a lammergeyer. Ere reaching it, however, a keen eye descried one of these birds in the heavens at an altitude that dwarfed the great _Gypaëtus_ to the size of a humble kestrel. Presently, after many descending sweeps, the lammergeyer entered another cavern 2000 feet higher up--in fact, close under the sky-line, among some scanty pinsápos. The hour was 4 P.M., and after a long day's scramble, the writer shied at a fresh ascent. Not so my companion, L., who set off at a run, and within an hour had reached the eyrie. It proved empty, though the leg of a freshly killed kid lay half across the nest. This was presumably the alternative site, used, this year, merely as a larder; but time did not that night admit of further search. The writer beguiled the two-hours interval in interviewing a wild gipsy-eyed girl of twelve, whose name was Joséfa Aguilár, and whose vocation in life to attend a herd of swine. Throughout Spain, whether on mountain or plain, one sees this thing--a small boy or girl spending the livelong day in solitary charge of dumb beasts, goats or pigs, even turkeys--and the sight ever causes me a pang of regret. Probably I am quite wrong, but such hardly seems a human vocation--certainly it leads nowhere. In intervals of pelting her recalcitrant charges with stones, Joséfa told me she lived in a reed-hut which was close by, but so small that I had overlooked its existence; that she never went to school or had been farther from home than Zahara, a village some few miles away. She asked if I was from Grazalema, and on being told from England, she repeated the word "Inglaterra" again and again, while her bright black eyes became almost sessile with wonderment. Joséfa's frock was hanging in tatters, torn to bits by the thorny scrub. I gave her some coppers to buy a new one, and with a little joyous scream Joséfa vanished among the bush. [Illustration: LAMMERGEYER ENTERING EYRIE] Darkness was closing in ere L. returned; then great thunder-clouds rolled up, obscuring the moon, and oh! what we suffered those next three hours, scrambling over rock and ridge, through forest and thicket--all in inky darkness and under a deluge of rain. On returning to this remote ridge (having ascended from the opposite face), we soon renewed our friendship with the lammergeyer--when first seen, it was being mobbed by an impudent chough. Then it sailed up the deep gorge below us, passing close in front, and after clearing an angle of the hill, wheeled inwards and with gently closing wings plunged into a cavern in the crag. We felt we had our object assured; yet on examining these mighty piles of rocks--a couple of hours' stiff climbing--it was evident we were mistaken, for no nest, past or present, did they reveal. It was on yet a third stupendous crag, quite a mile from the alternative site first discovered, that this year these lammergeyers had fixed their home. The nest was in quite a small cave in the rock-face; more often (as described in _Wild Spain_) the lammergeyer prefers a huge cavern in the centre of which is piled an immense mass of sticks, heather-stalks, and other rubbish--the accumulation of years--and lined with esparto-grass and wool. The eggs always number two and are richly coloured, whereas the griffon lays but one, and that white. Although laying takes place as early as January, yet the young are unable to fly before June. Our principal object this year was to sketch the lammergeyer in life, and in this several rough portraits serve to show that we succeeded--so far as in us lies. * * * * * There remain notes of later vernal developments in these beautiful sierras; but alas! this chapter is already too long, so over the taffrail they go. CHAPTER XXXVI SERRANÍA DE RONDA (_Continued_) II. THE SIERRA BERMEJA The Sierra Bermeja, standing on Mediterranean shore, demands a page or two if only because it affords a home to three of Spain's peculiar and rarer guests--the pinsápo, the ibex, and the lammergeyer. Our earlier experience in Bermeja, our efforts to study its ibex--and to secure a specimen or two--are told in _Wild Spain_. Suffice it here to say that the characteristic of these Mediterranean mountains is that here the ibex habitually live, and even lie-up (as hares do), among the scrubby brushwood of the hills--a remarkable deviation from their observed habits elsewhere, whether in Spain, the Caucasus and Himalayas, or wherever ibex are found. But since brushwood clothes Bermeja and other Mediterranean hills to their topmost heights, the local wild-goats have literally no choice in the matter. Still, such a habitat must strike a hunter's eye as abnormal, and is, in fact, a curious instance of "adaptation to environment."[62] During December 1907 we spent some days in Bermeja in an attempt to stalk the ibex--a difficult undertaking when game is always three-parts hidden by scrub. On former occasions we had secured a specimen or two by stalking (here called _raspagéo_) and "driving"; but whatever chance there might have been was this time annihilated by incessant mists enshrouding the heights in opaque screen. Thus another carefully organised expedition and unstinted labour were once more thrown away! [Illustration: LAMMERGEYER [Drawn from life in Sierra Bermeja, March 1891.]] On December 19 we drove the "Pinsapal." This, commencing near the highest tops, 5000 feet, extends down a tremendous conch-shaped ravine, merging at the base into pine-forests--chiefly, we believe, _Pinus pinaster_. This "drive" lasted two hours, mist sometimes densely thick, at others clearing a little; but only allowing a view varying from twenty to eighty yards. This, coupled with constant drip from the gigantic pinsápos and a bitter wind blowing through clothes already soaked, was ... well, comfortless and pretty hopeless to boot. Twice the dogs gave tongue--and it could be nothing but ibex here; while D., who was posted on the left, heard the rattling of hoofs as a herd passed within, as he reckoned, 200 yards. A second lot, followed by dogs, was heard though not seen on the extreme right. The pinsápos at this season, and in such weather, form a favourite resort, for we saw more sign hereabouts than on the high tops. A _levante_ wind in winter always means mist--and failure. The ibex in winter hold the high ground unless driven down by snow. In spring and summer they come lower--even to cork-oak levels--presumably to avoid contact with tame goats, then pasturing on the tops. The east wind and fog continuing a whole week, though we tried all we knew, every effort was frustrated by atmospheric obstruction. To drive ibex successfully, the skilled training of the dogs is essential. Formerly there were goat-herds who possessed clever dogs of great local repute. But these days of "free-shooting" have passed away, and the ibex of Bermeja with those of other Spanish sierras have recently fallen under the beneficent ægis of "protection." Bird-life in winter is scarce. We noticed a few redwings feeding on berries; jays, partridges, and many wood-pigeons picking up acorns. Vultures rarely appear here, but both golden and Bonelli's eagles were observed, and in one mountain-gorge a pair of lammergeyers have their stronghold, where in 1891 we examined both their eyries, one containing a young _Gypaëtus_ as big as a turkey. That was in March, at which season hawfinches abounded in the pines, and at dawn the melody of the blue thrush recalled Scandinavian springs and the redwing's song. Another small bird caused recurrent annoyance while ibex-driving. With a loud "Rat, tat, tat," resembling the patter of horny hoofs on rock, its song commences; then follows a hissing note as of a heavy body passing through brushwood--for an instant one expects the coveted game to appear. No, confound that bird! it's only a blackstart. We extract the following scene from _Wild Spain_:-- On the lifting of a cloud-bank which rested on the mountain-side, I descried four ibex standing on a projecting rock in bold relief about 400 yards away. The intervening ground was rugged--rocks and brush-wood with scattered pines--and except the first 50 yards, the stalk offered no difficulty. I had passed the dangerous bit, and was already within 200 yards, when in a moment the wet mist settled down again and I saw the game no more. Curiously, on the fog first lifting, an eagle sat all bedraggled and woe-begone on a rock-point hard by, his feathers fluffed out and a great yellow talon protruding, as it seemed, from the centre of his chest. Then a faint sun-ray played on his bronzed plumage: he shook himself and launched forth in air, sweeping downwards--luckily without moving the ibex, though they took note of the circumstance. In the lower forests here are some pig and roe-deer. A far greater stronghold, however, for both these game-animals is at Almoraima, belonging to the Duke of Medinaceli, some six or eight leagues to the westward. Almoraima covers a vast extent of wild mountainous land of no great elevations generally, but all wooded and jungle-clad. On the lower levels grow immense cork-forests. Here, during a series of _monterías_ in February 1910, in which the writer, to his lasting regret, was prevented from taking part, a total of 19 roe-deer and 52 boars was secured. The two best roebuck heads measured as follows:-- Length (outside curve). Circumference. Tip to Tip. No. 1 9-1/2" 3-1/2" 3-5/8" No. 2 9-1/4" 4-3/8" 3" III. SIERRA DE JEREZ These mountains (being within sight of our home) formed the scene of our earliest sporting ventures in Spain. It is forty years ago now, yet do we not forget that first day and its anxieties, as we rode by crevices that serve for bridle-paths, along with a too jovial hill-farmer, Barréa by name, who persisted in carrying a loaded gun swinging haphazard and full-cock in the saddle-slings--that it was loaded we saw by the shiny copper cap on each nipple! Our objects that day were boar and roe-deer; but presently a partridge was descried sprinting up the rugged screes above. Out came the ready gun, and next moment all that remained of that partridge was a cloud of feathers and scattered anatomy. The ball had gone true. Barréa casually shouted to a lad to pick up the pieces, himself riding on as though such practice was an everyday affair. My own experience of ball-shooting being then limited, I reflected that if such were Spanish marksmanship, I might be left behind! On assembling for lunch, however, some vultures were wheeling high overhead, and it occurred to me to try my luck. By precisely a similar fluke, one huge griffon collapsed to the shot, and swirling round and round like a parachute, occupied (it seemed) five minutes in reaching the ground--1000 feet below us. That afternoon the antics of two strange beasties attracted my attention and again my ball went straight. The victim was a mongoose, and with some pride I had the specimen carefully stowed in the mule-panniers--never to see it more! The mongoose, we now know, owing to its habit of eating snakes, has acquired a personal aroma surpassing in pungency that of any other beast of the field, and our men, so soon as my back was turned, had discreetly thrown out the malodorous trophy. A boar-shooting trip to the Sierra de Jerez formed the first sporting venture in which the authors were jointly engaged; for which reason (though the memory dates back to March 1872) we may be forgiven for extracting a brief summary from _Wild Spain_:-- Our quarters were a little white rancho perched amid deep bush and oak-woods on the slope of the Sierra del Valle. A mile farther up the valley was closed by the dark transverse mass of the Sierra de las Cabras, the two ranges being separated by an abrupt chasm called the Boca de la Foz, which was to be the scene of this day's operations. A pitiable episode occurred. While preparing to mount, there resounded from behind a peal of strange inhuman laughter, followed by incoherent words; and through an iron-barred window we discerned the emaciated figure of a man, wild and unkempt, whose eagle-like claws grasped the barriers of his cell--a poor lunatic. No connected replies could we get, nothing beyond vacuous laughter and gibbering chatter. Now he was at the theatre and quoted magic jargon; anon supplicating the mercy of a judge; then singing a stanza of some old song, to break off abruptly into fierce denunciation of one of us as the cause of his troubles. Poor wretch! he had once been a successful advocate; but signs of madness having developed, which increased with years, the once popular lawyer was reduced to the durance of this iron-girt cell, his only share and view of God's earth just so much of sombre everlasting sierra as the narrow opening allowed. We were warned that any effort to ameliorate his lot was hopeless, his case being desperate. What hidden wrongs may exist in a land where no judicial intervention is obligatory between the "rights of families" and their insane relations (or those whom they may consider such) are easy to conceive. The first covert tried was a strong jungle flanking the main gorge, but this and a second beat proved blank, though two roebuck broke back. The third drive comprised the main _manchas_, or thickets, of the Boca de la Foz, and to this we ascended on foot, leaving the horses picketed behind. Our four guns occupied the rim of a natural amphitheatre which dipped sharply away some 1500 feet beneath us, the centre choked with brushwood--lentisk, arbutus, and thorn--20 feet deep. On our left towered a perpendicular block of limestone cliffs, the right flank of the jungle being bordered by a series of up-tilted rock-strata, white as marble and resembling a ruined street. Ten minutes of profound silence, not a sound save the distant tinkle of a goat-bell, or the song of that feathered recluse, the blue rock-thrush (in Spanish, _Solitario_), then the distant cries of the beaters in the depths below told us the fray had begun. Another ten minutes' suspense. Then a crash of hound-music proclaimed that the quarry was at home. This boar proved to be one of certain grizzly monsters of which we were specially in search, his lair a jumble of boulders islanded amid thickest jungle. Here he held his ground, declining to recognise in canine aggressors a superior force. Two boar-hounds reinforced the skirmishers of the pack, yet the old tusker stood firm. For minutes that seemed like hours the conflict raged stationary: the sonorous baying of the boar-hounds, the "yapping" of the smaller dogs, and shouts of mountaineers blended with the howl of an incautious _podenco_ as he received a death-rip--all formed a chorus of sounds that carried their exciting story to the sentinel guns above. The seat of war being near half-a-mile away, no immediate issue was expected. Then there occurred one crash of bush, and a second boar dashed straight for the pass where the writer barred the way. The suddenness of the encounter disconcerted, and the first shot missed--the bullet splashing on a grey rock just above--time barely remained to jump aside and avoid collision. The left barrel got home: a stumble and a savage grunt as an ounce of lead penetrated his vitals, and the boar plunged headlong, his life-blood dyeing the weather-blanched rocks and green palmetto. For a moment he lay, but ere cold steel could administer a quietus, he had regained his feet and dashed back. Whether revenge prompted that move or it was merely an effort to regain the covert he had just left, we know not--a third bullet laid him lifeless. During this interlude (though it only occupied five seconds) the main combat below reached its climax. The old boar had left his stronghold, and after sundry sullen stands and promiscuous skirmishes (during which a second _podenco_ died), he made for the heights. Showing first on the centre, he was covered for a moment by a ·450 Express; but, not breaking covert, no shot could be fired, and when next viewed the boar was trotting up a stone-slide on the extreme left. Here a rifle-shot broke a foreleg, and the disabled beast, unable to face the hill, retreated to the thicket below, scattering dogs and beaters in headlong flight. And now commenced the hue and cry--the real hard work for those who meant to see the end and earn the spoils of war. Presently _Moro's_ deep voice told us of the boar at bay, far away down in the depths of the defile. What followed in that hurly-burly--that mad scramble through brake and thicket, down crag and scree--cannot be written. Each man only knows what he did himself, or did not do. We can answer for three. One of these seated himself on a rock and lit a cigarette. The others, ten minutes later, arrived on the final scene, one minus his nether garments and sundry patches of skin, but in time to take part in the death of as grand a boar as roams the Spanish sierras. This last spring (1910), after thirty-eight years, we revisited the Boca de la Foz, partly to reassure ourselves that the above description was not overdrawn. No! 'Tis a terrible wild gorge, the Foz, but the days when we can follow a wounded boar through obstacles such as those have passed away. The boars, we were told, are still there, and so are the vultures in those magnificent crags. We climbed along the ledges and there were the great stick-built nests, each in its ancestral site. In March each contains a single egg; now (April) that is replaced by a leaden-hued chick. These cliffs are also tenanted by ravens and a single pair of choughs. Neophrons occupied the same cavern whence I shot a female in 1872, and crag-martins held their old abodes, plastered on to the roofs of the caves. As April advances a new and striking bird-form arrives to adorn the higher sierras--the least observant can scarce miss this, the rock-thrush (_Monticola saxatilis_), conspicuous alike in plumage and actions; with clear blue head and chestnut breast, its colour-scheme includes a broad patch of white set in the centre of a dark back. The contrast is most effective, and, so far as we know, this "fashion" of a white back is unique among birds, unless indeed it be shared by Bonelli's eagle. The rock-thrush is also endowed with a lovely wild song, quite low and simple, but replete with a fine "high-tops" quality. By April 20 he yields to vernal impulses, and his courting is pretty to see; wheeling around on transparent pinions, he soars and sings the livelong day; at intervals, with collapsed wing, he drops like a stone to join his sober-hued mate among the rocks; a few picturesque poses, displaying all those flashing tints of orange and opal, and off he goes again to soar and sing once more. His cousin, the blue-thrush, has also a sweet song and a similar hovering flight, ending in a "drop act"; but the ascent is more vertical, while frequently he varies the descent and comes fluttering down in tree-pipit or butterfly-like style. Even the sober little blackchat now "shows off," perched on some boulder with quivering wings and tail spread fan-like over his back. Both these two last, being resident, nest much earlier than the migratory rock-thrush: the latter was building (in crevices of the rocks) by mid-April, but hardly lays before May. These sierras being only 3000 to 4000 feet, one misses here some of the alpine forms observed at higher altitudes. The tawny pipit, for example, a sandy-hued bird with dark eye-stripe and active wagtail-like gait, which was common on San Cristobal at 4500 feet in April, never showed up here at all; nor did any of the following species, all so characteristic of the higher ground: Blackstarts, woodlarks, rock-buntings, cole-and longtail-tits, and tree-creepers. The choughs, spotted woodpeckers, rock-thrushes, crag-martins, and wood-pigeons, though observed, were here very much scarcer. The lammergeyer, too, rarely descends here, and then only while in his smoke-black uniform of immaturity. THE PUERTA DE PALOMAS In May 1883, while returning from Ubrique, our horses fell lame owing to loss of shoes, and for four days and nights we were encamped in the pass known as the Puerta de Palomas. There is a tiny _ventorillo_, or wayside wine-shop, at the foot of the pass; but nights are warm in May, and we preferred the freedom of the open hill, where the strange growls made by the griffons at dawn, together with the awakening carol of the rock-thrush, formed our reveille each morning in that roofless bedroom amidst the boulders. The opposite side of the pass is dominated by the picturesque pile called the Picacho del Aljibe, a conical peak that towers in tiers of crags above the adjoining sierras not unlike a gigantic Arthur's Seat over the Salisbury Crags. Our own side was rather a chaotic jumble of detached monoliths than cliffs proper, and by clambering over these we reached in one morning sixteen vultures' nests, the easiest of access we ever struck. They were mostly very slight affairs, bare rock often protruding through the scanty structure; though, where necessary, a broad platform of sticks was provided--as sketched. The poults (only one in each nest) were now as big as guinea-fowls, with brown feathers sprouting through the white down. These eyries, albeit slightly malodorous, are always strictly clean, since vultures feed their young by disgorging half-digested food from their own crops, and we watched this not-pleasing operation being performed within some eighty yards' distance; hence there is no carrion or putrefying matter lying about, as is the case with the neophron and lammergeyer. [Illustration: GRIFFON VULTURE FEEDING YOUNG--PUERTA DE PALOMAS, APRIL 10, 1910.] These eyries were situate on three great outstanding stacks of rock, and during the scramble we came face to face with a pair of eagle-owls solemnly dreaming away the hours in the recesses of a cavern, though no sign of a nest was discovered. The caves were shared by crag-martins, whose swallow-like nests were fixed under the roof, usually just beyond reach. Their eggs are white, flecked with grey. On May 18 we obtained here a nest of the rock-thrush with five beautiful greenish-blue eggs. It was built in a cranny of the crags. This year (1910) found us once more in the Puerta de Palomas, the date April 8. On rounding the Sierra de las Cabras, as L. was already far up the hillside, I rode forward intending to ascend at the north end and work back, thus meeting in centre. A succession of mischances, however, upset that plan. A small clump of ilex clung to the steep above the point whereat I had left the horses, and in traversing this, I walked right into a calf concealed beneath a lentiscus. Knowing that this might involve trouble should its half-wild mother be within hearing, I gently retreated, but, hard by, stumbled on a second calf, even smaller, in another bush. No. 1 meanwhile had gained its legs and bleated softly. There followed a crash among the bush above, and as fierce-looking a wild beast as ever I saw (and I have seen some) came hurtling down those rugged rocks at amazing speed. On seeing me (luckily some little distance from her own offspring) the infuriated mother pulled up, full-face--a pretty picture, but rather menacing, especially as she kept up a muttered bellowing, horribly eloquent. I had sidled alongside a tree; but Paco, who carried my gun, with the reckless spirit begotten of the bull-fight, boldly addressed the enemy in opprobrious terms. The only result was that she came still nearer, and I swung to a lower branch. Paco, nothing daunted, now tried stones (in addition to expletives), and it was, to me at least, a relief when that cow at length retired. The half-wild savage may easily be more dangerous than the truly wild. The former have lost some of their pristine respect for man, and of course one has less means of defence. This incident over, we commenced the climb. The rock-stack rose vertically above us, but we diverged to the right as affording an easier route. On reaching the desired level, however, I found it impossible to make good that interval on our left--a smooth rock-face devoid of handhold, and too upright to traverse, forbade all lateral movement. Up we went another twenty yards, then another; but always to find that slithery rock-face mocking our efforts to outflank it. We were now well above the rock-stack overlooking the eyries, and I could see two griffons brooding, another feeding a poult close by. But between us was a great gulf fixed, and that gulf stopped us. The obvious alternative was to descend and try again from a fresh point. But here a new difficulty faced us: we could not descend. We had come up by following a series of vertical fissures, or "chimnies," none too easy, since every crevice sheltered some vicious vegetation, each more spikey and thorny than the last. Still from _below_ one can always select a handhold somewhere, and then defy the thorn; whereas on looking _backwards_, nothing is visible but a vanishing outline of rock and gorse, porcupine broom, or palmetto--beyond is vacant space, and a sheer drop at that. In a word, we could neither descend nor move laterally. It was humiliating--even more so than the antecedent incident with a _COW_! One resource remained--to climb on to the top; and even in that direction a single bad rock might cut off escape. No such crowning catastrophe befell, but it was tooth-and-claw work, every yard of it, and the vertical height could not have been less than 1000 feet. While thus "clawing up" I recollect passing a perfect glory in orchids--great twin purple blooms, golden-tipped and quite amorphous in outline. They grew just beyond my reach. Curious recumbent ferns clung to the rocks; anemones and violet-like bouquets peered from each cranny. Meanwhile L., approaching from the other side, had examined the rock-stacks and succeeded in attaining one main objective--the nest of the eagle-owl. This was in a rock-cavern, close by that of '83, easy of access--indeed the great owl flew out in his face as he passed below. The cave (four feet high by two wide) was at the foot of a vertical limestone cliff, its floor level with a goat-track that skirted the crag, and fully exposed to view; there was no nest nor any debris. Two young owls in white down, with one egg actually "chipping," lay on the bare earth. * * * * * One of the griffon's nests still contained (on April 8) a fresh egg, which is now in the writer's collection as a memorial of that day. We had secured all we had expected in the Puerta de Palomas--and something more besides. CHAPTER XXXVII A SPANISH SYSTEM OF FOWLING THE "CABRESTO" OR STALKING-HORSE Spain is a land of flocks and herds, of breeders and graziers. At the head of the scale stands the fighting-bull, monarch of the richest _vegas_; at the opposite extreme come the shaggy little ponies and brood-mares that eke out a feral and precarious subsistence in the wildest regions. Throughout the marismas hardy beasts with wild-bred progeny on which no human hand has ever laid, abound, grazing knee-deep in watery wildernesses where tasteless reed or wiry spear-grass afford a bare subsistence. There they live, splashing in the shadows, heads half-immersed as they pull up subaquatic herbage; on the back of one rides perched a snow-white egret, on another a couple of magpies, preying on ticks or warbles, while all around swim wildfowl that scarce deign to move aside. No fowler could view such a scene without perceiving that approach to the wildfowl might be effected under cover of these unsuspected ponies. The earliest aucipial mind probably realised the advantage offered, and the system has been practised in Spain from time immemorial. The method is simple. The ponies (termed, when trained, _cabrestos_, or "decoys") seem by intuition to realise what is required. By a cord attached to the headstall, the fowler, crouching behind the shoulder, directs his pony's course towards the unconscious fowl. At intervals, still further to disarm suspicion, feigned halts are made as though to simulate grazing. Before closing in, the nose-cord is made fast to the near fore-knee, thus holding the pony's head well down. Presently the ducks are within half gunshot, and we amateurs (whose doubled backs ache excruciatingly from a constrained position maintained for half an hour) pray each moment for relief and the signal to fire. No! Our fowler-friends shoot for a livelihood, and continue, with marvellous skill and patience, so to manoeuvre their beasts that the utmost possible target shall finally be presented to the broadside. There is no hurry--nor time nor aching vertebræ with them count one centimo. (See photo at p. 90.) Should it be necessary to change course, that operation is effected by wheeling the pony stern-on to the fowl, the fowler meanwhile crouching low under his muzzle: critical moments ensue during which the expert has no cover but the pony's breadth--instead of his length--to shield him from detection by hundreds of the keenest eyes on earth. But it is remarkable how little notice is taken of what is necessarily in full view provided that the exposed objects are _beneath_ the covering animal. Once let a human head or a gun-barrel appear _above_ its outline and the spell is broken. But otherwise--say during those interludes of feigned "grazing"--the suffering fowlers can straighten their backs by squatting down (in the water!) and thus enjoy at closest quarters a spectacle of wild creatures that is impossible to attain by any other means yet discovered. Though the fowlers are now fully visible, framed, as it were, beneath the _cabresto's_ belly and between his legs, no notice will be taken or any alarm created so long as the pony's skylines remain unadorned with human appendages. There, within a score of yards, you sit face to face with ducks by the hundred, feeding, splashing, preening--all utterly unconcerned! Those of our readers who are most familiar with wildfowl will best realise how incredible such a statement must read. Ordinarily, the slightest visible movement--the mere glint of a gun-barrel though half masked by cover--suffices to shift every duck at one hundred yards and more. Here they ignore objects practically exposed and close at hand. Apparently the habitual companionship day by day of water-bred ponies has annihilated in their minds all sense of danger arising from such a quarter. The Spanish professionals (using large but antiquated muzzle-loaders) work singly, each man behind his own pony; or should two or more join forces for a broadside, there still remains but one man behind each animal. These men are reputed to have made extraordinary shots; and having viewed their infinite patience, we can well believe such records. To place two guns behind one _cabresto_-pony, that is, an amateur as well as the professional, is a distinct handicap. We have done it ourselves, and accepted the handicap merely to see the system in operation; yet by using more powerful weapons have probably killed as many fowl at one shot as even the fabled totals of our friends. Obviously no comparison can be, or is, suggested as between two totally different performances. It has been solely for the purpose of learning the system, and also of enjoying unequalled views of wildfowl close at hand, that we have occasionally put in a day with the _cabresto_-ponies, and here annex a few records of shots made by this means, taken at random from our diaries. _January 1, 1898._--Fired three broadsides with two guns, a double 8-and a single 4-bore; in the second case the fowl had just been badly scared by a kite. Results:-- (1) 59 wigeon, 3 teal 62 (2) 30 " 3 " 33 (3) 60 " 1 " 4 pintail, 4 shoveler 69 ___ Total 164 _January 31, 1905._--In three shots at wigeon, the first being half spoilt by a big black-backed gull, the authors (two guns) gathered:-- 27 + 51 + 48 = 126 wigeon. _December 29, 1893._--Santolalla (2 guns), 78 teal, besides some coots, at a single shot. _January 1894._--Laguna Dulce; three _cabrestos_ with Spanish fowlers, and two amateurs with big breech-loaders (a broadside of 5 barrels):-- 198 teal (including about a dozen wigeon). A shot made in January 1894 seems worth recording merely in respect of the numbers killed by only some _seven ounces_ of lead. An islet actually _carpeted_ with teal was our target, and two 12-bores, aided by an ancient Spanish muzzle-loader (about 10-bore), realised fifty head, to wit, forty-nine teal and one mallard-drake. Geese will rarely admit of approach to the close quarters necessary for effective work; yet just on those rare exceptional occasions we have secured (using heavy shoulder-guns) from six to a dozen greylags in a day, once or twice more than this--five at a shot being the maximum. THE STANCHION-GUN IN SPAIN In contrast with the success of the _cabresto_ system, the stancheon-gun proved a failure. So admirably adapted for punt-gunning appeared those great shallow marismas, that in 1888 we sent out the entire outfit and artillery for wildfowling afloat--a 22-foot double-handed gunning-punt and an 80-lb. gun to throw 16 oz. of shot. The little craft reached the Guadalquivir in September, but unforeseen difficulties arose. The Spanish custom-house took alarm. True, the smart little gun-boat was an entire novelty--even in the Millwall docks she had created surprise; here she was incomprehensible. No such vessel had ever floated on Spanish waters, and the official mind needed time to consider. That oracle, after weeks of cogitation, ordered the removal of the suspicious craft from the obscure port of Bonanza to the fuller light that plays on the custom-house at Seville. There, after more weeks of delay, it was decided that the white-painted six-foot barrel was "an arm of war," that "the combination of boat and gun savoured of the mechanism of war," and, finally, that "the boat could not be permitted to pass the customs until it had been registered at the Admiralty." Thus our _Boadicea_ joined the Imperial Navy of Spain. Seven months elapsed whilst these difficulties were in process of solution, and ere they were smoothed away (as difficulties in Spain, or elsewhere, do dissolve under prudent treatment), and the _Boadicea_ set free to navigate the marismas, the season had passed and the migrant fowl had returned to the north. The following autumn, however, it at once became apparent that the venture was a failure. No wildfowl would tolerate her presence within half-a-mile. No sooner had her low snake-like form crept clear of fringing covert than the broad _lucio_ in front was in seething tumult, every duck within sight had sprung on wing. Naturally we tried every known plan, but all in vain. A system that is effective on the harassed and hard-shot estuaries of England utterly broke down on the desolate marismas of Spain. The apparent explanation is that whereas fowl at home are accustomed to see passing craft of many kinds, and perhaps mistake the low-lying gunboat for a larger vessel far away; here no craft of any sort navigate the marisma, or should the box-shape _cajones_ of native gunners be so classed, they are at once recognised as wholly and solely hostile.[63] One plan remained by which the big gun might be brought to bear upon the larger bodies of fowl: concealing the boat among sedges at some point where ducks had been observed to assemble _within reach_ of such covert. That, however, to begin with, was most uncertain--the only certainty was that enormous drafts on patience would be required; and, after all, it forms no part of the system of wildfowling afloat and lacks the joys and glories of that pursuit. WILD SWANS IN SPAIN Since meeting with four hoopers in February 1891, as recorded in _Wild Spain_, we had neither seen nor heard of wild swans in Southern Spain till February of the present year, 1910, when H.R.H. the Duke of Orleans kindly informed us that he had succeeded in shooting one of a pair met with in his marismas of Villamanrique. It proved to be an adult male of Bewick's swan--the first occurrence of that species that has been recorded in Spain. CHAPTER XXXVIII THE "CORROS," OR MASSING OF WILDFOWL IN SPRING FOR THEIR NORTHERN MIGRATION The withdrawal of the wildfowl at the vernal equinox affords an unequalled scenic display. It forms, moreover, one of those rare revelations of her inner working that Nature but seldom allows to man. Her operations, as a rule, are essentially secretive. A little may be revealed, the bulk must be inferred. Here, for once, a vast revolution is performed in open daylight, _coram populo_--that is, if the authors and a handful of Spanish fowlers be accepted as representative, since no other witness is present at these scenes enacted in remote watery wilderness. Up to mid-February the daily life of the marisma continues as already described. From that date a new movement becomes perceptible--the seasonal redistribution. Daily there withdraw northward bands and detachments counting into thousands apiece. But no vacancy occurs since their places are simultaneously filled by corresponding arrivals from beyond the Mediterranean. It is at this precise epoch that there occurs the phenomenon of which we have spoken. Towards the close of February, dependent on the moon, a marked climatic change takes place. A period of sudden heat usually sets in--a sequence of warm sunny days, breathless, and at noontide almost suffocating. But each afternoon with flowing tide there arises from the sea a S. W. breeze, gentle at first and uncertain but gaining strength with the rising flood. Already, shortly before this change, the duck-tribes had partially relaxed their full mid-winter activities--owing to abundant spring growths of food-plants, had become more sedentary; if not sluggish, at least reluctant to move. After the brief morning-flight not a wing stirred. But now, scan the mirror-like surface of some great _lucio_ and you will recognise a new movement distinct and dissimilar from regular hibernal habit. There float within sight (and the same is happening at a score of places beyond sight) not only the usual loose flotillas, but three, four, or five concrete assemblages of densely massed fowl whose appearance the slightest scrutiny will differentiate from the others. These are not sitting quiescent. The binoculars disclose a scene of perpetual motion, well-nigh of riot--one might be regarding a feathered faction-fight. Hundreds of units fight, splash, and chase, or throw up water with beating wings till surf and spray half conceals the seething crowd. That flicker of pinions and flying foam are, moreover, accompanied by a chorus of myriad notes--a babel of twirling sound blended in rising and falling cadences, comparable only to the distant roar of some mighty city. A more singular spectacle we have not encountered. Inquiry from one's companion elicits the reply that these assemblages are _hechando corros para irse_ (literally, "forming choruses preparatory to departure")--an expression which conveyed no more significance to us than it can to the reader.[64] We decided to return at daybreak to see this thing through, and after watching the phenomenon a score of times can now explain it. During the morning hours there are established focal points whereat assemble those units already affected by the emigrant furor. These (at first, perhaps, but a score or two) rapidly increase in numbers till each focus becomes the nucleus of a corro. The seasonal infection spreads, and as its influence impregnates the surrounding masses, these, singly or in scores or hundreds as the passion seizes them, hasten to join one or other of the mobilising army-corps. Within an hour or two the insignificant original nucleus has developed into a vast host all in a ferment of agitation, and being constantly reinforced by buzzing swarms of recruits from without. All this procedure, remember, has been taking place during the blazing noontide heat. Now the hour is 2 P.M., and the first gentle breath of the daily sea-breeze--the _viento de la mar_--is becoming perceptible. This breeze springs from the S. W., and let us here admit that, being fowlers as well as naturalists, our observance of the phenomenon has usually been carried out upon a _lucio_ which happens to terminate towards the N. E. in a long narrow bight fringed by tall reeds and bulrush, where, concealed in friendly covert, we can continue the observation while glancing along the barrel of a punt-gun. That secondary fact is merely incidental and, it so happens, facilitates the main object. A mile to windward three such armies are mobilising separately within the scope of our view; and now the gentle force of that sea-breeze begins to impel those unconscious hosts, too preoccupied with all-absorbing passion to notice detail, directly towards the point whereat we lie concealed. [Illustration: REED-BUNTING A winter visitor to the marismas.] By this time the sun has three or four hours of declension and the thin dark line representing thousands of surging atoms has drifted down to within 200 yards. We can study at short range an amazing phenomenon. In weird exuberance they fight and flirt, chase, cherish, and flap till churned water flies in foam and a discordant roar of sibilant sound fills to the zenith the voids of space. The volume of voices defies description since these assembling multitudes belong to no single species, but include a promiscuous agglomeration of all that care to enlist, and each adds its own distinctive element to the general uproar.[65] Around the floating host new-comers buzz like swarming bees, each seeking some spot to wedge itself into the crowd. To-night the main _corro_ that we had been awaiting drifted past our front a trifle beyond effective range. The two that followed both "took the ground" and remained stationary, away to the right. The chance of making a great shot had failed; but we were content to watch the phenomenon to its finish. Now the sun dips. The western sky is filled with golden glory; in twenty short minutes darkness will have enveloped the earth. Then in a moment, as by word of command, silence, sudden and impressive, reigns where just before that torrential babel had raged. Such, now, is the stilly silence that by comparison the pipe of a passing redshank sounds well-nigh scandalous! A few seconds pass. Then, dominated by a single impulse, the concentrated mass on our front rises simultaneously on wing. The spell of silence is broken; the roar of pinions reverberates far and wide. They're off--bound for Siberia! Yet unperplexed as though one spirit swayed Their indefatigable flight. Holding the same massed formation, the fowl in three or four broadening circles quickly attain a considerable altitude--say 100 yards--and then head away on their course, _ALWAYS_ (so far as they remain visible) to the _SOUTH-EAST_--diametrically opposite to the direction one would expect. As in deepening darkness we set forth on our homeward voyage, the heaven above pulsates at intervals with the beating of wings as yet more north-bound _corros_ pass overhead. Certain notable facts are observable in this vernal exodus. For upwards of twelve hours prior to departure the outgoing fowl take no food. That period is devoted exclusively to preparation and overhaul, _and_ to pairing. Plumage is preened and dressed till each unit is spick and span, speckless, and not a feather misplaced. All, moreover, are absolutely empty--in best and lightest travelling trim. When ducks are _acorrados_--that is, formed into _corros_ (the term is used thus in verb-form)--their normal watchfulness is relaxed. All thought and energy are concentrated on the impending event. Hence, at these periods they are apt to fall an easier prey to the fowler and on wholesale lines. The native gunners with their trained _cabresto_-ponies sometimes unite and enormous totals are secured as the result of a single joint broadside. The fowl thus obtained afford proof of the facts just stated, being all absolutely empty; besides which many different species will be killed at the one shot.[66] These men also state that the ducks start already paired and flying side by side; this, they say, explains the ferment and commotion of the previous hours--courting and sorting. Adult ducks, as previously indicated (p. 110), apparently pair for life; but since some species (such as wigeon) take at least two years to gain maturity, it is probable that the sexual phenomena which are so conspicuous in the _corros_ represent the first pairing of the newly adult two-year-olds. The most favourable time for the assembling of corros is on those days when great heat and calm at midday is succeeded towards evening by an extra strong sea-breeze. On such occasions very large numbers will leave between sundown and dark. Northerly winds will almost absolutely arrest the exodus. For the season of 1900-1901 our game-books showed a total of 4849 wildfowl (4674 ducks and 175 geese)--a record for which we were good-humouredly taken to task by our venerable friend the late Canon Tristram, who thought it looked excessive. The figures certainly are big, but the next entry in the book reads:-- _March 15._--This evening between fifty and seventy _corros_ left within half an hour--say 50,000 to 70,000 ducks. Next morning the marisma appeared as full as ever. Our toll of 5000 seemed by comparison but as a drop in the bucket! CHAPTER XXXIX SPRING-TIME IN THE MARISMAS BIRD-LIFE IN A DRY SEASON Bird-life in the Spanish marisma--in spring no less than in winter--presents spectacles of such abounding variety as can nowhere in Europe be surpassed. In the Arctic are vaster aggregations, but these, comprising, say, only half-a-dozen species, are less attractive. It is the infinite kaleidoscopic succession of graceful and dissimilar forms that hour by hour flash on one's sight--in a word, it is variety that lends abiding charm to our Spanish bird-world. [Illustration: GREY PLOVER (MAY)] These scenes have already been described--we have ourselves described them in detail, and do not propose to recapitulate, alluring though the subject be. Here we purpose depicting bird-life under undescribed conditions--in a spring when, by reason of exceptional drought, the myriad marsh-dwellers find themselves entirely at fault. Winging their seasonal way from Africa, to seek the seclusion of reed-girt pools and their accustomed league-long swamps and shallows, they found instead a calcined plain, no drop of water remaining, plant-life either prematurely parched or pulverised beneath a fiery sun. Watching the arrival of the advance-guard in early spring, one wondered what the bewildered hosts would do next, how they would face this fresh freak of nature. The marismas, it should be explained, normally dry every summer, however wet the previous winter may have been. Though the great _lucios_ stood five feet deep in February, yet the deepest will be stone-dry by midsummer or, at latest, by St. Jago (July 24). Cattle and the wild-game can then only drink at the narrowed pools where permanent water, however exiguous, oozes forth--or the cattle from wells. In normal years, however, the marsh-birds have already reared their broods before these dates. But in years of drought--what resource have they, where can they find a substitute for their sun-destroyed and desolate _incunabula_? Many (the waders in particular) instinctively prognosticate a drought; few, comparatively, either come or remain--those that come pass on. Even such birds as breed on permanent deep-water lakes (such, for example, as the smaller herons, egrets, and ibises) perceive in advance that, although they may have water assured, there will neither be sufficient covert, later on, to conceal their nurseries nor food for the rearing of their young. The erewhiles teeming heronries are abandoned. Never within forty years has there occurred a drier season than this last, 1909-10. Incidentally we may remark that most of the previous spring-tides that we had expressly devoted to the marisma had been years of excessive rainfall, years when flamingoes nested abundantly--an unfailing index. Such was 1872, for example, 1879, and 1883; again, in April 1891, we remember our gunning-punt, caught in a squall, sinking beneath us in quite three feet of water though barely a mile from shore. These are the seasons when (as described in _Wild Spain_) one sees the waterfowl in their fullest abundance. On the present occasion (1910) we were to witness converse conditions. Throughout the preceding winter the fountains of heaven had been stayed, nor did the advent of spring bring one hour of rain. By mid-March the marisma was practically waterless--a fortnight later, sunbaked hard as bricks. Where now were the marsh-birds? In April or May you could ride a long day over arid mud-flats and never see a wing, bar, in the latter month, a few Kentish plovers and fluttering pratincoles[67]--add a band or two of croaking sand-grouse (_Pterocles alchata_) passing in the high heavens. Where had the exiled myriads gone? No man can answer. We are not so foolish as attempt to say; but we do venture to express the opinion that in years when even wildest Spain refuses asylum to wild creatures such as these, the result to them can only represent an overwhelming catastrophe. For there lies before them no alternative refuge; their races must perish by wholesale. At those rare points where permanent waters remained one might look for great concentrations of bird-life, yet such was not the case. As indicated, the bulk had foreseen the event and abandoned this country. One phenomenon struck us as inexplicable. Of the birds that did remain none displayed the slightest symptom of yielding to the vernal impulse, of pairing, or of desiring to nest. Flamingoes, for example (what few there were), continued massed in solid herds up to mid-May. A band of 300 that we examined closely on the 12th at the Caño de la Junquera (though fully 90 per cent were adults in perfect pink feather) contained not a single paired couple. Hard by the flamingoes some forty or fifty spoonbills were feeding. These, last year, nested at this spot, building upon or among the low samphire-scrub--a dangerously open situation for such big and conspicuous birds. This spring, though many remained in the marisma, not a spoonbill nested in the district at all. Flamingoes, by the way, had exhibited extreme restlessness throughout the spring. On February 22, for example, while steaming up the Straits of Gibraltar, we detected them in quite incredible numbers but at an altitude almost beyond the range even of prism-glasses--it was a dim similitude to drifting _cirri_ that first caught our eye. So vast was their aërial elevation that it was only after prolonged examination we at length recognised those revolving grey specks as being birds at all; presently a nearer band, directly overhead, revealed their characteristic identity. The bulk of these held a southerly tendency, towards Africa; others drifted undecided; while several bands, halting between two opinions, when lost to sight were wheeling beyond the Spanish hills. Ducks also in mid-May serried the skies in utterly anachronous skeins--reminiscent of winter. These were largely marbled ducks, all unpaired; but there were also very large aggregations of mallards. One such pack on May 10 certainly counted 500--a number we never remember to have seen massed together in Spain before, not even in winter. This was at the Hondon. A similar phenomenon was observed with the white-faced ducks. These curious creatures also remained in packs, and without sign of pairing, on the open waters of Santolalla--open only because aquatic plants had forborne to grow. In normal seasons these lakes are studded with great cane-brakes and islanded reed-jungles, within whose recesses these amphibians build their floating homes. This spring not a reed had grown--partly owing to cattle having destroyed the earlier shoots which are usually protected by deep water. There was literally no covert within which these ducks (and the swarming coots and grebes) could breed, even were they so minded--which they were not! The only ducks that had paired in earnest were gadwall, garganey, common and white-eyed pochard (of which the first three nest here in very limited numbers), together with normal quantities of mallard. [Illustration: HEAD OF CRESTED COOT The frontal plate is concave, whereas in the common coot it is convex.] A collateral result of the shortage of water wrought yet further havoc among the birds which had elected to remain, and accentuated the prescience of those that had departed. Nesting-places, ordinarily islanded in mid-water, were now left stranded on dry land and thus open to the ravages of the whole fraternity of four-footed egg-devouring vermin. Many species, we know, foresee such risks and invariably avoid them; others, less prudent, make the attempt and lose their labour. The white-eyed pochards, for example, which are accustomed to nest in islanded clumps of rush and dense aquatic grasses, this year simply provided free breakfasts to rats and ichneumons! We happened to require two or three settings of these ducks to hatch-off under hens, but no sooner did a marked nest contain three or four eggs than all were devoured! As to the coots, of which both the common and crested species breed in the marisma in myriads, they simply gave it up as a bad business. They did not depart, but resigned themselves to the necessity of skipping a season. Gulls, great and small, with graceful marsh-terns, floated spectre-like, surveying in solitude and silence arid wastes where before they had found aquatic Edens. Once or twice we also noticed the small white herons (buff-backed and egret) flying disconsolately over their lost homes. A similar remark would apply to most of the other marsh-breeders--we need not recapitulate them all. Stilts, for example, and avocets remained perforce in single blessedness--the latter in noisy querulous bands, quite wild and showing no tendency to assume spring notes or habits. We _did_ chance on a single avocet's nest, where, in other years, we have found hundreds. The same with the stilts--they also retained winter ways. Curiously on May 17--one wet day--two male stilts had a regular set-to over an irresponsive female; the only symptom of their love-making we noticed all that spring! [Illustration: AVOCETS FEEDING Though long-legged, these are half-webfooted and swim freely.] Here, in the very height of what ought to have been the breeding-season, we had all these birds (and many others), instead of hovering overhead and shrieking in one's ear, flying wild in great packs at 100 yards. How came it to pass that the normal vernal impulse was neglected for a whole season, unfelt and unrecognised--what was the precise psychological reason? It reads ridiculous to assume that any feathered husband should deliberately remark: "Now, Angelina, don't you agree that it would be imprudent our attempting to raise a family this drought-struck season?" Nor could the neglect arise from physical weakness, since the birds were strong and wild. Such specimens as we shot proved plump and well favoured, though the generative organs disclosed a hybernal obsolescence. One explanation--indeed a rough-and-ready diagnosis that seemed to cover the ground--was given by Vasquez. Now Vasquez is our Guarda of the marisma; he is not scientific, but has been in charge of the wilderness and its wildfowl these thirty years and, more than all, he is observant. This rough keeper perhaps understands the inner lives of wildfowl, with the causes that actuate their movements and habits, better than our best scientists, and Vasquez told us in February: "This year no birds will breed here; the conditions necessary to _calientár los ovários_ [literally, to warm up the ovaries] are wanting." The subsequent course of events, corroborated by the evidence of dissection, proved the correctness of his forecast. * * * * * For a moment we return to the white-faced ducks--no European bird-form less known, or more extravagant. With heavy, swollen beaks, quite disproportionate in size and pale waxy-blue in colour, with white heads, black necks, and rich chestnut bodies, their tiny wings (as well as the sheeny silken plumage) recall those of grebes, but they have long stiff tails like cormorants, and are more tenacious of the water than either of those. To push them on wing is well-nigh impossible. They seek safety in the middle waters and there abide, ignoring threats. To-day, however (May 16), we needed specimens, and by hustling their company between three guns, two mounted keepers, and an old boat that leaked like a sieve we eventually forced them to fly and secured three. They flew entirely in packs (not pairs), rarely many feet above the surface, but with a speed little inferior to pochard or other diving-ducks. Dissection showed that in a female the ovaries had not begun to develop, there were no ripe ova, nor had the oviduct been used. The _testes_ in both the males proved also that here these birds were not yet breeding, or thinking of doing so. A week earlier, however, at another lake of quite different formation and different plant-growth (thirty miles away), we had found these singular waterfowl already nesting, and append a note of that day:-- [Illustration: WHITE-FACED DUCK (_Erísmatura leucocephala_). See also p. 28.] LAGUNA DE LAS TERAJES, _May 8._--A lonely lagoon hidden away in a saucer-shaped basin amidst sequestered downs; almost the entire extent (twenty acres) choked with dense cane-brakes and thick green reeds which stood six or eight feet above water. We had driven hither, nine miles, across sandy heaths and pine-wood; and while breakfasting on the shore our two canoes (carted here yesterday) were got afloat. Meanwhile, on a patch of open water we had observed several white-faced ducks swimming, deeply immersed, and with their long stiff tails cocked upright at intervals, together with some eared grebes; while marsh-harriers slowly quartered the brakes and the reed-beds rang with the harsh nasal notes of the great sedge-warbler. On pushing out into the aquatic jungle ahead--no light labour with five feet of water encumbered with densely matted canes and the dead tangle of former growths--we soon fell in with nests of all the species above mentioned and several more. Those of the white-faced ducks consisted, first, of a big floating platform of broken canes, upon which was piled a mass of fine dried "duck-weed"--the coots' nests being formed of flags and reeds alone. None of the ducks' nests contained eggs; probably the season was too early (in other years we have found their great white eggs, rough-grained, about the third week in May), but possibly the harriers had forestalled us, as we found one egg floating alongside. The grebes were just beginning to lay; their nests, composed of rotten floatage, all awash and malodorous, containing one to three eggs. Next we found two nests of marsh-harriers, immense masses of dead flags, two feet high, supported on floating canes and lined with sticks, heather-stalks, and palmetto. One had four eggs, hard-sat; the other, two eggs, chipping, and two small young in white down, with savage black eyes. The harriers' eggs are usually dull white; in one nest found this year, however, the eggs were spotted with pale red--apparently blood-stains. Hard by were two nests of the purple water-hen, both of which had obviously been recently robbed by the harriers next door. These curious birds climb the tall green reeds parrot-wise, grasping four or five at once in their long, supple, heavily clawed toes; then with their powerful red beaks neatly cut down the reeds a yard or more above water, in order to feed on the tender pith. Here and there float masses of these cut-down reeds, split and emptied--_comederos_, the natives call such spots. But the birds are silly enough to cut down the very reeds that surround their nests--thus exposing the huge piled-up structures to the gaze of their truculent neighbour, the egg-loving marsh-harrier. Instinct badly at fault here. With a degree more intelligence, the purple water-hens might at least retaliate, by watching their opportunity and mopping-up the harriers' young. They are amply equipped for such work, having great pincer-like beaks fit to cut barbed wire! On the other hand, the great purple water-hens habitually do a bit robbery and murder on their own account, plundering the nests both of ducks and coots and devouring eggs or young alike. We shot one whose beak was smeared all over with yolk from a plundered duck's nest hard by, and alongside the nest of a _Porphyrio_ with five eggs (found May 1) lay floating the head-less corpses of two young coots. We have also observed similar phenomena alongside the nests of the coots themselves--doubtless attributable to the same cause. The eggs of the purple water-hen are lovely objects, ruddier and much more richly coloured than those of any of its congeners. These birds remain in the marismas all winter. In the densest brake bred purple herons, but this part proved quite impenetrable to canoes. A few days later, however, at the Retuerta, we reached a little colony of three nests. A beautiful sight they presented, broad platforms of criss-crossed canes, cleverly supported on tall bamboos, and lined with the flowering tops of _carrizos_ (canes). These three nests were close together (another or two hard by), were about five feet above water-level, and contained three, three, and four pale-blue eggs. While circling around their nests, the old herons showed a conspicuous projection beneath their curved necks. We therefore shot one and found the effect was caused by a curious "kink" or bony process on the front of the upper neck--as sketched. Of other birds observed at this Laguna de Terajes may be noted a few mallard and marbled ducks, a pair of squacco herons (not breeding), common sandpipers (on May 8), and a party of whiskered terns which arrived while we were there. The day we had spent among the marsh-birds at this sequestered lagoon happened to be the day of the general election and the usual excitement prevailed. Yet, as we journeyed down by the early train, we had read in the morning's paper this paragraph: "An understanding" [_Inteligencia_]--"Yesterday an understanding was arrived at in Madrid between Maura and Cañalejas, by which the former is to hold 225 seats." Why, after that, bother further with an election? 'Twill serve as an object-lesson at home. [Illustration: PURPLE HERON (_Ardea purpurea_)] Another phenomenon of the Spanish marismas is the through-transit in May of that little group of world-wanderers that make a winter-home in the southern hemisphere--in South Africa and Madagascar, Australia, New Zealand, some even in Patagonia--and yet return each spring to summer in Arctic regions. These comprise, notably, but four species, and not one of these four, in our view, is excelled for perfect beauty of bright, chaste, and contrasted coloration by any other bird-form on earth. This quartette is composed of the grey plover, knot, curlew-sandpiper, and bartailed godwit--all four of which appear here in thousands every May, and all in summer dress. Note, first, that these do not arrive in Spain (having come 6000 or 8000 miles but being still 2000 or 3000 miles short of their final destination) until long after all other birds--including several congeneric and closely related species--have already laid their eggs and many hatched their young. Also, secondly, that some of them begin to assume their spring breeding-plumage under autumnal conditions _before_ quitting Australia in April--that is, the Australian autumn--and while yet some 10,000 miles distant from the points at which that breeding-dress is designed to be worn. To the four named might properly be added other two species--the sanderling and the little stint. Our only reason for confining our remarks to the original quartette is that, in Spain, the transit of the other two is less pronounced and noticeable. Last spring (1910), dry as the marismas were, we had these globe-spanners in thousands. They were extremely wild, and it was only by elaborate "drives" that we secured a few specimens.[68] We also observed in mid-May hundreds of _black_-tailed godwits, a species which usually disappears from southern Spain at end of March and which we have found nesting in Jutland _before_ the above date, viz. the first week in May. [Illustration: GREY PLOVERS In summer plumage, on route for Siberia--Marisma, May 12.] Whimbrels had been extremely abundant early in May, together with a few greenshanks, ring-dotterel, and green sandpiper. On May 13 we observed several of the Mediterranean black-headed gull (_Larus melanocephalus_) on Santolalla. [NOTE.--Referring to the last sentence, our companion, Commander H. Lynes, R. N., writes:--"All the gulls I saw on Santolalla I am positive were _L. ridibundus_, and I looked most carefully. The wing-pattern of _melanocephalus_ is very distinct. With the latter I became quite familiar in the Mediterranean in winter, and also saw them in late summer at Smyrna." We, nevertheless, leave our own record as above, being confident that such gulls as happened to come within our own view were _exclusively_ of the southern species, with its darker and deeper hood. But the occurrence of our British Black-headed Gull so far south in mid-May is also remarkable. That species, though abundant all winter, has disappeared, as a rule, by the end of March. Our own last note of observing it during the spring in question was on April 1. We may add a further note of having observed _both_ species (swimming alongside) on Guadalquivir, March 12, 1909. The distinction, alike in the depth and darker shade of the "hood" in _L. melanocephalus_, was unmistakable, even to naked eye.] This dry spring not a spoonbill nested in Andalucia. The teeming _pajaréras_, or heronries, at the Rocina de la Madre and in Doñana were left lifeless and abandoned. In normal years these are tenanted (as shown in photo at p. 32) by countless multitudes of buff-backed, squacco, and night-herons, glossy ibis, some purple herons, and a few pairs of spoonbills, whose massed nests fairly weigh down the marsh-girt tamarisks. [Illustration: ORPHEAN WARBLER (_Sylvia orphea_) Arrives end of April; hardly so brilliant a songster as its specific title would import.] CHAPTER XL SKETCHES OF SPANISH BIRD-LIFE Spain is a land where one can enjoy seeing in their everyday life those "rare" British birds that at home can only be seen in books or museums. So far as it can be done in half-a-dozen brief sketches, we will endeavour to illustrate this. I. AN EVENING'S STROLL FROM JEREZ. Spanish towns and villages are self-contained like the "fenced cities" of Biblical days. The _pueblecitos_ of the sierra show up as a concrete splash of white on the brown hillside. Once outside the gates you are in the _campo_ = the country. Even Jerez with its 60,000 inhabitants boasts no suburban zone. Within half an hour's walk one may witness scenes in wild bird-life for the like of which home-staying naturalists sigh in vain. We are at our "home-marsh," a mile or two away: it is mid-February. Within fifteen yards a dozen stilts stalk in the shallows; hard by is a group of godwits, some probing the ooze, the rest preening in eccentric outstretched poses. Beyond, the drier shore is adorned by snow-white egrets (_Ardea bubulcus_), some perched on our cattle, relieving their tick-tormented hides. Thus, within less than fifty yards, we have in view three of the rarest and most exquisite of British birds. And the list can be prolonged. A marsh-harrier in menacing flight, his broad wings brushing the bulrushes, sweeps across the bog, startling a mallard and snipes; there are storks and whimbrels in sight (the latter possibly slender-billed curlew), and a pack of lesser bustard crouch within 500 yards in the palmettos. From a marsh-drain springs a green sandpiper; and as we take our homeward way, serenaded by bull-frogs and mole-crickets, there resounds overhead the clarion-note of cranes cleaving their way due north. II. AN ISOLATED CRAG IN ANDALUCIA Within an easy half-day's ride from X. lie the cliffs of Chipipi, rising in crenellated tiers from the winding river at their base. It is a lovely May morning. Doves in dozens dash away as we ride through groves of white poplars, and the soft air is filled with their murmurous chorus; the bush-clad banks are vocal with the song of orioles and nightingales, cuckoos, and a score of warblers--Cetti's and orphean, Sardinian, polyglotta, Bonelli's. The handsome rufous warbler, though not much of a songster, is everywhere conspicuous, flirting a boldly-barred, fan-shaped tail that catches one's eye. There are woodchats, serins, hoopoes; azure-blue rollers squawk, and brilliant bee-eaters poise and chatter overhead--their nest-burrows perforate the river-bank like a sand-martins' colony. On willow-clad eyots nest lesser ring-dotterels and otters bask; while in the shaded depths beneath the fringing osiers lurk barbel intent to dash at belated grasshopper or cricket. [Illustration: SAVI'S WARBLER (_Sylcia savii_) A spring-migrant, common but very local. Has eggs by mid-April.] In a thick lentiscos is the nest of a great grey shrike, and while we watch, its owner flies up carrying a lizard in her beak. Half an hour later we see a second shrike, with falcon-like dash, capture another lizard basking in a sunny cranny among the rocks--no mean performance that. There are snakes here also; one we killed, a coluber, on March 31, was 5-1/2 feet long and contained two rabbits swallowed whole and head first--one partly digested. Another snake, quite small, struck us as being something new; him we bottled in spirit and despatched to the British Museum. Presently came the reply, thanking us for a "Lizard, _Blanus cinereus_." Lizard? Well, we learnt a lesson. There are limbless lizards, and this was one--the subterranean amphisbaena; our British blindworm (_Anguis fragilis_) is another, and that also we did not know before. There are curious reptiles here in Spain--the chameleon, for example. The lobe-footed gecko, _Salamanquésa_ in Spanish, haunts sunny rocks where insects abound. But he carries war into the enemy's camp, invading (not singly, but in force) the wild-bees' nests. A Spanish bee-keeper gravely assured us that the cold-blooded gecko does this thing expressly to enjoy the sensation of being stung in twenty places at once! Here in a shady glade lie strewn broadcast the wings of butterflies--examine very closely the bush above, and presently an iris-less eye, expressionless as a grey pearl, will meet your own. That is a praying mantis (or _Santa Teresa_ in Spanish), a practical insect but no aesthete, since he devours the ugly body and casts aside the beauteous wings!--see his portrait at p. 87. Among butterflies we counted here the scarce swallowtail, _Thaïs polyxena_ (hatching out on April 3), _Vanessa polychloros_, a big fritillary with blood-red under-surface to its fore-wings (_Argynnis maia_, Cramer), _Euchloëbelia_ (March) and the curious insect figured alongside, we know not what it is.[69] [Illustration] For more than thirty years within our knowledge (and probably for centuries before) these cliffs have formed a home of Bonelli's eagle. Two huge stick-built nests stand out in visible projection from crevices in the crag, some forty yards apart. To-day (April 3) the occupied eyrie contained a down-clad eaglet, four partridges, and half a rabbit, besides a partridge's egg, intact, and sundry scraps of flesh, all quite fresh. The nest was lined with green olive-twigs; swarms of carrion-flies buzzed around, and a great tortoiseshell butterfly alit on its edge while we were yet inside. The parent eagles soared overhead, the female carrying a half rabbit, which, in her impatience, she presently commenced to devour, the pair perching on a dead ilex, and affording us this sketch and another inserted at p. 26. Her white breast shone in the sun with a satin-like sheen. Within sight (though fifteen miles away) is another eyrie of this species--the alternative nests not ten feet apart, merely a projecting buttress of rock separating the two vertical fissures in which they rest. This site is in a rock-stack standing out from the wooded slope of the sierra. The two eggs, slightly blotched with red, were laid in February. The rough bush-clad hills above our cliff are preserved, and presently meeting the gamekeeper, we tried--(that daily toll of four partridges plus sundry rabbits had got on our consciences!)--to put in a word for our eagle-friends, assuring him they did him service by destroying snakes and big lizards (which they don't). "Si, señor," he agreed, adding, "y los insectos!" [Illustration: BONELLI'S EAGLES SOARING AROUND EYRIE Note white patch in centre of back, between the wings.] Farther along the cliff we found two nests of neophron, each containing two very handsome eggs. This bird makes a comfortable home, the foundation being of sticks, but with a warmly lined central saucer, bedecked with old bones, snakes' vertebrae, rabbit-skulls, and similar ornaments. The nests were on overhung shelves of the vertical crag, and (like those of the eagles) only accessible by rope. There lay a rat in one--and rather "high." Remaining denizens of these crags we can but briefly name. A pair of eagle-owls had three young (fully fledged by June 10) in a deep rock-fissure; there were also ravens, many lesser kestrels, and a colony of genets. III. OAK-WOOD AND SCRUB Cistus and tree-heath, genista and purple heather that brushes your shoulder as you ride, studded with groves of cork-oak--such was our hunting-field. The reader's patience shall not be abused by a catalogue of ornithological fact. True, we were studying bird-problems, and at the moment the writer was endeavouring, amidst ten-foot scrub, to locate by its song, a nest of Polyglotta--or was it _Bonellii_?--when in the depths of osmunda fern was descried something _hairy_--it was a wild-boar!... Three horsemen armed with _garrochas_ come galloping through the bush--herdsmen rounding-up cattle? But this morning it is a _bull_ they are rounding-up; and a bull that had grown so savage and intractable that his life was forfeit. A crash in the brushwood and we stand face to face. Three minutes later that bull fell dead with two balls in his body; but two others, less well aimed, had whistled past our ears. Those three minutes had been momentous--the choice, it had seemed, lay between horn and bullet. Bird-nesting in Spanish wilds has its serious side. The afternoon was less eventful. Almost each islanded grove had yielded spoil. We need not specify spectacled, subalpine, and orphean warblers, woodpeckers, woodchats and grey shrikes, nightjars, owls, kestrels, and kites--some prizes demanding patient watching, others a strenuous climb. The last hour had resulted in discovering a nest of booted eagle, two of black, and one of red kites, each with two eggs (the next tree held a nest of the latter containing a youngster near full grown). We had turned to ride homewards when, over a centenarian cork-oak on the horizon, we recognised (by their buoyant flight and white undersides) a pair of serpent-eagles. The grotesque old tree was half overthrown, and on its topmost limb was established the snake-eaters' eyrie, containing the usual single big white egg--this specimen, however, distinctly splashed with reddish brown. In the same tree were also breeding cushats and doves, a woodpecker with four eggs, and a swarm of bees who made things lively for the climber. One of to-day's climbs, by the way, had resulted incidentally in the capture of a family of dormice, _Lirones avellanos_ in Spanish, handsome creatures with immense whiskers and arrayed in contrasts of rich brown, black and white. Half an hour later we descried the unmistakable eyrie of an imperial eagle--a platform of sticks that crowned the summit of a huge cork-oak, the more conspicuous since any projecting twigs that might interrupt the view are always broken off. The eagle, entirely black with white shoulders, only soared aloft when L. was already half-way up. The two handsome eggs we left, though they have since, presumably, added two more "detrimentals" to prey on our partridges. Eagles, so soon as adult, pair for life; but that condition may require several years for full attainment, and in the imperial eagle the adolescent period is passed in a distinctive uniform of rich chestnut. So long ago as 1883, however, we discovered the singular fact that this species breeds while yet (apparently) "immature." That is, we have frequently found one of a nesting pair in the paler plumage described, while its mate gloried in the rich sable-black of maturity, as sketched on p. 31. This year (1910) we had come across such a couple--they had two eggs on March 15--the male being black, while his partner was parti-coloured. A curious incident had occurred at that nest; at dawn next morning a griffon vulture was discovered asleep close alongside the sitting eagle. But on the arrival of the husband a furious scene ensued! The intruder (whom we acquit of dishonourable intent) was set upon, hustled, and violently ejected from the tree--hurriedly and dishevelled he departed. But conjugal peace was soon restored, and presently the royal pair set out in company for a morning's hunting. These resident birds-of-prey breed early. We have found the eagles' eggs by February 28, buzzards' on March 12, and red kites' on March 14. This spring was remarkable for the numbers of hobbies that passed north during May, sometimes in regular flocks. They often roosted in old kites' nests, and when disturbed therefrom misled us into a futile climb. * * * * * WHITE-TAILED OR SEA-EAGLE (_Haliaëtos albicilla_).--This does not properly belong to the Spanish zone. We cannot find recorded a single authentic instance of its occurrence in that country, but can supply one ourselves. In the early days of February 1898 we watched on several occasions an eagle (which at the time we took to be Bonelli's) wildly chasing the geese that are wont to assemble in front of our shooting-lodge. Splendid spectacles these aerial hunts afforded. The selected goose, skilfully separated from his company, made a grand defence. Fast he flew and far, now low on water, now soaring upwards in widening circle; but all the time gaggling and protesting against the outrage in strident tones that we could hear a mile away. Never, so far as eyesight could reach, did the assailant make good his hold. Months afterwards--it was before daybreak on December 28 (1898)--the authors lay awaiting the "early flight" of geese at the Puntal, hard by, when an eagle (whether the same or not) appeared from out the gloom, made a feint at No. 1's decoy-geese (made of wood), passed on and fairly "stooped" at those of No. 2. A moment later the great bird-of-prey fell with resounding splash, and proved to be (so far as we know) the only sea-eagle ever shot in Spain--a female, weight 12-1/2 lbs., expanse just under 8 feet. * * * * * This is not the only instance in our experience of eagles hunting before the dawn. We recall several others. Apparently, if pressed by hunger, eagles start business early--almost as early as we do ourselves. SPOTTED EAGLE (_Aquila naevia_).--This also, like the last, is scarcely a Spanish species; but a beautiful example, heavily spotted, was shot in September in the Pinar de San Fernando by our friend Mr. Osborne of Puerto Sta. Maria. It was one of a pair. PEREGRINE AND PARTRIDGE.--CORRAL QUEMADO, _Jan. 27, 1909_. While posted on a mesembrianthemum-clad knoll during a big-game drive, troops of partridges kept streaming out from the covert behind. Their demeanour struck both me and the next gun posted on a knoll 200 yards away. Across the intervening glade, almost bare sand but for a stray tuft of rush or marram-grass, the partridge ran to and fro in a dazed sort of way, crouching flat as though terror-stricken, or standing upright, gazing stupidly in turn. None dared to fly, though some were so near they could not have failed to detect me. The mystery was solved when a peregrine swept close overhead and made feint after feint: yet not a partridge would rise. Well they knew that the falcon would not strike _on the ground_; but what a "soft job" it would have been for a goshawk or marsh-harrier! Presumably partridge discriminate between their winged enemies and in each case adapt defence to fit attack. An interesting scene was terminated by a lynx trotting out by my neighbour, Sir Maurice de Bunsen, who might thus have been taken unawares; only ambassadors are never believed to be so, and on this occasion the spotted diplomat certainly got the ball quite right, behind the shoulder. MARSH-HARRIER (_Circus aeruginosus_).--Over dark wastes resound "duck-guns sullenly booming." Thereat from reed-bed and cane-brake awaken roosting harriers, quick to realise the import. It is long before their normal "hours of business," but these miss no chances, and soon the hidden gunner descries spectral forms drifting in the gloom--all intent to share his spoils. Watch the robbers' methods. In the deep a winged teal is making away, almost swash. The raptor feints again and again, following the cripple's subaquatic course; but he never attempts to strike till incessant diving has worn the victim out. Then--so soon as the luckless teal is compelled to tarry five seconds above water--instantly those terrible talons close like a rat-trap. Next comes a lively wigeon, merely wing-tipped; but the water here is shoal and the hawk dare not close. For the volume of mud and spray thrown up by those whirling pinions would drench his own plumage. The wigeon realises his advantage and sticks to the shallow--the raptor ever trying to force him to the deep. The end comes all the same, though the process of tiring-out occupies longer--sooner or later, down drop the yellow legs--there is a moment of strenuous struggle and the duck is lifted and borne ashore. Should no land be near, the branches of a submerged samphire will serve for a dining-table. Within five minutes nought is left but empty skin and clean-picked bones. Obviously any attempt to seek dead at a distance or to recover cripples is labour lost--once they drift, or swim, or dive, to the danger-radius instantly the chattel passes to the rival "sphere of influence." As early as February (and sometimes even in January) the abounding coots begin to lay. The marsh-harrier notes the date and becomes a determined oologist. Over the everlasting samphire-swamp resounds the reverberating cry of the crested coot, _Hoo, hoo, Hoo, hoo_, so strikingly human that one looks round to see who is signalling. Presently you hear the same cry, but wailing in different tone and temper. That is a coot defending hearth and home against the despoiler; and bravely is that defence maintained. With a glass, one sees the coot throw herself on her back and hold the hawk at bay, striking out right and left, for she has powerful claws and can scratch like a cat. Often the assailant is fairly beaten off; or should the fight end without visible issue, probably the coveted eggs have been hustled overboard in the tussle. Then it amuses to watch the harrier's frantic efforts to recover the sunken prizes from the shallows. [Illustration] GREAT SPOTTED CUCKOO (_Oxylophus glandarius_).--A striking rakish form, this stranger from unknown Africa silently appears in Spain during the closing days of February or early in March. On the fifth evening of the latter month, while rambling in the bush on the watch for "some new thing," a hawk-like figure swept by and perched on the outer branches of a thorny acacia. When shot, the bird dropped a yard or so, then clutching a bough with prehensile zygodactylic claws, hung suspended with so desperate a hold that it was with difficulty released. Waiting a few minutes, a harsh resonant scream--_cheer-oh_, thrice repeated--announced the arrival of the male, which fell winged on a patch of bog beyond. Ere we could reach the spot the bird had run back, regained the outer trees, and was climbing a willow-trunk more in the style of parrot than cuckoo. The beak was used for steadying, and so fast did it climb that we had to ascend after it. The beak in this species opens far back, giving a very wide gape--colour inside pink, deepening to dark carmine. We sketched and preserved both specimens, see p. 41 and above. * * * * * As a rule this cuckoo disappears in early autumn, but we have an exceptional record of its occurrence in winter. One was shot at San Lucar de Barraméda, December 19, 1909. This cuckoo, like all its old-world congeners,[70] is parasitic in its domestic _ménage_--that is, it adopts a system of reproduction by proxy--relying, as Canon Tristram long ago put it, on finding a "foundling hospital" for its young. But even the keen intellect quoted was at first at fault. For the great spotted cuckoo differs in one essential point from that "wandering voice" with which we are familiar at home. The latter deposits a single egg in casual nest of titlark, hedge-sparrow, wagtail--in short, of any small bird, regardless of the fact that its own egg may differ conspicuously from those of its selected foster-parent. The spotted cuckoo is more circumspect. Everywhere it restricts the delegated duty to some member of the _Corvidae_,[71] and in Spain exclusively to the magpies. Moreover, whether by accident or evolution, the cuckoo has so admirably adapted the coloration of its own egg to resemble that of its victim, as to deceive even so cute a bird as the magpie. Earlier ornithologists (as above suggested) failed for a moment to distinguish the difference--it was, in fact, the zygodactylic foot of an unhatched embryo that first betrayed the secret (Tristram, _Ibis_, 1859). On close examination the cuckoo's eggs differ in their more elliptic form and granular surface; but, unless previously fore-warned and specially alert, no one would suspect that these were not magpies' eggs, any more than does the magpie itself. The spotted cuckoo deposits two, three, and even four eggs in the _same_ magpie's nest, sometimes leaving the lawful owner's eggs undisturbed, in other cases removing all or part of them--we have noticed spilt yoke at the entrance. It would appear difficult, in these domed nests, for the young cuckoos to eject their pseudo-brothers and sisters; but this detail of their life-history remains, as yet, unsolved. CROSSBILLS.--Nature delights in presenting phenomena which no tangible cause appears to warrant. Such were the thrice-repeated invasions of Europe by "Tartar hordes"--they were only sand-grouse--that occurred during the past century (in 1863, 1872, and 1888); and in 1909 an analogous problem, though on minor scale, was offered by crossbills. From north to extreme south of our Continent these small forest-dwellers precipitated themselves bodily westwards. This was in July. All the west-European countries, from Norway to Spain, recorded an unwonted irruption. In Andalucia (at Jerez) crossbills were first noticed about mid-July, and their appearance so impressed country-folk little accustomed to discriminate small birds, as to suggest to them the idea that the strangers must have fled from Morocco to avoid the fighting then raging around Melilla! But in Spain a further and anomalous complexity followed. For the Spanish specimens we sent home, on being submitted to Dr. Ernst Hartert, proved to belong to a purely Spanish subspecies--a race distinguishable by its weaker mandibles and other minor variations. Hence the movement in Spain had been purely internal, and it became difficult to suppose that (although simultaneous) it could have been predisposed and actuated by precisely the same motives as those which compelled a more extensive exodus farther north. Thus results the curious issue--that presumably different causes, operating over a wide geographical area, produced similar and simultaneous effects. These immigrant crossbills disappeared from Andalucia at the end of August. [Illustration: CROSSBILLS, ADULT AND YOUNG (_Loxia curvirostra_.) JEREZ, July 1910.] Crossbills we used to observe in winter in our pine-forests of Doñana; but owing to local causes they have now missed several years. Their migrations within Spain are rather on the vertical than the horizontal plane--that is, merely seasonal movements between the higher lands and the lower. In Spain, denuded of natural forest, the habitat of such birds is narrowly restricted. Hence their sudden appearance in new areas (such as this, at forestless Jerez) is at once conspicuous. GLOSSY IBIS (_Plegadis falcinellus_).--Birds, as a rule, are strict geographists. They recognise fixed range-boundaries and abide thereby. But exceptions occur, and an instance has been offered by the glossy ibis. This bird has always been a conspicuous member of the teeming _pajaréras_, or mixed heronries, of our wooded swamps of Andalucia. But it was only as a spring-migrant that the ibis was known. It arrived in April and departed, after nesting, in September. A diluvial winter in 1907-8, however, apparently induced it to reconsider its "standing orders." Already, that autumn, the ibises had departed--as usual. But in December (the whole country meanwhile having been inundated) they suddenly reappeared. Small parties distributed themselves over the marismas, and with them came an unwonted profusion of other waders, stilts and curlews, whimbrels and godwits, the latter a month or two before their usual date. All availed the occasion to frequent far-inland spots, normally dry bush and forest, _nota quae sedes fuerat columbis_, and one saw flights of waders and even ducks, such as teal and shoveler, circling over flooded forest-glades. The changed quarters evidently met with approval, for each succeeding year since then we have had the company of ibises _during winter_. An immature ibis, shot January 30, otherwise in normal plumage, had the head and neck brownish grey with curlew-like striations. SLENDER-BILLED CURLEW (_Numenius tenuirostris_).--Years ago we wrote in our wrath, moved thereto by the constant misuse of the term, that such a thing as a "rare bird" does not exist, save only in a relative sense. Go to its proper home, wherever that may be, and the supposed rarity is found abundant as its own utility and nature's balances permit. Should some lost wanderer straggle a few hundred miles thence, it is proclaimed a "rare bird." Against this, our old mentor, Howard Saunders, wrote across the proof-sheet: "There ARE rare birds, some nearly extinct"; and the above species affords an admirable example of these exceptions to the general rule. No one at present knows the true home of the slender-billed curlew, nor the points (if any) where it is common, nor where it breeds. In southern Spain it appears every year during February and at no other season; while even then its visits are confined to a few days and to certain limited areas. The photo at p. 250 shows a beautiful pair shot February 5, 1898. When met with, they are rather conspicuous birds, distinguishable from whimbrel by their paler colour--indeed, on rising, the "slender-bills" look almost white. A specially favoured haunt in the Coto Doñana is the bare sandy flat in front of Martinazo. When we first studied ornithology there still remained whole categories of birds (many of them abundant British species) whose breeding-places were utterly unknown. One by one they have been removed from the list of "missing," forced to surrender their secrets by the resistless, world-scouring energy of ornithologists (mostly British). The year 1909 saw but ONE species yet undiscovered--our present friend, the slender-billed curlew. While we are yet busy with this book, the eggs of the slender-billed curlew have been found--in Siberia!--the ultimate answer in all such cases. The first was exhibited by Mr. H. E. Dresser at the meeting of the British Ornithologists' Club on December 15, 1909, having been taken by Mr. P. A. Schastowskij on the shores of Lake Tschany, near Taganowskiye, in Siberia on the 20th of May preceding. Yes, there _do_ exist "rare birds," and in Europe the slender-billed curlew appears to be an excellent illustration of the fact. SANTOLALLA, _December 29, 1897_.--A wild night, black as ink, and a whole gale blowing from the eastward; an hour's ride through the scrub, and five guns silently distribute themselves along the shores. Strategic necessity placed us to windward, so most fowl were bound to fall in the water. As stars pale to the dawn the flight begins, the dark skies hurtle with the rush of passing clouds, and for two hours a steady fusillade startles the solitude. As ten o'clock approaches, one by one we seek the cork-oak, from beneath whose canopy a welcome column of smoke has long announced that breakfast was preparing. But considering the run of shooting we have heard, the toll of game brought in seems humiliating. Each gunner, gloomily depositing his fifteen or twenty, declares he has lost twice that number in the open water!... Well, a list of "claims" being drawn up, it appears that 205 duck are stated to have been shot, while only 120 can be counted. In his inner conscience possibly each man regards the rest as ... but, ere breakfast is over, here come the keepers. They have ridden round the lee-shores and islets, and bring in another 114! The bag after all sums up to 234, or actually nineteen more than the sum-total of claims that we had been laughing at as extravagant. This is the list:-- 2 geese 8 mallard 53 wigeon 152 teal 4 gadwall 2 shoveler 3 pochard 9 tufted duck There were also shot two cormorants (mistaken for geese in the half-light), a marsh-harrier, two great crested grebes, and several coots. The incident illustrates an instance of scrupulous honesty. OTHER COUNTRIES, OTHER STANDARDS (A Sentiment about Wildfowl) (_January 1909._) A wet winter and flooded marisma--under our eyes float wildfowl in league-long lengths; countless, but far out in open water. By experience we know them to be unassailable. Yet these hosts seem to throw down the gauntlet of defiance at our very doors; and under the reproach of that unspoken challenge experience succumbs. That night we arranged to dispose our six guns over a two-league triangle before the morrow's dawn. After every detail had been fixed, to us our trusted pessimist, Vasquez: "Ni por aqui ni por alli, ni por este lado ni por el otro, ni por ninguna parte cualquiera, no harémos _náda_ por la mañana"--"Neither on this side nor on that, neither to east nor west, nor at any other point whatever, shall we do the slightest good to-morrow!" On reassembling for breakfast, the result worked out as follows: 2 geese, 3 mallard, 29 wigeon, 26 teal, 7 gadwall, 4 shovelers, 1 marbled and 1 tufted duck. Total, 73 head before ten o'clock, besides a curlew and several golden plover, godwits and sundries. We felt fairly satisfied; yet Vasquez's comment ran: "Seventy head among six guns, _eso no es náda_ = that is nothing!" NOTE.--The writer had in his pocket a letter from home: "We put in six days' punt-gunning at the New Year. Frost severe and all conditions favourable. My bag, 4 brent-geese, 2 mallard, 3 wigeon, and a northern diver.--E. H. C." Appendix A SPECIFIC NOTE ON THE WILD-GEESE OF SPAIN The Greylag Goose (_Anser cinereus_) is the only species we need here consider. For of the many hundreds of wild-geese that we have shot and examined during the eighteen years since the publication of _Wild Spain_, every one has proved to be a Greylag. This is the more remarkable inasmuch as an allied form, the Bean-Goose, was supposed in earlier days to occur in Spain, though relatively in small numbers. Col. Irby estimated the Bean-Geese as one to 200 of the Greylags; but no such proportion any longer exists, at least in the delta of the Guadalquivir, where, during eighteen years, hardly a single Bean-Goose has been obtained.[72] This abandonment of southern Spain by the Bean-Goose (presuming it was ever found therein) appears inexplicable. The species has lately been recognised as divisible into various races or subspecies (differing chiefly in the form and colour of the beak),[73] for which reason it may here be recorded that of the few Bean-Geese examined twenty years ago in Spain, the beak was invariably dark to below the nasal orifice, with a dark tip, and an intermediate band of rufous-chestnut. Of the other three members of the genus, the Pink-footed Goose (_Anser brachyrhynchus_) has never occurred in Spain; while neither the white-fronted nor the lesser white-fronted species (_A. albifrons_ and _A. erythropus_, L.) have ever been recorded save in an isolated instance in either case. We have never met with any one of them--indeed, the only wild-goose in our records, other than Greylag and half-a-dozen Bean-Geese, is a single Bernacle (_Bernicla leucopsis_), one of three that was shot at Santolalla by our late friend Mr. William Garvey. Of the Greylags that winter in Andalucia, the great majority are adults--that is (presuming our diagnosis to be correct), scarcely one in four is a gosling of the year. The adult geese we distinguish by the spur on the wing-point of the ganders and generally by their larger size and heavier build. Their undersides, moreover, are more or less spotted or barred with black--some wear regular "barred waistcoats," whereas the young birds are wholly plain white beneath. The legs and feet of the latter are also of the palest flesh-colour (some almost white), rarely showing any approximation to a pink shade, and their beaks vary from nearly white to palest yellow; whereas in the older, mostly "spot-breasted," geese the beak is deep yellow to orange, and their legs and feet are distinctly pink--some as pronouncedly so as in _A. brachyrhynchus_. These "soft parts" are, however, subject to infinite variation, and the above definition is a careful deduction from the results of many years' observation.[74] On several occasions we have examined from a dozen to a score of geese without finding a single _gosling_ among them. The largest proportion of the latter so recorded was on January 29, 1907, when of sixteen geese shot, five (or possibly six) were young birds of the year before. All these sixteen showed some white feathers on the forehead, and the heaviest pair (two old ganders) weighed together 18-1/2 lbs. As regards their weights, the following notes show the variation:-- During the severe drought of 1896, six geese weighed on November 26, when almost starving for food and water, ranged from 6-1/4 to 7-3/4 lbs. A month later, when rains had fallen, weights had increased to 8-1/4 to 9-1/4 lbs. _December 28, 1899._--The heaviest of 29 scaled 9-1/4 lbs. _January 30, 1905._--The geese this dry season are in fine condition. An old gander, shot at Martinazo, exceeded 10-1/2 lbs., another pair, shot right and left, scaled 9-1/2 and 10 lbs. _February 4, 1907._--Two geese, the heaviest of eleven shot this morning, weighed over 9 lbs. each, the pair scaling 18-1/4 lbs. It was a severe frost, the shallows being covered with ice, and as each goose fell, two bits of solid ice, in form as it were a pair of sandals, were found lying alongside it, these having been detached by the fall from the feet of the bird. * * * * * _1906. November 28._--Two pure white geese observed on Santolalla to-day and on subsequent occasions. Though usually seen flying in company with packs of normally coloured geese, the white pair always kept together. _1907. January 25._--After a month's bitterly cold and dry weather with few geese, the wind to-day shifted to east, with heavy rain. All day long a continuous entry of geese took place from the south-westward, in frequent successive packs--sometimes two or three lots in sight at once. A sense of movement was perceptible over the whole marisma. Next morning these newcomers were sitting in ranks of thousands by the "new water" all along the verge of the marisma--a wondrous sight. NOTES ON SOME WILDFOWL THAT NEST IN SOUTHERN SPAIN WILD-DUCKS PINTAIL (_Dafila acuta_).--In wet years a considerable number of pintails remain to nest in the marismas of Guadalquivir, and by August the broods (together with those of garganey, marbled duck, etc.) assemble on the only waters that then remain--such as the Lagunas de Santolalla, etc. In 1908, a very wet spring, almost as many pintails bred here as mallards, and in eight nests observed the maximum number of eggs was nine. They resemble those of mallards, consisting of twigs with a few feathers placed on the mud, and easily seen through the open clump of samphire which shelters them.[75] MALLARD (_Anas boschas_), in the marisma, nest in precisely similar situations, but their eggs number twelve or fourteen. Elsewhere their nests (being among bush or reedbeds) are less easily seen. WIGEON (_Mareca penelope_) never breed, though chance birds (and some greylags also) remain every summer--possibly wounded. GADWALL (_Anas strepera_) do not nest in the open marisma, but many pairs retire to the rush-fringed inland lagoons, such as Zopiton and Santolalla. They lay nine to twelve eggs about mid-May, usually at a short distance from the water. TEAL (_Nettion crecca_) remain quite exceptionally. Even in that wet spring, 1908, only a single nest was found. There were eight eggs laid on bare mud, with hardly any nest, beneath a samphire bush. Though quite fresh, and placed at once under a hen, these eggs did not hatch. GARGANEY (_Querquedula circia_) breed among the samphire in the open marisma--in wet seasons quite numerously. Seven young, caught newly hatched in 1908 and kept alive at Jerez, showed no distinctive sexual coloration all that autumn or up to February 1909. Early in March three drakes became distinguishable, the most advanced being complete in feather by the 15th, and all three perfect by April 1. Young pintails, on the other hand, acquire complete sexual dress in the autumn, as mallards do, by November. Garganey also nest in large numbers on the lagoons of Daimiel in La Mancha. MARBLED DUCK (_Querquedula angustirostris_).--This is one of the most abundant of the Spanish-breeding ducks, nesting both in the marisma and along the various channels of the Guadalquivir. Their nests, substantially built of twigs of samphire, dead reeds, and grass, lined with down, are carefully concealed among covert, usually on dry ground. Some are approached by a sort of tunnel. Exceptionally we have seen a nest built a foot high in the branches of a samphire bush with a clear space beneath, and overhanging shallow water. The eggs, laid at the end of May, vary from twelve to fourteen, and in one instance twenty--possibly the produce of two females. We find these the most difficult of all the ducks to rear in confinement. Probably their food is quite different, anyway they are very bad eating. Marbled ducks are unknown at Daimiel. SHOVELERS (_Spatula clypeata_) only breed exceptionally and in wet seasons; we found one nest at Las Nuevas in 1908. Though abundant in winter, does not breed at Daimiel. FERRUGINOUS DUCKS (_Fuligula nyroca_), like all the diving tribe, breed only on deep and permanent lakes, such as those of Medina and Daimiel, where they abound all summer. None nest in the marisma, which in summer is largely dry. Nests, mid-May; eggs, nine or ten. POCHARD (_Fuligula ferina_).--Though we have not found it ourselves, one of our fowlers (Machachado) tells us that pochards breed on the lakes, and even more in Las Nuevas, laying but few eggs--five to seven. RED-CRESTED POCHARD (_Fuligula rufila_).--This is the characteristic breeding-duck at Daimiel in La Mancha, as well as on the Albufera of Valencia, at both of which points it abounds. Yet curiously it is all but unknown on the Bætican marismas. Among the thousands of ducks we have shot therein, but a single example of the red-crested pochard figures--a female killed January 19, 1903. TUFTED DUCK (_Fuligula cristata_).--None remain, though abundant in winter. WHITE-FACED DUCK (_Erismatura leucocephala_).--This species, known as _Bamboléta_ or _Malvasía_, arrives in spring and breeds commonly on every deep pool and reed-girt lagoon in Andalucia. SHELDUCKS (_Tadorna cornuta_), we are assured (though this we have not proved), breed in the marisma in hollows (_hoyos_)--such as the cavernous footprints made by cattle in the soft mud in winter. Common in dry winters. RUDDY SHELDUCK (_Tadorna casarca_).--These are seen here all summer, yet we have failed to discover their breeding-places. They are common, old and young, on the Laguna de Medina in August and September. This is a striking species of stately flight and clear-toned ringing cry--_H[=a][=a]-[)a][)a]_--thrice repeated. WAGTAILS PIED WAGTAIL (_Motacilla lugubris_).--This familiar British species occurs rarely in S. Spain--we have but four records, all in winter. In the reverse, the WHITE WAGTAIL (_M. alba_) abounds--ploughed lands sometimes look _grey_ with it; and it is here, in winter, as tame and familiar as one sees it in Norway and Iceland in summer. Yet midway between the two, _i.e._ in the British Isles, we have seen it but thrice! There it may indeed be termed a "rare bird." The explanation seems to be that (like the two southern wheatears) these two wagtails are not specifically distinct, but merely a dimorphic form. This year (June 1910) we found the white wagtail breeding commonly in North Estremadura. During a northerly hurricane on February 7, 1903, we observed an assemblage of many hundreds of white wagtails on the barren sand-dunes of Majada Real--a second crowd, as numerous, a mile away. Both were migrating bands arrested by the gale. This is merely one example out of scores that have come under our notice of the magical apparition of birds from the clouds, caused by a sudden change of wind. Specially notable, besides wagtails, are swallows, wheatears, pipits and larks. The GREY WAGTAIL (_M. melanope_), though occasionally seen in winter, is most conspicuous about mid-February, when it passes several days on our lawn at Jerez. It has not then acquired the black throat of spring; but two months later we have found it nesting on mountain-burns of the sierras--precisely such situations as it frequents among the Northumbrian moors. The YELLOW WAGTAIL (_M. flava_; the Continental form, _cinereocapilla_) appears on the lawn a week or so after the grey species has disappeared; but this remains throughout the spring, nesting in wet meadows and marshes, laying during the last week of April. The British form (_M. raii_) also occurs during spring, but rarely and on passage only, none remaining to nest. RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION ROOK (_Corvus frugilegus_).--There is a certain limited stretch--say a league or so, on the foreshores of the marisma--whither each winter come a few scores of rooks. At that one spot, and nowhere else within our knowledge, are rooks to be found in southern Spain. MAGPIE (_Pica caudata_).--On the western bank of Guadalquivir this bird abounds to a degree we have seen surpassed nowhere else on earth. But cross that river, and never another magpie will you see for a hundred miles to the eastward. For it the lower Bætis marks a frontier. Over the rest of Spain its distribution is normal and regular. A similar remark would almost hold good of the Jackdaw (_Corvus monedula_). The AZURE-WINGED MAGPIE (_Cyanopica cooki_) abounds in central Spain and in the Sierra Moréna. But its southern range stops dead at the little village of Coria del Rio just below Sevilla. 'Tis but a few miles beyond, yet in Doñana we have never seen so much as a straggler. The Azure-wing does not straggle. From Spain (as elsewhere stated) you must travel to China and Japan ere you see another azure-winged magpie. JAYS (_Garrulus glandarius_) in Spain confine themselves to mountain-forests, eschewing the lowland woods which in other lands form their home. Index Absenteeism, 12 Accentor, alpine, 222, 316 Africa, 29, 40, 41, 67, 91, 111, 112, 381, 383; bird natives of, 272 Africa, British East, 272, 295 African bush-cuckoo, 400 _n._ 1 Agriculture, Moorish, 9-10; Spanish, 11 Alagon River, 232 and _n._ 1, 233, 295 Albufera Lake, 321-4, 410 Alfonso XII., 37, 190, 292 Alfonso XIII., 19, 26, 31, 37, 72, 131, 140, 190, 206, 292, 336 Algamita, Sierra of, 176 Algeciras, 295 _Alimañas_, 28, 42, 337-46 Almanzór, Plaza de, 140, 213, 216, 217, 286 Almonte, village of, 82 _et seq._ Almoraima, 363 Alpuxarras, the, 142, 302, 305 _Alquerías_ (Las Hurdes), 235, 236, 241 America, flamingoes in, 273 _Anatidae_, 40; distribution of, in S. Spain, 136 Andalucia, 2, 4, 10, 351, 393, 401, 402, 403; bandits in, 175 _et seq._; big game of, 54 _et seq._; birds of, 40 _et seq._, 222, 393-5, 403 Ant-lion (_Myrmeleon_), 36 Arabs. _See_ Moors Arahal, Niño de, bandit, 176 _et seq._ _Armajo_ (samphire), 89-90, 91, 106, 114 Asturias, the, 294 _et seq._; chamois in, 283-93 Avila, 213, 219 Avocet, 268, 385 Badger, 337, 344, 345 Bandits, 174 _et seq._ Barbary stag, 43, 44 Barbel, 298-9, 393 Basques, the, 5 Bear, 289, 298; brown, 4, 29, 294 Bear-hunting, 296-7 Bee-eater, 41, 209, 211, 226, 393 Bernicle goose, 191, 407 Bewick's swan, 375 Bharal, 26 Bidassoa River, 2 Big game in Spain, 6, 28-9, 54 _et seq._, 148 _n._ 1, 303 Bird-life on the marisma, 40-42, 91 _et seq._, 114 _et seq._, 138 _n._ 1, 265-71, 376, 381-91, 408, 409 Bird-migration, 29, 40, 41-2, 91-2, 99 and _n._ 1, 103-4, 111, 376-80, 389-90, 401-3 Blackbird, 223 Black-chat, 222, 230, 319, 353 _n._ 1, 367 Blackstart, 313, 318, 352, 362, 367 Boar, wild, 29, 42, 47, 68-9, 70 _et seq._, 147, 161, 171, 191, 229, 238, 289, 353, 365-6, 396 Boar-hunting, 70 _et seq._ _Boga_, 299 Bombita I., matador, 199 Bombita II. (Ricardo Torres), 199, 205 Bonaparte, Joseph, 196-7 Bonelli's eagle, 28, 289, 355, 362, 366, 394-5 Bonelli's Warbler, 232, 318, 393 Bonito, 300 Brambling, 62 Breeding-places of flamingoes, 265-71 Bull, the Spanish fighting, breeding and training of, 200-204; breeds of, 88, 204, 208 Bull-fight, the Spanish, 8, 15, 192-9 Bull-fighters, famous, 195-9 Bull-frog, 392 Bustard, 212, 226, 227, 232; great, 4, 11, 24, 29, 119, 209, 242-64; lesser (_Otis tetrax_), 29, 262-4, 328, 392 Bustard-shooting, 244 _et seq_. Butterflies, 62, 313 _Lycaena telicanus_, 62 _Megaera_, 62 _Thaïs polyxena_, 62, 394 _Vanessa polychloros_, 394 Buzzard, 228, 342, 397 _Cabrestos_, 371-3, 379 Caceres, province, 228 _n._ 1 _Caciquismo_, 175, 180-81, 240 _Cactus_ (prickly-pear), 9 Caldereria, 324-7 Camels, wild, on the marisma, 36, 40, 275-82 Cantabria, 4, 28, 29, 298; mountains of, 286 Cape de Verde Islands, 266, 271 _n._ 1 Capercaillie, 4, 29, 294, 298 Cares River, 284, 296 Castile, 5, 29 Catalonia, 5 and _n._ 1 Cavestany, Sr. D. A., Spanish poet laureate, 164 Central Asia, wild camels in, 276 Cervantes, 183 Cetti's warbler, 61, 393 Chaffinch, 164, 319 Chameleon, 394 Chamois, 4, 29; in the Asturias, 283-93, 294; preservation of, 142 Chamois-shooting, 286 _et seq._ Chapman, Mr. F., 273 Chapman, Mr. J. Crawhall, 280 Charles V., Emperor, 194 Chough, 222, 309, 319, 353, 355, 358, 366, 367 Ciguela River, 185 Cinco Lagunas, Las, 141, 215 Cirl-bunting, 319, 348 Cistus (_Helianthemum_), 37, 50, 62 Climate of Spain, effects of, 2-4 Coot, 186, 188, 207, 326, 384, 387, 388, 399; crested, 399 Cormorant, 186 _Corros_, 376-80 Cortez, 231 _Corvidae_, 401 _Corvus cornix_, 401 _n._ 1 Costillares, bull-fighter, 196 Coto Doñana, 30 _et seq._, 58, 59, 74, 78, 89, 122, 332, 343, 402, 404; fauna of, 38 _et seq._ Crag-martin, 319, 366, 367, 368 Crake, 39 Crane, 40, 392 Crossbill, 351; migrations of, 401-3 Cuckoo, 313, 393; great spotted, 41, 400-401 Curlew, 403; slender-billed, 392, 403-4; stone-, 227, 232, 343 Cushat, 396 Daimiel, lagoons of, 185-91, 324, 409, 410; town of, 191 Dampier, 266, 271 _n._ 1 Dartford Warbler, 61, 223, 353 _n._ 1 Date-palm, 4 Deer, 94, 148, 161, 171, 333, 343; fallow, 28, 148 and _n._ 1, 228 and _n._ 1; red, 42 _et seq._, 147, 155-6, 158 and _n._ 1, 228, 238,; _tables_, 170-3; roe-, 165, 229, 298, 353, 363 Deer-shooting ("driving"), 44, 156 _et seq._ Deer-stalking, 44 _et seq._, 60 Despeñaperros, 149 Deva River, 284, 296 Dipper, 211, 319 Diving ducks, 101, 112, 138 _n._ 1, 324 Don Quixote, country of, 183, 228 Dormice, 396 Dove, 209, 226, 393, 396; turtle, 212, 331 "Driving" (_see also Monteria_), 44, 47 _et seq._, 59 _et seq._, 115, 116-22, 248-55, 286 _et seq._, 338-40, 360-62 Duck, 40, 41, 95, 96, 99, 102, 186-90, 322, 324 _et seq._, 375 _n._ 1, 383, 388, 403; habits of, 106, 110-11, 187; ferruginous, 101, 186, 190, 409; marbled, 101, 112, 135, 383, 389, 409; tufted, 101, 138 _n._ 1, 186, 410; white-faced, 384, 386-7, 410 Duck-hawk, 102, 186 Duck-shooting, 108, 187-90 Dunlin, 63 _n._ 1 Dwarf-juniper, 315 Eagle, 38, 222, 228, 333, 334, 342, 363; Bonelli's, 28, 289, 355, 362, 366, 394-5; booted, 396; golden, 28, 153, 156, 317, 353-5, 362; imperial, 28, 258-9, 396-7; spotted, 398; white-tailed or sea-, 397-8 Eagle-owl, 343, 368, 370, 395 Egret, 186, 382, 385, 392 Espinosa, Pedro, 37 Estepa, 175 _n_. 1. Estremadura, 80, 225-33; climate of, 230; fauna of, 29, 43, 226, 228 Falcon, 334; peregrine, 135, 317, 398 Fantail warbler, 61 Ferdinand VII., 195, 197 Firecrest, 352 Flamingo, 25 and _n._ 1, 40, 94-5, 100-101, 134, 186, 191, 327, 382, 383; breeding-places of, 265-74; _Phoenicopterus minor_, 272 _n._ 1; _Phoenicopterus ruber_, 273 "Flighting," 122-4, 136 Fly-catcher, 41; pied, 232, 319; spotted, 232 Foumart, 341 Fowling, Spanish modes of, 371-5, 379 Fox, 46, 60, 129, 226, 277, 317, 333, 334, 337 _et seq._ Francolin, 321 Frascuelo, bull-fighter, 197-8 Fuen-Caliente, 142, 149-50, 171 Gadwall, 101, 111, 384, 409 Gaëtanes, 2 Galicia, 4 Game preservation in Spain, 335-6 Garganey, 112, 190, 384, 409 Gecko, lobe-footed, 394 Genet, 171, 334, 337, 395 Gibraltar, 355 Godoy, 196 Godwit, 42, 63 _n._ 1, 134, 392, 403,; bartailed, 389; black-tailed, 390 Goose, bean, 407; bernicle, 191, 407; black (_Ganzos negros_), 186; greylag, 31, 32-3, 92, 95, 102, 114 _et seq._, 120, 125, 127, 191, 373, 375 _n._ 1, 407-8; pink-footed, 407 Goths, the, 229, 231 Granada, 10, 301 Granadilla, 232 and _n._ 1, 233 Grasshopper (_Cigarras panzonas_), 259 Grebe, 186, 190; eared, 387 Grédos, Circo de, chief features of, 141, 213-15 Greenshank, 390 Griffon. _See under_ Vulture Guadalete, battle of, 7, 229 Guadalquivir River, 30, 35, 299, 374, 391, 411; marismas of, 88 _et seq._, 114, 190, 265, 408, 409 Guadiana River, 185 Guerra, Rafael, bull-fighter, 198 Gull, 41, 186, 384; black-backed, 107; British black-headed (_L. ridibundus_), 391; Mediterranean black-headed (_Larus melanocephalus_), 268, 390-91 slender-billed (_Larus gelastes_), 268 Gum-cistus (_see also_ Cistus), 160, 225, 235 Hare, 226, 238, 328, 330, 331, 334 Hawfinch, 61, 362 Hawk, 333 Hazel-grouse, 4, 29, 298 Heron, 41, 186, 190, 382 buff-backed, 385 purple, 267, 388 squacco, 389 Hobby, 397 Hoopoe, 41, 62, 184, 226, 230, 313, 319, 393 Humming-bird hawk-moth, 62 Hunting dogs, 159, 164, 328, 340 Hurdanos, the, 5, 234 _et seq._ Ibex, Spanish (_Capra hispánica_), 15, 26, 29, 43, 139-46, 149, 156, 210, 287, 303 _et seq._, 317, 321-2, 352, 360 and _n._ 1, 362; distribution of, 142, 303, 305; habits of, 144-6, 152, 153, 360; heads, _Table of_, 157; preservation of, 139-42 Ibex-hunting, 216-24, 304 _et seq._ Ibis, 41, 382 glossy, 403 Inns (_posada_), 18, 19 _et seq._ Irrigation, neglect of, 12, 230 Isabel I. (_la Católica_), 194 Isabella II., 323 James I., 321 Janda, Laguna de, 375 _n._ 1 Jay, 164, 362, 411 Jerez, 347, 392, 401, 403 Kestrel, 164, 212, 226, 230, 319, 396 lesser, 355, 395 Kite, 211, 333, 334, 342, 396 red, 397 Kitty-wren, 348 Knot, 42, 63 _n._ 1, 389 Lagartijo, bull-fighter, 197-8 Laguna de Grédos, 219, 220 La Mancha, 183-91, 409, 410 Lammergeyer, 26-7, 149, 217-8, 314-5, 353, 357, 358-9, 360, 362, 367, 368 Land-tortoise, 343 Lanjarón, 306 Lark, 41, 212, 226, 232 Calandra, 209 crested, 209, 319 short-toed, 319 sky-, 312 wood-, 313, 319, 348, 352, 353 _n._ 1, 367 Las Hurdes, 5, 233 _et seq._ Las Nuevas, 99 _et seq._, 280 Lemming, 210 _n._ 1 León, 5; Cortes de, 6 Lilford, Lord, 265 Linnet, 319 Lizard, 333, 334, 355 _Blanus cinereus_, 393 Locusts, 226, 227 Lugar Nuevo, 172 Lynx, 33, 46, 60, 68, 76-7, 155, 171, 317, 333, 334, 337 _et seq._, 398 Madoz, Pascual, on the Hurdanos, 239 and _n._ 1, 240, 241 Magpie, 226, 232, 333, 401, 411 Spanish azure-winged, 29, 164, 184, 209, 225, 226, 411 Mallard, 186, 188, 190, 326, 327, 384, 389, 392, 409 _Manzanilla_ (camomile), 111 Maria, José, bandit, 174, 181 Marisma, the, 35-6, 88 _et seq._, 190; bird-life in, 40-42, 91 _et seq._, 114 _et seq._, 138 _n._ 1, 265-71, 376, 381-91, 408, 409; plant-life in, 89-90, 115; wild camels on, 36, 40, 275-82; wildfowl shooting in, 95 _et seq._, 105-13, 115 _et seq._, 371-75 Marmot, 210 _n._ 1 Marsh-harrier, 38, 102, 107, 135, 387, 388, 392, 399 Marsh-tern, 384 Marten, 171, 317, 319 Martin, 355 Mazzantini, Luis, bull-fighter, 198-9 Merida, 229, 230 Mezquitillas, 167, 170, 171 Migration of wildfowl. _See_ Bird-migration Missel-thrush, 212, 318 "Miura question," 192, 204-7 Mole-cricket, 392 Monachil River, 314, 316, 317, 318, 319 valley, 311 Mongoose, 163, 171, 333, 334, 337, 339, 341, 344, 364 _Montería_, 157, 158 _et seq._, 283, 296 Montes, Francisco, bull-fighter, 197 Moorish domination, traces of, 7 _et seq._, 37, 232-3, 295 origin of bull-fight, 8, 193-4 Moors, the, 149, 229 Mosquito, 62 Mudéla, estate, 335 Mulahacen, 312, 315 Mullet, grey, 299 Naranjo de Bulnes, 291-2 National characteristics, 5, 12 _et seq._, 19 types, 4-5 Navarre, 6 _Neophron_, 319, 366, 368, 395 Nightingale, 232, 318, 393 Nightjar, 41, 396 _Nucléo central_, 140 Nuthatch, 223, 232 Oleander, 160, 166 and _n._ 1 Orange, cultivation of, 9 Oriole, 393 golden, 41, 232 Orphean warbler, 393, 396 Ortolan, 319 Osprey, 191 Otter, 337 _Ovis bidens_, 352-3 Owl, 396 little, 319 white, 230 Paris, Comtes de, 278-9 Partridge, 15, 30, 32, 164, 226, 238, 331, 332-3, 335-6, 362, 363, 398 grey, 28, 298 redleg, 15, 29, 184, 319, 328, 329 Peewit, 267 Pelayo, 7 Pelican, Danish, 276 Peñones, the, 314, 315 Pepe-Illo, bull-fighter, 196 Peregrine falcon, 135, 317, 398 Perez, Gregorio, 292, 293 Pernales, bandit, 174 _et seq_. Petroleum, 347 _n._ 1 Phillip II., 195 Phillip III., 195, 323 Phillip IV., 37, 195 Phillip V., 195 _Pica mauretanica_, 401 _n._ 1 Picos de Europa, 142, 144, 283, 285, 292, 302 Pig, 298, 363 Pilgrimages to Rocio, 82 _et seq._ "Pincushion" gorse, 314, 352 Pine (_Pinus pinaster_), 319, 361 Pinsapo pine (_Abies pinsapo_), 349-52 and _notes_, 360, 362 Pintail, 94, 97, 101, 110, 111, 186, 188, 326, 408, 409 "Piorno" (_Spartius scorpius_), 352 Pipit, alpine, 222 tawny, 319, 353 _n._ 1, 367 Pius V., Pope, 194 Pizarro, 231 Plant-life in the marisma, 89-90, 115 Plover, golden, 63 _n._ 1, 331 grey, 42, 134, 389 Kentish, 267, 382 Pochard, 101, 138 _n._ 1, 186, 188, 324, 327, 384, 410 red-crested (_Pato colorado_), 186, 188, 190, 327, 410 white-eyed, 138 _n._ 1, 384 Polyglotta warbler, 393 Pratincole, 268, 382 and _n._ 1 Praying mantis, 394 Préjavalsky, Russian explorer, 276 Ptarmigan, 4, 29, 298 _Pterostichus rutilans_, 314 Puerta de Palomas, 367-70 Puntales del Peco, 167 Pyrenean musk-rat, 29 Pyrenees, 28, 29, 298, 302; ibex in, 142, 143-4 Quail, 29, 328, 330 Rabbit, 330, 338, 341 Rail, 39 "Rare birds," 403, 404 Raven, 209, 222, 309, 319, 366, 395 _Reclamo_ (call-bird), 328-9 Redondo, José, bull-fighter, 197 Redshank, 267, 268, 379 Redstart, 223 Redwing, 164, 362 Reed-climbers, 39, 61 Ribbon-grass (_canaliza_), 115 Rice-grounds, 322, 323, 324-5 Ring-dotterel, 390 lesser, 393 Ring-ouzel, 222, 309, 316, 353 _n._ 1 Ring-plover, 238 Riscos del Fraile, 141, 211, 214, 221 Robin, 232, 318 Rocio, shrine at, pilgrimages to, 82 _et seq._ Rock-bunting, 313, 319, 348, 367 Rock-climbing, 144 Rock-sparrow, 319, 355 Rock-thrush, 222, 313, 318, 353 _n._ 1, 366, 367, 368 blue, 230, 365 Roderick, King of the Goths, 7 Roe-deer, 165, 229, 298, 353, 363 Roller, 226, 393 Romans, the, in Spain, 6, 229, 232 Romero, Francisco, bull-fighter, 195 Romero, Pedro, bull-fighter, 196 _Ronda_, _Caceria á la_, 80-1 Rook, 411 Rota, 299 Rudolph, late Crown Prince of Austria, 266 Ruff, 63 _n._ 1, 134 Rufous warbler, 232, 318, 393 Salmon, 295-6 San Cristobal, 347, 349, 351, 352, 353 Sanderling, 390 Sand-grouse, 4, 29, 186, 209, 227, 382, 401; black-bellied, 232 Sand-hills and wild geese, 125-32 Sand-lizard, 62 and _n._ 1 Sand-piper, 211, 389 curlew, 42, 389 green, 390, 392 Sardinian warbler, 164, 393 Saunders, Howard, 265, 403 Schastowskij, Mr. P. A., 404 Sedge-warbler, great, 387 Serin, 311, 313, 319, 348, 393 Serpent-eagle, 209, 396 Serranía de Ronda, 2, 267, 347-59, 360 _et seq._; flora of, 348 _et seq._, 360, 361; ibex in, 142 Shad, 299 Shelduck, 101, 112, 191, 327, 410 ruddy, 410 Shoveler, 97, 101, 111, 112, 186, 188, 327, 403, 409 Shrike, great grey (_Lanius meridionalis_), 62, 63 _n._ 2, 212, 393 _Lanius excubitor_, 63 _n._ 2 Siberia, 404 Sierra Bermeja, 349, 360-63 Sierra de Gata, 227, 235 Sierra de Grédos, 140, 208 _et seq._, 302; ibex in, 142, 145, 210 _et seq._, 352 Sierra de Guadalupe, 227 and _n._ 1 Sierra de Jerez, 363-7 Sierra Moréna, 29, 411; fauna of, 42, 142, 147 _et seq._; flora of, 160, 225 Sierra Nevada, 301 _et seq._, 355; birds of, 311-16. 318-19; ibex in, 142, 148-9, 303, 317 Sierra de las Nieves, 349 Sierra Quintana, 149-53, 171 Silk manufacture, Moorish, 9-10 Small-game shooting, 328-36 Snake, 334 coluber, 393 Snipe, 327, 330, 331, 392 Snow-finch, 316, 318 Soldier-ants, 61 Spear-grass, 90, 92, 95, 115 Spectacled warbler, 232, 396 Sphinx moth (_S. convolvuli_), 62 Spoonbill, 327, 383 "Still-hunting," 54 _et seq._, 60 Stilt, 190, 267, 268, 385, 392, 403 Stint, little, 390 Stonechat, 209, 211, 319 Stone-curlew, 227, 232, 343 Stork, 40, 230, 392 Subalpine warbler, 232, 396 Sugar-cane, 4, 9 Swan, wild, 375; Bewick's, _ib._ Swift, alpine, 355 Tagus River, 228 _n._ 1; valley of, 210 Tarifa, 300 Tarik, Arab chief, 7 Tato, El, bull-fighter, 197 Teal, 91, 97, 101, 111, 126, 134, 188, 327, 373, 399, 403, 409 marbled, 186 Tench, 295 Tern, 41; gull-billed (_Sterna anglica_), 268; whiskered, 389 Thistle, Spanish, 248, 262 Thrush, 164, 223; blue, 222, 313, 318, 319, 353 _n._ 1, 362, 367 Tit, blue, 319, 352; cole, 319, 352, 367; great, 319; long-tailed, 232, 348, 367 Toledo, Montes de, 147, 148 and _n._ 1, 184, 227 _n._ 1 Tormes River, 221, 223 Tree-creeper, 367 Trout, 15-16, 294-5, 309, 317 Trujillo, 227, 229, 230-31, 295 Tumbler-pigeons, 126 Tunny, 299-300 Valdelagrana, 172 Valencia, 2, 4, 187; ibex in, 142; wildfowl in, 321-7, 410 Veleta, Picacho de la, 312 _et seq._ _Vetas_, 88-9, 90, 115, 122 Villarejo, 221 Villaviciosa, Don Pedro Pidal, Marquis de, 292, 296 Vivillo, El, bandit, 175 _et seq._, 181-2 Vulture, 67, 228, 356 and _n._ 1, 362, 366, 367-8 black, 221-2 griffon, 163, 222, 315, 319, 359, 364, 367, 369, 370, 397 Waders, 41, 382, 403 Wagtail, grey, 318, 348, 410 pied, 410 white, 232, 237, 410 yellow, 410-11 Warblers. _See_ under names Water-hen, purple (_Porphyrio_), 388 Water-shrew, 103, 166 Wheatear, 41, 184, 211, 223, 312, 313, 318, 353 _n._ 1 black-throated, 318 eared, 318 Whimbrel, 390, 392, 403, 404 Whitethroat, 232, 318 Wigeon, 97, 101, 110, 111, 186, 188, 327, 380, 399, 409 Wild-cat, 165, 167, 226, 317, 333, 334, 337 _et seq._ Wildfowl at Daimiel, 186-91, 409, 410 of marisma, 40-2, 91 _et seq._, 114 _et seq._, 381-91, 408, 409 shooting, 95 _et seq._, 105-13, 115 _et seq._, 131-2, 254, 323-7, 371-5, 379 in Valencia, 321 _et seq._ Wild-thyme (_Cantuéso_), 225 Willow-warbler, 232 Wolf, 147, 154, 156, 164, 171, 229, 238, 289, 306, 317, 319, 334 Woodchat, 41, 318, 393, 396 Woodcock, 331 Wood-pecker, 396 great black, 298 green, 68 and _n._ 2, 164, 232 spotted, 367 Wood-pigeon, 362, 367 Wren, 282, 318 Wryneck, 311 Yna de la Garganta, 355-7 Zamujar, 172 Zaragoza, Cortes of, 6 THE END _Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_. * * * * * FOOTNOTES: [1] Catalonia was a separate State, under independent rulers, the Counts of Barcelona, until A.D. 1131, when it was merged in the Kingdom of Arragon. [2] The term "Moor" has always seemed to us a trifle unfortunate, as tending to indicate that the conquering race came from Morocco--"Turks" or "Arabs" would have been a more appropriate title. For fifty years after the conquest Spain was governed by Emirs subject to the Kaliphs of Damascus, the first independent power being wielded by the Emir Abderahman III. who, in 777, usurped the title of Kaliph of Cordoba. That kaliphate, by the way, during its earlier splendours, became the centre of universal culture, Cordoba being the intellectual capital of the world, with a population that has been stated at two millions. [3] For the information of readers who have not studied the subject, it may be well to add that, during the early years of the seventeenth century, something like a million of Spanish Moors--the most industrious of its inhabitants--were either massacred in Spain or expelled from the country. [4] At a big hotel the menu on May 26 included (as usual) "partridges." We emphasised a mild protest by refusing to eat them; but the landlord scored with both barrels. On opening our luncheon-basket next day (we had a twelve-hours' railway journey), there were the rejected redlegs! We had to eat them then--or starve! [5] We have seen an exception to this in the mountain villages of the Castiles, where on _fiesta_ nights a sort of rude valse is danced in the open street. [6] By their peculiar style of aviation these birds, swaying up and down and swerving on zigzag courses, alternately expose a scintillating crimson mass suddenly flashing into a cloud of black and rosy white--according as their brilliant wing-plumage or their white bodies are presented to the eye. "A flame of fire" is the Arab signification of their name _flamenco_. [7] No offence to our scientific friends aforesaid. We recognise their argument and respect its thoroughness, though regarding it as occasionally misdirected. Possibly in their splendid zeal they overlook the danger of reducing scientific classification to a mere monopoly confined to a few score of professors, specialists, and cabinet-naturalists, instead of serving as an aid and general guide (as is surely its true intention) to thousands of less learned students. Over-elaboration is apt to beget chaos. [8] We have known the spoor of a wounded stag pass beneath strong interlacing branches so low that, in following, we have had to wriggle under on hands and knees. The spoor showed there had been no such cervine necessity. [9] Weight, clean, two days killed, 78 kilos = 180 lbs. [10] There are sand-lizards identical in colour with the sand itself--pale yellow or drab, adorned with wavy black lines closely resembling the wind-waves on the sand. [11] There are, of course, exceptions, such as golden plovers, ruffs, dunlin, godwits, knots, that do assume a vernal dress. [12] This, the southernmost form of the green woodpecker, has much the most ringing voice. The closely allied northern form, _G. canus_, that one hears constantly in Norway, utters but a sharp monosyllabic note. A second curious fact may here be mentioned: that the great grey shrike, just named, _Lanius meridionalis_, is resident in Spain throughout the year, while the closely allied and almost identical _L. excubitor_ breeds exclusively in the far north (chiefly within the Arctic) and only descends to England in winter. Besides the harsh note mentioned above, the southern shrike, in spring, utters a piping whistle not unlike a golden plover. [13] This is only the second instance in thirty or forty years of a wounded or "bayed" stag killing a dog. In the Culata del Faro, we remember, many years ago, a stag shot through the lungs, and which was brought to bay close behind the writer's post, tossing a _podenco_ clean over its head, and so injuring it that the dog had to be destroyed at once. [14] The initials are those of our late friend Colonel Brymer of Ilsington, Dorset, formerly M.P. for that county, and who was a frequent visitor to Spain, where, alas! his death occurred while we write this chapter (May 1909). A unique exploit of the Colonel's during his last shooting-trip may fitly be recorded. On February 5, 1909, at the Culata del Faginado, four big stags broke in a clump past his post on a pine-crowned ridge in the forest. Two he dropped right and left; then reloading one barrel, killed a third ere the survivors had vanished from sight. These three stags carried thirty-four points, the best head taping 30-1/2 inches by 27 inches in width, and 4-1/2 inches basal circumference. [15] Not a single accident, great or small, has occurred during the authors' long tenure of the Coto Doñana. [16] See _On Safari_, by Abel Chapman, pp. 216-17. The Spanish term _Ronda_ may roughly be translated as "rounding-up." [17] At the date in question (end of November) it is, of course, possible that this immigration was proceeding, not from the north, but from the south. That is, that these were fowl which, on their first arrival in Spain in September and October, had found the _marisma_ untenable from lack of water, and had in consequence passed on into Africa, whence they were now returning, on the changed weather. But be that as it may, the route above indicated is that invariably followed by the north-bred wildfowl on their first arrival in Spain. [18] This was in earlier days. Later on we developed a flotilla of flat-bottomed canoes expressly adapted to this service. A photo of one of these is annexed. [19] See _Instructions to Young Sportsmen_, by P. Hawker, second edition (1816), pp. 229, 230. [20] In the big and deep lucios no plant-life exists, nor could surface-feeding ducks reach down to it even if subaquatic herbage of any kind did grow there. [21] We have here in our mind's eye our own shooting-grounds in the Bætican marismas. But there are other regions in Andalucia where geese feed on open grassy plains on which shelter of some sort is often available. It may be but a clump of dead thistles or wild asparagus; but at happy times a friendly ditch or dry watercourse will yield quite a decent hollow where one can hide in comparative comfort and security. On the day here described no such "advantage" befriended. [22] The scarcity of diving-ducks is explained by these having all been shot in the shallow, open marisma. In the deeper waters, such as Santolalla, common and white-eyed pochards, tufted ducks, etc., abound. [23] The Montes de Toledo comprise some of the best big-game country in Spain and include several of her most famous preserves; such, for example, as the Coto de Cabañeros belonging to the Conde de Valdelagrana, El Castillo, a domain of the Duke of Castillejos, and Zumajo of the Marques de Alventos. The Duke of Arión possesses a wild tract inhabited by fallow-deer. [24] Thirteen wolves were killed thus (and recovered) on the property of the Marquis del Mérito in the winter of 1906-7. [25] Similarly the half-wild cattle of Spain leave their new-born calves concealed in some bush or palmetto, the mother going off for a whole day and only returning at sunset. [26] Photos given in _Wild Spain_. [27] We exclude from consideration all deer that are winter-fed or otherwise assisted, and of course all that have been "improved" by crosses with extraneous blood. These mountain deer of Spain are true native aborigines, unaltered and living the same wild life as they lived here in Roman days and in ages before. [28] We here use the term hound or dog indiscriminately as, in the altering circumstances, each is equally applicable and correct [29] I never myself count shots, hits or misses--_horas non numero_. The above record is solely due to the inception by our gracious hostess at Mezquitillas of a pretty custom, namely, that for every bullet fired, a small sum should be payable by the sportsman towards a local charity. [30] The oleander is poisonous to horses and other domestic animals, and is instinctively avoided by both game and cattle. During the Peninsular War it is recorded that several British soldiers came by their deaths through this cause. A foraging party cut and peeled some oleander branches to use as skewers in roasting meat over the camp-fires. Of twelve men who ate the meat, seven died. [31] Pernales was born at Estepa, province of Sevilla, September 3, 1878, a ne'er-do-weel son of honest, rural parents. By 1906 he had become notorious as a determined criminal. His appearance and Machiavellian instincts were interpreted as indicating great personal courage, and, united with his physique, combined to present a repulsive and menacing figure. A huge head set on broad chest and shoulders, with red hair and deep-set blue eyes, a livid freckled complexion, thin eyebrows, and one long tusk always visible, protruding from a horrid mouth, made up a sufficiently characteristic ensemble. [32] The authors personally assisted at this _toilet_, Talavera, May 1891. [33] The oft-described details of the bull-fight we omit; but should any reader care to peruse an impartial description thereof, written by one of the co-authors of the present work, such will be found in the _Encyclopædia of Sport_, vol. i. p. 151. [34] In particular, remembering an incident that had occurred here in 1891, and recorded in _Wild Spain_, p. 147, we were anxious to ascertain if the lemming, or any relative of his, still survived in these central Spanish cordilleras. The marmot is another possible inhabitant. [35] For these, as well as graphic notes on the subject, we are indebted to Sr. D. Manuel F. de Amezúa, the most experienced and intrepid explorer of the Sierra de Grédos. [36] This range is, in fact, a northern outspur of the Montes de Toledo, which occupy the whole space betwixt Tagus and Guadiana. Its highest peak, La Cabeza del Moro, reaches 5110 feet. [37] Wild fallow-deer are indigenous among the infinite scrub-clad hills that fringe the course of the Tagus, as well as in various _dehesas_ in the province of Caceres--those of Las Corchuelas and de Valero may be specified. The wild fallow are larger and finer animals than the others. [38] Immediately adjoining the south approach to the bridge over the Alagón is sculptured on the bluff a heraldic device representing a figure plucking a pomegranate (_Granada_) from a tree--the arms of Granadilla. There is an inscription, with date, beneath; but these we failed to decipher. [39] _Diccionario geografico, estadistico, y historico de España_, by Pascual Madoz (Madrid, 1845). [40] A later Spanish work, the _Diccionario enciclopedico hispano-americano_ (Barcelona, 1892), regards some of Pascual Madoz's descriptions as over-coloured and exaggerated. Our own observation, however, rather tended to confirm his views and to show that subsequent amelioration exists rather in name than in fact. [41] The Hurdanos, we were told, make bad soldiers. Being despised by their comrades, they are only employed on the menial work of the barracks. Many, from long desuetude, are unable to wear boots. [42] The white on a bustard's plumage exceeds in its intensity that of almost any other bird we know. It is a dead white, without shade or the least symptom of any second tint so usual a feature in white. [43] _Avetarda_ is old Spanish, the modern spelling being _Abutarda_. [44] A large number of horsemen inevitably excites suspicion in game unaccustomed to see more than three or four men together. [45] The horses, if ground permits, may be utilised as "stops" to extreme right and left of the drive, otherwise they must be concealed in some convenient hollow in charge of a boy or two. [46] We know of no other bird that increases thus in weight anticipatory of the breeding-season, nor are we at all sure that it is the swollen neck that explains that increase. [47] We have never succeeded in inducing our tame bustards to breed in captivity. [48] Dampier, _New Voyage round the World_, 2nd ed., i. p. 71; London, 1699. [49] Dampier's visit to the Cape de Verde Islands took place in September, when, of course, flamingoes would not be nesting. [50] We also observed in Equatoria a second species, smaller and red all over, _Phoenicopterus minor_. This, however, was far less numerous; the great bulk of East-African flamingoes were the common _Ph. roseus_. [51] It is right to add that in America the growth of mangrove and other bushes, sometimes in close proximity to the nests, offers facilities to the photographer that are wholly wanting in Spain, where the flamingo only nests in perfectly open waters devoid of the slightest covert or means of concealment. [52] _Gaitero_ is the word used. The _gaita_ is a musical instrument which we may translate as bagpipes. [53] For notes on these subjects, we are indebted to Mr. Carl D. Williams. [54] Boabdil, we read, was a keen hunter, and during his sojourn at Besmer frequently spent weeks at a time among the mountains with his hawks and hounds. [55] _La Alpujarra_, by Don Pedro A. de Alarcón (4th edition, Madrid, 1903). [56] Several of these animals, moreover, yield excellent fur. [57] These mountains are believed to overlie vast store of subterranean wealth in the form of petroleum. Geologists seem agreed upon that; but they differ as to the precise locality of the treasure or whence it may most conveniently be exploited. [58] We have a number of pinsápos growing in Northumberland. They were planted some ten years ago on a cold northern exposure, and are now flourishing vigorously, some having reached a height of eight or ten feet. Nearly all tend to throw up numerous "leaders" as described. [59] Pinsápo timber is fairly hard, but too "knotty" for general purposes, and it is useless for charcoal. Yet these glorious forests are being sacrificed wholesale because the wood affords "good kindling" for the charcoal-furnace--can wasteful wantonness further go? That the only existing forests of the kind on earth should be ruthlessly destroyed for no single object but to provide _kindling_ passes understanding. [60] We mention, parenthetically, certain birds observed at end of March on that alpine meadow (4800 feet), as follows:--One ring-ouzel, a pair of common wheatears, woodlarks, and Dartford warblers--all, no doubt, on migration--besides, of course, blackchats, blue thrushes, etc. A month later the beautiful rock-thrush had come to grace the desolation with lilting flight and song, and tawny pipits ran blithely among the rocks. [61] Note that the pellets or "castings" thrown up by vultures are chiefly formed of grass cut up into lengths and compacted with saliva, evidently digestive. We have frequently seen vultures carrying a wisp of grass in their beaks. [62] The Spanish name of the ibex, _Cabra montés_, signifies, not as might appear, "mountain-goat," but _scrub-goat_; and may have originated in this region, or at least from a habit which prevails here though obsolete everywhere else. [63] Similar results followed on the Laguna de Janda. That great shallow lake abounds in winter with both ducks and geese; but differs from the marismas in being sweet water, hence is not frequented by flamingoes. Another point of difference is that its shores are occupied by wild bulls instead of brood-mares; hence the _cabresto_-pony is not available. Wildfowl here also proved inaccessible to a gunning-punt on open waters; while wherever reeds or sedge promised some "advantage," in such places the depth of water was always insufficient to float the lightest of craft within range. The best shot made during four seasons realised but twenty-three (seven geese and sixteen duck)--a paltry total. Occasionally a great bustard was shot from the gunboat. [64] The word "_Corro_" applies in Spanish to any noisy group--say a knot of people discussing politics in the street! [65] One feels convinced, while lying listening, that these exuberant fowl invent and formulate a series of new notes and cries special to the occasion and outside their normal vocabulary. Hence, possibly, originated the use of the term "_Corro_." [66] _Corros_ usually consist (especially the earlier assemblies) of one root-species--others merely "edge in." The later _corros_, however, are much mixed. They vary in numbers: one may contain but 200 pairs, another within half-a-mile as many thousands. [67] Pratincoles cast themselves down flat on the dry mud, fluttering as though in mortal agony--or, say, like a huge butterfly with a pin through its thorax! The device is presumably adopted in order to decoy an intruder away from their eggs or young. This year, however, the pratincoles still practised it, although they had neither eggs nor young at all. One day (May 12) a gale of wind blew some of the deceivers bodily away. [68] In none were the generative organs more than slightly developed, and in most the plumage was full of new blood-feathers, showing that the summer change was not yet complete. The date, May 10-15. Another drawing is given at p. 42. [69] Common British birds we exclude from notice, or might fill a page with swarming goldfinches, robins, wrens, chaffinch, blackbird, stonechat, whitethroats, tree-pipits, titlarks (the last three on passage), blackcap, garden-warbler, whinchat, redstart, and a host more. [70] The African bush-cuckoos, or coucals (_Centropus_), certainly build their own nests; but they are only related nominally, and the connection is remote. [71] In Egypt the hooded crow (_Corvus cornix_) is invariably the cuckoo's dupe; in Algeria, _Pica mauretanica_. [72] We find a note that one Bean-Goose was shot on November 27, 1896--weight 5-1/4 lbs. [73] See the elaborate monograph on _The Geese of Europe and Asia_, by M. Serge Alphéraky of St. Petersburg (London, Rowland Ward). [74] One such note may be given as an example:-- "1903.--Examined 40 geese shot January 1 and 2. Legs varied from white and pale flesh-colour to pale yellowish and pink, adults all of the latter colour. Beaks vary from whitish or flesh-colour, through yellow, up to bright orange. A few of the geese, mostly the smaller, young birds, were nearly pure white below: others heavily spotted or barred with black: nearly all (old and young) show signs of a 'white-front.'" [75] In Jutland we found some pintails' nests rather cunningly concealed in holes upon open grassy islets in marine lagoons not unlike our Spanish marismas; others were on bare ground, though occasionally hidden among thistles. Here also the eggs numbered eight or nine. See _Ibis_, 1894, p. 349. * * * * * Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber: averge depth=> average depth {pg 302} produces these montrosities=> produces these monstrosities {pg 348} secured a specimen of two=> secured a specimen or two {pg 360} are always strictly cleanly=> are always strictly clean {pg 368} Préjavelsky, Russian explorer, 276=> Préjavalsky, Russian explorer, 276 {index} 
7470	----	CASTILIAN DAYS By John Hay Published November 1903 PUBLISHERS' NOTE In this Holiday Edition of _Castilian Days_ it has been thought advisable to omit a few chapters that appeared in the original edition. These chapters were less descriptive than the rest of the book, and not so rich in the picturesque material which the art of the illustrator demands. Otherwise, the text is reprinted without change. The illustrations are the fruit of a special visit which Mr. Pennell has recently made to Castile for this purpose. BOSTON, AUTUMN, 1903 LIST OF CONTENTS MADRID AL FRESCO SPANISH LIVING AND DYING INFLUENCE OF TRADITION IN SPANISH LIFE TAUROMACHY RED-LETTER DAYS AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS A CASTLE IN THE AIR THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS THE ESCORIAL A MIRACLE PLAY THE CRADLE AND THE GRAVE OF CERVANTES MADRID AL FRESCO Madrid is a capital with malice aforethought. Usually the seat of government is established in some important town from the force of circumstances. Some cities have an attraction too powerful for the court to resist. There is no capital of England possible but London. Paris is the heart of France. Rome is the predestined capital of Italy in spite of the wandering flirtations its varying governments in different centuries have carried on with Ravenna, or Naples, or Florence. You can imagine no Residenz for Austria but the Kaiserstadt,--the gemuthlich Wien. But there are other capitals where men have arranged things and consequently bungled them. The great Czar Peter slapped his imperial court down on the marshy shore of the Neva, where he could look westward into civilization and watch with the jealous eye of an intelligent barbarian the doings of his betters. Washington is another specimen of the cold-blooded handiwork of the capital builders. We shall think nothing less of the _clarum et venerabile nomen_ of its founder if we admit he was human, and his wishing the seat of government nearer to Mount Vernon than Mount Washington sufficiently proves this. But Madrid more plainly than any other capital shows the traces of having been set down and properly brought up by the strong hand of a paternal government; and like children with whom the same regimen has been followed, it presents in its maturity a curious mixture of lawlessness and insipidity. Its greatness was thrust upon it by Philip II. Some premonitory symptoms of the dangerous honor that awaited it had been seen in preceding reigns. Ferdinand and Isabella occasionally set up their pilgrim tabernacle on the declivity that overhangs the Manzanares. Charles V. found the thin, fine air comforting to his gouty articulations. But Philip II. made it his court. It seems hard to conceive how a king who had his choice of Lisbon, with its glorious harbor and unequalled communications; Seville, with its delicious climate and natural beauty; and Salamanca and Toledo, with their wealth of tradition, splendor of architecture, and renown of learning, should have chosen this barren mountain for his home, and the seat of his empire. But when we know this monkish king we wonder no longer. He chose Madrid simply because it was cheerless and bare and of ophthalmic ugliness. The royal kill-joy delighted in having the dreariest capital on earth. After a while there seemed to him too much life and humanity about Madrid, and he built the Escorial, the grandest ideal of majesty and ennui that the world has ever seen. This vast mass of granite has somehow acted as an anchor that has held the capital fast moored at Madrid through all succeeding years. It was a dreary and somewhat shabby court for many reigns. The great kings who started the Austrian dynasty were too busy in their world conquest to pay much attention to beautifying Madrid, and their weak successors, sunk in ignoble pleasures, had not energy enough to indulge the royal folly of building. When the Bourbons came down from France there was a little flurry of construction under Philip V., but he never finished his palace in the Plaza del Oriente, and was soon absorbed in constructing his castle in cloud-land on the heights of La Granja. The only real ruler the Bourbons ever gave to Spain was Charles III., and to him Madrid owes all that it has of architecture and civic improvement. Seconded by his able and liberal minister, Count Aranda, who was educated abroad, and so free from the trammels of Spanish ignorance and superstition, he rapidly changed the ignoble town into something like a city. The greater portion of the public buildings date from this active and beneficent reign. It was he who laid out the walks and promenades which give to Madrid almost its only outward attraction. The Picture Gallery, which is the shrine of all pilgrims of taste, was built by him for a Museum of Natural Science. In nearly all that a stranger cares to see, Madrid is not an older city than Boston. There is consequently no glory of tradition here. There are no cathedrals. There are no ruins. There is none of that mysterious and haunting memory that peoples the air with spectres in quiet towns like Ravenna and Nuremberg. And there is little of that vast movement of humanity that possesses and bewilders you in San Francisco and New York. Madrid is larger than Chicago; but Chicago is a great city and Madrid a great village. The pulsations of life in the two places resemble each other no more than the beating of Dexter's heart on the home-stretch is like the rising and falling of an oozy tide in a marshy inlet. There is nothing indigenous in Madrid. There is no marked local color. It is a city of Castile, but not a Castilian city, like Toledo, which girds its graceful waist with the golden Tagus, or like Segovia, fastened to its rock in hopeless shipwreck. But it is not for this reason destitute of an interest of its own. By reason of its exceptional history and character it is the best point in Spain to study Spanish life. It has no distinctive traits itself, but it is a patchwork of all Spain. Every province of the Peninsula sends a contingent to its population. The Gallicians hew its wood and draw its water; the Asturian women nurse its babies at their deep bosoms, and fill the promenades with their brilliant costumes; the Valentians carpet its halls and quench its thirst with orgeat of chufas; in every street you shall see the red bonnet and sandalled feet of the Catalan; in every cafe, the shaven face and rat-tail chignon of the Majo of Andalusia. If it have no character of its own, it is a mirror where all the faces of the Peninsula may sometimes be seen. It is like the mockingbird of the West, that has no song of its own, and yet makes the woods ring with every note it has ever heard. Though Madrid gives a picture in little of all Spain, it is not all Spanish. It has a large foreign population. Not only its immediate neighbors, the French, are here in great numbers,--conquering so far their repugnance to emigration, and living as gayly as possible in the midst of traditional hatred,--but there are also many Germans and English in business here, and a few stray Yankees have pitched their tents, to reinforce the teeth of the Dons, and to sell them ploughs and sewing-machines. Its railroads have waked it up to a new life, and the Revolution has set free the thought of its people to an extent which would have been hardly credible a few years ago. Its streets swarm with newsboys and strangers,--the agencies that are to bring its people into the movement of the age. It has a superb opera-house, which might as well be in Naples, for all the national character it has; the court theatre, where not a word of Cas-tilian is ever heard, nor a strain of Spanish music. Even cosmopolite Paris has her grand opera sung in French, and easy-going Vienna insists that Don Juan shall make love in German. The champagny strains of Offenbach are heard in every town of Spain oftener than the ballads of the country. In Madrid there are more _pilluelos_ who whistle _Bu qui s'avance_ than the Hymn of Riego. The Cancan has taken its place on the boards of every stage in the city, apparently to stay; and the exquisite jota and cachucha are giving way to the bestialities of the casino cadet. It is useless perhaps to fight against that hideous orgie of vulgar Menads which in these late years has swept over all nations, and stung the loose world into a tarantula dance from the Golden Horn to the Golden Gate. It must have its day and go out; and when it has passed, perhaps we may see that it was not so utterly causeless and irrational as it seemed; but that, as a young American poet has impressively said, "Paris was proclaiming to the world in it somewhat of the pent-up fire and fury of her nature, the bitterness of her heart, the fierceness of her protest against spiritual and political repression. It is an execration in rhythm,--a dance of fiends, which Paris has invented to express in license what she lacks in liberty." This diluted European, rather than Spanish, spirit may be seen in most of the amusements of the politer world of Madrid. They have classical concerts in the circuses and popular music in the open air. The theatres play translations of French plays, which are pretty good when they are in prose, and pretty dismal when they are turned into verse, as is more frequent, for the Spanish mind delights in the jingle of rhyme. The fine old Spanish drama is vanishing day by day. The masterpieces of Lope and Calderon, which inspired all subsequent playwriting in Europe, have sunk almost utterly into oblivion. The stage is flooded with the washings of the Boulevards. Bad as the translations are, the imitations are worse. The original plays produced by the geniuses of the Spanish Academy, for which they are crowned and sonneted and pensioned, are of the kind upon which we are told that gods and men and columns look austerely. This infection of foreign manners has completely gained and now controls what is called the best society of Madrid. A soiree in this circle is like an evening in the corresponding grade of position in Paris or Petersburg or New York in all external characteristics. The toilets are by Worth; the beauties are coiffed by the deft fingers of Parisian tiring-women; the men wear the penitential garb of Poole; the music is by Gounod and Verdi; Strauss inspires the rushing waltzes, and the married people walk through the quadrilles to the measures of Blue Beard and Fair Helen, so suggestive of conjugal rights and duties. As for the suppers, the trail of the Neapolitan serpent is over them all. Honest eating is a lost art among the effete denizens of the Old World. Tantalizing ices, crisped shapes of baked nothing, arid sandwiches, and the feeblest of sugary punch, are the only supports exhausted nature receives for the shock of the cotillon. I remember the stern reply of a friend of mine when I asked him to go with me to a brilliant reception,--"No! Man liveth not by biscuit-glace alone!" His heart was heavy for the steamed cherry-stones of Harvey and the stewed terrapin of Augustin. The speech of the gay world has almost ceased to be national. Every one speaks French sufficiently for all social requirements. It is sometimes to be doubted whether this constant use of a foreign language in official and diplomatic circles is a cause or effect of paucity of ideas. It is impossible for any one to use another tongue with the ease and grace with which he could use his own. You know how tiresome the most charming foreigners are when they speak English. A fetter-dance is always more curious than graceful. Yet one who has nothing to say can say it better in a foreign language. If you must speak nothing but phrases, Ollendorff's are as good as any one's. Where there are a dozen people all speaking French equally badly, each one imagines there is a certain elegance in the hackneyed forms. I know of no other way of accounting for the fact that clever people seem stupid and stupid people clever when they speak French. This facile language thus becomes the missionary of mental equality,--the principles of '89 applied to conversation. All men are equal before the phrase-book. But this is hypercritical and ungrateful. We do not go to balls to hear sermons nor discuss the origin of matter. If the young grandees of Spain are rather weaker in the parapet than is allowed in the nineteenth century, if the old boys are more frivolous than is becoming to age, and both more ignorant of the day's doings than is consistent with even their social responsibilities, in compensation the women of this circle are as pretty and amiable as it is possible to be in a fallen world. The foreigner never forgets those piquant, _mutines_ faces of Andalusia and those dreamy eyes of Malaga,--the black masses of Moorish hair and the blond glory of those graceful heads that trace their descent from Gothic demigods. They were not very learned nor very witty, but they were knowing enough to trouble the soundest sleep. Their voices could interpret the sublimest ideas of Mendelssohn. They knew sufficiently of lines and colors to dress themselves charmingly at small cost, and their little feet were well enough educated to bear them over the polished floor of a ball-room as lightly as swallows' wings. The flirting of their intelligent fans, the flashing of those quick smiles where eyes, teeth, and lips all did their dazzling duty, and the satin twinkling of those neat boots in the waltz, are harder to forget than things better worth remembering. Since the beginning of the Revolutionary regime there have been serious schisms and heart-burnings in the gay world. The people of the old situation assumed that the people of the new were rebels and traitors, and stopped breaking bread with them. But in spite of this the palace and the ministry of war were gay enough,--for Madrid is a city of office-holders, and the White House is always easy to fill, even if two thirds of the Senate is uncongenial. The principal fortress of the post was the palace of the spirituelle and hospitable lady whose society name is Duchess of Penaranda, but who is better known as the mother of the Empress of the French. Her salon was the weekly rendezvous of the irreconcilable adherents of the House of Bourbon, and the aristocratic beauty that gathered there was too powerful a seduction even for the young and hopeful partisans of the powers that be. There was nothing exclusive about this elegant hospitality. Beauty and good manners have always been a passport there. I have seen a proconsul of Prim talking with a Carlist leader, and a fiery young democrat dancing with a countess of Castile. But there is another phase of society in Madrid which is altogether pleasing,--far from the domain of politics or public affairs, where there is no pretension or luxury or conspiracy,--the old-fashioned Tertulias of Spain. There is nowhere a kindlier and more unaffected sociableness. The leading families of each little circle have one evening a week on which they remain at home. Nearly all their friends come in on that evening. There is conversation and music and dancing. The young girls gather together in little groups,--not confined under the jealous guard of their mothers or chaperons,--and chatter of the momentous events of the week--their dresses, their beaux, and their books. Around these compact formations of loveliness skirmish light bodies of the male enemy, but rarely effect a lodgment. A word or a smile is momently thrown out to meet the advance; but the long, desperate battle of flirtation, which so often takes place in America in discreet corners and outlying boudoirs, is never seen in this well-organized society. The mothers in Israel are ranged for the evening around the walls in comfortable chairs, which they never leave; and the colonels and generals and chiefs of administration, who form the bulk of all Madrid gatherings, are gravely smoking in the library or playing interminable games of tresillon, seasoned with temperate denunciations of the follies of the time. Nothing can be more engaging than the tone of perfect ease and cordial courtesy which pervades these family festivals. It is here that the Spanish character is seen in its most attractive light. Nearly everybody knows French, but it is never spoken. The exquisite Castilian, softened by its graceful diminutives into a rival of the Italian in tender melody, is the only medium of conversation; it is rare that a stranger' is seen, but if he is, he must learn Spanish or be a wet blanket forever. You will often meet, in persons of wealth and distinction, an easy degenerate accent in Spanish, strangely at variance with their elegance and culture. These are Creoles of the Antilles, and they form one of the most valued and popular elements of society in the capital. There is a gallantry and dash about the men, and an intelligence and independence about the women, that distinguish them from their cousins of the Peninsula. The American element has recently grown very prominent in the political and social world. Admiral Topete is a Mexican. His wife is one of the distinguished Cuban family of Arrieta. General Prim married a Mexican heiress. The magnificent Duchess de la Torre, wife of the Regent Serrano, is a Cuban born and bred. In one particular Madrid is unique among capitals,--it has no suburbs. It lies in a desolate table-land in the windy waste of New Castile; on the north the snowy Guadarrama chills its breezes, and on every other side the tawny landscape stretches away in dwarfish hills and shallow ravines barren of shrub or tree, until distance fuses the vast steppes into one drab plain, which melts in the hazy verge of the warm horizon. There are no villages sprinkled in the environs to lure the Madrilenos out of their walls for a holiday. Those delicious picnics that break with such enchanting freshness and variety the steady course of life in other capitals cannot here exist. No Parisian loves _la bonne ville_ so much that he does not call those the happiest of days on which he deserts her for a row at Asnieres, a donkey-ride at Enghien, or a bird-like dinner in the vast chestnuts of Sceaux. "There is only one Kaiserstadt," sings the loyal Kerl of Vienna, but he shakes the dust of the Graben from his feet on holiday mornings, and makes his merry pilgrimage to the lordly Schoen-brunn or the heartsome Dornbach, or the wooded eyry of the Kahlenberg. What would white-bait be if not eaten at Greenwich? What would life be in the great cities without the knowledge that just outside, an hour away from the toil and dust and struggle of this money-getting world, there are green fields, and whispering forests, and verdurous nooks of breezy shadow by the side of brooks where the white pebbles shine through the mottled stream,--where you find great pied pan-sies under your hands, and catch the black beady eyes of orioles watching you from the thickets, and through the lush leafage over you see patches of sky flecked with thin clouds that sail so lazily you cannot be sure if the blue or the white is moving? Existence without these luxuries would be very much like life in Madrid. Yet it is not so dismal as it might seem. The Grande Duchesse of Gerolstein, the cheeriest moralist who ever occupied a throne, announces just before the curtain falls, "Quand on n'a pas ce qu'on aime, il faut aimer ce qu'on a." But how much easier it is to love what you have when you never imagined anything better! The bulk of the good people of Madrid have never left their natal city. If they have been, for their sins, some day to Val-lecas or Carabanchel or any other of the dusty villages that bake and shiver on the arid plains around them, they give fervid thanks on returning alive, and never wish to go again. They shudder when they hear of the summer excursions of other populations, and commiserate them profoundly for living in a place they are so anxious to leave. A lovely girl of Madrid once said to me she never wished to travel,--some people who had been to France preferred Paris to Madrid; as if that were an inexplicable insanity by which their wanderings had been punished. The indolent incuriousness of the Spaniard accepts the utter isolation of his city as rather an advantage. It saves him the trouble of making up his mind where to go. _Vamonos al Prado!_ or, as Browning says,-- "Let's to the Prado and make the most of time." The people of Madrid take more solid comfort in their promenade than any I know. This is one of the inestimable benefits conferred upon them by those wise and liberal free-thinkers Charles III. and Aranda. They knew how important to the moral and physical health of the people a place of recreation was. They reduced the hideous waste land on the east side of the city to a breathing-space for future generations, turning the meadow into a promenade and the hill into the Buen Retiro. The people growled terribly at the time, as they did at nearly everything this prematurely liberal government did for them. The wise king once wittily said: "My people are like bad children that kick the shins of their nurse whenever their faces are washed." But they soon became reconciled to their Prado,--a name, by the way, which runs through several idioms,--in Paris they had a Pre-aux-clercs, the Clerks' Meadow, and the great park of Vienna is called the Prater. It was originally the favorite scene of duels, and the cherished trysting-place of lovers. But in modern times it is too popular for any such selfish use. The polite world takes its stately promenade in the winter afternoons in the northern prolongation of the real Prado, called in the official courtier style _Las delicias de Isabel Segunda,_ but in common speech the Castilian Fountain, or _Castellana,_ to save time. So perfect is the social discipline in these old countries that people who are not in society never walk in this long promenade, which is open to all the world. You shall see there, any pleasant day before the Carnival, the aristocracy of the kingdom, the fast young hopes of the nobility, the diplomatic body resident, and the flexible figures and graceful bearing of the high-born ladies of Castile. Here they take the air as free from snobbish competition as the good society of Olympus, while a hundred paces farther south, just beyond the Mint, the world at large takes its plebeian constitutional. How long, with a democratic system of government, this purely conventional respect will be paid to blue-ness of blood cannot be conjectured. Its existence a year after the Revolution was to me one of the most singular of phenomena. After Easter Monday the Castellana is left to its own devices for the summer. With the warm long days of May and June, the evening walk in the Salon begins. Europe affords no scene more original and characteristic. The whole city meets in this starlit drawing-room. It is a vast evening party al fresco, stretching from the Alcala to the Course of San Geronimo. In the wide street beside it every one in town who owns a carriage may be seen moving lazily up and down, and apparently envying the gossiping strollers on foot. On three nights in the week there is music in the Retiro Garden,--not as in our feverish way beginning so early that you must sacrifice your dinner to get there, and then turning you out disconsolate in that seductive hour which John Phoenix used to call the "shank of the evening," but opening sensibly at half past nine and going leisurely forward until after midnight. The music is very good. Sometimes Arban comes down from Paris to recover from his winter fatigues and bewitch the Spains with his wizard _baton._ In all this vast crowd nobody is in a hurry. They have all night before them. They stayed quietly at home in the stress of the noontide when the sunbeams were falling in the glowing streets like javelins,--they utilized some of the waste hours of the broiling afternoon in sleep, and are fresh as daisies now. The women are not haunted by the thought of lords and babies growling and wailing at home. Their lords are beside them, the babies are sprawling in the clean gravel by their chairs. Late in the small hours I have seen these family parties in the promenade, the husband tranquilly smoking his hundredth cigarette, his _placens uxor_ dozing in her chair, one baby asleep on the ground, and another slumbering in her lap. This Madrid climate is a gallant one, and kindlier to the women than the men. The ladies are built on the old-fashioned generous plan. Like a Southern table in the old times, the only fault is too abundant plenty. They move along with a superb dignity of carriage that Banting would like to banish from the world, their round white shoulders shining in the starlight, their fine heads elegantly draped in the coquettish and always graceful mantilla. But you would look in vain among the men of Madrid for such fulness and liberality of structure. They are thin, eager, sinewy in appearance,--though it is the spareness of the Turk, not of the American. It comes from tobacco and the Guadarrama winds. This still, fine, subtle air that blows from the craggy peaks over the treeless plateau seems to take all superfluous moisture out of the men of Madrid. But it is, like Benedick's wit, "a most manly air, it will not hurt a woman." This tropic summer-time brings the halcyon days of the vagabonds of Madrid. They are a temperate, reasonable people, after all, when they are let alone. They do not require the savage stimulants of our colder-blooded race. The fresh air is a feast. As Walt Whitman says, they loaf and invite their souls. They provide for the banquet only the most spiritual provender. Their dissipation is confined principally to starlight and zephyrs; the coarser and wealthier spirits indulge in ice, agraz, and meringues dissolved in water. The climax of their luxury is a cool bed. Walking about the city at midnight, I have seen the fountains all surrounded by luxurious vagabonds asleep or in revery, dozens of them stretched along the rim of the basins, in the spray of the splashing water, where the least start would plunge them in. But the dreams of these Latin beggars are too peaceful to trouble their slumber. They lie motionless, amid the roar of wheels and the tramp of a thousand feet, their bed the sculptured marble, their covering the deep, amethystine vault, warm and cherishing with its breath of summer winds, bright with its trooping stars. The Providence of the worthless watches and guards them! The chief commerce of the streets of Madrid seems to be fire and water, bane and antidote. It would be impossible for so many match-venders to live anywhere else, in a city ten times the size of Madrid. On every block you will find a wandering merchant dolefully announcing paper and phosphorus,--the one to construct cigarettes and the other to light them. The matches are little waxen tapers very neatly made and enclosed in pasteboard boxes, which are sold for a cent and contain about a hundred _fosforos._ These boxes are ornamented with portraits of the popular favorites of the day, and afford a very fair test of the progress and decline of parties. The queen has disappeared from them except in caricature, and the chivalrous face of Castelar and the heavy Bourbon mouth of Don Carlos are oftener seen than any others. A Madrid smoker of average industry will use a box a day. They smoke more cigarettes than cigars, and in the ardor of conversation allow their fire to go out every minute. A young Austrian, who was watching a _senorito_ light his wisp of paper for the fifth time, and mentally comparing it with the volcano volume and _kern-deutsch_ integrity of purpose of the meerschaums of his native land, said to me: "What can you expect of a people who trifle in that way with the only work of their lives?" It is this habit of constant smoking that makes the Madrilenos the thirstiest people in the world; so that, alternating with the cry of "Fire, lord-lings! Matches, chevaliers!" you hear continually the drone so tempting to parched throats, "Water! who wants water? freezing water! colder than snow!" This is the daily song of the Gallician who marches along in his irrigating mission, with his brown blouse, his short breeches, and pointed hat, like that Aladdin wears in the cheap editions; a little varied by the Valentian in his party-colored mantle and his tow trousers, showing the bronzed leg from the knee to the blue-bordered sandals. Numerous as they are, they all seem to have enough to do. They carry their scriptural-looking water-jars on their backs, and a smart tray of tin and burnished brass, with meringues and glasses, in front. The glasses are of enormous but not extravagant proportions. These dropsical Iberians will drink water as if it were no stronger than beer. In the winter-time, while the cheerful invitation rings out to the same effect,--that the beverage is cold as the snow,--the merchant prudently carries a little pot of hot water over a spirit-lamp to take the chill off for shivery customers. Madrid is one of those cities where strangers fear the climate less than residents. Nothing is too bad for the Castilian to say of his native air. Before you have been a day in the city some kind soul will warn you against everything you have been in the habit of doing as leading to sudden and severe death in this subtle air. You will hear in a dozen different tones the favorite proverb, which may be translated,-- The air of Madrid is as sharp as a knife,-- It will spare a candle and blow out your life:-- and another where the truth, as in many Spanish proverbs, is sacrificed to the rhyme, saying that the climate is _tres meses invierno y nueve infierno,--_three months winter and nine months Tophet. At the first coming of the winter frosts the genuine son of Madrid gets out his capa, the national full round cloak, and never leaves it off till late in the hot spring days. They have a way of throwing one corner over the left shoulder, so that a bright strip of gay lining falls outward and pleasantly relieves the sombre monotony of the streets. In this way the face is completely covered by the heavy woollen folds, only the eyes being visible under the sombrero. The true Spaniard breathes no out-of-doors air all winter except through his cloak, and they stare at strangers who go about with uncovered faces enjoying the brisk air as if they were lunatics. But what makes the custom absurdly incongruous is that the women have no such terror of fresh air. While the hidalgo goes smothered in his wrappings his wife and daughter wear nothing on their necks and faces but their pretty complexions, and the gallant breeze, grateful for this generous confidence, repays them in roses. I have sometimes fancied that in this land of traditions this difference might have arisen in those days of adventure when the cavaliers had good reasons for keeping their faces concealed, while the senoras, we are bound to believe, have never done anything for which their own beauty was not the best excuse. Nearly all there is of interest in Madrid consists in the faces and the life of its people. There is but one portion of the city which appeals to the tourist's ordinary set of emotions. This is the old Moors' quarter,--the intricate jumble of streets and places on the western edge of the town, overlooking the bankrupt river. Here is St. Andrew's, the parish church where Isabella the Catholic and her pious husband used to offer their stiff and dutiful prayers. Behind it a market-place of the most primitive kind runs precipitately down to the Street of. Segovia, at such an angle that you wonder the turnips and carrots can ever be brought to keep their places on the rocky slope. If you will wander through the dark alleys and hilly streets of this quarter when twilight is softening the tall tenement-houses to a softer purpose, and the doorways are all full of gossiping groups, and here and there in the little courts you can hear the tinkling of a guitar and the drone of ballads, and see the idlers lounging by the fountains, and everywhere against the purple sky the crosses of old convents, while the evening air is musical with slow chimes from the full-arched belfries, it will not be hard to imagine you are in the Spain you have read and dreamed of. And, climbing out of this labyrinth of slums, you pass under the gloomy gates that lead to the Plaza Mayor. This once magnificent square is now as squalid and forsaken as the Place Royale of Paris, though it dates from a period comparatively recent. The mind so instinctively revolts at the contemplation of those orgies of priestly brutality which have made the very name of this place redolent with a fragrance of scorched Christians, that we naturally assign it an immemorial antiquity. But a glance at the booby face of Philip III. on his round-bellied charger in the centre of the square will remind us that this place was built at the same time the Mayflower's passengers were laying the massive foundations of the great Republic. The Autos-da-Fe, the plays of Lope de Vega, and the bull-fights went on for many years with impartial frequency under the approving eyes of royalty, which occupied a convenient balcony in the Panaderia, that overdressed building with the two extinguisher towers. Down to a period disgracefully near us, those balconies were occupied by the dull-eyed, pendulous-lipped tyrants who have sat on the throne of St. Ferdinand, while there in the spacious court below the varied sports went on,--to-day a comedy of Master Lope, to-morrow the gentle and joyous slaying of bulls, and the next day, with greater pomp and ceremony, with banners hung from the windows, and my lord the king surrounded by his women and his courtiers in their bravest gear, and the august presence of the chief priests and their idol in the form of wine and wafers,--the judgment and fiery sentence of the thinking men of Spain. Let us remember as we leave this accursed spot that the old palace of the Inquisition is now the Ministry of Justice, where a liberal statesman has just drawn up the bill of civil marriage; and that in the convent of the Trinitarians a Spanish Rationalist, the Minister of Fomento, is laboring to secularize education in the Peninsula. There is much coiling and hissing, but the fangs of the ser-pent are much less prompt and effective than of old. The wide Calle Mayor brings you in a moment out of these mouldy shadows and into the broad light of nowadays which shines in the Puerta del Sol. Here, under the walls of the Ministry of the Interior, the quick, restless heart of Madrid beats with the new life it has lately earned. The flags of the pavement have been often stained with blood, but of blood shed in combat, in the assertion of individual freedom. Although the government holds that fortress-palace with a grasp of iron, it can exercise no control over the free speech that asserts itself on the very sidewalk of the Principal. At every step you see news-stands filled with the sharp critical journalism of Spain,--often ignorant and unjust, but generally courteous in expression and independent in thought. Every day at noon the northern mails bring hither the word of all Europe to the awaking Spanish mind, and within that massive building the converging lines of the telegraph are whispering every hour their persuasive lessons of the world's essential unity. The movement of life and growth is bearing the population gradually away from that dark mediaeval Madrid of the Catholic kings through the Puerta del Sol to the airy heights beyond, and the new, fresh quarter built by the philosopher Bourbon Charles III. is becoming the most important part of the city. I think we may be permitted to hope that the long reign of savage faith and repression is broken at last, and that this abused and suffering people is about to enter into its rightful inheritance of modern freedom and progress. SPANISH LIVING AND DYING Nowhere is the sentiment of home stronger than in Spain. Strangers, whose ideas of the Spanish character have been gained from romance and comedy, are apt to note with some surprise the strength and prevalence of the domestic affections. But a moment's reflection shows us that nothing is more natural. It is the result of all their history. The old Celtic population had scarcely any religion but that of the family. The Goths brought in the pure Teutonic regard for woman and marriage. The Moors were distinguished by the patriarchal structure of their society. The Spaniards have thus learned the lesson of home in the school of history and tradition. The intense feeling of individuality, which so strongly marks the Spanish character, and which in the political world is so fatal an element of strife and obstruction, favors this peculiar domesticity. The Castilian is submissive to his king and his priest, haughty and inflexible with his equals. But his own house is a refuge from the contests of out of doors. The reflex of absolute authority is here observed, it is true. The Spanish father is absolute king and lord by his own hearthstone, but his sway is so mild and so readily acquiesced in that it is hardly felt. The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it, and the Spanish family seldom calls for the harsh exercise of parental authority. This is the rule. I do not mean to say there are no exceptions. The pride and jealousy inherent in the race make family quarrels, when they do arise, the bitterest and the fiercest in the world. In every grade of life these vindictive feuds among kindred are seen from time to time. Twice at least the steps of the throne have been splashed with royal blood shed by a princely hand. Duels between noble cousins and stabbing affrays between peasant brothers alike attest the unbending sense of personal dignity that still infects this people. A light word between husbands and wives sometimes goes unexplained, and the rift between them widens through life. I know some houses where the wife enters at one door and the husband at another; where if they meet on the stairs, they do not salute each other. Under the same roof they have lived for years and have not spoken. One word would heal all discord, and that word will never be spoken by either. They cannot be divorced,--the Church is inexorable. They will not incur the scandal of a public separation. So they pass lives of lonely isolation in adjoining apartments, both thinking rather better of each other and of themselves for this devilish persistence. An infraction of parental discipline is never forgiven. I knew a general whose daughter fell in love with his adjutant, a clever and amiable young officer. He had positively no objection to the suitor, but was surprised that there should be any love-making in his house without his previous suggestion. He refused his consent, and the young people were married without it. The father and son-in-law went off on a campaign, fought, and were wounded in the same battle. The general was asked to recommend his son-in-law for promotion. "I have no son-in-law!" "I mean your daughter's husband." "I have no daughter." "I refer to Lieutenant Don Fulano de Tal. He is a good officer. He distinguished himself greatly in the recent affair." "Ah! otra cosa!" said the grim father-in-law. His hate could not overcome his sense of justice. The youth got his promotion, but his general will not recognize him at the club. It is in the middle and lower classes that the most perfect pictures of the true Spanish family are to be found. The aristocracy is more or less infected with the contagion of Continental manners and morals. You will find there the usual proportion of wives who despise their husbands, and men who neglect their wives, and children who do not honor their parents. The smartness of American "pickles" has even made its appearance among the little countesses of Madrid. A lady was eating an ice one day, hungrily watched by the wide eyes of the infant heiress of the house. As the latter saw the last hope vanishing before the destroying spoon, she cried out, "Thou eatest all and givest me none,--maldita sea tu alma!" (accursed be thy soul). This dreadful imprecation was greeted with roars of laughter from admiring friends, and the profane little innocent was smothered in kisses and cream. Passing at noon by any of the squares or shady places of Madrid, you will see dozens of laboring-people at their meals. They sit on the ground, around the steaming and savory _cocido_ that forms the peasant Spaniard's unvaried dinner. The foundation is of _garbanzos,_ the large chick-pea of the country, brought originally to Europe by the Carthaginians,--the Roman _cicer,_ which gave its name to the greatest of the Latin orators. All other available vegetables are thrown in; on days of high gala a piece of meat is added, and some forehanded housewives attain the climax of luxury by flavoring the compound with a link of sausage. The mother brings the dinner and her tawny brood of nestlings. A shady spot is selected for the feast. The father dips his wooden spoon first into the vapory bowl, and mother and babes follow with grave decorum. Idle loungers passing these patriarchal groups, on their way to a vapid French breakfast at a restaurant, catch the fragrance of the _olla_ and the chatter of the family, and envy the dinner of herbs with love. There is no people so frugal. We often wonder how a Washington clerk can live on twelve hundred dollars, but this would be luxury in expensive Madrid. It is one of the dearest capitals in Europe. Foreigners are never weary decrying its high prices for poor fare; but Castilians live in good houses, dress well, receive their intimate friends, and hold their own with the best in the promenade, upon incomes that would seem penury to any country parson in America. There are few of the nobility who retain the great fortunes of former days. You can almost tell on your fingers the tale of the grandees in Madrid who can live without counting the cost. The army and navy are crowded with general officers whose political services have obliged their promotion. The state is too much impoverished to pay liberal salaries, and yet the rank of these officers requires the maintenance of a certain social position. Few of them are men of fortune. The result is that necessity has taught them to live well upon little, I knew widows who went everywhere in society, whose daughters were always charmingly dressed, who lived in a decent quarter of the town, and who had no resources whatever but a husband's pension. The best proof of the capacity of Spaniards to spread a little gold over as much space as a goldbeater could is the enormous competition for public employment. Half the young men in Spain are candidates for places under government ranging from $250 to $1000. Places of $1500 to $2000 are considered objects of legitimate ambition even to deputies and leading politicians. Expressed in reals these sums have a large and satisfying sound. Fifty dollars seems little enough for a month's work, but a thousand reals has the look of a most respectable salary. In Portugal, however, you can have all the delightful sensations of prodigality at a contemptible cost. You can pay, without serious damage to your purse, five thousand reis for your breakfast. It is the smallness of incomes and the necessity of looking sharply to the means of life that makes the young people of Madrid so prudent in their love affairs. I know of no place where ugly heir-esses are such belles, and where young men with handsome incomes are so universally esteemed by all who know them. The stars on the sleeves of young officers are more regarded than their dancing, and the red belt of a field officer is as winning in the eyes of beauty as a cestus of Venus. A. subaltern offered his hand and heart to a black-eyed girl of Castile. She said kindly but firmly that the night was too cloudy. "What," said the stupefied lover, "the sky is full of stars." "I see but one," said the prudent beauty, her fine eyes resting pensively upon his cuff, where one lone luminary indicated his rank. This spirit is really one of forethought, and not avarice. People who have enough for two almost always marry from inclination, and frequently take partners for life without a penny. If men were never henpecked except by learned wives, Spain would be the place of all others for timid men to marry in. The girls are bright, vivacious, and naturally very clever, but they have scarcely any education whatever. They never know the difference between _b_ and _v._ They throw themselves in orthography entirely upon your benevolence. They know a little music and a little French, but they have never crossed, even in a school-day excursion, the border line of the ologies. They do not even read novels. They are regarded as injurious, and cannot be trusted to the daughters until mamma has read them. Mamma never has time to read them, and so they are condemned by default. Fernan Caballero, in one of her sleepy little romances, refers to this illiterate character of the Spanish ladies, and says it is their chief charm,--that a Christian woman, in good society, ought not to know anything beyond her cookery-book and her missal. There is-an old proverb which coarsely conveys this idea: A mule that whinnies and a woman that talks Latin never come to any good. There is a contented acquiescence in this moral servitude among the fair Spaniards which would madden our agitatresses. (See what will become of the language when male words are crowded out of the dictionary!) It must be the innocence which springs from ignorance that induces an occasional coarseness of expression which surprises you in the conversation of those lovely young girls. They will speak with perfect freedom of the _etat-civil_ of a young unmarried mother. A maiden of fifteen said to me: "I must go to a party this evening _decolletee,_ and I hate it. Benigno is getting old enough to marry, and he wants to see all the girls in low neck before he makes up his mind." They all swear like troopers, without a thought of profanity. Their mildest expression of surprise is Jesus Maria! They change their oaths with the season. At the feast of the Immaculate Conception, the favorite oath is Maria Purissima. This is a time of especial interest to young girls. It is a period of compulsory confession,--conscience-cleaning, as they call it. They are all very pious in their way. They attend to their religious duties with the same interest which they displayed a few years before in dressing and undressing their dolls, and will display a few years later in putting the lessons they learned with their dolls to a more practical use. The visible concrete symbols and observances of religion have great influence with them. They are fond of making vows in tight places and faithfully observing them afterwards. In an hour's walk in the streets of Madrid you will see a dozen ladies with a leather strap buckled about their slender waists and hanging nearly to the ground. Others wear a knotted cord and tassels. These are worn as the fulfilment of vows, or penances. I am afraid they give rise to much worldly conjecture on the part of idle youth as to what amiable sins these pretty penitents can have been guilty of. It is not prudent to ask an explanation of the peculiar mercy, or remorse, which this purgatorial strap commemorates. You will probably not enlarge your stock of knowledge further than to learn that the lady in question considers you a great nuisance. The graceful lady who, in ascending the throne of France, has not ceased to be a thorough Spaniard, still preserves these pretty weaknesses of her youth. She vowed a chapel to her patron saint if her firstborn was a man-child, and paid it. She has hung a vestal lamp in the Church of Notre Dame des Victoires, in pursuance of a vow she keeps rigidly secret. She is a firm believer in relics also, and keeps a choice assortment on hand in the Tuileries for sudden emergencies. When old Baciocchi lay near his death, worn out by a horrible nervous disorder which would not let him sleep, the empress told the doctors, with great mystery, that she would cure him. After a few preliminary masses, she came into his room and hung on his bedpost a little gold-embroidered sachet containing (if the evidence of holy men is to be believed) a few threads of the swaddling-clothes of John the Baptist. Her simple childlike faith wrung the last grim smile from the tortured lips of the dying courtier. The very names of the Spanish women are a constant reminder of their worship. They are all named out of the calendar of saints and virgin martyrs. A large majority are christened Mary; but as this sacred name by much use has lost all distinctive meaning, some attribute, some especial invocation of the Virgin, is always coupled with it. The names of Dolores, Mercedes, Milagros, recall Our Lady of the Sorrows, of the Gifts, of the Miracles. I knew a hoydenish little gypsy who bore the tearful name of Lagrimas. The most appropriate name I heard for these large-eyed, soft-voiced beauties was Peligros, Our Lady of Dangers. Who could resist the comforting assurance of "Consuelo"? "Blessed," says my Lord Lytton, "is woman who consoles." What an image of maiden purity goes with the name of Nieves, the Virgin of the Snows! From a single cotillon of Castilian girls you can construct the whole history of Our Lady; Conception, Annunciation, Sorrows, Solitude, Assumption. As young ladies are never called by their family names, but always by their baptismal appellations, you cannot pass an evening in a Spanish _tertulia_ without being reminded of every stage in the life of the Immaculate Mother, from Bethlehem to Calvary and beyond. The common use of sacred words is universal in Catholic countries, but nowhere so striking as in Spain. There is a little solemnity in the French adieu. But the Spaniard says adios instead of "good-morning." No letter closes without the prayer, "God guard your Grace many years!" They say a judge announces to a murderer his sentence of death with the sacramental wish of length of days. There is something a little shocking to a Yankee mind in the label of Lachryma Christi; but in La Mancha they call fritters the Grace of God. The piety of the Spanish women does not prevent them from seeing some things clearly enough with their bright eyes. One of the most bigoted women in Spain recently said: "I hesitate to let my child go to confession. The priests ask young girls such infamous questions, that my cheeks burn when I think of them, after all these years." I stood one Christmas Eve in the cold midnight wind, waiting for the church doors to open for the night mass, the famous _misa del gallo._ On the steps beside me sat a decent old woman with her two daughters. At last she rose and said, "Girls, it is no use waiting any longer. The priests won't leave their housekeepers this cold night to save anybody's soul." In these two cases, taken from the two extremes of the Catholic society, there was no disrespect for the Church or for religion. Both these women believed with a blind faith. But they could not help seeing how unclean were the hands that dispensed the bread of life. The respect shown to the priesthood as a body is marvellous, in view of the profligate lives of many. The general progress of the age has forced most of the dissolute priests into hypocrisy. But their cynical immorality is still the bane of many families. And it needs but a glance at the vile manual of confession, called the Golden Key, the author of which is the too well known Padre Claret, confessor to the queen, to see the systematic moral poisoning the minds of Spanish women must undergo who pay due attention to what is called their religious duties. If a confessor obeys the injunctions of this high ecclesiastical authority, his fair penitents will have nothing to learn from a diligent perusal of Faublas or Casanova. It would, however, be unjust to the priesthood to consider them all as corrupt as royal chaplains. It requires a combination of convent and palace life to produce these finished specimens of mitred infamy. It is to be regretted that the Spanish women are kept in such systematic ignorance. They have a quicker and more active intelligence than the men. With a fair degree of education, much might be hoped from them in the intellectual development of the country. In society, you will at once be struck with the superiority of the women to their husbands and brothers in cleverness and appreciation. Among small tradesmen, the wife always comes to the rescue of her slow spouse when she sees him befogged in a bargain. In the fields, you ask a peasant some question about your journey. He will hesitate, and stammer, and end with, "_Quien sabe?"_ but his wife will answer with glib completeness all you want to know. I can imagine no cause for this, unless it be that the men cloud their brains all day with the fumes of tobacco, and the women do not. The personality of the woman is not so entirely merged in that of the husband as among us. She retains her own baptismal and family name through life. If Miss Matilda Smith marries Mr. Jonathan Jones, all vestige of the former gentle being vanishes at once from the earth, and Mrs. Jonathan Jones alone remains. But in Spain she would become Mrs. Matilda Smith de Jones, and her eldest-born would be called Don Juan Jones y Smith. You ask the name of a married lady in society, and you hear as often her own name as that of her husband. Even among titled people, the family name seems more highly valued than the titular designation. Everybody knows Narvaez, but how few have heard of the Duke of Valencia! The Regent Serrano has a name known and honored over the world, but most people must think twice before they remember the Duke de la Torre. Juan Prim is better known than the Marques de los Castillejos ever will be. It is perhaps due to the prodigality with which titles have been scattered in late years that the older titles are more regarded than the new, although of inferior grade. Thus Prim calls himself almost invariably the Conde de Reus, though his grandeeship came with his investiture as marquis. There is something quite noticeable about this easy way of treating one's name. We are accustomed to think a man can have but one name, and can sign it but in one way. Lord Derby can no more call himself Mr. Stanley than President Grant can sign a bill as U. Simpson. Yet both these signatures would be perfectly valid according to Spanish analogy. The Marquis of Santa Marta signs himself Guzman; the Marquis of Albaida uses no signature but Orense; both of these gentlemen being Republican deputies. I have seen General Prim's name signed officially, Conde de Reus, Marques de los Castillejos, Prim, J. Prim, Juan Prim, and Jean Prim, changing the style as often as the humor strikes him. Their forms of courtesy are, however, invariable. You can never visit a Spaniard without his informing you that you are in your own house. If, walking with him, you pass his residence, he asks you to enter your house and unfatigue yourself a moment. If you happen upon any Spaniard, of whatever class, at the hour of repast, he always offers you his dinner; if you decline, it must be with polite wishes for his digestion. With the Spaniards, no news is good news; it is therefore civil to ask a Spaniard if his lady-wife goes on without novelty, and to express your profound gratification on being assured that she does. Their forms of hospitality are evidently Moorish, derived from the genuine open hand and open tent of the children of the desert; now nothing is left of them but grave and decorous words. In the old times, one who would have refused such offers would have been held a churl; now one who would accept them would be regarded as a boor. There is still something primitive about the Spanish servants. A flavor of the old romances and the old comedy still hangs about them. They are chatty and confidential to a degree that appalls a stiff and formal Englishman of the upper middle class. The British servant is a chilly and statuesque image of propriety. The French is an intelligent and sympathizing friend. You can make of him what you like. But the Italian, and still more the Spaniard, is as gay as a child, and as incapable of intentional disrespect. The Castilian grandee does not regard his dignity as in danger from a moment's chat with a waiter. He has no conception of that ferocious decorum we Anglo-Saxons require from our manservants and our maidservants. The Spanish servant seems to regard it as part of his duty to keep your spirits gently excited while you dine by the gossip of the day. He joins also in your discussions, whether they touch lightly on the politics of the hour or plunge profoundly into the depths of philosophic research. He laughs at your wit, and swings his napkin with convulsions of mirth at your good stories. He tells you the history of his life while you are breaking your egg, and lays the story of his loves before you with your coffee. Yet he is not intrusive. He will chatter on without waiting for a reply, and when you are tired of him you can shut him off with a word. There are few Spanish servants so uninteresting but that you can find in them from time to time some sparks of that ineffable light which shines forever in Sancho and Figaro. The traditions of subordination, which are the result of long centuries of tyranny, have prevented the development of that feeling of independence among the lower orders, which in a freer race finds its expression in ill manners and discourtesy to superiors. I knew a gentleman in the West whose circumstances had forced him to become a waiter in a backwoods restaurant. He bore a deadly grudge at the profession that kept him from starving, and asserted his unconquered nobility of soul by scowling at his customers and swearing at the viands he dispensed. I remember the deep sense of wrong with which he would growl, "Two buckwheats, begawd!" You see nothing of this defiant spirit in Spanish servants. They are heartily glad to find employment, and ask no higher good-fortune than to serve acceptably. As to drawing comparisons between themselves and their masters, they never seem to think they belong to the same race. I saw a pretty grisette once stop to look at a show-window where there was a lay-figure completely covered with all manner of trusses. She gazed at it long and earnestly, evidently thinking it was some new fashion just introduced into the gay world. At last she tripped away with all the grace of her unfettered limbs, saying, "If the fine ladies have to wear all those machines, I am glad I am not made like them." Whether it be from their more regular and active lives, or from their being unable to pay for medical attendance, the poorer classes suffer less from sickness than their betters. An ordinary Spaniard is sick but once in his life, and that once is enough,--'twill serve. The traditions of the old satires which represented the doctor and death as always hunting in couples still survive in Spain. It is taken as so entirely a matter of course that a patient must die that the law of the land imposed a heavy fine upon physicians who did not bring a priest on their second visit. His labor of exhortation and confession was rarely wasted. There were few sufferers who recovered from the shock of that solemn ceremony in their chambers. Medical science still labors in Spain under the ban of ostracism, imposed in the days when all research was impiety. The Inquisition clamored for the blood of Vesalius, who had committed the crime of a demonstration in anatomy. He was forced into a pilgrimage of expiation, and died on the way to Palestine. The Church has always looked with a jealous eye upon the inquirers, the innovators. Why these probes, these lancets, these multifarious drugs, when the object in view could be so much more easily obtained by the judicious application of masses and prayers? So it has come about that the doctor is a Pariah, and miracles flourish in the Peninsula. At every considerable shrine you will see the walls covered with waxen models of feet, legs, hands, and arms secured by the miraculous interposition of the _genius loci,_ and scores of little crutches attesting the marvellous hour when they became useless. Each shrine, like a mineral spring, has its own especial virtue. A Santiago medal was better than quinine for ague. St. Veronica's handkerchief is sovereign for sore eyes. A bone of St. Magin supersedes the use of mercury. A finger-nail of San Frutos cured at Segovia a case of congenital idiocy. The Virgin of Ona acted as a vermifuge on royal infantas, and her girdle at Tortosa smooths their passage into this world. In this age of unfaith relics have lost much of their power. They turn out their score or so of miracles every feast-day, it is true, but are no longer capable of the _tours de force_ of earlier days. Cardinal de Retz saw with his eyes a man whose wooden legs were turned to capering flesh and blood by the image of the Pillar of Saragossa. But this was in the good old times before newspapers and telegraphs had come to dispel the twilight of belief. Now, it is excessively probable that neither doctor nor priest can do much if the patient is hit in earnest. He soon succumbs, and is laid out in his best clothes in an improvised chapel and duly sped on his way. The custom of burying the dead in the gown and cowl of monks has greatly passed into disuse. The mortal relics are treated with growing contempt, as the superstitions of the people gradually lose their concrete character. The soul is the important matter which the Church now looks to. So the cold clay is carted off to the cemetery with small ceremony. Even the coffins of the rich are jammed away into receptacles too small for them, and hastily plastered out of sight. The poor are carried off on trestles and huddled into their nameless graves, without following or blessing. Children are buried with some regard to the old Oriental customs. The coffin is of some gay and cheerful color, pink or blue, and is carried open to the grave by four of the dead child's young companions, a fifth walking behind with the ribboned coffin-lid. I have often seen these touching little parties moving through the bustling streets, the peaceful small face asleep under the open sky, decked with the fading roses and withering lilies. In all well-to-do families the house of death is deserted immediately after the funeral. The stricken ones retire to some other habitation, and there pass eight days in strict and inviolable seclusion. On the ninth day the great masses for the repose of the soul of the departed are said in the parish church, and all the friends of the family are expected to be present. These masses are the most important and expensive incident of the funeral. They cost from two hundred to one thousand dollars, according to the strength and fervor of the orisons employed. They are repeated several years on the anniversary of the decease, and afford a most sure and nourishing revenue to the Church. They are founded upon those feelings inseparable from every human heart, vanity and affection. Our dead friends must be as well prayed for as those of others, and who knows but that they may be in deadly need of prayers! To shorten their fiery penance by one hour, who would not fast for a week? On these anniversaries a black-bordered advertisement appears in the newspapers, headed by the sign of the cross and the Requiescat in Pace, announcing that on this day twelve months Don Fulano de Tal passed from earth garnished with the holy sacraments, that all the masses this day celebrated in such and such churches will be applied to the benefit of his spirit's repose, and that all Christian friends are hereby requested to commend his soul this day unto God. These efforts, if they do the dead no good, at least do the living no harm. A luxury of grief, in those who can afford it, consists in shutting up the house where a death has taken place and never suffering it to be opened again. I once saw a beautiful house and wide garden thus abandoned in one of the most fashionable streets of Madrid. I inquired about it, and found it was formerly the residence of the Duke of------. His wife had died there many years before, and since that day not a door nor a window had been opened. The garden gates were red and rough with rust. Grass grew tall and rank in the gravelled walks. A thick lush undergrowth had overrun the flower-beds and the lawns. The blinds were rotting over the darkened windows. Luxuriant vines clambered over all the mossy doors. The stucco was peeling from the walls in unwholesome blotches. Wild birds sang all day in the safe solitude. There was something impressive in this spot of mould and silence, lying there so green and implacable in the very heart of a great and noisy city. The duke lived in Paris, leading the rattling life of a man of the world. He never would sell or let that Madrid house. Perhaps in his heart also, that battered thoroughfare worn by the pattering boots of Ma-bine and the Bois, and the Quartier Breda, there was a green spot sacred to memory and silence, where no footfall should ever light, where no living voice should ever be heard, shut out from the world and its cares and its pleasures, where through the gloom of dead days he could catch a glimpse of a white hand, a flash of a dark eye, the rustle of a trailing robe, and feel sweeping over him the old magic of love's young dream, softening his fancy to tender regret and his eyes to a happy mist-- "Like that which kept the heart of Eden green Before the useful trouble of the rain." INFLUENCE OF TRADITION IN SPANISH LIFE Intelligent Spaniards with whom I have conversed on political matters have often exclaimed, "Ah, you Americans are happy! you have no traditions." The phrase was at first a puzzling one. We Americans are apt to think we have traditions,--a rather clearly marked line of precedents. And it is hard to see how a people should be happier without them. It is not anywhere considered a misfortune to have had a grandfather, I believe, and some very good folks take an innocent pride in that very natural fact. It was not easy to conceive why the possession of a glorious history of many centuries should be regarded as a drawback. But a closer observation of Spanish life and thought reveals the curious and hurtful effect of tradition upon every phase of existence. In the commonest events of every day you will find the flavor of past ages lingering in petty annoyances. The insecurity of the middle ages has left as a legacy to our times a complicated system of obstacles to a man getting into his own house at night. I lived in a pleasant house on the Prado, with a minute garden in front, and an iron gate and railing. This gate was shut and locked by the night watchman of the quarter at midnight,--so conscientiously that he usually had everything snug by half past eleven. As the same man had charge of a dozen or more houses, it was scarcely reasonable to expect him to be always at your own gate when you arrived. But by a singular fatality I think no man ever found him in sight at any hour. He is always opening some other gate or shutting some other door, or settling the affairs of the nation with a friend in the next block, or carrying on a chronic courtship at the lattice of some olive-cheeked soubrette around the corner. Be that as it may, no one ever found him on hand; and there is nothing to do but to sit down on the curbstone and lift up your voice and shriek for him until he comes. At two o'clock of a morning in January the exercise is not improving to the larynx or the temper. There is a tradition in the very name of this worthy. He is called the Sereno, because a century or so ago he used to call the hour and the state of the weather, and as the sky is almost always cloudless here, he got the name of the Sereno, as the quail is called Bob White, from much iteration. The Sereno opens your gate and the door of your house. When you come to your own floor you must ring, and your servant takes a careful survey of you through a latticed peep-hole before he will let you in. You may positively forbid this every day in the year, but the force of habit is too strong in the Spanish mind to suffer amendment. This absurd custom comes evidently down from a time of great lawlessness and license, when no houses were secure without these precautions, when people rarely stirred from their doors after nightfall, and when a door was never opened to a stranger. Now, when no such dangers exist, the annoying and senseless habit still remains, because no one dreams of changing anything which their fathers thought proper. Three hundred thousand people in Madrid submit year after year to this nightly cross, and I have never heard a voice raised in protest, nor even in defence of the custom. There is often a bitterness of opposition to evident improvement which is hard to explain. In the last century, when the eminent naturalist Bowles went down to the Almaden silver-mines, by appointment of the government, to see what was the cause of their exhaustion, he found that they had been worked entirely in perpendicular shafts instead of following the direction of the veins. He perfected a plan for working them in this simple and reasonable way, and no earthly power could make the Spanish miners obey his orders. There was no precedent for this new process, and they would not touch it. They preferred starvation rather than offend the memory of their fathers by a change. At last they had to be dismissed and a full force imported from Germany, under whose hands the mines became instantly enormously productive. I once asked a very intelligent English contractor why he used no wheelbarrows in his work. He had some hundreds of stalwart navvies employed carrying dirt in small wicker baskets to an embankment. He said the men would not use them. Some said it broke their backs. Others discovered a capital way of amusing themselves by putting the barrow on their heads and whirling the wheel as rapidly as possible with their hands. This was a game which never grew stale. The contractor gave up in despair, and went back to the baskets. But it is in the official regions that tradition is most powerful. In the budget of 1870 there was a curious chapter called "Charges of Justice." This consisted of a collection of articles appropriating large sums of money for the payment of feudal taxes to the great aristocracy of the kingdom as a compensation for long extinct seigniories. The Duke of Rivas got thirteen hundred dollars for carrying the mail to Victoria. The Duke of San Carlos draws ten thousand dollars for carrying the royal correspondence to the Indies. Of course this service ceased to belong to these families some centuries ago, but the salary is still paid. The Duke of Almodovar is well paid for supplying the _baton_ of office to the Alguazil of Cordova. The Duke of Osuna--one of the greatest grandees of the kingdom, a gentleman who has the right to wear seventeen hats in the presence of the Queen--receives fifty thousand dollars a year for imaginary feudal services. The Count of Altamira, who, as his name indicates, is a gentleman of high views, receives as a salve for the suppression of his fief thirty thousand dollars a year. In consideration of this sum he surrenders, while it is punctually paid, the privilege of hanging his neighbors. When the budget was discussed, a Republican member gently criticised this chapter; but his amendment for an investigation of these charges was indignantly rejected. He was accused of a shocking want of Espanolismo. He was thought to have no feeling in his heart for the glories of Spain. The respectability of the Chamber could find but one word injurious enough to express their contempt for so shameless a proposition; they said it was little better than socialism. The "charges" were all voted. Spain, tottering on the perilous verge of bankruptcy, her schoolmasters not paid for months, her sinking fund plundered, her credit gone out of sight, borrowing every cent she spends at thirty per cent., is proud of the privilege of paying into the hands of her richest and most useless class this gratuity of twelve million reals simply because they are descended from the robber chiefs of the darker ages. There is a curious little comedy played by the family of Medina Celi at every new coronation of a king of Spain. The duke claims to be the rightful heir to the throne. He is descended from Prince Ferdinand, who, dying before his father, Don Alonso X., left his babies exposed to the cruel kindness of their uncle Sancho, who, to save them the troubles of the throne, assumed it himself and transmitted it to his children,--all this some half dozen centuries ago. At every coronation the duke formally protests; an athletic and sinister-looking court headsman comes down to his palace in the Carrera San Geronimo, and by threats of immediate decapitation induces the duke to sign a paper abdicating his rights to the throne of all the Spains. The duke eats the Bourbon leek with inward profanity, and feels that he has done a most clever and proper thing. This performance is apparently his only object and mission in life. This one sacrifice to tradition is what he is born for. The most important part of a Spaniard's signature is the _rubrica_ or flourish with which it closes. The monarch's hand is set to public acts exclusively by this _parafe._ This evidently dates from the time when none but priests could write. In Madrid the mule-teams are driven tandem through the wide streets, because this was necessary in the ages when the streets were narrow. There is even a show of argument sometimes to justify an adherence to things as they are. About a century ago there was an effort made by people who had lived abroad, and so become conscious of the possession of noses, to have the streets of Madrid cleaned. The proposition was at first received with apathetic contempt, but when the innovators persevered they met the earnest and successful opposition of all classes. The Cas-tilian _savans_ gravely reported that the air of Madrid, which blew down from the snowy Guadarra-mas, was so thin and piercing that it absolutely needed the gentle corrective of the ordure-heaps to make it fit for human lungs. There is no nation in Europe in which so little washing is done. I do not think it is because the Spaniards do not want to be neat. They are, on the whole, the best-dressed people on the Continent. The hate of ablutions descends from those centuries of warfare with the Moors. The heathens washed themselves daily; therefore a Christian should not. The monks, who were too lazy to bathe, taught their followers to be filthy by precept and example. Water was never to be applied externally except in baptism. It was a treacherous element, and dallying with it had gotten Bathsheba and Susanna into no end of trouble. So when the cleanly infidels were driven out of Granada, the pious and hydrophobic Cardinal Ximenez persuaded the Catholic sovereigns to destroy the abomination of baths they left behind. Until very recently the Spanish mind has been unable to separate a certain idea of immorality from bathing. When Madame Daunoy, one of the sprightliest of observers, visited the court of Philip IV., she found it was considered shocking among the ladies of the best society to wash the face and hands. Once or twice a week they would glaze their pretty visages with the white of an egg. Of late years this prejudice has given way somewhat; but it has lasted longer than any monument in Spain. These, however, are but trivial manifestations of that power of tradition which holds the Spanish intellect imprisoned as in a vice of iron. The whole life of the nation is fatally influenced by this blind reverence for things that have been. It may be said that by force of tradition Christian morality has been driven from individual life by religion, and honesty has been supplanted as a rule of public conduct by honor,--a wretched substitute in either case, and irreconcilably at war with the spirit of the age. The growth of this double fanaticism is easily explained; it is the result of centuries of religious wars. From the hour when Pelayo, the first of the Asturian kings, successfully met and repulsed the hitherto victorious Moors in his rocky fortress of Covadonga, to the day when Boabdil the Unlucky saw for the last time through streaming tears the vermilion towers of Alhambra crowned with the banner of the cross, there was not a year of peace in Spain. No other nation has had such an experience. Seven centuries of constant warfare, with three thousand battles; this is the startling epitome of Spanish history from the Mahometan conquest to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. In this vast war there was laid the foundation of the national character of to-day. Even before the conquering Moslem crossed from Africa, Spain was the most deeply religious country in Europe; and by this I mean the country in which the Church was most powerful in its relations with the State. When the Council of Toledo, in 633, received the king of Castile, he fell on his face at the feet of the bishops before venturing to address them. When the hosts of Islam had overspread the Peninsula, and the last remnant of Christianity had taken refuge in the inaccessible hills of the northwest, the richest possession they carried into these inviolate fastnesses was a chest of relics,--knuckle-bones of apostles and splinters of true crosses, in which they trusted more than in mortal arms. The Church had thus a favorable material to work upon in the years of struggle that followed. The circumstances all lent themselves to the scheme of spiritual domination. The fight was for the cross against the crescent; the symbol of the quarrel was visible and tangible. The Spaniards were poor and ignorant and credulous. The priests were enough superior to lead and guide them, and not so far above them as to be out of the reach of their sympathies and their love. They marched with them. They shared their toils and dangers. They stimulated their hate of the enemy. They taught them that their cruel anger was the holy wrath of God. They held the keys of eternal weal or woe, and rewarded subservience to the priestly power with promises of everlasting felicity; while the least symptom of rebellion in thought or action was punished with swift death and the doom of endless flames. There was nothing in the Church which the fighting Spaniard could recognize as a reproach to himself. It was as bitter, as brave, as fierce, and revengeful as he. His credulity regarded it as divine, and worthy of blind adoration, and his heart went out to it with the sympathy of perfect love. In these centuries of war there was no commerce, no manufactures, no settled industry of importance among the Spaniards. There was consequently no wealth, none of that comfort and ease which is the natural element of doubt and discussion. Science did not exist. The little learning of the time was exclusively in the hands of the priesthood. If from time to time an intelligent spirit struggled against the chain of unquestioning bigotry that bound him, he was rigorously silenced by prompt and bloody punishment. There seemed to be no need of discussion, no need of inculcation of doctrine. The serious work of the time was the war with the infidel. The clergy managed everything. The question, "What shall I do to be saved?" never entered into those simple and ignorant minds. The Church would take care of those who did her bidding. Thus it was that in the hammering of those struggling ages the nation became welded together in one compact mass of unquestioning, unreasoning faith, which the Church could manage at its own good pleasure. It was also in these times that Spanish honor took its rise. This sentiment is so nearly connected with that of personal loyalty that they may be regarded as phases of the same monarchical spirit. The rule of honor as distinguished from honesty and virtue is the most prominent characteristic of monarchy, and for that reason the political theorists from the time of Montesquieu have pronounced in favor of the monarchy as a more practicable form of government than the republic, as requiring a less perfect and delicate machinery, men of honor being far more common than men of virtue. As in Spain, owing to special conditions, monarchy attained the most perfect growth and development which the world has seen, the sentiment of honor, as a rule of personal and political action, has there reached its most exaggerated form. I use this word, of course, in its restricted meaning of an intense sense of personal dignity, and readiness to sacrifice for this all considerations of interest and morality. This phase of the Spanish character is probably derived in its germ from the Gothic blood of their ancestors. Their intense self-assertion has been, in the Northern races, modified by the progress of intelligence and the restraints of municipal law into a spirit of sturdy self-respect and a disinclination to submit to wrong. The Goths of Spain have unfortunately never gone through this civilizing process. Their endless wars never gave an opportunity for the development of the purely civic virtues of respect and obedience to law. The people at large were too wretched, too harried by constant coming and going of the waves of war, to do more than live, in a shiftless, hand-to-mouth way, from the proceeds of their flocks and herds. There were no cities of importance within the Spanish lines. There was no opportunity for the growth of the true burgher spirit. There was no law to speak of in all these years except the twin despotism of the Church and the king. If there had been dissidence between them it might have been better for the people. But up to late years there has never been a quarrel between the clergy and the crown. Their interests were so identified that the dual tyranny was stronger than even a single one could have been. The crown always lending to the Church when necessary the arm of flesh, and the Church giving to the despotism of the sceptre the sanction of spiritual authority, an absolute power was established over body and soul. The spirit of individual independence inseparable from Gothic blood being thus forced out of its natural channels of freedom of thought and municipal liberty, it remained in the cavaliers of the army of Spain in the same barbarous form which it had held in the Northern forests,--a physical self-esteem and a readiness to fight on the slightest provocation. This did not interfere with the designs of the Church and was rather a useful engine against its enemies. The absolute power of the crown kept the spirit of feudal arrogance in check while the pressure of a common danger existed. The close cohesion which was so necessary in camp and Church prevented the tendency to disintegration, while the right of life and death was freely exercised by the great lords on their distant estates without interference. The predominating power of the crown was too great and too absolute to result in the establishment of any fixed principle of obedience to law. The union of crozier and sceptre had been, if anything, too successful. The king was so far above the nobility that there was no virtue in obeying him. His commission was divine, and he was no more confined by human laws than the stars and the comets. The obedience they owed and paid him was not respect to law. It partook of the character of religious worship, and left untouched and untamed in their savage hearts the instinct of resistance to all earthly claims of authority. Such was the condition of the public spirit of Spain at the beginning of that wonderful series of reigns from Ferdinand and Isabella to their great-grandson Philip II., which in less than a century raised Spain to the summit of greatness and built up a realm on which the sun never set. All the events of these prodigious reigns contributed to increase and intensify the national traits to which we have referred. The discovery of America flooded Europe with gold, and making the better class of Spaniards the richest people in the world naturally heightened their pride and arrogance. The long and eventful religious wars of Charles V. and Philip II. gave employment and distinction to thousands of families whose vanity was nursed by the royal favor, and whose ferocious self-will was fed and pampered by the blood of heretics and the spoil of rebels. The national qualities of superstition and pride made the whole cavalier class a wieldy and effective weapon in the hands of the monarch, and the use he made of them reacted upon these very traits, intensifying and affirming them. So terrible was this absolute command of the spiritual and physical forces of the kingdom possessed by the monarchs of that day, that when the Reformation flashed out, a beacon in the northern sky of political and religious freedom to the world, its light could not penetrate into Spain. There was a momentary struggle there, it is true. But so apathetic was the popular mind that the effort to bring it into sympathy with the vast movement of the age was hopeless from the beginning. The axe and the fagot made rapid work of the heresy. After only ten years of burnings and beheadings Philip II. could boast that not a heretic lived in his borders. Crazed by his success and his unquestioned omnipotence at home, and drunken with the delirious dream that God's wrath was breathing through him upon a revolted world, he essayed to crush heresy throughout Europe; and in this mad and awful crime his people undoubtingly seconded him. In this he failed, the stars in their courses fighting against him, the God that his worship slandered taking sides against him. But history records what rivers of blood he shed in the long and desperate fight, and how lovingly and adoringly his people sustained him. He killed, in cold blood, some forty thousand harmless people for their faith, besides the vastly greater number whose lives he took in battle. Yet this horrible monster, who is blackened with every crime at which humanity shudders, who had no grace of manhood, no touch of humanity, no gleam of sympathy which could redeem the gloomy picture of his ravening life, was beloved and worshipped as few men have been since the world has stood. The common people mourned him at his death with genuine unpaid sobs and tears. They will weep even yet at the story of his edifying death,--this monkish vampire breathing his last with his eyes fixed on the cross of the mild Nazarene, and tormented with impish doubts as to whether he had drunk blood enough to fit him for the company of the just! His successors rapidly fooled away the stupendous empire that had filled the sixteenth century with its glory. Spain sank from the position of ruler of the world and queen of the seas to the place of a second-rate power, by reason of the weakening power of superstition and bad government, and because the people and the chieftains had never learned the lesson of law. The clergy lost no tittle of their power. They went on, gayly roasting their heretics and devouring the substance of the people, more prosperous than ever in those days of national decadence. Philip III. gave up the government entirely to the Duke of Lerma, who formed an alliance with the Church, and they led together a joyous life. In the succeeding reign the Church had become such a gnawing cancer upon the state that the servile Cortes had the pluck to protest against its inroads. There were in 1626 nine thousand monasteries for men, besides nunneries. There were thirty-two thousand Dominican and Franciscan friars. In the diocese of Seville alone there were fourteen thousand chaplains. There was a panic in the land. Every one was rushing to get into holy orders. The Church had all the bread. Men must be monks or starve. _Zelus domus tuae come-dit me,_ writes the British ambassador, detailing these facts. We must remember that this was the age when the vast modern movement of inquiry and investigation was beginning. Bacon was laying in England the foundations of philosophy, casting with his prophetic intelligence the horoscope of unborn sciences. Descartes was opening new vistas of thought to the world. But in Spain, while the greatest names of her literature occur at this time, they aimed at no higher object than to amuse their betters. Cervantes wrote Quixote, but he died in a monk's hood; and Lope de Vega was a familiar of the Inquisition. The sad story of the mind of Spain in this momentous period may be written in one word,--everybody believed and nobody inquired. The country sank fast into famine and anarchy. The madness of the monks and the folly of the king expelled the Moors in 1609, and the loss of a million of the best mechanics and farmers of Spain struck the nation with a torpor like that of death. In 1650 Sir Edward Hyde wrote that "affairs were in huge disorder." People murdered each other for a loaf of bread. The marine perished for want of sailors. In the stricken land nothing flourished but the rabble of monks and the royal authority. This is the curious fact. The Church and the Crown had brought them to this misery, yet better than their lives the Spaniards loved the Church and the Crown. A word against either would have cost any man his life in those days. The old alliance still hung together firmly. The Church bullied and dragooned the king in private, but it valued his despotic power too highly ever to slight it in public. There was something superhuman about the faith and veneration with which the people, and the aristocracy as well, regarded the person of the king. There was somewhat of gloomy and ferocious dignity about Philip II. which might easily bring a courtier to his knees; but how can we account for the equal reverence that was paid to the ninny Philip III., the debauched trifler Philip IV., and the drivelling idiot Charles II.? Yet all of these were invested with the same attributes of the divine. Their hands, like those of Midas, had the gift of making anything they touched too precious for mortal use. A horse they had mounted could never be ridden again. A woman they had loved must enter a nunnery when they were tired of her. When Buckingham came down to Spain with Charles of England, the Conde-Duque of Olivares was shocked and scandalized at the relation of confidential friendship that existed between the prince and the duke. The world never saw a prouder man than Olivares. His picture by Velazquez hangs side by side with that of his royal master in Madrid. You see at a glance that the count-duke is the better man physically, mentally, morally. But he never dreamed it. He thought in his inmost heart that the best thing about him was the favor of the worthless fribble whom he governed. Through all the vicissitudes of Spanish history the force of these married superstitions--reverence for the Church as distinguished from the fear of God, and reverence for the king as distinguished from respect for law--have been the ruling characteristics of the Spanish mind. Among the fatal effects of this has been the extinction of rational piety and rational patriotism. If a man was not a good Catholic he was pretty sure to be an atheist. If he did not honor the king he was an outlaw. The wretched story of Spanish dissensions beyond seas, and the loss of the vast American empire, is distinctly traceable to the exaggerated sentiment of personal honor, unrestrained by the absolute authority of the crown. It seems impossible for the Spaniard of history and tradition to obey anything out of his sight. The American provinces have been lost one by one through petty quarrels and colonial rivalries. At the first word of dispute their notion of honor obliges them to fly to arms, and when blood has been shed reconciliation is impossible. So weak is the principle of territorial loyalty, that whenever the Peninsula government finds it necessary to overrule some violence of its own soldiers, these find no difficulty in marching over to the insurrection, or raising a fresh rebellion of their own. So little progress has there been in Spain from the middle ages to to-day in true political science, that we see such butchers as Caballero and Valmaseda repeating to-day the crimes and follies of Cortes and Pamfilo Narvaez, of Pizarro and Almagro, and the revolt of the bloodthirsty volunteers of the Havana is only a question of time. It is true that in later years there has been the beginning of a better system of thought and discussion in Spain. But the old tradition still holds its own gallantly in Church and state. Nowhere in the world are the forms of religion so rigidly observed, and the precepts of Christian morality less regarded. The most facile beauties in Madrid are severe as Minervas on Holy Thursday. I have seen a dozen fast men at the door of a gambling-house fall on their knees in the dust as the Host passed by in the street. Yet the fair were no less frail and the senoritos were no less profligate for this unfeigned reverence for the outside of the cup and platter. In the domain of politics there is still the lamentable disproportion between honor and honesty. A high functionary cares nothing if the whole Salon del Prado talks of his pilferings, but he will risk his life in an instant if you call him no gentleman. The word "honor" is still used in all legislative assemblies, even in England and America. But the idea has gone by the board in all democracies, and the word means no more than the chamberlain's sword or the speaker's mace. The only criterion which the statesman of the nineteenth century applies to public acts is that of expediency and legality. The first question is, "Is it lawful?" the second, "Does it pay?" Both of these are questions of fact, and as such susceptible of discussion and proof. The question of honor and religion carries us at once into the realm of sentiment where no demonstration is possible. But this is where every question is planted from the beginning in Spanish politics. Every public matter presents itself under this form: "Is it consistent with Spanish honor?" and "Will it be to the advantage of the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church?" Now, nothing is consistent with Spanish honor which does not recognize the Spain of to-day as identical with the Spain of the sixteenth century, and the bankrupt government of Madrid as equal in authority to the world-wide autocracy of Charles V. And nothing is thought to be to the advantage of the Church which does not tend to the concubinage of the spiritual and temporal power, and to the muzzling of speech and the drugging of the mind to sleep. Let any proposition be made which touches this traditional susceptibility of race, no matter how sensible or profitable it may be, and you hear in the Cortes and the press, and, louder than all, among the idle cavaliers of the _cafes,_ the wildest denunciations of the treason that would consent to look at things as they are. The men who have ventured to support the common-sense view are speedily stormed into silence or timid self-defence. The sword of Guzman is brandished in the Chambers, the name of Pelayo is invoked, the memory of the Cid is awakened, and the proposition goes out in a blaze of patriotic pyrotechnics, to the intense satisfaction of the unthinking and the grief of the judicious. The senoritos go back to the serious business of their lives--coffee and cigarettes--with a genuine glow of pride in a country which is capable of the noble self-sacrifice of cutting off its nose to spite somebody else's face. But I repeat, the most favorable sign of the times is that this tyranny of tradition is losing its power. A great deal was done by the single act of driving out the queen. This was a blow at superstition which gave to the whole body politic a most salutary shock. Never before in Spain had a revolution been directed at the throne. Before it was always an obnoxious ministry that was to be driven out. The monarch remained; and the exiled outlaw of to-day might be premier to-morrow. But the fall of Novaliches at the Bridge of Alcolea decided the fate not only of the ministry but of the dynasty; and while General Concha was waiting for the train to leave Madrid, Isabel of Bourbon and Divine Right were passing the Pyrenees. Although the moral power of the Church is still so great, the incorporation of freedom of worship in the constitution of 1869 has been followed by a really remarkable development of freedom of thought. The proposition was regarded by some with horror and by others with contempt. One of the most enlightened statesmen in Spain once said to me, "The provision for freedom of worship in the constitution is a mere abstract proposition,--it can never have any practical value except for foreigners. I cannot conceive of a Spaniard being anything but a Catholic." And so powerful was this impression in the minds of the deputies that the article only accords freedom of worship to foreigners in Spain, and adds, hypothetically, that if any Spaniards should profess any other religion than the Catholic, they are entitled to the same liberty as foreigners. The Inquisition has been dead half a century, but you can see how its ghost still haunts the official mind of Spain. It is touching to see how the broken links of the chain of superstition still hang about even those who imagine they are defying it. As in their Christian burials, following unwittingly the example of the hated Moors, they bear the corpse with uncovered face to the grave, and follow it with the funeral torch of the Romans, so the formula of the Church clings even to the mummery of the atheists. Not long ago in Madrid a man and woman who belonged to some fantastic order which rejected religion and law had a child born to them in the course of things, and determined that it should begin life free from the taint of superstition. It should not be christened, it should be named, in the Name of Reason. But they could not break loose from the idea of baptism. They poured a bottle of water on the shivering nape of the poor little neophyte, and its frail life went out in its first wheezing week. But in spite of all this a spirit of religious inquiry is growing up in Spain, and the Church sees it and cannot prevent it. It watches the liberal newspapers and the Protestant prayer-meetings much as the old giant in Bunyan's dream glared at the passing pilgrims, mumbling and muttering toothless curses. It looks as if the dead sleep of uniformity of thought were to be broken at last, and Spain were to enter the healthful and vivifying atmosphere of controversy. Symptoms of a similar change may be seen in the world of politics. The Republican party is only a year or two old, but what a vigorous and noisy infant it is! With all its faults and errors, it seems to have the promise of a sturdy and wholesome future. It refuses to be bound by the memories of the past, but keeps its eyes fixed on the brighter possibilities to come. Its journals, undeterred by the sword of Guzman or the honor of all the Caballeros,--the men on horseback,--are advocating such sensible measures as justice to the Antilles, and the sale of outlying property, which costs more than it produces. Emilio Castelar, casting behind him all the restraints of tradition, announces as his idea of liberty "the right of all citizens to obey nothing but the law." There is no sounder doctrine than this preached in Manchester or Boston. If the Spanish people can be brought to see that God is greater than the Church, and that the law is above the king, the day of final deliverance is at hand. TAUROMACHY The bull-fight is the national festival of Spain. The rigid Britons have had their fling at it for many years. The effeminate _badaud_ of Paris has declaimed against its barbarity. Even the aristocracy of Spain has begun to suspect it of vulgarity and to withdraw from the arena the light of its noble countenance. But the Spanish people still hold it to their hearts and refuse to be weaned from it. "As Panem et Circenses was the cry Among the Roman populace of old, So Pan y Toros is the cry in Spain." It is a tradition which has passed into their national existence. They received it from nowhere. They have transmitted it nowhither except to their own colonies. In late years an effort has been made to transplant it, but with small success. There were a few bull-fights four years ago at Havre. There was a sensation of curiosity which soon died away. This year in London the experiment was tried, but was hooted out of existence, to the great displeasure of the Spanish journals, who said the ferocious Islanders would doubtless greatly prefer baiting to death a half dozen Irish serfs from the estate of Lord Fritters,--a gentle diversion in which we are led to believe the British peers pass their leisure hours. It is this monopoly of the bull-fight which so endears it to the Spanish heart. It is to them conclusive proof of the vast superiority of both the human and taurine species in Spain. The eminent torero, Pepe Illo, said: "The love of bulls is inherent in man, especially in the Spaniard, among which glorious people there have been bull-fights ever since bulls were, because," adds Pepe, with that modesty which forms so charming a trait of the Iberian character, "the Spanish men are as much more brave than all other men, as the Spanish bull is more savage and valiant than all other bulls." The sport permeates the national life. I have seen it woven into the tapestry of palaces, and rudely stamped on the handkerchief of the peasant. It is the favorite game of children in the street. Loyal Spain was thrilled with joy recently on reading in its Paris correspondence that when the exiled Prince of Asturias went for a half-holiday to visit his imperial comrade at the Tuileries, the urchins had a game of "toro" on the terrace, admirably conducted by the little Bourbon and followed up with great spirit by the little Montijo-Bonaparte. The bull-fight has not always enjoyed the royal favor. Isabel the Catholic would fain have abolished bathing and bull-fighting together. The Spaniards, who willingly gave up their ablutions, stood stoutly by their bulls, and the energetic queen was baffled. Again when the Bourbons came in with Philip V., the courtiers turned up their thin noses at the coarse diversion, and induced the king to abolish it. It would not stay abolished, however, and Philip's successor built the present coliseum in expiation. The spectacle has, nevertheless, lost much of its early splendor by the hammering of time. Formerly the gayest and bravest gentlemen of the court, mounted on the best horses in the kingdom, went into the arena and defied the bull in the names of their lady-loves. Now the bull is baited and slain by hired artists, and the horses they mount are the sorriest hacks that ever went to the knacker. One of the most brilliant shows of the kind that was ever put upon the scene was the Festival of Bulls given by Philip IV. in honor of Charles I., "When the Stuart came from far, Led by his love's sweet pain, To Mary, the guiding star That shone in the heaven of Spain." And the memory of that dazzling occasion was renewed by Ferdinand VII. in the year of his death, when he called upon his subjects to swear allegiance to his baby Isabel. This festival took place in the Plaza Mayor. The king and court occupied the same balconies which Charles and his royal friend and model had filled two centuries before. The champions were poor nobles, of good blood but scanty substance, who fought for glory and pensions, and had quadrilles of well-trained bull-fighters at their stirrups to prevent the farce from becoming tragedy. The royal life of Isabel of Bourbon was inaugurated by the spilled blood of one hundred bulls save one. The gory prophecy of that day has been well sustained. Not one year has passed since then free from blood shed in her cause. But these extraordinary attractions are not necessary to make a festival of bulls the most seductive of all pleasures to a Spaniard. On any pleasant Sunday afternoon, from Easter to All Souls, you have only to go into the street to see that there is some great excitement fusing the populace into one living mass of sympathy. All faces are turned one way, all minds are filled with one purpose. From the Puerta del Sol down the wide Alcala a vast crowd winds, solid as a glacier and bright as a kaleidoscope. From the grandee in his blazoned carriage to the manola in her calico gown, there is no class unrepresented. Many a red hand grasps the magic ticket which is to open the realm of enchantment to-day, and which represents short commons for a week before. The pawnbrokers' shops have been very animated for the few preceding days. There is nothing too precious to be parted with for the sake of the bulls. Many of these smart girls have made the ultimate sacrifice for that coveted scrap of paper. They would leave one their mother's cross with the children of Israel rather than not go. It is no cheap entertainment. The worst places in the broiling sun cost twenty cents, four reals; and the boxes are sold usually at fifteen dollars. These prices are necessary to cover the heavy expenses of bulls, horses, and gladiators. The way to the bull-ring is one of indescribable animation. The cabmen drive furiously this day their broken-kneed nags, who will soon be found on the horns of the bulls, for this is the natural death of the Madrid cab-horse; the omnibus teams dash gayly along with their shrill chime of bells; there are the rude jests of clowns and the high voices of excited girls; the water-venders droning their tempting cry, "Cool as the snow!" the sellers of fans and the merchants of gingerbread picking up their harvests in the hot and hungry crowd. The Plaza de Toros stands just outside the monumental gate of the Alcala. It is a low, squat, prison-like circus of stone, stuccoed and whitewashed, with no pretence of ornament or architectural effect. There is no nonsense whatever about it. It is built for the killing of bulls and for no other purpose. Around it, on a day of battle, you will find encamped great armies of the lower class of Madrilenos, who, being at financial ebb-tide, cannot pay to go in. But they come all the same, to be in the enchanted neighborhood, to hear the shouts and roars of the favored ones within, and to seize any possible occasion for getting in. Who knows? A caballero may come out and give them his check. An English lady may become disgusted and go home, taking away numerous lords whose places will be vacant. The sky may fall, and they may catch four reals' worth of larks. It is worth taking the chances. One does not soon forget the first sight of the full coliseum. In the centre is the sanded arena, surrounded by a high barrier. Around this rises the graded succession of stone benches for the people; then numbered seats for the connoisseurs; and above a row of boxes extending around the circle. The building holds, when full, some fourteen thousand persons; and there is rarely any vacant space. For myself I can say that what I vainly strove to imagine in the coliseum at Rome, and in the more solemn solitude of the amphitheatres of Capua and Pompeii, came up before me with the vividness of life on entering the bull-ring of Madrid. This, and none other, was the classic arena. This was the crowd that sat expectant, under the blue sky, in the hot glare of the South, while the doomed captives of Dacia or the sectaries of Judea commended their souls to the gods of the Danube, or the Crucified of Galilee. Half the sand lay in the blinding sun. Half the seats were illuminated by the fierce light. The other half was in shadow, and the dark crescent crept slowly all the afternoon across the arena as the sun declined in the west. It is hard to conceive a more brilliant scene. The women put on their gayest finery for this occasion. In the warm light, every bit of color flashes out, every combination falls naturally into its place. I am afraid the luxuriance of hues in the dress of the fair Iberians would be considered shocking in Broadway, but in the vast frame and broad light of the Plaza the effect was very brilliant. Thousands of party-colored paper fans are sold at the ring. The favorite colors are the national red and yellow, and the fluttering of these broad, bright disks of color is dazzlingly attractive. There is a gayety of conversation, a quick fire of repartee, shouts of recognition and salutation, which altogether make up a bewildering confusion. The weary young water-men scream their snow-cold refreshment. The orange-men walk with their gold-freighted baskets along the barrier, and throw their oranges with the most marvellous skill and certainty to people in distant boxes or benches. They never miss their mark. They will throw over the heads of a thousand people a dozen oranges into the outstretched hands of customers, so swiftly that it seems like one line of gold from the dealer to the buyer. At length the blast of a trumpet announces the clearing of the ring. The idlers who have been lounging in the arena are swept out by the alguaciles, and the hum of conversation gives way to an expectant silence. When the last loafer has reluctantly retired, the great gate is thrown open, and the procession of the toreros enters. They advance in a glittering line: first the marshals of the day, then the picadors on horseback, then the matadors on foot surrounded each by his quadrille of chulos. They walk towards the box which holds the city fathers, under whose patronage the show is given, and formally salute the authority. This is all very classic, also, recalling the _Ave Caesar, morituri,_ etc., of the gladiators. It lacks, however, the solemnity of the Roman salute, from those splendid fellows who would never all leave the arena alive. A bullfighter is sometimes killed, it is true, but the percentage of deadly danger is scarcely enough to make a spectator's heart beat as the bedizened procession comes flashing by in the sun. The municipal authority throws the bowing alguacil a key, which he catches in his hat, or is hissed if he misses it. With this he unlocks the door through which the bull is to enter, and then scampers off with undignified haste through the opposite entrance. There is a bugle flourish, the door flies open, and the bull rushes out, blind with the staring light, furious with rage, trembling in every limb. This is the most intense moment of the day. The glorious brute is the target of twelve thousand pairs of eyes. There is a silence as of death, while every one waits to see his first movement. He is doomed from the beginning; the curtain has risen on a three-act tragedy, which will surely end with his death, but the incidents which are to fill the interval are all unknown. The minds and eyes of all that vast assembly know nothing for the time but the movements of that brute. He stands for an instant recovering his senses. He has been shot suddenly out of the darkness into that dazzling light. He sees around him a sight such as he never confronted before,--a wall of living faces lit up by thousands of staring eyes. He does not dwell long upon this, however; in his pride and anger he sees a nearer enemy. The horsemen have taken position near the gate, where they sit motionless as burlesque statues, their long ashen spears, iron-tipped, in rest, their wretched nags standing blindfolded, with trembling knees, and necks like dromedaries, not dreaming of their near fate. The bull rushes, with a snort, at the nearest one. The picador holds firmly, planting his spear-point in the shoulder of the brute. Sometimes the bull flinches at this sharp and sudden punishment, and the picador, by a sudden turn to the left, gets away unhurt. Then there is applause for the torero and hisses for the bull. Some indignant amateurs go so far as to call him cow, and to inform him that he is the son of his mother. But oftener he rushes in, not caring for the spear, and with one toss of his sharp horns tumbles horse and rider in one heap against the barrier and upon the sand. The capeadores, the cloak-bearers, come fluttering around and divert the bull from his prostrate victims. The picador is lifted to his feet,--his iron armor not permitting him to rise without help,--and the horse is rapidly scanned to see if his wounds are immediately mortal. If not, the picador mounts again, and provokes the bull to another rush. A horse will usually endure two or three attacks before dying. Sometimes a single blow from in front pierces the heart, and the blood spouts forth in a cataract. In this case the picador hastily dismounts, and the bridle and saddle are stripped in an instant from the dying brute. If a bull is energetic and rapid in execution, he will clear the arena in a few moments. He rushes at one horse after another, tears them open with his terrible "spears" ("horns" is a word never used in the ring), and sends them madly galloping over the arena, trampling out their gushing bowels as they fly. The assistants watch their opportunity, from time to time, to take the wounded horses out of the ring, plug up their gaping rents with tow, and sew them roughly up for another sally. It is incredible to see what these poor creatures will endure,--carrying their riders at a lumbering gallop over the ring, when their thin sides seem empty of entrails. Sometimes the bull comes upon the dead body of a horse he has killed. The smell of blood and the unmoving helplessness of the victim excite him to the highest pitch. He gores and tramples the carcass, and tosses it in the air with evident enjoyment, until diverted by some living tormentor. You will occasionally see a picador nervous and anxious about his personal safety. They are ignorant and superstitious, and subject to presentiments; they often go into the ring with the impression that their last hour has come. If one takes counsel of his fears and avoids the shock of combat, the hard-hearted crowd immediately discover it and rain maledictions on his head. I saw a picador once enter the ring as pale as death. He kept carefully out of the way of the bull for a few minutes. The sharp-eyed Spaniards noticed it, and commenced shouting, "Craven! He wants to live forever!" They threw orange-skins at him, and at last, their rage vanquishing their economy, they pelted him with oranges. His pallor gave way to a flush of shame and anger. He attacked the bull so awkwardly that the animal, killing his horse, threw him also with great violence. His hat flew off, his bald head struck the hard soil. He lay there as one dead, and was borne away lifeless. This mollified the indignant people, and they desisted from their abuse. A cowardly bull is much more dangerous than a courageous one, who lowers his head, shuts his eyes, and goes blindly at everything he sees. The last refuge of a bull in trouble is to leap the barrier, where he produces a lively moment among the water-carriers and orange-boys and stage-carpenters. I once saw a bull, who had done very little execution in the arena, leap the barrier suddenly and toss an unfortunate carpenter from the gangway sheer into the ring. He picked himself up, laughed, saluted his friends, ran a little distance and fell, and was carried out dying. Fatal accidents are rarely mentioned in the newspapers, and it is considered not quite good form to talk about them. When the bull has killed enough horses, the first act of the play terminates. But this is an exceedingly delicate matter for the authorities to decide. The audience will not endure any economy in this respect. If the bull is enterprising and "voluntary," he must have as many horses as he can dispose of. One day in Madrid the bulls operated with such activity that the supply of horses was exhausted before the close of the show, and the contractors rushed out in a panic and bought a half dozen screws from the nearest cab-stand. If the president orders out the horses before their time, he will hear remarks by no means complimentary from the austere groundlings. The second act is the play of the banderilleros, the flag-men. They are beautifully dressed and superbly built fellows, principally from Andalusia, got up precisely like Figaro in the opera. Theirs is the most delicate and graceful operation of the bull-fight. They take a pair of barbed darts, with little banners fluttering at their ends, and provoke the bull to rush at them. At the instant he reaches them, when it seems nothing can save them, they step aside and plant the banderillas in the neck of the bull. If the bull has been cowardly and sluggish, and the spectators have called for "fire," darts are used filled with detonating powder at the base, which explode in the flesh of the bull. He dances and skips like a kid or a colt in his agony, which is very diverting to the Spanish mind. A prettier conceit is that of confining small birds in paper cages, which come apart when the banderilla is planted, and set the little fluttering captives free. Decking the bull with these torturing ornaments is the last stage in the apprenticeship of the chulo, before he rises to the dignity of matador, or killer. The matadors themselves on special occasions think it no derogation from their dignity to act as banderilleros. But they usually accompany the act with some exaggeration of difficulty that reaps for them a harvest of applause. Frascuelo sits in a chair and plants the irritating bannerets. Lagartijo lays his handkerchief on the ground and stands upon it while he coifs the bull. A performance which never fails to bring down the house is for the torero to await the rush of the bull, and when the bellowing monster comes at him with winking eyes and lowered head, to put his slippered foot between the horns, and vault lightly over his back. These chulos exhibit the most wonderful skill and address in evading the assault of the bull. They can almost always trick him by waving their cloaks a little out of the line of their flight. Sometimes, however, the bull runs straight at the man, disregarding the flag, and if the distance is great to the barrier the danger is imminent; for swift as these men are, the bulls are swifter. Once I saw the bull strike the torero at the instant he vaulted over the barrier. He fell sprawling some distance the other side, safe, but terribly bruised and stunned. As soon as he could collect himself he sprang into the arena again, looking very seedy; and the crowd roared, "Saved by miracle." I could but think of Basilio, who, when the many cried, "A miracle," answered, "Industria! Industria!" But these bullfighters are all very pious, and glad to curry favor with the saints by attributing every success to their intervention. The famous matador, Paco Montes, fervently believed in an amulet he carried, and in the invocation of Our Lord of the True Cross. He called upon this special name in every tight place, and while other people talked of his luck he stoutly affirmed it was his faith that saved him; often he said he saw the veritable picture of the Passion coming down between him and the bull, in answer to his prayers. At every bull-ring there is a little chapel in the refreshment-room where these devout ruffians can toss off a prayer or two in the intervals of work. A priest is always at hand with a consecrated wafer, to visa the torero's passport who has to start suddenly for Paradise. It is not exactly regular, but the ring has built many churches and endowed many chapels, and must not be too rigidly regarded. In many places the chief boxes are reserved for the clergy, and prayers are hurried through an hour earlier on the day of combat. The final act is the death of the bull. It must come at last. His exploits in the early part of his career afford to the amateur some indication of the manner in which he will meet his end. If he is a generous, courageous brute, with more heart than brains, he will die gallantly and be easily killed. But if he has shown reflection, forethought, and that saving quality of the oppressed, suspicion, the matador has a serious work before him. The bull is always regarded from this objective standpoint. The more power of reason the brute has, the worse opinion the Spaniard has of him. A stupid creature who rushes blindly on the sword of the matador is an animal after his own heart. But if there be one into whose brute brain some glimmer of the awful truth has come,--and this sometimes happens,--if he feels the solemn question at issue between him and his enemy, if he eyes the man and not the flag, if he refuses to be fooled by the waving lure, but keeps all his strength and all his faculties for his own defence, the soul of the Spaniard rises up in hate and loathing. He calls on the matador to kill him any way. If he will not rush at the flag, the crowd shouts for the demi-lune; and the noble brute is houghed from behind, and your soul grows sick with shame of human nature, at the hellish glee with which they watch him hobbling on his severed legs. This seldom happens. The final act is usually an admirable study of coolness and skill against brute force. When the banderillas are all planted, and the bugles sound for the third time, the matador, the espada, the sword, steps forward with a modest consciousness of distinguished merit, and makes a brief speech to the corregidor, offering in honor of the good city of Madrid to kill the bull. He turns on his heel, throws his hat by a dexterous back-handed movement over the barrier, and advances, sword and cape in hand, to where his noble enemy awaits him. The bull appears to recognize a more serious foe than any he has encountered. He stops short and eyes the newcomer curiously. It is always an impressive picture: the tortured, maddened animal, whose thin flanks are palpitating with his hot breath, his coat one shining mass of blood from the darts and the spear-thrusts, his massive neck still decked as in mockery with the fluttering flags, his fine head and muzzle seeming sharpened by the hour's terrible experience, his formidable horns crimsoned with onset; in front of this fiery bulk of force and courage, the slight, sinewy frame of the killer, whose only reliance is on his coolness and his intellect. I never saw a matador come carelessly to his work. He is usually pale and alert. He studies the bull for a moment with all his eyes. He waves the blood-red engano, or lure, before his face. If the bull rushes at it with his eyes shut, the work is easy. He has only to select his own stroke and make it. But if the bull is jealous and sly, it requires the most careful management to kill him. The disposition of the bull is developed by a few rapid passes of the red flag. This must not be continued too long: the tension of the nerves of the auditory will not bear trifling. I remember one day the crowd was aroused to fury by a bugler from the adjoining barracks playing retreat at the moment of decision. All at once the matador seizes the favorable instant. He poises his sword as the bull rushes upon him. The point enters just between the left shoulder and the spine; the long blade glides in up to the hilt. The bull reels and staggers and dies. Sometimes the matador severs the vertebrae. The effect is like magic. He lays the point of his sword between the bull's horns, as lightly as a lady who touches her cavalier with her fan, and he falls dead as a stone. If the blow is a clean, well-delivered one, the enthusiasm of the people is unbounded. Their approval comes up in a thunderous shout of "Well done! Valiente! Viva!" A brown shower of cigars rains on the sand. The victor gathers them up: they fill his hands, his pockets, his hat. He gives them to his friends, and the aromatic shower continues. Hundreds of hats are flung into the ring. He picks them up and shies them back to their shouting owners. Sometimes a dollar is mingled with the flying compliments; but the enthusiasm of the Spaniard rarely carries him so far as that. For ten minutes after a good estocada, the matador is the most popular man in Spain. But the trumpets sound again, the door of the Toril flies open, another bull comes rushing out, and the present interest quenches the past. The play begins again, with its sameness of purpose and its infinite variety of incident. It is not quite accurate to say, as is often said, that the bull-fighter runs no risk. El Tato, the first sword of Spain, lost his leg in 1869, and his life was saved by the coolness and courage of Lagartijo, who succeeded him in the championship, and who was terribly wounded in the foot the next summer. Arjona killed a bull in the same year, which tossed and ruptured him after receiving his death-blow. Pepe Illo died in harness, on the sand. Every year picadors, chulos, and such small deer are killed, without gossip. I must copy the inscription on the sword which Tato presented to Lagartijo, as a specimen of tauromachian literature:-- "If, as philosophers say, gratitude is the tribute of noble souls, accept, dear Lagartijo, this present; preserve it as a sacred relic, for it symbolizes the memory of my glories, and is at the same time the mute witness of my misfortune. With it I killed my last bull named _Peregrino,_ bred by D. Vicente Martinez, fourth of the fight of the 7th June, 1869, in which act I received the wound which has caused the amputation of my right leg. The will of man can do nothing against the designs of Providence. Nothing but resignation is left to thy affectionate friend, Antonio Sanchez [Tato]." It is in consideration of the mingled skill and danger of the trade, that such enormous fees are paid the principal performers. The leading swordsmen receive about three hundred dollars for each performance, and they are eagerly disputed by the direction of all the arenas of Spain. In spite of these large wages, they are rarely rich. They are as wasteful and improvident as gamblers. Tato, when he lost his leg, lost his means of subsistence, and his comrades organized one or two benefits to keep him from want. Cuchares died in the Havana, and left no provision for his family. There is a curious naivete in the play-bill of a bull-fight, the only conscientious public document I have seen in Spain. You know how we of Northern blood exaggerate the attractions of all sorts of shows, trusting to the magnanimity of the audience. "He warn't nothing like so little as that," confesses Mr. Magsman, "but where's your dwarf what is?" There are few who have the moral courage to demand their money back because they counted but thirty-nine thieves when the bills promised forty. But the management of the Madrid bull-ring knows its public too well to promise more than it is sure of performing. It announces six bulls, and positively no more. It says there will be no use of bloodhounds. It promises two picadors, with three others in reserve, and warns the public that if all five become inutilized in the combat, no more will be issued. With so fair a preliminary statement, what crowd, however inflammable, could mob the management? Some industrious and ascetic statistician has visited Spain and interested himself in the bullring. Here are some of the results of his researches. In 1864 the number of places in all the taurine establishments of Spain was 509,283, of which 246,813 belonged to the cities, and 262,470 to the country. In the year 1864, there were 427 bull-fights, of which 294 took place in the cities, and 13 3 in the country towns. The receipts of ninety-eight bullrings in 1864 reached the enormous sum of two hundred and seventeen and a half millions of reals (nearly $11,000,000). The 427 bull-fights which took place in Spain during the year 1864 caused the death of 2989 of these fine animals, and about 7473 horses,--something more than half the number of the cavalry of Spain. These wasted victims could have ploughed three hundred thousand hectares of land, which would have produced a million and a half hectolitres of grain, worth eighty millions of reals; all this without counting the cost of the slaughtered cattle, worth say seven or eight millions, at a moderate calculation. Thus far the Arithmetic Man; to whom responds the tauromachian aficionado: That the bulk of this income goes to purposes of charity; that were there no bull-fights, bulls of good race would cease to be bred; that nobody ever saw a horse in a bull-ring that could plough a furrow of a hundred yards without giving up the ghost; that the nerve, dexterity, and knowledge of brute nature gained in the arena is a good thing to have in the country; that, in short, it is our way of amusing ourselves, and if you don't like it you can go home and cultivate prize-fighters, or kill two-year-old colts on the racecourse, or murder jockeys in hurdle-races, or break your own necks in steeple-chases, or in search of wilder excitement thicken your blood with beer or burn your souls out with whiskey. And this is all we get by our well-meant effort to convince Spaniards of the brutality of bullfights. Must Chicago be virtuous before I can object to Madrid ale, and say that its cakes are unduly gingered? Yet even those who most stoutly defend the bull-fight feel that its glory has departed and that it has entered into the era of full decadence. I was talking one evening with a Castilian gentleman, one of those who cling with most persistence to the national traditions, and he confessed that the noble art was wounded to death. "I do not refer, as many do, to the change from the old times, when gentlemen fought on their own horses in the ring. That was nonsense, and could not survive the time of Cervantes. Life is too short to learn bull-fighting. A grandee of Spain, if he knows anything else, would make a sorry torero. The good times of the art are more modern. I saw the short day of the glory of the ring when I was a boy. There was a race of gladiators then, such as the world will never see again,--mighty fighters before the king. Pepe Illo and Costillares, Romero and Paco Montes,--the world does not contain the stuff to make their counterparts. They were serious, earnest men. They would have let their right arms wither before they would have courted the applause of the mob by killing a bull outside of the severe traditions. Compare them with the men of to-day, with your Rafael Molina, who allows himself to be gored, playing with a heifer; with your frivolous boys like Frascuelo. I have seen the ring convulsed with laughter as that buffoon strutted across the arena, flirting his muleta as a manola does her skirts, the bewildered bull not knowing what to make of it. It was enough to make Illo turn in his bloody grave. "Why, my young friend, I remember when bulls were a dignified and serious matter; when we kept account of their progress from their pasture to the capital. We had accounts of their condition by couriers and carrier-pigeons. On the day when they appeared it was a high festival in the court. All the sombreros in Spain were there, the ladies in national dress with white mantillas. The young queen always in her palco (may God guard her). The fighters of that day were high priests of art; there was something of veneration in the regard that was paid them. Duchesses threw them bouquets with billets-doux. Gossip and newspapers have destroyed the romance of common life. "The only pleasure I take in the Plaza de Toros now is at night. The custodians know me and let me moon about in the dark. When all that is ignoble and mean has faded away with the daylight, it seems to me the ghosts of the old time come back upon the sands. I can fancy the patter of light hoofs, the glancing of spectral horns. I can imagine the agile tread of Romero, the deadly thrust of Montes, the whisper of long-vanished applause, and the clapping of ghostly hands. I am growing too old for such skylarking, and I sometimes come away with a cold in my head. But you will never see a bull-fight you can enjoy as I do these visionary festivals, where memory is the corregidor, and where the only spectators are the stars and I." RED-LETTER DAYS No people embrace more readily than the Spaniards the opportunity of spending a day without work. Their frequent holidays are a relic of the days when the Church stood between the people and their taskmasters, and fastened more firmly its hold upon the hearts of the ignorant and overworked masses, by becoming at once the fountain of salvation in the next world, and of rest in this. The government rather encouraged this growth of play-days, as the Italian Bourbons used to foster mendicancy, by way of keeping the people as unthrifty as possible. Lazzaroni are so much more easily managed than burghers! It is only the holy days that are successfully celebrated in Spain. The state has tried of late years to consecrate to idle parade a few revolutionary dates, but they have no vigorous national life. They grow feebler and more colorless year by year, because they have no depth of earth. The most considerable of these national festivals is the 2d of May, which commemorates the slaughter of patriots in the streets of Madrid by Murat. This is a political holiday which appeals more strongly to the national character of the Spaniards than any other. The mingled pride of race and ignorant hate of everything foreign which constitutes that singular passion called Spanish patriotism, or Espanolismo, is fully called into play by the recollections of the terrible scenes of their war of independence, which drove out a foreign king, and brought back into Spain a native despot infinitely meaner and more injurious. It is an impressive study in national character and thought, this self-satisfaction of even liberal Spaniards at the reflection that, by a vast and supreme effort of the nation, after countless sacrifices and with the aid of coalesced Europe, they exchanged Joseph Bonaparte for Ferdinand VII. and the Inquisition. But the victims of the Dos de Mayo fell fighting. Daoiz, Velarde, and Ruiz were bayoneted at their guns, scorning surrender. The alcalde of Mostoles, a petty village of Castile, called on Spain to rise against the tyrant. And Spain obeyed the summons of this cross-roads justice. The contempt of probabilities, the Quixotism of these successive demonstrations, endear them to the Spanish heart. Every 2d of May the city of Madrid gives up the day to funeral honors to the dead of 1808. The city government, attended by its Maceros, in their gorgeous robes of gold and scarlet, with silver maces and long white plumes; the public institutions of all grades, with invalids and veterans and charity children; a large detachment of the army and navy,--form a vast procession at the Town Hall, and, headed by the Supreme Government, march to slow music through the Puerta del Sol and the spacious Alcala street to the granite obelisk in the Prado which marks the resting-place of the patriot dead. I saw the regent of the kingdom, surrounded by his cabinet, sauntering all a summer's afternoon under a blazing sun over the dusty mile that separates the monument from the Ayuntamiento. The Spaniards are hopelessly inefficient in these matters. The people always fill the line of march, and a rivulet of procession meanders feebly through a wilderness of mob. It is fortunate that the crowd is more entertaining than the show. The Church has a very indifferent part in this ceremonial. It does nothing more than celebrate a mass in the shade of the dark cypresses in the Place of Loyalty, and then leaves the field clear to the secular power. But this is the only purely civic ceremony I ever saw in Spain. The Church is lord of the holidays for the rest of the year. In the middle of May comes the feast of the ploughboy patron of Madrid,--San Isidro. He was a true Madrileno in tastes, and spent his time lying in the summer shade or basking in the winter sunshine, seeing visions, while angels came down from heaven and did his farm chores for him. The angels are less amiable nowadays, but every true child of Madrid reveres the example and envies the success of the San Isidro method of doing business. In the process of years this lazy lout has become a great saint, and his bones have done more extensive and remarkable miracle-work than any equal amount of phosphate in existence. In desperate cases of sufficient rank the doctors throw up the sponge and send for Isidro's urn, and the drugging having ceased, the noble patient frequently recovers, and much honor and profit comes thereby to the shrine of the saint. There is something of the toady in Isidro's composition. You never hear of his curing any one of less than princely rank. I read in an old chronicle of Madrid, that once when Queen Isabel the Catholic was hunting in the hills that overlook the Manzanares, near what is now the oldest and quaintest quarter of the capital, she killed a bear of great size and ferocity; and doubtless thinking it might not be considered lady-like to have done it unassisted, she gave San Isidro the credit of the lucky blow and built him a nice new chapel for it near the Church of San Andres. If there are any doubters, let them go and see the chapel, as I did. When the allied armies of the Christian kings of Spain were seeking for a passage through the hills to the Plains of Tolosa, a shepherd appeared and led them straight to victory and endless fame. After the battle, which broke the Moorish power forever in Central Spain, instead of looking for the shepherd and paying him handsomely for his timely scout-service, they found it more pious and economical to say it was San Isidro in person who had kindly made himself flesh for this occasion. By the great altar in the Cathedral of Toledo stand side by side the statues of Alonso VIII., the Christian commander, and San Isidro brazenly swelling in the shepherd garb of that unknown guide who led Alonso and his chivalry through the tangled defiles of the Sierra Morena. His fete is the Derby Day of Madrid. The whole town goes out to his Hermitage on the further banks of the Manzanares, and spends a day or two of the soft spring weather in noisy frolic. The little church stands on a bare brown hill, and all about it is an improvised village consisting half of restaurants and the other half of toyshops. The principal traffic is in a pretty sort of glass whistle which forms the stem of an artificial rose, worn in the button-hole in the intervals of tooting, and little earthen pig-bells, whose ringing scares away the lightning. There is but one duty of the day to flavor all its pleasures. The faithful must go into the oratory, pay a penny, and kiss a glass-covered relic of the saint which the attendant ecclesiastic holds in his hand. The bells are rung violently until the church is full; then the doors are shut and the kissing begins. They are very expeditious about it. The worshippers drop on their knees by platoons before the railing. The long-robed relic-keeper puts the precious trinket rapidly to their lips; an acolyte follows with a saucer for the cash. The glass grows humid with many breaths. The priest wipes it with a dirty napkin from time to time. The multitude advances, kisses, pays, and retires, till all have their blessing; then the doors are opened and they all pass out,--the bells ringing furiously for another detachment. The pleasures of the day are like those of all fairs and public merrymaking. Working-people come to be idle, and idle people come to have something to do. There is much eating and little drinking. The milk-stalls are busier than the wine-shops. The people are gay and jolly, but very decent and clean and orderly. To the east of the Hermitage, over and beyond the green cool valley, the city rises on its rocky hills, its spires shining in the cloudless blue. Below on the emerald meadows there are the tents and wagons of those who have come from a distance to the Romeria. The sound of guitars and the drone of peasant songs come up the hill, and groups of men are leaping in the wild barbaric dances of Iberia. The scene is of another day and time. The Celt is here, lord of the land. You can see these same faces at Donnybrook Fair. These large-mouthed, short-nosed, rosy-cheeked peasant-girls are called Dolores and Catalina, but they might be called Bridget and Kathleen. These strapping fellows, with long simian upper lips, with brown leggings and patched, mud-colored overcoats, who are leaping and swinging their cudgels in that Pyrrhic round are as good Tipperary boys as ever mobbed an agent or pounded, twenty to one, a landlord to death. The same unquestioning, fervent faith, the same superficial good-nature, the same facility to be amused, and at bottom the same cowardly and cruel blood-thirst. What is this mysterious law of race which is stronger than time, or varying climates, or changing institutions? Which is cause, and which is effect, race or religion? The great Church holiday of the year is Corpus Christi. On this day the Host is carried in solemn procession through the principal streets, attended by the high officers of state, several battalions of each arm of the service in fresh bright uniforms, and a vast array of ecclesiastics in the most gorgeous stoles and chasubles their vestiary contains. The windows along the line of march are gayly decked with flags and tapestry. Work is absolutely suspended, and the entire population dons its holiday garb. The Puerta del Sol--at this season blazing with relentless light--is crowded with patient Madrilenos in their best clothes, the brown-cheeked maidens with flowing silks as in a ball-room, and with no protection against the ardent sky but the fluttering fan they hold in their ungloved hands. As everything is behind time in this easy-going land, there are two or three hours of broiling gossip on the glowing pavement before the Sacred Presence is announced by the ringing of silver bells. As the superb structure of filigree gold goes by, a movement of reverent worship vibrates through the crowd. Forgetful of silks and broadcloth and gossip, they fall on their knees in one party-colored mass, and, bowing their heads and beating their breasts, they mutter their mechanical prayers. There are thinking men who say these shows are necessary; that the Latin mind must see with bodily eyes the thing it worships, or the worship will fade away from its heart. If there were no cathedrals and masses, they say, there would be no religion; if there were no king, there would be no law. But we should not accept too hurriedly this ethnological theory of necessity, which would reject all principles of progress and positive good, and condemn half the human race to perpetual childhood. There was a time when we Anglo-Saxons built cathedrals and worshipped the king. Look at Salisbury and Lincoln and Ely; read the history of the growth of parliaments. There is nothing more beautifully sensuous than the religious spirit that presided over those master works of English Gothic; there is nothing in life more abject than the relics of the English love and fear of princes. But the steady growth of centuries has left nothing but the outworn shell of the old religion and the old loyalty. The churches and the castles still exist. The name of the king still is extant in the constitution. They remain as objects of taste and tradition, hallowed by a thousand memories of earlier days, but, thanks be to God who has given us the victory, the English race is now incapable of making a new cathedral or a new king. Let us not in our safe egotism deny to others the possibility of a like improvement. This summery month of June is rich in saints. The great apostles, John, Peter, and Paul, have their anniversaries on its closing days, and the shortest nights of the year are given up to the riotous eating of fritters in their honor. I am afraid that the progress of luxury and love of ease has wrought a change in the observance of these festivals. The feast of midsummer night is called the Verbena of St. John, which indicates that it was formerly a morning solemnity, as the vervain could not be hunted by the youths and maidens of Spain with any success or decorum at midnight. But of late years it may be that this useful and fragrant herb has disappeared from the tawny hills of Castile. It is sure that midsummer has grown too warm for any field work. So that the Madrilenos may be pardoned for spending the day napping, and swarming into the breezy Prado in the light of moon and stars and gas. The Prado is ordinarily the promenade of the better classes, but every Spanish family has its John, Paul, and Peter, and the crowded barrios of Toledo and the Penue-las pour out their ragged hordes to the popular festival. The scene has a strange gypsy wildness. From the round point of Atocha to where Cybele, throned among spouting waters, drives southward her spanking team of marble lions, the park is filled with the merry roysterers. At short intervals are the busy groups of fritter merchants; over the crackling fire a great caldron of boiling oil; beside it a mighty bowl of dough. The bunolero, with the swift precision of machinery, dips his hand into the bowl and makes a delicate ring of the tough dough, which he throws into the bubbling caldron. It remains but a few seconds, and his grimy acolyte picks it out with a long wire and throws it on the tray for sale. They are eaten warm, the droning cry continually sounding, "Bunuelos! Calientitos!" There must be millions of these oily dainties consumed on every night of the Verbena. For the more genteel revellers, the Don Juans, Pedros, and Pablos of the better sort, there are improvised restaurants built of pine planks after sunset and gone before sunrise. But the greater number are bought and eaten by the loitering crowd from the tray of the fritterman. It is like a vast gitano-camp. The hurrying crowd which is going nowhere, the blazing fires, the cries of the venders, the songs of the majos under the great trees of the Paseo, the purposeless hurly-burly, and above, the steam of the boiling oil and the dust raised by the myriad feet, form together a striking and vivid picture. The city is more than usually quiet. The stir of life is localized in the Prado. The only busy men in town are those who stand by the seething oil-pots and manufacture the brittle forage of the browsing herds. It is a jealous business, and requires the undivided attention of its professors. The _ne sutor ultra crepidam_ of Spanish proverb is "Bunolero haz tus bunuelos,"--Fritterman, mind thy fritters. With the long days and cooler airs of the autumn begin the different fairs. These are relics of the times of tyranny and exclusive privilege, when for a few days each year, by the intervention of the Church, or as a reward for civic service, full liberty of barter and sale was allowed to all citizens. This custom, more or less modified, may be found in most cities of Europe. The boulevards of Paris swarm with little booths at Christmas-time, which begin and end their lawless commercial life within the week. In Vienna, in Leipsic, and other cities, the same waste-weir of irregular trade is periodically opened. These fairs begin in Madrid with the autumnal equinox, and continue for some weeks in October. They disappear from the Alcala to break out with renewed virulence in the avenue of Atocha, and girdle the city at last with a belt of booths. While they last they give great animation and spirit to the street life of the town. You can scarcely make your way among the heaps of gaudy shawls and handkerchiefs, cheap laces and illegitimate jewels, that cumber the pavement. When the Jews were driven out of Spain, they left behind the true genius of bargaining. A nut-brown maid is attracted by a brilliant red and yellow scarf. She asks the sleepy merchant nodding before his wares, "What is this rag worth?" He answers with profound indifference, "Ten reals." "Hombre! Are you dreaming or crazy?" She drops the coveted neck-gear, and moves on, apparently horror-stricken. The chapman calls her back peremptorily. "Don't be rash! The scarf is worth twenty reals, but for the sake of Santisima Maria I offered it to you for half price. Very well! You are not suited. What will you give?" "Caramba! Am I buyer and seller as well? The thing is worth three reals; more is a robbery." "Jesus! Maria! Jose! and all the family! Go thou with God! We cannot trade. Sooner than sell for less than eight reals I will raise the cover of my brains! Go thou! It is eight of the morning, and still thou dreamest." She lays down the scarf reluctantly, saying, "Five?" But the outraged mercer snorts scornfully, "Eight is my last word! Go to!" She moves away, thinking how well that scarf would look in the Apollo Gardens, and casts over her shoulder a Parthian glance and bid, "Six!" "Take it! It is madness, but I cannot waste my time in bargaining." Both congratulate themselves on the operation. He would have taken five, and she would have given seven. How trade would suffer if we had windows in our breasts! The first days of November are consecrated to all the saints, and to the souls of all the blessed dead. They are observed in Spain with great solemnity; but as the cemeteries are generally of the dreariest character, bare, bleak, and most forbidding under the ashy sky of the late autumn, the days are deprived of that exquisite sentiment that pervades them in countries where the graves of the dead are beautiful. There is nothing more touching than these offerings of memory you see every year in Mont Parnasse and Pere-la-Chaise. Apart from all beliefs, there is a mysterious influence for good exerted upon the living by the memory of the beloved dead. On all hearts not utterly corrupt, the thoughts that come by the graves of the departed fall like dew from heaven, and quicken into life purer and higher resolves. In Spain, where there is nothing but desolation in graveyards, the churches are crowded instead, and the bereaved survivors commend to God their departed friends and their own stricken hearts in the dim and perfumed aisles of temples made with hands. A taint of gloom thus rests upon the recollection and the prayer, far different from the consolation that comes with the free air and the sunshine, and the infinite blue vault, where Nature conspires with revelation to comfort and cherish and console. Christmas apparently comes in Spain on no other mission than that referred to in the old English couplet, "bringing good cheer." The Spaniards are the most frugal of people, but during the days that precede their Noche Buena, their Good Night, they seem to be given up as completely to cares of the commissariat as the most eupeptic of Germans. Swarms of turkeys are driven in from the surrounding country, and taken about the streets by their rustic herdsmen, making the roads gay with their scarlet wattles, and waking rural memories by their vociferous gobbling. The great market-place of the season is the Plaza Mayor. The ever-fruitful provinces of the South are laid under contribution, and the result is a wasteful show of tropical luxuriance that seems most incongruous under the wintry sky. There are mountains of oranges and dates, brown hillocks of nuts of every kind, store of every product of this versatile soil. The air is filled with nutty and fruity fragrance. Under the ancient arcades are the stalls of the butchers, rich with the mutton of Castile, the hams of Estremadura, and the hero-nourishing bull-beef of Andalusian pastures. At night the town is given up to harmless racket. Nowhere has the tradition of the Latin Saturnalia been fitted with less change into the Christian calendar. Men, women, and children of the proletariat--the unemancipated slaves of necessity--go out this night to cheat their misery with noisy frolic. The owner of a tambourine is the equal of a peer; the proprietor of a guitar is the captain of his hundred. They troop through the dim city with discordant revel and song. They have little idea of music. Every one sings and sings ill. Every one dances, without grace or measure. Their music is a modulated howl of the East. Their dancing is the savage leaping of barbarians. There is no lack of couplets, religious, political, or amatory. I heard one ragged woman with a brown baby at her breast go shrieking through the Street of the Magdalen,-- "This is the eve of Christmas, No sleep from now till morn, The Virgin is in travail, At twelve will the child be born!" Behind her stumped a crippled beggar, who croaked in a voice rough with frost and aguardiente his deep disillusion and distrust of the great:-- "This is the eve of Christmas, But what is that to me? We are ruled by thieves and robbers, As it was and will always be." Next comes a shouting band of the youth of Spain, strapping boys with bushy locks, crisp and black almost to blueness, and gay young girls with flexible forms and dark Arab eyes that shine with a phosphorescent light in the shadows. They troop on with clacking castinets. The challenge of the mozos rings out on the frosty air,-- "This is the eve of Christmas, Let us drink and love our fill!" And the saucy antiphon of girlish voices responds,-- "A man may be bearded and gray, But a woman can fool him still!" The Christmas and New-Year's holidays continue for a fortnight, ending with the Epiphany. On the eve of the Day of the Kings a curious farce is performed by bands of the lowest orders of the people, which demonstrates the apparently endless naivete of their class. In every coterie of water-carriers, or mozos de cordel, there will be one found innocent enough to believe that the Magi are coming to Madrid that night, and that a proper respect to their rank requires that they must be met at the city gate. To perceive the coming of their feet, beautiful upon the mountains, a ladder is necessary, and the poor victim of the comedy is loaded with this indispensable "property." He is dragged by his gay companions, who never tire of the exquisite wit of their jest, from one gate to another, until suspicion supplants faith in the mind of the neophyte, and the farce is over. In the burgher society of Castile this night is devoted to a very different ceremony. Each little social circle comes together in a house agreed upon. They take mottoes of gilded paper and write on each the name of some one of the company. The names of the ladies are thrown into one urn, and those of the cavaliers into another, and they are drawn out by pairs. These couples are thus condemned by fortune to intimacy during the year. The gentleman is always to be at the orders of the dame and to serve her faithfully in every knightly fashion. He has all the duties and none of the privileges of a lover, unless it be the joy of those "who stand and wait." The relation is very like that which so astonished M. de Gramont in his visit to Piedmont, where the cavalier of service never left his mistress in public and never approached her in private. The true Carnival survives in its naive purity only in Spain. It has faded in Rome into a romping day of clown's play. In Paris it is little more than a busier season for dreary and professional vice. Elsewhere all over the world the Carnival gayeties are confined to the salon. But in Madrid the whole city, from grandee to cordwainer, goes with childlike earnestness into the enjoyment of the hour. The Corso begins in the Prado on the last Sunday before Lent, and lasts four days. From noon to night the great drive is filled with a double line of carriages two miles long, and between them are the landaus of the favored hundreds who have the privilege of driving up and down free from the law of the road. This right is acquired by the payment of ten dollars a day to city charities, and produces some fifteen thousand dollars every Carnival. In these carriages all the society of Madrid may be seen; and on foot, darting in and out among the hoofs of the horses, are the young men of Castile in every conceivable variety of absurd and fantastic disguise. There are of course pirates and Indians and Turks, monks, prophets, and kings, but the favorite costumes seem to be the Devil and the Englishman. Sometimes the Yankee is attempted, with indifferent success. He wears a ribbon-wreathed Italian bandit's hat, an embroidered jacket, slashed buckskin trousers, and a wide crimson belt,--a dress you would at once recognize as universal in Boston. Most of the maskers know by name at least the occupants of the carriages. There is always room for a mask in a coach. They leap in, swarming over the back or the sides, and in their shrill monotonous scream they make the most startling revelations of the inmost secrets of your soul. There is always something impressive in the talk of an unknown voice, but especially is this so in Madrid, where every one scorns his own business, and devotes himself rigorously to his neighbor's. These shrieking young monks and devilkins often surprise a half-formed thought in the heart of a fair Castilian and drag it out into day and derision. No one has the right to be offended. Duchesses are called Tu! Isabel! by chin-dimpled school-boys, and the proudest beauties in Spain accept bonbons from plebeian hands. It is true, most of the maskers are of the better class. Some of the costumes are very rich and expensive, of satin and velvet heavy with gold. I have seen a distinguished diplomatist in the guise of a gigantic canary-bird, hopping briskly about in the mud with bedraggled tail-feathers, shrieking well-bred sarcasms with his yellow beak. The charm of the Madrid Carnival is this, that it is respected and believed in. The best and fairest pass the day in the Corso, and gallant young gentlemen think it worth while to dress elaborately for a few hours of harmless and spirituelle intrigue. A society that enjoys a holiday so thoroughly has something in it better than the blase cynicism of more civilized capitals. These young fellows talk like the lovers of the old romances. I have never heard prettier periods of devotion than from some gentle savage, stretched out on the front seat of a landau under the peering eyes of his lady, safe in his disguise, if not self-betrayed, pouring out his young soul in passionate praise and prayer; around them the laughter and the cries, the cracking of whips, the roll of wheels, the presence of countless thousands, and yet these two young hearts alone under the pale winter sky. The rest of the Continent has outgrown the true Carnival. It is pleasant to see this gay relic of simpler times, when youth was young. No one here is too "swell" for it. You may find a duke in the disguise of a chimney-sweep, or a butcher-boy in the dress of a Crusader. There are none so great that their dignity would suffer by a day's reckless foolery, and there are none so poor that they cannot take the price of a dinner to buy a mask and cheat their misery by mingling for a time with their betters in the wild license of the Carnival. The winter's gayety dies hard. Ash Wednesday is a day of loud merriment and is devoted to a popular ceremony called the Burial of the Sardine. A vast throng of workingmen carry with great pomp a link of sausage to the bank of the Manzanares and inter it there with great solemnity. On the following Saturday, after three days of death, the Carnival has a resurrection, and the maddest, wildest ball of the year takes place at the opera. Then the sackcloth and ashes of Lent come down in good earnest and the town mourns over its scarlet sins. It used to be very fashionable for the genteel Christians to repair during this season of mortification to the Church of San Gines, and scourge themselves lustily in its subterranean chambers. A still more striking demonstration was for gentlemen in love to lash themselves on the sidewalks where passed the ladies of their thoughts. If the blood from the scourges sprinkled them as they sailed by, it was thought an attention no female heart could withstand. But these wholesome customs have decayed of late unbelieving years. The Lenten piety increases with the lengthening days. It reaches its climax on Holy Thursday. On this day all Spain goes to church: it is one of the obligatory days. The more you go, the better for you; so the good people spend the whole day from dawn to dusk roaming from one church to another, and investing an Ave and a Pater-Noster in each. This fills every street of the city with the pious crowd. No carriages are permitted. A silence like that of Venice falls on the rattling capital. With three hundred thousand people in the street, the town seems still. In 1870, a free-thinking cabman dared to drive up the Calle Alcala. He was dragged from his box and beaten half to death by the chastened mourners, who yelled as they kicked and cuffed him, "Que bruto! He will wake our Jesus." On Good Friday the gloom deepens. No colors are worn that day by the orthodox. The senoras appear on the street in funeral garb. I saw a group of fast youths come out of the jockey club, black from hat to boots, with jet studs and sleeve-buttons. The gayest and prettiest ladies sit within the church doors and beg in the holy name of charity, and earn large sums for the poor. There are hourly services in the churches, passionate sermons from all the pulpits. The streets are free from the painted haunters of the pavement. The whole people taste the luxury of a sentimental sorrow. Yet in these heavy days it is not the Redeemer whose sufferings and death most nearly touch the hearts of the faithful. It is Santisima Maria who is worshipped most. It is the Dolorous Mother who moves them to tears of tenderness. The presiding deity of these final days of meditation is Our Lady of Solitude. But at last the days of mourning are accomplished. The expiation for sin is finished. The grave is vanquished, death is swallowed up in victory. Man can turn from the grief that is natural to the joy that is eternal. From every steeple the bells fling out their happy clangor in glad tidings of great joy. The streets are flooded once more with eager multitudes, gay as in wedding garments. Christ has arisen! The heathen myth of the awakening of nature blends the old tradition with the new gospel. The vernal breezes sweep the skies clean and blue. Birds are pairing in the budding trees. The streams leap down from the melting snow of the hills. The brown turf takes a tint of verdure. Through the vast frame of things runs a quick shudder of teeming power. In the heart of man love and will mingle into hope. Hail to the new life and the ever-new religion! Hail to the resurrection morning! AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS As a general thing it is well to distrust a Spaniard's superlatives. He will tell you that his people are the most amiable in the world, but you will do well to carry your revolver into the interior. He will say there are no wines worth drinking but the Spanish, but you will scarcely forswear Clicquot and Yquem on the mere faith of his assertion. A distinguished general once gravely assured me that there was no literature in the world at all to be compared with the productions of the Castilian mind. All others, he said, were but pale imitations of Spanish master-work. Now, though you may be shocked at learning such unfavorable facts of 'Shakespeare and Goethe and Hugo, you will hardly condemn them to an Auto da fe, on the testimony even of a grandee of Spain. But when a Spaniard assures you that the picture-gallery of Madrid is the finest in the world, you may believe him without reserve. He probably does not know what he is talking about. He may never have crossed the Pyrenees. He has no dream of the glories of Dresden, or Florence, or the Louvre. It is even possible that he has not seen the matchless collection he is boasting of. He crowns it with a sweeping superlative simply because it is Spanish. But the statement is nevertheless true. The reason of this is found in that gigantic and overshadowing fact which seems to be an explanation of everything in Spain,--the power and the tyranny of the House of Austria. The period of the vast increase of Spanish dominion coincided with that of the meridian glory of Italian art. The conquest of Granada was finished as the divine child Raphael began to meddle with his father's brushes and pallets, and before his short life ended Charles, Burgess of Ghent, was emperor and king. The dominions he governed and transmitted to his son embraced Spain, the Netherlands, Franche-Comte, the Milanese, Naples, and Sicily; that is to say, those regions where art in that age and the next attained its supreme development. He was also lord of the New World, whose inexhaustible mines poured into the lap of Europe a constant stream of gold. Hence came the riches and the leisure necessary to art. Charles V., as well as his great contemporary and rival, Francis I., was a munificent protector of art. He brought from Italy and Antwerp some of the most perfect products of their immortal masters. He was the friend and patron of Titian, and when, weary of the world and its vanities, he retired to the lonely monastery of Yuste to spend in devout contemplation the evening of his days, the most precious solace of his solitude was that noble canvas of the great Venetian, where Charles and Philip are borne, in penitential guise and garb, on luminous clouds into the visible glory of the Most High. These two great kings made a good use of their unbounded opportunities. Spain became illuminated with the glowing canvases of the incomparable Italians. The opening up of the New World beyond seas, the meteoric career of European and African conquest in which the emperor had won so much land and glory, had given an awakening shock to the intelligent youth of Spain, and sent them forth in every avenue of enterprise. This jealously patriotic race, which had remained locked up by the mountains and the seas for centuries, started suddenly out, seeking adventures over the earth. The mind of Spain seemed suddenly to have brightened and developed like that of her great king, who, in his first tourney at Valladolid, wrote with proud sluggishness _Nondum_--not yet--on his maiden shield, and a few years later in his young maturity adopted the legend of arrogant hope and promise,--_Plus Ultra._ There were seen two emigrations of the young men of Spain, eastward and westward. The latter went for gold and material conquest into the American wilds; and the former, led by the sacred love of art, to that land of beauty and wonder, then, now, and always the spiritual shrine of all peoples,--Italy. A brilliant young army went out from Spain on this new crusade of the beautiful. From the plains of Castile and the hills of Navarre went, among others, Berruguete, Becerra, and the marvellous deaf-mute Navarrete. The luxurious city of Valentia sent Juan de Juanes and Ribalta. Luis de Vargas went out from Seville, and from Cordova the scholar, artist, and thinker, Paul of Cespedes. The schools of Rome and Venice and Florence were thronged with eager pilgrims, speaking an alien Latin and filled with a childlike wonder and appreciation. In that stirring age the emigration was not all in one direction. Many distinguished foreigners came down to Spain, to profit by the new love of art in the Peninsula. It was Philip of Burgundy who carved, with Berruguete, those miracles of skill and patience we admire to-day in the choir of Toledo. Peter of Champagne painted at Seville the grand altar-piece that so comforted the eyes and the soul of Murillo. The wild Greek bedouin, George Theotocopouli, built the Mozarabic chapel and filled the walls of convents with his weird ghost-faces. Moor, or Moro, came from the Low Countries, and the Carducci brothers from Italy, to seek their fortunes in Madrid. Torrigiani, after breaking Michael Angelo's nose in Florence, fled to Granada, and died in a prison of the Inquisition for smashing the face of a Virgin which a grandee of Spain wanted to steal from him. These immigrations, and the refluent tide of Spanish students from Italy, founded the various schools of Valentia, Toledo, Seville, and Madrid. Madrid soon absorbed the school of Toledo, and the attraction of Seville was too powerful for Valentia. The Andalusian school counts among its early illustrations Vargas, Roelas, the Castillos, Herrera, Pacheco, and Moya, and among its later glories Velazquez, Alonzo Cano, Zurbaran, and Murillo, last and greatest of the mighty line. The school of Madrid begins with Berruguete and Na-varrete, the Italians Caxes, Rizi, and others, who are followed by Sanchez Coello, Pantoja, Collantes. Then comes the great invader Velazquez, followed by his retainers Pareja and Carreno, and absorbs the whole life of the school. Claudio Coello makes a good fight against the rapid decadence. Luca Giordano comes rattling in from Naples with his whitewash-brush, painting a mile a minute, and classic art is ended in Spain with the brief and conscientious work of Raphael Mengs. There is therefore little distinction of schools in Spain. Murillo, the glory of Seville, studied in Madrid, and the mighty Andalusian, Velazquez, performed his enormous life's work in the capital of Castile. It now needs but one word to show how the Museum of Madrid became so rich in masterpieces. During the long and brilliant reigns of Charles V. and Philip II., when art had arrived at its apogee in Italy, and was just beginning its splendid career in Spain, these powerful monarchs had the lion's share of all the best work that was done in the world. There was no artist so great but he was honored by the commands of these lords of the two worlds. They thus formed in their various palaces, pleasure-houses, and cloisters a priceless collection of pictures produced in the dawn of the Spanish and the triumphant hey-day of Italian genius. Their frivolous successors lost provinces and kingdoms, honor and prestige, but they never lost their royal prerogative nor their taste for the arts. They consoled themselves for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune by the delights of sensual life, and imagined they preserved some distant likeness to their great forerunners by encouraging and protecting Velazquez and Lope de Vega and other intellectual giants of that decaying age. So while, as the result of a vicious system of kingly and spiritual thraldom, the intellect of Spain was forced away from its legitimate channels of thought and action, under the shadow of the royal prerogative, which survived the genuine power of the older kings, art flourished and bloomed, unsuspected and unpersecuted by the coward jealousy of courtier and monk. The palace and the convent divided the product of those marvellous days. Amid all the poverty of the failing state, it was still the king and clergy who were best able to appropriate the works of genius. This may have contributed to the decay of art. The immortal canvases passed into oblivion in the salons of palaces and the cells of monasteries. Had they been scattered over the land and seen by the people, they might have kept alive the spark that kindled their creators. But exclusiveness is inevitably followed by barrenness. When the great race of Spanish artists ended, these matchless works were kept in the safe obscurity of palaces and religious establishments. History was working in the interests of this Museum. The pictures were held by the clenched dead hand of the Church and the throne. They could not be sold or distributed. They made the dark places luminous, patiently biding their time. It was long enough coming, and it was a despicable hand that brought them into the light. Ferdinand VII. thought his palace would look fresher if the walls were covered with French paper, and so packed all the pictures off to the empty building on the Prado, which his grandfather had built for a museum. As soon as the glorious collection was exposed to the gaze of the world, its incontestable merit was at once recognized. Especially were the works of Velazquez, hitherto almost an unknown name in Europe, admired and appreciated. Ferdinand, finding he had done a clever thing unawares, began to put on airs and poser for a patron of art. The gallery was still further immensely enriched on the exclaustration of the monasteries, by the hidden treasures of the Escorial, and other spoils of mortmain. And now, as a collection of masterpieces, it has no equal in the world. A few figures will prove this. It contains more than two thousand pictures already catalogued,--all of them worth a place on the walls. Among these there are ten by Raphael, forty-three by Titian, thirty-four by Tintoret, twenty-five by Paul Veronese. Rubens has the enormous contingent of sixty-four. Of Teniers, whose works are sold for fabulous sums for the square inch, this extraordinary museum possesses no less than sixty finished pictures,--the Louvre considers itself rich with fourteen. So much for a few of the foreigners. Among the Spaniards the three greatest names could alone fill a gallery. There are sixty-five Velazquez, forty-six Murillos, and fifty-eight Riberas. Compare these figures with those of any other gallery in existence, and you will at once recognize the hopeless superiority of this collection. It is not only the greatest collection in the world, but the greatest that can ever be made until this is broken up. But with all this mass of wealth it is not a complete, nor, properly speaking, a representative museum. You cannot trace upon its walls the slow, groping progress of art towards perfection. It contains few of what the book-lovers call _incunabula._ Spanish art sprang out full-armed from the mature brain of Rome. Juan de Juanes came back from Italy a great artist. The schools of Spain were budded on a full-bearing tree. Charles and Philip bought masterpieces, and cared little for the crude efforts of the awkward pencils of the necessary men who came before Raphael. There is not a Perugino in Madrid. There is nothing Byzantine, no trace of Renaissance; nothing of the patient work of the early Flemings,--the art of Flanders comes blazing in with the full splendor of Rubens and Van Dyck. And even among the masters, the representation is most unequal. Among the wilderness of Titians and Tintorets you find but two Domenichinos and two Correggios. Even in Spanish art the gallery is far from complete. There is almost nothing of such genuine painters as Zurbaran and Herrera. But recognizing all this, there is, in this glorious temple, enough to fill the least enthusiastic lover of art with delight and adoration for weeks and months together. If one knew he was to be blind in a year, like the young musician in Auerbach's exquisite romance, I know of no place in the world where he could garner up so precious a store of memories for the days of darkness, memories that would haunt the soul with so divine a light of consolation, as in that graceful Palace of the Prado. It would be a hopeless task to attempt to review with any detail the gems of this collection. My memory is filled with the countless canvases that adorn the ten great halls. If I refer to my notebook I am equally discouraged by the number I have marked for special notice. The masterpieces are simply innumerable. I will say a word of each room, and so give up the unequal contest. As you enter the Museum from the north, you are in a wide sturdy-columned vestibule, hung with splashy pictures of Luca Giordano. To your right is the room devoted to the Spanish school; to the left, the Italian. In front is the grand gallery where the greatest works of both schools are collected. In the Spanish saloon there is an indefinable air of severity and gloom. It is less perfectly lighted than some others, and there is something forbidding in the general tone of the room. There are prim portraits of queens and princes, monks in contemplation, and holy people in antres vast and deserts idle. Most visitors come in from a sense of duty, look hurriedly about, and go out with a conscience at ease; in fact, there is a dim suggestion of the fagot and the rack about many of the Spanish masters. At one end of this gallery the Prometheus of Ribera agonizes chained to his rock. His gigantic limbs are flung about in the fury of immortal pain. A vulture, almost lost in the blackness of the shadows, is tugging at his vitals. His brow is convulsed with the pride and anguish of a demigod. It is a picture of horrible power. Opposite hangs one of the few Zurbarans of the gallery,--also a gloomy and terrible work. A monk kneels in shadows which, by the masterly chiaroscuro of this ascetic artist, are made to look darker than blackness. Before him in a luminous nimbus that burns its way through the dark, is the image of the crucified Saviour, head downwards. So remarkable is the vigor of the drawing and the power of light in this picture that you can imagine you see the resplendent crucifix suddenly thrust into the shadow by the strong hands of invisible spirits, and swayed for a moment only before the dazzled eyes of the ecstatic solitary. But after you have made friends with this room it will put off its forbidding aspect, and you will find it hath a stern look but a gentle heart. It has two lovely little landscapes by Murillo, showing how universal was that wholesome genius. Also one of the largest landscapes of Velazquez, which, when you stand near it, seems a confused mass of brown daubs, but stepping back a few yards becomes a most perfect view of the entrance to a royal park. The wide gate swings on its pivot before your eyes. A court cortege moves in,--the long, dark alley stretches off for miles directly in front, without any trick of lines or curves; the artist has painted the shaded air. To the left a patch of still water reflects the dark wood, and above there is a distant and tranquil sky. Had Velazquez not done such vastly greater things, his few landscapes would alone have won him fame enough. He has in this room a large number of royal portraits,--one especially worth attention, of Philip III. The scene is by the shore,--a cool foreground of sandy beach,--a blue-gray stretch of rippled water, and beyond, a low promontory between the curling waves and the cirrus clouds. The king mounts a magnificent gray horse, with a mane and tail like the broken rush of a cascade. The keeping is wonderful; a fresh sea breeze blows out of the canvas. A brilliant bit of color is thrown into the red, gold-fringed scarf of the horseman, fluttering backward over his shoulder. Yet the face of the king is, as it should be, the principal point of the picture,--the small-eyed, heavy-mouthed, red-lipped, fair, self-satisfied face of these Austrian despots. It is a handsomer face than most of Velazquez, as it was probably painted from memory and lenient tradition. For Philip III. was gathered to his fathers in the Escorial before Velazquez came up from Andalusia to seek his fortune at the court. The first work he did in Madrid was to paint the portrait of the king, which so pleased his majesty that he had it repeated _ad nauseam._ You see him served up in every form in this gallery,--on foot, on horseback, in full armor, in a shooting-jacket, at picnics, and actually on his knees at his prayers! We wonder if Velazquez ever grew tired of that vacant face with its contented smirk, or if in that loyal age the smile of royalty was not always the sunshine of the court? There is a most instructive study of faces in the portraits of the Austrian line. First comes Charles V., the First of Spain, painted by Titian at Augsburg, on horseback, in the armor he wore at Muhl-berg, his long lance in rest, his visor up over the eager, powerful face,--the eye and beak of an eagle, the jaw of a bull-dog, the face of a born ruler, a man of prey. And yet in the converging lines about the eyes, in the premature gray hair, in the nervous, irritable lips, you can see the promise of early decay, of an age that will be the spoil of superstition and bigotry. It is the face of a man who could make himself emperor and hermit. In his son, Philip II., the soldier dies out and the bigot is intensified. In the fine portrait by Pantoja, of Philip in his age, there is scarcely any trace of the fresh, fair youth that Titian painted as Adonis. It is the face of a living corpse; of a ghastly pallor, heightened by the dull black of his mourning suit, where all passion and feeling have died out of the livid lips and the icy eyes. Beside him hangs the portrait of his rickety, feebly passionate son, the unfortunate Don Carlos. The forehead of the young prince is narrow and ill-formed; the Austrian chin is exaggerated one degree more; he looks a picture of fitful impulse. His brother, Philip III., we have just seen, fair and inane,--a monster of cruelty, who burned Jews and banished Moors, not from malice, but purely from vacuity of spirit; his head broadens like a pine-apple from the blond crest to the plump jowls. Every one knows the head of Philip IV.,--he was fortunate in being the friend of Velazquez,--the high, narrow brow, the long, weak face, the yellow, curled mustache, the thick, red lips, and the ever lengthening Hapsburg chin. But the line of Austria ends with the utmost limit of caricature in the face of Charles the Bewitched! Carreno has given us an admirable portrait of this unfortunate,--the forehead caved in like the hat of a drunkard, the red-lidded eyes staring vacantly, a long, thin nose absurd as a Carnival disguise, an enormous mouth which he could not shut, the under-jaw projected so prodigiously,--a face incapable of any emotion but fear. And yet in gazing at this idiotic mask you are reminded of another face you have somewhere seen, and are startled to remember it is the resolute face of the warrior and statesman, the king of men, the Kaiser Karl. Yes, this pitiable being was the descendant of the great emperor, and for that sufficient reason, although he was an impotent and shivering idiot, although he could not sleep without a friar in his bed to keep the devils away, for thirty-five years this scarecrow ruled over Spain, and dying made a will whose accomplishment bathed the Peninsula in blood. It must be confessed this institution of monarchy is a luxury that must be paid for. We did not intend to talk of politics in this room, but that line of royal effigies was too tempting. Before we go, let us look at a beautiful Magdalen in penitence, by an unknown artist of the school of Murillo. She stands near the entrance of her cave, in a listening attitude. The bright out-of-door light falls on her bare shoulder and gives the faintest touch of gold to her dishevelled brown hair. She casts her eyes upward, the large melting eyes of Andalusia; a chastened sorrow, through which a trembling hope is shining, softens the somewhat worldly beauty of her exquisite and sensitive face. Through the mouth of the cave we catch a glimpse of sunny mountain solitude, and in the rosy air that always travels with Spanish angels a band of celestial serenaders is playing. It is a charming composition, without any depth of sentiment or especial mastery of treatment, but evidently painted by a clever artist in his youth, and this Magdalen is the portrait of the lady of his dreams. None of Murillo's pupils but Tobar could have painted it, and the manner is precisely the same as that of his Divina Pastora. Across the hall is the gallery consecrated to Italian artists. There are not many pictures of the first rank here. They have been reserved for the great central gallery, where we are going. But while here, we must notice especially two glorious works of Tintoret,--the same subject differently treated,--the Death of Holofernes. Both are placed higher than they should be, considering their incontestable merit. A full light is needed to do justice to that magnificence of color which is the pride of Venice. There are two remarkable pictures of Giordano,--one in the Roman style, which would not be unworthy of the great Sanzio himself, a Holy Family, drawn and colored with that scrupulous correctness which seems so impossible in the ordinary products of this Protean genius; and just opposite, an apotheosis of Rubens, surrounded by his usual "properties" of fat angels and genii, which could be readily sold anywhere as a specimen of the estimate which the unabashed Fleming placed upon himself. It is marvellous that any man should so master the habit and the thought of two artists so widely apart as Raphael and Rubens, as to produce just such pictures as they would have painted upon the same themes. The halls and dark corridors of the Museum are filled with Giordano's canvases. In less than ten years' residence in Spain he covered the walls of dozens of churches and palaces with his fatally facile work. There are more than three hundred pictures recorded as executed by him in that time. They are far from being without merit. There is a singular slap-dash vigor about his drawing. His coloring, except when he is imitating some earlier master, is usually thin and poor. It is difficult to repress an emotion of regret in looking at his laborious yet useless life. With great talents, with indefatigable industry, he deluged Europe with paintings that no one cares for, and passed into history simply as Luca Fa Presto,--Luke Work-Fast. It is not by mere activity that great things are done in art. In the great gallery we now enter we see the deathless work of the men who wrought in faith. This is the grandest room in Christendom. It is about three hundred and fifty feet long and thirty-five broad and high. It is beautifully lighted from above. Its great length is broken here and there by vases and statues, so placed between doors as nowhere to embarrass the view. The northern half of the gallery is Spanish, and the southern half Italian. Halfway down, a door to the left opens into an oval chamber, devoted to an eclectic set of masterpieces of every school and age. The gallery ends in a circular room of French and German pictures, on either side of which there are two great halls of Dutch and Flemish. On the ground floor there are some hundreds more Flemish and a hall of sculpture. The first pictures you see to your left are by the early masters of Spain,--Morales, called in Spain the Divine, whose works are now extremely rare, the Museum possessing only three or four, long, fleshless faces and stiff figures of Christs and Marys,--and Juan de Juanes, the founder of the Valentian school, who brought back from Italy the lessons of Raphael's studio, that firmness of design and brilliancy of color, and whose genuine merit has survived all vicissitudes of changing taste. He has here a superb Last Supper and a spirited series of pictures illustrating the martyrdom of Stephen. There is perhaps a little too much elaboration of detail, even for the Romans. Stephen's robes are unnecessarily new, and the ground where he is stoned is profusely covered with convenient round missiles the size of Vienna rolls, so exactly suited to the purpose that it looks as if Providence sided with the persecutors. But what a wonderful variety and truth in the faces and the attitudes of the groups! What mastery of drawing, and what honest integrity of color after all these ages! It is reported of Juanes that he always confessed and prayed before venturing to take up his pencils to touch the features of the saints and Saviours that shine on his canvas. His conscientious fervor has its reward. Across the room are the Murillos. Hung together are two pictures, not of large dimensions, but of exquisite perfection, which will serve as fair illustrations of the work of his youth and his age; the frio and the vaporoso manner. In the former manner is this charming picture of Rebecca at the Well; a graceful composition, correct and somewhat severe drawing, the greatest sharpness and clearness of outline. In the Martyrdom of St. Andrew the drawing and the composition are no less absolutely perfect, but there hangs over the whole picture a luminous haze of strangeness and mystery. A light that never was on sea or land bathes the distant hills and battlements, touches the spears of the legionaries, and shines in full glory on the ecstatic face of the aged saint. It does not seem a part of the scene. You see the picture through it. A step further on there is a Holy Family, which seems to me the ultimate effort of the early manner. A Jewish carpenter holds his fair-haired child between his knees. The urchin holds up a bird to attract the attention of a little white dog on the floor. The mother, a dark-haired peasant woman, looks on the scene with quiet amusement. The picture is absolutely perfect in detail. It seems to be the _consigne_ among critics to say it lacks "style." They say it is a family scene in Judaea, _voila tout._ Of course, and it is that very truth and nature that makes this picture so fascinating. The Word was made flesh, and not a phosphorescent apparition; and Murillo knew what he was about when he painted this view of the interior of St. Joseph's shop. What absurd presumption to accuse this great thinker of a deficiency of ideality, in face of these two glorious Marys of the Conception that fill the room with light and majesty! They hang side by side, so alike and yet so distinct in character. One is a woman in knowledge and a goddess of purity; the other, absolute innocence, startled by the stupendous revelation and exalted by the vaguely comprehended glory of the future. It is before this picture that the visitor always lingers longest. The face is the purest expression of girlish loveliness possible to art. The Virgin floats upborne by rosy clouds, flocks of pink cherubs flutter at her feet waving palm-branches. The golden air is thick with suggestions of dim celestial faces, but nothing mars the imposing solitude of the Queen of Heaven, shrined alone, throned in the luminous azure. Surely no man ever understood or interpreted like this grand Andalusian the power that the worship of woman exerts on the religions of the world. All the passionate love that has been poured out in all the ages at the feet of Ashtaroth and Artemis and Aphrodite and Freya found visible form and color at last on that immortal canvas where, with his fervor of religion and the full strength of his virile devotion to beauty, he created, for the adoration of those who should follow him, this type of the perfect Feminine,-- "Thee! standing loveliest in the open heaven! Ave Maria! only Heaven and Thee!" There are some dozens more of Murillo here almost equally remarkable, but I cannot stop to make an unmeaning catalogue of them. There is a charming Gypsy Fortune-teller, whose wheedling voice and smile were caught and fixed in some happy moment in Seville; an Adoration of the Shepherds, wonderful in its happy combination of rigid truth with the warmest glow of poetry; two Annunciations, rich with the radiance that streams through the rent veil of the innermost heaven,--lights painted boldly upon lights, the White Dove sailing out of the dazzling background of celestial effulgence,--a miracle and mystery of theology repeated by a miracle and mystery of art. Even when you have exhausted the Murillos of the Museum you have not reached his highest achievements in color and design. You will find these in the Academy of San Fernando,--the Dream of the Roman Gentleman, and the Founding of the Church of St. Mary the Greater; and the powerful composition of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, in her hospital work. In the first, a noble Roman and his wife have suddenly fallen asleep in their chairs in an elegant apartment. Their slumber is painted with curious felicity,--you lower your voice for fear of waking them. On the left of the picture is their dream: the Virgin comes in a halo of golden clouds and designates the spot where her church is to be built. In the next picture the happy couple kneel before the pope and expose their high commission, and outside a brilliant procession moves to the ceremony of the laying of the corner-stone. The St. Elizabeth is a triumph of genius over a most terribly repulsive subject. The wounds and sores of the beggars are painted with unshrinking fidelity, but every vulgar detail is redeemed by the beauty and majesty of the whole. I think in these pictures of Murillo the last word of Spanish art was reached. There was no further progress possible in life, even for him. "Other heights in other lives, God willing." Returning to the Museum and to Velazquez, we find ourselves in front of his greatest historical work, the Surrender of Breda. This is probably the most utterly unaffected historical painting in existence. There is positively no stage business about it. On the right is the Spanish staff, on the left the deputation of the vanquished Flemings. In the centre the great Spinola accepts the keys of the city from the governor; his attitude and face are full of dignity softened by generous and affable grace. He lays his hand upon the shoulder of the Flemish general, and you can see he is paying him some chivalrous compliment on the gallant fight he has lost. If your eyes wander through the open space between the two escorts, you see a wonderful widespread landscape in the Netherlands, which would form a fine picture if the figures all were gone. Opposite this great work is another which artists consider greater,--Las Meninas. When Luca Giordano came from Italy he inquired for this picture, and said on seeing it, "This is the theology of painting." If our theology were what it should be, and cannot be, absolute and unquestionable truth, Luca the Quick-worker would have been right. Velazquez was painting the portrait of a stupid little infanta when the idea came to him of perpetuating the scene just as it was. We know how we have wished to be sure of the exact accessories of past events. The modern rage for theatrical local color is an illustration of this desire. The great artist, who must have honored his art, determined to give to future ages an exact picture of one instant of his glorious life. It is not too much to say he has done this. He stands before his easel, his pencils in his hand. The little princess is stiffly posing in the centre. Her little maids are grouped about her. Two hideous dwarfs on the right are teasing a noble dog who is too drowsy and magnanimous to growl. In the background at the end of a long gallery a gentleman is opening a door to the garden. The presence of royalty is indicated by the reflection of the faces of the king and queen in a small mirror, where you would expect to see your own. The longer you look upon this marvellous painting, the less possible does it seem that it is merely the placing of color on canvas which causes this perfect illusion. It does not seem possible that you are looking at a plane surface. There is a stratum of air before, behind, and beside these figures. You could walk on that floor and see how the artist is getting on with the portrait. There is space and light in this picture, as in any room. Every object is detached, as in the common miracle of the stereoscope. If art consist in making a fleeting moment immortal, if the True is a higher ideal than the Beautiful, then it will be hard to find a greater painting than this. It is utterly without beauty; its tone is a cold olive green-gray; there is not one redeeming grace or charm about it except the noble figure of Velazquez himself,--yet in its austere fidelity to truth it stands incomparable in the world. It gained Velazquez his greatest triumph. You see on his breast a sprawling red cross, painted evidently by an unskilful hand. This was the gracious answer made by Philip IV. when the artist asked him if anything was wanting to the picture. This decoration, daubed by the royal hand, was the accolade of the knighthood of Santiago,--an honor beyond the dreams of an artist of that day. It may be considered the highest compliment ever paid to a painter, except the one paid by Courbet to himself, when he refused to be decorated by the Man of December. Among Velazquez's most admirable studies of life is his picture of the Borrachos. A group of rustic roysterers are admitting a neophyte into the drunken _confrerie._ He kneels to receive a crown of ivy from the hands of the king of the revel. A group of older tipplers are filling their cups, or eyeing their brimming glasses, with tipsy, mock-serious glances. There has never been a chapter written which so clearly shows the drunkard's nature as this vulgar anacreontic. A thousand men have painted drunken frolics, but never one with such distinct spiritual insight as this. To me the finest product of Jordaens' genius is his Bohnen Koenig in the Belvedere, but there you see only the incidents of the mad revel; every one is shouting or singing or weeping with maudlin glee or tears. But in this scene of the Borrachos there is nothing scenic or forced. These topers have come together to drink, for the love of the wine,--the fun is secondary. This wonderful reserve of Velazquez is clearly seen in his conception of the king of the rouse. He is a young man, with a heavy, dull, somewhat serious face, fat rather than bloated, rather pale than flushed. He is naked to the waist to show the plump white arms and shoulders and the satiny skin of the voluptuary; one of those men whose heads and whose stomachs are too loyal ever to give them _Katzenjammer_ or remorse. The others are of the commoner type of haunters of wine-shops,--with red eyes and coarse hides and grizzled matted hair,--but every man of them inexorably true, and a predestined sot. We must break away from Velazquez, passing by his marvellous portraits of kings and dwarfs, saints and poodles,--among whom there is a dwarf of two centuries ago, who is too like Tom Thumb to serve for his twin brother,--and a portrait of Aesop, which is a flash of intuition, an epitome of all the fables. Before leaving the Spaniards we must look at the most pleasing of all Ribera's works,--the Ladder-Dream of Jacob. The patriarch lies stretched on the open plain in the deep sleep of the weary. To the right in a broad shaft of cloudy gold the angels are ascending and descending. The picture is remarkable for its mingling the merits of Ribera's first and second manner. It is a Caravaggio in its strength and breadth of light and shade, and a Correggio in its delicacy of sentiment and refined beauty of coloring. He was not often so fortunate in his Parmese efforts. They are usually marked by a timidity and an attempt at prettiness inconceivable in the haughty and impulsive master of the Neapolitan school. Of the three great Spaniards, Ribera is the least sympathetic. He often displays a tumultuous power and energy to which his calmer rivals are strangers. But you miss in him that steady devotion to truth which distinguishes Velazquez, and that spiritual lift which ennobles Murillo. The difference, I conceive, lies in the moral character of the three. Ribera was a great artist, and the others were noble men. Ribera passed a youth of struggle and hunger and toil among the artists of Rome,--a stranger and penniless in the magnificent city,--picking up crusts in the street and sketching on quiet curbstones, with no friend, and no name but that of Spagnoletto,--the little Spaniard. Suddenly rising to fame, he broke loose from his Roman associations and fled to Naples, where he soon became the wealthiest and the most arrogant artist of his time. He held continually at his orders a faction of _bravi_ who drove from Naples, with threats and insults and violence, every artist of eminence who dared visit the city. Car-racci and Guido only saved their lives by flight, and the blameless and gifted Domenichino, it is said, was foully murdered by his order. It is not to such a heart as this that is given the ineffable raptures of Murillo or the positive revelations of Velazquez. These great souls were above cruelty or jealousy. Velazquez never knew the storms of adversity. Safely anchored in the royal favor, he passed his uneventful life in the calm of his beloved work. But his hand and home were always open to the struggling artists of Spain. He was the benefactor of Alonzo Cano; and when Murillo came up to Madrid, weary and footsore with his long tramp from Andalusia, sustained by an innate consciousness of power, all on fire with a picture of Van Dyck he had seen in Seville, the rich and honored painter of the court received with generous kindness the shabby young wanderer, clothed him, and taught him, and watched with noble delight the first flights of the young eagle whose strong wing was so soon to cleave the empyrean. And when Murillo went back to Seville he paid his debt by doing as much for others. These magnanimous hearts were fit company for the saints they drew. We have lingered so long with the native artists we shall have little to say of the rest. There are ten fine Raphaels, but it is needless to speak of them. They have been endlessly reproduced. Raphael is known and judged by the world. After some centuries of discussion the scorners and the critics are dumb. All men have learned the habit of Albani, who, in a frivolous and unappreciative age, always uncovered his head at the name of Raphael Sanzio. We look at his precious work with a mingled feeling of gratitude for what we have, and of rebellious wonder that lives like his and Shelley's should be extinguished in their glorious dawn, while kings and country gentlemen live a hundred years. What boundless possibilities of bright achievement these two divine youths owed us in the forty years more they should have lived! Raphael's greatest pictures in Madrid are the Spasimo di Sicilia, and the Holy Family, called La Perla. The former has a singular history. It was painted for a convent in Palermo, shipwrecked on the way, and thrown ashore on the gulf of Genoa. It was again sent to Sicily, brought to Spain by the Viceroy of Naples, stolen by Napoleon, and in Paris was subjected to a brilliantly successful operation for transferring the layer of paint from the worm-eaten wood to canvas. It came back to Spain with other stolen goods from the Louvre. La Perla was bought by Philip IV. at the sale of Charles I.'s effects after his decapitation. Philip was fond of Charles, but could not resist the temptation to profit by his death. This picture was the richest of the booty. It is, of all the faces of the Virgin extant, the most perfectly beautiful and one of the least spiritual. There is another fine Madonna, commonly called La Virgen del Pez, from a fish which young Tobit holds in his hand. It is rather tawny in color, as if it had been painted on a pine board and the wood had asserted itself from below. It is a charming picture, with all the great Roman's inevitable perfection of design; but it is incomprehensible that critics, M. Viardot among them, should call it the first in rank of Raphael's Virgins in Glory. There are none which can dispute that title with Our Lady of San Sisto, unearthly and supernatural in beauty and majesty. The school of Florence is represented by a charming Mona Lisa of Leonardo da Vinci, almost identical with that of the Louvre; and six admirable pictures of Andrea del Sarto. But the one which most attracts and holds all those who regard the Faultless Painter with sympathy, and who admiring his genius regret his errors, is a portrait of his wife Lucrezia Fede, whose name, a French writer has said, is a double epigram. It was this capricious and wilful beauty who made poor Andrea break his word and embezzle the money King Francis had given him to spend for works of art. Yet this dangerous face is his best excuse,--the face of a man-snarer, subtle and passionate and cruel in its blind selfishness, and yet so beautiful that any man might yield to it against the cry of his own warning conscience. Browning must have seen it before he wrote, in his pathetic poem,-- "Let my hands frame your face in your hair's gold, You beautiful Lucrezia, that are mine!" Nowhere, away from the Adriatic, is the Venetian school so richly represented as in Madrid. Charles and Philip were the most munificent friends and patrons of Titian, and the Royal Museum counts among its treasures in consequence the enormous number of forty-three pictures by the wonderful centenarian. Among these are two upon which he set great value,--a Last Supper, which has unfortunately mouldered to ruin in the humid refectory of the Escorial, equal in merit and destiny with that of Leonardo; and the Gloria, or apotheosis of the imperial family, which, after the death of Charles, was brought from Yuste to the Escorial, and thence came to swell the treasures of the Museum. It is a grand and masterly work. The vigorous genius of Titian has grappled with the essential difficulties of a subject that trembles on the balance of ridiculous and sublime, and has come out triumphant. The Father and the Son sit on high. The Operating Spirit hovers above them. The Virgin in robes of azure stands in the blaze of the Presence. The celestial army is ranged around. Below, a little lower than the angels, are Charles and Philip with their wives, on their knees, with white cowls and clasped hands,--Charles in his premature age, with worn face and grizzled beard; and Philip in his youth of unwholesome fairness, with red lips and pink eyelids, such as Titian painted him in the Adonis. The foreground is filled with prophets and saints of the first dignity, and a kneeling woman, whose face is not visible, but whose attitude and drapery are drawn with the sinuous and undulating grace of that hand which could not fail. Every figure is turned to the enthroned Deity, touched with ineffable light. The artist has painted heaven, and is not absurd. In that age of substantial faith such achievements were possible. There are two Venuses by Titian very like that of Dresden, but the heads have not the same dignity; and a Danae which is a replica of the Vienna one. His Salome bearing the Head of John the Baptist is one of the finest impersonations of the pride of life conceivable. So unapproachable are the soft lights and tones on the perfect arms and shoulders of the full-bodied maiden, that Tintoret one day exclaimed in despair before it, "That fellow paints with ground flesh." This gallery possesses one of the last works of Titian,--the Battle of Lepanto, which was fought when the artist was ninety-four years of age. It is a courtly allegory,--King Philip holds his little son in his arms, a courier angel brings the news of victory, and to the infant a palm-branch and the scroll _Majora tibi._ Outside you see the smoke and flash of a naval battle, and a malignant and tur-baned Turk lies bound on the floor. It would seem incredible that this enormous canvas should have been executed at such an age, did we not know that when the pest cut the mighty master off in his hundredth year he was busily at work upon a Descent from the Cross, which Palma the Elder finished on his knees and dedicated to God: Quod Titianus inchoatum reliquit Palma reverenter absolvit Deoque dicavit opus. The vast representation of Titian rather injures Veronese and Tintoret. Opposite the Gloria of Yuste hangs the sketch of that stupendous Paradise of Tintoret, which we see in the Palace of the Doges,--the biggest picture ever painted by mortal, thirty feet high and seventy-four long. The sketch was secured by Velazquez in his tour through Italy. The most charming picture of Veronese is a Venus and Adonis, which is finer than that of Titian,--a classic and most exquisite idyl of love and sleep, cool shadow and golden-sifted sunshine. His most considerable work in the gallery is a Christ teaching the Doctors, magnificent in arrangement, severely correct in drawing, and of a most vivid and dramatic interest. We pass through a circular vaulted chamber to reach the Flemish rooms. There is a choice though scanty collection of the German and French schools. Albert Durer has an Adam and Eve, and a priceless portrait of himself as perfectly preserved as if it were painted yesterday. He wears a curious and picturesque costume,--striped black-and-white,--a graceful tasselled cap of the same. The picture is sufficiently like the statue at Nuremberg; a long South-German face, blue-eyed and thin, fair-whiskered, with that expression of quiet confidence you would expect in the man who said one day, with admirable candor, when people were praising a picture of his, "It could not be better done." In this circular room are four great Claudes, two of which, Sunrise and Sunset, otherwise called the Embarcation of Sta. Paula, and Tobit and the Angel, are in his best and richest manner. It is inconceivable to us, who graduate men by a high-school standard, that these refined and most elegant works could have been produced by a man so imperfectly educated as Claude Lorrain. There remain the pictures of the Dutch and the Flemings. It is due to the causes we have mentioned in the beginning that neither in Antwerp nor Dresden nor Paris is there such wealth and profusion of the Netherlands art as in this mountain-guarded corner of Western Europe. I shall have but a word to say of these three vast rooms, for Rubens and Van Dyck and Teniers are known to every one. The first has here a representation so complete that if Europe were sunk by a cataclysm from the Baltic to the Pyrenees every essential characteristic of the great Fleming could still be studied in this gallery. With the exception of his Descent from the Cross in the Cathedral at Antwerp, painted in a moment of full inspiration that never comes twice in a life, everything he has done elsewhere may be matched in Madrid. His largest picture here is an Adoration of the Kings, an overpowering exhibition of wasteful luxuriance of color and _fougue_ of composition. To the left the Virgin stands leaning with queenly majesty over the effulgent Child. From this point the light flashes out over the kneeling magi, the gorgeously robed attendants, the prodigality of velvet and jewels and gold, to fade into the lovely clear-obscure of a starry night peopled with dim camels and cattle. On the extreme right is a most graceful and gallant portrait of the artist on horseback. We have another fine self-portraiture in the Garden of Love,--a group of lords and ladies in a delicious pleasance where the greatest seigneur is Peter Paul Rubens and the finest lady is Helen Forman. These true artists had to paint for money so many ignoble faces that they could not be blamed for taking their revenge in painting sometimes their own noble heads. Van Dyck never drew a profile so faultless in manly beauty as his own which we see on the same canvas with that of his friend the Earl of Bristol. Look at the two faces side by side, and say whether God or the king can make the better nobleman. Among those mythological subjects in which Rubens delighted, the best here are his Perseus and Andromeda, where the young hero comes gloriously in a brand-new suit of Milanese armor, while the lovely princess, in a costume that never grows old-fashioned, consisting of sunshine and golden hair, awaits him and deliverance in beautiful resignation; a Judgment of Paris, the Three Graces,--both prodigies of his strawberries-and-cream color; and a curious suckling of Hercules, which is the prototype or adumbration of the ecstatic vision of St. Bernard. He has also a copy of Titian's Adam and Eve, in an out-of-the-way place downstairs, which should be hung beside the original, to show the difference of handling of the two master colorists. Especially happy is this Museum in its Van Dycks. Besides those incomparable portraits of Lady Oxford, of Liberti the Organist of Antwerp, and others better than the best of any other man, there are a few large and elaborate compositions such as I have never seen elsewhere. The principal one is the Capture of Christ by Night in the Garden of Gethsemane, which has all the strength of Rubens, with a more refined study of attitudes and a greater delicacy of tone and touch. Another is the Crowning with Thorns,--although of less dimensions, of profound significance in expression, and a flowing and marrowy softness of execution. You cannot survey the work of Van Dyck in this collection, so full of deep suggestion, showing an intellect so vivid and so refined, a mastery of processes so thorough and so intelligent, without the old wonder of what he would have done in that ripe age when Titian and Murillo and Shakespeare wrought their best and fullest, and the old regret for the dead,--as Edgar Poe sings, the doubly dead in that they died so young. We are tempted to lift the veil that hides the unknown, at least with the furtive hand of conjecture; to imagine a field of unquenched activity where the early dead, free from the clogs and trammels of the lower world, may follow out the impulses of their diviner nature,--where Andrea has no wife, and Raphael and Van Dyck no disease,--where Keats and Shelley have all eternity for their lofty rhyme,--where Ellsworth and Koerner and the Lowell boys can turn their alert and athletic intelligence to something better than war. A CASTLE IN THE AIR I have sometimes thought that a symptom of the decay of true kinghood in modern times is the love of monarchs for solitude. In the early days when monarchy was a real power to answer a real want, the king had no need to hide himself. He was the strongest, the most knowing, the most cunning. He moved among men their acknowledged chief. He guided and controlled them. He never lost his dignity by daily use. He could steal a horse like Diomede, he could mend his own breeches like Dagobert, and never tarnish the lustre of the crown by it. But in later times the throne has become an anachronism. The wearer of a crown has done nothing to gain it but give himself the trouble to be born. He has no claim to the reverence or respect of men. Yet he insists upon it, and receives some show of it. His life is mainly passed in keeping up this battle for a lost dignity and worship. He is given up to shams and ceremonies. To a life like this there is something embarrassing in the movement and activity of a great city. The king cannot join in it without a loss of prestige. Being outside of it, he is vexed and humiliated by it. The empty forms become nauseous in the midst of this honest and wholesome reality of out-of-doors. Hence the necessity of these quiet retreats in the forests, in the water-guarded islands, in the cloud-girdled mountains. Here the world is not seen or heard. Here the king may live with such approach to nature as his false and deformed education will allow. He is surrounded by nothing but the world of servants and courtiers, and it requires little effort of the imagination to consider himself chief and lord. It was this spirit which in the decaying ripeness of the Bourbon dynasty drove the Louis from Paris to Versailles and from Versailles to Marly. Millions were wasted to build the vast monument of royal fatuity, and when it was done the Grand Monarque found it necessary to fly from time to time to the sham solitude and mock retirement he had built an hour away. When Philip V. came down from France to his splendid exile on the throne of Spain, he soon wearied of the interminable ceremonies of the Cas-tilian court, and finding one day, while hunting, a pleasant farm on the territory of the Segovian monks, flourishing in a wrinkle of the Guadarrama Mountains, he bought it, and reared the Palace of La Granja. It is only kings who can build their castles in the air of palpable stones and mortar. This lordly pleasure-house stands four thousand feet above the sea level. On this commanding height, in this savage Alpine loneliness, in the midst of a scenery once wildly beautiful, but now shorn and shaven into a smug likeness of a French garden, Philip passed all the later years of his gloomy and inglorious life. It has been ever since a most tempting summer-house to all the Bourbons. When the sun is calcining the plains of Castile, and the streets of Madrid are white with the hot light of midsummer, this palace in the clouds is as cool and shadowy as spring twilights. And besides, as all public business is transacted in Madrid, and La Granja is a day's journey away, it is too much trouble to send a courier every day for the royal signature,--or, rather, rubric, for royalty in Spain is above handwriting, and gives its majestic approval with a flourish of the pen,--so that everything waits a week or so, and much business goes finally undone; and this is the highest triumph of Spanish industry and skill. We had some formal business with the court of the regent, and were not sorry to learn that his highness would not return to the capital for some weeks, and that consequently, following the precedent of a certain prophet, we must go to the mountain. We found at the Estacion del Norte the state railway carriage of her late majesty,--a brilliant creation of yellow satin and profuse gilding, a bovidoir on wheels,--not too full of a distinguished company. Some of the leading men of New Spain, one or two ministers, were there, and we passed a pleasant two hours on the road in that most seductive of all human occupations,--talking politics. It is remarkable that whenever a nation is remodelling its internal structure, the subject most generally discussed is the constitutional system of the United States. The republicans usually adopt it solid. The monarchists study it with a jealous interest. I fell into conversation with Senor------, one of the best minds in Spain, an enlightened though conservative statesman. He said: "It is hard for Europe to adopt a settled belief about you. America is a land of wonders, of contradictions. One party calls your system freedom, another anarchy. In all legislative assemblies of Europe, republicans and absolutists alike draw arguments from America. But what cannot be denied are the effects, the results. These are evident, something vast and grandiose, a life and movement to which the Old World is stranger." He afterwards referred with great interest to the imaginary imperialist movement in America, and raised his eyebrows in polite incredulity when I assured him there was as much danger of Spain becoming Mohammedan as of America becoming imperialist. We stopped at the little station of Villalba, in the midst of the wide brown table-land that stretches from Madrid to the Escorial. At Villalba we found the inevitable swarm of beggars, who always know by the sure instinct of wretchedness where a harvest of cuartos is to be achieved. I have often passed Villalba and have seen nothing but the station-master and the water-vender. But to-day, because there were a half dozen excellencies on the train, the entire mendicant force of the district was on parade. They could not have known these gentlemen were coming; they must have scented pennies in the air. Awaiting us at the rear of the station were three enormous lumbering diligences, each furnished with nine superb mules,--four pairs and a leader. They were loaded with gaudy trappings, and their shiny coats, and backs shorn into graceful arabesques, showed that they did not belong to the working-classes, but enjoyed the gentlemanly leisure of official station. The drivers wore a smart postilion uniform and the royal crown on their caps. We threw some handfuls of copper and bronze among the picturesque mendicants. They gathered them up with grave Castilian decorum, and said, "God will repay your graces." The postilions cracked their whips, the mules shook their bells gayly, the heavy wagons started off at a full gallop, and the beggars said, "May your graces go with God!" It was the end of July, and the sky was blue and cloudless. The fine, soft light of the afternoon was falling on the tawny slopes and the close-reaped fields. The harvest was over. In the fields on either side they were threshing their grain, not as in the outside world, with the whirring of loud and swift machinery, nor even with the active and lively swinging of flails; but in the open air, under the warm sky, the cattle were lazily treading out the corn on the bare ground, to be winnowed by the wandering wind. No change from the time of Solomon. Through an infinity of ages, ever since corn and cattle were, the Iberian farmer in this very spot had driven his beasts over his crop, and never dreamed of a better way of doing the work. Not only does the Spaniard not seek for improvements, he utterly despises and rejects them. The poorer classes especially, who would find an enormous advantage in increased production, lightening their hard lot by a greater plenty of the means of life, regard every introduction of improved machinery as a blow at the rights of labor. When many years ago a Dutch vintner went to Valdepenas and so greatly improved the manufacture of that excellent but ill-made wine that its price immediately rose in the Madrid market, he was mobbed and plundered by his ignorant neighbors, because, as they said, he was laboring to make wine dearer. In every attempt which has been made to manufacture improved machinery in Spain, the greatest care has to be taken to prevent the workmen from maliciously damaging the works, which they imagine are to take the bread from the mouths of their children. So strong is this feeling in every department of national life, that the mayoral who drove our spanking nine-in-hand received with very ill humor our suggestion that the time could be greatly shortened by a Fell railroad over the hills to La Granja. "What would become of nosotros?" he asked. And it really would seem a pity to annihilate so much picturesqueness and color at the bidding of mere utility. A gayly embroidered Andalusian jacket, bright scarlet silk waistcoat,--a rich wide belt, into which his long knife, the navaja, was jauntily thrust,--buckskin breeches, with Valentian stockings, which, as they are open at the bottom, have been aptly likened to a Spaniard's purse,--and shoes made of Murcian matting, composed his natty outfit. By his side on the box sat the zagal, his assistant, whose especial function seemed to be to swear at the cattle. I have heard some eloquent imprecation in my day. "Our army swore terribly" at Hilton Head. The objuration of the boatmen of the Mississippi is very vigorous and racy. But I have never assisted at a session of profanity so loud, so energetic, so original as that with which this Castilian postilion regaled us. The wonderful consistency and perseverance with which the role was sustained was worthy of a much better cause. He began by yelling in a coarse, strident voice, "Arre! arre!" (Get up!) with a vicious emphasis on the final syllable. This is one of the Moorish words that have remained fixed like fossils in the language of the conquerors. Its constant use in the mouths of muleteers has given them the name of arrieros. This general admonition being addressed to the team at large, the zagal descended to details, and proceeded to vilipend the galloping beasts separately, beginning with the leader. He informed him, still in this wild, jerking scream, that he was a dog, that his mother's character was far from that of Caesar's wife, and that if more speed was not exhibited on this down grade, he would be forced to resort to extreme measures. At the mention of a whip, the tall male mule who led the team dashed gallantly off, and the diligence was soon enveloped in a cloud of dust. This seemed to excite our gay charioteer to the highest degree. He screamed lustily at his mules, addressing each personally by its name. "Andaluza, arre! Thou of Arragon, go! Beware the scourge, Manchega!" and every animal acknowledged the special attention by shaking its ears and bells and whisking its shaven tail, as the diligence rolled furiously over the dull drab plain. For three hours the iron lungs of the muleteer knew no rest or pause. Several times in the journey we stopped at a post-station to change our cattle, but the same brazen throat sufficed for all the threatening and encouragement that kept them at the top of their speed. Before we arrived at our journey's end, however, he was hoarse as a raven, and kept one hand pressed to his jaw to reinforce the exhausted muscles of speech. When the wide and dusty plain was passed, we began by a slow and winding ascent the passage of the Guadarrama. The road is an excellent one, and although so seldom used,--a few months only in the year,--it is kept in the most perfect repair. It is exclusively a summer road, being in the winter impassable with snow. It affords at every turn the most charming compositions of mountain and wooded valley. At intervals we passed a mounted guardia civil, who sat as motionless in his saddle as an equestrian statue, and saluted as the coaches rattled by. And once or twice in a quiet nook by the roadside we came upon the lonely cross that marked the spot where a man had been murdered. It was nearly sunset when we arrived at the summit of the pass. We halted to ask for a glass of water at the hut of a gray-haired woman on the mountain-top. It was given and received as always in this pious country, in the name of God. As we descended, the mules seemed to have gained new vigor from the prospect of an easy stretch of _facilis descensus,_ and the zagal employed what was left of his voice in provoking them to speed by insulting remarks upon their lineage. The quick twilight fell as we entered a vast forest of pines that clothed the mountain-side. The enormous trees looked in the dim evening light like the forms of the Anakim, maimed with lightning but still defying heaven. Years of battle with the mountain winds had twisted them into every conceivable shape of writhing and distorted deformity. I never saw trees that so nearly conveyed the idea of being the visible prison of tortured dryads. Their trunks, white and glistening with oozing resin, added to the ghostly impression they created in the uncertain and failing light. We reached the valley and rattled by a sleepy village, where we were greeted by a chorus of outraged curs whose beauty-sleep we had disturbed, and then began the slow ascent of the hill where St. Ildefonso stands. We had not gone far when we heard a pattering of hoofs and a ringing of sabres coming down the road to meet us. The diligence stopped, and the Introducer of Ambassadors jumped to the ground and announced, "El Regente del Reino!" It was the regent, the courteous and amiable Marshal Serrano, who had ridden out from the palace to welcome his guests, and who, after hasty salutations, galloped back to La Granja, where we soon arrived. We were assigned the apartments usually given to the papal nuncio, and slept with an episcopal peace of mind. In the morning, as we were walking about the gardens, we saw looking from the palace window one of the most accomplished gentlemen and diplomatists of the new regime. He descended and did the honors of the place. The system of gardens and fountains is enormous. It is evidently modelled upon Versailles, but the copy is in many respects finer than the original. The peculiarity of the site, while offering great difficulties, at the same time enhances the triumph of success. This is a garden taught to bloom upon a barren mountain-side. The earth in which these trees are planted was brought from those dim plains in the distance on the backs of men and mules. The pipes that supply these innumerable fountains were laid on the bare rocks and the soil was thrown over them. Every tree was guarded and watched like a baby. There was probably never a garden that grew under such circumstances,--but the result is superb. The fountains are fed by a vast reservoir in the mountain, and the water they throw into the bright air is as clear as morning dew. Every alley and avenue is a vista that ends in a vast picture of shaggy hills or far-off plains,--while behind the royal gardens towers the lordly peak of the Penalara, thrust eight thousand feet into the thin blue ether. The palace has its share of history. It witnessed the abdication of the uxorious bigot Philip V. in 1724, and his resumption of the crown the next year at the instance of his proud and turbulent Parmesan wife. His bones rest in the church here, as he hated the Austrian line too intensely to share with them the gorgeous crypt of the Escorial. His wife, Elizabeth Farnese, lies under the same gravestone with him, as if unwilling to forego even in death that tremendous influence which her vigorous vitality had always exercised over his wavering and sensual nature. "Das Ewig-Weibliche" masters and guides him still. This retreat in the autumn of 1832 was the scene of a prodigious exhibition of courage and energy on the part of another Italian woman, Dona Louisa Carlota de Borbon. Ferdinand VIL, his mind weakened by illness, and influenced by his ministers, had proclaimed his brother Don Carlos heir to the throne, to the exclusion of his own infant daughter. His wife, Queen Christine, broken down by the long conflict, had given way in despair. But her sister, Dona Louisa Carlota, heard of the news in the south of Spain, and, leaving her babies at _Cadiz_ (two little urchins, one of whom was to be king consort, and the other was to fall by his cousin Montpensier's hand in the field of Carabanchel), she posted without a moment's pause for rest or sleep over mountains and plains from the sea to La Granja. She fought with the lackeys and the ministers twenty-four hours before she could see her sister the queen. Having breathed into Christine her own invincible spirit, they succeeded, after endless pains, in reaching the king. Obstinate as the weak often are, he refused at first to listen to them; but by their womanly wiles, their Italian policy, their magnetic force, they at last brought him to revoke his decree in favor of Don Carlos and to recognize the right of his daughter to the crown. Then, terrible in her triumph, Dona Louisa Carlota sent for the Minister Calomarde, overwhelmed him with the coarsest and most furious abuse, and, unable to confine her victorious rage and hate to words alone, she slapped the astounded minister in the face. Calomarde, trembling with rage, bowed and said, "A white hand cannot offend." There is nothing stronger than a woman's weakness, or weaker than a woman's strength. A few years later, when Ferdinand was in his grave, and the baby Isabel reigned under the regency of Christine, a movement in favor of the constitution of 1812 burst out, where revolutions generally do, in the south, and spread rapidly over the contiguous provinces. The infection gained the troops of the royal guard at La Granja, and they surrounded the palace bawling for the constitution. The regentess, with a proud reliance upon her own power, ordered them to send a deputation to her apartment. A dozen of the mutineers came in, and demanded the constitution. "What is that?" asked the queen. They looked at each other and cudgelled their brains. They had never thought of that before. "Caramba!" said they. "We don't know. They say it is a good thing, and will raise our pay and make salt cheaper." Their political economy was somewhat flimsy, but they had the bayonets, and the queen was compelled to give way and proclaim the constitution. I must add one trifling reminiscence more of La Granja, which has also its little moral. A friend of mine, a colonel of engineers, in the summer before the revolution, was standing before the palace with some officers, when a mean-looking cur ran past. "What an ugly dog!" said the colonel. "Hush!" replied another, with an awe-struck face. "That is the dog of his royal highness the Prince of Asturias." The colonel unfortunately had a logical mind, and failed to see that ownership had any bearing on a purely aesthetic question. He defined his position. "I do not think the dog is ugly because he belongs to the prince. I only mean the prince has an ugly dog." The window just above them slammed, and another officer came up and said that the Adversary was to pay. "THE QUEEN was at the window and heard every word you said." An hour after the colonel received an order from the commandant of the place, revoking his leave of absence and ordering him to duty in Madrid. It is not very surprising that this officer was at the Bridge of Alcolea. At noon the day grew dark with clouds, and the black storm-wreath came down over the mountains. A terrific fire of artillery resounded for a half-hour in the craggy peaks about us, and a driving shower passed over palace and gardens. Then the sun came out again, the pleasure-grounds were fresher and greener than ever, and the visitors thronged in the court of the palace to see the fountains in play. The regent led the way on foot. The general followed in a pony phaeton, and ministers, adjutants, and the population of the district trooped along in a party-colored mass. It was a good afternoon's work to visit all the fountains. They are twenty-six in number, strewn over the undulating grounds. People who visit Paris usually consider a day of Grandes Eaux at Versailles the last word of this species of costly trifling. But the waters at Versailles bear no comparison with those of La Granja. The sense is fatigued and bewildered here with their magnificence and infinite variety. The vast reservoir in the bosom of the mountain, filled with the purest water, gives a possibility of more superb effects than have been attained anywhere else in the world. The Fountain of the Winds is one, where a vast mass of water springs into the air from the foot of a great cavernous rock; there is a succession of exquisite cascades called the Race-Course, filled with graceful statuary; a colossal group of Apollo slaying the Python, who in his death agony bleeds a torrent of water; the Basket of Flowers, which throws up a system of forty jets; the great single jet called Fame, which leaps one hundred and thirty feet into the air, a Niagara reversed; and the crowning glory of the garden, the Baths of Diana, an immense stage scene in marble and bronze, crowded with nymphs and hunting-parties, wild beasts and birds, and everywhere the wildest luxuriance of spouting waters. We were told that it was one of the royal caprices of a recent tenant of the palace to emulate her chaste prototype of the silver bow by choosing this artistic basin for her ablutions, a sufficient number of civil guards being posted to prevent the approach of Castilian Actaeons. Ford aptly remarks of these extravagant follies: "The yoke of building kings is grievous, and especially when, as St. Simon said of Louis XIV. and his Versailles, 'II se plut a tyranniser la nature.'" As the bilious Philip paused before this mass of sculptured extravagance, he looked at it a moment with evident pleasure. Then he thought of the bill, and whined, "Thou hast amused me three minutes and hast cost me three millions." To do Philip justice, he did not allow the bills to trouble him much. He died owing forty-five million piastres, which his dutiful son refused to pay. When you deal with Bourbons, it is well to remember the Spanish proverb, "A sparrow in the hand is better than a bustard on the wing." We wasted an hour in walking through the palace. It is, like all palaces, too fine and dreary to describe. Miles of drawing-rooms and boudoirs, with an infinity of tapestry and gilt chairs, all the apartments haunted by the demon of ennui. All idea of comfort is sacrificed to costly glitter and flimsy magnificence. Some fine paintings were pining in exile on the desolate walls. They looked homesick for the Museum, where they could be seen of men. The next morning we drove down the mountain and over the rolling plain to the fine old city of Segovia. In point of antiquity and historic interest it is inferior to no town in Spain. It has lost its ancient importance as a seat of government and a mart of commerce. Its population is now not more than eleven thousand. Its manufactures have gone to decay. Its woollen works, which once employed fourteen thousand persons and produced annually twenty-five thousand pieces of cloth, now sustain a sickly existence and turn out not more than two hundred pieces yearly. Its mint, which once spread over Spain a Danaean shower of ounces and dollars, is now reduced to the humble office of striking copper cuartos. More than two centuries ago this decline began. Boisel, who was there in 1669, speaks of the city as "presque desert et fort pauvre." He mentions as a mark of the general unthrift that the day he arrived there was no bread in town until two o'clock in the afternoon, "and no one was astonished at it." Yet even in its poverty and rags it has the air of a town that has seen better days. Tradition says it was founded by Hercules. It was an important city of the Roman Empire, and a great capital in the days of the Arab monarchy. It was the court of the star-gazing King Alonso the Wise. Through a dozen centuries it was the flower of the mountains of Castile. Each succeeding age and race beautified and embellished it, and each, departing, left the trace of its passage in the abiding granite of its monuments. The Romans left the glorious aqueduct, that work of demigods who scorned to mention it in their histories; its mediaeval bishops bequeathed to later times their ideas of ecclesiastical architecture; and the Arabs the science of fortification and the industrial arts. Its very ruin and decay makes it only more precious to the traveller. There are here none of the modern and commonplace evidences of life and activity that shock the artistic sense in other towns. All is old, moribund, and picturesque. It lies here in the heart of the Guadarramas, lost and forgotten by the civilization of the age, muttering in its senile dream of the glories of an older world. It has not vitality enough to attract a railroad, and so is only reached by a long and tiresome journey by diligence. Its solitude is rarely intruded upon by the impertinent curious, and the red back of Murray is a rare apparition in its winding streets. Yet those who come are richly repaid. One does not quickly forget the impression produced by the first view of the vast aqueduct, as you drive into the town from La Granja. It comes upon you in an instant,--the two great ranges of superimposed arches, over one hundred feet high, spanning the ravine-like suburb from the outer hills to the Alcazar. You raise your eyes from the market-place, with its dickering crowd, from the old and squalid houses clustered like shot rubbish at the foot of the chasm, to this grand and soaring wonder of utilitarian architecture, with something of a fancy that it was never made, that it has stood there since the morning of the world. It has the lightness and the strength, the absence of ornament and the essential beauty, the vastness and the perfection, of a work of nature. It is one of those gigantic works of Trajan, so common in that magnificent age that Roman authors do not allude to it. It was built to bring the cool mountain water of the Sierra Fonfria a distance of nine miles through the hills, the gulches, and the pine forests of Valsain, and over the open plain to the thirsty city of Segovia. The aqueduct proper runs from the old tower of Caseron three thousand feet to the reservoir where the water deposits its sand and sediment, and thence begins the series of one hundred and nineteen arches, which traverse three thousand feet more and pass the valley, the arrabal, and reach the citadel. It is composed of great blocks of granite, so perfectly framed and fitted that not a particle of mortar or cement is employed in the construction. The wonder of the work is not so much in its vastness or its beauty as in its tremendous solidity and duration. A portion of it had been cut away by barbarous armies during the fifteenth century, and in the reign of Isabella the Catholic the monk-architect of the Parral, Juan Escovedo, the greatest builder of his day in Spain, repaired it. These repairs have themselves twice needed repairing since then. Marshal Ney, when he came to this portion of the monument, exclaimed, "Here begins the work of men's hands." The true Segovian would hoot at you if you assigned any mortal paternity to the aqueduct. He calls it the Devil's Bridge, and tells you this story. The Evil One was in love with a pretty girl of the upper town, and full of protestations of devotion. The fair Segovian listened to him one evening, when her plump arms ached with the work of bringing water from the ravine, and promised eyes of favor if his Infernal Majesty would build an aqueduct to her door before morning. He worked all night, like the Devil, and the maiden, opening her black eyes at sunrise, saw him putting the last stone in the last arch, as the first ray of the sun lighted on his shining tail. The Church, we think very unfairly, decided that he had failed, and released the coquettish contractor from her promise; and it is said the Devil has never trusted a Sego-vian out of his sight again. The bartizaned keep of the Moorish Alcazar is perched on the western promontory of the city that guards the meeting of the streams Eresma and Clamores. It has been in the changes of the warring times a palace, a fortress, a prison (where our friend--everybody's friend--Gil Blas was once confined), and of late years a college of artillery. In one of its rooms Alonso the Wise studied the heavens more than was good for his orthodoxy, and from one of its windows a lady of the court once dropped a royal baby, of the bad blood of Trasta-mara. Henry of Trastamara will seem more real if we connect him with fiction. He was the son of "La Favorita," who will outlast all legitimate princesses, in the deathless music of Donizetti. Driving through a throng of beggars that encumbered the carriage wheels as grasshoppers sometimes do the locomotives on a Western railway, we came to the fine Gothic Cathedral, built by Gil de Ontanon, father and son, in the early part of the sixteenth century. It is a delight to the eyes; the rich harmonious color of the stone, the symmetry of proportion, the profuse opulence and grave finish of the details. It was built in that happy era of architecture when a builder of taste and culture had all the past of Gothic art at his disposition, and before the degrading influence of the Jesuits appeared in the churches of Europe. Within the Cathedral is remarkably airy and graceful in effect. A most judicious use has been made of the exquisite salmon-colored marbles of the country in the great altar and the pavement. We were met by civil ecclesiastics of the foundation and shown the beauties and the wonders of the place. Among much that is worthless, there is one very impressive Descent from the Cross by Juan de Juni, of which that excellent Mr. Madoz says "it is worthy to rank with the best masterpieces of Raphael or--Mengs;" as if one should say of a poet that he was equal to Shakespeare or Southey. We walked through the cloisters and looked at the tombs. A flood of warm light poured through the graceful arches and lit up the trees in the garden and set the birds to singing, and made these cloisters pleasanter to remember than they usually are. Our attendant priest told us, with an earnest credulity that was very touching, the story of Maria del Salto, Mary of the Leap, whose history was staring at us from the wall. She was a Jewish lady, whose husband had doubts of her discretion, and so threw her from a local Tarpeian rock. As she fell she invoked the Virgin, and came down easily, sustained, as you see in the picture, by her faith and her petticoats. As we parted from the good fathers and entered our carriages at the door of the church, the swarm of mendicants had become an army. The word had doubtless gone through the city of the outlandish men who had gone into the Cathedral with whole coats, and the result was a _levee en masse_ of the needy. Every coin that was thrown to them but increased the clamor, as it confirmed them in their idea of the boundless wealth and munificence of the givers. We recalled the profound thought of Emerson, "If the rich were only as rich as the poor think them!" At last we drove desperately away through the ragged and screaming throng. We passed by the former home of the Jeronomite monks of the Parral, which was once called an earthly paradise, and in later years has been a pen for swine; past crumbling convents and ruined churches; past the charming Romanesque San Millan, girdled with its round-arched cloisters; the granite palace of his Reverence the Bishop of Segovia, and the elegant tower of St. Esteban, where the Roman is dying and the Gothic is dawning; and every step of the route is a study and a joy to the antiquarian. But though enriched by all these legacies of an immemorial past, there seems no hope, no future for Segovia. It is as dead as the cities of the Plain. Its spindles have rusted into silence. Its gay company is gone. Its streets are too large for the population, and yet they swarm with beggars. I had often heard it compared in outline to a ship,--the sunrise astern and the prow pointing westward,--and as we drove away that day and I looked back to the receding town, it seemed to me like a grand hulk of some richly laden galleon, aground on the rock that holds it, alone, abandoned to its fate among the barren billows of the tumbling ridges, its crew tired out with struggling and apathetic in despair, mocked by the finest air and the clearest sunshine that ever shone, and gazing always forward to the new world and the new times hidden in the rosy sunset, which they shall never see. THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS Emilio Castelar said to me one day, "Toledo is the most remarkable city in Spain. You will find there three strata of glories,--Gothic, Arab, and Castilian,--and an upper crust of beggars and silence." I went there in the pleasantest time of the year, the first days of June. The early harvest was in progress, and the sunny road ran through golden fields which were enlivened by the reapers gathering in their grain with shining sickles. The borders of the Tagus were so cool and fresh that it was hard to believe one was in the arid land of Castile. From Madrid to Aranjuez you meet the usual landscapes of dun hillocks and pale-blue vegetation, such as are only seen in nature in Central Spain, and only seen in art on the matchless canvas of Velazquez. But from the time you cross the tawny flood of the Tagus just north of Aranjuez, the valley is gladdened by its waters all the way to the Primate City. I am glad I am not writing a guide-book, and do not feel any responsibility resting upon me of advising the gentle reader to stop at Aranjuez or to go by on the other side. There is a most amiable and praiseworthy class of travellers who feel a certain moral necessity impelling them to visit every royal abode within their reach. They always see precisely the same things,--some thousand of gilt chairs, some faded tapestry and marvellous satin upholstery, a room in porcelain, and a room in imitation of some other room somewhere else, and a picture or two by that worthy and tedious young man, Raphael Mengs. I knew I would see all these things at Aranjuez, and so contented myself with admiring its pretty site, its stone-cornered brick facade, its high-shouldered French roof, and its general air of the Place Royale, from the outside. The gardens are very pleasant, and lonely enough for the most philosophic stroller. A clever Spanish writer says of them, "They are sombre as the thoughts of Philip II., mysterious and gallant as the pleasures of Philip IV." To a revolutionary mind, it is a certain pleasure to remember that this was the scene of the _emeute_ that drove Charles IV. from his throne, and the Prince of Peace from his queen's boudoir. Ferdinand VII., the turbulent and restless Prince of Asturias, reaped the immediate profit of his father's abdication; but the two worthless creatures soon called in Napoleon to decide the squabble, which he did in his leonine way by taking the crown away from both of them and handing it over for safe-keeping to his lieutenant brother Joseph. Honor among thieves!--a silly proverb, as one readily sees if he falls into their hands, or reads the history of kings. If Toledo had been built, by some caprice of enlightened power, especially for a show city, it could not be finer in effect. In detail, it is one vast museum. In ensemble, it stands majestic on its hills, with its long lines of palaces and convents terraced around the rocky slope, and on the height the soaring steeples of a swarm of churches piercing the blue, and the huge cube of the Alcazar crowning the topmost crest, and domineering the scene. The magnificent zigzag road which leads up the steep hillside from the bridge of Alcantara gives an indefinable impression, as of the lordly ramp of some fortress of impossible extent. This road is new, and in perfect condition. But do not imagine you can judge the city by the approaches. When your carriage has mounted the hill and passed the evening promenade of the To-ledans, the quaint triangular Place,--I had nearly called it Square,--"waking laughter in indolent reviewers," the Zocodover, you are lost in the dae-dalian windings of the true streets of Toledo, where you can touch the walls on either side, and where two carriages could no more pass each other than two locomotives could salute and go by on the same track. This interesting experiment, which is so common in our favored land, could never be tried in Toledo, as I believe there is only one turnout in the city, a minute omnibus with striped linen hangings at the sides, driven by a young Castilian whose love of money is the root of much discussion when you pay his bill. It is a most remarkable establishment. The horses can cheerfully do their mile in fifteen or twenty minutes, but they make more row about it than a high-pressure Mississippi steamer; and the crazy little trap is noisier in proportion to its size than anything I have ever seen, except perhaps an Indiana tree-toad. If you make an excursion outside the walls, the omnibus, noise and all, is inevitable; let it come. But inside the city you must walk; the slower the better, for every door is a study. It is hard to conceive that this was once a great capital with a population of two hundred thousand souls. You can easily walk from one end of the city to the other in less than half an hour, and the houses that remain seem comfortably filled by eighteen thousand inhabitants. But in this narrow space once swarmed that enormous and busy multitude. The city was walled about by powerful stone ramparts, which yet stand in all their massy perfection. So there could have been no suburbs. This great aggregation of humanity lived and toiled on the crests and in the wrinkles of the seven hills we see to-day. How important were the industries of the earlier days we can guess from the single fact that John of Padilla, when he rose in defence of municipal liberty in the time of Charles V., drew in one day from the teeming workshops twenty thousand fighting men. He met the usual fate of all Spanish patriots, shameful and cruel death. His palace was razed to the ground. Successive governments, in shifting fever-fits of liberalism and absolutism, have set up and pulled down his statue. But his memory is loved and honored, and the example of this noblest of the comuneros impresses powerfully to-day the ardent young minds of the new Spain. Your first walk is of course to the Cathedral, the Primate Church of the kingdom. Besides its ecclesiastical importance, it is well worthy of notice in itself. It is one of the purest specimens of Gothic architecture in existence, and is kept in an admirable state of preservation. Its situation is not the most favorable. It is approached by a network of descending streets, all narrow and winding, as streets were always built under the intelligent rule of the Moors. They preferred to be cool in summer and sheltered in winter, rather than to lay out great deserts of boulevards, the haunts of sunstroke and pneumonia. The site of the Cathedral was chosen from strategic reasons by St. Eugene, who built there his first Episcopal Church. The Moors made a mosque of it when they conquered Castile, and the fastidious piety of St. Ferdinand would not permit him to worship in a shrine thus profaned. He tore down the old church and laid, in 1227, the foundations of this magnificent structure, which was two centuries after his death in building. There is, however, great unity of purpose and execution in this Cathedral, due doubtless to the fact that the architect Perez gave fifty years of his long life to the superintendence of the early work. Inside and outside it is marked by a grave and harmonious majesty. The great western facade is enriched with three splendid portals,--the side ones called the doors of Hell and Judgment; and the central a beautiful ogival arch divided into two smaller ones, and adorned with a lavish profusion of delicately sculptured figures of saints and prophets; on the chaste and severe cornice above, a group of spirited busts represents the Last Supper. There are five other doors to the temple, of which the door of the Lions is the finest, and just beside it a heavy Ionic portico in the most detestable taste indicates the feeling and culture that survived in the reign of Charles IV. To the north of the west facade rises the massive tower. It is not among the tallest in the world, being three hundred and twenty-four feet high, but is very symmetrical and impressive. In the preservation of its pyramidal purpose it is scarcely inferior to that most consummate work, the tower of St. Stephen's in Vienna. It is composed of three superimposed structures, gradually diminishing in solidity and massiveness from the square base to the high-springing octagonal spire, garlanded with thorny crowns. It is balanced at the south end of the facade by the pretty cupola and lantern of the Mozarabic Chapel, the work of the Greek Theotocopouli. But we soon grow tired of the hot glare of June, and pass in a moment into the cool twilight vastness of the interior, refreshing to body and soul. Five fine naves, with eighty-four pillars formed each of sixteen graceful columns,--the entire edifice measuring four hundred feet in length and two hundred feet in breadth,--a grand and shadowy temple grove of marble and granite. At all times the light is of an unearthly softness and purity, toned by the exquisite windows and rosaces. But as evening draws on, you should linger till the sacristan grows peremptory, to watch the gorgeous glow of the western sunlight on the blazing roses of the portals, and the marvellous play of rich shadows and faint gray lights in the eastern chapels, where the grand aisles sweep in their perfect curves around the high altar. A singular effect is here created by the gilded organ pipes thrust out horizontally from the choir. When the powerful choral anthems of the church peal out over the kneeling multitude, it requires little fancy to imagine them the golden trumpets of concealed archangels, who would be quite at home in that incomparable choir. If one should speak of all the noteworthy things you meet in this Cathedral, he would find himself in danger of following in the footsteps of Mr. Parro, who wrote a handbook of Toledo, in which seven hundred and forty-five pages are devoted to a hasty sketch of the basilica. For five hundred years enormous wealth and fanatical piety have worked together and in rivalry to beautify this spot. The boundless riches of the Church and the boundless superstition of the laity have left their traces here in every generation in forms of magnificence and beauty. Each of the chapels--and there are twenty-one of them--is a separate masterpiece in its way. The finest are those of Santiago and St. Ildefonso,--the former built by the famous Constable Alvaro de Luna as a burial-place for himself and family, and where he and his wife lie in storied marble; and the other commemorating that celebrated visit of the Virgin to the bishop, which is the favorite theme of the artists and ecclesiastical gossips of Spain. There was probably never a morning call which gave rise to so much talk. It was not the first time the Virgin had come to Toledo. This was always a favorite excursion of hers. She had come from time to time, escorted by St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. James. But on the morning in question, which was not long after Bishop Ildefonso had written his clever treatise, "De Virginitate Stae Mariae," the Queen of Heaven came down to matin prayers, and, taking the bishop's seat, listened to the sermon with great edification. After service she presented him with a nice new chasuble, as his own was getting rather shabby, made of "cloth of heaven," in token of her appreciation of his spirited pamphlet in her defence. This chasuble still exists in a chest in Asturias. If you open the chest, you will not see it; but this only proves the truth of the miracle, for the chroniclers say the sacred vestment is invisible to mortal eyes. But we have another and more palpable proof of the truth of the history. The slab of marble on which the feet of the celestial visitor alighted is still preserved in the Cathedral in a tidy chapel built on the very spot where the avatar took place. The slab is enclosed in red jasper and guarded by an iron grating, and above it these words of the Psalmist are engraved in the stone, _Adorabimus in loco ubi steterunt pedes ejus._ This story is cut in marble and carved in wood and drawn upon brass and painted upon canvas, in a thousand shapes and forms all over Spain. You see in the Museum at Madrid a picture by Murillo devoted to this idle fancy of a cunning or dreaming priest. The subject was unworthy of the painter, and the result is what might have been expected,--a picture of trivial and mundane beauty, without the least suggestion of spirituality. But there can be no doubt of the serious, solemn earnestness with which the worthy Castilians from that day to this believe the romance. They came up in groups and families, touching their fingers to the sacred slab and kissing them reverentially with muttered prayers. A father would take the first kiss himself, and pass his consecrated finger around among his awe-struck babes, who were too brief to reach to the grating. Even the aged verger who showed us the shrine, who was so frail and so old that we thought he might be a ghost escaped from some of the mediaeval tombs in the neighborhood, never passed that pretty white-and-gold chapel without sticking in his thumb and pulling out a blessing. A few feet from this worship-worn stone, a circle drawn on one of the marble flags marks the spot where Santa Leocadia also appeared to this same favored Ildefonso and made her compliments on his pamphlet. Was ever author so happy in his subject and his gentle readers? The good bishop evidently thought the story of this second apparition might be considered rather a heavy draught on the credulity of his flock, so he whipped out a convenient knife and cut off a piece of her saint-ship's veil, which clinched the narrative and struck doubters dumb. That great king and crazy relic-hunter, Philip II., saw this rag in his time with profound emotion,--this tiger heart, who could order the murder of a thousand innocent beings without a pang. There is another chapel in this Cathedral which preaches forever its silent condemnation of Spanish bigotry to deaf ears. This is the Mozarabic Chapel, sacred to the celebration of the early Christian rite of Spain. During the three centuries of Moorish domination the enlightened and magnanimous conquerors guaranteed to those Christians who remained within their lines the free exercise of all their rights, including perfect freedom of worship. So that side by side the mosque and the church worshipped God each in its own way without fear or wrong. But when Alonso VI. recaptured the city in the eleventh century, he wished to establish uniformity of worship, and forbade the use of the ancient liturgy in Toledo. That which the heathen had respected the Catholic outraged. The great Cardinal Ximenez restored the primitive rite and devoted this charming chapel to its service. How ill a return was made for Moorish tolerance we see in the infernal treatment they afterwards received from king and Church. They made them choose between conversion and death. They embraced Christianity to save their lives. Then the priests said, "Perhaps this conversion is not genuine! Let us send the heathen away out of our sight." One million of the best citizens of Spain were thus torn from their homes and landed starving on the wild African coast. And Te Deums were sung in the churches for this triumph of Catholic unity. From that hour Spain has never prospered. It seems as if she were lying ever since under the curse of these breaking hearts. Passing by a world of artistic beauties which never tire the eyes, but soon would tire the chronicler and reader, stepping over the broad bronze slab in the floor which covers the dust of the haughty primate Porto Carrero, but which bears neither name nor date, only this inscription of arrogant humility, HIC JACET PULVIS CINIS ET NIHIL, we walk into the verdurous and cheerful Gothic cloisters. They occupy the site of the ancient Jewish markets, and the zealous prelate Tenorio, cousin to the great lady's man Don Juan, could think of no better way of acquiring the ground than that of stirring up the mob to burn the houses of the heretics. A fresco that adorns the gate explains the means employed, adding insult to the old injury. It is a picture of a beautiful child hanging upon a cross; a fiendish-looking Jew, on a ladder beside him, holds in his hand the child's heart, which he has just taken from his bleeding breast; he holds the dripping knife in his teeth. This brutal myth was used for centuries with great effect by the priesthood upon the mob whenever they wanted a Jew's money or his blood. Even to-day the old poison has not lost its power. This very morning I heard under my window loud and shrill voices. I looked out and saw a group of brown and ragged women, with babies in their arms, discussing the news from Madrid. The Protestants, they said, had begun to steal Catholic children. They talked themselves into a fury. Their elf-locks hung about their fierce black eyes. The sinews of their lean necks worked tensely in their voluble rage. Had they seen our mild missionary at that moment, whom all men respect and all children instinctively love, they would have torn him in pieces in their Maenad fury, and would have thought they were doing their duty as mothers and Catholics. This absurd and devilish charge was seriously made in a Madrid journal, the organ of the Moderates, and caused great fermentation for several days, street rows, and debates in the Cortes, before the excitement died away. Last summer, in the old Murcian town of Lorca, an English gentleman, who had been several weeks in the place, was attacked and nearly killed by a mob, who insisted that he was engaged in the business of stealing children, and using their spinal marrow for lubricating telegraph wires! What a picture of blind and savage ignorance is here presented! It reminds us of that sad and pitiful "blood-bath revolt" of Paris, where the wretched mob rose against the wretched tyrant Louis XV., accusing him of bathing in the blood of children to restore his own wasted and corrupted energies. Toledo is a city where you should eschew guides and trust implicitly to chance in your wanderings. You can never be lost; the town is so small that a short walk always brings you to the river or the wall, and there you can take a new departure. If you do not know where you are going, you have every moment the delight of some unforeseen pleasure. There is not a street in Toledo that is not rich in treasures of architecture,--hovels that once were marvels of building, balconies of curiously wrought iron, great doors with sculptured posts and lintels, with gracefully finished hinges, and studded with huge nails whose fanciful heads are as large as billiard balls. Some of these are still handsome residences, but most have fallen into neglect and abandonment. You may find a beggar installed in the ruined palace of a Moorish prince, a cobbler at work in the pleasure-house of a Castilian conqueror. The graceful carvings are mutilated and destroyed, the delicate arabesques are smothered and hidden under a triple coat of whitewash. The most beautiful Moorish house in the city, the so-called Taller del Moro, where the grim governor of Huesca invited four hundred influential gentlemen of the province to a political dinner, and cut off all their heads as they entered (if we may believe the chronicle, which we do not), is now empty and rapidly going to ruin. The exquisite panelling of the walls, the endlessly varied stucco work that seems to have been wrought by the deft fingers of ingenious fairies, is shockingly broken and marred. Gigantic cacti look into the windows from the outer court. A gay pomegranate-tree flings its scarlet blossoms in on the ruined floor. Rude little birds have built their nests in the beautiful fretted rafters, and flutter in and out as busy as brokers. But of all the feasting and loving and plotting these lovely walls beheld in that strange age that seems like fable now,--the vivid, intelligent, scientific, tolerant age of the Moors,--even the memory has perished utterly and forever. We strolled away aimlessly from this beautiful desolation, and soon came out upon the bright and airy Paseo del Transito. The afternoon sunshine lay warm on the dull brown suburb, but a breeze blew freshly through the dark river-gorge, and we sat upon the stone benches bordering the bluff and gave ourselves up to the scene. To the right were the ruins of the Roman bridge and the Moorish mills; to the left the airy arch of San Martin's bridge spanned the bounding torrent, and far beyond stretched the vast expanse of the green valley refreshed by the river, and rolling in rank waves of verdure to the blue hills of Guadalupe. Below us on the slippery rocks that lay at the foot of the sheer cliffs, some luxurious fishermen reclined, idly watching their idle lines. The hills stretched away, ragged and rocky, dotted with solitary towers and villas. A squad of beggars rapidly gathered, attracted by the gracious faces of Las Senoras. Begging seems almost the only regular industry of Toledo. Besides the serious professionals, who are real artists in studied misery and ingenious deformity, all the children in town occasionally leave their marbles and their leap-frog to turn an honest penny by amateur mendicancy. A chorus of piteous whines went up. But La Senora was firm. She checked the ready hands of the juveniles. "Children should not be encouraged to pursue this wretched life. We should give only to blind men, because here is a great and evident affliction; and to old women, because they look so lonely about the boots." The exposition was so subtle and logical that it admitted no reply. The old women and the blind men shuffled away with their pennies, and we began to chaff the sturdy and rosy children. A Spanish beggar can bear anything but banter. He is a keen physiognomist, and selects his victims with unerring acumen. If you storm or scowl at him, he knows he is making you uncomfortable, and hangs on like a burr. But if you laugh at him, with good humor, he is disarmed. A friend of mine reduced to confusion one of the most unabashed mendicants in Castile by replying to his whining petition, politely and with a beaming smile, "No, thank you. I never eat them." The beggar is far from considering his employment a degrading one. It is recognized by the Church, and the obligation of this form of charity especially inculcated. The average Spaniard regards it as a sort of tax to be as readily satisfied as a toll-fee. He will often stop and give a beggar a cent, and wait for the change in maravedises. One day, at the railway station, a muscular rogue approached me and begged for alms. I offered him my _sac-de-nuit_ to carry a block or two. He drew himself up proudly and said, "I beg your pardon, sir; I am no Gallician." An old woman came up with a basket on her arm. "Can it be possible in this far country," said La Senora, "or are these--yes, they are, deliberate peanuts." With a penny we bought unlimited quantities of this levelling edible, and with them the devoted adherence of the aged merchant. She immediately took charge of our education. We must see Santa Maria la Blanca,--it was a beautiful thing; so was the Transito. Did we see those men and women grubbing in the hillside? They were digging bones to sell at the station. Where did the bones come from? Quien sabe? Those dust-heaps have been there since King Wamba. Come, we must go and see the Churches of Mary before it grew dark. And the zealous old creature marched away with us to the synagogue built by Samuel Ben Levi, treasurer to that crowned panther, Peter the Cruel. This able financier built this fine temple to the God of his fathers out of his own purse. He was murdered for his money by his ungrateful lord, and his synagogue stolen by the Church. It now belongs to the order of Cala-trava. But the other and older synagogue, now called Santa Maria la Blanca, is much more interesting. It stands in the same quarter, the suburb formerly occupied by the industrious and thriving Hebrews of the Middle Ages until the stupid zeal of the Catholic kings drove them out of Spain. The synagogue was built in the ninth century under the enlightened domination of the Moors. At the slaughter of the Jews in 1405 it became a church. It has passed through varying fortunes since then, having been hospital, hermitage, stable, and warehouse; but it is now under the care of the provincial committee of art, and is somewhat decently restored. Its architecture is altogether Moorish. It has three aisles with thick octagonal columns supporting heavy horseshoe arches. The spandrels are curiously adorned with rich circular stucco figures. The soil you tread is sacred, for it was brought from Zion long before the Crusades; the cedar rafters above you preserve the memory and the odors of Lebanon. A little farther west, on a fine hill overlooking the river, in the midst of the ruined palaces of the early kings, stands the beautiful votive church of San Juan de los Reyes. It was built by Ferdinand and Isabella, before the Columbus days, to commemorate a victory over their neighbors the Portuguese. During a prolonged absence of the king, the pious queen, wishing to prepare him a pleasant surprise, instead of embroidering a pair of impracticable slippers as a faithful young wife would do nowadays, finished this exquisite church by setting at work upon it some regiments of stone-cutters and builders. It is not difficult to imagine the beauty of the structure that greeted the king on his welcome home. For even now, after the storms of four centuries have beaten upon it, and the malignant hands of invading armies have used their utmost malice against it, it is still a won-drously perfect work of the Gothic inspiration. We sat on the terrace benches to enjoy the light and graceful lines of the building, the delicately ornate door, the unique drapery of iron chains which the freed Christians hung here when delivered from the hands of the Moors. A lovely child, with pensive blue eyes fringed with long lashes, and the slow sweet smile of a Madonna, sat near us and sang to a soft, monotonous air a war-song of the Carlists. Her beauty soon attracted the artistic eyes of La Senora, and we learned she was named Francisca, and her baby brother, whose flaxen head lay heavily on her shoulder, was called Jesus Mary. She asked, Would we like to go into the church? She knew the sacristan and would go for him. She ran away like a fawn, the tow head of little Jesus tumbling dangerously about. She reappeared in a moment; she had disposed of mi nino, as she called it, and had found the sacristan. This personage was rather disappointing. A sacristan should be aged and mouldy, clothed in black of a decent shabbiness. This was a Toledan swell in a velvet shooting-jacket, and yellow peg-top trousers. However, he had the wit to confine himself to turning keys, and so we gradually recovered from the shock of the shooting-jacket. The church forms one great nave, divided into four vaults enriched with wonderful stone lace-work. A superb frieze surrounds the entire nave, bearing in great Gothic letters an inscription narrating the foundation of the church. Everywhere the arms of Castile and Arragon, and the wedded ciphers of the Catholic kings. Statues of heralds start unexpectedly out from the face of the pillars. Fine as the church is, we cannot linger here long. The glory of San Juan is its cloisters. It may challenge the world to show anything so fine in the latest bloom and last development of Gothic art. One of the galleries is in ruins,--a sad witness of the brutality of armies. But the three others are enough to show how much of beauty was possible in that final age of pure Gothic building. The arches bear a double garland of leaves, of flowers, and of fruits, and among them are ramping and writhing and playing every figure of bird or beast or monster that man has seen or poet imagined. There are no two arches alike, and yet a most beautiful harmony pervades them all. In some the leaves are in profile, in others delicately spread upon the graceful columns and every vein displayed. I saw one window where a stone monkey sat reading his prayers, gowned and cowled,--an odd caprice of the tired sculptor. There is in this infinite variety of detail a delight that ends in something like fatigue. You cannot help feeling that this was naturally and logically the end of Gothic art. It had run its course. There was nothing left but this feverish quest of variety. It was in danger, after having gained such divine heights of invention, of degenerating into prettinesses and affectation. But how marvellously fine it was at last! One must see it, as in these unequalled cloisters, half ruined, silent, and deserted, bearing with something of conscious dignity the blows of time and the ruder wrongs of men, to appreciate fully its proud superiority to all the accidents of changing taste and modified culture. It is only the truest art that can bear that test. The fanes of Paestum will always be more beautiful even than the magical shore on which they stand. The Parthenon, fixed like a battered coronet on the brow of the Acropolis, will always be the loveliest sight that Greece can offer to those who come sailing in from the blue Aegean. It is scarcely possible to imagine a condition of thought or feeling in which these master-works shall seem quaint or old-fashioned. They appeal, now and always, with that calm power of perfection, to the heart and eyes of every man born of woman. The cloisters enclose a little garden just enough neglected to allow the lush dark ivy, the passionflowers, and the spreading oleanders to do their best in beautifying the place, as men have done their worst in marring it. The clambering vines seem trying to hide the scars of their hardly less perfect copies. Every arch is adorned with a soft and delicious drapery of leaves and tendrils; the fair and outraged child of art is cherished and caressed by the gracious and bountiful hands of Mother Nature. As we came away, little Francisca plucked one of the five-pointed leaves of the passion-flowers and gave it to La Senora, saying reverentially, "This is the Hand of Our Blessed Lord!" The sun was throned, red as a bacchanal king, upon the purple hills, as we descended the rocky declivity and crossed the bridge of St. Martin. Our little Toledan maid came with us, talking and singing incessantly, like a sweet-voiced starling. We rested on the farther side and looked back at the towering city, glorious in the sunset, its spires aflame, its long lines of palace and convent clear in the level rays, its ruins softened in the gathering shadows, the lofty bridge hanging transfigured over the glowing river. Before us the crumbling walls and turrets of the Gothic kings ran down from the bluff to the water-side, its terrace overlooking the baths where, for his woe, Don Roderick saw Count Julian's daughter under the same inflammatory circumstances as those in which, from a Judaean housetop, Don David beheld Captain Uriah's wife. There is a great deal of human nature abroad in the world in all ages. Little Francisca kept on chattering. "That is St. Martin's bridge. A girl jumped into the water last year. She was not a lady. She was in service. She was tired of living because she was in love. They found her three weeks afterwards; but, Santisima Maria! she was good for nothing then." Our little maid was too young to have sympathy for kings or servant girls who die for love. She was a pretty picture as she sat there, her blue eyes and Madonna face turned to the rosy west, singing in her sweet child's voice her fierce little song of sedition and war:-- "Arriba los valientes! Abajo tirania! Pronto llegara el dia De la Restauracion. Carlistas a caballo! Soldados en Campana! Viva el Rey de Espana, Don Carlos de Borbon!" I cannot enumerate the churches of Toledo,--you find them in every street and by-way. In the palmy days of the absolute theocracy this narrow space contained more than a hundred churches and chapels. The province was gnawed by the cancer of sixteen monasteries of monks and twice as many convents of nuns, all crowded within these city walls. Fully one half the ground of the city was covered by religious buildings and mortmain property. In that age, when money meant ten times what it signifies now, the rent-roll of the Church in Toledo was forty millions of reals. There are even yet portions of the town where you find nothing but churches and convents. The grass grows green in the silent streets. You hear nothing but the chime of bells and the faint echoes of masses. You see on every side bolted doors and barred windows, and, gliding over the mossy pavements, the stealthy-stepping, long-robed priests. I will only mention two more churches, and both of these converts from heathendom; both of them dedicated to San Cristo, for in the democracy of the calendar the Saviour is merely a saint, and reduced to the level of the rest. One is the old pretorian temple of the Romans, which was converted by King Sizebuto into a Christian church in the seventh century. It is a curious structure in brick and mortar, with an apsis and an odd arrangement of round arches sunken in the outer wall and still deeper pointed ones. It is famed as the resting-place of Saints Ildefonso and Leocadia, whom we have met before. The statue of the latter stands over the door graceful and pensive enough for a heathen muse. The little cloisters leading to the church are burial vaults. On one side lie the canonical dead and on the other the laity, with bright marble tablets and gilt inscriptions. In the court outside I noticed a flat stone marked _Ossuarium._ The sacristan told me this covered the pit where the nameless dead reposed, and when the genteel people in the gilt marble vaults neglected to pay their annual rent, they were taken out and tumbled in to moulder with the common clay. This San Cristo de la Vega, St. Christ of the Plain, stands on the wide flat below the town, where you find the greater portion of the Roman remains. Heaps of crumbling composite stretched in an oval form over the meadow mark the site of the great circus. Green turf and fields of waving grain occupy the ground where once a Latin city stood. The Romans built on the plain. The Goths, following their instinct of isolation, fixed their dwelling on the steep and rugged rock. The rapid Tagus girdling the city like a horseshoe left only the declivity to the west to be defended, and the ruins of King Wamba's wall show with what jealous care that work was done. But the Moors, after they captured the city, apparently did little for its defence. A great suburb grew up in the course of ages outside the wall, and when the Christians recaptured Toledo in 1085, the first care of Alonso VI. was to build another wall, this time nearer the foot of the hill, taking inside all the accretion of these years. From that day to this that wall has held Toledo. The city has never reached, perhaps will never reach, the base of the steep rock on which it stands. When King Alonso stormed the city, his first thought, in the busy half hour that follows victory, was to find some convenient place to say his prayers. Chance led him to a beautiful little Moorish mosque or oratory near the superb Puerta del Sol. He entered, gave thanks, and hung up his shield as a votive offering. This is the Church of San Cristo de la Luz. The shield of Alonso hangs there defying time for eight centuries,--a golden cross on a red field,--and the exquisite oratory, not much larger than a child's toy-house, is to-day one of the most charming specimens of Moorish art in Spain. Four square pillars support the roof, which is divided into five equal "half-orange" domes, each different from the others and each equally fascinating in its unexpected simplicity and grace. You cannot avoid a feeling of personal kindliness and respect for the refined and genial spirit who left this elegant legacy to an alien race and a hostile creed. The Military College of Santa Cruz is one of the most precious specimens extant of those somewhat confused but beautiful results of the transition from florid Gothic to the Renaissance. The plateresque is young and modest, and seeks to please in this splendid monument by allying the innovating forms with the traditions of a school outgrown. There is an exquisite and touching reminiscence of the Gothic in the superb portal and the matchless group of the Invention of the Cross. All this fine facade is by that true and genuine artist, Enrique de Egas, the same who carved the grand Gate of the Lions, for which may the gate of paradise be open to him. The inner court is surrounded by two stories of airy arcades, supported by slim Corinthian columns. In one corner is the most elaborate staircase in Spain. All the elegance and fancy of Arab and Renaissance art have been lavished upon this masterly work. Santa Cruz was built for a hospital by that haughty Cardinal Mendoza, the Tertius Rex of Ferdinand and Isabella. It is now occupied by the military school, which receives six hundred cadets. They are under the charge of an inspector-general and a numerous staff of professors. They pay forty cents a day for their board. The instruction is gratuitous and comprehends a curriculum almost identical with that of West Point. It occupies, however, only three years. The most considerable Renaissance structure in Toledo is the Royal Alcazar. It covers with its vast bulk the highest hilltop in the city. From the earliest antiquity this spot has been occupied by a royal palace or fortress. But the present structure was built by Charles V. and completed by Herrera for Philip II. Its north and south facades are very fine. The Alcazar seems to have been marked by fate. The Portuguese burned it in the last century, and Charles III. restored it just in time for the French to destroy it anew. Its indestructible walls alone remain. Now, after many years of ruinous neglect, the government has begun the work of restoration. The vast quadrangle is one mass of scaffolding and plaster dust. The grand staircase is almost finished again. In the course of a few years we may expect to see the Alcazar in a state worthy of its name and history. We would hope it might never again shelter a king. They have had their day there. Their line goes back so far into the mists of time that its beginning eludes our utmost search. The Roman drove out the unnamed chiefs of Iberia. The fair-haired Goth dispossessed the Italian. The Berber destroyed the Gothic monarchy. Castile and Leon fought their way down inch by inch through three centuries from Covadonga to Toledo, halfway in time and territory to Granada and the Midland Sea. And since then how many royal feet have trodden this breezy crest,--Sanchos and Henrys and Ferdinands,--the line broken now and then by a usurping uncle or a fratricide brother,--a red-handed bastard of Trastamara, a star-gazing Alonso, a plotting and praying Charles, and, after Philip, the dwindling scions of Austria and the nullities of Bourbon. This height has known as well the rustle of the trailing robes of queens,--Berenguela, Isabel the Catholic, and Juana,--Crazy Jane. It was the prison of the widow of Philip IV. and mother of Charles II. What wonder if her life left much to be desired? With such a husband and such a son, she had no memories nor hopes. The kings have had a long day here. They did some good in their time. But the world has outgrown them, and the people, here as elsewhere, is coming of age. This Alcazar is built more strongly than any dynasty. It will make a glorious school-house when the repairs are finished and the Republic is established, and then may both last forever! One morning at sunrise, I crossed the ancient bridge of Alcantara, and climbed the steep hill east of the river to the ruined castle of San Cervantes, perched on a high, bold rock, which guards the river and overlooks the valley. Near as it is to the city, it stands entirely alone. The instinct of aggregation is so powerful in this people that the old towns have no environs, no houses sprinkled in the outlying country, like modern cities. Every one must be huddled inside the walls. If a solitary house, like this castle, is built without, it must be in itself an impregnable fortress. This fine old ruin, in obedience to this instinct of jealous distrust, has but one entrance, and that so narrow that Sir John Falstaff would have been embarrassed to accept its hospitalities. In the shade of the broken walls, grass-grown and gay with scattered poppies, I looked at Toledo, fresh and clear in the early day. On the extreme right lay the new spick-and-span bull-ring, then the great hospice and Chapel of St. John the Baptist, the Convent of the Immaculate Conception, and next, the Latin cross of the Chapel of Santa Cruz, whose beautiful fagade lay soft in shadow; the huge arrogant bulk of the Alcazar loomed squarely before me, hiding half the view; to the left glittered the slender spire of the Cathedral, holding up in the pure air that emblem of august resignation, the triple crown of thorns; then a crowd of cupolas, ending at last near the river-banks with the sharp angular mass of San Cristobal. The field of vision was filled with churches and chapels, with the palaces of the king and the monk. Behind me the waste lands went rolling away untilled to the brown Toledo mountains. Below, the vigorous current of the Tagus brawled over its rocky bed, and the distant valley showed in its deep rich green what vitality there was in those waters if they were only used. A quiet, as of a plague-stricken city, lay on Toledo. A few mules wound up the splendid roads with baskets of vegetables. A few listless fishermen were preparing their lines. The chimes of sleepy bells floated softly out on the morning air. They seemed like the requiem of municipal life and activity slain centuries ago by the crozier and the crown. Thank Heaven, that double despotism is wounded to death. As Chesterfield predicted, before the first muttering of the thunders of '89, "the trades of king and priest have lost half their value." With the decay of this unrighteous power, the false, unwholesome activity it fostered has also disappeared. There must be years of toil and leanness, years perhaps of struggle and misery, before the new genuine life of the people springs up from beneath the dead and withered rubbish of temporal and spiritual tyranny. Freedom is an angel whose blessing is gained by wrestling. THE ESCORIAL The only battle in which Philip II. was ever engaged was that of St. Quentin, and the only part he took in that memorable fight was to listen to the thunder of the captains and the shouting afar off, and pray with great unction and fervor to various saints of his acquaintance and particularly to St. Lawrence of the Gridiron, who, being the celestial officer of the day, was supposed to have unlimited authority, and to whom he was therefore profuse in vows. While Egmont and his stout Flemings were capturing the Constable Montmorency and cutting his army in pieces, this young and chivalrous monarch was beating his breast and pattering his panic-stricken prayers. As soon as the victory was won, however, he lost his nervousness, and divided the entire credit of it between himself and his saints. He had his picture painted in full armor, as he appeared that day, and sent it to his doting spouse, Bloody Mary of England. He even thought he had gained glory enough, and while his father, the emperor-monk, was fiercely asking the messenger who brought the news of victory to Yuste, "Is my son at Paris?" the prudent Philip was making a treaty of peace, by which his son Don Carlos was to marry the Princess Elizabeth of France. But Mary obligingly died at this moment, and the stricken widower thought he needed consolation more than his boy, and so married the pretty princess himself. He always prided himself greatly on the battle of St. Quentin, and probably soon came to believe he had done yeoman service there. The childlike credulity of the people is a great temptation to kings. It is very likely that after the coup-d'etat of December, the trembling puppet who had sat shivering over his fire in the palace of the Elysee while Morny and Fleury and St. Arnaud and the rest of the cool gamblers were playing their last desperate stake on that fatal night, really persuaded himself that the work was his, and that _he_ had saved society. That the fly should imagine he is moving the coach is natural enough; but that the horses, and the wooden lumbering machine, and the passengers should take it for granted that the light gilded insect is carrying them all,--there is the true miracle. We must confess to a special fancy for Philip II. He was so true a king, so vain, so superstitious, so mean and cruel, it is probable so great a king never lived. Nothing could be more royal than the way he distributed his gratitude for the victory on St. Lawrence's day. To Count Egmont, whose splendid courage and loyalty gained him the battle, he gave ignominy and death on the scaffold; and to exhibit a gratitude to a myth which he was too mean to feel to a man, he built to San Lorenzo that stupendous mass of granite which is to-day the visible demonstration of the might and the weakness of Philip and his age. He called it the Monastery of San Lorenzo el Real, but the nomenclature of the great has no authority with the people. It was built on a site once covered with cinder-heaps from a long abandoned iron-mine, and so it was called in common speech the Escorial. The royal seat of San Ildefonso can gain from the general public no higher name than La Granja, the Farm. The great palace of Catharine de Medici, the home of three dynasties, is simply the Tuileries, the Tile-fields. You cannot make people call the White House the Executive Mansion. A merchant named Pitti built a palace in Florence, and though kings and grand dukes have inhabited it since, it is still the Pitti. There is nothing so democratic as language. You may alter a name by trick when force is unavailing. A noble lord in Segovia, following the custom of the good old times, once murdered a Jew, and stole his house. It was a pretty residence, but the skeleton in his closet was that the stupid commons would not call it anything but "the Jew's house." He killed a few of them for it, but that did not serve. At last, by advice of his confessor, he had the facade ornamented with projecting knobs of stucco, and the work was done. It is called to this day "the knobby house." The conscience of Philip did not permit a long delay in the accomplishment of his vow. Charles V. had charged him in his will to build a mausoleum for the kings of the Austrian race. He bound the two obligations in one, and added a third destination to the enormous pile he contemplated. It should be a palace as well as a monastery and a royal charnel-house. He chose the most appropriate spot in Spain for the erection of the most cheerless monument in existence. He had fixed his capital at Madrid because it was the dreariest town in Spain, and to envelop himself in a still profounder desolation, he built the Escorial out of sight of the city, on a bleak, bare hillside, swept by the glacial gales of the Guadarrama, parched by the vertical suns of summer, and cursed at all seasons with the curse of barrenness. Before it towers the great chain of mountains separating Old and New Castile. Behind it the chilled winds sweep down to the Madrid plateau, over rocky hillocks and involved ravines,--a scene in which probably no man ever took pleasure except the royal recluse who chose it for his home. John Baptist of Toledo laid the corner-stone on an April day of 1563, and in the autumn of 1584 John of Herrera looked upon the finished work, so vast and so gloomy that it lay like an incubus upon the breast of earth. It is a parallelogram measuring from north to south seven hundred and forty-four feet, and five hundred and eighty feet from east to west. It is built, by order of the fantastic bigot, in the form of St. Lawrence's gridiron, the courts representing the interstices of the bars, and the towers at the corners sticking helpless in the air like the legs of the supine implement. It is composed of a clean gray granite, chiefly in the Doric order, with a severity of facade that degenerates into poverty, and defrauds the building of the effect its great bulk merits. The sheer monotonous walls are pierced with eleven thousand windows, which, though really large enough for the rooms, seem on that stupendous surface to shrink into musketry loopholes. In the centre of the parallelogram stands the great church, surmounted by its soaring dome. All around the principal building is stretched a circumscribing line of convents, in the same style of doleful yellowish-gray uniformity, so endless in extent that the inmates might easily despair of any world beyond them. There are few scenes in the world so depressing as that which greets you as you enter into the wide court before the church, called El Templo. You are shut finally in by these iron-gray walls. The outside day has given you up. Your feet slip on the damp flags. An unhealthy fungus tinges the humid corners with a pallid green. You look in vain for any trace of human sympathy in those blank walls and that severe facade. There is a dismal attempt in that direction in the gilded garments and the painted faces of the colossal prophets and kings that are perched above the lofty doors. But they do not comfort you; they are tinselled stones, not statues. Entering the vestibule of the church, and looking up, you observe with a sort of horror that the ceiling is of massive granite and flat. The sacristan has a story that when Philip saw this ceiling, which forms the floor of the high choir, he remonstrated against it as too audacious, and insisted on a strong pillar being built to support it. The architect complied, but when Philip came to see the improvement he burst into lamentation, as the enormous column destroyed the effect of the great altar. The canny architect, who had built the pillar of pasteboard, removed it with a touch, and his majesty was comforted. Walking forward to the edge of this shadowy vestibule, you recognize the skill and taste which presided at this unique and intelligent arrangement of the choir. If left, as usual, in the body of the church, it would have seriously impaired that solemn and simple grandeur which distinguishes this above all other temples. There is nothing to break the effect of the three great naves, divided by immense square-clustered columns, and surmounted by the vast dome that rises with all the easy majesty of a mountain more than three hundred feet from the decent black and white pavement. I know of nothing so simple and so imposing as this royal chapel, built purely for the glory of God and with no thought of mercy or consolation for human infirmity. The frescos of Luca Giordano show the attempt of a later and degenerate age to enliven with form and color the sombre dignity of this faultless pile. But there is something in the blue and vapory pictures which shows that even the unabashed Luca was not free from the impressive influence of the Escorial. A flight of veined marble steps leads to the beautiful retable of the high altar. The screen, over ninety feet high, cost the Milanese Trezzo seven years of labor. The pictures illustrative of the life of our Lord are by Tibaldi and Zuccaro. The gilt bronze tabernacle of Trezzo and Herrera, which has been likened with the doors of the Baptistery of Florence as worthy to figure in the architecture of heaven, no longer exists. It furnished a half hour's amusement to the soldiers of France. On either side of the high altar are the oratories of the royal family, and above them are the kneeling effigies of Charles, with his wife, daughter, and sisters, and Philip with his successive harem of wives. One of the few luxuries this fierce bigot allowed himself was that of a new widowhood every few years. There are forty other altars with pictures good and bad. The best are by the wonderful deaf-mute, Navarrete, of Logrono, and by Sanchez Coello, the favorite of Philip. To the right of the high altar in the transept you will find, if your tastes, unlike Miss Riderhood's, run in a bony direction, the most remarkable Reliquary in the world. With the exception perhaps of Cuvier, Philip could see more in a bone than any man who ever lived. In his long life of osseous enthusiasm he collected seven thousand four hundred and twenty-one genuine relics,--whole skeletons, odd shins, teeth, toe-nails, and skulls of martyrs,--sometimes by a miracle of special grace getting duplicate skeletons of the same saint. The prime jewels of this royal collection are the grilled bones of San Lorenzo himself, bearing dim traces of his sacred gridiron. The sacristan will show you also the retable of the miraculous wafer, which bled when trampled on by Protestant heels at Gorcum in 1525. This has always been one of the chief treasures of the Spanish crown. The devil-haunted idiot Charles II. made a sort of idol of it, building it this superb altar, consecrated "in this miracle of earth to the miracle of heaven." When the atheist Frenchmen sacked the Escorial and stripped it of silver and gold, the pious monks thought most of hiding this wonderful wafer, and when the storm passed by, the booby Ferdinand VII. restored it with much burning of candles, swinging of censers, and chiming of bells. Worthless as it is, it has done one good work in the world. It inspired the altar-picture of Claudio Coello, the last best work of the last of the great school of Spanish painters. He finished it just before he died of shame and grief at seeing Giordano, the nimble Neapolitan, emptying his buckets of paint on the ceiling of the grand staircase, where St. Lawrence and an army of martyrs go sailing with a fair wind into glory. The great days of art in the Escorial are gone. Once in every nook and corner it concealed treasures of beauty that the world had nearly forgotten. The Perla of Raphael hung in the dark sacristy. The Cena of Titian dropped to pieces in the refectory. The Gloria, which had sunk into eclipse on the death of Charles V., was hidden here among unappreciative monks. But on the secularization of the monasteries, these superb canvases went to swell the riches of the Royal Museum. There are still enough left here, however, to vindicate the ancient fame of the collection. They are perhaps more impressive in their beauty and loneliness than if they were pranking among their kin in the glorious galleries and perfect light of that enchanted palace of Charles III. The inexhaustible old man of Cadora has the Prayer on Mount Olivet, an Ecce Homo, an Adoration of the Magi. Velazquez one of his rare scriptural pieces, Jacob and his Children. Tintoretto is rather injured at the Museo by the number and importance of his pictures left in this monkish twilight; among them is a lovely Esther, and a masterly Presentation of Christ to the People. Plenty of Giordanos and Bassanos and one or two by El Greco, with his weird plague-stricken faces, all chalk and charcoal. A sense of duty will take you into the crypt where the dead kings are sleeping in brass. This mausoleum, ordered by the great Charles, was slow in finishing. All of his line had a hand in it down to Philip IV., who completed it and gathered in the poor relics of royal mortality from many graves. The key of the vault is the stone where the priest stands when he elevates the Host in the temple above. The vault is a graceful octagon about forty feet high, with nearly the same diameter; the flickering light of your torches shows twenty-six sarcophagi, some occupied and some empty, filling the niches of the polished marble. On the right sleep the sovereigns, on the left their consorts. There is a coffin for Dona Isabel de Bourbon among the kings, and one for her amiable and lady-like husband among the queens. They were not lovely in their lives, and in their deaths they shall be divided. The quaint old church-mouse who showed me the crypt called my attention to the coffin where Maria Louisa, wife of Charles IV.,--the lady who so gallantly bestrides her war-horse, in the uniform of a colonel, in Goya's picture,--coming down those slippery steps with the sure footing of feverish insanity, during a severe illness, scratched _Luisa_ with the point of her scissors and marked the sarcophagus for her own. All there was good of her is interred with her bones. Her frailties live on in scandalized history. Twice, it is said, the coffin of the emperor has been opened by curious hands,--by Philip IV., who found the corpse of his great ancestor intact, and observed to the courtier at his elbow, "An honest body, Don Luis!" and again by the Ministers of State and Fomento in the spring of 1870, who started back aghast when the coffin-lid was lifted and disclosed the grim face of the Burgess of Ghent, just as Titian painted him,--the keen, bold face of a world-stealer. I do not know if Philip's funeral urn was ever opened. He stayed above ground too long as it was, and it is probable that people have never cared to look upon his face again. All that was human had died out of him years before his actual demise, and death seemed not to consider it worth while to carry off a vampire. Go into the little apartment where his last days were passed; a wooden table and book-shelf, one arm-chair and two stools--the one upholstered with cloth for winter, the other with tin for summer--on which he rested his gouty leg, and a low chair for a secretary,--this was all the furniture he used. The rooms are not larger than cupboards, low and dark. The little oratory where he died looks out upon the high altar of the Temple. In a living death, as if by an awful anticipation of the common lot it was ordained that in the flesh he should know corruption, he lay waiting his summons hourly for fifty-three days. What tremendous doubts and fears must have assailed him in that endless agony! He had done more for the Church than any living man. He was the author of that sublime utterance of uncalculating bigotry, "Better not reign than reign over heretics." He had pursued error with fire and sword. He had peopled limbo with myriads of rash thinkers. He had impoverished his kingdom in Catholic wars. Yet all this had not sufficed. He lay there like a leper smitten by the hand of the God he had so zealously served. Even in his mind there was no peace. He held in his clenched hand his father's crucifix, which Charles had held in his exultant death at Yuste. Yet in his waking hours he was never free from the horrible suggestion that he had not done enough for salvation. He would start in horror from a sleep that was peopled with shapes from torment. Humanity was avenged at last. So powerful is the influence of a great personality that in the Escorial you can think of no one but Philip II. He lived here only fourteen years, but every corridor and cloister seems to preserve the souvenir of his sombre and imperious genius. For two and a half centuries his feeble successors have trod these granite halls; but they flit through your mind pale and unsubstantial as dreams. The only tradition they preserved of their great descent was their magnificence and their bigotry. There has never been one utterance of liberty or free thought inspired by this haunted ground. The king has always been absolute here, and the monk has been the conscience-keeper of the king. The whole life of the Escorial has been unwholesomely pervaded by a flavor of holy water and burial vaults. There was enough of the repressive influence of that savage Spanish piety to spoil the freshness and vigor of a natural life, but not enough to lead the court and the courtiers to a moral walk and conversation. It was as profligate a court in reality, with all its masses and monks, as the gay and atheist circle of the Regent of Orleans. Even Philip, the Inquisitor King, did not confine his royal favor to his series of wives. A more reckless and profligate young prodigal than Don Carlos, the hope of Spain and Rome, it would be hard to find to-day at Mabille or Cremorne. But he was a deeply religious lad for all that, and asked absolution from his confessors before attempting to put in practice his intention of killing his father. Philip, forewarned, shut him up until he died, in an edifying frame of mind, and then calmly superintended the funeral arrangements from a window of the palace. The same mingling of vice and superstition is seen in the lessening line down to our day. The last true king of the old school was Philip IV. Amid the ruins of his tumbling kingdom he lived royally here among his priests and his painters and his ladies. There was one jealous exigency of Spanish etiquette that made his favor fatal. The object of his adoration, when his errant fancy strayed to another, must go into a convent and nevermore be seen of lesser men. Madame Daunoy, who lodged at court, heard one night an august footstep in the hall and a kingly rap on the bolted door of a lady of honor. But we are happy to say she heard also the spirited reply from within, "May your grace go with God! I do not wish to be a nun!" There is little in these frivolous lives that is worth knowing,--the long inglorious reigns of the dwindling Austrians and the parody of greater days played by the scions of Bourbon, relieved for a few creditable years by the heroic struggle of Charles III. against the hopeless decadence. You may walk for an hour through the dismal line of drawing-rooms in the cheerless palace that forms the gridiron's handle, and not a spirit is evoked from memory among all the tapestry and panelling and gilding. The only cheerful room in this granite wilderness is the library, still in good and careful keeping. A long, beautiful room, two hundred feet of bookcases, and tasteful frescos by Tibaldi and Carducho, representing the march of the liberal sciences. Most of the older folios are bound in vellum, with their gilded edges, on which the title is stamped, turned to the front. A precious collection of old books and older manuscripts, useless to the world as the hoard of a miser. Along the wall are hung the portraits of the Escorial kings and builders. The hall is furnished with marble and porphyry tables, and elaborate glass cases display some of the curiosities of the library,--a copy of the Gospels that belonged to the Emperor Conrad, the Suabian Kurz; a richly illuminated Apocalypse; a gorgeous missal of Charles V.; a Greek Bible, which once belonged to Mrs. Phoebus's ancestor Cantacuzene; Persian and Chinese sacred books; and a Koran, which is said to be the one captured by Don Juan at Lepanto. Mr. Ford says it is spurious; Mr. Madoz says it is genuine. The ladies with whom I had the happiness to visit the library inclined to the latter opinion for two very good reasons,--the book is a very pretty one, and Mr. Madoz's head is much balder than Mr. Ford's. Wandering aimlessly through the frescoed cloisters and looking in at all the open doors, over each of which a cunning little gridiron is inlaid in the woodwork, we heard the startling and unexpected sound of boyish voices and laughter. We approached the scene of such agreeable tumult, and found the theatre of the monastery full of young students rehearsing a play for the coming holidays. A clever-looking priest was directing the drama, and one juvenile Thespis was denouncing tyrants and dying for his country in hexameters of a shrill treble. His friends were applauding more than was necessary or kind, and flourishing their wooden swords with much ferocity of action. All that is left of the once extensive establishment of the monastery is a boys' school, where some two hundred youths are trained in the humanities, and a college where an almost equal number are educated for the priesthood. So depressing is the effect of the Escorial's gloom and its memories, that when you issue at last from its massive doors, the trim and terraced gardens seem gay and heartsome, and the bleak wild scene is full of comfort. For here at least there is light and air and boundless space. You have emerged from the twilight of the past into the present day. The sky above you bends over Paris and Cheyenne. By this light Darwin is writing, and the merchants are meeting in the Chicago Board of Trade. Just below you winds the railway which will take you in two hours to Madrid,--to the city of Philip II., where the nineteenth century has arrived; where there are five Protestant churches and fifteen hundred evangelical communicants. Our young crusader, Professor Knapp, holds night schools and day schools and prayer meetings, with an active devotion, a practical and American fervor, that is leavening a great lump of apathy and death. These Anglo-Saxon missionaries have a larger and more tolerant spirit of propaganda than has been hitherto seen. They can differ about the best shape for the cup and the platter, but they use what they find to their hand. They are giving a tangible direction and purpose to the vague impulse of reform that was stirring, before they came, in many devout hearts. A little while longer of this state of freedom and inquiry, and the shock of controversy will come, and Spain will be brought to life. Already the signs are full of promise. The ancient barriers of superstition have already given way in many places. A Protestant can not only live in Spain, but, what was once a more important matter, he can die and be buried there. This is one of the conquests of the revolution. So delicate has been the susceptibility of the Spanish mind in regard to the pollution of its soil by heretic corpses that even Charles I. of England, when he came a-wooing to Spain, could hardly gain permission to bury his page by night in the garden of the embassy; and in later days the Prussian Minister was compelled to smuggle his dead child out of the kingdom among his luggage to give it Christian burial. Even since the days of September the clergy has fought manfully against giving sepulture to Protestants; but Rivero, alcalde of Madrid and president of the Cortes, was not inclined to waste time in dialectics, and sent a police force to protect the heretic funerals and to arrest any priest who disturbed them. There is freedom of speech and printing. The humorous journals are full of blasphemous caricatures that would be impossible out of a Catholic country, for superstition and blasphemy always run in couples. It was the Duke de Guise, commanding the pope's army at Civitella, who cried in his rage at a rain which favored Alva, "God has turned Spaniard;" like Quashee, who burns his fetish when the weather is foul. The liberal Spanish papers overflowed with wit at the proclamation of infallibility. They announced that his holiness was now going into the lottery business with brilliant prospects of success; that he could now tell what Father Manterola had done with the thirty thousand dollars' worth of bulls he sold last year and punctually neglects to account for, and other levities of the sort, which seemed greatly relished, and which would have burned the facetious author two centuries before, and fined and imprisoned him before the fight at Alcolea. The minister having charge of the public instruction has promised to present a law for the prohibition of dogmatic doctrine in the national schools. The law of civil registry and civil marriage, after a desperate struggle in the Cortes, has gone into operation with general assent. There is a large party which actively favors the entire separation of the spiritual from the temporal power, making religion voluntary, and free, and breaking its long concubinage with the crown. The old superstition, it is true, still hangs like a malarial fog over Spain. But it is invaded by flashes and rays of progress. It cannot resist much longer the sunshine of this tolerant age. Far up the mountain-side, in the shade of a cluster of chestnuts, is a rude block of stone, called the "King's Chair," where Philip used to sit in silent revery, watching as from an eyry the progress of the enormous work below. If you go there, you will see the same scene upon which his basilisk glance reposed,--in a changed world, the same unchanging scene,--the stricken waste, the shaggy horror of the mountains, the fixed plain wrinkled like a frozen sea, and in the centre of the perfect picture the vast chill bulk of that granite pile, rising cold, colorless, and stupendous, as if carved from an iceberg by the hand of Northern gnomes. It is the palace of vanished royalty, the temple of a religion which is dead. There are kings and priests still, and will be for many coming years. But never again can a power exist which shall rear to the glory of the sceptre and the cowl a monument like this. It is a page of history deserving to be well pondered, for it never will be repeated. The world which Philip ruled from the foot of the Guadarrama has passed away. A new heaven and a new earth came in with the thunders of 1776 and 1789. There will be no more Pyramids, no more Versailles, no more Escoriais. The unpublished fiat has gone forth that man is worth more than the glory of princes. The better religion of the future has no need of these massive dungeon-temples of superstition and fear. Yet there is a store of precious teachings in this mass of stone. It is one of the results of that mysterious law to which the genius of history has subjected the caprices of kings, to the end that we might not be left without a witness of the past for our warning and example,--the law which induces a judged and sentenced dynasty to build for posterity some monument of its power, which hastens and commemorates its ruin. By virtue of this law we read on the plains of Egypt the pride and the fall of the Pharaohs. Before the fagade of Versailles we see at a glance the grandeur of the Capetian kings and the necessity of the Revolution. And the most vivid picture of that fierce and gloomy religion of the sixteenth century, compounded of a base alloy of worship for an absolute king and a vengeful God, is to be found in this colossal hermitage in the flinty heart of the mountains of Castile. A MIRACLE PLAY In the windy month of March a sudden gloom falls upon Madrid,--the reaction after the _folie gaiete_ of the Carnival. The theatres are at their gayest in February until Prince Carnival and his jolly train assault the town, and convert the temples of the drama into ball-rooms. They have not yet arrived at the wonderful expedition and despatch observed in Paris, where a half hour is enough to convert the grand opera into the masked ball. The invention of this process of flooring the orchestra flush with the stage and making a vast dancing-hall out of both is due to an ingenious courtier of the regency, bearing the great name of De Bouillon, who got much credit and a pension by it. In Madrid they take the afternoon leisurely to the transformation, and the evening's performance is of course sacrificed. So the sock and buskin, not being adapted to the cancan, yielded with February, and the theatres were closed finally on Ash Wednesday. Going by the pleasant little theatre of Lope de Rueda, in the Calle Barquillo, I saw the office-doors open, the posters up, and an unmistakable air of animation among the loungers who mark with a seal so peculiar the entrance of places of amusement. Struck by this apparent levity in the midst of the general mortification, I went over to look at the bills and found the subject announced serious enough for the most Lenten entertainment,--Los Siete Dolores de Maria,--The Seven Sorrows of Mary,--the old mediaeval Miracle of the Life of the Saviour. This was bringing suddenly home to me the fact that I was really in a Catholic country. I had never thought of going to Ammergau, and so, when reading of these shows, I had entertained no more hope of seeing one than of assisting at an auto-da-fe or a witch-burning. I went to the box-office to buy seats. But they were all sold. The forestallers had swept the board. I was never able to determine whether I most pitied or despised these pests of the theatre. Whenever a popular play is presented, a dozen ragged and garlic-odorous vagabonds go early in the day and buy as many of the best places as they can pay for. They hang about the door of the theatre all day, and generally manage to dispose of their purchases at an advance. But it happens very often that they are disappointed; that the play does not draw, or that the evening threatens rain, and the Spaniard is devoted to his hat. He would keep out of a revolution if it rained. So that, at the pleasant hour when the orchestra are giving the last tweak to the key of their fiddles, you may see these woebegone wretches rushing distractedly from the Piamonte to the Alcala, offering their tickets at a price which falls rapidly from double to even, and tumbles headlong to half-price at the first note of the opening overture. When I see the forestaller luxuriously basking at the office-door in the warm sunshine, and scornfully refusing to treat for less than twice the treasurer's figures, I feel a divided indignation against the nuisance and the management that permits it. But when in the evening I meet him haggard and feverish, hawking his unsold places in desperate panic on the sidewalk, I cannot but remember that probably a half dozen dirty and tawny descendants of Pelayo will eat no beans to-morrow for those unfortunate tickets, and my wrath melts, and I buy his crumpled papers, moist with the sweat of anxiety, and add a slight propina, which I fear will be spent in aguardiente to calm his shattered nerves. This day the sky looked threatening, and my shabby hidalgo listened to reason, and sold me my places at their price and a _petit verre._ As we entered in the evening the play had just begun. The scene was the interior of the Temple at Jerusalem, rather well done,--two ranges of superimposed porphyry columns with a good effect of oblique perspective, which is very common in the Spanish theatres. St. Simeon, in a dress suspiciously resembling that of the modern bishop, was talking with a fiery young Hebrew who turns out to be Demas, the Penitent Thief, and who is destined to play a very noticeable part in the evening's entertainment. He has received some slight from the government authorities and does not propose to submit to it. The aged and cooler-blooded Simeon advises him to do nothing rash. Here at the very outset is a most characteristic Spanish touch. You are expected to be interested in Demas, and the only crime which could appeal to the sympathies of a Castilian crowd would be one committed at the promptings of injured dignity. There is a soft, gentle strain of music played pianissimo by the orchestra, and, surrounded by a chorus of mothers and maidens, the Virgin Mother enters with the Divine Child in her arms. The Madonna is a strapping young girl named Gutierrez, a very clever actress; and the Child has been bought in the neighboring toy-shop, a most palpable and cynical wax-doll. The doll is handed to Simeon, and the solemn ceremony of the Presentation is performed to fine and thoughtful music. St. Joseph has come in sheepishly by the flies with his inseparable staff crowned with a garland of lilies, which remain miraculously fresh during thirty years or so, and kneels at the altar, on the side opposite to Miss Gutierrez. As the music ceases, Simeon starts as from a trance and predicts in a few rapid couplets the sufferings and the crucifixion of the child. Mary falls overwhelmed into the arms of her attendants, and Simeon exclaims, "Most blessed and most unfortunate among women! thy heart is to be pierced with Seven Sorrows, and this is the first." Demas rushes in and announces the massacre of the innocents, concluding with the appropriate reflection, "Perish the kings! always the murderers of the people." This sentiment is so much to the taste of the gamins of the paraiso that they vociferously demand an encore; but the Roman soldiers come in and commence the pleasing task of prodding the dolls in the arms of the chorus. The next act is the Flight into Egypt. The curtain rises on a rocky ravine with a tinsel torrent in the background and a group of robbers on the stage. Gestas, the impenitent thief, stands sulky and glum in a corner, fingering his dagger as you might be sure he would, and informing himself in a growling soliloquy that his heart is consumed with envy and hate because he is not captain. The captain, one Issachar, comes in, a superbly handsome young fellow, named Mario, to my thinking the first comedian in Spain, dressed in a flashy suit of leopard hides, and announces the arrival of a stranger. Enters Demas, who says he hates the world and would fain drink its foul blood. He is made politely welcome. No! he will be captain or nothing. Issachar laughs scornfully and says _he_ is in the way of that modest aspiration. But Demas speedily puts him out of the way with an Albacete knife, and becomes captain, to the profound disgust of the impenitent Gestas, who exclaims, just as the profane villains do nowadays on every well-conducted stage, "Damnation! foiled again!" The robbers pick up their idolized leader and pitch him into the tinsel torrent. This is also extremely satisfactory to the wide-awake young Arabs of the cock-loft. The bandits disperse, and Demas indulges in some fifty lines of rhymed reflections, which are interrupted by the approach of the Holy Family, hotly pursued by the soldiery of Herod. They stop under a sycamore tree, which instantly, by very clever machinery, bends down its spreading branches and miraculously hides them from the bloodthirsty legionaries. These pass on, and Demas leads the saintly trio by a secret pass over the torrent,--the Mother and Child mounted upon an ass and St. Joseph trudging on behind with his lily-decked staff, looking all as if they were on a short leave of absence from Correggio's picture-frame. Demas comes back, calls up his merrymen, and has a battle-royal with the enraged legionaries, which puts the critics of the gallery into a frenzy of delight and assures the success of the spectacle. The curtain falls in a gust of applause, is stormed up again, Demas comes forward and makes a neat speech, announcing the author. Que salga! roar the gods,--"Trot him out!" A shabby young cripple hobbles to the front, leaning upon a crutch, his sallow face flushed with a hectic glow of pride and pleasure. He also makes a glib speech,--I have never seen a Spaniard who could not,--disclaiming all credit for himself, but lauding the sublimity of the acting and the perfection of the scene-painting, and saying that the memory of this unmerited applause will be forever engraved upon his humble heart. Act third, the Lost Child, or Christ in the Temple. The scene is before the Temple on a festival day, plenty of chorus-girls, music, and flowers. Demas and the impenitent Gestas and Barabbas, who, I was pleased to see, was after all a very good sort of fellow, with no more malice than you or I, were down in the city on a sort of lark, their leopard skins left in the mountains and their daggers hid under the natty costume of the Judaean dandy of the period. Demas and Gestas have a quarrel, in which Gestas is rather roughly handled, and goes off growling like every villain, _qui se respecte,--_"I will have r-revenge." Barabbas proposes to go around to the cider-cellars, but Demas confides to him that he is enslaved by a dream of a child, who said to him, "Follow me--to Paradise;" that he had come down to Jerusalem to seek and find the mysterious infant of his vision. The jovial Barabbas seems imperfectly impressed by these transcendental fancies, and at this moment Mary comes in dressed like a Madonna of Guido Reni, and soon after St. Joseph and his staff. They ask each other where is the Child,--a scene of alarm and bustle, which ends by the door of the Temple flying open and discovering, shrined in ineffable light, Jesus teaching the doctors. In the fourth act, Demas meets a beautiful woman by the city gate, in the loose, graceful dress of the Hetairai, and the most wonderful luxuriance of black curls I have ever seen falling in dense masses to her knees. After a conversation of amorous banter, he gives her a golden chain, which she assumes, well pleased, and gives him her name, La Magdalena. A motley crowd of street loafers here rushed upon the scene, and I am sure there was no one of Northern blood in the theatre that did not shudder for an instant at the startling apparition that formed the central figure of the group. The world has long ago agreed upon a typical face and figure for the Saviour of men; it has been repeated on myriads of canvases and reproduced in thousands of statues, till there is scarcely a man living that does not have the same image of the Redeemer in his mind. Well, that image walked quietly upon the stage, so perfect in make-up that you longed for some error to break the terrible vraisemblance. I was really relieved when the august appearance spoke, and I recognized the voice of a young actor named Morales, a clever light comedian of the Bressant type. The Magdalene is soon converted by the preaching of the Nazarene Prophet, and the scene closes by the triumphant entry into Jerusalem amid the waving of palm-branches, the strewing of flowers, and "sonorous metal blowing martial sounds." The pathetic and sublime lament, "Jerusalem! Jerusalem! thou that killest the prophets!" was delivered with great 'feeling and power. The next act brings us before the judgment-seat of Pontius Pilate. This act is almost solely horrible. The Magdalene in her garb of penitence comes in to beg the release of Jesus of Nazareth. Pontius, who is represented as a gallant old gentleman, says he can refuse nothing to a lady. The prisoner is dragged in by two ferocious ruffians, who beat and buffet him with absurd and exaggerated violence. There is nothing more hideous than the awful concreteness of this show,--the naked helplessness of the prisoner, his horrible, cringing, overdone humility, the coarse kicking and cuffing of the deputy sheriffs. The Prophet is stripped and scourged at the pillar until he drops from exhaustion. He is dragged anew before Pilate and examined, but his only word is, "Thou hast said." The scene lasts nearly an hour. The theatre was full of sobbing women and children. At every fresh brutality I could hear the weeping spectators say, "Pobre Jesus!" "How wicked they are!" The bulk of the audience was of people who do not often go to theatres. They looked upon the revolting scene as a real and living fact. One hard-featured man near me clenched his fists and cursed the cruel guards. A pale, delicate-featured girl who was leaning out of her box, with her brown eyes, dilated with horror, fixed upon the scene, suddenly shrieked as a Roman soldier struck the unresisting Saviour, and fell back fainting in the arms of her friends. The Nazarene Prophet was condemned at last. Gestas gives evidence against him, and also delivers Demas to the law, but is himself denounced, and shares their sentence. The crowd howled with exultation, and Pilate washed his hands in impotent rage and remorse. The curtain came down leaving the uncultivated portion of the audience in the frame of mind in which their ancestors a few centuries earlier would have gone from the theatre determined to serve God and relieve their feelings by killing the first Jew they could find. The diversion was all the better, because safer, if they happened to the good luck of meeting a Hebrew woman or child. The Calle de Amargura--the Street of Bitterness--was the next scene. First came a long procession of official Romans,--lictors and swordsmen, and the heralds announcing the day's business. Demas appears, dragged along with vicious jerks to execution. The Saviour follows, and falls under the weight of the cross before the footlights. Another long and dreary scene takes place, of brutalities from the Roman soldiers, the ringleader of whom is a sanguinary Andalusian ingeniously encased in a tin barrel, a hundred lines of rhymed sorrow from the Madonna, and a most curious scene of the Wandering Jew. This worthy, who in defiance of tradition is called Samuel, is sitting in his doorway watching the show, when the suffering Christ begs permission to rest a moment on his threshold. He says churlishly, Anda!--"Begone!" "I will go, but thou shalt go forever until I come." The Jew's feet begin to twitch convulsively, as if pulled from under him. He struggles for a moment, and at last is carried off by his legs, which are moved like those of the walking dolls with the Greek names. This odd tradition, so utterly in contradiction with the picture the Scriptures give us of the meek dignity with which the Redeemer forgave all personal injuries, has taken a singular hold upon the imaginations of all peoples. Under varying names,---Ahasuerus, Salathiel, le Juif Errant, der ewige Jude,--his story is the delight and edification of many lands; and I have met some worthy people who stoutly insisted that they had read it in the Bible. The sinister procession moves on. The audience, which had been somewhat cheered by the prompt and picturesque punishment inflicted upon the inhospitable Samuel, was still further exhilarated by the spectacle of the impenitent traitor Gestas, staggering under an enormous cross, his eyes and teeth glaring with abject fear, with an athletic Roman haling him up to Calvary with a new hempen halter. A long intermission followed, devoted to putting babies to sleep,--for there were hundreds of them, wide-eyed and strong-lunged,--to smoking the hasty cigarette, to discussing the next combination of Prim or the last scandal in the gay world. The carpenters were busy behind the scenes building the mountain. When the curtain rose, it was worth waiting for. It was an admirable scene. A genuine Spanish mountain, great humpy undulations of rock and sand, gigantic cacti for all vegetation, a lurid sky behind, but not over-colored. A group of Roman soldiers in the foreground, in the rear the hill, and the executioners busily employed in nailing the three victims to their crosses. Demas was fastened first; then Gestas, who, when undressed for execution, was a superb model of a youthful Hercules. But the third cross still lay on the ground; the hammering and disputing and coming and going were horribly lifelike and real. At last the victim is securely nailed to the wood, and the cross is slowly and clumsily lifted and falls with a shock into its socket. The soldiers _huzza.,_ the fiend in the tin barrel and another in a tin hat come down to the footlights and throw dice for the raiment. "Caramba! curse my luck!" says our friend in the tin case, and the other walks off with the vestment. The Passion begins, and lasts an interminable time. The grouping is admirable, every shifting of the crowd in the foreground produces a new and finished picture, with always the same background of the three high crosses and their agonizing burdens against that lurid sky. The impenitent Gestas curses and dies; the penitent Demas believes and receives eternal rest. The Holy Women come in and group themselves in picturesque despair at the foot of the cross. The awful drama goes on with no detail omitted,--the thirst the sponge dipped in vinegar, the cry of desolation, the spear-thrust, the giving up of the ghost. The stage-lights are lowered. A thick darkness--of crape--comes down over the sky. Horror falls on the impious multitude, and the scene is deserted save by the faithful. The closing act opens with a fine effect of moon and stars. "Que linda luna!" sighed a young woman beside me, drying her tears, comforted by the beauty of the scene. The central cross is bathed in the full splendor that is denied the others. Joseph of Abarimathea (as he is here called) comes in with ladders and winding-sheets, and the dead Christ is taken from the cross. The Descent is managed with singular skill and genuine artistic feeling. The principal actor, who has been suspended for an hour in a most painful and constrained posture, has a corpse-like rigidity and numbness. There is one moment when you can almost imagine yourself in Antwerp, looking at that sublimest work of Rubens. The Entombment ends, and the last tableau is of the Mater Dolorosa in the Solitude. I have rarely seen an effect so simple, and yet so striking,--the darkened stage, the softened moonlight, the now Holy Rood spectral and tall against the starry sky, and the Dolorous Mother, alone in her sublime sorrow, as she will be worshipped and revered for coming aeons. A curious observation is made by all foreigners, of the absence of the apostles from the drama. They appear from time to time, but merely as supernumeraries. One would think that the character of Judas was especially fitted for dramatic use. I spoke of this to a friend, and he said that formerly the false apostle was introduced in the play, but that the sight of him so fired the Spanish heart that not only his life, but the success of the piece was endangered. This reminds one of Mr. A. Ward's account of a high-handed outrage at "Utiky," where a young gentleman of good family stove in the wax head of "Jewdas Iscarrit," characterizing him at the same time as a "pew-serlanimous cuss." "To see these Mysteries in their glory," continued my friend, "you should go into the small towns in the provinces, uncontaminated with railroads or unbelief. There they last several days The stage is the town, the Temple scene takes place in the church, the Judgment at the city hall, and the procession of the Via Crucis moves through all the principal streets. The leading roles are no joke,--carrying fifty kilos of wood over the mud and cobble-stones for half a day. The Judas or Gestas must be paid double for the kicks and cuffs he gets from tender-hearted spectators,--the curses he accepts willingly as a tribute to his dramatic ability. His proudest boast in the evening is Querian matarme,--'They wanted to kill me!' I once saw the hero of the drama stop before a wine-shop, sweating like rain, and positively swear by the life of the Devil, he would not carry his gallows a step farther unless he had a drink. They brought him a bottle of Valdepenas, and he drained it before resuming his way to Golgotha. Some of us laughed thoughtlessly, and narrowly escaped the knives of the orthodox ruffians who followed the procession." The most striking fact in this species of exhibition is the evident and unquestioning faith of the audience. To all foreigners the show is at first shocking and then tedious; to the good people of Madrid it is a sermon, full of absolute truth and vivid reality. The class of persons who attend these spectacles is very different from that which you find at the Royal Theatre or the Comic Opera. They are sober, serious bourgeois, who mind their shops and go to mass regularly, and who come to the theatre only in Lent, when the gay world stays away. They would not dream of such an indiscretion as reading the Bible. Their doctrinal education consists of their catechism, the sermons of the curas, and the traditions of the Church. The miracle of St. Veronica, who, wiping the brow of the Saviour in the Street of Bitterness, finds his portrait on her handkerchief, is to them as real and reverend as if it were related by the evangelist. The spirit of inquiry which has broken so many idols, and opened such new vistas of thought for the minds of all the world, is as yet a stranger to Spain. It is the blind and fatal boast of even the best of Spaniards that their country is a unit in religious faith. Nunca se disputo en Espana,--"There has never been any discussion in Spain,"--exclaims proudly an eminent Spanish writer. Spectacles like that which we have just seen were one of the elements which in a barbarous and unenlightened age contributed strongly to the consolidation of that unthinking and ardent faith which has fused the nation into one torpid and homogeneous mass of superstition. No better means could have been devised for the purpose. Leaving out of view the sublime teachings of the large and tolerant morality of Jesus, the clergy made his personality the sole object of worship and reverence. By dwelling almost exclusively upon the story of his sufferings, they excited the emotional nature of the ignorant, and left their intellects untouched and dormant. They aimed to arouse their sympathies, and when that was done, to turn their natural resentment against those whom the Church considered dangerous. To the inflamed and excited worshippers, a heretic was the enemy of the crucified Saviour, a Jew was his murderer, a Moor was his reviler. A Protestant wore to their bloodshot eyes the semblance of the torturer who had mocked and scourged the meek Redeemer, who had crowned his guileless head with thorns, who had pierced and slain him. The rack, the gibbet, and the stake were not enough to glut the pious hate this priestly trickery inspired. It was not enough that the doubter's life should go out in the blaze of the crackling fagots, but it must be loaded in eternity with the curses of the faithful. Is there not food for earnest thought in the fact that faith in Christ, which led the Puritans across the sea to found the purest social and political system which the wit of man has yet evolved from the tangled problems of time, has dragged this great Spanish people down to a depth of hopeless apathy, from which it may take long years of civil tumult to raise them? May we not find the explanation of this strange phenomenon in the contrast of Catholic unity with Protestant diversity? "Thou that killest the prophets!"--the system to which this apostrophe can be applied is doomed. And it matters little who the prophets may be. THE CRADLE AND THE GRAVE OF CERVANTES In Rembrandt Peale's picture of the Court of Death a cadaverous shape lies for judgment at the foot of the throne, touching at either extremity the waters of Lethe. There is something similar in the history of the greatest of Spanish writers. No man knew, for more than a century after the death of Cervantes, the place of his birth and burial. About a hundred years ago the investigations of Rios and Pellicer established the claim of Alcala de Henares to be his native city; and last year the researches of the Spanish Academy have proved conclusively that he is buried in the Convent of the Trinitarians in Madrid. But the precise spot where he was born is only indicated by vague tradition; and the shadowy conjecture that has so long hallowed the chapel and cloisters of the Calle Cantarranas has never settled upon any one slab of their pavement. It is, however, only the beginning and the end of this most chivalrous and genial apparition of the sixteenth century that is concealed from our view. We know where he was christened and where he died. So that there are sufficiently authentic shrines in Alcala and Madrid to satisfy the most sceptical pilgrims. I went to Alcala one summer day, when the bare fields were brown and dry in their after-harvest nudity, and the hills that bordered the winding Henares were drab in the light and purple in the shadow. From a distance the town is one of the most imposing in Castile. It lies in the midst of a vast plain by the green water-side, and the land approach is fortified by a most impressive wall emphasized by sturdy square towers and flanking bastions. But as you come nearer you see this wall is a tradition. It is almost in ruins. The crenellated towers are good for nothing but to sketch. A short walk from the station brings you to the gate, which is well defended by a gang of picturesque beggars, who are old enough to have sat for Murillo, and revoltingly pitiable enough to be millionaires by this time, if Castilians had the cowardly habit of sponging out disagreeable impressions with pennies. At the first charge we rushed in panic into a tobacco-shop and filled our pockets with maravedis, and thereafter faced the ragged battalion with calm. It is a fine, handsome, and terribly lonesome town. Its streets are wide, well built, and silent v as avenues in a graveyard. On every hand there are tall and stately churches, a few palaces, and some two dozen great monasteries turning their long walls, pierced with jealous grated windows, to the grass-grown streets. In many quarters there is no sign of life, no human habitations among these morose and now empty barracks of a monkish army. Some of them have been turned into military casernes, and the bright red and blue uniforms of the Spanish officers and troopers now brighten the cloisters that used to see nothing gayer than the gowns of cord-girdled friars. A large garrison is always kept here. The convents are convenient for lodging men and horses. The fields in the vicinity produce great store of grain and alfalfa,--food for beast and rider. It is near enough to the capital to use the garrison on any sudden emergency, such as frequently happens in Peninsular politics. The railroad that runs by Alcala has not brought with it any taint of the nineteenth century. The army is a corrupting influence, but not modern. The vice that follows the trail of armies, or sprouts, fungus-like, about the walls of barracks, is as old as war, and links the present, with its struggle for a better life, to the old mediaeval world of wrong. These trim fellows in loose trousers and embroidered jackets are the same race that fought and drank and made prompt love in Italy and Flanders and butchered the Aztecs in the name of religion three hundred years ago. They have laid off their helmets and hauberks, and use the Berdan rifle instead of the Roman spear. But they are the same careless, idle, dissolute bread-wasters now as then. The town has not changed in the least. It has only shrunk a little. You think sometimes it must be a vacation, and that you will come again when people return. The little you see of the people is very attractive. Passing along the desolate streets, you glance in at an open door and see a most delightful cabinet picture of domestic life. All the doors in the house are open. You can see through the entry, the front room, into the cool court beyond, gay with oleanders and vines, where a group of women half dressed are sewing and spinning and cheering their souls with gossip. If you enter under pretence of asking a question, you will be received with grave courtesy, your doubts solved, and they will bid you go with God, with the quaint frankness of patriarchal times. They do not seem to have been spoiled by overmuch travel. Such impressive and Oriental courtesy could not have survived the trampling feet of the great army of tourists. On our pilgrim-way to the cradle of Cervantes we came suddenly upon the superb facade of the university. This is one of the most exquisite compositions of plateresque in existence. The entire front of the central body of the building is covered with rich and tasteful ornamentation. Over the great door is an enormous escutcheon of the arms of Austria, supported by two finely carved statues,--on the one side a nearly nude warrior, on the other the New World as a feather-clad Indian woman. Still above this a fine, bold group of statuary, representing, with that reverent naivete of early art, God the Father in the work of creation. Surrounding the whole front as with a frame, and reaching to the ground on either side, is carved the knotted cord of the Franciscan monks. No description can convey the charming impression given by the harmony of proportion and the loving finish of detail everywhere seen in this beautifully preserved fagade. While we were admiring it an officer came out of the adjoining cuartel and walked by us with jingling spurs. I asked him if one could go inside. He shrugged his shoulders with a Quien sabe? indicating a doubt as profound as if I had asked him whether chignons were worn in the moon. He had never thought of anything inside. There was no wine nor pretty girls there. Why should one want to go in? We entered the cool vestibule, and were ascending the stairs to the first court, when a porter came out of his lodge and inquired our errand. We were wandering barbarians with an eye to the picturesque, and would fain see the university, if it were not unlawful. He replied, in a hushed and scholastic tone of voice, and with a succession of confidential winks that would have inspired confidence in the heart of a Talleyrand, that if our lordships would give him our cards he had no doubt he could obtain the required permission from the rector. He showed us into a dim, claustral-looking anteroom, in which, as I was told by my friend, who trifles in lost moments with the integral calculus, there were seventy-two chairs and one microscopic table. The wall was decked with portraits of the youth of the college, all from the same artist, who probably went mad from the attempt to make fifty beardless faces look unlike each other. We sat for some time mourning over his failure, until the door opened, and not the porter, but the rector himself, a most courteous and polished gentleman in the black robe and three-cornered hat of his order, came in and graciously placed himself and the university at our disposition. We had reason to congratulate ourselves upon this good fortune. He showed us every nook and corner of the vast edifice, where the present and the past elbowed each other at every turn: here the boys' gymnasium, there the tomb of Valles; here the new patent cocks of the water-pipes, and there the tri-lingual patio where Alonso Sanchez lectured in Arabic, Greek, and Chaldean, doubtless making a choice hash of the three; the airy and graceful paraninfo, or hall of degrees, a masterpiece of Moresque architecture, with a gorgeous panelled roof, a rich profusion of plaster arabesques, and, _horresco referens,_ the walls covered with a bright French paper. Our good rector groaned at this abomination, but said the Gauls had torn away the glorious carved panelling for firewood in the war of 1808, and the college was too poor to restore it. His righteous indignation waxed hot again when we came to the beautiful sculptured pulpit of the chapel, where all the delicate details are degraded by a thick coating of whitewash, which in some places has fallen away and shows the gilding of the time of the Catholic kings. There is in this chapel a picture of the Virgin appearing to the great cardinal whom we call Ximenez and the Spaniards Cisneros, which is precious for two reasons. The portrait of Ximenez was painted from life by the nameless artist, who, it is said, came from France for the purpose, and the face of the Virgin is a portrait of Isabella the Catholic. It is a good wholesome face, such as you would expect. But the thin, powerful profile of Ximenez is very striking, with his red hair and florid tint, his curved beak, and long, nervous lips. He looks not unlike that superb portrait Raphael has left of Cardinal Medici. This university is fragrant with the good fame of Ximenez. In the principal court there is a fine medallion of the illustrious founder and protector, as he delighted to be drawn, with a sword in one hand and a crucifix in the other,--twin brother in genius and fortune of the soldier-priest of France, the Cardinal-Duke Richelieu. On his gorgeous sarcophagus you read the arrogant epitaph with which he revenged himself for the littleness of kings and courtiers:-- "Praetextam junxi sacco, galeamque galero, Frater, dux, praesul, cardineusque pater. Quin, virtute mea junctum est diadema cucullo, Dum mihi regnanti patuit Gesperia." By a happy chance our visit was made in a holiday time, and the students were all away. It was better that there should be perfect solitude and silence as we walked through the noble system of buildings and strove to re-create the student world of Cervantes's time. The chronicle which mentions the visit of Francis I. to Alcala, when a prisoner in Spain, says he was received by eleven thousand students. This was only twenty years before the birth of Cervantes. The world will never see again so brilliant a throng of ingenuous youth as gathered together in the great university towns in those years of vivid and impassioned greed for letters that followed the revival of learning. The romance of Oxford or Heidelberg or Harvard is tame compared with that electric life of a new-born world that wrought and flourished in Padua, Paris, and Alcala. Walking with my long-robed scholarly guide through the still, shadowy courts, under Renaissance arches and Moorish roofs, hearing him talking with enthusiasm of the glories of the past and never a word of the events of the present, in his pure, strong, guttural Castilian, no living thing in view but an occasional Franciscan gliding under the graceful arcades, it was not difficult to imagine the scenes of the intense young life which filled these noble halls in that fresh day of aspiration and hope, when this Spanish sunlight fell on the marble and the granite bright and sharp from the chisel of the builder, and the great Ximenez looked proudly on his perfect work and saw that it was good. The twilight of superstition still hung heavily over Europe. But this was nevertheless the breaking of dawn, the herald of the fuller day of investigation and inquiry. It was into this rosy morning of the modern world that Cervantes was ushered in the season of the falling leaves of 1547. He was born to a life of poverty and struggle and an immortality of fame. His own city did not know him while he lived, and now is only known through him. Pilgrims often come from over distant seas to breathe for one day the air that filled his baby lungs, and to muse among the scenes that shaped his earliest thoughts. We strolled away from the university through the still lanes and squares to the Calle Mayor, the only thoroughfare of the town that yet retains some vestige of traffic. It is a fine, long street bordered by stone arcades, within which are the shops, and without which in the pleasant afternoon are the rosy and contemplative shopkeepers. It would seem a pity to disturb their dreamy repose by offering to trade; and in justice to Castilian taste and feeling I must say that nobody does it. Halfway down the street a side alley runs to the right, called Calle de Cervantes, and into this we turned to find the birthplace of the romancer. On one side was a line of squalid, quaint, gabled houses, on the other a long garden wall. We walked under the shadow of the latter and stared at the house-fronts, looking for an inscription we had heard of. We saw in sunny doorways mothers oiling into obedience the stiff horse-tail hair of their daughters. By the grated windows we caught glimpses of the black eyes and nut-brown cheeks of maidens at their needles. But we saw nothing to show which of these mansions had been honored by tradition as the residence of Roderick Cervantes. A brisk and practical-looking man went past us. I asked him where was the house of the poet. He smiled in a superior sort of way, and pointed to the wall above my head: "There is no such house. Some people think it once stood here, and they have placed that stone in the garden-wall to mark the spot. I believe what I see. It is all child's play anyhow, whether true or false. There is better work to be done now than to honor Cervantes. He fought for a bigot king, and died in a monk's hood." "You think lightly of a glory of Castile." "If we could forget all the glories of Castile it would be better for us." "Puede ser," I assented. "Many thanks. May your grace go with God!" "Health and fraternity!" he answered, and moved away with a step full of energy and dissent. He entered a door under an inscription, "Federal Republican Club." Go your ways, I thought, radical brother. You are not so courteous nor so learned as the rector. But this Peninsula has need of men like you. The ages of belief have done their work for good and ill. Let us have some years of the spirit that denies, and asks for proofs. The power of the monk is broken, but the work is not yet done. The convents have been turned into barracks, which is no improvement. The ringing of spurs in the streets of Alcala is no better than the rustling of the sandalled friars. If this Republican party of yours cannot do something to free Spain from the triple curse of crown, crozier, and sabre, then Spain is in doleful case. They are at last divided, and the first two have been sorely weakened in detail. The last should be the easiest work. The scorn of my radical friend did not prevent my copying the modest tablet on the wall:-- "Here was born Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, author of Don Quixote. By his fame and his genius he belongs to the civilized world; by his cradle to Alcala de Henares." There is no doubt of the truth of the latter part of this inscription. Eight Spanish towns have claimed to have given birth to Cervantes, thus beating the blind Scian by one town; every one that can show on its church records the baptism of a child so called has made its claim. Yet Alcala, who spells his name wrong, calling him Carvantes, is certainly in the right, as the names of his father, mother, brothers, and sisters are also given in its records, and all doubt is now removed from the matter by the discovery of Cervantes's manuscript statement of his captivity in Algiers and his petition for employment in America, in both of which he styles himself "Natural de Alcala de Henares." Having examined the evidence, we considered ourselves justly entitled to all the usual emotions in visiting the church of the parish, Santa Maria la Mayor. It was evening, and from a dozen belfries in the neighborhood came the soft dreamy chime of silver-throated bells. In the little square in front of the church a few families sat in silence on the massive stone benches. A few beggars hurried by, too intent upon getting home to supper to beg. A rural and a twilight repose lay on everything. Only in the air, rosy with the level light, flew out and greeted each other those musical voices of the bells rich with the memories of all the days of Alcala. The church was not open, but we followed a sacristan in, and he seemed too feeble-minded to forbid. It is a pretty church, not large nor imposing, with a look of cosy comfort about it. Through the darkness the high altar loomed before us, dimly lighted by a few candles where the sacristans were setting up the properties for the grand mass of the morrow,--Our Lady of the Snows. There was much talk and hot discussion as to the placing of the boards and the draperies, and the image of Our Lady seemed unmoved by words unsuited to her presence. We know that every vibration of air makes its own impression on the world of matter. So that the curses of the sacristans at their work, the prayers of penitents at the altar, the wailing of breaking hearts bowed on the pavement through many years, are all recorded mysteriously, in these rocky walls. This church is the illegible history of the parish. But of all its ringing of bells, and swinging of censers, and droning of psalms, and putting on and off of goodly raiment, the only show that consecrates it for the world's pilgrimage is that humble procession that came on the 9th day of October, in the year of Grace 1547, to baptize Roderick Cervantes's youngest child. There could not be an humbler christening. Juan Pardo--John Gray--was the sponsor, and the witnesses were "Baltazar Vazquez, the sacristan, and I who baptized him and signed with my name," says Mr. Bachelor Serrano, who never dreamed he was stumbling into fame when he touched that pink face with the holy water and called the child Miguel. It is my profound conviction that Juan Pardo brought the baby himself to the church and took it home again, screaming wrathfully; Neighbor' Pardo feeling a little sheepish and mentally resolving never to do another good-natured action as long as he lived. As for the neophyte, he could not be blamed for screaming and kicking against the new existence he was entering, if the instinct of genius gave him any hint of it. Between the font of St. Mary's and the bier at St. Ildefonso's there was scarcely an hour of joy waiting him in his long life, except that which comes from noble and earnest work. His youth was passed in the shabby privation of a poor gentleman's house; his early talents attracted the attention of my Lord Aquaviva, the papal legate, who took him back to Rome in his service; but the high-spirited youth soon left the inglorious ease of the cardinal's house to enlist as a private soldier in the sea-war against the Turk. He fought bravely at Lepanto, where he was three times wounded and his left hand crippled. Going home for promotion, loaded with praise and kind letters from the generous bastard, Don Juan of Austria, the true son of the Emperor Charles and pretty Barbara Blumberg, he was captured with his brother by the Moors, and passed five miserable years in slavery, never for one instant submitting to his lot, but wearying his hostile fate with constant struggles. He headed a dozen attempts at flight or insurrection, and yet his thrifty owners would not kill him. They thought a man who bore letters from a prince, and who continued cock of his walk through years of servitude, would one day bring a round ransom. At last the tardy day of his redemption came, but not from the cold-hearted tyrant he had so nobly served. The matter was presented to him by Cervantes's comrades, but he would do nothing. So that Don Roderick sold his estate and his sisters sacrificed their dowry to buy the freedom of the captive brothers. They came back to Spain still young enough to be fond of glory, and simple-hearted enough to believe in the justice of the great. They immediately joined the army and served in the war with Portugal. The elder brother made his way and got some little promotion, but Miguel got married and discharged, and wrote verses and plays, and took a small office in Seville, and moved with the Court to Valladolid; and kept his accounts badly, and was too honest to steal, and so got into jail, and grew every year poorer and wittier and better; he was a public amanuensis, a business agent, a sub-tax-gatherer,--anything to keep his lean larder garnished with scant ammunition against the wolf hunger. In these few lines you have the pitiful story of the life of the greatest of Spaniards, up to his return to Madrid in 1606, when he was nearly sixty years old. From this point his history becomes clearer and more connected up to the time of his death. He lived in the new-built suburb, erected on the site of the gardens of the Duke of Lerma, first minister and favorite of Philip III. It was a quarter much affected by artists and men of letters, and equally so by ecclesiastics. The names of the streets indicate the traditions of piety and art that still hallow the neighborhood. Jesus Street leads you into the street of Lope de Vega. Quevedo and Saint Augustine run side by side. In the same neighborhood are the streets called Cervantes, Saint Mary, and Saint Joseph, and just round the corner are the Magdalen and the Love-of-God. The actors and artists of that day were pious and devout madcaps. They did not abound in morality, but they had of religion enough and to spare. Many of them were members of religious orders, and it is this fact which has procured us such accurate records of their history. All the events in the daily life of the religious establishments were carefully recorded, and the manuscript archives of the convents and brotherhoods of that period are rich in materials for the biographer. There was a special reason for the sudden rise of religious brotherhoods among the laity. The great schism of England had been fully completed under Elizabeth. The devout heart of Spain was bursting under this wrong, and they could think of no way to avenge it. They would fain have roasted the whole heretical island, but the memory of the Armada was fresh in men's minds, and the great Philip was dead. There were not enough heretics in Spain to make it worth while to waste time in hunting them. Philip could say as Narvaez, on his death-bed, said to his confessor who urged him to forgive his enemies, "Bless your heart, I have none. I have killed them all." To ease their pious hearts, they formed confraternities all over Spain, for the worship of the Host. They called themselves "Unworthy Slaves of the Most Holy Sacrament." These grew at once very popular in all classes. Artisans rushed in, and wasted half their working days in processions and meetings. The severe Suarez de Figueroa speaks savagely of the crowd of Narcissuses and petits maitres (a word which is delicious in its Spanish dress of petimetres) who entered the congregations simply to flutter about the processions in brave raiment, to be admired of the multitude. But there were other more serious members,--the politicians who joined to stand well with the bigot court, and the devout believers who found comfort and edification in worship. Of this latter class was Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, who joined the brotherhood in the street of the Olivar in 1609. He was now sixty-two years old, and somewhat infirm,--a time, as he said, when a man's salvation is no joke. From this period to the day of his death he seemed to be laboring, after the fashion of the age, to fortify his standing in the other world. He adopted the habit of the Franciscans in Alcala in 1613, and formally professed in the Third Order in 1616, three weeks before his death. There are those who find the mirth and fun of his later works so inconsistent with these ascetic professions, that they have been led to believe Cervantes a bit of a hypocrite. But we cannot agree with such. Literature was at that time a diversion of the great, and the chief aim of the writer was to amuse. The best opinion of scholars now is that Rabelais, whose genius illustrated the preceding century, was a man of serious and severe life, whose gaulish crudeness of style and brilliant wit have been the cause of all the fables that distort his personal history. No one can read attentively even the Quixote without seeing how powerful an influence was exerted by his religion even upon the noble and kindly soul of Cervantes. He was a blind bigot and a devoted royalist, like all the rest. The mean neglect of the Court never caused his stanch loyalty to swerve. The expulsion of the Moors, the crowning crime and madness of the reign of Philip III., found in him a hearty advocate and defender. _Non facit monachum cucullus,--_it was not his hood and girdle that made him a monk; he was thoroughly saturated with their spirit before he put them on. But he was the noblest courtier and the kindliest bigot that ever flattered or persecuted. In 1610, the Count of Lemos, who had in his grand and distant way patronized the poet, was appointed Viceroy of Naples, and took with him to his kingdom a brilliant following of Spanish wits and scholars. He refused the petition of the greatest of them all, however, and to soften the blow gave him a small pension, which he continued during the rest of Cervantes's life. It was a mere pittance, a bone thrown to an old hound, but he took it and gnawed it with a gratitude more generous than the gift. From this time forth all his works were dedicated to the Lord of Lemos, and they form a garland more brilliant and enduring than the crown of the Spains. Only kind words to disguised fairies have ever been so munificently repaid, as this young noble's pension to the old genius. It certainly eased somewhat his declining years. Relieving him from the necessity of earning his daily crust, it gave him leisure to complete and bring out in rapid succession the works which have made him immortal. He had published the first part of Don Quixote in the midst of his hungry poverty at Valladolid in 1605. He was then fifty-eight, and all his works that survive are posterior to that date. He built his monument from the ground up, in his old age. The Persiles and Sigis-munda, the Exemplary Novels, and that most masterly and perfect work, the Second Part of Quixote, were written by the flickering glimmer of a life burnt out. It would be incorrect to infer that the scanty dole of his patron sustained him in comfort. Nothing more clearly proves his straitened circumstances than his frequent change of lodgings. Old men do not move for the love of variety. We have traced him through six streets in the last four years of his life. But a touching fact is that they are all in the same quarter. It is understood that his natural daughter and only child, Isabel de Saavedra, entered the Convent of the Trinitarian nuns in the street of Cantarranas--Singing Frogs--at some date unknown. All the shifting and changing which Cervantes made in these embarrassed years are within a small half-circle, whose centre is his grave and the cell of his child. He fluttered about that little convent like a gaunt old eagle about the cage that guards his callow young. Like Albert Duerer, like Raphael and Van Dyck, he painted his own portrait at this time with a force and vigor of touch which leaves little to the imagination. As few people ever read the Exemplary Novels,--more is the pity,--I will translate this passage from the Prologue:-- "He whom you see there with the aquiline face, chestnut hair, a smooth and open brow, merry eyes, a nose curved but well proportioned, a beard of silver which twenty years ago was of gold, long mustaches, a small mouth, not too full of teeth, seeing he has but six, and these in bad condition, a form of middle height, a lively color, rather fair than brown, somewhat round-shouldered and not too light on his feet; this is the face of the author of Galatea and of Don Quixote de la Mancha, of him who made the Voyage to Parnassus, and other works which are straying about without the name of the owner: he is commonly called Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra." There were, after all, compensations in this evening of life. As long as his dropsy would let him, he climbed the hilly street of the Olivar to say his prayers in the little oratory. He passed many a cheerful hour of gossip with Mother Francisca Romero, the independent superior of the Trinitarian Convent, until the time when the Supreme Council, jealous of the freedom of the good lady's life, walled up the door which led from her house to her convent and cut her off from her nuns. He sometimes dropped into the studios of Carducho and Caxes, and one of them made a sketch of him one fortunate day. He was friends with many of the easy-going Bohemians who swarmed in the quarter,--Cristobal de Mesa, Quevedo, and Mendoza, whose writings, Don Miguel says, are distinguished by the absence of all that would bring a "blush to the cheek of a young person,"-- "Por graves, puros, castos y excelentes." In the same street where Cervantes lived and died, the great Lope de Vega passed his edifying old age. This phenomenon of incredible fecundity is one of the mysteries of that time. Few men of letters have ever won so marvellous a success in their own lives, few have been so little read after death. The inscription on Lope's house records that he is the author of two thousand comedies and twenty-one million of verses. Making all possible deductions for Spanish exaggeration, it must still be admitted that his activity and fertility of genius were prodigious. In those days a play was rarely acted more than two or three times, and he wrote nearly all that were produced in Spain. He had driven all competitors from the scene. Cervantes, when he published his collection of plays, admitted the impossibility of getting a hearing in the theatre while this "monster of nature" existed. There was a courteous acquaintance between the two great poets. They sometimes wrote sonnets to each other, and often met in the same oratories. But a grand seigneur like Frey Lope could not afford to be intimate with a shabby genius like brother Miguel. In his inmost heart he thought Don Quixote rather low, and wondered what people could see in it. Cervantes, recognizing the great gifts of De Vega, and, generously giving him his full meed of praise, saw with clearer insight than any man of his time that this deluge of prodigal and facile genius would desolate rather than fructify the drama of Spain. What a contrast in character and destiny between our dilapidated poet and his brilliant neighbor across the way! The one rich, magnificent, the poet of princes and a prince among poets, the "Phoenix of Spanish Genius," in whose ashes there is no flame of resurrection; the other, hounded through life by unmerciful disaster, and using the brief respite of age to achieve an enduring renown; the one, with his twenty millions of verses, has a great name in the history of literature; but the other, with his volume you can carry in your pocket, has caused the world to call the Castilian tongue the language of Cervantes. We will not decide which lot is the more enviable. But it seems a poet must choose. We have the high authority of Sancho for saying,-- "Para dar y tener Seso ha menester." He is a bright boy who can eat his cake and have it. In some incidents of the closing scenes of these memorable lives there is a curious parallelism. Lope de Vega and Cervantes lived and died in the same street, now called the Calle de Cervantes, and were buried in the same convent of the street now called Calle de Lope de Vega. In this convent each had placed a beloved daughter, the fruit of an early and unlawful passion. Isabel de Saavedra, the child of sin and poverty, was so ignorant she could not sign her name; while Lope's daughter, the lovely and gifted Marcela de Carpio, was rich in the genius of her father and the beauty of her mother, the high-born Maria de Lujan. Cervantes's child glided from obscurity to oblivion no one knew when, and the name she assumed with her spiritual vows is lost to tradition. But the mystic espousals of the sister Marcela de San Felix to the eldest son of God--the audacious phrase is of the father and priest Frey Lope--were celebrated with princely pomp and luxury; grandees of Spain were her sponsors; the streets were invaded with carriages from the palace, the verses of the dramatist were sung in the service by the Court tenor Florian, called the "Canary of Heaven;" and the event celebrated in endless rhymes by the genteel poets of the period. Rarely has a lovelier sacrifice been offered on the altar of superstition. The father, who had been married twice before he entered the priesthood, and who had seen the folly of errant loves without number, twitters in the most innocent way about the beauty and the charm of his child, without one thought of the crime of quenching in the gloom of the cloister the light of that rich young life. After the lapse of more than two centuries we know better than he what the world lost by that lifelong imprisonment. The Marquis of Mo-lins, director of the Spanish Academy, was shown by the ladies of the convent in this year of 1870 a volume of manuscript poems from the hand of Sor Marcela, which prove her to have been one of the most vigorous and original poets of the time. They are chiefly mystical and ecstatic, and full of the refined and spiritual voluptuousness of a devout young heart whose pulsations had never learned to beat for earthly objects. M. de Molins is preparing a volume of these manuscripts; but I am glad to present one of the seguidillas here, as an illustration of the tender and ardent fantasies of virginal passion this Christian Sappho embroidered upon the theme of her wasted prayers:-- Let them say to my Lover That here I lie! The thing of his pleasure, His slave am I. Say that I seek him Only for love, And welcome are tortures My passion to prove. Love giving gifts Is suspicious and cold; I have _all,_ my Beloved, When thee I hold. Hope and devotion The good may gain, I am but worthy Of passion and pain. So noble a Lord None serves in vain,-- For the pay of my love Is my love's sweet pain. I love thee, to love thee, No more I desire, By faith is nourished My love's strong fire. I kiss thy hands When I feel their blows, In the place of caresses Thou givest me woes. But in thy chastising Is joy and peace, O Master and Love, Let thy blows not cease! Thy beauty, Beloved, With scorn is rife! But I know that thou lovest me, Better than life. And because thou lovest me, Lover of mine, Death can but make me Utterly thine! I die with longing Thy face to see; Ah! sweet is the anguish Of death to me! This is a long digression, but it will be forgiven by those who feel how much of beautiful and pathetic there is in the memory of this mute nightingale dying with her passionate music all unheard in the silence and shadows. It is to me the most purely poetic association that clings about the grave of Cervantes. This vein of mysticism in religion has been made popular by the recent canonization of Saint Theresa, the ecstatic nun of Avila. In the ceremonies that celebrated this event there were three prizes awarded for odes to the new saint. Lope de Vega was chairman of the committee of award, and Cervantes was one of the competitors. The prizes it must be admitted were very tempting: first, a silver pitcher; second, eight yards of camlet; and third, a pair of silk stockings. We hope Cervantes's poem was not the best. We would rather see him carry home the stuff for a new cloak and pourpoint, or even those very attractive silk stockings for his shrunk shank, than that silver pitcher which he was too Castilian ever to turn to any sensible use. The poems are published in a compendium of the time, without indicating the successful ones; and that of Cervantes contained these lines, which would seem hazardous in this colder age, but which then were greatly admired:-- "Breaking all bolts and bars, Comes the Divine One, sailing from the stars, Full in thy sight to dwell: And those who seek him, shortening the road, Come to thy blest abode, And find him in thy heart or in thy cell." The anti-climax is the poet's, and not mine. He knew he was nearing his end, but worked desperately to retrieve the lost years of his youth, and leave the world some testimony of his powers. He was able to finish and publish the Second Part of Quixote, and to give the last touches of the file to his favorite work, the long pondered and cherished Persiles. This, he assures Count Lemos, will be either the best or the worst work ever produced by mortal man, and he quickly adds that it will not be the worst. The terrible disease gains upon him, laying its cold hand on his heart. He feels the pulsations growing slower, but bates no jot of his cheerful philosophy. "With one foot in the stirrup," he writes a last farewell of noble gratitude to the viceroy of Naples. He makes his will, commanding that his body be laid in the Convent of the Trinitarians. He had fixed his departure for Sunday, the 17th of April, but waited six days for Shakespeare, and the two greatest souls of that age went into the unknown together, on the 23d of April, 1616. The burial of Cervantes was as humble as his christening. His bier was borne on the shoulders of four brethren of his order. The upper half of the coffin-lid was open and displayed the sharpened features to the few who cared to see them: his right hand grasped a crucifix with the grip of a soldier. Behind the grating was a sobbing nun whose name in the world was Isabel de Saavedra. But there was no scenic effort or display, such as a few years later in that same spot witnessed the laying away of the mortal part of Vega-Carpio. This is the last of Cervantes upon earth. He had fought a good fight. A long life had been devoted to his country's service. In his youth he had poured out his blood, and dragged the chains of captivity. In his age he had accomplished a work which folds in with Spanish fame the orb of the world. But he was laid in his grave like a pauper, and the spot where he lay was quickly forgotten. At that very hour a vast multitude was assisting at what the polished academician calls a "more solemn ceremony," the bearing of the Virgin of the Atocha to the Convent of San Domingo el Real, to see if peradventure pleased by the airing, she would send rain to the parching fields. The world speedily did justice to his name. Even before his death it had begun. The gentlemen of the French embassy who came to Madrid in 1615 to arrange the royal marriages asked the chaplain of the Archbishop of Toledo in his first visit many questions of Miguel Cervantes. The chaplain happened to be a friend of the poet, and so replied, "I know him. He is old, a soldier, a gentleman, and poor." At which they wondered greatly. But after a while, when the whole civilized world had trans-lated and knew the Quixote by heart, the Spaniards began to be proud of the genius they had neglected and despised. They quote with a certain fatuity the eulogy of Montesquieu, who says it is the only book they have; "a proposition" which Navarrete considers "inexact," and we agree with Navarrete. He has written a good book himself. The Spaniards have very frankly accepted the judgment of the world, and although they do not read Cervantes much, they admire him greatly, and talk about him more than is amusing. The Spanish Academy has set up a pretty mural tablet on the facade of the convent which shelters the tired bones of the unlucky immortal, enjoying now their first and only repose. In the Plaza of the Cortes a fine bronze statue stands facing the Prado, catching on his chiselled curls and forehead the first rays of morning that leap over the hill of the Retiro. It is a well-poised, energetic, chivalrous figure, and Mr. Ger-mond de Lavigne has criticised it as having more of the sabreur than the savant. The objection does not seem well founded. It is not pleasant for the world to be continually reminded of its meannesses. We do not want to see Cervantes's days of poverty and struggle eternized in statues. We know that he always looked back with fondness on his campaigning days, and even in his decrepit age he called himself a soldier. If there were any period in that troubled history that could be called happy, surely it was the time when he had youth and valor and hope as the companions of his toil. It would have been a precious consolation to his cheerless age to dream that he could stand in bronze, as we hope he may stand for centuries, in the unchanging bloom of manhood, with the cloak and sword of a gentleman and soldier, bathing his Olympian brow forever in the light of all the mornings, and gazing, at evening, at the rosy reflex flushing the east,--the memory of the day and the promise of the dawn. 
50125	----	[Frontispiece: Philip IV at the age of 55. _From a portrait by Valazquez in the National Gallery, London._] The Court of Philip IV. SPAIN IN DECADENCE BY MARTIN HUME EDITOR OF THE CALENDARS OF SPANISH STATE PAPERS (PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE) LECTURER IN SPANISH HISTORY AND LITERATURE PEMBROKE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. _Vuestras augustisinas Soberanias vivan_, O GRAN FELIPE, _inclitamente triunfantes, gravadas en los Anales de la Fama, pues sois sólida columna y mobil Atlante de la Fe, unica defensa di la iglesia, y bien universal de vuestras invencibles reinos_ LONDON EVELEIGH NASH 1907 {v} PREFACE "I lighted upon great files and heaps of papers and writings of all sorts.... In searching and turning over whereof, whilst I laboured till I sweat again, covered all over with dust, to gather fit matter together ... that noble Lord died, and my industry began to flag and wax cold in the business." Thus wrote William Camden with reference to his projected life of Lord Burghley, which was never written; and the words may be applied not inappropriately to the present book and its writer. Some years ago I passed many laborious months in archives and libraries at home and abroad, searching and transcribing contemporary papers for what I hoped to make a complete history of the long reign of Philip IV., during which the final seal of decline was stamped indelibly upon the proud Spanish empire handed down by the great Charles V. to his descendants. I had dreamed of writing a book which should not only be a social review of the period signalised by the triumph of French over Spanish influence in the civilisation of Europe, but also a political history of the wane and final disappearance of the prodigious national imposture that had enabled Spain, aided by the rivalries between other nations, to dominate the world for a century by moral force unsupported by any proportionate material power. {vi} The sources to be studied for such a history were enormous in bulk and widely scattered, and I worked very hard at my self-set task. But at length I, too, began to wax faint-hearted; not, indeed, because my "noble Lord had died"; for no individual lord, noble or ignoble, has ever done, or I suppose ever will do, anything for me or my books; but because I was told by those whose business it is to study his moods, that the only "noble Lord" to whom I look for patronage, namely the sympathetic public in England and the United States that buys and reads my books, had somewhat changed his tastes. He wanted to know and understand, I was told, more about the human beings who personified the events of history, than about the plans of the battles they fought. He wanted to draw aside the impersonal veil which historians had interposed between him and the men and women whose lives made up the world of long ago; to see the great ones in their habits as they lived, to witness their sports, to listen to their words, to read their private letters, and with these advantages to obtain the key to their hearts and to get behind their minds; and so to learn history through the human actors, rather than dimly divine the human actors by means of the events of their times. In fact, he cared no longer, I was told, for the stately three-decker histories which occupied half a lifetime to write, and are now for the most part relegated, in handsome leather bindings, to the least frequented shelves of dusty libraries. I therefore decided to reduce my plan to more modest proportions, and to present not a universal {vii} history of the period of Spain's decline, but rather a series of pictures chronologically arranged of the life and surroundings of the "Planet King" Philip IV.--that monarch with the long, tragic, uncanny face, whose impassive mask and the raging soul within, the greatest portrait painter of all time limned with merciless fidelity from the King's callow youth to his sin-seared age. I have adopted this method of writing a history of the reign, because the great wars throughout Europe in which Spain took a leading part, under Philip and his successor, have already been described in fullest details by eminent writers in every civilised language, and because I conceive that the truest understanding of the broader phenomena of the period may be gained by an intimate study of the mode of life and ruling sentiments of the King and his Court, at a time when they were the human embodiment, and Madrid the phosphorescent focus, of a great nation's decay. The ground was practically virgin. John Dunlop, three-quarters of a century ago, wrote a stolid history of the reign, mainly concerned with the Spanish wars in Germany, Flanders, and Italy. But that was before the archives of Europe were accessible; and, creditable as was Dunlop's history for the time in which it was written, it is obsolete now. The Spanish reproduction in recent years, of seventeenth-century documents, for the most part unknown in England, has added much to recent information; whilst numerous original manuscripts, and old printed narratives and letters of the time, in Spanish, English, and French, have also provided ample material for the embodiment {viii} in the text of first-hand descriptions of events. The book as it stands is far less ambitious than that originally projected; but it contains much of the contemporary matter which would have provided substance for the wider history; and though it is limited in its scope, it may nevertheless render the important period it covers human and interesting to ordinary readers who seek intellectual amusement, as well as intelligible to students who read for information alone. The book--"a poor thing, but mine own"--owes nothing to the labours of previous English historians, except that in describing the Prince of Wales' visit to Madrid I have referred to two documents published by the Camden Society under the editorship of the late Dr. Gardiner. With these exceptions the material has been sought in contemporary unpublished manuscripts and printed records and letters, in most cases now first utilised for the purpose. Whatever its faults may be--and doubtless the critical microscope may discover many--it is the only comprehensive history of Philip IV. and the decadent society over which he reigned that modern research has yet produced. May good fortune follow it; for, as the Bachiller Carasco sagely said: "_No hay libra tan malo que no tenga algo bueno_," and I hope that in this book, at least, the "good" will be held to outbalance the "bad." MARTIN HUME. LONDON, _October_ 1907 {ix} CONTENTS CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY--PHILIP'S BAPTISM, 1605--THE ENGLISH EMBASSY--EXALTED RELIGIOUS FEELING--DEDICATION OF PHILIP'S LIFE TO THE VINDICATION OF ORTHODOXY--STATE OF SPAIN--EFFECTS OF LERMA'S POLICY--POVERTY OF THE COUNTRY--EXPULSION OF THE MORISCOS--PHILIP'S CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH--HIS BETROTHAL--FALL OF LERMA--THE PRINCE AND OLIVARES--DEATH OF PHILIP III. CHAPTER II ACCESSION OF PHILIP IV.--OLIVARES THE VICE-KING--CONDITION OF THE COUNTRY--MEASURES ADOPTED BY THE NEW KING--RETRENCHMENT--MODE OF LIFE OF PHILIP AND HIS MINISTER--PHILIP'S IDLENESS--HIS _APOLOGIA_--DISSOLUTENESS OF THE CAPITAL--VILLA MEDIANA--THE AMUSEMENTS OF THE KING AND COURT--A SUMPTUOUS SHOW--ARRIVAL OF THE PRINCE OF WALES IN MADRID--HIS PROCEEDINGS--OLIVARES AND BUCKINGHAM CHAPTER III STATE ENTRY OF CHARLES INTO MADRID--GREAT FESTIVITIES--HIS LOVE-MAKING--ATTEMPTS TO CONVERT THE PRINCE--THE REAL INTENTION OF OLIVARES--HIS CLEVER PROCRASTINATION--CHARLES AND BUCKINGHAM LOSE PATIENCE--HOWELL'S STORY OF CHARLES AND THE INFANTA--THE FEELING AGAINST BUCKINGHAM--ANXIETY OF KING JAMES--HIS CORRESPONDENCE WITH {x} "BABY AND STEENIE"--CHARLES DECIDES TO DEPART--FURTHER DELAY--THE DIPLOMACY OF OLIVARES--BUCKINGHAM AND ARCHY ARMSTRONG--DEPARTURE OF CHARLES--HIS RETURN HOME, AND THE ENGLISH DISILLUSION CHAPTER IV FOREIGN WAR RENDERED INEVITABLE BY OLIVARES' POLICY--ITS EFFECTS IN SPAIN--CONDITION OF THE COURT--WASTE, IDLENESS, AND OSTENTATION OF ALL CLASSES--EXTRAVAGANCE IN DRESS--PHILIP'S EFFORTS TO REFORM MANNERS--RETRENCHMENT IN HIS HOUSEHOLD--THE SUMPTUARY ENACTMENTS--THE _GOLILLA_--THE INDUSTRY OF OLIVARES--HIS CHARACTER AND APPEARANCE--HIS MAIN OBJECT TO SECURE POLITICAL AND FISCAL UNITY IN SPAIN--THE DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY OF THIS--THE COMEDIES--THEATRES IN MADRID--PHILIP'S LOVE FOR THE STAGE--AN _AUTO DE FE_--LORD WIMBLEDON'S ATTACK ON CADIZ--RICHELIEU'S LEAGUE AGAINST SPAIN--SPANISH SUCCESSES--"PHILIP THE GREAT"--VISIT OF THE KING TO ARAGON AND CATALONIA IN 1626--DISCONTENT AND DISSENSION--PHILIP'S LIFE TRAGEDY CHAPTER V RISE OF THE PARTY OPPOSED TO OLIVARES--THE QUEEN AND THE INFANTES CARLOS AND FERNANDO--OLIVARES REMONSTRATES WITH PHILIP FOR HIS NEGLECT OF BUSINESS--PHILIP'S REPLY--ILLNESS OF THE KING--FEARS OF OLIVARES--PHILIP'S CONSCIENCE--ASPECT OF MADRID AT THE TIME--HABITS OF THE PEOPLE--A GREAT ARTISTIC CENTRE--MANY FOREIGN VISITORS--VELASQUEZ--PHILIP'S LOVE OF ART, LITERATURE, AND THE DRAMA--CONTEMPORARY DESCRIPTION OF A PLAYHOUSE--PHILIP AND THE _CALDERONA_, MOTHER OF DON JUAN OF AUSTRIA--BIRTH AND BAPTISM OF BALTASAR CARLOS--PHILIP'S FIELD SPORTS--GENERAL SOCIAL DECADENCE {xi} CHAPTER VI RENEWED WAR WITH FRANCE, LATE IN 1628--RECONCILIATION WITH ENGLAND--THE PALATINATE AGAIN--COTTINGTON IN MADRID--HIS RECEPTION AND NEGOTIATIONS WITH OLIVARES AND PHILIP--FETES IN MADRID FOR BIRTH OF THE PRINCE OF WALES--DEATH OF SPINOLA--TREATY OF CASALE--A "LOCAL PEACE" WITH FRANCE--SPAIN AND THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR--POVERTY AND MISERY OF THE COUNTRY--UNPOPULARITY OF OLIVARES--HIS MONOPOLY OF POWER--HIS GREAT ENTERTAINMENT TO THE KING--HIS INTERVENTION IN PHILIP'S DOMESTIC AFFAIRS--"DON FRANCISCO FERNANDO OF AUSTRIA"--THE BUEN RETIRO--HOPTON IN MADRID--HIS DESCRIPTIVE LETTERS--THE INFANTES--PHILIP'S VISIT TO BARCELONA--DISCONTENT OF THE CORTES--THE INFANTE FERNANDO LEFT AS GOVERNOR--DEATH OF THE INFANTE CARLOS--DEATH OF THE INFANTA ISABEL IN FLANDERS--THE INFANTE FERNANDO ON HIS WAY THITHER WINS BATTLE OF NORDLINGEN--GREAT WAR NOW INEVITABLE WITH FRANCE CHAPTER VII INTRIGUES TO SECURE ENGLISH NEUTRALITY--HOPTON AND OLIVARES--SOCIAL LAXITY IN MADRID--CHARLES I. APPROACHES SPAIN--THE BUEN RETIRO AND THE ARTS--WAR IN CATALONIA--DISTRESS IN THE CAPITAL AND FRIVOLITY IN THE COURT--PREVAILING LAWLESSNESS--THE RECEPTION OF THE PRINCESS OF CARIGNANO--SIR WALTER ASTON IN MADRID--THE ENGLISH INTRIGUE ABANDONED CHAPTER VIII FESTIVITIES IN MADRID--EXTRAVAGANCE AND PENURY--NEW WAYS OF RAISING MONEY--HOPTON AND WINDEBANK--BATTLE OF THE DOWNS--VIOLENCE IN THE STREETS OF MADRID--REVOLT OF PORTUGAL--FRENCH {xii} INVASION OF SPAIN--REVOLT OF CATALONIA--PHILIP'S AMOUR WITH THE NUN OF ST. PLACIDO--THE WANE OF OLIVARES--PHILIP'S VOYAGE TO ARAGON--INTRIGUES AGAINST OLIVARES--FALL OF OLIVARES CHAPTER IX DEATH OF RICHELIEU AND OF THE CARDINAL INFANTE--PHILIP'S GOOD RESOLUTIONS--HIS CORRESPONDENCE WITH THE NUN OF AGREDA--PHILIP WITH HIS ARMIES--DEATH OF QUEEN ISABEL OF BOURBON--THE WAR CONTINUES IN CATALONIA--DEATH OF BALTASAR CARLOS--PHILIP'S GRIEF--HE LOSES HEART--INFLUENCE OF THE NUN--HIS SECOND MARRIAGE WITH HIS NIECE MARIANA--HIS LIFE WITH HER--DON LUIS DE HARO--NEGOTIATIONS WITH ENGLAND--CROMWELL'S ENVOY, ANTHONY ASCHAM--HIS MURDER IN MADRID--FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN PHILIP AND THE ENGLISH COMMONWEALTH--CROMWELL SEIZES JAMAICA--WAR WITH ENGLAND CHAPTER X MORAL AND SOCIAL DECADENCE IN MADRID--PHILIP'S HABITS--POVERTY IN THE PALACE--VELAZQUEZ--THE MENINAS--BIRTH OF AN HEIR--THE CHRISTENING--THE PEACE OF THE PYRENEES--PHILIP'S JOURNEY TO THE FRONTIER--MARRIAGE OF MARIA TERESA--CAMPAIGNS IN PORTUGAL--DON JUAN--DEATH OF HARO--PHILIP BEWITCHED--DEATH OF PHILIP PROSPER--BIRTH OF CHARLES--FANSHAWE'S EMBASSY--LADY FANSHAWE AND SPAIN--ROUT OF CARACENA IN PORTUGAL--PHILIP'S ILLNESS--THE INQUISITION AND WITCHCRAFT--DEATH OF PHILIP INDEX {xiii} LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PHILIP IV. AT THE AGE OF 55 . . . _Frontispiece_ _From a portrait by_ VELAZUEZ _in the National Gallery, London._ ISABEL DE BOURBON, FIRST WIFE OF PHILIP IV _From a portrait by_ VELAZQUEZ _in the possession of Edward Huth, Esq._ PHILIP IV. AS A YOUNG MAN _From a contemporary portrait in the possession of His Grace the Duke of Wellington, at Strathfieldsaye._ CASPAR DE GUZMAN, COUNT-DUKE OF OLIVARES _From a portrait by_ VELAZQUEZ _in the possession of Edward Huth, Esq._ PRINCE BALTASAR CARLOS ON HORSEBACK _From a picture by_ VELAZQUEZ _at the Prado Museum._ THE NUN SOR MARIA DE AGREDA _From an etching reproducing a contemporary portrait in the Franciscan Convent of St. Domingo de la Calzada._ {xiv} MARIANA DE AUSTRIA, SECOND WIFE OF PHILIP IV. _From a portrait by_ VELAZQUEZ _at the Prado Museum._ THE MAIDS OF HONOUR _Portrait of the Infanta Margaret; from a picture by_ VELAZQUEZ _at the Prado Museum._ {1} THE COURT OF PHILIP IV. CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY--PHILIP'S BAPTISM, 1605--THE ENGLISH EMBASSY--EXALTED RELIGIOUS FEELING--DEDICATION OF PHILIP'S LIFE TO THE VINDICATION OF ORTHODOXY--STATE OF SPAIN--EFFECTS OF LERMA'S POLICY--POVERTY OF THE COUNTRY--EXPULSION OF THE MORISCOS--PHILIP'S CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH--HIS BETROTHAL--FALL OF LERMA--THE PRINCE AND OLIVARES--DEATH OF PHILIP III The mean city of Valladolid reached the summit of its glory on the 28th of May 1605. Seven weeks before--on Good Friday, the 8th April--there had been born in the King's palace an heir to the world-wide monarchy of the Spains, the first male child that had been vouchsafed to the tenuous reigning house for seven-and-twenty years; and the new capital, proud of the fleeting importance that the folly of Lerma had conferred upon it, curtailed its lenten penance, and gave itself up to sensuous devotion blent with ostentatious revelry. King Philip III. and his nobles, in a blaze of splendour, had knelt in thanksgiving to sacred images of the {2} Holy Mother bedizened with priceless gems; well-fed monks and friars had chanted praises before a hundred glittering altars; and famished common folk, in filthy tatters, snarled like ravening beasts over the free food that had been flung to them, and fought fiercely for the silver coins that had been lavishly scattered for their scrambling.[1] From every window had flared waxen torches; for the hovels of beggars were illumined as well as the palaces of nobles,--nay, the courtly chronicler records that the very bells in the church tower of St. Benedict, seventeen of them, "melted in glittering tears of joy" when, to put it more prosaically, the edifice was gutted by a conflagration accidentally caused by the torches.[2] Cavalry parades, bull fights, and cane-tourneys by knights and nobles had alternated with banquets and balls during the fifty days that had been needed to bring together in the city of the Castilian plain the chivalry of Philip's realms. One after the other grandees and prelates, with long cavalcades of followers as fine as money or credit could make them, had crowded into the narrow streets and straggling plazas of Valladolid; and as the great day approached for the baptism of the Prince, who had been pledged by his father at his birth to the Virgin of San Llorente as the future champion of Catholic orthodoxy, news came that a greater company than that of any {3} grandee of them all was slowly riding over the mountains of Leon to honour the festival, and to pledge the most Catholic King to lasting peace and amity with heretic England, that in forty years of bitter strife had challenged the pretension of Spain to dictate doctrine to Christendom; and had, though few saw it yet, sapped the foundation upon which the imposing edifice of Spanish predominance was reared. [Sidenote: Howard in Spain] Then grave heads were shaken in doubt that this thing might be of evil omen. Already had the rigid Ribera, Archbishop of Valencia,[3] solemnly warned the King and Lerma of their impiety in making terms with the enemies of the faith; lamentations, as loud as was consistent with safety, had gone up from churches and guardrooms innumerable at this tacit confession of a falling away from the stern standard of Philip II. But now that Lord Admiral Howard, Earl of Nottingham, who had defeated the great Armada in 1588, and had commanded at the sack of Cadiz in 1596, was to ruffle and feast, with six hundred heretic Englishmen at his heels, in the very capital of orthodox Spain, whilst the baby prince whom God had sent to realise the dream of his house was baptized into the Church, offended pride almost overcame the stately courtesy and hospitality which are inborn in the Spanish character. But not quite: for though priests looked sour, and soldiers swaggered a little more than usual when they met the Englishmen in the {4} cobbled streets, yet to outward seeming all was kind on both sides; and even the biting satires of the poets were decently suppressed until the strangers had gone their way.[4] [Sidenote: Howard's reception] Howard and his train were lodged on the night of the 25th May in the castle and town of Simancas, on its bold bluff seven miles from the city; and betimes in the morning the six hundred and more British horsemen, all in their finest garb, set forth over the arid sandy plain on the banks of the Pisuerga, to enter in stately friendship the capital of the realm that they and theirs had harried by land and sea for two score years. For seven months no drop of rain had fallen on the parched earth; and as the noble figure of the old earl, in white satin and gold, surrounded by equally splendid kinsmen, passed on horseback to the appointed meeting place outside the walls of the city, the dust alone marred the magnificence of the cavalcade. For two hours the Englishmen were kept waiting under the trees, {5} where the Grand Constable, the Duke of Frias,[5] and the other grandees were to meet them; for Spanish pride was never at a loss for a device to inflict a polite snub upon a rival. This time it was a diplomatic illness of the Duke of Alba that delayed the starting of the great crowd of nobles who were to greet the English ambassador, and it was five o'clock in the afternoon before the Spanish horsemen reached their waiting guests. Then, as if by magic, the heavens grew suddenly black as night, and such a deluge as few men had seen[6] descended upon the gaudy throng; "heaven weeping in sorrow at their reception," said the bigots. In vain the Constable of Castile besought the stiff old Lord Admiral to take shelter in a coach. He would not balk the people of the sight, he said, and the costly finery of both English and Spanish received such a baptism as for ever spoilt its pristine beauty. Wet to the skin, their velvets and satins bedraggled, their plumes drooping, and their great lace ruffs as limp as rags, the thousand noble horsemen passed through dripping, silent, but curious crowds to their quarters. [Sidenote: English peculiarities] Howard himself was lodged in seven fine rooms in the palace of Count de Salinas, hard by the yet unfinished palace; and his six hundred followers were billeted in the houses of nobles and citizens.[7] {6} Fifty English gentlemen of rank dined together that evening in Howard's lodging, and their manners, dress, and demeanour furnished food for curious discourse in Spain for many days to come. How tall and handsome they were, though some of them were spoilt by full beards! said the gossips; how careful to show respect for the objects of worship in the churches, although only fourteen of the whole number were avowed Catholics. Many of them spoke Spanish well, as did Howard himself, and their dress was, on the whole, adjudged to be handsome; "though their ornaments were not so fine as ours." But what amused their critics more than anything else was their industrious poking about the city in search of books, and a curious fashion they had of breaking off in their discourse--or in a pause of the conversation--and practising a few steps of a dance, the tune of which they hummed between their teeth.[8] In the innocence of their hearts, too, they imagined that they were {7} paying a compliment to the Spaniards by saying how little real difference there was between their own creed and that of their hosts; a view which the latter received in courteous silence in their presence, but rejected with scorn and derision behind their backs.[9] Brave doings there had been, too, the next day, when Howard had his first interview with Philip III. Surrounded by the King's Spanish and Teuton guard, in new uniforms of yellow and red, the Lord Admiral was led by the Duke of Lerma into the presence of the King. Of the genuflections and embraces, of the advances on each side, measured and recorded to an inch by jealous onlookers, of the piled-up sumptuousness of the garments and the gifts, it boots not here to tell in full, but the King's new liveries alone on this occasion are said to have cost 120,000 ducats; and Howard excused himself for the poverty of his country when he handed to Queen Margaret an Austrian eagle in precious stones worth no more than the same great sum.[10] All this, however, was a mere foretaste of the overwhelming magnificence of the following day, Whit Sunday, the 28th May, for ever memorable in the annals of Valladolid as the greatest day in its long history; for then it was that in solemn majesty, and lavish ostentation without example, there was dedicated to the great task in which his ancestors had failed, a babe with a lily-fair skin and wide open light blue eyes, upon whom were {8} centred the hopes and prayers of a sensitive, devout people, who had seen in a few years their high-strung illusions vanish, their assurance of divine selection grow fainter and fainter, the cause they thought was that of heaven conquered everywhere by the legions of evil, and their own country reduced to chronic penury; burdened with a weight beyond its strength, yet too proud to cast the burden down or to acknowledge its own defeat. The almost despairing cry that constant disaster had wrung from Philip II: "Surely God will in the end make His own cause triumph," still found an echo in thousands of Spanish hearts; and this child of many prayers was greeted as an instrument sent at last from heaven, on the most solemn day in the Christian year, to put all things right when he should grow to be a man.[11] The presence of the "heretic" peace embassy seemed of no good omen, though some men even affected to interpret it as such when Howard knelt before the King and was raised and embraced by him; but, as if to banish every doubt, and mark for all the world that the vocation of the Prince was irrevocably fixed beforehand, there was brought in solemn pomp, from the remote village of Calguera, the {9} crumbling little font in which, five hundred years before, had been baptized the fierce firebrand St. Dominic, scourge of heresy and founder of the Holy Inquisition, whose work it was to make all Christians one, though blood and fire alone might do it. [Sidenote: Philip and the Dominicans] Nothing was omitted that could connect the Prince with the Dominican idea. Early in the morning of the day of the baptism, the King, who was to take no public part in the later christening ceremony, walked in state with all his Court[12] in a great procession of six hundred monks of Saint Dominic from their monastery of San Pablo to the cathedral, there again solemnly to dedicate his infant heir to the vindication of the Church; and at the dazzling ceremony which took place the same afternoon in the Dominican church of San Pablo a similar note was struck. The fair infant, with its vague blue eyes, was borne in triumph by the Duke of Lerma, a half dozen of the proudest dukes in Christendom carried the symbols and implements of the ceremony, cardinals and bishops in pontificals received the baby with royal state at the church porch, the populace pressed in thousands around with tears and blessings to see their future King; all that lavish extravagance and exuberant {10} fancy could devise to add refulgence to the solemnity was there; but, looking back with understanding eyes, we can see that the two significant objects which stand forth clearly in antagonism from all that welter of gew-gaws are the humble rough font of St. Dominic under its jewelled canopy, supported by great silver pillars, and the stately white-haired figure of the "heretic" ambassador with his prominent eyes bowing gravely, yet triumphantly, in his balcony, as the pompous procession swept by. Other less important things there were which must have told their tale and cast their shadow as plainly to those who witnessed them as to us. The two black-browed Savoyard cousins, who walked in the place of honour, the eldest of them as chief sponsor, must have been but skeletons at the feast, for the birth of the Prince had spoilt their cherished hope of the great inheritance; and, as we shall see in the course of this history, Victor-Amadeus of Savoy and his kin brought, therefore, abounding sorrow to his god-son and to Spain. When the infant, too, was denuded of his rich adornments for the ceremony, and they were deposited upon the solid silver bed that had been erected in the church for the purpose, some of the great personages, who alone could have had access to the precious objects, stole them all, and the heir of Spain, Prince Philip Dominic, who entered the church with his tiny body covered with gems, left it as unadorned as ascetic St. Dominic himself could have wished.[13] {11} [Sidenote: Philip's dedication] Thus, in a whirlwind of squandering waste, surrounded by pompous pride, unscrupulous dishonesty, and ecstatic devotion, Philip from his birth was pledged to the hopeless task of extirpating religious dissent from Christendom: the task that had been too great for the Emperor and his steadfast son, that had drained to exhaustion the wealth of the Indies, had turned Castile into a wilderness, and was to drag the Spanish Empire to ruin and dissolution under the sceptre of the babe whose christening we have witnessed. The life-story of the unhappy monarch which we have to tell is one of constant struggle amidst the antagonistic circumstances that surrounded his baptism; against the impossibility of reconciling the successful performance of the work, to which devotional pride and not national interest had bound him, with the poverty and exhaustion that had forced Philip III. and Lerma to seek peace with Protestants, and had made the victor of the Invincible Armada an honoured guest when the heir of Catholic Spain was dedicated to the ideal of Dominic. For, in good truth, it was from no lack of either devotion or pride that Philip III. had been forced to parley with the thing that he had been taught to look upon as accursed of God. Almost the only policy in which he was ever vehemently energetic was the attempt in the first days of his reign to invade Ireland in the interests of the Catholics, and to secure the control of the Crown of England by {12} means of the anti-Jacobite party.[14] He was, as Llorente truly says, more fit himself for a Dominican friar's frock than a regal mantle; and if rigid obedience to the directions of his spiritual guides had enabled him to root out Protestant dissent from Christendom, as he rooted out the Moriscos from his realms, Philip III. would have succeeded where his greater father and grandfather failed. [Sidenote: The Philips compared] But devotion was not enough to secure the triumph of Spain; fervent belief in the divine approval was not enough. Both Philip II. and the Spaniards of his time possessed those qualities to excess, and yet they had failed. What was needed now, even to avert catastrophe, were orderly organisation, industry, celerity in council and in action, economical adaptation of ways and means, ready resource and a flexible conscience; in short, statesmanship,--and these were the very qualities which Philip III. conspicuously lacked. With the accession of Philip III. (1598) the weak point in the system of the Emperor and his son had come out; and their laboriously constructed political machine had broken down. Under Philip II. himself, in his later recluse years, it had grown rusty and sluggish, but whilst the mainspring, the monarch, had laboured ceaselessly, treating his ministers as clerks, and raising them from the gutter that they might be his tools alone, the wheels at least went round; but when the monarch in whom all motion was centred left off working, and did nothing but dance and pray alternately, then came paralysis {13} and consequent disaster. "Ah! Don Cristobal; I fear they will rule him," groaned Philip II. on his agonised deathbed; and, though too late, he had guessed his son's character aright. Thenceforward the favourite, Lerma or another, was monarch in all but name; and each problem of government as it arose, or was submitted to the King, was considered by Philip III. not in its broad political aspects, but as a case of private conscience to be quibbled over by confessors and theologians, and finally decided with timorous heart-searching on grounds apart from national interests or expediency. Philip II. himself had all his life been sternly conscientious, according to his lights, and his inflexibility had been one of the main causes of the partial failure of his policy and the exhaustion of his country. He was a strong, slow, persistent man, unwavering in his methods, as he was consistent in his objects; but he was withal a statesman of vast ability, with the power of self-persuasion that all great statesmen must possess, and he played the game of international politics with mundane pieces, though he convinced himself and others that they were divine. His son and grandson, as will be seen in the course of this book, had not his power of self-conviction; they lived in an age of growing national disillusionment, and were swayed mainly by sentimental, traditional, and devotional considerations. They were for ever unlocking with trembling hands the secret closet of their conscience, to assure themselves that indeed no stain rested there. Having seen that all was spotless in their own breasts, they {14} were content to sit with crossed hands, in almost Oriental fatalism, throwing the whole responsibility for what happened, or failed to happen, upon the divine decrees. _They_ had satisfied their confessor and their conscience in the course they had taken, and if things went awry after that it was not _their_ fault.[15] This was no doubt all very saintly and good; but it meant calamity as a system of government when its professors were pitted against rivals unhampered by such scruples and limitations. It may seem paradoxical to assert that the more purely religious character of the motives that swayed Philip III. and Philip IV., than of those which influenced Philip II., resulted from a weakening of the exalted devotional faith that had dominated Spain during the greater part of the sixteenth century; and yet, if it be carefully considered, such will prove to be the case. A faith so fervent as that which carried the men-at-arms and explorers of the Emperor and his son triumphant through the world left no room for doubt. What _they_ did could not be wrong, because they were chosen to do God's own work; and for that all means were sanctified. They did not need to be {15} for ever pulling their consciences up by the roots to satisfy themselves that the fruit was good. If Philip II. ordered murder to be committed, or the Emperor seized private or ecclesiastical property for his own purposes; if hundreds of inconvenient political persons were consigned to a living tomb in the galleys and dungeons of the Inquisition, we may be assured that no qualms of conscience were felt in consequence by the first two sovereigns of the Spanish house of Austria; for the spiritual fervour, which was the secret of the unity and power of their realms, made all things right which were done in furtherance of objects which were considered sacred: and throughout the Reformation period the Spanish sovereigns quite honestly and unhesitatingly employed religious forms and professions to attain purely political ends.[16] But after the accession of Philip III. disillusion and faintness of faith set in, and the assurance of divine selection grew weaker. People in Spain were, it is true, more outwardly devout than ever, for the Inquisition increased in strength as it became more independent and less a political engine in the hands of the weak monarch; but the constant timid misgivings of governors and people, the universal recourse of gentle and simple to priests, friars, and nuns for guidance, consolation, and reassurance, were of themselves a proof that the old robust self-sufficing faith was declining; and in the course of this history we shall see how {16} the process continued hand in hand with the national decadence; the devotional influence upon political action increasing as religious faith grew less positive and conscience more clamorous. We have seen the wasteful splendour with which young Philip's infancy was surrounded: it will be necessary now for us to examine the state of the country at the time, in order that we may be able to trace in future pages the consequences of Philip's action and character when he came to the throne. Most of the contemporary chroniclers of the reign whose works remain to us, men like Novoa, Davila, Porreño, Cabrera, Malvezzi, and Torquemada, courtiers or placemen all, lose themselves in hyperbolical ecstasy at the colossal riches and greatness of the sovereign who could afford to spend in feasts and shows such vast sums as those squandered on the christening of Prince Philip Dominic and similar celebrations: but they were too much taken up with the pomp and glitter of their patrons, and in recording the interminable lists of high-sounding titles and glittering garments, to give much attention to the reverse side of the picture. For that we must turn to other authorities, especially to the narratives of foreign visitors, and to the remonstrances of the unfortunate members of the Cortes of Castile, who, between the despairing and indignant orders of their constituents, and the ceaseless pressure of the sovereign for fresh supplies of money, were obliged to speak plainly, though fruitlessly, of the ruin that impended unless matters were reformed.[17] {17} [Sidenote: State of Spain in 1600] The first Cortes of the third Philip's reign (1598), when Lerma demanded the previously unheard-of vote of eighteen million ducats, spread over six years, to be raised by a tax on wine, oil, meat, etc., earnestly prayed the King to attend to their long-neglected petitions for a readjustment of expenditure and taxation. When the sum was voted, the King's promise of reform was, as usual, broken, and the Cortes then told the King that his country was already ruined and could pay no more. "Castile is depopulated, as you may see; the people in the villages being now insufficient for the urgently necessary agricultural work: and an infinite number of places formerly possessing a hundred households are now reduced to ten, and many to none at all."[18] The common people were starving: the formerly prosperous cloth-weaving industry was rapidly being strangled by the terrible "_alcabala_" tax, imposed upon all commodities every time they changed hands by sale. The price of necessary articles was enormously and constantly rising, owing to the tampering of {18} Lerma with the currency, the dwarfing of industry by the _alcabala_, town tolls, local octrois, and the greatly increasing demand for commodities by America. Whilst the sternest decrees were issued in rapid succession against luxury in dress and living, the advent of Lerma and the host of greedy aristocrats to power had caused a perfect frenzy for magnificence in attire; and the vast amounts of money spent in costly stuffs and precious embroideries, etc., were almost entirely sent abroad, inasmuch as the Spanish manufacturers and dealers in such wares were not only impeded in the production and distribution of them by the economical causes mentioned, but were practically the only classes punished for infraction of the sumptuary decrees. Thus the great sums that arrived in Seville every year from the Indies to a large extent never penetrated Spain at all, but were transhipped at once to other countries, either in exchange for foreign commodities which unwise sumptuary decrees and faulty finance prevented from being produced in Spain, or else to pay the Genoese and German loan-mongers,--_asentistas_, as they were called,--who on usurious terms were always ready to provide money against future revenue for the wasteful shows by means of which the idea of Spain's abounding wealth and power was kept up. What portion of the American gold and silver did reach the Spanish people themselves was mostly hoarded or buried to keep it from the grasp of tax-farmers, thieves, and extortioners of all sorts, to whom a man of known wealth was simply looked upon as fair prey. The copper money, genuine and forged, with which the country {19} was flooded[19] was the only sort commonly current, and this had been by decree (1603) raised to double its face value, again increasing the price of articles of prime necessity to the poorer purchaser; whilst the nobles and other wealthier people who possessed hoarded silver and gold lived comparatively cheaply. [Sidenote: Spain at Philip's birth] In the very year 1605, when, as we have seen, money was squandered in Valladolid without limit, every source of national revenue had been pledged for years in advance; and a year or two previously the King's officers had been forced to beg from door to door for so-called voluntary contributions of not less than fifty reals, for the daily expenses of the royal household. The revenue in this year was stated to be nominally 23,859,787 copper ducats of the value of 2s. 5-1/3d. each,--more than enough, if it had been received, to meet every necessary expenditure; but peculation and corruption were so universal, contraband and evasion so general, that according to the Venetian ambassador, every branch of the administration was starved, the national defences in a deplorable condition, and the King unable to raise an army of more than 20,000 or 30,000 men in Spain.[20] In the meanwhile Lerma and his family and friends and their respective adherents were piling up possessions and riches beyond computation. The first act of Philip III. on his accession had been to give to his favourite the right to receive what presents {20} were offered to him, and Lerma had exercised the privilege to the full. What the chief minister did the subordinates imitated. Rodrigo Calderon, the favourite of the favourite, and Franquesa, the clerk of the council of finance, were found in their subsequent disgrace to have hoarded immense quantities of gold and silver; and every one of the twenty Viceroys, forty-six Governor-Generals, and their infinite underlings, robbed as much money as he could grasp, the sooner to come and swagger in the Court amidst a squalid, starving population, of which every man was striving within his limits to imitate his betters, and to share in the easily won riches of official corruption.[21] The one prosperous trade was the service of the King or the service of his servants; and thus, whilst the sovereign himself was blind and deaf to all but his innocent frivolities, and the superstitious awe that constituted his religion, Spain grew yearly poorer and more miserable as a nation, and the favoured classes, the nobles and the clergy, practically exempt from taxation, waxed ever fatter, more insolent, and more lavish. [Sidenote: Spain's responsibilities] The policy and aims of Philip II. had kept his realms at war for a generation. The fatal possession of the Flemish and Dutch territories {21} of the House of Burgundy and the traditions of Catholic unity had cursed poor Castile with a European policy, and had driven Spain into constant war with Protestant England, her natural ally; but Philip II. on his deathbed had done his best to lighten his son's burden. Flanders was left to his dear daughter Isabel, and her destined husband, the Cardinal-Archduke Albert, with reversion, unfortunately, to Spain, in the probable case of failure of issue from the Infanta. To this extent Spain was relieved. There was no longer any material need for her to spend her blood and money in fighting the Protestants, either for the Emperor or for the new Archduchess of Flanders; who herself, and especially her husband, were content to let the Protestant Dutch go their own way, whilst she enjoyed in peace her inherited Catholic Belgic sovereignty. The exhaustion of Spain and his own avarice had tended to make Lerma pacific; and, as we have seen, peace was arranged both with France and England: it must be confessed, on extremely favourable terms for Spain, as early in the reign of Philip III. as was practicable. The war with the Dutch in support of the Infanta still dragged on; for the Spaniards would bate not a jot of their pride, and Maurice of Nassau and his Hollanders were in no submissive mood after holding their own for forty years. The Infanta and her husband ardently longed for peace, and were ready to acknowledge the independence of Holland; but Philip III. was full of scruples of conscience as to the morality of formally ceding territory to Protestants, even when he could not hold it himself, {22} and it was 1609 before the punctilious haggling ended, and the famous truce of twelve years was signed, practically giving the stout Dutchmen the independence for which they had fought so well. Spain was then at peace for the first time within most men's memory; and, with prudence, economy, and good government, might yet have repaired the disasters that had befallen her. The promotion of production, the rehabilitation of labour, a return to the frugal, honest life which prevailed before the nation was led to its splendid hysteria by the imperial connection, would have enabled the great revenues from the Indies to be kept in Spain, whose shipping was now for a time free from the depredations of privateers. But we have seen how demoralised the whole people had grown. Long wars in foreign lands, usually against Protestants or infidels, the craze for discovery and profitable adventure in the Indies, and the dwarfing of industry, except for the very poor, humble, plodding folk, had made the vast majority of Spaniards scornful of labour; and in any case it would have been hard to set men to work again. The attempt even was never seriously made. Peace for Philip III. and his people did not mean an opportunity for setting their house in order and reorganising the nation, because they did not even yet fully recognise the hopelessness of the national dream of domination through the unity of Christendom on Spanish Catholic lines. [Sidenote: The Moriscos] For the realisation of this dream absolute unity of faith in Spain itself was the first necessary condition. The country was peopled by several {23} unamalgamated racial and political elements, and had been artificially unified by the religious exaltation resulting from the conquest of Granada and the fierce doctrinal pride fostered by the Inquisition, artfully utilised for political ends by Ferdinand the Catholic and his successors. The weak point of the sacred bond that held Spaniards together was the large hard-working Moorish population scattered over the Peninsula, and especially numerous in the south-west. In spite of pledges and promises of toleration, Christian baptism had been forced upon these people. Taxes and disabilities of all sorts had been piled upon them, insulting and oppressive rules had been made to their detriment, alternate cruelty and persuasion had been resorted to in vain: the Moriscos at heart remained true to their own faith, however humbly they conformed to the Christian rites imposed upon them. They were still the most thrifty toilers; the carrying trade of the Peninsula was almost entirely in their hands, and their means of inter-communication were thus better than those enjoyed even by Christian Spaniards. How to deal with this alien element so as to eliminate the danger that existed from their presence in a Christian state, the realisation of whose great ambition depended upon unbroken religious unification, had puzzled the minds of Spanish statesmen for years. It had been practically decided at one time (1581) by Philip II. to take the whole Morisco population out to sea and sink the ships that carried them; Gomez Davila of Toledo urged Philip III. in 1598 to massacre the whole of them, whilst others more humane advocated the forcible abduction {24} of all the children, the sterilisation of the males, and other heroic measures. For a time also the milder spirits, such as Father Las Casas, prayed that gentler methods might be tried; but the attitude of the Moriscos themselves and the bigotry of the churchmen soon silenced the voice of mercy. For years the Moriscos had been plotting with Spain's enemies; with Henry IV. of France, with Elizabeth of England, with the Duke of Savoy, with the Sultan, with the King of Fez, or whoever else would promise them aid to break up the Spanish monarchy; and the very day that the Prince Philip Dominic was born (8th April 1605) was fixed for the great Moslem rising at Valencia which should deliver Eastern Spain to the French King. The plot was discovered in time, and this frustrated treason had added to the religious fervour of the baptism, which has been described at the beginning of this chapter. Thenceforward the black cloud that loomed over the folk of Moorish blood grew ever darker. Not the religious bigots alone, but statesmen too, intent only on the immediate problem before them, urged that if unity of Christendom was the necessary condition of Spain's greatness, then the faith within her own realms must be made pure and solid beyond all question or doubt, let the sacrifice be what it might.[22] Racial jealousy, economical rivalry, and envy of the superior financial position of the frugal Moriscos over that of their Christian neighbours, {25} aided the forces of religious bigotry and political expediency: and, just as the baptism of Prince Philip had coincided in point of time with the discovery of the Moorish treason, so did the next ceremony of his infant life coincide with the fatal decision to exterminate root and branch from Spain all those in whose veins was known to flow the blood of the Moslem races. For the attainment of the views of both statesmen and churchmen of the day, purblind as they were to the larger issues, the resolution to expel the Moriscos was necessary, but, as will be seen later, it was disastrous industrially and economically. In accordance with the condition of political science of the time, the results of the measure were indeed neither considered nor understood in the latter aspects.[23] It was discussed in the King's Council, first as a point of conscience, and secondly as a political necessity, and the breathing time given to Spain by the peace with the Protestants after forty years of strife, instead of being employed in the repair and recuperation of national forces, was seized upon by those who yet pursued the chimera of domination by religious unification, to deplete still further the already exhausted country by the expulsion of the principal productive element of {26} its population, amidst the fervent applause of the idle and thriftless majority. And still the frenzy of waste and magnificence in all classes went on, for no men saw fully yet that ruin was the inevitable result of a state of society in which luxurious idleness, or the pretence of it, was alone regarded as honourable, and where the honey was seized by the drones of the hive before workers had stored it. On the 13th January 1608 the ceremony of swearing allegiance to the child Philip as heir to the Crown of Spain was celebrated in the church of St. Geronimo in Madrid,[24] with a lavishness that almost rivalled that of his baptism. Once more the King, in white satin and spangles and overloaded with gems, walked in procession with the fair-haired fragile Queen, even more splendidly bedight than he;[25] once more the lavish Lerma led the baby Prince as sponsor, and the courtiers who followed vied with the favourite in the magnificence of their attire; once more Cardinal Sandoval de Rojas with a crowd of prelates invested the act with all the solemn state of which the Church was capable, and in the courtly fashion of his house substituted a kiss for the canonical blow in the ceremony of confirmation.[26] Madrid was {27} ablaze with light, and the ball in the palace at night surpassed anything that the now deposed Valladolid could show; but over all the glitter the black cloud hovered, and even whilst the ceremony of homage was being celebrated, the Council of State, despairing now of the conversion of the Moriscos by softer methods, and alarmed at the prospects of a great invasion from Morocco, practically decided to clear the soil of Spain of the descendants of its former conquerors. Of the details of the expulsion this is not the place to speak. We are principally concerned with it here to show that Philip IV. was bound from his earliest infancy to an inherited policy, and that the seeds of social and national decadence were sown before his time. He was no Hercules to root them out, but was forced with bitter anguish to witness the riches and power of his realms choked and destroyed by the noxious growth which grew to maturity in his time: whilst he wept and prayed for the miraculous remedy that never comes, or sought forgetfulness in vicious indulgence that added private remorse to his public sorrow. [Sidenote: Philip's childhood] Young Philip's education and the surroundings of his childhood were not calculated to increase his self-reliance or independence of judgment. His devout, delicate, Austrian mother died in childbirth when he was but six years old, and his father's awestricken devotion thereafter grew {28} more mystic than ever. Friars surrounded him, dictating the most trifling as well as the most important acts of his life; supernatural visions and heavenly voices assured him of divine favour in his intervals of terrified despair which reduced him almost to lunacy,[27] and the little boy who was to be the heir of his gilded misery was left to the care of cloistered churchmen, whose ideal of goodness was the suppression of all natural impulse and the extinction of personal initiative as opposed to the dread fatalism which made them supreme. Beyond dull, ceremonious visits to the royal convent of the Discalced Carmelites, hard by the palace of Madrid, the little Prince saw no relaxation from prayers and lessons, but an occasional stage play or masque performed by himself and his young courtiers of similar age. Even as a small child this was young Philip's sole delight; and so long as he could declaim verse before his father's Court, or listen to the declamation of others, he was content. On one occasion, in 1614, it is recorded in a gossiping letter of the time, that the Prince, who was then nine years old, represented the character of cupid before the King and his family in the room in the palace devoted to such shows; and as he had to make his entry upon the stage in a high ornamental chariot, the jolting of the vehicle made the poor child seasick; and the God of love, when he advanced to the footlights, was reduced to a most unlovely plight in face of the dignified audience, {29} though we are told that he "performed his part very prettily." There were those who shook grave heads, especially some of the friars, at this early indulgence of the heir of Spain in his passion for a pastime so little in accord with the traditional dignity of the royal house;[28] but little Philip himself very soon learnt his lesson, for he was an apt pupil, and even as a youth assumed a staid gravity on all public and ceremonious occasions entirely at variance with his demeanour in private. In the meanwhile the country was sunk in the most abject misery. Corruption and plunder of the national resources by Lerma and his favourites and their hangers-on had at last aroused the resentment, or perhaps the jealousy, of rival self-seekers. Spain was at war again, and a league of all liberal Europe under Henry IV. of France was pledged to humble finally the inflated pretensions of the house of Austria; but just as Lerma's star was waning, and the prompt ruin of Spain seemed imminent, a circumstance happened that gave a new lease of life to the proud dreams of the Philips, and made the subsequent downfall during the reign we have to record the more complete. In May 1610 the dagger of a crazy fanatic ended the glorious life of "Henry of Navarre"; and the coalition against Spain broke down, and gave way to a struggle between his widow Marie de Medici and James I. of England to secure the friendship of the decadent power which still loomed so large and asserted its high claims so haughtily. The Queen Regent of France, papal and clerical as she {30} was, succeeded where crafty, servile James Stuart failed; and in 1612 the eldest daughter of Spain, the Infanta Ana, was betrothed in Madrid by proxy to the boy King of France, Louis XIII., and young Philip, Prince of Asturias, became the affianced husband of Isabel of Bourbon, the elder daughter of Henry IV., the great Béarnais. Of the lavish splendour that accompanied the betrothals in Madrid this is not the place to speak,[29] but when Lerma's fall was at last approaching, engineered by his own son the Duke of Uceda, in 1615, King Philip III. and his pompous Court travelled north in an interminable cavalcade to exchange the brides on the frontier. [Sidenote: Philip's betrothal] Prince Philip remained at the ancient Castilian capital of Burgos, whilst the dark-eyed young beauty who was destined to be his wife rode, surrounded by Spanish nobles, from the little frontier stream through San Sebastian and Vittoria to meet her eleven year old bridegroom. The boy and his father rode a league or two out of Burgos to greet the girl, who it was fondly hoped would cement France and Spain together for the fulfilment of the impossible old dream of Christian unity dictated from Madrid; and eye-witnesses tell that the pale little milksop Prince, with his lank sandy hair and his red hanging under-lip, gazed speechless in admiration of the pretty bright-eyed child, in unbecoming Spanish dress, who was destined to be the companion of his youth and prime. The next day Burgos was in a blaze of splendour to welcome the future Queen, who rode on her white palfrey and her silver sidesaddle through {31} the narrow frowning streets to the glorious cathedral; and then, from city to city, through stark Castile, the little bride, smiling and happy, and her pale boy bridegroom, followed by the most splendid Court in Christendom, slowly made their way to the crowning triumph of the capital.[30] In the gorgeous crowd of courtiers that accompanied the King on his long journey to and from the French frontier, intrigue and falsity were rife. The Duke of Lerma's favourite, Calderon, had languished in a dungeon already for five years, and the spoilt favourite himself knew that his fall had been plotted long since by his son and the powerful clerical clique that swayed the timorous soul of Philip III. But Lerma was making a brave fight for his dignity and vast wealth. Philip III. was kind and tender-hearted, and the habit of subjection to his favourite was hard to break, so that his enemies had to tread warily. Their plan was to place gradually around the King and his heir nobles whom Lerma had failed to satisfy with sufficient bribes. One of them was a young man of twenty-eight, perhaps the most forceful of them all, Caspar de Guzman, Count of Olivares, son of that proud minister of Philip II. who had bullied and hoodwinked Sixtus V. into supporting the Armada in 1588. For years Caspar de Guzman, and his father before him, had fruitlessly besought Lerma to convert their peerage of Castile into a grandeeship of Spain; and on the journey to France with the King, the Count, though his branch of the great Guzman {32} house was less rich than noble, had striven to show by the splendour of his train that if he was not a grandee he was magnificent enough to be one.[31] Philip III. loved lavishness, especially to dazzle the French at this juncture, and was easily persuaded by Lerma's false son to make the Count of Olivares a gentleman of the chamber to the Prince. At first young Philip disliked his masterful attendant, whose imperious manner and stern looks frightened the sensitive boy; but gradually, as the latter grew older and more curious, the address and cleverness of Olivares asserted their influence over the weaker spirit of the Prince. Olivares was supposed by Uceda to be acting entirely in his interest, and had persuaded the latter to give him complete control of the Prince's household, which he took care to pack with friends pledged to himself. When Lerma was finally dismissed with a cardinal's hat and all his riches, young Philip was anxious to know why so great a minister had been disgraced. Olivares was always ready to enlighten the lad, and would spend long periods chatting with him alone as the Prince lay in bed, or as he was riding. In answer to Philip's questions about Lerma, he impressed upon him the insolence of favourites generally, their noxious public influence, their evil effect upon monarchs, and much more to the same purport, pointed at Uceda the new minister quite as much as at his fallen father. The sufferings of the people were described vividly to the sympathising boy, who was told of the vast plunder held by Lerma and his family from the national resources, and the noble task awaiting a monarch who would {33} govern his realm himself and redress the wrongs of his subjects. Young Philip's youthful ambition was aroused, and thenceforward he listened to his mentor eagerly; whilst he ostentatiously frowned in public upon the Duke of Uceda.[32] [Sidenote: Results of Lerma's rule] Spain, notwithstanding the change of favourites, went from bad to worse. The vast sums spent by the King upon the building of new convents and in sumptuous shows were still wrung from the humblest classes, who alone did any profitable work, and in vain was the sainted image of the Virgin of Atocha carried in regal state through the streets of the capital, in the hope of averting widespread famine. Lerma at least, in his long ministry, had managed to conceal from the indolent King the utter ruin that threatened; but the ineptitude of the new favourites made the misery patent even to him. The knowledge overwhelmed his feeble spirit, and his long spells of despair were but rarely relieved now by the frivolities that formerly delighted him. Ill and failing as he was, and his poor spirit broken, he prayed the Council of Castile to tell him the truth as to the condition of his people, and to suggest remedies for their ills. The report, which reached him in February 1619, finally opened his eyes, now that it was too late, to the appalling results of his rule; and, stricken with panic fear that he would be damned eternally for his life-long neglect of duty, the poor King broke down {34} utterly. He knew that his strength was ebbing, and forgiveness for himself was his first thought, and then to pray that his son might do better than he had done. To distract him, his favourites persuaded him to make a royal progress to Portugal, with all the old lavish splendour, to witness the taking of the oath by the Portuguese Cortes to young Philip as heir to the throne. For months the cities of Portugal were the scene of prodigal pomp and devotion, that once more drove out of the muddled brain of the King all thought of the misery he had left behind him in Castile; and as he sat, on the 14th July 1619, under his gold and silken canopy in his palace at Lisbon, dressed in white taffeta and gold, and surrounded by the nobles of Portugal and Spain, it seemed as if the lying fable that made him personally the master of boundless wealth must be true, and that his stark and ruined realm was overflowing with happy abundance.[33] By his side sat his hopeful son Philip, a tall slim lad of fourteen, wearing a white satin suit covered with gold and gems, and surmounted by a black velvet shoulder-cape a mass of bullion embroidery; and as the representatives of the Portuguese nation bent the knee and swore to accept him as King when his father should die, in exchange for his assurance that their ancient rights should be respected, little thought any of the glittering throng that the pale long-faced boy with the loose lower lip would, out of indolent amiability, cause rivers of blood to run between Portugal {35} and Spain, and that all the oaths sworn that day on both sides would be broken. Little dreamed they, either, that the dark-visaged man with the big square head, who stood behind the Prince's chair, was to be the mover of this calamity, and of the final disruption of his young master's great inheritance. Olivares, secure in his hold now over the Prince, left Lisbon to go to the home of his house in Seville for a time, knowing well that the jarring rivals around the boy would soon make his return to Court the more welcome. The King was ill and like to die on his way back to Madrid,[34] and Olivares was near the Prince at the critical time, more influential than ever. [Sidenote: Death of Philip III.] Philip was precocious, and Olivares encouraged his precocity. By his influence it was decided that the married life of the fifteen and a half year old Prince and his pretty French bride should commence in November 1620, at the suburban palace of the Pardo; and thenceforward, whilst the poor King, in alternate fits of agonised remorse and hysterical hope, clung to his mouldering relics of dead saints for comfort, and to the frocks of his attendant friars for reassurance against the wrath of the Most High, his son Philip was yearning impatiently for the coming of the time when he might as King carry into effect the lessons his mentor Olivares had whispered to him; banish the whole brood of Sandoval y Rojas, and revive, as {36} by magic, the potency of his country and the happiness of his people. Through the month of March 1621, King Philip III. lay dying in his palace at Madrid, overlooking the bare Castilian plain.[35] He was not much over forty years of age, but though his malady was slight his vitality had fled, and all desire to prolong his disillusioned life. His remorse and horror of heaven's vengeance were terrible to behold, though during all his reign his habits had been those of a frivolous friar rather than of a bad man, which he certainly was not.[36] On the 30th March young Philip took a last farewell of his father. "I have sent for you," said the King, "that you may see how it all ends"; and he gave the weeping lad similar advice to that given by his own greater father, Philip II., to him on his deathbed, counsel to be treated in a similar way. He was to marry his sister Maria to the German Emperor, and to set his face sternly against all temptations to make a less Catholic alliance for her; for James of England {37} had been striving hard, seconded by Gondomar, to win her for Charles, Prince of Wales, and to secure the Palatinate of the Rhine for his son-in-law Frederick. The dying Philip urged his son to strive for the happiness of his people, cherish his sisters and brothers, to avoid new counsellors, and to stand steadfast to the faith of Spain; but when the young Prince left the room Uceda and his crew knew that it was to go straight and take counsel of Olivares and his supporters for making a clean sweep of all those who had not bent the knee to the cadet of the house of Guzman, the dark man with the bent shoulders, the big square head, flashing fierce black eyes, and brusque imperious manner, who was already assuming the airs of a master. For many months the palace had been a swarming hive of intriguers, where hate, jealousy, and uncharitableness reigned supreme; but one by one the friends of the Sandovals had been pushed into the background, and no one but Olivares and his creatures were now allowed to approach the lad who was soon to be King of Spain. It was clear to Uceda that he was not strong enough to resist the coming storm alone; perhaps the father he had ousted, the Cardinal Duke of Lerma, who had acted on the death of Philip II. as Olivares was acting now, might with his experience and prestige yet win the day. The dying King had already raised the exile of all the other courtiers who had been banished from Court; though on their return they had been excluded by Olivares from access to the Prince; and now, in the last days of the King's life, Uceda obtained {38} from him a decree recalling the Duke of Lerma. Like a thunderbolt the news fell in the camp of the Guzmans. Olivares summoned his kin, headed by the wisest of them, old Baltasar de Zuñiga. From this meeting Olivares went to the Prince and told him that as his father was dying it was necessary to look ahead and take measures for securing prompt obedience when the crucial moment came. Young Philip acquiesced, for he was as wax in the hands of his imperious mentor; and Olivares, thus reinforced, proceeded to the King's apartments, where by cajolery and threats he obtained from the two great nobles on duty, the aged Duke of Infantado and the Marquis of Malpica, not only a knowledge of the provisions of the King's will, but also a promise that prompt information of everything that passed in the death chamber should be sent direct to the Prince's adviser. The Cardinal Duke was hurrying across Castile towards Madrid, full of hope for a revival of his greatness; for young Philip, whom he had dandled as a babe, always liked him, and had wept for his "Gossip," as he called him, when he had been banished from Court. If once the Duke reached Madrid, Guzman was in danger, and no time was to be lost. So the Prince, at the bidding of Olivares, took the bold and dangerous course of assuming sovereign power to countermand his father's orders whilst yet the King lived. Young Philip was alone in the dusk of the evening in his panelled chamber in the old palace of Madrid, when the president of the Council of Castile, the highest functionary in Spain and {39} Archbishop of Burgos, stood bowing before him in obedience to his call. The Prince, who lounged against a carved oak sideboard, was dressed in black, and his long sallow face had assumed the haughty immobility that for the rest of his life was his official mask of majesty. "I have sent for you, he mumbled to the Archbishop in slow, measured tones, to direct you to despatch a member of the Council to forbid the Duke of Lerma from entering Castile, and to command him to return immediately to Valladolid to await my orders."[37] The Archbishop knelt and promised obedience, though he knew, we are told, that if the King recovered he would have to suffer for his weak compliance with an illegal command.[38] There was little to fear in the world now, however, from Philip III., who in the intervals of his bodily anguish was occupied solely in his panic-stricken intercessions for pardon. His room was encumbered with ghastly remains of saintly humanity, and the sacred offices succeeded each other day and night: but around the bed worldly ambitions were raging bitterly. In the morning of the 30th March a consultation of physicians pronounced the end to be near; and the Duke of Uceda, as principal minister and first chamberlain, announced his intention of conveying the news to the Prince. Then the Duke of Infantado, secure in the favour of Olivares, to whom only two days before he had betrayed the secrets of the {40} death chamber, broke out tempestuously: "No, indeed; that is my place, for the Prince has specially ordered me to go." Uceda knew his day was past, and meekly bent his head: and thus, in the midst of greedy bickering, his nerveless hand grasping to the last the rough crucifix that had comforted the glazing eyes of his grandfather the Emperor, and his father Philip II., the third Philip passed the dread divide, revered and beloved by the people whom his ineptitude had ruined, because he had still upheld throughout Europe the claim of his house to impose Christian orthodoxy upon the world, and had purged the sacred soil of Spain of the taint of Moorish blood, to his country's permanent undoing. Olivares had played his cards cleverly. For weeks he had feigned a desire to seek retirement in his home at Andalusia, knowing well that young Philip, in the welter of difficulties and intrigues that surrounded him, looked to him alone for guidance; and the adviser had only to hint at a wish to retire for the Prince to assent to whatever he demanded. As the King lay dying Uceda had met Olivares in the corridor. "How goes it," he asked, "in the Prince's chamber?" "All is mine," replied the Count. "All!" exclaimed the Duke of Uceda ruefully; "Yes, without exception," retorted Olivares; "for his Highness overrates me in all things but my goodwill."[39] Before many hours had passed Uceda and his kin knew to their cost that Olivares had not boasted in vain. All was {41} indeed his, and the strong hand fell ruthlessly upon those who had ruled and plundered Spain since the greatest of the Philips had passed his heavy crown to his weak son twenty-two years before. [1] See a curious contemporary, unpublished, account by Don Geronimo Gascon de Torquemada. Add. MSS. 10,236 British Museum. He says that the Town Council scattered 12,000 silver reals in the plaza on Saturday, 9th April, and that 30,000 wax candles, with as many sheets of white paper to wrap round them for torches, were distributed to the poor; the whole population of the city at the time being between 50,000 and 60,000. [2] Narrative of Matias de Novoa, _Documentos Ineditos_, vol. lx. [3] The vehement protest of Ribera is reproduced _in extenso_ in Gil Gonzalez Davila's _Vida y Hechos de Phelipe III_. Original MS. in possession of the author. Also published, Madrid, 1771. Ribera it was who principally promoted the expulsion of the Moriscos a few years later. [4] Gongora's sonnet, for instance, which is thus Englished by Churton-- "Our Queen had borne a Prince. When all were gay, A Lutheran envoy came across the main. With some six hundred followers in his train,-- All knaves of Luther's brood. His proud array Cost us, in one fair fortnight and a day, A million ducats of the gold of Spain, In jewels, feasting crowds, and pageant play. But then he brought us, for our greater gain, The peace King James on Calvin's Bible swore. Well! we baptized our Prince; Heaven bless the child! But why make Luther rich, and leave Spain poor? What witch our dancing courtiers' wits beguiled?-- Cervantes, write these doings: they surpass Your grave Don Quixote, Sancho and his ass." See also Cervantes' ballad of the Churching of Queen Margaret, in his Exemplary Novel of _The Little Gipsy_, written, however, some years after the event. [5] Don Juan Fernandez de Velasco, hereditary Great Constable of Castile, Duke of Frias, who in the previous year, 1604, had gone to England to conclude with James I. the Treaty of Peace. [6] So at least say the eye-witnesses; though it can hardly have been a more violent downpour than that which overtook the present writer on the same spot, and at a similar date, in a recent year, when, with hardly five minutes' notice, the road was converted into a rushing torrent several inches deep, though previously no rain had fallen for months. [7] Cabrera (_Documentos Ineditos_) says that care was taken that no sacred pictures were placed in the rooms, for fear of offence, though they were hung with fine tapestries. Three new beds, he says, were bought for Howard and his sons, etc. As an instance of the great care taken on both sides to avoid offence, Davila mentions that Howard, having learnt that two of his gentlemen had brought English Bibles with them, insisted upon their being returned to the ship; and Gascon de Torquemada asserts that the Englishmen were forbidden to dispute with Spaniards, right or wrong, on pain of death. [8] "Todos tienen lindos trajes y altos cuerpos; y en habiendo entrado en conversacion con nosotros se apartan luego, y hacen cabriolas, cantando entre dientes: y aunque entre ellos usan esto no lo usava el Almirante." Gascon de Torquemada's MS B.M., Add. MSS. 10,236. Cabrera de Cordova (_Relacion de las Cosas Sucedidas desde 1599 hasta_ 1614) also mentions the "cabriolas" or skipping of the English gentlemen in the grand ball given in their honour on the 16th June by the King. The passion for dancing "high and disposedly" was at the time considered peculiarly English, and Englishmen are frequently referred to in Spanish letters of the time as being naturally volatile and mercurial, in marked contrast with their latter-day descendants. [9] See Geronimo Gascon de Torquemada's MS. B.M., Add. MSS. 10,936. [10] Full accounts of Howard's reception may be found in Torquemada's MS. already quoted, in Novoa's relation (_Documentos Ineditos_, 60 and 61), in Cabrera de Cordova, in Davila already quoted, and in Yepes' _Felipe III_. Madrid, 1723. [11] Cervantes thus writes on the subject-- "This pearl that Thou to us hast given, Star of Austria's diadem: What crafty plans, what high designs, Are shattered by this peerless gem. What hopes within our breasts are raised, What soaring schemes have come to nought, What fears are by his birth aroused. What havoc with ambition wrought!" MacColl's translation of "The Exemplary Novels." [12] With him, we are told, walked the Princes of Savoy and all the grandees and prelates present in Valladolid, the household of each parsonage being dressed in new liveries for the occasion, those of the royal servants being white and crimson trimmed with gold. The English ambassador Howard witnessed the procession, as he did later in the day that of the baptism, from a corner balcony in Count Rivadavia's house, his garments glittering with diamonds, and the collar of the Garter on his shoulder. It was noticed that when the King passed beneath the Englishman doffed his bonnet and made a deep reverence. Porreño, _Vida y Hechos de Phelipe III_. [13] Cabrera, _Relacion de las Cosas Sucedidas desde 1599 hasta 1614_. In addition to the authorities already quoted, there is a curious account of the celebrations referred to, sometimes attributed to Cervantes, called _Relacion de lo Subcedido en la Ciudad da Valladolid_, etc. Published at Valladolid in 1605. [14] A detailed account of these attempts will be found in _Treason and Plot_, by the present writer, and in the fourth volume of his _Calendars of Spanish State Papers of the Reign of Elizabeth_. [15] When the capital of Spain was again transferred to Madrid in 1606, Queen Margarita was much opposed to and distressed at the change. Porreño relates that she went to take leave of her favourite nuns at Valladolid with tears in her eyes, and when asked by the nuns why she did not persuade the King to remain at Valladolid, which agreed so well with his wife and children, she replied that "nothing on earth could move the King now, as the removal of the capital to Madrid had now been presented to him as a case of conscience." "Thus," says Porreño, in admiration, "he was ready to sacrifice the welfare of his wife and children, and all earthly considerations, for his conscience' sake!" Spaniards of the period thought that no higher praise than this could be given to any man. [16] For instance, Charles' unblushing manipulation of the Council of Trent in 1545-46, the juggle with Paul III. about the Italian principalities, and the clever hoodwinking of Sixtus V. as to the real objects of the Armada of 1588. [17] It must be borne in mind that the Cortes of Castile (which comprised Castile, Leon, Andalucia, etc., and consisted of thirty-six deputies for eighteen cities) had, after the abortive rising of the Comuneros early in the reign of Charles V., in a great measure allowed the control of supply to slip from its hands, and was rapidly becoming effete; all the members being bribed and influenced by grants and favours of the Court. The three Cortes of the Crown of Aragon, however, still held their own purse-strings, and always made supply a matter of bargain. For this reason practically the whole of the growing national burden rested upon wretched Castile. [18] Danvila y Collado, _El Poder Civil en España_, vol. 6. In this petition the Cortes told the King that, whereas it had cost twelve years previously 60 ducats to maintain a student and his servant at Salamanca for a year, it now cost 120. Wages had risen for a bricklayer from 4 reals to 8, and for a labourer from 2 reals to 4; a trimmed felt hat which had previously cost 12 reals now cost 24. Segovia cloth, of which the price was formerly 3 ducats a piece, now fetched nearly double. The ducats quoted are the so-called copper ducat of 2_s._ 5-1/3_d._, the real being the silver real worth about 6_d._ [19] The quantity of copper coin in circulation increased in five or six years from 6 millions of ducats' worth to 28 millions. [20] Contarini to the Doge and Senate of Venice (_Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneziani_). [21] Navarrete says, speaking of the luxury of the Court at this period--and we shall see that it was exceeded later--"The smallest hidalgo insisted upon his wife only going out in a carriage, and that her equipage should be as showy as that of the greatest gentleman at Court. Not even a carpenter or a saddler, or any other artizan, was seen but he must be dressed in velvet or satin like a nobleman. He must needs wear his sword and his dagger, and have a guitar hanging on the wall of his shop." When it is remembered that the production and distribution in Spain itself of the precious stuffs mentioned were hampered at every point, it will be understood how great and constant the drain of wealth was from a country which now exported little but the products of its soil. [22] For details of the expulsion see, _inter alia_, Fray Jaime Bleda's _Cronica de los Moros de España_ (Valencia, 1618); _The Moriscos of Spain_, by C. H. Lea (London, 1901); _Memorable Expulsion_, etc., by Guadalajara (Pamplona, 1614); and Porreño's _Felipe III_. [23] The wise minister of Philip II., Idiaquez, in 1595 almost alone saw the economical evil of the expulsion. In an important letter to a colleague (MS. Loyola No. 1., 31, Royal Academy of History, Madrid) he rebuked the general idea that Spain would be richer for the expulsion of the Moriscos, and pointed out that they almost alone were creating national wealth by their industry, frugality, and skill in agriculture. "But all this," he says, "is of no consideration in exchange for putting away from our throat the knife which threatens it so long as these people remain amongst us in their present condition and we in ours." [24] The ancient church in the Prado where this ceremony always took place, and where the young King of Spain and his English bride were married recently. [25] "His Majesty wore a white doublet and trunks with a grey satin cloak, all embroidered with bugles and gold spangles and lined with ermine. White shoes and a black velvet cap with strings of pearls and diamonds and a plume of white feathers sprinkled with magnificent diamonds; a sword beautifully chased and an embroidered belt; a ruff with crimson silk ribs and the grand collar of the Golden Fleece." See a curious contemporary MS. account of the ceremony. British Museum MSS., Egerton, 367. [26] The Prince was nevertheless so frightened that the silken bands necessary in the ceremony meant an intention to bleed him, and he cried so much in consequence, that he had to be led to a little chair at his mother's knee before he could be pacified; and there his sister, the Infanta Ana, weighed down by her stiff gorgeousness, knelt and did homage, to be followed by the cardinal, the nobles, and the Cortes. _Ibid_. [27] Gil Gonzalez de Avila, in his MS. _Historia de Phelipe III._, gives many admiring instances of the King's mystic communications with the heavenly powers, and of his attacks of religious panic. (Original MS. in my possession.) [28] Cabrera de Cordova, _Cosas Sucedidas a la Corte_, etc., _desde_ 1599 á 1614. [29] A full account of the crazy magnificence on the occasion will be found in _Documenios Ineditos_, lxi. [30] An unpublished account of the progress by an eye-witness is in Add. MSS. 102,36, British Museum. See also _Queens of Old Spain_, by Martin Hume, and _Documenios Ineditos_, lxi. [31] Malvezzi, _Historia de Felipe III._, Yañez. [32] Matias de Novoa, _Felipe III_. _Doctimentos Ineditos_, lxi. This writer was a chamberlain of Philip IV. and an agent of Olivares; but receiving from the latter no reward, he wrote a series of bitter attacks upon him. [33] The King's and the Prince's splendid dresses and adornments on this occasion are described fully by Porreño in _Dichos y Hechos de Don Felipe III_. [34] His recovery from this grave illness after the doctors had given up hope was ascribed to the miraculous effect produced by the dead body of the newly beatified Saint Isidore of Madrid, which was brought to his bedside at Covarrubias. The King kissed and embraced the corpse, and improved from that hour. [35] The ridiculous story, related by entirely untrustworthy French travellers, of the cause of Philip's fatal illness being the Court etiquette, which forbade any attendant but a high noble who happened to be absent to remove a brazier from too close proximity to the King, may be dismissed as a fable. Anything which exaggerated the strangeness, the romance, and the inflation of Spanish manners found ready belief in seventeenth-century France, and has done so ever since. The absurd ideas relative to Spain even at the present time are mainly due to this insistence on the part of French writers in seeing everything Spanish through the coloured medium of the romantic school. Madame D'Aulnoy's overdone "local colour" and evidently invented stories are largely responsible for this, aided by Bassompiere Saint Simon, Mme. Villars, and the later romantic school of French novelists. [36] Terrible accounts of Philip's awful deathbed are given by Gil Gonzales de Avila, his chronicler and friend, in his _Historia de Felipe III._, original MS. in my possession, in Yañez's additions to Malvezzi, and in Novoa, _Documentos Ineditos_, lxi.; all contemporaries. [37] Novoa, _Documentos Ineditos_, lxi. [38] Novoa says that when the Archbishop signed the order he broke into tears and cast away the pen he had used. [39] _Fragmentos Historicos de la Vida de D. Caspar de Guzman_, etc. Unpublished contemporary MS. biography of Olivares in my possession; the work of his partisan Vera y Figueroa, Count de la Roca. {42} CHAPTER II ACCESSION OF PHILIP IV.--OLIVARES THE VICE-KING--CONDITION OF THE COUNTRY--MEASURES ADOPTED BY THE NEW KING--RETRENCHMENT--MODE OF LIFE OF PHILIP AND HIS MINISTER--PHILIP'S IDLENESS--HIS APOLOGIA--DISSOLUTENESS OF THE CAPITAL--VILLA MEDIANA--THE AMUSEMENTS OF THE KING AND COURT--A SUMPTUOUS SHOW--ARRIVAL OF THE PRINCE OF WALES IN MADRID--HIS PROCEEDINGS--OLIVARES AND BUCKINGHAM Prince Philip lay in his great square tentlike bedstead in the palace of Madrid, at nine o'clock on the morning of the 31st March 1621, when an usher announced his Dominican confessor, Sotomayor. The friar entered, and, kneeling by the bedside with a grave face, saluted his new sovereign as King Philip IV. For a moment the boy was overwhelmed at the long-looked-for news, and bade the attendants draw the curtains close that he might indulge his grief unseen. But soon the eager worshippers of the risen sun flocked into the room to pay their court to the new monarch when he should deign to show his face. Anon there was stir in the antechamber, and the crowd divided, bowing low as the stern, masterful man who was now lord over all stalked through the room, accompanied by his aged uncle the white-haired {43} Don Baltasar de Zuñiga, destined by him to be nominally the King's chief minister, behind whom Olivares might rule unchecked. Advancing to the King's bed, Olivares threw back the curtains and peremptorily told Philip that he must get up, for there was much to be done. Uceda was still officially first minister and great chamberlain, with right of free access to the Sovereign; but when, a few moments later, he and his secretary entered the antechamber, amidst the scarcely concealed sneers of the courtiers, and the whisper reached Philip that they were coming, the King leapt from his bed and cried out that no one else was to be admitted until he was dressed. [Sidenote: The rise of Olivares] Dressing on this occasion was a long process, for the young King broke down with grief and excitement several times whilst his attendants were preparing him for public audience; and Uceda, in the antechamber, fumed and fretted at the insult put upon him by the King, who thus disregarded his father's dying injunctions in the first moments of his bereavement. Whilst Uceda awaited the King's pleasure, Olivares, leaving the bed-chamber, met his falling rival face to face, and a violent altercation took place as to the premature action of Philip in ordering the Duke of Lerma, a Prince of the Church now, and immune from lay commands, to stay his journey to Madrid. Pointing to the State papers, seals, and keys in the hands of the secretary who accompanied him, Uceda asked who but the Duke of Lerma was worthy of taking charge of them. "My uncle, Don Baltasar de Zuñiga is here," replied Olivares, "to do so, and to give to the State the advantage {44} of his long experience, and wisdom second to none." Uceda was then notified that the King, being dressed, would receive him; and entering the room, he knelt and proffered to Philip the seals and papers of his office. Pouting and frowning, the King waved his hand towards the sideboard, and said, "Put them there," and Uceda went out unthanked, to weep his now certain ruin and disgrace.[1] Whilst the King was busy condoling with his young wife and sister and his two brothers Carlos and Fernando, and receiving the homage of his nobles, the preparations were hastily made in the great hall of the Alcazar for the lying in state of the body of Philip III. in his habit as a friar of St. Francis. And as the muffled death bells boomed from the steeples of the capital, one man at least there was whose heart fainted at the sound. "The King is dead, and so am I," cried Don Rodrigo de Calderon from the prison where he had suffered and languished for years, the scapegoat for others, borne down by accusations innumerable, from theft to witchcraft and regicide. In his pride and power he had piled up wealth beyond compute, as his master Lerma had done, but it is clear now that the other charges against him were mainly false. His long trial had resulted in no mortal crime being proved, and had Philip III. lived he would doubtless have been pardoned; but he had belonged to the old greedy gang, and Olivares had no mercy upon them. Before Philip's nine days mourning reclusion in the {45} monastery of St. Geronimo was ended a clean sweep was made of the men who had surrounded the dead King. Calderon's head fell on the scaffold in the Plaza Mayor of Madrid; the great Duke of Osuna, who had ruled Naples with so high a hand as to be accused of the wish to make himself a King, was incarcerated and persecuted till his proud heart broke; Uceda met with a similar fate; the powerful confessor Aliaga was disgraced and banished; and even Lerma was not spared, though he fought stoutly for his plunder; and all the clan of Sandoval and Rojas were trampled under the heels of the Guzmans and their allies. [Sidenote: Olivares supreme] The state of things which the new Sovereign had to face was positively appalling. The details of the abject penury and misery universal throughout Spain, except amongst those who managed the public revenues and their numerous hangers-on, sound almost incredible. Idleness and pretence were everywhere. Insolent gentlemen in velvet doublets and no shirts, workmen who strutted and clattered in ruffs and rapiers, seeking prey as sham soldiers instead of earning wages by honest handicrafts, led poets, and paid satirists, gamesters, swindlers, bravos and cutpurses, pretended students who lived like the rest of the idle crew on alms and effrontery, crowds of friars and priests whose only attraction to their cloth was the sloth which it excused; ladies, rouged and overdressed, who deliberately and purposely aped the look and manners of prostitutes,--these were the prevailing types of the capital, as described by eyewitnesses innumerable, as well as by the romancers who revelled in the colour, movement, and squalid {46} picturesqueness of such a society.[2] And to maintain the real and false splendour in Madrid the starving agriculturists, who had not abandoned their holdings in sheer despair, were ground down to their last real by the crushing alcabala tax, by local tolls and octrois, and by the heartless extortions of the tax farmers. There is no doubt that, so far as their light extended, both the King and Olivares sincerely wished to reform abuses of which the results were patent to all. Young Philip himself was good hearted and kindly, as his father had been, but far more sensual and less devout in his habits. Though in public he assumed the marble gravity traditional thenceforward in Spanish kings, he was gay and witty in private discourse with those whose society he enjoyed, especially writers and players. His love of books, music, and pictures, as well as of poetry and the drama, made him, as time went on, the greatest patron of authors and artists in Spain's golden age of social and political decadence. But idleness marred all his qualities, and the lust for pleasure which he was powerless to resist made him the slave of favourites and his passions all his life. A man such as this, endowed with a gentle heart and a tender conscience, was doomed to a life of misery and remorse in the intervals of his thoughtless pleasures; and in the course of this book we shall see that sorrow ever followed close on joy's footsteps in the life of the "Planet King," until final ruin overtook the nation, cursed with the gayest and wickedest Court since that of {47} Heliogabalus, and all was quenched in a great wave of tears. [Sidenote: Philip and his minister] The man to whom Philip handed his conscience, as has been described, on the first day of his reign, was nearly twenty years his senior. An indefatigable worker, with an ambition as voracious as his industry, Olivares was the exact reverse of the idle, courtly, conciliatory Lerma. His greed was not personal, as that of Lerma had been, though his love of power led him to absorb as many offices as he. He was vehement and voluble, arrogant and impatient even with the King, and impressed upon Philip incessantly the need for exertion on his own part.[3] Able as he unquestionably was, he appraised his ability too highly, and contemned all opinions but his own; whilst his attitude towards the foreign Powers was insolent in the extreme, and quite unwarranted by Spain's position at the time. From an economic point of view, Olivares, though he began his rule by cutting down expenses in drastic fashion, was no wiser than his predecessors; though his ruling idea that the political unity of Spain was the thing primarily needful was sage and statesmanlike. But in this he was before his time, and his disregard for provincial traditions and rights in his determination to force unity of sacrifice upon the country, led to his own ruin and the disintegration of Spain. The portraits of him by Velazquez enable us to see the man as he lived,--stern, dark, and masterful, {48} with bulging forehead and sunken eyes and mouth, his massive shoulders bowed by the weight of his ponderous head, we know instinctively that such a man would either dominate or die. He was the finest horseman in Spain, and he treated men as he treated his big-boned chargers, breaking them to obedience by force of will and persistence. Such was the man who led Spain during the crucial period which was to decide, not only whether France or Spain should prevail politically, but whether the culture and civilisation of Europe should in future receive its impulse and colour from Spanish or French influences. In that great contest Spain was beaten, not so much because Olivares was inferior to Richelieu, as because of the old tradition that hampered Spain at home and abroad and pitted a decentralised country, where productive industry had been stifled and the sources of wealth choked, against a homogeneous nation where active work was fostered, and whose resources were at the command of the central authority.[4] [Sidenote: Olivares made a grandee] This much it was necessary to say in order to make clear the manner of men that in future ruled the Court of which we have to write: a King to whom pleasure was a business; and a minister to whom business alone was pleasure, who loved the reality of rule whilst his master loved the ceremonial of it. Not many days passed before the ambition of the Guzmans for the grandeeship was satisfied. The King was still passing his first days of mourning in the monastery of St. Geronimo when the sermon of the day, either by chance or {49} design, inculcated the need for properly rewarding services done to us. The sermon over, Philip went to dinner, the room being crowded with nobles, amongst whom was Uceda, not yet finally banished. When the King had finished his meal and the cloth was drawn, Olivares entered very unobtrusively, and sidled against the wall behind the other nobles in attendance, well knowing, probably, what was coming. The King, catching his eye, said: "Let us obey the good friar who preached to-day; Count of Olivares, be covered!" This was the form used in the raising of a peer to the grandeeship, and Olivares, putting on his wide-brimmed hat, threw himself at the King's feet with his uncle and those of his kin who were in the room, overjoyed at the honour done to their house; and their joy was increased when, a few hours later, Uceda was told that he must surrender to Olivares at once one of his two great offices in the household. Offices and honours thenceforward crowded upon the favourite, who was soon made Duke of San Lucar and principal chamberlain. Almost ostentatiously he professed a desire to leave politics entirely to his uncle, and to confine himself to the duties of his household offices near the King. Nobody was deceived by his apparent modesty, for even before Zuñiga's death, which happened in a year, it was known that his nephew's long personal conversations with the King, facilitated by his courtly palace duties, were mainly concerned with questions of Government and State. The Count-Duke, as he came to be called universally, would allow nothing to be done for the King but by himself. Before Philip was out of bed the minister {50} was the first to enter the room, draw the curtains and open the window. Then on his knees by the bedside he rehearsed the business of the coming day. Every garment that the King put on passed first through the hands of Olivares, who stood by whilst Philip dressed. After the midday meal, at which Olivares was often present, the minister was wont to amuse the King by entertaining chat, detailing the gossip of the capital, and late in the evening he attended to give him an account of the despatches received, and consult him as to the answers, after which he saw the monarch to bed.[5] This constant attendance upon the King made it impossible for any person not an absolute creature of Olivares to approach Philip's ear with doubt as to the policy of the favourite in political matters. [Sidenote: State of Spain] When Philip's first parliament met, a few months after his accession, it was stated in the assembly that so terrible was the distress that "people had abandoned their lands and were now wandering on the roads, living on herbs and roots, or else travelling to provinces where they had not to pay the awful food excises and alcabalas"; whilst every source of revenue was anticipated for years to come on usurious terms.[6] Philip himself, in an important original paper hitherto unpublished (British Museum, Egerton MSS. 338), gives the following account of the state of affairs he had to face on his accession, whilst complaining of the little help he had received from his officers: "I found {51} finance so exhausted (apart from the dreadful state it had been left in at the death of Philip II., who had pledged it deeply) that all resources were anticipated for several years, and my patrimony had been so reduced that in my father's time alone 96,000,000 crowns had been granted in gifts, etc.; besides what had been spent in the other realms (_i.e._ Aragon, Catalonia, etc.), from which no returns have been received. The currency had been raised to three times its face value, an unheard-of thing in any realm.... Ecclesiastical affairs were in such disorder, that it was asserted from Rome that innumerable dispensations for simony had been obtained for archbishoprics, bishoprics, prebends, etc.... As for justice, on the very first day of my reign I was obliged to put my foot down, as will be recollected, ... for the ministers who received bribes were more numerous than those who did not ... My State, too, was so discredited that in the truce that the Dutch had made with my father they were treated as independent sovereigns, although every minister, from the King my father and the Archduke downward, refused to acknowledge such a claim.... I had only seven ships of war in the fleet.... India and the Indies were well-nigh lost.... The truce with Flanders was just expiring.... German affairs were more pressing than ever.... The marriage of the Prince of Wales with my sister was so far advanced that it seemed impossible to avoid it without a great war, which, indeed, followed, as we could not give way on the religious point.[7] Portugal was discontented {52} with the Viceroy, ... whilst all the other parts of the monarchy was neglected or misgoverned.... We were at war with Venice; the Kingdom of Naples was almost in revolt, and the money there was utterly corrupted. All this was from no fault of my father, nor of his predecessors, as all the world knows, but simply because God so ordained it." This document, written by Philip himself a few years afterwards for his own justification, proves how pressing was the need for an abatement of untenable claims on the part of Spain to interfere with the affairs of other nations, and the absolute necessity for a policy of retrenchment. And yet at the bidding of Olivares, against the opinion even of wise old Zuñiga, the first minister, the interminable war with the Dutch for the assertion of Spain's sovereignty over Holland was resumed as soon as the truce ended, only a few months after the young King's accession. [Sidenote: Philip's policy] In his address to his first Cortes, Philip struck the unwise note of Dominican intolerance and pride {53} which had pervaded his baptism, setting forth in the midst of the miserable state of things just described that his first duty as a Spanish sovereign was, "with holy zeal befitting so Catholic a Prince, to undertake the defence and exaltation of our holy Catholic faith; ... to aid the Emperor in Bohemia; to fight the rebel Hollanders again, and to defend everywhere our sacred faith and the authority of the Holy See." So, whilst Olivares made efforts to stop the peculation of high officers of State, to compel restitution of past plunder, to prevent further alienation of national property, and to reduce to a minimum the cost of the royal establishment, and whilst he passed ferocious sumptuary laws enjoining modesty and economy in dress, the real root of the evil was not touched; for taxation continued to strangle production and fell mainly upon the poor, and the wasteful drain of unnecessary wars for an exploded idea continued as if Spain was still wallowing in wealth. Good, therefore, as the intentions of Olivares may have been, it is clear that he was a disastrous adviser for an inexperienced, idle young sovereign of sixteen. And if his political influence was unfortunate, his social and moral influence was no less evil. There exists, for instance, in manuscript in various collections, and notably in the British Museum (Egerton MSS. 329), a pregnant correspondence between the Archbishop of Granada, Philip's tutor, and Olivares, written shortly after the accession, in which the Archbishop indignantly reproaches the favourite, who was certainly old enough to know better, for taking the young King out into the streets of the capital at night, and introducing him {54} into evil company. "People," says the prelate, "are gossiping about it all over Madrid, and things are being said about it which add little to the Sovereign's credit or dignity." Madrid is, even now, fond of scandal, but early in the seventeenth century, isolated as it was from the world, Philip's capital found its most piquant pursuit from morn till night in slander and tittle-tattle, both in the form of malicious satirical verses that passed from hand to hand, and in whispered immoralities touching high and low. The long raised walk by the side wall of the Church of St. Philip at the entrance of the Calle Mayor (High Street), from the Puerta del Sol, opposite the still standing Oñate Palace, was the recognised centre of such confidences, and came to be called by the appropriate name of the Mentidero (Liars' Walk). The Archbishop in his letter proceeds to say that not only have these people begun to whisper things about the King's proceedings which were better unsaid; but the example shown of a young monarch and his principal minister scouring the streets at night in search of adventure is a bad one for the people at large; and he reminds Olivares of the great grief and anxiety of the late King on this very account, and of his dread that his youthful heir was already before his death being inducted into dissipation. The answer to the bold prelate's remonstrance is just such as might have been expected from the arrogant favourite. He tells him, in effect, that he is an impertinent meddler, and ought to be ashamed, at his age and in his high position, to trouble him with the vulgar gossip of the streets! "The King is sixteen," he says, "and he (Olivares) is thirty-four, {55} and it is not to be expected that they are to be kept in ignorance of what is going on in the world. It is good that the King should see all phases of life, bad as well as good. Besides, he never trusts the King with anyone else"; and the favourite's letter ends with a barely concealed threat that if the Archbishop does not mind his own business in future, ill might befall him. [Sidenote: Philip's early profligacy] Early, however, as was Philip's introduction into the profligacy that was the curse of his life, and the endless subject of his remorse in later years, he was a gallant young husband to his pretty French wife, though with the fall of her mother, Marie de Medici, and her Italianate crew the political object of the marriage had already failed, and France and Spain, once more at issue, were rapidly drifting into war. Scandalous and notorious as Philip's infidelity to his wife very soon became, he appears to have been devotedly attached to her, and was violently jealous of any appearance of special love or homage to her beauty. She, on her part, true daughter of the gallant _Béarnais_ as she was, was gay and debonair in her bearing, and followed, though decorously, the fashion in Spain of her time, which allowed women an amount of licence of speech with gallants impossible in other countries or at other periods.[8] As {56} with all other ladies of the Court, there was unkind tittle-tattle about the gay young Queen; but apparently without the slightest foundation, though a supposed passion for her on the part of one of the most brilliant nobles of the Court led to tragic results for the gallant. [Illustration: ISABEL DE BOURBON, FIRST WIFE OF PHILIP IV. _From a portrait by Velazquez in the possession of Edward Huth, Esq._] At a royal bull-fight--one of the earliest shows to celebrate the King's accession in the summer of 1621--the Count of Villa Mediana, Don Juan de Tassis, rode into the arena at the head of his troop of cavaliers, bearing as his device a mass of silver coins called "reals" (or royals), and above them the audacious motto of "My loves are ----," which was taken to mean, in conjunction with his daring glances and marked salutes, that his love was set upon the Queen. The Count was over forty years of age, and no beauty; and his malicious satirical verses had been aimed at everybody in Court, from the King downward. He was therefore well provided with enemies, who were ready to place the worst construction on his acts. It is now proved--as far as any such thing can be proved[9]--that the real object of the Count's regards was a lady named Doña Francisca de Tavara, with whom the King was carrying on an intrigue at the time. But in either case the young King's jealousy was aroused, and his annoyance was increased by an innocent {57} remark of his wife that "Villa Mediana aimed well." "Ah!" replied Philip crossly, "but he aims too high"; and soon the ill-natured story with due embellishments was being whispered all over Madrid.[10] [Sidenote: Count de Villa Mediana] But in the following spring of 1622 there was a great series of festivals at Aranjuez, where the Court was then in residence, to celebrate Philip's seventeenth birthday. Already the glamour of the stage had seized upon Philip and his wife, and one of the attractions of the rejoicings was the representation in a temporary theatre of canvas erected amidst the trees on the "island garden," and beautifully adorned, of a comedy in verse by Count de Villa Mediana dedicated to the Queen. The comedy was called _La Gloria de Niquea_, and Isabel herself was to personate the goddess of beauty. It was night, and the flimsy structure of silk and canvas was brilliantly lit with wax lights when all the Court had assembled to see the show; the young King and his two brothers and sister being seated in front of the stage, and the Queen in the retiring-room behind the scenes. The prologue had been finished successfully, and the audience were awaiting the withdrawing of the curtain that screened the stage, when a piercing shriek went up from the back, and a moment afterwards a long tongue of flame licked up half the drapery before the stage, and immediately the whole place was ablaze. Panic seized upon the splendid mob, and there was a rush to escape. The King succeeded in fighting his way out with difficulty, and made his {58} way to the back of the stage in search of his wife. In the densely wooded gardens that surrounded the blazing structure he sought for a time in vain, but at last found that Villa Mediana had been before him, and that the half-fainting figure of the Queen was lying in the Count's arms. Whatever may have been the truth of the matter, this, at all events, made a delightful _bonne bouche_ for the scandal-mongers, who hated Villa Mediana for his atrabilious gibes, and it soon became noised abroad that the Count had planned the whole affair, and had purposely set fire to the theatre that he might gain the credit of having saved the Queen, and enjoy the satisfaction of having clasped her in his arms, if but for a moment. [Sidenote: Murder of Villa Mediana] Four months afterwards, in August 1622, Villa Mediana was returning home in his coach soon after dark, when, from an archway in the Calle Mayor, opposite the alley leading to the Church of St. Gines, there darted the cloaked figure of a man, who discharged at him a bolt from a crossbow which pierced his chest. The Count had just time to leap from the coach and draw his sword, shouting "It is done," when he fell dead upon the road. Villa Mediana had been noted in a splendid Court as the most splendid and extravagant courtier. Amongst men to whom gallantry was an obsession, he was looked upon as the most gallant; in a society of literary and artistic dilettanti, he was held to be the most critical and refined; and his murder, almost at his own door in the midst of the capital, caused a profound sensation. Murders in the open streets, it is true, had become scandalously frequent, mostly, it was said, prompted {59} by private vengeance, and rarely punished; but the killing of Villa Mediana in the circumstances related set tongues wagging in a way that had not been equalled since that luckless secretary of Don Juan of Austria, Escovedo, had been assassinated nearly fifty years before by the secret orders of Philip II. As if by common consent, all fingers pointed at young King Philip as the instigator of the crime.[11] It was asserted that the man who struck the blow was one Alonso Mateo, a crossbowman of the King; but though hundreds affirmed it, neither he nor any other was ever prosecuted for the crime, and the immortal Lope de Vega, who firmly believed that the young Sovereign connived at the murder of the Duke of Lemos, the former minister of his father, in November 1622, only interpreted the general belief in the capital, if it was indeed he who wrote that whoever struck the fatal blow at Villa Mediana, "_the impulse that guided it was sovereign_." Whilst murders such as this were of frequent occurrence in the capital, whilst war was looming daily closer, whilst industry lay ruined and the fields unproductive, whilst poverty and famine stalked unchecked through the land, the nobles and officials dependent upon the Court grew richer in plunder and more insolent in ostentation, {60} notwithstanding the sumptuary decrees and the frantic efforts of Philip and Olivares to impose strict economy in one direction, as a counterbalance to lavish squandering in others. Almost any pretext was good enough for Philip to seize for a wasteful show. In after-times people blamed Olivares for purposely leading the lad into these frivolous extravagances, with the set object of diverting him from his duty; but I am inclined to believe that this view is an unjust one as regards the beginning of the reign. Olivares, of course, wished to please and flatter his master; but whilst he worked like a giant himself, and behind a perfect multitude of boards and juntas contrived to keep in his own hands supreme control of national affairs, he unquestionably urged Philip again and again to apply himself diligently to work and to spend less time in pleasure.[12] [Sidenote: Devotions and diversions] Philip's own inclinations led him to idle and profitless pleasures, especially those which lent themselves to theatrical display or ostentatious decorations. The bull-fights, combats between wild beasts, equestrian parades, cane tourneys, masques, balls, comedies and banquets, alternated with religious processions and church ceremonies. In these rejoicings Philip and his wife took equal pleasure. It was the Augustan age of Spanish literature, and the drama of intrigue which Spaniards had invented to delight Europe in future was then in its full flood of malicious fertility. From October 1622 every Sunday and Thursday, except during the height of summer, dramas {61} were performed by regular actors and actresses in the private theatre of the palace, the Queen being nominally the principal patron of the pastime. Some of the comedies then first represented may be mentioned as indicating the taste of the time. "The Scorned Sweetheart," "Jealousy of a Horse," and "The Loss of Spain" were three plays by Pedro Valdes, for which the Queen paid 300 reals, or £6 each. "The Fortunate Farmer," "The Woman's Avenger," "The Husband of his Sister," and "The Power of Opportunity" were other plays paid for by the Queen; and the total number of new dramas represented in the Queen's apartments in the palace during the winter of 1622-23 was forty-three, the fees for which reached 13,500 reals, equal to £270.[13] The favourite convent of the Discalced Carmelites, by the Church of St. Martin, was the scene of constant royal visits and semi-religious dissipations, and one of the most pompous of the ceremonious festivities that beguiled the dazzled crowd at the beginning of the reign was the series of shows that celebrated the canonisation of three of the most popular of Spanish saints in 1622, when all Madrid, in alternating devotional ecstasy and frivolous jollity, followed the King and his wife in honouring St. Isidore, the husbandman, now the patron of Madrid, St. Teresa of Avila, and St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. Accompanied by the bull-fights and ceremonial trials of accused heretics, called _autos-de-fe_, which specially delighted the crowd, this canonisation fete also {62} revived an ancient Spanish diversion, which thenceforward became under Philip's patronage one of the most highly appreciated of the pleasures of his literary Court, namely, the Literary Academies, as they were called, and Floral Games, or poetical competitions, in which the poetasters tried their mettle one against the other, in hope of gaining the ear of powerful patrons for their verses. It was a struggle of keen wits; for in no time or court was poetry, especially satirical and dramatic poetry, ever so fashionable; and that it degenerated later into preciosity, extravagance, and affectation was the natural result of the universal struggle to gain a hearing in a chorus of verse. [Sidenote: An equestrian masque] There are abundant and for the most part tedious contemporary descriptions of these various courtly festivities, descriptions usually as pompous and dry as is to our taste the affected frivolity of the festivities themselves.[14] But though these turgid productions cannot be quoted to any great length in a book like the present, which is intended to suggest a general picture of the Court and times rather than a series of minute sectional photographs, an idea may be gained of the scale upon which the festivities were arranged, by giving a rigidly condensed translation of the account of a great masque and equestrian display given by Philip and his brother Carlos on the 26th February 1623.[15] {63} "All the Court was anxious for the day when his Majesty and the Infante Don Carlos should honour and delight it with the promised feast. It took place on Palm Sunday, with a magnificent mask notable not only for its beauty, its ingenuity, and costly garments, and the high nobles and gentlemen who took part, but also because his Majesty and his Highness appeared in it. "Four enclosed courses had been made; the principal one before the palace, and the others before the Convent of Discalced Carmelites, in the Plaza Mayor, and at the Gate of Guadalajara,[16] many (side) streets being barricaded and occupied by mounted alguacils (constables), and no coaches being allowed in the streets. The best horses Andalucia could breed or the world could see were brought out that day, with glittering trappings and harness, liveries, devices and accoutrements, richer than had ever been beheld. The King had ordered all the maskers to be ready mounted at the Convent of the Incarnation[17] at one o'clock, a stage and canopy having been erected there from which his Majesty was to mount. At about two o'clock the Spanish and German Guards arrived,[18] very smart and handsome, under Don Fernando Verdugo and the Marquis de Rentin; and soon afterwards the {64} royal horses came, having gone in procession through the streets where the maskers were to pass. This was the order in which they came. First twelve drummers, thirty trumpeters, and eight minstrels, all on horseback, and dressed in white and black velvet; after them came the pioneers on foot, and then the royal grooms, and thirty-six splendidly caparisoned horses covered with housings of crimson velvet fringed with gold, bearing upon each a crown of cloth of gold and a cipher of "Philip IV." They were led by thirty-six lackeys, some in black and some in crimson, their garments being trimmed with frizzed velvet, like embroidery. The farriers came next, distinguished from the lackeys by wearing caps instead of hats. Thirty-six postillions followed, dressed like slaves in silvered plush on a black ground, with hats to match.... [Sidenote: An equestrian parade] "The first noble to put in an appearance (_i.e._ at the Incarnation) was Don Pedro de Toledo, Marquis of Villafranca, general of the Spanish cavalry. He was dressed in black, with cape and bonnet, and bore the insignia and baton of a general. With him came twelve lackeys in liveries of black velvet trimmed with gold, and twelve pages dressed similarly, but with white plumes in their caps. In like guise came the Marquis of Flores D'Avila, chief equerry of the King, whose noble presence and snowy hair, even if he had been alone, would have sufficed to dignify the feast. When the greater part of the nobles, the flower of Spain, had collected, the sun, to speak in poetical terms, envious of so much splendour and majesty, summoned up dark clouds which for a long time ceased not to pour water upon the festival. The {65} feelings on the matter of the rain were divided. First it was a pity if the show were spoilt, the preparations being more beautiful and costly than had ever been made for a masquerade at Court, there being forty-eight pairs of horsemen, each with different liveries, besides his Majesty and his brother. The livery of the King and the Count of Olivares was steel grey with white plumes, whilst those of the Infante and the Marquis de Carpio were black and white with plumes to match. The second emotion aroused by the rain was rejoicing at the good it would do to the poor people who needed it so much for their crops, even though the maskers and merry-makers had to take shelter under the eaves. But soon the sky cleared, and the rain ceased; so that all were satisfied. The clarions by and by rang out and announced that the King and the Infante had mounted, and the maskers did the same. Then Don Fernando Verdugo and the Guards clearing the way, Don Pedro de Toledo led the cavalcade to the palace, where the course ended in front of the balcony in which our lady the Queen with the Infanta Maria, and the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, the Infante Fernando, were seated, the ladies in waiting occupying the rest of the balconies of the royal apartment. If I described the precious stones, the gold, the rich dresses and the wealth displayed, this work would be a long one. The first to run was Don Pedro de Toledo, with his accustomed gravity and dignity; and, having reached the end of the course, he bowed low to the Queen and their royal Highnesses, and then made a signal for the rest of the maskers to follow one {66} another along the course. (Here follow the resounding names of the ninety-six Spanish nobles, dukes, marquises, and counts who formed the company.) The last pair to run were his Majesty the King and the Count of Olivares, with the dexterity and gallantry to be expected of them. The effect was strange and brilliant in the extreme, for each pair of horsemen wore different colours and devices. The splendid squadron was closed by the Spanish and German Guards and other troops, led by Verdugo. All the horsemen rode with great rapidity, but the Infante Carlos and the Marquis of Carpio went by like a flash of lightning, to the astonishment of everyone. This pair had hardly covered half the course when the Queen and the Infanta and the Cardinal Infante stood up in their balcony, because they saw that the King and the Count of Olivares were starting out, they being the last to run. They swept by, not on steeds, as it seemed, but on the wind itself, wafted onward by the blessings of those who saw them. Again they covered the course thus, and then the whole cavalcade rode to the plaza before the Convent of the Discalced Carmelites." At various parts of the capital the same sumptuous show was repeated; the most popular and crowded exhibition being in the great square (the Plaza Mayor) then recently built, and but little altered since that time. The King, we are told, rode a beautiful bay stallion presented to him by the Marquis of Carpio; and when the running was over and night fell the horsemen still paraded the streets, which were illuminated by thousands {67} of torches, the cost of the feast having amounted to more than 200,000 ducats. [Sidenote: Two strangers in Madrid] But ten days after the wasteful ostentation just described an event happened which not only stirred Spain and all Europe, but was an occasion for the display of lavishness by Philip that threw into the shade all the festivities that had gone before it. Between five and six in the evening of the 7th March 1623, as the twilight began to fall, two young Englishmen, travel-stained and unaccompanied, rode into the noisome, unpaved streets of Madrid. Inquiring the way to the house of the English ambassador, the Earl of Bristol, they were directed to the "house of the seven chimneys," lying in a retired street off the Calle de Alcalá. When they arrived there, the elder of the two travellers was told, in answer to his summons at the wicket, that his Excellency the ambassador was busy, and could not be disturbed. The visitor persisted, and sent word that he brought an important letter from Sir Francis Cottington, who was on his way from England, and had broken down on the road a day's journey away. At length, upon being admitted, the cloaked and dishevelled stranger, shouldering a small valise that formed their only luggage, left his younger companion in the shadow of the wall across the way to guard the horses during his parley with the ambassador. Lord Bristol (Sir John Digby) was full of care, for matters were not going very smoothly with the difficult negotiation upon the successful issue of which his whole future depended, as well as great international issues. For twelve years he {68} had been backwards and forwards to Spain as King James' ambassador to bring about a marriage of the Prince of Wales with the Infanta Maria. James Stuart was a cunning fool, who was easily beaten in diplomacy, because he flattered himself that he could beat everybody else in duplicity. Most of his life, from long before he inherited the English crown, he had been playing the same game: trying to make other men his tools by pretending to agree with them. He had professed himself both Catholic and Protestant so often that now no one believed or trusted him, least of all the Catholics, whom he had deceived again and again. [Sidenote: The English match] When it had been necessary for Philip III. and Lerma to divert England from a threatened coalition with France, they had feigned to listen to the British King's advances, which they had previously repelled with scorn. Though insincere, they always had in view the prospect of gaining great immediate advantages for the Catholics of England, and subsequently they hoped the re-entry of Great Britain into the fold of the Church. The King of Spain and his minister had also been somewhat led astray by the sanguine hopes in this direction, given by their own ambassador in London, Count de Gondomar, whose diplomatic position was as much at stake as that of the Earl of Bristol. Gondomar, confident, as well he might be, of his power to bend King James ultimately to his will, had, there is no doubt, systematically minimised for years the obstacles to the match on both sides, and had led both his own Government and King James to believe that the other side would ultimately make concessions, which {69} we now see clearly would have been impossible for either. James or his son dared not become openly Catholic, nor could they force the English Parliament to reverse the whole religious policy of the last half century at the bidding of a foreign Power; whilst, with their traditions behind them, it was equally impossible for Philip and Lerma to mate their Princess with a "heretic." In order to keep James from breaking away from Spain, the intrigue had for some years past been transferred to Rome, where a dispensation from the Pope for the marriage was being interminably discussed. This was the position when Philip IV. ascended the throne, and it is quite certain that, whatever may have been the real intentions of the ministers of Philip III. at an earlier period, neither Philip IV. nor Olivares, with their revived arrogant claims for Spain as the dictatress of Europe, meant to marry the Infanta to the English Prince against the dying injunction of Philip III., unless, indeed, and even that is doubtful, upon terms quite impossible for the English to accept.[19] Bristol had {70} been sent once more to Madrid as ambassador in June 1622. He had found Olivares and Philip full of soft words about the match, though he promptly guessed that their real aim was still to delay matters, whilst securing Catholic concessions from England, and he urged King James to insist upon a settlement of the points at issue.[20] Whilst he was labouring at his impossible task, and almost despairing of success, an underhand intrigue was carried on behind his back by those who thought that his diplomatic caution stood in the way of a settlement of the affair. James badly wanted ready money in form of a dowry for his son's bride, and a guarantee that the Palatinate should be restored by the Emperor to his son-in-law, Frederick. Olivares wanted to lead England on to the slope of Catholicism, and to ensure Spain's hegemony over Europe. Gondomar, who had returned to Spain, and Buckingham, whom he had bought, wanted to gain the honour and profit of having effected so important a match. So, at Gondomar's instance, Buckingham sent his half-Spanish secretary, Endymion Porter, a late page of Olivares, to Madrid with secret orders to promise religious concessions, which, had they been known in England, would have caused serious trouble, and to hint that the Prince himself might come to Spain to fetch his bride. Porter, who was no diplomatist, saw Olivares early in November 1622, and bluntly asked for assurance that in return for the concessions promised, Spain would at once consent to the marriage and force the Emperor to restore the Palatinate to the Elector, {71} at which Olivares haughtily scoffed, and said that, as for the match, he did not know what Porter meant.[21] Bristol soon heard of this, and quite lost heart, but he did not know that Endymion took back to London a private message from Gondomar to Buckingham, telling him that the only way to make the match was for the Prince to come suddenly to Madrid incognito and force the hands of the slow-moving diplomatists, who would be unable to draw back when the honour of England was so far pledged. Poetic and romantic Prince Charles was soon won over to so compromising and dangerous a course; but King James wept and slobbered like a frightened infant when "Baby" and "Steenie" wrung from him unwilling permission to undertake so hare-brained an adventure.[22] Only Cottington and Porter were to go with them to Spain, and the former at least, who knew Spain well, was dead against the voyage; but Buckingham's violence gained the day. Distancing all posts, and riding for a fortnight an average of sixty miles a day, through France and over the rough mule tracks in the north of Spain, {72} the little party pushed onwards. Cottington and Porter were distanced and left behind a day's journey from Madrid; and when the man with the valise, who gave his name as Thomas Smith, entered Lord Bristol's study, and, throwing aside his cloak and hat, disclosed the handsome face of "Steenie," the Marquis of Buckingham, the King's favourite, the ambassador was in dismay, increased almost to terror when he learnt that the Prince of Wales, the only son of King James, masquerading under the name of John Smith, was holding the horses on the other side of the dark street.[23] [Sidenote: Charles and Buckingham] What was to be done? The presence of the heir of England could not be hidden for many hours from gossiping Madrid, for the couriers from Paris, where he had been recognised, were following close upon his heels. A voyage to Spain in those days was a far greater adventure than an expedition to Thibet would be now, and the temerity, nay the foolhardiness, of putting such a pledge as the Prince of Wales unconditionally in the hands of the Spaniards, who if they chose to detain him could exact what terms they liked as the price of his safe return, struck the harassed ambassador with alarm. "My Lord Bristol in a kind of astonishment brought him (_i.e._ Prince Charles) up to his chamber, where he presently called for pen and ink, and despatched a post that night to England to acquaint his Majesty how in less than sixteen days he was come safely to the Court of Spain."[24] After grave discussion in Bristol's room, it was {73} decided to send at once for Gondomar, to whom, as Buckingham well knew, the arrival of the Prince would cause no surprise. It was past nine o'clock at night when Gondomar entered the "house with the seven chimneys," full of glee at the success of his bold diplomacy; and not long afterwards he was at the door of Olivares' rooms' in the palace, anxious to give to the favourite the first news of the great event. The Count-Duke was seated at supper as Gondomar entered the apartment. The famous Spanish ambassador in England owed much of his success to the assumed bluff jocosity with which he was wont to cover his cunning; but when he bounced into the Count-Duke's supper chamber on this occasion, he was so exuberant in his joy that grave Olivares looked up in surprise, and said: "Ah, Count! what brings you here at such an hour as this? You look as jolly as if you had the King of England himself in Madrid." "If we have not the King," chuckled Gondomar, "we have the next best thing to him,--the Prince of Wales."[25] Olivares was far from sharing Gondomar's delight. To him the news meant infinite anxiety, danger, and expenditure; for not only must the Prince be entertained lavishly, but somehow he must be got rid of without marrying the Infanta, and if possible without a national war with England for the slight put upon the Prince. The Count-Duke hurried to the King's apartments with the great news, and Philip was as much taken aback as his minister, for young as he was he fully understood the gravity of the situation. One thing, however, {74} he was quite determined upon. Already the adulation of which he had been made the object, and the high hopes aroused by the new measures and men that had been introduced upon his accession, had convinced the lad he was the heaven-sent instrument destined to restore to Spain its proud supremacy over a united Christendom, and religious exaltation had claimed him henceforth for its own, however ungodly his daily life might be. When Olivares had laid before him the difficulties that arose from the unexpected descent of Charles Stuart upon them, Philip rose, and walking to where a figure of Christ crucified hung at the head of his bed, he kissed the feet of the figure, and burst out into the following impassioned oath: "O Lord! I swear to Thee by the human and divine alliance crucified that in Thee I adore, and upon whose feet I seal this pledge with my lips, that not only shall the coming of this Prince be powerless to make me concede one point in the matter of the Catholic religion, not in accordance with what Thy Vicar the Pontiff of Rome may resolve, but even if I were to lose all the realms I enjoy, by Thy grace I will not give way a single iota." Then turning to Olivares (who says that this was one of the only two oaths he ever knew the King to take), Philip told him they must nevertheless fulfil the duties of hospitality that the Prince had thrown upon them.[26] For the greater part of that night the minister worked hard laying out all the plans for the entertainment of the Prince, and for avoiding without giving mortal offence the marriage he sought. At {75} eight o'clock next morning a meeting of high councillors, with Gondomar and the King's confessor, met in the Count-Duke's room in the palace, the result of their deliberations, being highly characteristic: namely, "first, to offer public prayers to God in thanks for the event, and in supplication for His guidance"; and secondly, to instruct Gondomar to sound Buckingham and Cottington (who was expected to arrive that day) as to how far the King of England might be squeezed, "in order to bring this visit to be a great and very signal service to the Church."[27] [Sidenote: Olivares meets Buckingham] A dozen knotty points of etiquette had to be settled, and Gondomar was busy all day speeding backward and forward between the palace and the "house with the seven chimneys";[28] but at last it was arranged that the pride of Olivares should be saved from making the first visit, by the device of an apparently chance meeting with Buckingham. Already Madrid was agog with the news that some great personage, the King of England some said, had arrived in disguise; and when, late on Saturday afternoon, the great swaying gilded coach of Olivares, with its leather curtains, its six gaudily decked mules, and its crowd of liveried servants and pages around it, was seen threading the green {76} alleys of the gardens below the palace on the banks of the Manzanares, all the idlers on "Liars Walk" knew that the Count-Duke was going to meet, "by chance," the Admiral of England, the favourite of his King. When the carriages met, Olivares alighted and greeted Buckingham half-way between their coaches, where, with carefully arranged politeness and high-flown compliments, as false as they were pompous, the great Guzman first measured his strength with brilliant, rash, unscrupulous George Villiers. After many professions of delight on both sides, the Count-Duke entered the English coach with Buckingham, Bristol, and Cottington, and for an hour they drove in close confabulation. On their return they entered the palace gateway, and Olivares secretly led Buckingham into the King's presence, where again the compliments were repeated. There is no doubt that the Spaniards, from the King downward, were flattered with the embarrassing visit, which was a patent proof, it was proudly claimed, of the reality of Spain's regained power and superiority under the new régime, when the heir of England came wooing her at so great a risk. So Philip was all smiles to Buckingham; and when the latter returned to the "house with the seven chimneys," Olivares insisted upon accompanying him to greet the Prince personally in the King's name, the Spanish narratives say that the Count-Duke performed his part with all the dignity and splendour characteristic of him; but Howel, who was in Madrid at the time, and knew Porter well, writes that the Count-Duke "knelt, and kissed his (_i.e._ the Prince's) hands and hugged his thighs, {77} and delivered how immeasurably glad his Catholic Majesty was at his coming, and other high compliments, which Mr. Porter did interpret."[29] During the interview Charles expressed his ardent desire to see his lady love, the Infanta--"to discover the wooer," as Buckingham called it; and it was agreed that on the next day, Sunday, 9th March, the coaches of the royal family should parade the Prado, where the Infanta should be distinguished by a blue ribbon tied round her arm; and the Prince in Bristol's coach might meet the royal party as if by chance, and incognito. Little enough of incognito there was about the affair, when, at four o'clock in the afternoon the ambassador's coach with the Prince, Buckingham, Aston, Gondomar, and Bristol in it, stood in the narrow street of the Puerta de Guadalajara in the Calle Mayor to await the coming of the King's party. Every foot of the streets was crowded with sightseers, and the pride and joy of the show-loving Madrileños knew no bounds. By and by the long line of coaches accompanying the King rumbled by, and at last young Philip with his pretty dark-eyed girl wife, his two young brothers, Carlos and Fernando, almost exact replicas of himself, with their lank sandy hair, their long white faces, thick red lips, under-hung jaws and great pale eyes. In the door-seat of the carriage sat the Infanta Maria. She was much like her brothers: "a very comely lady, rather of Flemish complexion than Spanish, fair haired, and carrying a most pure mixture of red and white in her face. She is full and big lipped, {78} which is held a beauty rather than a blemish."[30] As the King's carriage passed that of the Prince, Philip, who was not supposed to see Charles, bowed low, as did his brothers, to Lord Bristol; but it was noticed that the Infanta first flushed and then turned deadly pale as her lover's eyes fell upon her. The poor girl, indeed, was getting seriously alarmed. She was, of course, devout and ignorant. To her heretics were an abomination, and the prospect of living amongst such was worse than death. Her monkish confessor painted in lurid colours the horror of the fate that threatened her; worse than hell it was, he said, to lie by a heretic's side, and bear heretic children. Only that morning she had sent her confidential lady, Margaret Tavara, to Olivares, passionately protesting against the marriage being seriously negotiated. She would, she said, take refuge in the Convent of the Discalced Carmelites, and assume the nun's veil the moment she heard that the capitulations were signed. Charles on his part appears to have been really smitten with the pink and white charms of the little lady, and played the eager wooer well. The Prince and Buckingham writing to their "Dear Dad and Gossip" (the King) calls this first meeting "a private obligation hidden from nobody; for there was the Pope's Nuncio, the Emperor's ambassador, the French, and all the streets filled with guards and other people. Before the King's coach went the best of the nobility, after followed by the ladies of the Court. We sat in an invisible coach, because nobody was suffered {79} to take notice of it, though seen by all the world."[31] The cavalcades then wended their ways by different roads to the Prado, where, parading up and down, the Prince had several opportunities of looking upon his blushing sweetheart. Soon Olivares came and entered the Prince's coach; and again fulsome compliments passed as they drove back to the English embassy.[32] Buckingham, indeed, was fairly dazzled and deceived, for both he and Charles believed now that the match was as good as completed. Alas! they did not know Olivares or Spanish methods so well as Bristol did. [Sidenote: "Steenie's" letter to James I.] "If we can judge by outward shows," wrote Charles and Steenie to the King, "or general speeches, we have reason to condemn your ambassadors for rather writing too sparingly than too much. To conclude, we find the Conde de Olivares so overvaluing our journey, he is so full of real courtesy, that we can do no less than beseech your Majesty to write the kindest letter of thanks and acknowledgment you can unto him. He said, no later to us than this morning, that if the Pope would not give a dispensation for a wife they would give the Infanta to thy Baby as his wench,[33] {80} and hath this day written to Cardinal Ludovico, the Pope's nephew, that the King of England hath put such an obligation upon this King in sending his son hither, that he entreats him to make haste of the dispensation, for he can deny nothing that is in his kingdom.... The Pope's Nuncio works as maliciously and as actively as he can against us, but receives such rude answers that we hope he will soon weary on't. We make this collection that the Pope will be very loth to grant a dispensation, which, if he will not do, then we would gladly have your directions how far we may engage you in the acknowledgment of the Pope's special power, for we almost find, if you will be contented to acknowledge the Pope as chief head under Christ, that the match will be made without him."[34] It is difficult to know what to condemn most in this astounding letter,--whether the simplicity that made Buckingham so easy a dupe of Olivares' soft speeches, or the proposal at the end, which, as the reply shows, was too much even for King James, that the latter should abandon the main condition upon which he held the Protestant crown of England. It is clear that the intention of {81} Olivares was to cast upon the Pope the whole of the blame for the failure of the match, and this, at least from the Spanish point of view, was a statesmanlike policy, although the full falsity of it is evident to us now that we have before us the communications that passed between Madrid and Rome on the subject.[35] [Sidenote: Charles in Madrid] Leaving Charles at the embassy after the drive, Olivares and Buckingham, with Porter as their interpreter, re-entered a coach and drove off in the gathering darkness to the gardens behind the palace, to arrange the details of the coming private interview to be held that night between Philip and the English Prince. Whilst the coach, with Olivares and Buckingham, was in the green alleys of the garden, a man, unaccompanied, with his cloak masking his face, and sword and buckler by his side, was seen walking towards them. "This is the King," said Olivares, to Steenie's intense astonishment. "Is it possible," exclaimed Buckingham, "that you have a King who can walk like that? What a marvel!" and, leaping from the carriage, he knelt and kissed the young King's hand. Entering the coach again, the party, accompanied now by the King, were driven through the quiet streets of the unlit capital, for it was ten o'clock at night, to the Prado, where the Prince, with Gondomar, Bristol, Aston, and Cottington, in another coach, awaited their coming. Descending and embracing warmly, the King and Prince then re-entered the carriage with Bristol alone, and for more than half an hour discoursed amiable banalities in the darkness under the overhanging trees of the promenade. {82} Thenceforward Buckingham and Olivares by agreement changed offices, the former constituting himself chief equerry in waiting to Philip, whilst Olivares attended Prince Charles. In pursuance of this idea, the suite of apartments in the palace occupied by Olivares as master of the horse were hastily prepared with great magnificence for the occupation of the English Prince; and whilst their redecoration and furnishing were being accomplished, Charles was invited to transfer his lodging to the rooms in the monastery of St. Geronimo in the Prado, to which the Kings of Spain usually retired in times of mourning, and previous to state entries to the capital, an invitation which he did not accept. In the week that followed the first meeting of Charles and his host, until Sunday the 16th March,[36] which was the day fixed for his public entry into the city, Madrid was astir with excitement. The pragmatic decrees recently promulgated forbidding starched and fluted ruffs, embroidered dresses, and the use of gold in tissues, and generally suppressing extravagance of living, were all suspended by proclamation during the visit of the Prince; the streets were ordered to be swept and garnished, and the houses on the line of route richly adorned; and Madrid, by the morning of the day fixed for the public entry, had covered its squalor and dirt by an overcoating of finery. All the gaols, too, were emptied of prisoners, by way of welcoming the English guest.[37] In the week of waiting Charles sought permission {83} to visit Philip privately in return for the interview in the Prado on Sunday night, and he and Buckingham gave the following account of the meeting to their "Dear Dad and Gossip." "The next day your Baby desired to kiss the King's hand privately in the palace, which was granted, and thus performed. First, the King would not suffer him to come to his chamber, but met him at the stair-foot, then entered into the coach and walked in his park. The greatest matter that passed between them was compliments, ... and then by force he would needs convey him (_i.e._ Charles) half way home, in which doing they were both almost overthrown in brick pits. Two days after we met his Majesty again in his park with his two brothers; they spent their time in seeing his men kill partridges flying and conies running with a gun."[38] In the meanwhile the people with pride and delight had quite satisfied themselves that the coming of the Prince meant the intended conversion of himself to Catholicism and the return of England to the fold of the Church,[39] and Olivares pressed this {84} point so persistently and publicly upon Charles, that Buckingham himself began to take fright. He noticed that whenever the Count-Duke found himself near Charles, which indeed was continually, he turned the conversation towards the Catholic religion. Charles was young, the son of a Catholic mother, and was certainly for the time smitten by the Catholic Infanta: his father had professed himself Catholic again and again; and at this moment was writing thus to his "Sweet boys": "I send you, my Baby, two of your fittest chaplains for this purpose, Mawe and Wren, together with all stuff and ornaments fit for the service of God. I have fully instructed them, so as all their behaviour and service shall, I hope, prove decent and agreeable to the service of the primitive Church; _and yet as near the Roman form as can lawfully be done; for it hath ever been my way to go with the Church of Rome usque ad aras_." But whatever may have been the tendencies of Charles himself, Buckingham in his saner moments, and certainly Bristol, must have seen the pitfall laid for the Prince, and thus early, in the midst of all the complimentary billing and cooing before the state entry, the young adventurers began to realise the {85} difficulty of the task, which looked so easy from a distance. On the day following the state entry, Charles and Buckingham wrote to the King-- "For our chief business, we find them by outward shows as desirous of it as ourselves, yet they are hankering upon a conversion; for they say that there can be no firm friendship without union in religion, but they put no question in bestowing their sister, and we put the other quite out of the question, because neither our conscience nor the time serves for it."[40] Delay, as they said, was the worst denial; for King James was in a hurry,--in a hurry to get his heir married, in a hurry for the Infanta's dowry, and in a hurry to get the Palatinate back for his son-in-law; and as yet the priests were still squabbling over the dispensation in Rome, and Olivares, equally with his master, was determined to delay until either England became practically Catholic, or the English themselves broke off the negotiations by refusing the terms upon which Rome, prompted by the Spanish agents, alone would consent to the match. This, indeed, as Olivares saw, was the only slender chance of preventing war with England, and to avoid throwing James into the arms of France. [1] Novoa, who was present at the scene described, _Documentos Ineditos_, lxi. [2] Especially Gil Blas, Guzman de Alfarache, Marcos de Obregon, Estevanillo Gonzales, and El Diablo Cojuelo. [3] This was constantly denied by his many enemies, but original documents, to which I shall refer later, will prove that in this as in so many other things they did him an injustice, whatever his real aim might have been. [4] _Cambridge Modern History_, vol. iv. "Spain," by Martin Hume. [5] _Fragmentos Historicos MSS._, by Vera y Figueroa, also Novoa, and Yañez,; and _Relazioni degli Ambassciatori Veneti_, British Museum MSS., Add. 8701. [6] _Discursos y Apuntamientos_, by Lison y Biedma, a member of this Parliament. (Secretly printed book of the period in my possession, which gives a sad picture of affairs.) [7] There are two letters in _Cabala_--the first from Philip to Olivares, and the second the minister's reply to the King--which show that there was never any intention on their part of carrying the English match through. The long letter from Olivares to the King is an adaptation of a Spanish original which is well known, and to which I shall refer later, proposing the marriage of Charles with the Emperor's daughter; but the King's letter which produced Olivares' reply is not, to my knowledge, printed elsewhere. "The King my father declared at his death that his intention never was to marry my sister the Infanta Doña Maria with the Prince of Wales, which your uncle Don Baltasar well understood; for he so treated this match with an intention to delay it, notwithstanding it is so far advanced that, considering with all the averseness unto it of the Infanta, it is high time to seek some means to divert the treaty which I would have you discover, and I will make it good whatsoever it may be; but in all other things procure the satisfaction of the King of Great Britain, who hath deserved very much, and it shall content me, so that it be not the match." This must have been written before Charles' arrival in Madrid. [8] Nearly all foreigners who visited Madrid during the reign of Philip IV. remarked the extraordinary liberty which existed in the demeanour of the women, even ladies of high birth and position, no doubt a reaction from the conventual strictness with which they had been kept during the two previous reigns. There is no need to multiply authorities; but the following passage, from the report of the Venetian ambassador in Spain at the time of Olivares' fall, will give an idea of the prevailing laxity--even in the royal entourage. "In the royal palace the gentlemen are permitted to carry on with the ladies of the Queen the relations they call 'gallanting,' in which lavishness, ostentation, and expenditure are carried to such an extraordinary excess as to be beyond belief, although here it is considered the most ordinary thing in the world, for rivalry and competition do away with all moderation. Those who go the greatest lengths are held in the highest esteem, not only by the courtiers in general, but also by the royal personages, who make quite a recreation of hearing the accounts of the presents given and attentions paid to them, that the ladies narrate daily to their Majesties." British Museum MS., Add. 8701. [9] Address; by J. E. Hartzenbusch, _Transactions of the Royal Spanish Academy_, 1861. [10] It is fair to say that this story depends upon the very untrustworthy evidence of Mme. D'Aulnoy. [11] The tradition that this was the case existed from the first, and has never been lost; although most of the stories of the relations of Villa Mediana with the Queen are quite unsupported by serious contemporary evidence. Lord Holland, in his _Lope de Vega_, says that only a few days after Philip's accession, the Prime Minister Zuñiga, Olivares' uncle, warned Villa Mediana that his life was in danger. The tradition that Philip was involved in the murder from motives of jealousy is too firm and long-standing to be ignored, though whether his jealousy concerned his wife is very doubtful. [12] Transcripts (contemporary) of these letters, etc., to which reference will be made later, are in British Museum, Egerton MSS. 338. [13] _Historia del Arte Dramatica en España_, from the German of A. F. Schack. [14] Especially in the MS. of the Royal Academy of History, Madrid by Soto y Aguilar, one of the courtiers and writers of the time, and in the MS. at the National Library at Madrid (M. 299) called Noticias de Madrid. These are contemporary news letters from 1621 to 1627. [15] From the Soto y Aguilar MS. already mentioned. [16] This was a narrow street forming part of the line of the Calle Mayor, in which it is now incorporated. It is quite close to the other three courses. [17] A tremendous and costly monastic house (of which the church still stands in the Calle Mayor) upon which Philip III. and his wife had squandered incredible sums. [18] This is very Spanish. The whole of the company had been ordered to be ready mounted at one o'clock, and yet the royal guard which was to keep the space and maintain order did not appear until an hour later, the maskers of course coming later still. [19] In a document quoted on page 51, it will have been noticed that Philip refers to the match as being one that it was necessary to avoid, even at the cost of a war with England. In a notable document in Spanish in the British Museum (MSS. Add. 14,043), reproduced by the Camden Society under the editorship of Dr. Gardiner (_El Hecho de los Tratados de Matrimonio_, etc.), there is a long memorandum written by Olivares for Philip's information in 1622, proposing as a way out of the difficulty the marriage of the Infanta to the son of the Emperor, the marriage of the Prince of Wales with the Emperor's elder daughter, and the betrothal of the Palatine's eldest son Maurice to the second daughter on condition that the Prince was sent to Vienna to be brought up as a Catholic, the Palatinate being restored to him after his marriage. This solution, however, it is quite evident, would have been unacceptable to James for many reasons. In any case it is quite clear that when Charles appeared in Madrid, Olivares had no intention of allowing the Infanta to marry him, unless indeed England became Catholic. [20] The Earl of Bristol's defence. _Camden Society Miscellany_, vol. vi. [21] A very interesting and, as I believe, unpublished contemporary manuscript account of the proceedings of Charles and Buckingham in Madrid, and of the events that followed their return to London, so far as regards the Spanish match, has been brought to my notice whilst this chapter is being written. The manuscript, evidently an original, appears to have been the work of someone who accompanied the Prince in his journey. Many expressions in it are the same as those which I have quoted from other sources, especially from certain letters of Endymion Porter in the Record Office, and from those of Buckingham to the King, most of which were written by Porter. I am therefore led to the conclusion that this interesting new document, which is the property of Dr. Rosedale of the Royal Society of Literature, is the work of Endymion Porter. I am informed that it will shortly be published by the Society. [22] Clarendon, _Great Rebellion_. [23] Howel's _Familiar Letters_. Howel was in Madrid at the time. [24] Howel's _Familiar Letters_. [25] _Fragmentos Historicos de la Vida de Caspar de Guzman_, etc. MS. by Count de la Roca in my possession. [26] _Fragmentos Historicos_, etc. MS. by Count de la Roca, the great friend and confidant of Olivares. [27] _Hecho de los Tratados_, etc., British Museum MS., Add. 14,043, and Camden Society. [28] Gondomar had been raised to the Council of State during the early morning sitting, and on his first visit that day (Saturday) to the English embassy he came rushing to the Prince in his usual boisterously jocose fashion, saying that he had a strange piece of news to convey. "An Englishman had been sworn a Privy Councillor of Spain," meaning, as Howel (who tells the story) says, himself, who, he professed, was an Englishman at heart. This was the kind of joke by which he had managed to dominate King James. [29] _Familiar Letters_. The sequence of events, meetings, etc., as given in _Life and Times of James I._, is untrustworthy. [30] Howel. [31] Hardwicke, _State Papers_. Charles and Buckingham to the King. [32] We are told that on this occasion Olivares, notwithstanding the Prince's remonstrance, insisted upon taking the humble seat at the carriage doorstep; and that throughout the whole visit he treated Charles with the same honours as he did the King, kneeling when he spoke to him, kissing his hand, etc. Charles, on the other hand, appears to have been equally polite to Olivares; but Buckingham soon got tired of an attitude so unusual to him, and behaved himself with extraordinary rudeness and ill-breeding, as will be told later. _Hecho de los Tratados_, etc. [33] Lord Bristol, in his defence (Camden Miscellany, vi.) gives an account of a conversation in the coach when the Prince, Bristol, Gondomar, Olivares, Buckingham, and Aston were waiting for the royal party to pass on the Sunday referred to in the text. This shows how entirely Olivares had convinced them all of his sincerity. Gondomar in boastful mood had asked Olivares if he was not justified now in all he had written from England about the real desire of King James for the marriage; and whether Bristol and himself had not proved themselves honest men. "Yes," replied Olivares, "you may both say your _Nunc Dimitis_ now, and trouble no more about it, except to claim the reward of success." No blame, he said, could attach to them in any case. [34] Hardwicke, _State Papers_. [35] _Hecho de los Tratados_, etc. B.M. MSS. Add. 14,043. [36] The dates given throughout are old style, according to the English calendar of the time. The Spanish dates are ten days later. [37] MSS. Soto y Aguilar. [38] Hardwicke, _State Papers_. [39] Most of the poets and poetasters of the Court were convinced of this, and the romantic love-making of the Prince, who for the sweet eyes of the Infanta was to make England Catholic, inspired many verses. Howel sends to a friend in England one stanza of such a poem written at this time, he says by Lope de Vega-- Carlos Estuardo, soy, Que siendo amor mi guia. Al cielo de España voy. Par ver mi estrella Maria. Charles Stuart, here am I, Guided by love afar Into the Spanish sky, To see Maria my star. Gongora's fine sonnet, translated by Churton, is worth quoting entire-- Fair from his cradle springs the star of day, Rock'd on bright waves fair sinks his parting light: Such be thy course, in sunlike beauty bright, Daughter of kings and born to be as they. The world's majestic wonder. Lo! thy ray Hath called a royal bird, in venturous flight, From realms where keen Arcturus fires by night The polar skies: from regions far away He wheels on swiftest wing: within thy sphere Secure his bold eye drinks the soft clear fires. Now Heaven and Love be kind; and both ordain What time his suit shall win thy beauty's ear. The Northern Eagle won with chaste desires, By Truth's pure light may live to God again. [40] Hardwicke, _State Papers_. {86} CHAPTER III STATE ENTRY OF CHARLES INTO MADRID--GREAT FESTIVITIES--HIS LOVE-MAKING--ATTEMPTS TO CONVERT THE PRINCE--THE REAL INTENTION OF OLIVARES--HIS CLEVER PROCRASTINATION--CHARLES AND BUCKINGHAM LOSE PATIENCE--HOWEL'S STORY OF CHARLES AND THE INFANTA--THE FEELING AGAINST BUCKINGHAM--ANXIETY OF KING JAMES--HIS CORRESPONDENCE WITH "BABY AND STEENIE"--CHARLES DECIDES TO DEPART--FURTHER DELAY--THE DIPLOMACY OF OLIVARES--BUCKINGHAM AND ARCHY ARMSTRONG--DEPARTURE OF CHARLES--HIS RETURN HOME, AND THE ENGLISH DISILLUSION All being ready for the public entry of Charles on Sunday, 16th, the Prince, though he declined the invitation to sleep the previous night at the monastery of St. Geronimo, as was customary with Spanish sovereigns who entered the capital in state, went thither early in the morning, and was entertained at a sumptuous banquet by the Count Gondomar, as near as he could manage it in English fashion. Then, as was also the usage with Spanish sovereigns, all the members of the numerous Councils and juntas rode in full state, accompanied by their officers and escorts, to pay their respects to the Prince. Charles received this glittering crowd, numbering some hundreds, standing by a velvet-covered {87} table beneath a canopy of silver tissue in the royal apartment of the monastery, the empty throne being behind him, and the walls of the chambers covered with rich hangings and pictures, amongst which were portraits of King James and his councillors. As each pompously named official knelt and begged permission to kiss the Prince's hand, Charles gracefully threw his arms upon their shoulders instead, and raised them from the ground.[1] The impression generally produced by the Prince now and during his stay was excellent, and it was noticed throughout that he never took advantage, as Buckingham and the crowd of noisy English courtiers who soon arrived in Spain did, of the Spanish politeness which places everything at the disposal of a guest. The behaviour of these courtiers, indeed, and especially Buckingham's insolence, very soon produced disgust amongst the grave, courteous Spaniards. [Sidenote: The state entry] At midday, when the councils had retired and taken their places on the line of route, a flourish of drums and pipes heralded the coming of the Spanish Guard in orange and scarlet to the monastery, followed by the German Guard, in crimson satin and gold with white sleeves and plumed caps; {88} then came the municipality of Madrid, with a great following of town officers dressed in orange satin with silver spangles. Nobles and princes followed in pairs, led by Prince Edward of Portugal and the Count of Villamor, each pair of high gentlemen resplendent in satin, velvet and gold, jingling and flashing on their showy Andalusian horses. Following these and a hundred other ostentatious groups, the mention of which would fill pages, King Philip left his palace as the great clock in the courtyard--one of the marvels of Madrid--struck the hour of one, and reached a side door of the monastery in his coach by a circuitous route. Until three o'clock Charles and Philip chatted in friendly converse, and then the signal was given for the cortege to start, the King and Prince mounting their horses at the same moment. The drums, pipes, clarionets, and trumpets led off followed by judges, officials, courtiers, and nobles, heralds, guards, pages, lacqueys, and grooms by the hundred, upon whose grand dresses Soto y Aguilar dwells with tedious minuteness. Then came the King and the Prince, under a canopy of white damask and gold, mounted upon silver poles borne by six officers of the corporation, the Prince riding on the right hand of his host. They must have looked a gallant pair, for they were mere youths, and both fine horsemen. Olivares and Buckingham side by side followed them, and then came a great troop of Spanish grandees with the English ambassadors and officers. Through the streets, decked lavishly, and crowded with cheering people, flattered at the coming conversion of England by means of Spain the cavalcade rode {89} by the Puerta del Sol and Calle Mayor to the ancient Alcazar upon the cliff, which looks across the arid plain to the snow-capped Guadarramas. On the line of route national dances and the eternal comedies were played until the Prince approached, when special dances were performed in his honour, at which, we are told, he was much delighted. Upon entering the palace the King himself conveyed the Prince to his apartments, and surpassed himself in courtly welcome to his guest; and that same night the Queen sent to the Prince a great present of white linen for table use and personal wear, with a rich dressing gown and toilet paraphernalia in a scented casket with gold keys.[2] It was all as Howel wrote, "a very glorious sight to behold, for the custom of the Spaniard is, tho' he go plain in his ordinary habit, yet upon some great festival or cause of triumph there's none goes beyond him in gaudiness."[3] The next day the municipality of Madrid celebrated a royal bull-fight on a scale of magnificence rarely approached. The great Plaza Mayor of Madrid, 340 feet square, was surrounded by stagings, and every one of the hundreds of balconies of the high houses overlooking the plaza was hung with crimson silk and gold, and filled with noblemen and ladies whose names were as splendid as the clothes, of which Solo y Aguilar[4] spares us no detail. The royal balcony was erected on the first floor of the municipal bakery (still standing), {90} and must have been a mass of crimson and cloth of gold, with its hangings, its canopies, its curtains, and its balustrades. Every council and board, and under Olivares they were infinite, had its special tribune. Nobles, officials, officers, and foreign representatives, all of whose fine garb the literary quarter-master details for us until his description produces but a vague impression of sumptuous stuffs without end, smothered in bullion, arrived in procession to occupy their places as spectators or actors in the glittering show. The English visitors were accommodated in a special stand occupying the opening of the Street of Bitterness (Calle de Amargura), which gave rise to much satirical comment. When all was ready, and around the vast plaza a packed mass of bedizened humanity had assembled, the royal coaches entered and drove around the arena to the central entrance of the Queen's balcony before the bakehouse. Here Isabel alighted, dressed, we are told, like the Infanta, who accompanied her, in brown silk embroidered with gold, and covered with gems, the plumes of their jaunty toques being white and brown, sprinkled with diamonds. With them came the two Infantes, Carlos, in black velvet and gold, with diamond chains and buttons, and the boy Cardinal Infante Fernando, in the purple of his ecclesiastical rank. Behind them came scores of ladies, and then officers of the Guards, and finally a "great company of Spanish and English gentlemen, courtiers, grandees, and attendants." The Prince of Wales was very beautifully dressed in black with white plumes, and was mounted on {91} a bright bay horse, whilst the King, also in sober brown, for it was Lent, rode a silver grey charger, "both horses showing by their majestic port that they were conscious of the preciousness of their burdens." After them rode the Admiral of England (_i.e._ Buckingham) and the Count of Olivares, with the English ambassador, councillors of state, gentlemen-in-waiting, and archers of the guard.... The Queen and Infanta sat in the right-hand balcony, and separated only by a rail from them in the next balcony were Don Carlos, the King, the Prince of Wales, and the Cardinal Infante Don Fernando; the Marquis of Buckingham, the Count of Olivares, and the other English and Spanish gentlemen being in the balcony on the left. The trumpets sounded, and when a hundred lacqueys, in brown jerkins and floating silver ribbons, had cleared the arena, the Duke of Cea pranced in on a grey horse, preceded by fifty lacqueys in doublets of cloth of silver and fawn-coloured breeches, wearing silver thread caps, and followed by a group of famous bull-fighters. The Duke bowed low before the royal balcony, whereupon Prince Charles uncovered. Then came the Duke of Maqueda, with his gallant party, who performed the same courtly ceremony as the Duke of Cea, "looking like a Cæsar," as Soto y Aguilar says. And so noble after noble, each with his glittering train of mounted gentlemen and host of servants, passed before the King and his English guest, until, in the written description of the scene, gorgeous fabrics, fine colours, and precious metals seem to lose their separate significance, so lavish is the repetition of them. {92} Then came the many bulls, each despatched by a grandee's spear (_rejon_); many hairbreadth escapes being recorded, but no noble killed. When the feast was ended the rain was falling heavily, and we are told by the courtly chronicler "that amidst the falling torrents there fell a torrent of pages with torches who inundated with light the realms of darkness." It would be tedious to give particulars of the many such shows provided for Prince Charles, but at one subsequent bullfight, more splendid still, described by Soto, no less than twenty bulls were done to death by noble bull-fighters on horseback, and prodigality itself ran riot to show the English Prince how rich Spain was. For three days more the rejoicings of the State entry of Charles went on day and night: comedies, music, cane tourneys, and illumination and fireworks continuing without cessation. Even Buckingham was dazzled, extravagant as he was, and he says in his letter to the King-- They "made their entry with as great a triumph as could be, where he (Philip) forced your Baby (Charles) to ride on his right hand.... This entry was made just as when the Kings of Castile came first to the crown, all prisoners set at liberty, and no office nor matter of grace falls but is put into your Baby's hands to dispose of.... We had almost forgotten to tell you that the first thing they did at their arrival in the palace was to visit the Queen, where grew a quarrel between your Baby and lady for want of a salutation; but your dog's (_i.e._ Buckingham's) opinion is that it is an artificial forced quarrel to beget hereafter greater kindness." {93} [Sidenote: Charles in love] But in this letter, written the day after the state entry, when the municipality were offering as a present to Buckingham the costly canopy that had served in the ceremony,[5] the flustered visitors forgot to tell the King how his "Baby" liked the Infanta, whom he had now seen at close quarters for the first time, and a hurried little note was scribbled and enclosed with the letter just quoted, saying-- "Baby Charles himself is so touched at the heart that he confesses that all he ever saw is nothing to her[6] (_i.e._ the Infanta), and swears that if he want her there shall be blows. I (Buckingham) shall lose no time in hastening their conjunction, in which I shall please him, her, you, and myself most of all, in thereby getting liberty to make the speedier haste to lay myself at your feet; for never none longed more to be in the arms of his mistress. So, craving your blessing, I end, your humble slave and dog, Steenie."[7] But withal the negotiations got no nearer. The dispensation still tarried in Rome, and Olivares staved off all definite discussion, on the lying {94} pretext that he did not know upon what the Pope would insist. To keep things going and beguile the English, the Count-Duke persuaded Charles to listen to a disputation in the monastery of St. Geronimo as to the truth of the Catholic religion, and set all the most persuasive clerics of the Court upon the task of converting the English Prince. An English priest named Wallsfort (?) was specially charged to tackle Buckingham, in conjunction with Friar Francisco de Jesus, the King's preacher; but, as may be supposed, with little success, though they asserted that Buckingham, though a heretic for political reasons, was really a Catholic at heart. But when the great attempt was made to bring to bear all the priestly artillery in Madrid upon the Prince's Protestantism, and Charles showed some signs of acquiescence in the Catholic arguments,[8] Buckingham put his foot down firmly, and rudely told Olivares he should not allow the Prince to continue the discussion, to which Olivares retorted by warning him that any attempt to introduce the Protestant chaplains from England into the Prince's apartment in the palace would be resisted by force,[9] for all their pretence that the {95} rites they used were similar to those of Rome. Charles, indeed, flattered himself with the idea that he had half converted the Infanta's confessor, Rahosa,[10] though certainly no signs appear of it in the subsequent actions of the priest. In every diocese in Spain, too, orders were given that religious processions, rogations, and penitential exercises should be celebrated in all churches and convents, in supplication to God for the fortunate issue of the negotiations for the marriage, which, of course, meant the conversion of the Prince and his country, whilst ecclesiastics were bombarding the King and Olivares with solemn addresses, denouncing the idea of the marriage of the Infanta to any Prince not a devout Catholic. [Sidente: Attempts at conversion] It is fair to say that Olivares, whilst professing platonically an ardent desire for the match, never attempted to disguise that it would only be conceded on terms quite impossible for England. The self-deception was indeed entirely on the part of Buckingham and the Englishmen of Catholic leanings whose hopes prompted the belief. From the first no pretence was made on the Spanish side of trusting to the word, or even the oath, of King James; the Spaniards knew him too well. Deeds must precede words, repeated Olivares again and again. The Catholics of England must have full toleration, and Parliament must repeal the Penal Acts of Elizabeth against them before the Infanta left Spain. James was ready to promise much, and did promise much at various times, though not so much as Buckingham; but it was clear that he could not coerce the English {96} Parliament into a course of action that would have made his crown not worth a week's purchase; and, charm as he and Buckingham might, the Spaniards never budged an inch on the main point, amiable and flattering as they were to Charles, in the hope, probably, that some solid concession to the English Catholics might be wrung from his father, in any case, as a preliminary to the more than problematical marriage. It is impossible in this book to follow the daily changing phases of the negotiations through the many months that the Prince stayed in Madrid, but some accounts, contained in the correspondence and other contemporary manuscripts, of the manner in which he and his followers passed their time at Court, will convey the best idea of the dexterity with which Olivares beguiled and befooled the Prince and his advisers into the position which threw upon them the onus of a rupture, whilst the Spaniards appeared to be only too anxious for the marriage and for the friendship of England. Charles usually spent his afternoons with Philip or Olivares, witnessing fencing bouts or other sports from a window in the palace, or walking in the garden, or in hunting the boar or hawking; and though he did not accompany the King and Court in their frequent visits to the Discalced Carmelite convent, or to the other religious houses where celebrations were held he often saw the processions from closed jalousies, or through the drawn leather curtains of a coach. The mornings were passed in studying Spanish or writing, and in the evening he frequently visited the royal family, where, on a few occasions, the Infanta was present. {97} One such visit, on Easter Day 1623, is thus described in Bristol's diary[11]-- "In the morning the Prince sent to desire leave to repay the visit and the _buenas pascuas_ he had received the day before, and was accordingly appointed about four o'clock in the afternoon to be brought up by a private way to the King, with whom, when he had been a short space and performed that compliment, he intimated a desire to do the like to the Queen, and was presently conducted by the King, who accompanied him publicly, attended by all the grandees and great ministers of the Court, from his own side of the square, which is on the opposite side of the palace (to the Queen's), and there found the Queen and the Infanta together, attended by all the ladies of the Court. This being the first time that his Highness had personally visited the Infanta, there were four chairs set: in the middlemost sat the Queen and the Infanta, on the right hand of the Queen sat the Prince, and on the left of them all sat the King. When the Prince had given the Queen the _buenas pascuas_ (_i.e._ compliments of the season), and passed some other compliments of gratitude for the favours he had received from her since his coming to this Court, in which it pleased his Highness to call me (_i.e._ Bristol) to do him service as interpreter, he rose out of his chair and went towards the Infanta, who likewise rose to entertain (_i.e._ to receive) him; and, after fitting courtesies on both sides performed, the Prince {98} told her that the great friendship which was between his Catholic Majesty and the King his father, had brought him to this Court to make a personal acknowledgment thereof, and to assure, for his part, the desire he had to continue and increase the same, and that he was glad on this occasion to kiss her Highness's hands and offer her his services. To which the Infanta answered, that she did highly esteem what the Prince had said unto her. His Highness then told her that he had been troubled to understand that of late she had not been in perfect health, and asked her how she had passed the Lent, and how she did now, whereunto the Infanta answered: "_Que quedava buena á servicio de su Alteza_ (that she was now well, and at his Highness's service). The Prince then retired himself to his chair and sat down again by the Queen, with whom he passed some short compliments, and so they all rose, and with much courtesy took their leaves. [Sidenote: Charles's lovemaking] "And I do assure you (_i.e._ Mr. Secretary Conway, to whom the diary was sent) that in all things the Prince's comportment was so natural and suitable to his quality and greatness, that he hath given instant cause to the Spaniards to admire him, as I find they generally do. From hence he was conducted by the King in the same equipage that he had come thither unto the King's side, where, when the King had entertained his Highness awhile with beholding from a window certain masters and gentlemen exercising fencing before them, the King had him to another window which looketh upon a large place before the court-gate, and, telling the Prince that he would only go and {99} see the Queen, took his brother, Don Carlos, with him, and left the Infante Cardinal with the Prince, expecting his return. "But before much time had passed there appeared about three score of the principal nobility of the kingdom in the gallery (_i.e._ course) before the window, who were very richly apparelled with embroideries, and being on horseback came two and two together their several careers. They all had their faces uncovered save only the King, Don Carlos, the Count of Olivares, and the Marquis of Carpio, who wore vizards."[12] The extremely slow courtship here described seems to have struck Charles as unsatisfactory, and a few weeks afterwards, probably encouraged by the general laxity and freedom he saw about him in the intercourse of the sexes, the Prince seriously violated the royal etiquette by an attempt to make love to the Infanta in less formal fashion. Howel tells the story in a letter to Tom Porter: "Not long since the Prince, understanding that the Infanta was used to go some mornings to the _Casa de Campo_, a summer-house the King hath on t'other side of the river, to gather May-dew, he rose {100} betimes and went thither, taking your brother (_i.e._ Endymion Porter) with him. They were let into the house, and so into the garden; but the Infanta was in the orchard, there being a high partition-wall between, and the door, doubly bolted, the Prince got on the top of the wall and sprung down a great height, and so made towards her. But she, spying him first of all the rest, gave a shriek and ran back. The old marquis that was then her guardian came towards the Prince and fell on his knees, conjuring his Highness to retire, in regard that he hazarded his head if he admitted any to her company. So the door was opened, and he came out under that wall over which he had got in. I have seen him watch a long hour together in a close coach in the open street to see her as she went abroad. I cannot say that the Prince did ever talk with her privately, yet publicly often, my Lord of Bristol being interpreter; but the King sat hard by, to overhear all. Our cousin Archy (_i.e._ Archy Armstrong, King James's jester, who had joined Charles in Madrid with a large number of English courtiers) hath more privileges than any, for he often goes with his fool's coat where the Infanta is with her _meninas_ (maids) and ladies of honour, and keeps a'blowing and blustering among them, and slurts out what he lists."[13] Festivities kept Charles well occupied; and; now that his father's courtiers had joined him {101} with full baggage, he could play the Prince more effectively than on his first arrival. King James, indeed, seems to have imagined that by gifts and ostentation he could carry the point he had at heart,[14] though in one of his letters to his "sweet boys" he says that "for the honour of England he had curtailed the train of courtiers that went by sea of a number of rascals." Those who went, however, behaved very badly, and did little to {102} raise Spanish opinion of English nobles generally. Buckingham was accused of having introduced bad company even into the palace, and to have behaved outrageously to the women who acted on the stage during a comedy. "For outward usage" (writes Howel in July), "there is all industry used to give the Prince and his servants all possible contentment, and some of the King's own servants wait upon them at table in the palace, where I am sorry to hear some of them jeer at the Spanish fare, and use other slighting speeches and demeanour."[15] Worst of all, many of these fine gallants went out of their way to offend Spanish religious susceptibilities; and Howel mentions one such case which nearly led to grave trouble. One of the Prince's pages, Mr. Washington, had died of fever, and before his death an English priest named Ballard visited him, in the hope of converting him. Sir Edmund Verney met the priest on the stairs, and attacked him, first with words and then with blows. "The business was like to gather very ill blood and to come to a great height, had not Count Gondomar quashed it; which I believe he could not have done unless the times had been favourable, for such is the reverence they bear to the Church here, and so holy a conceit have they of all ecclesiastics, that the greatest Don in Spain will tremble to offer the meanest of them any outrage or affront. Count Gondomar hath also helped to free some English that were in the Inquisition in Toledo and Seville, and I could allege {103} many instances how ready and cheerful he is to assist any Englishman whatsoever, notwithstanding the base affronts he hath often received from the London boys.[16] I heard a merry saying of his to the Queen, who, discoursing with him of the greatness of London, and whether it was as populous as Madrid: "Yes, madam," he said, "and more populous when I came away, though I believe there's scarce a man left now, but all women and children, for all the men both in court and city were ready booted and spurred to go away." [Sidenote: English courtiers in Madrid] Madrid was not quite so full of English courtiers as that, though their presence was conspicuous and assertive enough at Court. At the weekly representation of the comedies in the palace, only the royal party were provided with chairs; the ladies, in the usual Spanish Court fashion, being seated on cushions on the floor, and the gentlemen standing behind the royal family. This did not suit either Buckingham or the most ostentatious nobleman of his time, the upstart Hay, Earl of Carlisle, and they both fumed and fretted at what they considered a slight upon them. Buckingham, of course, was obliged to stay, but Hay and many others of the insolent crew left Madrid in dudgeon before the great heats came on. Hay, indeed, found it extremely difficult to obtain audience of the Infanta, whom the English already called Princess of Wales; and when, after much importunity, he was admitted, "he was brought into a room where the Infanta was placed on a throne {104} aloft, gloriously set forth with her ladies about her: my lord, with his compliments, motions, and approaches, could not draw from her so much as the least nod, she remaining all the while as immovable as the image of the Virgin Mary.... At his coming away the Infanta gave him leave to kneel to her above an hour, whereupon our great ladies begin to consult how they shall demean herself when she comes."[17] [Sidenote: Marriage negotiations] During the whole of the spring, matters in Madrid remained thus, the arrival of the dispensation being constantly delayed, whilst England was being every day more deeply pledged to an impossible policy by the folly of Buckingham and Charles and the eagerness of King James. James had made the fatal mistake--after saying, through Bristol, that the Pope's dispensation meant nothing whatever to him--of sending agents, Father Gage particularly, to Rome to negotiate for the dispensation to be modified and expedited, and he showed himself more squeezable on the religious point at every turn of the negotiation. "As for myself," he wrote to his son and Buckingham late in March, "I would with all my heart give my consent that the Bishop of Rome should have the first seat. I, being a western King, would go with the Patriarch of the West. And as for his temporal seigniory of Rome I do not quarrel with that either. Let him, in God's name, be _primus episcopus inter omnes episcopos, et princeps episcoporum_, so it be no otherwise but as St. Peter was _princeps episcoporum_." So confident were they all that no serious hitch would stand in the way of the wedding {105} at last, that the fleet which was intended to carry back the Infanta and her husband to England was ready to sail for Spain in April, and the silly doting King was busy settling the smallest details of the voyage for the comfort of his "sweet boys." At length, late in April, news came to Madrid that the dispensation was on its way to Spain, but "clogged" with new guarantees and conditions in favour of English Catholics, which Buckingham still thought he could avoid granting, and asked that the English fleet should be sent to Corunna at once to convey them back triumphant with the Infanta. They soon found that matters were not so easily settled, for, as we know now, Olivares was determined that no marriage should take place, and a device for delay was easily found in the assembly of a commission of divines at St. Geronimo to discuss how far the conditions of the dispensation might be modified. Buckingham conceived the extraordinary plan of asking James to give a blank commission to his son, and Charles accordingly wrote to his father to send him the following pledge signed by his own hand: "_We do hereby promise by the word of a King that whatsoever you, our son, shall promise in our name we shall punctually perform_." "Sir, I confess," wrote the Prince, "that this is an ample trust; and if it were not mere necessity I should not be so bold"; and Buckingham accompanied the Prince's letter by a note that he knew would touch the King. "This letter of your son's is written out of an extraordinary desire to be soon with you again. He thinks if you sign thus much, though they would be glad (which he doth not yet discover) {106} to make any further delay, this will disappoint them. The discretion of your Baby you need not doubt."[18] Needless to say, the weak King sent the power as requested, in order, as he wrote, "that ye may speedily and happily return and light in the arms of your dear Dad." Provided with this unlimited pledge, the Prince and Buckingham, assisted by Bristol, Aston, and Cottington, met a commission appointed by Philip. For weeks the discussions continued. In vain the English pointed out the impossibility of acceding to the demands that religious toleration in England should be decreed forthwith, and that the consent of the English Parliament should be obtained within a year or so for the abrogation of all the penal laws against English Catholics, with the many other points which were now insisted upon by the Pope for the first time. The Pope had even written a letter direct to Charles, urging his immediate conversion; and Charles had further compromised himself by answering it in a way which, although vague, would have caused, if it had been known, intense indignation in England. As the English negotiators advanced, Olivares retired, whilst Buckingham became daily more impatient and angry, throwing the blame now entirely upon the Count-Duke.[19] At length, at the end of May, Buckingham came to an open quarrel with Olivares, and threatened to leave with the Prince at once and abandon the negotiation. This angry departure did not {107} suit the Spaniards; and, after much protest and entreaty on the part of Philip and Olivares, it was agreed that the Prince should stay in Madrid at least until King James was made acquainted with the point insisted upon, and sent his instructions; although, after having consented to remain, Charles, seeing the persistent attempts to put pressure upon him to marry at once on the Pope's conditions, endeavoured to withdraw his promise altogether and retire. Eventually, however, the cajolery of Olivares prevailed, and Cottington went off post haste to England, carrying with him the details of the Spanish papal demands. In the letter written by Charles and Buckingham to James, and taken by Cottington, they still express a hope that he may accede to the terms, though they dared not do so themselves without his consent. "Dear Dad and Gossip," this letter runs, "the Pope having written a courteous letter to me, your Baby, I have been bold to write to him an answer.... We make no doubt but to have the opinions of the busy divines reversed (for already the Count of Olivares hath put out ten of the worst), so that your Majesty will be pleased to begin to put in execution the favour towards your Roman Catholic subjects, and ye will be bound by your oath as soon as the Infanta comes over, which we hope you will do for the hastening of us home, with this protestation to reverse all, if there be any delay in the marriage. We send you here the articles as they are to go, the oaths, public and private, that you and your Baby are to {108} take, with the councils, wherein if you scare at the least clause of your private oath (where you promise that the Parliament shall revoke all penal laws against the Papists within three years), we thought good to tell your Majesty our opinion, which is that if you think you may do it in that time (which we think you may if you do your best), although it take not effect, you have not broken your word, for this promise is only security that you will do your best. The Spanish ambassador for respect of the Pope will present to you the articles as they came from Rome, as likewise to require that the delivery of the Infanta may be deferred till the spring.... We both humbly beg of your Majesty that you will confirm these articles soon, and press earnestly for our speedy return."[20] King James was in despair when he received this letter and Cottington's intelligence. Olivares had cleverly turned the whole negotiation on the acceptance by the English of the religious demands, and had remained quite unpledged as to the restoration of the Palatinate, which was the thing nearest to James' heart. The reply of the King is too characteristic for compression, and is here reproduced entire. "My sweet Boys, your letter by Cottington hath strucken me dead! I fear it shall very much shorten my days, and I am more perplexed that I know not how to satisfy the people's expectation here; neither know I what to say to our Council, for the fleet that staid upon a wind {109} this fortnight. Rutland and all abroad must now be staid, and I know not what reason I shall pretend for doing it. But as for my advice and directions that ye crave in case they will not alter their decree, it is, in a word, to come speedily away, if ye can get leave, and give over all treaty. And this I speak without respect of any security they may offer, except ye never look to see your old Dad again, whom I fear ye shall never see if ye see him not before winter. Alas! I now repent me sore that ever I suffered you to go away. I care for match, nor nothing, so I may once have you in my arms again. God grant it! God grant it! God grant it! Amen, amen, amen! I protest ye shall be as heartily welcome as if ye had done all things ye went for, so that I may once more have you in my arms again, and God bless you both, my sweet son and my only best sweet servant, and let me hear from you quickly with all speed as ye love my life; and so God send you a happy, joyful meeting in the arms of your dear Dad.-- JAMES R. GREENWICH, 14 _June_ 1623." The poor King was nearer to his difficulties than was Buckingham, for Archbishop Abbott and the English Puritan divines were becoming clamorous at all this coquetting with the Scarlet Lady, and to have conceded openly a half of the papal demands as payment for the Spanish match would have meant a revolution in England. In the meanwhile Charles and Buckingham continued their struggle to get the conditions modified; whilst Olivares, supported by his theologians, still {110} insisted that the marriage might be celebrated conditionally in Madrid, to be confirmed at some future time when the measures in favour of the English Catholics had been put into operation. The events of the next few weeks are related by the Spanish authority,[21] very differently from the version given by the Prince and Buckingham to King James. The Spaniards aver that Charles' counter-proposals and amendments were considered exhaustively by the various commissions, and unhesitatingly rejected, the Prince, in his final interview with Olivares on the subject, when the answer was given to him, signifying his intention to return to England at once, and requesting an audience to take leave of the King. The Prince is represented by the Spaniards to have asked Bristol to draw up for him a valedictory address which he might read to Philip, but when Lord Bristol submitted his draft the Prince expressed dissatisfaction with it, and said that he would trust to the inspiration of the moment and take leave of the King in his own words. The leave-taking was fixed for the 17th July, in the evening, and when Charles, with Buckingham and the whole of his train, were in the presence of Philip, to the intense astonishment and dismay of Bristol, the Prince expressed his intention of accepting the conditions laid down by the Spaniards with regard to religion, and said that he would, in his father's name, give due security for their fulfilment. Couriers were sent post haste to Rome to obtain the Pope's final consent to the slightly modified conditions accepted by Charles; and for a time {111} the Spanish Court ostensibly regarded the marriage as irrevocably fixed. This is the story as told by the Spaniards, and it is probably not far from the truth; but in the letters to King James[22] the Prince and Buckingham naturally represent the conditions they accepted as being an important modification of the previous Spanish demands, which, so far as can be seen, they were not. On the very day when the reconsidered conditions were first handed to Charles, and, according to the Spanish story, rejected, he and Buckingham wrote to King James. (26th June-6th July.) "DEAR DAD AND GOSSIP,--Though late, yet at last we have gotten the articles drawn up in the forms we sent you by Lord Rochford, without any new addition or alteration. The foolery of the Conde de Olivares hath been the cause of this long delay, who would willingly against thee have pulled it out of the junta's and Council's hands and put it into a wrangling lawyer's, a favourite of his, who, like himself, had not only put it into odious form, but had slipped in a multitude of new unreasonable, undemanded, and ungranted conditions, which the Council yielded unto merely out of fear; for when we met the junta they did not make one answer to our many objections, but confessed with blushing faces that we had more than reason on our side; and concluded with us that the same oath should serve which passed between Queen Mary and King Philip (II.) being put to the end of every article which is to be sworn {112} to. By this you may guess the little favour with which they proceed with us, first delaying us as long as they possibly can, then, when things are concluded, they throw in new particulars in hope that they will pass, out of our desire to make haste. But when our business is done we shall joy in it the more that we have overcome so many difficulties, and in the meantime we expect pity at your hands. But for the love of God and our business let nothing fall from you to discover anything of this, and comfort yourself that all will end well to your contentment and honour. Our return now will depend upon your quick despatch of these, for we thank God we find the heats such here that we may well travel both evenings and mornings. The divines have not yet recalled their sentence, but the Conde tells us that he hath converted very many of them, yet keeps his old form in giving us no hope of anything till the business speaks it itself. But we dare say they dare not break it upon this, nor, we think, upon any other, except the affairs of Christendom should smile strangely upon them." How completely Olivares had outwitted them is plain by this letter. He still insisted verbally upon the whole of the pretensions originally formulated, but had by subtle hints led them into the self-deceiving condition displayed by their fatuous words in the letter just quoted. A few hours only after the above letter was written, the courier Crofts arrived in Madrid with King James' peremptory order for his son to return, printed on page 109. With this order in {113} their hands, Charles and Buckingham thought to bring matters to a crisis, and, as they say, told Olivares with a sad face that the King of England had ordered them to return immediately. How, they asked him, could they obey the command without sacrificing the marriage? "His answer was that there were two good ways to do the business and one ill one. The two good ones were either with your Baby's conversion, or to do it with trust, putting all things freely with the Infanta into our hands. The ill one was to bargain and stick upon conditions as long as they could. As for the first (_i.e._ conversion) we had utterly rejected it; and, for the second, he confessed that if he were King he would do it; and, as he is, it lay in his power to do it: but he cast many doubts, lest he should hereafter suffer for it if it should not succeed. The last he confessed impossible, since your command was so peremptory. To conclude, he left us with a promise to consider it; and when I, your dog (_i.e._ Buckingham) conveyed him to the door, he bade me cheer up my heart, and your Baby's, both. Our opinion is the longest time we can stay here is a month, and not that neither without bringing the Infanta with us. If we find ourselves sure of that, look for us sooner. Whichever of these resolutions be taken, you shall hear from us shortly, that you may in that time give order for the fleet. We must once more entreat your Majesty to make all the haste you can to return those papers confirmed, and in the meantime give order for the execution of all these things (_i.e._ the abrogation of {114} all penal enactments against Catholics, and the granting of religious toleration, etc.), and let us here know so much."[23] The next night Charles sent for Olivares, and asked him what advice he had to give him. The matter was still under discussion, replied the minister; and two or three days more would have to be given before King Philip could send his final decision. Charles and Buckingham demurred at further delay, and again talked of immediate departure; but, as usual, Olivares hinted and implied much, whilst he pledged himself to nothing, and when he returned he left "Baby" and "Steenie" once more in a fool's paradise of confident hope. From day to day they were thus kept; Olivares hinting that as soon as news came that King James had given liberty to English Catholics, all obstacles would be removed, and the Infanta might accompany her bridegroom to England. Charles and his adviser begged James urgently and often to fulfil their promises in this respect without delay; for, said they, they were convinced that Olivares would stand out no longer when the news came. "We know you will think a little more time will be well spent to bring her with us, when by that means we may upon equaller terms treat with them of other things. Do your best there (_i.e._ in England), and we will not fail of ours here.... Of all this we must entreat you to speak nothing; for if you do our labour here will be the harder, and when it shall be hoped there and not take {115} effect they will be the more discontented.[24] I, your Baby, have, since this conclusion, been with my mistress, and she sits publicly with me at the plays, and within these two or three days shall take place of the Queen as Princess of England." James in London was sorely perplexed, for the Marquis of Hinojosa and Carlos Coloma, the Spanish ambassadors, were pressing him still more to make the concessions to the English Catholics thorough and irrevocable; whilst the Council, even Buckingham's sycophantic creatures, Conway and Calvert, the Secretaries of State, were ill at ease. But the step had to be taken, and James, with many prickings of conscience, or more worldly fears, summoned his Council at Whitehall on Sunday the 20th July, and, after feasting the two Spanish ambassadors, the King of England took an oath before them and a Catholic priest, with Cottington and the two Secretaries of State only in attendance, to comply with all the conditions of the marriage which had been accepted in Madrid, the English Catholics being given immediate and complete toleration.[25] This ceremony in the palace of Whitehall having come to an end, King James was entering his coach to go to the Spanish embassy, and take a secret oath there to obtain within a {116} given time the abrogation by Parliament of all the penal laws, when, as he says, Lord Andover, travel-stained with his long rapid journey from Madrid, "came stepping in the door like a ghost," and delivered the letter from Charles and Buckingham, saying that the Spaniards were insisting upon deferring the departure of the Infanta until the spring, to give time for the reception of the Pope's consent to the modified conditions, and for the full execution of the decrees, relieving the English Catholics from their disabilities. [Sidenote: Charles outwitted] Poor James must have seen now clearly that he had been outwitted. He was pledged, pledged up to the hilt. He had just solemnly sworn to accept all the Spanish conditions. His son was still in the hands of Spain; no promise whatever binding Spain had been given for the return of the Palatinate to Frederick; and now the gage that he and his shallow favourite had thought would guarantee their demands upon Spain was not to be delivered until next spring, which might mean never! "This course is both a dishonour to me and double charges, if I must send two fleets. But if they will not send her till March, then let them, in God's name, send her by their own fleet, ... but if no better may be, do ye hasten your business: the fleet shall be at you as soon as wind and weather can serve, and this bearer (_i.e._ Cottington) will bring you the power to treat for the Palatinate, and in the matter of Holland. And, sweet Baby, go on with the contract, and the best assurance ye can get of sending her next year. But, upon {117} my blessing, lie not with her in Spain, except ye be sure to bring her with you; and forget not to make them keep their former conditions anent the portion (_i.e._ dowry), otherwise both my Baby and I are bankrupt for ever." Cottington lost no time; and by the 5th (15th N.S.) August was back again in Madrid with the news of the King of England's compliance on oath with the Spanish conditions. Again the divines, at Olivares' bidding, began wrangling over the form and substance of James' oath; for Hinojosa, the Spanish ambassador in England, had reported unfavourably upon the real intentions of James towards the Catholics, and three weeks more passed before the whole marriage treaty was embodied in a formal document, which Charles, on the 28th August (7th September), swore solemnly on the Gospels in the hands of the Patriarch of the Indies to fulfil, whilst Philip simply promised that the marriage should take place _when the Pope's consent arrived_, in which case the Infanta should be sent to England in the following spring. It was indeed a triumph for the diplomacy of Olivares, and Charles endeavoured to save appearances by asking, now that it was too late, for some assurance that the Pope's consent would be given by Christmas and the marriage solemnised. Philip was all smiles. Nothing would delight him better; but, as it was a case of conscience, the theologians must decide. When they met to do so they raked up many stories, old and new, to show that Englishmen could not be trusted further than you could see them in matters of religion, and decided that all of {118} King James's promises to the Catholics must come into actual effect before any further step could be taken by Philip. Cottington, it appears, had fallen ill with the fatigue of his rapid journey; and, in the belief that he was dying, sent for a priest and confessed himself a Catholic, yet as soon as the fit passed off and he recovered he withdrew his professions, and this was cited as a proof of the falsity of Englishmen. The story, already quoted from Howel, of Varney's coming to fisticuffs with the English priest Ballard was made the most of. Besides, said they, a gentleman of King Philip's chamber only the other day had seen on a sideboard in Prince Charles's apartment, in the palace of the Catholic King himself, "a Protestant catechism in which all the heresies and errors are taught, translated into Spanish and richly and curiously bound." This was really too shocking, and the divines decided that Charles was not to be trusted an inch beyond the conventions already made. [Sidenote: A hollow betrothal] In vain a grander bull-fight than ever was given to celebrate the so-called betrothal, in which Charles cut a gallant figure in white satin, and in which, amidst a mad prodigality of splendour, three-and-twenty bulls were done to death by nobles;[26] in vain feasts[27] and banquets hailed {119} Charles as the husband of a Spanish Princess, and the future restorer of England to the Catholic faith; both Charles and Buckingham now saw that they had been fooled, and were only anxious to get away with a good face and such dignity as they might. Olivares personally still pretended to be eager for the match, and feigned a desire to send the Infanta with the Prince, "to turn them all out of Spain together, as he said jocosely"; but Buckingham now profoundly distrusted him--and, indeed, told him at this juncture that he would always be his enemy--and was determined that the Prince should not be further pledged to the marriage, unless the Infanta accompanied them to England. "Send us peremptory commands to come away, with all possible speed," they wrote to King James; "we desire this, not that we fear we shall need it, but in case we have, that your son, who hath expressed much affection to the Infanta, may press his coming away under colour of your command without appearing an ill lover." The love romance, in good truth, was at an end, and the foolish adventure had resulted in one side being pledged to a course that threatened the stability of England, whilst the other was bound to nothing whatever, since the Pope's consent would be given or withheld as Spain desired. Worst blow of all to King James was the contemptuous treatment of his demands about the Palatinate. {120} "As for the business of the Palatinate," wrote Charles to his father, "now that we have pressed them we have discovered these two impediments: first, they say they have no hope to accommodate it without the marriage of your grandchild with the Emperor's daughter, ... to be brought up in the Emperor's Court; and the second is, that though they will restore his lands (to the Palatine) they will not restore his honour." It was, indeed, time that Charles was gone, for the sorry part he and Buckingham had played in Madrid, and their long absence, had provoked serious discontent in England; and even Archy Armstrong in Madrid, with his fool's privilege, goaded Buckingham with taunts and sneers, until the enraged favourite threatened that he would have him hanged. "No one ever heard of a fool being hanged for talking," retorted Archy, "but many Dukes in England have been hanged for insolence."[28] On the 29th August (8th September, N.S.), Charles was conducted in state by Philip to take his leave of the Queen and the Infanta, to whom he made all manner of professions and promises. Buckingham on this occasion did not accompany the Prince, being desirous, as the Spaniards said, of having a separate honour for himself; but even whilst this ostentatious ceremony was being used towards him, a secret paper was being drafted by skilful hands and brains in Madrid that was destined to precede him and the Prince to London, and to set before King James the long tale of Buckingham's transgressions and omissions whilst in Spain, his violence, his rudeness, his lack of {121} diplomacy, his inexpertness in affairs, his pride and insolence. The Spaniards, indeed, had determined to make Buckingham the scapegoat as an additional security for themselves, and they, or rather Olivares, thus laid the foundation of the spoilt favourite's ruin. Splendid presents were given on both sides: Philip sending to his guest four-and-twenty Spanish and Arab horses and six mares, twenty hackneys in velvet housings, fringed and embroidered with gold, two pairs of fine Spanish asses for the stud, a dagger, a sword, and a pistol, all richly encrusted with diamonds, eighty muskets and eighty crossbows and a hundred of the best swords in Spain; whilst Charles, in return for this, apart from his gifts to the King, gave to the bearer of his presents a great diamond jewel. Buckingham also received from the King a fine stud of horses and mares, with arms and jewels of immense value.[29] The Queen's present to Charles consisted of an enormous quantity of linen under-garments of great fineness, worked by the discalced nuns, fifty dressed and perfumed skins, and two hundred and fifty scented glove skins of great rarity and value; whilst Olivares, knowing Charles' artistic tastes and the interest he had taken in the fine pictures in the palace, presented him with many beautiful paintings, some chamber hangings, and three Sedan chairs, fit, as Soto says, for the greatest king on earth; one entirely of tortoiseshell and gold, these chairs being for the use in London of King James, the Prince of Wales, and Buckingham respectively. All the principal courtiers came {122} with similar gifts; but when, with many false tears on both sides, Charles went to the Convent of the Discalced Carmelites to take a last private farewell of his betrothed, she gave him, amongst many rich and beautiful toys, perfumes, and the like, a letter from which she said she hoped great things would come. It was addressed to a saintly nun at Carrion, which lay in his road towards the sea, and the Infanta prayed that he would visit and confer with the holy woman for the good of his soul.[30] She made Charles promise her, moreover, that he would have a care for the Catholics of England, for any one of whom, she said, she would lay down her life. Charles was as lavish in his gifts as were his hosts, jewels of inestimable value being given to the King and Queen, and, indeed, to everybody, apparently, with whom the Prince had been brought into contact at the Spanish Court. The Infanta received from her lover a string of two hundred and fifty great perfect pearls, with similar pearls for the ears and breast, and a diamond ornament so precious "that no one dared to estimate its value."[31] Amongst the shower of jewels that fell upon the Spanish courtiers, that which came to Olivares seems to have been one of the most precious. It was the great "Portuguese" diamond of purest water, that once had been the pride of the crown jewels of Portugal, and had been brought to England by the pretender Don Antonio, who, {123} whilst his jewels lasted, had found so warm a welcome in the Court of Elizabeth. At dawn on Saturday, 30th August, King Philip and his brother Carlos, with their English guest, and followed by hundreds of gallant gentlemen, rode across the bridge of Segovia out of the Castilian capital, over the arid plain towards the vast monastery palace of the Escorial in the Guadarramas, the enduring gloomy monument of the first of the Spanish Philips. The next day was spent in seeing the wonders of the building, and on Monday hunting in the woods and moors around occupied the day. On Tuesday morning, 3rd September, the party set forth, and a few miles on the road the King, after an alfresco luncheon and a long private conversation with his guest, took final leave of Charles, with much ceremonial salutation and professions of eternal regard. That night the English Prince, in whose coach travelled Buckingham, Bristol, and Gondomar, arrived at the village of Guadarrama, and the next night was spent at the ancient city of Segovia. Charles had left in Bristol's hands a power to conclude the marriage on the arrival in Madrid of the consent of the Pope to the modified conditions; but at Segovia he signed two letters, one to King Philip reiterating his intention and desire to carry the match through, and the other revoking the full powers he had given to Bristol to conclude the espousals when the Pope's consent arrived, on the ground that there was nothing in the conventions to prevent the Infanta from embracing a conventual life after the {124} marriage.[32] With Charles's slow progress through Spain to Santander[33], and so to England, this book has naught to do, nor with the extraordinary set of intrigues by which, to Bristol's indignation and subsequent ruin, Buckingham on his return drew the pliant James into alliance with France against Spain. Bristol, during his short further stay in Madrid, laboured hard, aided by Gondomar, to keep the negotiations afoot, the Spanish party in the English Court endeavoured with the same object to arouse the fears of James against Buckingham, and nearly succeeded in doing it. Bristol's colleague and successor at Madrid, Sir Walter Aston, hoping to smooth matters, incurred Buckingham's violent resentment by provisionally agreeing to a day for the espousals, when at last the Pope's conditional consent came. James, and now apparently Charles, had quite made up their minds that no marriage should take place without the Palatinate being surrendered by the Emperor; and Philip, as Olivares had said again and again, would never coerce his Catholic kinsman to do that for the sake of a heretic. Thenceforward though the bickering both in Madrid and London still continued for months, the marriage of Charles and the Infanta was impracticable, and the unwise attempt to force the hands of cunning statesmen by a romantic _coup de théâtre_ came to the undignified and unsuccessful end that it deserved. {125} [Sidenote: Failure of the match] The Spaniards pretended that the match would have been carried through but for Buckingham's bad faith and his personal quarrel with Olivares, and they found it convenient to defend their own character for sincerity by using the favourite for a scapegoat. But it is quite certain now, with the abundant authoritative documents before us, that, except upon quite impossible conditions, there never was any intention on the part of Philip and Olivares to give the Infanta to Charles. Olivares played the game with consummate skill, obtaining concessions to the English Catholics, which, if they had been sincerely carried out, would have endangered James's crown; and presenting to Europe the spectacle of the English King and Prince soliciting an alliance with Spain in a way which allowed such a rebuff to be administered to England as might have made the great Elizabeth turn in her grave. That Buckingham was keenly alive to his defeat, and was determined to avenge it upon Spain, is seen in his letter to James as soon as he left Madrid,[34] and by the strenuous and successful efforts which he made on his return to London to defeat the Spanish party, to which he had, thanks to Gondomar's bribery, formerly belonged. The subsequent ignominious war with Spain into which England was dragged by Buckingham and the French alliance, was a fitting sequel, in its inept mismanagement, to the utter foolishness of the policy which had precipitated it. The comparison between {126} the incompetence of Sir Edward Cecil with his disorganised and futile fleet before Cadiz in 1625, and the English attack upon the same city in 1596 under Howard, Raleigh, and Essex, is as complete and humiliating as the contrast between shallow Buckingham and sagacious Burghley, or between the doting poltroon whose letters to his "sweet Boys" we have seen, and the proudly patriotic termagant whom he succeeded on the throne of England. [1] Soto y Aguilar. Another unpublished contemporary account in Spanish of the state entry in the British Museum, MSS. Add. 10,236, says that Charles advanced to the centre of the room and took off his hat as the councillors entered. It is mentioned that Charles retained his English dress and had "a gallant figure" (bizarro en el talle). He was noticed to doff his hat whenever Philip did on passing a church or sacred image, and this greatly impressed the crowd in his favour. When the royal personages arrived at the palace at half-past six, having taken three hours to cover the distance of about a mile from St. Geronimo to the palace, the Prince was led to salute the Queen, Lord Bristol kneeling before them to interpret their conversation. This account is very enthusiastic as to Charles' graciousness and dignity. [2] MS. Soto y Aguilar. [3] _Familiar Letters_. [4] MS. Royal Academy of History, Madrid. Transcript in my possession. The writer, in this official capacity, was present at all these feasts. [5] MS. Soto y Aguilar. [6] Charles really seems to have fallen in love with her. Howel writes in July. "There are comedians once a week come to the palace, where, under a great canopy the Queen and the Infanta sit in the middle and our Prince and Don Carlos on the Queen's right hand, and the little Cardinal on the Infanta's left hand. I have seen the Prince have his eyes immovably fixed upon the Infanta half an hour together in a thoughtful speculative posture, which sure would needs be tedious unless affection did sweeten it. It was no handsome comparison of Olivares that he watched her as a cat doth a mouse." Endymion Porter, writing to his wife soon after the Prince's arrival in Spain, says: "The Prince hath taken such a liking to his mistress that now he loves her as much for her beauty as he can for being sister to so great a King. She deserves it, for never was there a fairer creature." _State Papers, Domestic_, March 1623. [7] Hardwicke, _State Papers_. [8] From a somewhat ungenerous letter from Charles to Bristol (who was made the scapegoat), written on the 21st January 1625, he says: "you will remember how at our first coming into Spain, when taking upon you to be so wise as to foresee our intention to change our religion, you were so far from dissuading us that you offered your services and secrecy to concur in it; and in many other open conferences pressing to show how convenient it was for us to be Roman Catholic, it being impossible in your opinion to do any great action otherwise." The letter is full of reproaches and condemnation of Bristol's conduct, but it is quite clear that Bristol saw the only condition under which the match was possible from the first, which Charles and Buckingham, deceived by Olivares, did not. Cabala (ed. 1691) p. 188. [9] _Hecho de los Tratados_. Camden Society. [10] Carey, Earl of Monmouth, _Guerre d' Italia_. [11] Lord Bristol's diary, MS. in the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh, gives a minute account of the Prince's movements from day to day. [12] Soto y Aguilar gives a glowing and pompous account of this festivity, which, according to him, was a cane tournament and competition of horsemanship got up in honour of Charles by the Admiral of Castile. Charles is described as being dressed in black satin, with the blue ribbon and jewel of the Garter on his breast, the simplicity of his garb being praised as being very distinguished in appearance, as it may well have been amidst so gorgeous a crowd as that described by Soto. It should be noted, however, that Philip himself rarely dressed in bright colours, though his red doublet in the Dulwich College picture is splendid enough, his favourite colour being brown with steel or silver trimmings. On this occasion he is described as being dressed in this way, with a chain consisting of four linked jewelled crowns on his breast. [13] _Familiar Letters_. Several references are made in Spanish documents of Archy's insolence whilst in Madrid, though that was no new thing in Philip's Court, where the buffoons were numerous. [14] Writing on the 17th March, he says: "I send you also your robes of the order, which you must not forget to wear upon St. George's day, and dine together in them if they come in time, which I pray God they may, for it will be a goodly sight for the Spaniards to see my two boys dine in them. I send you also the jewels I promised; some of mine, and such of yours, I mean both of you, as are worthy of sending. For my Baby's presenting to his mistress, I send him an old double cross of Lorraine, not so rich as ancient, and yet not contemptible for the value, a good looking-glass with my picture in it to be hung at her girdle, which ye must tell her ye have caused it so to be enchanted by art magic as whensoever she shall be pleased to look in it she shall see the fairest lady that either her brother's or your father's dominions can afford. Ye shall present her with two long fair diamonds set like an anchor, and a fair pendant diamond hanging to them; ye shall give her a goodly rope of pearls, ye shall give her a carcanet or collar, thirteen great ball rubies and thirteen knots or conques of pearls, and ye shall give her a head dressing of two-and-twenty great pear pearls; and ye shall give her three goodly peak pendants, diamonds whereof the biggest to be worn at a needle on the forehead and one in each ear. For my Baby's own wearing ye have two good jewels of your own, your round brooch of diamonds and your triangle diamond with the great round pearl, and I send ye for your wearing three bretheren that ye know full well, but newly set; the mirror of France, the fellow of the Portugal diamond, which I would wish you to wear alone in your hat with a little black feather. You have also good diamond buttons of your own to be set to a doublet or jerkin. As for your 'J,' it may serve as a present for a Don. As for thee, my sweet Gossip, I send thee a fair table diamond, which I would once have given thee before if thou would'st have taken it for wearing in thy hat or where thou pleases; and if my Baby will spare thee two long diamonds in form of an anchor it were fit for an Admiral to wear." After minute instructions as to how Charles is to give his presents to the Infanta, the King continues: "I have also sent four other crosses of meaner value, with a great pointed diamond in a ring, which will save charges in presents to Dons, according to quality; but I will send with the fleet divers other jewels for presents." Hardwicke, _State Papers_. [15] _Familiar Letters_. [16] Gondomar was specially obnoxious to the London prentices, who attacked him in his carriage on more than one occasion. [17] News-letter from London. [18] Hardwicke, _State Papers_. [19] Full details of the discussion from day to day are in _El Hecho de los Tratados_, etc. Camden Society. [20] Hardwicke, State Papers. [21] _Hecho de los Tratados_. Camden Society. [22] Hardwicke, _State Papers_. [23] Hardwicke, _State Papers_. [24] The meaning of this somewhat obscure passage, appears to be that if King James made public the conditions to which he was to pledge himself the opposition in England might prevent the measures promised from being carried out, in which case the disappointment in Spain would be redoubled. [25] Secretary Conway to Buckingham. Hardwicke, _State Papers_. Conway says concerning this: "The acts of favour are gone for the King's signature, which, known, will create cold sweat and fear until the return of his Highness." [26] Soto y Aguilar MS. [27] One of these, a cane tourney, is fully described in a Spanish account translated in Somers' Tracts. Philip was always a lover of this showy diversion, in which bodies of gaily clad horsemen manoeuvred in opposing squadrons, throwing small cane javelins at each other, the skilful horsemanship being the criterion of excellence. After the usual parade through the gaily decked streets, in which Philip and Charles rode side by side, the King went to the palace of the Countess de Miranda to change his dress and prepare for the evolutions. The palace was splendidly fitted up with white damask for his reception; the halls being artificially cooled and perfumed. His hostess received him in state at the door, and served him with a refection, "consisting of all manner of conserves, dried suckets and rosewater confections of eight different sorts." Philip, by the way, was a great lover of sweetmeats. [28] _Hecho de los Tratados_. [29] They are all described, _ad nauseam_, in the Soto y Aguilar MS. [30] The Nuncio sent the same night a special messenger to the nun, directing her how she was to endeavour to do the great service to the Catholic Church. [31] These jewels were afterwards returned when the match was abandoned. [32] Lord Bristol's remonstrance to the Prince on this disingenuous proceeding is in Cabala, p. 101. [33] Buckingham, in his haughty letter of rebuke to Aston (Cabala, 120), says that Charles wrote to Aston from Santander to the effect that he would never marry the Infanta unless good conditions were agreed to with regard to the Palatinate. Aston's letters from Madrid are in Cabala. [34] I'll bring all things with me you have desired except the Infanta, which hath almost broken my heart, because your, your son's, and the nation's honour is touched by the miss of it. Hardwicke, _State Papers_. {127} CHAPTER IV FOREIGN WAR RENDERED INEVITABLE BY OLIVARES' POLICY--ITS EFFECT IN SPAIN--CONDITION OF THE COURT--WASTE, IDLENESS, AND OSTENTATION OF ALL CLASSES--EXTRAVAGANCE IN DRESS--PHILIP'S EFFORTS TO REFORM MANNERS--RETRENCHMENT IN HIS HOUSEHOLD--THE SUMPTUARY ENACTMENTS--THE _GOLILLA_--THE INDUSTRY OF OLIVARES--HIS CHARACTER AND APPEARANCE--HIS MAIN OBJECT TO SECURE POLITICAL AND FISCAL UNITY IN SPAIN--THE DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY OF THIS--THE COMEDIES--THEATRES IN MADRID--PHILIP'S LOVE FOR THE STAGE--AN AUTO-DE-FE--LORD WIMBLEDON'S ATTACK ON CADIZ--RICHELIEU'S LEAGUE AGAINST SPAIN--SPANISH SUCCESSES--"PHILIP THE GREAT"--VISIT OF THE KING TO ARAGON AND CATALONIA IN 1626--DISCONTENT AND DISSENSION--PHILIP'S LIFE TRAGEDY The policy of Olivares, which had estranged England and revived the haughty old claims of Spain to dictate to Europe, had already begun to produce widespread effects. France, no longer under the papal Italian rule of the Queen-mother, but in the firm hands of Richelieu, could not be expected to submit to such claims now; and during 1624 Europe once more divided itself into two camps, one to assert and the other to dispute the {128} supremacy of the house of Austria under the hegemony of Spain. Richelieu did not believe in beginning the game until he held all the cards in his hands, and delayed an open declaration of war until he could join with him in a league against Spain, the United Provinces, and Savoy, and had bought at least the neutrality if not the active aid of England. [Sidenote: A corrupt capital] In the meanwhile we will glance at the effects which had been produced in Spain, and particularly in the Court, by the joint action of the young King and his mentor, the Count-Duke. The ruin and disappearance of the greedy crew that had followed Lerma and his family, and the accession of a promising youth like Philip IV. to the throne, had filled the lieges with the belief that, as if by a fairy wand, all Spain's troubles would cease and national power and general prosperity would flood the long-suffering land with joy. The happy dream was of short duration, for the ills were too deep seated to be quickly cured, if even wise measures had been adopted. But the reforms of Olivares had been merely of a palliative character, leaving the system and incidence of taxation radically bad. Whilst rigid investigation of past peculations was effected, whilst the squandering of the royal resources in grants was limited, and economy severely enjoined in the expenditure of private citizens, the most lavish waste was perpetrated in other directions; and this, with the cost incurred by a forward foreign policy, had, in the three years that succeeded the accession of Philip, again brought affairs to a crisis, in which the national penury was the conspicuous fact. {129} As soon as the echoes had died away of the festivals that had been organised to dazzle the English Prince, the discontent of the people began to find voice amongst those whose mordant speech and fluent pen were so eager always to seize upon a pretext for the exercise of their powers. Quevedo, the greatest wit of his time, who had once more been recalled from the exile into which his biting satire so often cast him,[1] and was the idol both of the quidnuncs of Liars' Walk and of the dilettante nobles of the Court, launched his darts against the grumblers, and told Spaniards boldly that the continued misery was the fault of the degenerate race of his countrymen, "the well perfumed but ill conducted hosts" who impatiently resisted or evaded the decrees of those who endeavoured to mend matters. The decrees, it is true, were from their intricacy and their thoroughness not easy to follow, for they sought to revolutionise the customs and ways of life rendered familiar by almost immemorial usage. The evils to be cured had been patent to all, but the remedies were too sudden and too drastic to be effectual. When Philip had first come to the throne, and the new broom was to be wielded, the reforming member of the Cortes, Lison y Biedma, had told the King[2]-- "Your subjects spend and waste great sums in the abuse of costly garb, with so many varieties of trimmings that the making costs more than the {130} stuff; and as soon as the clothes are made there is a change of fashion and the money has to be spent over again. When they marry the wealth they squander on dress alone ruins them, and they remain in debt for the rest of their lives; ... such is the excess that the wife of an artisan nowadays needs as much finery as a lady, even though she have to get money for it by dishonest means and to the offence of God.... As for collars and ruffs, the disorder in their use is very scandalous. A single ruff of linen with its making and ravelling will cost over 200 reals, and six reals every time it is dressed, which at the end of the year doubles its cost, and much money is thus wasted. Besides, many strong, able young men are employed in dressing and goffering these extravagant things, who might be better employed in work necessary for the commonwealth or in tilling the ground. The servants, too, have to be paid higher wages in consequence of the money they spend in wearing these collars, which indeed consumes most of what they earn; and a great quantity of wheat is wasted in starch which is sorely wanted for food. The fine linens to make these collars have, moreover, to be brought from abroad, and money has to be sent out of the country to pay for them. With respect to coaches, great evil is caused and offence given to God, seeing the disquiet they bring to women who own them; for they never stay at home, but leave their children and servants to run riot, with the evil example of the mistress being always gadding abroad. The art of horsemanship is dying out, and those who ought to be mounted crowd, six or eight of them together, {131} in a coach, talking to wenches rather than learning how to ride. Very different gentlemen, indeed, will they grow up who have all their youth been lolling about in coaches instead of riding." And so on, almost every item of the daily life of Madrid is shown by the writers of the day to be vicious, wasteful, and corrupt. Idlers crowd in the monasteries, and hosts of other idlers, sham students, poetasters, bullies, and beggars, depend for their daily sustenance upon the garlic soup and crusts which are doled out at the gates from the superfluity of the friars; and servants, with or without wages, but living slothfully upon their patron's food in tawdry finery and squalid plenty, pester the noble houses from stable court to roof.[3] Philip and Olivares in the early days did not lack courage, and they came out with a decree so drastic to restrict the wearing of rich clothes, the abuse of ornament, and the possession of rich furniture, the use of trimmings, bullion, silks, velvets, embroideries, and fringes, and to limit the employment of silver and gold plate for household use,[4] as to be quite inoperative; besides which, almost as soon as the decree was promulgated the visit of Charles Stuart caused its suspension. The number of servants to be kept was rigidly restricted, the use of coaches was only to be allowed to people of a certain rank, women were forbidden to drive up and down unattended by father or {132} husband, and, what caused more gibes than anything else, the houses of ill fame, of which, in the alleys leading out of the Calle Mayor, there was an enormous number, were ordered to be closed. Above all, the most severe orders were given against the wearing of ruffs and the using of starch for any purpose. Pillory, confiscation, and exile were to be the fate of any person who wore any pleated or goffered linen in any shape, and the broad, flat Walloon collar, which fell upon the shoulders, alone was to be allowed. Alguacils were provided with shears, and at a given signal raided the fashionable promenades, cutting the fine lace ruffs which the fops still insisted upon wearing, seizing and burning the stocks of them in the shops, lopping hat-brims to the requisite narrowness, confiscating jewels, and even snipping off the lovelocks before the ears which were the mark of the exquisite. The ladies, too, were no better treated, and many a brazen-faced madam was hauled out of her trundling coach and put to shame, or had portions of her forbidden finery profaned by the coarse hands of catchpoles. The Calle Mayor and the Prado were up in arms at such sacrilege, and bewailed the time when, the stern pragmatics notwithstanding, each hidalgo and his dame who could get money or credit dressed as splendidly as they liked. The worst of it was, that except the time when all the Court was ablaze with the welcome to its English visitor, the King, for the first time, followed his own pragmatics. Philip, like his grandfather, disliked gorgeous attire for himself; though, when the dignity of his position demanded it, he could be refulgent. He was, moreover, {133} sincerely desirous of remedying the terrible penury that existed everywhere. He had been told by his advisers that one of the ways to do this was to limit personal expenditure, in order that there might be more money for the State to spend, and he endeavoured in his own person to set the example of economy. [Sidenote: Philip's reforms] Philip has left a document in his own hand,[5] setting forth the reforms he introduced in the service of his own palace (February 1624). It is addressed to the master of the household, the Duke of Infantado, and although far too long to reproduce entire here, some few passages of it may be quoted, as showing that, severe as the cutting down might be, the royal household was still much larger than would now be considered necessary for a monarch.[6] The distressed condition of the public revenues, says the King, the many calls upon it, the end of the truce with the Dutch, and Spain's many foes on sea and land, make it imperative to cut down every unnecessary expense. A beginning is to be made in the salary of the master of the household himself, all _future_ holders of the office to receive a million maravedis less salary (_i.e._ £330 less), but to retain all the perquisites of the office. Only the four senior stewards are in future to be paid, the rest to serve without payment, but to retain their rations, with some small reductions, namely, the dish of chicken custard or rice is to be suppressed, and the {134} allowance of twenty pounds of ice hitherto given to each steward daily to be stopped. The number of "gentlemen of the mouth" is in future to be restricted to fifty, the gentlemen of the chambers to forty, who are not to have more than two lacqueys each. The pages in future are to be only twenty-four. The numbers of officials of the bakery, fruitery, cellar, spicery, chandlery, and butchery are all reduced to what still seems an extravagant personnel according to modern ideas, and the old scandal of the enormous "rations" drawn (and in many cases sold) by all the palace officials is once more attacked. For instance, the perquisite of sixty wax torches taken by the chief gentlemen of the bed-chamber is abolished; and only eight sets of rations are to be served to the gentlemen of the bed-chamber, whilst the chief groom of the bed-chamber is in future to go without his fifty reals a month in lieu of salads, and his jam on fast days. The controller of the household will no longer be entitled to fresh meat, pastry, bacon, chicken custard, salad and jams, and will have to content himself in future whilst on a journey with two dishes of roast meat and one dish of boiled, and two dishes for supper,--"and he must not take anything out of the store." [Sidenote: Philip's household economies] Through every branch of the household this process of reduction was decreed by Philip, and even the pay of the guards was rigidly cut down. The members of the Spanish guard had recently had their pay doubled to 200 ducats a month, and now found themselves reduced to their former pay of 100. The King, by these reforms, decreed that a saving of 67,300 ducats a year was to {135} be effected. In another manuscript of the King's,[7] in which a year or two afterwards he recapitulates his personal efforts to remedy the evils of his country, he refers particularly to the sacrifices he made in his household for the commonweal at this time. "I have twice reformed my household," he says, "and although my servants may be more numerous than before, I have had no other money to pay them with than honours, and they have received no pecuniary pay. As for my personal expenses, the moderation of my dress and my rare feasts prove how modest it is, and I spend no money voluntarily on myself, for I try to give my vassals an example to avoid vain ostentation. So I have reconciled myself to ask for nothing for my own person, but only the indispensable funds for the defence of my realm and the Catholic faith. I want no more, not a maravedi, from my vassals, and I charge you (the Council of Castile) on your conscience to let me know if anything is being spent beyond this." Philip spoke truly and from his heart when he expressed his desire to avoid as much as possible the oppression of his subjects, but the science of political economy had not yet been born, and neither he nor his advisers could see that a system of taxation that largely consisted of a crushing fine upon every sale of commodities and food stopped production and trade, and tapped the stream of revenue before it had time to fructify the land. The money from the Indies, or what was left of it after the peculations of officers, all {136} drifted abroad immediately, mostly before landing, to pay for the loans raised on usurious interest, and in return for the articles of extravagance and luxury which were forbidden to be made in Spain, or of which the vicious taxation had killed the production. And so Philip, with the best of intentions, still, be it remembered, a mere boy of nineteen, was enclosed in the vicious circle which the impossible policy of saddling Spain with the defence and assertion of the Catholic faith throughout the world had imposed upon his doomed house. He might, and did, as I have just shown, do his best to economise for the supposed benefit of his people; but it was his people themselves who needed reforming. Whilst they complained that matters got no better, they shouted as loudly as ever that Spain must teach heretics their error at the point of the pike, and they themselves resisted and evaded by every means in their power the sumptuary and other measures intended for the general relief. That these sumptuary measures were to a great extent absurd, and the methods of enforcing them undignified and often ridiculous, is, of course, clear to us now; but the resistance to them was not founded on that ground, but because they went against the prevailing sentiment of the people, at least the people of the capital. The general pretentiousness, idleness, and love of luxury unearned by labour were, indeed, symptomatic of the natural decadence of society, produced by the unfounded inflation and unreal exaltation of the nation for the greater part of a century previously. The decay had gone too far now for any but a great governing genius to remedy it; {137} and Philip, though good hearted, well meaning, and not without ability, certainly was not that. The poison had to work itself out of the national system by slow and painful process, until the patient, exhausted but sound, could build up its strength again. Philip, throughout his life a brilliant idler with good heart and a tender conscience, was condemned to witness the progress of the disease without being able to understand or remedy it; and to watch at the same time with failing heart the parallel decline and threatened extinction of his own historic house. Whilst the male, and especially the female, swaggerers of the Calle Mayor gave grudging and evasive obedience to the royal pragmatics against extravagance in most respects, there was one enactment of Philip's which, though at first resisted more sulkily than any of them, gave rise at length to a new fashion, which was seized upon by the whole of Spain with avidity, and became for the rest of the century--seventy-five years--the most entirely characteristic article of Spanish male dress. The ruffs under Philip III. had become enormous, and the costly lace edging and elaborate devices for keeping the frills stiff had made them, perhaps, the most extravagant articles of dress ever generally and diurnally worn in any country. Many attempts had been made to suppress them before Philip and Olivares tried their hands, but all had failed. The alternative collar decreed by Philip's pragmatics was either a plain linen band or the flat Walloon collar falling on the shoulders. The former of these was rejected utterly by people who aspired to be well dressed, as being mean {138} and lacking in distinction after the spreading splendour of the "lettuce frill" ruff. The Walloon collar, unstarched, soon got wrinkled, creased, and soiled; and moreover, it had become to a great extent identified with the "heretic" Hollanders and unpopular Flemings, so that Madrid never looked upon it with favour, though the King wore it after his first pragmatic. The problem was to find a new collar which should be dignified and stiff without the forbidden starch, "or other alchemy," as the pragmatics said; should present the light contrast becoming to swarthy faces, without employing the fine foreign lawn and lace which the royal decree made illegal, and should render unnecessary the puritanical wrinkled Walloon. [Sidenote: The _golilla_] An ingenious tailor in the Calle Mayor, early in 1623, submitted to the King and to his brother Carlos a new device, consisting of a high spreading collar of cardboard, covered with white or grey silk on its inner surface, and on the outside with dark cloth to match the doublet. By means of heated iron rollers and shellac the cardboard shape was permanently moulded into a graceful curve which bent outwards at the height of the chin, presenting in juxtaposition with the face the surface of light coloured silk.[8] Philip was pleased with the novelty, which was distinctly more "dressy" than the Walloon, and had none of the objections of the ruff, and ordered some to be made for his brother Carlos and himself. The tailor, in {139} high glee, went home to his shop to make them. But, alas! the pragmatics had forbidden "any sort of alchemy" to make collars stiff, and, moreover, the Inquisition was soon told by its spies that some secret incantations, needing the use of mysterious smoking pots and heated machines turned by handles, were being performed by the tailor in the Calle Mayor. This was suspicious, and smelt of the Evil One; and soon the poor tailor and his uncanny instruments were haled before the dread tribunal on suspicion of witchcraft and sorcery. It could not make much of the tools, but as, in any case, the collars were lined with silk, and that was against the pragmatic, the poor tailor's stock and instruments were ordered to be publicly burnt before his door. The tailor, in trouble, went to Olivares, who was furious at the King's collars being burnt, and he and the Duke of Infantado sent for the president of the Inquisition Council, and rated him soundly. The president declared that he knew not that the strange things were for his Majesty; but pointed out how dangerously new they were in shape, how mysteriously stiffened, and how they sinned against the pragmatic. But he was soon silenced by the Count-Duke, who told him they were the best and most economical neck-gear ever invented, as they needed no washing or starching, and would last for a year without further expense. Philip[9] and Carlos, with many of the courtiers, wore the new _Golilla_ for the first time during the visit of {140} the Prince of Wales, and the fashion caught the popular taste. Thenceforward all Spain, Spanish Italy, and South America wore golillas, the curve, size, and shape changing somewhat as other fashions changed, but the principle remained the same, until Spain was born again and a French King banned the golilla as barbarous, and imposed upon his new subjects the falling lace cravat and jabot of the eighteenth century. Though the satirists and poetasters might gibe anonymously at the small remedial effect that followed the well-meant measures of the King and his "bogey," as they called Olivares, and might whisper spitefully, as they did, that the latter purposely kept Philip absorbed in frivolous pursuits, the better to be able to rule unchecked himself, the favourite went on his way sternly and forcefully, pushing aside roughly those who stood in nis path, and behaving none too generously to those who aided him. He gave up none of the duties of personal attendance upon the King, although now the whole of the details of every department of State passed through his hands. The jealous courtiers, whose perquisites he had curtailed, sneered beneath their breath at him for coming into the King's room hung all round with packets of paper, with similar packets stuck in sheafs under the band of his hat, and bulging from his pockets, the very way, they said, to disgust with affairs a youth already disinclined for business and constitutionally idle. [Sidenote: The policy of Olivares] It is quite evident, however, that someone had to do the business of the State; and the numerous and very able State papers and memoranda of {141} advice from Olivares to Philip, still in existence,[10] show that every subject of importance was exhaustively explained to the King, naturally from Olivares' point of view, and that, if Philip left the executive power in the hands of the minister, it was not because he was kept in ignorance of the issues involved. Even thus early the main tendency of Olivares' policy was avowed to the King, a policy which was in its essence wise and statesmanlike, but impossible of expeditious consummation. The difficulty which faced Olivares had faced Ferdinand and Isabel and all subsequent Spanish sovereigns, namely, the want of political unity of the country. The "Catholic Kings" had attained a factitious homogeneity by promoting a common spiritual pride, which had given to Spain the temporary force, already well-nigh dead when Olivares took the reins. How could Spain face half Europe in arms, and force orthodoxy on unwilling princes and populations with the resources of ruined Castile alone? Aragonese and Catalans were rich, but held their purse-strings tight. Portugal, with its fine harbours and its rich Oriental trade, held stiffly to the constitution, to respect which Spanish kings had solemnly sworn, and not a ducat of taxes could be imposed upon it by the King of Spain without Portuguese consent, or for other than Portuguese purposes. [Sidenote: Olivares advocates unification] The expiry of the truce with the Hollanders, and the evident approach of war after the departure of Charles Stuart from Spain, made necessary the {142} raising of large funds somehow. It has been shown how terribly exhausted the national resources of the Castilian realms were; and the poverty of the country had wrung a cry from the Cortes of Castile, which met late in 1623 to vote new supplies for three years. They could not vote, nor could Castile pay, more than the usual amount, which for the needs of a new war, in addition to the resumed struggle with Holland, was quite insufficient. It would be necessary, therefore, for Philip soon to go and face the independent Parliaments of Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia; and, whilst renewing and taking the usual oaths, beg for generosity from his eastern subjects. There is extant a paper,[11] bearing date of 1625, in which Olivares unfolds to Philip his ideas of the relations that ought to exist between the various dominions of which Spain consisted: the object in view, as he says, being to arrange that "in case any of the States was at war, the rest should be obliged to come to its aid and defence." He cites many examples, ancient and modern, of the need for national unity in the matter of finance and reciprocal obligation, and points out for the benefit of the outer realms of Spain that they can only expect to form a great Power by making such sacrifices for their King as other subjects are obliged to make. His idea, evidently, was to use the obligation of mutual defence as the first step to a complete political fusion of the crowns, and he tried to gild the pill by saying that each of the outer realms may now be considered feudatories of Castile, whereas if they were all united {143} each would be the head. There was, and is, no sentiment or tradition so strong in these regions, especially in Catalonia, as that of political independence of Castile, and any such argument as that of Olivares was bound to meet with stout resistance if he attempted to enforce it. The very rumour was sufficient, and even before the journey of Philip to the eastern realms was begun, in January 1626, ominous murmurs came that Castile might fight her own battles. The crowns of Aragon would provide money and men to defend themselves, and pay their stipulated tribute to their King on the ancient conditions; but that if an attempt was made to coerce any further payment trouble would ensue. How this threat was carried out to the bitter end the later pages of this book will tell; but before we accompany Philip and his mentor on their first regal visit to the stubborn realms of the east, the further progress of events in the capital must be told. Philip's routine of life had already become fixed, and for many years to come changed but little. Olivares, as before, was always the first to enter his room in the morning, and assisted him to rise, afterwards reciting to him the business of the day, to which, except in the short but frequent fits of penitence and remorse that throughout his life plagued him, it is to be feared the King paid but little attention. He rose early, and ate and drank very soberly, dining at about eleven in the morning after an early cup of chocolate, and performing his religious duties. Like all his house, he was a devoted lover of the chase, and the large preserves in the neighbourhood of all his palaces provided {144} him with ample sport; besides which, as will be described in a later chapter, he enjoyed frequent wild boar drives, in which his fine horsemanship was displayed with advantage. His dress was usually a close-fitting doublet of brown duffel with trunks to match, or on occasions of greater ceremony black silk or velvet with the thin chain and tiny badge of the Golden Fleece at the neck, but no other ornament. The golilla was almost invariably worn, his doublet being, for outdoor wear, surmounted by a serviceable long shoulder cape of similar dark colour. The galligaskins were full, and tied at the knee with ribbons, and confined at the waist by a leather belt, square-toed shoes with buckles, and stockings of lighter colour than the galligaskins, but not usually pure white, completed the leg coverings, except for hunting wear, when gaiters or boots to the knee were used. A broad-trimmed felt hat with a band, and sometimes a side feather, was his head-dress; and in the spring or autumn, when the cloak would have been too heavy, his outdoor garment over the close-fitting doublet was a _ropilla_ or outer jacket with false sleeves cut open and hanging from the shoulder. [Sidenote: Diversions of the court] Both Philip and his wife Isabel[12] were indefatigable in their pursuit of pleasure, in which their tastes agreed. The two main amusements were the theatre and the devotional celebrations in churches and monasteries; and the immense number of these in Madrid and the principal cities provided an endless choice of such festivities. The splendour and glitter which the sumptuary {145} decrees prohibited so sternly in secular life ran riot in the temples, and a generation forbidden to be extravagant in their own persons flocked to the garish festivities of the Church to find the sensuous enjoyment which the mere sight of richness gave them. No opportunity, indeed, was lost of getting up a religious show. Philip's second child[13] was born in November 1623,--the condition of the Queen at the time of Charles Stuart's departure having been the reason why Philip did not accompany his guest farther on his road to the coast. The infant Princess, Margarita Maria, only lived a month; but the ceremonial to celebrate her baptism reads like the relation of a fairy-tale.[14] [Illustration: PHILIP IV. AS A YOUNG MAN. _From a contemporary portrait in the possession of His Grace the Duke of Wellington at Strathfieldsaye._] In July of the next year, 1624, a splendid {146} opportunity for devotional display was provided by the action of a madman. The most crowded church in Madrid was that of the Augustinian Monastery of St. Philip, at the entrance to the Calle Mayor, upon whose steps and raised sidewalk the idlers and gossips of the Court met to whisper scandal and bandy satiric verse. Every morning from matins until the angelus bell tolled the hour of noon, when the soup and bread at the gates were doled to hungry authors, stranded poets, and idlers out of luck, Liars' Walk was full. But rarely had such a sensation of horror pervaded it as on the day just mentioned, when the congregation rushed in panic from the church, with cries of horror that a heretic had knelt before the high altar and had deliberately insulted the Holy Mystery there displayed.[15] Horror upon horrors! and in the Court of the Catholic King! For eight days the King and Queen, with all their Court in the deepest mourning, peregrinated the capital, visiting shrines and making propitiatory offerings. Every church in Madrid was draped in black, and processions, rogations, and public flagellations of devotees went on ceaselessly for a week, during the whole of which time "no stage plays were allowed, and public women were forbidden {147} to ply their trade." In the corridors of the palace itself separate altars were raised for every royal personage, and all the jewels that the crown of Spain could provide were piled upon them to appease the outraged divinity. [Sidenote: The Theatres of Madrid] The deprivation, even for a week, of the pleasures of the theatre must have been to the citizens of the Court a greater penance for the offence of the madman than any other; for Spain had literally gone crazy for the stage, and Philip and his wife led or followed the fashion eagerly. Actors, or histrions, as they were called, were popular heroes, and upon the Liars' Walk they swaggered and exchanged quips with the fecund poets who supplied them with lines of facile verse by the fathom.[16] There walked Quevedo, with his great tortoiseshell goggles and his sober black garb; there, observed of all observers, was the "phoenix of wits," the great Lope; there, Moreto and Calderon; and there also the rival comedians of the two theatres, the Corral de la Pacheca and the Teatro de la Cruz, twisted moustachios of defiance at one another, and talked of the King's compliments at their last appearance in the palace. The two theatres of the capital consisted of large courtyards enclosed by houses, which were usually held by the owners of the theatres.[17] A raised stage at the farther end, with tiled eaves {148} and a curtain, was faced by a number of benches protected from sun and rain by an awning. In these seats men alone were allowed to sit, whilst in the open uncovered space behind them other men, who had paid a smaller sum, witnessed the show standing. On the left hand on the ground level was a sort of enclosed gallery called the _cazuela_, the stew-pan, where the women were accommodated; and, as upon the English stage at the time, some of the more privileged of the gallants were allowed to be seated on stools upon the stage itself. In the closely grated windows of the houses surrounding the courtyard the aristocracy saw the play and the audience without being seen; and as these windows corresponded with rooms (_aposentos_) in different houses with separate entrances, but yet in most cases of easy access to the stage, infinite opportunities for intrigue were provided. So scandalous did this state of affairs become at a somewhat later period, that murderous affrays even between the highest nobles of Spain on the subject of the actresses were of frequent occurrence.[18] Philip, by the Court etiquette, was not supposed to go to public theatres, and had {149} a regular stage erected in the Alcazar and other palaces, where comedies were performed twice a week; but, in fact, he was a constant visitor to both the public theatres, going, of course, incognito, and often masked, as was the fashion of the time. There he would sit in one of the private rooms, unseen behind a heavily grated window, but vigilant for any new beauty who appeared on the stage or in the cazuela.[19] Sometimes, too, the Queen would go with similar precautions, and it is to be feared, from the stories of eye-witnesses, that her tastes were, at all events in these joyful early years of her life, not too refined. Not only was she an ardent lover of the bull-fight, but she would in the palace or public theatres countenance amusements which would now be considered coarse. Quarrels and fights between country wenches would be incited for her to witness unsuspected; nocturnal tumults would be provoked for her amusement in the gardens of Aranjuez or other palaces; and it is related that, when she was in one of the grated _aposentos_ of a public theatre, snakes or noxious reptiles would be secretly let loose upon the floor or in the _cazuela_, to the confusion and alarm of the spectators, whilst the gay red-cheeked young {150} Queen would almost laugh herself into fits to see the stampede. [Sidenote: An _auto-de-fé_] Nor were bull-fights, comedies, equestrian shows and church spectacles the only amusements of a Court which actually lived for idle pleasures. There was another in which poignancy of excitement and devotion of the peculiar Spanish sort were equally blended; and, though not so frequent as the other diversions, was still more popular. These were the _autos-de-fe_. Heretics of the Protestant kind there were now practically none to burn; but sorcery, impiety, and above all Judaism, or the suspicion of it, provided enough victims to furnish forth an occasional public holiday. The description of one such ceremonial at this period will suffice.[20] It was not long after the mad French pedlar had outraged the religious proprieties in the Church of St. Philip, when the branch of the Inquisition at Madrid received advice from one of its ubiquitous familiars that certain persons, believed to be of Jewish origin, were in the habit of meeting at the house of a certain Licentiate in the Calle de las Infantas, where, amongst other impious rites, they flogged and maltreated a wooden crucifix. Before many hours had passed, the whole of the accused and their friends were in the dungeons of the Inquisition; and, as a warning to other backsliders, it was determined to hold a solemn public ceremonial judgment of the offenders in the Plaza Mayor of Madrid on Sunday, 4th July 1624. The municipality provided the stands and {151} decorations of the great square, with a splendidly adorned balcony for the King and Queen, six other balconies being reserved for the ladies in attendance, with nine balconies for gentlemen of the palace party; a vast concourse of citizens filling the public space, and the hundreds of balconies looking down upon the square. An immense staging was erected facing the royal balcony, upon which, in their state robes, were to be seated the Town Council of Madrid, the Inquisition of Toledo, the Supreme Tribunal, all the Royal Councils and other official bodies. The ceremonies began on the evening before the great day. At five o'clock on Saturday afternoon, a solemn procession left the Convent of Doña Maria de Aragon,[21] near the palace, carrying the gigantic green cross which upon these occasions held the place of honour. The standard was borne by the first official noble in the land, the Constable of Castile, whilst the Admiral of Castile carried the tassels of the sacred banner. Then, amidst a crowd of priests with flaring waxen tapers, came the white cross in the hands of the representative of Toledo, followed by the green cross itself, in the hands of the prior of St. Thomas. Torch-bearers and faggot-bearers came after, many scores of them, and the procession closed by long lines of friars bearing tapers from every monastery in Madrid. At seven o'clock the next morning the King and Queen left the palace in their coach, followed by the whole Court; and when the royal party had seated themselves in their gay bedizened balconies, the long procession of the Inquisition, {152} with swaying censers, flaming tapers, and propitiatory dirges, wound into the plaza under the archway from the Calle Mayor. First came the alguaciles of the municipality and the town officials, then the alguaciles of the Court and the officers of the Royal Council; seventy hooded familiars of the dread tribunal with their big crosses upon their sombre garb, followed with the crowd of consultants, notaries, and prosecutors of the Holy Office. After them walked the municipality of Madrid, then the Chief Constable of the Inquisition alone, followed by the fiscal of the Inquisition of Toledo bearing the banner of the Holy Office, whose tassels were held by fiscals of Castile. The Inquisition of Toledo came next, and then the Supreme Council of the Inquisition itself, the last and most important member being Cardinal Zapata, the Inquisitor-General. When all had taken their places, the Cardinal, as usual, ascended to the royal balcony and administered to the King the oath to keep inviolate the purity of the Church at any cost, an oath afterwards repeated by the members of the tribunal itself and the Councils. Upon a lower staging before the official platform were grouped the forty wretched creatures in their flaming tabards of shame, whose offence this pompous show was to punish. An interminable sermon was preached by the King's confessor, Sotomayor, exhorting the accused to repent and the faithful to increased zeal in the extermination of the enemies of the holy faith; and then the dread sentences were read out by the relator. Seven of the accused were condemned to be burned alive that night {153} outside the gate of the city, and four more were to be executed in effigy, whilst their bodies rotted for life in the secret dungeons of the Holy Office; the rest being sent back to their prison, probably never again to see the light of day, and to suffer unrecorded tortures until death should release them. The house where the offence was said to have been committed was doomed to be swept utterly from the face of the earth, and a church and monastery dedicated to Christ crucified erected in its place.[22] By the time the condemned were led away it was three o'clock in the afternoon; and whilst the wretched prisoners in their _sambenitos_, amidst the curses and insults of the crowd, went to their doom, the smart company of courtiers, together with King Philip and his wife, returned to their respective homes and their much-needed repast, doubtless in an exceedingly self-approving and pharisaical mood.[23] Whilst the King and his people were thus absorbed in the pursuit of demoralising pleasures, and loudly proclaiming to Europe that Spain had abandoned none of its past pretensions, the European league against her had been fully organised. It had been clear to Richelieu from the beginning of Philip's reign, that unless France struck boldly and promptly she would be in danger of finding herself once more shut in by the House of Austria, more solid than ever now that Olivares was determined to aid the Emperor to keep the {154} Palatinate, and the blood and treasure of Castile were again to be squandered in fighting heresy abroad. Spinola, victorious in Germany with Spanish troops, was seriously threatening the United Provinces, and Spain, in defiance of treaties, still held by force the Valtelline, which connected Lombardy with Tyrol. The Duke of Savoy, ambitious and discontented with his Spanish kinsman, tired of the rôle of catspaw to which he was condemned, and greedy to seize Lombardy and Genoa, readily listened to Richelieu's approaches; and England, still smarting under the humiliation she had suffered from Olivares, did the same, whilst the United Provinces, already at war with Spain, willingly joined the enemies of her enemy. Europe found itself for a short time again thus divided in its old way: France, Savoy, and the Protestant Powers being on one side; whilst the House of Austria in Germany and Spain, with the Italian principalities, were on the other. The first object of Richelieu was to break the territorial circle by ousting the Spaniards from the Valtelline, which he invaded with French and Swiss troops in 1625. Then followed the ignominious attack upon Cadiz by the English fleet under Sir Edward Cecil (Lord Wimbledon) in October of the same year,[24] and Spain thus found herself at war with half Europe. [Sidenote: War with France] Poor and exhausted as we have seen that the country was, the labours of Olivares had not been quite without result, and with great effort funds were raised to present a front to the enemies of {155} the faith worthy of Spanish traditions. The Queen offered her personal jewels to fight her own countrymen, the French; the nobles contributed a million ducats in cash from their ill-gotten hoards; the pulpits and altars of Spain and the Indies rang with priestly exhortations to sacrifice for the faith; and the clergy itself undertook to maintain twenty thousand troops during the war. The property of all French subjects in Spain was confiscated, and for once the energy of Olivares was felt in all branches of the Spanish service. It was as if the old times of Philip II. had returned. Feria and Spinola, the one on land, the other at sea, forced the French to abandon their conquests in the Valtelline and Genoa. Spain, in a fever of pride and jubilation, hailed the young King, who personally had done nothing and had never left Madrid, as "Philip the Great," and Olivares caused the title to be officially accorded to his young master. But after a time the diplomacy of the Spanish Queen of France and Olivares did more to end the war than the skill of the generals. Richelieu was a cardinal of the Church, and could not entirely ignore the remonstrances of the Pope, prompted by Olivares, against his making common cause with heretics to fight the orthodox Catholic Power; and a treaty between France and Spain was patched up in January 1626 with regard to the Valtelline, where the Catholics were to enjoy full liberty of conscience on payment of a tribute to the Protestant Grisons. But in Germany the war, now mainly a religious one, went on, the arms of the Emperor being to a great extent successful, thanks to {156} the genius of Tilly and the ample aid in men and money poured into mid-Europe by Spain. Spanish resources, too, were plentifully sent to the Infanta Archduchess to carry on the eternal war with the Dutch, who were, as of yore, upheld by their brother Protestants in England and France. Once more the Dutch privateers harried Spanish commerce, and again all traffic between Holland and Spain was prohibited, to Spain's detriment. But the new-born spurt of energy favoured Spanish arms even here; for Don Fadrique de Toledo destroyed the Dutch fleet off Gibraltar, and Spinola at last, after a siege of ten months, captured Breda. To complete the picture of Spain's unwonted success, the Dutch were expelled from Guayaquil in South America and from Puerto Rico in the West Indies, and the Moorish pirates who had harried the Mediterranean, and even the Spanish coasts, for years, were crushed by Philip's galleys. [Sidenote: "Philip the Great"] The pride and jubilation in Spain passed all bounds, and Philip himself, in a recapitulation of the situation made to the Council of Castile,[25] sets forth in words of proud satisfaction the rise in the national prestige that had followed his accession. It is significant, however, that the occasion that gave rise to this document, congratulatory and exculpatory at the same time, was the absolute destitution of the country as a consequence of the expense caused by the renewal of the war of which they were all so proud. "Our prestige," says the King, "has been {157} immensely improved. We have had all Europe against us, but we have not been defeated, nor have our allies lost, whilst our enemies (_i.e._ the French) have sued me for peace. Last year, 1625, we had nearly 300,000 infantry and cavalry in our pay, and over 500,000 men of the militia under arms, whilst the fortresses of Spain are being put into a thorough state of defence. The fleet, which consisted of only seven vessels on my accession, rose at one time in 1625 to 108 ships of war at sea, without counting the vessels at Flanders, and the crews are the most skilful mariners this realm ever possessed. Thank God, our enemies have never captured one of my ships, except a solitary hulk. So it may truly be said that we have recovered our prestige at sea; and fortunately so, for, lacking our sea power, we should lose not only all the realms we possess, but religion even in Madrid itself would be ruined, and this is the principal point to be considered. This very year of 1626 we have had two royal armies in Flanders and one in the Palatinate, and yet all the power of France, England, Sweden, Venice, Savoy, Denmark, Holland, Brandenberg, Saxony, and Weimer could not save Breda from our victorious arms." In a similar gratulatory spirit the young King reviews the wars in which Spain has held her own in the Grisons, Venetian territory, France, and Genoa. "We have," he continues, "held our own against England, both with regard to the marriage and at Cadiz; and yet, with all this universal conspiracy against us, I have not depleted my {158} patrimony by 50,000 ducats. It would be impossible to believe this if I did not see it with my own eyes, and that my own realms are all quiet and religious. I have written this paper to you to show you (_i.e._ the Council of Castile, the supreme administrative, judicial, and financial authority in Spain) that I have done my part, and have put my own shoulder to the wheel without sparing sacrifice. I have spent nothing unnecessary upon myself, and I have made Spain and myself respected by my enemies." The political blindness that afflicted Philip in common with other Spaniards of the day, is strikingly exhibited in this paper. The liberty or supremacy of the Valtelline Catholics mattered not one jot to Spain. The religious fate of Bohemia and the Palatinate was equally foreign to purely Spanish interests, whilst it must have been patent to all the world that a recognition of the inevitable independence of Protestant Holland, which it was clear now Spain could never prevent, would have resulted in a perfectly honourable peace in that direction, and would have freed Spain from the drain which was exhausting her. And yet there is in the document just quoted, and in scores of others of the period emanating from Philip or his ministers, not one word to indicate any idea that it was unwise or unstatesmanlike to lead suffering Spain to utter ruin for the sake of championing the Catholic faith, and all the causes masquerading under its name, in any part of Europe. [Sidenote: Philip's appeal to Aragon] But though Philip and his Castilian subjects were blinded to political expediency by what they {159} proudly considered their religious privilege and duty, the subjects of his eastern realms, hardheaded men of other racial origins and political traditions, had no notion of allowing themselves to be ruined for a sentimental idea, however grandiose. When the King had asked the Aragonese Cortes for the usual grant in 1624, he was told that he must first present himself before the Aragonese Parliaments (Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia) to take the usual oath to respect their constitutions, before they could make a grant; and as they stiffly held to the principle, which the Castilian Parliament had lost, of "redress before supply," they could vote nothing until their legislative demands were satisfied. The anger of Olivares at such a reply may be guessed by the tenour of the document of his quoted on page 142, but there was no help for it, and Philip with as good a grace as he might promised to visit his eastern subjects, perfectly well aware that his progress was not likely to be a mere voyage of pleasure, as his trip to Andalucia had been a year previously. The disappointed courtier Novoa[26] gives an amusing account of the meeting of the Council of State which decided upon the King's voyage. He says that Olivares, "careful as usual of the unessential point and careless of what was most important," was determined to show off his oratory, and begged the King and his brothers to sit behind the grating in the council chamber, where unseen {160} they could watch the proceedings, in order to hear his speech. The wisest and oldest councillors in their speeches dwelt upon the gravity of the situation, and expressed hope that the alliance of their enemies would soon fall to pieces, and Lord Wimbledon's fleet be wrecked on its way home. [Illustration: GASPAR DE GUZMAN, COUNT-DUKE OF OLIVARES. _From a portrait by Velazquez in the possession of Edward Huth, Esq._] [Sidenote: The policy of Olivares] "Then came the Count's turn to speak. Settling himself firmly on his legs, and thrusting his crutch stick between his bald patch and his false hair, he made a longer pause than the occasion demanded, and said that there was no reason for alarm, nor to make so much of the power of many other potentates, for his Majesty was greater than all of them put together. Even if France, England, Venice, Holland, Savoy, Piedmont, Sweden and Denmark were to join together, none of them, and hardly the whole of them united, were so great as the realms under the dominion of King Philip. The realm of Castile, they all knew the greatness of, and so they did of Portugal, Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia, Sicily, Navarre, Naples, Milan, Flanders, the East Indies and the West and other islands, and great territories elsewhere. Well, then! if his Majesty alone had in various parts of the world greater possessions than many of the others together, why should we be so frightened of the power of many united?[27] Let his Majesty leave Castile, and as {161} Portugal is only one realm, Naples and Sicily, so far away and across the sea, let him go to Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia. Let him call their Cortes together, and ask them for supplies. Let him show them how many years Castile has borne the burden alone, and demand that these three realms shall do their part in providing men and money for his Majesty; and those who cannot go to the war themselves, let them provide capable and experienced men to replace them. By this means we shall be able to outweigh with our own forces the powers against us, without having to go and beg for help from foreign princes. Who doubts, he continued, that by this means we shall raise great armies and fleets to defend the country. We can then easily send the aid necessary to Italy, Flanders, and elsewhere, and to our own coasts, so that our enemies will all be in fear of us, and perhaps will desist from their evil intentions. This is what appears to me, in the present case, as being necessary to carry out the plans I have formed, which I cannot explain at this juncture, but by which I hope to render signal service to his Majesty." Novoa says that Olivares delivered an empty, pompous harangue for two hours, but that the above was the substance of his speech, and, after making due allowance for the narrator's bias against Olivares, it is evident that the speech as given represents fairly the policy by which Olivares stood and fell. It is difficult to understand how a clever man could be so blind as he appears to have been to facts that now seem so patent, namely, that the extent and scattered position of Spain's {162} vast territories were a source of weakness, rather than of the strength of which Olivares boasted so vainly; that Philip in resources was not more powerful than all the enemies together; and that France or England alone could raise from their own resources, homogeneous and commercially prosperous as they were, larger and steadier contributions than could disunited Spain, and especially ruined Castile; whilst the brave talk of demanding heavy grants of men and money from the eastern realms of Spain for foreign wars was very soon proved to be hollow. Olivares thought to bounce and bully Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, and later, Portugal, into stultifying their Parliaments and abandoning their constitutions as Castile had done, but he did not realise the fact that in adopting this policy _à outrance_ he was pitting himself against the most powerful sentiment in Spain, namely, local individuality; and it is not too much to say that all of Spain's internal troubles from the days of Olivares to the present have sprung from the attempts to override this sentiment. [Sidenote: Philip and the Aragonese] The Aragonese nobles were numerous and powerful, and the merchants and shipmen of Catalonia were immensely more wealthy than any others in Spain; and even before the King left Madrid it was evident that Olivares would have to face strenuous opposition. Power so absolute and so arrogant as his, so regardless of the feelings and the dignity of others, had already in the six years of his power raised up against him the bitter, if discreetly veiled, enmity of many of the older nobles, especially those of the outer realms, and the speech we have just quoted, shadowing {163} forth his policy in Aragon publicly--in addition to the document addressed to the King and quoted on page 142, gave the signal for the gradual drawing together of the elements against him. The King and his brother Carlos left Madrid on the 7th September 1625, attended by Olivares, his son-in-law, the Marquis of Heliche, the Admiral of Castile (the Duke of Medina de Rio Seco), the Marquis of Castel Rodrigo, and other nobles, but with much less state than usual and a smaller attendance, the plan being to travel rapidly, and "rush" the three Cortes into voting what was needed. But the Aragonese and the others were already full of suspicion. The three Cortes had been convened,--that of Aragon at Barbastro, that of Catalonia at Lerida, and that of Valencia at Monzon, a town outside the realm of Valencia. The Valencians had flared up at once, and had sent a deputation to Madrid to remonstrate with the King for thus disregarding their privileges. After several interviews with Olivares, who had treated them very off-handedly, the deputation waited upon him for a final interview the day before the King left Madrid. "Why should you put this slight upon us?" asked the Valencians. "You do not act thus with the Aragonese and Catalans." "Oh!" replied the Count-Duke, "we think you Valencians are softer." "If you mean," said the offended deputation, "that we are softer in giving way to the wishes of our King and his ministers, regardless of our rights, that seems to be a reason why you should grant our request instead of rejecting it." "Well," continued Olivares drily, "all I can say is, that the King is {164} going to Monzon; if the Valencian Cortes are assembled there when he arrives, well and good. If not, we shall have to take the course we think best." "Shall I write that to my principals?" said the spokesman. "You may do as you like," retorted the Count-Duke, as he called his page to show the deputation out.[28] Philip entered Zaragoza, the capital city of Aragon, on the 13th January 1626, and the official rejoicing of the citizens, though respectful, was marred by their discontent at the lack of the Court splendour they looked for; for the Aragonese, though dour, are loyal and love show. In the great cathedral on the banks of the Ebro, Philip swore upon the Gospels, held in the hand of the Chief Justice of the realm, never to impair the liberties of Aragon, and to the Cortes the King made a pitiable statement of the needs of his realm, and asked for 3330 armed soldiers for the war, and the right of freely enlisting 10,000 more to be drilled and kept ready in case of need. The Deputies said that such a vote was impossible, but offered instead to provide a million ducats, payable in ten annual instalments. Philip, with Olivares at his elbow, was angry and threatening; and at last in dudgeon he adjourned the Parliament to Calatayud, and hurried off to Barcelona. [Sidenote: Philip and the Valencians] But in the meanwhile a much more serious conflict had taken place between the King and the offended Cortes of Valencia at Monzon. There for weeks the King was kept waiting. The clergy and popular estates were bribed and frightened {165} into promising to vote the amount demanded; but, deaf to the King's anger and the violent threats of Olivares, the landed gentlemen's estate obstinately stood out. The expulsion of the Moriscos, their best tenants, they said, had ruined them, and they could not pay. Philip, in a formal document, almost raved at their obstinacy, and on one occasion said that there could not have been loyal gentlemen amongst them, or they would have stabbed a particularly bold speaker who advocated resistance. It was necessary that the three estates should vote together, and that the decision should be unanimous; and at length, in the face of open threats, the vote was cast as the King demanded, with the exception that one member, Don Francisco Millan, obstinately held out. He ought to be garroted, said one of Philip's secretaries, and at the alarmed persuasion of his colleagues he gave way. But then other difficulties were raised. The estates could not agree amongst themselves as to their shares of the vote, but after much wrangling promised to contribute in material, but not in money, one half as much as the Aragonese paid. This did not suit Philip, and fresh trouble, more acute than ever, arose. The Cortes asked the King to stay in Monzon twelve days more, whilst the Cortes remained in legislative session; to which request the King replied by a haughty intimation that he should leave next day, and that the matter of the vote of supply must be settled within half an hour, which, taking out his watch, he told the deputation had already begun. This message fell like a thunderbolt upon the Cortes, which had not yet even discussed any legislation. Some were for {166} defiance, and an immediate dissolution of the assembly without voting or discussion on any subject. All night long they sat, considering this grave crisis in their national history, and at six in the morning a messenger from the King entered the chamber, and told the members that his Majesty had decided to punish them by abolishing their famous right of _nemine discrepante_, by which no vote of supply could be enforced unless it was unanimous. In future, he said, a bare majority would suffice, and he was leaving for Barcelona at once. This was illegal and unconstitutional, and the Valencians never forgave it, but, rather than enter then upon the new path of open rebellion--up to that time an unheard-of thing in Spain since the loss of Castilian legislative power at Villalar a hundred years before--the Cortes of Valencia gave way, and at the stern order of the King voted the supply unconditionally and unanimously; after which the members were expelled the chamber, and sooner or later an armed struggle between the regal Castilian power and the Parliament of Valencia was rendered inevitable. This was the first result of Olivares' attempt to override sentiment and ancient constitutional rights. [Sidenote: Philip and the Catalans] Far more serious in the long run was the conflict in the stubborn Cortes of Catalonia. Even before the King made his splendid state entry into Barcelona, the dissensions amongst the nobles in immediate attendance upon him had come at last to an open quarrel. The proud nobles of ancient title looked down upon the new grandeeship of Olivares, and his insolence had deeply wounded {167} them. The matter came to a head upon a trivial point. The King's coach had been occupied by Philip and his brother Carlos, Olivares, as first minister and lord chamberlain, the Admiral of Castile as the senior official grandee by hereditary right, with the Marquis of Heliche, Olivares' young son-in-law, and the Marquis of Carpio, another relative of the Count-Duke and acting master of the horse. The party was to pass the night before entering Barcelona at the house of the Duke of Cardona, the proudest of Catalan nobles; and when they were setting out in the morning the King called for his host Cardona to accompany him in his coach. The Admiral of Castile, determined not to be ousted, pushing forward, took his place in the coach and refused to move or make way for Cardona; whereupon the King, in a rage, rebuked the admiral roughly. To make matters worse, the admiral and his friends at once threw the blame upon Olivares, and the latter, feigning an attack of gout, sulked and ostentatiously absented himself from the solemnities of Holy Week in Barcelona. The King thereupon appointed young Heliche to replace his father-in-law at court, and consequently to take precedence of the admiral. This was too much, and the proud noble gave the King a bit of his mind about his favourite, and ended by flinging his key, the insignia of office as chamberlain, upon the table, resigned his Court appointment, and went off to Madrid in a towering rage, there to be placed under arrest and to suffer all sorts of investigations and humiliations.[29] {168} After the splendours and plausibilities of Barcelona,[30] the change to the hard-fisted Cortes at Lerida was a shock to the King and his minister. There was no hesitation in the demand of the Catalan Cortes that they must be heard before they would vote anything at all, and they were more inclined to ask the King to repay them what they had advanced to him than to grant him more money. The tone of Philip towards them at first was supplicatory, for they were rich, strong, and united. Mildness, however, was wasted upon the Catalans, and the private meetings of the members and other signs of resistance were considered to be dangerous. Olivares began to threaten, and gave them three days to pass the vote, but the Catalans were still unmoved. Then the Count-Duke, in a panic of fear, suddenly and without notice hurried Philip back to Madrid (May 1626). The Catalans, when he was gone, frightened in their turn, voted what was asked for, but all grace in the act was gone, and a deep chasm thenceforward existed between the eastern realms and the King's favourite in a hurry, who had tried to undermine their ancient liberties. [Sidenote: The independent parliaments] Philip from Madrid tried to appease the Aragonese by voluntarily reducing the contribution they had at length voted; but the result of his journey left not only resentment in the hearts of his non-Castilian subjects, but led to outrageous raids of angry Castilian soldiery into Aragon, and aroused in the King himself a bitter feeling towards the {169} peoples who had been the first to challenge the despotic supremacy which Olivares had taught him was his divine birthright. Philip, indeed, like his immediate predecessors on the throne, was saturated with the idea of his divinely delegated authority. To oppose his will was not disloyalty alone, but impiety, and it was naturally difficult for him to understand that this view, which was generally held by his Castilian subjects, whose kingly traditions were sacerdotal, could not be shared by peoples whose institutions were based upon a purely elective military monarchy, and feudalism modified by a representative democracy. How the anger rankled in his breast is seen in the long exculpatory document which I have several times quoted, which on his return to Madrid he addressed to the Council of Castile.[31] In the course of the document, whilst showing how he, personally, has striven to improve matters, he rates them, and indeed almost everybody, for so imperfectly seconding his efforts. But the hardness of his eastern subjects was evidently that which touched him most. "Anything is better," he says, "than to burden more heavily these poor unhappy vassals of Castile, who, by their love, their efforts, and their sufferings have made us masters of the rest of what we possess, and still preserve it for us, as the head and part principal of our commonwealth. I would far rather take burdens from these poor people than impose further sacrifices upon them, and when I think of what they have to pay, and also the {170} trouble and annoyance they have to submit to in the collection of it, in good truth I would rather beg for charity from door to door, if I could, to provide for the funds necessary for the national defence, than deal so harshly with such vassals as these.... I grieve in my very soul to see such good subjects suffer so much from the faults of my ministers. If my own life-blood would remedy it I would cheerfully give it. And yet, though you (the Council of Castile) know how this cuts me to the heart, and though I reproach you, you propose no remedy.... I tried the Cortes of Aragon, running, as you well know, serious risk, and incurring great trouble and inconvenience, solely for the purpose of alleviating the pressure upon these Castilian subjects, and I am directing my efforts in the same way with my other realms, so that some day I hope we may be able to lighten the taxes in Castile. God knows, I yearn for the coming of that day more than to conquer Constantinople." [Sidenote: Philip's life tragedy] We shall see as time goes on that this attitude is the one natural to Philip through all the troubles which gathered blacker and blacker, as the evil seed sown by him and Olivares grew and ripened. He himself, acting conscientiously and under divine inspiration, was never wrong in the measures he adopted. If suffering and adversity came, they always came either from the wiles of the evil one, or for some wise inscrutable purpose of God. They were never at this time a consequence of any want of wisdom or prescience of his. His heart bled, as we see by his own passionate words quoted above, for the misery of his subjects, but it never seemed {171} through his life to occur to him that the way to remedy it was to abandon an untenable position in his foreign relations, and devote his energies to the concentration of national resources for the promotion of productive industry and interior economy. This was Philip's tragedy, the tragedy of a lifetime which this book will try to follow to its sad disillusioned end. The haunting, sorrow-stricken, compassionate face shows through its proud mask of impassivity and its leaden eyes deep traces of the terrible struggle within; of the throes of a man who dared not show his pain, and who in later years bared his soul but to one woman in the world. Weak of will, tender of conscience, sensitive of soul. A rake without conviction, a voluptuary who sought sensuous pleasures from vicious habit long after they had ceased to be pleasures to him, and yet expiated them with agonies of remorse which made his soul a raging hell. This is the man. Philip the Great! "The Planet King," as the flattering poets called him; this pale, long-faced, sallow young man of twenty-one, who came back to his capital in the spring of 1626 already embittered and disillusioned, confronted by wars and threats of wars on all sides, overwhelmed with poverty yet inflated with pride: seeking escape from his troubles in the company of poets, painters, actors, and courtesans, and in the buffoonery of distorted dwarfs and half-idiotic monstrosities, whilst the dark heavy man with the big square head and arrogant mien led the nation down the slope that ended in inevitable disruption and ruin. [1] He wrote a series of interesting descriptions of the ceremonies and feasts in honour of Charles's visit to Madrid. _Terpsichore_. [2] _Apuntamientos_. Secretly printed in Madrid, 1623. [3] When the Duke of Osuna was arrested early in Philip's reign he had 300 servants resident in his house. [4] There are copies of many of these decrees in British Museum MSS. Add. 9933 and 9934. [5] Contemporary transcript by Father Torquemada. MSS. Add. 10,236 British Museum. The original is in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid. [6] It may be noted that Olivares, who of course cut down his own household, still had 122 servants after that process. _Revista de Archivos_, iv. p. 20. [7] British Museum, Egerton MSS. 338, f. 136. [8] The first idea of this collar, which was promptly dubbed _Golilla_ (little gorget), was merely as a support for the linen Walloon, which would thus be made to stand out like a ruff, but the silk-lined golilla alone was soon generally adopted. [9] Philip during his life was rarely seen in any other collar, though in his fine portrait as a young man at Dulwich he wears a large lace Walloon. [10] There is a most important collection of these originals and transcripts, in the Egerton MSS., British Museum. [11] British Museum, Egerton MSS. 338. [12] A biography of the Queen is given in the author's _Queens of Old Spain_. [13] The first had been a girl, prematurely born in August 1621, who died in a few hours. [14] There is a very long and detailed account of the ceremony in MS. (Biblioteca National, Madrid, p.v.c. 27), transcribed by the writer. The new-born babe was borne down the great staircase of the Alcazar in the arms of a lady of the house of Spinola, the Count-Duke of Olivares walking backwards with golden candlesticks escorting the new Princess to the rooms of her governess, the Countess Duchess of Olivares, in the ground floor apartment that had only a few months before housed the Prince of Wales. The King with all his Court attended the Royal Chapel for the _Te Deum_, pontifically celebrated by the Patriarch and Cardinal Zapata. For three nights in succession every balcony in Madrid was illuminated by a wax torch, and at night a great masked equestrian display of 120 nobles of the Court with new costumes and liveries was performed, the Count of Olivares and Don Pedro de Toledo being the most brilliant, and skilful riders. The great cavalcade paraded the principal streets of the capital, and ran two courses, one in the Calle Mayor and the other before the Convent of Discalced Carmelites. The next day the King rode in state with all the Court to give thanks to the Virgin of Atocha, returning in coaches and admiring the illuminations. The baptism took place in the little parish church of St. Gil, hung for the occasion with cloth of gold. There the Nuncio with cardinals and bishops galore made a Christian of the babe. The tremendous ceremony, with silver cradle, its rich offerings and its pompous names, must be taken for granted here, but the pride of the narrator in the grandeur of it all is significant of the time. There is extant a news-letter from Don Antonio de Mendoza to the Duke of Bejar of the date (quoted by Hartzenbusch in his _Calderon_) giving an account of the great festivity held by Marquis of Alcañices in his palace in Madrid to celebrate the birth of this Infanta. "Two comedies by different authors were represented with excellent dancers and a dance of maskers in which elegance and skill vied with each other; the great saloon in which it was held inciting envy in the heavenly spheres, such was the beauty and the brilliancy it contained." [15] He was a French pedlar named Reynard de Peralta, and was of course garotted and burnt by the Inquisition for his crime, which amounted to a denial of the Immaculate Conception. [16] The actors had also another Mentidero or Liars' Walk of their own, where they were wont to congregate on an open space at the corner of the Calle de Leon, opposite to what is now the great literary club of Madrid, the Ateneo. [17] The original pretext for the establishment of the public theatres was to provide funds for the charitable fraternities who partly owned them, and always received a considerable share of the takings. [18] Frequent attempts were made by the authorities to suppress the scandals and abuses in the theatres, which, although the performances always took place by daylight, were inevitable in such a state of society as that we are now describing. It was forbidden, for instance, for men in the courtyard or pit to converse with women in the cazuela or on the stage; the actresses were not allowed to dress in masculine garb, and an alguacil was always to be on duty in the auditorium during the performance. See Schack's _Historia del arte dramatica en España_; Pellicer's _Tratado Historico sobre el origen ... de la Comedia en España_ (1804); _El Corral de la Pacheca_, by Juan Comba; _Origen Epocas y Progresos del Teatro Español_, by Hugalde (1802), and the valuable MS. _Memorias Cronologicas sobre el origen ... de Comedias en España_, by Antonio de Armona, in the Royal Academy of History, Madrid. [19] Philip's passion for the theatre was so well understood, that a comedy formed part of the entertainment at every place he visited. In the spring of 1624 he made a short but very splendid progress in Andalucia, and every great noble and city that received him gave him a new play. On the 18th March the Duke of Medina Sidonia, the great Andalucian magnate and kinsman of Olivares, entertained the King in his country house near St. Lucar, and presented a new comedy before him every day of his stay. On the 7th April we learn that, during his visit to Granada the King witnessed a comedy in the Alhambra! The King himself wrote some plays, now lost. [20] Leon Pinelo's _Anales Manuscritos de Madrid_ and other contemporary writings describe many such. [21] Now the Senate. [22] The site is now converted into a pretty public garden, called the Plaza de Bilbao. [23] The _auto_ is described by Leon Pinelo (_Anales Manuscritos_), by Montero de los Rios (_Historia de Madrid_), and others. [24] A full account of this little known inglorious episode is given from the Elliot papers in the Camden Society, 1883. [25] British Museum, Egerton MSS. 338, 136. [26] _Memorias de Matias de Novoa; Ayuda de Camara de Felipe IV_. These invaluable memoirs, written by a bitter enemy of Olivares, were formerly supposed to have been written by another favourite courtier of Philip, called Vivanco. Though vivid, they are unfair to Olivares. [27] It is rather a curious fact that the Count-Duke's father, the second Count of Olivares, had been the first councillor in 1603 to speak plainly in the Council of Philip in on the projects of Spain to dominate England. He pointed out very strongly that extension of territory did not mean increase of power, but the contrary, as it meant the distribution instead of the concentration of national strength. See the writer's _Calendar of Spanish State Papers of Elizabeth_, vol. iv. [28] Dormer, _Anales de Aragon_, MS., Royal Academy of History, Madrid. The published portion of the book only covers the sixteenth century. [29] Novoa and British Museum, Egerton MSS. 338. [30] There is a most interesting and full unpublished account of Philip's entry and stay in Barcelona in British Museum, Add. MSS. 10,236, called _Entrada que el Rey Nuestro Señor hizo en la ciudad de Barcelona y fiestas que se hicieron_, 1626. [31] Egerton MSS. 338. {172} CHAPTER V RISE OF THE PARTY OPPOSED TO OLIVARES--THE QUEEN AND THE INFANTES CARLOS AND FERNANDO--OLIVARES REMONSTRATES WITH PHILIP FOR HIS NEGLECT OF BUSINESS--PHILIP'S REPLY--ILLNESS OF THE KING--FEARS OF OLIVARES--PHILIP'S CONSCIENCE--ASPECT OF MADRID AT THE TIME--HABITS OF THE PEOPLE--A GREAT ARTISTIC CENTRE--MANY FOREIGN VISITORS--VELAZQUEZ--PHILIP'S LOVE OF ART, LITERATURE, AND THE DRAMA--CONTEMPORARY DESCRIPTION OF A PLAYHOUSE--PHILIP AND THE CALDERONA, MOTHER OF DON JUAN OF AUSTRIA--BIRTH AND BAPTISM OF BALTASAR CARLOS--PHILIP'S FIELD SPORTS--GENERAL SOCIAL DECADENCE On the King's return to Madrid in the spring of 1626 almost simultaneous baptism of another short-lived infant Princess and the betrothal of the Infanta Maria, the erstwhile "Princess of Wales," to the King of Hungary, heir to the empire, gave other pretext for one of those interminable rounds of pompous shows in which Philip delighted. The marriage of yet another Princess of the Spanish branch of Hapsburg to a future emperor was a provocation flung in the face of Europe, and so Richelieu understood it; and again patiently knitted his plans for taking up the challenge in due time, and defeating finally the threatened {173} hegemony of the house of Austria to the detriment of that of Bourbon. [Sidenote: The enemies of Olivares] During the absence of the Court at Aragon, the party against Olivares had taken courage in Madrid; for already it was seen that the young Queen, full of spirit as she was, chafed under the complete subjection in which the King was held, and the almost equal tutelage which the Countess of Olivares endeavoured to exercise over her. Isabel loved diversion as much as her husband did, though her amusements were less intellectual than his; but she could not help seeing, even if there had not been those who were eager to tell her, that the high hopes that the domination of Olivares had first aroused were very far from being fulfilled, and that the distress in the country was greater than ever with the increased drain of the never-ending war. Olivares, moreover, took no pains to conciliate the Queen, and his attitude towards ladies in general was frankly insolent and contemptuous. He was determined, in any case, to brook no possible interference with his supremacy, and deliberately endeavoured to lessen the Queen's influence by encouraging the formation of other ties by Philip. Not that Philip, indeed, needed much encouragement; but a regular network of agents in the principal cities kept the favourite informed of the appearance of any new and charming actress on the provincial stage, in order that she might be brought to the theatres of the capital and placed before the eyes of the King. [Sidenote: The Infantes] Nor was the Queen the only person of the family whose influence Olivares was determined {174} to check. The two young Infantes, the King's brothers, were now growing into manhood, the elder, Charles, born in 1607, being twenty years of age, and the Cardinal Infante Fernando two years younger. A curious memorandum from Olivares to the King on the subject of his brothers is extant,[1] and shows plainly the method by which Olivares kept his hold upon the King by arousing suspicion of all others, even of the members of the royal family. It appears that at the instance of the minister Philip had appointed a commission, headed, of course, by Olivares, to consider and report upon what should be done for the future of the King's brothers; and the series of memoranda referred to set forth the result of their deliberations. The points to be settled, says the document, are full of difficulty, and though there has been a period of nineteen years to consider it (_i.e._ since the Infante Carlos was born), it is as full of perplexity as ever. The great danger and risk is to make a choice of servants for the Princes. "We must approach this by taking into account the characters and dispositions of their Highnesses. We consider Don Carlos to be of easy and yielding disposition, and that he will tend the way that those who are near him may desire. But in Don Fernando may be seen a greater natural vivacity, which, with a little help, might be inflamed to a point that would cause serious harm, which we must try to prevent." It is far better, says Olivares and his colleagues, to face the matter now {175} than to let it drift until it becomes unmanageable. "The best thing will be for Fernando to continue in the ecclesiastic state; but not to take higher steps in it than at present, in view of the succession.[2] Let him have sufficient money, but let us be careful not to arouse his spirit and ambition by giving him the power that too much money bestows, and do not let us in our generosity to him defraud the poor flocks and the other bishops. Or else give him the bishopric of Oran and arouse his zeal in Africa, like Cardinal Ximenez."[3] This project was not approved of by the commission, as the desire for arms and conquest might set him against his profession. "Or we might make him Inquisitor-General, in order to introduce him into government affairs, as was done with Prince Henry the navigator. But the worst of that is that he is yet very young, and the Inquisition is a very serious matter. Or we might send him to Flanders, or even put him into the Council of State here; but if we did that we must put Carlos in too, and we can see many reasons against doing so. Carlos, of course, must be married or set to some active exercise, to keep him employed and out of mischief until God shall point out to us what had better be done with him. At present there is no available princess for him." Several princesses are then suggested, such as one of the Savoy cousins, a younger daughter of the Emperor, and a sister of the Duke of Lorraine; but all are rejected, and after an {176} interminable prologue the final recommendation of Olivares is reached, namely, to get Fernando, evidently the one he dreaded most, out of the way by sending him to Flanders. But even this is full of suspicion and difficulty. The people there want a Prince of their own. The old Infanta might leave him the throne when she died, and the Flemings might use the Infante to conquer and hold independence of you with your (_i.e._ Philip's) own arms, and that, of course, must be avoided. If the States of Flanders could be left without a master when the Infanta dies, that would be best, but as it cannot be your Majesty must keep them.[4] Or if your Majesty thought well, you might make him Grand Admiral and Prince of the Sea. In that capacity, as the authority would be so much divided, it would not be easy for him to do anything to your Majesty's detriment, especially as he will be surrounded by persons of unquestionable fidelity. But it is difficult to know how we can do this. If he were appointed to supreme command, both in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, with both ships and galleys under him, he would have to depute much of his authority, and we think this would be good. But still, it would be putting vast power into the lad's hands. Besides, {177} perhaps he would not be contented with the place unless a viceroyalty like that of Sicily was attached to it. And so every possibility is discussed at length, and every suggestion either rejected altogether or approved of with many qualifications and drawbacks, pointing out the danger of giving power to princes. But though the commission could come to no decided conclusion, Olivares, in a private letter to Philip, recommended that Carlos should eventually be made Viceroy of Sicily, and Fernando sent to Flanders with a wise old household, although, for the present, it was decided that nothing should be done, except to keep the Princes quiet and as much apart from affairs as possible. I have given to these curious documents perhaps more space than their intrinsic importance deserved, because they seem to me to illustrate exactly the almost diabolical distrust that Olivares sought to instil into the young King, even of his own brothers. Philip's, however, was an affectionate nature, and he was never soured against his brothers, as Philip II. by similar Machiavellian counsels from Perez was fatally estranged from his. Distrust was the note struck everywhere by Olivares: distrust of relatives, of nobles, even of councillors, except those who were creatures of his own; and it is evident that on the return of the Court to Madrid, after the absence of five months in Aragon, the favourite found the atmosphere less grateful to him than before. The Queen, as Regent in Philip's absence, had enjoyed an increase of power and consideration, and the nobles, priests, and ladies around her had been able to speak more {178} boldly whilst they were relieved of the alarming presence of the Count-Duke. [Sidenote: Philip's idleness] Olivares soon struck a blow to regain any power or prestige that he had lost and to fill his enemies with confusion. The King, as we have seen, was indolent and pleasure-loving, leaving all the hard work of the Government to Olivares, upon whom he depended absolutely. The minister knew full well that without his guidance his master would be utterly at sea, and the threat of his retirement always brought Philip to heel. No step, therefore, could have been more effectual in stopping the mouths of the carpers opposed to the favourite, than for the latter himself to protest against the King's neglect of his duties. The State paper in which Olivares remonstrated with the King in the autumn of 1626 for his lack of attention to work, and the King's reply, have been printed several times in Spanish; but they deserve to be quoted here as specimens of the consummate skill of the minister in facing the situation in which he found himself and his clever management of the young King.[5] The document is headed, "Paper from the Count-Duke to his Majesty, in which he urges him to consider and despatch current and private affairs himself, without obtaining the opinions of the junta, and, above all, the opinion of the Count-Duke, so that the King himself may, by a step later, take entire control of affairs of State and Government." "Your Majesty is good witness of the many times during the long period I have {179} served you, that I have told you how important it was for your best interests that people should not only see the result of your own actions, but that they should also recognise them as such, and give you the full credit for them, thus also endowing with force those actions upon which you must needs take counsel. For it is certain, sire, that in the present state of this republic no other course will remedy our ills. Let people recognise in your Majesty attention, resolution, a determination to be obeyed, and if this be not sufficient, let it be recognised in the orders you give, and even in your own person in insignificant acts, nay in the most private actions in your own chamber, where most of the fears which the people entertain have their origin. I have also on many occasions begged your Majesty to give me leave to retire, and to recognise how impossible it is for me to succeed in any of my efforts to serve your Majesty, without your own attention, resolution, and application to the papers. Feeling, as I do, the weight of the duty and love I owe to your Majesty, I have tried to impress this need upon you in the preamble of my various requests; and to show you how indispensable it is for your Majesty's conscience, for your reputation, and for the redress of the evils of the Government, that you should work, or everything will sink to the bottom, no matter how desperate my efforts may be to keep things going. I have decided, therefore, to make a last appeal to you, because during the last few months affairs have become so urgent that there really is no other course but that your Majesty should put your shoulder to the wheel, or commit a mortal sin. {180} I must protest, with due respect to your Majesty, as your humble slave and faithful minister, that if your Majesty will not at once adopt this resolution, I shall be looked upon as a traitor if I continue in this place, knowing as I do that, however I may strive, it is quite impossible, without the personal aid and support of your Majesty, for me to do what is necessary for the State, and this is being proved now to me by daily experience. It may be that the reason why your Majesty will not consent to work and do as I beg you, arises from the entire confidence you place in me, and that if I were not here you might apply yourself more to work, because you might not trust others as you trust me. This thought, together with the zeal and desire, as God knows, I have to serve your Majesty, have brought me to the point of saying resolutely, that if your Majesty will not do as I ask you, I will go away at once without asking your leave or even letting you know I am going, even though your Majesty may punish my disobedience by sending me to a fortress, because, God forbid that I, who owe what I do to your Majesty, should with my eyes open fail to act as I believe for the best, even at the risk of ruin to myself and all my kin, a loss which would be well repaid if it resulted in inducing your Majesty to do what is necessary to remedy the evils which demand the personal attention of your Majesty. I have said all that a subject may say, clearly and boldly; I would rather risk your anger than fail in my duty. The evil is great. Reputation has been lost, the treasury has been totally exhausted, ministers have grown venial and slack, taught to {181} neglect the execution of the laws or to administer them with laxity, and this is one of the great causes of the evils that afflict the country and justice. Take, I pray you, sire, the work into your own hands. Let the very name "favourite" (_privado_) disappear. I will continue to urge your Majesty to shoulder this burden that God Himself has cast upon you, to labour with it, if you will, without overworking yourself, but not without work at all. 4th September 1626." [Sidenote: Philip promises to work] The appeal sounds genuine, and no doubt to some extent it was so, for it did not suit Olivares to be the person to be held solely responsible for the grave state of things that was already arousing even long-suffering Castile to passionate protest; and the privation and misery of the greater part of the population were, it must have been evident to the Count-Duke, powerful instruments against him in the hands of his enemies, now growing daily bolder. Philip always wanted to do well, that was the tragedy of his life, and if good resolutions had sufficed, no better ruler could have been desired. Any appeal, moreover, to his conscience always found an immediate echo, though a fleeting one; and in his reply to the minister the weakness as well as the rectitude of his character are touchingly displayed. In his own great sprawling hand Philip wrote on Olivares' letter-- "COUNT,--I have resolved to do as you ask me, for the sake of God, of myself, and of you. Nothing is boldness from you to me, knowing, as I do, your zeal and love. I will do it, Count, and I return you this paper with this reply, so that {182} you may make it an heirloom of your house, that your descendants may learn how to speak to kings in matters that touch their fame, and that they may know what an ancestor they had. I should like to leave it in my archives to teach my children, if God grant me any, and other kings, how they should submit to what is just and expedient.--I, THE KING." Whatever may have been Philip's intention, and it is impossible to doubt his sincerity, his good resolutions, as Olivares probably foresaw, did not last long; but the cavillers for a time were silenced, and Olivares at any future crisis could and did always point to his letter, and shift a full share of his responsibility upon the King. The responsibility, in good truth, was a heavy one. The constant drain of men and money to Germany, Italy, and Flanders fell mainly upon the realms of Castile, where the poverty was greatest. The expulsion of the Moriscos (1610), the most ingenious and industrious craftsmen in the land, had already produced its dire effects, and skilled industry, which formerly paid most of the taxes, had well-nigh disappeared. Without doing anything to revive manufactures in Spain itself, the Government of Olivares now began the fatal policy of prohibiting commerce of all sorts with the countries at war with Spain, which soon meant all maritime Europe; and the consequence was a complete dearth of commercial movements, a terrible rise in prices, universal contraband and untold suffering, which the purblind minister sought to remedy by the puerile device of suddenly reducing by one half the value of copper money (May 1627), and {183} fixing a maximum price at which farmers might sell food stuffs! [Sidenote: Illness of the king] Anxiety and dissipation acted upon a physique never strong, and Philip, in the summer of 1627, fell seriously ill in Madrid. The last baby girl had died, and though the Queen was pregnant, the next heir, failing issue to the King, was his brother Carlos, a gentle, easy-going young man, in appearance and character wonderfully like his elder brother. But for all his gentleness Carlos was no friend of Olivares, who had taken from his side all the friends he depended upon, most of them, be it said, kinsmen of Lerma, whose sister had been the Prince's governess. Young Fernando, the cardinal, as we have seen, was much more able and ardent than his brother; and when courtiers began to shake grave heads and doctors doubted of the King's recovery, it was Fernando rather than Carlos who took the lead in resenting the attempts of Olivares to isolate the King.[6] By means of his wife, also, Olivares endeavoured to set the Queen against her brothers-in-law, and to extract a pledge from her that if the King died she would retain the minister in his place in the interests of her unborn child. As Philip grew worse, and himself despaired of recovery, the Infantes, strengthened now by a large party of nobles, made no secret of their anger with Olivares, and the latter lost heart and fell ill (or, as spiteful Novoa says, feigned illness), giving himself up for lost, and groaning that everyone {184} hated him so much that they even wished the King dead in order to get rid of him. The palace of Madrid became a buzzing nest of intrigues, in which, however, the principal song was that of gleeful anticipated vengeance on Olivares and all his kin; though, unknown to his foes, arrangements had been made by him and his party to seize the Government and propitiate the Queen and Don Carlos the moment the King died, as he was expected to from one hour to the other.[7] Whilst Olivares still kept his bed from illness and fear, an attendant entered and said that the King had recovered consciousness and showed signs of improvement. "Who says so?" cried Olivares, springing up in his bed. "Dr. Polanco." "Then send Dr. Polanco to me immediately." Dr. Polanco bore no love to the arrogant favourite, and he came tardily to the call, and gave a dry and reticent statement of the King's condition. His Majesty, though better for the moment, he said, could hardly survive another crisis. But there were other royal physicians more courtly than Dr. Polanco, and one soon entered the Count-Duke's room with the welcome news that the King was really better, and had asked for Olivares. The Count-Duke's malady left him as if by magic at the news, and in a few minutes he was at Philip's bedside. On the opposite side of it stood the young Cardinal Infante, who exchanged with him {185} a glance of undisguised enmity, whilst Carlos at his side was all mildness, only unselfishly delighted that the King was better. After a few words of greeting only from the King, who said he was very ill and in want of rest, Olivares retired, disturbed and uneasy at the open hatred of him shown by the Cardinal Infante. In the present state of uncertainty he dared not quarrel with the King's brother, the cleverest member of the family, and by submissive diplomacy and professions of devotion soon managed to patch up a reconciliation with him,[8] whilst resolving in his own mind to lose no opportunity that offered of getting away from Madrid so inconvenient a Prince. [Sidenote: Philip recovers] Again the King's life was despaired of, when, after many mouldering relics had been piled up fruitlessly, until the King's bedroom looked like a rag and bone warehouse, the prayed-for miracle was worked by a shoeless Austin friar, "who brought that admirable and miraculous relic of the little loaves of St. Nicholas, which the King took from the hands of the friar with fervent prayers and supplication for divine help and mercy, and the King recovered."[9] Olivares did not spare those who had thrown him into such a panic whilst the King lay ill, and the plans for the future made by the minister's enemies were represented to Philip as treason against himself. "Ah, sire," he said on his first long conversation after the King's recovery, "we have had an anxious time. In future must keep our eyes open." "Yes, no doubt," assented the King languidly. "As for me," continued the minister, "I considered {186} myself as already being almost thrown out of the window. The Infante Fernando, sire, is in very bad hands!" "And how about Carlos," asked the King, "is he in any better hands?" But though Philip listened to the whispers of treason against all but those who were the creatures of Olivares, he was too amiable and kind to allow any harsh measures against his brothers, and Olivares had to postpone for the present the greater part of his vengeance.[10] [Sidenote: Philip's conscience] Philip's tender conscience had, as usual, plagued him during his illness and convalescence. In later years, as calamity after calamity fell upon him and his, it became his settled conviction that the wrath of heaven poured upon his country and upon those whom he loved best in the world was the awful retribution exacted for his personal transgressions; but even in this, his first severe illness, apparently the same idea assailed him, and as soon as he recovered he addressed a curious and characteristic document to each of his many councils, treating the administrative actions of his reign as a case of conscience for himself. The document is dated 14th August 1627, and the preamble states that it is drawn up for the discharge of the King's conscience after his serious illness.[11] "1. If I have caused any damage or loss of {187} property to anybody by any act or order of mine or otherwise, I desire that redress shall be given to the sufferers. "2. If by any means or way property belonging to any person be unjustly taken or withheld by any act of ours, I command that the wrong be righted at once. "3. Consider the means that can be devised to pay all my debts, so that in this respect my conscience may be clear, and in future as far as possible let all necessary expenses be justly met and paid. "4. Consider whether any of the contributions payable by my vassals can be abolished, and what reform is possible, both as to the amounts levied and the mode of collection. "5. If any minister of your Council does any unjust act, if he fails to administer justice righteously, or if any grievance is inflicted by him on my subjects, severe punishment must be meted out to him. Great vigilance must be exercised by you in this respect. "6. If, in order to favour or benefit me, any injustice has been done, it must be redressed at once, regardless of every other consideration. "Consider all this maturely, and report to me.--I, THE KING." However well intentioned such decrees as this might be, in the existing state of the country they were absurd. If a foreign policy was persisted in which brought Spain into conflict with every progressive and prosperous country in Europe, which shut the ports of Spain to foreign commerce, and excluded Spanish ships from foreign harbours; if a system of finance were persisted in which ruined {188} taxpayers and paralysed production; if industry was a disgrace and idleness respectable; if corruption existed from the base to the summit of the administration at home and abroad, and ostentation, vanity, greed, and self-indulgence permeated every class of society in the capital, the heart from which flowed the tainted life-blood of the nation, it was futile to order redress to be given for individual wrongs, and for the surface administration to be cleansed, whilst the mass was corrupt; and it is needless to say that the King's conscience was rapidly lulled to rest again, leaving matters much as they were before, and as they remained for years to come, whilst Madrid was the artistic and literary centre of the world, and the rest of Spain was sunk in utter misery and debasement. [Sidenote: Madrid in 1627] A glance at the material and moral aspect of society in Philip's Court during this period, the flower of his reign and life, will be necessary in order to understand what followed. After the restoration to Madrid of its rank as the capital in 1606, the increase in the size and population of the town had been extraordinary; and it was at this period that Madrid assumed the extent and appearance that it retained with little change until the middle of the nineteenth century. As now, the great palace on its bold spur looking over the Manzanares and the plains of Castile to the snow-capped Guadarramas, formed the conspicuous boundary of the capital on the west, and the precipitous slope on that side to the bridge of Segovia, then recently built, checked expansion in that direction. But to the north and east the new {189} streets stretched forth in a way which was at the time looked upon as prodigious. The Puerta del Sol, the present centre of the capital, had even in Philip's time begun to acquire importance as leading to the broad new street of Alcalá, which afforded a less congested approach to the promenade of the Prado than the ancient and narrow Carrera de San Geronimo. The Calle Mayor, leading from the palace to the Puerta del Sol, was not, as now, one broad street in its entire length, the wide portion being, indeed, only the newer stretch near the Puerta del Sol, but in the greater part of its length consisted of a continuous line of narrow and somewhat tortuous streets called by different names. This, however, being the road to and from the palace, was the fashionable promenade, especially for the great swaying coaches then the rage in Madrid. In hot summer nights the dry bed of the Manzanares attracted fashionable promenaders to enjoy such coolness as could be found there; whilst the Prado itself, from the street of Alcalá to the Atocha, on certain occasions, especially on saints days, church festivals, and in the evenings of spring, was the crowded resort of the idlers. The Plaza Mayor, or great square, standing much as it does to-day, had been built in the previous reign, the houses that enclosed it being capable of accommodating in their lines of balconies as many as fifty thousand spectators to the bull-fights, _autos-de-fe_, or equestrian shows, which were held there on great occasions.[12] The construction of the houses, for the most {190} part rapidly run up to meet the sudden increase of the population--the Court, as has been explained, attracting everybody in Spain with brains, ambition, or money--was extremely mean and shabby, the heavy ostentatious palaces of the nobles, many of which still stand, being surrounded by wretched little shanties with mud walls and filthy exteriors.[13] The windows towards the street were heavily grated, and mostly small, which gave a gloomy dungeon-like appearance to the buildings, whilst the total absence of drainage made the roadways a mere middenheap, through which the heavy coaches ploughed, and bespattered the pedestrians. To the enormous number of strangers and foreigners whom curiosity, politics, or business brought to Madrid at this period, the filthy condition of the streets became a byword. The gutters of the houses projecting far out from the eaves threw great jets of water when it rained into the middle of the narrow roadways, and with the mere warning of "_Agua va_" all the house garbage, debris, and excrement were cast forth into the open street, there to fester until the salutary sun had deodorised it and reduced it to dust. In these streets, and especially in the portion of the Calle Mayor near the Church of St. Philip and the Puerta del Sol, the idlers of the capital, {191} which meant the greater part of the population, loved to promenade for hours every day, preferably in coaches, bandying coarse jests with the people on foot. This objectless promenading and gossiping was so characteristic that a special verb was coined to describe it, namely, to _ruar_. Everybody pretended to be wealthier, more highly placed, and better dressed than he really was; and though sumptuary pragmatics and decrees, announced by heralds in the Calle Mayor, constantly threatened transgressors with all sorts of pains and penalties, the people, especially the women, continued to defy the law in their dress and behaviour. The insolent dames would wear outrageous garments; flattened farthingales (_guardainfantes_) so immensely wide as to be indecent, starched ruffs, pattens so high with jingling heels as to be like musical stilts, and would still insist upon covering their faces, all but one eye, the more to pique curiosity and indulge with impunity in their not too delicate badinage. The large spaces occupied by the frowning religious houses, whilst adding to the gloom of the city, must have increased its salubrity, in consequence of the large shady gardens that they usually enjoyed. At twelve o'clock, when the angelus sounded, the monastery gates opened, and there came forth a lay brother with an immense cauldron of soup and a basket of bread, which formed the principal meal of many hundreds of poor people and idlers all the year round. The students, real or pretended, who in token of their dependence on these eleemosynary meals wore a wooden spoon tucked into the brim of their hats, formed a considerable portion of those who attacked the garlic {192} broth with avidity. Broken soldiers and led captains, gamblers out of luck and varlets out of place, fought too for the food with the maimed and diseased beggars who crowded the most frequented streets at fashionable hours.[14] In addition to these charity meals given by the religious houses, there were numerous lay brotherhoods established to relieve the sick and impotent; and one particular brotherhood, which went its rounds at night, especially in the outer districts of the capital, was called by the people the "bread and egg watch," because the brethren carried with them baskets of bread and eggs to distribute to the needy whom they found exhausted and homeless by the way. It may be asked if Madrid was so forbidding in appearance, as it was certainly difficult of access and lacking in comfort and convenience, what was the attraction that drew to it at the time not only the enriched Spaniards from the Indies, and the ambitious and idle of the Peninsula itself, but the immense number of foreign visitors who now frequented it. So far as the Spaniards were concerned, it has already been explained that by the time of which we are writing the Court had, in fact, drawn to itself all that was left of available wealth in the country. There alone could the Spanish love of ostentation be indulged; there alone could bravery of dress and demeanour find the attention and emulation it always seeks; there alone could advancement in any unlaborious career be found, for where all the patronage, wealth, and taste were, {193} there also must be those who sought patronage or provided things that taste and wealth alone could buy, and so the Court--"_la Corte_" as Madrid was always called--shone brightly, like the last phosphorescent spot in a decaying body, and attracted by its brilliancy when all the rest of Spain was dark. [Sidenote: An artistic capital] The fame of the splendid shows of Philip's Court, the traditional wealth of the monarch, and the reputation for gallantry and gaiety which the place obtained, brought to it pleasure-seekers from all Europe. The close connection with Austria naturally attracted Germans to Spain in numbers; Flemish Catholics were, of course, almost as much at home in Madrid as in Brussels; whilst the marriage of Philip's sister Anna of Austria in France had made the romantic view of Spain fashionable there. The war with France somewhat restricted the French incursion, but Burgundian and Franche-Comtois craftsmen were numerous, and the enemies of Richelieu always found a welcome in the Spanish Court. Italians, especially Neapolitan and Milanese subjects of Philip, who served in his armies and provided his finest weapons, were frequent visitors to his capital. It was, moreover, a dilettante age, when all over Europe, and particularly in Madrid, where for a century the monarchs had been generous patrons of art, a perfect craze had seized wealthy people to collect and display rare and beautiful artistic objects of all sorts, and the ostentatious nobles who surrounded Philip IV., many of whom had lived in Italy, had shared the King's love of such objects, and had made their palaces perfect museums of art treasures of every description. {194} Olivares himself exacted from viceroys and Spanish officers abroad presents of tapestries and articles of virtu.[15] The Count of Monterey and the Marquis of Leganes, both kinsmen of the Count-Duke, had crammed their palaces with rarities,--clocks, mirrors, enamels, medals, marqueterie, and paintings; and Monterey, who had been viceroy of Naples, had brought back with him to Madrid a whole cargo of silver repoussé work, tapestries, ivory carvings, gems, and such treasures as the red chalk drawing of the cartoon of Michael Angelo's famous "Bathers."[16] V. Carducho, who lived in Madrid at the time, describes in his _Diálogos_ the regular meetings there of connoisseurs and patrons of art, to inspect, exchange, or criticise paintings, models and other rare and beautiful things; where, he says, "originals by Raphael, Correggio, Titian, Tintoretto, Palma, Bassano, and living painters were admired, and where much taste and knowledge were displayed." Besides paintings, he continues, there were to be seen at these meetings "coats of armour and weapons of famous armourers, damascened swords and daggers, rock crystal work and pyramids and globes of jasper and glass." On one particular occasion Carducho mentions that the host of the meeting-place was engaged in arranging some {195} articles for an exchange he was negotiating with the Admiral of Castile, a great art patron, whom he was expecting. They comprised an original by Titian, six heads by Antonio Mor, two bronze statues and a small culverin, whilst the admiral had left with the host a good copy of a painting by Caracci; and Carducho mentions that Monterey had there at the same time an original Madonna by Raphael from the convent of Discalced Carmelites at Valladolid.[17] The agglomeration of such works of art at Madrid during a long period naturally led to the dispersion of the great collections on the death or fall of the noble owners, and this was effected by the usual Spanish form of sale still common, called an _almoneda_, such articles as are for sale usually remain _in situ_, but on public view, with the prices marked; and the German ambassador, Count Harrach, mentions no less than twenty of such almonedas of artistic collections belonging to Madrid nobles within the space of five years, at a somewhat later period of Philip's reign than that of which we are now writing.[18] Of one such noble collector in Madrid (Juan de Espina) Quevedo says: "For years his house was an epitome of the marvels of Europe, visited by strangers, to the great honour of our nation, for they had often nothing to tell of Spain except their recollections of him." I have mentioned that one of the presents given by Olivares to the Prince of Wales on his departure was a set of paintings, but these were by no means the only pictures that Charles took back {196} with him to enrich the royal galleries of England. The unfortunate murdered Count Villa Mediana's great collection was still being dispersed by _almoneda_ at the time, and here Charles bought several specimens. Lope de Vega says that the Prince "collected with remarkable zeal all the paintings that could be had, paying for them excessive prices." He was unable to persuade Quevedo's friend Espina to sell him the gem of his collection, two volumes of original drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, which, however, eventually came to England as the property of Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel.[19] Many other paintings and precious objects were secured by Charles during his stay by purchase and gift; and it may be fairly assumed that so great an art lover as he must have found his principal solace for his long absence from home in the inspection and acquisition of objects he prized so highly. In the Calle Mayor, against the wall of the Oñate Palace, opposite Liars' Walk, on the raised path along the side of St. Philip's Church, the Spanish painters of the day, on the lookout for patrons, were wont to exhibit their canvasses for sale,[20] and some of the modern Spanish pictures that Charles took home with him were doubtless seen and bought in the course of his {197} daily promenade through the fashionable street of the capital. [Sidenote: Valezquez in Madrid] There was one young painter of the day, a stripling of twenty-four, though already married and with two children when he arrived in Madrid at the same time as the Prince of Wales, who at least had no need to seek purchasers for his canvasses upon the rough side walk, though he did exhibit them there for the admiring criticism of the connoisseurs opposite. To have come from Seville, as he did, was, to begin with, a good credential in the time of Olivares, whose own noble house was of Andalucia, and who himself was Sevillano to the marrow. But this young man, Diego Velazquez, had married the daughter of his master, Pacheco, the best known painter in Seville, and the bosom friend of Francisco de Rojas, the literary henchman and devoted adherent of Olivares. Three years before this, Diego had come to Court full of high hopes and ambitions; for the painting of convent altar-pieces in Seville was a narrow field for genius, and Diego yearned for the wide recognition that the "Court" alone could give. But though he had the help of the Sevillians who abounded in Olivares' household, and notably that of Dr. Fonseca, the Court chaplain and King's "curtain-drawer" in the royal chapel, business was so pressing, both for King and minister, in the early days of the reign, that there was no time to be spared for portrait painters, and Velazquez returned home disappointed. But in the spring of 1623, whilst Charles Stuart was in Madrid, Fonseca, at Olivares' bidding, wrote to the artist telling him that he might now {198} with good hope return to Madrid, and sending him fifty ducats for his travelling expenses. He needed no further urging, nor did his famous father-in-law, who, if he was not a genius himself, at least realised genius when he saw it, and together they set forth, with the assurance that young Diego was going to conquer Madrid. There was no heart-breaking struggle for him, though his triumph was not so immediate as he would have wished. The effort to get to the palace, the fountain of all patronage, was universal; and the rivalry of competitors was keen. Poets, dramatists, actors, placemen, and artists were all struggling eagerly to catch the eye of royalty, or the ministers of royalty, and for a time even Fonseca could not secure for his protégé an admission to the King's presence. In the meanwhile Velazquez painted a portrait of the priestly patron Fonseca, in whose house he lived. As soon as it was finished the chamberlain of the Cardinal Infante Fernando, the Count de Peñaranda, visited the house by chance, saw the picture, and insisted upon carrying it off with him to the palace. Everybody at Court knew the reverend "royal curtain-drawer" in chapel, and within an hour the portrait had been seen by all the _palaciegos_, from the King downward, and praised to the skies. Promises were sent to the young painter that he should be commissioned to portray the King and his brother; but the King's work and play, more momentarily pressing, still delayed the anticipated honour until the end of August, when Philip, on his prancing charger--for the King was a splendid and intrepid horseman--carracoled in the garden of the palace before the grave, lean young painter {199} with the jet black hair and flashing Andaluz eyes, who for the first time fixed there upon canvas the face and form which his genius was to immortalise. Philip was a good judge of art, and when he saw the picture, though no muscle of his impassive face moved, he expressed his satisfaction with courteous condescension. Olivares, vehement as usual, and proud that a Sevillian should have succeeded, swore that no one else had ever painted the King as he was, and that in future Diego Velazquez alone should paint his Majesty. When the last touch was given to it, the great life-sized equestrian portrait of Philip was exhibited upon the pavement opposite Liars' Walk, not for sale, but for the astonishment and delight of loyal Madrileños.[21] Diego Velazquez's fortune was made. Within a few weeks he was appointed Court painter, with a salary of twenty ducats a month, with extra payment for each picture and a studio in the palace, and thenceforward pensions and favours of all sorts testified to Olivares' pride in his fellow-countryman and the King's recognition of a genius. From the time of the great Emperor and his son the tradition had existed that intimate familiarity was permissible between the King of Spain and those household servants whom he cared thus to honour. Both the Emperor and Philip II. had allowed the greatest liberty to their jesters, dwarfs, and body servants, and had extended their friendship to the artist craftsmen who had served them. Philip IV. bettered the instruction, for he at heart was a poet and an artist himself; and whilst he {200} delighted in the company of clever people generally, he distinguished with life-long regard and considerate kindness the young artist, only a few years older than himself, who did so much to ennoble and illustrate his Court. In Velazquez's studio in the palace a leather armchair was always kept sacred for the King, who was wont to come in unannounced when the fancy seized him, and watch the painter at work. Indeed, during his stay in Madrid he hardly missed a day in his visits, and would often come accompanied by his wife to the studio. There he witnessed, gradually growing under the magic brush, the counterfeit presentments of those who made up his life, his wives, brothers, and children, the latter in their chubby babyhood, stiff with irksome splendour; the distorted and deformed beings who ministered to the merriment of those whose surroundings were otherwise far from merry; the poets who solaced his life, the women he loved, the famous captains of his armies; Spinola, Pimentel, Pulido-Pareja, and the rest of them; the great Olivares himself, and all the rout of glittering satellites who revolved around the Planet King. [Sidenote: A literary court] Philip enjoyed almost as much the society of Quevedo as that of Velazquez, but the satiric wit was less careful than the painter, and his medium was more risky; so that, though his biting verse and malicious prose had in the King an appreciative listener, the poet was almost as often in exile as in favour.[22] The literary contests and discussions which amused Philip as he grew older {201} always, when Quevedo was not in disgrace, benefited by his ready wit. Philip himself took part in these literary orgies in the palace, frequently proposing a subject for an impromptu play in the facile blank verse which comes so trippingly upon Spanish lips. The subject would sometimes be a sacred one, in which case the treatment was such as would shock modern ears, though for abject lip devotion the persons who spoke so slightingly of sacred things were never surpassed. It is related that on one such occasion Philip set the Creation of the World as the subject for an impromptu play, assigning to himself the character of the Maker. The poet, whom he had cast for Adam, made his part unduly long, and Philip elaborately expressed his grief, as the Eternal Father, that ever he should have afflicted the world with such a long-winded Adam. But though these literary diversions had already become attractive to him at the period at which we are now writing (1626-1630), the gloomy old Alcazar was not a congenial setting for frivolity; and it was not until later, when the new suburban palace of the Buen Retiro was specially devised by Olivares for the purpose, that the poetic and dramatic exercises of the Court reached their zenith, as will be related in a future chapter. But from the first Philip's devotion to the theatre never wavered, and in this his people, high and low, agreed with him. The two public theatres of the capital, the Corral de la Pacheca (on the site of the present Teatro Espanol) and the Corral de la Cruz, in the street of the same name, were crowded every day, and sometimes twice a day; {202} the performance before noon being attended mainly by women, and that of the afternoon by men, and women of a better class. The appurtenances of the stage were extremely rough, and the scenery widely adaptable where it existed at all, as the constant changes of comedy made special scenery impossible. The plays presented, hundreds of which are still extant, are marvellous in the inventive fertility of their plots; the intrigues that spring from mistaken personality, marital wiles, and lovers' stratagems furnishing the foundations of most of them. The speeches, according to modern ideas, appear intolerably pompous and long, but the mere sound of the flowing rhythm pleased the ears of Spaniards, as similar speeches do to-day, and the Madrileños never grew weary of their shows. [Sidenote: Madrid theatres] The following lively description of one of the theatres in the reign of Philip IV. will give an idea of the scene they presented on a holiday.[23] You must dine hurriedly at noon, and not stay long at table if you are going in the afternoon and wish to find a seat. The first thing you do when you arrive at the door of the theatre is to try to get in without paying. Many work and as few pay as possible. That is the actor's first misfortune. It would not be so bad for twenty people to get in for four farthings, if many more did not try to imitate them. As it is, if one person gets in without payment others expect to do the same. Everybody wishes to enjoy the privilege of free admission, in order that people may see that they are worthy of it. For this reason they {203} strive so hard to enjoy it that it gives rise to endless disputes and altercations; with all the more reason that by these means they usually succeed in their aim. When once a person gets entrance without payment he adopts it as a general rule, and never wants to pay. A fine way this to remunerate those who merit some return for their work in trying to amuse them. And perhaps you will think that he who pays not is more easy to please. On the contrary, when the actor is not properly dressed, those who have not paid insult and hiss him most. At last our man gets into the theatre, and asks those who are seated on the benches to make room for him.[24] They tell him that there is no seat for him, but that perhaps one of those who have paid for a seat will not come, so he had better wait until the guitar players appear and he may then occupy the vacant seat. This being agreed upon, our friend goes to the dressing-room to amuse himself in the meanwhile. There he finds the actresses taking off their usual clothes and assuming those necessary for their characters; they being sometimes as naked as if they were going to bed. He stops and stares before one of them, who, having come through the streets on foot, is changing her boots by the aid of her servant. This cannot be done without some sacrifice of decorum, and the poor actress is much put out, {204} but she dares not protest, because, as her main object is to gain applause, she is afraid of offending. A hiss, however unjustified, discredits an actor, because people in general incline more to the censure of others than to their own judgment. The actress consequently does not suspend the changing of her boots, and suffers the importunity of the visitor patiently. In the meanwhile the blockhead never takes his eyes off her. "After that he looks from the stage to see what is happening with the doubtful seat he covets. It is still vacant, and in the hope that the legitimate owner of it will not come he runs to occupy it. The moment he does so the owner appears and defends his claim. The other does the same, and both grow heated and come to blows. The last comer, as he has come to the theatre for amusement, and finding no amusement in shouting and fighting, thinks it better to stand for three hours than to continue clawing, and retires from the fray, another seat being provided for him by those who have intervened and pacified the dispute. When this hurly-burly has ended, our intruder settles down quietly and casts an eye upon the cazuela,[25] and passes in review the women who fill it. He takes a sudden fancy to one of them, and begins to manifest his feelings by making signs to her. But, my good friend! you have surely gone to the theatre to see the play, not the cazuela. "It is four o'clock in the afternoon by this time, and the performance has not begun yet. Our friend, looking vaguely about him, first on one side and then on another, suddenly feels that {205} someone is pulling at his cloak. He turns his head and sees an orange-seller, who, bending towards him between the two spectators behind, whispers in his ear that the lady who is tapping her knee with her fan has watched with sincere pleasure the spirit he showed in the quarrel about the seat, and that it would be a gracious thing if he bought her a dozen oranges in recognition of her sympathy. Our friend scans the cazuela again, and sees that the lady in question is the one that caught his fancy before; so he pays for the oranges, and tells the orangeman to let the lady know that he will willingly pay for anything else she would like. When the orangeman disappears with this message, our friend thinks of nothing else than how he shall approach the lady when they leave the theatre, cursing the comedy in the meanwhile, which appears to him interminable, such is his impatience. He signifies his disapproval aloud, and groans without cause, exciting the musqueteers[26] below to imitate him and to break forth in offensive cries. This is not only rude and uncultivated, but monstrously ungrateful, for, of all men, actors are those who strive hardest to gain applause. What a bad time they pass, and how laborious whilst they rehearse a piece. And when the first representation comes, any of them would give a year's wage to be applauded for his part. What anxiety assails them, what inexpressible yearning they feel on the stage to please the public. When they have to cast themselves down from some {206} precipice, they throw themselves off the painted canvas rock with desperation; when they have to represent a dying man and to writhe in agony, how they soil their clothes, which have often cost much money, and tear their hands with the nails and splinters of the boards!" The rest of the chapter is more concerned with the evils of the actor's life than with the audience, which is the point most interesting to us; but it is clear from what has been quoted that the comedies, witty and facile as they were, nevertheless did not form the only attraction that drew crowds daily to the theatres of the Court. In the first place, they were a pretext for the prevailing idleness, and the sure sign of decadence which manifests itself in the inactive many gazing upon and criticising the hired exertions of the active few. But the "corrales" of Madrid are also shown in the above extract, and in hundreds of allusions in the comedies themselves, to have been places of assignation and incentives to promiscuous gallantry.[27] The King himself, behind the impenetrable window grating of a first-floor private room (_aposento_) first saw many of his mistresses, they were not mistresses in the sense that prevailed at the Court of the French Bourbon kings. None of them ever aspired to, or attained, political or social power, for the distance between the sacrosanct sovereign and common humanity was too great for that to be possible in Castile. They were just the creatures Of Philip's caprice, and the {207} momentary playthings of his passions, none of them retaining hold upon him but for a very short time. [Sidenote: "The _Calderona_"] Of his thirty and more illegitimate children, of whom eight were recognised, the only one that was given princely rank was that Don Juan of Austria who was beloved by his father above all others of his offspring. From the theatre, at the period which we are now writing, Don Juan of Austria sprang. It was at the Corral de la Cruz in 1627 that Philip first set eyes upon the girl whom one of Olivares' agents had sent from the country to act upon the Madrid stage. Her name was Maria Calderon, and at the time she appeared in the capital she was not more than sixteen years of age. She was no great beauty, but her grace and fascination were supreme, and her voice was so sweet and her speech so captivating that Madrid fell in love with her at once.[28] The King from his aposento was enamoured of her the first time he saw her, and for him to desire was to enjoy. She was immediately summoned to the private apartment, that the King might listen more closely to her lovely voice, and when he heard it the King's love grew fiercer still. From the corral to the palace was but a step when Philip willed it, and thenceforward the _Calderona_ became the King's best beloved mistress. She still acted upon the stage, though gifts and tokens of affection were piled upon her by the love-lorn King. She, proud of the ineffable honour vouchsafed to her, became rigidity itself in her virtue, and turned a hard face to all other lovers. {208} [Sidenote: Birth of Baltasar Carlos] The tradition in Spain made the position of King's mistress not by any means one to be coveted by most women, since it was understood that when the liaison ended the lady must immure herself in a convent for the rest of her life, to prevent such a sacrilege as for the King to have a successor in any woman's regards. It is told of one young lady of the Court to whom Philip was making unmistakable advances, that she shut herself behind a locked door when she knew the amorous King was seeking her, and cried out to him from the inside: "No, no, sire; I don't want to be a nun!" The Calderona had no such scruples, either from natural devotion or because she really felt the honour of the King's love to be overwhelming. Her son by the King was born on the 17th April 1629, and as soon as the _Calderona_ could leave her room she sought the King, and, throwing herself at his feet in tears, prayed for his permission for the mother of his son to sin no more. For it was enough, she said, to have borne a child to the greatest monarch on earth, and nothing more was left for her but to devote the rest of her life to cloistered sanctity. Philip was deeply in love with her still; all his children by the Queen, none of whom had been sons, had expired at, or soon after, their births, and this boy by the _Calderona_ was held to be the most beautiful and perfect child ever seen. Philip tried hard to alter the resolve of his mistress, but she absolutely refused to cohabit with him again; and at last, but with sorrow, he gave way, and the actress Maria Calderon became the abbess of a remote convent, whilst her child was sent with semi-royal surroundings {209} to be educated with exquisite care at Ocaña, with a view to his future greatness. This was the background: a vast conspiracy of make-shift and of make-believe, before which the Court of Philip IV. alternately prayed and postured unconvinced. An utterly decadent society, of which each individual was striving to get as much as possible out of life without giving anything in return; a society which combined besotted superstition and abject servility to priests and ritual with appalling impiety, a society that lived from day to day for such pleasures as it could grasp, knowing that all was crumbling to dissolution beneath its feet, that squandered and lavished money, mostly ill-gotten, in empty splendour, whilst the whole nation beyond the mud walls of the "Court" was sunk in carking penury. And amidst the festivities and stage plays, the poetical recitals, the battues that stood for sport, and the _autos-de-fe_ that stood for holiness, "Philip the Great" moved like a demigod, knowing in his heart of hearts that all was hollow--his wealth a lie, his dignity a mask, and he himself but a poor sinning trifler whose coward conscience denied him even pleasure in his sin. Philip's love for ostentation had full opportunity for its exercise in October 1629, when, six months after the birth of his son by the _Calderona_, an heir was born to the Spanish crowns. The month had begun with splendour, for on the 3rd October the Prince of Guastalla had entered the capital as the envoy of the Emperor to marry by proxy the Infanta Maria for the King of Hungary, heir to the imperial crown. The whole of the grandees of Spain had gone out to receive him, {210} and his train of thirty-six pages and lackeys in liveries of black velvet and gold, and his thirty-six baggage horses with crimson and gold horse-cloths, the Spanish nobles being so numerous and smart, as Soto says, that "Madrid looked like another Indies for richness." Before the splendours of Guastalla's welcome had become dim, the prince of so many prayers was born, and Madrid settled down to another orgy of festivities. The magnificence of the baptism in the Church of St. John near the palace need not be detailed in full; suffice it to say that a temporary staircase and gallery splendidly adorned with tapestries descended from the great balcony over the palace portico to the church. Down this corridor, in a sedan chair of silver and crystal, preceded by heralds and followed by crowds of nobles, the child was carried very slowly to its baptism on the lap of the Countess of Olivares. On the left hand of the chair marched Olivares himself, strangely dressed, as was remarked at the time, in a long robe of cloth of silver with sleeves reaching to the ground, his breast crossed by a crimson baldric--some ceremonial dress, it was thought, of the house of Austria. Then came the new Queen of Hungary, her nephew's godmother, and the rest of the high personages, to attend the ceremony. It was against the etiquette for the King to be there, but he was too proud and happy to forego the pleasure of seeing the show secretly, which he did from a closely curtained pew reached from the adjoining house. The Countess of Olivares, as supreme in the palace as her husband was in the Government, held the child at the font, seated upon "a chair of rock {211} crystal, the most costly piece of furniture ever seen in Europe," whilst cardinals and bishops did their best to make Prince Baltasar Carlos of Austria a member of the Christian Church. As soon as the Queen was able to appear, which was on her birthday, she was feted in her turn as she had never been feted before. Masked equestrian contests, torchlight parades, bull-fights, and balls succeeded each other day after day, and in all of them the King and his brother, Don Carlos, made a gallant appearance.[29] [Sidenote: Philip's field sports] The fact that both Philip and Olivares were accomplished horsemen made equestrian pastimes and field sports specially fashionable in this the best period of Philip's reign. At least two realistic representations exist of hunting battues in which Philip was seen to great advantage, reproducing from the brush of the great painter the exact aspect of such diversions. That in the Ashburton Collection portrays one of the deer hunts in the leafy glades of Aranjuez, Philip's spring palace on the Tagus, twenty-eight miles from Madrid. In the wooded park the afternoon sun glints through the dark verdured trees against the cloudless sky, and upon a wide stretch of sward a great white canvas enclosure is erected. Into its gradually narrowing limits the frightened deer are being driven by beaters, and at the narrow end of the funnel, the only outlet from the enclosure, the "hunters" are stationed on prancing steeds. Over the narrowest part of the funnel neck a leafy bridge or balcony is built, decked with crimson hangings and furnished with soft cushions, upon which the {212} Queen and her ladies sit, dressed in brilliant colours. Just beneath them, on horseback, are the King, his brother Carlos, and the inevitable Olivares; and as the terrified deer rush past them underneath the ladies' bower, the cavaliers, with big sharp hunting-knives, slash at them, killing some, laming others, and leaving those they miss to the mercies of the hounds that await them beyond. The ground beneath is drenched with blood, but the ladies smile approvingly upon the butchery. The exercise demanded a firm seat in the saddle, and great agility and dexterity in the management of the horse, and it was universally admitted that no one in Spain shone so brilliantly at these battues as Philip himself,[30] though Olivares, courtier like, was only just inferior to him. The other picture by Velazquez, which is in the National Gallery in London, presents a sport somewhat less repugnant to English eyes. The scene in this case is the hunting seat of the Pardo, a few miles out of Madrid, and the King, within the canvas walls of the vast enclosure, is, from the saddle of his caracoling steed, which he sits like a centaur, thrusting his forked javelin into the flank of the boar as it rushes past, Olivares being close by, whilst other mounted courtiers in different {213} parts of the enclosure are participating in the sport. Inside the enclosure there are stationed some of the heavy leather-curtained coaches then in use, filled with ladies. The mules in every case have been unharnessed and put out of the way of a charge from an infuriated boar; but as the boars were agile when aroused, and had been known to leap into the carriages themselves, the ladies inside are armed with dainty little javelins to repel any such attempt; not very easy to happen, one would imagine, as the heavy leather aprons or screens that cover the footplate and serve as doors are closed. To look upon these pictures is to view the very life of Philip's Court; the posturing gentlemen outside the enclosure, the prancing gentlemen inside. Beyond agile showy horsemanship and well-trained steeds, nothing was called for on the part of those who joined in the sport. There was no danger, and little exertion needed from the "hunters," for the quarry was all driven into the enclosure, and could not get away. One sees that ostentation and "show-off" are the main attraction and object of the sport; and in the sports, as in the pleasures and devotions, the same inevitable note is struck: that of selfish epicureanism that seeks to enjoy sensuously without risk or labour. Each poor mortal is marked out in his own esteem as the central point of a brilliant show, and gorges the best of life's banquet to the end, careless of who pays the scot. [1] British Museum, Egerton MSS 2081, p. 261. Some of the papers in question were also published many years ago by Valladares in the _Semanario Erudito_. [2] Fernando was as yet only a deacon, not a full priest, and the King when this was written had only one child, an epileptic girl infant, who died soon afterwards. [3] _i.e._ the great minister of Isabel and Ferdinand. [4] This was the worst possible advice, and its ultimate adoption consummated the ruin of Spain. Philip II. had left the sovereignty of Flanders to his daughter the Infanta Isabel and her husband the Archduke Albert, in the hope that they might remain Catholic and friendly, but separate thenceforward from the Spanish crown. The Infanta had no children, and when she died the resumption by Spain of the sovereignty of Flanders, on the advice of Olivares, was disastrous. Fernando, in effect, became Governor of Flanders for his brother a few years afterwards on the death of the Infanta, and turned out a Prince of great promise, and a military commander of real distinction, but he died young, and of course unmarried, in Flanders, after years of ceaseless war. [5] Contemporary transcripts are in British Museum, Egerton MSS. 338, fol. 571. [6] Novoa says that Olivares turned Fernando out of his bedroom, which adjoined that of the King, in order that he (Olivares) might occupy it during the King's danger. [7] The principal conspirator with Olivares is represented by Novoa to have been the Marquis of Hinojosa who had until recently been the ambassador in London, and had specially signalised himself by his bitter enmity against Buckingham, whom he had tried to ruin by means of statements damaging to him, and impugning his loyalty to King James. See the correspondence in Cabala. [8] Novoa. [9] _Ibid._ [10] An important series of letters from Olivares to the King soon after his illness, mainly about the Infantes, their characters, their friends, and their proceedings, is in Egerton MSS., British Museum, 2081, from which I have already quoted some papers on the same subject of an earlier date. The whole object of the letters is evidently to arouse the suspicion of the King against his brothers. [11] Contemporary draft, British Museum MSS., Add. 10,236 f. 382. [12] All one side of the great square was destroyed by fire a few years after the time of which we are writing (in 1631). [13] The fact of so many of the wretched houses of the capital having only one storey is explained by the oppressive arrangement which placed at the disposal of the Court one entire floor of every house of more than one storey, a right grossly abused by Court hangers-on to quarter their relatives and friends rent free upon the citizens. In Philip IV.'s time this oppressive right had been partially commuted to a payment of 250,000 ducats annually by the municipality, which was estimated to be one-sixth of the rental value of such houses. Mesonero Romanes, _El Antigua Madrid_. [14] A vivid picture of Madrid of the time is given in _El Diablo Cojuelo_, by Velez de Guevara, a judge, and favourite of Philip IV. [15] In this he only followed the recognised rule of Spanish ministers. Quevedo, writing from Madrid to his patron the Duke of Osuna, Viceroy of Sicily, shortly before Philip's accession, says: "Men here are like strumpets, every one of them has to be bought.... The Marquis of Siete Iglesias (_i.e._ Calderon) would like a present for his cabinet, and it would be worth while to send some trifle for his cell to the King's confessor." The "trifle" he did accept was a diamond reliquary worth 20,000 reals and a splendid altar jewel. [16] Carl Justi. [17] Carl Justi. [18] _Ibid._ [19] When Sir Francis Cottington went to Spain to negotiate peace in 1629, Endymion Porter asked him to try and buy these drawings by Leonardo da Vinci from D. Juan de Espina, whom everybody knows, for Lord Arundel. The half-Spanish Porter gave a good many other commissions to Cottington on his departure: some paintings by Titian, some orange-flower water, some orange confection, a dozen baskets of oranges, six barrels of large Seville olives, caraways, figs, chestnuts, marmalade, wine, gloves, perfumes, matting, wine, dried peaches, fine crocks, etc., in considerable quantities. (Record Office SP. Spain MS. 34, November 1629.) [20] At a somewhat later period Murillo sprang into fame and fortune through Philip seeing a picture of his exposed for sale here. [21] Pacheco, _Arte de la Pintura_. [22] He offended Olivares somehow in 1627, and remained in exile until the minister fell. [23] Zabaleta, _El dia de fiesta_, Coimbra, 1666. [24] The mere admission to the theatre was, and still is in Spanish theatres, paid for separately from the seat. And from the extract quoted it would appear that the bench seats at the time were sometimes booked beforehand, as they may be to-day. The _entrada_ in Spanish theatres gives the right to the run of the house, but nothing more. The noble army of deadheads appears to have been as numerous and unblushing three hundred years ago in Spain, as they are in England at the present time. [25] The side gallery where the women were seated. [26] The men who had only paid for the entrance and stood at the back of the patio (or pit) were so called, but they soon became a recognised paid claque. [27] The rooms in the top floors were called _desvanes_. The attic rooms were often occupied by priests. [28] Contemporary Italian MS. in British Museum, MSS. Add. 8703. "Ritratto della nascitá qualitá ed accioni di Don Juan d'Austria." [29] All are described _ad nauseam_ in the _Soto y Aguilar_ MS. [30] Most of the Spanish kings have been fanatical devotees of the chase in various forms. During the reign of Philip's father it used to be said that "Lerma and the woods were King." Philip IV. spent much time in field sports. In a letter from the Venetian ambassador in Madrid, enclosed in one from Dermond O'Sullivan Bear to an Irish correspondent (March 1628), the following passage occurs: "The King is so inclined to horse exercise and hunting, that Olivares manages to keep him at it all day, thus leaving the King no time to do anything but sign the decisions of the Councils, which suits Olivares perfectly." Record Office, S.P. Spain 34, MSS. {214} CHAPTER VI RENEWED WAR WITH FRANCE LATE IN 1628--RECONCILIATION WITH ENGLAND--THE PALATINATE AGAIN--COTTINGTON IN MADRID--HIS RECEPTION AND NEGOTIATIONS WITH OLIVARES AND PHILIP--FETES IN MADRID FOR BIRTH OF THE PRINCE OF WALES--DEATH OF SPINOLA--TREATY OF CASALE--A "LOCAL PEACE" WITH FRANCE--SPAIN AND THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR--POVERTY AND MISERY OF THE COUNTRY--UNPOPULARITY OF OLIVARES--HIS MONOPOLY OF POWER--HIS GREAT ENTERTAINMENT TO THE KING--HIS INTERVENTION IN PHILIP'S DOMESTIC AFFAIRS--"DON FRANCISCO FERNANDO OF AUSTRIA"--THE BUEN RETIRO--HOPTON IN MADRID--HIS DESCRIPTIVE LETTERS--THE INFANTES--PHILIP'S VISIT TO BARCELONA--DISCONTENT OF THE CORTES--THE INFANTE FERNANDO LEFT AS GOVERNOR--DEATH OF THE INFANTE CARLOS--DEATH OF THE INFANTA ISABEL IN FLANDERS--THE INFANTE FERNANDO ON HIS WAY THITHER WINS BATTLE OF NORDLINGEN--GREAT WAR NOW INEVITABLE WITH FRANCE [Sidenote: Richelieu and Olivares] The Spaniards for all their poverty had never ceased to send men and money in plenty to the Emperor for his eternal war against freedom of conscience in Germany, and to the Infanta Isabel {215} against Holland. But Richelieu, hampered with a war with England about the unfulfilled conditions of Henrietta Maria's marriage contract, had kept the peace with Spain since January 1626. An English fleet co-operated with the Huguenots at Rochelle, but Richelieu was equal to the occasion, and he and Marshal Schomberg together sent back Buckingham and his fleet disgraced and defeated, with a loss of two-thirds of his force, after which--late in 1628--Richelieu, relieved of the terrible siege of Rochelle, could turn his attention again to the doings of Olivares and the Spaniards. The pretext for fighting this time was the old question of the duchy of Mantua, which, being vacant, was claimed by a French and an Italian imperial pretender; and Olivares, thinking in any case to grab something for Spain, seized the strong place of Casale in Montferrat, aided and abetted on this occasion by the Duke of Savoy, who, greedy and discontented as usual, had again changed sides. As soon as Richelieu was partially free from the struggle with the Huguenots, he sent a French army to oust the invaders from Mantuan territory; and once more Philip saw himself pledged to a national war with France for a cause which was of no interest whatever to his Spanish subjects; a war in which if he were victor he could gain little or nothing, whilst if he were vanquished he might lose enormously. Olivares began by concentrating his resources, recalling Spinola from Flanders to meet the French in Italy; and once more smiling upon England, where Buckingham, smarting under his ignominious defeat at Oleron by Richelieu, in the previous year, {216} was raising another fleet at Portsmouth to relieve Rochelle. He was assassinated by Felton in August 1628, and the fleet under Lord Lindsay arrived too late to succour the heroic Huguenots, who had been at last obliged to surrender in October 1628. France was then free to launch her whole force against Spain, and peace with England, which had been desirable for Spain before, became an absolute necessity. The need was a bitter one for Olivares, for friendship and alliance with a heretic power was an open confession to the world that Spain's proud claim to the possession of a divine mandate to crush heterodoxy throughout the world could not be enforced. [Sidenote: Reconciliation with England] But past insincerities and present inconsistencies on the part of Spain weighed but little with Charles I. of England against the flattering vision of obtaining for his German brother-in-law the restoration of the Palatinate by the influence of Philip, and he welcomed the informal approaches which for some time past had been made to him by Olivares. The plotting with the Irish Catholics, which had been busily carried on from Madrid, through O'Sullivan (Count of Bearhaven), Burke (Marquis of Mayo), the agents of Tyrone and Tyrconnel and the Irish friars,[1] was suddenly cooled by Olivares, much to the disgust of the exiles; and the Irish Dominican who had been sent from Spain to sound Charles I., reported that peace might now be easily settled in England. Simultaneously Father Scaglia, an Italian friar, had been sent from Turin by the Earl of Carlisle to Madrid {217} upon a similar mission, and reported that he had seen Olivares, and that everything was ready for Cottington's arrival in Spain to settle terms.[2] Rubens also took a hand in the game. He was painting industriously in Madrid, and was in high favour with Philip, but held secret credentials from Charles I., and wrote enthusiastically about the approaching friendship of the two countries.[3] The preliminaries were not altogether easy to arrange. The Irish exiles in Madrid were still clamorous for armed Spanish aid to their desired rebellion, and were discontented at Olivares' _volte face_, whilst Charles I. himself, who had been tricked before by the Count-Duke, wanted something definite about the Palatinate before he sent Cottington openly to Spain. Scaglia tried hard and hopefully all through 1628 to get matters in train. Olivares was graciousness itself in his usual non-committal way;[4] but when the need for peace became pressing, he tired at last of this slow progress, and decided to send Rubens to London in the summer of 1629 with the rank of Secretary of the Council and Ambassador. At length, thanks largely to Rubens' personality, {218} all the thorny preliminaries were settled, and Cottington started in November 1629, but with strict orders from Charles that he was not to ask for audience until the Spanish ambassador Coloma, who was being sent from Brussels but had been delayed, should present himself in London. For Charles was still distrustful of Olivares, and feared a trick to make him appear the suppliant for peace. Rubens was prompt in conveying this suspicion to Olivares, who was quite shocked that anyone should doubt his sincerity. His letter to Cottington, received by the latter when he landed at Lisbon, elaborately explains the delay in Coloma's arrival in London by the necessity for the ambassador to remain with the Infanta in Flanders for a time until the Marquis of Aytona arrived there, owing to the loss of Bois le Duc, and ends in a holograph postscript deploring that he should be so distrusted: "You cannot think how this business has distressed me!"[5] [Sidenote: Cottington's mission, 1630] Nothing was left undone by Olivares to win Cottington, always a pro-Spaniard. He was offered as a present the whole of the customs dues (£5000) on a great English ship's cargo of goods, allowed by special licence to enter Lisbon at the same time as he did, which gift he refused, and all along the road from Lisbon to Madrid evidence of thought for his comfort met him. On the other hand, Charles I. could not do enough to honour Coloma when he came to a state dinner at Whitehall on Twelfth Day, 1630, where there were so many ladies to do him honour, writes Lord Dorchester to Cottington, "that there were many fallings out {219} amongst them for spoyling one another's ruffs, by being so close ranked."[6] But amiable as were the appearances, the distrust was deep, especially on the side of the English. When Cottington arrived within a day's journey from Madrid, he sent his coadjutor, Mr. Arthur Hopton, ahead to discover what preparations were made to receive him. He learnt, to his surprise, that Philip was absent from the capital, having gone to escort his sister, the Infanta Queen of Hungary, on her way to her new home, and that Olivares had been left behind to do the honours to the English envoy. Cottington was determined that this should not be, so he dodged the host of grandees, who had been sent out with coaches and guards to welcome him, and entered Madrid secretly by night. No sooner had he arrived at his lodging than Olivares presented himself, but the Englishman flatly refused to receive him there, and, entering a coach, drove off to the palace to offer his respects to the Queen in the absence of the King, and seek audience through Olivares as first minister. There, in his apartment, Olivares kept Cottington in converse until midnight, using all his blandishments to persuade the Englishman that he meant to deal straightforwardly this time. "All my art of fence," wrote Cottington, "could not keep him from entering into the principal business, yet but flashed and intermixed with other points. He could not doubt, he said, that I had brought orders to renew the peace negotiations at least. I said yes, if I found good resolutions to give satisfaction to my King (Charles) and his friends {220} and allies. I know your meaning, he said, ye would have restitution of the Palatinate. Yes, said I; but that is not all. You know that my King has made a league with the States, and their interests must also be considered." The protestations and heated disputes continued between them thus for hours; the point of Olivares evidently being to secure the marriage of the Palgrave's son with a daughter of the Emperor or other Spanish nominee without a prior restitution of any part of the Palatinate. At last Olivares rose, and, taking Cottington by the hand, said: "The King of England shall do the greatest work in Christendom, for by his means the Palatinate shall be entirely restored, and by his means also the King of Spain shall find peace in those northern parts."[7] Whilst the two statesmen were talking, the Countess of Olivares entered with a message from the Queen, to ask after the health of King Charles. Cottington was rigid. King Charles, he said, had sent a letter to the Queen by him, though she had not written to him for a good many years; and when he delivered the letter he had a good mind to tell her so, as King Charles was very much offended. Both Olivares and his wife were much concerned at this, and asked Cottington what had better be done. You may tell the Queen, he replied, that she might write a letter to King Charles, and send it to the Spanish Ambassador in London before the King of England's letter was delivered to her. This was promised, and when finally Cottington was led to the Queen he found her all smiles and {221} kindness for the ambassador of her brother-in-law, for matters were complicated terribly by the fact that she was the sister of Queen Henrietta Maria. [Sidenote: Cottington in Madrid] Philip was not expected to return to Madrid for several days, and in the meantime it was necessary for Olivares somehow to worm out the nature and extent of the Englishman's instructions. On Monday, two days after the interview just described, Olivares made the excuse of taking Cottington out hawking, to get him quietly in the country and alone all day from morn till dark. But they had no sport, says Cottington ruefully, for the Count-Duke was so eager in his talk that he forgot all about the hawks. The disputations, now on horseback, now in a coach, often waxed angry. The States would not have a peace, but wanted a truce, said Olivares. They will not have either, replied the Englishman, unless my King's demands are granted. How can we restore the Palatinate? blustered Olivares, which is held mostly by Bavaria. Then Cottington in a rage said he should go back to England immediately, as he saw they had been deceived. If you do, retorted Olivares, we will make a league of half Europe against you.[8] On Friday the King arrived in the capital, and great efforts were made to persuade Cottington to leave Madrid, and make a state entry, but this he refused to do. The next best thing was to send the whole Court in its finest garb to accompany him to the palace for his first audience with Philip. Nothing could exceed the honour paid him, though {222} on that occasion nothing political was discussed. But on the next day, in private conference, Cottington came to close quarters with Philip. The great question, of course, was that of the Palatinate. Philip assured Cottington that he would give every satisfaction on that point if he only had patience until powers came from Germany. As the Englishman left only half convinced, Philip called him back and asked him why the English would not accept a suspension of hostilities. Because, replied Cottington, it would look like a surrender of the point about the Palatinate. There can be no peace, he said, until that question is settled. [Sidenote: Cottington's negotiations] The weeks dragged on, every trifling point being utilised by Olivares to keep the negotiations afoot, and relieve Spain of the strain of war with England, without ceding--what it was clear they could not cede--the restoration of the Palatinate, which was mostly held by the Germans. An interminable wrangle took place about the titles to be given to the King of England: whether he should be called Majesty, which the Spaniards always gave grudgingly to any king but their own. Then it appeared that the draft protocols sent by Coloma from London gave Charles the style of "King, etc.," without his full titles, and "Defender of the Faith." Although it was late at night when the courier arrived, Cottington hurried off to complain to Philip of this. The King of England shall be given whatever style he likes, laughed Philip. Then there was a lengthy squabble about the styles to be used by the two sister-Queens in writing to each other. When that was settled, Cottington {223} grumbled incessantly at all this intriguing with the Catholic Irish rebels, and at Tyrone's presence in Madrid. Again and again Cottington, tired of Olivares' shilly-shally, was for returning to England post haste, but the Count-Duke always managed to smooth matters over by assuring him that they would really use all their influence to get the Palatinate restored if he only had patience. But at length, in March 1630, Cottington's long-suffering gave way. He saw, he says, that he was being played with, and he sent Hopton to England to ask permission for him to come home. Charles was loath to give up hope, but he too was beginning to doubt the good faith of Philip and his minister, and sent instructions that there must be no more delay. Spain wants peace, but before peace can be made by England, Philip must say clearly and promptly what portion of the Palatinate he will guarantee to restore. When this message from England was brought to Madrid by Hopton in the middle of May, Philip and Olivares took fright, for a continuance of the war with England whilst they were at war with France meant certain ruin for Spain, and yet they could not take the Palatinate from Catholic hands and restore it to Protestant Frederick. So again the blandishments re-commenced. "Pray tell me your real opinion," asked Philip of Cottington. "My real opinion, sire, is that I shall return at once, unless some means be found for making peace with the Hollanders and raising the ban against Palgrave," replied the Englishman. Philip very rarely showed anger or emotion of any sort, but he grew impatient and cross at {224} Cottington's insistence, which he attributed to his personal desire to return home for domestic reasons. Rojas, the friend of Velazquez, and Olivares' factotum, came and implored Cottington as a friend to deal plainly with him, and tell him whether he was really going home; and Olivares himself sent for him late at night to ply him with remonstrances and expostulations.[9] [Sidenote: Peace with England] And thus the juggle went on for months, until at last Charles I., himself sorely needing peace, gave way and sent instructions to Cottington to make a treaty with Spain, leaving all questions still unprejudiced, like the agreement of 1604, with which this book began. Thenceforward all was straight sailing, for Olivares had once more worked his way, and attained the peace that was necessary for Spain, and yet pledging Philip to nothing. Whilst yet the final terms were being settled, with which Rubens was to be sent to London, news came to Madrid of the birth of a son and heir to the King of England. On the 15th June, Philip received Cottington in full state to congratulate him upon the news. Never in the brightest time had the old palace of Madrid put on a braver aspect, for now that in the essential matter of peace the King had gained his point, in that of ceremonial rejoicing he Was determined there should be no shortcoming. Surrounded by a full gathering of grandees in gold chains, Philip stood under his canopy dressed in his military garb, almost English in fashion, as he stands in the Dulwich Gallery portrait, with a splendidly embroidered scarlet {225} ropilla doublet, a broad lace collar and "paned" hose, his breast covered with rich jewels and with a great feather in his hat. As Sir Francis Cottington approached him the King expressed his joy at the news. He was as glad, he said, as if the son had been his own; and he had prayed upon his knees for the happiness of the young prince. Then the delighted Englishman visited the two Infantes to receive their good wishes, they being, as Cottington says, "no less brave in attire" than their brother. In the afternoon another state visit was paid to the Queen, and to the baby Prince Baltasar Carlos, "in cap and feathers and loaded with charms and jewels." Solemn proclamation of the news was made by heralds in the public squares; the Calle Mayor and the Plaza were illuminated as bright as day with wax torches, and a great firework display was made before the palace. Every religious house in Madrid held a solemn service of thanks, and all the priors visited the English ambassador with their congratulations. Four days afterwards, one of the big royal bull-fights, in honour of the birth of a Prince of Wales, was given by Philip in the presence of Cottington in the Plaza Mayor, at which twenty bulls were killed, with many horses and three men.[10] At length the treaty of peace, the real object of all the plausibility, was settled. Olivares had won the game again. England and Spain were at peace, with the Palatinate still unrestored, and Cottington left Spain, that he knew so well, outwitted for the second time by the bland procrastination of Spanish diplomacy. {226} Once more the rivals, Richelieu and Olivares, France and Spain, were face to face in North Italy; the Pope, Venice, and the new Duke of Mantua (Nevers) being on the side of France. Richelieu was victorious almost everywhere over the Spaniards, Germans, and Savoyards. Carlo Emmanuele sank to the grave broken hearted, leaving his ancient duchy in the occupation of the French conquerors, and Spinola died of grief before Casale at the scant support and ungenerous treatment he received from Spain. His successor, Santa Cruz, patched up an ignominious treaty with the French in the field, to the violent indignation of the Spaniards at home; for the country which had paid most for the war had gained nothing by the peace. But the treaty of Casale was merely a local pacification between France and Spain. The house of Austria must be crushed, if France were to be raised to the first rank amongst the nations. Olivares unhappily could not shake off the imperial traditions which had been the ruin of Spain; and for many years to come Spanish men and money wrung from starving Castile were still poured in an endless stream to fill the armies of the Emperor. Year after year the deadly struggle went on in Central Europe. Sweden and the Protestants with France on the one side, the house of Austria and the Catholics of Germany on the other; with Spain and Spanish Flanders as the milch cow to provide the wherewithal to face all the progressive elements of Europe. [Sidenote: The Thirty-Years' War] With the vicissitudes of this epochal war between antagonistic civilisations the present book is not directly concerned, but only with such echoes and influences of it as reached the Court of Spain. {227} Battles and sieges, the death of heroes and the fall of kings, seared their deep brand upon the page of history. Spain, bereft of commerce and almost of industry, might in its agony protest with passionate tears that it could suffer no more, and lower its dark brows when the arrogant minister who ruled the fainéant King was mentioned.[11] But through it all Madrid laughed and rioted with ghastly gaiety and pagan fatalism, eating, drinking, and making merry, lest before to-morrow it should die. Outside its mud walls the fields lay bare and arid, in the provincial cities sloth and apathy ruled supreme over grass-grown market squares and empty streets; but in the Court, "the only Court," the Madrileños boastfully called it, shameless waste ran riot still; flaunting finery elbowed aside the squalid parasites that sought its smiles and struggled for its scraps; vain shows and vainer posturings filled the hollow days, and the witling who had pompously declaimed a turgid epic upon the nation's glory was held a hundred times a greater hero than he who starved in Flemish dykes, or rotted of putrid fever in overcrowded hosts before a German city, fighting and dying, as scores of thousands of them did, for the vague mirage of Spanish honour, of which the Court of Philip the Great was the centre and the source. [Sidenote: The Policy of Olivares] There is no doubt that deep discontent {228} smouldered throughout the country at the results of Olivares' policy. Spaniards were ready enough to acclaim the privilege and duty of their country to set all the world right about religion, and to interfere in the quarrels of Central Europe. The boastful vainglory of Spanish superiority and the hollow pretence of the King's irresistible power and wealth were as popular as ever, though evidence of their falsity was patent in every house in the land. But though by most Spaniards the dire effect was not traced to its true cause, and they never thought of blaming themselves for their sufferings, the minister who was the protagonist of the system was held personally to be the cause of all the trouble. Already the outer realms, Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, and Portugal, understood clearly that Olivares aimed at destroying their ancient autonomy,[12] and were seething in anger against him and the triflers at Madrid. The greater nobles, even in Castile itself, disgusted at the monopolous arrogance of Olivares, stood ostentatiously aloof from him, only awaiting an opportunity to retaliate. The minister had taken care to place in the councils persons entirely subservient to him, or those whose age or feebleness of character made them innocuous. His principal {229} subordinate ministers were his own kinsmen,--the Count of Monterey; the Marquis del Carpio; Marquis of Leganes; the Marquis of Aytona; the Marquis of Heliche, who had married his only daughter, but to Olivares' intense grief had been left a widower within the year; and the Duke of Medina de las Torres; Cardinal Zapata, the Inquisitor-General and member of many Councils, who was old, weak, and foolish; and the King's confessor, Sotomayor, was a man of no character, and entirely sold to the minister. It will be seen, therefore, that Philip was quite inaccessible to anyone not in the interests of Olivares. The Queen resented her husband's isolation, but the minister and his wife kept her also well under subjection, and her love of pleasure made her almost as easy to manage as the King. If it had been possible, even now, for the whole truth to be told to Philip as to the real causes of the poverty and wretchedness that afflicted the country, a prompt reversal of the policy that caused it might have arrested the ruin. But, in any case, it was unlikely that such change should be made; for Philip himself failed to see, as did the friends as well as the foes of Olivares, that only by a frank acceptance of the fact that Spain must abandon all her old flighty notions and impossible claims, could prosperity be brought back to the country. To prevent the danger of Philip's either discovering for himself or being told by others how deep and growing the discontent of the country was, Olivares plunged the idle young King more completely than ever in the pleasures and distractions that occupied most of his time and thoughts. Hunting, {230} play-going, religious ceremonies, literary amusements, and other entertainments left no opportunity for investigation and sustained application to business by the King. It is evident that now, whatever may have been the case at the beginning of the reign, the minister deliberately promoted this waste of time for his own ends; and his efforts to distract the King increased as the discontent in the country and Court grew. [Sidenote: A sumptuous feast] On the 1st June 1631, for instance, the Countess of Olivares gave a sumptuous entertainment to the sovereigns, as she was in the habit of doing on every possible pretext, in the gardens of her brother, the Count of Monterey;[13] and this is represented by the contemporary chronicler, who describes both fetes to have aroused the emulation of her husband to give another entertainment to the King and Queen on the night of St. John, three weeks later, that should eclipse all similar occasions. The document from which I am quoting, written by a whole-souled admirer of Olivares, is too long and tedious for reproduction entire here, but a few extracts from it may be interesting as showing now desperately the Olivares tried to please. "Although there were but few days to arrange everything, the Count-Duke was determined to show the extreme love and care with which he serves our Lord the King, and how easily he conquers the most difficult tasks by means of it. As a beginning of the preparations for the feast, which {231} was, amongst many other things, to include two new comedies not yet even thought of, much less written, his Excellency ordered Lope de Vega to write one, which he did in three days, and D. Francisco de Quevedo and D. Antonio de Mendoza the other, which they wrote in a single day, and the comedies were handed to the companies of Avendaño and Vallejo, the two best now on the boards, to study and rehearse." Notwithstanding his constant state occupations, Olivares is said to have worked night and day in personally making the preparations for the great fete. Not only the garden of Monterey, but those on each side of it[14] were appropriated; and a great Italian architect, who had designed the wonderful jasper pantheon of the Kings at the Escorial, was commissioned to build a beautiful open-air theatre and a series of improvised edifices for the accommodation of the principal guests. Like magic, thanks to lavish expenditure, there sprang up in the shady gardens a gorgeously upholstered chamber or bower with chairs of state for the King and his two brothers, and the customary cushions for the Queen, placed in a projecting balcony from which the stage could be seen, with two similar apartments, one on each side, for the suite, and retired nooks or niches between them, we are told, in which the Count and Countess of Olivares might watch over the comfort of their guests. A {232} stage, surrounded and crowned by a multitude of lights in crystal globes, and decked with flowers, faced the royal pavilions, and on each side seats were provided for the ladies of the Court, but no gentleman was allowed to be present. By the wall separating the gardens from the Prado great stands were erected to accommodate the six orchestras and choirs that were ordered to be present, and the gentlemen guests, none of whom were asked to the garden itself. To each of Olivares' great kinsmen already mentioned was assigned a department: one was to superintend the rehearsals, another was to take charge of the marshalling of the coaches and the reception of the royal guests, another had under his care the refreshments, and so on. On the day before the fête the Countess of Olivares dined in the garden, and witnessed a full dress rehearsal of the whole entertainment; and Madrid was agog with excitement when, after dark on the night of St. John, all the grand folk from the palace in their heavy coaches lumbered down to the Prado to attend the fête. At nine o'clock the royal party were received by the Countess at the entrance pavilion which had been erected for the purpose, the united choirs chanting a pæan of welcome as the King and Queen advanced to the chamber whence they were to see the comedies. Gentlemen of the Count-Duke's household on their knees offered to the royal guests and their suite of ladies perfumes in crystal and gold flasks, scented lace handkerchiefs, bouquets, scented clay crocks,[15] {233} fans, etc., on silver salvers. Then, after a flourish of trumpets and an overture on the guitars, Quevedo's and Mendoza's new comedy was performed by Vallejo's company. "_Who Lies Most Thrives Most_" was the name of the piece, and we are told that it was crammed "with the smart sayings and courtly gallantry of Don Francisco de Quevedo, whose genius is so favourably known in the world." The principal actress was the famous Maria de Riquelme,[16] who in verse welcomed the great guests, and praised the King in a manner that, if he had not been case-hardened to adulation, would have made an archangel blush, whilst at the same time several strong hints were introduced that the Count-Duke himself was only one degree less divine than his master. For two hours the stage entertainment went on, with comedies, dances, poetry and music, all present agreeing that Don Francisco de Quevedo had in his one day's work put more wit and humour than other authors would consider sufficient for a dozen comedies. At one of the intervals, when the first comedy was finished, the King and Queen were conducted to the adjoining garden of the Duke of Maqueda, where they found a series of {234} beautiful chambers communicating with one another, and constructed entirely of flowers and leaves. One of these was for the King and his brothers, another for the Queen, and the third for the ladies in attendance, and in each of the rooms were disguises for the guests. For the King had been provided a long brown cloak, trimmed with great scrolls of black and silver, and closed by frogs and olives of wrought silver, a white hat with white and brown plumes, a shield of scented leather and silver, and a white falling Walloon collar; similar but diverse disguises being provided for the two princes. Upon a side table in each flower chamber was a precious casket of morocco leather and gold filled with choice sweetmeats, a variety of perfumes, and some of the scented clay vessels of which Spanish ladies of the day fancied the taste to nibble and even sometimes to swallow. The Queen's disguise was like that of the King, but with much more adornment in the way of spangles and the like; and when the whole party had covered their ordinary garb with these unusual additions, "strange in shape and fashion," they were led in stately procession with much attitudinising to see the second comedy, in which, says the awestricken chronicler, "they lost no jot of the majesty which is not the least of their inestimable virtues and perfections." The assumption of these fantastic disguises by the royal personages is elaborately apologised for by the chronicler, by whom it was considered apparently as a somewhat risky and undignified experiment; especially as, owing to it, no male person except Olivares and his household was admitted to the gardens themselves; the gentlemen {235} of the Court being relegated to the stands by the Prado wall, in order that they might not see the King unbend sufficiently to don a disguise. When Lope de Vega's new comedy, "_The Night of St. John_," was finished, the royal party retired to a banqueting-room constructed of flowers in the other garden on the north. Here a sumptuous supper was served at midnight, the King and Queen at their high table being served by Olivares and his wife, everything being done with perfect silence and order,--"though a multitude of dishes were carried to the musicians, singers, and gentlemen in the orchestra stands." By the time the lights were dimming, and the sky was turning to pearly grey beyond the trees of St. Geronimo, the whole stately company turned out in their coaches for a drive up and down the Prado; and then back to the palace, doubtless to sleep.[17] When the dawn broke fully, it was found that, notwithstanding the prohibition, a perfect host of people, men and boys, had surreptitiously found their way in from the Prado, and, hidden in the copses and under the stagings, they had witnessed the whole show, including the questionable proceeding of risking the majesty of monarchs by a fancy dress; whereupon the chronicler attributes the quietness and {236} patience of these intruders to the awe and reverence inspired by a king, no matter how dressed.[18] As will be seen by this curious account, the hand of Olivares was everywhere. From handing the King his shirt in the morning and drawing his bed curtains at night, to deciding peace and war for the nation, the Count-Duke did everything. The King's amusements and amours were as much his affairs as were the routine duties of Government; and I unearthed some years ago, and described fully in a former book of mine,[19] a curious series of original manuscript documents which prove that at the period now under review (1630-1635) the most secret domestic concerns of the King were settled by Olivares as a matter of course. The first document of the series[20] is a note written by Olivares to the King in 1630, saying that it was high time that a certain little boy, whose age is given as four years, should be concealed, and taken away from the people he was then with; so that all trace of him may be broken. He has, he says, been thinking very deeply how this is to be done, and, as was usual with him, had found objections to every solution that has presented itself. But he thinks, upon the whole, that the child should be secretly put in the care of a certain gentleman of his acquaintance living at Salamanca, named Don Juan de Isasi Ydiaquez; and the Count-Duke proposes that this gentleman should be summoned to Court without telling him why he was wanted; and "after seeing him, your Majesty may decide." {237} Across this document Philip has written in his big straggling hand: "It appears very necessary that something should be done in this matter, and I approve of your suggestion." [Sidenote: One of Philip's sons] The rest of the papers unfold the poor sad little mystery. The babe in question was one of Philip's illegitimate children, christened Francisco Fernando, and he was probably his first son; born, as we are told in these papers, at the house of his grand-parents, who were gentlefolk, between eleven and twelve at night on the 15th May 1626; Don Francisco de Eraso, Count of Humanes,[21] leading the midwife thither and being present at the birth, the infant being conveyed immediately afterwards to the house of Don Baltasar de Alamos, Councillor of the Treasury, where a nurse awaited him, in whose care he remained until he was delivered by Olivares to his new keeper, the hidalgo of Salamanca, who belonged to a notable bureaucratic and secretarial family. The subsequent short career of the infant does not enter into our present subject; but it is fully detailed in the documents: the periodical reports of the child's progress, the grave discussions of Olivares with physicians and keepers as to his diet and health; the provisions for his proper education, his clothing and diversions, his infantile ailments, the most trivial circumstances of the child's life, are all considered and passed in review by the minister, upon whose bowed shoulders the whole work of the State rested. The little left-handed royalty, for all the care with which his life was surrounded, failed to resist the bleak air {238} of Salamanca, and on the 17th March 1634 the King's Secretary of State, Geronimo de Villanueva, of whom we shall hear again, wrote to the hidalgo Isasi Ydiaquez, saying "that his Majesty had received with the deepest grief the news of the death of Don Francisco Fernando, who showed such bright promise for his tender years, and his Majesty highly appreciated all the care that had been taken with him."[22] And a few days later, the little corpse, dressed in a red and gold gown, and enclosed in a black velvet coffin, was carried with all secrecy to the Escorial, where, in the presence of the inevitable Don Geronimo de Villanueva, the secretary and confidential agent of the King, the "body of Don Francisco Fernando, son of his Catholic Majesty Don Felipe IV.," was handed to the bishop of Avila in the porch of the church, and buried by the friars in the vaults of their monastery. The frowning old Alcazar on the cliff overlooking the Manzanares, so often mentioned as the scene of Philip's festivities, was unfit for gaiety, and offered but few attractions to him. The Escorial for similar reasons was never a favourite residence of his; and Aranjuez was always insalubrious except in the spring. The Court therefore was usually in residence in Madrid itself, or in the neighbouring hunting seat of the Prado. But there was in the extensive and beautiful grounds attached to the monastery of St. Geronimo at the east gate of the capital a suite of apartments used {239} by the royal family for religious or mourning retreats, or for an occasional guest house. It occurred to Olivares in 1631 that this place might be made more attractive, and used more frequently as a relief to Philip from the stern mediæval palace at the other end of the town. The idea began with the mere levelling of an inequality here, the clearing of a lawn there, and the building of an aviary and a few fountains and summer houses. But very soon the Count-Duke's ambition grew, and he and Philip became fascinated and absorbed in the building of a palace which became to the reign of Philip what Versailles was to that of Louis XIV. [Sidenote: The Buen Retiro] The palace of the Buen Retiro was intended by Olivares, and truly was, a fit setting for the elegant, chivalric, and poetic surroundings of the King, a light and pretty retreat in the midst of enchanting gardens, where upon stages under the trees or in high and gilded halls the witty dissolute comedies might be played to an audience of the elect. Nothing that the inspiration of genius, the efforts of flattery, or the exercise of unrestrained expenditure could compass was spared by Olivares in making the Buen Retiro perfect for its purpose of keeping the King diverted. An immense territory, in addition to the monastery grounds, was appropriated for the purpose,[23] and Olivares exhausted all the horticultural knowledge of the time in laying out {240} the grounds with lakes, grottoes, and cascades; whilst in a very short time there arose in all its beauty the palace that in future was to be the symbol of Philip's elegant, picturesque, but useless reign. Even before the building itself was finished, the place was inaugurated by a ceremony characteristic both of Philip and his minister. On the 1st October 1632, the King paid his visit to see the preparations being made for the festival to be held in celebration of the birth of an heir to his sister the Queen of Hungary. When he approached the new royal house, he was met by Olivares, who had conferred upon himself the post of honorary Constable of the Palace, bearing upon a silver salver the gold master-keys of the Buen Retiro.[24] Kneeling, he handed them to the King, who, touching them with his hand, signified that the bearer should retain them; and when, later, the festivities commenced in the recently built rooms, to continue thereafter for many days, Philip and his wife fairly fell in love with the place, whose lightsome grace was a revelation to them after the dark old Alcazar. First there was a showy cane tourney, in which the King on horseback, with Olivares at his side, led a glittering troop of riders, Philip taking part in the festivities, as the flattering poet said, "not as a king but as a most gallant skilful gentleman." This splendid show the greatest poet of his time, Lope de Vega, then rapidly sinking into the grave, celebrated in verse. "The Vega del Parnaso," {241} dedicated to the first festival of the new palace, was an appropriate swan's song of the great dramatist, whose inexhaustible wit and invention had done so much to lead the thoughts of his countrymen to the theatrical expression of which this new fairy palace was to be the apotheosis. Afterwards there was one of the usual bull-fights; then running at the ring, with rich prizes of silver plate, of course won by the King, and afterwards a ball was held in the unfinished halls, at which, as at a modern cotillon, "perfumed purses of ducats and rich dress lengths" were given to the lady dancers.[25] [Sidenote: Baltasar Carlos] Only a few months before this, the Church of St. Geronimo had been the scene of another of those stately ceremonials which were the birthright of Spanish princes. There, upon a splendidly decked staging before the high altar, the tiny Prince Baltasar Carlos, who had been carried thither the day before, received the oaths of the Commons of Castile as heir to the throne. There were two violent altercations for precedence between nobles, even in the King's presence, before the ceremony; but all was silence as the chubby princeling, in crimson plush embroidered with gold, toddled up the nave to the staging, held in leading strings by his two uncles Carlos and Fernando; the first in a few months to sink into the grave, a silent, amiable young enigma to the last. The little Prince, we are told, carried a miniature sword and dagger covered with enamel and diamonds, and wore a black hat trimmed with bugles and diamonds, and adorned by scarlet plumes. It is {242} to be remarked that in most of these festivities Philip himself was faithful to his love of brown for his dress; and on this occasion is described as wearing light brown velvet embroidered with gold thread, and wearing the collar of the Golden Fleece, whilst he rested his hand upon the shoulder of his gentleman-in-waiting, the Count de Galve, clad smartly in crimson satin and gold.[26] [Sidenote: Financial exactions] In the meanwhile, over the tinkling of all this courtly gaiety, there echoed the distant rumbling of the storm. Mr. Arthur Hopton, the new English ambassador, left in Madrid to look after English commercial interests, and to push the eternal question of the Palatinate, wrote to Lord Dorchester in February 1631: "All the Spanish Barbary garrisons are starving, but the want of corn here is so great that every grain from Andalusia is sorely wanted for Castile."[27] But the extravagant expenditure on the Buen Retiro and on the never-ending war had to be met somehow, and Olivares had to incur increased odium by inventing new exactions. "The Count of Olivares," continues Hopton, "being the most industrious man in his master's service, and more so in the matter of his revenue than anything else, hath made him an instrument by directing a new imposition on salt, making the King the owner of all the salt that is spent, and delivering it out at 40 reals the fanega (_i.e._ 1½ bushels), whilst remitting 12 per cent. on the wine and oil excise that had nine years to run. This is a pretty way of imposing {243} taxation on the clergy and religious without the leave of the Pope."[28] But the salt monopoly was much more than that, as Hopton soon found by the bitter complaints of the English shipmasters, who, now that the trade was reopened, had hoped to do a large business again with salt from Andalucia to England. Olivares replied suavely to all his remonstrances, that he wished to treat the English better than any others, but the King _must_ have money, and he hoped the increased price of salt would not alter the new friendship. It soon turned out that the new tax was to be in addition to, and not in place of, the wine and oil excise ("the millions," as it was called); and Hopton displays almost admiration at the financial resource of Olivares. "He means to keep the millions too, now that he has got the other voted. I think it may be truly claimed that the inventor of this project hath discovered a way to bring a greater revenue to this King's purse than Columbus did that discovered the West Indies. Aragon has not yet consented, but probably will do so, as the tax is to be imposed on strangers (_i.e._ those who bought Spanish salt for export). When I was last with Olivares he let fall a word that makes me think they mean to satisfy his Majesty (_i.e._ King Charles of England) in another way. I said it would require good consideration to instruct their ambassador what reasons to make the imposition appear to be no breach of the _Article_. {244} He said: 'Doubt it not.' I said it would be fit to do it presently, for it would be better to come to his Majesty (Charles) by way of reason than complaint. He replied, 'We are providing some papers to send to the King (of England) that will not be unwelcome.'"[29] What this "secret affair," as Hopton calls it, was does not appear; but doubtless it was one of Olivares' usual mystifications to keep the English complaints from being pushed too urgently, for the hosts of English shipmasters so long kept out of Spain by the war, but who were now crowding into Spanish ports to trade, were clamorous about the extortion and injustice to which they were subjected. Hopton bribed Olivares' subordinates heavily, and besieged the minister himself; but the resources of delay in Spanish diplomacy were infinite, and little redress could be obtained. Of sweet words Hopton found an abundance from Olivares, who was always ready to flatter in furtherance of his aims, and Hopton was inclined to be boastful of English prowess. "All the rest of the world must pardon me," said Olivares once to him, in answer to a bit of innocent brag, "but I hold no nation fit to fight in a royal Armada but England and Spain."[30] Money, and ever more money, was Olivares' constant cry. "His time is principally taken up," says Hopton, "in arranging loans." The price of salt had been raised to 35 or 40 reals 1½ bushel for inland consumption or export, an enormous increase "which will bring an exorbitant revenue {245} if they can enforce it in all the kingdoms. They are also decreeing a tax on all royal grants, titles, and appointments, which will also bring a vast revenue." Writing to Lord Dorchester in August 1631, Hopton mentions the excessive price of all commodities in Madrid. "I can assure your Lordship that only in regard of the value of brass money, wherein all the trade of this country is done, what was last year at 30 per cent. and upwards is not now worth 10 per cent., the charge of living here since last year is one in five increased."[31] [Sidenote: Spain's responsibilities] Dire news too came from Central Europe, which foreshadowed the need of yet greater sacrifices for Spain. The meteoric Swede, Gustavus Adolphus, had entered the field on the side of France (January 1631), and was sweeping all before him. One imperial city after the other opened its gates to him, and some of the Emperor's feudatories who had been considered the most loyal rallied to the victorious enemy. The empire was altogether inadequate to face the strong new combination against it, and could only, as usual, appeal to Spain for resources. Looking back at the position with our present lights, it is impossible to understand the besotted folly that led Philip and his minister to assume the main burden of a war such as this. They had nothing material to gain by it. The religion, and even the territorial disputes, of the German princes were of no real importance to Spain, and a nation in the terrible financial and industrial condition of the latter was not justified in further consummating its ruin for the sake of an already outworn sentiment. {246} [Sidenote: Fresh embarrassments] Another trouble almost as pressing as the Emperor's war loomed also in the near future. The old Infanta Isabel was rapidly sinking to her grave childless; and in accordance with the calamitous agreement of 1598, the Flemish dominions of the house of Burgundy were to revert in that case to the crown of Spain, a fatal inheritance, the Flemish States being open to attack from France on one side and Holland on the other, and destined to keep Spain at war until the final catastrophe overwhelmed both nation and dynasty. Olivares had kept the two Infantes in the background until now; though, as we have seen by his paper of six years before, he had always foreseen the ultimate necessity of sending Fernando, the young Cardinal, to Flanders as his brother's representative. Carlos, silent, amiable, unambitious, and lacking in vitality, gave the minister little cause for anxiety; but Fernando was by far the cleverest of his house. The nobles of Castile were already looking to him as a possible leader against Olivares; and at last it was decided that Fernando should go to Flanders, to be near his aunt, and succeed as Governor for his brother when the Infanta should die. Carlos being, as he said, a man of arms, for once plucked up spirit to protest and claim his right, as senior, to go to Flanders, but Olivares said that after Baltasar Carlos, "who had growne sickly of late, and there is some doubt whether the King will have any more children,"[32] he (Carlos) was his brother's heir, and could not be allowed to go far away. He was mollified by promises that were never kept, that {247} he should be sent to command in Portugal or Catalonia; but in the summer of next year, 1632, as will be told, he sickened and died unmarried, greatly, no doubt, to the relief of Olivares, who dreaded the possibility of his being made a figurehead by his enemies.[33] It was not easy to send Fernando to Flanders, even after it was decided to do so, and many months passed before even the money could be raised and preparations made for his going. Hopton wrote in August 1631: "The Infante Cardinal hastens his going to Flanders, and has arranged to borrow of the Fucars 240,000 ducats at 40,000 per month. The matter is so forward that the brokers have received the first payment, but I do not believe that he will go; for if he do it will be no easy matter to stay Carlos going to Portugal, and it is not likely that the King will leave the realm so destitute of his brothers, _and expose them to the familiarity with those who may be dangerous to him_." A month later he reported that, after all, the young Cardinal was not to go that year, "but may slip away secretly, in imitation of our King's coming hither." In fact, serious news had suddenly reached Olivares from Central Europe. The battle of Breitenfeld, in which the Emperor's best General, Tilly, had been routed by Gustavus Adolphus, had made the latter master of Germany, and if he chose to march on, Vienna itself was at his mercy. Dismay reigned amongst the imperialists at this crushing blow, and as soon as Olivares received {248} the news at the end of September he sent for Hopton, late at night. The Englishman found him in great agitation. "There is no time for words," he said, "but for God's sake send to England post haste, telling them to send to Vienna at once every offer that may facilitate an arrangement with the Emperor. I speak out of my goodwill to England, and I am sending to Vienna with the same object." The real end of Olivares' move is evident. In the critical position of the imperialists, with most of the Emperor's feudatories falling away and John Frederick of Saxony in arms against him, joined to Sweden and France, this was the opportunity, if ever, for England to strike an effectual blow for the Palatinate. It is true that the Marquis of Hamilton and some Scottish mercenaries were already with Gustavus Adolphus, but this was not national war; and if England could be diverted into diplomatic negotiations during this time of the imperialists' adversity, all might be well, but if she joined the allies the house of Austria was ruined; and for the next few weeks, whilst the danger lasted, nothing could exceed the amiability of Olivares to the English.[34] {249} Blow after blow continued to fall upon the imperial cause. Gustavus at Mayence was practically the master of Europe, the Spanish fleet had been defeated off Flanders. Tilly was utterly crushed and killed at Ingolstadt, and a revolt had broken out in Spanish Sicily against the new taxes of Olivares. Worst of all, when the minister decreed that the salt tax should be levied in the autonomous Basque provinces, the assembly there flatly refused to pay it. Olivares blustered that he would send 30,000 soldiers to make them. "We will await their coming," replied the assembly, "with 3000 and beat them."[35] And so gradually the policy of Olivares, which kept Spain at war with Europe for a barren idea, was leading the outer realms of the Peninsula itself towards rebellion, a thing unheard of for generations, because of their fear that they too were marked out by the minister to undergo the same fate as unhappy Castile. [Sidenote: Olivares and England] In the midst of all his difficulties at home and abroad, the consummate skill with which Olivares played upon the English statesmen is almost amusing at this distance of time. Hopton's spirits rose and fell from week to week, as those of Anstruther did in Vienna. Olivares and the Emperor understood each other perfectly, and had no difficulty between them in keeping England quiet with the old bait of the restoration of the Palatinate. A specimen from Hopton's letters will illustrate the clever way in which Olivares beguiled his interlocutor. "In the time my memorial was in debate {250} I sometimes took occasion to see the Conde (_i.e._ Olivares). On one it happened that the _Ave Maria_ bell rang, and when he had ended his prayer he examined me in all the material points of our religion, wherein, I perceive, he is not ignorant. In the sacrament of baptism I said all the essential parts are the same in both Churches. But, he said, here they say, 'O! he was christened by a minister; but I (Olivares) tell them that I see no cause why a man may not as well be saved being christened by a minister as by a priest.' This was in the palace, on the occasion of the christening of our Princess, of whom they have begun to talk of as theirs.[36] When the Duke of Lennox went to kiss the Prince's hand, the Countess of Olivares, who was present, bade the Prince ask for his cousin's hand, and said, 'You have a mistress there; and then, turning to us, she said, 'We are beginning to _galantear_ (_i.e._ to court) already.' He (Olivares) examined me upon the Lord's supper, and was much pleased to know the chiefest difference is in the manner of the presence. He asked me concerning divorces, and approved of the practice of confession, though, he said, that it was too lightly practised amongst them. Did we, he asked, receive the blessed Virgin? I said he who did so was not considered a good Christian. He said, 'The top of the difference is the Pope's supremacy, and the chiefest scruple was in temporalities, because you would not have him meddle in matters of Kings.' I said yes; whereupon he shook his head and said no more. I know his meaning, as {251} things stand between him and the Pope. He said that if that point could be agreed I think it would not be hard to reconcile Protestants to the Church."[37] All this talk about marriage and reconciliation in religion had done duty only ten years before; but apparently the English diplomatists were as ready as ever to follow the Will o' the Wisp until the time of danger for Spain had passed and they could safely be shelved. The young Duke of Lennox was flattered and treated with almost royal honours, and Hopton himself was quite confused by the sustained amiability of Olivares. But at length even he began to doubt; and presented a strongly worded memorial to Philip, calling upon him to have the Palatinate restored. After inordinate delay the reply to this was simply another promise to instruct the Spanish ambassador with the Emperor to urge the matter again upon him. In very truth this eternal shuttlecock between Vienna and Madrid was growing stale again; and the English Government did now, when it was too late, what it should have done at first, namely, talk of preparations for war. But it was only talk; and though it frightened Olivares for a week or two, Hopton deplored that the preparations were not being made a good earnest to fight; "for this is the only way to bring Spain to reason, and they themselves are making preparations for a big war." In fact it was quite evident now to everyone that unless Spain promptly withdrew her pretensions a great war to the death would have to be fought with France. Her troops in the Emperor's {252} armies had never ceased in Central Europe to meet in combat those of Louis XIII., but the impending resumption of rule by Spain over Catholic Flanders was an event that again threatened the integrity of France itself; for with Spanish frontiers, north, south, and east of her, the old position that had led to the great wars between Charles V. and Francis I. in the previous century would be repeated; and the new France which had arisen under Henry IV., and had been strengthened by Richelieu, would never suffer without a struggle a return to the old state of affairs. Money, constant, never-ending money, was the first desideratum of King Philip, if such a war as that foreshadowed, in addition to the struggle in Germany, was to be undertaken. The outer realms, and especially Portugal, were in a condition of sulky apprehension; but Philip was forced to meet the legislatures before he could get money from them. It was a necessity that he and Olivares dreaded and hated, but it had to be faced. All the Cortes therefore were summoned. "All to get money for their great engagements: how great they are they know not themselves," wrote Hopton. [Sidenote: The need for money] But money had to be got somehow, even before the Cortes could meet or King go to his eastern realms. All the taxes had been anticipated, the loan-mongers had run dry, and the silver from the indies had not arrived. Writing in February 1632, Hopton says; "They have levied heavy contributions on the tradesmen of Madrid,[38] but they {253} press them not hard yet, trying mild means first, and then passing to violent. However, they spare not those who are known to be moneyed men; for they have sent to the Duke of Bejar for 100,000 ducats, and to the Duke of Medina Sidonia, and others in proportion. It will be a very great sum in all, but will be needed for the war next summer." Cardinal Borgia contributed 50,000 crowns, and nobles, merchants, and churchmen were squeezed as they had never been squeezed before, even in the time of Lerma.[39] In the Cortes of Castile (February 1632) a spirited protest for once was made, representing the poverty of the country, and saying that it was unjust to impoverish the land in order to send vast sums of money to the Emperor for a war useless to Spain.[40] But, as usual, the deputies, who were bribed heavily, ended in voting despairingly what was asked; and after taking the oath of allegiance, as has already been described, to Prince Baltasar Carlos in the Church of St. Geronimo, they were promptly dismissed. [Sidenote: The two Infantes] The journey of the King to Aragon was an {254} anxious matter. Olivares had complicated the situation by aiding Marie de Medici and Gaston Duke of Orleans in their armed revolt against the government of Richelieu, to the openly expressed fury of the people of Madrid, who hated disloyalty to a King, even if he were King of France; and the rumour prevailed that in revenge for the action of Olivares a French army was preparing to invade Catalonia and carry the war into Spain itself. The risk and danger of the King's journey were urged upon Philip, and discussed at length in his Council; but Olivares, whilst admitting the risk, concluded that, "considering the penury of your Majesty's treasury, ... the suffering to be incurred and the risk of annoyance from the Cortes would be lesser evils than the loss of the two millions (of ducats) we hope to get."[41] But though the voyage was decided upon, of one thing Olivares had quite made up his mind, namely, that the King's two brothers should not be left behind to plot at liberty the downfall of the favourite they hated. Don Carlos, left to himself and excluded from all affairs by Olivares, had fallen into a dissipated mode of life; and both he and his abler brother Fernando were on terms of intimate friendship with the Count-Duke's enemy, the Admiral of Castile and his kinsmen, especially with Don Antonio de Moscoso, who was the inseparable factotum of Don Fernando. A most interesting paper, transcribed at length by Novoa as being written at the time by Olivares to the King on the subject of the two Infantes, shows how bitter and unscrupulous the {255} minister was towards these two young Princes. The vilest suspicion is expressed as to their loyalty, and the most cynical distrust of all their actions and words. It had been decided to send Fernando to Flanders, but for various reasons he had not yet been allowed to start; and when the voyage of the King to Barcelona was decided upon, Olivares made his cowardly secret attack upon him and his brother Carlos in the document in question.[42] The nobles who are friendly to the Infantes are all represented as traitors and scoundrels; and the Princes themselves are credited not only with unworthy behaviour, but also with evil plots and designs. "In any case," says Olivares, "they must both be separated from all their friends, and this voyage to Barcelona will offer a good opportunity for doing it without attracting public notice. Fernando," he continues, "is already kicking over the traces, and assuming airs on the strength of his going to Flanders; and the money he has command of is making him dangerous. He and Carlos are close friends, and their secret communications indicate an evil bent. Under the pretext of these Cortes in Barcelona your Majesty might get Fernando and his servants out of Madrid, saying that you wanted him to look after ecclesiastical affairs there, and the noble and university members of the Cortes, leaving him there when you return to deal with and close the assembly. Moscoso, who has a wife in Madrid and does not like travelling, would stay here, ... and if he was bold enough to disobey orders and try to join the Infante, we {256} would soon find means to upset his projects. As for Don Carlos, when the Admiral is away from him, and the Prince absent, his household will assume a very different aspect. Seeing the musters of enemies on our frontiers and the dangers threatening us on every hand, it will be a good plan to send the (Catalan) nobles to their own estates, to see what troops they can raise, giving out that Fernando is to be their leader, surrounding him with greyheads to keep him more enclosed, and even imprisoned, for it is a grave crime for him to show annoyance as he does at your Majesty's orders.... So, Sire, if we get the Admiral away from here there will be a way to prevent him from returning, and the Infante Fernando may remain in Barcelona better occupied than he is now, whilst Carlos, quieter and in better frame of mind, may stay by your Majesty's side." [Sidenote: Philip and the Catalans] Philip as usual accepted his mentor's recommendation. The two Infantes, fully informed by Olivares' enemies of the reason for taking them away from Madrid, had to accompany their brother to the east, the Queen remaining behind as Regent. Philip and his brothers, with a large following of the minister's kin and friends, left Madrid on 12th April 1632, the two young Princes being almost without attendants. Fernando's reduced household were sent ahead to Barcelona, and the Infante cried out aloud that this meant that he was not to return to Madrid, and that the whole journey to Catalonia had been got up solely to get him away from Court for good. The Princes, indeed, were almost in open revolt against Olivares; and {257} it was noticed that they travelled with loaded pistols at their saddle-bows, a thing never seen before. After a stay of a week in Valencia, where Cortes were convoked and swore allegiance to the little Prince Baltasar Carlos, the whole Court moved on to Barcelona, where the great struggle for money was expected, for the stout Catalans were determined now that they would make a stand against the encroachments of Olivares on their liberties. The Viceroy, the Duke of Cardona, met the King at Murviedro, and warned him that the Catalans were in a dangerous mood. They objected to vote any more money, objected to a royal Prince for a Viceroy,--it was the duty of the King himself, they said, to come to them, and remain whilst the Cortes were in session, and they would not be contented unless the King stayed at least four months with them. All along the road the King and his favourite found the people scowling, and at Tortosa they broke out in subversive cries because he only stayed a few hours in the town. At Barcelona the King found the Cortes of Catalonia more recalcitrant than ever, opposing endless difficulties to everything proposed, and advancing all sorts of old claims with regard to ceremonial and ancient privilege, each one of which had to be discussed interminably.[43] At last the ordinary supply was voted without increase, and the Infante Fernando was accepted by the Catalans as Governor with a sufficiently ill grace. Fernando himself was furious, and protested to his brother and Olivares hotly that he was being {258} isolated in the interests of the latter, without the chance of distinction and elevation that he would have gained in Flanders. But he was at last reconciled by mingled flattery, cajolery, and appeals to duty, and remained as Governor to continue the Cortes, closely surrounded by mentors in the interests of Olivares.[44] Lerida had refused to send members to the Barcelona Cortes at all, and as Philip approached the city on his way home it was given out that he intended to punish it for its disobedience. Terrified, the city fathers came to meet the King and pray for pardon, which, only with difficulty and a complete submission, was partially accorded to them. When the Court arrived at Almadrones, two or three days' journey from Madrid, they were met by Antonio Moscoso, with an ostentatious train of followers and servants, on his way to join the Infante Fernando at Barcelona. This could never be allowed, and the King's confessor ordered Moscoso to return to Madrid at once. He appealed and wept in vain at the humiliation of such a return; but was told that the King's orders must be obeyed without reply. When he went to kiss Philip's hand, the King, immovable as a statue, drily asked, "When are you leaving?" "I must speak to the Count-Duke first, your Majesty," replied Moscoso. "You will be too late," said Philip, "for he was going to rest at once, and {259} would not awake till ten at night, in order to set out on the road from twelve to one."[45] So Moscoso was fain to turn back with a heavy heart, explaining by the way to Olivares that the Infante had sent for him, and he meant no harm. But though Olivares tried to lay the whole of the responsibility upon the King, this insult rankled deeply in the breast of the Infante Fernando, and was one more mark for vengeance scored up by the enemies of the minister. An indignant and formal complaint was made to the King by his brother, and in order to ensure its attention it was handed to Philip by his wife, much to the dismay of Olivares, who knew now that Isabel of Bourbon was the head of his foes, and that he could not dispose of her as he had done of the Infante. [Sidenote: Death of Don Carlos] As soon as Philip returned to Madrid, at the end of June 1632, the occasion was celebrated by another great _auto-de-fé_ in the Plaza Mayor, where the King and Queen with the Infante Carlos sat in their balcony from eight in the morning (3rd July 1632) till late in the afternoon, witnessing the indictment, the preaching of prosy sermons, and the reading of legal documents, reciting the errors and heresies of the poor wretches who stood upon the high scaffold in the midst of the square, dressed in sambenitos. The ghastly rejoicing, such as it was, soon turned to mourning. The Infante Carlos had fallen ill on the way home from Barcelona, but had partially recovered on his arrival at Madrid. The summer was the most oppressive that had been experienced for years, and the young Infante--he {260} was only twenty-five--fell ill of fever in Madrid, and died in a few days;[46] and Olivares had one less difficulty to contend with, though the amiable, unambitious young man was of himself inoffensive. [Sidenote: France and Spain] Nor was it long before the other Infante was removed from the path of Olivares. The old Infanta Isabel ended at last her strenuous life in 1633, and Fernando was sent by way of Italy to the States of Flanders to govern the fatal dominion for Spain once more, to Spain's ultimate undoing. Fernando was able and ambitious. From Milan he was to lead a large Spanish force to Flanders. But affairs had gone ill with the imperial cause. Gustavus Adolphus, it is true, had fallen; but in the fight at which he fell he had beaten Wallenstein, with the loss of 12,000 men on the imperialist side. On the appeal of the Emperor, Fernando turned aside, and a critical moment when the imperialists were delivering the attack he arrived before the Protestant city of Nördlingen (September 1634). His presence turned the scale, for a relieving force {261} of Swedes was just approaching, and the ensuing battle, one of the most decisive in the Thirty Years' War, was a crushing defeat to the Swedes and the Protestants. The Cardinal Infante passed on his way triumphant to his new governship, crowned by the laurels of victory and the plaudits of his countrymen. But his active intervention in the war with Spanish Government troops changed the aspect of the war. The Swedes were no longer the leaders of a federation of Protestants against a federation of Catholics. It was clear to Richelieu that unless with the whole force of France he threw himself into the fray against the house of Austria, not only Protestantism in Germany would suffer--for that indeed he cared nothing, but the vital interests of France. And so it happened that when the Cardinal Infante was entering Brussels in pompous triumph, Richelieu had already heavily subsidised the Dutch for an active renewal of their war against him; and within a few months, early in 1635, Spain herself was in the grip of a great national struggle with France, a struggle which extended as time went on from her Flanders dominions to her Italian possession, and from the Franche Comté to the sacred soil of Spain itself. [1] See letters from Madrid to Eugene Field in the Monastery of Timoleague, etc., in Record Office, S.P. Spain 34, 1627. [2] Scaglia to Carlisle. Record Office, S.P. Spain 34, MS., 19th January, 1628. [3] Rubens to Carlisle. Record Office, S.P. Spain 34, MS., January 1628, etc. [4] A good specimen of his style is seen in his reply to a letter from Scaglia early in April 1629 (Record Office, S.P. Spain 34, MS.), asking for an audience at the desire of Lord Carlisle, in order to tell Olivares how much Carlisle esteems him. "I will give this audience to your lordship very willingly to-night (writes Olivares), and it will give me most particular pleasure to talk about the Earl of Carlisle, of whom I am the most affectionate servitor, and have been so all through the worst tribulations; although when he was here I always considered him a friend of France.... The differences that have taken place between us are all owing to French intrigue." [5] Record Office, S.P. Spain 34, MS., December 1629. [6] Record Office, S.P. Spain 34, 10th January 1630. [7] Cottington to Dorchester, 29th January 1630, Record Office, S.P. Spain 34, MS. [8] Cottington to Dorchester, 29th January 1630. Record Office, S.P. Spain MS. [9] Cottington to Dorchester, MS. Record Office, S.P. Spain 34, many letters in 1630. [10] Cottington to Dorchester, July 1630, Record Office, S.P. Spain MS. [11] W. Gardiner, writing to Lord Dorchester when Cottington landed at Lisbon in 1629, says: "This city has now lost all its ancient splendour since I was here seventeen years ago. It is now completely ruined. All the merchants are bankrupt, and all their commodities are gone except their diamonds, Brazil tobacco, and coarse sugar, all of which are dearer here than in Holland. There is great discontent with Castilian rule, and especially some new laws whose object is to bring them more absolutely under the King." Record Office, S.P. Spain 34, MS. [12] In a letter sent by Abbé Scaglia to Lord Carlisle in 1628 a long document is enclosed, drawn up by the Marquis of Leganes, who was Olivares' principal instrument and a kinsman, advocating the absorption of Portugal by Spain. The evil and danger of the existing want of unity are pointed out, and the need to arouse a united national spirit is enforced. This document, supplementing those of Olivares himself quoted on an earlier page, show that the propaganda in favour of national unity was pushed persistently, and the outer realms were naturally alarmed and disturbed at the threat implied to them. Record Office, S.P. Spain 34, MS. [13] The house and garden of Monterey occupied the centre portion of the space facing the Salon del Prado between the Calle de Alcalá and the Carrera de San Geronimo. [14] Occupying thus the whole of the space from the Calle de Alcalá to the Carrera de San Geronimo. That on the north is now covered by the new Bank of Spain, and that on the south is still the palace of the Duke of Villahermosa, the descendant of the Duke of Maqueda, to whom it then belonged. [15] These very fine pieces of red biscuit clay unglazed and highly scented were much prized; and it was a vicious fashion, of ladies particularly, to masticate or eat this ware. [16] This beautiful and gifted actress, the idol of the susceptible Madrileños, was also for a wonder at that period a decent member of society. She was a member of the charitable fraternity of Nuestra Señora de la Novena, and was very devout. She died in 1656, and was buried at Barcelona in the Augustan Monastery of St. Monica, where there was a special actors' chapel. Fifty years afterwards, her body, and even the veil in which it was enveloped, were found incorrupt, and she was thenceforward considered almost a saint. Juan de Caramuel wrote of her: "She was a beautiful girl, gifted with so vehement an imagination that, to the surprise of everyone, when she was acting her colour changed in accordance with the emotions she portrayed. If the event represented were a pleasant one, her face was rosy, whilst pallor cloaked her cheeks when the play was sad and sorrowful. In this she was unique and inimitable." [17] Less than a fortnight after this costly feast, a terrible fire, which threatened all Madrid with destruction, and demolished in the three days it lasted half of the Plaza Mayor, took place (7th July 1631). The loss and terror of the people were great; but so wedded was the capital to shows, that almost before the ashes were extinguished a great royal bull-fight in the presence of the King and Court was held in the still smoking square. During the corrida a house in the Plaza caught fire again, and many of the panic-stricken people in their efforts to escape were trampled upon and seriously injured. It is stated that Philip did not even rise from his seat, and ordered the bull-fight to proceed. [18] MS. account reproduced in Mesonero Romanos' _Antigua Madrid_. [19] _The Year after the Armada, and Other Historical Studies_. [20] Egerton MSS. 329, British Museum. [21] This was a well-known noble poet and friend of Philip's in his dramatic amusements. [22] Philip showed his appreciation of the services of Don Juan Isasi Ydiaquez in the most flattering way, by at once appointing him governor and tutor of his legitimate son and heir, the promising little Don Baltasar Carlos, then five years old. [23] The vast park of Madrid represents part of the grounds which ran up from the present line of the Prado to the extreme end of the present park on the east, and included the whole space from the Alcala to the Atocha. Olivares had kept his plan secret from the King as long as he could, having gradually acquired the ground without disclosing his intention. The Venetian ambassador Corner mentions in 1635 with surprise that the whole place had sprung up in two years. [24] The only portions of the palace now remaining are the Artillery Museum, and the fine concert hall, built by Philip V., and decorated by Luca Giordiano. The ancient church of the monastery, of course, still exists. [25] At all these festivities it was the fashion for the company to pelt each other with egg-shells filled with scent. [26] MSS Add. 1026, British Museum. [27] Sir Arthur Hopton's Notebook MS., British Museum, Egerton, 1820. [28] The meaning of this is that nobles and clergy were exempt from the food excise, but all consumers of salt would have to pay the increased price. But, in fact, the excise was not remitted after all. [29] Hopton's MS. Notebook, British Museum. [30] _Ibid._ [31] Hopton's MS. Notebook, British Museum. [32] Hopton's MS. Letter-book. [33] There is an extremely curious medical report on the health and habits of Carlos in one of Hopton's letters from Madrid, in July 1632. MS. Notebook. [34] This was indeed the crucial time in the fate of the Palatinate. In the contest of ambitions in Germany only a bold course, both towards Spain and the Empire on the part of England, would have been effectual. But poor Frederick at the Court of Gustavus promptly came to understand that whilst his English brother-in-law held aloof from the war he could expect little consideration. At this very period Charles I. was principally interested in adding to his picture gallery. Cottington, writing to Hopton, 10th November (O.S.) 1631, says: "You must tell the Count of Benavente from the King that the copie of the Venus of the Prado is now ready for him, with a picture of his Majesty, if he will give him his St. Philip for them. You must remember to send the King the painted grapes which the poore fellow hath drawn for him." Hopton's MS. Notebook. [35] Hopton's MS. Notebook. [36] Mary Stuart, afterwards Princess of Orange, whom it was proposed to betroth to the Prince Baltasar Carlos. [37] Hopton's MS. Notebook, January 1632. [38] There is in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, a draft of the royal order, petitioning those who could afford it to come to the assistance of the King with money at this juncture (January 1632). [39] Hopton, writing at this time, says: "The King told the Cortes that if the war goes on he will have to call upon them again. Though how the country will beare it I know not, for in all the kingdom of Castile their poverty is not to be dissembled. I am informed for a certainty that the procuradores of Andalucia have told the King plainly that if the peace with England be kept they will be able to serve him, but if not they cannot do it." MS. Notebook. [40] Hopton, writing during the session of this Cortes, 4th March 1632, gives an account of the anger of Olivares and the King at the cities that had not given their representatives full powers to vote supplies, whilst the cities themselves were very angry at the demand for 6,000,000 ducats (_i.e._ in three years), and a renewal of the excise in addition to the salt tax. "A decree is lately issued for a donation through all the realm, which is put into practice by sending gentlemen of qualitie to every man's doore and taking their almes down as lowe as foure reales." Hopton's MS. Notebook. [41] Decision of the Council of State, 23rd March 1632. Danvila, _El Poder Civil en España_. [42] _Memorias de Matias de Novoa_. vol. i. p. 133. [43] They are all set forth in the documents reproduced in Danvila's _Poder Civil en España_. [44] There were endless squabbles between the Infante Fernando and the Catalan deputies on all manner of subjects. He objected to the deputies being covered before him; they insisted upon it as their right. He forbade them to repair and strengthen the city walls; they at once employed three times as many men on it as before. But, said Hopton, writing on the subject: "He is doubtless a most sweete young Prince. All are ready to forgive him and lay all the blame on Count Oñate, who is with him." MS. Notebook. [45] The heat was very great, and the King consequently travelled by night. Novoa. [46] On the 29th July, Hopton wrote: "Don Carlos was sick for seventeen days with ordinary ague at first, but at the end of eight days it turned to tabardillo (spotted typhus) with convulsions. My man has come in from the palace whilst I am sealing up this, and says he is not yet dead, but cannot live two hours. All things for his funeral are prepared, and blacks taken up, and servants that are to wait on his body to ye Escorial are commanded to be in readiness so that your honour (Coke) may take it that this gallant young Prince is a dead man." Hopton's MS. Notebook. In another letter he wrote of the distress of the people at the Infante's death: "The mourning could not be more hearty for the King, and they have good reason, for he was a Prince that never offended any man willingly, but did good offices for all; being bred upp amonge them to as much perfection as they could expect." Writing an unofficial letter to Cottington on the same day, Hopton gives some extremely curious private details of the causes of the Prince's illness, which cannot be here translated. But he continues: "The poore Conde de Olivares is the scape, goat that must bear all men's faults; but he is very much afflicted, for he was very sure of this Prince's love, whatsoever the world sayeth." {262} CHAPTER VII INTRIGUES TO SECURE ENGLISH NEUTRALITY--HOPTON AND OLIVARES--SOCIAL LAXITY IN MADRID--CHARLES I. APPROACHES SPAIN--THE BUEN RETIRO AND THE ARTS--WAR IN CATALONIA--DISTRESS IN THE CAPITAL AND FRIVOLITY IN THE COURT--PREVENTING LAWLESSNESS--THE RECEPTION OF THE PRINCESS OF CARIGNANO--SIR WALTER ASTON IN MADRID--THE ENGLISH INTRIGUE ABANDONED As Spain drifted nearer and nearer to the inevitable war with France, Olivares became more friendly with the English. He hinted that Spain was getting tired of the burden of the Emperor's wars, and might soon be pleased to give up the Palatinate. At another time he told Hopton that the Palatine business might be settled in a few hours; and through all the reverses that were daily befalling the imperial and Spanish cause the Count-Duke kept a good face. "I never saw him merrier, nor with greater appearance of confidence. God grant he may have reason," reported Hopton in the summer of 1633. Rojas, too, who was the mouthpiece of Olivares, harped constantly on the same string. "They were most desirous of close friendship with England; but had such crosses with Germany." At the same time the talk of war with France grew throughout the {263} country; though Hopton could not understand how it was possible for them to raise armies or money, for all their talk, "having neither men sufficient to man their ships nor to till their ground." [Sidenote: Decay of commerce] The penury of the country, indeed, was greater than ever. The American trade, a close monopoly nominally, had previously been the ultimate resource of Spanish kings in need; but that was failing now. In June 1632 the silver fleet came into Seville, and instead of the treasure being delivered to its legitimate owners, most of it was seized by the Government. The merchants utterly lost heart, and when the time came for the return fleet to leave Seville in the autumn, Hopton wrote: "The Indian fleet is ready to sail, but there is no merchandise nor merchant ships, and it will cost the King more than it will bring. The reason for this is that for many years past the trade of the Indies has decayed, being wholly given up by Spaniards, and kept alive by strangers. The Spanish merchants think it not worth while to continue a fleet, as the King keeps in the _Contratacion_ (India House) all the silver and gold, and hath assumed to himself first the customs, then the 47 per cent. average, and will not declare his purpose as to the rest. This has caused such disability and unwillingness to send goods, and hath brought trade so low, that whereas licences for strangers to trade there were hardly gotten for 4000 ducats, they are now offering them for 4000 reales; and I thinke they will shortly be forced to _hyre_ adventurers. As for the trade in Portugal, that country cannot do a sixth part of it, and so they are obliged to grant licences {264} to contract with strangers to trade in Brazil, offering such conditions as they may trade safely." I have transcribed these lines at length, because they show in vivid terms how the suicidal system of finance was ruining every class of the community. The workers, agricultural and urban, especially the former, had been the first to go under, then the smaller tradesmen, crushed by the alcabala tax on all sales, and the tampering with the currency; and the turn now had come of the great merchants and bankers; whilst even the nobles and churchmen had been bled freely by the last "voluntary donation."[1] In these circumstances it is not surprising that the dissatisfaction became almost clamorous in its intensity. Such pasquins passed from hand to hand on Liars' Walk that people said that the ghost of Villa Mediana must surely be walking his old haunts again, so bitter were they. Olivares, it was whispered, had poisoned the Infante Carlos, and had tried to send Fernando by the same road. The French were ready with great armies to devastate Spain, only because Olivares was coquetting with the rebel Orleans. Even the Pope, said the gossips, was being insulted and flouted by this minister, who was but an ill-born Jew in disguise.[2] "If you heard," wrote Hopton to Cottington, in August 1632, "the {265} libels and foolish inventions of the people against the Conde, you would never desire to be a favourite."[3] [Sidenote: Olivares' difficulties] Thus affairs in the capital went from bad to worse. Fanaticism spent itself upon the loan-mongers, mostly Genoese and Jews with Portuguese names, who served Olivares in extremity, and many of them, and the richest, fell into the hands of the Inquisition. There were frequent hints, uttered beneath bated breath, that if all men had their due Olivares himself would be burnt in a _sambenito_ outside the gate of Fuencarral, for he had risen by the devilish arts of sorcery, and kept the King in his power by witchcraft.[4] Enormous difficulty was experienced in levying troops for the war, for the country was half depopulated, and many able-bodied men fled: the old spirit of confidence in a sacred mission was gone, and they had now no stomach for a fight provoked by the King's favourite. The Catalans looked on in sulky suspicion, believing that Olivares needed the soldiers to rob them of their liberties; whilst in Madrid itself, though there were only eight {266} companies of troops, "and more idle men to be spared than in half Spain."[5] The shirkers flocked by thousands into ecclesiastical and noble service, or in that of the Inquisition, with little or no pay, in order to escape enlistment.[6] News came daily, too, of reverses in Flanders, and serious riots in Biscay against the salt tax; and in the meanwhile the French armies were mustering upon the Pyrenean frontier to menace Spanish territory when the dread hour should strike. No spot of brightness indeed appeared anywhere. Olivares had opened secret negotiations direct with Charles I. for an offensive and defiance alliance against France, in union with the party of Marie de Medici and the Duke of Orleans; and again the English were sure for a time that now the Palatinate would be restored,--too late, however, in any case, for poor Frederick, who had just died. But soon another cause for dispute changed Olivares' tone towards England. Behind the amiable talk about the Palatinate large bodies of men for the Spanish service had been raised in Ireland. This, it was seen, would not do. Charles I. was willing to oblige Spain in return for concessions in the matter of the Palatinate; and Scottish, or even English, mercenaries, he said, might be obtained. But {267} Catholic Irishmen, "utter rebels"! Olivares was told plainly that he could not have; "for if ever Spain meant to do us harm it would be by means of the Irish." So the new Irish troops were stopped by England before they were embarked, and Olivares, in a violent rage, said he had been betrayed and ruined, and would never trust an Englishman again. England, indeed, at last was learning what manner of man Olivares was. Suave and diplomatic when it served his turn, but, whilst gaining everything, giving nothing but vague promises in exchange. English shipmasters were still being disgracefully despoiled; not a step had really been taken for the restoration of the Palatinate; and Charles was more than justified in insisting upon practical proofs of Spanish friendship before he stretched a point to help Olivares. [Sidenote: A dissolute court] Through all this gathering trouble, with deep discontent at home and menace on all sides, the trivial life in Madrid went on in the usual way. "The King hath been very sensible of the losse of Rheinsberg," wrote Hopton in June 1633; "and the Conde hath endeavoured to divert him with playes and maskes at a new house (Buen Retiro) he hath built near the St. Geronimo monasterie: a thing of noe great expense for such a King, yet murmured at by the people, who will allow to governors in times of misfortune nothing but care."[7] As time went on, Philip had grown more idle and dissolute than ever; and the tone of the Court had followed the fashion of the King. The newsletters of the period from Madrid are simply a collection of atrocious scandals touching {268} the honour of the highest people in the Court. The blame for this also was laid, though not very justly, upon Olivares, who, having lost his only daughter, the Marchioness de Heliche, to his enduring grief, had now cast the whole of his affection upon his bastard son Julian, whom he subsequently legitimated, and rechristened Enrique Felipe de Guzman, to the fury of the nobles who were opposed to him. But this fact, although it contributed ostensibly to his fall, as the Queen was persuaded that he had induced Philip to legitimate his own favourite bastard Don Juan in order that he, Olivares, might have a good precedent to do likewise with his, was really but a venial fault in a Court so corrupt as this. [Sidenote: A budget of scandal] In his private letters to Cottington, Hopton occasionally allowed himself to tell some of the current scandal concerning courtiers, who were, of course, well known to Cottington. He appears in one of his letters to have hinted at a terrible misfortune as having happened to some highly placed ladies in Madrid, but without giving details. Charles I. saw the letter, and was much offended apparently that the scandal should be mentioned vaguely. Hopton (26th October 1633) wrote an abject letter of apology to King Charles, beseeching pardon, and saying that he had only mentioned scandal and avoided particulars in order to save the lady's honour; but in obedience to his Majesty's orders he would now tell the whole story. "The tragedy began in Cardinal Zapata's house, where there is a niece of his, daughter of his sister the Countess de Valenzuela, a very fine lady, and exceedingly well beloved by her uncle, {269} who married her about two years ago to the eldest son of the Count de Sevilla, with whom she lived about a year, and, being left a widow, returned to the protection of the Cardinal, her uncle. In the house there lived a favourite servant of the Cardinal, one Joseph Cabra, who had entered the service at Zaragoza as a page, but now occupied the post of highest trust in the household. The Count of Sevilla's son was jealous of this man before he died; but since his death the Count his father has proceeded criminally against the young Countess and Cabra, for living in adultery together and murdering the husband. It is now certain that since she became a widow she lived with Cabra and had a child by him, which made them resolve on a secret marriage. This was concealed for some months, and divulged at last through a slip of Cabra's, who failed to pay sufficiently handsomely the officers of the church where they were married. The whole business then came out. Cabra fled to his own country, where he thought he would be safe; and there he published something vindicating his quality. There was no reason, he argued, why his marriage with the Countess should be considered strange. Others of greater inequality had been married before; for instance, the Duchess of Peñaranda and her steward Avellaneda. He knew this, he said, by his having had access to the secret books of Toledo Cathedral. The Duchess of Peñaranda was a younger daughter of the Cardinal Duke of Lerma; and she was known in her youth to have been free, but all passed under her high spirits. The Duke of Lerma had a page called Avellaneda, who, {270} being a favourite, was appointed to wait upon his daughter in those liberties she assumed, and to be the instrument of justification to her and him. The Duke of Lerma having died, the page was appointed steward, and although he was already married, she (the Duchess) had a child by him, who is now five years old. Eighteen months ago, Avellaneda's wife died, and the Duchess married him. When the bans were published, her son, the present Duke of Peñaranda, happened to be present; but the names being common ones he did not suspect, though he mentioned the matter to his mother as a curious coincidence. This marriage being discovered by the disclosures in Cabra's pamphlet, threw all the town in a turmoil. The Duke of Peñaranda assembled in the house of his sister, the Marchioness of Villena, his confidential kindred, to consult them as to what had to be done. There it was decided that he must first kill Avellaneda. When this news reached the palace, the King sent for the Duke of Peñaranda, and ordered him to do nothing as he (the King) would take the matter into his own hands. He sent to Illescas, where Avellaneda was, and had him brought in a cart to the common prison here; the Duchess being sent to the royal convent of nuns of St. Domingo el Real,[8] where she still remains. Cabra, who had caused all this trouble, was also imprisoned, and his wife as well, though she in her justification said: 'Why punish me, who try to live in the grace of God?--let them look to those who live like strumpets'; and amongst those who did so she {271} mentioned the Dowager Duchess of Pastrana. The affair has caused dreadful scandal, but has been hushed up. The good old Cardinal (Zapata) has taken so much to heart the misfortune of his niece, who, after having been committed to the custody of an Alcalde de Corte, has been sent to a nunnery, that ill-meaning people say that she is really his daughter. He is so troubled about it that he has moved to six different houses in six months, and much mistrust exists. Another thing has arisen out of the affair. The great distaste to the house of Peñaranda has caused the Duke to retire from Court. The King was quite willing for him to go, but did not like his wife to go with him. She is the daughter and heir to the Marquis of Valdonquilla, the uncle of the Admiral (of Castile), who, without taking any notice of the King's displeasure, forced her to follow her husband. But they say the commerce is established." This budget of scandal sent to the King of England shows how utterly rotten was the moral condition of the Court, when it sufficed for one disgraceful episode to be made public for a whole string of others to follow touching the honour of those who stood highest. This scandalous immorality, arising apparently from the absolute degeneration of religion into a formula, and of its ceasing to be a guide of conduct, extended to all classes of society, and terrified stories were told of horrible irreligious rites being carried on in the conventual houses themselves by a secret society called the "illumined ones" (_alumbrados_). The particulars of one awful scandal of the sort, which {272} was investigated by the Inquisition at this time (1633), caused great excitement in Madrid. It related to the proceedings of the nuns of St. Placido of Madrid, who were pronounced by the Benedictine chaplain, Fray Garcia, to be nearly all possessed of the devil; and on the pretext of exorcising them he was with them almost day and night. This went on for three years, when the fact that twenty-eight out of the thirty nuns in the convent were said to be possessed appeared so strange and suspicious, that the Inquisition intervened; and, in the course of a long inquiry and much torture of the chaplain, uncovered an appalling story of sacrilege, black magic, and immorality combined, for which all the persons implicated were severely punished; though a few years afterwards (1638) an attempt was made to whitewash the condemned.[9] It is needless to say that in such a society as this, idle, depraved, and to all effects pagan under its morbid devotion, the race after pleasure became ever keener, notwithstanding the disasters abroad and the misery at home. The Saints' days were excessively numerous, and the parishes vied with each other in the attractions of their religious performances; the _autos-de-fe_ alternated with the constant bull-fights, cane tourneys, and the other festivities so often described in earlier pages; the amorous adventures of the King became more frequent, or at all events were more talked about, than before; and the new palace and garden of the Buen Retiro formed a more suitable background for such proceedings than the old palace {273} had been. Every birth in the King's family, every reception of ambassadors, every royal anniversary, was made the excuse for one of these long series of festivities. Hopton, writing to Coke in October 1633, says that the King was then boar killing at the Escorial and Balsain, and that already the capital was preparing to welcome him back in the following week with a series of bull-fights and cane tourneys. [Sidenote: The Buen Retiro] "Great preparations are being made to warme a new house built near by the monastery of St. Geronimo, and contrived by Olivares.... The business seems to be a matter of Olivares' or the King's affection, or both, as about 1000 men are at work to have the place ready in time. They are working day and night, as well as Sundays and holidays. I doubt what will happen when the place is burdened with such a posse of people as usually resort to such pastimes, the mortar being yet greene, the building will run some hazard. There is much talk in the town about it, generally against the charge thereof being taken from the bellys of the people by an imposition on wine, flesh, etc. They suffer it worse because they say it is a fancy of the Conde's (Olivares)."[10] {274} In another letter, Hopton mentions that the house-warming of the Buen Retiro is to last four days; with bull-fights, running at the ring, wild beast fights and other similar sports; in which "I may say without flattery, the King, with his excellent comportment, exceeded all that came in with him. The house is very richly furnished, and almost all by presents; for the Conde hath made the matter his own, by whose means it hath wanted not friends."[11] And then, as if to furnish a fit commentary upon all this wasteful frivolity, the English ambassador proceeds to say that trade with the Indies was dead, and that, "if things go on like this they will not be able to re-establish it, and that Portuguese Indian trade has been almost quite killed by neglect."[12] [Sidenote: Charles I. and Olivares] Whilst the drums were beating in Madrid and other great cities to enlist recruits to face the French in the coming war, and Olivares, almost in despair, was casting about for fresh ways of getting large sums of money, he ceaselessly endeavoured to win England to his side. It was clear that the old method and the old bait would have to be changed somewhat, for bland verbal assurances from the Spaniards in favour of a restoration of the Palatinate, whilst the Emperor was left unpledged, could no longer impose upon the least suspicious of diplomatists. The new move was an extraordinary one, and displays vividly the falsity of Charles I. For some time previous to {275} the beginning of 1634, Olivares had been delighting Hopton by his conciliatoriness, and somewhat mystifying him by arch hints as to the future. Writing on the 24th January 1634, Hopton says that Olivares was very much better disposed in English affairs than he was wont to be. "I have done him several services, and try to leave him contented." A few weeks after this, an explanation of the Count-Duke's amiability came to Hopton in the form of a private letter from Windebank, the Secretary of the King of England, enclosing the copy of an address made by the resident Spanish agent in London, Nicolalde, to Charles. There had been a talk for weeks of sending some great personage from Spain as a special ambassador; but in the meantime Nicolalde had cast soundings by suggesting a close alliance between England and the Emperor, in which the Palatine would join. Charles had replied cautiously, saying that he would consider it if the Palatine were confirmed in the possession of the territories he now held, and especially the Lower Palatinate. But the real inwardness of it all was revealed in a private letter of 13th February from Cottington to Hopton, saying that Charles was willing to league himself with the Emperor and Spain on certain conditions, but that Coke, the Secretary of State, was to be kept entirely in the dark about it, the negotiations being carried on with the King (Charles) direct through Windebank. The object of the proposed alliance was, "the expulsion of foreigners from the empire, and the reduction of the rebels to due obedience," which meant the crushing of the Dutch Protestants. King Charles, {276} says Cottington, is quite set upon it. The plan can only miscarry by incredulity on the part of Olivares, or any waywardness of Nicolalde; and Charles, as an earnest of his good faith, offers the escort of an English fleet to the Infante Fernando, if it was intended to send him to Flanders by sea.[13] [Sidenote: Intrigues with Charles I.] Behind this there was another mysterious negotiation going on, relating apparently to a marriage between Charles's eldest daughter Mary Stuart to Prince Baltasar Carlos, both of whom were children of tender years. Many close conversations on the subject took place between Hopton, as the personal mouthpiece of King Charles, and Philip and his minister. The constant claims and complaints of the English merchants and shipmasters of Spanish extortion annoyed Hopton almost as much as Olivares, because they introduced an element of trouble in these loving confabulations. But Hopton, though zealous to serve his King, was clearly ill at ease, as well he might be, for it was a dangerous business for Charles to receive a big money subsidy from SPain, as was proposed, and to turn the arms of England against the Protestants. Hopton goes so far, indeed, as to say in his letters to Windebank that he is not in favour of the subsidy, but that King Charles should fit out a fleet at his own expense against the Dutch. This will, he says, be easier, and will leave Charles more free and able to bring the Dutch to reason. But, he continues, if the matter is undertaken at all, it must be seen through to the end, or Holland will wax too insolent to be borne. {277} Long discussions with the Council of State and with Olivares kept Hopton busy in Madrid for months; the while the great betrayal proposed was kept from the Secretary of State and all the responsible ministers in England, a good foretaste of the policy that led Charles Stuart to ruin and the block. To the official Secretary of State, Hopton had much to say about the great preparations being made in Spain for war, but no word about the secret plan for England to join in it on the Catholic side. Great loans and levies are constantly being raised, he reported in April 1634. "This great ship," he wrote, meaning of course Spain, "contains much water (_i.e._ money), but many leaks, and is always dry. It is certain that they have made loans this year for 13 millions (of ducats), and are still treating of more, yet at the end of the year they will neither have money in their purse, nor army paid, nor nobody contented; which is to be attributed to the hard terms wherewith they do their business. For being masters of the mines of gold and silver, and withal having but few friends, nobody will serve them but for their interests: and their own subjects are so well conceited of themselves, as they think they cannot be paid enough."[14] "In their present levies," he continues, "though they are sorry men, they give them 3 reales a day, which is 18 pence English, and yet have all they can do to keep them from running away. Subjects are fearfully hardly pressed. The hard usage of business men in the Indian trade has made concealment general, which has greatly reduced the {278} revenue of the crown. Great measures were taken to discover unregistered treasure in the last fleet, and they found 600,000 ducats, and will yet find more. But this again will stop trade." [Sidenote: Approach of war] Everything possible was done by Olivares to please the English at this juncture. The prisoners of the Inquisition at Cadiz were released, Hopton was made much of, King Charles was the most popular potentate amongst the idlers of Madrid; whilst the French ambassador, stoned and insulted in the streets, was fain to take refuge in a monastery twelve miles away to avoid scandal. "They want our friendship now," wrote Hopton, "and we may make our market." The English ambassador had his head quite turned by so much attention, and, to the anger of King Charles, was drawn by the superior diplomacy of Olivares into going beyond his instructions in his promises to the Spaniards. The King of England had been bitten too often by Spanish plausibility not to be distrustful; and Windebank's letter to Hopton, in May 1634, was almost violent in its scolding. Hopton had gone so far as to say that the English had decided to put a powerful army in the field to punish the insolence of the Dutch, whereas King Charles had only broached it as a proposition, and Nicolalde in the meanwhile was pledging the Spaniards to nothing. When Olivares was pressed for guarantees in return for the English aid he craved, the usual story was told; and by the middle of July Hopton wrote to Windebank-- "_The_ business, as I expected when I saw them {279} haggling, has come to naught. They only want to keep us neutral; and the affair is at an end. I am not sorry, unless the Palatine might be made secure. When I said they would oblige the gratefullest prince living, Olivares replied: 'No hay gratitud entre Reyes' (There is no gratitude between kings)."[15] Olivares was beset on all sides. Detested by the nobles, with nearly all of whom he was at feud;[16] feared and dreaded by the commercial community, whom he had ruined; overworked, and at his wits' end to face the vast present and prospective drains upon the national resources, striving not only to do all the work of State himself and to direct everything, but also to keep the King in a good humour by providing an endless series of amusements for him, the Count-Duke was "so spent with the burden of business that lies upon him," as Hopton wrote, "as to deserve pity, if he would only pity himself." There was no class of people now that did not feel the crushing weight of the war expenditure, even before the great war with France had begun. In June 1634, Hopton reports that "a new tax had been imposed of one-eighth of the value of all wine sold in Madrid, with no exception allowed, and one twenty-fourth of all that is sold in the Castilian realms. All the shops that sell wine are shut, so that all stock may be registered and an account be rendered of sales. They think thus to charge the retailer under great penalties. {280} It is like to be a great trouble, and the greater part of the benefit will be consumed in officers and false accounts." "I doe much doubte," he continues, "that by degrees those impositions will first be laid upon all things of home fabric and growth, and afterwards upon those things imported from abroad; and your Honour (Coke) may guess to what immoderation the revenues of this crown will grow by this means."[17] The good, simple ambassador made no allowance for the self-stultifying operation of oppressive taxation, and if he had reviewed the state of affairs a few years later, he would have seen, as we shall in the course of this book, that, so far from benefiting Philip's treasury, these blighting impositions on the exchange of commodities ended in a decrease of the revenue. But whilst the citizens were groaning under impossible burdens, and the curses of a whole nation were following the careworn Count-Duke, the King, as much afflicted with the troubles of his people as anyone, but looking upon them as a visitation of providence, must needs seek in pleasure distraction from his vicarious sorrow which the oppressed citizens themselves could not escape. "All the Court is at the new house" (_i.e._ the Buen Retiro) "for a fortnight," wrote Hopton in July 1634, "which time hath been spent in all manner of entertainments and much to their Majesties' contentment, wherein the Count of Olivares took great pains, all things being ordered by himself; and so well, as it savoured of his excellent {281} judgment in all things, especially in the furniture of the house, which was such as not to be thought there had been so many curiosities in the whole kingdom; and this at very little expense, for it was for the most part done by presents. Howbeit the things that were bought were dearly and punctually paid for, inasmuch as nobody can wisely complain." [Sidenote: Furnishing the Buen Retiro] Doubtless no one could _wisely_ complain, but many had reason to do so, for few great people with art collections escaped spoliation, and the other palaces were to a great extent denuded of their treasures, for the purpose of cramming the Buen Retiro with rarities. Some of the nobles, like the Auditor Tejada, were artful enough to have copies made of their best pictures, and sent the copies as originals to the Buen Retiro. But, as in his case, this was bitterly resented by Olivares if it was found out. The Marquis of Leganés, the nephew of the Count-Duke, had a superb collection of pictures and articles of vertu brought from Flanders and Italy; but when he was called upon to disgorge, his wife stepped in and claimed the whole collection as her dowry, and the Marquis was let off with the present of a piece of tapestry. The chapel was fitted up at the expense of the President of the Council of Castile; the Infante Fernando continued to send beautiful objects, many of them spoils of war from Flanders; Olivares' brother-in-law Monterey had to surrender much of the vast store of pictures he had collected at Naples; and all the painters in Madrid were kept busy copying or designing canvasses {282} for the new palace,[18] under the direction of the King's painter, Don Diego Velazquez, who, having returned from his long visit to Rome, was now, and had been for the last three years, again working indefatigably in his studio in the old Alcazar. This, indeed, was the period when the great artist produced some of the best of his work, such as the Surrender of Breda (the Lanzas), the portraits of the child Prince Baltasar Carlos, the fine portrait of Olivares reproduced in this book, and the famous equestrian portrait of Philip himself. In the midst of all the growing national trouble, this in many respects was the most brilliant and perhaps the happiest time of Philip's reign, so far as he personally was concerned. His habits were fixed and his pleasures keen. His fits of contrition were frequent, it is true; but they were always banished by fresh pleasures or amours contrived by Olivares. The {283} King intermittently attended to State business himself; but the interminable discussions and reports by the various Councils upon every subject made the despatch of business peculiarly irksome and tedious. The Spanish system of a consultative and deliberative bureaucracy, indeed, seemed specially devised to disgust anyone but a patient laborious plodder like Philip II. His grandson, impatient of detail and quick of apprehension, loathed the dull pompous discussions of the Councils, and not unnaturally was content to hear a summary of results from Olivares, whose final decision he always confirmed. [Sidenote: Philip's domestic life] Philip's domestic life at this time had every reason to be happy, though the growing tension between his wife and Olivares had to some extent estranged them, and the Queen was, under the influence of the minister, somewhat ostentatiously excluded from public business, not unnaturally to her annoyance. She was, however, a good wife, and shared Philip's frequent pleasures gaily, whilst in devotion of the peculiar Spanish type she was even more emphatic than he. She had a woman's reason for her dislike of Olivares, as well as the political objections to him which were the ultimate cause of his fall. It has already been mentioned that in pursuance of his system of doing everybody's work, the minister had taken under his care the management of the King's affairs of gallantry, and the results thereof. This, of course, was perfectly well known to the Queen, and the satirical poets who wrote so copiously of frailty in high places took care to publish the fact. Even Hopton, when in a gossiping mood, referred to it more than {284} once. Speaking of the skits that were current about Olivares and the new palace, he wrote: "He (Olivares) hath had likewise some harsh words with the Admiral for speaking to the King in disparagement of his new house; and the Queen hath had her little saying to him also, for some opinion she had of some secret pleasures there brought to the King." Whatever may have been the sum of Philip's infidelities, and it cannot be denied that they were numerous, they were never more than temporary and vulgar intrigues, which, whilst they would naturally annoy his wife, did not threaten her permanent influence or interfere with her continuous marital life with her husband. With monotonous regularity almost every year the Queen gave birth to a child, usually a girl, whose advent was an excuse for the customary series of costly festivities so often described in earlier pages, festivities that in most cases lasted almost as long as the life of the child whose advent they greeted; for all the infants up to this time (1634) had died except the sturdy, promising little Baltasar Carlos, who was idolised by his father and mother, and, so far as the oppressive etiquette of the Court would allow, was petted by the whole Court. The little Prince who was born in 1629, had early developed a love for horsemanship and field sports, and as a baby horseman, hunter, or soldier, he is presented to the life again and again by Velazquez. From Flanders his admiring uncle Fernando sent him many presents, beautiful armour and weapons in miniature, which now adorn the rich Armeria in Madrid, martial toys, and above all in 1633 what {285} afterwards became the Prince's favourite steed, a "little devil of a stallion pony," as the Infante calls him, that had to be lashed liberally before Baltasar Carlos was allowed to mount him.[19] [Sidenote: The Portuguese problem] The limited number of his near relatives had become a source of embarrassment to Philip. Of his two brothers, one, Carlos, had died, and the other, the Infante Cardinal Fernando, was in Flanders fighting and working heroically. There were no other Spanish relatives, but the heir Baltasar Carlos and the beautiful illegitimate son Juan, now growing into a handsome, clever lad in the secluded castle of Ocaña, whilst the German archdukes had drifted farther and farther from Spain, as had the Savoy Princes. It had always been the policy of the house of Austria to keep the Spanish nobles powerless in the Peninsula. They might command Spanish armies abroad and act as viceroys across the seas, but were never to be trusted with executive power in the realms of Spain; and it had become increasingly difficult, now that the nobles of the outer realms had grown distrustful of Olivares, to find men of the respective provinces who were of sufficient rank and could be trusted to govern the non-Castilian territories in the name of the King. The principal difficulty was in Portugal, where the widest autonomy, and every possible guarantee against Spanish oppression, had been granted by Philip II. But, as we have seen, the tendency for a long time past, and especially under {286} Olivares, had been to curtail the rights enjoyed by Portugal since the union of the crowns. The promise that none but Portuguese should rule in the country had been disregarded almost from the first in the appointment of Viceroys. The Austrian nephew, the Archduke Albert, had reigned under Philip II.; and Moura, the wise half-Portuguese minister of Philip II., had ruled Portugal for years under his son. But to appoint a Portuguese noble now, with Olivares' known policy, would have been highly dangerous, and the Portuguese would hardly have stood a Spanish noble, even if Philip had dared to appoint one. The policy of conciliation that Philip II. had adopted had left the house of Braganza, which had a better claim to the Portuguese crown than Philip, richer and more powerful than most sovereigns. The reigning Duke of Braganza had married a sister of the Spanish Duke of Medina Sidonia, the head of the Guzmans, of which house Olivares was a cadet; and in normal circumstances Braganza might have been the ideal man for Viceroy. But the circumstances were not normal. The deepest discontent reigned in the country at the ruin that had befallen its trade in consequence of its union with Spain, and especially at the new taxation for Spanish objects proposed at the bidding of Olivares; and a subject so powerful and so popular as Braganza was naturally suspect. The difficulty was met at the end of 1634 by going somewhat far afield for a ruler of Portugal. The younger daughter of Philip II., the Infanta Catharine, had married Carlo Emmanuele, Duke of Savoy, in 1585; and one of their daughters, Princess Margaret, the {287} widowed and dispossessed Duchess of Mantua, a first cousin of Philip, was brought to Spain to govern Portugal,--the idea being that, as she was a lady and a foreigner, she would be a safe and obedient instrument in the hands of Olivares. In November 1634 she entered Madrid in great state, and at the bull-fights and other festivities held to celebrate her coming she sat by the side of Philip and his Queen, which the Madrileños thought a great and unusual honour, accorded in order to give her higher prestige and authority before she set out for her fateful government, a figurehead for Olivares' attempts against Portuguese autonomy. [Sidenote: Catalonia] Catalonia was more uneasy even than Portugal. There had been a talk all the summer of the King's going thither to ask for more money, and the Catalans were in anger at the very idea. So great was the ill-feeling, that the Viceroy, the Duke of Cardona, a humble servant of Olivares, thought it safer to keep out of the way of his subjects; and the Castilian soldiers were daggers-drawn with the people, in whose houses they were billeted, in defiance of the Catalonian constitution. The growing danger from these provinces, and the busy intrigues of Richelieu with the Dutch, to the intended detriment of Spain, again drove Olivares to seek a renewal of the suspended negotiations intended to draw Charles I. into the Catholic camp. At the end of July, Olivares sent for Hopton in great excitement, to show him an intercepted letter of the Prince of Orange, which, he said, disclosed a dangerous plan against England and Spain. "Ah!" said the Count-Duke, "we ought to have carried out that league of ours." "It {288} was your fault," replied Hopton, "that it was not concluded. Nicolalde in London was not authorised to give the necessary pledges." "Well," retorted. Olivares, "the matter may be arranged now, if you like." The hint was enough for Charles. The first thing, he said, was to get rid of Nicolalde, who was unsympathetic; and he sent an English agent named Taylor to Madrid to recommend this course to Philip. Soon negotiations were in full swing again. Some great personage, the Count of Humanes probably, was to be sent to England, whilst the Duke of Medina Celi was to go to France, and endeavour to secure the return of Marie de Medici the Queen-Mother and her son Orleans to France, which of course would have meant the paralysation of Richelieu. When the news came of the decisive battle of Nördlingen (page 260), gained over the Swedes and Weimar by the Infante Fernando, the great rejoicings and festivities with which Philip greeted the victory (October 1634), the bonfires and bull-fights and _Te Deums_, did not disguise the fact that war with France sooner or later must now be inevitably faced, and the efforts to come to an agreement with England proceeded more warmly than ever. [Sidenote: The agreement with Charles I.] In October, at length, Windebank sent to Madrid the draft of the agreement, and one stands aghast at the unwisdom of Charles and his secret advisers, in thus showing willingness to betray the Protestant cause at the hollow charming of Olivares. England was to provide twenty ships of at least 400 tons each, ostensibly to protect the coast of England and Ireland; but as soon as {289} the fleet was at sea, notice was to be given to the Dutch in the form of an ultimatum to surrender to Spain, or the English would attack them. Spain was nominally to lend, but really to give, to Charles 200,000 crowns, and 100,000 a month for every month the fleet was at sea.[20] When Hopton saw Philip with this draft, and as usual raised the question of the Palatinate as a pendant to the Agreement, only evasive answers were given to him, and again the negotiations flagged, whilst desperate efforts were made in Spain itself to force the nobles to raise and arm soldiers to take the field against France when the expected war should begin in the spring. But whilst Olivares was thus striving to obtain at least the neutrality of England on the easiest terms for Spain, there was other diplomacy at work at least as profound and more generous than his. The battle of Nördlingen had broken up the effective league between Sweden and the German Protestants, and John Frederick of Saxony, with the other German Lutherans, soon made terms of compromise with the Emperor, by which they gained the toleration they sought, and the Thirty Years' War came to an end, so far as the religious struggle in Germany was concerned. But the far-reaching schemes of Richelieu would have been frustrated if the war had ended here, leaving Spain free from the drain of helping the Emperor; for then she would have had power to deal with Holland effectually, and re-establish her waning hold over Italy to the injury of France. So, as war with Spain was necessary for Richelieu, he {290} took good care to isolate his opponent before it began. He first effected an alliance with the United Provinces, and intrigued in Catholic Flanders with the nobles. Then he drew into his net Savoy, Mantua, and Parma; he occupied the Valtelline again, and Sweden was coupled to the car of France anew by Axenstiern, whilst, as a last stroke, he strove hard to include Charles I. in his league with the Dutch. [Sidenote: The intrigue with England] At the end of 1634, Olivares sent to Hopton in a great fright at news that he had heard, to the effect that Charles I. had joined France and Holland in their league; and bitter complaints were made of the treatment of Spanish cruisers in English ports and in the Channel. In one case a Dutch prize had actually been taken away from the Spanish captors by English vessels, and brought into Dover. What was the meaning of it? asked Olivares in a towering rage. Was the King of England going to throw them over after all? A mention of the Palatinate only made him more furious still. Thus the bickering and bargaining went on all through the year 1635; Hopton urging Olivares to send some news worth the carrying by Taylor to London about the Palatinate, and the Count-Duke wrangling over the details of the agreement about the subsidy to England, which he swore that Charles had altered without consultation with Nicolalde. "He (Olivares) is in a good humour now," wrote Hopton on one occasion; "but he is of a most dangerous nature, to which we shall always be subject as long as the business of the Palatinate shall last." At length, when Olivares had exhausted the possibilities of prevarication in Madrid, the secret {291} draught agreement was sent back to London for further discussion and amendment, and the continued neutrality of England at least was secured for another breathing space. One is struck with positive admiration for the masterly way in which, with this stale bait of the Palatinate, England was beguiled by Olivares from year to year, and prevented from joining the enemies of Spain. Richelieu had been bidding for English aid or benevolent neutrality too, and this was a chance which, if Charles had possessed any statesmanship worthy of the name, or any national ambition apart from the advantage of his dynasty, might have enabled England to play the part of the arbiter in Europe. But, as usual, the chance was missed by the instability of Charles, and when the cloud of war burst in the spring of 1635, the negotiations between London and Madrid were still dragging on. There was a talk at one time of a partition of the Spanish Netherlands between France and Holland after they should have been conquered, and this made Charles more eager than ever for the alliance with Spain to prevent such an eventuality, whilst both Olivares and Richelieu were glad to keep him wavering with insincere negotiations. His own condition, moreover, in England was already becoming difficult; for he had levied the ship money, and had taken the first fatal step by deciding to dispense with his Parliament; so that a strong ally with ready money was desirable to him. Windebank wrote to Hopton on 27th May 1635: "The French ambassador is pressing King Charles very hard to make a league with them; and it is {292} not the fault of the Spaniards that it is not already concluded, for they are going the right way to thrust us upon the French, though they cannot send a letter or pass an ambassador without us. This is a strange fascination, and they deserve to smart for it, as they will dearly if Dunkirk be besieged and his Majesty help them not."[21] A little later Hopton writes: "Their (the Spaniards) only hope for Flanders and at sea is the friendship of our King. And yet they retain their gravity, as if they were the arbiters of the world. I saw the Conde yesterday, and, though he was a little troubled, yet he is very confident that all would end to their honour." The conclusion of the precious alliance with King Charles had evidently at last to be carried through, or further delayed, by more highly-placed ambassadors than Hopton and Nicolalde; and it was decided that Sir Walter Aston should go to Madrid and the Count of Humanes to London. Olivares was, or pretended to be, apprehensive of the coming of a new English ambassador, but was assured by Hopton that Sir Walter was all that could be desired from the Spanish point of view. Humanes, on the other hand, was reported to be "an honest gentleman, but with a good enough conceipt of himself. Thinking to get great things, he will be a little hard to deal with in England." But the seas were crowded with Dutch and French cruisers, and the land route through France was of course closed to Spaniards, so it was a difficult thing to get Humanes to England at all, unless he went {293} back in the English ship that brought Aston. And so month after month of 1635 slipped by, the war proceeding actively in Flanders against the Infante Cardinal, and the French troops threatening Catalonia from Perpignan, whilst the English treaty with Spain was still on the balance. Hopton, in June 1635, told Olivares that this coldness and delay in his proceeding was producing a bad effect in England, and that unless they stirred themselves King Charles might look elsewhere. "Upon what ground do you say that," asked Olivares. "Upon Nicolalde's way of proceeding, and the delay that is taking place. It makes us think that the whole thing is a pretence," replied Hopton. "Everything is now practically settled with very few alterations, and there need be no more delay," Olivares assured him. In July alarming news came to Madrid, that the Infante Cardinal had sustained severe defeat in the Low Countries (at Tirlemont), and was in personal danger. The Infante was intensely beloved in Spain, and the evil tidings "caused great care to their Majesties and the whole Court, for I cannot express what tenderness all sorts of people show to the Infante," wrote Hopton; and, almost for the first time, Philip flew into a violent rage with Olivares, when he learnt that a letter written by the Infante, asking for further resources, had been concealed from him. Olivares found himself faced now, as he had never been before, by a determination on the part of Philip to act in opposition to his advice. Philip had no lack of personal courage, and under stress was capable of prolonged exertion. He was burning, {294} too, to distinguish himself in arms, as his brother had done; and, urged thereto by many of Olivares' enemies, he was insistent in his wish to lead his armies in person on the Catalonian frontier, now threatened by the French. Olivares, knowing that if the King were in the field he could not keep him isolated, or hope to retain his exclusive hold upon him, resisted the King's desire to the utmost, and almost daily squabbles took place between them on the subject. [Sidenote: The plot thickens] It was clear now to Olivares that the aid of English ships in the Channel was really in the circumstances desirable for the success of Spain in Flanders. The road through Lombardy had been rendered difficult by the adhesion of the several Italian princes to Richelieu's league, and the war that was proceeding on the Rhine; and the sea route was equally dangerous by reason of the Dutch and French squadrons. So the Count-Duke made another desperate attempt to buy Charles Stuart cheaply, and on trust. Late in July 1635, Olivares sent a very pressing message to Hopton that he wanted to see him, and when the ambassador presented himself in the palace, the Count-Duke asked him if he had a confidential English servant he could lend him, to hurry off to England at once with despatches for Nicolalde in London. "Yes," replied Hopton, "my man David Matthew will serve your turn"; and before many hours had passed David Matthew was speeding on his way to London, with instructions to the Spanish agent that the maritime treaty was to be settled at all costs. The question of the Palatinate, Olivares told Hopton again, should really be {295} settled now, though, not unnaturally, Hopton had his doubts; for he knew secretly that the rebel Earl of Tyrone had been brought disguised to Madrid by the Emperor's ambassador, and was plotting even then with Olivares to raise sedition in Ireland if King Charles turned to the side of the French. Nicolalde in London still went no further than amiable speeches; but at least Olivares' urgency had the effect of deciding Charles to send Sir Walter Aston to Spain, though poor Humanes died in Madrid, whilst still waiting for a ship to carry him, and was replaced as ambassador in London by Count de Oñate, much to Hopton's delight, who looked upon the appointment of so highly placed a personage as a great compliment. "For what he cannot do, nobody can. He is very honest, but somewhat hasty. In any case it is good to be rid of Nicolalde, who hates us." Aston, when he arrived at Corunna in September 1635, was received with ostentatious warmness; and it was evident that his coming meant more than the mere ratification of a treaty already nearly concluded. Cottington sent by him what he calls "a merry letter" to Olivares, to tell him "how French I have become, for the Queen (Henrietta Maria) dined with me at Hanworth awhile since, and not long after the new French ambassadors, who now are become my friends, after complaining to the King of my ill affection to their master's service, calling me Conde de Olivares." It is plain that Sir Francis Cottington's "merriment" was intended to convey a hint that unless Olivares was really prompt this time in closing the deal, Charles would go over to the French. Hopton was hopeful {296} but doubtful of Aston's better success than his own, for he knew that the Palatinate still stood in the way, and that Catholic Philip could never force the Emperor to restore it to a Protestant. "I believe they wish for a close union," he wrote, when he was leaving to return to England, "and this King might revoke the impediment if he liked, but I shall never be convinced he will do it till he comes to the point."[22] Money, as usual, was the great desideratum for Philip, if the war was to be carried on with hope of success. Cortes were summoned both in Castile and Barcelona, and the former, as usual, did as they were asked, and voted 3 million ducats for the year;[23] Olivares having at the time laid by, {297} as we are told, no less than 8 millions, "which he will make 16 before the war begins in earnest." Spain was fortunate that year 1635, too, with the Indies fleet, which arrived in June with 14 millions of ducats, "of which the greater part will reach the King, besides the good profit he will get out of the confiscations." The Cortes of Barcelona was, as always, difficult to deal with; and for a time they were obstinate in their refusal to vote anything at all. But it was their own country now that was threatened, and on the promise of the King to relieve them from the levy of men for his armies, the Cortes of Catalonia agreed to vote him 400,000 ducats, and promised as much more as they could afford. [Sidenote: Philip's revolt] Philip's great dispute with Olivares was with regard to his wish to visit Barcelona during the session of the Cortes, and to remain there with his army, ready to lead it either to Italy, France, or elsewhere, as the events of the war might demand. The favourite was shocked at the King being exposed to such danger, and especially at the idea that he might leave the country; and he opposed with all his experience and authority the King's plan. "If Olivares can hinder the King from engaging his person he will do so. He pretends to give way, so as not to cross the King, who is set upon it, but he will not fail of ways to compass {298} that which he wishes."[24] But though Olivares was determined, Philip was obstinate; and when the minister, as was his wont, told the King that the Council of State was opposed to his going, Philip addressed a rescript to the Council, ordering them to discuss and vote on the question of his going, but that every Councillor should give his reasons individually to him for the advice he tendered. This was not in accordance with the usual procedure, and under Olivares' guidance the Council declined to do it, saying that the Count-Duke's knowledge of their opinions was so complete that he would report them to the King. It appears that Philip had given peremptory orders to Olivares to make every preparation for his immediate departure, and this was the subject submitted by the minister to the Council for discussion. With the arrogant Count-Duke dominating them, the Councillors, who were all his humble servants, of course agreed with him against the King. Money was short, they said, for the journey; and the recent successes in Flanders might perhaps make the voyage unnecessary. In any case, they begged the King not to undertake the matter lightly. Philip made the best of this halting dissent, replying that he accepted the advice as to not going for the moment, but ordered that everything should be made ready for his going at twenty days' notice if it became necessary.[25] [Sidenote: Continued decadence] In the meanwhile the never-ending trivial show of Madrid went on. The idlers still paraded up {299} and down the Calle Mayor or gossiped on Liars' Walk for the greater part of the day. Philip issued ferocious but ineffective pragmatics against extravagance in dress and household appointments;[26] both the public playhouses were filled, and the comedies applauded by eager crowds as usual. But, on the other hand, famine had laid its grisly hand everywhere on the arid lands of Castile, the excise had been increased until even in the capital itself starvation was not a threat but a reality; the ecclesiastical revenues were drained as they had never been drained before, and salaries, pensions, and State debts were either not paid at all or else ruinously curtailed. In Madrid, penury was now evident even amongst the better classes;[27] and Philip, who always lived frugally in his own person, was obliged to write to his brother Fernando, begging him to save to the utmost: not to allow his household to wear other than plain cloth, and not to spend a ducat unnecessarily. Spanish troops were fighting under the Infante {300} for the preservation of Flanders, in Germany, in Italy, in the Valtelline, wherever the enemies of the faith or the allies of Richelieu defied the Spanish claims; and yet it never entered the head, apparently, either of Olivares or his master, that these terrible sacrifices were useless to Spain; except that it was a point of honour to hold the Catholic States of Flanders that had been the ancient inheritance of its royal house. Holland was really lost beyond all recovery, though the stiff-necked pride of Castile would not acknowledge it; the religious question in Germany had already practically settled itself, and had left Spain hardly an excuse for fighting for orthodoxy there. All that was needed, even now, for Spain was to eat her unavoidable leek, to recognise facts patent to all the world, and to abandon her impossible pretensions; and peace with France and Holland might have been attained with ease. But through all the suffering and stress, that if continued meant national exhaustion, there was no indication anywhere of the conviction that Spain must voluntarily humble herself or bleed to death. [Sidenote: Court diversions] The process of social decadence had gone on apace, as was inevitable in such circumstances. scandals were of constant occurrence. At the end of 1635, when the grave matters referred to were under discussion, two nobles, the Marquis del Aguila and Don Juan de Herrera, came to blows with each other in the theatre of the Buen Retiro Palace, in the presence of the King himself;[28] {301} and whilst they fled from justice, a greater noble still, the Count of Sastago, Captain of the King's Guard, was accused of inciting them to the disturbance. As was invariably the case, no sooner was one offence mentioned than a dozen were added to it. The Count, it was said, had sold the sergeancy of the guard for 1100 ducats; the provedor of the guard paid him fifty reals every day, filched from the mess bill; he ill-treated his wife, ... and much else of the same sort; and as soon as Count de Sastago was under lock and key for these offences, no less than three other noble Counts were competing and quarrelling with each other for his place as Captain of the Guard;[29] whilst, a few days afterwards, Zapata, the Lieutenant of the Guard, was carried to prison for making a disturbance at the entrance of the palace, and breaking down the barriers to get in, against the royal orders, whilst Prince Baltasar Carlos was coming out. On New Year's Eve 1636, we are told, "their Majesties went to dine at the Buen Retiro, where there was in the afternoon a sort of comedy or festival never seen before in Spain. First there appeared the poet Atillano, who has come from the Indies, and who may justly be called a prodigy of the world, as he proved himself to be on this occasion; for such is his poetic rage, that he utters {302} a perfect torrent of Castilian verse on any subject proposed to him,[30] and, withal, in very remarkable style, with much taste and adornments from the Scriptures and classical authors, brought in most aptly, with comparisons, emphasis, digressions, and poetic figures, which strike his hearers with astonishment, many believing that it can only be done by devilish arts, for he never drops a foot or forgets a syllable.... After Atillano came Cristobal, the blind man, well known at Court; and he also showed his skill in turning out couplets impromptu, with his usual prettiness and propriety, and quite in courtier-like fashion. But as he lacks erudition, and the other man possesses much, you may well imagine the difference between them. After the poets came Calabaza, the dwarfs, the little negro, and the girls they call the _Count's wrigglers_;[31] and they represented their figures and played a hundred monkey tricks to raise a laugh. Afterwards the party ended by a ball and masquerade. It was {303} very good and diverting; and my lady Countess of Olivares gave the collation to their Majesties." [Sidenote: Progress of the war] The year thus fittingly begun in the Court was signalised by the Cardinal Infante Fernando in Flanders and France by military capacity which recalled the great days of the Emperor a hundred years before. The French and Dutch allies were already suspicious of each other, and were not co-operating cordially; so that Fernando had been able to wear out the resistance of the French without a general engagement, and whilst they, disorganised and decimated with famine and disease, retreated into France, the Infante overran Picardy and Champagne. He pushed his advance beyond the Somme and to the banks of the Oise, threatening Paris itself, and elated Olivares planned a simultaneous invasion of France under the Admiral of Castile, and yet another from the side of Germany over the frontier of Burgundy. The only one of these attacks that came to anything was that of the Cardinal Infante; but even he, either from want of resources or lack of boldness, lagged on the line of the Somme and Oise until the French had recovered from their panic. Orange was also marching to aid his ally, and Paris had raised a great army of citizens to resist further attack; and early in 1637 the Spaniards, under the Cardinal Infante, had retreated into Flanders again, forced once more to stand on the defensive. But the net result of the temporary display of Spanish vigour had been to free the Catalonian frontier from imminent fears from the French, and Philip had found no excuse for insisting further upon his {304} desire to place himself in command of his troops in Barcelona. A perusal of the gossiping newsletters of the times, though, of course, much that they record is merely trivial, throws a lurid light upon the utterly lawless condition of the capital at this grave juncture, when the nation was supposed to be straining every nerve to prevent humiliation at the hands of its implacable enemy. It would be profitless to give details of all, or of any large number, of the scandals mentioned by the chroniclers from day to day; but as a specimen a few entries belonging to this year 1636 will give an idea of the state of affairs in Philip's Court at the time. In January, Don Antonio Oquendo, the famous naval commander, was at Mass in the church of Buen Suceso,[32] when a challenge to immediate combat was brought from the rival admiral Nicholas Spinola. Oquendo just gave himself time to confess, and then met his opponent, both being mounted and armed with knives. One of the combatants was wounded before the passers-by could interfere, and the other fled to hiding.[33] [Sidenote: A turbulent capital] A day or two later, proclamation was made in the streets that the King ordered all the Portuguese murderers in Madrid to leave within a week, or they would be apprehended and sent before the judges, who Were considering their cases. "The intention of this," sapiently says the chronicler, "appears to be that they may thus be forced to {305} enlist as soldiers, and the pragmatic with regard to the number of lackeys allowed had a similar object." At the same time a scandalous quarrel was going on between the officers of the Inquisition and the alcaldes of the Court, or judges of first instance, on some trivial point of etiquette, but which ended in wholesale excommunication of all the alcaldes in a body, and several inferior officers on both sides being condemned and imprisoned by the rival authorities. In the summer another panic occurred in the Church of St. Philip and on Liars' Walk, because a heretic shouted some sacrilegious words in the church; and soon afterwards an offended soldier murdered by a pistol shot a gentleman named Bilbao on the steps leading to the crowded atrium of the church, the most frequented spot in Madrid. On the 28th July there was a great bull-fight in the Plaza Mayor, which had attracted a vast concourse of people, as the bulls were said to have been unusually savage. They must have been so, for several men were killed; but worse than this, daggers were drawn and a slashing match commenced under the King's very eyes. Philip, outraged at such disrespect, ordered the offenders to be arrested. They were handed by the alguacils to the Archers of the Guard, from whom they managed to escape. Philip quite lost his temper at this, which he very rarely did, and rose wrathfully to leave the arena. The Queen pulled him by the cloak, and coaxed him into sitting again whilst two more bulls and many horses were done to death. But the King was still unappeased, and as he went out past the Archers of the Guard {306} he told them "that they had managed it very nicely. Why were they Archers, he wondered, and what were they paid for?" the matter ending in mutual recriminations between the Archers and the alguacils, and the punishment of the former. Matrimonial scandals succeeded each other daily in the Newsletters, and the highest names in the Court are treated with the utmost scurrility in this particular; whilst accusations of corruption on the part of judicial authorities and priests are quite as common. The authorities whose duty it was to keep order appear to have been as lawless as the rest of the citizens. The Corregidor[34] (Governor of Madrid) had occasion in October to call upon the King's upholsterer and valet de chambre, who was also captain of a newly raised company of militia. The soldiers in his courtyard, for some reason not stated, snatched the Corregidor's wand of office from the page who carried it, and, having broken it, belaboured the boy's back with it. The Corregidor, offended in his dignity, told the soldiers angrily that he was a member of the Council of {307} War, and their master; whereupon one of the men-at-arms thrust his pike against the august breast of the Corregidor, and threatened to kill him. Upon this a free fight took place between the alguacils in attendance on the Corregidor and the soldiers, and after much uproar one of the soldiers was overpowered and borne off in triumph by the alguacils to the prison of the municipality, "notwithstanding that it was the feast day of our seraphic father St. Francis." The Corregidor lost no time, but sat in judgment at once, and of course found the soldier guilty. But before the trial was done a great rabble of soldiers assembled outside the Guildhall (Casa de la Villa) to rescue their comrade from the hands of justice. The town officers read an order from the balcony that every soldier was immediately to withdraw, and the stout-hearted Corregidor himself arrested the ringleader, and, kicking and cuffing, thrust him into a cell. That afternoon the Corregidor accompanied the first offender through the streets of Madrid, whilst 200 strokes of the lash were administered on the poor soldier's bare back, and when the Corregidor returned to the Guildhall he stood by whilst the other offender was tortured on the rack. Out of this arose a quarrel royal between the Council of War, who took the soldiers' part, and the Royal Council, who were for the civil authorities; and for weeks afterwards recriminations and punishments were abundantly exchanged. There was, indeed, in all spheres a shocking absence of real dignity and restraint. Crimes of the most horrible description are mentioned as {308} being prevalent in the better classes;[35] and after the first outcry they were allowed to go almost unpunished and unchecked. As may be supposed, in such a state of society superstition of the grossest description was common. The proceedings of the miracle-working nun of Carrion, to whom, it will be recollected, the Infanta Maria had recommended the Prince of Wales, had become so notorious that the Inquisition had taken her in hand, and condemned her as a witch and an impostor. But this appears only to have increased her fame for sanctity, for several books in her praise were burnt by the Inquisition, and every measure taken to expose her frauds by the Holy Office; but with so little effect, that after her death, early in 1637, an edict was read in every church in Madrid pronouncing major excommunication against all those who retained images, portraits, signatures, crosses, certificates, beads, or books relating to her.[36] When the Marquis of Aitona was unwilling to start from Madrid to take up the governorship of Milan in the spring of 1636, and delayed his departure from week to week, a fresh pretext for delay, and one generally praised, was that it would be most unwise for {309} him to leave Madrid on the Ides of March, because it was the anniversary of the murder of Cæsar. [Sidenote: General lawlessness] The lawlessness was not confined even to grown people, but extended to children. It appears that late in 1636 a pragmatic had been drafted, but not yet officially promulgated, decreeing that no man in future might wear in Madrid the long wisp of hair before the ears (_guedejas_) that had recently become the fashion; and women were strictly forbidden to appear in the strange farthingales or very wide hoop skirt, flattened back and front, called _guardainfantes_; "although," says the chronicler, "it has not yet been proclaimed, the boys are already hunting women who wear guardainfantes as if they were cows, hissing and whistling at them, and insulting them dreadfully. To such a length has this insolence been carried, that mounted alguacils have been posted to prevent violence, two boys having been killed in the street last Thursday by attendants upon the women, who had turned upon the boys."[37] Whilst Olivares bore upon his bowed shoulders the whole burden of government, resorting to the most empirical means to raise money, such as calling in the copper coin and restamping it to three times its former value,[38] the King had to be distracted and kept amused by never-ending entertainments, such as those that have been described {310} in former pages.[39] Hardly a week passed without some pretext for a long series of such shows, which now usually took place at the favourite Buen Retiro. Aston, in one of his letters to Coke in May 1636,[40] describes the festivities of Whitsuntide that year. "Three days of noble feasting," he calls it; "the first day a masquerade on horseback, in the evening, and bull-fights on the other two days, with cane tourneys. I was invited to all of them, and had the particular honour on the first night to be placed in a balcony in the King's own apartments with the grandees; this being an unusual honour. On the other days I occupied a special balcony with my own people. When the welcome news of the Cardinal Infante's victories in Picardy came to Madrid late in September 1636, the rejoicings were frantic. His Majesty and all the Court rode to Our Lady of Atocha to give thanks.... They returned at night through the streets, illuminated by countless torches; all the Councils having been ordered to make a celebration in honour of the occasion, they all complied famously, and with great sumptuousness, each feast having cost 2000 ducats, and others are yet to come which will surpass them all."[41] {311} [Sidenote: Continual festivities] A few weeks later, an excuse was found in the expected arrival in Madrid of the French Bourbon Princess of Carignano, wife of Prince Thomas of Savoy, who was fighting for the Spanish under the Cardinal Infante, and it was determined that in her honour the Buen Retiro should surpass itself. Before the Princess had even embarked for Spain, the great preparations were begun "to finish the new arena at the Buen Retiro. Experts have been despatched to the country around Madrid to obtain the 80,000 planks which will be needed for the barriers that are to surround it. The work is going on so actively, both in levelling the ground and erecting the woodwork, that there is no cessation, even on Sunday or feast days; and the Corregidor has erected there a scaffolding with a (neck) ring to punish the workmen who do not complete their task properly, as an example to the others. A triumphal car is also being made, of which the cover alone is to cost 4000 ducats; and it will be enclosed in glass, in order that the inside may look more beautiful."[42] Another fine feast is described by Aston in June 1636. Writing to Coke, he says: "The King and Queen retired to Buen Retiro to enjoy the curious gardens and new waterworks contrived by Olivares, and a great variety of festivals. One on Midsummer night was of the greatest ostentation and curiosity I have ever seen in my life. I had {312} the honour to be invited to it, and had extraordinary favour and respect shown in the place that was given to me. The entertainment was a play that was made on purpose to be acted by the three several companies of players of this town, the intention whereof was so good; the place where it was acted being set out with three several scenes of much ostentation, and the disposition of the lights so full of novelty and delight, that I am highly tempted to give your honour a larger description of it, but that it would prove to be business enough for a large letter."[43] It was not all feasting and play-going for Sir Walter Aston at the historic "house with the seven chimneys." When he arrived to replace Arthur Hopton, early in 1636, the famous agreement between Philip and Charles was still uncompleted, and the complaints of the English shipmasters against Spanish oppression were louder and more insistent than ever. Tyrone and the Desmonds were in Madrid negotiating for the raising of fresh Catholic Irish regiments for the Spanish service, and urging Philip to make no terms about the Palatinate unless Charles would restore the lands of O'Neill. But the aid of an English fleet in the Channel became more and more desirable to Spain as the war went on; and it was clear that the old vague promises and smiling plausibilities of Olivares had at last lost their efficacy with Charles. An instructive light is thrown upon the methods by which Olivares still strove to cope with the situation, by an original holograph letter in the Record Office[44] from Olivares' confidential secretary Rojas, {313} to the imperial ambassador in Madrid, asking him by King Philip's orders to "give some words of hope to the English ambassador about the Palatinate." "It is of the utmost importance that we should make use of all such expedients as present themselves; as it appears that the King of England is extremely busy preparing a powerful fleet to be used to the detriment of this Crown, ... probably against Brazil, in co-operation with the Hollanders." On the 18th June 1636, Olivares wrote a serious letter to Aston, evidently intended to bring affairs to a crisis. He, Olivares, had news, he said, of a design of a French naval attack on the English coast. Aston replied coolly that he had no doubt due measures would be taken in England to repel any attempt; but in the subsequent interview he succeeded "in persuading," as he says, "the Conde to assent to the terms for the co-operation of the English fleet, and Count de Oñate was instructed to start for England at once. They are really trying to prove that they desire the King of England's friendship. Indeed, in the present state of things it is needful for them, and I hope our King will make wise use of the opportunity."[45] But, withal, the Palatinate, which was the question nearest to Charles's heart, was still left open, though Arundel in Vienna was pushing the point there industriously, while the Palatine himself appealed personally to Philip by a letter which received no answer. When Count de Oñate eventually presented himself before King Charles at Whitehall, the English King left no doubt that the Palatinate {314} was uppermost in his mind. Speaking in Latin, he asked Oñate three questions--"Whether, having notice of the final answer of the Emperor to Arundel, he hath any power by way of interpretation or otherwise to qualify the said answer? Whether he hath power from the King of Spain to deliver to King Charles, or the Prince Elector, that part of the Lower Palatinate in his (Philip's) possession, and also by this mediation that part held by the Emperor? Whether he hath commission to set down in particular those conveniences that his father told Arundel the King of Spain would insist upon? Whether, in accordance with the assurance given by the English ambassador in Spain, King Charles may expect by him (Oñate) any more particular and full satisfaction than hath yet been delivered?"[46] Needless to say that Oñate had no clear answers to any of these questions, nor instructions to forward the matter of the Palatinate definitely; and once more discouragement fell upon those who had hoped to carry through the treaty. Hopton, when he arrived in London and heard the news, wrote to Aston by Richard Fanshawe, who was on his way to Spain: "A greater change has taken place in our purposes in the last month than in years before. Our eyes are now opened to the intention of the house of Austria to keep hold of the Palatinate. They must have a very mean opinion of us to treat our King with so little courtesy. If his Majesty gives way to the opinion {315} of his subjects about the Palatinate, it will prove to Spain their error. It is incredible that they should act thus. They will certainly lose us if they be not careful." At the same time, the Spaniards were boasting in Madrid that "the Palatinate has been put to bed, and the King of England will not dare to break with us about it." [Sidenote: England again shelved] The need of Spain for English co-operation was now once again growing less urgent, for the star of Richelieu was temporarily dimmed. The coalition of the Italian princes against Spain had fallen to pieces, the Dukes of Mantua and Savoy died, and Parma was forced to submit to Spain. The Valtelline was retaken and occupied by the Spanish troops, and the Grisons conciliated; whilst Cardinal la Valette's campaign in 1637 against the Infante Cardinal partially failed. In Germany, too, the French were defeated all along the line, and, worst of all, France lost Alsace. Richelieu, moreover, was faced by the dangerous Court intrigues of Gaston of Orleans and his cousin Soissons, and half France was in smouldering revolt against the taxation imposed by the great Cardinal. The way across Lombardy and Tyrol to Germany and Flanders by land was now open to Spanish troops; and Olivares, having kept unstable Charles of England on the tenterhooks all these years with the bait of the Palatinate, could now snap his fingers at him, and for a time drop the mask. [1] An attempt was made to enforce gifts of this donation from foreigners, and four English youths at Bilbao resisted, but on Hopton's representations they were exempt. [2] In fact, a notification had been sent to the Pope that the Nuncio in future would be treated as any other ambassador, and the large revenue drawn by the Papacy from Spain would be in future taken by the King. Upon this the Nuncio was withdrawn, and much trouble ensued. [3] Corner, the Venetian ambassador in Madrid, writing at the same period, says: "He (Olivares) is greatly hated both by the grandees and by the people of all classes, but nobody believes that he can be turned out of his place.... He is very austere and hard in his dealings with people, which causes great anger, and the murmurs against him are open and loud, even the preachers in the pulpits denouncing him; and everybody is saying that it is a wonder he can stand against it all." [4] As if to silence these terrible hints, Olivares had at this time adopted an ostentatiously saintly mode of life. Corner speaks of him as living very quietly and in great melancholy since the death of his only daughter. "He professes to live in much piety and devotion, confessing and communicating every day. He has so many masses said daily, and to all appearance lives the life of a devotee. He has now begun to lie in a coffin in his chamber like a corpse, with tapers around him, whilst the _de profundis_ is sung; whilst in ordinary affairs he talks like a capuchin friar, and speaks of the grandeur of this world with the greatest disdain." [5] Hopton's MS. Notebook. [6] Hopton, writing soon after this (January 1634), says the levies are going on very slowly. Yesterday a pragmatic was published limiting the number of lackeys and squires, all beyond that number are to be discharged, and so also are those employed in unnecessary trades, so that many will be at leisure to serve the King. But the pragmatics did not dare to attack the greater scandal of all, namely, the enormous number of ruffians who escaped all responsibility to the ordinary laws by becoming nominally "Familiars" of the Inquisition, or servants, in the broadest sense, to the religious communities. [7] Hopton's MS. Notebook. [8] This was an ancient Dominican religious house near the palace, at the corner of the present Cuesta de Santo Domingo in Madrid. [9] Particulars of the case will be found in the contemporary MS., D. 150, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid. [10] On a portion of the site of the Buen Retiro the Countess of Olivares had formerly had an aviary with a collection of domestic poultry, in which she and her husband had taken great interest. The wits of the capital had dubbed the place "the hen-coop"; and the name was the peg upon which the satirists and poets hung their scurrilous gibes at the new palace. Corner, the Venetian ambassador at this time, writes: "The origin of the edifice has become a subject for great ridicule. The site was occupied by a collection of poultry the Countess had, and although the hens were curious and pretty of their sort, it was a source of much wonder and derision that the Count, who is occupied in such grave business, should have taken such interest in the hens.... Everybody calls it (the palace) the 'hen-coop,' and numberless pasquins have been written about it, even Cardinal Richelieu joking about the hens and the hen-coop to a secretary of the King (Philip) who was in Paris." [11] Hopton's MS. Notebook. Corner also says that anybody who wished to stand well with Olivares hurried to send some precious thing to adorn the Buen Retiro. [12] _Ibid._ [13] Fernando was in Milan, and was already under orders to march to Flanders overland at this time. [14] Hopton's MS. Notebook. [15] Hopton's MS. Notebook. [16] At this very period the great Don Fadrique de Toledo, son of the Duke of Alba, was in prison, the victim of Olivares' jealousy, and most of the grandees avoided Court as much as possible. [17] Hopton's MS. Notebook. [18] Carl Justi. Presents of paintings were also sent from England. Coke, for instance, sent, presumably from Charles I., a picture by Horatio Gentileschi as a present to King Philip. It is extraordinary to note in the correspondence of the English diplomatists at this period the constant mention of the sending of pictures to Spain, and vice versa, mostly for King Charles, but very often also for Lady Cottington. In May 1633, Hopton writes to Cottington the following reference to a painter sent to Madrid to copy pictures for Charles I., which I do not think has been noticed before. "The King's painter is sending some pieces. He is a very well governed young man and a good husband (_i.e._ a good manager of money), yet by reason of the dearenesse of this place, and being willing to live in so handsome a manner as a man sent by his Majesty, money goes away apace which I cannot remedy, because I doe not see that he can; but I conceive his Majesty will have a very good account of him, to whose service I perceive he hath wholly disposed himself." A little later we are told that "the King's painter hath fallen sick of a calenture, and grows worse. I am out of a great deal of money by him." Lady Cottington and others in England were constantly asking for Labrador's flower and fruit pieces to be sent to them, and purchases and exchanges of pictures are often spoken of for King Charles himself. [19] The charming picture by Velazquez, here reproduced, represents the little Prince at about the age of nine on his pony galloping near the Pardo. There is another charming equestrian portrait of the Prince in the Duke of Westminster's collection, with Olivares in the background. [20] Hopton's MS. Notebook. [21] Hopton's MS. Notebook. [22] It is curious that during all this period of great international anxiety and important negotiations, the talk about pictures is still constantly to be met with in the diplomatic correspondence. At one time, in June 1635, Suero de Quiñones wished to send two pictures as a present to King Charles. "I (Hopton) and King (Charles's) painter have seen them, and think they are good, particularly a Venus and Adonis of Luqueto. The other piece is by Tintoret. Suero de Quiñones is poor, but of quality. I know not why he should give his pictures away thus." But Quiñones, urged doubtless by poverty rather than his quality, did not give them away after all, and perhaps never intended to do so; for Hopton writes months afterwards: "Quiñones has played the knave, and sold his pictures." On another occasion (July of the same year), Hopton expresses his delight to Cottington that Labrador's paintings had come to hand at last. "The painter who made the landskips," he continues, "is now dead, and his pieces are much sought after and highly prized. I have a few of them and am using diligence to get some more, at your lordship's service. If the man had lived I think I had carried him with me to England; for he was grown much out of love with his own country, and was much my friend." MS. Notebook. [23] After they had voted this usual 9 millions to extend over three years, the Cortes were thunderstruck in the following January 1636, by a demand of Olivares that they should vote an additional 13 millions. The members were all paid and submissive; but this was too much even for them. They flatly refused to vote the sum, which they said it was quite impossible for their constituents to pay. The royal Council then at once commenced criminal proceedings against them, whereupon the members prayed for time to consult their constituents, and orders were given by the Council to levy the 13 millions of necessary without the vote: to this abject state had representative institutions been reduced in the realms of Castile. See Danvila's _Poder Civil en España_, _Documents_, and Rodriguez Villa's Newsletters, 1636-37. [24] Hopton to Coke, 13th June 1635. MS. Notebook. [25] Council of State Deliberations of 19th November 1635. Danvila, _El Poder Civil en España_. [26] There was one pragmatic which touched Madrid to the quick, namely, that which forbade the use of carriages except to a very few privileged people. So great was the outcry against this, that it was found to be impossible to enforce it, as the driving about in coaches was the main pleasure and amusement of every one who could afford it, and of many people who could not. Whilst, therefore, the pragmatic was rigidly enforced in the provincial capitals, licences were issued to anyone in Madrid to own a coach on payment of 100 ducats.--Rodriguez Villa's Newsletters, January 1636. Other pragmatics were issued at the time, regulating the courtesy titles, as it was found that too many people were calling themselves _Lordship_. [27] In the Rodriguez Villa's Newsletters at this period, hardly a week passes without reference to the selling up of some nobleman's belongings for debt. One of the most ostentatious nobles in Madrid, the Marquis de las Navas, was soon after this fined for some offence, and as he had no money an execution was put in on his coaches and horses, which it was then found were not his own but hired; and his furniture and even the tapestries of his palace belonged to other people. [28] Both of them got safe away abroad, and the Marquis del Aguila was condemned to death in his absence. Herrera subsequently issued a public challenge for the Marquis to meet Him and fight in Switzerland, and thus explains the affray. The Marquis, he asserts, said in the theatre that he was drunk, and though he made no reply to this, an hour afterwards he came behind him and struck him a great blow on the back of the neck. He (Herrera) then drew his sword, and he and the Marquis were both seized by the Guard. [29] _La Corte y Monarquia de España en_ 1636-1637, a series of newsletters written by an anonymous grandee in Madrid, edited by A. Rodriguez Villa. [30] Philip had grown very fond of these tests of literary promptitude, at which he appears to have shone. In Morel Fatio's _Espagne au XVI. et XVII. Siècle_ there is reproduced the programme of a great burlesque _Academy_ of this sort, which took place at the Buen Retiro during the fetes of 1637. There are fourteen items for competition, of which the following are good specimens: A romance declaring which stomach is most to be envied, that which will digest great sorrows or great suppers. An epigram in two Castilian couplets, declaring which is the most foolish, to be a fool sometimes or to be always discreet. Sixteen roundels, about a procuress who was dying, much comforted that there were no proper men left in the world; and just as she is about to expire, a young man comes in whom she receives with delight, saying to him, "My friend, you are just in time; there are two beautiful lasses in there, as good as gold; one dark and the other fair." And as the youth was hesitating which to choose the expiring old woman cried, "My son; for heaven's sake take the dark one. This is no time for me to deceive people." The tale has been drawn out thus, because they say it is true. [31] Las Sabandijas del Conde. [32] This church was at the end of the Puerta del Sol, where the Hotel de Paris now stands. [33] Oquendo, only a few weeks later, took command of the galleys at Cadiz to attack the French fleet, and received 200,000 ducats. [34] This was the Count of Montalvo, who must have been more quarrelsome and punctilious than most of his compeers, for only a few weeks after the contention here described he had a violent quarrel with the Council of Castile, the supreme judicial authority, which ended in the Corregidor himself being imprisoned and heavily fined. It appears that he had ordered an alguacil to attend him, which the alguacil refused to do, as he was not under his jurisdiction. The Corregidor's answer was to cast the man into prison; whereupon the alguacil appealed to the President of the Council of Castile, who told the Corregidor that he had exceeded his powers. The touchy Corregidor in a rage burst out with: "A rebuke to me. By Christ's body, his Majesty the King has many ministers who do not know what they are doing." The scandalised president without more ado cast the Corregidor into prison, from which only after much trouble he was released. [35] Particulars of these may be found in Rodriguez Villa's _La Corte y Monarquia de España en_ 1636-1637, p. 50 and in Barrionuevo's Newsletters of a subsequent date. With regard to the period now under review (1636), one of the accused persons under torture was hastily taken down from the rack, "as he showed an intention of accusing half Madrid." On this occasion two obscure persons were burnt alive, but scores of aristocrats whose names are freely mentioned in the letters escaped with short banishment from Court or no punishment at all. [36] It was afterwards stated that one bishop had surrendered thousands of the nun's letters to the Inquisition, and the Cura of Santa Cruz had "a room full of crosses, medals, images, and old rags belonging to her, whilst the Duke of Arschot had two thousand made specially to be blessed by her." Rodriguez Villa. [37] Rodriguez Villa's Newsletter, October 1636. [38] This, as Aston wrote, made gold and silver a mere merchandise. The pragmatics, it is true, fixed the premium on silver at 25 per cent., but it was at once raised in the open market to 34 per cent. and more, the resulting distress and dislocation of business being appalling. Aston to Coke, 29th May 1636. Record Office, S.P. Spanish MSS. 38. [39] In April of this year, 1636, for instance, Philip for some reason or other was in depressed spirits on Sunday 26th, and was for a time secretly closeted in the chapel alone in prayer. At once, we are told, "great and sudden preparations were ordered to be made in the palace for comedies and interludes, and the comedians were warned to play as many buffooneries as they could to make his Majesty laugh." An account in MS. of all that happened in the Court from 1636 to 1642, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, H. 33 [40] Record Office, S.P. Spanish MSS. 38 [41] Newsletter. Aston also describes the rejoicings on this occasion, and mentions that Philip "let fall some expressions of regret that his brother-in-law's affairs had fallen into such bad case." This was a curious expression, as the brother-in-law in question was the King of France, and it was Philip's own army that had put him "in bad case." [42] Rodriguez Villa. [43] Record Office S.P., Spain MSS. 38. [44] _Ibid._ [45] Aston to Coke, 30th June 1636. Record Office, MSS. S.P., Spain, 39. [46] Record Office S.P., Spain MSS. {316} CHAPTER VIII FESTIVITIES IN MADRID--EXTRAVAGANCE AND PENURY--NEW WAYS OF RAISING MONEY--HOPTON AND WINDEBANK--BATTLE OF THE DOWNS--VIOLENCE IN THE STREETS OF MADRID--REVOLT OF PORTUGAL--FRENCH INVASION OF SPAIN--REVOLT OF CATALONIA--PHILIP'S AMOUR WITH THE NUN OF ST. PLACIDO--THE WANE OF OLIVARES--PHILIP'S VOYAGE TO ARAGON--INTRIGUES AGAINST OLIVARES--FALL OF OLIVARES [Sidenote: Princess Carignano] Nothing even in Spain could exceed the magnificence with which Philip greeted the Bourbon Princess of Carignano. She was really a person of little importance, but her significance in Spain for the moment was that she was a sister of the Count of Soissons, who in France was in arms against Richelieu; and a foe of the Cardinal was a friend of Spain. The proud dame was equal to the occasion, and, after endless discussions as to the exact behaviour of both at a proposed interview with the English ambassador, Sir Walter Aston decided that he could not, with due regard for his dignity, meet the Princess at all. The points of difference seem trivial enough: when Aston was to take off his hat, how many steps upon the dais the lady was to advance to meet him, and so on; but the Princess was indignant that the Englishman {317} should thus haggle over the courtesy due to her, and all Madrid took malicious part in the squabble.[1] The usual round of festivities for the Princess, with the addition of a great pig-sticking day with twenty wild boars at the Pardo, were followed in a fortnight by another series more sumptuous still, to celebrate, the election of Philip's brother-in-law to the kingship of the Romans and to the succession of the imperial throne. Many detailed accounts of these extraordinary feasts, the greatest ever given in the Buen Retiro, exist;[2] but so many similar celebrations have been described in this book from Spanish sources, that it will suffice in this case to quote only Sir Walter Aston's short description of what he saw. "On the 7th February 1637 the King came from the Pardo to the Buen Retiro, and he has been busy ever since arranging the festivities for the election of the King of the Romans. The feasts began on the 15th, the King being present. A large place had been specially cleared and levelled before the Buen Retiro, and built about with uniform scaffolds two storeys high, the posts and divisions {318} all beautified with paintings and gilding. The King and the Conde (Olivares) dressed themselves in the house of Carlo Strada, the _asentista_ (loan-monger), by whom they were richly presented, not only with jewels but with the whole furniture of the apartments,[3] which he had provided for each. [Sidenote: A sumptuous show] His house is in the Carrera de San Geronimo, where the King and Conde took horse, and, attended by 200 of the nobility and persons of quality, and two triumphal chariots drawn by 20 oxen apiece, entered the Plaza, where they performed a curious masquerade after their manner full of changes, the one half of the horsemen being led by the King and the other half by the Count-Duke; the King and Conde and all the rest being richly clad after the same kind. The Plaza was round about set full of torches in several heights, and postures which had so much delight and magnificence in the appearance, that those who have looked curiously into the entertainments of former times say that amongst the Romans they have not read of any greater ostentation.[4] The charge hath {319} certainly been very great, but hath cost the King nothing; for it hath long used this town to defray all extraordinaries either for his honour or his pleasure. Since then there has been a bull-feast and some fresh entertainment every day. On Sunday last there was a masked carnival fit for the Shrove-tide season; so full of variety of different figures, antique shapes, and several dances, that I have not seen in a ridiculous way any of more pleasure. Late advices have given them little contentment; but however their business may go abroad, they are resolved to make themselves merry at home."[5] However "merry" the Court might be, the need for money was more pressing than ever. In the same letter that describes these entertainments, we are told that the Marquis of Castel Rodrigo had been sent to Seville to demand 800,000 ducats for present needs in Madrid. "Though he is to demand it as a denature, this King's requests are {320} understood to be commands, and admit of no reply.[6] The denature has already begun in this Court, and is to go through the whole kingdom, everybody being told by way of request what he has to pay." The Pope, too, who had been for months striving to bring about peace or a truce, was persuaded to consent that the Spanish clergy should be mulcted in 500,000 ducats; and when the Indies fleet arrived, Olivares ordered a similar amount of private treasure in it to be seized in exchange for assignments, which, says Aston, is commonly a very slow and lame payment. But the greatest novelty in the way to raise funds was invented at this juncture by a Jesuit priest in Madrid named Salazar, and was at once seized upon by Olivares to become until our own days a principal source of revenue in all civilised States; namely, the device of using government-stamped paper for all official and formal documents. This new impost was published in Madrid early in 1637, there being four denominations of stamped paper; respectively of 1, 2, 3, and 4 reals per sheet, to forge which was an offence punishable by death. The lawyers and people were up in arms against it, though financiers said it would bring in two million ducats a year, and the Nuncio and priests flatly refused to conform to {321} it for the ecclesiastical courts, etc., without the special order of the Pope.[7] [Sidenote: Prices in Madrid] The prices of commodities in Madrid had risen enormously in the previous few years, thanks to the tampering with the coinage and the oppressive operation of the alcabala tax on all sales; and the figures given by Hopton at the time to Coke are very significant of the increased cost of living. Aston, sore and humiliated at the final failure of the treaty, begged to be recalled; and Hopton, who had not long returned to England disappointed, and, as he said, shelved, was again nominated for the embassy at Madrid. But Coke informed him that his allowance for diet would be in future reduced from £6 to £4 per day, "as it was in the time of Queen Elizabeth." Sir Arthur Hopton (he had only just been knighted) wrote feelingly on this matter, pointing out how unjust the reduction was. "All the diet of table and stables is three times as dear as in Sir Charles Cornwallis's time, when the £2 a day was first added. A loaf of bread {322} was then worth 12 maravedis, and is now worth 34.[8] An azumbre[9] of wine was then worth 12 maravedis, and now sells for 30; a pound of mutton, which was then worth 17 maravedis, is now worth 40; a fanega[10] of barley then cost 6 reals,[11] and 16 now. I myself have paid as much as 26. If this new rule be enforced, the English ambassador cannot maintain his position, for some of the small Italian ambassadors have as much as £6." But Hopton need not have exerted himself to obtain the full pay; for before he could make ready to return to his post a change came over the scene. Aston had long been puzzled as to what was being arranged in London. Rumours had reached him that some agreement was on foot between England and France, but Hopton from London had emphatically assured him, on the 23rd May 1637, that nothing of the sort was intended. By the next courier Aston received an enigmatical letter written by Charles's own hand, which only made the mystery deeper, and drew from the ambassador an impatient exclamation that he could not give any useful warning to the English merchants on such a riddle as that. Why was he not told, he asked, if war was really intended, and he then could make some use of his knowledge. The King's letter is a characteristic one, and as it has not to my knowledge ever been printed, I give it in full. {323} "Watt. The darkeness of ther inventions could not suffer my resolutions to be cleare: so that it was impossible to send you a right light to walke by. What that is (though uncertaine yet) Secretary Windebanke will send you worde. They may be assured of my friendship, but then ther actions not their words must doe it. So referring you to my Secretaries despatch, I rest your friend Charles R. Theobalds, the 15th June 1637."[12] [Sidenote: English neutrality] Aston had not to wait many days for partial enlightenment. Hopton wrote reminding him of Olivares's dictum that there was no gratitude amongst princes; but said the Count-Duke might have been more grateful on this occasion with advantage to himself. Now it was too late; for a great change had been effected in English policy, and a treaty had been arranged with France. A few days later, Windebank wrote a long official despatch, setting forth all the causes for complaint against the house of Austria, and announcing an alliance with Louis XIII.[13] But still Aston did not know whether {324} it meant war with Spain, or simply a neutrality with benevolent tendency towards the French and Dutch. He learnt before long that all that Richelieu had needed was to divert Charles from an agreement with Spain, for the Stuart ship was already steering straight for the breakers, and thenceforward no active attack from England had to be feared by either of the parties to the great struggle on the Continent. Relations between England and Spain almost came to open hostility when, in October 1639, the powerful fleet of seventy vessels which Philip had by a supreme effort fitted out was almost destroyed by the Dutch in the Downs, and in English waters, where they had taken refuge from Tromp's pursuing fleet. When the Spanish agent in England sought from Charles the protection due to a belligerent in neutral waters, the King at once attempted to bargain for conditions about the Palatinate. But Tromp was in no mood for scrupulousness, and, taking the matter in his own hands, whilst Charles was huckstering, boldly attacked and routed the Spaniards as they lay on the coast of Kent. Olivares was furious, and demanded redress from the King of England, who, he said, had aided the Dutch in their attack. Admiral Pennington, to keep up appearances, was imprisoned for not defending the neutrality of English waters; but that was all. The Battle of the Downs was a deathblow to Spain's spirited attempt under Olivares to become again a great naval power, and the loss of prestige and material then suffered was never fully recovered. By the neutrality of England settled in 1637, {325} and the cessation of the war in the Valtelline and in Italy, the area of the duel to the death between France and Spain, between Richelieu and Olivares, was gradually narrowing; but this concentration of the struggle brought nearer the danger to Spanish territory itself. Great as had been the pressure brought to bear upon all classes to obtain funds for the war, the threat of invasion made the cry for money more peremptory than ever. Not only every noble, but now every knight of an order, was summoned to provide a horse and arms for himself and servant, and to hold himself in readiness to join a company; and coach and cart horses were seized for government use everywhere.[14] A new "donativo" was decreed for Madrid, and rich men were unmercifully drained.[15] Even the beggars who lived in squalid plenty were passed in review, in order to find how many impostors there were who in purse or person could serve the King. It was found by this inquiry that of 3300 people who lived by public mendicancy in the capital, only 1300 were really poor and deserving.[16] On the other hand, as we have seen, at this very time, with the danger hourly growing, ostentatious expenditure on pleasure exhausted in a day sums large enough, in relation to the national revenue, to have provided to a great extent for the more pressing needs. [Sidenote: Poverty and extravagance] Peculation and personal lavishness were as remarkable as the public waste. A Portuguese Count of Linhares, who was Philip's Admiral of the Galleys of Sicily, arrived in Madrid in February {326} 1637, and in his first audience he gave to the King a string of diamonds, which was said to be the handsomest ever seen in Europe, its value being estimated at considerably over 60,000 ducats. The Count then went to salute the Queen, to whom he offered a casket with a pair of marvellous earrings. The Queen, we are told, fell in love with them at once, and without waiting for ladies or tire-women, snatched her own ornaments from her ears and put in the new pair. Whilst she was admiring the effect of them in a mirror the King came in, delighted, to show her his string of diamonds, which he wore in his hat; and they exchanged many jokes at each other's vanity. What the Count-Duke received as his present from Linhares is not stated; but that he was so pleased with Linhares' generosity that he said, "This is the sort of ministers and viceroys for his Majesty"; and he thereupon appointed Linhares, much to the latter's chagrin, Viceroy of Brazil, which post he would only accept on all manner of new and favourable conditions.[17] {327} [Sidenote: Noble criminals] It was in all respects high time that the noble courtiers who surrounded Philip should be made to occupy themselves in real warfare against the enemy of their country, for their quarrels and turbulence had already reached a point that made them a public reproach. It had been for more than a century a fixed policy of Spanish kings to keep the territorial nobles as much as possible excluded from executive activity in the Peninsula, and to attach them to the personal service of the monarch at Court. The peerage had been enormously increased under Philip III. and IV., and the numerous class of newly enriched and ennobled courtiers and officers that thronged Philip's Court, utterly idle and corrupt as they were, with no great feudal or military traditions, had become insolent and pretentious beyond measure. The broils of the nobles during the month of festivities in the early part of 1637 were so scandalous, that it was seriously considered by Philip and Olivares how they could punish the highly placed law-breakers, and positively forbid duels altogether. First, the quidnuncs on Liars' Walk were regaled at the end of January by the sight of four gentlemen of birth being led past the Calle Mayor to be hanged instead of beheaded. These criminals had plied their impudent trade of cloak-snatchers in every street in Madrid, and had, amongst many other outrages, killed a priest who had objected to part with his raiment. The Duke of Hijar, a great friend of Olivares and a notable boaster, had been relieved not only of his cape, but of his sword and buckler as well; and a considerable band of these ruffians, led by a {328} young noble of nineteen, one of those hanged, had so terrorised the streets of the capital as to make them unsafe in broad daylight. The next day, ten men and women, mostly people of good position, were whipped through the Calle Mayor as thieves and receivers; and some highly born gentlemen were condemned to death as housebreakers. "This place," wrote an eye-witness, "simply swarms with folks of this sort, and the efforts of the ministers of justice are powerless to stop them."[18] One morning soon afterwards, Madrid woke up to find the walls placarded with a public challenge from Don Juan de Herrera to the Marquis del Aguila to meet him and fight to the death in Switzerland. These were the two nobles who had fought in the presence of the King (page 300), and had fled from justice to foreign parts; and the subject of discussion amongst the idlers and satirists in Madrid was whether or not the Marquis was bound to accept the challenge. But in three days this subject had to give way to another excitement. Don Juan Pacheco, eldest son of the Marquis of Cerralbo, had asked the manager of one of the theatrical companies of the capital, Tomas Fernandez, to represent a new comedy, in honour of the recovery of his sweetheart, the daughter of the Marquis of Cadreita, from fever. Fernandez had made other arrangements for his company and declined to do so; and Pacheco at once hired a bravo to stab the comedian as he was walking and chatting with other actors in the open space near the Church of St Sebastian, called the "Liars' Walk of the Comedians." When the {329} assassin delivered the blow, this noble employer who was standing close by, shouted: "That is the way to serve varlets." Hardly had the exclamations on this event ceased, than another affray between gentlemen in broad daylight interested the gossipers. On the 10th February there was dress rehearsal of the mounted masquerade in the new arena at the Buen Retiro, which has been described on page 318. The populace broke into the ring, and the royal guard had much trouble to clear the space for the riders. During the process of clearing, young Spinola, indignant that he, a Genoese noble, should be hustled, called out offensively to Don Francisco Zapata, the lieutenant (whom we have seen in trouble before): "Hi, Don Francisco! don't you know who I am?" to which Zapata replied: "I don't care who you are"; and in spite of his threats of vengeance Spinola was "moved on." As Zapata left the gates of the palace afterwards, he met Spinola waiting for him in the Prado. "I have a word to say to you," cried the Genoese. "I have no sword," replied Zapata. "Then I will wait whilst you go and fetch one," said Spinola; and with that Zapata leapt in a rage from his mule, and, snatching a sword from a bystander, he fell upon his opponent, though the pair were separated before blood was shed. Another foolish fray over punctilious trifles took place on the following day between the Count of Salazar and one of the gentlemen in attendance on the Princess of Carignano, a Milanese Spanish subject who bore an Italian title of Count de Pozo. The Spanish nobles always sneered at Italian titles; {330} and Salazar shied at calling Pozo "Lordship." The latter had retaliated by calling Salazar himself "Worship" instead of "Lordship," and when he met him in the Calle Mayor had neglected to bow to him. Worse still, when they met again in the passage of the Buen Retiro palace leading to the Count-Duke's apartment, Salazar doffed his hat, and Pozo neglected to return the salute. In a moment Salazar turned back, and, snatching off Pozo's wide-brimmed felt hat, gave the owner a tremendous buffet on the face with it. In a moment swords flew from scabbards, and the two angry nobles grappled; but they, too, were separated, Salazar taking refuge in the German embassy, whilst Pozo fled into hiding. The "discourses" in this case decided that Salazar was in the wrong; but he had many friends, and held a perfect levee in the German embassy, closely isolated from suspicious visitors, to prevent a hostile message reaching him that would need his going out to fight. But by a trick one of the pages of the Princess of Carignano obtained admission, and handed him a challenge from Pozo. When the antagonists met next morning at the place appointed, on the outskirts of the town, they were both arrested; and even then the two alcaldes who arrested them had a violent quarrel as to which of them should take Salazar. These, and several other scandals of the sort, all happened within the space of a fortnight; and it is little wonder that the Royal Council, at the instance of Olivares, discussed the matter and reported to the King that something must be done. The step decided upon was very Spanish. All the {331} old fire-eaters and officers of experience were fighting under the Cardinal Infante in Flanders, and to them the whole subject was referred for consideration and report; "after which a very strict pragmatic will be drawn up and published forbidding duels under heavy penalties, and even making them cases for the Inquisition, or at least that the principals and their descendants should be degraded. Either of these two courses would touch Spaniards deeply." Needless to say that, long before the report from Flanders came to Madrid, if it ever came, these good resolves were forgotten, and the affrays of noble ruffians disgraced Madrid uninterruptedly as before. [Sidenote: Nearing the crisis] Philip and his minister, indeed, had plenty of other things of greater moment to occupy them than this. From the first we have seen that Olivares recognised the absolute need for fiscal unity and equality of sacrifice from all Spain if the old dream of supremacy was to be enforced and France humiliated. Portugal, Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia, naturally jealous of ancient rights which each successive ruler had sworn to respect, were determined to resist any attack by the favourite upon their autonomy. I have on many occasions pointed out that the main explanation of the past, and problem of the future, of Spanish history is the intensely local and regional character of the patriotism of the people. In our times the rapid means of intercommunication between the parts, and the existence of a unified administrative system for two centuries, have in some directions rendered this feeling less conspicuous than it was; though in others, and particularly in Catalonia and the {332} Basque Provinces, it is still strong and clamant. But in the time of Olivares the sentiment was absolutely unimpaired. Philip II., even after the rising against him in Aragon, had done little really to injure the ancient _fueros_, whilst in Portugal he had gone to the very extreme of prudence in recognising the separate national rights of his new subjects. Any attack, or even threat, therefore, on the part of a new and much hated minister like Olivares upon this, the strongest racial and traditional sentiment of the most active and enterprising communities in the Peninsula, was certain to lead to conflict. The need for money, nevertheless, was pressing, and however statesmanlike the aim of the minister may have been if its execution had been gentle and cautious extending over many years, it became the height of rashness when forced to an immediate issue. Olivares was very far from being foolish or naturally rash, and when his policy was first explained to Philip, soon after his accession, he did not disguise that his object was difficult to attain, and must be a work of time.[19] But when once he had embraced the policy which forced upon Spain {333} costly wars abroad, defeat and ruin for himself was the only alternative to the dangerous plan of making the autonomous realms pay their share of the cost of wars undertaken by the King, and of the rampant waste amongst the decadent crowd in Madrid that had already bled Castile to exhaustion. [Sidenote: Portuguese autonomy] For some years the Portuguese had been justly irritated by the giving to Spaniards of administrative offices in Portugal, and by the contemptuous way in which Olivares habitually received representations or remonstrances as to the injuries suffered by Portuguese subjects in consequence of the union with Castile. The principal instruments of the Count-Duke in his attempts to rule Portugal on Castilian lines were two creatures of his--Miguel Vasconcellos and Diego Suarez, both Portuguese of obscure origin, who had practically superseded the Duchess of Mantua, Philip's nominal figurehead, who was personally not unpopular. In 1637, at an attempt to impose a tax on all property in Portugal for Spanish purposes, risings took place in the Algarves and Evora, and protests loud and deep came from other Portuguese cities. Madrid at once announced that the King himself would go with a large force and conquer his realm of Portugal; but though this was untrue, the Duke of Medina Sidonia marched into the Algarves with a Spanish force, whilst another threatened the north of Portugal, and the Portuguese, unready as yet for the conflict, were cowed by the threat. But the injury rankled deeply, and when, in the following year 1638, Olivares summoned to Madrid the Portuguese archbishops, seven nobles and three {334} Jesuit priests, to discuss the closer unity of the two countries--an assembly which coincided with the imposition of a new illegal tax upon the Portuguese as a punishment for the risings--Portuguese nobles and people alike knew that unless they were to be enslaved by Castile they must needs fight for their national existence. Thenceforward the great conspiracy that was to bring independence to Portugal never ceased until victory crowned the attempt. The Duke of Braganza, the Portuguese pretender with the best right to the throne, was prodigiously rich and over cautious, but his virile Spanish Guzman wife was eager and ambitious; whilst her wealthy brother, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, head of the Guzmans, silently helped forward the scheme which would make his sister a Queen, and afford him, the most powerful vassal of the Castilian crown, a precedent for the creation of an independent principality for himself in Andalucia, free from the weak and corrupt bureaucracy led by his cousin Olivares in Madrid. In the meanwhile the war with France had taken a new aspect. The much vaunted Spanish invasion of France through Bayonne under the Duke of Nocera had turned out a ridiculous fiasco, and it was soon evident that Richelieu meant to make an effort to revenge the attempt by an invasion of Spain, as well as to retrieve the reverses he had sustained elsewhere in the previous year. Anna of Austria, the Queen Mother of France, did her best privately to persuade her brother and Olivares to terms of peace acceptable to her son; and she sent to Madrid for the purpose, in the summer of 1637, {335} a Minorite friar, who had many interviews with Olivares on the subject. But the war had now entered into a phase which involved the personal rivalry of two all-powerful statesmen, as well as the prestige of two great nations, so that it had to be fought to a finish. The blinded courtiers in Madrid, moreover, openly scoffed at the idea of making peace with France until Spain had asserted its incontestable superiority;[20] and all that the Minorite friar took back with him to France was the little finger of Saint Isidore the Husbandman, the patron of Madrid, which was secretly cut from the body of the saint in his church in the Calle de Toledo at midnight, to be sent as a venerated relic to Philip's sister Anna in Paris.[21] [Sidenote: Spain invaded] In the summer of 1638, Richelieu was ready to strike his blow on Spanish soil. Crossing the river Bidasoa at St. Jean de Luz, a French army rapidly captured Irun and the fine harbour of Pasages, and laid siege to Fuenterrabia both by sea and by land. The Prince of Condé (Henri de Bourbon) and the Duke de la Valette were in command on land, and the Bishop of Bordeaux at sea. An attempt was made by the French to storm the hill upon which the fortress stands, but the Admiral of Castile and the Marquis of los Velez, with 6000 men from Navarre and Guipuzcoa, eager to fight for their own provinces, came opportunely upon the scene. A dashing charge threw panic into the French camp, and the besiegers fled headlong to their boats. Spaniards were always ready enough to fight when well led, and they were fighting for their own {336} provincial frontiers; and though La Valette was accused by Richelieu of treachery, and condemned to death in his absence in England, whither he had fled to join Marie de Medici, his men on this occasion were fairly beaten by Spanish soldiers, who were irresistible when they were defending their own provinces. [Sidenote: The French repelled] The same thing was seen in Catalonia in the following spring, where, counting upon the notorious disaffection of the Catalans with Olivares' policy, Condé in the spring of 1639 invaded Roussillon, which then belonged to Catalonia, and captured Salcés. Peremptory demands for help came to Madrid, but Olivares was in no hurry to help the Catalans, and preferred that their own impotence to defend their country without the aid of Castile should be first demonstrated. The provincial authorities were stout and determined, and rapidly raised an army of 10,000 men. But the Catalans had no leader yet worthy of the name; and, though they fought bravely, they fought for a time in vain. They were badly and timidly led; and 8000 of them died of the plague before Salcés, in which fortress the French were shut up. Condé, late in the autumn, came back from Provence with a new French army of 20,000 foot and 4000 horse to reinforce the French; and though the case seemed hopeless, the Catalans, ever a dour race, determined to stand and fight them. Full of confidence, the French army stormed the trenches of the besieging Catalans on the 1st November. But the ditches and moats were swollen by autumn rains, and regiment after regiment rushed to the attack, only to be repelled with terrible loss by the {337} stout Catalans, behind their earthworks and gabions. Discouragement at last seized the French, and they fled, leaving the Catalans masters of the field, and Salcés unrelieved. The fortress surrendered to famine at the beginning of the year 1640, and the second attempt of Richelieu to invade Spain failed. Nor were the attempts upon the Catalan coasts by the French fleet under the Bishop of Bordeaux more successful; for, after some depredations and the temporary occupation of Spanish ports, the French fleet was scattered by a storm and returned disabled to France. Once more it was proved that Spaniards were indomitable when they were fighting for a deep-seated sentiment. The deepest of all was local loyalty. Whilst the sentiment of religious selection had been dominant it had given Spaniards a strength not their own; but that burning faith was ashes now,[22] and the only thing worth fighting for, beyond the inborn love of contest, was the independence of the province that gave them birth, and for this, rather than for a Spain that for most of them was but a geographical expression, Spaniards were still ready to sacrifice their lives without stint. It was a wretched story that King Philip had to tell the Cortes of Castile that were assembled in {338} Madrid in the summer of 1638. His treasury, he said, was more empty than ever; "for he had been obliged by his duty to oppose all the heretics in Europe in defence of the Catholic religion, as well as the enemies of his house in Italy, Germany, Flanders, and Brazil, and a greater war was now on his hands than had afflicted Spain since the time of Charles V. And although peace had been discussed through various channels, as yet unsuccessfully, the surest way to attain tranquillity was to arm more powerfully than ever, and strike their enemies with dismay." Seventy two millions and a half of ducats had been raised by loans at 8 per cent. interest, and spent in the previous six years on war, in addition to two millions and a quarter for the army in Spain itself. This was an expenditure unheard of previously in Spain, and it meant that a sum greater than ever was demanded now of Castile in the form of an enormous addition to the food excise, and an increase of the alcabala. The country was depopulated and starving, said the deputies;[23] but withal the duty of his Majesty as a Christian prince was clear, and, no matter at what sacrifice, the means for fighting the battle of the Church and Spain must be found by his faithful vassals. And so, through 1638 and 1639, as has already been told, the war went on, not on the whole unfavourably for Spanish arms, for the French invasion, at least, was repelled; but more disastrously than ever, for the overtaxed and ruined people upon whom the crushing burden lay of providing {339} funds. Talk of peace went on in Madrid all the while. A secret agent of Richelieu named Pujol was in close though cautious negotiation with Olivares for three years, both ministers professing ardent desires for an agreement. But it was clear that neither was disposed to give way an inch in his claims, and again and again the Spanish agents declared that on no account would they recognise the Dutch otherwise than as recalcitrant rebels against their King. In the circumstances, therefore, peace was impossible; for Holland had not held her own for seventy years to bow the head now, and in the summer of 1640 the internal storm which had long been gathering burst upon Spain, not, we may be sure, to Richelieu's surprise, and all hope for peace fled. [Sidenote: Rebellion in Spain] The fatal burden of Philip's inherited task, and the traditions imposed at his baptism, had led him to embark in impossible wars for an idea; the need for money to support a policy of Quixotic adventure had drained Castile; and the unhappy insistence of Olivares in exacting from the autonomous realms a similar sacrifice, had at last sapped their loyalty to the sacred personality of the sovereign. Philip, in the prime of his manhood, after nineteen years of rule, found himself face to face with rebellion of his own people, as well as with a great war abroad; whilst the centre of his realm, whither all wealth flowed and whence all power emanated, was sunk in pagan epicureanism, pride, pretence, and sloth. In earlier chapters we have seen that on both the occasions that Philip had personally attended the Cortes of the eastern realms, he, and especially {340} Olivares, had quarrelled bitterly with the deputies, and had returned to Madrid in anger, leaving a rankling discontent behind. Olivares since then had lost no opportunity of dealing hardly with Catalans particularly,--their causes in Madrid being treated with ostentatious neglect, and their interests passed over, in order, as Olivares said, to teach them the lesson of obedience; whilst the Catalans, whose qualities certainly do not include submissiveness, repaid this treatment by passively resisting the orders that came to them from the Court. When Roussillon was invaded by the French in the autumn of 1639, Olivares had been slow to send succour from Castile. As we have seen, the drain for the foreign war was tremendous, and both money and men were scarce, even if Olivares had desired to send prompt aid. But such was not the case; and the main efforts by which the French were expelled and Salcés captured were those of the Catalans themselves. The Viceroy was Queralt, Marquis of Santa Coloma, who, although a Catalan, was devoted heart and soul to Olivares, and had been chosen as a more pliant instrument for the minister than his dignified predecessor, the Duke of Cardona. To Santa Coloma, whilst the Catalans were straining every nerve to defend their principality from the French, Olivares and the King continued to send messages calculated to arouse the deepest resentment of the people. "Do not," wrote Olivares, "suffer a single man who can work to absent himself from the field, nor a woman who can bear on her back food or forage.... {341} If the enterprise can be effected without violating the privileges of the province, well and good, but if in order to respect these the service of the King is retarded by one single hour, he who dares to uphold them at such a cost will be an enemy to God, his King, his race, and his country.... Make the Catalans understand that the general welfare of the people and of the troops must be preferred to all rights and privileges.... You must take great care that the troops are well lodged and have good beds; and if there are none to be had, you must not hesitate to take them from the highest people in the province; for it is better that they should lie on the ground than that the troops should suffer." [Sidenote: Revolt in Catalonia] The reinforcements from Castile and elsewhere that eventually reached Catalonia under Spinola, Marquis of Balbeses, arrived after most of the fighting was over, and the French had retired; but orders were given that these troops should remain quartered in the province. This was a violation of one of the most cherished rights of the Catalans; and Spinola made matters worse by his marked insolence to people of the country, and his public instructions that in every case the troops lodged in a place were to be stronger than the inhabitants, so that they should always be the masters. Protests and indignant remonstrances met with the same contemptuous treatment from Olivares, Santa Coloma, and Spinola; and as the months wore on the mood of the Catalans became ever more dangerous. It was announced in the spring of 1640 that the King would go and hold {342} a Cortes in Barcelona; but to hold Cortes, it was remarked that he did not need the strong armed force he summoned to attend him. The knights of the orders were again placed under contribution, and protested in vain that it was an abuse to press them thus for subordinate military service; the grandees of Castile were each commanded to provide and pay for four months 100 soldiers each; and this, on the top of other swollen demands, aroused higher than ever their hatred of Olivares. The Duke of Arcos said that he had already paid 900,000 ducats; the Dukes of Priego and Bejar, 800,000 each, and others in like proportion, and that they were at the end of their resources.[24] The Portuguese nobles saw in the summons only a pretext for withdrawing them from their own country, and many went into hiding to avoid compliance with it, whilst others with feigned acquiescence procrastinated until they could safely throw aside the mask. Whilst Philip was still trifling in Madrid with the usual merrymakings at the Retiro to celebrate the feast of Corpus Christi in June 1640, there came flying news from Barcelona that the threatened tempest had burst. The Catalans, driven to desperation by the exactions and insolence of the polyglot rabble of troops quartered upon them, had risen and massacred every Castilian soldier and officer they could hound down. Santa Coloma himself in flight had sunk by the wayside, and had been hacked to death by his maddened countrymen; and from Barcelona through all Catalonia the fiery cross had been borne with cries, it is true, {343} of "Long Live the King"; but still louder shouts of "Vengeance," "Liberty," and "Down with the Government." In a vain attempt to stem the flood the old Duke of Cardona was reappointed Viceroy; and, after his death shortly afterwards, was succeeded by the aged Archbishop of Barcelona. But it was too late, and anarchy soon ruled unchecked. Cardinal Borja, himself a Valencian and an active minister of Philip's thenceforward, openly declared in the Royal Council at Madrid that "the revolt could only be drowned in rivers of blood." Again the screw had to be turned, and Olivares was almost in despair. But he worked like a giant, cajoling and humouring Braganza and the Portuguese nobles into what he hoped was a better frame of mind, whilst he depleted the Portuguese frontier of the forces with which he had up to that time terrorised the sister kingdom. The details of the Secession War in Catalonia cannot be told here.[25] Suffice to say that again Philip, supported by the enemies of Olivares, clamoured to be allowed to lead his troops against the rebel subjects; but it suited the minister to keep him amused with poetical academies, comedies, amours, and devotions, rather than to bring him in touch with realities, and enable him to learn the whole of the dire truth. The Marquis of los Velez was sent to Catalonia with such an army as could be got together, and in the summer he swept through the province, almost without resistance, until he came to Tarragona and Barcelona, which places had been occupied, by the invitation of the Catalans, by {344} French troops. Epernon, who commanded them, again showed the white feather, and retired; but the stout Catalans, though deserted by their allies, formally renouncing the rule of the King of Castile and acknowledging Louis XIII. as their prince, manfully stood behind their trenches to defend the capital. The attempt to storm the outworks was made on the 26th January 1641, the Earl of Tyrone leading the Irish regiment, and falling dead at the first onset. The battle was a desperate and sanguinary one, but just as victory seemed assured for the Castilians, a panic seized them; a Catalan attack in their rear completed the demoralisation, and Barcelona, untaken and victorious, proclaimed itself a French city, whilst the routed Spanish army retreated to Tarragona, a mere rabble. Thenceforward French government troops poured into the principality; and Philip, amidst his alternate wanton pleasures and agonised remorse in Madrid, realised that the realms of his fathers were crumbling apart, and that the King of France ruled with the consent of Spaniards over some of the richest provinces of Spain. The knowledge struck like death to the heart of Philip, for up to that hour, kept in the dark by Olivares, he had never understood the tenacity of the autonomous States, or the danger of tampering with a deeply rooted national tradition. [Sidenote: Secession of Portugal] But the news of the secession of Catalonia, terrible as it was, came only a few weeks after another blow which had affected Philip even more. The King, in the earlier days of December 1640, was presiding over one of the ostentatious bullfights that he loved, given in honour of the Danish {345} ambassador, when a courier from the Portuguese frontier galloped post haste to the quarters of Olivares in the palace. Soon Liars' Walk and Calle Mayor were full of grave faces and important whispers that dreadful news had come from the sister kingdom. In the palace, even in the Plaza where the bullfight was being held, everybody knew or guessed the story that had come; yet none dared whisper a hint to the King, for the sallow, frowning face of the Count-Duke was rigid, and until he spoke the word none might break the silence. Hours passed; the bull-fight came to its usual end, and, on returning to the palace, the King sat at play with his friends. To him entered the Count-Duke, gay and smiling. "I bring great news for your Majesty," he said. "What is it?" asked the King, with little concern. "In one moment, Sire, you have won a great dukedom and vast wealth," replied the minister. "How so, Conde?" inquired Philip. "Sire, the Duke of Braganza has gone mad, and has proclaimed himself King of Portugal; so it will be necessary for you to confiscate all his possessions." The King's long face fell longer still, and his brow clouded, for all his minister's jauntiness. He was no fool, and he knew this was tidings of evil moment. "Let a remedy be found for it," was all he said, turning anew to his game; and the Count-Duke, as he left the room, looked sad, as if he saw the beginning of his own eclipse. In three hours the long prepared conspiracy had come to a head. Braganza himself had done little, though he had artfully kept himself out of the trap which Olivares had cleverly baited for him. On the 1st December 1640 the cry had rung {346} through Lisbon, "Long live King John IV." The hated Vasconcellos had been murdered first, literally torn to pieces by the crowd; the Duchess of Mantua, Philip's Vice-Reine, had been respectfully conducted to safety in a convent, and the Castilians in the city had been interned in the fortress. Resistance there was none, and no adequate Spanish force to make any; and although for the rest of Philip's sad life the pretence was kept up of treating the Portuguese as rebels, and intermittently war was pushed on the frontier to regain Castilian hold over the country, the separation was permanent, and Portugal never lost her independence again.[26] [Sidenote: Fresh troubles] The volume of discontent against the minister grew apace, and all Olivares could do was to keep Philip amused, whilst he isolated him more and more from those who could open his eyes to the true state of affairs. Several attempts had been made in the past years by rash individuals to open the King's eyes. Once a young courtier named Lujanes had thrown himself at the feet of Philip in the royal chapel, and had shouted to him to beware of Olivares, who was bent upon his ruin. He was hurried away, and the servile friends of the Count-Duke shrugged their shoulders and said the poor fellow was a lunatic; but the next day he died mysteriously in confinement, and the gossips made no hesitation in saying that he had been poisoned. Other cries to the same effect had from time to time greeted Philip in the streets and public diversions; but now they became more frequent and {347} outspoken. As he was going on a wolf-hunt, cries arose: "Hunt the French, sire! They are our worst wolves." The disaster of a great part of the Buen Retiro being burnt down with its sumptuous contents, during a splendid carnival in February 1641, a few weeks only after the reception of the ill news from Barcelona and Lisbon, gave fresh cause for complaint against Olivares. Twice previously the King had been in danger there by the bursting of reservoirs, and now he ran a worse risk by the place catching fire.[27] The place was accursed, said the grumblers; and when the irreparable loss of precious works of art by the fire had to be made good by "voluntary" offerings of similar things from private collections, and 60,000 ducats for rebuilding were extorted from the deputies of the Cortes, with 20,000 from the municipality of Madrid, 30,000 from the Council of Castile, and 10,000 from the Council of War, whilst the soldiers in the field were unpaid and starving, all those who were not absolutely slaves to the Count-Duke openly cried shame.[28] Another trouble occurred at this time which embittered Philip's heart and conscience for years to come; and this, again, whether true in all its particulars or not, was added to the heavy account that the people at large had against the Count-Duke. It will be recollected that a horrible scandal had taken place in the convent of San Placido in Madrid in 1632. The matter was hushed up and condoned in 1638, and the nuns went into residence {348} again. Now, the patron of San Placido was the King's confidant, and Olivares' henchman, the protonotary Geronimo de Villanueva, whose mansion in the Calle de Madera adjoined the convent. Villanueva had always been one of the useful ministers of Philip's amours, and when his convent was rehabilitated in 1638 he brought stories of a very beautiful young nun that he had seen there. Philip and Olivares insisted upon seeing this paragon of loveliness, and Villanueva, exerting his authority as patron, obtained entrance into the locutory for the King in disguise; and for many nights in succession the interviews took place. [Sidenote: A convent scandal] The affair, though very carefully concealed, began to be whispered, before the King and his friends had penetrated beyond the grille which separated them from the beautiful nun; and though Philip's conscience after an offence was tender enough, it usually did not operate until after the offence was committed. So determined was he to approach more nearly to the object of his passion, that Olivares and Villanueva together managed by bribes and prayers to persuade the nun to consent to a violation of her vows, and to admit the King. A passage was made from Villanueva's house to the cellars of the convent to facilitate the entrance of the King; but before the secret work was finished, the nun, either conscience-stricken or afraid of consequences, told the abbess what was going on. The punishments meted out by the Inquisition a few years before had probably been enough for this good lady; for she besought Villanueva to desist from so terrible and dangerous a crime, But Villanueva, anxious to please the King, {349} and being, like most of the courtiers of his generation, a religious cynic, turned a deaf ear to her entreaties. When later he led the enamoured King through the secret passage into the sacred cloister, and to the room where it was arranged that the meeting should take place, the pair were horrified to see that the abbess had laid out the nun upon a bier, her eyes closed, her hands crossed upon her breast clasping a crucifix, whilst tapers were burning at the head and foot of the bier. This was too much for Philip, and he fled; but subsequently affairs were arranged more comfortably, and the amours, we are assured, continued for some time.[29] By and by the Inquisition heard something of what was going on from its spies. What could be done? The King was too high even for the Holy Office to touch; yet so awful a sacrilege as this could not be allowed to go on. The Inquisitor-General was Friar Archbishop Sotomayor, Philip's own confessor, a creature of Olivares, and a man of indifferent character; but even he took the King to task severely and repeatedly for his crime. Subsequently, when Philip probably was tired of the intrigue, he desisted, and then, after interminable secret inquiries by the Holy Office, it was decided that Villanueva was guilty of sacrilege of the worst description, and must be arrested. The King, remorseful or panic-stricken, was for letting the matter take its course; but Olivares, trembling now for himself (in 1642), went to the {350} Inquisitor-General, Sotomayor, with two decrees signed by the King, one dismissing him and banishing him from Spain, the other giving him a pension of 12,000 ducats a year for life, on condition that he resigned the Inquisitor-Generalship and retired to Cordova. Sotomayor naturally accepted the latter alternative. At the same time strong measures were taken in Rome by Philip's agents to induce the Pope to demand the reference of the case to him. The Inquisition obeyed the Pope's command, and sent the whole of the papers in a casket to Rome by one of its own confidential officers. Olivares managed to delay his departure whilst one of the King's painters, perhaps Velazquez, made several sketches of the messenger's face, which sketches were sent off post haste to the King's officers in various parts of Italy, with orders to capture the original secretly wherever he appeared, and send him closely isolated to Naples, whilst his precious casket of papers was to be forwarded intact to Olivares. The unfortunate messenger, Paredes, landed at Genoa, where he was at once kidnapped and spirited off to the strong castle of Ovo at Naples, fated to be kept in close confinement for the rest of his life, fifteen years. The casket was conveyed with great secrecy to Olivares, who, with the King, reduced it and its unread contents to ashes in Philip's private room. The new Inquisitor-General was a Benedictine friar in the confidence of Queen Isabel, one Diego de Arce; and as no news came from Rome of the case, letters were written by him and the Council of the Inquisition to the Pope. The latter, primed by Philip's ambassador, still {351} kept silence; and as the minutes of the trial of course could not be found, and the wretched messenger had apparently vanished from the face of the earth, there were no proofs forthcoming against Villanueva, who remained under interdiction and in partial seclusion. This, however, could not continue for ever; and when, in 1644, Olivares had disappeared from the scene, and nothing more was to be feared from him, Villanueva was formally arrested by the Inquisition, and carried off to Toledo, where he was taken before the judges in _penitenciæ_; and, without any particulars being recited, was admonished that he had sinned enormously by sacrilege and irreligion, whereby he had incurred the heaviest penalties; but that the Holy Office in its clemency would absolve him, only imposing upon him the obligation of fasting on Fridays for the rest of his life, of never entering a convent again, or speaking to a nun, and of giving 2000 ducats for charity to the Prior of the Atocha. The King then restored Villanueva to his post, and imposed perpetual silence with regard to the case against him.[30] What penalty Philip himself paid for his terrible offence is not known; though it is said that the clock of the convent, which played the dirge for the dead each hour, and which existed well within the memory of the present writer, and perhaps exists still, was one of the King's peace offerings to the outraged cloister. {352} [Sidenote: Don Juan legitimated] The clouds gathered ever blacker over Olivares. The demands he was forced to make now for resources to face the French in Catalonia, and to present some show of attempting the recovery of Portugal, drove the Castilian nobles and people of means into almost open revolt. The copper currency was again tampered with, being reduced to one-sixth of its previous value;[31] and large demands were assessed in silver upon persons who were assumed to be able to pay. In Madrid alone on this occasion, 150 people were sent to the dungeons for their inability or unwillingness to pay all that was asked of them. In addition to the public causes for the hatred of the people against the minister, there were also personal reasons of rapidly increasing strength for his unpopularity with his own class. His arrogance had always offended the nobles of high lineage, and he now added to it, as if in mere wantonness, an offence for which even his own kin never forgave him. His only daughter had died soon after her early marriage; and whatever may have been Olivares' faults, he was an extremely fond father. He had, as he grew older, practically adopted his nephew Don Luis de Haro, son of the Marquis del Carpio, as his heir; but suddenly there appeared at Court a young man of twenty-eight, up to that time known by another name, and passing as the son {353} of a small government official in Madrid. The name now given to this person was Enrique Felipe de Guzman, and Olivares brought him to the palace and to the King's apartments, introducing him as his son. The young man was a person of no breeding or attraction, and his mode of life was far from exemplary, but Olivares appears to have been perfectly infatuated with him. Following his own bent, the son had married a lady of good house in Seville; but Olivares had higher views for him, and, by dint of great and costly efforts, caused the marriage to be declared invalid. No people in the world were more tenacious of purity of blood than the Spanish nobility, whose open immorality of life, indeed, added to their strictness with regard to their legitimate succession; and, much as Olivares favoured his new son, and lavishly as, at his instance, Philip endowed him with rank, resources, and offices, it was difficult to get him acknowledged as an equal by the proud Guzmans, and much less by the nobles, who were already bitterly opposed to the minister. But Olivares was powerful and determined. At his instance, the handsome, gallant young son of the King, and of the actress the _Calderona_, who was now twelve years old, was brought to Madrid, and by decree was given the same semi-royal honours as had been bestowed on the other Don Juan of Austria, the son of the great Emperor. Queen Isabel had but two living children, young Baltasar Carlos, the heir, and a younger girl, Maria Teresa. Baltasar Carlos, who was the same age as his half-brother, was a promising, sturdy little Prince, immensely popular with the people of Madrid as he pranced {354} about on his pony, or raised in his name fresh regiments for the war. But naturally the Queen his mother was jealous that another son of the King, even better looking than Baltasar Carlos, should be brought into such close competition with her own legitimate offspring.[32] The significance of the legitimation of Don Juan was seen in a family council summoned by the Count-Duke, in which Olivares' three sisters, all great ladies, and their children, were required to greet Enrique Felipe de Guzman as "Excellency," and a relative.[33] All the Castilian nobility was up in arms at such an insult; but the disgust was infinitely deepened when Olivares demanded of the Constable of Castile, the Duke of Frias, the hand of his daughter for Enrique Felipe de Guzman, and when the Constable, a weak man, consented to the indignity-- Soy de la Casa de Velasco, Y de nada hago asco. Here great Velasco's chief you see; Nothing is too vile for me, {355} was written by one of the poets of the Calle Mayor, and another scorpion was added to the lash preparing for the back of Olivares. [Sidenote: The son of Olivares] The minister was no weakling, and his hand fell heavily upon those who dared to oppose him. Quevedo's trenchant pen had scarified the vices and weaknesses of Madrid in a dozen satires: he had scourged the slothful, vain, pretentious crew that filled the gutters of the slums and the galleries of the Buen Retiro; but so long as he was friendly to Olivares none dared to touch him. The moment he turned his glib verse and bitter prose, addressed to the poet-king himself,[34] to an exposure of the {356} evils arising from the policy of the favourite, then isolation in a dark and filthy dungeon was Quevedo's reward. There, until the favourite's fall, the poet, loaded with chains, was kept, whilst the vices he had scourged grew greater with impunity. The streets of Madrid became more scandalous even than before. Bravos and assassins almost openly stood for hire; murder and robbery were so common in broad daylight as to attract only passing notice, and in one fortnight at this period (1641) there were 110 murders in Madrid alone, many of them of persons of position.[35] Devout in form as were the people, even sanctuary was now no protection, and the most hideous sacrilege went hand in hand with grovelling sanctimoniousness. Fresh pragmatics, with penalties ferocious in their severity, denounced evil living, but little notice was taken of them after the first few days. Women still clattered up and down the Prado and the Calle Mayor on high jingling pattens, and with great swelling farthingales, their faces covered and their breasts exposed; cape snatchers still plied their trade at the street corners, and ruffling bullies picked quarrels for gain with peaceful citizens. {357} [Sidenote: Disintegration] In Catalonia the Spanish armies and fleet were being beleaguered and beaten hopelessly (1641). The French King had received the oath of allegiance from Barcelona, whilst powerful French armies under Schomberg, De la Motte, and Meilleraie, with Richelieu behind them, held the principality firmly, cordially seconded by the Catalans themselves. All Spain, even Madrid, now almost at the end of its resources, saw that the country was upon the rapid slope that led to utter ruin. Portugal gone, with hardly as yet a pretence of winning it back. Catalonia gone, apparently as hopelessly, Andalucia almost in revolt,[36] and Naples simmering in discontent: a great empire of formerly loyal people falling into impotent disintegration, and all fingers pointed at the heavy, frowning, yellow-visaged man, who worked night and day doing everybody's work, and desperately keeping the King immersed in trifling pleasures, as the author of all this ruin and disgrace. It was inevitable that it should be so; but it {358} was, of course, unjust. At the beginning of the reign, and for long afterwards, the policy that caused the trouble, that of persisting in the inflated claims of a century before, had been heartily endorsed by the whole people. They wanted glory, pride, supremacy. They wanted still to act the part of God's militia, to dragoon the world into one belief--their own--to boast of the riches of their King and the greatness of their country. But when at last they understood that a policy abroad of bombastic meddling and of domestic waste at home was costly, they turned to rend the man who had carried their vain aspirations into acts. Olivares was no wiser than other Spanish statesmen of his time. He could only see with the eyes of his own generation; and his share of the blame for the ruin that had ensued upon his rule was only greater because more conspicuous than that of the whole people, who were blinded and besotted by the foolish hope of enjoying advantages, national and personal, which were beyond their means. In April 1642, Madrid was panic-stricken by the news that the last reinforcements sent to the seat of war, and raised with such terrible suffering from the exhausted people, had been overwhelmed by Marshal de la Motte; and Castile was now powerless to send adequate forces to make any head against the absolute domination of Catalonia by the French. The satires and epigrams fell as thick as autumn leaves in Madrid, urging Philip to wake up and act the man. Louis XIII. was to be present with his army on Spanish soil at Perpignan, and was already playing a worthy part in a great national crisis; whilst Philip, his Spanish {359} brother-in-law, still dangled about the Buen Retiro, busy in arranging comedies, even writing them, some said; planning ostentatious shows and affected literary competitions, or, as a change, speared driven boars at the Pardo. The Queen, a Frenchwoman though she was, added her tears and entreaties that her husband himself should go whither his duty called him, no matter at what sacrifice of his ease and pleasures. [Sidenote: Philip goes to the war] To do Philip justice, he personally was eager to fulfil his duty; but long custom had made him almost incapable now of shaking off the yoke of Olivares and having his own way. For a time the minister and his obedient Councils opposed every obstacle to the project of the King's joining the army in the field. The personal danger was made most of; the incommodity of the voyage, the inconvenience to the troops to be weighted with the additional responsibility of the safety of the monarch; the risk of assassination by rebel subjects; even the positive lack of money for the journey, was urged, again and again, upon Philip by Olivares. It was useless, moreover, he said, for the King to go without large reinforcements. On the other hand, the Queen and the higher nobles, even many of the Councillors, urged that the case was desperate, and that without the King's personal example Catalonia was lost for ever to Spain. They even began to whisper that cowardice was the reason of Olivares' obstinate resistance to the journey; and at length Philip, aroused for once in his life, put his foot down, peremptorily silenced the remonstrances of the Council, and tore up its Memorial opposing his going. {360} Again the drums were beaten. The cities of Andalucia were appealed to in the name of loyalty; the nobles and their sons were once more squeezed. The son of Olivares, with his father's money, raised a chosen corps with which he made a brilliant show before the King, and gave an excuse (says Novoa) to put pressure upon other young nobles to do the like. At last, with infinite effort, a new force was got together to accompany the King to Aragon; the Queen, working strenuously, selling her jewels, putting pressure upon pious ladies and ecclesiastics to subscribe, making much of the popularity of her son Baltasar Carlos; and for the time putting aside the frivolous pleasures that had delighted her, to play a part worthy of the daughter of the gallant Béarnais, Henry of Navarre. When news came to Madrid that Louis XIII. was on Spanish soil in Roussillon, Philip finally determined to go to the front in spite of Olivares. He would go by Aranjuez, he said, and if the Count-Duke did not like to join him there he should go without him. This was open rebellion, but Olivares was too old a hand to gainsay the King, who, like all weak men, was obstinacy itself when once his mind had been made up. On the 26th April, Philip, on a splendid charger, with pistols at his saddle-bow and sword by his side, rode to the Atocha church to pray to the famous image of the Virgin, and thence by Barajas and Alcalá de Henares, on his way to the war. Like a lighted powder-train the enthusiasm flew through the country as the King passed onward. Not in the memory of living men had a monarch of Spain thus rode forth to war to fight for his inheritance, and the foul {361} miasma of sloth and ignoble enjoyment was swept from the hearts of thousands of young Spaniards, whose spirits were aflame and whose chivalry was touched anew with the spirit that in times past had made their sires invincible. The Queen was left in Madrid as Regent, with the President of the Council of Castile and the Marquis de Santa Cruz to aid her; and Olivares, who knew well the danger of the course he was obliged to acquiesce in, lagged behind in the capital as long as he dared,--afraid of the war, sneered some; afraid of leaving the Queen alone, whispered others; whilst, as time went on, the opinion became general that the King's going was all a feint to get more money and men. There seemed good reason for the suspicion; for when Olivares at length joined his master, it was with plans formed to beguile Philip in the usual way. Two days were passed in devotion at the shrine of St. James at Alcalá; then a pompous visit with long festivities to Olivares' own house at Loeches; and thence to Aranjuez, where and in the neighbourhood nearly a month was passed in hunting parties, tourneys, and the like, with frequent visits from the Queen. Again the war spirit in the country flagged, and the people despaired at so much trifling, when, as the saying went, there were three Kings on Spanish soil instead of one.[37] At length Philip shook himself free again, thanks to the exhortation of his wife; and on the 20th May rode forth from Aranjuez, now with a numerous unwieldy train of servants, carriages, and baggage, and followed by Olivares in terror {362} of assassination, surrounded by guards whom he beseeched to allow no one to approach him.[38] Olivares was in mortal fear, too, of an interview between Philip and his cousin the Duchess of Mantua, the expelled Vicereine of Portugal; whom, much to her indignation, the minister had forbidden to come to Madrid, and had secluded under formal restraint at Ocaña, which lay in the road by which the King must pass. The Duchess, if once she got ear of the King alone, would tell him how, and why, Portugal had been lost; and in the long drive during which the Duchess shared the King's coach on his way to Ocaña, she laid such a story before him, of oppression, cruelty, and unwise government, as to leave Philip shocked and angered that so much had been hidden from him. [Sidenote: Philip in Aragon] Visiting noble houses and shrines on the road, and seizing every opportunity for delay, Olivares managed to spin out the journey to Saragossa until the 27th July, when Aragon itself was half overrun by French raiders. Philip's entry into the city was more fitting for a monarch's triumphal return from victory than for the opening of a campaign by a soldier. Soon after his arrival he heard with dismay that Monzon, the ancient legislative capital, had been occupied by the French; whilst everywhere his troops were either retiring before the enemy or being beaten hopelessly. The greater nobles, both Castilian and Aragonese, systematically avoided contact with Olivares; but the {363} presence of Philip in the Aragonese capital offered a good opportunity for a visit of the grandees to him, in order to take counsel as to what could be done in so calamitous a state of affairs. Olivares received them almost rudely, and refused them collective access to the King, whereupon the nobles in high dudgeon shook the dust of Saragossa from their feet, and to a man swore to be avenged on the insolent upstart who, they said, was keeping the King prisoner. In fact, Philip was practically isolated in two rooms whilst at Saragossa, on the plea of the risk to his life if he went out. Olivares rode forth every day in a coach closely surrounded by guards, and no one was allowed to approach him. For all the months that Philip passed in the Aragonese city he never saw his army or approached the enemy, his main amusement being to watch tennis matches from his window.[39] Roussillon was lost in September, never to be recovered, when Perpignan fell; and thenceforward every week brought some story of disgrace and defeat for the Spanish arms; whilst Philip, in inglorious despair, moped in his seclusion, bereft even of his cherished amusements. Olivares was growing desperate. Every courier brought from the stout-hearted Queen Regent in Madrid messages of encouragement and good cheer. She was working bravely, and with wonderful success; collecting funds from hoards hitherto unsuspected, gathering troops and putting heart into them. With her {364} son by her side she reviewed soldiers, and made herself the idol of the populace, who for a time had plucked up some hope and pride in the future of their country. But with the Queen's cheery news to her husband there always went open or covert blame of Olivares. To the minister she sent all the plate, jewels, and treasure she could collect; but he saw from the comparative ease with which she could raise it, whilst he could not, that she held the winning hand and had the people behind her. In despair of beating the French in the field, he stooped to conspire with Cinq Mars against the life of Richelieu himself. The conspiracy was discovered, and made the feeling against him personally more bitter than ever. Philip could not be kept quite ignorant of the misery and ruin around him, or of his own undignified position, and he grew moody and irritable with the minister who had led him to such a pass. Without even consulting him, he appointed the Marquis of Leganes, a cousin of Olivares and an experienced soldier, to the chief command of what was left of his army; and Olivares, foreseeing his disgrace, craved leave to retire. But this Philip would not allow. He had no other minister to replace him; he was in the midst of a disastrous war, and he had neither the energy nor the knowledge necessary to take matters in his own hand at this juncture. [Illustration: PRINCE BALTASAR CARLOS. _From a painting by Velazquez in the Prado Museum_] The Queen in Madrid had no lack of friends and advisers, all of them enemies of the Guzmans, especially the Counts of Castrillo and Paredes; but the ostentatious legitimation of Olivares' son Enrique had also alienated his own most influential {365} kinsman, the Haros, represented by the Marquis of Carpio, whose son he had disinherited so far as he was able; and these with other former adherents now joined the Queen's friends. All Madrid knew that the Queen was against Olivares; and, safe now from his presence, she made no concealment of it. "My efforts and my boy's innocence must serve the King for eyes," she said; "for if he use those of the Count-Duke much longer my son will be reduced to a poor King of Castile instead of King of Spain." When la Motte defeated Philip's army under Leganes before Lerida late in the autumn (1642), the last hope seemed gone. Torrecusa, the Neapolitan general who had fought so well in the previous campaigns, went to Saragossa, and, forcing his way to the King, told him that all was lost unless a change was made in the direction of affairs. Torrecusa was mollified with a grandeeship on the spot; but Philip, overweighed and almost at his wits' end, was fain to return to his capital, in the desperate hope of raising another army in the spring, though the citizens of Saragossa prayed him to stay and defend them against the all-victorious French and Catalans.[40] Alas! he had neither troops nor money with which to defend them,--no spirit, no counsel, no hope. [Sidenote: Fall of Olivares] On the 1st December 1642, Philip turned his face towards Madrid, after signing decrees, drafted by Olivares, imposing upon Castile new and crushing impositions with which to raise a fresh army. Another "voluntary" levy of money was ordered, a new loan authorised, the seizure of all the church {366} and domestic plate decreed, and a tax of 7 per cent. upon all real property demanded. Well might the subjects stand aghast at this. Where, they asked, was the actual money to come from? The copper was so debased as to be worthless; the only standard was silver at a high premium (38 per cent.), and of this there was not enough available for currency, much less to represent the new demand. When, therefore, Philip entered Madrid by the side of his wife, all spirits were prepared and eager for the change they saw must come. As the royal pair passed in their coach from the Retiro to the palace, blessings loud and long greeted the Queen, such as Philip had never heard before. Olivares understood the signs of the times too. Summoning his brother-in-law Carpio, he tried to reconcile him, but in vain, and complained bitterly that all the gentlemen of the King's chamber had turned his enemies. He talked, indeed, about retiring; but Philip never moved a muscle of his face, and the minister knew that the course which had served him so often was powerless to help him now. The Countess was strong and resourceful, and undertook to bring Philip round. When she met him in the palace that evening, she spoke much of her husband's services and efforts, and of the excellent arrangements he was making for carrying on a successful war in the following spring. Philip bowed gravely, but made no reply. The day afterwards (14th January 1643) a courier came from the Emperor, bringing more bad news to Philip and bitterly attacking Olivares, and this also sank into the King's mind. Moodily the King walked to his wife's apartment {367} that afternoon. There, to his surprise, he found with her the heir Baltasar Carlos, now aged fourteen. Casting herself at the King's feet with her son by her side, the Queen solemnly exhorted him, for the sake of what remained of their child's inheritance, to cast aside the evil councillor who was dragging them all to ruin. The King was troubled, for everything with him was a case of conscience, and he felt that he could trust no one. On his way from his wife's apartment he traversed a passage where he was intercepted by an old woman, his foster-mother, Ana de Guevara, who had been banished by Olivares and had returned without leave. Kneeling, she in her turn implored Philip to listen to those who loved him best; and then with a torrent of impassioned eloquence she impeached the favourite and all his acts: spoke of the national ruin, of the people's misery, of fields untilled, of looms idle, of the foreigner reigning over Spanish land, and of people who once were the soul of loyalty now in revolt against their King, all, all through Olivares. Philip was overwhelmed, and could only raise her, saying, "You have spoken truly." But still one more blow was to be struck that night at the falling favourite. The Duchess of Mantua, secretly summoned by the Queen, had fled from Ocaña, and as fast as post-horses could draw her carriage through the winter storm she had come to Madrid. Suddenly appearing in the office of Olivares, she said she had come to see the King, and required lodging and food. The minister treated her with great rudeness, and made her wait for four hours before he provided a bad lodging for her in the house of the Treasury. But she was the {368} King's cousin; and the next day the Queen introduced her into Philip's presence, where, this time with documentary proofs, she brought home to him the responsibility of Olivares and his creatures for the loss of Portugal. That night Philip wrote to his minister, saying that the leave to retire he had so often craved was now accorded him, and that he might go where and when he pleased. Olivares, we are told by one who saw him, stood as if turned to stone as he read the letter; but at length, recovering his serenity, he turned to his wife and told her that he needed rest and change, and would shortly leave for a stay at Loeches, his seat some twelve miles from Madrid, if she would start at once and prepare the place for his coming. Guessing the truth, she resisted as much as possible, but was at last forced to obey. On the following morning, according to his invariable custom for so many years, the minister entered the King's room early, and knelt before him for a time in silence. Then he launched forth an eloquent denunciation of those who had slandered him in the eyes of his master, and in justification of his efforts. He had failed, he acknowledged; circumstances and the venom of his enemies had wrecked his best laid schemes for the exaltation of Spain and the glory of his Sovereign; but at least he prayed that his loyalty should be recognised, and that, in the retirement to which he willingly went at the King's behest, he might carry with him the regard of the master he had so strenuously tried to serve. No word of reply came from the King, whose long sallow face remained as expressionless as if {369} moulded in putty, and Olivares left the presence for the moment defeated; but still revolving in his mind other expedients to regain Philip's favour, or at least to delay his own fall. First he wrote to his energetic and spirited wife at Loeches, telling her the whole truth; for where he had failed he thought she might succeed. When her husband's letter reached the Countess, she was just taking her seat at table for dinner, "and on reading it not only did her natural colour fly from her face, but the rouge with which she covered it, as is the fashion in the palace, paled and left her like a corpse."[41] Leaving her dinner untouched, the afflicted woman hurried back to Madrid; and after an interview with her husband tried her blandishments upon the King as he was on his way through the corridors to visit his children as usual. She found him unmoved and silent, and then, rushing to the Queen's apartment, she threw herself at her feet. But Isabel had suffered under her hard rule too long, and answered coldly: "What God, the people, and evil happenings have done, Countess, neither the King nor I can undo." Then Olivares summoned to the Retiro his nephew, Don Luis de Haro, Carpio's son, who he knew was in high favour with the King. He had, he told him, been a bad uncle to him; but he had brought his father and him from their remote grange at Carpio, and had made them rich and powerful; and he begged him, notwithstanding later jealousy, to be a good nephew to him and plead his cause. Haro saw the King, and gave him account of several secret points of politics {370} on behalf of the fallen minister, and asked in his name many and expensive favours for his servant, all of which Philip granted,[42] but kept silent with regard to Olivares himself. Soon the news was whispered in Madrid; and Liars' Walk was like a swarming hive. At first men were incredulous. It was all a sham, they declared; just another trick to squeeze more money out of them on the pretext that the hated Olivares had gone. But by and by the happy truth gradually forced itself upon them. The nightmare that had sat for all these years upon the heart of Spain had been shaken off at last! And then there burst out such a frantic flood of rejoicing as Madrid had rarely seen before. We have a King again! cried the crowds that stood in the great square before the palace; and squibs and pasquins were handed from hand to hand by the score.[43] But still day followed day and yet Olivares tarried in the vain hope of averting his fate. A hundred excuses were found by him for delay: the difficulty of transport, the condition of his health, his desire to see all those who had served him well provided for, and much else. Hints reached him in plenty that his {371} absence was desirable, though he admitted no one to see him. His keys were demanded, and he sent them; once he saw the King in public audience, and talked to him of affairs for a quarter of an hour, but those who stood by remarked that Philip's eyes never once rested upon him; and again he retired discomfited, with tears coursing down his cheeks. As the King and Queen, with the Duchess of Mantua in their coach, went on St. Anthony's day (17th January 1643) to the Convent of Discalced Carmelites, the people, who now knew everything, impulsively surged around them with joyous cries: "Our King is King at last!--God save the King!" At length Philip grew impatient at the delay, for he would appoint no new officers until he was clean quit of Olivares and his crew, and he decided to hunt for two days at the Escorial in order that measures might be taken in his absence. No sooner had he left than the Countess of Olivares made another tearful appeal to the Queen, who dismissed her promptly; and on the second day (20th January 1643), when Philip was approaching Madrid on his way back, a great gathering of nobles came out to meet him. Through Melchior Borja they said that they wished to place themselves and their possessions at the disposal of their King once more. Hitherto they had stood aloof, for reasons now known to him; but so soon as that evil cause was removed they were willing to stand by him to the death. Then they urged him to change all his councils and administrative officers, and begin a new régime. When Philip entered the palace, he turned to Don Luis de Haro and asked, "Has he gone?" {372} "No, Sire," was the reply. "Is he waiting for us to use force?" grumbled the King; and soon the hint was conveyed to Olivares, and, convinced now of the hopelessness of his case, the man who had ruled Spain over the King for two-and-twenty disastrous years slunk out of the capital by unfrequented ways, accompanied by only four attendants in a coach with closely drawn curtains, in mortal fear of assassination; for, as his spiteful biographer says, the very children in the streets would have stoned him to death if they had known of his flitting.[44] Not until the fallen favourite had left Madrid well behind him did Philip feel himself safe. Summoning to his workroom in one of the corner towers of the old palace, Cardinals Borja and Spinola, and a number of the nobles who had opposed Olivares, he addressed a long speech to them. He was, he said, ardently determined to take the details of Government into his own hands in future. The Count-Duke had served him long, well, and zealously; but his health had broken down and he needed repose. Thenceforward he (the King) would have no confidential minister, but would work himself as minister, with the aid and counsel of his hearers, from whom he asked now reports and suggestions for future remedial action. Oñate, an old man and vain, hoped for some days that he was to replace Olivares as sole minister, but the King promptly undeceived him, and declared publicly that in future he would have no other minister but his wife, whose energy, {373} wisdom, patriotism he now understood for the first time. As for the once powerful minister who had gone into obscurity broken-hearted, none was so poor as to do him reverence, few magnanimous enough to give him a good word. Those who had beslavered him with adulation were the first now to load him with ignominy; even the Constable of Castile, who had so willingly married his daughter to Olivares' base son, now stripped of all his honour, claimed that young Guzman's earlier marriage had been valid after all. When it was pointed out to the Constable that this would leave his daughter dishonoured, he replied: "I would rather see my daughter a bawd and free, than an honest woman and Guzman's wife."[45] The many scathing attacks published upon Olivares and his administration, provoked by his fall, found but one able, though imprudently frank, answer, which was called _Nicandra_,[46] and is ascribed to Ahumada, the Prince's tutor, and to that staunch friend of Velazquez and of the Count-Duke, Francisco de Rioja; but now that the dust of the convulsion has cleared away, we see that it was Olivares' methods rather than his principles that were the cause of the disasters of his rule. The foreign policy which he represented was not his alone, but was the policy of the immense majority of his countrymen at the time; and if it had not brought him into antagonism with the {374} provincial and autonomous traditions of the outer realms of the Peninsula, the principal factor of his fall would not have existed. The vast wealth which it was said he had heaped upon himself, amounting, so his enemies asserted, to the enormous total of 400,000 ducats a year, was not accumulated for personal gratification or greed, as had been the case with Lerma, nor were the sums he obtained larger than were appropriated by his great rival Richelieu. He lived very quietly, almost humbly, giving the whole of his time to work, and spent his revenues largely in the entertainment and convenience of the King. From Loeches he soon, with the King's permission, retired to Toro, far away from Court. Even there, divested of his dignities and power, the envy and hate of his enemies pursued him. More than once in the two years that followed his retreat the King seemed inclined to recall his old minister. But watchful eyes and jealous heart always frustrated such an idea, if it was entertained. Many a time, in fear of such a calamity to them, the nobles, especially those of Aragon, urged the King to punish with death a man who had thus betrayed his confidence; but Philip was neither cruel nor unjust, and naturally drew back from such a course as this. Once it seemed as if the enemies of Olivares had almost succeeded; for in reply to an address from the ex-minister upon public affairs, in which the latter offered his services again, the King wrote from Saragossa: "In short, Count, I must reign, and my son must be crowned King of Aragon. This is difficult unless I deliver your head to my subjects, who {375} demand it unanimously, and I cannot oppose them any further." [Sidenote: The end of Olivares] Alas! the head of Olivares was useless to them or to anyone else thenceforward, for the letter sent him raving mad, and he died on the 22nd July 1645, only two years and a half after his disgrace. Thenceforward Philip, for good or for evil, stands alone. What is done he does, and no powerful minister is interposed as a shield between him and the responsibility for his acts. "Philip the Great" meant well, but he had yet to learn the lesson that broke his heart: that good intentions alone are not sufficient to ensure success; and that the despairing struggles of one conscience-haunted man are powerless to save a nation that has lost its faith in itself, and its dependence upon labour as a means to salvation. [1] She ended by utterly wearing out her welcome, and disgusting everybody in Madrid by her pride and rapacity and the turbulence of her followers, and before she left she was supplanted by another great French lady, the Duchess of Chevreuse, who came to Madrid from London as an emissary of Marie de Medici, and was received with great distinction, much to the Princess of Carignano's anger. Needless to say that nothing came of either of the intrigues, and that Richelieu kept his hand firmly on the helm until he died in 1642. [2] These two series of festivities, which together lasted about a month, certainly mark the high-water mark of the splendour of the Buen Retiro. Full descriptions of parts of them have been published by Mesonero Romanes in _El Antiguo Madrid_, by Morel Fatio in _L'Espagne au XVI. et XVII. Siècle_, and by at least three contemporary writers--Mendez Silva, Andrés Sanchez del Espejo, and the Newsletters in Rodriguez Villa's _Corte y Monarquia de España_, etc. [3] The contents of the King's apartment, given by Strada to Philip, "with a very precious reliquary," was valued at 20,000 ducats. But this splendid gift did not save Strada from a fine of 200 ducats a few weeks afterwards, for having addressed Camporedondo, the senior member of the Council of Finance as "Lordship" whereas by the pragmatic he was only allowed to be addressed as "Worship." The house Strada lived in was one he rented from Spinola his fellow-Genoese. As an instance of the prevailing corruption it may be mentioned that Strada paid 300 ducats to the author of the official account of these festivities for the favourable references to him in it. [4] The Newsletters say that there were 7000 wax lights, which alone cost over 8000 ducats, the cost of this one day's feast being 300,000 ducats--afterwards increased to 500,000 ducats. This enormous expenditure shocked everybody who thought about the matter. "The gossips," says the Newsletter, "assert that this great event, which had no other end than pastime and pleasure, which indeed was pure ostentation was to show our friend Cardinal Richelieu that there is plenty more money left in the world to punish his King." But many persons who dared in the subsequent carnival to blame this waste found themselves in the dungeons a few days afterwards; and several priests who preached before Olivares at St. Geronimo in the ensuing Lenten retreat, and ventured to denounce such wicked extravagance, were banished from Court. Rodriguez Villa's Newsletters have much to say about this. [5] Aston to Coke, 20th and 25th February 1637.--Record Office, S.P. Spain MSS. 38. This part of the entertainments had been arranged and paid for by Philip's state secretary and confidential friend, Geronimo de Villanueva, Marquis of Villalba, of whom we shall hear later. On the following Tuesday the regular public carnival took place, and the licence appears to have been shocking in the extreme. In one of the cars a donkey was represented as dying in bed, with pretended priests and friars mocking the most sacred mysteries around him, whilst the supposed doctors were going through indecent antics. One masker was covered with habits of knighthood, crosses, and noble insignia, with the significant motto, "For Sale." Rodriguez Villa. [6] Amongst other devices at this period, Olivares in the King's name appropriated one-third of all the household plate and manufactured silver in private hands, and ordered each member of the Councils of the Indies and Castile to provide each month 200 ducats in silver to be exchanged (for depreciated copper) at the exchange of 25 per cent., the current rate being 38. A young Irish student at the Escoria came and said that he had discovered how to convert a mark of silver and a mark of copper into two marks of pure silver. Olivares accepted the youth's offer to demonstrate his discovery at the palace before experts, but after two attempts he ignominiously failed and was imprisoned. [7] As may be imagined, Father Salazar's invention produced a perfect torrent of satires, and the Jesuit himself was sternly reproved by his ecclesiastical superiors for busying himself in financial affairs. So bitter was the feeling against him, that he was forced to leave the Society. Amongst other rumours about him was that he had devised a government monopoly of drinking water. In the ensuing Lent the pulpits of Madrid rang in denunciation of Father Salazar; and at the carnival a masker dressed as a peasant bore a banner inscribed-- Sisas alcabalas y papel sellado, Me tienen desollado. With food excise and tax on all I sell. And now with paper stamps, you've flayed me well. The unfortunate masker had to fly to hiding to escape the wrath of Olivares. [8] Thirty-four maravedis at the normal value would be equal to 2½d. [9] An azumbre is ancient liquid measure of about 2 quarts. [10] A Castilian fanega of grain is 1½ bushel. [11] This is the silver real, then worth 6d. [12] Record Office, S.P. Spain MSS. 39. [13] Although not immediately touching our subject, a very curious set of letters included in the above in the Record Office may be mentioned. They relate to Secretary Windebank's young son Christopher, or Kit Windebank, as he was called. He had been sent under Aston's care to Spain to see the world; and had been quite carried away by the _genius loci_ of Madrid, and got out of hand altogether. The scapegrace makes the best of his proceedings in his letters to his father and mother, but Aston's reports tell a different tale, and Kit is very angry when his money is stopped. The worst of it was that he fell in love with a Spanish girl, and, running away from embassy, married her. At Aston's instance Olivares threw into prison the priest who married them; but a thousand legal difficulties existed, he said, to obtaining a divorce, especially as Kit swore that he would not give up the girl, who was _enceinte_. At the end, however, he submits sulkily, the girl is sent to a convent, and young Kit returns home; doubtless to commit bigamy in due time in England, and continue the knightly family of Windebank. [14] It is curious to note that when the census of private coaches was made in Madrid for this purpose, it was found that there were 900 in use. [15] March 1637, Rodriguez Villa's Newsletters. [16] _Ibid._ [17] The Portuguese in question was splendidly repaid for his generosity. and when he left Madrid at the end of the year he had received the following grants,--"Marquis of Viseu, Count of Linhares for his eldest son and successors, the post of Marshal of Portugal for his second son, that of Governor of Ceuta for his third son, an extension for three years longer of the revenues of the governorship of Sofala (_i.e._ Mozambique), a grant of 24,000 for his own expenses, 5000 ducats per annum for ever, 2500 ducats perpetual pension for his daughter-in-law, General on land and sea during his stay in Brazil with the title of Viceroy, and the title of Lieutenant-Generalin Portugal so long as the Duchess of Mantua rules there, grants for a second life of all the pensioned knighthoods he holds, and four pensioned knighthoods to be disposed of as he likes, and a renewal for three lives of the pension he holds from the crown." It was said that these grants were worth 700,000 ducats. This is a fair specimen of the lavishness to quite a second-rate personage at a time when the nation was in the deepest distress. Rodriguez Villa's Newsletters, 1637. [18] Rodriguez Villa's Newsletter, 1637. [19] The following words occur in the famous Memorial on the subject referred to on page 142, etc.: "Let your Majesty hold as the most important affair of your State to make yourself _King of Spain_. I mean, Sire, that you should not content yourself with being King of Portugal, of Aragon, of Valencia, Count of Barcelona, but that you should strive and consider with mature and secret counsel to reduce these realms of which Spain consists to the laws and form of Castile, without any distinction. If your Majesty succeeds in this, you will be the most powerful Prince in the world. Nevertheless this is not a business which can be carried through in a limited time nor do I suggest that it should be disclosed to anybody, however confidential he may be; because the desirability of the object is indisputable, and what is to be done in preparation and anticipation can be done by your Majesty yourself." [20] Rodriguez Villa's Newsletters. [21] Aston's letters, MSS., Record Office S.P., Spain. [22] How completely the old crusading spirit had decayed is seen in the derision with which the courtiers in Madrid greeted the saying of Antonio Mascarenhas, the dignified old-fashioned hidalgo governor of Tangier. When he visited Madrid he went to present his respects to the little Prince Baltasar Carlos. "Who are you?" asked the boy. "I am the gentleman," replied the Portuguese, "who by and by will help your Highness to conquer the Holy Sepulchre." It was the answer of a knight-errant, sneered the courtiers, and so it was, but it was this fervent knight-errantry which had given to Spain the strength it had possessed, and which under the scoffers and mockers it never could possess again. [23] The speeches are given _in extenso_ in the documents printed in Danvila's _Poder Civil en España_. [24] Novoa, _Memorias_. [25] The best contemporary is that by General de Melo, _Guerra de Cataluña_. [26] The details will be found in _Historia de la Conjuracion de Portugal, Revolutions de Portugal_, Vertot; _Historia del levantamiento de Portugal_, Seyner; and Canovas de Castello's _Estudios del Reinado de Felipe IV._, vol. i. [27] The King was actually dressing at the time, and with the royal family escaped to one of the hermitages in the park, though at one time in danger. Many ladies who were yet in bed fled in their night garb, and were rescued with difficulty. Novoa. [28] _Ibid._ [29] The only part of the story which appears open to question is the continuance of the intrigue after Philip's remorseful flight. There seems to be some doubt about this. [30] The story is told with many embellishments, but the above version is the most trustworthy. It comes from a contemporary MS., written after the fall of Olivares, transcribed by Mesonero Romanes in _El Antiguo_, Madrid. [31] August 1642. Novoa, an eye-witness, referring to this time, says; "Trade and commerce were confused, and the prices rose enormously, so that people could not find money for boots and clothes; and even provisions could not be had, as no one would sell. The copper money was valueless, and people threw it about or forced it upon those to whom they owed money, as the law gave it currency. The agony and desperation of the people were intense, and utter despair consumed the hearts and lives of the people." Novoa, _Memorias_. [32] Don Juan was acknowledged in 1642, and the occasion was taken for a great series of festivities to celebrate the event, though the state of public affairs at the time was more deplorable than ever. The Nuncio Panzuolo took a prominent part in the affair, and gave the Pope's blessing to the young Prince; but it was noted that the Queen, usually so hearty and debonnaire, was cold and haughty when Don Juan was led up to kiss her hand and that of Prince Baltasar Carlos. It was noticed that the latter, prompted apparently by his mother, addressed his half-brother as _Vos_, You, which was the manner usually adopted towards nobles, but not to royal personages. An interesting unpublished paper in Italian in the British Museum gives many curious particulars of Don Juan's youth, and the details of his legitimation. Add MSS. 8703. "Ritratto della nascitá qualitá costumi ed accioni de Don Juan d'Austria." [33] A most amusing account of this family council is given by Novoa, who hits off the respective characters of the three sisters--the Marchiones of Carpio, Marchioness of Monterey, and Countess of Alcañizes--very neatly. [34] The terrible Memorial, written by Quevedo, exposing in burning words the state of the country, and calling upon the King to arouse himself, should be read by anyone who desires confirmation of the pictures I have tried to trace in this book. The paper was slipped under the King's napkin at dinner, and was accompanied by a parody paternoster, beginning as follows-- Filipo, que el mundo aclama Rey del infiel tan temido, Despierta, que por dormido Nadie te teme, ni te ama; Despierta, rey, que la fama Por todo el orbe pregona Que es de leon tu corona Y tu dormir de liròn, Mira que la adulacion Te llama con fin siniestro "Padre Nuestro." Hail, Philip, King whom all acclaim, In fear the infidel to keep, Awake! for in thy slumber deep No one doth love or fear thy name. Awake! oh King, the worlds proclaim Thy crown on lion's brow to sit, Thy slumber's but for dormouse fit. Listen! 'tis flattery's artful wile That sunk in sloth thy days beguile, And calls thee, its base ends to foster, "Pater Noster." [35] At this time three of the principal grandees of Spain were banished from Court by Philip, for scaling the walls of the Retiro at night and clandestinely making love to the maids of honour. Two years previously affairs had reached such a scandalous length with the nobles, that Philip ordered a special commission to inquire into the matter. As a result a large batch of nobles, two marquises and one of Philip's chamberlains amongst them, were expelled as persons of known evil life. But suspicion is aroused by the terms of the decree that their dissoluteness was not the sole cause of this disgrace, as they are said to have "frequented gambling houses and there murmured without any reason at all against the present Government and the higher officers of the State, although some of them are deeply obliged to the same." Rodriguez Villa's Newsletter. [36] An extremely dangerous conspiracy hatched at this time in Andalucia was discovered, and contributed much to the increased unpopularity of the Guzmans. The principal plotters were two of Olivares' greatest kinsmen, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, brother of the new Queen of Portugal, and the Marquis of Ayamonte, the object of the conspiracy being to make Medina Sidonia King of Andalucia by the aid of the new King of Portugal. Ayamonte had already betrayed to the Portuguese a conspiracy hatched by Olivares in Lisbon; and then suggested to Medina Sidonia that the discontent in Andalucia and the disorganisation in Madrid offered a good opportunity for him to proclaim himself an independent sovereign. The proud magnate consented, but the plot was discovered. Olivares did his best to minimise the matter, and the Duke was let off with a heavy fine, much humiliation, and a challenge to fight John IV. in single combat; but Ayamonte lost his head, although his life had been promised if he divulged the whole plot, which he did. A curious account of how the plot was discovered is in MSS. Egerton, 2081, British Museum. [37] That is to say, Philip, the King of Portugal, and the King of France. [38] It must not be forgotten that Novoa, who says this, was an enemy of Olivares; though there is no doubt that the minister did believe at the time that his death was planned. [39] These particulars are taken from an interesting Italian MS. in the British Museum, Add. 8701, from the pen of the Venetian ambassador in Madrid at the time, and also to some extent from Novoa. [40] Novoa ascribes their desire for his presence to the money spent by the Court. [41] So one of her servants who was present told Novoa. [42] "I got a pension of 400 ducats," says Novoa; and he relates the whole of these grants and favours to those who had served Olivares. [43] Amongst the skits was a placard that was stuck upon the palace gates, saying-- El dia de San Antonio Se hicieron milagros dos; Pues empezó á reinar Dios, Y del rey se echó el demonio. Saint Antonio's day did bring Of miracles this twain, 'Twas then the Lord began to reign, And devil cast from the King. [44] Novoa and, also for other details, Newsletters in Valladares' _Semanario Erudito_, vol. xxxiii. [45] Many of these particulars are taken from the Venetian narrative, British Museum MSS., Add. 8701. [46] The work was confiscated by the Inquisition, and the supposed authors and the printer prosecuted; as were the attacks that gave rise to it. {376} CHAPTER IX DEATH OF RICHELIEU AND OF THE CARDINAL INFANTE--PHILIP'S GOOD RESOLUTIONS--HIS CORRESPONDENCE WITH THE NUN OF AGREDA--PHILIP WITH HIS ARMIES--DEATH OF QUEEN ISABEL OF BOURBON--THE WAR CONTINUES IN CATALONIA--DEATH OF BALTASAR CARLOS--PHILIP'S GRIEF--HE LOSES HEART--INFLUENCE OF THE NUN--HIS SECOND MARRIAGE WITH HIS NIECE MARIANA--HIS LIFE WITH HER--DON LUIS DE HARO--NEGOTIATIONS WITH ENGLAND--CROMWELL'S ENVOY, ANTHONY ASCHAM--HIS MURDER IN MADRID--FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN PHILIP AND THE ENGLISH COMMONWEALTH--CROMWELL SEIZES JAMAICA--WAR WITH ENGLAND [Sidenote: Changed conditions] The disappearance from the scene of Olivares seemed to the people of Madrid to change the national winter into summer. All the evils under which Spain had groaned so long would vanish, they thought, like snow before the sunshine; and once more Spain, powerful and rich, would dictate the law to Europe. Philip swore in solemn fashion to forsake dissipation and devote himself thenceforward to the welfare of his people. It was a golden dream whilst it lasted, and for a time it really did lift Spaniards into some semblance of the old-time faith and confidence. All the gang {377} of Guzmans were thrust into the background, and those who had stood aloof were now summoned to the Councils of the King. Quevedo came from his dungeon, cynically triumphant; the distribution of business amongst a multitude of unimportant juntas subservient to Olivares was abolished, and the great Councils again took executive and administrative charge of the affairs entrusted to them. The active and intelligent influence of the Queen was exerted everywhere; and new life was breathed for a time in the languishing body of the State. There were also other great changes nearly coinciding with the fall of Olivares that increased the hopefulness of Spaniards for the future. Richelieu died some months before, and the personal rivalry between the two ministers, which had done so much to embitter the war, disappeared. Then, in May 1643, the King of France, Louis XIII., died, and Philip's sister, Anna of Austria, became Queen-regent of France for her five-year-old son, Louis XIV. Anna had always been a true daughter of Spain, and deplored the war between the land of her birth and that of her adoption; and it was hoped that she would find a means to end the differences. Another event had occurred at the end of 1641, which, whilst adding to Philip's gloom, made the continuance of the war in the Netherlands more hopeless than ever. The Cardinal Infante Fernando, his frail physique worn out by constant campaigning and enfeebled by fever, died at Brussels;[1] and Philip had no relative now to {378} stand for Spain in the ancient patrimony of Burgundy. With all these changes in the space of two years, the spring of 1643 seemed to blossom with hopes of peace once more, humiliating as the terms might be. But again Spanish pride stood in the way, and after long discussion Philip's new councillors determined that honour demanded the expulsion of the French from Spanish soil before any negotiations for peace with them were undertaken. With infinite difficulty money and men were got together somehow[2] for Philip to take the field again in Aragon, where the French had arrived within a few miles of Saragossa. Before he could start on his way thither, there came from Flanders news of a crushing defeat sustained by General Melo, who had replaced the Cardinal Infante in the command. Melo at first had done well; for he was skilled and bold, and had more than held his own against the allies. But on the 18th May 1643 the terrible battle of Rocroy was fought, in which Melo himself was captured, Count de Fuentes was killed, and the Spanish army of 20,000 men, the tried veterans who were the last remnant of the once invincible _tercios_, whose fame was world-wide, were put to utter rout by the genius of the youthful Enghien (Prince of Condé). The Spanish infantry never regained the prestige they lost at Rocroy, which was to the army of Spain what the defeat of the Armada was to her {379} navy;[3] and with the knowledge that disaster was pursuing him on all sides, for the Portuguese were raiding far into Castile and the French were threatening the capital of Aragon, Philip left Madrid, his heart well-nigh breaking, early in June 1643. [Sidenote: The nun of Agreda] In the five months that had passed since he had dismissed Olivares the King had tried hard; but already his indolence was casting its paralysing blight over him; and most of the work of the Government was handed to Don Luis de Haro, the nephew of Olivares, who went with the King to Aragon. This time Philip was accompanied by a modest train, and by little of the ceremonial state that Olivares had deemed needful for his previous voyage. He travelled slowly, nevertheless, and on the 10th July, as he approached the Aragonese frontier city of Tarazona, he halted at the humble Convent of the Immaculate Conception at Agreda, which in the previous few years had been founded by a lady whose fame for sanctity and wisdom had already become wide, though she was but forty years of age yet. Maria Coronel had written several mystically religious books, and the convent under her rule was known for its rigidity in an age when most cloisters had grown lax. Philip probably visited the house and its abbess as a usual compliment and duty; but the visit, whatever its motive, set its mark upon him for the rest of his life. The abbess, Sor Maria, as she was called, must have been a woman of worldly wisdom as deep as {380} was her piety. She must have impressed the King, moreover, powerfully as being absolutely disinterested and free from mundane temptation. He was, as we have seen, almost in despair at the magnitude of the tasks before him; the strong spirit upon which he had leant since he was a boy had passed out of his life, and he knew not whither to turn for unselfish counsel. Sor Maria, saintly, but keen, with her sad yet half humorous face, and her shrewd, kindly eyes, seemed to him a very rock of refuge, and in the long talk he had with her she spoke so wisely, yet so fearlessly, of the oppressive governance and ungodly methods of Olivares, she urged the King so powerfully to trust to God and himself alone, to work and pray and make his people cleanly, that he went forth from Agreda refreshed in faith and hope, leaving with Sor Maria his command that she was to write to him her private counsel when she listed, and to pray for him and his unceasingly with all her saintly soul. [Illustration: The nun of Agreda] Thenceforward until death snapped the spiritual link that joined them, the heart of Philip was bared in all its sorrow, its weakness, and its sin to Sor Maria alone. The haughty face with the pathetic eyes and great projecting jaw remained unmoved before the world, only the deepening furrows in it showing the storm that raged within. Men thought that he was callous and cold; for he suffered silently behind his mask. But Sor Maria knew, and none but she under heaven, the true secret of the King's gilded misery. His cry of agony, of remorse, of pity thenceforward came to the cloistered nun as a surer way to reach the throne of grace than to all the cardinals, confessors, {381} and bishops who waited upon his smile, and gently hinted disapproval of kingly vice. At the end of July 1643, Philip entered his city of Saragossa, this time, to the delight of the jealous Aragonese, unattended by the crowd of dissolute nobles and courtiers who made love to their wives and threatened their political liberty.[4] No time was lost now in moving against the French, who were threatening the centre of Aragon, and the new commander, Felipe de Silva, whom Olivares' jealousy had consigned to a prison, showed great energy, and soon changed the appearance of affairs. It will be useful for our purpose to reproduce the principal paragraphs of Philip's first letter to the nun on the 4th October 1643, five weeks after his arrival at Saragossa, the precursor of so long and important a correspondence.[5] [Sidenote: Philip and Sor Maria] "SOR MARIA,--I write to you leaving a half margin, so that your reply may come on the same paper, and I enjoin and command you not to allow the contents of this to be communicated to anybody. Since the day that I was with you I have felt much encouraged by your promise to pray to God for me, and for success to my realm; for the earnest attachment towards my well being that I then recognised in you gave me great confidence and encouragement. As I told you, I left Madrid lacking all human resources, and trusting only to divine help, which is the sole way to obtain what {382} we desire. Our Lord has already begun to work in my favour, bringing in the silver fleet, and relieving Oran[6] when we least expected it; whereby I have been able, though with infinite trouble and tardiness for want of money, to dispose my forces here so that we shall, I hope, start work with them this week. Although I beseech God and His most holy Mother to succour and aid us, I trust very little in myself; for I have offended, and still offend very much, and I justly deserve the punishments and afflictions which I suffer. And so I appeal to you to fulfil your promise to me, to clamour to God to guide my actions and my arms, to the end that the quietude of these realms may be secured, and peace reign throughout Christendom. The Portuguese rebels still raid the frontiers of Portugal, acting against God and their natural sovereign. Affairs in Flanders are in great extremity, and there is risk of a rising unless God will intervene in my favour; and though affairs in Aragon have somewhat improved with my presence, I fear that unless we can gain some successes to encourage people here they are liable to lose heart and to take a course very injurious to the monarchy. The necessities, of course, are numerous {383} and great; but I must confess that it is not that which distresses me most, but the certain conviction that they all arise from my having offended our Lord. As He knows, I earnestly wish to please Him and to fulfil my duty in all things; and I desire that, if by any means you arrive at a knowledge of what it is His holy will that I should do to placate Him, write to me here, for I am very anxious to do right, and I do not know in what I err. Some religious people give me to understand that they have revelations; and that God commands that I should punish certain persons, and that I should dismiss others from my service. But you know full well that in this matter of revelations one must be very careful, and particularly when these religious persons speak against those who are not really bad, and against whom I have never discovered anything injurious to me; whilst others are approved whose proceedings are not usually thought well of. The general opinion about these persons is that they love turning things over, and that their truth cannot be depended upon. I do hope that you will keep your word to me, and will speak with all frankness as to a confessor, for we kings have much of the confessor in us. Do not let yourself be influenced by what the world says, for that is little to be depended upon, seeing the aims of those who move such discourse; but be guided solely by the inspiration of God, before whom I protest (and I have just partaken of Him, in the Sacrament) that I desire in all things, and for all things, to fulfil His sacred law and the obligation which He has laid upon me as a King. And I hope in His {384} mercy that He will take pity on our pains and help us out of those afflictions. The greatest favour that I can receive from His holy hands is that the punishment He lays upon these realms may be laid upon me; for it is I, and not they, who really deserve the punishment, for they have always been true and firm Catholics. I do hope you will console me with your reply, and that I may have in you a true intercessor with our Lord, that He may guide and enlighten me, and extricate me from the troubles in which I am now immersed.--I, THE KING. Saragossa, 4th October 1644." [Sidenote: Philip's inner self] In addition to the invaluable and unquestionable glimpse which this letter affords of public affairs, it gives us the key, more entirely perhaps than any of the six hundred letters that followed it, to the real character of the King. He was weak; he confesses to have no confidence in himself, although in his heart of hearts he is striving to live well and do his duty. He is unable to struggle successfully against the worldly pleasures that have captured him, and which he pursues still, whilst hating himself for doing so. Conscience-haunted, he is the only sinner, and the terrible conviction forces itself upon him that his personal sins of omission and commission are to be visited in awful punishment upon whole nations of innocent people. His natural justice and his knowledge of men cause him to rebel against the suggestions that come to him, even under the cloak of religion, to punish those who in his eyes have done no ill; and behind the regal purple and the stately port of his great office we see the poor soul, so remorseful {385} in the knowledge of its sin and insignificance as to feel unworthy even to pray without a poor nun's intercession to the appalling deity he thinks he has incensed. And yet, with all this humility, how the true Spaniard peeps out in the conviction that God has His eyes specially on him; how God's designs for the universe revolve around his fortunes, his acts, and his transgressions. Only by the light of these self-revelatory letters can we see how penetrating was the genius of Velazquez. The tragic, haunted face of Philip, when age had palled his pleasures, only told its tale to the painter; and its pride, its weakness, its mercy and despair, an enigma until now, are explained to us when, after looking upon his portrait, we read the King's own words, meant for the eyes of the cloistered nun alone. Whilst Philip was, for the first time for twenty years, manfully struggling against his indolence, and facing his enemies in Aragon, the Queen, as regent of Castile, was straining every nerve to provide money for the campaigns; and during the autumn (1643) an army of 16,000 men was mustered in the various provinces, and sent to the King. Queen Isabel too put her hand to the Augean stable of Madrid. Murders in the streets and armed affrays upon trifling pretexts were as numerous as ever, one Newsletter (25th August) enumerating four or five of such fatal scandals during the previous few days;[7] one of which--although that was in Valencia and is given as an instance--is curious: one Iñigo Velasco, an actor, we are told, having been beheaded "because, forgetting the humility of his calling, he courted ladies as impudently as any {386} gentleman could have done." But it was noticed in Madrid that the punishment now followed the crime more surely and more promptly:[8] that immorality was attacked more earnestly than before, and that the large public houses of ill-fame were being rapidly cleared out by the new President of the Council of Castile. The financial officers and others were also having rather a ruthless time, for secret commissions descended upon them and their papers without notice one after the other, and scores of thousands of ducats of ill-gotten plunder had to be disgorged; whilst the friends of Olivares who had survived his fall, and kept their places, were gradually made to understand that things had altered for them.[9] The Countess of Olivares thus far had held firmly to her footing as Mistress of the Robes, notwithstanding the frowns of the Queen; but the Duchess of Mantua brought matters to a head with her. As the Countess aspired to sit upon a seat in the royal carriage instead of in the doorway, the Duchess rose and said that that was not her place, and she would leave the carriage. The Queen placated her, but a few days afterwards {387} the Queen's coach was surrounded in Madrid by a crowd that cried, "Long live the Queen, and down with the Duchess of Olivares"; and soon orders came from the King in Aragon that the lady was to follow her husband into retirement. The legitimated son, too, Enrique Felipe de Guzman, who had kept close to the King as a gentleman-in-waiting, found that the atmosphere at Court, and especially amongst Aragonese, was antagonistic to him; and he also was dismissed to join his father.[10] [Sidenote: Baltasar Carlos and Juan] The only subject of difference between Philip and his wife now was the rivalry between his two sons. Young Baltasar Carlos had been granted a separate household, and was already assuming the state befitting the heir of Spain. Philip was devotedly attached to him, as was his mother; for, after allowing for all the adulation of courtiers, the Prince must have been a manly and gracious youth. But Don Juan was infinitely more handsome, and it was said of extraordinary talent, although it is fair to say that the actions of his later life hardly justified the fame of his youth. In any case, Philip was very proud of him, and now gave him a separate household, with many noble attendants and officers about him, and, as a separate residence, the suburban pleasure house called Zarzuela. Don Juan was to be called Serene Highness, and was to address gentlemen as _Vos_, You, as if he had been a royal Prince. To {388} add to his importance, he was now made Grand Master of St. John, and delighted the courtiers with his boyish assumption of sovereign dignity.[11] Isabel looked askance at all this, and Baltasar Carlos saw little of his half-brother; but Philip, having before him the example of his great-grandfather and the other Don Juan, evidently destined his left-handed son for great things. He had, moreover, no near male relatives now, and it is clear that there were ample opportunities for usefulness open to a semi-royal Prince in Philip's wide dominions. [Sidenote: Philip's reformation] Philip and his little army in Catalonia and Aragon did well. Monzon was captured by Silva from the French on the 3rd December, to the immense solace of the King, who had been beseeching the nun's prayers for the victory; and with the laurels still on him he returned in triumph to Madrid to pass the Christmas with his wife. The Queen had ordered dinner to be prepared for his reception at the Buen Retiro (14th December), and had gone to meet him at the Atocha, where the holy image had to be thanked for his safe return. But Philip was a changed man since the nun's weekly letters of exhortation and encouragement had reached him; and the palace of past frivolities was not in accordance with his mood. He would not even enter it, but went, gaily dressed, through the cheering crowds to the old palace, which if gloomy was yet kingly. Philip {389} went the next day to the Discalced Carmelites to pray; but the Queen did not accompany him, for the proud, exacting Savoy Princess, Duchess of Mantua, who lived in the convent, occupied the royal apartments, and all manner of questions of etiquette would have arisen if the Queen had gone with her husband. During the few days of staid rejoicings for Christmas, for the splendid old entertainments were now discontinued,[12] the King wrote to Sor Maria to ask her to help with her prayers the expected arrival of the silver fleet from Mexico; and as a mixture of mystic devotion and worldly aims the King's letter is quaint. "The promise you gave me when I was with you, that your prayers should not fail me, delighted me much, and I remind you of it in the greatest necessities. We are expecting hourly, by God's help, the arrival of the galleons, and you may imagine what depends upon it for us; and although I hope that, in His mercy, He will bring them safely, I want to urge you to help me by supplicating His Divine Majesty to do me this favour. It is true, I do not deserve it, but rather great punishment; but I have full confidence that He will not permit the total loss of this monarchy, and that He will continue the successes that He has begun to give us. I should very much like to succeed in carrying out the advice you give me in your letter of the 6th {390} instant.[13] I can assure you I will try to do so; and for my part, I will use every effort to comply with the will of God, both personally and in official matters. May He give me grace to do it. I cannot help telling you of the joy it gave me to come hither and see the Queen and my children, for my absence had seemed to me very long. They are, thank God, very well; and although I shall feel keenly leaving such company, I am preparing to return; for the welfare of my realms must be placed before all things, even before the pleasure of being with such treasures as these. God send me the time when I may enjoy them with more tranquillity." The King's and the nun's prayers were satisfied. A few days after the letter was written, Madrid was rejoiced to know that the galleons had arrived safely, "which on this occasion were sorely needed; for the loans for the frontier fortresses, and for Italy and Flanders, were held back, and the lenders would not do business without this guarantee.... They bring five millions (of ducats) for the King, and almost as much for private owners, with much {391} indigo, etc.... It is believed that the King will not take any from private people or from the treasury pensions, so that we all breathe again."[14] In these somewhat alleviated circumstances, Philip, full of hope, started for Aragon on 6th February 1644, having signalised his short stay in Madrid by giving the gold key of chamberlain to Diego Velazquez, "who, they say, is at the present time the greatest painter in Spain. I understand there are to be no more honours given this Twelfth Day, as in other years."[15] [Sidenote: Philip again in Aragon] Philip, with a very small suite, hurried to Aragon; for already in his absence his officers were quarrelling amongst themselves about ridiculous questions of style and precedence, and on the very frontier a deputation of Aragonese notables met him to ask for the dismissal of his Commander-in-chief, Felipe Silva, the most successful General he had; and, although not immediately, Silva, disgusted by the jealousy that surrounded him--a Portuguese--ultimately went into retirement, to the lasting loss of Spanish arms. Whilst Philip was busy in Aragon ordering the coming campaign, the welcome news came to him in March 1644 of the pregnancy of his wife; but soon his joy was dashed with the intelligence of her miscarriage and illness. The gossips said that, attended only by the Marquis of Aytona, he rushed to Madrid secretly for a few days to see her; but whether the cloaked cavalier who came post from Saragossa was indeed the King is uncertain. In any case, Philip was with his army during the summer, gradually making way before the French, and {392} keeping up his resolution to live an exemplary life; although the nobles and others were beginning to grumble that Don Luis de Haro was almost as powerful a minister as his uncle Olivares had been. Philip was still rejoicing over the capture of the important city of Lerida at the middle of August 1644, and the relief of Tarragona in September, when ill news came to him of his wife's health. She had, it seems, on the 28th September suffered some sort of choleraic attack with erysipelas. Messengers were sent to the King, whilst the doctors, as was their wont, bled the patient copiously until they had left her bloodless, though with symptoms which now would be recognised at once as those of diphtheria. Then, in their desperation, the dead body of St. Isidore the Husbandman and the sainted image of the Atocha were brought to the palace; though the dying woman protested that she was unworthy to have them brought to her bedside. But the inflammation of the throat increased, notwithstanding all the charms of the Church and the prayers of young Baltasar Carlos, who was devotedly attached to his mother. There was no church nor convent in Madrid that did not bring out in procession its crucifixes and most sacred images in Prayer for the Queen's restoration to health, and the fervent prayers of a whole people went up in rogation that her life might be spared. [Sidenote: Death of the Queen] On the 5th October the Queen tried to make a new will, but she was too weak to sign it, and only left verbal testamentary instructions before witnesses for the King to be informed of her wishes. At noon that day she sent for a _fleur de lys_ which {393} formed one of the ornaments of the crown, and in which there was a fragment of the true Cross. This she worshipped fervently, and her two children, Baltasar Carlos and Maria Teresa, were brought to her; but she would not suffer them to approach her for fear of infection, though she blessed them fervently from a distance. "There are plenty of Queens for Spain," she sighed; "but Princes and Princesses are rare." The next day, at a quarter past four in the afternoon, stout-hearted loyal Isabel of Bourbon breathed her last, aged 41. Garbed as a Franciscan nun, the body of the Queen was borne to the Convent of Discalced Carmelites, where she had so often prayed and diverted herself;[16] and thence soon afterwards it was carried back again to the palace in grand coffins of lead and brocade, to lie in state with flaring torches and all the pomp and circumstances of royal mourning. "Isabels always bring happiness to Spain," shouted the crowd that adored her, after the fall of Olivares. She, poor soul, had brought happiness neither to Spain nor to France, though she did her best and was truly mourned. She had always been devoutly Catholic; and since the commencement of the war she had grown stronger in her devotion, and in her determination to reform the scandalous licence of the Court.[17] Frenchwoman though {394} she was, no breath of suspicion of her loyalty to her husband's people had ever been heard during all the years of war with her brother's realm. [Sidenote: Philip's grief] Philip hastened home as fast as relays of mules would carry him. At Maranchon, about fifty miles from Madrid, where the King had alighted to dine at a wretched _venta_, the courier bringing the news of the Queen's death met him. The ministers and courtiers around the King, knowing how he loved his wife, avoided telling him the evil tidings at first; for the anxiety and fatigue of the voyage had told upon him, "and he had only just dined." But a few miles farther on, at Almadrones, the news was broken to him in his carriage by the Marquis of Carpio and his son, the favourite Haro, and the bereaved King begged to be left alone with his grief. Turning aside from Madrid, now a city of mourning for him, Philip retired to the Pardo, where, with his son Baltasar--all that was left to him now, for Maria Teresa was but a child--for a few days he indulged his sorrow in private. Thence he went for the official mourning in the old apartment at San Geronimo; whilst, with the gloomy pomp traditional in Spain, the body of the Queen was carried at dead of night across {395} the bleak Castilian plain, with hundreds of monks and nobles following, to the gorgeous new jasper pantheon at the Escorial reserved for Kings and mothers of Kings, which, from very dread, Isabel had never dared to enter in her lifetime.[18] Three days after the Queen died her wraith appeared, it is said, before the nun of Agreda, asking for the prayers of the godly to liberate her from purgatory for the vain splendour of her attire during her life.[19] Philip himself was overwhelmed at his loss, and the nun wrote to him exhortations to resignation and patience; but it was a month before he could gather sufficient courage to reply: his grief, as he says, and the many calls upon him having prevented him from doing it before. "I find myself in the most oppressed state of sorrow possible," he wrote, "for I have lost in one person everything that can be lost in this world; and if I did not know, according to the faith that I profess, that the Lord disposes for us what is best, I do not know what would become of me." The following spring again saw Philip in the field in Aragon. Things were going badly with him now, and he was again losing heart. To the nun he wrote on the 25th March 1645-- "Your letter indeed arrived at a good time; for the cares that surround me had much afflicted me, and your words have encouraged me. I now trust that God in His mercy, looking to all Christendom, and to these realms, which are so pure in their {396} Catholic faith, will not allow us to be ruined utterly, but will shield and defend them, and grant us a good peace. Short are the human resources with which I have returned hither; and what appals me most is to see that my faults alone are sufficient to provoke the ire of our Lord, and to bring upon me greater punishments than before. But the greater the punishment, the greater will be my appeal to faith and hope, as you say; and I will continually supplicate our Lord to supply with His almighty hand what we need. I for my part will do all I can, trying not to displease Him, and to comply with the obligations He has placed upon me, even though in doing so I risk my own life. I have not hesitated to give up the comforts of my home, in order to attend personally to the defence of these realms: for, whilst I thus fulfil this duty, I trust our Lord will not fail me; but in any extremity I submit to His holy will. I have wished for the Prince to begin to learn what will fall upon him after my days are done; and so, though alone, I have brought him with me, and have confided his health to the hands of God, trusting in His mercy to guard him, and to guide all his actions to His greater service."[20] The campaign brought reverse after reverse to Philip. Jealousy had lost him the services of Silva, his best General; and the new French Viceroy of Catalonia, Count de Harcourt, scattered the Spaniards at Balaguer, and all Catalonia and most of Aragon lay at his mercy, if he had been sure of the loyalty of the Catalans, who, truth {397} to say, were getting somewhat disappointed and tired of their French masters. [Sidenote: War in Catalonia] The Aragonese mostly remained faithful to Philip, but held firmly to their privileges; and when in the autumn of 1645 he summoned the Cortes of Saragossa and Valencia to swear allegiance to Baltasar Carlos, they drove a hard bargain, and Philip was forced to concede many legislative demands of the members, in return for sparing votes of supply. The tale he told to the Castilian Cortes summoned early in 1646 in Madrid was disconsolate in the extreme. All was spent: the wars still went on in Flanders, Germany, Italy, and Catalonia, as well as on the Portuguese frontier, and the regular revenue was utterly insufficient. The deputies were as much afflicted by the penury of their constituents as the King was by the emptiness of his treasury, but with many groans they voted an immediate grant of a million and a half of ducats in money, and in the following year an extension of the special war taxation upon food, and leave to sell pensions was granted. Almost every week beseeching letters went from Philip to the nun, praying for her intercession with the Almighty to aid him in his troubles; and the replies of the good woman were always wise, as she inculcated hope and labour without remission. Sometimes Philip's faith weakened, and he almost despaired, for he was convinced that all the national trouble arose from his personal sins, and yet, as he says, he could not help sinning. In the meanwhile disasters fell upon his arms thick and fast, and the national distress became more intense. He could suffer his own troubles, {398} wrote Philip, for he knew that he had deserved them; "but to see the sufferings of so many poor innocent people in these wars and conflicts pierces me to the very heart, and if with my life's blood I could remedy it I would expend it most willingly." When Philip returned to Madrid for the winter of 1645-46, Sor Maria's constant exhortations had prevailed upon him to make a determined attempt to cleanse Madrid of some of its blatant vice in order to win God's favour. She was particularly strong in her condemnation of the dress and demeanour of the women of the capital, and a severe pragmatic on the subject was issued: the playhouses, to the dismay of the comedy-loving people, were rigorously closed,[21] the press-gangs that scoured the country for recruits were enjoined to be merciful to the poor in their operations, and other measures urged by the nun became the law of the land, whilst the lethal crimes so common in Madrid were prosecuted now with merciless severity. Leaving his capital at least outwardly more decent, Philip travelled north again in April 1646, accompanied by his promising young son, now approaching manhood; Pamplona, the capital of Navarre, being taken on the way, in order that the Navarrese Cortes might swear allegiance to the heir. No sooner had they entered Pamplona, late in April, than Baltasar Carlos fell seriously ill of tertian fevers; and the nun's prayers were frantically supplicated for the boy by his afflicted father, who would not leave his son's side, although the Aragonese were getting clamorous for his coming to {399} direct the campaign, which had already been opened by the enemy, who were actively besieging Lerida. After two months' delay, Philip at length entered Saragossa in June, when he received the news of the death of his sister, the Empress Maria, who had been betrothed to Charles, Prince of Wales. This, coming on the top of all his other troubles, almost broke the poor King down. "If I did not recognise that my troubles are sent by God, as warnings for me to prepare my own salvation, I could hardly tolerate them.... Help me, Sor Maria, to pray to Him; for my strength is small, and I fear my weakness." [Sidenote: Baltasar Carlos dies] A greater blow than all fell upon him soon afterwards. An insincere embassy had been sent to England some little while before, in order to frustrate the betrothal of Mary Stuart, daughter of Charles I., with the Prince of Orange; and the means employed had been the old suggestion of the marriage of an English Princess with Baltasar Carlos. It came to nothing, and, so far as the Spaniards were concerned, was a mere feint from the first, for the real wish of Philip's heart, as it had been that of his father, was still further to cement the two branches of the house of Austria, by marrying his heir to the Emperor's daughter. Imperial ambassadors were at Saragossa when Philip arrived, and the King wrote cheerfully to the nun soon after, saying that the marriage of Baltasar Carlos had now been settled, and that his niece Mariana of Austria was betrothed to his heir. "My son is very much pleased with his new state, and I am so too, to have chosen such a good daughter-in-law, as I hold this marriage {400} certain to produce very beneficial effects to the Catholic religion, which is my sole aspiration."[22] Not many weeks afterwards, on the 7th October, the King in great trouble writes to the nun-- "I have received your letter, but I confess that I am not in a condition to reply to it, for our Lord has placed upon me a trial through which I can hardly live. Since yesterday my son is oppressed with very extreme fever. It began by severe pains in his body, which lasted all day; and now he is delirious, and we are in such fear that we hope it will turn to smallpox, ... of which the doctors say they see signs. I know, Sor Maria, that I deserve heavy punishments, and that all that may come to me in this life will be insufficient to repay my sins; but I do cry now to the divine mercy of our Lord, and the intercession of His holy Mother; and I beseech you to help with all your strength." [Sidenote: Philip's despair] Three days afterwards, the heart-broken father writes in dull despair that his son had died. "I have lost," he wrote, "my only son, and such a son, as you know he was." And for this pain the consolations of the good woman, though salutary, {401} were weak. Philip bowed his head, and to all outward seeming was resigned to his loss. He did not rail against the decrees of Providence that had left him alone in the world, but his resignation now was a fatalistic hopelessness; for this blow had finally convinced him that the Most High had doomed him to affliction, and his people to suffering untold, solely for his sins. There was no way out of it, even by prayer; and Philip for a time gave up trying to be good. Don Luis de Haro already did most of the work of the State, and Philip grew still more idle after the death of his son, one of the results of his indolence being a weakening of the struggle he had fought for four years against the temptations of the flesh. Sor Maria from her convent took him to task somewhat seriously for his remissness, and for the first time Philip defended himself with some spirit[23] with regard to his dependence upon others. He was anxious to do right, he assured her; but his great predecessors and all other monarchs had been obliged to employ ministers, and he did not think he could be doing wrong in following their example. One man cannot, he says, look into the execution of all his commands, and must trust to others; "for it does not accord with the dignity of a monarch to go from one office to the other to see personally that his decrees are being properly {402} carried out." When he first came to the throne, he reminds the nun, he was only sixteen, and, quite naturally in his inexperience, depended upon a man of more knowledge than himself. Where he had erred was in keeping that minister supreme too long. Since he dismissed Olivares he had tried to avoid having a favourite; and the minister who people now say does everything was brought up with him as a boy, and has always been irreproachable; but even so, he (Philip) had always refused to give him the post of sole minister, and he only does what the King cannot do, namely, look after the raising of funds, and hear the opinions of people with whom the King cannot discourse. "I, Sor Maria," he wrote, "do not shirk any labour, for, as anyone can tell you, I am here seated in this chair continually with my papers before me and my pen in my hand, dealing with all the reports that are sent to me here, and with the despatches from abroad; resolving points in question immediately, and trying to adopt the most proper decision in each case." The nun even took upon herself, as the winter wore on, to tell the King that it was high time to arrange the new campaign, and follow up the brilliant defence of Lerida which had ended in the defeat of the French under Condé himself. The Aragonese thought so too, for the troops there refused to move for a time unless Philip would come to Saragossa, as in previous years, to direct the campaign personally. [Sidenote: Philip betrothed again] The nun could hardly speak very clearly in reprehension of the King's moral backsliding, although her hints even in this respect are pretty {403} broad. But his confessor and the other friars around him did not hesitate to do so; and people other than friars were saying that with no heir to the crown the King must marry again. So long as Baltasar Carlos lived, Philip had gently put aside these suggestions by saying that his hopes were centred in his son; but when after his heir's death his excesses in the intervals of his poignant contrition shocked the devotees of his Court, and they added their censure to the pressure of the laymen for another Queen-Consort, Philip consented, though without enthusiasm, to marry again. He was only forty-two, but anxiety and dissipation had aged him, and he was approaching the years when most of his ancestors had developed the peculiar strain of mystic devotion that borders upon madness, but his people clamoured for a male heir, for the Infanta Maria Teresa was only eight, and Don Juan of Austria, popular as he was, was impossible as King. In the letter which Philip wrote to the nun, on the 9th January 1647, he says: "I have received a letter from the Emperor condoling with me for the loss of my son, and at the same time offering my niece to be my wife. As this agrees with my own feelings, I think I may decide to accept this marriage, which is doubtless the most fitting one for me; so I hope that our Lord will help this with His powerful hand, so that the business may tend to His service, and to that of my own country"; and a few weeks afterwards he conveyed to her the intelligence that the match has been arranged. Mariana was as yet a child, and the daughter of Philip's sister Maria. That such a companion {404} can have been really congenial to him it is difficult to believe, but his subjects needed an heir. The unhappy tradition that imposed upon Spain the belief in its duty to dictate orthodoxy to the world was not yet dead, and the solidarity of the house of Austria was a first condition for its success. Spain had already paid dearly for such Austrian help as she had obtained, and the price now given for the further union was a high one indeed; for by this dire incestuous union of Philip and his niece the consummation of his country's ruin and the extinction of his dynasty was wrought. What for the time being was worst of all was, that the support of Austria in the wars that were finally to exhaust Spain was withdrawn even before the marriage took place. [Sidenote: The treaty of Münster] For three years the representatives of the Powers of Europe, invited by the Emperor, had been laboriously discussing terms for a general pacification at Osnabrück and Münster. Philip wrote to the nun that the French demands were so insolent that it was clear that they did not want peace;[24] but the Hollanders were more inclined to an accommodation, for they had grown suspicious of the ultimate designs of Mazarin. After interminable intrigues and self-seeking, however, an arrangement was arrived at which practically ended the Thirty Years War; and Spain, beaten to her knees, still burdened with war in Catalonia, on the Portuguese border, and in Flanders, with her kingdom of Naples in full revolt, was obliged to accept, at last, what the world had seen to be inevitable for many {405} years past, the recognition of Protestant Holland as an independent Power. For nearly a hundred years the war with her Protestant former dependency had dragged Spain down, and made her an easy prey to the French, and at last from the sheer impotence of Spain to struggle longer the Treaty of Münster (October 1648) was signed by her, which made Holland free and gave Alsace to France. The central European Powers were satisfied, the religious compromise was ratified, there was nothing more for the Emperor to fight for, and he retired from the war with France, leaving Philip to fight her enemy alone. The long dream of Spain's supremacy over an orthodox Catholic Europe was indeed dissipated at last; she had now to fight for the integrity of her own soil and her continued existence as a great nation, and in this hard strait the empire deserted her. All through the year 1647, Philip remained in Madrid, whilst the wars in Flanders and Catalonia, as well as on the Portuguese frontier, dragged on with various fortunes, but on the whole not disastrously for Spain. The great revolt of Massaniello in Naples for a time threatened Philip with the loss of the kingdom; when the happy thought came to him of sending his brilliant young son, Don Juan, thither as his Commander-in-chief. He arrived at a time when Guise, the French pretender to the Neapolitan crown, had disgusted the fickle populace which had formerly acclaimed him, and by a fortunate _coup de main_ Don Juan recaptured the city for his father in February 1648, to the joy of most of the inhabitants, who were tired of the anarchy which had lasted for a year. The exploit {406} raised the popularity of the young Prince almost as high as that of his famous namesake after Lepanto, and the rejoicings in Madrid to celebrate the victory made the capital for a time seem its old self again. But though the lieges might still enjoy their brilliant shows as of yore, Philip himself had become introspective and gloomy; and he attended the bull-fights and parades with sad, weary face. He wrote weekly to the nun deploring his frailty, and beseeching her intercession; but it is clear that he had thrown over most of his good resolutions, for Don Luis de Haro was as necessary to him as Olivares had been; and the fragile beauties of the capital found in him again as ardent an admirer as ever.[25] The departure of the bride who was to rescue him from his evil life was long delayed for want of money, both on the part of her father the Emperor, and of Philip;[26] and, notwithstanding the King's saintly contrition after his faults, the talk of his loose and idle life began to make him personally unpopular with many, who thought that his place was with his army in Catalonia rather than in the Retiro sunk in slothful pleasures.[27] {407} [Sidenote: An execution] In September, a great Aragonese noble of turbulent antecedents, the Duke of Hijar, with three other nobles of rank, were suddenly seized and committed to prison in Madrid. The accusation against them was that they had plotted against the crown: some said in favour of the King of Portugal, others in favour of France; but the King specially assured the nun that there had not been discovered any design against his life. The Duke, as soon as he was arrested, endeavoured to implicate Sor Maria in the plot, and produced a letter from her to him. In a note in her own hand on the King's account written to her of the execution of the prisoners in December, she explains the matter. Hijar, it appears, had written to her hinting at some plan against the Government being in contemplation, and asking her advice. She had replied deploring such wickedness, and had referred him to the King. The nun says that many had been the attempts to bring her into trouble about it; but that in all his letters to her referring {408} to the plot the King had never even mentioned her connection with the matter, which showed that he, at least, did not believe that she was culpably concerned. The King, indeed, in his letters rather makes light of the affair, as being "the most foolish conspiracy ever conceived," and he evidently did not think that the Duke of Hijar was the prime mover in the affair; as repeated torture having failed to wring any incriminatory admissions from the Duke, the judges sentenced him to perpetual imprisonment only, though we are told that the torture had made him a cripple for life, both hand and foot. One of the other conspirators died of a fit in the prison soon after the death sentence was passed, his fate, as Philip wrote to the nun, being worst of all, since he had died unabsolved. [Sidenote: The "Hijar conspirators"] The public execution in the Plaza Mayor of the two principal conspirators, both nobles, Don Pedro de Silva, Marquis de la Vega de Sagra, and Don Carlos de Padilla, moved excitement-loving Madrid profoundly, and several eye-witnesses of the scene have left their impressions of it. From one unpublished account in the British Museum[28] the following description is condensed as an example of a Spanish execution, of the first importance at the time. Shortly before noon, on Saturday, the 5th December 1648, the massive doors of the Carcel de la Corte, opposite the Plaza de Santa Cruz, near the Atocha entrance of the Plaza Mayor,[29] opened for {409} a sombre procession to issue therefrom. First came seventy alguacils of the Court; then followed, amidst tapers and swinging censers, two famous figures of Christ from the parish church of Santa Cruz opposite, with the attendant clergy. Then came a saddle mule covered to the ground with housings of black baize, and led by an executioner. Upon the mule sat Don Carlos de Padilla, who only on the previous day had been divested of his honourable habit of a Knight of Santiago. Now, as he rode disconsolate, a crucifix in his hand and closely surrounded by many Jesuit fathers, he wore a long gown of black baize, with a cap of the same, and a steel chain dangled from his right foot. It was noticed, too, that instead of the almost universal golilla he wore a white starched Walloon collar unblued. After him came on another draped mule the Marquis, Don Pedro, similarly garbed; but, instead of the collar, wearing the tippet of a Fellow of the College, of Cuenca at Salamanca. Following the condemned men came crowds of alguacils, notaries, and officers of justice; and as the procession swept along dismally, heralded by tolling bells and the dreary call of the criers for the people to pray for the souls of the departing, vast crowds stood at every coign of vantage, and were held back at the end of each side street by guards and alguacils. The procession did not enter the Plaza by the nearest gate, that of the Atocha, but debouched into the {410} Calle Mayor, in order to enter the Plaza by a principal, Guadalajara, portal. It was noticed that as Don Carlos Padilla reached the entrance by the Guadalajara gate his face lit up radiantly, and the word passed along the awestruck crowd that a heavenly vision had brought comfort to him, now that all earthly comfort had fled. The Plaza Mayor itself had been cleared of all its fruit stalls, as if for a bull-fight; and in the centre (where now stands the statue of Philip III.) was erected a scaffold, upon which were two uncovered chairs side by side. Don Carlos de Padilla ascended first the fatal stair, and, taking his seat upon the left-hand chair with much serenity, slowly arranged his long gown decorously, whilst the swarm of priests and friars around him continued their sacred ministrations. The doomed noble's hands and feet were firmly bound to the chair, and a strip of black baize blinded his eyes. Then the executioner, stepping forward, with a large butcher's knife slashed the throat across again and again. It was remarked that Don Carlos, being a robust man, shed an immense quantity of blood. Then going behind him, the executioner with several heavy blows on the nape of the neck severed the head entirely, and the deed was finished. Then came the turn of the Marquis, Don Pedro de Silva, to mount; and as he reached the top his eyes perforce rested upon the dead body of his comrade, still bound to the chair. "Blessed be the name of the Lord," he exclaimed in horror at the ghastly sight, as he took his seat on the adjoining chair. The strip of baize that had bound the {411} eyes of Don Carlos was too much soaked with blood to be used for the second time, and another had to be brought; Don Pedro devoutly repeating the Creed in the meanwhile. It was noticed that Don Pedro, being a dry, shrunken little man, shed but little blood; and when his head at last was severed from the back, as that of Don Carlos had been, the King's justice was satisfied. The bodies remained in the chairs all that day; but at one o'clock in the morning the executioner and the widows shrouded the bodies by the light of two candle-ends, and enclosed them in rough coffins, in which they were carried in procession, with the parish cross and eight wax tapers before them, across the Calle Mayor to the churchyard of St. Gines for burial. The two Christs of Santa Cruz went with them too, though the clergy were not allowed to accompany them; for they had claimed the right of burying the bodies in their own church, which is the parish in which the prison is situated, and the King had ordered the sepulchre at St. Gines. The King had taken no part in the trial of the prisoners, and had strictly enjoined the five judges specially appointed to investigate the case to be absolutely impartial, though the nun herself had almost violently urged that no mercy should be shown against men who aimed at overturning the Government. The real object of the conspiracy appears to have been the overthrow of Don Luis de Haro, and the adoption of a conciliatory policy which would end the warfare in Catalonia and Portugal, even at the cost of a sacrifice of pride and territory to Spain. Already, when the impressive sight just described {412} was passing in Madrid, the new girl Queen-Consort was slowly, very slowly, making her way from city to city of her father's dominions, Tyrol, Hungary, and Italy, on her way to the expectant arms of her elderly avuncular bridegroom. Festivities and celebrations greeted her in every town she entered, and everywhere the inexperienced girl enjoyed her new importance without restraint. At Trent, Philip's representatives met her, and thenceforward she travelled as Queen of Spain, staying on her way for many weeks at each place.[30] The reasons for so long a delay were several. First, money was scarce for the conveyance of the tremendous company of 160 Spanish nobles with their households who accompanied the Queen; secondly, the plague was raging throughout eastern Spain, where she had to land; and thirdly, she herself was as yet quite immature, being barely fifteen. During all this long delay, which lasted until the late autumn of 1649, Philip continued to write to the nun, deploring his inability to overcome the frailty of the flesh, and fervently invoking her aid in prayer to make him as perfect as he wished to be. Though the world knew it not at the time, it is quite certain from these letters that the ecstatic religious mysticism that had taken possession of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather at a similar age, had at this time firmly captured Philip IV. But he, unlike them, still retained his pleasure-seeking instincts, and with him it was a {413} never-ending battle between the spirit and the flesh which prevented him subsequently from sinking into the monkish seclusion of his ancestors. [Sidenote: Queen Mariana] At length, whilst Philip was in Madrid in September, a messenger, bringing for him a beautiful jewel from his bride, came to announce her landing on Spanish soil at Denia;[31] and the King at once wrote in delight to the nun, to tell her the news and ask her blessing, to which the good woman replied by urging him to begin a new life on his marriage. Mariana had been received at Denia by all the nobles of Valencia, where the Sandoval interest was strong, and jealousy surrounded her from the first hour; the Duke of Najera and Maqueda, who had conducted her from Italy, being dismissed in disgrace as soon as he landed for some lack of respect reported of him. Mariana troubled her head little about such things. She was a red-cheeked, full-blooded lass, with bright black eyes, and an insatiable ambition to enjoy and make the most of life. Selfish and hard-hearted she proved herself to be later, but now in her florid spring she seemed a gay, happy girl, whose high spirits nothing could damp, even the prospect of matrimonial life with a worn-out, disillusioned voluptuary in chronic anxiety about his soul. As she slowly moved onward through Valencia and Castile, she was entertained everywhere with feastings and shows which delighted her. At one place, after dinner, some of the King's {414} dwarfs and buffoons were introduced to amuse her, at whose antics she screamed with laughter. The stately Countess of Medillin, a Sandoval, her Mistress of the Robes, shocked at such a breach of etiquette, reminded her that sovereigns of Spain never laughed in public. But Mariana snapped her fingers at such stiffness, and avowed that she should laugh as often as she saw anything to laugh at; and when the same great lady informed her that it was a violation of all the Court traditions for her to walk, she obtained a similar answer. As she approached Madrid, Philip, with his young daughter, Maria Teresa, moved to the Escorial, to be within easy riding distance of the village of Navalcarnero, where the royal wedding was to be celebrated.[32] Every few days, letters, gifts, and loving messages had passed between Philip and his bride since her arrival on Spanish soil, and he evidently desired to act his part of the anxious lover irreproachably. When, therefore, he learnt that the Queen was to arrive at Navalcarnero, on the 6th October, he complied with the traditional usage of the Spanish Court, and set forth on horseback, and in perfectly transparent disguise, to look upon his new wife incognito and without formality for the first time. That he did so to his satisfaction is on record in his subsequent letters to the nun, for Mariana was a buxom lass, and as she sat gaily smiling at the comedy with which she was being entertained before her evening meal, she doubtless looked an attractive bride. The King {415} retired that night to a little neighbouring hamlet called Brunete; and betimes in the morning, with a brave array of courtiers, he rode up to the humble house in which Mariana was temporarily lodged, whilst she stood smiling and blushing beneath her plentiful rouge until he approached, when she made as if to kneel; but he raised her without a word, and led her to the adjoining chapel, where mass was celebrated before them, and the marriage was performed by the Primate of Spain, Cardinal Moscoso Sandoval, with all the state which Navalcarnero could contain. After their dining in public at noon, there was a long series of bull-fights and comedies to go through before the royal pair and their Court in the great swaying coaches moved on the Escorial, where the early days of the honeymoon were to be passed. A league from the palace they were met by the Infanta Maria Teresa, who at once became the friend and play-fellow of her stepmother, only five years older than herself, and thenceforward her inseparable companion. The stern old monastery palace of Philip II. tried its hardest to look gay for the occasion, with its 11,000 wax lights and its array of fine courtiers; but gaiety sits badly upon it. Here in diversions, especially in hunting, the time passed happily for three weeks before the pair proceeded to the Pardo, nearer Madrid, whilst the capital was busy putting on the festal garb it loved so much, and had missed for so long. At length all was ready. From the Retiro to the old palace, the entire length of Madrid, a series of beautiful triumphal arches were erected, spanning the road. All the fountains, which were ordinarily {416} unpretending enough, had been turned to account and made to appear classic temples, whence the Olympian gods and goddesses dispensed refreshing nectar to the world. The shabby house-fronts were masked by erections of imitation marble, or hung with splendid tapestries and armorial shields; in fact, Madrid once more, almost ruined though she was, managed somehow to raise money enough to make herself handsome again for a space. Mariana, with her white teeth, rosy painted cheeks, so full and round, and her frank, unabashed gaiety, captured the hearts of the Madrileños at once, as she, rode on her splendidly caparisoned milk-white palfrey, from the Buen Retiro by the Carrera de San Geronimo, across the Puerta del Sol, and up the Calle Mayor to the palace. They did not know yet, as they learned later, that she was greedy and hard, caring nothing for Spain except for what it could give her.[33] [Sidenote: Philip's second marriage] Philip was too much immersed in the delights of his honeymoon to write to the nun for several {417} weeks after his marriage; but when he did write, on the 17th November, he testified to his full satisfaction with his new wife. "I confess to you that I do not know how I can thank our Lord for the favour he has shown me in giving me such a companion; for all the qualities I have seen up to the present in my niece are great, and I am extremely content, and desirous not to be ungrateful to Him who has granted me so singular a boon: showing my gratitude by changing my life and executing His will in all things." The nun in her reply places much stress upon the need of the country for an heir to the crown, and urges the King to be faithful to his wife, if only for that end; "trying to fix your whole attention and goodwill upon the Queen, without turning your eyes to other objects strange and curious." Philip had no great difficulty at the time in following his friend's advice; for he really was smitten with the fresh charms of his fifteen-year-old niece-wife. He was full of good resolves and saintly protestations; he would never go astray again, for he was as anxious for a son as his people were, though he confided to the nun that he was in doubt whether his wife was as yet mature enough to bear children, "although others of her age, which is fifteen years, are so. But it is easy for our Lord to remedy this, and I hope in His mercy that He will do so."[34] [Illustration: MARIANA DE AUSTRIA: SECOND WIFE OF PHILIP IV. _From a portrait by Velazquez at the Prado Museum_] In the meanwhile, Mariana, the depository of all these hopes, was diverting herself as best she could, in girlish romps with Maria Teresa, and in the constant shows, comedies, and masques which were offered for her pleasure. Once more the {418} Buen Retiro rang with mirth and blazed with lights. The playhouses of the capital again were allowed to open their doors; and the Madrileños did their best to evade, bit by bit, the sumptuary enactments that had kept them in sober garb and outward gravity of demeanour for seven years of war and trouble. Neither the war nor the trouble was yet over, for the plague came almost to the doors of Madrid, and scourged whole provinces; whilst the war with the French still went on in Catalonia and Flanders, and Portugal continued to defy successfully the arms of Philip. But, withal, the drain upon Castile, bad as it still was, became somewhat less pressing; for Mazarin had his hands full in France with the revolt of the Fronde, which, of course, Spain helped to the extent of her possibilities; and the Catalans were far less enamoured with their French masters than they were at first. Don Juan, the King's son, moreover, who was now in command in Catalonia, was doing well, and winning popularity on all sides, whilst the recognition of Dutch independence by Philip had freed his Indies fleets from their greatest danger. The novelty of the King's honeymoon soon wore off, and in his letters to the nun he refers to his wife thenceforward kindly and with solicitude, but as it seems somewhat wearily, and usually in connection with her many more or less disappointed hopes of maternity, or to her love for shows and festivities; which it is quite evident from his tone now palled upon him. Pleasure and the joy of living absorbed most of Mariana's attention, and, immersed as the King was in business {419} and devotion, he could have little in common with his young wife. His own habits were absolutely fixed, and an observer at his Court at the time says that it was possible to foretell a year beforehand exactly what the King would do on a given day and hour.[35] His demeanour in public was like that of a statue, and when he received ambassadors or ministers it was noticed that no muscle of his face moved but his lips, and he rarely showing any emotion, even by a smile. Already the haughty disillusionment, represented by Velazquez so finely in the later portraits, had been fixed indelibly upon his features, and his eyes had grown blear with remorseful tears. In 1651 a daughter was born to Philip and Mariana, and christened with the usual extravagant pomp Margaret Maria,[36] but, though oft expected, the longed-for son came not. Mariana felt her husband growing colder, and guessed his infidelity. Then she fell homesick and disappointed, and Philip became anxious. A splendid series of festivities were arranged at the Buen Retiro to solace and enliven her, an ingenious Florentine being requisitioned to invent novelties to attract her attention. But it was all dust and ashes to Philip now. He speaks in his secret letters always gently of his young wife, sometimes even almost with enthusiasm of her goodness; but it is plain to {420} see that there was little sympathy between them,[37] for his terrible remorse at his moral fragility and evil life, and his grief at the troubles he firmly believed he was bringing upon his people by his own backsliding, show that the struggle between the spirit and the flesh had begun again as severely as ever, and that Mariana was powerless to keep him entirely faithful to her. She, on her side, had soon learnt the lesson of the Court. Her face grew cold and haughty, and her ostentatious German sympathies and repellent Austrian manner cooled the warm-blooded spontaneous Spaniards towards her. Thus, with all stately dignity, decorum, and solemnity in outward seeming, the ill-matched pair lived: passing from Madrid to Aranjuez and the Escorial at stated seasons, wearily going through the dull, depressing tale of prearranged devotions and duties; the Queen seeking such distraction as was possible in comedies and the like, the King spending much time at his desk, reading the never-ending reports of his Councils brought to him by Don Luis de Haro, and scribbling in his big straggling hand on the margins "_Como parece_," or some similar sentence signifying his acquiescence in the conclusions arrived at by his advisers. [Sidenote: Philip's changed life] And behind this dreary changeless round there was, unknown to all but one lonely cloistered woman, a human soul in mortal pain for transgressions real and imaginary, which it was unable to avoid, and yet was convinced were dragging the {421} man it animated and millions of the people that he loved and pitied to suffering and sorrow. Philip's constant correspondence with the nun had changed him much; for it is evident, whatever may have been his shortcomings, that her exhortations to him to be brave, dutiful, and faithful, and her wise insistence upon unceasing work and prayer, had made the King watchful of his own weakness, and kept him from sinking into indifference. It is highly probable, indeed, that in his constant self-reproach his failings at this time were exaggerated by him, as those of his father had been on his deathbed. Certainly, from this time forward he tried his best, according to his lights and strength, to live worthily, and to rescue his country from the trouble into which the policy of his ancestors and himself had dragged it; though still there was no glimmering of true statesmanship such as was needed in circumstances so difficult. Philip's spirit was a poor one; and his faith, notwithstanding his devotion, was far from robust. He continued to look upon himself and his country as doomed irrevocably by the Almighty to suffer for his personal sins and those of his generation, and the only remedy presented to his mind was to plead fervently for mercy through a saintly soul untouched by the sins of the time. Of the efficiency even of this resource he needed constant reassurance, and for ever foresaw disaster whilst he was frantically praying for triumph. Lacking in statesmanship as were Philip and all his advisers, it would nevertheless be unjust to attribute to their ineptitude alone the troubles that overwhelmed Spain. It has been pointed out {422} that Philip inherited both his policy and his methods; and so fixed were they upon the tradition of Charles V. and Philip II., that nothing short of a real genius or a sudden great catastrophe could have altered them. But Philip was specially unfortunate in the international circumstances of his time. The deadly rivalry between the house of Austria and the house of France had existed since the earliest years of the sixteenth century; and wars between them had been frequent since that period. But England had always provided a check to prevent such wars being fought to the bitter end. It had been a fixed canon of English foreign policy that the Flemish dominions of the house of Burgundy, that had descended to the Spanish Kings, must never be allowed to fall into the hands of France, and when such a danger threatened, England invariably interfered in favour of Spain; whilst any aggressive action of France against England, either in Scotland or elsewhere, usually brought Spain to the side of the English sovereigns. But the revolutionary war which had overthrown the monarchy of the Stuarts had for years doomed England to impotence in the struggles of Europe; and Richelieu and his successor Mazarin had been able to disregard an influence which had always previously stepped in to prevent the final humiliation of Spain. Without this immunity from England's interference, France would never have been free to foment rebellion in Catalonia and Portugal; and it may be said that Philip to a great extent owed the extremity of his tribulation to the internal disturbance in England. [Sidenote: Philip and England] It will be recollected that after the diplomacy {423} of Olivares had secured the neutrality of England in the war with France, Sir Arthur Hopton remained in Madrid as English ambassador, having little to do but to press the constant complaints of English shipmasters against the authorities of Spanish ports, and other maritime questions. But in the late summer of 1641, Olivares had sent to Hopton, and in a long interview with him had complained that Charles I. had received an ambassador from the Duke of Braganza, the usurping King of Portugal. Hopton says[38] that the Count-Duke spoke modestly and without much bitterness in the matter, and the English envoy at once pointed out that Charles did not presume to judge of the Duke of Braganza's right to the crown, but that as English interests in Portugal were very large, it was needful that he should negotiate with the power wielding effective control in the country. Sir Arthur, moreover, slyly pointed out that words only had passed between his King and the Portuguese envoy, whereas it was with much more than words that the King of Spain had aided Bavaria to keep the Palatinate. Indeed, with the exception of constantly harping on the Palatinate in his discussions with Philip and his ministers, and complaining of the action of the Spanish ambassador in London, Don Alonso de Cardenas, against Charles I., Sir Arthur Hopton confined himself practically to the negotiation of shipping claims,[39] until affairs in England and his lack of money necessitated his return home in 1644. {424} When at last the axe fell in Whitehall, on the 30th January 1649, upon the neck of the Stuart King, Don Alonso de Cardenas, who was accredited to Charles and not yet to the Parliament, was without definite instructions how to proceed, and for that or some other reason he did not identify himself with the Dutch ambassadors in their protest against the death sentence pronounced upon the King. This may have been an accident; but it is certain that there was little love lost between Charles I. and Philip since the visit of the former to Madrid, and his French marriage. It is true that large numbers of Irish and English troops had been raised for the Spanish service with his consent even during the course of the civil war, but his sympathy with Braganza, and the ostentatiously French leanings of Henrietta Maria, had, as Charles's troubles increased, estranged Philip from him personally. It was, moreover, of the highest importance to Philip that, whoever had command of the English fleet and the Channel, should be friendly with him. [Sidenote: Spain and the Commonwealth] It was a serious thing, nevertheless, for Philip, the soul of legitimacy, to have dealings with rebels and regicides; and when Cardenas conveyed to Secretary Geronimo de la Torre in Madrid the news of the tragedy of Whitehall, Philip and his Councils discussed as usual interminably the best course to be pursued. "Truly," wrote Cardenas, three days after Charles's execution, "I am as grieved as so dreadful a tragedy as that which has befallen this unhappy Prince demands. The events both in this country {425} and abroad have contributed to it, and especially the turmoils in France.... You will now see that what I wrote to you on the 20th August was a true forecast, and indeed I wrote it from certain knowledge I possessed of the designs of these people; namely, that they would try to do without a King, and if they could not succeed in that they would choose the Duke of Gloucester.... We are here in utter chaos, living without religion, King, or law, subject entirely to the power of the sword, and this faction is bearing itself as the conqueror of the realm, wherefrom many novelties will spring."[40] The next letter from Cardenas, on the 19th March (N.S.), warned the Spanish Government that the English were in negotiation with the French, and that unless prompt steps were taken the danger to Spain would be great. This intelligence set Philip's Councils considering again; for unpleasant as it would be to make friends with these "heretic" regicides, their threatened alliance with France in the war would have meant certain ruin for Spain. As usual, the Councils deliberated frequently and at length, and, equally as usual, followed their tradition of avoiding as long as possible decisive action of any sort. An agent of the Parliament came to Cardenas in April 1649 to say that the English Government was desirous of continuing in friendly relations with Spain, and desired to know if King Philip would receive an ambassador from them. This was disconcerting; but the embarrassment was increased by {426} a letter which Sir Francis Cottington wrote to Cardenas from the Hague, saying that the Prince of Wales (Charles II.) had instructed him to go to Madrid as his ambassador, and to ask assistance in his attempts to regain the crown of England. The Council was determined, if possible, to prevent Cottington from coming until the attitude of the French towards Charles was known, but they were very doubtful, on the other hand, about receiving a republican envoy, and accrediting the Spanish ambassador to the Parliament, and thus putting Philip in the unenviable position of offending Charles II. and the legitimist elements in Europe. The result of many weeks of deliberation in Madrid was that which might have been confidently foretold from the first, namely, to cast upon someone else the responsibility of deciding. Philip accordingly wrote to the Archduke Leopold, his Governor of Flanders, asking him, in the first place, to stop Cottington by any pretext until he discovered what his instructions and object were, or to prevent his going to Madrid at all if possible without offending him. Cottington was to be assured secretly of Philip's sympathy with Charles, but to be told that the best way for Charles to regain his father's crown was to bring about peace between Spain and France. The Archduke was instructed to rap Cardenas sharply over the knuckles for saying so much to the agent of the Parliament, and to instruct him to hold the English revolutionary Government at arm's length for the present, "until at least it was solidly established."[41] In the meanwhile no formal declaration was {427} to be made on behalf of Spain, either to Charles II. or to the Parliament; although, with characteristic duplicity, the former was given the title of Majesty in a letter antedated, so that the Parliament, if they learnt of it, might think that it was written before the Stuarts had been excluded from the succession.[42] And, as if to counterbalance this, Cardenas was unofficially to convey to the Parliament Philip's satisfaction at their friendliness. This non-committal attitude, of which Spanish statesmen were always so fond, soon tired the downright English politicians of the Parliament, and they began to show their teeth. In July Cardenas was informed that he would not be treated as an envoy unless he produced new credentials addressed to the Parliamentary Government, and he begged Philip either to recall him or to send new credentials. Philip and his Councils were very loth to do either, intent, as usual, upon running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. At first it was agreed by Philip's Council that the King should not recognise the English Parliament until it was quite clear whether it or Charles II. was likely to prevail in the end; whilst the Stuart Prince in Holland was to be treated with full ceremony, but nothing else. Other Councillors consulted later thought that, as the Parliament was strong and threatening, the Archduke Leopold in Flanders should be empowered to give Cardenas temporary leave to go to Belgium on the pretext of ill-health; but that if any grave occasion should arise another envoy might be sent temporarily, _duly accredited to the Parliament of England_; and {428} a small number of Councillors, whilst deploring the necessity, were in favour of new credentials being sent to Cardenas at once. The matter was finally submitted to Philip himself, who decided that the Archduke should act as he thought best.[43] Being in closer touch with the realities and dangers of the situation in Flanders than were Philip and his Councillors, the Archduke promptly sent credentials to Cardenas addressed to the Parliamentary Government of England; and thus it happened that the ultra-Catholic King of Spain was the first sovereign in Europe formally to recognise the Puritan revolution in England, and the Stuarts had to pay thus for the reception of an envoy of the Braganza King of Portugal by Charles I. years before. The chain of grievances between the Stuarts and Philip was unbroken. The rebuff in Madrid in 1623, the insincere juggling of the Spaniards about the Palatinate, the marriage of Charles I. to a French Princess, and the recognition of the Portuguese pretender led now, in 1649, to the strange and paradoxical position in which Philip, whose Dominican baptism was described in the first pages of this book, and who ever since had been the champion of Catholic orthodoxy, made friends with the stern Ironsides and Puritans of the Long Parliament.[44] It was important also for Cromwell so to deal with the continental Powers as to prevent them from extending to Charles the aid he was so industriously {429} soliciting for the re-establishment of his family on the throne of England; and if France and Spain, from which Cromwell had most to fear, could be conciliated, the main danger from without which threatened the English republic would be avoided. It was therefore natural that the Parliamentary Government should be desirous of establishing as early as possible full diplomatic relations with Spain. The question was on several occasions pressed upon Cardenas in London; but it went against the grain for so proud a sovereign as Philip to receive an ambassador from a Government whose very existence was a negation of the principle of Spanish sovereignty. He dared not, however, drive England into the arms of France against him, and after the usual protracted deliberation the Spanish Council of State reported upon the letter from Cardenas in these words: "It was a matter of the gravest importance to pass over so serious an excess as that which the English had committed in publicly beheading their King and born ruler; and it would be very worthy of great monarchs to contribute to the punishment of those who were guilty of such an atrocious crime."[45] But, nevertheless, whilst they recognised this, they saw the difficulties in the way of Philip's doing so. Again they took shelter behind the former reception of the Portuguese envoy by Charles I., and decided that as yet no other Power had recognised Charles II. there was no reason why they should take the lead in doing so, especially as Prince Rupert's fleet was still finding welcome in Portuguese ports with his prizes. After much preamble of this {430} sort, Philip's Council made a clean breast of it to each other: the Parliament of England, with its fleet, was too strong for Spain to offend, and, distasteful as it might be, the ambassador from the English Parliament must be allowed to reside in Madrid. Cardenas had recommended that a bargain should be made, and that Cromwell, in return for the reception of his envoy in Spain, should refuse to receive a Portuguese envoy in England; but Philip was afraid of drawing the cord too tight, and gave orders that the Puritan ambassador should be placed upon the same footing as the other ministers from foreign Powers resident in his Court. [Sidenote: A Republican envoy] The man chosen for the post was one Anthony Ascham. He must have been in an advanced stage of consumption; for, when he was first appointed in October 1649, he was doubtful if he could go, and wrote to Lord President Bradshaw, saying that the haemorrhage of the lungs from which he suffered was so bad that he must go to his father's house at Boston to recover before he could set out.[46] However, although still in wretched health, he safely arrived at Cadiz, though not without an attack on the voyage from a French man-of-war, on the 17/27 March 1650. The great Andalucian magnate, Duke of Medina Celi, received him with all honour, and took him across to Port St. Mary to lodge at his palace. Ascham wished to go to St. Lucar, as being a quieter place, and better fitted for an invalid; but, to his surprise and indignation, he learnt from the Duke that he was not to be allowed to leave Port St. Mary until instructions came from Madrid. The Duke, indeed, {431} expressed haughty astonishment that the Parliament should have presumed to send an envoy at all until they learnt King Philip's pleasure in the matter. Philip knew all about his coming months before, Ascham replied; and whatever orders came from Madrid to the Duke, he, Ascham, would only acknowledge a direct reply to the letter of the Parliament to King Philip. It was clear that, although fear forced the Government in Madrid to receive the envoy, they were determined to snub him as much as possible, and during the time Ascham was detained at Port St. Mary, not unwillingly, for he was still very ill, it was decided that although he might be sent to Madrid with an escort to ensure his safety, when he arrived there he was to be kept waiting on various pretexts as long as possible before even being received by Don Luis de Haro, who was to avoid all negotiations or agreements when he did see him, until he knew the tenour of his instructions and his object in coming to Spain;[47] the intention of Philip and his Councillors evidently being to compromise themselves as little as possible until it was proved which party in England would ultimately triumph. Ascham was kept in Port St. Mary's until almost the middle of May, though treated with ostentatious respect; and at last, with an escort of six Spanish officers, headed by a colonel, slowly moved on through the burning Andalucian summer to Madrid. He had naturally expected to be taken, as was usual, to some good private house retained by the King for his accommodation; but, much to his {432} surprise, the colonel who was the chief of his escort led him on the day of his arrival, Sunday, 5th June, to a poor inn kept by a widow named Pandes in the Calle del Caballero de Gracia. Ascham, who was accompanied by a secretary named Fischer, an Italian interpreter, and an English servant, remonstrated against being thus exposed to the discomfort and danger of lodging in an open posada without locks or bolts upon the doors. The colonel was very haughty and off-handed about it, doubtless prompted by his superiors, and told the envoy that his duty was ended in bringing him safely to Madrid; but that he would return in the morning. Ascham, in high dudgeon, remained at the inn that night, and early in the morning sent for an Englishman named Marston resident in Madrid, who came at once, accompanied by another Englishman who was with him at the time, one Laurence Chambers.[48] To them Ascham, in alarm, stated the case. Here he was, he said, without even a lock on his door, in a Catholic country swarming with enemies of his Government and his religion; with Sir Francis Cottington posing at the Spanish Court as the representative of Charles Stuart; and yet the colonel, who had just visited him, had told him that he must look after his own safety, for he had done with him. [Sidenote: Murder of Ascham] Ascham had that morning sent his interpreter to see Secretary Geronimo de la Torre, who had {433} expressed surprise at the colonel's action; and had promised to place some of the King's own guard at Ascham's disposal. "But in the meanwhile," said Ascham, "here I am in hourly danger of my life, for I cannot trust these people." His own ignorance of Spanish had prevented his understanding his escort's instructions, and whether the safe-conduct sent to Medina Celi covered his stay in Madrid and his return to the coast. "If not," said poor Ascham, "I am a dead man." Marston and Chambers agreed as to his danger, and at once set out to find him a fitting lodging in a safe house. Whilst the Englishmen were house-hunting for the unfortunate ambassador in the forenoon of the 6/16 June, another party of their countrymen were drinking in a tavern within a few doors of the posada where Ascham was lodged. For years Catholic Irish and North and West countrymen from England had been incorporated in the Spanish armies; and at the final break up of the royalist forces in England many of Charles's late soldiers enlisted under the same banner. They were a turbulent, swaggering lot, though good soldiers, and were wont to hang about the Catholic Flemish cities and Madrid until new companies were formed in which they could serve. Five or six men of this sort it was who were drinking in the tavern in the Calle del Caballero de Gracia. There was Major Halsey, a man from Lancashire; Captain Prodgers, a Welshman; Captain Williams, his compatriot; Valentine Roche, an Irishman; and one Sparkes, a merchant's book-keeper from Oxford, as well as a Scottish trumpeter named Arnet. The talk {434} turned upon the arrival in Madrid on the previous evening of the Roundhead ambassador, sent by the men who had murdered his Sacred Majesty King Charles. It were a good deed to kill such a crop-eared knave, said one of the swashbucklers; for he had even written a scurvy book defending the regicides. The wine was heady and cheap; and as they talked thus and drank, the project grew in favour, for were they not in Catholic Spain, where to kill a heretic and a rebel, envoy or no envoy, was a godly deed that all men praised? In the meanwhile Marston and Chambers came back to the posada, which was still without a guard, and informed Ascham that they had found an excellent and secure lodging for him. Mr. Fischer was asked to go with them to see the house and settle the bargain; but dinner being on the table in the room on the first floor occupied by Ascham, the latter asked his countrymen to partake of the meal before going. Marston declined, and earnestly recommended the envoy to forego his dinner and move to the new lodgings instantly, since the guard had not come, and he had reason to feel apprehensive for the envoy's safety. The Italian interpreter, John Baptist Arribas, made light of the danger, and persuaded Ascham to dine first and then to transfer his lodging, whether the King's guard came or not. With this Marston and Chambers, accompanied by the secretary Fischer, went out, leaving Ascham and his interpreter at dinner, attended by the English serving-man. Presently a tramping upon the stairs was heard, and the Lancashire soldier, Major Edward Halsey, entered the room, followed by Williams, Sparkes, {435} and Arnet; whilst the others remained at the door and the head of the stairs. Halsey advanced as if to salute the envoy, and the latter rose, but seeing the three others following Halsey he drew back towards a side table upon which some loaded pistols were lying. Before he could reach it Halsey seized him by the hair and cried out, "Traitor!" whilst Williams thrust him through the arm with a dagger, and another stabbed him in the temples. The unhappy envoy fell at once, and the murderers hacked him about the head and body as he lay; whilst the Italian, in mortal fear, made as if to fly, crying out in Spanish, "I am not the man!" But as he ran towards the door he was slashed across the stomach by Halsey and another of the ruffians, and was just able to stagger into the bedroom beyond, where he fell dead. Then the six assassins fled, as they had arranged to do, to the Church of St. Andres, a door or two away in the same street, where before the high altar they claimed sanctuary. In a few minutes all the quarter was in an uproar, from the Red de San Luis at the top of the street to the Convent of St. Hermenegildo at the bottom. Grave alcaldes carrying white wands, and followed by alguacils, surrounded the posada, and on entering the upper room they found Ascham and the Italian interpreter lying dead, and the English serving-man uninjured, but almost beside himself with terror. The case was so scandalous that the alcalde ordered the murderers to be taken from sanctuary, a most unusual thing, which was looked upon askance by those who saw it. But Philip had been determined, since he had enjoyed the support of the nun, {436} to allow no immunity to open assassination in the capital; and with shouts of indignant protest five of the prisoners were led off to gaol. [Sidenote: Spain and Cromwell] Much interrogation there was of Mr. Fischer. Why had they come to Spain? What was their religion? and finally, the poor secretary had his money and papers seized, and was borne off to remain in strict seclusion in the alcalde's house pending the orders of His Majesty. Philip was intensely annoyed at the news of the crime, which rendered his position with Cromwell's Government more difficult than ever. He found himself, to begin with, at issue with the ecclesiastical authorities, who peremptorily demanded the restoration of the prisoners to sanctuary; the murderers, moreover, openly boasted of their deed, and competed with each other in claiming the leading part in it. The feeling in Madrid was, of course, strongly in favour of them; for was it not a virtue to kill an unrepentant heretic and rebel regicide? Every Madrileño who had enjoyed himself at an _auto-de-fé_ knew that it was a saintly act and not murder which these men had done; and they in their prison were the heroes of the hour. Philip personally could hardly be expected to look upon it otherwise; for in his eyes a King, however bad, was sacrosanct. Yet how could he let the murderers of a political envoy under his safe-conduct go free, and thus arouse the ire of Cromwell, who with his Council now wielded the power of England, and could ruin Spanish commerce as well as ensure the victory of the French in the lingering war. Again political expediency won the day; for Philip refused to surrender the {437} prisoners to the Church or to the Inquisition, and they remained in prison until the affair blew over and circumstances changed; when all but one of them, who had died, were quietly let out and disappeared. In the meanwhile Fischer assumed the part of agent in Madrid for the Parliament, and was treated by Haro with marked politeness and respect. "Had Fischer any authority to negotiate an alliance?" asked Don Luis. "No," replied Fischer. "The Parliament is not so much perplexed at the murder of their agent as at the tardance thereby of a firm league between the two countries." Haro said that the King was still just as anxious to be friendly as the English were. "Are not the French and the Portuguese the enemies both of the Parliament and of King Philip?" "Yes," replied Fischer; "but the Parliament will be very scrupulous about sending another envoy until they know how Ascham's murderers are to be punished."[49] "Cottington," writes Fischer, "is still here, and lives in good fashion, by his Catholic Majesty's charity; although I am confident he can work little with him,--but he passeth better here than he can elsewhere, so he thinks not of departure. Had the Parliament once capitulated with his Majesty (_i.e._ Philip) I suppose he would be quickly cashiered."[50] Fischer was not a man of sufficient standing to bring about an international agreement; and by Cromwell's orders he returned to England in {438} 1651, without having negotiated an alliance. But thenceforward Cromwell and Philip were polite and friendly to each other to an extent that filled English royalists and Catholics with indignant surprise. A high noble, the Marquis de Lede, was sent from Spanish Flanders to congratulate the Lord Protector upon the assumption of his new dignity; and Cardenas had nothing but kind messages to give from his master to the English Puritans. Cromwell, however, wanted something more solid than amiable messages. He knew full well, as indeed Fischer wrote, that fear, not love, made the Spanish King so courteous. Cromwell had, it is true, secured something when he prevented Spain from helping the Stuarts, but he wanted also as conditions of the proposed alliance with Spain that freedom should be given to English ships to trade in the West Indies, that the power of the Inquisition over Englishmen in Spain should be limited, that reciprocal advantages in the matter of duties should be given to English and Spanish trade, and that English merchants should be allowed to buy wool in Spain. [Sidenote: Cromwell seizes Jamaica] The two first demands were flatly and haughtily refused by Cardenas in Philip's name, and Cromwell looked around for a means of coercion, for he was in no humour to take the traditional view of Spain's awesome superiority. He found it in Mazarin's difficulties in France, and his urgent need to end the war quickly at any cost. The aid of England on the sea would make all the difference, and if he obtained it Spain must bow the head and accept the terms he offered them. So he bade higher than Philip for Cromwell's friendship,--Dunkirk, {439} a Spanish Flemish port to be jointly captured, being the bribe; and Blake, who had long been co-operating with Philip to suppress Moorish piracy in the Mediterranean, suddenly sailed with the Parliament fleet, and without a declaration of war fell upon the Spanish silver fleet in the Atlantic, whilst Penn and Venables attacked Mexico and St. Domingo unsuccessfully, and without warning captured from the Spaniards the rich island of Jamaica. This was in May 1655; and the news fell upon Philip like an avalanche. Panic spread through Seville and Cadiz, and curses loud and deep of the falsity of heretics rang through Liars' Walk and the Calle Mayor. For all these years poor overburdened Spain had kept at bay half the world in arms, but hitherto the diplomacy which had successfully kept England neutral had saved her from being utterly overwhelmed. Now, as hope was dawning that her great antagonist was fainting from the domestic strife which crippled Mazarin, and that terms honourable to Philip's pride and respectful to the integrity of his territory could be attained, the new and strong republican England had cast her glaive into the scale on the side of France; and Spain, already exhausted, plague-ridden, and bankrupt, was face to face with two great enemies instead of one. Well might Philip write to the nun when he heard of the intentions of the English fleets, and the probable outbreak of hostilities: "If this should happen it would be the final ruin of this realm; and no human power would be able to stop it: the Almighty hand of God alone could do it; and so I beseech you most {440} earnestly to supplicate Him to take pity upon us, and not to allow the infidels to destroy realms so pure in the faith and so religious as these are. Blessed be His holy name!"[51] [1] A pathetic account of his deathbed is given by Novoa. After eighty-eight days of continual fever, the miraculous image of Our Lady of Bois le Duc was brought to his sick chamber. As the image entered the door the Prince chanted the hymn, "Mater, Mater Gratia," and when he reached the words "Mater Misericordia" he faltered and died. [2] The Cortes of Castile voted 4,000,000 ducats a year for six years in June 1643, and the silver fleet arrived in Seville intact with a large treasure, which was seized by the Government as a forced loan. [3] The story of the battle of Rocroy is told in minutest detail by Canovas del Castillo in _Estudios de Reinado de Felipe IV._, vol. ii. [4] Newsletter, Valladares' _Semanario Erudito_, vol. xxxiii. [5] Many isolated letters have been known, and some of them published, at various times; but in 1885 the whole correspondence, so far as it is known, was published by my lamented friend, Don Francisco Silvela. [6] Oran, a Spanish fortress on the African coast, was closely beleaguered by land and sea by the Moors, at the instance, so it was said, of the new King of Portugal. The Duke of Arcos, Governor of Valencia, managed to run the blockade with two English ships full of provisions, and the place was thus relieved. The superstitious Madrileños of the time attributed the relief to a miraculous painting of the Virgin that had just been discovered in Madrid. A servant girl had begun to sing a hymn of praise and dance before the figure, when she saw the fingers of the painting move. Her cries brought the crowd to see the miracle, and all Madrid was stirred. The painting was taken to the convent of Discalced Carmelites. The next day it was exposed in the church, and the news came of the relief of Oran. Newsletters, Valladares. [7] Villadares' Newsletter. [8] The punishments were terrible. In a Newsletter written during this winter it is mentioned that two young gentlemen of birth had been hanged that week as known thieves. "A young girl who was their accomplice did not accompany them, as she was not old enough to be hanged, but they gave her two hundred lashes, and cut off her ears under the scaffold, after which they kept her all day hanging by the hair in sight of the public; so that she died of the punishment within two days." Valladares. [9] The famous Villanueva, we are told, had to dance attendance upon Secretary Andres de Rozas instead of keeping everybody waiting in his antechamber; and the King's former confessor had to pay his respects in the cell of Friar Santo Tomas, who was now the King's spiritual guide. [10] A Newsletter of the time gives rather a quaint instance of the feeling against him at Saragossa. Don Antonio de Mendoza, the poet, entered a room where Guzman was playing cards. Guzman impatiently said: "How tiresome that man is to me." Mendoza stood behind his chair to watch the game. "Get away from there," said Guzman, addressing the noble as "Vos," You, instead of "Your Worship." This was repeated, when Mendoza in a rage said: "I am not 'Vos' to you, and don't intend to be," and flung off to complain to the King. [11] Valladares' Newsletter, 28th July 1643. [12] The King's good example had as yet done but little to wean the Madrid people from their bad habits. On the 26th December a gentleman was shot dead before the Church of St. Sebastian, and the next day a murderous affray in a playhouse about a seat ended in two deaths. [13] The advice to which this refers is significant, and was evidently intended to be so by the nun, although the words she uses are very cautious and involved. "I supplicate your Majesty, as your servant, to make yourself thoroughly versed in everything touching you. This admonition is very important, and in order to adopt it with full knowledge of facts, your Majesty should choose, guided by your own sound judgment, someone whom you can depend upon, and listen to him with the fitting dissimulation. God will not deny this boon to your Majesty; and when you have learnt the truth, the execution should be rapid; for the evil is great and the remedy needs resolution. God assist your Majesty and rule your heart." This probably refers to the reform of the social and moral evils in Madrid, as that subject had been broached by the nun in her first interview with Philip. [14] Valladares' Newsletter. [15] _Ibid._ [16] Only a few weeks before her death, she had gone to the Discalced Convent to visit the Duchess of Mantua with Baltasar Carlos. When she entered the apartment she noticed that the cushions placed under the canopy for her to sit upon were of black velvet. She thought black unlucky, as the King was in danger; and she made an excuse not to sit down. When she had sent her son off to play about the convent, she sat upon the carpet rather than risk the ill-luck of sitting on black cushions. Valladares' Newsletter. [17] One of her last acts had been to issue a stringent decree--probably suggested to Philip by the nun of Agreda, with regard to the comedies, of which in her happier days she had been so inordinately fond. In future it was ordered that no fictitious plots should be represented, but only scenes from the Scriptures or from history. No actors, male or female, were to dress in gold cloth; and no unmarried woman nor widow was to be allowed to appear on a stage, only married women, whilst gentlemen were not permitted to visit an actress more than twice. New plays were not allowed to be produced more than once a week; and plays in private houses were forbidden; whilst the managers were not to receive in their companies any actors but those known to be decent and well behaved. Valladares' Newsletter, March 1644. [18] Novoa; Valladares' Newsletters; Florez, _Reinas Catolicas_, and Martin Hume's _Queens of Old Spain_. [19] _Life of Sor Maria_, quoted by Florez. [20] _Cartas de Sor Maria_. [21] Avisos de Pullicer. [22] The Prince, who had seen the nun on his way to Saragossa, wrote the following artless letter to her about his betrothal. "Mother, two or three days ago my father gave me a letter from you congratulating me on the marriage that my father has made for me with the Archduchess Mariana. I am the most pleased in the world to have taken this state, especially with my cousin, who was the one I wished for ever since I had use of my reason; and it seems impossible to me that I could have come across any other woman so much to my taste. So I hope His Divine Majesty will let us be very happily married, which is all I can hope for. I ask you to pray for this. Our Lord guard you.--I, THE PRINCE. Saragossa, 20th July 1646." [23] Her reproaches were curiously framed. Just as after the Queen's death she had tried to reform the extravagance of women's dress by pretending to have seen Isabel's ghost in trouble for her fine garments on earth, so she now appealed to Philip to keep hard at work, by saying that the soul of Baltasar Carlos had told her that he was troubled to see his father surrounded by people who looked after their own interests rather than after those of the nation. _Cartas de Sor Maria_, 30th January 1647. [24] One of their proposals was to evacuate Catalonia in exchange for Spanish Flanders. [25] Writing to the nun on 15th July 1648 from Madrid, in reply to her expressions of sorrow at the vice prevalent, he says: "It pierces my heart, too, to see the vicious state at which the world has arrived. I recognise it as clearly as you do, and as I cannot remedy it so quickly as I should like I am greatly troubled; although I do what I can. God grant that I may succeed in remedying it, and that I may begin by my own amendment; for there is no doubt that I need it more than anyone. Pray for me, Sor Maria, ... for I have need of your help against my own frailty." _Cartas de Sor Maria_. [26] _Ibid._ [27] How deep this feeling was is seen by the courtier Novoa's words at the time (_Memorias_). "The only place where the war was carried on with activity was here in Castile, and that in a most unheard-of way, by disarming subjects and divesting them of their property on the pretext of the war. Even the treasury warrants which had been specially exempt from deduction were again seized and forced to yield a half. When those who had to pay were advised not to do so, because whilst the war lasted so long would the Government cut their purses and would soon take everything, a certain person asked: 'Why do they give habits? (of knighthood).--'Because they are cloth,' was the reply. 'Why do they give keys?' (_i.e._ the office of chamberlain).--'Because they are iron.' 'Why do they give titles?'--'Because they are air.' 'Why do they not give money?'--'Because that is the essence and substance of everything, and they do not wish anyone to have it.' And he added: 'God save us from him who is liberal to vice and stingy to virtue, for the only people now who are comfortable and placed aloft are concubines and the women who look after them, low and common women, and those men who have been base enough to marry them.'" This was pretty plain speaking for a courtier; but, of course, the Memoirs were not made public for many years after. [28] Egerton MSS., 367, 181. [29] The "prison of the Court" still stands nearly opposite the Plaza de Santa Cruz, at the end of the Calle de Atocha, and near the entrance to the Plaza Mayor. It was built in 1634 by the same Italian architect who had designed the Buen Retiro, and is a very handsome building. It is now used as the Spanish Foreign Office, which was formerly housed in the basement floor of the royal palace. [30] A tedious account from day to day of her doings was written by Mascarenhas, Bishop of Leiria, who accompanied her. _Viage de la Serenisima Reina_, etc., Madrid, 1650. [31] Some days before arriving at Denia the Queen's flotilla had anchored at Tarragona to water, and amongst other ceremonies the Queen was amused during the necessary delay by the representation of a comedy by Roque de Figueroa on the quarter-deck of her vessel. Pinelo, _Anales_. [32] I have remarked in my _Queens of Old Spain_ that the reason why these wretched villages were often chosen for royal weddings was the custom to free them thenceforward from seigniorial tributes. [33] Soto y Aguilar gives interminable accounts of the festivities to celebrate the entrance of the Queen into Madrid. The entertainments lasted nearly a month. Novoa says that on the 27th November the King himself took part in a "masquerade" on horseback, as in old times, running in a pair with his first minister and favourite, Don Luis de Haro: "all the nobles and gentles in the realm taking part in this show, which in liveries and splendid appointments surpassed all others. It was indeed a day of marvellous brilliancy. A proclamation was issued by sound of drum, by which the King gave leave to men of business and capitalists trading abroad for them to fit out eighty ships and trade with them in his ports and those of his allies, but not with the French Catalans or Portuguese. Politicians talked much of this, thinking it would be of the greatest advantage to the country." The chronicler, however, says that no advantage was taken of the permission, as merchants thought that the ships would be seized for the King. This shows how completely confidence had been lost in the honesty of Philip's Government, even by his friends. [34] _Cartas de Sor Maria._ [35] Aersens van Sommerdyk. [36] Florez relates that at this sumptuous christening the little Infanta Maria Teresa was god-mother, and in drawing off her glove she dropped a very precious bracelet of brilliants. A lady in the crowd picked it up and offered it to the Infanta, who even thus early had learnt the haughty traditions of her house, to take nothing from the hand of anyone but certain officials, made a sign that the lady was to keep the bracelet, _Reinas Catolicas_. [37] He usually speaks of her in the earlier years as "my niece," not as "my wife," or "the Queen," and very frequently mentions her and his daughter together as "the girls." [38] Record Office MSS., S.P. Spain 42. [39] See Hopton's summary of his proceedings in Spain. Record Office MSS., S.P. Spain 42. [40] MSS. Simancas, _Estado_, 2526; Canovas, del Castillo, _Estudios del Reinado de Felipe IV._ [41] Simancas MSS., _Estado_, 2526; Canovas del Castillo. [42] Simancas MSS., _Estado_, 2526; Canovas del Castillo. [43] Canovas del Castillo. [44] I have remarked elsewhere (_Spanish Influences in English Literature_) the strange approximation of the Spanish mystics (such as Sor Maria) with the English Puritans. [45] MSS. Simancas, _Estado_, 2526; Canovas del Castillo. [46] MSS. Record Office. S.P. Spain 42. [47] _Consultas del Consejo de Estado_, Simancas. [48] The present narrative is compiled from (1) the details of Ascham's murder, given to the English Council by Laurence Chambers on his return to England (Record Office MSS., S.P. Spain 43); (2) the letters of Fischer, the secretary, in the same packet; and (3) an unpublished manuscript deposition of the prisoners in Bib. Nat., Madrid, i. 325, transcribed by me. [49] Fischer's letters and full account of his negotiations are in Record Office MSS., S.P. Spain 43. [50] Fischer to the Council, 26th November 1650. MSS. Record Office. [51] _Cartas de Sor Maria_, 30th June 1655. {441} CHAPTER X MORAL AND SOCIAL DECADENCE IN MADRID--PHILIP'S HABITS--POVERTY IN THE PALACE--VELAZQUEZ--THE MENINAS--BIRTH OF AN HEIR--THE CHRISTENING--THE PEACE OF THE PYRENEES--PHILIP'S JOURNEY TO THE FRONTIER--MARRIAGE OF MARIA TERESA--CAMPAIGNS IN PORTUGAL--DON JUAN--DEATH OF HARO--PHILIP BEWITCHED--DEATH OF PHILIP PROSPER--BIRTH OF CHARLES--FANSHAWE's EMBASSY--LADY FANSHAWE AND SPAIN--ROUT OF CARACENA IN PORTUGAL--PHILIP'S ILLNESS--THE INQUISITION AND WITCHCRAFT--DEATH OF PHILIP By great good fortune there have survived descriptions and accounts of life in Philip's Court at the time of which we now write (1654-1660), so minute and so photographic in their fidelity, as to provide absolutely trustworthy material for a true comparison of the condition of affairs after five-and-twenty years of a disastrous reign, with that which had existed on the King's accession. A writer of keen observation, insatiable curiosity, ample opportunity, and much literary skill, the noble churchman and poet Jeronimo de Barrionuevo, from 1654 for several years wrote almost every week a chatty letter from Madrid to his friend the Dean of Saragossa and others, setting {442} forth with perfect frankness everything worth recording that passed in Madrid. At the same time, an observant Hollander named Aersens van Sommerdyk visited Spain, and stayed in the capital long enough to write an account of the social and political condition of the Court as it appeared to an intelligent foreigner; whilst shortly afterwards the sparkling narrative of life in Madrid, written by the Frenchman Bonnecasse, came to confirm the impressions of the Spaniard and the Dutchman.[1] If we add to these Philip's own weekly letters to the nun, and the reports of the Venetian ambassadors, which are also in print, we have a mass of contemporary evidence which cannot be contradicted, especially in matters upon which all agree. [Sidenote: Madrid in 1655-1660] It is well that this should be so; for the picture to be presented of life in the capital of the Spains at the end of Philip's reign is so gloomy, that the historian who ventured to produce it without full contemporary warrant would be accused of bias {443} and exaggeration. At the beginning of the reign we saw a fairly numerous class of nobles, churchmen, and officials, still rich with royal grants and government plunder; whilst the mass of the people were sunk in poverty. At the time of which we are now writing the nobles themselves had been bled to a state of bankruptcy. They and the Church were supposed to be exempt from taxation; but the demands made upon them, and especially upon the nobles, for funds for the war had ended by reducing most of them to the same poverty-stricken condition as their inferiors in rank. The financial and mercantile classes had lost all confidence; for the arbitrary seizure of their property again and again by the Government, and the crushing taxation on exports, even to Spanish colonies, had driven them to universal evasion and contraband, to the further depletion of Philip's resources.[2] Haro, who had a revenue of 130,000 ducats a year, and a few of his kinsmen, were still very rich, and continued to plunder all they could, though there was, indeed, little left to plunder; and in addition to these, the only people who had much ready money to spend were the colonial officials who had returned home with the booty of their offices. The idleness and pretension of all classes in the capital had increased now to such an extent, that practically the whole of the necessary work had to be done by foreigners; there being as many as 40,000 French subjects in Madrid dressing as Spaniards, and calling themselves Burgundians or Walloons, to escape the special tax on foreigners.[3] {444} By these people most crafts and callings were conducted, the Spanish working classes being occupied mainly in casual service, petty traffic, and mendicancy; whilst highway robbery and murder, even in Madrid, was so frequent as to cause no remark. The streets were more filthy and dilapidated than ever, and still the crowd of idlers on foot and in vast number of coaches, drawn by mules now, for the horses had been seized, thronged the promenades,--the Calle Mayor in the winter, the Prado and river bank in the summer; the humbler classes elbowing their social superiors with perfect effrontery, wearing swords and daggers, claiming equal respect, and, indeed, swaggering more than the nobles. The two playhouses, which had been reopened on the King's second marriage, were crammed every day with artizans dressed in imitation or cast-off finery, and calling themselves _caballeros_, who had to pay from 10 to 15 sous in all for a seat;[4] and, whilst the fields were mostly tilled, if at all, and the urban labour was performed, by foreigners, the very cloth upon Spanish backs being made in Holland and England from Spanish wool, the native working classes still vociferously kept up the silly tradition of their own gentility, and of national potency and the overwhelming wealth of the King. The alternate appreciation and debasement of the coinage had enormously raised the price of commodities, and especially of house rent {445} in Madrid; the houses being still low, shabby, and incommodious, for the most part, owing to the claim of the King to the first floor of every house or its equivalent in money. But what struck foreigners, and indeed observant Spaniards, at this period, was the appalling profligacy still prevalent in Madrid. Public women almost monopolised the promenades; their shameless impudence in broad daylight having the effect of lowering the standard of behaviour, even of decent women, who thought it no insult, but rather the contrary, to be addressed in amorous terms by strange men in the street.[5] The women, for the most part, still went about, notwithstanding the prohibition, with shawls covering their faces except one eye, and this facilitated intrigue in all classes to a shocking extent. The Government were in despair about the utter disregard by women of the dress regulations; for the wide farthingales, stiff, extravagant wigs, and fine stuffs were worn in spite of all pragmatics, since the Queen and her ladies set the fashion; and the only persons punished were the unfortunate shopkeepers who supplied the offending things. The whole moral situation in Spain was indeed a social problem which can only be explained by the lack of feminine influence in society at the time and previously. There had always remained a taint of Oriental tradition in the treatment of women in Spain. They had been kept in strict seclusion; {446} they were for the most part entirely ignorant, and had never taken an equal social position with men, usually dining apart from their husbands, visiting each other in closed chairs or coaches, and spent their time squatting on the ground in circles talking trivialities or devotion, whilst the men were rarely accompanied by their woman-kind in public. It was therefore no wonder that in such a state of society as this, ladies and modest women for the most part abandoned the streets and public places to utter profligacy; and that men, free from the salutary influence exercised by the presence of good women, sank deeper and deeper into vice. Philip, under the influence of the nun, had striven hard to make his capital more decent; but the whole tide of feeling was contrary and too strong for him; whilst his own example in this respect was a very bad one, which seriously weakened his efforts. Barrionuevo, in one of his letters at this time, mentions the King as being "a fine hand at bastards, but with very poor luck as regards legitimate children"; and shortly afterwards, during one of Philip's spasmodic attempts to cleanse his capital, the same writer says: "They are arresting all the women they find wandering unoccupied about the streets, and hailing them off by tens and twenties to prison with their hands tied. The gaol is crammed full, so that they have hardly room to stand, and the house will have to be largely extended if this rigour is to go on, or vast supplies of wood will have to be laid in to burn some of them otherwise." In the matter of men's dress Philip's example had agreed with his precept; and here he had {447} succeeded in imposing the fashion of sombre modesty. No man was allowed to enter his presence, or even to tender a petition to him as he went to Mass through his lines of red and yellow halberdiers, unless apparelled entirely in black, and wearing a _golilla_. The style of dress had changed somewhat since the King's accession. The hats were much smaller, and often of silk instead of felt, and profusely trimmed with black lace. The doublet, trunks, and cape of the men were usually of black baize, as was the _ropilla_, a close-fitting unbuttoned tunic reaching to the thighs, with open sleeves hanging from the shoulder; though gentlemen often wore black silk doublets and trunks in the summer. The trunks or breeches were now cut quite narrow, with buttons at the knee, like modern knickerbockers; and the fashion was to wear thin black silk stockings over thick white ones, and the shoes were tied with very broad black ribbons.[6] The King was now rarely seen in public, except that on two days in the week he sat almost motionless for an hour in public audience to receive petitions, which with a slight inclination of his head he referred to Don Luis de Haro. The various Councils, as before, discussed at great length every point touching their respective departments, and, unseen, the King might listen to their deliberations; but practically his intervention in their business was confined now to his {448} sitting upon his throne every Friday morning, whilst the respective secretaries recited what had been done during the previous week. The King's assent to their recommendations was usually given simply by the words "_Está bien_," It is well; but if the matter appeared to demand further attention he turned to Don Luis de Haro, who stood by his side, and told him to speak to him later about it. Don Luis de Haro was in all but name a Vice-King. Everyone, even the Secretary of State, knelt whilst he addressed him, and Philip appended his signature "Yo el Rey," with little or no inquiry, to everything that the favourite placed before him. His finances were more hopelessly involved than ever, especially after Cromwell joined the French against him: and he told the Cortes of Castile in the previous year, 1654, that out of the 10 million ducats voted to him by them he only received 3 millions. From the Indies in all he received in good years from 1½ to 2 millions of ducats;[7] whilst about 2 millions came from Aragon, etc. Out of a total nominal revenue, therefore, of about 18 million ducats he only received about 8 or 9 millions, the rest being either anticipated or intercepted by peculation; and in the year 1654 he confessed to an uncovered debt of 120 million ducats. But, withal, though Philip himself made no secret of his poverty, the country at large, and particularly the people of Madrid, insisted upon boasting still Of the boundless wealth at his disposal. There are in Barrionuevo's letters scores of references to the squalid penury that existed {449} everywhere at this period,[8] even in the interior of Philip's palace; but the following short extract from one of them, belonging to the year 1657, will suffice. [Sidenote: Poverty in the palace] "For the last two months and a half the usual rations have not been distributed in the palace; for the King has not a _real_. On the day of St. Francis they served a capon to the Infanta (Maria Teresa), who ordered them to take it away, as it stank like a dead dog. They then brought her a chicken, of which she is fond, on sippets of toast, but it was so covered with flies that she nearly overturned the lot. This is how things go on in the palace.... It appears also that the Queen likes to finish her dinner with sweetmeats; but as none had been brought to her table for some days, she asked the lady whose business it is to attend to these things, why they were not served as usual. She replied that the confectioner refused to supply them because he could not get paid, and a large amount was owing to him. The lady then drew a ring from her finger, and said to a servant: 'Run out at once and get some sweetmeats, anywhere, with this jewel.' But the buffoon Manuelito de Gante was present, and cried: 'Put your finger in your ring again, mistress'; and with that he took a copper real from his pocket and said: 'Go and get some {450} sweetmeats quickly, so that this good lady may finish her dinner.'" With poverty touching even the Queen's own table, with Philip and his ministers in despair of finding fresh means to extort more money from the empty pockets of subjects, and from the hidden hoards of the Church, lavish waste still jostled carking poverty. Barrionuevo gives an account of an entertainment provided by the Marquis of Heliche, the eldest son of Haro, a few months only before the scene just described (January 1657), to celebrate the visit paid to him by Philip and his wife at the Zarzuela outside Madrid, where, in addition to comedies and the like, a great banquet was prepared. [Sidenote: A gargantuan feast] "It cost 16,000 ducats.... There was a dinner served of 1000 dishes; and there was one monstrous stew in a huge jar sunk in the ground with a fire beneath it.... It contained a three-year-old calf, 4 sheep, 100 pairs of pigeons, 100 partridges, 100 rabbits, 1000 pigs' trotters, and 1000 tongues, 200 fowls, 30 hams, 500 sausages, and 100,000 other trifles. They say it cost 8000 reals, though mostly presents. Everything I am telling you is true, and I minimise rather than exaggerate. There were three or four thousand persons present, and there was plenty for everybody, and to spare. So much was left, indeed, that it was brought back to Madrid in baskets, and I got some relieves and scraps. And all this was in addition to tarts and puffs and pasties, sweet cakes, preserves, fruits, and enormous quantities of wine and sweet drinks. {451} The Venice ambassador presented 500 ducats' worth of glass, and Tutavilla gave a similar amount of crockery.... All the scenery and apparatus have been brought to the Retiro, to the new theatre which they have made in the St. Paul's Hermitage there, and the whole affair is to be repeated there this carnival." It is hardly necessary to say that, in reward for this Gargantuan feast, Heliche was made a grandee a few days afterwards. Philip took no pleasure personally now in these coarse frivolities; though Mariana hungered for them, to distract her from the fits of homesick depression into which she periodically sank in the dull monotony of her life and her frequently disappointed hopes of renewed motherhood. The King himself was well-nigh despondent: going through his life like a leaden automaton, signing papers placed before him by Haro, usually without discussion or remark.[9] His condition, indeed, now was closely akin to melancholy religious madness, such was the morbid misery that preyed upon him: in anticipation of an early death, weeping for his own sins, for the utter ruin that seemed impending, {452} and for the continued absence of a male heir to his broken realms. One of his strange whims at this time was to pass hours alone in the new jasper mausoleum at the Escorial, to which he had transferred the bodies of his ancestors shortly before. After one of these visits in 1654, he wrote to Sor Maria: "I saw the corpse of the Emperor, whose body, although he has been dead ninety-six years, is still perfect; and by this it may be seen how richly the Lord has repaid him for his efforts in favour of the faith whilst he lived. It helped me much, especially as I contemplated the place where I am to lie when God shall take me. I prayed Him not to let me forget what I saw there." Soon afterwards, Barrionuevo records that the King had passed two solitary hours upon his knees in prayer on the bare stones of the mausoleum before the niche which was to be his own final resting-place; and that when he came out his eyes were red and swollen with weeping. [Sidenote: "The meninas"] The years went on, and still Mariana's repeated hopes of progeny were disappointed. Her own health was not good, for she fretted much, whilst Philip's troubles had crushed and aged him sadly. The Indian silver, which had previously been so precious a contribution to his revenue, was now regularly captured by Cromwell's cruisers, which closely beleaguered Cadiz. The French on the Flemish frontier and in Catalonia were still holding his territory, though Don Juan was doing his best and not unsuccessfully in Flanders (1656-57). Peace, as Philip well knew, was now a vital necessity for him; but pride still kept him from surrendering to the foreigner the land of his fathers, and Mazarin's {453} terms were as yet too humiliating for acceptance by a Power which had for so long claimed predominance in Europe. Girl children had been born to Mariana, but each one had died at, or soon after, birth, though the wildest caprice of the mother was complied with in order to produce favourable conditions; but after the simultaneous birth and death of the girl child which came in August 1656, all hope seemed gone, and a profound melancholy fell upon both husband and wife, unrelieved by one ray of light. Philip's principal pleasure now, with the exception of his prayers and the immoralities he deplored so much, were the visits he paid every few days to the studio of Velazquez in the old palace. There, beneath the magic brush of the painter, he saw grow in resemblance the portraits of those amongst whom his life was passed,--the dwarfs and buffoons, who tried now so fruitlessly to make him smile, the quaint characters about the palace, the generals and admirals, the councillors and secretaries, whose faces he knew so well; and, above all, his two little girls and his young wife, with her rouged cheeks, her stiff square wig and her hard eyes. The favourite child--for Mariana was jealous of the elder, Maria Teresa--was the little Infanta Margaret, born in 1651, a fragile, fair little flower of a girl, degenerate from her descent, but in childhood not showing excessively the unlovely features she inherited. The etiquette that surrounded the child and her sister was freezing in its formality. Those who served them knelt, and everything had to pass through several hands before reaching them. Their dress, {454} with the wide-hooped farthingales and stiff long bodices, were utterly unchildlike and cumbrous, but, withal, the charm of youth could not be utterly crushed out of Margaret; and Velazquez has left us portraits of her as a child which will always remain the ideal of infancy. [Illustration: THE MAIDS OF HONOUR. _Portrait of the Infanta Margaret; from a picture by Velazquez at the Prado Museum_] The finest painting that ever left the master's easel is that which presents not only a portrait of the little Princess, but also an interior which tells more of Court life at the time (1656) than pages of written description could do. The tiny Infanta stands in her white satin hooped dress, her fair hair parted at the side, in the studio of Velazquez, who, with the coveted cross of Santiago upon his breast,[10] is painting a portrait of the King and Queen, whose faces are seen reflected in a mirror at the back of the room, but who do not appear in the picture itself. The child had probably been brought to relieve the tedium of her parents in sitting for their portraits, and she seems herself to have grown fretful and needed amusing. The young maid of honour, Doña Maria de Sarmiento, kneels before her, handing her, on a gold salver, a cup of water in the fine red scented clay which it was a vicious fashion of ladies of the day to eat. In the foreground lies a mastiff dozing, and close by it are two of the ugly dwarfs who were such important personages in the Spanish Court, Mari Barbola and Nicolasico Pertusato; whilst behind {455} them, slightly curtseying, is another maid of honour, Doña Isabel de Velasco; and still farther back in the gloom a lady and gentleman in attendance, the former in a conventual dress; whilst in the extreme rear of the picture stands the Queen's quarter-master, Don Jose Nieto, at the open door drawing back a curtain, perhaps that more light may be thrown upon the King and Queen, whom the painter is portraying. The interior of the room, with its special lighting and its unrivalled perspective, fixes for us, as if in a flashlight photograph, one unstudied moment of life in Philip's Court as it was actually passed, and for this reason the picture is invaluable. The existence it crystallises is a dull one, unrelieved from tedium for Philip except by the presence of his little child, and the trembling consolations of his religion. [Sidenote: Birth of an heir] Soon, however, hope for a time was to blossom again. After months of anxiety, in which his doubts and fears were laid before the nun again and again by the anxious father, he was assured that another child was yet to be born to him, and the astrologers and soothsayers predicted that this time it would be a son, and would live. Philip was in dire straits for money at the time (November 1657), and on the first day of the Vigil of the Presentation of the Virgin he had nothing to eat but eggs without fish; as his steward had not a _real_ of ready money to pay for anything else, and the tradesmen would give no more credit.[11] But yet the most whimsical fancy of his wife now had to be gratified at any sacrifice, and the Buen Retiro soon again rang with jovial music and water parties {456} on the lake, merry comedies, novel bull-fights, and diversions of all sorts, which were produced to make Mariana happy. Don Juan sent from Flanders a splendid silver bedstead, with brocade hangings; and all that care and solicitude could discover to ensure the happy arrival of the looked-for heir was forthcoming. [Sidenote: Prince Philip Prosper] At last, to the weary, worn-out King of fifty-two, a man-child was born at the end of November 1657. The mother was thought to be dying, but no one had thoughts for her, the birth of an heir to Philip being greeted by rejoicings so tumultuous in the capital as of themselves to prove the lawless condition into which the people had sunk. "On the day of the birth," writes Barrionuevo (5th December 1657), "not a bench nor a table was left unbroken in the palace, nor a single pastry-cook's nor tavern that was not sacked. In the Admiral's house, too, one of his equerries, and riding-master to some of the greatest gentlemen in Madrid, named Chicho Cristalino, killed his groom in the stable, stabbing him for some trivial cause.... He has escaped. He was a Knight of Calatrava. The same night three or four other similar misfortunes happened, and in the rejoicings nobody's cape was safe.... To-morrow they say that his Majesty will go on horseback to the Atocha to give thanks to the Mother of God.... They say the Prince is a pretty little chap, and that the King wishes him to be baptized at once, before the extreme cold comes on.... There are to be masquerades, bullfights, and cane-tourneys as soon as the Queen gets up to see them, as well as plays with machinery {457} invented by an engineer, a servant of the Nuncio, to be represented at the theatre at the Retiro, and in the saloon of the palace.... The municipality, following the lead of the Councils, have gone to congratulate the King, ... and no gentleman, great or small, has failed to do the like. There have been some funny incidents. Here are two. The little Count de Haro, the Admiral's child, six years old, went, and the King was much pleased with the little man, as he was so serious, and especially when he said to his Majesty, 'But, Sir! those buttons of yours are against the pragmatic; they are gold!' They were really diamond buttons that the King had put on for the celebration. The favourite (_i.e._ Haro) accompanied him, and one of the courtiers present came up to him and said: 'God bless your Excellency for the boon you have bestowed upon Spain in sending us a Prince,' as if Haro had been the artificer of the work. There was much laughter at this." Astrologers were busy predicting all manner of glory and good fortune for the new-born Prince, and Philip was full of gratitude and hope that all would now be well. "Help me, Sor Maria," he wrote, "to give thanks to God; for I by myself am unable to do so adequately. Pray to Him to make me fully thankful for the signal favour conferred upon me, and to give me strength henceforward to do His holy will. The new-born babe is well, and I implore you to take him under your protection, and pray to our Lord and His holy Mother to keep him for their service, for the exaltation of the faith and the good of these realms. If this is {458} not to be, then pray let him be taken from me before he reaches manhood."[12] [Sidenote: Baptism of Philip Prosper] For weeks the usual festivities in Madrid went on, though the general penury made them less brilliant than the occasion warranted. But Philip, for his part, seemed almost young again with joy. On the 6th December he rode through the decorated streets of his capital on a spirited Neapolitan charger. Dances, masques, and music greeted him on his way, and the public fountains ran wine instead of water, whilst the night was made as light as day by thousands of wax torches.[13] A week afterwards the baptism of the Prince was celebrated in the royal chapel by the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo (Borja), whose magnificent preparations of liveries, vestments, and equipages were to cost 50,000 {459} ducats; though, says Barrionuevo, he had not a _real_. "On Thursday the 13th, the corridors and courtyards of the palace were decorated with great splendour, and three canopies were erected, one in each corridor and one in the chapel." There was a very sumptuous bed adjoining the King's curtained closet, and a step away a staging, with two steps and a triangle of silver. Upon this was placed the font of St. Dominic's baptism, and six great silver braziers very full of fuel, which were replenished every now and then from the fireplaces, so that the air might be warmed, which it was until it was like an oven. There were also sconces which perfumed the air divinely. Shortly after two the ceremony commenced; the Inquisitor-General and the Bishop of Siguenza, apparelled in pontificals, assisting the Cardinal, who awaited the arrival of the Infante near the altar, whilst the whole chapel was hung with the most beautiful hangings the King possesses. Don Luis Ponce, without a cape, led the way with the Spanish Guard, followed by peers, nobles, and grandees; after whom came the Nuncio and ambassadors. Then came the minister (Don Luis de Haro), dressed in a gown of cloth of gold and a red sash.[14] Following him the Prince, richly adorned, was borne in the arms of the Countess of Salvatierra, seated in a crystal chair; and the Infanta (Maria Teresa) {460} walked behind, her train carried by the Mistress of the Robes, after whom marched the heralds and archers of the Guard, who entirely surrounded the space. The Marquis of Priego carried the sacred taper, Alba bore the custode and napkins, the Admiral carried the ewer, which was of a single emerald, very large, and set with diamonds. The marchpane[15] fell to the Count of Oñate, the towels to Medina de las Torres, the salt-cellar to the Prince of Astillano, his son. The ladies of the Court followed the Infanta, their trains borne by pages. The presidents of the Councils, with their two senior officers on each side, were ranged around the chapel, with the grandees before them; and when the ladies entered they stood in front of the grandees. The lady-in-waiting handed the Prince to the Infanta naked, except for a very short little jacket of plush much adorned, and with false sleeves. The Infanta cried out in a very clear voice: 'Why have you not put his clothes on? Why do you give him to me so undressed?' The lady replied: 'That is done on purpose, Madam, that it may be seen that he is a male.' The water they baptized him with was from the Jordan, ... brought lately by some friars who came from the Holy House. The Prince screamed lustily when he was baptized, and, attracted by the loud resonant voice, the King, who was looking through his jalousies, {461} exclaimed, "Ah! that does sound well; the house smells of a man now."[16] [Sidenote: Pride of the Constable] Then, after retailing the baby's names, Philip Prosper, "and the whole litany of saints to follow," and the magnificent presents given to the child's nurse, the narrator gives a curious instance of the overweening pride of the higher Spanish nobles of the time. A staircase had broken down with the crush of people, and the Duke of Bejar, whose duty it was to carry the marchpane, could not get through the crowd. The acting Lord Chamberlain, the Count of Puñonrostro, seeing that the ceremony was being delayed in consequence, asked the King what he should do. "Tell the Constable (_i.e._ the Grand Constable of Castile, the Duke of Frias) to carry the marchpane," said Philip. The proud noble replied that his arm was bad, and he could not do it. This answer only produced a repetition of the command from the King that the Constable was to carry the marchpane. "Tell his Majesty that the Constables of Castile are too big to serve as stopgaps for anybody," said the Constable. Two days later the Duke was being hurried off to Berlanga under arrest. If Dukes and Constables could be impracticably proud, so could scullions; for only a fortnight after this there was a regular pitched battle in the King's kitchen on some point of honour between the scullions and the guards, in which six of the combatants were killed outright, and twenty were wounded, many more being carried off to the prison of the Court to answer for their turbulence. {462} Admiration spent itself in praises of the beauty of the infant that had been born to Philip's decline. Never, sure, was such a babe vouchsafed to man as this. Verse and prose galore declaimed its present perfection and coming greatness. But alas! Philip Prosper, as might have been expected from the offspring of several generations of incest, was a poor epileptic monstrosity, who quietly made his exit from the world four years after he entered it with such a blare of trumpets. The good nun of Agreda, far away from the turmoil of rejoicing at the Prince's birth, had misgivings at the ungodliness and extravagance of the festivities, and remonstrated with Philip upon them. "It is good and politic for your Majesty to receive the congratulations of your subjects, ... but I do beseech you earnestly not to allow excessive sums to be spent on such festivities as these, when there is a lack of money needful even for the defence of your crown. Let there be no offence to God in what is done.... It is good to rejoice for the birth of the Prince; but pray let us do it with a clear conscience."[17] Through all these years the wars in which Spain was engaged had gone on. Mazarin's many enemies in France had been encouraged and bribed largely by Spain, and the greatest of French commanders, Turenne and Condé, for a time entered Philip's service against their own country. This changed the aspect of affairs, especially on the Flemish frontier, whilst in the south of France the leaders of the Fronde with Spanish aid kept Mazarin's troops busy there. When Turenne {463} again returned to the French side the tables were turned somewhat (1655), and after a series of defeats the Archduke Leopold, Philip's Governor of Flanders, had retired, leaving Condé in command of the troops, whilst Don Juan, King Philip's son, succeeded the Archduke as Governor (1656). This brilliant pair of young men did much to restore Spanish prestige in Flanders; but when the alliance between Cromwell and Mazarin was signed Spain was outmatched, and all observers could see that France in the end must be victorious. [Sidenote: Loss of Dunkirk] One after the other the Flemish frontier places surrendered to the allies; but the great blow to Philip's arms fell in the summer of 1658. Dunkirk, a Spanish port in Flanders, promised to Cromwell by Mazarin, was closely blockaded by an English fleet, and besieged on the land side by Turenne, who was accompanied by young Louis XIV. himself; whilst a Spanish army under Don Juan and Condé, with whom was James Duke of York, now nominal Admiral of the Spanish fleet, was endeavouring to break through Turenne's lines and relieve the place. By a _coup de main_ Turenne outflanked the Spanish force, whilst Cromwell's fleet bombarded them from the sea. Panic overtook the Spaniards, who fled precipitately with great loss, and Dunkirk soon after capitulated. This Battle of the Dunes seemed the last drop in Philip's cup of sorrow, for by it all Flanders lay at the mercy of the French royalists, and city after city fell into their hands. Shortly before this, and soon after the christening of Philip Prosper described above, an equally fatal catastrophe had fallen upon Philip on the Portuguese {464} frontier. There for years a state of hostility had continued, with frequent raids on both sides; but, growing bolder with Philip's increased exhaustion, the masculine Spanish Queen Mother of Portugal[18] had laid regular siege to the great Spanish frontier fortress of Badajoz. At any cost this daring insolence had to be met, and Philip, with no able commanders now available, Don Juan being in Flanders, entrusted the leadership of his forces of 8000 men, raised with infinite sacrifice and difficulty, to his favourite, Don Luis de Haro. On the news of his approach the Portuguese raised the siege of Badajoz and recrossed the frontier; but Haro, utterly inexperienced in warfare, was drawn into pursuing them, led into an ambush and put to ignominious flight, with the loss of guns, baggage, and most of his men. [Sidenote: Peace with France] This defeat, followed by the Battle of the Dunes a few months afterwards, proved to all the world that Spain had come to the end of her tether and could struggle no more. Material resources, faith in herself, belief in her mission, even confidence in her God, had all fled, and nothing was left to her but besotted pride and a sanctimonious ritual devotion which lightly covered a scoffing mockery of the noble ideals that had made her temporarily great. Peace had now, indeed, become for Philip absolutely necessary. There had been many efforts made through the influence of Anna of Austria, Queen of France, to come to an understanding with her brother, ever since the treaty of Münster; but the demands of Mazarin, that the {465} French should continue to hold all they had taken including Catalonia, had in every case frustrated the attempts. But the aspect of affairs was changing. Catalonia was heartily tired of the French, who left the province less liberty than it had enjoyed under the Castilian Kings, whilst the grave discontent and division in France against Mazarin's Government had rendered peace necessary even for him. But that which, above all, contributed to a peaceful agreement was the fact that Philip's health was evidently failing, and that only one life, that of the scrofulous epileptic infant, Philip Prosper, stood between the house of France and the Spanish throne. It is true that when Queen Anna had married Louis XIII. she had solemnly renounced for herself and her family the right of succession to Spain; but some of the dowry which was to have been paid to her had not been paid, and it might be contended that as one condition of the contract had not been fulfilled the others could not be enforced as against the house of France. Mariana, Philip's second wife, was at Madrid quite as much in the capacity of Austrian ambassador as of Philip's consort, and she had always tried to prevent any closer union between France and Spain; her object, aided by the German agents who prompted her, being to maintain the fatal alliance between the two branches of the house of Austria, which had dragged Spain to ruin. In the summer of 1656 a sincere attempt had been made by France to come to an understanding with Philip. A skilled diplomatist, M. de Lionne, in the confidence of Mazarin, had arrived with great secrecy at Madrid, and was lodged at the Retiro, {466} where he and Haro held many conferences, with a result that an agreement on many points was arrived at, especially upon the retrocession of Catalonia (though not of Roussillon) to Spain. In one of their conferences Lionne noticed that Haro was wearing in his hat, doubtless for a purpose, a medal impressed with the portrait of the Infanta Maria Teresa. "If your King would give to my master for his wife the original of the portrait you wear," said Lionne, "peace might soon be made."[19] Haro passed over the matter lightly, for in the absence of a male heir to Philip it would have been impossible to marry Maria Teresa to the King of France; but the idea was not a new one, and the possibility of bringing about such a match as a pledge of peace between France and Spain had often been mooted by the quidnuncs of Madrid.[20] [Sidenote: Peace negotiations] Lionne's negotiations came to nothing at the time, mainly because the knotty point of the Prince of Condé's position could not be settled; but when the birth of Philip Prosper provided Philip with an heir, the marriage idea again came to the front, and made both sides in the subsequent peace negotiations much more conciliatory than they otherwise would have been, especially when there was a talk of marrying Louis XIV. elsewhere. He was, indeed, {467} on a courting expedition to the south of France to meet the Princess of Savoy, when Haro, in May 1659, sent Antonio Pimentel in a hurry to Mazarin reminding him of what Lionne had said three years before about a Spanish marriage. Anna of Austria and Mazarin were quite willing; and in a very few weeks the diplomatists on both sides had drawn up a protocol suspending hostilities, and providing for a meeting of plenipotentiaries of both Powers in the little Isle of Pheasants in the Bidosoa River that separates France and Spain. This was to take place in August, and in the meanwhile ministers were busy drawing up marriage settlements and agreeing upon the main points in dispute between the two Powers. Mariana struggled hard to prevent the agreement by proposing a marriage between the Infanta and the Archduke Leopold, the Emperor's heir. She even prevailed upon her brother to send the Archduke Sigismund to replace Don Juan in Flanders, and to bring a strong imperial army with him to defend Spanish territory there. Before they could meet the French, however, the truce between Philip and Louis was signed (June 1659), and the Austrian interest for the present had to accept defeat. Peace or war, the stereotyped merrymaking never ceased for very long in the Court of Madrid. Like Olivares before them, Philip's ministers were constantly on the look-out for new musicians, buffoons, or beauties to distract him, and discovering fresh pretexts for shows.[21] To celebrate {468} the birth of the sickly Philip Prosper, the festivities continued for months; and in answer to the nun's remonstrances about it, the King invites her to tell him how he can fulfil his desire to withdraw his mind from worldly things, "since it is obligatory for me to live amongst men, and to be present at festivities and other public occasions, which I cannot avoid attending. In the midst of all this turmoil I should like to execute your directions, if my frailty does not prevent me from doing so. Help me, Sor Maria, and pray to God and His holy Mother to aid me in attaining such a boon."[22] In one of Philip Prosper's frequent illnesses a saintly friar from Jerusalem, one Father Antonio, went to see Philip, and brusquely told him, in reply to his request for prayers for the Prince's health, "that he, the King, ought to pray also, and leave off all these comedies and other rejoicings."[23] The Madrileños of Philip's time would no more abandon their idle pleasures than they would their daily bread. Fresh taxes of 2 per cent. more were put upon food, and upon every payment made of any sort; even fireplaces and windows were taxed more heavily, the idea being to make people redeem these taxes by paying a sum down, and so, as Barrionuevo says, to get money quickly. "All this makes men of business desperate, for it is said that even upon loans and payments of every sort the {469} tax is to be charged; so that we shall soon have nothing to pay with but water and sunshine."[24] [Sidenote: Poverty and waste] Only a few days after this was written, the municipality of Madrid gave a luncheon to the eleven Royal Councils, handsome presents being given to all the guests, the cost of the entertainment being over 550,000 ducats; and hardly a week passes without the record of two or three costly shows, bull-fights, masquerades, and tourneys, in which smart new clothes are always a notable feature, and the King and Queen are usually present, the young Marquis of Heliche being generally the busiest promoter. Madrid, although suffering from a winter more severe than had been known in the memory of man (February 1658), was full of foreigners and strangers, attracted by these continual shows, and doubtless much of the money squandered came ultimately from them; but the people themselves must have been in dire straits, for robbery seems to have been openly resorted to, even by priests; and so highly placed an ecclesiastic as Barrionuevo says of it: "I do not wonder, for the pinch of poverty is such that everybody is forced to do it." Madrid, at the time, indeed, presented a strange picture of anarchy. The only rich people were the comparatively few who were concerned in the administration, either in Spain or the Colonies; and they spent their money with the utmost prodigality, whilst the great bulk of the population lived from hand to mouth on the proceeds of this expenditure, gained either by service, work, or robbery. There was practically no industry, {470} except that carried on in a small way by foreigners; and the vast majority of the inhabitants of Madrid lived, directly or indirectly, by government expenditure. Philip looked on helplessly, convinced apparently that his calamities were unavoidable, because sent for a special purpose by the Almighty as a scourge for his and his people's transgressions. Preachers unrebuked thundered out of pulpits to him that most of the evils might be avoided by energy. "Your Majesty is poor, and your ministers are rich," cried one to him. "You give grants, favours, pensions, and double pay to people such as these, who beguile you with vain shows. The noblest eagle may be left bare if plucked feather by feather; and your Majesty is obliged to appeal to these very ministers, whom you enable to settle vast estates, for money necessary for your very food and garments." [Sidenote: Peace of the Pyrenees] In good truth, it was too late to preach to Philip now; for he did little but register the decisions of others, and go through his dull round of duties with despairing, earthy face; his great consolation, as he says again and again, being the letters of the nun, which assured him of the divine mercy and of the efficacy of constant prayer. To his great delight another son was born to him in December 1658, though the babe lived only for a few months; but Philip Prosper lingered on still, through a sickly infancy. In the meanwhile Don Luis de Haro and Cardinal Mazarin were in close confabulation on the Isle of Pheasants, settling the terms of the much-needed peace; and the death of Cromwell, and the probable restoration of the Stuarts to the English throne, gave a further {471} hope that, after a long lifetime of constant war, Philip's days might end at peace with all the world. In October 1659 the peace negotiations were sufficiently advanced for a formal demand to be made to Philip for his daughter's hand on behalf of her cousin Louis XIV. The ambassador was one of the greatest seigneurs of the Court of France, Marshal de Grammont; and though Madrid, with good reason this time, assumed its most pompous garb, and Spaniards held their heads high, yet de Grammont, as he entered with his brilliant suite into Philip's capital, consciously represented a new dispensation that was in process of supplanting that of Spain. For a century and a half Spain had claimed precedence over all earthly Powers: her language was that of culture and fashion; her literature, especially of the theatre and the novel, had given the tone to the writers of Europe; her dress had set the fashion; her soldiers had taught the art of war; and her explorers had borne to the four quarters of the earth her traditions, her tongue, and her religion. But the stately entrance of de Grammont with his new airs and graces into the palace of Madrid, after a devastating war extending over thirty years, marked the opening of a new epoch in the civilisation of the world. Spain was the waning force, France was the youthful giant with a long life before him; the Planet King Philip, spent and weary, was sinking to his yearned-for rest after a reign of tragic failure; the Roi Soleil was climbing in the sky. All the courtly conventions of diplomatists, all the gracious politeness of de Grammont, all the consideration shown by French statesmen to Spain in the treaty of {472} peace, could not hide these facts; nor could it be concealed that this new friendship meant the end of the fatal union of Austria and Spain, whose aim had been to force orthodoxy upon the world. Mariana frowned and pouted as Grammont and his company of princes and nobles bowed before her; and the gloomy grandeur of the old palace of Madrid, with the richly sombre dresses of Philip and his courtiers, seemed to the triumphant and gaily dressed Frenchman, fresh from the sprightly youthful Court of Louis, to be in harmony with the old obscurantist régime which was passing. The visitors were liberal in recording their impressions of a society which they regarded as romantic and antique.[25] The description of a theatrical representation in the old palace of Madrid in honour of Grammont, written by one of his chaplains, will give a good idea of a characteristic feature of Philip's Court at the time. "The great saloon was lit only by six enormous wax candles in gigantic silver stands. On each side of the saloon, facing each other, were two boxes or tribunes with iron grilles before them. One of these was occupied by the Infanta, whilst the other was destined for the Marshal (Grammont). Two benches covered with Persian rugs ran along the sides beneath the boxes, also facing each other, upon which sat about twelve ladies of the Court, whilst we Frenchmen stood behind them.... The {473} Queen and the little Infanta entered, preceded by a lady holding a candle. When the King appeared he saluted the ladies and took his seat in the box on the right hand of the Queen, whilst the little Infanta sat on her left. The King remained motionless during the whole of the play, and only once said a word to the Queen; although he occasionally cast his eyes round on every side. A dwarf was standing close by him. When the play was ended, all the ladies rose and gathered in the middle, as canons do after a service. Then joining hands in a row they made their courtesies, one by one, a ceremony that lasted some seven or eight minutes. In the meanwhile the King was standing, and he then bowed to the Queen, who bowed to the Infanta, after which they all joined hands and retired."[26] It was far into the winter (1659) before the terms of the pregnant peace of the Pyrenees could be finally settled by the plenipotentiaries on the Isle of Pheasants. More than once the negotiations came to a deadlock, for, comparatively easy as the French conditions were, they were very bitter for the pride of Spain to swallow.[27] She had to surrender the province of Roussillon and most of Artois, as well as many of the principal cities of French Flanders, whilst the English kept her port of Dunkirk. But in return Catalonia willingly {474} became Spanish again under its old constitution, whilst the new King of England and his friends the Portuguese were excluded from the treaty. The rejoicings in Madrid, and the adulation of the favourite Haro, who was made Prince of the Peace, knew no bounds. At last, no matter, thought the lieges, at what cost, Spain was free from the war that had weighed her down for a whole generation; and now the rebel Portuguese might be punished for their contumacy, and Philip be King of the Peninsula again. Don Juan, the King's son, was to have the honour of reconquering Portugal for Castile; but for the present all minds were occupied by the ceremonious journey of King Philip and all his Court to the French frontier to conduct his daughter, the Infanta, to her waiting bridegroom. [Sidenote: Marriage of Maria Teresa] For many months, notwithstanding Philip's expressed desire that things should be done as economically as possible, the preparations for the voyage had been carried out on a scale of magnificence surpassing that of all previous bridal progresses between Spain and France. The Spanish nobles and courtiers, taking their tone from Haro himself, were determined, even at the cost of their last ducat, that the Frenchmen should see that the country was neither exhausted materially nor humiliated morally. So again the old prodigal pride asserted itself, and Madrid pushed its poverty in the background, as it spent its money on gew-gaws, or flocked to see the preliminary turnout of the royal equipages prepared for the King's journey to France. {475} "There were four litters, and fourteen coaches with six mules each;--a fine sight! The table services, newly made with the arms of Spain and France, which her Highness is to take with her, are a marvel of richness and beauty. The jewels for presents and for adornment exceed all price and praise. Each of the gentlemen who is to accompany the royal party is making preparations more in accordance with his spirit than with his means. They say that the Duke of Medina de las Torres will distinguish himself specially. He gives five suits of livery to each of his servants, one set alone of which made in Naples will cost 65,000 ducats; whilst, as to his Excellency's own dresses, wonderful stories are told of them, and also of the jewels he is taking with him, worthy as they are of the greatness of his heart. The preparations of Don Luis de Haro can only be conceived by those who recollect that he is the luminary of the world upon which reflects and radiates most fully the majesty and brilliancy of our Sun-Monarch. The value of the horses and hackneys, with their harness and housings, alone are said to be worth a vast treasure; but when we consider the rank of the persons with whom the horses of the Sun will enter Irun, these latter, richly caparisoned as they may be, will be unworthy of an occasion so supreme. It is likely enough that when our Infanta took leave of the altars of Madrid her eyes were wet with tears; but our muffled women, who spare nobody, said so in such a way as to hint that the tears were really hearty smiles. The Queen looks very sad at the King's going away."[28] {476} [Sidenote: Journey to the frontier] On the 15th April 1660, Philip set forth on his famous journey to the French frontier to give his daughter Maria Teresa to his young nephew Louis XIV. for his wife, and meet in peace once more his sister Anna, whom he had not seen since their early youth, over forty years before. The train that accompanied him surpassed anything of the sort ever seen before in Spain. Don Luis de Haro himself was served by a household of 200 persons, and scores of other nobles vied with him in magnificence.[29] All the sumptuary pragmatics were suspended, and as a reaction after the long insistence upon plain, sombre attire for men, Philip's courtiers were gorgeous in the costly richness of their garb, determined as they were to impress the Frenchmen. The land through which the long procession slowly made its way, at the rate of about six miles a day, was stark and ruined; and provisions, as well as beds and all other necessaries, had to be carried for the whole multitude, the cavalcade covering over twenty miles of road. Such of the wretched peasants as were left in Castile[30] saluted their King with frantic joy as he passed; for he looked so sad and sorry for them, and with so much wealth as he now displayed before their famished eyes, surely he would not grind them down to utter famine as he had done for these unhappy years of strife. All would be well now. {477} The Infanta was to be Queen of France, and she would not allow her father's realm to be laid desolate again by those over whom her young husband reigned. Everywhere hope blossomed again. The towns on the way regaled the vast concourse of courtiers with shows, banquets, and bull-fights; long-hidden hoards of money were brought out and spent in rejoicing now, even by the humbler farmer folk, for the great fear that all would be taken from them by the tax farmers had passed away. At length, after six weeks of tedious travel over miserable roads, where overturns and other mishaps were frequent, the King and his Court entered St. Sebastian, where the first marriage ceremony was to be performed, on the 2nd June 1660. In the crowds of splendidly apparelled Spanish courtiers, whose names were as resounding as their pedigrees were long, there was one olive-skinned man, with a touzled mop of wavy black hair streaked with grey, whose fame was to outlive them all. His office, that of the King's quarter-master, and one of his chamberlains, kept him close to the person of Philip, who loved his company. Upon the breast of his dark, closely fitting tunic was embroidered in scarlet the long sword-shaped cross of Santiago, whilst an enamelled and diamond pendant hung from a rich gold chain around his neck; and Diego Velazquez, the painter, now growing old with his master, looked as distinguished as any in the throng, doing his courtier's service in the famous journey as if he had been merely a grandee of long lineage instead of a poor gentleman who happened to be a genius.[31] {478} All the magnificence that could be crammed into the humble town of St. Sebastian was there on the morning of the 2nd June 1660.[32] In the principal house, under canopies of damask stiff with bullion armorial embroideries, sat upon thrones side by side Philip and his daughter, the Patriarch of the Indies and the Bishop of Pamplona standing in their robes near to them, with Haro upon the steps of the dais. Every inch of standing room was filled with the proudest nobles of Spain, intermingled with many masked and cloaked figures whom all knew or guessed were French princes, princesses, and nobles, who had crossed the frontier disguised to witness the ceremonies which some still hoped, notwithstanding the failures of past similar attempts, would "level the Pyrenees." One who was there writes: "The ladies-in-waiting were dazzlingly handsome, and all the multitude of people, grandees, peers, noble gentlemen, and others, stood with uncovered heads, their Majesties alone being seated; whilst Don Fernando de Contreras, the Secretary of State, read aloud the solemn document in which the Queen of France, by oath on a Christ crucified, renounced for herself and hers for ever all claim to the succession of the Spanish throne." For a long hour and more the Secretary of State, on his knees, read the pompous sentences of the act which was in after years to convulse all Europe in war, and change the dynasty of Spain; but those who listened to it {479} were more concerned with their own fatigue at standing in a crowd so long than at the vast import of the renunciation, whose effects were hidden in the womb of time.[33] When, at last, Contreras had finished reading, the Bishop stepped forth, and upon the Gospels and the crucifix Maria Teresa swore to keep inviolate the pledge contained in the act. [Sidenote: The wedding] The next morning the humble parish church of St. Sebastian was transformed, by the "richest hangings and adornments necessary for the greatest wedding that ever was seen in the world, whilst their Majesties and the Court were a blaze of magnificence." Advancing with his daughter, Philip took his seat upon the curtained throne by the side of the high altar, whilst Maria Teresa stood beneath the canopy, and Don Luis Haro, who was honoured by holding the proxy of King Louis to marry her, stood a step below her. The church was crowded with French princes, princesses, and nobles in disguise intermingled with the Spaniards, and, as the pontifical mass was sung with its beautiful ceremonial, appealing to all the senses before that gorgeous assembly, St. Sebastian reached the apogee of its glory, never to be surpassed. When the sacrament was ended the Bishop descended to the canopy, where the Infanta and Haro were standing before the King. In answer to the ritual question whether she would take his Majesty the most Christian King for a {480} husband, the Infanta with streaming eyes turned and sank upon her knees before her father. Philip, himself overcome with emotion, bowed his head and gave his blessing to the daughter who was to be the pledge of future peace between Spain and France; and the Bishop had to repeat his question three times before the weeping Princess could summon composure enough to reply in the affirmative. Then she and Haro together placed their hands in a great gold dish that stood upon a side table, whilst Haro in the name of King Louis XIV. accepted Maria Teresa of Austria as his legitimate wife. Taking a gold ring from the centre of the salver upon which their hands rested, the Spanish minister placed it upon the rim near the fingers of the Infanta, but without touching them; and then with a sweeping flood of melody the _Te Deum_ burst out, whilst the great guns of the fortress upon the crag overhanging the church thundered their message to the two realms that another Spanish Princess was Queen of France.[34] In the midst of the uproar King Philip led his daughter from the church, followed by all the glittering crowd. [Sidenote: Marriage of Maria Teresa] That afternoon the royal party rode to the neighbouring land-locked Port of Pasages three miles away, and so to Renteria for dinner, and by Oyarzun to the ancient fortress village of Fuentarrabia on its jutting peninsula, from which you may cast a stone to France on the other side of the river mouth. The roads were so narrow and bad that the maids of honour were upset on the way; and Don Luis de Haro, anxious as he was to do {481} honour to the Sovereign who had made him little less than a King, he was unable to meet him on the narrow rocky causeway, but perforce had to stand, surrounded by the King's Guards in their new yellow uniforms, at the gate of the ancient palace fortress upon its cliff, that twenty-two years before had so stoutly withstood the siege of the French by land and sea. The following day, whilst preparations for the public interviews upon the Isle of Pheasants were being made, Philip embarked with his daughter, Haro, and a very few attendants, amongst whom was Diego Velazquez, and landed privately upon the little island in mid stream. The buildings, which had been specially erected for the peace conference of the previous autumn, were constructed with the jealous punctiliousness which always characterised the intercourse between France and Spain. The eyot was divided into a Spanish and a French half, and the houses, each in its respective territory, were connected by a corridor, the conference hall, which stood upon the dividing line, being half upon Spanish and half on French soil. Even in Philip's private meeting with the sister from whom he had been separated and at war so long, the utmost precision of etiquette was preserved. Landing on the Spanish part of the island, and entering the Spanish house, he bade all his attendants stay behind, except Haro, Velazquez, and one or two more, who alone accompanied him to the hall, where, on the French side of the dividing line across the hall, stood Anna of Austria. The meeting was a painful one, for when they had last met Philip and his sister had been in the {482} flower of youth, full of hope and bright ambition; and now both were old and broken, with lives of bitterness behind them. Both brother and sister had been slaves of their passions, and had surrendered their regal power to other hands. They had been but figureheads of State; and though, as was the case with all their house, their family affection had been strong, national aspirations had been too powerful for them, and victor and vanquished, brother and sister, must have felt themselves, for all their grandeur, the helpless victims of forces beyond their control or understanding. Anna of Austria broke down into piteous tears when she saw the unhappy face of her brother; and, after a few low-spoken words of comfort had passed between them, there came tiptoeing silently behind the Cardinal and Don Luis, who stood behind Queen Anna, a handsome young man with aquiline features and a nascent black down upon his upper lip. He wore, in the French fashion of the time, high red heels to his shoes; and a flowing black curled periwig fell upon the wide Walloon collar of fine lawn that covered the shoulders of his satin skirted-coat. Peeping over the shoulders of those before him,[35] himself supposed to be unseen, thus Louis XIV. first looked upon his bride, and upon the King the ruin of whose realm and dynasty was to make way for the supremacy of France and the Roi Soleil. [Sidenote: The wedding] At length, on Sunday, 6th June, all was ready for the ceremonial meeting and delivery of the bride to her new country. At a signal both {483} monarchs stepped into their boats at the same time, Philip in Fuenterrabia and Louis in St. Jean de Luz, followed soon by crowds of other boats filled with courtiers as fine as silks and satins and bullion tissues could make them, for sumptuary decrees were all thrown to the winds now; whilst strong armed forces, 12,000 troops in all, with loaded arms and new uniforms, stood upon each side of the tiny stream, as many as 4000 cavalry being arrayed on the French bank, with numbers of pikemen and guards; "all smart looking troops, but both men and horses small," said a Spanish expert, who thought Philip's fine array of red and yellow guards "better troops, smarter and with better horses."[36] As far as the eye reached on either side, crowds of people stood upon the banks, and far away upon the hills overlooking the scene, which for most of them promised peace and renewed prosperity; whilst the ante-rooms of the conference hall which was to be the scene of the interview were packed to suffocation by a privileged crowd of nobles and courtiers of both nations. At the same moment the two Kings landed upon their respective ends of the island, and at the same moment they and their suites entered the conference hall by opposite doors, Philip leading his daughter, followed by Haro and a great household, and Louis his mother with Mazarin, and forty ladies-in-waiting behind. Advancing to the line that divided the room, Louis made as if to kneel to Philip, who prevented him from doing so by clasping him in his arms. "My son," said Philip, "I {484} welcome you. For me this has been the happiest day I have ever known or shall know; for I see your Majesty is as well as I can wish"; and then, pointing to the Infanta, he continued: "the only person after your Majesty who could have brought me on this journey is this piece of my own heart, that I have brought to give you for your wife; and I trust that your Majesty will hold her in the esteem she deserves, not only as Queen of France and my daughter, but also in consideration of the goodwill with which I give her to you."[37] Anna of Austria was weeping copiously the while; but Louis himself, not to be outdone in courtesy, was fully equal to the occasion. "My father," he said, "only the favours I am receiving from the generous and potent hands of your Majesty could force me to confess myself not only unworthy to be the son of so powerful a monarch, but also your humble vassal," and with that he warmly returned his uncle's embrace. Much more flattering talk there was about Philip's potency and strength, and the obligation of France to him. It pleased the Spaniards vastly; for words with them ever took the place of deeds when their pride was touched, and every courteous word of the Frenchmen was as balm in Gilead to men who, in their heart of hearts, knew that poverty, humiliation and defeat had befallen them and their country. Many tears there were, too, when Philip formally handed his daughter to her new husband, and the four sovereigns took their seats side by side on thrones arranged for them across the {485} line. Then Mazarin came forward with a missal in his hand, upon which Philip on his knees swore to keep the terms of the peace, and the Patriarch of the Indies administered a similar oath to Louis. The public act being thus ended, the hall was cleared of the crowds of nobles that encumbered it, and for four hours the royal party gave themselves up to familiar intercourse; after which Louis with his Court, "the most enchanting sight ever seen in the world," says the Spanish chronicler, rode off to St. Jean de Luz, and Philip returned by Irun to Fuenterrabia. Of the costly presents on both sides, of the overwhelming magnificence of the subsequent ceremonies in St. Jean de Luz, where the personal marriage took place,[38] and of the delight of the gallant Spanish courtiers at the nice French fashion of kissing all the ladies, it boots not here to tell; but as Philip and his cumbrous Court slowly wended their way home again to Madrid, the younger courtiers of both sexes, at all events, took back with them something like a contempt for the old Spanish fashions which had persisted so long.[39] The _golilla_ was voted stiff and {486} ungraceful when compared with the fine lace cravats of the French; black-framed goggles looked frumpish; the ropilla and close doublet were not half so modish as the full skirted long tunics, open in the front and showing a smart vest, that Louis and his gentlemen had worn; and who would care to wear thin lank hair, even when a topknot on the brow and _guedejas_ before the ears adorned it, when he could buy a splendid flowing curly periwig such as made the French look so stately? It is true that the change of fashion that began on the banks of the Bidasoa did not go very deep or far away from Court; for the common people clung to the old modes still, and the wars that divided Spain forty years afterwards caused French fashions, or anything but Spanish, to be loathed by all ranks as unpatriotic. But, nevertheless, this great transmigration of Spanish courtiers to the French frontier in 1660 was the first opening of the door by which some glimpses of light from a new Europe entered Spain, the first inkling to Spaniards that anything outside their own frontiers could be estimable and worth imitating. [Sidenote: Death of Don Luis de Haro] Philip was welcomed back to Madrid by his wife and his people, with great rejoicing for his safety, on the 26th June, and even poor suffering little Philip Prosper, tricked out in a military uniform with a sword by his side, was carried in his nurse's arms to greet his father as he ascended the stairs of his palace, though the child fell into a series of exhausting fevers immediately afterwards. The King's base-born son, Don Juan, of whom Queen Mariana was bitterly jealous, was impatiently waiting outside Madrid[40] {487} for troops and means to be provided for him to conquer Portugal; Don Luis de Haro, who had ignominiously failed in the task himself, not being at all active in forwarding Don Juan's ambition. It was six months more before an army was at last got together, and, early in 1661, Don Juan crossed the frontier with 20,000 men, whilst Osuna's force of 15,000 co-operated with him in the north. But the marriage of Charles II. of England with a Portuguese wife had given to Portugal the aid of England; and though Don Juan fought well, he had now Marshal Schomberg with an English force to cope with, in addition to the Portuguese, and he made but little way. Bitter complaints came from him to his father that Haro would not provide him with the resources necessary for the task he had to do. But Haro died at the end of the year 1661,[41] and after that Mariana's influence against him crippled Don Juan more than ever, though at one period the civil dissensions in Portugal enabled him to overrun for a time some of the central provinces of the country. The loss of Don Luis de Haro affected Philip greatly. The minister was not a strong man, but his conciliatory manner and quiet industry had prevented the existence of such violent antagonism to him as had ruined his predecessors. The nun of Agreda had never ceased to urge upon Philip the need for hard work on his part, and the King had wearily defended himself, again and again, by saying {488} that it was impossible for him to do everything. Indeed, the whole system was so cumbrous that under it the monarch's whole time was taken up in reviewing the interminable reports of the various Councils, and signing papers placed before him, leaving him no opportunity for initiating policies. When Count Castrillo, Haro's uncle, entered the King's chamber one morning late in 1661, and announced Haro's sudden death, he told the King that all the official papers had been locked up, and requested the King's instructions as to who should take charge of the key. Philip meditated for a while, and then replied: "Put it on that table," much to Castrillo's disappointment, as he expected to be appointed chief minister. Philip, however, thought this time really to do without an all-powerful vice-king, such as he had had all his life; and as soon as Haro was buried he issued decrees dividing the administration between Castrillo, the Duke of Medina de las Torres, the Inquisitor-General, and himself, and ordering that every question from all quarters should be submitted to him before decision. Entering the Queen's apartments a few days afterwards, he found all the ladies chattering upon the floor, as usual, about what a bold preacher had said in the pulpit that morning: that the King was going to show the Councils now that he was really King. Hearing this talk, Philip said: "I am quite old enough now to see things for myself, and I shall be glad if those who know of anything that needs remedying will advise me of it, and I will see to it. Things are not going on as they had been doing." [Sidenote: Heliche's plot] There appears, indeed, to have been a dead set against Haro's family as soon as he died. The {489} Marquis of Heliche, his son and heir, claimed, amongst other lucrative offices held by his father, the Keepership of the Retiro. This offended Philip, who refused him the office, and gave it to the Duke of Medina de las Torres. Heliche was soon afterwards accused of a plot to blow up the Retiro, which brought him and his family into the deepest disgrace. One morning in March 1662, three packets of gunpowder, connected by a train with a slow match, was found under the stage of the Retiro Theatre among a lot of heavy stage machinery, which had been used in a comedy recently represented, and designed and paid for by Heliche, but which was now to be used for a play to be produced before the King and Queen under other auspices. As soon as the discovery, was made (in time to avert disaster), five underlings connected with the theatre, two of them being Moorish slaves, were arrested; and when Heliche heard of it he went to the gaoler, saying that as one of the Moors had been punished by him, and had his ears cut off, he would probably say that he, Heliche, had prompted the crime. He therefore offered the gaoler a bribe to kill the Moor, by giving him a slight wound and anointing it with a poisonous unguent which Heliche would send. The gaoler divulged the plot, and the page of the Marquis was captured with the unguent in his possession. The Marquis was then arrested, and though great efforts were made by his kinsmen to obtain his release, four Duchesses kneeling before Philip at one time to beg for mercy, the King refused to interfere, though he said he was sorry the lad had not escaped. In the end the Marquis was let off with a term of banishment, apparently on the ground that he was {490} bewitched. His own excuse for the crime was that he did not wish his scenery and stage effects to be used by the Duke of Maqueda. The whole case is an interesting illustration of the morals of the time. Soon Madrid had something more piquant to talk about even than this; though for days no one dared to whisper it above his breath. But by and by Liars' Walk became bolder, and, with the accompaniment of many a sign of the cross, the story ran through the city, growing ever larger with additions as it ran, that devilish arts were being practised upon the King. It appears that a certain alcalde suspected that the house in Madrid of a lady, the sister of a judge at Granada, was being used as a factory of base money; and on going thither to search the premises and arrest the inmates, he discovered amongst the instruments for counterfeit coining, two engraved metal plates, each of which bore the device of a heart pierced with an arrow, one being inscribed with the name of "Philip IV., son of Philip III. and Margaret," and the other with the name and parentage of Don Luis de Haro, with other words taken from the Scriptures; the hearts themselves bearing the words, "I am thine, and thou art mine."[42] The alcalde thought that this looked serious, and carried the incised plates to the Inquisition, which promptly decided that it was a case of witchcraft, and at once sent its hosts of familiars to worm out the rest of the dreadful story, whilst sweeping into their silent dungeons all who might be suspected of complicity or knowledge, and giving occasion thus for all Madrid to invent its own details. The case dragged on in secret, as {491} was the wont of Inquisition investigations, but thenceforward until his death the awe-stricken whisper was never long silent that the King lay under a maleficent charm; and grave heads were shaken knowingly, and crossed fingers kissed devoutly, when any fresh misfortune befell him. [Sidenote: Death of Philip Prosper] Evil fate, indeed, gave Philip little truce from sorrow. The frail life of his only son Philip Prosper flickered out on the 1st November 1661, and a week later the bereaved father wrote to the nun-- "The long illness of my son and my constant attendance at his bedside have prevented me from answering your letter, nor has my grief allowed me to do so, until to-day. I confess to you, Sor Maria, that my grief is great, as is natural after losing such a jewel as this. But in the midst of my sorrow I have tried to offer it to God, and to submit to His divine will; believing most earnestly that He will order all things for the best, which is the most important thing. I can assure you that what grieves me even more than my loss is that I see clearly that I have angered God, and that these punishments are sent in retribution for my sins. I only yearn to know how to amend myself, and to fulfil the divine will by avoiding transgression, with which end I will try my hardest, surrendering my life, if necessary, in order to succeed. Help me, as a true friend, with your prayers to placate the ire of God, and supplicate Him, since He has taken away my son, to send a safe delivery to the Queen, whose confinement we expect every hour; to protect her and grant that her offspring should be for His service, for otherwise I desire it not. The Queen has borne {492} the blow as a true Christian, though sorrowfully. I am not surprised at this, for she is an angel. O Sor Maria! if I had been able to carry out your doctrines, perhaps I should not find myself in this state. Pray to God that my eyes may be opened, so that I may comply with His will in all things." And then in a postscript, written a day later, the King, full of gratitude, conveys the happy news to his friend that another son had been born to him. "Our Lord has deigned to send me back my son, by bringing me another; for which I am as grateful as so signal a boon and mercy demands. Help me, Sor Maria, to prostrate myself at His feet and beseech Him to preserve this pledge, if it be for His service, otherwise I desire it not, but to bow my head to His will. The Queen and the child are well, and I am content." [Sidenote: Fresh attempts at reform] The child that was born to Philip's old age was greeted, as his many predecessors had been, by violent rejoicings in the capital, though the King took little or no part in them beyond the religious ceremonies; for he really was trying hard now to do without a minister, working early and late at the drudgery of administration, drafting new stern pragmatics to reform the corruption of his capital, which had become more scandalous than ever, and bringing to book many of those who had grown rich under Don Luis de Haro. Money was needed for the Portuguese war, and the coinage was again debased; clothes were ordered to be plainer than ever, no silk was to be worn by officials, and no one was to have more than two mules to his coach; {493} the owners of carriages were to pay for the paving of the streets of Madrid, which had become simply quagmires, whilst, to the joy of the populace, the taxes on food entering Madrid were reduced by one half. The speculators who farmed these dues cried out that they were being defrauded, and they were recompensed by a cession to them of half the 10 per cent. property tax on Madrid. Thus, with reforms in judicial procedure, the cancelling of grants and pensions which could not be justified, and desperate efforts to suppress the open vice that paraded the capital, Philip, for the third time in his life (in 1661-1662), tried to carry into effect the saintly precepts in which he believed. Much of this new zeal for reform was evidently owing to the insistence of Sor Maria, who was never tired of pointing her lesson. Soon after Haro's sudden death she wrote-- "Let your Majesty order your ministers strictly to punish the rich and powerful people who cheat the poor by usurping their property, make your inferior ministers do justice with equity and impartiality, let them punish foul vices and all sorts of sin, and let the superior government of your Court assume a better form. And, for God's sake, moderate some of the taxes the poor people pay, for I know that villages have been depopulated in consequence of them; and that the poor people only keep body and soul together on barley-bread and the herbs of the fields.... So many changes in the coinage, too, are most injurious."[43] Philip did his best, but he was sick and weary, {494} and soon slackened in his personal efforts. Nothing that he did, indeed, seemed to prosper, and in his constant letters to Sor Maria his despairing references to his own sins being the cause of all his troubles became increasingly poignant. With infinite trouble and scraping together of resources, he managed to raise another army and full campaign material, with which his son Don Juan was to reconquer Portugal for the crown.[44] At first in the spring of 1663 all went well with Don Juan, who invaded Portugal and captured the important city of Evora, but he was met near that place by the English and Portuguese and defeated on the 8th June. Attempting to retreat into Spain, he was overtaken, and again the Spanish army suffered a disastrous rout, with a loss of 8000 men, with baggage, standards, and arms. Don Juan himself fought bravely, pike in hand, but was borne away in the flight, and with difficulty escaped to Badajoz. He was then recalled to Madrid, and in long conferences with his father's ministers[45] arranged a new campaign for the {495} following year, though it was evident now to everyone that the reconquest of her lost dominion was beyond the material and moral strength of Spain. Ever since the Restoration in England, Charles II. had been making tentative efforts to bring about peace with Spain. Philip it was certain would not officially recognise the independence of Portugal; but perhaps a _modus vivendi_ might be arranged, by means of a long truce or otherwise, so that direct trade between England and Spain might be restored, and the mutual injuries inflicted at sea be stopped. The advantage to Spain would, of course, be great, because the silver fleets were constantly preyed upon by English privateers; but the English shipmasters and merchants also had felt severely the deprivation of Spanish trade; and after the crushing defeat of Don Juan at Amegial, just referred to, in June 1663, it seemed a good opportunity for Charles II. to suggest directly to Philip the advisability of an agreement. [Sidenote: Fanshawe's embassy] The envoy chosen was that Dick Fanshawe who had been in Spain in the time of Bristol and Aston, and had lately negotiated the marriage with Catharine of Braganza. He, stout loyalist as he had been during all the Commonwealth, was Sir Richard Fanshawe, Baronet, now, and in high favour with Charles, who, it was thought, would have made him Secretary of State. He was instructed to set forth to Philip the benefit that {496} would accrue to both States from a reopening of maritime trade, and to say how anxious the King of England was to be friendly with the Catholic King, whom he esteemed so highly, notwithstanding the refusal of Spain to deal with him during the Commonwealth and the expulsion of his agents from Madrid at that time, as well as the closing of the Spanish ports to Prince Rupert's fleet. The matter of Portugal was to be very tenderly handled. Fanshawe was instructed to say that the King of Spain "cannot imagine that we will ever persuade him to deprive himself of his reputed right to the kingdom of Portugal, but whether the determination of that difference may not be advantageously suspended till a more favourable conjuncture, and until the crown of Spain be less liable to accidents, will be his part to judge."[46] Fanshawe arrived in Cadiz on the 24th February (O.S.) 1664, and nothing could exceed the honour shown to the English ambassador and his wife by the magnates of Andalucia. The keys of the city were tendered to him in a "great silver basin," and he was asked to give the password for the night, which, courtier like, he did in the form of "_Viva el Rey Catolico_." Very different was the welcome that had awaited poor Ascham in the same port fourteen years before; though Fanshawe, overcome by all this ceremonious posturing, hoped that it was "not instead of substance, for then it would be very tedious and irksome to me, indeed, but an earnest prognostick of it, which {497} time will try when I come to treat."[47] Everywhere, as Fanshawe travelled towards the capital, he was treated with almost royal honours; bull-fights, cane-tourneys, and, of course, the usual comedies being offered by nobles on the way: and it was the 7th May before he reached Vallecas in the outskirts of Madrid, where he remained for a time, as Philip was staying at Aranjuez, and no house had been provided in the capital for Fanshawe's accommodation; the famous "house with the seven chimneys" being then occupied by the Venetian ambassador. For the next five weeks the exchange of visits of compliment and ceremonial generalities with the Duke of Medina de las Torres, now Philip's principal minister, and many other nobles and officials, occupied the time of Fanshawe and his clever wife; who wrote, "Though the men visited my husband, I could not suffer the ladies to visit me, though they much desired it, because I was so straitened in lodgings that in no sort were they convenient to receive persons of that quality, in not being capacious enough for my own family." The gossips of the Calle Mayor were full of the visit of the English peace-envoy, and saw all manner of grave political import in the difficulty of finding him a house; though Fanshawe himself attributes it to its true cause, namely, the insufficient house room in the capital; though he offered _carte blanche_ as to terms, and to pay a year's rent in advance in silver. After much delay and {498} resistance on the part of the Venetian ambassador, who wished to retain the house after his departure for the accommodation of his successor, the English ambassador was once more housed in the "house with the seven chimneys," after he had stayed for a time at a house standing in its own grounds outside the Fuencarral gate at Santa Barbara. [Sidenote: Fanshawe's state entry] At length, Philip having returned from Aranjuez, Fanshawe made his state entry into the capital, and had his first audience of Philip. "On Wednesday the 8/18th June," says Lady Fanshawe, "my husband had his audience of his Catholic Majesty, who sent the Marquis de Malpica to conduct him, bringing him a horse of his Majesty for my husband to ride on, and thirty more for his gentlemen, and his Majesty's coach with his guard, that he (_i.e._ Malpica) was captain of. No ambassador's coach accompanied my husband but the French, who did it contrary to the King's command, who had before, upon my husband's demanding the custom of ambassadors accompanying all other ambassadors that came to this Court at their audience, replied that, although it had been so it should never be again; saying that it was a custom brought into this Court within less than twenty-five years.[48] My husband, about eleven of the clock, set forth out of his lodgings thus. First went all those gentlemen of the town and palace that came to {499} accompany my husband, then went twenty footmen, all in new liveries of the same colour we used to give, which is dark green cloth with a frost upon green lace. Then went all my husband's gentlemen, and next before himself his _camarados_, two and two (here follow the eight names). Then my husband, in a very rich suit of clothes, of a dark fille (feuille) morte brocade laced with silver and gold lace, nine laces, every one as broad as my hand, and a little silver and gold lace laid between them, both of very curious workmanship. His suit was trimmed with scarlet taffeta ribbon, his stockings of white silk upon long scarlet silk ones, his shoes black with scarlet shoe-strings and garters, his linen very finely laced with very rich Flanders lace, a black beaver buttoned on the left side with a jewel of twelve hundred pounds, a curious wrought old gold chain made at the Indies, at which hung the King his master's picture richly set with diamonds, cost three hundred pounds, which his Majesty in great grace and favour had been pleased to give him at his coming home from Portugal. On his fingers he wore two very rich rings, his gloves trimmed with the same ribbon as his clothes. All his whole family (_i.e._ suite) was very richly clothed according to their several qualities."[49] In this great magnificence Sir Richard Fanshawe rode through Madrid with the Marquis of Malpica by his side, followed by the Teuton guard, groups of pages and lackeys, and then the royal coach. After that came a coach drawn by four black horses, the finest state coach, says Lady Fanshawe, that ever {500} came out of England, and to describe its grandeur nothing but the lady's own words will do justice. "It was of rich crimson velvet, laced with broad silver and gold lace, fringed round with a massy gold and silver fringe, and the falls of the boots so rich that they hung almost down to the ground. The very fringe cost almost four hundred pounds. The coach was very richly gilt on the outside, and very richly adorned with brass work, with rich tassels of gold and silver hanging round the top of the curtains round about the coach. The curtains were of rich damask fringed with silver and gold. The harness for six horses was richly embossed with brass work, with reins and tassels for the horses of crimson silk, silver and gold. That coach is said to be the finest that ever entered Madrid." After it followed a host of other coaches, which, fine as they were, must have appeared dull by the side of such a chariot as this. Fanshawe passed through an admiring crowd both outside and inside the palace, for the Madrileños ever loved finery; and at length reached the presence of Philip, who received him courteously, and many complimentary speeches, meaning nothing, were exchanged; after which ceremonious visits had to be paid to Queen Mariana and her children, the Infanta Margaret, now called the Empress, by virtue of her betrothal to her uncle, and the scrofulous rickety infant, Don Carlos, now Philip's only son. [Sidenote: Lady Fanshawe in Madrid] A week afterwards, Sir Richard had his first private interview with the King at the Buen Retiro. Philip was ill, and unequal now to much exertion, so that after Fanshawe's long address on the need {501} for peace, and the conditions upon which it might be attained, he could only request that the whole of the points might be put in writing for his careful consideration. Soon after this, on the 27th June, Lady Fanshawe first went to salute Queen Mariana, and thus gives her impressions of what she saw-- "I waited on the Queen and the Empress (_i.e._ the little Infanta Margaret) with my three daughters and all my train. I was received at the Buen Retiro by the guard, and afterwards when I came upstairs by the Marquesa de Hinojosa, the Queen's _Camarera Mayor_. Through an infinite number of people I passed to the Queen's presence, where her Majesty was seated at the upper end under a cloth of state upon three cushions, and on her left hand the Empress upon three more. The ladies were all standing. After making my last reverence to the Queen, her Majesty and the Empress, rising up and making me a little curtsey, sat down again. Then I, by my interpreter, Sir Benjamin Wright, said those compliments that were due from me to her Majesty, to which her Majesty made a gracious and kind reply. Then I presented my children, whom her Majesty received with great grace and favour. Then her Majesty, speaking to me to sit, I sat down upon a cushion laid for me above all the ladies, but below the Camarera Mayor (no woman taking place of her but Princesses). The children sat on the other side, mingled with the Court ladies that are maids-of-honour. Thus, after passing half an hour in discourse, I took my leave of her Majesty and the {502} Empress, making reverences to all the ladies in passing." Of the various times the Fanshawes saw the King or Queen no detailed account need be given here, as the descriptions add nothing to our knowledge; nor is it necessary to dwell upon the accounts given of the Court diversions, which have already been described fully in the earlier pages of this book. Lady Fanshawe's opinions, however, of Spain and Spaniards generally are quaint. She thinks that the usually accepted English idea that Spain is a land of famine is unjust, especially for those who could afford to pay. "There is not in the Christian world," she says, "better wines than their midland (_i.e._ southern) wines, especially sherry and canary. Their water tastes like milk, and their wheat makes the sweetest and best bread in the world. Bacon is beyond belief good; the Segovia veal much whiter, larger, and fatter than ours. They have a small bird that lives and fattens on grapes and corn--so fat that it exceeds the quantity of flesh. They have the best partridges I ever ate, and the best sausages, and salmon, pike, and seabream, which they send up in pickle called escabeche in Madrid; and dolphins, which are excellent meat,[50] besides carps and many other sorts of fish. The cream called nata is much sweeter and thicker than ever I saw in England. Their eggs much exceed ours; and so all sorts of salads, roots, and fruits.... Besides that, I have ate many sorts of biscuits, cakes, cheese, and excellent sweetmeats.... Their olives, which are {503} nowhere so good. Their perfumes of amber excel all the world in their kind, both for clothes, household stuff, and fumes; and there is no such waters made as at Seville." The good lady, too, was much enamoured of the courtesy of Spaniards. "They are civil to all, as their qualities require, with highest respect; so I have seen a grandee and a duke stop his horse, when an ordinary woman passeth over a kennel, because he would not spoil her clothes, and put off his hat to the meanest woman that makes reverence, though it be to their footmen's wives.... They are punctual in visits, men to men and women to women. They visit not together, except their greatest ministers of State to wives of public ministers from Princes.... They are generally pleasant and facetious company, but in this their women exceed, who seldom laugh and never aloud, but are the most witty in repartees and stories and notions in the world.... They work little, but that rarely well, especially in monasteries (_i.e._ convents). They all paint white and red, from the Queen to the cobbler's wife, old and young, widows excepted, which never go out of close mourning, nor wear gloves nor show their hair after their husband's death, and seldom marry. They delight much in the feasts of bulls and in stage plays, and take great pleasure to see their little children act before them in their own houses, which they will do to perfection.... Until their daughters marry they never stir so much as down stairs, nor marry for no consideration under their quality, which to {504} prevent, if their fortunes will not procure them husbands, they make them nuns. They are very magnificent in their houses, furniture, pictures of the best, jewels, plate, and clothes; most noble in presents, entertainments, and in their equipage."[51] Fanshawe's mission made but slow progress, for the pride of Spain with regard to Portugal still stood in the way, and Philip was hoping against hope that the campaign of the following year, 1665, would restore to him the crown he had lost. He was still straining every nerve to get money; and as a last fatal resource in order to relieve as he hoped the distress of the treasury, he now reduced the value of the silver money to half, so that, as Lady Fanshawe says, "the pistole that was this morning at 82 _reals_ was now proclaimed to go but for 48, which was above £800 loss to my husband."[52] At length, in the spring, by such devices as this--seizing all the securities lodged for loans, etc.--another army was got together. Don Juan, by the intrigues of the Austrian faction, was recalled and sent into semi-disgrace to Consuegra; the Count of Caracena, distinguished in the war with the Turks on the frontier of Hungary, being entrusted with the task of reconquering Portugal. Philip, indeed, at this time, as his health and strength decayed, was surrounded by intrigue, intended, as it did, to drag unhappy Spain once more into the fatal alliance with the Emperor, in {505} which Spain was made the catspaw of Austrian ambition, and the milch-cow of Austrian greed. It was no longer to suppress freedom of conscience in the German States. That had been conceded long ago; and against that alone had it been Spain's traditional policy to fight. The German Queen and her confessor Nithard, with Pöetting, the Austrian ambassador, were all intent now upon obtaining Spanish aid to the wars with the Turk on the Hungarian frontiers.[53] Philip still treated it as a question of conscience, and his letters to the nun breathed continual sorrow at having to deplete his own poverty-stricken subjects to help the Emperor. But it never seems to occur to him that he was really under no obligation whatever to do so, and that Spain would not have been seriously affected even if the Turk had been victorious in Hungary. [Sidenote: The nun's last letter] His personal health was now very bad, gallstones and other painful maladies keeping him in almost constant agony. To a letter from the nun, imploring him to care for his health, in March 1665, he answered that he would do so; "but I can assure you that I only want what may be best for God's service, and neither health, nor anything else, but that the divine will should be executed upon me. This is what I wish you to supplicate His Divine Majesty to grant me, and my salvation, which is my main concern." A few weeks after this was written, in March 1665, the nun sent to her royal friend another letter full of goodly counsel {506} and encouragement; and then the pen fell from her hands for ever, and Philip was left utterly alone. His wife, working hard for her future influence, and in favour of the Austrian policy, had no sympathy to spare for the sufferings of the declining old uncle-husband, to whom political ambitions had given her as his wife. The only son who lived to succeed him was a scrofulous degenerate, who presented, even in his infancy, an exaggeration of his inherited type, which made him a monstrosity, a poor creature who never emerged from puerility, and finally died of senile decay at forty. There was literally no ray of light on earth for Philip, now that Sor Maria was dead. Around him, as he knew and saw, plans and intrigues were anticipating the time when he should be no more. There were those in the Court, looking mostly to Don Juan, who dreaded to see Spain dragged once more at the tail of the Empire; for Louis XIV. was already threatening, and most Spaniards hankered for the closer alliance, meaning peace with France, that seemed so firm on the Isle of Pheasants only five years before; whilst Mariana and the Austrians had gained to their side a large party of nobles, pledged for their own greedy ends to support the Queen when she should succeed to the Regency and hold in her hands the resources of Spain. [Sidenote: The last blow] On the 20th June 1665 the terrible news had to be broken to the King, that his forlorn hope had been defeated. Count Caracena, from whom so much had been hoped, had been utterly crushed by the Portuguese and their English auxiliaries. Eight hours of carnage had reduced the Spanish {507} army from 15,000 men to 7000, and all the guns had been lost. Philip could, in very truth, do no more. To raise this army every means, legal and illegal, had been resorted to; private property had been violated, pledges had been broken, injustice had been perpetrated, and suffering had been inflicted upon poor people already sorely oppressed. To this had the great dream come at last: that the King who was held to be the proudest and wealthiest in Christendom was unable to hold even his own territory. For the first time Philip broke down in the sight of men; for Sor Maria was dead, and to none could he turn now for comfort. Heart-broken, he cast himself upon the ground in a paroxysm of grief, and sobbed out the formula that was his only refuge, "Oh God! Thy will be done," almost the same words as those which his grandfather uttered when he received the news of the catastrophe that had overtaken his great Armada. But Philip IV.'s case was worse, by far, than that of Philip II. Behind the latter there was still a nation full of faith in its divine selection to dominate the world for the glory of God and His chosen King: behind Philip IV., himself aged and worn with sickness of body and disillusion of spirit, there was a people who had lost all confidence in themselves and their mission, ready to scoff and spit upon the idols that had failed them; a people whom sloth, vanity, and epicureanism had robbed for a time of their nobleness, and who yet had to pass through the consummation of their woe before, cleansed in the fires of suffering, they should arise again. Philip knew it; and, looking back over his long {508} reign, he must have cursed the fate that condemned him from his birth to the performance of an almost impossible task with utterly inadequate means. He had been dedicated at his baptism to the Dominican ideal of a Christian church purged of dissent at any cost; and yet, from the time when the Protestant ambassadors of England were the honoured guests at his christening, until now in his despairing age Fanshawe was reminding him daily of his impotence both on land and sea, he had been obliged to woo heretics, and to fight a great Catholic Power which was bent upon the final humiliation of his house. Thus, with bitter irony, some mightier power, with ends incomprehensible to men, mocked at the great designs of those who thought that they and theirs were but junior partners with providence, the chosen agents of the Almighty; and Philip, in whose days the scales had fallen from the nation's eyes, ascribed the agonised awakening, and the ruin it disclosed, to the vengeance of an offended deity for his own puny sins. [Sidenote: Philip bewitched] Philip was tired of the struggle, weary of the sordid intrigues around him, and he fell into gloomy despondency that banished from him all interest in life. His bodily sufferings were intense, for the malady that afflicted him was a cruel one. Again the rumour ran that the King was bewitched, and that the late Inquisitor-General had been arranging means to remove the spell when he died. The great ecclesiastics in attendance were convinced that Satan was at the bottom of the King's troubles; and asked Philip's permission to proceed in their incantations to defeat the evil one who was thus persecuting him. There were those at Court who {509} sneered at the absurdity of attempting to cure a physical malady by such means;[54] but the Inquisition insisted, and took over the management of the case. The acting Inquisitor-General, Gonzalez, accompanied by Philip's confessor, Juan Martinez, went to the patient and asked him for a little bag of relics which he always wore around his neck, for they feared some evil charm might be amongst them. Then to the Dominican monastery of the Atocha they solemnly carried "an old book of sorcery, some prints of his Majesty transfixed with pins," and other rubbish, all of which they solemnly burnt with much sacred mummery. This did the King no good, and then the doctors tried their hand with a sweet conserve of mallow leaves, not, one would think, a sovereign remedy for gall-stones. On Monday, 14th September, the physicians confessed themselves hopeless. The hemorrhage was very great, and the patient utterly exhausted with frequent paroxysms of fever, in one of which he was thought to be dead, and the news spread through the capital that he was so. When he was restored to consciousness, he summoned the new Secretary of State, Loyola, and entrusted him with official papers and his will for Queen Mariana, and then demanded the last sacrament. When the friars brought the viaticum and told the dying man that all hope was gone, he was resigned; though the Holy Virgin of the Atocha was taken in procession past his windows, and the body of {510} St. Diego, with scores of other grisly remains, were kept in the sick-room itself, in the hope that good would come of them. Mariana and her two children came to say good-bye to the dying man on Monday afternoon, and, with tears in his eyes, Philip sighed to the five-year-old weakling who was to succeed him: "God make you happier than He has made me."[55] He took an affecting leave, too, of the Duke of Medina de las Torres, and the other nobles who were attached to him; pardoned the Marquis of Heliche for the attempt to blow up the Retiro, and granted many titles and knighthoods to his gentlemen-in-waiting. Count Castrillo, always self-seeking, had the bad taste to pester the King, both personally and through the friars, that he should be made Grandee, but Philip angrily referred him to the Queen. For three days the King lingered on in suffering, confessing again and again and receiving absolution; never for long abandoning his hold upon the rough crucifix that had comforted the last moments of his saintly predecessors on the throne. The jealous friars and confessors about him quarrelled so violently in the death chamber on one occasion, about administering the last sacrament again, that the Marquis of Aytona turned the King's confessor out of the room and forbade his return. On Wednesday, Castrillo came in full of the great news that Don Juan had presented himself at the palace, and Philip, disturbed and unhappy at the trouble that this portended, sternly sent orders for the Prince to return instantly; for this, he said, was only {511} the time for him to die, not to enter into mundane disputes. [Sidenote: Death of Philip IV.] All that night the King was delirious, until he suddenly recovered consciousness just before dawn on Thursday, 17th September 1665, and then quietly passed away. He had been beloved by those around him, and had been prodigal all his life of favour to the men who served him; but Mariana and her son were the source of bounty now, and human nature showed its baseness at such a crisis, as it is wont to do in palaces; for, as my eye-witness authority avers,[56] "Of all his Majesty's household, the Marquis of Aytona and two other servants alone wept for the death of their King and master; and in all the rest of the capital there was not one person who shed a tear." The Marquis of Malpica, captain of the Guard, came from the death chamber first to the anteroom filled with guards on duty, and announced the King's passing by shouting: "Now, comrades, your duty is to go upstairs[57] and guard his Majesty King Charles." Courtiers were too busy thence-forward looking towards the future to care much for the unhappy Planet King who had laid down his heavy burden. The reading of the will which made Mariana Regent, the constant meetings, and the coming and going of the ministers, kept the palace astir from morning till night; but a few faithful souls dressed the poor remains of the King in a musk-coloured velvet suit, embroidered with silver, placed a silver sword by his side, a {512} diamond cross in his hands folded upon his breast, which was embroidered with the great red dagger of Santiago, and covered the head with a beaver hat. And so, garbed and enclosed in gorgeous silver and red velvet coffins, he was placed high upon a dais under a canopy illumined by great wax torches, surrounded with the insignia of imperial majesty, and guarded by the faithful halberdiers of Espinosa; whilst friars chanted and prayed around the bier hour after hour. The hall in which the body of Philip lay thus in deathly state was that which had seen so many gay hours of his hopeful youth; for it was the room devoted to the stage-plays that he had loved not wisely but too well. Lady Fanshawe, like the rest of the great people in Madrid, went to see the sight, and thus records her impressions-- "The body of Philip IV. lay exposed from the 18th September, Friday morning, till the night of Saturday the 19th, in a great room in his palace, in which they used to act plays. The room was hung with fourteen pieces of the King's best hangings, and over them rich pictures round about, all of one size placed close together. At the upper end of the room was raised a throne of three steps, upon which there was placed a bedstead raised at the head. The throne was covered with a rich Persian carpet, and the bottom of the bedstead with a counterpoint of cloth of gold. The bedstead was of silver, the valance and headcloth of gold wrought in flowers with crimson silk. Over the bedstead was {513} placed a cloth of state of the same as the valance and headcloth of the bedstead, upon which stood a silver gilt coffin raised a foot or more at the head than at the feet, and in the coffin lay Philip IV. with his head on a pillow, upon it a white beaver hat, his hair combed, his beard trimmed, his face and hands painted. He was clothed in a musk-coloured silk suit embroidered with gold, a golilla about his neck, cuffs on his hands, which were clasped on his breast, holding a globe and a cross therein. His cloak was of the same, with his sword on his side; stockings, shoe-strings, and garters of the same, and a pair of white shoes upon his feet." [Sidenote: The burial of Philip] Seven altars and scores of lighted tapers were erected in the chamber, and offices for the dead King's soul went ceaselessly on, as the courtiers came and went before the painted clay that had been once so potent; but when, late on Saturday, the time came to carry the body through the night across the plains to the snow-tipped Guadarramas glimmering afar off, where in the stately jasper chamber he had wrought for his royal house Philip IV. was to lie amongst the greater dead, few of the high nobles and officers cared to absent themselves from Madrid in these early days; and one after the other they refused to do the last sad offices to him who had so often commanded them with a glance. At last the Duke of Medina de las Torres peremptorily ordered a kinsman of his own to take charge of the body to the Escorial. Even the bearing of the body to the mule litter that awaited it gave rise to a hot dispute, in which threats of {514} violence between two sets of officials were flung across the coffin.[58] With fourscore friars and the great officers of the palace who were obliged to accompany the corpse, the litter, surrounded by torches, travelled throughout the night, and on Sunday, 20th September 1655, the prior of the Escorial relieved the courtiers of the burden of which they were so glad to be free; whereafter they all scurried back, as fast as horses could carry them, to make the preparations and ensure their own important participation in the glorious series of bull-fights, cane-tourneys, masques, and sumptuous parades which within a fortnight were to greet the accession of his Catholic Majesty King Charles II. [Sidenote: The end] There were still thirty-five years more of national humiliation and grief for Spain before the great convulsion that awoke her to a new life; but these years were but a prolongation of the agony preceding the dissolution that had been made inevitable during the reign of Philip IV. The Court over which he was the presiding spirit had exhibited in the forty-five years he ruled it the strange phenomenon of corruscating intellectual activity, accompanied by unexampled moral and social corruption. Literature and art had blazed up with sudden refulgence before they too sank into twilight; and when Philip passed in, the generation of geniuses that illumined his Court were dead or hastening to the grave, whilst all else was sinking deeper and deeper into darkness. It needed the formation of new ideals, the evolution of a new patriotism, to make Spain {515} worthy of her history again; and the outworn, incestuous blood of the Philips was powerless to lead the nation back to health and sanity after its splendid epoch of heroics. Philip did his best, but he himself was but a product of his time and country: a kindly gentleman of noble aspirations and ignoble practice, weak of will and tender of conscience, a poet and a dilettante, doomed to an overwhelming task for which he was unfit. In his long reign he saw moral decadence that he could not arrest, national ruin that even his frantic prayers were powerless to avert; and he lived through half a lifetime of martyrdom, because he ascribed his failure to the vengeance of a ruthless deity whom he had offended by his sins, and believed that he, gentle-hearted as he was, had brought upon the people that he loved the wide-spread woe he saw around him. [1] _Avisos de Barrionuevo_ (Coleccion de Autores Castellanos), Madrid, 1892; _Voyage en Espagne_ (1655), Aersens Van Sommerdyk, Amsterdam, 1666; _Relation de l'État et Gouvernement d'Espagne_, Bonnecasse, Cologne, 1667. Barrionuevo, who was brother of the Marquis of Cusano, was a "character." He was a jovial priest, not ashamed to boast of his love affairs, of his good looks, of his bravery: and he belonged to a turbulent family who were always getting into affrays of some sort, He himself records without any word of reprobation a murder committed in the open streets of Madrid by his kinsman, Francisco Barrionuevo, upon a man who had boasted of making love to his wife; and the chronicler quite unconcernedly predicts that the murderer, who had fled to sanctuary, will get off. Barrionuevo confesses that he is insatiably curious, and gathers news from everyone, going every morning to the palace to learn what was passing there. His brother, who was Spanish ambassador in London, also kept him well posted as to what happened in England. See Barrionuevo's biography by Señor Paz y Melia in the first volume of the _Avisos_. [2] Van Sommerdyk. [3] _Ibid._ The population at this time was between 250,000 and 300,000. [4] Aersens and Bonnecasse. The charge for entrance was 1½ sous, which went to the actors; 2 sous were charged for admission to the seated part, which went to the Town Council; and 7 sous was the cost of a seat in the cheapest part, 1½ sous of which went to charity, and the rest for the lessee. [5] Bonnecasse says that at this time there were 30,000 women of evil life in Madrid. Even now strangers in Madrid are surprised to see the impunity with which well-dressed, respectable young men dare to make audible remarks of an amorous or complimentary nature intended to reach the ears of ladies unknown to them in the streets. [6] A curious craze was universal amongst men in Madrid at this time, and for some years previously, namely, that of wearing large round horn framed spectacles such as are seen in the portrait of Quevedo. The modern name for goggles in Spanish is "Quevedos." The habit of snuff-taking was also a fashionable affectation of the time. [7] Worth 2s. 8d. each. [8] He also cites, however, very numerous cases of professedly poor people having large secret hoards of money. The universal want of confidence had undoubtedly led to the hoarding of coin--especially silver--to a very great extent by all classes, and this will to some extent explain the strange facility with which money was found on emergency even in the midst of poverty. [9] Barrionuevo mentions a malicious caricature which was current in the palace (1655, satirising Philip's helpless despondency in the face of universal corruption.) A group represents Haro, the chief minister, saying: "I can do everything"; the Secretary of State, Contreras, saying: "I want everything"; the King saying: "I see everything"; his Confessor saying: "I absolve everything"; and the devil saying: "I shall fly away with the lot." Aersens, as an instance of the ineptitude and corruption everywhere at the same period, mentions that he saw on the beach at St. Sebastian a great warship in course of construction, but which had not been touched for a long time; "but upon which more millions had already been spent than would have built a dozen such; but those who have spent it have alone profited by it." [10] The tradition is that Philip himself painted the cross of Santiago on the representation of Velazquez as a token of his delight at the masterpiece. This, however, is hardly likely to be the case, as the rank was not granted to the painter until two years later. It was no doubt eventually added by Philip's orders, but Velazquez was not a Knight of Santiago when the painting was executed. [11] Barrionuevo. [12] _Curias de Sor Maria_. Philip evidently recollected the bitterness of his losing Baltasar Carlos in the flower of his youth. [13] In a long doggerel ballad on the occasion, quoted by Barrionuevo, many lines are devoted to the King's delight. These are specimens-- Salio el Rey á verlo todo, y tambien á que le viesen; porque todos conociesen en el regocijo el modo de salir.... En toda mi vida vi hacer locuras mayores a plebeyos y señores; y sin reparar, entrando al rey le iban hablando desde el Grande hasta el rapaz. Fué el Rey el dia noveno a dar las gracias á Atocha mas tierno que una melcocha, y, por Dios, que iba muy bueno de diamantes todo lleno, a ese cielo parecia. The King came out to see the show, And also that he might be seen; For by his gay and happy mien Thus all the world his joy might know. Sure never in my life before Did such mad pranking meet my eye, By rich and poor and low and high. For no one cared, but in did walk, And to the King himself did talk, From great grandee to urchin poor. And when nine days had taken flight, Atocha's saint with thanks to greet, Our King did ride, as honey sweet, By God! he was a gallant sight, From top to toe with diamonds fine, Like starlit heaven did he shine. [14] It will be recollected that this was the same costume as that which Olivares wore at the baptism of Baltasar Carlos, and which then puzzled people. The dress, whatever it was, seems only to have been worn at christenings. [15] What was called "marchpane" at royal baptisms was not really marchpane, which is of course a sweetmeat compounded of almond paste and honey, but a piece of crumb of bread upon which the bishop wiped his fingers of the holy oil after anointing the royal infant during the ceremony. The crumb of bread was often enclosed in an envelope of marchpane and was carried in the procession wrapped in a beautifully embroidered cloth upon a gold salver. [16] Barrionuevo. [17] _Cartas de Sor Maria_. [18] Braganza himself, John IV., had died in 1656, leaving his son, Alfonso VI., a minor. [19] Lionne's own account of his negotiations in _Recueil des Instructions données aux Ambassadeurs Français_. Ed. Morel Fatio, Paris, 1894. [20] On Good Friday, 1657, for instance, the procession, as usual, passed before the palace of Madrid, and as the carved group representing the Flight into Egypt passed the royal balconies a large flight of white doves was let loose. One of the doves, Barrionuevo says, flew direct to the window where the Infanta was standing, and settled upon her head, whilst another alighted upon the King's hat. Both birds were caught and liberated by the King's command, and all Madrid was soon talking of the good omen the event presented. [21] On the day of St. Blas, writes Barrionuevo, the King and Queen go to the Retiro, and on the 8th February (1658) there will be the great comedy there which will cost 50,000 ducats, with unheard of machines. There will be 132 performers, 42 of them musical women brought from all parts of Spain.... One of them, the _Bezona_, is a very fine lady from Seville, and another one, the _Grifona_, has escaped from her prison, so that the feast will be brilliant, and will last from Shrove Sunday to Ash Wednesday. [22] _Cartas de Sor Maria._ [23] Barrionuevo. [24] Barrionuevo. [25] There are three French MS. narratives of it in the Bibliotheque Nationale, written by various hands, as well as a _Journal du Voyage d'Espagne_, by Bertaut, in print, Paris, 1669, and _La Veritable Rélation du Voyage_, etc., Toulouse, 1659. Several Spanish narratives of the embassy also exist in print and MS. in the Biblioteca Nacional. [26] _Journal du Voyage d'Espagne_, par l'Abbe Bertaut, Paris, 1669. [27] So jealous were the nations of one another still, that Mazarin strictly forbade any of his French followers from crossing the Spanish line during the conference: "Dans la crainte qu'il avail que les Français, accoutumés à mépriser les étrangers et à se moquer de tous ceux qui ne sont pas vétus à leur mode, ne fissent quelques déplaisirs aux espagnols, dont le procédé est plus serieux et plus modeste." "L'isle de la Conference et le Mariage du Roi," 1660. [28] _Avisos anonimos_. Appendix to Barrionuevo. [29] A full account of the progress from day to day, written by an eyewitness, is _Viage del Rey Nuestro Señor à la Frontera de Francia_. Madrid, 1667. [30] So few were they at this time, that it was projected to repopulate the rural districts by large immigration of Irish and Dalmatian families (Barrionuevo). [31] Palamino, _Life of Velazquez_. [32] An eye-witness, from whose unpublished MS. description of these ceremonies I have condensed some passages, says they were "de los mayores y de mayor lucimiento que ha visto Europa en muchos siglos." MS. Biblioteca Nacional, P. v. c. 27. [33] In one of the narratives of the ceremonies from day to day, written by Roque de la Luna, one of Philip's household (MS. Biblioteca Nacional, P. v. c. 31, transcribed by me), he says "Don Francisco took an hour and a half to read it, and as we were all standing it seemed a very long time to us." [34] "The noise was so great that it seemed as if the world was crumbling," says the narrator from whose manuscript I am quoting. [35] Narrative of Roque de Luna, MS., Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid. P. v. c. 31. [36] Narrative of Roque de Luna, MS., Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, P. v. c. 31. [37] MS. narrative of an anonymous eye-witness. Biblioteca National, Madrid, P. v. c. 27. [38] Contemporary descriptions of these ceremonies in French are numerous. One, published in Paris in June 1660, is specially interesting. It is called "Le mariage du Roy, célébré à St. Jean de Luz." The occasion remains one of the great glories of St. Jean de Luz, where the house in which Maria Teresa lodged still stands, and is called "La maison de l'Infante." A series of interesting tapestry pictures of the ceremonies may be seen in the exhibition palace in the Champs Elysées, Paris. [39] Some of the Spanish narrators mention with surprise and chagrin that neither the Spanish troops nor courtiers were so fine as the French. The anonymous Newsletter writer (sequel to Barrionuevo) says: "Many of our courtiers write (_i.e._ to Madrid) that the French gentlemen and ladies who came to the ceremonies were so numerous, and the adornments they wore were so rich and abundant, that we were evidently inferior to them, although much care had been taken on our side to excel, and no expense had been spared. So we cannot say this time, as we have said before, that the French finery was nothing but frills, furbelows, and feathers." [40] It was against the etiquette of the Court for a left-handed son of the sovereign to stay in Madrid, or even to visit it without special permission. The rumour, though untrue, that Don Juan was to be allowed to come to Madrid and welcome Philip at this time caused much heart-burning. [41] The Newsletter writer (_Avisos anonimos_) says that when Don Juan was told of Haro's death, he replied: "My father has lost a great minister; Let us go hunting," which he did immediately, to show his satisfaction. [42] _Avisos_. Sequel to Barrionuevo. [43] _Cartas de Sor Maria_, 25th November 1661. [44] It was necessary for Philip to seize all the securities lodged in the hands of the contractors and money-lenders for the raising and provision of this army, the excuse being that the contractors were swindling him. It appears that they bought barley in Estremadura at 8 reals the fanega (1½ bushels), and sold it to the army for 56 reals. The contractors (Genoese and Portuguese) offered 3½ million ducats for the securities back again, but it was refused. Another seizure of securities left with loan-mongers and contractors was made in the following year, which completed the ruin of several of them. _Avisos_. 1660-1664. [45] Don Juan was kept in Madrid for many months, much to his own disgust, as he saw that it was in consequence of the intrigues of Queen Mariana to separate him from the army altogether. One of her plans was to induce the King to order Don Juan to conduct to Germany the young Infanta Margaret, who had just been betrothed to her uncle, the Emperor. Don Juan stood out firmly against this. He hated the Austrian connection, and Mariana and her German advisers were his enemies. Affairs came to a head in October 1663, when Don Juan forced the pace by boldly urging his father to make him an Infante of Spain and first minister. This frightened Mariana and her alter ego, Father Nithard, her Jesuit confessor; and it had the effect desired by Don Juan, of obtaining his despatch from Madrid to the army at Badajoz. During his stay in the capital he had offended nearly all the nobles by his haughty arrogance. _Avisos_. [46] Instructions to Sir Richard Fanshawe. _Original Letters of Sir Richard Fanshawe_, London, 1702. [47] Fanshawe's _Original Letters_. A most naive and amusing account of his embassy in Spain, where he died, is in Lady Fanshawe's Memoirs. of which a new and fully annotated edition has recently been published. [48] The controversy on this point is fully set forth in Fanshawe's own letter to Lord Holles. The French ambassador's exceptional courtesy to the Englishman somewhat disconcerted the Spaniards, who thought there was some political significance behind it. [49] Lady Fanshawe's _Memoirs_. [50] The fish she calls dolphins were probably tunny. [51] Lady Fanshawe's _Memoirs_. [52] Whilst the penury of the country led Philip to adopt such measures as this, the influence of Mariana and her German entourage induced him at this very time--November 1664--to send a contribution of 500,000 ducats to the Emperor's needs. [53] An interesting volume founded upon Pöetting's correspondence, and dealing with the connection between Spain and the Empire at this time, has recently been published by his Excellency Don W. de Villa Urrutia, Spanish ambassador in England. It is called _Relaciones entre Espana y Austria_, Madrid, 1905. [54] There is a very minute account of Philip's illness and death written by one of his attendants, from which I take some of the particulars. Biblioteca National, Madrid, P. v. c. 24. Manuscript, 15 pages transcribed by me. [55] _Muerte del Rey Felipe IV._, a contemporary account by an eyewitness. British Museum MSS., Add. 8703. [56] MSS. Bib. Nac., Madrid, P. v. c. 24. [57] Philip had died in the entresol-room in the palace, which he always occupied in summer, as it was shady and cool. [58] MSS. Biblioteca National, Madrid, p. v. c. 24. {519} INDEX Abbot, Archbishop, 109. Academies (literary contests), 200, 301. Admiral of Castile (Duke of Medina de Rio Seco), 163, 167. Aguila, Marquis del, 300. Ahumada, Father, 373. Alamos, Don Baltasar de, 237. Albert, Cardinal, Archduke, 21, 286. Aliaga, confessor of Philip III., 45. Alumbrados, the blasphemous sect so called, 271. Amegial, battle of, 494, 495. Anna of Austria, Queen of France, 155, 334, 335, 377, 464, 465, 482. Aragonese Cortes, 141, 159, 162-170, 228, 254-259, 287, 296, 397. Archy Armstrong in Spain, 100, 120. Arcos, Duke of, 342. Arnet, murderer of Ascham, 433. Arundel, Philip, Earl of, 196. Ascham, Anthony, Cromwell's envoy to Spain, 429; his mission, 431; his murder in Madrid, 431-437. Astillano, Prince of, 460. Aston, Sir Walter, 77, 81, 106, 124, 292, 293, 295, 311, 312, 313, 317, 322. Atillano, "the poet," 301. Auto-de-fé, an, 150, 259. Avendaño, an actor, 231. Aytona, Marquis of, 218, 229, 391, 510. B Balbeses, Marquis of (Spinola), 341. Ballard, an English priest in Madrid, 102. Baltasar, Carlos, Prince, 210, 225, 241, 244, 246, 250, 253, 257, 276, 282, 284, 285, 353, 367, 387, 397; his betrothal, 399. Barbastro, Cortes at, 164. Barcelona, 167 et seq., 255-259, 297, 337-342. Bejar, Duke of, 253, 342, 461. Borgia, Cardinal, 253, 343, 458. Borja, Melchior, 371. Braganza, Duke of, 286, 334; proclaimed King of Portugal, 345, 423. Breitenfeld, battle of, 247. Bristol, Earl of, Sir John Digby, 67, 68, 72, 73, 76, 77, 81, 97, 98, 100, 106, 123, 124. Buckingham, Duke of, in Madrid, 67 et seq.; meets Philip, 81-85; the state entry, 86-92, 95, 96, 105; quarrels with Olivares, 106, 113-120; leaves Spain, 121-123, 125; his assassination, 216. Buckingham, Duke of, his letters to King James, 79, 83, 92, 93, 105, 107, 111, 114. Buen Retiro, palace of, 201, 238, 273, 280, 281, 284, 300, 301, 311, 316-319, 330, 342, 388, 392, 455, 489. Burgos, Archbishop of, 39. Burke, Marquis of Mayo, 216. C Calderon, 147. Calderon, Marquis de Siete Iglesias, 31, 44. Caracena, Count, defeated in Portugal, 504. Cardenas, Alonso de, 423, 424, 425-429. Cardona, Duke of, 167, 257, 287, 342. Carducho, V., 194. Carignano, Princess of, her reception in Madrid, 311, 316-319, 329. Carlos, Infante, 44, 62, 65, 66, 90, 99, 123, 138, 163, 167, 174-186, 241, 246, 247, 255, 256, 259; his death, 260. Carlos, Prince, son of Philip IV., 492, 500, 511. Carpio, Marquis of, 65, 66, 99, 167, 229, 352, 366, 371, 394. Carrion, the nun of, 122; her impostures, 308. Castel Rodrigo, Marquis of, 163, 319. Castrillo, Count of, 364, 488, 510. Catalan Cortes. _See_ Aragonese. Catalonia, disaffection and war in, 336-342, 357, 365, 388, 391, 392. Cea, Duke of, 91. Chambers, Laurence, 432. Charles, Prince of Wales, 37; the Spanish match, 51, 52; arrives in Madrid, 67 et seq.; he sees the Infanta, 77; meets Philip, 81-83; his state entry to Madrid, 87 et seq.; in love with the Infanta, 93; attempts to convert him, 94, 95; his pastimes in Madrid, 96; his visits to the Infanta, 97; his indiscretion, 100; negotiations, 104-110; disillusioned, 119; departs from Spain, 121, 195, 196. Charles I., King of England, 216, 217-225, 243, 266, 274, 282, 288, 290-295, 313, 315, 321, 322, 323; his execution, 424. Charles I., his painter in Madrid, 282 n. Charles II. of England, birth of, 224, 426, 487, 495. Chevreuse, Duchess of, in Madrid, 317. Cinq Mars, 364. Coloma, Carlos, Spanish ambassador in England, 218. Condé, Prince of, 378, 462, 463, 466. Cottington, Sir Francis, 67, 74, 76, 81, 106, 107, 117, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222-225, 268, 275, 282, 295, 426, 432. Corral de la Cruz. _See_ Theatres. Corral de la Pacheca. _See_ Theatres. Crofts, Courier, 112. Cromwell, his relations with Spain, 423-437. D Don Juan of Austria, son of Charles V., 59. Don Juan Jose of Austria, son of Philip IV., 207, 285, 353, 387, 403, 405, 418, 452, 463, 464, 467, 474, 486, 487, 494, 495, 504, 506, 510. Downs, the capture of the Spanish fleet in, 324. Dunkirk captured, 463. E English courtiers, their behaviour at Philip's christening, 6. English embassy at Philip's baptism, 1-10. Eraso, Don Francisco, 237. Escovedo, 59. Execution of the Hijar conspirators, 407-411. F Fadrique de Toledo, 156, 279 n. Fanshawe, Lady, in Madrid, 498 et seq.; her opinion of Spaniards, 501; her account of Philip's lying in state, 512. Fanshawe, Sir Richard, 314; his mission to Spain, 495-497; his state entry, 498; his failure, 504. Fashions, change of, in Spain after the marriage of Maria Teresa, 486. Felton assassinates Buckingham, 216. Feria, Duke of, 155. Fernando, Infante, 44, 90, 174-186, 241, 246, 247, 255, 256, 259; goes to Flanders, 260, 281, 288, 293, 299, 303, 310, 315, 331; dies, 377. Festivities in Madrid, 60-66, 86-92, 101, 118, 145, 150, 209, 210, 225, 231-235, 273, 301, 307, 310, 312, 316-319, 451, 456-46l, 469, 472. Fischer, Ascham's secretary, 432-437. Field sports in Spain, 211-213. Flanders and Spain, 21, 156, 176, 246, 247. Flores d'Avila, Marquis of, 64. Fonseca, Dr., patron of Velazquez, 197-199. Francisco Fernando of Austria, Philip's natural son, 236-238. Frederick the Palatine, 70, 116, 216, 217-225, 266. Frias, Duke of, Grand Constable of Castile, 5, 354, 461. Fuenterrabia, 335, 480. G Garcia Fray, punished by the Inquisition, 272. Golilla, the, 138, 144, 447, 486. Gomez Davila's way with the Moriscos, 23. Gondomar, Count, Spanish ambassador in England, 68, 73, 74, 76, 81, 102, 123, 125. Gongora, his sonnet on the English embassy, 4. Grammont, Marshal, his mission to Madrid, 471. Granada, Archbishop of, Philip's tutor, remonstrates with Olivares, 53. Guevara, Anna de, 367. Gustavus Adolphus, 245, 247, 249. Guzman, Enrique Felipe, Olivares' son, 268, 352, 354. Guzman, the house of. _See_ Olivares. H Halsey, Major, murderer of Ascham, 433 et seq. Haro, Count of (a child), 457. Haro, Don Luis de, 352, 369, 371, 379, 394, 401, 406, 411, 420, 448, 451, 457, 459, 464, 466-485; death of, 487-490. Hay, Earl of Carlisle, 103, 216, 217. Heliche, Marquis of, 163, 167, 229. Heliche, Marquis of (2), 450, 451, 469, 489, 510. Henrietta Maria, Queen, 295. Henry IV. of France, 24, 29. Herrera, Don Juan, 300, 328. Hijar, Duke of, 327; his conspiracy, 407 et seq. Hinojosa, Marquis of, Spanish ambassador in England, 115, 117, 501. Hopton, Sir Arthur, 219, 242, 243, 244, 249, 250, 252, 260, 263, 268, 273, 275, 276, 277-279, 280, 282, 287, 288, 290, 291, 292-295, 312, 314, 321, 322, 423. Howard, Lord Admiral, Earl of Nottingham, in Spain, 3. Howel, his account of the visit of Charles Stuart to Madrid. _See_ Charles, Prince of Wales. Humanes, Count of, 237, 288, 292. I Idiaquez, Minister of Philip II., 25. Infanta Isabel, 21, 156, 176, 246, 260. Infantado, Duke of, 38, 39, 133, 139. Irish intrigues in Madrid, 216, 312. Isabel of Bourbon, Philip's first wife, 30, 31, 55-58, 60, 61, 65, 77, 91, 97, 120, 121, 144, 145, 147, 173, 183, 212, 220, 229, 230, 231-235, 259, 283-326, 353, 360, 361; leads the enemies of Olivares, 367; illness and death of, 392-395. Isasi Ydiaquez, Don Juan, 236. Isle of Pheasants, conferences and meetings on, 467, 470, 473, 481. J Jamaica seized by England, 439. James I. of England, 29, 36, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 84, 85, 95, 101, 105, 114, 115, 116, 119, 120, 124. James I., his letters to "Baby" and "Steenie," 84, 101, 104, 108, 112, 116. James, Duke of York, 463. John Frederick of Saxony, 289. L Lede, Marquis of, goes to England, 438. Leganes, Marquis of, 194, 229, 281, 364, 365. Lerida, Cortes at, 163. Lerma, Duke of, 1, 9, 11, 17, 19, 30, 31, 32, 33, 37, 38, 39, 43, 46, 68, 69. Liars' Walk, 54, 76, 146, 147, 196, 299, 327, 371, 439. Lindsay, Lord, 216. Linhares, Count, 325, 326. Lionne's mission to France, 465-467. Lope de Vega, 59, 147, 196, 240, 241. Los Velez, Marquis of, 335, 343. Louis XIII., 30, 252, 360, 377. Louis XIV, 377; his marriage with Maria Teresa, 466-485. M Madrid, 27, 54, 59-66; Prince Charles arrives at, 67; his state entry, 87; social condition, 131-136, 146, 147, 188-194; as an artistic centre, 194-196; corruption of, 209, 227, 265; scandals in, 268-271; artists in, 282, 296; turbulence in, 299-310; prices in, 321; lawlessness, 328-331, 356, 385, 441-446, 456, 469. Malpica, Marquis of, 38, 498, 499, 511. Mantua, Duchess of (Margaret of Savoy), 287, 333, 346, 367, 386, 387. Maqueda, Duke of, 91, 233, 490. Margaret of Austria, Queen of Spain, 7, 14, 26, 27. Margaret Maria, Infanta, 419, 453, 501. Maria, Infanta, 36, 50, 51, 52, 65, 68, 77, 84, 85, 91, 97, 99, 100, 103, 118, 120, 121; betrothed to the Emperor's heir, 172, 209, 219, 240, 403. Maria Teresa, Infanta, 353, 393, 403, 414, 415, 419, 453, 459; her marriage with Louis XIV., 466-485. Mariana of Austria, betrothed to Baltasar Carlos, 399; betrothed to Philip, 403, 413-416; married, 417-419, 449, 465, 472, 475, 487, 489, 501, 511. Marie de Medici, 29, 55, 254, 266, 288, 317. Marston, English resident in Madrid, 432, 433. Mary Stuart (Princess of Orange), 276, 399. Masaniello's revolt, 405. Matthew, David, 294. Maurice of Nassau, 21. Mawe, English chaplain, 84. Mazarin, Cardinal, 404, 418, 438, 462, 465, 467, 470. Medina Celi, Duke of, 288, 430. Medina de las Torres, Duke of, 229, 460, 475, 488, 489, 497, 510, 513. Medina Sidonia, Duke of, 253, 286, 333, 334, 357. Melo, General, 378. Mendoza, Antonio de, 231, 233. Meninas, the, 455. Millan, Don Francisco, 165. Montalvo, Count, Corregidor of Madrid, 307. Monterey, Count of, 194, 195, 229, 230, 231, 281. Monzon, Cortes at, 165. Moreto, 147. Moriscos, the expulsion of, 23-27. Moscoso, Antonio de, 254, 255, 258, 259. Motte, Marshall de la, 357, 353. Moura, Don Cristobal, 286. Münster, Treaty of, 404, 405 n. N Navarre, 398. Nicolalde, Spanish agent in London, 275, 276, 288, 290, 292, 293, 295. Nithard, Father, Mariana's confessor, 495, 505. Nocera, Duke of, 334. Nördlingen, battle of, 260, 288, 289. O Olivares, the Count-Duke, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 43, 46, 49, 60, 65, 66, 69, 70, 72, 73, 85, 104-114, 121, 128; his policy, 141, 154, 155, 158, 159, 160-162; in Aragon, 163-170; opposition to him, 173-177, 183-186; urges Philip to work, 179; patron of Velazquez, 197; negotiations with England, 216-225; his entertainment to the King, 230-235; builds the Buen Retiro, 238-241; his negotiations with Hopton, 242 et seq.; and the Catalan Cortes, 254-259; fresh negotiations with England, 262; his unpopularity, 265; secret negotiation with Charles I., 266, 275, 276, 288, 289-295; opposes Philip's journey, 297; again approaches England, 312, 313; negotiations dropped, 324, 325; his policy in Portugal, etc., 332, 333; his decline, 352; goes to Aragon, 362; his fall, 366-374; his death, 375. Olivares, Countess of, 210, 220, 230, 273, 367-375, 386, 387. Oñate, Count, 295, 313, 460. Oquendo, Admiral, his quarrel with Spinola, 304. Orange, Prince of, 287. Orleans, Gaston, Duke of, 254, 266, 288, 315. O'Sullivan, Beare, Count of Bearhaven, 216. Osuña, Duke of, 45. P Pacheco, Don Juan, 329. Padilla, Carlos de, execution of, 408. Palatinate, the, 37, 70, 116, 120, 216, 217-225, 242, 251, 266, 274, 296, 313, 314, 423. Peace of the Pyrenees, 465-474. Pennington, Admiral, 324. Philip II., 11, 12, 13, 14, 20, 21, 23, 40. Philip III., 1, 6, 7, 11, 19, 22, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32; his death, 36-40, 51, 68, 69. Philip IV., christening of, at Valladolid, 1-10; his childhood, 26-30; his marriage, 31; under the influence of Olivares, 35; his accession, 42; his reforms, 46; his own account of affairs, 50; early profligacy, 54; his character, 60; his attitude towards the English match, 51, 52, 74, 81; his reception of Charles, 86-92, 97-99; his reforms, 135; his mode of life, 143; his garb, 144; goes to Aragon, 162; quarrels with the Aragonese, 163-170; his pity for Castile, 170, 171; and his brothers, 174-186; promises to work, 180, 181; his serious illness, 183; scruples of conscience, 187; his liking for Velazquez, 189-200; his literary and dramatic tastes, 200-202; his amours, 206; the Calderona, 207; his field sports, 211-213; receives Cottington, 221, 224; at an entertainment, 230-235; goes to Barcelona, 254-259; his domestic life in Madrid, 283; negotiations with England, 290-295, 296; insists upon going to Aragon, 297; at a grand entertainment, 318; scandal of the Nun of St. Placido, 348; goes to Aragon, 359; his good resolves after dismissing Olivares, 377; returns to Aragon, 379, 381, 389, 395, 398, 401; betrothed to Mariana, 403; his marriage, 413; his mode of life, 420; his attitude towards the English Commonwealth, 423-440; his garb, 447; his poverty, 449, 455; his despondency, 452, 470; he visits the frontier for his daughter's marriage, 475; splendid ceremonies, 478-485; said to be bewitched, 490; intrigues around him, 505; his last illness, 509; his death, 511; his burial, 513; his character, 515 Philip IV., his letters to Sor Maria, 381, 389, 395, 399, 400; 402, 406, 417, 457, 468, 491, 492, 505. Philip Prosper, Infante, 456-462, 463, 465, 470, 486; dies, 491. Poëtting, Count, Austrian ambassador, 505. Polanco, Dr., 184. Porter, Endymion, 70, 77, 81, 100. Portugal, Dom Duarte de, 88. Portugal, Queen of, 334, 464. Portugal, revolt of, 268, 333, 344-346, 405, 423, 464, 487, 494, 495. Pozo, Count, 329. Priego, Duke of, 342. Priego, Marquis of, 460. Prodgers, Captain, murderer of Ascham, 433 et seq. Punoñrostro, Count of, 461. Q Quevedo, 147, 200, 231, 233, 355. Quiñones, Suero, his promise of pictures to Charles I., 296 n. R Rahosa, the Infanta's confessor, 95. Rentin, Marquis of, 63. Ribera, Archbishop of Valencia, 3. Richelieu, his rivalry with Olivares, 154, 155, 214 et seq., 226, 260, 261, 288, 289, 303, 315, 325, 334, 335, 364, 376. Roche, Valentine, murderer of Ascham, 433. Rocroy, battle of, 378. Rojas, Francisco de, 197, 262, 312, 373. Rubens, Peter Paul, 217, 218, 224. S St. Isidore, the Husbandman, 61, 335, 392. St. Placido, the scandals of, 272, 347-350. St. Teresa, 61. Salazar, Count, 329. Salazar, Father, invents stamped paper, 320. Salinas, Count of, Howard lodges in his house, 5. Salvatierra, Countess of, 459. Sandoval, house of. _See_ Lerma. Sandoval de Rojas, Cardinal, 26. San Lucar, Duke of, 49. _See_ also Olivares. Santa Coloma, Viceroy of Catalonia, 340; killed, 343. Santa Cruz, Marquis of, 361. Saragossa, Philip at, 164, 363, 381, 391, 399. Sastago, Count, 301. Savoy, Duke of, 24, 154, 215, 315. Scaglia, Abbé, an English agent in Madrid, 216, 217. Schomberg, Marshal, 357, 487. Seven Chimneys, the house with the, 67, 81, 498. Silva, General, 397. Silva, Pedro de, execution of, 408. Simancas, English embassy lodged at, 4. Soissons, Count of, 315. Sor Maria of Agreda, 379-384, 395, 398-401, 407, 417, 462 et seq.; her death, 506. Sotomayor, Philip's confessor, 42, 229, 349. Spain, condition of (in 1600), 17 et seq.; (1621), 45 et seq.; 50, 51, 130-135, 242, 243, 263, 277, 279, 299, 309, (1637), 320, 327, 338, (1654-1660), 441-447. Spanish match. _See_ Charles, Prince of Wales. Sparkes, murderer of Ascham, 433. Spinola, Marquis, 155. Spinola, Nicholas, quarrels with Oquendo, 304, 328, 329. Strada, Carlos, 318. Suarez Diego, Portuguese minister, 333. Sumptuary laws, 131, 137, 309, 319, 320, 445, 447, 476. T Tavara, Margaret, 79. Taxation in Spain, 17, 18, 19, 20, 162, 170, 243, 252, 253, 263, 277, 279, 296, 309, 319, 325, 338, 352, 366, 406 n., 444, 448, 468, 492, 493, 504. Taylor, English agent in Spain, 288. Tejada, Auditor, 281. Theatres (Corrales) of Madrid, 147, 201; description of a performance, 202-206, 444. Theatrical craze, 57, 60, 61, 147, 201-206, 233, 444. Thirty Years' War and Spain, 245-249, 260, 267, 289, 300-303, 315. Tilly, Imperial general, 156, 249. Tirlemont, battle of, 293. Toledo, Pedro de, Marquis of Villafranca, 64, 65. Torrecusa, Marquis, 365. Turenne, Marshal, 462. Tyrone, Earl of, 223, 312, 344. U Uceda, Duke of, 30, 32, 33, 37, 40; his fall, 43, 45. V Valette, Duke de la, 335, 336, 344. Valladolid, Philip's christening at, 1-10, 19. Vallejo, an actor, 231. Vasconcellos, Miguel, Portuguese minister, 333, 346. Velazquez, Diego, 197-200, 212, 282, 284, 350, 373, 385, 454-456, 477, 481. Verdugo Fernando, 63, 65. Verney, Sir Edmund, 102. Villa Mediana, Count of, murder of, 56-59, 196. Villamor, Count, 88. Villanueva, Geronimo de, State Secretary, 238, 319 n., 348-351. W War with France, 154-158, 214 et seq., 226, 274, 303, 315, 325, 334, 340-343, 357 et seq., 378, 391, 397, 422, 448, 452, 465-467. Washington, page to Charles in Madrid, 102. Williams, Captain, murderer of Ascham, 433. Wimbledon, Lord (Sir E. Cecil), his attack on Cadiz, 126, 154, 157. Windebank, Secretary, 275, 276, 278, 288, 291, 323. Windebank, Kit, his escapade in Madrid, 323. Wren, English chaplain, 84. Wright, Sir Benjamin, 501. Z Zapata, Cardinal, Inquisitor, 152, 229, 268. Zapata, Lieutenant of the Guard, 301, 329. Zuñiga, Baltasar de, 38, 43, 49, 52. _Printed by_ MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED _Edinburgh_ 
6967	----	HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA, THE CATHOLIC. BY WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. II. CONTENTS OF VOLUME II. PART FIRST. [CONTINUED.] CHAPTER XII. INTERNAL AFFAIRS OF THE KINGDOM.--INQUISITION IN ARAGON. ISABELLA ENFORCES THE LAWS CHASTISEMENT OF CERTAIN ECCLESIASTICS MARRIAGE OF CATHARINE OF NAVARRE LIBERATION OF CATALAN SERFS INQUISITION IN ARAGON REMONSTRANCES OF CORTES CONSPIRACY FORMED ASSASSINATION OF ARBUES CRUEL PERSECUTIONS INQUISITION THROUGHOUT FERDINAND'S DOMINIONS CHAPTER XIII. WAR OF GRANADA.--SURRENDER OF VELEZ MALAGA.--SIEGE AND CONQUEST OF MALAGA. POSITION OF VELEZ MALAGA ARMY BEFORE VELEZ DEFEAT OF EL ZAGAL NARROW ESCAPE OF FERDINAND SURRENDER OF VELEZ DESCRIPTION OF MALAGA SHARP RECONTRE MALAGA INVESTED BY SEA AND LAND BRILLIANT SPECTACLE EXTENSIVE PREPARATIONS THE QUEEN VISITS THE CAMP SUMMONS OF THE TOWN DANGER OF THE MARQUIS OF CADIZ CIVIL FEUDS OF THE MOORS ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE THE SOVEREIGNS DISTRESS AND RESOLUTION OF THE BESIEGED ENTHUSIASM OF THE CHRISTIANS DISCIPLINE OF THE ARMY GENERAL SALLY GENEROSITY OF A MOORISH KNIGHT OUTWORKS CARRIED GRIEVOUS FAMINE PROPOSALS FOR SURRENDER HAUGHTY DEMEANOR OF FERDINAND MALAGA SURRENDERS AT DISCRETION PURIFICATION OF THE CITY ENTRANCE OF THE SOVEREIGNS RELEASE OF CHRISTIAN CAPTIVES LAMENT OF THE MALAGANS SENTENCE PASSED ON THEM WARY DEVICE OF FERDINAND CRUEL POLICY OF THE VICTORS MEASURES FOR REPEOPLING MALAGA CHAPTER XIV. WAR OF GRANADA.--CONQUEST OF BAZA.--SUBMISSION OF EL ZAGAL. THE SOVEREIGNS VISIT ARAGON INROADS INTO GRANADA BORDER WAR EMBASSY FROM MAXIMILIAN PREPARATIONS FOR THE SIEGE OF BAZA THE KING TAKES COMMAND OF THE ARMY POSITION AND STRENGTH OF BAZA ASSAULT ON THE GARDEN DESPONDENCY OF THE SPANISH CHIEFS DISPELLED BY ISABELLA GARDENS CLEARED OF THEIR TIMBER CITY CLOSELY INVESTED MISSION FROM THE SULTAN OF EGYPT HOUSES ERECTED FOB THE ARMY ITS STRICT DISCIPLINE HEAVY TEMPEST ISABELLA'S ENERGY HER PATRIOTIC SACRIFICES RESOLUTION OF THE BESIEGED ISABELLA VISITS THE CAMP SUSPENSION OF ARMS BAZA SURRENDERS CONDITIONS OCCUPATION OF THE CITY TREATY OF SURRENDER WITH EL ZAGAL PAINFUL MARCH OF THE SPANISH ARMY INTERVIEW BETWEEN FERDINAND AND EL ZAGAL OCCUPATION OF EL ZAGAL'S DOMAIN EQUIVALENT ASSIGNED TO HIM DIFFICULTIES OF THIS CAMPAIGN ISABELLA'S POPULARITY AND INFLUENCE NOTICE OF PETER MARTYR CHAPTER XV. WAR OF GRANADA.-SIEGE AND SURRENDER OF THE CITY OF GRANADA. THE INFANTA ISABELLA PUBLIC FESTIVITIES GRANADA SUMMONED IN VAIN KNIGHTHOOD OF DON JUAN FERDINAND'S POLICY ISABELLA DEPOSES THE JUDGES OF CHANCERY FERDINAND MUSTERS HIS FORCES ENCAMPS IN THE VEGA POSITION OF GRANADA MOSLEM AND CHRISTIAN CHIVALRY THE QUEEN SURVEYS THE CITY SKIRMISH WITH THE ENEMY CONFLAGRATION OF THE CHRISTIAN CAMP ERECTION OF SANTA FE NEGOTIATIONS FOR SURRENDER CAPITULATION OF GRANADA COMMOTIONS IN GRANADA PREPARATIONS FOR OCCUPYING THE CITY THE CROSS RAISED ON THE ALHAMBRA FATE OF ABDALLAH RESULTS OF THE WAR OF GRANADA ITS MORAL INFLUENCE ITS MILITARY INFLUENCE DESTINY OF THE MOORS DEATH AND CHARACTER OF THE MARQUIS OF CADIZ NOTICE OF BERNALDEZ, CURATE OF LOS PALACIOS IRVING'S CHRONICLE OF GRANADA CHAPTER XVI. APPLICATION OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AT THE SPANISH COURT. MARITIME ENTERPRISE OF THE PORTUGUESE EARLY SPANISH DISCOVERIES EARLY HISTORY OF COLUMBUS BELIEF OF LAND IN THE WEST COLUMBUS APPLIES TO PORTUGAL TO THE COURT OF CASTILE REFERRED TO A COUNCIL HIS APPLICATION REJECTED HE PREPARES TO LEAVE SPAIN INTERPOSITION IN HIS BEHALF COLUMBUS AT SANTA FE NEGOTIATIONS AGAIN BROKEN OFF THE QUEEN'S FAVORABLE DISPOSITION FINAL ARRANGEMENT WITH COLUMBUS HE SAILS ON HIS FIRST VOYAGE INDIFFERENCE TO HIS ENTERPRISE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS DUE TO ISABELLA NOTICE OF NAVARRETE CHAPTER XVII. EXPULSION OF THE JEWS FROM SPAIN. EXCITEMENT AGAINST THE JEWS FOMENTED BY THE CLERGY VIOLENT CONDUCT OF TORQUEMADA EDICT OF EXPULSION ITS SEVERE OPERATION CONSTANCY OF THE JEWS ROUTES OF THE EMIGRANTS THEIR SUFFERINGS IN AFRICA IN OTHER COUNTRIES WHOLE NUMBER OF EXILES DISASTROUS RESULTS TRUE MOTIVES OF THE EDICT CONTEMPORARY JUDGMENTS MISTAKEN PIETY OF THE QUEEN CHAPTER XVIII. ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF FERDINAND.--RETURN AND SECOND VOYAGE OF COLUMBUS. THE SOVEREIGNS VISIT ARAGON ATTEMPT ON FERDINAND'S LIFE GENERAL CONSTERNATION LOYALTY OF THE PEOPLE SLOW RECOVERY OF THE KING PUNISHMENT OF THE ASSASSIN RETURN OF COLUMBUS DISCOVERY OF THE WEST INDIES JOYOUS RECEPTION OF COLUMBUS HIS PROGRESS TO BARCELONA INTERVIEW WITH THE SOVEREIGNS SENSATIONS CAUSED BY THE DISCOVERY BOARD FOR INDIAN AFFAIRS REGULATIONS OF TRADE PREPARATIONS FOR A SECOND VOYAGE CONVERSION OF THE NATIVES NEW POWERS GRANTED TO COLUMBUS APPLICATION TO ROME FAMOUS BULLS OF ALEXANDER VI JEALOUSY OF THE COURT OF LISBON WARY DIPLOMACY SECOND VOYAGE OF COLUMBUS MISSION TO PORTUGAL DISGUST OF JOHN II TREATY OF TORDESILLAS CHAPTER XIX. CASTILIAN LITERATURE.--CULTIVATION OF THE COURT.--CLASSICAL LEARNING.-- SCIENCE. FERDINAND'S EDUCATION NEGLECTED INSTRUCTION OF ISABELLA HER COLLECTION OF BOOKS TUITION OF THE INFANTAS OF PRINCE JOHN THE QUEEN'S CARE FOR THE EDUCATION OF HER NOBLES LABORS OF MARTYR OF LUCIO MARINEO SCHOLARSHIP OF THE NOBLES ACCOMPLISHED WOMEN CLASSICAL LEARNING LEBRIJA ARIAS BARBOSA MERITS OF THE SPANISH SCHOLARS UNIVERSITIES SACRED STUDIES OTHER SCIENCES PRINTING INTRODUCED THE QUEEN ENCOURAGES IT ITS RAPID DIFFUSION ACTUAL PROGRESS OF SCIENCE CHAPTER XX. CASTILIAN LITERATURE.--ROMANCES OF CHIVALRY.--LYRICAL POETRY.-- THE DRAMA. THIS REIGN AN EPOCH IN POLITE LETTERS ROMANCES OF CHIVALRY THEIR PERNICIOUS EFFECTS BALLADS OR ROMANCES EARLY CULTIVATION IN SPAIN RESEMBLANCE TO THE ENGLISH MOORISH MINSTRELSY ITS DATE AND ORIGIN ITS HIGH REPUTE NUMEROUS EDITIONS OF THE BALLADS LYRIC POETRY CANCIONERO GENERAL ITS LITERARY VALUE LOW STATE OF LYRIC POETRY COPLAS OF MANRIQUE RISE OF THE SPANISH DRAMA TRAGICOMEDY OF CELESTINA CRITICISM ON IT IT OPENED THE WAY TO DRAMATIC WRITING NUMEROUS EDITIONS OF IT JUAN DE LA ENCINA HIS DRAMATIC ECLOGUES TORRES DE NAHARRO HIS COMEDIES SIMILAR IN SPIRIT WITH THE LATER DRAMAS NOT ACTED IN SPAIN LOW CONDITION OF THE STAGE TRAGIC DRAMA OLIVA'S CLASSIC IMITATIONS NOT POPULAR NATIONAL SPIRIT OF THE LITERATURE OF THIS EPOCH MORATIN'S DRAMATIC CRITICISM PART SECOND. THE PERIOD WHEN, THE INTERIOR ORGANIZATION OF THE MONARCHY HAVING BEEN COMPLETED, THE SPANISH NATION ENTERED ON ITS SCHEMES OF DISCOVERY AND CONQUEST; OR THE PERIOD ILLUSTRATING MORE PARTICULARLY THE FOREIGN POLICY OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA. CHAPTER I. ITALIAN WARS.--GENERAL VIEW OF EUROPE.--INVASION OF ITALY BY CHARLES VIII., OF FRANCE. FOREIGN POLITICS DIRECTED BY FERDINAND EUROPE AT THE CLOSE OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY CHARACTER OF THE REIGNING SOVEREIGNS IMPROVED POLITICAL AND MORAL CONDITION MORE INTIMATE RELATIONS BETWEEN STATES FOREIGN RELATIONS CONDUCTED BY THE SOVEREIGN ITALY THE SCHOOL OF POLITICS HER MOST POWERFUL STATES CHARACTER OF ITALIAN POLITICS INTERNAL PROSPERITY INTRIGUES OF SFORZA CHARLES VIII., OF FRANCE HIS PRETENSIONS TO NAPLES NEGOTIATIONS RESPECTING ROUSSILLON CHARLES'S COUNSELLORS IN THE PAY OP FERDINAND TREATY OF BARCELONA ITS IMPORTANCE TO SPAIN ALARM AT THE FRENCH INVASION, IN ITALY IN EUROPE, ESPECIALLY SPAIN PREPARATIONS OF CHARLES AN ENVOY SENT TO THE FRENCH COURT ANNOUNCES FERDINAND'S VIEWS CHARLES'S DISSATISFACTION THE FRENCH CROSS THE ALPS ITALIAN TACTICS THE SWISS INFANTRY FRENCH ARTILLERY SFORZA JEALOUS OF THE FRENCH THE POPE CONFERS THE TITLE OF CATHOLIC NAVAL PREPARATIONS IN SPAIN SECOND MISSION TO CHARLES VIII BOLD CONDUCT OF THE ENVOYS THE KING OF NAPLES FLIES TO SICILY THE FRENCH ENTER NAPLES GENERAL HOSTILITY TO THEM LEAGUE OF VENICE ZURITA'S LIFE AND WRITINGS CHAPTER II. ITALIAN WARS.--RETREAT OF CHARLES VIII.--CAMPAIGNS OF GONSALVO DE CORDOVA.--FINAL EXPULSION OF THE FRENCH. CONDUCT OF CHARLES PLUNDERS THE WORKS OF ART RETREAT OF THE FRENCH GONSALVO DE CORDOVA HIS EARLY LIFE HIS BRILLIANT QUALITIES RAISED TO THE ITALIAN COMMAND ARRIVES IN ITALY LANDS IN CALABRIA MARCHES ON SEMINARA GONSALVO'S PRUDENCE BATTLE OF SEMINARA DEFEAT OF THE NEAPOLITANS GONSALVO RETREATS TO REGGIO FERDINAND RECOVERS HIS CAPITAL GONSALVO IN CALABRIA HIS SUCCESSES DECLINE OF THE FRENCH BESIEGED IN ATELLA GONSALVO SURPRISES LAINO ARRIVES BEFORE ATELLA RECEIVES THE TITLE OF GREAT CAPTAIN BEATS A DETACHMENT OF SWISS CAPITULATION OF MONTPENSIER MISERABLE STATE OF THE FRENCH DEATH OF FERDINAND OF NAPLES ACCESSION OF FREDERIC II TOTAL EXPULSION OF THE FRENCH REMARKS ON GUICCIARDINI AND GIOVIO SISMONDI CHAPTER III. ITALIAN WARS.--GONSALVO SUCCORS THE POPE.--TREATY WITH FRANCE.-- ORGANIZATION OF THE SPANISH MILITIA. WAR ON THE SIDE OF ROUSSILLON THE POPE ASKS THE AID OF GONSALVO STORMING AND CAPTURE OF OSTIA GONSALVO ENTERS ROME HIS RECEPTION BY THE POPE RETURNS TO SPAIN PEACE WITH FRANCE FERDINAND'S VIEWS RESPECTING NAPLES HIS FAME ACQUIRED BY THE WAR INFLUENCE OF THE WAR ON SPAIN ORGANIZATION OF THE MILITIA CHAPTER IV. ALLIANCES OF THE ROYAL FAMILY.--DEATH OF PRINCE JOHN AND PRINCESS ISABELLA. ROYAL FAMILY OF CASTILE JOANNA BELTRANEJA MARRIAGE OF THE PRINCESS ISABELLA DEATH OF HER HUSBAND ALLIANCES WITH THE HOUSE OF AUSTRIA AND THAT OF ENGLAND JOANNA EMBARKS THE QUEEN'S ANXIETY MARGARET OF AUSTRIA RETURNS IN THE FLEET MARRIAGE OF JOHN AND MARGARET SECOND MARRIAGE OF PRINCESS ISABELLA SUDDEN ILLNESS OF PRINCE JOHN HIS DEATH HIS AMIABLE CHARACTER THE KING AND QUEEN OF PORTUGAL VISIT SPAIN OBJECTIONS TO THEIR RECOGNITION ISABELLA DISPLEASED HER DAUGHTER'S DEATH ITS EFFECTS ON ISABELLA PRINCE MIGUEL'S RECOGNITION CHAPTER V. DEATH OF CARDINAL MENDOZA.--RISE OF XIMENES.--ECCLESIASTICAL REFORM. DEATH OF MENDOZA HIS EARLY LIFE AND CHARACTER HIS AMOURS THE QUEEN HIS EXECUTOR BIRTH OF XIMENES HE VISITS ROME HIS RETURN AND IMPRISONMENT ESTABLISHED AT SIGUENZA ENTERS THE FRANCISCAN ORDER HIS SEVERE PENANCE HIS ASCETIC LIFE HE IS MADE GUARDIAN OF SALZEDA INTRODUCED TO THE QUEEN MADE HER CONFESSOR ELECTED PROVINCIAL CORRUPTION OF THE MONASTERIES ATTEMPTS AT REFORM SEE OF TOLEDO VACANT OFFERED TO XIMENES HE RELUCTANTLY ACCEPTS CHARACTERISTIC ANECDOTES OF XIMENES HIS AUSTERE LIFE REFORM IN HIS DIOCESE EXAMPLE OF HIS SEVERITY REFORM OF THE MONASTIC ORDERS GREAT EXCITEMENT CAUSED BY IT VISIT OF THE FRANCISCAN GENERAL INSULTS THE QUEEN THE POPE'S INTERFERENCE CONSENTS TO THE REFORM ITS OPERATION AND EFFECTS ALVARO GOMEZ, AND BIOGRAPHERS OF XIMENES CHAPTER VI. XIMENES IN GRANADA.--PERSECUTION, INSURRECTION, AND CONVERSION OF THE MOORS. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS XIMENES, HIS CONSTANCY OF PURPOSE TRANQUIL STATE OF GRANADA TENDILLA TALAVERA ARCHBISHOP OF GRANADA HIS MILD POLICY THE CLERGY DISSATISFIED WITH IT TEMPERATE SWAY OF THE SOVEREIGNS XIMENES IN GRANADA HIS VIOLENT MEASURES DESTROYS ARABIC BOOKS MISCHIEVOUS EFFECTS REVOLT OF THE ALBAYCIN XIMENES BESIEGED IN HIS PALACE THE INSURGENTS APPEASED BY TALAVERA DISPLEASURE OF THE SOVEREIGNS XIMENES HASTENS TO COURT CONVERSION OP GRANADA APPLAUDED BY THE SPANIARDS CHAPTER VII. RISING IN THE ALPUXARRAS.--DEATH OF ALONSO DE AGUILAR.--EDICT AGAINST THE MOORS. THE ALPUXARRAS RISING OF THE MOORS HUEJA SACKED FERDINAND MARCHES INTO THE MOUNTAINS CARRIES LANJARON PUNISHMENT OF THE REBELS REVOLT OF THE SIERRA VERMEJA RENDEZVOUS AT RONDA EXPEDITION INTO THE SIERRA THE MOORS RETREAT UP THE MOUNTAINS RETURN ON THE SPANIARDS ALONSO DE AGUILAR HIS GALLANTRY AND DEATH HIS NOBLE CHARACTER BLOODY ROUT OF THE SPANIARDS DISMAY OF THE NATION THE REBELS SUBMIT TO FERDINAND BANISHMENT OR CONVERSION COMMEMORATIVE BALLADS MELANCHOLY REMINISCENCES EDICT AGAINST THE MOORS OF CASTILE CHRISTIANITY AND MAHOMETANISM CAUSES OF INTOLERANCE AGGRAVATED IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY EFFECTS OF THE INQUISITION DEFECTS OF THE TREATY OF GRANADA EVASION OF IT BY THE CHRISTIANS PRIESTLY CASUISTRY LAST NOTICE OF THE MOORS IN THE PRESENT REIGN CHAPTER VIII. COLUMBUS.--PROSECUTION OF DISCOVERY.--HIS TREATMENT BY THE COURT. PROGRESS OF DISCOVERY MISCONDUCT OF THE COLONISTS COMPLAINTS AGAINST COLUMBUS HIS SECOND RETURN THE QUEEN'S CONFIDENCE IN HIM UNSHAKEN HONORS CONFERRED ON HIM HIS THIRD VOYAGE DISCOVERS TERRA FIRMA MUTINY IN THE COLONY LOUD COMPLAINTS AGAINST COLUMBUS BIGOTED VIEWS IN REGARD TO THE HEATHEN MORE LIBERAL SENTIMENTS OF ISABELLA SHE SENDS BACK THE INDIAN SLAVES AUTHORITY TO BOBADILLA OUTRAGE ON COLUMBUS DEEP REGRET OF THE SOVEREIGNS RECEPTION OF COLUMBUS VINDICATION OF THE SOVEREIGNS COMMISSION TO OVANDO GROUNDLESS IMPUTATIONS ON THE GOVERNMENT THE ADMIRAL'S DESPONDENCY HIS FOURTH AND LAST VOYAGE REMARKABLE FATE OF HIS ENEMIES CHAPTER IX. SPANISH COLONIAL POLICY. CAREFUL PROVISION FOR THE COLONIES LIBERAL GRANTS LICENSE FOR PRIVATE VOYAGES THEIR SUCCESS INDIAN DEPARTMENT CASA DE CONTRATACION IMPORTANT PAPAL CONCESSIONS SPIRIT OF THE COLONIAL LEGISLATION THE QUEEN'S ZEAL FOB CONVERTING THE NATIVES UNHAPPILY DEFEATED IMMEDIATE PROFITS FROM THE DISCOVERIES ORIGIN OF THE VENEREAL DISEASE MORAL CONSEQUENCES OP THE DISCOVERIES THEIR GEOGRAPHICAL EXTENT HISTORIANS OF THE NEW WORLD PETER MARTYR HERRERA AND MUÑOZ PART FIRST. [CONTINUED.] CHAPTER XII. INTERNAL AFFAIRS OF THE KINGDOM.--INQUISITION IN ARAGON. 1483-1487. Isabella enforces the Laws.--Punishment of Ecclesiastics.--Inquisition in Aragon.--Remonstrances of the Cortes.--Conspiracy.--Assassination of the Inquisitor Arbues.--Cruel Persecutions.--Inquisition throughout Ferdinand's Dominions. In such intervals of leisure as occurred amid their military operations, Ferdinand and Isabella were diligently occupied with the interior government of the kingdom, and especially with the rigid administration of justice, the most difficult of all duties in an imperfectly civilized state of society. The queen found especial demand for this in the northern provinces, whose rude inhabitants were little used to subordination. She compelled the great nobles to lay aside their arms, and refer their disputes to legal arbitration. She caused a number of the fortresses, which were still garrisoned by the baronial banditti, to be razed to the ground; and she enforced the utmost severity of the law against such inferior criminals as violated the public peace. [1] Even ecclesiastical immunities, which proved so effectual a protection in most countries at this period, were not permitted to screen the offender. A remarkable instance of this occurred at the city of Truxillo, in 1486. An inhabitant of that place had been committed to prison for some offence by order of the civil magistrate. Certain priests, relations of the offender, alleged that his religious profession exempted him from all but ecclesiastical jurisdiction; and, as the authorities refused to deliver him up, they inflamed the populace to such a degree, by their representations of the insult offered to the church, that they rose in a body, and, forcing the prison, set at liberty not only the malefactor in question, but all those confined there. The queen no sooner heard of this outrage on the royal authority, than she sent a detachment of her guard to Truxillo, which secured the persons of the principal rioters, some of whom were capitally punished, while the ecclesiastics, who had stirred up the sedition, were banished the realm. Isabella, while by her example she inculcated the deepest reverence for the sacred profession, uniformly resisted every attempt from that quarter to encroach on the royal prerogative. The tendency of her administration was decidedly, as there will be occasion more particularly to notice, to abridge the authority which that body had exercised in civil matters under preceding reigns. [2] Nothing of interest occurred in the foreign relations of the kingdom, during the period embraced by the preceding chapter; except perhaps the marriage of Catharine, the young queen of Navarre, with Jean d'Albret, a French nobleman, whose extensive hereditary domains, in the southwest corner of France, lay adjacent to her kingdom. This connection was extremely distasteful to the Spanish sovereigns, and indeed to many of the Navarrese, who were desirous of the alliance with Castile. This was ultimately defeated by the queen-mother, an artful woman, who, being of the blood royal of France, was naturally disposed to a union with that kingdom. Ferdinand did not neglect to maintain such an understanding with the malcontents of Navarre, as should enable him to counteract any undue advantage which the French monarch might derive from the possession of this key, as it were, to the Castilian territory. [3] In Aragon, two circumstances took place in the period under review, deserving historical notice. The first relates to an order of the Catalan peasantry, denominated vassals _de remenza_. These persons were subjected to a feudal bondage, which had its origin in very remote ages, but which had become in no degree mitigated, while the peasantry of every other part of Europe had been gradually rising to the rank of freemen. The grievous nature of the impositions had led to repeated rebellions in preceding reigns. At length, Ferdinand, after many fruitless attempts at a mediation between these unfortunate people and their arrogant masters, prevailed on the latter, rather by force of authority than argument, to relinquish the extraordinary seignorial rights, which they had hitherto enjoyed, in consideration of a stipulated annual payment from their vassals. [4] The other circumstance worthy of record, but not in like manner creditable to the character of the sovereign, is the introduction of the modern Inquisition into Aragon. The ancient tribunal had existed there, as has been stated in a previous chapter, since the middle of the thirteenth century, but seems to have lost all its venom in the atmosphere of that free country; scarcely assuming a jurisdiction beyond that of an ordinary ecclesiastical court. No sooner, however, was the institution organized on its new basis in Castile, than Ferdinand resolved on its introduction, in a similar form, in his own dominions. Measures were accordingly taken to that effect in a meeting of a privy council convened by the king at Taraçona, during the session of the cortes in that place, in April, 1484; and a royal order was issued, requiring all the constituted authorities throughout the kingdom to support the new tribunal in the exercise of its functions. A Dominican monk, Fray Gaspard Juglar, and Pedro Arbues de Epila, a canon of the metropolitan church, were appointed by the general, Torquemada, inquisitors over the diocese of Saragossa; and, in the month of September following, the chief justiciary and the other great officers of the realm took the prescribed oaths. [5] The new institution, opposed to the ideas of independence common to all the Aragonese, was particularly offensive to the higher orders, many of whose members, including persons filling the most considerable official stations, were of Jewish descent, and of course precisely the class exposed to the scrutiny of the Inquisition. Without difficulty, therefore, the cortes was persuaded in the following year to send a deputation to the court of Rome, and another to Ferdinand, representing the repugnance of the new tribunal to the liberties of the nation, as well as to their settled opinions and habits, and praying that its operation might be suspended for the present, so far at least as concerned the confiscation of property, which it rightly regarded as the moving power of the whole terrible machinery. [6] Both the pope and the king, as may be imagined, turned a deaf ear to these remonstrances. In the mean while the Inquisition commenced operations, and autos da fe were celebrated at Saragossa, with all their usual horrors, in the months of May and June, in 1485. The discontented Aragonese, despairing of redress in any regular way, resolved to intimidate their oppressors by some appalling act of violence. They formed a conspiracy for the assassination of Arbues, the most odious of the inquisitors established over the diocese of Saragossa. The conspiracy, set on foot by some of the principal nobility, was entered into by most of the new Christians, or persons of Jewish extraction in the district. A sum of ten thousand reals was subscribed to defray the necessary expenses for the execution of their project. This was not easy, however, since Arbues, conscious of the popular odium that he had incurred, protected his person by wearing under his monastic robes a suit of mail, complete even to the helmet beneath his hood. With similar vigilance, he defended, also, every avenue to his sleeping apartment. [7] At length, however, the conspirators found an opportunity of surprising him while at his devotions. Arbues was on his knees before the great altar of the cathedral, near midnight, when his enemies, who had entered the church in two separate bodies, suddenly surrounded him, and one of them wounded him in the arm with a dagger, while another dealt him a fatal blow in the back of his neck. The priests, who were preparing to celebrate matins in the choir of the church, hastened to the spot; but not before the assassins had effected their escape. They transported the bleeding body of the inquisitor to his apartment, where he survived only two days, blessing the Lord that he had been permitted to seal so good a cause with his blood. The whole scene will readily remind the English reader of the assassination of Thomas à Becket. [8] The event did not correspond with the expectations of the conspirators. Sectarian jealousy proved stronger than hatred of the Inquisition. The populace, ignorant of the extent or ultimate object of the conspiracy, were filled with vague apprehensions of an insurrection of the new Christians, who had so often been the objects of outrage; and they could only be appeased by the archbishop of Saragossa, riding through the streets, and proclaiming that no time should be lost in detecting and punishing the assassins. This promise was abundantly fulfilled; and wide was the ruin occasioned by the indefatigable zeal, with which the bloodhounds of the tribunal followed up the scent. In the course of this persecution, two hundred individuals perished at the stake, and a still greater number in the dungeons of the Inquisition; and there was scarcely a noble family in Aragon but witnessed one or more of its members condemned to humiliating penance in the autos da fe. The immediate perpetrators of the murder were all hanged, after suffering the amputation of their right hands. One, who had appeared as evidence against the rest, under assurance of pardon, had his sentence so far commuted, that his hand was not cut off till after he had been hanged. It was thus that the Holy Office interpreted its promises of grace. [9] Arbues received all the honors of a martyr. His ashes were interred on the spot where he had been assassinated. [10] A superb mausoleum was erected over them, and, beneath his effigy, a bas-relief was sculptured representing his tragical death, with an inscription containing a suitable denunciation of the race of Israel. And at length, when the lapse of nearly two centuries had supplied the requisite amount of miracles, the Spanish Inquisition had the glory of adding a new saint to the calendar, by the canonization of the martyr under Pope Alexander the Seventh, in 1664. [11] The failure of the attempt to shake off the tribunal served only, as usual in such cases, to establish it more firmly than before. Efforts at resistance were subsequently, but ineffectually, made in other parts of Aragon, and in Valencia and Catalonia. It was not established in the latter province till 1487, and some years later in Sicily, Sardinia, and the Balearic Isles. Thus Ferdinand had the melancholy satisfaction of riveting the most galling yoke ever devised by fanaticism, round the necks of a people, who till that period had enjoyed probably the greatest degree of constitutional freedom which the world had witnessed. FOOTNOTES [1] Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decades, iii. lib. 1, cap. 10.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 3, cap. 27, 39, 67, et alibi.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 175.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 348. [2] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 66.--A pertinent example of this occurred, December, 1485, at Alcalá de Henares, where the court was detained during the queen's illness, who there gave birth to her youngest child, Doña Catalina, afterwards so celebrated in English history as Catharine of Aragon. A collision took place in this city between the royal judges and those of the archbishop of Toledo, to whose diocese it belonged. The later stoutly maintained the pretensions of the church. The queen with equal pertinacity asserted the supremacy of the royal jurisdiction over every other in the kingdom, secular or ecclesiastical. The affair was ultimately referred to the arbitration of certain learned men, named conjointly by the adverse parties. It was not then determined, however, and Pulgar has neglected to acquaint us with the award. Reyes Católicos, cap. 53.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1485. [3] Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. lib. 35, cap. 2. [4] Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. cap. 52, 67.--Mariana, Hist. de España, lib. 25, cap. 8. [5] Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. chap. 6, art. 2.--Zurita, Anales, lib. 20, cap. 65. At this cortes, convened at Taraçona, Ferdinand and Isabella experienced an instance of the haughty spirit of their Catalan subjects, who refused to attend, alleging it to be a violation of their liberties to be summoned to a place without the limits of their principality. The Valencians also protested, that their attendance should not operate as a precedent to their prejudice. It was usual to convene a central or general cortes at Fraga, or Monzon, or some town, which the Catalans, who were peculiarly jealous of their privileges, claimed to be within their territory. It was still more usual, to hold separate cortes of the three kingdoms simultaneously in such contiguous places in each, as would permit the royal presence in all during their session. See Blancas, Mode de Proceder en Cortes de Aragon, (Zaragoza, 1641,) cap. 4. [6] By one of the articles in the Privilegium Generale, the Magna Charta of Aragon, it is declared, "Que turment: ni inquisicion; no sian en Aragon como sian contra Fuero el qual dize que alguna pesquisa no hauemos: et contra el privilegio general, el qual vieda que inquisicion so sia feyta." (Fueros y Observancias, fol. 11.) The tenor of this clause (although the term _inquisicion_ must not be confounded with the name of the modern institution) was sufficiently precise, one might have thought, to secure the Aragonese from the fangs of this terrible tribunal. [7] Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, chap. 6, art. 2, 3. [8] Llorente, ubi supra.--Paramo, De Origine Inquisitionis, pp. 182, 183. --Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. pp. 37, 38. [9] Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. chap. 6, art. 5.--Blancas, Aragonensium Rerum Commentarii, (Caesaraugustae, 1588,) p. 266. Among those, who after a tedious imprisonment were condemned to do penance in an auto da fe, was a nephew of King Ferdinand, Don James of Navarre. Mariana, willing to point the tale with a suitable moral, informs us, that, although none of the conspirators were ever brought to trial, they all perished miserably within a year, in different ways, by the judgment of God. (Hist. de España, tom. ii. p. 368.) Unfortunately for the effect of this moral, Llorente, who consulted the original processes, must be received as the better authority of the two. [10] According to Paramo, when the corpse of the inquisitor was brought to the place where he had been assassinated, the blood, which had been coagulated on the pavement, smoked up and boiled with most miraculous fervor! De Origine Inquisitionis, p. 382. [11] Paramo, De Origine Inquisitionis, p. 183.--Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, chap. 6, art. 4. France and Italy also, according to Llorente, could each boast a saint inquisitor. Their renown, however, has been, eclipsed by the superior splendors of their great master, St. Dominic; --"Fils inconnus d'un si glorieux père." CHAPTER XIII. WAR OF GRANADA.--SURRENDER OF VELEZ MALAGA.--SIEGE AND CONQUEST OF MALAGA. 1487. Narrow Escape of Ferdinand before Velez.--Malaga invested by Sea and Land.--Brilliant Spectacle.--The Queen visits the Camp.--Attempt to Assassinate the Sovereigns.--Distress and Resolution of the Besieged.-- Enthusiasm of the Christians.--Outworks Carried by them.--Proposals for Surrender.--Haughty Demeanor of Ferdinand.--Malaga Surrenders at Discretion.--Cruel Policy of the Victors. Before commencing operations against Malaga, it was thought expedient by the Spanish council of war to obtain possession of Velez Malaga, situated about five leagues distant from the former. This strong town stood along the southern extremity of a range of mountains that extend to Granada. Its position afforded an easy communication with that capital, and obvious means of annoyance to an enemy interposed between itself and the adjacent city of Malaga. The reduction of this place, therefore, became the first object of the campaign. The forces assembled at Cordova, consisting of the levies of the Andalusian cities principally, of the retainers of the great nobility, and of the well-appointed chivalry which thronged from all quarters of the kingdom, amounted on this occasion to twelve thousand horse and forty thousand foot; a number, which sufficiently attests the unslackened ardor of the nation in the prosecution of the war. On the 7th of April, King Ferdinand, putting himself at the head of this formidable host, quitted the fair city of Cordova amid the cheering acclamations of its inhabitants, although these were somewhat damped by the ominous occurrence of an earthquake, which demolished a part of the royal residence, among other edifices, during the preceding night. The route, after traversing the Yeguas and the old town of Antequera, struck into a wild, hilly country, that stretches towards Velez. The rivers were so much swollen by excessive rains, and the passes so rough and difficult, that the army in part of its march advanced only a league a day; and on one occasion, when no suitable place occurred for encampment for the space of five leagues, the men fainted with exhaustion, and the beasts dropped down dead in the harness. At length, on the 17th of April, the Spanish army sat down before Velez Malaga, where in a few days they were joined by the lighter pieces of their battering ordnance; the roads, notwithstanding the immense labor expended on them, being found impracticable for the heavier. [1] The Moors were aware of the importance of Velez to the security of Malaga. The sensation excited in Granada by the tidings of its danger was so strong, that the old chief, El Zagal, found it necessary to make an effort to relieve the beleaguered city, notwithstanding the critical posture in which his absence would leave his affairs in the capital. Dark clouds of the enemy were seen throughout the day mustering along the heights, which by night were illumined with a hundred fires. Ferdinand's utmost vigilance was required for the protection of his camp against the ambuscades and nocturnal sallies of his wily foe. At length, however, El Zagal, having been foiled in a well-concerted attempt to surprise the Christian quarters by night, was driven across the mountains by the marquis of Cadiz, and compelled to retreat on his capital, completely baffled in his enterprise. There the tidings of his disaster had preceded him. The fickle populace, with whom misfortune passes for misconduct, unmindful of his former successes, now hastened to transfer their allegiance to his rival, Abdallah, and closed the gates against him; and the unfortunate chief withdrew to Guadix, which, with Almeria, Baza, and some less considerable places, still remained faithful. [2] Ferdinand conducted the siege all the while with his usual vigor, and spared no exposure of his person to peril or fatigue. On one occasion, seeing a party of Christians retreating in disorder before a squadron of the enemy, who had surprised them while fortifying an eminence near the city, the king, who was at dinner in his tent, rushed out with no other defensive armor than his cuirass, and, leaping on his horse, charged briskly into the midst of the enemy, and succeeded in rallying his own men. In the midst of the rencontre, however, when he had discharged his lance, he found himself unable to extricate his sword from the scabbard which hung from the saddle-bow. At this moment he was assaulted by several Moors, and must have been either slain or taken, but for the timely rescue of the marquis of Cadiz, and a brave cavalier, Garcilasso de la Vega, who, galloping up to the spot with their attendants, succeeded after a sharp skirmish in beating off the enemy. Ferdinand's nobles remonstrated with him on this wanton exposure of his person, representing that he could serve them more effectually with his head than his hand. But he answered, that "he could not stop to calculate chances, when his subjects were perilling their lives for his sake;" a reply, says Pulgar, which endeared him to the whole army. [3] At length, the inhabitants of Velez, seeing the ruin impending from the bombardment of the Christians, whose rigorous blockade both by sea and land excluded all hopes of relief from without, consented to capitulate on the usual conditions of security to persons, property, and religion. The capitulation of this place, April 27th, 1487, was followed by that of more than twenty places of inferior note lying between it and Malaga, so that the approaches to this latter city were now left open to the victorious Spaniards. [4] This ancient city, which, under the Spanish Arabs in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, formed the capital of an independent principality, was second only to the metropolis itself, in the kingdom of Granada. Its fruitful environs furnished abundant articles of export, while its commodious port on the Mediterranean opened a traffic with the various countries washed by that inland sea, and with the remoter regions of India. Owing to these advantages, the inhabitants acquired unbounded opulence, which showed itself in the embellishments of their city, whose light forms of architecture, mingling after the eastern fashion with odoriferous gardens and fountains of sparkling water, presented an appearance most refreshing to the senses in this sultry climate. [5] The city was encompassed by fortifications of great strength, and in perfect repair. It was commanded by a citadel, connected by a covered way with a second fortress impregnable from its position, denominated Gebalfaro, which stood along the declivities of the bold sierra of the Axarquia, whose defiles had proved so disastrous to the Christians. The city lay between two spacious suburbs, the one on the land side being also encircled by a formidable wall; and the other declining towards the sea, showing an expanse of olive, orange, and pomegranate gardens, intermingled with the rich vineyards that furnished the celebrated staple for its export. Malaga was well prepared for a siege by supplies of artillery and ammunition. Its ordinary garrison was reinforced by volunteers from the neighboring towns, and by a corps of African mercenaries, Gomeres, as they were called, men of ferocious temper, but of tried valor and military discipline. The command of this important post had been intrusted by El Zagal to a noble Moor, named Hamet Zeli, whose renown in the present war had been established by his resolute defence of Ronda. [6] Ferdinand, while lying before Velez, received intelligence that many of the wealthy burghers of Malaga were inclined to capitulate at once, rather than hazard the demolition of their city by an obstinate resistance. He instructed the marquis of Cadiz, therefore, to open a negotiation with Hamet Zeli, authorizing him to make the most liberal offers to the alcayde himself, as well as his garrison, and the principal citizens of the place, on condition of immediate surrender. The sturdy chief, however, rejected the proposal with disdain, replying, that he had been commissioned by his master to defend the place to the last extremity, and that the Christian king could not offer a bribe large enough to make him betray his trust. Ferdinand, finding little prospect of operating on this Spartan temper, broke up his camp before Velez, on the 7th of May, and advanced with his whole army as far as Bezmillana, a place on the seaboard about two leagues distant from Malaga. [7] The line of march now lay through a valley commanded at the extremity nearest the city by two eminences; the one on the sea-coast, the other facing the fortress of the Gebalfaro, and forming part of the wild sierra which overshadowed Malaga on the north. The enemy occupied both these important positions. A corps of Galicians were sent forward to dislodge them from the eminence towards the sea. But it failed in the assault, and, notwithstanding it was led up a second time by the commander of Leon and the brave Garcilasso de la Vega, [8] was again repulsed by the intrepid foe. A similar fate attended the assault on the sierra, which was conducted by the troops of the royal household. They were driven back on the vanguard, which had halted in the valley under command of the grand master of St. James, prepared to support the attack on either side. Being reinforced, the Spaniards returned to the charge with the most determined resolution. They were encountered by the enemy with equal spirit. The latter, throwing away their lances, precipitated themselves on the ranks of the assailants, making use only of their daggers, grappling closely man to man, till both rolled promiscuously together down the steep sides of the ravine. No mercy was asked or shown. None thought of sparing or of spoiling, for hatred, says the chronicler, was stronger than avarice. The main body of the army, in the mean while, pent up in the valley, were compelled to witness the mortal conflict, and listen to the exulting cries of the enemy, which, after the Moorish custom, rose high and shrill above the din of battle, without being able to advance a step in support of their companions, who were again forced to give way before their impetuous adversaries, and fall back on the vanguard under the grand master of St. James. Here, however, they speedily rallied; and, being reinforced, advanced to the charge a third time, with such inflexible courage as bore down all opposition, and compelled the enemy, exhausted, or rather overpowered by superior numbers, to abandon his position. At the same time the rising ground on the seaside was carried by the Spaniards under the commander of Leon and Garcilasso de la Vega, who, dividing their forces, charged the Moors so briskly in front and rear, that they were compelled to retreat on the neighboring fortress of Gebalfaro. [9] As it was evening before these advantages were obtained, the army did not defile into the plains around Malaga before the following morning, when dispositions were made for its encampment. The eminence on the sierra, so bravely contested, was assigned as the post of greatest danger to the marquis duke of Cadiz. It was protected by strong works lined with artillery, and a corps of two thousand five hundred horse and fourteen thousand foot was placed under the immediate command of that nobleman. A line of defence was constructed along the declivity from this redoubt to the seashore. Similar works, consisting of a deep trench and palisades, or, where the soil was too rocky to admit of them, of an embankment or mound of earth, were formed in front of the encampment, which embraced the whole circuit of the city; and the blockade was completed by a fleet of armed vessels, galleys and caravels, which rode in the harbor under the command of the Catalan admiral, Requesens, and effectually cut off all communication by water. [10] The old chronicler Bernaldez warms at the aspect of the fair city of Malaga, thus encompassed by Christian legions, whose deep lines, stretching far over hill and valley, reached quite round from one arm of the sea to the other. In the midst of this brilliant encampment was seen the royal pavilion, proudly displaying the united banners of Castile and Aragon, and forming so conspicuous a mark for the enemy's artillery, that Ferdinand, after imminent hazard, was at length compelled to shift his quarters. The Christians were not slow in erecting counter-batteries; but the work was obliged to be carried on at night, in order to screen them from the fire of the besieged. [11] The first operations of the Spaniards were directed against the suburb, on the land side of the city. The attack was intrusted to the count of Cifuentes, the nobleman who had been made prisoner in the affair of the Axarquia, and subsequently ransomed. The Spanish ordnance was served with such effect, that a practicable breach was soon made in the wall. The combatants now poured their murderous volleys on each other through the opening, and at length met on the ruins of the breach. After a desperate struggle the Moors gave way. The Christians rushed into the enclosure, at the same time effecting a lodgment on the rampart; and, although a part of it, undermined by the enemy, gave way with a terrible crash, they still kept possession of the remainder, and at length drove their antagonists, who sullenly retreated step by step, within the fortifications of the city. The lines were then drawn close around the place. Every avenue of communication was strictly guarded, and every preparation was made for reducing the town by regular blockade. [12] In addition to the cannon brought round by water from Velez, the heavier lombards, which from the difficulty of transportation had been left during the late Siege at Antequera, were now conducted across roads, levelled for the purpose, to the camp. Supplies of marble bullets were also brought from the ancient and depopulated city of Algezira, where they had lain ever since its capture in the preceding century by Alfonso the Eleventh. The camp was filled with operatives, employed in the manufacture of balls and powder, which were stored in subterranean magazines, and in the fabrication of those various kinds of battering enginery, which continued in use long after the introduction of gunpowder. [13] During the early part of the siege, the camp experienced some temporary inconvenience from the occasional interruption of the supplies transported by water. Rumors of the appearance of the plague in some of the adjacent villages caused additional uneasiness; and deserters, who passed into Malaga, reported these particulars with the usual exaggeration, and encouraged the besieged to persevere, by the assurance that Ferdinand could not much longer keep the field, and that the queen had actually written to advise his breaking up the camp. Under these circumstances, Ferdinand saw at once the importance of the queen's presence in order to dispel the delusion of the enemy, and to give new heart to his soldiers. He accordingly sent a message to Cordova, where she was holding her court, requesting her appearance in the camp. Isabella had proposed to join her husband before Velez, on receiving tidings of El Zagal's march from Granada, and had actually enforced levies of all persons capable of bearing arms, between twenty and seventy years of age, throughout Andalusia, but subsequently disbanded them, on learning the discomfiture of the Moorish army. Without hesitation, she now set forward, accompanied by the cardinal of Spain and other dignitaries of the church, together with the infanta Isabella, and a courtly train of ladies and cavaliers in attendance on her person. She was received at a short distance from the camp by the marquis of Cadiz and the grand master of St. James, and escorted to her quarters amidst the enthusiastic greetings of the soldiery. Hope now brightened every countenance. A grace seemed to be shed over the rugged features of war; and the young gallants thronged from all quarters to the camp, eager to win the guerdon of valor from the hands of those from whom it is most grateful to receive it. [14] Ferdinand, who had hitherto brought into action only the lighter pieces of ordnance, from a willingness to spare the noble edifices of the city, now pointed his heaviest guns against its walls. Before opening his fire, however, he again summoned the place, offering the usual liberal terms in case of immediate, compliance, and engaging otherwise, "with the blessing of God, to make them all slaves"! But the heart of the alcayde was hardened like that of Pharaoh, says the Andalusian chronicler, and the people were swelled with vain hopes, so that their ears were closed against the proposal; orders were even issued to punish with death any attempt at a parley. On the contrary, they made answer by a more lively cannonade than before, along the whole line of ramparts and fortresses which overhung the city. Sallies were also made at almost every hour of the day and night on every assailable point of the Christian lines, so that the camp was kept in perpetual alarm. In one of the nocturnal sallies, a body of two thousand men from the castle of Gebalfaro succeeded in surprising the quarters of the marquis of Cadiz, who, with his followers, was exhausted by fatigue and watching, during the two preceding nights. The Christians, bewildered with the sudden tumult which broke their slumber, were thrown into the greatest confusion; and the marquis, who rushed half armed from his tent, found no little difficulty in bringing them to order, and beating off the assailants, after receiving a wound in the arm from an arrow; while he had a still narrower escape from the ball of an arquebus, that penetrated his buckler and hit him below the cuirass, but fortunately so much spent as to do him no injury. [15] The Moors were not unmindful of the importance of Malaga, or the gallantry with which it was defended. They made several attempts to relieve it, whose failure was less owing to the Christians than to treachery and their own miserable feuds. A body of cavalry, which El Zagal despatched from Guadix to throw succors into the beleaguered city, was encountered and cut to pieces by a superior force of the young king Abdallah, who consummated his baseness by sending an embassy to the Christian camp, charged with a present of Arabian horses sumptuously caparisoned to Ferdinand, and of costly silks and Oriental perfumes to the queen; at the same time complimenting them on their successes, and soliciting the continuance of their friendly dispositions towards himself. Ferdinand and Isabella requited this act of humiliation by securing to Abdallah's subjects the right of cultivating their fields in quiet, and of trafficking with the Spaniards in every commodity, save military stores. At this paltry price did the dastard prince consent to stay his arm, at the only moment when it could be used effectually for his country. [16] More serious consequences were like to have resulted from an attempt made by another party of Moors from Guadix to penetrate the Christian lines. Part of them succeeded, and threw themselves into the besieged city. The remainder were cut in pieces. There was one, however, who, making no show of resistance, was made prisoner without harm to his person. Being brought before the marquis of Cadiz, he informed that nobleman, that he could make some important disclosures to the sovereigns. He was accordingly conducted to the royal tent; but, as Ferdinand was taking his siesta, in the sultry hour of the day, the queen, moved by divine inspiration, according to the Castilian historian, deferred the audience till her husband should awake, and commanded the prisoner to be detained in the adjoining tent. This was occupied by Doña Beatrix de Bobadilla, marchioness of Moya, Isabella's early friend, who happened to be at that time engaged in discourse with a Portuguese nobleman, Don Alvaro, son of the duke of Braganza. [17] The Moor did not understand the Castilian language, and, deceived by the rich attire and courtly bearing of these personages, he mistook them for the king and queen. While in the act of refreshing himself with a glass of water, he suddenly drew a dagger from beneath the broad folds of his _albornoz_, or Moorish mantle, which he had been incautiously suffered to retain, and, darting on the Portuguese prince, gave him a deep wound on the head; and then, turning like lightning on the marchioness, aimed a stroke at her, which fortunately glanced without injury, the point of the weapon being turned by the heavy embroidery of her robes. Before he could repeat his blow, the Moorish Scaevola, with a fate very different from that of his Roman prototype, was pierced with a hundred wounds by the attendants, who rushed to the spot, alarmed by the cries of the marchioness, and his mangled remains were soon after discharged from a catapult into the city; a foolish bravado, which the besieged requited by slaying a Galician gentleman, and sending his corpse astride upon a mule through the gates of the town into the Christian camp. [18] This daring attempt on the lives of the king and queen spread general consternation throughout the army. Precautions were taken for the future, by ordinances prohibiting the introduction of any unknown person armed, or any Moor whatever, into the royal quarters; and the bodyguard was augmented by the addition of two hundred hidalgos of Castile and Aragon, who, with their retainers, were to keep constant watch over the persons of the sovereigns. Meanwhile, the city of Malaga, whose natural population was greatly swelled by the influx of its foreign auxiliaries, began to be straitened for supplies, while its distress was aggravated by the spectacle of abundance which reigned throughout the Spanish camp. Still, however, the people, overawed by the soldiery, did not break out into murmurs, nor did they relax in any degree the pertinacity of their resistance. Their drooping spirits were cheered by the predictions of a fanatic, who promised that they should eat the grain which they saw in the Christian camp; a prediction, which came to be verified, like most others that are verified at all, in a very different sense from that intended or understood. The incessant cannonade kept up by the besieging army, in the mean time, so far exhausted their ammunition, that they were constrained to seek supplies from the most distant parts of the kingdom, and from foreign countries. The arrival of two Flemish transports at this juncture, from the emperor of Germany, whose interest had been roused in the crusade, afforded a seasonable reinforcement of military stores and munitions. The obstinate defence of Malaga had given the siege such celebrity, that volunteers, eager to share in it, flocked from all parts of the Peninsula to the royal standard. Among others, the duke of Medina Sidonia, who had furnished his quota of troops at the opening of the campaign, now arrived in person with a reinforcement, together with a hundred galleys freighted with supplies, and a loan of twenty thousand doblas of gold to the sovereigns for the expenses of the war. Such was the deep interest in it excited throughout the nation, and the alacrity which every order of men exhibited in supporting its enormous burdens. [19] The Castilian army, swelled by these daily augmentations, varied in its amount, according to different estimates, from sixty to ninety thousand men. Throughout this immense host, the most perfect discipline was maintained. Gaming was restrained by ordinances interdicting the use of dice and cards, of which the lower orders were passionately fond. Blasphemy was severely punished. Prostitutes, the common pest of a camp, were excluded; and so entire was the subordination, that not a knife was drawn, and scarcely a brawl occurred, says the historian, among the motley multitude. Besides the higher ecclesiastics who attended the court, the camp was well supplied with holy men, priests, friars, and the chaplains of the great nobility, who performed the exercises of religion in their respective quarters with all the pomp and splendor of the Roman Catholic worship; exalting the imaginations of the soldiers into the high devotional feeling, which became those who were fighting the battles of the Cross. [20] Hitherto, Ferdinand, relying on the blockade, and yielding to the queen's desire to spare the lives of her soldiers, had formed no regular plan of assault upon the town. But, as the season rolled on without the least demonstration of submission on the part of the besieged, he resolved to storm the works, which, if attended by no other consequences, might at least serve to distress the enemy, and hasten the hour of surrender. Large wooden towers on rollers were accordingly constructed, and provided with an apparatus of drawbridges and ladders, which, when brought near to the ramparts, would open a descent into the city. Galleries were also wrought, some for the purpose of penetrating into the place, and others to sap the foundations of the walls. The whole of these operations was placed under the direction of Francisco Ramirez, the celebrated engineer of Madrid. But the Moors anticipated the completion of these formidable preparations by a brisk, well-concerted attack on all points of the Spanish lines. They countermined the assailants, and, encountering them in the subterraneous passages, drove them back, and demolished the frame-work of the galleries. At the same time, a little squadron of armed vessels, which had been riding in safety under the guns of the city, pushed out and engaged the Spanish fleet. Thus the battle raged with fire and sword, above and under ground, along the ramparts, the ocean, and the land, at the same time. Even Pulgar cannot withhold his tribute of admiration to this unconquerable spirit in an enemy, wasted by all the extremities of famine and fatigue. "Who does not marvel," he says, "at the bold heart of these infidels in battle, their prompt obedience to their chiefs, their dexterity in the wiles of war, their patience under privation, and undaunted perseverance in their purposes?" [21] A circumstance occurred in a sortie from the city, indicating a trait of character worth recording. A noble Moor, named Abrahen Zenete, fell in with a number of Spanish children who had wandered from their quarters. Without injuring them, he touched them gently with the handle of his lance, saying, "Get ye gone, varlets, to your mothers." On being rebuked by his comrades, who inquired why he had let them escape so easily, he replied, "Because I saw no beard upon their chins." "An example of magnanimity," says the Curate of Los Palacios, "truly wonderful in a heathen, and which might have reflected credit on a Christian hidalgo." [22] But no virtue nor valor could avail the unfortunate Malagans against the overwhelming force of their enemies, who, driving them back from every point, compelled them, after a desperate struggle of six hours, to shelter themselves within the defences of the town. The Christians followed up their success. A mine was sprung near a tower, connected by a bridge of four arches with the main works of the place. The Moors, scattered and intimidated by the explosion, retreated across the bridge, and the Spaniards, carrying the tower, whose guns completely enfiladed it, obtained possession of this important pass into the beleaguered city. For these and other signal services during the siege, Francisco Ramirez, the master of the ordnance, received the honors of knighthood from the hand of King Ferdinand. [23] The citizens of Malaga, dismayed at beholding the enemy established in their defences, and fainting under exhaustion from a siege which had already lasted more than three months, now began to murmur at the obstinacy of the garrison, and to demand a capitulation. Their magazines of grain were emptied, and for some weeks they had been compelled to devour the flesh of horses, dogs, cats, and even the boiled hides of these animals, or, in default of other nutriment, vine leaves dressed with oil, and leaves of the palm tree, pounded fine, and baked into a sort of cake. In consequence of this loathsome and unwholesome diet, diseases were engendered. Multitudes were seen dying about the streets. Many deserted to the Spanish camp, eager to barter their liberty for bread; and the city exhibited all the extremes of squalid and disgusting wretchedness, bred by pestilence and famine among an overcrowded population. The sufferings of the citizens softened the stern heart of the alcayde, Hamet Zeli, who at length yielded to their importunities, and, withdrawing his forces into the Gebalfaro, consented that the Malagans should make the best terms they could with their conqueror. A deputation of the principal inhabitants, with an eminent merchant named Ali Dordux at their head, was then despatched to the Christian quarters, with the offer of the city to capitulate, on the same liberal conditions which had been uniformly granted by the Spaniards. The king refused to admit the embassy into his presence, and haughtily answered through the commander of Leon, "that these terms had been twice offered to the people of Malaga, and rejected; that it was too late for them to stipulate conditions, and nothing now remained but to abide by those which he, as their conqueror, should vouchsafe to them." [24] Ferdinand's answer spread general consternation throughout Malaga. The inhabitants saw too plainly that nothing was to be hoped from an appeal to sentiments of humanity. After a tumultuous debate, the deputies were despatched a second time to the Christian camp, charged with propositions in which concession was mingled with menace. They represented that the severe response of King Ferdinand to the citizens had rendered them desperate. That, however, they were willing to resign to him their fortifications, their city, in short, their property of every description, on his assurance of their personal security and freedom. If he refused this, they would take their Christian captives, amounting to five or six hundred, from the dungeons in which they lay, and hang them like dogs over the battlements; and then, placing their old men, women, and children in the fortress, they would set fire to the town, and cut a way for themselves through their enemies, or fall in the attempt. "So," they continued, "if you gain a victory, it shall be such a one as shall make the name of Malaga ring throughout the world, and to ages yet unborn!" Ferdinand, unmoved by these menaces, coolly replied, that he saw no occasion to change his former determination; but they might rest assured, if they harmed a single hair of a Christian, he would put every soul in the place, man, woman, and child, to the sword. The anxious people, who thronged forth to meet the embassy on its return to the city, were overwhelmed with the deepest gloom at its ominous tidings. Their fate was now sealed. Every avenue to hope seemed closed by the stern response of the victor. Yet hope will still linger; and, although there were some frantic enough to urge the execution of their desperate menaces, the greater number of the inhabitants, and among them those most considerable for wealth and influence, preferred the chance of Ferdinand's clemency to certain, irretrievable ruin. For the last time, therefore, the deputies issued from the gates of the city, charged with an epistle to the sovereigns from their unfortunate countrymen, in which, after deprecating their anger, and lamenting their own blind obstinacy, they reminded their highnesses of the liberal terms which their ancestors had granted to Cordova, Antequera, and other cities, after a defence as pertinacious as their own. They expatiated on the fame which the sovereigns had established by the generous policy of their past conquests, and, appealing to their magnanimity, concluded with submitting themselves, their families, and their fortunes to their disposal. Twenty of the principal citizens were then delivered up as hostages for the peaceable demeanor of the city until its occupation by the Spaniards. "Thus," says the Curate of Los Palacios, "did the Almighty harden the hearts of these heathen, like to those of the Egyptians, in order that they might receive the full wages of the manifold oppressions which they had wrought on his people, from the days of King Roderic to the present time." [25] On the appointed day, the commander of Leon rode through the gates of Malaga, at the head of his well-appointed chivalry, and took possession of the _alcazaba_, or lower citadel. The troops were then posted on their respective stations along the fortifications, and the banners of Christian Spain triumphantly unfurled from the towers of the city, where the crescent had been displayed for an uninterrupted period of nearly eight centuries. The first act was to purify the town from the numerous dead bodies, and other offensive matter, which had accumulated during this long siege, and lay festering in the streets, poisoning the atmosphere. The principal mosque was next consecrated with due solemnity to the service of Santa Maria de la Encarnacion. Crosses and bells, the symbols of Christian worship, were distributed in profusion among the sacred edifices; where, says the Catholic chronicler last quoted, "the celestial music of their chimes, sounding at every hour of the day and night, caused perpetual torment to the ears of the infidel." [26] On the eighteenth day of August, being somewhat more than three months from the date of opening trenches, Ferdinand and Isabella made their entrance into the conquered city, attended by the court, the clergy, and the whole of their military array. The procession moved in solemn state up the principal streets, now deserted, and hushed in ominous silence, to the new cathedral of St. Mary, where mass was performed; and as the glorious anthem of the Te Deum rose for the first time within its ancient walls, the sovereigns, together with the whole army, prostrated themselves in grateful adoration of the Lord of hosts, who had thus reinstated them in the domains of their ancestors. The most affecting incident was afforded by the multitude of Christian captives, who were rescued from the Moorish dungeons. They were brought before the sovereigns, with their limbs heavily manacled, their beards descending to their waists, and their sallow visages emaciated by captivity and famine. Every eye was suffused with tears at the spectacle. Many recognized their ancient friends, of whose fate they had long been ignorant. Some, had lingered in captivity ten or fifteen years; and among them were several belonging to the best families in Spain. On entering the presence, they would have testified their gratitude by throwing themselves at the feet of the sovereigns; but the latter, raising them up and mingling their tears with those of the liberated captives, caused their fetters to be removed, and, after administering to their necessities, dismissed them with liberal presents. [27] The fortress of Gebalfaro surrendered on the day after the occupation of Malaga by the Spaniards. The gallant Zegri chieftain, Hamet Zeli, was loaded with chains; and, being asked why he had persisted so obstinately in his _rebellion_, boldly answered, "Because I was commissioned to defend the place to the last extremity; and, if I had been properly supported, I would have died sooner than surrender now!" The doom of the vanquished was now to be pronounced. On entering the city, orders had been issued to the Spanish soldiery, prohibiting them under the severest penalties from molesting either the persons or property of the inhabitants. These latter were directed to remain in their respective mansions with a guard set over them, while the cravings of appetite were supplied by a liberal distribution of food. At length, the whole population of the city, comprehending every age and sex, was commanded to repair to the great courtyard of the alcazaba, which was overlooked on all sides by lofty ramparts garrisoned by the Spanish soldiery. To this place, the scene of many a Moorish triumph, where the spoil of the border foray had been often displayed, and which still might be emblazoned with the trophy of many a Christian banner, the people of Malaga now directed their steps. As the multitude swarmed through the streets, filled with boding apprehensions of their fate, they wrung their hands, and, raising their eyes to heaven, uttered the most piteous lamentations. "Oh, Malaga," they cried, "renowned and beautiful city, how are thy sons about to forsake thee! Could not thy soil, on which they first drew breath, be suffered to cover them in death? Where is now the strength of thy towers, where the beauty of thy edifices? The strength of thy walls, alas, could not avail thy children, for they had sorely displeased their Creator. What shall become of thy old men and thy matrons, or of thy young maidens delicately nurtured within thy halls, when they shall feel the iron yoke of bondage? Can thy barbarous conquerors without remorse thus tear asunder the dearest ties of life?" Such are the melancholy strains, in which the Castilian chronicler has given utterance to the sorrows of the captive city. [28] The dreadful doom of slavery was denounced on the assembled multitude. One-third was to be transported into Africa in exchange for an equal number of Christian captives detained there; and all, who had relatives or friends in this predicament, were required to furnish a specification of them. Another third was appropriated to reimburse the state for the expenses of the war. The remainder were to be distributed as presents at home and abroad. Thus, one hundred of the flower of the African warriors were sent to the pope, who incorporated them into his guard, and converted them all in the course of the year, says the Curate of Los Palacios, into very good Christians. Fifty of the most beautiful Moorish girls were presented by Isabella to the queen of Naples, thirty to the queen of Portugal, others to the ladies of her court; and the residue of both sexes were apportioned among the nobles, cavaliers, and inferior members of the army, according to their respective rank and services. [29] As it was apprehended that the Malagans, rendered desperate by the prospect of a hopeless, interminable captivity, might destroy or secrete their jewels, plate, and other precious effects, in which this wealthy city abounded, rather than suffer them to fall into the hands of their enemies, Ferdinand devised a politic expedient for preventing it. He proclaimed that he would receive a certain sum, if paid within nine months, as the ransom of the whole population, and that their personal effects should be admitted in part payment. This sum averaged about thirty doblas a head, including in the estimate all those who might die before the determination of the period assigned. The ransom, thus stipulated, proved more than the unhappy people could raise, either by themselves, or agents employed to solicit contributions among their brethren of Granada and Africa; at the same time, it so far deluded their hopes, that they gave in a full inventory of their effects to the treasury. By this shrewd device, Ferdinand obtained complete possession both of the persons and property of his victims. [30] Malaga was computed to contain from eleven to fifteen thousand inhabitants, exclusive of several thousand foreign auxiliaries, within its gates at the time of surrender. One cannot, at this day, read the melancholy details of its story, without feelings of horror and indignation. It is impossible to vindicate the dreadful sentence passed on this unfortunate people for a display of heroism, which should have excited admiration in every generous bosom. It was obviously most repugnant to Isabella's natural disposition, and must be admitted to leave a stain on her memory, which no coloring of history can conceal. It may find some palliation, however, in the bigotry of the age, the more excusable in a woman whom education, general example, and natural distrust of herself accustomed to rely, in matters of conscience, on the spiritual guides, whose piety and professional learning seemed to qualify them for the trust. Even in this very transaction, she fell far short of the suggestions of some of her counsellors, who urged her to put every inhabitant without exception to the sword; which, they affirmed, would be a just requital of their obstinate _rebellion_, and would prove a wholesome warning to others! We are not told who the advisers of this precious measure were; but the whole experience of this reign shows, that we shall scarcely wrong the clergy much by imputing it to them. That their arguments could warp so enlightened a mind, as that of Isabella, from the natural principles of justice and humanity, furnishes a remarkable proof of the ascendency which the priesthood usurped over the most gifted intellects, and of their gross abuse of it, before the Reformation, by breaking the seals set on the sacred volume, opened to mankind the uncorrupted channel of divine truth. [31] The fate of Malaga may be said to have decided that of Granada. The latter was now shut out from the most important ports along her coast; and she was environed on every point of her territory by her warlike foe, so that she could hardly hope more from subsequent efforts, however strenuous and united, than to postpone the inevitable hour of dissolution. The cruel treatment of Malaga was the prelude to the long series of persecutions, which awaited the wretched Moslems in the land of their ancestors; in that land, over which the "star of Islamism," to borrow their own metaphor, had shone in full brightness for nearly eight centuries, but where it was now fast descending amid clouds and tempests to the horizon. The first care of the sovereigns was directed towards repeopling the depopulated city with their own subjects. Houses and lands were freely granted to such as would settle there. Numerous towns and villages with a wide circuit of territory were placed under its civil jurisdiction, and it was made the head of a diocese embracing most of the recent conquests in the south and west of Granada. These inducements, combined with the natural advantages of position and climate, soon caused the tide of Christian population to flow into the deserted city; but it was very long before it again reached the degree of commercial consequence to which it had been raised by the Moors. [32] After these salutary arrangements, the Spanish sovereigns led back their victorious legions in triumph to Cordova, whence dispersing to their various homes, they prepared, by a winter's repose, for new campaigns and more brilliant conquests. FOOTNOTES [1] Vedmar, Antiguedad y Grandezas de la Ciudad de Velez, (Granada, 1652,) fol. 148.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 27, cap. 10.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. iii. cap. 70.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1487.-- Bleda, Corónica, lib. 5, cap. 14. [2] Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. pp. 292-294.-- Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, ubi supra.--Vedmar, Antiguedad de Velez, fol. 151. [3] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 175.--Vedmar, Antiguedad.--de Velez, fol. 150, 151.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 14. In commemoration of this event, the city incorporated into its escutcheon the figure of a king on horseback, in the act of piercing a Moor with his javelin. Vedmar, Antiguedad de Velez, fol. 12. [4] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 52.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 14. [5] Conde doubts whether the name of Malaga is derived from the Greek _malakè_, signifying "agreeable," or the Arabic _malka_, meaning "royal." Either etymology is sufficiently pertinent. (See El Nubiense, Descripcion de España, p. 186, not.) For notices of sovereigns who swayed the sceptre of Malaga, see Casiri, Bibliotheca Escurialensis, tom. ii. pp. 41, 56, 99, et alibi. [6] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. p. 237.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 74.--El Nubiense, Descripcion de España, not., p. 144. [7] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 82.--Vedmar, Antiguedad de Velez, fol. 154.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 74. [8] This cavalier, who took a conspicuous part both in the military and civil transactions of this reign, was descended from one of the most ancient and honorable houses in Castile. Hyta, (Guerras Civiles de Granada, tom. i. p. 399,) with more effrontery than usual, has imputed to him a chivalrous rencontre with a Saracen, which is recorded of an ancestor, in the ancient Chronicle of Alonso XI. "Garcilaso de la Vega desde alli se ha intitulado, porque en la Vega hiciera campo con aquel pagano." Oviedo, however, with good reason, distrusts the etymology and the story, as he traces both the cognomen and the peculiar device of the family to a much older date than the period assigned in the Chronicle. Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 3, dial. 43. [9] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 75.--Salazar de Mendoza, Crón. del Gran Cardenal, lib. 1, cap. 64. [10] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 83.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 76.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1487. [11] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, ubi supra.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., ubi supra. [12] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., lib. 1, epist. 83--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 76.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, cap. 83.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 36. [13] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 76. [14] Salazar de Mendoza, Crón. del Gran Cardenal, lib. 1, cap. 64.-- Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. cap. 70.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 83. [15] Bleda, Corónica, lib. 5, cap. 15.--Conde, Dominacion, tom. iv. pp. 237, 238.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 83.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 79. [16] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, ubi supra. During the siege, ambassadors arrived from an African potentate, the king of Tremecen, bearing a magnificent present to the Castilian sovereigns, interceding for the Malagans, and at the same time asking protection for his subjects from the Spanish cruisers in the Mediterranean. The sovereigns graciously complied with the latter request, and complimented the African monarch with a plate of gold, on which the royal arms were curiously embossed, says Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, cap. 84. [17] This nobleman, Don Alvaro de Portugal, had fled his native country, and sought an asylum in Castile from the vindictive enmity of John II, who had been put to death by the duke of Braganza, his elder brother. He was kindly received by Isabella, to whom he was nearly related, and subsequently preferred to several important offices of state. His son, the count of Gelves, married a granddaughter of Christopher Columbus. Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS. [18] Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 23.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., lib. 1, epist. 63.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 84.--Bleda, Corónica de los Moros, lib. 5, cap. 15.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 175, 176. [19] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 87-89.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 84. [20] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 87.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 71. [21] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. pp. 237, 238.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 80.--Caro de Torres, Ordenes Militares, fol. 82, 83. [22] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 9l.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 84. The honest exclamation of the Curate brings to mind the similar encomium of the old Moorish ballad, "Caballeros Granadinos, Aunque Moros, hijosdalgo." Hyta, Guerras de Granada, tom. i., p. 257. [23] There is no older well-authenticated account of the employment of gunpowder in mining in European warfare, so far as I am aware, than this by Ramirez. Tiraboschi, indeed, refers, on the authority of another writer, to a work in the library of the Academy of Siena, composed by one Francesco Giorgio, architect of the duke of Urbino, about 1480, in which that person claims the merit of the invention. (Letteratura Italiana, tom. vi. p. 370.) The whole statement is obviously too loose to warrant any such conclusion. The Italian historians notice the use of gunpowder mines at the siege of the little town of Serezanello in Tuscany, by the Genoese, in 1487, precisely contemporaneous with the siege of Malaga. (Machiavelli, Istorie Fiorentine, lib. 8.--Guicciardini, Istoria d'Italia, (Milano, 1803,) tom. iii. lib. 6.) This singular coincidence, in nations having then but little intercourse, would seem to infer some common origin of greater antiquity. However this may be, the writers of both nations are agreed in ascribing the first successful use of such mines on any extended scale to the celebrated Spanish engineer, Pedro Navarro, when serving under Gonsalvo of Cordova, in his Italian campaigns at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Guicciardini, ubi supra.--Paolo Giovio, de Vitâ Magni Gonsalvi, (Vitae Illustrium Virorum, Basiliae, 1578,) lib. 2.-- Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. lib. 35, cap. 12. [24] Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. p. 296.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 175.--Rades y Andrada, Las Tres Ordenes, fol. 54.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 92.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 85. [25] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 93.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. p. 296. The Arabic historians state that Malaga was betrayed by Ali Dordux, who admitted the Spaniards into the castle, while the citizens were debating on Ferdinand's terms. (See Conde, Domination de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 39.) The letter of the inhabitants, quoted at length by Pulgar, would seem to be a refutation of this. And yet there are good grounds for suspecting false play on the part of the ambassador Dordux, since the Castilian writers admit that he was exempted, with forty of his friends, from the doom of slavery and forfeiture of property, passed upon his fellow- citizens. [26] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 85. [27] Carbajal, whose meagre annals have scarcely any merit beyond that of a mere chronological table, postpones the surrender till September. Anales, año 1487.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 14. [28] Bleda, Corónica, lib. 5, cap. 15. As a counterpart to the above scene, twelve Christian renegades, found in the city, were transfixed with canes, _acañavereados_, a barbarous punishment derived from the Moors, which was inflicted by horsemen at full gallop, who discharged pointed reeds at the criminal, until he expired under repeated wounds. A number of relapsed Jews were at the same time condemned to the flames. "These," says Father Abarca, "were the _fêtes_ and illuminations most grateful to the Catholic piety of our sovereigns"! Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 3. [29] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, ubi supra.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., ubi supra.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 62. [30] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 87.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 176.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. p. 238. --Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. p. 296.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1487. Not a word of comment escapes the Castilian historians on this merciless rigor of the conqueror towards the vanquished. It is evident that Ferdinand did no violence to the feelings of his orthodox subjects. _Tacendo clamant._ [31] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 87.--Bleda, Corónica, lib. 5, cap. 15. About four hundred and fifty Moorish Jews were ransomed by a wealthy Israelite of Castile for 27,000 doblas of gold. A proof that the Jewish stock was one which thrived amidst persecution. It is scarcely possible that the circumstantial Pulgar should have omitted to notice so important a fact as the scheme of the Moorish ransom, had it occurred. It is still more improbable, that the honest Curate of Los Palacios should have fabricated it. Any one who attempts to reconcile the discrepancies of contemporary historians even, will have Lord Orford's exclamation to his son Horace brought to his mind ten times a day; "Oh! read me not history, for that I know to be false." [32] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 94.--Col. de Céd., tom. vi. no. 321. CHAPTER XIV. WAR OF GRANADA.--CONQUEST OF BAZA.--SUBMISSION OF EL ZAGAL. 1487-1489. The Sovereigns visit Aragon.--The King lays Siege to Baza.--Its Great Strength.--Gardens Cleared of their Timber.--The Queen Raises the Spirits of her Troops.--Her Patriotic Sacrifices.--Suspension of Arms.--Baza Surrenders.--Treaty with Zagal.--Difficulties of the Campaign.--Isabella's Popularity and Influence. In the autumn of 1487, Ferdinand and Isabella, accompanied by the younger branches of the royal family, visited Aragon, to obtain the recognition from the cortes of Prince John's succession, now in his tenth year, as well as to repress the disorders into which the country had fallen during the long absence of its sovereigns. To this end, the principal cities and communities of Aragon had recently adopted the institution of the hermandad, organized on similar principles to that of Castile. Ferdinand, on his arrival at Saragossa in the month of November, gave his royal sanction to the association, extending the term of its duration to five years, a measure extremely unpalatable to the great feudal nobility, whose power, or rather abuse of power, was considerably abridged by this popular military force. [1] The sovereigns, after accomplishing the objects of their visit, and obtaining an appropriation from the cortes for the Moorish war, passed into Valencia, where measures of like efficiency were adopted for restoring the authority of the law, which was exposed to such perpetual lapses in this turbulent age, even in the best constituted governments, as required for its protection the utmost vigilance, on the part of those intrusted with the supreme executive power. From Valencia the court proceeded to Murcia, where Ferdinand, in the month of June, 1488, assumed the command of an army amounting to less than twenty thousand men, a small force compared with those usually levied on these occasions; it being thought advisable to suffer the nation to breathe a while, after the exhausting efforts in which it had been unintermittingly engaged for so many years. Ferdinand, crossing the eastern borders of Granada, at no great distance from Vera, which speedily opened its gates, kept along the southern slant of the coast as far as Almeria; whence, after experiencing some rough treatment from a sortie of the garrison, he marched by a northerly circuit on Baza, for the purpose of reconnoitring its position, as his numbers were altogether inadequate to its siege. A division of the army under the marquis duke of Cadiz suffered itself to be drawn here into an ambuscade by the wily old monarch El Zagal, who lay in Baza with a strong force. After extricating his troops with some difficulty and loss from this perilous predicament, Ferdinand retreated on his own dominions by the way of Huescar, where he disbanded his army, and withdrew to offer up his devotions at the cross of Caravaca. The campaign, though signalized by no brilliant achievement, and indeed clouded with some slight reverses, secured the surrender of a considerable number of fortresses and towns of inferior note. [2] The Moorish chief, El Zagal, elated by his recent success, made frequent forays into the Christian territories, sweeping off the flocks, herds, and growing crops of the husbandman; while the garrisons of Almeria and Salobrena, and the bold inhabitants of the valley of Purchena, poured a similar devastating warfare over the eastern borders of Granada into Murcia. To meet this pressure, the Spanish sovereigns reinforced the frontier with additional levies under Juan de Benavides and Garcilasso de la Vega; while Christian knights, whose prowess is attested in many a Moorish lay, flocked there from all quarters, as to the theatre of war. During the following winter, of 1488, Ferdinand and Isabella occupied themselves with the interior government of Castile, and particularly the administration of justice. A commission was specially appointed to supervise the conduct of the corregidors and subordinate magistrates, "so that every one," says Pulgar, "was most careful to discharge his duty faithfully, in order to escape the penalty, which was otherwise sure to overtake him." [3] While at Valladolid, the sovereigns received an embassy from Maximilian, son of the emperor Frederic the Fourth, of Germany, soliciting their co- operation in his designs against France for the restitution of his late wife's rightful inheritance, the duchy of Burgundy, and engaging in turn to support them in their claims on Roussillon and Cerdagne. The Spanish monarchs had long entertained many causes of discontent with the French court, both with regard to the mortgaged territory of Roussillon, and the kingdom of Navarre; and they watched with jealous eye the daily increasing authority of their formidable neighbor on their own frontier. They had been induced, in the preceding summer, to equip an armanent at Biscay and Guipuscoa, to support the duke of Brittany in his wars with the French regent, the celebrated Anne de Beaujeu. This expedition, which proved disastrous, was followed by another in the spring of the succeeding year. [4] But, notwithstanding these occasional episodes to the great work in which they were engaged, they had little leisure for extended operations; and, although they entered into the proposed treaty of alliance with Maximilian, they do not seem to have contemplated any movement of importance before the termination of the Moorish war. The Flemish ambassadors, after being entertained for forty days in a style suited to impress them with high ideas of the magnificence of the Spanish court, and of its friendly disposition towards their master, were dismissed with costly presents, and returned to their own country. [5] These negotiations show the increasing intimacy growing up between the European states, who, as they settled their domestic feuds, had leisure to turn their eyes abroad, and enter into the more extended field of international politics. The tenor of this treaty indicates also the direction which affairs were to take, when the great powers should be brought into collision with each other on a common theatre of action. All thoughts were now concentrated on the prosecution of the war with Granada, which, it was determined, should be conducted on a more enlarged scale than it had yet been; notwithstanding the fearful pest which had desolated the country during the past year, and the extreme scarcity of grain, owing to the inundations caused by excessive rains in the fruitful provinces of the south. The great object proposed in this campaign was the reduction of Baza, the capital of that division of the empire which belonged to El Zagal. Besides this important city, that monarch's dominions embraced the wealthy sea-port of Almeria, Guadix, and numerous other towns and villages of less consequence, together with the mountain region of the Alpuxarras, rich in mineral wealth; whose inhabitants, famous for the perfection to which they had carried the silk manufacture, were equally known for their enterprise and courage in war, so that El Zagal's division comprehended the most potent and opulent portion of the empire. [6] In the spring of 1489, the Castilian court passed to Jaen, at which place the queen was to establish her residence, as presenting the most favorable point of communication with the invading army. Ferdinand advanced as far as Sotogordo, where, on the 27th of May, he put himself at the head of a numerous force, amounting to about fifteen thousand horse and eighty thousand foot, including persons of every description; among whom was gathered, as usual, that chivalrous array of nobility and knighthood, who, with stately and well-appointed retinues, were accustomed to follow the royal standard in these crusades. [8] The first point, against which operations were directed, was the strong post of Cuxar, two leagues only from Baza, which surrendered after a brief but desperate resistance. The occupation of this place, and some adjacent fortresses, left the approaches open to El Zagal's capital. As the Spanish army toiled up the heights of the mountain barrier, which towers above Baza on the west, their advance was menaced by clouds of Moorish light troops, who poured down a tempest of musket-balls and arrows on their heads. These however were quickly dispersed by the advancing vanguard; and the Spaniards, as they gained the summits of the hills, beheld the lordly city of Baza, reposing in the shadows of the bold sierra that stretches towards the coast, and lying in the bosom of a fruitful valley, extending eight leagues in length, and three in breadth. Through this valley flowed the waters of the Guadalentin and the Guadalquiton, whose streams were conducted by a thousand canals over the surface of the vega. In the midst of the plain, adjoining the suburbs, might be descried the orchard or garden, as it was termed, of Baza, a league in length, covered with a thick growth of wood, and with numerous villas and pleasure-houses of the wealthy citizens, now converted into garrisoned fortresses. The suburbs were encompassed by a low mud wall; but the fortifications of the city were of uncommon strength. The place, in addition to ten thousand troops of its own, was garrisoned by an equal number from Almeria; picked men, under the command of the Moorish prince Cidi Yahye, a relative of El Zagal, who lay at this time in Guadix, prepared to cover his own dominions against any hostile movement of his rival in Granada. These veterans were commissioned to defend the place to the last extremity; and, as due time had been given for preparation, the town was victualled with fifteen months' provisions, and even the crops growing in the vega had been garnered before their prime, to save them from the hands of the enemy. [8] The first operation, after the Christian army had encamped before the walls of Baza, was to get possession of the garden, without which it would be impossible to enforce a thorough blockade, since its labyrinth of avenues afforded the inhabitants abundant facilities of communication with the surrounding country. The assault was intrusted to the grand master of St. James, supported by the principal cavaliers, and the king in person. Their reception by the enemy was such as gave them a foretaste of the perils and desperate daring they were to encounter in the present siege. The broken surface of the ground, bewildered with intricate passes, and thickly studded with trees and edifices, was peculiarly favorable to the desultory and illusory tactics of the Moors. The Spanish cavalry was brought at once to a stand; the ground proving impracticable for it, it was dismounted, and led to the charge by its officers on foot. The men, however, were soon scattered far asunder from their banners and their leaders. Ferdinand, who from a central position endeavored to overlook the field, with the design of supporting the attack on the points most requiring it, soon lost sight of his columns amid the precipitous ravines, and the dense masses of foliage which everywhere intercepted the view. The combat was carried on, hand to hand, in the utmost confusion. Still the Spaniards pressed forward, and, after a desperate struggle for twelve hours, in which many of the bravest on both sides fell, and the Moslem chief Reduan Zafarga had four horses successively killed under him, the enemy were beaten back behind the intrenchments that covered the suburbs, and the Spaniards, hastily constructing a defence of palisades, pitched their tents on the field of battle. [9] The following morning Ferdinand had the mortification to observe, that the ground was too much broken and obstructed with wood, to afford a suitable place for a general encampment. To evacuate his position, however, in the face of the enemy, was a delicate manoeuvre, and must necessarily expose him to severe loss. This he obviated, in a great measure, by a fortunate stratagem. He commanded the tents nearest the town to be left standing, and thus succeeded in drawing off the greater part of his forces, before the enemy was aware of his intention. After regaining his former position, a council of war was summoned to deliberate on the course next to be pursued. The chiefs were filled with despondency, as they revolved the difficulties of their situation. They almost despaired of enforcing the blockade of a place, whose peculiar situation gave it such advantages. Even could this be effected, the camp would be exposed, they argued, to the assaults of a desperate garrison on the one hand, and of the populous city of Guadix, hardly twenty miles distant, on the other; while the good faith of Granada could scarcely be expected to outlive a single reverse of fortune; so that, instead of besieging, they might be more properly regarded as themselves besieged. In addition to these evils, the winter frequently set in with much rigor in this quarter; and the torrents, descending from the mountains, and mingling with the waters of the valley, might overwhelm the camp with an inundation, which, if it did not sweep it away at once, would expose it to the perils of famine by cutting off all external communication. Under these gloomy impressions, many of the council urged Ferdinand to break up his position at once, and postpone all operations on Baza, until the reduction of the surrounding country should make it comparatively easy. Even the marquis of Cadiz gave in to this opinion; and Gutierre de Cardenas, commander of Leon, a cavalier deservedly high in the confidence of the king, was almost the only person of consideration decidedly opposed to it. In this perplexity, Ferdinand, as usual in similar exigencies, resolved to take counsel of the queen. [10] Isabella received her husband's despatches a few hours after they were written, by means of the regular line of posts maintained between the camp and her station at Jaen. She was filled with chagrin at their import, from which she plainly saw, that all her mighty preparations were about to vanish into air. Without assuming the responsibility of deciding the proposed question, however, she besought her husband not to distrust the providence of God, which had conducted them through so many perils towards the consummation of their wishes. She reminded him, that the Moorish fortunes were never at so low an ebb as at present, and that their own operations could probably never be resumed on such a formidable scale or under so favorable auspices as now, when their arms had not been stained with a single important reverse. She concluded with the assurance, that, if his soldiers would be true to their duty, they might rely on her for the faithful discharge of hers in furnishing them with all the requisite supplies. The exhilarating tone of this letter had an instantaneous effect, silencing the scruples of the most timid, and confirming the confidence of the others. The soldiers, in particular, who had received with dissatisfaction some intimation of what was passing in the council, welcomed it with general enthusiasm; and every heart seemed now intent on furthering the wishes of their heroic queen by prosecuting the siege with the utmost vigor. The army was accordingly distributed into two encampments; one under the marquis duke of Cadiz, supported by the artillery, the other under King Ferdinand on the opposite side of the city. Between the two lay the garden or orchard before mentioned, extending a league in length; so that, in order to connect the works of the two camps, it became necessary to get possession of this contested ground, and to clear it of the heavy timber with which it was covered. This laborious operation was intrusted to the commander of Leon, and the work was covered by a detachment of seven thousand troops, posted in such a manner as to check the sallies of the garrison. Notwithstanding four thousand _taladores_, or pioneers, were employed in the task, the forest was so dense, and the sorties from the city so annoying, that the work of devastation did not advance more than ten paces a day, and was not completed before the expiration of seven weeks. When the ancient groves, so long the ornament and protection of the city, were levelled to the ground, preparations were made for connecting the two camps, by a deep trench, through which the mountain waters were made to flow; while the borders were fortified with palisades, constructed of the timber lately hewn, together with strong towers of mud or clay, arranged at regular intervals. In this manner, the investment of the city was complete on the side of the vega. [11] As means of communication still remained open, however, by the opposite sierra, defences of similar strength, consisting of two stone walls separated by a deep trench, were made to run along the rocky heights and ravines of the mountains until they touched the extremities of the fortifications on the plain; and thus Baza was encompassed by an unbroken line of circumvallation. In the progress of the laborious work, which occupied ten thousand men, under the indefatigable commander of Leon, for the space of two months, it would have been easy for the people of Guadix, or of Granada, by co- operation with the sallies of the besieged, to place the Christian army in great peril. Some feeble demonstration of such a movement was made at Guadix, but it was easily disconcerted. Indeed, El Zagal was kept in check by the fear of leaving his own territory open to his rival, should he march against the Christians. Abdallah, in the mean while, lay inactive in Granada, incurring the odium and contempt of his people, who stigmatized him as a Christian in heart, and a pensioner of the Spanish sovereigns. Their discontent gradually swelled into a rebellion, which was suppressed by him with a severity, that at length induced a sullen acquiescence in a rule, which, however inglorious, was at least attended with temporary security. [12] While the camp lay before Baza, a singular mission was received from the sultan of Egypt, who had been solicited by the Moors of Granada to interpose in their behalf with the Spanish sovereigns. Two Franciscan friars, members of a religious community in Palestine, were bearers of despatches; which, after remonstrating with the sovereigns on. their persecution of the Moors, contrasted it with the protection uniformly extended by the sultan to the Christians in his dominions. The communication concluded with menacing a retaliation of similar severities on these latter, unless the sovereigns desisted from their hostilities towards Granada. From the camp, the two ambassadors proceeded to Jaen, where they were received by the queen with all the deference due to their holy profession, which seemed to derive additional sanctity from the spot in which it was exercised. The menacing import of the sultan's communication, however, had no power to shake the purposes of Ferdinand and Isabella, who made answer, that they had uniformly observed the same policy in regard to their Mahometan, as to their Christian subjects; but that they could no longer submit to see their ancient and rightful inheritance in the hands of strangers; and that, if these latter would consent to live under their rule, as true and loyal subjects, they should experience the same paternal indulgence which had been shown to their brethren. With this answer the reverend emissaries returned to the Holy Land, accompanied by substantial marks of the royal favor, in a yearly pension of one thousand ducats, which the queen settled in perpetuity on their monastery, together with a richly embroidered veil, the work of her own fair hands, to be suspended over the Holy Sepulchre. The sovereigns subsequently despatched the learned Peter Martyr as their envoy to the Moslem court, in order to explain their proceedings more at length, and avert any disastrous consequences from the Christian residents. [13] In the mean while, the siege went forward with spirit; skirmishes and single rencontres taking place every day between the high-mettled cavaliers on both sides. These chivalrous combats, however, were discouraged by Ferdinand, who would have confined his operations to strict blockade, and avoided the unnecessary effusion of blood; especially as the advantage was most commonly on the side of the enemy, from the peculiar adaptation of their tactics to this desultory warfare. Although some months had elapsed, the besieged rejected with scorn every summons to surrender; relying on their own resources, and still more on the tempestuous season of autumn, now fast advancing, which, if it did not break up the encampment at once, would at least, by demolishing the roads, cut off all external communication. In order to guard against these impending evils, Ferdinand caused more than a thousand houses, or rather huts, to be erected, with walls of earth or clay, and roofs made of timber and tiles; while the common soldiers constructed cabins by means of palisades loosely thatched with the branches of trees. The whole work was accomplished in four days; and the inhabitants of Baza beheld with amazement a city of solid edifices, with all its streets and squares in regular order, springing as it were by magic out of the ground, which had before been covered with the light and airy pavilions of the camp. The new city was well supplied, owing to the providence of the queen, not merely with the necessaries, but the luxuries of life. Traders flocked there as to a fair, from Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia, and even Sicily, freighted with costly merchandise, and with jewelry and other articles of luxury; such as, in the indignant lament of an old chronicler, "too often corrupt the souls of the soldiery, and bring waste and dissipation into a camp." That this was not the result, however, in the present instance, is attested by more than one historian. Among others, Peter Martyr, the Italian scholar before mentioned, who was present at this siege, dwells with astonishment on the severe decorum and military discipline, which everywhere obtained among this motley congregation of soldiers. "Who would have believed," says he, "that the Galician, the fierce Asturian, and the rude inhabitant of the Pyrenees, men accustomed to deeds of atrocious violence, and to brawl and battle on the lightest occasions at home, should mingle amicably, not only with one another, but with the Toledans, La-Manchans, and the wily and jealous Andalusian; all living together in harmonious subordination to authority, like members of one family, speaking one tongue, and nurtured under a common discipline; so that the camp seemed like a community modelled on the principles of Plato's republic!" In another part of this letter, which was addressed to a Milanese prelate, he panegyrizes the camp hospital of the queen, then a novelty in war; which, he says, "is so profusely supplied with medical attendants, apparatus, and whatever may contribute to the restoration or solace of the sick, that it is scarcely surpassed in these respects by the magnificent establishments of Milan." [14] During the five months which the siege had now lasted, the weather had proved uncommonly propitious to the Spaniards, being for the most part of a bland and equal temperature, while the sultry heats of midsummer were mitigated by cool and moderate showers. As the autumnal season advanced, however, the clouds began to settle heavily around the mountains; and at length one of those storms, predicted by the people of Baza, burst forth with incredible fury, pouring a volume of waters down the rocky sides of the sierra, which, mingling with those of the vega, inundated the camp of the besiegers, and swept away most of the frail edifices constructed for the use of the common soldiery. A still greater calamity befell them in the dilapidation of the roads, which, broken up or worn into deep gullies by the force of the waters, were rendered perfectly impassable. All communication was of course suspended with Jaen, and a temporary interruption of the convoys filled the camp with consternation. This disaster, however, was speedily repaired by the queen, who, with an energy always equal to the occasion, caused six thousand pioneers to be at once employed in reconstructing the roads; the rivers were bridged over, causeways new laid, and two separate passes opened through the mountains, by which the convoys might visit the camp, and return without interrupting each other. At the same time, the queen bought up immense quantities of grain from all parts of Andalusia, which she caused to be ground in her own mills; and, when the roads, which extended more than seven leagues in length, were completed, fourteen thousand mules might be seen daily traversing the sierra, laden with supplies, which from that time forward were poured abundantly, and with the most perfect regularity, into the camp. [15] Isabella's next care was to assemble new levies of troops, to relieve or reinforce those now in the camp; and the alacrity with which all orders of men from every quarter of the kingdom answered her summons is worthy of remark. But her chief solicitude was to devise expedients for meeting the enormous expenditures incurred by the protracted operations of the year. For this purpose, she had recourse to loans from individuals and religious corporations, which were obtained without much difficulty, from the general confidence in her good faith. As the sum thus raised, although exceedingly large for that period, proved inadequate to the expenses, further supplies were obtained from wealthy individuals, whose loans were secured by mortgage of the royal demesne; and, as a deficiency still remained in the treasury, the queen, as a last resource, pawned the crown jewels and her own personal ornaments to the merchants of Barcelona and Valencia, for such sums as they were willing to advance on them. [16] Such were the efforts made by this high-spirited woman, for the furtherance of her patriotic enterprise. The extraordinary results, which she was enabled to effect, are less to be ascribed to the authority of her station, than to that perfect confidence in her wisdom and virtue, with which she had inspired the whole nation, and which secured their earnest co-operation in all her undertakings. The empire, which she thus exercised, indeed, was far more extended than any station, however exalted, or any authority, however despotic, can confer; for it was over the hearts of her people. Notwithstanding the vigor with which the siege was pressed, Baza made no demonstration of submission. The garrison was indeed greatly reduced in number; the ammunition was nearly expended; yet there still remained abundant supplies of provisions in the town, and no signs of despondency appeared among the people. Even the women of the place, with a spirit emulating that of the dames of ancient Carthage, freely gave up their jewels, bracelets, necklaces, and other personal ornaments, of which the Moorish ladies were exceedingly fond, in order to defray the charges of the mercenaries. The camp of the besiegers, in the mean while, was also greatly wasted both by sickness and the sword. Many, desponding under perils and fatigues, which seemed to have no end, would even at this late hour have abandoned the siege; and they earnestly solicited the queen's appearance in the camp, in the hope that she would herself countenance this measure, on witnessing their sufferings. Others, and by far the larger part, anxiously desired the queen's visit, as likely to quicken the operations of the siege, and bring it to a favorable issue. There seemed to be a virtue in her presence, which, on some account or other, made it earnestly desired by all. Isabella yielded to the general wish, and on the 7th of November arrived before the camp, attended by the infanta Isabella, the cardinal of Spain, her friend, the marchioness of Moya, and other ladies of the royal household. The inhabitants of Baza, says Bernaldez, lined the battlements and housetops, to gaze at the glittering cavalcade as it emerged from the depths of the mountains, amidst flaunting banners and strains of martial music, while the Spanish cavaliers thronged forth in a body from the camp to receive their beloved mistress, and gave her the most animated welcome. "She came," says Martyr, "surrounded by a choir of nymphs, as if to celebrate the nuptials of her child; and her presence seemed at once to gladden and reanimate our spirits, drooping under long vigils, dangers, and fatigue." Another writer, also present, remarks that, from the moment of her appearance, a change seemed to come over the scene. No more of the cruel skirmishes, which had before occurred every day; no report of artillery, or clashing of arms, or any of the rude sounds of war, was to be heard, but all seemed disposed to reconciliation and peace. [17] The Moors probably interpreted Isabella's visit into an assurance, that the Christian army would never rise from before the place until its surrender. Whatever hopes they had once entertained of wearying out the besiegers, were therefore now dispelled. Accordingly, a few days after the queen's arrival, we find them proposing a parley for arranging terms of capitulation. On the third day after her arrival, Isabella reviewed her army, stretched out in order of battle along the slope of the western hills; after which, she proceeded to reconnoitre the beleaguered city, accompanied by the king and the cardinal of Spain, together with a brilliant escort of the Spanish chivalry. On the same day, a conference was opened with the enemy through the _comendador_ of Leon; and an armistice arranged, to continue until the old monarch, El Zagal, who then lay at Guadix, could be informed of the real condition of the besieged, and his instructions be received, determining the course to be adopted. The alcayde of Baza represented to his master the low state to which the garrison was reduced by the loss of lives and the failure of ammunition. Still, he expressed such confidence in the spirit of his people, that he undertook to make good his defence some time longer, provided any reasonable expectation of succor could be afforded; otherwise, it would be a mere waste of life, and must deprive him of such vantage ground as he now possessed, for enforcing an honorable capitulation. The Moslem prince acquiesced in the reasonableness of these representations. He paid a just tribute to his brave kinsman Cidi Yahye's loyalty, and the gallantry of his defence; but, confessing at the same time his own inability to relieve him, authorized him to negotiate the best terms of surrender which he could, for himself and garrison. [18] A mutual desire of terminating the protracted hostilities infused a spirit of moderation into both parties, which greatly facilitated the adjustment of the articles. Ferdinand showed none of the arrogant bearing, which marked his conduct towards the unfortunate people of Malaga, whether from a conviction of its impolicy, or, as is more probable, because the city of Baza was itself in a condition to assume a more imposing attitude. The principal stipulations of the treaty were, that the foreign mercenaries employed in the defence of the place should be allowed to march out with the honors of war; that the city should be delivered up to the Christians; but that the natives might have the choice of retiring with their personal effects where they listed; or of occupying the suburbs, as subjects of the Castilian crown, liable only to the same tribute which they paid to their Moslem rulers, and secured in the enjoyment of their property, religion, laws, and usages. [19] On the fourth day of December, 1489, Ferdinand and Isabella took possession of Baza, at the head of their legions, amid the ringing of bells, the peals of artillery, and all the other usual accompaniments of this triumphant ceremony; while the standard of the Cross, floating from the ancient battlements of the city, proclaimed the triumph of the Christian arms. The brave alcayde, Cidi Yahye, experienced a reception from the sovereigns very different from that of the bold defender of Malaga. He was loaded with civilities and presents; and these acts of courtesy so won upon his heart, that he expressed a willingness to enter into their service. "Isabella's compliments," says the Arabian historian, dryly, "were repaid in more substantial coin." Cidi Yahye was soon prevailed on to visit his royal kinsman El Zagal, at Guadix, for the purpose of urging his submission to the Christian sovereigns. In his interview with that prince, he represented the fruitlessness of any attempt to withstand the accumulated forces of the Spanish monarchies; that he would only see town after town pared away from his territory, until no ground was left for him to stand on, and make terms with the victor. He reminded him, that the baleful horoscope of Abdallah had predicted the downfall of Granada, and that experience had abundantly shown how vain it was to struggle against the tide of destiny. The unfortunate monarch listened, says the Arabian annalist, without so much as moving an eyelid; and, after a long and deep meditation, replied with the resignation characteristic of the Moslems, "What Allah wills, he brings to pass in his own way. Had he not decreed the fall of Granada, this good sword might have saved it; but his will be done!" It was then arranged, that the principal cities of Almeria, Guadix, and their dependencies, constituting the domain of El Zagal, should be formally surrendered by that prince to Ferdinand and Isabella, who should instantly proceed at the head of their army to take possession of them. [20] On the seventh day of December, therefore, the Spanish sovereigns, without allowing themselves or their jaded troops any time for repose, marched out of the gates of Baza, King Ferdinand occupying the centre, and the queen the rear of the army. Their route lay across the most savage district of the long sierra, which stretches towards Almeria; leading through many a narrow pass, which a handful of resolute Moors, says an eye-witness, might have made good against the whole Christian army, over mountains whose peaks were lost in clouds, and valleys whose depths were never warmed by a sun. The winds were exceedingly bleak, and the weather inclement, so that men, as well as horses, exhausted by the fatigues of previous service, were benumbed by the intense cold, and many of them frozen to death. Many more, losing their way in the intricacies of the sierra, would have experienced the same miserable fate, had it not been for the marquis of Cadiz, whose tent was pitched on one of the loftiest hills, and who caused beacon fires to be lighted around it, in order to guide the stragglers back to their quarters. At no great distance from Almeria, Ferdinand was met, conformably to the previous arrangement, by El Zagal, escorted by a numerous body of Moslem cavaliers. Ferdinand commanded his nobles to ride forward and receive the Moorish prince. "His appearance," says Martyr, who was in the royal retinue, "touched my soul with compassion; for, although a lawless barbarian, he was a king, and had given signal proofs of heroism." El Zagal, without waiting to receive the courtesies of the Spanish nobles, threw himself from his horse, and advanced towards Ferdinand with the design of kissing his hand; but the latter, rebuking his followers for their "rusticity," in allowing such an act of humiliation in the unfortunate monarch, prevailed on him to remount, and then rode by his side towards Almeria. [21] This city was one of the most precious jewels in the diadem of Granada. It had amassed great wealth by its extensive commerce with Syria, Egypt, and Africa; and its corsairs had for ages been the terror of the Catalan and Pisan marine. It might have stood a siege as long as that of Baza, but it was now surrendered without a blow, on conditions similar to those granted to the former city. After allowing some days for the refreshment of their wearied forces in this pleasant region, which, sheltered from the bleak winds of the north by the sierra they had lately traversed, and fanned by the gentle breezes of the Mediterranean, is compared by Martyr to the gardens of the Hesperides, the sovereigns established a strong garrison there, under the commander of Leon, and then, striking again into the recesses of the mountains, marched on Guadix, which, after some opposition on the part of the populace, threw open its gates to them. The surrender of these principal cities was followed by that of all the subordinate dependencies belonging to El Zagal's territory, comprehending a multitude of hamlets scattered along the green sides of the mountain chain that stretched from Granada to the coast. To all these places the same liberal terms, in regard to personal rights and property, were secured, as to Baza. As an equivalent for these broad domains, the Moorish chief was placed in possession of the _taha_, or district, of Andaraz, the vale of Alhaurin, and half the salt-pits of Maleha, together with a considerable revenue in money. He was, moreover, to receive the title of King of Andaraz, and to render homage for his estates to the crown of Castile. This shadow of royalty could not long amuse the mind of the unfortunate prince. He pined away amid the scenes of his ancient empire; and, after experiencing some insubordination on the part of his new vassals, he determined to relinquish his petty principality, and withdraw for ever from his native land. Having received a large sum of money, as an indemnification for the entire cession of his territorial rights and possessions to the Castilian crown, he passed over to Africa, where, it is reported, he was plundered of his property by the barbarians, and condemned to starve out the remainder of his days in miserable indigence. [22] The suspicious circumstances attending this prince's accession to the throne throw a dark cloud over his fame, which would otherwise seem, at least as far as his public life is concerned, to be unstained by any opprobrious act. He possessed such energy, talent, and military science, as, had he been fortunate enough to unite the Moorish nation under him by an undisputed title, might have postponed the fall of Granada for many years. As it was, these very talents, by dividing the state in his favor, served only to precipitate its ruin. The Spanish sovereigns, having accomplished the object of the campaign, after stationing part of their forces on such points as would secure the permanence of their conquests, returned with the remainder to Jaen, where they disbanded the army on the 4th of January, 1490. The losses sustained by the troops, during the whole period of their prolonged service, greatly exceeded those of any former year, amounting to not less than twenty thousand men, by far the larger portion of whom are said to have fallen victims to diseases incident to severe and long-continued hardships and exposure. [23] Thus terminated the eighth year of the war of Granada, a year more glorious to the Christian arms, and more important in its results, than any of the preceding. During this period, an army of eighty thousand men had kept the field, amid all the inclemencies of winter, for more than seven months; an effort scarcely paralleled in these times, when both the amount of levies, and period of service, were on the limited scale adapted to the exigencies of feudal warfare. [24] Supplies for this immense host, notwithstanding the severe famine of the preceding year, were punctually furnished, in spite of every embarrassment presented by the want of navigable rivers, and the interposition of a precipitous and pathless sierra. The history of this campaign is, indeed, most honorable to the courage, constancy, and thorough discipline of the Spanish soldier, and to the patriotism and general resources of the nation; but most of all to Isabella. She it was, who fortified the timid councils of the leaders, after the disasters of the garden, and encouraged them to persevere in the siege. She procured all the supplies, constructed the roads, took charge of the sick, and furnished, at no little personal sacrifice, the immense sums demanded for carrying on the war; and when at last the hearts of the soldiers were fainting under long-protracted sufferings, she appeared among them, like some celestial visitant, to cheer their faltering spirits, and inspire them with her own energy. The attachment to Isabella seemed to be a pervading principle, which animated the whole nation by one common impulse, impressing a unity of design on all its movements. This attachment was imputable to her sex as well as character. The sympathy and tender care, with which she regarded her people, naturally raised a reciprocal sentiment in their bosoms. But when they beheld her directing their counsels, sharing their fatigues and dangers, and displaying all the comprehensive intellectual powers of the other sex, they looked up to her as to some superior being, with feelings far more exalted than those of mere loyalty. The chivalrous heart of the Spaniard did homage to her, as to his tutelar saint; and she held a control over her people, such as no man could have acquired in any age,--and probably no woman, in an age and country less romantic. * * * * * Pietro Martire, or, as he is called in English, Peter Martyr, so often quoted in the present chapter, and who will constitute one of our best authorities during the remainder of the history, was a native of Arona (not of Anghiera, as commonly supposed), a place situated on the borders of Lake Maggiore in Italy. (Mazzuchelli, Scrittori d'ltalia, (Brescia, 1753-63,) tom. ii. _voce_ Anghiera.) He was of noble Milanese extraction. In 1477, at twenty-two years of age, he was sent to complete his education at Rome, where he continued ten years, and formed an intimacy with the most distinguished literary characters of that cultivated capital. In 1487, he was persuaded by the Castilian ambassador, the count of Tendilla, to accompany him to Spain, where he was received with marked distinction by the queen, who would have at once engaged him in the tuition of the young nobility of the court, but, Martyr having expressed a preference of a military life, she, with her usual delicacy, declined to press him on the point. He was present, as we have seen, at the siege of Baza, and continued with the army during the subsequent campaigns of the Moorish war. Many passages of his correspondence, at this period, show a whimsical mixture of self-complacency with a consciousness of the ludicrous figure which he made in "exchanging the Muses for Mars." At the close of the war, he entered the ecclesiastical profession, for which he had been originally destined, and was persuaded to resume his literary vocation. He opened his school at Valladolid, Saragossa, Barcelona, Alcalá de Henares, and other places; and it was thronged with the principal young nobility from all parts of Spain, who, as he boasts in one of his letters, drew their literary nourishment from him. "Suxerunt mea literalia ubera Castellae principes fere omnes." His important services were fully estimated by the queen, and, after her death, by Ferdinand and Charles V., and he was recompensed with high ecclesiastical preferment as well as civil dignities. He died about the year 1525, at the age of seventy, and his remains were interred beneath a monument in the cathedral church of Granada, of which he was prior. Among Martyr's principal works is a treatise "De Legatione Babylonica," being an account of a visit to the sultan of Egypt, in 1501, for the purpose of deprecating the retaliation with which he had menaced the Christian residents in Palestine, for the injuries inflicted on the Spanish Moslems. Peter Martyr conducted his negotiation with such address, that he not only appeased the sultan's resentment, but obtained several important immunities for his Christian subjects, in addition to those previously enjoyed by them. He also wrote an account of the discoveries of the New World, entitled "De Rebus Oceanicis et Novo Orbe," (Coloniae, 1574,) a book largely consulted and commended by subsequent historians. But the work of principal value in our researches is his "Opus Epistolarum," being a collection of his multifarious correspondence with the most considerable persons of his time, whether in political or literary life. The letters are in Latin, and extend from the year 1488 to the time of his death. Although not conspicuous for elegance of diction, they are most valuable to the historian, from the fidelity and general accuracy of the details, as well as for the intelligent criticism in which they abound, for all which, uncommon facilities were afforded by the writer's intimacy with the leading actors, and the most recondite sources of information of the period. This high character is fully authorized by the judgments of those best qualified to pronounce on their merits,--Martyr's own contemporaries. Among these, Dr. Galindez de Carbajal, a counsellor of King Ferdinand, and constantly employed in the highest concerns of state, commends these epistles as "the work of a learned and upright man, well calculated to throw light on the transactions of the period." (Anales, MS., prólogo.) Alvaro Gomez, another contemporary who survived Martyr, in the Life of Ximenes, which he was selected to write by the University of Alcalá, declares, that "Martyr's Letters abundantly compensate by their fidelity for the unpolished style in which they are written." (De Rebus Gestis, fol. 6.) And John de Vergara, a name of the highest celebrity in the literary annals of the period, expresses himself in the following emphatic terms. "I know no record of the time more accurate and valuable. I myself have often witnessed the promptness with which he put down things the moment they occurred. I have sometimes seen him write one or two letters, while they were setting the table. For, as he did not pay much attention to style and mere finish of expression, his composition required but little time, and experienced no interruption from his ordinary avocations." (See his letter to Florian de Ocampo, apud Quintanilla y Mendoza, Archetypo de Virtudes, Espejo de Prelados, el Venerable Padre y Siervo de Dios, F. Francisco Ximenez de Cisneros, (Palermo, 1653,) Archivo, p. 4.) This account of the precipitate manner in which the epistles were composed, may help to explain the cause of the occasional inconsistencies and anachronisms, that are to be found in them; and which their author, had he been more patient of the labor of revision, would doubtless have corrected. But he seems to have had little relish for this, even in his more elaborate works, composed with a view to publication. (See his own honest confessions in his book "De Rebus Oceanicis," dec. 8, cap. 8, 9.) After all, the errors, such as they are, in his Epistles, may probably be chiefly charged on the publisher. The first edition appeared at Alcalá de Henares, in 1530, about four years after the author's death. It has now become exceedingly rare. The second and last, being the one used in the present History, came out in a more beautiful form from the Elzevir press, Amsterdam, in 1670, folio. Of this also but a small number of copies were struck off. The learned editor takes much credit to himself for having purified the work from many errors, which had flowed from the heedlessness of his predecessor. It will not be difficult to detect several yet remaining. Such, for example, as a memorable letter on the _lues venerea_, (No. 68,) obviously misplaced, even according to its own date; and that numbered 168, in which two letters are evidently blended into one. But it is unnecessary to multiply examples.--It is very desirable, that an edition of this valuable correspondence should be published, under the care of some one qualified to illustrate it by his intimacy with the history of the period, as well as to correct the various inaccuracies which have crept into it, whether through the carelessness of the author or of his editors. I have been led into this length of remark by some strictures which met my eye in the recent work of Mr. Hallam; who intimates his belief, that the Epistles of Martyr, instead of being written at their respective dates, were produced by him at some later period; (Introduction to the Literature of Europe, (London, 1837,) vol. i. pp. 439-441;) a conclusion which I suspect this acute and candid critic would have been slow to adopt, had he perused the correspondence in connection with the history of the times, or weighed the unqualified testimony borne by contemporaries to its minute accuracy. FOOTNOTES [1] Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 351, 352, 356.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 25, cap. 12.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 3, cap. 95. [2] Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. p. 76.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 98.--Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 402.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. pp. 298, 299.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1488. [3] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. pp. 239, 240.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 100, 101.--During the preceding year, while the court was at Murcia, we find one of the examples of prompt and severe exercise of justice, which sometimes occur in this reign. One of the royal collectors having been resisted and personally maltreated by the alcayde of Salvatierra, a place belonging to the crown, and by the alcalde of a territorial court of the duke of Alva, the queen caused one of the royal judges privately to enter into the place, and take cognizance of the affair. The latter, after a brief investigation, commanded the alcayde to be hung up over his fortress, and the alcalde to be delivered over to the court of chancery at Valladolid, who ordered his right hand to be amputated, and banished him the realm. This summary justice was perhaps necessary in a community, that might be said to be in transition from a state of barbarism to that of civilization, and had a salutary effect in proving to the people that no rank was elevated enough to raise the offender above the law. Pulgar, cap. 99. [4] Ialigny, Hist. de Charles VIII., pp. 92, 94.--Sismondi, Hist. des Français, tom. xv. p. 77.--Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. p. 61.-- Histoire du Royaume de Navarre, pp. 578, 579.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 102. In the first of these expeditions, more than a thousand Spaniards were slain or taken at the disastrous battle of St. Aubin, in 1488, being the same in which Lord Rivers, the English noble, who made such a gallant figure at the siege of Loja, lost his life. In the spring of 1489, the levies sent into France amounted to two thousand in number. These efforts abroad, simultaneous with the great operations of the Moorish war, show the resources as well as energy of the sovereigns. [5] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, ubi supra. [6] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 91.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 354.--Bleda, Corónica, fol. 607.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 307. Such was the scarcity of grain that the prices in 1489, quoted by Bernaldez, are double those of the preceding year.--Both Abarca and Zurita mention the report, that four-fifths of the whole population were swept away by the pestilence of 1488. Zurita finds more difficulty in swallowing this monstrous statement than Father Abarca, whose appetite for the marvellous appears to have been fully equal to that of most of his calling in Spain. [7] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., lib. 2, epist. 70.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 104. It may not be amiss to specify the names of the most distinguished cavaliers who usually attended the king in these Moorish wars; the heroic ancestors of many a noble house still extant in Spain. Alonso de Cardenas, master of Saint Jago. Juan de Zuñiga, master of Alcantara. Juan Garcia de Padilla, master of Calatrava. Rodrigo Ponce de Leon, marquis duke of Cadiz. Enrique de Guzman, duke of Medina Sidonia. Pedro Manrique, duke of Najera. Juan Pacheco, duke of Escalona, marquis of Villena. Juan Pimentel, count of Benavente. Fadrique de Toledo, son of the duke of Alva. Diego Fernandez de Cordova, count of Cabra. Gomez Alvarez de Figueroa, count of Feria. Alvaro Tellez Giron, count of Ureña. Juan de Silva, count of Cifuentes. Fadrique Enriquez, adelantado of Andalusia. Alonso Fernandez de Cordova, lord of Aguilar. Gonsalvo de Cordova, brother of the last, known afterwards as the Great Captain. Luis Porto-Carrero, lord of Palma. Gutierre de Cardenas, first commander of Leon. Pedro Fernandez de Velasco, count of Haro, constable of Castile. Beltran de la Cueva, duke of Albuquerque. Diego Fernandez de Cordova, alcayde of the royal pages, afterwards marquis of Comaras. Alvaro de Zuñiga, duke of Bejar. Iñigo Lopez de Mendoza, count of Tendilla, afterwards marquis of Mondejar. Luis de Cerda, duke of Medina Celi. Iñigo Lopez de Mendoza, marquis of Santillana, second duke of Infantado. Garcilasso de la Vega, lord of Batras. [8] Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 360.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. p. 241.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., lib. 2, epist. 70.--Estrada, Poblacion de España, tom. ii. fol. 239.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 16. [9] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 106, 107.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 40.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 71. Pulgar relates these particulars with a perspicuity very different from his entangled narrative of some of the preceding operations in this war. Both he and Martyr were present during the whole siege of Baza. [10] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 92.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. pp. 299, 300.--Bleda, Corónica, p. 611.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. p. 664. Don Gutierre de Cardenas, who possessed so high a place in the confidence of the sovereigns, occupied a station in the queen's household, as we have seen, at the time of her marriage with Ferdinand. His discretion and general ability enabled him to retain the influence which he had early acquired, as is shown by a popular distich of that time. "Cardenas, y el Cardenal, y Chacon, y Fray Mortero, Traen la Corte al retortero." Fray Mortero was Don Alonso de Burgos, bishop of Palencia, confessor of the sovereigns. Don Juan Chacon was the son of Gonsalvo, who had the care of Don Alfonso and the queen during her minority, when he was induced by the liberal largesses of John II., of Aragon, to promote her marriage with his son Ferdinand. The elder Chacon was treated by the sovereigns with the greatest deference and respect, being usually called by them "father." After his death, they continued to manifest a similar regard towards Don Juan, his eldest son, and heir of his ample honors and estates. Salazar de Mendoza, Dignidades, lib. 4, cap. 1.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 2, dial. 1, 2. [11] Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. p. 304.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 109.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., lib. 2, epist. 73. --Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 92. [12] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 40.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 25, cap. 12.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 111. [13] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 112.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. p. 86. [14] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., lib. 2, epist. 73, 80.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 113, 114, 117.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. p. 667.--Bleda, Corónica, p. 64. The plague, which fell heavily this year on some parts of Andalusia, does not appear to have attacked the camp, which Bleda imputes to the healing influence of the Spanish sovereigns, "whose good faith, religion, and virtue banished the contagion from their army, where it must otherwise have prevailed." Personal comforts and cleanliness of the soldiers, though not quite so miraculous a cause, may be considered perhaps full as efficacious. [15] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., lib. 2, epist. 73.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 116. [16] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 118.--Archivo de Simancas, in Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. p. 311. The city of Valencia lent 35,000 florins on the crown and 20,000 on a collar of rubies. They were not wholly redeemed till 1495. Señor Clemencin has given a catalogue of the royal jewels, (see Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilustracion 6,) which appear to have been extremely rich and numerous, for a period anterior to the discovery of those countries, whose mines have since furnished Europe with its _bijouterie_. Isabella, however, set so little value on them, that she divested herself of most of them in favor of her daughters. [17] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 92.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 120, 121.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. p. 93.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., lib. 3, epist. 80. [18] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., lib. 3, epist. 80.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. p. 242.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1489.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. p. 305. [19] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 124.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 16. [20] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 40.--Bleda, Corónica, p. 612.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 92.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 16. [21] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., lib. 3, epist. 81.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. p. 340.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, loc. cit.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 40. [22] El Nubiense, Descripcion de España, p. 160, not.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1488.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. p. 304. --Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., lib. 3, epist. 81.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. pp. 245, 246.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 93. [23] Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 360.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 308. [24] The city of Seville alone maintained 600 horse and 8000 foot under the count of Cifuentes, for the space of eight months during this siege. See Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 404. CHAPTER XV. WAR OF GRANADA.--SIEGE AND SURRENDER OF THE CITY OF GRANADA. 1490-1492. The Infanta Isabella Affianced to the Prince of Portugal.--Isabella Deposes Judges at Valladolid.--Encampment before Granada.--The Queen Surveys the City.--Moslem and Christian Chivalry.--Conflagration of the Christian Camp.--Erection of Santa Fe.--Capitulation of Granada.--Results of the War.--Its Moral Influence.--Its Military Influence.--Fate of the Moors.--Death and Character of the Marquis of Cadiz. In the spring of 1490, ambassadors arrived from Lisbon for the purpose of carrying into effect the treaty of marriage, which had been arranged between Alonso, heir of the Portuguese monarchy, and Isabella, infanta of Castile. An alliance with this kingdom, which from its contiguity possessed such ready means of annoyance to Castile, and which had shown such willingness to employ them in enforcing the pretensions of Joanna Beltraneja, was an object of importance to Ferdinand and Isabella. No inferior consideration could have reconciled the queen to a separation from this beloved daughter, her eldest child, whose gentle and uncommonly amiable disposition seems to have endeared her beyond their other children to her parents. The ceremony of the affiancing took place at Seville, in the month of April, Don Fernando de Silveira appearing as the representative of the prince of Portugal; and it was followed by a succession of splendid _fêtes_ and tourneys. Lists were enclosed, at some distance from the city on the shores of the Guadalquivir, and surrounded with galleries hung with silk and cloth of gold, and protected from the noontide heat by canopies or awnings richly embroidered with the armorial bearings of the ancient houses of Castile. The spectacle was graced by all the rank and beauty of the court, with the infanta Isabella in the midst, attended by seventy noble ladies, and a hundred pages of the royal household. The cavaliers of Spain, young and old, thronged to the tournament, as eager to win laurels on the mimic theatre of war, in the presence of so brilliant an assemblage, as they had shown themselves in the sterner contests with the Moors. King Ferdinand, who broke several lances on the occasion, was among the most distinguished of the combatants for personal dexterity and horsemanship. The martial exercises of the day were relieved by the more effeminate recreations of dancing and music in the evening; and every one seemed willing to welcome the season of hilarity, after the long- protracted fatigues of war. [1] In the following autumn, the infanta was escorted into Portugal by the cardinal of Spain, the grand master of St. James, and a numerous and magnificent retinue. Her dowry exceeded that usually assigned to the infantas of Castile, by five hundred marks of gold and a thousand of silver; and her wardrobe was estimated at one hundred and twenty thousand gold florins. The contemporary chroniclers dwell with much complacency on these evidences of the stateliness and splendor of the Castilian court. Unfortunately, these fair auspices were destined to be clouded too soon by the death of the prince, her husband. [2] No sooner had the campaign of the preceding year been brought to a close, than Ferdinand and Isabella sent an embassy to the king of Granada, requiring a surrender of his capital, conformably to his stipulations at Loja, which guaranteed this, on the capitulation of Baza, Almeria, and Guadix. That time had now arrived; King Abdallah, however, excused himself from obeying the summons of the Spanish sovereigns; replying that he was no longer his own master, and that, although he had all the inclination to keep his engagements, he was prevented by the inhabitants of the city, now swollen much beyond its natural population, who resolutely insisted on its defence. [3] It is not probable that the Moorish king did any great violence to his feelings, in this evasion of a promise extorted from him in captivity. At least, it would seem so from the hostile movements which immediately succeeded. The people of Granada resumed all at once their ancient activity, foraying into the Christian territories, surprising Alhendin and some other places of less importance, and stirring up the spirit of revolt in Guadix and other conquered cities. Granada, which had slept through the heat of the struggle, seemed to revive at the very moment when exertion became hopeless. Ferdinand was not slow in retaliating these acts of aggression. In the spring of 1490, he marched with a strong force into the cultivated plain of Granada, sweeping off, as usual, the crops and cattle, and rolling the tide of devastation up to the very walls of the city. In this campaign he conferred the honor of knighthood on his son, prince John, then only twelve years of age, whom he had brought with him, after the ancient usage of the Castilian nobles, of training up their children from very tender years in the Moorish wars. The ceremony was performed on the banks of the grand canal, under the battlements almost of the beleaguered city. The dukes of Cadiz and Medina Sidonia were prince John's sponsors; and, after the completion of the ceremony, the new knight conferred the honors of chivalry in like manner on several of his young companions in arms. [4] In the following autumn, Ferdinand repeated his ravages in the vega, and, at the same time appearing before the disaffected city of Guadix with a force large enough to awe it into submission, proposed an immediate investigation of the conspiracy. He promised to inflict summary justice on all who had been in any degree concerned in it; at the same time offering permission to the inhabitants, in the abundance of his clemency, to depart with all their personal effects wherever they would, provided they should prefer this to a judicial investigation of their conduct. This politic proffer had its effect. There were few, if any, of the citizens who had not been either directly concerned in the conspiracy, or privy to it. With one accord, therefore, they preferred exile to trusting to the tender mercies of their judges. In this way, says the Curate of Los Palacios, by the mystery of our Lord, was the ancient city of Guadix brought again within the Christian fold; the mosques converted into Christian temples, filled with the harmonies of Catholic worship, and the pleasant places, which for nearly eight centuries had been trampled under the foot of the infidel, were once more restored to the followers of the Cross. A similar policy produced similar results in the cities of Almeria and Baza, whose inhabitants, evacuating their ancient homes, transported themselves, with such personal effects as they could carry, to the city of Granada, or the coast of Africa. The space thus opened by the fugitive population was quickly filled by the rushing tide of Spaniards. [5] It is impossible at this day to contemplate these events with the triumphant swell of exultation, with which they are recorded by contemporary chroniclers. That the Moors were guilty (though not so generally as pretended) of the alleged conspiracy, is not in itself improbable, and is corroborated indeed by the Arabic statements. But the punishment was altogether disproportionate to the offence. Justice might surely have been satisfied by a selection of the authors and principal agents of the meditated insurrection;--for no overt act appears to have occurred. But avarice was too strong for justice; and this act, which is in perfect conformity to the policy systematically pursued by the Spanish crown for more than a century afterwards, may be considered as one of the first links in the long chain of persecution, which terminated in the expulsion of the Moriscoes. During the following year, 1491, a circumstance occurred illustrative of the policy of the present government in reference to ecclesiastical matters. The chancery of Valladolid having appealed to the pope in a case coming within its own exclusive jurisdiction, the queen commanded Alonso de Valdivieso, bishop of Leon, the president of the court, together with all the auditors, to be removed from their respective offices, which she delivered to a new board, having the bishop of Oviedo at its head. This is one among many examples of the constancy with which Isabella, notwithstanding her reverence for religion, and respect for its ministers, refused to compromise the national independence by recognizing in any degree the usurpations of Rome. From this dignified attitude, so often abandoned by her successors, she never swerved for a moment during the course of her long reign. [6] The winter of 1490 was busily occupied with preparations for the closing campaign against Granada. Ferdinand took command of the army in the month of April, 1491, with the purpose of sitting down before the Moorish capital, not to rise until its final surrender. The troops, which mustered in the Val de Velillos, are computed by most historians at fifty thousand horse and foot, although Martyr, who served as a volunteer, swells the number to eighty thousand. They were drawn from the different cities, chiefly, as usual, from Andalusia, which had been stimulated to truly gigantic efforts throughout this protracted war, [7] and from the nobility of every quarter, many of whom, wearied out with the contest, contented themselves with sending their quotas, while many others, as the marquises of Cadiz, Villena, the counts of Tendilla, Cabra, Ureña, and Alonso de Aguilar, appeared in person, eager, as they had borne the brunt of so many hard campaigns, to share in the closing scene of triumph. On the 26th of the month, the army encamped near the fountain of Ojos de Huescar, in the vega, about two leagues distant from Granada. Ferdinand's first movement was to detach a considerable force, under the marquis of Villena, which he subsequently supported in person with the remainder of the army, for the purpose of scouring the fruitful regions of the Alpuxarras, which served as the granary of the capital. This service was performed with such unsparing rigor, that no less than twenty-four towns and hamlets in the mountains were ransacked, and razed to the ground. After this, Ferdinand returned loaded with spoil to his former position on the banks of the Xenil, in full view of the Moorish metropolis, which seemed to stand alone, like some sturdy oak, the last of the forest, bidding defiance to the storm which had prostrated all its brethren. Notwithstanding the failure of all external resources, Granada was still formidable from its local position and its defences. On the east it was fenced in by a wild mountain barrier, the _Sierra Nevada_, whose snow-clad summits diffused a grateful coolness over the city through the sultry heats of summer. The side towards the vega, facing the Christian encampment, was encircled by walls and towers of massive strength and solidity. The population, swelled to two hundred thousand by the immigration from the surrounding country, was likely, indeed, to be a burden in a protracted siege; but among them were twenty thousand, the flower of the Moslem chivalry, who had escaped the edge of the Christian sword. In front of the city, for an extent of nearly ten leagues, lay unrolled the magnificent vega, "Fresca y regalada vega, Dulce recreacion de damas Y de hombres gloria immensa," whose prolific beauties could scarcely be exaggerated in the most florid strains of the Arabian minstrel, and which still bloomed luxuriant, notwithstanding the repeated ravages of the preceding season. [8] The inhabitants of Granada were filled with indignation at the sight of their enemy, thus encamped under the shadow, as it were, of their battlements. They sallied forth in small bodies, or singly, challenging the Spaniards to equal encounter. Numerous were the combats which took place between the high-mettled cavaliers on both sides, who met on the level arena, as on a tilting-ground, where they might display their prowess in the presence of the assembled beauty and chivalry of their respective nations; for the Spanish camp was graced, as usual, by the presence of Queen Isabella and the infantas, with the courtly train of ladies who had accompanied their royal mistress from Alcalá la Real. The Spanish ballads glow with picturesque details of these knightly tourneys, forming the most attractive portion of this romantic minstrelsy, which, celebrating the prowess of Moslem, as well as Christian warriors, sheds a dying glory round the last hours of Granada. [9] The festivity, which reigned throughout the camp on the arrival of Isabella, did not divert her attention from the stern business of war. She superintended the military preparations, and personally inspected every part of the encampment. She appeared on the field superbly mounted, and dressed in complete armor; and, as she visited the different quarters and reviewed her troops, she administered words of commendation or sympathy, suited to the condition of the soldier. [10] On one occasion, she expressed a desire to take a nearer survey of the city. For this purpose, a house was selected, affording the best point of view, in the little village of Zubia, at no great distance from Granada. The king and queen stationed themselves before a window, which commanded an unbroken prospect of the Alhambra, and the most beautiful quarter of the town. In the mean while, a considerable force, under the marquis duke of Cadiz, had been ordered, for the protection of the royal persons, to take up a position between the village and the city of Granada, with strict injunctions on no account to engage the enemy, as Isabella was unwilling to stain the pleasures of the day with unnecessary effusion of blood. The people of Granada, however, were too impatient long to endure the presence, and, as they deemed it, the bravado of their enemy. They burst forth from the gates of the capital, dragging along with them several pieces of ordnance, and commenced a brisk assault on the Spanish lines. The latter sustained the shock with firmness, till the marquis of Cadiz, seeing them thrown into some disorder, found it necessary to assume the offensive, and, mustering his followers around him, made one of those desperate charges, which had so often broken the enemy. The Moorish cavalry faltered; but might have disputed the ground, had it not been for the infantry, which, composed of the rabble population of the city, was easily thrown into confusion, and hurried the horse along with it. The rout now became general. The Spanish cavaliers, whose blood was up, pursued to the very gates of Granada, "and not a lance," says Bernaldez, "that day, but was dyed in the blood of the infidel." Two thousand of the enemy were slain and taken in the engagement, which lasted only a short time; and the slaughter was stopped only by the escape of the fugitives within the walls of the city. [11] About the middle of July, an accident occurred in the camp, which had like to have been attended with fatal consequences. The queen was lodged in a superb pavilion, belonging to the marquis of Cadiz, and always used by him in the Moorish war. By the carelessness of one of her attendants, a lamp was placed in such a situation, that, during the night, perhaps owing to a gust of wind, it set fire to the drapery or loose hangings of the pavilion, which was instantly in a blaze. The flame communicated with fearful rapidity to the neighboring tents, made of light, combustible materials, and the camp was menaced with general conflagration. This occurred at the dead of night, when all but the sentinels were buried in sleep. The queen and her children, whose apartments were near hers, were in great peril, and escaped with difficulty, though fortunately without injury. The alarm soon spread. The trumpets sounded to arms, for it was supposed to be some night attack of the enemy. Ferdinand, snatching up his arms hastily, put himself at the head of his troops; but, soon ascertaining the nature of the disaster, contented himself with posting the marquis of Cadiz, with a strong body of horse, over against the city, in order to repel any sally from that quarter. None, however, was attempted, and the fire was at length extinguished without personal injury, though not without loss of much valuable property, in jewels, plate, brocade, and other costly decorations of the tents of the nobility. [12] In order to guard against a similar disaster, as well as to provide comfortable winter quarters for the army, should the siege be so long protracted as to require it, it was resolved to build a town of substantial edifices on the place of the present encampment. The plan was immediately put in execution. The work was distributed in due proportions among the troops of the several cities and of the great nobility; the soldier was on a sudden converted into an artisan, and, instead of war, the camp echoed with the sounds of peaceful labor. In less than three months, this stupendous task was accomplished. The spot so recently occupied by light, fluttering pavilions, was thickly covered with solid structures of stone and mortar, comprehending, besides dwelling-houses, stables for a thousand horses. The town was thrown into a quadrangular form, traversed by two spacious avenues, intersecting each other at right angles in the centre, in the form of a cross, with stately portals at each of the four extremities. Inscriptions on blocks of marble in the various quarters, recorded the respective shares of the several cities in the execution of the work. When it was completed, the whole army was desirous that the new city should bear the name of their illustrious queen, but Isabella modestly declined this tribute, and bestowed on the place the title of _Santa Fe_, in token of the unshaken trust, manifested by her people throughout this war, in Divine Providence. With this name it still stands as it was erected in 1491, a monument of the constancy and enduring patience of the Spaniards, "the only city in Spain," in the words of a Castilian writer, "that has never been contaminated by the Moslem heresy." [13] The erection of Santa Fe by the Spaniards struck a greater damp into the people of Granada, than the most successful military achievement could have done. They beheld the enemy setting foot on their soil, with a resolution never more to resign it. They already began to suffer from the rigorous blockade, which effectually excluded supplies from their own territories, while all communication with Africa was jealously intercepted. Symptoms of insubordination had begun to show themselves among the overgrown population of the city, as it felt more and more the pressure of famine. In this crisis, the unfortunate Abdallah and his principal counsellors became convinced, that the place could not be maintained much longer; and at length, in the month of October, propositions were made through the vizier Abul Cazim Abdelmalic, to open a negotiation for the surrender of the place. The affair was to be conducted with the utmost caution; since the people of Granada, notwithstanding their precarious condition, and their disquietude, were buoyed up by indefinite expectations of relief from Africa, or some other quarter. The Spanish sovereigns intrusted the negotiation to their secretary Fernando de Zafra, and to Gonsalvo de Cordova, the latter of whom was selected for this delicate business, from his uncommon address, and his familiarity with the Moorish habits and language. Thus the capitulation of Granada was referred to the man, who acquired in her long wars the military science, which enabled him, at a later period, to foil the most distinguished generals of Europe. The conferences were conducted by night with the utmost secrecy, sometimes within the walls of Granada, and at others, in the little hamlet of Churriana, about a league distant from it. At length, after large discussion on both sides, the terms of capitulation were definitively settled, and ratified by the respective monarchs on the 25th of November, 1491. [14] The conditions were of similar, though somewhat more liberal import, than those granted to Baza. The inhabitants of Granada were to retain possession of their mosques, with the free exercise of their religion, with all its peculiar rites and ceremonies; they were to be judged by their own laws, under their own cadis or magistrates, subject to the general control of the Castilian governor; they were to be unmolested in their ancient usages, manners, language, and dress; to be protected in the full enjoyment of their property, with the right of disposing of it on their own account, and of migrating when and where they would; and to be furnished with vessels for the conveyance of such as chose within three years to pass into Africa. No heavier taxes were to be imposed than those customarily paid to their Arabian sovereigns, and none whatever before the expiration of three years. King Abdallah was to reign over a specified territory in the Alpuxarras, for which he was to do homage to the Castilian crown. The artillery and the fortifications were to be delivered into the hands of the Christians, and the city was to be surrendered in sixty days from the date of the capitulation. Such were the principal terms of the surrender of Granada, as authenticated by the most accredited Castilian and Arabian authorities; which I have stated the more precisely, as affording the best data for estimating the extent of Spanish perfidy in later times. [15] The conferences could not be conducted so secretly, but that some report of them got air among the populace of the city, who now regarded Abdallah with an evil eye for his connection with the Christians. When the fact of the capitulation became known, the agitation speedily mounted into an open insurrection, which menaced the safety of the city, as well as of Abdallah's person. In this alarming state of things, it was thought best by that monarch's counsellors, to anticipate the appointed day of surrender; and the 2d of January, 1492, was accordingly fixed on for that purpose. Every preparation was made by the Spaniards for performing this last act of the drama with suitable pomp and effect. The mourning which the court had put on for the death of Prince Alonso of Portugal, occasioned by a fall from his horse a few months after his marriage with the infanta Isabella, was exchanged for gay and magnificent apparel. On the morning of the 2d, the whole Christian camp exhibited a scene of the most animating bustle. The grand cardinal Mendoza was sent forward at the head of a large detachment, comprehending his household troops, and the veteran infantry grown grey in the Moorish wars, to occupy the Alhambra preparatory to the entrance of the sovereigns. [16] Ferdinand stationed himself at some distance in the rear, near an Arabian mosque, since consecrated as the hermitage of St. Sebastian. He was surrounded by his courtiers, with their stately retinues, glittering in gorgeous panoply, and proudly displaying the armorial bearings of their ancient houses. The queen halted still farther in the rear, at the village of Armilla. [17] As the column under the grand cardinal advanced up the Hill of Martyrs, over which a road had been constructed for the passage of the artillery, he was met by the Moorish prince Abdallah, attended by fifty cavaliers, who, descending the hill, rode up to the position occupied by Ferdinand on the banks of the Xenil. As the Moor approached the Spanish king, he would have thrown himself from his horse, and saluted his hand in token of homage, but Ferdinand hastily prevented him, embracing him with every mark of sympathy and regard. Abdallah then delivered up the keys of the Alhambra to his conqueror, saying, "They are thine, O king, since Allah so decrees it; use thy success with clemency and moderation." Ferdinand would have uttered some words of consolation to the unfortunate prince, but he moved forward with dejected air to the spot occupied by Isabella, and, after similar acts of obeisance, passed on to join his family, who had preceded him with his most valuable effects on the route to the Alpuxarras. [18] The sovereigns during this time waited with impatience the signal of the occupation of the city by the cardinal's troops, which, winding slowly along the outer circuit of the walls, as previously arranged, in order to spare the feelings of the citizens as far as possible, entered by what is now called the gate of Los Molinos. In a short time, the large silver cross, borne by Ferdinand throughout the crusade, was seen sparkling in the sunbeams, while the standards of Castile and St. Jago waved triumphantly from the red towers of the Alhambra. At this glorious spectacle, the choir of the royal chapel broke forth into the solemn anthem of the Te Deum, and the whole army, penetrated with deep emotion, prostrated themselves on their knees in adoration of the Lord of hosts, who had at length granted the consummation of their wishes, in this last and glorious triumph of the Cross. [19] The grandees who surrounded Ferdinand then advanced towards the queen, and kneeling down saluted her hand in token of homage to her as sovereign of Granada. The procession took up its march towards the city, "the king and queen moving in the midst," says an historian, "emblazoned with royal magnificence; and, as they were in the prime of life, and had now achieved the completion of this glorious conquest, they seemed to represent even more than their wonted majesty. Equal with each other, they were raised far above the rest of the world. They appeared, indeed, more than mortal, and as if sent by Heaven for the salvation of Spain." [20] In the mean while the Moorish king, traversing the route of the Alpuxarras, reached a rocky eminence which commanded a last view of Granada. He checked his horse, and, as his eye for the last time wandered over the scenes of his departed greatness, his heart swelled, and he burst into tears. "You do well," said his more masculine mother, "to weep like a woman, for what you could not defend like a man!" "Alas!" exclaimed the unhappy exile, "when were woes ever equal to mine!" The scene of this event is still pointed out to the traveller by the people of the district; and the rocky height, from which the Moorish chief took his sad farewell of the princely abodes of his youth, is commemorated by the poetical title of _El Ultimo Sospiro del Moro_, "The Last Sigh of the Moor." The sequel of Abdallah's history is soon told. Like his uncle, El Zagal, he pined away in his barren domain of the Alpuxarras, under the shadow, as it were, of his ancient palaces. In the following year, he passed over to Fez with his family, having commuted his petty sovereignty for a considerable sum of money paid him by Ferdinand and Isabella, and soon after fell in battle in the service of an African prince, his kinsman. "Wretched man," exclaims a caustic chronicler of his nation, "who could lose his life in another's cause, though he did not dare to die in his own. Such," continues the Arabian, with characteristic resignation, "was the immutable decree of destiny. Blessed be Allah, who exalteth and debaseth the kings of the earth, according to his divine will, in whose fulfilment consists that eternal justice, which regulates all human affairs." The portal, through which King Abdallah for the last time issued from his capital, was at his request walled up, that none other might again pass through it. In this condition it remains to this day, a memorial of the sad destiny of the last of the kings of Granada. [21] The fall of Granada excited general sensation throughout Christendom, where it was received as counterbalancing, in a manner, the loss of Constantinople, nearly half a century before. At Rome, the event was commemorated by a solemn procession of the pope and cardinals to St. Peter's, where high mass was celebrated, and the public rejoicing continued for several days. [22] The intelligence was welcomed with no less satisfaction in England, where Henry the Seventh was seated on the throne. The circumstances attending it, as related by Lord Bacon, will not be devoid of interest for the reader. [23] Thus ended the war of Granada, which is often compared by the Castilian chroniclers to that of Troy in its duration, and which certainly fully equalled the latter in variety of picturesque and romantic incidents, and in circumstances of poetical interest. With the surrender of its capital, terminated the Arabian empire in the Peninsula, after an existence of seven hundred and forty-one years from the date of the original conquest. The consequences of this closing war were of the highest moment to Spain. The most obvious, was the recovery of an extensive territory, hitherto held by a people, whose difference of religion, language, and general habits, made them not only incapable of assimilating with their Christian neighbors, but almost their natural enemies; while their local position was a matter of just concern, as interposed between the great divisions of the Spanish monarchy, and opening an obvious avenue to invasion from Africa. By the new conquest, moreover, the Spaniards gained a large extent of country, possessing the highest capacities for production, in its natural fruitfulness of soil, temperature of climate, and in the state of cultivation to which it had been brought by its ancient occupants; while its shores were lined with commodious havens, that afforded every facility for commerce. The scattered fragments of the ancient Visigothic empire were now again, with the exception of the little state of Navarre, combined into one great monarchy, as originally destined by nature; and Christian Spain gradually rose by means of her new acquisitions from a subordinate situation, to the level of a first-rate European power. The moral influence of the Moorish war, its influence on the Spanish character, was highly important. The inhabitants of the great divisions of the country, as in most countries during the feudal ages, had been brought too frequently into collision with each other to allow the existence of a pervading national feeling. This was particularly the case in Spain, where independent states insensibly grew out of the detached fragments of territory recovered at different times from the Moorish monarchy. The war of Granada subjected all the various sections of the country to one common action, under the influence of common motives of the most exciting interest; while it brought them in conflict with a race, the extreme repugnance of whose institutions and character to their own, served greatly to nourish the nationality of sentiment. In this way, the spark of patriotism was kindled throughout the whole nation, and the most distant provinces of the Peninsula were knit together by a bond of union, which has remained indissoluble. The consequences of these wars in a military aspect are also worthy of notice. Up to this period, war had been carried on by irregular levies, extremely limited in numerical amount and in period of service; under little subordination, except to their own immediate chiefs, and wholly unprovided with the apparatus required for extended operations. The Spaniards were even lower than most of the European nations in military science, as is apparent from the infinite pains of Isabella to avail herself of all foreign resources for their improvement. In the war of Granada, masses of men were brought together, far greater than had hitherto been known in modern warfare. They were kept in the field not only through long campaigns, but far into the winter; a thing altogether unprecedented. They were made to act in concert, and the numerous petty chiefs brought in complete subjection to one common head, whose personal character enforced the authority of station. Lastly, they were supplied with all the requisite munitions, through the providence of Isabella, who introduced into the service the most skilful engineers from other countries, and kept in pay bodies of mercenaries, as the Swiss for example, reputed the best disciplined troops of that day. In this admirable school, the Spanish soldier was gradually trained to patient endurance, fortitude, and thorough subordination; and those celebrated captains were formed, with that invincible infantry, which in the beginning of the sixteenth century spread the military fame of their country over all Christendom. But, with all our sympathy for the conquerors, it is impossible, without a deep feeling of regret, to contemplate the decay and final extinction of a race, who had made such high advances in civilization as the Spanish Arabs; to see them driven from the stately palaces reared by their own hands, wandering as exiles over the lands, which still blossomed with the fruits of their industry, and wasting away under persecution, until their very name as a nation was blotted out from the map of history. [24] It must be admitted, however, that they had long since reached their utmost limit of advancement as a people. The light shed over their history shines from distant ages; for, during the later period of their existence, they appear to have reposed in a state of torpid, luxurious indulgence, which would seem to argue, that, when causes of external excitement were withdrawn, the inherent vices of their social institutions had incapacitated them for the further production of excellence. In this impotent condition, it was wisely ordered, that their territory should be occupied by a people, whose religion and more liberal form of government, however frequently misunderstood or perverted, qualified them for advancing still higher the interests of humanity. It will not be amiss to terminate the narrative of the war of Granada with some notice of the fate of Rodrigo Ponce de Leon, marquis duke of Cadiz; for he may be regarded in a peculiar manner as the hero of it, having struck the first stroke by the surprise of Alhama, and witnessed every campaign till the surrender of Granada. A circumstantial account of his last moments is afforded by the pen of his worthy countryman, the Andalusian Curate of Los Palacios. The gallant marquis survived the close of the war only a short time, terminating his days at his mansion in Seville, on the 28th of August, 1492, with a disorder brought on by fatigue and incessant exposure. He had reached the forty-ninth year of his age, and, although twice married, left no legitimate issue. In his person, he was of about the middle stature, of a compact, symmetrical frame, a fair complexion, with light hair inclining to red. He was an excellent horseman, and well skilled indeed in most of the exercises of chivalry. He had the rare merit of combining sagacity with intrepidity in action. Though somewhat impatient, and slow to forgive, he was frank and generous, a warm friend, and a kind master to his vassals. [25] He was strict in his observance of the Catholic worship, punctilious in keeping all the church festivals and in enforcing their observance throughout his domains; and, in war, he was a most devout champion of the Virgin. He was ambitious of acquisitions, but lavish of expenditure, especially in the embellishment and fortification of his towns and castles; spending on Alcalá de Guadaira, Xerez, and Alanis, the enormous sum of seventeen million maravedies. To the ladies he was courteous, as became a true knight. At his death, the king and queen with the whole court went into mourning; "for he was a much-loved cavalier," says the Curate, "and was esteemed, like the Cid, both by friend and foe; and no Moor durst abide in that quarter of the field where his banner was displayed." His body, after lying in state for several days in his palace at Seville, with his trusty sword by his side, with which he had fought all his battles, was borne in solemn procession by night through the streets of the city, which was everywhere filled with the deepest lamentation; and was finally deposited in the great chapel of the Augustine church, in the tomb of his ancestors. Ten Moorish banners, which he had taken in battle with the infidel, before the war of Granada, were borne along at his funeral, "and still wave over his sepulchre," says Bernaldez, "keeping alive the memory of his exploits, as undying as his soul." The banners have long since mouldered into dust; the very tomb which contained his ashes has been sacrilegiously demolished; but the fame of the hero will survive as long as anything like respect for valor, courtesy, unblemished honor, or any other attribute of chivalry, shall be found in Spain. [26] * * * * * One of the chief authorities on which the account of the Moorish war rests, is Andres Bernaldez, Curate of Los Palacios. He was a native of Fuente in Leon, and appears to have received his early education under the care of his grandfather, a notary of that place, whose commendations of a juvenile essay in historical writing led him later in life, according to his own account, to record the events of his time in the extended and regular form of a chronicle. After admission to orders, he was made chaplain to Deza, archbishop of Seville, and curate of Los Palacios, an Andalusian town not far from Seville, where he discharged his ecclesiastical functions with credit, from 1488 to 1513, at which time, as we find no later mention of him, he probably closed his life with his labors. Bernaldez had ample opportunities for accurate information relative to the Moorish war, since he lived, as it were, in the theatre of action, and was personally intimate with the most considerable men of Andalusia, especially the marquis of Cadiz, whom he has made the Achilles of his epic, assigning him a much more important part in the principal transactions, than is always warranted by other authorities. His Chronicle is just such as might have been anticipated from a person of lively imagination, and competent scholarship for the time, deeply dyed with the bigotry and superstition of the Spanish clergy in that century. There is no great discrimination apparent in the work of the worthy curate, who dwells with goggle-eyed credulity on the most absurd marvels, and expends more pages on an empty court show, than on the most important schemes of policy. But if he is no philosopher, he has, perhaps for that very reason, succeeded in making us completely master of the popular feelings and prejudices of the time; while he gives a most vivid portraiture of the principal scenes and actors in this stirring war, with all their chivalrous exploit, and rich theatrical accompaniment. His credulity and fanaticism, moreover, are well compensated by a simplicity and loyalty of purpose, which secure much more credit to his narrative than attaches to those of more ambitious writers, whose judgment is perpetually swayed by personal or party interests. The chronicle descends as late as 1513, although, as might be expected from the author's character, it is entitled to much less confidence in the discussion of events which fell without the scope of his personal observation. Notwithstanding its historical value is fully recognized by the Castilian critics, it has never been admitted to the press, but still remains ingulfed in the ocean of manuscripts, with which the Spanish libraries are deluged. It is remarkable that the war of Granada, which is so admirably suited in all its circumstances to poetical purposes, should not have been more frequently commemorated by the epic muse. The only successful attempt in this way, with which I am acquainted, is the "Conquisto di Granata," by the Florentine Girolamo Gratiani, Modena, 1650. The author has taken the license, independently of his machinery, of deviating very freely from the historic track; among other things, introducing Columbus and the Great Captain as principal actors in the drama, in which they played at most but a very subordinate part. The poem, which swells into twenty-six cantos, is in such repute with the Italian critics, that Quadrio does not hesitate to rank it "among the best epical productions of the age." A translation of this work has recently appeared at Nuremberg, from the pen of C. M. Winterling, which is much commended by the German critics. Mr. Irving's late publication, the "Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada," has superseded all further necessity for poetry, and, unfortunately for me, for history. He has fully availed himself of all the picturesque and animating movements of this romantic era; and the reader who will take the trouble to compare his Chronicle with the present more prosaic and literal narrative, will see how little he has been seduced from historic accuracy by the poetical aspect of his subject. The fictitious and romantic dress of his work has enabled him to make it the medium for reflecting more vividly the floating opinions and chimerical fancies of the age, while he has illuminated the picture with the dramatic brilliancy of coloring denied to sober history. FOOTNOTES [1] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1490.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 95.--Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, pp. 404, 405.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 3, cap. 127.--La Clède, Hist. de Portugal, tom. iv. p. 19.--Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. p. 452. [2] Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. pp. 452-456.--Florez, Reynas Cathólicas, p. 845.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 129.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 2, dial. 3. [3] Conde, Domination de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 41.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 90. Neither the Arabic nor Castilian authorities impeach the justice of the summons made by the Spanish sovereigns. I do not, however, find any other foundation for the obligation imputed to Abdallah in them, than that monarch's agreement during his captivity at Loja, in 1486, to surrender his capital in exchange for Guadix, provided the latter should be conquered within six months. Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, p. 275.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. iv. p. 418. [4] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 176.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 130.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. cap. 85.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. p. 309. [5] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 131, 132.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 97.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 41.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., lib. 3, epist. 84.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. iv. p. 424.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. pp. 309, 310. [6] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1491. [7] According to Zuñiga, the quota furnished by Seville this season amounted to 6000 foot and 500 horse, who were recruited by fresh reinforcements no less than five times during the campaign. Annales de Sevilla, p. 406.--See also Col. de Cédulas, tom. iii. no. 3. [8] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 42.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 100.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., lib. 3, epist. 89.-- Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 18.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 177. Martyr remarks, that the Genoese merchants, "voyagers to every clime, declare this to be the largest fortified city in the world." Casiri has collected a body of interesting particulars respecting the wealth, population, and social habits of Granada, from various Arabic authorities. Bibliotheca Escurialensis, tom. ii. pp. 247-260. The French work of Laborde, Voyage Pittoresque, (Paris, 1807,) and the English one of Murphy, Engravings of Arabian Antiquities of Spain, (London, 1816,) do ample justice in their finished designs to the general topography and architectural magnificence of Granada. [9] On one occasion, a Christian knight having discomfited with a handful of men a much superior body of Moslem chivalry, King Abdallah testified his admiration of his prowess by sending him on the following day a magnificent present, together with his own sword superbly mounted. (Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. p. 178.) The Moorish ballad beginning "Al Rey Chico de Granada" describes the panic occasioned in the city by the Christian encampment on the Xenil. "For ese fresco Genil un campo viene marchando, todo de lucida gente, las armas van relumbrando. "Las vanderas traen tendidas, y un estandarte dorado; el General de esta gente es el invicto Fernando. Y tambien viene la Reyna, Muger del Hey don Fernando, la qual tiene tanto esfuerzo que anima a qualquier soldado." [10] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 101. [11] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 101.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 42.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., lib. 4, epist. 90. --Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 133.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. cap. 88. Isabella afterwards caused a Franciscan monastery to be built in commemoration of this event at Zubia, where, according to Mr. Irving, the house from which she witnessed the action is to be seen at the present day. See Conquest of Granada, chap. 90, note. [12] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., lib. 4, epist. 91.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 101.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. p. 673.--Bleda, Corónica, p. 619.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 18. [13] Estrada, Poblacion de España, tom. ii. pp. 344, 348.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., lib. 4, epist. 91.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 18. Hyta, who embellishes his florid prose with occasional extracts from the beautiful ballad poetry of Spain, gives one commemorating the erection of Santa Fe. "Cercada esta Santa Fe con mucho lienzo encerado al rededor muchas tiendas de seda, oro, y brocado. "Donde estan Duques, y Condes, Señores de gran estado," etc. Guerras de Granada, p. 515. [14] Pedraza, Antiguedad de Granada, fol. 74.--Giovio, De Vita Gonsalvi, apud Vitae Illust. Virorum, pp. 211, 212.--Salazar de Mendoza, Crón. del Gran Cardenal, p. 236.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. pp. 316, 317.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 42.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 178.--Marmol, however, assigns the date in the text to a separate capitulation respecting Abdallah, dating that made in behalf of the city three days later. (Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 19.) This author has given the articles of the treaty with greater fulness and precision than any other Spanish historian. [15] Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 19.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 42.--Zurita, Anales, tom. ii. cap. 90.-- Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. pp. 317, 318.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 28. Martyr adds, that the principal Moorish nobility were to remove from the city. (Opus Epist., lib. 4, epist. 92.) Pedraza, who has devoted a volume to the history of Granada, does not seem to think the capitulations worth specifying. Most of the modern Castilians pass very lightly over them. They furnish too bitter a comment on the conduct of subsequent Spanish monarchs. Marmol and the judicious Zurita agree in every substantial particular with Conde, and this coincidence may be considered as establishing the actual terms of the treaty. [16] Oviedo, whose narrative exhibits many discrepancies with those of other contemporaries, assigns this part to the count of Tendilla, the first captain-general of Granada. Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 28. But, as this writer, though an eye-witness, was but thirteen or fourteen years of age at the time of the capture, and wrote some sixty years later from his early recollections, his authority cannot be considered of equal weight with that of persons who, like Martyr, described events as they were passing before them. [17] Pedraza, Antiguedad de Granada, fol. 75.--Salazar de Mendoza, Crón. del Gran Cardenal, p. 238.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. cap. 90.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., lib. 4, epist. 92.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 309.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 20. [18] Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, ubi supra.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 43.--Pedraza, Antiguedad de Granada, fol. 76.-- Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 102.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. cap. 90.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 28. [19] Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., ubi supra.--One is reminded of Tasso's description of the somewhat similar feelings exhibited by the crusaders on their entrance into Jerusalem. "Ecco apparir Gerusalem si vede, Ecco additar Gerusalem si scorge; Ecco da mille voci unitamente Gerusalemme salutar si sente. * * * * * "Al gran placer che quella prima vista Dolcemente spirò nell' altruì petto, Alta contrizion successe, mista Di timoroso e riverente affetto, Osano appena d'innalzar la vista Ver la città." Gerusalemme Liberata,--Cant. iii. st. 3, 5. [20] Mariana, Hist. de España tom. ii. p. 597.--Pedraza, Antiguedad de Granada, fol. 76.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1492.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 43.--Bleda, Corónica, pp. 621, 622.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. cap. 90.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. i. cap. 20. --L. Marineo, and indeed most of the Spanish authorities, represent the sovereigns as having postponed their entrance into the city until the 5th or 6th of January. A letter transcribed by Pedraza, addressed by the queen to the prior of Guadalupe, one of her council, dated from the city of Granada on the 2d of January, 1492, shows the inaccuracy of this statement. See folio 76. In Mr. Lockhart's picturesque version of the Moorish ballads, the reader may find an animated description of the triumphant entry of the Christian army into Granada. "There was crying in Granada when the sun was going down, Some calling on the Trinity, some calling on Mahoun; Here passed away the Koran, there in the cross was borne, And here was heard the Christian bell, and there the Moorish horn; _Te Deum laudamus_ was up the Alcala sung, Down from the Alhambra's minarets were all the crescents flung; The arms thereon of Aragon and Castile they display; One king comes in in triumph, one weeping goes away." [21] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 90.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. ii. pp. 319, 320.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. iv. lib. 40, cap. 42.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 20. Mr. Irving, in his beautiful Spanish Sketch-book, "The Alhambra," devotes a chapter to mementos of Boabdil, in which he traces minutely the route of the deposed monarch after quitting the gates of his capital. The same author, in the Appendix to his Chronicle of Granada, concludes a notice of Abdallah's fate with the following description of his person. "A portrait of Boabdil el Chico is to be seen in the picture gallery of the Generalife. He is represented with a mild, handsome face, a fair complexion, and yellow hair. His dress is of yellow brocade, relieved with black velvet; and he has a black velvet cap, surmounted with a crown. In the armory of Madrid are two suits of armor said to have belonged to him, one of solid steel, with very little ornament; the morion closed. From the proportions of these suits of armor, he must have been of full stature and vigorous form." Note, p. 398. [22] Senarega, Commentarii de Rebus Genuensibus, apud Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, (Mediolani, 1723-51,) tom. xxiv. p. 531.--It formed the subject of a theatrical representation before the court at Naples, in the same year. This drama, or _Farsa_, as it is called by its distinguished author, Sannazaro, is an allegorical medley, in which Faith, Joy, and the false prophet Mahomet play the principal parts. The difficulty of a precise classification of this piece, has given rise to warmer discussion among Italian critics, than the subject may be thought to warrant. See Signorelli, Vicende della Coltura nelle due Sicilie, (Napoli, 1810,) tom. iii. pp. 543 et seq. [23] "Somewhat about this time, came letters from Ferdinando and Isabella, king and queen of Spain; signifying the final conquest of Granada from the Moors; which action, in itself so worthy, King Ferdinando, whose manner was, never to lose any virtue for the showing, had expressed and displayed in his letters, at large, with all the particularities and religious punctos and ceremonies, that were observed in the reception of that city and kingdom; showing amongst other things, that the king would not by any means in person enter the city until he had first aloof seen the Cross set up upon the greater tower of Granada, whereby it became Christian ground. That likewise, before he would enter, he did homage to God above, pronouncing by an herald from the height of that tower, that he did acknowledge to have recovered that kingdom by the help of God Almighty, and the glorious Virgin, and the virtuous apostle St. James, and the holy father Innocent VIII., together with the aids and services of his prelates, nobles, and commons. That yet he stirred not from his camp, till he had seen a little army of martyrs, to the number of seven hundred and more Christians, that had lived in bonds and servitude, as slaves to the Moors, pass before his eyes, singing a psalm for their redemption; and that he had given tribute unto God, by alms and relief extended to them all, for his admission into the city. These things were in the letters, with many more ceremonies of a kind of holy ostentation. "The king, ever willing to put himself into the consort or quire of all religious actions, and naturally affecting much the king of Spain, as far as one king can affect another, partly for his virtues, and partly for a counterpoise to France; upon the receipt of these letters, sent all his nobles and prelates that were about the court, together with the mayor and aldermen of London, in great solemnity to the church of Paul; there to hear a declaration from the lord chancellor, now cardinal. When they were assembled, the cardinal, standing upon the uppermost step, or halfpace, before the quire, and all the nobles, prelates, and governors of the city at the foot of the stairs, made a speech to them; letting them know that they were assembled in that consecrated place to sing unto God a new song. For that, said he, these many years the Christians have not gained new ground or territory upon the infidels, nor enlarged and set farther the bounds of the Christian world. But this is now done by the prowess and devotion of Ferdinando and Isabella, kings of Spain; who have, to their immortal honor, recovered the great and rich kingdom of Granada, and the populous and mighty city of the same name from the Moors, having been in possession thereof by the space of seven hundred years, and more; for which this assembly and all Christians are to render laud and thanks to God, and to celebrate this noble act of the king of Spain; who in this is not only victorious but apostolical, in the gaining of new provinces to the Christian faith. And the rather for that this victory and conquest is obtained without much effusion of blood. Whereby it is to be hoped, that there shall be gained not only new territory, but infinite souls to the Church of Christ, whom the Almighty, as it seems, would have live to be converted. Herewithal he did relate some of the most memorable particulars of the war and victory. And, after his speech ended, the whole assembly went solemnly in procession, and Te Deum was sung." Lord Bacon, History of the Reign of King Henry VII., in his Works, (ed. London, 1819,) vol. v. pp. 85, 86.--See also Hall, Chronicle, p. 453. [24] The African descendants of the Spanish Moors, unable wholly to relinquish the hope of restoration to the delicious abodes of their ancestors, continued for many generations, and perhaps still continue, to put up a petition to that effect in their mosques every Friday. Pedraza, Antiguedad de Granada, fol. 7. [25] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1492. Don Henrique de Guzman, duke of Medina Sidonia, the ancient enemy, and, since the commencement of the Moorish war, the firm friend of the marquis of Cadiz, died the 28th of August, on the same day with the latter. [26] Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 411.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 104. The marquis left three illegitimate daughters by a noble Spanish lady, who all formed high connections. He was succeeded in his titles and estates, by the permission of Ferdinand and Isabella, by Don Rodrigo Ponce de Leon, the son of his eldest daughter, who had married with one of her kinsmen. Cadiz was subsequently annexed by the Spanish sovereigns to the crown, from which it had been detached in Henry IV.'s time, and considerable estates were given as an equivalent, together with the title of Duke of Arcos, to the family of Ponce de Leon. CHAPTER XVI. APPLICATION OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AT THE SPANISH COURT. 1492. Early Discoveries of the Portuguese.--Of the Spaniards.--Columbus.--His Application at the Castilian Court.--Rejected.--Negotiations Resumed.-- Favorable Disposition of the Queen.--Arrangement with Columbus.--He Sails on his First Voyage.--Indifference to the Enterprise.--Acknowledgments due to Isabella. While Ferdinand and Isabella were at Santa Fe, the capitulation was signed, that opened the way to an extent of empire, compared with which their recent conquests, and indeed all their present dominions, were insignificant. The extraordinary intellectual activity of the Europeans in the fifteenth century, after the torpor of ages, carried them forward to high advancement in almost every department of science, but especially nautical, whose surprising results have acquired for the age, the glory of being designated as peculiarly that of maritime discovery. This was eminently favored by the political condition of modern Europe. Under the Roman empire, the traffic with the east naturally centred in Rome, the commercial capital of the west. After the dismemberment of the empire, it continued to be conducted principally through the channel of the Italian ports, whence it was diffused over the remoter regions of Christendom. But these countries, which had now risen from the rank of subordinate provinces to that of separate independent states, viewed with jealousy this monopoly of the Italian cities, by means of which these latter were rapidly advancing beyond them in power and opulence. This was especially the case with Portugal and Castile, [1] which, placed on the remote frontiers of the European continent, were far removed from the great routes of Asiatic intercourse; while this disadvantage was not compensated by such an extent of territory, as secured consideration to some other of the European states, equally unfavorably situated for commercial purposes with themselves. Thus circumstanced, the two nations of Castile and Portugal were naturally led to turn their eyes on the great ocean which washed their western borders, and to seek in its hitherto unexplored recesses for new domains, and if possible strike out some undiscovered track towards the opulent regions of the east. The spirit of maritime enterprise was fomented, and greatly facilitated in its operation, by the invention of the astrolabe, and the important discovery of the polarity of the magnet, whose first application to the purposes of navigation on an extended scale may be referred to the fifteenth century. [2] The Portuguese were the first to enter on the brilliant path of nautical discovery, which they pursued under the infant Don Henry with such activity, that, before the middle of the fifteenth century, they had penetrated as far as Cape de Verd, doubling many a fearful headland, which had shut in the timid navigator of former days; until at length, in 1486, they descried the lofty promontory which terminates Africa on the south, and which, hailed by King John the Second, under whom it was discovered, as the harbinger of the long-sought passage to the east, received the cheering appellation of the Cape of Good Hope. The Spaniards, in the mean while, did not languish in the career of maritime enterprise. Certain adventurers from the northern provinces of Biscay and Guipuscoa, in 1393, had made themselves masters of one of the smallest of the group of islands, supposed to be the Fortunate Isles of the ancients, since known as the Canaries. Other private adventurers from Seville extended their conquests over these islands in the beginning of the following century. These were completed in behalf of the crown under Ferdinand and Isabella, who equipped several fleets for their reduction, which at length terminated in 1495 with that of Teneriffe. [3] From the commencement of their reign, Ferdinand and Isabella had shown an earnest solicitude for the encouragement of commerce and nautical science, as is evinced by a variety of regulations which, however imperfect, from the misconception of the true principles of trade in that day, are sufficiently indicative of the dispositions of the government. [4] Under them, and indeed under their predecessors as far back as Henry the Third, a considerable traffic had been carried on with the western coast of Africa, from which gold dust and slaves were imported into the city of Seville. The annalist of that city notices the repeated interference of Isabella in behalf of these unfortunate beings, by ordinances tending to secure them a more equal protection of the laws, or opening such social indulgences as might mitigate the hardships of their condition. A misunderstanding gradually arose between the subjects of Castile and Portugal, in relation to their respective rights of discovery and commerce on the African coast, which promised a fruitful source of collision between the two crowns; but which was happily adjusted by an article in the treaty of 1479, that terminated the war of the succession. By this it was settled, that the right of traffic and of discovery on the western coast of Africa should be exclusively reserved to the Portuguese, who in their turn should resign all claims on the Canaries to the crown of Castile. The Spaniards, thus excluded from further progress to the south, seemed to have no other opening left for naval adventure than the hitherto untravelled regions of the great western ocean. Fortunately, at this juncture, an individual appeared among them, in the person of Christopher Columbus, endowed with capacity for stimulating them to this heroic enterprise, and conducting it to a glorious issue. [5] This extraordinary man was a native of Genoa, of humble parentage, though perhaps honorable descent. [6] He was instructed in his early youth at Pavia, where he acquired a strong relish for the mathematical sciences, in which he subsequently excelled. At the age of fourteen, he engaged in a seafaring life, which he followed with little intermission till 1470; when, probably little more than thirty years of age, [7] he landed in Portugal, the country to which adventurous spirits from all parts of the world then resorted, as the great theatre of maritime enterprise. After his arrival, he continued to make voyages to the then known parts of the world, and, when on shore, occupied himself with the construction and sale of charts and maps; while his geographical researches were considerably aided by the possession of papers belonging to an eminent Portuguese navigator, a deceased relative of his wife. Thus stored with all that nautical science in that day could supply, and fortified by large practical experience, the reflecting mind of Columbus was naturally led to speculate on the existence of some other land beyond the western waters; and he conceived the possibility of reaching the eastern shores of Asia, whose provinces of Zipango and Cathay were emblazoned in such gorgeous colors in the narratives of Mandeville and the Poli, by a more direct and commodious route than that which traversed the eastern continent. [8] The existence of land beyond the Atlantic, which was not discredited by some of the most enlightened ancients, [9] had become matter of common speculation at the close of the fifteenth century; when maritime adventure was daily disclosing the mysteries of the deep, and bringing to light new regions, that had hitherto existed only in fancy. A proof of this popular belief occurs in a curious passage of the "Morgante Maggiore" of the Florentine poet Palci, a man of letters, but not distinguished for scientific attainments beyond his day. [10] The passage is remarkable, independently of the cosmographical knowledge it implies, for its allusion to phenomena in physical science, not established till more than a century later. The Devil, alluding to the vulgar superstition respecting the pillars of Hercules, thus addresses his companion Rinaldo: "Know that this theory is false; his bark The daring mariner shall urge far o'er The western wave, a smooth and level plain, Albeit the earth is fashioned like a wheel. Man was in ancient days of grosser mould, And Hercules might blush to learn how far Beyond the limits he had vainly set, The dullest sea-boat soon shall wing her way. Men shall descry another hemisphere, Since to one common centre all things tend; So earth, by curious mystery divine Well balanced, hangs amid the starry spheres. At our antipodes are cities, states, And thronged empires, ne'er divined of yore. But see, the Sun speeds on his western path To glad the nations with expected light." [11] Columbus's hypothesis rested on much higher ground than mere popular belief. What indeed was credulity with the vulgar, and speculation with the learned, amounted in his mind to a settled practical conviction, that made him ready to peril life and fortune on the result of the experiment. He was fortified still further in his conclusions by a correspondence with the learned Italian Toscanelli, who furnished him with a map of his own projection, in which the eastern coast of Asia was delineated opposite to the western frontier of Europe. [12] Filled with lofty anticipations of achieving a discovery, which would settle a question of such moment, so long involved in obscurity, Columbus submitted the theory on which he had founded his belief in the existence of a western route to King John the Second, of Portugal. Here he was doomed to encounter for the first time the embarrassments and mortifications, which so often obstruct the conceptions of genius, too sublime for the age in which they are formed. After a long and fruitless negotiation, and a dishonorable attempt on the part of the Portuguese to avail themselves clandestinely of his information, he quitted Lisbon in disgust, determined to submit his proposals to the Spanish sovereigns, relying on their reputed character for wisdom and enterprise. [13] The period of his arrival in Spain, being the latter part of 1484, would seem to have been the most unpropitious possible to his design. The nation was then in the heat of the Moorish war, and the sovereigns were unintermittingly engaged, as we have seen, in prosecuting their campaigns, or in active preparation for them. The large expenditure, incident to this, exhausted all their resources; and indeed the engrossing character of this domestic conquest left them little leisure for indulging in dreams of distant and doubtful discovery. Columbus, moreover, was unfortunate in his first channel of communication with the court. He was furnished by Fray Juan Perez de Marchena, guardian of the convent of La Rabida in Andalusia, who had early taken a deep interest in his plans, with an introduction to Fernando de Talavera, prior of Prado, and confessor of the queen, a person high in the royal confidence, and gradually raised through a succession of ecclesiastical dignities to the archiepiscopal see of Granada. He was a man of irreproachable morals, and of comprehensive benevolence for that day, as is shown in his subsequent treatment of the unfortunate Moriscoes. [14] He was also learned; although his learning was that of the cloister, deeply tinctured with pedantry and superstition, and debased by such servile deference even to the errors of antiquity, as at once led him to discountenance everything like innovation or enterprise. [15] With these timid and exclusive views, Talavera was so far from comprehending the vast conceptions of Columbus, that he seems to have regarded him as a mere visionary, and his hypothesis as involving principles not altogether orthodox. Ferdinand and Isabella, desirous of obtaining the opinion of the most competent judges on the merits of Columbus's theory, referred him to a council selected by Talavera from the most eminent scholars of the kingdom, chiefly ecclesiastics, whose profession embodied most of the science of that day. Such was the apathy exhibited by this learned conclave, and so numerous the impediments suggested by dulness, prejudice, or skepticism, that years glided away before it came to a decision. During this time, Columbus appears to have remained in attendance on the court, bearing arms occasionally in the campaigns, and experiencing from the sovereigns an unusual degree of deference and personal attention; an evidence of which is afforded in the disbursements repeatedly made by the royal order for his private expenses, and in the instructions, issued to the municipalities of the different towns in Andalusia, to supply him gratuitously with lodging and other personal accommodations. [16] At length, however, Columbus, wearied out by this painful procrastination, pressed the court for a definite answer to his propositions; when he was informed, that the council of Salamanca pronounced his scheme to be "vain, impracticable, and resting on grounds too weak to merit the support of the government." Many in the council, however, were too enlightened to acquiesce in this sentence of the majority. Some of the most considerable persons of the court, indeed, moved by the cogency of Columbus's arguments, and affected by the elevation and grandeur of his views, not only cordially embraced his scheme, but extended their personal intimacy and friendship to him. Such, among others, were the grand cardinal Mendoza, a man whose enlarged capacity and acquaintance with affairs raised him above many of the narrow prejudices of his order, and Deza, archbishop of Seville, a Dominican friar, whose commanding talents were afterwards unhappily perverted in the service of the Holy Office, over which he presided as successor to Torquemada. [17] The authority of these individuals had undoubtedly great weight with the sovereigns, who softened the verdict of the junto, by an assurance to Columbus, that, "although they were too much occupied at present to embark in his undertaking, yet, at the conclusion of the war, they should find both time and inclination to treat with him." Such was the ineffectual result of Columbus's long and painful solicitation; and, far from receiving the qualified assurance of the sovereigns in mitigation of their refusal, he seems to have considered it as peremptory and final. In great dejection of mind, therefore, but without further delay, he quitted the court, and bent his way to the south, with the apparently almost desperate intent of seeking out some other patron to his undertaking. [18] Columbus had already visited his native city of Genoa, for the purpose of interesting it in his scheme of discovery; but the attempt proved unsuccessful. He now made application, it would seem, to the dukes of Medina Sidonia and Medina Celi, successively, from the latter of whom he experienced much kindness and hospitality; but neither of these nobles, whose large estates lying along the sea-shore had often invited them to maritime adventure, was disposed to assume one which seemed too hazardous for the resources of the crown. Without wasting time in further solicitation, Columbus prepared with a heavy heart to bid adieu to Spain, and carry his proposals to the king of France, from whom he had received a letter of encouragement while detained in Andalusia. [19] His progress, however, was arrested at the convent of La Rabida, which he visited previous to his departure, by his friend the guardian, who prevailed on him to postpone his journey till another effort had been made to move the Spanish court in his favor. For this purpose the worthy ecclesiastic undertook an expedition in person to the newly erected city of Santa Fe, where the sovereigns lay encamped before Granada. Juan Perez had formerly been confessor of Isabella, and was held in great consideration by her for his excellent qualities. On arriving at the camp, he was readily admitted to an audience, when he pressed the suit of Columbus with all the earnestness and reasoning of which he was capable. The friar's eloquence was supported by that of several eminent persons, whom Columbus during his long residence in the country had interested in his project, and who viewed with sincere regret the prospect of its abandonment. Among these individuals are particularly mentioned Alonso de Quintanilla, comptroller general of Castile, Louis de St. Angel, a fiscal officer of the crown of Aragon, and the marchioness of Moya, the personal friend of Isabella, all of whom exercised considerable influence over her counsels. Their representations, combined with the opportune season of the application, occurring at the moment when the approaching termination of the Moorish war allowed room for interest in other objects, wrought so favorable a change in the dispositions of the sovereigns, that they consented to resume the negotiation with Columbus. An invitation was accordingly sent to him to repair to Santa Fe, and a considerable sum provided for his suitable equipment, and his expenses on the road. [20] Columbus, who lost no time in availing himself of this welcome intelligence, arrived at the camp in season to witness the surrender of Granada, when every heart, swelling with exultation at the triumphant termination of the war, was naturally disposed to enter with greater confidence on a new career of adventure. At his interview with the king and queen, he once more exhibited the arguments on which his hypothesis was founded. He then endeavored to stimulate the cupidity of his audience, by picturing the realms of Mangi and Cathay, which he confidently expected to reach by this western route, in all the barbaric splendors which had been shed over them by the lively fancy of Marco Polo and other travellers of the Middle Ages; and he concluded with appealing to a higher principle, by holding out the prospect of extending the empire of the Cross over nations of benighted heathen, while he proposed to devote the profits of his enterprise to the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. This last ebullition, which might well have passed for fanaticism in a later day, and given a visionary tinge to his whole project, was not quite so preposterous in an age, in which the spirit of the crusades might be said still to linger, and the romance of religion had not yet been dispelled by sober reason. The more temperate suggestion of the diffusion of the gospel was well suited to affect Isabella, in whose heart the principle of devotion was deeply seated, and who, in all her undertakings, seems to have been far less sensible to the vulgar impulses of avarice or ambition, than to any argument connected, however remotely, with the interests of religion. [21] Amidst all these propitious demonstrations towards Columbus, an obstacle unexpectedly arose in the nature of his demands, which stipulated for himself and heirs the title and authority of Admiral and Viceroy over all lands discovered by him, with one-tenth of the profits. This was deemed wholly inadmissible. Ferdinand, who had looked with cold distrust on the expedition from the first, was supported by the remonstrances of Talavera, the new archbishop of Granada; who declared, that "such demands savored of the highest degree of arrogance, and would be unbecoming in their Highnesses to grant to a needy foreign adventurer." Columbus, however, steadily resisted every attempt to induce him to modify his propositions. On this ground, the conferences were abruptly broken off, and he once more turned his back upon the Spanish court, resolved rather to forego his splendid anticipations of discovery, at the very moment when the career so long sought was thrown open to him, than surrender one of the honorable distinctions due to his services. This last act is perhaps the most remarkable exhibition in his whole life, of that proud, unyielding spirit, which sustained him through so many years of trial, and enabled him at length to achieve his great enterprise, in the face of every obstacle which man and nature had opposed to it. [22] The misunderstanding was not suffered to be of long duration. Columbus's friends, and especially Louis de St. Angel, remonstrated with the queen on these proceedings in the most earnest manner. He frankly told her, that Columbus's demands, if high, were at least contingent on success, when they would be well deserved; that, if he failed, he required nothing. He expatiated on his qualifications for the undertaking, so signal as to insure in all probability the patronage of some other monarch, who would reap the fruits of his discoveries; and he ventured to remind the queen, that her present policy was not in accordance with the magnanimous spirit, which had hitherto made her the ready patron of great and heroic enterprise. Far from being displeased, Isabella was moved by his honest eloquence. She contemplated the proposals of Columbus in their true light; and, refusing to hearken any longer to the suggestions of cold and timid counsellors, she gave way to the natural impulses of her own noble and generous heart; "I will assume the undertaking," said she, "for my own crown of Castile, and am ready to pawn my jewels to defray the expenses of it, if the funds in the treasury shall be found inadequate." The treasury had been reduced to the lowest ebb by the late war, but the receiver, St. Angel, advanced the sums required, from the Aragonese revenues deposited in his hands. Aragon however was not considered as adventuring in the expedition, the charges and emoluments of which were reserved exclusively for Castile. [23] Columbus, who was overtaken by the royal messenger at a few leagues' distance only from Granada, experienced the most courteous reception on his return to Santa Fe, where a definitive arrangement was concluded with the Spanish sovereigns, April 17th, 1492. By the terms of the capitulation, Ferdinand and Isabella, as lords of the ocean-seas, constituted Christopher Columbus their admiral, viceroy, and governor- general of all such islands and continents as he should discover in the western ocean, with the privilege of nominating three candidates, for the selection of one by the crown, for the government of each of these territories. He was to be vested with exclusive right of jurisdiction over all commercial transactions within his admiralty. He was to be entitled to one-tenth of all the products and profits within the limits of his discoveries, and an additional eighth, provided he should contribute one- eighth part of the expense. By a subsequent ordinance, the official dignities above enumerated were settled on him and his heirs for ever, with the privilege of prefixing the title of Don to their names, which had not then degenerated into an appellation of mere courtesy. [24] No sooner were the arrangements completed, than Isabella prepared with her characteristic promptness to forward the expedition by the most efficient measures. Orders were sent to Seville and the other ports of Andalusia, to furnish stores and other articles requisite for the voyage, free of duty, and at as low rates as possible. The fleet, consisting of three vessels, was to sail from the little port of Palos in Andalusia, which had been condemned for some delinquency to maintain two caravels for a twelvemonth for the public service. The third vessel was furnished by the admiral, aided, as it would seem, in defraying the charges, by his friend the guardian of La Rabida, and the Pinzons, a family in Palos long distinguished for its enterprise among the mariners of that active community. With their assistance, Columbus was enabled to surmount the disinclination, and indeed open opposition, manifested by the Andalusian mariners to his perilous voyage; so that in less than three months his little squadron was equipped for sea. A sufficient evidence of the extreme unpopularity of the expedition is afforded by a royal ordinance of the 30th of April, promising protection to all persons, who should embark in it, from criminal prosecution of whatever kind, until two months after their return. The armament consisted of two caravels, or light vessels without decks, and a third of larger burden. The total number of persons who embarked amounted to one hundred and twenty; and the whole charges of the crown for the expedition did not exceed seventeen thousand florins, The fleet was instructed to keep clear of the African coast, and other maritime possessions of Portugal. At length, all things being in readiness, Columbus and his whole crew partook of the sacrament, and confessed themselves, after the devout manner of the ancient Spanish voyagers, when engaged in any important enterprise; and on the morning of the 3d of August, 1492, the intrepid navigator, bidding adieu to the Old World, launched forth on that unfathomed waste of waters where no sail had been ever spread before. [25] It is impossible to peruse the story of Columbus without assigning to him almost exclusively the glory of his great discovery; for, from the first moment of its conception to that of its final execution, he was encountered by every species of mortification and embarrassment, with scarcely a heart to cheer, or a hand to help him. [26] Those more enlightened persons whom, during his long residence in Spain, he succeeded in interesting in his expedition, looked to it probably as the means of solving a dubious problem, with the same sort of vague and skeptical curiosity as to its successful result, with which we contemplate, in our day, an attempt to arrive at the Northwest passage. How feeble was the interest excited, even among those who from their science and situation would seem to have their attention most naturally drawn towards it, may be inferred from the infrequency of allusion to it in the correspondence and other writings of that time, previous to the actual discovery. Peter Martyr, one of the most accomplished scholars of the period, whose residence at the Castilian court must have fully instructed him in the designs of Columbus, and whose inquisitive mind led him subsequently to take the deepest interest in the results of his discoveries, does not, so far as I am aware, allude to him in any part of his voluminous correspondence with the learned men of his time, previous to the first expedition. The common people regarded, not merely with apathy, but with terror, the prospect of a voyage, that was to take the mariner from the safe and pleasant seas which he was accustomed to navigate, and send him roving on the boundless wilderness of waters, which tradition and superstitious fancy had peopled with innumerable forms of horror. It is true that Columbus experienced a most honorable reception at the Castilian court; such as naturally flowed from the benevolent spirit of Isabella, and her just appreciation of his pure and elevated character. But the queen was too little of a proficient in science to be able to estimate the merits of his hypothesis; and, as many of those, on whose judgment she leaned, deemed it chimerical, it is probable that she never entertained a deep conviction of its truth; at least not enough to warrant the liberal expenditure, which she never refused to schemes of real importance. This is certainly inferred by the paltry amount actually expended on the armament, far inferior to that appropriated to the equipment of two several fleets in the course of the late war for a foreign expedition, as well as to that, with which in the ensuing year she followed up Columbus's discoveries. But while, on a review of the circumstances, we are led more and more to admire the constancy and unconquerable spirit, which carried Columbus victorious through all the difficulties of his undertaking, we must remember, in justice to Isabella, that, although tardily, she did in fact furnish the resources essential to its execution; that she undertook the enterprise when it had been explicitly declined by other powers, and when probably none other of that age would have been found to countenance it; and that, after once plighting her faith to Columbus, she became his steady friend, shielding him against the calumnies of his enemies, reposing in him the most generous confidence, and serving him in the most acceptable manner, by supplying ample resources for the prosecution of his glorious discoveries. [27] * * * * * It is now more than thirty years since the Spanish government intrusted Don Martin Fernandez de Navarrete, one of the most eminent scholars of the country, with the care of exploring the public archives, for the purpose of collecting information relative to the voyages and discoveries of the early Spanish navigators. In 1825, Señor Navarrete gave to the world the first fruits of his indefatigable researches, in two volumes, the commencement of a series, comprehending letters, private journals, royal ordinances, and other original documents, illustrative of the discovery of America. These two volumes are devoted exclusively to the adventures and personal history of Columbus, and must be regarded as the only authentic basis, on which any notice of the great navigator can hereafter rest. Fortunately, Mr. Irving's visit to Spain, at this period, enabled the world to derive the full benefit of Señor Navarrete's researches, by presenting their results in connection with whatever had been before known of Columbus, in the lucid and attractive form, which engages the interest of every reader. It would seem highly proper, that the fortunes of the discoverer of America should engage the pen of an inhabitant of her most favored and enlightened region; and it is unnecessary to add, that the task has been executed in a manner which must secure to the historian a share in the imperishable renown of his subject. The adventures of Columbus, which form so splendid an episode to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, cannot properly come within the scope of its historian, except so far as relates to his personal intercourse with the government, or their results on the fortunes of the Spanish monarchy. FOOTNOTES [1] Aragon, or rather Catalonia, maintained an extensive commerce with the Levant, and the remote regions of the east, during the Middle Ages, through the flourishing port of Barcelona. See Capmany y Montpalau, Memorias Históricas sobre la Marina, Comercio y Artes de Barcelona, (Madrid, 1779-92,) passim. [2] A council of mathematicians in the court of John II., of Portugal, first devised the application of the ancient astrolabe to navigation, thus affording to the mariner the essential advantages appertaining to the modern quadrant. The discovery of the polarity of the needle, which vulgar tradition assigned to the Amalfite Flavio Gioja, and which Robertson has sanctioned without scruple, is clearly proved to have occurred more than a century earlier. Tiraboschi, who investigates the matter with his usual erudition, passing by the doubtful reference of Guiot de Provins, whose age and personal identity even are contested, traces the familiar use of the magnetic needle as far back as the first half of the thirteenth century, by a pertinent passage from Cardinal Vitri, who died 1244; and sustains this by several similar references to other authors of the same century. Capmany finds no notice of its use by the Castilian navigators earlier than 1403. It was not until considerably later in the fifteenth century, that the Portuguese voyagers, trusting to its guidance, ventured to quit the Mediterranean and African coasts, and extend their navigation to Madeira and the Azores. See Navarrete, Coleccion de los Viages y Descubrimientos que hicieron por Mar los Españoles, (Madrid, 1825-29,) tom. i. Int. sec. 33.--Tiraboschi, Letteratura Italiana, tom. iv. pp. 173, 174.--Capmany, Mem. de Barcelona, tom. iii. part. 1, cap. 4.--Koch, Tableau des Révolutions de l'Europe, (Paris, 1814,) tom. i. pp. 358-360. [3] Four of the islands were conquered on behalf of private adventurers, chiefly from Andalusia, before the accession of Ferdinand and Isabella, and under their reign were held as the property of a noble Castilian family, named Peraza. The sovereigns sent a considerable armament from Seville in 1480, which subdued the great island of Canary on behalf of the crown, and another in 1493, which effected the reduction of Palma and Teneriffe after a sturdy resistance from the natives. Bernaldez postpones the last conquest to 1495. Salazar de Mendoza, Monarquía, tom. i. pp. 347- 349.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, pp. 136, 203.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 64, 65, 66, 133.--Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. i. Introd., sec. 28. [4] Among the provisions of the sovereigns enacted previous to the present date, may be noted those for regulating the coin and weights; for opening a free trade between Castile and Aragon; for security to Genoese and Venetian trading vessels; for safe conduct to mariners and fishermen; for privileges to the seamen of Palos; for prohibiting the plunder of vessels wrecked on the coast; and an ordinance of the very last year, requiring foreigners to take their return cargoes in the products of the country. See these laws as extracted from the Ordenanças Reales and the various public archives, in Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 11. [5] Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, pp. 373, 374, 398.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. lib. 20, cap. 30, 34.--Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages. [6] Spotorno, Memorials of Columbus, (London, 1823,) p. 14.--Senarega, apud Muratori, Rerum Ital. Script., tom. xxiv. p. 535.--Antonio Gallo, De Navigatione Columbi, apud Muratori, Rerum Ital. Script., tom. xxiii. p. 202. It is very generally agreed that the father of Columbus exercised the craft of a wool-carder, or weaver. The admiral's son Ferdinand, after some speculation on the genealogy of his illustrious parent, concludes with remarking, that, after all, a noble descent would confer less lustre on him than to have sprung from such a father; a philosophical sentiment, indicating pretty strongly that he had no great ancestry to boast of. Ferdinand finds something extremely mysterious and typical in his father's name of _Columbus_, signifying a _dove_, in token of his being ordained to "carry the olive-branch and oil of baptism over the ocean, like Noah's dove, to denote the peace and union of the heathen people with the church, after they had been shut up in the ark of darkness and confusion." Fernando Colon, Historia del Almirante, cap. 1, 2, apud Barcia, Historiadores Primitivos de las Indian Occidentals, (Madrid, 1749,) tom. i., tom. i. Introd., sec. 21, 24.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. vii. p. 548. [7] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 131.--Muñoz, Historia del Nuevo- Mundo, (Madrid, 1793,) lib. 2, sec. 13. There are no sufficient data for determining the period of Columbus's birth. The learned Muñoz places it in 1446. (Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 2, sec. 12.) Navarrete, who has weighed the various authorities with caution, seems inclined to remove it back eight or ten years further, resting chiefly on a remark of Bernaldez, that he died in 1506, "in a good old age, at the age of seventy, a little more or less." (Cap. 131.) The expression is somewhat vague. In order to reconcile the facts with this hypothesis, Navarrete is compelled to reject, as a chirographical blunder, a passage in a letter of the admiral, placing his birth in 1456, and to distort another passage in his book of "Prophecies," which, if literally taken, would seem to establish his birth near the time assigned by Muñoz. Incidental allusions in some other authorities, speaking of Columbus's old age at or near the time of his death, strongly corroborate Navarrete's inference. (See Coleccion de Viages, tom. i. Introd., sec. 54.)--Mr. Irving seems willing to rely exclusively on the authority of Bernaldez. [8] Antonio de Herrera, Historia General de las Indias Occidentales, (Amberes, 1728,) tom. i. dec. 1, lib. 1, cap. 7.--Gomara, Historia de las Indias, cap. 14, apud Barcia, Hist. Primitivos, tom. ii.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 118.--Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. i. Introd., sec. 30. Ferdinand Columbus enumerates three grounds on which his father's conviction of land in the west was founded. First, natural reason,--or conclusions drawn from science; secondly, authority of writers,--amounting to little more than vague speculations of the ancients; thirdly, testimony of sailors, comprehending, in addition to popular rumors of land described in western voyages, such relics as appeared to have floated to the European shores from the other side of the Atlantic. Hist. del Almirante, cap. 6-8. [9] None of the intimations are so precise as that contained in the well- known lines of Seneca's Medea, "Venient annuis saecula," etc., although, when regarded as a mere poetical vagary, it has not the weight which belongs to more serious suggestions, of similar import, in the writings of Aristotle and Strabo. The various allusions in the ancient classic writers to an undiscovered world form the subject of an elaborate essay in the Memorias da Acad. Real das Sciencias de Lisboa, (tom. v. pp. 101-112,) and are embodied, in much greater detail, in the first section of Hnmboldt's "Histoire de la Géographie du Nouveau Continent;" a work in which the author, with his usual acuteness, has successfully applied the vast stores of his erudition and experience to the illustration of many interesting points connected with the discovery of the New World, and the personal history of Columbus. [10] It is probably the knowledge of this which has led some writers to impute part of his work to the learned Marsilio Ficino, and others, with still less charity and probability, to refer the authorship of the whole to Politian. Comp. Tasso, Opere, (Venezia, 1735-42,) tom. x. p. 129.--and Crescimbeni, Istoria della Volgar Poesia, (Venezia, 1731,) tom. iii. pp. 273, 274. [11] Pulci, Morgante Maggiore, canto 25, st. 229, 230.--I have used blank verse, as affording facility for a more literal version than the corresponding _ottava rima_ of the original. This passage of Pulci, which has not fallen under the notice of Humboldt, or any other writer on the same subject whom I have consulted, affords, probably, the most circumstantial prediction that is to be found of the existence of a western world. Dante, two centuries before, had intimated more vaguely his belief in an undiscovered quarter of the globe. "De' vostri sensi, ch' è del rimanente, Non vogliate negar l'esperienza, Diretro al sol, del mondo senza gente." Inferno, cant. 26, v. 115. [12] Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii., Col. Dipl., no. 1.--Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 2, sec. 17.--It is singular that Columbus, in his visit to Iceland, in 1477, (see Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 4,) should have learned nothing of the Scandinavian voyages to the northern shores of America in the tenth and following centuries; yet if he was acquainted with them, it appears equally surprising that he should not have adduced the fact in support of his own hypothesis of the existence of land in the west; and that he should have taken a route so different from that of his predecessors in the path of discovery. It may be, however, as M. de Humboldt has well remarked, that the information he obtained in Iceland was too vague to suggest the idea, that the lands thus discovered by the Northmen had any connection with the Indies, of which he was in pursuit. In Columbus's day, indeed, so little was understood of the true position of these countries, that Greenland is laid down on the maps in the European seas, and as a peninsular prolongation of Scandinavia. See Humboldt, Géographie du Nouveau Continent, tom. ii. pp. 118, 125. [13] Herrera, Indias Occidentals, tom. i. dec. 1, lib. 1, cap. 7.--Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 2, sec. 19.--Gomara, Hist. de las Indias, cap. 15.--Benzoni, Novi Orbis Historia, lib. 1, cap. 6.--Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 10.--Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. part. 3, cap. 4. [14] Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., dial. de Talavera. [15] Salazar de Mendoza, Crón. del Gran Cardenal, p. 214.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, tom. i. dec. 1, lib. 1, cap. 8.--Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 11. [16] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 1, cap. 8.--Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 104.--Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. i. sec. 60, 61, tom. ii., Col. Dipl., nos. 2, 4. [17] This prelate, Diego de Deza, was born of poor but respectable parents, at Toro. He early entered the Dominican order, where his learning and exemplary life recommended him to the notice of the sovereigns, who called him to court to take charge of Prince John's education. He was afterwards raised, through the usual course of episcopal preferment, to the metropolitan see of Seville. His situation, as confessor of Ferdinand, gave him great influence over that monarch, with whom he appears to have maintained an intimate correspondence, to the day of his death. Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., dial. de Deza. [18] Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 11.--Salazar de Mendoza, Crón. del Gran Cardenal, p. 215.--Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 2, sec. 25, 29.--Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. i., Introd., sec. 60. [19] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 1, cap. 8.--Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 2, sec. 27.--Spotorno, Memorials of Columbus, pp. 31-33.--The last dates the application to Genoa prior to that to Portugal. A letter from the duke of Medina Celi to the cardinal of Spain, dated 19th March, 1493, refers to his entertaining Columbus as his guest for two years. It is very difficult to determine the date of these two years. If Herrera is correct in the statement, that, after a five years' residence at court, whose commencement he had previously referred to 1484, he carried his proposals to the duke of Medina Celi, (see cap. 7, 8.) the two years may have intervened between 1489-1491. Navarrete places them between the departure from Portugal and the first application to the court of Castile, in 1486. Some other writers, and among them Muñoz and Irving, referring his application to Genoa to 1485, and his first appearance in Spain to a subsequent period, make no provision for the residence with the duke of Medina Celi. Mr. Irving indeed is betrayed into a chronological inaccuracy, in speaking of a seven years' residence at the court in 1491, which he had previously noticed as having before begun in 1486. (Life of Columbus, (London, 1828,) comp. vol. i. pp. 109, 141.) In fact, the discrepancies among the earliest authorities are such as to render hopeless any attempt to settle with precision the chronology of Columbus's movements previous to his first voyage. [20] Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. pp. 129, 130.--Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 2, sec. 31.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 1, cap. 8.--Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. i., Introd., sec. 60. [21] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 1, cap. 8.--Primer Viage de Colon, apud Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. i. pp. 2, 117.-- Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 13. [22] Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 2, sec. 28, 29.--Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, ubi supra. [23] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 1, cap. 8.--Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 2, sec. 32, 33.--Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 14.--Gomara, Hist. de las Indias, cap. 15. [24] Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii., Col. Diplomat., nos. 5, 6. --Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 412.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. p. 605. [25] Peter Martyr, De Rebus Oceanicis et Novo Orbe, (Coloniae, 1574,) dec. 1, lib. 1.--Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii., Col. Diplomat., nos. 7, 8, 9, 10, 12.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 1, cap. 9.-- Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 14.--Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo- Mundo, lib. 2, sec. 33.--Benzoni, Novi Orbis Hist., lib. 1, cap. 6.-- Gomara, Hist. de las Indias, cap. 15. The expression in the text will not seem too strong, even admitting the previous discoveries of the Northmen, which were made in so much higher latitudes. Humboldt has well shown the probability, _a priori_, of such discoveries, made in a narrow part of the Atlantic, where the Orcades, the Feroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland afforded the voyager so many intermediate stations, at moderate distances from each other. (Géographie du Nouveau Continent, tom. ii. pp. 183 et seq.) The publication of the original Scandinavian MSS., (of which imperfect notices and selections, only, have hitherto found their way into the world,) by the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries, at Copenhagen, is a matter of the deepest interest; and it is fortunate that it is to be conducted under auspices, which must insure its execution in the most faithful and able manner. It may be doubted, however, whether the declaration of the Prospectus, that "it was the knowledge of the Scandinavian voyages, in all probability, which prompted the expedition of Columbus," can ever be established. His personal history furnishes strong internal evidence to the contrary. [26] How strikingly are the forlorn condition and indomitable energy of Columbus depicted in the following noble verses of Chiabrera; "Certo da cor, ch' alto destin non scelse, Son l' imprese magnanime neglette; Ma le bell' alme alle bell' opre elette Sanno gioir nelle fatiche eccelse; Nè biasnio popolar, frale catena, Spirto d'onore, il suo cammin reffrena. Così lunga stagion per modi indegni Europa disprezzò l'inclita speme, Schernendo il vulgo, e seco i Regi insieme, _Nudo nocchier, promettitor di Regni._" Rime, parte 1, canzone 12. [27] Columbus, in a letter written on his third voyage, pays an honest, heartfelt tribute to the effectual patronage which he experienced from the queen. "In the midst of the general incredulity," says he, "the Almighty infused into the queen, my lady, the spirit of intelligence and energy; and, whilst every one else, in his ignorance, was expatiating only on the inconvenience and cost, her Highness approved it, on the contrary, and gave it all the support in her power." See Carta al Ama del Principe D. Juan, apud Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. i. p. 266. CHAPTER XVII. EXPULSION OF THE JEWS FROM SPAIN. 1492. Excitement against the Jews.--Edict of Expulsion.--Dreadful Sufferings of the Emigrants.--Whole Number of Exiles.--Disastrous Results.--True Motives of the Edict.--Contemporary Judgments. While the Spanish sovereigns were detained before Granada, they published their memorable and most disastrous edict against the Jews; inscribing it, as it were, with the same pen which drew up the glorious capitulation of Granada and the treaty with Columbus. The reader has been made acquainted in a preceding chapter with the prosperous condition of the Jews in the Peninsula, and the pre-eminent consideration, which they attained there beyond any other part of Christendom. The envy raised by their prosperity, combined with the high religious excitement kindled in the long war with the infidel, directed the terrible arm of the Inquisition, as has been already stated, against this unfortunate people; but the result showed the failure of the experiment, since comparatively few conversions, and those frequently of a suspicious character, were effected, while the great mass still maintained a pertinacious attachment to ancient errors. [1] Under these circumstances, the popular odium, inflamed by the discontent of the clergy at the resistance which they encountered in the work of proselytism, gradually grew stronger and stronger against the unhappy Israelites. Old traditions, as old indeed as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, were revived, and charged on the present generation, with all the details of place and action. Christian children were said to be kidnapped, in order to be crucified in derision of the Saviour; the host, it was rumored, was exposed to the grossest indignities; and physicians and apothecaries, whose science was particularly cultivated by the Jews in the Middle Ages, were accused of poisoning their Christian patients. No rumor was too absurd for the easy credulity of the people. The Israelites were charged with the more probable offence of attempting to convert to their own faith the _ancient Christians_, as well as to reclaim such of their own race as had recently embraced Christianity. A great scandal was occasioned also by the inter-marriages, which still occasionally took place between Jews and Christians; the latter condescending to repair their dilapidated fortunes by these wealthy alliances, though at the expense of their vaunted purity of blood. [2] These various offences were urged against the Jews with great pertinacity by their enemies, and the sovereigns were importuned to adopt a more rigorous policy. The inquisitors, in particular, to whom the work of conversion had been specially intrusted, represented the incompetence of all lenient measures to the end proposed. They asserted, that the only mode left for the extirpation of the Jewish heresy, was to eradicate the seed; and they boldly demanded the immediate and total banishment of every unbaptized Israelite from the land. [3] The Jews, who had obtained an intimation of these proceedings, resorted to their usual crafty policy for propitiating the sovereigns. They commissioned one of their body to tender a donative of thirty thousand ducats towards defraying the expenses of the Moorish war. The negotiation, however, was suddenly interrupted by the inquisitor-general, Torquemada, who burst into the apartment of the palace, where the sovereigns were giving audience to the Jewish deputy, and, drawing forth a crucifix from beneath his mantle, held it up, exclaiming, "Judas Iscariot sold his master for thirty pieces of silver. Your Highnesses would sell him anew for thirty thousand; here he is, take him, and barter him away." So saying, the frantic priest threw the crucifix on the table, and left the apartment. The sovereigns, instead of chastising this presumption, or despising it as a mere freak of insanity, were overawed by it. Neither Ferdinand nor Isabella, had they been left to the unbiassed dictates of their own reason, could have sanctioned for a moment so impolitic a measure, which involved the loss of the most industrious and skilful portion of their subjects. Its extreme injustice and cruelty rendered it especially repugnant to the naturally humane disposition of the queen. [4] But she had been early schooled to distrust her own reason, and indeed the natural suggestions of humanity, in cases of conscience. Among the reverend counsellors, on whom she most relied in these matters, was the Dominican Torquemada. The situation which this man enjoyed as the queen's confessor, during the tender years of her youth, gave him an ascendency over her mind, which must have been denied to a person of his savage, fanatical temper, even with the advantages of this spiritual connection, had it been formed at a riper period of her life. Without opposing further resistance to the representations, so emphatically expressed, of the holy persons in whom she most confided, Isabella, at length, silenced her own scruples, and consented to the fatal measure of proscription. The edict for the expulsion of the Jews was signed by the Spanish sovereigns at Granada, March 30th, 1492. The preamble alleges, in vindication of the measure, the danger of allowing further intercourse between the Jews and their Christian subjects, in consequence of the incorrigible obstinacy, with which the former persisted in their attempts to make converts of the latter to their own faith, and to instruct them in their heretical rites, in open defiance of every legal prohibition and penalty. When a college or corporation of any kind,--the instrument goes on to state,--is convicted of any great or detestable crime, it is right that it should be disfranchised, the less suffering with the greater, the innocent with the guilty. If this be the case in temporal concerns, it is much more so in those which affect the eternal welfare of the soul. It finally decrees, that all unbaptized Jews, of whatever sex, age, or condition, should depart from the realm by the end of July next ensuing; prohibiting them from revisiting it, on any pretext whatever, under penalty of death and confiscation of property. It was, moreover, interdicted to every subject, to harbor, succor, or minister to the necessities of any Jew, after the expiration of the term limited for his departure. The persons and property of the Jews, in the mean time, were taken under the royal protection. They were allowed to dispose of their effects of every kind on their own account, and to carry the proceeds along with them, in bills of exchange, or merchandise not prohibited, but neither in gold nor silver. [5] The doom of exile fell like a thunderbolt on the heads of the Israelites. A large proportion of them had hitherto succeeded in shielding themselves from the searching eye of the Inquisition, by an affectation of reverence for the forms of Catholic worship, and a discreet forbearance of whatever might offend the prejudices of their Christian brethren. They had even hoped, that their steady loyalty, and a quiet and orderly discharge of their social duties, would in time secure them higher immunities. Many had risen to a degree of opulence, by means of the thrift and dexterity peculiar to the race, which gave them a still deeper interest in the land of their residence. [6] Their families were reared in all the elegant refinements of life; and their wealth and education often disposed them to turn their attention to liberal pursuits, which ennobled the character, indeed, but rendered them personally more sensible to physical annoyance, and less fitted to encounter the perils and privations of their dreary pilgrimage. Even the mass of the common people possessed a dexterity in various handicrafts, which afforded a comfortable livelihood, raising them far above similar classes in most other nations, who might readily be detached from the soil on which they happened to be cast, with comparatively little sacrifice of local interests. [7] These ties were now severed at a blow. They were to go forth as exiles from the land of their birth; the land where all whom they ever loved had lived or died; the land, not so much of their adoption, as of inheritance; which had been the home of their ancestors for centuries, and with whose prosperity and glory they were of course as intimately associated, as was any ancient Spaniard. They were to be cast out helpless and defenceless, with a brand of infamy set on them, among nations who had always held them in derision and hatred. Those provisions of the edict, which affected a show of kindness to the Jews, were contrived so artfully, as to be nearly nugatory. As they were excluded from the use of gold and silver, the only medium for representing their property was bills of exchange. But commerce was too limited and imperfect to allow of these being promptly obtained to any very considerable, much less to the enormous amount required in the present instance. It was impossible, moreover, to negotiate a sale of their effects under existing circumstances, since the market was soon glutted with commodities; and few would be found willing to give anything like an equivalent for what, if not disposed of within the prescribed term, the proprietors must relinquish at any rate. So deplorable, indeed, was the sacrifice of property, that a chronicler of the day mentions, that he had seen a house exchanged for an ass, and a vineyard for a suit of clothes! In Aragon, matters were still worse. The government there discovered, that the Jews were largely indebted to individuals and to certain corporations. It accordingly caused their property to be sequestrated for the benefit of their creditors, until their debts should be liquidated. Strange, indeed, that the balance should be found against the people, who have been everywhere conspicuous for their commercial sagacity and resources, and who, as factors of the great nobility and farmers of the revenue, enjoyed at least equal advantages in Spain with those possessed in other countries, for the accumulation of wealth. [8] While the gloomy aspect of their fortunes pressed heavily on the hearts of the Israelites, the Spanish clergy were indefatigable in the work of conversion. They lectured in the synagogues and public squares, expounding the doctrines of Christianity, and thundering forth both argument and invective against the Hebrew heresy. But their laudable endeavors were in a great measure counteracted by the more authoritative rhetoric of the Jewish Rabbins, who compared the persecutions of their brethren to those which their ancestors had suffered under Pharaoh. They encouraged them to persevere, representing that the present afflictions were intended as a trial of their faith by the Almighty, who designed in this way to guide them to the promised land, by opening a path through the waters, as he had done to their fathers of old. The more wealthy Israelites enforced their exhortations by liberal contributions for the relief of their indigent brethren. Thus strengthened, there were found but very few, when the day of departure arrived, who were not prepared to abandon their country rather than their religion. The extraordinary act of self-devotion by a whole people for conscience' sake may be thought, in the nineteenth century, to merit other epithets than those of "perfidy, incredulity, and stiff-necked obstinacy," with which the worthy Curate of Los Palacios, in the charitable feeling of that day, has seen fit to stigmatize it. [9] When the period of departure arrived, all the principal routes through the country might be seen swarming with emigrants, old and young, the sick and the helpless, men, women, and children, mingled promiscuously together, some mounted on horses or mules, but far the greater part undertaking their painful pilgrimage on foot. The sight of so much misery touched even the Spaniards with pity, though none might succor them; for the grand inquisitor, Torquemada, enforced the ordinance to that effect, by denouncing heavy ecclesiastical censures on all who should presume to violate it. The fugitives were distributed along various routes, being determined in their destination by accidental circumstances, much more than any knowledge of the respective countries to which they were bound. Much the largest division, amounting according to some estimates to eighty thousand souls, passed into Portugal; whose monarch, John the Second, dispensed with his scruples of conscience so far as to give them a free passage through his dominions on their way to Africa, in consideration of a tax of a _cruzado_ a head. He is even said to have silenced his scruples so far as to allow certain ingenious artisans to establish themselves permanently in the kingdom. [10] A considerable number found their way to the ports of Santa Maria and Cadiz, where, after lingering some time in the vain hope of seeing the waters open for their egress, according to the promises of the Rabbins, they embarked on board a Spanish fleet for the Barbary coast. Having crossed over to Ercilla, a Christian settlement in Africa, whence they proceeded by land towards Fez, where a considerable body of their countrymen resided, they were assaulted on their route by the roving tribes of the desert, in quest of plunder. Notwithstanding the interdict, the Jews had contrived to secrete small sums of money, sewed up in their garments or the linings of their saddles. These did not escape the avaricious eyes of their spoilers, who are even said to have ripped open the bodies of their victims, in search of gold, which they were supposed to have swallowed. The lawless barbarians, mingling lust with avarice, abandoned themselves to still more frightful excesses, violating the wives and daughters of the unresisting Jews, or massacring in cold blood such as offered resistance. But without pursuing these loathsome details further, it need only be added, that the miserable exiles endured such extremity of famine, that they were glad to force a nourishment from the grass which grew scantily among the sands of the desert; until at length great numbers of them, wasted by disease, and broken in spirit, retraced their steps to Ercilla, and consented to be baptized, in the hope of being permitted to revisit their native land. The number, indeed, was so considerable, that the priest who officiated was obliged to make use of the mop, or hyssop, with which the Roman Catholic missionaries were wont to scatter the holy drops, whose mystic virtue could cleanse the soul in a moment from the foulest stains of infidelity. "Thus," says a Castilian historian, "the calamities of these poor blind creatures proved in the end an excellent remedy, that God made use of to unseal their eyes, which they now opened to the vain promises of the Rabbins; so that, renouncing their ancient heresies, they became faithful followers of the Cross!" [11] Many of the emigrants took the direction of Italy. Those who landed at Naples brought with them an infectious disorder, contracted by long confinement in small, crowded, and ill-provided vessels. The disorder was so malignant, and spread with such frightful celerity, as to sweep off more than twenty thousand inhabitants of the city, in the course of the year, whence it extended its devastation over the whole Italian peninsula. A graphic picture of these horrors is thus given by a Genoese historian, an eye-witness of the scenes he describes. "No one," he says, "could behold the sufferings of the Jewish exiles unmoved. A great many perished of hunger, especially those of tender years. Mothers, with scarcely strength to support themselves, carried their famished infants in their arms, and died with them. Many fell victims to the cold, others to intense thirst, while the unaccustomed distresses incident to a sea-voyage aggravated their maladies. I will not enlarge on the cruelty and the avarice which they frequently experienced from the masters of the ships which transported them from Spain. Some were murdered to gratify their cupidity, others forced to sell their children for the expenses of the passage. They arrived in Genoa in crowds, but were not suffered to tarry there long, by reason of the ancient law which interdicted the Jewish traveller from a longer residence than three days. They were allowed, however, to refit their vessels, and to recruit themselves for some days from the fatigues of their voyage. One might have taken them for spectres, so emaciated were they, so cadaverous in their aspect, and with eyes so sunken; they differed in nothing from the dead, except in the power of motion, which indeed they scarcely retained. Many fainted and expired on the mole, which, being completely surrounded by the sea, was the only quarter vouchsafed to the wretched emigrants. The infection bred by such a swarm of dead and dying persons was not at once perceived; but, when the winter broke up, ulcers began to make their appearance, and the malady, which lurked for a long time in the city, broke out into the plague in the following year." [12] Many of the exiles passed into Turkey, and to different parts of the Levant, where their descendants continued to speak the Castilian language far into the following century. Others found their way to France, and even England. Part of their religious services is recited to this day in Spanish, in one or more of the London synagogues; and the modern Jew still reverts with fond partiality to Spain, as the cherished land of his fathers, illustrated by the most glorious recollections in their eventful history. [13] The whole number of Jews expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella is variously computed from one hundred and sixty thousand to eight hundred thousand souls; a discrepancy sufficiently indicating the paucity of authentic data. Most modern writers, with the usual predilection for startling results, have assumed the latter estimate; and Llorente has made it the basis of some important calculations, in his History of the Inquisition. A view of all the circumstances will lead us without much hesitation to adopt the more moderate computation. [14] This, moreover, is placed beyond reasonable doubt by the direct testimony of the Curate of Los Palacios. He reports, that a Jewish Rabbin, one of the exiles, subsequently returned to Spain, where he was baptized by him. This person, whom Bernaldez commends for his intelligence, estimated the whole number of his unbaptized countrymen in the dominions of Ferdinand and Isabella, at the publication of the edict, at thirty-six thousand families. Another Jewish authority, quoted by the Curate, reckoned them at thirty-five thousand. This, assuming an average of four and a half to a family, gives the sum total of about one hundred and sixty thousand individuals, agreeably to the computation of Bernaldez. There is little reason for supposing, that the actual amount would suffer diminution in the hands of either the Jewish or Castilian authority; since the one might naturally be led to exaggerate, in order to heighten sympathy with the calamities of his nation, and the other, to magnify as far as possible the glorious triumphs of the Cross. [15] The detriment incurred by the state, however, is not founded so much on any numerical estimate, as on the subtraction of the mechanical skill, intelligence, and general resources of an orderly, industrious population. In this view, the mischief was incalculably greater than that inferred by the mere number of the exiled; and, although even this might have been gradually repaired in a country allowed the free and healthful development of its energies, yet in Spain this was so effectually counteracted by the Inquisition, and other causes in the following century, that the loss may be deemed irretrievable. The expulsion of so numerous a class of subjects by an independent act of the sovereign, might well be regarded as an enormous stretch of prerogative, altogether incompatible with anything like a free government. But to judge the matter rightly, we must take into view the actual position of the Jews at that time. Far from forming an integral part of the commonwealth, they were regarded as alien to it, as a mere excrescence, which, so far from contributing to the healthful action of the body politic, was nourished by its vicious humors, and might be lopped off at any time, when the health of the system demanded it. Far from being protected by the laws, the only aim of the laws, in reference to them, was to define more precisely their civil incapacities, and to draw the line of division more broadly between them and the Christians. Even this humiliation by no means satisfied the national prejudices, as is evinced by the great number of tumults and massacres of which they were the victims. In these circumstances, it seemed to be no great assumption of authority, to pronounce sentence of exile against those whom public opinion had so long proscribed as enemies to the state. It was only carrying into effect that opinion, expressed as it had been in a great variety of ways; and, as far as the rights of the nation were concerned, the banishment of a single Spaniard would have been held a grosser violation of them, than that of the whole race of Israelites. It has been common with modern historians to detect a principal motive for the expulsion of the Jews, in the avarice of the government. It is only necessary, however, to transport ourselves back to those times, to find it in perfect accordance with their spirit, at least in Spain. It is indeed incredible, that persons possessing the political sagacity of Ferdinand and Isabella could indulge a temporary cupidity at the sacrifice of the most important and permanent interests, converting their wealthiest districts into a wilderness, and dispeopling them of a class of citizens who contributed beyond all others, not only to the general resources, but the direct revenues of the crown; a measure so manifestly unsound, as to lead even a barbarian monarch of that day to exclaim, "Do they call this Ferdinand a politic prince, who can thus impoverish his own kingdom and enrich ours!" [16] It would seem, indeed, when the measure had been determined on, that the Aragonese monarch was willing, by his expedient of sequestration, to control its operation in such a manner as to secure to his own subjects the full pecuniary benefit of it. [17] No imputation of this kind attaches to Castile. The clause of the ordinance, which might imply such a design, by interdicting the exportation of gold and silver, was only enforcing a law, which had been already twice enacted by cortes in the present reign, and which was deemed of such moment, that the offence was made capital. [18] We need look no further for the principle of action, in this case, than the spirit of religious bigotry, which led to a similar expulsion of the Jews from England, France, and other parts of Europe, as well as from Portugal, under circumstances of peculiar atrocity, a few years later. [19] Indeed, the spirit of persecution did not expire with the fifteenth century, but extended far into the more luminous periods of the seventeenth and eighteenth; and that, too, under a ruler of the enlarged capacity of Frederic the Great, whose intolerance could not plead in excuse the blindness of fanaticism. [20] How far the banishment of the Jews was conformable to the opinions of the most enlightened contemporaries, may be gathered from the encomiums lavished on its authors from more than one quarter. Spanish writers, without exception, celebrate it as a sublime sacrifice of all temporal interests to religious principle. The best instructed foreigners, in like manner, however they may condemn the details of its execution, or commiserate the sufferings of the Jews, commend the act, as evincing the most lively and laudable zeal for the true faith. [21] It cannot be denied, that Spain at this period surpassed most of the nations of Christendom in religious enthusiasm, or, to speak more correctly, in bigotry. This is doubtless imputable to the long war with the Moslems, and its recent glorious issue, which swelled every heart with exultation, disposing it to consummate the triumphs of the Cross by purging the land from a heresy, which, strange as it may seem, was scarcely less detested than that of Mahomet. Both the sovereigns partook largely of these feelings. With regard to Isabella, moreover, it must be borne constantly in mind, as has been repeatedly remarked in the course of this History, that she had been used to surrender her own judgment, in matters of conscience, to those spiritual guardians, who were supposed in that age to be its rightful depositaries, and the only casuists who could safely determine the doubtful line of duty. Isabella's pious disposition, and her trembling solicitude to discharge her duty, at whatever cost of personal inclination, greatly enforced the precepts of education. In this way, her very virtues became the source of her errors. Unfortunately, she lived in an age and station, which attached to these errors the most momentous consequences. [22]--But we gladly turn from these dark prospects to a brighter page of her history. FOOTNOTES [1] It is a proof of the high consideration in which such Israelites as were willing to embrace Christianity were held, that three of that number, Alvarez, Avila, and Pulgar, were private secretaries of the queen. (Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 18.) An incidental expression of Martyr's, among many similar ones by contemporaries, affords the true key to the popular odium against the Jews. "Cum namque viderent, Judaeorum tabido commercio, qui hac horâ sunt in Hispaniâ _innumeri Christianis ditiores_, plurimorum animos corrumpi ac seduci," etc. Opus Epist., epist. 92. [2] Paramo, De Origine Inquisitionis, p. 164.--Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. cap. 7, sec. 3.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 94.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. p. 128. [3] Paramo, De Origine Inquisitionis, p. 163. Salazar de Mendoza refers the sovereign's consent to the banishment of the Jews, in a great measure, to the urgent remonstrances of the cardinal of Spain. The bigotry of the biographer makes him claim the credit of every fanatical act for his illustrious hero. See Crón. del Gran Cardenal, p. 250. [4] Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. chap. 7, sect. 5. Pulgar, in a letter to the cardinal of Spain, animadverting with much severity on the tenor of certain municipal ordinances against the Jews in Guipuscoa and Toledo, in 1482, plainly intimates, that they were not at all to the taste of the queen. See Letras, (Amstelodami, 1670,) let. 31. [5] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1492.--Recep. de las Leyes, lib. 8, tit. 2, ley 2.--Pragmáticas del Reyno, ed. 1520, fol. 3. [6] The Curate of Los Palacios speaks of several Israelites worth one or two millions of maravedies, and another even as having amassed ten. He mentions one in particular, by the name of Abraham, as renting the _greater part of Castile_! It will hardly do to take the good Curate's statement _à la lettre_. See Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 112. [7] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, ubi supra. [8] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 10.--Zurita, Analos, tom. v. fol. 9. Capmany notices the number of synagogues existing in Aragon, in 1428, as amounting to nineteen. In Galicia at the same time there were but three, and in Catalonia but one. See Mem. de Barcelona, tom. iv. Apend. num. 11. [9] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 10, 113.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. p. 131. [10] Zurita, Anales, tom. v. fol. 9.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. p. 133.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, ubi supra.--La Clède, Hist. de Portugal, tom. iv. p. 95.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. p. 602. [11] Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. p. 133.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 113. [12] Senarega, apud Muratori, Rerum Ital. Script., tom. xxiv. pp. 531, 532. [13] See a sensible notice of Hebrew literature in Spain, in the Retrospective Review, vol. iii. p. 209.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 26, cap. 1.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. fol. 9. Not a few of the learned exiles attained to eminence in those countries of Europe where they transferred their residence. One is mentioned by Castro as a leading practitioner of medicine in Genoa; another, as filling the posts of astronomer and chronicler, under King Emanuel of Portugal. Many of them published works in various departments of science, which were translated into the Spanish and other European languages. Biblioteca Española, tom. i. pp. 359-372. [14] From a curious document in the _Archives of Simancas_, consisting of a report made to the Spanish sovereigns by their accountant general, Quintanilla, in 1492, it would appear, that the population of the kingdom of Castile, exclusive of Granada, was then estimated at 1,500,000 _vecinos_, or householders. (See Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., Apend. no. 12.) This, allowing four and a half to a family, would make the whole population 6,750,000. It appears from the statement of Bernaldez, that the kingdom of Castile contained five-sixths of the whole amount of Jews in the Spanish monarchy. This proportion, if 800,000 be received as the total, would amount in round numbers to 670,000, or ten per cent, of the whole population of the kingdom. Now, it is manifestly improbable that so large a portion of the whole nation, conspicuous moreover for wealth and intelligence, could have been held so light in a political aspect, as the Jews certainly were, or have tamely submitted for so many years to the most wanton indignities without resistance; or finally, that the Spanish government would have ventured on so bold a measure as the banishment of so numerous and powerful a class, and that too with as few precautions, apparently, as would be required for driving out of the country a roving gang of gypsies. [15] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 110.--Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. chap. 7, sect. 7.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 26.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. fol. 9. [16] Bajazet. See Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. p. 310.--Paramo, De Origine Inquisitionis, p. 168. [17] "In truth," Father Abarca somewhat innocently remarks, "King Ferdinand was a politic Christian, making the interests of church and state mutually subservient to each other"! Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 310. [18] Once at Toledo, 1480, and at Murcia, 1488. See Recop. de las Leyes, lib. 6, tit. 18, ley 1. [19] The Portuguese government caused all children of fourteen years of age, or under, to be taken from their parents and retained in the country, as fit subjects for a Christian education. The distress occasioned by this cruel provision may be well imagined. Many of the unhappy parents murdered their children to defeat the ordinance; and many laid violent hands on themselves. Faria y Sousa coolly remarks, that "It was a great mistake in King Emanuel to think of converting any Jew to Christianity, old enough to pronounce the name of Moses!" He fixes three years of age as the utmost limit. (Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. p. 496.) Mr. Turner has condensed, with his usual industry, the most essential chronological facts relative to modern Jewish history, into a note contained in the second volume of his History of England, pp. 114-120. [20] They were also rejected from Vienna, in 1669. The illiberal, and indeed most cruel legislation of Frederic II., in reference to his Jewish subjects, transports us back to the darkest periods of the Visigothic monarchy. The reader will find a summary of these enactments in the third volume of Milman's agreeable History of the Jews. [21] The accomplished and amiable Florentine, Pico di Mirandola, in his treatise on Judicial Astrology, remarks that, "the sufferings of the Jews, _in which the glory of divine justice delighted_, were so extreme as to fill us Christians with commiseration." The Genoese historian, Senarega, indeed admits that the measure savored _of some slight degree of cruelty_. "Res haec primo conspectu laudabilis visa est, quia decus nostrae Religionis respiceret, sed aliquantulum in se crudelitatis continere, si eos non belluas, sed homines a Deo creatos, consideravimus." De Rebus Genuensibus, apud Muratori, Rerum Ital. Script., tom. xxiv.-- Illescas, Hist. Pontif., apud Paramo, De Origine Inquisitionis, p. 167. [22] Llorente sums up his account of the expulsion, by assigning the following motives to the principal agents in the business. "The measure," he says, "may be referred to the fanaticism of Torquemada, to the avarice and superstition of Ferdinand, to the false ideas and inconsiderate zeal with which they had inspired Isabella, to whom history cannot refuse the praise of great sweetness of disposition, and an enlightened mind." Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. ch. 7, sec. 10. CHAPTER XVIII. ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF FERDINAND.--RETURN AND SECOND VOYAGE OF COLUMBUS. 1492-1493. Attempt on Ferdinand's Life.--Consternation and Loyalty of the People.-- Return of Columbus.--His Progress to Barcelona.--Interviews with the Sovereigns.--Sensations caused by the Discovery.--Regulations of Trade.-- Conversion of the Natives.--Famous Bulls of Alexander VI.--Jealousy of Portugal.--Second Voyage of Columbus.--Treaty of Tordesillas. Towards the latter end of May, 1492, the Spanish sovereigns quitted Granada, between which and Santa Fe they had divided their time since the surrender of the Moorish metropolis. They were occupied during the two following months with the affairs of Castile. In August they visited Aragon, proposing to establish their winter residence there in order to provide for its internal administration, and conclude the negotiations for the final surrender of Roussillon and Cerdagne by France, to which these provinces had been mortgaged by Ferdinand's father, John the Second; proving ever since a fruitful source of diplomacy, which threatened more than once to terminate in open rupture. Ferdinand and Isabella arrived in Aragon on the 8th of August, accompanied by Prince John and the infantas, and a brilliant train of Castilian nobles. In their progress through the country they were everywhere received with the most lively enthusiasm. The whole nation seemed to abandon itself to jubilee, at the approach of its illustrious sovereigns, whose heroic constancy had rescued Spain from the detested empire of the Saracens. After devoting some months to the internal police of the kingdom, the court transferred its residence to Catalonia, whose capital it reached about the middle of October. During its detention in this place, Ferdinand's career was wellnigh brought to an untimely close. [1] It was a good old custom of Catalonia, long since fallen into desuetude, for the monarch to preside in the tribunals of justice, at least once a week, for the purpose of determining the suits of the poorer classes especially, who could not afford the more expensive forms of litigation. King Ferdinand, in conformity with this usage, held a court in the house of deputation, on the 7th of December, being the vigil of the conception of the Virgin. At noon, as he was preparing to quit the palace, after the conclusion of business, he lingered in the rear of his retinue, conversing with some of the officers of the court. As the party was issuing from a little chapel contiguous to the royal saloon, and just as the king was descending a flight of stairs, a ruffian darted from an obscure recess in which he had concealed himself early in the morning, and aimed a blow with a short sword, or knife, at the back of Ferdinand's neck. Fortunately the edge of the weapon was turned by a gold chain or collar which he was in the habit of wearing. It inflicted, however, a deep wound between the shoulders. Ferdinand instantly cried out, "St. Mary preserve us! treason, treason!" and his attendants, rushing on the assassin, stabbed him in three places with their poniards, and would have despatched him on the spot, had not the king, with his usual presence of mind, commanded them to desist, and take the man alive, that they might ascertain the real authors of the conspiracy. This was done accordingly, and Ferdinand, fainting with loss of blood, was carefully removed to his apartments in the royal palace. [2] The report of the catastrophe spread like wildfire through the city. All classes were thrown into consternation by so foul an act, which seemed to cast a stain on the honor and good faith of the Catalans. Some suspected it to be the work of a vindictive Moor, others of a disappointed courtier. The queen, who had swooned on first receiving intelligence of the event, suspected the ancient enmity of the Catalans, who had shown such determined opposition to her husband in his early youth. She gave instant orders to hold in readiness one of the galleys lying in the port, in order to transport her children from the place, as she feared the conspiracy might be designed to embrace other victims. [3] The populace, in the mean while, assembled in great numbers round the palace where the king lay. All feelings of hostility had long since given way to devoted loyalty towards a government, which had uniformly respected the liberties of its subjects, and whose paternal sway had secured similar blessings to Barcelona with the rest of the empire. They thronged round the building, crying out that the king was slain, and demanding that his murderers should be delivered up to them. Ferdinand, exhausted as he was, would have presented himself at the window of his apartment, but was prevented from making the effort by his physicians. It was with great difficulty that the people were at length satisfied that he was still living, and that they finally consented to disperse, on the assurance, that the assassin should be brought to condign punishment. The king's wound, which did not appear dangerous at first, gradually exhibited more alarming symptoms. One of the bones was found to be fractured, and a part of it was removed by the surgeons. On the seventh day his situation was considered extremely critical. During this time, the queen was constantly by his side, watching with him day and night, and administering all his medicines with her own hand. At length, the unfavorable symptoms yielded; and his excellent constitution enabled him so far to recover, that in less than three weeks he was able to show himself to the eyes of his anxious subjects, who gave themselves up to a delirium of joy, offering thanksgivings and grateful oblations in the churches; while many a pilgrimage, which had been vowed for his restoration to health, was performed by the good people of Barcelona, with naked feet, and even on their knees, among the wild sierras that surround the city. The author of the crime proved to be a peasant, about sixty years of age, of that humble class, _de remensa_, as it was termed, which Ferdinand had been so instrumental some few years since in releasing from the baser and more grinding pains of servitude. The man appeared to be insane; alleging, in vindication of his conduct, that he was the rightful proprietor of the crown, which he expected to obtain by Ferdinand's death. He declared himself willing, however, to give up his pretensions, on condition of being set at liberty. The king, convinced of his alienation of mind, would have discharged him; but the Catalans, indignant at the reproach which such a crime seemed to attach to their own honor, and perhaps distrusting the plea of insanity, thought it necessary to expiate it by the blood of the offender, and condemned the unhappy wretch to the dreadful doom of a traitor; the preliminary barbarities of the sentence, however, were remitted, at the intercession of the queen. [4] In the spring of 1493, while the court was still at Barcelona, letters were received from Christopher Columbus, announcing his return to Spain, and the successful achievement of his great enterprise, by the discovery of land beyond the western ocean. The delight and astonishment, raised by this intelligence, were proportioned to the skepticism, with which his project had been originally viewed. The sovereigns were now filled with a natural impatience to ascertain the extent and other particulars of the important discovery; and they transmitted instant instructions to the admiral to repair to Barcelona, as soon as he should have made the preliminary arrangements for the further prosecution of his enterprise. [5] The great navigator had succeeded, as is well known, after a voyage the natural difficulties of which had been much augmented by the distrust and mutinous spirit of his followers, in descrying land on Friday, the 12th of October, 1492. After some months spent in exploring the delightful regions, now for the first time thrown open to the eyes of a European, he embarked in the month of January, 1493, for Spain. One of his vessels had previously foundered, and another had deserted him; so that he was left alone to retrace his course across the Atlantic. After a most tempestuous voyage, he was compelled to take shelter in the Tagus, sorely against his inclination. [6] He experienced, however, the most honorable reception from the Portuguese monarch, John the Second, who did ample justice to the great qualities of Columbus, although he had failed to profit by them. [7] After a brief delay, the admiral resumed his voyage, and crossing the bar of Saltes entered the harbor of Palos about noon, on the 15th of March, 1493, being exactly seven months and eleven days since his departure from that port. [8] Great was the agitation in the little community of Palos, as they beheld the well-known vessel of the admiral re-entering their harbor. Their desponding imaginations had long since consigned him to a watery grave; for, in addition to the preternatural horrors which hung over the voyage, they had experienced the most stormy and disastrous winter within the recollection of the oldest mariners. [9] Most of them had relatives or friends on board. They thronged immediately to the shore, to assure themselves with their own eyes of the truth of their return. When they beheld their faces once more, and saw them accompanied by the numerous evidences which they brought back of the success of the expedition, they burst forth in acclamations of joy and gratulation. They awaited the landing of Columbus, when the whole population of the place accompanied him and his crew to the principal church, where solemn thanksgivings were offered up for their return; while every bell in the village sent forth a joyous peal in honor of the glorious event. The admiral was too desirous of presenting himself before the sovereigns, to protract his stay long at Palos. He took with him on his journey specimens of the multifarious products of the newly discovered regions. He was accompanied by several of the native islanders, arrayed in their simple barbaric costume, and decorated, as he passed through the principal cities, with collars, bracelets, and other ornaments of gold, rudely fashioned; he exhibited also considerable quantities of the same metal in dust, or in crude masses, [10] numerous vegetable exotics, possessed of aromatic or medicinal virtue, and several kinds of quadrupeds unknown in Europe, and birds, whose varieties of gaudy plumage gave a brilliant effect to the pageant. The admiral's progress through the country was everywhere impeded by the multitudes thronging forth to gaze at the extraordinary spectacle, and the more extraordinary man, who, in the emphatic language of that time, which has now lost its force from its familiarity, first revealed the existence of a "New World." As he passed through the busy, populous city of Seville, every window, balcony, and housetop, which could afford a glimpse of him, is described to have been crowded with spectators. It was the middle of April before Columbus reached Barcelona. The nobility and cavaliers in attendance on the court, together with the authorities of the city, came to the gates to receive him, and escorted him to the royal presence. Ferdinand and Isabella were seated, with their son, Prince John, under a superb canopy of state, awaiting his arrival. On his approach, they rose from their seats, and, extending their hands to him to salute, caused him to be seated before them. These were unprecedented marks of condescension to a person of Columbus's rank, in the haughty and ceremonious court of Castile. It was, indeed, the proudest moment in the life of Columbus. He had fully established the truth of his long-contested theory, in the face of argument, sophistry, sneer, skepticism, and contempt. He had achieved this, not by chance, but by calculation, supported through the most adverse circumstances by consummate conduct. The honors paid him, which had hitherto been reserved only for rank, or fortune, or military success, purchased by the blood and tears of thousands, were, in his case, a homage to intellectual power, successfully exerted in behalf of the noblest interests of humanity. [11] After a brief interval, the sovereigns requested from Columbus a recital of his adventures. His manner was sedate and dignified, but warmed by the glow of natural enthusiasm. He enumerated the several islands which he had visited, expatiated on the temperate character of the climate, and the capacity of the soil for every variety of agricultural production, appealing to the samples imported by him, as evidence of their natural fruitfulness. He dwelt more at large on the precious metals to be found in these islands, which he inferred, less from the specimens actually obtained, than from the uniform testimony of the natives to their abundance in the unexplored regions of the interior. Lastly, he pointed out the wide scope afforded to Christian zeal, in the illumination of a race of men, whose minds, far from being wedded to any system of idolatry, were prepared by their extreme simplicity for the reception of pure and uncorrupted doctrine. The last consideration touched Isabella's heart most sensibly; and the whole audience, kindled with various emotions by the speaker's eloquence, filled up the perspective with the gorgeous coloring of their own fancies, as ambition, or avarice, or devotional feeling predominated in their bosoms. When Columbus ceased, the king and queen, together with all present, prostrated themselves on their knees in grateful thanksgivings, while the solemn strains of the Te Deum were poured forth by the choir of the royal chapel, as in commemoration of some glorious victory. [12] The discoveries of Columbus excited a sensation, particularly among men of science, in the most distant parts of Europe, strongly contrasting with the apathy which had preceded them. They congratulated one another on being reserved for an age which had witnessed the consummation of so grand an event. The learned Martyr, who, in his multifarious correspondence, had not even deigned to notice the preparations for the voyage of discovery, now lavished the most unbounded panegyric on its results; which he contemplated with the eye of a philosopher, having far less reference to considerations of profit or policy, than to the prospect which they unfolded of enlarging the boundaries of knowledge. [12] Most of the scholars of the day, however, adopted the erroneous hypothesis of Columbus, who considered the lands he had discovered, as bordering on the eastern shores of Asia, and lying adjacent to the vast and opulent regions depicted in such golden colors by Mandeville and the Poli. This conjecture, which was conformable to the admiral's opinions before undertaking the voyage, was corroborated by the apparent similarity between various natural productions of these islands, and of the east. From this misapprehension, the new dominions soon came to be distinguished as the West Indies, an appellation by which they are still recognized in the titles of the Spanish. crown. [13] Columbus, during his residence at Barcelona, continued to receive from the Spanish sovereigns the most honorable distinctions which royal bounty could confer. When Ferdinand rode abroad, he was accompanied by the admiral at his side. The courtiers, in emulation of their master, made frequent entertainments, at which he was treated with the punctilious deference paid to a noble of the highest class. [14] But the attentions most grateful to his lofty spirit were the preparations of the Spanish court for prosecuting his discoveries, on a scale commensurate with their importance. A board was established for the direction of Indian affairs, consisting of a superintendent and two subordinate functionaries. The first of these officers was Juan de Fonseca, archdeacon of Seville, an active, ambitious prelate, subsequently raised to high episcopal preferment, whose shrewdness, and capacity for business, enabled him to maintain the control of the Indian department during the whole of the present reign. An office for the transaction of business was instituted at Seville, and a custom-house placed under its direction at Cadiz. This was the origin of the important establishment of the _Casa de la Contratacion de las Indias_, or India House. [15] The commercial regulations adopted exhibit a narrow policy in some of their features, for which a justification may be found in the spirit of the age, and in the practice of the Portuguese particularly, but which entered still more largely into the colonial legislation of Spain under later princes. The new territories, far from being permitted free intercourse with foreign nations, were opened only under strict limitations to Spanish subjects, and were reserved, as forming, in some sort, part of the exclusive revenue of the crown. All persons of whatever description were interdicted, under the severest penalties, from trading with, or even visiting the Indies, without license from the constituted authorities. It was impossible to evade this, as a minute specification of the ships; cargoes, crews, with the property appertaining to each individual, was required to be taken at the office in Cadiz, and a corresponding registration in a similar office established at Hispaniola. A more sagacious spirit was manifested in the ample provision made of whatever could contribute to the support or permanent prosperity of the infant colony. Grain, plants, the seeds of numerous vegetable products, which in the genial climate of the Indies might be made valuable articles for domestic consumption or export, were liberally furnished. Commodities of every description for the supply of the fleet were exempted from duty. The owners of all vessels throughout the ports of Andalusia were required, by an ordinance somewhat arbitrary, to hold them in readiness for the expedition. Still further authority was given to impress both officers and men, if necessary, into the service. Artisans of every sort, provided with the implements of their various crafts, including a great number of miners for exploring the subterraneous treasures of the new regions, were enrolled in the expedition; in order to defray the heavy charges of which, the government, in addition to the regular resources, had recourse to a loan, and to the sequestrated property of the exiled Jews. [16] Amid their own temporal concerns, the Spanish sovereigns did not forget the spiritual interests of their new subjects. The Indians, who accompanied Columbus to Barcelona, had been all of them baptized, being offered up, in the language of a Castilian writer, as the first-fruits of the gentiles. King Ferdinand, and his son, Prince John, stood as sponsors to two of them, who were permitted to take their names. One of the Indians remained attached to the prince's establishment; the residue were sent to Seville, whence, after suitable religious instruction, they were to be returned as missionaries for the propagation of the faith among their own countrymen. Twelve Spanish ecclesiastics were also destined to this service; among whom was the celebrated Las Casas, so conspicuous afterwards for his benevolent exertions in behalf of the unfortunate natives. The most explicit directions were given to the admiral, to use every effort for the illumination of the poor heathen, which was set forth as the primary object of the expedition. He was particularly enjoined "to abstain from all means of annoyance, and to treat them well and lovingly, maintaining a familiar intercourse with them, rendering them all the kind offices in his power, distributing presents of the merchandise and various commodities, which their Highnesses had caused to be embarked on board the fleet for that purpose; and finally, to chastise, in the most exemplary manner, all who should offer the natives the slightest molestation." Such were the instructions emphatically urged on Columbus for the regulation of his intercourse with the savages; and their indulgent tenor sufficiently attests the benevolent and rational views of Isabella, in religious matters, when not warped by any foreign influence. [17] Towards the last of May, Columbus quitted Barcelona for the purpose of superintending and expediting the preparations for departure on his second voyage. He was accompanied to the gates of the city by all the nobility and cavaliers of the court. Orders were issued to the different towns to provide him and his suite with lodgings free of expense. His former commission was not only confirmed in its full extent, but considerably enlarged. For the sake of despatch, he was authorized to nominate to all offices, without application to government; and ordinances and letters patent, bearing the royal seal, were to be issued by him, subscribed by himself or his deputy. He was intrusted, in fine, with such unlimited jurisdiction, as showed, that, however tardy the sovereigns may have been in granting him their confidence, they were not disposed to stint the measure of it, when his deserts were once established. [18] Soon after Columbus's return to Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella applied to the court of Rome, to confirm them in the possession of their recent discoveries, and invest them with similar extent of jurisdiction with that formerly conferred on the kings of Portugal. It was an opinion, as ancient perhaps as the crusades, that the pope, as vicar of Christ, had competent authority to dispose of all countries inhabited by heathen nations, in favor of Christian potentates. Although Ferdinand and Isabella do not seem to have been fully satisfied of this right, yet they were willing to acquiesce in its assumption in the present instance, from the conviction that the papal sanction would most effectually exclude the pretensions of all others, and especially their Portuguese rivals. In their application to the Holy See, they were careful to represent their own discoveries as in no way interfering with the rights formerly conceded by it to their neighbors. They enlarged on their services in the propagation of the faith, which they affirmed to be a principal motive of their present operations. They intimated, finally, that, although many competent persons deemed their application to the court of Rome, for a title to territories already in their possession, to be unnecessary, yet, as pious princes, and dutiful children of the church, they were unwilling to proceed further without the sanction of him, to whose keeping its highest interests were intrusted. [19] The pontifical throne was at that time filled by Alexander the Sixth; a man who, although degraded by unrestrained indulgence of the most sordid appetites, was endowed by nature with singular acuteness, as well as energy of character. He lent a willing ear to the application of the Spanish government, and made no hesitation in granting what cost him nothing, while it recognized the assumption of powers, which had already begun to totter in the opinion of mankind. On the 3d of May, 1493, he published a bull, in which, taking into consideration the eminent services of the Spanish monarchs in the cause of the church, especially in the subversion of the Mahometan empire in Spain, and willing to afford still wider scope for the prosecution of their pious labors, he, "out of his pure liberality, infallible knowledge, and plenitude of apostolic power," confirmed them in the possession of all lands discovered or hereafter to be discovered by them in the western ocean, comprehending the same extensive rights of jurisdiction with those formerly conceded to the kings of Portugal. This bull he supported by another, dated on the following day, in which the pope, in order to obviate any misunderstanding with the Portuguese, and acting no doubt on the suggestion of the Spanish sovereigns, defined with greater precision the intention of his original grant to the latter, by bestowing on them all such lands as they should discover to the west and south of an imaginary line, to be drawn from pole to pole, at the distance of one hundred leagues to the west of the Azores and Cape de Verd Islands. [20] It seems to have escaped his Holiness, that the Spaniards, by pursuing a western route, might in time reach the eastern limits of countries previously granted to the Portuguese. At least this would appear from the import of a third bull, issued September 25th of the same year, which invested the sovereigns with plenary authority over all countries discovered by them, whether in the east, or within the boundaries of India, all previous concessions to the contrary notwithstanding. With the title derived from actual possession, thus fortified by the highest ecclesiastical sanction, the Spaniards might have promised themselves an uninterrupted career of discovery, but for the jealousy of their rivals, the Portuguese. [21] The court of Lisbon viewed with secret disquietude the increasing maritime enterprise of its neighbors. While the Portuguese were timidly creeping along the barren shores of Africa, the Spaniards had boldly launched into the deep, and rescued unknown realms from its embraces, which teemed in their fancies with treasures of inestimable wealth. Their mortification was greatly enhanced by the reflection, that all this might have been achieved for themselves, had they but known how to profit by the proposals of Columbus. [22] From the first moment in which the success of the admiral's enterprise was established, John the Second, a politic and ambitious prince, had sought some pretence to check the career of discovery, or at least to share in the spoils of it. [23] In his interview with Columbus, at Lisbon, he suggested, that the discoveries of the Spaniards might interfere with the rights secured to the Portuguese by repeated papal sanctions since the beginning of the present century, and guaranteed by the treaty with Spain, in 1479. Columbus, without entering into the discussion, contented himself with declaring, that he had been instructed by his own government to steer clear of all Portuguese settlements on the African coast, and that his course indeed had led him in an entirely different direction. Although John professed himself satisfied with the explanation, he soon after despatched an ambassador to Barcelona, who, after dwelling on some irrelevant topics, touched, as it were, incidentally on the real object of his mission, the late voyage of discovery. He congratulated the Spanish sovereigns on its success; expatiated on the civilities shown by the court of Lisbon to Columbus, on his late arrival there; and acknowledged the satisfaction felt by his master at the orders given to the admiral, to hold a western course from the Canaries, expressing a hope that the same course would be pursued in future, without interfering with the rights of Portugal by deviation to the south. This was the first occasion, on which the existence of such claims had been intimated by the Portuguese. In the mean while, Ferdinand and Isabella received intelligence that King John was equipping a considerable armament in order to anticipate or defeat their discoveries in the west. They instantly sent one of their household, Don Lope de Herrera, as ambassador to Lisbon, with instructions to make their acknowledgments to the king for his hospitable reception of Columbus, accompanied with a request that he would prohibit his subjects from interference with the discoveries of the Spaniards in the west, in the same manner as these latter had been excluded from the Portuguese possessions in Africa. The ambassador was furnished with orders of a different import, provided he should find the reports correct, respecting the equipment and probable destination of a Portuguese armada. Instead of a conciliatory deportment, he was, in that case, to assume a tone of remonstrance, and to demand a full explanation from King John, of his designs. The cautious prince, who had received, through his secret agents in Castile, intelligence of these latter instructions, managed matters so discreetly as to give no occasion for their exercise. He abandoned, or at least postponed, his meditated expedition, in the hope of adjusting the dispute by negotiation, in which he excelled. In order to quiet the apprehensions of the Spanish court, he engaged to fit out no fleet from his dominions within sixty days; at the same time he sent a fresh mission to Barcelona, with directions to propose an amicable adjustment of the conflicting claims of the two nations, by making the parallel of the Canaries a line of partition between them; the right of discovery to the north being reserved to the Spaniards, and that to the south to the Portuguese. [24] While this game of diplomacy was going on, the Castilian court availed itself of the interval afforded by its rival, to expedite preparations for the second voyage of discovery; which, through the personal activity of the admiral, and the facilities everywhere afforded him, were fully completed before the close of September. Instead of the reluctance, and indeed avowed disgust, which had been manifested by all classes to his former voyage, the only embarrassment now arose from the difficulty of selection among the multitude of competitors, who pressed to be enrolled in the present expedition. The reports and sanguine speculations of the first adventurers had inflamed the cupidity of many, which was still further heightened by the exhibition of the rich and curious products which Columbus had brought back with him, and by the popular belief that the new discoveries formed part of that gorgeous east, "whose caverns teem With diamond flaming, and with seeds of gold," and which tradition and romance had alike invested with the supernatural splendors of enchantment. Many others were stimulated by the wild love of adventure, kindled in the long Moorish war, but which, now excluded from that career, sought other objects in the vast, untravelled regions of the New World. The complement of the fleet was originally fixed at twelve hundred souls, which, through importunity or various pretences of the applicants, was eventually swelled to fifteen hundred. Among these were many who enlisted without compensation, including several persons of rank, hidalgos, and members of the royal household. The whole squadron amounted to seventeen vessels, three of them of one hundred tons' burden each. With this gallant navy, Columbus, dropping down the Guadalquivir, took his departure from the bay of Cadiz, on the 25th of September, 1493; presenting a striking contrast to the melancholy plight, in which, but the year previous, he sallied forth like some forlorn knight-errant, on a desperate and chimerical enterprise. [25] No sooner had the fleet weighed anchor, than Ferdinand and Isabella despatched an embassy in solemn state to advise the king of Portugal of it. This embassy was composed of two persons of distinguished rank, Don Pedro de Ayala, and Don Garci Lopez de Carbajal. Agreeably to their instructions, they represented to the Portuguese monarch the inadmissibility of his propositions respecting the boundary line of navigation; they argued that the grants of the Holy See, and the treaty with Spain in 1479, had reference merely to the actual possessions of Portugal, and the right of discovery by an eastern route along the coasts of Africa to the Indies; that these rights had been invariably respected by Spain; that the late voyage of Columbus struck into a directly opposite track; and that the several bulls of Pope Alexander the Sixth, prescribing the line of partition, not from east to west, but from the north to the south pole, were intended to secure to the Spaniards the exclusive right of discovery in the western ocean. The ambassadors concluded with offering, in the name of their sovereigns, to refer the whole matter in dispute to the arbitration of the court of Rome, or of any common umpire. King John was deeply chagrined at learning the departure of the Spanish expedition. He saw that his rivals had been acting while he had been amused with negotiation. He at first threw out hints of an immediate rupture; and endeavored, it is said, to intimidate the Castilian ambassadors, by bringing them accidentally, as it were, in presence of a splendid array of cavalry, mounted and ready for immediate service. He vented his spleen on the embassy, by declaring, that "it was a mere abortion; having neither head nor feet;" alluding to the personal infirmity of Ayala, who was lame, and to the light, frivolous character of the other envoy. [26] These symptoms of discontent were duly notified to the Spanish government; who commanded the superintendent, Fonseca, to keep a vigilant eye on the movements of the Portuguese, and, in case any hostile armament should quit their ports, to be in readiness to act against it with one double its force. King John, however, was too shrewd a prince to be drawn into so impolitic a measure as war with a powerful adversary, quite as likely to baffle him in the field, as in the council. Neither did he relish the suggestion of deciding the dispute by arbitration; since he well knew, that his claim rested on too unsound a basis, to authorize the expectation of a favorable award from any impartial umpire. He had already failed in an application for redress to the court of Rome, which answered him by reference to its bulls, recently published. In this emergency, he came to the resolution at last, which should have been first adopted, of deciding the matter by a fair and open conference. It was not until the following year, however, that his discontent so far subsided as to allow his acquiescence in this measure. At length, commissioners named by the two crowns convened at Tordesillas, and on the 7th of June, 1494, subscribed articles of agreement, which were ratified, in the course of the same year, by the respective powers. In this treaty, the Spaniards were secured in the exclusive right of navigation and discovery in the western ocean. At the urgent remonstrance of the Portuguese, however, who complained that the papal line of demarcation cooped up their enterprises within too narrow limits, they consented, that instead of one hundred, it should be removed three hundred and seventy leagues west of the Cape de Verd islands, beyond which all discoveries should appertain to the Spanish nation. It was agreed that one or two caravels should be provided by each nation, to meet at the Grand Canary, and proceed due west, the appointed distance, with a number of scientific men on board, for the purpose of accurately determining the longitude; and if any lands should fall under the meridian, the direction of the line should be ascertained by the erection of beacons at suitable distances. The proposed meeting never took place. But the removal of the partition line was followed by important consequences to the Portuguese, who derived from it their pretensions to the noble empire of Brazil. [27] Thus this singular misunderstanding, which menaced an open rupture at one time, was happily adjusted. Fortunately, the accomplishment of the passage round the Cape of Good Hope, which occurred soon afterwards, led the Portuguese in an opposite direction to their Spanish rivals, their Brazilian possessions having too little attractions, at first, to turn them from the splendid path of discovery thrown open in the east. It was not many years, however, before the two nations, by pursuing opposite routes of circumnavigation, were brought into collision on the other side of the globe; a circumstance never contemplated, apparently, by the treaty of Tordesillas. Their mutual pretensions were founded, however, on the provisions of that treaty, which, as the reader is aware, was itself only supplementary to the original bull of demarcation of Alexander the Sixth. [28] Thus this bold stretch of papal authority, so often ridiculed as chimerical and absurd, was in a measure justified by the event, since it did, in fact, determine the principles on which the vast extent of unappropriated empire in the eastern and western hemispheres was ultimately divided between two petty states of Europe. FOOTNOTES [1] Zurita, Anales, tom. v. fol. 13.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 28. [2] Zurita, Anales, tom. v. fol. 15.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 116.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. pp. 678, 679.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 315.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1492.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 4, dial. 9. [3] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 125.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 116.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, ubi supra. The great bell of Velilla, whose miraculous tolling always announced some disaster to the monarchy, was heard to strike at the time of this assault on Ferdinand, being the fifth time since the subversion of the kingdom by the Moors. The fourth was on the assassination of the inquisitor Arbues. All which is established by a score of good orthodox witnesses, as reported by Dr. Diego Dormer, in his Discursos Varies, pp. 206, 207. [4] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 136.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 125, 127, 131.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. fol. 16.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., loc. cit.--Garibay, after harrowing the reader's feelings with half a column of inhuman cruelties inflicted on the miserable man, concludes with the comfortable assurance, "Pero abogaronle primero por clemencia y misericordia de la Reyna." (Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 1.) A letter written by Isabella to her confessor, Fernando de Talavera, during her husband's illness, shows the deep anxiety of her own mind, as well as that of the citizens of Barcelona, at his critical situation, furnishing abundant evidence, if it were needed, of her tenderness of heart, and the warmth of her conjugal attachment. See Correspondencia Epistolar, apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 13. [5] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 2, cap. 3.--Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 4, sect. 13, 14. Columbus concludes a letter addressed, on his arrival at Lisbon, to the treasurer Sanchez, in the following glowing terms; "Let processions be made, festivals held, temples be filled with branches and flowers, for Christ rejoices on earth as in Heaven, seeing the future redemption of souls. Let us rejoice, also, for the temporal benefit likely to result, not merely to Spain, but to all Christendom." See Primer Viage de Colon, apud Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. i. [6] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, tom. i. dec. 1, lib. 2, cap. 2.--Primer Viage de Colon, apud Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. i.--Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 39. The Portuguese historian, Faria y Sousa, appears to be nettled at the prosperous issue of the voyage; for he testily remarks, that "the admiral entered Lisbon with a vainglorious exultation, in order to make Portugal feel, by displaying the tokens of his discovery, how much she had erred in not acceding to his propositions." Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. pp. 462, 463. [7] My learned friend, Mr. John Pickering, has pointed out to me a passage in a Portuguese author, giving some particulars of Columbus's visit to Portugal. The passage, which I have not seen noticed by any writer, is extremely interesting, coming, as it does, from a person high in the royal confidence, and an eye-witness of what he relates. "In the year 1493, on the sixth day of March, arrived in Lisbon Christopher Columbus, an Italian, who came from the discovery, made under the authority of the sovereigns of Castile, of the islands of Cipango and Antilia; from which countries he brought with him the first specimens of the people, as well as of the gold and other things to be found there; and he was entitled admiral of them. The king, being forthwith informed of this, commanded him into his presence; and appeared to be annoyed and vexed, as well from the belief that the said discovery was made within the seas and boundaries of his seigniory of Guinea,--which might give rise to disputes,--as because the said admiral, having become somewhat haughty by his situation, and in the relation of his adventures always exceeding the bounds of truth, made this affair, as to gold, silver, and riches, much greater than it was. Especially did the king accuse himself of negligence, in having declined this enterprise, when Columbus first came to ask his assistance, from want of credit and confidence in it. And, notwithstanding the king was importuned to kill kim on the spot; since with his death the prosecution of the undertaking, so far as the sovereigns of Castile were concerned, would cease, from want of a suitable person to take charge of it; and notwithstanding this might be done without suspicion of the king's being privy to it,--for inasmuch as the admiral was overbearing and puffed up by his success, they could easily bring it about, that his own indiscretion should appear the occasion of his death,--yet the king, as he was a prince greatly fearing God, not only forbade this, but even showed the, admiral honor and much favor, and therewith dismissed him." Ruy de Pina, Chronica d'el Rei Dom Joaõ II., cap. 66, apud Collecçaõ de Livros Ineditos de Historia Portugueza, (Lisboa, 1790-93,) tom. ii. [8] Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 40, 41.--Charlevoix, Histoire de S. Domingue, (Paris, 1730,) tom. i. pp. 84-90.--Primer Viage de Colon, apud Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. i.--La Clède, Hist. de Portugal, tom. iv. pp. 53-58. Columbus sailed from Spain on Friday, discovered land on Friday, and re- entered the port of Palos on Friday. These curious coincidences should have sufficed, one might think, to dispel, especially with American mariners, the superstitions dread, still so prevalent, of commencing a voyage on that ominous day. [9] Primer Viage de Colon, Let 2. [10] Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 4, sec. 14.--Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 41. Among other specimens, was a lump of gold, of sufficient magnitude to be fashioned into a vessel for containing the host; "thus," says Salazar de Mendoza, "converting the first fruits of the new dominions to pious uses." Monarquía, pp. 351, 352. [11] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 133, 134, 140.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 118.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. pp. 141, 142.--Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, ubi supra.--Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 413.--Gomara, Hist. de las Indias, cap. 17.--Benzoni, Novi Orbis Hist., lib. 1, cap. 8, 9.--Gallo, apud Muratori, Rerum Ital. Script., tom. xxiii. p. 203. [12] Herrera, Indias Occidental., tom. i. dec. 1, lib. 2, cap. 3.--Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 4, sec. 15, 16, 17.--Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, ubi supra. [12] In a letter, written soon after the admiral's return, Martyr announces the discovery to his correspondent, Cardinal Sforza, in the following manner. "Mira res ex eo terrarum orbe, quem sol horarum quatuor et viginti spatio circuit, ad nostra usque tempora, quod minime te latet, trita cognitaque dimidia taptum pars, ab Aurea utpote Chersoneso, ad Gades nostras Hispanas, reliqua vero a cosmographis pro incognitâ relicta est. Et si quae mentio facta, ea tenuis et incerta. Nunc autem, o beatum facinus! meorum regum auspiciis, quod latuit hactenus a rerum primordio, intelligi coeptum est." In a subsequent epistle to the learned Pomponio Leto, he breaks out in a strain of warm and generous sentiment. "Prae laetitia prosiliisse te, vixque a lachrymis prae gaudio temperasse, quando literas adspexisti meas, quibus de Antipodum Orbe latenti hactenus, te certiorem feci, mi suavissime Pomponi, insinuasti. Ex tuis ipse literis colligo, quid senseris. Sensisti autem, tantique rem fecisti, quanti virum summâ doctrinâ insignitum decuit. Quis namque cibus sublimibus praestari potest ingeniis isto suavior? quod condimentum gravius? a me facio conjecturam. Beari sentio spiritus meos, quando accitos alloquor prudentes aliquos ex his qui ab eâ redeunt provinciâ. Implicent animos pecuniarum cumulis augendis miseri avari, libidinibus obscoeni; noetras nos mentes, postquam Deo pleni aliquandiu fuerimus, contemplando, hujuscemodi rerum notitiâ demulceamus." Opus Epist., epist. 124, 152. [13] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 118.--Gallo, apud Muratori, Rerum Ital. Script., tom. xxiii. p. 203.--Gomara, Hist. de las Indias, cap. 18. Peter Martyr seems to have received the popular inference, respecting the identity of the new discoveries with the East Indies, with some distrust. "Insulas reperit plures; has esse, de quibus fit apud cosmographos mentio extra Oceanum Orientalem, adjacentes Indiae arbitrantur. Nec inficior ego penitus, quamvis sphaerae magnitudo aliter sentire videatur; neque enim desunt qui parvo tractu a finibus Hispanis distare littus Indicum, putent." Opus Epist., epist. 135. [14] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 2, cap. 3.--Benzoni, Novi Orbis Hist., lib. 1, cap. 8.--Gomara, Hist. de las Indias, cap. 17.-- Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 413.--Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, ubi supra. He was permitted to quarter the royal arms with his own, which consisted of a group of golden islands amid azure billows. To these were afterwards added five anchors, with the celebrated motto, well known as being carved on his sepulchre. (See Part II. Chap. 18.) He received besides, soon after his return, the substantial gratuity of a thousand doblas of gold, from the royal treasury, and the premium of 10,000 maravedies, promised to the person who first descried land. See Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, Col. Diplom., nos. 20, 32, 38. [15] Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii. Col. Diplom., no. 45.-- Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 4, sec. 21. [16] Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, Col. Diplom., nos. 33, 35, 45.-- Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 2, cap. 4.--Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 4, sec. 21. [17] See the original instructions, apud Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, Col. Diplom., no. 45.--Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 4, sec. 22.-- Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 413. L. Marineo eagerly claims the conversion of the natives, as the prime object of the expedition with the sovereigns, far outweighing all temporal considerations. The passage is worth quoting, if only to show what egregious blunders a contemporary may make in the relation of events passing, as it were, under his own eyes. "The Catholic sovereigns having subjugated the Canaries, and established Christian worship there, sent _Peter Colon_, with _thirty-five_ ships, called caravels, and _a great number of men_ to other much larger islands abounding in mines of gold, not so much, however, for the sake of the gold, as for the salvation of the poor heathen natives." Cosas Memorables, fol. 161. [18] See copies of the original documents, apud Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii., Col. Diplom., nos. 39, 41, 42, 43. [19] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 2, cap. 4.--Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 4, sec. 18. [20] A point south of the meridian is something new in geometry; yet so says the bull of his Holiness. "Omnes insulas et terras firmas inventas et inveniendas, detectas et detegendas, versus Occidentem et meridiem, fabricando et constituendo unam lineam a Polo Arctico, scilicet septentrione, ad Polum Antarcticum, scilicet meridiem." [21] See the original papal grants, transcribed by Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii., Col. Diplom., nos. 17, 18. Appendice al Col. Diplom., no. 11. [22] Padre Abarca considers "that the discovery of a new world, first offered to the kings of Portugal and England, was reserved by Heaven for Spain, being forced, in a manner, on Ferdinand, in recompense for the subjugation of the Moors, and the expulsion of the Jews!" Reyes de Aragon, fol. 310, 311. [23] La Clède, Hist. de Portugal, tom. iv. pp. 53-58. [24] Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. p. 463.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, loc. cit.--Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 4, sec. 27, 28.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. pp. 606, 607.--La Clède, Hist. de Portugal, tom. iv. pp. 53-58. [25] Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 413.--Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 44.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 118.--Peter Martyr, De Rebus Oceanicis, dec. 1, lib. 1.--Benzoni, Novi Orbis Historia, lib. 1, cap. 9.--Gomara, Hist. de las Indias, cap. 20. [26] La Clède, Hist. de Portugal, tom. iv. pp. 53-58.--Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 4, sec. 27, 28. [27] Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, Doc. Diplom., no. 75.--Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. p. 463.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 2, cap. 8, 10.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. pp. 606, 607.--La Clède, Hist. de Portugal, tom. iv. pp. 60-62.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. fol. 31. [28] The contested territory was the Molucca Islands, which each party claimed for itself, by virtue of the treaty of Tordesillas. After more than one congress, in which all the cosmographical science of the day was put in requisition, the affair was terminated _à l'amiable_ by the Spanish government's relinquishing its pretensions, in consideration of 350,000 ducats, paid by the court of Lisbon. See La Clède, Hist. De Portugal, tom. iv. pp. 309, 401, 402, 480.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. pp. 607, 875.--Salazar de Mendoza, Monarquía, tom. ii. pp. 205, 206. CHAPTER XIX. CASTILIAN LITERATURE.--CULTIVATION OF THE COURT.--CLASSICAL LEARNING.-- SCIENCE. Early Education of Ferdinand.--Of Isabella.--Her Library.--Early Promise of Prince John.--Scholarship of the Nobles.--Accomplished Women.-- Classical Learning.--Universities.--Printing Introduced.--Encouraged by the Queen.--Actual Progress of Science. We have now arrived at the period, when the history of Spain becomes incorporated with that of the other states of Europe. Before embarking on the wide sea of European politics, however, and bidding adieu, for a season, to the shores of Spain, it will be necessary, in order to complete the view of the internal administration of Ferdinand and Isabella, to show its operation on the intellectual culture of the nation. This, as it constitutes, when taken in its broadest sense, a principal end of all government, should never be altogether divorced from any history. It is particularly deserving of note in the present reign, which stimulated the active development of the national energies in every department of science, and which forms a leading epoch in the ornamental literature of the country. The present and the following chapter will embrace the mental progress of the kingdom, not merely down to the period at which we have arrived, but through the whole of Isabella's reign, in order to exhibit as far as possible its entire results, at a single glance, to the eye of the reader. We have beheld, in a preceding chapter, the auspicious literary promise afforded by the reign of Isabella's father, John the Second, of Castile. Under the anarchical sway of his son, Henry the Fourth, the court, as we have seen, was abandoned to unbounded license, and the whole nation sunk into a mental torpor, from which it was roused only by the tumults of civil war. In this deplorable state of things, the few blossoms of literature, which had begun to open under the benign influence of the preceding reign, were speedily trampled under foot, and every vestige of civilization seemed in a fair way to be effaced from the land. The first years of Ferdinand and Isabella's government were too much clouded by civil dissensions, to afford a much more cheering prospect. Ferdinand's early education, moreover, had been greatly neglected. Before the age of ten, he was called to take part in the Catalan wars. His boyhood was spent among soldiers, in camps instead of schools, and the wisdom which he so eminently displayed in later life, was drawn far more from his own resources, than from books. [1] Isabella was reared under more favorable auspices; at least more favorable to mental culture. She was allowed to pass her youth in retirement, and indeed oblivion, as far as the world was concerned, under her mother's care, at Arevalo. In this modest seclusion, free from the engrossing vanities and vexations of court life, she had full leisure to indulge the habits of study and reflection to which her temper naturally disposed her. She was acquainted with several modern languages, and both wrote and discoursed in her own with great precision and elegance. No great expense or solicitude, however, appears to have been lavished on her education. She was uninstructed in the Latin, which in that day was of greater importance than at present; since it was not only the common medium of communication between learned men, and the language in which the most familiar treatises were often composed, but was frequently used by well- educated foreigners at court, and especially employed in diplomatic intercourse and negotiation. [2] Isabella resolved to repair the defects of education, by devoting herself to the acquisition of the Latin tongue, so soon as the distracting wars with Portugal, which attended her accession, were terminated. We have a letter from Pulgar, addressed to the queen soon after that event, in which he inquires concerning her progress, intimating his surprise, that she can find time for study amidst her multitude of engrossing occupations, and expressing his confidence that she will acquire the Latin with the same facility with which she had already mastered other languages. The result justified his prediction; for "in less than a year," observes another contemporary, "her admirable genius enabled her to obtain a good knowledge of the Latin language, so that she could understand without much difficulty whatever was written or spoken in it." [3] Isabella inherited the taste of her father, John the Second, for the collecting of books. She endowed the convent of San Juan de los Reyes at Toledo, at the time of its foundation, 1477, with a library consisting principally of manuscripts. [4] The archives of Simancas contain catalogues of part of two separate collections, belonging to her, whose broken remains have contributed to swell the magnificent library of the Escurial. Most of them are in manuscript; the richly colored and highly decorated binding of these volumes (an art which the Spaniards derived from the Arabs) show how highly they were prized, and the worn and battered condition of some of them prove that they were not kept merely for show. [5] The queen manifested the most earnest solicitude for the instruction of her own children. Her daughters were endowed by nature with amiable dispositions, that seconded her maternal efforts. The most competent masters, native and foreign, especially from Italy, then so active in the revival of ancient learning, were employed in their tuition. This was particularly intrusted to two brothers, Antonio and Alessandro Geraldino, natives of that country. Both were conspicuous for their abilities and classical erudition, and the latter, who survived his brother Antonio, was subsequently raised to high ecclesiastical preferments. [6] Under these masters, the infantas made attainments rarely permitted to the sex, and acquired such familiarity with the Latin tongue especially, as excited lively admiration among those over whom they were called to preside in riper years. [7] A still deeper anxiety was shown in the education of her only son, Prince John, heir of the united Spanish monarchies. Every precaution was taken to train him up in a manner that might tend to the formation of the character suited to his exalted station. He was placed in a class consisting of ten youths, selected from the sons of the principal nobility. Five of them were of his own age, and five of riper years, and they were all brought to reside with him in the palace. By this means it was hoped to combine the advantages of public with those of private education; which last, from its solitary character, necessarily excludes the subject of it from the wholesome influence exerted by bringing the powers into daily collision with antagonists of a similar age. [8] A mimic council was also formed on the model of a council of state, composed of suitable persons of more advanced standing, whose province it was to deliberate on, and to discuss, topics connected with government and public policy. Over this body the prince presided, and here he was initiated into a practical acquaintance with the important duties, which were to devolve on him at a future period of life. The pages, in attendance on his person, were also selected with great care from the cavaliers and young nobility of the court, many of whom afterwards filled with credit the most considerable posts in the state. The severer discipline of the prince was relieved by attention to more light and elegant accomplishments. He devoted many of his leisure hours to music, for which he had a fine natural taste, and in which he attained sufficient proficiency to perform with skill on a variety of instruments. In short, his education was happily designed to produce that combination of mental and moral excellence, which should fit him for reigning over his subjects with benevolence and wisdom. How well the scheme succeeded is abundantly attested by the commendations of contemporary writers, both at home and abroad, who enlarge on his fondness for letters, and for the society of learned men, on his various attainments, and more especially his Latin scholarship, and above all on his disposition, so amiable as to give promise of the highest excellence in maturer life,--a promise, alas! most unfortunately for his own nation, destined never to be realized. [9] Next to her family, there was no object which the queen had so much at heart, as the improvement of the young nobility. During the troubled reign of her predecessor, they had abandoned themselves to frivolous pleasure, or to a sullen apathy, from which nothing was potent enough to arouse them, but the voice of war. [10] She was obliged to relinquish her plans of amelioration, during the all-engrossing struggle with Granada, when it would have been esteemed a reproach for a Spanish knight to have exchanged the post of danger in the field for the effeminate pursuit of letters. But no sooner was the war brought to a close, than Isabella resumed her purpose. She requested the learned Peter Martyr, who had come into Spain with the count of Tendilla, a few years previous, to repair to the court, and open a school there for the instruction of the young nobility. [11] In an epistle addressed by Martyr to Cardinal Mendoza, dated at Granada, April, 1492, he alludes to the promise of a liberal recompense from the queen, if he would assist in reclaiming the young cavaliers of the court from the idle and unprofitable pursuits, in which, to her great mortification, they consumed their hours. The prejudices to be encountered seem to have filled him with natural distrust of his success; for he remarks, "Like their ancestors, they hold the pursuit of letters in light estimation, considering them an obstacle to success in the profession of arms, which alone they esteem worthy of honor." He however expresses his confidence, that the generous nature of the Spaniards will make it easy to infuse into them a more liberal taste; and, in a subsequent letter, he enlarges on the "good effects likely to result from the literary ambition exhibited by the heir apparent, on whom the eyes of the nation were naturally turned." [12] Martyr, in obedience to the royal summons, instantly repaired to court, and in the month of September following, we have a letter dated from Saragossa, in which he thus speaks of his success. "My house, all day long, swarms with noble youths, who, reclaimed from ignoble pursuits to those of letters, are now convinced that these, so far from being a hindrance, are rather a help in the profession of arms. I earnestly inculcate on them, that consummate excellence in any department, whether of war or peace, is unattainable without science. It has pleased our royal mistress, the pattern of every exalted virtue, that her own near kinsman, the duke of Guimaraena, as well as the young duke of Villahermosa, the king's nephew, should remain under my roof during the whole day; an example which has been imitated by the principal cavaliers of the court, who, after attending my lectures in company with their private tutors, retire at evening to review them with these latter in their own quarters." [13] Another Italian scholar, often cited as authority in the preceding portion of this work, Lucio Marineo Siculo, co- operated with Martyr in the introduction of a more liberal scholarship among the Castilian nobles. He was born at Bedino in Sicily, and, after completing his studies at Rome under the celebrated Pomponio Leto, opened a school in his native island, where he continued to teach for five years. He was then induced to visit Spain, in 1486, with the admiral Henriquez, and soon took his place among the professors of Salamanca, where he filled the chairs of poetry and grammar with great applause for twelve years. He was subsequently transferred to the court, which he helped to illumine, by his exposition of the ancient classics, particularly the Latin. [14] Under the auspices of these and other eminent scholars, both native and foreign, the young nobility of Castile shook off the indolence in which they had so long rusted, and applied with generous ardor to the cultivation of science; so that, in the language of a contemporary, "while it was a most rare occurrence, to meet with a person of illustrious birth, before the present reign, who had even studied Latin in his youth, there were now to be seen numbers every day, who sought to shed the lustre of letters over the martial glory inherited from their ancestors." [15] The extent of this generous emulation may be gathered from the large correspondence both of Martyr and Marineo with their disciples, including the most considerable persons of the Castilian court; it may be still further inferred from the numerous dedications to these persons, of contemporary publications, attesting their munificent patronage of literary enterprise; [16] and, still more unequivocally, from the zeal with which many of the highest rank entered on such severe literary labor as few, from the mere love of letters, are found willing to encounter. Don Gutierre de Toledo, son of the duke of Alva, and a cousin of the king, taught in the university of Salamanca. At the same place, Don Pedro Fernandez de Velasco, son of the count of Haro, who subsequently succeeded his father in the hereditary dignity of grand constable of Castile, read lectures on Pliny and Ovid. Don Alfonso de Manrique, son of the count of Paredes, was professor of Greek in the university of Alcalá. All ages seemed to catch the generous enthusiasm; and the marquis of Denia, although turned of sixty, made amends for the sins of his youth, by learning the elements of the Latin tongue, at this late period. In short, as Giovio remarks in his eulogium on Lebrija, "No Spaniard was accounted noble who held science in indifference." From a very early period, a courtly stamp was impressed on the poetic literature of Spain. A similar character was now imparted to its erudition; and men of the most illustrious birth seemed eager to lead the way in the difficult career of science, which was thrown open to the nation. [17] In this brilliant exhibition, those of the other sex must not be omitted, who contributed by their intellectual endowments to the general illumination of the period. Among them, the writers of that day lavish their panegyrics on the marchioness of Monteagudo, and Doña Maria Pacheco, of the ancient house of Mendoza, sisters of the historian, Don Diego Hurtado, [18] and daughters of the accomplished count of Tendilla, [19] who, while ambassador at Rome, induced Martyr to visit Spain, and who was grandson of the famous marquis of Santillana, and nephew of the grand cardinal. [20] This illustrious family, rendered yet more illustrious by its merits than its birth, is worthy of specification, as affording altogether the most remarkable combination of literary talent in the enlightened court of Castile. The queen's instructor in the Latin language was a lady named Doña Beatriz de Galindo, called from her peculiar attainments _la Latina_. Another lady, Doña Lucia de Medrano, publicly lectured on the Latin classics in the university of Salamanca. And another, Doña Francisca de Lebrija, daughter of the historian of that name, filled the chair of rhetoric with applause at Alcalá. But our limits will not allow a further enumeration of names, which should never be permitted to sink into oblivion, were it only for the rare scholarship, peculiarly rare in the female sex, which they displayed, in an age comparatively unenlightened. [21] Female education in that day embraced a wider compass of erudition, in reference to the ancient languages, than is common at present; a circumstance attributable, probably, to the poverty of modern literature at that time, and the new and general appetite excited by the revival of classical learning in Italy. I am not aware, however, that it was usual for learned ladies, in any other country than Spain, to take part in the public exercises of the gymnasium, and deliver lectures from the chairs of the universities. This peculiarity, which may be referred in part to the queen's influence, who encouraged the love of study by her own example, as well as by personal attendance on the academic examinations, may have been also suggested by a similar usage, already noticed, among the Spanish Arabs. [22] While the study of the ancient tongues came thus into fashion with persons of both sexes, and of the highest rank, it was widely and most thoroughly cultivated by professed scholars. Men of letters, some of whom have been already noticed, were invited into Spain from Italy, the theatre, at that time, on which, from obvious local advantages, classical discovery was pursued with greatest ardor and success. To this country it was usual also for Spanish students to repair, in order to complete their discipline in classical literature, especially the Greek, as first taught on sound principles of criticism, by the learned exiles from Constantinople. The most remarkable of the Spanish scholars, who made this literary pilgrimage to Italy, was Antonio de Lebrija, or Nebrissensis, as he is more frequently called from his Latin name. [23] After ten years passed at Bologna and other seminaries of repute, with particular attention to their interior discipline, he returned, in 1473, to his native land, richly laden with the stores of various erudition. He was invited to fill the Latin chair at Seville, whence he was successively transferred to Salamanca and Alcalá, both of which places he long continued to enlighten by his oral instruction and publications. The earliest of these was his _Introducciones Latinas_, the third edition of which was printed in 1485, being four years only from the date of the first; a remarkable evidence of the growing taste for classical learning. A translation in the vernacular accompanied the last edition, arranged, at the queen's suggestion, in columns parallel with those of the original text; a form which, since become common, was then a novelty. [24] The publication of his Castilian grammar, "_Grammatica Castillana_," followed in 1492; a treatise designed particularly for the instruction of the ladies of the court. The other productions of this indefatigable scholar embrace a large circle of topics, independently of his various treatises on philology and criticism. Some were translated into French and Italian, and their republication has been continued to the last century. No man of his own, or of later times, contributed more essentially than Lebrija to the introduction of a pure and healthful erudition into Spain. It is not too much to say, that there was scarcely an eminent Spanish scholar in the beginning of the sixteenth century, who had not formed himself on the instructions of this master. [25] Another name worthy of commemoration, is that of Arias Barbosa, a learned Portuguese, who, after passing some years, like Lebrija, in the schools of Italy, where he studied the ancient tongues under the guidance of Politiano, was induced to establish his residence in Spain. In 1489, we find him at Salamanca, where he continued for twenty, or, according to some accounts, forty years, teaching in the departments of Greek and rhetoric. At the close of that period he returned to Portugal, where he superintended the education of some of the members of the royal family, and survived to a good old age. Barbosa was esteemed inferior to Lebrija in extent of various erudition, but to have surpassed him in an accurate knowledge of the Greek and poetical criticism. In the former, indeed, he seems to have obtained a greater repute than any Spanish scholar of the time. He composed some valuable works, especially on ancient prosody. The unwearied assiduity and complete success of his academic labors have secured to him a high reputation among the restorers of ancient learning, and especially that of reviving a livelier relish for the study of the Greek, by conducting it on principles of pure criticism, in the same manner as Lebrija did with the Latin. [26] The scope of the present work precludes the possibility of a copious enumeration of the pioneers of ancient learning, to whom Spain owes so large a debt of gratitude. [27] The Castilian scholars of the close of the fifteenth, and the beginning of the sixteenth century, may take rank with their illustrious contemporaries of Italy. They could not indeed achieve such brilliant results in the discovery of the remains of antiquity, for such remains had been long scattered and lost amid the centuries of exile and disastrous warfare consequent on the Saracen invasion. But they were unwearied in their illustrations, both oral and written, of the ancient authors; and their numerous commentaries, translations, dictionaries, grammars, and various works of criticism, many of which, though now obsolete, passed into repeated editions in their own day, bear ample testimony to the generous zeal with which they conspired to raise their contemporaries to a proper level for contemplating the works of the great masters of antiquity; and well entitled them to the high eulogium of Erasmus, that "liberal studies were brought, in the course of a few years, in Spain to so flourishing a condition, as might not only excite the admiration, but serve as a model to the most cultivated nations of Europe." [28] The Spanish universities were the theatre on which this classical erudition was more especially displayed. Previous to Isabella's reign, there were but few schools in the kingdom; not one indeed of any note, except in Salamanca; and this did not escape the blight which fell on every generous study. But under the cheering patronage of the present government, they were soon filled, and widely multiplied. Academies of repute were to be found in Seville, Toledo, Salamanca, Granada, and Alcalá; and learned teachers were drawn from abroad by the most liberal emoluments. At the head of these establishments stood "the illustrious city of Salamanca," as Marineo fondly terms it, "mother of all liberal arts and virtues, alike renowned for noble cavaliers and learned men." [29] Such was its reputation, that foreigners as well as natives were attracted to its schools, and at one time, according to the authority of the same professor, seven thousand students were assembled within its walls. A letter of Peter Martyr, to his patron the count of Tendilla, gives a whimsical picture of the literary enthusiasm of this place. The throng was so great to hear his introductory lecture on one of the Satires of Juvenal, that every avenue to the hall was blockaded, and the professor was borne in on the shoulders of the students. Professorships in every department of science then studied, as well as of polite letters, were established at the university, the "new Athens," as Martyr somewhere styles it. Before the close of Isabella's reign, however, its glories were rivalled, if not eclipsed, by those of Alcalá; [30] which combined higher advantages for ecclesiastical with civil education, and which, under the splendid patronage of Cardinal Ximenes, executed the famous polyglot version of the Scriptures, the most stupendous literary enterprise of that age. [31] This active cultivation was not confined to the dead languages, but spread more or less over every department of knowledge. Theological science, in particular, received a large share of attention. It had always formed a principal object of academic instruction, though suffered to languish under the universal corruption of the preceding reign. It was so common for the clergy to be ignorant of the most elementary knowledge, that the council of Aranda found it necessary to pass an ordinance, the year before Isabella's accession, that no person should be admitted to orders who was ignorant of Latin. The queen took the most effectual means for correcting this abuse, by raising only competent persons to ecclesiastical dignities. The highest stations in the church were reserved for those who combined the highest intellectual endowments with unblemished piety. Cardinal Mendoza, whose acute and comprehensive mind entered with interest into every scheme for the promotion of science, was archbishop of Toledo; Talavera, whose hospitable mansion was itself an academy for men of letters, and whose princely revenues were liberally dispensed for their support, was raised to the see of Granada; and Ximenes, whose splendid literary projects will require more particular notice hereafter, succeeded Mendoza in the primacy of Spain. Under the protection of these enlightened patrons, theological studies were pursued with ardor, the Scriptures copiously illustrated, and sacred eloquence cultivated with success. A similar impulse was felt in the other walks of science. Jurisprudence assumed a new aspect, under the learned labors of Montalvo. [32] The mathematics formed a principal branch of education, and were successfully applied to astronomy and geography. Valuable treatises were produced on medicine, and on the more familiar practical arts, as husbandry, for example. [33] History, which since the time of Alfonso the Tenth had been held in higher honor and more widely Cultivated in Castile than in any other European state, began to lay aside the garb of chronicle, and to be studied on more scientific principles. Charters and diplomas were consulted, manuscripts collated, coins and lapidary inscriptions deciphered, and collections made of these materials, the true basis of authentic history; and an office of public archives, like that now existing at Simancas, was established at Burgos, and placed under the care of Alonso de Mota, as keeper, with a liberal salary. [34] Nothing could have been more opportune for the enlightened purposes of Isabella, than the introduction of the art of printing into Spain, at the commencement, indeed in the very first year, of her reign. She saw, from the first moment, all the advantages which it promised for diffusing and perpetuating the discoveries of science. She encouraged its establishment by large privileges to those who exercised it, whether natives or foreigners, and by causing many of the works, composed by her subjects, to be printed at her own charge. [35] Among the earlier printers we frequently find the names of Germans; a people, who to the original merits of the discovery may justly add that of its propagation among every nation of Europe. We meet with a _pragmática_, or royal ordinance, dated in 1477, exempting a German, named Theodoric, from taxation, on the ground of being "one of the principal persons in the discovery and practice of the art of printing books, which he had brought with him into Spain at great risk and expense, with the design of ennobling the libraries of the kingdom." [36] Monopolies for printing and selling books for a limited period, answering to the modern copyright, were granted to certain persons, in consideration of their doing so at a reasonable rate. [37] It seems to have been usual for the printers to be also the publishers and venders of books. These exclusive privileges, however, do not appear to have been carried to a mischievous extent. Foreign books, of every description, by a law of 1480, were allowed to be imported into the kingdom, free of all duty whatever; an enlightened provision, which might furnish a useful hint to legislators of the nineteenth century. [38] The first press appears to have been erected at Valencia, in 1474; although the glory of precedence is stoutly contested by several places, and especially by Barcelona. [39] The first work printed was a collection of songs, composed for a poetical contest in honor of the Virgin, for the most part in the Limousin or Valencian dialect. [40] In the following year the first ancient classic, being the works of Sallust, was printed; and, in 1478, there appeared from the same press a translation of the Scriptures, in the Limousin, by Father Boniface Ferrer, brother of the famous Dominican, St. Vincent Ferrer. [41] Through the liberal patronage of the government, the art was widely diffused; and before the end of the fifteenth century, presses were established and in active operation in the principal cities of the united kingdom; in Toledo, Seville, Ciudad Real, Granada, Valladolid, Burgos, Salamanca, Zamora, Saragossa, Valencia, Barcelona, Monte Rey, Lerida, Murcia, Tolosa, Tarragona, Alcalá de Henares, and Madrid. It is painful to notice amidst the judicious provisions for the encouragement of science, one so entirely repugnant to their spirit as the establishment of the censorship. By an ordinance, dated at Toledo, July 8th, 1502, it was decreed, that, "as many of the books sold in the kingdom were defective, or false, or apocryphal, or pregnant with vain and superstitious novelties, it was therefore ordered that no book should hereafter be printed without special license from the king, or some person regularly commissioned by him for the purpose." The names of the commissioners then follow, consisting mostly of ecclesiastics, archbishops and bishops, with authority respectively over their several dioceses. [42] This authority was devolved in later times, under Charles the Fifth and his successors, on the Council of the Supreme, over which the inquisitor- general presided _ex-officio_. The immediate agents employed in the examination were also drawn from the Inquisition, who exercised this important trust, as is well known, in a manner most fatal to the interests of letters and humanity. Thus a provision, destined in its origin for the advancement of science, by purifying it from the crudities and corruptions which naturally infect it in a primitive age, contributed more effectually to its discouragement, than any other which could have been devised, by interdicting the freedom of expression, so indispensable to freedom of inquiry. [43] While endeavoring to do justice to the progress of civilization in this reign, I should regret to present to the reader an over-colored picture of its results. Indeed, less emphasis should be laid on any actual results, than on the spirit of improvement, which they imply in the nation, and the liberal dispositions of the government. The fifteenth century was distinguished by a zeal for research and laborious acquisition, especially in ancient literature, throughout Europe, which showed itself in Italy in the beginning of the age, and in Spain, and some other countries, towards the close. It was natural that men should explore the long-buried treasures descended from their ancestors, before venturing on anything of their own creation. Their efforts were eminently successful; and, by opening an acquaintance with the immortal productions of ancient literature, they laid the best foundation for the cultivation of the modern. In the sciences, their success was more equivocal. A blind reverence for authority, a habit of speculation, instead of experiment, so pernicious in physics, in short, an ignorance of the true principles of philosophy, often led the scholars of that day in a wrong direction. Even when they took a right one, their attainments, under all these impediments, were necessarily so small, as to be scarcely perceptible, when viewed from the brilliant heights to which science has arrived in our own age. Unfortunately for Spain, its subsequent advancement has been so retarded, that a comparison of the fifteenth century with those which succeeded it, is by no means so humiliating to the former as in some other countries of Europe; and, it is certain, that in general intellectual fermentation, no period has surpassed, if it can be said to have rivalled, the age of Isabella. FOOTNOTES [1] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 153. [2] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 154, 182. [3] Carro de las Doñas, lib. 2, cap. 62 et seq., apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 21.--Pulgar, Letras, (Amstelodami, 1670,) let. 11. --L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 182.--It is sufficient evidence of her familiarity with the Latin, that the letters addressed to her by her confessor seem to have been written in that language and the Castilian indifferently, exhibiting occasionally a curious patchwork in the alternate use of each in the same epistle. See Correspondencia Epistolar, apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 13. [4] Previous to the introduction of printing, collections of books were necessarily very small and thinly scattered, owing to the extreme cost of manuscripts. The learned Saez has collected some curious particulars relative to this matter. The most copious library which he could find any account of, in the middle of the fifteenth century, was owned by the counts of Benavente, and contained not more than one hundred and twenty volumes. Many of these were duplicates; of Livy alone there were eight copies. The cathedral churches in Spain rented their books every year by auction to the highest bidders, whence they derived a considerable revenue. It would appear from a copy of Gratian's Canons, preserved in the Celestine monastery in Paris, that the copyist was engaged twenty-one months in transcribing that manuscript. At this rate, the production of four thousand copies by one hand would require nearly eight thousand years, a work now easily performed in less than four months. Such was the tardiness in multiplying copies before the invention of printing. Two thousand volumes may be procured now at a price, which in those days would hardly have sufficed to purchase fifty. See Tratado de Monedas de Enrique III., apud Moratin, Obras, ed. de la Acad., (Madrid, 1830,) tom. i. pp. 91, 92. Moratin argues from extreme cases. [5] Navagiero, Viaggio fatto in Spagna et in Francia, (Vinegia, 1563,) fol. 23.--Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust, 17. The largest collection comprised about two hundred and one articles, or distinct works. Of these, about a third is taken up with theology, comprehending Bibles, psalters, missals, lives of saints, and works of the fathers; one- fifth, civil law and the municipal code of Spain; one-fourth, ancient classics, modern literature, and romances of chivalry; one-tenth, history; the residue is devoted to ethics, medicine, grammar, astrology, etc. The only Italian author, besides Leonardo Bruno d'Arezzo, is Boccaccio. The works of the latter writer consisted of the "Fiammetta," the treatises "De Casibus Illustrium Virorum," and "De Claris Mulieribus," and probably the "Decameron;" the first in the Italian, and the three last translated into the Spanish. It is singular, that neither of Boccaccio's great contemporaries, Dante and Petrarch, the former of whom had been translated by Villena, and imitated by Juan de Mena, half a century before, should have found a place in the collection. [6] Antonio, the eldest, died in 1488. Part of his Latin poetical works, entitled "Sacred Bucolics," was printed in 1505, at Salamanca. The younger brother, Alessandro, after bearing arms in the Portuguese war, was subsequently employed in the instruction of the infantas, finally embraced the ecclesiastical state, and died bishop of St. Domingo, in 1525. Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 16.--Tiraboschi, Letteratura Italiana, tom. vi. part. 2, p. 285. [7] The learned Valencian, Luis Vives, in his treatise "De Christianâ Feminâ," remarks, "Aetas noster quatuor illas Isabellae reginae filias, quas paullo ante memoravi, eruditas vidit. Non sine laudibus et admiratione refertur mihi passim in hae terrâ Joannam, Philippi conjugem, Caroli hujus matrem, extempore latinis orationibus, quae de more apud novos principes oppidatim habentur, latine respondisse. Idem de reginâ suâ, Joannae sorore, Britanni praedicant; idem omnes de duabus aliis, quae in Lusitaniâ fato concessere." (De Christianâ Feminâ, cap. 4, apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 16.)--It appears, however, that Isabella was not inattentive to the more humble accomplishments, in the education of her daughters. "Regina," says the same author, "nere, suere, acu pingere quatuor filias auas doctas esse voluit." Another contemporary, the author of the Carro de las Doñas, (lib. 2, cap. 62, apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., Ilust. 21,) says, "she educated her son and daughters, giving them masters of life and letters, and surrounding them with such persons as tended to make them vessels of election, and kings in Heaven." Erasmus notices the literary attainments of the youngest daughter of the sovereigns, the unfortunate Catharine of Aragon, with unqualified admiration. In one of his letters, he styles her "egregie doctam;" and in another he remarks, "Regina non tantum in sexus miraculum literata est; nec minus pietate suspicienda, quam eruditione." Epistolae, (Londini, 1642,) lib. 19, epist. 31; lib. 2, epist. 24. [8] Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., dial. de Deza.--Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 14. [9] Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 14. Juan de la Eucina, in the dedication to the prince, of his translation of Virgil's Bucolics, pays the following compliment to the enlightened and liberal taste of Prince John. "Favoresceis tanto la sciencia andando acompañado de tantos e tan doctísimos varones, que no menos dejareis perdurable memoria de haber alargado e estendido los límites e términos de la sciencia que los del imperio." The extraordinary promise of this young prince made his name known in distant parts of Europe, and his untimely death, which occurred in the twentieth year of his age, was commemorated by an epitaph of the learned Greek exile, Constantine Lascaris. [10] "Aficionados á la guerra," says Oviedo, speaking of some young nobles of his time, "_por su Española y natural inclinacion_." Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 36. [11] For some account of this eminent Italian scholar, see the postscript to Part I. Chap. 14, of this History. [12] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 102, 103. Lucio Marineo, in a discourse addressed to Charles V., thus notices the queen's solicitude for the instruction of her young nobility. "Isabella praesertim Regina magnanima, virtutum omnium maxima cultrix. Quae quidem multis et magnis occupata negotiis, ut aliis exemplum praeberet, a primis grammaticae rudimentis studere coepit, et omnes suae domûs adolescentes utriusque sexûs nobilium liberos, praeceptoribus liberaliter et honorifice conductis erudiendos commendabat." Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Apend. 16.--See also Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 36. [13] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 115. [14] A particular account of Marineo's writings may be found in Nic. Antonio. (Bibliotheca Nova, tom. ii. Apend. p. 369.) The most important of these is his work "De Rebus Hispaniae Memorabilibus," often cited, in the Castilian, in this History. It is a rich repository of details respecting the geography, statistics, and manners of the Peninsula, with a copious historical notice of events in Ferdinand and Isabella's reign. The author's insatiable curiosity, during a long residence in the country, enabled him to collect many facts, of a kind that do not fall within the ordinary compass of history; while his extensive learning, and his familiarity with foreign models, peculiarly qualified him for estimating the institutions he describes. It must be confessed he is sufficiently partial to the land of his adoption. The edition, referred to in this work, is in black letter, printed before, or soon after, the author's death (the date of which is uncertain), in 1539, at Alcalá de Henares, by Juan Brocar, one of a family long celebrated in the annals of Castilian printing. Marineo's prologue concludes with the following noble tribute to letters. "Porque todos los otros bienes son subjectos a la fortuna y mudables y en poco tiempo mudan muchos dueños passando de unos señores en otros, mas los dones de letras y hystorias que se ofrescen para perpetuidad de memoria y fama son immortales y prorogan y guardan para siempre la memoria assi de los que los reciben, como de los que los ofrescen." [15] Sepulveda, Democrites, apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 16.--Signorelli, Coltura nelle Sicilie, tom. iv. p. 318.-- Tiraboschi, Letteratura Italiana, tom. vii. part. 3, lib. 3, cap. 4.-- Comp. Lampillas, Saggio Storico-Apologetico de la Letteratura Spagnuola, (Genova, 1778,) tom. ii. dis. 2, sect. 5.--The patriotic Abate is greatly scandalized by the degree of influence which Tiraboschi and other Italian critics ascribe to their own language over the Castilian, especially at this period. The seven volumes, in which he has discharged his bile on the heads of the offenders, afford valuable materials for the historian of Spanish literature. Tiraboschi must be admitted to have the better of his antagonist in temper, if not in argument. [16] Among these we find copious translations from the ancient classics, as Caesar, Appian, Plutarch, Plautus, Sallust, Aesop, Justin, Boëthius, Apulius, Herodian, affording strong evidence of the activity of the Castilian scholars in this department. Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. pp. 406, 407.--Mendez, Typographia Española, pp. 133, 139. [17] Salazar de Mendoza, Dignidades, cap. 21. Lucio Marineo Siculo, in his discourse above alluded to, in which he exhibits the condition of letters under the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, enumerates the names of the nobility most conspicuous for their scholarship. This valuable document was to be found only in the edition of Marineo's work, "De Rebus Hispaniae Memorabilibus," printed at Alcalá, in 1630, whence it has been transferred by Clemencin to the sixth volume of the Memoirs of the Royal Academy of History. [18] His work "Guerra de Granada," was first published at Madrid, in 1610, and "may be compared," says Nic. Antonio, in a judgment which has been ratified by the general consent of his countrymen, "with the compositions of Sallust, or any other ancient historian." His poetry and his celebrated _picaresco_ novel "Lazarillo de Tormes," have made an epoch in the ornamental literature of Spain. [19] Oviedo has devoted one of his dialogues to this nobleman, equally distinguished by his successes in arms, letters, and love; the last of which, according to that writer, he had not entirely resigned at the age of seventy.--Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 28. [20] For an account of Santillana, see the First Chapter of this History. The cardinal, in early life, is said to have translated for his father the Aeneid, the Odyssey, Ovid, Valerius Maximus, and Sallust. (Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 16.) This Herculean feat would put modern school-boys to shame, and we may suppose that partial versions only of these authors are intended. [21] Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 16.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., dial. de Grizio. Señor Clemencin has examined with much care the intellectual culture of the nation under Isabella, in the sixteenth _Ilustracion_ of his work. He has touched lightly on its poetical character, considering, no doubt, that this had been sufficiently developed by other critics. His essay, however, is rich in information in regard to the scholarship and severer studies of the period. The reader, who would pursue the inquiry still further, may find abundant materials in Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Vetus, tom. ii. lib. 10, cap. 13 et seq.--Idem, Bibliotheca Hispana Nova, (Matriti, 1783-8,) tom. i. ii. passim. [22] See Part I. Chap. 8, of this History. [23] For a notice of this scholar, see the postscript to Part I. Chap. 11, of this History. [24] Mendez, Typographia Española, pp. 271, 272. In the second edition, published 1482, the author states, that no work of the time had a greater circulation, more than a thousand copies of it, at a high price, having been disposed of in the preceding year. Ibid., p. 237. [25] Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Nova, tom. i. pp. 132-139.--Lampillas, Letteratura Spagnuola, tom. ii. dis. 2, sec. 3.--Dialogo de las Lenguas, apud Mayans y Siscar, Orígenes, (Madrid, 1737,) tom. ii. pp. 46, 47. Lucio Marineo pays the following elegant compliment to this learned Spaniard, in his discourse before quoted. "Amisit nuper Hispania maximum sui cultorem in re litterariâ, Antonium Nebrissensem, qui primus ex Italiâ in Hispaniam Musas adduxit, quibuscum barbariem ex suâ patriâ fugavit, et Hispaniam totam linguae Latinae lectionibus illustravit." "Meruerat id," says Gomez de Castro of Lebrija, "et multo majora hominis eruditio, cui Hispania debet, quicquid habet bonarum literarum." The acute author of the "Dialogo de las Lenguas," while he renders ample homage to Lebrija's Latin erudition, disputes his critical acquaintance with his own language, from his being a native of Andalusia, where the Castilian was not spoken with purity. "Hablaba y escrivia como en el Andalucia y no como en la Castilla." P. 92. See also pp. 9, 10, 46, 53. [26] Barbosa, Bibliotheca Lusitana, (Lisboa Occidental, 1741,) tom. i. pp. 76-78.--Signorelli, Coltura nelle Sicilie, tom. iv. pp. 315-321.--Mayans y Siscar, Origenes, tom. i. p. 173.--Lampillas, Letteratura Spagnuola, tom. ii. dis. 2, sect. 5.--Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Nova, tom. i. pp. 170, 171. [27] Among these are particularly deserving of attention the brothers John and Francis Vergara, professors at Alcalá, the latter of whom was esteemed one of the most accomplished scholars of the age; Nuñez de Guzman, of the ancient house of that name, professor for many years at Salamanca and Alcalá, and the author of the Latin version in the famous Polyglot of Cardinal Ximenes; he left behind him numerous works, especially commentaries on the classics; Olivario, whose curious erudition was abundantly exhibited in his illustrations of Cicero and other Latin authors; and lastly Vives, whose fame rather belongs to Europe than his own country, who, when only twenty-six years old, drew from Erasmus the encomium, that "there was scarcely any one of the age whom he could venture to compare with him in philosophy, eloquence, and liberal learning." But the most unequivocal testimony to the deep and various scholarship of the period is afforded by that stupendous literary work of Cardinal Ximenes, the Polyglot Bible, whose versions in the Greek, Latin, and Oriental tongues were collated, with a single exception, by Spanish scholars. Erasmus, Epistolae, lib. 19, epist. 101.--Lampillas, Letteratura Spagnuola, tom. ii. pp. 382-384, 495, 792-794; tom. ii. p. 208 et seq.-- Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 37. [28] Erasmus, Epistolae, p. 977. [29] "La muy esclarecida ciudad de Salamanca, madre de las artes liberales, y todas virtudes, y ansi de cavalleros como de letrados varones, muy ilustre." Cosas Memorables, fol. 11.--Chacon, Hist. de la Universidad de Salamanca, apud Semanario Erudito, tom. xviii. pp. 1-61. [30] "Academia Complutensis," says Erasmus of this university, "non aliunde celebritatem nominis auspicata est quàm a complectendo linguae ac bonas literas. Cujus praecipuum oramentum est egregius ille senex, planéque dignus qui multos vincat Nestoras, Antonius Nebrissensis." Epist. ad Ludovicum Vivem, 1521. Epistolae, p. 755. [31] Cosas Memorables, ubi supra.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 57.-- Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, lib. 4.--Chacon, Universidad de Salamanca, ubi supra. It appears that the practice of scraping with the feet as an expression of disapprobation, familiar in our universities, is of venerable antiquity; for Martyr mentions, that he was saluted with it before finishing his discourse by one or two idle youths, dissatisfied with its length. The lecturer, however, seems to have given general satisfaction, for he was escorted back in triumph to his lodgings, to use his own language, "like a victor in the Olympic games," after the conclusion of the exercise. [32] For some remarks on the labors of this distinguished jurisconsult, see Part I. Chap. 6, and Part II. Chap. 26, of the present work. [33] The most remarkable of these latter is Herrera's treatise on Agriculture, which since its publication in Toledo, in 1520, has passed through a variety of editions at home and translations abroad. Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Nova, tom. i. p. 503. [34] This collection, with the ill luck which has too often befallen such repositories in Spain, was burnt in the war of the Communities, in the time of Charles V. Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 16.-- Morales, Obras, tom. vii. p. 18.--Informe de Ríol, who particularly notices the solicitude of Ferdinand and Isabella for preserving the public documents. [35] Mendez, Typographia Española, p. 51. [36] Archivo de Murcia, apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. p. 244. [37] Mendez, Typographia Española, pp. 52, 332. [38] Ordenanças Reales, lib. 4, tit. 4, ley 22.--The preamble of this statute is expressed in the following enlightened terms; "Considerando los Reyes de gloriosa memoria quanto era provechoso y honroso, que a estos sus reynos se truxessen libros de otras partes para que con ellos se hiziessen los hombres letrados, quisieron y ordenaron, que de los libros no se pagasse el alcavala.... Lo qual parece que redunda en provecho universal de todos, y en ennoblecimiento de nuestros Reynos." [39] Capmany, Mem. de Barcelona, tom. i. part. 2, lib. 2, cap. 6.--Mendez, Typographia Española, pp. 55, 93. Bouterwek intimates, that the art of printing was first practised in Spain by German printers at Seville, _in the beginning of the sixteenth century_. (Bouterwek, Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit, (Göttingen, 1801-17,) band iii. p. 98.)--He appears to have been misled by a solitary example quoted from Mayans y Siscar. The want of materials has more than once led this eminent critic to build sweeping conclusions on slender premises. [40] The title of the book is "Certamen poetich en lohor de la Concecio," Valencia, 1474, 4to. The name of the printer is wanting. Mendez, Typographia Española, p. 56. [41] Ibid., pp. 61-63. [42] Mendez, Typographia Española, pp. 52, 53.--Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 138, 139. [43] Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. chap. 13, art. 1. "Adempto per _inquisitiones_," says Tacitus of the gloomy times of Domitian, "et loquendi audiendique commercio." (Vita Agricolae, sec. 2.) Beaumarchais, in a merrier vein, indeed, makes the same bitter reflections. "Il s'est établi dans Madrid un système de liberté sur la vente des productions, qui s'étend même a celles de la presse; et que, pourvu que je ne parle en mes écrits ni de l'autorité, ni de culte, ni de la politique, ni de la morale, ni des gens en place, ni des corps en crédit, ni de l'Opéra, ni des autres spectacles, ni de personne qui tienne à quelque chose, je puis tout imprimer librement, sous l'inspection de deux ou trois censeurs," Mariage de Figaro, acte 5, sc. 3. CHAPTER XX. CASTILIAN LITERATURE.--ROMANCES OF CHIVALRY.--LYRICAL POETRY.-THE DRAMA. This Reign an Epoch in Polite Letters.--Romances of Chivalry.--Ballads or _Romances_.--Moorish Minstrelsy.--"Cancionero General."--Its Literary Value.--Rise of the Spanish Drama.--Criticism on "Celestina."--Encina.-- Naharro.--Low Condition of the Stage.--National Spirit of the Literature of this Epoch. Ornamental or polite literature, which, emanating from the taste and sensibility of a nation, readily exhibits its various fluctuations of fashion and feeling, was stamped in Spain with the distinguishing characteristics of this revolutionary age. The Provencal, which reached such high perfection in Catalonia, and subsequently in Aragon, as noticed in an introductory chapter, [1] expired with the union of this monarchy with Castile, and the dialect ceased to be applied to literary purposes altogether, after the Castilian became the language of the court in the united kingdoms. The poetry of Castile, which throughout the present reign continued to breathe the same patriotic spirit, and to exhibit the same national peculiarities that had distinguished it from the time of the Cid, submitted soon after Ferdinand's death to the influence of the more polished Tuscan, and henceforth, losing somewhat of its distinctive physiognomy, assumed many of the prevalent features of continental literature. Thus the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella becomes an epoch as memorable in literary, as in civil history. The most copious vein of fancy, in that day, was turned in the direction of the prose romance of chivalry; now seldom disturbed, even in its own country, except by the antiquary. The circumstances of the age naturally led to its production. The romantic Moorish wars, teeming with adventurous exploit and picturesque incident, carried on with the natural enemies of the Christian knight, and opening moreover all the legendary stores of Oriental fable,--the stirring adventures by sea as well as land,--above all, the discovery of a world beyond the waters, whose unknown regions gave full scope to the play of the imagination, all contributed to stimulate the appetite for the incredible chimeras, the _magnanime menzogne_, of chivalry. The publication of "Amadis de Gaula" gave a decided impulse to this popular feeling. This romance, which seems now well ascertained to be the production of a Portuguese in the latter half of the fourteenth century, [2] was first printed in a Spanish version, probably not far from 1490. [3] Its editor, Garci Ordoñez de Montalvo, states, in his prologue, that "he corrected it from the ancient originals, pruning it of all superfluous phrases, and substituting others of a more polished and elegant style." [4] How far its character was benefited by this work of purification may be doubted; although it is probable it did not suffer so much by such a process as it would have done in a later and more cultivated period. The simple beauties of this fine old romance, its bustling incidents, relieved by the delicate play of Oriental machinery, its general truth of portraiture, above all, the knightly character of the hero, who graced the prowess of chivalry with a courtesy, modesty, and fidelity unrivalled in the creations of romance, soon recommended it to popular favor and imitation. A continuation, bearing the title of "Las Sergas de Esplandian," was given to the world by Montalvo himself, and grafted on the original stock, as the fifth book of the Amadis, before 1510. A sixth, containing the adventures of his nephew, was printed at Salamanca in the course of the last-mentioned year; and thus the idle writers of the day continued to propagate dulness through a series of heavy tomes, amounting in all to four and twenty books, until the much- abused public would no longer suffer the name of Amadis to cloak the manifold sins of his posterity. [5] Other knights-errant were sent roving about the world at the same time, whose exploits would fill a library; but fortunately they have been permitted to pass into oblivion, from which a few of their names only have been rescued by the caustic criticism of the curate in Don Quixote; who, it will be remembered, after declaring that the virtues of the parent shall not avail his posterity, condemns them and their companions, with one or two exceptions only, to the fatal funeral pile. [6] These romances of chivalry must have undoubtedly contributed to nourish those exaggerated sentiments, which from a very early period entered into the Spanish character. Their evil influence, in a literary view, resulted less from their improbabilities of situation, which they possessed in common with the inimitable Italian epics, than from the false pictures which they presented of human character, familiarizing the eye of the reader with such models as debauched the taste, and rendered him incapable of relishing the chaste and sober productions of art. It is remarkable that the chivalrous romance, which was so copiously cultivated through the greater part of the sixteenth century, should not have assumed the poetic form, as in Italy, and indeed among our Norman ancestors; and that, in its prose dress, no name of note appears to raise it to a high degree of literary merit. Perhaps such a result might have been achieved, but for the sublime parody of Cervantes, which cut short the whole race of knights-errant, and by the fine irony, which it threw around the mock heroes of chivalry, extinguished them for ever. [7] The most popular poetry of this period, that springing from the body of the people, and most intimately addressed to it, is the ballads, or _romances_, as they are termed in Spain. These indeed were familiar to the Peninsula as far back as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; but in the present reign they received a fresh impulse from the war with Granada, and composed, under the name of the Moorish ballads, what may perhaps be regarded, without too high praise, as the most exquisite popular minstrelsy of any age or country. The humble narrative lyrics making up the mass of ballad poetry, and forming the natural expression of a simple state of society, would seem to be most abundant in nations endowed with keen sensibilities, and placed in situations of excitement and powerful interest, fitted to develop them. The light and lively French have little to boast of in this way. [8] The Italians, with a deeper poetic feeling, were too early absorbed in the gross business habits of trade, and their literature received too high a direction from its master spirits, at its very commencement, to allow any considerable deviation in this track. The countries where it has most thriven, are probably Great Britain and Spain. The English and the Scotch, whose constitutionally pensive and even melancholy temperament has been deepened by the sober complexion of the climate, were led to the cultivation of this poetry still further by the stirring scenes of feudal warfare in which they were engaged, especially along the borders. The Spaniards, to similar sources of excitement, added that of high religious feeling in their struggles with the Saracens, which gave a somewhat loftier character to their effusions. Fortunately for them, their early annals gave birth, in the Cid, to a hero whose personal renown was identified with that of his country, round whose name might be concentrated all the scattered lights of song, thus enabling the nation to build up its poetry on the proudest historic recollections. [9] The feats of many other heroes, fabulous as well as real, were permitted to swell the stream of traditionary verse; and thus a body of poetical annals, springing up as it were from the depths of the people, was bequeathed from sire to son, contributing, perhaps, more powerfully than any real history could have done, to infuse a common principle of patriotism into the scattered members of the nation. There is considerable resemblance between the early Spanish ballad and the British. The latter affords more situations of pathos and deep tenderness, particularly those of suffering, uncomplaining love, a favorite theme with old English poets of every description. [10] We do not find, either, in the ballads of the Peninsula, the wild, romantic adventures of the roving outlaw, of the Robin Hood genus, which enter so largely into English minstrelsy. The former are in general of a more sustained and chivalrous character, less gloomy, and although fierce not so ferocious, nor so decidedly tragical in their aspect, as the latter. The ballads of the Cid, however, have many points in common with the border poetry; the same free and cordial manner, the same love of military exploit, relieved by a certain tone of generous gallantry, and accompanied by a strong expression of national feeling. The resemblance between the minstrelsy of the two countries vanishes, however, as we approach the Moorish ballads. The Moorish wars had always afforded abundant themes of interest for the Castilian muse; but it was not till the fall of the capital, that the very fountains of song were broken up, and those beautiful ballads were produced, which seem like the echoes of departed glory, lingering round the ruins of Granada. Incompetent as these pieces may be as historical records, they are doubtless sufficiently true to manners. [11] They present a most remarkable combination, of not merely the exterior form, but the noble spirit of European chivalry, with the gorgeousness and effeminate luxury of the east. They are brief, seizing single situations of the highest poetic interest, and striking the eye of the reader with a brilliancy of execution, so artless in appearance withal as to seem rather the effect of accident than study. We are transported to the gay seat of Moorish power, and witness the animating bustle, its pomp and its revelry, prolonged to the last hour of its existence. The bull-fight of the Vivarrambla, the graceful tilt of reeds, the amorous knights with their quaint significant devices, the dark Zegris, or Gomeres, and the royal, self-devoted Abencerrages, the Moorish maiden radiant at the tourney, the moonlight serenade, the stolen interview, where the lover gives vent to all the intoxication of passion in the burning language of Arabian metaphor and hyperbole, [12]--these, and a thousand similar scenes, are brought before the eye, by a succession of rapid and animated touches, like the lights and shadows of a landscape. The light trochaic structure of the _redondilla_ [13], as the Spanish ballad measure is called, rolling on its graceful, negligent _asonante_, [14] whose continued repetition seems by its monotonous melody to prolong the note of feeling originally struck, is admirably suited by its flexibility to the most varied and opposite expression; a circumstance which has recommended it as the ordinary measure of dramatic dialogue. Nothing can be more agreeable than the general effect of the Moorish ballads, which combine the elegance of a riper period of literature, with the natural sweetness and simplicity, savoring sometimes even of the rudeness, of a primitive age. Their merits have raised them to a sort of classical dignity in Spain, and have led to their cultivation by a higher order of writers, and down to a far later period, than in any other country in Europe. The most successful specimens of this imitation may be assigned to the early part of the seventeenth century; but the age was too late to enable the artist, with all his skill, to seize the true coloring of the antique. It is impossible, at this period, to ascertain the authors of these venerable lyrics, nor can the exact time of their production be now determined; although, as their subjects are chiefly taken from the last days of the Spanish Arabian empire, the larger part of them was probably posterior, and, as they were printed in collections at the beginning of the sixteenth century, could not have been long posterior, to the capture of Granada. How far they may be referred to the conquered Moors, is uncertain. Many of these wrote and spoke the Castilian with elegance, and there is nothing improbable in the supposition, that they should seek some solace under present evils in the splendid visions of the past. The bulk of this poetry, however, was in all probability the creation of the Spaniards themselves, naturally attracted by the picturesque circumstances in the character and condition of the conquered nation to invest them with poetic interest. The Moorish _romances_ fortunately appeared after the introduction of printing into the Peninsula, so that they were secured a permanent existence, instead of perishing with the breath that made them, like so many of their predecessors. This misfortune, which attaches to so much of popular poetry in all nations, is not imputable to any insensibility in the Spaniards to the excellence of their own. Men of more erudition than taste may have held them light, in comparison with more ostentatious and learned productions. This fate has befallen them in other countries than Spain. [15] But persons of finer poetic feeling, and more enlarged spirit of criticism, have estimated them as a most essential and characteristic portion of Castilian literature. Such was the judgment of the great Lope de Vega, who, after expatiating on the extraordinary compass and sweetness of the _romance_, and its adaptation to the highest subjects, commends it as worthy of all estimation for its peculiar national character. [16] The modern Spanish writers have adopted a similar tone of criticism, insisting on its study, as essential to a correct appreciation and comprehension of the genius of the language. [17] The Castilian ballads were first printed in the "Cancionero General" of Fernando del Castillo, in 1511. They were first incorporated into a separate work, by Sepulveda, under the name of "Romances sacados de Historias Antiguas," printed at Antwerp, in 1551. [18] Since that period, they have passed into repeated editions, at home and abroad, especially in Germany, where they have been illustrated by able critics. [19] Ignorance of their authors, and of the era of their production, has prevented any attempt at exact chronological arrangement; a circumstance rendered, moreover, nearly impossible, by the perpetual modification which the original style of the more ancient ballads has experienced, in their transition through successive generations; so that, with one or two exceptions, no earlier date should probably be assigned to the oldest of them, in their present form, than the fifteenth century. [20] Another system of classification has been adopted, of distributing them according to their subjects; and independent collections also of the separate departments, as ballads of the Cid, of the Twelve Peers, the Morisco ballads, and the like, have been repeatedly published, both at home and abroad. [21] The higher and educated classes of the nation were not insensible to the poetic spirit, which drew forth such excellent minstrelsy from the body of the people. Indeed, Castilian poetry bore the same patrician stamp through the whole of the present reign, which had been impressed on it in its infancy. Fortunately, the new art of printing was employed here, as in the case of the _romances_, to arrest those fugitive sallies of imagination, which in other countries were permitted, from want of this care, to pass into oblivion; and _cancioneros_, or collections of lyrics, were published, embodying the productions of this reign and that of John the Second, thus bringing under one view the poetic culture of the fifteenth century. The earliest _cancionero_ printed was at Saragossa, in 1492. It comprehended the works of Mena, Manrique, and six or seven other bards of less note. [22] A far more copious collection was made by Fernando del Castillo, and first published at Valencia, in 1511, under the title of "Cancionero General," since which period it has passed into repeated editions. This compilation is certainly more creditable to Castillo's industry, than to his discrimination or power of arrangement. Indeed, in this latter respect it is so defective, that it would almost seem to have been put together fortuitously, as the pieces came to hand. A large portion of the authors appear to have been persons of rank; a circumstance to which perhaps they were indebted, more than to any poetic merit, for a place in the miscellany, which might have been decidedly increased in value by being diminished in bulk. [23] The _works of devotion_ with which the collection opens, are on the whole the feeblest portion of it. We discern none of the inspiration and lyric glow, which were to have been anticipated from the devout, enthusiastic Spaniard. We meet with anagrams on the Virgin, glosses on the creed and pater noster, _canciones_ on original sin and the like unpromising topics, all discussed in the most bald, prosaic manner, with abundance of Latin phrase, scriptural allusion, and commonplace precept, unenlivened by a single spark of true poetic fire, and presenting altogether a farrago of the most fantastic pedantry. The lighter, especially the amatory poems, are much more successfully executed, and the primitive forms of the old Castilian versification are developed with considerable variety and beauty. Among the most agreeable effusions in this way, may be noticed those of Diego Lopez de Haro, who, to borrow the encomium of a contemporary, was "the mirror of gallantry for the young cavaliers of the time." There are few verses in the collection composed with more facility and grace. [24] Among the more elaborate pieces, Diego de San Pedro's "Desprecio de la Fortuna" may be distinguished, not so much for any poetic talent which it exhibits, as for its mercurial and somewhat sarcastic tone of sentiment. [25] The similarity of subject may suggest a parallel between it and the Italian poet Guidi's celebrated ode on Fortune; and the different styles of execution may perhaps be taken, as indicating pretty fairly the distinctive peculiarities of the Tuscan and the old Spanish school of poetry. The Italian, introducing the fickle goddess, in person, on the scene, describes her triumphant march over the ruins of empires and dynasties, from the earliest time, in a flow of lofty dithyrambic eloquence, adorned with all the brilliant coloring of a stimulated fancy and a highly finished language. The Castilian, on the other hand, instead of this splendid personification, deepens his verse into a moral tone, and, dwelling on the vicissitudes and vanities of human life, points his reflections with some caustic warning, often conveyed with enchanting simplicity, but without the least approach to lyric exaltation, or indeed the affectation of it. This proneness to moralize the song is in truth a characteristic of the old Spanish bard. He rarely abandons himself, without reserve, to the frolic puerilities so common with the sister Muse of Italy, "Scritta così come la penna getta, Per fuggir l'ozio, e non per cercar gloria." It is true, he is occasionally betrayed by verbal subtilties and other affectations of the age; [26] but even his liveliest sallies are apt to be seasoned with a moral, or sharpened by a satiric sentiment. His defects, indeed, are of the kind most opposed to those of the Italian poet, showing themselves, especially in the more elaborate pieces, in a certain tumid stateliness and overstrained energy of diction. On the whole, one cannot survey the "Cancionero General" without some disappointment at the little progress of the poetic art, since the reign of John the Second, at the beginning of the century. The best pieces in the collection are of that date, and no rival subsequently arose to compete with the masculine strength of Mena, or the delicacy and fascinating graces of Santillana. One cause of this tardy progress may have been the direction to utility manifested in this active reign, which led such as had leisure for intellectual pursuits to cultivate science, rather than abandon themselves to the mere revels of the imagination. Another cause may be found in the rudeness of the language, whose delicate finish is so essential to the purposes of the poet, but which was so imperfect at this period that Juan de la Encina, a popular writer of the time, complained that he was obliged, in his version of Virgil's Eclogues, to coin, as it were, a new vocabulary, from the want of terms corresponding with the original, in the old one. [27] It was not until the close of the present reign, when the nation began to breathe awhile from its tumultuous career, that the fruits of the patient cultivation which it had been steadily, though silently experiencing, began to manifest themselves in the improved condition of the language, and its adaptation to the highest poetical uses. The intercourse with Italy, moreover, by naturalizing new and more finished forms of versification, afforded a scope for the nobler efforts of the poet, to which the old Castilian measures, however well suited to the wild and artless movements of the popular minstrelsy, were altogether inadequate. We must not dismiss the miscellaneous poetry of this period, without some notice of the "Coplas" of Don Jorge Manrique, [28] on the death of his father, the count of Paredes, in 1474 [29]. The elegy is of considerable length, and is sustained throughout in a tone of the highest moral dignity, while the poet leads us up from the transitory objects of this lower world to the contemplation of that imperishable existence, which Christianity has opened beyond the grave. A tenderness pervades the piece, which may remind us of the best manner of Petrarch; while, with the exception of a slight taint of pedantry, it is exempt from the meretricious vices that belong to the poetry of the age. The effect of the sentiment is heightened by the simple turns and broken melody of the old Castilian verse, of which perhaps this may be accounted the most finished specimen; such would seem to be the judgment of his own countrymen, [30] whose glosses and commentaries on it have swelled into a separate volume. [31] I shall close this survey with a brief notice of the drama, whose foundations may be said to have been laid during this reign. The sacred plays, or mysteries, so popular throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, may be traced in Spain to an ancient date. Their familiar performance in the churches, by the clergy, is recognized in the middle of the thirteenth century, by a law of Alfonso the Tenth, which, while it interdicted certain profane mummeries that had come into vogue, prescribed the legitimate topics for exhibition. [32] The transition from these rude spectacles to more regular dramatic efforts, was very slow and gradual. In 1414, an allegorical comedy, composed by the celebrated Henry, marquis of Villena, was performed at Saragossa, in the presence of the court. [33] In 1469, a dramatic eclogue by an anonymous author was exhibited in the palace of the count of Ureña, in the presence of Ferdinand, on his coming into Castile to espouse the infanta Isabella. [34] These pieces may be regarded as the earliest theatrical attempts, after the religious dramas and popular pantomimes already noticed; but unfortunately they have not come down to us. The next production deserving attention is a "Dialogue between Love and an Old Man," imputed to Rodrigo Cota, a poet of whose history nothing seems to be known, and little conjectured, but that he flourished during the reigns of John the Second, and Henry the Fourth. The dialogue is written with much vivacity and grace, and with as much dramatic movement as is compatible with only two interlocutors. [35] A much more memorable production is referred to the same author, the tragicomedy of "Celestina," or "Calisto and Melibea," as it is frequently called. The first act, indeed, constituting nearly one-third of the piece, is all that is ascribed to Cota. The remaining twenty, which however should rather be denominated scenes, were continued by another hand, some, though to judge from the internal evidence afforded by the style, not many years later. The second author was Fernando de Roxas, bachelor of law, as he informs us, who composed this work as a sort of intellectual relaxation, during one of his vacations. The time was certainly not misspent. The continuation, however, is not esteemed by the Castilian critics to have risen quite to the level of the original act. [36] The story turns on a love intrigue. A Spanish youth of rank is enamoured of a lady, whose affections he gains with some difficulty, but whom he finally seduces, through the arts of an accomplished courtesan, whom the author has introduced under the romantic name of Celestina. The piece, although comic, or rather sentimental in its progress, terminates in the most tragical catastrophe, in which all the principal actors are involved. The general texture, of the plot is exceedingly clumsy, yet it affords many situations of deep and varied interest in its progress. The principal characters are delineated in the piece with considerable skill. The part of Celestina, in particular, in which a veil of plausible hypocrisy is thrown over the deepest profligacy of conduct, is managed with much address. The subordinate parts are brought into brisk comic action, with natural dialogue, though sufficiently obscene; and an interest of a graver complexion is raised by the passion of the lovers, the timid, confiding tenderness of the lady, and the sorrows of the broken-hearted parent. The execution of the play reminds us on the whole less of the Spanish, than of the old English theatre, in many of its defects, as well as beauties; in the contrasted strength and imbecility of various passages; its intermixture of broad farce and deep tragedy; the unseasonable introduction of frigid metaphor and pedantic allusion in the midst of the most passionate discourses; in the unveiled voluptuousness of its coloring, occasionally too gross for any public exhibition; but, above all, in the general strength and fidelity of its portraiture. The tragicomedy, as it is styled, of Celestina, was obviously never intended for representation, to which, not merely the grossness of some of the details, but the length and arrangement of the piece, are unsuitable. But, notwithstanding this, and its approximation to the character of a romance, it must be admitted to contain within itself the essential elements of dramatic composition; and, as such, is extolled by the Spanish critics, as opening the theatrical career of Europe. A similar claim has been maintained for nearly contemporaneous productions in other countries, and especially for Politian's "Orfeo," which, there is little doubt, was publicly acted before 1483. Notwithstanding its representation, however, the "Orfeo," presenting a combination of the eclogue and the ode, without any proper theatrical movement, or attempt at development of character, cannot fairly come within the limits of dramatic writing. A more ancient example than either, at least as far as the exterior forms are concerned, may be probably found in the celebrated French farce of Pierre Pathelin, printed as early as 1474, having been repeatedly played during the preceding century, and which, with the requisite modifications, still keeps possession of the stage. The pretensions of this piece, however, as a work of art, are comparatively humble; and it seems fair to admit, that in the higher and more important elements of dramatic composition, and especially in the delicate, and at the same time powerful delineation of character and passion, the Spanish critics may be justified in regarding the "Celestina" as having led the way in modern Europe. [37] Without deciding on its proper classification as a work of art, however, its real merits are settled by its wide popularity, both at home and abroad. It has been translated into most of the European languages, and the preface to the last edition, published in Madrid, so recently as 1822, enumerates thirty editions of it in Spain alone, in the course of the sixteenth century. Impressions were multiplied in Italy, and at the very time when it was interdicted at home on the score of its immoral tendency. A popularity thus extending through distant ages and nations, shows how faithfully it is built on the principles of human nature. [38] The drama assumed the pastoral form, in its early stages, in Spain, as in Italy. The oldest specimens in this way, which have come down to us, are the productions of Juan de la Encina, a contemporary of Roxas. He was born in 1469, and, after completing his education at Salamanca, was received into the family of the duke of Alva. He continued there several years, employed in the composition of various poetical works, among others, a version of Virgil's Eclogues, which he so altered as to accommodate them to the principal events in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. He visited Italy in the beginning of the following century, and was attracted by the munificent patronage of Leo the Tenth to fix his residence at the papal court. While there, he continued his literary labors. He embraced the ecclesiastical profession; and his skill in music recommended him to the office of principal director of the pontifical chapel. He was subsequently presented with the priory of Leon, and returned to Spain, where he died in 1534. [39] Encina's works first appeared at Salamanca, in 1496, collected into one volume, folio. [40] Besides other poetry, they comprehend a number of dramatic eclogues, sacred and profane; the former, suggested by topics drawn from Scripture, like the ancient mysteries; the latter, chiefly amatory. They were performed in the palace of his patron, the duke of Alva, in the presence of Prince John, the duke of Infantado, and other eminent persons of the court; and the poet himself occasionally assisted at the representation. [41] Encina's eclogues are simple compositions, with little pretence to dramatic artifice. The story is too meagre to admit of much ingenuity or contrivance, or to excite any depth of interest. There are few interlocutors, seldom more than three or four, although on one occasion rising to as many as seven; of course, there is little scope for theatrical action. The characters are of the humble class belonging to pastoral life, and the dialogue, which is extremely appropriate, is conducted with facility; but the rustic condition of the speakers precludes anything like literary elegance or finish, in which respect they are doubtless surpassed by some of his more ambitious compositions. There is a comic air imparted to them, however, and a lively colloquial turn, which renders them very agreeable. Still, whatever be their merit as pastorals, they are entitled to little consideration as specimens of dramatic art; and, in the vital spirit of dramatic composition, must be regarded as far inferior to the "Celestina." The simplicity of these productions, and the facility of their exhibition, which required little theatrical decoration or costume, recommended them to popular imitation, which continued long after the regular forms of the drama were introduced into Spain. [42] The credit of this introduction belongs to Bartholomeo Torres de Naharro, often confounded by the Castilian writers themselves with a player of the same name, who flourished half a century later. [43] Few particulars have been ascertained of his personal history. He was born at Torre, in the province of Estremadura. In the early part of his life he fell into the hands of the Algerines, and was finally released from captivity by the exertions of certain benevolent Italians, who generously paid his ransom. He then established his residence in Italy, at the court of Leo the Tenth. Under the genial influence of that patronage, which quickened so many of the seeds of genius to production in every department, he composed his "Propaladia," a work embracing a variety of lyrical and dramatic poetry, first published at Rome, in 1517. Unfortunately, the caustic satire, levelled in some of the higher pieces of this collection at the license of the pontifical court, brought such obloquy on the head of the author as compelled him to take refuge in Naples, where he remained under the protection of the noble family of Colonna. No further particulars are recorded of him except that he embraced the ecclesiastical profession; and the time and place of his death are alike uncertain. In person he is said to have been comely, with an amiable disposition, and sedate and dignified demeanor. [44] His "Propaladia," first published at Rome, passed through several editions subsequently in Spain, where it was alternately prohibited, or permitted, according to the caprice of the Holy Office. It contains, among other things, eight comedies, written in the native _redondillas_; which continue to be regarded as the suitable measure for the drama. They afford the earliest example of the division into _jornadas_, or days, and of the _intróito_, or prologue, in which the author, after propitiating the audience by suitable compliment, and witticisms not over delicate, gives a view of the length and general scope of his play. [45] The scenes of Naharro's comedies, with a single exception, are laid in Spain and Italy; those in the latter country probably being selected with reference to the audiences before whom they were acted. The diction is easy and correct, without much affectation of refinement or rhetorical ornament. The dialogue, especially in the lower parts, is sustained with much comic vivacity; indeed, Naharro seems to have had a nicer perception of character as it is found in lower life, than as it exists in the higher; and more than one of his plays are devoted exclusively to its illustration. On some occasions, however, the author assumes a more elevated tone, and his verse rises to a degree of poetic beauty, deepened by the moral reflection so characteristic of the Spaniards. At other times, his pieces are disfigured by such a Babel-like confusion of tongues, as makes it doubtful which may be the poet's vernacular. French, Spanish, Italian, with a variety of barbarous _patois_, and mongrel Latin, are all brought into play at the same time, and all comprehended, apparently with equal facility, by each one of the _dramatis personae_. But it is difficult to conceive how such a jargon could have been comprehended, far more relished, by an Italian audience. [46] Naharro's comedies are not much to be commended for the intrigue, which generally excites but a languid interest, and shows little power or adroitness in the contrivance. With every defect, however, they must be allowed to have given the first forms to Spanish comedy, and to exhibit many of the features which continued to be characteristic of it in a state of more perfect development under Lope de Vega and Calderon. Such, for instance, is the amorous jealousy, and especially the point of honor, so conspicuous on the Spanish theatre; and such, too, the moral confusion too often produced by blending the foulest crimes with zeal for religion. [47] These comedies, moreover, far from blind conformity with the ancients, discovered much of the spirit of independence, and deviated into many of the eccentricities which distinguish the national theatre in later times; and which the criticism of our own day has so successfully explained and defended on philosophical principles. Naharro's plays were represented, as appears from his prologue, in Italy, probably not at Rome, which he quitted soon after their publication, but at Naples, which, then forming a part of the Spanish dominions, might more easily furnish an audience capable of comprehending them. [48] It is remarkable that, notwithstanding their repeated editions in Spain, they do not appear to have ever been performed there. The cause of this, probably, was the low state of the histrionic art, and the total deficiency in theatrical costume and decoration; yet it was not easy to dispense with these in the representation of pieces, which brought more than a score of persons occasionally, and these crowned heads, at the same time, upon the stage. [49] Some conception may be afforded of the lamentable poverty of the theatrical equipment, from the account given of its condition, half a century later, by Cervantes. "The whole wardrobe of a manager of the theatre, at that time," says he, "was contained in a single sack, and amounted only to four dresses of white fur trimmed, with gilt leather, four beards, four wigs, and four crooks, more or less. There were no trapdoors, movable clouds, or machinery of any kind. The stage itself consisted only of four or six planks, placed across as many benches, arranged in the form of a square, and elevated but four palms from the ground. The only decoration of the theatre was an old coverlet, drawn from side to side by cords, behind which the musicians sang some ancient _romance_, without the guitar." [50] In fact, no further apparatus was employed than that demanded for the exhibition of mysteries, or the pastoral dialogues which succeeded them. The Spaniards, notwithstanding their precocity, compared with most of the nations of Europe, in dramatic art, were unaccountably tardy in all its histrionic accompaniments. The public remained content with such poor mummeries, as could be got up by strolling players and mountebanks. There was no fixed theatre in Madrid until the latter part of the sixteenth century; and that consisted of a courtyard, with only a roof to shelter it, while the spectators sat on benches ranged around, or at the windows of the surrounding houses. [51] A similar impulse with that experienced by comic writing, was given to tragedy. The first that entered on this department were professed scholars, who adopted the error of the Italian dramatists, in fashioning their pieces servilely after the antique, instead of seizing the expression of their own age. The most conspicuous attempts in this way were made by Fernan Perez de Oliva. [52] He was born at Cordova, in 1494, and, after many years passed in the various schools of Spain, France, and Italy, returned to his native land, and became a lecturer in the university of Salamanca. He instructed in moral philosophy and mathematics, and established the highest reputation for his critical acquaintance with the ancient languages and his own. He died young, at the age of thirty-nine, deeply lamented for his moral, no less than for his intellectual worth. [53] His various works were published by the learned Morales, his nephew, some fifty years after his death. Among them are translations in prose of the Electra of Sophocles, and the Hecuba of Euripides. They may with more propriety be termed imitations, and those too of the freest kind. Although they conform, in the general arrangement and progress of the story, to their originals, yet characters, nay whole scenes and dialogues, are occasionally omitted; and in those retained, it is not always easy to recognize the hand of the Grecian artist, whose modest beauties are thrown into shade by the ambitious ones of his imitator. [54] But with all this, Oliva's tragedies must be admitted to be executed, on the whole, with vigor; and the diction, notwithstanding the national tendency to exaggeration above alluded to, may be generally commended for decorum and an imposing dignity, quite worthy of the tragic drama; indeed, they may be selected as affording probably the best specimen of the progress of prose composition during the present reign. [55] Oliva's reputation led to a similar imitation of the antique. But the Spaniards were too national in all their tastes to sanction it. These classical compositions did not obtain possession of the stage, but were confined to the closet, serving only as a relaxation for the man of letters; while the voice of the people compelled all who courted it, to accommodate their inventions to those romantic forms, which were subsequently developed in such variety of beauty by the great Spanish dramatists. [56] We have now surveyed the different kinds of poetic culture familiar to Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella. Their most conspicuous element is the national spirit which pervades them, and the exclusive attachment which they manifest to the primitive forms of versification peculiar to the Peninsula. The most remarkable portion of this body of poetry may doubtless be considered the Spanish _romances_, or ballads; that popular minstrelsy, which, commemorating the picturesque and chivalrous incidents of the age, reflects most faithfully the romantic genius of the people who gave it utterance. The lyric efforts of the period were less successful. There were few elaborate attempts in this field, indeed, by men of decided genius. But the great obstacle may be found in the imperfection of the language and the deficiency of the more exact and finished metrical forms, indispensable to high poetic execution. The whole period, however, comprehending, as it does, the first decided approaches to a regular drama, may be regarded as very important in a literary aspect; since it exhibits the indigenous peculiarities of Castilian literature in all their freshness, and shows to what a degree of excellence it could attain, while untouched by any foreign influence. The present reign may be regarded as the epoch which divides the ancient from the modern school of Spanish poetry; in which the language was slowly but steadily undergoing the process of refinement, that "made the knowledge of it," to borrow the words of a contemporary critic, "pass for an elegant accomplishment, even with the cavaliers and dames of cultivated Italy;" [57] and which finally gave full scope to the poetic talent, that raised the literature of the country to such brilliant heights in the sixteenth century. * * * * * I have had occasion to advert more than once in the course of this chapter to the superficial acquaintance of the Spanish critics with the early history of their own drama, authentic materials for which are so extremely rare and difficult of access, as to preclude the expectation of anything like a satisfactory account of it out of the Peninsula. The nearest approach to this within my knowledge is made in an article in the eighth number of the American Quarterly Review, ascribed to Mr. Ticknor, late Professor of Modern Literature in Harvard University. This gentleman, during a residence in the Peninsula, had every facility for replenishing his library with the most curious and valuable works, both printed and manuscript, in this department; and his essay embodies in a brief compass the results of a well-directed industry, which he has expanded in greater detail in his lectures on Spanish literature, delivered before the classes of the University. The subject is discussed with his usual elegance and perspicuity of style; and the foreign, and indeed Castilian scholar, may find much novel information there, in the views presented of the early progress of the dramatic and the histrionic art in the Peninsula. Since the publication of this article, Moratin's treatise, so long and anxiously expected, "Orígenes del Teatro Español," has made its appearance under the auspices of the Royal Academy of History, which has enriched the national literature with so many admirable editions of its ancient authors. Moratin states in his Preface, that he was employed from his earliest youth in collecting notices, both at home and abroad, of whatever might illustrate the origin of the Spanish drama. The results have been two volumes, containing in the First Part an historical discussion, with ample explanatory notes, and a catalogue of dramatic pieces from the earliest epoch down to the time of Lope de Vega, chronologically arranged, and accompanied with critical analyses, and copious illustrative extracts from pieces of the greatest merit. The Second Part is devoted to the publication of entire pieces of various authors, which from their extreme rarity, or their existence only in manuscript, have had but little circulation. The selections throughout are made with that careful discrimination, which resulted from poetic talent combined with extensive and thorough erudition. The criticisms, although sometimes warped by the peculiar dramatic principles of the author, are conducted in general with great fairness; and ample, but not extravagant, commendation is bestowed on productions, whose merit, to be properly appreciated, must be weighed by one conversant with the character and intellectual culture of the period. The work unfortunately did not receive the last touches of its author, and undoubtedly something may be found wanting to the full completion of his design. On the whole, it must be considered as a rich repertory of old Castilian literature, much of it of the most rare and recondite nature, directed to the illustration of a department, that has hitherto been suffered to languish in the lowest obscurity, but which is now so arranged that it may be contemplated, as it were, under one aspect, and its real merits accurately determined. It was not till some time after the publication of this History, that my attention was called to that portion of the writings of Don Martinez de la Rosa, in which he criticizes the various departments of the national literature. This criticism is embodied in the annotations and appendix to his elegant "Poetica" (Obras Literarias, (Paris, 1827,) tom. i. ii.) The former discuss the general laws, by which the various kinds of poetry are to be regulated; the latter presents a very searching and scientific analysis of the principal productions of the Spanish poets, down to the close of the last century. The critic exemplifies his own views by copious extracts from the subjects of his criticism, and throws much collateral light on the argument by illustrations borrowed from foreign literature. In the examination of the Spanish drama, especially comedy, which he modestly qualifies as a "succinct notice, not very exact," he is very elaborate; and discovers the same taste and sagacity in estimating the merits of individual writers, which he had shown in discussing the general principles of the art. Had I read his work sooner, it would have greatly facilitated my own inquiries in the same obscure path; and I should have recognized, at least, one brilliant exception to my sweeping remark on the apathy manifested by the Castilian scholars to the antiquities of the national drama. FOOTNOTES [1] Eichhorn, Geschichte der Kultur und Litteratur der Neueren Europa, (Göttingen, 1796-1811,) pp. 129, 130.--See also the conclusion of the Introduction, Sec. 2, of this History. [2] Nic. Antonio seems unwilling to relinquish the pretensions of his own nation to the authorship of this romance. (See Bibliotheca Nova, tom. ii. p. 394.) Later critics, and among them Lampillas, (Ensayo Historico- Apologético de la Literatura Española, (Madrid, 1789,) tom. v. p. 168,) who resigns no more than he is compelled to do, are less disposed to contest the claims of the Portuguese. Mr. Southey has cited two documents, one historical, the other poetical, which seem to place its composition by Lobeira in the latter part of the fourteenth century beyond any reasonable doubt. (See Amadis of Gaul, pref.,--also Sarmiento, Memorias para la Historia de la Poesía y Poetas Españoles, Obras Posthumas, (Madrid, 1775,) tom. i. p. 239.) Bouterwek, and after him Sismondi, without adducing any authority, have fixed the era of Lobeira's death at 1325. Dante, who died but four years previous to that date, furnishes a negative argument, at least, against this, since, in his notice of some doughty names of chivalry then popular, he makes no allusion to Amadis, the best of all. Inferno, cantos v., xxxi. [3] The excellent old romance "Tirante the White," _Tirant lo Blanch_, was printed at Valencia in 1490. (See Mendez, Typographia Española, tom. i. pp. 72-75.) If, as Cervantes asserts, the "Amadis" was the first book of chivalry printed in Spain, it must have been anterior to this date. This is rendered probable by Montalvo's prologue to his edition at Saragossa, in 1521, still preserved in the royal library at Madrid, where he alludes to his former publication of it in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. (Cervantes, Don Quixote, ed. Pellicer, Discurso Prelim.) Mr. Dunlop, who has analyzed these romances with a patience that more will be disposed to commend than imitate, has been led into the error of supposing that the first edition of the "Amadis" was printed at Seville, in 1526, from detached fragments appearing in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, and subsequently by Montalvo, at Salamanca, in 1547. See History of Prose Fiction, vol. ii. chap. 10. [4] The following is Montalvo's brief prologue to the introduction of the first book. "Aqvi comiença el primero libro del esforçado et virtuoso cauallero Amadis hijo del rey Perion de Gaula; y dela reyna Elisena: el qual fue coregido y emendado por el honrado y virtuoso cauallero Garciordoñes de Montalvo, regidor dela noble uilla de Medina del campo; et corregiole delos antiguos originales que estauan corruptos, et compuestos en antiguo estilo: por falta delos diferentes escriptores. Quitando muchas palabras superfluas; et poniendo otras de mas polido y elegante estilo: tocantes ala caualleria et actos della, animando los coraçones gentiles de manzebos belicosos que con grandissimo affetto abrazan el arte dela milicia corporal animando la immortal memoria del arte de caualleria no menos honestissimo que glorioso." Amadis de Gaula, (Venecia, 1533,) fol. 1. [5] Nic. Antonio enumerates the editions of thirteen of this doughty family of knights-errant. (Bibliotheca Nova, tom. ii. pp. 394, 395.) He dismisses his notice with the reflection, somewhat more charitable than that of Don Quixote's curate, that "he had felt little interest in investigating these fables, yet was willing to admit, with others, that their reading was not wholly useless." Moratin has collected an appalling catalogue of _part_ of the books of chivalry published in Spain at the close of the fifteenth and the following century. The first on the list is the _Carcel de Amor_, por Diego Hernandez de San Pedro, en Burgos, año de 1496. Obras, tom. i. pp. 93-98. [6] Cervantes, Don Quixote, tom. i. part. 1, cap. 6. The curate's wrath is very emphatically expressed. "Pues vayan todos al corral, dixo el Cura, que a trueco de quemar a la reyna Pintiquïniestra, y al pastor Darinel y a sus eglogas, y a las endiabladas y revueltas razones de su autor, quemara con ellos al padre que me engendro si andubiera en figura de caballero andante." The author of the "Dialogo de las Lenguas" chimes in with the same tone of criticism. "Los quales," he says, speaking of books of chivalry, "de mas de ser mentirossissimos, son tal mal compuestos, assi por dezir las mentiras tan desvergonçadas, como por tener el estilo desbaraçado, que no ay buen estomago que lo pueda leer." Apud Mayans y Siscar, Orígenes, tom. ii. p. 158. [7] The labors of Bowles, Rios, Arrieta, Pellicer, and Navarrete would seem to have left little to desire in regard to the illustration of Cervantes. But the commentaries of Clemencin, published since this chapter was written, in 1833, show how much yet remained to be supplied. They afford the most copious illustrations, both literary and historical, of his author, and exhibit that nice taste in verbal criticism, which is not always joined with such extensive erudition. Unfortunately, the premature death of Clemencin has left the work unfinished; but the fragment completed, which reaches to the close of the First Part, is of sufficient value permanently to associate the name of its author with that of the greatest genius of his country. [8] The fabliaux cannot fairly be considered as an exception to this. These graceful little performances, the work of professed bards, who had nothing further in view than the amusement of a listless audience, have little claim to be considered as the expression of national feeling or sentiment. The poetry of the south of France, more impassioned and lyrical in its character, wears the stamp, not merely of patrician elegance, but refined artifice, which must not be confounded with the natural flow of popular minstrelsy. [9] How far the achievements claimed for the Campeador are strictly true, is little to the purpose. It is enough that they were received as true, throughout the Peninsula, as far back as the twelfth, or, at latest, the thirteenth century. [10] One exception, among others, readily occurs in the pathetic old ballad of the Conde Alarcos, whose woful catastrophe, with the unresisting suffering of the countess, suggests many points of coincidence with the English minstrelsy. The English reader will find a version of it in the "Ancient Poetry and Romances of Spain," from the pen of Mr. Bowring, to whom the literary world is so largely indebted for an acquaintance with the popular minstrelsy of Europe. [11] I have already noticed the insufficiency of the _romances_ to authentic history, Part I. Chap. 8, Note 30. My conclusions there have been confirmed by Mr. Irving, (whose researches have led him in a similar direction,) in his "Alhambra," published nearly a year after the above note was written. The great source of the popular misconceptions respecting the domestic history of Granada is Gines Perez de Hyta, whose work, under the title of "Historia de los Vandos de los Zegries y Abencerrages, Cavalleros Moros de Granada, y las Guerras Civiles que huvo en ella," was published at Alcalá in 1604. This romance, written in prose, embodied many of the old Moorish ballads in it, whose singular beauty, combined with the romantic and picturesque character of the work itself, soon made it extremely popular, until at length it seems to have acquired a degree of the historical credit claimed for it by its author as a translation from an Arabian chronicle; a credit which has stood it in good stead with the tribe of travel-mongers and _raconteurs_, persons always of easy faith, who have propagated its fables far and wide. Their credulity, however, may be pardoned in what has imposed on the perspicacity of so cautions an historian as Müller. Allgemeine Geschichte, (1817,) band ii. p. 504. [12] Thus, in one of their _romances_, we have a Moorish lady "shedding drops of liquid silver, and scattering her hair of Arabian gold" over the corpse of her murdered husband! "Sobre el cuerpo de Albencayde Destila liquida plata, Y convertida en cabellos Esparce el oro de Arabia." Can anything be more Oriental than this imagery? In another we have "an hour of years of impatient hopes;" a passionate sally, that can scarcely be outmatched by Scriblerus. This taint of exaggeration, however, so far from being peculiar to the popular minstrelsy, has found its way, probably through this channel in part, into most of the poetry of the Peninsula. [13] The _redondilla_ may be considered as the basis of Spanish versification. It is of great antiquity, and compositions in it are still extant, as old as the time of the infante Don Manuel, at the close of the thirteenth century. (See Cancionero General, fol. 207.) The redondilla admits of great variety; but in the romances it is most frequently found to consist of eight syllables, the last foot, and some or all of the preceding, as the case may be, being trochees. (Rengifo, Arte Poetica Espanola, (Barcelona, 1727,) cap. 9, 44.) Critics have derived this delightful measure from various sources. Sarmiento traces it to the hexameter of the ancient Romans, which may be bisected into something analogous to the redondillas. (Memorias, pp. 168-171.) Bouterwek thinks it may have been suggested by the songs of the Roman soldiery. (Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit, band iii., Einleitung, p. 20.)--Velazquez borrows it from the rhyming hexameters of the Spanish Latin poets, of which he gives specimens of the beginning of the fourteenth century. (Poesía Castellana, pp. 77, 78.) Later critics refer its derivation to the Arabic. Conde has given a translation of certain Spanish-Arabian poems, in the measure of the original, from which it is evident, that the hemistich of an Arabian verse corresponds perfectly with the redondilla. (See his Dominacion de los Arabes, passim.) The same author, in a treatise, which he never published, on the "poesía oriental," shows more precisely the intimate affinity subsisting between the metrical form of the Arabian and the old Castilian verse. The reader will find an analysis of his manuscript in Part I. Chap. 8, Note 49, of this History. This theory is rendered the more plausible by the influence which the Arabic has exercised on Castilian versification in other respects, as in the prolonged repetition of the rhyme, for example, which is wholly borrowed from the Spanish Arabs; whose superior cultivation naturally affected the unformed literature of their neighbors, and through no channel more obviously than its popular minstrelsy. [14] The _asonante_ is a rhyme made by uniformity of the vowels, without reference to the consonants; the regular rhyme, which obtains in other European literatures, is distinguished in Spain by the term _consonante_. Thus the four following words, taken at random from a Spanish ballad, are consecutive _asonantes_; _regozijo_, _pellico_, _luzido_, _amarillo_. In this example, the two last syllables have the assonance; although this is not invariable, it sometimes falling on the antepenultima and the final syllable. (See Rengifo, Arte Poética Española, pp. 214, 215, 218.) There is a wild, artless melody in the _asonante_, and a graceful movement coming somewhere, as it does, betwixt regular rhyme and blank verse, which would make its introduction very desirable, but not very feasible, in our own language. An attempt of the kind has been made by a clever writer, in the Retrospective Review. (Vol. iv. art. 2.) If it has failed, it is from the impediments presented by the language, which has not nearly the same amount of vowel terminations, nor of simple uniform vowel sounds, as the Spanish; the double termination, however full of grace and beauty in the Castilian, assumes, perhaps from the effect of association, rather a doggerel air in the English. [15] This may be still further inferred from the tenor of a humorous, satirical old _romance_, in which the writer implores the justice of Apollo on the heads of the swarm of traitor poets, who have deserted the ancient themes of song, the Cids, the Laras, the Gonzalez, to celebrate the Ganzuls and Abderrahmans and the fantastical fables of the Moors. "Tanta Zayda y Adalifa, tanta Draguta y Daraxa, tanto Azarque y tanto Adulce, tanto Gazul, y Abenamar, tanto alquizer y marlota, tanto almayzar, y almalafa, tantas emprisas y plumas, tantas cifras y medallas, tanta roperia Mora. Y en vanderillas y adargas, tanto mote, y tantas motas muera yo sino me cansan." * * * * * "Los Alfonsos, los Henricos, los Sanchos, y los de Lara, que es dellos, y que es del Cid? tanto olvido en glorias tantas? ninguna pluma las buela, ninguna Musa las canta? Justicia, Apollo, justicia, vengadores rayos lança contra Poetas Moriscos." Dr. Johnson's opinions are well known, in regard to this department of English literature, which, by his ridiculous parodies, he succeeded for a time in throwing into the shade, or, in the language of his admiring biographer, made "perfectly contemptible." Petrarch, with like pedantry, rested his hopes of fame on his Latin epic, and gave away his lyrics, as alms to ballad-singers. Posterity, deciding on surer principles of taste, has reversed both these decisions. [16] "Algunos quieren que sean la cartilla de los Poetas; yo no lo siento assi; antes bien los hallo capaces, no solo de exprimir y declarar qualquier concepto con facil dulzura, pero de prosequir toda grave accion de numeroso Poema. Y soy tan de veras Español, que por ser en nuestro idioma natural este genero, no me puedo persuadir que no sea digno de toda estimacion."(Coleccion de Obras Sueltas, (Madrid, 1776-9,) tom. iv. p. 176, Prólogo.) In another place he finely styles them "Iliads without a Homer." [17] See, among others, the encomiastic and animated criticism of Fernandez and Quintana. Fernandez, Poesías Escogidas, de Nuestros Cancioneros y Romanceros Antiguos, (Madrid, 1796,) tom. xvi., Prólogo.-- Quintana, Poesías Selectas Castellanas, Introd. art. 4. [18] Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Nova, tom. ii. p. 10.--The Spanish translators of Bouterwek have noticed the principal "collections and earliest editions" of the _Romances_. This original edition of Sepulveda has escaped their notice. See Literatura Española, pp. 217, 218. [19] See Grimm, Depping, Herder, etc. This last poet has embraced a selection of the Cid ballads, chronologically arranged, and translated with eminent simplicity and spirit, if not with the scrupulous fidelity usually aimed at by the Germans. See his Sämmtliche Werke, (Wien, 1813,) band iii. [20] Sarmiento, Memorias, pp. 242, 243.--Moratin considers that none have come down to us, in their original costume, of an earlier date than John II.'s reign, the first half of the fifteenth century. (Obras, tom. i. p. 84.) The Spanish translators of Bouterwek transcribe a _romance_, relating to the Cid, from the fathers Berganza and Merino, purporting to exhibit the primitive, uncorrupted diction of the thirteenth century. Native critics are of course the only ones competent to questions of this sort; but, to the less experienced eye of a foreigner, the style of this ballad would seem to resemble much less that genuine specimen of the versification of the preceding age, the poem of the Cid, than the compositions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. [21] The principle of philosophical arrangement, if it may so be called, is pursued still further in the latest Spanish publications of the _romances_, where the Moorish minstrelsy is embodied in a separate volume, and distributed with reference to its topics. This system is the more practicable with this class of ballads, since it far exceeds in number any other. See Duran, Romancero de Romances Moriscos. The Romancero I have used is the ancient edition of Medina del Campo, 1602. It is divided into nine parts, though it is not easy to see on what principle, since the productions of most opposite date and tenor are brought into juxtaposition. The collection contains nearly a thousand ballads, which, however, fall far short of the entire number preserved, as may easily be seen by reference to other compilations. When to this is added the consideration of the large number which insensibly glided into oblivion without ever coming to the press, one may form a notion of the immense mass of these humble lyrics, which floated among the common people of Spain; and we shall be the less disposed to wonder at the proud and chivalrous bearing that marks even the peasantry of a nation, which seems to breathe the very air of romantic song. [22] The title of this work was "Coplas de Vita Christi, de la Cena con la Pasion, y de la Veronica con la Resurreccion de nuestro Redemtor. E las siete Angustias e siete Gozos de nuestra Señora, con otras obras mucho provechosas." It concludes with the following notice, "Fue la presente obra emprentada en la insigne Ciudad de Zaragoza de Aragon por industria e expensas de Paulo Hurus de Constancia aleman. A 27 dias de Noviembre, 1492." (Mendez, Typographia Española, pp. 134, 136.) It appears there were two or three other cancioneros compiled, none of which, however, were admitted to the honors of the press. (Bouterwek, Literatura Española, nota.) The learned Castro, some fifty years since, published an analysis with copious extracts from one of these made by Baena, the Jewish physician of John II., a copy of which existed in the royal library of the Escurial. Bibliotheca Española, tom. i. p. 265 et seq. [23] Cancionero General, passim.--Moratin has given a list of the men of rank who contributed to this miscellany; it contains the names of the highest nobility of Spain. (Orig. del Teatro Español, Obras, tom. i. pp. 85, 86.) Castillo's Cancionero passed through several editions, the latest of which appeared in 1573. See a catalogue, not entirely complete, of the different Spanish Cancioneros in Bouterwek, Literatura Española, trad., p. 217. [24] Cancionero General, pp. 83-89.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS. [25] Cancionero General, pp. 158-161.--Some meagre information of this person is given by Nic. Antonio, whose biographical notices may be often charged with deficiency in chronological data; a circumstance perhaps unavoidable from the obscurity of their subjects. Biblioteca Vetus, tom. ii. lib. 10, cap. 6. [26] There are probably more direct puns in Petrarch's lyrics alone, than in all the Cancionero General. There is another kind of _niaiserie_, however, to which the Spanish poets were much addicted, being the transposition of the word in every variety of sense and combination; as, for example, "Acordad Vuestros olvidos Y olvida vuestros acuerdos Porque tales desacuerdos Acuerden vuestros sentidos," etc. Cancionero General, fol. 226. It was such subtilties as these, _entricadas razones_, as Cervantes calls them, that addled the brains of poor Don Quixote. Tom. i. cap. 1. [27] Velasquez, Poesía Castellana, p. 122.--More than half a century later, the learned Ambrosio Morales complained of the barrenness of the Castilian, which he imputed to the too exclusive adoption of the Latin upon all subjects of dignity and importance. Obras, tom. xiv. pp. 147, 148. [28] L. Marineo, speaking of this accomplished nobleman, styles him "virum satis illustrem.--Eum enim poetam et philosophum natura formavit ac peperit." He unfortunately fell in a skirmish, five years after his father's death, in 1479. Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. p. 531. [29] An elaborate character of this Quixotic old cavalier may be found in Pulgar, Claros Varones, tit. 13. [30] "Don Jorge Manrique," says Lope de Vega, "cuyas coplas Castellanas admiren los ingenios estrangeros y merecen estar escritas con letras de oro." Obras Sueltas, tom. xii. Prólogo. [31] Coplas de Don Jorge Manrique, ed. Madrid, 1779.--Diálogo de las Lenguas, apud Mayans y Siscar, Orígenes, tom. ii. p. 149.--Manrique's Coplas have also been the subject of a separate publication in the United States. Professor Longfellow's version, accompanying it, is well calculated to give the English reader a correct notion of the Castilian bard, and, of course, a very exaggerated one of the literary culture of the age. [32] After proscribing certain profane mummeries, the law confines the clergy to the representation of such subjects as "the birth of our Saviour, in which is shown how the angels appeared, announcing his nativity; also his advent, and the coming of the three Magi kings to worship him; and his resurrection, showing his crucifixion and ascension on the third day; and other such things leading men to do well and live constant in the faith." (Siete Partidas, tit. 6, ley 34.) It is worth noting, that similar abuses continued common among the ecclesiastics, down to Isabella's reign, as may be inferred from a decree, very similar to the law of the Partidas above cited, published by the council of Aranda, in 1473. (Apud Moratin, Obras, tom. i. p. 87.) Moratin considers it certain, that the representation of the mysteries existed in Spain, as far back as the eleventh century. The principal grounds for this conjecture appear to be, the fact that such notorious abuses had crept into practice by the middle of the thirteenth century, as to require the intervention of the law. (Ibid., pp. 11, 13.) The circumstance would seem compatible with a much more recent origin. [33] Cervantes, Comedias y Entremeses, (Madrid, 1749,) tom. i. prólogo de Nasarre.--Velazquez, Poesía Castellana, p. 86.--The fifth volume of the Memoirs of the Spanish Royal Academy of History contains a dissertation on the "national diversions," by Don Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, replete with curious erudition, and exhibiting the discriminating taste to have been expected from its accomplished author. Among these antiquarian researches, the writer has included a brief view of the first theatrical attempts in Spain. See Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. v. Mem. 6. [34] Moratin, Obras, tom. i. p. 115.--Nasarre (Cervantes, Comedias, pról.), Jovellanos (Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. v. Memor. 6), Pellicer (Orígen y Progreso de la Comedia, (1804,) tom. i. p. 12), and others, refer the authorship of this little piece, without hesitation, to Juan de la Encina, although the year of its representation corresponds precisely with that of his birth. The prevalence of so gross a blunder among the Spanish scholars, shows how little the antiquities of their theatre were studied before the time of Moratin. [35] This little piece has been published at length by Moratin, in the first volume of his works. (See Orígenes del Teatro Español, Obras, tom. i. pp. 303-314.) The celebrated marquis of Santillana's poetical dialogue, "Comedieta da Ponza," has no pretensions to rank as a dramatic composition, notwithstanding its title, which is indeed as little significant of its real character, as the term "Commedia" is of Dante's epic. It is a discourse on the vicissitudes of human life, suggested by a sea-fight near Ponza, in 1435. It is conducted without any attempt at dramatic action or character, or, indeed, dramatic development of any sort. The same remarks may be made of the political satire, "Mingo Revulgo," which appeared in Henry IV.'s reign. Dialogue was selected by these authors as a more popular and spirited medium than direct narrative for conveying their sentiments. The "Comedieta da Ponza" has never appeared in print; the copy which I have used is a transcript from the one in the royal library at Madrid, and belongs to Mr. George Ticknor. [36] Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, (Alcalá, 1586,) Introd.--Nothing is positively ascertained respecting the authorship of the first act of the Celestina. Some impute it to Juan de Mena; others with more probability to Rodrigo Cota el Tio, of Toledo, a person who, although literally nothing is known of him, has in some way or other obtained the credit of the authorship of some of the most popular effusions of the fifteenth century; such, for example, as the Dialogue above cited of "Love and an Old Man," the Coplas of "Mingo Revulgo," and this first act of the "Celestina." The principal foundation of these imputations would appear to be the bare assertion of an editor of the "Dialogue between Love and an Old Man," which appeared at Medina del Campo, in 1569, nearly a century, probably, after Cota's death; another example of the obscurity which involves the history of the early Spanish drama. Many of the Castilian critics detect a flavor of antiquity in the first act which should carry back its composition as far as John II.'s reign. Moratin does not discern this, however, and is inclined to refer its production to a date not much more distant, if any, than Isabella's time. To the unpractised eye of a foreigner, as far as style is concerned, the whole work might well seem the production of the same period. Moratin, Obras, tom. i. pp. 88, 115, 116.--Diálogo de las Lenguas, apud Mayans y Siscar, Orígenes, pp. 165- 167.--Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Nova, tom. ii. p. 263. [37] Such is the high encomium of the Abate Andres, (Letteratura, tom. v. part. 2, lib. 1.)--Cervantes does not hesitate to call it "libro divino;" and the acute author of the "Diálogo de las Lenguas" concludes a criticism upon it with the remark, that "there is no book in the Castilian which surpasses it in the propriety and elegance of its diction." (Don Quixote, ed. de Pellicer, tom. i., p. 239.--Mayans y Siscar, tom. ii. p. 167.) Its merits indeed seem in some degree to have disarmed even the severity of foreign critics; and Signorelli, after standing up stoutly in defence of the precedence of the "Orfeo" as a dramatic composition, admits the "Celestina" to be a "work, rich in various beauties, and meriting undoubted applause. In fact," he continues, "the vivacity of the description of character, and faithful portraiture of manners, have made it immortal." Storia Critica de' Teatri Antichi e Moderni, (Napoli, 1813,) tom. vi. pp. 146, 147. [38] Bouterwek, Literatura Española, notas de traductores, p. 234.-- Andres, Letteratura, tom. v. pp. 170, 171.--Lampillas, Letteratura Spagnuola, tom. vi. pp. 57-59. [39] Rojas, Viage Entretenido, (1614,) fol. 46.--Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Nova, tom. i. p. 684.--Moratin, Obras, tom. i. pp. 126, 127.--Pellicer, Orígen de la Comedia, tom. i. pp. 11, 12. [40] They were published under the title "Cancionero de todas las Obras de Juan de la Encina con otras añadidas." (Mendez, Typographia Española, p. 247.) Subsequent impressions of his works, more or less complete, appeared at Salamanca in 1509, and at Saragossa in 1512 and 1516.--Moratin, Obras, tom. i. p. 127, nota. [41] The comedian Rojas, who flourished in the beginning of the following century, and whose "Viage Entretenido" is so essential to the knowledge of the early histrionic art in Spain, identifies the appearance of Encina's Eclogues with the dawn of the Castilian drama. His verses may be worth quoting. "Que es en nuestra madre España, porque en la dichosa era, que aquellos gloriosos Reyes dignos de memoria eterna Don Fernando e Ysabel (que ya con los santos reynan) de echar de España acabavan todos los Moriscos, que eran De aquel Reyno de Granada, y entonces se dava en ella princípio a la Inquisicion, se le dio a nuestra comedia. Juan de la Encina el primero, aquel insigne poeta, que tanto bien empezo de quien tenemos tres eglogas Que el mismo represento al Almirante y Duquessa de Castilla, y de Infantado que estas fueron las primeras Y para mas honra suya, y de la comedia nuestra, en los dias que Colon descubrio la gran riqueza De Indias y nuevo mundo, y el gran Capitan empieza, a sugetar aquel Reyno de Napoles, y su tierra. A descubrirse empezo el uso de la comedia porque todos se animassen a emprender cosas tan buenas." Fol. 46, 47. [42] Signorelli, correcting what he denominates the "romance" of Lampillas, considers Encina to have composed only one pastoral drama, and that, on occasion of Ferdinand's entrance into Castile. The critic should have been more charitable, as he has made two blunders himself in correcting one. Storia Critica de' Teatri, tom. iv. pp. 192, 193. [43] Andres, confounding Torres de Naharro, the poet, with Naharro the comedian, who flourished about half a century later, is led into a ludicrous train of errors in controverting Cervantes, whose criticism of the actor is perpetually misapplied by Andres to the poet. Velasquez seems to have confounded them in like manner. Another evidence of the extremely superficial acquaintance of the Spanish critics with their early drama. Comp. Cervantes, Comedias y Entremeses, tom. i. prólogo.--Andres, Letteratura, tom. v. p. 179.--Velazquez, Poesía Castellana, p. 88. [44] Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Nova, tom. i. p. 202.--Cervantes, Comedias, tom. i. pról. de Nasarre.--Pellicer, Orígen de la Comedia, tom. ii. p. 17.--Moratin, Obras, tom. i. p. 48. [45] Bartolomé Torres de Naharro, Propaladia, (Madrid, 1573.)--The deficiency of the earlier Spanish books, of which Bouterwek repeatedly complains, has led him into an error respecting the "Propaladia," which he had never seen. He states that Naharro was the first to distribute the play into three jornadas or acts, and takes Cervantes roundly to task for assuming the original merit of this distribution to himself. In fact, Naharro did introduce the division into _five_ jornadas, and Cervantes assumes only the credit of having been the first to _reduce them to three_. Comp. Bouterwek, Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit, band iii. p. 285,--and Cervantes, Comedias, tom. i. pról. [46] In the argument to the "Seraphina," he thus prepares the audience for this colloquial _olla podrida_. "Mas haveis de estar alerta por sentir los personages que hablan quatro lenguages, hasta acabar su rehyerta no salen de cuenta cierta por Latin e Italiano Castellano y Valenciano que ninguno desconcierta." Propaladia, p. 50. [47] The following is an example of the precious reasoning with which Floristan, in the play above quoted, reconciles his conscience to the murder of his wife Orfea, in order to gratify the jealousy of his mistress Seraphina. Floristan is addressing himself to a priest. "Y por mas daño escusar no lo quiero hora hazer, sino que es menester, que yo mate luego a Orfea do Serafina lo vea porque lo pueda creer. Que yo bien me mataria, pues toda razon me inclina; pero se de Serafina que se desesperaría. y Orfea, pues que haria? quando mi muerte supiesse; que creo que no pudiesse sostener la vida un dia. Pues hablando aca entre nos a Orfea cabe la suerte; porque con su sola muerte se escusaran otras dos: de modo que padre vos si llamar me la quereys, a mi merced me hareys y tambien servicio a dios. * * * * * porque si yo la matare morira christianamente; yo morire penitente, quando mi suerte llegare." Propaladia, fol. 68. [48] Signorelli waxes exceedingly wroth with Don Blas Nasarre for the assertion, that Naharro first taught the Italians to write comedy, taxing him with downright mendacity; and he stoutly denies the probability of Naharro's comedies ever having been performed on the Italian boards. The critic seems to be in the right, as far as regards the influence of the Spanish dramatist; but he might have been spared all doubts respecting their representation in the country, had he consulted the prologue of Naharro himself, where he asserts the fact in the most explicit manner. Comp. Propaladia, pról., and Signorelli, Storia Critica de' Teatri, tom. vi. pp. 171-179.--See also Moratin, Orígenes, Obras, tom. i. pp. 149, 150. [49] Propaladia; see the comedies of "Trofea" and "Tinelaria."-- Jovellanos, Memoria sobre las Diversiones Públicas, apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. v. [50] Cervantes, Comedias, tom. i. pról. [51] Pellicer, Orígen de la Comedia, tom. ii. pp. 58-62.--See also American Quarterly Review, no. viii. art. 3. [52] Oliva, Obras, (Madrid, 1787.)--Vasco Diaz Tanco, a native of Estremadura, who flourished in the first half of the sixteenth century, mentions in one of his works three tragedies composed by himself on Scripture subjects. As there is no evidence, however, of their having been printed, or performed, or even read in manuscript by any one, they hardly deserve to be included in the catalogue of dramatic compositions. (Moratin, Obras, tom. i. pp. 150, 151.--Lampillas, Letteratura Spagnuola, tom. v. dis. 1, sec. 5.) This patriotic _littérateur_ endeavors to establish the production of Oliva's tragedies in the year 1515, in the hope of antedating that of Trissino's "Sophonisba," composed a year later, and thus securing to his nation the palm of precedence, in time at least, though it should be only for a few months, on the tragic theatre of modern Europe. Letteratura Spagnuola, ubi supra. [53] Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Nova, tom. i. p. 386.--Oliva, Obras, pref. de Morales. [54] The following passage, for example, in the "Venganza de Agamemnon," imitated from the Electra of Sophocles, will hardly be charged on the Greek dramatist. "Habed, yo os ruego, de mi compassion, no querais atapar con vuestros consejos los respiraderos de las hornazas de fuego, que dentro me atormentan." See Oliva, Obras, p. 185. [55] Compare the diction of these tragedies with that of the "Centon Epistolario," for instance, esteemed one of the best literary compositions of John II.'s reign, and see the advance made, not only in orthography, but in the verbal arrangement generally, and the whole complexion of the style. [56] Notwithstanding some Spanish critics, as Cueva, for example, have vindicated the romantic forms of the drama on scientific principles, it is apparent that the most successful writers in this department have been constrained to adopt them by public opinion, rather than their own, which would have suggested a nearer imitation of the classical models of antiquity, so generally followed by the Italians, and which naturally recommends itself to the scholar. See the canon's discourse in Cervantes, Don Quixote, ed. de Pellicer, tom. iii. pp. 207-220,--and, more explicitly, Lope de Vega, Obras Sueltas, tom. iv. p. 406. [57] "Ya en Italia, assi entre Damas, como entre Caballeros, se tiene por gentileza y galania, saber hablar Castellano." Diálogo de las Lenguas, apud Mayans y Siscar, Orígenes, tom. ii. p. 4. PART SECOND. 1493-1517. THE PERIOD WHEN, THE INTERIOR ORGANIZATION OF THE MONARCHY HAVING BEEN COMPLETED, THE SPANISH NATION ENTERED ON ITS SCHEMES OF DISCOVERY AND CONQUEST; OR THE PERIOD ILLUSTRATING MORE PARTICULARLY THE FOREIGN POLICY OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA. CHAPTER I. ITALIAN WARS.--GENERAL VIEW OF EUROPE.--INVASION OF ITALY BY CHARLES VIII. OF FRANCE. 1493-1495. Europe at the Close of the Fifteenth Century.--More Intimate Relations between States.--Italy the School of Politics.--Pretensions of Charles VIII. to Naples.--Treaty of Barcelona.--The French Invade Naples.-- Ferdinand's Dissatisfaction.--Tactics and Arms of the Different Nations.-- Preparations of Spain.--Mission to Charles VIII.--Bold Conduct of the Envoys.--The French enter Naples. We have now reached that memorable epoch, when the different nations of Europe, surmounting the barriers which had hitherto confined them within their respective limits, brought their forces, as if by a simultaneous impulse, against each other on a common theatre of action. In the preceding part of this work, we have seen in what manner Spain was prepared for the contest, by the concentration of her various states under one government, and by such internal reforms, as enabled the government to act with vigor. The genius of Ferdinand will appear as predominant in what concerns the foreign relations of the country, as did that of Isabella in its interior administration. So much so, indeed, that the accurate and well-informed historian, who has most copiously illustrated this portion of the national annals, does not even mention, in his introductory notice, the name of Isabella, but refers the agency in these events exclusively to her more ambitious consort. [1] In this he is abundantly justified, both by the prevailing character of the policy pursued, widely differing from that which distinguished the queen's measures, and by the circumstance that the foreign conquests, although achieved by the united efforts of both crowns, were undertaken on, behalf of Ferdinand's own dominions of Aragon, to which in the end they exclusively appertained. The close of the fifteenth century presents, on the whole, the most striking point of view in modern history; one from which we may contemplate the consummation of an important revolution in the structure of political society, and the first application of several inventions destined to exercise the widest influence on human civilization. The feudal institutions, or rather the feudal principle, which operated even where the institutions, strictly speaking, did not exist, after having wrought its appointed uses, had gradually fallen into decay; for it had not the power of accommodating itself to the increased demands and improved condition of society. However well suited to a barbarous age, it was found that the distribution of power among the members of an independent aristocracy was unfavorable to that degree of personal security and tranquillity indispensable to great proficiency in the higher arts of civilization. It was equally repugnant to the principle of patriotism, so essential to national independence, but which must have operated feebly among a people whose sympathies, instead of being concentrated on the state, were claimed by a hundred masters, as was the case in every feudal community. The conviction of this reconciled the nation to the transfer of authority into other hands; not those of the people, indeed, who were too ignorant, and too long accustomed to a subordinate, dependent situation, to admit of it,--but into the hands of the sovereign. It was not until three centuries more had elapsed, that the condition of the great mass of the people was to be so far improved, as to qualify them for asserting and maintaining the political consideration which of right belongs to them. In whatever degree public opinion and the progress of events might favor the transition of power from the aristocracy to the monarch, it is obvious that much would depend on his personal character; since the advantages of his station alone made him by no means a match for the combined forces of his great nobility. The remarkable adaptation of the characters of the principal sovereigns of Europe to this exigency, in the latter half of the fifteenth century, would seem to have something providential in it. Henry the Seventh of England, Louis the Eleventh of France, Ferdinand of Naples, John the Second of Aragon, and his son Ferdinand, and John the Second of Portugal, however differing in other respects, were all distinguished by a sagacity, which enabled them to devise the most subtile and comprehensive schemes of policy, and which was prolific in expedients for the circumvention of enemies too potent to be encountered by open force. Their operations, all directed towards the same point, were attended with similar success, resulting in the exaltation of the royal prerogative at the expense of the aristocracy, with more or less deference to the rights of the people, as the case might be; in France, for example, with almost total indifference to them, while in Spain they were regarded, under the parental administration of Isabella, which tempered the less scrupulous policy of her husband, with tenderness and respect. In every country, however, the nation at large gained greatly by the revolution, which came on insensibly, at least without any violent shock to the fabric of society, and which, by securing internal tranquillity and the ascendency of law over brute force, gave ample scope for those intellectual pursuits, that withdraw mankind from sensual indulgence, and too exclusive devotion to the animal wants of our nature. No sooner was the internal organization of the different nations of Europe placed on a secure basis, than they found leisure to direct their views, hitherto confined within their own limits, to a bolder and more distant sphere of action. Their international communication was greatly facilitated by several useful inventions coincident with this period, or then first extensively applied. Such was the art of printing, diffusing knowledge with the speed and universality of light; the establishment of posts, which, after its adoption by Louis the Eleventh, came into frequent use in the beginning of the sixteenth century; and lastly, the compass, which, guiding the mariner unerringly through the trackless wastes of the ocean, brought the remotest regions into contact. With these increased facilities for intercommunication, the different European states might be said to be brought into as intimate relation with one another, as the different provinces of the same kingdom were before. They now for the first time regarded each other as members of one great community, in whose action they were all mutually concerned. A greater anxiety was manifested to detect the springs of every political movement of their neighbors. Missions became frequent, and accredited agents were stationed, as a sort of honorable spies, at the different courts. The science of diplomacy, on narrower grounds, indeed, than it is now practised, began to be studied. [2] Schemes of aggression and resistance, leading to political combinations the most complex and extended, were gradually formed. We are not to imagine, however, the existence of any well-defined ideas of a balance of power at this early period. The object of these combinations was some positive act of aggression or resistance, for purposes of conquest or defence, not for the maintenance of any abstract theory of political equilibrium. This was the result of much deeper reflection, and of prolonged experience. The management of the foreign relations of the nation, at the close of the fifteenth century, was resigned wholly to the sovereign. The people took no further part or interest in the matter, than if it had concerned only the disposition of his private property. His measures were, therefore, often characterized by a degree of temerity and precipitation, that could not have been permitted under the salutary checks afforded by popular interposition. A strange insensibility, indeed, was shown to the rights and interests of the nation. War was regarded as a game, in which the sovereign parties engaged, not on behalf of their subjects, but exclusively on their own. Like desperate gamblers, they contended for the spoils or the honors of victory, with so much the more recklessness as their own station was too elevated to be materially prejudiced by the results. They contended with all the animosity of personal feeling; every device, however paltry, was resorted to; and no advantage was deemed unwarrantable, which could tend to secure the victory. The most profligate maxims of state policy were openly avowed by men of reputed honor and integrity. In short, the diplomacy of that day is very generally characterized by a low cunning, subterfuge, and petty trickery, which would leave an indelible stain on the transactions of private individuals. Italy was, doubtless, the great school where this political morality was taught. That country was broken up into a number of small states, too nearly equal to allow the absolute supremacy of any one; while, at the same time, it demanded the most restless vigilance on the part of each to maintain its independence against its neighbors. Hence such a complexity of intrigues and combinations as the world had never before witnessed. A subtile, refined policy was conformable to the genius of the Italians. It was partly the result, moreover, of their higher cultivation, which naturally led them to trust the settlement of their disputes to superior intellectual dexterity, rather than to brute force, like the _barbarians_ beyond the Alps. [3] From these and other causes, maxims were gradually established, so monstrous in their nature as to give the work, which first embodied them in a regular system, the air of a satire rather than a serious performance, while the name of its author has been converted into a by-word of political knavery. [4] At the period before us, the principal states of Italy were, the republics of Venice and Florence, the duchy of Milan, the papal see, and the kingdom of Naples. The others may be regarded merely as satellites, revolving round some one or other of these superior powers, by whom their respective movements were regulated and controlled. Venice may be considered as the most formidable of the great powers, taking into consideration her wealth, her powerful navy, her territory in the north, and princely colonial domain. There was no government in that age which attracted such general admiration, both from natives and foreigners; who seem to have looked upon it as affording the very best model of political wisdom. [5] Yet there was no country where the citizen enjoyed less positive freedom; none whose foreign relations were conducted with more absolute selfishness, and with a more narrow, bargaining spirit, savoring rather of a company of traders than of a great and powerful state. But all this was compensated, in the eyes of her contemporaries, by the stability of her institutions, which still remained unshaken, amidst revolutions which had convulsed or overturned every other social fabric in Italy. [6] The government of Milan was at this time under the direction of Lodovico Sforza, or Lodovico the Moor, as he is commonly called; an epithet suggested by his complexion, but which he willingly retained, as indicating the superior craftiness on which he valued himself. [7] He held the reins in the name of his nephew, then a minor, until a convenient season should arrive for assuming them in his own. His cool, perfidious character was stained with the worst vices of the most profligate class of Italian statesmen of that period. The central parts of Italy were occupied by the republic of Florence, which had ever been the rallying point of the friends of freedom, too often of faction; but which had now resigned itself to the dominion of the Medici, whose cultivated tastes and munificent patronage shed a splendid illusion over their administration, which has blinded the eyes of contemporaries, and even of posterity. The papal chair was filled by Alexander the Sixth, a pontiff whose licentiousness, avarice, and unblushing effrontery have been the theme of unmingled reproach, with Catholic as well as Protestant writers. His preferment was effected by lavish bribery, and by his consummate address, as well as energy of character. Although a native Spaniard, his election was extremely unpalatable to Ferdinand and Isabella, who deprecated the scandal it must bring upon the church, and who had little to hope for themselves, in a political view, from the elevation of one of their own subjects even, whose mercenary spirit placed him at the control of the highest bidder. [8] The Neapolitan sceptre was swayed by Ferdinand the First, whose father, Alfonso the Fifth, the uncle of Ferdinand of Aragon, had obtained the crown by the adoption of Joanna of Naples, or rather by his own good sword. Alfonso settled his conquest on his illegitimate son Ferdinand, to the prejudice of the rights of Aragon, by whose blood and treasure he had achieved it. Ferdinand's character, the very opposite of his noble father's, was dark, wily, and ferocious. His life was spent in conflict with his great feudal nobility, many of whom supported the pretensions of the Angevin family. But his superior craft enabled him to foil every attempt of his enemies. In effecting this, indeed, he shrunk from no deed of treachery or violence, however atrocious, and in the end had the satisfaction of establishing his authority, undisputed, on the fears of his subjects. He was about seventy years of age at the period of which we are treating, 1493. The heir apparent, Alfonso, was equally sanguinary in his temper, though possessing less talent for dissimulation than his father. Such was the character of the principal Italian courts at the close of the fifteenth century. The politics of the country were necessarily regulated by the temper and views of the leading powers. They were essentially selfish and personal. The ancient republican forms had been gradually effaced during this century, and more arbitrary ones introduced. The name of freedom, indeed, was still inscribed on their banners, but the spirit had disappeared. In almost every state, great or small, some military adventurer, or crafty statesman, had succeeded in raising his own authority on the liberties of his country; and his sole aim seemed to be to enlarge it still further, and to secure it against the conspiracies and revolutions, which the reminiscence of ancient independence naturally called forth. Such was the case with Tuscany, Milan, Naples, and the numerous subordinate states. In Rome, the pontiff proposed no higher object than the concentration of wealth and public honors in the hands of his own family. In short, the administration of every state seemed to be managed with exclusive reference to the personal interests of its chief. Venice was the only power of sufficient strength and stability to engage in more extended schemes of policy, and even these were conducted, as has been already noticed, in the narrow and calculating spirit of a trading corporation. But, while no spark of generous patriotism seemed to warm the bosoms of the Italians; while no sense of public good, or even menace of foreign invasion, could bring them to act in concert with one another, [9] the internal condition of the country was eminently prosperous. Italy had far outstripped the rest of Europe in the various arts of civilized life; and she everywhere afforded the evidence of faculties developed by unceasing intellectual action. The face of the country itself was like a garden; "cultivated through all its plains to the very tops of the mountains; teeming with population, with riches, and an unlimited commerce; illustrated by many munificent princes, by the splendor of many noble and beautiful cities, and by the majesty of religion; and adorned with all those rare and precious gifts, which render a name glorious among the nations." [10] Such are the glowing strains in which the Tuscan historian celebrates the prosperity of his country, ere yet the storm of war had descended on her beautiful valleys. This scene of domestic tranquillity was destined to be changed by that terrible invasion which the ambition of Lodovico Sforza brought upon his country. He had already organized a coalition of the northern powers of Italy, to defeat the interference of the king of Naples in behalf of his grandson, the rightful duke of Milan, whom his uncle held in subjection during a protracted minority, while he exercised all the real functions of sovereignty in his name. Not feeling sufficiently secure from his Italian confederacy, Sforza invited the king of France to revive the hereditary claims of the house of Anjou to the crown of Naples, promising to aid him in the enterprise with all his resources. In this way, this wily politician proposed to divert the storm from his own head, by giving Ferdinand sufficient occupation at home. The throne of France was at that time filled by Charles the Eighth, a monarch scarcely twenty-two years of age. His father, Louis the Eleventh, had given him an education unbecoming, not only a great prince, but even a private gentleman. He would allow him to learn no other Latin, says Brantôme, than his favorite maxim, "Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare." [11] Charles made some amends for this, though with little judgment, in later life, when left to his own disposal. His favorite studies were the exploits of celebrated conquerors, of Caesar and Charlemagne particularly, which filled his young mind with vague and visionary ideas of glory. These dreams were still further nourished by the tourneys and other chivalrous spectacles of the age, in which he delighted, until he seems to have imagined himself some doughty paladin of romance, destined to the achievement of a grand and perilous enterprise. It affords some proof of this exalted state of his imagination, that he gave his only son the name of Orlando, after the celebrated hero of Roncesvalles. [12] With a mind thus excited by chimerical visions of military glory, he lent a willing ear to the artful propositions of Sforza. In the extravagance of vanity, fed by the adulation of interested parasites, he affected to regard the enterprise against Naples as only opening the way to a career of more splendid conquests, which were to terminate in the capture of Constantinople, and the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. He even went so far as to purchase of Andrew Paleologus, the nephew and heir of Constantine, the last of the Caesars, his title to the Greek empire. [13] Nothing could be more unsound, according to the principles of the present day, than Charles's claims to the crown of Naples. Without discussing the original pretensions of the rival houses of Aragon and Anjou, it is sufficient to state, that, at the time of Charles the Eighth's invasion, the Neapolitan throne had been in the possession of the Aragonese family more than half a century, under three successive princes solemnly recognized by the people, sanctioned by repeated investitures of the papal suzerain, and admitted by all the states of Europe. If all this did not give validity to their title, when was the nation to expect repose? Charles's claim, on the other hand, was derived originally from a testamentary bequest of René, count of Provence, operating to the exclusion of the son of his own daughter, the rightful heir of the house of Anjou; Naples being too notoriously a female fief to afford any pretext for the action of the Salic law. The pretensions of Ferdinand, of Spain, as representative of the legitimate branch of Aragon, were far more plausible. [14] Independently of the defects in Charles's title, his position was such as to make the projected expedition every way impolitic. A misunderstanding had for some time subsisted between him and the Spanish sovereigns, and he was at open war with Germany and England; so that it was only by large concessions that he could hope to secure their acquiescence in an enterprise most precarious in its character, and where even complete success could be of no permanent benefit to his kingdom. "He did not understand," says Voltaire, "that a dozen villages adjacent to one's territory, are of more value than a kingdom four hundred leagues distant." [15] By the treaties of Etaples and Senlis, he purchased a reconciliation with Henry the Seventh of England, and with Maximilian, the emperor elect; and finally, by that of Barcelona, effected an amicable adjustment of his difficulties with Spain. [16] This treaty, which involved the restoration of Roussillon and Cerdagne, was of great importance to the crown of Aragon. These provinces, it will be remembered, had been originally mortgaged by Ferdinand's father, King John the Second, to Louis the Eleventh of France, for the sum of three hundred thousand crowns, in consideration of aid to be afforded by the latter monarch against the Catalan insurgents. Although the stipulated sum had never been paid by Aragon, yet a plausible pretext for requiring the restitution was afforded by Louis the Eleventh's incomplete performance of his engagements, as well as by the ample reimbursement, which the French government had already derived from the revenues of these countries. [17] This treaty had long been a principal object of Ferdinand's policy. He had not, indeed, confined himself to negotiation, but had made active demonstrations more than once of occupying the contested territory by force. Negotiation, however, was more consonant to his habitual policy; and, after the termination of the Moorish war, he pressed it with the utmost vigor, repairing with the queen to Barcelona, in order to watch over the deliberations of the envoys of the two nations at Figueras. [18] The French historians accuse Ferdinand of bribing two ecclesiastics, in high influence at their court, to make such a representation of the affair, as should alarm the conscience of the young monarch. These holy men insisted on the restoration of Roussillon as an act of justice; since the sums for which it had been mortgaged, though not repaid, had been spent in the common cause of Christendom, the Moorish war. The soul, they said, could never hope to escape from purgatory, until restitution was made of all property unlawfully held during life. His royal father, Louis the Eleventh, was clearly in this predicament, as he himself would hereafter be, unless the Spanish territories should be relinquished; a measure, moreover, the more obligatory on him, since it was well known to be the dying request of his parent. These arguments made a suitable impression on the young monarch, and a still deeper on his sister, the duchess of Beaujeu, who exercised great influence over him, and who believed her own soul in peril of eternal damnation by deferring the act of restoration any longer. The effect of this cogent reasoning was no doubt greatly enhanced by the reckless impatience of Charles, who calculated no cost in the prosecution of his chimerical enterprise. With these amicable dispositions an arrangement was at length concluded, and received the signatures of the respective monarchs on the same day, being signed by Charles at Tours, and by Ferdinand and Isabella at Barcelona, January 19th, 1493. [19] The principal articles of the treaty provided, that the contracting parties should mutually aid each other against all enemies; that they should reciprocally prefer this alliance to that with any other, _the vicar of Christ excepted_; that the Spanish sovereigns should enter into no understanding with any power, _the vicar of Christ excepted_, prejudicial to the interests of France; that their children should not be disposed of in marriage to the kings of England, or of the Romans, or to any enemy of France, without the French king's consent. It was finally stipulated that Roussillon and Cerdagne should be restored to Aragon; but that, as doubts might be entertained to which power the possession of these countries rightfully appertained, arbitrators _named by Ferdinand and Isabella_ should be appointed, if requested by the French monarch, with full power to decide the question, by whose judgment the contracting parties mutually promised to abide. This last provision, obviously too well guarded to jeopard the interests of the Spanish sovereigns, was introduced to allay in some measure the discontents of the French, who loudly inveighed against their cabinet, as sacrificing the interests of the nation; accusing, indeed, the Cardinal D'Albi, the principal agent in the negotiation, of being in the pay of Ferdinand. [20] The treaty excited equal surprise and satisfaction in Spain, where Roussillon was regarded as of the last importance, not merely from the extent of its resources, but from its local position, which made it the key of Catalonia. The nation, says Zurita, looked on its recovery as scarcely less important than the conquest of Granada; and they doubted some sinister motive, or deeper policy than appeared in the conduct of the French king. He was influenced, however, by no deeper policy than the cravings of a puerile ambition. [21] The preparations of Charles, in the mean while, excited general alarm throughout Italy. Ferdinand, the old king of Naples, who in vain endeavored to arrest them by negotiation, had died in the beginning of 1494. He was succeeded by his son Alfonso, a prince of bolder but less politic character, and equally odious, from the cruelty of his disposition, with his father. He lost no time in putting his kingdom in a posture of defence; but he wanted the best of all defences, the attachment of his subjects. His interests were supported by the Florentine republic and the pope, whose family had intermarried with the royal house of Naples. Venice stood aloof, secure in her remoteness, unwilling to compromise her interests by too precipitate a declaration in favor of either party. The European powers regarded the expedition of Charles the Eighth with somewhat different feelings; most of them were not unwilling to see so formidable a prince waste his resources in a remote and chimerical expedition; Ferdinand, however, contemplated with more anxiety an event, which might terminate in the subversion of the Neapolitan branch of his house, and bring a powerful and active neighbor in contact with his own dominions in Sicily. He lost no time in fortifying the faltering courage of the pope by assurances of support. His ambassador, then resident at the papal court, was Garcilasso de la Vega, father of the illustrious poet of that name, and familiar to the reader by his exploits in the Granadine war. This personage with rare political sagacity combined an energy of purpose, which could not fail to infuse courage into the hearts of others. He urged the pope to rely on his master, the king of Aragon, who, he assured him, would devote his whole resources, if necessary, to the protection of his person, honor, and estate. Alexander would gladly have had this promise under the hand of Ferdinand; but the latter did not think it expedient, considering his delicate relations with France, to put himself so far in the power of the wily pontiff. [22] In the mean time, Charles's preparations went forward with the languor and vacillation resulting from divided councils and multiplied embarrassments. "Nothing essential to the conduct of a war was at hand," says Comines. The king was very young, weak in person, headstrong in will, surrounded by few discreet counsellors, and wholly destitute of the requisite funds. [23] His own impatience, however, was stimulated by that of the youthful chivalry of his court, who burned for an opportunity of distinction; as well as by the representations of the Neapolitan exiles, who hoped, under his protection, to re-establish themselves in their own country. Several of these, weary with the delay already experienced, made overtures to King Ferdinand to undertake the enterprise on his own behalf, and to assert his legitimate pretensions to the crown of Naples, which, they assured him, a large party in the country was ready to sustain. The sagacious monarch, however, knew how little reliance was to be placed on the reports of exiles, whose imaginations readily exaggerated the amount of disaffection in their own country. But, although the season had not yet arrived for asserting his own paramount claims, he was determined to tolerate those of no other potentate. [24] Charles entertained so little suspicion of this, that, in the month of June, he despatched an envoy to the Spanish court, requiring Ferdinand's fulfilment of the treaty of Barcelona, by aiding him with men and money, and by throwing open his ports in Sicily for the French navy. "This gracious proposition," says the Aragonese historian, "he accompanied with information of his proposed expedition against the Turks; stating incidentally, as a thing of no consequence, his intention to take Naples by the way." [25] Ferdinand saw the time was arrived for coming to an explicit declaration with the French court. He appointed a special mission, in order to do this in the least offensive manner possible. The person selected for this delicate task was Alonso de Silva, brother of the count of Cifuentes, and _clavero_ of Calatrava, a cavalier possessed of the coolness and address requisite for diplomatic success. [26] The ambassador, on arriving at the French court, found it at Vienne in all the bustle of preparation for immediate departure. After seeking in vain a private audience from King Charles, he explained to him the purport of his mission in the presence of his courtiers. He assured him of the satisfaction which the king of Aragon had experienced, at receiving intelligence of his projected expedition against the infidel. Nothing gave his master so great contentment, as to see his brother monarchs employing their arms, and expending their revenues, against the enemies of the Cross; where even failure was greater gain than success in other wars. He offered Ferdinand's assistance in the prosecution of such wars, even though they should be directed against the Mahometans of Africa, over whom the papal sanction had given Spain exclusive rights of conquest. He besought the king not to employ the forces destined to so glorious a purpose against any one of the princes of Europe, but to reflect how great a scandal this must necessarily bring on the Christian cause; above all, he cautioned him against forming any designs on Naples, since that kingdom was a fief of the church, in whose favor an exception was expressly made by the treaty of Barcelona, which recognized her alliance and protection as paramount to every other obligation. Silva's discourse was responded to by the president of the parliament of Paris in a formal Latin oration, asserting generally Charles's right to Naples, and his resolution to enforce it previously to his crusade against the infidel. As soon as it was concluded, the king rose and abruptly quitted the apartment. [27] Some days after, he interrogated the Spanish ambassador, whether his master would not, in case of a war with Portugal, feel warranted by the terms of the late treaty in requiring the co-operation of France, and on what plea the latter power could pretend to withhold it. To the first of these propositions the ambassador answered in the affirmative, if it were a defensive war, but not, if an offensive one, of his own seeking; an explanation by no means satisfactory to the French monarch. Indeed, he seems not to have been at all prepared for this interpretation of the compact. He had relied on this, as securing without any doubt the non- interference of Ferdinand, if not his actual co-operation in his designs against Naples. The clause touching the rights of the church was too frequent in public treaties to excite any particular attention; and he was astounded at the broad ground, which it was now made to cover, and which defeated the sole object proposed by the cession of Roussillon. He could not disguise his chagrin and indignation at what he deemed the perfidy of the Spanish court. He refused all further intercourse with Silva, and even stationed a sentinel at his gate, to prevent his communication with his subjects; treating him as the envoy, not of an ally, but of an open enemy. [28] The unexpected and menacing attitude, however, assumed by Ferdinand, failed to arrest the operations of the French monarch, who, having completed his preparations, left Vienne in the month of August, 1494, and crossed the Alps at the head of the most formidable host which had scaled that mountain barrier since the irruption of the northern barbarians. [29] It will be unnecessary to follow his movements in detail. It is sufficient to remark, that his conduct throughout was equally defective in principle and in sound policy. He alienated his allies by the most signal acts of perfidy, seizing their fortresses for himself, and entering their capitals with all the vaunt and insolent port of a conquerer. On his approach to Rome, the pope and the cardinals took refuge in the castle of St. Angelo, and on the 31st of December, Charles defiled into the city at the head of his victorious chivalry; if victorious they could be called, when, as an Italian historian remarks, they had scarcely broken a lance, or spread a tent, in the whole of their progress. [30] The Italians were panic-struck at the aspect of troops so different from their own, and so superior to them in organization, science, and military equipment; and still more in a remorseless ferocity of temper, which had rarely been witnessed in their own feuds. Warfare was conducted on peculiar principles in Italy, adapted to the character and circumstances of the people. The business of fighting, in her thriving communities, instead of forming part of the regular profession of a gentleman, as in other countries at this period, was intrusted to the hands of a few soldiers of fortune, _condottieri_, as they were called, who hired themselves out, with the forces under their command, consisting exclusively of heavy-armed cavalry, to whatever state would pay them best. These forces constituted the capital, as it were, of the military chief, whose obvious interest it was to economize as far as possible all unnecessary expenditure of his resources. Hence, the science of defence was almost exclusively studied. The object seemed to be, not so much the annoyance of the enemy, as self-preservation. The common interests of the _condottieri_ being paramount to every obligation towards the state which they served, they easily came to an understanding with one another to spare their troops as much as possible; until at length battles were fought with little more personal hazard than would be incurred in an ordinary tourney. The man-at-arms was riveted into plates of steel of sufficient thickness to turn a musket-ball. The ease of the soldier was so far consulted, that the artillery, in a siege, was not allowed to be fired on either side from sunset to sunrise, for fear of disturbing his repose. Prisoners were made for the sake of their ransom, and but little blood was spilled in an action. Machiavelli records two engagements, at Anghiari and Castracaro, among the most noted of the time for their important consequences. The one lasted four hours, and the other half a day. The reader is hurried along through all the bustle of a well-contested fight, in the course of which the field is won and lost several times; but, when he comes to the close, and looks for the list of killed and wounded, he finds to his surprise not a single man slain, in the first of these actions; and, in the second, only one, who, having tumbled from his horse, and being unable to rise, from the weight of his armor, was suffocated in the mud! Thus war became disarmed of its terrors. Courage was no longer essential in a soldier; and the Italian, made effeminate, if not timid, was incapable of encountering the adventurous daring and severe discipline of the northern warrior. [31] The astonishing success of the French was still more imputable to the free use and admirable organization of their infantry, whose strength lay in the Swiss mercenaries. Machiavelli ascribes the misfortunes of his nation chiefly to its exclusive reliance on cavalry. [32] This service, during the whole of the Middle Ages, was considered among the European nations the most important; the horse being styled by way of eminence "the battle." The memorable conflict of Charles the Bold with the Swiss mountaineers, however, in which the latter broke in pieces the celebrated Burgundian _ordonnance_, constituting the finest body of chivalry of the age, demonstrated the capacity of infantry; and the Italian wars, in which we are now engaged, at length fully re-established its ancient superiority. The Swiss were formed into battalions varying from three to eight thousand men each. They wore little defensive armor, and their principal weapon was the pike, eighteen feet long. Formed into these solid battalions, which, bristling with spears all around, received the technical appellation of the _hedgehog_, they presented an invulnerable front on every quarter. In the level field, with free scope allowed for action, they bore down all opposition, and received unshaken the most desperate charges of the steel- clad cavalry on their terrible array of pikes. They were too unwieldy, however, for rapid or complicated manoeuvres; they were easily disconcerted by any unforseen impediment, or irregularity of the ground; and the event proved, that the Spanish foot, armed with its short swords and bucklers, by breaking in under the long pikes of its enemy, could succeed in bringing him to close action, where his formidable weapon was of no avail. It was repeating the ancient lesson of the Roman legion and the Macedonian phalanx. [33] In artillery, the French were at this time in advance of the Italians, perhaps of every nation in Europe. The Italians, indeed, were so exceedingly defective in this department, that their best field-pieces consisted of small copper tubes, covered with wood and hides. They were mounted on unwieldy carriages drawn by oxen, and followed by cars or wagons loaded with stone balls. These guns were worked so awkwardly, that the besieged, says Guicciardini, had time between the discharges to repair the mischief inflicted by them. From these circumstances, artillery was held in so little repute, that some of the most competent Italian writers thought it might be dispensed with altogether in field engagements. [34] The French, on the other hand, were provided with a beautiful train of ordnance, consisting of bronze cannon about eight feet in length, and many smaller pieces. [35] They were lightly mounted, drawn by horses, and easily kept pace with the rapid movements of the army. They discharged iron balls, and were served with admirable skill, intimidating their enemies by the rapidity and accuracy of their fire, and easily demolishing their fortifications, which, before this invasion, were constructed with little strength or science. [36] The rapid successes of the French spread consternation among the Italian states, who now for the first time seemed to feel the existence of a common interest, and the necessity of efficient concert. Ferdinand was active in promoting these dispositions, through his ministers, Garcilasso de la Vega and Alonso de Silva. The latter had quitted the French court on its entrance into Italy, and withdrawn to Genoa. From this point he opened a correspondence with Lodovico Sforza, who now began to understand, that he had brought a terrible engine into play, the movements of which, however mischievous to himself, were beyond his strength to control. Silva endeavored to inflame still further his jealousy of the French, who had already given him many serious causes of disgust; and, in order to detach him more effectually from Charles's interests, encouraged him with the hopes of forming a matrimonial alliance for his son with one of the infantas of Spain. At the same time, he used every effort to bring about a co-operation between the duke and the republic of Venice, thus opening the way to the celebrated league which was concluded in the following year. [37] The Roman pontiff had lost no time, after the appearance of the French army in Italy, in pressing the Spanish court to fulfil its engagements. He endeavored to propitiate the good-will of the sovereigns by several important concessions. He granted to them and their successors the _tercias_, or two-ninths of the tithes, throughout the dominions of Castile; an impost still forming part of the regular revenue of the crown. [38] He caused bulls of crusade to be promulgated throughout Spain, granting at the same time a tenth of the ecclesiastical rents, with the understanding that the proceeds should be devoted to the protection of the Holy See. Towards the close of this year, 1494, or the beginning of the following, he conferred the title of Catholic on the Spanish sovereigns, in consideration, as is stated, of their eminent virtues, their zeal in defence of the true faith of the apostolic see, their reformation of conventual discipline, their subjugation of the Moors of Granada, and the purification of their dominions from the Jewish heresy. This orthodox title, which still continues to be the jewel most prized in the Spanish crown, has been appropriated in a peculiar manner to Ferdinand and Isabella, who are universally recognized in history as _Los Reyes Católicos_. [39] Ferdinand was too sensible of the peril, to which the occupation of Naples by the French would expose his own interests, to require any stimulant to action from the Roman pontiff. Naval preparations had been going forward during the summer, in the ports of Galicia and Guipuscoa. A considerable armament was made ready for sea by the latter part of December, at Alicant, and placed under the command of Galceran de Requesens, count of Trevento. The land forces were intrusted to Gonsalvo de Cordova, better known in history as the Great Captain. Instructions were at the same time sent to the viceroy of Sicily, to provide for the security of that island, and to hold himself in readiness to act in concert with the Spanish fleet. [40] Ferdinand, however, determined to send one more embassy to Charles the Eighth, before coming to an open rupture with him. He selected for this mission Juan de Albion and Antonio de Fonseca, brother of the bishop of that name, whom we have already noticed as superintendent of the Indian department. The two envoys reached Rome, January 28th, 1495, the same day on which Charles set out on his march for Naples. They followed the army, and on arriving at Veletri, about twenty miles from the capital, were admitted to an audience by the monarch, who received them in the presence of his officers. The ambassadors freely enumerated the various causes of complaint entertained by their master against the French king; the insult offered to him in the person of his minister Alonso de Silva; the contumelious treatment of the pope, and forcible occupation of the fortresses and estates of the church; and finally, the enterprise against Naples, the claims to which as a papal fief could of right be determined in no other way than by the arbitration of the pontiff himself. Should King Charles consent to accept this arbitration, they tendered the good offices of their master as mediator between the parties; should he decline it, however, the king of Spain stood absolved from all further obligations of amity with him, by the terms of the treaty of Barcelona, which expressly recognized his right to interfere in defence of the church. [41] Charles, who could not dissemble his indignation during this discourse, retorted with great acrimony, when it was concluded, on the conduct of Ferdinand, which he stigmatized as perfidious, accusing him, at the same time, of a deliberate design to circumvent him, by introducing into their treaty the clause respecting the pope. As to the expedition against Naples, he had now gone too far to recede; and it would be soon enough to canvass the question of right, when he had got possession of it. His courtiers, at the same time, with the impetuosity of their nation, heightened by the insolence of success, told the envoys, that they knew well enough how to defend their rights with their arms, and that King Ferdinand would find the French chivalry enemies of quite another sort from the holiday tilters of Granada. These taunts led to mutual recrimination, until at length Fonseca, though naturally a sedate person, was so far transported with anger, that he exclaimed, "The issue then must be left to God,--arms must decide it;" and, producing the original treaty, bearing the signatures of the two monarchs, he tore it in pieces before the eyes of Charles and his court. At the same time he commanded two Spanish knights who served in the French army to withdraw from it, under pain of incurring the penalties of treason. The French cavaliers were so much incensed by this audacious action, that they would have seized the envoys, and, in all probability, offered violence to their persons, but for Charles's interposition, who with more coolness caused them to be conducted from his presence, and sent back under a safe escort to Rome. Such are the circumstances reported by the French and Italian writers of this remarkable interview. They were not aware that the dramatic exhibition, as far as the ambassadors were concerned, was all previously concerted before their departure from Spain. [42] Charles pressed forward on his march without further delay. Alfonso the Second, losing his confidence and martial courage, the only virtues that he possessed, at the crisis when they were most demanded, had precipitately abandoned his kingdom while the French were at Rome, and taken refuge in Sicily, where he formally abdicated the crown in favor of his son, Ferdinand the Second. This prince, then twenty-five years of age, whose amiable manners were rendered still more attractive by contrast with the ferocious temper of his father, was possessed of talent and energy competent to the present emergency, had he been sustained by his subjects. But the latter, besides being struck with the same panic which had paralyzed the other people of Italy, had too little interest in the government to be willing to hazard much in its defence. A change of dynasty was only a change of masters, by which they had little either to gain or to lose. Though favorably inclined to Ferdinand, they refused to stand by him in his perilous extremity. They gave way in every direction, as the French advanced, rendering hopeless every attempt of their spirited young monarch to rally them, till at length no alternative was left, but to abandon his dominions to the enemy, without striking a blow in their defence. He withdrew to the neighboring island of Ischia, whence he soon after passed into Sicily, and occupied himself there in collecting the fragments of his party, until the time should arrive for more decisive action. [43] Charles the Eighth made his entrance into Naples at the head of his legions, February 22d, 1495, having traversed this whole extent of hostile territory in less time than would be occupied by a fashionable tourist of the present day. The object of his expedition was now achieved. He seemed to have reached the consummation of his wishes; and, although he assumed the titles of King of Sicily and of Jerusalem, and affected the state and authority of Emperor, he took no measures for prosecuting his chimerical enterprise further. He even neglected to provide for the security of his present conquest; and, without bestowing a thought on the government of his new dominions, resigned himself to the licentious and effeminate pleasures so congenial with the soft voluptuousness of the climate, and his own character. [44] While Charles was thus wasting his time and resources in frivolous amusements, a dark storm was gathering in the north. There was not a state through which he had passed, however friendly to his cause, which had not complaints to make of his insolence, his breach of faith, his infringement of their rights, and his exorbitant exactions. His impolitic treatment of Sforza had long since alienated that wily and restless politician, and raised suspicions in his mind of Charles's designs against his own duchy of Milan. The emperor elect, Maximilian, whom the French king thought to have bound to his interests by the treaty of Senlis, took umbrage at his assumption of the imperial title and dignity. The Spanish ambassadors, Garcilasso de la Vega, and his brother Lorenzo Suarez, the latter of whom resided at Venice, were indefatigable in stimulating the spirit of discontent. Suarez, in particular, used every effort to secure the co- operation of Venice, representing to the government, in the most urgent terms, the necessity of general concert and instant action among the great powers of Italy, if they would preserve their own liberties. [45] Venice, from its remote position, seemed to afford the best point for coolly contemplating the general interests of Italy. Envoys of the different European powers were assembled there, as if by common consent, with the view of concerting some scheme of operation for their mutual good. The conferences were conducted by night, and with such secrecy as to elude for some time the vigilant eye of Comines, the sagacious minister of Charles, then resident at the capital. The result was the celebrated league of Venice. It was signed the last day of March, 1495, on the part of Spain, Austria, Rome, Milan, and the Venetian republic. The ostensible object of the treaty, which was to last twenty-five years, was the preservation of the estates and rights of the confederates, especially of the Roman see. A large force, amounting in all to thirty-four thousand horse and twenty thousand foot, was to be assessed in stipulated proportions on each of the contracting parties. The secret articles of the treaty, however, went much further, providing a formidable plan of offensive operations. It was agreed in these, that King Ferdinand should employ the Spanish armament, now arrived in Sicily, in re-establishing his kinsman on the throne of Naples; that a Venetian fleet of forty galleys should attack the French positions on the Neapolitan coasts; that the duke of Milan should expel the French from Asti, and blockade the passes of the Alps, so as to intercept the passage of further reinforcements; and that the emperor and the king of Spain should invade the French frontiers, and their expenses be defrayed by subsidies from the allies. [46] Such were the terms of this treaty, which may be regarded as forming an era in modern political history, since it exhibits the first example of those extensive combinations among European princes, for mutual defence, which afterwards became so frequent. It shared the fate of many other coalitions, where the name and authority of the whole have been made subservient to the interests of some one of the parties, more powerful, or more cunning, than the rest. The intelligence of the new treaty diffused general joy throughout Italy. In Venice, in particular, it was greeted with _fêtes_, illuminations, and the most emphatic public rejoicing, in the very eyes of the French minister, who was compelled to witness this unequivocal testimony of the detestation in which his countrymen were held. [47] The tidings fell heavily on the ears of the French in Naples. It dispelled the dream of idle dissipation in which they were dissolved. They felt little concern, indeed, on the score of their Italian enemies, whom their easy victories taught them to regard with the same insolent contempt, that the paladins of romance are made to feel for the unknightly rabble, myriads of whom they could overturn with a single lance. But they felt serious alarm as they beheld the storm of war gathering from other quarters,--from Spain and Germany, in defiance of the treaties by which they had hoped to secure them. Charles saw the necessity of instant action. Two courses presented themselves: either to strengthen himself in his new conquests, and prepare to maintain them until he could receive fresh reinforcements from home, or to abandon them altogether and retreat across the Alps, before the allies could muster in sufficient strength to oppose him. With the indiscretion characteristic of his whole enterprise, he embraced a middle course, and lost the advantages which would have resulted from the exclusive adoption of either. * * * * * The principal light, by which we are to be guided through the remainder of this history, is the Aragonese annalist, Zurita, whose great work, although less known abroad than those of some more recent Castilian writers, sustains a reputation at home, unsurpassed by any other, in the great, substantial qualities of an historian. The notice of his life and writings has been swelled into a bulky quarto by Dr. Diego Dormer, in a work entitled, "Progressos de la Historia en el Reyno de Aragon. Zaragoza, 1680;" from which I extract a few particulars. Gerónimo Zurita, descended from an ancient and noble family, was born at Saragossa, December 4th, 1512. He was matriculated at an early age in the university of Alcalá. He there made extraordinary proficiency, under the immediate instruction of the learned Nuñez de Guzman, commonly called El Pinciano. He became familiar with the ancient, and a variety of modern tongues, and attracted particular attention by the purity and elegance of his Latinity. His personal merits, and his father's influence, recommended him, soon after quitting the university, to the notice of the emperor Charles V. He was consulted and employed in affairs of public importance, and subsequently raised to several posts of honor, attesting the entire confidence reposed in his integrity and abilities. His most honorable appointment, however, was that of national historiographer. In 1547, an act passed the cortes general of Aragon, providing for the office of national chronicler, with a fixed salary, whose duty it should be to compile, from authentic sources, a faithful history of the monarchy. The talents and eminent qualifications of Zurita recommended him to this post, and he was raised to it by the unanimous consent of the legislature, in the following year, 1548. From this time he conscientiously devoted himself to the execution of his great task. He visited every part of his own country, as well as Sicily and Italy, for the purpose of collecting materials. The public archives, and every accessible source of information, were freely thrown open to his inspection, by order of the government; and he returned from his literary pilgrimage with a large accumulation of rare and original documents. The first portion of his annals was published at Saragossa, in two volumes folio, 1562. The work was not completed until nearly twenty years later, and the last two volumes were printed under his own eye at Saragossa, in 1580, a few months only before his death. This edition, being one of those used in the present history, is in large folio, fairly executed, with double columns on the page, in the fashion of most of the ancient Spanish historians. The whole work was again published, as before, at the expense of the state, in 1585, by his son, amended and somewhat enlarged, from the manuscripts left by his father. Bouterwek has fallen into the error of supposing, that no edition of Zurita's Annals appeared till after the reign of Philip II., who died in 1592. (Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit, band iii. p. 319.) No incidents worthy of note seem to have broken the peaceful tenor of Zurita's life; which he terminated at Saragossa, in the sixty-eighth year of his age, in the monastery of Santa Engracia, to which he had retired during a temporary residence in the city, to superintend the publication of his Annals. His rich collection of books and manuscripts was left to the Carthusian monastery of Aula Dei; but from accident or neglect, the greater part have long since perished. His remains were interred in the convent where he died, and a monument, bearing a modest inscription, was erected over them by his son. The best monument of Zurita, however, is his Annals. They take up the history of Aragon from its first rise after the Arabic conquest, and continue it to the death of Ferdinand the Catholic. The reign of this prince, as possessing the largest interest and importance, is expanded into two volumes folio; being one-third of the whole work. The minuteness of Zurita's investigations has laid him open to the charge of prolixity, especially in the earlier and less important periods. It should be remembered, however, that his work was to be the great national repository of facts, interesting to his own countrymen, but which, from difficulty of access to authentic sources, could never before be fully exhibited to their inspection. But, whatever he thought of his redundancy, in this or the subsequent parts of his narrative, it must be admitted that he has uniformly and emphatically directed the attention of the reader to the topics most worthy of it; sparing no pains to illustrate the constitutional antiquities of the country, and to trace the gradual formation of her liberal polity, instead of wasting his strength on mere superficial gossip, like most of the chroniclers of the period. There is no Spanish historian less swayed by party or religious prejudice, or by the feeling of nationality, which is so apt to overflow in the loyal effusions of the Castilian writers. This laudable temperance, indeed, has brought on him the rebuke of more than one of his patriotic countrymen. There is a sobriety and coolness in his estimate of historical evidence, equally removed from temerity on the one hand, and credulity on the other; in short, his whole manner is that of a man conversant with public business, and free from the closet pedantry which too often characterizes the monkish annalists. The greater part of his life was passed under the reign of Charles V., when the spirit of the nation was not yet broken by arbitrary power, nor debased by the melancholy superstition which settled on it under his successor; an age, in which the memory of ancient liberty had not wholly faded away, and when, if men did not dare express all they thought, they at least thought with a degree of independence which gave a masculine character to their expression. In this, as well as in the liberality of his religious sentiments, he may be compared favorably with his celebrated countryman Mariana, who, educated in the cloister, and at a period when the nation was schooled to maxims of despotism, exhibits few glimpses of the sound criticism and reflection, which are to be found in the writings of his Aragonese rival. The seductions of style, however, the more fastidious selection of incidents, in short, the superior graces of narration, have given a wider fame to the former, whose works have passed into most of the cultivated languages of Europe, while those of Zurita remain, as far as I am aware, still undisturbed in the vernacular. FOOTNOTES [1] Zurita, Historia del Rey Don Hernando el Cathólico, (Anales, tom. v. vi., Zaragoza, 1580,) lib. 1, Introd. [2] The "Legazione," or official correspondence of Machiavelli, while stationed at the different European courts, may be regarded as the most complete manual of diplomacy as it existed at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It affords more copious and curious information respecting the interior workings of the governments with whom he resided, than is to be found in any regular history; and it shows the variety and extent of duties attached to the office of resident minister, from the first moment of its creation. [3] "Sed diu," says Sallust, noticing the similar consequence of increased refinement among the ancients, "magnum inter mortales certamen fuit, vine corporis an virtute animi res militaris magis procederet. ***** Tum demum periculo atque negotiis compertum est, in bello plurimum ingenium posse." Bellum Catilinarium, cap. 1, 2. [4] Machiavelli's political treatises, his "Principe" and "Discorsi sopra Tito Livio," which appeared after his death, excited no scandal at the time of their publication. They came into the world, indeed, from the pontifical press, under the privilege of the reigning pope, Clement VII. It was not until thirty years later that they were placed on the Index; and this not from any exceptions taken at the immorality of their doctrines, as Ginguené has well proved, (Histoire Littéraire d'Italie, (Paris, 1811-19,) tom. viii. pp. 32, 74,) but from the imputations they contained on the court of Rome. [5] "Aquel Senado é Señoría de Venecianos," says Gonzalo de Oviedo, "donde me parece á mi que esta recogido todo el saber é prudencia de los hombres humanos; porque és la gente del mundo que mejor se sabe gobernar; é la republica, que mas tiempo há durado en el mundo por la buena forma de su regimiento, é donde con mejor manera hán los hombres vivido en comunidad sin tener Rey;" etc. Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 3, dial. 44. [6] Of all the incense which poets and politicians have offered to the Queen of the Adriatic, none is more exquisite than that conveyed in these few lines, where Sannazaro notices her position as the bulwark of Christendom. "Una Italum regina, altae pulcherrima Romae Aemula, quae terris, quae dominaris aquis! Tu tibi vel reges cives facis; O decus! O lux Ausoniae, per quam libera turba sumus; Per quam barbaries nobis non imperat, et Sol Exoriens nostro clarius orbe micat!" Opera Latina, lib. 3, eleg. 1, 95. [7] Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. lib. 3, p. 147. [8] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 119, 123.--Fleury, Histoire Ecclésiastique, contin. (Paris, 1722,) tom. xxiv. lib. 117, p. 545.--Peter Martyr, whose residence and rank at the Spanish court gave him access to the best sources of information as to the repute in which the new pontiff was held there, expresses himself in one of his letters to Cardinal Sforza, who had assisted at his election, in the following unequivocal language. "Sed hoc habeto, princeps illustrissime, non placuisse meis Regibus pontificatum ad Alexandrum, quamvis eorum ditionarium, pervenisse. Verentur namque ne illius cupiditas, ne ambitio, ne (quod gravius) mollities filialis Christianam religionem in praeceps trahat." Epist. 119. [9] A remarkable example of this occurred in the middle of the fifteenth century, when the inundation of the Turks, which seemed ready to burst upon them, after overwhelming the Arabian and Greek empires, had no power to still the voice of faction, or to concentrate the attention of the Italian states, even for a moment. [10] Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. lib. 1, p. 2. [11] Brantôme, Vies des Hommes Illustres, Oeuvres Complètes, (Paris, 1822- 3,) tom. ii. disc. i. pp. 2, 20. [12] Sismondi, Hist. des Français, tom. xv. p. 112.--Gaillard, Rivalité, tom. iv. pp. 2, 3. [13] Daru, Histoire de la République de Venise, (Paris, 1821,) tom. iii. liv. 20.--See the deed of cession, in the memoir of M. de Foncemagne. (Mémoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, tom. xvii. pp. 539-579.) This document, as well as some others which appeared on the eve of Charles's expedition, breathes a tone of Quixotic and religious enthusiasm that transports us back to the days of the crusades. [14] The conflicting claims of Anjou and Aragon are stated at length by Gaillard, with more candor and impartiality than were to be expected from a French writer. (Histoire de François I., (Paris, 1769,) tom. i. pp. 71- 92.) They form the subject of a juvenile essay of Gibbon, in which we may discern the germs of many of the peculiarities which afterwards characterized the historian of the Decline and Fall. Miscellaneous Works, (London, 1814.) vol. iii. pp. 206-222. [15] Essai sur les Moeurs, chap. 107.--His politic father, Louis XI., acted on this principle, for he made no attempt to maintain his pretensions to Naples; although Mably affects to doubt whether this were not the result of necessity rather than policy. "Il est douteux si cette modération fut l'ouvrage d'une connoissance approfondie de ses vrais intérêts, ou seulement de cette défiance qu'il avoit des grands de son royaume, et qu'il n'osoit perdre de vue." Observations sur l'Histoire de France, Oeuvres, (Paris, 1794-5,) liv. 6, chap. 4. [16] Flassan, Histoire de la Diplomatic Française, (Paris, 1809,) tom. i. pp. 254-259.--Dumont, Corps Universel Diplomatique du Droit des Gens, (Amsterdam, 1726-31,) tom. iii. pp. 297-300. [17] See the narrative of these transactions in the Fifth and Sixth Chapters of Part I. of this History. Most historians seem to take it for granted, that Louis XI. advanced a sum of money to the king of Aragon; and some state, that payment of the debt, for which the provinces were mortgaged, was subsequently tendered to the French king. (See, among others, Sismondi, Républiques Italiennes, tom. xii. p. 93.--Roscoe, Life and Pontificate of Leo X., (London, 1827,) vol. i. p. 147.) The first of these statements is a palpable error; and I find no evidence of the last in any Spanish authority, where, if true, it would naturally have been noticed. I must, indeed, except Bernaldez, who says, that Ferdinand having repaid the money, borrowed by his father from Louis XI., to Charles VIII., the latter monarch returned it to Isabella, in consideration of the great expenses incurred by the Moorish war. It is a pity that this romantic piece of gallantry does not rest on any better foundation than the Curate of Los Palacios, who shows a degree of ignorance in the first part of his statement, that entitles him to little credit in the last. Indeed, the worthy curate, although much to be relied on for what passed in his own province, may be found frequently tripping in the details of what passed out of it. Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 117. [18] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 1, cap. 4, 7, 10. [19] Fleury, Histoire Ecclésiastique, contin., tom. xxiv. pp. 533-555.-- Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 1, cap. 14.--Daru, Hist. de Venise, tom. iii. pp. 51, 52.--Gaillard, Rivalité, tom. iv. p. 10.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 6. Comines, alluding to the affair of Roussillon, says that Ferdinand and Isabella, whether from motives of economy or hypocrisy, always employed priests in their negotiations. "Car toutes leurs oeuvres ont fait mener et conduire par telles gens (religieux), ou par hypocrisie, ou afin de moins despendre." (Mémoires, p. 211.) The French king, however, made more use of the clergy in this very transaction than the Spanish. Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 1, cap. 10. [20] Paolo Giovio, Historia sui Temporis, (Basiliae, 1578,) lib. 1, p. 16.--The treaty of Barcelona is given at length by Dumont. (Corps Diplomatique, tom. iii. pp. 297-300.) It is reported with sufficient inaccuracy by many historians, who make no hesitation in saying, that Ferdinand expressly bound himself, by one of the articles, not to interfere with Charles's meditated attempt on Naples. (Gaillard, Rivalité, tom. iv. p. 11.--Voltaire, Essai sur les Moeurs, chap. 107.--Comines, Mémoires, liv. 8, chap. 23.--Giovio, Hist. sui Temporis, lib. 1, p. 16.-- Varillas, Politique d'Espagne, ou du Roi Ferdinand, (Amsterdam, 1688,) pp. 11, 12.--Roscoe, Life of Leo X., tom. i. chap. 3.) So far from this, there is no allusion whatever to the proposed expedition in the treaty, nor is the name of Naples once mentioned in it. [21] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 1, cap. 18.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, ubi supra. [22] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 1, cap. 28.--Bembo, Istoria Viniziana, (Milano, 1809,) tom. i. lib. 2, pp. 118, 119.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 3, dial. 43. [23] Comines, Mémoires, liv. 7, introd. [24] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 1, cap. 20.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 123.--Comines, Mémoires, liv. 7, chap. 3.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 26, cap. 6.--Zurita concludes the arguments which decided Ferdinand against assuming the enterprise, with one which may be considered the gist of the whole matter. "El Rey entendia bien que no era tan facil la causa que se proponia." Lib. 1, cap. 20. [25] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 1, cap. 31. [26] Oviedo notices Silva as one of three brothers, all gentle cavaliers, of unblemished honor, remarkable for the plainness of their persons, the elegance and courtesy of their manners, and the magnificence of their style of living. This one, Alonso, he describes as a man of a singularly clear head. Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 4. [27] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, ubi supra. [28] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib, 1, cap. 31, 41. [29] Villeneuve, Mémoires, apud Petitot, Collection des Mémoires, tom. xiv. pp. 255, 256. The French army consisted of 3600 gens d'armes, 20,000 French infantry, and 8000 Swiss, without including the regular camp followers. (Sismondi, Républiques Italiennes, tom. xii. p. 132.) The splendor and novelty of their appearance excited a degree of admiration, which disarmed in some measure the terror of the Italians. Peter Martyr, whose distance from the theatre of action enabled him to contemplate more calmly the operation of events, beheld with a prophetic eye the magnitude of the calamities impending over his country. In one of his letters, he writes thus; "Scribitur exercitum visum fuisse nostra tempestate nullum unquam nitidiorem. Et qui futuri sunt calamitatis participes, Carolum aciesque illius ac peditum turmas laudibus extollunt; sed Italorum impensâ instructas." (Opus Epist., epist. 143.) He concludes another with this remarkable prediction; "Perimeris, Galle, ex majori parte, nec in patriam redibis. Jacebis insepultus; sed tua non restituetur strages, Italia." Epist. 123. [30] Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. lib. 1, p. 71.--Scipione Ammirato, Istorie Fiorentine, (Firenze, 1647,) p. 205.--Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, tom. iii. lib. 29, introd.--Comines, Mémoires, liv. 7, chap. 17.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 3, dial. 43. [31] Du Bos, Histoire de la Ligue faite à Cambray, (Paris, 1728), tom. i. dissert, prélim.--Machiavelli, Istorie Fiorentine, lib. 5.--Denina, Rivoluzioni d'Italia, lib. 18, cap. 3. [32] Arte della Guerra, lib. 2. [33] Machiavelli, Arte della Guerra, lib. 3.--Du Bos, Ligue de Cambray, tom. i. dis. prélim.--Giovio, Hist. sui Temporis, lib. 2, p. 41. Polybius, in his minute account of this celebrated military institution of the Greeks, has recapitulated nearly all the advantages and defects imputed to the Swiss _hérisson_, by modern European writers. (See lib. 17, sec. 25 et seq.) It is singular, that these exploded arms and tactics should be revived, after the lapse of nearly seventeen centuries, to be foiled again in the same manner as before. [34] Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. pp. 45, 46.--Machiavelli, Arte della Guerra, lib. 3.--Du Bos, Ligue de Cambray, ubi supra. [35] Guicciardini speaks of the name of "cannon," which the French gave to their pieces, as a novelty at that time in Italy. Istoria, pp. 45, 46. [36] Giovio, Hist. sui Temporis, lib. 2, p. 42.--Machiavelli, Arte della Guerra, lib. 7. [37] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 1, cap. 35.--Alonso da Silva acquitted himself to the entire satisfaction of the sovereigns, in his difficult mission. He was subsequently sent on various others to the different Italian courts, and uniformly sustained his reputation for ability and prudence. He did not live to be old. Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 4. [38] Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 26, cap. 6.--Salazar de Mendoza, Monarquía, lib. 3, cap. 14. This branch of the revenue yields at the present day, according to Laborde, about 6,000,000 reals, or 1,500,000 francs. Itinéraire, tom. vi. p. 51. [39] Zurita, Abarca, and other Spanish historians, fix the date of Alexander's grant at the close of 1496. (Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib, 2, cap. 40.--Reyes de Aragon, rey 30, cap. 9.) Martyr notices it with great particularity as already conferred, in a letter of February, 1495. (Opus Epist., epist. 157.) The pope, according to Comines, designed to compliment Ferdinand and Isabella for their conquest of Granada, by transferring to them the title of Most Christian, hitherto enjoyed by the kings of France. He had even gone so far as to address them thus in more than one of his briefs. This produced a remonstrance from a number of the cardinals; which led him to substitute the title of Most Catholic. The epithet of Catholic was not new in the royal house of Castile, nor indeed of Aragon; having been given to the Asturian prince Alfonso I. about the middle of the eighth, and to Pedro II., of Aragon, at the beginning of the thirteenth century. I will remark, in conclusion, that, although the phrase _Los Reyes Católicos_, as applied to a female equally with a male, would have a whimsical appearance literally translated into English, it is perfectly consonant to the Spanish idiom, which requires that all words, having reference to both a masculine and a feminine noun, should be expressed in the former gender. So also in the ancient languages; _Aemen tyrannoi_, says Queen Hecuba; (Euripides, _Troad_, v. 476.) But it is clearly incorrect to render _Los Reyes Católicos_, as usually done by English writers, by the corresponding term of "Catholic kings." [40] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1495. [41] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 138.--Sismondi, Républiques Italiennes, tom. xii. pp. 192-194.--Garibay, Compendio, lib. 19, cap. 4. [42] Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 3, dial. 43.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 1, cap. 43.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 138.--Giovio, Hist. sui Temporis, lib. 2, p. 46.--Lanuza, Historias, tom. i. lib. 1, cap. 6. This appears from a letter of Martyr's, dated three months before the interview; in which he says, "Antonius Fonseca, vir equestris ordinis, et armis clarus, destinatus est orator, qui eum moneat, ne, priusquam de jure inter ipsum et Alfonsum regem Neapolitanum decernatur, ulterius procedat. Fert in mandatis Antonius Fonseca, ut Carolo capitulum id sonans ostendat, anteque ipsius oculos (si detrectaverit) pacti veteris chirographum laceret, atque indicat inimicitias." Opus Epist., epist. 144. [43] Comines, Mémoires, liv. 7, chap. 16.--Villeneuve, Mémoires, apud Petitot, Collection des Mémoires, tom. xii., p. 260.--Ammirato, Istorie Florentine, tom. iii. lib. 26.--Summonte, Hist. di Napoli, tom. iii. lib. 6, cap. 1, 2. [44] Giovio, Hist. sui Temporis, lib. 2, p. 55.--Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 29, cap. 1, 2.--André de la Vigne, Histoire de Charles VIII., (Paris, 1617,) p. 201. [45] Giovio, Hist. sui Temporis, lib. 2, p. 56.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. pp. 86, 87.--Bembo, Istoria Viniziana, tom. i. lib. 2, p. 120-- Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 2, chap. 3, 5.--Comines, Mémoires, liv. 7, chap. 19. [46] Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. lib. 2, p. 88.--Comines, Mémoires, liv. 7, chap. 20.--Bembo, Istoria Viniziana, tom. i. lib. 2, pp. 122, 123.--Daru, Hist. de Venise, tom. iii. pp. 255, 256.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 2, cap. 5. [47] Comines, Mémoires, p. 96.--Comines takes great credit to himself for his perspicacity in detecting the secret negotiations carried on at Venice against his master. According to Bembo, however, the affair was managed with such profound caution, as to escape his notice until it was officially announced by the doge himself; when he was so much astounded by the intelligence, that he was obliged to ask the secretary of the senate, who accompanied him home, the particulars of what the doge had said, as his ideas were so confused at the time, that he had not perfectly comprehended it. Istoria Viniziana, lib. 2, pp. 128, 129. CHAPTER II. ITALIAN WARS.--RETREAT OF CHARLES VIII.--CAMPAIGNS OF GONSALVO DE CORDOVA.--FINAL EXPULSION OF THE FRENCH. 1495-1496. Impolitic Conduct of Charles.--He Plunders the Works of Art.--Gonsalvo de Cordova.--His Brilliant Qualities.--Raised to the Italian Command.--Battle of Seminara.--Gonsalvo's Successes.--Decline of the French.--He Receives the Title of Great Captain.--Expulsion of the French from Italy. Charles the Eighth might have found abundant occupation, during his brief residence at Naples, in placing the kingdom in a proper posture of defence, and in conciliating the good-will of the inhabitants, without which he could scarcely hope to maintain himself permanently in his conquest. So far from this, however, he showed the utmost aversion to business, wasting his hours, as has been already noticed, in the most frivolous amusements. He treated the great feudal aristocracy of the country with utter neglect; rendering himself difficult of access, and lavishing all dignities and emoluments with partial prodigality on his French subjects. His followers disgusted the nation still further by their insolence and unbridled licentiousness. The people naturally called to mind the virtues of the exiled Ferdinand, whose temperate rule they contrasted with the rash and rapacious conduct of their new masters. The spirit of discontent spread more widely, as the French were too thinly scattered to enforce subordination. A correspondence was entered into with Ferdinand in Sicily, and in a short time several of the most considerable cities of the kingdom openly avowed their allegiance to the house of Aragon. [1] In the mean time, Charles and his nobles, satiated with a life of inactivity and pleasure, and feeling that they had accomplished the great object of the expedition, began to look with longing eyes towards their own country. Their impatience was converted into anxiety on receiving tidings of the coalition mustering in the north. Charles, however, took care to secure to himself some of the spoils of victory, in a manner which we have seen practised, on a much greater scale, by his countrymen in our day. He collected the various works of art with which Naples was adorned, precious antiques, sculptured marble and alabaster, gates of bronze curiously wrought, and such architectural ornaments as were capable of transportation, and caused them to be embarked on board his fleet for the south of France, "endeavoring," says the Curate of Los Palacios, "to build up his own renown on the ruins of the kings of Naples, of glorious memory." His vessels, however, did not reach their place of destination, but were captured by a Biscayan and Genoese fleet off Pisa. [2] Charles had entirely failed in his application to Pope Alexander the Sixth for a recognition of his right to Naples, by a formal act of investiture. [3] He determined, however, to go through the ceremony of a coronation; and, on the 12th of May, he made his public entrance into the city, arrayed in splendid robes of scarlet and ermine, with the imperial diadem on his head, a sceptre in one hand, and a globe, the symbol of universal sovereignty, in the other; while the adulatory populace saluted his royal ear with the august title of Emperor. After the conclusion of this farce, he made preparations for his instant departure from Naples. On the 20th of May, he set out on his homeward march, at the head of one-half of his army, amounting in all to not more than nine thousand fighting men. The other half was left for the defence of his new conquest. This arrangement was highly impolitic, since he neither took with him enough to cover his retreat, nor left enough to secure the preservation of Naples. [4] It is not necessary to follow the French army in its retrograde movement through Italy. It is enough to say, that this was not conducted with sufficient despatch to anticipate the junction of the allied forces, who assembled to dispute its passage on the banks of the Taro, near Fornovo. An action was there fought, in which King Charles, at the head of his loyal chivalry, achieved such deeds of heroism, as shed a lustre over his ill-concerted enterprise, and which, if they did not gain him an undisputed victory, secured the fruits of it, by enabling him to effect his retreat without further molestation. At Turin he entered into negotiation with the calculating duke of Milan, which terminated in the treaty of Vercelli, October 10th, 1495. By this treaty Charles obtained no other advantage than that of detaching his cunning adversary from the coalition. The Venetians, although refusing to accede to it, made no opposition to any arrangement, which would expedite the removal of their formidable foe beyond the Alps. This was speedily accomplished; and Charles, yielding to his own impatience and that of his nobles, recrossed that mountain rampart which nature has so ineffectually provided for the security of Italy, and reached Grenoble with his army on the 27th of the month. Once more restored to his own dominions, the young monarch abandoned himself without reserve to the licentious pleasures to which he was passionately addicted, forgetting alike his dreams of ambition, and the brave companions in arms whom he had deserted in Italy. Thus ended this memorable expedition, which, though crowned with complete success, was attended with no other permanent result to its authors, than that of opening the way to those disastrous wars, which wasted the resources of their country for a great part of the sixteenth century. [5] Charles the Eighth had left as his viceroy in Naples Gilbert de Bourbon, duke of Montpensier, a prince of the blood, and a brave and loyal nobleman, but of slender military capacity, and so fond of his bed, says Comines, that he seldom left it before noon. The command of the forces in Calabria was intrusted to M. d'Aubigny, a Scottish cavalier of the house of Stuart, raised by Charles to the dignity of grand constable of France. He was so much esteemed for his noble and chivalrous qualities, that he was styled by the annalists of that day, says Brantôme, "grand chevalier sans reproche." He had large experience in military matters, and was reputed one of the best officers in the French service. Besides these principal commanders, there were others of subordinate rank stationed at the head of small detachments on different points of the kingdom, and especially in the fortified cities along the coasts. [6] Scarcely had Charles the Eighth quitted Naples, when his rival, Ferdinand, who had already completed his preparations in Sicily, made a descent on the southern extremity of Calabria. He was supported in this by the Spanish levies under the admiral Requesens, and Gonsalvo of Cordova, who reached Sicily in the month of May. As the latter of these commanders was destined to act a most conspicuous part in the Italian wars, it may not be amiss to give some account of his early life. Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordova, or Aguilar, as he is sometimes styled from the territorial title assumed by his branch of the family, was born at Montilla, in 1453. His father died early, leaving two sons, Alonso de Aguilar, whose name occurs in some of the most brilliant passages of the war of Granada, and Gonsalvo, three years younger than his brother. During the troubled reigns of John the Second and Henry the Fourth, the city of Cordova was divided by the feuds of the rival families of Cabra and Aguilar; and it is reported that the citizens of the latter faction, after the loss of their natural leader, Gonsalvo's father, used to testify their loyalty to his house by bearing the infant children along with them in their rencontres; thus Gonsalvo may be said to have been literally nursed amid the din of battle. [7] On the breaking out of the civil wars, the two brothers attached themselves to the fortunes of Alfonso and Isabella. At their court, the young Gonsalvo soon attracted attention by the uncommon beauty of his person, his polished manners, and proficiency in all knightly exercises. He indulged in a profuse magnificence in his apparel, equipage, and general style of living; a circumstance, which, accompanied with his brilliant qualities, gave him the title at the court of _el príncipe de los cavalleros_, the prince of cavaliers. This carelessness of expense, indeed, called forth more than once the affectionate remonstrance of his brother Alonso, who, as the elder son, had inherited the _mayorazgo_, or family estate, and who provided liberally for Gonsalvo's support. He served during the Portuguese war under Alonso de Cardenas, grand master of St. James, and was honored with the public commendations of his general for his signal display of valor at the battle of Albuera; where, it is remarked, the young hero incurred an unnecessary degree of personal hazard by the ostentatious splendor of his armor. Of this commander, and of the count of Tendilla, Gonsalvo always spoke with the greatest deference, acknowledging that he had learned the rudiments of war from them. [8] The long war of Granada, however, was the great school in which his military discipline was perfected. He did not, it is true, occupy so eminent a position in these campaigns as some other chiefs of riper years and more enlarged experience; but on various occasions he displayed uncommon proofs both of address and valor. He particularly distinguished himself at the capture of Tajara, Illora, and Monte Frio. At the last place, he headed the scaling party, and was the first to mount the walls in the face of the enemy. He wellnigh closed his career in a midnight skirmish before Granada, which occurred a short time before the end of the war. In the heat of the struggle his horse was slain; and Gonsalvo, unable to extricate himself from the morass in which he was entangled, would have perished, but for the faithful servant of the family, who mounted him on his own horse, briefly commending to his master the care of his wife and children. Gonsalvo escaped, but his brave follower paid for his loyalty with his life. At the conclusion of the war, he was selected, together with Ferdinand's secretary Zafra, in consequence of his plausible address, and his familiarity with the Arabic, to conduct the negotiation with the Moorish government. He was secretly introduced for this purpose by night into Granada, and finally succeeded in arranging the terms of capitulation with the unfortunate Abdallah, as has been already stated. In consideration of his various services, the Spanish sovereigns granted him a pension, and a large landed estate in the conquered territory. [9] After the war, Gonsalvo remained with the court, and his high reputation and brilliant exterior made him one of the most distinguished ornaments of the royal circle. His manners displayed all the romantic gallantry characteristic of the age, of which the following, among other instances, is recorded. The queen accompanied her daughter Joanna on board the fleet which was to bear her to Flanders, the country of her destined husband. After bidding adieu to the infanta, Isabella returned in her boat to the shore; but the waters were so swollen, that it was found difficult to make good a footing for her on the beach. As the sailors were preparing to drag the bark higher up the strand, Gonsalvo, who was present, and dressed, as the Castilian historians are careful to inform us, in a rich suit of brocade and crimson velvet, unwilling that the person of his royal mistress should be profaned by the touch of such rude hands, waded into the water, and bore the queen in his arms to the shore, amid the shouts and plaudits of the spectators. The incident may form a counterpart to the well-known anecdote of Sir Walter Raleigh. [10] Isabella's long and intimate acquaintance with Gonsalvo enabled her to form a correct estimate of his great talents. When the Italian expedition was resolved on, she instantly fixed her eyes on him as the most suitable person to conduct it. She knew that he possessed the qualities essential to success in a new and difficult enterprise,--courage, constancy, singular prudence, dexterity in negotiation, and inexhaustible fertility of resource. She accordingly recommended him, without hesitation, to her husband, as the commander of the Italian army. He approved her choice, although it seems to have caused no little surprise at the court, which, notwithstanding the favor in which Gonsalvo was held by the sovereigns, was not prepared to see him advanced over the heads of veterans, of so much riper years and higher military renown than himself. The event proved the sagacity of Isabella. [11] The part of the squadron destined to convey the new general to Sicily was made ready for sea in the spring of 1495. After a tempestuous voyage, he reached Messina on the 24th of May. He found that Ferdinand, of Naples, had already begun operations in Calabria, where he had occupied Reggio with the assistance of the admiral Requesens, who reached Sicily with a part of the armament a short time previous to Gonsalvo's arrival. The whole effective force of the Spaniards did not exceed six hundred lances and fifteen hundred foot, besides those employed in the fleet, amounting to about three thousand and five hundred more. The finances of Spain had been too freely drained in the late Moorish war to authorize any extraordinary expenditure; and Ferdinand designed to assist his kinsman rather with his name, than with any great accession of numbers. Preparations, however, were going forward for raising additional levies, especially among the hardy peasantry of the Asturias and Galicia, on which the war of Granada had fallen less heavily than on the south. [12.] On the 26th of May, Gonsalvo de Cordova crossed over to Reggio in Calabria, where a plan of operation was concerted between him and the Neapolitan monarch. Before opening the campaign, several strong places in the province, which owed allegiance to the Aragonese family, were placed in the hands of the Spanish general, as security for the reimbursement of expenses incurred by his government in the war. As Gonsalvo placed little reliance on his Calabrian or Sicilian recruits, he was obliged to detach a considerable part of his Spanish forces to garrison these places. [13] The presence of their monarch revived the dormant loyalty of his Calabrian subjects. They thronged to his standard, till at length he found himself at the head of six thousand men, chiefly composed of the raw militia of the country. He marched at once with Gonsalvo on St. Agatha, which opened its gates without resistance. He then directed his course towards Seminara, a place of some strength about eight leagues from Reggio. On his way he cut in pieces a detachment of French on its march to reinforce the garrison there. Seminara imitated the example of St. Agatha, and, receiving the Neapolitan army without opposition, unfurled the standard of Aragon on its walls. While this was going forward, Antonio Grimani, the Venetian admiral, scoured the eastern coasts of the kingdom with a fleet of four and twenty galleys, and, attacking the strong town of Monopoli, in the possession of the French, put the greater part of the garrison to the sword. D'Aubigny, who lay at this time with an inconsiderable body of French troops in the south of Calabria, saw the necessity of some vigorous movement to check the further progress of the enemy. He determined to concentrate his forces, scattered through the province, and march against Ferdinand, in the hope of bringing him to a decisive action. For this purpose, in addition to the garrisons dispersed among the principal towns, he summoned to his aid the forces, consisting principally of Swiss infantry, stationed in the Basilicate under Précy, a, brave young cavalier, esteemed one of the best officers in the French service. After the arrival of this reinforcement, aided by the levies of the Angevin barons, D'Aubigny, whose effective strength now greatly surpassed that of his adversary, directed his march towards Seminara. [14] Ferdinand, who had received no intimation of his adversary's junction with Précy, and who considered him much inferior to himself in numbers, no sooner heard of his approach, than he determined to march out at once before he could reach Seminara, and give him battle. Gonsalvo was of a different opinion. His own troops had too little experience in war with the French and Swiss veterans to make him willing to risk all on the chances of a single battle. The Spanish heavy-armed cavalry, indeed, were a match for any in Europe, and were even said to surpass every other in the beauty and excellence of their appointments, at a period, when arms were finished to luxury. [15] He had but a handful of these, however; by far the greatest part of his cavalry consisting of _ginetes_, or light-armed troops, of inestimable service in the wild guerilla warfare to which they had been accustomed in Granada, but obviously incapable of coping with the iron _gendarmerie_ of France. He felt some distrust, too, in bringing his little corps of infantry without further preparation, armed, as they were, only with short swords and bucklers, and much reduced, as has been already stated, in number, to encounter the formidable phalanx of Swiss pikes. As for the Calabrian levies, he did not place the least reliance on them. At all events, he thought it prudent, before coming to action, to obtain more accurate information than they now possessed, of the actual strength of the enemy. [16] In all this, however, he was overruled by the impatience of Ferdinand and his followers. The principal Spanish cavaliers, indeed, as well as the Italian, among whom, may be found names which afterwards rose to high distinction in these wars, urged Gonsalvo to lay aside his scruples; representing the impolicy of showing any distrust of their own strength at this crisis, and of balking the ardor of their soldiers, now hot for action. The Spanish chief, though far from being convinced, yielded to these earnest remonstrances, and King Ferdinand led out his little army without further delay against the enemy. After traversing a chain of hills, stretching in an easterly direction from Seminara, at the distance of about three miles he arrived before a small stream, on the plains beyond which he discerned the French army in rapid advance against him. He resolved to wait its approach; and, taking position on the slope of the hills towards the river, he drew up his horse on the right wing, and his infantry on the left. [17] The French generals, D'Aubigny and Précy, putting themselves at the head of their cavalry on the left, consisting of about four hundred heavy- armed, and twice as many light horse, dashed into the water without hesitation. Their right was occupied by the bristling phalanx of Swiss spearmen in close array; behind these were the militia of the country. The Spanish _ginetes_ succeeded in throwing the French gendarmerie into some disorder, before it could form after crossing the stream; but, no sooner was this accomplished, than the Spaniards, incapable of withstanding the charge of their enemy, suddenly wheeled about and precipitately retreated with the intention of again returning on their assailants, after the fashion of the Moorish tactics. The Calabrian militia, not comprehending this manoeuvre, interpreted it into a defeat. They thought the battle lost, and, seized with a panic, broke their ranks, and fled to a man, before the Swiss infantry had time so much as to lower its lances against them. King Ferdinand in vain attempted to rally the dastardly fugitives. The French cavalry was soon upon them, making frightful slaughter in their ranks. The young monarch, whose splendid arms and towering plumes made him a conspicuous mark in the field, was exposed to imminent peril. He had broken his lance in the body of one of the foremost of the French cavaliers, when his horse fell under him, and as his feet were entangled in the stirrups, he would inevitably have perished in the _mêlée_, but for the prompt assistance of a young nobleman named Juan de Altavilla, who mounted his master on his own horse, and calmly awaited the approach of the enemy, by whom he was immediately slain. Instances of this affecting loyalty and self-devotion not unfrequently occur in these wars, throwing a melancholy grace over the darker and more ferocious features of the time. [18] Gonsalvo was seen in the thickest of the fight, long after the king's escape, charging the enemy briskly at the head of his handful of Spaniards, not in the hope of retrieving the day, but of covering the flight of the panic-struck Neapolitans. At length he was borne along by the rushing tide, and succeeded in bringing off the greater part of his cavalry safe to Seminara. Had the French followed up the blow, the greater part of the royal army, with probably King Ferdinand and Gonsalvo at its head, would have fallen into their hands, and thus not only the fate of the campaign, but of Naples itself, would have been permanently decided by this battle. Fortunately, the French did not understand so well how to use a victory, as to gain it. They made no attempt to pursue. This is imputed to the illness of their general, D'Aubigny, occasioned by the extreme unhealthiness of the climate. He was too feeble to sit long on his horse, and was removed into a litter as soon as the action was decided. Whatever was the cause, the victors by this inaction suffered the golden fruits of victory to escape them. Ferdinand made his escape on the same day on board a vessel which conveyed him back to Sicily; and Gonsalvo, on the following morning before break of day, effected his retreat across the mountains to Reggio, at the head of four hundred Spanish lances. Thus terminated the first battle of importance in which Gonsalvo of Cordova held a distinguished command; the only one which he lost during his long and fortunate career. Its loss, however, attached no discredit to him, since it was entered into in manifest opposition to his judgment. On the contrary, his conduct throughout this affair tended greatly to establish his reputation by showing him to be no less prudent in council, than bold in action. [19] King Ferdinand, far from being disheartened by this defeat, gained new confidence from his experience of the favorable dispositions existing towards him in Calabria. Relying on a similar feeling of loyalty in his capital, he determined to hazard a bold stroke for its recovery; and that, too, instantly, before his late discomfiture should have time to operate on the spirits of his partisans. He accordingly embarked at Messina, with a handful of troops only, on board the fleet of the Spanish admiral, Requesens. It amounted in all to eighty vessels, most of them of inconsiderable size. With this armament, which, notwithstanding its formidable show, carried little effective force for land operations, the adventurous young monarch appeared off the harbor of Naples before the end of June. Charles's viceroy, the duke of Montpensier, at that time garrisoned Naples with six thousand French troops. On the appearance of the Spanish navy, he marched out to prevent Ferdinand's landing, leaving a few only of his soldiers to keep the city in awe. But he had scarcely quitted it before the inhabitants, who had waited with impatience an opportunity for throwing off the yoke, sounded the tocsin, and, rising to arms through every part of the city, and massacring the feeble remains of the garrison, shut the gates against him; while Ferdinand, who had succeeded in drawing off the French commander in another direction, no sooner presented himself before the walls, than he was received with transports of joy by the enthusiastic people. [20] The French, however, though excluded from the city, by making a circuit effected an entrance into the fortresses which commanded it. From these posts, Montpensier sorely annoyed the town, making frequent attacks on it, day and night, at the head of his gendarmerie, until they were at length checked in every direction by barricades which the citizens hastily constructed with wagons, casks of stones, bags of sand, and whatever came most readily to hand. At the same time, the windows, balconies, and house- tops were crowded with combatants, who poured down such a deadly shower of missiles on the heads of the French as finally compelled them to take shelter in their defences. Montpensier was now closely besieged, till at length, reduced by famine, he was compelled to capitulate. Before the term prescribed for his surrender had arrived, however, he effected his escape at night, by water, to Salerno, at the head of twenty-five hundred men. The remaining garrison, with the fortresses, submitted to the victorious Ferdinand, the beginning of the following year. And thus, by one of those sudden turns which belong to the game of war, the exiled prince, whose fortunes a few weeks before appeared perfectly desperate, was again established in the palace of his ancestors. [21] Montpensier did not long remain in his new quarters. He saw the necessity of immediate action, to counteract the alarming progress of the enemy. He quitted Salerno before the end of winter, strengthening his army by such reinforcements as he could collect from every quarter of the country. With this body, he directed his course towards Apulia, with the intention of bringing Ferdinand, who had already established his headquarters there, to a decisive engagement. Ferdinand's force, however, was so far inferior to that of his antagonist, as to compel him to act on the defensive, until he had been reinforced by a considerable body of troops from Venice. The two armies were then so equally matched, that neither cared to hazard all on the fate of a battle; and the campaign wasted away in languid operations, which led to no important result. In the mean time, Gonsalvo de Cordova was slowly fighting his way up through southern Calabria. The character of the country, rough and mountainous, like the Alpuxarras, and thickly sprinkled with fortified places, enabled him to bring into play the tactics which he had learned in the war of Granada. He made little use of heavy-armed troops, relying on his _ginetes_, and still more on his foot; taking care, however, to avoid any direct encounter with the dreaded Swiss battalions. He made amends for paucity of numbers and want of real strength, by rapidity of movement and the wily tactics of Moorish warfare; darting on the enemy where least expected, surprising his strong-holds at dead of night, entangling him in ambuscades, and desolating the country with those terrible forays, whose effects he had so often witnessed on the fair vegas of Granada. He adopted the policy practised by his master Ferdinand the Catholic in the Moorish war, lenient to the submissive foe, but wreaking terrible vengeance on such as resisted. [22] The French were sorely disconcerted by these irregular operations, so unlike anything to which they were accustomed in European warfare. They were further disheartened by the continued illness of D'Aubigny, and by the growing disaffection of the Calabrians, who in the southern provinces contiguous to Sicily were particularly well inclined to Spain. Gonsalvo, availing himself of these friendly dispositions, pushed forward his successes, carrying one strong-hold after another, until by the end of the year he had overrun the whole of Lower Calabria. His progress would have been still more rapid but for the serious embarrassments which he experienced from want of supplies. He had received some reinforcements from Sicily, but very few from Spain; while the boasted Galician levies, instead of fifteen hundred, had dwindled to scarcely three hundred men; who arrived in the most miserable plight, destitute of clothing and munitions of every kind. He was compelled to weaken still further his inadequate force by garrisoning the conquered places, most of which, however, he was obliged to leave without any defence at all. In addition to this, he was so destitute of the necessary funds for the payment of his troops, that he was detained nearly two months at Nicastro, until February, 1496, when he received a remittance from Spain. After this, he resumed operations with such vigor, that by the end of the following spring he had reduced all Upper Calabria, with the exception of a small corner of the province, in which D'Aubigny still maintained himself. At this crisis, he was summoned from the scene of his conquests to the support of the king of Naples, who lay encamped before Atella, a town intrenched among the Apennines, on the western borders of the Basilicate. [23] The campaign of the preceding winter had terminated without any decisive results, the two armies of Montpensier and King Ferdinand having continued in sight of each other, without ever coming to action. These protracted operations were fatal to the French. Their few supplies were intercepted by the peasantry of the country; their Swiss and German mercenaries mutinied and deserted for want of pay; and the Neapolitans in their service went off in great numbers, disgusted with the insolent and overbearing manners of their new allies. Charles the Eighth, in the mean while, was wasting his hours and health in the usual round of profligate pleasures. From the moment of recrossing the Alps he seemed to have shut out Italy from his thoughts. He was equally insensible to the supplications of the few Italians at his court, and the remonstrances of his French nobles, many of whom, although opposed to the first expedition, would willingly have undertaken a second to support their brave comrades, whom the heedless young monarch now abandoned to their fate. [24] At length Montpensier, finding no prospect of relief from home, and straitened by the want of provisions, determined to draw off from the neighborhood of Benevento, where the two armies lay encamped, and retreat to the fruitful province of Apulia, whose principal places were still garrisoned by the French. He broke up his camp secretly at dead of night, and gained a day's march on his enemy, before the latter began his pursuit. This Ferdinand pushed with such vigor, however, that he overtook the retreating army at the town of Atella, and completely intercepted its further progress. This town, which, as already noticed, is situated on, the western skirts of the Basilicate, lies in a broad valley encompassed by a lofty amphitheatre of hills, through which flows a little river, tributary to the Ofanto, watering the town, and turning several mills which supplied it with flour. At a few miles' distance was the strong place of Ripa Candida, garrisoned by the French, through which Montpensier hoped to maintain his communications with the fertile regions of the interior. Ferdinand, desirous if possible to bring the war to a close, by the capture of the whole French army, prepared for a vigorous blockade. He disposed his forces so as to intercept supplies by commanding the avenues to the town in every direction. He soon found, however, that his army, though considerably stronger than his rival's, was incompetent to this without further aid. He accordingly resolved to summon to his support Gonsalvo de Cordova, the fame of whose exploits now resounded through every part of the kingdom. [25] The Spanish general received Ferdinand's summons while encamped with his army at Castrovillari, in the north of Upper Calabria. If he complied with it, he saw himself in danger of losing all the fruits of his long campaign of victories; for his active enemy would not fail to profit by his absence to repair his losses. If he refused obedience, however, it might defeat the most favorable opportunity which had yet presented itself for bringing the war to a close. He resolved, therefore, at once to quit the field of his triumphs, and march to King Ferdinand's relief. But, before his departure, he prepared to strike such a blow as should, if possible, incapacitate his enemy for any effectual movement during his absence. He received intelligence that a considerable number of Angevin lords, mostly of the powerful house of San Severino, with their vassals and a reinforcement of French troops, were assembled at the little town of Laino, on the northwestern borders of Upper Calabria; where they lay awaiting a junction with D'Aubigny. Gonsalvo determined to surprise this place, and capture the rich spoils which it contained, before his departure. His road lay through a wild and mountainous country. The passes were occupied by the Calabrian peasantry in the interest of the Angevin party. The Spanish general, however, found no difficulty in forcing a way through this undisciplined rabble, a large body of whom he surrounded and cut to pieces, as they lay in ambush for him in the valley of Murano. Laino, whose base is washed by the waters of the Lao, was defended by a strong castle built on the opposite side of the river, and connected by a bridge with the town. All approach to the place by the high road was commanded by this fortress. Gonsalvo obviated this difficulty, however, by a circuitous route across the mountains. He marched all night, and, fording the waters of the Lao about two miles above the town, entered it with his little army before break of day, having previously detached a small corps to take possession of the bridge. The inhabitants, startled from their slumbers by the unexpected appearance of the enemy in their streets, hastily seized their arms and made for the castle on the other side of the river. The pass, however, was occupied by the Spaniards; and the Neapolitans and French, hemmed in on every side, began a desperate resistance, which terminated with the death of their chief, Americo San Severino, and the capture of such of his followers as did not fall in the mêlée. A rich booty fell into the hands of the victors. The most glorious prize, however, was the Angevin barons, twenty in number, whom Gonsalvo, after the action, sent prisoners to Naples. This decisive blow, whose tidings spread like wildfire throughout the country, settled the fate of Calabria. It struck terror into the hearts of the French, and crippled them so far as to leave Gonsalvo little cause for anxiety during his proposed absence. [26] The Spanish general lost no time in pressing forward on his march towards Atella. Before quitting Calabria he had received a reinforcement of five hundred soldiers from Spain, and his whole Spanish forces, according to Giovio, amounted to one hundred men-at-arms, five hundred light cavalry, and two thousand foot, picked men, and well schooled in the hardy service of the late campaign. [27] Although a great part of his march lay through a hostile country, he encountered little opposition; for the terror of his name, says the writer last quoted, had everywhere gone before him. He arrived before Atella at the beginning of July. The king of Naples was no sooner advised of his approach, than he marched out of camp, attended by the Venetian general, the marquis of Mantua, and the papal legate, Caesar Borgia, to receive him. All were eager to do honor to the man who had achieved such brilliant exploits; who, in less than a year, had made himself master of the larger part of the kingdom of Naples, and that, with the most limited resources, in defiance of the bravest and best disciplined soldiery in Europe. It was then, according to the Spanish writers, that he was by general consent greeted with the title of the Great Captain; by which he is much more familiarly known in Spanish, and, it may be added, in most histories of the period, than by his own name. [28] Gonsalvo found the French sorely distressed by the blockade, which was so strictly maintained as to allow few supplies from abroad to pass into the town. His quick eye discovered at once, however, that in order to render it perfectly effectual, it would be necessary to destroy the mills in the vicinity, which supplied Atella with flour. He undertook this, on the day of his arrival, at the head of his own corps. Montpensier, aware of the importance of these mills, had stationed a strong guard for their defence, consisting of a body of Gascon archers, and the Swiss pikemen. Although the Spaniards had never been brought into direct collision with any large masses of this formidable infantry, yet occasional rencontres with small detachments, and increased familiarity with its tactics, had stripped it of much of its terrors. Gonsalvo had even so far profited by the example of the Swiss, as to strengthen his infantry by mingling the long pikes, with the short swords and bucklers of the Spaniards. [29] He made two divisions of his cavalry, posting his handful of heavy-armed, with some of the light horse, so as to check any sally from the town, while he destined the remainder to support the infantry in the attack upon the enemy. Having made these arrangements, the Spanish chieftain led on his men confidently to the charge. The Gascon archery, however, seized with a panic, scarcely awaited his approach, but fled shamefully, before they had time to discharge a second volley of arrows, leaving the battle to the Swiss. These latter, exhausted by the sufferings of the siege, and dispirited by long reverses, and by the presence of a new and victorious foe, did not behave with their wonted intrepidity, but, after a feeble resistance, abandoned their position, and retreated towards the city. Gonsalvo, having gained his object, did not care to pursue the fugitives, but instantly set about demolishing the mills, every vestige of which, in a few hours, was swept from the ground. Three days after, he supported the Neapolitan troops in an assault on Ripa Candida, and carried that important post, by means of which Atella maintained a communication with the interior. [30] Thus cut off from all their resources, and no longer cheered by hopes of succor from their own country, the French, after suffering the severest privations, and being reduced to the most loathsome aliment for subsistence, made overtures for a capitulation. The terms were soon arranged with the king of Naples, who had no desire but to rid his country of the invaders. It was agreed, that, if the French commander did not receive assistance in thirty days, he should evacuate Atella, and cause every place holding under him in the kingdom of Naples, with all its artillery, to be surrendered to King Ferdinand; and that, on these conditions, his soldiers should be furnished with vessels to transport them back to France; that the foreign mercenaries should be permitted to return to their own homes; and that a general amnesty should be extended to such Neapolitans as returned to their allegiance in fifteen days. [31] Such were the articles of capitulation, signed on the 21st of July, 1496, which Comines, who received the tidings at the court of France, does not hesitate to denounce as "a most disgraceful treaty, without parallel, save in that made by the Roman consuls at the Caudine Forks, which was too dishonorable to be sanctioned by their countrymen." The reproach is certainly unmerited; and comes with ill grace from a court, which was wasting in riotous indulgence the very resources indispensable to the brave and loyal subjects, who were endeavoring to maintain its honor in a foreign land. [32] Unfortunately, Montpensier was unable to enforce the full performance of his own treaty; as many of the French refused to deliver up the places intrusted to them, under the pretence that their authority was derived, not from the viceroy, but from the king himself. During the discussion of this point, the French troops were removed to Baia and Pozzuolo, and the adjacent places on the coast. The unhealthiness of the situation, together with that of the autumnal season, and an intemperate indulgence in fruits and wine, soon brought on an epidemic among the soldiers, which swept them off in great numbers. The gallant Montpensier was one of the first victims. He refused the earnest solicitations of his brother-in-law, the marquis of Mantua, to quit his unfortunate companions, and retire to a place of safety in the interior. The shore was literally strewed with the bodies of the dying and the dead. Of the whole number of Frenchmen, amounting to not less than five thousand, who marched out of Atella, not more than five hundred ever reached their native country. The Swiss and other mercenaries were scarcely more fortunate. "They made their way back as they could through Italy," says a writer of the period, "in the most deplorable state of destitution and suffering, the gaze of all, and a sad example of the caprice of fortune." [33] Such was the miserable fate of that brilliant and formidable array, which scarcely two years before had poured down on the fair fields of Italy in all the insolence of expected conquest. Well would it be, if the name of every conqueror, whose successes, though built on human misery, are so dazzling to the imagination, could be made to point a moral for the instruction of his species, as effectually as that of Charles the Eighth. The young king of Naples did not live long to enjoy his triumphs. On his return from Atella, he contracted an inauspicious marriage with his aunt, a lady nearly of his own age, to whom he had been long attached. A careless and somewhat intemperate indulgence in pleasure, succeeding the hardy life which he had been lately leading, brought on a flux which carried him off in the twenty-eighth year of his age, and second of his reign. He was the fifth monarch, who, in the brief compass of three years, had sat on the disastrous throne of Naples. Ferdinand possessed many qualities suited to the turbulent times in which he lived. He was vigorous and prompt in action, and naturally of a high and generous spirit. Still, however, he exhibited glimpses, even in his last hours, of an obliquity, not to say ferocity of temper, which characterized many of his line, and which led to ominous conjectures as to what would have been his future policy. [34] He was succeeded on the throne by his uncle Frederic, a prince of gentle disposition, endeared to the Neapolitans by repeated acts of benevolence, and by a magnanimous regard for justice, of which the remarkable fluctuations of his fortune had elicited more than one example. His amiable virtues, however, required a kindlier soil and season for their expansion; and, as the event proved, made him no match for the subtile and unscrupulous politicians of the age. His first act was a general amnesty to the disaffected Neapolitans, who felt such confidence in his good faith, that they returned, with scarcely an exception, to their allegiance. His next measure was to request the aid of Gonsalvo de Cordova in suppressing the hostile movements made by the French during his absence from Calabria. At the name of the Great Captain, the Italians flocked from all quarters, to serve without pay under a banner which was sure to lead them to victory. Tower and town, as he advanced, went down before him; and the French general, D'Aubigny, soon saw himself reduced to the necessity of making the best terms he could with his conqueror, and evacuating the province altogether. The submission of Calabria was speedily followed by that of the few remaining cities in other quarters, still garrisoned by the French; comprehending the last rood of territory possessed by Charles the Eighth in the kingdom of Naples. [35] * * * * * Our narrative now leads us on the beaten track of Italian history. I have endeavored to make the reader acquainted with the peculiar character and pretensions of the principal Spanish authorities, on whom I have relied in the progress of the work. This would be superfluous in regard to the Italian, who enjoy the rank of classics, not only in their own country, but throughout Europe, and have furnished the earliest models among the moderns of historic composition. Fortunately, two of the most eminent of them, Guicciardini and Paolo Giovio, lived at the period of our narrative, and have embraced the whole extent of it in their histories. These two writers, besides the attractions of elegant scholarship, and talent, occupied a position which enabled them to take a clear view of all the principal political movements of their age; circumstances, which have made their accounts of infinite value in respect to foreign transactions, as well as domestic. Guicciardini was a conspicuous actor in the scenes he describes; and a long residence at the court of Ferdinand the Catholic opened to him the most authentic sources of information in regard to Spain. Giovio, from his intimate relations with the principal persons of his time, had also access to the best sources of knowledge, while in the notice of foreign transactions he was but little exposed to those venal influences, which led him too often to employ the golden or iron pen of history as interest dictated. Unfortunately, a lamentable hiatus occurs in his greatest work, "Historiae sui Temporis," embracing the whole period intervening between the end of Charles VIII.'s expedition and the accession of Leo X., in 1513. At the time of the memorable sack of Rome by the duke of Bourbon, in 1527, Giovio deposited his manuscript, with a quantity of plate, in an iron chest, which he hid in an obscure corner of the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. The treasure, however, did not escape the searching eyes of two Spanish soldiers, who broke open the chest, and one of them seized on the plate, regarding the papers as of no value. The other, not being quite such a fool, says Giovio, preserved such of the manuscripts as were on vellum, and ornamented with rich bindings, but threw away what was written on paper. The part thus thrown away contained six books, relating to the period above mentioned, which were never afterwards recovered. The soldier brought the remainder to their author, who bought them at the price of a vacant benefice, which he persuaded the pope to confer on the freebooter, in his native land of Cordova. It is not often that simony has found so good an apology. The deficiency, although never repaired by Giovio, was in some degree supplied by his biographies of eminent men, and, among others, by that of Gonsalvo de Cordova, in which he has collected with great industry all the events of any interest in the life of this great commander. The narrative is in general corroborated by the Spanish authorities, and contains some additional particulars, especially respecting his early life, which Giovio's personal intimacy with the principal characters of the period might easily have furnished. This portion of our story is, moreover, illustrated by the labors of M. Sismondi, in his "Républiques Italiennes," which may undoubtedly claim to be ranked among the most remarkable historical achievements of our time; whether we consider the dexterous management of the narrative, or the admirable spirit of philosophy by which it is illumined. It must be admitted, that he has perfectly succeeded in unravelling the intricate web of Italian politics; and, notwithstanding the complicated, and, indeed, motley character of his subject, the historian has left a uniform and harmonious impression on the mind of the reader. This he has accomplished, by keeping constantly in view the principle which regulated all the various movements of the complex machinery; so that his narrative becomes, what he terms it in his English abridgment, a history of Italian liberty. By keeping this principle steadily before him, he has been able to solve much that hitherto was dark and problematical in his subject; and if he has occasionally sacrificed something to theory, he has, on the whole, pursued the investigation in a truly philosophical manner, and arrived at results the most honorable and cheering to humanity. Fortunately, his own mind was deeply penetrated with reverence for the free institutions which he has analyzed. If it is too much to say that the historian of republics should be himself a republican, it is at least true that his soul should be penetrated to its very depths with the spirit which animates them. No one, who is not smitten with the love of freedom, can furnish the key to much that is enigmatical in her character, and reconcile his readers to the harsh and repulsive features that she sometimes wears, by revealing the beauty and grandeur of the soul within. That portion of our narrative which is incorporated with Italian story is too small to occupy much space on Sismondi's plan. He has discussed it, moreover, in a manner not very favorable to the Spaniards, whom he seems to have regarded with somewhat of the aversion with which an Italian of the sixteenth century viewed the ultramontane barbarians of Europe. Perhaps the reader may find some advantage in contemplating another side of the picture, and studying the less familiar details presented by the Spanish authorities. FOOTNOTES [1] Comines, Mémoires, liv. 7, chap. 17.--Summonte, Hist. di Napoli, tom. iii. lib. 6, cap. 2.--Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 29, cap. 2. [2] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 140-143. [3] Summonte, Hist. di Napoli, tom. iii. lib. 6, cap. 2. According to Giannone, (Istoria di Napoli, lib. 29, cap. 2,) he did obtain the investiture from the pope; but this statement is contradicted by several, and confirmed by none, of the authorities I have consulted. [4] Brantôme, Hommes Illustres, Oeuvres, tom. ii. pp. 3-5.--Comines, Mémoires, liv. 8, chap. 2. The particulars of the coronation are recorded with punctilious precision by André de la Vigne, secretary of Queen Anne. (Hist. de Charles VIII., p. 201.) Daru has confounded this farce with Charles's original entry into Naples in February. Hist. de Venise, tom. iii. liv. 20, p. 247. [5] Villeneuve, Mémoires, apud Petitot, Collection de Mémoires, tom. xiv. pp. 262, 263.--Flassan, Diplomatie Française, tom. i. pp. 267-269.-- Comines, Mémoires, liv. 8, chap. 10-12, 18. [6] Comines, Mémoires, liv. 8, chap. 1.--Brantôme, Hommes Illustres, tom. ii. p. 59. [7] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 2, cap. 7.--Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, lib. 1, pp. 204, 205. [8] Pulgar, Sumario de las Hazañas del Gran Capitan, (Madrid, 1834,) p. 145.--Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, lib. 1, pp. 205 et seq. [9] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 90.--Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, lib. 1, pp. 211, 212.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 42.--Quintana, Españoles Célebres, tom. i. pp. 207-216.--Pulgar, Sumario, p. 193. Florian has given circulation to a popular error by his romance of "Gonsalve de Cordone," where the young warrior is made to play a part he is by no means entitled to, as hero of the Granadine war. Graver writers, who cannot lawfully plead the privilege of romancing, have committed the same error. See, among others, Varillas, Politique de Ferdinand, p. 3. [10] Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, p. 214.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan Gonzalo Hernandez de Cordova y Aguilar, (Alcalá de Henares, 1584,) cap. 23. Another example of his gallantry occurred during the Granadine war, when the fire of Santa Fe had consumed the royal tent, with the greater part of the queen's apparel and other valuable effects. Gonsalvo, on learning the disaster, at his castle of Illora, supplied the queen so abundantly from the magnificent wardrobe of his wife Doña Maria Manrique, as led Isabella pleasantly to remark, that, "the fire had done more execution in his quarters, than in her own." Pulgar, Sumario, p. 187. [11] Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, p. 214.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 23. [12] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 2, cap. 7, 24.--Quintana, Españoles Célebres, tom. i. p. 222.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, ubi supra. Giovio, in his biography of Gonsalvo, estimates these forces at 5000 foot and 600 horse, which last in his History he raises to 700. I have followed Zurita, as presenting the more probable statement, and as generally more accurate in all that relates to his own nation. It is a hopeless task to attempt to reconcile the manifold inaccuracies, contradictions, and discrepancies, which perplex the narratives of the writers on both sides, in everything relating to numerical estimates. The difficulty is greatly increased by the extremely vague application of the term _lance_, as we meet with it, including six, four, three, or even a less number of followers, as the case might be. [13] Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 26, cap. 10.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 2, cap. 7. The occupation of these places by Gonsalvo excited the pope's jealousy, as to the designs of the Spanish sovereigns. In consequence of his remonstrances, the Castilian envoy, Garcilasso de la Vega, was instructed to direct Gonsalvo, that, "in case any inferior places had been since put into his hands, he should restore them; if they were of importance, however, he was first to confer with his own government." King Ferdinand, as Abarca assures his readers, "was unwilling to give cause of complaint to any one, _unless he were greatly a gainer by it_." Reyes de Aragon, rey 30, cap. 8.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. v. lib. 2, cap. 8. [14] Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, pp. 215-217.--Idem, Hist. sui Temporis, pp. 83-85.--Bembo, Istoria Viniziana, lib. 3, pp. 160, 185.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 2, cap. 8.--Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 2, pp. 88, 92.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 25. [15] Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, lib. 1.--Du Bos, Ligue de Cambray, introd., p. 58. [16] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 2, cap. 7.--Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, ubi supra. [17] Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, lib. 1, pp. 216, 217.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 24.--Quintana, Españoles Célebres, tom. i. pp. 223-227. [18] Giovio, Hist. sui Temporis, lib. 3, pp. 83-85.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 24.--Summonte, Hist. di Napoli, tom. iii. lib. 6, cap. 2.-- Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 2, p. 112.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, p. 690. [19] Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 1, p. 112.--Giovio, Hist. sui Temporis, lib. 3, p. 85.--Lanuza, Historias, tom. i. lib. 1, cap. 7. [20] Summonte, Hist. di Napoli, tom. vi. p. 519.--Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 2, pp. 113, 114.--Giovio, Hist. sui Temporis, lib. 3, pp. 87, 88.-- Villeneuve, Mémoires, apud Petitot, Collection des Mémoires, tom. xiv. pp. 264, 265. [21] Giovio, Hist. sui Temporis, lib. 3, pp. 88-90, 114-119.-- Guicciardini, Istoria, lib, 2, pp. 114-117.--Summonte, Hist. di Napoli, tom. vi. pp. 520, 521. [22] Bembo, Istoria Viniziana, lib. 3, pp. 173, 174.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 26.--Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, lib. 1, p. 218.-- Villeneuve, Mémoires, p. 313.--Sismondi, Républiques Italiennes, tom. xii. p. 386. [23] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 2, cap. 11, 20.--Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 2, p. 140.--Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, lib. 1, pp. 219, 220.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 25, 26. [24] Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 3, pp. 140, 157, 158.--Comines, Mémoires, liv. 8, chap. 23, 24.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 183. Du Bos discriminates between the character of the German levies or landsknechts and the Swiss, in the following terms. "Les lansquenets étoient même de beaucoup mieux faits, _généralement_ parlant, et de bien meilleure mine sous les armes, que les fantassins Suisses; mais ils étoient incapables de discipline. Au contraire des Suisses, ils étoient sans obéissance pour leur chefs, et sans amitié pours leurs camarades." (Ligue de Cambray, tom. i. dissert. prélim., p. 66.) Comines confirms the distinction with a high tribute to the loyalty of the Swiss, which has continued their honorable characteristic to the present day. Mémoires, liv. 8, chap. 21. [25] Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, lib. 1, pp. 218, 219.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 28.--Quintana, Españoles Célebres, tom. i. p. 226.--Bembo, Istoria Viniziana, lib. 3, p. 184.--Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 3, p. 158. [26] Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, pp. 219, 220.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 27.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 2, cap. 26.--Quintana, Españoles Célebres, tom. i. pp. 227, 228.--Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 3, pp. 158, 159.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 26, cap. 12. [27] Giovio, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 4, p. 132. [28] Quintana, Españoles Célebres, tom. i. p. 228.--Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, lib. 1, p. 220. The Aragonese historians are much ruffled by the irreverent manner in which Guicciardini notices the origin of the cognomen of the Great Captain; which even his subsequent panegyric cannot atone for. "Era capitano Gonsalvo Ernandes, di casa d'Aghilar, di patria Cordovese, uomo di molto valore, ed esercitato lungamente nelle guerre di Granata, il quale nel principio della venuta sua in Italia, cognominato _dalla jattanza Spagnuola_ il Gran Capitano, per significare con questo titolo la suprema podestà sopra loro, meritò per le preclare vittorie che ebbe dipoi, che per consentimento universale gli fosse confermato e perpetuate questo sopranome, per significazione di virtù grande, e di grande eccellenza nella disciplina militare." (Istoria, tom. i. p. 112.) According to Zurita, the title was not conferred till the Spanish general's appearance before Atella, and the first example of its formal recognition was in the instrument of capitulation at that place. (Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 2, cap. 27.) This seems to derive support from the fact that Gonsalvo's biographer and contemporary, Giovio, begins to distinguish him by that epithet from this period. Abarca assigns a higher antiquity to it, quoting the words of the royal grant of the duchy of Sessa, made to Gonsalvo, as authority. (Reyes de Aragon, rey 39, cap. 9.) In a former edition, I intimated my doubt of the historian's accuracy. A subsequent inspection of the instrument itself, in a work since come into my possession, shows this distrust to have been well founded; for it is there simply said, that the title was conferred in Italy. Pulgar, Sumario, p. 188. [29] This was improving on the somewhat similar expedient ascribed by Polybius to King Pyrrhus, who mingled alternate cohorts, armed with short weapons after the Roman fashion, with those of his Macedonian spearmen. Lib. 17 sec. 24. [30] Giovio, Hist. sui Temporis, lib. 4, p. 133.--Idem, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, pp. 220, 221.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 2, cap. 27. --Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 28.--Quintana, Españoles Célebres, tom. i. p. 229.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, rey 30, cap. 9. [31] Villeneuve, Mémoires, p. 318.--Comines, Mémoires, liv. 8, chap. 21.-- Giovio, Hist. sui Temporis, lib. 4, p. 136. [32] Comines, Mémoires, liv. 8, chap. 21. [33] Giovio, Hist. sui Temporis, p. 137.--Comines, Mémoires, liv. 8, chap. 21.--Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, lib. 1, p. 221.--Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 3, p. 160.--Villeneuve, Mémoires, apud Petitot, tom. xiv. p. 318. [34] Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 29, cap. 2.--Summonte, Hist. di Napoli, lib. 6, cap. 2.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 188. While stretched on his death-bed, Ferdinand, according to Bembo, caused the head of his prisoner, the Bishop of Teano, to be brought to him, and laid at the foot of his couch, that he might be assured with his own eyes of the execution of the sentence. Istoria Viniziana, lib. 3, p. 189. [35] Giovio, Hist. sui Temporis, lib, 4, p. 139.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 2, cap. 30, 33.--Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 3, p. 160.-- Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, tom. iii. lib. 29, cap. 3. CHAPTER III. ITALIAN WARS.--GONSALVO SUCCORS THE POPE.--TREATY WITH FRANCE.-- ORGANIZATION OF THE SPANISH MILITIA. 1496-1498. Gonsalvo Succors the Pope.--Storms Ostia.--Reception in Rome.--Peace with France.--Ferdinand's Reputation advanced by his Conduct in the War.-- Organization of the Militia. It had been arranged by the treaty of Venice, that while the allies were carrying on the war in Naples, the emperor elect and the king of Spain should make a diversion in their favor, by invading the French frontiers. Ferdinand had performed his part of the engagement. Ever since the beginning of the war, he had maintained a large force along the borders from Fontarabia to Perpignan. In 1496, the regular army kept in pay amounted to ten thousand horse and fifteen thousand foot; which, together with the Sicilian armament, necessarily involved an expenditure exceedingly heavy under the financial pressure occasioned by the Moorish war. The command of the levies in Roussillon was given to Don Enrique Enriquez de Guzman, who, far from acting on the defensive, carried his men repeatedly over the border, sweeping off fifteen or twenty thousand head of cattle in a single foray, and ravaging the country as far as Carcassona and Narbonne. [1] had concentrated a considerable force in the south, retaliated by similar inroads, in one of which they succeeded in surprising the fortified town of Salsas. The works, however, were in so dilapidated a state, that the place was scarcely tenable, and it was abandoned on the approach of the Spanish army. A truce soon followed, which put an end to further operations in that quarter. [2] The submission of Calabria seemed to leave no further occupation for the arms of the Great Captain in Italy. Before quitting that country, however, he engaged in an adventure, which, as narrated by his biographers, forms a brilliant episode to his regular campaigns. Ostia, the seaport of Rome, was, among the places in the papal territory, forcibly occupied by Charles the Eighth, and on his retreat had been left to a French garrison under the command of a Biscayan adventurer named Menaldo Guerri. The place was so situated as entirely to command the mouth of the Tiber, enabling the piratical horde who garrisoned it almost wholly to destroy the commerce of Rome, and even to reduce the city to great distress for want of provisions. The imbecile government, incapable of defending itself, implored Gonsalvo's aid in dislodging this nest of formidable freebooters. The Spanish general, who was now at leisure, complied with the pontiff's solicitations, and soon after presented himself before Ostia with his little corps of troops, amounting in all to three hundred horse and fifteen hundred foot. [3] Guerri, trusting to the strength of his defences, refused to surrender. Gonsalvo, after coolly preparing his batteries, opened a heavy cannonade on the place, which at the end of five days effected a practicable breach in the walls. In the mean time, Garcilasso de la Vega, the Castilian ambassador at the papal court, who could not bear to remain inactive so near the field where laurels were to be won, arrived to Gonsalvo's support, with a handful of his own countrymen resident in Rome. This gallant little band, scaling the walls on the opposite side to that assailed by Gonsalvo, effected an entrance into the town, while the garrison was occupied with maintaining the breach against the main body of the Spaniards. Thus surprised, and hemmed in on both sides, Guerri and his associates made no further resistance, but surrendered themselves prisoners of war; and Gonsalvo, with more clemency than was usually shown on such occasions, stopped the carnage, and reserved his captives to grace his entry into the capital. [4] This was made a few days after, with all the pomp of a Roman triumph. The Spanish general entered by the gate of Ostia, at the head of his martial squadrons in battle array, with colors flying and music playing, while the rear was brought up by the captive chief and his confederates, so long the terror, now the derision, of the populace. The balconies and windows were crowded with spectators, and the streets, lined with multitudes, who shouted forth the name of Gonsalvo de Cordova, the "deliverer of Rome!" The procession took its way through the principal streets of the city towards the Vatican, where Alexander the Sixth awaited its approach, seated under a canopy of state in the chief saloon of the palace, surrounded by his great ecclesiastics and nobility. On Gonsalvo's entrance, the cardinals rose to receive him. The Spanish general knelt down to receive the benediction of the pope; but the latter, raising him up, kissed him on the forehead, and complimented him with the golden rose, which the Holy See was accustomed to dispense as the reward of its most devoted champions. In the conversation which ensued, Gonsalvo obtained the pardon of Guerri and his associates, and an exemption from taxes for the oppressed inhabitants of Ostia. In a subsequent part of the discourse, the pope taking occasion most inopportunely to accuse the Spanish sovereigns of unfavorable dispositions towards himself, Gonsalvo replied with much warmth, enumerating the various good offices rendered by them to the church; and, roundly taxing the pope with ingratitude, somewhat bluntly advised him to reform his life and conversation, which brought scandal on all Christendom. His Holiness testified no indignation at this unsavory rebuke of the Great Captain, though, as the historians with some simplicity inform us, he was greatly surprised to find the latter so fluent in discourse, and so well instructed in matters foreign to his profession. [5] Gonsalvo experienced the most honorable reception from King Frederic on his return to Naples. During his continuance there, he was lodged and sumptuously entertained in one of the royal fortresses; and the grateful monarch requited his services with the title of Duke of St. Angelo, and an estate in Abruzzo, containing three thousand vassals. He had before pressed these honors on the victor, who declined accepting them till he had obtained the consent of his own sovereigns. Soon after, Gonsalvo, quitting Naples, revisited Sicily, where he adjusted certain differences which had arisen betwixt the viceroy and the inhabitants respecting the revenues of the island. Then embarking with his whole force, he reached the shores of Spain in the month of August, 1498. His return to his native land was greeted with a general enthusiasm far more grateful to his patriotic heart, than any homage or honors conferred by foreign princes. Isabella welcomed him with pride and satisfaction, as having fully vindicated her preference of him to his more experienced rivals for the difficult post of Italy; and Ferdinand did not hesitate to declare, that the Calabrian campaigns reflected more lustre on his crown, than the conquest of Granada. [6] The total expulsion of the French from Naples brought hostilities between that nation and Spain to a close. The latter had gained her point, and the former had little heart to resume so disastrous an enterprise. Before this event, indeed, overtures had been made by the French court for a separate treaty with Spain. The latter, however, was unwilling to enter into any compact, without the participation of her allies. After the total abandonment of the French enterprise, there seemed to exist no further pretext for prolonging the war. The Spanish government, moreover, had little cause for satisfaction with its confederates. The emperor had not co-operated in the descent on the enemy's frontier, according to agreement; nor had the allies ever reimbursed Spain for the heavy charges incurred in fulfilling her part of the engagements. The Venetians were taken up with securing to themselves as much of the Neapolitan territory as they could, by way of indemnification for their own expenses. [7] The duke of Milan had already made a separate treaty with King Charles. In short, every member of the league, after the first alarm subsided, had shown itself ready to sacrifice the common weal to its own private ends. With these causes of disgust, the Spanish government consented to a truce with France, to begin for itself on the 5th of March, and, for the allies, if they chose to be included in it, seven weeks later, and to continue till the end of October, 1497. This truce was subsequently prolonged, and, after the death of Charles the Eighth, terminated in a definitive treaty of peace, signed at Marcoussi, August 5th, 1498. [8] In the discussions to which these arrangements gave rise, the project is said to have been broached for the conquest and division of the kingdom of Naples by the combined powers of France and Spain, which was carried into effect some years later. According to Comines, the proposition originated with the Spanish court, although it saw fit, in a subsequent period of the negotiations, to disavow the fact. [9] The Spanish writers, on the other hand, impute the first suggestion of it to the French, who, they say, went so far as to specify the details of the partition subsequently adopted, according to which the two Calabrias were assigned to Spain. However this may be, there is little doubt that Ferdinand had long since entertained the idea of asserting his claim, at some time or other, to the crown of Naples. He, as well as his father, and indeed the whole nation, had beheld with dissatisfaction the transfer of what they deemed their rightful inheritance, purchased by the blood and treasure of Aragon, to an illegitimate branch of the family. The accession of Frederic, in particular, who came to the throne with the support of the Angevin party, the old enemies of Aragon, had given great umbrage to the Spanish monarch. The Castilian envoy, Garcilasso de la Vega, agreeably to the instructions of his court, urged Alexander the Sixth to withhold the investiture of the kingdom from Frederic, but unavailingly, as the pope's interests were too closely connected, by marriage, with those of the royal family of Naples. Under these circumstances, it was somewhat doubtful what course Gonsalvo should be directed to pursue in the present exigency. That prudent commander, however, found the new monarch too strong in the affections of his people to be disturbed at present. All that now remained for Ferdinand, therefore, was to rest contented with the possession of the strong posts pledged for the reimbursement of his expenses in the war, and to make such use of the correspondence which the late campaigns had opened to him in Calabria, that, when the time arrived for action, he might act with effect. [10] Ferdinand's conduct through the whole of the Italian war had greatly enhanced his reputation throughout Europe for sagacity and prudence. It afforded a most advantageous comparison with that of his rival, Charles the Eighth, whose very first act had been the surrender of so important a territory as Roussillon. The construction of the treaty relating to this, indeed, laid the Spanish monarch open to the imputation of artifice. But this, at least, did no violence to the political maxims of the age and only made him regarded as the more shrewd and subtile diplomatist; while, on the other hand, he appeared before the world in the imposing attitude of the defender of the church, and of the rights of his injured kinsman. His influence had been clearly discernible in every operation of moment, whether civil or military. He had been most active, through his ambassadors at Genoa, Venice, and Rome, in stirring up the great Italian confederacy, which eventually broke the power of King Charles; and his representations had tended, as much as any other cause, to alarm the jealousy of Sforza, to fix the vacillating politics of Alexander, and to quicken the cautious and dilatory movements of Venice. He had shown equal vigor in action; and contributed mainly to the success of the war by his operations on the side of Roussillon, and still more in Calabria. On the latter, indeed, he had not lavished any extraordinary expenditure; a circumstance partly attributable to the state of his finances, severely taxed, as already noticed, by the Granadine war, as well as by the operations in Roussillon, but in part, also, to his habitual frugality, which, with a very different spirit from that of his illustrious consort, always stinted the measure of his supplies to the bare exigency of the occasion. Fortunately, the genius of the Great Captain was so fruitful in resources, as to supply every deficiency; enabling him to accomplish such brilliant results, as effectually concealed any poverty of preparation on the part of his master. The Italian wars were of signal importance to the Spanish nation. Until that time, they had been cooped up within the narrow limits of the Peninsula, uninstructed and taking little interest in the concerns of the rest of Europe. A new world was now opened to them. They were taught to measure their own strength by collision with other powers on a common scene of action; and, success inspiring them with greater confidence, seemed to beckon them on towards the field, where they were destined to achieve still more splendid triumphs. This war afforded them also a most useful lesson of tactics. The war of Granada had insensibly trained up a hardy militia, patient and capable of every privation and fatigue, and brought under strict subordination. This was a great advance beyond the independent and disorderly habits of the feudal service. A most valuable corps of light troops had been formed, schooled in all the wild, irregular movements of guerilla warfare. But the nation was still defective in that steady, well-disciplined infantry, which, in the improved condition of military science, seemed destined to decide the fate of battles in Europe thenceforward. The Calabrian campaigns, which were suited in some degree to the display of their own tactics, fortunately gave the Spaniards opportunity for studying at leisure those of their adversaries. The lesson was not lost. Before the end of the war important innovations were made in the discipline and arms of the Spanish soldier. The Swiss pike, or lance, which, as has been already noticed, Gonsalvo de Cordova had mingled with the short sword of his own legions, now became the regular weapon of one- third of the infantry. The division of the various corps in the cavalry and infantry services was arranged on more scientific principles, and the whole, in short, completely reorganized. [11] Before the end of the war, preparations were made for embodying a national militia, which should take the place of the ancient hermandad. Laws were passed regulating the equipment of every individual according to his property. A man's arms were declared not liable for debt, even to the crown; and smiths and other artificers were restricted, under severe penalties, from working them up into other articles. [12] In 1496, a census was taken of all persons capable of bearing arms; and by an ordinance, dated at Valladolid, February 22d, in the same year, it was provided that one out of every twelve inhabitants, between twenty and forty-five years of age, should be enlisted in the service of the state, whether for foreign war, or the suppression of disorders at home. The remaining eleven were liable to be called on in case of urgent necessity. These recruits were to be paid during actual service, and excused from taxes; the only legal exempts were the clergy, hidalgos, and paupers. A general review and inspection of arms were to take place every year, in the months of March and September, when prizes were to be awarded to those best accoutred, and most expert in the use of their weapons. Such were the judicious regulations by which every citizen, without being withdrawn from his regular occupation, was gradually trained up for the national defence; and which, without the oppressive incumbrance of a numerous standing army, placed the whole effective force of the country, prompt and fit for action, at the disposal of the government, whenever the public good should call for it. [13] FOOTNOTES [1] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 2, cap. 12-14; 16, 24. Giovio says, in allusion to King Ferdinand's show of preparation on the frontier, "Ferdinandus, maximè cautus et pecuniae tenax, speciem ingentis coacti exercitus ad deterrendos hostes praebere, quam bellum gerere mallet, quum id sine ingenti pecunià administrari non posse intelligeret." Hist. sui Temporis, p. 140. [2] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 2, cap. 35, 36.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, rey 30, cap. 9.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 5.-- Comines, Mémoires, liv. 8, chap. 23.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 169. [3] Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, lib. 1, p. 221.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 30.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 3, cap. 1.-- Villeneuve, Mémoires, p. 317. [4] Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, p. 222.--Quintana, Españoles Célebres, tom. i. p. 234. [5] Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, p. 222.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 3, cap. 1.--Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 3, p. 175.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 30. [6] Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, p. 223.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 31, 32.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 3, cap. 38. [7] Comines says, with some _naïveté_, in reference to the places in Naples which the Venetians had got into their possession, "Je croy que leur intention n'est point de les rendre; car ils ne l'ont point de coustume quand elles leur sont bienséantes comme sont cellescy, qui sont du costé de leur goufre de Venise." Mémoires, p. 194. [8] Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 3, p. 178.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 2, cap. 44; lib. 3, cap. 13, 19, 21, 26.--Comines, Mémoires, liv. 8, chap. 23. [9] Comines gives some curious details respecting the French embassy, which he considers to have been completely outwitted by the superior management of the Spanish government; who intended nothing further at this time by the proposal of a division, than to amuse the French court until the fate of Naples should be decided. Mémoires, liv. 8, chap. 23. [10] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 2, cap. 26, 33.--Mariana, Hist. de España, lib. 26, cap. 16.--Salazar de Mendoza, Monarquía, tom. i. lib. 3, cap. 10. [11] Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 6.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 3, cap. 6. The ancient Spaniards, who were as noted as the modern for the temper and finish of their blades, used short swords, in the management of which they were very adroit. "Hispano," says Livy, "punctim magis, quam caesim, adsueto petere hostem, brevitate habiles [gladii] et cum macronibus." (Hist., lib. 22, cap. 47.) Sandoval notices the short sword, "cortas espadas," as the peculiar weapon of the Spanish soldier in the twelfth century. Historia de los Reyes de Castilla y de Leon, (Madrid, 1792,) tom. ii. p. 240. [12] Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 83, 127, 129. The former of these ordinances, dated Taraçona, Sept. 18th, 1495, is extremely precise in specifying the appointments required for each individual. Among other improvements, introduced somewhat earlier, may be mentioned that of organizing and thoroughly training a small corps of heavy-armed cavalry, amounting to twenty-five hundred. The number of men-at-arms had been greatly reduced in the kingdom of late years, in consequence of the exclusive demand for the _ginetes_ in the Moorish war. Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS. Ordinances were also passed for encouraging the breed of horses, which had suffered greatly from the preference very generally given by the Spaniards to mules. This had been carried to such a length, that, while it was nearly impossible, according to Bernaldez, to mount ten or twelve thousand cavalry on horses, ten times that number could be provided with mules. (Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 184.) "E porque si a esto se diesse lugar," says one of the _pragmáticas_, adverting to this evil, "muy prestamente se perderia en nuestros reynos la nobleza de la cauellería que en ellos suele auer, e se oluidaria el exercicio militar de que en los tiempos passados nuestra nacion de España ha alcançado gran fama e loor;" it was ordered that no person in the kingdom should be allowed to keep a mule, unless he owned a horse also; and that none but ecclesiastics and women should be allowed the use of mules in the saddle. These edicts were enforced with the utmost rigor, the king himself setting the example of conformity to them. By these seasonable precautions, the breed of Spanish horses, so long noted throughout Europe, was restored to its ancient credit, and the mule consigned to the humble and appropriate offices of drudgery, or raised only for exportation. For these and similar provisions, see Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 127-132. Matéo Aleman's whimsical _picaresco_ novel, Guzman d'Alfarache, contains a comic adventure, showing the excessive rigor with which the edict against mules was enforced, as late as the close of Philip II.'s reign. The passage is extracted in Roscoe's elegant version of the Spanish Novelists, Vol. I. p. 132. [13] See a copy of the ordinance taken from the Archives of Simancas; apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. apend. 13. When Francis I, who was destined to feel the effects of this careful military discipline, beheld, during his detention in Spain in the beginning of the following century, striplings with scarce down upon the chin, all armed with swords at their sides, he is said to have cried out, "O bienaventurada España, que pare y eria los hombres armados!" (L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, lib. 5.) An exclamation not unworthy of a Napoleon,--or an Attila. CHAPTER IV. ALLIANCES OF THE ROYAL FAMILY.--DEATH OF PRINCE JOHN AND PRINCESS ISABELLA. Royal Family of Castile.--Matrimonial Alliances with Portugal.--With Austria.--Marriage of John and Margaret.--Death of Prince John.--The Queen's Resignation.--Independence of the Cortes of Aragon.--Death of the Princess Isabella.--Recognition of her Infant Son Miguel. The credit and authority which the Castilian sovereigns established by the success of their arms, were greatly raised by the matrimonial connections which they formed for their children. This was too important a spring of their policy to be passed over in silence. Their family consisted of one son and four daughters, whom they carefully educated in a manner befitting their high rank; and who repaid their solicitude by exemplary filial obedience, and the early manifestation of virtues rare even in a private station. [1] They seem to have inherited many of the qualities which distinguished their illustrious mother; great decorum and dignity of manners, combined with ardent sensibilities, and unaffected piety, which, at least in the eldest and favorite daughter, Isabella, was, unhappily, strongly tinctured with bigotry. They could not, indeed, pretend to their mother's comprehensive mind, and talent for business, although there seems to have been no deficiency in these respects; or, if any, it was most effectually supplied by their excellent education. [2] The marriage of the princess Isabella with Alonso, the heir of the Portuguese crown, in 1490, has been already noticed. This had been eagerly desired by her parents, not only for the possible contingency, which it afforded, of bringing the various monarchies of the Peninsula under one head, (a design of which they never wholly lost sight,) but from the wish to conciliate a formidable neighbor, who possessed various means of annoyance, which he had shown no reluctance to exert. The reigning monarch, John the Second, a bold and crafty prince, had never forgotten his ancient quarrel with the Spanish sovereigns in support of their rival Joanna Beltraneja, or Joanna the Nun, as she was generally called in the Castilian court after she had taken the veil. John, in open contempt of the treaty of Alcantara, and indeed of all monastic rule, had not only removed his relative from the convent of Santa Clara, but had permitted her to assume a royal state, and subscribe herself "I the Queen." This empty insult he accompanied with more serious efforts to form such a foreign alliance for the liberated princess as should secure her the support of some arm more powerful than his own, and enable her to renew the struggle for her inheritance with better chance of success. [3] These flagrant proceedings had provoked the admonitions of the Roman see, and had formed the topic, as may be believed, of repeated, though ineffectual remonstrance from the court of Castile. [4] It seemed probable that the union of the princess of the Asturias with the heir of Portugal, as originally provided by the treaty of Alcantara, would so far identify the interests of the respective parties as to remove all further cause of disquietude. The new bride was received in Portugal in a spirit which gave cordial assurance of these friendly relations for the future; and the court of Lisbon celebrated the auspicious nuptials with the gorgeous magnificence, for which, at this period of its successful enterprise, it was distinguished above every other court in Christendom. [5] Alonso's death, a few months after this event, however, blighted the fair hopes which had begun to open of a more friendly feeling between the two countries. His unfortunate widow, unable to endure the scenes of her short-lived happiness, soon withdrew into her own country to seek such consolation as she could find in the bosom of her family. There, abandoning herself to the melancholy regrets to which her serious and pensive temper naturally disposed her, she devoted her hours to works of piety and benevolence, resolved to enter no more into engagements, which had thrown so dark a cloud over the morning of her life. [6] On King John's death, in 1495, the crown of Portugal devolved on Emanuel, that enlightened monarch, who had the glory in the very commencement of his reign of solving the grand problem, which had so long perplexed the world, of the existence of an undiscovered passage to the east. This prince had conceived a passion for the young and beautiful Isabella during her brief residence in Lisbon; and, soon after his accession to the throne, he despatched an embassy to the Spanish court inviting her to share it with him. But the princess, wedded to the memory of her early love, declined the proposals, notwithstanding they were strongly seconded by the wishes of her parents, who, however, were unwilling to constrain their daughter's inclinations on so delicate a point, trusting perhaps to the effects of time, and the perseverance of her royal suitor. [7] In the mean while, the Catholic sovereigns were occupied with negotiations for the settlement of the other members of their family. The ambitious schemes of Charles the Eighth established a community of interests among the great European states, such as had never before existed, or, at least, been understood; and the intimate relations thus introduced naturally led to intermarriages between the principal powers, who, until this period, seem to have been severed almost as far asunder as if oceans had rolled between them. The Spanish monarchs, in particular, had rarely gone beyond the limits of the Peninsula for their family alliances. The new confederacy into which Spain had entered, now opened the way to more remote connections, which were destined to exercise a permanent influence on the future politics of Europe. It was while Charles the Eighth was wasting his time at Naples, that the marriages were arranged between the royal houses of Spain and Austria, by which the weight of these great powers was thrown into the same scale, and the balance of Europe unsettled for the greater part of the following century. [8] The treaty provided, that Prince John, the heir of the Spanish monarchies, then in his eighteenth year, should be united with the princess Margaret, daughter of the emperor Maximilian; and that the archduke Philip, his son and heir, and sovereign of the Low Countries in his mother's right, should marry Joanna, second daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. No dowry was to be required with either princess. [9] In the course of the following year, arrangements were also concluded for the marriage of the youngest daughter of the Castilian sovereigns with a prince of the royal house of England, the first example of the kind for more than a century. [10] Ferdinand had cultivated the good-will of Henry the Seventh, in the hope of drawing him into the confederacy against the French monarch; and in this had not wholly failed, although the wary king seems to have come into it rather as a silent partner, if we may so say, than with the intention of affording any open or very active co-operation. [11] The relations of amity between the two courts were still further strengthened by the treaty of marriage above alluded to, finally adjusted October 1st, 1496, and ratified the following year, between Arthur, prince of Wales, and the infanta Doña Catalina, conspicuous in English history, equally for her misfortunes and her virtues, as Catharine of Aragon. [12] The French viewed with no little jealousy the progress of these various negotiations, which they zealously endeavored to thwart by all the artifices of diplomacy. But King Ferdinand had sufficient address to secure in his interests persons of the highest credit at the courts of Henry and Maximilian, who promptly acquainted him with the intrigues of the French government, and effectually aided in counteracting them. [13] The English connection was necessarily deferred for some years, on account of the youth of the parties, neither of whom exceeded eleven years of age. No such impediment occurred in regard to the German alliances, and measures were taken at once for providing a suitable conveyance for the infanta Joanna into Flanders, which should bring back the princess Margaret on its return. By the end of summer, in 1496, a fleet consisting of one hundred and thirty vessels, large and small, strongly manned and thoroughly equipped with all the means of defence against the French cruisers, was got ready for sea in the ports of Guipuscoa and Biscay. [14] The whole was placed under the direction of Don Fadrique Enriquez, admiral of Castile, who carried with him a splendid show of chivalry, chiefly drawn from the northern provinces of the kingdom. A more gallant and beautiful armada never before quitted the shores of Spain. The infanta Joanna, attended by a numerous suite, arrived on board the fleet towards the end of August, at the port of Laredo, on the eastern borders of the Asturias, where she took a last farewell of the queen her mother, who had postponed the hour of separation as long as possible, by accompanying her daughter to the place of embarkation. The weather soon after her departure became extremely rough and tempestuous; and it was so long before any tidings of the squadron reached the queen, that her affectionate heart was filled with the most distressing apprehensions. She sent for the oldest and most experienced navigators in these boisterous northern seas, consulting them, says Martyr, day and night on the probable causes of delay, the prevalent courses of the winds at that season, and the various difficulties and dangers of the voyage; bitterly regretting that the troubles with France prevented any other means of communication, than the treacherous element to which she had trusted her daughter. [15] Her spirits were still further depressed at this juncture by the death of her own mother, the dowager Isabella, who, under the mental infirmity with which she had been visited for many years, had always experienced the most devoted attention from her daughter, who ministered to her necessities with her own hands, and watched over her declining years with the most tender solicitude.[16] At length, the long-desired intelligence came of the arrival of the Castilian fleet at its place of destination. It had been so grievously shattered, however, by tempests, as to require being refitted in the ports of England. Several of the vessels were lost, and many of Joanna's attendants perished from the inclemency of the weather, and the numerous hardships to which they were exposed. The infanta, however, happily reached Flanders in safety, and, not long after, her nuptials with the archduke Philip were celebrated in the city of Lisle with all suitable pomp and solemnity. The fleet was detained until the ensuing winter, to transport the destined bride of the young prince of the Asturias to Spain. This lady, who had been affianced in her cradle to Charles the Eighth of France, had received her education in the court of Paris. On her intended husband's marriage with the heiress of Brittany, she had been returned to her native land under circumstances of indignity never to be forgiven by the house of Austria. She was now in the seventeenth year of her age, and had already given ample promise of those uncommon powers of mind which distinguished her in riper years, and of which she has left abundant evidence in various written compositions. [17] On her passage to Spain, in midwinter, the fleet encountered such tremendous gales, that part of it was ship-wrecked, and Margaret's vessel had wellnigh foundered. She retained, however, sufficient composure amidst the perils of her situation, to indite her own epitaph, in the form of a pleasant distich, which Pontenelle has made the subject of one of his amusing dialogues, where he affects to consider the fortitude displayed by her at this awful moment as surpassing that of the philosophic Adrian in his dying hour, or the vaunted heroism of Cato of Utica. [18] Fortunately, however, Margaret's epitaph was not needed; she arrived in safety at the port of Santander in the Asturias, early in March, 1497. The young prince of the Asturias, accompanied by the king his father, hastened towards the north to receive his royal mistress, whom they met and escorted to Burgos, where she was received with the highest marks of satisfaction by the queen and the whole court. Preparations were instantly made for solemnizing the nuptials of the royal pair, after the expiration of Lent, in a style of magnificence such as had never before been witnessed under the present reign. The marriage ceremony took place on the 3d of April, and was performed by the archbishop of Toledo in the presence of the grandees and principal nobility of Castile, the foreign ambassadors, and the delegates from Aragon. Among these latter were the magistrates of the principal cities, clothed in their municipal insignia and crimson robes of office, who seem to have had quite as important parts assigned them by their democratic communities, in this and all similar pageants, as any of the nobility or gentry. The nuptials were followed by a brilliant succession of fetes, tourneys, tilts of reeds, and other warlike spectacles, in which the matchless chivalry of Spain poured into the lists to display their magnificence and prowess in the presence of their future queen. [19] The chronicles of the day remark on the striking contrast, exhibited at these entertainments, between the gay and familiar manners of Margaret and her Flemish nobles, and the pomp and stately ceremonial of the Castilian court, to which, indeed, the Austrian princess, nurtured as she had been in a Parisian atmosphere, could never be wholly reconciled. [20] The marriage of the heir apparent could not have been celebrated at a more auspicious period. It was in the midst of negotiations for a general peace, when the nation might reasonably hope to taste the sweets of repose, after so many uninterrupted years of war. Every bosom swelled with exultation in contemplating the glorious destinies of their country under the beneficent sway of a prince, the first heir of the hitherto divided monarchies of Spain. Alas! at the moment when Ferdinand and Isabella, blessed in the affections of their people, and surrounded by all the trophies of a glorious reign, seemed to have reached the very zenith of human felicity, they were doomed to receive one of those mournful lessons, which admonish us that all earthly prosperity is but a dream. [21] Not long after Prince John's marriage, the sovereigns had the satisfaction to witness that of their daughter Isabella, who, notwithstanding her repugnance to a second union, had yielded at length to the urgent entreaties of her parents to receive the addresses of her Portuguese lover. She required as the price of this, however, that Emanuel should first banish the Jews from his dominions, where they had bribed a resting- place since their expulsion from Spain; a circumstance to which the superstitious princess imputed the misfortunes which had fallen of late on the royal house of Portugal. Emanuel, whose own liberal mind revolted at this unjust and impolitic measure, was weak enough to allow his passion to get the better of his principles, and passed sentence of exile on every Israelite in his kingdom; furnishing, perhaps, the only example, in which love has been made one of the thousand motives for persecuting this unhappy race. [22] The marriage, ushered in under such ill-omened auspices, was celebrated at the frontier town of Valencia de Alcantara, in the presence of the Catholic sovereigns, without pomp or parade of any kind. While they were detained there, an express arrived from Salamanca, bringing tidings of the dangerous illness of their son, the prince of the Asturias. He had been seized with a fever in the midst of the public rejoicings to which his arrival with his youthful bride in that city had given rise. The symptoms speedily assumed an alarming character. The prince's constitution, naturally delicate, though strengthened by a life of habitual temperance, sunk under the violence of the attack; and when his father, who posted with all possible expedition to Salamanca, arrived there, no hopes were entertained of his recovery. [23] Ferdinand, however, endeavored to cheer his son with hopes which he did not feel himself; but the young prince told him that it was too late to be deceived; that he was prepared to part with a world, which in its best estate was filled with vanity and vexation; and that all he now desired was, that his parents might feel the same sincere resignation to the divine will, which he experienced himself. Ferdinand gathered new fortitude from the example of his heroic son, whose presages were unhappily too soon verified. He expired on the 4th of October, 1497, in the twentieth year of his age, in the same spirit of Christian philosophy which he had displayed during his whole illness. [24] Ferdinand, apprehensive of the effect which the abrupt intelligence of this calamity might have on the queen, caused letters to be sent at brief intervals, containing accounts of the gradual decline of the prince's health, so as to prepare her for the inevitable stroke. Isabella, however, who through all her long career of prosperous fortune may be said to have kept her heart in constant training for the dark hour of adversity, received the fatal tidings in a spirit of meek and humble acquiescence, testifying her resignation in the beautiful language of Scripture, "The Lord hath given, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be his name!" [25] "Thus," says Martyr, who had the melancholy satisfaction of rendering the last sad offices to his royal pupil, "was laid low the hope of all Spain." "Never was there a death," says another chronicler, "which occasioned such deep and general lamentation throughout the land." All the unavailing honors which affection could devise were paid to his memory. His funeral obsequies were celebrated with melancholy splendor, and his remains deposited in the noble Dominican monastery of St. Thomas at Avila, which had been erected by his parents. The court put on a new and deeper mourning than that hitherto used, as if to testify their unwonted grief. [26] All offices, public and private, were closed for forty days; and sable-colored banners were suspended from the walls and portals of the cities. Such extraordinary tokens of public sorrow bear strong testimony to the interest felt in the young prince, independently of his exalted station; similar, and perhaps more unequivocal evidence of his worth, is afforded by abundance of contemporary notices, not merely in works designed for the public, but in private correspondence. The learned Martyr, in particular, whose situation, as Prince John's preceptor, afforded him the best opportunities of observation, is unbounded in commendations of his royal pupil, whose extraordinary promise of intellectual and moral excellence had furnished him with the happiest, alas! delusive auguries, for the future destiny of his country. [27] By the death of John without heirs, the succession devolved on his eldest sister, the queen of Portugal. [28] Intelligence, however, was received soon after that event, that the archduke Philip, with the restless ambition which distinguished him in later life, had assumed for himself and his wife Joanna the title of "princes of Castile." Ferdinand and Isabella, disgusted with this proceeding, sent to request the attendance of the king and queen of Portugal in Castile, in order to secure a recognition of their rights by the national legislature. The royal pair, accordingly, in obedience to the summons, quitted their capital of Lisbon, early in the spring of 1498. In their progress through the country, they were magnificently entertained at the castles of the great Castilian lords, and towards the close of April reached the ancient city of Toledo, where the cortes had been convened to receive them. [29] After the usual oaths of recognition had been tendered, without opposition, by the different branches to the Portuguese princes, the court adjourned to Saragossa, where the legislature of Aragon was assembled for a similar purpose. Some apprehensions were entertained, however, of the unfavorable disposition of that body, since the succession of females was not countenanced by the ancient usage of the country; and the Aragonese, as Martyr remarks in one of his Epistles, "were well known to be a pertinacious race, who would leave no stone unturned, in the maintenance of their constitutional rights." [30] These apprehensions were fully realized; for, no sooner was the object of the present meeting laid before cortes in a speech from the throne, with which parliamentary business in Aragon was always opened, than decided opposition was manifested to a proceeding, which it was declared had no precedent in their history. The succession of the crown, it was contended, had been limited by repeated testaments of their princes to male heirs, and practice and public sentiment had so far coincided with this, that the attempted violation of the rule by Peter the Fourth, in favor of his own daughters, had plunged the nation in a civil war. It was further urged that by the will of the very last monarch, John the Second, it was provided that the crown should descend to the male issue of his son Ferdinand, and in default of such to the male issue of Ferdinand's daughters, to the entire exclusion of the females. At all events, it was better to postpone the consideration of this matter until the result of the queen of Portugal's pregnancy, then far advanced, should be ascertained; since, should it prove to be a son, all doubts of constitutional validity would be removed. In answer to these objections, it was stated, that no express law existed in Aragon excluding females from the succession; that an example had already occurred, as far back indeed as the twelfth century, of a queen who held the crown in her own right; that the acknowledged power of females to transmit the right of succession necessarily inferred that right existing in themselves; that the present monarch had doubtless as competent authority as his predecessors to regulate the law of inheritance, and that his act, supported by the supreme authority of cortes, might set aside any former disposition of the crown; that this interference was called for by the present opportunity of maintaining the permanent union of Castile and Aragon; without which they must otherwise return to their ancient divided state, and comparative insignificance. [31] These arguments, however cogent, were far from being conclusive with the opposite party; and the debate was protracted to such length, that Isabella, impatient of an opposition to what the practice in her own dominions had taught her to regard as the inalienable right of her daughter, inconsiderately exclaimed, "It would be better to reduce the country by arms at once, than endure this insolence of the cortes." To which Antonio de Fonseca, the same cavalier who spoke his mind so fearlessly to King Charles the Eighth, on his march to Naples, had the independence to reply, "That the Aragonese had only acted as good and loyal subjects, who, as they were accustomed to mind their oaths, considered well before they took them; and that they must certainly stand excused if they moved with caution in an affair, which they found so difficult to justify by precedent in their history." [32] This blunt expostulation of the honest courtier, equally creditable to the sovereign who could endure, and the subject who could make it, was received in the frank spirit in which it was given, and probably opened Isabella's eyes to her own precipitancy, as we find no further allusion to coercive measures. Before anything was determined, the discussion was suddenly brought to a close by an unforeseen and most melancholy event,--the death of the queen of Portugal, the unfortunate subject of it. That princess had possessed a feeble constitution from her birth, with a strong tendency to pulmonary complaints. She had early felt a presentiment that she should not survive the birth of her child; this feeling strengthened as she approached the period of her delivery; and in less than one hour after that event, which took place on the 23d of August, 1498, she expired in the arms of her afflicted parents. [33] This blow was almost too much for the unhappy mother, whose spirits had not yet had time to rally, since the death of her only son. She, indeed, exhibited the outward marks of composure, testifying the entire resignation of one who had learned to rest her hopes of happiness on a better world. She schooled herself so far, as to continue to take an interest in all her public duties, and to watch over the common weal with the same maternal solicitude as before; but her health gradually sunk under this accumulated load of sorrow, which threw a deep shade of melancholy over the evening of her life. The infant, whose birth had cost so dear, proved a male, and received the name of Miguel, in honor of the saint on whose day he first saw the light. In order to dissipate, in some degree, the general gloom occasioned by the late catastrophe, it was thought best to exhibit the young prince before the eyes of his future subjects; and he was accordingly borne in the arms of his nurse, in a magnificent litter, through the streets of the city, escorted by the principal nobility. Measures were then taken for obtaining the sanction of his legitimate claims to the crown. Whatever doubts had been entertained of the validity of the mother's title, there could be none whatever of the child's; since those who denied the right of females to inherit for themselves, admitted their power of conveying such a right to male issue. As a preliminary step to the public recognition of the prince, it was necessary to name a guardian, who should be empowered to make the requisite engagements, and to act in his behalf. The Justice of Aragon, in his official capacity, after due examination, appointed the grandparents, Ferdinand and Isabella, to the office of guardians during his minority, which would expire by law at the age of fourteen. [34] On Saturday, the 22d of September, when the queen had sufficiently recovered from a severe illness brought on by her late sufferings, the four _arms_ of the cortes of Aragon assembled in the house of deputation at Saragossa; and Ferdinand and Isabella made oath as guardians of the heir apparent, before the Justice, not to exercise any jurisdiction whatever in the name of the young prince during his minority; engaging, moreover, as far as in their power, that, on his coming of age, he should swear to respect the laws and liberties of the realm, before entering on any of the rights of sovereignty himself. The four estates then took the oath of fealty to Prince Miguel, as lawful heir and successor to the crown of Aragon; with the protestation, that it should not be construed into a precedent for exacting such an oath hereafter during the minority of the heir apparent. With such watchful attention to constitutional forms of procedure, did the people of Aragon endeavor to secure their liberties; forms, which continued to be observed in later times, long after those liberties had been swept away. [35] In the month of January, of the ensuing year, the young prince's succession was duly confirmed by the cortes of Castile, and, in the following March, by that of Portugal. Thus, for once, the crowns of the three monarchies of Castile, Aragon, and Portugal were suspended over one head. The Portuguese, retaining the bitterness of ancient rivalry, looked with distrust at the prospect of a union, fearing, with some reason, that the importance of the lesser state would be wholly merged in that of the greater. But the untimely death of the destined heir of these honors, which took place before he had completed his second year, removed the causes of jealousy, and defeated the only chance, which had ever occurred, of bringing under the same rule three independent nations, which, from their common origin, their geographical position, and, above all, their resemblance in manners, sentiments, and language, would seem to have originally been intended to form but one. [36] FOOTNOTES [1] The princess Doña Isabel, the eldest daughter, was born at Dueñas, October 1st, 1470. Their second child and only son, Juan, prince of the Asturias, was not born until eight years later, June 30th, 1478, at Seville. Doña Juana, whom the queen used playfully to call her "mother-in- law," _suegra_, from her resemblance to King Ferdinand's mother, was born at Toledo, November 6th, 1479. Doña Maria was born at Cordova, in 1482, and Doña Catalina, the fifth and last child, at Alcalá de Henares, December 5th, 1485. The daughters all lived to reign; but their brilliant destinies were clouded with domestic afflictions, from which royalty could afford no refuge. Carbajal, Anales, MS., loc. mult. [2] The only exception to these remarks, was that afforded by the infanta Joanna, whose unfortunate eccentricities, developed in later life, must be imputed, indeed, to bodily infirmity. [3] Nine different matches were proposed for Joanna in the course of her life; but they all vanished into air, and the "excellent lady," as she was usually called by the Portuguese, died as she had lived, in single blessedness, at the ripe age of sixty-eight. In the Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi., the 19th Ilustracion is devoted to this topic, in regard to which Father Florez shows sufficient ignorance, or inaccuracy. Reynas Cathólicas, tom. ii. p. 780. [4] Instructions relating to this matter, written with the queen's own hand, still exist in the archives of Simancas. Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., ubi supra. [5] La Clède, Histoire de Portugal, tom. iv. p. 100. The Portuguese historian, Faria y Sousa, expends half a dozen folio pages on these royal revelries, which cost six months' preparation, and taxed the wits of the most finished artists and artificers in France, England, Flanders, Castile, and Portugal. (Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. pp. 452 et seq.) We see, throughout, the same luxury of spectacle, the same elegant games of chivalry, as the tilt of reeds, the rings, and the like, which the Castilians adopted from the Spanish Arabs. [6] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. v. fol. 38.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 312. [7] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. v. fol. 78, 82.--La Clède, Hist. de Portugal, tom. iv. p. 95.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 146. Martyr, in a letter written at the close of 1496, thus speaks of the princess Isabella's faithful attachment to her husband's memory; "Mira fuit hujus foeminae in abjiciendis secundis nuptiis constantia. Tanta est ejus modestia, tanta vidualis castitas, ut neo mensa post mariti mortem comederit, nec lauti quicquam degustaverit. Jejuniis sese vigiliisque ita maceravit, ut sicco stipite siccior sit effecta. Suffulta rubore perturbatur, quandocunque de jugali thalamo sermo intexitur. Parentum tamen aliquando precibus, veluti olfacimus, inflectetur. Viget fama, futuram vestri regis Emmanuelis uxorem." Epist. 171. [8] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. v. fol. 63. [9] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. v. lib. 2, cap. 5.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. p. 160. [10] I believe there is no instance of such a union, save that of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, with Doña Constanza, daughter of Peter the Cruel, in 1371, from whom Queen Isabella was lineally descended on the father's side. The title of _Prince of the Asturias_, appropriated to the heir apparent of Castile, was first created for the infant Don Henry, afterwards Henry III., on occasion of his marriage with John of Gaunt's daughter, in 1388. It was professedly in imitation of the English title of Prince of Wales; and the Asturias were selected as that portion of the ancient Gothic monarchy, which had never bowed beneath the Saracen yoke. Florez, Reynas Cathólicas, tom. ii. pp. 708-715.--Mendoza, Dignidades, lib. 3, cap. 23. [11] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 2, cap. 25.--Rymer, Foedera, (London, 1727,) vol. xii. pp. 638-642. Ferdinand used his good offices to mediate a peace between Henry VII. and the king of Scots; and it is a proof of the respect entertained for him by both these monarchs, that they agreed to refer their disputes to his arbitration. (Rymer, Foedera, vol. xii. p. 671.) "And so," says the old chronicler Hall, of the English prince, "beying confederate and alied by treatie and league with al his neighbors, he gratefied with his moost heartie thanks kyng Ferdinand and the quene his wife, to which woman none other was comparable in her tyme, for that they were the mediators, organes, and instrumentes by the which the truce was concluded betwene the Scottish kynge and him, and rewarded his ambassadoure moost liberally and bountefully." Chronicle, p. 483. [12] See the marriage treaty in Rymer. (Foedera, vol. xii. pp. 658-666.) The marriage had been arranged between the Spanish and English courts as far back as March, 1489, when the elder of the parties had not yet reached the fifth year of her age. This was confirmed by another, more full and definite, in the following year, 1490. By this treaty, it was stipulated, that Catharine's portion should be 200,000 gold crowns, one-half to be paid down at the date of her marriage, and the remainder in two equal payments in the course of the two years ensuing. The prince of Wales was to settle on her one-third of the revenues of the principality of Wales, the dukedom of Cornwall, and earldom of Chester. Rymer, Foedera, vol. xii. pp. 411-417. [13] "Procuro," says Zurita, "que se effectuassen los matrimonios de sus hijos, no solo con promesas, pero con dadivas que se hizieron a los privados de aquellos principes, que en ello entendian." Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 2, cap. 3. [14] Historians differ, as usual, as to the strength of this armament. Martyr makes it 110 vessels, and 10,000 soldiers, (Opus Epist., epist. 168;) while Bernaldez carries the number to 130 sail, and 25,000 soldiers, (Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 153.) Ferreras adopts the latter estimate, (tom. viii. p. 173.) Martyr may have intended only the galleys and regular troops, while Bernaldez, more loosely, included vessels and seamen of every description. See also the royal ordinances, ap. Coleccion de Cédulas, (tom. i. nos. 79, 80, 82,) whose language implies a very large number, without specifying it. [15] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 172.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1496.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 26, cap. 12. [16] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1496.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 172. [17] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 174.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 6.--Gaillard, Rivalité, tom. iii. pp. 416, 423.--Sandoval, Historia del Emperador Carlos V., (Amberes, 1681,) tom. i. p. 2. These, comprehending her verses, public addresses, and discourse on her own life, have been collected into a single volume, under the title of "La Couronne Margaritique," Lyons, 1549, by the French writer Jean la Maire de Belges, her faithful follower, but whose greatest glory it is, to have been the instructor of Clement Marot. [18] Fontenelle, Oeuvres, tom. i. dial. 4. "Ci gist Margot, la gentil' damoiselle Qu'a deux maris, et encore est pucelle." It must be allowed that Margaret's quiet nonchalance was much more suited to Fontenelle's habitual taste, than the imposing scene of Cato's death. Indeed, the French satirist was so averse to scenes of all kinds, that he has contrived to find a ridiculous side in this last act of the patriot Roman. [19] That these were not mere holiday sports, was proved by the melancholy death of Alonso de Cardenas, son of the comendador of Leon, who lost his life in a tourney. Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 2, dial. 1. [20] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1497.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 26, cap. 16.--Lanuza, Historias, lib. 1, cap. 8.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 330. "Y aunque," says the last author, "a la princessa se le dexaron todos sus criados, estilos, y entretenimientos, se la advirtio, que en las ceremonias no havia de tratar a las personas Reales, y Grandes con la familiaridad y llaneza de las casas de Austria, Borgoñia, y Francia, sino con la gravedad, y mesurada autoridad de los Reyes y naciones de España!" The sixth volume of the Spanish Academy of History contains an inventory, taken from the archives of Simancas, of the rich plate and jewels, presented to the princess Margaret on the day of her marriage. They are said to be "of such value and perfect workmanship, that the like was never before seen." (Ilust. 11, pp. 338-342.) Isabella had turned these baubles to good account in the war of Granada. She was too simple in her taste to attach much value to luxury of apparel. [21] It is precisely this period, or rather the whole period from 1493 to 1497, which Oviedo selects as that of the greatest splendor and festivity at the court of the Catholic sovereigns. "El año de 1493, y uno ó dos despues, y aun hasta el de 1497 años fué cuando la corte de los Reyes Católicos Don Fernando é Doña Isabel de gloriosa memoria, mas alegres tiempos é mas regozijados, vino en su corte, é mas encumbrada andubo la gala é las fiestas é servicios de galanes é damas." Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 4, dial. 44. [22] Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. pp. 498, 499.--La Clède, Hist. de Portugal, tom. iv. p. 95.--Zurita, tom. v, lib. 3, cap. 6.-- Lanuza, Historias, ubi supra. [23] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1497.--Florez, Reynas Cathólicas, tom. ii. pp. 846, 848.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. v. fol. 127, 128.--La Clède, Hist. de Portugal, tom. iv. p. 101. The physicians recommended a temporary separation of John from his young bride; a remedy, however, which the queen opposed from conscientious scruples somewhat singular. "Hortantur medici Reginam, hortatur et Rex, ut a principis latere Margaritam aliquando semoveat, interpellet. Inducias precantur. Protestantur periculum ex frequenti copulâ ephebo imminere; qualiter eum suxerit, quamve subtristis incedat, consideret iterum atque iterum monent; medullas laedi, stomachum hebetari se sentire Reginae renunciant. Intercidat, dum licet, obstetque principiis, instant. Nil proficiunt. Respondet Regina, homines non oportere, quos Deus jugali vinculo junxerit, separare." Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 176. [24] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 182.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 182.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1497.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., dial. de Deza. Peter Martyr, in more of a classic than a Christian vein, refers Prince John's composure in his latter hours to his familiarity with the divine Aristotle. "Aetatem quae ferebat superabat; nec mirum tamen. Perlegerat namque divini Aristotelis pleraque volumina," etc. Ubi supra. [25] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 183. Martyr draws an affecting picture of the anguish of the bereaved parents, which betrayed itself in looks more eloquent than words. "Reges tantam dissimulare aerumnam nituntur; ast nos prostratum in internis ipsorum animum cernimus; oculos alter in faciem alterius crebro conjiciunt, in propatulo sedentes. Unde quid lateat proditur. Nimirum tamen, desinerent humanâ carne vestiti esse homines, essentque adamante duriores, nisi quid amiserint sentirent." [26] Blancas, Coronaciones de los Serenissimos Reyes de Aragon, (Zaragoza, 1641,) lib. 3, cap. 18.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 6.-- Sackcloth was substituted for the white serge, which till this time had been used as the mourning dress. [27] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 182.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 6.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 182.--Blancas, Coronaciones, p. 248. It must be allowed to furnish no mean proof of the excellence of Prince John's heart, that it was not corrupted by the liberal doses of flattery with which his worthy tutor was in the habit of regaling him, from time to time. Take the beginning of one of Martyr's letters to his pupil, in the following modest strain. "Mirande in pueritiâ senex, salve. Quotquot tecum versantur homines, sive genere polleant, sive ad obsequium fortunae humiliores destinati ministri, te laudant, extollunt, admirantur." Opus Epist., epist. 98. [28] Hopes were entertained of a male heir at the time of John's death, as his widow was left pregnant; but these were frustrated by her being delivered of a still-born infant at the end of a few months. Margaret did not continue long in Spain. She experienced the most affectionate treatment from the king and queen, who made her an extremely liberal provision. (Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. v. lib. 3, cap. 4.) But her Flemish followers could not reconcile themselves to the reserve and burdensome ceremonial of the Castilian court, so different from the free and jocund life to which they had been accustomed at home; and they prevailed on their mistress to return to her native land in the course of the year 1499. She was subsequently married to the duke of Savoy, who died without issue in less than three years, and Margaret passed the remainder of her life in widowhood, being appointed by her father, the emperor, to the government of the Netherlands, which she administered with ability. She died in 1530. [29] Marina has transcribed from the archives of Toledo the writ of summons to that city on this occasion. Teoría, tom. ii. p. 16.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. v. lib. 3, cap. 18.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 154.--La Clède, Hist. de Portugal, tom. iv. p. 101.-- Carbajal, Anales. MS., año 1498.--Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. pp. 500, 501. The last writer expatiates with great satisfaction on the stately etiquette observed at the reception of the Portuguese monarchs and their suite by the Spanish sovereigns. "Queen Isabella," he says, "appeared leaning on the arm of her old favorite Gutierre de Cardenas, comendador of Leon, and of a Portuguese noble, Don Juan de Sousa. The latter took care to acquaint her with the rank and condition of each of his countrymen, as they were presented, in order that she might the better adjust the measure of condescension and courtesy due to each; a perilous obligation," he continues, "with all nations, but with the Portuguese most perilous!" [30] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 194.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 334.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 27, cap. 3. [31] Blancas, Commentarii, p. 273.--Idem, Coronaciones, lib. 1, cap. 18.-- Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 27, cap. 3.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. v. fol. 55, 56. It is remarkable that the Aragonese should so readily have acquiesced in the right of females to convey a title to the crown which they could not enjoy themselves. This was precisely the principle on which Edward III. set up his claim to the throne of France, a principle too repugnant to the commonest rules of inheritance to obtain any countenance. The exclusion of females in Aragon could not pretend to be founded on any express law, as in France, but the practice, with the exception of a single example three centuries old, was quite as uniform. [32] Blancas, Coronaciones, lib. 3, cap. 18.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. v. lib. 3, cap. 30. It is a proof of the high esteem in which Isabella held this independent statesman, that we find his name mentioned in her testament among half a dozen others, whom she particularly recommended to her successors for their meritorious and loyal services. See the document in Dormer, Discursos Varios, p. 354. [33] Carbajal, Anales, MS., años 1470, 1498.--Florez, Reynas Cathólicas, tom. ii. pp. 846, 847.--Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. p. 504. [34] Blancas, Commentarii, pp. 510, 511.--Idem, Coronaciones, lib. 3, cap. 19.--Gerónimo Martel, Forma de Celebrar Cortes en Aragon, (Zaragoza, 1641,) cap. 44.--Alvaro Gomez, De Rebus Gestis a Francisco Ximenio Cisnerio, (Compluti, 1569,) fol. 28.--Lanuza, Historias, lib. 1, cap. 9. [35] Blancas, Coronaciones, ubi supra.--Idem, Commentarii, pp. 510, 511. The reverence of the Aragonese for their institutions is shown in their observance of the most insignificant ceremonies. A remarkable instance of this occurred in the year 1481, at Saragossa, when, the queen having been constituted _lieutenant general_ of the kingdom, and duly qualified to hold a cortes in the absence of the king her husband, who, by the ancient laws of the land, was required to preside over it in person, it was deemed necessary to obtain a formal act of the legislature, for opening the door for her admission. See Blancas, Modo de Proceder en Cortes de Aragon, (Zaragoza, 1641,) fol. 82, 83. [36] Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. pp. 504, 507.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 154.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1499.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. v. lib. 3, cap. 33--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 4. CHAPTER V. DEATH OF CARDINAL MENDOZA.--RISE OF XIMENES.--ECCLESIASTICAL REFORM. Death of Mendoza.--His Early Life and Character.--The Queen his Executor. --Origin of Ximenes.--He Enters the Franciscan Order.--His Ascetic Life.-- Confessor to the Queen.--Made Archbishop of Toledo.--Austerity of his Life.--Reform of the Monastic Orders.--Insults Offered to the Queen.--She Consents to the Reform. In the beginning of 1495, the sovereigns lost their old and faithful minister, the grand cardinal of Spain, Don Pedro Gonzalez de Mendoza. He was the fourth son of the celebrated marquis of Santillana, and was placed by his talents at the head of a family, every member of which must be allowed to have exhibited a rare union of public and private virtue. The cardinal reached the age of sixty-six, when his days were terminated after a long and painful illness, on the 11th of January, at his palace of Guadalaxara. [1] In the unhappy feuds between Henry the Fourth and his younger brother Alfonso, the cardinal had remained faithful to the former. But on the death of that monarch, he threw his whole weight, with that of his powerful family, into the scale of Isabella, whether influenced by a conviction of her superior claims, or her capacity for government. This was a most important acquisition to the royal cause; and Mendoza's consummate talents for business, recommended by the most agreeable address, secured him the confidence of both Ferdinand and Isabella, who had long been disgusted with the rash and arrogant bearing of their old minister, Carillo. On the death of that turbulent prelate, Mendoza succeeded to the archiepiscopal see of Toledo. His new situation naturally led to still more intimate relations with the sovereigns, who uniformly deferred to his experience, consulting him on all important matters, not merely of a public, but of a private nature. In short, he gained such ascendency in the cabinet, during a long ministry of more than twenty years, that he was pleasantly called by the courtiers the "third king of Spain." [2] The minister did not abuse the confidence so generously reposed in him. He called the attention of his royal mistress to objects most deserving it. His views were naturally grand and lofty; and, if he sometimes yielded to the fanatical impulse of the age, he never failed to support her heartily in every generous enterprise for the advancement of her people. When raised to the rank of primate of Spain, he indulged his natural inclination for pomp and magnificence. He filled his palace with pages, selected from the noblest families in the kingdom, whom he carefully educated. He maintained a numerous body of armed retainers, which, far from being a mere empty pageant, formed a most effective corps for public service on all requisite occasions. He dispensed the immense revenues of his bishopric with the same munificent hand which has so frequently distinguished the Spanish prelacy, encouraging learned men, and endowing public institutions. The most remarkable of these were the college of Santa Cruz at Valladolid, and the hospital of the same name for foundlings at Toledo, the erection of which, completed at his sole charge, consumed more than ten years each. [3] The cardinal, in his younger days, was occasionally seduced by those amorous propensities, in which the Spanish clergy freely indulged, contaminated, perhaps, by the example of their Mahometan neighbors. He left several children by his amours with two ladies of rank, from whom some of the best houses in the kingdom are descended. [4] A characteristic anecdote is recorded of him in relation to this matter. An ecclesiastic, who one day delivered a discourse in his presence, took occasion to advert to the laxity of the age, in general terms, indeed, but bearing too pertinent an application to the cardinal to be mistaken. The attendants of the latter boiled with indignation at the preacher's freedom, whom they determined to chastise for his presumption. They prudently, however, postponed this until they should see what effect the discourse had on their master. The cardinal, far from betraying any resentment, took no other notice of the preacher than to send him a dish of choice game, which had been served up at his own table, where he was entertaining a party of friends that day, accompanying it at the same time, by way of sauce, with a substantial donative of gold doblas; an act of Christian charity not at all to the taste of his own servants. It wrought its effects on the worthy divine, who at once saw the error of his ways, and, the next time he mounted the pulpit, took care to frame his discourse in such a manner as to counteract the former unfavorable impressions, to the entire satisfaction, if not edification, of his audience. "Now-a-days," says the honest biographer who reports the incident, himself a lineal descendant of the cardinal, "the preacher would not have escaped so easily. And with good reason; for the holy Gospel should be discreetly preached, 'cum grano salis,' that is to say, with the decorum and deference due to majesty and men of high estate." [5] When Cardinal Mendoza's illness assumed an alarming aspect, the court removed to the neighborhood of Guadalaxara, where he was confined. The king and queen, especially the latter, with the affectionate concern which she manifested for more than one of her faithful subjects, used to visit him in person, testifying her sympathy for his sufferings, and benefiting by the lights of the sagacious mind, which had so long helped to guide her. She still further showed her regard for her old minister by condescending to accept the office of his executor, which she punctually discharged, superintending the disposition of his effects according to his testament, [6] and particularly the erection of the stately hospital of Santa Cruz, before mentioned, not a stone of which was laid before his death. [7] In one of her interviews with the dying minister, the queen requested his advice respecting the nomination of his successor. The cardinal, in reply, earnestly cautioned her against raising any one of the principal nobility to this dignity, almost too exalted for any subject, and which, when combined with powerful family connections, would enable a man of factious disposition to defy the royal authority itself, as they had once bitter experience in the case of Archbishop Carillo. On being pressed to name the individual whom he thought best qualified, in every point of view, for the office, he is said to have recommended Fray Francisco Ximenez de Cisneros, a friar of the Franciscan order, and confessor of the queen. As this extraordinary personage exercised a more important control over the destinies of his country than any other subject, during the remainder of the present reign, it will be necessary to put the reader in possession of his history. [8] Ximenez de Cisneros, or Ximenes, as he is usually called, was born at the little town of Tordelaguna, in the year 1436, [9] of an ancient but decayed family. [10] He was early destined by his parents for the church, and, after studying grammar at Alcalá, was removed at fourteen to the university of Salamanca. Here he went through the regular course of instruction then pursued, devoting himself assiduously to the civil and canon law, and at the end of six years received the degree of bachelor in each of them, a circumstance at that time of rare occurrence. [11] Three years after quitting the university, the young bachelor removed by the advice of his parents to Rome, as affording a better field for ecclesiastical preferment than he could find at home. Here he seems to have attracted some notice by the diligence with which he devoted himself to his professional studies and employments. But still he was far from reaping the golden fruits presaged by his kindred; and at the expiration of six years he was suddenly recalled to his native country by the death of his father, who left his affairs in so embarrassed a condition, as to require his immediate presence. [12] Before his return, Ximenes obtained a papal bull, or _expectative_, preferring him to the first benefice of a specified value, which should become vacant in the see of Toledo. Several years elapsed before such a vacancy offered itself by the death of the archpriest of Uzeda; and Ximenes took possession of that living by virtue of the apostolic grant. This assumption of the papal court to dispose of the church livings at its own pleasure, had been long regarded by the Spaniards as a flagrant imposition; and Carillo, the archbishop of Toledo, in whose diocese the vacancy occurred, was not likely tamely to submit to it. He had, moreover, promised this very place to one of his own followers. He determined, accordingly, to compel Ximenes to surrender his pretensions in favor of the latter, and, finding argument ineffectual, resorted to force, confining him in the fortress of Uzeda, whence he was subsequently removed to the strong tower of Santorcaz, then used as a prison for contumacious ecclesiastics. But Carillo understood little of the temper of Ximenes, which was too inflexible to be broken by persecution. The archbishop in time became convinced of this, and was persuaded to release him, but not till after an imprisonment of more than six years. [13] Ximenes, thus restored to freedom, and placed in undisturbed possession of his benefice, was desirous of withdrawing from the jurisdiction of his vindictive superior; and not long after effected an exchange for the chaplainship of Siguenza. In this new situation he devoted himself with renewed ardor to his theological studies, occupying himself diligently, moreover, with Hebrew and Chaldee, his knowledge of which proved of no little use in the concoction of his famous Polyglot. Mendoza was at that time bishop of Siguenza. It was impossible that a man of his penetration should come in contact with a character like that of Ximenes, without discerning its extraordinary qualities. It was not long before he appointed him his vicar, with the administration of his diocese; in which situation he displayed such capacity for business, that the count of Cifuentes, on falling into the hands of the Moors, after the unfortunate affair of the Axarquia, confided to him the sole management of his vast estates during his captivity. [14] But these secular concerns grew more and more distasteful to Ximenes, whose naturally austere and contemplative disposition had been deepened, probably, by the melancholy incidents of his life, into stern religious enthusiasm. He determined, therefore, to break at once from the shackles which bound him to the world, and seek an asylum in some religious establishment, where he might devote himself unreservedly to the service of Heaven. He selected for this purpose the Observantines of the Franciscan order, the most rigid of the monastic societies. He resigned his various employments and benefices, with annual rents to the amount of two thousand ducats, and, in defiance of the arguments and entreaties of his friends, entered on his novitiate in the convent of San Juan de los Reyes, at Toledo; a superb pile then erecting by the Spanish sovereigns, in pursuance of a vow made during the war of Granada. [15] He distinguished his novitiate by practising every ingenious variety of mortification with which superstition has contrived to swell the inevitable catalogue of human sufferings. He slept on the ground, or on the hard floor, with a billet of wood for his pillow. He wore hair-cloth next his skin; and exercised himself with fasts, vigils, and stripes, to a degree scarcely surpassed by the fanatical founder of his order. At the end of the year, he regularly professed, adopting then for the first time the name of Francisco, in compliment to his patron saint, instead of that of Gonzalo, by which he had been baptized. No sooner had this taken place, than his reputation for sanctity, which his late course of life had diffused far and wide, attracted multitudes of all ages and conditions to his confessional; and he soon found himself absorbed in the same vortex of worldly passions and interests, from which he had been so anxious to escape. At his solicitation, therefore, he was permitted to transfer his abode to the convent of our Lady of Castañar, so called from a deep forest of chestnuts, in which it was embosomed. In the midst of these dark mountain solitudes, he built with his own hands a little hermitage or cabin, of dimensions barely sufficient to admit his entrance. Here he passed his days and nights in prayer, and in meditations on the sacred volume, sustaining life, like the ancient anchorites, on the green herbs and running waters. In this state of self-mortification, with a frame wasted by abstinence, and a mind exalted by spiritual contemplation, it is no wonder that he should have indulged in ecstasies and visions, until he fancied himself raised into communication with celestial intelligences. It is more wonderful that his understanding was not permanently impaired by these distempered fancies. This period of his life, however, seems to have been always regarded by him with peculiar satisfaction; for long after, as his biographer assures us, when reposing in lordly palaces, and surrounded by all the appliances of luxury, he looked back with fond regret on the hours which glided so peacefully in the hermitage of Castañar. [16] Fortunately, his superiors, choosing to change his place of residence according to custom, transferred him at the end of three years to the convent of Salzeda. Here he practised, indeed, similar austerities, but it was not long before his high reputation raised him to the post of guardian of the convent. This situation necessarily imposed on him the management of the institution; and thus the powers of his mind, so long wasted in unprofitable reverie, were again called into exercise for the benefit of others. An event which occurred some years later, in 1492, opened to him a still wider sphere of action. By the elevation of Talavera to the metropolitan see of Granada, the office of queen's confessor became vacant. Cardinal Mendoza, who was consulted on the choice of a successor, well knew the importance of selecting a man of the highest integrity and talent; since the queen's tenderness of conscience led her to take counsel of her confessor, not merely in regard to her own spiritual concerns, but all the great measures of her administration. He at once fixed his eye on Ximenes, of whom he had never lost sight, indeed, since his first acquaintance with him at Siguenza. He was far from approving his adoption of the monastic life, and had been heard to say, that "parts so extraordinary would not long be buried in the shades of a convent." He is said, also, to have predicted that Ximenes would one day succeed him in the chair of Toledo. A prediction, which its author contributed more than any other to verify. [17] He recommended Ximenes in such emphatic terms to the queen, as raised a strong desire in her to see and converse with him herself. An invitation was accordingly sent him from the cardinal to repair to the court at Valladolid, without intimating the real purpose of it. Ximenes obeyed the summons, and, after a short interview with his early patron, was conducted, as if without any previous arrangement, to the queen's apartment. On finding himself so unexpectedly in the royal presence, he betrayed none of the agitation or embarrassment to have been expected from the secluded inmate of a cloister, but exhibited a natural dignity of manners, with such discretion and fervent piety, in his replies to Isabella's various interrogatories, as confirmed the favorable prepossessions she had derived from the cardinal. Not many days after, Ximenes was invited to take charge of the queen's conscience. Far from appearing elated by this mark of royal favor, and the prospects of advancement which it opened, he seemed to view it with disquietude, as likely to interrupt the peaceful tenor of his religious duties; and he accepted it only with the understanding, that he should be allowed to conform in every respect to the obligations of his order, and to remain in his own monastery when his official functions did not require attendance at court. [18] Martyr, in more than one of his letters dated at this time, notices the impression made on the courtiers by the remarkable appearance of the new confessor, in whose wasted frame, and pallid, care-worn countenance, they seemed to behold one of the primitive anchorites from the deserts of Syria or Egypt. [19] The austerities and the blameless purity of Ximenes's life had given him a reputation for sanctity throughout Spain; [20] and Martyr indulges the regret, that a virtue, which had stood so many trials, should be exposed to the worst of all, in the seductive blandishments of a court. But Ximenes's heart had been steeled by too stern a discipline to be moved by the fascinations of pleasure, however it might be by those of ambition. Two years after this event, he was elected provincial of his order in Castile, which placed him at the head of its numerous religious establishments. In his frequent journeys for their inspection he travelled on foot, supporting himself by begging alms, conformably to the rules of his order. On his return he made a very unfavorable report to the queen of the condition of the various institutions, most of which he represented to have grievously relaxed in discipline and virtue. Contemporary accounts corroborate this unfavorable picture, and accuse the religious communities of both sexes throughout Spain, at this period, of wasting their hours, not merely in unprofitable sloth, but in luxury and licentiousness. The Franciscans, in particular, had so far swerved from the obligations of their institute, which interdicted the possession of property of any description, that they owned large estates in town and country, living in stately edifices, and in a style of prodigal expense not surpassed by any of the monastic orders. Those who indulged in this latitude were called _conventuals_, while the comparatively small number who put the strictest construction on the rule of their founder were denominated _observantines_, or brethren of the observance. Ximenes, it will be remembered, was one of the latter. [21] The Spanish sovereigns had long witnessed with deep regret the scandalous abuses which had crept into these ancient institutions, and had employed commissioners for investigating and reforming them, but ineffectually. Isabella now gladly availed herself of the assistance of her confessor in bringing them into a better state of discipline. In the course of the same year, 1494, she obtained a bull with full authority for this purpose from Alexander the Sixth, the execution of which she intrusted to Ximenes. The work of reform required all the energies of his powerful mind, backed by the royal authority. For, in addition to the obvious difficulty of persuading men to resign the good things of this world for a life of penance and mortification, there were other impediments, arising from the circumstance that the conventuals had been countenanced in their lax interpretation of the rules of their order by many of their own superiors, and even the popes themselves. They were besides sustained in their opposition by many of the great lords, who were apprehensive that the rich chapels and masses, which they or their ancestors had founded in the various monasteries, would be neglected by the observantines, whose scrupulous adherence to the vow of poverty excluded them from what, in church as well as state, is too often found the most cogent incentive to the performance of duty. [22] From these various causes, the work of reform went on slowly; but the untiring exertions of Ximenes gradually effected its adoption in many establishments; and, where fair means could not prevail, he sometimes resorted to force. The monks of one of the convents in Toledo, being ejected from their dwelling, in consequence of their pertinacious resistance, marched out in solemn procession, with the crucifix before them, chanting, at the same time, the psalm _De exitu Israel_, in token of their persecution. Isabella resorted to milder methods. She visited many of the nunneries in person, taking her needle or distaff with her, and endeavoring by her conversation and example to withdraw their inmates from the low and frivolous pleasures to which they were addicted. [23] While the reformation was thus silently going forward, the vacancy in the archbishopric of Toledo already noticed occurred by the death of the grand cardinal. Isabella deeply felt the responsibility of providing a suitable person to this dignity, the most considerable not merely in Spain, but probably in Christendom, after the papacy; and which, moreover, raised its possessor to eminent political rank, as high chancellor of Castile. [24] The right of nomination to benefices was vested in the queen by the original settlement of the crown. She had uniformly discharged this trust with the most conscientious impartiality, conferring the honors of the church on none but persons of approved piety and learning. [25] In the present instance, she was strongly solicited by Ferdinand, in favor of his natural son Alfonso, archbishop of Saragossa. But this prelate, although not devoid of talent, had neither the age nor experience, and still less the exemplary morals, demanded for this important station; and the queen mildly, but unhesitatingly, resisted all entreaty and expostulation of her husband on his behalf. [26] The post had always been filled by men of high family. The queen, loath to depart from this usage, notwithstanding the dying admonition of Mendoza, turned her eyes on various candidates before she determined in favor of her own confessor, whose character presented so rare a combination of talent and virtue, as amply compensated any deficiency of birth. As soon as the papal bull reached Castile, confirming the royal nomination, Isabella summoned Ximenes to her presence, and, delivering to him the parcel, requested him to open it before her. The confessor, who had no suspicion of their real purport, took the letters and devoutly pressed them to his lips; when his eye falling on the superscription, "To our venerable brother Francisco Ximenez de Cisneros, archbishop elect of Toledo," he changed color, and involuntarily dropped the packet from his hands, exclaiming, "There is some mistake in this; it cannot be intended for me;" and abruptly quitted the apartment. The queen, far from taking umbrage at this unceremonious proceeding, waited a while, until the first emotions of surprise should have subsided. Finding that he did not return, however, she despatched two of the grandees, who she thought would have the most influence with him, to seek him out and persuade him to accept the office. The nobles instantly repaired to his convent in Madrid, in which city the queen then kept her court. They found, however, that he had already left the place. Having ascertained his route, they mounted their horses, and, following as fast as possible, succeeded in overtaking him at three leagues' distance from the city, as he was travelling on foot at a rapid rate, though in the noontide heat, on his way to the Franciscan monastery at Ocana. After a brief expostulation with Ximenes on his abrupt departure, they prevailed on him to retrace his steps to Madrid; but, upon his arrival there, neither the arguments nor entreaties of his friends, backed as they were by the avowed wishes of his sovereign, could overcome his scruples, or induce him to accept an office, of which he professed himself unworthy. "He had hoped," he said, "to pass the remainder of his days in the quiet practice of his monastic duties; and it was too late now to call him into public life, and impose a charge of such heavy responsibility on him, for which he had neither capacity nor inclination." In this resolution he pertinaciously persisted for more than six months, until a second bull was obtained from the pope, commanding him no longer to decline an appointment which the church had seen fit to sanction. This left no further room for opposition, and Ximenes acquiesced, though with evident reluctance, in his advancement to the first dignity in the kingdom. [27] There seems to be no good ground for charging Ximenes with hypocrisy in this singular display of humility. The _nolo episcopal_, indeed, has passed into a proverb; but his refusal was too long and sturdily maintained to be reconciled with affectation or insincerity. He was, moreover, at this time, in the sixtieth year of his age, when ambition, though not extinguished, is usually chilled in the human heart. His habits had been long accommodated to the ascetic duties of the cloister, and his thoughts turned from the business of this world to that beyond the grave. However gratifying the distinguished honor conferred on him might be to his personal feelings, he might naturally hesitate to exchange the calm, sequestered way of life, to which he had voluntarily devoted himself, for the turmoil and vexations of the world. But, although Ximenes showed no craving for power, it must be confessed he was by no means diffident in the use of it. One of the very first acts of his administration is too characteristic to be omitted. The government of Cazorla, the most considerable place in the gift of the archbishop of Toledo, had been intrusted by the grand cardinal to his younger brother Don Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza. The friends of this nobleman applied to Ximenes to confirm the appointment, reminding him at the same time of his own obligations to the cardinal, and enforcing their petition by the recommendation which they had obtained from the queen. This was not the way to approach Ximenes, who was jealous of any improper influence over his own judgment, and, above all, of the too easy abuse of the royal favor. He was determined, in the outset, effectually to discourage all such applications; and he declared, that "the sovereigns might send him back to the cloister again, but that no personal considerations should ever operate with him in distributing the honors of the church." The applicants, nettled at this response, returned to the queen, complaining in the bitterest terms of the arrogance and ingratitude of the new primate. Isabella, however, evinced no symptoms of disapprobation, not altogether displeased, perhaps, with the honest independence of her minister; at any rate, she took no further notice of the affair. [28] Some time after, the archbishop encountered Mendoza in one of the avenues of the palace, and, as the latter was turning off to avoid the meeting, he saluted him with the title of adelantado of Cazorla. Mendoza stared with astonishment at the prelate, who repeated the salutation, assuring him, "that, now he was at full liberty to consult his own judgment, without the suspicion of any sinister influence, he was happy to restore him to a station, for which he had shown himself well qualified." It is scarcely necessary to say, that Ximenes was not importuned after this with solicitations for office. Indeed, all personal application he affected to regard as of itself sufficient ground for a denial, since it indicated "the want either of merit or of humility in the applicant." [29] After his elevation to the primacy, he retained the same simple and austere manners as before, dispensing his large revenues in public and private charities, but regulating his domestic expenditure with the severest economy, [30] until he was admonished by the Holy See to adopt a state more consonant with the dignity of his office, if he would not disparage it in popular estimation. In obedience to this, he so far changed his habits, as to display the usual magnificence of his predecessors, in all that met the public eye,--his general style of living, equipage, and the number and pomp of his retainers; but he relaxed nothing of his own personal mortifications. He maintained the same abstemious diet, amidst all the luxuries of his table. Under his robes of silk or costly furs he wore the coarse frock of St. Francis, which he used to mend with his own hands. He used no linen about his person or bed; and he slept on a miserable pallet like that used by the monks of his fraternity, and so contrived as to be concealed from observation under the luxurious couch in which he affected to repose. [31] As soon as Ximenes entered on the duties of his office, he bent all the energies of his mind to the consummation of the schemes of reform which his royal mistress, as well as himself, had so much at heart. His attention was particularly directed to the clergy of his diocese, who had widely departed from the rule of St. Augustine, by which they were bound. His attempts at reform, however, excited such a lively dissatisfaction in this reverend body, that they determined to send one of their own number to Rome, to prefer their complaints against the archbishop at the papal court. [32] The person selected for this delicate mission was a shrewd and intelligent canon by the name of Albornoz. It could not be conducted so privately as to escape the knowledge of Ximenes. He was no sooner acquainted with it, than he despatched an officer to the coast, with orders to arrest the emissary. In case he had already embarked, the officer was authorized to fit out a fast sailing vessel, so as to reach Italy, if possible, before him. He was at the same time fortified with despatches from the sovereigns to the Spanish minister, Garcilasso de la Vega, to be delivered immediately on his arrival. The affair turned out as had been foreseen. On arriving at the port, the officer found the bird had flown. He followed, however, without delay, and had the good fortune to reach Ostia several days before him. He forwarded his instructions at once to the Spanish minister, who in pursuance of them caused Albornoz to be arrested the moment he set foot on shore, and sent him back as a prisoner of state to Spain; where a close confinement for two and twenty mouths admonished the worthy canon of the inexpediency of thwarting the plans of Ximenes. [33] His attempts at innovation among the regular clergy of his own order were encountered with more serious opposition. The reform fell most heavily on the Franciscans, who were interdicted by their rules from holding property, whether as a community, or as individuals; while the members of other fraternities found some compensation for the surrender of their private fortunes, in the consequent augmentation of those of their fraternity. There was no one of the religious orders, therefore, in which the archbishop experienced such a dogged resistance to his plans, as in his own. More than a thousand friars, according to some accounts, quitted the country and passed over to Barbary, preferring rather to live with the infidel, than conform to the strict letter of their founder's rules. [34] One account represents the migration as being to Italy and other Christian countries, where the conventual order was protected; which would seem the most probable, though not the best authenticated, statement of the two. The difficulties of the reform were perhaps augmented by the mode in which it was conducted. Isabella, indeed, used all gentleness and persuasion; [35] but Ximenes carried measures with a high and inexorable hand. He was naturally of an austere and arbitrary temper, and the severe training which he had undergone made him less charitable for the lapses of others; especially of those, who, like himself, had voluntarily incurred the obligations of monastic rule. He was conscious of the rectitude of his intentions; and, as he identified his own interests with those of the church, he regarded all opposition to himself as an offence against religion, warranting the most peremptory exertion of power. The clamor raised against his proceedings became at length so alarming, that the general of the Franciscans, who resided at Rome, determined to anticipate the regular period of his visit to Castile for inspecting the affairs of the order. As he was himself a conventual, his prejudices were of course all enlisted against the measures of reform; and he came over fully resolved to compel Ximenes to abandon it altogether, or to undermine, if possible, his credit and influence at court. But this functionary had neither the talent nor temper requisite for so arduous an undertaking. He had not been long in Castile before he was convinced that all his own power, as head of the order, would be incompetent to protect it against the bold innovations of his provincial, while supported by royal authority. He demanded, therefore, an audience of the queen, in which he declared his sentiments with very little reserve. He expressed his astonishment that she should have selected an individual for the highest dignity in the church, who was destitute of nearly every qualification, even that of birth; whose sanctity was a mere cloak to cover his ambition; whose morose and melancholy temper made him an enemy not only of the elegances, but the common courtesies of life; and whose rude manners were not compensated by any tincture of liberal learning. He deplored the magnitude of the evil, which his intemperate measures had brought on the church, but which it was, perhaps, not yet too late to rectify; and he concluded by admonishing her, that, if she valued her own fame, or the interests of her soul, she would compel this man of yesterday to abdicate the office, for which he had proved himself so incompetent, and return to his original obscurity! The queen, who listened to this violent harangue with an indignation, that prompted her more than once to order the speaker from her presence, put a restraint on her feelings, and patiently waited to the end. When he had finished, she calmly asked him, "If he was in his senses, and knew whom he was thus addressing?" "Yes," replied the enraged friar, "I am in my senses, and know very well whom I am speaking to;--the queen of Castile, a mere handful of dust, like myself!" With these words, he rushed out of the apartment, shutting the door after him with furious violence. [36] Such impotent bursts of passion could, of course, have no power to turn the queen from her purpose. The general, however, on his return to Italy, had sufficient address to obtain authority from His Holiness to send a commission of conventuals to Castile, who should be associated with Ximenes in the management of the reform. These individuals soon found themselves mere ciphers; and, highly offended at the little account which the archbishop made of their authority, they preferred such complaints of his proceedings to the pontifical court, that Alexander the Sixth was induced, with the advice of the college of cardinals, to issue a brief, November 9th, 1496, peremptorily inhibiting the sovereigns from proceeding further in the affair, until it had been regularly submitted for examination to the head of the church. [37] Isabella, on receiving this unwelcome mandate, instantly sent it to Ximenes. The spirit of the latter, however, rose in proportion to the obstacles it had to encounter. He sought only to rally the queen's courage, beseeching her not to faint in the good work, now that it was so far advanced, and assuring her that it was already attended with such beneficent fruits, as could not fail to secure the protection of Heaven. Isabella, every act of whose administration may be said to have had reference, more or less remote, to the interests of religion, was as little likely as himself to falter in a matter which proposed these interests as its direct and only object. She assured her minister that she would support him in all that was practicable; and she lost no time in presenting the affair, through her agents, in such a light to the court of Rome, as might work a more favorable disposition in it. In this she succeeded, though not till after multiplied delays and embarrassments; and such ample powers were conceded to Ximenes, in conjunction with the apostolic nuncio, as enabled him to consummate his grand scheme of reform, in defiance of all the efforts of his enemies. [38] The reformation thus introduced extended to the religious institutions of very order equally with his own. It was most searching in its operation, reaching eventually to the moral conduct of the subjects of it, no less than the mere points of monastic discipline. As regards the latter; it may be thought of doubtful benefit to have enforced the rigid interpretation of a rule, founded on the melancholy principle, that the amount of happiness in the next world is to be regulated by that of self-inflicted suffering in this. But it should be remembered, that, however objectionable such a rule may be in itself, yet, where it is voluntarily assumed as an imperative moral obligation, it cannot be disregarded without throwing down the barrier to unbounded license; and that the reassertion of it, under these circumstances, must be a necessary preliminary to any effectual reform of morals. The beneficial changes wrought in this latter particular, which Isabella had far more at heart than any exterior forms of discipline, are the theme of unqualified panegyric with her contemporaries. [39] The Spanish clergy, as I have before had occasion to remark, were early noted for their dissolute way of life, which, to a certain extent, seemed to be countenanced by the law itself. [40] This laxity of morals was carried to a most lamentable extent under the last reign, when all orders of ecclesiastics, whether regular or secular, infected probably by the corrupt example of the court, are represented (we may hope it is an exaggeration) as wallowing in all the excesses of sloth and sensuality. So deplorable a pollution of the very sanctuaries of religion could not fail to occasion sincere regret to a pure and virtuous mind like Isabella's. The stain had sunk too deep, however, to be readily purged away. Her personal example, indeed, and the scrupulous integrity with which she reserved all ecclesiastical preferment for persons of unblemished piety, contributed greatly to bring about an amelioration in the morals of the secular clergy. But the secluded inmates of the cloister were less open to these influences; and the work of reform could only be accomplished there, by bringing them back to a reverence for their own institutions, and by the slow operation of public opinion. Notwithstanding the queen's most earnest wishes, it may be doubted whether this would have ever been achieved without the co-operation of a man like Ximenes, whose character combined in itself all the essential elements of a reformer. Happily, Isabella was permitted to see before her death, if not the completion, at least the commencement, of a decided amendment in the morals of the religious orders; an amendment, which, so far from being transitory in its character calls forth the most emphatic eulogium from a Castilian writer far in the following century; who, while he laments their ancient laxity, boldly challenges comparison for the religious communities of his own country, with those of any other, in temperance, chastity, and exemplary purity of life and conversation. [41] * * * * * The authority on whom the life of Cardinal Ximenes mainly rests, is Alvaro Gomez de Castro. He was born in the village of St. Eulalia, near Toledo, in 1515, and received his education at Alcalá, where he obtained great repute for his critical acquaintance with the ancient classics. He was afterwards made professor of the humanities in the university; a situation which he filled with credit, but subsequently exchanged for the rhetorical chair in a school recently founded at Toledo. While thus occupied, he was chosen by the university of Alcalá to pay the most distinguished honor, which could be rendered to the memory of its illustrious founder, by a faithful record of his extraordinary life. The most authentic sources of information were thrown open to him. He obtained an intimate acquaintance with the private life of the cardinal, from three of his principal domestics, who furnished abundance of reminiscences from personal observation, while the archives of the university supplied a mass of documents relating to the public services of its patron. From these and similar materials, Gomez prepared his biography, after many years of patient labor. The work fully answered public expectation; and its merits are such as to lead the learned Nic. Antonio to express a doubt, whether anything more excellent or perfect in its way could be achieved; "quo opere in eo genere an praestantius quidquam aut perfectius, esse possit, non immerito saepe dubitavi." (Bibliotheca Nova, tom. i. p. 59.) The encomium may be thought somewhat excessive; but it cannot be denied, that the narrative is written in an easy and natural manner, with fidelity and accuracy, with commendable liberality of opinion, though with a judgment sometimes warped into an undue estimate of the qualities of his hero. It is distinguished, moreover, by such beauty and correctness of Latinity, as have made it a text-book in many of the schools and colleges of the Peninsula. The first edition, being that used in the present work, was published at Alcalá, in 1569. It has since been reprinted twice in Germany, and perhaps elsewhere. Gomez was busily occupied with other literary lucubrations during the remainder of his life, and published several works in Latin prose and verse, both of which he wrote with ease and elegance. He died of a catarrh, in 1580, in the sixty-sixth year of his age, leaving behind him a reputation for disinterestedness and virtue, which is sufficiently commemorated in two lines of his epitaph; "Nemini unquam sciens nocui, Prodesse quam pluribus curavi." The work of Gomez has furnished the basis for all those biographies of Ximenes which have since appeared in Spain. The most important of these, probably, is Quintanilla's; which, with little merit of selection or arrangement, presents a copious mass of details, drawn from every quarter whence his patient industry could glean them. Its author was a Franciscan, and employed in procuring the beatification of Cardinal Ximenes by the court of Rome; a circumstance which probably disposed him to easier faith in the _marvellous_ of his story, than most of his readers will be ready to give. The work was published at Palermo in 1653. In addition to these authorities I have availed myself of a curious old manuscript, presented to me by Mr. O. Rich, entitled "Suma de la Vida del R. S. Cardenal Don Fr. Francisco Ximenez de Cisneros." It was written within half a century after the cardinal's death, by "un criado de la casa de Coruña." The original, in "very ancient letter," was extant in the archives of that noble house in Quintanilla's time, and is often cited by him. (Archetypo, apend., p. 77.) Its author evidently had access to those contemporary notices, some of which furnished the basis of Castro's narrative, from which, indeed, it exhibits no material discrepancy. The extraordinary character of Ximenes has naturally attracted the attention of foreign writers, and especially the French, who have produced repeated biographies of him. The most eminent of these is by Fléchier, the eloquent bishop of Nismes. It is written with the simple elegance and perspicuity, which characterize his other compositions; and in the general tone of its sentiments, on all matters both of church and state, is quite as orthodox as the most bigoted admirer of the cardinal could desire. Another life, by Marsollier, has obtained a very undeserved repute. The author, not content with the extraordinary qualities really appertaining to his hero, makes him out a sort of universal genius, quite ridiculous, rivalling Molière's Dr. Pancrace himself. One may form some idea of the historian's accuracy from the fact, that he refers the commencement and conduct of the war of Granada chiefly to the counsels of Ximenes, who, as we have seen, was not even introduced at court till after the close of the war. Marsollier reckoned largely on the ignorance and _gullibility_ of his readers. The event proved he was not mistaken. FOOTNOTES [1] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1495.--Salazar de Mendoza, Crón. del Gran Cardenal, lib. 2, cap. 45, 46.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. fol. 61.--Pulgar, Claros Varones, tit. 4. His disorder was an abscess on the kidneys, which confined him to the house nearly a year before his death. When this event happened, a white cross of extraordinary magnitude and splendor, shaped precisely like that on his arms, was seen in the heavens directly over his house, by a crowd of spectators, for more than two hours; a full account of which was duly transmitted to Rome by the Spanish court, and has obtained easy credit with the principal Spanish historians. [2] Alvaro Gomez says of him, "Nam praeter clarissimum tum natalium, tum fortunae, tum dignitatis splendorem, quae in ilio ornamenta summa erant, incredibilem animi sublimitatem cum pari morum facilitate, elegantiâque conjunxerat; ut merito locum in republicâ summo proximum ad supremum usque diem tenuerit." (De Rebus Gestis, fol. 9.) Martyr, noticing the cardinal's death, bestows the following brief but comprehensive panegyric on him. "Periit Gonsalus Mendotiae, domûs splendor et lucida fax; periit quem universa colebat Hispania, quem exteri etiam principes venerabantur, quem ordo cardineus collegam sibi esse gloriabatur." Opus Epist., epist. 158. [3] Salazar de Mendoza, Crón. del Gran Cardenal, pp. 263-273, 381-410. [4] "Gran varon, y muy experimentado y prudente en negocios," says Oviedo of the cardinal, "_pero a vueltas de las negociaciones desta vida_, tuvo trés hijos varones," etc. Then follows a full notice of this graceless progeny. Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 8. [5] Salazar de Mendoza, Crón. del Gran Cardenal, lib. 2, cap. 66. The doctor Pedro Salazar de Mendoza's biography of his illustrious relative is a very fair specimen of the Spanish style of book-making in ancient times. One event seems to suggest another with about as much cohesion as the rhymes of "The House that Jack built." There is scarcely a place or personage of note, that the grand cardinal was brought in contact with in the course of his life, whose history is not made the theme of profuse dissertation. Nearly fifty chapters are taken up, for example, with the distinguished men, who graduated at the college of Santa Cruz. [6] "Non hoc," says Tacitus with truth, "praecipuum amicorum munus est, prosequi defunctum ignavo questu; sed quae voluerit meminisse, quae mandaverit exsequi." Annales, lib. 2, sect. 71. [7] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 143.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1494.--Salazar de Mendoza, Crón. del Gran Cardenal, lib. 2, cap. 45. A foundling hospital does not seem to have come amiss in Spain, where, according to Salazar, the wretched parents frequently destroyed their offspring by casting them into wells and pits, or exposing them in desert places to die of famine. "_The more compassionate_," he observes, "laid them at the doors of churches, where they were too often worried to death by dogs and other animals." The grand cardinal's nephew, who founded a similar institution, is said to have furnished an asylum in the course of his life to no less than 13,000 of these little victims! Ibid., cap. 61. [8] Salazar de Mendoza, Crón, del Gran Cardenal, lib. 2, cap. 46.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 8. The dying cardinal is said to have recommended, among other things, that the queen should repair any wrong done to Joanna Beltraneja, by marrying her with the young prince of the Asturias; which suggestion was so little to Isabella's taste that she broke off the conversation, saying, "the good man wandered and talked nonsense." [9] It is singular, that Fiddlier should have blundered some twenty years in the date of Ximenes's birth, which he makes 1457. (Hist. de Ximenés, liv. 1, p. 3.) It is not singular, that Marsollier should. Histoire du Ministère du Cardinal Ximenez, (Toulouse, 1694,) liv. 1, p. 3. [10] The honorable extraction of Ximenes is intimated in Juan Vergara's verses at the end of the Complutensian Polyglot: "Nomine Cisnerius clarâ de stirpe parentum, Et meritis factus clarior ipse suis." Fray Pedro de Quintanilla y Mendoza makes a goodly genealogical tree for his hero, of which King Pelayo, King Pepin, Charlemagne, and other royal worthies are the respectable roots. (Proemia Dedicatoria, pp. 5-35.) According to Gonzalo de Oviedo, his father was a poor hidalgo, who, having spent his little substance on the education of his children, was obliged to take up the profession of an advocate. Quincuagenas, MS. [11] Quintanilla, Archetypo, p. 6.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, Ximen., fol. 2.--Idem, Miscellanear., MS., ex Bibliothecâ, Regiâ Matritensi, tom. ii. fol. 189. [12] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 2.--Idem, Miscellanear., MS., ubi supra.--Eugenio de Robles, Compendio de la Vida y Hazañas del Cardenal Don Fray Francisco Ximenez de Cisneros, (Toledo, 1604,) cap. 11. [13] Quintanilla, Archetype, pp. 8, 10.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 2.-- Fléchier, Hist. de Ximenés, pp. 8-10.--Suma de la Vida del R. S. Cardenal Don Fr. Francisco Ximenez de Cisneros, sacada de los Memoriales de Juan de Vallejo, Paje de CEamara, è de algunas Personas que en su Tiempo lo vieron: para la Ilustrisima Señora Doña Catalina de la Zerda, Condesa de Coruña, a quien Dios guarde, y de su Gracia, por un Criado de su Casa, MS. [14] Suma de la Vida de Cisneros, MS.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 3.-- Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 11.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., dial, de Ximeni. [15] Quintanilla, Archetypo, p. ll.--Gomez, Miscellanear., MS., ubi supra.--Idem, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 4. This edifice, says Salazar de Mendoza, in respect to its sacristy, choir, cloisters, library, etc., was the most sumptuous and noted of its time. It was originally destined by the Catholic sovereigns for their place of sepulture; an honor afterwards reserved for Granada, on its recovery from the infidels. The great chapel was garnished with the fetters taken from the dungeons of Malaga, in which the Moors confined their Christian captives. Monarquía, tom. i. p. 410. [16] Fléchier, Hist. de Ximenés, p. 14.--Quintanilla, Archetype, pp. 13, 14.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 4.--Suma de la Vida de Cisneros, MS.-- Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS. [17] Salazar de Mendoza, Crón. del Gran Cardenal, lib. 2, cap. 63.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 4.--Suma de la Vida de Cisneros, MS.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 12. [18] Fléchier, Hist. de Ximenés, pp. 18, 19.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 108.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, ubi supra.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS. [19] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 108. "Praeterea," says Martyr, in a letter to Don Fernando Alvarez, one of the royal secretaries, "nonne tu sanotissimum quendam virum à, solitudine abstrusisque silvis, macie ob abstinentiam confectum, relicti Granatensis loco fuisse suffactum, scriptitasti? In istius facie obdnctâ, nonne Hilarionis te imaginem aut primi Pauli vultum conspexisse fateris?" Opus Epist., epist. 105. [20] "Todos hablaban," says Oviedo, "de la sanctimonia é vida de este religioso." The same writer says, that he saw him at Medina del Campo, in 1494, in a solemn procession, on the day of Corpus Christi, his body much emaciated, and walking barefooted in his coarse friar's dress. In the same procession was the magnificent cardinal of Spain, little dreaming how soon his proud honors were to descend on the head of his more humble companion. Quincuagenas, MS. [21] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 201.--Suma de la Vida de Cisneros, MS.--Mosheim, Ecclesiastical History, vol. iii. cent. 14, p. 2. --Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 163.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 165.--Oviedo, Epilogo Real, Imperial y Pontifical, MS., apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 8.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 3, cap. 15. [22] Fléchier, Hist. de Ximenés, pp. 25, 26.--Quintanilla, Archetypo, pp. 21, 22.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 6, 7.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 12. [23] Fléchier, Hist. de Ximenes, p. 25.--Quintanilla, Archetypo, lib. 1, cap. ll.--Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 8--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, ubi supra. [24] Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 2, dial. 1.--Ferdinand and Isabella annexed the dignity of high chancellor in perpetuity to that of archbishop of Toledo. It seems, however, at least in later times, to have been a mere honorary title. (Mendoza, Dignidades, lib. 2, cap. 8.) The revenues of the archbishopric at the beginning of the sixteenth century amounted to 80,000 ducats, (Navagiero, Viaggio, fol. 9.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 23,) equivalent to about 702,200 dollars at the present day. See Introd., Sect. I. Note 63, of this History. [25] "De mas desto," says Lucio Marineo, "tenia por costumbre que quando avia de dar alguna dignidad, o obispado, mas mirava en virtud, honestidad, y sciencia de las personas, que las riquezas, y generosidad, aun que fuessen sus deudos. Lo qual fue causa que muchos de los que hablavan poco, y tenian los cabellos mas cortos que las cejas; comenparon a traer los ojos baxos mirando la tierra, y andar con mas gravedad, y hazer mejor vida, zimulando por venture algunos mas la virtud, que exercitando la." (Cosas Memorables, fol. 182.) "L'hypocrisie est l'hommage que le vice rend à la vertu." The maxim is now somewhat stale, like most others of its profound author. [26] Quintanilla, Archetype, lib. 1, cap. 16.--Salazar de Mendoza, Crón. del Gran Cardenal, lib. 2, cap. 65. This prelate was at this time only twenty-four years of age. He had been raised to the see of Saragossa when only six. This strange abuse of preferring infants to the highest dignities of the church seems to have prevailed in Castile as well as Aragon; for the tombs of five archdeacons might be seen in the church of Madre de Dios at Toledo, in Salazar's time, whose united ages amounted only to thirty years. See Crón. del Gran Cardenal, ubi supra. [27] Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 4.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 26, cap. 7.--Suma de la Vida de Cisneros, MS.-- Quintanilla, Archetype, lib. 1, cap. 16.--Gomez, De rebus Gestis, fol. 11.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1495.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 13.-- Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS. [28] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 11. [29] Ibid., ubi supra.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 13, 14. [30] "He kept five or six friars of his order," says Gonzalo de Oviedo, "in his palace with him, and as many asses in his stables; but the latter all grew sleek and fat, for the archbishop would not ride himself, nor allow his brethren to ride either." Quincuagenas, MS. [31] Suma de la Vida de Cisneros, MS.--Quintanilla, Archetype, lib. 2, cap. 8, 9.--Gomez, de Rebus Gestis, fol. 12.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS.-- Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 13. [32] Gomez de Rebus Gestis, fol. 16. The Venetian minister Navagiero, noticing the condition of the canons of Toledo, some few years later, celebrates them, as "lording it above all others in their own city, being especial favorites with the ladies, dwelling in stately mansions, passing, in short, the most agreeable lives in the world, without any one to trouble them." Viaggio, fol. 9. [33] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 17. [34] Quintanilla, Archetype, pp. 22, 23.--Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. p. 201.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 3, cap. 15. [35] "Trataba las monjas," say Riol, "con un agrado y amor tan cariñoso, que las robaba los corazones, y hecha dueña de ellas, las persuadia non suavidad y eficacia á que votasen clausura. Y es cosa admirable, que raro fue el conventu donde entró esta celebre heroina, donde no lograse en el propio dia el efecto de su santo deseo." Informe, apud Semanario Erudito, tom. iii. p. 110. [36] Fléchier, Hist. de Ximenes, pp. 56, 58.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 14.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 3, cap. 15.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 13. [37] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 23.--Quintanilla, Archetypo, lib. 1, cap. 11. [38] Quintanilla, Archetypo, lib. 1, cap. 13-14.--Riol discusses the various monastic reforms effected by Ximenes, in his Memorial to Philip V., apud Semanario Erudito, tom. iii. pp. 102-110. [39] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 165.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 201.--et al. [40] The practice of concubinage by the clergy was fully recognized, and the ancient _fueros_ of Castile permitted their issue to inherit the estates of such parents as died intestate. (See Marina, Ensayo Histórico- Crítico sobre la Antigua Legislacion de Castilla, (Madrid, 1808,) p. 154.) The effrontery of these legalized strumpets, _barraganas_, as they were called, was at length so intolerable as to call for repeated laws, regulating their apparel, and prescribing a badge for distinguishing them from honest women. (Sempere, Hist. del Luxo, tom. i. pp. 165-169.) Spain is probably the only country in Christendom, where concubinage was ever sanctioned by law; a circumstance doubtless imputable, in some measure, to the influence of the Mahometans. [41] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 23. CHAPTER VI. XIMENES IN GRANADA--PERSECUTION, INSURRECTION, AND CONVERSION OF THE MOORS. 1499-1500. Tranquil State of Granada.--Mild Policy of Talavera.--Clergy Dissatisfied with it.--Violent Measures of Ximenes.--His Fanaticism.--Its Mischievous Effects.--Insurrection in Granada.--Tranquillity Restored.--Baptism of the Inhabitants. Moral energy, or constancy of purpose, seems to be less properly an independent power of the mind than a mode of action, by which its various powers operate with effect. But, however this may be, it enters more largely, perhaps, than mere talent, as commonly understood, into the formation of what is called character, and is often confounded by the vulgar with talent of the highest order. In the ordinary concerns of life, indeed, it is more serviceable than brilliant parts; while, in the more important, these latter are of little weight without it, evaporating only in brief and barren flashes, which may dazzle the eye by their splendor, but pass away and are forgotten. The importance of moral energy is felt not only, where it would be expected, in the concerns of active life, but in those more exclusively of an intellectual character, in deliberative assemblies, for example, where talent, as usually understood, might be supposed to assert an absolute supremacy, but where it is invariably made to bend to the controlling influence of this principle. No man destitute of it can be the leader of a party; while there are few leaders, probably, who do not number in their ranks minds from which they would be compelled to shrink in a contest for purely intellectual pre-eminence. This energy of purpose presents itself in a yet more imposing form when stimulated by some intense passion, as ambition, or the nobler principle of patriotism or religion; when the soul, spurning vulgar considerations of interest, is ready to do and to dare all for conscience' sake; when, insensible alike to all that this world can give or take away, it loosens itself from the gross ties which bind it to earth, and, however humble its powers in every other point of view, attains a grandeur and elevation, which genius alone, however gifted, can never reach. But it is when associated with exalted genius, and under the action of the potent principles above mentioned, that this moral energy conveys an image of power, which approaches, nearer than anything else on earth, to that of a divine intelligence. It is, indeed, such agents that Providence selects for the accomplishment of those great revolutions, by which the world is shaken to its foundations, new and more beautiful systems created, and the human mind carried forward at a single stride, in the career of improvement, further than it had advanced for centuries. It must, indeed, be confessed, that this powerful agency is sometimes for evil, as well as for good. It is this same impulse, which spurs guilty Ambition along his bloody track, and which arms the hand of the patriot sternly to resist him; which glows with holy fervor in the bosom of the martyr, and which lights up the fires of persecution, by which he is to win his crown of glory. The direction of the impulse, differing in the same individual under different circumstances, can alone determine whether he shall be the scourge or the benefactor of his species. These reflections have been suggested by the character of the extraordinary person brought forward in the preceding chapter, Ximenes de Cisneros, and the new and less advantageous aspect, in which he must now appear to the reader. Inflexible constancy of purpose formed, perhaps, the most prominent trait of his remarkable character. What direction it might have received under other circumstances it is impossible to say. It would be no great stretch of fancy to imagine, that the unyielding spirit, which in its early days could voluntarily endure years of imprisonment, rather than submit to an act of ecclesiastical oppression, might under similar influences have been aroused, like Luther's, to shake down the ancient pillars of Catholicism, instead of lending all its strength to uphold them. The latter position, however, would seem better assimilated to the constitution of his mind, whose sombre enthusiasm naturally prepared him for the vague and mysterious in the Romish faith, as his inflexible temper did for its bold and arrogant dogmas. At any rate, it was to this cause he devoted the whole strength of his talents and commanding energies. We have seen, in the preceding chapter, with what promptness he entered on the reform of religious discipline, as soon as he came into office, and with what pertinacity he pursued it, in contempt of all personal interest and popularity. We are now to see him with similar zeal devoting himself to the extirpation of heresy; with contempt not merely of personal consequences, but also of the most obvious principles of good faith and national honor. Nearly eight years had elapsed since the conquest of Granada, and the subjugated kingdom continued to repose in peaceful security under the shadow of the treaty, which guaranteed the unmolested enjoyment of its ancient laws and religion. This unbroken continuance of public tranquillity, especially difficult to be maintained among the jarring elements of the capital, whose motley population of Moors, renegades, and Christians suggested perpetual points of collision, must be chiefly referred to the discreet and temperate conduct of the two individuals whom Isabella had charged with the civil and ecclesiastical government. These were Mendoza, count of Tendilla, and Talavera, archbishop of Granada. The former, the brightest ornament of his illustrious house, has been before made known to the reader by his various important services, both military and diplomatic. Immediately after the conquest of Granada he was made alcayde and captain general of the kingdom, a post for which he was every way qualified by his prudence, firmness, enlightened views, and long experience. [1] The latter personage, of more humble extraction, [2] was Fray Fernando de Talavera, a Hieronymite monk, who, having been twenty years prior of the monastery of Santa Maria del Prado, near Valladolid, was made confessor of Queen Isabella, and afterwards of the king. This situation necessarily gave him considerable influence in all public measures. If the keeping of the royal conscience could be safely intrusted to any one, it might certainly be to this estimable prelate, equally distinguished for his learning, amiable manners, and unblemished piety; and, if his character was somewhat tainted with bigotry, it was in so mild a form, so far tempered by the natural benevolence of his disposition, as to make a favorable contrast to the dominant spirit of the time. [3] After the conquest, he exchanged the bishopric of Avila for the archiepiscopal see of Granada. Notwithstanding the wishes of the sovereigns, he refused to accept any increase of emolument in this new and more exalted station. His revenues, indeed, which amounted to two millions of maravedies annually, were somewhat less than he before enjoyed. [4] The greater part of this sum he liberally expended on public improvements and works of charity; objects, which, to their credit be it spoken, have rarely failed to engage a large share of the attention and resources of the higher Spanish clergy. [5] The subject which pressed most seriously on the mind of the good archbishop, was the conversion of the Moors, whose spiritual blindness he regarded with feelings of tenderness and charity, very different from those entertained by most of his reverend brethren. He proposed to accomplish this by the most rational method possible. Though late in life, he set about learning Arabic, that he might communicate with the Moors in their own language, and commanded his clergy to do the same. [6] He caused an Arabic vocabulary, grammar, and catechism to be compiled; and a version in the same tongue to be made of the liturgy, comprehending the selections from the Gospels; and proposed to extend this at some future time to the whole body of the Scriptures. [7] Thus unsealing the sacred oracles which had been hitherto shut out from their sight, he opened to them the only true sources of Christian knowledge; and, by endeavoring to effect their conversion through the medium of their understandings, instead of seducing their imaginations with a vain show of ostentatious ceremonies, proposed the only method by which conversion could be sincere and permanent. These wise and benevolent measures of the good prelate, recommended, as they were, by the most exemplary purity of life, acquired him great authority among the Moors, who, estimating the value of the doctrine by its fruits, were well inclined to listen to it, and numbers were daily added to the church. [8] The progress of proselytism, however, was necessarily slow and painful among a people reared from the cradle, not merely in antipathy to, but abhorrence of, Christianity; who were severed from the Christian community by strong dissimilarity of language, habits, and institutions; and now indissolubly knit together by a common sense of national misfortune. Many of the more zealous clergy and religious persons, conceiving, indeed, this barrier altogether insurmountable, were desirous of seeing it swept away at once by the strong arm of power. They represented to the sovereigns, that it seemed like insensibility to the goodness of Providence, which had delivered the infidels into their hands, to allow them any longer to usurp the fair inheritance of the Christians, and that the whole of the stiff- necked race of Mahomet might justly be required to submit without exception to instant baptism, or to sell their estates and remove to Africa. This, they maintained, could be scarcely regarded as an infringement of the treaty, since the Moors would be so great gainers on the score of their eternal salvation; to say nothing of the indispensableness of such a measure to the permanent tranquillity and security of the kingdom. [9] But these considerations, "just and holy as they were," to borrow the words of a devout Spaniard, [10] failed to convince the sovereigns, who resolved to abide by their royal word, and to trust to the conciliatory measures now in progress, and a longer and more intimate intercourse with the Christians, as the only legitimate means for accomplishing their object. Accordingly, we find the various public ordinances, as low down as 1499, recognizing this principle, by the respect which they show for the most trivial usages of the Moors, [11] and by their sanctioning no other stimulant to conversion than the amelioration of their condition. [12] Among those in favor of more active measures was Ximenes, archbishop of Toledo. Having followed the court to Granada in the autumn of 1499, he took the occasion to communicate his views to Talavera, the archbishop, requesting leave at the same time to participate with him in his labor of love; to which the latter, willing to strengthen himself by so efficient an ally, modestly assented. Ferdinand and Isabella soon after removed to Seville; but, before their departure, enjoined on the prelates to observe the temperate policy hitherto pursued, and to beware of giving any occasion for discontent to the Moors. [13] No sooner had the sovereigns left the city, than Ximenes invited some of the leading _alfaquies_, or Mussulman doctors, to a conference, in which he expounded, with all the eloquence at his command, the true foundations of the Christian faith, and the errors of their own; and, that his teaching might be the more palatable, enforced it by liberal presents, consisting mostly of rich and costly articles of dress, of which the Moors were at all times exceedingly fond. This policy he pursued for some time, till the effect became visible. Whether the preaching or presents of the archbishop had most weight, does not appear. [14] It is probable, however, that the Moorish doctors found conversion a much more pleasant and profitable business than they had anticipated; for they one after another declared their conviction of their errors, and their willingness to receive baptism. The example of these learned persons was soon followed by great numbers of their illiterate disciples, insomuch that no less than four thousand are said to have presented themselves in one day for baptism; and Ximenes, unable to administer the rite to each individually, was obliged to adopt the expedient familiar to the Christian missionaries, of christening them _en masse_ by aspersion; scattering the consecrated drops from a mop, or hyssop, as it was called, which he twirled over the heads of the multitude. [15] So far all went on prosperously; and the eloquence and largesses of the archbishop, which latter he lavished so freely as to encumber his revenues for several years to come, brought crowds of proselytes to the Christian fold. [16] There were some, indeed, among the Mahometans, who regarded these proceedings as repugnant, if not to the letter, at least to the spirit of the original treaty of capitulation; which seemed intended to provide, not only against the employment of force, but of any undue incentive to conversion. [17] Several of the more sturdy, including some of the principal citizens, exerted their efforts to stay the tide of defection, which threatened soon to swallow up the whole population of the city. But Ximenes, whose zeal had mounted up to fever heat in the excitement of success, was not to be cooled by any opposition, however formidable; and if he had hitherto respected the letter of the treaty, he now showed himself to be prepared to trample on letter and spirit indifferently, when they crossed his designs. Among those most active in the opposition was a noble Moor named Zegri, well skilled in the learning of his countrymen, with whom he had great consideration. Ximenes having exhausted all his usual artillery of arguments and presents on this obdurate infidel, had him taken into custody by one of his officers named Leon, "a lion," says a punning historian, "by nature as well as by name," [18] and commanded the latter to take such measures with his prisoner, as would clear the film from his eyes. This faithful functionary executed his orders so effectually, that, after a few days of fasting, fetters, and imprisonment, he was able to present his charge to his employer, penitent to all outward appearance, and with an humble mien strongly contreating with his former proud and lofty bearing. After the most respectful obeisance to the archbishop, Zegri informed him, that "on the preceding night he had had a revelation from Allah, who had condescended to show him the error of his ways, and commanded him to receive instant baptism;" at the same time, pointing to his jailer, he "jocularly" remarked, "Your reverence has only to turn this lion of yours loose among the people, and my word for it, there will not be a Mussulman left many days within the walls of Granada." [19] "Thus," exclaims the devout Ferreras, "did Providence avail itself of the darkness of the dungeon to pour on the benighted minds of the infidel the light of the true faith!" [20] The work of proselytism now went on apace; for terror was added to the other stimulants. The zealous propagandist, in the mean while, flushed with success, resolved not only to exterminate infidelity, but the very characters in which its teachings were recorded. He accordingly caused all the Arabic manuscripts which he could procure to be heaped together in a common pile in one of the great squares of the city. The largest part were copies of the Koran, or works in some way or other connected with theology; with many others, however, on various scientific subjects. They were beautifully executed, for the most part, as to their chirography, and sumptuously bound and decorated; for, in all relating to the mechanical finishing, the Spanish Arabs excelled every people in Europe. But neither splendor of outward garniture, nor intrinsic merit of composition, could atone for the taint of heresy in the eye of the stern inquisitor; he reserved for his university of Alcalá three hundred works, indeed, relating to medical science, in which the Moors were as pre-eminent in that day as the Europeans were deficient; but all the rest, amounting to many thousands, [21] he consigned to indiscriminate conflagration. [22] This melancholy _auto da fe_, it will be recollected, was celebrated, not by an unlettered barbarian, but by a cultivated prelate, who was at that very time actively employing his large revenues in the publication of the most stupendous literary work of the age, and in the endowment of the most learned university in Spain. [23] It took place, not in the darkness of the Middle Ages, but in the dawn of the sixteenth century, and in the midst of an enlightened nation, deeply indebted for its own progress to these very stores of Arabian wisdom. It forms a counterpart to the imputed sacrilege of Omar, [24] eight centuries before, and shows that bigotry is the same in every faith and every age. The mischief occasioned by this act, far from being limited to the immediate loss, continued to be felt still more severely in its consequences. Such as could, secreted the manuscripts in their possession till an opportunity occurred for conveying them out of the country; and many thousands in this way were privately shipped over to Barbary. [25] Thus Arabian literature became rare in the libraries of the very country to which it was indigenous; the Arabic scholarship, once so flourishing in Spain, and that too in far less polished ages, gradually fell into decay from want of aliment to sustain it. Such were the melancholy results of this literary persecution; more mischievous, in one view, than even that directed against life; for the loss of an individual will scarcely be felt beyond his own generation, while the annihilation of a valuable work, or, in other words, of mind itself embodied in a permanent form, is a loss to all future time. The high hand with which Ximenes now carried measures, excited serious alarm in many of the more discreet and temperate Castilians in the city. They besought him to use greater forbearance, remonstrating against his obvious violations of the treaty, as well as against the expediency of forced conversions, which could not, in the nature of things, be lasting. But the pertinacious prelate only replied, that, "A tamer policy might, indeed, suit temporal matters, but not those in which the interests of the soul were at stake; that the unbeliever, if he could not be drawn, should be driven, into the way of salvation; and that it was no time to stay the hand, when the ruins of Mahometanism were tottering to their foundations." He accordingly went on with unflinching resolution. [26] But the patience of the Moors themselves, which had held out so marvellously under this system of oppression, began now to be exhausted. Many signs of this might be discerned by much less acute optics than those of the archbishop; but his were blinded by the arrogance of success. At length, in this inflammable state of public feeling, an incident occurred which led to a general explosion. Three of Ximenes's servants were sent on some business to the Albayein, a quarter inhabited exclusively by Moors, and encompassed by walls which separated it from the rest of the city. [27] These men had made themselves peculiarly odious to the people by their activity in their master's service. A dispute, having arisen between them and some inhabitants of the quarter, came at last to blows, when two of the servants were massacred on the spot, and their comrade escaped with difficulty from the infuriated mob. [28] The affair operated as the signal for insurrection. The inhabitants of the district ran to arms, got possession of the gates, barricaded the streets, and in a few hours the whole Albayein was in rebellion. [29] In the course of the following night, a large number of the enraged populace made their way into the city to the quarters of Ximenes, with the purpose of taking summary vengeance on his head for all his persecutions. Fortunately, his palace was strong, and defended by numerous resolute and well-armed attendants. The latter, at the approach of the rioters, implored their master to make his escape, if possible, to the fortress of the Alhambra, where the count of Tendilla was established. But the intrepid prelate, who held life too cheap to be a coward, exclaimed, "God forbid I should think of my own safety, when so many of the faithful are perilling theirs! No, I will stand to my post and wait there, if Heaven wills it, the crown of martyrdom." [30] It must be confessed he well deserved it. The building, however, proved too strong for the utmost efforts of the mob; and, at length, after some hours of awful suspense and agitation to the beleaguered inmates, the count of Tendilla arrived in person at the head of his guards, and succeeded in dispersing the insurgents, and driving them back to their own quarters. But no exertions could restore order to the tumultuous populace, or induce them to listen to terms; and they even stoned the messenger charged with pacific proposals from the count of Tendilla. They organized themselves under leaders, provided arms, and took every possible means for maintaining their defence. It seemed as if, smitten with the recollections of ancient liberty, they were resolved to recover it again at all hazards. [31] At length, after this disorderly state of things had lasted for several days, Talavera, the archbishop of Granada, resolved to try the effect of his personal influence, hitherto so great with the Moors, by visiting himself the disaffected quarter. This noble purpose he put in execution, in spite of the most earnest remonstrances of his friends. He was attended only by his chaplain, bearing the crucifix before him, and a few of his domestics, on foot and unarmed like himself. At the site of their venerable pastor, with his countenance beaming with the same serene and benign expression with which they were familiar when listening to his exhortations from the pulpit, the passions of the multitude were stilled. Every one seemed willing to abandon himself to the tender recollections of the past; and the simple people crowded around the good man, kneeling down and kissing the hem of his robe, as if to implore his benediction. The count of Tendilla no sooner learned the issue, than he followed into the Albayein, attended by a handful of soldiers. When he had reached the place where the mob was gathered, he threw his bonnet into the midst of them, in token of his pacific intentions. The action was received with acclamations, and the people, whose feelings had now taken another direction, recalled by his presence to the recollection of his uniformly mild and equitable rule, treated him with similar respect to that shown the archbishop of Granada. [32] These two individuals took advantage of this favorable change of feeling to expostulate with the Moors on the folly and desperation of their conduct, which must involve them in a struggle with such overwhelming odds as that of the whole Spanish monarchy. They implored them to lay down their arms and return to their duty, in which event they pledged themselves, as far as in their power, to allow no further repetition of the grievances complained of, and to intercede for their pardon with the sovereigns. The count testified his sincerity, by leaving his wife and two children as hostages in the heart of the Albayein; an act which must be admitted to imply unbounded confidence in the integrity of the Moors. [33] These various measures, backed, moreover, by the counsels and authority of some of the chief alfaquis, had the effect to restore tranquillity among the people, who, laying aside their hostile preparations, returned once more to their regular employments. [34] The rumor of the insurrection, in the mean while, with the usual exaggeration, reached Seville, where the court was then residing. In one respect rumor did justice, by imputing the whole blame of the affair to the intemperate zeal of Ximenes. That personage, with his usual promptness, had sent early notice of the affair to the queen by a negro slave uncommonly fleet of foot. But the fellow had become intoxicated by the way, and the court were several days without any more authentic tidings than general report. The king, who always regarded Ximenes's elevation to the primacy, to the prejudice, as the reader may remember, of his own son, with dissatisfaction, could not now restrain his indignation, but was heard to exclaim tauntingly to the queen, "So we are like to pay dear for your archbishop, whose rashness has lost us in a few hours what we have been years in acquiring." [35] The queen, confounded at the tidings, and unable to comprehend the silence of Ximenes, instantly wrote to him in the severest terms, demanding an explanation of the whole proceeding. The archbishop saw his error in committing affairs of moment to such hands as those of his sable messenger; and the lesson stood him in good stead, according to his moralizing biographer, for the remainder of his life. [36] He hastened to repair his fault by proceeding to Seville in person, and presenting himself before the sovereigns. He detailed to them the history of all the past transactions; recapitulated his manifold services, the arguments and exhortations he had used, the large sums he had expended, and his various expedients, in short, for effecting conversion, before resorting to severity. He boldly assumed the responsibility of the whole proceeding, acknowledging that he had purposely avoided communicating his plans to the sovereigns for fear of opposition. If he had erred, he said, it could be imputed to no other motive, at worst, than too great zeal for the interests of religion; but he concluded with assuring them, that the present position of affairs was the best possible for their purposes, since the late conduct of the Moors involved them in the guilt, and consequently all the penalties of treason, and that it would be an act of clemency to offer pardon on the alternatives of conversion or exile! [37] The archbishop's discourse, if we are to credit his enthusiastic biographer, not only dispelled the clouds of royal indignation, but drew forth the most emphatic expressions of approbation. [38] How far Ferdinand and Isabella were moved to this by his final recommendation, or what, in clerical language, may be called the "improvement of his discourse," does not appear. They did not at any rate adopt it in its literal extent. In due time, however, commissioners were sent to Granada, fully authorized to inquire into the late disturbances and punish their guilty authors. In the course of the investigation, many, including some of the principal citizens, were imprisoned on suspicion. The greater part made their peace by embracing Christianity. Many others sold their estates and migrated to Barbary; and the remainder of the population, whether from fear of punishment, or contagion of example, abjured their ancient superstition and consented to receive baptism. The whole number of converts was estimated at about fifty thousand, whose future relapses promised an almost inexhaustible supply for the fiery labors of the Inquisition. From this period the name of Moors, which had gradually superseded the primitive one of Spanish Arabs, gave way to the title of Moriscoes, by which this unfortunate people continued to be known through the remainder of their protracted existence in the Peninsula. [39] The circumstances, under which this important revolution in religion was effected in the whole population of this great city, will excite only feelings of disgust at the present day, mingled, indeed, with compassion for the unhappy beings, who so heedlessly incurred the heavy liabilities attached to their new faith. Every Spaniard, doubtless, anticipated the political advantages likely to result from a measure, which divested the Moors of the peculiar immunities secured by the treaty of capitulation, and subjected them at once to the law of the land. It is equally certain, however, that they attached great value in a spiritual view to the mere show of conversion, placing implicit confidence in the purifying influence of the waters of baptism, to whomever and under whatever circumstances administered. Even the philosophic Martyr, as little tinctured with bigotry as any of the time, testifies his joy at the conversion, on the ground, that, although it might not penetrate beneath the crust of infidelity, which had formed over the mind of the older and of course inveterate Mussulman, yet it would have full effect on his posterity, subjected from the cradle to the searching operation of Christian discipline. [40] With regard to Ximenes, the real author of the work, whatever doubts were entertained of his discretion, in the outset, they were completely dispelled by the results. All concurred in admiring the invincible energy of the man, who, in the face of such mighty obstacles, had so speedily effected this momentous revolution in the faith of a people, bred from childhood in the deadliest hostility to Christianity; [41] and the good archbishop Talavera was heard in the fulness of his heart to exclaim, that "Ximenes had achieved greater triumphs than even Ferdinand and Isabella; since they had conquered only the soil, while he had gained the souls of Granada!" [42] FOOTNOTES [1] "Hombre," says his son, the historian, of him, "de prudencia en negocios graves, de animo firme, asegurado con luenga experiencia de rencuentros i battallas ganadas." (Guerra de Granada, lib. 1, p. 9.) Oviedo dwells with sufficient amplification on the personal history and merits of this distinguished individual, in his garrulous reminiscences. Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 28. [2] Oviedo, at least, can find no better pedigree for him, than that of Adam. "Quanto á su linage él fué del linage de todos los humanos ó de aquel barro y subcesion de Adan." (Quincuagenas, MS. dial. de Talavera.) It is a very hard case, when a Castilian cannot make out a better genealogy for his hero. [3] Pedraza, Antiguedad de Granada, lib. 3, cap. 10.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 21. Talavera's correspondence with the queen, published in various works, but most correctly, probably, in the sixth volume of the Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., (Ilust. 13,) is not calculated to raise his reputation. His letters are little else than homilies on the love of company, dancing, and the like heinous offences. The whole savors more of the sharp twang of Puritanism than that of the Roman Catholic school. But bigotry is neutral ground, on which the most opposite sects may meet. [4] Pedraza, Antiguedad de Granada, lib. 3, cap. 10.--Marmol, lib. 1, cap. 21. Equivalent to 56,000 dollars of the present day; a sum which Pedraza makes do quite as hard duty, according to its magnitude, as the 500 pounds of Pope's Man of Ross. [5] Pedraza, ubi supra.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., dial. de Talavera. The worthy archbishop's benefactions on some occasions were of rather an extraordinary character. "Pidiendole limosna," says Pedraza, "Una muger que no tenia camisa, se entró en una casa, y se desnudó la suya y se la dio; diziendo con san Pedro, No tengo oro ni plata que darte, doyte lo que tengo." Antiguedad de Granada, lib. 3, cap. 10. [6] Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 21.--Pedraza, Antiguedad de Granada, ubi supra. [7] Fléchier, Hist. de Ximenes, p. 17.--Quintanilla, Archetypo, lib. 2, cap. 2.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 32.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS. These tracts were published at Granada, in 1505, in the European character, being the first books ever printed in the Arabic language, according to Dr. M'Crie, (Reformation in Spain, p. 70,) who cites Schnurrer, Bibl. Arabica, pp. 16-18. [8] Bleda, Corónica, lib. 5, cap. 23.--Pedraza, Antiguedad de Granada, lib. 3, cap. 10.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 21.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 29.--"Hacia lo que predicaba, é predicó lo que hizo," says Oviedo of the archbishop, briefly, "é así fué mucho provechoso é util en aquella ciudad para la conversion de los Moros." Quincuagenas, MS. [9] Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 23. [10] Ibid., ubi supra. [11] In the _pragmática_ dated Granada, October 30th, 1499, prohibiting silk apparel of any description, an exception was made in favor of the Moors, whose robes were usually of that material, among the wealthier classes. Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 120. [12] Another law, October 31st, 1499, provided against the disinheritance of Moorish children who had embraced Christianity, and secured, moreover, to the female converts a portion of the property which had fallen to the state on the conquest of Granada. (Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 5.)-- Llorente has reported this pragmatic with some inaccuracy. Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. p. 334. [13] Bleda, Corónica, lib. 5, cap. 23.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 29.-- Quintanilla, Archetypo, lib. 2, p. 54.--Suma de la Vida de Cisneros, MS. Ferdinand and Isabella, according to Ferreras, took counsel of sundry learned theologians and jurists, whether they could lawfully compel the Mahometans to become Christians, notwithstanding the treaty, which guaranteed to them the exercise of their religion. After repeated conferences of this erudite body, "il fut decidé," says the historian, "qu'on solliciteroit la conversion des Mahometans de la Ville et du Royaume de Grenade, en ordonnant à ceux qui ne voudroient pas embrasser la religion Chrétienne, de vendre leurs biens et de sortir du royaume." (Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. p. 194.) Such was the idea of solicitation entertained by these reverend casuists! The story, however, wants a better voucher than Ferreras. [14] The honest Robles appears to be of the latter opinion. "Alfin," says he, with _naïveté_, "con halagos, dadivas, y caricias, los truxo a conocimiento del verdadero Dios." Vida de Ximenez, p. 100. [15] Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 14.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 24.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 29.--Suma de la Vida de Cisneros, MS. [16] Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 14.--Quintanilla, Archetypo, fol. 55.-- The sound of bells, so unusual to Mahometan ears, pealing day and night from the newly consecrated mosques, gained Ximenes the appellation of _alfaqui campanero_ from the Granadines. Suma de la Vida de Cisneros, MS. [17] Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 25. Take for example the following provisions in the treaty. "Que si algun Moro tuviere alguna renegada por muger, no será apremiada á ser Christiana contra su voluntad, sino que será interrogada, en presencia de Christianos y de Moros, y se siguirá su voluntad; y lo mesmo se entenderá con los niños y niñas nacidos de Christiana y Moro. Que ningun Moro ni Mora serán apremiados á ser Christianos contra su voluntad; y que si alguna doncella, ó casada, ó viuda, por razon de algunos amores se quisiere tornar Christiana, tampoco será recebida, hasta ser interrogada." The whole treaty is given in _extenso_ by Marmol, and by no other author that I have seen. [18] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, lib. 1, fol. 29. [19] Robles, Rebelion de Moriscos, cap. 14.--Suma de la Vida de Cisneros, MS.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 30.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 25. Zegri assumed the baptismal name of the Great Captain, Gonzalo Hernandez, whose prowess he had experienced in a personal rencontre in the vega of Granada. Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, ubi supra.--Suma de la Vida de Cisneros, MS. [20] Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. p. 195. [21] According to Robles, (Rebelion de Moriscos, p. 104,) and the Suma de la Vida de Cisneros, 1,005,000; to Conde, (El Nubiense, Descripcion d'España, p. 4, note,) 80,000; to Gomez and others, 5000. There are scarcely any data for arriving at probability in this monstrous discrepancy. The famous library of the Ommeyades at Cordova was said to contain 600,000 volumes. It had long since been dissipated; and no similar collection had been attempted in Granada, where learning was never in that palmy state which it reached under the Cordovan dynasty. Still, however, learned men were to be found there, and the Moorish metropolis would naturally be the depository of such literary treasures as had escaped the general shipwreck of time and accident. On the whole, the estimate of Gomez would appear much too small, and that of Robles as disproportionately exaggerated. Conde, better instructed in Arabic lore than any of his predecessors, may be found, perhaps, here, as elsewhere, the best authority. [22] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, lib. 2, fol. 30.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 25.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 14.--Suma de la Vida de Cisneros, MS.--Quintanilla, Archetypo, p. 58. [23] Yet the archbishop might find some countenance for his fanaticism in the most polite capital of Europe. The faculty of Theology in Paris, some few years later, declared "que c'en était fait de la religion, si on permettait l'etude du Grec et de l'Hebreu!" Villers, Essai sur l'Esprit et l'Influence de la Réformation de Luther, (Paris, 1820,) p. 64, note. [24] Gibbon's argument, if it does not shake the foundations of the whole story of the Alexandrian conflagration, may at least raise a natural skepticism as to the pretended amount and value of the works destroyed. [25] The learned Granadine, Leo Africanus, who emigrated to Fez after the fall of the capital, notices a single collection of 3000 manuscripts belonging to an individual, which he saw in Algiers, whither they had been secretly brought by the Moriscoes from Spain.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, prólogo.--Casiri, Bibliotheca Escurialensis, tom. i. p. 172. [26] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 30.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, rey 30, cap. 10. [27] Casiri, Bibliotheca Escurialensis, tom. ii. p. 281.--Pedraza, Antiguedad de Granada, lib. 3, cap. 10. [28] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 31. There are some discrepancies, not important, however, between the narrative of Gomez and the other authorities. Gomez, considering his uncommon opportunities of information, is worth them all. [29] Suma de la Vida de Cisneros, MS.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, lib. 2, fol. 31.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 26. [30] Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 14.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 27, cap. 5.--Quintanilla, Archetype, p. 56.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 212. [31] Mariana, Hist. de España, ubi supra.--Bleda, Corónica, lib. 5, cap. 23.--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 11. [32] Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 25.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 212.--Quintanilla, Archetype, p. 56.--Bleda, Corónica, ubi supra. [33] Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, loc cit.--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, lib. 1, p. 11. That such confidence was justified, may be inferred from a common saying of Archbishop Talavera, "That Moorish works and Spanish faith were all that were wanting to make a good Christian." A bitter sarcasm this on his own countrymen! Pedraza, Antiguedad de Granada, lib. 3, cap. 10. [34] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 212.--Bleda, Corónica, loc. cit.-- Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, ubi supra. [35] Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 27, cap. 5.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, 14.--Suma de la Vida de Cisneros, MS. [36] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 32.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 14. [37] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, ubi supra. [38] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 33.--Suma de la Vida de Cisneros, MS. [39] Bleda, Corónica, lib. 5, cap. 23.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 27, cap. 5.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 215.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 27.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, lib. 2, fol. 32.-- Lanuza, Historias, tom. i. lib. 1, cap. 11.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1500.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 159.--The last author carries the number of converts in Granada and its _environs_ to 70,000. [40] "Tu vero inquies," he says, in a letter to the cardinal of Santa Cruz, "hisdem in snum Mahometem vivent animis, atque id jure merito suspicandum est. Durum namque majorum institute relinquere; attamen ego existimo, consultum optime fuisse ipsorum admittere postulata: paulatim namque nova superveniente disciplina, juvenun saltem et infantum atque eo tutius nepotum, inanibus illis superstitionibus abrasis, novis imbuentur ritibus. De senescentibus, qui callosis animis induruerunt, haud ego quidem id futurum inficior." Opus Epist., epist. 215.--Also, Carta de Gonzalo, MS. [41] "Magnae deinceps," says Gomez, "apud omnes veneration! Ximenius esse cospit.--Porro plus mentis acie videre quam solent homines credebatur, qufid re ancipiti, neque plane confirmata, barbara civitate adhoc suum Mahumetum spirante, tanza animi contentione, ut Christi doctrinam amplecterentur, laboraverat et effecerat." (De Rebus Gestis, fol. 33.) The panegyric of the Spaniard is endorsed by Fléchier, (Histoire de Ximenes, p. 119,) who, in the age of Louis XIV., displays all the bigotry of that of Ferdinand and Isabella. [42] Talavera, as I have already noticed, had caused the offices, catechisms, and other religious exercises to be translated into Arabic for the use of the converts; proposing to extend the translation at some future time to the great body of the Scriptures. That time had now arrived, but Ximenes vehemently remonstrated against the measure. "It would be throwing pearls before swine," said he, "to open the Scriptures to persons in their low state of ignorance, who could not fail, as St. Paul says, to wrest them to their own destruction. The word of God should be wrapped in discreet mystery from the vulgar, who feel little reverence for what is plain and obvious. It was for this reason, that our Saviour himself clothed his doctrines in parables, when he addressed the people. The Scriptures should be confined to the three ancient languages, which God with mystic import permitted to be inscribed over the head of his crucified Son; and the vernacular should be reserved for such devotional and moral treatises, as holy men indite, in order to quicken the soul, and turn it from the pursuit of worldly vanities to heavenly contemplation." De Rebus Gestis, fol. 32, 33. The narrowest opinion, as usual, prevailed, and Talavera abandoned his wise and benevolent purpose. The sagacious arguments of the primate lead his biographer, Gomez, to conclude, that he had a prophetic knowledge of the coming heresy of Luther, which owed so much of its success to the vernacular versions of the Scriptures; in which probable opinion he is faithfully echoed, as usual, by the good bishop of Nismes. Fléchier, Hist. de Ximenés, pp. 117-119. CHAPTER VII. RISING IN THE ALPUXARRAS.--DEATH OF ALONSO DE AGUILAR.--EDICT AGAINST THE MOORS. 1500-1502. Rising in the Alpuxarras.--Expedition to the Sierra Vermeja.--Alonso de Aguilar.--His Noble Character, and Death.--Bloody Rout of the Spaniards.-- Final Submission to Ferdinand.--Cruel Policy of the Victors.-- Commemorative Ballads.--Edict against the Moors,--Causes of Intolerance.-- Last Notice of the Moors under the Present Reign. While affairs went forward so triumphantly in the capital of Granada, they excited general discontent in other parts of that kingdom, especially the wild regions of the Alpuxarras. This range of maritime Alps, which stretches to the distance of seventeen leagues in a southeasterly direction from the Moorish capital, sending out its sierras like so many broad arms towards the Mediterranean, was thickly sprinkled with Moorish villages, cresting the bald summits of the mountains, or checkering the green slopes and valleys which lay between them. Its simple inhabitants, locked up within the lonely recesses of their hills, and accustomed to a life of penury and toil, had escaped the corruptions as well as refinements of civilization. In ancient times they had afforded a hardy militia for the princes of Granada; and they now exhibited an unshaken attachment to their ancient institutions and religion, which had been somewhat effaced in the great cities by more intimate intercourse with the Europeans. [1] These warlike mountaineers beheld with gathering resentment the faithless conduct pursued towards their countrymen, which, they had good reason to fear, would soon be extended to themselves; and their fiery passions were inflamed to an ungovernable height by the public apostasy of Granada. They at length resolved to anticipate any similar attempt on themselves by a general insurrection. They accordingly seized on the fortresses and strong passes throughout the country, and began as usual with forays into the lands of the Christians. These bold acts excited much alarm in the capital, and the count of Tendilla took vigorous measures for quenching the rebellion in its birth. Gonsalvo de Cordova, his early pupil, but who might now well be his master in the art of war, was at that time residing in Granada; and Tendilla availed himself of his assistance to enforce a hasty muster of levies, and march at once against the enemy. His first movement was against Huejar, a fortified town situated in one of the eastern ranges of the Alpuxarras, whose inhabitants had taken the lead in the insurrection. The enterprise was attended with more difficulty than was expected. "God's enemies," to borrow the charitable epithet of the Castilian chroniclers, had ploughed up the lands in the neighborhood; and, as the light cavalry of the Spaniards was working its way through the deep furrows, the Moors opened the canals which intersected the fields, and in a moment the horses were floundering up to their girths in the mire and water. Thus embarrassed in their progress, the Spaniards presented a fatal mark to the Moorish missiles, which rained on them with pitiless fury; and it was not without great efforts and considerable loss, that they gained a firm landing on the opposite side. Undismayed, however, they then charged the enemy with such vivacity, as compelled him to give way and take refuge within the defences of the town. No impediment could now check the ardor of the assailants. They threw themselves from their horses, and, bringing forward the scaling-ladders, planted them against the walls. Gonsalvo was the first to gain the summit; and, as a powerful Moor endeavored to thrust him from the topmost round of the ladder, he grasped the battlements firmly with his left hand and dealt the infidel such a blow with the sword in his right, as brought him headlong to the ground. He then leapt into the place, and was speedily followed by his troops. The enemy made a brief and ineffectual resistance. The greater part were put to the sword; the remainder, including the women and children, were made slaves, and the town was delivered up to pillage. [2] The severity of this military execution had not the effect of intimidating the insurgents; and the revolt wore so serious an aspect, that King Ferdinand found it necessary to take the field in person, which he did at the head of as complete and beautiful a body of Castilian chivalry as ever graced the campaigns of Granada. [3] Quitting Alhendin, the place of rendezvous, in the latter end of February, 1500, he directed his march on Lanjaron, one of the towns most active in the revolt, and perched high among the inaccessible fastnesses of the sierra, southeast of Granada. The inhabitants, trusting to the natural strength of a situation, which had once baffled the arms of the bold Moorish chief El Zagal, took no precautions to secure the passes. Ferdinand, relying on this, avoided the more direct avenue to the place; and, bringing his men by a circuitous route over dangerous ravines and dark and dizzy precipices, where the foot of the hunter had seldom ventured, succeeded at length, after incredible toil and hazard, in reaching an elevated point, which entirely commanded the Moorish fortress. Great was the dismay of the insurgents at the apparition of the Christian banners, streaming in triumph in the upper air, from the very pinnacles of the sierra. They stoutly persisted, however, in the refusal to surrender. But their works were too feeble to stand the assault of men, who had vanquished the more formidable obstacles of nature; and, after a short struggle, the place was carried by storm, and its wretched inmates experienced the same dreadful fate with those of Huejar. [4] At nearly the same time, the count of Lerin took several other fortified places in the Alpuxarras, in one of which he blew up a mosque filled with women and children. Hostilities were carried on with all the ferocity of a civil, or rather servile war; and the Spaniards, repudiating all the feelings of courtesy and generosity, which they had once shown to the same men, when dealing with them as honorable enemies, now regarded them only as rebellious vassals, or indeed slaves, whom the public safety required to be not merely chastised, but exterminated. These severities, added to the conviction of their own impotence, at length broke the spirit of the Moors, who were reduced to the most humble concessions; and the Catholic king, "unwilling out of his great clemency," says Abarca, "to stain his sword with the blood of all these wild beasts of the Alpuxarras," consented to terms, which may be deemed reasonable, at least in comparison with his previous policy. These were, the surrender of their arms and fortresses and the payment of the round sum of fifty thousand ducats. [5] As soon as tranquillity was re-established, measures were taken for securing it permanently, by introducing Christianity among the natives, without which they never could remain well affected to their present government. Holy men were therefore sent as missionaries, to admonish them, calmly and without violence, of their errors, and to instruct them in the great truths of revelation. [6] Various immunities were also proposed, as an additional incentive to conversion, including an entire exemption to the party from the payment of his share of the heavy mulct lately imposed. [7] The wisdom of these temperate measures became every day more visible in the conversion, not merely of the simple mountaineers, but of nearly all the population of the great cities of Baza, Guadix, and Almeria, who consented before the end of the year to abjure their ancient religion, and receive baptism. [8] This defection, however, caused great scandal among the more sturdy of their countrymen, and a new insurrection broke out on the eastern confines of the Alpuxarras, which was suppressed with similar circumstances of stern severity,. and a similar exaction of a heavy sum of money;--money, whose doubtful efficacy may be discerned, sometimes in staying, but more frequently in stimulating, the arm of persecution. [9] But while the murmurs of rebellion died away in the east, they were heard in thunders from the distant hills on the western borders of Granada. This district, comprehending the sierras Vermeja and Villa Luenga, in the neighborhood of Ronda, was peopled by a warlike race, among whom was the African tribe of Gandules, whose blood boiled with the same tropical fervor as that which glowed in the veins of their ancestors. They had early shown symptoms of discontent at the late proceedings in the capital. The duchess of Arcos, widow of the great marquis duke of Cadiz, whose estates lay in that quarter, [10] used her personal exertions to appease them; and the government made the most earnest assurances of its intention to respect whatever had been guaranteed by the treaty of capitulation. [11] But they had learned to place little trust in princes; and the rapidly extending apostasy of their countrymen exasperated them to such a degree, that they at length broke out in the most atrocious acts of violence; murdering the Christian missionaries, and kidnapping, if report be true, many Spaniards of both sexes, whom they sold as slaves in Africa. They were accused, with far more probability, of entering into a secret correspondence with their brethren on the opposite shore, in order to secure their support in the meditated revolt. [12] The government displayed its usual promptness and energy on this occasion. Orders were issued to the principal chiefs and cities of Andalusia, to muster their forces with all possible despatch, and concentrate them on Ronda. The summons was obeyed with such alacrity, that, in the course of a very few weeks, the streets of that busy city were thronged with a shining array of warriors drawn from all the principal towns of Andalusia. Seville sent three hundred horse and two thousand foot. The principal leaders of the expedition were the count of Cifuentes, who, as assistant of Seville, commanded the troops of that city; the count of Ureña, and Alonso de Aguilar, elder brother of the Great Captain, and distinguished like him for the highest qualities of mind and person. It was determined by the chiefs to strike at once into the heart of the Sierra Vermeja, or Red Sierra, as it was called from the color of its rocks, rising to the east of Ronda, and the principal theatre of insurrection. On the 18th of March, 1501, the little army encamped before Monarda, on the skirts of a mountain, where the Moors were understood to have assembled in considerable force. They had not been long in these quarters before parties of the enemy were seen hovering along the slopes of the mountain, from which the Christian camp was divided by a narrow river,--the Rio Verde, probably, which has gained such mournful celebrity in Spanish song. [13] Aguilar's troops, who occupied the van, were so much roused by the sight of the enemy, that a small party, seizing a banner, rushed across the stream without orders, in pursuit of them. The odds, however, were so great, that they would have been severely handled, had not Aguilar, while he bitterly condemned their temerity, advanced promptly to their support with the remainder of his corps. The count of Ureña followed with the central division, leaving the count of Cifuentes with the troops of Seville to protect the camp. [14] The Moors fell back as the Christians advanced, and, retreating nimbly from point to point, led them up the rugged steeps far into the recesses of the mountains. At length they reached an open level, encompassed on all sides by a natural rampart of rocks, where they had deposited their valuable effects, together with their wives and children. The latter, at sight of the invaders, uttered dismal cries, and fled into the remoter depths of the sierra. The Christians were too much attracted by the rich spoil before them to think of following, and dispersed in every direction in quest of plunder, with all the heedlessness and insubordination of raw, inexperienced levies. It was in vain, that Alonso de Aguilar reminded them, that their wily enemy was still unconquered; or that he endeavored to force them into the ranks again, and restore order. No one heeded his call, or thought of anything beyond the present moment, and of securing as much booty to himself as he could carry. The Moors, in the mean while, finding themselves no longer pursued, were aware of the occupation of the Christians, whom they not improbably had purposely decoyed into the snare. They resolved to return to the scene of action, and surprise their incautious enemy. Stealthily advancing, therefore, under the shadows of night, now falling thick around, they poured through the rocky defiles of the inclosure upon the astonished Spaniards. An unlucky explosion, at this crisis, of a cask of powder, into which a spark had accidentally fallen, threw a broad glare over the scene, and revealed for a moment the situation of the hostile parties;--the Spaniards in the utmost disorder, many of them without arms, and staggering under the weight of their fatal booty; while their enemies were seen gliding like so many demons of darkness through every crevice and avenue of the inclosure, in the act of springing on their devoted victims. This appalling spectacle, vanishing almost as soon as seen, and followed by the hideous yells and war-cries of the assailants, struck a panic into the hearts of the soldiers, who fled, scarcely offering any resistance. The darkness of the night was as favorable to the Moors, familiar with all the intricacies of the ground, as it was fatal to the Christians, who, bewildered in the mazes of the sierra, and losing their footing at every step, fell under the swords of their pursuers, or went down the dark gulfs and precipices which yawned all around. [15] Amidst this dreadful confusion, the count of Ureña succeeded in gaining a lower level of the sierra, where he halted and endeavored to rally his panic-struck followers. His noble comrade, Alonso de Aguilar, still maintained his position on the heights above, refusing all entreaties of his followers to attempt a retreat. "When," said he proudly, "was the banner of Aguilar ever known to fly from the field?" His eldest son, the heir of his house and honors, Don Pedro de Cordova, a youth of great promise, fought at his side. He had received a severe wound on the head from a stone, and a javelin had pierced quite through his leg. With one knee resting on the ground, however, he still made a brave defence with his sword. The sight was too much for the father, and he implored him to suffer himself to be removed from the field. "Let not the hopes of our house be crushed at a single blow," said he; "go, my son, live as becomes a Christian knight,--live, and cherish your desolate mother." All his entreaties were fruitless, however; and the gallant boy refused to leave his father's side, till he was forcibly borne away by the attendants, who fortunately succeeded in bringing him in safety to the station occupied by the count of Ureña. [16] Meantime the brave little band of cavaliers, who remained true to Aguilar, had fallen one after another; and the chief, left almost alone, retreated to a huge rock which rose in the middle of the plain, and, placing his back against it, still made fight, though weakened by loss of blood, like a lion at bay, against his enemies. [17] In this situation he was pressed so hard by a Moor of uncommon size and strength, that he was compelled to turn and close with him in single combat. The strife was long and desperate, till Don Alonso, whose corselet had become unlaced in the previous struggle, having--received a severe wound in the breast, followed by another on the head, grappled closely with his adversary, and they came rolling on the ground together. The Moor remained uppermost; but the spirit of the Spanish cavalier had not sunk with his strength, and he proudly exclaimed, as if to intimidate his enemy, "I am Don Alonso de Aguilar;" to which the other rejoined, "And I am the Feri de Ben Estepar," a well-known name of terror to the Christians. The sound of this detested name roused all the vengeance of the dying hero; and, grasping his foe in mortal agony, he rallied his strength for a final blow; but it was too late,-his hand failed, and he was soon despatched by the dagger of his more vigorous rival. [18] Thus fell Alonso Hernandez de Cordova, or Alonso de Aguilar, as he is commonly called from the land where his family estates lay. [19] "He was of the greatest authority among the grandees of his time," says Father Abarca, "for his lineage, personal character, large domains, and the high posts which he filled, both in peace and war. More than forty years of his life he served against the infidel, under the banner of his house in boyhood, and as leader of that same banner in later life, or as viceroy of Andalusia and commander of the royal armies. He was the fifth lord of his warlike and pious house who had fallen fighting for their country and religion against the accursed sect of Mahomet. And there is good reason to believe," continues the same orthodox authority, "that his soul has received the glorious reward of the Christian soldier; since he was armed on that very morning with the blessed sacraments of confession and communion." [20] The victorious Moors, all this time, were driving the unresisting Spaniards, like so many terrified deer, down the dark steeps of the sierra. The count of Ureña, who had seen his son stretched by his side, and received a severe wound himself, made the most desperate efforts to rally the fugitives, but was at length swept away by the torrent. Trusting himself to a faithful adalid, who knew the passes, he succeeded with much difficulty in reaching the foot of the mountain, with such a small remnant of his followers as could keep in his track. [21] Fortunately, he there found the count of Cifuentes, who had crossed the river with the rearguard, and encamped on a rising ground in the neighborhood. Under favor of this strong position, the latter commander and his brave Sevillians, all fresh for action, were enabled to cover the shattered remains of the Spaniards, and beat off the assaults of their enemies till the break of morn, when they vanished like so many foul birds of night into the recesses of the mountains. The rising day, which dispersed their foes, now revealed to the Christians the dreadful extent of their own losses. Few were to be seen of all that proud array, which had marched up the heights so confidently under the banners of their ill-fated chiefs the preceding evening. The bloody roll of slaughter, besides the common file, was graced with the names of the best and bravest of the Christian knighthood, Among the number was Francisco Ramirez de Madrid, the distinguished engineer, who had contributed so essentially to the success of the Granadine war. [22] The sad tidings of the defeat soon spread throughout the country, occasioning a sensation such as had not been felt since the tragic affair of the Axarquia. Men could scarcely credit that so much mischief could be inflicted by an outcast race, who, whatever terror they once inspired, had long since been regarded with indifference or contempt. Every Spaniard seemed to consider himself in some way or other involved in the disgrace; and the most spirited exertions were made on all sides to retrieve it. By the beginning of April, King Ferdinand found himself at Ronda, at the head of a strong body of troops, which he determined to lead in person, notwithstanding the remonstrances of his courtiers, into the heart of the Sierra, and take bloody vengeance on the rebels. These latter, however, far from being encouraged, were appalled by the extent of their own success; and, as the note of warlike preparation reached them in their fastnesses, they felt their temerity in thus bringing the whole weight of the Castilian monarchy on their heads. They accordingly abandoned all thoughts of further resistance, and lost no time in sending deputies to the king's camp, to deprecate his anger, and sue in the most submissive terms for pardon. Ferdinand, though far from vindictive, was less open to pity than the queen; and in the present instance he indulged in a full measure of the indignation, with which sovereigns, naturally identifying themselves with the state, are wont to regard rebellion, by viewing it in the aggravated light of a personal offence. After some hesitation, however, his prudence got the better of his passions, as he reflected that he was in a situation to dictate the terms of victory, without paying the usual price for it. His past experience seems to have convinced him of the hopelessness of infusing sentiments of loyalty in a Mussulman towards a Christian prince; for, while he granted a general amnesty to those concerned in the insurrection, it was only on the alternative of baptism or exile, engaging at the same time to provide conveyance for such as chose to leave the country, on the payment of ten doblas of gold a head. [23.] These engagements were punctually fulfilled. The Moorish emigrants were transported in public galleys from Estepona to the Barbary coast. The number, however, was probably small; by far the greater part being obliged, however reluctantly, from want of funds, to remain and be baptized. "They would never have stayed," says Bleda, "if they could have mustered the ten doblas of gold; a circumstance," continues that charitable writer, "which shows with what levity they received baptism, and for what paltry considerations they could be guilty of such sacrilegious hypocrisy!" [24] But, although every spark of insurrection was thus effectually extinguished, it was long, very long, before the Spanish nation could recover from the blow, or forget the sad story of its disaster in the Red Sierra. It became the theme, not only of chronicle, but of song; the note of sorrow was prolonged in many a plaintive _romance_, and the names of Aguilar and his unfortunate companions were embalmed in that beautiful minstrelsy, scarcely less imperishable, and far more touching, than the stately and elaborate records of history. [25] The popular feeling was displayed after another fashion in regard to the count of Ureña and his followers, who were accused of deserting their posts in the hour of peril; and more than one ballad of the time reproachfully demanded an account from him of the brave companions in arms whom he had left in the Sierra. [26] The imputation on this gallant nobleman appears wholly undeserved; for certainly he was not called on to throw away his own life and those of his brave followers, in a cause perfectly desperate, for a chimerical point of honor. And, so far from forfeiting the favor of his sovereigns by his conduct on this occasion, he was maintained by them in the same high stations, which he before held, and which he continued to fill with dignity to a good old age. [27] It was about seventy years after this event, in 1570, that the duke of Arcos, descended from the great marquis of Cadiz, and from this same count of Ureña, led an expedition into the Sierra Vermeja, in order to suppress a similar insurrection of the Moriscoes. Among the party were many of the descendants and kinsmen of those who had fought under Aguilar. It was the first time since that these rude passes had been trodden by Christian feet; but the traditions of early childhood had made every inch of ground familiar to the soldiers. Some way up the eminence, they recognized the point at which the count of Ureña had made his stand; and further still, the fatal plain, belted round with its dark rampart of rocks, where the strife had been hottest. Scattered fragments of arms and harness still lay rusting on the ground, which was covered with the bones of the warriors, that had lain for more than half a century unburied and bleaching in the sun. [28] Here was the spot on which the brave son of Aguilar had fought so sturdily by his father's side; and there the huge rock, at whose foot the chieftain had fallen, throwing its dark shadow over the remains of the noble dead, who lay sleeping around. The strongly marked features of the ground called up all the circumstances, which the soldiers had gathered from tradition; their hearts beat high, as they recapitulated them one to another; and the tears, says the eloquent historian who tells the story, fell fast down their iron cheeks, as they gazed on the sad relics, and offered up a soldier's prayer for the heroic souls which once animated them. [29] Tranquillity was now restored throughout the wide borders of Granada. The banner of the Cross floated triumphantly over the whole extent of its wild sierras, its broad valleys, and populous cities. Every Moor, in exterior at least, had become a Christian. Every mosque had been converted into a Christian church. Still the country was not entirely purified from the stain of Islamism, since many professing their ancient faith were scattered over different parts of the kingdom of Castile, where they had been long resident before the surrender of their capital. The late events seemed to have no other effect than to harden them in error; and the Spanish government saw with alarm the pernicious influence of their example and persuasion, in shaking the infirm faith of the new converts. To obviate this, an ordinance was published, in the summer of 1501, prohibiting all intercourse between these Moors and the orthodox kingdom of Granada. [30] At length, however, convinced that there was no other way to save the precious seed from being choked by the thorns of infidelity than to eradicate them altogether, the sovereigns came to the extraordinary resolution of offering them the alternative of baptism or exile. They issued a pragmática to that effect from Seville, February 12th, 1502. After a preamble, duly setting forth the obligations of gratitude on the Castilians to drive God's enemies from the land, which he in his good time had delivered into their hands, and the numerous backslidings occasioned among the new converts by their intercourse with their unbaptized brethren, the act goes on to state, in much the same terms with the famous ordinance against the Jews, that all the unbaptized Moors in the kingdoms of Castile and Leon, above fourteen years of age if males, and twelve if females, must leave the country by the end of April following; that they might sell their property in the mean time, and take the proceeds in anything save gold and silver and merchandise regularly prohibited; and, finally, that they might emigrate to any foreign country, except the dominions of the Grand Turk, and such parts of Africa as Spain was then at war with. Obedience to these severe provisions was enforced by the penalties of death and confiscation of property. [31] This stern edict, so closely modelled on that against the Jews, must have been even more grievous in its application. [32] For the Jews may be said to have been denizens almost equally of every country; while the Moors, excluded from a retreat among their countrymen on the African shore, were sent into the lands of enemies or strangers. The former, moreover, were far better qualified by their natural shrewdness and commercial habits for disposing of their property advantageously, than the simple, inexperienced Moors, skilled in little else than husbandry or rude mechanic arts. We have nowhere met with any estimate of the number who migrated on this occasion. The Castilian writers pass over the whole affair in a very few words; not, indeed, as is too evident, from any feelings of disapprobation, but from its insignificance in a political view. Their silence implies a very inconsiderable amount of emigrants; a circumstance not to-be wondered at, as there were very few, probably, who would not sooner imitate their Granadine brethren, in assuming the mask of Christianity, than encounter exile under all the aggravated miseries with which it was accompanied. [33] Castile might now boast, the first time for eight centuries, that every outward stain, at least, of infidelity, was purified from her bosom. But how had this been accomplished? By the most detestable expedients which sophistry could devise, and oppression execute; and that, too, under an enlightened government, proposing to be guided solely by a conscientious regard for duty. To comprehend this more fully, it will be necessary to take a brief view of public sentiment in matters of religion at that time. It is a singular paradox, that Christianity, whose doctrines inculcate unbounded charity, should have been made so often an engine of persecution; while Mahometanism, whose principles are those of avowed intolerance, should have exhibited, at least till later times, a truly philosophical spirit of toleration. [34] Even the first victorious disciples of the prophet, glowing with all the fiery zeal of proselytism, were content with the exaction of tribute from the vanquished; at least, more vindictive feelings were reserved only for idolaters, who did not, like the Jews and Christians, acknowledge with themselves the unity of God. With these latter denominations they had obvious sympathy, since it was their creed which formed the basis of their own. [35] In Spain, where the fiery temperament of the Arab was gradually softened under the influence of a temperate climate and higher mental culture, the toleration of the Jews and Christians, as we have already had occasion to notice, was so remarkable, that, within a few years after the conquest, we find them not only protected in the enjoyment of civil and religious freedom, but mingling on terms almost of equality with their conquerors. It is not necessary to inquire here, how far the different policy of the Christians was owing to the peculiar constitution of their hierarchy, which, composed of a spiritual militia drawn from every country in Europe, was cut off by its position from all human sympathies, and attached to no interests but its own; which availed itself of the superior science and reputed sanctity, that were supposed to have given it the key to the dread mysteries of a future life, not to enlighten but to enslave the minds of a credulous world; and which, making its own tenets the only standard of faith, its own rites and ceremonial the only evidence of virtue, obliterated the great laws of morality, written by the divine hand on every heart, and gradually built up a system of exclusiveness and intolerance most repugnant to the mild and charitable religion of Jesus Christ. Before the close of the fifteenth century, several circumstances operated to sharpen the edge of intolerance, especially against the Arabs. The Turks, whose political consideration of late years had made them the peculiar representatives and champions of Mahometanism, had shown a ferocity and cruelty in their treatment of the Christians, which brought general odium on all the professors of their faith, and on the Moors, of course, though most undeservedly, in common with the rest. The bold, heterodox doctrines, also, which had occasionally broken forth in different parts of Europe in the fifteenth century, like so many faint streaks of light ushering in the glorious morn of the Reformation, had roused the alarm of the champions of the church, and kindled on more than one occasion the fires of persecution; and, before the close of the period, the Inquisition was introduced into Spain. From that disastrous hour, religion wore a new aspect in this unhappy country. The spirit of intolerance, no longer hooded in the darkness of the cloister, now stalked abroad in all his terrors. Zeal was exalted into fanaticism, and a rational spirit of proselytism, into one of fiendish persecution. It was not enough now, as formerly, to conform passively to the doctrines of the church, but it was enjoined to make war on all who refused them. The natural feelings of compunction in the discharge of this sad duty was a crime; and the tear of sympathy, wrung out by the sight of mortal agonies, was an offence to be expiated by humiliating penance. The most frightful maxims were deliberately engrafted into the code of morals. Any one, it was said, might conscientiously kill an apostate wherever he could meet him. There was some doubt whether a man might slay his own father, if a heretic or infidel, but none whatever as to his right, in that event, to take away the life of his son or of his brother. [36] These maxims were not a dead letter, but of most active operation, as the sad records of the dread tribunal too well prove. The character of the nation underwent a melancholy change. The milk of charity, nay of human feeling, was soured in every bosom. The liberality of the old Spanish cavalier gave way to the fiery fanaticism of the monk. The taste for blood, once gratified, begat a cannibal appetite in the people, who, cheered on by the frantic clergy, seemed to vie with one another in the eagerness with which they ran down the miserable game of the Inquisition. It was at this very time, when the infernal monster, gorged but not sated with human sacrifice, was crying aloud for fresh victims, that Granada surrendered to the Spaniards, under the solemn guaranty of the full enjoyment of civil and religious liberty. The treaty of capitulation granted too much, or too little,--too little for an independent state, too much for one whose existence was now merged in that of a greater; for it secured to the Moors privileges in some respects superior to those of the Castilians, and to the prejudice of the latter. Such, for example, was the permission to trade with the Barbary coast, and with the various places in Castile and Andalusia, without paying the duties imposed on the Spaniards themselves; [37] and that article, again, by which runaway Moorish slaves from other parts of the kingdom were made free and incapable of being reclaimed by their masters, if they could reach Granada. [38] The former of these provisions struck at the commercial profits of the Spaniards, the latter directly at their property. It is not too much to say, that such a treaty, depending for its observance on the good faith and forbearance of the stronger party, would not hold together a year in any country of Christendom, even at the present day, before some flaw or pretext would be devised to evade it. How much greater was the probability of this in the present case, where the weaker party was viewed with all the accumulated odium of long hereditary hostility and religious rancor! The work of conversion, on which the Christians, no doubt, much relied, was attended with greater difficulties than had been anticipated by the conquerors. It was now found, that, while the Moors retained their present faith, they would be much better affected towards their countrymen in Africa, than to the nation with which they were incorporated. In short, Spain still had enemies in her bosom; and reports were rife in every quarter, of their secret intelligence with the Barbary states, and of Christians kidnapped to be sold as slaves to Algerine corsairs. Such tales, greedily circulated and swallowed, soon begat general alarm; and men are not apt to be over-scrupulous as to measures which they deem essential to their personal safety. The zealous attempt to bring about conversion by preaching and expostulation was fair and commendable. The intervention of bribes and promises, if it violated the spirit, did not, at least, the letter of the treaty. The application of force to a few of the most refractory, who by their blind obstinacy were excluding a whole nation from the benefits of redemption, was to be defended on other grounds; and these were not wanting to cunning theologians, who considered that the sanctity of the end justified extraordinary means, and that, where the eternal interests of the soul were at stake, the force of promises and the faith of treaties were equally nugatory. [39] But the _chef-d'oeuvre_ of monkish casuistry was the argument imputed to Ximenes for depriving the Moors of the benefits of the treaty, as a legitimate consequence of the rebellion, into which they had been driven by his own malpractices. This proposition, however, far from outraging the feelings of the nation, well drilled by this time in the metaphysics of the cloister, fell short of them, if we are to judge from recommendations of a still more questionable import, urged, though ineffectually, on the sovereigns at this very time, from the highest quarter. [40] Such are the frightful results to which the fairest mind may be led, when it introduces the refinements of logic into the discussions of duty; when, proposing to achieve some great good, whether in politics or religion, it conceives that the importance of the object authorizes a departure from the plain principles of morality, which regulate the ordinary affairs of life; and when, blending these higher interests with those of a personal nature, it becomes incapable of discriminating between them, and is led insensibly to act from selfish motives, while it fondly imagines itself obeying only the conscientious dictates of duty. [41] With these events may be said to terminate the history of the Moors, or the Moriscoes, as henceforth called, under the present reign. Eight centuries had elapsed since their first occupation of the country; during which period they had exhibited all the various phases of civilization, from its dawn to its decline. Ten years had sufficed to overturn the splendid remains of this powerful empire; and ten more, for its nominal conversion to Christianity. A long century of persecution, of unmitigated and unmerited suffering, was to follow, before the whole was to be consummated by the expulsion of this unhappy race from the Peninsula. Their story, in this latter period, furnishes one of the most memorable examples in history, of the impotence of persecution, even in support of a good cause against a bad one. It is a lesson that cannot be too deeply pondered through every succeeding age. The fires of the Inquisition are, indeed, extinguished, probably to be lighted no more. But where is the land which can boast that the spirit of intolerance, which forms the very breath of persecution, is altogether extinct in its bosom? FOOTNOTES [1] Alpuxarras,--an Arabic word, signifying "land of warriors," according to Salazar de Mendoza. (Monarquía, tom. ii. p. 138.) According to the more accurate and learned Conde, it is derived from an Arabic term for "pasturage." (El Nubiense, Descripcion de España, p. 187.) "La Alpuxarra, aquessa sierra que al Sol la cervis lavanta y que poblada de Villas, es Mar de peñas, y plantas, adonde sus poblaciones ondas navegan de plata." Calderon, (Comedias, (Madrid, 1760,) tom. i. p. 353,) whose gorgeous muse sheds a blaze of glory over the rudest scenes. [2] Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, tom. i. lib. 1, cap. 28.--Quintana, Españoles Célebres, tom. i. p. 239.--Bleda, Corónica, lib. 5, cap. 23.-- Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 159.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 338.--Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 12. [3] If we are to believe Martyr, the royal force amounted to 80,000 foot and 15,000 horse; so large an army, so promptly brought into the field, would suggest high ideas of the resources of the nation; too high indeed to gain credit, even from Martyr, without confirmation. [4] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 215.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 338.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 3, cap. 45.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1500. [5] Footnote: Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 28.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 338.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 159.--Bleda, Corónica, lib. 5, cap. 24. [6] Bleda, Corónica, lib. 5, cap. 24.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 165. [7] Privilegios á los Moros de Valdelecrin y las Alpuxarras que se convirtieren, á 30 de Julio de 1500. Archive de Simancas, apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. apend. 14. [8] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1500.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 10. [9] Footnote: Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1501.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 4, cap. 27, 31. [10] The great marquis of Cadiz was third count of Arcos, from which his descendants took their title on the resumption of Cadiz by the crown after his death. Mendoza, Dignidades, lib. 3, cap. 8, 17. [11] See two letters dated Seville, January and February, 1500, addressed by Ferdinand and Isabella to the inhabitants of the Serrania de Ronda, preserved in the archives of Simancas, apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 15. [12] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 165.--Bleda, Corónica, lib. 5, cap. 25.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 221. The complaints of the Spanish and African Moors to the Sultan of Egypt, or of Babylon, as he was then usually styled, had drawn from that prince sharp remonstrances to the Catholic sovereigns against their persecutions of the Moslems, accompanied by menaces of strict retaliation on the Christians in his dominions. In order to avert such calamitous consequences, Peter Martyr was sent as ambassador to Egypt. He left Granada in August, 1501, proceeded to Venice, and embarked there for Alexandria, which place he reached in December. Though cautioned on his arrival, that his mission, in the present exasperated state of feeling at the court, might cost him his head, the dauntless envoy sailed up the Nile under a Mameluke guard to Grand Cairo. Far from experiencing any outrage, however, he was courteously received by the Sultan; although the ambassador declined compromising the dignity of the court he represented, by paying the usual humiliating mark of obeisance, in prostrating himself on the ground in the royal presence; an independent bearing highly satisfactory to the Castilian historians. (See Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 12.) He had three audiences, in which he succeeded so completely in effacing the unfavorable impressions of the Moslem prince, that the latter not only dismissed him with liberal presents, but granted, at his request, several important privileges to the Christian residents, and the pilgrims to the Holy Land, which lay within his dominions. Martyr's account of this interesting visit, which gave him ample opportunity for studying the manners of a nation, and seeing the stupendous monuments of ancient art, then little familiar to Europeans, was published in Latin, under the title of "De Legatione Babylonica," in three books, appended to his more celebrated "Decades de Rebus Oceanicis et Novo Orbe." Mazzuchelli, (Sorittori d'ltalia, race Anghiera,) notices an edition which he had seen published separately, without date or name of the printer. [13] "Rio Verde, Rio Verde, Tinto va en sangre viva;"-- Percy, in his well-known version of one of these agreeable _romances_, adopts the tame epithet of "gentle river," from the awkwardness, he says, of the literal translation of "verdant river." He was not aware, it appears, that the Spanish was a proper name. (See Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, (London, 1812,) vol. i. p. 357.) The more faithful version of "green river," however, would have nothing very unpoetical in it; though our gifted countryman, Bryant seems to intimate, by his omission, somewhat of a similar difficulty, in his agreeable stanzas on the beautiful stream of that name in New England. [14] Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, año 1501.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. p. 340.--Bleda, Corónica, lib. 5, cap. 26.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 165. "Fue muy gentil capitan," says Oviedo, speaking of this latter nobleman, "y valiente lanza; y rauchas vezes dio testimonio grande de su animoso esfuerzo." Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 36. [15] Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 340.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 4, cap. 33.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 10.-- Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 165.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 28. [16] Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 13.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. 2, fol. 340.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 28.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 36. The boy, who lived to man's estate, was afterwards created marquis of Priego by the Catholic sovereigns. Salazar de Mendoza, Dignidades, lib. 2, cap. 13. [17] It is the simile of the fine old ballad: "Solo queda Don Alonso Su campaña es acabada Pelea como un Leon Pero poco aprovechaba." [18] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., ubi supra.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. ubi supra.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 10.-- Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, p. 13.--Sandoval, Hist. Del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 5. According to Hyta's prose, Aguilar had first despatched more than thirty Moors with his own hand. (Guerras de Granada, part. i. p. 568.) The ballad, with more discretion, does not vouch for any particular number. "Don Alonso en este tiempo Muy gran batalla hacia, El cavallo le havian muerto, Por muralla le tenia. Y arrimado a un gran peñon Con valor se defendia: Muchos Moros tiene muertos, Pero poco le valia. Porque sobre el cargan muchos, Y le dan grandes heridas, Tantas que cayó allí muerto Entre la gente enemiga." The warrior's death is summed up with an artless brevity, that would be affectation in more studied composition. "Muerto queda Don Alonso, Y eterna fama ganada." [19] Paolo Giovio finds an etymology for the name in the eagle (aguila), assumed as the device of the warlike ancestors of Don Alonso. St. Ferdinand of Castile, in consideration of the services of this illustrious house at the taking of Cordova, in 1236, allowed it to bear as a cognomen the name of that city. This branch, however, still continued to be distinguished by their territorial epithet of Aguilar, although Don Alonso's brother, the Great Captain, as we have seen, was more generally known by that of Cordova. Vita Magni Gonsalvi, fol. 204. [20] Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol 340, 341. The hero's body, left on the field of battle, was treated with decent respect by the Moors, who restored it to King Ferdinand; and the sovereigns caused it to be interred with all suitable pomp in the church of St. Hypolito at Cordova. Many years afterwards the marchioness of Priego, his descendant, had the tomb opened; and, on examining the mouldering remains, the iron head of a lance, received in his last mortal struggle, was found buried in the bones. Bleda, Corónica, lib. 5, cap. 26. [21] "Tambien el Conde de Urena, Mal herido en demasia, Se sale de la batalla Llevado por una guia. "Que sabia bien la senda Que de la Sierra salia: Muchos Moros dexaba muertos Por su grande valentia. "Tambien algunos se escapan, Que al buen Conde le seguian." Oviedo, speaking of this retreat of the good count and his followers, says, "Volvieron las riendas a sus caballos, y se retiraron a mas que galope por la multitud de los Infieles." Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 36. [22] Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, año 1501.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1501.--Bleda, Corónica, lib. 5, cap. 26.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 36. For a more particular notice of Ramirez, see Part I. Chapter 13, of this History. [23] Bleda, Corónica, lib. 5, cap. 26, 27.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 16.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 165.--Mariana, Hist. de España, lib. 27, cap. 5.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 28. [24] Corónica, lib. 5, cap. 27. The Curate of Los Palacios disposes of the Moors rather summarily; "The Christians stripped them, gave them a free passage, and sent them to the devil!" Reyes Católicos, cap. 165. [25] According to one of the _romances_, cited by Hyta, the expedition of Aguilar was a piece of romantic Quixotism, occasioned by King Ferdinand's challenging the bravest of his knights to plant his banner on the summits of the Alpuxarras. "Qual de vosotros, amigos, Ira a la Sierra mañana, A poner mi Real pendon Encima de la Alpuxarra?" All shrunk from the perilous emprise, till Alonso de Aguilar stepped forward and boldly assumed it for himself. "A todos tiembla la barba, Sino fuera don Alonso, Que de Aguilar se llamaba. Levantose en pie ante el Rey De esta manera le habla. "Aquesa empresa, Señor, Para mi estaba guardada, Que mi senora la reyna Ya me la tiene mandada. "Alegrose mucho el Rey Por la oferta que le daba, Au no era amanecido Don Alonso ya cavalga." These popular ditties, it cannot be denied, are slippery authorities for any important fact, unless supported by more direct historic testimony. When composed, however, by contemporaries, or those who lived near the time, they may very naturally record many true details, too insignificant in their consequences to attract the notice of history. The ballad translated with so much elaborate simplicity by Percy, is chiefly taken up, as the English reader may remember, with the exploits of a Sevillian hero named Saavedra. No such personage is noticed, as far as I am aware, by the Spanish chroniclers. The name of Saavedra, however, appears to have been a familiar one in Seville, and occurs two or three times in the muster-roll of nobles and cavaliers of that city, who joined King Ferdinand's army in the preceding year, 1500. Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, eodem anno. [26] Mendoza notices these splenetic effusions (Guerra de Granada, p. 13); and Bleda (Corónica, p. 636) cites the following couplet from one of them. "Decid, conde de Ureña, Don Alonso donde queda." [27] The Venetian ambassador, Navagiero, saw the count of Ureña at Ossuna, in 1526. He was enjoying a green old age, or, as the minister expresses it, "molto vecchio e gentil corteggiano però." "Diseases," said the veteran good-humoredly, "sometimes visit me, but seldom tarry long; for my body is like a crazy old inn, where travellers find such poor fare, that they merely touch and go." Viaggio, fol. 17. [28] Guerra de Granada, p. 301.--Compare the similar painting of Tacitus, in the scene where Germanicus pays the last sad offices to the remains of Varus and his legions. "Dein semiruto vallo, humili fossa, accisae jam reliquiae consedisse intelligebantur: medio campi albentia ossa, ut fugerant, ut restiterant, disjecta vel aggerata; adjacebant fragmina telorum, equorumque artus, simul truncis arborum antefixa ora."(Annales, lib. 1, sect. 61.) Mendoza falls nothing short of this celebrated description of the Roman historian; "Pan etiam Arcadiâ dicat se judice victum." [29] Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, pp. 300-302. The Moorish insurrection of 1570 was attended with at least one good result, in calling forth this historic masterpiece, the work of the accomplished Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, accomplished alike as a statesman, warrior, and historian. His "Guerra de Granada," confined as it is to a barren fragment of Moorish history, displays such liberal sentiments, (too liberal, indeed, to permit its publication till long after its author's death,) profound reflection, and classic elegance of style, as well entitled him to the appellation of the Spanish Sallust. [30] Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 6. [31] Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 7. [32] Bleda anxiously claims the credit of the act of expulsion for Fray Thomas de Torquemada, of inquisitorial memory. (Corónica, p. 640.) That eminent personage had, indeed, been dead some years; but this edict was so obviously suggested by that against the Jews, that it may be considered as the result of his principles, if not directly taught by him. Thus it is, "the evil that men do lives after them." [33] The Castilian writers, especially the dramatic, have not been insensible to the poetical situations afforded by the distresses of the banished Moriscoes. Their sympathy for the exiles, however, is whimsically enough contrasted by an orthodox anxiety to justify the conduct of their own government. The reader may recollect a pertinent example in the story of Sancho's Moorish friend, Ricote. Don Quixote, part. 2, cap. 54. [34] The _spirit of toleration_ professed by the Moors, indeed, was made a principal argument against them in the archbishop of Valencia's memorial to Philip III. The Mahometans would seem the better Christians of the two. See Geddes, Miscellaneous Tracts, (London, 1702-6,) vol. i. p. 94. [35] Heeren seems willing to countenance the learned Pluquet in regarding Islamism, in its ancient form, as one of the modifications of Christianity; placing the principal difference between that and Socinianism, for example, in the mere rites of circumcision and baptism. (Essai sur l'Influence des Croisades, traduit par Villers, (Paris, 1808,) p. 175, not.) "The Mussulmans," says Sir William Jones, "are a sort of heterodox Christians, if Locke reasons justly, because they firmly believe the immaculate conception, divine character, and miracles of the Messiah; heterodox in denying vehemently his character of Son, and his equality, as God, with the Father, of whose unity and attributes they entertain and express the most awful ideas." See his Dissertation on the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India; Works, (London, 1799,) vol. i. p. 279. [36] See the bishop of Orihuela's treatise, "De Bello Sacro," etc., cited by the industrious Clemencin. (Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 15.) The Moors and Jews, of course, stood no chance in this code; the reverend father expresses an opinion, with which Bleda heartily coincides, that the government would be perfectly justified in taking away the life of every Moor in the kingdom, for their shameless infidelity. Ubi supra;-- and Bleda, Corónica, p. 995. [37] The articles of the treaty are detailed at length by Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 19. [38] Idem, ubi supra. [39] See the arguments of Ximenes, or of his enthusiastic biographer Fléchier, for it is not always easy to discriminate between them. Hist. de Ximenés, pp. 108, 109. [40] The duke of Medina Sidonia proposed to Ferdinand and Isabella to be avenged on the Moors, in some way not explained, after their disembarkation in Africa, on the ground that, the term of the royal safe- conduct having elapsed, they might lawfully be treated as enemies. To this proposal, which would have done honor to a college of Jesuits in the sixteenth century, the sovereigns made a reply too creditable not to be transcribed. "El Rei é la Réina. Fernando de Zafra, nuestro secretário. Vimos vuestra letra, en que nos fecistes saber lo que el duque de Medinasidónia tenia pensado que se podia facer contra los Moros de Villaluenga después de desembarcados allende. Decide que le agradecemos y tenemos en servício el buen deseo que tiene de nos servir: _pero porqué nuestra, palabra y seguro real así se debe guardar á los infieles como á los Oristianos_, y faciéndose lo que él dice pareceria cautela y engaño armado sobre nuestro seguro para no le guardar, que en ninguna, manera se haga eso, ni otra cosa de que pueda parecer que se quebranta nuestro seguro. De Granada véinte y nueve de mayo de quiniéntos y un años.--Yo el Rei.--Yo la Réina--Por mandado del Rei é del Réina, Miguel Perez Almazan." Would that the suggestions of Isabella's own heart, instead of the clergy, had always been the guide of her conduct in these matters! Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 15, from the original in the archives of the family of Medina Sidonia. [41] A memorial of the archbishop of Valencia to Philip III. affords an example of this moral obliquity, that may make one laugh, or weep, according to the temper of his philosophy. In this precious document he says, "Your Majesty may, without any scruple of conscience, make slaves of all the Moriscoes, and may put them into your own galleys or mines, or sell them to strangers. And as to their children, they may be all sold at good rates here in Spain; which will be so far from being a punishment, that it will be a mercy to them; since by that means they will all become Christians; which they would never have been, had they continued with their parents. By the holy execution of which piece of justice, _a great sum of money will flow into your Majesty's treasury_." (Geddes, Miscellaneous Tracts, vol. i. p. 71.) "Il n'est point d'hostilité excellente comme la Chrestienne," says old Montaigne; "nostre zele faict merveilles, quand il va secondant nostre pente vers la haine, la cruanté, l'ambition, l'avarice, la detraction, la rebellion. Nostre religion est faicte pour extirper les vices; elle les couvre, les nourrit, les incite." Essais, liv. 2, chap. 12. CHAPTER VIII. COLUMBUS.--PROSECUTION OF DISCOVERY.--HIS TREATMENT BY THE COURT. 1494-1503. Progress of Discovery.--Reaction of Public Feeling.--The Queen's Confidence in Columbus.--He Discovers Terra Firma.--Isabella Sends Back the Indian Slaves.--Complaints against Columbus.--Superseded in the Government.--Vindication of the Sovereigns.--His Fourth and Last Voyage. The reader will turn with satisfaction from the melancholy and mortifying details of superstition, to the generous efforts, which the Spanish government was making to enlarge the limits of science and dominion in the west. "Amidst the storms and troubles of Italy, Spain was every day stretching her wings over a wider sweep of empire, and extending the glory of her name to the far Antipodes." Such is the swell of exultation with which the enthusiastic Italian, Martyr, notices the brilliant progress of discovery under his illustrious countryman Columbus. [1] The Spanish sovereigns had never lost sight of the new domain, so unexpectedly opened to them, as it were, from the depths of the ocean. The first accounts transmitted by the great navigator and his companions, on his second voyage, while their imaginations were warm with the beauty and novelty of the scenes which met their eyes in the New World, served to keep alive the tone of excitement, which their unexpected successes had kindled in the nation. [2] The various specimens sent home in the return ships, of the products of these unknown regions, confirmed the agreeable belief that they formed part of the great Asiatic continent, which had so long excited the cupidity of Europeans. The Spanish court, sharing in the general enthusiasm, endeavored to promote the spirit of discovery and colonization, by forwarding the requisite supplies, and complying promptly with the most minute suggestions of Columbus. But, in less than two years from the commencement of his second voyage, the face of things experienced a melancholy change. Accounts were received at home of the most alarming discontent and disaffection in the colony; while the actual returns from these vaunted regions were so scanty, as to bear no proportion to the expenses of the expedition. This unfortunate result was in a great measure imputable to the misconduct of the colonists themselves. Most of them were adventurers, who had embarked with no other expectation than that of getting together a fortune as speedily as possible in the golden Indies. They were without subordination, patience, industry, or any of the regular habits demanded for success in such an enterprise. As soon as they had launched from their native shore, they seemed to feel themselves released from the constraints of all law. They harbored jealousy and distrust of the admiral as a foreigner. The cavaliers and hidalgos, of whom there were too many in the expedition, contemned him as an upstart, whom it was derogatory to obey. From the first moment of their landing in Hispaniola, they indulged the most wanton license in regard to the unoffending natives, who, in the simplicity of their hearts, had received the white men as messengers from Heaven. Their outrages, however, soon provoked a general resistance, which led to such a war of extermination, that, in less than four years after the Spaniards had set foot on the island, one-third of its population, amounting, probably, to several hundred thousands, were sacrificed! Such were the melancholy auspices, under which the intercourse was opened between the civilized white man and the simple natives of the western world. [3] These excesses, and a total neglect of agriculture,--for none would condescend to turn up the earth for any other object than the gold they could find in it,--at length occasioned an alarming scarcity of provisions; while the poor Indians neglected their usual husbandry, being willing to starve themselves, so that they could starve out their oppressors. [4] In order to avoid the famine which menaced his little colony, Columbus was obliged to resort to coercive measures, shortening the allowance of food, and compelling all to work, without distinction of rank. These unpalatable regulations soon bred general discontent. The high-mettled hidalgos, especially, complained loudly of the indignity of such mechanical drudgery, while Father Boil and his brethren were equally outraged by the diminution of their regular rations. [5] The Spanish sovereigns were now daily assailed with complaints of the mal- administration of Columbus, and of his impolitic and unjust severities to both Spaniards and natives. They lent, however, an unwilling ear to these vague accusations; they fully appreciated the difficulties of his situation; and, although they sent out an agent to inquire into the nature of the troubles which threatened the existence of the colony, they were careful to select an individual who they thought would be most grateful to the admiral; and when the latter in the following year, 1496, returned to Spain, they received him with the most ample acknowledgments of regard. "Come to us," they said, in a kind letter of congratulation, addressed to him soon after his arrival, "when you can do it without inconvenience to yourself, for you have endured too many vexations already." [6] The admiral brought with him, as before, such samples of the productions of the western hemisphere, as would strike the public eye, and keep alive the feeling of curiosity. On his journey through Andalusia, he passed some days under the hospitable roof of the good curate, Bernaldez, who dwells with much satisfaction on the remarkable appearance of the Indian chiefs, following in the admiral's train, gorgeously decorated with golden collars and coronets and various barbaric ornaments. Among these he particularly notices certain "belts and masks of cotton and of wood, with figures of the Devil embroidered and carved thereon, sometimes in his own proper likeness, and at others in that _of a cat or an owl_. There is much reason," he infers, "to believe that he appears to the islanders in this guise, and that they are all idolaters, having Satan for their lord!" [7] But neither the attractions of the spectacle, nor the glowing representations of Columbus, who fancied he had discovered in the mines of Hispaniola the golden quarries of Ophir, from which King Solomon had enriched the temple of Jerusalem, could rekindle the dormant enthusiasm of the nation. The novelty of the thing had passed. They heard a different tale, moreover, from the other voyagers, whose wan and sallow visages provoked the bitter jest, that they had returned with more gold in their faces than in their pockets. In short, the skepticism of the public seemed now quite in proportion to its former overweening confidence; and the returns were so meagre, says Bernaldez, "that it was very generally believed there was little or no gold in the island." [8] Isabella was far from participating in this unreasonable distrust. She had espoused the theory of Columbus, when others looked coldly or contemptuously on it. [9] She firmly relied on his repeated assurances, that the track of discovery would lead to other and more important regions. She formed a higher estimate, moreover, of the value of the new acquisitions than any founded on the actual proceeds in gold and silver; keeping ever in view, as her letters and instructions abundantly show, the glorious purpose of introducing the blessings of Christian civilization among the heathen. [10] She entertained a deep sense of the merits of Columbus, to whose serious and elevated character her own bore much resemblance; although the enthusiasm, which distinguished each, was naturally tempered in hers with somewhat more of benignity and discretion. But although the queen was willing to give the most effectual support to his great enterprise, the situation of the country was such as made delay in its immediate prosecution unavoidable. Large expense was necessarily incurred for the actual maintenance of the colony; [11] the exchequer was liberally drained, moreover, by the Italian war, as well as by the profuse magnificence with which the nuptials of the royal family were now celebrating. It was, indeed, in the midst of the courtly revelries attending the marriage of Prince John, that the admiral presented himself before the sovereigns at Burgos, after his second voyage. Such was the low condition of the treasury from these causes, that Isabella was obliged to defray the cost of an outfit to the colony, at this time, from funds originally destined for the marriage of her daughter Isabella with the king of Portugal. [12] This unwelcome delay, however, was softened to Columbus by the distinguished marks which he daily received of the royal favor; and various ordinances were passed, confirming and enlarging his great powers and privileges in the most ample manner, to a greater extent, indeed, than his modesty, or his prudence, would allow him to accept. [13] The language in which these princely gratuities were conferred, rendered them doubly grateful to his noble heart, containing, as they did, the most emphatic acknowledgments of his "many good, loyal, distinguished, and continual services," and thus testifying the unabated confidence of his sovereigns in his integrity and prudence. [14] Among the impediments to the immediate completion of the arrangements for the admiral's departure on his third voyage, may be also noticed the hostility of Bishop Fonseca, who, at this period, had the control of the Indian department; a man of an irritable, and, as it would seem, most unforgiving temper, who, from some causes of disgust which he had conceived with Columbus previous to his second voyage, lost no opportunity of annoying and thwarting him, for which his official station unfortunately afforded him too many facilities. [15] From these various circumstances the admiral's fleet was not ready before the beginning of 1498. Even then further embarrassment occurred in manning it, as few were found willing to embark in a service which had fallen into such general discredit. This led to the ruinous expedient of substituting convicts, whose regular punishments were commuted into transportation, for a limited period, to the Indies. No measure could possibly have been devised more effectual for the ruin of the infant settlement. The seeds of corruption, which had been so long festering in the Old World, soon shot up into a plentiful harvest in the New, and Columbus, who suggested the measure, was the first to reap the fruits of it. At length, all being in readiness, the admiral embarked on board his little squadron, consisting of six vessels, whose complement of men, notwithstanding every exertion, was still deficient, and took his departure from the port of St. Lucar, May 30th, 1498. He steered in a more southerly direction than on his preceding voyages, and on the first of August succeeded in reaching _terra firma_; thus entitling himself to the glory of being the first to set foot on the great southern continent, to which he had before opened the way. [16] It is not necessary to pursue the track of the illustrious voyager, whose career, forming the most brilliant episode to the history of the present reign, has been so recently traced by a hand which few will care to follow. It will suffice briefly to notice his personal relations with the Spanish government, and the principles on which the colonial administration was conducted. On his arrival at Hispaniola, Columbus found the affairs of the colony in the most deplorable confusion. An insurrection had been raised by the arts of a few factious individuals against his brother Bartholomew, to whom he had intrusted the government during his absence. In this desperate rebellion all the interests of the community were neglected. The mines, which were just beginning to yield a golden harvest, remained unwrought. The unfortunate natives were subjected to the most inhuman oppression. There was no law but that of the strongest. Columbus, on his arrival, in vain endeavored to restore order. The very crews he brought with him, who had been unfortunately reprieved from the gibbet in their own country, served to swell the mass of mutiny. The admiral exhausted art, negotiation, entreaty, force, and succeeded at length in patching up a specious reconciliation by such concessions as essentially impaired his own authority. Among these was the grant of large tracts of land to the rebels, with permission to the proprietor to employ an allotted number of the natives in its cultivation. This was the origin of the celebrated system of repartimientos, which subsequently led to the foulest abuses that ever disgraced humanity. [17] Nearly a year elapsed after the admiral's return to Hispaniola, before he succeeded in allaying these intestine feuds. In the mean while, rumors were every day reaching Spain of the distractions of the colony, accompanied with most injurious imputations on the conduct of Columbus and his brother, who were loudly accused of oppressing both Spaniards and Indians, and of sacrificing the public interests, in the most unscrupulous manner, to their own. These complaints were rung in the very ears of the sovereigns by numbers of the disaffected colonists, who had returned to Spain, and who surrounded the king, as he rode out on horseback, clamoring loudly for the discharge of the arrears, of which they said the admiral had defrauded them. [18] There were not wanting, even, persons of high consideration at the court, to give credence and circulation to these calumnies. The recent discovery of the pearl fisheries of Paria, as well as of more prolific veins of the precious metals in Hispaniola, and the prospect of an indefinite extent of unexplored country, opened by the late voyage of Columbus, made the viceroyalty of the New World a tempting bait for the avarice and ambition of the most potent grandee. They artfully endeavored, therefore, to undermine the admiral's credit with the sovereigns, by raising in their minds suspicions of his integrity, founded not merely on vague reports, but on letters received from the colony, charging him with disloyalty, with appropriating to his own use the revenues of the island, and with the design of erecting an independent government for himself. [19] Whatever weight these absurd charges may have had with Ferdinand, they had no power to shake the queen's confidence in Columbus, or lead her to suspect his loyalty for a moment. But the long-continued distractions of the colony made her feel a natural distrust of his capacity to govern it, whether from the jealousy entertained of him as a foreigner, or from some inherent deficiency in his own character. These doubts were mingled, it is true, with sterner feelings towards the admiral, on the arrival, at this juncture, of several of the rebels with the Indian slaves assigned to them by his orders. [20] It was the received opinion among good Catholics of that period, that heathen and barbarous nations were placed by the circumstance of their infidelity without the pale both of spiritual and civil rights. Their souls were doomed to eternal perdition. Their bodies were the property of the Christian nation who should occupy their soil. [21] Such, in brief, were the profession and the practice of the most enlightened Europeans of the fifteenth century; and such the deplorable maxims which regulated the intercourse of the Spanish and Portuguese navigators with the uncivilized natives of the western world. [22] Columbus, agreeably to these views, had, very soon after the occupation of Hispaniola, recommended a regular exchange of slaves for the commodities required for the support of the colony; representing, moreover, that in this way their conversion would be more surely effected,--an object, it must be admitted, which he seems to have ever had most earnestly at heart. Isabella, however, entertained views on this matter far more liberal than those of her age. She had been deeply interested by the accounts she had received from the admiral himself of the gentle, unoffending character of the islanders; and she revolted at the idea of consigning them to the horrors of slavery, without even an effort for their conversion. She hesitated, therefore, to sanction his proposal; and when a number of Indian captives were advertised to be sold in the markets of Andalusia, she commanded the sale to be suspended, till the opinion of a counsel of theologians and doctors, learned in such matters, could be obtained, as to its conscientious lawfulness. She yielded still further to the benevolent impulses of her nature, causing holy men to be instructed as far as possible in the Indian languages, and sent out as missionaries for the conversion of the natives. [23] Some of them, as Father Boil and his brethren, seem, indeed, to have been more concerned for the welfare of their own bodies, than for the souls of their benighted flock. But others, imbued with a better spirit, wrought in the good work with disinterested zeal, and, if we may credit their accounts, with some efficacy. [24] In the same beneficent spirit, the royal letters and ordinances urged over and over again the paramount obligation of the religious instruction of the natives, and of observing the utmost gentleness and humanity in all dealings with them. When, therefore, the queen learned the arrival of two vessels from the Indies, with three hundred slaves on board, which the admiral had granted to the mutineers, she could not repress her indignation, but impatiently asked, "By what authority does Columbus venture thus to dispose of my subjects?" She instantly caused proclamation to be made in the southern provinces, that all who had Indian slaves in their possession, granted by the admiral, should forthwith provide for their return to their own country; while the few, still held by the crown, were to be restored to freedom in like manner. [25] After a long and visible reluctance, the queen acquiesced in sending out a commissioner to investigate the affairs of the colony. The person appointed to this delicate trust was Don Francisco de Bobadilla, a poor knight of Calatrava. He was invested with supreme powers of civil and criminal jurisdiction. He was to bring to trial and pass sentence on all such as had conspired against the authority of Columbus. He was authorized to take possession of the fortresses, vessels, public stores, and property of every description, to dispose of all offices, and to command whatever persons he might deem expedient for the tranquillity of the island, without distinction of rank, to return to Spain, and present themselves before the sovereigns. Such, in brief, was the sum of the extraordinary powers intrusted to Bobadilla. [26] It is impossible now to determine what motives could have led to the selection of so incompetent an agent, for an office of such high responsibility. He seems to have been a weak and arrogant man, swelled up with immeasurable insolence by the brief authority thus undeservedly bestowed on him. From the very first, he regarded Columbus in the light of a convicted criminal, on whom it was his business to execute the sentence of the law. Accordingly, on his arrival at the island, after an ostentatious parade of his credentials, he commanded the admiral to appear before him, and, without affecting the forms of a legal inquiry, at once caused him to be manacled, and thrown into prison. Columbus submitted without the least show of resistance, displaying in this sad reverse that magnanimity of soul, which would have touched the heart of a generous adversary. Bobadilla, however, discovered no such sensibility; and, after raking together all the foul or frivolous calumnies, which hatred or the hope of favor could extort, he caused the whole loathsome mass of accusation to be sent back to Spain with the admiral, whom he commanded to be kept strictly in irons during the passage; "afraid," says Ferdinand Columbus bitterly, "lest he might by any chance swim back again to the island." [27] This excess of malice served, as usual, however, to defeat itself. So enormous an outrage shocked the minds of those most prejudiced against Columbus. All seemed to feel it as a national dishonor, that such indignities should be heaped on the man, who, whatever might be his indiscretions, had done so much for Spain, and for the whole civilized world; a man, who, in the honest language of an old writer, "had he lived in the days of ancient Greece or Rome, would have had statues raised, and temples and divine honors dedicated to him, as to a divinity!" [28] None partook of the general indignation more strongly than Ferdinand and Isabella, who, in addition to their personal feelings of disgust at so gross an act, readily comprehended the whole weight of obloquy, which its perpetration must necessarily attach to them. They sent to Cadiz without an instant's delay, and commanded the admiral to be released from his ignominious fetters. They wrote to him in the most benignant terms, expressing their sincere regret for the unworthy usage which he had experienced, and requesting him to appear before them as speedily as possible, at Granada, where the court was then staying. At the same time, they furnished him a thousand ducats for his expenses, and a handsome retinue to escort him on his journey. Columbus, revived by these assurances of the kind dispositions of his sovereigns, proceeded without delay to Granada, which he reached on the 17th of December. Immediately on his arrival he obtained an audience. The queen could not repress her tears at the sight of the man, whose illustrious services had met with such ungenerous requital, as it were, at her own hands. She endeavored to cheer his wounded spirit with the most earnest assurances of her sympathy and sorrow for his misfortunes. Columbus, from the first moment of his disgrace, had relied on the good faith and kindness of Isabella; for, as an ancient Castilian writer remarks, "she had ever favored him beyond the king her husband, protecting his interests, and showing him especial kindness and good-will." When he beheld the emotion of his royal mistress, and listened to her consolatory language, it was too much for his loyal and generous heart; and, throwing himself on his knees, he gave vent to his feelings, and sobbed aloud. The sovereigns endeavored to soothe and tranquillize his mind, and, after testifying their deep sense of his injuries, promised him, that impartial justice should be done his enemies, and that he should be reinstated in his emoluments and honors. [29] Much censure has attached to the Spanish government for its share in this unfortunate transaction; both in the appointment of so unsuitable an agent as Bobadilla, and the delegation of such broad and indefinite powers. With regard to the first, it is now too late, as has already been remarked, to ascertain on what grounds such a selection could have been made. There is no evidence of his being indebted for his promotion to intrigue or any undue influence. Indeed, according to the testimony of one of his contemporaries, he was reputed "an extremely honest and religious man," and the good bishop Las Casas expressly declares that "no imputation of dishonesty or avarice had ever rested on his character." [30] It was an error of judgment; a grave one, indeed, and must pass for as much as it is worth. But in regard to the second charge, of delegating unwarrantable powers, it should be remembered, that the grievances of the colony were represented as of a most pressing nature, demanding a prompt and peremptory remedy; that a more limited and partial authority, dependent for its exercise on instructions from the government at home, might be attended with ruinous delays; that this authority must necessarily be paramount to that of Columbus, who was a party implicated, and that, although unlimited jurisdiction was given over all offences committed against him, yet neither he nor his friends were to be molested in any other way than by temporary suspension from office, and a return to their own country, where the merits of their case might be submitted to the sovereigns themselves. This view of the matter, indeed, is perfectly conformable to that of Ferdinand Columbus, whose solicitude, so apparent in every page, for his father's reputation, must have effectually counterbalanced any repugnance he may have felt at impugning the conduct of his sovereigns. "The only ground of complaint," he remarks, in summing up his narrative of the transaction, "which I can bring against their Catholic Highnesses is, the unfitness of the agent whom they employed, equally malicious and ignorant. Had they sent out a suitable person, the admiral would have been highly gratified; since he had more than once requested the appointment of some one with full powers of jurisdiction in an affair, where he felt some natural delicacy in moving, in consequence of his own brother having been originally involved in it." And, as to the vast magnitude of the powers intrusted to Bobadilla, he adds," It can scarcely be wondered at, considering the manifold complaints against the admiral made to their Highnesses." [31] Although the king and queen determined without hesitation on the complete restoration of the admiral's honors, they thought it better to defer his reappointment to the government of the colony, until the present disturbances should be settled, and he might return there with personal safety and advantage. In the mean time, they resolved to send out a competent individual, and to support him with such a force as should overawe faction, and enable him to place the tranquillity of the island on a permanent basis. The person selected was Don Nicolas de Ovando, comendador of Lares, of the military order of Alcantara. He was a man of acknowledged prudence and sagacity, temperate in his habits, and plausible and politic in his address. It is sufficient evidence of his standing at court, that he had been one of the ten youths selected to be educated in the palace as companions for the prince of the Asturias. He was furnished with a fleet of two and thirty sail, carrying twenty-five hundred persons, many of them of the best families in the kingdom, with every variety of article for the nourishment and permanent prosperity of the colony; and the general equipment was in a style of expense and magnificence, such as had never before been lavished on any armada destined for the western waters. [32] The new governor was instructed immediately on his arrival to send Bobadilla home for trial. Under his lax administration, abuses of every kind had multiplied to an alarming extent, and the poor natives, in particular, were rapidly wasting away under the new and most inhuman arrangement of the _repartimientos_, which he established. Isabella now declared the Indians free; and emphatically enjoined on the authorities of Hispaniola to respect them as true and faithful vassals of the crown. Ovando was especially to ascertain the amount of losses sustained by Columbus and his brothers, to provide for their full indemnification, and to secure the unmolested enjoyment in future of all their lawful rights and pecuniary perquisites. [33] Fortified with the most ample instructions in regard to these and other details of his administration, the governor embarked on board his magnificent flotilla, and crossed the bar of St. Lucar, February 15th, 1502. A furious tempest dispersed the fleet, before it had been out a week, and a report reached Spain that it had entirely perished. The sovereigns, overwhelmed with sorrow at this fresh disaster, which consigned so many of their best and bravest to a watery grave, shut themselves up in their palace for several days. Fortunately, the report proved ill-founded. The fleet rode out the storm in safety, one vessel only having perished, and the remainder reached in due time its place of destination. [34] The Spanish government has been roundly taxed with injustice and ingratitude for its delay in restoring Columbus to the full possession of his colonial authority; and that too by writers generally distinguished for candor and impartiality. No such animadversion, however, as far as I am aware, is countenanced by contemporary historians; and it appears to be wholly undeserved. Independent of the obvious inexpediency of returning him immediately to the theatre of disaffection, before the embers of ancient animosity had had time to cool, there were several features in his character, which make it doubtful whether he were the most competent person, in any event, for an emergency demanding at once the greatest coolness, consummate address, and acknowledged personal authority. His sublime enthusiasm, which carried him victorious over every obstacle, involved him also in numerous embarrassments, which men of more phlegmatic temperament would have escaped. It led him to count too readily on a similar spirit in others,--and to be disappointed. It gave an exaggerated coloring to his views and descriptions, that inevitably led to a reaction in the minds of such as embarked their all on the splendid dreams of a fairy land, which they were never to realize. [35] Hence a fruitful source of discontent and disaffection in his followers. It led him, in his eagerness for the achievement of his great enterprises, to be less scrupulous and politic as to the means, than a less ardent spirit would have been. His pertinacious adherence to the scheme of Indian slavery, and hhis impolitic regulation compelling the labor of the hidalgos, are pertinent examples of this. [36] He was, moreover, a foreigner, without rank, fortune, or powerful friends; and his high and sudden elevation naturally raised him up a thousand enemies among a proud, punctilious, and intensely national people. Under these multiplied embarrassments, resulting from peculiarities of character and situation, the sovereigns might well be excused for not intrusting Columbus, at this delicate crisis, with disentangling the meshes of intrigue and faction, in which the affairs of the colony were so unhappily involved. I trust these remarks will not be construed into an insensibility to the merits and exalted services of Columbus. "A world," to borrow the words, though not the application, of the Greek historian, "is his monument." His virtues shine With too bright a lustre to be dimmed by a few natural blemishes; but it becomes necessary to notice these, to vindicate the Spanish government from the imputation of perfidy and ingratitude, where it has been most freely urged, and apparently with the least foundation. It is more difficult to excuse the paltry equipment with which the admiral was suffered to undertake his fourth and last voyage. The object proposed by this expedition was the discovery of a passage to the great Indian Ocean, which, he inferred sagaciously enough from his premises, though, as it turned out, to the great inconvenience of the commercial world, most erroneously, must open somewhere between Cuba and the coast of Paria. Four caravels, only, were furnished for the expedition, the largest of which did not exceed seventy tons' burden; a force forming a striking contrast to the magnificent armada lately intrusted to Ovando, and altogether too insignificant to be vindicated on the ground of the different objects proposed by the two expeditions. [37] Columbus, oppressed with growing infirmities, and a consciousness, perhaps, of the decline of popular favor, manifested unusual despondency previously to his embarkation. He talked even of resigning the task of further discovery to his brother Bartholomew. "I have established," said he, "all that I proposed,--the existence of land in the west. I have opened the gate, and others may enter at their pleasure; as indeed they do, arrogating to themselves the title of discoverers, to which they can have little claim, following as they do in my track." He little thought the ingratitude of mankind would sanction the claims of these adventurers so far as to confer the name of one of them on that world, which his genius had revealed. [38] The great inclination, however, which the admiral had to serve the Catholic sovereigns, and especially the most serene queen, says Ferdinand Columbus, induced him to lay aside his scruples, and encounter the perils and fatigues of another voyage. A few weeks before his departure, he received a gracious letter from Ferdinand and Isabella, the last ever addressed to him by his royal mistress, assuring him of their purpose to maintain inviolate all their engagements with him, and to perpetuate the inheritance of his honors in his family. [39] Comforted and cheered by assurances, the veteran navigator, quitting the port of Cadiz, on the 9th of March, 1502, once more spread his sails for those golden regions, which he had approached so near, but was destined never to reach. It will not be necessary to pursue his course further than to notice a single occurrence of most extraordinary nature. The admiral had received instructions not to touch at Hispaniola on his outward voyage. The leaky condition of one of his ships, however, and the signs of an approaching storm, induced him to seek a temporary refuge there; at the same time, he counselled Ovando to delay for a few days the departure of the fleet, then riding in the harbor, which was destined to carry Bobadilla and the rebels with their ill-gotten treasures back to Spain. The churlish governor, however, not only refused Columbus admittance, but gave orders for the instant departure of the vessels. The apprehensions of the experienced mariner were fully justified by the event. Scarcely had the Spanish fleet quitted its moorings, before one of those tremendous hurricanes came on, which so often desolate these tropical regions, sweeping down everything before it, and fell with such violence on the little navy, that out of eighteen ships, of which it was composed, not more than three or four escaped. The rest all foundered, including those which contained Bobadilla, and the late enemies of Columbus. Two hundred thousand _castellanos_ of gold, half of which belonged to the government, went to the bottom with them. The only one of the fleet which made its way back to Spain was a crazy, weather-beaten bark, which contained the admiral's property, amounting to four thousand ounces of gold. To complete these curious coincidences, Columbus with his little squadron rode out the storm in safety under the lee of the island, where he had prudently taken shelter, on being so rudely repulsed from the port. This even-handed retribution of justice, so uncommon in human affairs, led many to discern the immediate interposition of Providence. Others, in a less Christian temper, referred it all to the necromancy of the admiral. [40] FOOTNOTES [1] "Inter has Italiae procellas magis indies ac magis alas protendit Hispania, imperium auget, gloriam nomenque suum ad Antipodes porriget." Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 146. [2] See, among others, a letter of Dr. Chanca, who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage. It is addressed to the authorities of Seville. After noticing the evidences of gold in Hispaniola, he says; "Ansi que de cierto los Reyes nuestros Señores desde agora se pueden tener por los mas prosperos e mas ricos Principes del mundo, porque tal cosa hasta agora no se ha visto ni leido de ningnno en el mundo, porque verdaderamente a otro camino que los navios vuelvan puedan llevar tanta cantidad de oro que se pueden maravillar cualesquiera que lo supieren." In another part of the letter, the Doctor is equally sanguine in regard to the fruitfulness of the soil and climate. Letra de Dr. Chanca, apud Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. i. pp. 198-224. [3] Fernando Colon, Hist. de Almirante, cap. 60, 62.--Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 5, sec. 25.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 2, cap. 9.--Benzoni, Novi Orbis Hist., lib. 1, cap. 9. [4] The Indians had some grounds for relying on the efficacy of starvation, if, as Las Casas gravely asserts, "one Spaniard consumed in a single day as much as would suffice three families!" Llorente, Oeuvres de Don Barthélemi de las Casas, precedées de sa Vie, (Paris, 1822,) tom. i. p. 11. [5] Martyr, De Rebus Oceanicis, dec. 1, lib. 4.--Goinara, Hist. de las Indias, cap. 20, tom. ii.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 2, cap. 12. [6] Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii., Doc. Dipl., no. 101.-- Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 64.--Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo- Mundo, lib. 5, sec. 31. [7] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 131.--Herrera expresses the same charitable opinion. "Muy claramente se conocio que el demonio estava, apoderado de aquella gente, y la traia ciega y engañada, hablandoles, y mostrandoles en diversas figuras." Indias Occidentales, lib. 3, cap. 4. [8] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 131.--Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo- Mundo, lib. 6, sec. 1. [9] Columbus, in his letter to Prince John's nurse, dated 1500, makes the following ample acknowledgment of the queen's early protection of him. "En todos hobo incredulidad, y a la Reina mi Señora dio Nuestro Señor el espiritu de inteligencia y esfuerzo grande, y la hizo de todo heredera como a cara y muy amada hija." "Su Alteza lo aprobaba al contrario, y lo sostuvo fasta que pudo." Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. i. p. 266. [10] See the letters to Columbus, dated May 14th, 1493, August, 1494, apud Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii. pp. 66, 154, et mult. al. [11] The salaries alone, annually disbursed by the crown to persons resident in the colony, amounted to six million maravedies. Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 5, sec. 33. [12] Idem, lib. 6, sec. 2.--Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 64. --Herrera, Indias Occidentales, lib. 3, cap. 1. [13] Such, for example, was the grant of an immense tract of land in Hispaniola, with the title of count or duke, as the admiral might prefer. Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 6, sec. 17. [14] The instrument establishing the _mayorazgo_, or perpetual entail of Columbus's estates, contains an injunction, that "his heirs shall never use any other signature than that of 'the Admiral, _el Almirante_, whatever other titles and honors may belong to them." That title indicated his peculiar achievements, and it was an honest pride which led him by this simple expedient to perpetuate the remembrance of them in his posterity. See the original document, apud Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii. pp. 221-235. [15] Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 6, sec. 20.--Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 64.--Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, año 1496. [16] Peter Martyr, De Rebus Oceanicis, dec. 1, lib. e.--Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii., Doc. Dipl., nos. 116, 120.--Tercer Viage de Colon, apud Navarrete, tom. i. p. 245.--Benzoni, Novi Orbis Hist., lib. 1, cap. 10, ll.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 3, cap. 10, ll.-- Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 6, sec. 19. [17] Gomara, Hist. de las Indias, cap. 20.--Benzoni, Novi Orbis Hist., lib. 1, cap. 10, ll.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 7.-- Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 73-82.--Peter Martyr, De Rebus Oceanicis, dec. 1, lib. 5.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 3, cap. 16.--Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 6, sec. 40-42. [18] Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 7.--Peter Martyr, De Rebus Oceanicis, dec. 1, lib. 7.--Gomara, Hist. de las Indias, cap. 23.-- Benzoni, Novi Orbis Hist., cap. 11. Ferdinand Columbus mentions that he and his brother, who were then pages to the queen, could not stir out into the courtyard of the Alhambra, without being followed by fifty of these vagabonds, who insulted them in the grossest manner, "as the sons of the adventurer, who had led so many brave Spanish hidalgos to seek their graves in the land of vanity and delusion which he had found out." Hist. del Almirante, cap. 85. [19] Benzoni, Novi Orbis Hist., lib. 1, cap. 12.--National feeling operated, no doubt, as well as avarice to sharpen the tooth of slander against the admiral. "Aegre multi patiuntur," says Columbus's countryman, with honest warmth, "peregrinum hominem, et quidem e nostrâ Italia ortum, tantum honoris ac gloriae consequutum, ut non tantum Hispanicae gentis, sed et cujusvis alterius homines superaverit." Benzoni, lib. 1, cap. 5. [20] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, lib. 4, cap. 7, 10, and more especially lib. 6, cap. 13.--Las Casas, Oeuvres, ed. de Llorente, tom. i. p. 306. [21] "La qualité de Catholique Romain," says the philosophic Villers, "avait tout-à-fait remplacé celle d'homme, et même de Chrétien. Qui n'était pas Catholique Romain, n'était pas homme, était moins qu'homme; et eût-il été un souverain, c'était une bonne action que de lui ôter la vie." (Essai sur la Réformation, p. 56. ed. 1820.) Las Casas rests the title of the Spanish crown to its American possessions on the original papal grant, made on condition of converting the natives to Christianity. The pope, as vicar of Jesns Christ, possesses plenary authority over all men for the safety of their souls. He might, therefore, in furtherance of this, confer on the Spanish sovereigns _imperial supremacy_ over all lands discovered by them,--not, however, to the prejudice of authorities already existing there, and over such nations only as voluntarily embraced Christianity. Such is the sum of his thirty propositions, submitted to the council of the Indies for the inspection of Charles V. (Oeuvres, ed. De Llorente, tom. i. pp. 286-311.) One may see in these arbitrary and whimsical limitations, the good bishop's desire to reconcile what reason told him were the natural rights of man, with what faith prescribed as the legitimate prerogative of the pope. Few Roman Catholics at the present day will be found sturdy enough to maintain this lofty prerogative, however carefully limited. Still fewer in the sixteenth century would have challenged it. Indeed, it is but just to Las Casas, to admit, that the general scope of his arguments, here and elsewhere, is very far in advance of his age. [22] A Spanish casuist founds the right of his nation to enslave the Indians, among other things, on their smoking tobacco, and not trimming their beards _à l'Espagnole_. At least, this is Montesquieu's interpretation of it. (Esprit des Loix, lib. 15, chap. 3.) The doctors of the Inquisition could hardly have found a better reason. [23] 23 Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 5, sec. 34.--Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii., Doc. Dipl., no. 92.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, lib. 3, cap. 4. [24] "Among other things that the holy fathers carried out," says Robles, "was a little organ and several bells, which greatly delighted the simple people, so that from one to two thousand persons were baptized every day." (Vida de Ximenez, p. 120.) Ferdinand Columbus remarks with some _naïveté_, that "the Indians were so obedient from their fear of the admiral, and at the same time so desirous to oblige him, that they voluntarily became Christians!" Hist. del Almirante, cap. 84. [25] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, lib. 4, cap. 7.--Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii., Doc. Dipl., no. 134. Las Casas observes, that "so great was the queen's indignation at the admiral's misconduct in this particular, that nothing but the consideration of his great public services saved him from immediate disgrace." Oeuvres, ed. de Llorente, tom. i. p. 306. [26] Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii., Doc. Dipl., nos. 127-130. The original commission to Bobadilla was dated March 21st, and May 21st, 1499; the execution of it, however, was delayed until July, 1500, in the hope, doubtless, of obtaining such tidings from Hispaniola as should obviate the necessity of a measure so prejudicial to the admiral. [27] Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 86.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 7.--Peter Martyr, De Rebus Oceanicis, dec. 1, lib. 7.--Gomara, Hist. de las Indias, cap. 23.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, lib. 4, cap. 10.--Benzoni, Novi Orbis Hist., lib. 1, cap. 12. [28] Benzoni, Novi Orbis Hist., lib. 1, cap. 12.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, lib. 6, cap. 15. Ferdinand Columbus tells us, that his father kept the fetters in which he was brought home, hanging up in an apartment of his house, as a perpetual memorial of national ingratitude, and, when he died, ordered them to be buried in the same grave with himself. Hist. del Almirante, cap. 86. [29] Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 7.--Peter Martyr, De Rebus Oceanicis, dec. 1, lib. 7.--Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 86, 87.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. I, lib. 4, cap. 8-10.--Benzoni, Novi Orbis Hist., lib. 1, cap. 12. [30] Oviedo, Hist. Gen. de las Ind., p. 1, lib. 3, cap. 6.--Las Casas, lib. 2, cap. 6, apud Navarrete, tom. i., introd., p. 99. [31] Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 86. [32] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 4, cap. 11.--Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 87.--Benzoni, Novi Orbis Hist., lib. 1, cap. 12.--Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. p. 385. [33] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, lib. 4, cap. 11-13.--Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii., Doc. Dipl., nos. 138,144.--Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 87. [34] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, lib. 5, cap. 1. [35] The high devotional feeling of Columbus led him to trace out allusions in Scripture to the various circumstances and scenes of his adventurous life. Thus he believed his great discovery announced in the Apocalypse, and in Isaiah; he identified, as I have before stated, the mines of Hispaniola with those which furnished Solomon with materials for his temple; he fancied that he had determined the actual locality of the garden of Eden in the newly discovered region of Paria. But his greatest extravagance was his project of a crusade for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. This he cherished from the first hour of his discovery, pressing it in the most urgent manner on the sovereigns, and making actual provision for it in his testament. This was a flight, however, beyond the spirit even of this romantic age, and probably received as little serious attention from the queen, as from her more cool and calculating husband. Peter Martyr, De Rebus Oceanicis, dec. 1, lib. 6.--Tercer, Viage de Colon, apud Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. i. p. 259.--tom. ii., Doc. Dipl., no. 140.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, lib. 6, cap. 15. [36] Another example was the injudicious punishment of delinquents by diminishing their regular allowance of food, a measure so obnoxious as to call for the interference of the sovereigns, who prohibited it altogether. (Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii., Doc. Dipl., 97.) Herrera, who must be admitted to have been in no degree insensible to the merits of Columbus, closes his account of the various accusations urged against him and his brothers, with the remark, that, "with every allowance for calumny, they must be confessed not to have governed the Castilians with the moderation that they ought to have done." Indias Occidentales, lib. 4, cap. 9. [37] Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 14.--Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 88.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, lib. 5, cap. 1.-- Benzoni, Novi Orbis Hist., cap. 14. [38] It would be going out of our way to investigate the pretensions of Amerigo Vespucci to the honor of first discovering the South American continent. The reader will find them displayed with perspicuity and candor by Mr. Irving, in his "Life of Columbus." (Appendix, No. 9.) Few will be disposed to contest the author's conclusion respecting their fallacy, though all may not have the same charity as he, in tracing its possible origin to an editorial blunder, instead of wilful fabrication on the part of Vespucci; in which light, indeed, it seems to have been regarded by the two most ancient and honest historians of the event, Las Casas and Herrera. Mr. Irving's conclusions, however, have since been confirmed, in the fullest manner, by M. de Humboldt, in the fifth volume of his "Géographie du Nouveau Continent," published in 1839, a year after the preceding portion of this note was first printed; in which he has assembled a mass of testimony, suggesting the most favorable impressions of Vespucci's innocence of the various charges brought against him. Since the appearance of Mr. Irving's work, Señor Navarrete has published the third volume of his "Coleccion de Viages y Descubrimientos," etc., containing, among other things, the original letters recording Vespucci's American voyages, illustrated by all the authorities and facts, that could come within the scope of his indefatigable researches. The whole weight of evidence leads irresistibly to the conviction, that Columbus is entitled to the glory of being the original discoverer of the southern continent, as well as islands, of the western hemisphere. (Coleccion de Viages, tom. iii. pp. 183-334.) In addition to the preceding writers, the American reader will find the claims of Vespucci discussed, with much ingenuity and careful examination of authorities, by Mr. Cushing, in his "Reminiscences of Spain," vol. ii. pp. 210 et seq. [39] Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 87.--Herrera notices this letter, written, he says, "con tanta humanidad, que parecia extraordinaria de lo que usavan con otros, y no sin razon, pues jamas nadie les hizo tal servicio," Indias Occidentales, lib. 5, cap. 1. Among other instances of the queen's personal regard for Columbus, may be noticed her receiving his two sons, Diego and Fernando, as her own pages, on the death of Prince John, in whose service they had formerly been. (Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii., Doc. Dipl., 125.) By an ordinance of 1593, we find Diego Colon made _contino_ of the royal household, with an annual salary of 50,000 maravedies. Ibid., Doc. Dipl., no. 150. [40] Peter Martyr, De Rebus Oceanicis, dec. 1, lib. 10.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 14.--Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 88.--Benzoni, Novi Orbis Hist., cap. 12.--Herrera, Indias Occidentals, lib. 5, cap. 2. CHAPTER IX. SPANISH COLONIAL POLICY. Careful Provision for the Colonies.--License for Private Voyages.-- Important Papal Concessions.--The Queen's Zeal for Conversion.--Immediate Profits from the Discoveries.--Their Moral Consequences.--Their Geographical Extent. A consideration of the colonial policy pursued during Isabella's lifetime has been hitherto deferred to avoid breaking the narrative of Columbus's personal adventures. I shall now endeavor to present the reader with a brief outline of it, as far as can be collected from imperfect and scanty materials; for, however incomplete in itself, it becomes important as containing the germ of the gigantic system developed in later ages. Ferdinand and Isabella manifested from the first an eager and enlightened curiosity in reference to their new acquisitions, constantly interrogating the admiral minutely as to their soil and climate, their various vegetable and mineral products, and especially the character of the uncivilized races who inhabited them. They paid the greatest deference to his suggestions, as before remarked, and liberally supplied the infant settlement with whatever could contribute to its nourishment and permanent prosperity. [1] Through their provident attention, in a very few years after its discovery, the island of Hispaniola was in possession of the most important domestic animals, as well as fruits and vegetables of the Old World, some of which have since continued to furnish the staple of a far more lucrative commerce than was ever anticipated from its gold mines. [2] Emigration to the new countries was encouraged by the liberal tenor of the royal ordinances passed from time to time. The settlers in Hispaniola were to have their passage free; to be excused from taxes; to have the absolute property of such plantations on the island as they should engage to cultivate for four years; and they were furnished with a gratuitous supply of grain and stock for their farms. All exports and imports were exempted from duty; a striking contrast to the narrow policy of later ages. Five hundred persons, including scientific men and artisans of every description, were sent out and maintained at the expense of government. To provide for the greater security and quiet of the island, Ovando was authorized to gather the residents into towns, which were endowed with the privileges appertaining to similar corporations in the mother country; and a number of married men, with their families, were encouraged to establish themselves in them, with the view of giving greater solidity and permanence to the settlement. [3] With these wise provisions were mingled others savoring too strongly of the illiberal spirit of the age. Such were those prohibiting Jews, Moors, or indeed any but Castilians, for whom the discovery was considered exclusively to have been made, from inhabiting, or even visiting, the New World. The government kept a most jealous eye upon what it regarded as its own peculiar perquisites, reserving to itself the exclusive possession of all minerals, dyewoods, and precious stones, that should be discovered; and although private persons were allowed to search for gold, they were subjected to the exorbitant tax of two-thirds, subsequently reduced to one-fifth, of all they should obtain, for the crown. [4] The measure which contributed more effectually than any other, at this period, to the progress of discovery and colonization, was the license granted, under certain regulations, in 1495, for voyages undertaken by private individuals. No use was made of this permission until some years later, in 1499. The spirit of enterprise had flagged, and the nation had experienced something like disappointment on contrasting the meagre results of their own discoveries with the dazzling successes of the Portuguese, who had struck at once into the very heart of the jewelled east. The report of the admiral's third voyage, however, and the beautiful specimens of pearls which he sent home from the coast of Paria, revived the cupidity of the nation. Private adventurers now proposed to avail themselves of the license already granted, and to follow up the track of discovery on their own account. The government, drained by its late heavy expenditures, and jealous of the spirit of maritime adventure beginning to show itself in the other nations of Europe, [5] willingly acquiesced in a measure, which, while it opened a wide field of enterprise for its subjects, secured to itself all the substantial benefits of discovery, without any of the burdens. The ships fitted out under the general license were required to reserve one-tenth of their tonnage for the crown, as well as two-thirds of all the gold, and ten per cent. of all other commodities which they should procure. The government promoted these expeditions by a bounty on all vessels of six hundred tons and upwards, engaged in them. [6] With this encouragement the more wealthy merchants of Seville, Cadiz, and Palos, the old theatre of nautical enterprise, freighted and sent out little squadrons of three or four vessels each, which they intrusted to the experienced mariners, who had accompanied Columbus in his first voyage, or since followed in his footsteps. They held in general the same course pursued by the admiral on his last expedition, exploring the coasts of the great southern continent. Some of the adventurers returned with such rich freights of gold, pearls, and other precious commodities, as well compensated the fatigues and perils of the voyage. But the greater number were obliged to content themselves with the more enduring but barren honors of discovery. [7] The active spirit of enterprise now awakened, and the more enlarged commercial relations with the new colonies, required a more perfect organization of the department for Indian affairs, the earliest vestiges of which have been already noticed in a preceding chapter. [8] By an ordinance dated at Alcalá, January 20th, 1503, it was provided that a board should be established, consisting of three functionaries, with the titles of treasurer, factor, and comptroller. Their permanent residence was assigned in the old alcazar of Seville, where they were to meet every day for the despatch of business. The board was expected to make itself thoroughly acquainted with whatever concerned the colonies, and to afford the government all information, that could be obtained, affecting their interests and commercial prosperity. It was empowered to grant licenses under the regular conditions, to provide for the equipment of fleets, to determine their destination, and furnish them instructions on sailing. All merchandise for exportation was to be deposited in the alcazar, where the return cargoes were to be received, and contracts made for their sale. Similar authority was given to it over the trade with the Barbary coast and the Canary Islands. Its supervision was to extend in like manner over all vessels which might take their departure from the port of Cadiz, as well as from Seville. With these powers were combined others of a purely judicial character, authorizing them to take cognizance of questions arising out of particular voyages, and of the colonial trade in general. In this latter capacity they were to be assisted by the advice of two jurists, maintained by a regular salary from the government. [9] Such were the extensive powers intrusted to the famous _Casa de Contratacion_, or House of Trade, on this its first definite organization; and, although its authority was subsequently somewhat circumscribed by the appellate jurisdiction of the Council of the Indies, it has always continued the great organ by which the commercial transactions with the colonies have been conducted and controlled. The Spanish government, while thus securing to itself the more easy and exclusive management of the colonial trade, by confining it within one narrow channel, discovered the most admirable foresight in providing for its absolute supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs, where alone it could be contested. By a bull of Alexander the Sixth, dated November 16th, 1501, the sovereigns were empowered to receive all the tithes in the colonial dominions. [10] Another bull, of Pope Julius the Second, July 28th, 1508, granted them the right of collating to all benefices, of whatever description, in the colonies, subject only to the approbation of the Holy See. By these two concessions, the Spanish crown was placed at once at the head of the church in its transatlantic dominions, with the absolute disposal of all its dignities and emoluments. [11] It has excited the admiration of more than one historian, that Ferdinand and Isabella, with their reverence for the Catholic church, should have had the courage to assume an attitude of such entire independence of its spiritual chief. [12] But whoever has studied their reign, will regard this measure as perfectly conformable to their habitual policy, which never suffered a zeal for religion, or a blind deference to the church, to compromise in any degree the independence of the crown. It is much more astonishing, that pontiffs could be found content to divest themselves of such important prerogatives. It was deviating widely from the subtle and tenacious spirit of their predecessors; and, as the consequences came to be more fully disclosed, furnished ample subject of regret to those who succeeded them. Such is a brief summary of the principal regulations adopted by Ferdinand and Isabella for the administration of the colonies. Many of their peculiarities, including most of their defects, are to be referred to the peculiar circumstances under which the discovery of the New World was effected. Unlike the settlements on the comparatively sterile shores of North America, which were permitted to devise laws accommodated to their necessities, and to gather strength in the habitual exercise of political functions, the Spanish colonies were from the very first checked and controlled by the over-legislation of the parent country. The original project of discovery had been entered into with indefinite expectations of gain. The verification of Columbus's theory of the existence of land in the west gave popular credit to his conjecture, that that land was the far-famed Indies. The specimens of gold and other precious commodities found there, served to maintain the delusion. The Spanish government regarded the expedition as its own private adventure, to whose benefits it had exclusive pretensions. Hence those jealous regulations for securing to itself a monopoly of the most obvious sources of profit, the dyewoods and precious metals. These impolitic provisions were relieved by others better suited to the permanent interests of the colony. Such was the bounty offered in various ways on the occupation and culture of land; the erection of municipalities; the right of inter-colonial traffic, and of exporting and importing merchandise of every description free of duty. [13] These and similar laws show that the government, far from regarding the colonies merely as a foreign acquisition to be sacrificed to the interests of the mother country, as at a later period, was disposed to legislate for them on more generous principles, as an integral portion of the monarchy. Some of the measures, even, of a less liberal tenor, may be excused, as sufficiently accommodated to existing circumstances. No regulation, for example, was found eventually more mischievous in its operation than that which confined the colonial trade to the single port of Seville, instead of permitting it to find a free vent in the thousand avenues naturally opened in every part of the kingdom; to say nothing of the grievous monopolies and exactions, for which this concentration of a mighty traffic on so small a point was found, in later times, to afford unbounded facility. But the colonial trade was too limited in its extent, under Ferdinand and Isabella, to involve such consequences. It was chiefly confined to a few wealthy seaports of Andalusia, from the vicinity of which the first adventurers had sallied forth on their career of discovery. It was no inconvenience to them to have a common port of entry, so central and accessible as Seville, which, moreover, by this arrangement became a great mart for European trade, thus affording a convenient market to the country for effecting its commercial exchanges with every quarter of Christendom. [14] It was only when laws, adapted to the incipient stages of commerce, were perpetuated to a period when that commerce had swelled to such gigantic dimensions as to embrace every quarter of the empire, that their gross impolicy became manifest. It would not be giving a fair view of the great objects proposed by the Spanish sovereigns in their schemes of discovery, to omit one which was paramount to all the rest, with the queen at least,--the propagation of Christianity among the heathen. The conversion and civilization of this simple people form, as has been already said, the burden of most of her official communications from the earliest period. [15] She neglected no means for the furtherance of this good work, through the agency of missionaries exclusively devoted to it, who were to establish their residence among the natives, and win them to the true faith by their instructions, and the edifying example of their own lives. It was with the design of ameliorating the condition of the natives, that she sanctioned the introduction into the colonies of negro slaves born in Spain. This she did on the representation that the physical constitution of the African was much better fitted than that of the Indian to endure severe toil under a tropical climate. To this false principle of economizing human suffering, we are indebted for that foul stain on the New World, which has grown deeper and darker with the lapse of years. [16] Isabella, however, was destined to have her benevolent designs, in regard to the natives, defeated by her own subjects. The popular doctrine of the absolute rights of the Christian over the heathen seemed to warrant the exaction of labor from these unhappy beings to any degree, which avarice on the one hand could demand, or human endurance concede on the other. The device of the _repartimientos_ systematized and completed the whole scheme of oppression. The queen, it is true, abolished them under Ovando's administration, and declared the Indians "as free as her own subjects." [17] But his representation, that the Indians, when no longer compelled to work, withdrew from all intercourse with the Christians, thus annihilating at once all hopes of their conversion, subsequently induced her to consent that they should be required to labor moderately and for a reasonable compensation. [18] This was construed with their usual latitude by the Spaniards. They soon revived the old system of distribution on so terrific a scale, that a letter of Columbus, written shortly after Isabella's death, represents more than six-sevenths of the whole population of Hispaniola to have melted away under it! [19] The queen was too far removed to enforce the execution of her own beneficent measures; nor is it probable, that she ever imagined the extent of their violation, for there was no intrepid philanthropist, in that day, like Las Casas, to proclaim to the world the wrongs and sorrows of the Indian. [20] A conviction, however, of the unworthy treatment of the natives seems to have pressed heavily on her heart; for in a codicil to her testament, dated a few days only before her death, she invokes the kind offices of her successor in their behalf in such strong and affectionate language, as plainly indicates how intently her thoughts were occupied with their condition down to the last hour of her existence. [21] The moral grandeur of the maritime discoveries under this reign must not so far dazzle us, as to lead to a very high estimate of their immediate results in an economical view. Most of those articles which have since formed the great staples of South American commerce, as cocoa, indigo, cochineal, tobacco, etc., were either not known in Isabella's time, or not cultivated for exportation. Small quantities of cotton had been brought to Spain, but it was doubted whether the profit would compensate the expense of raising it. The sugar-cane had been transplanted into Hispaniola, and thrived luxuriantly in its genial soil. But it required time to grow it to any considerable amount as an article of commerce; and this was still further delayed by the distractions as well as avarice of the colony, which grasped at nothing less substantial than gold itself. The only vegetable product extensively used in trade was the brazil-wood, whose beautiful dye and application to various ornamental purposes made it, from the first, one of the most important monopolies of the crown. The accounts are too vague to afford any probable estimate of the precious metals obtained from the new territories previous to Ovando's mission. Before the discovery of the mines of Hayna it was certainly very inconsiderable. The size of some of the specimens of ore found there would suggest magnificent ideas of their opulence. One piece of gold is reported by the contemporary historians to have weighed three thousand two hundred castellanos, and to have been so large, that the Spaniards served up a roasted pig on it, boasting that no potentate in Europe could dine off so costly a dish. [22] The admiral's own statement, that the miners obtained from six gold castellanos to one hundred or even two hundred and fifty in a day, allows a latitude too great to lead to any definite conclusion. [23] More tangible evidence of the riches of the island is afforded by the fact that two hundred thousand castellanos of gold went down in the ships with Bobadilla. But this, it must be remembered, was the fruit of gigantic efforts, continued, under a system of unexampled oppression, for more than two years. To this testimony might be added that of the well-informed historian of Seville, who infers from several royal ordinances that the influx of the precious metals had been such, before the close of the fifteenth century, as to affect the value of the currency, and the regular prices of commodities. [24] These large estimates, however, are scarcely reconcilable with the popular discontent at the meagreness of the returns obtained from the New World, or with the assertion of Bernaldez, of the same date with Zuñiga's reference, that, "so little gold had been brought home as to raise a general belief that there was scarcely any in the island." [25] This is still further confirmed by the frequent representations of contemporary writers, that the expenses of the colonies considerably exceeded the profits; and may account for the very limited scale on which the Spanish government, at no time blind to its own interests, pursued its schemes of discovery, as compared with its Portuguese neighbors, who followed up theirs with a magnificent apparatus of fleets and armies, that could have been supported only by the teeming treasures of the Indies. [26] While the colonial, commerce failed to produce immediately the splendid returns which were expected, it was generally believed to have introduced a physical evil into Europe, which, in the language of an eminent writer, "more than counterbalanced all the benefits that resulted from the discovery of the New World." I allude to the loathsome disease, which Heaven has sent as the severest scourge of licentious intercourse between the sexes; and which broke out with all the virulence of an epidemic in almost every quarter of Europe, in a very short time after the discovery of America. The coincidence of these two events led to the popular belief of their connection with each other, though it derived little support from any other circumstance. The expedition of Charles the Eighth, against Naples, which brought the Spaniards, soon after, in immediate contact with the various nations of Christendom, suggested a plausible medium for the rapid communication of the disorder; and this theory of its origin and transmission, gaining credit with time, which made it more difficult to be refuted, has passed with little examination from the mouth of one historian to another to the present day. The extremely brief interval which elapsed, between the return of Columbus and the simultaneous appearance of the disorder at the most distant points of Europe, long since suggested a reasonable distrust of the correctness of the hypothesis; and an American, naturally desirous of relieving his own country from so melancholy a reproach, may feel satisfaction that the more searching and judicious criticism of our own day has at length established beyond a doubt that the disease, far from originating in the New World, was never known there till introduced by Europeans. [27] Whatever be the amount of physical good or evil, immediately resulting to Spain from her new discoveries, their moral consequences were inestimable. The ancient limits of human thought and action were overleaped; the veil which had covered the secrets of the deep for so many centuries was removed; another hemisphere was thrown open; and a boundless expansion promised to science, from the infinite varieties in which nature was exhibited in these unexplored regions. The success of the Spaniards kindled a generous emulation in their Portuguese rivals, who soon after accomplished their long-sought passage into the Indian seas, and thus completed the great circle of maritime discovery. [28] It would seem as if Providence had postponed this grand event, until the possession of America, with its stores of precious metals, might supply such materials for a commerce with the east, as should bind together the most distant quarters of the globe. The impression made on the enlightened minds of that day is evinced by the tone of gratitude and exultation, in which they indulge, at being permitted to witness the consummation of these glorious events, which their fathers had so long, but in vain, desired to see. [29] The discoveries of Columbus occurred most opportunely for the Spanish nation, at the moment when it was released from the tumultuous struggle in which it had been engaged for so many years with the Moslems. The severe schooling of these wars had prepared it for entering on a bolder theatre of action, whose stirring and romantic perils raised still higher the chivalrous spirit of the people. The operation of this spirit was shown in the alacrity with which private adventurers embarked in expeditions to the New World, under cover of the general license, during the last two years of this century. Their efforts, combined with those of Columbus, extended the range of discovery from its original limits, twenty-four degrees of north latitude, to probably more than fifteen south, comprehending some of the most important territories in the western hemisphere. Before the end of 1500, the principal groups of the West Indian islands had been visited, and the whole extent of the southern continent coasted, from the Bay of Honduras to Cape St. Augustine. One adventurous mariner, indeed, named Lepe, penetrated several degrees south of this, to a point not reached by any other voyager for ten or twelve years after. A great part of the kingdom of Brazil was embraced in this extent, and two successive Castilian navigators landed and took formal possession of it for the crown of Castile, previous to its reputed discovery by the Portuguese Cabral; [30] although the claims to it were subsequently relinquished by the Spanish Government, conformably to the famous line of demarkation established by the treaty of Tordesillas. [31] While the colonial empire of Spain was thus every day enlarging, the man to whom it was all due was never permitted to know the extent or the value of it. He died in the conviction in which he lived, that the land he had reached was the long-sought Indies. But it was a country far richer than the Indies; and, had he on quitting Cuba struck into a westerly, instead of southerly direction, it would have carried him into the very depths of the golden regions, whose existence he had so long and vainly predicted. As it was, he "only opened the gates," to use his own language, for others more fortunate than himself; and before he quitted Hispaniola for the last time, the young adventurer arrived there, who was destined, by the conquest of Mexico, to realize all the magnificent visions, which had been derided as only visions, in the lifetime of Columbus. * * * * * The discovery of the New World was fortunately reserved for a period when the human race was sufficiently enlightened to form some conception of its importance. Public attention was promptly and eagerly directed to this momentous event, so that few facts worthy of note, during the whole progress of discovery from its earliest epoch, escaped contemporary record. Many of these notices have, indeed, perished through neglect, in the various repositories in which they were scattered. The researches of Navarrete have rescued many, and will, it is to be hoped, many more, from their progress to oblivion. The first two volumes of his compilation, containing the journals and letters of Columbus, the correspondence of the sovereigns with him, and a vast quantity of public and private documents, form, as I have elsewhere remarked, the most authentic basis for a history of that great man. Next to these in importance is the "History of the Admiral," by his son Ferdinand, whose own experience and opportunities, combined with uncommon literary attainments, eminently qualified him for recording his father's extraordinary life. It must be allowed, that he has done this with a candor and good faith seldom warped by any overweening, though natural, partiality for his subject. His work met with a whimsical fate. The original was early lost, but happily not before it had been translated into the Italian, from which a Spanish version was afterwards made; and from this latter, thus reproduced in the same tongue in which it originally appeared, are derived the various translations of it into the other languages of Europe. The Spanish version, which is incorporated into Barcia's collection, is executed in a slovenly manner, and is replete with chronological inaccuracies; a circumstance not very wonderful, considering the curious transmigration it has undergone. Another contemporary author of great value is Peter Martyr, who took so deep an interest in the nautical enterprise of his day, as to make it, independently of the abundant notices scattered through his correspondence, the subject of a separate work. His history, "De Rebus Oceanicis et Novo Orbe," has all the value which extensive learning, a reflecting, philosophical mind, and intimate familiarity with the principal actors in the scenes he describes, can give. Indeed, that no source of information might be wanting to him, the sovereigns authorized him to be present at the Council of the Indies, whenever any communication was made to that body, respecting the progress of discovery. The principal defects of his work arise from the precipitate manner in which the greater part of it was put together, and the consequently imperfect and occasionally contradictory statements which appear in it. But the honest intentions of the author, who seems to have been fully sensible of his own imperfections, and his liberal spirit, are so apparent, as to disarm criticism in respect to comparatively venial errors. But the writer who has furnished the greatest supply of materials for the modern historian is Antonio de Herrera. He did not flourish, indeed, until near a century after the discovery of America; but the post which he occupied of historiographer of the Indies gave him free access to the most authentic and reserved sources of information. He has availed himself of these with great freedom; transferring whole chapters from the unpublished narratives of his predecessors, especially of the good bishop Las Casas, whose great work, "Crónica de las Indias Occidentales," contained too much that was offensive to national feeling to be allowed the honors of the press. The Apostle of the Indians, however, lives in the pages of Herrera, who, while he has omitted the tumid and overheated declamation of the original, is allowed by the Castilian critics to have retained whatever is of most value, and exhibited it in a dress far superior to that of his predecessor. It must not be omitted, however, that he is also accused of occasional inadvertence in stating as fact, what Las Casas only adduced as tradition or conjecture. His "Historia General de las Indias Occidentales," bringing down the narrative to 1554, was published in four volumes, at Madrid, in 1601. Herrera left several other histories of the different states of Europe, and closed his learned labors in 1625, at the age of sixty. No Spanish historian had since arisen to contest the palm with Herrera on his own ground, until, at the close of the last century, Don Juan Bautista Muñoz was commissioned by the government to prepare a history of the New World. The talents and liberal acquisitions of this scholar, the free admission opened to him in every place of public and private deposit, and the immense mass of materials collected by his indefatigable researches, authorized the most favorable auguries of his success. These were justified by the character of the first volume, which brought the narrative of early discovery to the period of Bobadilla's mission, written in a perspicuous and agreeable style, with such a discriminating selection of incident and skilful arrangement, as convey the most distinct impression to the mind of the reader. Unfortunately, the untimely death of the author crushed his labors in the bud. Their fruits were not wholly lost, however. Señor Navarrete, availing himself of them, in connection with those derived from his own extensive investigations, is pursuing in part the plan of Muñoz, by the publication of original documents; and Mr. Irving has completed this design in regard to the early history of Spanish discovery, by the use which he has made of these materials in constructing out of them the noblest monument to the memory of Columbus. FOOTNOTES [1] See, in particular, a letter to Columbus, dated August, 1494; (apud Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii., Doc. Dipl., no. 79;) also an elaborate memorial presented by the admiral in the same year, setting forth the various necessities of the colony, every item of which is particularly answered by the sovereigns, in a manner showing how attentively they considered his suggestions.--Ibid., tom. i. pp. 226-241. [2] Abundant evidence of this is furnished by the long enumeration of articles subjected to tithes, contained in an ordinance dated October 5th, 1501, showing with what indiscriminate severity this heavy burden was imposed from the first on the most important products of human industry. Recopilacion de Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias, (Madrid, 1774,) tom. i. lib. 1, tit. 16, ley 2. [3] Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii., Doc. Dipl., no. 86, April 10th, 1495.--Nos. 103, 105-108, April 23d, 1497.--No. 110, May 6th, 1497. --No. 121, July 22d, 1497.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 4, cap. 12. [4] Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii., Doc. Dipl., nos. 86, 121.-- Herrera, Indias Occidentales, lib. 3, cap. 2.--Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo- Mundo, lib. 5, sec. 34. The exclusion of foreigners, at least all but "Catholic Christians," is particularly recommended by Columbus in his first communication to the crown. Primer Viage de Colon. [5] Among the foreign adventurers were the two Cabots, who sailed in the service of the English monarch, Henry VII., in 1497, and ran down the whole coast of North America, from Newfoundland to within a few degrees of Florida, thus encroaching, as it were, on the very field of discovery preoccupied by the Spaniards. [6] Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 5, sect. 32.--Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, Doc. Dipl., no. 86. [7] Columbus seems to have taken exceptions at the license for private voyages, as an infringement of his own prerogatives. It is difficult, however, to understand in what way. There is nothing in his original capitulations with the government having reference to the matter, (see Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, Doc. Dipl., no. 5,) while, in the letters patent made out previously to his second voyage, the right of granting licenses is expressly reserved to the crown, and to the superintendent, Fonseca, equally with the admiral. (Doc. Dipl., no. 35.) The only legal claim which he could make in all such expeditions as were not conducted under him, was to one-eighth of the tonnage, and this was regularly provided for in the general license. (Doc. Dipl., no. 86.) The sovereigns, indeed, in consequence of his remonstrances, published an ordinance, June 2d, 1497, in which, after expressing their unabated respect for all the rights and privileges of the admiral, they declared, that whatever shall be found in their previous license repugnant to these shall be null and void. (Doc. Dipl., 113.) The hypothetical form in which this is stated shows that the sovereigns, with an honest desire of keeping their engagements with Columbus, had not a very clear perception in what manner they had been violated. Peter Martyr, De Rebus Oceanicis, Dec. 1, lib. 9.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, lib. 4, cap. 11.--Benzoni, Novi Orbis Hist., cap. 13. [8] Part I. Chap. 18, of this History. [9] Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii., Doc. Dipl., no. 148.-- Solorzano y Pereyra, Política Indiana, (Madrid, 1776,) lib. 6, cap. 17.-- Linage de Veitia, Norte de la Contratacion de las Indias Occidentales, (Sevilla, 1672,) lib. 1, cap. 1.--Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, año 1503.-- Herrera, Indias Occidentales, lib. 5, cap. 12.--Navagiero, Viaggio, fol. 15. [10] See the original bull, apud Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii. apend. 14, and a Spanish version of it, in Solorzano, Política Indiana, lib. 4, cap. 1, sec. 7. [11] Solorzano, Política Indiana, tom. ii. lib. 4, cap. 2, sec. 9--Riol, Informe, apud Semanario Erudite, tom. iii. pp. 160, 161. [12] Among others see Raynal, History of the East and West Indies, translated by Justamond, (London, 1788,) vol. iv. p. 277.--Robertson, History of America, (London, 1796,) vol. iii. p. 283. [13] Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 5, sec. 32, 33.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, lib. 4, cap. 11, 12.--Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii., Doc. Dipl., no. 86. [14] The historian of Seville mentions that it was the resort especially of the merchants of Flanders, with whom a more intimate intercourse had been opened by the intermarriages of the royal family with the house of Burgundy. See Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 415. [15] Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii., Doc. Dipl., no. 45, et loc. al.--Las Casas, amidst his unsparing condemnation of the guilty, does ample justice to the pure and generous, though, alas! unavailing efforts of the queen. See Oeuvres, ed. de Llorente, tom. i. pp. 21, 307, 395, et alibi. [16] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, lib. 4, cap. 12.--A good account of the introduction of negro slavery into the New World, comprehending the material facts, and some little known, may be found in the fifth chapter of Bancroft's "History of the United States;" a work in which the author has shown singular address in creating a unity of interest out of a subject which, in its early stages, would seem to want every other unity. It is the deficiency of this, probably, which has prevented Mr. Grahame's valuable History from attaining the popularity, to which its solid merits justly entitle it. Should the remaining volumes of Mr. Bancroft's work be conducted with the same spirit, scholarship, and impartiality as the volume before us, it cannot fail to take a permanent rank in American literature. [17] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, lib. 4, cap. 11. [18] Dec. 20th, 1503.--Ibid., lib. 5, cap. 11.--See the instructions to Ovando in Navarrete, (Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii., Doc. Dipl., no. 153.) "Pay them regular wages," says the ordinance, "for their labor," "como personas libres como lo son, y no como siervos." Las Casas, who analyzes these instructions, which Llorente, by the by, has misdated, exposes the atrocious manner in which they were violated, in every particular, by Ovando and his successors. Oeuvres, ed. de Llorente, tom. i. p. 309, et seq. [19] Ibid., ubi supra.--Las Casas, Hist. Ind., lib. 2, cap. 36, MS., apud Irving, vol. iii. p. 412.--The venerable bishop confirms this frightful picture of desolation, in its full extent, in his various memorials prepared for the Council of the Indies. Oeuvres, ed. de Llorente, tom. i. passim. [20] Las Casas made his first voyage to the Indies, it is true, in 1498, or at latest 1502; but there is no trace of his taking an active part in denouncing the oppressions of the Spaniards earlier than 1510, when he combined his efforts with those of the Dominican missionaries lately arrived in St. Domingo, in the same good work. It was not until some years later, 1515, that he returned to Spain and pleaded the cause of the injured natives before the throne. Llorente, Oeuvres de Las Casas, tom. i. pp. 1-23.--Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Nova, tom. i. pp. 191, 192. [21] See the will, apud Dormer, Discursos Varios, p. 381. [22] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, lib. 5, cap. 1.--Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 84.--Oviedo, Relacion Sumaria de la Historia Natural de las Indias, cap. 84, apud Barcia, Historiadores Primitivos, tom. i. [23] Tercer Viage de Colon, apud Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. i. p. 274. [24] Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 415. The alteration was in the gold currency; which continued to rise in value till 1497, when it gradually sunk, in consequence of the importation from the mines of Hispaniola. Clemencin has given its relative value as compared with silver, for several different years; and the year he assigns for the commencement of its depreciation, is precisely the same with that indicated by Zuñiga. (Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 20.) The value of silver was not materially affected till the discovery of the great mines of Potosí and Zacatecas. [25] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 131. [26] The estimates in the text, it will be noticed, apply only to the period antecedent to Ovando's administration, in 1502. The operations under him were conducted on a far more extensive and efficient plan. The system of _repartimientos_ being revived, the whole physical force of the island, aided by the best mechanical apparatus, was employed in extorting from the soil all its hidden stores of wealth. The success was such that in 1506, within two years after Isabella's death, the four foundries established in the island yielded an annual amount, according to Herrera, of 450,000 ounces of gold. It must be remarked, however, that one-fifth only of the gross sum obtained from the mines was at that time paid to the crown. It is a proof how far these returns exceeded the expectations at the time of Ovando's appointment, that the person then sent out, as marker of the gold, was to receive, as a reasonable compensation, one per cent, of all the gold assayed. The perquisite, however, was found to be so excessive, that the functionary was recalled, and a new arrangement made with his successor. (See Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 6, cap. 18.) When Navagiero visited Seville, in 1520, the royal fifth of the gold, which passed through the mints, amounted to about 100,000 ducats annually. Viaggio, fol. 15. [27] The curious reader is particularly referred to a late work, entitled _Lettere sutta Storia de' Mali Venerei, di Domenico Thiene, Venezia_, 1823; for the knowledge and loan of which I am indebted to my friend, Dr. Walter Channing. In this work, the author has assembled all the early notices of the disease of any authority, and discussed their import with great integrity and judgment. The following positions may be considered as established by his researches. 1. That neither Columbus nor his son, in their copious narratives and correspondence, allude in any way to the existence of such a disease in the New World. I must add, that an examination of the original documents, published by Navarrete since the date of Dr. Thiene's work, fully confirms this statement. 2. That among the frequent notices of the disease, during the twenty-five years immediately following the discovery of America, there is not a single intimation of its having been brought from that country; but, on the contrary, a uniform derivation of it from some other source, generally France. 3. That the disorder was known and circumstantially described previous to the expedition of Charles VIII., and of course could not have been introduced by the Spaniards in that way, as vulgarly supposed. 4. That various contemporary authors trace its existence in a variety of countries, as far back as 1493, and the beginning of 1494, showing a rapidity and extent of diffusion perfectly irreconcilable with its importation by Columbus in 1493. 5. Lastly, that it was not till after the close of Ferdinand and Isabella's reigns, that the first work appeared affecting to trace the origin of the disease to America; and this, published 1517, was the production not of a Spaniard, but a foreigner. A letter of Peter Martyr to the learned Portuguese Arias Barbosa, professor of Greek at Salamanca, noticing the symptoms of the disease in the most unequivocal manner, will settle at once this much vexed question, if we can rely on the genuineness of the date, the 5th of April, 1488, about five years before the return of Columbus. Dr. Thiene, however, rejects the date as apocryphal, on the ground, 1. That the name of "morbus Gallicus," given to the disease by Martyr, was not in use till after the French invasion, in 1494. 2. That the superscription of Greek professor at Salamanca was premature, as no such professorship existed there till 1508. As to the first of these objections, it may be remarked, that there is but one author prior to the French invasion, who notices the disease at all. He derives it from Gaul, though not giving it the technical appellation of _morbus Gallicus_; and Martyr, it may be observed, far from confining himself to this, alludes to one or two other names, showing that its title was then quite undetermined. In regard to the second objection, Dr. Thiene does not cite his authority for limiting the introduction of Greek at Salamanca to 1508. He may have found a plausible one in the account of that university compiled by one of its officers, Pedro Chacon, in 1569, inserted in the eighteenth volume of the Semanario Erudito, (Madrid, 1789.) The accuracy of the writer's chronology, however, may well be doubted from a gross anachronism on the same page with the date referred to, where he speaks of Queen Joanna as inheriting the crown in 1512. (Hist. de la Universidad de Salamanca, p. 55.) Waiving this, however, the fact of Barbosa being Greek professor at Salamanca in 1488 is directly intimated by his pupil the celebrated Andrew Resendi. "Arias Lusitanus," says he, "quadraginta, et eo plus annos Salmanticae tum Latinas litteras, tum Graecas, magnâ cum laude professus est." (Responsio ad Quevedum, apud Barbosa, Bibliotheca Lusitana, tom. i. p. 77.) Now, as Barbosa, by general consent, passed several years in his native country, Portugal, before his death in 1530, this assertion of Resendi necessarily places him at Salamanca in the situation of Greek instructor some time before the date of Martyr's letter. It may be added, indeed, that Nic. Antonio, than whom a more competent critic could not be found, so far from suspecting the date of the letter, cites it as settling the period when Barbosa filled the Greek chair at Salamanca, (See Bibliotheca Nova, tom. i. p. 170.) Martyr's epistle, if we admit the genuineness of the date, must dispose at once of the whole question of the American origin of the venereal disease. But as this question is determined quite as conclusively, though not so summarily, by the accumulated evidence from other sources, the reader will probably think the matter not worth so much discussion. [28] This event occurred in 1497, Vasco de Gama doubling the Cape of Good Hope, November 20th, in that year, and reaching Calicut in the following May, 1498. La Clède, Hist. de Portugal, tom. iii. pp. 104-109. [29] See, among others, Peter Martyr, Opus Epist, epist. 181. [30] Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. iii. pp. 18-26.--Cabral's pretensions to the discovery of Brazil appear not to have been doubted until recently. They are sanctioned both by Robertson and Raynal. [31] The Portuguese court formed, probably, no very accurate idea of the geographical position of Brazil. King Emanuel, in a letter to the Spanish sovereigns acquainting them with Cabral's voyage, speaks of the newly discovered region as not only convenient, but _necessary_, for the navigation to India. (See the letter, apud Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. iii. no. 13.) The oldest maps of this country, whether from ignorance or design, bring it twenty-two degrees east of its proper longitude, so that the whole of the vast tract now comprehended under the name of Brazil, would fall on the Portuguese side of the partition line agreed on by the two governments, which, it will be remembered, was removed to 370 leagues west of the Cape de Verd Islands. The Spanish court made some show at first of resisting the pretensions of the Portuguese, by preparations for establishing a colony on the northern extremity of the Brazilian territory. (Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. iii. p. 39.) It is not easy to understand how it came finally to admit these pretensions. Any correct admeasurement with the Castilian league would only have included the fringe, as it were, of the northeastern promontory of Brazil. The Portuguese league, allowing seventeen to a degree, may have been adopted, which would embrace nearly the whole territory which passed under the name of Brazil, in the best ancient maps, extending from Para on the north, to the great river of San Pedro on the south. (See Malte Brun, Universal Geography, (Boston, 1824-9,) book 91.) Mariana seems willing to help the Portuguese, by running the partition line one hundred leagues farther west than they claimed themselves. Hist. de España, tom. ii. p. 607. END OF VOL. II. 
6968	----	HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA, THE CATHOLIC. BY WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. III. CONTENTS OF VOLUME III. PART SECOND. [CONTINUED.] CHAPTER X ITALIAN WARS.--PARTITION OF NAPLES.--GONSALVO OVERRUNS CALABRIA. LOUIS XII.'S DESIGNS ON ITALY POLITICS OF THAT COUNTRY THE FRENCH CONQUER MILAN ALARM OF THE SPANISH COURT REMONSTRANCE TO THE POPE BOLDNESS OF GARCILASSO DE LA VEGA NEGOTIATIONS WITH VENICE AND THE EMPEROR LOUIS OPENLY MENACES NAPLES VIEWS OF FERDINAND FLEET FITTED OUT UNDER GONSALVO DE CORDOVA PARTITION OF NAPLES GROUND OF FERDINAND'S CLAIM GONSALVO SAILS AGAINST THE TURKS STORMING OF ST. GEORGE HONORS PAID TO GONSALVO THE POPE CONFIRMS THE PARTITION ASTONISHMENT OF ITALY SUCCESS AND CRUELTIES OF THE FRENCH FATE OF FREDERIC GONSALVO INVADES CALABRIA INVESTS TARENTO DISCONTENTS IN THE ARMY MUNIFICENCE OF GONSALVO HE PUNISHES A MUTINY BOLDER PLAN OF ATTACK TARENTO SURRENDERS PERJURY OF GONSALVO CHAPTER XI. ITALIAN WARS.--RUPTURE WITH FRANCE.--GONSALVO BESIEGED IN BARLETA. MUTUAL DISTRUST OF THE FRENCH AND SPANIARDS CAUSE OF RUPTURE THE FRENCH BEGIN HOSTILITIES THE ITALIANS FAVOR THEM THE FRENCH ARMY INFERIORITY OF THE SPANIARDS GONSALVO RETIRES TO BARLETA SIEGE OF CANOSA CHIVALROUS CHARACTER OF THE WAR TOURNAMENT NEAR TRANI DUEL BETWEEN BAYARD AND SOTOMAYOR DISTRESS OF THE SPANIARDS SPIRIT OF GONSALVO THE FRENCH REDUCE CALABRIA CONSTANCY OF THE SPANIARDS NEMOURS DEFIES THE SPANIARDS ROUT OF THE FRENCH REAR-GUARD ARRIVAL OF SUPPLIES DESIGN ON RUVO GONSALVO STORMS AND TAKES IT HIS TREATMENT OF THE PRISONERS PREPARES TO LEAVE BARLETA CHAPTER XII. ITALIAN WARS.--NEGOTIATIONS WITH FRANCE.--VICTORY OF CERIGNOLA.-- SURRENDER OF NAPLES. BIRTH OF CHARLES V PHILIP AND JOANNA VISIT SPAIN RECOGNIZED BY CORTES PHILIP'S DISCONTENT LEAVES SPAIN FOR FRANCE NEGOTIATES A TREATY WITH LOUIS XII TREATY OF LYONS THE GREAT CAPTAIN REFUSES TO COMPLY WITH IT MARCHES OUT OF BARLETA DISTRESS OF THE TROOPS ENCAMPS BEFORE CERIGNOLA NEMOURS PURSUES THE SPANISH FORCES THE FRENCH FORCES BATTLE OF CERIGNOLA DEATH OF NEMOURS ROUT OF THE FRENCH THEIR LOSS PURSUIT OF THE ENEMY D'AUBIGNY DEFEATED SUBMISSION OF NAPLES TRIUMPHANT ENTRY OF GONSALVO FORTRESSES OF NAPLES CASTEL NUOVO STORMED NEARLY ALL THE KINGDOM REDUCED CHAPTER XIII. NEGOTIATIONS WITH FRANCE--UNSUCCESSFUL INVASION OF SPAIN.--TRUCE. TREATY OF LYONS REJECTED BY FERDINAND HIS POLICY EXAMINED JOANNA'S DESPONDENCY FIRST SYMPTOMS OF HER INSANITY THE QUEEN HASTENS TO HER ISABELLA'S DISTRESS HER ILLNESS AND FORTITUDE THE FRENCH INVADE SPAIN SIEGE OF SALSAS ISABELLA'S EXERTIONS FERDINAND'S SUCCESSES TRUCE WITH FRANCE REFLECTIONS ON THE CAMPAIGN IMPEDIMENTS TO HISTORIC ACCURACY SPECULATIVE WRITERS CHAPTER XIV. ITALIAN WARS.--CONDITION OF ITALY.--FRENCH AND SPANISH ARMIES ON THE GARIGLIANO. MELANCHOLY CONDITION OF ITALY VIEWS OF THE ITALIAN STATES OF THE EMPEROR GREAT PREPARATIONS OF LOUIS XII DEATH OF ALEXANDER VI ELECTIONEERING INTRIGUES JULIUS II GONSALVO REPULSED BEFORE GAETA STRENGTH OF HIS FORCES OCCUPIES SAN GERMANO THE FRENCH ENCAMP ON THE GARIGLIANO PASSAGE OF THE BRIDGE DESPERATE RESISTANCE THE FRENCH RESUME THEIR QUARTERS ANXIOUS EXPECTATION OF ITALY GONSALVO STRENGTHENS HIS POSITION GREAT DISTRESS OF THE ARMY GONSALVO'S RESOLUTION REMARKABLE INSTANCE OF IT PATIENCE OF THE SPANIARDS SITUATION OF THE FRENCH THEIR INSUBORDINATION SALUZZO TAKES THE COMMAND HEROISM OF PAREDES AND BAYARD CHAPTER XV. ITALIAN WARS.--ROUT OF THE GARIGLIANO.--TREATY WITH FRANCE.--GONSALVO'S MILITARY CONDUCT. GONSALVO SECURES THE ORSINI ASSUMES THE OFFENSIVE PLAN OF ATTACK CONSTERNATION OF THE FRENCH THEY RETREAT ON GAETA ACTION AT THE BRIDGE OF MOLA HOTLY CONTESTED ARRIVAL OF THE SPANISH REAR THE FRENCH ROUTED THEIR LOSS GALLANTRY OF THEIR CHIVALRY CAPITULATION OF GAETA GONSALVO'S COURTESY CHAGRIN OF LOUIS XII SUFFERINGS OF THE FRENCH THE SPANIARDS OCCUPY GAETA PUBLIC ENTHUSIASM EXTORTIONS OF THE SPANISH TROOPS GONSALVO'S LIBERALITY TO HIS OFFICERS APPREHENSIONS OF LOUIS XII TREATY WITH FRANCE GALLANTRY OF LOUIS D'ARS CAUSES OF THE FRENCH FAILURES REVIEW OF GONSALVO'S CONDUCT HIS REFORM OF THE SERVICE INFLUENCE OVER THE ARMY HIS CONFIDENCE IN THEIR CHARACTER POSITION OF THE ARMY RESULTS OF THE CAMPAIGNS MEMOIRS OF GONSALVO DE CORDOVA FRENCH CHRONICLES CHAPTER XVI. ILLNESS AND DEATH OF ISABELLA.--HER CHARACTER. DECLINE OF THE QUEEN'S HEALTH MAD CONDUCT OF JOANNA THE QUEEN SEIZED WITH A FEVER RETAINS HER ENERGIES ALARM OF THE NATION HER TESTAMENT SETTLES THE SUCCESSION FERDINAND NAMED REGENT PROVISION FOR HIM HER CODICIL SHE FAILS RAPIDLY HER RESIGNATION AND DEATH HER REMAINS TRANSPORTED TO GRANADA LAID IN THE ALHAMBRA ISABELLA'S PERSON HER MANNERS HER MAGNANIMITY HER PIETY HER BIGOTRY COMMON TO HER AGE AND LATER TIMES HER STRENGTH OF PRINCIPLE HER PRACTICAL SENSE HER UNWEARIED ACTIVITY HER COURAGE HER SENSIBILITY PARALLEL WITH QUEEN ELIZABETH UNIVERSAL HOMAGE TO HER VIRTUES CHAPTER XVII. FERDINAND REGENT.--HIS SECOND MARRIAGE.--DISSENSIONS WITH PHILIP.-- RESIGNATION OF THE REGENCY. PHILIP AND JOANNA PROCLAIMED DISCONTENT OF THE NOBLES DON JUAN MANUEL PHILIP'S PRETENSIONS HIS PARTY INCREASES HE TAMPERS WITH GONSALVO DE CORDOVA FERDINAND'S PERPLEXITIES PROPOSALS FOR A SECOND MARRIAGE POLICY OF LOUIS XII TREATY WITH FRANCE ITS IMPOLICY CONCORD OR SALAMANCA PHILIP AND JOANNA EMBARK REACH CORUÑA PHILIP JOINED BY THE NOBLES HIS CHARACTER FERDINAND UNPOPULAR INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP COURTEOUS DEPORTMENT OF FERDINAND PHILIP'S DISTRUST FERDINAND RESIGNS THE REGENCY HIS PRIVATE PROTEST HIS MOTIVES SECOND INTERVIEW DEPARTURE OF FERDINAND AUTHORITIES FOR THE ACCOUNT OF PHILIP CHAPTER XVIII. COLUMBUS.--HIS RETURN TO SPAIN.--HIS DEATH. COLUMBUS'S LAST VOYAGE HE LEARNS ISABELLA'S DEATH HIS ILLNESS HE VISITS THE COURT FERDINAND'S UNJUST TREATMENT OF HIM HE DECLINES IN HEALTH AND SPIRITS HIS DEATH HIS PERSON AND HABITS HIS ENTHUSIASM HIS LOFTY CHARACTER CHAPTER XIX. REIGN AND DEATH OF PHILIP I.--PROCEEDINGS IN CASTILE.--FERDINAND VISITS NAPLES. PHILIP AND JOANNA PHILIP'S ARBITRARY GOVERNMENT RECKLESS EXTRAVAGANCE TROUBLES FROM THE INQUISITION FERDINAND'S DISTRUST OF GONSALVO HE SAILS FOR NAPLES GONSALVO'S LOYALTY DEATH OF PHILIP HIS CHARACTER PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT JOANNA'S CONDITION CONVOCATION OF CORTES FERDINAND RECEIVED WITH ENTHUSIASM HIS ENTRY INTO NAPLES RESTORES THE ANGEVINS GENERAL DISSATISFACTION CHAPTER XX. FERDINAND'S RETURN AND REGENCY.--GONSALVO'S HONORS AND RETIREMENT. MEETING OF CORTES JOANNA'S INSANE CONDUCT SHE CHANGES HER MINISTERS DISORDERLY STATE OF CASTILE DISTRESS OF THE KINGDOM FERDINAND'S POLITIC BEHAVIOR HE LEAVES NAPLES GONSALVO DE CORDOVA GRIEF OF THE NEAPOLITANS BRILLIANT INTERVIEW OF FERDINAND AND LOUIS COMPLIMENTS TO GONSALVO THE KING'S RECEPTION IN CASTILE JOANNA'S RETIREMENT IRREGULARITY OF FERDINAND'S PROCEEDINGS GENERAL AMNESTY HE ESTABLISHES A GUARD HIS EXCESSIVE SEVERITY DISGUST OF THE NOBLES GONSALVO'S PROGRESS THROUGH THE COUNTRY FERDINAND BREAKS HIS WORD THE QUEEN'S COOLNESS GONSALVO WITHDRAWS FROM COURT SPLENDOR OF HIS RETIREMENT CHAPTER XXI. XIMENES.--CONQUESTS IN AFRICA.--UNIVERSITY OF ALCALA--POLYGLOT BIBLE. POLICY OF FERDINAND'S SEVERITY ENTHUSIASM OF XIMENES HIS DESIGNS AGAINST ORAN HIS WARLIKE PREPARATIONS HIS PERSEVERANCE SENDS AN ARMY TO AFRICA ADDRESSES THE TROOPS THE COMMAND LEFT TO NAVARRO BATTLE BEFORE ORAN THE CITY STORMED MOORISH LOSS XIMENES ENTERS ORAN OPPOSITION OF HIS GENERAL HIS DISTRUST OF FERDINAND XIMENES RETURNS TO SPAIN REFUSES PUBLIC HONORS NAVARRO'S AFRICAN CONQUESTS COLLEGE OF XIMENES AT ALCALA ITS MAGNIFICENCE PROVISIONS FOR EDUCATION THE KING VISITS THE UNIVERSITY POLYGLOT EDITION OF THE BIBLE DIFFICULTIES OF THE TASK GRAND PROJECTS OF XIMENES CHAPTER XXII. WARS AND POLITICS OF ITALY. PROJECTS AGAINST VENICE LEAGUE OF CAMBRAY ITS ORIGIN LOUIS XII. INVADES ITALY 01 RESOLUTION OF VENICE ALARM OF FERDINAND INVESTITURE OF NAPLES HOLY LEAGUE GASTON DE FOIX BATTLE OF RAVENNA DEATH OF GASTON DE FOIX HIS CHARACTER THE FRENCH RETREAT VENICE DISGUSTED BATTLE OF NOVARA OF LA MOTTA THE SPANIARDS VICTORIOUS DARU'S "HISTOIRE DE VENISE" CHAPTER XXIII. CONQUEST OF NAVARRE. SOVEREIGNS OF NAVARRE DISTRUST OF SPAIN NEGOTIATIONS WITH FRANCE FERDINAND DEMANDS A PASSAGE NAVARRE ALLIED TO FRANCE INVADED BY ALVA AND CONQUERED CHARACTER OF JEAN D'ALBRET DISCONTENT OF THE ENGLISH DISCOMFITURE OF THE FRENCH TREATY OF ORTHES FERDINAND SETTLES HIS CONQUESTS UNITED WITH CASTILE THE KING'S CONDUCT EXAMINED RIGHT OF PASSAGE IMPRUDENCE OF NAVARRE IT AUTHORIZES WAR GROSS ABUSE OF VICTORY AUTHORITIES FOR THE HISTORY OF NAVARRE CHAPTER XXIV. DEATH OF GONSALVO DE CORDOVA.--ILLNESS AND DEATH OF FERDINAND.--HIS CHARACTER. MAXIMILIAN'S PRETENSIONS GONSALVO ORDERED TO ITALY GENERAL ENTHUSIASM THE KING'S DISTRUST GONSALVO GOES INTO RETIREMENT THE KING'S DESIRE FOR CHILDREN DECLINE OF HIS HEALTH GONSALVO'S ILLNESS AND DEATH PUBLIC GRIEF HIS CHARACTER HIS PRIVATE VIRTUES HIS WANT OF FAITH HIS LOYALTY FERDINAND'S ILLNESS INCREASES HIS INSENSIBILITY TO HIS SITUATION HIS LAST HOURS HIS DEATH AND TESTAMENT HIS BODY TRANSPORTED TO GRANADA HIS PERSON AND CHARACTER HIS TEMPERANCE AND ECONOMY HIS BIGOTRY ACCUSED OF HYPOCRISY HIS PERFIDY HIS SHREWD POLICY HIS INSENSIBILITY CONTRAST WITH ISABELLA GLOOMY CLOSE OF HIS LIFE HIS KINGLY QUALITIES JUDGMENT OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES CHAPTER XXV. ADMINISTRATION, DEATH, AND CHARACTER OF CARDINAL XIMENES. DISPUTES RESPECTING THE REGENCY CHARLES PROCLAIMED KING ANECDOTE OF XIMENES HIS MILITARY ORDINANCE HIS DOMESTIC POLICY HIS FOREIGN POLICY ASSUMES THE SOLE POWER INTIMIDATES THE NOBLES PUBLIC DISCONTENTS TREATY OF NOYON CHARLES LANDS IN SPAIN HIS UNGRATEFUL LETTER THE CARDINAL'S LAST ILLNESS HIS DEATH HIS CHARACTER HIS VERSATILITY OF TALENT HIS DESPOTIC GOVERNMENT HIS MORAL PRINCIPLE HIS DISINTERESTEDNESS HIS MONASTIC AUSTERITIES HIS ECONOMY OF TIME HIS PERSON PARALLEL WITH RICHELIEU NOTICE OF GALINDEZ DE CARBAJAL CHAPTER XXVI. GENERAL REVIEW OF THE ADMINISTRATION OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA. POLICY OF THE CROWN DEPRESSION OF THE NOBLES THEIR GREAT POWER TREATMENT OF THE CHURCH CARE OF MORALS STATE OF THE COMMONS THEIR CONSIDERATION ROYAL ORDINANCES ARBITRARY MEASURES OF FERDINAND ADVANCEMENT OF PREROGATIVE LEGAL COMPILATIONS ORGANIZATION OF COUNCILS LEGAL PROFESSION ADVANCED CHARACTER OF THE LAWS ERRONEOUS PRINCIPLES OF LEGISLATION PRINCIPAL EXPORTS MANUFACTURES AGRICULTURE ECONOMICAL POLICY INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS INCREASE OF EMPIRE GOVERNMENT OF NAPLES REVENUES FROM THE INDIES SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE PROGRESS OF DISCOVERY EXCESSES OF THE SPANIARDS SLAVERY IN THE COLONIES COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION GENERAL PROSPERITY PUBLIC EMBELLISHMENTS AUGMENTATION OF REVENUE INCREASE OF POPULATION PATRIOTIC PRINCIPLE CHIVALROUS SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE SPIRIT OF BIGOTRY BENEFICENT IMPULSE THE PERIOD OF NATIONAL GLORY PART SECOND. [CONTINUED.] CHAPTER X. ITALIAN WARS.--PARTITION OF NAPLES.--GONSALVO OVERRUNS CALABRIA. 1498-1502. Louis XII.'s Designs on Italy.--Alarm of the Spanish Court.--Bold Conduct of its Minister at Rome.--Celebrated Partition of Naples.--Gonsalvo Sails against the Turks.--Success and Cruelties of the French.--Gonsalvo Invades Calabria.--He Punishes a Mutiny.--His Munificent Spirit.--He Captures Tarento.--Seizes the Duke of Calabria. During the last four years of our narrative, in which the unsettled state of the kingdom and the progress of foreign discovery appeared to demand the whole attention of the sovereigns, a most important revolution was going forward in the affairs of Italy. The death of Charles the Eighth would seem to have dissolved the relations recently arisen between that country and the rest of Europe, and to have restored it to its ancient independence. It might naturally have been expected that France, under her new monarch, who had reached a mature age, rendered still more mature by the lessons he had received in the school of adversity, would feel the folly of reviving ambitious schemes, which had cost so dear and ended so disastrously. Italy, too, it might have been presumed, lacerated and still bleeding at every pore, would have learned the fatal consequence of invoking foreign aid in her domestic quarrels, and of throwing open the gates to a torrent, sure to sweep down friend and foe indiscriminately in its progress. But experience, alas! did not bring wisdom, and passion triumphed as usual. Louis the Twelfth, on ascending the throne, assumed the titles of Duke of Milan and King of Naples, thus unequivocally announcing his intention of asserting his claims, derived through the Visconti family, to the former, and through the Angevin dynasty, to the latter state. His aspiring temper was stimulated rather than satisfied by the martial renown he had acquired in the Italian wars; and he was urged on by the great body of the French chivalry, who, disgusted with a life of inaction, longed for a field where they might win new laurels, and indulge in the joyous license of military adventure. Unhappily, the court of France found ready instruments for its purpose in the profligate politicians of Italy. The Roman pontiff, in particular, Alexander the Sixth, whose criminal ambition assumes something respectable by contrast with the low vices in which he was habitually steeped, willingly lent himself to a monarch, who could so effectually serve his selfish schemes of building up the fortunes of his family. The ancient republic of Venice, departing from her usual sagacious policy, and yielding to her hatred of Lodovico Sforza, and to the lust of territorial acquisition, consented to unite her arms with those of France against Milan, in consideration of a share (not the lion's share) of the spoils of victory. Florence, and many other inferior powers, whether from fear or weakness, or the short-sighted hope of assistance in their petty international feuds, consented either to throw their weight into the same scale, or to remain neutral. [1] Having thus secured himself from molestation in Italy, Louis the Twelfth entered into negotiations with such other European powers, as were most likely to interfere with his designs. The emperor Maximilian, whose relations with Milan would most naturally have demanded his interposition, was deeply entangled in a war with the Swiss. The neutrality of Spain was secured by the treaty of Marcoussis, August 5th, 1498, which settled all the existing differences with that country. And a treaty with Savoy in the following year guaranteed a free passage through her mountain passes to the French army into Italy. [2] Having completed these arrangements, Louis lost no time in mustering his forces, which, descending like a torrent on the fair plains of Lombardy, effected the conquest of the entire duchy in little more than a fortnight; and, although the prize was snatched for a moment from his grasp, yet French valor and Swiss perfidy soon restored it. The miserable Sforza, the dupe of arts which he had so long practised, was transported into France, where he lingered out the remainder of his days in doleful captivity. He had first called the _barbarians_ into Italy, and it was a righteous retribution which made him their earliest victim. [3] By the conquest of Milan, France now took her place among the Italian powers. A preponderating weight was thus thrown into the scale, which disturbed the ancient political balance, and which, if the projects on Naples should be realized, would wholly annihilate it. These consequences, to which the Italian states seemed strangely insensible, had long been foreseen by the sagacious eye of Ferdinand the Catholic, who watched the movements of his powerful neighbor with the deepest anxiety. He had endeavored, before the invasion of Milan, to awaken the different governments in Italy to a sense of their danger, and to stir them up to some efficient combination against it. [4] Both he and the queen had beheld with disquietude the increasing corruptions of the papal court, and that shameless cupidity and lust of power, which made it the convenient tool of the French monarch. By their orders, Garcilasso de la Vega, the Spanish ambassador, read a letter from his sovereigns in the presence of his Holiness, commenting on his scandalous immorality, his invasion of ecclesiastical rights appertaining to the Spanish crown, his schemes of selfish aggrandizement, and especially his avowed purpose of transferring his son Caesar Borgia, from a sacred to a secular dignity; a circumstance that must necessarily make him, from the manner in which it was to be conducted, the instrument of Louis the Twelfth. [5] This unsavory rebuke, which probably lost nothing of its pungency from the tone in which it was delivered, so incensed the pope that he attempted to seize the paper and tear it in pieces, giving vent at the same time to the most indecent reproaches against the minister and his sovereigns. Garcilasso coolly waited till the storm had subsided, and then replied undauntedly, "That he had uttered no more than became a loyal subject of Castile; that he should never shrink from declaring freely what his sovereigns commanded, or what he conceived to be for the good of Christendom; and, if his Holiness were displeased with it, he could dismiss him from his court, where he was convinced, indeed, his residence could be no longer useful." [6] Ferdinand had no better fortune at Venice, where his negotiations were conducted by Lorenzo Suarez de la Vega, an adroit diplomatist, brother of Garcilasso. [7] These negotiations were resumed after the occupation of Milan by the French, when the minister availed himself of the jealousy occasioned by that event to excite a determined resistance to the proposed aggression on Naples. But the republic was too sorely pressed by the Turkish war,--which Sforza, in the hope of creating a diversion in his own favor, had brought on his country,--to allow leisure for other operations. Nor did the Spanish court succeed any better at this crisis with the emperor Maximilian, whose magnificent pretensions were ridiculously contrasted with his limited authority, and still more limited revenues, so scanty, indeed, as to gain him the contemptuous epithet among the Italians of _pochi denari_, or "the Moneyless." He had conceived himself, indeed, greatly injured, both on the score of his imperial rights and his connection with Sforza, by the conquest of Milan; but, with the levity and cupidity essential to his character, he suffered himself, notwithstanding the remonstrances of the Spanish court, to be bribed into a truce with King Louis, which gave the latter full scope for his meditated enterprise on Naples. [8] Thus disembarrassed of the most formidable means of annoyance, the French monarch went briskly forward with his preparations, the object of which he did not affect to conceal. Frederic, the unfortunate king of Naples, saw himself with dismay now menaced with the loss of empire, before he had time to taste the sweets of it. He knew not where to turn for refuge, in his desolate condition, from the impending storm. His treasury was drained, and his kingdom wasted, by the late war. His subjects, although attached to his person, were too familiar with revolutions to stake their lives or fortunes on the cast. His countrymen, the Italians, were in the interest of his enemy; and his nearest neighbor, the pope, had drawn from personal pique motives for the most deadly hostility. [9] He had as little reliance on the king of Spain, his natural ally and kinsman, who, he well knew, had always regarded the crown of Naples as his own rightful inheritance. He resolved, therefore, to apply at once to the French monarch; and he endeavored to propitiate him by the most humiliating concessions,--the offer of an annual tribute, and the surrender into his hands of some of the principal fortresses in the kingdom. Finding these advances coldly received, he invoked, in the extremity of his distress, the aid of the Turkish sultan, Bajazet, the terror of Christendom, requesting such supplies of troops as should enable him to make head against their common foe. This desperate step produced no other result than that of furnishing the enemies of the unhappy prince with a plausible ground of accusation against him, of which they did not fail to make good use. [10] The Spanish government, in the mean time, made the most vivid remonstrances through its resident minister, or agents expressly accredited for the purpose, against the proposed expedition of Louis the Twelfth. It even went so far as to guarantee the faithful discharge of the tribute proffered by the king of Naples. [11] But the reckless ambition of the French monarch, overleaping the barriers of prudence, and indeed of common sense, disdained the fruits of conquest without the name. Ferdinand now found himself apparently reduced to the alternative of abandoning the prize at once to the French king, or of making battle with him in defence of his royal kinsman. The first of these measures, which would bring a restless and powerful rival on the borders of the Sicilian dominions, was not to be thought of for a moment. The latter, which pledged him a second time to the support of pretensions hostile to his own, was scarcely more palatable. A third expedient suggested itself; the partition of the kingdom, as hinted in the negotiations with Charles the Eighth, [12] by which means the Spanish government, if it could not rescue the whole prize from the grasp of Louis, would at least divide it with him. Instructions were accordingly given to Gralla, the minister at the court of Paris, to sound the government on this head, bringing it forward as his own private suggestion. Care was taken at the same time to secure a party in the French councils to the interests of Ferdinand. [13] The suggestions of the Spanish envoy received additional weight from the report of a considerable armament then equipping in the port of Malaga. Its ostensible purpose was to co-operate with the Venetians in the defence of their possessions in the Levant. Its main object, however, was to cover the coasts of Sicily in any event from the French, and to afford means for prompt action on any point where circumstances might require it. The fleet consisted of about sixty sail, large and small, and carried forces amounting to six hundred horse and four thousand foot, picked men, many of them drawn from the hardy regions of the north, which had been taxed least severely in the Moorish wars. [14] The command of the whole was intrusted to the Great Captain, Gonsalvo of Cordova, who since his return home had fully sustained the high reputation, which his brilliant military talents had acquired for him abroad. Numerous volunteers, comprehending the noblest of the young chivalry of Spain, pressed forward to serve under the banner of this accomplished and popular chieftain. Among them may be particularly noticed Diego de Mendoza, son of the grand cardinal, Pedro de la Paz, [15] Gonzalo Pizarro, father of the celebrated adventurer of Peru, and Diego de Paredes, whose personal prowess and feats of extravagant daring furnished many an incredible legend for chronicle and romance. With this gallant armament the Great Captain weighed anchor in the port of Malaga, in May, 1500, designing to touch at Sicily before proceeding against the Turks. [16] Meanwhile, the negotiations between France and Spain, respecting Naples, were brought to a close, by a treaty for the equal partition of that kingdom between the two powers, ratified at Granada, November 11th, 1500. This extraordinary document, after enlarging on the unmixed evils flowing from war, and the obligation on all Christians to preserve inviolate the blessed peace bequeathed them by the Saviour, proceeds to state that no other prince, save the kings of France and Aragon, can pretend to a title to the throne of Naples; and as King Frederic, its present occupant, has seen fit to endanger the safety of all Christendom, by bringing on it its bitterest enemy the Turks, the contracting parties, in order to rescue it from this imminent peril, and preserve inviolate the bond of peace, agree to take possession of his kingdom and divide it between them. It is then provided that the northern portion, comprehending the Terra di Lavoro and Abruzzo, be assigned to France, with the title of King of Naples and Jerusalem, and the southern, consisting of Apulia and Calabria, with the title of Duke of those provinces, to Spain. The _dogana_, an important duty levied on the flocks of the Capitanate, was to be collected by the officers of the Spanish government, and divided equally with France. Lastly, any inequality between the respective territories was to be so adjusted, that the revenues accruing to each of the parties should be precisely equal. The treaty was to be kept profoundly secret, until preparations were completed for the simultaneous occupation of the devoted territory by the combined powers. [17] Such were the terms of this celebrated compact, by which two European potentates coolly carved out and divided between them the entire dominions of a third, who had given no cause for umbrage, and with whom they were both at that time in perfect peace and amity. Similar instances of political robbery (to call it by the coarse name it merits) have occurred in later times; but never one founded on more flimsy pretexts, or veiled under a more detestable mask of hypocrisy. The principal odium of the transaction has attached to Ferdinand, as the kinsman of the unfortunate king of Naples. His conduct, however, admits of some palliatory considerations, that cannot be claimed for Louis. The Aragonese nation always regarded the bequest of Ferdinand's uncle, Alfonso the Fifth, in favor of his natural offspring as an unwarrantable and illegal act. The kingdom of Naples had been won by their own good swords, and, as such, was the rightful inheritance of their own princes. Nothing but the domestic troubles of his dominions had prevented John the Second of Aragon, on the decease of his brother, from asserting his claim by arms. His son, Ferdinand the Catholic, had hitherto acquiesced in the usurpation of the bastard branch of his house only from similar causes. On the accession of the present monarch, he had made some demonstrations of vindicating his pretensions to Naples, which, however, the intelligence he received from that kingdom induced him to defer to a more convenient season. [18] But it was deferring, not relinquishing, his purpose. In the mean time, he carefully avoided entering into such engagements, as should compel him to a different policy by connecting his own interests with those of Frederic; and with this view, no doubt, rejected the alliance, strongly solicited by the latter, of the duke of Calabria, heir apparent to the Neapolitan crown, with his third daughter, the infanta Maria. Indeed, this disposition of Ferdinand, so far from being dissembled, was well understood by the court of Naples, as is acknowledged by its own historians. [19] It may be thought, that the undisturbed succession of four princes to the throne of Naples, each of whom had received the solemn recognition of the people, might have healed any defects in their original title, however glaring. But it may be remarked, in extenuation of both the French and Spanish claims, that the principles of monarchical succession were but imperfectly settled in that day; that oaths of allegiance were tendered too lightly by the Neapolitans, to carry the same weight as in other nations; and that the prescriptive right derived from possession, necessarily indeterminate, was greatly weakened in this case by the comparatively few years, not more than forty, during which the bastard line of Aragon had occupied the throne,--a period much shorter than that after which the house of York had in England, a few years before, successfully contested the validity of the Lancastrian title. It should be added, that Ferdinand's views appear to have perfectly corresponded with those of the Spanish nation at large; not one writer of the time, whom I have met with, intimating the slightest doubt of his title to Naples, while not a few insist on it with unnecessary emphasis. [20] It is but fair to state, however, that foreigners, who contemplated the transaction with a more impartial eye, condemned it as inflicting a deep stain on the characters of both potentates. Indeed, something like an apprehension of this, in the parties themselves, may be inferred from their solicitude to deprecate public censure by masking their designs under a pretended zeal for religion. Before the conferences respecting the treaty were brought to a close, the Spanish armada under Gonsalvo, after a long detention in Sicily, where it was reinforced by two thousand recruits, who had been serving as mercenaries in Italy, held its course for the Morea. The Turkish squadron, lying before Napoli di Romania, without waiting Gonsalvo's approach, raised the siege, and retreated precipitately to Constantinople. The Spanish general, then uniting his forces with the Venetians, stationed at Corfu, proceeded at once against the fortified place of St. George, in Cephalonia, which the Turks had lately wrested from the republic. [21] The town stood high on a rock, in an impregnable position, and was garrisoned by four hundred Turks, all veteran soldiers, prepared to die in its defence. We have not room for the details of this siege, in which both parties displayed unbounded courage and resources, and which was protracted nearly two months under all the privations of famine, and the inclemencies of a cold and stormy winter. [22] At length, weary with this fatal procrastination, Gonsalvo and the Venetian admiral, Pesaro, resolved on a simultaneous attack on separate quarters of the town. The ramparts had been already shaken by the mining operations of Pedro Navarro, who, in the Italian wars, acquired such terrible celebrity in this department, till then little understood. The Venetian cannon, larger and better served than that of the Spaniards, had opened a practicable breach in the works, which the besieged repaired with such temporary defences as they could. The signal being given at the appointed hour, the two armies made a desperate assault on different quarters of the town, under cover of a murderous fire of artillery. The Turks sustained the attack with dauntless resolution, stopping up the breach with the bodies of their dead and dying comrades, and pouring down volleys of shot, arrows, burning oil and sulphur, and missiles of every kind, on the heads of the assailants. But the desperate energy, as well as numbers of the latter, proved too strong for them. Some forced the breach, others scaled the ramparts; and, after a short and deadly struggle within the walls, the brave garrison, four-fifths of whom with their commander had fallen, were overpowered, and the victorious banners of St. Jago and St. Mark were planted side by side triumphantly on the towers. [23] The capture of this place, although accomplished at considerable loss, and after a most gallant resistance by a mere handful of men, was of great service to the Venetian cause; since it was the first cheek given to the arms of Bajazet, who had filched one place after another from the republic, menacing its whole colonial territory in the Levant. The promptness and efficiency of King Ferdinand's succor to the Venetians gained him high reputation throughout Europe, and precisely of the kind which he most coveted, that of being the zealous defender of the faith; while it formed a favorable contrast to the cold supineness of the other powers of Christendom. The capture of St. George restored to Venice the possession of Cephalonia; and the Great Captain, having accomplished this important object, returned in the beginning of the following year, 1501, to Sicily. Soon after his arrival there, an embassy waited on him from the Venetian senate, to express their grateful sense of his services; which they testified by enrolling his name on the golden book, as a nobleman of Venice, and by a magnificent present of plate, curious silks and velvets, and a stud of beautiful Turkish horses. Gonsalvo courteously accepted the proffered honors, but distributed the whole of the costly largess, with the exception of a few pieces of plate, among his friends and soldiers. [24] In the mean while, Louis the Twelfth having completed his preparations for the invasion of Naples, an army, consisting of one thousand lances and ten thousand Swiss and Gascon foot, crossed the Alps, and directed its march towards the south. At the same time a powerful armament, under Philip de Ravenstein, with six thousand five hundred additional troops on board, quitted Genoa for the Neapolitan capital. The command of the land forces was given to the Sire d'Aubigny, the same brave and experienced officer who had formerly coped with Gonsalvo in the campaigns of Calabria. [25] No sooner had D'Aubigny crossed the papal borders, than the French and Spanish ambassadors announced to Alexander the Sixth and the college of cardinals the existence of the treaty for the partition of the kingdom between the sovereigns, their masters, requesting his Holiness to confirm it, and grant them the investiture of their respective shares. In this very reasonable petition his Holiness, well drilled in the part he was to play, acquiesced without difficulty; declaring himself moved thereto solely by his consideration of the pious intentions of the parties, and the unworthiness of King Frederic, whose treachery to the Christian commonwealth had forfeited all right (if he ever possessed any) to the crown of Naples. [26] From the moment that the French forces had descended into Lombardy, the eyes of all Italy were turned with breathless expectation on Gonsalvo, and his army in Sicily. The bustling preparations of the French monarch had diffused the knowledge of his designs throughout Europe. Those of the king of Spain, on the contrary, remained enveloped in profound secrecy. Few doubted, that Ferdinand would step forward to shield his kinsman from the invasion which menaced him, and, it might be, his own dominions in Sicily; and they looked to the immediate junction of Gonsalvo with King Frederic, in order that their combined strength might overpower the enemy before he had gained a footing in the kingdom. Great was their astonishment, when the scales dropped from their eyes, and they beheld the movements of Spain in perfect accordance with those of France, and directed to crush their common victim between them. They could scarcely credit, says Guicciardini, that Louis the Twelfth could be so blind as to reject the proffered vassalage and substantial sovereignty of Naples, in order to share it with so artful and dangerous a rival as Ferdinand. [27] The unfortunate Frederic, who had been advised for some time past of the unfriendly dispositions of the Spanish government, [28] saw no refuge from the dark tempest mustering against him on the opposite quarters of his kingdom. He collected such troops as he could, however, in order to make battle with the nearest enemy, before he should cross the threshold. On the 28th of June, the French army resumed its march. Before quitting Rome, a brawl arose between some French soldiers and Spaniards resident in the capital; each party asserting the paramount right of its own sovereign to the crown of Naples. From words they soon came to blows, and many lives were lost before the fray could be quelled; a melancholy augury for the permanence of the concord so unrighteously established between the two governments. [29] On the 8th of July, the French crossed the Neapolitan frontier. Frederic, who had taken post at St. Germano, found himself so weak, that he was compelled to give way on its approach, and retreat on his capital. The invaders went forward, occupying one place after another with little resistance till they came before Capua, where they received a temporary check. During a parley for the surrender of that place, they burst into the town, and, giving free scope to their fiendish passions, butchered seven thousand citizens in the streets, and perpetrated outrages worse than death on their defenceless wives and daughters. It was on this occasion that Alexander the Sixth's son, the infamous Caesar Borgia, selected forty of the most beautiful from the principal ladies of the place, and sent them back to Rome to swell the complement of his seraglio. The dreadful doom of Capua intimidated further resistance, but inspired such detestation of the French throughout the country, as proved of infinite prejudice to their cause in their subsequent struggle with the Spaniards. [30] King Frederic, shocked at bringing such calamities on his subjects, resigned his capital without a blow in its defence, and, retreating to the isle of Ischia, soon after embraced the counsel of the French admiral Ravenstein, to accept a safe-conduct into France, and throw himself on the generosity of Louis the Twelfth. The latter received him courteously, and assigned him the duchy of Anjou with an ample revenue for his maintenance, which, to the credit of the French king, was continued after he had lost all hope of recovering the crown of Naples. [31] With this show of magnanimity, however, he kept a jealous eye on his royal guest; under pretence of paying him the greatest respect, he placed a guard over his person, and thus detained him in a sort of honorable captivity to the day of his death, which occurred soon after, in 1504. Frederic was the last of the illegitimate branch of Aragon, who held the Neapolitan sceptre; a line of princes, who, whatever might be their characters in other respects, accorded that munificent patronage to letters which sheds a ray of glory over the roughest and most turbulent reign. It might have been expected, that an amiable and accomplished prince, like Frederic, would have done still more towards the moral development of his people, by healing the animosities which had so long festered in their bosoms. His gentle character, however, was ill suited to the evil times on which he had fallen; and it is not improbable, that he found greater contentment in the calm and cultivated retirement of his latter years, sweetened by the sympathies of friendship which adversity had proved, [32] than when placed on the dazzling heights which attract the admiration and envy of mankind. [33] Early in March, Gonsalvo of Cordova had received his first official intelligence of the partition treaty, and of his own appointment to the post of lieutenant-general of Calabria and Apulia. He felt natural regret at being called to act against a prince, whose character he esteemed, and with whom he had once been placed in the most intimate and friendly relations. In the true spirit of chivalry, he returned to Frederic, before taking up arms against him, the duchy of St. Angel and the other large domains, with which that monarch had requited his services in the late war, requesting at the same time to be released from his obligations of homage and fealty. The generous monarch readily complied with the latter part of his request, but insisted on his retaining the grant, which he declared an inadequate compensation, after all, for the benefits the Great Captain had once rendered him. [34] The levies assembled at Messina amounted to three hundred heavy-armed, three hundred light horse, and three thousand eight hundred infantry, together with a small body of Spanish veterans, which the Castilian ambassador had collected in Italy. The number of the forces was inconsiderable, but they were in excellent condition, well disciplined, and seasoned to all the toils and difficulties of war. On the 5th of July, the Great Captain landed at Tropea, and commenced the conquest of Calabria, ordering the fleet to keep along the coast, in order to furnish whatever supplies he might need. The ground was familiar to him, and his progress was facilitated by the old relations he had formed there, as well as by the important posts which the Spanish government had retained in its hands, as an indemnification for the expenses of the late war. Notwithstanding the opposition or coldness of the great Angevin lords who resided in this quarter, the entire occupation of the two Calabrias, with the exception of Tarento, was effected in less than a month. [35] This city, remarkable in ancient times for its defence against Hannibal, was of the last importance. King Frederic had sent thither his eldest son, the duke of Calabria, a youth about fourteen years of age, under the care of Juan de Guevara, count of Potenza, with a strong body of troops, considering it the place of greatest security in his dominions. Independently of the strength of its works, it was rendered nearly inaccessible by its natural position; having no communication with the main land except by two bridges, at opposite quarters of the town, commanded by strong towers, while its exposure to the sea made it easily open to supplies from abroad. Gonsalvo saw that the only method of reducing the place must be by blockade. Disagreeable as the delay was, he prepared to lay regular siege to it, ordering the fleet to sail round the southern point of Calabria, and blockade the port of Tarento, while he threw up works on the land side, which commanded the passes to the town, and cut off its communications with the neighboring country. The place, however, was well victualled, and the garrison prepared to maintain it to the last.[36] Nothing tries more severely the patience and discipline of the soldier, than a life of sluggish inaction, unenlivened, as in the present instance, by any of the rencontres, or feats of arms, which keep up military excitement, and gratify the cupidity or ambition of the warrior. The Spanish troops, cooped up within their intrenchments, and disgusted with the languid monotony of their life, cast many a wistful glance to the stirring scenes of war in the centre of Italy, where Caesar Borgia held out magnificent promises of pay and plunder to all who embarked in his adventurous enterprises. He courted the aid, in particular, of the Spanish veterans, whose worth he well understood, for they had often served under his banner, in his feuds with the Italian princes. In consequence of these inducements, some of Gonsalvo's men were found to desert every day; while those who remained were becoming hourly more discontented, from the large arrears due from the government; for Ferdinand, as already remarked, conducted his operations with a stinted economy, very different from the prompt and liberal expenditure of the queen, always competent to its object. [37] A trivial incident, at this time, swelled the popular discontent into mutiny. The French fleet, after the capture of Naples, was ordered to the Levant to assist the Venetians against the Turks. Ravenstein, ambitious of eclipsing the exploits of the Great Captain, turned his arms against Mitilene, with the design of recovering it for the republic. He totally failed in the attack, and his fleet was soon after scattered by a tempest, and his own ship wrecked on the isle of Cerigo. He subsequently found his way, with several of his principal officers, to the shores of Calabria, where he landed in the most forlorn and desperate plight. Gonsalvo, touched with his misfortunes, no sooner learned his necessities, than he sent him abundant supplies of provisions, adding a service of plate, and a variety of elegant apparel for himself and followers; consulting his own munificent spirit in this, much more than the limited state of his finances. [38] This excessive liberality was very inopportune. The soldiers loudly complained that their general found treasures to squander on foreigners, while his own troops were defrauded of their pay. The Biscayans, a people of whom Gonsalvo used to say, "he had rather be a lion-keeper than undertake to govern them," took the lead in the tumult. It soon swelled into open insurrection; and the men, forming themselves into regular companies, marched to the general's quarters and demanded payment of their arrears. One fellow, more insolent than the rest, levelled a pike at his breast with the most angry and menacing looks. Gonsalvo, however, retaining his self-possession, gently put it aside, saying, with a good- natured smile, "Higher, you careless knave, lift your lance higher, or you will run me through in your jesting." As he was reiterating his assurances of the want of funds, and his confident expectation of speedily obtaining them, a Biscayan captain called out, "Send your daughter to the brothel, and that will soon put you in funds!" This, was a favorite daughter named Elvira, whom Gonsalvo loved so tenderly, that he would not part with her, even in his campaigns. Although stung to the heart by this audacious taunt, he made no reply; but, without changing a muscle of his countenance, continued, in the same tone as before, to expostulate with the insurgents, who at length were prevailed on to draw off, and disperse to their quarters. The next morning, the appalling spectacle of the lifeless body of the Biscayan, hanging by the neck from a window of the house in which he had been quartered, admonished the, army that there were limits to the general's forbearance it was not prudent to overstep. [39] An unexpected event, which took place at this juncture, contributed even more than this monitory lesson to restore subordination to the army. This was the capture of a Genoese galleon with a valuable freight, chiefly iron, bound to some Turkish port, as it was said, in the Levant, which Gonsalvo, moved no doubt by his zeal for the Christian cause, ordered to be seized by the Spanish cruisers; and the cargo to be disposed of for the satisfaction of his troops. Giovio charitably excuses this act of hostility against a friendly power with the remark, that "when the Great Captain did anything contrary to law, he was wont to say, 'A general must secure the victory at all hazards, right or wrong; and, when he has done this, he can compensate those whom he has injured with tenfold benefits.'" [40] The unexpected length of the siege of Tarento determined Gonsalvo, at length, to adopt bolder measures for quickening its termination. The city, whose insulated position has been noticed, was bounded on the north by a lake, or rather arm of the sea, forming an excellent interior harbor, about eighteen miles in circumference. The inhabitants, trusting to the natural defences of this quarter, had omitted to protect it by fortifications, and the houses rose abruptly from the margin of the basin. Into this reservoir, the Spanish commander resolved to transport such of his vessels then riding in the outer bay, as from their size could be conveyed across the narrow isthmus, which divided it from the inner. After incredible toil, twenty of the smallest craft were moved on huge cars and rollers across the intervening land, and safely launched on the bosom of the lake. The whole operation was performed amid the exciting accompaniments of discharges of ordnance, strains of martial music, and loud acclamations of the soldiery. The inhabitants of Tarento saw with consternation the fleet so lately floating in the open ocean under their impregnable walls, now quitting its native element, and moving, as it were by magic, across the land, to assault them on the quarter where they were the least defended. [41] The Neapolitan commander perceived it would be impossible to hold out longer, without compromising the personal safety of the young prince under his care. He accordingly entered into negotiations for a truce with the Great Captain, during which articles of capitulation were arranged, guaranteeing to the duke of Calabria and his followers the right of evacuating the place and going wherever they listed. The Spanish general, in order to give greater solemnity to these engagements, bound himself to observe them by an oath on the sacrament. [42] On the 1st of March, 1502, the Spanish army took possession, according to agreement, of the city of Tarento; and the duke of Calabria with his suite was permitted to leave it, in order to rejoin his father in France. In the mean time, advices were received from Ferdinand the Catholic, instructing Gonsalvo on no account to suffer the young prince to escape from his hands, as he was a pledge of too great importance for the Spanish government to relinquish. The general in consequence sent after the duke, who had proceeded in company with the count of Potenza as far as Bitonto, on his way to the north, and commanded him to be arrested and brought back to Tarento. Not long after, he caused him to be conveyed on board one of the men-of-war in the harbor, and, in contempt of his solemn engagements, sent a prisoner to Spain. [43] The national writers have made many awkward attempts to varnish over this atrocious act of perfidy in their favorite hero. Zurita vindicates it by a letter from the Neapolitan prince to Gonsalvo, requesting the latter to take this step, since he preferred a residence in Spain to one in France, but could not with decency appear to act in opposition to his father's wishes on the subject. If such a letter, however, were really obtained from the prince, his tender years would entitle it to little weight, and of course it would afford no substantial ground for justification. Another explanation is offered by Paolo Giovio, who states that the Great Captain, undetermined what course to adopt, took the opinion of certain learned jurists. This sage body decided, that Gonsalvo was not bound by his oath, since it was repugnant to his paramount obligations to his master; and that the latter was not bound by it, since it was made without his privity! [44] The man who trusts his honor to the tampering of casuists, has parted with it already. [45] The only palliation of the act must be sought in the prevalent laxity and corruption of the period, which is rife with examples of the most flagrant violation of both public and private faith. Had this been the act of a Sforza, indeed, or a Borgia, it could not reasonably have excited surprise. But coming from one of a noble, magnanimous nature, like Gonsalvo, exemplary in his private life, and unstained with any of the grosser vices of the age, it excited general astonishment and reprobation, even among his contemporaries. It has left a reproach on his name, which the historian may regret, but cannot wipe away. FOOTNOTES [1] Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. lib. 4, p. 214, ed. 1645.--Flassan, Diplomatie Française, tom. i. pp. 275, 277. [2] Dumont, Corps Diplomatique, tom. iii. pp. 397-400.--Flassan, Diplomatie Française, tom. i. p. 279. [3] Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 4, pp. 250-252.--Mémoires de La Trémoille, chap. 19, apud Petitot, Collection de Mémoires, tom. xiv.--Buonaccorsi, Diario de' Successi più Importanti, (Fiorenza, 1568,) pp. 26-29. [4] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 3, cap. 31. Martyr, in a letter written soon after Sforza's recovery of his capital, says that the Spanish sovereigns "could not conceal their joy at the event, such was their jealousy of France." (Opus Epist., epist. 213.) The same sagacious writer, the distance of whose residence from Italy removed him from those political factions and prejudices which clouded the optics of his countrymen, saw with deep regret their coalition with France, the fatal consequences of which he predicted in a letter to a friend in Venice, the former minister at the Spanish court. "The king of France," says he, "after he has dined with the duke of Milan, will come and sup with you." (Epist. 207.) Daru, on the authority of Burchard, refers this remarkable prediction, which time so fully verified, to Sforza, on his quitting his capital. (Hist. de Venise, tom. iii. p. 326, 2d ed.) Martyr's letter, however, is dated some months previously to that event. [5] Louis XII., for the good offices of the pope in the affair of his divorce from the unfortunate Jeanne of France, promised the un-cardinalled Caesar Borgia the duchy of Valence in Dauphiny, with a rent of 20,000 livres, and a considerable force to support him in his flagitious enterprises against the princes of Romagna. Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. lib. 4, p. 207.--Sismondi, Hist. des Français, tom. xv. p. 275.--Carta de Garcilasso de la Vega, MS. [6] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 3, cap. 33. Garcilasso de la Vega seems to have possessed little of the courtly and politic address of a diplomatist. In a subsequent audience, which the pope gave him together with a special embassy from Castile, his blunt expostulation so much exasperated his Holiness, that the latter hinted it would not cost him much to have him thrown into the Tiber. The hold bearing of the Castilian, however, appears to have had its effect; since we find the pope soon after revoking an offensive ecclesiastical provision he had made in Spain, taking occasion at the same time to eulogize the character of the Catholic sovereigns in full consistory. Ibid., lib. 3, cap. 33, 35. [7] Oviedo has made this cavalier the subject of one of his dialogues. Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 3, dial. 44. [8] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 3, cap. 38, 39.--Daru, Hist. de Venise, tom. iii. pp. 336, 339, 347.--Muratori, Annali d'Italia, (Milano, 1820,) tom. xiv. pp. 9, 10.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. lib. 5, p. 260. [9] Alexander VI. had requested the hand of Carlotta, daughter of King Frederic, for his son, Caesar Borgia; but this was a sacrifice, at which pride and parental affection alike revolted. The slight was not to be forgiven by the implacable Borgias. Comp. Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 29, cap. 3.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. lib. 4, p. 223.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 3, cap. 22. [10] Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. lib. 5, pp. 265, 266.--Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 29, cap. 3.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 3, cap. 40.--Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, lib. 1, p. 229.--Daru, Hist. de Venise, tom. iii. p, 338. [11] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., lib. 14, epist. 218. [12] See Part II. Chapter 3, of this History. [13] According to Zurita, Ferdinand secured the services of Guillaume de Poictiers, lord of Clérieux and governor of Paris, by the promise of the city of Cotron, mortgaged to him in Italy. (Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 3, cap. 40.) Comines calls the same nobleman "a good sort of a man, qui aisément croit, et pour espécial _tels personnages_," meaning King Ferdinand. Comines, Mémoires, liv. 8, chap. 23. [14] Bembo, Istoria Viniziana, tom. iii. lib. 5, p. 324.--Ulloa, Vita et Fatti dell' Invitissimo Imperatore Carlo V., (Venetia, 1606,) fol. 2.-- Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 27, cap. 7.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, tom. i. p. 226.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 4, cap. 11.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 10, sec. 13. [15] This cavalier, one of the most valiant captains in the army, was so diminutive in size, that, when mounted, he seemed almost lost in the high demipeak war-saddle then in vogue; which led a wag, according to Brantôme, when asked if he had seen Don Pedro de Paz pass that way, to answer, that "he had seen his horse and saddle, but no rider." Oeuvres, tom. i. disc. 9. [16] Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. p. 217.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 161.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 9. [17] See the original treaty, apud Dumont, Corps Diplomatique, tom. iii. pp. 445, 446. [18] See Part II. Chapter 3, of this History. [19] Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 19, cap. 3.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 3, cap. 32. [20] See, in particular, the Doctor Salazar de Mendoza, who exhausts the subject,--and the reader's patience,--in discussing the multifarious grounds of the incontrovertible title of the house of Aragon to Naples. Monarquía, tom. i. lib. 3, cap. 12-15. [21] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, tom. i. p. 226.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 9.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 4, cap. 19. [22] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, ubi supra.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 14. [23] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, ubi supra.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 10.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 4, cap. 25.-- Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 167. [24] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 167.--Quintana, Españoles Célebres, tom. i. p. 246.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 228.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 4. [25] Jean d'Auton, Histoire de Louys XII., (Paris, 1622,) part. 1, chap. 44, 45, 48.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. p. 265.--Sainct Gelais, Histoire de Louys XII., (Paris, 1622,) p. 163.--Buonaccorsi, Diario, p. 46. [26] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 4, cap. 43.--Lanuza, Historias, tom. i. lib. 1, cap. 14. [27] Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. lib. 5, p. 266.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 8. [28] In the month of April the king of Naples received letters from his envoys in Spain, written by command of King Ferdinand, informing him that he had nothing to expect from that monarch in case of an invasion of his territories by France. Frederic bitterly complained of the late hour at which this intelligence was given, which effectually prevented an accommodation he might otherwise have made with King Louis. Lanuza, Historias, lib. 1, cap. 14.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 4, cap. 37. [29] D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., part. 1, chap. 48. [30] Summonte, Hist. di Napoli, tom. iii. lib. 6, cap. 4.--D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., part. 1, chap. 51-54.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 8.-- Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 5, pp. 268, 269.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 4, cap. 41.--Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 29, cap. 3. [31] St. Gelais, Hist. de Louys XII., p. 163.--D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., part. 1, ch. 56.--Summonte, Hist. di Napoli, tom. iii. p. 541. [32] The reader will readily call to mind the Neapolitan poet Sannazaro, whose fidelity to his royal master forms so beautiful a contrast with the conduct of Pontano, and indeed of too many of his tribe, whose gratitude is of that sort that will only rise above zero in the sunshine of a court. His various poetical effusions afford a noble testimony to the virtues of his unfortunate sovereign, the more unsuspicious as many of them were produced in the days of his adversity. [33] "Neque mala vel bona," says the philosophic Roman, "quae vulgus putet; multos, qui conflictari udversis videantur, beatos; ac plerosque, quamquam magnas per opes, miserrimos; si illi gravem fortunam constanter tolerent, hi prosperâ inconsultè utantur." Tacitus, Annales, lib. 6, sect. 22. [34] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 4, cap. 35.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 230.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 21.-- Lanuza, Historias, tom. i. lib. 1, cap. 14. [35] Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 11, sec. 8.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 4, cap. 44.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 27, cap. 9. [36] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 231.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V, fol. 9.--Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 29, cap. 3.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 31. [37] Don Juan Mannel, the Spanish minister at Vienna, seems to hare been fully sensible of this trait of his master. He told the emperor Maximilian, who had requested the loan of 300,000 ducats from Spain, that it was as much money as would suffice King Ferdinand for the conquest, not merely of Italy, but Africa into the bargain. Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 3, cap. 42. [38] Bembo, Istoria Viniziana, tom. III. lib. 6, p. 368.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 232.--D'Auton, part. 1, chap. 71, 72. [39] Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 34.--Quintana, Españoles Célebres, tom. i. pp. 252, 253.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 232.--Carta de Gonzalo, MS. [40] Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, lib. 1, p. 233. [41] Gonsalvo took the hint for this, doubtless, from Hannibal's similar expedient. See Polybius, lib. 8. [42] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 4, cap. 52, 53.-- Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. lib. 5, p. 270.--Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 29, cap. 3.--Muratori, Annali d'Italia, tom. xiv. p. 14. The various authorities differ more irreconcilably than usual in the details of the siege. I have followed Paolo Giovio, a contemporary, and personally acquainted with the principal actors. All agree in the only fact, in which one would willingly see some discrepancy, Gonsalvo's breach of faith to the young duke of Calabria. [43] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 4, cap. 56.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 11, sec. 10-12.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 9.--Lanuza, Historias, lib. 1, cap. 14. Martyr, who was present on the young prince's arrival at court, where he experienced the most honorable reception, speaks of him in the highest terms. "Adolescens namque est et regno et regio sanguine dignus, mirae indolis, formâ egregius." (See Opus Epist., epist. 252.) He survived to the year 1550, but without ever quitting Spain, contrary to the fond prediction of his friend Sannazaro; "Nam mihl, nam tempus veniet, cum reddita sceptra Parthenopes, fractosque tua sub cuspide reges Ipse canam." Opera Latina, Ecloga 4. [44] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 4, cap. 58.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, lib. 1, p. 234. Mariana coolly disposes of Gonsalvo's treachery with the remark, "No parece se le guardo lo que tenian asentado. En la guerra quien hay que de todo punto lo guarde?" (Hist. de España, tom. ii. p. 675.) ----"Dolus an virtus, quis in hoste requirat?" [45] In Gonsalvo's correspondence is a letter to the sovereigns written soon after the occupation of Tarento, in which he mentions his efforts to secure the duke of Calabria in the Spanish interests. The communication is too brief to clear up the difficulties in this dark transaction. As coming from Gonsalvo himself, it has great interest, and I will give it to the reader in the curious orthography of the original. "Asi en la platica que estava con el duque don fernando de ponerse al servicio y amparo de vuestras alteças syn otro partido ny ofrecimiento demas de certificarle que en todo tiempo seria libre para yr donde quisiese sy vuestras altezas bien no le tratasen y que vuestras alteças le ternian el respeto que a tal persona como el se deve. El conde de potença e algunos de los que estan ceerca del han trabajado por apartarle de este proposito e levarle a Iscla asi yo por muchos modos he procurado de reducirle al servicio de vuestras alteças y tengole en tal termino que puedo certificar a vuestras alteças que este mozo no les saldra de la mano con consenso suyo del servicio de vuestras alteças asta tanto que vuestras alteças me embien a mandar como del he de disponer e de lo que con el se ha de facer y por las contrastes que en esto han entrevenido no ha salido de taranto porque asi ha convenido. El viernes que sera once de marzo saldra a castellaneta que es quince millas de aqui con algunos destos suyos que le quieren seguir con alguna buena parte de compañia destos criados de vuestras alteças para acompañarle y este mismo dia viernes entrar an las vanderas e gente de vuestras alteças en el castillo de tarento con ayuda de nuestro Señor." De Tarento, 10 de Marzo, 1502, MS. CHAPTER XI. ITALIAN WARS.--RUPTURE WITH FRANCE.--GONSALVO BESIEGED IN BARLETA. 1502, 1503. Rupture between the French and Spaniards.--Gonsalvo Retires to Barleta.-- Chivalrous Character of the War.--Tourney near Trani.--Duel between Bayard and Sotomayor.--Distress of Barleta.--Constancy of the Spaniards. --Gonsalvo Storms and Takes Ruvo.--Prepares to Leave Barleta. It was hardly to be expected that the partition treaty between France and Spain, made so manifestly in contempt of all good faith, would be maintained any longer than suited the convenience of the respective parties. The French monarch, indeed, seems to have prepared, from the first, to dispense with it, as soon as he had secured his own moiety of the kingdom; [1] and sagacious men at the Spanish court inferred that King Ferdinand would do as much, when he should be in a situation to assert his claims with success. [2] It was altogether improbable, whatever might be the good faith of the parties, that an arrangement could long subsist, which so rudely rent asunder the members of this ancient monarchy; or that a thousand points of collision should not arise between rival hosts, lying as it were on their arms within bowshot of each other, and in view of the rich spoil which each regarded as its own. Such grounds for rupture did occur, sooner probably than either party had foreseen, and certainly before the king of Aragon was prepared to meet it. The immediate cause was the extremely loose language of the partition treaty, which assumed such a geographical division of the kingdom into four provinces, as did not correspond with any ancient division, and still less with the modern, by which the number was multiplied to twelve. [3] The central portion, comprehending the Capitanate, the Basilicate, and the Principality, became debatable ground between the parties, each of whom insisted on these as forming an integral part of its own moiety. The French had no ground whatever for contesting the possession of the Capitanate, the first of these provinces, and by far the most important, on account of the tolls paid by the numerous flocks which descended every winter into its sheltered valleys from the snow-covered mountains of Abruzzo. [4] There was more uncertainty to which of the parties the two other provinces were meant to be assigned. It is scarcely possible that language so loose, in a matter requiring mathematical precision, should have been unintentional. Before Gonsalvo de Cordova had completed the conquest of the southern moiety of the kingdom, and while lying before Tarento, he received intelligence of the occupation by the French of several places, both in the Capitanate and Basilicate. He detached a body of troops for the protection of these countries, and, after the surrender of Tarento, marched towards the north to cover them with his whole army. As he was not in a condition for immediate hostilities, however, he entered into negotiations, which, if attended with no other advantage, would at least gain him time. [5] The pretensions of the two parties, as might have been expected, were too irreconcilable to admit of compromise; and a personal conference between the respective commanders-in-chief led to no better arrangement, than that each should retain his present acquisitions, till explicit instructions could be received from their respective courts. But neither of the two monarchs had further instructions to give; and the Catholic king contented himself with admonishing his general to postpone an open rupture as long as possible, that the government might have time to provide more effectually for his support, and strengthen itself by alliance with other European powers. But, however pacific may have been the disposition of the generals, they had no power to control the passions of their soldiers, who, thus brought into immediate contact, glared on each other with the ferocity of bloodhounds, ready to slip the leash which held them in temporary check. Hostilities soon broke out along the lines of the two armies, the blame of which each nation charged on its opponent. There seems good ground, however, for imputing it to the French; since they were altogether better prepared for war than the Spaniards, and entered into it so heartily as not only to assail places in the debatable ground, but in Apulia, which had been unequivocally assigned to their rivals. [6] In the mean while, the Spanish court fruitlessly endeavored to interest the other powers of Europe in its cause. The emperor Maximilian, although dissatisfied with the occupation of Milan by the French, appeared wholly engrossed with the frivolous ambition of a Roman coronation. The pontiff and his son, Caesar Borgia, were closely bound to King Louis by the assistance which he had rendered them in their marauding enterprises against the neighboring chiefs of Romagna. The other Italian princes, although deeply incensed and disgusted by this infamous alliance, stood too much in awe of the colossal power, which had planted its foot so firmly on their territory, to offer any resistance. Venice alone, surveying from her distant watch-tower, to borrow the words of Peter Martyr, the whole extent of the political horizon, appeared to hesitate. The French ambassadors loudly called on her to fulfil the terms of her late treaty with their master, and support him in his approaching quarrel; but that wily republic saw with distrust the encroaching ambition of her powerful neighbor, and secretly wished that a counterpoise might be found in the success of Aragon. Martyr, who stopped at Venice on his return from Egypt, appeared before the senate, and employed all his eloquence in supporting his master's cause in opposition to the French envoys; but his pressing entreaties to the Spanish sovereigns to send thither some competent person, as a resident minister, show his own conviction of the critical position in which their affairs stood. [7] The letters of the same intelligent individual, during his journey through the Milanese, [8] are filled with the most gloomy forebodings of the termination of a contest for which the Spaniards were so indifferently provided; while the whole north of Italy was alive with the bustling preparations of the French, who loudly vaunted their intention of driving their enemy not merely out of Naples, but Sicily itself. [9] Louis the Twelfth superintended these preparations in person, and, to be near the theatre of operations, crossed the Alps, and took up his quarters at Asti. At length, all being in readiness, he brought things to an immediate issue, by commanding his general to proclaim war at once against the Spaniards, unless they abandoned the Capitanate in four-and-twenty hours. [10] The French forces in Naples amounted, according to their own statements, to one thousand men-at-arms, three thousand five hundred French and Lombard, and three thousand Swiss infantry, in addition to the Neapolitan levies raised by the Angevin lords throughout the kingdom. The command was intrusted to the duke of Nemours, a brave and chivalrous young nobleman of the ancient house of Armagnac, whom family connections more than talents had raised to the perilous post of viceroy over the head of the veteran D'Aubigny. The latter would have thrown up his commission in disgust, but for the remonstrances of his sovereign, who prevailed on him to remain where his counsels were more than ever necessary to supply the inexperience of the young commander. The jealousy and wilfulness of the latter, however, defeated these intentions; and the misunderstanding of the chiefs, extending to their followers, led to a fatal want of concert in their movements. With these officers were united some of the best and bravest of the French chivalry; among whom may be noticed Jacques de Chabannes, more commonly known as the Sire de la Palice, a favorite of Louis the Twelfth, and well entitled to be so by his deserts; Louis d'Ars; Ives d'Alègre, brother of the Précy who gained so much renown in the wars of Charles the Eighth; and Pierre de Bayard, the knight "sans peur et sans reproche," who was then entering on the honorable career in which he seemed to realize all the imaginary perfections of chivalry. [11] Notwithstanding the small numbers of the French force, the Great Captain was in no condition to cope with them. He had received no reinforcements from home since he first landed in Calabria. His little corps of veterans was destitute of proper clothing and equipments, and the large arrears due them made the tenure of their obedience extremely precarious. [12] Since affairs began to assume their present menacing aspect, he had been busily occupied with drawing together the detachments posted in various parts of Calabria, and concentrating them on the town of Atella in the Basilicate, where he had established his own quarters. He had also opened a correspondence with the barons of the Aragonese faction, who were most numerous as well as most powerful in the northern section of the kingdom, which had been assigned to the French. He was particularly fortunate in gaining over the two Colonnas, whose authority, powerful connections, and large military experience proved of inestimable value to him. [13] With all the resources he could command, however, Gonsalvo found himself, as before noticed, unequal to the contest, though it was impossible to defer it, after the peremptory summons of the French viceroy to surrender the Capitanate. To this he unhesitatingly answered, that "the Capitanate belonged of right to his own master; and that, with the blessing of God, he would make good its defence against the French king, or any other who should invade it." Notwithstanding the bold front put on his affairs, however, he did not choose to abide the assault of the French in his present position. He instantly drew off with the greater part of his force to Barleta, a fortified seaport on the confines of Apulia, on the Adriatic, the situation of which would enable him either to receive supplies from abroad, or to effect a retreat, if necessary, on board the Spanish fleet, which still kept the coast of Calabria. The remainder of his army he distributed in Bari, Andria, Canosa, and other adjacent towns; where he confidently hoped to maintain himself till the arrival of reinforcements, which he solicited in the most pressing manner from Spain and Sicily, should enable him to take the field on more equal terms against his adversary. [14] The French officers, in the mean time, were divided in opinion as to the best mode of conducting the war. Some were for besieging Bari, held by the illustrious and unfortunate Isabella of Aragon; [15] others, in a more chivalrous spirit, opposed the attack of a place defended by a female, and advised an immediate assault on Barleta itself, whose old and dilapidated works might easily be forced, if it did not at once surrender. The duke of Nemours, deciding on a middle course, determined to invest the last- mentioned town; and, cutting off all communication with the surrounding country, to reduce it by regular blockade. This plan was unquestionably the least eligible of all, as it would allow time for the enthusiasm of the French, the _furia Francese_, as it was called in Italy, which carried them victorious over so many obstacles, to evaporate, while it brought into play the stern resolve, the calm, unflinching endurance, which distinguished the Spanish soldier. [16] One of the first operations of the French viceroy was the siege of Canosa, a strongly fortified place west of Barleta, garrisoned by six hundred picked men under the engineer Pedro Navarro. The defence of the place justified the reputation of this gallant soldier. He beat off two successive assaults of the enemy, led on by Bayard, La Palice, and the flower of their chivalry. He had prepared to sustain a third, resolved to bury himself under the ruins of the town rather than surrender. But Gonsalvo, unable to relieve it, commanded him to make the best terms he could, saying, "the place was of far less value, than the lives of the brave men who defended it." Navarro found no difficulty in obtaining an honorable capitulation; and the little garrison, dwindled to one-third of its original number, marched out through the enemy's camp, with colors flying and music playing, as if in derision of the powerful force it had so nobly kept at bay. [17] After the capture of Canosa, D'Aubigny, whose misunderstanding with Nemours still continued, was despatched with a small force into the south, to overrun the two Calabrias. The viceroy, in the mean while, having fruitlessly attempted the reduction of several strong places held by the Spaniards in the neighborhood of Barleta, endeavored to straiten the garrison there by desolating the surrounding country, and sweeping off the flocks and herds which grazed in its fertile pastures. The Spaniards, however, did not remain idle within their defences, but, sallying out in small detachments, occasionally retrieved the spoil from the hands of the enemy, or annoyed him with desultory attacks, ambuscades, and other irregular movements of _guerrilla_ warfare, in which the French were comparatively unpractised. [18] The war now began to assume many of the romantic features of that of Granada. The knights on both sides, not content with the usual military rencontres, defied one another to jousts and tourneys, eager to establish their prowess in the noble exercises of chivalry. One of the most remarkable of these meetings took place between eleven Spanish and as many French knights, in consequence of some disparaging remarks of the latter on the cavalry of their enemies, which they affirmed inferior to their own. The Venetians gave the parties a fair field of combat in the neutral territory under their own walls of Trani. A gallant array of well-armed knights of both nations guarded the lists, and maintained the order of the fight. On the appointed day, the champions appeared in the field, armed at all points, with horses richly caparisoned, and barbed or covered with steel panoply like their masters. The roofs and battlements of Trani were covered with spectators, while the lists were thronged with the French and Spanish chivalry, each staking in some degree the national honor on the issue of the contest. Among the Castilians were Diego de Paredes and Diego de Vera, while the good knight Bayard was most conspicuous on the other side. As the trumpets sounded the appointed signal, the hostile parties rushed to the encounter. Three Spaniards were borne from their saddles by the rudeness of the shock, and four of their antagonists' horses slain. The fight, which began at ten in the morning, was not to be protracted beyond sunset. Long before that hour, all the French save two, one of them the chevalier Bayard, had been dismounted, and their horses, at which the Spaniards had aimed more than at the riders, disabled or slain. The Spaniards, seven of whom were still on horseback, pressed hard on their adversaries, leaving little doubt of the fortune of the day. The latter, however, intrenching themselves behind the carcasses of their dead horses, made good their defence against the Spaniards, who in vain tried to spur their terrified steeds over the barrier. In this way the fight was protracted till sunset; and, as both parties continued to keep possession of the field, the palm of victory was adjudged to neither, while both were pronounced to have demeaned themselves like good and valiant knights. [19] The tourney being ended, the combatants met in the centre of the lists, and embraced each other in the true companionship of chivalry, "making good cheer together," says an old chronicler, before they separated. The Great Captain was not satisfied with the issue of the fight. "We have, at least," said one of his champions, "disproved the taunt of the Frenchmen, and shown ourselves as good horsemen as they." "I sent you for better," coldly retorted Gonsalvo. [20] A more tragic termination befell a combat _à l'outrance_ between the chevalier Bayard and a Spanish cavalier, named Alonso de Sotomayor, who had accused the former of uncourteous treatment of him, while his prisoner. Bayard denied the charge, and defied the Spaniard to prove it in single fight, on horse or on foot, as he best liked. Sotomayor, aware of his antagonist's uncommon horsemanship, preferred the latter alternative. At the day and hour appointed, the two knights entered the lists, armed with sword and dagger, and sheathed in complete harness; although, with a degree of temerity unusual in these, combats, they wore their visors up. Both combatants knelt down in silent prayer for a few moments, and then rising and crossing themselves, advanced straight against each other; "the good knight Bayard," says Brantôme, "moving as light of step, as if he were going to lead some fair lady down the dance." The Spaniard was of a large and powerful frame, and endeavored to crush his enemy by weight of blows, or to close with him and bring him to the ground. The latter, naturally inferior in strength, was rendered still weaker by a fever, from which he had not entirely recovered. He was more light and agile than his adversary, however, and superior dexterity enabled him not only to parry his enemy's strokes, but to deal him occasionally one of his own, while he sorely distressed him by the rapidity of his movements. At length, as the Spaniard was somewhat thrown off his balance by an ill-directed blow, Bayard struck him so sharply on the gorget, that it gave way, and the sword entered his throat. Furious with the agony of the wound, Sotomayor collected all his strength for the last struggle, and, grasping his antagonist in his arms, they both rolled in the dust together. Before either could extricate himself, the quick- eyed Bayard, who had retained his poniard in his left hand during the whole combat, while the Spaniard's had remained in his belt, drove the steel with such convulsive strength under his enemy's eye, that it pierced quite through the brain. After the judges had awarded the honors of the day to Bayard, the minstrels as usual began to pour forth triumphant strains in praise of the victor; but the good knight commanded them to desist, and, having first prostrated himself on his knees in gratitude for his victory, walked slowly out of the lists, expressing a wish that the combat had had a different termination, so that his honor had been saved. [2] In these jousts and tourneys, described with sufficient prolixity, but in a truly heart-stirring tone, by the chroniclers of the day, we may discern the last gleam of the light of chivalry, which illumined the darkness of the Middle Ages; and, although rough in comparison with the pastimes of more polished times, they called forth such displays of magnificence, courtesy, and knightly honor, as throw something like the grace of civilization over the ferocious features of the age. While the Spaniards, cooped up within the old town of Barleta, sought to vary the monotony of their existence by these chivalrous exercises, or an occasional foray into the neighboring country, they suffered greatly from the want of military stores, food, clothing, and the most common necessaries of life. It seemed as if their master had abandoned them to their fate on this forlorn outpost, without a struggle in their behalf. [22] How different from the parental care with which Isabella watched over the welfare of her soldiers in the long war of Granada! The queen appears to have taken no part in the management of these wars, which, notwithstanding the number of her own immediate subjects embarked in them, she probably regarded, from the first, as appertaining to Aragon, as exclusively as the conquests in the New World did to Castile. Indeed, whatever degree of interest she may have felt in their success, the declining state of her health at this period would not have allowed her to take any part in the conduct of them. Gonsalvo was not wanting to himself in this trying emergency, and his noble spirit seemed to rise as all outward and visible resources failed. He cheered his troops with promises of speedy relief, talking confidently of the supplies of grain he expected from Sicily, and the men and money he was to receive from Spain and Venice. He contrived, too, says Giovio, that a report should get abroad, that a ponderous coffer lying in his apartment was filled with gold, which he could draw upon in the last extremity. The old campaigners, indeed, according to the same authority, shook their heads at these and other agreeable fictions of their general, with a very skeptical air. They derived some confirmation, however, from the arrival soon after of a Sicilian bark, laden with corn, and another from Venice with various serviceable stores and wearing apparel, which Gonsalvo bought on his own credit and that of his principal officers, and distributed gratuitously among his destitute soldiers. [23] At this time he received the unwelcome tidings that a small force which had been sent from Spain to his assistance, under Don Manuel de Benavides, and which had effected a junction with one much larger from Sicily under Hugo de Cardona, was surprised by D'Aubigny near Terranova, and totally defeated. This disaster was followed by the reduction of all Calabria, which the latter general, at the head of his French and Scottish gendarmerie, rode over from one extremity to the other without opposition. [24] The prospect now grew darker and darker around the little garrison of Barleta. The discomfiture of Benavides excluded hopes of relief in that direction. The gradual occupation of most of the strong places in Apulia by the duke of Nemours cut off all communication with the neighboring country; and a French fleet cruising in the Adriatic rendered the arrival of further stores and reinforcements extremely precarious. Gonsalvo, however, maintained the same unruffled cheerfulness as before, and endeavored to infuse it into the hearts of others. He perfectly understood the character of his countrymen, knew all their resources, and tried to rouse every latent principle of honor, loyalty, pride, and national feeling; and such was the authority which he acquired over their minds, and so deep the affection which he inspired, by the amenity of his manners and the generosity of his disposition, that not a murmur or symptom of insubordination escaped them during the whole of this long and painful siege. But neither the excellence of his troops, nor the resources of his own genius, would have been sufficient to extricate Gonsalvo from the difficulties of his situation, without the most flagrant errors on the part of his opponent. The Spanish general, who understood the character of the French commander perfectly well, lay patiently awaiting his opportunity, like a skilful fencer, ready to make a decisive thrust at the first vulnerable point that should be presented. Such an occasion at length offered itself early in the following year. [25] The French, no less weary than their adversaries of their long inaction, sallied out from Canosa, where the viceroy had established his headquarters, and, crossing the Ofanto, marched up directly under the walls of Barleta, with the intention of drawing out the garrison from the "old den," as they called it, and deciding the quarrel in a pitched battle. The duke of Nemours, accordingly, having taken up his position, sent a trumpet into the place to defy the Great Captain to the encounter; but the latter returned for answer, that "he was accustomed to choose his own place and time for fighting, and would thank the French general to wait till his men found time to shoe their horses, and burnish up their arms." At length, Nemours, after remaining some days, and finding there was no chance of decoying his wily foe from his defences, broke up his camp and retired, satisfied with the empty honors of his gasconade. No sooner had he fairly turned his back, than Gonsalvo, whose soldiers had been restrained with difficulty from sallying out on their insolent foe, ordered the whole strength of his cavalry under the command of Diego de Mendoza, flanked by two corps of infantry, to issue forth and pursue the French. Mendoza executed these orders so promptly that he brought up his horse, which were somewhat in advance of the foot, on the rear-guard of the French, before it had got many miles from Barleta. The latter instantly halted to receive the charge of the Spaniards, and, after a lively skirmish of no great duration, Mendoza retreated, followed by the incautious enemy, who, in consequence of their irregular and straggling march, were detached from the main body of their army. In the mean time, the advancing columns of the Spanish infantry, which had now come up with the retreating horse, unexpectedly closing on the enemy's flanks, threw them into some disorder, which became complete when the flying cavalry of the Spaniards, suddenly wheeling round in the rapid style of the Moorish tactics, charged them boldly in front. All was now confusion. Some made resistance, but most sought only to escape; a few effected it, but the greater part of those who did not fall on the field were carried prisoners to Barleta; where Mendoza found the Great Captain with his whole army drawn up under the walls in order of battle, ready to support him in person, if necessary. The whole affair passed so expeditiously, that the viceroy, who, as has been said, conducted his retreat in a most disorderly manner, and in fact had already dispersed several battalions of his infantry to the different towns from which he had drawn them, knew nothing of the rencontre, till his men were securely lodged within the walls of Barleta. [26] The arrival of a Venetian trader at this time, with a cargo of grain, brought temporary relief to the pressing necessities of the garrison. [27] This was followed by the welcome intelligence of the total discomfiture of the French fleet under M. de Préjan by the Spanish admiral Lezcano, in an action off Otranto, which consequently left the seas open for the supplies daily expected from Sicily. Fortune seemed now in the giving vein; for in a few days a convoy of seven transports from that island, laden with grain, meat, and other stores, came safe into Barleta, and supplied abundant means for recruiting the health and spirits of its famished inmates. [28] Thus restored, the Spaniards began to look forward with eager confidence to the achievement of some new enterprise. The temerity of the viceroy soon afforded an opportunity. The people of Castellaneta, a town near Tarento, were driven by the insolent and licentious behavior of the French garrison to betray the place into the hands of the Spaniards. The duke of Nemours, enraged at this defection, prepared to march at once with his whole force, and take signal vengeance on the devoted little town; and this, notwithstanding the remonstrances of his officers against a step which must inevitably expose the unprotected garrisons in the neighborhood to the assault of their vigilant enemy in Barleta. The event justified these apprehensions. [29] No sooner had Gonsalvo learned the departure of Nemours on a distant expedition, than he resolved at once to make an attack on the town of Ruvo, about twelve miles distant, and defended by the brave La Palice, with a corps of three hundred French lances, and as many foot. With his usual promptness, the Spanish general quitted the walls of Barleta the same night on which he received the news, taking with him his whole effective force, amounting to about three thousand infantry and one thousand light and heavy-armed horse. So few, indeed, remained to guard the city, that he thought it prudent to take some of the principal inhabitants as hostages to insure its fidelity in his absence. At break of day, the little army arrived before Ruvo. Gonsalvo immediately opened a lively cannonade on the old ramparts, which in less than four hours effected a considerable breach. He then led his men to the assault, taking charge himself of those who were to storm the breach, while another division, armed with ladders for scaling the walls, was intrusted to the adventurous cavalier Diego de Paredes. The assailants experienced more resolute resistance than they had anticipated from the inconsiderable number of the garrison. La Palice, throwing himself into the breach with his iron band of dismounted gendarmes, drove back the Spaniards as often as they attempted to set foot on the broken ramparts; while the Gascon archery showered down volleys of arrows thick as hail, from the battlements, on the exposed persons of the assailants. The latter, however, soon rallied under the eye of their general, and returned with fresh fury to the charge, until the overwhelming tide of numbers bore down all opposition, and they poured in through the breach and over the walls with irresistible fury. The brave little garrison were driven before them; still, however, occasionally making fight in the streets and houses. Their intrepid young commander, La Palice, retreated facing the enemy, who pressed thick and close upon him, till, his further progress being arrested by a wall, he placed his back against it, and kept them at bay, making a wide circle around him with the deadly sweep of his battle-axe. But the odds were too much for him; and at length, after repeated wounds, having been brought to the ground by a deep cut in the head, he was made prisoner; not, however, before he had flung his sword far over the heads of the assailants, disdaining, in the true spirit of a knight-errant, to yield it to the rabble around him. [30] All resistance was now at an end. The women of the place had fled, like so many frightened deer, to one of the principal churches; and Gonsalvo, with more humanity than was usual in these barbarous wars, placed a guard over their persons, which effectually secured them from the insults of the soldiery. After a short time spent in gathering up the booty and securing his prisoners, the Spanish general, having achieved the object of his expedition, set out on his homeward march, and arrived without interruption at Barleta. The duke of Nemours had scarcely appeared before Castellaneta, before he received tidings of the attack on Ruvo. He put himself, without losing a moment, at the head of his gendarmes, supported by the Swiss pikemen, hoping to reach the beleaguered town in time to raise the siege. Great was his astonishment, therefore, on arriving before it, to find no trace of an enemy, except the ensigns of Spain unfurled from the deserted battlements. Mortified and dejected, be made no further attempt to recover Castellaneta, but silently drew off to hide his chagrin in the walls of Canosa. [31] Among the prisoners were several persons of distinguished rank. Gonsalvo treated them with his usual courtesy, and especially La Palice, whom he provided with his own surgeon and all the appliances for rendering his situation as comfortable as possible. For the common file, however, he showed no such sympathy; but condemned them all to serve in the Spanish admiral's galleys, where they continued to the close of the campaign. An unfortunate misunderstanding had long subsisted between the French and Spanish commanders respecting the ransom and exchange of prisoners; and Gonsalvo was probably led to this severe measure, so different from his usual clemency, by an unwillingness to encumber himself with a superfluous population in the besieged city. [32] But, in truth, such a proceeding, however offensive to humanity, was not at all repugnant to the haughty spirit of chivalry, which, reserving its courtesies exclusively for those of gentle blood and high degree, cared little for the inferior orders, whether soldier or peasant, whom it abandoned without remorse to all the caprices and cruelties of military license. The capture of Ruvo was attended with important consequences to the Spaniards. Besides the valuable booty of clothes, jewels, and money, they brought back with them nearly a thousand horses, which furnished Gonsalvo with the means of augmenting his cavalry, the small number of which had hitherto materially crippled his operations. He accordingly selected seven hundred of his best troops and mounted them on the French horses; thus providing himself with a corps, burning with zeal to approve itself worthy of the distinguished honor conferred on it. [33] A few weeks after, the general received an important accession of strength from the arrival of two thousand German mercenaries, which Don Juan Manuel, the Spanish minister at the Austrian court, had been permitted to raise in the emperor's dominions. This event determined the Great Captain on a step which he had been some time meditating. The new levies placed him in a condition for assuming the offensive. His stock of provisions, moreover, already much reduced, would be obviously insufficient long to maintain his increased numbers. He resolved, therefore, to sally out of the old walls of Barleta, and, availing himself of the high spirits in which the late successes had put his troops, to bring the enemy at once to battle. [34] FOOTNOTES [1] Peter Martyr, in a letter written from Venice, while detained there on his way to Alexandria, speaks of the efforts made by the French emissaries to induce the republic to break with Spain, and support their master in his designs on Naples. "Adsunt namque a Ludovico rege Gallorum oratores, qui omni nixu conantur a vobis Venetorum animos avertere. Fremere dentibus aiunt oratorem primarium Gallum, quia nequeat per Venetorum suffragia consequi, ut aperte vobis hostilitatem edicant, utque velint Gallis regno Parthenopeo contra vestra praesidia ferre suppetias." The letter is dated October 1st, 1501. Opus Epist., epist. 231. [2] Martyr, after noticing the grounds of the partition treaty, comments with his usual shrewdness on the politic views of the Spanish sovereigns. "Facilius namque se sperant, eam partem, quam sibi Galli sortiti sunt, habituros aliquando, quam si universum regnum occuparint." Opus Epist., epist. 218. [3] The Italian historians, who have investigated the subject with some parade of erudition, treat it so vaguely, as to leave it after all nearly as perplexed as they found it. Giovio includes the Capitanate in Apulia, according to the ancient division; Guicciardini, according to the modern; and the Spanish historian Mariana, according to both. The last writer, it may be observed, discusses the matter with equal learning and candor, and more perspicuity than either of the preceding. He admits reasonable grounds for doubt to which moiety of the kingdom the Basilicate and Principalities should be assigned. Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. p. 670.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. lib. 5, pp. 274, 275.--Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, lib. 1, pp. 234, 235. [4] The provision of the partition treaty, that the Spaniards should collect the tolls paid by the flocks on their descent from the French district of Abruzzo into the Capitanate, is conclusive evidence of the intention of the contracting parties to assign the latter to Spain. See the treaty apud Dumont, Corps Diplomatique, tom. in. pp. 445, 446. [5] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom, i. lib. 4, cap. 52.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii, lib. 27, cap. 12.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 10. [6] D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., part. 2, chap. 3-7.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 4, cap. 60, 62, 64, 65.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, tom. i. p. 236.--Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 29, cap. 4. Bernaldez states, that the Great Captain, finding his conference with the French general ineffectual, proposed to the latter to decide the quarrel between their respective nations by single combat. (Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 167.) We should require some other authority, however, than that of the good Curate to vouch for this romantic flight, so entirely out of keeping with the Spanish general's character, in which prudence was probably the most conspicuous attribute. [7] Daru, Hist. de Venise, tom. iii. p. 345.--Bembo, Istoria Viniziana, tom. i. lib. 6.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 238, 240, 252.--This may appear strange, considering that Lorenzo Suarez de la Vega was there, a person of whom Gonzalo de Oviedo writes, "Fué gentil caballero, é sabio, é de gran prudencia; ***** muy entendido é de mucho reposo é honesto é afable é de linda conversarcion;" and again more explicitly, "Embaxador á Venecia, en el qual oficio sirvio muy bien, é como prudente varon." (Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 3, dial. 44.) Martyr admits his prudence, but objects his ignorance of Latin, a deficiency, however heinous in the worthy tutor's eyes, probably of no rare occurrence among the elder Castilian nobles. [8] Many of Martyr's letters were addressed to both Ferdinand and Isabella. The former, however, was ignorant of the Latin language, in which they were written. Martyr playfully alludes to this in one of his epistles, reminding the queen of her promise to interpret them faithfully to her husband. The unconstrained and familiar tone of his correspondence affords a pleasing example of the personal intimacy to which the sovereigns, so contrary to the usual stiffness of Spanish etiquette, admitted men of learning and probity at their court, without distinction of rank. Opus Epist., epist. 230. [9] "Galli," says Martyr, in a letter more remarkable for strength of expression than elegance of Latinity, "furunt, saeviunt, internecionem nostris minantur, putantque id sibi fere facillimum. Regem eorum esse in itinere, inquiunt, ut ipse cum duplicato exercitu Alpes trajiciat in Italiam. Vestro nomini insurgunt. Cristas erigunt in vos superbissimè. Provinciam hanc, veluti rem humilem, parvique momenti, se aggressuros praeconantur. Nihil esse negotii eradicare exterminareque vestra praesidia ex utrâque Siciliâ blacterant. Insolenter nimis exspuendo insultant." Opus Epist., epist. 241. [10] D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., part. 2, chap. 8.--Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 29, cap. 4.--Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 5, pp. 274, 275.-- Buonaccorsi, Diario, p. 61. [11] Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 5, p. 265.--D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., part. 1, chap. 57.--Gaillard, Rivalité, tom. iv. pp. 221-233.--St. Gelais, Hist. de Louys XII, p. 169. Brantôme has introduced sketches of most of the French captains mentioned in the text into his admirable gallery of national portraits.--See Vies des Hommes Illustres, Oeuvres, tom. ii. and iii. [12] Martyr's epistles at this crisis are filled with expostulation, argument, and entreaties to the sovereigns, begging them to rouse from their apathy, and take measures to secure the wavering affections of Venice, as well as to send more effectual aid to their Italian troops. Ferdinand listened to the first of these suggestions; but showed a strange insensibility to the last. [13] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, lib. 4, cap. 62, 65.--Carta del Gran Capitan, MS. Prospero Colonna, in particular, was distinguished not only for his military science, but his fondness for letters and the arts, of which he is commemorated by Tiraboschi as a munificent patron. (Letteratura Italians, tom. viii. p. 77.) Paolo Giovio has introduced his portrait among the effigies of illustrious men, who, it must be confessed, are more indebted in his work to the hand of the historian than the artist. Elogia Virorum Bellica Virtute Illustrium, (Basiliae, 1578,) lib. 5. [14] D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., part. 2, chap. 8.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 10.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 42.--Summonte, Hist. di Napoli, tom. iii. p. 541. [15] This beautiful and high-spirited lady, whose fate has led Boccalini, in his whimsical satire of the "Ragguaglí dí Parnasso," to call her the most unfortunate female on record, had seen her father, Alfonso II., and her husband, Galeazzo Sforza, driven from their thrones by the French, while her son still remained in captivity in their hands. No wonder they revolted from accumulating new woes on her devoted head. [16] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 237.--Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 5, pp. 282, 283.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 14.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 249.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 168. [17] Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 47.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 4, cap. 69.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, tom. i. p. 241.-- D'Auton, part. 2, chap. 11.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 247. Martyr says, that the Spaniards marched through the enemy's camp, shouting "España, España, viva España!" (ubi supra.) Their gallantry in the defence of Canosa elicits a hearty eulogium from Jean D'Auton, the loyal historiographer of Louis XII. "Je ne veux donc par ma Chronique mettre les biensfaicts des Espaignols en publy, mais dire que pour vertueuse defence, doibuent auoir louange honorable." Hist. de Louys XII., chap. 11. [18] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 169.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 10.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 66. [19] Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 53.--D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., part. 2, chap. 26.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, pp. 238, 239.--Mémoires de Bayard par le Loyal Serviteur, chap. 23, apud Petitot, Collection des Mémoires, tom. xv.--Brantôme, Oeuvres, tom. iii. disc. 77. This celebrated tourney, its causes, and all the details of the action, are told in as many different ways as there are narrators; and this, notwithstanding it was fought in the presence of a crowd of witnesses, who had nothing to do but look on, and note what passed before their eyes. The only facts in which all agree, are, that there was such a tournament, and that neither party gained the advantage. So much for history! [20] D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., ubi supra.--Quintana, Españoles Célebres, tom. ii. p. 263. [21] Brantôme, Oeuvres, tom. vi. Discours sur les Duels.--D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., part. 2, chap. 27.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 11.-- Mémoires de Bayard, chap. 22, apud Collection des Mémoires.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 240. [22] According to Martyr, the besieged had been so severely pressed by famine for some time before this, that Gonsalvo entertained serious thoughts of embarking the whole of his little garrison on board the fleet, and abandoning the place to the enemy. "Barlettae inclusos fame pesteque urgeri graviter aiunt. Vicina ipsorum omnia Galli occupant, et nostros quotidie magis ac magis premunt. Ita obsessi undi que, de relinquendâ etiam Barlettâ saepius iniere consilium. Ut mari terga dent hostibus, ne fame pesteque pereant, saepe cadit in deliberationem." Opus Epist., epist. 249. [23] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 242.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 5, cap. 4.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 167.--Guicciardini, Istoria, p. 283. [24] Ibid., lib. 5, p. 294.--D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., part. 2, chap. 22.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 63. [25] Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 11.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, tom. i. p. 247.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 5, cap. 9. [26] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, pp. 243, 244.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 11, 12. A dispute arose, soon after this affair, between a French officer and some Italian gentlemen at Gonsalvo's table, in consequence of certain injurious reflections made by the former on the bravery of the Italian nation. The quarrel was settled by a combat _à l'outrance_ between thirteen knights on each side, fought under the protection of the Great Captain, who took a lively interest in the success of his allies. It terminated in the discomfiture and capture of all the French. The tourney covers more pages in the Italian historians than the longest battle, and is told with pride and a swell of exultation which show that this insult of the French cut more deeply than all the injuries inflicted by them. Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, pp. 244-247.--Guicciardini, Istoria, pp. 296-298.--Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 29, cap. 4.--Summonte, Hist. di Napoli, tom. iii. pp. 542-552.--et al. [27]: This supply was owing to the avarice of the French general Alègre, who, having got possession of a magazine of corn in Foggia, sold it to the Venetian merchant, instead of reserving it, where it was most needed, for his own army. [28] D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., part, 1, chap. 72.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 254.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 242. [29] Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 5, p. 296.--D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., part. 2, chap. 31. [30] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, pp. 248, 249.--Guicciardini, Istoria, p. 296.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 175.--D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., part. 2, chap. 31.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 72. The gallant behavior of La Palice, and indeed the whole siege of Ruvo, is told by Jean D'Auton in a truly heart-stirring tone, quite worthy of the chivalrous pen of old Froissart. There is an inexpressible charm imparted to the French memoirs and chronicles of this ancient date, not only from the picturesque character of the details, but from a gentle tinge of romance shed over them, which calls to mind the doughty feats of "prowest knights, Both Paynim and the peers of Charlemagne." [31] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., ubi supra.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 16.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 72. [32] D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., ubi supra.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 249.--Quintana, Españoles Célebres, tom. ii. p. 270.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 5, cap. 14. [33] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 249. [34] Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 15.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 5, cap. 16.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 17. CHAPTER XII. ITALIAN WARS.--NEGOTIATIONS WITH FRANCE.--VICTORY OF CERIGNOLA.--SURRENDER OF NAPLES. 1503. Birth of Charles V.--Philip and Joanna Visit Spain.--Treaty of Lyons.--The Great Captain Refuses to Comply with it.--Encamps before Cerignola.-- Battle and Rout of the French.--Triumphant Entry of Gonsalvo into Naples. Before accompanying the Great Captain further in his warlike operations, it will be necessary to take a rapid glance at what was passing in the French and Spanish courts, where negotiations were in train for putting a stop to them altogether. The reader has been made acquainted in a preceding chapter with the marriage of the infanta Joanna, second daughter of the Catholic sovereigns, with the archduke Philip, son of the emperor Maximilian, and sovereign, in right of his mother, of the Low Countries. The first fruit of this marriage was the celebrated Charles the Fifth, born at Ghent, February 24th, 1500, whose birth was no sooner announced to Queen Isabella, than she predicted that to this infant would one day descend the rich inheritance of the Spanish monarchy. [1] The premature death of the heir apparent, Prince Miguel, not long after, prepared the way for this event by devolving the succession on Joanna, Charles's mother. From that moment the sovereigns were pressing in their entreaties that the archduke and his wife would visit Spain, that they might receive the customary oaths of allegiance, and that the former might become acquainted with the character and institutions of his future subjects. The giddy young prince, however, thought too much of present pleasure to heed the call of ambition or duty, and suffered more than a year to glide away, before he complied with the summons of his royal parents. In the latter part of 1501, Philip and Joanna, attended by a numerous suite of Flemish courtiers, set out on their journey, proposing to take their way through France. They were entertained with profuse magnificence and hospitality at the French court, where the politic attentions of Louis the Twelfth not only effaced the recollection of ancient injuries to the house of Burgundy, [2] but left impressions of the most agreeable character on the mind of the young prince. [3] After some weeks passed in a succession of splendid _fêtes_ and amusements at Blois, where the archduke confirmed the treaty of Trent recently made between his father, the emperor, and the French king, stipulating the marriage of Louis's eldest daughter, the princess Claude, with Philip's son Charles, the royal pair resumed their journey towards Spain, which they entered by the way of Fontarabia, January 29th, 1502. [4] Magnificent preparations had been made for their reception. The grand constable of Castile, the duke of Naxara, and many other of the principal grandees waited on the borders to receive them. Brilliant _fêtes_ and illuminations, and all the usual marks of public rejoicing, greeted their progress through the principal cities of the north, and a _pragmática_ relaxing the simplicity, or rather severity, of the sumptuary laws of the period, so far as to allow the use of silks and various-colored apparel, shows the attention of the sovereigns to every circumstance, however trifling, which could affect the minds of the young princes agreeably, and diffuse an air of cheerfulness over the scene. [5] Ferdinand and Isabella, who were occupied with the affairs of Andalusia at this period, no sooner heard of the arrival of Philip and Joanna, than they hastened to the north. They reached Toledo towards the end of April, and in a few days, the queen, who paid the usual penalties of royalty, in seeing her children, one after another, removed far from her into distant lands, had the satisfaction of again folding her beloved daughter in her arms. On the 22d of the ensuing month, the archduke and his wife received the usual oaths of fealty from the cortes duly convoked for the purpose at Toledo. [6] King Ferdinand, not long after, made a journey into Aragon, in which the queen's feeble health would not permit her to accompany him, in order to prepare the way for a similar recognition by the estates of that realm. We are not informed what arguments the sagacious monarch made use of to dispel the scruples formerly entertained by that independent body, on a similar application in behalf of his daughter, the late queen of Portugal. [7] They were completely successful, however; and Philip and Joanna, having ascertained the favorable disposition of cortes, made their entrance in great state into the ancient city of Saragossa, in the month of October. On the 27th, having first made oath before the Justice, to observe the laws and liberties of the realm, Joanna as future queen proprietor, and Philip as her husband,--were solemnly recognized by the four _arms_ of Aragon as successors to the crown, in default of male issue of King Ferdinand. The circumstance is memorable, as affording the first example of the parliamentary recognition of a female heir apparent in Aragonese history. [8] Amidst all the honors so liberally lavished on Philip, his bosom secretly swelled with discontent, fomented still further by his followers, who pressed him to hasten his return to Flanders, where the free and social manners of the people were much more congenial to their tastes, than the reserve and stately ceremonial of the Spanish court. The young prince shared in these feelings, to which, indeed, the love of pleasure, and an instinctive aversion to anything like serious occupation, naturally disposed him. Ferdinand and Isabella saw with regret the frivolous disposition of their son-in-law, who, in the indulgence of selfish and effeminate ease, was willing to repose on others all the important duties of government. They beheld with mortification his indifference to Joanna, who could boast few personal attractions, [9] and who cooled the affections of her husband by alternations of excessive fondness and irritable jealousy, for which last the levity of his conduct gave her too much occasion. Shortly after the ceremony at Saragossa, the archduke announced his intention of an immediate return to the Netherlands, by the way of France. The sovereigns, astonished at this abrupt determination, used every argument to dissuade him from it. They represented the ill effects it might occasion the princess Joanna, then too far advanced in a state of pregnancy to accompany him. They pointed out the impropriety, as well as danger, of committing himself to the hands of the French king, with whom they were now at open war; and they finally insisted on the importance of Philip's remaining long enough in the kingdom to become familiar with the usages, and establish himself in the affections of the people over whom he would one day be called to reign. All these arguments were ineffectual; the inflexible prince, turning a deaf ear alike to the entreaties of his unhappy wife, and the remonstrances of the Aragonese cortes, still in session, set out from Madrid, with the whole of his Flemish suite, in the month of December. He left Ferdinand and Isabella disgusted with the levity of his conduct, and the queen, in particular, filled with mournful solicitude for the welfare of the daughter with whom his destinies were united. [10] Before his departure for France, Philip, anxious to re-establish harmony between that country and Spain, offered his services to his father-in-law in negotiating with Louis the Twelfth, if possible, a settlement of the differences respecting Naples. Ferdinand showed some reluctance at intrusting so delicate a commission to an envoy in whose discretion he placed small reliance, which was not augmented by the known partiality which Philip entertained for the French monarch. [11] Before the archduke had crossed the frontier, however, he was overtaken by a Spanish ecclesiastic named Bernaldo Boyl, abbot of St. Miguel de Cuxa, who brought full powers to Philip from the king for concluding a treaty with France, accompanied at the same time with private instructions of the most strict and limited nature. He was enjoined, moreover, to take no step without the advice of his reverend coadjutor, and to inform the Spanish court at once, if different propositions were submitted from those contemplated by his instructions. [12] Thus fortified, the archduke Philip made his appearance at the French Court in Lyons, where he was received by Louis with the same lively expressions of regard as before. With these amiable dispositions, the negotiations were not long in resulting in a definitive treaty, arranged to the mutual satisfaction of the parties, though in violation of the private instructions of the archduke. In the progress of the discussions, Ferdinand, according to the Spanish historians, received advices from his envoy, the abate Boyl, that Philip was transcending his commission; in consequence of which the king sent an express to France, urging his son-in-law to adhere to the strict letter of his instructions. Before the messenger reached Lyons, however, the treaty was executed. Such is the Spanish account of this blind transaction. [13] The treaty, which was signed at Lyons, April 5th, 1503, was arranged on the basis of the marriage of Charles, the infant son of Philip, and Claude, princess of France; a marriage, which, settled by three several treaties, was destined never to take place. The royal infants were immediately to assume the titles of King and Queen of Naples, and Duke and Duchess of Calabria. Until the consummation of the marriage, the French division of the kingdom was to be placed under the administration of some suitable person named by Louis the Twelfth, and the Spanish under that of the archduke Philip, or some other deputy appointed by Ferdinand. All places unlawfully seized by either party were to be restored; and lastly it was settled, with regard to the disputed province of the Capitanate, that the portion held by the French should be governed by an agent of King Louis, and the Spanish by the archduke Philip on behalf of Ferdinand. [14] Such in substance was the treaty of Lyons; a treaty, which, while it seemed to consult the interests of Ferdinand, by securing the throne of Naples eventually to his posterity, was in fact far more accommodated to those of Louis, by placing the immediate control of the Spanish moiety under a prince over whom that monarch held entire influence. It is impossible that so shrewd a statesman as Ferdinand could, from the mere consideration of advantages so remote to himself and dependent on so precarious a contingency as the marriage of two infants, then in their cradles, have seriously contemplated an arrangement, which surrendered all the actual power into the hands of his rival; and that too at the moment when his large armament, so long preparing for Calabria, had reached that country, and when the Great Captain, on the other quarter, had received such accessions of strength as enabled him to assume the offensive, on at least equal terms with the enemy. No misgivings on this head, however, appeared to have entered the minds of the signers of the treaty, which was celebrated by the court at Lyons with every show of public rejoicing, and particularly with tourneys and tilts of reeds, in imitation of the Spanish chivalry. At the same time, the French king countermanded the embarkation of French troops on board a fleet equipping at the port of Genoa for Naples, and sent orders to his generals in Italy to desist from further operations. The archduke forwarded similar instructions to Gonsalvo, accompanied with a copy of the powers intrusted to him by Ferdinand. That prudent officer, however, whether in obedience to previous directions from the king, as Spanish writers affirm, or on his own responsibility, from a very natural sense of duty, refused to comply with the ambassador's orders; declaring "he knew no authority but that of his own sovereigns, and that he felt bound to prosecute the war with all his ability, till he received their commands to the contrary." [15] Indeed, the archduke's despatches arrived at the very time when the Spanish general, having strengthened himself by a reinforcement from the neighboring garrison of Tarento under Pedro Navarro, was prepared to sally forth, and try his fortune in battle with the enemy. Without further delay, he put his purpose into execution, and on Friday, the 28th of April, marched out with his whole army from the ancient walls of Barleta; a spot ever memorable in history as the scene of the extraordinary sufferings and indomitable constancy of the Spanish soldier. The road lay across the field of Cannae, where, seventeen centuries before, the pride of Rome had been humbled by the victorious arms of Hannibal, [16] in a battle which, though fought with far greater numbers, was not so decisive in its consequences as that which the same scenes were to witness in a few hours. The coincidence is certainly singular; and one might almost fancy that the actors in these fearful tragedies, unwilling to deface the fair haunts of civilization, had purposely sought a more fitting theatre in this obscure and sequestered region. The weather, although only at the latter end of April, was extremely sultry; the troops, notwithstanding Gonsalvo's orders on crossing the river Ofanto, the ancient Aufidus, had failed to supply themselves with sufficient water for the march; parched with heat and dust, they were soon distressed by excessive thirst; and, as the burning rays of the noontide sun beat fiercely on their heads, many of them, especially those cased in heavy armor, sunk down on the road, fainting with exhaustion and fatigue. Gonsalvo was seen in every quarter, administering to the necessities of his men, and striving to reanimate their drooping spirits. At length, to relieve them, he commanded that each trooper should take one of the infantry on his crupper, setting the example himself by mounting a German ensign behind him on his own horse. In this way, the whole army arrived early in the afternoon before Cerignola, a small town on an eminence about sixteen miles from Barleta, where the nature of the ground afforded the Spanish general a favorable position for his camp. The sloping sides of the hill were covered with vineyards, and its base was protected by a ditch of considerable depth. Gonsalvo saw at once the advantages of the ground. His men were jaded by the march; but there was no time to lose, as the French, who, on his departure from Barleta, had been drawn up under the walls of Canosa, were now rapidly advancing. All hands were put in requisition, therefore, for widening the trench, in which they planted sharp-pointed stakes; while the earth which they excavated enabled them to throw up a parapet of considerable height on the side next the town. On this rampart he mounted his little train of artillery, consisting of thirteen guns, and behind it drew up his forces in order of battle. [17] Before these movements were completed in the Spanish camp, the bright arms and banners of the French were seen glistening in the distance amid the tall fennel and cane-brakes with which the country was thickly covered. As soon as they had come in view of the Spanish encampment, they were brought to a halt, while a council of war was called, to determine the expediency of giving battle that evening. The duke of Nemours would have deferred it till the following morning, as the day was already far spent, and allowed no time for reconnoitring the position of his enemy. But Ives d'Allègre, Chandieu, the commander of the Swiss, and some other officers, were for immediate action, representing the importance of not balking the impatience of the soldiers, who were all hot for the assault. In the course of the debate, Allègre was so much heated as to throw out some rash taunts on the courage of the viceroy, which the latter would have avenged on the spot, had not his arm been arrested by Louis d'Ars. He had the weakness, however, to suffer them to change his cooler purpose, exclaiming, "We will fight to-night, then; and perhaps those who vaunt the loudest will be found to trust more to their spurs, than their swords;" a prediction bitterly justified by the event. [18] While this dispute was going on, Gonsalvo gained time for making the necessary disposition of his troops. In the centre he placed his German auxiliaries, armed with their long pikes, and on each wing the Spanish infantry under the command of Pedro Navarro, Diego de Paredes, Pizarro, and other illustrious captains. The defence of the artillery was committed to the left wing. A considerable body of men-at-arms, including those recently equipped from the spoils of Ruvo, was drawn up within the intrenchments, in a quarter affording a convenient opening for a sally, and placed under the orders of Mendoza and Fabrizio Colonna, whose brother Prospero and Pedro de la Paz took charge of the light cavalry, which was posted without the lines to annoy the advance of the enemy, and act on any point, as occasion might require. Having completed his preparations, the Spanish general coolly waited the assault of the French. The duke of Nemours had marshalled his forces in a very different order. He distributed them into three battles or divisions, stationing his heavy horse, composing altogether, as Gonsalvo declared, "the finest body of cavalry seen for many years in Italy," under the command of Louis d'Ars, on the right. The second and centre division, formed somewhat in the rear of the right, was made up of the Swiss and Gascon infantry, headed by the brave Chandieu; and his left, consisting chiefly of his light cavalry, and drawn up, like the last, somewhat in the rear of the preceding, was intrusted to Allègre. [19] It was within half an hour of sunset when the duke de Nemours gave orders for the attack, and, putting himself at the head of the gendarmerie on the right, spurred at full gallop against the Spanish left. The hostile armies were nearly equal, amounting to between six and seven thousand men each. The French were superior in the number and condition of their cavalry, rising to a third of their whole force; while Gonsalvo's strength lay chiefly in his infantry, which had acquired a lesson of tactics under him, that raised it to a level with the best in Europe. As the French advanced, the guns on the Spanish left poured a lively fire into their ranks, when, a spark accidentally communicating with the magazine of powder, the whole blew up with a tremendous explosion. The Spaniards were filled with consternation; but Gonsalvo, converting the misfortune into a lucky omen, called out, "Courage, soldiers, these are the beacon lights of victory! We have no need of our guns at close quarters." In the mean time, the French van under Nemours, advancing rapidly under the dark clouds of smoke, which rolled heavily over the field, were unexpectedly brought up by the deep trench, of whose existence they were unapprised. Some of the horse were precipitated into it, and all received a sudden check, until Nemours, finding it impossible to force the works in this quarter, rode along their front in search of some practicable passage. In doing this, he necessarily exposed his flank to the fatal aim of the Spanish arquebusiers. A shot from one of them took effect on the unfortunate young nobleman, and he fell mortally wounded from his saddle. At this juncture, the Swiss and Gascon infantry, briskly moving up to second the attack of the now disordered horse, arrived before the intrenchments. Undismayed by this formidable barrier, their commander, Chandieu, made the most desperate attempts to force a passage; but the loose earth freshly turned up afforded no hold to the feet, and his men were compelled to recoil from the dense array of German pikes, which bristled over the summit of the breastwork. Chandieu, their leader, made every effort to rally and bring them back to the charge; but, in the act of doing this, was hit by a ball, which stretched him lifeless in the ditch; his burnished arms, and the snow-white plumes above his helmet, making him a conspicuous mark for the enemy. All was now confusion. The Spanish arquebusiers, screened by their defences, poured a galling fire into the dense masses of the enemy, who were mingled together indiscriminately, horse and foot, while, the leaders being down, no one seemed capable of bringing them to order. At this critical moment, Gonsalvo, whose eagle eye took in the whole operations of the field, ordered a general charge along the line; and the Spaniards, leaping their intrenchments, descended with the fury of an avalanche on their foes, whose wavering columns, completely broken by the violence of the shock, were seized with a panic, and fled, scarcely offering any resistance. Louis d'Ars, at the head of such of the men-at-arms as could follow him, went off in one direction, and Ives d'Allègre, with his light cavalry, which had hardly come into action, in another; thus fully verifying the ominous prediction of his commander. The slaughter fell most heavily on the Swiss and Gascon foot, whom the cavalry under Mendoza and Pedro de la Paz rode down and cut to pieces without sparing, till the shades of evening shielded them at length from their pitiless pursuers. [20] Prospero Colonna pushed on to the French encampment, where he found the tables in the duke's tent spread for his evening repast; of which the Italian general and his followers did not fail to make good account. A trifling incident, that well illustrates the sudden reverses of war. The Great Captain passed the night on the field of battle, which, on the following morning, presented a ghastly spectacle of the dying and the dead. More than three thousand French are computed by the best accounts to have fallen. The loss of the Spaniards, covered as they were by their defences, was inconsiderable. [21] All the enemy's artillery, consisting of thirteen pieces, his baggage, and most of his colors fell into their hands. Never was there a more complete victory, achieved too within the space of little more than an hour. The body of the unfortunate Nemours, which was recognized by one of his pages from the rings on the fingers, was found under a heap of slain, much disfigured. It appeared that he had received three several wounds, disproving, if need were, by his honorable death the injurious taunts of Allègre. Gonsalvo was affected even to tears at beholding the mutilated remains of his young and gallant adversary, who, whatever judgment may be formed of his capacity as a leader, was allowed to have all the qualities which belong to a true knight. With him perished the last scion of the illustrious house of Armagnac. Gonsalvo ordered his remains to be conveyed to Barleta, where they were laid in the cemetery of the convent of St. Francis, with all the honors due to his high station. [22] The Spanish commander lost no time in following up his blow, well aware that it is quite as difficult to improve a victory as to win one. The French had rushed into battle with too much precipitation to agree on any plan of operations, or any point on which to rally in case of defeat. They accordingly scattered in different directions, and Pedro de la Paz was despatched in pursuit of Louis d'Ars, who threw himself into Venosa, [23] where he kept the enemy at bay for many months longer. Paredes kept close on the scent of Allègre, who, finding the gates shut against him wherever he passed, at length took shelter in Gaeta on the extreme point of the Neapolitan territory. There he endeavored to rally the scattered relics of the field of Cerignola, and to establish a strong position, from which the French, when strengthened by fresh supplies from home, might recommence operations for the recovery of the kingdom. The day after the battle of Cerignola the Spaniards received tidings of another victory, scarcely less important, gained over the French in Calabria, the preceding week. [24] The army sent out under Portocarrero had reached that coast early in March; but, soon after its arrival, its gallant commander fell ill and died. [25] The dying general named Don Fernando de Andrada as his successor; and this officer, combining his forces with those before in the country under Cardona and Benavides, encountered the French commander D'Aubigny in a pitched battle, not far from Seminara, on Friday, the 21st of April. It was near the same spot on which the latter had twice beaten the Spaniards. But the star of France was on the wane; and the gallant old officer had the mortification to see his little corps of veterans completely routed after a sharp engagement of less than an hour, while he himself was retrieved with difficulty from the hands of the enemy by the valor of his Scottish guard. [26] The Great Captain and his army, highly elated with the news of this fortunate event, which annihilated the French power in Calabria, began their march on Naples; Fabrizio Colonna having been first detached into the Abruzzi to receive the submission of the people in that quarter. The tidings of the victory had spread far and wide; and, as Gonsalvo's army advanced, they beheld the ensigns of Aragon floating from the battlements of the towns upon their route, while the inhabitants came forth to greet the conqueror, eager to testify their devotion to the Spanish cause. The army halted at Benevento; and the general sent his summons to the city of Naples, inviting it in the most courteous terms to resume its ancient allegiance to the legitimate branch of Aragon. It was hardly to be expected, that the allegiance of a people, who had so long seen their country set up as a mere stake for political gamesters, should sit very closely upon them, or that they should care to peril their lives on the transfer of a crown which had shifted on the heads of half a dozen proprietors in as many successive years. [27] With the same ductile enthusiasm, therefore, with which they greeted the accession of Charles the Eighth or Louis the Twelfth, they now welcomed the restoration of the ancient dynasty of Aragon; and deputies from the principal nobility and citizens waited on the Great Captain at Acerra, where they tendered him the keys of the city, and requested the confirmation of their rights and privileges. Gonsalvo, having promised this in the name of his royal master, on the following morning, the 14th of May, 1503, made his entrance in great state into the capital, leaving his army without the walls. He was escorted by the military of the city under a royal canopy borne by the deputies. The streets were strewed with flowers, the edifices decorated with appropriate emblems and devices, and wreathed with banners emblazoned with the united arms of Aragon and Naples. As he passed along, the city rung with the acclamations of countless multitudes who thronged the streets; while every window and housetop was filled with spectators, eager to behold the man, who, with scarcely any other resources than those of his own genius, had so long defied, and at length completely foiled, the power of France. On the following day a deputation of the nobility and people waited on the Great Captain at his quarters, and tendered him the usual oaths of allegiance for his master, King Ferdinand, whose accession finally closed the series of revolutions which had so long agitated this unhappy country. [28] The city of Naples was commanded by two strong fortresses still held by the French, which, being well victualled and supplied with ammunition, showed no disposition to surrender. The Great Captain determined, therefore, to reserve a small corps for their reduction, while he sent forward the main body of his army to besiege Gaeta. But the Spanish infantry refused to march until the heavy arrears, suffered to accumulate through the negligence of the government, were discharged; and Gonsalvo, afraid of awakening the mutinous spirit which he had once found it so difficult to quell, was obliged to content himself with sending forward his cavalry and German levies, and to permit the infantry to take up its quarters in the capital, under strict orders to respect the persons and property of the citizens. He now lost no time in pressing the siege of the French fortresses, whose impregnable situation might have derided the efforts of the most formidable enemy in the ancient state of military science. But the reduction of these places was intrusted to Pedro Navarro, the celebrated engineer, whose improvements in the art of mining have gained him the popular reputation of being its inventor, and who displayed such unprecedented skill on this occasion, as makes it a memorable epoch in the annals of war. [29] Under his directions, the small tower of St. Vincenzo having been first reduced by a furious cannonade, a mine was run under the outer defences of the great fortress called Castel Nuovo. On the 21st of May, the mine was sprung; a passage was opened over the prostrate ramparts, and the assailants, rushing in with Gonsalvo and Navarro at their head, before the garrison had time to secure the drawbridge, applied their ladders to the walls of the castle, and succeeded in carrying the place by escalade, after a desperate struggle, in which the greater part of the French were slaughtered. An immense booty was found in the castle. The Angevin party had made it a place of deposit for their most valuable effects, gold, jewels, plate, and other treasures, which, together with its well-stored magazines of grain and ammunition, became the indiscriminate spoil of the victors. As some of these, however, complained of not getting their share of the plunder, Gonsalvo, giving full scope in the exultation of the moment to military license, called out gayly, "Make amends for it, then, by what you can find in my quarters!" The words were not uttered to deaf ears. The mob of soldiery rushed to the splendid palace of the Angevin prince of Salerno, then occupied by the Great Captain, and in a moment its sumptuous furniture, paintings, and other costly decorations, together with the contents of its generous cellar, were seized and appropriated without ceremony by the invaders, who thus indemnified themselves at their general's expense for the remissness of government. After some weeks of protracted operations, the remaining fortress, Castel d'Uovo, as it was called, opened its gates to Navarro; and a French fleet, coming into the harbor, had the mortification to find itself fired on from the walls of the place it was intended to relieve. Before this event, Gonsalvo, having obtained funds from Spain for paying off his men, quitted the capital and directed his march on Gaeta. The important results of his victories were now fully disclosed. D'Aubigny, with the wreck of the forces escaped from Seminara, had surrendered. The two Abruzzi, the Capitanate, all the Basilicate, except Venosa, still held by Louis d'Ars, and indeed every considerable place in the kingdom, had tendered its submission, with the exception of Gaeta. Summoning, therefore, to his aid Andrada, Navarro, and his other officers, the Great Captain resolved to concentrate all his strength on this point, designing to press the siege, and thus exterminate at a blow the feeble remains of the French power in Italy. The enterprise was attended with more difficulty than he had anticipated. [30] FOOTNOTES [1] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1500.--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 2. The queen expressed herself in the language of Scripture. "Sora cecidit super Mathiam," in allusion to the circumstance of Charles being born on that saint's day; a day which, if we are to believe Garibay, was fortunate to him through the whole course of his life. Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 9. [2] Charles VIII., Louis's predecessor, had contrived to secure the hand of Anne of Bretagne, notwithstanding she was already married by proxy to Philip's father, the emperor Maximilian; and this, too, in contempt of his own engagements to Margaret, the emperor's daughter, to whom he had been affianced from her infancy. This twofold insult, which sunk deep into the heart of Maximilian, seems to have made no impression on the volatile spirits of his son. [3] Mariana, Hist. de España, lib. 27, cap. 11.--St. Gelais describes the cordial reception of Philip and Joanna by the Court at Blois, where he was probably present himself. The historian shows his own opinion of the effect produced on their young minds by these flattering attentions, by remarking, "Le roy leur monstra si très grand semblant d'amour, que par noblesse et honesteté de coeur _il les obligeoit envers luy de leur en souvenir toute leur vie_." Hist. de Louys. XII., pp. 164, 165. In passing through Paris, Philip took his seat in parliament as peer of France, and subsequently did homage to Louis XII., as his suzerain for his estates in Flanders; an acknowledgment of inferiority not at all palatable to the Spanish historians, who insist with much satisfaction on the haughty refusal of his wife, the archduchess, to take part in the ceremony. Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 4, cap. 55.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1502.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 13, sec. 1.-- Dumont, Corps Diplomatique, tom. iv. part. 1, p. 17. [4] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1501.--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 5. [5] Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 4, cap. 55.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. p. 220. This extreme simplicity of attire, in which Zurita discerns "the modesty of the times," was enforced by laws, the policy of which, whatever be thought of their moral import, may well be doubted in an economical view. I shall have occasion to draw the reader's attention to them hereafter. [6] The writ is dated at Llerena, March 8. It was extracted by Marina from the archives of Toledo, Teoría, tom. ii. p. 18. [7] It is remarkable that the Aragonese writers, generally so inquisitive on all points touching the constitutional history of their country, should have omitted to notice the grounds on which the cortes thought proper to reverse its former decision in the analogous case of the infanta Isabella. There seems to have been even less reason for departing from ancient usage in the present instance, since Joanna had a son, to whom the cortes might lawfully have tendered its oath of recognition; for a female, although excluded from the throne in her own person, was regarded as competent to transmit the title unimpaired to her male heirs. Blancas suggests no explanation of the affair, (Coronaciones, lib. 3, cap. 20, and Commentarii, pp. 274, 511,) and Zurita quietly dismisses it with the remark, that "there was some opposition raised, but _the king had managed it so discreetly beforehand_, that there was not the same difficulty as formerly." (Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 5, cap. 5.) It is curious to see with what effrontery the prothonotary of the cortes, in the desire to varnish over the departure from constitutional precedent, declares, in the opening address, "the princess Joanna, true and lawful heir to the crown, to whom, in default of male heirs, the usage and law of the land require the oath of allegiance." Coronaciones, ubi supra. [8] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1500.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 12, sec. 6.--Robles, Vita de Ximenez, p. 126.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 14.--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 5. Petronilla, the only female who ever sat, in her own right, on the throne of Aragon, never received the homage of cortes as heir apparent; the custom not having been established at that time, the middle of the twelfth century. (Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 5.) Blancas has described the ceremony of Joanna's recognition with quite as much circumstantiality as the novelty of the case could warrant. Coronaciones, lib. 3, cap. 20. [9] "Simplex est foemina," says Martyr, speaking of Joanna, "licet a tantâ muliere progenita." Opus Epist., epist. 250. [10] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., ubi supra.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 10.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 44.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1502. [11] Such manifest partiality for the French court and manners was shown by Philip and his Flemish followers, that the Spaniards very generally believed the latter were in the pay of Louis XII. See Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 44.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 23.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 253.--Lanuza, Historias, cap. 16. [12] Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 10.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 13, sec. 2.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 15.--D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., part. 1, chap. 32. [13] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 5, cap. 23.--St. Gelais, Hist. de Louys XII., pp. 170, 171.--Claude de Seyssel, Histoire de Louys XII., (Paris, 1615,) p. 108.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 13, sec. 3.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. pp. 690, 691.-- Lanuza, Historias, tom. i. cap. 16. Some of the French historians speak of two agents besides Philip employed in the negotiations. Father Boyl is the only one named by the Spanish writers, as regularly commissioned for the purpose, although it is not improbable that Gralla, the resident minister at Louis's court, took part in the discussions. [14] See the treaty, apud Dumont, Corps Diplomatique, tom. iv. pp. 27-29. [15] Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 33, sec. 3.--Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 29, cap. 4.--St. Gelais, Hist. de Louys XII., p. 171.--Buonaccorsi, Diario, p. 75.--D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., part. 2, chap. 32. According to the Aragonese historians, Ferdinand, on the archduke's departure, informed Gonsalvo of the intended negotiations with France, cautioning the general at the same time not to heed any instructions of the archduke till confirmed by him. This circumstance the French writers regard as unequivocal proof of the king's insincerity in entering into the negotiation. It wears this aspect at first, certainly; but, on a nearer view, admits of a very different construction. Ferdinand had no confidence in the discretion of his envoy, whom, if we are to believe the Spanish writers, he employed in the affair more from accident than choice; and, notwithstanding the full powers intrusted to him, he did not consider himself bound to recognize the validity of any treaty which the other should sign, until first ratified by himself. With these views, founded on principles now universally recognized in European diplomacy, it was natural to caution his general against any unauthorized interference on the part of his envoy, which the rash and presumptuous character of the latter, acting, moreover, under an undue influence of the French monarch, gave him good reason to fear. As to the Great Captain, who has borne a liberal share of censure on this occasion, it is not easy to see how he could have acted otherwise than he did, even in the event of no special instructions from Ferdinand. For he would scarcely have been justified in abandoning a sure prospect of advantage on the authority of one, the validity of whose powers he could not determine, and which, in fact, do not appear to have warranted such interference. The only authority he knew, was that from which he held his commission, and to which he was responsible for the faithful discharge of it. [16] Neither Polybius (lib. 3, sec. 24 et seq.) nor Livy, (Hist., lib. 22, cap. 43-50,) who give the most circumstantial narratives of the battle, are precise enough to enable us to ascertain the exact spot in which it was fought. Strabo, in his topographical notices of this part of Italy, briefly alludes to "the affair of Cannae" (_ta peri Kannas_), without any description of the scene of action. (Geog., lib. 6, p. 285.) Cluverius fixes the site of the ancient Cannae on the right bank of the Anfidus, the modern Ofanto, between three and four miles below Canusium; and notices the modern hamlet of nearly the same name, Canne, where common tradition recognizes the ruins of the ancient town. (Italia Antiqua, lib. 4, cap. 12, sec. 8.) D'Anville makes no difficulty in identifying these two, (Géographie Ancienne Abrégée, tom. i. p. 208,) having laid down the ancient town in his maps in the direct line, and about midway, between Barleta and Cerignola. [17] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, fol. 253-255.--Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 5, p. 303.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 75, 76.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 27.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 256.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 16, 17. Giovio says, that he had heard Fabrizio Colonna remark more than once, in allusion to the intrenchments at the base of the hill, "that the victory was owing, not to the skill of the commander, nor the valor of the troops, but to a mound and a ditch." This ancient mode of securing a position, which had fallen into disuse, was revived after this, according to the same author, and came into general practice among the best captains of the age. Ubi supra. [18] Brantôme, Oeuvres, tom. ii. disc. 8.--Garnier, Histoire de France, (Paris, 1783-8,) tom. v. pp. 395, 396.--Gaillard, Rivalité, tom. iv. p. 244.--St. Gelais, Hist. de Louys XII., p. 171. [19] Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 76.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, fol. 253-255.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 17. [20] Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 75.--Garnier, Hist. de France, tom. v. pp. 396, 397.--Fleurange, Mémoires, chap. 5, apud Petitot, Collection des Mémoires, tom. xvi.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, ubi supra.-- Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. pp. 303, 304.--St. Gelais, Hist. de Louys XII., pp. 171, 172.--Brantôme, Oeuvres, tom. ii. disc. 8. [21] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, fol. 255.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 15.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 180.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 256.--Fleurange, Mémoires, chap. 5. No account, that I know of, places the French loss so low as 3000; Garibay raises it to 4500, and the French maréchal de Fleurange rates that of the Swiss alone at 5000; a round exaggeration, not readily accounted for, as he had undoubted access to the best means of information. The Spaniards were too well screened to sustain much injury, and no estimate makes it more than a hundred killed, and some considerable less. The odds are indeed startling, but not impossible; as the Spaniards were not much exposed by personal collision with the enemy, until the latter were thrown into too much disorder to think of anything but escape. The more than usual confusion and discrepancy in the various statements of the particulars of this action may probably be attributed to the lateness of the hour, and consequently imperfect light, in which it was fought. [22] Quintana, Españoles Célebres, tom i. p. 277.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, fol. 255.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. pp. 248, 249.-- Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 17.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 181. [23] It was to this same city of Venusium that the rash and unfortunate Varro made his retreat, some seventeen centuries before, from the bloody field of Cannae. Liv. Hist., lib. 22, cap. 49. [24] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, fol. 255.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 256.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 80. Friday, says Guicciardini, alluding no doubt to Columbus's discoveries, as well as these two victories, was observed to be a lucky day to the Spaniards; according to Gaillard, it was regarded from this time by the French with more superstitious dread than ever. Istoria, tom. i. p. 301.-- Rivalité, tom. iv. p. 348. [25] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 5, cap. 8, 24.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, fol. 250. The reader may perhaps recollect the distinguished part played in the Moorish war by Luis Portocarrero, lord of Palma. He was of noble Italian origin, being descended from the ancient Genoese house of Boccanegra. The Great Captain and he had married sisters; and this connection probably recommended him, as much as his military talents, to the Calabrian command, which it was highly important should be intrusted to one who would maintain a good understanding with the commander-in-chief; a thing not easy to secure among the haughty nobility of Castile. [26] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, fol. 255.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 256.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 80.--Varillas, Histoire de Louis XII. (Paris, 1688,) tom. i. pp. 289-292. See the account of D'Aubigny's victories at Seminara, in Part II. Chapters 2 and 11, of this History. [27] Since 1494 the sceptre of Naples had passed into the hands of no less than seven princes, Ferdinand I., Alfonso II., Ferdinand II., Charles VIII., Frederic III., Louis XII., Ferdinand the Catholic. No private estate in the kingdom in the same time had probably changed masters half so often. See Cartas del Gran Capitan, MS. [28] Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. p. 304.--Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 29, cap. 4.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. p. 250.--Summonte, Hist. di Napoli, tom. iii. pp. 552, 553.--Muratori, Annali d'Italia, tom. xiv. p. 40.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 81.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 18. [29] The Italians, in their admiration of Pedro Navarro, caused medals to be struck, on which the invention of mines was ascribed to him. (Marini, apud Daru, Hist. de Venise, tom. iii. p. 351.) Although not actually the inventor, his glory was scarcely less, since he was the first who discovered the extensive and formidable uses to which they might be applied in the science of destruction. See Part I. Chapter 13, note 23, of this History. [30] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 5, cap. 30, 31, 34, 35. --Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, fol. 255-257.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 15.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 183.-- Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 6, pp. 307-309.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 18, 19.--Ammirato, Istorie Florentine, tom. iii. p. 271.-Summonte, Hist. di Napoli, tom. iii. p. 554.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 84, 86, 87, 93, 95.--Sismondi, Hist. des Français, tom. xv. pp. 407-409. CHAPTER XIII. NEGOTIATIONS WITH FRANCE.--UNSUCCESSFUL INVASION OF SPAIN.--TRUCE. 1503. Ferdinand's Policy Examined.--First Symptoms of Joanna's Insanity.-- Isabella's Distress and Fortitude.--Efforts of France.--Siege of Salsas.-- Isabella's Levies.--Ferdinand's Successes.--Reflections on the Campaign. The events noticed in the preceding chapter glided away as rapidly as the flitting phantoms of a dream. Scarcely had Louis the Twelfth received the unwelcome intelligence of Gonsalvo de Cordova's refusal to obey the mandate of the archduke Philip, before he was astounded with the tidings of the victory of Cerignola, the march on Naples, and the surrender of that capital, as well as of the greater part of the kingdom, following one another in breathless succession. It seemed as if the very means on which the French king had so confidently relied for calming the tempest, had been the signal for awakening all its fury, and bringing it on his devoted head. Mortified and incensed at being made the dupe of what he deemed a perfidious policy, he demanded an explanation of the archduke, who was still in France. The latter, vehemently protesting his own innocence, felt, or affected to feel, so sensibly the ridiculous and, as it appeared, dishonorable part played by him in the transaction, that he was thrown into a severe illness, which confined him to his bed for several days. [1] Without delay, he wrote to the Spanish court in terms of bitter expostulation, urging the immediate ratification of the treaty made pursuant to its orders, and an indemnification to France for its subsequent violation. Such is the account given by the French historians. The Spanish writers, on the other hand, say, that before the news of Gonsalvo's successes reached Spain, King Ferdinand refused to confirm the treaty sent him by his son-in-law, until it had undergone certain material modifications. If the Spanish monarch hesitated to approve the treaty in the doubtful posture of his affairs, he was little likely to do so, when he had the game entirely in his own hands. [2] He postponed an answer to Philip's application, willing probably to gain time for the Great Captain to strengthen himself firmly in his recent acquisitions. At length, after a considerable interval, he despatched an embassy to France, announcing his final determination never to ratify a treaty made in contempt of his orders, and so clearly detrimental to his interests. He endeavored, however, to gain further time by spinning out the negotiation, holding up for this purpose the prospect of an ultimate accommodation, and suggesting the re-establishment of his kinsman, the unfortunate Frederic, on the Neapolitan throne, as the best means of effecting it. The artifice, however, was too gross even for the credulous Louis; who peremptorily demanded of the ambassadors the instant and absolute ratification of the treaty, and, on their declaring it was beyond their powers, ordered them at once to leave his court. "I had rather," said he, "suffer the loss of a kingdom, which may perhaps be retrieved, than the loss of honor, which never can." A noble sentiment, but falling with no particular grace from the lips of Louis the Twelfth. [3] The whole of this blind transaction is stated in so irreconcilable a manner by the historians of the different nations, that it is extremely difficult to draw anything like a probable narrative out of them. The Spanish writers assert that the public commission of the archduke was controlled by strict private instructions; [4] while the French, on the other hand, are either silent as to the latter, or represent them to have been as broad and unlimited as his credentials. [5] If this be true, the negotiations must be admitted to exhibit, on the part of Ferdinand, as gross an example of political jugglery and falsehood, as ever disgraced the annals of diplomacy. [6] But it is altogether improbable, as I have before remarked, that a monarch so astute and habitually cautious should have intrusted unlimited authority, in so delicate a business, to a person whose discretion, independent of his known partiality for the French monarch, he held so lightly. It is much more likely that he limited, as is often done, the full powers committed to him in public, by private instructions of the most explicit character; and that the archduke was betrayed by his own vanity, and perhaps ambition (for the treaty threw the immediate power into his own hands), into arrangements unwarranted by the tenor of these instructions. [7] If this were the case, the propriety of Ferdinand's conduct in refusing the ratification depends on the question how far a sovereign is bound by the acts of a plenipotentiary who departs from his private instructions. Formerly, the question would seem to have been unsettled. Indeed, some of the most respectable writers on public law in the beginning of the seventeenth century maintain, that such a departure would not justify the prince in withholding his ratification; deciding thus, no doubt, on principles of natural equity, which appear to require that a principal should be held responsible for the acts of an agent, coming within the scope of his powers, though at variance with his secret orders, with which the other contracting party can have no acquaintance or concern. [8] The inconvenience, however, arising from adopting a principle in political negotiations, which must necessarily place the destinies of a whole nation in the hands of a single individual, rash or incompetent, it may be, without the power of interference or supervision on the part of the government, has led to a different conclusion in practice; and it is now generally admitted by European writers, not merely that the exchange of ratifications is essential to the validity of a treaty, but that a government is not bound to ratify the doings of a minister who has transcended his private instructions. [9] But, whatever be thought of Ferdinand's good faith in the early stages of this business, there is no doubt that, at a later period, when his position was changed by the success of his arms in Italy, he sought only to amuse the French court with a show of negotiation, in order, as we have already intimated, to paralyze its operations and gain time for securing his conquests. The French writers inveigh loudly against this crafty and treacherous policy; and Louis the Twelfth gave vent to his own indignation in no very measured terms. But, however we may now regard it, it was in perfect accordance with the trickish spirit of the age; and the French king resigned all right of rebuking his antagonist on this score, when he condescended to become a party with him to the infamous partition treaty, and still more when he so grossly violated it. He had voluntarily engaged with his Spanish rival in the game, and it afforded no good ground of complaint, that he was the least adroit of the two. While Ferdinand was thus triumphant in his schemes of foreign policy and conquest, his domestic life was clouded with the deepest anxiety, in consequence of the declining health of the queen, and the eccentric conduct of his daughter, the infanta Joanna. We have already seen the extravagant fondness with which that princess, notwithstanding her occasional sallies of jealousy, doated on her young and handsome husband. [10] From the hour of his departure she had been plunged in the deepest dejection, sitting day and night with her eyes fixed on the ground, in uninterrupted silence, or broken only by occasional expressions of petulant discontent. She refused all consolation, thinking only of rejoining her absent lord, and "equally regardless," says Martyr, who was then at the court, "of herself, her future subjects, and her afflicted parents." [11] On the 10th of March, 1503, she was delivered of her second son, who received the baptismal name of Ferdinand, in compliment to his grandfather. [12] No change, however, took place in the mind of the unfortunate mother, who from this time was wholly occupied with the project of returning to Flanders. An invitation to that effect, which she received from her husband in the month of November, determined her to undertake the journey, at all hazards, notwithstanding the affectionate remonstrances of the queen, who represented the impracticability of traversing France, agitated, as it then was, with all the bustle of war-like preparation, or of venturing by sea at this inclement and stormy season. One evening, while her mother was absent at Segovia, Joanna, whose residence was at Medina del Campo, left her apartment in the castle, and sallied out, though in dishabille, without announcing her purpose to any of her attendants. They followed, however, and used every argument and entreaty to prevail on her to return, at least for the night, but without effect; until the bishop of Burgos, who had charge of her household, finding every other means ineffectual, was compelled to close the castle gates, in order to prevent her departure. The princess, thus thwarted in her purpose, gave way to the most violent indignation. She menaced the attendants with her utmost vengeance for their disobedience, and, taking her station on the barrier, she obstinately refused to re-enter the castle, or even to put on any additional clothing, but remained cold and shivering on the spot till the following morning. The good bishop, sorely embarrassed by the dilemma to which he found himself reduced, of offending the queen by complying with the mad humor of the princess, or the latter still more, by resisting it, despatched an express in all haste to Isabella, acquainting her with the affair, and begging instructions how to proceed. The queen, who was staying, as has been said, at Segovia, about forty miles distant, alarmed at the intelligence, sent the king's cousin, the admiral Henriquez, together with the archbishop of Toledo, at once to Medina, and prepared to follow as fast as the feeble state of her health would permit. The efforts of these eminent persons, however, were not much more successful than those of the bishop. All they could obtain from Joanna was, that she would retire to a miserable kitchen in the neighborhood, during the night; while she persisted in taking her station on the barrier as soon as it was light, and continued there, immovable as a statue, the whole day. In this deplorable state she was found by the queen on her arrival; and it was not without great difficulty that the latter, with all the deference habitually paid her by her daughter, succeeded in persuading her to return to her own apartments in the castle. These were the first unequivocal symptoms of that hereditary taint of insanity which had clouded the latter days of Isabella's mother, and which, with a few brief intervals, was to shed a deeper gloom over the long-protracted existence of her unfortunate daughter. [13] The conviction of this sad infirmity of the princess gave a shock to the unhappy mother, scarcely less than that which she had formerly been called to endure in the death of her children. The sorrows, over which time had had so little power, were opened afresh by a calamity, which naturally filled her with the most gloomy forebodings for the fate of her people, whose welfare was to be committed to such incompetent hands. These domestic griefs were still further swelled at this time by the death of two of her ancient friends and counsellors, Juan Chacon, adelantado of Murcia, [14] and Gutierre de Cardenas, grand commander of Leon. [15] They had attached themselves to Isabella in the early part of her life, when her fortunes were still under a cloud; and they afterwards reaped the requital of their services in such ample honors and emoluments as royal gratitude could bestow, and in the full enjoyment of her confidence, to which their steady devotion to her interests well entitled them. [16] But neither the domestic troubles which pressed so heavily on Isabella's heart, nor the rapidly declining state of her own health, had power to blunt the energies of her mind, or lessen the vigilance with which she watched over the interests of her people. A remarkable proof of this was given in the autumn of the present year, 1503, when the country was menaced with an invasion from France. The whole French nation had shared the indignation of Louis the Twelfth, at the mortifying result of his enterprise against Naples; and it answered his call for supplies so promptly and liberally, that, in a few months after the defeat of Cerignola, he was able to resume operations, on a more formidable scale than France had witnessed for centuries. Three large armies were raised, one to retrieve affairs in Italy, a second to penetrate into Spain, by the way of Fontarabia, and a third to cross into Roussillon, and get possession of the strong post of Salsas, the key of the mountain passes in that quarter. Two fleets were also equipped in the ports of Genoa and Marseilles, the latter of which was to support the invasion of Roussillon by a descent on the coast of Catalonia. These various corps were intended to act in concert, and thus, by one grand, simultaneous movement, Spain was to be assailed on three several points of her territory. The results did not correspond with the magnificence of the apparatus. [17] The army destined to march on Fontarabia was placed under the command of Alan d'Albret, father of the king of Navarre, along the frontiers of whose dominions its route necessarily lay. Ferdinand had assured himself of the favorable dispositions of this prince, the situation of whose kingdom, more than its strength, made his friendship important; and the lord d'Albret, whether from a direct understanding with the Spanish monarch, or fearful of the consequences which might result to his son from the hostility of the latter, detained the forces intrusted to him, so long among the bleak and barren fastnesses of the mountains, that at length, exhausted by fatigue and want of food, the army melted away without even reaching the enemy's borders. [18] The force directed against Roussillon was of a more formidable character. It was commanded by the maréchal de Rieux, a brave and experienced officer, though much broken by age and bodily infirmities. It amounted to more than twenty thousand men. Its strength, however, lay chiefly in its numbers. It was, with the exception of a few thousand lansquenets under William de la Marck, [19] made up of the arrière-ban of the kingdom, and the undisciplined militia from the great towns of Languedoc. With this numerous array the French marshal entered Roussillon without opposition, and sat down before Salsas on the 16th of September, 1503. The old castle of Salsas, which had been carried without much difficulty by the French in the preceding war, had been put in a defensible condition at the commencement of the present, under the superintendence of Pedro Navarro, although the repairs were not yet wholly completed. Ferdinand, on the approach of the enemy, had thrown a thousand picked men into the place, which was well victualled and provided for a siege; while a corps of six thousand was placed under his cousin, Don Frederic de Toledo, duke of Alva, with orders to take up a position in the neighborhood, where he might watch the movements of the enemy, and annoy him as far as possible by cutting off his supplies. [20] Ferdinand, in the mean while, lost no time in enforcing levies throughout the kingdom, with which he might advance to the relief of the beleaguered fortress. While thus occupied, he received such accounts of the queen's indisposition as induced him to quit Aragon, where he then was, and hasten by rapid journeys to Castile. The accounts were probably exaggerated; he found no cause for immediate alarm on his arrival, and Isabella, ever ready to sacrifice her own inclinations to the public weal, persuaded him to return to the scene of operations, where his presence at this juncture was so important. Forgetting her illness, she made the most unwearied efforts for assembling troops without delay to support her husband. The grand constable of Castile was commissioned to raise levies through every part of the kingdom, and the principal nobility flocked in with their retainers from the farthest provinces, all eager to obey the call of their beloved mistress. Thus strengthened, Ferdinand, whose head-quarters were established at Girona, saw himself in less than a month in possession of a force, which, including the supplies of Aragon, amounted to ten or twelve thousand horse, and three or four times that number of foot. He no longer delayed his march, and about the middle of October put his army in motion, proposing to effect a junction with the duke of Alva, then lying before Perpignan, at a few leagues' distance from Salsas. [21] Isabella, who was at Segovia, was made acquainted by regular expresses with every movement of the army. She no sooner learned its departure from Gerona than she was filled with disquietude at the prospect of a speedy encounter with the enemy, whose defeat, whatever glory it might reflect on her own arms, could be purchased only at the expense of Christian blood. She wrote in earnest terms to her husband, requesting him not to drive his enemies to despair by closing up their retreat to their own land, but to leave vengeance to Him to whom alone it belonged. She passed her days, together with her whole household, in fasting and continual prayer, and, in the fervor of her pious zeal, personally visited the several religious houses of the city, distributing alms among their holy inmates, and imploring them humbly to supplicate the Almighty to avert the impending calamity. [22] The prayers of the devout queen and her court found favor with Heaven. [23] King Ferdinand reached Perpignan on the 19th of October, and on that same night the French marshal, finding himself unequal to the rencontre with the combined forces of Spain, broke up his camp, and, setting fire to his tents, began his retreat towards the frontier, having consumed nearly six weeks since first opening trenches. Ferdinand pressed close on his flying enemy, whose rear sustained some annoyance from the Spanish _ginetes_, in its passage through the defiles of the sierras. The retreat, however, was conducted in too good order to allow any material loss to be inflicted on the French, who succeeded at length in sheltering themselves under the cannon of Narbonne, up to which place they were pursued by their victorious foe. Several places on the frontier, as Leocate, Palme, Sigean, Roquefort, and others, were abandoned to the Spaniards, who pillaged them of whatever was worth carrying off; without any violence, however, to the persons of the inhabitants, whom, as a Christian population, if we are to believe Martyr, Ferdinand refused even to make prisoners. [24] The Spanish monarch made no attempt to retain these acquisitions; but, having dismantled some of the towns, which offered most resistance, returned loaded with the spoils of victory to his own dominions. "Had he been as good a general as he was a statesman," says a Spanish historian, "he might have penetrated to the centre of France." [25] Ferdinand, however, was too prudent to attempt conquests which could only be maintained, if maintained at all, at an infinite expense of blood and treasure. He had sufficiently vindicated his honor by meeting his foe so promptly, and driving him triumphantly over the border; and he preferred, like a cautious prince, not to risk all he had gained by attempting more, but to employ his present successes as a vantage-ground for entering on negotiation, in which at all times he placed more reliance than on the sword. In this, his good star still further favored him. The armada, equipped at so much cost by the French king at Marseilles, had no sooner put to sea, than it was assailed by furious tempests, and so far crippled, that it was obliged to return to port without even effecting a descent on the Spanish coast. These accumulated disasters so disheartened Louis the Twelfth, that he consented to enter into negotiations for a suspension of hostilities; and an armistice was finally arranged, through the mediation of his pensioner Frederic, ex-king of Naples, between the hostile monarchs. It extended only to their hereditary dominions; Italy and the circumjacent seas being still left open as a common arena, on which the rival parties might meet, and settle their respective titles by the sword. This truce, first concluded for five months, was subsequently prolonged to three years. It gave Ferdinand, what he most needed, leisure, and means to provide for the security of his Italian possessions, on which the dark storm of war was soon to burst with ten-fold fury. [26] The unfortunate Frederic, who had been drawn from his obscurity to take part in these negotiations, died in the following year. It is singular that the last act of his political life should have been to mediate a peace between the dominions of two monarchs, who had united to strip him of his own. The results of this campaign were as honorable to Spain, as they were disastrous and humiliating to Louis the Twelfth, who had seen his arms baffled on every point, and all his mighty apparatus of fleets and armies dissolve, as if by enchantment, in less time than it had been preparing. The immediate success of Spain may no doubt be ascribed in a considerable degree to the improved organization and thorough discipline introduced by the sovereigns into the national militia at the close of the Moorish war, without which it would have been scarcely possible to concentrate so promptly on a distant point such large masses of men, all well equipped and trained for active service. So soon was the nation called to feel the effect of these wise provisions. But the results of the campaign are, after all, less worthy of notice as indicating the resources of the country, than as evidence of a pervading patriotic feeling, which could alone make these resources available. Instead of the narrow local jealousies, which had so long estranged the people of the separate provinces, and more especially those of the rival states of Aragon and Castile, from one another, there had been gradually raised up a common national sentiment like that knitting together the constituent parts of one great commonwealth. At the first alarm of invasion on the frontier of Aragon, the whole extent of the sister kingdom, from the green, valleys of the Guadalquivir up to the rocky fastnesses of the Asturias, responded to the call, as to that of a common country, sending forth, as we have seen, its swarms of warriors, to repel the foe, and roll back the tide of war upon his own land. What a contrast did all this present to the cold and parsimonious hand with which the nation, thirty years before, dealt out its supplies to King John the Second, Ferdinand's father, when he was left to cope single-handed with the whole power of France, in this very quarter of Roussillon. Such was the consequence of the glorious _union_, which brought together the petty and hitherto discordant tribes of the Peninsula under the same rule; and, by creating common interests and an harmonious principle of action, was silently preparing them for constituting one great nation,--one and indivisible, as intended by nature. * * * * * Those who have not themselves had occasion to pursue historical inquiries will scarcely imagine on what loose grounds the greater part of the narrative is to be built. With the exception of a few leading outlines, there is such a mass of inconsistency and contradiction in the details, even of contemporaries, that it seems almost as hopeless to seize the true aspect of any particular age as it would be to transfer to the canvas a faithful likeness of an individual from a description simply of his prominent features. Much of the difficulty might seem to be removed, now that we are on the luminous and beaten track of Italian history; but, in fact, the vision is rather dazzled than assisted by the numerous cross lights thrown over the path, and the infinitely various points of view from which every object is contemplated. Besides the local and party prejudices which we had to encounter in the contemporary Spanish historians, we have now a host of national prejudices, not less unfavorable to truth; while the remoteness of the scene of action necessarily begets a thousand additional inaccuracies in the gossipping and credulous chroniclers of France and Spain. The mode in which public negotiations were conducted at this period, interposes still further embarrassments in our search after truth. They were regarded as the personal concerns of the sovereign, in which the nation at large had no right to interfere. They were settled, like the rest of his private affairs, under his own eye, without the participation of any other branch of the government. They were shrouded, therefore, under an impenetrable secrecy, which permitted such results only to emerge into light as suited the monarch. Even these results cannot be relied on as furnishing the true key to the intentions of the parties. The science of the cabinet, as then practised, authorized such a system of artifice and shameless duplicity, as greatly impaired the credit of those official documents which we are accustomed to regard as the surest foundations of history. The only records which we can receive with full confidence are the private correspondence of contemporaries, which, from its very nature, is exempt from most of the restraints and affectations incident more or less to every work destined for the public eye. Such communications, indeed, come like the voice of departed years; and when, as in Martyr's case, they proceed from one whose acuteness is combined with singular opportunities for observation, they are of inestimable value. Instead of exposing to us only the results, they lay open the interior workings of the machinery, and we enter into all the shifting doubts, passions, and purposes which agitate the minds of the actors. Unfortunately, the chain of correspondence here, as in similar cases, when not originally designed for historical uses, necessarily suffers from occasional breaks and interruptions. The scattered gleams which are thrown over the most prominent points, however, shed so strong a light, as materially to aid us in groping our way through the darker and more perplexed passages of the story. The obscurity which hangs over the period has not been dispelled by those modern writers, who, like Varillas, in his well-known work, _Politique de Ferdinand le Catholique_, affect to treat the subject philosophically, paying less attention to facts than to their causes and consequences. These ingenious persons, seldom willing to take things as they find them, seem to think that truth is only to be reached by delving deep below the surface. In this search after more profound causes of action, they reject whatever is natural and obvious. They are inexhaustible in conjectures and fine-spun conclusions, inferring quite as much from what is not said or done, as from what is. In short, they put the reader as completely in possession of their hero's thoughts on all occasions, as any professed romance-writer would venture to do. All this may be very agreeable, and, to persons of easy faith, very satisfactory; but it is not history and may well remind us of the astonishment somewhere expressed by Cardinal de Retz at the assurance of those who, at a distance from the scene of action, pretended to lay open all the secret springs of policy, of which he himself, though a principal party, was ignorant. No prince, on the whole, has suffered more from these unwarrantable liberties than Ferdinand the Catholic. His reputation for shrewd policy suggests a ready key to whatever is mysterious and otherwise inexplicable in his government; while it puts writers like Gaillard and Varillas constantly on the scent after the most secret and subtile sources of action, as if there were always something more to be detected than readily meets the eye. Instead of judging him by the general rules of human conduct, everything is referred to deep-laid stratagem; no allowance is made for the ordinary disturbing forces, the passions and casualties of life; every action proceeds with the same wary calculation that regulates the moves upon a chessboard; and thus a character of consummate artifice is built up, not only unsupported by historical evidence, but in manifest contradiction to the principles of our nature. The part of our subject embraced in the present chapter has long been debatable ground between the French and Spanish historians; and the obscurity which hangs over it has furnished an ample range for speculation to the class of writers above alluded to, which they have not failed to improve. FOOTNOTES [1] St. Gelais seems willing to accept Philip's statement, and to consider the whole affair of the negotiation as "one of Ferdinand's old tricks," "l'ancienne cantele de celuy qui en sçavoit bien faire d'autres." Hist. de Louys XII., p. 172. [2] Idem, ubi supra.--Garnier, Hist. de France, tom. v. p. 410.--Gaillard, Rivalité, tom. iv. pp. 238, 239.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 23.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 15.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. p. 233. [3] Garnier, Hist. de France, tom. v. p. 388.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 13, sec. 3.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. p. 300, ed. 1645.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 9. It is amusing to see with what industry certain French writers, as Gaillard and Varillas, are perpetually contrasting the _bonne foi_ of Louis XII. with the _méchanceté_ of Ferdinand, whose secret intentions, even, are quoted in evidence of his hypocrisy, while the most objectionable acts of his rival seem to be abundantly compensated by some fine sentiment like that in the text. [4] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 5, cap. 10.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 13, sec. 2.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. pp. 690, 691.--et al. [5] Seyssel, Hist. de Louys XII., p. 61.--St. Gelais, Hist. de Louys XII., p. 171.--Gaillard, Rivalité, tom. iv. p. 239.--Garnier, Hist. de France, tom. v. p. 387.--D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., part. 2, chap. 32. [6] Varillas regards Philip's mission to France as a _coup de maître_ on the part of Ferdinand, who thereby rid himself of a dangerous rival at home, likely to contest his succession to Castile on Isabella's death, while he employed that rival in outwitting Louis XII. by a treaty which he meant to disavow. (Politique de Ferdinand, liv. 1, pp. 146-150.) The first of these imputations is sufficiently disproved by the fact that Philip quitted Spain in opposition to the pressing remonstrances of the king, queen, and cortes, and to the general disgust of the whole nation, as is repeatedly stated by Gomez, Martyr, and other contemporaries. The second will be difficult to refute, and still harder to prove, as it rests on a man's secret intentions, known only to himself. Such are the flimsy cobwebs of which this political dreamer's theories are made. Truly _châteaux en Espagne_. [7] Martyr, whose copious correspondence furnishes the most valuable commentary, unquestionably, on the proceedings of this reign, is provokingly reserved in regard to this interesting matter. He contents himself with remarking in one of his letters, that "the Spaniards derided Philip's negotiations as of no consequence, and indeed altogether preposterous, considering the attitude assumed by the nation at that very time for maintaining its claims by the sword;" and he dismisses the subject with a reflection, that seems to rest the merits of the case more on might than right. "Exitus, qui judex est rerum aeternus, loquatur. Nostri regno potiuntur majori ex parte." (Opus Epist., epist. 257.) This reserve of Martyr might be construed unfavorably for Ferdinand, were it not for the freedom with which he usually criticizes whatever appears really objectionable to him in the measures of the government. [8] Grotius, De Jure Belli et Pacis, lib. 2, cap. 11, sec. 12; lib. 3, cap. 22, sec. 4.--Gentilis, De Jure Belli, lib. 3, cap. 14, apud Bynkershoek, Quaest. Juris Publici, lib. 2, cap. 7. [9] Bynkershoek, Quaest. Juris Publici, lib. 2, cap. 7.--Mably, Droit Publique, chap. 1.--Vattel, Droit des Gens, liv. 2, chap. 12.--Martens, Law of Nations, trans., book 2, chap. 1. Bynkershoek, the earliest of these writers, has discussed the question with an amplitude, perspicuity, and fairness unsurpassed by any who have followed him. [10] Philip is known in history by the title of "the Handsome," implying that he was, at least, quite as remarkable for his personal qualities, as his mental. [11] Opus Epist., epist. 253.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. pp. 235, 238.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 44. [12] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1503.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 45, 46. He was born at Alcalá de Henares. Ximenes availed himself of this circumstance to obtain from Isabella a permanent exemption from taxes for his favorite city, which his princely patronage was fast raising up to contest the palm of literary precedence with Salamanca, the ancient "Athens of Spain." The citizens of the place long preserved, and still preserve, for aught I know, the cradle of the royal infant, in token of their gratitude. Robles, Vida de Ximenez, p. 127. [13] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 268.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 5, cap. 56.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 46. [14] "Espejo de bondad," _mirror of virtue,_ as Oviedo styles this cavalier. He was always much regarded by the sovereigns, and the lucrative post of _contador mayor_, which he filled for many years, enabled him to acquire an immense estate, 50,000 ducats a year, without imputation on his honesty. Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 2, dial. 2. [15] The name of this cavalier, as well as that of his cousin, Alonso de Cardenas, grand master of St. James, have become familiar to us in the Granadine war. If Don Gutierre made a less brilliant figure than the latter, he acquired, by means of his intimacy with the sovereigns, and his personal qualities, as great weight in the royal councils as any subject in the kingdom. "Nothing of any importance," says Oviedo, "was done without his advice." He was raised to the important posts of comendador de Leon, and contador mayor, which last, in the words of the same author, "made its possessor a second king over the public treasury." He left large estates, and more than five thousand vassals. His eldest son was created duke of Maqueda. Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 2, dial. 1.--Col. de Céd., tom. v. no. 182. [16] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 255.--Gomez, de Rebus Gestis, fol. 45.--For some further account of these individuals see Part I, Chapter 14, note 10. Martyr thus panegyrizes the queen's fortitude under her accumulated sorrows. "Sentit, licet constantissima sit, et supra foeminam prudens, has alapas fortunae saevientis regina, ita concussa fluctibus undique, veluti vasta rupes, maris in medio." Opus Epist., loc. cit. [17] Garnier, Hist. de France, tom. v. pp. 405, 406.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. pp. 235-238.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. pp. 300, 301.--Mémoires de la Trémoille, chap. 19, apud Petitot, Collection des Mémoires, tom. xiv. [18] Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. pp. 110-112. The king of Navarre promised to oppose the passage of the French, if attempted, through his dominions; and, in order to obviate any distrust on the part of Ferdinand, sent his daughter Margaret to reside at the court of Castile, as a pledge for his fidelity. Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. p. 235. [19] Younger brother of Robert, third duke of Bouillon. (D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., part. 2, pp. 103, 186.) The reader will not confound him with his namesake, the famous "boar of Ardennes,"--more familiar to us now in the pages of romance than history,--who perished ignominiously some twenty years before this period, in 1484, not in fight, but by the hands of the common executioner at Utrecht. Duclos, Hist. de Louis XI., tom. ii. p. 379. [20] Gonzalo Ayora, Capitan de la Guardia Real, Cartas al Rey, Don Fernando, (Madrid, 1794,) carta 9.--Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. pp. 112, 113.--Garnier, Hist. de France, tom. v. p. 407.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 51.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom, ii, rey 30, cap. 13, sec. 11. [21] Gonzalo Ayora, Cartas, cap. 9.--Zurita, Anales, ubi supra.-- Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 197, 198.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1503.--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 8.--Col. de Cédulas, tom. i. no. 97. The most authentic account of the siege of Salsas is to be found in the correspondence of Gonzalo Ayora, dated in the Spanish camp. This individual, equally eminent in letters and arms, filled the dissimilar posts of captain of the royal guard and historiographer of the crown. He served in the army at this time, and was present at all its operations. Pref. ad Cartas, de Ayora; and Nic. Antonio, Biliotheca Nova, tom. i. p. 551. [22] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist, epist. 263. The loyal captain, Ayora, shows little of this Christian vein. He concludes one of his letters with praying, no doubt most sincerely, "that the Almighty would be pleased to infuse less benevolence into the hearts of the sovereigns, and incite them to chastise and humble the proud French, and strip them of their ill-gotten possessions, which, however repugnant to their own godly inclinations, would tend greatly to replenish their coffers, as well as those of their, faithful and loving subjects." See this graceless petition in his Cartas, carta 9, p. 66. [23] "Exaudivit igitur sancte reginee religiosorumque ac virginum preces summus Altitonans." (Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 263.) The learned Theban borrows an epithet more familiar to Greek and Roman than to Christian ears. [24] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 5, cap. 54.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 13, sec. 11.-Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 264.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1503.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 198.--Garnier, Hist. de France, tom. v. pp. 408, 409.--Gonzalo Ayora, Cartas, carta 11.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., dial. de Deza. Peter Martyr seems to have shared none of Isabella's scruples in regard to bringing the enemy to battle. On the contrary, he indulges in a most querulous strain of sarcasm against the Catholic king for his remissness in this particular. "Quar elucescente die moniti nostri de Gallorum discessu ad eos, at sero, concurrerunt. Rex Perpiniani agebat, ad millia passuum sex non brevia, uti nosti. Propterea sero id actum, venit concitato cursu, at sero. Ad hostes itur, at sero. Cernunt hostium acies, at sero, at a longe. Distabant jam milliaria circiter duo. Ergo sero Phryges sapuerunt. Cujus haec culpa, tu scrutator aliunde; mea est, si nescis. Maximam dedit ea dies, quae est, si nescis, calendarum Novembrium sexta, Hispanis ignominiam, et aliquando jacturam illis pariet collachrymandam." Letter to the cardinal of Santa Cruz, epist. 262. [25] Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. p. 113. Oviedo, who was present in this campaign, seems to have been of the same opinion. At least he says, "If the king had pursued vigorously, not a Frenchman would have lived to carry back the tidings of defeat to his own land." If we are to believe him, Ferdinand desisted from the pursuit at the earnest entreaty of Bishop Deza, his confessor. Quincuagenas, MS. [26] Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 55.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 13, sec. 11.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 264.--Lanuza, Historias, tom. i. cap. 17.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 16.--Machiavelli, Legazione Prima a Roma, let. 27. Mons. Varillas notices as the weak side of Louis XII., "une démangeaison de faire la paix à contre temps, dont il fut travaillé durant toute sa vie." (Politique de Ferdinand, liv. 1, p. 148.) A statesman shrewder than Varillas, De Retz, furnishes, perhaps, the best key to this policy, in the remark, "Les gens foibles ne plient jamais quand ils le doivent." CHAPTER XIV. ITALIAN WARS.--CONDITION OF ITALY.--FRENCH AND SPANISH ARMIES ON THE GARIGLIANO. 1503. Melancholy State of Italy.--Great Preparations of Louis.--Gonsalvo Repulsed before Gaeta.--Armies on the Garigliano.--Bloody Passage of the Bridge.--Anxious Expectation of Italy.--Critical Situation of the Spaniards.--Gonsalvo's Resolution.--Heroism of Paredes and Bayard. We must now turn our eyes towards Italy, where the sounds of war, which had lately died away, were again heard in wilder dissonance than ever. Our attention, hitherto, has been too exclusively directed to mere military manoeuvres to allow us to dwell much on the condition of this unhappy land. The dreary progress of our story, over fields of blood and battle, might naturally dispose the imagination to lay the scene of action in some rude and savage age; an age, at best, of feudal heroism, when the energies of the soul could be roused only by the fierce din of war. Far otherwise, however; the tents of the hostile armies were now pitched in the bosom of the most lovely and cultivated regions on the globe; inhabited by a people who had carried the various arts of policy and social life to a degree of excellence elsewhere unknown; whose natural resources had been augmented by all the appliances of ingenuity and industry; whose cities were crowded with magnificent and costly works of public utility; into whose ports every wind that blew wafted the rich freights of distant climes; whose thousand hills were covered to their very tops with the golden labors of the husbandman; and whose intellectual development showed itself, not only in a liberal scholarship far outstripping that of their contemporaries, but in works of imagination, and of elegant art more particularly, which rivalled the best days of antiquity. The period before us, indeed, the commencement of the sixteenth century, was that of their meridian splendor, when Italian genius, breaking through the cloud which had temporarily obscured its early dawn, shone out in full effulgence; for we are now touching on the age of Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Michael Angelo,--the golden age of Leo the Tenth. It is impossible, even at this distance of time, to contemplate without feelings of sadness the fate of such a country, thus suddenly converted into an arena for the bloody exhibitions of the gladiators of Europe; to behold her trodden under foot by the very nations on whom she had freely poured the light of civilization; to see the fierce soldiery of Europe, from the Danube to the Tagus, sweeping like an army of locusts over her fields, defiling her pleasant places, and raising the shout of battle, or of brutal triumph under the shadow of those monuments of genius, which have been the delight and despair of succeeding ages. It was the old story of the Goths and Vandals acted over again. Those more refined arts of the cabinet, on which the Italians were accustomed to rely, much more than on the sword, in their disputes with one another, were of no avail against these rude invaders, whose strong arm easily broke through the subtile webs of policy which entangled the movements of less formidable adversaries. It was the triumph of brute force over civilization,--one of the most humiliating lessons by which Providence has seen fit to rebuke the pride of human intellect. [1] The fate of Italy inculcates a most important lesson. With all this outward show of prosperity, her political institutions had gradually lost the vital principle, which could alone give them stability or real value. The forms of freedom, indeed, in most instances, had sunk under the usurpation of some aspiring chief. Everywhere patriotism was lost in the most intense selfishness. Moral principle was at as low an ebb in private, as in public life. The hands, which shed their liberal patronage over genius and learning, were too often red with blood. The courtly precincts, which seemed the favorite haunt of the Muses, were too often the Epicurean sty of brutish sensuality; while the head of the church itself, whose station, exalted over that of every worldly potentate, should have raised him at least above their grosser vices, was sunk in the foulest corruptions that debase poor human nature. Was it surprising, then, that the tree, thus cankered at heart, with all the goodly show of blossoms on its branches, should have fallen before the blast, which now descended in such pitiless fury from the mountains? Had there been an invigorating national feeling, any common principle of coalition among the Italian states; had they, in short, been true to themselves, they possessed abundant resources in their wealth, talent, and superior science, to have shielded their soil from violation. Unfortunately, while the other European states had been augmenting their strength incalculably by the consolidation of their scattered fragments into one whole, those of Italy, in the absence of some great central point round which to rally, had grown more and more confirmed in their original disunion. Thus, without concert in action, and destitute of the vivifying impulse of patriotic sentiment, they were delivered up to be the spoil and mockery of nations, whom in their proud language they still despised as barbarians; an impressive example of the impotence of human genius, and of the instability of human institutions, however excellent in themselves, when unsustained by public and private virtue. [2] The great powers, who had now entered the lists, created entirely new interests in Italy, which broke up the old political combinations. The conquest of Milan enabled France to assume a decided control over the affairs of the country. Her recent reverses in Naples, however, had greatly loosened this authority; although Florence and other neighboring states, which lay under her colossal shadow, still remained true to her. Venice, with her usual crafty policy, kept aloof, maintaining a position of neutrality between the belligerents, each of whom made the most pressing efforts to secure so formidable an 'ally. She had, however, long since entertained a deep distrust of her French neighbor; and, although she would enter into no public engagements, she gave the Spanish minister every assurance of her friendly disposition towards his government. [3] She intimated this still more unequivocally, by the supplies she had allowed her citizens to carry into Barleta during the late campaign, and by other indirect aid of a similar nature during the present; for all which she was one day to be called to a heavy reckoning by her enemies. The disposition of the papal court towards the French monarch was still less favorable; and it took no pains to conceal this after his reverses in Naples. Soon after the defeat of Cerignola, it entered into correspondence with Gonsalvo de Cordova; and, although Alexander the Sixth refused to break openly with France, and sign a treaty with the Spanish sovereigns, he pledged himself to do so, on the reduction of Gaeta. In the mean time, he freely allowed the Great Captain to raise such levies as he could in Rome, before the very eyes of the French ambassador. So little had the immense concessions of Louis, including those of principle and honor, availed to secure the fidelity of this treacherous ally. [4] With the emperor Maximilian, notwithstanding repeated treaties, he was on scarcely better terms. That prince was connected with Spain by the matrimonial alliances of his family, and no less averse to France from personal feeling, which, with the majority of minds, operates more powerfully than motives of state policy. He had, moreover, always regarded the occupation of Milan by the latter as an infringement, in some measure, of his imperial rights. The Spanish government, availing itself of these feelings, endeavored through its minister, Don Juan Manuel, to stimulate Maximilian to the invasion of Lombardy. As the emperor, however, demanded, as usual, a liberal subsidy for carrying on the war, King Ferdinand, who was seldom incommoded by a superfluity of funds, preferred reserving them for his own enterprises, to hazarding them on the Quixotic schemes of his ally. But, although the negotiations were attended with no result, the amicable dispositions of the Austrian government were evinced by the permission given to its subjects to serve under the banners of Gonsalvo, where indeed, as we have already seen, they formed some of his best troops. [5] But while Louis the Twelfth drew so little assistance from abroad, the heartiness with which the whole French people entered into his feelings at this crisis, made him nearly independent of it, and, in an incredibly short space of time, placed him in a condition for resuming operations on a far more formidable scale than before. The preceding failures in Italy he attributed in a great degree to an overweening confidence in the superiority of his own troops, and his neglect to support them with the necessary reinforcements and supplies. He now provided against this by remitting large sums to Rome, and establishing ample magazines of grain and military stores there, under the direction of commissaries for the maintenance of the army. He equipped without loss of time a large armament at Genoa, under the marquis of Saluzzo, for the relief of Gaeta, still blockaded by the Spaniards. He obtained a small supply of men from his Italian allies, and subsidized a corps of eight thousand Swiss, the strength of his infantry; while the remainder of his army, comprehending a fine body of cavalry, and the most complete train of artillery, probably, in Europe, was drawn from his own dominions. Volunteers of the highest rank pressed forward to serve in an expedition, to which they confidently looked for the vindication of the national honor. The command was intrusted to the maréchal de la Trémouille, esteemed the best general in France; and the whole amount of force, exclusive of that employed permanently in the fleet, is variously computed from twenty to thirty thousand men. [6] In the month of July, the army was on its march across the broad plains of Lombardy, but, on reaching Parma, the appointed place of rendezvous for the Swiss and Italian mercenaries, was brought to a halt by tidings of an unlooked-for event, the death of Pope Alexander the Sixth. He expired on the 18th of August, 1503, at the age of seventy-two, the victim, there is very little doubt, of poison he had prepared for others; thus closing an infamous life by a death equally infamous. He was a man of undoubted talent, and uncommon energy of character. But his powers were perverted to the worst purposes, and his gross vices were unredeemed, if we are to credit the report of his most respectable contemporaries, by a single virtue. In him the papacy reached its lowest degradation. His pontificate, however, was not without its use; since that Providence, which still educes good from evil, made the scandal, which it occasioned to the Christian world, a principal spring of the glorious Reformation. [7] The death of this pontiff occasioned no particular disquietude at the Spanish court, where his immoral life had been viewed with undisguised reprobation, and made the subject of more than one pressing remonstrance, as we have already seen. His public course had been as little to its satisfaction; since, although a Spaniard by birth, being a native of Valencia, he had placed himself almost wholly at the disposal of Louis the Twelfth, in return for the countenance afforded by that monarch to the iniquitous schemes of his son, Caesar Borgia. The pope's death was attended with important consequences on the movements of the French. Louis's favorite minister, Cardinal D'Amboise, had long looked to this event as opening to him the succession to the tiara. He now hastened to Italy, therefore, with his master's approbation, proposing to enforce his pretensions by the presence of the French army, placed, as it would seem, with this view at his disposal. The army, accordingly, was ordered to advance towards Rome, and halt within a few miles of its gates. The conclave of cardinals, then convened to supply the vacancy in the pontificate, were filled with indignation at this attempt to overawe their election; and the citizens beheld with anxiety the encampment of this formidable force under their walls, anticipating some counteracting movement on the part of the Great Captain, which might involve their capital, already in a state of anarchy, in all the horrors of war. Gonsalvo, indeed, had sent forward a detachment of between two and three thousand men, under Mendoza and Fabrizio Colonna, who posted themselves in the neighborhood of the city, where they could observe the movements of the enemy. [8] At length Cardinal D'Amboise, yielding to public feeling, and the representations of pretended friends, consented to the removal of the French forces from the neighborhood, and trusted for success to his personal influence. He over-estimated its weight. It is foreign to our purpose to detail the proceedings of the reverend body, thus convened to supply the chair of St. Peter. They are displayed at full length by the Italian writers, and must be allowed to form a most edifying chapter in ecclesiastical history. [9] It is enough to state, that, on the departure of the French, the suffrages of the conclave fell on an Italian, who assumed the name of Pius the Third, and who justified the policy of the choice by dying in less time than his best friends had anticipated;-- within a month after his elevation. [10] The new vacancy was at once supplied by the election of Julius the Second, the belligerent pontiff who made his tiara a helmet, and his crosier a sword. It is remarkable, that, while his fierce, inexorable temper left him with scarcely a personal friend, he came to the throne by the united suffrages of each of the rival factions of France, Spain, and, above all, Venice, whose ruin in return he made the great business of his restless pontificate. [11] No sooner had the game, into which Cardinal D'Amboise had entered with such prospects of success, been snatched from his grasp by the superior address of his Italian rivals, and the election of Pius the Third been publicly announced, than the French army was permitted to resume its march on Naples, after the loss,--an irreparable loss,--of more than a month. A still greater misfortune had befallen it, in the mean time, in the illness of Trémouille, its chief; which compelled him to resign the command into the hands of the marquis of Mantua, an Italian nobleman, who held the second station in the army. He was a man of some military experience, having fought in the Venetian service, and led the allied forces, with doubtful credit indeed, against Charles the Eighth at the battle of Fornovo. His elevation was more acceptable to his own countrymen than to the French; and in truth, however competent to ordinary exigencies, he was altogether unequal to the present, in, which he was compelled to measure his genius with that of the greatest captain of the age. [12] The Spanish commander, in the mean while, was detained before the strong post of Gaeta, into which Ives d'Allègre had thrown himself, as already noticed, with the fugitives from the field of Cerignola, where he had been subsequently reinforced by four thousand additional troops under the marquis of Saluzzo. From these circumstances, as well as the great strength of the place, Gonsalvo experienced an opposition, to which, of late, he had been wholly unaccustomed. His exposed situation in the plains, under the guns of the city, occasioned the loss of many of his best men, and, among others, that of his friend Don Hugo de Cardona, one of the late victors at Seminara, who was shot down at his side, while conversing with him. At length, after a desperate but ineffectual attempt to extricate himself from his perilous position by forcing the neighboring eminence of Mount Orlando, he was compelled to retire to a greater distance, and draw off his army to the adjacent village of Castellone, which may call up more agreeable associations in the reader's mind, as the site of the Villa Formiana of Cicero. [13] At this place he was still occupied with the blockade of Gaeta, when he received intelligence that the French had crossed the Tiber, and were in full march against him. [14] While Gonsalvo lay before Gaeta, he had been intent on collecting such reinforcements as he could from every quarter. The Neapolitan division under Navarro had already joined him, as well as the victorious legions of Andrada from Calabria. His strength was further augmented by the arrival of between two and three thousand troops, Spanish, German, and Italian, which the Castilian minister, Francisco de Roxas, had levied in Rome; and he was in daily hopes of a more important accession from the same quarter, through the good offices of the Venetian ambassador. Lastly, he had obtained some additional recruits, and a remittance of a considerable sum of money, in a fleet of Catalan ships lately arrived from Spain. With all this, however, a heavy amount of arrears remained due to his troops. In point of numbers he was still far inferior to the enemy; no computation swelling them higher than three thousand horse, two of them light cavalry, and nine thousand foot. The strength of his army lay in his Spanish infantry, on whose thorough discipline, steady nerve, and strong attachment to his person he felt he might confidently rely. In cavalry, and still more in artillery, he was far below the French, which, together with his great numerical inferiority, made it impossible for him to keep the open country. His only resource was to get possession of some pass or strong position, which lay in their route, where he might detain them, till the arrival of further reinforcements should enable him to face them on more equal terms. The deep stream of the Garigliano presented such a line of defence as he wanted. [15] On the 6th of October, therefore, the Great Captain broke up his camp at Castellone, and, abandoning the whole region north of the Garigliano to the enemy, struck into the interior of the country, and took post at San Germano, a strong place on the other side of the river, covered by the two fortresses of Monte Casino [16] and Rocca Secca. Into this last he threw a body of determined men under Villalba, and waited calmly the approach of the enemy. It was not long before the columns of the latter were descried in full march on Ponte Corvo, at a few miles' distance only on the opposite side of the Garigliano. After a brief halt there, they traversed the bridge before that place and advanced confidently forward in the expectation of encountering little resistance from a foe so much their inferior. In this they were mistaken; the garrison of Rocca Secca, against which they directed their arms, handled them so roughly, that, after in vain endeavoring to carry the place in two desperate assaults, the marquis of Mantua resolved to abandon the attempt altogether, and, recrossing the river, to seek a more practicable point for his purpose lower down. [17] Keeping along the right bank, therefore, to the southeast of the mountains of Fondi, he descended nearly to the mouth of the Garigliano, the site, as commonly supposed, of the ancient Minturnae. [18] The place was covered by a fortress called the Tower of the Garigliano, occupied by a small Spanish garrison, who made some resistance, but surrendered on being permitted to march out with the honors of war. On rejoining their countrymen under Gonsalvo, the latter were so much incensed that the garrison should have yielded on any terms, instead of dying on their posts, that, falling on them with their pikes, they massacred them all to a man. Gonsalvo did not think proper to punish this outrage, which, however shocking to his own feelings, indicated a desperate tone of resolution, which he felt he should have occasion to tax to the utmost in the present exigency. [19] The ground now occupied by the armies was low and swampy, a character which it possessed in ancient times; the marshes on the southern side being supposed to be the same in which Marius concealed himself from his enemies during his proscription. [20] Its natural humidity was greatly increased, at this time, by the excessive rains, which began earlier and with much more violence than usual. The French position was neither so low nor so wet as that of the Spaniards. It had the advantage, moreover, of being supported by a well-peopled and friendly country in the rear, where lay the large towns of Fondi, Itri, and Gaeta; while their fleet, under the admiral Prejan, which rode at anchor in the mouth of the Garigliano, might be of essential service in the passage of the river. In order to effect this, the marquis of Mantua prepared to throw a bridge across, at a point not far from Trajetto. He succeeded in it, notwithstanding the swollen and troubled condition of the waters, [20] in a few days, under cover of the artillery, which he had planted on the bank of the river, and which from its greater elevation entirely commanded the opposite shore. The bridge was constructed of boats belonging to the fleet, strongly secured together and covered with planks. The work being completed, on the 6th of November the army advanced upon the bridge, supported by such a lively cannonade from the batteries along the shore, as made all resistance on the part of the Spaniards ineffectual. The impetuosity with which the French rushed forward was such as to drive back the advanced guard of their enemy, which, giving way in disorder, retreated on the main body. Before the confusion could extend further, Gonsalvo, mounted _á la gineta_, in the manner of the light cavalry, rode through the broken ranks, and, rallying the fugitives, quickly brought them to order. Navarro and Andrada, at the same time, led up the Spanish infantry, and the whole column charging furiously against the French, compelled them to falter and at length to fall back on the bridge. The struggle now became desperate, officers and soldiers, horse and foot, mingling together, and fighting hand to hand, with all the ferocity kindled by close personal combat. Some were trodden under the feet of the cavalry, many more were forced from the bridge, and the waters of the Garigliano were covered with men and horses, borne down by the current, and struggling in vain to gain the shore. It was a contest of mere bodily strength and courage, in which skill and superior tactics were of little avail. Among those who most distinguished themselves, the name of the noble Italian, Fabrizio Colonna, is particularly mentioned. An heroic action is recorded also of a person of inferior rank, a Spanish _alferez_, or standard-bearer, named Illescas. The right hand of this man was shot away by a cannon-ball. As a comrade was raising up the fallen colors, the gallant ensign resolutely grasped them, exclaiming that "he had one hand still left." At the same time, muffling a scarf round the bleeding stump, he took his place in the ranks as before. This brave deed did not go unrewarded, and a liberal pension was settled on him, at Gonsalvo's instance. During the heat of the _mêlée_, the guns on the French shore had been entirely silent, since they could not be worked without doing as much mischief to their own men as to the Spaniards, with whom they were closely mingled. But, as the French gradually recoiled before their impetuous adversaries, fresh bodies of the latter rushing forward to support their advance necessarily exposed a considerable length of column to the range of the French guns, which opened a galling fire on the further extremity of the bridge. The Spaniards, notwithstanding "they threw themselves into the face of the cannon," as the marquis of Mantua exclaimed, "with as much unconcern as if their bodies had been made of air instead of flesh and blood," found themselves so much distressed by this terrible fire, that they were compelled to fall back; and the van, thus left without support, at length retreated in turn, abandoning the bridge to the enemy. [21] This action was one of the severest which occurred in these wars. Don Hugo de Moncada, the veteran of many a fight by land and sea, told Paolo Giovio that "he had never felt himself in such imminent peril in any of his battles, as in this." [22] The French, notwithstanding they remained masters of the contested bridge, had met with a resistance which greatly discouraged them; and, instead of attempting to push their success further, retired that same evening to their quarters on the other side of the river. The tempestuous weather, which continued with unabated fury, had now broken up the roads, and converted the soil into a morass, nearly impracticable for the movements, of horse, and quite so for those of artillery, on which the French chiefly relied; while it interposed comparatively slight obstacles to the manoeuvres of infantry, which constituted the strength of the Spaniards. From a consideration of these circumstances, the French commander resolved not to resume active operations till a change of weather, by restoring the roads, should enable him to do so with advantage. Meanwhile he constructed a redoubt on the Spanish extremity of the bridge, and threw a body of troops into it, in order to command the pass whenever he should be disposed to use it. [23] While the hostile armies thus lay facing each other, the eyes of all Italy were turned to them, in anxious expectation of a battle which should finally decide the fate of Naples. Expresses were daily despatched from the French camp to Rome, whence the ministers of the different European powers transmitted the tidings to their respective governments. Machiavelli represented at that time the Florentine republic at the papal court, and his correspondence teems with as many floating rumors and speculations as a modern gazette. There were many French residents in the city, with whom the minister was personally acquainted. He frequently notices their opinions on the progress of the war, which they regarded with the most sanguine confidence, as sure to result in the triumph of their own arms, when once fairly brought into collision with the enemy. The calmer and more penetrating eye of the Florentine discerns symptoms in the condition of the two armies of quite a different tendency. [24] It seemed now obvious, that victory must declare for that party which could best endure the hardships and privations of its present situation. The local position of the Spaniards was far more unfavorable than that of the enemy. The Great Captain, soon after the affair of the bridge, had drawn off his forces to a rising ground about a mile from the river, which was crowned by the little hamlet of Cintura, and commanded the route to Naples. In front of his camp he sunk a deep trench, which, in the saturated soil, speedily filled with water; and he garnished it at each extremity with a strong redoubt. Thus securely intrenched, he resolved patiently to await the movements of the enemy. The situation of the army, in the mean time, was indeed deplorable. Those who occupied the lower level were up to their knees in mud and water; for the excessive rains, and the inundation of the Garigliano, had converted the whole country into a mere quagmire, or rather standing pool. The only way in which the men could secure themselves was by covering the earth as far as possible with boughs and bundles of twigs; and it was altogether uncertain how long even this expedient would serve against the encroaching element. Those on the higher grounds were scarcely in better plight. The driving storms of sleet and rain, which had continued for several weeks without intermission, found their way into every crevice of the flimsy tents and crazy hovels, thatched only with branches of trees, which afforded a temporary shelter to the troops. In addition to these evils, the soldiers were badly fed, from the difficulty of finding resources in the waste and depopulated regions in which they were quartered, [25] and badly paid, from the negligence, or perhaps poverty, of King Ferdinand, whose inadequate remittances to his general exposed him, among many other embarrassments, to the imminent hazard of disaffection among the soldiery, especially the foreign mercenaries, which nothing, indeed, but the most delicate and judicious conduct on his part could have averted. [26] In this difficult crisis, Gonsalvo de Cordova retained all his usual equanimity, and even the cheerfulness, so indispensable in a leader who would infuse heart into his followers. He entered freely into the distresses and personal feelings of his men, and, instead of assuming any exemption from fatigue or suffering on the score of his rank, took his turn in the humblest tour of duty with the meanest of them, mounting guard himself, it is said, on more than one occasion. Above all, he displayed that inflexible constancy, which enables the strong mind in the hour of darkness and peril to buoy up the sinking spirits around it. A remarkable instance of this fixedness of purpose occurred at this time. The forlorn condition of the army, and the indefinite prospect of its continuance, raised a natural apprehension in many of the officers, that, if it did not provoke some open act of mutiny, would in all probability break down the spirits and constitution of the soldiers. Several of them, therefore, among the rest Mendoza and the two Colonnas, waited on the commander-in-chief, and, after stating their fears without reserve, besought him to remove the camp to Capua, where the troops might find healthy and commodious quarters, at least until the severity of the season was mitigated; before which, they insisted, there was no reason to anticipate any movement on the part of the French. But Gonsalvo felt too deeply the importance of grappling with the enemy, before they should gain the open country, to be willing to trust to any such precarious contingency. Besides, he distrusted the effect of such a retrograde movement on the spirits of his own troops. He had decided on his course after the most mature deliberation; and, having patiently heard his officers to the end, replied in these few but memorable words; "It is indispensable to the public service to maintain our present position; and be assured, I would sooner march forward two steps, though it should bring me to my grave, than fall back one, to gain a hundred years." The decided tone of the reply relieved him from further importunity. [27] There is no act of Gonsalvo's life, which on the whole displays more strikingly the strength of his character. When thus witnessing his faithful followers drooping and dying around him, with the consciousness that a word could relieve them from all their distresses, he yet refrained from uttering it, in stern obedience to what he regarded as the call of duty; and this too on his own responsibility, in opposition to the remonstrances of those on whose judgment he most relied. Gonsalvo confided in the prudence, sobriety, and excellent constitution of the Spaniards, for resisting the bad effects of the climate. He relied too on their tried discipline, and their devotion to himself, for carrying them through any sacrifice he should demand of them. His experience at Barleta led him to anticipate results of a very opposite character with the French troops. The event justified his conclusions in both respects. The French, as already noticed, occupied higher and more healthy ground, on the other side of the Garigliano, than their rivals. They were fortunate enough also to find more effectual protection from the weather in the remains of a spacious amphitheatre, and some other edifices, which still covered the site of Minturnae. With all this, however, they suffered more severely from the inclement season than their robust adversaries. Numbers daily sickened and died. They were much straitened, moreover, from want of provisions, through the knavish peculations of the commissaries who had charge of the magazines in Rome. Thus situated, the fiery spirits of the French soldiery, eager for prompt and decisive action, and impatient of delay, gradually sunk under the protracted miseries of a war, where the elements were the principal enemy, and where they saw themselves melting away like slaves in a prison-ship, without even the chance of winning an honorable death on the field of battle. [28] The discontent occasioned by these circumstances was further swelled by the imperfect success, which had attended their efforts, when allowed to measure weapons with the enemy. At length the latent mass of disaffection found an object on which to vent itself, in the person of their commander-in-chief, the marquis of Mantua, never popular with the French soldiers. They now loudly taxed him with imbecility, accused him of a secret understanding with the enemy, and loaded him with the opprobrious epithets with which Trans-alpine insolence was accustomed to stigmatize the Italians. In all this, they were secretly supported by Ives d'Allègre, Sandricourt, and other French officers, who had always regarded with dissatisfaction the elevation of the Italian general; till at length the latter, finding that he had influence with neither officers nor soldiers, and unwilling to retain command where he had lost authority, availed himself of a temporary illness, under which he was laboring, to throw up his commission, and withdrew abruptly to his own estates. He was succeeded by the marquis of Saluzzo, an Italian, indeed, by birth, being a native of Piedmont, but who had long served under the French banners, where he had been intrusted by Louis the Twelfth with very important commands. He was not deficient in energy of character or military science. But it required powers of a higher order than his to bring the army under subordination, and renew its confidence under present circumstances. The Italians, disgusted with the treatment of their former chief, deserted in great numbers. The great body of the French chivalry, impatient of their present unhealthy position, dispersed among the adjacent cities of Fondi, Itri, and Gaeta, leaving the low country around the Tower of the Garigliano to the care of the Swiss and German infantry. Thus, while the whole Spanish army lay within a mile of the river, under the immediate eye of their commander, prepared for instant service, the French were scattered over a country more than ten miles in extent, where, without regard to military discipline, they sought to relieve the dreary monotony of a camp, by all the relaxations which such comfortable quarters could afford. [29] It must not be supposed that the repose of the two armies was never broken by the sounds of war. More than one rencontre, on the contrary, with various fortune, took place, and more than one display of personal prowess by the knights of the two nations, as formerly at the siege of Barleta. The Spaniards made two unsuccessful efforts to burn the enemy's bridge; but they succeeded, on the other hand, in carrying the strong fortress of Rocca Guglielma, garrisoned by the French. Among the feats of individual heroism, the Castilian writers expatiate most complacently on that of their favorite cavalier, Diego de Paredes, who descended alone on the bridge against a body of French knights, all armed in proof, with a desperate hardihood worthy of Don Quixote; and would most probably have shared the usual fate of that renowned personage on such occasions, had he not been rescued by a sally of his own countrymen. The French find a counterpart to this adventure in that of the preux chevalier Bayard, who, with his single arm, maintained the barriers of the bridge against two hundred Spaniards, for an hour or more. [30] Such feats, indeed, are more easily achieved with the pen than with the sword. It would be injustice, however, to the honest chronicler of the day to suppose that he did not himself fully "Believe the magic wonders that he sung." Every heart confessed the influence of a romantic age,--the dying age, indeed, of chivalry,--but when, with superior refinement, it had lost nothing of the enthusiasm and exaltation of its prime. A shadowy twilight of romance enveloped every object. Every day gave birth to such extravagances, not merely of sentiment, but of action, as made it difficult to discern the precise boundaries of fact and fiction. The chronicler might innocently encroach sometimes on the province of the poet, and the poet occasionally draw the theme of his visions from the pages of the chronicler. Such, in fact, was the case; and the romantic Muse of Italy, then coming forth in her glory, did little more than give a brighter flush of color to the chimeras of real life. The characters of living heroes, a Bayard, a Paredes, and a La Palice, readily supplied her with the elements of those ideal combinations, in which she has so gracefully embodied the perfections of chivalry. [31] FOOTNOTES [1] "O pria sì cara al ciel del mondo parte, Che l'acqua cigne, e 'l sasso orrido serra; O lieta sopra ogn' altra e dolce terra, Che 'l superbo Appennin segna e diparte; Che val omai se 'l buon popol di Marte Ti lasciò del mar donna e de la terra? Le genti a te gia serve, or ti fan guerra, E pongon man ne le tue treccie sparte. Lasso nè manea de' tuoi figli ancora Chi le più strane a te chiamando insieme La spada sua nel tuo bel corpo adopre. Or son queste simili a l' antich' opre? O pur così pietate e Dio a' onora? Ahi secol duro, ahi tralignato seme." Bembo, rime Son. 108. This exquisite little lyric, inferior to none other which had appeared on the same subject since the "Italia mia" of Petrarch, was composed by Bembo at the period of which we are treating. [2] The philosophic Machiavelli discerned the true causes of the calamities, in the corruptions of his country; which he has exposed, with more than his usual boldness and bitterness of sarcasm, in the seventh book of his "Arte della Guerra." [3] Lorenzo Suarez de la Vega filled the post of minister at the republic during the whole of the war. His long continuance in the office at so critical a period, under so vigilant a sovereign as Ferdinand, is sufficient warrant for his ability. Peter Martyr, while he admits his talents, makes some objections to his appointment, on the ground of his want of scholarship. "Nec placet quod hunc elegeritis hac tempestate. Maluissem namque virum, qui Latinum calleret, vel salterm intelligeret, linguam; hic tantum suam patriam vernaculam novit; prudentem esse alias, atque inter ignaros literarum satis esse gnarum, Rex ipse mihi testatus est. Cupissem tamen ego, quae dixi." (See the letter to the Catholic queen, Opus Epist., epist. 246.) The objections have weight undoubtedly, the Latin being the common medium of diplomatic intercourse at that time. Martyr, who on his return through Venice from his Egyptian mission took charge for the time of the interests of Spain, might probably have been prevailed on to assume the difficulties of a diplomatic station there himself. See also Part II. Chapter 11, note 7, of this History. [4] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 5, cap. 38, 48.--Bembo, Istoria Viniziana, tom. iii. lib. 6.--Daru, Hist. de Venise, tom. iii. p. 347.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. lib. 6, p. 311, ed. 1645.-- Buonaccorsi, Diario, pp. 77, 81. [5] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 5, cap. 55.--Coxe, History of the House of Austria, (London, 1807,) vol. i. chap. 23. [6] Buonaccorsi, Diario, p. 78.--St. Gelais, Hist. de Louys XII., pp. 173, 174.--Varillas, Hist. de Louis XII., tom. i. pp. 386, 387.--Mémoires de la Trémoille, chap. 19, apud Petitot, Collection des Mémoires, tom. xiv.-- Muratori, Annali d'Italia, tom. xiv. anno 1503.--Carta de Gonzalo, MS. Historians, as usual, differ widely in their estimates of the French numbers. Guicciardini, whose moderate computation of 20,000 men is usually followed, does not take the trouble to reconcile his sum total with the various estimates given by him in detail, which considerably exceed that amount. Istoria, pp. 308, 309, 312. [7] Buonaccorsi, Diario, p. 81.--Bembo, Istoria Viniziana, lib. 6. The little ceremony with which Alexander's remains were treated, while yet scarcely cold, is the best commentary on the general detestation in which he was held. "Lorsque Alexandre," says the pope's _maître des cérémonies_, "rendit le dernier soupir, il n'y avait dans sa chambre que l'évêque de Rieti, le dataire et quelques palefreniers. Cette chambre fut aussitôt pillée. La face du cadavre devint noire; la langue s'enfla au point qu'elle remplissait la bouche qui resta ouverte. La bière dans laquelle il fallait mettre le corps se trouva trop petite; on l'y enfonça à coups de poings. Les restes du pape insultés par ses domestiques furent portés dans l'église de St. Pierre, sans être accompagnés de prêtres ni de torches, et on les plaça en dedans de la grille du choeur pour les dérober aux outrages de la populace." Notice de Burchard, apud Brequigny, Notices et Extraits des Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque du Roi, (Paris, 1787-1818,) tom. i. p. 120. [8] Buonaccorsi, Diario, p. 82.--Machiavelli, Legazione Prima a Roma, Let. 1, 3, et al.--Bembo, Istoria Viniziana, tom. iii. lib. 6.--Ammirato, Istorie Fiorentine, tom. iii. lib. 28.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 47. [9] Guicciardini, in particular, has related them with a circumstantiality which could scarcely have been exceeded by one of the conclave itself. Istoria, lib. 6, pp. 316-318. [10] Bembo, Istoria Viniziana, lib. 6.--Ammirato, Istorie Fiorentine, tom. iii. lib. 28. The election of Pius was extremely grateful to Queen Isabella, who caused Te Deums and thanksgivings to be celebrated in the churches, for the appointment of "so worthy a pastor over the Christian fold." See Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 265. [11] Machiavelli, Legazione Prima a Roma, let. 6.--Bembo, Istoria Viniziana, lib. 7. [12] Garnier, Hist. de France, tom. v. pp. 435-438.--Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 6, p. 316.--Buonaccorsi, Diario, p. 83.--St. Gelais, Hist. de Louys XII., p. 173. [13] Cicero's country seat stood midway between Gaeta and Mola, the ancient Formiae, about two miles and a half from each. (Cluverius, Ital. Antiq., lib. 3, cap. 6.) The remains of his mansion and of his mausoleum may still be discerned, on the borders of the old Appian way, by the classical and credulous tourist. [14] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, fol. 258, 259.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 2, cap. 95.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 19.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 261. [15] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 5, cap. 38, 43, 44, 48, 57.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, fol. 258, 259.--Sismondi, Hist. des Français, tom. xv. p. 417.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 16.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. pp. 252-257.--Carta del Gran Capitan, MS. The Castilian writers do not state the sum total of the Spanish force, which is to be inferred only from the scattered estimates, careless and contradictory as usual, of the various detachments which joined it. [16] The Spaniards carried Monte Casino by storm, and with sacrilegious violence plundered the Benedictine monastery of all its costly plate. They were compelled, however, to respect the bones of the martyrs, and other saintly relics; a division of spoil probably not entirely satisfactory to its reverend inmates. Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, fol. 262. [17] Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 2, cap. 102.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 21.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. lib. 6, pp. 326, 327.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 267.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 188. [18] The remains of this city, which stood about four miles above the mouth of the Liris, are still to be seen on the right of the road. In ancient days it was of sufficient magnitude to cover both sides of the river. See Strabo, Geographia, lib. 5, p. 233, (Paris, 1629, with Casaubon's notes,) p. 110. [19] Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 2, cap. 107.--Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, fol. 263. [20] The marshes of Minturnae lay between the city and the mouth of the Liris. (Cluverius, Ital. Antiq., lib. 3, cap. 10, sec. 9.) The Spanish army encamped, says Guicciardini, "in a place called by Livy, from its vicinity to Sessa, _aquae Sinuessanae_, being perhaps the marshes in which Marius hid himself." (Istoria, lib. 6.) The historian makes two blunders in a breath. 1st. _Aquae Sinuessanae_, was a name derived not from Sessa, the ancient Suessa Aurunca, but from the adjacent Sinuessa, a town about ten miles southeast of Minturnae. (Comp. Livy, lib. 22, cap. 14, and Strabo, lib. 5, p. 233.) 2d. The name did not indicate marshes, but natural hot springs, particularly noted for their salubrity. "Salubritate harum aquarum," says Tacitus in allusion to them (Annales, lib. 12); and Pliny notices their medicinal properties more explicitly. Hist. Naturalis, lib. 31, cap. 2. [20] This does not accord with Horace's character of the Garigliano, the ancient Liris, as the "taciturnus amnis," (Carm., lib. i. 30,) and still less with that of Silius Italicus, "Liris ... qui fonte quieto Dissimulat cursum, et _nullo mutabilis imbre_ Perstringit tacitas gemmanti gurgite ripas." Puncia, lib. 4. Indeed, the stream exhibits at the present day the same soft and tranquil aspect celebrated by the Roman poets. Its natural character, however, was entirely changed at the period before us, in consequence of the unexampled heaviness and duration of the autumnal rains. [21] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 188.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 14.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 16. --Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 269.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, fol. 262-264.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 22.--Machiavelli, Legazione Prima a Roma, let. 11, Nov. 10.--let. 16, Nov. 13.--let. 17.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 2, cap. 106.--Garnier, Hist. de France, tom. v. pp. 440, 441. [22] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, fol. 264. [23] Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 6, pp. 327, 328.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, fol. 262.--Machiavelli, Legazione Prima a Roma, let. 29.-- Garnier, Hist. de France, tom. v. pp. 443-445. [24] Legazione Prima a Roma, let. 9, 10, 18. The French showed the same confidence from the beginning of hostilities. One of that nation having told Suarez, the Castilian minister at Venice, that the marshal de la Trémouille said, "He would give 20,000 ducats, if he could meet Gonsalvo de Cordova in the plains of Viterbo;" the Spaniard smartly replied, "Nemours would have given twice as much not to have met him at Cerignola." Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 36. [25] This barren tract of uninhabited country must have been of very limited extent; for it lay in the Campania Felix, in the neighborhood of the cultivated plains of Sessa, the Massicau mountain, and Falernian fields,--names, which call up associations, that must live while good poetry and good wine shall be held in honor. [26] Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 28, cap. 5.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. lib. 6, p. 328.--Machiavelli, Legazione Prima a Roma, let. 44.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 22.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 107, 108.--The Neapolitan conquests, it will be remembered, were undertaken exclusively for the crown of Aragon, the revenues of which were far more limited than those of Castile. [27] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 188.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 2, cap. 108.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap, 16.--Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 6, p. 328.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 58. [28] Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, fol. 265.--Garnier, Hist. de France, tom. v. p. 445.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 59.--Buonaccorsi, Diario, fol. 85.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 22.--Varillas, Hist. de Louis XII., tom. i. pp. 401, 402. [29] Garnier, Hist. de France, tom. v. pp. 440-443.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, fol. 264, 265.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. lib. 6, p. 329.-- Machiavelli, Legazione Prima a Roma, let. 44.--St. Gelais, Hist. de Louys XII., pp. 173, 174. [30] Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 2, cap. 106.--Mémoires de Bayard, chap. 25, apud Petitot, Collection des Mémoires, tom. xv.--Varillas, Hist. de Louis XII., tom. i. p. 417.--Quintana, Españoles Célebres, tom. i. pp. 288-290.--Machiavelli, Legazione Prima a Roma, let. 39, 44. [31] Compare the prose romances of D'Auton, of the "loyal serviteur" of Bayard, and the no less loyal biographer of the Great Captain, with the poetic ones of Ariosto, Berni, and the like. "Magnanima menzogna! or quando è il vero Si bello, che si possa a te preporre?" CHAPTER XV. ITALIAN WARS.--ROUT OF THE GARIGLIANO.--TREATY WITH FRANCE.--GONSALVO'S MILITARY CONDUCT. 1503, 1504. Gonsalvo Crosses the River.--Consternation of the French.--Action near Gaeta.--Hotly Contested.--The French Defeated.--Gaeta Surrenders.--Public Enthusiasm.--Treaty with France.--Review of Gonsalvo's Military Conduct.-- Results of the Campaign. Seven weeks had now elapsed, since the two armies had lain in sight of each other without any decided movement on either side. During this time, the Great Captain had made repeated efforts to strengthen himself, through the intervention of the Spanish ambassador, Francisco de Rojas, [1] by reinforcements from Rome. His negotiations were chiefly directed to secure the alliance of the Orsini, a powerful family, long involved in a bitter feud with the Colonnas, then in the Spanish service. A reconciliation between these noble houses was at length happily effected; and Bartolomeo d'Alviano, the head of the Orsini, agreed to enlist under the Spanish commander with three thousand men. This arrangement was finally brought about through the good offices of the Venetian minister at Rome, who even advanced a considerable sum of money towards the payment of the new levies. [2] The appearance of this corps, with one of the most able and valiant of the Italian captains at its head, revived the drooping spirits of the camp. Soon after his arrival, Alviano strongly urged Gonsalvo to abandon his original plan of operations, and avail himself of his augmented strength to attack the enemy in his own quarters. The Spanish commander had intended to confine himself wholly to the defensive, and, too unequal in force to meet the French in the open field, as before noticed, had intrenched himself in his present strong position, with the fixed purpose of awaiting the enemy there. Circumstances had now greatly changed. The original inequality was diminished by the arrival of the Italian levies, and still further compensated by the present disorderly state of the French army. He knew, moreover, that in the most perilous enterprises, the assailing party gathers an enthusiasm and an impetus in its career, which counterbalance large numerical odds; while the party taken by surprise is proportionably disconcerted, and prepared, as it were, for defeat before a blow is struck. From these considerations, the cautious general acquiesced in Alviano's project to cross the Garigliano, by establishing a bridge at a point opposite Suzio, a small place garrisoned by the French on the right bank, about four miles above their head-quarters. The time for the attack was fixed as soon as possible after the approaching Christmas, when the French, occupied with the festivities of the season, might be thrown off their guard. [3] This day of general rejoicing to the Christian world at length arrived. It brought little joy to the Spaniards, buried in the depths of these dreary morasses, destitute of most of the necessaries of life, and with scarcely any other means of resisting the climate, than those afforded by their iron constitutions and invincible courage. They celebrated the day, however, with all the devotional feeling, and the imposing solemnities, with which it is commemorated by the Roman Catholic church; and the exercises of religion, rendered more impressive by their situation, served to exalt still higher the heroic constancy, which had sustained them under such unparalleled sufferings. In the mean while, the materials for the bridge were collected, and the work went forward with such despatch, that on the 28th of December all was in readiness for carrying the plan of attack into execution. The task of laying the bridge across the river was intrusted to Alviano, who had charge of the van. The central and main division of the army under Gonsalvo was to cross at the same point; while Andrada at the head of the rear-guard was to force a passage at the old bridge, lower down the stream, opposite to the Tower of the Garigliano. [4] The night was dark and stormy. Alviano performed the duty intrusted to him with such silence and celerity, that the work was completed without attracting the enemy's notice. He then crossed over with the van-guard, consisting chiefly of cavalry, supported by Navarro, Paredes, and Pizarro; and, falling on the sleeping garrison of Suzio, cut to pieces all who offered resistance. The report of the Spaniards having passed the river spread far and wide, and soon reached the head-quarters of the marquis of Saluzzo, near the Tower of the Garigliano. The French commander-in-chief, who believed that the Spaniards were lying on the other side of the river, as torpid as the snakes in their own marshes, was as much astounded by the event as if a thunderbolt had burst over his head from a cloudless sky. He lost no time, however, in rallying such of his scattered forces as he could assemble, and in the mean while despatched Ives d'Allègre with a body of horse to hold the enemy in check, till he could make good his own retreat on Gaeta. His first step was to demolish the bridge near his own quarters, cutting the moorings of the boats and turning them adrift down the river. He abandoned his tents and baggage, together with nine of his heaviest cannon; leaving even the sick and wounded to the mercy of the enemy, rather than encumber himself with anything that should retard his march. The remainder of the artillery he sent forward in the van. The infantry followed next, and the rear, in which Saluzzo took his own station, was brought up by the men-at-arms to cover the retreat. Before Allègre could reach Suzio, the whole Spanish army had passed the Garigliano, and formed on the right bank. Unable to face such superior numbers, he fell back with precipitation, and joined himself to the main body of the French, now in full retreat on Gaeta. [5] Gonsalvo, afraid the French might escape him, sent forward Prospero Colonna, with a corps of light horse, to annoy and retard their march until he could come up. Keeping the right bank of the river with the main body, he marched rapidly through the deserted camp of the enemy, leaving little leisure for his men to glean the rich spoil, which lay tempting them on every side. It was not long before he came up with the French, whose movements were greatly retarded by the difficulty of dragging their guns over the ground completely saturated with rain. The retreat was conducted, however, in excellent order; they were eminently favored by the narrowness of the road, which, allowing but a comparatively small body of troops on either side to come into action, made success chiefly depend on the relative merits of these. The French rear, as already stated, was made up of their men-at-arms, including Bayard, Sandricourt, La Fayette, and others of their bravest chivalry, who, armed at all points, found no great difficulty in beating off the light troops which formed the advance of the Spaniards. At every bridge, stream, and narrow pass, which afforded a favorable position, the French cavalry closed their ranks, and made a resolute stand to gain time for the columns in advance. In this way, alternately halting and retreating, with perpetual skirmishes, though without much loss on either side, they reached the bridge before Mola di Gaeta. Here, some of the gun-carriages breaking down or being overturned occasioned considerable delay and confusion. The infantry, pressing on, became entangled with the artillery. The marquis of Saluzzo endeavored to avail himself of the strong position afforded by the bridge to restore order. A desperate struggle ensued. The French knights dashed boldly into the Spanish ranks, driving back for a time the tide of pursuit. The chevalier Bayard, who was seen as usual in the front of danger, had three horses killed under him; and, at length, carried forward by his ardor into the thickest of the enemy, was retrieved with difficulty from their hands by a desperate charge of his friend Sandricourt. [6] The Spaniards, shaken by the violence of the assault, seemed for a moment to hesitate; but Gonsalvo had now time to bring up his men-at-arms, who sustained the faltering columns, and renewed the combat on more equal terms. He himself was in the hottest of the _mêlée_; and at one time was exposed to imminent hazard by his horse's losing his footing on the slippery soil, and coming with him to the ground. The general fortunately experienced no injury, and, quickly recovering himself, continued to animate his followers by his voice and intrepid bearing, as before. The fight had now lasted two hours. The Spaniards, although still in excellent heart, were faint with fatigue and want of food, having travelled six leagues, without breaking their fast since the preceding evening. It was, therefore, with no little anxiety, that Gonsalvo looked for the coming up of his rear-guard, left, as the reader will remember, under Andrada at the lower bridge, to decide the fortune of the day. The welcome spectacle at length presented itself. The dark columns of the Spaniards were seen, at first faint in the distance, by degrees growing more and more distinct to the eye. Andrada had easily carried the French redoubt on his side of the Garigliano; but it was not without difficulty and delay, that he recovered the scattered boats which the French had set adrift down the stream, and finally succeeded in re-establishing his communications with the opposite bank. Having accomplished this, he rapidly advanced by a more direct road, to the east of that lately traversed by Gonsalvo along the sea-side, in pursuit of the French. The latter beheld with dismay the arrival of this fresh body of troops, who seemed to have dropped from the clouds on the field of battle. They scarcely waited for the shock before they broke, and gave way in all directions. The disabled carriages of the artillery, which clogged up the avenues in the rear, increased the confusion among the fugitives, and the foot were trampled down without mercy under the heels of their own cavalry, in the eagerness of the latter to extricate themselves from their perilous situation. The Spanish light horse followed up their advantage with the alacrity of vengeance long delayed, inflicting bloody retribution for all they had so long suffered in the marshes of Sessa. At no great distance from the bridge the road takes two directions, the one towards Itri, the other to Gaeta. The bewildered fugitives here separated; by far the greater part keeping the latter route. Gonsalvo sent forward a body of horse under Navarro and Pedro de la Paz by a short cut across the country, to intercept their flight. A large number fell into his hands in consequence of this manoeuvre; but the greater part of those who escaped the sword succeeded in throwing themselves into Gaeta. [7] The Great Captain took up his quarters that night in the neighboring village of Castellone. His brave followers had great need of refreshment, having fasted and fought through the whole day, and that under a driving storm of rain which had not ceased for a moment. Thus terminated the battle, or rout, as it is commonly called, of the Garigliano, the most important in its results of all Gonsalvo's victories, and furnishing a suitable close to his brilliant military career. [8] The loss of the French is computed at from three to four thousand men, left dead on the field, together with all their baggage, colors, and splendid train of artillery. The Spaniards must have suffered severely during the sharp conflict on the bridge; but no estimate of their loss is to be met with, in any native or foreign writer. [9] It was observed that the 29th of December, on which this battle was won, came on Friday, the same ominous day of the week, which had so often proved auspicious to the Spaniards under the present reign. [10] The disparity of the forces actually engaged was probably not great, since the extent of country over which the French were quartered prevented many of them from coming up in time for action. Several corps, who succeeded in reaching the field at the close of the fight, were seized with such a panic as to throw down their arms without attempting resistance. [11] The admirable artillery, on which the French placed chief reliance, was not only of no service, but of infinite mischief to them, as we have seen. The brunt of the battle fell on their chivalry, which bore itself throughout the day with the spirit and gallantry worthy of its ancient renown; never flinching, till the arrival of the Spanish rear-guard fresh in the field, at so critical a juncture, turned the scale in their adversaries' favor. Early on the following morning, Gonsalvo made preparations for storming the heights of Mount Orlando, which overlooked the city of Gaeta. Such was the despondency of its garrison, however, that this strong position, which bade defiance a few months before to the most desperate efforts of Spanish valor, was now surrendered without a struggle. The same feeling of despondency had communicated itself to the garrison of Gaeta; and, before Navarro could bring the batteries of Mount Orlando to bear upon the city, a flag of truce arrived from the marquis of Saluzzo with proposals for capitulation. This was more than the Great Captain could have ventured to promise himself. The French were in great force; the fortifications of the place in excellent repair; it was well provided with artillery and ammunition, and with provisions for ten days at least; while their fleet, riding in the harbor, afforded the means of obtaining supplies from Leghorn, Genoa, and other friendly ports. But the French had lost all heart; they were sorely wasted by disease; their buoyant self-confidence was gone, and their spirits broken by the series of reverses, which had followed without interruption from the first hour of the campaign, to the last disastrous affair of the Garigliano. The very elements seemed to have leagued against them. Further efforts they deemed a fruitless struggle against destiny; and they now looked with melancholy longing to their native land, eager only to quit these ill-omened shores for ever. The Great Captain made no difficulty in granting such terms, as, while they had a show of liberality, secured him the most important fruits of victory. This suited his cautious temper far better than pressing a desperate foe to extremity. He was, moreover, with all his successes, in no condition to do so; he was without funds, and, as usual, deeply in arrears to his army; while there was scarcely a ration of bread, says an Italian historian, in his whole camp. [12] It was agreed by the terms of capitulation, January 1st, 1504, that the French should evacuate Gaeta at once, and deliver it up to the Spaniards with its artillery, munitions, and military stores of every description. The prisoners on both sides, including those taken in the preceding campaign, an arrangement greatly to the advantage of the enemy, were to be restored; and the army in Gaeta was to be allowed a free passage by land or sea, as they should prefer, to their own country. [13] From the moment hostilities were brought to a close; Gonsalvo displayed such generous sympathy for his late enemies, and such humanity in relieving them, as to reflect more honor on his character than all his victories. He scrupulously enforced the faithful performance of the treaty, and severely punished any violence offered to the French by his own men. His benign and courteous demeanor towards the vanquished, so remote from the images of terror with which he had been, hitherto associated in their minds, excited unqualified admiration; and they testified their sense of his amiable qualities, by speaking of him as the "gentil capitaine et gentil cavalier." [14] The news of the rout of the Garigliano and the surrender of Gaeta diffused general gloom and consternation over France. There was scarcely a family of rank, says a writer of that country, that had not some one of its members involved in these sad disasters. [15] The court went into mourning. The king, mortified at the discomfiture of all his lofty schemes, by the foe whom he despised, shut himself up in his palace, refusing access to every one, until the agitation of his spirits threw him into an illness, which had wellnigh proved fatal. Meanwhile his exasperated feelings found an object on which to vent themselves in the unfortunate garrison of Gaeta, who so pusillanimously abandoned their post to return to their own country. He commanded them to winter in Italy, and not to recross the Alps without further orders. He sentenced Sandricourt and Allègre to banishment for insubordination to their commander-in-chief; the latter, for his conduct, more particularly, before the battle of Cerignola; and he hanged up the commissaries of the army, whose infamous peculations had been a principal cause of its ruin. [16] But the impotent wrath of their monarch was not needed to fill the bitter cup, which the French soldiers were now draining to the dregs. A large number of those, who embarked for Genoa, died of the maladies contracted during their long bivouac in the marshes of Minturnae. The rest recrossed the Alps into France, too desperate to heed their master's prohibition. Those who took their way by land suffered still more severely from the Italian peasantry, who retaliated in full measure the barbarities they had so long endured from the French. They were seen wandering like spectres along the high roads and principal cities on the route, pining with cold and famine; and all the hospitals in Rome, as well as the stables, sheds, and every other place, however mean, affording shelter, were filled with the wretched vagabonds, eager only to find some obscure retreat to die in. The chiefs of the expedition fared little better. Among others, the marquis of Saluzzo, soon after reaching Genoa, was carried off by a fever, caused by his distress of mind. Sandricourt, too haughty to endure disgrace, laid violent hands on himself. Allègre, more culpable, but more courageous, survived to be reconciled with his sovereign, and to die a soldier's death on the field of battle. [17] Such are the dismal colors in which the French historians depict the last struggle made by their monarch for the recovery of Naples. Few military expeditions have commenced under more brilliant and imposing auspices; few have been conducted in so ill-advised a manner through their whole progress; and none attended in their close with more indiscriminate and overwhelming ruin. On the 3d of January, 1504, Gonsalvo made his entry into Gaeta; and the thunders of his ordnance, now for the first time heard from its battlements, announced that this strong key to the dominions of Naples had passed into the hands of Aragon. After a short delay for the refreshment of his troops, he set out for the capital. But, amidst the general jubilee which greeted his return, he was seized with a fever, brought on by the incessant fatigue and high mental excitement in which he had been kept for the last four months. The attack was severe, and the event for some time doubtful. During this state of suspense the public mind was in the deepest agitation. The popular manners of Gonsalvo had won the hearts of the giddy people of Naples, who transferred their affections, indeed, as readily as their allegiance; and prayers and vows for his restoration, were offered up in all the churches and monasteries of the city. His excellent constitution at length got the better of his disease. As soon as this favorable result was ascertained, the whole population, rushing to the other extreme, abandoned itself to a delirium of joy; and, when he was sufficiently recovered to give them audience, men of all ranks thronged to Castel Nuovo to tender their congratulations, and obtain a sight of the hero, who now returned to their capital, for the third time, with the laurel of victory on his brow. Every tongue, says his enthusiastic biographer, was eloquent in his praise; some dwelling on his noble port, and the beauty of his countenance; others on the elegance and amenity of his manners; and all dazzled by a spirit of munificence, which would have become royalty itself. [18] The tide of panegyric was swelled by more than one bard, who sought, though with indifferent success, to catch inspiration from so glorious a theme; trusting doubtless that his liberal hand would not stint the recompense to the precise measure of desert. Amid this general burst of adulation, the muse of Sannazaro, worth all his tribe, was alone silent; for the trophies of the conqueror were raised on the ruins of that royal house, under which the bard had been so long sheltered; and this silence, so rare in his tuneful brethren, must be admitted to reflect more credit on his name, than the best he ever sung. [19] The first business of Gonsalvo was to call together the different orders of the state, and receive their oaths of allegiance to King Ferdinand. He next occupied himself with the necessary arrangements for the reorganization of the government, and for reforming various abuses which had crept into the administration of justice, more particularly. In these attempts to introduce order, he was not a little thwarted, however, by the insubordination of his own soldiery, They loudly clamored for the discharge of the arrears, still shamefully protracted, till, their discontents swelling to open mutiny, they forcibly seized on two of the principal places in the kingdom as security for the payment. Gonsalvo chastised their insolence by disbanding several of the most refractory companies, and sending them home for punishment. He endeavored to relieve them in part by raising contributions from the Neapolitans. But the soldiers took the matter into their own hands, oppressing the unfortunate people on whom they were quartered in a manner which rendered their condition scarcely more tolerable, than when exposed to the horrors of actual war. [20] This was the introduction, according to Guicciardini, of those systematic military exactions in time of peace, which became so common afterwards in Italy, adding an inconceivable amount to the long catalogue of woes which afflicted that unhappy land. [21] Amidst his manifold duties, Gonsalvo did not forget the gallant officers who had borne with him the burdens of the war, and he requited their services in a princely style, better suited to his feelings than his interests, as subsequently appeared. Among them were Navarro, Mendoza, Andrada, Benavides, Leyva, the Italians Alviano and the two Colonnas, most of whom lived to display the lessons of tactics, which they learned under this great commander, on a still wider theatre of glory, in the reign of Charles the Fifth. He made them grants of cities, fortresses, and extensive lands, according to their various claims, to be held as fiefs of the crown. All this was done with the previous sanction of his royal master, Ferdinand the Catholic. They did some violence, however, to his more economical spirit, and he was heard somewhat peevishly to exclaim, "It boots little for Gonsalvo de Cordova to have won a kingdom for me, if he lavishes it all away before it comes into my hands." It began to be perceived at court that the Great Captain was too powerful for a subject. [22] Meanwhile, Louis the Twelfth was filled with serious apprehensions for the fate of his possessions in the north of Italy. His former allies, the emperor Maximilian and the republic of Venice, the latter more especially, had shown many indications, not merely of coldness to himself, but of a secret understanding with his rival, the king of Spain. The restless pope, Julius the Second, had schemes of his own, wholly independent of France. The republics of Pisa and Genoa, the latter one of her avowed dependencies, had entered into correspondence with the Great Captain, and invited him to assume their protection; while several of the disaffected party in Milan had assured him of their active support, in case he would march with a sufficient force to overturn the existing government. Indeed, not only France, but Europe in general, expected that the Spanish commander would avail himself of the present crisis, to push his victorious arms into upper Italy, revolutionize Tuscany in his way, and, wresting Milan from the French, drive them, crippled and disheartened by their late reverses, beyond the Alps. [23] But Gonsalvo had occupation enough on his hands in settling the disordered state of Naples. King Ferdinand, his sovereign, notwithstanding the ambition of universal conquest absurdly imputed to him by the French writers, had no design to extend his acquisitions beyond what he could permanently maintain. His treasury, never overflowing, was too deeply drained by the late heavy demands on it, for him so soon to embark on another perilous enterprise, that must rouse anew the swarms of enemies, who seemed willing to rest in quiet after their long and exhausting struggle; nor is there any reason to suppose he sincerely contemplated such a movement for a moment. [24] The apprehension of it, however, answered Ferdinand's purpose, by preparing the French monarch to arrange his differences with his rival, as the latter now earnestly desired, by negotiation. Indeed, two Spanish ministers had resided during the greater part of the war at the French court, with the view of improving the first opening that should occur for accomplishing this object; and by their agency a treaty was concluded, to continue for three years, which guaranteed to Aragon the undisturbed possession of her conquests during that period. The chief articles provided for the immediate cessation of hostilities between the belligerents, and the complete re-establishment of their commercial relations and intercourse, with the exception of Naples, from which the French were to be excluded. The Spanish crown was to have full power to reduce all refractory places in that kingdom; and the contracting parties solemnly pledged themselves, each to render no assistance, secretly or openly, to the enemies of the other. The treaty, which was to run from the 25th of February, 1504, was signed by the French king and the Spanish plenipotentiaries at Lyons, on the 11th of that month, and ratified by Ferdinand and Isabella, at the convent of Santa Maria de la Mejorada, the 31st of March following. [25] There was still a small spot in the heart of Naples, comprehending Venosa and several adjoining towns, where Louis d'Ars and his brave associates yet held out against the Spanish arms. Although cut off by the operation of this treaty from the hope of further support from home, the French knight disdained to surrender; but sallied out at the head of his little troop of gallant veterans, and thus, armed at all points, says Brantôme, with lance in rest, took his way through Naples, and the centre of Italy. He marched in battle array, levying contributions for his support on the places through which he passed. In this manner he entered France, and presented himself before the court at Blois. The king and queen, delighted with his prowess, came forward to welcome him, and made good cheer, says the old chronicler, for himself and his companions, whom they recompensed with liberal largesses, proffering at the same time any boon to the brave knight, which he should demand for himself. The latter in return simply requested that his old comrade Ives d'Allègre should be recalled from exile. This trait of magnanimity, when contrasted with the general ferocity of the times, has something in it inexpressibly pleasing. It shows, like others recorded of the French gentlemen of that period, that the age of chivalry,--the chivalry of romance, indeed,--had not wholly passed away. [26] The pacification of Lyons sealed the fate of Naples; and, while it terminated the wars in that kingdom, closed the military career of Gonsalvo de Cordova. It is impossible to contemplate the magnitude of the results, achieved with such slender resources, and in the face of such overwhelming odds, without deep admiration for the genius of the man by whom they were accomplished. His success, it is true, is imputable in part to the signal errors of his adversaries. The magnificent expedition of Charles the Eighth failed to produce any permanent impression, chiefly in consequence of the precipitation with which it had been entered into, without sufficient concert with the Italian states, who became a formidable enemy when united in his rear. He did not even avail himself of his temporary acquisition of Naples to gather support from the attachment of his new subjects. Far from incorporating with them, he was regarded as a foreigner and an enemy, and, as such, expelled by the joint action of all Italy from its bosom, as soon as it had recovered sufficient strength to rally. Louis the Twelfth profited by the errors of his predecessor. His acquisitions in the Milanese formed a basis for future operations; and by negotiation and otherwise he secured the alliance and the interests of the various Italian governments on his side. These preliminary arrangements were followed by preparations every way commensurate with his object. He failed in the first campaign, however, by intrusting the command to incompetent hands, consulting birth rather than talent or experience. In the succeeding campaigns, his failure, though partly chargeable on himself, was less so than on circumstances beyond his control. The first of these was the long detention of the army before Rome by Cardinal D'Amboise, and its consequent exposure to the unexampled severity of the ensuing winter. A second was the fraudulent conduct of the commissaries, implying, no doubt, some degree of negligence in the person who appointed them; and lastly, the want of a suitable commander-in-chief of the army. La Trémouille being ill, and D'Aubigny a prisoner in the hands of the enemy, there appeared no one among the French qualified to cope with the Spanish general. The marquis of Mantua, independently of the disadvantage of being a foreigner, was too timid in council, and dilatory in conduct, to be any way competent to this difficult task. If his enemies, however, committed great errors, it is altogether owing to Gonsalvo that he was in a situation to take advantage of them. Nothing could be more unpromising than his position on first entering Calabria. Military operations had been conducted in Spain on principles totally different from those which prevailed in the rest of Europe. This was the case especially in the late Moorish wars, where the old tactics and the character of the ground brought light cavalry chiefly into use. This, indeed, constituted his principal strength at this period; for his infantry, though accustomed to irregular service, was indifferently armed and disciplined. An important revolution, however, had occurred in the other parts of Europe. The infantry had there regained the superiority which it maintained in the days of the Greeks and Romans. The experiment had been made on more than one bloody field; and it was found that the solid columns of Swiss and German pikes not only bore down all opposition in their onward march, but presented an impregnable barrier, not to be shaken by the most desperate charges of the best heavy-armed cavalry. It was against these dreaded battalions that Gonsalvo was now called to measure for the first time the bold but rudely armed and comparatively raw recruits from Galicia and the Asturias. He lost his first battle, into which it should be remembered he was precipitated against his will. He proceeded afterwards with the greatest caution, gradually familiarizing his men with the aspect and usages of the enemy whom they held in such awe, before bringing them again to a direct encounter. He put himself to school during this whole campaign, carefully acquainting himself with the tactics, discipline, and novel arms of his adversaries, and borrowing just so much as he could incorporate into the ancient system of the Spaniards, without discarding the latter altogether. Thus, while he retained the short sword and buckler of his countrymen, he fortified his battalions with a large number of spearmen, after the German fashion. The arrangement is highly commended by the sagacious Machiavelli, who considers it as combining the advantages of both systems, since, while the long spear served all the purposes of resistance, or even of attack on level ground, the short swords and targets enabled their wearers, as already noticed, to cut in under the dense array of hostile pikes, and bring the enemy to close quarters, where his formidable weapon was of no avail. [27] While Gonsalvo made this innovation in the arms and tactics, he paid equal attention to the formation of a suitable character in his soldiery. The circumstances in which he was placed at Barleta, and on the Garigliano, imperatively demanded this. Without food, clothes, or pay, without the chance even of retrieving his desperate condition by venturing a blow at the enemy, the Spanish soldier was required to remain passive. To do this demanded, patience, abstinence, strict subordination, and a degree of resolution far higher than that required to combat obstacles, however formidable in themselves, where active exertion, which tasks the utmost energies of the soldier, renews his spirits and raises them to a contempt of danger. It was calling on him, in short, to begin with achieving that most difficult of all victories, the victory over himself. All this the Spanish commander effected. He infused into his men a portion of his own invincible energy. He inspired a love of his person, which led them to emulate his example, and a confidence in his genius and resources, which supported them under all their privations by a firm reliance on a fortunate issue. His manners were distinguished by a graceful courtesy, less encumbered with etiquette than was usual with persons of his high rank in Castile. He knew well the proud and independent feelings of the Spanish soldier; and, far from annoying him by unnecessary restraints, showed the most liberal indulgence at all times. But his kindness was tempered with severity, which displayed itself, on such occasions as required interposition, in a manner that rarely failed to repress everything like insubordination. The reader will readily recall an example of this in the mutiny before Tarento; and it was doubtless by the assertion of similar power, that he was so long able to keep in check his German mercenaries, distinguished above the troops of every other nation by their habitual license and contempt of authority. While Gonsalvo relied so freely on the hardy constitution and patient habits of the Spaniards, he trusted no less to the deficiency of these qualities in the French, who, possessing little of the artificial character formed under the stern training of later times, resembled their Gaulish ancestors in the facility with which they were discouraged by unexpected obstacles, and the difficulty with which they could be brought to rally. [28] In this he did not miscalculate. The French infantry, drawn from the militia of the country, hastily collected and soon to be disbanded, and the independent nobility and gentry who composed the cavalry service, were alike difficult to be brought within the strict curb of military rule. The severe trials, which steeled the souls, and gave sinewy strength to the constitutions, of the Spanish soldiers, impaired those of their enemies, introduced divisions into their councils, and relaxed the whole tone of discipline. Gonsalvo watched the operation of all this, and, coolly waiting the moment when his weary and disheartened adversary should be thrown off his guard, collected all his strength for a decisive blow, by which to terminate the action. Such was the history of those memorable campaigns, which closed with the brilliant victories of Cerignola and the Garigliano. In a review of his military conduct, we must not overlook his politic deportment towards the Italians, altogether the reverse of the careless and insolent bearing of the French. He availed himself liberally of their superior science, showing great deference, and confiding the most important trusts, to their officers. [29] Far from the reserve usually shown to foreigners, he appeared insensible to national distinctions, and ardently embraced them as companions in arms, embarked in a common cause with himself. In their tourney with the French before Barleta, to which the whole nation attached such importance as a vindication of national honor, they were entirely supported by Gonsalvo, who furnished them with arms, secured a fair field of fight, and shared the triumph of the victors as that of his own countrymen,--paying those delicate attentions, which cost far less, indeed, but to an honorable mind are of greater value, than more substantial benefits. He conciliated the good-will of the Italian states by various important services; of the Venetians, by his gallant defence of their possessions in the Levant; of the people of Rome, by delivering them from the pirates of Ostia; while he succeeded, notwithstanding the excesses of his soldiery, in captivating the giddy Neapolitans to such a degree, by his affable manners and splendid style of life, as seemed to efface from their minds every recollection of the last and most popular of their monarchs, the unfortunate Frederic. The distance of Gonsalvo's theatre of operations from his own country, apparently most discouraging, proved extremely favorable to his purposes. The troops, cut off from retreat by a wide sea and an impassable mountain barrier, had no alternative but to conquer or to die. Their long continuance in the field without disbanding gave them all the stern, inflexible qualities of a standing army; and, as they served through so many successive campaigns under the banner of the same leader, they were drilled in a system of tactics far steadier and more uniform than could be acquired under a variety of commanders, however able. Under these circumstances, which so well fitted them for receiving impressions, the Spanish army was gradually moulded into the form determined by the will of its great chief. When we look at the amount offered at the disposal of Gonsalvo, it appears so paltry, especially compared with the gigantic apparatus of later wars, that it may well suggest disparaging ideas of the whole contest. To judge correctly, we must direct our eyes to the result. With this insignificant force, we shall then see the kingdom of Naples conquered, and the best generals and armies of France annihilated; an important innovation effected in military science; the art of mining, if not invented, carried to unprecedented perfection; a thorough reform introduced in the arms and discipline of the Spanish soldier; and the organization completed of that valiant infantry, which is honestly eulogized by a French writer, as irresistible in attack, and impossible to rout; [30] and which carried the banners of Spain victorious, for more than a century, over the most distant parts of Europe. * * * * * The brilliant qualities and achievements of Gonzalo de Cordova have naturally made him a popular theme both for history and romance. Various biographies of him have appeared in the different European languages, though none, I believe, hitherto in English. The authority of principal reference in these pages is the Life which Paolo Giovio has incorporated in his great work, "Vitae Illustrium Virorum," which I have elsewhere noticed. This Life of Gonsalvo is not exempt from the prejudices, nor from the minor inaccuracies, which may be charged on most of this author's productions; but these are abundantly compensated by the stores of novel and interesting details which Giovio's familiarity with the principal actors of the time enabled him to throw into his work, and by the skilful arrangement. of his narrative, so disposed as, without studied effort, to bring into light the prominent qualities of his hero. Every page bears the marks of that "golden pen," which the politic Italian reserved for his favorites; and, while this obvious partiality may put the reader somewhat on his guard, it gives an interest to the work, inferior to none other of his agreeable compositions. The most imposing of the Spanish memoirs of Gonsalvo, in bulk at least, is the "Chrónica del Gran Capitan," Alcala de Henares, 1584. Nic. Antonio doubts whether the author were Pulgar, who wrote the "History of the Catholic Kings," of such frequent reference in the Granadine wars', or another Pulgar del Salar, as he is called, who received the honors of knighthood from King Ferdinand for his valorous exploits against the Moors. (See Bibliotheca Uova, tom. i. p. 387.) With regard to the first Pulgar, there is no reason to suppose that he lived into the sixteenth century; and, as to the second, the work composed by him, so far from being the one in question, was a compendium, bearing the title of "Sumario de los Hechos del Gran Capitan," printed as early as 1527, at Seville, (See the editor's prologue to Pulgar's "Chrónica de los Reyes Católicos," ed Valencia, 1780.) Its author, therefore, remains in obscurity. He sustains no great damage on the score of reputation, however, from this circumstance; as his work is but an indifferent specimen of the rich old Spanish chronicle, exhibiting most of its characteristic blemishes, with a very small admixture of its beauties. The long and prosy narrative is overloaded with the most frivolous details, trumpeted forth in a strain of glorification, which sometimes disfigures more meritorious compositions in the Castilian. Nothing like discrimination of character, of course, is to be looked for in the unvarying swell of panegyric, which claims for its subject all the extravagant flights of a hero of romance. With these deductions, however, and a liberal allowance, consequently, for the nationality of the work, it has considerable value as a record of events, too recent in their occurrence to be seriously defaced by those deeper stains of error, which are so apt to settle on the weather-beaten monuments of antiquity. It has accordingly formed a principal source of the "Vida del Gran Capitan," introduced by Quintana in the first volume of his "Españoles Célebres," printed at Madrid, in 1807. This memoir, in which the incidents are selected with discernment, displays the usual freedom and vivacity of its poetic author. It does not bring the general politics of the period under review, but will not be found deficient in particulars having immediate connection with the personal history of its subject; and, on the whole, exhibits in an agreeable and compendious form whatever is of most interest or importance for the general reader. The French have also a "Histoire de Gonsalve de Cordoue," composed by Father Duponcet, a Jesuit, in two vols. 12mo, Paris, 1714. Though an ambitious, it is a bungling performance, most unskilfully put together, and contains quite as much of what its hero did not do, as of what he did. The prolixity of the narrative is not even relieved by the piquancy of style, which forms something like a substitute for thought in many of the lower order of French historians. It is less to history, however, than to romance, that the French public is indebted for its conceptions of the character of Gonsalvo de Cordova, as depicted by the gaudy pencil of Florian, in that highly poetic coloring, which is more attractive to the majority of readers than the cold and sober delineations of truth. The contemporary French accounts of the Neapolitan wars of Louis XII. are extremely meagre, and few in number. The most striking, on the whole, is D'Auton's chronicle, composed in the true chivalrous vein of old Froissart, but unfortunately terminating before the close of the first campaign. St. Gelais and Claude Seyssel touch very lightly on this part of their subject. History becomes in their hands, moreover, little better than fulsome panegyric, carried to such a height, indeed, by the latter writer, as brought on him the most severe strictures from his contemporaries; so that he was compelled to take up the pen more than once in his own vindication. The "Mémoires de Bayard," Fleurange, and La Trémouille, so diffuse in most military details, are nearly silent in regard to those of the Neapolitan war. The truth is, the subject was too ungrateful in itself, and presented too unbroken a series of calamities and defeats, to invite the attention of the French historians, who willingly turned to those brilliant passages in this reign, more soothing to national vanity. The blank has been filled up, or rather attempted to be so, by the assiduity of their later writers. Among these, occasionally consulted by me, are Varillas, whose "Histoire de Louis XII.," loose as it is, rests on a somewhat more solid basis than his metaphysical reveries, assuming the title of "Politique de Ferdinand," already repeatedly noticed; Garnier, whose perspicuous narrative, if inferior to that of Gaillard in acuteness and epigrammatic point, makes a much nearer approach to truth; and, lastly, Sismondi, who, if he may be charged, in his "Histoire des Français," with some of the defect incident to indiscreet rapidity of composition, succeeds by a few brief and animated touches in opening deeper views into character and conduct than can be got from volumes of ordinary writers. The want of authentic materials for a perfect acquaintance with the reign of Louis XII. is a subject of complaint with French writers themselves. The memoirs of the period, occupied with the more dazzling military transactions, make no attempt to instruct us in the interior organization or policy of the government. One might imagine, that their authors lived a century before Philippe de Comines, instead of coming after him, so inferior are they, in all the great properties of historic composition, to this eminent statesman. The French _savans_ have made slender contributions to the stock of original documents collected more than two centuries ago by Godefroy for the illustration of this reign. It can scarcely be supposed, however, that the labors of this early antiquary exhausted the department, in which the French are rich beyond all others, and that those, who work the same mine hereafter, should not find valuable materials for a broader foundation of this interesting portion of their history. It is fortunate that the reserve of the French in regard to their relations with Italy, at this time, has been abundantly compensated by the labors of the most eminent contemporary writers of the latter country, as Bembo, Machiavelli, Giovio, and the philosophic Guicciardini; whose situation as Italians enabled them to maintain the balance of historic truth undisturbed, at least by undue partiality for either of the two great rival powers; whose high public stations introduced them to the principal characters of the day, and to springs of action hidden from vulgar eyes; and whose superior science, as well as genius, qualified them for rising above the humble level of garrulous chronicle and memoir to the classic dignity of history. It is with regret that we must now strike into a track unillumined by the labors of these great masters of their art in modern times. Since the publication of this History, the Spanish Minister at Washington, Don Angel Calderon de la Barca, did me the favor to send me a copy of the biography above noticed as the "Sumario de los Hechos del Gran Capitan." It is a recent reprint from the ancient edition of 1527, of which the industrious editor, Don F. Martinez de la Rosa, was able to find but one copy in Spain. In its new form, it covers about a hundred duodecimo pages. It has positive value, as a contemporary document, and as such I gladly avail myself of it. But the greater part is devoted to the early history of Gonsalvo, over which my limits have compelled me to pass lightly; and, for the rest, I am happy to find, on the perusal of it, nothing of moment, which conflicts with the statements drawn from other sources. The able editor has also combined an interesting notice of its author, Pulgar, _El de las Hazañas_, one of those heroes whose doughty feats shed the illusions of knight-errantry over the war of Granada. FOOTNOTES [1] He succeeded Garcilasso de la Vega at the court of Rome. Oviedo says, in reference to the illustrious house of Rojas, "En todas las historias de España no se hallan tantos caballeros de un linage y nombre notados por valerosos caballeros y valientes milites como deste nombre de Rojas." Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 2, dial. 8. [2] Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 28, cap. 5.--Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 6, pp. 319, 320.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 48, 57.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 14, sec. 4, 5.--Daru, Hist. de Venise, tom. iii. pp. 364, 365. [3] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, pp. 267, 268.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 22.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. lib. 6, pp. 329, 330.-- Machiavelli, Legazione Prima a Roma, let. 36. [4] Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 2, cap. 110.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 189.--Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, lib. 3, fol. 266. --Zurita, Historia del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 5, cap. 60.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 270.--Buonaccorsi, Diario, p. 84. [5] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 189.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 22, 23.--Guicciardini, Istoria, p. 330.--Garnier, Hist. de France, tom. v. pp. 448, 449.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 2, cap. 110.-- Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 14, sec. 6.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 60.--Senarega, apud Muratori, Rerum Ital. Script., tom. xxiv. p. 579. [6] Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 6, pp. 330, 331.--Garnier, Hist. de France, tom. v. pp. 449-451.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, ubi supra.-- Varillas, Hist. de Louis XII., tom. i. pp. 416-418.--Ammirato, Istorie Florentine, tom. iii. lib. 28, p. 273.--Summonte, Hist. di Napoli, tom. iii. p. 555.--Buonaccorsi, Diario, pp. 84, 85.--Giovio, Vitae Magni Gonsalvi, fol. 268. [8] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 190.--Garnier, Hist. de France, tom. v. pp. 452, 453.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 23.--Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 6, p. 331.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 16.-- Chrónica del Gran Capitan, ubi supra.--Buonaccorsi, Diario, pp. 84, 85.-- Ammirato, Istorie Fiorentine, ubi supra.--Varillas, Hist. de Louis XII., tom. i. pp. 416-418. [8] Soon after the rout of the Garigliano, Bembo produced the following sonnet, which most critics agree was intended, although no name appears in it, for Gonsalvo de Cordova. "Ben devria farvi onor d' eterno esempio Napoli vostra, e 'n mezzo al suo bel monte Scolpirvi in lieta e ooronata fronte, Gir trionfando, e dar i voti al tempio: Poi che l' avete all' orgoglioso ed empio Stuolo ritolta, e pareggiate l' onte; Or ch' avea più la voglia e le man pronte A far d' Italia tutta acerbo scempio. Torcestel voi, Signor, dal corso ardito, E foste tal, ch' ancora esser vorebbe A por di qua dall' Alpe nostra il piede. L' onda Tirrena del suo sangue crebbe, E di tronchi resto coperto il lito, E gli angelli ne fer secure prede." Opere, tom. ii. p. 57. [9] The Curate of Los Palacios sums up the loss of the French, from the time of Gonsalvo's occupation of Barleta to the surrender of Gaeta, in the following manner; 6000 prisoners, 14,000 killed in battle, a still greater number by exposure and fatigue, besides a considerable body cut off by the peasantry. To balance this bloody roll, he computes the Spanish loss at two hundred slain in the field! Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 191. [10] Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 2, cap. 110.--Zurita, Anales, ubi supra.--Garibay, Compendio, lib. 19, cap. 16.--Quintana, Españoles Célebres, tom. i. pp. 296, 97. Guicciardini, who has been followed in this by the French writers, fixes the date of the rout at the 28th of December. If, however, it occurred on Friday, as he, and every authority, indeed, asserts, it must have been on the 29th, as stated by the Spanish historians. Istoria, lib. 6, p. 330. [11] Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, fol. 268. [12] Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, fol. 268, 269.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 2, cap. 111.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 270.-- Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 6, p. 331.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 61.--Garnier, Hist. de France, tom. v. pp. 454, 455.--Sismondi, Hist. des Français, tom. xv. cap. 29. [13] Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 5, cap. 61.--Garnier, Hist. de France, tom. v. pp. 454, 455.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 190.--Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 29, cap. 4. No particular mention was made of the Italian allies in the capitulation. It so happened that several of the great Angevin lords, who had been taken in the preceding campaigns of Calabria, were found in arms in the place. (Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, fol. 252, 253, 269.) Gonsalvo, in consequence of this manifest breach of faith, refusing to regard them as comprehended in the treaty, sent them all prisoners of state to the dungeons of Castel Nuovo in Naples. This action has brought on him much unmerited obloquy with the French writers. Indeed, before the treaty was signed, if we are to credit the Italian historians, Gonsalvo peremptorily refused to include the Neapolitan lords within it. Thus much is certain; that, after having been taken and released, they were now found under the French banners a second time. It seems not improbable, therefore, that the French, however naturally desirous they may have been of protection for their allies, finding themselves unable to enforce it, acquiesced in such an equivocal silence with respect to them as, without apparently compromising their own honor, left the whole affair to the discretion of the Great Captain. With regard to the sweeping charge made by certain modern French historians against the Spanish general, of a similar severity to the other Italians indiscriminately, found in the place, there is not the slightest foundation for it in any contemporary authority. See Gaillard, Rivalité, tom. iv. p. 254.--Garnier, Hist. de France, tom. v. p. 456.--Varillas, Hist de Louis XII., tom. i. pp. 419, 420. [14] Fleurange, Mémoires, chap. 5, apud Petitot, Collection des Mémoires, tom. xvi.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 190.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, fol. 269, 270.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, cap. 111. [15] Brantôme, who visited the banks of the Garigliano, some fifty years after this, beheld them in imagination thronged with the shades of the illustrious dead, whose bones lay buried in its dreary and pestilent marshes. There is a sombre coloring in the vision of the old chronicler, not unpoetical. Vies des Hommes Illustres, disc. 6. [16] Garnier, Hist. de France, tom. v. pp. 456-458.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, fol. 269, 270.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. i. lib. 6, pp. 332, 337.--St. Gelais, Hist. de Louys XII., p. 173. [17] Buonaccorsi, Diario, p. 86.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 23.-- Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 190.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, ubi supra.--Gaillard, Rivalité, tom. iv. pp. 254-256. [18] Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, fol. 270, 271.--Quintana, Españoles Célebres, tom. i. p. 298.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 3, cap. 1.-- Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 359.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 190, 191. [19] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, fol. 271. [20] "Per servir sempre, vincitrice o vinia." The Italians began at this early period to feel the pressure of those woes, which a century and a half later wrung out of Filicaja the beautiful lament, which has lost something of its touching graces, even under the hand of Lord Byron. [21] Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 64.--Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 6, pp. 340, 341.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, ubi supra.--Carta del Gran Capitan, MS. [22] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, fol. 270, 271.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 8, cap. 1.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 24. [23] Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 6, p. 338.--Zurita, Hist. del Rey Hernando, tom. i. lib. 5, cap. 64.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, rey 30, cap. 14.--Buonaccorsi, Diario, pp. 85, 86. [24] Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 66. The campaign against Louis XII. had cost the Spanish crown 331 _cuentos_ or millions of maravedies, equivalent to 9,268,000 dollars of the present time. A moderate charge enough for the conquest of a kingdom; and made still lighter to the Spaniards by one-fifth of the whole being drawn from Naples itself. See Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 359. [25] The treaty is to be found in Dumont, Corps Diplomatique, tom. iv. no. 26, pp. 51-53.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 64.--Machiavelli, Legazione Seconda a Francia, let. 9, Feb. 11. [26] Brantôme, Oeuvres, tom. ii. disc. 11.--Fleurange, Mémoires, chap. 5, apud Petitot, Collection des Mémoires, tom. xvi.--Buonaccorsi, Diario, p. 85.--Gaillard, Rivalité, tom. iv. pp. 255-260. See also Mémoires de Bayard, chap. 25; the good knight, "sans peur et sans reproche," made one of this intrepid little band, having joined Louis d'Ars after the capitulation of Gaeta. [27] Machiavelli, Arte della Guerra. lib. 2.--Machiavelli considers the victory over D'Aubigny at Seminara as imputable in a great degree to the peculiar arms of the Spaniards, who, with their short swords and shields, gliding in among the deep ranks of the Swiss spearmen, brought them to close combat, where the former had the whole advantage. Another instance of the kind occurred at the memorable battle of Ravenna some years later. Ubi supra. [28] "Prima," says Livy pithily, speaking of the Gauls in the time of the Republic, "eorum proelia plus quam virorum, postrema minu quam foeminarum." Lib. 10, cap. 28. [29] Two of the most distinguished of these were the Colonnas, Prospero and Fabrizio, of whom frequent mention has been made in our narrative. The best commentary on the military reputation of the latter, is the fact, that he is selected by Machiavelli as the principal interlocutor in his Dialogues on the Art of War. [30] See Dubos, Ligue de Cambray, dissert. prelim., p. 60.--This French writer has shown himself superior to national distinctions, in the liberal testimony which he bears to the character of these brave troops. See a similar strain of panegyric from the chivalrous pen of old Brantôme, Oeuvres, tom. i. disc. 27. CHAPTER XVI. ILLNESS AND DEATH OF ISABELLA.--HER CHARACTER. 1504. Decline of the Queen's Health.--Alarm of the Nation.--Her Testament.--And Codicil.--Her Resignation and Death.--Her Remains Transported to Granada. --Isabella's Person.--Her Manners.--Her Character.--Parallel with Queen Elizabeth. The acquisition of an important kingdom in the heart of Europe, and of the New World beyond the waters, which promised to pour into her lap all the fabled treasures of the Indies, was rapidly raising Spain to the first rank of European powers. But, in this noontide of her success, she was to experience a fatal shock in the loss of that illustrious personage, who had so long and so gloriously presided over her destinies. We have had occasion to notice more than once the declining state of the queen's health during the last few years. Her constitution had been greatly impaired by incessant personal fatigue and exposure, and by the unremitting activity of her mind. It had suffered far more severely, however, from a series of heavy domestic calamities, which had fallen on her with little intermission since the death of her mother in 1496. The next year, she followed to the grave the remains of her only son, the heir and hope of the monarchy, just entering on his prime; and in the succeeding, was called on to render the same sad offices to the best beloved of her daughters, the amiable queen of Portugal. The severe illness occasioned by this last blow terminated in a dejection of spirits, from which she never entirely recovered. Her surviving children were removed far from her into distant lands; with the occasional exception, indeed, of Joanna, who caused a still deeper pang to her mother's affectionate heart, by exhibiting infirmities which justified the most melancholy presages for the future. Far from abandoning herself to weak and useless repining, however, Isabella sought consolation, where it was best to be found, in the exercises of piety, and in the earnest discharge of the duties attached to her exalted station. Accordingly, we find her attentive as ever to the minutest interests of her subjects; supporting her great minister Ximenes in his schemes of reform, quickening the zeal for discovery in the west, and, at the close of the year 1503, on the alarm of the French invasion, rousing her dying energies, to kindle a spirit of resistance in her people. These strong mental exertions, however, only accelerated the decay of her bodily strength, which was gradually sinking under that sickness of the heart, which admits of no cure, and scarcely of consolation. In the beginning of that very year she had declined so visibly, that the cortes of Castile, much alarmed, petitioned her to provide for the government of the kingdom after her decease, in case of the absence or incapacity of Joanna. [1] She seems to have rallied in some measure after this, but it was only to relapse into a state of greater debility, as her spirits sunk under the conviction, which now forced itself on her, of her daughter's settled insanity. Early in the spring of the following year, that unfortunate lady embarked for Flanders, where, soon after her arrival, the inconstancy of her husband, and her own ungovernable sensibilities, occasioned the most scandalous scenes. Philip became openly enamoured of one of the ladies of her suite, and his injured wife, in a paroxysm of jealousy, personally assaulted her fair rival in the palace, and caused the beautiful locks, which had excited the admiration of her fickle husband, to be shorn from her head. This outrage so affected Philip, that he vented his indignation against Joanna in the coarsest and most unmanly terms, and finally refused to have any further intercourse with her. [2] The account of this disgraceful scene reached Castile in the month of June. It occasioned the deepest chagrin and mortification to the unhappy parents. Ferdinand soon after fell ill of a fever, and the queen was seized with the same disorder, accompanied by more alarming symptoms. Her illness was exasperated by anxiety for her husband, and she refused to credit the favorable reports of his physicians while he was detained from her presence. His vigorous constitution, however, threw off the malady, while hers gradually failed under it. Her tender heart was more keenly sensible than his to the unhappy condition of their child, and to the gloomy prospects which awaited her beloved Castile. [3] Her faithful follower, Martyr, was with the court at this time in Medina del Campo. In a letter to the count of Tendilla, dated October 7th, he states that the most serious apprehensions were entertained by the physicians for the queen's fate. "Her whole system," he says, "is pervaded by a consuming fever. She loathes food of every kind, and is tormented with incessant thirst, while the disorder has all the appearance of terminating in a dropsy." [4] In the mean while, Isabella lost nothing of her solicitude for the welfare of her people, and the great concerns of government. While reclining, as she was obliged to do a great part of the day, on her couch, she listened to the recital or reading of whatever occurred of interest, at home or abroad. She gave audience to distinguished foreigners, especially such Italians as could acquaint her with particulars of the late war, and, above all, in regard to Gonsalvo de Cordova, in whose fortunes she had always taken the liveliest concern. [5] She received with pleasure, too, such intelligent travellers, as her renown had attracted to the Castilian court. She drew forth their stores of various information, and dismissed them, says a writer of the age, penetrated with the deepest admiration of that masculine strength of mind, which sustained her so nobly under the weight of a mortal malady. [6] This malady was now rapidly gaining ground. On the 15th of October we have another epistle of Martyr, of the following melancholy tenor. "You ask me respecting the state of the queen's health. We sit sorrowful in the palace all day long, tremblingly waiting the hour, when religion and virtue shall quit the earth with her. Let us pray that we may be permitted to follow hereafter where she is soon to go. She so far transcends all human excellence, that there is scarcely anything of mortality about her. She can hardly be said to die, but to pass into a nobler existence, which should rather excite our envy than our sorrow. She leaves the world filled with her renown, and she goes to enjoy life eternal with her God in heaven. I write this," he concludes, "between hope and fear, while the breath is still fluttering within her." [7] The deepest gloom now overspread the nation. Even Isabella's long illness had failed to prepare the minds of her faithful people for the sad catastrophe. They recalled several ominous circumstances which had before escaped their attention. In the preceding spring, an earthquake, accompanied by a tremendous hurricane, such as the oldest men did not remember, had visited Andalusia, and especially Carmona, a place belonging to the queen, and occasioned frightful desolation there. The superstitious Spaniards now read in these portents the prophetic signs, by which Heaven announces some great calamity. Prayers were put up in every temple; processions and pilgrimages made in every part of the country for the recovery of their beloved sovereign,--but in vain. [8] Isabella, in the mean time, was deluded with no false hopes. She felt too surely the decay of her bodily strength, and she resolved to perform what temporal duties yet remained for her, while her faculties were still unclouded. On the 12th of October she executed that celebrated testament, which reflects so clearly the peculiar qualities of her mind and character. She begins with prescribing the arrangements for her burial. She orders her remains to be transported to Granada, to the Franciscan monastery of Santa Isabella in the Alhambra, and there deposited in a low and humble sepulchre, without other memorial than a plain inscription on it. "But," she continues, "should the king, my lord, prefer a sepulchre in some other place, then my will is that my body be there transported, and laid by his side; that the union we have enjoyed in this world, and, through the mercy of God, may hope again for our souls in heaven, may be represented by our bodies in the earth." Then, desirous of correcting by her example, in this last act of her life, the wasteful pomp of funeral obsequies to which the Castilians were addicted, she commands that her own should be performed in the plainest and most unostentatious manner, and that the sum saved by this economy should be distributed in alms among the poor. She next provides for several charities, assigning, among others, marriage portions for poor maidens, and a considerable sum for the redemption of Christian captives in Barbary. She enjoins the punctual discharge of all her personal debts within a year; she retrenches superfluous offices in the royal household, and revokes all such grants, whether in the forms of lands or annuities, as she conceives to have been made without sufficient warrant. She inculcates on her successors the importance of maintaining the integrity of the royal domains, and, above all, of never divesting themselves of their title to the important fortress of Gibraltar. After this, she comes to the succession of the crown, which she settles on the infanta Joanna, as "queen proprietor," and the archduke Philip as her husband. She gives them much good counsel respecting their future administration; enjoining them, as they would secure the love and obedience of their subjects, to conform in all respects to the laws and usages of the realm, to appoint no foreigner to office,-an error, into which Philip's connections, she saw, would be very likely to betray them, --and to make no laws or ordinances, "which necessarily require the consent of cortes," during their absence from the kingdom. [9] She recommends to them the same conjugal harmony which had ever subsisted between her and her husband; she beseeches them to show the latter all the deference and filial affection "due to him beyond every other parent, for his eminent virtues;" and finally inculcates on them the most tender regard for the liberties and welfare of their subjects. She next comes to the great question proposed by the cortes of 1503, respecting the government of the realm in the absence or incapacity of Joanna. She declares that, after mature deliberation, and with the advice of many of the prelates and nobles of the kingdom, she appoints King Ferdinand her husband to be the sole regent of Castile, in that exigency, until the majority of her grandson Charles; being led to this, she adds, "by the consideration of the magnanimity and illustrious qualities of the king, my lord, as well as his large experience, and the great profit which will redound to the state from his wise and beneficent rule." She expresses her sincere conviction that his past conduct affords a sufficient guarantee for his faithful administration, but, in compliance with established usage, requires the customary oath from him on entering on the duties of the office. She then makes a specific provision for her husband's personal maintenance, which, "although less than she could wish, and far less than he deserves, considering the eminent services he had rendered the state," she settles at one-half of all the net proceeds and profits accruing from the newly discovered countries in the west; together with ten million maravedies annually, assigned on the _alcavalas_ of the grand-masterships of the military orders. After some additional regulations, respecting the descent of the crown on failure of Joanna's lineal heirs, she recommends in the kindest and most emphatic terms to her successors the various members of her household, and her personal friends, among whom we find the names of the marquis and marchioness of Moya, (Beatrice de Bobadilla, the companion of her youth,) and Garcilasso de la Vega, the accomplished minister at the papal court. And, lastly, concluding in the same beautiful strain of conjugal tenderness in which she began, she says, "I beseech the king my lord, that he will accept all my jewels, or such as he shall select, so that, seeing them, he may be reminded of the singular love I always bore him while living, and that I am now waiting for him in a better world; by which remembrance he may be encouraged to live the more justly and holily in this." Six executors were named to the will. The two principal were the king and the primate Ximenes, who had full powers to act in conjunction with any one of the others. [10] I have dwelt the more minutely on the details of Isabella's testament, from the evidence it affords of her constancy in her dying hour to the principles which had governed her through life; of her expansive and sagacious policy; her prophetic insight into the evils to result from her death,--evils, alas! which no forecast could avert; her scrupulous attention to all her personal obligations; and that warm attachment to her friends, which could never falter while a pulse beat in her bosom. After performing this duty, she daily grew weaker, the powers of her mind seeming to brighten as those of her body declined. The concerns of her government still occupied her thoughts; and several public measures, which she had postponed through urgency of other business, or growing infirmities, pressed so heavily on her heart, that she made them the subject of a codicil to her former will. It was executed November 23d, only three days before her death. Three of the provisions contained in it are too remarkable to pass unnoticed. The first concerns the codification of the laws. For this purpose, the queen appoints a commission to make a new digest of the statutes and _pragmáticas_, the contradictory tenor of which still occasioned much embarrassment in Castilian jurisprudence. This was a subject she always had much at heart; but no nearer approach had been made to it, than the valuable, though insufficient work of Montalvo, in the early part of her reign; and, notwithstanding her precautions, none more effectual was destined to take place till the reign of Philip the Second. [11] The second item had reference to the natives of the New World. Gross abuses had arisen there since the partial revival of the _repartimientos_, although Las Casas says, "intelligence of this was carefully kept from the ears of the queen." [12] Some vague apprehension of the truth, however, appears to have forced itself on her; and she enjoins her successors, in the most earnest manner, to quicken the good work of converting and civilizing the poor Indians, to treat them with the greatest gentleness, and redress any wrongs they may have suffered in their persons or property. Lastly, she expresses her doubts as to the legality of the revenue drawn from the _alcavalas_, constituting the principal income of the crown. She directs a commission to ascertain whether it were originally intended to be perpetual, and if this were done with the free consent of the people; enjoining her heirs, in that event, to collect the tax so that it should press least heavily on her subjects. Should it be found otherwise, however, she directs that the legislature be summoned to devise proper measures for supplying the wants of the crown,--"measures depending for their validity on the good pleasure of the subjects of the realm." [13] Such were the dying words of this admirable woman; displaying the same respect for the rights and liberties of the nation, which she had shown through life, and striving to secure the blessings of her benign administration to the most distant and barbarous regions under her sway. These two documents were a precious legacy bequeathed to her people, to guide them when the light of her personal example should be withdrawn for ever. The queen's signature to the codicil, which still exists among the manuscripts of the royal library at Madrid, shows, by its irregular and scarcely legible characters, the feeble state to which she was then reduced. [14] She had now adjusted all her worldly concerns, and she prepared to devote herself, during the brief space which remained, to those of a higher nature. It was but the last act of a life of preparation. She had the misfortune, common to persons of her rank, to be separated in her last moments from those whose filial tenderness might have done so much to soften the bitterness of death. But she had the good fortune, most rare, to have secured for this trying hour the solace of disinterested friendship; for she beheld around her the friends of her childhood, formed and proved in the dark season of adversity. As she saw them bathed in tears around her bed, she calmly said, "Do not weep for me, nor waste your time in fruitless prayers for my recovery, but pray rather for the salvation of my soul." [15] On receiving the extreme unction, she refused to have her feet exposed, as was usual on that occasion; a circumstance, which, occurring at a time when there can be no suspicion of affectation, is often noticed by Spanish writers, as a proof of that sensitive delicacy and decorum, which distinguished her through life. [16] At length, having received the sacraments, and performed all the offices of a sincere and devout Christian, she gently expired a little before noon, on Wednesday, November 26th, 1504, in the fifty-fourth year of her age, and thirtieth of her reign. [17] "My hand," says Peter Martyr, in a letter written on the same day to the archbishop of Granada, "falls powerless by my side, for very sorrow. The world has lost its noblest ornament; a loss to be deplored not only by Spain, which she has so long carried forward in the career of glory, but by every nation in Christendom; for she was the mirror of every virtue, the shield of the innocent, and an avenging sword to the wicked. I know none of her sex, in ancient or modern times, who in my judgment is at all worthy to be named with this incomparable woman." [18] No time was lost in making preparations for transporting the queen's body unembalmed to Granada, in strict conformity to her orders. It was escorted by a numerous _cortège_ of cavaliers and ecclesiastics, among whom was the faithful Martyr. The procession began its mournful march the day following her death, taking the route through Arevalo, Toledo, and Jaen. Scarcely had it left Medina del Campo, when a tremendous tempest set in, which continued with little interruption during the whole journey. The roads were rendered nearly impassable; the bridges swept away, the small streams swollen to the size of the Tagus, and the level country buried under a deluge of water. Neither sun nor stars were seen during their whole progress. The horses and mules were borne down by the torrents, and the riders in several instances perished with them. "Never," exclaims Martyr, "did I encounter such perils, in the whole of my hazardous pilgrimage to Egypt." [19] At length, on the 18th of December, the melancholy and way-worn cavalcade reached the place of its destination; and, amidst the wild strife of the elements, the peaceful remains of Isabella were laid, with simple solemnities, in the Franciscan monastery of the Alhambra. Here, under the shadow of those venerable Moslem towers, and in the heart of the capital which her noble constancy had recovered for her country, they continued to repose till after the death of Ferdinand, when they were removed to be laid by his side, in the stately mausoleum of the cathedral church of Granada. [20] I shall defer the review of Queen Isabella's administration, until it can be done in conjunction with that of Ferdinand; and shall confine myself at present to such considerations on the prominent traits of her character, as have been suggested by the preceding history of her life. Her person, as mentioned in the early part of the narrative, was of the middle height, and well proportioned. She had a clear, fresh complexion, with light blue eyes and auburn hair,--a style of beauty exceedingly rare in Spain. Her features were regular, and universally allowed to be uncommonly handsome. [21] The illusion which attaches to rank, more especially when united with engaging manners, might lead us to suspect some exaggeration in the encomiums so liberally lavished on her. But they would seem to be in a great measure justified by the portraits that remain of her, which combine a faultless symmetry of features with singular sweetness and intelligence of expression. Her manners were most gracious and pleasing. They were marked by natural dignity and modest reserve, tempered by an affability which flowed from the kindliness of her disposition. She was the last person to be approached with undue familiarity; yet the respect which she imposed was mingled with the strongest feelings of devotion and love. She showed great tact in accommodating herself to the peculiar situation and character of those around her. She appeared in arms at the head of her troops, and shrunk from none of the hardships of war. During the reforms introduced into the religious houses, she visited the nunneries in person, taking her needle-work with her, and passing the day in the society of the inmates. When travelling in Galicia, she attired herself in the costume of the country, borrowing for that purpose the jewels and other ornaments of the ladies there, and returning them with liberal additions. [22] By this condescending and captivating deportment, as well as by her higher qualities, she gained an ascendency over her turbulent subjects, which no king of Spain could ever boast. She spoke the Castilian with much elegance and correctness. She had an easy fluency of discourse, which, though generally of a serious complexion, was occasionally seasoned with agreeable sallies, some of which have passed into proverbs. [23] She was temperate even to abstemiousness in her diet, seldom or never tasting wine; [24] and so frugal in her table, that the daily expenses for herself and family did not exceed the moderate sum of forty ducats. [25] She was equally simple and economical in her apparel. On all public occasions, indeed, she displayed a royal magnificence; [26] but she had no relish for it in private, and she freely gave away her clothes [27] and jewels, [28] as presents to her friends. Naturally of a sedate, though cheerful temper, [29] she had little taste for the frivolous amusements which make up so much of a court life; and, if she encouraged the presence of minstrels and musicians in her palace, it was to wean her young nobility from the coarser and less intellectual pleasures to which they were addicted. [30] Among her moral qualities, the most conspicuous, perhaps, was her magnanimity. She betrayed nothing little or selfish, in thought or action. Her schemes were vast, and executed in the same noble spirit in which they were conceived. She never employed doubtful agents or sinister measures, but the most direct and open policy. [31.] She scorned to avail herself of advantages offered by the perfidy of others. [32] Where she had once given her confidence, she gave her hearty and steady support; and she was scrupulous to redeem any pledge she had made to those who ventured in her cause, however unpopular. She sustained Ximenes in all his obnoxious but salutary reforms. She seconded Columbus in the prosecution of his arduous enterprise, and shielded him from the calumny of his enemies. She did the same good service to her favorite, Gonsalvo de Cordova; and the day of her death was felt, and, as it proved, truly felt by both, as the last of their good fortune. [33] Artifice and duplicity were so abhorrent to her character, and so averse from her domestic policy, that when they appear in the foreign relations of Spain, it is certainly not imputable to her. She was incapable of harboring any petty distrust, or latent malice; and, although stern in the execution and exaction of public justice, she made the most generous allowance, and even sometimes advances, to those who had personally injured her. [34] But the principle, which gave a peculiar coloring to every feature of Isabella's mind, was piety. It shone forth from the very depths of her soul with a heavenly radiance, which illuminated her whole character. Fortunately, her earliest years had been passed in the rugged school of adversity, under the eye of a mother who implanted in her serious mind such strong principles of religion as nothing in after life had power to shake. At an early age, in the flower of youth and beauty, she was introduced to her brother's court; but its blandishments, so dazzling to a young imagination, had no power over hers; for she was surrounded by a moral atmosphere of purity, "Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt." [35] Such was the decorum of her manners, that, though encompassed by false friends and open enemies, not the slightest reproach was breathed on her fair name in this corrupt and calumnious court. She gave a liberal portion of her time to private devotions, as well as to the public exercises of religion. [36] She expended large sums in useful charities, especially in the erection of hospitals and churches, and the more doubtful endowments of monasteries. [37] Her piety was strikingly exhibited in that unfeigned humility, which, although the very essence of our faith, is so rarely found; and most rarely in those whose great powers and exalted stations seem to raise them above the level of ordinary mortals. A remarkable illustration of this is afforded in the queen's correspondence with Talavera, in which her meek and docile spirit is strikingly contrasted with the puritanical intolerance of her confessor. [38] Yet Talavera, as we have seen, was sincere, and benevolent at heart. Unfortunately, the royal conscience was at times committed to very different keeping; and that humility which, as we have repeatedly had occasion to notice, made her defer so reverentially to her ghostly advisers, led, under the fanatic Torquemada, the confessor of her early youth, to those deep blemishes on her administration, the establishment of the Inquisition, and the exile of the Jews. But, though blemishes of the deepest dye on her administration, they are certainly not to be regarded as such on her moral character. It will be difficult to condemn her, indeed, without condemning the age; for these very acts are not only excused, but extolled by her contemporaries, as constituting her strongest claims to renown, and to the gratitude of her country. [39] They proceeded from the principle, openly avowed by the court of Rome, that zeal for the purity of the faith could atone for every crime. This immoral maxim, flowing from the head of the church, was echoed in a thousand different forms by the subordinate clergy, and greedily received by a superstitious people. [40] It was not to be expected, that a solitary woman, filled with natural diffidence of her own capacity on such subjects, should array herself against those venerated counsellors, whom she had been taught from her cradle to look to as the guides and guardians of her conscience. However mischievous the operations of the Inquisition may have been in Spain, its establishment, in point of principle, was not worse than many other measures, which have passed with far less censure, though in a much more advanced and civilized age. [41] Where, indeed, during the sixteenth, and the greater part of the seventeenth century, was the principle of persecution abandoned by the dominant party, whether Catholic or Protestant? And where that of toleration asserted, except by the weaker? It is true, to borrow Isabella's own expression, in her letter to Talavera, the prevalence of a bad custom cannot constitute its apology. But it should serve much to mitigate our condemnation of the queen, that she fell into no greater error, in the imperfect light in which she lived, than was common to the greatest minds in a later and far riper period. [42] Isabella's actions, indeed, were habitually based on principle. Whatever errors of judgment be imputed to her, she most anxiously sought in all situations to discern and discharge her duty. Faithful in the dispensation of justice, no bribe was large enough to ward off the execution of the law. [43] No motive, not even conjugal affection, could induce her to make an unsuitable appointment to public office. [44] No reverence for the ministers of religion could lead her to wink at their misconduct; [45] nor could the deference she entertained for the head of the church, allow her to tolerate his encroachments on the rights of her crown. [46] She seemed to consider herself especially bound to preserve entire the peculiar claims and privileges of Castile, after its union under the same sovereign with Aragon. [47] And although, "while her own will was law," says Peter Martyr, "she governed in such a manner that it might appear the joint action of both Ferdinand and herself," yet she was careful never to surrender into his hands one of those prerogatives which belonged to her as queen proprietor of the kingdom. [48] Isabella's measures were characterized by that practical good sense, without which the most brilliant parts may work more to the woe than to the weal of mankind. Though engaged all her life in reforms, she had none of the failings so common in reformers. Her plans, though vast, were never visionary. The best proof of this is, that she lived to see most of them realized. She was quick to discern objects of real utility. She saw the importance of the new discovery of printing, and liberally patronized it from the first moment it appeared. [49] She had none of the exclusive, local prejudices, too common with her countrymen. She drew talent from the most remote quarters to her dominions, by munificent rewards. She imported foreign artisans for her manufactures; foreign engineers and officers for the discipline of her army; and foreign scholars to imbue her martial subjects with more cultivated tastes. She consulted the useful in all her subordinate regulations; in her sumptuary laws, for instance, directed against the fashionable extravagances of dress, and the ruinous ostentation, so much affected by the Castilians in their weddings and funerals. [50] Lastly, she showed the same perspicacity in the selection of her agents; well knowing that the best measures become bad in incompetent hands. But, although the skilful selection of her agents was an obvious cause of Isabella's success, yet another, even more important, is to be found in her own vigilance and untiring exertions. During the first busy and bustling years of her reign, these exertions were of incredible magnitude. She was almost always in the saddle, for she made all her journeys on horseback; and she travelled with a rapidity, which made her always present on the spot where her presence was needed. She was never intimidated by the weather, or the state of her own health; and this reckless exposure undoubtedly contributed much to impair her excellent constitution. [51] She was equally indefatigable in her mental application. After assiduous attention to business through the day, she was often known to sit up all night, dictating despatches to her secretaries. [52] In the midst of these overwhelming cares, she found time to supply the defects of her early education by learning Latin, so as to understand it without difficulty, whether written or spoken; and indeed, in the opinion of a competent judge, to attain a critical accuracy in it. [53] As she had little turn for light amusements, she sought relief from graver cares by some useful occupation appropriate to her sex; and she left ample evidence of her skill in this way, in the rich specimens of embroidery, wrought with her own fair hands, with which she decorated the churches. She was careful to instruct her daughters in these more humble departments of domestic duty; for she thought nothing too humble to learn, which was useful. [54] With all her high qualifications, Isabella would have been still unequal to the achievement of her grand designs, without possessing a degree of fortitude rare in either sex; not the courage, which implies contempt of personal danger,--though of this she had a larger share than falls to most men; [55] nor that which supports its possessor under the extremities of bodily pain,--though of this she gave ample evidence, since she endured the greatest suffering her sex is called to bear, without a groan; [56] but that moral courage, which sustains the spirit in the dark hour of adversity, and, gathering light from within to dispel the darkness, imparts its own cheering influence to all around. This was shown remarkably in the stormy season which ushered in her accession, as well as through the whole of the Moorish war. It was her voice that decided never to abandon Alhama. [57] Her remonstrances compelled the king and nobles to return to the field, when they had quitted it, after an ineffectual campaign. As dangers and difficulties multiplied, she multiplied resources to meet them; and, when her soldiers lay drooping under the evils of some protracted siege, she appeared in the midst, mounted on her war-horse, with her delicate limbs cased in knightly mail; [58] and, riding through their ranks, breathed new courage into their hearts by her own intrepid bearing. To her personal efforts, indeed, as well as counsels, the success of this glorious war may be mainly imputed; and the unsuspicious testimony of the Venetian minister, Navagiero, a few years later, shows that the nation so considered it. "Queen Isabel," says he, "by her singular genius, masculine strength of mind, and other virtues most unusual in our own sex, as well as hers, was not merely of great assistance in, but the chief cause of the conquest of Granada. She was, indeed, a most rare and virtuous lady, one of whom the Spaniards talk far more than of the king, sagacious as he was, and uncommon for his time." [59] Happily, these masculine qualities in Isabella did not extinguish the softer ones which constitute the charm of her sex. Her heart overflowed with affectionate sensibility to her family and friends. She watched over the declining days of her aged mother, and ministered to her sad infirmities with all the delicacy of filial tenderness. [60] We have seen abundant proofs how fondly and faithfully she loved her husband to the last, [61] though this love was not always as faithfully requited. [62] For her children she lived more than for herself; and for them too she died, for it was their loss and their afflictions which froze the current of her blood, before age had time to chill it. Her exalted state did not remove her above the sympathies of friendship. [63.] With her friends she forgot the usual distinctions of rank, sharing in their joys, visiting and consoling them in sorrow and sickness, and condescending in more than one instance to assume the office of executrix on their decease. [64] Her heart, indeed, was filled with benevolence to all mankind. In the most fiery heat of war, she was engaged in devising means for mitigating its horrors. She is said to have been the first to introduce the benevolent institution of camp hospitals; and we have seen, more than once, her lively solicitude to spare the effusion of blood even of her enemies. But it is needless to multiply examples of this beautiful, but familiar trait in her character. [65] It is in these more amiable qualities of her sex, that Isabella's superiority becomes most apparent over her illustrious namesake, Elizabeth of England, [66] whose history presents some features parallel to her own. Both were disciplined in early life by the teachings of that stern nurse of wisdom, adversity. Both were made to experience the deepest humiliation at the hands of their nearest relative, who should have cherished and protected them. Both succeeded in establishing themselves on the throne after the most precarious vicissitudes. Each conducted her kingdom, through a long and triumphant reign, to a height of glory, which it had never before reached. Both lived to see the vanity of all earthly grandeur, and to fall the victims of an inconsolable melancholy; and both left behind an illustrious name, unrivalled in the subsequent annals of their country. But, with these few circumstances of their history, the resemblance ceases. Their characters afford scarcely a point of contact. Elizabeth, inheriting a large share of the bold and bluff King Harry's temperament, was haughty, arrogant, coarse, and irascible; while with these fiercer qualities she mingled deep dissimulation and strange irresolution. Isabella, on the other hand, tempered the dignity of royal station with the most bland and courteous manners. Once resolved, she was constant in her purposes, and her conduct in public and private life was characterized by candor and integrity. Both may be said to have shown that magnanimity which is implied by the accomplishment of great objects in the face of great obstacles. But Elizabeth was desperately selfish; she was incapable of forgiving, not merely a real injury, but the slightest affront to her vanity; and she was merciless in exacting retribution. Isabella, on the other hand, lived only for others,--was ready at all times to sacrifice self to considerations of public duty; and, far from personal resentments, showed the greatest condescension and kindness to those who had most sensibly injured her; while her benevolent heart sought every means to mitigate the authorized severities of the law, even towards the guilty. [67] Both possessed rare fortitude. Isabella, indeed, was placed in situations, which demanded more frequent and higher displays of it than her rival; but no one will doubt a full measure of this quality in the daughter of Henry the Eighth. Elizabeth was better educated, and every way more highly accomplished than Isabella. But the latter knew enough to maintain her station with dignity; and she encouraged learning by a munificent patronage. [68] The masculine powers and passions of Elizabeth seemed to divorce her in a great measure from the peculiar attributes of her sex; at least from those which constitute its peculiar charm; for she had abundance of its foibles,--a coquetry and love of admiration, which age could not chill; a levity, most careless, if not criminal; [69] and a fondness for dress and tawdry magnificence of ornament, which was ridiculous, or disgusting, according to the different periods of life in which it was indulged. [70] Isabella, on the other hand, distinguished through life for decorum of manners, and purity beyond the breath of calumny, was content with the legitimate affection which she could inspire within the range of her domestic circle. Far from a frivolous affectation of ornament or dress, she was most simple in her own attire, and seemed to set no value on her jewels, but as they could serve the necessities of the state; [71] when they could be no longer useful in this way, she gave them away, as we have seen, to her friends. Both were uncommonly sagacious in the selection of their ministers; though Elizabeth was drawn into some errors in this particular, by her levity, [72] as was Isabella by religious feeling. It was this, combined with her excessive humility, which led to the only grave errors in the administration of the latter. Her rival fell into no such errors; and she was a stranger to the amiable qualities which led to them. Her conduct was certainly not controlled by religious principle; and, though the bulwark of the Protestant faith, it might be difficult to say whether she were at heart most a Protestant or a Catholic. She viewed religion in its connection with the state, in other words, with herself; and she took measures for enforcing conformity to her own views, not a whit less despotic, and scarcely less sanguinary, than those countenanced for conscience' sake by her more bigoted rival. [73] This feature of bigotry, which has thrown a shade over Isabella's otherwise beautiful character, might lead to a disparagement of her intellectual power compared with that of the English queen. To estimate this aright, we must contemplate the results of their respective reigns. Elizabeth found all the materials of prosperity at hand, and availed herself of them most ably to build up a solid fabric of national grandeur. Isabella created these materials. She saw the faculties of her people locked up in a deathlike lethargy, and she breathed into them the breath of life for those great and heroic enterprises, which terminated in such glorious consequences to the monarchy. It is when viewed from the depressed position of her early days, that the achievements of her reign seem scarcely less than miraculous. The masculine genius of the English queen stands out relieved beyond its natural dimensions by its separation from the softer qualities of her sex. While her rival's, like some vast but symmetrical edifice, loses in appearance somewhat of its actual grandeur from the perfect harmony of its proportions. The circumstances of their deaths, which were somewhat similar, displayed the great dissimilarity of their characters. Both pined amidst their royal state, a prey to incurable despondency, rather than any marked bodily distemper. In Elizabeth it sprung from wounded vanity, a sullen conviction that she had outlived the admiration on which she had so long fed,--and even the solace of friendship, and the attachment of her subjects. Nor did she seek consolation, where alone it was to be found, in that sad hour. Isabella, on the other hand, sunk under a too acute sensibility to the sufferings of others. But, amidst the gloom which gathered around her, she looked with the eye of faith to the brighter prospects which unfolded of the future; and, when she resigned her last breath, it was amidst the tears and universal lamentations of her people. It is in this undying, unabated attachment of the nation, indeed, that we see the most unequivocal testimony to the virtues of Isabella. In the downward progress of things in Spain, some of the most ill-advised measures of her administration have found favor and been perpetuated, while the more salutary have been forgotten. This may lead to a misconception of her real merits. In order to estimate these, we must listen to the voice of her contemporaries, the eye-witnesses of the condition in which she found the state, and in which she left it. We shall then see but one judgment formed of her, whether by foreigners or natives. The French and Italian writers equally join in celebrating the triumphant glories of her reign, and her magnanimity, wisdom, and purity of character. [74] Her own subjects extol her as "the most brilliant exemplar of every virtue," and mourn over the day of her death as "the last of the prosperity and happiness of their country." [75] While those who had nearer access to her person are unbounded in their admiration of those amiable qualities, whose full power is revealed only in the unrestrained intimacies of domestic life. [76] The judgment of posterity has ratified the sentence of her own age. The most enlightened Spaniards of the present day, by no means insensible to the errors of her government, but more capable of appreciating its merits than those of a less instructed age, bear honorable testimony to her deserts; and, while they pass over the bloated magnificence of succeeding monarchs, who arrest the popular eye, dwell with enthusiasm on Isabella's character, as the most truly great in their line of princes. [77] FOOTNOTES [1] Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 28, cap. 11.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 84. [2] Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 16.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 271, 272.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 46.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1504. [3] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 46, 47.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 273.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1504. [4] Opus Epist., epist. 274. [5] A short time before her death, she received a visit from the distinguished officer, Prospero Colonna. The Italian noble, on being presented to King Ferdinand, told him, that "he had come to Castile to behold the woman, who from her sick bed ruled the world;" "ver una señora que desde la cama mandava al mundo." Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 8.--Carta de Gonzalo, MS. [6] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 47. Among the foreigners introduced to the queen at this time, was a celebrated Venetian traveller, named Vianelli, who presented her with a cross of pure gold set with precious stones, among which was a carbuncle of inestimable value. The liberal Italian met with rather an uncourtly rebuke from Ximenes, who told him, on leaving the presence, that "he had rather have the money his diamonds cost, to spend in the service of the church, than all the gems of the Indies." Ibid. [7] Opus Epist., epist. 276. [8] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 200, 201.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1504.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 16.--Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, pp. 423, 424. [9] "Ni fagan fnera de los dichos mis Reynos e Señorios, Leyes e Premáticas, ni las otras cosas que en Cortes se deven hazer segand las Leyes de ellos;" (Testamento, apud Dormer, Discursos Varios, p. 343;) an honorable testimony to the legislative rights of the cortes, which contrasts strongly with the despotic assumption of preceding and succeeding princes. [10] I have before me three copies of Isabella's testament; one in MS., apud Carbajal, Anales, año 1504; a second printed in the beautiful Valencia edition of Mariana, tom. ix. apend. no. 1; and a third published in Dormer's Discursos Varios de Historia, pp. 314-388. I am not aware that it has been printed elsewhere. [11] The "Ordenanjas Reales de Castilla," published in 1484, and the "Pragmáticas del Reyno," first printed in 1503, comprehend the general legislation of this reign; a particular account of which the reader may find in Part I. Chapter 6, and Part II. Chapter 26, of this History. [12] Las Casas, who will not be suspected of sycophancy, remarks, in his narrative of the destruction of the Indies, "Les plus grandes horreurs de ces guerres et de cette boucherie commencèrent aussitôt qu'on sut en Amérique que la reine Isabelle venait de mourir; car jusqu'alors il ne s'était pas commis autant de crimes dans l'île Espagnole, et l'on avait même eu soin de les cacher à cette princesse, parce qu'elle ne cessait de recommander de traiter les Indiens avec douceur, et de ne rien négliger pour les rendre heureux: _j'ai vu, ainsi que beaucoup d'Espagnols, les lettres qu'elle écrivait à ce sujet, et les ordres qu'elle envoyait; ce qui prouve que cette admirable reine aurait mis fin à tant de cruautés, si elle avait pu les connaître_." Oeuvres, ed. de Llorente, tom. i. p. 21. [13] The original codicil is still preserved among the manuscripts of the Royal Library at Madrid. It is appended to the queen's testament in the works before noticed. [14] Clemencin has given a fac-simile of this last signature of the queen, in the Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 21. [15] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 187.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 16. [16] Arevalo, Historia Palentina, MS., apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. p. 572.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 187.--Garibay, Compendio, ubi supra. [17] Isabella was born April 22d, 1451, and ascended the throne December 12th, 1474. [18] Opus Epist., epist. 279. [19] Opus Epist., epist. 280.--The text does not exaggerate the language of the epistle. [20] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 201.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1504.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 16.--Zurita, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 84.--Navagiero, Viaggio, fol. 23. [21] The Curate of Los Palacios remarks of her, "Fue muger hermosa, de muy gentil cuerpo, e gesto, e composicion." (Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 201.) Pulgar, another contemporary, eulogizes "el mirar muy gracioso, y honesto, las facciones del rostro bien puestas, la cara toda muy hermosa." (Reyes Católicos, part. 1, cap. 4.) L. Marineo says, "Todo lo que avia en el rey de dignidad, se hallava en la reyna de graciosa hermosura, y en entrambos se mostrava una majestad venerable, aunque a juyzio de muchos la reyna era de mayor hermosura." (Cosas Memorables, fol. 182.) And Oviedo, who had likewise frequent opportunities of personal observation, does not hesitate to declare, "En hermosura puestas delante de S. A. todas las mugeres que yo he visto, ninguna vi tan graciosa, ni tanto de ver como su persona." Quincuagenas, MS. [22] Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 8. [23] Ibid., ubi supra. [24] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 182.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 1, cap, 4. [25] Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. p. 323. [26] Such occasions have rare charms, of course, for the gossipping chroniclers of the period. See, among others, the gorgeous ceremonial of the baptism and presentation of Prince John at Seville, 1478, as related by the good Curate of Los Palacios. (Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 32, 33.) "Isabella was surrounded and served," says Pulgar, "by grandees and lords of the highest rank, so that it was said she maintained too great pomp; _pompa demasiada_." Reyes Católicos, part. 1, cap. 4. [27] Florez quotes a passage from an original letter of the queen, written soon after one of her progresses into Galicia, showing her habitual liberality in this way. "Decid a doña Luisa, que porque vengo de Galicia desecha de vestidos, no le envio para su hermana; que no tengo agora cosa buena; mas yo ge los enviare presto buenos." Reynas Cathólicas, tom. ii. p. 839. [28] See the magnificent inventory presented to her daughter-in-law, Margaret of Austria, and to her daughter Maria, queen of Portugal, apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 12. [29] "Alegre," says the author of "Carro de las Doñas," "de una alegria honesta y mui mesurada." Ibid., p. 558. [30] Among the retainers of the court, Bernaldez notices "la moltitud de poetas, de trobadores, e músicos de todas partes." Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 201. [31] "Queria que sus cartas é mandamientos fuesen complidos con diligencia." Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 1, cap. 4 [32] See a remarkable instance of this, in her treatment of the faithless Juan de Corral, noticed in Part I. Chapter 10, of this History. [33] The melancholy tone of Columbus's correspondence after the queen's death, shows too well the color of his fortunes and feelings. (Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. i. pp. 341 et seq.) The sentiments of the Great Captain were still more unequivocally expressed, according to Giovio. "Nec multis inde diebus Regina fato concessit, incredibili cum dolore atque jacturâ Consalvi; nam ab eâ tanquam alumnus, ac in ejus regiâ educatus, cuncta quae exoptari possent virtutis et dignitatis incrementa ademptum fuisse fatebatur, rege ipso quanquam minus benigno parumque liberali nunquam reginae voluntati reluctari anso. Id vero praeclare tanquam verissimum apparuit elatâ reginâ." Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 275. [34] The reader may recall a striking example of this, in the early part of her reign, in her great tenderness and forbearance towards the humors of Carillo, archbishop of Toledo, her quondam friend, but then her most implacable foe. [35] Isabella at her brother's court might well have sat for the whole of Milton's beautiful portraiture. "So dear to heaven is saintly chastity, That, when a soul is found sincerely so, A thousand liveried angels lackey her. Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt, And, in clear dream and solemn vision. Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear, Till oft converse with heavenly habitants Begin to cast a beam on the outward shape, The unpolluted temple of the mind, And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence, Till all be made immortal." [36] "Era tanto," says L. Marineo, "el ardor y diligencia que tenia cerca el culto divino, que aunque de dia y de noche estava muy ocupada en grandes y arduos negocios de la governacion de muchos reynos y señorios, parescia que _su vida era mas contemplativa que activa_. Porque siempre se hallava presente a los divinos oficios y a la palabra de Dios. Era tanta su atencion que si alguno de los que celebravan o cantavan los psalmos, o otras cosas de la yglesia errava alguna dicion o syllaba, lo sintia y lo notava, y despues como maestro a discipulo se lo emendava y corregia. Acostumbrava cada dia dezir todas las horas canónicas demas de otras muchas votivas y extraordinarias devociones que tenia." Cosas Memorables, fol. 183. [37] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 1, cap. 4.--Lucio Marineo enumerates many of these splendid charities.--(Cosas Memorables, fol. 165.) See also the notices scattered over the Itinerary (Viaggio in Spagna) of Navagiero, who travelled through the country a few years after. [38] The archbishop's letters are little better than a homily on the sins of dancing, feasting, dressing, and the like, garnished with scriptural allusions, and conveyed in a tone of sour rebuke, that would have done credit to the most canting Roundhead in Oliver Cromwell's court. The queen, far from taking exception at it, vindicates herself from the grave imputations with a degree of earnestness and simplicity, which may provoke a smile in the reader. "I am aware," she concludes, "that custom cannot make an action, bad in itself, good; but I wish your opinion, whether, under all the circumstances, these can be considered bad; that, if so, they may be discontinued in future." See this curious correspondence in Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 13. [39] Such encomiums become still more striking in writers of sound and expansive views like Zurita and Blancas, who, although flourishing in a better instructed age, do not scruple to pronounce the Inquisition "the greatest evidence of her prudence and piety, whose uncommon utility, not only Spain, but all Christendom, freely acknowledged!" Blancas, Commentarii, p. 263.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 1, cap. 6. [40] Sismondi displays the mischievous influence of these theological dogmas in Italy, as well as Spain, under the pontificate of Alexander VI. and his immediate predecessors, in the 90th chapter of his eloquent and philosophical "Histoire des Républiques Italiennes." [41] I borrow almost the words of Mr. Hallam, who, noticing the penal statutes against Catholics under Elizabeth, says, "They established a persecution, which fell not at all short in principle of that for which the Inquisition had become so odious." (Constitutional History of England, (Paris, 1827,) vol. i. chap. 3.) Even Lord Burleigh, commenting on the mode of examination adopted in certain cases by the High Commission court, does not hesitate to say, the interrogatories were "so curiously penned, so full of branches and circumstances, as he thought the inquisitors of Spain used not so many questions to comprehend and to trap their preys." Ibid., chap. 4. [42] Even Milton, in his essay on the "Liberty of Unlicensed Printing," the most splendid argument, perhaps, the world had then witnessed in behalf of intellectual liberty, would exclude Popery from the benefits of toleration, as a religion which the public good required at all events to be extirpated. Such were the crude views of the rights of conscience entertained in the latter half of the seventeenth century, by one of those gifted minds, whose extraordinary elevation enabled it to catch and reflect back the coming light of knowledge, long before it had fallen on the rest of mankind. [43] The most remarkable example of this, perhaps, occurred in the case of the wealthy Galician knight, Yañez de Lugo, who endeavored to purchase a pardon of the queen by the enormous bribe of 40,000 doblas of gold. The attempt failed, though warmly supported by some of the royal counsellors. The story is well vouched. Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 97.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 180. [44] The reader may recollect a pertinent illustration of this, on the occasion of Ximenes's appointment to the primacy. See Part II. Chapter 5, of this History. [45] See, among other instances, her exemplary chastisement of the ecclesiastics of Truxillo. Part I. Chapter 12, of this History. [46] Ibid., Part I. Chapter 6, Part II. Chapter 10, et alibi. Indeed, this independent attitude was shown, as I have more than once had occasion to notice, not merely in shielding the rights of her own crown, but in the boldest remonstrances against the corrupt practices and personal immorality of those who filled the chair of St. Peter at this period. [47] The public acts of this reign afford repeated evidence of the pertinacity with which Isabella insisted on reserving the benefits of the Moorish conquests and the American discoveries for her own subjects of Castile, by whom and for whom they had been mainly achieved. The same thing is reiterated in the most emphatic manner in her testament. [48] Opus Epist., epist. 31. [49] Mem. de la. Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. p. 49. [50] The preamble of one of her _pragmáticas_ against this lavish expenditure at funerals, contains some reflections worth quoting for the evidence they afford of her practical good sense. "Nos deseando proveer e remediar al tal gasto sin provecho, e considerando que esto no redunda en sufragio e alivio de las animas de los defuntos," etc. "Pero los Católicos Christianos que creemos que hai otra vida despues desta, donde las animas esperan folganza e vida perdurable, _desta habemos de curar e procurar de la ganar por obras meritorias, e no por cosas transitorias e vanas como son los lutos e gastos excesivos_," Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. p. 318. [51] Her exposure in this way on one occasion brought on a miscarriage. According to Gomez, indeed, she finally died of a painful internal disorder, occasioned by her long and laborious journeys. (De Rebus Gestis, fol. 47.) Giovio adopts the same account. (Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 275.) The authorities are good, certainly; but Martyr, who was in the palace, with every opportunity of correct information, and with no reason for concealment of the truth, in his private correspondence with Tendilla and Talavera, makes no allusion whatever to such a complaint, in his circumstantial account of the queen's illness. [52] Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. vii. p. 411.--Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. p. 29. [53] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 182.--"Pronunciaba con primor el latin, y era tan habil en la prosodia, que si erraban algun acento, luego le corregia." Idem., apud Florez, Reynas Cathólicas, tom. ii. pp. 834. [54] If we are to believe Florez, the king wore no shirt but of the queen's making. "Preciabase de no haverse puesto su marido camisa, que elle no huviesse hilado y cosido." (Reynas Cathólicas, tom. ii. p. 832.) If this be taken literally, his wardrobe, considering the multitude of her avocations, must have been indifferently furnished. [55] Among many evidences of this, what other need be given than her conduct at the famous riot at Segovia? Part I. Chapter 6, of this History. [56] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 1, cap. 4.--"No fue la Reyna," says L. Marineo, "de animo menos fuerte para sufrir los dolores corporales. Porque como yo fuy informado de las dueñas que le servian en la camara, ni en los dolores que padescia de sus enfermidades, ni en los del parto (que es cosa de grande admiracion) nunca la vieron quexar se; antes con increyble y maravillosa fortaleza los suffria y dissimulava." (Cosas Memorables, fol. 186.) To the same effect writes the anonymous author of the "Carro de las Doñas," apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. p. 559. [57] "Era firme en sus propósitos, de los quales se retraia con gran dificultad." Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 1, cap. 4. [58] The reader may refresh his recollection of Tasso's graceful sketch of Erminia in similar warlike panoply. "Col durissimo acciar preme ed offende Il delicato collo e l'aurea chioma; E la tenera man lo scudo prende Pur troppo grave e insopportabil soma. Cosi tutta di ferro intorno splende, E in atto militar se stessa doma." Gerusalemme Liberata, canto 6, stanza 92. [59] Viaggio, fol. 27. [60] We find one of the first articles in the marriage treaty with Ferdinand enjoining him to cherish, and treat her mother with all reverence, and to provide suitably for her royal maintenance. (Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Apend. no. 1.) The author of the "Carro de las Doñas" thus notices her tender devotedness to her parent, at a later period. "Y esto me dijo quien lo vido por sus proprios ojos, que la Reyna Doña Isabel, nuestra señora, cuando estaba alli en Arevalo visitando a su madre, ella misma por su persona servia a su misma madre. E aqui tomen ejemplo los hijos como han de servir à sus padres, pues una Reina tan poderosa y en negocios tan arduos puesta, todos los mas de los años (puesto todo aparte y pospuesto) iba a visitar a su madre y la servia humilmente." Viaggio, p. 557. [61] Among other little tokens of mutual affection, it may be mentioned that not only the public coin, but their furniture, books, and other articles of personal property, were stamped with their initials, F & I, or emblazoned with their devices, his being a yoke, and hers a sheaf of arrows. (Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 2, dial. 3.) It was common, says Oviedo, for each party to take a device, whose initial corresponded with that of the name of the other; as was the case here, with _jugo_ and _flechas_. [62] Marineo thus speaks of the queen's discreet and most amiable conduct in these delicate matters. "Amava en tanta manera al Rey su marido, que andava sobre aviso con celos a ver si el amava a otras. Y si sentia que mirava a alguna dama o donzella de su casa con señal de amores, con mucha prudencia buscava medios y maneras con que despedir aquella tal persona de su casa, con su mucha honrra y provecho." (Cosas Memorables, fol. 182.) There was unfortunately too much cause for this uneasiness. See Part II. Chapter 24, of this History. [63] The best beloved of her friends, probably, was the marchioness of Moya, who, seldom separated from her royal mistress through life, had the melancholy satisfaction of closing her eyes in death. Oviedo, who saw them frequently together, says, that the queen never addressed this lady, even in later life, with any other than the endearing title of _hija marquesa_, "daughter marchioness." Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 23 [64] As was the case with Cardenas, the comendador mayor, and the grand cardinal Mendoza, to whom, as we have already seen, she paid the kindest attentions during their last illness. While in this way she indulged the natural dictates of her heart, she was careful to render every outward mark of respect to the memory of those whose rank or services entitled them to such consideration. "Quando," says the author so often quoted, "quiera que fallescia alguno de los grandes de su reyno, o algun príncipe Christiano, luego embiavan varones sabios y religiosos para consolar a sus heredores y deudos. Y demas desto se vestian de ropas de luto en testimonio del dolor y sentimiento que hazian." L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 185. [65] Her humanity was shown in her attempts to mitigate the ferocious character of those national amusements, the bull-fights, the popularity of which throughout the country was too great, as she intimates in one of her letters, to admit of her abolishing them altogether. She was so much moved at the sanguinary issue of one of these combats, which she witnessed at Arevalo, says a contemporary, that she devised a plan, by guarding the horns of the bulls, for preventing any serious injury to the men and horses; and she never would attend another of these spectacles until this precaution had been adopted. Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS. [66] Isabella, the name of the Catholic queen, is correctly rendered into English by that of Elizabeth. [67] She gave evidence of this, in the commutation of the sentence she obtained for the wretch who stabbed her husband, and whom her ferocious nobles would have put to death, without the opportunity of confession and absolution, that "his soul might perish with his body!" (See her letter to Talavera.) She showed this merciful temper, so rare in that rough age, by dispensing altogether with the preliminary barbarities, sometimes prescribed by the law in capital executions. Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 13. [68] Hume admits, that, "unhappily for literature, at least for the learned of this age, Queen Elizabeth's vanity lay more in shining by her own learning, than in encouraging men of genius by her liberality." [69] Which of the two, the reader of the records of these times may be somewhat puzzled to determine.--If one need be convinced how many faces history can wear, and how difficult it is to get at the true one, he has only to compare Dr. Lingard's account of this reign with Mr. Turner's. Much obliquity was to be expected, indeed, from the avowed apologist of a persecuted party, like the former writer. But it attaches, I fear, to the latter in more than one instance,--as in the reign of Richard III., for example. Does it proceed from the desire of saying something new on a beaten topic, where the new cannot always be true? Or, as is most probable, from that confiding benevolence, which throws somewhat of its own light over the darkest shades of human character? The unprejudiced reader may perhaps agree, that the balance of this great queen's good and bad qualities is held with a more steady and impartial hand by Mr. Hallam than any preceding writer. [70] The unsuspicious testimony of her godson, Harrington, places these foibles in the most ludicrous light. If the well-known story, repeated by historians, of the three thousand dresses left in her wardrobe at her decease, be true, or near truth, it affords a singular contrast with Isabella's taste in these matters. [71] The reader will remember how effectually they answered this purpose in the Moorish war. See Part I. Chapter 14, of this History. [72] It is scarcely necessary to mention the names of Hatton and Leicester, both recommended to the first offices in the state chiefly by their personal attractions, and the latter of whom continued to maintain the highest place in his sovereign's favor for thirty years or more, in despite of his total destitution of moral worth. [73] Queen Elizabeth, indeed, in a declaration to her people, proclaims, "We know not, nor have any meaning to allow, that any of our subjects should be molested, either by examination or inquisition, in any matter of faith, as long as they shall profess the Christian faith." (Turner's Elizabeth, vol. ii. p. 241, note.) One is reminded of Parson Thwackum's definition in "Tom Jones," "When I mention religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the church of England." It would be difficult to say which fared worst, Puritans or Catholics, under this system of toleration. [74] "Quum generosi," says Paolo Giovio, speaking of her, "prudentisque animi magnitudine, tum pudicitiae et pietatis laude antiquis heroidibus comparanda." (Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 205.) Guicciardini eulogizes her as "Donna di onestissimi costumi, e in concetto grandissimo nei Regni suoi di magnanimità e prudenza." (Istoria, lib. 6.) The _loyal serviteur_ notices her death in the following chivalrous strain. "L'an 1506, une des plus triumphantes e glorieuses dames qui puis mille ans ait esté sur terre alla de vie a trespas; ce fut la royne Ysabel de Castille, qui ayda, le bras armé, à conquester le royaulme de Grenade sur les Mores. Je veux bien asseurer aux lecteurs de ceste presente hystoire, que sa vie a esté telle, qu'elle a bien mérité couronne de laurier après sa mort." Mémoires de Bayard, chap. 26.--See also Comines, Mémoires, chap. 23.--Navagiero, Viaggio, fol. 27.--et al. auct. [75] I borrow the words of one contemporary; "Quo quidem die omnis Hispaniae felicitas, omne decus, omnium virtutum pulcherrimum specimen interiit," (L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, lib. 21,)--and the sentiments of all. [76] If the reader needs further testimony of this, he will find abundance collected by the indefatigable Clemencin, in the 21st Ilust. of the Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. [77] It would be easy to cite the authority over and over again of such writers as Marina, Sempere, Llorente, Navarrete, Quintana, and others, who have done such honor to the literature of Spain in the present century. It will be sufficient, however, to advert to the remarkable tribute paid to Isabella's character by the Royal Spanish Academy of History; who in 1805 appointed their late secretary, Clemencin, to deliver a eulogy on that illustrious theme; and who raised a still nobler monument to her memory, by the publication, in 1821, of the various documents compiled by him for the illustration of her reign, as a separate volume of their valuable Memoirs. CHAPTER XVII. FERDINAND REGENT.--HIS SECOND MARRIAGE.--DISSENSIONS WITH PHILIP.-- RESIGNATION OF THE REGENCY. 1504-1506. Ferdinand Regent.--Philip's Pretensions.--Ferdinand's Perplexities.-- Impolitic Treaty with France.--The King's Second Marriage.--Landing of Philip and Joanna.--Unpopularity of Ferdinand.--His Interview with his Son-in-law.--He resigns the Regency. The death of Isabella gives a new complexion to our history, a principal object of which has been the illustration of her personal character and public administration. The latter part of the narrative, it is true, has been chiefly occupied with the foreign relations of Spain, in which her interference has been less obvious than in the domestic. But still we have been made conscious of her presence and parental supervision, by the maintenance of order, and the general prosperity of the nation. Her death will make us more sensible of this influence; since it was the signal for disorders which even the genius and authority of Ferdinand were unable to suppress. While the queen's remains were yet scarcely cold, King Ferdinand took the usual measures for announcing the succession. He resigned the crown of Castile, which he had worn with so much glory for thirty years. From a platform raised in the great square of Toledo, the heralds proclaimed, with sound of trumpet, the accession of Philip and Joanna to the Castilian throne, and the royal standard was unfurled by the duke of Alva, in honor of the illustrious pair. The king of Aragon then publicly assumed the title of administrator or governor of Castile, as provided by the queen's testament, and received the obeisance of such of the nobles as were present, in his new capacity. These proceedings took place on the evening of the same day on which the queen expired. [1] A circular letter was next addressed to the principal cities, requiring them, after the customary celebration of the obsequies of their late sovereign, to raise the royal banners in the name of Joanna; and writs were immediately issued in her name, without mention of Philip's, for the convocation of a cortes to ratify these proceedings. [2] The assembly met at Toro, January 11th, 1505. The queen's will, or rather such clauses of it as related to the succession, were read aloud, and received the entire approbation of the commons, who, together with the grandees and prelates present, took the oaths of allegiance to Joanna, as queen and lady proprietor, and to Philip as her husband. They then determined that the exigency, contemplated in the testament, of Joanna's incapacity, actually existed, [3] and proceeded to tender their homage to King Ferdinand, as the lawful governor of the realm in her name. The latter in turn made the customary oath to respect the laws and liberties of the kingdom, and the whole was terminated by an embassy from the cortes, with a written account of its proceedings, to their new sovereigns in Flanders. [4] All seemed now done, that was demanded for giving a constitutional sanction to Ferdinand's authority as regent. By the written law of the land, the sovereign was empowered to nominate a regency, in case of the minority or incapacity of the heir apparent. [5] This had been done in the present instance by Isabella, and at the earnest solicitation of the cortes, made two years previously to her death. It had received the cordial approbation of that body, which had undeniable authority to control such testamentary provisions. [6] Thus, from the first to the last stage of the proceeding, the whole had gone on with a scrupulous attention to constitutional forms. Yet the authority of the new regent was far from being firmly seated; and it was the conviction of this, which had led him to accelerate measures. Many of the nobles were extremely dissatisfied with the queen's settlement of the regency, which had taken air before her death; and they had even gone so far as to send to Flanders before that event, and invite Philip to assume the government himself, as the natural guardian of his wife. [7] These discontented lords, if they did not refuse to join in the public acts of acknowledgment to Ferdinand at Toro, at least were not reserved in intimating their dissatisfaction. [8] Among the most prominent were the marquis of Villena, who may be said to have been nursed to faction from the cradle, and the duke of Najara, both potent nobles, whose broad domains had been grievously clipped by the resumption of the crown lands so scrupulously enforced by the late government, and who looked forward to their speedy recovery under the careless rule of a young, inexperienced prince like Philip. [9] But the most efficient of his partisans was Don Juan Manuel, Ferdinand's ambassador at the court of Maximilian. This nobleman, descended from one of the most illustrious houses in Castile, was a person of uncommon parts; restless and intriguing, plausible in his address, bold in his plans, but exceedingly cautious, and even cunning, in the execution of them. He had formerly insinuated himself into Philip's confidence, during his visit to Spain, and, on receiving news of the queen's death, hastened without delay to join him in the Netherlands. Through his means, an extensive correspondence was soon opened with the discontented Castilian lords; and Philip was persuaded, not only to assert his pretensions to undivided supremacy in Castile, but to send a letter to his royal father-in-law, requiring him to resign the government at once, and retire into Aragon. [10] The demand was treated with some contempt by Ferdinand, who admonished him of his incompetency to govern a nation like the Spaniards, whom he understood so little, but urged him at the same time to present himself before them with his wife, as soon as possible. [12] Ferdinand's situation, however, was far from comfortable. Philip's, or rather Manuel's, emissaries were busily stirring up the embers of disaffection. They dwelt on the advantages to be gained from the free and lavish disposition of Philip, which they contrasted with the parsimonious temper of the stern _old Catalan_, who had so long held them under his yoke. [13] Ferdinand, whose policy it had been to crush the overgrown power of the nobility, and who, as a foreigner, had none of the natural claims to loyalty enjoyed by his late queen, was extremely odious to that jealous and haughty body. The number of Philip's adherents increased in it every day, and soon comprehended the most considerable names in the kingdom. The king, who watched these symptoms of disaffection with deep anxiety, said little, says Martyr, but coolly scrutinized the minds of those around him, dissembling as far as possible his own sentiments. [14] He received further and more unequivocal evidence, at this time, of the alienation of his son-in-law. An Aragonese gentleman, named Conchillos, whom he had placed near the person of his daughter, obtained a letter from her, in which she approved in the fullest manner of her father's retaining the administration of the kingdom. The letter was betrayed to Philip; the unfortunate secretary was seized and thrown into a dungeon, and Joanna was placed under a rigorous confinement, which much aggravated her malady. [15] With this affront, the king received also the alarming intelligence, that the emperor Maximilian and his son Philip were tampering with the fidelity of the Great Captain; endeavoring to secure Naples in any event to the archduke, who claimed it as the appurtenance of Castile, by whose armies its conquest, in fact, had been achieved. There were not wanting persons of high standing at Ferdinand's court, to infuse suspicions, however unwarrantable, into the royal mind, of the loyalty of his viceroy, a Castilian by birth, and who owed his elevation exclusively to the queen. [16] The king was still further annoyed by reports of the intimate relations subsisting between his old enemy, Louis the Twelfth, and Philip, whose children were affianced to each other. The French monarch, it was said, was prepared to support his ally in an invasion of Castile, for the recovery of his rights, by a diversion in his favor on the side of Roussillon, as well as of Naples. [17] The Catholic king felt sorely perplexed by these multiplied embarrassments. During the brief period of his regency, he had endeavored to recommend himself to the people by a strict and impartial administration of the laws, and the maintenance of public order. The people, indeed, appreciated the value of a government under which they had been protected from the oppressions of the aristocracy more effectually than at any former period. They had testified their good-will by the alacrity with which they confirmed Isabella's testamentary dispositions, at Toro. But all this served only to sharpen the aversion of the nobles. Some of Ferdinand's counsellors would have persuaded him to carry measures with a higher hand. They urged him to resume the title of King of Castile, which he had so long possessed as husband of the late queen; [18] and others even advised him to assemble an armed force, which should overawe all opposition to his authority at home, and secure the country from invasion. He had facilities for this in the disbanded levies lately returned from Italy, as well as in a considerable body drawn from his native dominions of Aragon, waiting his orders on the frontier. [19] Such violent measures, however, were repugnant to his habitual policy, temperate and cautious. He shrunk from a contest, in which even success must bring unspeakable calamities on the country, [20] and, if he ever seriously entertained such views, [21] he abandoned them, and employed his levies on another destination in Africa. [22] His situation, however, grew every hour more critical. Alarmed by rumors of Louis's military preparations, for which liberal supplies were voted by the states general; trembling for the fate of his Italian possessions; deserted and betrayed by the great nobility at home; there seemed now no alternative left for him but to maintain his ground by force, or to resign at once, as required by Philip, and retire into Aragon. This latter course appears never to have been contemplated by him. He resolved at all hazards to keep the reins in his own grasp, influenced in part, probably, by the consciousness of his rights, as well as by a sense of duty, which forbade him to resign the trust he had voluntarily assumed into such incompetent hands as those of Philip and his counsellors; and partly, no doubt, by natural reluctance to relinquish the authority which he had enjoyed for so many years. To keep it, he had recourse to an expedient, such as neither friend nor foe could have anticipated. He saw the only chance of maintaining his present position lay in detaching France from the interests of Philip, and securing her to himself. The great obstacle to this was their conflicting claims on Naples. This he proposed to obviate by proposals of marriage to some member of the royal family, in whose favor these claims, with the consent of King Louis, might be resigned. He accordingly despatched a confidential envoy privately into France, with ample instructions for arranging the preliminaries. This person was Juan de Enguera, a Catalan monk of much repute for his learning, and a member of the royal council. [23] Louis the Twelfth had viewed with much satisfaction the growing misunderstanding betwixt Philip and his father-in-law, and had cunningly used his influence over the young prince to foment it. He felt the deepest disquietude at the prospect of the enormous inheritance which was to devolve on the former, comprehending Burgundy and Flanders, Austria, and probably the Empire, together with the united crowns of Spain and their rich dependencies. By the proposed marriage, a dismemberment might be made at least of the Spanish monarchy; and the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, passing under different sceptres, might serve, as they had formerly done, to neutralize each other. It was true, this would involve a rupture with Philip, to whose son his own daughter was promised in marriage. But this match, extremely distasteful to his subjects, gradually became so to Louis, as every way prejudicial to the interests of France. [24] Without much delay, therefore, preliminaries were arranged with the Aragonese envoy, and immediately after, in the month of August, the count of Cifuentes, and Thomas Malferit, regent of the royal chancery, were publicly sent as plenipotentiaries on the part of King Ferdinand, to conclude and execute the treaty. It was agreed, as the basis of the alliance, that the Catholic king should be married to Germaine, daughter of Jean de Foix, viscount of Narbonne, and of one of the sisters of Louis the Twelfth, and granddaughter to Leonora, queen of Navarre,--that guilty sister of King Ferdinand, whose fate is recorded in the earlier part of our History. The princess Germaine, it will be seen, therefore, was nearly related to both the contracting parties. She was at this time eighteen years of age, and very beautiful. [25] She had been educated in the palace of her royal uncle, where she had imbibed the free and volatile manners of his gay, luxurious court. To this lady Louis the Twelfth consented to resign his claims on Naples, to be secured by way of dowry to her and her heirs, male or female, in perpetuity. In case of her decease without issue, the moiety of the kingdom recognized as his by the partition treaty with Spain was to revert to him. It was further agreed, that Ferdinand should reimburse Louis the Twelfth for the expenses of the Neapolitan war, by the payment of one million gold ducats, in ten yearly instalments; and lastly, that a complete amnesty should be granted by him to the lords of the Angevin or French party in Naples, who should receive full restitution of their confiscated honors and estates. A mutual treaty of alliance and commerce was to subsist henceforth between France and Spain, and the two monarchs, holding one another, to quote the words of the instrument, "as two souls, in one and the same body," pledged themselves to the maintenance and defence of their respective rights and kingdoms against every other power whatever. This treaty was signed by the French king at Blois, October 12th, 1505, and ratified by Ferdinand the Catholic, at Segovia, on the 16th of the same month. [26] Such were the disgraceful and most impolitic terms of this compact, by which Ferdinand, in order to secure the brief possession of a barren authority, and perhaps to gratify some unworthy feelings of revenge, was content to barter away all those solid advantages, flowing from the union of the Spanish monarchies, which had been the great and wise object of his own and Isabella's policy. For, in the event of male issue,--and that he should have issue was by no means improbable, considering he was not yet fifty-four years of age,--Aragon and its dependencies must be totally severed from Castile. [27] In the other alternative, the splendid Italian conquests, which after such cost of toil and treasure he had finally secured to himself, must be shared with his unsuccessful competitor. In any event, he had pledged himself to such an indemnification of the Angevin faction in Naples, as must create inextricable embarrassment, and inflict great injury on his loyal partisans, into whose hands their estates had already passed. And last, though not least, he dishonored by this unsuitable and precipitate alliance his late illustrious queen, the memory of whose transcendent excellence, if it had faded in any degree from his own breast, was too deeply seated in those of her subjects, to allow them to look on the present union otherwise than as a national indignity. So, indeed, they did regard it; although the people of Aragon, in whom late events had rekindled their ancient jealousy of Castile, viewed the match with more complacency, as likely to restore them to that political importance which had been somewhat impaired by the union with their more powerful neighbor. [28] The European nations could not comprehend an arrangement, so irreconcilable with the usual sagacious policy of the Catholic king. The petty Italian powers, who, since the introduction of France and Spain into their political system, were controlled by them more or less in all their movements, viewed this sinister conjunction as auspicious of no good to their interests or independence. As for the archduke Philip, he could scarcely credit the possibility of this desperate act, which struck off at a blow so rich a portion of his inheritance. He soon received confirmation, however, of its truth, by a prohibition from Louis the Twelfth, to attempt a passage through his dominions into Spain, until he should come to some amicable understanding with his father-in-law. [29] Philip, or rather Manuel, who exercised unbounded influence over his counsels, saw the necessity now of temporizing. The correspondence was resumed with Ferdinand, and an arrangement was at length concluded between the parties, known as the concord of Salamanca, November 24th, 1505. The substance of it was, that Castile should be governed in the joint names of Ferdinand, Philip, and Joanna, but that the first should be entitled, as his share, to one-half of the public revenue. This treaty, executed in good faith by the Catholic king, was only intended by Philip to lull the suspicions of the former, until he could effect a landing in the kingdom, where, he confidently believed, nothing but his presence was wanting to insure success. He completed the perfidious proceeding by sending an epistle, well garnished with soft and honeyed phrase, to his royal father- in-law. These artifices had their effect, and completely imposed, not only on Louis, but on the more shrewd and suspicious Ferdinand. [30] On the 8th of January, 1506, Philip and Joanna embarked on board a splendid and numerous armada, and set sail from a port in Zealand. A furious tempest scattered the fleet soon after leaving the harbor; Philip's ship, which took fire in the storm, narrowly escaped foundering; and it was not without great difficulty that they succeeded in bringing her, a miserable wreck, into the English port of Weymouth. [31] King Henry the Seventh, on learning the misfortunes of Philip and his consort, was prompt to show every mark of respect and consideration for the royal pair, thus thrown upon his island. They were escorted in magnificent style to Windsor, and detained with dubious hospitality for nearly three months. During this time, Henry the Seventh availed himself of the situation and inexperience of his young guest so far as to extort from him two treaties, not altogether reconcilable, as far as the latter was concerned, with sound policy or honor. [32] The respect which the English monarch entertained for Ferdinand the Catholic, as well as their family connection, led him to offer his services as a common mediator between the father and son. He would have persuaded the latter, says Lord Bacon, "to be ruled by the counsel of a prince, so prudent, so experienced, and so fortunate as King Ferdinand;" to which the archduke replied, "If his father-in-law would let him govern Castile, he should govern him." [33] At length Philip, having reassembled his Flemish fleet at Weymouth, embarked with Joanna and his numerous suite of courtiers and military retainers, and reached Coruña, in the northwestern corner of Galicia, after a prosperous voyage, on the 28th of April. A short time previous to this event, the count of Cifuentes having passed into France for the purpose, the betrothed bride of King Ferdinand quitted that country under his escort, attended by a brilliant train of French and Neapolitan lords. [34] On the borders, at Fontarabia, she was received by the archbishop of Saragossa, Ferdinand's natural son, with a numerous retinue, composed chiefly of Aragonese and Catalan nobility, and was conducted with much solemnity to Dueñas, where she was joined by the king. In this place, where thirty years before he had been united to Isabella, he now, as if to embitter still further the recollections of the past, led to the altar her young and beautiful successor. "It seemed hard," says Martyr, in his quiet way, "that these nuptials should take place so soon, and that too in Isabella's own kingdom of Castile, where she had lived without peer, and where her ashes are still held in as much veneration as she enjoyed while living." [35] It was less than six weeks after this that Philip and Joanna landed at Coruña. Ferdinand, who had expected them at some nearer northern port, prepared without loss of time to go forward and receive them. He sent on an express to arrange the place of meeting with Philip, and advanced himself as far as Leon. But Philip had no intention of such an interview at present. He had purposely landed in a remote corner of the country, in order to gain time for his partisans to come forward and declare themselves. Missives had been despatched to the principal nobles and cavaliers, and they were answered by great numbers of all ranks, who pressed forward to welcome and pay court to the young monarch. [36] Among them were the names of most of the considerable Castilian families, and several, as Villena and Najara, were accompanied by large, well-appointed retinues of armed followers. The archduke brought over with him a body of three thousand German infantry, in complete order. He soon mustered an additional force of six thousand native Spaniards, which, with the chivalry who thronged to meet him, placed him in a condition to dictate terms to his father-in-law; and he now openly proclaimed, that he had no intention of abiding by the concord of Salamanca, and that he would never consent to an arrangement prejudicing in any degree his and his wife's exclusive possession of the crown of Castile. [37] It was in vain that Ferdinand endeavored to gain Don Juan Manuel to his interests by the most liberal offers. He could offer nothing to compete with the absolute ascendency which the favorite held over his young sovereign. It was in vain that Martyr, and afterwards Ximenes, were sent to the archduke, to settle the grounds of accommodation, or at least the place of interview with the king. Philip listened to them with courtesy, but would abate not a jot of his pretensions; and Manuel did not care to expose his royal master to the influence of Ferdinand's superior address and sagacity in a personal interview. [38] Martyr gives a picture, by no means unfavorable, of Philip at this time. He had an agreeable person, a generous disposition, free and open manners, with a certain nobleness of soul, although spurred on by a most craving ambition. But he was so ignorant of affairs, that he became the dupe of artful men, who played on him for their own purposes. [39] Ferdinand, at length, finding that Philip, who had now left Coruña, was advancing by a circuitous route into the interior, on purpose to avoid him, and that all access to his daughter was absolutely refused, could no longer repress his indignation; and he prepared a circular letter, to be sent to the different parts of the country, calling on it to rise and aid him in rescuing the queen, their sovereign, from her present shameful captivity. [40] It does not appear that he sent it. He probably found that the call would not be answered; for the French match had lost him even that degree of favor, with which he had been regarded by the commons; so the very expedient, on which he relied for perpetuating his authority in Castile, was the chief cause of his losing it altogether. He was doomed to experience still more mortifying indignities. By the orders of the marquis of Astorga and the count of Benevente, he was actually refused admittance into those cities; while proclamation was made by the same arrogant lords, prohibiting any of their vassals from aiding or harboring his Aragonese followers. "A sad spectacle, indeed," exclaims the loyal Martyr, "to behold a monarch, yesterday almost omnipotent, thus wandering a vagabond in his own kingdom, refused even the sight of his own child!" [41] Of all the gay tribe of courtiers who fluttered around him in his prosperity, the only Castilians of note who now remained true were the duke of Alva and the count of Cifuentes. [42] For even his son-in-law, the constable of Castile, had deserted him. There were some, however, at a distance from the scene of operations, as the good Talavera, for instance, and the count of Tendilla, who saw with much concern the prospect of changing the steady and well-tried hand, which had held the helm for more than thirty years, for the capricious guidance of Philip and his favorites. [43] An end was at length put to this scandalous exhibition, and Manuel, whether from increased confidence in his own resources, or the fear of bringing public odium on himself, consented to trust his royal charge to the peril of an interview. The place selected was an open plain near Puebla de Senabria, on the borders of Leon and Galicia. But, even then, the precautions taken were of a kind truly ludicrous, considering the forlorn condition of King Ferdinand. The whole military apparatus of the archduke was put in motion, as if he expected to win the crown by battle. First came the well-appointed German spearmen, all in fighting order. Then, the shining squadrons of the noble Castilian chivalry, and their armed retainers. Next followed the "Ayer era Rey de España, oy no lo soy de una villa; ayer villas y castillos, oy ninguno posseya; ayer tenia criados," etc. The lament of King Roderic, in this fine old ballad, would seem hardly too extravagant in the mouth of his royal descendant. archduke, seated on his war-horse and encompassed by his body-guard; while the rear was closed by the long files of archers and light cavalry of the country. [44] Ferdinand, on the other hand, came into the field attended by about two hundred nobles and gentlemen, chiefly Aragonese and Italians, riding on mules, and simply attired in the short black cloak and bonnet of the country, with no other weapon than the sword usually worn. The king trusted, says Zurita, to the majesty of his presence, and the reputation he had acquired by his long and able administration. The Castilian nobles, brought into contact with Ferdinand, could not well avoid paying their obeisance to him. He received them in his usual gracious and affable manner, making remarks, the good humor of which was occasionally seasoned with something of a more pungent character. To the duke of Najara, who was noted for being a vain-glorious person, and who came forward with a gallant retinue in all the panoply of war, he exclaimed, "So, duke, you are mindful as ever, I see, of the duties of a great captain!" Among others, was Garcilasso de la Vega, Ferdinand's minister formerly at Rome. Like many of the Castilian lords, he wore armor under his dress, the better to guard against surprise. The king, embracing him, felt the mail beneath, and, tapping him familiarly on the shoulder, said, "I congratulate you, Garcilasso; you have grown wonderfully lusty since we last met." The desertion, however, of one who had received so many favors from him, touched him more nearly than all the rest. As Philip drew near, it was observed he wore an anxious, embarrassed air, while his father-in-law maintained the same serene and cheerful aspect as usual. After exchanging salutations, the two monarchs alighted, and entered a small hermitage in the neighborhood, attended only by Manuel and Archbishop Ximenes. They had no sooner entered, than the latter, addressing the favorite with an air of authority it was not easy to resist, told him, "It was not meet to intrude on the private concerns of their masters," and, taking his arm, led him out of the apartment and coolly locked the door on him, saying at the same time, that "He would serve as porter." The conference led to no result. Philip was well schooled in his part, and remained, says Martyr, immovable as a rock. [45] There was so little mutual confidence between the parties, that the name of Joanna, whom Ferdinand desired so much to see, was not even mentioned during the interview. [46] But, however reluctant Ferdinand might be to admit it, he was no longer in a condition to stand upon terms; and, in addition to the entire loss of influence in Castile, he received such alarming accounts from Naples, as made him determine on an immediate visit in person to that kingdom. He resolved, therefore, to bow his head to the present storm, in hopes that a brighter day was in reserve for him. He saw the jealousy hourly springing up between the Flemish and Castilian courtiers, and he probably anticipated such misrule as would afford an opening, perhaps with the good-will of the nation, for him to resume the reins, so unceremoniously snatched from his grasp. [47] At any rate, should force be necessary, he would be better able to employ it effectively, with the aid of his ally, the French king, after he had adjusted the affairs of Naples. [48] Whatever considerations may have influenced the prudent monarch, he authorized the archbishop of Toledo, who kept near the person of the archduke, to consent to an accommodation on the very grounds proposed by the latter. On the 27th of June, he signed and solemnly swore to an agreement, by which he surrendered the entire sovereignty of Castile to Philip and Joanna, reserving to himself only the grand-masterships of the military orders, and the revenues secured by Isabella's testament. [49] On the following day, he executed another instrument of most singular import, in which, after avowing in unequivocal terms his daughter's incapacity, he engages to assist Philip in preventing any interference in her behalf, and to maintain him, as far as in his power, in the sole, exclusive authority. [50] Before signing these papers, he privately made a protest, in the presence of several witnesses, that what he was about to do was not of his own free will, but from necessity, to extricate himself from his perilous situation, and shield the country from the impending evils of a civil war. He concluded with asserting, that, so far from relinquishing his claims to the regency, it was his design to enforce them, as well as to rescue his daughter from her captivity, as soon as he was in a condition to do so. [51] Finally, he completed this chain of inconsistencies by addressing a circular letter, dated July 1st, to the different parts of the kingdom, announcing his resignation of the government into the hands of Philip and Joanna, and declaring the act one which, notwithstanding his own right and power to the contrary, he had previously determined on executing, so soon as his children should set foot in Spain. [52] It is not easy to reconcile this monstrous tissue of incongruity and dissimulation with any motives of necessity or expediency. Why should he, so soon after preparing to raise the kingdom in his daughter's cause, thus publicly avow her imbecility, and deposit the whole authority in the hands of Philip? Was it to bring odium on the head of the latter, by encouraging him to a measure which he knew must disgust the Castilians? [53] But Ferdinand by this very act shared the responsibility with him. Was it in the expectation that uncontrolled and undivided power, in the hands of one so rash and improvident, would the more speedily work his ruin? As to his clandestine protest, its design was obviously to afford a plausible pretext at some future time for reasserting his claims to the government, on the ground, that his concessions had been the result of force. But then, why neutralize the operation of this, by the declaration, spontaneously made in his manifesto to the people, that his abdication was not only a free, but most deliberate and premeditated act? He was led to this last avowal, probably, by the desire of covering over the mortification of his defeat; a thin varnish, which could impose on nobody. The whole of the proceedings are of so ambiguous a character as to suggest the inevitable inference, that they flowed from habits of dissimulation too strong to be controlled, even when there was no occasion for its exercise. We occasionally meet with examples of a similar fondness for superfluous manoeuvring in the humbler concerns of private life. After these events, one more interview took place between King Ferdinand and Philip, in which the former prevailed on his son-in-law to pay such attention to decorum, and exhibit such outward marks of a cordial reconciliation, as, if they did not altogether impose on the public, might at least throw a decent veil over the coming separation. Even at this last meeting, however, such was the distrust and apprehension entertained of him, that the unhappy father was not permitted to see and embrace his daughter before his departure. [54] Throughout the whole of these trying scenes, says his biographer, the king maintained that propriety and entire self-possession, which comported with the dignity of his station and character, and strikingly contrasted with the conduct of his enemies. However much he may have been touched with the desertion of a people, who had enjoyed the blessings of peace and security under his government for more than thirty years, he manifested no outward sign of discontent. On the contrary, he took leave of the assembled grandees with many expressions of regard, noticing kindly their past services to him, and studying to leave such an impression, as should efface the recollection of recent differences. [55] The circumspect monarch looked forward, no doubt, to the day of his return. The event did not seem very improbable; and there were other sagacious persons besides himself, who read in the dark signs of the times abundant augury of some speedy revolution. [56] * * * * * The principal authorities for the events in this Chapter, as the reader may remark, are Martyr and Zurita. The former, not merely a spectator, but actor in them, had undoubtedly the most intimate opportunities of observation. He seems to have been sufficiently impartial too, and prompt to do justice to what was really good in Philip's character; although that of his royal master was of course calculated to impress the deepest respect on a person of Martyr's uncommon penetration and sagacity. The Aragonese chronicler, however, though removed to a somewhat further distance as to time, was from that circumstance placed in a point of view more favorable for embracing the whole field of action, than if he had taken part and jostled in the crowd, as one of it. He has accordingly given much wider scope to his survey, exhibiting full details of the alleged grievances, pretensions, and policy of the opposite party; and, although condemning them himself without reserve, has conveyed impressions of Ferdinand's conduct less favorable, on the whole, than Martyr. But neither the Aragonese historian, nor Martyr, nor any contemporary writer, native or foreign, whom I have consulted, countenances the extremely unfavorable portrait which Dr. Robertson has given of Ferdinand in his transactions with Philip. It is difficult to account for the bias which this eminent historian's mind has received in this matter, unless it be that he has taken his impressions from the popular notions entertained of the character of the parties, rather than from the circumstances of the particular case under review; a mode of proceeding extremely objectionable in the present instance, where Philip, however good his natural qualities, was obviously a mere tool in the hands of corrupt and artful men, working exclusively for their own selfish purposes. FOOTNOTES [1] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 52.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 279.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 20, cap. 1.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1504.--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 9. "Sapientiae alii," says Martyr, in allusion to those prompt proceedings, "et summae bonitati adscribunt; alii, rem novam admirati, regem incusant, remque arguunt non debuisse fieri." Ubi supra. [2] Philip's name was omitted, as being a foreigner, until he should have taken the customary oath to respect the laws of the realm, and especially to confer office on none but native Castilians. Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 84. [3] The maternal tenderness and delicacy, which had led Isabella to allude to her daughter's infirmity only in very general terms, are well remarked by the cortes. See the copy of the original act in Zurita, tom. vi. lib. 6, cap. 4. [4] Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 15, sec. 2.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 6, cap. 3.--Marina, Teoría, part. 2, cap. 4.-- Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 28, cap. 12.--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 9. [5] Siete Partidas, part. 2, tit. 15, ley 3. Guicciardini, with the ignorance of the Spanish constitution natural enough in a foreigner, disputes the queen's right to make any such settlement. Istoria, lib. 7. [6] See the whole subject of the powers of cortes in this particular, as discussed very fully and satisfactorily by Marina, Teoría, part. 2, cap 13. [7] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 203.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 15, sec. 3.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 274, 277. [8] Zurita's assertion, that all the nobility present did homage to Ferdinand, (Anales, tom. vi. cap. 3,) would seem to be contradicted by a subsequent passage. Comp. cap. 4. [9] Isabella in her will particularly enjoins on her successors never to alienate or to restore the crown lands recovered from the marquisate of Villena. Dormer, Discursos Varios, p. 331. [10] "Nor was it sufficient," says Dr. Robertson, in allusion to Philip's pretensions to the government, "to oppose to these just rights, and to the inclination of the people of Castile, the authority of a testament, _the genuineness of which was perhaps doubtful_, and its contents to him appeared certainly to be iniquitous." (History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V., (London, 1796,) vol. ii. p. 7.) But who ever intimated a doubt of its genuineness, before Dr. Robertson? Certainly no one living at that time; for the will was produced before cortes, by the royal secretary, in the session immediately following the queen's death; and Zurita has preserved the address of that body, commenting on the part of its contents relating to the succession. (Anales, tom. vi. cap. 4.) Dr. Carbajal, a member of the royal council, and who was present, as he expressly declares, at the approval of the testament, "a cuyo otorgamiento y aun ordenacion me hallé," has transcribed the whole of the document in his Annals, with the signatures of the notary and the seven distinguished persons who witnessed its execution. Dormer, the national historiographer of Aragon, has published the instrument with the same minuteness in his "Discursos Varios," "from authentic MSS. in his possession," "escrituras auténticas en mi poder." Where the original is now to be found, or whether it be in existence, I have no knowledge. The codicil, as we have seen, with the queen's signature, is still extant in the Royal Library at Madrid. [12] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 282.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 6, cap. 1.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 53.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 28, cap. 12. [13] "Existimantes," says Giovio, "sub florentissimo juvene rege aliquanto liberius atque licentius ipsorum potentiâ fruituros, quam sub austero et parum liberali, ut aiebant, _sene Catalano_." Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 277. [14] "Rex quaecunque versant atque ordiuntur, sentit, dissimulat et animos omnium tacitus scrutatur." Opus Epist., epist. 289. [15] Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 15, sec. 4.--Lanuza, Historias, tom. i. lib. 1, cap. 18.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 286.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 6, cap. 8.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 3, dial. 9.--Oviedo had the story from Conchillos's brother. [16] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, pp. 275-277.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 6, cap. 5, 11.--Ulloa, Vita de Carlo V., fol. 25.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 15, sec. 3. [17] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 290.--Buonaccorsi, Diario, p. 94. [18] The vice-chancellor Alonso de la Caballería, prepared an elaborate argument in support of Ferdinand's pretensions to the regal authority and title, less as husband of the late queen, than as the lawful guardian and administrator of his daughter. See Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. cap. 14. [19] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 6, cap. 5, 15.--Lanuza, Historias, tom. i. lib. 1, cap. 18. [20] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 291. [21] Robertson speaks with confidence of Ferdinand's intention to "oppose Philip's landing by force of arms," (History of Charles V., vol. ii. p. 13,) an imputation, which has brought a heavy judgment on the historian's head from the clever author of the "History of Spain and Portugal." (Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia.) "All this," says the latter, "is at variance with both truth and probability; nor does Ferreras, the only authority cited for this unjust declamation, afford the slightest ground for it." (Vol. ii. p. 286, note.) Nevertheless, this is so stated by Ferreras, (Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. p. 282,) who is supported by Mariana, (Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 28, cap. 16,) and, in the most unequivocal manner, by Zurita, (Anales, tom. vi. lib. 6, cap. 21,) a much higher authority than either. Martyr, it is true, whom Dr. Dunham does not appear to have consulted on this occasion, declares that the king had no design of resorting to force. See Opus Epist., epist. 291, 305. [22] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 202.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1505. [23] Before venturing on this step, it was currently reported, that Ferdinand had offered his hand, though unsuccessfully, to Joanna Beltraneja, Isabella's unfortunate competitor for the crown of Castile, who still survived in Portugal. (Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 6, cap. 14.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. vi. lib. 28, cap. 13.--et al.) The report originated, doubtless, in the malice of the Castilian nobles, who wished in this way to discredit the king still more with the people. It received, perhaps, some degree of credit from a silly story, in circulation, of a testament of Henry IV. having lately come into Ferdinand's possession, avowing Joanna to be his legitimate daughter. See Carbajal, (Anales, MS., año 1474,) the only authority for this last rumor. Robertson has given an incautious credence to the first story, which has brought Dr. Dunham's iron flail somewhat unmercifully on his shoulders again; yet his easy faith in the matter may find some palliation, at least sufficient to screen him from the charge of wilful misstatement, in the fact, that Clemencin, a native historian, and a most patient and fair inquirer after truth, has come to the same conclusion. (Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 19.) Both writers rely on the authority of Sandoval, an historian of the latter half of the sixteenth century, whose naked assertion cannot be permitted to counterbalance the strong testimony afforded by the silence of contemporaries and the general discredit of succeeding writers. (Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 10.) Sismondi, not content with this first offer of King Ferdinand, makes him afterwards propose for a daughter of King Emanuel, or in other words, his own granddaughter! Hist. des Français, tom. xv. chap. 30. [24] Fleurange, Mémoires, chap. 15.--Seyssel, Hist. de Louys XII., pp. 223-229. [25] Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. lib. 35, cap. 7, sec. 4.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 58.--Salazar de Mendoza, Monarquía, tom. i. p. 410. "Laquelle," says Fleurange, who had doubtless often seen the princess, "étoit bonne et fort belle princesse, du moins elle n'avoit point perdu son embonpoint." (Mémoires, chap. 19.) It would be strange if she had at the age of eighteen. Varillas gets over the discrepancy of age between the parties very well, by making Ferdinand's at this time only thirty-seven years! Hist. de Louis XII., tom. i. p. 457. [26] Dumont, Corps Diplomatique, tom. iv. no 40, pp. 72-74. [27] These dependencies did not embrace, however, the half of Granada and the West Indies, as supposed by Mons. Gaillard, who gravely assures us, that "Les états conquis par Ferdinand étoient conquêtes de communauté, dont la moitié appartenoit au mari, et la moitié aux enfans." (Rivalité, tom. iv. p. 306.) Such are the gross misconceptions of fact, on which this writer's _speculations_ rest! [28] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 6, cap. 19.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 28, cap. 16. [29] Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 15, sec. 8.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 6, cap. 21.--Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 7. He received much more unequivocal intimation in a letter from Ferdinand, curious as showing that the latter sensibly felt the nature and extent of the sacrifices he was making. "You," says he to Philip, "by lending yourself to be the easy dupe of France, have driven me most reluctantly into a second marriage; have stripped me of the fair fruits of my Neapolitan conquests," etc. He concludes with this appeal to him. "Sit satis, fili, pervagatum; redi in te, si filius, non hostis accesseris; his non obstantibus, mi filius, amplexabere. Magna est paternae vis naturae." Philip may have thought his father-in-law's late conduct an indifferent commentary on the "paternae vis naturae." See the king's letter quoted by Peter Martyr in his correspondence with the count of Tendilla. Opus Epist., epist 293. [30] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1506.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 6, cap. 23.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 28, cap, 16.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 292.--Zurita has transcribed the whole of this dutiful and most loving epistle. Ubi supra. Guicciardini considers Philip as only practising the lessons he had learned in Spain, "le arti Spagnuole." (Istoria, lib. 7.) The phrase would seem to have been proverbial with the Italians, like the "Punica fides," which their Roman ancestors fastened on the character of their African enemy;--perhaps with equal justice. [31] Joanna, according to Sandoval, displayed much composure in her alarming situation. When informed by Philip of their danger, she attired herself in her richest dress, securing a considerable sum of money to her person, that her body, if found, might be recognized, and receive the obsequies suited to her rank. Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 10. [32] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 204--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1506.--St. Gelais, Hist. de Louys XII., p. 186.--Bacon, Hist. of Henry VII., Works, vol. v. pp. 177-179.--Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 7.--Rymer, Foedera, tom. xiii. pp. 123-132. One was a commercial treaty with Flanders, so disastrous as to be known in that country by the name of "malus intercursus;" the other involved the surrender of the unfortunate duke of Suffolk. [33] Bacon, Hist. of Henry VII., Works, vol. v. p. 179. [34] Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 2, dial. 36.--Mémoires de Bayard, chap. 26. [35] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 300.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 2, dial. 36.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1506.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 203. "_Some affirmed_," says Zurita, "that Isabella, before appointing her husband to the regency, exacted an oath from him, that he would not marry a second time." (Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 84.) This improbable story, so inconsistent with the queen's character, has been transcribed with more or less qualification by succeeding historians from Mariana to Quintana. Robertson repeats it without any qualification at all. See History of Charles V., vol. ii. p. 6. [36] "Quisque enim in spes suas pronus et expeditus, commodo serviendum," says Giovio, borrowing the familiar metaphor, "et orientem solem potius quam occidentem adorandum esse dictitabat." Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 278. [37] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 6, cap. 29, 30.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 57.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 204.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 304, 305.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1506.-- Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 10. [38] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 306, 308, 309.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 59.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 278. [39] "Nil benignius Philippo in terris, nullus inter orbis principes animosior, inter juvenes pulchrior," etc. (Opus Epist., epist. 285.) In a subsequent letter he thus describes the unhappy predicament of the young prince; "Nescit hic juvenis, nescit quo se vertat, hinc avaris, illinc ambitiosis, atque utrimque vafris hominibus circumseptus alienigena, bonae naturae, apertique animi. Trahetur in diversa, perturbabitur ipse atque obtundetur. Omnia confundentur. Utinam vana praedicem!" Epist. 308. [40] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 2. [41] Opus Epist., epist. 308. [42] "Ipsae amicos res optimae pariunt, adversae probant." Pub. Syrus. [43] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 306, 311.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, p. 143.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 28, cap. 19.--Lanuza, Historias, tom. i. lib. 1, cap. 19.--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 10. [44] The only pretext for all this pomp of war was the rumor, that the king was levying a considerable force, and the duke of Alva mustering his followers in Leon;--rumors willingly circulated, no doubt, if not a sheer device of the enemy. Zurita, Anales, lib. 7, cap. 2. [45] "Durior Caucasiâ rupe, paternum nihil auscultavit." Opus Epist., epist. 310. [46] Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 3, dial. 43.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, pp. 146-149.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 28, cap. 20.---Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 5.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 61, 62.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 15.-- Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1506.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS, cap. 204. [47] Lord Bacon remarks, in allusion to Philip's premature death, "There was an observation by the wisest of that court, that, if he had lived, his father would have gained upon him in that sort, as he would have governed his councils and designs, if not his affections." (Hist. of Henry VII., Works, vol. v. p. 180.) The prediction must have been suggested by the general estimation of their respective characters; for the parties never met again after Ferdinand withdrew to Aragon. [48] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 8. [49] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 204.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1506.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 7.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 210. [50] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 8. [51] Zurita, Anales, ubi supra. [52] Idem, ubi supra. Ferdinand's manifesto, as well as the instrument declaring his daughter's incapacity, are given at length by Zurita. The secret protest rests on the unsupported authority of the historian; and surely a better authority cannot easily be found, considering his proximity to the period, his resources as national historiographer, and the extreme caution and candor with which he discriminates between fact and rumor. It is very remarkable, however, that Peter Martyr, with every opportunity for information, as a member of the royal household, apparently high in the king's confidence, should have made no allusion to this secret protest in his correspondence with Tendilla and Talavera, both attached to the royal party, and to whom he appears to have communicated all matters of interest without reserve. [53] This motive is charitably imputed to him by Gaillard. (Rivalité, tom. iv. p. 311.) The same writer commends Ferdinand's _habilité_, in extricating himself from his embarrassments by the treaty, "auquel _il fit consentir_ Philippe dans leur entrevue"! p. 310. [54] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 10.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 28, cap. 21.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 64.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 210. [55] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 10.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1. quinc. 3, dial. 9. [56] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 10.--See also the melancholy vaticinations of Martyr, (Opus Epist., epist. 311,) who seems to echo back the sentiments of his friends Tendilla and Talavera. CHAPTER XVIII. COLUMBUS.--HIS RETURN TO SPAIN.--HIS DEATH. 1504-1506. Return of Columbus from his Fourth Voyage.--His Illness.--Neglected by Ferdinand.--His Death.--His Person.--And Character. While the events were passing, which occupy the beginning of the preceding chapter, Christopher Columbus returned from his fourth and last voyage. It had been one unbroken series of disappointment and disaster. After quitting Hispaniola, and being driven by storms nearly to the island of Cuba, he traversed the Gulf of Honduras, and coasted along the margin of the golden region, which had so long flitted before his fancy. The natives invited him to strike into its western depths in vain, and he pressed forward to the south, now solely occupied with the grand object of discovering a passage into the Indian Ocean. At length, after having with great difficulty advanced somewhat beyond the point of Nombre de Dios, he was compelled by the fury of the elements, and the murmurs of his men, to abandon the enterprise, and retrace his steps. He was subsequently defeated in an attempt to establish a colony on terra firma, by the ferocity of the natives; was wrecked on the island of Jamaica, where he was permitted to linger more than a year, through the malice of Ovando, the new governor of St. Domingo; and finally, having re-embarked with his shattered crew in a vessel freighted at at his own expense, was driven by a succession of terrible tempests across the ocean, until, on the 7th of November, 1504, he anchored in the little port of St. Lucar, twelve leagues from Seville. [1] In this quiet haven, Columbus hoped to find the repose his broken constitution and wounded spirit so much needed, and to obtain a speedy restitution of his honors and emoluments from the hand of Isabella. But here he was to experience his bitterest disappointment. At the time of his arrival, the queen was on her death-bed; and in a very few days Columbus received the afflicting intelligence, that the friend, on whose steady support he had so confidently relied, was no more. It was a heavy blow to his hopes, for "he had always experienced favor and protection from her," says his son Ferdinand, "while the king had not only been indifferent, but positively unfriendly to his interests." [2] We may readily credit, that a man of the cold and prudent character of the Spanish monarch would not be very likely to comprehend one so ardent and aspiring as that of Columbus, nor to make allowance for his extravagant sallies. And, if nothing has hitherto met our eye to warrant the strong language of the son, yet we have seen that the king, from the first, distrusted the admiral's projects, as having something unsound and chimerical in them. The affliction of the latter at the tidings of Isabella's death is strongly depicted in a letter written immediately after to his son Diego. "It is our chief duty," he says, "to commend to God most affectionately and devoutly the soul of our deceased lady, the queen. Her life was always Catholic and virtuous, and prompt to whatever could redound to His holy service; wherefore, we may trust, she now rests in glory, far from all concern for this rough and weary world." [3] Columbus, at this time, was so much crippled by the gout, to which he had been long subject, that he was unable to undertake a journey to Segovia, where the court was, during the winter. He lost no time, however, in laying his situation before the king through his son Diego, who was attached to the royal household. He urged his past services, the original terms of the capitulation made with him, their infringement in almost every particular, and his own necessitous condition. But Ferdinand was too busily occupied with his own concerns, at this crisis, to give much heed to those of Columbus, who repeatedly complains of the inattention shown to his application. [4] At length, on the approach of a milder season, the admiral, having obtained a dispensation in his favor from the ordinance prohibiting the use of mules, was able by easy journeys to reach Segovia, and present himself before the monarch. [5] He was received with all the outward marks of courtesy and regard by Ferdinand, who assured him that "he fully estimated his important services, and, far from stinting his recompense to the precise terms of the capitulation, intended to confer more ample favors on him in Castile." [6] These fair words, however, were not seconded by actions. The king probably had no serious thoughts of reinstating the admiral in his government. His successor, Ovando, was high in the royal favor. His rule, however objectionable as regards the Indians, was every way acceptable to the Spanish colonists; [7] and even his oppression of the poor natives was so far favorable to his cause, that it enabled him to pour much larger sums into the royal coffers, than had been gleaned by his more humane predecessor. [8] The events of the last voyage, moreover, had probably not tended to dispel any distrust, which the king previously entertained of the admiral's capacity for government. His men had been in a state of perpetual insubordination; while his letter to the sovereigns, written under distressing circumstances, indeed, from Jamaica, exhibited such a deep coloring of despondency, and occasionally such wild and visionary projects, as might almost suggest the suspicion of a temporary alienation of mind. [9] But whatever reasons may have operated to postpone Columbus's restoration to power, it was the grossest injustice to withhold from him the revenues secured by the original contract with the crown. According to his own statement, he was so far from receiving his share of the remittances made by Ovando, that he was obliged to borrow money, and had actually incurred a heavy debt for his necessary expenses. [10] The truth was, that, as the resources of the new countries began to develop themselves more abundantly, Ferdinand felt greater reluctance to comply with the letter of the original capitulation; he now considered the compensation as too vast and altogether disproportioned to the services of any subject; and at length was so ungenerous as to propose that the admiral should relinquish his claims, in consideration of other estates and dignities to be assigned him in Castile. [11] It argued less knowledge of character, than the king usually showed, that he should have thought the man, who had broken off all negotiations on the threshold of a dubious enterprise, rather than abate one tittle of his demands, would consent to such abatement when the success of that enterprise was so gloriously established. What assistance Columbus actually received from the crown at this time, or whether he received any, does not appear. He continued to reside with the court, and accompanied it in its removal to Valladolid. He no doubt enjoyed the public consideration due to his high repute and extraordinary achievements; though by the monarch he might be regarded in the unwelcome light of a creditor, whose claims were too just to be disavowed, and too large to be satisfied. With spirits broken by this unthankful requital of his services, and with a constitution impaired by a life of unmitigated hardship, Columbus's health now rapidly sunk under the severe and reiterated attacks of his disorder. On the arrival of Philip and Joanna, he addressed a letter to them, through his brother Bartholomew, in which he lamented the infirmities which prevented him from paying his respects in person, and made a tender of his future services. The communication was graciously received, but Columbus did not survive to behold the young sovereigns. [12] His mental vigor, however, was not impaired by the ravages of disease, and on the 19th of May, 1506, he executed a codicil, confirming certain testamentary dispositions formerly made, with special reference to the entail of his estates and dignities, manifesting, in his latest act, the same solicitude he had shown through life, to perpetuate an honorable name. Having completed these arrangements with perfect composure, he expired on the following day, being that of our Lord's ascension, with little apparent suffering, and in the most Christian spirit of resignation. [13] His remains, first deposited in the convent of St. Francis at Valladolid, were, six years later, removed to the Carthusian monastery of Las Cuevas at Seville, where a costly monument was raised over them by King Ferdinand, with the memorable inscription, "A Castilla y á Leon Nuevo mundo dió Colon;" "the like of which," says his son Ferdinand, with as much truth as simplicity, "was never recorded of any man in ancient or modern times." [14] From this spot his body was transported, in the year 1536, to the island of St. Domingo, the proper theatre of his discoveries; and, on the cession of that island to the French, in 1795, was again removed to Cuba, where his ashes now quietly repose in the cathedral church of its capital. [15] There is considerable uncertainty as to Columbus's age, though it seems probable it was not far from seventy at the time of his death. [16] His person has been minutely described by his son. He was tall and well made, his head large, with an aquiline nose, small light-blue or grayish eyes, a fresh complexion and red hair, though incessant toil and exposure had bronzed the former, and bleached the latter, before the age of thirty. He had a majestic presence, with much dignity, and at the same time affability of manner. He was fluent, even eloquent in discourse; generally temperate in deportment, but sometimes hurried by a too lively sensibility into a sally of passion. [17] He was abstemious in his diet, indulged little in amusements of any kind, and, in truth, seemed too much absorbed by the great cause to which he had consecrated his life, to allow scope for the lower pursuits and pleasures, which engage ordinary men. Indeed, his imagination, by feeding too exclusively on this lofty theme, acquired an unnatural exaltation, which raised him too much above the sober realities of existence, leading him to spurn at difficulties, which in the end proved insurmountable, and to color the future with those rainbow tints, which too often melted into air. This exalted state of the imagination was the result in part, no doubt, of the peculiar circumstances of his life. For the glorious enterprise which he had achieved almost justified the conviction of his acting under the influence of some higher inspiration than mere human reason, and led his devout mind to discern intimations respecting himself in the dark and mysterious annunciations of sacred prophecy. [18] That the romantic coloring of his mind, however, was natural to him, and not purely the growth of circumstances, is evident from the chimerical speculations, in which he seriously indulged before the accomplishment of his great discoveries. His scheme of a crusade for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre was most deliberately meditated, and strenuously avowed from the very first date of his proposals to the Spanish government. His enthusiastic communications on the subject must have provoked a smile from a pontiff like Alexander the Sixth; [19] and may suggest some apology for the tardiness, with which his more rational projects were accredited by the Castilian government. But these visionary fancies never clouded his judgment in matters relating to his great undertaking; and it is curious to observe the prophetic accuracy, with which he discerned, not only the existence, but the eventual resources of the western world; as is sufficiently evinced by his precautions, to the very last, to secure the full fruits of them, unimpaired, to his posterity. Whatever were the defects of his mental constitution, the finger of the historian will find it difficult to point to a single blemish in his moral character. His correspondence breathes the sentiment of devoted loyalty to his sovereigns. His conduct habitually displayed the utmost solicitude for the interests of his followers. He expended almost his last maravedi in restoring his unfortunate crew to their native land. His dealings were regulated by the nicest principles of honor and justice. His last communication to the sovereigns from the Indies remonstrates against the use of violent measures in order to extract gold from the natives, as a thing equally scandalous and impolitic. [20] The grand object to which he dedicated himself seemed to expand his whole soul, and raised it above the petty shifts and artifices, by which great ends are sometimes sought to be compassed. There are some men, in whom rare virtues have been closely allied, if not to positive vice, to degrading weakness. Columbus's character presented no such humiliating incongruity. Whether we contemplate it in its public or private relations, in all its features it wears the same noble aspect. It was in perfect harmony with the grandeur of his plans, and their results, more stupendous than those which Heaven has permitted any other mortal to achieve. [21] FOOTNOTES [1] Martyr, De Rebus Oceanicis, dec. 3, lib. 4.--Benzoni, Novi Orbis Hist., lib. 1, cap. 14.--Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 88- 108.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 5, cap. 2-12; lib. 6, cap. 1-13.--Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. i. pp. 282-325. The best authorities for the fourth voyage are the relations of Mendez and Porras, both engaged in it; and above all the admiral's own letter to the sovereigns from Jamaica. They are all collected in the first volume of Navarrete. (Ubi supra.) Whatever cloud may be thrown over the early part of Columbus's career, there is abundant light on every step of his path after the commencement of his great enterprise. [2] Hist. del Almirante, cap. 108. [3] Cartas de Colon, apud Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. i. p. 341. [4] See his interesting correspondence with his son Diego; now printed for the first time by Señor Navarrete from the original MSS. in the duke of Veragua's possession. Coleccion de Viages, tom. i. p. 338 et seq. [5] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 6, cap. 14.--Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 108. For an account of this ordinance see Part II. Chapter 3, note 12, of this History. [6] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 6, cap. 14. [7] Ibid., dec. 1, lib. 5, cap. 12. [8] Ibid., dec. 1, lib. 5, cap. 12; lib. 6, cap. 16-18.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 19, cap. 14. [9] This document exhibits a medley, in which sober narrative and sound reasoning are strangely blended with crazy dreams, doleful lamentation, and wild schemes for the recovery of Jerusalem, the conversion of the Grand Khan, etc. Vagaries like these, which come occasionally like clouds over his soul, to shut out the light of reason, cannot fail to fill the mind of the reader, as they doubtless did those of the sovereigns at the time, with mingled sentiments of wonder and compassion. See Cartas de Colon, apud Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. i. p. 296. [10] Ibid., p. 338. [11] Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 108.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, lib. 6, cap. 14. [12] Navarrete has given the letter, Coleccion de Viages, tom. iii. p. 530.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, ubi supra. [13] Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 429.--Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 108.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 131.-- Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom, ii., Doc. Dipl., 158. [14] Hist. del Almirante, ubi supra. The following eulogium of Paolo Giovio is a pleasing tribute to the deserts of the great navigator, showing the high estimation in which he was held, abroad as well as at home, by the enlightened of his own day. "Incomparabilis Liguribus honos, eximium Italiae decus, et praefulgidum jubar seculo nostro nasceretur, quod priscorum heroum, Herculis, et Liberi patris famam obscuraret. Quorum memoriam grata olim mortalitas aeternis literarum monumentis coelo consecrarit." Elogia Virorum Illust., lib. 4, p. 123. [15] Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii., Doc. Dipl., 177. On the left of the grand altar of this stately edifice, is a bust of Columbus, placed in a niche in the wall, and near it a silver urn, containing all that now remains of the illustrious voyager. See Abbot's "Letters from Cuba," a work of much interest and information, with the requisite allowance for the inaccuracies of a posthumous publication. [16] The various theories respecting the date of Columbus's birth cover a range of twenty years, from 1436 to 1456. There are sturdy objections to either of the hypotheses; and the historian will find it easier to cut the knot than to unravel it. Comp. Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. i. Intr., sec. 54.--Muñoz, Hist. del Nuevo-Mundo, lib. 2, sec. 12.--Spotorno, Memorials of Columbus, pp. 12, 25.--Irving, Life of Columbus, vol. iv. book 18, chap. 4. [17] Fernando Colon, Hist. del Almirante, cap. 3.--Novi Orbis Hist., lib. 1, cap. 14.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 6, cap. 15. [18] See the extracts from Columbus's book of Prophecies, (apud Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom, ii., Doc. Dipl., no. 140,) as still existing in the Bibliotheca Colombina at Seville. [19] See his epistle to the most selfish and sensual of the successors of St. Peter, in Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom, ii., Doc. Dipl., no. 145. [20] "El oro, bien que segun informacion el sea mucho, no me paresció bien ni servicio de vuestras Altezas de se le tomar por via de robo. La buena orden evitará escándolo y mala fama," etc. Cartas de Colon, apud Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. i. p. 310. [21] Columbus left two sons, Fernando and Diego. The former, illegitimate, inherited his father's genius, says a Castilian writer, and the latter, his honors and estates. (Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, año 1506.) Fernando, besides other works now lost, left a valuable memoir of his father, often cited in this history. He was a person of rather uncommon literary attainments, and amassed a library, in his extensive travels, of 20,000 volumes, perhaps the largest private collection in Europe at that day. (Ibid., año 1539.) Diego did not succeed to his father's dignities, till he had obtained a judgment in his favor against the crown from the Council of the Indies, an act highly honorable to that tribunal, and showing that the independence of the courts of justice, the greatest bulwark of civil liberty, was well maintained under King Ferdinand. (Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. ii., Doc. Dipl., nos. 163, 164; tom. iii., Supl. Col. Dipl., no. 69.) The young _admiral_ subsequently married a lady of the great Toledo family, niece of the duke of Alva. (Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 2, dial. 8.) This alliance with one of the most ancient branches of the haughty aristocracy of Castile, proves the extraordinary consideration, which Columbus must have attained during his own lifetime. A new opposition was made by Charles V. to the succession of Diego's son; and the latter, discouraged by the prospect of this interminable litigation with the crown, prudently consented to commute his claims, too vast and indefinite for any subject to enforce, for specific honors and revenues in Castile. The titles of Duke of Veragua and Marquis of Jamaica, derived from the places visited by the admiral in his last voyage, still distinguish the family, whose proudest title, above all that monarchs can confer, is, to have descended from Columbus. Spotorno, Memorials of Columbus, p. 123. CHAPTER XIX. REIGN AND DEATH OF PHILIP I.--PROCEEDINGS IN CASTILE.--FERDINAND VISITS NAPLES. 1506. Philip and Joanna.--Their Reckless Administration.--Ferdinand Distrusts Gonsalvo.--He Sails for Naples.--Philip's Death and Character.--The Provisional Government.--Joanna's Condition.--Ferdinand's Entry into Naples.--Discontent Caused by his Measures there. King Ferdinand had no sooner concluded the arrangement with Philip, and withdrawn into his hereditary dominions, than the archduke and his wife proceeded towards Valladolid, to receive the homage of the estates convened in that city. Joanna, oppressed with an habitual melancholy, and clad in the sable habiliments better suited to a season of mourning than rejoicing, refused the splendid ceremonial and festivities, with which the city was prepared to welcome her. Her dissipated husband, who had long since ceased to treat her not merely with affection, but even decency, would fain have persuaded the cortes to authorize the confinement of his wife, as disordered in intellect, and to devolve on him the whole charge of the government. In this he was supported by the archbishop of Toledo, and some of the principal nobility. But the thing was distasteful to the commons, who could not brook such an indignity to their own "natural sovereign;" and they were so stanchly supported by the admiral Enriquez, a grandee of the highest authority from his connection with the crown, that Philip was at length induced to abandon his purpose, and to content himself with an act of recognition similar to that made at Toro. [1] No notice whatever was taken of the Catholic king, or of his recent arrangement transferring the regency to Philip. The usual oaths of allegiance were tendered to Joanna as queen and lady proprietor of the kingdom, and to Philip as her husband, and finally to their eldest son, prince Charles, as heir apparent and lawful successor on the demise of his mother. [2] By the tenor of these acts the royal authority would seem to be virtually vested in Joanna. From this moment, however, Philip assumed the government into his own hands. The effects were soon visible in the thorough revolution introduced into every department. Old incumbents in office were ejected without ceremony, to make way for new favorites. The Flemings, in particular, were placed in every considerable post, and the principal fortresses of the kingdom intrusted to their keeping. No length or degree of service was allowed to plead in behalf of the ancient occupant. The marquis and marchioness of Moya, the personal friends of the late queen, and who had been particularly recommended by her to her daughter's favor, were forcibly expelled from Segovia, whose strong citadel was given to Don Juan Manuel. There were no limits to the estates and honors lavished on this crafty minion. [3] The style of living at the court was on the most thoughtless scale of wasteful expenditure. The public revenues, notwithstanding liberal appropriations by the late cortes, were wholly unequal to it. To supply the deficit, offices were sold to the highest bidder. The income drawn from the silk manufactures of Granada, which had been appropriated to defray King Ferdinand's pension, was assigned by Philip to one of the royal treasurers. Fortunately, Ximenes obtained possession of the order and had the boldness to tear it in pieces. He then waited on the young monarch and remonstrated with him on the recklessness of measures which must infallibly ruin his credit with the people. Philip yielded in this instance; but, although he treated the archbishop with the greatest outward deference, it is not easy to discern the habitual influence over his counsels claimed for the prelate by his adulatory biographers. [4] All this could not fail to excite disgust and disquietude throughout the nation. The most alarming symptoms of insubordination began to appear in different parts of the kingdom. In Andalusia, in particular, a confederation of the nobles was organized, with the avowed purpose of rescuing the queen from the duress, in which it was said she was held by her husband. At the same time the most tumultuous scenes were exhibited in Cordova, in consequence of the high hand with which the Inquisition was carrying matters there. Members of many of the principal families, including persons of both sexes, had been arrested on the charge of heresy. This sweeping proscription provoked an insurrection, countenanced by the marquis of Priego, in which the prisons were broken open, and Lucero, an inquisitor who had made himself deservedly odious by his cruelties, narrowly escaped falling into the hands of the infuriated populace. [5] The grand inquisitor, Deza, archbishop of Seville, the steady friend of Columbus, but whose name is unhappily registered on some of the darkest pages of the tribunal, was so intimidated as to resign his office. [6] The whole affair was referred to the royal council by Philip, whose Flemish education had not predisposed him to any reverence for the institution; a circumstance, which operated quite as much to his prejudice, with the more bigoted part of the nation, as his really exceptionable acts. [7] The minds of the wise and the good were filled with sadness, as they listened to the low murmurs of popular discontent, which seemed to be gradually swelling into strength for some terrible convulsion; and they looked back with fond regret to the halcyon days, which they had enjoyed under the temperate rule of Ferdinand and Isabella. The Catholic king, in the mean time, was pursuing his voyage to Naples. He had been earnestly pressed by the Neapolitans to visit his new dominions, soon after the conquest. [8] He now went, less, however, in compliance with that request, than to relieve his own mind, by assuring himself of the fidelity of his viceroy, Gonsalvo de Cordova. That illustrious man had not escaped the usual lot of humanity; his brilliant successes had brought on him a full measure of the envy, which seems to wait on merit like its shadow. Even men like Rojas, the Castilian ambassador at Rome, and Prospero Colonna, the distinguished Italian commander, condescended to employ their influence at court to depreciate the Great Captain's services, and raise suspicions of his loyalty. His courteous manners, bountiful largesses, and magnificent style of living were represented as politic arts, to seduce the affections of the soldiery and the people. His services were in the market for the highest bidder. He had received the most splendid offers from the king of France and the pope. He had carried on a correspondence with Maximilian and Philip, who would purchase his adhesion, if possible, to the latter, at any price; and, if he had not hitherto committed himself by any overt act, it seemed probable he was only waiting to be determined in his future course by the result of King Ferdinand's struggle with his son-in-law. [9] These suggestions, in which some truth, as usual, was mingled with a large infusion of error, gradually excited more and more uneasiness in the breast of the cautious and naturally distrustful Ferdinand. He at first endeavored to abridge the powers of the Great Captain by recalling half the troops in his service, notwithstanding the unsettled state of the kingdom. [10] He then took the decisive step of ordering his return to Castile, on pretence of employing him in affairs of great importance at home. To allure him more effectually, he solemnly pledged himself by an oath to transfer to him, on his landing in Spain, the grandmastership of St. Jago, with all its princely dependencies and emoluments, the noblest gift in the possession of the crown. Finding all this ineffectual, and that Gonsalvo still procrastinated his return on various pretexts, the king's uneasiness increased to such a degree, that he determined to press his own departure for Naples, and bring back, if not too late, his too powerful vassal. [11] On the 4th of September, 1506, Ferdinand embarked at Barcelona, on board a well-armed squadron of Catalan galleys, taking with him his young and beautiful bride, and a numerous train of Aragonese nobles. On the 24th of the month, after a boisterous and tedious passage, he reached the port of Genoa. Here, to his astonishment, he was joined by the Great Captain, who, advised of the king's movements, had come from Naples with a small fleet to meet him. This frank conduct of his general, if it did not disarm Ferdinand of his suspicions, showed him the policy of concealing them; and he treated Gonsalvo with all the consideration and show of confidence, which might impose, not merely on the public, but on the immediate subject of them. [12] The Italian writers of the time express their astonishment that the Spanish general should have so blindly trusted himself into the hands of his suspicious master. [13] But he, doubtless, felt strong in the consciousness of his own integrity. There appears to have been no good reason for impeaching this. His most equivocal act was his delay to obey the royal summons. But much weight is reasonably due to his own explanation, that he was deterred by the distracted state of the country, arising from the proposed transfer of property to the Angevin barons, as well as from the precipitate disbanding of the army, which it required all his authority to prevent from breaking into open mutiny. [14] To these motives may be probably added the natural, though perhaps unconscious reluctance to relinquish the exalted station, little short of absolute sovereignty, which he had so long and so gloriously filled. He had, indeed, lorded it over his viceroyalty with most princely sway. But he had assumed no powers to which he was not entitled by his services and peculiar situation. His public operations in Italy had been uniformly conducted for the advantage of his country, and, until the late final treaty with France, were mainly directed to the expulsion of that power beyond the Alps. [15] Since that event, he had busily occupied himself with the internal affairs of Naples, for which he made many excellent provisions, contriving by his consummate address to reconcile the most conflicting interests and parties. Although the idol of the army and of the people, there is not the slightest evidence of an attempt to pervert his popularity to an unworthy purpose. There is no appearance of his having been corrupted, or even dazzled, by the splendid offers repeatedly made him by the different potentates of Europe. On the contrary, the proud answer recorded of him, to Pope Julius the Second, breathes a spirit of determined loyalty, perfectly irreconcilable with anything sinister or selfish in his motives. [16] The Italian writers of the time, who affect to speak of these motives with some distrust, were little accustomed to such examples of steady devotion; [17] but the historian, who reviews all the circumstances, must admit that there was nothing to justify such distrust, and that the only exceptionable acts in Gonsalvo's administration were performed not to advance his own interests, but those of his master, and in too strict obedience to his commands. King Ferdinand was the last person who had cause to complain of them. After quitting Genoa, the royal squadron was driven by contrary winds into the neighboring harbor of Portofino, where Ferdinand received intelligence, which promised to change his destination altogether. This was the death of his son-in-law, the young king of Castile. This event, so unexpected and awfully sudden, was occasioned by a fever, brought on by too violent exercise at a game of ball, at an entertainment made for Philip by his favorite, Manuel, in Burgos, where the court was then held. Through the unskilfulness of his physicians, as it was said, who neglected to bleed him, the disorder rapidly gained ground, [18] and on the sixth day after his attack, being the 25th of September, 1506, he breathed his last. [19] He was but twenty-eight years old, of which brief period he had enjoyed, or endured, the "golden cares" of sovereignty but little more than two months, dating from his recognition by the cortes. His body, after being embalmed, lay in state for two days, decorated with the insignia,--the mockery of royalty, as it had proved to him,--and was then deposited in the convent of Miraflores near Burgos, to await its final removal to Granada, agreeably to his last request. [20] Philip was of the middle height; he had a fair, florid complexion, regular features, long flowing locks, and a well-made, symmetrical figure. Indeed, he was so distinguished for comeliness both of person and countenance, that he is designated on the roll of Spanish sovereigns as Felipe el Hermoso, or the Handsome. [21] His mental endowments were not so extraordinary. The father of Charles the Fifth possessed scarcely a single quality in common with his remarkable son. He was rash and impetuous in his temper, frank, and careless. He was born to great expectations, and early accustomed to command, which seemed to fill him with a crude, intemperate ambition, impatient alike of control or counsel. He was not without generous, and even magnanimous sentiments; but he abandoned himself to the impulse of the moment, whether for good or evil; and, as he was naturally indolent and fond of pleasure, he willingly reposed the burden of government on others, who, as usual, thought more of their own interests than those of the public. His early education exempted him from the bigotry characteristic of the Spaniards; and, had he lived, he might have done much to mitigate the grievous abuses of the Inquisition. As it was, his premature death deprived him of the opportunity of compensating, by this single good act, the manifold mischiefs of his administration. This event, too improbable to have formed any part of the calculations of the most far-sighted politician, spread general consternation throughout the country. The old adherents of Ferdinand, with Ximenes at their head, now looked forward with confidence to his re-establishment in the regency. Many others, however, like Garcilasso de la Vega, whose loyalty to their old master had not been proof against the times, viewed this with some apprehension. [22] Others, again, who had openly from the first linked their fortunes to those of his rival, as the duke of Najara, the marquis of Villena, and, above all, Don Juan Manuel, saw in it their certain ruin, and turned their thoughts towards Maximilian, or the king of Portugal, or any other monarch, whose connection with the royal family might afford a plausible pretext for interference in the government. On Philip's Flemish followers the tidings fell like a thunderbolt, and in their bewilderment they seemed like so many famished birds of prey, still hovering round the half-devoured carcass from which they had been unceremoniously scared. [23] The weight of talent and popular consideration was undoubtedly on the king's side. The most formidable of the opposition, Manuel, had declined greatly in credit with the nation during the short, disastrous period of his administration; while the archbishop of Toledo, who might be considered as the leader of Ferdinand's party, possessed talents, energy, and reputed sanctity of character, which, combined with the authority of his station, gave him unbounded influence over all classes of the Castilians. It was fortunate for the land, in this emergency, that the primacy was in such able hands. It justified the wisdom of Isabella's choice, made in opposition, it may be remembered, to the wishes of Ferdinand, who was now to reap the greatest benefit from it. That prelate, foreseeing the anarchy likely to arise on Philip's death, assembled the nobility present at the court, in his own palace, the day before this event took place. It was there agreed to name a provisional council, or regency, who should carry on the government, and provide for the tranquillity of the kingdom. It consisted of seven members, with the archbishop of Toledo at its head, the duke of Infantado, the grand constable and the admiral of Castile, both connected with the royal family, the duke of Najara, a principal leader of the opposite faction, and two Flemish lords. No mention was made of Manuel. [24] The nobles, in a subsequent convention on the 1st of October, ratified these proceedings, and bound themselves not to carry on private war, or attempt to possess themselves of the queen's person, and to employ all their authority in supporting the provisional government, whose term was limited to the end of December. [25] A meeting of cortes was wanting to give validity to their acts, as well as to express the popular will in reference to a permanent settlement of the government. There was some difference of opinion, even among the king's friends, as to the expediency of summoning that body at this crisis; but the greatest impediment arose from the queen's refusal to sign the writs. [26] This unhappy lady's condition had become truly deplorable. During her husband's illness, she had never left his bedside; but neither then, nor since his death, had been seen to shed a tear. She remained in a state of stupid insensibility, sitting in a darkened apartment, her head resting on her hand, and her lips closed, as mute and immovable as a statue. When applied to, for issuing the necessary summons for the cortes, or to make appointments to office, or for any other pressing business, which required her signature, she replied, "My father will attend to all this when he returns; he is much more conversant with business than I am; I have no other duties now, but to pray for the soul of my departed husband." The only orders she was known to sign were for paying the salaries of her Flemish musicians; for in her abject state she found some consolation in music, of which she had been passionately fond from childhood. The few remarks which she uttered were discreet and sensible, forming a singular contrast with the general extravagance of her actions. On the whole, however, her pertinacity in refusing to sign anything was attended with as much good as evil, since it prevented her name from being used, as it would undoubtedly have often been, in the existing state of things, for pernicious and party purposes. [27] Finding it impossible to obtain the queen's co-operation, the council at length resolved to issue the writs of summons in their own name, as a measure justified by necessity. The place of meeting was fixed at Burgos in the ensuing month of November; and great pains were taken, that the different cities should instruct their representatives in their views respecting the ultimate disposition of the government. [28] Long before this, indeed immediately after Philip's death, letters had been despatched by Ximenes and his friends to the Catholic king, acquainting him with the state of affairs, and urging his immediate return to Castile. He received them at Portofino. He determined, however, to continue his voyage, in which he had already advanced so far, to Naples. The wary monarch perhaps thought, that the Castilians, whose attachment to his own person he might with some reason distrust, would not be the less inclined to his rule after having tasted the bitterness of anarchy. In his reply, therefore, after briefly expressing a decent regret at the untimely death of his son-in-law, and his uudoubting confidence in the loyalty of the Castilians to their queen, his daughter, he prudently intimates that he retains nothing but kindly recollections of his ancient subjects, and promises to use all possible despatch in adjusting the affairs of Naples, that he may again return to them. [29] After this, the king resumed his voyage, and having touched at several places on the coast, in all which he was received with great enthusiasm, arrived before the capital of his new dominions in the latter part of October. All were anxious, says the great Tuscan historian of the time, to behold the prince who had acquired a mighty reputation throughout Europe for his victories both over Christian and infidel; and whose name was everywhere revered for the wisdom and equity with which he had ruled in his own kingdom. They looked to his coming, therefore, as an event fraught with importance, not merely to Naples, but to all Italy, where his personal presence and authority might do so much to heal existing feuds, and establish permanent tranquillity. [30] The Neapolitans, in particular, were intoxicated with joy at his arrival. The most splendid preparations were made for his reception. A fleet of twenty vessels of war came out to meet him and conduct him into port; and, as he touched the shores of his new dominions, the air was rent with acclamations of the people, and with the thunders of artillery from the fortresses, which crowned the heights of the city, and from the gallant navy which rode in her waters. [31] The faithful chronicler of Los Palacios, who generally officiates as the master of ceremonies on these occasions, dilates with great complacency on all the circumstances of the celebration, even to the minutest details of the costume worn by the king and his nobility. According to him, the monarch was arrayed in a long, flowing mantle of crimson velvet, lined with satin of the same color. On his head was a black velvet bonnet, garnished with a resplendent ruby, and a pearl of inestimable price. He rode a noble white charger, whose burnished caparisons dazzled the eye with their splendor. By his side was his young queen, mounted on a milk- white palfrey, and wearing a skirt or undergarment of rich brocade, and a French robe, simply fastened with clasps or loops of fine wrought gold. On the mole they were received by the Great Captain, who, surrounded by his guard of halberdiers, and his silken array of pages wearing his device, displayed all the pomp and magnificence of his household. After passing under a triumphal arch, where Ferdinand swore to respect the liberties and privileges of Naples, the royal pair moved forward under a gorgeous canopy, borne by the members of the municipality, while the reins of their steeds were held by some of the principal nobles. After them followed the other lords and cavaliers of the kingdom, with the clergy, and ambassadors assembled from every part of Italy and Europe, bearing congratulations and presents from their respective courts. As the procession halted in the various quarters of the city, it was greeted with joyous bursts of music from a brilliant assemblage of knights and ladies, who did homage by kneeling down and saluting the hands of their new sovereigns. At length, after defiling through, the principal streets and squares, it reached the great cathedral, where the day was devoutly closed with solemn prayer and thanksgiving. [32] Ferdinand was too severe an economist of time, to waste it willingly on idle pomp and ceremonial. His heart swelled with satisfaction, however, as he gazed on the magnificent capital thus laid at his feet, and pouring forth the most lively expressions of a loyalty, which of late he had been led to distrust. With all his impatience, therefore, he was not disposed to rebuke this spirit by abridging the season of hilarity. But, after allowing sufficient scope for its indulgence, he devoted himself assiduously to the great purposes of his visit. He summoned a parliament general of the kingdom, where, after his own recognition, oaths of allegiance were tendered to his daughter Joanna and her posterity, as his successors, without any allusion being made to the rights of his wife. This was a clear evasion of the treaty with France. But Ferdinand, though late, was too sensible of the folly of that stipulation which secured the reversion of his wife's dower to the latter crown, to allow it to receive any sanction from the Neapolitans. [33] Another, and scarcely less disastrous provision of the treaty he complied with in better faith. This was the reestablishment of the Angevin proprietors in their ancient estates; the greater part of which, as already noticed, had been parcelled out among his own followers, both Spaniards and Italians. It was, of course, a work of extraordinary difficulty and vexation. When any flaw or impediment could be raised in the Angevin title, the transfer was evaded. When it could not, a grant of other land or money was substituted, if possible. More frequently, however, the equivalent, which probably was not very scrupulously meted out, was obliged to be taken by the Aragonese proprietor. To accomplish this the king was compelled to draw largely on the royal patrimony in Naples, as well as to make liberal appropriations of land and rents in his native dominions. As all this proved insufficient, he was driven to the expedient of replenishing the exchequer by draughts on his new subjects. [34] The result, although effected without violence or disorder, was unsatisfactory to all parties. The Angevins rarely received the full extent of their demands. The loyal partisans of Aragon saw the fruits of many a hard-fought battle snatched from their grasp, to be given back again to their enemies. [35] Lastly, the wretched Neapolitans, instead of the favors and immunities incident to a new reign, found themselves burdened with additional imposts, which, in the exhausted state of the country, were perfectly intolerable. So soon were the fair expectations formed of Ferdinand's coming, like most other indefinite expectations, clouded over by disappointment; and such were some of the bitter fruits of the disgraceful treaty with Louis the Twelfth. [36] FOOTNOTES [1] Marina tells an anecdote too long for insertion here, in relation to this cortes, showing the sturdy stuff of which a Castilian commoner in that day was made. (Teoría, part. 2, cap. 7.) It will scarcely gain credit without a better voucher than the anonymous scribbler from whom he has borrowed it. [2] Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 28, cap. 22.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 11.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 15. Joanna on this occasion was careful to inspect the powers of the deputies herself, to see they were all regularly authenticated. Singular astuteness for a mad woman! [3] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 312.--Mariana, Hist. De España, tom. ii. lib. 28, cap. 22.--Lanuza, Historias, tom. i. lib. 1, cap. 21.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 65.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 23. [4] Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 17.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 65.-- Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, rey 30, cap. 16.--Quintanilla, Archetypo, lib. 3, cap. 14. [5] Lucero (whom honest Martyr, with a sort of back-handed pun, usually nicknames Tenebrero) resumed his inquisitorial functions on Philip's death. Among his subsequent victims was the good archbishop Talavera, whose last days were embittered by his persecution. His insane violence at length provoked again the interference of government. His case was referred to a special commission, with Ximenes at its head. Sentence was pronounced against him. The prisons he had filled were emptied. His judgments were reversed, as founded on insufficient and frivolous grounds. But alas! what was this to the hundreds he had consigned to the stake, and the thousands he had plunged in misery? He was in the end sentenced,--not to be roasted alive,--but to retire to his own benefice, and confine himself to the duties of a Christian minister! Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 77.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist, 333, 334, et al.--Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. chap. 10, art. 3, 4.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., dial, de Deza. [6] Oviedo has given an ample notice of this prelate, Ferdinand's confessor, in one of his dialogues. He mentions a singular taste, in one respect, quite worthy of an inquisitor. The archbishop kept a tame lion in his palace, which used to accompany him when he went abroad, and lie down at his feet when he said mass in the church. The monster had been stripped of his teeth and claws when young, but he was "espantable en su vista é aspeto," says Oviedo, who records two or three of his gambols, lion's play, at best. Quincuagenas, MS. [7] Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. chap. 10, art. 3, 4.-- Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, rey 30, cap.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 333, 334, et al. "Toda la gente," says Zurita, in reference to this affair, "noble y de limpia sangre se avia escandalizado dello;" (Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 11;) and he plainly intimates his conviction, that Philip's profane interference brought Heaven's vengeance on his head, in the shape of a premature death. Zurita was secretary of the Holy Office in the early part of the sixteenth century. Had he lived in the nineteenth, he might have acted the part of a Llorente. He was certainly not born for a bigot. [8] Summonte, Hist. di Napoli, tom. iv. lib. 6, cap. 5. [9] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 276.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 16.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 6, cap. 5, 11, 17, 27, 31; lib. 7, cap, 14.--Buonaccorsi, Diario, p. 123.--Gonsalvo, in a letter to the king dated July 2, 1506, alludes bitterly to these unfounded imputations on his honor. Cartas, MS. [10] Mariana, Hist. de España, lib. 28, cap. 12.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 6, cap. 5. [11] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 6.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iv. p. 12, ed. di Milano, 1803.--Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 30, cap. 1.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 280.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 3, dial. 9. [12] Giannone, Istoria de Napoli, ubi supra.--Summonte, Hist. di Napoli, tom. iv. lib. 6, cap. 5.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 187.-- Buonaccorsi Diario, p. 123.--Capmany, Mem. de Barcelona, tom. i. p. 152.-- "Este," says Capmany of the squadron which bore the king from Barcelona, "se puede decir fué el último armamento que salió de aquella capital." [13] Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iv. p. 30.--Machiavelli, Legazione Seconda a Roma, let. 23.--Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 30, cap. 1. [14] Zurita, Anales, lib. 6, cap. 31. [15] My limits will not allow room for the complex politics and feuds of Italy, into which Gonsalvo entered with all the freedom of an independent potentate. See the details, apud Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 2, cap. 112-127.--Sismondi, Républiques Italiennes, tom. xiii. chap. 103.-- Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iii. p. 235 et alibi.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 6, cap. 7, 9.--Carta del Gran Capitan, MS. [16] Zurita, Anales, lib. 6, cap. 11. [17] "Il Gran Capitan," says Guicciardini, "conscio dei sospetti, i quali il re _forse non vanamente_ aveva avuti di lui," etc. (Istoria, tom, iv. p. 30.) This way of damning a character by surmise, is very common with Italian writers of this age, who uniformly resort to the very worst motive as the key of whatever is dubious or inexplicable in conduct. Not a sudden death, for example, occurs, without at least a _sospetto_ of poison from some hand or other. What a fearful commentary on the morals of the land! [18] Philip's disorder was lightly regarded at first by his Flemish physicians; whose practice and predictions were alike condemned by their coadjutor Lodovico Marliano, an Italian doctor, highly commended by Martyr, as "inter philosophos et medicos lucida lampas." 'He was at least the better prophet on this occasion. Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 313.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 14. [19] Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 3, dial. 9.--Fortunately for Ferdinand's reputation, Philip's death was attended by too unequivocal circumstances, and recorded by too many eyewitnesses, to admit the suggestion of poison. It seems he drank freely of cold water while very hot. The fever he brought on was an epidemic, which at that time afflicted Castile. Machiavelli, Legazione Seconda a Roma, let. 29.--Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, año 1506. [20] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 313, 316.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 206.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 66.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1506.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 187.--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 11. [21] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 187, 188.--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., ubi supra. Martyr, touched with the melancholy fate of his young sovereign, pays the following not inelegant, and certainly not parsimonious tribute to his memory, in a letter written a few days after his death, which, it may be noticed, he makes a day earlier than other contemporary accounts. "Octavo Calendas Octobris animam emisit ille juvenis, formosus, pulcher, elegans, animo pollens et ingesio, procerae validaeque naturae, uti flos vernus evanuit." Opus Epist., epist. 316. [22] Garcilasso de la Vega appears to have been one of those dubious politicians, who, to make use of a modern phrase, are always "on the fence." The wags of his day applied to him a coarse saying of the old duke of Alva in Henry IV.'s time, "Que era como el perro del ventero, que ladra a los de fuera, y muerde a los de dentro." Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 39. [23] Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 29, cap. 2.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 206.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 22. [24] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 15.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 29, cap. 1.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 317.--Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, año 1506.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 67. [25] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 16. I find no authority for the statement made by Alvaro Gomez (De Rebus Gestis, fol. 68), and faithfully echoed by Robles (Vida de Ximenez, cap. 17) and Quintanilla (Archetypo, lib. 3, cap. 14), that Ximenes filled the office of sole regent at this juncture. It is not warranted by Martyr, (Opus Epist., epist. 317,) and is contradicted by the words of the original instrument cited as usual by Zurita, (ubi supra.) The archbishop's biographers, one and all, claim as many merits and services for their hero, as if, like Quintanilla, they were working expressly for his beatification. [26] The duke of Alva, the staunch supporter of King Ferdinand in all his difficulties, objected to calling the cortes together, on the grounds, that the summonses, not being by the proper authority, would be informal; that many cities might consequently refuse to obey them, and the acts of the remainder be open to objection, as not those of the nation; that, after all, should cortes assemble, it was quite uncertain under what influences it might be made to act, and whether it would pursue the course most expedient for Ferdinand's interests; and finally, that if the intention was to procure the appointment of a regency, this had already been done by the nomination of King Ferdinand at Toro, in 1505; that to start the question anew was unnecessarily to bring that act into doubt. The duke does not seem to have considered that Ferdinand had forfeited his original claim to the regency by his abdication; perhaps, on the ground, that it had never been formally accepted by the commons. I shall have occasion to return to this hereafter. See the discussion _in extenso_, apud Zurita, Anales, lib. 7, cap. 26. [27] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 318.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 29, cap. 2.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 71-73. [28] Zurita, Anales, lib. 7, cap. 22. [29] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 187.--Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, año 1506.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 317.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 68, 69, 71. Shall we wrong Ferdinand much by applying to him the pertinent verses of Lucan, on a somewhat similar occasion? "Tutumque putavit Jam bonus esse socer; lacrymas non sponte cadentes Effudit, gemitusque expressit pectore laeto, Non aliter manifesta putans abscondere mentis Gaudía, quam lacrymis." Pharsalia, lib. 9. [30] "Un re glorioso per tante vittorie avute contro gl' Infedeli, e contro i Cristiani, venerabile per opinione di prudenza, e del quale risonava fama Cristianissima, che avesse con singolare giustizia, e tranquillità governato i reami suoi." Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iv. p. 31.--Also Buonaccorsi, Diario, p. 124.--Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 30, cap. 1. [31] Summonte, Hist. di Napoli, tom. iv. lib. 6, cap. 5.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iv. p. 31.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, pp. 278, 279.-- Bembo, Istoria Viniziana, lib. 7. [32] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 210.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 20.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, ubi supra.--Garibay, Compendio, lib. 20, cap. 9. [33] Zurita, Anales, ubi supra.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iv. pp. 72, 73. [34] Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 30, cap. 1.--Summonte, Hist. di Napoli, tom. iv. lib. 6, cap. 5.--Buonaccorsi, Diario, p. 129.-- Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iv. p. 71. [35] Such, for example, was the fate of the doughty little cavalier, Pedro de la Paz, the gallant Leyva, so celebrated in the subsequent wars of Charles V., the ambassador Rojas, the Quixotic Paredes, and others. The last of these adventurers, according to Mariana, endeavored to repair his broken fortunes by driving the trade of a corsair in the Levant. Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 29, cap. 4. [36] If any one would see a perfect specimen of the triumph of style, let him compare the interminable prolixities of Zurita with Mariana, who, in this portion of his narrative, has embodied the facts and opinions of his predecessor, with scarcely any alteration, save that of greater condensation, in his own transparent and harmonious diction. It is quite as great a miracle in its way as the _rifacimento_ of Berni. CHAPTER XX. FERDINAND'S RETURN AND REGENCY.--GONSALVO'S HONORS AND RETIREMENT. 1506-1509 Joanna's Mad Conduct.--She Changes her Ministers.--Disorders in Castile.-- Ferdinand's Politic Behavior.--He Leaves Naples.--His Brilliant Reception by Louis XII.--Honors to Gonsalvo.--Ferdinand's Return to Castile.--His Excessive Severity.--Neglect of the Great Captain.--His Honorable Retirement. While Ferdinand was thus occupied in Naples, the representatives of most of the cities, summoned by the provisional government, had assembled in Burgos. Before entering on business, they were desirous to obtain the queen's sanction to their proceedings. A committee waited on her for that purpose, but she obstinately refused to give them audience. [1] She still continued plunged in moody melancholy, exhibiting, however, occasionally the wildest freaks of insanity. Towards the latter end of December, she determined to leave Burgos, and remove her husband's remains to their final resting-place in Granada. She insisted on seeing them herself, before her departure. The remonstrances of her counsellors, and the holy men of the monastery of Miraflores, proved equally fruitless. Opposition only roused her passions into frenzy, and they were obliged to comply with her mad humors. The corpse was removed from the vault; the two coffins of lead and wood were opened, and such as chose gazed on the mouldering relics, which, notwithstanding their having been embalmed, exhibited scarcely a trace of humanity. The queen was not satisfied till she touched them with her own hand, which she did without shedding a tear, or testifying the least emotion. The unfortunate lady, indeed, was said never to have been seen to weep, since she detected her husband's intrigue with the Flemish courtesan. The body was then placed on a magnificent car, or hearse, drawn by four horses. It was accompanied by a long train of ecclesiastics and nobles, who, together with the queen, left the city on the night of the 20th of December. She made her journeys by night, saying, that "a widow, who had lost the sun of her own soul, should never expose herself to the light of day." When she halted, the body was deposited in some church or monastery, where the funeral services were performed, as if her husband had just died; and a corps of armed men kept constant guard, chiefly, as it would seem, with the view of preventing any female from profaning the place by her presence. For Joanna still retained the same jealousy of her sex, which she had unhappily so much cause to feel during Philip's lifetime. [2] In a subsequent journey, when at a short distance from Torquemada, she ordered the corpse to be carried into the court-yard of a convent, occupied, as she supposed, by monks. She was filled with horror, however, on finding it a nunnery, and immediately commanded the body to be removed into the open fields. Here she encamped with her whole party at dead of night; not, however, until she had caused the coffins to be unsealed, that she might satisfy herself of the safety of her husband's relics; although it was very difficult to keep the torches, during the time, from being extinguished by the violence of the wind, and leaving the company in total darkness. [3] These mad pranks, savoring of absolute idiocy, were occasionally checkered by other acts of more intelligence, but not less startling. She had early shown a disgust to her father's old counsellors, and especially to Ximenes, who, she thought, interfered too authoritatively in her domestic concerns. Before leaving Burgos, however, she electrified her husband's adherents, by revoking all grants made by the crown since Isabella's death. This, almost the only act she was ever known to sign, was a severe blow to the courtly tribe of sycophants, on whom the golden favors of the late reign had been so prodigally showered. At the same time she reformed her privy council, by dismissing the present members, and reinstating those appointed by her royal mother, sarcastically telling one of the ejected counsellors, that, "he might go and complete his studies at Salamanca." The remark had a biting edge to it, as the worthy jurist was reputed somewhat low in his scholarship. [4] These partial gleams of intelligence, directed in this peculiar way too, led many to discern the secret influence of her father. She still, however, pertinaciously refused to sanction any measures of cortes for his recall; and, when pressed by that body on this and other matters, at an audience which she granted before leaving Burgos, she plainly told them "to return to their quarters, and not to meddle further in the public business without her express commands." Not long after this, the legislature was prorogued by the royal council for four months. The term assigned for the provisional government expired in December, and was not renewed. No other regency was appointed by the nobles; and the kingdom, without even the shadow of protection afforded by its cortes, and with no other guide but its crazy sovereign, was left to drift at random amidst the winds and waves of faction. This was not slow in brewing in every quarter, with the aid especially of the overgrown nobles, whose license, on such occasions as this, proved too plainly, that public tranquillity was not founded so much on the stability of law, as on the personal character of the reigning sovereign. [5] The king's enemies, in the mean time, were pressing their correspondence with the emperor Maximilian, and urging his immediate presence in Spain. Others devised schemes for marrying the poor queen to the young duke of Calabria, or some other prince, whose years or incapacity might enable them to act over again the farce of King Philip. To add to the troubles occasioned by this mesh of intrigue and faction, the country, which of late years had suffered from scarcity, was visited by a pestilence, that fell most heavily on the south. In Seville alone, Bernaldez reports the incredible number of thirty thousand persons to have fallen victims to it. [6] But, although the storm was thus darkening from every quarter, there was no general explosion, to shake the state to its foundations, as in the time of Henry the Fourth. Orderly habits, if not principles, had been gradually formed. under the long reign of Isabella. The great mass of the people had learned to respect the operation, and appreciate the benefits of law; and notwithstanding the menacing attitude, the bustle, and transitory ebullitions of the rival factions, there seemed a manifest reluctance to break up the established order of things, and, by deeds of violence and bloodshed, to renew the days of ancient anarchy. Much of this good result was undoubtedly to be attributed to the vigorous counsels and conduct of Ximenes, [7] who, together with the grand constable and the duke of Alva, had received full powers from Ferdinand to act in his name. Much is also to be ascribed to the politic conduct of the king. Far from an intemperate zeal to resume the sceptre of Castile, he had shown throughout a discreet forbearance. He used the most courteous and condescending style, in his communications to the nobles and the municipalities, expressing his entire confidence in their patriotism, and their loyalty to the queen, his daughter. Through the archbishop, and other important agents, he had taken effectual measures to soften the opposition of the more considerable lords; until, at length, not only such accommodating statesmen as Garcilasso de la Vega, but more sturdy opponents, as Villena, Benavente, and Bejar, were brought to give in their adhesion to their old master. Liberal promises, indeed, had been made by the emperor, in the name of his grandson Charles, who had already been made to assume the title of King of Castile. But the promises of the imperial braggart passed lightly with the more considerate Castilians, who knew how far they usually outstripped his performance, and who felt, on the other hand, that their true interests were connected with those of a prince, whose superior talents and personal relations all concurred to recommend him to the seat, which he had once so honorably occupied. The great mass of the common people, too, notwithstanding the temporary alienation of their feelings from the Catholic king by his recent marriage, were driven by the evils they actually suffered, and the vague apprehension of greater, to participate in the same sentiments; so that, in less than eight months from Philip's death, the whole nation may be said to have returned to its allegiance to its ancient sovereign. The only considerable exceptions were Don Juan Manuel and the duke of Najara. The former had gone too far to recede, and the latter possessed too chivalrous, or too stubborn, a temper to do so. [8] At length, the Catholic monarch, having completed his arrangements at Naples, and waited until the affairs of Castile were fully ripe for his return, set sail from his Italian capital, June 4th, 1507. He proposed to touch at the Genoese port of Savona, where an interview had been arranged between him and Louis the Twelfth. During his residence in Naples, he had assiduously devoted himself to the affairs of the kingdom. He had avoided entering into the local politics of Italy, refusing all treaties and alliances proposed to him by its various states, whether offensive or defensive. He had evaded the importunate solicitations and remonstrances of Maximilian in regard to the Castilian regency, and had declined, moreover, a personal conference proposed to him by the emperor, during his stay in Italy. After the great work of restoring the Angevins to their estates, he had thoroughly reorganized the interior administration of the kingdom; creating new offices, and entirely new departments. He made large reforms, moreover, in the courts of law, and prepared the way for the new system, demanded by its relations as a dependency of the Spanish monarchy. Lastly, before leaving the city, he acceded to the request of the inhabitants for the re-establishment of their ancient university. [9] In all these sagacious measures, he had been ably assisted by his viceroy, Gonsalvo de Cordova. Ferdinand's deportment towards the latter had been studied, as I have said, to efface every uncomfortable impression from his mind. On his first arrival, indeed, the king had condescended to listen to complaints, made by certain officers of the exchequer, of Gonsalvo's waste and misapplication of the public moneys. The general simply asked leave to produce his own accounts in his defence. The first item, which he read aloud, was two hundred thousand seven hundred and thirty-six ducats, given in alms to the monasteries and the poor, to secure their prayers for the success of the king's enterprise. The second was seven hundred thousand four hundred and ninety-four ducats to the spies employed in his service. Other charges equally preposterous followed; while some of the audience stared incredulous, others laughed, and the king himself, ashamed of the paltry part he was playing, dismissed the whole affair as a jest. The common saying of _cuentas del Gran Capitan_, at this day, attests at least the popular faith in the anecdote. [10] From this moment, Ferdinand continued to show Gonsalvo unbounded marks of confidence; advising with him on all important matters, and making him the only channel of royal favor. He again renewed, in the most emphatic manner, his promise to resign the grand-mastership of St. Jago in his favor, on their return to Spain, and made formal application to the pope to confirm it. [11] In addition to the princely honors already conferred on the Great Captain, he granted him the noble duchy of Sessa, by an instrument, which, after a pompous recapitulation of his stately titles and manifold services, [12] declares that these latter were too great for recompense. Unfortunately for both king and subject, this was too true. [13] Gonsalvo remained a day or two behind his royal master in Naples, to settle his private affairs. In addition to the heavy debts incurred by his own generous style of living, he had assumed those of many of his old companions in arms, with whom the world had gone less prosperously than with himself. The claims of his creditors, therefore, had swollen to such an amount, that, in order to satisfy them fully, he was driven to sacrifice part of the domains lately granted him. Having discharged all the obligations of a man of honor, he prepared to quit the land, over which he had ruled with so much splendor and renown for nearly four years. The Neapolitans in a body followed him to the vessel; and nobles, cavaliers, and even ladies of the highest rank lingered on the shore to bid him a last adieu. Not a dry eye, says the historian, was to be seen. So completely had he dazzled their imaginations, and captivated their hearts, by his brilliant and popular manners, his munificent spirit, and the equity of his administration,--qualities more useful, and probably more rare in those turbulent times, than military talent. He was succeeded in the office of grand constable of the kingdom by Prospero Colonna, and in that of viceroy by the count of Ribagorza, Ferdinand's nephew. [14] On the 28th of June, the royal fleet of Aragon entered the little port of Savona, where the king of France had already been waiting for it several days. The French navy was ordered out to receive the Catholic monarch, and the vessels on either side, gayly decorated with the national flags and ensigns, rivalled each other in the beauty and magnificence of their equipments. King Ferdinand's galleys were spread with rich carpets and awnings of yellow and scarlet, and every sailor in the fleet exhibited the same gaudy-colored livery of the royal house of Aragon. Louis the Twelfth came to welcome his illustrious guests, attended by a gallant train of his nobility and chivalry; and, in order to reciprocate, as far as possible, the confidence reposed in him by the monarch with whom he had been so recently at deadly feud, immediately went on board the vessel of the latter. [15] Horses and mules richly caparisoned awaited them at the landing. The French king, mounting his steed, gallantly placed the young queen of Aragon behind him. His cavaliers did the same with the ladies of her suite, most of them French women, though attired, as an old chronicler of the nation rather peevishly complains, after the Spanish fashion; and the whole party, with the ladies _en croupe_, galloped off to the royal quarters in Savona. [16] Blithe and jocund were the revels, which rung through the halls of this fair city, during the brief residence of its royal visitors. Abundance of good cheer had been provided by Louis's orders, writes an old cavalier, [17] who was there to profit by it; and the larders of Savona were filled with the choicest game, and its cellars well stored with the delicious wines of Corsica, Languedoc, and Provence. Among the followers of Louis were the marquis of Mantua, the brave La Palice, the veteran D'Aubigny, and many others of renown, who had so lately measured swords with the Spaniards on the fields of Italy, and who now vied with each other in rendering them these more grateful, and no less honorable, offices of chivalry. [18] As the gallant D'Aubigny was confined to his apartment by the gout, Ferdinand, who had always held his talents and conduct in high esteem, complimented him by a visit in person. But no one excited such general interest and attention as Gonsalvo de Cordova, who was emphatically the hero of the day. At least, such is the testimony of Guicciardini, who will not be suspected of undue partiality. Many a Frenchman there had had bitter experience of his military prowess. Many others had grown familiar with his exploits in the exaggerated reports of their country-men. They had been taught to regard him with mingled feelings of fear and hatred, and could scarcely credit their senses, as they beheld the bugbear of their imaginations distinguished above all others for "the majesty of his presence, the polished elegance of his discourse, and manners in which dignity was blended with grace." [19] But none were so open in their admiration as King Louis. At his request, Gonsalvo was admitted to sup at the same table with the Aragonese sovereigns and himself. During the repast he surveyed his illustrious guest with the deepest interest, asking him various particulars respecting those memorable campaigns, which had proved so fatal to France. To all these the Great Captain responded with becoming gravity, says the chronicler; and the French monarch testified his satisfaction, at parting, by taking a massive chain of exquisite workmanship from his own neck, and throwing it round Gonsalvo's. The historians of the event appear to be entirely overwhelmed with the magnitude of the honor conferred on the Great Captain, by thus admitting him to the same table with three crowned heads; and Guicciardini does not hesitate to pronounce it a more glorious epoch in his life than even that of his triumphal entry into the capital of Naples. [20] During this interview, the monarchs held repeated conferences, at which none were present but the papal envoy, and Louis's favorite minister, D'Amboise. The subject of discussion can only be conjectured by the subsequent proceedings, which make it probable that it related to Italy; and that it was in this season of idle dalliance and festivity, that the two princes, who held the destinies of that country in their hands, matured the famous league of Cambray, so disastrous to Venice, and reflecting little credit on its projectors, either on the score of good faith or sound policy. But to this we shall have occasion to return hereafter. [21] At length, after enjoying for four days the splendid hospitality of their royal entertainer, the king and queen of Aragon re-embarked, and reached their own port of Valencia, after various detentions, on the 20th of July, 1507. Ferdinand, having rested a short time in his beautiful capital, pressed forward to Castile, where his presence was eagerly expected. On the borders, he was met by the dukes of Albuquerque and Medina Celi, his faithful follower the count of Cifuentes, and many other nobles and cavaliers. He was soon after joined by deputies from many of the principal cities in the kingdom, and, thus escorted, made his entry into it by the way of Monteagudo, on the 21st of August. How different from the forlorn and outcast condition, in which he had quitted the country a short year before! He intimated the change in his own circumstances, by the greater state and show of authority which he now assumed. The residue of the old Italian army, just arrived under the celebrated Pedro Navarro, count of Oliveto, [22] preceded him on the march; and he was personally attended by his alcaldes, alguazils, and kings-at-arms, with all the appropriate insignia of royal supremacy. [23] At Tortoles he was met by the queen, his daughter, accompanied by Archbishop Ximenes. The interview between them had more of pain than pleasure in it. The king was greatly shocked by Joanna's appearance; for her wild and haggard features, emaciated figure, and the mean, squalid attire in which she was dressed, made it difficult to recognize any trace of the daughter, from whom he had been so long separated. She discovered more sensibility on seeing him, than she had shown since her husband's death, and henceforth resigned herself to her father's will with little opposition. She was soon after induced by him to change her unsuitable residence for more commodious quarters at Tordesillas. Her husband's remains were laid in the monastery of Santa Clara, adjoining the palace, from whose windows she could behold his sepulchre. From this period, although she survived forty-seven years, she never quitted the walls of her habitation. And, although her name appeared jointly with that of her son, Charles the Fifth, in all public acts, she never afterwards could be induced to sign a paper, or take part in any transactions of a public nature. She lingered out a half century of dreary existence, as completely dead to the world, as the remains which slept in the monastery of Santa Clara beside her. [24] From this time the Catholic king exercised an authority nearly as undisputed, and far less limited and defined than in the days of Isabella. So firm did he feel in his seat, indeed, that he omitted to obtain the constitutional warrant of cortes. He had greatly desired this at the late irregular meeting of that body. But it broke up, as we have seen, without effecting anything; and, indeed, the disaffection of Burgos and some other principal cities at that time, must have made the success of such an application very doubtful. But the general cordiality, with which Ferdinand was greeted, gave no ground for apprehending such a result at present. Many, indeed, of his partisans objected to any intervention of the legislature in this matter, as superfluous; alleging that he held the regency as natural guardian of his daughter, nominated, moreover, by the queen's will, and confirmed by the cortes at Toro. These rights, they argued, were not disturbed by his resignation, which was a compulsory act, and had never received any express legislative sanction; and which, in any event, must be considered as intended only for Philip's lifetime, and to be necessarily determined with that. But, however plausible these views, the irregularity of Ferdinand's proceedings furnished an argument for disobedience on the part of discontented nobles, who maintained, that they knew no supreme authority but that of their queen, Joanna, till some other had been sanctioned by the legislature. The whole affair was finally settled, with more attention to constitutional forms, in the cortes held at Madrid, October 6th, 1510, when the king took the regular oaths as administrator of the realm in his daughter's name, and as guardian of her son. [25] Ferdinand's deportment, on his first return, was distinguished by a most gracious clemency, evinced not so much, indeed, by any excessive remuneration of services, as by the politic oblivion of injuries. If he ever alluded to these, it was in a sportive way, implying that there was no rancor or ill-will at heart. "Who would have thought," he exclaimed one day to a courtier near him, "that you could so easily abandon your old master, for one so young and inexperienced?" "Who would have thought," replied the other with equal bluntness, "that my old master would have outlived my young one?" [26] With all this complaisance, however, the king did not neglect precautions for placing his authority on a sure basis, and fencing it round so as to screen it effectually from the insults to which it had been formerly exposed. He retained in pay most of the old Italian levies, with the ostensible purpose of an African expedition. He took good care that the military orders should hold their troops in constant readiness, and that the militia of the kingdom should be in condition for instant service. He formed a body-guard to attend the royal person on all occasions. It consisted at first of only two hundred men, armed and drilled after the fashion of the Swiss ordonnance, and placed under the command of his chronicler, Ayora, an experienced martinet, who made some figure at the defence of Salsas. This institution probably was immediately suggested by the _garde du corps_ of Louis the Twelfth, at Savona, which, altogether on a more formidable scale, indeed, had excited his admiration by the magnificence of its appointments and its thorough discipline. [27] Notwithstanding the king's general popularity, there were still a few considerable persons, who regarded his resumption of authority with an evil eye. Of these Don Juan Manuel had fled the kingdom before his approach, and taken refuge at the court of Maximilian, where the counsellors of that monarch took good care that he should not acquire the ascendency he had obtained over Philip. The duke of Najara, however, still remained in Castile, shutting himself up in his fortresses, and refusing all compromise or obedience. The king without hesitation commanded Navarro to march against him with his whole force. Najara was persuaded by his friends to tender his submission, without waiting the encounter; and he surrendered his strong-holds to the king, who, after detaining them some time in his keeping, delivered them over to the duke's eldest son. [28] With another offender he dealt more sternly. This was Don Pedro de Cordova, marquis of Priego, who, the reader may remember, when quite a boy, narrowly escaped the bloody fate of his father, Alonso de Aguilar, in the fatal slaughter of the Sierra Vermeja. This nobleman, in common with some other Andalusian lords, had taken umbrage at the little estimation and favor shown them, as they conceived, by Ferdinand, in comparison with the nobles of the north; and his temerity went so far, as not only to obstruct the proceedings of one of the royal officers, sent to Cordova to inquire into recent disturbances there, but to imprison him in the dungeons of his castle of Montilla. This outrage on the person of his own servant exasperated the king beyond all bounds. He resolved at once to make such an example of the offender, as should strike terror into the disaffected nobles, and shield the royal authority from the repetition of similar indignities. As the marquis was one of the most potent and extensively allied grandees in the kingdom, Ferdinand made his preparations on a formidable scale, ordering, in addition to the regular troops, a levy of all between the ages of twenty and seventy throughout Andalusia. Priego's friends, alarmed at these signs of the gathering tempest, besought him to avert it, if possible, by instant concession; and his uncle, the Great Captain, urged this most emphatically, as the only way of escaping utter ruin. The rash young man, finding himself likely to receive no support in the unequal contest, accepted the counsel, and hastened to Toledo, to throw himself at the king's feet. The indignant monarch, however, would not admit him into his presence, but ordered him to deliver up his fortresses, and to remove to the distance of five leagues from the court. The Great Captain soon after sent the king an inventory of his nephew's castles and estates, at the same time deprecating his wrath, in consideration of the youth and inexperience of the offender. Ferdinand, however, without heeding this, went on with his preparations, and, having completed them, advanced rapidly to the south. When arrived at Cordova, he ordered the imprisonment of the marquis. A formal process was then instituted against him before the royal council, on the charge of high treason. He made no defence, but threw himself on the mercy of his sovereign. The court declared, that he had incurred the penalty of death, but that the king, in consideration of his submission, was graciously pleased to commute this for a fine of twenty millions of maravedies, perpetual banishment from Cordova and its district, and the delivery of his fortresses into the royal keeping, with the entire demolition of the offending castle of Montilla. This last, famous as the birth-place of the Great Captain, was one of the strongest and most beautiful buildings in all Andalusia. [29] Sentence of death was at the same time pronounced against several cavaliers, and other inferior persons concerned in the affair, and was immediately executed. The Castilian aristocracy, alarmed and disgusted by the severity of a sentence, which struck down one of the most considerable of their order, were open in their remonstrances to the king, beseeching him, if no other consideration moved him in favor of the young nobleman, to grant something to the distinguished services of his father and his uncle. The latter, as well as the grand constable, Velasco, who enjoyed the highest consideration at court, were equally pressing in their solicitations. Ferdinand, however, was inexorable; and the sentence was executed. The nobles chafed in vain; although the constable expostulated with the king in a tone, which no subject in Europe but a Castilian grandee would have ventured to assume. Gonsalvo coolly remarked, "It was crime enough in Don Pedro to be related to me." [30] This illustrious man had had good reason to feel, before this, that his credit at court was on the wane. On his return to Spain, he was received with unbounded enthusiasm by the nation. He was detained by illness a few days behind the court, and his journey towards Burgos to rejoin it, on his recovery, was a triumphal procession the whole way. The roads were thronged with multitudes so numerous, that accommodations could scarcely be found for them in the towns on the route. [31] For they came from the remotest parts of the country, all eager to catch a glimpse of the hero, whose name and exploits, the theme of story and of song, were familiar to the meanest peasant in Castile. In this way he made his entry into Burgos, amid the cheering acclamations of the people, and attended by a _cortège_ of officers, who pompously displayed on their own persons, and the caparisons of their steeds, the rich spoils of Italian conquests. The old count of Ureña, his friend, who, with the whole court, came out by Ferdinand's orders to receive him, exclaimed with a prophetic sigh, as he saw the splendid pageant come sweeping by, "This gallant ship, I fear, will require deeper water to ride in than she will find in Castile!" [32] Ferdinand showed his usual gracious manners in his reception of Gonsalvo. It was not long, however, before the latter found that this was all he was to expect. No allusion was made to the grand-mastership. When it was at length brought before the king, and he was reminded of his promises, he contrived to defer their performance under various pretexts; until, at length, it became too apparent, that it was his intention to evade them altogether. While the Great Captain and his friends were filled with an indignation, at this duplicity, which they could ill suppress, a circumstance occurred to increase the coldness arising in Ferdinand's mind towards his injured subject. This was the proposed marriage (a marriage which, from whatever cause, never took place [33]) of Gonsalvo's daughter Elvira, to his friend the constable of Castile. [34] Ferdinand had designed to secure her large inheritance to his own family, by an alliance with his grandson, Juan de Aragon, son of the archbishop of Saragossa. His displeasure, at finding himself crossed in this, was further sharpened by the petulant spirit of his young queen. The constable, now a widower, had been formerly married to a natural daughter of Ferdinand. Queen Germaine, adverting to his intended union with the lady Elvira, unceremoniously asked him, "If he did not feel it a degradation to accept the hand of a subject, after having wedded the daughter of a king?" "How can I feel it so," he replied, alluding to the king's marriage with her, "when so illustrious an example has been set me!" Germaine, who certainly could not boast the magnanimity of her predecessor, was so stung with the retort, that she not only never forgave the constable, but extended her petty resentment to Gonsalvo, who saw the duke of Alva from this time installed in the honors he had before exclusively enjoyed, of immediate attendance on her royal person whenever she appeared in public. [35] However indifferent Gonsalvo may have been to the little mortifications inflicted by female spleen, he could no longer endure his residence at a court, where he had lost all consideration with the sovereign, and experienced nothing but duplicity and base ingratitude. He obtained leave, without difficulty, to withdraw to his own estates; where, not long after, the king, as if to make some amends for the gross violation of his promises, granted him the royal city of Loja, not many leagues from Granada. It was given to him for life, and Ferdinand had the effrontery to propose, as a condition of making the grant perpetual to his heirs, that Gonsalvo should relinquish his claim to the grandmastership of St. Jago. But the latter haughtily answered, "He would not give up the right of complaining of the injustice done him, for the finest city in the king's dominions." [36] From this time he remained on his estates in the south, chiefly at Loja, with an occasional residence in Granada, where he enjoyed the society of his old friend and military instructor, the count of Tendilla. He found abundant occupation in schemes for improving the condition of his tenantry, and of the neighboring districts. He took great interest in the fate of the unfortunate Moriscoes, numerous in this quarter, whom he shielded as far as possible from the merciless grasp of the Inquisition, while he supplied teachers and other enlightened means for converting them, or confirming them in a pure faith. He displayed the same magnificence and profuse hospitality in his living that he had always done. His house was visited by such intelligent foreigners as came to Spain, and by the most distinguished of his countrymen, especially the younger nobility and cavaliers, who resorted to it, as the best school of high-bred and knightly courtesy, He showed a lively curiosity in all that was going on abroad, keeping up his information by an extensive correspondence with agents, whom he regularly employed for the purpose in the principal European courts. When the league of Cambray was adjusted, the king of France and the pope were desirous of giving him the command of the allied armies. But Ferdinand had injured him too sensibly, to care to see him again at the head of a military force in Italy. He was as little desirous of employing him in public affairs at home, and suffered the remainder of his days to pass away in distant seclusion; a seclusion, however, not unpleasing to himself, nor unprofitable to others. [37] The world called it disgrace; and the old count of Ureña exclaimed, "The good ship is stranded at last, as I predicted!" "Not so," said Gonsalvo, to whom the observation was reported; "she is still in excellent trim, and waits only the rising of the tide, to bear away as bravely as ever." [38] FOOTNOTES [1] Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib, 29, cap. 2.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 29. [2] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 324, 332, 339, 363.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 29, cap. 3.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1506.-- Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 206.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 17. "Childish as was the affection," says Dr. Dunham, "of Joanna for her husband, she did not, as Robertson relates, cause the body to be removed from the sepulchre after it was buried, and brought to her apartment. She once visited the sepulchre, and, after affectionately gazing on the corpse, was persuaded to retire. Robertson seems not to have read, at least not with care, the authorities for the reign of Fernando." (History of Spain and Portugal, vol. ii. p. 287, note.) Whoever will take the trouble to examine these authorities, will probably not find Dr. Dunham much more accurate in the matter than his predecessor. Robertson, indeed, draws largely from the Epistles of Peter Martyr, the best voucher for this period, which his critic apparently has not consulted. In the very page preceding that in which he thus taxes Robertson with inaccuracy, we find him speaking of Charles VIII. as the reigning monarch of France; an error not merely clerical, since it is repeated no less than three times. Such mistakes would be too trivial for notice in any but an author, who has made similar ones the ground for unsparing condemnation of others. [3] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 339. A foolish Carthusian monk, "laevi sicco folio levior," to borrow Martyr's words, though more knave than fool probably, filled Joanna with absurd hopes of her husband's returning to life, which, he assured her, had happened, as he had read, to a certain prince, after he had been dead fourteen years. As Philip was disembowelled, he was hardly in a condition for such an auspicious event. The queen, however, seems to have been caught with the idea. (Opus Epist., epist. 328.) Martyr loses all patience at the inventions of this "blactero cucullatus," as he calls him in his abominable Latin, as well as at the mad pranks of the queen, and the ridiculous figure which he and the other grave personages of the court were compelled to make on the occasion. It is impossible to read his Jeremiads on the subject without a smile. See, in particular, his whimsical epistle to his old friend, the archbishop of Granada. Opus Epist., epist. 333. [4] Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 29, cap. 3.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 26, 38, 54.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 72.-- Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 11. [5] Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 16.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 346.--Zurita, Anales, lib. 7, cap. 36-38.--Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, año 1507.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 206. The duke of Medina Sidonia, son of the nobleman who bore so honorable a part in the Granadine war, mustered a large force by land and sea for the recovery of his ancient patrimony of Gibraltar.--Isabella's high-spirited friend, the marchioness of Moya, put herself at the head of a body of troops with better success, during her husband's illness, and re-established herself in the strong fortress of Segovia, which Philip had transferred to Manuel. (Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 343.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 207.) "No one lamented the circumstance," says Oviedo. The marchioness closed her life not long after this, at about sixty years of age. Her husband, though much older, survived her. Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 23. [6] Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 208.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 71.-- Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 29, cap. 2. The worthy Curate of Los Palacios does not vouch for this exact amount from his own knowledge. He states, however, that 170 died, out of his own little parish of 500 persons, and he narrowly escaped with life himself, after a severe attack. Ubi supra. [7] Ximenes equipped and paid out of his own funds a strong corps, for the ostensible purpose of protecting the queen's person, but quite as much to enforce order by checking the turbulent spirit of the grandees; a stretch of authority, which this haughty body could ill brook. (Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 17.) Zurita, indeed, who thinks the archbishop had a strong relish for sovereign power, accuses him of being "at heart much more of a king than a friar." (Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 29.) Gomez, on the contrary, traces every political act of his to the purest patriotism. (De Rebus Gestis, fol. 70, et alib.) In the mixed motives of action, Ximenes might probably have been puzzled himself, to determine how much belonged to the one principle, and how much to the other. [8] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 351.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 187.--Lanuza, Historias, tom. i. lib. 1, cap. 21.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 19, 22, 25, 30, 39.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iv. p. 76, ed Milano, 1803.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 17.--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 12. [9] Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 30, cap. 1-5.--Summonte, Hist. di Napoli, tom. iv. lib. 6, cap. 5.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 187. --Buonaccorsi, Diario, p. 129.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 210. --Signorelli, Coltura nelle Sicilie, tom. iv. p. 84. The learned Neapolitan civilian, Giannone, bears emphatic testimony to the general excellence of the Spanish legislation for Naples. Ubi supra. [10] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 102.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 3. [11] Machiavelli expresses his astonishment, that Gonsalvo should have been the dupe of promises, the very magnitude of which made them suspicious. "Ho sentito ragionare di questo accordo fra Consalvo e il Re, e maravigliarsi ciascuno che Consalvo se ne fidi; _e quanto qual Re è stato più liberale verso di lui, tanto più, ne insospettisce la brigata,_ pensando che il Re abbi fatto per assicurarlo, e per poterne meglio disporre sotto questa sicurtà." (Legazione Seconda a Roma, let. 23, Oct. 6.) But what alternative had he, unless indeed that of open rebellion, for which he seems to have had no relish? And, if he had, it was too late after Ferdinand was in Naples. [12] Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 3, cap. 3.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 6, 49.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 279. "Vos el ilustre Don Gonzalo Hernandez de Cordoba," begins the instrument, "Duque de Terra Nova, Marques de Santangelo y Vitonto, y mi Condestable del reyno de Nápoles, nuestro muy charo y muy amado primo, y uno del nuestro secreto Consejo," etc. (See the document, apud Quintana, Españoles Célebres, tom. i. Apend. no. 1.) The revenues from his various estates amounted to 40,000 ducats. Zurita speaks of another instrument, a public manifesto of the Catholic king, proclaiming to the world his sense of his general's exalted services and unimpeachable loyalty. (Anales, tom. vi. lib. 8, cap. 3.) This sort of testimony seems to contain an implication not very flattering, and on the whole is so improbable, that I cannot but think the Aragonese historian has confounded it with the grant of Sessa, bearing precisely the same date, February 25th, and containing also, though incidentally, and as a thing of course, the most ample tribute to the Great Captain.--Comp. also Pulgar, Sum., p. 138. [13] Tacitus may explain why. "Beneficia eo usque laeta sunt, dum videntur exsolvi posse; ubi multum antevenere, pro gratia odium redditur." (Annales, lib. 4. sec. 18.) "Il n'est pas si dangereux," says Rochefoucault, in a more caustic vein, "de faire du mal à la plûpart des hommes, que de leur faire trop de bien." [14] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, pp. 280, 281.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 20, cap. 9.--Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 30, cap. 1.-- Summonte, Hist. di Napoli, tom. iv. lib. 6, cap 5.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iv. p. 72.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 3, cap. 4. [15] "Spettacolo certamente memorabile, vedere insieme due Re potentissimi tra tutti i Principi Cristiani, stati poco innanzi si acerbissimi inimici, non solo riconciliati, e congiunti di parentado, ma deposti i segni dell' odio, e della memoria delle offese, commettere ciascuno di loro la vita propria in arbitrio dell' altro con non minore confidenza, che se sempre fossero stati concordissimi fratelli." (Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iv. p. 75.) This astonishment of the Italian is an indifferent tribute to the habitual good faith of the times. [16] D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., part. 3, chap. 38.--Buonaccorsi, Diario, p. 132.--St. Gelais, Hist. de Louys XII, p. 204. Germaine appears to have been no great favorite with the French chroniclers. "Et y estoit sa femme Germaine de Fouez, _qui tenoit une marveilleuse audace_. Elle fist peu de compte de tous les François, mesmement de son frère, le gentil duc de Nemours." (Mémoires de Bayard, chap. 27, apud Petitot, Collection des Mémoires, tom. xv.) See also Fleurange, (Mémoires, chap. 19, apud Petitot, Collection des Mémoires, tom. xvi.) who notices the same arrogant bearing. [17] For fighting, and feasting, and all the generous pastimes of chivalry, none of the old French chroniclers of this time rivals D'Auton. He is the very Froissart of the sixteenth century. A part of his works still remains in manuscript. That which is printed retains the same form, I believe, in which it was given to the public by Godefroy, in the beginning of the seventeenth century; while many an inferior chronicler and memoirmonger has been published and republished, with all the lights of editorial erudition. [18] D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., part. 3, chap. 38.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., ubi supra.--Bembo, Istoria Viniziana, lib. 7.--St. Gelais, Hist. de Louys XII., p. 201. [19] Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iv. pp. 76, 77.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 282.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 3, cap. 4. "Ma non dava minore materia ai ragionamenti il Gran Capitano, al quale non erano meno volti gli occhi degli uomini per la fama del suo valore, e per la memoria di tante vittorie, la quale faceva, che i Franzesi, ancora che vinti tante volte di lui, e che solevano avere in sommo odio, e orrore il suo nome, non si saziassero di contemplarlo e onorarlo. ***** E accresceva l'ammirazione degli uomini la maestà eccellente della presenza sua, la magnificenza delle parole, i gesti, e la maniera piena di gravità condita di grazia: ma sopra tutti il Re di Francia," etc. Guicciardini, ubi supra. [20] Brantôme, Vies des Hommes Illustres, disc. 6.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 3, cap. 4.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iv. pp. 77, 78.-- D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., ubi supra.--Quintana, Españoles Célebres, tom. i. p. 319.--Mémoires de Bayard, chap. 27, apud Petitot, Collection des Mémoires, tom. xv.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 210.-- Pulgar, Sumario, p. 195. [21] D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., part. 3, chap. 38.--Buonaccorsi, Diario, p. 133.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 36. [22] King Ferdinand had granted him the title and territory of Oliveto in the kingdom of Naples, in recompense for his eminent services in the Italian wars. Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. p. 178.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 190. [23] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 210.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 8, cap. 4, 7.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 358.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 74.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS. [24] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 75.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 363.--Zurita, Anales, lib. 8, cap. 49.--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 13. Philip's remains were afterwards removed to the cathedral church of Granada; where they were deposited, together with those of his wife Joanna, in a magnificent sepulchre erected by Charles V., near that of Ferdinand and Isabella. Pedraza, Antiguedad de Granada, lib. 3, cap. 7.-- Colmenar, Délices de l'Espagne et du Portugal, (Leide, 1715,) tom. iii. p. 490. [25] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 7, cap. 26, 34; lib. 9, cap. 20. See the bold language of the protest of the marquis of Priego, against this assumption of the regency by the Catholic king. "En caso tan grande," he says, "que se trata de gobernacion de grandes reinos é señoríos justa é razonable cosa fuera, é sería que fueramos llamados é certificados de ello, porque yo é los otros caballeros grandes é las ciudades é alcaldes mayores vieramos lo que debiamos hacer é consentir como vasallos é leales servidores de la reina nuestra señora, porque la administration é gobernacion destos reinos se diera é concediera á quien las leyes destos reynos mandan que se den é encomienden en caso," etc. (MS. de la Biblioteca de la Real Acad. de Hist., apud Marina, Teoría, tom. ii. part. 2, cap. 18.) Marina, however, is not justified in regarding Ferdinand's subsequent convocation of cortes for this purpose, as a concession to the demands of the nation. (Teoría, ubi supra.) It was the result of the treaty of Blois, with Maximilian, guaranteed by Louis XII., the object of which was to secure the succession to the archduke Charles. Zurita, Anales, lib. 8, cap. 47. [26] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 282.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 3, cap. 4. [27] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 8, cap. 10.--MSS. de Torres y de Oviedo, apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 6.--D'Auton, Hist. de Louys XII., part. 3, chap. 38. The Catholic king was very minute in his inquiries, according to Auton, "du faict et de l'estat des gardes du Roy, et de ses Gentilshommes, qu'il réputoit à grande chose, et triomphale ordonnance." Ubi supra. [28] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 210.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 363.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 75.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 8, cap. 15. [29] "Montiliana," writes Peter Martyr, "illa atria, quae vidisti aliquando, multo auro, multoque ebore compta ornataque, proh dolor! funditus dirui sunt jussa." (Opus Epist., epist. 405.) He was well acquainted with the lordly halls of Montilla, for he had been preceptor to their young master, who was a favorite pupil, to judge from the bitter wailings of the kind-hearted pedagogue over his fate. See epist. 404, 405. [30] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 215.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 392, 393, 405.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 284.-- Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 8, cap. 20, 21, 22.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1507.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 20, cap. 10.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 3, cap. 6.--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 13. [31] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p, 282.--Pulgar, Sumario, p. 197. [32] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 210.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, ubi supra.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 3, cap. 5. [33] Quintana errs in stating that Doña Elvira _married_ the constable. (Españoles Célebres, tom. i. p. 321.) He had two wives, Doña Blanca de Herrera, and Doña Juana de Aragon, and at his death was laid by their side in the church of Santa Clara de Medina del Pomar. (Salazar de Mendoza, Dignidades, lib. 3, cap. 21.) Elvira married the count of Cabra. Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 42. [34] Bernardino de Velasco, _grand_ constable of Castile, as he was called, _par excellence_, succeeded in 1492 to that dignity, which became hereditary in his family. He was third count of Haro, and was created by the Catholic sovereigns, for his distinguished services, duke of Frias. He had large estates, chiefly in Old Castile, with a yearly revenue, according to L. Marineo, of 60,000 ducats. He appears to have possessed many noble and brilliant qualities, accompanied, however, with a haughtiness, which made him feared, rather than loved. He died in February, 1512, after a few hours' illness, as appears by a letter of Peter Martyr. Opus Epist., epist. 479.--Salazar de Mendoza, Dignidades, ubi supra.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 23. [35] Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, pp. 282, 283. [36] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, pp. 284, 285.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 3, cap. 6.--Pulgar, Sumario, p. 208. [37] The inscription on Guicciardini's monument might have been written on Gonsalvo's. "Cujus negotium, an otium gloriosius incertum." See Pignotti, Storia della Toscana, (Pisa, 1813,) tom. ix. p. 155. [38] Quintana, Españoles Célebres, tom. i. pp. 322-334.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 286.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 3, cap. 7-9.-- Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 560.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iv. pp. 77, 78. CHAPTER XXI. XIMENES.--CONQUESTS IN AFRICA--UNIVERSITY OF ALCALÁ.--POLYGLOT BIBLE. 1508-1510. Enthusiasm of Ximenes.--His Warlike Preparations.--He Sends an Army to Africa.--Storms Oran.--His Triumphant Entry.--The King's Distrust of Him. --He Returns to Spain.--Navarro's African Conquests.--Magnificent Endowments of Ximenes.--University of Alcalá.--Complutensian Polyglot. The high-handed measures of Ferdinand, in regard to the marquis of Priego and some other nobles, excited general disgust among the jealous aristocracy of Castile. But they appear to have found more favor with the commons, who were probably not unwilling to see that haughty body humbled, which had so often trampled on the rights of its inferiors. [1] As a matter of policy, however, even with the nobles, this course does not seem to have been miscalculated; since it showed, that the king, whose talents they had always respected, was now possessed of power to enforce obedience, and was fully resolved to exert it. Indeed, notwithstanding a few deviations, it must be allowed that Ferdinand's conduct on his return was extremely lenient and liberal; more especially, considering the subjects of provocation he had sustained, in the personal insults and desertion of those, on whom he had heaped so many favors. History affords few examples of similar moderation on the restoration of a banished prince, or party. In fact, a violent and tyrannical course would not have been agreeable to his character, in which passion, however strong by nature, was habitually subjected to reason. The present, as it would seem, excessive acts of severity are to be regarded, therefore, not as the sallies of personal resentment, but as the dictates of a calculating policy, intended to strike terror into the turbulent spirits, whom fear only could hold in check. To this energetic course he was stimulated, as was said, by the counsels of Ximenes. This eminent prelate had now reached the highest ecclesiastical honors short of the papacy. Soon after Ferdinand's restoration, he received a cardinal's hat from Pope Julius the Second; [2] and this was followed by his appointment to the office of inquisitor general of Castile, in the place of Deza, archbishop of Seville. The important functions devolved on him by these offices, in conjunction with the primacy of Spain, might be supposed to furnish abundant subject and scope for his aspiring spirit. But his views, on the contrary, expanded with every step of his elevation, and now fell little short of those of an independent monarch. His zeal glowed fiercer than ever for the propagation of the Catholic faith. Had he lived in the age of the crusades, he would indubitably have headed one of those expeditions himself; for the spirit of the soldier burned strong and bright under his monastic weeds. [3] Indeed, like Columbus, he had formed plans for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, even at this late day. [4] But his zeal found a better direction in a crusade against the neighboring Moslems of Africa, who had retaliated the wrongs of Granada by repeated descents on the southern coasts of the Peninsula, calling in vain for the interference of government. At the instigation and with the aid of Ximenes, an expedition had been fitted out soon after Isabella's death, which resulted in the capture of Mazarquivir, an important port, and formidable nest of pirates, on the Barbary coast, nearly opposite Carthagena. He now meditated a more difficult enterprise, the conquest of Oran. [5] This place, situated about a league from the former, was one of the most considerable of the Moslem possessions in the Mediterranean, being a principal mart for the trade of the Levant. It contained about twenty thousand inhabitants, was strongly fortified, and had acquired a degree of opulence by its extensive commerce, which enabled it to maintain a swarm of cruisers, that swept this inland sea, and made fearful depredations on its populous borders. [6] No sooner was Ferdinand quietly established again in the government, than Ximenes urged him to undertake this new conquest. The king saw its importance, but objected the want of funds. The cardinal, who was prepared for this, replied, that "he was ready to lend whatever sums were necessary, and to take sole charge of the expedition, leading it, if the king pleased, in person." Ferdinand, who had no objection to this mode of making acquisitions, more especially as it would open a vent for the turbulent spirits of his subjects, readily acquiesced in the proposition. The enterprise, however disproportionate it might seem to the resources of a private individual, was not beyond those of the cardinal. He had been carefully husbanding his revenues for some time past, with a view to this object; although he had occasionally broken in upon his appropriations, to redeem unfortunate Spaniards, who had been swept into slavery. He had obtained accurate surveys of the Barbary coast from an Italian engineer named Vianelli. He had advised, as to the best mode of conducting operations, with his friend Gonsalvo de Cordova, to whom, if it had been the king's pleasure, he would gladly have intrusted the conduct of the expedition. At his suggestion, that post was now assigned to the celebrated engineer, Count Pedro Navarro. [7] No time was lost in completing the requisite preparations. Besides the Italian veterans, levies were drawn from all quarters of the country, especially from the cardinal's own diocese. The chapter of Toledo entered heartily into his views, furnishing liberal supplies, and offering to accompany the expedition in person. An ample train of ordnance was procured, with provisions and military stores for the maintenance of an army four months. Before the close of the spring, in 1509, all was in readiness, and a fleet of ten galleys and eighty smaller vessels rode in the harbor of Carthagena, having on board a force, amounting in all to four thousand horse and ten thousand foot. Such were the resources, activity, and energy, displayed by a man whose life, until within a very few years, had been spent in cloistered solitudes, and in the quiet practices of religion, and who now, oppressed with infirmities more than usual, had passed the seventieth year of his age. In accomplishing all this, the cardinal had experienced greater obstacles than those arising from bodily infirmity or age. His plans had been constantly discouraged and thwarted by the nobles, who derided the idea of "a monk fighting the battles of Spain, while the Great Captain was left to stay at home, and count his beads like a hermit." The soldiers, especially those of Italy, as well as their commander Navarro, trained under the banners of Gonsalvo, showed little inclination to serve under their spiritual leader. The king himself was cooled by these various manifestations of discontent. But the storm, which prostrates the weaker spirit, serves only to root the stronger more firmly in its purpose; and the genius of Ximenes, rising with the obstacles it had to encounter, finally succeeded in triumphing over all, in reconciling the king, disappointing the nobles, and restoring obedience and discipline to the army. [8] On the 16th of May, 1509, the fleet weighed anchor, and on the following day reached the African port of Mazarquivir. No time was lost in disembarking; for the fires on the hill-tops showed that the country was already in alarm. It was proposed to direct the main attack against a lofty height, or ridge of land, rising between Mazarquivir and Oran, so near the latter as entirely to command it. At the same time, the fleet was to drop down before the Moorish city, and by opening a brisk cannonade, divert the attention of the inhabitants from the principal point of assault. As soon as the Spanish army had landed, and formed in order of battle, Ximenes mounted his mule, and rode along the ranks. He was dressed in his pontifical robes, with a belted sword at his side. A Franciscan friar rode before him, bearing aloft the massive silver cross, the archiepiscopal standard of Toledo. Around him were other brethren of the order, wearing their monastic frocks, with scimitars hanging from their girdles. As the ghostly cavalcade advanced, they raised the triumphant hymn of _Vexilla regis_, until at length the cardinal, ascending a rising ground, imposed silence, and made a brief but animated harangue to his soldiers. He reminded them of the wrongs they had suffered from the Moslems, the devastation of their coasts, and their brethren dragged into merciless slavery. When he had sufficiently roused their resentment against the enemies of their country and religion, he stimulated their cupidity by dwelling on the golden spoil, which awaited them in the opulent city of Oran; and he concluded his discourse by declaring, that he had come to peril his own life in the good cause of the Cross, and to lead them on to battle, as his predecessors had often done before him. [9] The venerable aspect and heart-stirring eloquence of the primate kindled a deep, reverential enthusiasm in the bosoms of his martial audience, which showed itself by the profoundest silence. The officers, however, closed around him at the conclusion of the address, and besought him not to expose his sacred person to the hazard of the fight; reminding him, that his presence would probably do more harm than good, by drawing off the attention of the men to his personal safety. This last consideration moved the cardinal, who, though reluctantly, consented to relinquish the command to Navarro, and, after uttering his parting benediction over the prostrate ranks, he withdrew to the neighboring fortress of Mazarquivir. The day was now far spent, and dark clouds of the enemy were seen gathering along the tops of the sierra, which it was proposed first to attack. Navarro, seeing this post so strongly occupied, doubted whether his men would be able to carry it before nightfall, if indeed at all, without previous rest and refreshment, after the exhausting labors of the day. He returned, therefore, to Mazarquivir, to take counsel of Ximenes. The latter, whom he found at his devotions, besought him "not to falter at this hour, but to go forward in God's name, since both the blessed Saviour and the false prophet Mahomet conspired to deliver the enemy into his hands." The soldier's scruples vanished before the intrepid bearing of the prelate, and, returning to the army, he gave instant orders to advance. [10] Slowly and silently the Spanish troops began their ascent up the steep sides of the sierra, under the friendly cover of a thick mist, which, rolling heavily down the skirts of the hills, shielded them for a time from the eye of the enemy. As soon as they emerged from it, however, they were saluted with showers of balls, arrows, and other deadly missiles, followed by the desperate charges of the Moors, who, rushing down, endeavored to drive back the assailants. But they made no impression on the long pikes and deep ranks of the latter, which remained unshaken as a rock. Still the numbers of the enemy, fully equal to those of the Spaniards, and the advantages of their position enabled them to dispute the ground with fearful obstinacy. At length Navarro got a small battery of heavy guns to operate on the flank of the Moors. The effect of this movement was soon visible. The exposed sides of the Moslem column, finding no shelter from the deadly volleys, were shaken and thrown into disorder. The confusion extended to the leading files, which now, pressed heavily by the iron array of spearmen in the Christian van, began to give ground. Retreat was soon quickened into a disorderly flight. The Spaniards pursued; many of them, especially the raw levies, breaking their ranks, and following up the flying foe without the least regard to the commands or menaces of their officers; a circumstance which might have proved fatal, had the Moors had strength or discipline to rally. As it was, the scattered numbers of the Christians, magnifying to the eye their real force, served only to increase the panic, and accelerate the speed of the fugitives. [11] While this was going on, the fleet had anchored before the city, and opened a very heavy cannonade, which was answered with equal spirit from sixty pieces of artillery which garnished the fortifications. The troops on board, however, made good their landing, and soon joined themselves to their victorious countrymen, descending from the sierra. They then pushed forward in all haste towards Oran, proposing to carry the place by escalade. They were poorly provided with ladders, but the desperate energy of the moment overleaped every obstacle; and planting their long pikes against the walls, or thrusting them into the crevices of the stones, they clambered up with incredible dexterity, although they were utterly unable to repeat the feat the next day in cold blood. The first who gained the summit was Sousa, captain of the cardinal's guard, who, shouting forth "St. Jago and Ximenes," unfurled his colors, emblazoned with the primate's arms on one side, and the Cross on the other, and planted them on the battlements. Six other banners were soon seen streaming from the ramparts; and the soldiers leaping into the town got possession of the gates, and threw them open to their comrades. The whole army now rushed in, sweeping everything before it. Some few of the Moors endeavored to make head against the tide, but most fled into the houses and mosques for protection. Resistance and flight were alike unavailing. No mercy was shown; no respect for age or sex; and the soldiery abandoned themselves to all the brutal license and ferocity, which seem to stain religious wars above every other. It was in vain Navarro called them off. They returned like bloodhounds to the slaughter, and never slackened, till at last, wearied with butchery, and gorged with the food and wine found in the houses, they sunk down to sleep promiscuously in the streets and public squares. [12] The sun, which on the preceding morning had shed its rays on Oran, flourishing in all the pride of commercial opulence, and teeming with a free and industrious population, next rose on it a captive city, with its ferocious conquerors stretched in slumber on the heaps of their slaughtered victims. [13] No less than four thousand Moors were said to have fallen in the battle, and from five to eight thousand were made prisoners. The loss of the Christians was inconsiderable. As soon as the Spanish commander had taken the necessary measures for cleansing the place from its foul and dismal impurities, he sent to the cardinal, and invited him to take possession of it. The latter embarked on board his galley, and, as he coasted along the margin of the city, and saw its gay pavilions and sparkling minarets reflected in the waters, his soul swelled with satisfaction at the glorious acquisition he had made for Christian Spain. It seemed incredible, that a town so strongly manned and fortified, should have been carried so easily. As Ximenes landed and entered the gates, attended by his train of monkish brethren, he was hailed with thundering acclamations by the army as the true victor of Oran, in whose behalf Heaven had condescended to repeat the stupendous miracle of Joshua, by stopping the sun in his career. [14] But the cardinal, humbly disclaiming all merits of his own, was heard to repeat aloud the sublime language of the Psalmist, "Non nobis, Domine, non nobis," while he gave his benedictions to the soldiery. He was then conducted to the alcazar, and the keys of the fortress were put into his hand. The spoil of the captured city, amounting, as was said, to half a million of gold ducats, the fruit of long successful trade and piracy, was placed at his disposal for distribution. But that which gave most joy to his heart was the liberation of three hundred Christian captives, languishing in the dungeons of Oran. A few hours after the surrender, the _mezuar_ of Tremecen arrived with a powerful reinforcement to its relief; but instantly retreated on learning the tidings. Fortunate, indeed, was it, that the battle had not been deferred to the succeeding day. This, which must be wholly ascribed to Ximenes, was by most referred to direct inspiration. Quite as probable an explanation may be found in the boldness and impetuous enthusiasm of the cardinal's character. [15] The conquest of Oran opened unbounded scope to the ambition of Ximenes; who saw in imagination the banner of the Cross floating triumphant from the walls of every Moslem city on the Mediterranean. He experienced, however, serious impediments to his further progress. Navarro, accustomed to an independent command, chafed in his present subordinate situation, especially under a spiritual leader, whose military science he justly held in contempt. He was a rude, unlettered soldier, and bluntly spoke his mind to the primate. He told him, "his commission under him terminated with the capture of Oran; that two generals were too many in one army; that the cardinal should rest contented with the laurels he had already won, and, instead of playing the king, go home to his flock, and leave fighting to those to whom the trade belonged." [16] But what troubled the prelate more than this insolence of his general, was a letter which fell into his hands, addressed by the king to Count Navarro, in which he requested him to be sure to find some pretence for detaining the cardinal in Africa, as long as his presence could be made any way serviceable. Ximenes had good reason before to feel that the royal favor to him flowed from selfishness, rather than from any personal regard. The king had always wished the archbishopric of Toledo for his favorite, and natural son, Alfonso of Aragon. After his return from Naples, he importuned Ximenes to resign his see, and exchange it for that of Saragossa, held by Alfonso; till, at length, the indignant prelate replied, "that he would never consent to barter away the dignities of the church; that if his Highness pressed him any further, he would indeed throw up the primacy, but it should be to bury himself in the friar's cell from which the queen had originally called him." Ferdinand, who, independently of the odium of such a proceeding, could ill afford to part with so able a minister, knew his inflexible temper too well ever to resume the subject. [17] With some reason, therefore, for distrusting the good-will of his sovereign, Ximenes put the worst possible construction on the expressions in his letter. He saw himself a mere tool in Ferdinand's hands, to be used so long as occasion might serve, with the utmost indifference to his own interests or convenience. These humiliating suspicions, together with the arrogant bearing of his general, disgusted him with the further prosecution of the expedition; while he was confirmed in his purpose of returning to Spain, and found an obvious apology for it in the state of his own health, too infirm to encounter, with safety, the wasting heats of an African summer. Before his departure, he summoned Navarro and his officers about him, and, after giving them much good counsel respecting the government and defence of their new acquisitions, he placed at their disposal an ample supply of funds and stores, for the maintenance of the army several months. He then embarked, not with the pompous array and circumstance of a hero returning from his conquests, but with a few domestics only, in an unarmed galley, showing, as it were, by this very act, the good effects of his enterprise, in the security which it brought to the before perilous navigation of these inland seas. [18] Splendid preparations were made for his reception in Spain, and he was invited to visit the court at Valladolid, to receive the homage and public testimonials due to his eminent services. But his ambition was of too noble a kind to be dazzled by the false lights of an ephemeral popularity. He had too much pride of character, indeed, to allow room for the indulgence of vanity. He declined, these compliments, and hastened without loss of time to his favorite city of Alcalá. There, too, the citizens, anxious to do him honor, turned out under arms to receive him, and made a breach in the walls, that he might make his entry in a style worthy of a conqueror. But this also he declined choosing to pass into the town by the regular avenue, with no peculiar circumstances attending his entrance, save only a small train of camels, led by African slaves, and laden with gold and silver plate from the mosques of Oran, and a precious collection of Arabian manuscripts, for the library of his infant university of Alcalá. He showed similar modesty and simplicity in his deportment and conversation. He made no allusion to the stirring scenes in which he had been so gloriously engaged; and, if others made any, turned the discourse into some other channel, particularly to the condition of his college, its discipline, and literary progress, which, with the great project for the publication of his famous Polyglot Bible, seemed now almost wholly to absorb his attention. [19] His first care, however, was to visit the families in his diocese, and minister consolation and relief, which he did in the most benevolent manner, to those who were suffering from the loss of friends, whether by death or absence, in the late campaign. Nor did he in his academical retreat lose sight of the great object which had so deeply interested him, of extending the empire of the Cross over Africa. From time to time he remitted supplies for the maintenance of Oran; and he lost no opportunity of stimulating Ferdinand to prosecute his conquests. The Catholic king, however, felt too sensibly the importance of his new possessions to require such admonition; and Count Pedro Navarro was furnished with ample resources of every kind, and, above all, with the veterans formed under the eye of Gonsalvo de Cordova. Thus placed on an independent field of conquest, the Spanish general was not slow in pushing his advantages. His first enterprise was against Bugia, whose king, at the head of a powerful army, he routed in two pitched battles, and got possession of his flourishing capital. Algiers, Tennis, Tremecen, and other cities on the Barbary coast, submitted one after another to the Spanish arms. The inhabitants were received as vassals of the Catholic king, engaging to pay the taxes usually imposed by their Moslem princes, and to serve him in war, with the addition of the whimsical provision, so often found in the old Granadine treaties, to attend him in cortes. They guaranteed, moreover, the liberation of all Christian captives in their dominions; for which the Algerines, however, took care to indemnify themselves, by extorting the full ransom from their Jewish residents. It was of little moment to the wretched Israelite which party won the day, Christian or Mussulman; he was sure to be stripped in either case. [20] On the 26th of July, 1510, the ancient city of Tripoli, after a most bloody and desperate defence, surrendered to the arms of the victorious general, whose name had now become terrible along the whole northern borders of Africa. In the following month, however, he met with a serious discomfiture in the island of Gelves, where four thousand of his men were slain or made prisoners. [21] This check in the brilliant career of Count Navarro put a final stop to the progress of the Castilian arms in Africa under Ferdinand. [22] The results already obtained, however, were of great importance, whether we consider the value of the acquisitions, being some of the most opulent marts on the Barbary coast, or the security gained for commerce, by sweeping the Mediterranean of the pestilent hordes of marauders, which had so long infested it. Most of the new conquests escaped from the Spanish crown in later times, through the imbecility or indolence of Ferdinand's successors. The conquests of Ximenes, however, were placed in so strong a posture of defence, as to resist every attempt for their recovery by the enemy, and to remain permanently incorporated with the Spanish empire. [23] This illustrious prelate, in the mean while, was busily occupied, in his retirement at Alcalá de Henares, with watching over the interests and rapid development of his infant university. This institution was too important in itself, and exercised too large an influence over the intellectual progress of the country, to pass unnoticed in a history of the present reign. As far back as 1497, Ximenes had conceived the idea of establishing a university in the ancient town of Alcalá, where the salubrity of the air, and the sober, tranquil complexion of the scenery, on the beautiful borders of the Henares, seemed well suited to academic study and meditation. He even went so far as to obtain plans at this time for his buildings from a celebrated architect. Other engagements, however, postponed the commencement of the work till 1500, when the cardinal himself laid the cornerstone of the principal college, with a solemn ceremonial, [24] and invocation of the blessing of Heaven on his designs. From that hour, amidst all the engrossing cares of church and state, he never lost sight of this great object. When at Alcalá, he might be frequently seen on the ground, with the rule in his hand, taking the admeasurements of the buildings, and stimulating the industry of the workmen by seasonable rewards. [25] The plans were too extensive, however, to admit of being speedily accomplished. Besides the principal college of San Ildefonso, named in honor of the patron saint of Toledo, there were nine others, together with an hospital for the reception of invalids at the university. These edifices were built in the most substantial manner, and such parts as admitted of it, as the libraries, refectories, and chapels, were finished with elegance, and even splendor. The city of Alcalá underwent many important and expensive alterations, in order to render it more worthy of being the seat of a great and flourishing university. The stagnant water was carried off by drains, the streets were paved, old buildings removed, and new and spacious avenues thrown open. [26] At the expiration of eight years, the cardinal had the satisfaction of seeing the whole of his vast design completed, and every apartment of the spacious pile carefully furnished with all that was requisite for the comfort and accommodation of the student. It was, indeed, a noble enterprise, more particularly when viewed as the work of a private individual. As such it raised the deepest admiration in Francis the First, when he visited the spot, a few years after the cardinal's death. "Your Ximenes," said he, "has executed more than I should have dared to conceive; he has done, with his single hand, what in France it has cost a line of kings to accomplish." [27] The erection of the buildings, however, did not terminate the labors of the primate, who now assumed the task of digesting a scheme of instruction and discipline for his infant seminary. In doing this, he sought light wherever it was to be found; and borrowed many useful hints from the venerable university of Paris. His system was of the most enlightened kind, being directed to call all the powers of the student into action, and not to leave him a mere passive recipient in the hands of his teachers. Besides daily recitations and lectures, he was required to take part in public examinations and discussions, so conducted as to prove effectually his talent and acquisitions. In these gladiatorial displays, Ximenes took the deepest interest, and often encouraged the generous emulation of the scholar by attending in person. Two provisions may be noticed as characteristic of the man. One, that the salary of a professor should be regulated by the number of his disciples. Another, that every professor should be re-eligible at the expiration of every four years. It was impossible, that any servant of Ximenes should sleep on his post. [28] Liberal foundations were made for indigent students, especially in divinity. Indeed, theological studies, or rather such a general course of study as should properly enter into the education of a Christian minister, was the avowed object of the institution. For the Spanish clergy up to this period, as before noticed, were too often deficient in the most common elements of learning. But in this preparatory discipline, the comprehensive mind of Ximenes embraced nearly the whole circle of sciences taught in other universities. Out of the forty-two chairs, indeed, twelve only were dedicated to divinity and the canon law; while fourteen were appropriated to grammar, rhetoric, and the ancient classics; studies, which probably found especial favor with the cardinal, as furnishing the only keys to a correct criticism and interpretation of the Scriptures. [29] Having completed his arrangements, the cardinal sought the most competent agents for carrying his plans into execution; and this indifferently from abroad and at home. His mind was too lofty for narrow local prejudices, and the tree of knowledge, he knew, bore fruit in every clime. [30] He took especial care, that the emolument should be sufficient to tempt talent from obscurity, and from quarters however remote, where it was to be found. In this he was perfectly successful, and we find the university catalogue at this time inscribed with the names of the most distinguished scholars in their various departments, many of whom we are enabled to appreciate by the enduring memorials of erudition, which they have bequeathed to us. [31] In July, 1508, the cardinal received the welcome intelligence, that his academy was opened for the admission of pupils; and in the following month the first lecture, being on Aristotle's Ethics, was publicly delivered. Students soon flocked to the new university, attracted by the reputation of its professors, its ample apparatus, its thorough system of instruction, and, above all, its splendid patronage, and the high character of its founder. We have no information of their number in Ximenes's lifetime; but it must have been very considerable, since no less than seven thousand came out to receive Francis the First on his visit to the university, within twenty years after it was opened. [32] Five years after this period, in 1513, King Ferdinand, in an excursion made for the benefit of his declining health, paid a visit to Alcalá. Ever since his return from Oran, the cardinal, disgusted with public life, had remained with a few brief exceptions in his own diocese, devoted solely to his personal and professional duties. It was with proud satisfaction that he now received his sovereign, and exhibited to him the noble testimony of the great objects, to which his retirement had been consecrated. The king, whose naturally inquisitive mind no illness could damp, visited every part of the establishment, and attended the examinations, and listened to the public disputations of the scholars with interest. With little learning of his own, he had been made too often sensible, of his deficiencies not to appreciate it in others. His acute perception readily discerned the immense benefit to his kingdom, and the glory conferred on his reign by the labors of his ancient minister, and he did ample justice to them in the unqualified terms of his commendation. It was on this occasion that the rector of San Ildefonso, the head of the university, came out to receive the king, preceded by his usual train of attendants, with their maces or wands of office. The royal guard, at this exhibition, called out to them to lay aside these insignia, as unbecoming any subject in the presence of his sovereign. "Not so," said Ferdinand, who had the good sense to perceive that majesty could not be degraded by its homage to letters; "not so; this is the seat of the Muses, and those, who are initiated in their mysteries, have the best right to reign here." [33] In the midst of his pressing duties, Ximenes found time for the execution of another work, which would alone have been sufficient to render his name immortal in the republic of letters. This was his famous Bible, or Complutensian Polyglot, as usually termed, from the place where it was printed. [34] It was on the plan, first conceived by Origen, of exhibiting in one view the Scriptures in their various ancient languages. It was a work of surpassing difficulty, demanding an extensive and critical acquaintance with the most ancient, and consequently the rarest, manuscripts. The character and station of the cardinal afforded him, it is true, uncommon facilities. The precious collection of the Vatican was liberally thrown open to him, especially under Leo the Tenth, whose munificent spirit delighted in the undertaking. [35] He obtained copies, in like manner, of whatever was of value in the other libraries of Italy, and, indeed, of Europe generally; and Spain supplied him with editions of the Old Testament of great antiquity, which had been treasured up by the banished Israelites. [36] Some idea may be formed of the lavish expenditure in this way, from the fact that four thousand gold crowns were paid for seven foreign manuscripts, which, however, came too late to be of use in the compilation. [37] The conduct of the work was entrusted to nine scholars, well skilled in the ancient tongues, as most of them had evinced by works of critical acuteness and erudition. After the labors of the day, these learned sages were accustomed to meet, in order to settle the doubts and difficulties which had arisen in the course of their researches, and, in short, to compare the results of their observations. Ximenes, who, however limited his attainments in general literature, [38] was an excellent biblical critic, frequently presided, and took a prominent part in these deliberations. "Lose no time, my friends," he would say, "in the prosecution of our glorious work; lest, in the casualties of life, you should lose your patron, or I have to lament the loss of those, whose services are of more price in my eyes than wealth and worldly honors." [39] The difficulties of the undertaking were sensibly increased by those of the printing. The art was then in its infancy, and there were no types in Spain, if indeed in any part of Europe, in the Oriental character. Ximenes, however, careful to have the whole executed under his own eye, imported artists from Germany, and had types cast in the various languages required, in his foundries at Alcala. [40] The work when completed occupied six volumes folio; [41] the first four devoted to the Old Testament, the fifth to the New; the last containing a Hebrew and Chaldaic vocabulary, with other elementary treatises of singular labor and learning. It was not brought to an end till 1517, fifteen years after its commencement, and a few months only before the death of its illustrious projector. Alvaro Gomez relates, that he had often heard John Broccario, the son of the printer, [42] say, that when the last sheet was struck off, he, then a child, was dressed in his best attire, and sent with a copy to the cardinal. The latter, as he took it, raised his eyes to Heaven, and devoutly offered up his thanks, for being spared to the completion of this good work. Then, turning to his friends who were present, he said, that "of all the acts which distinguished his administration, there was none, however arduous, better entitled to their congratulation than this." [43] This is not the place, if I were competent, to discuss the merits of this great work, the reputation of which is familiar to every scholar. Critics, indeed, have disputed the antiquity of the manuscripts used in the compilation, as well as the correctness and value of the emendations. [44] Unfortunately, the destruction of the original manuscripts, in a manner which forms one of the most whimsical anecdotes in literary history, makes it impossible to settle the question satisfactorily. [45] Undoubtedly, many blemishes may be charged on it, necessarily incident to an age when the science of criticism was imperfectly understood, [46] and the stock of materials much more limited, or at least more difficult of access, than at the present day. [47] After every deduction, however, the cardinal's Bible has the merit of being the first successful attempt at a polyglot version of the Scriptures, and consequently of facilitating, even by its errors, the execution of more perfect and later works of the kind. [48] Nor can we look at it in connection with the age, and the auspices under which it was accomplished, without regarding it as a noble monument of piety, learning, and munificence, which entitles its author to the gratitude of the whole Christian world. Such were the gigantic projects which amused the leisure hours of this great prelate. Though gigantic, they were neither beyond his strength to execute, nor beyond the demands of his age and country. They were not like those works, which, forced into being by whim, or transitory impulse, perish with the breath that made them; but, taking deep root, were cherished and invigorated by the national sentiment, so as to bear rich fruit for posterity. This was particularly the case with the institution at Alcalá. It soon became the subject of royal and private benefaction. Its founder bequeathed it, at his death, a clear revenue of fourteen thousand ducats. By the middle of the seventeenth century, this had increased to forty-two thousand, and the colleges had multiplied from ten to thirty-five. [49] The rising reputation of the new academy, which attracted students from every quarter of the Peninsula to its halls, threatened to eclipse the glories of the ancient seminary at Salamanca, and occasioned bitter jealousies between them. The field of letters, however, was wide enough for both, especially as the one was more immediately devoted to theological preparation, to the entire exclusion of civil jurisprudence, which formed a prominent branch of instruction at the other. In this state of things, their rivalry, far from being productive of mischief, might be regarded as salutary, by quickening literary ardor, too prone to languish without the spur of competition. Side by side the sister universities went forward, dividing the public patronage and estimation. As long as the good era of letters lasted in Spain, the academy of Ximenes, under the influence of its admirable discipline, maintained a reputation inferior to none other in the Peninsula, [50] and continued to send forth its sons to occupy the most exalted posts in church and state, and shed the light of genius and science over their own and future ages. [51] FOOTNOTES [1] On his return from Cordova, he experienced a most loyal and enthusiastic reception from the ancient capital of Andalusia. The most interesting part of the pageant was the troops of children, gayly dressed, who came out to meet him, presenting the keys of the city and an imperial crown, after which the whole procession moved under thirteen triumphal arches, each inscribed with the name of one of his victories. For a description of these civic honors, see Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 216, and Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, año 1508. [2] He obtained this dignity at the king's solicitation, during his visit to Naples. See Ferdinand's letter, apud Quintanilla, copied from the archives of Alcalá. Archetypo, Apend. no. 15. [3] "Ego tamen dum universas ejus actiones comparo," says Alvaro Gomez, "magis ad bellica exercitia a naturâ effictum esse judico. Erat enim vir animi invicti et sublimis, omniaque in melius asserere conantis." De Rebus Gestis, fol. 95. [4] From a letter of King Emanuel of Portugal, it appears that Ximenes had endeavored to interest him, together with the kings of Aragon and England, in a crusade to the Holy Land. There was much method in his madness, if we may judge from the careful survey he had procured of the coast, as well as his plan of operations. The Portuguese monarch praises in round terms the edifying zeal of the primate, but wisely confined himself to his own crusades in India, which were likely to make better returns, at least in this world, than those to Palestine. The letter is still preserved in the archives of Alcalá; see a copy in Quintanilla, Archetype, Apend. no. 16. [5] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 6, cap. 15.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 77.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 17.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1507.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 28, cap. 15; lib. 29, cap. 9. [6] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 418. [7] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 96-100.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 218--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 17.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 413.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 3, cap. 7. [8] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 100-102.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, ubi supra.--Quintanilla, Archetypo, lib. 3, cap. 19.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 218. [9] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., ubi supra.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 8, cap. 30.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 108.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., dial. de Ximenez. [10] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 108-110.--Quintanilla, Archetypo, lib. 3, cap. 19.--Zurita, Anales, lib. 8, cap. 30. [11] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 418.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 218.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 110, 111.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 18. [12] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, ubi supra.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 218.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 22.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., ubi supra.--Quintanilla, Archetypo, lib. 3, cap. 19.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1509.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS.--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 15. [13] "Sed tandem somnus ex labore et vino obortus eos oppressit, et cruentis hostium cadaveribus tantâ securitate et fiduciâ indormierunt, ut permulti in Oranis urbis plateis ad multam diem stertuerint." Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 111. [14] To accommodate the Christians, as the day was far advanced when the action began, the sun was permitted to stand still several hours; there is some discrepancy as to the precise number; most authorities, however, make it four. There is no miracle in the whole Roman Catholic budget, better vouched than this. It is recorded by four eye-witnesses, men of learning and character. It is attested, moreover, by a cloud of witnesses, who depose to have received it, some from tradition, others from direct communication with their ancestors present in the action; and who all agree that it was matter of public notoriety and belief at the time. See the whole formidable array of evidence set forth by Quintanilla. (Archetypo, pp. 236 et seq. and Apend. p. 103.) It was scarcely to have been expected that so astounding a miracle should escape the notice of all Europe, where it must have been as apparent as at Oran. This universal silence may be thought, indeed, the greater miracle of the two. [15] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 218.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 22.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 113.--Lanuza, Historias, tom. i. lib. 1, cap. 22.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS.--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 15. [16] Fléchier, Histoire de Ximenes, pp. 308, 309.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 18. [17] Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, lib. 3, p. 107.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 117.--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 16.--"The worthy brother," says Sandoval of the prelate, "thought his archbishopric worth more than the good graces of a covetous old monarch." [18] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 420.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 118.--Quintanilla, Archetypo, lib. 3, cap. 20. [19] Quintanilla, Archetypo, lib. 3, cap. 20.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 119, 120.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 8, cap. 30.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 22. [20] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 9, cap. 1, 2, 4, 13.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 435-437.--Quintanilla, Archetypo, lib. 3, cap. 20.-- Mariana, Hist. de España, lib. 29, cap. 22.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 122-124.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 222.--Zurita gives at length the capitulation with Algiers, lib. 9, cap. 13. [21] Chénier, Recherches sur les Manures, tom. ii. pp. 355, 356.--It is but just to state, that this disaster was imputable to Don Garcia de Toledo, who had charge of the expedition, and who expiated his temerity with his life. He was eldest son of the old duke of Alva, and father of that nobleman, who subsequently acquired such gloomy celebrity by his conquests and cruelties in the Netherlands. The tender poet, Garcilasso de la Vega, offers sweet incense to the house of Toledo, in one of his pastorals, in which he mourns over the disastrous day of Gelves; "O patria lagrimosa, i como buelves los ojos a los Gelves sospirando!" The death of the young nobleman is veiled under a beautiful simile, which challenges comparison with the great masters of Latin and Italian song, from whom the Castilian bard derived it. "Puso en el duro suelo la hermosa cara, como la rosa matutina, cuando ya el sol declina 'l medio dia; que pierde su alegria, i marchitando va la color mudando; o en el campo cual queda el lirio blanco, qu' el arado crudamente cortado al passar dexa; del cual aun no s' alexa pressuroso aquel color hermoso, o se destierra; mas ya la madre tierra descuidada, no l' administra nada de su aliento, qu' era el sustentamiento i vigor suyo; tal esta el rostro tuyo en el arena, fresca rosa, acucena blanea i pura." Garcilasso de la Vega, Obras, ed. de Herrera, pp. 507, 508. [22] The reader may feel some curiosity respecting the fate of count Pedro Navarro. He soon after this went to Italy, where he held a high command, and maintained his reputation in the wars of that country, until he was taken by the French in the great battle of Ravenna. Through the carelessness or coldness of Ferdinand he was permitted to languish in captivity, till he took his revenge by enlisting in the service of the French monarch. Before doing this, however, he resigned his Neapolitan estates, and formally renounced his allegiance to the Catholic king; of whom, being a Navarese by birth, he was not a native subject. He unfortunately fell into the hands of his own countrymen in one of the subsequent actions in Italy, and was imprisoned at Naples, in Castel Nuovo, which he had himself formerly gained from the French. Here he soon after died; if we are to believe Brantôme, being privately despatched by command of Charles V., or, as other writers intimate, by his own hand. His remains, first deposited in an obscure corner of the church of Santa Maria, were afterwards removed to the chapel of the great Gonsalvo, and a superb mausoleum was erected over them by the prince of Sessa, grandson of the hero. Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 124.--Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. pp. 226, 289, 406.--Brantôme, Vies des Hommes Illustres, disc. 9. --Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, pp. 190-193. [23] Ximenes continued to watch over the city which he had so valiantly won, long after his death. He never failed to be present in seasons of extraordinary peril. At least the gaunt, gigantic figure of a monk, dressed in the robes of his order, and wearing a cardinal's hat, was seen, sometimes stalking along the battlements at midnight, and, at others, mounted on a white charger and brandishing a naked sword in the thick of the fight. His last appearance was in 1643, when Oran was closely beleaguered by the Algerines. A sentinel on duty saw a figure moving along the parapet one clear, moonlight night, dressed in a Franciscan frock, with a general's baton in his hand. As soon as it was hailed by the terrified soldier, it called to him to "tell the garrison to be of good heart, for the enemy should not prevail against them." Having uttered these words, the apparition vanished without ceremony. It repeated its visit in the same manner on the following night, and, a few days after, its assurance was verified by the total discomfiture of the Algerines, in a bloody battle under the walls. See the evidence of these various apparitions, as collected, for the edification of the court of Rome, by that prince of miracle-mongers, Quintanilla. (Archetypo, pp. 317, 335, 338, 340.) Bishop Fléchier appears to have no misgivings as to the truth of these old wives' tales. (Histoire de Ximenés, liv. 6.) Oran, after resisting repeated assaults by the Moors, was at length so much damaged by an earthquake, in 1790, that it was abandoned, and its Spanish garrison and population were transferred to the neighboring city of Mazarquivir. [24] The custom, familiar at the present day, of depositing coins and other tokens, with inscriptions bearing the names of the architect and founder and date of the building, under the corner-stone was observed on this occasion, where it is noticed as of ancient usage, _more prisco_. Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 28. [25] Fléchier, Histoire de Ximenés, p. 597. [26] Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 16.-- Quintanilla, Archetypo, p. 178.--Colmenar, Délices de l'Espagne, tom. ii. pp. 308-310.--Navagiero, Viaggio, fol. 7,--who notices particularly the library, "piena di molti libri et Latini et Greci et Hebraici." The good people accused the cardinal of too great a passion for building; and punningly said, "The church of Toledo had never had a bishop of greater _edification_, in every, sense than Ximenes." Fléchier, Histoire de Ximenés, p. 597. [27] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 79. [28] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 82-84. [29] Navagiero says, it was prescribed the lectures should be in Latin. Viaggio, fol. 7.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 16. Of these professorships, six were appropriated to theology; six to canon law; four to medicine; one to anatomy; one to surgery; eight to the arts, as they were called, embracing logic, physics, and metaphysics; one to ethics; one to mathematics; four to the ancient languages; four to rhetoric; and six to grammar. One is struck with the disproportion of the mathematical studies to the rest. Though an important part of general education, and consequently of the course embraced in most universities, it had too little reference to a religious one, to find much favor with the cardinal. [30] Lampillas, in his usual patriotic vein, stoutly maintains that the chairs of the university were all supplied by native Spaniards. "Trovó in Spagna," he says of the cardinal, "tutta quella scelta copia di grandi uomini, quali richiedeva la grande impresa," etc. (Letteratura Spagnuola, tom. i, part. 2, p. 160.) Alvaro Gomez, who flourished two centuries earlier, and personally knew the professors, is the better authority. De Rebus Gestis, fol. 80-82. [31] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 13. Alvaro Gomez knew several of these _savans_ whose scholarship (and he was a competent judge) he notices with liberal panegyric. De Rebus Gestis, fol. 80 et seq. [32] Quintanilla, Archetypo, lib. 3, cap. 17. [33] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 86. The reader will readily call to mind the familiar anecdote of King Charles and Dr. Busby. [34] "Alcalá de Henares," says Martyr in one of his early letters, "quae dicitur esse Complutum. Sit, vel ne, nil mihi curae." (Opus Epist., epist. 254.) These irreverent doubts were uttered before it had gained its literary celebrity. L. Marineo derives the name _Complutum_ from the abundant fruitfulness of the soil,--"cumplumiento que tiene de cada cosa." Cosas Memorables, fol. 13. [35] Ximenes acknowledges his obligations to his Holiness, in particular for the Greek MSS. "Atque ex ipsis [exemplaribus] quidem Graeca Sanctitati tuae debemus; qui ex istâ Apostolicâ bibliothecâ antiquissimos tam Veteris quam Novi codices perquam humane ad nos misisti." Biblia Polyglotta, (Compluti, 1514-17,) Prólogo. [36] "Maximam," says the cardinal in his Preface, "laboris nostri partem in eo praecipue fuisse versatam; ut et virorum in linguarum cognitione eminentissimorum operâ uteremur, et castigatissima omni ex parte vetustissimaque exemplaria pro archetypis haberemus; quorum quidem, tam Hebraeorum quam Graecorum ac Latinorum, multiplicem copiam, variis ex locis, non sine summo labore conquisivimus." Biblia Polyglotta, Compluti, Prólogo. [37] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 39.--Quintanilla, Archetypo, lib. 3, cap. 10. [38] Martyr speaks of Ximenes, in one of his epistles, as "doctrinâ singulari oppletum." (Opus Epist., epist. 108.) He speaks with more distrust in another; "Aiunt esse virum, _si non literis_, morum taraen sanctitate egregium." (Epist. 160.) This was written some years later, when he had better knowledge of him. [39] Quintanilla, Archetype, lib. 3, cap. lo.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 38. The scholars employed in the compilation were the venerable Lebrija, the learned Nuñez, or Pinciano, of whom the reader has had some account, Lopez de Zuñiga, a controversialist of Erasmus, Bartholomeo de Castro, the famous Greek Demetrius Cretensis, and Juan de Vergara;--all thorough linguists, especially in the Greek and Latin. To these were joined Paulo Coronel, Alfonso a physician, and Alfonso Zamora, converted Jews, and familiar with the Oriental languages. Zamora has the merit of the philological compilations relative to the Hebrew and Chaldaic, in the last volume, lidem auct. ut supra; et Suma de la Vida de Cisneros, MS. [40] Quintanilla, Archetypo, lib. 3, cap. 10. [41] The work was originally put at the extremely low price of six ducats and a half a copy. (Biblia Polyglotta Compluti, Praefix.) As only 600 copies, however, were struck off, it has become exceedingly rare and valuable. According to Brunei, it has been sold as high as £63. [42] "Industriâ et solertiâ honorabilis viri Arnaldi Guillelmi de Brocario, artis impressoris Magistri. Anno Domini 1517. Julii die decimo." Biblia Polyglotta Compluti. Postscript to 4th and last part of Vetus Test. [43] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 38. The part devoted to the Old Testament contains the Hebrew original with the Latin Vulgate, the Septuagint version, and the Chaldaic paraphrase, with Latin translations by the Spanish scholars. The New Testament was printed in the original Greek, with the Vulgate of Jerome. After the completion of this work, the cardinal projected an edition of Aristotle on the same scale, which was unfortunately defeated by his death. Ibid., fol. 39. [44] The principal controversy on this subject was carried on in Germany between Wetstein and Goeze; the former impugning, the latter defending the Complutensian Bible. The cautious and candid Michaelis, whose prepossessions appear to have been on the side of Goeze, decides ultimately, after his own examination, in favor of Wetstein, as regards the value of the MSS. employed; not however as relates to the grave charge of wilfully accommodating the Greek text to the Vulgate. See the grounds and merits of the controversy, apud Michaelis, Introduction to the New Testament, translated by Marsh, vol. ii. part 1, chap. 12, sec. 1; part 2, notes. [45] Professor Moldenhauer, of Germany, visited Alcalá in 1784, for the interesting purpose of examining the MSS. used in the Complutensian Polyglot. He there learned that they had all been disposed of, as so much waste paper, (_membranas inutiles_) by the librarian of that time to a rocket-maker of the town, who soon worked them up in the regular way of his vocation! He assigns no reason for doubting the truth of the story. The name of the librarian, unfortunately, is not recorded. It would have been as imperishable as that of Omar. Marsh's Michaelis, vol. ii. part l, chap. 12, sec. 1, note. [46] The celebrated text of "the three witnesses," formerly cited in the Trinitarian controversy, and which Porson so completely overturned, rests in part on what Gibbon calls "the honest bigotry of the Complutensian editors." One of the three Greek manuscripts, in which that text is found, is a forgery from the Polyglot of Alcalá, according to Mr. Norton, in his recent work, "The Evidences of the Genuineness of the Gospels," (Boston, 1837, vol. i. Additional Notes, p. xxxix.),--a work which few can be fully competent to criticize, but which no person can peruse without confessing the acuteness and strength of its reasoning, the nice discrimination of its criticism, and the precision and purity of its diction. Whatever difference of opinion may be formed as to some of its conclusions, no one will deny that the originality and importance of its views make it a substantial accession to theological science; and that, within the range permitted by the subject, it presents, on the whole, one of the noblest specimens of scholarship, and elegance of composition, to be found in our youthful literature. [47] "Accedit," says the editors of the Polyglot, adverting to the blunders of early transcribers, "ubicunque Latinorum codicum varietas est, aut depravatae lectionis suspitio (id quod librariorum imperitiâ simul et negligentiâ frequentissimè accidere videmus), ad primam Scriptunae originem recurrendum est." Biblia Polyglotta, Compluti, Prólogo. [48] Tiraboschi adduces a Psalter, published in four of the ancient tongues, at Genoa, in 1516, as the first essay of a polyglot version. (Letteratura Italiana, tom. viii. p. 191.) Lampillas does not fail to add this enormity to the black catalogue which he has mustered against the librarian of Modena. (Letteratura Spagnuola, tom. ii. part. 2, p. 290.) The first three volumes of the Complutensian Bible were printed before 1516, although the whole work did not pass the press till the following year. [49] Quintanilla, Archetypo, lib. 3, cap. 17.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., dial. de Ximeni. Ferdinand and Isabella conceded liberal grants and immunities to Alcalá on more than one occasion. Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 43, 45. [50] Erasmus, in a letter to his friend Vergara, in 1527, perpetrates a Greek pun on the classic name of Alcalá, intimating the highest opinion of the state of science there. "Gratulor tibi, ornatissime adolescens, gratulor vestrae Hispaniae ad pristinam eruditionis laudem veluti postliminio reflorescenti. Gratulor Compluto, quod duorum praesulum Francisci et Alfonsi felicibus auspiciis sic efflorescit omni genere studiorum, ut jure optimo _pamplouton_ appellare possimus." Epistolae, p. 771. [51] Quintanilla is for passing the sum total of the good works of these worthies of Alcalá to the credit of its founder. They might serve as a makeweight to turn the scale in favor of his beatification. Archetypo, lib. 3, cap. 17. CHAPTER XXII. WARS AND POLITICS OF ITALY. 1508-1513. League of Cambray.--Alarm of Ferdinand.--Holy League.--Battle of Ravenna. --Death of Gaston de Foix.--Retreat of the French.--The Spaniards Victorious. The domestic history of Spain, after Ferdinand's resumption of the regency, contains few remarkable events. Its foreign relations were more important. Those with Africa have been already noticed, and we must now turn to Italy and Navarre. The possession of Naples necessarily brought Ferdinand within the sphere of Italian politics. He showed little disposition, however, to avail himself of it for the further extension of his conquests. Gonsalvo, indeed, during his administration, meditated various schemes for the overthrow of the French power in Italy, but with a view rather to the preservation than enlargement of his present acquisitions. After the treaty with Louis the Twelfth, even these designs were abandoned, and the Catholic monarch seemed wholly occupied with the internal affairs of his kingdom, and the establishment of his rising empire in Africa. [1] The craving appetite of Louis the Twelfth, on the other hand, sharpened by the loss of Naples, sought to indemnify itself by more ample acquisitions in the north. As far back as 1504, he had arranged a plan with the emperor, for the partition of the continental possessions of Venice, introducing it into one of those abortive treaties at Blois for the marriage of his daughter. [2] The scheme is said to have been communicated to Ferdinand in the royal interview at Savona. No immediate action followed, and it seems probable that the latter monarch, with his usual circumspection, reserved his decision until he should be more clearly satisfied of the advantages to himself. [3] At length the projected partition was definitely settled by the celebrated treaty of Cambray, December 10th, 1508, between Louis the Twelfth and the emperor Maximilian, in which the pope, King Ferdinand, and all princes who had any claims for spoliations by the Venetians, were invited to take part. The share of the spoil assigned to the Catholic monarch was the five Neapolitan cities, Trani, Brindisi, Gallipoli, Pulignano, and Otranto, pledged to Venice for considerable sums advanced by her during the late war. [4] The Spanish court, and, not long after, Julius the Second, ratified the treaty, although it was in direct contravention of the avowed purpose of the pontiff to chase the _barbarians_ from Italy. It was his bold policy, however, to make use of them first for the aggrandizement of the church, and then to trust to his augmented strength and more favorable opportunities for eradicating them altogether. Never was there a project more destitute of principle or sound policy. There was not one of the contracting parties, who was not at that very time in close alliance with the state, the dismemberment of which he was plotting. As a matter of policy, it went to break down the principal barrier, on which each of these powers could rely for keeping in check the overweening ambition of its neighbors, and maintaining the balance of Italy. [5] The alarm of Venice was quieted for a time by assurances from the courts of France and Spain, that the league was solely directed against the Turks, accompanied by the most hypocritical professions of good-will, and amicable offers to the republic. [6] The preamble of the treaty declares, that, it being the intention of the allies to support the pope in a crusade against the infidel, they first proposed to recover from Venice the territories of which she had despoiled the church and other powers, to the manifest hindrance of these pious designs. The more flagitious the meditated enterprise, the deeper was the veil of hypocrisy thrown over it in this corrupt age. The true reasons for the confederacy are to be found in a speech delivered at the German diet, some time after, by the French minister Hélian. "We," he remarks, after enumerating various enormities of the republic, "we wear no fine purple; feast from no sumptuous services of plate; have no coffers overflowing with gold. We are barbarians. Surely," he continues in another place, "if it is derogatory to princes to act the part of merchants, it is unbecoming in merchants to assume the state of princes." [7] This, then, was the true key to the conspiracy against Venice; envy of her superior wealth and magnificence, hatred engendered by her too arrogant bearing, and lastly the evil eye, with which kings naturally regard the movements of an active, aspiring republic. [8] To secure the co-operation of Florence, the kings of France and Spain agreed to withdraw their protection from Pisa, for a stipulated sum of money. There is nothing in the whole history of the merchant princes of Venice so mercenary and base, as this bartering away for gold the independence, for which this little republic had been so nobly contending for more than fourteen years. [9] Early in April, 1509, Louis the Twelfth crossed the Alps at the head of a force which bore down all opposition. City and castle fell before him, and his demeanor to the vanquished, over whom he had no rights beyond the ordinary ones of war, was that of an incensed master taking vengeance on his rebellious vassals. In revenge for his detention before Peschiera, he hung the Venetian governor and his son from the battlements. This was an outrage on the laws of chivalry, which, however hard they bore on the peasant, respected those of high degree. Louis's rank, and his heart it seems, unhappily, raised him equally above sympathy with either class. [10] On the 14th of May was fought the bloody battle of Agnadel, which broke the power of Venice, and at once decided the fate of the war. [11] Ferdinand had contributed nothing to these operations, except by his diversion on the side of Naples, where he possessed himself without difficulty of the cities allotted to his share. They were the cheapest, and if not the most valuable, were the most permanent acquisitions of the war, being reincorporated in the monarchy of Naples. Then followed the memorable decree, by which Venice released her continental provinces from their allegiance, authorizing them to provide in any way they could for their safety; a measure, which, whether originating in panic or policy, was perfectly consonant with the latter. [12] The confederates, who had remained united during the chase, soon quarrelled over the division of the spoil. Ancient jealousies revived. The republic, with cool and consummate diplomacy, availed herself of this state of feeling. Pope Julius, who had gained all that he had proposed, and was satisfied with the humiliation of Venice, now felt all his former antipathies and distrust of the French return in full force. The rising flame was diligently fanned by the artful emissaries of the republic, who at length effected a reconciliation on her behalf with the haughty pontiff. The latter, having taken this direction, went forward in it with his usual impetuosity. He planned a new coalition for the expulsion of the French, calling on the other allies to take part in it. Louis retaliated by summoning a council to inquire into the pope's conduct, and by marching his troops into the territories of the church. [13] The advance of the French, who had now got possession of Bologna, alarmed Ferdinand. He had secured the objects for which he had entered into the war, and was loath to be diverted from enterprises in which he was interested nearer home, "I know not," writes Peter Martyr, at this time, "on what the king will decide. He is intent on following up his African conquests. He feels natural reluctance at breaking with his French ally. But I do not well see how he can avoid supporting the pope and the church, not only as the cause of religion, but of freedom. For if the French get possession of Rome, the liberties of all Italy and of every state in Europe are in peril." [14] The Catholic king viewed it in this light, and sent repeated and earnest remonstrances to Louis the Twelfth, against his aggressions on the church, beseeching him not to interrupt the peace of Christendom, and his own pious purpose, more particularly, of spreading the banners of the Cross over the infidel regions of Africa. The very sweet and fraternal tone of these communications filled the king of France, says Guicciardini, with much distrust of his royal brother; and he was heard to say, in allusion to the great preparations which the Spanish monarch was making by sea and land, "I am the Saracen against whom they are directed." [14] To secure Ferdinand more to his interests, the pope granted him the investiture, so long withheld, of Naples, on the same easy terms on which it was formerly held by the Aragonese line. His Holiness further released him from the obligation of his marriage treaty, by which the moiety of Naples was to revert to the French crown, in case of Germaine's dying without issue. This dispensing power of the successors of St. Peter, so convenient for princes in their good graces, is undoubtedly the severest tax ever levied by superstition on human reason. [15] On the 4th of October, 1511, a treaty was concluded between Julius the Second, Ferdinand, and Venice, with the avowed object of protecting the church,--in other words, driving the French out of Italy. [16] From the pious purpose to which it was devoted, it was called the Holy League. The quota to be furnished by the king of Aragon was twelve hundred heavy and one thousand light cavalry, ten thousand foot, and a squadron of eleven galleys, to act in concert with the Venetian fleet. The combined forces were to be placed under the command of Hugo de Cardona, viceroy of Naples, a person of polished and engaging address, but without the resolution or experience requisite to military success. The rough old pope sarcastically nicknamed him "Lady Cardona." It was an appointment, that would certainly have never been made by Queen Isabella. Indeed, the favor shown this nobleman on this and other occasions was so much beyond his deserts, as to raise a suspicion in many, that he was more nearly allied by blood to Ferdinand, than was usually imagined. [17] Early in 1512, France, by great exertions, and without a single confederate out of Italy, save the false and fluctuating emperor, got an army into the field superior to that of the allies in point of numbers, and still more so in the character of its commander. This was Gaston de Foix, duke de Nemours, and brother of the queen of Aragon. Though a boy in years, for he was but twenty-two, he was ripe in understanding, and possessed consummate military talents. He introduced a severer discipline into his army, and an entirely new system of tactics. He looked forward to his results with stern indifference to the means by which they were to be effected. He disregarded the difficulties of the roads, and the inclemency of the season, which had hitherto put a check on military operations. Through the midst of frightful morasses, or in the depth of winter snows, he performed his marches with a celerity unknown in the warfare of that age. In less than a fortnight after leaving Milan, he relieved Bologna, then besieged by the allies, made a countermarch on Brescia, defeated a detachment by the way, and the whole Venetian army under its walls; and, on the same day with the last event, succeeded in carrying the place by storm. After a few weeks' dissipation of the carnival, he again put himself in motion, and, descending on Ravenna, succeeded in bringing the allied army to a decisive action under its walls. Ferdinand, well understanding the peculiar characters of the French and of the Spanish soldier, had cautioned his general to adopt the Fabian policy of Gonsalvo, and avoid a close encounter as long as possible. [18] This battle, fought with the greatest numbers, was also the most murderous, which had stained the fair soil of Italy for a century. No less than eighteen or twenty thousand, according to authentic accounts, fell in it, comprehending the best blood of France and Italy. [19] The viceroy Cardona went off somewhat too early for his reputation. But the Spanish infantry, under the count Pedro Navarro, behaved in a style worthy of the school of Gonsalvo. During the early part of the day, they lay on the ground, in a position which sheltered them from the deadly artillery of Este, then the best mounted and best served of any in Europe. When at length, as the tide of battle was going against them, they were brought into the field, Navarro led them at once against a deep column of landsknechts, who, armed with the long German pike, were bearing down all before them. The Spaniards received the shock of this formidable weapon on the mailed panoply with which their bodies were covered, and, dexterously gliding into the hostile ranks, contrived with their short swords to do such execution on the enemy, unprotected except by corselets in front, and incapable of availing themselves of their long weapon, that they were thrown into confusion, and totally discomfited. It was repeating the experiment more than once made during these wars, but never on so great a scale, and it fully established the superiority of the Spanish arms. [20] The Italian infantry, which had fallen back before the landsknechts, now rallied under cover of the Spanish charge; until at length the overwhelming clouds of French gendarmerie, headed by Ives d'Allègre, who lost his own life in the _mêlée_, compelled the allies to give ground. The retreat of the Spaniards, however, was conducted with admirable order, and they preserved their ranks unbroken, as they repeatedly turned to drive back the tide of pursuit. At this crisis, Gaston de Foix, flushed with success, was so exasperated by the sight of this valiant corps going off in so cool and orderly a manner from the field, that he made a desperate charge at the head of his chivalry, in hopes of breaking it. Unfortunately, his wounded horse fell under him. It was in vain his followers called out, "It is our viceroy, the brother of your queen!" The words had no charm for a Spanish ear, and he was despatched with a multitude of wounds. He received fourteen or fifteen in the face; good proof, says the _loyal serviteur_, "that the gentle prince had never turned his back." [21] There are few instances in history, if indeed there be any, of so brief, and at the same time so brilliant a military career, as that of Gaston de Foix; and it well entitled him to the epithet his countrymen gave him of the "thunderbolt of Italy." [22] He had not merely given extraordinary promise, but in the course of a very few months had achieved such results, as might well make the greatest powers of the peninsula tremble for their possessions. His precocious military talents, the early age at which he assumed the command of armies, as well as many peculiarities of his discipline and tactics, suggest some resemblance to the beginning of Napoleon's career. Unhappily, his brilliant fame is sullied by a recklessness of human life, the more odious in one too young to be steeled by familiarity with the iron trade to which he was devoted. It may be fair, however, to charge this on the age rather than on the individual, for surely never was there one characterized by greater brutality, and more unsparing ferocity in its wars. [23] So little had the progress of civilization done for humanity. It is not until a recent period, that a more generous spirit has operated; that a fellow-creature has been understood not to forfeit his rights as a man, because he is an enemy; that conventional laws have been established, tending greatly to mitigate the evils of a condition, which with every alleviation is one of unspeakable misery; and that those who hold the destinies of nations in their hands have been made to feel, that there is less true glory, and far less profit, to be derived from war, than from the wise prevention of it. The defeat at Ravenna struck a panic into the confederates. The stout heart of Julius the Second faltered, and it required all the assurances of the Spanish and Venetian ministers to keep him staunch to his purpose. King Ferdinand issued orders to the Great Captain to hold himself in readiness for taking the command of forces to be instantly raised for Naples. There could be no better proof of the royal consternation. [24] The victory of Ravenna, however, was more fatal to the French than to their foes. The uninterrupted successes of a commander are so far unfortunate, that they incline his followers, by the brilliant illusion they throw around his name, to rely less on their own resources, than on him whom they have hitherto found invincible; and thus subject their own destiny to all the casualties which attach to the fortunes of a single individual. The death of Gaston de Foix seemed to dissolve the only bond which held the French together. The officers became divided, the soldiers disheartened, and, with the loss of their young hero, lost all interest in the service. The allies, advised of this disorderly state of the army, recovered confidence, and renewed their exertions. Through Ferdinand's influence over his son-in-law, Henry the Eighth of England, the latter had been induced openly to join the League in the beginning of the present year. [25] The Catholic king had the address, moreover, just before the battle to detach the emperor from France, by effecting a truce between him and Venice. [26] The French, now menaced and pressed on every side, began their retreat under the brave La Palice, and, to such an impotent state were they reduced, that, in less than three months after the fatal victory, they were at the foot of the Alps, having abandoned not only their recent, but all their conquests in the north of Italy. [27] The same results now took place as in the late war against Venice. The confederates quarrelled over the division of the spoil. The republic, with the largest claims, obtained the least concessions. She felt that she was to be made to descend to an inferior rank in the scale of nations. Ferdinand earnestly remonstrated with the pope, and subsequently, by means of his Venetian minister, with Maximilian, on this mistaken policy. [28] But the indifference of the one, and the cupidity of the other, were closed against argument. The result was precisely what the prudent monarch foresaw. Venice was driven into the arms of her perfidious ancient ally, and on the 23d of March, 1513, a definitive treaty was arranged with France for their mutual defence. [29] Thus the most efficient member was alienated from the confederacy. All the recent advantages of the allies were compromised. New combinations were to be formed, and new and interminable prospects of hostility opened. Ferdinand, relieved from immediate apprehensions of the French, took comparatively little interest in Italian politics. He was too much occupied with settling his conquests in Navarre. The army, indeed, under Cardona still kept the field in the north of Italy. The viceroy, after re-establishing the Medici in Florence, remained inactive. The French, in the mean while, had again mustered in force, and crossing the mountains encountered the Swiss in a bloody battle at Novara, where the former were entirely routed. Cardona, then rousing from his lethargy, traversed the Milanese without opposition, laying waste the ancient territories of Venice, burning the palaces and pleasure-houses of its lordly inhabitants on the beautiful banks of the Brenta, and approaching so near to the "Queen of the Adriatic" as to throw a few impotent balls into the monastery of San Secondo. The indignation of the Venetians and of Alviano, the same general who had fought so gallantly under Gonsalvo at the Garigliano, hurried them into an engagement with the allies near La Motta, at two miles' distance from Vicenza. Cardona, loaded with booty and entangled among the mountain passes, was assailed under every disadvantage. The German allies gave way before the impetuous charge of Alviano, but the Spanish infantry stood its ground unshaken, and by extraordinary discipline and valor succeeded in turning the fortunes of the day. More than four thousand of the enemy were left on the field, and a large number of prisoners, including many of rank, with all the baggage and artillery, fell into the hands of the victors. [30] Thus ended the campaign of 1513; the French driven again beyond the mountains; Venice cooped up within her sea-girt fastnesses, and compelled to enrol her artisans and common laborers in her defence,--but still strong in resources, above all in the patriotism and unconquerable spirit of her people. [31] * * * * * Count Daru has supplied the desideratum, so long standing, of a full, authentic history of a state, whose institutions were the admiration of earlier times, and whose long stability and success make them deservedly an object of curiosity and interest to our own. The style of the work, at once lively and condensed, is not that best suited to historic writing, being of the piquant, epigrammatic kind, much affected by French writers. The subject, too, of the revolutions of empire, does not afford room for the dramatic interest, attaching to works which admit of more extended biographical development. Abundant interest will be found, however, in the dexterity with which he has disentangled the tortuous politics of the republic; in the acute and always sensible reflections with which he clothes the dry skeleton of fact; and in the novel stores of information he has opened. The foreign policy of Venice excited too much interest among friends and enemies in the day of her glory, not to occupy the pens of the most intelligent writers. But no Italian chronicler, not even one intrusted with the office by the government itself, has been able to exhibit the interior workings of the complicated machinery so satisfactorily as M. Daru has done, with the aid of those voluminous state papers, which were as jealously guarded from inspection, until the downfall of the republic, as the records of the Spanish Inquisition. FOOTNOTES [1] Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iii. lib. 5, p. 257, ed. Milano, 1803.-- Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 6, cap. 7, 9, et alibi. [2] Dumont, Corps Diplomatique, tom. iv. part. 1, no. 30.--Flassan, Diplomatie Française, tom. i. pp. 282, 283. [3] Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iv. p. 78. [4] Flassan, Diplomatie Française, tom. i. lib. 2, p. 283.--Dumont, Corps Diplomatique, tom. iv. part 1, no. 52. [5] This argument, used by Machiavelli against Louis's rupture with Venice, applies with more or less force to all the other allies. Opere, Il Principe, cap. 3. [6] Du Bos, Ligue de Cambray, tom. i. pp. 66, 67.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 36, 37. Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iv. p. 141.--Bembo, Istoria Viniziana, tom. ii. lib. 7. [7] See a liberal extract from this harangue, apud Daru, Hist. de Venise, tom. iii. liv. 23,--also apud Du Bos, Ligue de Cambray, tom. i. p. 240 et seq.--The old poet, Jean Marot, sums up the sins of the republic in the following verse: "Autre Dieu n'ont que l'or, c'est leur créance." Oeuvres de Clément Marot, avec les Ouvrages de Jean Marot, (La Haye, 1731,) tom. v. p. 71. [8] See the undisguised satisfaction, with which Martyr, a Milanese, predicts (Opus Epist., epist. 410), and Guicciardini, a Florentine, records the humiliation of Venice. (Istoria, lib. 4, p. 137.) The arrogance of the rival republic does not escape the satirical lash of Machiavelli; "San Marco, impetuoso ed importuno, Credendosi haver sempre il vento in poppa, Non si curu di rovinare ognuno; Ne vidde come la potenza troppa Era nociva." Dell' Asino d'Oro, cap. 5. [9] Mariana, Hist. de España, lib. 29, cap. 15.--Ammirato, Istorie Florentine, tom. iii. lib. 28, p. 286.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 423. Louis XII. was in alliance with Florence, but insisted on 100,000 ducats as the price of his acquiescence in her recovery of Pisa. Ferdinand, or rather his general, Gonsalvo de Cordova, had taken Pisa under his protection, and the king insisted on 50,000 ducats for his abandonment of her. This honorable transaction resulted in the payment of the respective amounts to the royal jobbers; the 50,000 excess of Louis's portion being kept a profound secret from Ferdinand, who was made to believe by the parties that his ally received only a like sum with himself. Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iv. pp. 78, 80, 156, 157. [10] Mémoires de Bayard, chap. 30.--Fleurange, Mémoires, chap. 8.-- Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iv. p. 183. Jean Marot describes the execution in the following cool and summary style. "Ce chastelain de là, aussi le capitaine, Pour la derrision et response vilaine Qu'ils firent au hérault, furent pris et sanglez Puis devant tout le monde pendus et estranglez." Oeuvres, tom. v. p. 158. [11] The fullest account, probably, of the action is in the "Voyage de Venise" of Jean Marot. (Oeuvres, tom. v. pp. 124-139.) This pioneer of French song, since eclipsed by his more polished son, accompanied his master, Louis XII., on his Italian expedition, as his poet chronicler; and the subject has elicited occasionally some sparks of poetic fire, though struck out with a rude hand. The poem is so conscientious in its facts and dates, that it is commended by a French critic as the most exact record of the Italian campaign. Ibid. Remarques, p. 16. [12] Foreign historians impute this measure to the former motive, the Venetians to the latter. The cool and deliberate conduct of this government, from which all passion, to use the language of the abbé Du Bos, seems to have been banished, may authorize our acquiescence in the statement most flattering to the national vanity. See the discussion apud Ligue de Cambray, pp. 126 et seq. [13] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 221.--Fleurange, Mémoires, chap. 7.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 416.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iv. pp. 178, 179, 190, 191; tom. v. pp. 71, 82-86.--Bembo, Istoria Viniziana, lib. 7, 9, 10. [14] Opus Epist., epist. 465.-Mémoires de Bayard, chap. 46.--Fleurange, Mémoires, chap. 26.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 225. [14] Istoria, lib. 9, p. 135.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1511.-- Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 225.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 465. Machiavelli's friend Vettori, in one of his letters, speaks of the Catholic king as the principal author of the new coalition against France, and notices three hundred lances which he furnished the pope in advance, for this purpose. (Machiavelli, Opere, Lettere Famigliari, no. 8.) He does not seem to understand that these lances were part of the services due for the fief of Naples. The letter above quoted of Martyr, a more competent and unsuspicious authority, shows Ferdinand's sincere aversion to a rupture with Louis at the present juncture; and a subsequent passage of the same epistle shows him too much in earnest in his dissuasives, to be open to the charge of insincerity. "Ut mitibus verbis ipsum, Reginam ejus uxorem, ut consiliarios omnes Cabanillas alloquatur, ut agant apud regem suum de pace, dat in frequentibus mandatis." Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., ubi supra.--See further, epist. 454. [15] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., no. 441.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 29, cap. 24.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 164.--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 18. The act of investiture was dated July 3d, 1510. In the following August, the pontiff remitted the feudal services for the annual tribute of a white palfrey, and the aid of 300 lances when the estates of the church should be invaded. (Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 9, cap. 11.) The pope had hitherto refused the investiture, except on the most exorbitant terms; which so much disgusted Ferdinand, that he passed by Ostia on his return from Naples, without condescending to meet his Holiness, who was waiting there for a personal interview with him. Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 353.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. iv. p. 73. [16] Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. v. lib. 10, p. 207.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 30, cap. 5.--Rymer, Foedera, tom. xiii. pp. 305-308. [17] Guicciardini, Istoria, tom., v. lib. 10, p. 208.--Bembo, Istoria Viniziana, tom. ii. lib. 12.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 30, cap. 5, 14.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 483. Vettori, it seems, gave credence to the same suggestion. "Spagna ha sempre amato assai questo suo Vicerè, e per errore che abbia fatto non l'ha gustigato, ma più presto fatto più grande, e si può pensare, come molti dicono, che _sia suo figlio, e che abbia in pensiero lasciarlo Re di Napoli_." Machiavelli, Opere, let. di 16 Maggio, 1514. According to Aleson, the king would have appointed Navarro to the post of commander-in-chief, had not his low birth disqualified him for it in the eyes of the allies. Annales de Navarra, tom. v. lib. 35, cap. 12. [18] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 230, 231.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. v. lib. 10, pp. 260-272.--Giovio, Vita Leonis X., apud Vitae Illust. Virorum, lib. 2, pp. 37, 38.--Mémoires de Bayard, chap. 48.-- Fleurange, Mémoires, chap. 26-28. [19] Ariosto introduces the bloody rout of Ravenna among the visions of Melissa; in which the courtly prophetess (or rather poet) predicts the glories of the house of Este. "Nuoteranno i destrier fino alla pancia Nel sangue uman per tutta la campagna; Ch' a seppellire il popol verrâ inanco Tedesco, Ispano, Greco, Italo, e Franco." Orlando Furioso, canto 3, st. 55. [20] Brantôme, Vies des Hommes Illustres, disc. 6.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. v. lib. 10, pp. 290-305.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 231, 233.--Mémoires de Bayard, chap. 54.--Du Bellay, Mémoires, apud Petitot, Collection des Mémoires, tom. xvii. p. 234.--Fleurange, Mémoires, chap. 29, 30.--Bembo, Istoria Viniziana, tom. ii. lib. 12. Machiavelli does justice to the gallantry of this valiant corps, whose conduct on this occasion furnishes him with a pertinent illustration, in estimating the comparative value of the Spanish, or rather Roman arms, and the German. Opere, tom. iv., Arte della Guerra, lib. 2, p. 67. [21] Mémoires de Bayard, chap. 54.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. v. lib. 10, pp. 306-309.--Peter Martyr, epist. 483.--Brantôme, Vies des Hommes Illustres, disc. 24. The best, that is, the most perspicuous and animated description of the fight of Ravenna, among contemporary writers, will be found in Guicciardini (ubi supra); among the modern, in Sismondi, (Républiques Italiennes, tom. xiv. chap. 109,) an author, who has the rare merit of combining profound philosophical analysis with the superficial and picturesque graces of narrative. [22] "Le foudre de l'Italie." (Gaillard, Rivalité, tom. iv. p. 391.)-- light authority, I acknowledge, even for a _sobriquet_. [23] One example may suffice, occurring in the war of the League, in 1510. When Vicenza was taken by the Imperialists, a number of the inhabitants, amounting to one, or, according to some accounts, six thousand, took refuge in a neighboring grotto, with their wives and children, comprehending many of the principal families of the place. A French officer, detecting their retreat, caused a heap of faggots to be piled up at the mouth of the cavern and set on fire. Out of the whole number of fugitives only one escaped with life; and the blackened and convulsed appearance of the bodies showed too plainly the cruel agonies of suffocation. (Mémoires de Bayard, chap. 40.--Bembo, Istoria Viniziana, tom. ii. lib. 10.) Bayard executed two of the authors of this diabolical act on the spot. But the "chevalier sans reproche" was an exception to, rather than an example of, the prevalent spirit of the age. [24] Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. v. lib. 10, pp. 310-312, 322, 323.-- Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 3, cap. 7.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 30, cap. 9.--Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, lib. 3, p. 288.-- Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1512.--See also Lettera di Vettori, Maggio 16, 1514, apud Machiavelli, Opere. [25] Dumont, Corps Diplomatique, tom. iv. p. 137. He had become a party to it as early as November 17, of the preceding year; he deferred its publication, however, until he had received the last instalment of a subsidy, that Louis XII. was to pay him for the maintenance of peace. (Rymer, Foedera, tom. xiii. pp. 311-323.--Sismondi, Hist. des Français, tom. xv. p. 385.) Even the chivalrous Harry the Eighth could not escape the trickish spirit of the age. [26] Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. v. lib. 10, p. 320. [27] Mémoires de Bayard, chap. 55.--Fleurange, Mémoires, chap. 31.-- Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. pp. 380, 381.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. v. lib. 10, pp. 335, 336.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi; lib. 10, cap, 20. [28] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 10, cap. 44-48.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. vi. lib. 11, p. 52. Martyr reports a conversation that he had with the Venetian minister in Spain, touching this business. Opus Epist., epist. 520. [29] Dumont, Corps Diplomatique, tom. iv. part. 1, no. 86. [30] Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. vi. lib. 11, pp. 101-138.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 523.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 30, cap. 21.--Fleurange, Mémoires, chap. 36, 37.--Also an original letter of King Ferdinand to Archbishop Deza, apud Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 242. Alviano died a little more than a year after this defeat, at sixty years of age. He was so much beloved by the soldiery, that they refused to be separated from his remains, which were borne at the head of the army for some weeks after his death. They were finally laid in the church of St. Stephen in Venice; and the senate, with more gratitude than is usually conceded to republics, settled an honorable pension on his family. [31] Daru, Hist. de Venise, tom. iii. pp. 615, 616. CHAPTER XXIII. CONQUEST OF NAVARRE. 1512-1513. Sovereigns of Navarre.--Ferdinand Demands a Passage.--Invasion and Conquest of Navarre.--Treaty of Orthès.--Ferdinand Settles his Conquests. --His Conduct Examined.--Gross Abuse of the Victory. While the Spaniards were thus winning barren laurels on the fields of Italy, King Ferdinand was making a most important acquisition of territory nearer home. The reader has already been made acquainted with the manner in which the bloody sceptre of Navarre passed from the hands of Eleanor, Ferdinand's sister, after a reign of a few brief days, into those of her grandson Phoebus. A fatal destiny hung over the house of Foix; and the latter prince lived to enjoy his crown only four years, when he was succeeded by his sister Catharine. It was not to be supposed, that Ferdinand and Isabella, so attentive to enlarge their empire to the full extent of the geographical limits which nature seemed to have assigned it, would lose the opportunity now presented of incorporating into it the hitherto independent kingdom of Navarre, by the marriage of their own heir with its sovereign. All their efforts, however, were frustrated by the queen mother Magdaleine, sister of Louis the Eleventh, who, sacrificing the interests of the nation to her prejudices, evaded the proposed match, under various pretexts, and in the end effected a union between her daughter and a French noble, Jean d'Albret, heir to considerable estates in the neighborhood of Navarre. This was a most fatal error. The independence of Navarre had hitherto been maintained less through its own strength, than the weakness of its neighbors. But, now that the petty states around her had been absorbed into two great and powerful monarchies, it was not to be expected, that so feeble a barrier would be longer respected, or that it would not be swept away in the first collision of those formidable forces. But, although the independence of the kingdom must be lost, the princes of Navarre might yet maintain their station by a union with, the reigning family of France or Spain. By the present connection with a mere private individual they lost both the one and the other. [1] Still the most friendly relations subsisted between the Catholic king and his niece during the lifetime of Isabella. The sovereigns assisted her in taking possession of her turbulent dominions, as well as in allaying the deadly feuds of the Beaumonts and Agramonts, with which they were rent asunder. They supported her with their arms in resisting her uncle Jean, viscount of Narbonne, who claimed the crown on the groundless pretext of its being limited to male heirs. [2] The alliance with Spain was drawn still closer by the avowed purpose of Louis the Twelfth to support his nephew, Gaston de Foix, in the claims of his deceased father. [3] The death of the young hero, however, at Ravenna, wholly changed the relations and feelings of the two countries. Navarre had nothing immediately to fear from France. She felt distrust of Spain on more than one account, especially for the protection afforded the Beaumontese exiles, at the head of whom was the young count of Lerin, Ferdinand's nephew. [4] France, too, standing alone, and at bay against the rest of Europe, found the alliance of the little state of Navarre of importance to her, especially at the present juncture, when the project of an expedition against Guienne, by the combined armies of Spain and England, naturally made Louis the Twelfth desirous to secure the good-will of a prince, who might be said to wear the keys of the Pyrenees as the king of Sardinia did those of the Alps, at his girdle. With these amicable dispositions, the king and queen of Navarre despatched their plenipotentiaries to Blois, early in May, soon after the battle of Ravenna, with full powers to conclude a treaty of alliance and confederation with the French government. [5] In the mean time, June 8th, an English squadron arrived at Passage, in Guipuscoa, having ten thousand men on board under Thomas Grey, marquis of Dorset, [6] in order to cooperate with King Ferdinand's army in the descent on Guienne. This latter force, consisting of two thousand five hundred horse, light and heavy, six thousand foot, and twenty pieces of artillery, was placed under Don Fadrique de Toledo, the old duke of Alva, grandfather of the general, who wrote his name in indelible characters of blood in the Netherlands, under Philip the Second. [7] Before making any movement, however, Ferdinand, who knew the equivocal dispositions of the Navarrese sovereigns, determined to secure himself from the annoyance which their strong position enabled them to give him on whatever route he adopted. He accordingly sent to request a free passage through their dominions, with the demand, moreover, that they should intrust six of their principal fortresses to such Navarrese as he should name, as a guarantee for their neutrality during the expedition. He accompanied this modest proposal with the alternative, that the sovereigns should become parties to the Holy League, engaging in that case to restore certain places in his possession, which they claimed, and pledging the whole strength of the confederacy to protect them against any hostile attempts of France. [8] The situation of these unfortunate princes was in the highest degree embarrassing. The neutrality they had so long and sedulously maintained was now to be abandoned; and their choice, whichever party they espoused, must compromise their possessions on one or the other side of the Pyrenees, in exchange for an ally, whose friendship had proved by repeated experience quite as disastrous as his enmity. In this dilemma they sent ambassadors into Castile, to obtain some modification of the terms, or at least to protract negotiations till some definitive arrangement should be made with Louis the Twelfth. [9] On the 17th of July, their plenipotentiaries signed a treaty with that monarch at Blois, by which France and Navarre mutually agreed to defend each other, in case of attack, against all enemies whatever. By another provision, obviously directed against Spain, it was stipulated, that neither nation should allow a passage to the enemies of the other through its dominions. And, by a third, Navarre pledged herself to declare war on the English now assembled in Guipuscoa, and all those co-operating with them. [10] Through a singular accident, Ferdinand was made acquainted with the principal articles of this treaty before its signature. [11] His army had remained inactive in its quarters around Victoria, ever since the landing of the English. He now saw the hopelessness of further negotiation, and, determining to anticipate the stroke prepared for him, commanded his general to invade without delay, and occupy Navarre. The duke of Alva crossed the borders on the 21st of July, proclaiming that no harm should be offered to those who voluntarily submitted. On the 23d, he arrived before Pampelona. King John, who all the while he had been thus dallying with the lion, had made no provision for defence, had already abandoned his capital, leaving it to make the best terms it could for itself. On the following day, the city, having first obtained assurance of respect for all its franchises and immunities, surrendered; "a circumstance," devoutly exclaims King Ferdinand, "in which we truly discern the hand of our blessed Lord, whose miraculous interposition has been visible through all this enterprise, undertaken for the weal of the church, and the extirpation of the accursed schism." [12] The royal exile, in the mean while, had retreated to Lumbier, where he solicited the assistance of the duke of Longueville, then encamped on the northern frontier for the defence of Bayonne. The French commander, however, stood too much in awe of the English, still lying in Guipuscoa, to weaken himself by a detachment into Navarre; and the unfortunate monarch, unsupported, either by his own subjects or his new ally, was compelled to cross the mountains, and take refuge with his family in France. [13] The duke of Alva lost no time in pressing his advantage; opening the way by a proclamation of the Catholic king, that it was intended only to hold possession of the country as security for the pacific disposition of its sovereigns, until the end of his present expedition against Guienne. From whatever cause, the Spanish general experienced so little resistance, that in less than a fortnight he overran and subdued nearly the whole of Upper Navarre. So short a time sufficed for the subversion of a monarchy, which, in defiance of storm and stratagem, had maintained its independence unimpaired, with a few brief exceptions, for seven centuries. [14] On reviewing these extraordinary events, we are led to distrust the capacity and courage of a prince, who could so readily abandon his kingdom, without so much as firing a shot in its defence. John had shown, however, on more than one occasion, that he was destitute of neither. He was not, it must be confessed, of the temper best suited to the fierce and stirring times on which he was cast. He was of an amiable disposition, social and fond of pleasure, and so little jealous of his royal dignity, that he mixed freely in the dances and other entertainments of the humblest of his subjects. His greatest defect was the facility with which he reposed the cares of state on favorites, not always the most deserving. His greatest merit was his love of letters. [15] Unfortunately, neither his merits nor defects were of a kind best adapted to extricate him from his present perilous situation, or enable him to cope with his wily and resolute adversary. For this, however, more commanding talents might well have failed. The period had arrived, when, in the regular progress of events, Navarre must yield up her independence to the two great nations on her borders; who, attracted by the strength of her natural position, and her political weakness, would be sure, now that their own domestic discords were healed, to claim each the moiety, which seemed naturally to fall within its own territorial limits. Particular events might accelerate or retard this result, but it was not in the power of human genius to avert its final consummation. King Ferdinand, who descried the storm now gathering on the side of France, resolved to meet it promptly, and commanded his general to cross the mountains, and occupy the districts of Lower Navarre. In this he expected the co-operation of the English. But he was disappointed. The marquis of Dorset alleged that the time consumed in the reduction of Navarre made it too late for the expedition against Guienne, which was now placed in a posture of defence. He loudly complained that his master had been duped by the Catholic king, who had used his ally to make conquests solely for himself; and, in spite of every remonstrance, he re-embarked his whole force, without waiting for orders; "a proceeding," says Ferdinand in one of his letters, "which touches me most deeply, from the stain it leaves on the honor of the most serene king my son-in-law, and the glory of the English nation, so distinguished in times past for high and chivalrous emprize." [16] The duke of Alva, thus unsupported, was no match for the French under Longueville, strengthened, moreover, by the veteran corps returned from Italy, with the brave La Palice. Indeed, he narrowly escaped being hemmed in between the two armies, and only succeeded in anticipating by a few hours the movements of La Palice, so as to make good his retreat through the pass of Roncesvalles, and throw himself into Pampelona. [17] Hither he was speedily followed by the French general, accompanied by Jean d'Albret. On the 27th of November, the besiegers made a desperate though ineffectual assault on the city, which was repeated with equal ill fortune on the two following days. The beleaguering forces, in the mean time, were straitened for provisions; and at length, after a siege of some weeks, on learning the arrival of fresh reinforcements under the duke of Najara, [18] they broke up their encampment, and withdrew across the mountains; and with them faded the last ray of hope for the restoration of the unfortunate monarch of Navarre. [19] On the 1st of April, in the following year, 1513, Ferdinand effected a truce with Louis the Twelfth, embracing their respective territories west of the Alps. It continued a year, and at its expiration was renewed for a similar time. [20] This arrangement, by which Louis sacrificed the interests of his ally the king of Navarre, gave Ferdinand ample time for settling and fortifying his new conquests; while it left the war open in a quarter, where he well knew, others were more interested than himself to prosecute it with vigor. The treaty must be allowed to be more defensible on the score of policy, than of good faith. [21] The allies loudly inveighed against the treachery of their confederate, who had so unscrupulously sacrificed the common interest, by relieving France from the powerful diversion he was engaged to make on her western borders. It is no justification of wrong, that similar wrongs have been committed by others; but those who commit them (and there was not one of the allies, who could escape the imputation, amid the political profligacy of the times,) certainly forfeit the privilege to complain. [22] Ferdinand availed himself of the interval of repose, now secured, to settle his new conquests. He had transferred his residence first to Burgos and afterwards to Logroño, that he might be near the theatre of operations. He was indefatigable in raising reinforcements and supplies, and expressed his intention at one time, notwithstanding the declining state of his health, to take the command in person. He showed his usual sagacity in various regulations for improving the police, healing the domestic feuds,--as fatal to Navarre as the arms of its enemies,--and confirming and extending its municipal privileges and immunities, so as to conciliate the affections of his new subjects. [23] On the 23d of March, 1513, the estates of Navarre took the usual oaths of allegiance to King Ferdinand. [24] On the 15th of June, 1515, the Catholic monarch by a solemn act in cortes, held at Burgos, incorporated his new conquests into the kingdom of Castile. [25] The event excited some surprise, considering his more intimate relations with Aragon. But it was to the arms of Castile that he was chiefly indebted for the conquest; and it was on her superior wealth and resources that he relied for maintaining it. With this was combined the politic consideration, that the Navarrese, naturally turbulent and factious, would be held more easily in subordination when associated with Castile, than with Aragon, where the spirit of independence was higher, and often manifested itself in such bold assertion of popular rights, as falls most unwelcome on a royal ear. To all this must be added the despair of issue by his present marriage, which had much abated his personal interest in enlarging the extent of his patrimonial domains. Foreign writers characterize the conquest of Navarre as a bold, unblushing usurpation, rendered more odious by the mask of religious hypocrisy. The national writers, on the other hand, have employed their pens industriously to vindicate it; some endeavoring to rake a good claim for Castile out of its ancient union with Navarre, almost as ancient, indeed, as the Moorish conquest. Others resort to considerations of expediency, relying on the mutual benefits of the connection to both kingdoms; arguments which prove little else than the weakness of the cause. [26] All lay more or less stress on the celebrated bull of Julius the Second, of February 18th, 1512, by which he excommunicated the sovereigns of Navarre, as heretics, schismatics, and enemies of the church, releasing their subjects from their allegiance, laying their dominions under an interdict, and delivering them over to any who should take, or had already taken, possession of them. [27] Most, indeed, are content to rest on this, as the true basis and original ground of the conquest. The total silence of the Catholic king respecting this document, before the invasion, and the omission of the national historians since to produce it, have caused much skepticism as to its existence. And, although its recent publication puts this beyond doubt, the instrument contains, in my judgment, strong internal evidence for distrusting the accuracy of the date affixed to it, which should have been posterior to the invasion; a circumstance materially affecting the argument; and which makes the papal sentence, not the original basis of the war, but only a sanction subsequently obtained to cover its injustice, and authorize retaining the fruits of it. [28] But, whatever authority such a sanction may have had in the sixteenth century, it will find little respect in the present, at least beyond the limits of the Pyrenees. The only way, in which the question can be fairly tried, must be by those maxims of public law universally recognized as settling the intercourse of civilized nations; a science, indeed, imperfectly developed at that time, but in its general principles the same as now, founded, as these are, on the immutable basis of morality and justice. We must go back a step beyond the war, to the proximate cause of it. This was Ferdinand's demand of a free passage for his troops through Navarre. The demand was perfectly fair, and in ordinary cases would doubtless have been granted by a neutral nation. But that nation must, after all, be the only judge of its propriety, and Navarre may find a justification for her refusal on these grounds. First, that, in her weak and defenceless state, it was attended with danger to herself. Secondly, that, as by a previous and existing treaty with Spain, the validity of which was recognized in her new one of July 17th with France, she had agreed to refuse the right of passage to the latter nation, she consequently could not grant it to Spain without a violation of her neutrality. [29] Thirdly, that the demand of a passage, however just in itself, was coupled with another, the surrender of the fortresses, which must compromise the independence of the kingdom. [30] But although, for these reasons, the sovereigns of Navarre were warranted in refusing Ferdinand's request, they were not therefore authorized to declare war against him, which they virtually did by entering into a defensive alliance with his enemy Louis the Twelfth, and by pledging themselves to make war on the English and their confederates; an article pointedly directed at the Catholic king. True, indeed, the treaty of Blois had not received the ratification of the Navarrese sovereigns; but it was executed by their plenipotentiaries duly authorized; and, considering the intimate intercourse between the two nations, was undoubtedly made with their full knowledge and concurrence. Under these circumstances, it was scarcely to be expected, that King Ferdinand, when an accident had put him in possession of the result of these negotiations, should wait for a formal declaration of hostilities, and thus deprive himself of the advantage of anticipating the blow of his enemy. The right of making war would seem to include that of disposing of its fruits; subject, however, to those principles of natural equity, which should regulate every action, whether of a public or private nature. No principle can be clearer, for example, than that the penalty should be proportioned to the offence. Now that inflicted on the sovereigns of Navarre, which went so far as to dispossess them of their crown, and annihilate the political existence of their kingdom, was such as nothing but extraordinary aggressions on the part of the conquered nation, or the self-preservation of the victors, could justify. As neither of these contingencies existed in the present case, Ferdinand's conduct must be regarded as a flagrant example of the abuse of the rights of conquest. We have been but too familiar, indeed, with similar acts of political injustice, and on a much larger scale, in the present civilized age. But, although the number and splendor of the precedents may blunt our sensibility to the atrocity of the act, they can never constitute a legitimate warrant for its perpetration. While thus freely condemning Ferdinand's conduct in this transaction, I cannot go along with those, who, having inspected the subject less minutely, are disposed to regard it as the result of a cool, premeditated policy from the outset. The propositions originally made by him to Navarre appear to have been conceived in perfect good faith. The requisition of the fortresses, impudent as it may seem, was nothing more than had been before made in Isabella's time, when it had been granted, and the security subsequently restored, as soon as the emergency had passed away. [31] The alternative proposed, of entering into the Holy League, presented many points of view so favorable to Navarre, that Ferdinand, ignorant, as he then was, of the precise footing on which she stood with France, might have seen no improbability in her closing with it. Had either alternative been embraced, there would have been no pretext for the invasion. Even when hostilities had been precipitated by the impolitic conduct of Navarre, Ferdinand (to judge, not from his public manifestoes only, but from his private correspondence) would seem to have at first contemplated holding the country only till the close of his French expedition. [32] But the facility of retaining these conquests, when once acquired, was too strong a temptation. It was easy to find some plausible pretext to justify it, and obtain such a sanction from the highest authority, as should veil the injustice of the transaction from the world,--and from his own eyes. And that these were blinded is but too true, if, as an Aragonese historian declares, he could remark on his death-bed, "that, independently of the conquest having been undertaken at the instance of the sovereign pontiff, for the extirpation of the schism, he felt his conscience as easy in keeping it, as in keeping his crown of Aragon." [33] * * * * * I have made use of three authorities exclusively devoted to Navarre, in the present History. 1. "L'Histoire du Royaume de Navarre, par un des Secrétaires Interprettes de sa Maiesté" Paris, 1596, 8vo. This anonymous work, from the pen of one of Henry IV.'s secretaries, is little else than a meagre compilation of facts, and these deeply colored by the national prejudices of the writer. It derives some value from this circumstance, however, in the contrast it affords to the Spanish version of the same transactions. 2. A tract entitled "Aelii Antonii Nebrissensis de Bello Navariensi Libri Duo." It covers less than thirty pages folio, and is chiefly occupied, as the title imports, with the military events of the conquest by the duke of Alva. It was originally incorporated in the volume containing its learned author's version, or rather paraphrase, of Pulgar's Chronicle, with some other matters; and first appeared from the press of the younger Lebrija, "apud inclytam Granatam, 1545." 3. But the great work illustrating the history of Navarre is the "Annales del Reyno;" of which the best edition is that in seven volumes, folio, from the press of Ibañez, Pamplona, 1766. Its typographical execution would be creditable to any country. The three first volumes were written by Moret, whose profound acquaintance with the antiquities of his nation has made his book indispensable to the student of this portion of its history. The fourth and fifth are the continuation of his work by Francisco de Aleson, a Jesuit who succeeded Moret as historiographer of Navarre. The two last volumes are devoted to investigations illustrating the antiquities of Navarre, from the pen of Moret, and are usually published separately from his great historic work. Aleson's continuation, extending from 1350 to 1527, is a production of considerable merit. It shows extensive research on the part of its author, who, however, has not always confined himself to the most authentic and accredited sources of information. His references exhibit a singular medley of original contemporary documents, and apocryphal authorities of a very recent date. Though a Navarrese, he has written with the impartiality of one in whom local prejudices were extinguished in the more comprehensive national feelings of a Spaniard. FOOTNOTES [1] See Part I. Chapters 10, 12. [2] Histoire du Royaume de Navarre, pp. 567, 570.--Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. lib. 34, cap. 1, fol.--Diccionario Geográfico-Histórico de España, por la Real Academia de la Historia, (Madrid, 1802,) tom. ii. p. 117. [3] Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. lib. 35, cap. 13.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 9, cap. 54.--Sismondi, Hist. des Français, tom. xv. p. 500. [4] Aleson, Annales de Navarra, ubi supra. [5] Dumont, Corps Diplomatique, tom. iv. part. 1, p. 147.--See also the king's letter to Deza, dated at Burgos, July 20th, 1512, apud Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 235. [6] Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. p. 245.--Herbert, Life and Raigne of Henry VIII., (London, 1649,) p. 20.--Holinshed, Chronicles, p.568, (London, 1810.)--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ix. p. 315. His Valencian editors correct his text, by substituting marquis of Dorchester! [7] The young poet, Garcilasso de la Vega, gives a brilliant sketch of this stern old nobleman in his younger days, such as our imagination would scarcely have formed of him at any period. "Otro Marte 'n guerra, en corte Febo. Mostravase mancebo en las señales del rostro, qu' eran tales, qu' esperança i cierta confiança claro davan a cuantos le miravan; qu' el seria, en quien s' informaria un ser divino." Obras, ed. de Herrera, p. 505. [8] Lebrija, De Bello Navariensi, lib. 1, cap. 3.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi lib. 10, cap. 4, 5.--Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. lib. 35, cap. 15.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 488.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., ubi supra.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 29, cap. 25.--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 25. [9] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 10, cap. 7, 8.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 487.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. iii. lib. 29, cap. 25. [10] Dumont, Corps Diplomatique, tom. iv. part. 1, no. 69.--Carta del Rey a D. Diego Deza, apud Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 235. [11] A confidential secretary of King Jean of Navarre was murdered in his sleep by his mistress. His papers, containing the heads of the proposed treaty with France, fell into the hands of a priest of Pampelona, who was induced by the hopes of a reward to betray them to Ferdinand. The story is told by Martyr, in a letter dated July 18th, 1512. (Opus Epist., epist. 490.) Its truth is attested by the conformity of the proposed terms with those of the actual treaty. [12] Carta del Rey a D. Diego Deza, Burgos, July 26th, apud Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 236.--Histoire du Royaume de Navarre, pp. 620- 627.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 21.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 495.--Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. lib. 35, cap. 15. Bernaldez has incorporated into his chronicle several letters of King Ferdinand, written during the progress of the war. It is singular, that, coming from so high a source, they should not have been more freely resorted to by the Spanish writers. They are addressed to his confessor, Deza, archbishop of Seville, with whom Bernaldez, curate of a parish in his diocese, was, as appears from other parts of his work, on terms of intimacy. [13] Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. lib. 35, cap. 15.--Histoire du Royaume de Navarre, p. 622.--Lebrija, De Bello Navariensi, lib. 1, cap. 4.--"Jean d'Albret you were born," said Catharine to her unfortunate husband, as they were flying from their kingdom, "and Jean d'Albret you will die. Had I been king, and you queen, we had been reigning in Navarre at this moment." (Garibay, Compendio, tom. iii. lib. 29, cap. 26.) Father Abarca treats the story as an old wife's tale, and Garibay as an old woman for repeating it. Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 21. [14] Manifiesto del Rey D. Fernando, July 30th, apud Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 236.--Lebrija, De Bello Navariensi, lib. 1, cap. 5.-- Garibay, Compendio, tom. iii. lib. 29, cap. 26. [15] Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. lib. 35, cap. 2.--Histoire du Royaume de Navarre, pp. 603, 604. [16] 16 See the king's third letter to Deza, Logroño, November 12th, apud Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 236.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 30, cap. 12.--Lebrija, De Bello Navariensi, lib. 1, cap. 7.-- Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 499.--Herbert, Life of Henry VIII., p. 24.--Holinshed, Chronicles, p. 571. [17] Garcilasso de la Vega alludes to these military exploits of the duke, in his second eclogue. "Con mas ilustre nombre los arneses de los fieros Franceses abollava." Obras, ed. de Herrera, p. 505. [18] Such was the power of the old duke of Najara, that he brought into the field on this occasion 1100 horse and 3000 foot, raised and equipped on his own estates. Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 507. [19] Mémoires de Bayard, chap. 55, 56.--Fleurange, Mémoires, chap. 33.-- Lebrija, De Bello Navariensi, lib. 1, cap. 8, 9.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 21.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1512. Jean and Catharine d'Albret passed the remainder of their days in their territories on the French side of the Pyrenees. They made one more faint and fruitless attempt to recover their dominions during the regency of Cardinal Ximenes. (Carbajal, Anales, MS., cap. 12.) Broken in spirits, their health gradually declined, and neither of them long survived the loss of their crown. Jean died June 23d, 1517, and Catharine followed on the 12th of February of the next year;--happy, at least, that, as misfortune had no power to divide them in life, so they were not long separated by death. (Histoire du Royaume de Navarre, p. 643.--Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. lib. 35, cap. 20, 21.) Their bodies sleep side by side in the cathedral church of Lescar, in their own dominions of Bearne; and their fate is justly noticed by the Spanish historians as one of the most striking examples of that stern decree, by which the sins of the fathers are visited on the children to the third and fourth generation. [20] Flassan, Diplomatie Française, tom. i. p 296.--Rymer, Foedera, tom. xiii. pp. 350-352.--Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. vi. lib. 11, p82, lib. 12, p. 168.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 30, cap 22.--"Fu cosa ridicola," says Guicciardini in relation to this truce, "che nei medesimi giorni, che la si bandiva solennemente per tutta. Ja Spagna, venne en araldo a significargli in nome del Re d'Ingbilterra gli apparati potentissimi, che ei faceva per assaltare la Francia, e a sollecitare che egli medesimamente movesse, secondo che aveva promesso, la guerra dalla parte di Spagna." Istoria, tom. vi. lib. 12, p. 84. [21] Francesco Vettori, the Florentine ambassador at the papal court, writes to Machiavelli, that he lay awake two hours that night speculating on the real motives of the Catholic king in making this truce, which, regarded simply as a matter of policy, he condemns _in toto_. He accompanies this with various predictions respecting the consequences likely to result from it. These consequences never occurred, however; and the failure of his predictions may be received as the best refutation of his arguments. Machiavelli, Opere, Lett. Famigl. Aprile 21 1513. [22] Guicciardini, Istoria, tom. vi. lib. II, pp. 81, 82.--Machiavelli, Opere, ubi supra.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 538. On the 5th of April a treaty was concluded at Mechlin, in the names of Ferdinand, the king of England, the emperor, and the pope. (Rymer, Foedera, tom. xiii. pp. 354-358.) The Castilian envoy, Don Luis Carroz, was not present at Mechlin, but it was ratified and solemnly sworn to by him, on behalf of his sovereign, in London, April 18th. (Ibid., tom. xiii. p. 363.) By this treaty, Spain agreed to attack France in Guienne, while the other powers were to cooperate by a descent on other quarters. (See also Dumont, Corps Diplomatique, tom. iv. part. 1, no 79.) This was in direct contradiction of the treaty signed only five days before at Orthès, and if made with the privity of King Ferdinand, must be allowed to be a gratuitous display of perfidy, not easily matched in that age. As such, of course, it is stigmatized by the French historians, that is the later ones, for I find no comment on it in contemporary writers. (See Rapin, History of England, translated by Tindal, (London, 1785-9,) vol. ii. pp. 93, 94. Sismondi, Hist. des Français, tom. xv. p. 626.) Ferdinand, when applied to by Henry VIII. to ratify the acts of his minister, in the following summer, refused, on the ground that the latter had transcended his powers. (Herbert, Life of Henry VIII., p. 29.) The Spanish writers are silent. His assertion derives some probability from the tenor of one of the articles, which provides, that in case he refuses to confirm the treaty, it shall still be binding between England and the emperor; language which, as it anticipates, may seem to authorize, such a contingency. Public treaties have, for obvious reasons, been generally received as the surest basis for history. One might well doubt this, who attempts to reconcile the multifarious discrepancies and contradictions in those of the period under review. The science of diplomacy, as then practised, was a mere game of finesse and falsehood, in which the more solemn the protestations of the parties, the more ground for distrusting their sincerity. [23] Carta del Rey a Don Diego Deza, Nov. 12th, 1512, apud Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 236.--Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. lib. 35, cap. 16.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 10, cap. 13, 36, 43.-- Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1512. [24] Hist. du Royaume de Navarre, pp. 629, 630.--Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. lib. 35, cap. 16.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. iii. lib. 30, cap. 1. [25] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 10, cap. 92.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1515.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. iii. lib. 30, cap. 1.--Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom, v. lib. 35, cap. 7.--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 26. [26] The honest canon Salazar de Mendoza, (taking the hint from Lebrija, indeed,) finds abundant warrant for Ferdinand's treatment of Navarre in the hard measure dealt by the Israelites of old to the people of Ephron, and to Sihon, king of the Amorites. (Monarquía, tom. i. lib. 3, cap. 6.) It might seem strange, that a Christian should look for authority in the practices of the race he so much abominates, instead of the inspired precepts of the Founder of his religion! But in truth your thoroughbred casuist is apt to be very little of a Christian. [27] See the original bull of Julius II., apud Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ix. Apend. no. 2, ed. Valencia, 1796.--"Joannem et Catharinam," says the bull, in the usual conciliatory style of the Vatican, "perditionis filios,--excommunicatos, anathemizatos, maledictos, aeterni supplicii reos," etc., etc. "Our armies swore terribly in Flanders, cried my uncle Toby,--but nothing to this. For my own part I could not have a heart to curse my dog so." [28] The ninth volume of the splendid Valencian edition of Mariana contains in the Appendix the famous bull of Julius II. of Feb. 18th, 1512, the original of which is to be found in the royal archives of Barcelona. The editor, Don Francisco Ortiz y Sanz, has accompanied it with an elaborate disquisition, in which he makes the apostolic sentence the great authority for the conquest. It was a great triumph undoubtedly, to be able to produce the document, to which the Spanish historians had been so long challenged in vain by foreign writers, and the existence of which might well be doubted, since no record of it appears on the papal register. (Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 21.) Paris de Grassis, _maître des cérémonies_ of the chapel of Julius II. and Leo X., makes no mention of bull or excommunication, although very exact and particular in reporting such facts. (Bréquigny, Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque du Roy, tom. ii. p. 570.) There is no reason that I know for doubting the genuineness of the present instrument. There are conclusive reasons to my mind, however, for rejecting its date, and assigning it to some time posterior to the conquest. 1st. The bull denounces John and Catharine as having openly joined themselves to Louis XII., and borne arms with him against England, Spain, and the church; a charge for which there was no pretence till five months later.--2d. With this bull the editor has given another, dated Rome, July 21st, 1512, noticed by Peter Martyr. (Opus Epist., epist. 497.) This latter is general in its import, being directed against all nations whatever, engaged in alliance with France against the church. The sovereigns of Navarre are not even mentioned, nor the nation itself, any further than to warn it of the imminent danger in which it stood of falling into the schism. Now it is obvious that this second bull, so general in its import, would have been entirely superfluous in reference to Navarre, after the publication of the first; while, on the other hand, nothing could be more natural than that these general menaces and warnings, having proved ineffectual, should be followed by the particular sentence of excommunication contained in the bull of February.--3d. In fact, the bull of February makes repeated allusion to a former one, in such a manner as to leave no doubt that the bull of July 21st is intended; since not only the sentiments, but the very form of expression, are perfectly coincident in both for whole sentences together.--4th. Ferdinand makes no mention of the papal excommunication, either in his private correspondence, where he discusses the grounds of the war, or in his manifesto to the Navarrese, where it would have served his purpose quite as effectually as his arms. I say nothing of the negative evidence afforded by the silence of contemporary writers, as Lebrija, Carbajal, Bernaldez, and Martyr, who, while they allude to a sentence of excommunication passed in the consistory, or to the publication of the bull of July, give no intimation of the existence of that of February; a silence altogether inexplicable. The inference from all this is, that the date of the bull of February 18th, 1512, is erroneous; that it should be placed at some period posterior to the conquest, and consequently could not have served as the ground of it; but was probably obtained at the instance of the Catholic king, in order, by the odium which it threw on the sovereigns of Navarre, as excommunicate, to remove that under which he lay himself, and at the same time secure what might be deemed a sufficient warrant for retaining his acquisitions. Readers in general may think more time has been spent on the discussion than it is worth. But the important light, in which it is viewed by those who entertain more deference for a papal decree, is sufficiently attested by the length and number of disquisitions on it, down to the present century. [29] Dumont, Corps Diplomatique, tom. iv. part. 1, no. 69. [30] According to Galindez de Carbajal, only three fortresses were originally demanded by Ferdinand. (Anales, MS., año 1512.) He may have confounded the number with that said to have been finally conceded by the king of Navarre; a concession, however, which amounted to little, since it excluded by name two of the most important places required, and the sincerity of which may well be doubted, if, as it would seem, it was not made till after the negotiations with France had been adjusted. See Zurita, Anales, lib. 10, cap. 7. [31] Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. lib. 35, cap. 1, 3.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. iii. lib. 29, cap. 13. [32] See King Ferdinand's letter, July 20th, and his manifesto, July 30th, 1512, apud Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 235.--Lebrija, De Bello Navariensi, lib. 1, cap. 7. [33] Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 21. CHAPTER XXIV. DEATH OF GONSALVO DE CORDOVA.--ILLNESS AND DEATH OF FERDINAND.--HIS CHARACTER. 1513-1516. Gonsalvo Ordered to Italy.--General Enthusiasm.--The King's Distrust.-- Gonsalvo in Retirement.--Decline of his Health.--His Death and Noble Character.--Ferdinand's Illness.--It Increases.--He Dies.--His Character. --A Contrast to Isabella.--The Judgment of his Contemporaries. Notwithstanding the good order which King Ferdinand maintained in Castile by his energetic conduct, as well as by his policy of diverting the effervescing spirits of the nation to foreign enterprise, he still experienced annoyance from various causes. Among these were Maximilian's pretensions to the regency, as paternal grandfather of the heir apparent. The emperor, indeed, had more than once threatened to assert his preposterous claims to Castile in person; and, although this Quixotic monarch, who had been tilting against windmills all his life, failed to excite any powerful sensation, either by his threats or his promises, it furnished a plausible pretext for keeping alive a faction hostile to the interests of the Catholic king. In the winter of 1509, an arrangement was made with the emperor, through the mediation of Louis the Twelfth, by which he finally relinquished his pretensions to the regency of Castile, in consideration of the aid of three hundred lances, and the transfer to him of the fifty thousand ducats, which Ferdinand was to receive from Pisa. [1] No bribe was too paltry for a prince, whose means were as narrow, as his projects were vast and chimerical. Even after this pacification, the Austrian party contrived to disquiet the king, by maintaining the archduke Charles's pretensions to the government in the name of his unfortunate mother; until at length, the Spanish monarch came to entertain not merely distrust, but positive aversion, for his grandson; while the latter, as he advanced in years, was taught to regard Ferdinand as one, who excluded him from his rightful inheritance by a most flagrant act of usurpation. [2] Ferdinand's suspicious temper found other grounds for uneasiness, where there was less warrant for it, in his jealousy of his illustrious subject Gonsalvo de Cordova. This was particularly the case, when circumstances had disclosed the full extent of that general's popularity. After the defeat of Ravenna, the pope and the other allies of Ferdinand urged him in the most earnest manner to send the Great Captain into Italy, as the only man capable of checking the French arms, and restoring the fortunes of the league. The king, trembling for the immediate safety of his own dominions, gave a reluctant assent, and ordered Gonsalvo to hold himself in readiness to take command of an army to be instantly raised for Italy. [3] These tidings were received with enthusiasm by the Castilians. Men of every rank pressed forward to serve under a chief, whose service was itself sufficient passport to fame. "It actually seemed," says Martyr, "as if Spain were to be drained of all her noble and generous blood. Nothing appeared impossible, or even difficult, under such a leader. Hardly a cavalier in the land, but would have thought it a reproach to remain behind. Truly marvellous," he adds, "is the authority which he has acquired over all orders of men!" [4] Such was the zeal with which men enlisted under his banner, that great difficulty was found in completing the necessary levies for Navarre, then menaced by the French. The king, alarmed at this, and relieved from apprehensions of immediate danger to Naples, by subsequent advices from that country, sent orders greatly reducing the number of forces to be raised. But this had little effect, since every man, who had the means, preferred acting as a volunteer under the Great Captain to any other service, however gainful; and many a poor cavalier was there, who expended his little all, or incurred a heavy debt, in order to appear in the field in a style becoming the chivalry of Spain. Ferdinand's former distrust of his general was now augmented tenfold by this evidence of his unbounded popularity. He saw in imagination much more danger to Naples from such a subject, than from any enemy, however formidable. He had received intelligence, moreover, that the French were in full retreat towards the north. He hesitated no longer, but sent instructions to the Great Captain at Cordova, to disband his levies, as the expedition would be postponed till after the present winter; at the same time inviting such as chose to enlist in the service of Navarre. [5] These tidings were received with indignant feelings by the whole army. The officers refused, nearly to a man, to engage in the proposed service. Gonsalvo, who understood the motives of this change in the royal purpose, was deeply sensible to what he regarded as a personal affront. He, however, enjoined on his troops implicit obedience to the king's commands. Before dismissing them, as he knew that many had been drawn into expensive preparations far beyond their means, he distributed largesses among them, amounting to the immense sum, if we may credit his biographers, of one hundred thousand ducats. "Never stint your hand," said he to his steward, who remonstrated on the magnitude of the donative; "there is no mode of enjoying one's property, like giving it away." He then wrote a letter to the king, in which he gave free vent to his indignation, bitterly complaining of the ungenerous requital of his services, and asking leave to retire to his duchy of Terranova in Naples, since he could be no longer useful in Spain. This request was not calculated to lull Ferdinand's suspicions. He answered, however, "in the soft and pleasant style, which he knew so well how to assume," says Zurita; and, after specifying his motives for relinquishing, however reluctantly, the expedition, he recommended Gonsalvo's return to Loja, at least until some more definite arrangement could be made respecting the affairs of Italy. Thus condemned to his former seclusion, the Great Captain resumed his late habits of life, freely opening his mansion to persons of merit, interesting himself in plans for ameliorating the condition of his tenantry and neighbors, and in this quiet way winning a more unquestionable title to human gratitude than when piling up the blood- stained trophies of victory. Alas for humanity, that it should have deemed otherwise! [6] Another circumstance, which disquieted the Catholic king, was the failure of issue by his present wife. The natural desire of offspring was further stimulated by hatred of the house of Austria, which made him eager to abridge the ample inheritance about to descend on his grandson Charles. It must be confessed, that it reflects little credit on his heart or his understanding, that he should have been so ready to sacrifice to personal resentment those noble plans for the consolidation of the monarchy, which had so worthily occupied the attention both of himself and of Isabella, in his early life. His wishes had nearly been realized. Queen Germaine was delivered of a son, March 3d, 1509. Providence, however, as if unwilling to defeat the glorious consummation of the union of the Spanish kingdoms, so long desired and nearly achieved, permitted the infant to live only a few hours. [7] Ferdinand repined at the blessing denied him, now more than ever. In order to invigorate his constitution, he resorted to artificial means. [8] The medicines which he took had the opposite effect. At least from this time, the spring of 1513, he was afflicted with infirmities before unknown to him. Instead of his habitual equanimity and cheerfulness, he became impatient, irritable, and frequently a prey to morbid melancholy. He lost all relish for business, and even for amusements, except field sports, to which he devoted the greater part of his time. The fever which consumed him made him impatient of long residence in any one place, and during these last years of his life the court was in perpetual migration. The unhappy monarch, alas! could not fly from disease, or from himself. [9] In the summer of 1515, he was found one night by his attendants in a state of insensibility, from which it was difficult to rouse him. He exhibited flashes of his former energy after this, however. On one occasion he made a journey to Aragon, in order to preside at the deliberations of the cortes, and enforce the grant of supplies, to which the nobles, from selfish considerations, made resistance. The king failed, indeed, to bend their intractable tempers, but he displayed on the occasion all his wonted address and resolution. [10] On his return to Castile, which, perhaps from the greater refinement and deference of the people, seems to have been always a more agreeable residence to him than his own kingdom of Aragon, he received intelligence very vexatious, in the irritable state of his mind. He learned that the Great Captain was preparing to embark for Flanders, with his friend the count of Ureña, the marquis of Priego his nephew, and his future son-in- law, the count of Cabra. Some surmised that Gonsalvo designed to take command of the papal army in Italy; others, to join himself with the archduke Charles, and introduce him, if possible, into Castile. Ferdinand, clinging to power more tenaciously as it was ready to slip of itself from his grasp, had little doubt that the latter was his purpose. He sent orders therefore to the south, to prevent the meditated embarkation, and, if necessary, to seize Gonsalvo's person. But the latter was soon to embark on a voyage, where no earthly arm could arrest him. [11] In the autumn of 1515 he was attacked by a quartan fever. Its approaches at first were mild. His constitution, naturally good, had been invigorated by the severe training of a military life; and he had been so fortunate, that, notwithstanding the free exposure of his person to danger, he had never received a wound. But, although little alarm was occasioned at first by his illness, he found it impossible to throw it off; and he removed to his residence in Granada, in hopes of deriving benefit from its salubrious climate. Every effort to rally the declining powers of nature proved unavailing; and on the 2d of December, 1515, he expired in his own palace at Granada, in the arms of his wife, and his beloved daughter Elvira. [12] The death of this illustrious man diffused universal sorrow throughout the nation. All envy and unworthy suspicion died with him. The king and the whole court went into mourning. Funeral services were performed in his honor, in the royal chapel and all the principal churches of the kingdom. Ferdinand addressed a letter of consolation to his duchess, in which he lamented the death of one, "who had rendered him inestimable services, and to whom he had ever borne such sincere affection!" [13] His obsequies were celebrated with great magnificence in the ancient Moorish capital, under the superintendence of the count of Tendilla, the son and successor of Gonsalvo's old friend, the late governor of Granada. [14] His remains, first deposited in the Franciscan monastery, were afterwards removed and laid beneath a sumptuous mausoleum in the church of San Geronimo; [15] and more than a hundred banners and royal pennons, waving in melancholy pomp around the walls of the chapel, proclaimed the glorious achievements of the warrior who slept beneath. [16] His noble wife, Doña Maria Manrique, survived him but a few days. His daughter Elvira inherited the princely titles and estates of her father, which, by her marriage with her kinsman, the count of Cabra, were perpetuated in the house of Cordova. [17] Gonsalvo, or, as he is called in Castilian, Gonzalo Hernandez de Cordova, was sixty-two years old at the time of his death. His countenance and person are represented to have been extremely handsome; his manners, elegant and attractive, were stamped with that lofty dignity, which so often distinguishes his countrymen. "He still bears," says Martyr, speaking of him in the last years of his life, "the same majestic port as when in the height of his former authority; so that every one who visits him acknowledges the influence of his noble presence, as fully as when, at the head of armies, he gave laws to Italy." [18] His splendid military successes, so gratifying to Castilian pride, have made the name of Gonsalvo as familiar to his countrymen as that of the Cid, which, floating down the stream of popular melody, has been treasured up as a part of the national history. His shining qualities, even more than his exploits, have been often made the theme of fiction; and fiction, as usual, has dealt with them in a fashion to leave only confused and erroneous conceptions of both. More is known of the Spanish hero, for instance, to foreign readers from Florian's agreeable novel, than from any authentic record of his actions. Yet Florian, by dwelling only on the dazzling and popular traits of his hero, has depicted him as the very personification of romantic chivalry. This certainly was not his character, which might be said to have been formed after a riper period of civilization than the age of chivalry. At least, it had none of the nonsense of that age,--its fanciful vagaries, reckless adventure, and wild romantic gallantry. [19] His characteristics were prudence, coolness, steadiness of purpose, and intimate knowledge of man. He understood, above all, the temper of his own countrymen. He may be said in some degree to have formed their military character; their patience of severe training and hardship, their unflinching obedience, their inflexible spirit under reverses, and their decisive energy in the hour of action. It is certain that the Spanish soldier under his hands assumed an entirely new aspect from that which he had displayed in the romantic wars of the Peninsula. Gonsalvo was untainted with the coarser vices characteristic of the time. He discovered none of that griping avarice, too often the reproach of his countrymen in these wars. His hand and heart were liberal as the day. He betrayed none of the cruelty and licentiousness, which disgrace the age of chivalry. On all occasions he was prompt to protect women from injury or insult. Although his distinguished manners and rank gave him obvious advantages with the sex, he never abused them; [20] and he has left a character, unimpeached by any historian, of unblemished morality in his domestic relations. This was a rare virtue in the sixteenth century. Gonsalvo's fame rests on his military prowess; yet his character would seem in many respects better suited to the calm and cultivated walks of civil life. His government of Naples exhibited much discretion and sound policy; [21] and there, as afterwards in his retirement, his polite and liberal manners secured not merely the good-will, but the strong attachment, of those around him. His early education, like that of most of the noble cavaliers who came forward before the improvements introduced under Isabella, was taken up with knightly exercises, more than intellectual accomplishments. He was never taught Latin, and had no pretensions to scholarship; but he honored and nobly recompensed it in others. His solid sense and liberal taste supplied all deficiencies in himself, and led him to select friends and companions from among the most enlightened and virtuous of the community. [22] On this fair character there remains one foul reproach. This is his breach of faith in two memorable instances; first, to the young duke of Calabria, and afterwards to Caesar Borgia, both of whom he betrayed into the hands of King Ferdinand, their personal enemy; and in violation of his most solemn pledges. [23] True, it was in obedience to his master's commands, and not to serve his own purposes; and true also, this want of faith was the besetting sin of the age. But history has no warrant to tamper with right and wrong, or to brighten the character of its favorites by diminishing one shade of the abhorrence which attaches to their vices. They should rather be held up in their true deformity, as the more conspicuous from the very greatness with which they are associated. It may be remarked, however, that the reiterated and unsparing opprobrium with which foreign writers, who have been little sensible to Gonsalvo's merits, have visited these offences, affords tolerable evidence that they are the only ones of any magnitude that can be charged on him. [24] As to the imputation of disloyalty, we have elsewhere had occasion to notice its apparent groundlessness. It would be strange, indeed, if the ungenerous treatment which he had experienced ever since his return from Naples had not provoked feelings of indignation in his bosom. Nor would it be surprising, under these circumstances, if he had been led to regard the archduke Charles's pretensions to the regency, as he came of age, with a favorable eye. There is no evidence, however, of this, or of any act unfriendly to Ferdinand's interests. His whole public life, on the contrary, exhibited the truest loyalty; and the only stains that darken his fame were incurred by too unhesitating devotion to the wishes of his master. He is not the first nor the last statesman, who has reaped the royal recompense of ingratitude, for serving his king with greater zeal than he had served his Maker. Ferdinand's health, in the mean time, had declined so sensibly, that it was evident he could not long survive the object of his jealousy. [25] His disease had now settled into a dropsy, accompanied with a distressing affection of the heart. He found difficulty in breathing, complained that he was stifled in the crowded cities, and passed most of his time, even after the weather became cold, in the fields and forests, occupied, as far as his strength permitted, with the fatiguing pleasures of the chase. As the winter advanced, he bent his steps towards the south. He passed some time, in December, at a country-seat of the duke of Alva, near Placentia, where he hunted the stag. He then resumed his journey to Andalusia, but fell so ill on the way, at the little village of Madrigalejo, near Truxillo, that it was found impossible to advance further. [26] The king seemed desirous of closing his eyes to the danger of his situation as long as possible. He would not confess, nor even admit his confessor into his chamber. [27] He showed similar jealousy of his grandson's envoy, Adrian of Utrecht. This person, the preceptor of Charles, and afterwards raised through his means to the papacy, had come into Castile some weeks before, with the ostensible view of making some permanent arrangement with Ferdinand in regard to the regency. The real motive, as the powers which he brought with him subsequently proved, was, that he might be on the spot when the king died, and assume the reins of government. Ferdinand received the minister with cold civility, and an agreement was entered into, by which the regency was guaranteed to the monarch, not only during Joanna's life, but his own. Concessions to a dying man cost nothing. Adrian, who was at Guadalupe at this time, no sooner heard of Ferdinand's illness, than he hastened to Madrigalejo. The king, however, suspected the motives of his visit. "He has come to see me die," said he; and, refusing to admit him into his presence, ordered the mortified envoy back again to Guadalupe. [28] At length the medical attendants ventured to inform the king of his real situation, conjuring him if he had any affairs of moment to settle, to do it without delay. He listened to them with composure, and from that moment seemed to recover all his customary fortitude and equanimity. After receiving the sacrament, and attending to his spiritual concerns, he called his attendants around his bed, to advise with them respecting the disposition of the government. Among those present, at this time, were his faithful followers, the duke of Alva, and the marquis of Denia, his majordomo, with several bishops and members of his council. [29] The king, it seems, had made several wills. By one, executed at Burgos, in 1512, he had committed the government of Castile and Aragon to the infante Ferdinand during his brother Charles's absence. This young prince had been educated in Spain under the eye of his grand-father, who entertained a strong affection for him. The counsellors remonstrated in the plainest terms against this disposition of the regency. Ferdinand, they said, was too young to take the helm into his own hands. His appointment would be sure to create new factions in Castile; it would raise him up to be in a manner a rival of his brother, and kindle ambitious desires in his bosom, which could not fail to end in his disappointment, and perhaps destruction. [30] The king, who would never have made such a devise in his better days, was more easily turned from his purpose now, than he would once have been. "To whom then," he asked, "shall I leave the regency?" "To Ximenes, archbishop of Toledo," they replied. Ferdinand turned away his face, apparently in displeasure; but after a few moments' silence rejoined, "It is well; he is certainly a good man, with honest intentions. He has no importunate friends or family to provide for. He owes everything to Queen Isabella and myself; and, as he has always been true to the interests of our family, I believe he will always remain so." [31] He, however, could not so readily abandon the idea of some splendid establishment for his favorite grandson; and he proposed to settle on him the grand-masterships of the military orders. But to this his attendants again objected, on the same grounds as before; adding, that this powerful patronage was too great for any subject, and imploring him not to defeat the object which the late queen had so much at heart, of incorporating it with the crown. "Ferdinand will be left very poor then," exclaimed the king, with tears in his eyes. "He will have the good-will of his brother," replied one of his honest counsellors, "the best legacy your Highness can leave him." [32] The testament, as finally arranged, settled the succession of Aragon and Naples on his daughter Joanna and her heirs. The administration of Castile during Charles's absence was intrusted to Ximenes, and that of Aragon to the king's natural son, the archbishop of Saragossa, whose good sense and popular manners made him acceptable to the people. He granted several places in the kingdom of Naples to the infante Ferdinand, with an annual stipend of fifty thousand ducats, chargeable on the public revenues. To his queen Germaine he left the yearly income of thirty thousand gold florins, stipulated by the marriage settlement, with five thousand a year more during widowhood. [33] The will contained, besides, several appropriations for pious and charitable purposes, but nothing worthy of particular note. [34] Notwithstanding the simplicity of the various provisions of the testament, it was so long, from the formalities and periphrases with which it was encumbered, that there was scarce time to transcribe it in season for the royal signature. On the evening of the 22d of January, 1516, he executed the instrument; and a few hours later, between one and two of the morning of the 23d, Ferdinand breathed his last. [35] The scene of this event was a small house belonging to the friars of Guadalupe. "In so wretched a tenement," exclaims Martyr, in his usual moralizing vein, "did this lord of so many lands close his eyes upon the world." [36] Ferdinand was nearly sixty-four years old, of which forty-one had elapsed since he first swayed the sceptre of Castile, and thirty-seven since he held that of Aragon. A long reign; long enough, indeed, to see most of those whom he had honored and trusted of his subjects gathered to the dust, and a succession of contemporary monarchs come and disappear like shadows. [37] He died deeply lamented by his native subjects, who entertained a partiality natural towards their own hereditary sovereign. The event was regarded with very different feelings by the Castilian nobles, who calculated their gains on the transfer of the reins from such old and steady hands into those of a young and inexperienced master. The commons, however, who had felt the good effect of this curb on the nobility, in their own personal security, held his memory in reverence as that of a national benefactor. [38] Ferdinand's remains were interred, agreeably to his orders, in Granada. A few of his most faithful adherents accompanied them; the greater part being deterred by a prudent caution of giving umbrage to Charles. [39] The funeral train, however, was swelled by contributions from the various towns through which it passed. At Cordova, especially, it is worthy of note, that the marquis of Priego, who had slender obligations to Ferdinand, came out with all his household to pay the last melancholy honors to his remains. They were received with similar respect in Granada, where the people, while they gazed on the sad spectacle, says Zurita, were naturally affected as they called to mind the pomp and splendor of his triumphal entry on the first occupation of the Moorish capital. [40] By his dying injunctions, all unnecessary ostentation was interdicted at his funeral. His body was laid by the side of Isabella's in the monastery of the Alhambra; and the year following, [41] when the royal chapel of the metropolitan church was completed, they were both transported thither. A magnificent mausoleum of white marble was erected over them, by their grandson, Charles the Fifth. It was executed in a style worthy of the age. The sides were adorned with figures of angels and saints, richly sculptured in bas-relief. On the top reposed the effigies of the illustrious pair, whose titles and merits were commemorated in the following brief, and not very felicitous inscription. "MAHOMETICAE SECTAE PROSTRATORES, ET HAERETICAE PERVICACIAE EXTINCTORES, FERNANDUS ARAGONUM, ET HELISABETA CASTELLAE, VIR ET UXOR UNANIMES, CATHOLICI APPELLATI, MARMOREO CLAUDUNTUR HOC TUMULO." [42] King Ferdinand's personal appearance has been elsewhere noticed. "He was of the middle size," says a contemporary, who knew him well. "His complexion was fresh; his eyes bright and animated; his nose and mouth small and finely formed, and his teeth white; his forehead lofty and serene; with flowing hair of a bright chestnut color. His manners were courteous, and his countenance seldom clouded by anything like spleen or melancholy. He was grave in speech and action, and had a marvellous dignity of presence. His whole demeanor, in fine, was truly that of a great king." For this flattering portrait Ferdinand must have sat at an earlier and happier period of his life. [43] His education, owing to the troubled state of the times, had been neglected in his boyhood, though he was early instructed in all the generous pastimes and exercises of chivalry. [44] He was esteemed one of the most perfect horsemen of his court. He led an active life, and the only kind of reading he appeared to relish was history. It was natural that so busy an actor on the great political theatre should have found peculiar interest and instruction in this study. [45] He was naturally of an equable temper, and inclined to moderation in all things. The only amusement for which he cared much was hunting, especially falconry, and that he never carried to excess till his last years. [46] He was indefatigable in application to business. He had no relish for the pleasures of the table, and, like Isabella, was temperate even to abstemiousness in his diet. [47] He was frugal in his domestic and personal expenditure; partly, no doubt, from a willingness to rebuke the opposite spirit of wastefulness and ostentation in his nobles. He lost no good opportunity of doing this. On one occasion, it is said, he turned to a gallant of the court noted for his extravagance in dress, and laying his hand on his own doublet, exclaimed, "Excellent stuff this; it has lasted me three pair of sleeves!" [48] This spirit of economy was carried so far as to bring on him the reproach of parsimony. [49] And parsimony, though not so pernicious on the whole as the opposite vice of prodigality, has always found far less favor with the multitude, from the appearance of disinterestedness, which the latter carries with it. Prodigality in a king, however, who draws not on his own resources, but on the public, forfeits even this equivocal claim to applause. But, in truth, Ferdinand was rather frugal, than parsimonious. His income was moderate; his enterprises numerous and vast. It was impossible that he could meet them without husbanding his resources with the most careful economy. [50] No one has accused him of attempting to enrich his exchequer by the venal sale of office, like Louis the Twelfth, or by griping extortion, like another royal contemporary, Henry the Seventh. He amassed no treasure, [51] and indeed died so poor, that he left scarcely enough in his coffers to defray the charges of his funeral. [52] Ferdinand was devout; at least he was scrupulous in regard to the exterior of religion. He was punctual in attendance on mass; careful to observe all the ordinances and ceremonies of his church; and left many tokens of his piety, after the fashion of the time, in sumptuous edifices and endowments for religious purposes. Although not a superstitious man for the age, he is certainly obnoxious to the reproach of bigotry; for he co-operated with Isabella in all her exceptionable measures in Castile, and spared no effort to fasten the odious yoke of the Inquisition on Aragon, and subsequently, though happily with less success, on Naples. [53] Ferdinand has incurred the more serious charge of hypocrisy. His Catholic zeal was observed to be marvellously efficacious in furthering his temporal interests. [54] His most objectionable enterprises, even, were covered with a veil of religion. In this, however, he did not materially differ from the practice of the age. Some of the most scandalous wars of that period were ostensibly at the bidding of the church, or in defence of Christendom against the infidel. This ostentation of a religious motive was indeed very usual with the Spanish and Portuguese. The crusading spirit, nourished by their struggle with the Moors, and subsequently by their African and American expeditions, gave such a religious tone habitually to their feelings, as shed an illusion over their actions and enterprises, frequently disguising their true character, even from themselves. It will not be so easy to acquit Ferdinand of the reproach of perfidy which foreign writers have so deeply branded on his name, [55] and which those of his own nation have sought rather to palliate than to deny. [56] It is but fair to him, however, even here, to take a glance at the age. He came forward when government was in a state of transition from the feudal forms to those which it has assumed in modern times; when the superior strength of the great vassals was circumvented by the superior policy of the reigning princes. It was the dawn of the triumph of intellect over the brute force, which had hitherto controlled the movements of nations, as of individuals. The same policy which these monarchs had pursued in their own domestic relations, they introduced into those with foreign states, when, at the close of the fifteenth century, the barriers that had so long kept them asunder were broken down. Italy was the first field, on which the great powers were brought into anything like a general collision. It was the country, too, in which this crafty policy had been first studied, and reduced to a regular system. A single extract from the political manual of that age [57] may serve as a key to the whole science, as then understood. "A prudent prince," says Machiavelli, "will not, and ought not to observe his engagements, when it would operate to his disadvantage, and the causes no longer exist which induced him to make them." [58] Sufficient evidence of the practical application of the maxim may be found in the manifold treaties of the period, so contradictory, or, what is to the same purpose for our present argument, so confirmatory of one another in their tenor, as clearly to show the impotence of all engagements. There were no less than four several treaties in the course of three years, solemnly stipulating the marriage of the archduke Charles and Claude of France. Louis the Twelfth violated his engagements, and the marriage after all never took place. [59] Such was the school in which Ferdinand was to make trial of his skill with his brother monarchs. He had an able instructor in his father, John the Second, of Aragon, and the result showed that the lessons were not lost on him. "He was vigilant, wary, and subtile," writes a French contemporary, "and few histories make mention of his being outwitted in the whole course of his life." [60] He played the game with more adroitness than his opponents, and he won it. Success, as usual, brought on him the reproaches of the losers. This is particularly true of the French, whose master, Louis the Twelfth, was more directly pitted against him. [61] Yet Ferdinand does not appear to be a whit more obnoxious to the charge of unfairness than his opponent. [62] If he deserted his allies when it suited his convenience, he, at least, did not deliberately plot their destruction, and betray them into the hands of their deadly enemy, as his rival did with Venice, in the league of Cambray. [63] The partition of Naples, the most scandalous transaction of the period, he shared equally with Louis; and if the latter has escaped the reproach of the usurpation of Navarre, it was because the premature death of his general deprived him of the pretext and means for achieving it. Yet Louis the Twelfth, the "father of his people," has gone down to posterity with a high and honorable reputation. [64] Ferdinand, unfortunately for his popularity, had nothing of the frank and cordial temper, the genial expansion of the soul, which begets love. He carried the same cautious and impenetrable frigidity into private life, that he showed in public. "No one," says a writer of the time, "could read his thoughts by any change of his countenance." [65] Calm and calculating, even in trifles, it was too obvious that everything had exclusive reference to self. He seemed to estimate his friends only by the amount of services they could render him. He was not always mindful of these services. Witness his ungenerous treatment of Columbus, the Great Captain, Navarro, Ximenes,--the men who shed the brightest lustre, and the most substantial benefits, on his reign. Witness also his insensibility to the virtues and long attachment of Isabella, whose memory he could so soon dishonor by a union with one every way unworthy to be her successor. Ferdinand's connection with Isabella, while it reflected infinite glory on his reign, suggests a contrast most unfavorable to his character. Hers was all magnanimity, disinterestedness, and deep devotion to the interests of her people. His was the spirit of egotism. The circle of his views might be more or less expanded, but self was the steady, unchangeable centre. Her heart beat with the generous sympathies of friendship, and the purest constancy to the first, the only object of her love. We have seen the measure of his sensibilities in other relations. They were not more refined in this; and he proved himself unworthy of the admirable woman with whom his destinies were united, by indulging in those vicious gallantries, too generally sanctioned by the age. [66] Ferdinand, in fine, a shrewd and politic prince, "surpassing," as a French writer, not his friend, has remarked, "all the statesmen of his time in the science of the cabinet," [67] may be taken as the representative of the peculiar genius of the age. While Isabella, discarding all the petty artifices of state policy, and pursuing the noblest ends by the noblest means, stands far above her age. In his illustrious consort Ferdinand may be said to have lost his good genius. [68] From that time his fortunes were under a cloud. Not that victory sat less constantly on his banner; but at home he had lost "All that should accompany old age, As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends." His ill-advised marriage disgusted his Castilian subjects. He ruled over them, indeed, but more in severity than in love. The beauty of his young queen opened new sources of jealousy; [69] while the disparity of their ages, and her fondness for frivolous pleasure, as little qualified her to be his partner in prosperity, as his solace in declining years. [70] His tenacity of power drew him into vulgar squabbles with those most nearly allied to him by blood, which settled into a mortal aversion. Finally, bodily infirmity broke the energies of his mind, sour suspicions corroded his heart, and he had the misfortune to live, long after he had lost all that could make life desirable. Let us turn from this gloomy picture to the brighter season of the morning and meridian of his life; when he sat with Isabella on the united thrones of Castile and Aragon, strong in the love of his own subjects, and in the fear and respect of his enemies. We shall then find much in his character to admire; his impartial justice in the administration of the laws; his watchful solicitude to shield the weak from the oppression of the strong; his wise economy, which achieved great results without burdening his people with oppressive taxes; his sobriety and moderation; the decorum, and respect for religion, which he maintained among his subjects; the industry he promoted by wholesome laws and his own example; his consummate sagacity, which crowned all his enterprises with brilliant success, and made him the oracle of the princes of the age. Machiavelli, indeed, the most deeply read of his time in human character, imputes Ferdinand's successes, in one of his letters, to "cunning and good luck, rather than superior wisdom." [71] He was indeed fortunate; and the "star of Austria," which rose as his declined, shone not with a brighter or steadier lustre. But success through a long series of years sufficiently, of itself, attests good conduct. "The winds and waves," says Gibbon, truly enough, "are always on the side of the most skilful mariner." The Florentine statesman has recorded a riper and more deliberate judgment in the treatise, which he intended as a mirror for the rulers of the time. "Nothing," says he, "gains estimation for a prince like great enterprises. Our own age has furnished a splendid example of this in Ferdinand of Aragon. We may call him a new king, since from a feeble one he has made himself the most renowned and glorious monarch of Christendom; and, if we ponder well his manifold achievements, we must acknowledge all of them very great, and some truly extraordinary." [72] Other eminent foreigners of the time join in this lofty strain of panegyric. [73] The Castilians, mindful of the general security and prosperity they had enjoyed under his reign, seem willing to bury his frailties in his grave. [74] While his own hereditary subjects, exulting with patriotic pride in the glory to which he had raised their petty state, and touched with grateful recollections of his mild, paternal government, deplore his loss in strains of national sorrow, as the last of the revered line, who was to preside over the destinies of Aragon, as a separate and independent kingdom. [75] FOOTNOTES [1] Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 29, cap. 21.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 8, cap. 45, 47. 834. [2] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 10, cap. 55, 69.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 531. [3] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 486.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 3, cap. 7.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 10, cap. 2.--Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, lib. 3, p. 288. [4] Opus Epist., epist. 487.--Pulgar, Sumario, p. 201. [5] Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, lib. 3, p. 289.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 3, cap. 7, 8.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 38.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 498.--Pulgar, Sumario, p. 201. [6] Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 30, cap. 14.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, pp. 290, 291.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 3, cap. 7, 8, 9.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 10, cap. 28.--Quintana, Españoles Célebres, tom. i. pp. 328-332.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 20.--Pulgar, Sumario, pp. 201-208. [7] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1509.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 10, cap. 55. [8] They are detailed with such curious precision by Martyr,--who is much too precise, indeed, for our pages,--as to leave little doubt of the fact. Opus Epist., epist. 531. [9] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1513, et seq.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 188.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 146.--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 27. "Non idem est vultus," says Peter Martyr of the king in a letter dated in October, 1513, "non eadem facultas in audiendo, non eadem lenitas. Tria sunt illi, ne priores resumat vires, opposita: senilis aetas; secundum namque agit et sexagesimum annum: uxor, quam a latere nunquam abigit: et venatus coeloque vivendi cupiditas, quae illum in sylvis detinet, ultra quam in juvenili aetate, citra salutem, fas esset." Opus Epist., epist. 529. [10] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 10, cap. 93, 94.--Carbajal, Anales MS., año 1515.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 550. [11] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 10, cap. 96.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 23.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 292. [12] Giovio Vitae Illust. Virorum, pp. 271, 292.--Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 3, cap. 9.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 560.-- Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1515.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 20, cap. 23.--Pulgar, Sumario, p. 209. [13] See a copy of the original letter in the Chrónica del Gran Capitan, (fol. 164.) It is dated Jan. 3d, 1516, only three weeks before Ferdinand's death. [14] Peter Martyr notices the death of this estimable nobleman, full of years and of honors, in a letter dated July 18th, 1515. It is addressed to Tendilla's son, and breathes the consolation flowing from the mild and philosophical spirit of its amiable author. The count was made marquis of Mondejar by Ferdinand, a short time before his death. His various titles and dignities, including the government of Granada, descended to his eldest son, Don Luis, Martyr's early pupil; his genius was inherited in full measure by a younger, the famous Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. [15] The following inscription is placed over them. "_GONZALI FERNANDEZ DE CORDOVA_, Qui propria virtute Magni Ducis nomen Proprium sibi fecit, Ossa, Perpetuae tandem Luci restituenda, Huic interea tumulo Credita sunt; Gloria minime consepulta." [16] Navagiero, Viaggio, fol. 24. On the top of the monument was seen the marble effigy of the Great Captain, armed and kneeling. The banners and other military trophies, which continued to garnish the walls of the chapel, according to Pedraza, as late as 1600, had disappeared before the eighteenth century; at least we may infer so from Colmenar's silence respecting them in his account of the sepulchre. Pedraza, Antiguedad de Granada, fol. 114.--Colmenar, Délices de l'Espagne, tom. iii p. 505. [±7] Chrónica del Gran Capitan, lib. 3, cap. 9.--Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, fol. 292. Gonsalvo was created duke of Terra Nuova and Sessa, and marquis of Bitonto, all in Italy, with estates of the value of 40,000 ducats rent. He was also grand constable of Naples, and a nobleman of Venice. His princely honors were transmitted by Doña Elvira to her son, Gonzalo Hernandez de Cordova, who filled the posts, under Charles V., of governor of Milan, and captain general of Italy. Under Philip II., his descendants were raised to a Spanish dukedom, with the title of Dukes of Baena. L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 24.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 41.--Salazar de Mendoza, Dignidades, p. 307. [18] Opus Epist., epist. 498.--Giovio, Vita Magni Gonsalvi, p. 292.-- Pulgar, Sumario, p. 212. [19] Gonsalvo assumed for his device a cross-bow moved by a pulley, with the motto, "Ingenium superat vires." It was characteristic of a mind trusting more to policy than force and daring exploit. Brantôme, Oeuvres, tom. i. p. 75. [20] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 271. [21] Ibid., p. 281.--Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 30, cap. 1, 5. [22] Giovio, Vitae Illust. Virorum, p. 271. "Amigo de sus amigos, ¡Qué Señor para criados Y parientes! ¡Qué enemigo de enemigos! ¡Qué maestro de esforzados Y valientes! ¡Qué seso para discretos! ¡Qué gracia para donosos! ¡Qué razon! Muy benigno á los sugetos, Y á los bravos y dañosos Un leon." Coplas de Don Jorge Manrique. [23] Borgia, after his father Alexander VI.'s death, escaped to Naples under favor of a safe conduct signed by Gonsalvo. Here, however, his intriguing spirit soon engaged him in schemes for troubling the peace of Italy, and, indeed, for subverting the authority of the Spaniards there; in consequence of which the Great Captain seized his person, and sent him prisoner to Castile. Such, at least, is the Spanish version of the story, and of course the one most favorable to Gonsalvo. Mariana dismisses it with coolly remarking, that "the Great Captain seems to have consulted the public good, in the affair, more than his own fame; a conduct well worthy to be pondered and emulated by all princes and rulers!" Hist. de España, lib. 28, cap. 8.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 5, cap. 72.--Quintana, Españoles Célebres, pp. 302, 303. [24] That but one other troubled him, appears from the fact (if it be a fact) of Gonsalvo's declaring, on his death-bed, that "there were three acts of his life which he deeply repented." Two of these were his treatment of Borgia and the duke of Calabria. He was silent respecting the third. "Some historians suppose," says Quintana, "that by this last he meant his omission to possess himself of the crown of Naples when it was in his power!" These historians, no doubt, like Fouché, considered a blunder in politics as worse than a crime. [25] The miraculous bell of Velilla, a little village in Aragon, nine leagues from Saragossa, about this time gave one of those prophetic tintinnabulations, which always boded some great calamity to the country. The side on which the blows fell denoted the quarter where the disaster was to happen. Its sound, says Dr. Dormer, caused dismay and contrition, with dismal "fear of change," in the hearts of all who heard it. No arm was strong enough to stop it on these occasions, as those found to their cost who profanely attempted it. Its ill-omened voice was heard for the twentieth and last time, in March, 1679. As no event of importance followed, it probably tolled for its own funeral.--See the edifying history, in Dr. Diego Dormer, of the miraculous powers and performances of this celebrated bell, as duly authenticated by a host of witnesses. Discursos Varios, pp. 198-244. [26] Carbajal, Anales, MS., años 1513-1516.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 146.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 542, 558, 561, 564. Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 10, cap. 99. Carbajal states, that the king had been warned, by some soothsayer, to beware of Madrigal, and that he had ever since avoided entering into the town of that name in Old Castile. The name of the place he was now in was not precisely that indicated, but corresponded near enough for a prediction. The event proved, that the witches of Spain, like those of Scotland, "Could keep the word of promise to the ear, And break it to the hope." The story derives little confirmation from the character of Ferdinand. He was not superstitious, at least while his faculties were in vigor. [27] "A la verdad," says Carbajal, "le tentó mucho el enemigo en aquel paso con incredulidad que le ponia de no morir tan presto, para que ni confesase ni recibiese los Sacramentos." According to the same writer, Ferdinand was buoyed up by the prediction of an old sybil, "la beata del Barco," that "he should not die till he had conquered Jerusalem." (Anales, MS., cap. 2.) We are again reminded of Shakespeare, "It hath been prophesied to me many years I should not die but in Jerusalem." King Henry IV. [28] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1516, cap. 1.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, ubi supra.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 565.--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 35. [29] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1516, cap. 2. Dr. Carbajal, who was a member of the royal council, was present with him during the whole of his last illness; and his circumstantial and spirited narrative of it forms an exception to the general character of his _itinerary_. [30] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1516, cap. 2. [31] Ibid., ubi supra. [32] Ibid., ubi supra. [33] Ferdinand's gay widow did not long enjoy this latter pension. Soon after his death, she gave her hand to the marquis of Brandenburg, and, he dying, she again married the prince of Calabria, who had been detained in a sort of honorable captivity in Spain, ever since the dethronement of his father, King Frederic. (Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 4, dial. 44.) It was the second sterile match, says Guicciardini, which Charles V., for obvious politic reasons, provided for the rightful heir of Naples. Istoria, tom. viii. lib. 15, p. 10. [34] Ferdinand's testament is to be found in Carbajal, Anales, MS.-- Dormer, Discursos Varies, p. 393 et seq.--Mariana, Hist. de España, ed. Valencia, tom. ix. Apend. no. 2. [35] Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 3, dial. 9.--The queen was at Alcalá de Henares, when she received tidings of her husband's illness. She posted with all possible despatch to Madrigalejo, but, although she reached it on the 20th, she was not admitted, says Gomez, notwithstanding her tears, to a private interview with the king, till the testament was executed, a few hours only before his death. De Rebus Gestis, fol. 147. [36] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1516.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 188.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 148. "Tot regnorum dominus, totque palmarum cumulis ornatus, Christianae religionis amplificator et prostrator hostium, Rex in rusticanâ obiit casâ, et pauper contra hominum opinionem obiit." Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 588.--Brantôme, (Vies des Hommes Illustres, Footnote: p. 72,) who speaks of Madrigalejo as a "meschant village," which he had seen. [37] Since Ferdinand ascended the throne he had seen no less than four kings of England, as many of France, and also of Naples, three of Portugal, two German emperors, and half a dozen popes. As to his own subjects, scarcely one of all those familiar to the reader in the course of our history now survived, except, indeed, the Nestor of his time, the octogenarian Ximenes. [38] Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 10, cap. 100.--Blancas, Commentarii, p. 275.--Lanuza, Historias, tom. i. lib. 1, cap. 25. [39] Zurita, Anales, ubi supra. The honest Martyr was one of the few who paid this last tribute of respect to their ancient master. "Ego ut mortuo debitum praestem," says he, in a letter to Prince Charles's physician, "corpus ejus exanime, Granatam, sepulchro sedem destinatam, comitabor." Opus Epist., epist. 566. [40] Anales, tom. vi. lib. 10, cap. 100.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 572.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 24.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1516, cap. 5. [41] Mem de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Illust. 21. According to Pedraza, this event did not take place till 1525. Antiguedad de Granada, lib. 3, cap. 7. [42] Pedraza, Antiguedad de Granada, lib. 3, cap. 7.--"Assai bello per Spagna;" says Navagiero, who, as an Italian, had a right to be fastidious. (Viaggio, fol. 23.) The artist, however, was not a Spaniard; at least common tradition assigns the work to Philip of Burgundy, an eminent sculptor of the period, who has left many specimens of his excellence in Toledo and other parts of Spain. (Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. p. 577.) Laborde's magnificent work contains an engraving of the monuments of the Catholic sovereigns and Philip and Joanna; "qui rappellent la renaissance des arts en Italie, et sont, à la fois d'une belle exécution et d'une conception noble." Laborde, Voyage Pittoresque, tom. ii. p. 25. [43] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 182. Pulgar's portrait of the king, taken also in the morning of his life, the close of which the writer did not live to see, is equally bright and pleasing. "Habia," says he," una gracia singular, que qualquier con él fablese, luego le amaba é le deseaba servir, porque tenia la communicacion amigable." Reyes Católicos, p. 36. [44] "He tilted lightly," says Pulgar, "and with a dexterity not surpassed by any man in the kingdom." Reyes Católicos, ubi supra. [45] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 153.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 24.--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 37. [46] Pulgar, indeed, notices his fondness for chess, tennis, and other games of skill, in early life. Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 3. [47] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 182.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 3. "Stop and dine with us," he was known to say to his uncle, the grand admiral Henriquez; "we are to have a chicken for dinner today." (Sempere, Hist, del Luxo, tom. ii. p. 2, nota.) The royal _cuisine_ would have afforded small scope for the talents of a Vatel or an Ude. [48] Sempere, Hist. del Luxo, ubi supra. [49] Machiavelli, by a single _coup de pinceau_, thus characterizes, or caricatures, the princes of his time. "Un imperatore instabile e vario; un re di Francia sdegnoso e pauroso; un re d'Inghilterra ricco, feroce, e cupido di gloria; _un re di Spagna taccagno e avaro_; per gli altri re, io no li conosco." [50] The revenues of his own kingdom of Aragon were very limited. His principal foreign expeditions were undertaken solely on account of that crown; and this, notwithstanding the aid from Castile, may explain, and in some degree excuse, his very scanty remittances to his troops. [51] On one occasion, having obtained a liberal supply from the states of Aragon, (a rare occurrence,) his counsellors advised him to lock it up against a day of need. "Mas el Rey," says Zurita, "que siempre supo gastar su dinero provechosamente, _y nunca fue escosso en despendello en las cosas del estado_, tuvo mas aparejo para emplearlo, que para encerrarlo." (Anales, tom. vi. fol. 225.) The historian, it must be allowed, lays quite as much emphasis on his liberality as it will bear. [52] Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 24.--Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 10, cap. 100.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 566. "Vix ad funeris pompam et paucis familiaribus praebendas vestes pullatas, pecuniae apud eum, neqne alibi congestae repertae sunt; quod nemo unquam de vivente judicavit." (Peter Martyr, ubi supra.) Guicciardini alludes to the same fact, as evidence of the injustice of the imputations on Ferdinand; "Ma accade," adds the historian, truly enough, "quasi sempre per il giudizio corrotto degli uomini, che nei Re è più lodata la prodigalità, benche a quella sia annessa la rapacità, che la parsimonia congiunta con l'astinenza dalla roba di altri." (Istoria, tom. vi. lib. 12, p. 273.) The state of Ferdinand's coffers formed, indeed, a strong contrast to that of his brother monarch's, Henry VII., "whose treasure of store," to borrow the words of Bacon, "left at his death, under his own key and keeping, amounted unto the sum of eighteen hundred thousand pounds sterling; a huge mass of money, even for these times." (Hist. of Henry VII., Works, vol. v. p. 183.) Sir Edward Coke swells this huge mass to "fifty and three hundred thousand pounds"! Institutes, part 4, chap. 35. [53] Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 30, cap. 24.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 182.--Zurita, Anales, lib. 9, cap. 26. Ferdinand's conduct in regard to the Inquisition in Aragon displayed singular duplicity. In consequence of the remonstrance of cortes, in 1512, in which that high-spirited body set forth the various usurpations of the Holy Office, Ferdinand signed a compact, abridging its jurisdiction. He repented of these concessions, however, and in the following year obtained a dispensation from Rome from his engagements. This proceeding produced such an alarming excitement in the kingdom, that the monarch found it expedient to renounce the papal brief, and apply for another, confirming his former compact. (Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. pp. 371 et seq.) One may well doubt whether bigotry entered as largely, as less pardonable motives of state policy, into this miserable juggling. [54] "Disoit-on," says Brantôme, "que la reyne Isabella de Castille estoit une fort devote et religieuse princesse, et que luy, quel grand zele qu'il y eust, n'estoit devotieux que par ypocrisie, couvrant ses actes et ambitions par ce sainct zele de religion." (Oeuvres, tom. i. p. 70.) "Copri," says Guicciardini, "quasi tutte le sue eupidità sotto colore di onesto zelo della religione e di santa intenzione al bene comune." (Istoria, tom. vi. lib. 12, p. 274.) The penetrating eye of Machiavelli glances at the same trait. II Principe, cap. 21. [55] Guicciardini, Istoria, lib. 12, p. 273.--Du Bellay, Mémoires, apud Petitot, Collection des Mémoires, tom. xvii. p. 272.--Giovio, Hist. sui Temporis, lib. 11, p. 160; lib. 16, p. 336.--Machiavelli, Opere, tom. ix. Lett. Diverse, no. 6, ed. Milano, 1805.--Herbert, Life of Henry VIII., p. 63.--Sismondi, Républiques Italiennes, tom. xvi. cap. 112.--Voltaire sums up Ferdinand's character in the following pithy sentence. "On l'appellait en Espagne _le sage, le prudent_; en Italie _le pieux_; en France et à Londres _le perfide_." Essai sur les Moeurs, chap. 114. [56] "Home era de verdad," says Pulgar, "como quiera que _las necesidades grandes_ en que le pusieron las guerras, le facian algunas veces variar." (Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 3.) Zurita exposes and condemns this blemish in his hero's character, with a candor which does him credit. "Fue muy notado, no solo de los estrangeros, pero de sus naturales, que no guardava la verdad, y fe que prometia; y que se anteponia siempre, y sobrepujava el respeto de su propria utilidad, a lo que era justo y honesto." Anales, tom. vi. fol. 406. [57] Charles V., in particular, testified his respect for Machiavelli, by having the "Principe" translated for his own use. [58] Machiavelli, Opera, tom. vi.--Il Principe, cap. 18, ed. Genova, 1798. [59] Dumont, Corps Diplomatique, tom. iv. part. 1, nos. 7, 11, 28, 29.-- Seyssel, Hist. de Louys XII., pp. 228-230.--St. Gelais, Hist. de Louys XII., p. 184. [60] Mémoires de Bayard, chap. 61.--"This prince," says Lord Herbert, who was not disposed to overrate the talents, any more than the virtues, of Ferdinand, "was thought the most active and politique of his time. No man knew better how to serve his turn on everybody, or to make their ends conduce to his." Life of Henry VIII., p. 63. [61] According to them, the Catholic king took no great pains to conceal his treachery. "Quelqu'un disant un jour à Ferdinand, que Louis XII. l'accusoit de l'avoir trompé trois fois, Ferdinand parut mécontent qn'il lui ravît une partie de sa gloire; _Il en a bien menti, l'ivrogne_, dit-il, avec toute la grossièreté du temps, _je l'ai trompé plus de dix_." (Gaillard, Rivalité, tom. iv. p. 240.) The anecdote has been repeated by other modern writers, I know not on what authority. Ferdinand was too shrewd a politician, to hazard his game by playing the braggart. [62] Paolo Giovio strikes the balance of their respective merits in this particular, in the following terms. "Ex horum enim longè maximorum nostrae tempestatis regum ingeniis, et turn liquidò et multùm anteà praclarè compertum est, nihil omnino sanctum et inviolabile, vel in ritè conceptis sancitisque foederibus reperiri, quòd, in proferendis imperiis augendisque opibus, apud eos nihil ad illustris famae decus interesset, dolone et nusquam sine fallaciis, an fide integrâ verâque virtute niterentur." Hist. sui Temporis, lib. 11, p. 160. [63] An equally pertinent example occurs in the efficient support he gave Caesar Borgia in his flagitious enterprises against some of the most faithful allies of France. See Sismondi, Républiques Italiennes, tom. xiii. cap. 101. [64] Read the honeyed panegyrics of Seyssel, St. Gelais, Voltaire even, to say nothing of Gaillard, Varillas, _e lulti quanti_, undiluted by scarce a drop of censure. Rare indeed is it to find one so imbued with the spirit of philosophy, as to raise himself above the local or national prejudices which pass for patriotism with the vulgar. Sismondi is the only writer in the French language, that has come under my notice, who has weighed the deserts of Louis XII. in the historic balance with impartiality and candor. And Sismondi is not a Frenchman. [65] Giovio, Hist. sui Temporis, lib. 16, p. 335. [66] Ferdinand left four natural children, one son and three daughters. The former, Don Alonso de Aragon, was born of the viscountess of Eboli, a Catalan lady. He was made archbishop of Saragossa when only six years old. There was little of the religious profession, however, in his life. He took an active part in the political and military movements of the period, and seems to have been even less scrupulous in his gallantries than his father. His manners in private life were attractive, and his public conduct discreet. His father always regarded him with peculiar affection, and intrusted him with the regency of Aragon, as we have seen, at his death. Ferdinand had three daughters, also, by three different ladies, one of them a noble Portuguese. The eldest child was named Doña Juana, and married the grand constable of Castile. The others, each named Maria, embraced the religious profession in a convent in Madrigal. L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 188.--Salazar de Mendoza, Monarquía, tom. i. p. 410. [67] "Enfin il surpassa tous les Princes de son siècle en la science du Cabinet, et c'est à lui qu'on doit attribuer le premier et le souverain usage de la politique moderne." Varillas, Politique de Ferdinand, liv. 3, disc. 10. [68] Brantôme notices a _sobriquet_ which his countrymen had given to Ferdinand. "Nos François appelloient ce roy Ferdinand Jehan Gipon, je ne sçay pour quelle dérision; mais il nous cousta bon, et nous fist bien du mal, et fust un grand roy et sage." Which his ancient editor thus explains: "_Gipon_ de i'italien _giubone_, c'est que nous appellons _jupon_ et _jupe_; voulant par là taxer ce prince de s'être laissé gouverner par Isabelle, reine de Castille, sa femme, dont il endossoit la _jupe_, pour ainsi dire, pendant qu'elle portoit les _chausses_." (Vies des Hommes Illustres, disc. 5.) There is more humor than truth in the etymology. The _gipon_ was part of a man's attire, being, as Mr. Tyrwhitt defines it, "a short cassock," and was worn under the armor. Thus Chaucer, in the Prologue to his "Canterbury Tales," says of his knight's dress, "Of fustian he wered a gipon Alle besmotred with his habergeon." Again, in his "Knighte's Tale," "Som wol ben armed in an habergeon, And in a brest-plate, and in a gipon." [69] When Ferdinand visited Aragon, in 1515, during his troubles with the cortes, he imprisoned the vice-chancellor, Antonio Augustin; being moved to this, according to Carbajal, by his jealousy of that minister's attentions to his young queen. (Anales, MS., año 1515.) It is possible. Zurita, however, treats it as mere scandal, referring the imprisonment to political offences exclusively. Anales, tom. vi. fol. 393.--See also Dormer, Anales de la Corona de Aragon, (Zaragoza, 1697,) lib. 1, cap. 9. [70] "Era poco hermosa," says Sandoval, who grudges her even this quality, "algo coja, amiga mucho de holgarse, y andar en banquetes, huertos y jardines, y en fiestas. Introduxo esta Señora en Castilla comidas soberbias, siendo los Castellanos, y sun sus Reyes muy moderados en esto. Pasabansele pocos dias que no convidase, 6 fuese convidada. La que mas gastaba en fiestas y banquetes con ella, era mas su amiga." Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 12. [71] Opere, tom. ix. Lettere Diverse, no. 6, ed. Milano, 1805. His correspondent, Vettori, is still more severe in his analysis of Ferdinand's public conduct. (Let. di 16 Maggio, 1514.) These statesmen were the friends of France, with whom Ferdinand was at war; and personal enemies of the Medici, whom that prince re-established in the government. As political antagonists therefore, every way, of the Catholic king, they were not likely to be altogether unbiassed in their judgments of his policy.--These views, however, find favor with Lord Herbert, who had evidently read, though he does not refer to, this correspondence. Life of Henry VIII., p. 63. [72] Opere, tom. vi. II Principe, cap. 21, ed. Genova, 1798. [73] Martyr, who had better opportunities than any other foreigner for estimating the character of Ferdinand, affords the most honorable testimony to his kingly qualities, in a letter written when the writer had no motive for flattery, after that monarch's death, to Charles V.'s physician. (Opus Epist., epist. 567.) Guicciardini, whose national prejudices did not lie in this scale, comprehends nearly as much in one brief sentence. "Re di eccellentissimo consiglio, e virtù, e nel quale, se fosse stato constante nelle promesse, no potresti facilmente riprendere cosa alcuna." (Istoria, tom. vi. lib. 12, p. 273.) See also Brantôme, (Oeuvres, tom. iv. disc. 5.)--Giovio, with scarcely more qualification, Hist. sui Temporis, lib. 16, p. 336.--Navagiero, Viaggio, fol. 27,--et alios. [74] "Principe el mas señalado," says the prince of the Castilian historians, in his pithy manner, "en valor y justicia y prudencia que en muchos siglos España tuvo. Tachas á nadie pueden faltar sea por la fragilidad propia, ò por la malicia y envidia agena que combate principalmente los altos lugares. Espejo sin duda por sus grandes virtudes en que todos los Principes de España se deben mirar." (Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ix. p. 375, cap. ult.) See also a similar tribute to his deserts, with greater amplification, in Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 20, cap. 24.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 148.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 42.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. ix. p. 426 et seq.--et plurimis auct. antiq. et recentibus. [75] See the closing chapter of the great Aragonese annalist, who terminates his historic labors with the death of Ferdinand the Catholic. (Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 10, cap. 100.) I will cite only one extract from the profuse panegyrics of the national writers; which attests the veneration in which Ferdinand's memory was held in Aragon. It is from one, whose penis never prostituted to parasitical or party purposes, and whose judgment is usually as correct as the expression of it is candid. "Quo plangore ac lamentatione universa civitas complebatur. Neque solùm homines, sed ipsa tecta, et parietes urbis videbantur acerbum illius, qui omnibus charissimus erat, interitum lugere. Et meritò. Erat enim, ut scitis, exemplum prudentiae ac fortitudinis: summae in re domesticâ continentiae: eximiae in publicâ dignitatis: humanitatis praetereà, ac leporis admirabilis. ***** Neque eos solùm, sed omnes certè tantâ amplectebatur benevolentiâ, ut interdum non nobis Rex, sed uniuscujusque nostrûm genitor ac parens videretur. Post ejus interitum omnis nostra juventus languet, deliciis plus dedita quàm deceret: nec perinde, ac debuerat, in laudis et gloriae cupiditate versatur. ***** Quid plura? nulla res fuit in usu bene regnandi posita, quae illius Regis scientiam effugeret. ***** Fuit enim aeximiâ corporis venustate praeditus. Sed pluris facere deberent consiliorum ac virtutum suarum, quam posteris reliquit, effigiem: quibus denique factum videmus, ut ab eo usque ad hoc tempus, non solùm nobis, sed Hispaniae cunctae, diuturnitas pacis otium confirmarit. Haec aliaque ejusmodi quotidie à nostris senibus de Catholici Regis memoriâ enarrantur: quae à rei veritate nequaquam abhorrent." Blancas, Commentarii, p. 276. CHAPTER XXV. ADMINISTRATION, DEATH, AND CHARACTER OF CARDINAL XIMENES. 1516, 1517. Ximenes Governor of Castile.--Charles Proclaimed King.--Ximenes's Domestic Policy.--He Intimidates the Nobles.--Public Discontents.--Charles Lands in Spain.--His Ingratitude to Ximenes.--The Cardinal's Illness and Death.-- His Extraordinary Character. The personal history of Ferdinand the Catholic terminates, of course, with the preceding chapter. In order to bring the history of his reign, however, to a suitable close, it is necessary to continue the narrative through the brief regency of Ximenes, to the period when the government was delivered into the hands of Ferdinand's grandson and successor, Charles the Fifth. By the testament of the deceased monarch, as we have seen, Cardinal Ximenez de Cisneros was appointed sole regent of Castile. He met with opposition, however, from Adrian, the dean of Louvain, who produced powers of similar purport from Prince Charles. Neither party could boast a sufficient warrant for exercising this important trust; the one claiming it by the appointment of an individual, who, acting merely as regent himself, had certainly no right to name his successor; while the other had only the sanction of a prince, who, at the time of giving it, had no jurisdiction whatever in Castile. The misunderstanding which ensued, was finally settled by an agreement of the parties to share the authority in common, till further instructions should be received from Charles. [1] It was not long before they arrived. They confirmed the cardinal's authority in the fullest manner; while they spoke of Adrian only as an ambassador, They intimated, however, the most entire confidence in the latter; and the two prelates continued as before to administer the government jointly. Ximenes sacrificed nothing by this arrangement; for the tame and quiet temper of Adrian was too much overawed by the bold genius of his partner, to raise any opposition to his measures. [2] The first requisition of prince Charles, was one that taxed severely the power and popularity of the new regent. This was to have himself proclaimed king; a measure extremely distasteful to the Castilians, who regarded it not only as contrary to established usage, during the lifetime of his mother, but as ah indignity to her. It was in vain that Ximenes and the council remonstrated on the impropriety and impolicy of the measure. [3] Charles, fortified by his Flemish advisers, sturdily persisted in his purpose. The cardinal, consequently, called a meeting of the prelates and principal nobles in Madrid, to which he had transferred the seat of government, and whose central position and other local advantages made it, from this time forward, with little variation, the regular capital of the kingdom. [4] The doctor Carbajal prepared a studied and plausible argument in support of the measure. [5] As it failed, however, to produce conviction in his audience, Ximenes, chafed by the opposition, and probably distrusting its real motives, peremptorily declared, that those who refused to acknowledge Charles as king, in the present state of things, would refuse to obey him when he was so. "I will have him proclaimed in Madrid to-morrow," said he, "and I doubt not every other city in the kingdom will follow the example." He was as good as his word; and the conduct of the capital was imitated, with little opposition, by all the other cities in Castile. Not so in Aragon, whose people were too much attached to their institutions to consent to it, till Charles first made oath in person to respect the laws and liberties of the realm. [6] The Castilian aristocracy, it may be believed, did not much relish the new yoke imposed on them by their priestly regent. On one occasion, it is said, they went in a body and demanded of Ximenes by what powers he held the government so absolutely. He referred them for answer to Ferdinand's testament and Charles's letter. As they objected to these, he led them to a window of the apartment, and showed them a park of artillery below, exclaiming, at the same time. "There are my credentials, then!" The story is characteristic; but, though often repeated, must be admitted to stand on slender authority. [7] One of the regent's first acts was the famous ordinance, encouraging the burgesses, by liberal rewards, to enroll themselves into companies, and submit to regular military training, at stated seasons. The nobles saw the operation of this measure too well, not to use all their efforts to counteract it. In this they succeeded for a time, as the cardinal, with his usual boldness, had ventured on it without waiting for Charles's sanction, and in opposition to most of the council. The resolute spirit of the minister, however, eventually triumphed over all resistance, and a national corps was organized, competent, under proper guidance, to protect the liberties of the people, but which, unfortunately, was ultimately destined to be turned against them. [8] Armed with this strong physical force, the cardinal now projected the boldest schemes of reform, especially in the finances, which had fallen into some disorder in the latter days of Ferdinand. He made a strict inquisition into the funds of the military orders, in which there had been much waste and misappropriation; he suppressed all superfluous offices in the state, retrenched excessive salaries, and cut short the pensions granted by Ferdinand and Isabella, which he contended should determine with their lives. Unfortunately, the state was not materially benefited by these economical arrangements, since the greater part of what was thus saved was drawn off to supply the waste and cupidity of the Flemish court, who dealt with Spain with all the merciless rapacity that could be shown to a conquered province. [9] The foreign administration of the regent displayed the same courage and vigor. Arsenals were established in the southern maritime towns, and a numerous fleet was equipped in the Mediterranean, against the Barbary corsairs. A large force was sent into Navarre, which defeated an invading army of French; and the cardinal followed up the blow by demolishing the principal fortresses of the kingdom; a precautionary measure, to which, in all probability, Spain owes the permanent preservation of her conquest. [10] The regent's eye penetrated to the farthest limits of the monarchy. He sent a commission to Hispaniola, to inquire into, and ameliorate, the condition of the natives. At the same time he earnestly opposed (though without success, being overruled in this by the Flemish counsellors,) the introduction of negro slaves into the colonies, which, he predicted, from the character of the race, must ultimately result in a servile war. It is needless to remark, how well the event has verified the prediction. [11] It is with less satisfaction that we must contemplate his policy in regard to the Inquisition. As head of that tribunal, he enforced its authority and pretensions to the utmost. He extended a branch of it to Oran, and also to the Canaries, and the New World. [12] In 1512, the _new Christians_ had offered Ferdinand a large sum of money to carry on the Navarrese war, if he would cause the trials before that tribunal to be conducted in the same manner as in other courts, where the accuser and the evidence were confronted openly with the defendant. To this reasonable petition Ximenes objected, on the wretched plea, that, in that event, none would be found willing to undertake the odious business of informer. He backed his remonstrance with such a liberal donative from his own funds, as supplied the king's immediate exigency, and effectually closed his heart against the petitioners. The application was renewed in 1516, by the unfortunate Israelites, who offered a liberal supply in like manner to Charles, on similar terms. But the proposal, to which his Flemish counsellors, who may be excused, at least, from the reproach of bigotry, would have inclined the young monarch, was firmly rejected through the interposition of Ximenes. [13] The high-handed measures of the minister, while they disgusted the aristocracy, gave great umbrage to the dean of Louvain, who saw himself reduced to a mere cipher in the administration. In consequence of his representations a second, and afterwards a third minister was sent to Castile, with authority to divide the government with the cardinal. But all this was of little avail. On one occasion, the co-regents ventured to rebuke their haughty partner, and assert their own dignity, by subscribing their names first to the despatches, and then sending them to him for his signature. But Ximenes coolly ordered his secretary to tear the paper in pieces, and make out a new one, which he signed, and sent out without the participation of his brethren. And this course he continued during the remainder of his administration. [14] The cardinal not only assumed the sole responsibility of the most important public acts, but, in the execution of them, seldom condescended to calculate the obstacles or the odds arrayed against him. He was thus brought into collision, at the same time, with three of the most powerful grandees of Castile; the dukes of Alva and Infantado, and the count of Ureña. Don Pedro Giron, the son of the latter, with several other young noblemen, had maltreated and resisted the royal officers, while in the discharge of their duty. They then took refuge in the little town of Villafrata, which they fortified and prepared for a defence. The cardinal without hesitation mustered several thousand of the national militia, and, investing the place, set it on fire, and deliberately razed it to the ground. The refractory nobles, struck with consternation, submitted. Their friends interceded for them in the most humble manner; and the cardinal, whose lofty spirit disdained to trample on a fallen foe, showed his usual clemency by soliciting their pardon from the king. [15] But neither the talents nor authority of Ximenes, it was evident, could much longer maintain subordination among the people, exasperated by the shameless extortions of the Flemings, and the little interest shown for them by their new sovereign. The most considerable offices in church and state were put up to sale; and the kingdom was drained of its funds by the large remittances continually made, on one pretext or another, to Flanders. All this brought odium, undeserved indeed, on the cardinal's government; [16] for there is abundant evidence, that both he and the council remonstrated in the boldest manner on these enormities; while they endeavored to inspire nobler sentiments in Charles's bosom, by recalling the wise and patriotic administration of his grandparents. [17] The people, in the mean while, outraged by these excesses, and despairing of redress from a higher quarter, loudly clamored for a convocation of cortes, that they might take the matter into their own hands. The cardinal evaded this as long as possible. He was never a friend to popular assemblies, much less in the present inflamed state of public feeling, and in the absence of the sovereign. He was more anxious for his return than any other individual, probably, in the kingdom. Braved by the aristocracy at home, thwarted in every favorite measure by the Flemings abroad, with an injured, indignant people to control, and oppressed, moreover, by infirmities and years, even his stern, inflexible spirit could scarcely sustain him under a burden too grievous, in these circumstances, for any subject. [18] At length, the young monarch, having made all preliminary arrangements, prepared, though still in opposition to the wishes of his courtiers, to embark for his Spanish dominions. Previously to this, on the 13th of August, 1516, the French and Spanish plenipotentiaries signed a treaty of peace at Noyon. The principal article stipulated the marriage of Charles to the daughter of Francis the First, who was to cede, as her dowry, the French claims on Naples. The marriage, indeed, never took place. But the treaty itself may be considered as finally adjusting the hostile relations which had subsisted, during so many years of Ferdinand's reign, with the rival monarchy of France, and as closing the long series of wars, which had grown out of the league of Cambray. [19] On the 17th of September, 1517, Charles landed at Villaviciosa, in the Asturias. Ximenes at this time lay ill at the Franciscan monastery of Aguilera, near Aranda on the Douro. The good tidings of the royal landing operated like a cordial on his spirits, and he instantly despatched letters to the young monarch, filled with wholesome counsel as to the conduct he should pursue, in order to conciliate the affections of the people. He received at the same time messages from the king, couched in the most gracious terms, and expressing the liveliest interest in his restoration to health. The Flemings in Charles's suite, however, looked with great apprehension to his meeting with the cardinal. They had been content that the latter should rule the state, when his arm was needed to curb the Castilian aristocracy; but they dreaded the ascendency of his powerful mind over their young sovereign, when brought into personal contact with him. They retarded this event, by keeping Charles in the north as long as possible. In the mean time, they endeavored to alienate his regards from the minister by exaggerated reports of his arbitrary conduct and temper, rendered more morose by the peevishness of age. Charles showed a facility to be directed by those around him in early years, which gave little augury of the greatness to which he afterwards rose. [20] By the persuasions of his evil counsellors, he addressed that memorable letter to Ximenes, which is unmatched, even in court annals, for cool and base ingratitude. He thanked the regent for all his past services, named a place for a personal interview with him, where he might obtain the benefit of his counsels for his own conduct, and the government of the kingdom; after which he would be allowed to retire to his diocese, and seek from Heaven that reward, which Heaven alone could adequately bestow! [21] Such was the tenor of this cold-blooded epistle, which, in the language of more than one writer, killed the cardinal. This, however, is stating the matter too strongly. The spirit of Ximenes was of too stern a stuff to be so easily extinguished by the breath of royal displeasure. [22] He was, indeed, deeply moved by the desertion of the sovereign whom he had served so faithfully, and the excitement which it occasioned brought on a return of his fever, according to Carbajal, in full force. But anxiety and disease had already done its work upon his once hardy constitution; and this ungrateful act could only serve to wean him more effectually from a world that he was soon to part with. [23] In order to be near the king, he had previously transferred his residence to Roa. He now turned his thoughts to his approaching end. Death may be supposed to have but little terrors for the statesman, who in his last moments could aver, "that he had never intentionally wronged any man; but had rendered to every one his due, without being swayed, as far as he was conscious, by fear or affection." Yet Cardinal Richelieu on his death-bed declared the same! [24] As a last attempt, he began a letter to the king. His fingers refused, however, to perform their office, and after tracing a few lines he gave it up. The purport of these seems to have been, to recommend his university at Alcalá to the royal protection. He now became wholly occupied with his devotions, and manifested such contrition for his errors, and such humble confidence in the divine mercy, as deeply affected all present. In this tranquil frame of mind, and in the perfect possession of his powers, he breathed his last, November 8th, 1517, in the eighty-first year of his age, and the twenty-second since his elevation to the primacy. The last words that he uttered were those of the Psalmist, which he used frequently to repeat in health, "In te, Domine, speravi,"--"In thee, Lord, have I trusted." His body, arrayed in his pontifical robes, was seated in a chair of state, and multitudes of all degrees thronged into the apartment to kiss the hands and feet. It was afterwards transported to Alcalá, and laid in the chapel of the noble college of San Ildefonso, erected by himself. His obsequies were celebrated with great pomp, contrary to his own orders, by, all the religious and literary fraternities of the city; and his virtues commemorated in a funeral discourse by a doctor of the university, who, considering the death of the good a fitting occasion to lash the vices of the living, made the most caustic allusion to the Flemish favorites of Charles, and their pestilent influence on the country. [25] Such was the end of this remarkable man; the most remarkable, in many respects, of his time. His character was of that stern and lofty cast, which seems to rise above the ordinary wants and weaknesses of humanity; his genius of the severest order, like Dante's and Michael Angelo's in the regions of fancy, impresses us with ideas of power, that excite admiration akin to terror. His enterprises, as we have seen, were of the boldest character. His execution of them equally bold. He disdained to woo fortune by any of those soft and pliant arts, which are often the most effectual. He pursued his ends by the most direct means. In this way he frequently multiplied difficulties; but difficulties seemed to have a charm for him, by the opportunity they afforded of displaying the energies of his soul. With these qualities he combined a versatility of talent, usually found only in softer and more flexible characters. Though bred in the cloister, he distinguished himself both in the cabinet and the camp. For the latter, indeed, so repugnant to his regular profession, he had a natural genius, according to the testimony of his biographer; and he evinced his relish for it, by declaring, that "the smell of gunpowder was more grateful to him than the sweetest perfume of Arabia!" [26] In every situation, however, he exhibited the stamp of his peculiar calling; and the stern lineaments of the monk were never wholly concealed under the mask of the statesman, or the visor of the warrior. He had a full measure of the religious bigotry which belonged to the age; and he had melancholy scope for displaying it, as chief of that dread tribunal, over which he presided during the last ten years of his life. [27] He carried the arbitrary ideas of his profession into political life. His regency was conducted on the principles of a military despotism. It was his maxim, that "a prince must rely mainly on his army for securing the respect and obedience of his subjects." [28] It is true he had to deal with a martial and factious nobility, and the end which he proposed was to curb their licentiousness, and enforce the equitable administration of justice; but, in accomplishing this, he showed little regard to the constitution, or to private rights. His first act, the proclaiming of Charles king, was in open contempt of the usages and rights of the nation. He evaded the urgent demands of the Castilians for a convocation of cortes; for it was his opinion, "that freedom of speech, especially in regard to their own grievances, made the people insolent and irreverent to their rulers." [29] The people, of course, had no voice in the measures which involved their most important interests. His whole policy, indeed, was to exalt the royal prerogative, at the expense of the inferior orders of the state. [30] And his regency, short as it was, and highly beneficial to the country in many respects, must be considered as opening the way to that career of despotism, which the Austrian family followed up with such hard-hearted constancy. But, while we condemn the politics, we cannot but respect the principles of the man. However erroneous his conduct in our eyes, he was guided by his sense of duty. It was this, and the conviction of it in the minds of others, which constituted the secret of his great power. It made him reckless of difficulties, and fearless of all personal consequences. The consciousness of the integrity of his purposes rendered him, indeed, too unscrupulous as to the means of attaining them. He held his own life cheap, in comparison with the great reforms that he had at heart. Was it surprising, that he should hold as lightly the convenience and interests of others, when they thwarted their execution? His views were raised far above considerations of self. As a statesman, he identified himself with the state; as a churchman, with the interests of his religion. He severely punished every offence against these. He as freely forgave every personal injury. He had many remarkable opportunities of showing this. His administration provoked numerous lampoons and libels. He despised them, as the miserable solace of spleen and discontent, and never persecuted their authors. [31] In this he formed an honorable contrast to Cardinal Richelieu, whose character and condition suggest many points of resemblance with his own. His disinterestedness was further shown by his mode of dispensing his large revenues. It was among the poor, and on great public objects. He built up no family. He had brothers and nephews; but he contented himself with making their condition comfortable, without diverting to their benefit the great trusts confided to him for the public. [32] The greater part of the funds which he left at his death was settled on the university of Alcala. [33] He had, however, none of that pride, which would make him ashamed of his poor and humble relatives. He had, indeed, a confidence in his own powers, approaching to arrogance, which led him to undervalue the abilities of others, and to look on them as his instruments rather than his equals. But he had none of the vulgar pride founded on wealth or station. He frequently alluded to his lowly condition in early life, with great humility, thanking Heaven, with tears in his eyes, for its extraordinary goodness to him. He not only remembered, but did many acts of kindness to his early friends, of which more than one touching anecdote is related. Such traits of sensibility, gleaming through the natural austerity and sternness of a disposition like his, like light breaking through a dark cloud, affect us the more sensibly by contrast. He was irreproachable in his morals, and conformed literally to all the rigid exactions of his severe order, in the court as faithfully as in the cloister. He was sober, abstemious, chaste. In the latter particular, he was careful that no suspicion of the license which so often soiled the clergy of the period, should attach--to him. [34] On one occasion, while on a journey, he was invited to pass the night at the house of the duchess of Maqueda, being informed that she was absent. The duchess was at home, however, and entered the apartment before he retired to rest. "You have deceived me, lady," said Ximenes, rising in anger; "if you have any business with me, you will find me tomorrow at the confessional." So saying, he abruptly left the palace. [35] He carried his austerities and mortifications so far, as to endanger his health. There is a curious brief extant of Pope Leo the Tenth, dated the last year of the cardinal's life, enjoining him to abate his severe penance, to eat meat and eggs on the ordinary fasts, to take off his Franciscan frock, and sleep in linen and on a bed. He would never consent, however, to divest himself of his monastic weeds. "Even laymen," said he, alluding to the custom of the Roman Catholics, "put these on when they are dying; and shall I, who have worn them all my life, take them off at that time!" [36] Another anecdote is told in relation to his dress. Over his coarse woollen frock, he wore the costly apparel suited to his rank. An impertinent Franciscan preacher took occasion one day before him to launch out against the luxuries of the time, especially in dress, obviously alluding to the cardinal, who was attired in a superb suit of ermine, which had been presented to him. He heard the sermon, patiently to the end, and after the services were concluded, took the preacher into the sacristy, and, having commended the general tenor of his discourse, showed under his furs and fine linen the coarse frock of his order, next his skin. Some accounts add, that the friar, on the other hand, wore fine linen under his monkish frock. After the cardinal's death, a little box was found in his apartment, containing the implements with which he used to mend the rents of his threadbare garment, with his own hands. [37] With so much to do, it may well be believed, that Ximenes was avaricious of time. He seldom slept more than four, or at most four hours and a half. He was shaved in the night, hearing at the same time some edifying reading. He followed the same practice at his meals, or varied it with listening to the arguments of some of his theological brethren, generally on some subtile question of school divinity. This was his only recreation. He had as little taste as time for lighter and more elegant amusements. He spoke briefly, and always to the point. He was no friend of idle ceremonies, and useless visits; though his situation exposed him more or less to both. He frequently had a volume lying open on the table before him, and when his visitor stayed too long, or took up his time with light and frivolous conversation, he intimated his dissatisfaction by resuming his reading. The cardinal's book must have been as fatal to a reputation as Fontenelle's ear trumpet. [38] I will close this sketch of Ximenes de Cisneros with a brief outline of his person. His complexion was sallow; his countenance sharp and emaciated; his nose aquiline; his upper lip projected far over the lower. His eyes were small, deep-set in his head, dark, vivid, and penetrating. His forehead ample, and, what was remarkable, without a wrinkle, though the expression of his features was somewhat severe. [39] His voice was clear, but not agreeable; his enunciation measured and precise. His demeanor was grave, his carriage firm and erect; he was tall in stature, and his whole presence commanding. His constitution, naturally robust, was impaired by his severe austerities and severer cares; and, in the latter years of his life, was so delicate as to be extremely sensible to the vicissitudes and inclemency of the weather. [40] I have noticed the resemblance which Ximenes bore to the great French minister, Cardinal Richelieu. It was, after all, however, more in the circumstances of situation, than in their characters; though the most prominent traits of these were not dissimilar. [41] Both, though bred ecclesiastics, reached the highest honors of the state, and indeed, may be said to have directed the destinies of their countries. [42] Richelieu's authority, however, was more absolute than that of Ximenes, for he was screened by the shadow of royalty; while the latter was exposed, by his insulated and unsheltered position, to the full blaze of envy, and, of course, opposition. Both were ambitious of military glory, and showed capacity for attaining it. Both achieved their great results by that rare union of high mental endowments and great efficiency in action, which is always irresistible. The moral basis of their characters was entirely different. The French cardinal's was selfishness, pure and unmitigated. His religion, politics, his principles in short, in every sense, were subservient to this. Offences against the state he could forgive; those against himself he pursued with implacable rancor. His authority was literally cemented with blood. His immense powers and patronage were perverted to the aggrandizement of his family. Though bold to temerity in his plans, he betrayed more than once a want of true courage in their execution. Though violent and impetuous, he could stoop to be a dissembler. Though arrogant in the extreme, he courted the soft incense of flattery. In his manners he had the advantage over the Spanish prelate. He could be a courtier in courts, and had a more refined and cultivated taste. In one respect, he had the advantage over Ximenes in morals. He was not, like him, a bigot. He had not the religious basis in his composition, which is the foundation of bigotry.--Their deaths were typical of their characters. Richelieu died, as he had lived, so deeply execrated, that the enraged populace would scarcely allow his remains to be laid quietly in the grave. Ximenes, on the contrary, was buried amid the tears and lamentations of the people; his memory was honored even by his enemies, and his name is reverenced by his countrymen, to this day, as that of a Saint. * * * * * Dr. Lorenzo Galindez de Carbajal, one of the best authorities for transactions in the latter part of our History, was born of a respectable family, at Placencia, in 1472. Little is gathered of his early life, but that he was studious in his habits, devoting himself assiduously to the acquisition of the civil and canon law. He filled the chair of professor in this department, at Salamanca, for several years. His great attainments and respectable character recommended him to the notice of the Catholic queen, who gave him a place in the royal council. In this capacity, he was constantly at the court, where he seems to have maintained himself in the esteem of his royal mistress, and of Ferdinand after her death. The queen testified her respect for Carbajal, by appointing him one of the commissioners for preparing a digest of the Castilian law. He made considerable progress in this arduous work; but how great is uncertain, since, from whatever cause, (there appears to be a mystery about it,) the fruits of his labor were made public; a circumstance deeply regretted by the Castilian jurists. (Asso y Manuel, Instituciones, Introd. p. 99.) Carbajal left behind him several historical works, according to Nic. Antonio, whose catalogue, however, rests on very slender grounds. (Bibliotheca Nova, tom. ii. p. 3.) The work by which he is best known to Spanish scholars, is his "Anales del Rey Don Fernando el Católico," which still remains in manuscript. There is certainly no Christian country, for which the invention of printing, so liberally patronized there at its birth, has done so little as for Spain. Her libraries teem at this day with manuscripts of the greatest interest for the illustration of every stage of her history; but which, alas! in the present gloomy condition of affairs, have less chance of coming to the light, than at the close of the fifteenth century, when the art of printing was in its infancy. Carbajal's Annals cover the whole ground of our narrative, from the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, to the coming of Charles V. into Spain. They are plainly written, without ambition of rhetorical show or refinement. The early part is little better than memoranda of the principal events of the period, with particular notice of all the migrations of the court. In the concluding portion of the work, however, comprehending Ferdinand's death, and the regency of Ximenes, the author is very full and circumstantial. As he had a conspicuous place in the government, and was always with the court, his testimony in regard to this important period is of the highest value as that of an eye-witness and an actor, and, it may be added, a man of sagacity and sound principles. No better commentary on the merit of his work need be required, than the brief tribute of Alvaro Gomez, the accomplished biographer of Cardinal Ximenes. "Porro Annales Laurentii Galendi Caravajali, quibus vir gravissimus rerumque illarum cum primis particeps quinquaginta fermè annorum memoriam complexus est, haud vulgariter meam operam juverunt." De Rebus Gestis, Praefatio. FOOTNOTES [1] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1516, cap. 8.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 18.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 150.--Quintanilla, Archetypo, lib. 4, cap. 5.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., dial. de Ximeni. [2] Carbajal has given us Charles's epistle, which is subscribed "El Principe." He did not venture on the title of king in his correspondence with the Castilians, though he affected it abroad. Anales, MS., año 1516, cap. 10. [3] The letter of the council is dated March 14th, 1516. It is recorded by Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1516, cap. 10. [4] It became permanently so in the following reign of Philip II. Semanario Erudito, tom. iii. p. 79. [5] Carbajal penetrates into the remotest depths of Spanish history for an authority for Charles's claim. He can find none better, however, than the examples of Alfonso VIII. and Ferdinand III.; the former of whom used force, and the latter obtained the crown by the voluntary cession of his mother. His argument, it is clear, rests much stronger on expediency, than precedent. Anales, MS., año 1516, cap. 11. [6] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 151 et seq.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1516, cap. 9-11.--Lanuza, Historias, tom. i. lib. 2, cap. 2.--Dormer, Anales de Aragon, lib. 1, cap. 1, 13.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 572, 590, 603.--Sandoval, Hist, del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 53. [7] Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 18.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 158.-- Lanuza, Historias, tom. i. lib. 2, cap. 4. Alvaro Gomez finds no better authority than vulgar rumor for this story. According to Robles, the cardinal, after this bravado, twirled his cordelier's belt about his fingers, saying, "he wanted nothing better than that to tame the pride of the Castilian nobles with!" But Ximenes was neither a fool nor a madman; although his over-zealous biographers make him sometimes one, and sometimes the other. Voltaire, who never lets the opportunity slip of seizing a paradox in character or conduct, speaks of Ximenes as one "qui, toujours vêtu en cordelier, met son faste à fouler sous ses sandales le faste Espagnol." Essai sur les Moeurs, chap. 121. [8] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1516, cap. 13.--Quintanilla, Archetypo, lib. 4, cap. 5.--Sempere, Hist. des Cortès, chap. 25.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 159.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS. [9] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 174 et seq.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 18.-Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1516, cap. 13. [10] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1516, cap. 11.--Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. p. 327.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 570.-- Quintanilla, Archetypo, lib. 4, cap. 5. [11] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 164, 165.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, tom. i. p. 278.--Las Casas, Oeuvres, ed. de Llorente, tom. i. p. 239. Robertson states the ground of Ximenes's objection to have been, the iniquity of reducing one set of men to slavery, in order to liberate another. (History of America, vol. i. p. 285.) A very enlightened reason, for which, however, I find not the least warrant in Herrera, (the authority cited by the historian,) nor in Gomez, nor in any other writer. [12] Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i, chap. 10, art. 5. [13] Paramo, De Origine Inquisitionis, lib. 2, tit. 2, cap. 5.--Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. chap. 11, art. l.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 184, 185. [14] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1517, cap. 2.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 189, 190.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 18.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 581.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS. "Ni properaveritis," says Martyr in a letter to Marliano, Prince Charles's physician, "ruent omnia. Nescit Hispania parere non regibus, aut non legitime regnaturis. _Nauseam inducit magnanimis viris hujus fratris_, licet potentis et reipublicae amatoris, gubernatio. Est quippe grandis animo, et ipse, ad aedificandum literatosqne viros fovendum natus magis qnam ad imperandum, bellicis colloquiis et apparatibus gaudet." Opus Epist., epist. 573. [15] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 198-201.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 567, 584, 590.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1517, cap. 3, 6.-- Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS.--Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 73. [16] In a letter to Marliano, Martyr speaks of the large sums, "ab hoc gubernatore ad vos missae, sub parandae classis praetextu." (Opus Epist., epist. 576.) In a subsequent epistle to his Castilian correspondents, he speaks in a more sarcastic tone. "_Bonus ille frater_ Ximenez Cardinalis gubernator thesauros ad Belgas transmittendos coacervavit. ***** Glacialis Oceani accolae ditabuntur, vestra expilabitur Castilla." (Epist. 606.) From some cause or other, it is evident the cardinal's government was not at all to honest Martyr's taste. Gomez suggests, as the reason, that his salary was clipped off in the general retrenchment, which he admits was a very hard case. (De Rebus Gestis, fol. 177.) Martyr, however, was never an extravagant encomiast of the cardinal, and one may imagine much more creditable reasons, than that assigned, for his disgust with him now. [17] See a letter in Carbajal, containing this honest tribute to the illustrious dead. (Anales, MS., año 1517, cap. 4.) Charles might have found an antidote to the poison of his Flemish sycophants in the faithful counsels of his Castilian ministers. [18] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 602.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 194.-Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 18. Martyr, in a letter written just before the king's landing, notices the cardinal's low state of health and spirits. "Cardinalis gubernator Matriti febribus aegrotaverat; convaluerat; nunc recidivavit. ***** Breves fore dies illius, medici automant. Est octogenario major; ipse regis adventum affectu avidissimo desiderare videtur. Sentit sine rege non rite posse corda Hispanorum moderari ac regi." Epist. 598. [19] Flassan, Diplomatic Français, tom. i. p. 313.--Dumont, Corps Diplomatique, tom. iv. part. 1, no. 106. [20] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1517, cap. 9.--Dormer, Anales de Aragon, lib. 1. cap. 1.--Ulloa, Vita di Carlo V., fol. 43.--Dolce, Vita di. Carlo V., p. 12.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 212.--Sandoval, Hist, del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 83. [21] Carbajal, Anales, MS., ubi supra.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 215. --Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 84. [22] "Cette terrible lettre qui fut la cause de sa mort," says Marsollier, plumply; a writer who is sure either to misstate or overstate. (Ministère du Card. Ximenez, p. 447.) Byron, alluding to the fate of a modern poet, ridicules the idea of "The mind, that fiery particle, Being extinguished by an Article!" The frown of a critic, however, might as well prove fatal as that of a king. In both cases, I imagine, it would be hard to prove any closer connection between the two events, than that of time. [23] "Con aquel despedimiento," says Galindez de Carbajal, "con esto acabó de tantos servicios luego que Ilegó esta carta el Cardenal rescibió alteracion y tomole recia calentnra que en pocos dias le des-pacho." (Anales, MS., año 1517, cap. 9.) Gomez tells a long story of poison administered to the cardinal in a trout, (De Rebus Gestis, fol. 206.) Others say, in a letter from Flanders, (see Moreri, Dictionnaire Historique, _voce_ Ximenes.) Oviedo notices a rumor of his having been poisoned by one of his secretaries; but vouches for the innocence of the individual accused, whom he personally knew. (Quincuagenas, MS., dial, de Xim.) Reports of this kind were too rife in these days, to deserve credit, unless supported by very clear evidence. Martyr and Carbajal, both with the court at the time, intimate no suspicion of foul play. [24] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1517, cap. 9.--Gomez, de Rebus Gestis, fol. 213, 214.--Quintanilla, Archetypo, lib. 4, cap. 8.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS. "'Voilà mon juge, qui prononcera bientôt ma sentence. Je le prie de tout mon coeur de me condamner, si, dans mon ministère, je me suis proposé autre chose que le bien de la religion et celui de l'état.' Le lendemain, au point du jour, il voulut recevoir l'extrême onction." Jay, Histoire du Ministère du Cardinal Richelieu, (Paris, 1816,) tom. ii. p. 217. [25] Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 18.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 215- 217.--Quintanilla, Archetypo, lib. 4, cap. 12-15; who quotes Maraño, an eye-witness.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1517, cap. 9, who dates the cardinal's death December 8th, in which he is followed by Lanuza. The following epitaph, of no great merit, was inscribed on his sepulchre, composed by the learned John Vergara in his younger days. "Condideram musis Franciscus grande lyceum, Condor in exiguo nune ego sarcophago. Praelextam junxi saccho, galeamque galero, Frater, dux, praesul, cardineusque pater. Quin virtute reel junctum est diadema cucullo, Cum mibi regnanti paruit Hesperia." [26] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 160.--Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 17. --"And who can doubt," exclaimed Gonzalo de Oviedo, "that powder, against the infidel, is incense to the Lord?" Quincuagenas, MS. [27] During this period, Ximenes "_permit_ la condamnation," to use the mild language of Llorente, of more than 2500 individuals to the stake, and nearly 50,000 to other punishments! (Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. chap. 10, art. 5; tom. iv. chap. 46.) In order to do justice to what is really good in the characters of this age, one must absolutely close his eyes against that odious fanaticism, which enters more or less into all, and into the best, unfortunately, most largely. [28] "Persuasum haberet, non alia ratione animos humanos imperia aliorum laturos, nisi vi facta aut adhibita. Quare pro certo affirmare solebat, nullum unquam principem exteris populis formidini, aut suis reverentiae fuisse, nisi comparato militum exercitu, atque omnibus belli instrumentis ad manum paratis." (Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 95.) We may well apply to the cardinal what Cato, or rather Lucan, applied to Pompey; "Praetulit arma togae; sed pacem armatus amavit." Pharsalia, lib. 9. [29] "Nulla enim re magis populos insolescere, et irreverentiam omnem exhibere, quam cum libertatem loquendi nacti sunt, et pro libidine suas vulgo jactant querimonias." Gomez quotes the language of Ximenes in his correspondence with Charles. De Rebus Gestis, fol. 194. [30] Oviedo makes a reflection, showing that he conceived the cardinal's policy better than most of his biographers. He states, that the various immunities, and the military organization, which he gave to the towns enabled them to raise the insurrection, known as the war of the "comunidades," at the beginning of Charles's reign. But he rightly considers this as only an indirect consequence of his policy, which made use of the popular arm only to break down the power of the nobles, and establish the supremacy of the crown. Quincuagenas, MS., dial, de Xim. [31] Quincuagenas, MS., ubi supra. Mr. Burke notices this noble trait, in a splendid panegyric which he poured forth on the character of Ximenes, at Sir Joshua Reynolds's table, as related by Madame d'Arblay, in the last, and not least remarkable of her productions. (Memoirs of Dr. Burney, vol. ii. pp. 231 et seq.) The orator, _if_ the lady reports him right, notices, as two of the cardinal's characteristics, his freedom from bigotry and despotism! [32] Their connection with so distinguished a person, however enabled most of them to form high alliances; of which Oviedo gives some account. Quincuagenas, MS. [33] "Die, and endow a college or a cat!" The verse is somewhat stale, but expresses, better than a page of prose can, the credit due to such posthumous benefactions, when they set aside the dearest natural ties for the mere indulgence of a selfish vanity, which motives cannot be imputed to Ximenes. He had always conscientiously abstained from appropriating his archi-episcopal revenues, as we have seen, to himself or his family. His dying bequest, therefore, was only in keeping with his whole life. [34] The good father Quintanilla vindicates his hero's chastity, somewhat at the expense of his breeding. "His purity was unexampled," says he. "He shunned the sex, like so many evil spirits; _looking on every woman as a devil_, let her be never so holy. Had it not been in the way of his professional calling, it is not too much to say he would never have suffered his eyes to light on one of them!" Archetypo, p. 80. [35] Fléchier, Histoire de Ximenés, liv. 6, p. 634. [36] Quintanilla has given the brief of his Holiness _in extenso_, with commentaries thereon, twice as long. See Archeotypo, lib. 4, cap. 10. [37] Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 219.--Quintanilla, Archetype, lib. 2, cap. 4. The reader may find a pendant to this anecdote in a similar one recorded of Ximenes's predecessor, the grand cardinal Mendoza, in Part II. Chapter 5, of this History. The conduct of the two primates on the occasion, was sufficiently characteristic. [38] Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, ubi supra.-- Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 13.--Quintanilla, Archetypo, lib. 2, cap. 5, 7, 8; who cites Dr. Vergara, the cardinal's friend. It is Baron Grimm, I think, who tells us of Fontenelle's habit of dropping his trumpet when the conversation did not pay him for the trouble of holding it up. The good- natured Reynolds, according to Goldsmith, could "shift his trumpet" on such an emergency also. [39] Ximenes's head was examined some forty years after his interment, and the skull was found to be without sutures. (Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 218.) Richelieu's was found to be perforated with little holes. The abbé Richard deduces a theory from this, which may startle the physiologist even more than the facts. "On ouvrit son Test, on y trouva 12 petits trous par ou s'exhaloient les vapeurs de son cerveau, ce qui fit qu' il n'eut jamais aucun mal de tête; au lieu que le Test de Ximenés étoit sans suture, a quoi l'on attribua les effroyables douleurs de tête qu'il avoit presque toujours." Parallèle, p. 177. [40] Robles, Vida de Ximenez, cap. 18.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 218. [41] A little treatise has been devoted to this very subject, entitled "Parallèle du Card. Ximenés et du Card. Richelieu, par Mons. l'Abbé Richard; à Trevoux, 1705." 222 pp. 12mo. The author, with a candor rare indeed, where national vanity is interested, strikes the balance without hesitation in favor of the foreigner Ximenes. [42] The catalogue of the various offices of Ximenes occupies near half a page of Quintanilla. At the time of his death, the chief ones that he filled were, those of archbishop of Toledo, and consequently primate of Spain, grand chancellor of Castile, cardinal of the Roman church, inquisitor-general of Castile, and regent. CHAPTER XXVI. GENERAL REVIEW OF THE ADMINISTRATION OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA. Policy of the Crown.--Towards the Nobles.--The Clergy.--Consideration of the Commons.--Advancement of Prerogative.--Legal Complications.--The Legal Profession.--Trade.--Manufactures.--Agriculture.--Restrictive Policy.-- Revenues.--Progress of Discovery.--Colonial Administration.--General Prosperity.--Increase of Population.--Chivalrous Spirit.--The Period of National Glory. We have now traversed that important period of history, comprehending the latter part of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century; a period when the convulsions, which shook to the ground, the ancient political fabrics of Europe, roused the minds of its inhabitants from the lethargy in which they had been buried for ages. Spain, as we have seen, felt the general impulse. Under the glorious rule of Ferdinand and Isabella, we have beheld her, emerging from chaos into a new existence; unfolding, under the influence of institutions adapted to her genius, energies of which she was before unconscious; enlarging her resources from all the springs of domestic industry and commercial enterprise; and insensibly losing the ferocious habits of a feudal age, in the refinements of an intellectual and moral culture. In the fulness of time, when her divided powers had been concentrated under one head, and the system of internal economy completed, we have seen her descend into the arena with the other nations of Europe, and in a very few years achieve the most important acquisitions of territory, both in that quarter and in Africa; and finally crowning the whole by the discovery and occupation of a boundless empire beyond the waters. In the progress of the action, we may have been too much occupied with its details, to attend sufficiently to the principles which regulated them. But now that we have reached the close, we may be permitted to cast a parting glance over the field that we have traversed, and briefly survey the principal steps by which the Spanish sovereigns, under Divine Providence, led their nation up to such a height of prosperity and glory. Ferdinand and Isabella, on their accession, saw at once that the chief source of the distractions of the country lay in the overgrown powers, and factious spirit, of the nobility. Their first efforts, therefore, were directed to abate these as far as possible. A similar movement was going forward, in the other European monarchies; but in none was it crowned with so speedy and complete success as in Castile, by means of those bold and decisive measures, which have been detailed in an early chapter of this work. [1] The same policy was steadily pursued during the remainder of their reign; less indeed by open assault than by indirect means. [2] Among these, one of the most effectual was the omission, to summon the privileged orders to cortes, in several of the most important sessions of that body. This so far from being a new stretch of prerogative, was only an exercise of the anomalous powers already familiar to the crown, as elsewhere noticed. [3] Nor does it seem to have been viewed as a grievance by the other party, who regarded these meetings with the more indifference, since their aristocratic immunities exempted them from the taxation, which was generally the prominent object of them. But, from whatever cause proceeding, by this impolitic acquiescence they surrendered, undoubtedly, the most valuable of their rights,--one which has enabled the British aristocracy to maintain its political consideration unimpaired, while that of the Castilian has faded away into an empty pageant. [4] Another practice steadily pursued by the sovereigns, was to raise men of humble station to offices of the highest trust; not, however, like their contemporary, Louis the Eleventh, because their station was humble, in order to mortify the higher orders, but because they courted merit, wherever it was to be found; [5]--a policy much and deservedly commended by the sagacious observers of the time. [6] The history of Spain does not probably afford another example of a person of the lowly condition of Ximenes, attaining, not merely the highest offices in the kingdom, but eventually its uncontrolled supremacy. [7] The multiplication of legal tribunals, and other civil offices, afforded the sovereigns ample scope for pursuing this policy, in the demand created for professional science. The nobles, intrusted hitherto with the chief direction of affairs, now saw it pass into the hands of persons, who had other qualifications than martial prowess or hereditary rank. Such as courted distinction, were compelled to seek it by the regular avenues of academic discipline. How extensively the spirit operated, and with what brilliant success, we have already seen. [8] But, whatever the aristocracy may have gained in refinement of character, it resigned much of its prescriptive power, when it condescended to enter the arena on terms of equal competition with its inferiors for the prizes of talent and scholarship. Ferdinand pursued a similar course in his own dominions of Aragon, where he uniformly supported the commons, or may more properly be said to have been supported by them, in the attempt to circumscribe the authority of the great feudatories. Although he accomplished this, to a considerable extent, their power was too firmly intrenched behind positive institutions to be affected like that of the Castilian aristocracy, whose rights had been swelled beyond their legitimate limits by every species of usurpation. [9] With all the privileges retrieved from this order, is still possessed a disproportionate weight in the political balance. The great lords still claimed some of the most considerable posts, both civil and military. [10] Their revenues were immense, and their broad lands covered unbroken leagues of extent in every quarter of the kingdom. [11] The queen, who reared many of their children in the royal palace, under her own eye, endeavored to draw her potent vassals to the court; [12] but many, still cherishing the ancient spirit of independence, preferred to live in feudal grandeur, surrounded by their retainers in their strong castles, and wait there, in grim repose, the hour when they might sally forth and reassert by arms their despoiled authority. Such a season occurred on Isabella's death. The warlike nobles eagerly seized it; but the wily and resolute Ferdinand, and afterwards the iron hand of Ximenes, kept them in check, and prepared the way for the despotism of Charles the Fifth, round whom the haughty aristocracy of Castile, shorn of substantial power, were content to revolve as the satellites of a court, reflecting only the borrowed splendors of royalty. The Queen's government was equally vigilant in resisting ecclesiastical encroachment. It may appear otherwise to one who casts a superficial glance at her reign, and beholds her surrounded always by a troop of ghostly advisers, and avowing religion as the great end of her principal operations at home and abroad. [13] It is certain, however, that, while in all her acts she confessed the influence of religion, she took more effectual means than any of her predecessors, to circumscribe the temporal powers of the clergy. [14] The volume of her pragmáticas is filled with laws designed to limit their jurisdiction, and restrain their encroachments on the secular authorities. [15] Towards the Roman See, she maintained, as we have often had occasion to notice, the same independent attitude. By the celebrated concordat made with Sixtus the Fourth, in 1482, the pope conceded to the sovereigns the right of nominating to the higher dignities of the church. [16] The Holy See, however, still assumed the collation to inferior benefices, which were too often lavished on non-residents, and otherwise unsuitable persons. The queen sometimes extorted a papal indulgence granting the right of presentation, for a limited time; on which occasions she showed such alacrity, that she is known to have disposed, in a single day, of more than twenty prebends and inferior dignities. At other times, when the nomination made by his Holiness, as not unfrequently happened, was distasteful to her, she would take care to defeat it, by forbidding the bull to be published until laid before the privy council; at the same time sequestrating the revenues of the vacant benefice, till her own requisitions were complied with. [17] She was equally solicitous in watching over the morals of the clergy, inculcating on the higher prelates to hold frequent pastoral communication with their suffragans, and to report to her such as were delinquent. [18] By these vigilant measures, she succeeded in restoring the ancient discipline of the church, and weeding out the sensuality and indolence, which had so long defiled it; while she had the inexpressible satisfaction to see the principal places, long before her death, occupied by prelates, whose learning and religious principle gave the best assurance of the stability of the reformation. [19] Few of the Castilian monarchs have been brought more frequently into collision, or pursued a bolder policy, with the court of Rome. Still fewer have extorted from it such important graces and concessions; a circumstance, which can only be imputed, says a Castilian writer, "to singular good fortune and consummate prudence;" [20] to that deep conviction of the queen's integrity, we may also add, which disarmed resistance, even in her enemies. The condition of the commons under this reign was probably, on the whole, more prosperous than in any other period of the Spanish history. New avenues to wealth and honors were opened to them; and persons and property were alike protected under the fearless and impartial administration of the law. "Such was the justice dispensed to every one under this auspicious reign," exclaims Marineo, "that nobles and cavaliers, citizens and laborers, rich and poor, masters and servants, all equally partook of it." [21] We find no complaints of arbitrary imprisonment, and no attempts, so frequent both in earlier and later times, at illegal taxation. In this particular, indeed, Isabella manifested the greatest tenderness for her people. By her commutation of the capricious tax of the _alcavala_ for a determinate one, and still more by transferring its collection from the revenue officers to the citizens themselves, she greatly relieved her subjects. [22] Finally, notwithstanding the perpetual call for troops for the military operations in which the government was constantly engaged, and notwithstanding the example of neighboring countries, there was no attempt to establish that iron bulwark of despotism, a standing army; at least, none nearer than that of the voluntary levies of the hermandad, raised and paid by the people. The queen never admitted the arbitrary maxims of Ximenes in regard to the foundation of government. Hers was essentially one of opinion, not force. [23] Had it rested on any other than the broad basis of public opinion, it could not have withstood a day the violent shocks, to which it was early exposed, nor have achieved the important revolution that it finally did, both in the domestic and foreign concerns of the country. The condition of the kingdom, on Isabella's accession, necessarily gave the commons unwonted consideration. In the tottering state of her affairs, she was obliged to rest on their strong arm for support. It did not fail her. Three sessions of the legislature, or rather the popular branch of it, were held during the two first years of her reign. It was in these early assemblies, that the commons bore an active part in concocting the wholesome system of laws, which restored vitality and vigor to the exhausted republic. [24] After this good work was achieved, the sessions of that body became more rare. There was less occasion for them, indeed, during the existence of the hermandad, which was, of itself, an ample representation of the Castilian commons, and which, by enforcing obedience to the law at home, and by liberal supplies for foreign war, superseded, in a great degree, the call for more regular meetings of cortes. [25] The habitual economy, too, not to say frugality, which regulated the public, as well as private expenditure of the sovereigns, enabled them, after this period, with occasional exceptions, to dispense with other aid than that drawn from the regular revenues of the crown. There is every ground for believing that the political franchises of the people, as then understood, were uniformly respected. The number of cities summoned to cortes, which had so often varied according to the caprices of princes, never fell short of that prescribed by long usage. On the contrary, an addition was made by the conquest of Granada, and, in a cortes held soon after the queen's death, we find a most narrow and impolitic remonstrance of the legislature itself, against the alleged unauthorized extension of the privilege of representation. [26] In one remarkable particular, which may be thought to form a material exception to the last observations, the conduct of the crown deserves to be noticed. This was, the promulgation of _pragmáticas_, or royal ordinances, and that to a greater extent, probably, than under any other reign, before or since. This important prerogative was claimed and exercised, more or less freely, by most European sovereigns in ancient times. Nothing could be more natural, than that the prince should assume such authority, or that the people, blind to the ultimate consequences, and impatient of long or frequent sessions of the legislature, should acquiesce in the temperate use of it. As far as these ordinances were of an executive character, or designed as supplementary to parliamentary enactments, or in obedience to previous suggestions of cortes, they appear to lie open to no constitutional objections in Castile. [27] But it was not likely that limits, somewhat loosely defined, would be very nicely observed; and under preceding reigns this branch of prerogative had been most intolerably abused. [28] A large proportion of these laws are of an economical character, designed to foster trade and manufactures, and to secure fairness in commercial dealings. [29] Many are directed against the growing spirit of luxury, and many more occupied with the organization of the public tribunals. Whatever be thought of their wisdom in some cases, it will not be easy to detect any attempt to innovate on the settled principles of criminal jurisprudence, or on those regulating the transfer of property. When these were to be discussed, the sovereigns were careful to call in the aid of the legislature; an example which found little favor with their successors. [30] It is good evidence of the public confidence in the government, and the generally beneficial scope of these laws, that, although of such unprecedented frequency, they should have escaped parliamentary animadversion. [31] But, however patriotic the intentions of the Catholic sovereigns, and however safe, or even salutary, the power intrusted to such hands, it was a fatal precedent, and under the Austrian dynasty became the most effectual lever for overturning the liberties of the nation. The preceding remarks on the policy observed towards the commons in this reign must be further understood as applying with far less qualification to the queen, than to her husband. The latter, owing perhaps to the lessons which he had derived from his own subjects of Aragon, "who never abated one jot of their constitutional rights," says Martyr, "at the command of a king," [32] and whose meetings generally brought fewer supplies to the royal coffers, than grievances to redress, seems to have had little relish for popular assemblies. He convened them as rarely as possible in Aragon, [33] and when he did, omitted no effort to influence their deliberations. [34] He anticipated, perhaps, similar difficulties in Castile, after his second marriage had lost him the affections of the people. At any rate, he evaded calling them together on more than one occasion imperiously demanded by the constitution; [35] and, when he did so, he invaded their privileges, [36] and announced principles of government, [37] which formed a discreditable, and, it must be admitted, rare exception to the usual tenor of his administration. Indeed, the most honorable testimony is borne to its general equity and patriotism, by a cortes convened soon after the queen's death, when the tribute, as far as she was concerned, still more unequivocally, must have been sincere. [38] A similar testimony is afforded by the panegyrics and the practice of the more liberal Castilian writers, who freely resort to this reign, as the great fountain of constitutional precedent. [39] The commons gained political consideration, no doubt, by the depression of the nobles; but their chief gain lay in the inestimable blessings of domestic tranquillity, and the security of private rights. The crown absorbed the power, in whatever form, retrieved from the privileged orders; the pensions and large domains, the numerous fortified places, the rights of seigniorial jurisdiction, the command of the military orders, and the like. Other circumstances conspired to raise the regal authority still higher; as, for example, the international relations then opened with the rest of Europe, which, whether friendly or hostile, were conducted by the monarch alone, who, unless to obtain supplies, rarely condescended to seek the intervention of the other estates; the concentration of the dismembered provinces of the Peninsula under one government; the immense acquisitions abroad, whether from discovery or conquest, regarded in that day as the property of the crown, rather than of the nation; and, finally, the consideration flowing from the personal character, and long successful rule, of the Catholic sovereigns. Such were the manifold causes, which, without the imputation of a criminal ambition, or indifference to the rights of their subjects, in Ferdinand and Isabella, all combined to swell the prerogative to an unprecedented height under their reign. This, indeed, was the direction in which all the governments of Europe, at this period, were tending. The people, wisely preferring a single master to a multitude, sustained the crown in its efforts to recover from the aristocracy the enormous powers it so grossly abused. This was the revolution of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The power thus deposited in a single hand, was found in time equally incompatible with the great ends of civil government; while it gradually accumulated to an extent, which threatened to crush the monarchy by its own weight. But the institutions derived from a Teutonic origin have been found to possess a conservative principle, unknown to the fragile despotisms of the east. The seeds of liberty, though dormant, lay deep in the heart of the nation, waiting only the good time to germinate. That time has at length arrived. Larger experience, and a wider moral culture, have taught men not only the extent of their political rights, but the best way to secure them. And it is the reassertion of these by the great body of the people, which now constitutes the revolution going forward in most of the old communities of Europe. The progress of liberal principles must be controlled, of course, by the peculiar circumstances and character of the nation; but their ultimate triumph, in every quarter, none can reasonably distrust. May it not be abused. The prosperity of the country, under Ferdinand and Isabella, its growing trade and new internal relations, demanded new regulations, which, as before noticed, were attempted to be supplied by the _pragmáticas_. This was adding, however, to the embarrassments of a jurisprudence already far too cumbrous. The Castilian lawyer might despair of a critical acquaintance with the voluminous mass of legislation, which, in the form of municipal charters, Roman codes, parliamentary statutes, and royal ordinances, were received as authority in the courts. [40] The manifold evils resulting from this unsettled and conflicting jurisprudence, had led the legislature repeatedly to urge its digest into a more simple and uniform system. Some approach was made towards this in the code of the "Ordenanças Reales," compiled in the early part of the queen's reign. [41] The great body of _Pragmáticas_, subsequently, issued, were also collected into a separate volume by her command, [42] and printed the year before her death. These two codes may therefore be regarded as embracing the ordinary legislation of her reign. [43] In 1505, the celebrated little code, called "Leyes de Tore," from the place where the cortes was held, received the sanction of that body. [44] Its laws, eighty-four in number, and designed as supplementary to those already existing, are chiefly occupied with the rights of inheritance and marriage. It is here that the ominous term "mayorazgo" may be said to have been naturalized in Castilian jurisprudence. [45] The peculiar feature of these laws, aggravated in no slight degree by the glosses of the civilians, [46] is the facility which they give to entails; a fatal facility, which, chiming in with the pride and indolence natural to the Spanish character, ranks them among the most efficient agents of the decay of husbandry and the general impoverishment of the country. Besides these codes, there were the "Leyes de la Hermandad," [47] the "Quaderno de Alcavalas," with others of less note for the regulation of trade, made in this reign. [48] But still the great scheme of a uniform digest of the municipal law of Castile, although it occupied the most distinguished jurisconsults of the time, was unattained at the queen's death. [49] How deeply it engaged her mind in that hour, is evinced by the clause in her codicil, in which she bequeaths the consummation of the work, as an imperative duty, to her successors. [50] It was not completed till the reign of Philip the Second; and the large proportion of Ferdinand and Isabella's laws, admitted into that famous compilation, shows the prospective character of their legislation, and the uncommon discernment with which it was accommodated to the peculiar genius and wants of the nation. [51] The immense increase of empire, and the corresponding development of the national resources, not only demanded new laws, but a thorough reorganization of every department of the administration. Laws may be received as indicating the dispositions of the ruler, whether for good or for evil; but it is in the conduct of the tribunals that we are to read the true character of his government. It was the upright and vigilant administration of these, which constituted the best claim of Ferdinand and Isabella to the gratitude of their country. To facilitate the despatch of business, it was distributed among a number of bureaus or councils, at the head of which stood the "royal council," whose authority and functions I have already noticed. [52] In order to leave this body more leisure for its executive duties, a new audience, or chancery, as it was called, was established at Valladolid, in 1480, whose judges were drawn from the members of the king's council. A similar tribunal was instituted, after the Moorish conquests, in the southern division of the monarchy; and both had supreme jurisdiction over all civil causes, which were carried up to them from the inferior audiences throughout the kingdom. [53] The "council of the supreme" was placed over the Inquisition with a special view to the interests of the crown; an end, however, which it very imperfectly answered, as appears from its frequent collision with the royal and secular jurisdictions. [54] The "council of the orders" had charge, as the name imports, of the great military fraternities. [55] The "council of Aragon" was intrusted with the general administration of that kingdom and its dependencies, including Naples; and had besides extensive jurisdiction as a court of appeal. [56] Lastly, the "council of the Indies" was instituted by Ferdinand, in 1511, for the control of the American department. Its powers, comprehensive as they were in its origin, were so much enlarged under Charles the Fifth and his successors, that it became the depository of all law, the fountain of all nominations, both ecclesiastical and temporal, and the supreme tribunal, where all questions, whether of government or trade in the colonies, were finally adjudicated. [57] Such were the forms, which the government assumed under the hands of Ferdinand and Isabella. The great concerns of the empire were brought under the control of a few departments, which looked to the crown as their common head. The chief stations were occupied by lawyers, who were alone competent to the duties; and the precincts of the court swarmed with a loyal militia, who, as they owed their elevation to its patronage, were not likely to interpret the law to the disparagement of prerogative. [58] The greater portion of the laws of this reign are directed, in some form or other, as might be expected, to commerce and domestic industry. Their very large number, however, implies an extraordinary expansion of the national energy and resources, as well as a most earnest disposition in the government to foster them. The wisdom of these efforts, at all times, is not equally certain. I will briefly enumerate a few of the most characteristic and important provisions. By a pragmatic of 1500, all persons, whether natives or foreigners, were prohibited from shipping goods in foreign bottoms, from a port where a Spanish ship could be obtained. [59] Another prohibited the sale of vessels to foreigners. [60] Another offered a large premium on all vessels of a certain tonnage and upwards; [61] and others held out protection and various immunities to seamen. [62] The drift of the first of these laws, like that of the famous English navigation act, so many years later, was, as the preamble sets forth, to exclude foreigners from the carrying trade; and the others were equally designed to build up a marine, for the defence, as well as commerce of the country. In this, the sovereigns were favored by their important colonial acquisitions, the distance of which, moreover, made it expedient to employ vessels of greater burden than those hitherto used. The language of subsequent laws, as well as various circumstances within our knowledge, attest the success of these provisions. The number of vessels in the merchant service of Spain, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, amounted to a thousand, according to Campomanes. [63] We may infer the flourishing condition of their commercial marine from their military, as shown in the armaments sent at different times against the Turks, or the Barbary corsairs. [64] The convoy which accompanied the infanta Joanna to Flanders, in 1496, consisted of one hundred and thirty vessels, great and small, having a force of more than twenty thousand men on board; a formidable equipment, inferior only to that of the far-famed "Invincible Armada." [65] A pragmatic was passed, in 1491, at the petition of the inhabitants of the northern provinces, requiring English and other foreign traders to take their returns in the fruits or merchandise of the country, and not in gold or silver. This law seems to have been designed less to benefit the manufacturer, than to preserve the precious metals in the country. [66] It was the same in purport with other laws prohibiting the exportation of these metals, whether in coin or bullion. They were not new in Spain, nor indeed peculiar to her. [67] They proceeded on the principle that gold and silver, independently of their value as a commercial medium, constituted, in a peculiar sense, the wealth of a country. This error, common, as I have said, to other European nations, was eminently fatal to Spain, since the produce of its native mines before the discovery of America, [68] and of those in that quarter afterwards, formed its great staple. As such, these metals should have enjoyed every facility for transportation to other countries, where their higher value would afford a corresponding profit to the exporter. The sumptuary laws of Ferdinand and Isabella are open, for the most part, to the same objections with those just noticed. Such laws, prompted in a great degree, no doubt, by the declamations of the clergy against the pomp and vanities of the world, were familiar, in early times, to most European states. There was ample scope for them in Spain, where the example of their Moslem neighbors had done much to infect all classes with a fondness for sumptuous apparel, and a showy magnificence of living. Ferdinand and Isabella fell nothing short of the most zealous of their predecessors, in their efforts to restrain this improvident luxury. They did, however, what few princes on the like occasions have done--enforced the precept by their own example. Some idea of their habitual economy, or rather frugality, may be formed from a remonstrance presented by the commons to Charles the Fifth, soon after his accession, which represents his daily household expenses as amounting to one hundred and fifty thousand maravedies; while those of the Catholic sovereigns were rarely fifteen thousand, or one- tenth of that sum. [69] They passed several salutary laws for restraining the ambitious expenditure at weddings and funerals, as usual, most affected by those who could least afford it. [70] In 1494, they issued a pragmatic, prohibiting the importation or manufacture of brocades, or of gold or silver embroidery, and also plating with these metals. The avowed object was to check the growth of luxury and the waste of the precious metals. [71] These provisions had the usual fate of laws of this kind. They gave an artificial and still higher value to the prohibited article. Some evaded them. Others indemnified themselves for the privation, by some other, and scarcely less expensive variety of luxury. Such, for example, were the costly silks, which came into more general use after the conquest of Granada. But here the government, on remonstrance of the cortes, again interposed its prohibition, restricting the privilege of wearing them to certain specified classes. [72] Nothing, obviously, could be more impolitic than these various provisions directed against manufactures, which, under proper encouragement, or indeed without any, from the peculiar advantages afforded by the country, might have formed an important branch of industry, whether for the supply of foreign markets, or for home consumption. Notwithstanding these ordinances, we find one, in 1500, at the petition of the silk-growers in Granada, against the introduction of silk thread from the kingdom of Naples; [73] thus encouraging the production of the raw material, while they interdicted the uses to which it could be applied. Such are the inconsistencies into which a government is betrayed by an over-zealous and impertinent spirit of legislation! The chief exports of the country in this reign were the fruits and natural products of the soil, the minerals, of which a great variety was deposited in its bosom, and the simpler manufactures, as sugar, dressed skins, oil, wine, steel, etc. [74] The breed of Spanish horses, celebrated in ancient times, had been greatly improved by the cross with the Arabian. It had, however, of late years fallen into neglect; until the government, by a number of judicious laws, succeeded in restoring it to such repute, that this noble animal became an extensive article of foreign trade. [75] But the chief staple of the country was wool; which, since the introduction of English sheep at the close of the fourteenth century, had reached a degree of fineness and beauty that enabled it, under the present reign, to compete with any other in Europe. [76] To what extent the finer manufactures were carried, or made an article of export, is uncertain. The vagueness of. statistical information in these early times has given rise to much crude speculation and to extravagant estimates of their resources, which have been met by a corresponding skepticism in later and more scrutinizing critics. Capmany, the most acute of these, has advanced the opinion, that these coarser cloths only were manufactured in Castile, and those exclusively for home consumption. [77] The royal ordinances, however, imply, in the character and minuteness of their regulations, a very considerable proficiency in many of the mechanic arts. [78] Similar testimony is borne by intelligent foreigners, visiting or residing in the country at the beginning of the sixteenth century; who notice the fine cloths and manufacture of arms in Segovia, [79] the silks and velvets of Granada and Valencia, [80] the woollen and silk fabrics of Toledo, which gave employment to ten thousand artisans, [81] and curiously wrought plate of Valladolid, [82] and the fine cutlery and glass manufactures of Barcelona, rivalling those of Venice. [83] The recurrence of seasons of scarcity, and the fluctuation of prices, might suggest a reasonable distrust of the excellence of the husbandry under this reign. [84] The turbulent condition of the country may account for this pretty fairly during the early part of it. Indeed, a neglect of agriculture, to the extent implied by these circumstances, is wholly irreconcilable with the general tenor of Ferdinand and Isabella's legislation, which evidently relies on this as the main spring of national prosperity. It is equally repugnant, moreover, to the reports of foreigners, who could best compare the state of the country with that of others at the same period. They extol the fruitfulness of a soil, which yielded the products of the most opposite climes; the hills clothed with vineyards and plantations of fruit trees, much more abundant, it would seem, in the northern regions, than at the present day; the valleys and delicious vegas, glowing with the ripe exuberance of southern vegetation; extensive districts, now smitten with the curse of barrenness, where the traveller scarce discerns the vestige of a road or of a human habitation, but which then teemed with all that was requisite to the sustenance of the populous cities in their neighborhood. [85] The inhabitant of modern Spain or Italy, who wanders amid the ruins of their stately cities, their grass-grown streets, their palaces and temples crumbling into dust, their massive bridges choking up the streams they once proudly traversed, the very streams themselves, which bore navies on their bosoms, shrunk into too shallow a channel for the meanest craft to navigate,--the modern Spaniard who surveys these vestiges of a giant race, the tokens of his nation's present degeneracy, must turn for relief to the prouder and earlier period of her history, when only such great works could have been achieved; and it is no wonder that he should be led, in his enthusiasm, to invest it with a romantic and exaggerated coloring. [86] Such a period in Spain cannot be looked for in the last, still less in the seventeenth century, for the nation had then reached the lowest ebb of its fortunes; [87] nor in the close of the sixteenth, for the desponding language of cortes shows that the work of decay and depopulation had then already begun. [88] It can only be found in the first half of that century, in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, and that of their successor, Charles the Fifth; in which last, the state, under the strong impulse it had received, was carried onward in the career of prosperity, in spite of the ignorance and mismanagement of those who guided it. There is no country which has been guilty of such wild experiments, or has showed, on the whole, such profound ignorance of the true principles of economical science, as Spain under the sceptre of the family of Austria. And, as it is not always easy to discriminate between their acts and those of Ferdinand and Isabella, under whom the germs of much of the subsequent legislation may be said to have been planted, this circumstance has brought undeserved discredit on the government of the latter. Undeserved, because laws, mischievous in their eventual operation, were not always so at the time for which they were originally devised; not to add, that what was intrinsically bad, has been aggravated ten fold under the blind legislation of their successors. [89] It is also true, that many of the most exceptionable laws sanctioned by their names, are to be charged on their predecessors, who had ingrafted their principles into the system long before; [90] and many others are to be vindicated by the general practice of other nations, which authorized retaliation on the score of self-defence. [91] Nothing is easier than to parade abstract theorems,--true in the abstract,--in political economy; nothing harder than to reduce them to practice. That an individual will understand his own interests better than the government can, or, what is the same thing, that trade, if let alone, will find its way into the channels on the whole most advantageous to the community, few will deny. But what is true of all together is not true of any one singly; and no one nation can safely act on these principles, if others do not. In point of fact, no nation has acted on them since the formation of the present political communities of Europe. All that a new state, or a new government in an old one, can now propose to itself is, not to sacrifice its interests to a speculative abstraction, but to accommodate its institutions to the great political system, of which it is a member. On these principles, and on the higher obligation of providing the means of national independence in its most extended sense, much that was bad in the economical policy of Spain, at the period under review, may be vindicated. It would be unfair to direct our view to the restrictive measures of Ferdinand and Isabella, without noticing also the liberal tenor of their legislation in regard to a great variety of objects. Such, for example, are the laws encouraging foreigners to settle in the country; [92] those for facilitating communication by internal improvements, roads, bridges, canals, on a scale of unprecedented magnitude; [93] for a similar attention to the wants of navigation, by constructing moles, quays, lighthouses along the coast, and deepening and extending the harbors, "to accommodate," as the acts set forth, "the great increase of trade;" for embellishing and adding in various ways to the accommodations of the cities; [94] for relieving the subject from onerous tolls and oppressive monopolies; [95] for establishing a uniform currency and standard of weights and measures throughout the kingdom, [96] objects of unwearied solicitude through this whole reign; for maintaining a police, which, from the most disorderly and dangerous, raised Spain, in the language of Martyr, to be the safest country in Christendom [97] for such equal justice, as secured to every man the fruits of his own industry, inducing him to embark his capital in useful enterprises; and, finally, for enforcing fidelity to contracts, [98] of which the sovereigns gave such a glorious example in their own administration, as effectually restored that public credit, which is the true basis of public prosperity. While these important reforms were going on in the interior of the monarchy, it experienced a greater change in its external condition by the immense augmentation of its territory. The most important of its foreign acquisitions were those nearest home, Granada and Navarre; at least, they were the ones most capable, from their position, of being brought under control, and thoroughly and permanently identified with the Spanish monarchy. Granada, as we have seen, was placed under the sceptre of Castile, governed by the same laws, and represented in its cortes, being, in the strictest sense, part and parcel of the kingdom. Navarre was also united to the same crown. But its constitution, which bore considerable analogy to that of Aragon, remained substantially the same as before. The government, indeed, was administered by a viceroy; but Ferdinand made as few changes as possible, permitting it to retain its own legislature, its ancient courts of law, and its laws themselves. So the forms, if not the spirit of independence, continued to survive its union with the victorious state. [99] The other possessions of Spain were scattered over the various quarters of Europe, Africa, and America. Naples was the conquest of Aragon; or, at least, made on behalf of that crown. The queen appears to have taken no part in the conduct of that war, whether distrusting its equity, or its expediency, in the belief that a distant possession in the heart of Europe would probably cost more to maintain than it was worth. In fact, Spain is the only nation, in modern times, which has been able to keep its hold on such possessions for any very considerable period; a circumstance implying more wisdom in her policy than is commonly conceded to her. The fate of the acquisitions alluded to forms no exception to the remark; and Naples, like Sicily, continued permanently ingrafted on the kingdom of Aragon. A fundamental change in the institutions of Naples became requisite to accommodate them to its new relations. Its great offices of state and its legal tribunals were reorganized. Its jurisprudence, which, under the Angevin race, and even the first Aragonese, had been adapted to French usages, was now modelled on the Spanish. The various innovations were conducted by the Catholic king with his usual prudence; and the reform in the legislation is commended by a learned and impartial Italian civilian, as breathing a spirit of moderation and wisdom. [100] He conceded many privileges to the people, and to the capital especially, whose venerable university he resuscitated from the decayed state into which it had fallen, making liberal appropriations from the treasury for its endowment. The support of a mercenary army, and the burdens incident to the war, pressed heavily on the people during the first years of his reign. But the Neapolitans, who, as already noticed, had been transferred too often from one victor to another to be keenly sensible to the loss of political independence, were gradually reconciled to his administration, and testified their sense of its beneficent character by celebrating the anniversary of his death, for more than two centuries, with public solemnities, as a day of mourning throughout the kingdom. [101] But far the most important of the distant acquisitions of Spain were those secured to her by the genius of Columbus and the enlightened patronage of Isabella. Imagination had ample range in the boundless perspective of these unknown regions; but the results actually realized from the discoveries, during the queen's life, were comparatively insignificant. In a mere financial view, they had been a considerable charge on the crown. This was, indeed, partly owing to the humanity of Isabella, who interfered, as we have seen, to prevent the compulsory exaction of Indian labor. This was subsequently, and immediately after her death indeed, carried to such an extent, that nearly half a million of ounces of gold were yearly drawn from the mines of Hispaniola alone. [102] The pearl fisheries, [103] and the culture of the sugar-cane, introduced from the Canaries, [104] yielded large returns under the same inhuman system. Ferdinand, who enjoyed, by the queen's testament, half the amount of the Indian revenues, was now fully awakened to their importance. It would be unjust, however, to suppose his views limited to immediate pecuniary profits; for the measures he pursued were, in many respects, well contrived to promote the nobler ends of discovery and colonization. He invited the persons most eminent for nautical science and enterprise, as Pinzon, Solis, Vespucci, to his court, where they constituted a sort of board of navigation, constructing charts, and tracing out new routes for projected voyages. [105] The conduct of this department was intrusted to the last-mentioned navigator, who had the glory, the greatest which accident and caprice ever granted to man, of giving his name to the new hemisphere. Fleets were now fitted out on a more extended scale, which might vie, indeed, with the splendid equipments of the Portuguese, whose brilliant successes in the east excited the envy of their Castilian rivals. The king occasionally took a share in the voyage, independently of the interest which of right belonged to the crown. [106.] The government, however, realized less from these expensive enterprises than individuals, many of whom, enriched by their official stations, or by accidentally falling in with some hoard of treasure among the savages, returned home to excite the envy and cupidity of their countrymen. [107] But the spirit of adventure was too high among the Castilians to require such incentive, especially when excluded from its usual field in Africa and Europe. A striking proof of the facility, with which the romantic cavaliers of that day could be directed to this new career of danger on the ocean, was given at the time of the last-meditated expedition into Italy under the Great Captain. A squadron of fifteen vessels, bound for the New World, was then riding in the Guadalquivir. Its complement was limited to one thousand two hundred men; but, on Ferdinand's countermanding Gonsalvo's enterprise, more than three thousand volunteers, many of them of noble family, equipped with unusual magnificence for the Italian service, hastened to Seville, and pressed to be admitted into the Indian armada. [108] Seville itself was in a manner depopulated by the general fever of emigration, so that it actually seemed, says a contemporary, to be tenanted only by women. [109] In this universal excitement, the progress of discovery was pushed forward with a success, inferior, indeed, to what might have been effected in the present state of nautical skill and science, but extraordinary for the times. The winding depths of the Gulf of Mexico were penetrated, as well as the borders of the rich but rugged isthmus, which connects the American continents. In 1512, Florida was discovered by a romantic old knight, Ponce de Leon, who, instead of the magical fountain of health, found his grave there. [110] Solis, another navigator, who had charge of an expedition, projected by Ferdinand, [111] to reach the South Sea by the circumnavigation of the continent, ran down the coast as far as the great Rio de la Plata, where he also was cut off by the savages. In 1513, Vasco Nunez de Balboa penetrated, with a handful of men, across the narrow part of the Isthmus of Darien, and from the summit of the Cordilleras, the first of Europeans, was greeted with the long-promised vision of the southern ocean. [112] The intelligence of this event excited a sensation in Spain, inferior only to that caused by the discovery of America. The great object which had so long occupied the imagination of the nautical men of Europe, and formed the purpose of Columbus's last voyage, the discovery of a communication with these far western waters, was accomplished. The famous spice islands, from which the Portuguese had drawn such countless sums of wealth, were scattered over this sea; and the Castilians, after a journey of a few leagues, might launch their barks on its quiet bosom, and reach, and perhaps claim, the coveted possessions of their rivals, as falling west of the papal line of demarkation. Such were the dreams, and such the actual progress of discovery, at the close of Ferdinand's reign. Our admiration of the dauntless heroism displayed by the early Spanish navigators, in their extraordinary career, is much qualified by a consideration of the cruelties with which it was tarnished; too great to be either palliated or passed over in silence by the historian. As long as Isabella lived, the Indians found an efficient friend and protector; but "her death," says the venerable Las Casas, "was the signal for their destruction." [113] Immediately on that event, the system of _repartimientos_, originally authorized, as we have seen, by Columbus, who seems to have had no doubt, from the first, of the crown's absolute right of property over the natives, [114] was carried to its full extent in the colonies. [115] Every Spaniard, however humble, had his proportion of slaves; and men, many of them not only incapable of estimating the awful responsibility of the situation, but without the least touch of humanity in their natures, were individually intrusted with the unlimited disposal of the lives and destinies of their fellow-creatures. They abused this trust in the grossest manner; tasking the unfortunate Indian far beyond his strength, inflicting the most refined punishments on the indolent, and hunting down those who resisted or escaped, like so many beasts of chase, with ferocious bloodhounds. Every step of the white man's progress in the New World, may be said to have been on the corpse of a native. Faith is staggered by the recital of the number of victims immolated in these fair regions within a very few years after the discovery; and the heart sickens at the loathsome details of barbarities, recorded by one, who, if his sympathies have led him sometimes to over-color, can never be suspected of wilfully misstating facts, of which he was an eye-witness. [116] A selfish indifference to the rights of the original occupants of the soil, is a sin which lies at the door of most of the primitive European settlers, whether papist or puritan, of the New World. But it is light, in comparison with the fearful amount of crimes to be charged on the early Spanish colonists; crimes that have, perhaps, in this world, brought down the retribution of Heaven, which has seen fit to turn this fountain of inexhaustible wealth and prosperity to the nation into the waters of bitterness. It may seem strange, that no relief was afforded by the government to these oppressed subjects. But Ferdinand, if we may credit Las Casas, was never permitted to know the extent of the injuries done to them. [117] He was surrounded by men in the management of the Indian department, whose interest it was to keep him in ignorance. [118] The remonstrances of some zealous missionaries led him, [119] in 1501, to refer the subject of the repartimientos to a council of jurists and theologians. This body yielded to the representations of the advocates of the system, that it was indispensable for maintaining the colonies, since the European was altogether unequal to labor in this tropical climate; and that it, moreover, afforded the only chance for the conversion of the Indian, who, unless compelled, could never be brought in contact with the white man. [120] On these grounds, Ferdinand openly assumed for himself and his ministers the responsibility of maintaining this vicious institution; and subsequently issued an ordinance to that effect, accompanied, however, by a variety of humane and equitable regulations for restraining its abuse. [121] The license was embraced in its full extent; the regulations were openly disregarded. [122] Several years after, in 1515, Las Casas, moved by the spectacle of human suffering, returned to Spain, and pleaded the cause of the injured native, in tones which made the dying monarch tremble on his throne. It was too late, however, for the king to execute the remedial measures he contemplated. [123] The efficient interference of Ximenes, who sent a commission for the purpose to Hispaniola, was attended with no permanent results. And the indefatigable "protector of the Indians" was left to sue for redress at the court of Charles, and to furnish a splendid, if not a solitary example there, of a bosom penetrated with the true spirit of Christian philanthropy. [124] I have elsewhere examined the policy pursued by the Catholic sovereigns in the government of their colonies. The supply of precious metals yielded by them eventually proved far greater than had ever entered into the conception of the most sanguine of the early discoverers. Their prolific soil and genial climate, moreover, afforded an infinite variety of vegetable products, which might have furnished an unlimited commerce with the mother country. Under a judicious protection, their population and productions, steadily increasing, would have enlarged to an incalculable extent the general resources of the empire. Such, indeed, might have been the result of a wise system of legislation. But the true principles of colonial policy were sadly misunderstood in the sixteenth century. The discovery of a world was estimated, like that of a rich mine, by the value of its returns in gold and silver. Much of Isabella's legislation, it is true, is of that comprehensive character, which shows that she looked to higher and far nobler objects. But with much that is good, there was mingled, as in most of her institutions, one germ of evil, of little moment at the time, indeed, but which, under the vicious culture of her successors, shot up to a height that overshadowed and blighted all the rest. This was the spirit of restriction and monopoly, aggravated by the subsequent laws of Ferdinand, and carried to an extent under the Austrian dynasty, that paralyzed colonial trade. Under their most ingeniously perverse system of laws, the interests of both the parent country and the colonies were sacrificed. The latter, condemned to look for supplies to an incompetent source, were miserably dwarfed in their growth; while the former contrived to convert the nutriment which she extorted from the colonies into a fatal poison. The streams of wealth which flowed in from the silver quarries of Zacatecas and Potosí, were jealously locked up within the limits of the Peninsula. The great problem, proposed by the Spanish legislation of the sixteenth century, was the reduction of prices in the kingdom to the same level as in other European nations. Every law that was passed, however, tended, by its restrictive character, to augment the evil. The golden tide, which, permitted a free vent, would have fertilized the region through which it poured, now buried the land under a deluge which blighted every green and living thing. Agriculture, commerce, manufactures, every branch of national industry and improvement, languished and fell to decay; and the nation, like the Phrygian monarch, who turned all that he touched to gold, cursed by the very consummation of its wishes, was poor in the midst of its treasures. From this sad picture, let us turn to that presented by the period of our History, when, the clouds and darkness having passed away, a new morn seemed to break upon the nation. Under the firm but temperate sway of Ferdinand and Isabella, the great changes we have noticed were effected without convulsion in the state. On the contrary, the elements of the social system, which before jarred so discordantly, were brought into harmonious action. The restless spirit of the nobles was turned from civil faction to the honorable career of public service, whether in arms or letters. The people at large, assured of the security of private rights, were occupied with the different branches of productive labor. Trade, as is abundantly shown by the legislation of the period, had not yet fallen into the discredit which attached to it in later times. [125] The precious metals, instead of flowing in so abundantly as to palsy the arm of industry, served only to stimulate it. [126] The foreign intercourse of the country was every day more widely extended. Her agents and consuls were to be found in all the principal ports of the Mediterranean and the Baltic. [127] The Spanish mariner, instead of creeping along the beaten track of inland navigation, now struck boldly across the great western ocean. The new discoveries had converted the land trade with India into a sea trade; and the nations of the Peninsula, who had hitherto lain remote from the great highways of commerce, now became the factors and carriers of Europe. The flourishing condition of the nation was seen in the wealth and population of its cities, the revenues of which, augmented in all to a surprising extent, had increased, in some, forty and even fifty fold beyond what they were at the commencement of the reign; [128] the ancient and lordly Toledo; Burgos, with its bustling, industrious traders; [129] Valladolid, sending forth its thirty thousand warriors from its gates, where the whole population now scarcely reaches two-thirds of that number; [130] Cordova, in the south, and the magnificent Granada, naturalizing in Europe the arts and luxuries of the east; Saragossa, "the abundant," as she was called from her fruitful territory; Valencia, "the beautiful;" Barcelona, rivalling in independence and maritime enterprise the proudest of the Italian republics; [131] Medina del Campo, whose fairs were already the great mart for the commercial exchanges of the Peninsula; [132] and Seville, [133] the golden gate of the Indies, whose quays began to be thronged with merchants from the most distant countries of Europe. The resources of the inhabitants were displayed in the palaces and public edifices, fountains, aqueducts, gardens, and other works of utility and ornament. This lavish expenditure was directed by an improved taste. Architecture was studied on purer principles than before, and, with the sister arts of design, showed the influence of the new connection with Italy in the first gleams of that excellence, which shed such lustre over the Spanish school at the close of the century. [134] A still more decided impulse was given to letters. More printing presses were probably at work in Spain in the infancy of the art, than at the present day. [135] Ancient seminaries were remodelled; new ones were created. Barcelona, Salamanca, and Alcalá, whose cloistered solitudes are now the grave, rather than the nursery of science, then swarmed with thousands of disciples, who, under the generous patronage of the government, found letters the surest path to preferment. [136] Even the lighter branches of literature felt the revolutionary spirit of the times, and, after yielding the last fruits of the ancient system, displayed new and more beautiful varieties, under the influence of Italian culture. [137] With this moral development of the nation, the public revenues, the sure index, when unforced, of public prosperity, went on augmenting with astonishing rapidity. In 1474, the year of Isabella's accession, the ordinary rents of the Castilian crown amounted to 885,000 reals; [138] in 1477, to 2,390,078; in 1482, after the resumption of the royal grants, to 12,711,591; and finally in 1504, when the acquisition of Granada [139] and the domestic tranquillity of the kingdom had encouraged the free expansion of all its resources, to 26,283,334; or thirty times the amount received at her accession. [140] All this, it will be remembered, was derived from the customary established taxes, without the imposition of a single new one. Indeed, the improvements in the mode of collection tended materially to lighten the burdens on the people. The accounts of the population at this early period are, for the most part, vague and unsatisfactory. Spain, in particular, has been the subject of the most absurd, though, as it seems, not incredible estimates, sufficiently evincing the paucity of authentic data. [141] Fortunately, however, we labor under no such embarrassment as regards Castile in Isabella's reign. By an official report to the crown on the organization of the militia, in 1492, it appears that the population of the kingdom amounted to 1,500,000 _vecinos_ or householders; or, allowing four and a half to a family (a moderate estimate), to 6,750,000 souls. [142] This census, it will be observed, was limited to the provinces immediately composing the crown of Castile, to the exclusion of Granada, Navarre, and the Aragonese dominions. [143] It was taken, moreover, before the nation had time to recruit from the long and exhausting struggle of the Moorish war, and twenty-five years before the close of the reign, when the population, under circumstances peculiarly favorable, must have swelled to a much larger amount. Thus circumscribed, however, it was probably considerably in advance of that of England at the same period. [144] How have the destinies of the two countries since been reversed? The territorial limits of the monarchy, in the mean time, went on expanding beyond example;--Castile and Leon, brought under the same sceptre with Aragon and its foreign dependencies, Sicily and Sardinia; with the kingdoms of Granada, Navarre, and Naples; with the Canaries, Oran, and the other settlements in Africa; and with the islands and vast continents of America. To these broad domains, the comprehensive schemes of the sovereigns would have added Portugal; and their arrangements for this, although defeated for the present, opened the way to its eventual completion under Philip the Second. [145] The petty states, which had before swarmed over the Peninsula, neutralizing each other's operations, and preventing any effective movement abroad, were now amalgamated into one whole. Sectional jealousies and antipathies, indeed, were too sturdily rooted to be wholly extinguished; but they gradually subsided, under the influence of a common government, and community of interests. A more enlarged sentiment was infused into the people, who, in their foreign relations, at least, assumed the attitude of one great nation. The names of Castilian and Aragonese were merged in the comprehensive one of Spaniard; and Spain, with an empire which stretched over three-quarters of the globe, and which almost realized the proud boast that the sun never set within her borders, now rose, not to the first class only, but to the first place, in the scale of European powers. The extraordinary circumstances of the country tended naturally to nourish the lofty, romantic qualities, and the somewhat exaggerated tone of sentiment, which always pervaded the national character. The age of chivalry had not faded away in Spain, as in most other lands. [146] It was fostered, in time of peace, by the tourneys, jousts, and other warlike pageants, which graced the court of Isabella. [147] It gleamed out, as we have seen, in the Italian campaigns under Gonsalvo de Cordova, and shone forth in all its splendors in the war of Granada. "This was a right gentle war," says Navagiero, in a passage too pertinent to be omitted, "in which, as firearms were comparatively little used, each knight had the opportunity of showing his personal prowess; and rare was it, that a day passed without some feat of arms and valorous exploit. The nobility and chivalry of the land all thronged there to gather renown. Queen Isabel, who attended with her whole court, breathed courage into every heart. There was scarce a cavalier, who was not enamoured of some one or other of her ladies, the witness of his achievements, and who, as she presented him his weapons, or some token of her favor, admonished him to bear himself like a true knight, and show the strength of his passion by his valiant deeds. [148] What knight so craven then," exclaims the chivalrous Venetian, "that he would not have been more than a match for the stoutest adversary; or who would not sooner have lost his life a thousand times, than return dishonored to the lady of his love. In truth," he concludes, "this conquest may be said to have been achieved by love, rather than by arms." [149] The Spaniard was a knight-errant, in its literal sense, [150] roving over seas on which no bark had ever ventured, among islands and continents where no civilized man had ever trodden, and which fancy peopled with all the marvels and drear enchantments of romance; courting danger in every form, combating everywhere, and everywhere victorious. The very odds presented by the defenceless natives among whom he was cast, "a thousand of whom," to quote the words of Columbus, "were not equal to three Spaniards," was in itself typical of his profession; [151] and the brilliant destinies to which the meanest adventurer was often called, now carving out with his good sword some "El Dorado" more splendid than fancy had dreamed of, and now overturning some old barbaric dynasty, were full as extraordinary as the wildest chimeras which Ariosto ever sang, or Cervantes satirized. His countrymen who remained at home, feeding greedily on the reports of his adventures, lived almost equally in an atmosphere of romance. A spirit of chivalrous enthusiasm penetrated the very depths of the nation, swelling the humblest individual with lofty aspirations, and a proud consciousness of the dignity of his nature. "The princely disposition of the Spaniards," says a foreigner of the time, "delighteth me much, as well as the gentle nurture and noble conversation, not merely of those of high degree, but of the citizen, peasant, and common laborer." [152] What wonder that such sentiments should be found incompatible with sober, methodical habits of business, or that the nation indulging them should be seduced from the humble paths of domestic industry to a brilliant and bolder career of adventure. Such consequences became too apparent in the following reign. [153] In noticing the circumstances that conspired to form the national character, it would be unpardonable to omit the establishment of the Inquisition, which contributed so largely to counterbalance the benefits resulting from Isabella's government; an institution which has done more than any other to stay the proud march of human reason; which, by imposing uniformity of creed, has proved the fruitful parent of hypocrisy and superstition; which has soured the sweet charities of human life, [154] and, settling like a foul mist on the goodly promise of the land, closed up the fair buds of science and civilization ere they were fully opened. Alas, that such a blight should have fallen on so gallant and generous a people! That it should have been brought on it too by one of such unblemished patriotism and purity of motive, as Isabella! How must her virtuous spirit, if it be permitted the departed good to look down on the scene of their earthly labors, mourn over the misery and moral degradation, entailed on her country by this one act! So true is it, that the measures of this great queen have had a permanent influence, whether for good or evil, on the destinies of her country. The immediate injury inflicted on the nation by the spirit of bigotry in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, although greatly exaggerated, [155] was doubtless serious enough. Under the otherwise beneficent operation of their government, however, the healthful and expansive energies of the state were sufficient to heal up these and deeper wounds, and still carry it onward in the career of prosperity. With this impulse, indeed, the nation continued to advance higher and higher, in spite of the system of almost unmingled evil pursued in the following reigns. The glories of this later period, of the age of Charles the Fifth, as it is called, must find their true source in the measures of his illustrious predecessors. It was in their court that Boscan, Garcilasso, Mendoza, and the other master- spirits were trained, who moulded Castilian literature into the new and more classical forms of later times. [156] It was under Gonsalvo de Cordova, that Leyva, Pescara, and those great captains with their invincible legions were formed, who enabled Charles the Fifth to dictate laws to Europe for half a century. And it was Columbus, who not only led the way, but animated the Spanish navigator with the spirit of discovery. Scarcely was Ferdinand's reign brought to a close, before Magellan completed, what that monarch had projected, the circumnavigation of the southern continent; the victorious banners of Cortes had already penetrated into the golden realms of Montezuma; and Pizarro, a very few years later, following up the lead of Balboa, embarked on the enterprise which ended in the downfall of the splendid dynasty of the Incas. Thus it is, that the seed sown under a good system continues to yield fruit in a bad one. The season of the most brilliant results, however, is not always that of the greatest national prosperity. The splendors of foreign conquest in the boasted reign of Charles the Fifth were dearly purchased by the decline of industry at home, and the loss of liberty. The patriot will see little to cheer him in this "golden age" of the national history, whose outward show of glory will seem to his penetrating eye only the hectic brilliancy of decay. He will turn to an earlier period, when the nation, emerging from the sloth and license of a barbarous age, seemed to renew its ancient energies, and to prepare like a giant to run its course; and glancing over the long interval since elapsed, during the first half of which the nation wasted itself on schemes of mad ambition, and in the latter has sunk into a state of paralytic torpor, he will fix his eye on the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, as the most glorious epoch in the annals of his country. FOOTNOTES [1] Ante, Part I., Chapter 6. [2] Among the minor means for diminishing the consequence of the nobility, may be mentioned the regulation respecting the "privilegios rodados"; instruments formerly requiring to be countersigned by the great lords and prelates, but which, from the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, were submitted for signature only, to officers especially appointed for the purpose. Salazar de Mendoza, Dignidades, lib. 2, cap. 12. [3] Ante, Introd. Sect. 1. [4]A pertinent example of this policy of the sovereigns occurred in the cortes of Madrigal, 1476; where, notwithstanding the important subjects of legislation, none but the third estate were present. (Pulgar Reyes Católicos, p. 94.) An equally apposite illustration is afforded by the care to summon the great vassals to the cortes of Toledo, in 1480, when matters nearly touching them, as the revocation of their honors and estates, were under discussion, but not till then. Ibid., p. 165. [5] The same principle made them equally vigilant in maintaining the purity of those in office. Oviedo mentions, that in 1497 they removed a number of jurists, on the charge of bribery and other malversation, from their seats in the royal council. Quincuagenas, MS., dial. de Grizio. [6] See a letter of the council to Charles V., commending the course adopted by his grandparents in their promotions to office, apud Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1517, cap. 4. [7] Yet strange instances of promotion are not wanting in Spanish history; witness the adventurer Ripperda, in Philip V.'s time, and the Prince of the Peace, in our own; men, who, owing their success less to their own powers, than the imbecility of others, could lay no claim to the bold and independent sway exercised by Ximenes. [8] Ante, Part I., Chapter 19.--"No os parece á vos," says Oviedo, in one of his Dialogues, "que es mejor ganado eso, que les dá su principe por sus servicios, é lo que llevan justamente de sus oficios, que lo que se adquiere robando capas agenas, é matando é vertiendo sangre de Cristianos?" (Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 3, dial. 9.) The sentiment would have been too enlightened for a Spanish cavalier of the fifteenth century. [9] In the cortes of Calatayud, in 1515, the Aragonese nobles withheld the supplies, with the design of compelling the crown to relinquish certain rights of jurisdiction, which it assumed over their vassals. "Les parecio," said the archbishop of Saragossa, in a speech on the occasion, "que auian perdido mucho, en que el ceptro real cobrasse lo suyo, por su industria. ***** Esto los otros estados del reyno lo atribuyeron a gran virtud: y lo estimauan por beneficio inmortal." (Zurita, Anales, tom. vi. lib. 10, cap. 93.) The other estates, in fact, saw their interests too clearly, not to concur with the crown in this assertion of its ancient prerogative. Blancas, Modo de Proceder, fol. 100. [10] Such, for example, were those of great chancellor, of admiral, and of constable of Castile. The first of these ancient offices was permanently united by Isabella with that of archbishop of Toledo. The office of admiral became hereditary, after Henry III., in the noble family of Enriquez, and that of constable in the house of Velasco. Although of great authority and importance in their origin, and, indeed, in the time of the Catholic sovereigns, these posts gradually, after becoming hereditary, declined into mere titular dignities. Salazar de Mendoza, Dignidades, lib. 2, cap. 8, 10; lib. 3, cap. 21.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 24. [11] The duke of Infantado, head of the ancient house of Mendoza, whose estates lay in Castile, and, indeed, in most of the provinces of the kingdom, is described by Navagiero as living in great magnificence. He maintained a body guard of 200 foot, besides men-at-arms; and could muster more than 30,000 vassals. (Viaggio, fol. 6, 33.) Oviedo makes the same statement. (Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 8.) Lucio Marineo, among other things in his curious _farrago_, has given an estimate of the rents, "poco mas 6 menos," of the great nobility of Castile and Aragon, whose whole amount he computes at one-third of those of the whole kingdom. I will select a few of the names familiar to us in the present narrative. Enriquez, admiral of Castile, 50,000 ducats income, equal to $440,000. Velasco, constable of Castile, 60,000 ducats income, estates in Old Castile. Toledo, duke of Alva, 50,000 ducats income, estates in Castile and Navarre. Mendoza, duke of Infantado, 50,000 ducats income, estates in Castile and other provinces. Guzman, duke of Medina Sidonia, 55,000 ducats income, estates in Andalusia. Cerda, duke of Medina Celi, 30,000 ducats income, estates in Castile and Andalusia. Ponce de Leon, duke of Arcos, 25,000 ducats income, estates in Andalusia. Pacheco, duke of Escalona (marquis of Villena), 60,000 ducats income, estates in Castile. Cordova, duke of Sessa, 60,000 ducats income, estates in Naples and Andalusia. Aguilar, marquis of Priego, 40,000 ducats income, estates in Andalusia and Estremadura. Mendoza, count of Tendilla, 15,000 ducats income, estates in Castile. Pimentel, count of Benavente, 60,000 ducats income, estates in Castile. Giron, count of Ureña, 20,000 ducats income, estates in Andalusia. Silva, count of Cifuentes, 10,000 ducats income, estates in Andalusia. (Cosas Memorables, fol. 24, 25.) The estimate is confirmed, with some slight discrepancies, by Navagiero, Viaggio, fol. 18, 33, et alibi. See also Salazar de Mendoza, Dignidades, discurso 2. [12] "En casa de aquellos Principes estaban las hijas de los principales señores 6 cavalleros por damas de la Reyna 6 de las Infantas sus hijas, y en la corte andaban todos los mayorazgos y hijos de grandes 4 los mas heredados de sus reynos." Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 4, dial 44. [13] "Como quier que oia el parecer de _personal religiosas_ é de los otros letrados que cerca della eran, pero la mayor parte seguia las cosas por su arbitrio." Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part 1, cap. 4. [14] Lucio Marineo has collected many particulars respecting the great wealth of the Spanish clergy in his time. There were four metropolitan sees in Castile. Toledo, income 80,000 ducats. St. James, " 24,000 " Seville, " 20,000 " Granada, " 10,000 " There were twenty-nine bishoprics, whose aggregate revenues, very unequally apportioned, amounted to 251,000 ducats. The church livings in Aragon were much fewer and leaner than in Castile. (Cosas Memorables, fol. 23.) The Venetian Navagiero, speaks of the metropolitan church of Toledo, as "the wealthiest in Christendom;" its canons lived in stately palaces, and its revenues, with those of the archbishopric, equalled those of the whole city of Toledo. (Viaggio, fol. 9.) He notices also the great opulence of the churches of Seville, Guadalupe, etc., fol. 11, 13. [15] See Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 11, 140, 141, 171, et loc. al.--From one of these ordinances, it appears the clergy were not backward in remonstrating against what they deemed an infringement of their rights. (Fol. 172.) The queen, however, while she guarded against their usurpations, interfered more than once, with her usual sense of justice, on their application, to shield them from the encroachments of the civil tribunals. Riol, Informe, apud Semanario Erudito, tom. iii. pp. 98, 99. [16] See Part I., Chapter 6, of this History. [17] See examples of this in Riol, Informe, apud Semanario Erudito, tom. iii. pp. 95-102.--Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 14. [18] Riol, Informe, apud Semanario Erudite, tom. iii. p. 94.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 182. [19] Oviedo bears emphatic testimony to this. "En nuestros tiempos há habido en España de nuestra Nacion grandes varones Letrados, excelentes Perlados y Religiosos y personas que por suos habilidades y sciencias hán subido á las mas altas dignidades de Capelos é de Arzobispados y todo lo que mas se puede alcanzar, en la Iglesia de Dios." Quincuagenas, MS., dial. de Talavera.--Col. de Cédulas, tom. i. p. 400. [20] "Lo qne debe admirar es, que en el tiempo mismo que se contendia con tanto ardor, obtuvieron los Reyes de la Santa Sede mas gracias y privilegios que ninguno de sus sucesores; prueba de su felicidad y de su prudentísima conducta." Riol, Informe, apud Semanario Erudito, tom. in. p. 95. [21] "Porque la igualidad de la justicia que los bienauenturados Principes hazian era tal, que todos los hombres de qualquier condicion que fuessen: aora nobles, y caualleros: aora plebeyos, y labradores, y riejos, o pobres, flacos, o fuertes, señores, o sieruos en lo que a la justicia tocaua todos fuessen iguales." Cosas Memorables, fol. 180. [22] These beneficial changes were made with the advice, and through the agency of Ximenes. (Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 24.--Quintanilla, Archetypo, p. 181.) The _alcavala_, a tax of one-tenth on all transfers of property, produced more than any other branch of the revenue. As it was originally designed, more than a century before, to furnish funds for the Moorish war, Isabella, as we have seen in her testament, entertained great scruples as to the right to continue it, without the confirmation of the people, after that was terminated. Ximenes recommended its abolition, without any qualification, to Charles V., but in vain. (Idem auct., ubi supra.) Whatever be thought of its legality, there can be no doubt it was one of the most successful means ever devised by a government for shackling the industry and enterprise of its subjects. [23] A pragmatic was issued, September 18th, 1495, prescribing the weapons and the seasons for a regular training of the militia. The preamble declares, that it was made at the instance of the representatives of the cities and the nobles, who complained, that, in consequence of the tranquillity, which the kingdom, through the divine mercy had for some years enjoyed, the people were very generally unprovided with arms, offensive or defensive, having sold or suffered them to fall into decay, insomuch that, in their present condition, they would be found wholly unprepared to meet either domestic disturbance, or foreign invasion. (Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 83.) What a tribute does this afford, in this age of violence, to the mild, paternal character of the administration? [24] The most important were those of Madrigal, in 1476, and of Toledo, in 1480, to which I have often had occasion to refer. "Las mas notables," say Asso and Mannel, in reference to the latter, "y famosas de este Reynado, en el qual podemos asegurar, que tuvo principio el mayor aumento, y arreglo de nuestra Jurisprudencia." (Instituciones, Introd., p. 91.) Marina notices this cortes with equal panegyric. (Teoría, tom. i. p. 75.) See also Sempere, Hist. des Cortés, p. 197. [25] See Part I. Chapters 10, 11, et alibi. [26] At Valladolid, in 1506. The number of cities having right of representation, "que acostumbran continuamente embiar procuradores á cortes," according to Pulgar, was seventeen. (Reyes Católicos, cap. 95.) This was before Granada was added. Martyr, writing some years after that event, enumerates only sixteen, as enjoying the privilege. (Opus Epist., epist. 460.) Pulgar's estimate, however, is corroborated by the petition of the cortes of Valladolid, which, with more than usual effrontery, would limit the representation to eighteen cities, as prescribed "por algunas leyes é inmemorial uso." Marina, Teoría, tom. i. p. 161. [27] Many of these _pragmáticas_ purport, in their preambles, to be made at the demand of cortes; many more at the petition of corporations or individuals; and many from the good pleasure of the sovereigns, bound to "remedy all grievances, and provide for the exigencies of the state." These ordinances very frequently are stated to have been made with the advice of the royal council. They were proclaimed in the public squares of the city, in which they were executed, and afterwards in those of the principal towns in the kingdom. The doctors Asso and Manuel divide _pragmáticas_ into two classes; those made at the instance of cortes, and those emanating from the "sovereign, as _supreme legislator_ of the kingdom, moved by his anxiety for the common weal." "Muchos de este género," they add, "contiene el libro raro intitulado _Pragmáticas del Reyno_, que se imprimió la primera vez en Alcalá en 1528." (Instituciones, Introd., p. 110.) This is an error;--see note 43, infra. [28] "Por la presente premáticasencion," said John II., in one of his ordinances, "lo cual todo é cada cosa dello é parte dello quiero é mando é ordeno que se guarde é compla daqui adelante para siempre jámas en todas las cibdades é villas é logares non embargante cualesquier leyes é fueros é derechos é ordenamientos, constituciones é posesiones é premáticas- senciones, é usos é costumbres, ca en cuanto á est oatañe yo los abrogo é derogo." (Marina, Teoría, tom. ii. p. 216.) This was the very essence of despotism, and John found it expedient to retract these expressions, on the subsequent remonstrance of cortes. [29] Indeed, it is worthy of remark, as evincing the progress of civilization under this reign, that most of the criminal legislation is to be referred to its commencement, while the laws of the subsequent period chiefly concern the new relations which grow out of an increased domestic industry. It is in the "Ordenanças Reales," and "Leyes de la Hermandad," both published by 1485, that we must look for the measures against violence and rapine. [30] Thus, for example, the important criminal laws of the Hermandad, and the civil code called the "Laws of Toro," were made under the express sanction of the commons. (Leyes de la Hermandad, fol. l.--Quaderno de las Leyes y Nuevas Decisiones hechas y ordenadas en la Ciudad de Toro, (Medina del Campo, 1555,) fol. 49.) Nearly all, if not all, the acts of the Catholic sovereigns introduced into the famous code of the "Ordenanças Reales," were passed in the cortes of Madrigal, in 1476, or Toledo, in 1480. [31] It should be stated, however, that the cortes of Valladolid, in 1506, two years after the queen's death, enjoined Philip and Joanna to make no laws without the consent of cortes; remonstrating, at the same time, against the existence of many royal _pragmáticas_, as an evil to be redressed. "Y por esto se estableció lei que no hiciesen ni renovasen leyes sino en cortes. ***** Y porque fuera de esta órden se han hecho muchas premáticas de que estos vuestros reynos se tienen por agraviados, manden que aquellas se revean y provean y remedien los agravios que las tales premáticas tienen." (Marina, Teoría, tom. ii. p. 218.) Whether this is to be understood of the ordinances of the reigning sovereigns, or their predecessors, may be doubted. It is certain, that the nation, however it may have acquiesced in the exercise of this power by the late queen, would not have been content to resign it to such incompetent hands, as those of Philip and his crazy wife. [32] "Liberi patriis legibus, nil imperio Regis gubernantur." Opus Epist., epist. 438. [33] Capmany, however, understates the number, when he limits it to four sessions only during this whole reign. Práctica y Estilo, p. 62. [34] See Part II., Chapter 12, note 7, of this History.--"Si quis aliquid," says Martyr, speaking of a cortes general held at Monzon, by Queen Germaine, "sibi contra jus illatum putat, aut a regiâ coronâ quaequam deberi existimat, nunquam dissolvuntur conventus, donec conquerenti satisfiat, neque Regibus parere in exigendis pecuniis, solent aliter. Regina quotidie scribit, se vexari eorum petitionibus, nec exsolvere se quire, quod se maxime optare ostendit. Rex imminentis necessitatis bellicae vim proponit, ut in aliud tempus querelas differant, per literas, per nuntios, per ministros, conventum praesidentesque hortatur monetque, et summissis fere verbis rogare videtur." 1512. (Opus Epist., epist. 493.) Blancas notices Ferdinand's astuteness, who, instead of money granted by the Aragonese with difficulty and reservations, usually applied for troops at once, which were furnished and paid by the state. (Modo de Proceder, fol. 100, 101.) Zurita tells us, that both the king and queen were averse to meetings of cortes in Castile oftener than absolutely necessary, and both took care, on such occasions, to have their own agents near the deputies, to influence their proceedings. "Todas las vezes que en lo passado el Rey, y la Reyna doña Isabel llamauan à cortes en Castilla, temian de las llamar: y despues de llamodos, y ayuntados los procuradores, ponian tales personas de su parte, que continuamente se juntassen con ellos; por escusar lo que podria resultar de aquellos ayuntamientos: y tambien por darles à entender, que no tenian tanto poder, quanto ellos se imaginauan." (Anales, tom. vi. fol. 96.) This course is as repugnant to Isabella's character as it is in keeping with her husband's. Under their joint administration, it is not always easy to discriminate the part which belongs to each. Their respective characters, and political conduct in affairs where they were separately concerned, furnish us a pretty safe clue to our judgment in others. [35] As, for example, both when he resigned, and resumed the regency. See Part II., Chapters 17, 20. [36] In the first cortes after Isabella's death, at Toro, in 1505, Ferdinand introduced the practice, which has since obtained, of administering an oath of secrecy to the deputies, as to the proceedings of the session; a serious wound to popular representation. (Marina, Teoría, tom. i. p. 273.) Capmany (Práctica y Estilo, p. 232.) errs in describing this as "un arteficio Maquiavélico inventado por _la política Alemana_." The German Machiavelism has quite sins enough in this way to answer for. [37] The introductory law to the "Leyes de Toro" holds this strange language; "Y porque al rey pertenesce y ha poder de hazer fueros y leyes, y de las interpretar y emendar donde vieren que cumple," etc. (Leyes de Toro, fol. 2.) What could John II., or any despot of the Austrian line, claim more? [38] See the address of the cortes, in Marina, Teoría, tom. p. 282. [39] Among the writers repeatedly cited by me, it is enough to point out the citizen Marina, who has derived more illustrations of his liberal theory of the constitution from the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella than from any other; and who loses no opportunity of panegyric on their "paternal government," and of contrasting it with the tyrannical policy of later times. [40] Marina enumerates no less than nine separate codes of civil and municipal law in Castile, by which the legal decisions were to be regulated, in Ferdinand and Isabella's time. Ensayo Historico-Critico, sobre la Antigua Legislacion de Castilla, (Madrid, 1808,) pp. 383-386.-- Asso y Manuel, Instituciones, Introd. [41] See Part I., Chapter 6, of this History. [42] "A collection," says senor Clemencin, "of the last importance, and indispensable to a right understanding of the spirit of Isabella's government, but, nevertheless, little known to Castilian writers, not excepting the most learned of them." (Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 9.) No edition of the _Pragmáticas_ has appeared since the publication of Philip II.'s "Nueva Recopilacion," in 1567, in which a large portion of them are embodied. The remainder having no further authority, the work has gradually fallen into oblivion. But, whatever be the cause, the fact is not very creditable to professional science in Spain. [43] The earliest edition was at Alcalá de Henares, printed by Lanzalao Polono, in 1503. It was revised and prepared for the press by Johan Ramirez, secretary of the royal council, from whom the work is often called "Pragmáticas de Ramirez." It passed through several editions by 1550. Clemencin (ubi supra) enumerates five, but his list is incomplete, as the one in my possession, probably the second, has escaped his notice. It is a fine old folio, in black letter, containing in addition some ordinances of Joanna, and the "Laws of Toro," in 192 folios. On the last is this notice by the printer. "Fue ympressa la presente obra en la muy noble y muy leal cibdad de Senilla, por Juan Varela ympressor de libros. Acabose a dos dias del mes de otubre de mill y quinientos y veynte años." The first leaf after the table of contents exhibits the motives of its publication. "E porqué como algunas de ellas (pragmáticas sanciones é cartas) ha mucho tiempo que se dieron, é otras se hicieron en diversos tiempos, estan derramadas por muchas partes, no se saben por todos, é aun muchas de las dichas justicias no tienen comlida noticia de todas ellas, paresciendo ser necesario é provechoso; mandamos fi los del nuestro consejo que las hiciesen juntar é corregir é impremir," etc. [44] "Leyes de Toro," say Asso and Manuel, "veneradas tanto desde entonces, que se les dió el primer lugar de valimiento sobre todas las del Reyno." Instituciones, Introd. p. 95. [45] See the sensible memorial of Jovellanos, "Informe al Real y Supremo Consejo en el Expediente de Ley Agraria." Madrid, 1795. There have been several editions of this code, since the first of 1505. (Marina, Ensayo, No. 450.) I have copies of two editions, in black letter, neither of them known to Marina; one, above noticed, printed at Seville, in 1520; and the other at Medina del Campo, in 1555, probably the latest. The laws were subsequently incorporated in the "Nueva Recopilacion." [46] "Esta ley," says Jovellanos, "que los jurisconsultos llaman a boca llena injusta y barbara, lo es mucho mas por la extension quelos pragmaticas le dieron en sus comentarios." (Informe, p. 76, nota.) The edition of Medina del Campo, in 1555, is swelled by the commentaries of Miguel de Cifuentes, till the text, in the language of bibliographers, looks like "cymba in oceano." [47] Ante, Part I., Chapter 6. [48] Leyes del Quaderno Nuevo de las Rentas de las Alcavalas y Franquezas, hecho en la Vega de Granada, (Salamanca, 1550); a little code of 37 folios, containing 147 laws for the regulation of the crown rents. It was made in the Vega of Granada, December 10th, 1491. The greater part of these laws, like so many others of this reign, have been admitted into the "Nueva Recopilacion." [49] the head of these, undoubtedly, must be placed Dr. Alfonso Diaz de Montalvo, noticed more than once in the course of this History. He illustrated three successive reigns by his labors, which he continued to the close of a long life, and after he had become blind. The Catholic sovereigns highly appreciated his services, and settled a pension on him of 30,000 maravedies. Besides his celebrated compilation of the "Ordenancas Reales," he wrote commentaries on the ancient code of the "Fuero Real," and on the "Siete Partidas," printed for the first time under his own eye, in 1491. (Mendez, Typographia Espanola, p. 183.) Marina (Ensayo, p. 405) has bestowed a beautiful eulogium on this venerable lawyer, who first gave to light the principal Spanish codes, and introduced a spirit of criticism into the national jurisprudence. [50] This gigantic work was committed, wholly or in part, to Dr. Lorenzo Galindez de Carbajal. He labored many years on it, but the results of his labors, as elsewhere noticed, have never been communicated to the public. See Asso y Manuel, Instituciones, pp. 50, 99.--Marina, Ensayo, pp. 392, 406, and Clemencin, whose Ilust. 9 exhibits a most clear and satisfactory view of the legal compilations under this reign. [51] Lord Bacon's comment on Henry VII.'s laws, might apply with equal force to these of Ferdinand and Isabella. "Certainly his times for good commonwealth's laws did excel. ***** For his laws, whoso marks them well, are deep, and not vulgar; not made upon the spur of a particular occasion for the present, but out of providence of the future, to make the estate of his people still more and more happy; after the manner of the legislators in ancient and heroical times." Hist. of Henry VII., Works, (ed. 1819,) vol. v. p. 60. [52] Ante, Part I., Chapter 6. [53] Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 24, 30, 39.--Recop. de las Leyes, (ed. 1640,) tom. i. lib. 2, tit. 5, leyes 1, 2, 3, 11, 12, 20; tit. 7, ley 1.-- Ordenanças Reales, lib. 2. tit. 4. The southern chancery, first opened at Ciudad Real, in 1494, was subsequently transferred by the sovereigns to Granada. [54] Ante, Part I., Chapter 7, note 39. [55] Ante, Part I., Chapter 6, note 34. [56] Riol, Informe, apud Seminario Erudito, tom. iii. p. 149.--It consisted of a vice chancellor, as president, and six ministers, two from each of the three provinces of the crown. It was consulted by the king on all appointments and matters of government. The Italian department was committed to a separate tribunal, called the council of Italy, in 1556. Capmany (Mem. de Barcelona, tom. iv. Apend. 17) has explained at length the functions and authority of this institution. [57] See the nature and broad extent of these powers, in Recop. de Leyes de las Indias, tom. i. lib. 2, tit. 2, leyes 1, 2.--Also Solorzano, Politica Indiana, tom. ii. lib. 5, cap. 15; who goes no further back than the remodelling of this tribunal under Charles V.--Riol, Informe, apud Semanario Erudito, tom. iii. pp. 159, 160. The third volume of the Semanario Erudito, pp. 73-233, contains a report, drawn up, by command of Philip V., in 1726, by Don Santiago Augustin Riol, on the organization and state of the various tribunals, civil and ecclesiastical, under Ferdinand and Isabella; together with an account of the papers contained in their archives. It is an able memorial, replete with curious information. It is singular that this interesting and authentic document should have been so little consulted, considering the popular character of the collection in which it is preserved. I do not recollect ever to have met with a reference to it in any author. It was by mere accident, in the absence of a general index, that I stumbled on it in the _mare magnum_ in which it is engulfed. [58] "Pusieron los Reyes Católicos," says the penetrating Mendoza, "el govierno de la justicia, i cosas públicas en manos de Letrados, gente media entre los grandes i pequeños, sin ofensa de los linos ni de los otros. Cuya profesion eran letras legales, comedimiento, secreto, verdad, vida liana, i sin corrupcion de costumbres." Guerre de Granada, p. 15. [59] Granada, September 3d, Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 135.--A pragmatic of similar import was issued by Henry III. Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom, i., Introd. p. 46. [60] Granada, August 11th, 1501. Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 137. [61] Alfaro, November 10th, 1495. Ibid., fol. 136. [62] See a number of these, collected by Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, Introd. pp. 43, 44. [63] Cited by Robertson, History of America, vol. iii. p. 305. [64] The fleet fitted out against the Turks, in 1482, consisted of seventy sail, and that under Gonsalvo, in 1500, of sixty, large and small. (Ante, Part I., Chapter 6: Part II., Chapter 10.) See other expeditions, enumerated by Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. i. p. 50. [65] Cura de los Palacios, MS., cap. 153; who, indeed, estimates the complement of this fleet at 25,000 men; a round number, which must certainly include persons of every description. The Invincible Armada consisted, according to Dunham, of about 130 vessels, large and small, 20,000 soldiers, and 8,000 seamen. (History of Spain and Portugal, vol. v. p. 59.) The estimate falls below that of most writers. [66] En el real de la vega de Granada, December 20th. (Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 133.) "Y les apercibays," enjoins the ordinance, "que los marauedis porque los vendieren los ban de sacar de nuestros reynos en mercadurias: y ni en oro ni en plata ni en moneda amonedada de manera que no pueden pretender ygnorancia: y den fianças lianas y abonadas de lo fazer y cumplir assi: y si fallaredes que sacan o lieuan oro o plata o moneda contra el tenor y forma de las dichas leyes y desta nuestra carta mandamos vos que gelo torneys: y sea perdido como las dichas leyes mandan, y demas cayan y incurran en las penas en las leyes de nuestros reynos contenidas contra los que sacan oro o plata o moneda fuera dellos sin nuestra licencia y mandado: las quales executad en ellosy en sus fiadores." [67] Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 92, 134.--These laws were as old as the fourteenth century in Castile, and had been renewed by every succeeding monarch, from the time of John I. (Ordenanças Reales, lib. 6, tit. 9, leyes 17-22.) Similar ones were passed under the contemporary princes, Henry VII. and Henry VIII. of England, James IV. of Scotland, etc. [68]--"Balucis malleator Hispanae," says Martial, noticing the noise made by the gold-beaters, hammering out the Spanish ore, as one of the chief annoyances which drove him from the capital, (lib. 12, ep. 57.) See also the precise statement of Pliny, cited Part I., Chapter 8, of this History. [69] "Porque haciéndose ansí al modo é costumbre de los dichos senores Reyes pasados, cesarán los inmensos gastos y sin provecho que la mesa é casa de S. M. se hacen; pues el daño desto notoriamente paresce porque se halla en el plato real y en los platos que se hacen á los privados é criados de su casa gastarse cada mio dia ciento y cincuenta mil maravedís; y los Católicos Reyes D. Hernando é Dona Isabel, seyendo tan excelentes y tan poderosos, en su plato y en el plato del principe D. Joan que haya glória, é de las señoras infantas con gran número y multitud de damas no se gastar cada un dia, seyetido mui abastados como de tales Reyes, mas de doce á quince mil maravedís." Peticion de la Junta de Tordesillas, October 20, 1520, apud Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 230. [70] In 1493; repeated in 1501. Recop. de las Leyes, tom. ii. fol. 3.--In 1502. Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 139. [71] At Segovia, September 2d; also in 1496 and 1498. Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 123, 125, 126. [72] At Granada, in 1499.--This on petition of cortes, in the year preceding. Sempere, in his sensible "Historia del Luxo," has exhibited the series of the manifold sumptuary laws in Castile. It is a history of the impotent struggle of authority, against the indulgence of the innocent propensities implanted in our nature, and naturally increasing with increasing wealth and civilization. [73] En la nombrada y gran ciudad de Granada, Agosto 20. Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 135. [74] Pragmáticas del Reyno, passim.--Diccionario Geográfico-Hist. de España, tom. i. p. 333--Capmany, Mem. de Barcelona, tom. iii. part 3, cap. 2.--Mines of lead, copper, and silver were wrought extensively in Guipuzcoa and Biscay.--Col. de Céd., tom. i. no. 25. [75] Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 127, 128.--Ante, Part II., Chapter 3, note 12.--The cortes of Toledo, in 1525, complained, "que habia tantos caballos Españoles en Francia como en Castilla." (Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. p. 285.) The trade, however, was contraband; the laws against the exportation of horses being as ancient as the time of Alfonso XI. (See also Ordenanças Reales, fol. 85, 86.) Laws can never permanently avail against national prejudices. Those in favor of mules have been so strong in the Peninsula, and such the consequent decay of the fine breed of horses, that the Spaniards have been compelled to supply themselves with the latter from abroad. Bourgoanne reckons that 20,000 were annually imported into the country from France, at the close of the last century. Travels in Spain, tom. i. chap. 4. [76] Hist. del Luxo, tom. i. p. 170.--"Tiene muchas ouejas," says Marineo, "cuya lana estan singular, que no solamente se aprouechan della en España, mas tambien se lleua en abundancia a otras partes." (Cosas Memorables, fol. 3.) He notices especially the fine wool of Molina, in whose territory 400,000 sheep pastured, fol. 19. [77] Mem. de Barcelona, tom. iii. pp. 338, 339.--"Or if ever exported," he adds, "it was at some period long posterior to the discovery of America." [78] Pragmáticas del Reyno, passim.--Many of them were designed to check impositions, too often practised in the manufacture and sale of goods, and to keep them up to a fair standard. [79] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 11. [80] Ibid., fol. 19.--Navagiero, Viaggio, fol. 26.--The Venetian minister, however, pronounces them inferior to the silks of his own country. [81] "Proueyda," says Marineo, "de todos officios, y artes mecánicas que en ella se exercitan mucho: y principalmente en lanor, y exercicio de lanas, y sedas. Por las quales dos cosas biuen en esta ciudad mas de diez mil personas. Es de mas desto la ciudad muy rica, por los grandes tratos de mercadurias." Cosas Memorables, fol. 12. [82] Ibid., fol. 15.--Navagiero, a more parsimonious eulogist, remarks, nevertheless, "Sono in Valladolid assai artefici di ogni sorte, e se vi lavora benessimo de tutte le arti, e sopra tutto d'Argenti, e vi son tanti argenteri quanti non sono in due altre terre." Viaggio, fol. 35. [83] Geron. Paulo, a writer at the close of the fifteenth century, cited by Capmany, Mem. de Barcelona, tom. i. part. 3, p. 23. [84] The twentieth Ilustracion of Señor Clemencin's invaluable compilation contains a table of prices of grain, in different parts of the kingdom, under Ferdinand and Isabella. Take, for example, those of Andalusia. In 1488, a. year of great abundance, the _fanega_ of wheat sold in Andalusia for 50 maravedies; in 1489 it rose to 100; in 1505, a season of great scarcity, to 375, and even 600; in 1508, it was at 306; and in 1509, it had fallen to 85 maravedies. Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. pp. 551, 552. [85] Compare, for example, the accounts of the environs of Toledo and Madrid, the two most considerable cities in Castile, by ancient and modern travellers. One of the most intelligent and recent of the latter, in his journey between these two capitals, remarks, "There is sometimes a visible track, and sometimes none; most commonly we passed over wide sands. The country between Madrid and Toledo, I need scarcely say, is ill peopled and ill cultivated; for it is all a part of the same arid plain, that stretches on every side around the capital; and which is bounded on this side by the Tagus. The whole of the way to Toledo, I passed through only four inconsiderable villages; and saw two others at a distance. A great part of the land is uncultivated, covered with furze and aromatic plants; but here and there some corn land is to be seen." (Inglis, Spain in 1830, vol. i. p. 366.) What a contrast does all this present to the language of the Italians, Navagiero and Marineo, in whose time the country around Toledo "surpassed all other districts of Spain, in the excellence and fruitfulness of the soil;" which, "skilfully irrigated by the waters of the Tagus, and minutely cultivated, furnished every variety of fruit and vegetable produce to the neighboring city." While, instead of the sunburnt plains around Madrid, it is described as situated "in the bosom of a fair country, with an ample territory, yielding rich harvests of corn and wine, and all the other aliments of life." Cosas Memorables, fol. 12, 13.-- Viaggio, fol. 7, 8. [86] Capmany has well exposed some of these extravagances. (Mem. de Barcelona, tom. in. part. 3, cap. 2.) The boldest of them, however, may find a warrant in the declarations of the legislature itself. "En los lugares de obrages de lanas," asserts the cortes of 1594, "donde se solian labrar veinte y treinta mil arrobas, no se labran hoi seis, y donde habia señores de ganado de grandísima cantidad, han disminuido en la misma y mayor proporcion, acaeciendo lo mismo en todas las otras cosas del comercio universal y particular. Lo cual hace que no haya ciudad de las principales destos réinos ni lugar ninguno, de donde no falte notable vecindad, como se echa bien de ver en la muchedumbre de casas que estan cerradas y despobladas, y en la baja que han dado los arrendamientos de las pocas que se arriendan y habitan." Apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist, tom. vi. p. 304. [87] A point which most writers would probably agree in fixing at 1700, the year of Charles II.'s death, the last and most imbecile of the Austrian dynasty. The population of the kingdom at this time, had dwindled to 6,000,000. See Laborde, (Itinéraire, tom. vi. pp. 125, 143, ed. 1830), who seems to have better foundation for this census than for most of those in his table. [88] See the unequivocal language of cortes, under Philip II. (supra.) With every allowance, it infers an alarming decline in the prosperity of the nation. [89] One has only to read, for an evidence of this, the lib. 6, tit. 18, of the "Nueva Recopilacion," on "cosas prohibidas;" the laws on gilding and plating, lib. 5, tit. 24; on apparel and luxury, lib. 7, tit. 12; on woollen manufactures, lib. 7, tit. 14-17, et legas al. Perhaps no stronger proof of the degeneracy of the subsequent legislation can be given, than by contrasting it with that of Ferdinand and Isabella in two important laws. 1. The sovereigns, in 1492, required foreign traders to take their returns in the products and manufactures of the country. By a law of Charles V., 1552, the exportation of numerous domestic manufactures was prohibited, and the foreign trader, in exchange for domestic wool, was required to import into the country a certain amount of linen and woollen fabrics. 2. By an ordinance, in 1500, Ferdinand and Isabella prohibited the importation of silk thread from Naples, to encourage its production at home. This appears from the tenor of subsequent laws to have perfectly succeeded. In 1552, however, a law was passed, interdicting the export of manufactured silk, and admitting the importation of the raw material. By this sagacious provision, both the culture of silk, and the manufacture were speedily crushed in Castile. [90] See examples of these, in the reigns of Henry III., and John II, (Recop. de las Leyes, tom. ii. fol. 180, 181.) Such also were the numerous tariffs fixing the prices of grain, the vexatious class of sumptuary laws, those for the regulation of the various crafts, and, above, all, on the exportation of the precious metals. [91] The English Statute Book alone will furnish abundant proof of this, in the exclusive regulations of trade and navigation existing at the close of the fifteenth century. Mr. Sharon Turner has enumerated many, under Henry VIII., of similar import with, and, indeed, more partial in their operation than, those of Ferdinand and Isabella. History of England, vol. iv. pp. 170 et seq. [92] Ordenanças Reales, lib. 6, tit. 4, ley 6. [93] Archivo de Simancas; in which most of these ordinances appear to be registered. Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 11. [94] "Ennoblescense los cibdades é villas en tener casas grandes é bien fechas en que fragan sus ayuntamientos é concejos," etc. (Ordenanças Reales, lib. 7, tit. 1, ley 1.) Señor Clemencin has specified the nature and great variety of these improvements, as collected from the archives of the different cities of the kingdom. Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilustracion ll.--Col. de Cédulas, tom. iv. no. 9. [95] Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 63. 91, 93.--Recop. de las Leyes, lib. 5, tit. 11, ley 12.--Among the acts for restricting monopolies may be mentioned one, which prohibited the nobility and great landholders from preventing their tenants' opening inns and houses of entertainment without their especial license. (Pragmáticas del Reyno, 1492, fol. 96.) The same abuse, however, is noticed by Mad. d'Aulnoy, in her "Voyage d'Espagne," as still existing, to the great prejudice of travellers, in the seventeenth century. Dunlop, Memoirs of Philip IV. and Charles II., vol. ii. chap. 11. [96] Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 93-112.--Recop. de las Leyes, lib. 5, tit. 21, 22. [97] "Ut nulla unquam per se tuta regio, tutiorem se fuisse jactare possit." Opus Epist., epist. 31. [98] For various laws tending to secure this, and prevent frauds in trade, see Ordenanças Reales, lib. 3, tit. 8, ley 5.--Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 45, 66, 67, et alibi.--Col. de Cédulas, tom. i. no. 63. [99] The fullest, though a sufficiently meagre, account of the Navarrese constitution, is to be found in Capmany's collection, "Práctica y Estilo," (pp. 250-258,) and in the "Diccionario Geográfico Hist, de España," (tom. ii. pp. 140-143.) The historical and economical details in the latter are more copious. [100] "Queste furono," says Giannone, "le prime leggi che ci diedero gli Spagnuoli: leggi tutte provvide e savie, nello stabilir delle quali furono veramente gli Spagnuoli più d' ogni altra nazione avveduti, e più esatti imitatori de' Romani." Istoria di Napoli, lib. 30, cap. 5. [101] Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, lib. 29, cap. 4; lib. 30, cap. 1, 2, 5.--Signorelli, Coltura nelle Sicilie, tom. iv. p. 84.--Every one knows the persecutions, the exile, and long imprisonment, which Giannone suffered for the freedom with which he treated the clergy, in his philosophical history. The generous conduct of Charles of Bourbon to his heirs is not so well known. Soon after his accession to the throne of Naples, that prince settled a liberal pension on the son of the historian, declaring, that "it did not comport with the honor and dignity of the government, to permit an individual to languish in indigence, whose parent had been the greatest man, the most useful to the state, and the most unjustly persecuted, that the age had produced." Noble sentiments, giving additional grace to the act which they accompanied. See the decree, cited by Corniani, Secoli della Letteratura Italiana, (Brescia, 1804-1813,) tom. ix. art. 15. [102] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 6, cap. 18.--According to Martyr, the two mints of Hispaniola yielded 300,000 lbs. of gold annually. De Rebus Oceanicis, dec. 1, lib. 10. [103] The pearl fisheries of Cuhagua were worth 75,000 ducats a year. Herrera, Indian Occidentales, dec 1, lib 7, cap. 9. [104] Oviedo, Historia Natural de las Indias, lib. 4, cap. 8.--Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 165. [105] Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. iii. documentos 1-13.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1. lib. 7, cap. 1. [106] Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. iii. pp. 48, 134. [107] Bernardin de Santa Clara, treasurer of Hispaniola, amassed, during a few years' residence there, 96,000 ounces of gold. This same _nouveau riche_ used to serve gold dust, says Herrera, instead of salt, at his entertainments. (Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 7, cap. 3.) Many believed, according to the same author, that gold was so abundant, as to be dragged up in nets from the beds of the rivers! Lib. 10, cap. 14. [108] Ante, Part II., Chapter 24.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 10, cap. 6, 7. [109] "Per esser Sevilla nel loco che è, vi vanno tanti di loro alle Indie, che la città resta mal popolata, e quasi in man di donne." (Navagiero, Viaggio, fol. 15.) Horace said, fifteen centuries before, "_Impiger extremes curris mercator ad Indos, Per mare pauperiem fugieus, per saxa, per ignes._" _Epist. i. 1._ [110] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 9, cap. 10.--Almost all the Spanish expeditions in the New World, whether on the northern or southern continent, have a tinge of romance, beyond what is found in those of other European nations. One of the most striking and least familiar of them is that of Ferdinand de Soto, the ill-fated discoverer of the Mississippi, whose bones bleach beneath its waters. His adventures are told with uncommon spirit by Mr. Bancroft, vol. i. chap. 2, of his History of the United States. [111] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 2, lib. 1, cap. 7. [112] The life of this daring cavalier forms one in the elegant series of national biographies by Quintana, "Vidas de Espanoles Celebres," (tom. ii. pp. 1-82), and is familiar to the English reader in Irving's "Companions of Columbus." The third volume of Navarrete's laborious compilation is devoted to the illustration of the minor Spanish voyagers, who followed up the bold track of discovery, between Columbus and Cortes. Coleccion de Viages. [113] Las Casas, Mémoires, Oeuvres, ed. de Llorente, tom. i. p. 189. [114] "Y crean (Vuestras Altezas) questa isla y todas las otras son asi suyas corao Castilla, que aqui no falta salvo asiento y mandarles hacer lo que quisieren." Primera Carta de Colon, apud Navarrete, Coleccion de Viages, tom. i. p. 93. [115] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 8, cap. 9.--Las Casas, Oeuvres, ed. de Llorente, tom. i. pp. 228, 229. [116] See the various Memorials of Las Casas, some of them expressly prepared for the council of the Indies. He affirms, that more than 12,000,000 lives were wantonly destroyed in the New World, within thirty- eight years after the discovery, and this in addition to those exterminated in the conquest of the country. (Oeuvres, ed. de Llorente, tom. i. p. 187.) Herrera admits that Hispaniola was reduced, in less than twenty-five years, from 1,000,000 to 14,000 souls. (Indias Occidentales, dec. 1. lib. 10, cap. 12.) The numerical estimates of a large savage population, must, of course, be in a great degree hypothetical. That it was large, however, in these fair regions, may readily be inferred from the facilities of subsistence, and the temperate habits of the natives. The minimum sum in the calculation, when the number had dwindled to a few thousand, might be more easily ascertained. [117] Oeuvres, ed. de Llorente, tom. i. p. 228. [118] One resident at the court, says the bishop of Chiapa, was proprietor of 800, and another of 1100 Indians. (Oeuvres, ed. de Llorente, tom. i. p. 238.) We learn their names from Herrera. The first was Bishop Fonseca, the latter the comendador Conchillos, both prominent men in the Indian department. (Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 9, cap. 14.) The last-named person was the same individual sent by Ferdinand to his daughter in Flanders, and imprisoned there by the archduke Philip. After that prince's death, he experienced signal favors from the Catholic king, and amassed great wealth as secretary of the Indian board. Oviedo has devoted one of his dialogues to him. Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 3, dial. 9. [119]The Dominican and other missionaries, to their credit be it told, labored with unwearied zeal and courage for the conversion of the natives, and the vindication of their natural rights. Yet these were the men, who lighted the fires of the Inquisition in their own land. To such opposite results may the same principle lead, under different circumstances! [120] Las Casas concludes an elaborate memorial, prepared for the government, in 1542, on the best means of arresting the destruction of the aborigines, with two propositions. 1. That the Spaniards would still continue to settle in America, though slavery were abolished, from the superior advantages for acquiring riches it offered over the Old World. 2. That if they would not, this would not justify slavery, since "_God forbids us to do evil that good may come of it_." Rare maxim, from a Spanish churchman of the sixteenth century! The whole argument, which comprehends the sum of what has been since said more diffusely in defence of abolition, is singularly acute and cogent. In its abstract principles it is unanswerable, while it exposes and denounces the misconduct of his countrymen, with a freedom which shows the good bishop knew no other fear than that of his Maker. [121] Recop. de Leyes de las Indias, August 14th, 1509, lib. 6, tit. 8, ley l.--Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 1, lib. 9, cap. 14. [122] The text expresses nearly enough the subsequent condition of things in Spanish America. "No government," says Heeren, "has done so much for the aborigines as the Spanish." (Modern History, Bancroft's trans., vol. i. p. 77.) Whoever peruses its colonial codes, may find much ground for the eulogium. But are not the very number and repetition of these humane provisions sufficient proof of their inefficacy? [123] Herrera, Indias Occidentales, dec. 2, lib. 2, cap. 3.--Las Casas, Mémoire, apud Oeuvres, ed. de Llorente, tom. i. p. 239. [124] In the remarkable discussion between the doctor Sepulveda and Las Casas, before a commission named by Charles V., in 1550, the former vindicated the persecution of the aborigines by the conduct of the Israelites towards their idolatrous neighbors. But the Spanish Fenelon replied, that "the behavior of the Jews was no precedent for Christians; that the law of Moses was a law of rigor; but that of Jesus Christ, one of grace, mercy, peace, good-will, and charity." (Oeuvres, ed. de Llorente, tom. i. p. 374.) The Spaniard first persecuted the Jews, and then quoted them as an authority for persecuting all other infidels. [125] It is only necessary to notice the contemptuous language of Philip II.'s laws, which designate the most useful mechanic arts, as those of blacksmiths, shoemakers, leather-dressers, and the like, as "_oficios viles y baxos_." A whimsical distinction prevails in Castile, in reference to the more humble occupations. A man of gentle blood may be a coachman, lacquey, scullion, or any other menial, without disparaging his nobility, which is said to _sleep_ in the mean while. But he fixes on it an indelible stain, if he exercises any mechanical vocation. "Hence," says Capmany, "I have often seen a village in this province, in which the vagabonds, smugglers, and hangmen even, were natives, while the farrier, shoemaker, etc., was a foreigner." (Mem. de Barcelona, tom. i. part. 3, p. 40; tom. iii. part. 2, pp. 317, 318.) See also some sensible remarks on the subject, by Blanco White, the ingenious author of Doblado's Letters from Spain, p. 44. [126] "The interval between the acquisition of money, and the rise of prices," Hume observes," is the only time when increasing gold and silver are favorable to industry." (Essays, part 2, essay 3.) An ordinance of June 13th, 1497, complains of the scarcity of the precious metals, and their insufficiency to the demands of trade. (Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 93.) It appears, however, from Zuñiga, that the importation of gold from the New World began to have a sensible effect on the prices of commodities, from that very year. Annales de Sevilla, p. 415. [127] Mr. Turner has made several extracts from the Harleian MSS., showing that the trade of Castile with England was very considerable in Isabella's time. (History of England, vol. iv. p. 90.) A pragmatic of July 21st, 1494, for the erection of a consulate at Burgos, notices the commercial establishments in England, France, Italy, and the Low Countries. This tribunal, with other extensive privileges, was empowered to hear and determine suits between merchants; "which," says the plain spoken ordinance, "in the hands of lawyers are never brought to a close; porque se presentauan escritos y libelos de letrados de manera que por mal pleyto que fuesse le sostenian los letrados de manera que _los hazian immortales_." (Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 146-148.) This institution rose soon to be of the greatest importance in Castile. [128] The sixth volume of the Memoirs of the Academy of History contains a schedule of the respective revenues afforded by the cities of Castile, in the years 1477, 1482, and 1504; embracing, of course, the commencement and close of Isabella's reign. The original document exists in the archives of Simancas. We may notice the large amount and great increase of taxes in Toledo, particularly, and in Seville; the former thriving from its manufactories, and the latter from the Indian trade. Seville, in 1504, furnished near a tenth of the whole revenue. Ilustracion 5. [129] "No ay en ella," says Marineo of the latter city, "gente ociosa, ni baldia, sino que todos trabajan, ansi mugeres como hombres, y los chicos como los grandes, buscando la vida con sus manos, y con sudores de sus carnes. Unos exercitan las artes mecánicas: y otros las liberales. Los que tratan las mercaderias, y hazen rica la ciudad, son muy fieles, y liberales." (Cosas Memorables, fol. 16.) It will not be easy to meet, in prose or verse, with a finer colored picture of departed glory, than Mr. Slidell has given of the former city, the venerable Gothic capital, in his "Year in Spain," chap. 12. [130] Sandoval, Hist. del Emp. Carlos V., tom. i. p. 60. [131] It was a common saying in Navagiero's time, "Barcelona la ricca, Saragossa la barta, Valentia la hermosa." (Viaggio, fol. 5.) The grandeur and commercial splendor of the first-named city, which forms the subject of Capmany's elaborate work, have been sufficiently displayed in Part I., Chapter 2, of this History. [132] "_Algunos suponen_," says Capmany, "que estas ferias eran ya famosas en tiempo de los Reyes Católicos," etc. (Mem. de Barcelona, tom. iii. p. 356.) A very cursory glance at the laws of this time, will show the reasonableness of the supposition. See the Pragmáticas, fol. 146, and the ordinances from the archives of Simancas, apud Mem. de Acad., tom. vi. pp. 249, 252, providing for the erection of buildings and other accommodations for the "great resort of traders." In 1520, four years after Ferdinand's death, the city, in a petition to the regent, represented the losses sustained by its merchants in the recent fire, as more than the revenues of the crown would probably be able to meet for several years. (Ibid., p. 264.) Navagiero, who visited Medina some six years later, when it was rebuilt, bears unequivocal testimony to its commercial importance. "Medina è buona terra, e piena di buone case, abondante assai se non che le tante ferie che se vi fanno ogn' anno, e il concorso grande che vi è di tutta Spagna, fanno pur che il tutto si paga più di quel che si faria.... La feria è abondante certo di molte cose, ma sopra tutto di speciarie assai, che vengono di Portogallo; ma le maggior faccende che se vi facciano sono cambij." Viaggio, fol. 36. [133] "Quien no vió á Sevilla No vió maravilla." The proverb, according to Zuñiga, is as old as the time of Alonso XI. Annales de Sevilla, p. 183. [134] The most eminent sculptors were, for the most part, foreigners;--as Miguel Florentin, Pedro Torregiano, Felipe de Borgoña,--chiefly from Italy, where the art was advancing rapidly to perfection in the school of Michael Angelo. The most successful architectural achievement was the cathedral of Granada, by Diego de Siloe. Pedraza, Antiguedad de Granada, fol. 82.--Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 16. [135] At least so says Clemencin, a competent judge. "Desde los mismos principios de su establecimiento fue mas comun la imprenta en España que lo es al cabo de trescientos años dentro ya del siglo décimonono." Elogio de Doña Isabel, Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. [136] Ante, Introduction, Sect. 2; Part 1., Chapter 19; Part II., Chapter 21.--The "Pragmáticas del Reyno" comprises various ordinances, defining the privileges of Salamanca and Valladolid, the manner of conferring degrees, and of election to the chairs of the universities, so as to obviate any undue influence or corruption. (Fol. 14-21.) "Porque," says the liberal language of the last law, "los estudios generales donde las ciencias se leen y aprenden effuerçan las leyes y fazen a los nuestros subditos y naturales sabidores y honrrados y acrecientan virtudes: y porque en el dar y assignar de las cátedras salariadas deue auer toda libertad porque sean dadas á personas sabidores y cientes." (Taraçona, October 5th, 1495.) If one would see the totally different principles on which such elections have been conducted in modern times, let him read Doblado's Letters from Spain, pp. 103-107. The university of Barcelona was suppressed in the beginning of the last century. Laborde has taken a brief survey of the present dilapidated condition of the others, at least as it was in 1830, since which it can scarcely have mended. Itinéraire, tom. vi. p. 144, et seq. [137] See the concluding note to this chapter. Erasmus, in a lively and elegant epistle to his friend, Francis Vergara, Greek professor at Alcalá, in 1527, lavishes unbounded panegyric on the science and literature of Spain, whose palmy state he attributes to Isabella's patronage, and the co-operation of some of her enlightened subjects. "----Hispaniae vestrae, tanto successu, priscam eruditionis gloriam sibi postliminiò vindicanti. Quae quum semper et regionis amoenitate fertilitaléque, semper ingeniorum eminentium ubere proventu, semper bellicâ laude floruerit, quid desiderari poterat ad summam felicitatem, nisi ut studiorum et religionis adjungeret ornamenta, quibus aspirante Deo sic paucis annis effloruit ut caeteris regionibus quamlibet hoc decorum genere praecellentibus vel invidiae queat esse vel exemplo.... Vos istam felicitatem secundum Deum debetis laudatissimae Reginarum Elisabetae, Francisco Cardinali quondam, Alonso Fonsecae nunc Archiepiscopo Toletano, et si qui sunt horum similes, quorum autoritas tuetur, benignitas alit fovetque bonas artes." Epistolae, p. 978. [138] The sums in the text express the _real de vellon_; to which they have been reduced by Señor Clemencin, from the original amount in _maravedis_, which varied very materially in value in different years. Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 5. [139] The kingdom of Granada appears to have contributed rather less than one-eighth of the whole tax. [140] In addition to the last-mentioned sum, the extraordinary service voted by cortes, for the dowry of the infantas, and other matters, in 1504, amounted to 16,113,014 reals de vellon; making a sum total for that year, of 42,396,348 reals. The bulk of the crown revenues was derived from the _alcavalas_, and the _tercias_, or two-ninths of the ecclesiastical tithes. These important statements were transcribed from the books of the _escribanía mayor de rentas_, in the archives of Simancas. Ibid., ubi supra. [141] The pretended amount of population has been generally in the ratio of the distance of the period taken, and, of course, of the difficulty of refutation. A few random remarks of ancient writers have proved the basis for the wildest hypotheses, raising the estimates to the total of what the soil, under the highest possible cultivation, would be capable of supporting. Even for so recent a period as Isabella's time, the estimate commonly received does not fall below eighteen or twenty millions. The official returns, cited in the text, of the most populous portion, of the kingdom, fully expose the extravagance of preceding estimates. [142] These interesting particulars are obtained from a memorial, prepared by order of Ferdinand and Isabella, by their _contador_, Alonso de Quintanilla, on the mode of enrolling and arming the militia, in 1492; as a preliminary step to which, he procured a census of the actual population of the kingdom. It is preserved in a volume entitled _Relaciones tocantes a la junta de la Hernandad_, in that rich national repository, the archives of Simancas. See a copious extract apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Apend. 12. [143] I am acquainted with no sufficient and authentic data for computing the population, at this time, of the crown of Aragon, always greatly below that of the sister kingdom. I find as little to be relied on, notwithstanding the numerous estimates, in one form or another, vouchsafed by historians and travelers, of the population of Granada. Marineo enumerates fourteen cities and ninety-seven towns (omitting, as he says, many places of less note,) at the time of the conquest; a statement obviously too vague for statistical purposes. (Cosas Memorables, fol. 179.) The capital, swelled by the influx from the country, contained, according to him, 200,000 souls at the same period. (Fol. 177.) In 1506, at the time of the forced conversions, we find the numbers in the city dwindled to fifty, or at most, seventy thousand. (Comp. Bleda, Corónica, lib. 5, cap. 23, and Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 159.) Loose as these estimates necessarily are, we have no better to guide us in calculating the total amount of the population of the Moorish kingdom, or of the losses sustained by the copious emigrations, during the first fifteen years after the conquest; although there has been no lack of confident assertion, as to both, in later writers. The desideratum, in regard to Granada, will now probably not be supplied; the public offices in the kingdom of Aragon, if searched with the same industry as those in Castile, would doubtless afford the means for correcting the crude estimates, so current respecting that country. [144] Hallam, in his "Constitutional History of England," estimates the population of the realm, in 1485, at 3,000,000, (vol. i. p. 10.) The discrepancies, however, of the best historians on this subject, prove the difficulty of arriving at even a probable result. Hume, on the authority of Sir Edward Coke, puts the population of England (including people of all sorts) a century later, in 1588, at only 900,000. The historian cites Lodovico Guicciardini, however, for another estimate, as high as 2,000,000, for the same reign of Queen Elizabeth. History of England, vol. vi. Append. 3. [145] Philip II. claimed the Portuguese crown in right of his mother and his wife, both descended from Maria, third daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, who, as the reader may remember, married King Emanuel. [146] Old Caxton mourns over the little honor paid to the usages of chivalry in his time; and it is sufficient evidence of its decay in England, that Richard III. thought it necessary to issue an ordinance requiring those possessed of the requisite £40 a year, to receive knighthood. (Turner, History of England, vol. iii. pp. 391, 392.) The use of artillery was fatal to chivalry; a consequence well understood, even at the early period of our History. At least, so we may infer from the verses of Ariosto, where Orlando throws Cimosco's gun into the sea. "Lo tolse e disse: Acciò più non istea Mai cavalier per te d'essere ardito; Nè quanto il buono val, mai più si vanti Il rio per te valer, qui giu rimanti." Orlando Furioso, canto 9, st. 90. [147] "Quien podrá, contar," exclaims the old Curate of Los Palacios, "la grandeza, el concierto de su corte, la cavallería de los Nobles de toda España, Duques, Maestres, Marqueses é Ricos homes; los Galanes, las Damas, las Fiestas, los Torneos, la Moltitud de Poetas é trovadores," etc. Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 201. [148] Oviedo notices the existence of a lady-love, even with cavaliers who had passed their prime, as a thing of quite as imperative necessity in his day, as it was afterwards regarded by the gallant knight of La Mancha. "Costumbre es en España entre log señores de estado que venidos á la corte, aunque nó estén enamorados ó que pasen de la mitad de la edad fingir que aman por servir y favorescer á alguna dama, y gastar como quien son en fiestas y otras cosas que se ofrescen de tales pasatiempos y amores, sin que les dé pena Cupido." Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 28. [149] Viaggio, fol. 27. Andrea Navagiero, whose itinerary has been of such frequent reference in these pages, was a noble Venetian, born in 1483. He became very early distinguished, in his cultivated capital, for his scholarship, poetical talents, and eloquence, of which he has left specimens, especially in Latin verse, in the highest repute to this day with his countrymen. He was not, however, exclusively devoted to letters, but was employed in several foreign missions by the republic. It was on his visit to Spain, as minister to Charles V., soon after that monarch's accession, that he wrote his Travels; and he filled the same office at the court of Francis I., when he died, at the premature age of forty-six, in 1529. (Tiraboschi, Letteratura Italiana, tom. vii. part. 3, p. 228, ed. 1785.) His death was universally lamented by the good and the learned of his time, and is commemorated by his friend, Cardinal Bembo, in two sonnets, breathing all the sensibility of that tender and elegant poet. (Rime, Son. 109, 110.) Navagiero becomes connected with Castilian literature by the circumstance of Boscan's referring to his suggestion the innovation he so successfully made in the forms of the national verse. Obras, fol. 20, ed. 1543. [150] Fernando de Pulgar, after enumerating various cavaliers of his acquaintance, who had journeyed to distant climes in quest of adventures and honorable feats of arms, continues, "E oí decir de otros Castellanos que con ánimo de Caballeros fueron por los Reynos estrafios á facer armas con qualquier Caballero que quisiere facerlas con ellos, é por ellas ganaron honra para sí, é fama de valientes y esforzados Caballeros para los Fijosdalgos de Castilla." Claros Varones, tit. 17. [151] "Son todos," says the Admiral, "de ningun ingenio en las armas, y muy cobardes, que mil no aguadarian tres!" (Primer Viage de Colon.) What could the bard of chivalry say more? "Ma quel ch'al timor non diede albergo, Estima la vil turba e l'arme tante Quel che dentro alla mandra all' aer cupo, Il numer dell' agnelle estimi il lupo." Orlando Furioso, canto 12. [152] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 30. [153] "I Spagnoli," says the Venetian minister, "non solo in questo paese di Granata, ma in tutto 'l resto della Spagna medesimamente, non sono molto industriosi, ne piantano, ne lavorano volontieri la terra; ma se danno ad altro, e più volontieri vanno alia guerra, o alle Indie ad acquistarsi facultà, che per tal vie." (Viaggio, fol. 25.) Testimonies to the same purport thicken, as the stream of history descends. See several collected by Capmany (Mem. de Barcelona, tom. iii. pp. 358, et seq.), who certainly cannot be charged with ministering to the vanity of his countrymen. [154] One may trace its immediate influence in the writings of a man like the Curate of Los Palacios, naturally, as it would seem, of an amiable, humane disposition; but who complacently remarks, "They (Ferdinand and Isabella) lighted up the fires for the heretics, in which, with good reason, they have burnt, and shall continue to burn, so long as a soul of them remains"! (Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 7.) It becomes more perceptible in the literature of later times, and, what is singular, most of all in the lighter departments of poetry and fiction, which seem naturally devoted to purposes of pleasure. No one can estimate the full influence of the Inquisition in perverting moral sense, and infusing the deadly venom of misanthropy into the heart, who has not perused the works of the great Castilian poets, of Lope de Vega, Ercilla, above all Calderon, whose lips seem to have been touched with fire from the very altars of this accursed tribunal. [155] The late secretary of the Inquisition has made an elaborate computation of the number of its victims. According to him, 13,000 were publicly burned by the several tribunals of Castile and Aragon, and 191,413 suffered other punishments, between 1481, the date of the commencement of the modern institution, and 1518. (Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. iv. chap. 46.) Llorente appears to have come to these appalling results by a very plausible process of calculation, and without any design to exaggerate. Nevertheless, his data are exceedingly imperfect, and he has himself, on a revision, considerably reduced, in his fourth volume, the original estimates in the first. I find good grounds for reducing them still further. 1. He quotes Mariana, for the fact, that 2000 suffered martyrdom at Seville, in 1481, and makes this the basis of his calculations for the other tribunals of the kingdom. Marineo, a contemporary, on the other hand, states, that "in the course of a few years they burned nearly 2000 heretics;" thus not only diffusing this amount over a greater period of time, but embracing all the tribunals then existing in the country. (Cosas Memorables, fol. 164.) 2. Bernaldez states, that five-sixths of the Jews resided in the kingdom of Castile. (Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 110.) Llorente, however, has assigned an equal amount of victims to each of the five tribunals of Aragon, with those of the sister kingdom, excepting only Seville. One might reasonably distrust Llorente's tables, from the facility with which he receives the most improbable estimates in other matters, as, for example, the number of banished Jews, which he puts at 800,000. (Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. p. 261.) I have shown, from contemporary sources, that this number did not probably exceed 160,000, or, at most, 170,000. (Part I., Chapter 17.) Indeed, the cautious Zurita, borrowing, probably, from the same authorities, cites the latter number. (Anales, tom. v. fol. 9.) Mariana, who owes so much of his narrative to the Aragonese historian, converting, as it would appear, these 170,000 individuals into families, states the whole in round numbers, at 800,000 souls. (Hist. de España, tom. ii. lib. 26, cap. 1.) Llorente, not content with this, swells the amount still further, by that of the Moorish exiles, and by emigrants to the New World, (on what authority?) to 2,000,000; and, going on with the process, computes that this loss may fairly infer one of 8,000,000 inhabitants to Spain, at the present day! (Ibid., ubi supra.) Thus the mischief imputed to the Catholic sovereigns goes on increasing in a sort of arithmetical progression, with the duration of the monarchy. Nothing is so striking to the imagination as numerical estimates; they speak a volume in themselves, saving a world of periphrasis and argument; nothing is so difficult to form with exactness, or even probability, when they relate to an early period; and nothing more carelessly received, and confidently circulated. The enormous statements of the Jewish exiles, and the baseless ones of the Moorish, are not peculiar to Llorente, but have been repeated, without the slightest qualification or distrust, by most modern historians and travellers. [156] In the two closing Chapters of Part I. of this History, I have noticed the progress of letters in this reign; the last which displayed the antique coloring and truly national characteristics of Castilian poetry. There were many circumstances, which operated, at this period, to work an important revolution, and subject the poetry of the Peninsula to a foreign influence. The Italian Muse, after her long silence, since the age of the _tricentisti_, had again revived, and poured forth such ravishing strains, as made themselves heard and felt in every corner of Europe. Spain, in particular, was open to their influence. Her language had an intimate affinity with the Italian. The improved taste and culture of the period led to a diligent study of foreign models. Many Spaniards, as we have seen, went abroad to perfect themselves in the schools of Italy; while Italian teachers filled some of the principal chairs in the Spanish universities. Lastly, the acquisition of Naples, the land of Sannazaro and of a host of kindred spirits, opened an obvious communication with the literature of that country. With the nation thus prepared, it was not difficult for a genius like that of Boscan, supported by the tender and polished Garcilasso, and by Mendoza, whose stern spirit found relief in images of pastoral tranquillity and ease, to recommend the more finished forms of Italian versification to their countrymen. These poets were all born in Isabella's reign. The first of them, the principal means of effecting this literary revolution, singularly enough, was a Catalan, whose compositions in the Castilian proved the ascendency which this dialect had already obtained. The second, Garcilasso de la Vega, was son of the distinguished statesman and diplomatist of that name, so often noticed in our History; and Mendoza was a younger son of the amiable count of Tendilla, the governor of Granada, whom he resembled in nothing but his genius. Both the elder Garcilasso and Tendilla had represented their sovereigns at the papal court, where they doubtless became tinctured with that relish for the Italian, which produced such results in the education of their children. The new revolution penetrated far below the superficial forms of versification; and the Castilian poet relinquished, with his _redondillas_ and artless _asonantes_, the homely, but heartful themes of the olden time; or, if he dwelt on them, it was with an air of studied elegance and precision, very remote from the Doric simplicity and freshness of the romantic minstrelsy. If he aspired to some bolder theme, it was rarely suggested by the stirring and patriotic recollections of his nation's history. Thus, nature and the rude graces of a primitive age gave way to superior refinement and lettered elegance; many popular blemishes were softened down, a purer and nobler standard was attained, but the national characteristics were effaced; beauty was everywhere, but it was the beauty of art, not of nature. The change itself was perfectly natural. It corresponded with the external circumstances of the nation, and its transition from an insulated position to a component part of the great European commonwealth, which subjected it to other influences and principles of taste, and obliterated, to a certain extent, the peculiar features of the national physiognomy. How far the poetic literature of Castile was benefited by the change, has been matter of long and hot debate between the critics of the country, in which I shall not involve the reader. The revolution, however, was the growth of circumstances, and was immediately effected by individuals, belonging to the age of Ferdinand and Isabella. As such, I had originally proposed to devote a separate chapter to its illustration. But I have been deterred from it by the unexpected length, to which the work has already extended, as well as by the consideration, on a nearer view, that these results, though prepared under a preceding reign, properly fall under the _domestic_ history of Charles V.; a history which still remains to be written. But who will attempt a _pendant_ to the delineations of Robertson? 
6918	----	Anne Soulard, Tiffany Vergon, Charles Aldarondo and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA, THE CATHOLIC. BY WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. I. TO THE HONORABLE WILLIAM PRESCOTT, LL.D., THE GUIDE OF MY YOUTH, MY BEST FRIEND IN RIPER YEARS, THESE VOLUMES, WITH THE WARMEST FEELINGS OF FILIAL AFFECTION, ARE RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED. PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. English writers have done more for the illustration of Spanish history, than for that of any other except their own. To say nothing of the recent general compendium, executed for the "Cabinet Cyclopaedia," a work of singular acuteness and information, we have particular narratives of the several reigns, in an unbroken series, from the emperor Charles the Fifth (the First of Spain) to Charles the Third, at the close of the last century, by authors whose names are a sufficient guaranty for the excellence of their productions. It is singular, that, with this attention to the modern history of the Peninsula, there should be no particular account of the period which may be considered as the proper basis of it,-- the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. In this reign, the several States, into which the country had been broken up for ages, were brought under a common rule; the kingdom of Naples was conquered; America discovered and colonized; the ancient empire of the Spanish Arabs subverted; the dread tribunal of the Modern Inquisition established; the Jews, who contributed so sensibly to the wealth and civilization of the country, were banished; and, in fine, such changes were introduced into the interior administration of the monarchy, as have left a permanent impression on the character and condition of the nation. The actors in these events were every way suited to their importance. Besides the reigning sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella, the latter certainly one of the most interesting personages in history, we have, in political affairs, that consummate statesman, Cardinal Ximenes, in military, the "Great Captain," Gonsalvo de Cordova, and in maritime, the most successful navigator of any age, Christopher Columbus; whose entire biographies fall within the limits of this period. Even such portions of it as have been incidentally touched by English writers, as the Italian wars, for example, have been drawn so exclusively from French and Italian sources, that they may be said to be untrodden ground for the historian of Spain. [1] It must be admitted, however, that an account of this reign could not have been undertaken at any preceding period, with anything like the advantages at present afforded; owing to the light which recent researches of Spanish scholars, in the greater freedom of inquiry now enjoyed, have shed on some of its most interesting and least familiar features. The most important of the works to which I allude are, the History of the Inquisition, from official documents, by its secretary, Llorente; the analysis of the political institutions of the kingdom, by such writers as Marina, Sempere, and Capmany; the literal version, now made for the first time, of the Spanish-Arab chronicles, by Conde; the collection of original and unpublished documents, illustrating the history of Columbus and the early Castilian navigators, by Navarrete; and, lastly, the copious illustrations of Isabella's reign, by Clemencin, the late lamented secretary of the Royal Academy of History, forming the sixth volume of its valuable Memoirs. It was the knowledge of these facilities for doing justice to this subject, as well as its intrinsic merits, which led me, ten years since, to select it; and surely no subject could be found more suitable for the pen of an American, than a history of that reign, under the auspices of which the existence of his own favored quarter of the globe was first revealed. As I was conscious that the value of the history must depend mainly on that of its materials, I have spared neither pains nor expense, from the first, in collecting the most authentic. In accomplishing this, I must acknowledge the services of my friends, Mr. Alexander H. Everett, then minister plenipotentiary from the United States to the court of Madrid, Mr. Arthur Middleton, secretary of the American legation, and, above all, Mr. O. Rich, now American consul for the Balearic Islands, a gentleman, whose extensive bibliographical knowledge, and unwearied researches, during a long residence in the Peninsula, have been liberally employed for the benefit both of his own country and of England. With such assistance, I flatter myself that I have been enabled to secure whatever can materially conduce to the illustration of the period in question, whether in the form of chronicle, memoir, private correspondence, legal codes, or official documents. Among these are various contemporary manuscripts, covering the whole ground of the narrative, none of which have been printed, and some of them but little known to Spanish scholars. In obtaining copies of these from the public libraries, I must add, that I have found facilities under the present liberal government, which were denied me under the preceding. In addition to these sources of information, I have availed myself, in the part of the work occupied with literary criticism and history, of the library of my friend, Mr. George Ticknor, who during a visit to Spain, some years since, collected whatever was rare and valuable in the literature of the Peninsula. I must further acknowledge my obligations to the library of Harvard University, in Cambridge, from whose rich repository of books relating to our own country I have derived material aid. And, lastly, I must not omit to notice the favors of another kind for which I am indebted to my friend, Mr. William H. Gardiner, whose judicious counsels have been of essential benefit to me in the revision of my labors. In the plan of the work, I have not limited myself to a strict chronological narrative of passing events, but have occasionally paused, at the expense, perhaps, of some interest in the story, to seek such collateral information as might bring these events into a clearer view. I have devoted a liberal portion of the work to the literary progress of the nation, conceiving this quite as essential a part of its history as civil and military details. I have occasionally introduced, at the close of the chapters, a critical notice of the authorities used, that the reader may form some estimate of their comparative value and credibility. Finally, I have endeavored to present him with such an account of the state of affairs, both before the accession, and at the demise of the Catholic sovereigns, as might afford him the best points of view for surveying the entire results of their reign. How far I have succeeded in the execution of this plan, must be left to the reader's candid judgment. Many errors he may be able to detect. Sure I am, there can be no one more sensible of my deficiencies than myself; although it was not till after practical experience, that I could fully estimate the difficulty of obtaining anything like a faithful portraiture of a distant age, amidst the shifting hues and perplexing cross lights of historic testimony. From one class of errors my subject necessarily exempts me; those founded on national or party feeling. I may have been more open to another fault; that of too strong a bias in favor of my principal actors; for characters, noble and interesting in themselves, naturally beget a sort of partiality akin to friendship, in the historian's mind, accustomed to the daily contemplation of them. Whatever defects may be charged on the work, I can at least assure myself, that it is an honest record of a reign important in itself, new to the reader in an English dress, and resting on a solid basis of authentic materials, such as probably could not be met with out of Spain, nor in it without much difficulty. I hope I shall be acquitted of egotism, although I add a few words respecting the peculiar embarrassments I have encountered, in composing these volumes. Soon after my arrangements were made, early in 1826, for obtaining the necessary materials from Madrid, I was deprived of the use of my eyes for all purposes of reading and writing, and had no prospect of again recovering it. This was a serious obstacle to the prosecution of a work requiring the perusal of a large mass of authorities, in various languages, the contents of which were to be carefully collated, and transferred to my own pages, verified by minute reference. [2] Thus shut out from one sense, I was driven to rely exclusively on another, and to make the ear do the work of the eye. With the assistance of a reader, uninitiated, it may be added, in any modern language but his own, I worked my way through several venerable Castilian quartos, until I was satisfied of the practicability of the undertaking. I next procured the services of one more competent to aid me in pursuing my historical inquiries. The process was slow and irksome enough, doubtless, to both parties, at least till my ear was accommodated to foreign sounds, and an antiquated, oftentimes barbarous phraseology, when my progress became more sensible, and I was cheered with the prospect of success. It certainly would have been a far more serious misfortune, to be led thus blindfold through the pleasant paths of literature; but my track stretched, for the most part, across dreary wastes, where no beauty lurked, to arrest the traveller's eye and charm his senses. After persevering in this course for some years, my eyes, by the blessing of Providence, recovered sufficient strength to allow me to use them, with tolerable freedom, in the prosecution of my labors, and in the revision of all previously written. I hope I shall not be misunderstood, as stating these circumstances to deprecate the severity of criticism, since I am inclined to think the greater circumspection I have been compelled to use has left me, on the whole, less exposed to inaccuracies, than I should have been in the ordinary mode of composition. But, as I reflect on the many sober hours I have passed in wading through black letter tomes, and through manuscripts whose doubtful orthography and defiance of all punctuation were so many stumbling-blocks to my amanuensis, it calls up a scene of whimsical distresses, not usually encountered, on which the good-natured reader may, perhaps, allow I have some right, now that I have got the better of them, to dwell with satisfaction. I will only remark, in conclusion of this too prolix discussion about myself, that while making my tortoise-like progress, I saw what I had fondly looked upon as my own ground, (having indeed lain unmolested by any other invader for so many ages,) suddenly entered, and in part occupied, by one of my countrymen. I allude to Mr. Irving's "History of Columbus," and "Chronicle of Granada;" the subjects of which, although covering but a small part of my whole plan, form certainly two of its most brilliant portions. Now, alas! if not devoid of interest, they are, at least, stripped of the charm of novelty. For what eye has not been attracted to the spot on which the light of that writer's genius has fallen? I cannot quit the subject which has so long occupied me, without one glance at the present unhappy condition of Spain; who, shorn of her ancient splendor, humbled by the loss of empire abroad, and credit at home, is abandoned to all the evils of anarchy. Yet, deplorable as this condition is, it is not so bad as the lethargy in which she has been sunk for ages. Better be hurried forward for a season on the wings of the tempest, than stagnate in a deathlike calm, fatal alike to intellectual and moral progress. The crisis of a revolution, when old things are passing away, and new ones are not yet established, is, indeed, fearful. Even the immediate consequences of its achievement are scarcely less so to a people who have yet to learn by experiment the precise form of institutions best suited to their wants, and to accommodate their character to these institutions. Such results must come with time, however, if the nation be but true to itself. And that they will come, sooner or later, to the Spaniards, surely no one can distrust who is at all conversant with their earlier history, and has witnessed the examples it affords of heroic virtue, devoted patriotism, and generous love of freedom; "Chè l'antico valore ----non è ancor morto." Clouds and darkness have, indeed, settled thick around the throne of the youthful Isabella; but not a deeper darkness than that which covered the land in the first years of her illustrious namesake; and we may humbly trust, that the same Providence, which guided her reign to so prosperous a termination, may carry the nation safe through its present perils, and secure to it the greatest of earthly blessings, civil and religious liberty. _November_, 1837. FOOTNOTES [1] The only histories of this reign by continental writers, with which I am acquainted, are the "Histoire des Rois Catholiques Ferdinand et Isabelle, par l'Abbé Mignot, Paris, 1766," and the "Geschichte der Regierung Ferdinand des Katholischen, von Rupert Becker, Prag und Leipzig, 1790." Their authors have employed the most accessible materials only in the compilation; and, indeed, they lay claim to no great research, which would seem to be precluded by the extent of their works, in neither instance exceeding two volumes duodecimo. They have the merit of exhibiting, in a simple, perspicuous form, those events, which, lying on the surface, may be found more or less expanded in moat general histories. [2] "To compile a history from various authors, when they can only be consulted by other eyes, is not easy, nor possible, but with more skilful and attentive help than can be commonly obtained." [Johnson's _Life of Milton_.] This remark of the great critic, which first engaged my attention in the midst of my embarrassments, although discouraging at first, in the end stimulated the desire to overcome them. PREFACE TO THE THIRD ENGLISH EDITION. Since the publication of the First Edition of this work, it has undergone a careful revision; and this, aided by the communications of several intelligent friends, who have taken an interest in its success, has enabled me to correct several verbal inaccuracies, and a few typographical errors, which had been previously overlooked. While the Second Edition was passing through the press, I received, also, copies of two valuable Spanish works, having relation to the reign of the Catholic sovereigns, but which, as they appeared during the recent troubles of the Peninsula, had not before come to my knowledge. For these I am indebted to the politeness of Don Angel Calderon de la Barca, late Spanish Minister at Washington; a gentleman, whose frank and liberal manners, personal accomplishments, and independent conduct in public life, have secured for him deservedly high consideration in the United States, as well as in his own country. I must still further acknowledge my obligation to Don Pascual de Gayangos, the learned author of the "Mahommedan Dynasties in Spain," recently published in London,--a work, which, from its thorough investigation of original sources, and fine spirit of criticism, must supply, what has been so long felt as an important desideratum with the student,--the means of forming a perfect acquaintance with the Arabian portion of the Peninsular annals. There fell into the hands of this gentleman, on the breaking up of the convents of Saragossa in 1835, a rich collection of original documents, comprehending, among other things, the autograph correspondence of Ferdinand and Isabella, and of the principal persons of their court. It formed, probably, part of the library of Geronimo Zurita,--historiographer of Aragon, under Philip the Second,--who, by virtue of his office, was intrusted with whatever documents could illustrate the history of the country. This rare collection was left at his death to a monastery in his native city. Although Zurita is one of the principal authorities for the present work, there are many details of interest in this correspondence, which have passed unnoticed by him, although forming the basis of his conclusions; and I have gladly availed myself of the liberality and great kindness of Señor de Gayangos, who has placed these manuscripts at my disposal, transcribing such as I have selected, for the corroboration and further illustration of my work. The difficulties attending this labor of love will be better appreciated, when it is understood, that the original writing is in an antiquated character, which _few_ Spanish scholars of the present day could comprehend, and often in cipher, which requires much patience and ingenuity to explain. With these various emendations, it is hoped that the present Edition may be found more deserving of that favor from the public, which has been so courteously accorded to the preceding. _March_, 1841. CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. INTRODUCTION. SECTION I. VIEW OF THE CASTILIAN MONARCHY BEFORE THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. STATE OF SPAIN AT THE MIDDLE OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY EARLY HISTORY AND CONSTITUTION OF CASTILE THE VISIGOTHS INVASION OF THE ARABS ITS INFLUENCE ON THE CONDITION OF THE SPANIARDS CAUSES OF THEIR SLOW RECONQUEST OF THE COUNTRY THEIR ULTIMATE SUCCESS CERTAIN THEIR RELIGIOUS ENTHUSIASM INFLUENCE OF THEIR MINSTRELSY THEIR CHARITY TO THE INFIDEL THEIR CHIVALRY EARLY IMPORTANCE OF THE CASTILIAN TOWNS THEIR PRIVILEGES CASTILIAN CORTES ITS GREAT POWERS ITS BOLDNESS HERMANDADES OF CASTILE WEALTH OF THE CITIES PERIOD OF THE HIGHEST POWER OF THE COMMONS THE NOBILITY THEIR PRIVILEGES THEIR GREAT WEALTH THEIR TURBULENT SPIRIT THE CAVALLEROS OR KNIGHTS THE CLERGY INFLUENCE OF THE PAPAL COURT CORRUPTION OP THE CLERGY THEIR RICH POSSESSIONS LIMITED EXTENT OF THE ROYAL PREROGATIVE POVERTY OF THE CROWN ITS CAUSES ANECDOTE OF HENRY III., OF CASTILE CONSTITUTIONAL WRITERS ON CASTILE CONSTITUTION AT THE BEGINNING OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY NOTICE OF MARINA AND SEMPERE SECTION II. REVIEW OF THE CONSTITUTION OF ARAGON TO THE MIDDLE OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. RISE OF ARAGON FOREIGN CONQUESTS CODE OF SOPRARBE THE RICOS HOMBRES THEIR IMMUNITIES THEIR TURBULENCE PRIVILEGES OF UNION THEIR ABROGATION THE LEGISLATURE OF ARAGON ITS FORMS OF PROCEEDING ITS POWERS THE GENERAL PRIVILEGE JUDICIAL FUNCTIONS OF CORTES PREPONDERANCE OF THE COMMONS THE JUSTICE OF ARAGON HIS GREAT AUTHORITY SECURITY AGAINST ITS ABUSE INDEPENDENT EXECUTION OF IT VALENCIA AND CATALONIA RISE AND OPULENCE OF BARCELONA HER FREE INSTITUTIONS HAUGHTY SPIRIT OF THE CATALANS INTELLECTUAL CULTURE POETICAL ACADEMY OF TORTOSA BRIEF GLORY OF THE LIMOUSIN CONSTITUTIONAL WRITERS ON ARAGON NOTICES OF BLANCAS, MARTEL, AND CAPMANY PART FIRST. THE PERIOD WHEN THE DIFFERENT KINGDOMS OF SPAIN WERE FIRST UNITED UNDER ONE MONARCHY, AND A THOROUGH REFORM WAS INTRODUCED INTO THEIR INTERNAL ADMINISTRATION; OR THE PERIOD EXHIBITING MOST FULLY THE DOMESTIC POLICY OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA. CHAPTER I. STATE OF CASTILE AT THE BIRTH OF ISABELLA.--REIGN OF JOHN II., OF CASTILE. REVOLUTION OF TRASTAMARA ACCESSION OF JOHN II. RISE OF ALVARO DE LUNA JEALOUSY OF THE NOBLES OPPRESSION OF THE COMMONS ITS CONSEQUENCES EARLY LITERATURE OF CASTILE ITS ENCOURAGEMENT UNDER JOHN II. MARQUIS OF VILLENA MARQUIS OF SANTILLANA JOHN DE MENA HIS INFLUENCE BAENA'S CANCIONERO CASTILIAN LITERATURE UNDER JOHN II DECLINE OF ALVARO DE LUNA HIS FALL HIS DEATH LAMENTED BY JOHN DEATH OF JOHN II BIRTH OF ISABELLA CHAPTER II. CONDITION OF ARAGON DURING THE MINORITY OF FERDINAND.--REIGN OF JOHN II., OF ARAGON. JOHN OF ARAGON TITLE OF HIS SON CARLOS TO NAVARRE HE TAKES ARMS AGAINST HIS FATHER IS DEFEATED BIRTH OF FERDINAND CARLOS RETIRES TO NAPLES HE PASSES INTO SICILY JOHN II. SUCCEEDS TO THE CROWN OF ARAGON CARLOS RECONCILED WITH HIS FATHER IS IMPRISONED INSURRECTION OF THE CATALANS CARLOS RELEASED HIS DEATH HIS CHARACTER TRAGICAL STORY OF BLANCHE FERDINAND SWORN HEIR TO THE CROWN BESIEGED BY THE CATALANS IN GERONA TREATY BETWEEN FRANCE AND ARAGON GENERAL REVOLT IN CATALONIA SUCCESSES OF JOHN CROWN OF CATALONIA OFFERED TO RENÉ OF ANJOU DISTRESS AND EMBARRASSMENTS OF JOHN POPULARITY OF THE DUKE OF LORRAINE DEATH OF THE QUEEN OF ARAGON IMPROVEMENT IN JOHN'S AFFAIRS SIEGE OF BARCELONA IT SURRENDERS CHAPTER III. REIGN OF HENRY IV., OF CASTILE.--CIVIL WAR.--MARRIAGE OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA. POPULARITY OF HENRY IV HE DISAPPOINTS EXPECTATIONS HIS DISSOLUTE HABITS OPPRESSION OF THE PEOPLE DEBASEMENT OF THE COIN CHARACTER OF PACHECO, MARQUIS OF VILLENA CHARACTER OF THE ARCHBISHOP OF TOLEDO INTERVIEW BETWEEN HENRY IV. AND LOUIS XI DISGRACE OF VILLENA AND THE ARCHBISHOP OF TOLEDO LEAGUE OF THE NOBLES DEPOSITION OF HENRY AT AVILA DIVISION OF PARTIES INTRIGUES OF THE MARQUIS OF VILLENA HENRY DISBANDS HIS FORCES PROPOSITION FOR THE MARRIAGE OF ISABELLA HER EARLY EDUCATION PROJECTED UNION WITH THE GRAND MASTER OF CALATRAVA HIS SUDDEN DEATH BATTLE OF OLMEDO CIVIL ANARCHY DEATH AND CHARACTER OF ALFONSO HIS REIGN A USURPATION THE CROWN OFFERED TO ISABELLA SHE DECLINES IT TREATY BETWEEN HENRY AND THE CONFEDERATES ISABELLA ACKNOWLEDGED HEIR TO THE CROWN AT TOROS DE GUISANDO SUITORS TO ISABELLA FERDINAND OF ARAGON SUPPORT OF JOANNA BELTRANEJA PROPOSAL OF THE KING OF PORTUGAL REJECTED BY ISABELLA SHE ACCEPTS FERDINAND ARTICLES OF MARRIAGE CRITICAL SITUATION OF ISABELLA FERDINAND ENTERS CASTILE PRIVATE INTERVIEW BETWEEN FERDINAND AND ISABELLA THEIR MARRIAGE NOTICE OF THE QUINCUAGENAS OF OVIEDO CHAPTER IV. FACTIONS IN CASTILE.--WAR BETWEEN FRANCE AND ARAGON.--DEATH OF HENRY IV., OF CASTILE. FACTIONS IN CASTILE FERDINAND AND ISABELLA CIVIL ANARCHY REVOLT OF ROUSSILLON FROM LOUIS XI. GALLANT DEFENCE OF PERPIGNAN FERDINAND RAISES THE SIEGE TREATY BETWEEN FRANCE AND ARAGON ISABELLA'S PARTY GAINS STRENGTH INTERVIEW BETWEEN HENRY IV. AND ISABELLA AT SEGOVIA SECOND FRENCH INVASION OF ROUSSILLON FERDINAND'S SUMMARY EXECUTION OF JUSTICE SIEGE AND REDUCTION OF PERPIGNAN PERFIDY OF LOUIS XI. ILLNESS OF HENRY IV., OF CASTILE HIS DEATH INFLUENCE OF HIS REIGN NOTICE OF ALONSO DE PALENCIA NOTICE OF ENRIQUEZ DE CASTILLO CHAPTER V. ACCESSION OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA.--WAR OF THE SUCCESSION.--BATTLE OF TORO. TITLE OF ISABELLA SHE IS PROCLAIMED QUEEN SETTLEMENT OF THE CROWN PARTISANS OF JOANNA ALFONSO OF PORTUGAL SUPPORTS HER CAUSE HE INVADES CASTILE HE ESPOUSES JOANNA CASTILIAN ARMY FERDINAND MARCHES AGAINST ALFONSO HE CHALLENGES HIM TO PERSONAL COMBAT DISORDERLY RETREAT OF THE CASTILIANS APPROPRIATION OF THE CHURCH PLATE REORGANIZATION OF THE ARMY KING OF PORTUGAL ARRIVES BEFORE ZAMORA ABSURD POSITION HE SUDDENLY DECAMPS OVERTAKEN BY FERDINAND BATTLE OF TORO THE PORTUGUESE ROUTED ISABELLA'S THANKSGIVING FOR THE VICTORY SUBMISSION OF THE WHOLE KINGDOM THE KING OF PORTUGAL VISITS FRANCE RETURNS TO PORTUGAL PEACE WITH FRANCE ACTIVE MEASURES OF ISABELLA TREATY OF PEACE WITH PORTUGAL JOANNA TAKES THE VEIL DEATH OF THE KING OF PORTUGAL DEATH OF THE KING OF ARAGON CHAPTER VI. INTERNAL ADMINISTRATION OF CASTILE. SCHEME OF REFORM FOR THE GOVERNMENT OF CASTILE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE HERMANDAD CODE OF THE HERMANDAD INEFFECTUAL OPPOSITION OF THE NOBILITY TUMULT AT SEGOVIA ISABELLA'S PRESENCE OF MIND ISABELLA VISITS SEVILLE HER SPLENDID RECEPTION THERE SEVERE EXECUTION OF JUSTICE MARQUIS OF CADIZ AND DUKE OF MEDINA SIDONIA ROYAL PROGRESS THROUGH ANDALUSIA IMPARTIAL EXECUTION OP THE LAWS REORGANIZATION OP THE TRIBUNALS KING AND QUEEN PRESIDE IN COURTS OF JUSTICE RE-ESTABLISHMENT OF ORDER REFORM OF THE JURISPRUDENCE CODE OF ORDENANÇAS REALES SCHEMES FOR REDUCING THE NOBILITY REVOCATION OF THE ROYAL GRANTS LEGISLATIVE ENACTMENTS THE QUEEN'S SPIRITED CONDUCT TO THE NOBILITY MILITARY ORDERS OF CASTILE ORDER OF ST. JAGO ORDER OF CALATRAVA ORDER OF ALCANTARA GRAND-MASTERSHIPS ANNEXED TO THE CROWN THEIR REFORMATION USURPATIONS OF THE CHURCH RESISTED BY CORTES DIFFERENCE WITH THE POPE RESTORATION OF TRADE SALUTARY ENACTMENTS OF CORTES PROSPERITY OF THE KINGDOM NOTICE OF CLEMENCIN CHAPTER VII. ESTABLISHMENT OF THE MODERN INQUISITION. ORIGIN OF THE ANCIENT INQUISITION ITS INTRODUCTION INTO ARAGON RETROSPECTIVE VIEW OF THE JEWS IN SPAIN UNDER THE ARABS UNDER THE CASTILIANS PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS THEIR STATE AT THE ACCESSION OF ISABELLA CHARGES AGAINST THEM BIGOTRY OF THE AGE ITS INFLUENCE ON ISABELLA CHARACTER OF HER CONFESSOR, TORQUEMADA PAPAL BULL AUTHORIZING THE INQUISITION ISABELLA RESORTS TO MILDER MEASURES ENFORCES THE PAPAL BULL INQUISITION AT SEVILLE PROOFS OF JUDAISM THE SANGUINARY PROCEEDINGS OF THE INQUISITORS CONDUCT OF THE PAPAL COURT FINAL ORGANIZATION OF THE INQUISITION FORMS OF TRIAL TORTURE INJUSTICE OF ITS PROCEEDINGS AUTOS DA FE CONVICTIONS UNDER TORQUEMADA PERFIDIOUS POLICY OF ROME NOTICE OF LLORENTE'S HISTORY OF THE INQUISITION CHAPTER VIII. REVIEW OF THE POLITICAL AND INTELLECTUAL CONDITION OF THE SPANISH ARABS PREVIOUS TO THE WAR OF GRANADA. EARLY SUCCESSES OF MAHOMETANISM CONQUEST OF SPAIN WESTERN CALIPHATE FORM OF GOVERNMENT CHARACTER OF THE SOVEREIGNS MILITARY ESTABLISHMENT SUMPTUOUS PUBLIC WORKS GREAT MOSQUE OF CORDOVA REVENUES MINERAL WEALTH OF SPAIN HUSBANDRY AND MANUFACTURES POPULATION CHARACTER OF ALHAKEM II. INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT DISMEMBERMENT OF THE CORDOVAN EMPIRE KINGDOM OF GRANADA AGRICULTURE AND COMMERCE RESOURCES OF THE CROWN LUXURIOUS CHARACTER OF THE PEOPLE MOORISH GALLANTRY CHIVALRY UNSETTLED STATE OF GRANADA CAUSES OF HER SUCCESSFUL RESISTANCE LITERATURE OF THE SPANISH ARABS CIRCUMSTANCES FAVORABLE TO IT PROVISIONS FOR LEARNING THE ACTUAL RESULTS AVERROES THEIR HISTORICAL MERITS USEFUL DISCOVERIES THE IMPULSE GIVEN BY THEM TO EUROPE THEIR ELEGANT LITERATURE POETICAL CHARACTER INFLUENCE ON THE CASTILIAN CIRCUMSTANCES PREJUDICIAL TO THEIR REPUTATION NOTICES OF CASIRI, CONDE, AND CARDONNE CHAPTER IX. WAR OF GRANADA.--SURPRISE OF ZAHARA.--CAPTURE OF ALHAMA. ZAHARA SURPRISED BY THE MOORS DESCRIPTION OF ALHAMA THE MARQUIS OF CADIZ HIS EXPEDITION AGAINST ALHAMA SURPRISE OF THE FORTRESS VALOR OF THE CITIZENS SALLY UPON THE MOORS DESPERATE COMBAT FALL OF ALHAMA CONSTERNATION OF THE MOORS THE MOORS BESIEGE ALHAMA DISTRESS OF THE GARRISON THE DUKE OF MEDINA SIDONIA MARCHES TO RELIEVE ALHAMA RAISES THE SIEGE MEETING OF THE TWO ARMIES THE SOVEREIGNS AT CORDOVA ALHAMA INVESTED AGAIN BY THE MOORS ISABELLA'S FIRMNESS FERDINAND RAISES THE SIEGE VIGOROUS MEASURES OF THE QUEEN CHAPTER X. WAR OF GRANADA.--UNSUCCESSFUL ATTEMPT ON LOJA.--DEFEAT IN THE AXARQUIA. SIEGE OF LOJA CASTILIAN FORCES ENCAMPMENT BEFORE LOJA SKIRMISH WITH THE ENEMY RETREAT OF THE SPANIARDS REVOLUTION IN GRANADA DEATH OF THE ARCHBISHOP OF TOLEDO AFFAIRS OF ITALY OF NAVARRE RESOURCES OF THE CROWN JUSTICE OF THE SOVEREIGNS EXPEDITION TO THE AXARQUIA THE MILITARY ARRAY PROGRESS OF THE ARMY MOORISH PREPARATIONS SKIRMISH AMONG THE MOUNTAINS RETREAT OF THE SPANIARDS THEIR DISASTROUS SITUATION THEY RESOLVE TO FORCE A PASSAGE DIFFICULTIES OF THE ASCENT DREADFUL SLAUGHTER MARQUIS OF CADIZ ESCAPES LOSSES OF THE CHRISTIANS CHAPTER XI. WAR OF GRANADA.--GENERAL VIEW OF THE POLICY PURSUED IN THE CONDUCT OF THIS WAR. ABDALLAH MARCHES AGAINST THE CHRISTIANS ILL OMENS MARCHES ON LUCENA BATTLE OF LUCENA CAPTURE OF ABDALLAH LOSSES OF THE MOORS MOORISH EMBASSY TO CORDOVA DEBATES IN THE SPANISH COUNCIL TREATY WITH ABDALLAH INTERVIEW BETWEEN THE TWO KINGS GENERAL POLICY OF THE WAR INCESSANT HOSTILITIES DEVASTATING FORAYS STRENGTH OF THE MOORISH FORTRESSES DESCRIPTION OF THE PIECES OF THE KINDS OF AMMUNITION ROADS FOR THE ARTILLERY DEFENCES OF THE MOORS TERMS TO THE VANQUISHED SUPPLIES FOR THE ARMY ISABELLA'S CARE OF THE TROOPS HER PERSEVERANCE IN THE WAR POLICY TOWARDS THE NOBLES COMPOSITION OF THE ARMY SWISS MERCENARIES THE ENGLISH LORD SCALES THE QUEEN'S COURTESY MAGNIFICENCE OF THE NOBLES THEIR GALLANTRY ISABELLA VISITS THE CAMP ROYAL COSTUME DEVOUT DEMEANOR OF THE SOVEREIGNS CEREMONIES ON THE OCCUPATION OF A CITY RELEASE OF CHRISTIAN CAPTIVES POLICY IN FOMENTING THE MOORISH FACTIONS CHRISTIAN CONQUESTS NOTICE OF FERNANDO DEL PULGAR NOTICE OF ANTONIO DE LEBRIJA INTRODUCTION. SECTION I. VIEW OF THE CASTILIAN MONARCHY BEFORE THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. Early History and Constitution of Castile.--Invasion of the Arabs.--Slow Reconquest of the Country.--Religious Enthusiasm of the Spaniards.-- Influence of their Minstrelsy.--Their Chivalry.--Castilian Towns.-- Cortes.--Its Powers.--Its Boldness.--Wealth of the Cities.--The Nobility. --Their Privileges and Wealth.--Knights.--Clergy.--Poverty of the Crown.-- Limited Extent of the Prerogative. For several hundred years after the great Saracen invasion in the beginning of the eighth century, Spain was broken up into a number of small but independent states, divided in their interests, and often in deadly hostility with one another. It was inhabited by races, the most dissimilar in their origin, religion, and government, the least important of which has exerted a sensible influence on the character and institutions of its present inhabitants. At the close of the fifteenth century, these various races were blended into one great nation, under one common rule. Its territorial limits were widely extended by discovery and conquest. Its domestic institutions, and even its literature, were moulded into the form, which, to a considerable extent, they have maintained to the present day. It is the object of the present narrative to exhibit the period in which these momentous results were effected,--the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. By the middle of the fifteenth century, the number of states, into which the country had been divided, was reduced to four; Castile, Aragon, Navarre, and the Moorish kingdom of Granada. The last, comprised within nearly the same limits as the modern province of that name, was all that remained to the Moslems of their once vast possessions in the Peninsula. Its concentrated population gave it a degree of strength altogether disproportioned to the extent of its territory; and the profuse magnificence of its court, which rivalled that of the ancient caliphs, was supported by the labors of a sober, industrious people, under whom agriculture and several of the mechanic arts had reached a degree of excellence, probably unequalled in any other part of Europe during the Middle Ages. The little kingdom of Navarre, embosomed within the Pyrenees, had often attracted the avarice of neighboring and more powerful states. But, since their selfish schemes operated as a mutual check upon each other, Navarre still continued to maintain her independence, when all the smaller states in the Peninsula had been absorbed in the gradually increasing dominion of Castile and Aragon. This latter kingdom comprehended the province of that name, together with Catalonia and Valencia. Under its auspicious climate and free political institutions, its inhabitants displayed an uncommon share of intellectual and moral energy. Its long line of coast opened the way to an extensive and flourishing commerce; and its enterprising navy indemnified the nation for the scantiness of its territory at home, by the important foreign conquests of Sardinia, Sicily, Naples, and the Balearic Isles. The remaining provinces of Leon, Biscay, the Asturias, Galicia, Old and New Castile, Estremadura, Murcia, and Andalusia, fell to the crown of Castile, which, thus extending its sway over an unbroken line of country from the Bay of Biscay to the Mediterranean, seemed by the magnitude, of its territory, as well as by its antiquity, (for it was there that the old Gothic monarchy may be said to have first revived after the great Saracen invasion,) to be entitled to a pre-eminence over the other states of the Peninsula. This claim, indeed, appears to have been recognized at an early period of her history. Aragon did homage to Castile for her territory on the western bank of the Ebro, until the twelfth century, as did Navarre, Portugal, and, at a later period, the Moorish kingdom of Granada. [1] And, when at length the various states of Spain were consolidated into one monarchy, the capital of Castile became the capital of the new empire, and her language the language of the court and of literature. It will facilitate our inquiry into the circumstances which immediately led to these results, if we briefly glance at the prominent features in the early history and constitution of the two principal Christian states, Castile and Aragon, previous to the fifteenth century. [2] The Visigoths who overran the Peninsula, in the fifth century, brought with them the same liberal principles of government which distinguished their Teutonic brethren. Their crown was declared elective by a formal legislative act. [3] Laws were enacted in the great national councils, composed of prelates and nobility, and not unfrequently ratified in an assembly of the people. Their code of jurisprudence, although abounding in frivolous detail, contained many admirable provisions for the security of justice; and, in the degree of civil liberty which it accorded to the Roman inhabitants of the country, far transcended those of most of the other barbarians of the north. [4] In short, their simple polity exhibited the germ of some of those institutions, which, with other nations, and under happier auspices, have formed the basis of a well-regulated constitutional liberty. [5] But, while in other countries the principles of a free government were slowly and gradually unfolded, their development was much accelerated in Spain by an event, which, at the time, seemed to threaten their total extinction,--the great Saracen invasion at the beginning of the eighth century. The religious, as well as the political institutions of the Arabs, were too dissimilar to those of the conquered nation, to allow the former to exercise any very sensible influence over the latter in these particulars. In the Spirit of toleration, which distinguished the early followers of Mahomet, they conceded to such of the Goths, as were willing to continue among them after the conquest, the free enjoyment of their religious, as well as of many of the civil privileges which they possessed under the ancient monarchy. [6] Under this liberal dispensation it cannot be doubted, that many preferred remaining in the pleasant regions of their ancestors, to quitting them for a life of poverty and toil. These, however, appear to have been chiefly of the lower order; [7] and the men of higher rank, or of more generous sentiments, who refused to accept a nominal and precarious independence at the hands of their oppressors, escaped from the overwhelming inundation into the neighboring countries of France, Italy, and Britain, or retreated behind those natural fortresses of the north, the Asturian hills and the Pyrenees, whither the victorious Saracen disdained to pursue them. [8] Here the broken remnant of the nation endeavored to revive the forms, at least, of the ancient government. But it may well be conceived, how imperfect these must have been under a calamity, which, breaking up all the artificial distinctions of society, seemed to resolve it at once into its primitive equality. The monarch, once master of the whole Peninsula, now beheld his empire contracted to a few barren, inhospitable rocks. The noble, instead of the broad lands and thronged halls of his ancestors, saw himself at best but the chief of some wandering horde, seeking a doubtful subsistence, like himself, by rapine. The peasantry, indeed, may be said to have gained by the exchange; and, in a situation, in which all factitious distinctions were of less worth than individual prowess and efficiency, they rose in political consequence. Even slavery, a sore evil among the Visigoths, as indeed among all the barbarians of German origin, though not effaced, lost many of its most revolting features, under the more generous legislation of later times. [9] A sensible and salutary influence, at the same time, was exerted on the moral energies of the nation, which had been corrupted in the long enjoyment of uninterrupted prosperity. Indeed, so relaxed were the morals of the court, as well as of the clergy, and so enervated had all classes become, in the general diffusion of luxury, that some authors have not scrupled to refer to these causes principally the perdition of the Gothic monarchy. An entire reformation in these habits was necessarily effected in a situation, where a scanty subsistence could only be earned by a life of extreme temperance and toil, and where it was often to be sought, sword in hand, from an enemy far superior in numbers. Whatever may have been the vices of the Spaniards, they cannot have been those of effeminate sloth. Thus a sober, hardy, and independent race was gradually formed, prepared to assert their ancient inheritance, and to lay the foundations of far more liberal and equitable forms of government, than were known to their ancestors. At first, their progress was slow and almost imperceptible. The Saracens, indeed, reposing under the sunny skies of Andalusia, so congenial with their own, seemed willing to relinquish the sterile regions of the north to an enemy whom they despised. But, when the Spaniards, quitting the shelter of their mountains, descended into the open plains of Leon and Castile, they found themselves exposed to the predatory incursions of the Arab cavalry, who, sweeping over the face of the country, carried off in a single foray the hard-earned produce of a summer's toil. It was not until they had reached some natural boundary, as the river Douro, or the chain of the Guadarrama, that they were enabled, by constructing a line of fortifications along these primitive bulwarks, to secure their conquests, and oppose an effectual resistance to the destructive inroads of their enemies. Their own dissensions were another cause of their tardy progress. The numerous petty states, which rose from the ruins of the ancient monarchy, seemed to regard each other with even a fiercer hatred than that with which they viewed the enemies of their faith; a circumstance that more than once brought the nation to the verge of ruin. More Christian blood was wasted in these national feuds, than in all their encounters with the infidel. The soldiers of Fernan Gonçalez, a chieftain of the tenth century, complained that their master made them lead the life of very devils, keeping them in the harness day and night, in wars, not against the Saracens, but one another. [10] These circumstances so far palsied the arm of the Christians, that a century and a half elapsed after the invasion, before they had penetrated to the Douro, [11] and nearly thrice that period before they had advanced the line of conquest to the Tagus, [12] notwithstanding this portion of the country had been comparatively deserted by the Mahometans. But it was easy to foresee that a people, living, as they did, under circumstances so well adapted to the development of both physical and moral energy, must ultimately prevail over a nation oppressed by despotism, and the effeminate indulgence, to which it was naturally disposed by a sensual religion and a voluptuous climate. In truth, the early Spaniard was urged by every motive that can give efficacy to human purpose. Pent up in his barren mountains, he beheld the pleasant valleys and fruitful vineyards of his ancestors delivered over to the spoiler, the holy places polluted by his abominable rites, and the crescent glittering on the domes, which were once consecrated by the venerated symbol of his faith. His cause became the cause of Heaven. The church published her bulls of crusade, offering liberal indulgences to those who served, and Paradise to those who fell in battle, against the infidel. The ancient Castilian was remarkable for his independent resistance of papal encroachment; but the peculiarity of his situation subjected him in an uncommon degree to ecclesiastical influence at home. Priests mingled in the council and the camp, and, arrayed in their sacerdotal robes, not unfrequently led the armies to battle. [13] They interpreted the will of Heaven as mysteriously revealed in dreams and visions. Miracles were a familiar occurrence. The violated tombs of the saints sent forth thunders and lightnings to consume the invaders; and, when the Christians fainted in the fight, the apparition of their patron, St. James, mounted on a milk-white steed, and bearing aloft the banner of the cross, was seen hovering in the air, to rally their broken squadrons, and lead them on to victory. [14] Thus the Spaniard looked upon himself as in a peculiar manner the care of Providence. For him the laws of nature were suspended. He was a soldier of the Cross, fighting not only for his country, but for Christendom. Indeed, volunteers from the remotest parts of Christendom eagerly thronged to serve under his banner; and the cause of religion was debated with the same ardor in Spain, as on the plains of Palestine. [15] Hence the national character became exalted by a religious fervor, which in later days, alas! settled into a fierce fanaticism. Hence that solicitude for the purity of the faith, the peculiar boast of the Spaniards, and that deep tinge of superstition, for which they have ever been distinguished above the other nations of Europe. The long wars with the Mahometans served to keep alive in their bosoms the ardent glow of patriotism; and this was still further heightened by the body of traditional minstrelsy, which commemorated in these wars the heroic deeds of their ancestors. The influence of such popular compositions on a simple people is undeniable. A sagacious critic ventures to pronounce the poems of Homer the principal bond which united the Grecian states. [16] Such an opinion may be deemed somewhat extravagant. It cannot be doubted, however, that a poem like that of the "Cid," which appeared as early as the twelfth century, [17] by calling up the most inspiring national recollections in connection with their favorite hero, must have operated powerfully on the moral sensibilities of the people. It is pleasing to observe, in the cordial spirit of these early effusions, little of the ferocious bigotry which sullied the character of the nation in after ages. [18] The Mahometans of this period far excelled their enemies in general refinement, and had carried some branches of intellectual culture to a height scarcely surpassed by Europeans in later times. The Christians, therefore, notwithstanding their political aversion to the Saracens, conceded to them a degree of respect, which subsided into feelings of a very different complexion, as they themselves rose in the scale of civilization. This sentiment of respect tempered the ferocity of a warfare, which, although sufficiently disastrous in its details, affords examples of a generous courtesy, that would do honor to the politest ages of Europe. [19] The Spanish Arabs were accomplished in all knightly exercises, and their natural fondness for magnificence, which shed a lustre over the rugged features of chivalry, easily communicated itself to the Christian cavaliers. In the intervals of peace, these latter frequented the courts of the Moorish princes, and mingled with their adversaries in the comparatively peaceful pleasures of the tourney, as in war they vied with them in feats of Quixotic gallantry. [20] The nature of this warfare between two nations, inhabitants of the same country, yet so dissimilar in their religious and social institutions as to be almost the natural enemies of each other, was extremely favorable to the exhibition of the characteristic virtues of chivalry. The contiguity of the hostile parties afforded abundant opportunities for personal rencounter and bold romantic enterprise. Each nation had its regular military associations, who swore to devote their lives to the service of God and their country, in perpetual war against the _infidel_ [21] The Spanish knight became the true hero of romance, wandering over his own land, and even into the remotest climes, in quest of adventures; and, as late as the fifteenth century, we find him in the courts of England and Burgundy, doing battle in honor of his mistress, and challenging general admiration by his uncommon personal intrepidity. [22] This romantic spirit lingered in Castile, long after the age of chivalry had become extinct in other parts of Europe, continuing to nourish itself on those illusions of fancy, which were at length dispelled by the caustic satire of Cervantes. Thus patriotism, religious loyalty, and a proud sense of independence, founded on the consciousness of owing their possessions to their personal valor, became characteristic traits of the Castilians previously to the sixteenth century, when the oppressive policy and fanaticism of the Austrian dynasty contrived to throw into the shade these generous virtues. Glimpses of them, however, might long be discerned in the haughty bearing of the Castilian noble, and in that erect, high-minded peasantry, whom oppression has not yet been able wholly to subdue. [23] To the extraordinary position, in which the nation was placed, may also be referred the liberal forms of its political institutions, as well as a more early development of them than took place in other countries of Europe. From the exposure of the Castilian towns to the predatory incursions of the Arabs, it became necessary, not only that they should be strongly fortified, but that every citizen should be trained to bear arms in their defence. An immense increase of consequence was given to the burgesses, who thus constituted the most effective part of the national militia. To this circumstance, as well as to the policy of inviting the settlement of frontier places by the grant of extraordinary privileges to the inhabitants, is to be imputed the early date, as well as liberal character, of the charters of community in Castile and Leon. [24] These, although varying a good deal in their details, generally conceded to the citizens the right of electing their own magistrates for the regulation of municipal affairs. Judges were appointed by this body for the administration of civil and criminal law, subject to an appeal to the royal tribunal. No person could be affected in life or property, except by a decision of this municipal court; and no cause while pending before it could be evoked thence into the superior tribunal. In order to secure the barriers of justice more effectually against the violence of power, so often superior to law in an imperfect state of society, it was provided in many of the charters that no nobles should be permitted to acquire real property within the limits of the community; that no fortress or palace should be erected by them there; that such as might reside within its territory, should be subject to its jurisdiction; and that any violence, offered by them to its inhabitants, might be forcibly resisted with impunity. Ample and inalienable funds were provided for the maintenance of the municipal functionaries, and for other public expenses. A large extent of circumjacent country, embracing frequently many towns and villages, was annexed to each city with the right of jurisdiction over it. All arbitrary tallages were commuted for a certain fixed and moderate rent. An officer was appointed by the crown to reside within each community, whose province it was to superintend the collection of this tribute, to maintain public order, and to be associated with the magistrates of each city in the command of the forces it was bound to contribute towards the national defence. Thus while the inhabitants of the great towns in other parts of Europe were languishing in feudal servitude, the members of the Castilian corporations, living under the protection of their own laws and magistrates in time of peace, and commanded by their own officers in war, were in full enjoyment of all the essential rights and privileges of freemen. [25] It is true, that they were often convulsed by intestine feuds; that the laws were often loosely administered by incompetent judges; and that the exercise of so many important prerogatives of independent states inspired them with feelings of independence, which led to mutual rivalry, and sometimes to open collision. But with all this, long after similar immunities in the free cities of other countries, as Italy for example, [26] had been sacrificed to the violence of faction or the lust of power, those of the Castilian cities not only remained unimpaired, but seemed to acquire additional stability with age. This circumstance is chiefly imputable to the constancy of the national legislature, which, until the voice of liberty was stifled by a military despotism, was ever ready to interpose its protecting arm in defence of constitutional rights. The earliest instance on record of popular representation in Castile occurred at Burgos, in 1169; [27] nearly a century antecedent to the celebrated Leicester parliament. Each city had but one vote, whatever might be the number of its representatives. A much greater irregularity, in regard to the number of cities required to send deputies to cortes on different occasions, prevailed in Castile, than ever existed in England; [28] though, previously to the fifteenth century, this does not seem to have proceeded from any design of infringing on the liberties of the people. The nomination of these was originally vested in the householders at large, but was afterwards confined to the municipalities; a most mischievous alteration, which subjected their election eventually to the corrupt influence of the crown. [29] They assembled in the same chamber with the higher orders of the nobility and clergy; but, on questions of moment, retired to deliberate by themselves. [30] After the transaction of other business, their own petitions were presented to the sovereign, and his assent gave them the validity of laws. The Castilian commons, by neglecting to make their money grants depend on correspondent concessions from the crown, relinquished that powerful check on its operations so beneficially exerted in the British parliament, but in vain contended for even there, till a much later period than that now under consideration. Whatever may have been the right of the nobility and clergy to attend in cortes, their sanction was not deemed essential to the validity of legislative acts; [31] for their presence was not even required in many assemblies of the nation which occurred in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. [32] The extraordinary power thus committed to the commons was, on the whole, unfavorable to their liberties. It deprived them of the sympathy and co-operation of the great orders of the state, whose authority alone could have enabled them to withstand the encroachments of arbitrary power, and who, in fact, did eventually desert them in their utmost need. [33] But, notwithstanding these defects, the popular branch of the Castilian cortes, very soon after its admission into that body, assumed functions and exercised a degree of power on the whole superior to that enjoyed by it in other European legislatures. It was soon recognized as a fundamental principle of the constitution, that no tax could be imposed without its consent; [34] and an express enactment to this effect was suffered to remain on the statute book, after it had become a dead letter, as if to remind the nation of the liberties it had lost. [35] The commons showed a wise solicitude in regard to the mode of collecting the public revenue, oftentimes more onerous to the subject than the tax itself. They watched carefully over its appropriation to its destined uses. They restrained a too prodigal expenditure, and ventured more than once to regulate the economy of the royal household. [36] They kept a vigilant eye on the conduct of public officers, as well as on the right administration of justice, and commissions were appointed at their suggestion for inquiring into its abuses. They entered into negotiation for alliances with foreign powers, and, by determining the amount of supplies for the maintenance of troops in time of war, preserved a salutary check over military operations. [37] The nomination of regencies was subject to their approbation, and they defined the nature of the authority to be entrusted to them. Their consent was esteemed indispensable to the validity of a title to the crown, and this prerogative, or at least the image of it, has continued to survive the wreck of their ancient liberties. [38] Finally, they more than once set aside the testamentary provisions of the sovereigns in regard to the succession. [39] Without going further into detail, enough has been said to show the high powers claimed by the commons, previously to the fifteenth century, which, instead of being confined to ordinary subjects of legislation, seem, in some instances, to have reached to the executive duties of the administration. It would, indeed, show but little acquaintance with the social condition of the Middle Ages, to suppose that the practical exercise of these powers always corresponded with their theory. We trace repeated instances, it is true, in which they were claimed and successfully exerted; while, on the other hand, the multiplicity of remedial statutes proves too plainly how often the rights of the people were invaded by the violence of the privileged orders, or the more artful and systematic usurpations of the crown. But, far from being intimidated by such acts, the representatives in cortes were ever ready to stand forward as the intrepid advocates of constitutional freedom; and the unqualified boldness of their language on such occasions, and the consequent concessions of the sovereign, are satisfactory evidence of the real extent of their power, and show how cordially they must have been supported by public opinion. It would be improper to pass by without notice an anomalous institution peculiar to Castile, which sought to secure the public tranquillity by means scarcely compatible themselves with civil subordination. I refer to the celebrated _Hermandad_, or Holy Brotherhood, as the association was sometimes called, a name familiar to most readers in the lively fictions of Le Sage, though conveying there no very adequate idea of the extraordinary functions which it assumed at the period under review. Instead of a regularly organized police, it then consisted of a confederation of the principal cities bound together by solemn league and covenant, for the defence of their liberties in seasons of civil anarchy. Its affairs were conducted by deputies, who assembled at stated intervals for this purpose, transacting their business under a common seal, enacting laws which they were careful to transmit to the nobles and even the sovereign himself, and enforcing their measures by an armed force. This wild kind of justice, so characteristic of an unsettled state of society, repeatedly received the legislative sanction; and, however formidable such a popular engine may have appeared to the eye of the monarch, he was often led to countenance it by a sense of his own impotence, as well as of the overweening power of the nobles, against whom it was principally directed. Hence these associations, although the epithet may seem somewhat overstrained, have received the appellation of "cortès extraordinary." [40] With these immunities, the cities of Castile attained a degree of opulence and splendor unrivalled, unless in Italy, during the middle ages. At a very early period, indeed, their contact with the Arabs had familiarized them with a better system of agriculture, and a dexterity in the mechanic arts unknown in other parts of Christendom. [41] On the occupation of a conquered town, we find it distributed into quarters or districts, appropriated to the several crafts, whose members were incorporated into guilds, under the regulation of magistrates and by- laws of their own appointment. Instead of the unworthy disrepute, into which the more humble occupations have since fallen in Spain, they were fostered by a liberal patronage, and their professors in some instances elevated to the rank of knighthood. [42] The excellent breed of sheep, which early became the subject of legislative solicitude, furnished them with an important staple which, together with the simpler manufactures and the various products of a prolific soil, formed the materials of a profitable commerce. [43] Augmentation of wealth brought with it the usual appetite for expensive pleasures; and the popular diffusion of luxury in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is attested by the fashionable invective of the satirist, and by the impotence of repeated sumptuary enactments. [44] Much of this superfluous wealth, however, was expended on the construction of useful public works. Cities, from which the nobles had once been so jealously excluded, came now to be their favorite residence. [45] But, while their sumptuous edifices and splendid retinues dazzled the eyes of the peaceful burghers, their turbulent spirit was preparing the way for those dismal scenes of faction, which convulsed the little commonwealths to their centre during the latter half of the fifteenth century. The flourishing condition of the communities gave their representatives a proportional increase of importance in the national assembly. The liberties of the people seemed to take deeper root in the midst of those political convulsions, so frequent in Castile, which unsettled the ancient prerogatives of the crown. Every new revolution was followed by new concessions on the part of the sovereign, and the popular authority continued to advance with a steady progress until the accession of Henry the Third, of Trastamara, in 1393, when it may be said to have reached its zenith. A disputed title and a disastrous war compelled the father of this prince, John the First, to treat the commons with a deference unknown to his predecessors. We find four of their number admitted into his privy council, and six associated in the regency, to which he confided the government of the kingdom during his son's minority. [46] A remarkable fact, which occurred in this reign, showing the important advances made by the commons in political estimation, was the substitution of the sons of burgesses for an equal number of those of the nobility, who were stipulated to be delivered as hostages for the fulfilment of a treaty with Portugal, in 1393. [47] There will be occasion to notice, in the first chapter of this History, some of the circumstances, which, contributing to undermine the power of the commons, prepared the way for the eventual subversion of the constitution. The peculiar situation of Castile, which had been so favorable to popular rights, was eminently so to those of the aristocracy. The nobles, embarked with their sovereign in the same common enterprise of rescuing their ancient patrimony from its invaders, felt entitled to divide with him the spoils of victory. Issuing forth, at the head of their own retainers, from their strong-holds or castles, (the great number of which was originally implied in the name of the country,) [48] they were continually enlarging the circuit of their territories, with no other assistance than that of their own good swords. [49] This independent mode of effecting their conquests would appear unfavorable to the introduction of the feudal system, which, although its existence in Castile is clearly ascertained, by positive law, as well as usage, never prevailed to anything like the same extent as it did in the sister kingdom of Aragon, and other parts of Europe. [50] The higher nobility, or _ricos hombres_, were exempted from general taxation, and the occasional attempt to infringe on this privilege in seasons of great public emergency, was uniformly repelled by this jealous body. [51] They could not be imprisoned for debt; nor be subjected to torture, so repeatedly sanctioned in other cases by the municipal law of Castile. They had the right of deciding their private feuds by an appeal to arms; a right of which they liberally availed themselves. [52] They also claimed the privilege, when aggrieved, of denaturalizing themselves, or, in other words, of publicly renouncing their allegiance to their sovereign, and of enlisting under the banners of his enemy. [53] The number of petty states, which swarmed over the Peninsula, afforded ample opportunity for the exercise of this disorganizing prerogative. The Laras are particularly noticed by Mariana, as having a "great relish for rebellion," and the Castros as being much in the habit of going over to the Moors. [54] They assumed the license of arraying themselves in armed confederacy against the monarch, on any occasion of popular disgust, and they solemnized the act by the most imposing ceremonials of religion. [55] Their rights of jurisdiction, derived to them, it would seem, originally from royal grant, [56] were in a great measure defeated by the liberal charters of incorporation, which, in imitation of the sovereign, they conceded to their vassals, as well as by the gradual encroachment of the royal judicatures. [57] In virtue of their birth they monopolized all the higher offices of state, as those of constable and admiral of Castile, _adelantados_ or governors of the provinces, cities, etc. [58] They secured to themselves the grand-masterships of the military orders, which placed at their disposal an immense amount of revenue and patronage. Finally, they entered into the royal or privy council, and formed a constituent portion of the national legislature. These important prerogatives were of course favorable to the accumulation of great wealth. Their estates were scattered over every part of the kingdom, and, unlike the grandees of Spain at the present day, [59] they resided on them in person, maintaining the state of petty sovereigns, and surrounded by a numerous retinue, who served the purposes of a pageant in time of peace, and an efficient military force in war. The demesnes of John, lord of Biscay, confiscated by Alfonso the Eleventh to the use of the crown, in 1327, amounted to more than eighty towns and castles. [60] The "good constable" Davalos, in the time of Henry the Third, could ride through his own estates all the way from Seville to Compostella, almost the two extremities of the kingdom. [61] Alvaro de Luna, the powerful favorite of John the Second, could muster twenty thousand vassals. [62] A contemporary, who gives a catalogue of the annual rents of the principal Castilian nobility at the close of the fifteenth or beginning of the following century, computes several at fifty and sixty thousand ducats a year, [63] an immense income, if we take into consideration the value of money in that age. The same writer estimates their united revenues as equal to one-third of those in the whole kingdom. [64] These ambitious nobles did not consume their fortunes, or their energies in a life of effeminate luxury. From their earliest boyhood they were accustomed to serve in the ranks against the infidel, [65] and their whole subsequent lives were occupied either with war, or with those martial exercises which reflect the image of it. Looking back with pride to their ancient Gothic descent, and to those times, when they had stood forward as the peers, the electors of their sovereign, they could ill brook the slightest indignity at his hand. [66] With these haughty feelings and martial habits, and this enormous assumption of power, it may readily be conceived that they would not suffer the anarchical provisions of the constitution, which seemed to concede an almost unlimited license of rebellion, to remain a dead letter. Accordingly, we find them perpetually convulsing the kingdom with their schemes of selfish aggrandizement. The petitions of the commons are filled with remonstrances on their various oppressions, and the evils resulting from their long, desolating feuds. So that, notwithstanding the liberal forms of its constitution, there was probably no country in Europe, during the Middle Ages, so sorely afflicted with the vices of intestine anarchy, as Castile. These were still further aggravated by the improvident donations of the monarch to the aristocracy, in the vain hope of conciliating their attachment, but which swelled their already overgrown power to such a height, that, by the middle of the fifteenth century, it not only overshadowed that of the throne, but threatened to subvert the liberties of the state. Their self-confidence, however, proved eventually their ruin. They disdained a co-operation with the lower orders in defence of their privileges, and relied too unhesitatingly on their power as a body, to feel jealous of their exclusion from the national legislature, where alone they could have made an effectual stand against the usurpations of the crown.--The course of this work will bring under review the dexterous policy, by which the crown contrived to strip the aristocracy of its substantial privileges, and prepared the way for the period, when it should retain possession only of a few barren though ostentatious dignities. [67] The inferior orders of nobility, the _hidalgos_, (whose dignity, like that of the _ricos hombres_, would seem, as their name imports, to have been originally founded on wealth,) [68] and the _cavalleros_, or knights, enjoyed many of the immunities of the higher class, especially that of exemption from taxation. [69] Knighthood appears to have been regarded with especial favor by the law of Castile. Its ample privileges and its duties are defined with a precision and in a spirit of romance, that might have served for the court of King Arthur. [70] Spain was indeed the land of chivalry. The respect for the sex, which had descended from the Visigoths, [71] was mingled with the religious enthusiasm, which had been kindled in the long wars with the infidel. The apotheosis of chivalry, in the person of their apostle and patron, St. James, [72] contributed still further to this exaltation of sentiment, which was maintained by the various military orders, who devoted themselves, in the bold language of the age, to the service "of God and the ladies." So that the Spaniard may be said to have put in action what, in other countries, passed for the extravagances of the minstrel. An example of this occurs in the fifteenth century, when a passage of arms was defended at Orbigo, not far from the shrine of Compostella, by a Castilian knight, named Sueño de Quenones, and his nine companions, against all comers, in the presence of John the Second and his court. Its object was to release the knight from the obligation, imposed on him by his mistress, of publicly wearing an iron collar round his neck every Thursday. The jousts continued for thirty days, and the doughty champions fought without shield or target, with weapons bearing points of Milan steel. Six hundred and twenty-seven encounters took place, and one hundred and sixty-six lances were broken, when the emprise was declared to be fairly achieved. The whole affair is narrated with becoming gravity by an eye-witness, and the reader may fancy himself perusing the adventures of a Launcelot or an Amadis. [73] The influence of the ecclesiastics in Spain may be traced back to the age of the Visigoths, when they controlled the affairs of the state in the great national councils of Toledo. This influence was maintained by the extraordinary position of the nation after the conquest. The holy warfare, in which it was embarked, seemed to require the co-operation of the clergy, to propitiate Heaven in its behalf, to interpret its mysterious omens, and to move all the machinery of miracles, by which the imagination is so powerfully affected in a rude and superstitious age. They even condescended, in imitation of their patron saint, to mingle in the ranks, and, with the crucifix in their hands, to lead the soldiers on to battle. Examples of these militant prelates are to be found in Spain so late as the sixteenth century. [74] But, while the native ecclesiastics obtained such complete ascendency over the popular mind, the Roman See could boast of less influence in Spain than in any other country in Europe. The Gothic liturgy was alone received, as canonical until the eleventh century; [75] and, until the twelfth, the sovereign held the right of jurisdiction over all ecclesiastical causes, of collating to benefices, or at least of confirming or annulling the election of the chapters. The code of Alfonso the Tenth, however, which borrowed its principles of jurisprudence from the civil and canon law, completed a revolution already begun, and transferred these important prerogatives to the pope, who now succeeded in establishing a usurpation over ecclesiastical rights in Castile, similar to that which had been before effected in other parts of Christendom. Some of these abuses, as that of the nomination of foreigners to benefices, were carried to such an impudent height, as repeatedly provoked the indignant remonstrances of the cortes. The ecclesiastics, eager to indemnify themselves for what they had sacrificed to Rome, were more than ever solicitous to assert their independence of the royal jurisdiction. They particularly insisted on their immunity from taxation, and were even reluctant to divide with the laity the necessary burdens of a war, which, from its sacred character, would seem to have imperative claims on them. [76] Notwithstanding the immediate dependence thus established on the head of the church by the legislation of Alfonso the Tenth, the general immunities secured by it to the ecclesiastics operated as a powerful bounty on their increase; and the mendicant orders in particular, that spiritual militia of the popes, were multiplied over the country to an alarming extent. Many of their members were not only incompetent to the duties of their profession, being without the least tincture of liberal culture, but fixed a deep stain on it by the careless laxity of their morals. Open concubinage was familiarly practised by the clergy, as well as laity, of the period; and, so far from being reprobated by the law of the land, seems anciently to have been countenanced by it. [77] This moral insensibility may probably be referred to the contagious example of their Mahometan neighbors; but, from whatever source derived, the practice was indulged to such a shameless extent, that, as the nation advanced in refinement, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it became the subject of frequent legislative enactments, in which the concubines of the clergy are described as causing general scandal by their lawless effrontery and ostentatious magnificence of apparel. [78] Notwithstanding this prevalent licentiousness of the Spanish ecclesiastics, their influence became every day more widely extended, while this ascendency, for which they were particularly indebted in that rude age to their superior learning and capacity, was perpetuated by their enormous acquisitions of wealth. Scarcely a town was reconquered from the Moors, without a considerable portion of its territory being appropriated to the support of some ancient, or the foundation of some new, religious establishment. These were the common reservoir, into which flowed the copious streams of private as well as royal bounty; and, when the consequences of these alienations in mortmain came to be visible in the impoverishment of the public revenue, every attempt at legislative interference was in a great measure defeated by the piety or superstition of the age. The abbess of the monastery of Huelgas, which was situated within the precincts of Burgos, and contained within its walls one hundred and fifty nuns of the noblest families in Castile, exercised jurisdiction ever fourteen capital towns, and more than fifty smaller places; and she was accounted inferior to the queen only in dignity. [79] The archbishop of Toledo, by virtue of his office primate of Spain and grand chancellor of Castile, was esteemed, after the pope, the highest ecclesiastical dignitary in Christendom. His revenues, at the close of the fifteenth century, exceeded eighty thousand ducats; while the gross amount of those of the subordinate beneficiaries of his church rose to one hundred and eighty thousand. He could muster a greater number of vassals than any other subject in the kingdom, and held jurisdiction over fifteen large and populous towns, besides a great number of inferior places. [80] These princely funds, when intrusted to pious prelates, were munificently dispensed in useful public works, and especially in the foundation of eleemosynary institutions, with which every great city in Castile was liberally supplied. [81] But, in the hands of worldly men, they were perverted from these noble uses to the gratification of personal vanity, or the disorganizing schemes of faction. The moral perceptions of the people, in the mean time, were confused by the visible demeanor of a hierarchy, so repugnant to the natural conceptions of religious duty. They learned to attach an exclusive value to external rites, to the forms rather than the spirit of Christianity; estimating the piety of men by their speculative opinions, rather than their practical conduct.--The ancient Spaniards, notwithstanding their prevalent superstition, were untinctured with the fiercer religious bigotry of later times; and the uncharitable temper of their priests, occasionally disclosed in the heats of religious war, was controlled by public opinion, which accorded a high degree of respect to the intellectual, as well as political superiority of the Arabs. But the time was now coming when these ancient barriers were to be broken down; when a difference of religious sentiment was to dissolve all the ties of human brotherhood; when uniformity of faith was to be purchased by the sacrifice of any rights, even those of intellectual freedom; when, in fine, the Christian and the Mussulman, the oppressor and the oppressed, were to be alike bowed down under the strong arm of ecclesiastical tyranny. The means by which a revolution so disastrous to Spain was effected, as well as the incipient stages of its progress, are topics that fall within the scope of the present history. From the preceding survey of the constitutional privileges enjoyed by the different orders of the Castilian monarchy, previous to the fifteenth century, it is evident that the royal authority must have been circumscribed within very narrow limits. The numerous states, into which the great Gothic empire was broken after the conquest, were individually too insignificant to confer on their respective sovereigns the possession of extensive power, or even to authorize their assumption of that state, by which, it is supported in the eyes of the vulgar. When some more fortunate prince, by conquest or alliance, had enlarged the circle of his dominions, and thus in some measure remedied the evil, it was sure to recur upon his death, by the subdivision of his estates among his children. This mischievous practice was even countenanced by public opinion; for the different districts of the country, in their habitual independence of each other, acquired an exclusiveness of feeling, which made it difficult for them ever cordially to coalesce; and traces of this early repugnance to each other are to be discerned in the mutual jealousies and local peculiarities which still distinguish the different sections of the Peninsula, after their consolidation into one monarchy for more than three centuries. The election to the crown, although no longer vested in the hands of the national assembly, as with the Visigoths, was yet subject to its approbation. The title of the heir apparent was formerly recognized by a cortes convoked for the purpose; and, on the demise of his parent, the new sovereign again convened the estates to receive their oath of allegiance, which they cautiously withheld until he had first sworn to preserve inviolate the liberties of the constitution. Nor was this a merely nominal privilege, as was evinced on more than one memorable occasion. [82] We have seen, in our review of the popular branch of the government, how closely its authority pressed even on the executive functions of the administration. The monarch was still further controlled, in this department, by his Royal or Privy Council, consisting of the chief nobility and great officers of state, to which, in later times, a deputation of the commons was sometimes added. [83] This body, together with the king, had cognizance of the most important public transactions, whether of a civil, military, or diplomatic nature. It was established by positive enactment, that the prince, without its consent, had no right to alienate the royal demesne, to confer pensions beyond a very limited amount, or to nominate to vacant benefices. [84] His legislative powers were to be exercised in concurrence with the cortes; [85] and, in the judicial department, his authority, during the latter part of the period under review, seems to have been chiefly exercised in the selection of officers for the higher judicatures, from a list of candidates presented to him on a vacancy by their members concurrently with his privy council. [86] The scantiness of the king's revenue corresponded with that of his constitutional authority. By an ancient law, indeed, of similar tenor with one familiar to the Saracens, the sovereign was entitled to a fifth of the spoils of victory. [87] This, in the course of the long wars with the Moslems, would have secured him more ample possessions than were enjoyed by any prince in Christendom. But several circumstances concurred to prevent it. The long minorities, with which Castile was afflicted perhaps more than any country in Europe, frequently threw the government into the hands of the principal nobility, who perverted to their own emoluments the high powers intrusted to them. They usurped the possessions of the crown, and invaded some of its most valuable privileges; so that the sovereign's subsequent life was often consumed in fruitless attempts to repair the losses of his minority. He sometimes, indeed, in the impotence of other resources, resorted to such unhappy expedients as treachery and assassination. [88] A pleasant tale is told by the Spanish historians, of the more innocent device of Henry the Third, for the recovery of the estates extorted from the crown by the rapacious nobles during his minority. Returning home late one evening, fatigued and half famished, from a hunting expedition, he was chagrined to find no refreshment prepared for him, and still more so, to learn from his steward, that he had neither money nor credit to purchase it. The day's sport, however, fortunately furnished the means of appeasing the royal appetite; and, while this was in progress, the steward took occasion to contrast the indigent condition of the king with that of his nobles, who habitually indulged in the most expensive entertainments, and were that very evening feasting with the archbishop of Toledo. The prince, suppressing his indignation, determined, like the far-famed caliph in the "Arabian Nights," to inspect the affair in person, and, assuming a disguise, introduced himself privately into the archbishop's palace, where he witnessed with his own eyes the prodigal magnificence of the banquet, teeming with costly wines and the most luxurious viands. The next day he caused a rumor to be circulated through the court, that he had fallen suddenly and dangerously ill. The courtiers, at these tidings, thronged to the palace; and, when they had all assembled, the king made his appearance among them, bearing his naked sword in his hand, and, with an aspect of unusual severity, seated himself on his throne at the upper extremity of the apartment. After an interval of silence in the astonished assembly, the monarch, addressing himself to the primate, inquired of him, "How many sovereigns he had known in Castile?" The prelate answering four, Henry put the same question to the duke of Benevente, and so on to the other courtiers in succession. None of them, however, having answered more than five, "How is this," said the prince, "that you, who are so old, should have known so few, while I, young as I am, have beheld more than twenty! Yes," continued he, raising his voice, to the astonished multitude, "you are the real sovereigns of Castile, enjoying all the rights and revenues of royalty, while I, stripped of my patrimony, have scarcely wherewithal to procure the necessaries of life." Then giving a concerted signal, his guards entered the apartment, followed by the public executioner bearing along with him the implements of death. The dismayed nobles, not relishing the turn the jest appeared likely to take, fell on their knees before the monarch and besought his forgiveness, promising, in requital, complete restitution of the fruits of their rapacity. Henry, content with having so cheaply gained his point, allowed himself to soften at their entreaties, taking care, however, to detain their persons as security for their engagements, until such time as the rents, royal fortresses, and whatever effects had been filched from the crown, were restored. The story, although repeated by the gravest Castilian writers, wears, it must be owned, a marvellous tinge of romance. But, whether fact, or founded on it, it may serve to show the dilapidated condition of the revenues at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and its immediate causes. [89] Another circumstance, which contributed to impoverish the exchequer, was the occasional political revolutions in Castile, in which the adhesion of a faction was to be purchased only by the most ample concessions of the crown.--Such was the violent revolution, which placed the House of Trastamara on the throne, in the middle of the fourteenth century. But perhaps a more operative cause, than all these, of the alleged evil, was the conduct of those imbecile princes, who, with heedless prodigality, squandered the public resources on their own personal pleasures and unworthy minions. The disastrous reigns of John the Second and Henry the Fourth, extending over the greater portion of the fifteenth century, furnish pertinent examples of this. It was not unusual, indeed, for the cortes, interposing its paternal authority, by passing an act for the partial resumption of grants thus illegally made, in some degree to repair the broken condition of the finances. Nor was such a resumption unfair to the actual proprietors. The promise to maintain the integrity of the royal demesnes formed an essential part of the coronation oath of every sovereign; and the subject, on whom he afterwards conferred them, knew well by what a precarious, illicit tenure he was to hold them. From the view which has been presented of the Castilian constitution at the beginning of the fifteenth century, it is apparent, that the sovereign was possessed of less power, and the people of greater, than in other European monarchies at that period. It must be owned, however, as before intimated, that the practical operation did not always correspond with the theory of their respective functions in these rude times; and that the powers of the executive, being susceptible of greater compactness and energy in their movements, than could possibly belong to those of more complex bodies, were sufficiently strong in the hands of a resolute prince, to break down the comparatively feeble barriers of the law. Neither were the relative privileges, assigned to the different orders of the state, equitably adjusted. Those of the aristocracy were indefinite and exorbitant. The license of armed combinations too, so freely assumed both by this order and the commons, although operating as a safety-valve for the escape of the effervescing spirit of the age, was itself obviously repugnant to all principles of civil obedience, and exposed the state to evils scarcely less disastrous than those which it was intended to prevent. It was apparent, that, notwithstanding the magnitude of the powers conceded to the nobility and the commons, there were important defects, which prevented them from resting on any sound and permanent basis. The representation of the people in cortes, instead of partially emanating, as in England, from an independent body of landed proprietors, constituting the real strength of the nation, proceeded exclusively from the cities, whose elections were much more open to popular caprice and ministerial corruption, and whose numerous local jealousies prevented them from acting in cordial co-operation. The nobles, notwithstanding their occasional coalitions, were often arrayed in feuds against each other. They relied, for the defence of their privileges, solely on their physical strength, and heartily disdained, in any emergency, to support their own cause by identifying it with that of the commons. Hence, it became obvious, that the monarch, who, notwithstanding his limited prerogative, assumed the anomalous privilege of transacting public business with the advice of only one branch of the legislature, and of occasionally dispensing altogether with the attendance of the other, might, by throwing his own influence into the scale, give the preponderance to whichever party he should prefer; and, by thus dexterously availing himself of their opposite forces, erect his own authority on the ruins of the weaker.--How far and how successfully this policy was pursued by Ferdinand and Isabella, will be seen in the course of this History. * * * * * Notwithstanding the general diligence of the Spanish historians, they have done little towards the investigation of the constitutional antiquities of Castile, until the present century. Dr. Geddes's meagre notice of the cortes preceded probably, by a long interval, any native work upon that subject. Robertson frequently complains of the total deficiency of authentic sources of information respecting the laws and government of Castile; a circumstance, that suggests to a candid mind an obvious explanation of several errors, into which he has fallen. Capmany, in the preface to a work, compiled by order of the central junta in Seville, in 1809, on the ancient organization of the cortes in the different states of the Peninsula, remarks, that "no author has appeared, down to the present day, to instruct us in regard to the origin, constitution, and celebration of the Castilian cortes, on all which topics there remains the most profound ignorance." The melancholy results to which such an investigation must necessarily lead, from the contrast it suggests of existing institutions to the freer forms of antiquity, might well have deterred the modern Spaniard from these inquiries; which, moreover, it can hardly be supposed, would have received the countenance of government. The brief interval, however, in the early part of the present century, when the nation so ineffectually struggled to resume its ancient liberties, gave birth to two productions, which have gone far to supply the _desiderata_ in this department. I allude to the valuable works of Marina, on the early legislation, and on the cortes, of Castile, to which repeated reference has been made in this section. The latter, especially, presents us with a full exposition of the appropriate functions assigned to the several departments of government, and with the parliamentary history of Castile deduced from original unpublished records. It is unfortunate that his copious illustrations are arranged in so unskilful a manner as to give a dry and repulsive air to the whole work. The original documents, on which it is established, instead of being reserved for an appendix, and their import only conveyed in the text, stare at the reader in every page, arrayed in all the technicalities, periphrases, and repetitions incident to legal enactments. The course of the investigation is, moreover, frequently interrupted by impertinent dissertations on the constitution of 1812, in which the author has fallen into abundance of crudities, which he would have escaped, had he but witnessed the practical operation of those liberal forms of government, which he so justly admires. The sanguine temper of Marina has also betrayed him into the error of putting, too uniformly, a favorable construction on the proceedings of the commons, and of frequently deriving a constitutional precedent from what can only be regarded as an accidental and transient exertion of power in a season of popular excitement. The student of this department of Spanish history may consult, in conjunction with Marina, Sempere's little treatise, often quoted, on the History of the Castilian Cortes. It is, indeed, too limited and desultory in its plan to afford anything like a complete view of the subject. But, as a sensible commentary, by one well skilled in the topics that he discusses, it is of undoubted value. Since the political principles and bias of the author were of an opposite character to Marina's, they frequently lead him to opposite conclusions in the investigation of the same facts. Making all allowance for obvious prejudices, Sempere's work, therefore, may be of much use in correcting the erroneous impressions made by the former writer, whose fabric of liberty too often rests, as exemplified more than once in the preceding pages, on an ideal basis. But, with every deduction, Marina's publications must be considered an important contribution to political science. They exhibit an able analysis of a constitution, which becomes singularly interesting, from its having furnished, together with that of the sister kingdom of Aragon, the earliest example of representative government, as well as from the liberal principles on which that government was long administered. FOOTNOTES [1] Aragon was formally released from this homage in 1177, and Portugal in 1264. (Mariana, Historia General de España, (Madrid, 1780,) lib. 11, cap. 14; lib. 13, cap. 20.) The king of Granada, Aben Alahmar, swore fealty to St. Ferdinand, in 1245, binding himself to the payment of an annual rent, to serve under him with a stipulated number of his knights in war, and personally _attend cortes when summoned_;--a whimsical stipulation this for a Mahometan prince. Conde, Historia de la Dominacion de los Arabes en España, (Madrid, 1820, 1821,) tom. iii. cap. 30. [2] Navarre was too inconsiderable, and bore too near a resemblance in its government to the other Peninsular kingdoms, to require a separate notice; for which, indeed, the national writers afford but very scanty materials. The Moorish empire of Granada, so interesting in itself, and so dissimilar, in all respects, to Christian Spain, merits particular attention. I have deferred the consideration of it, however, to that period of the history which is occupied with its subversion. See Part I., Chapter 8. [3] See the Canons of the fifth Council of Toledo. Florez, España Sagrada, (Madrid, 1747-1776,) tom. vi. p. 168. [4] Recesvinto, in order more effectually to bring about the consolidation of his Gothic and Roman subjects into one nation, abrogated the law prohibiting their intermarriage. The terms in which his enactment is conceived disclose a far more enlightened policy than that pursued either by the Franks or Lombards. (See the Fuero Juzgo, (ed. de la Acad., Madrid, 1815,) lib. 3, tit. 1, ley 1.)--The Visigothic code, Fuero Juzgo, (Forum Judicum,) originally compiled in Latin, was translated into Spanish under St. Ferdinand; a copy of which version was first printed in 1600, at Madrid. (Los Doctores Asso y Manuel, Instituciones del Derecho Civil de Castilla, (Madrid, 1792,) pp. 6, 7.) A second edition, under the supervision of the Royal Spanish Academy, was published in 1815. This compilation, notwithstanding the apparent rudeness and even ferocity of some of its features, may be said to have formed the basis of all the subsequent legislation of Castile. It was, doubtless, the exclusive contemplation of these features, which brought upon these laws the sweeping condemnation of Montesquieu, as "puériles, gauches, idiotes,-- frivoles dans le fond et gigantesques dans le style." Espirit des Loix, liv. 28, chap. 1. [5] Some of the local usages, afterwards incorporated in the _fueros_, or charters, of the Castilian communities, may probably be derived from the time of the Visigoths. The English reader may form a good idea of the tenor of the legal institutions of this people and their immediate descendants, from an article in the sixty-first Number of the Edinburgh Review, written with equal learning and vivacity. [6] The Christians, in all matters exclusively relating to themselves, were governed by their own laws, (See the Fuero Juzgo, Introd. p. 40,) administered by their own judges, subject only in capital cases to an appeal to the Moorish tribunals. Their churches and monasteries (_rosae inter spinas_, says the historian) were scattered over the principal towns, Cordova retaining seven, Toledo six, etc.; and their clergy were allowed to display the costume, and celebrate the pompous ceremonial, of the Romish communion. Florez, España Sagrada, tom. x. trat. 33, cap, 7.-- Morales, Corónica General de España, (Obras, Madrid, 1791-1793,) lib. 12, cap. 78.--Conde, Domination de los Arabes, part 1, cap. 15, 22. [7] Morales, Corónica, lib. 12, cap. 77.--Yet the names of several nobles resident among the Moors appear in the record of those times. (See Salazar de Mendoza, Monarquía de España, (Madrid, 1770,) tom. i. p. 34, note.) If we could rely on a singular fact, quoted by Zurita, we might infer that a large proportion of the Goths were content to reside among their Saracen conquerors. The intermarriages among the two nations had been so frequent, that, in 1311, the ambassador of James II., of Aragon, stated to his Holiness, Pope Clement V., that of 200.000 persons composing the population of Granada, not more than 500 were of pure Moorish descent! (Anales de la Corona de Aragon, (Zaragoza, 1610,) lib. 5, cap. 93.) As the object of the statement was to obtain certain ecclesiastical aids from the pontiff, in the prosecution of the Moorish war, it appears very suspicious, notwithstanding the emphasis laid on it by the historian. [8] Bleda, Corónica de los Moros de España, (Valencia, 1618,) p. 171.-- This author states, that in his time there were several families in Ireland, whose patronymics bore testimony to their descent from these Spanish exiles. That careful antiquarian, Morales, considers the regions of the Pyrenees lying betwixt Aragon and Navarre, together with the Asturias, Biscay, Guipuscoa, the northern portion of Galicia and the Alpuxarras, (the last retreat, too, of the Moors, under the Christian domination,) to have been untouched by the Saracen invaders. See lib. 12, cap. 76. [9] The lot of the Visigothic slave was sufficiently hard. The oppressions, which this unhappy race endured, were such as to lead Mr. Southey, in his excellent Introduction to the "Chronicle of the Cid," to impute to their co-operation, in part, the easy conquest of the country by the Arabs. But, although the laws, in relation to them, seem to be taken up with determining their incapacities rather than their privileges, it is probable that they secured to them, on the whole, quite as great a degree of civil consequence, as was enjoyed by similar classes in the rest of Europe. By the Fuero Juzgo, the slave was allowed to acquire property for himself, and with it to purchase his own redemption. (Lib. 5, tit. 4, ley 16.) A certain proportion of every man's slaves were also required to bear arms, and to accompany their master to the field. (Lib. 9, tit 2, ley 8.) But their relative rank is better ascertained by the amount of composition (that accurate measurement of civil rights with all the barbarians of the north) prescribed for any personal violence inflicted on them. Thus, by the Salic law, the life of a free Roman was estimated at only one-fifth of that of a Frank, (Lex Salica, tit. 43, sec. 1, 8;) while, by the law of the Visigoths, the life of a slave was valued at half of that of a freeman, (lib. 6, tit. 4, ley 1.) In the latter code, moreover, the master was prohibited, under the severe penalties of banishment and sequestration of property, from either maiming or murdering his own slave, (lib. 6, tit. 5, leyes 12, 13;) while, in other codes of the barbarians, the penalty was confined to similar trespasses on the slaves of another; and, by the Salic law, no higher mulct was imposed for killing, than for kidnapping a slave. (Lex Salica, tit. 11, sec. 1, 3.) The legislation of the Visigoths, in those particulars, seems to have regarded this unhappy race as not merely a distinct species of property. It provided for their personal security, instead of limiting itself to the indemnification of their masters. [10] Corónica General, part. 3, fol. 54. [11] According to Morales, (Corónica, lib. 13, cap. 57,) this took place about 850. [12] Toledo was not reconquered until 1085; Lisbon, in 1147. [13] The archbishops of Toledo, whose revenues and retinues far exceeded those of the other ecclesiastics, were particularly conspicuous in these holy wars. Mariana, speaking of one of these belligerent prelates, considers it worthy of encomium, that "it is not easy to decide whether he was most conspicuous for his good government in peace, or his conduct and valor in war." Hist. de España, tom. ii. p. 14. [14] The first occasion, on which the military apostle condescended to reveal himself to the Leonese, was the memorable day of Clavijo, A. D. 844, when 70,000 infidels fell on the field. From that time, the name of St. Jago became the battle-cry of the Spaniards. The truth of the story is attested by a contemporary charter of Ramiro I. to the church of the saint, granting it an annual tribute of corn and wine from the towns in his dominions, and a knight's portion of the spoils of every victory over the Mussulmans. The _privilegio del voto_, as it is called, is given at length by Florez in his Collection, (España Sagrada, tom. xix. p. 329,) and is unhesitatingly cited by most of the Spanish historians, as Garibay, Mariana, Morales, and others.--More sharp-sighted critics discover, in its anachronisms, and other palpable blunders, ample evidence of its forgery. (Mondejar, Advertencies &, la Historia de Mariana (Valencia, 1746,) no. 157,--Masdeu, Historia Crítica de España, y de la Cultura Española, (Madrid, 1783-1805,) tom. xvi. supl. 18.) The canons of Compostella, however, seem to have found their account in it, as the tribute of good cheer, which it imposed, continued to be paid by some of the Castilian towns, according to Mariana, in his day. Hist. de España, tom. i. p. 416. [15] French, Flemish, Italian, and English volunteers, led by men of distinguished rank, are recorded by the Spanish writers to have been present at the sieges of Toledo, Lisbon, Algeziras, and various others. More than sixty, or, as some accounts state, a hundred thousand, joined the army before the battle of Navas de Tolosa; a round exaggeration, which, however, implies the great number of such auxiliaries. (Garibay, Compendio Historial de las Chrónicas de España, (Barcelona, 1628,) lib. 12, cap. 33.) The crusades in Spain were as rational enterprises, as those in the East were vain and chimerical. Pope Pascal II. acted like a man of sense, when he sent back certain Spanish adventurers, who had embarked in the wars of Palestine, telling them that "the cause of religion could be much better served by them at home." [16] See Heeren, Politics of Ancient Greece, translated by Bancroft, chap. 7. [17] The oldest manuscript extant of this poem, (still preserved at Bivar, the hero's birth-place,) bears the date of 1207, or at latest 1307, for there is some obscurity in the writing. Its learned editor, Sanchez, has been led by the peculiarities of its orthography, metre, and idiom, to refer its composition to as early a date as 1153. (Coleccion de Poesías Castellanas anteriores al Siglo XV. (Madrid 1779-90,) tom. i. p. 223.) Some of the late Spanish antiquaries have manifested a skepticism in relation to the "Cid," truly alarming. A volume was published at Madrid, in 1792, by Risco, under the title of "Castilla, o Historia de Rodrigo Diaz," etc., which the worthy father ushered into the world with much solemnity, as a transcript of an original manuscript coeval with the time of the "Cid," and fortunately discovered by him in an obscure corner of some Leonese monastery. (Prólogo). Masdeu, in an analysis of this precious document, has been led to scrutinize the grounds on which the reputed achievements of the "Cid" have rested from time immemorial, and concludes with the startling assertion, that "of Rodrigo Diaz, el Campeador, we absolutely know nothing with any degree of probability, not even his existence!" (Hist. Crítica, tom. xx. p. 370.) There are probably few of his countrymen, that will thus coolly acquiesce in the annihilation of their favorite hero, whose exploits have been the burden of chronicle, as well as romance, from the twelfth century down to the present day. They may find a warrant for their fond credulity, in the dispassionate judgment of one of the greatest of modern historians, John Muller, who, so far from doubting the existence of the Campeador, has succeeded, in his own opinion at least, in clearing from his history the "mists of fable and extravagance," in which it has been shrouded. See his Life of the Cid, appended to Escobar's "Romancero," edited by the learned and estimable Dr. Julius, of Berlin. Frankfort, 1828. [18] A modern minstrel inveighs loudly against this charity of his ancestors, who devoted their "cantos de cigarra," to the glorification of this "Moorish rabble," instead of celebrating the prowess of the Cid, Bernardo, and other worthies of their own nation. His discourtesy, however, is well rebuked by a more generous brother of the craft. "No es culpa si de los Moros los valientes hechos cantan, pues tanto mas resplandecen nuestras celebres hazañas; que el encarecer los hechos del vencido en la batalla, engrandece al vencedor, aunque no hablen de el palabra." Duran, Romancero de Romances Moriscos, (Madrid, 1828.) p. 227. [19] When the empress queen of Alfonso VII. was besieged in the castle of Azeca, in 1139, she reproached the Moslem cavaliers for their want of courtesy and courage in attacking a fortress defended by a female. They acknowledged the justice of the rebuke, and only requested that she would condescend to show herself to them from her palace; when the Moorish chivalry, after paying their obeisance to her in the most respectful manner, instantly raised the siege, and departed. (Ferreras, Histoire Générale d'Espagne, traduite par d'Hermilly, (Paris, 1742-51.) tom. in. p. 410.) It was a frequent occurrence to restore a noble captive to liberty without ransom, and even with costly presents. Thus Alfonso XI. sent back to their father two daughters of a Moorish prince, who formed part of the spoils of the battle of Tarifa. (Mariana, Hist. die España, tom. ii. p. 32.) When this same Castilian sovereign, after a career of almost uninterrupted victory over the Moslems, died of the plague before Gibraltar, in 1350, the knights of Granada put on mourning for him, saying, that "he was a noble prince, and one that knew how to honor his enemies as well as his friends." Conde, Domination de los Arabes, tom. iii. p. 149. [20] One of the most extraordinary achievements, in this way, was that of the grand master of Alcantara, in 1394, who, after ineffectually challenging the king of Granada to meet him in single combat, or with a force double that of his own, marched boldly up to the gates of his capital, where he was assailed by such an overwhelming host, that he with all his little band perished on the field. (Mariana, Hist. de España, lib. 19, cap. 3.) It was over this worthy compeer of Don Quixote that the epitaph was inscribed, "Here lies one who never knew fear," which led Charles V. to remark to one of his courtiers, that "the good knight could never have tried to snuff a candle with his fingers." [21] This singular fact, of the existence of an Arabic military order, is recorded by Conde. (Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. i. p. 619, note.) The brethren were distinguished for the simplicity of their attire, and their austere and frugal habits. They were stationed on the Moorish marches, and were bound by a vow of perpetual war against the Christian infidel. As their existence is traced as far back as 1030, they may possibly have suggested the organization of similar institutions in Christendom, which they preceded by a century at least. The loyal historians of the Spanish military orders, it is true, would carry that of St. Jago as far back as the time of Ramiro I., in the ninth century; (Caro de Torres, Historia de las Ordenes Militares de Santiago, Calatrava, y Alcantara, (Madrid, 1629,) fol. 2.--Rades y Andrada, Chrónica de las Tres Ordenes y Cavallerías, (Toledo, 1572,) fol. 4,) but less prejudiced critics, as Zurita and Mariana, are content with dating it from the papal bull of Alexander III., 1175. [22] In one of the Paston letters, we find the notice of a Spanish knight appearing at the court of Henry VI., "wyth a Kercheff of Plesaunce iwrapped aboute hys arme, the gwych Knight," says the writer, "wyl renne a cours wyth a sharpe spere for his sou'eyn lady sake." (Fenn, Original Letters, (1787,) vol. i. p. 6.) The practice of using sharp spears, instead of the guarded and blunted weapons usual in the tournament, seems to have been affected by the chivalrous nobles of Castile; many of whom, says the chronicle of Juan II., lost their lives from this circumstance, in the splendid tourney given in honor of the nuptials of Blanche of Navarre and Henry, son of John II. (Crónica de D. Juan II., (Valencia, 1779,) p. 411.) Monstrelet records the adventures of a Spanish cavalier, who "travelled all the way to the court of Burgundy to seek honor and reverence" by his feats of arms. His antagonist was the Lord of Chargny; on the second day they fought with battle-axes, and "the Castilian attracted general admiration, by his uncommon daring in fighting with his visor up." Chroniques, (Paris, 1595,) tom. ii. p. 109. [23] The Venetian ambassador, Navagiero, speaking of the manners of the Castilian nobles, in Charles V.'s time, remarks somewhat bluntly, that, "if their power were equal to their pride, the whole world would not be able to withstand them." Viaggio fatto in Spagna et in Francia, (Vinegia, 1563,) fol. 10. [24] The most ancient of these regular charters of incorporation, now extant, was granted by Alfonso V., in 1020, to the city of Leon and its territory. (Mariana rejects those of an earlier date, adduced by Asso and Manuel and other writers. Ensayo Histórico-Crítico, sobre la Antigua Legislation de Castilla, (Madrid, 1808,) pp. 80-82.) It preceded, by a long interval, those granted to the burgesses in other parts of Europe, with the exception, perhaps, of Italy; where several of the cities, as Milan, Pavia, and Pisa, seem early in the eleventh century to have exercised some of the functions of independent states. But the extent of municipal immunities conceded to, or rather assumed by, the Italian cities at this early period, is very equivocal; for their indefatigable antiquarian confesses that all, or nearly all their archives, previous to the time of Frederick I., (the latter part of the twelfth century,) had perished amid their frequent civil convulsions. (See the subject in detail, in Muratori, Dissertazioni sopra le Antichità Italiane, (Napoli, 1752,) dissert. 45.) Acts of enfranchisement became frequent in Spain during the eleventh century; several of which are preserved, and exhibit, with sufficient precision, the nature of the privileges accorded to the inhabitants.--Robertson, who wrote when the constitutional antiquities of Castile had been but slightly investigated, would seem to have little authority, therefore, for deriving the establishment of communities from Italy, and still less for tracing their progress through France and Germany to Spain. See his History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, (London, 1796,) vol. i. pp. 29, 30. [25] For this account of the ancient polity of the Castilian cities, the reader is referred to Sempere, Histoire des Cortès d'Espagne, (Bordeaux, 1815,) and Marina's valuable works, Ensayo Histórico-Crítico sobre la Antigua Legislacion de Camilla, (Nos. 160-196,) and Teoría de las Cortes, (Madrid, 1813, part. 2, cap. 21-23,) where the meagre outline given above is filled up with copious illustration. [26] The independence of the Lombard cities had been sacrificed, according to the admission of their enthusiastic historian, about the middle of the thirteenth century. Sismondi, Histoire des Républiques Italiennes du Moyen-Age, (Paris, 1818,) ch. 20. [27] Or in 1160, according to the Corónica General, (part. 4, fol. 344, 345,) where the fact is mentioned; Mariana refers this celebration of cortes to 1170, (Hist. de España, lib. 11, cap. 2;) but Ferreras, who often rectifies the chronological inaccuracies of his predecessor, fixes it in 1169. (Hist. d'Espagne, tom. iii. p. 484) Neither of these authors notices the presence of the commons in this assembly; although the phrase used by the Chronicle, _los cibdadanos_, is perfectly unequivocal. [28] Capmany, Práctica y Estilo de Celebrar Cortes en Aragon, Cataluña, y Valencia, (Madrid, 1821,) pp. 230, 231.--Whether the convocation of the third estate to the national councils proceeded from politic calculation in the sovereign, or was in a manner forced on him by the growing power and importance of the cities, it is now too late to inquire. It is nearly as difficult to settle on what principles the selection of cities to be represented depended. Marina asserts, that every great town and community was entitled to a seat in the legislature, from the time of receiving its municipal charter from the sovereign, (Teoría, tom. i. p. 138;) and Sempere agrees, that this right became general, from the first, to all who chose to avail themselves of it. (Histoire des Cortès, p. 56.) The right, probably, was not much insisted on by the smaller and poorer places, which, from the charges it involved, felt it often, no doubt, less of a boon than a burden. This, we know, was the case in England. [29] It was an evil of scarcely less magnitude, that contested elections were settled by the crown. (Capmany, Práctica y Estilo, p. 231.) The latter of these practices, and, indeed, the former to a certain extent, are to be met with in English history. [30] Marina leaves this point in some obscurity. (Teoría, tom. i. cap. 28.) Indeed, there seems to have been some irregularity in the parliamentary usages themselves. From minutes of a meeting of cortes at Toledo, in 1538, too soon for any material innovation on the ancient practice, we find the three estates sitting in separate chambers, from the very commencement to the close of the session. See the account drawn up by the count of Coruña, apud Capmany, Práctica y Estilo, pp. 240 et seq. [31] This, however, so contrary to the analogy of other European governments, is expressly contradicted by the declaration of the nobles, at the cortes of Toledo, in 1538. "Oida esta respuesta se dijo, que pues S. M. habia dicho que no eran Córtes ni habia Brazos, no podian tratar cosa alguna, _que ellos sin procuradores, y los procuradores sin ellos, no seria válido lo que hicieren._" Relacion del Conde de Coruña, apud Capmany, Práctica y Estilo, p. 247. [32] This omission of the privileged orders was almost uniform under Charles V. and his successors. But it would be unfair to seek for constitutional precedent in the usages of a government, whose avowed policy was altogether subversive of the constitution. [33] During the famous war of the _Comunidades_, under Charles V. For the preceding paragraph consult Marina, (Teoría, part. 1, cap. 10, 20, 26, 29,) and Capmany. (Práctica y Estilo, pp. 220-250.) The municipalities of Castile seem to have reposed but a very limited confidence in their delegates, whom they furnished with instructions, to which they were bound to conform themselves literally. See Marina, Teoría, part. 1, cap. 23. [34] The term "fundamental principle" is fully authorized by the existence of repeated enactments to this effect. Sempere, who admits the "usage," objects to the phrase "fundamental law," on the ground that these acts were specific, not general, in their character. Histoire des Cortès, p. 254. [35] "Los Reyes en nuestros Reynos progenitores establecieron por leyes, y ordenanças fechas en Cortes, que no se echassen, ni repartiessen ningunos pechos, seruicios, pedidos, ni monedas, ni otros tributes nueuos, especial, ni generalmente en todos nuestros Reynos, sin que primeramente sean llamados à Cortes los procuradores de todas las Ciudades, y villas de nuestros Reynos, y sean otorgados por los dichos procuradores que á las Cortes vinieren." (Recopilacion de las Leyes, (Madrid, 1640,) tom. ii. fol. 124.) This law, passed under Alfonso XI., was confirmed by John II., Henry III., and Charles V. [36] In 1258, they presented a variety of petitions to the king, in relation to his own personal expenditure, as well as that of his courtiers; requiring him to diminish the charges of his table, attire, etc., and, bluntly, to "bring his appetite within a more reasonable compass;" to all which he readily gave his assent. (Sempere y Guarinos, Historia del Luxo, y de las Leyes Suntuarias de España, (Madrid, 1788,) tom. i. pp. 91, 92.) The English reader is reminded of a very different result, which attended a similar interposition of the commons in the time of Richard II., more than a century later. [37] Marina claims also the right of the cortes to be consulted on questions of war and peace, of which he adduces several precedents. (Teoría, part. 2, cap. 19, 20.) Their interference in what is so generally held the peculiar province of the executive, was perhaps encouraged by the sovereign, with the politic design of relieving himself of the responsibility of measures whose success must depend eventually on their support. Hallam notices a similar policy of the crown, under Edward III., in his view of the English constitution during the Middle Ages. View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, (London, 1819,) vol. iii. chap. 8. [38] The recognition of the title of the heir apparent, by a cortes convoked for that purpose, has continued to be observed in Castile down to the present time. Práctica y Estilo, p. 229. [39] For the preceding notice of the cortes, see Marina, Teoría, part. 2, cap. 13, 19, 20, 21, 31, 35, 37, 38. [40] So at least they are styled by Marina. See his account of these institutions; (Teoría, part. 2, cap. 39;) also Salazar de Mendoza, (Monarquía, lib. 3, cap. 15, 16,) and Sempere, (Histoire des Cortès, chap. 12, 13.) One hundred cities associated in the Hermandad of 1315. In that of 1295, were thirty-four. The knights and inferior nobility frequently made part of the association. The articles of confederation are given by Risco, in his continuation of Florez. (España Sagrada, (Madrid, 1775- 1826,) tom. xxxvi. p. 162.) In one of these articles it is declared, that, if any noble shall deprive a member of the association of his property, and refuse restitution, his house shall be razed to the ground. (Art. 4.) In another, that if any one, by command of the king, shall attempt to collect an unlawful tax, he shall be put to death on the spot. Art. 9. [41] See Sempere, Historia del Luxo, tom. i. p. 97.--Masdeu, Hist. Crítica, tom. xiii. nos. 90, 91.--Gold and silver, curiously wrought into plate, were exported in considerable quantities from Spain, the tenth and eleventh centuries. They were much used in the churches. The tiara of the pope was so richly encrusted with the precious metals, says Masdeu, as to receive the name of _Spanodista_. The familiar use of these metals as ornaments of dress is attested by the ancient poem of the "Cid." See, in particular, the costume of the Campeador; vv. 3099 et seq. [42] Zuñiga, Annales Eclesiasticos y Seculares de Sevilla, (Madrid, 1677,) pp. 74, 75.--Sempere, Historia del Luxo, tom. i. p. 80. [43] The historian of Seville describes that city, about the middle of the fifteenth century, as possessing a flourishing commerce and a degree of opulence unexampled since the conquest. It was filled with an active population, employed in the various mechanic arts. Its domestic fabrics, as well as natural products, of oil, wine, wool, etc., supplied a trade with Prance, Flanders, Italy, and England. (Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 341.--See also Sempere, Historia del Luxo, p. 81, nota 2.) The ports of Biscay, which belonged to the Castilian crown, were the marts of an extensive trade with the north, during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This province entered into repeated treaties of commerce with France and England; and her factories were established at Bruges, the great emporium of commercial intercourse during this period between the north and south, before those of any other people in Europe, except the Germans. (Diccionario Geográfico-Histórico de España, por la Real Academia de la Historia, (Madrid, 1802,) tom. i. p. 333.) The institution of the _mesta_ is referred, says Laborde, (Itinéraire Descriptif de l'Espagne, (Paris, 1827-1830,) tom. iv. p. 47,) to the middle of the fourteenth century, when the great plague, which devastated the country so sorely, left large depopulated tracts open to pasturage. This popular opinion is erroneous, since it engaged the attention of government, and became the subject of legislation as anciently as 1273, under Alfonso the Wise. (See Asso y Manuel, Instituciones, Introd. p. 56.) Capmany, however, dates the great improvement in the breed of Spanish sheep from the year 1394, when Catharine of Lancaster brought with her, as a part of her dowry to the heir apparent of Castile, a flock of English merinos, distinguished, at that time, above those of every other country, for the beauty and delicacy of their fleece. (Memorias Históricas sobre la Marina, Comercio, y Artes de Barcelona, (Madrid, 1779-1792,) tom. iii. pp. 336, 337.) This acute writer, after a very careful examination of the subject, differing from those already quoted, considers the raw material for manufacture, and the natural productions of the soil, to have constituted almost the only articles of export from Spain, until after the fifteenth century. (Ibid., p. 338.) We will remark, in conclusion of this desultory note, that the term _merinos_ is derived, by Conde, from _moedinos_, signifying "wandering;" the name of an Arabian tribe, who shifted their place of residence with the season. (Hist. de los Arabes en España, tom. i. p. 488, nota.) The derivation might startle any but a professed etymologist. [44] See the original acts, cited by Sempere. (Historia del Luxo, passim.) The archpriest of Hita indulges his vein freely against the luxury, cupidity, and other fashionable sins of his age. (See Sanchez, Poesias Castellanas, tom. iv.)--The influence of Mammon appears to have been as supreme in the fourteenth century as at any later period. "Sea un ome nescio, et rudo labrador, Los dineros le fasen fidalgo e sabidor, Quanto mas algo tiene, tanto es mas de valor, El que no ba dineros, non es de si señor." Vv. 465 et seq. [45] Marina, Ensayo, nos. 199, 297.--Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 341. [46] Marina, Teoría, part. 2, cap. 28.--Mariana, Hist. de España, lib. 18, cap. 15.--The admission of citizens into the king's council would have formed a most important epoch for the commons, had they not soon been replaced by jurisconsults, whose studies and sentiments inclined them less to the popular side than to that of prerogative. [47] Ibid., lib. 18, cap. 17. [48] _Castilla_. See Salazar de Mendoza, Monarquía, tom. i. p. 108.-- Livy mentions the great number of these towers in Spain in his day. "Multas et locis altis positas turres Hispania habet." (Lib. 22, cap. 19.)--A castle was emblazoned on the escutcheon of Castile, as far back as the reign of Urraca, in the beginning of the twelfth century, according to Salazar de Mendoza, (Monarquía, tom. i. p. 142,) although Garibay discerns no vestige of these arms on any instrument of a much older date than the beginning of the thirteenth century. Compendio, lib. 12, cap. 32. [49] "Hizo guerra a los Moros, Ganando sus fortalezas Y sus villas. Y en las lides que Venció Caballeros y Caballos Se perdiéron, Y en este ofloio ganó Las rentas y los vasallos Que le dieron." Coplas de Manrique, copla 31. [50] Asso and Manuel derive the introduction of fiefs into Castile, from Catalonia. (Instituciones, p. 96.) The twenty-sixth title, part. 4, of Alfonso X.'s code, (Siete Partidas,) treats exclusively of them. (De los Feudos.) The laws 2, 4, 5, are expressly devoted to a brief exposition of the nature of a fief, the ceremonies of investiture, and the reciprocal obligations of lord and vassal. Those of the latter consisted in keeping his lord's counsel, maintaining his interest, and aiding him in war. With all this, there are anomalies in this code, and still more in the usages of the country, not easy to explain on the usual principles of the feudal relation; a circumstance, which has led to much discrepancy of opinion on the subject, in political writers, as well as to some inconsistency. Sempere, who entertains no doubt of the establishment of feudal institutions in Castile, tells us, that "the nobles, after the Conquest, succeeded in obtaining an exemption from military service,"--one of the most conspicuous and essential of all the feudal relations. Histoire des Cortès, pp. 30, 72, 249. [51] Asso y Manuel, Instituciones, p. 26.--Sempere, Histoire des Cortès, chap. 4.--The incensed nobles quitted the cortes in disgust, and threatened to vindicate their rights by arms, on one such occasion, 1176. Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. i. p. 644. See also tom. ii. p. 176. [52] Idem auctores, ubi supra.--Prieto y Sotelo, Historia del Derecho Real de España, (Madrid, 1738,) lib. 2, cap. 23; lib. 3, cap. 8. [53] Siete Partidas, (ed. de la Real Acad., Madrid, 1807,) part. 4, tit. 25, ley 11. On such occasions they sent him a formal defiance by their king at arms. Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. i. pp. 768, 912. [54] Ibid., tom. i. pp. 707, 713. [55] The forms of this solemnity may be found in Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. i. p. 907. [56] Marina, Ensayo, p. 128. [57] John I., in 1390, authorized appeals from the seignorial tribunals to those of the crown. Ibid., tom. ii. p. 179. [58] The nature of these dignities is explained in Salazar de Mendoza, Monarquía, tom. i. pp. 155, 166, 203. [59] From the scarcity of these baronial residences, some fanciful etymologists have derived the familiar saying of "Châteaux en Espagne." See Bourgoanne, Travels in Spain, tom. ii. chap. 12. [60] Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. i. p. 910. [61] Crónica de Don Alvaro de Luna, (ed. de la Acad. Madrid, 1784,) App. p. 465. [62] Guzman, Generaciones y Semblanzas, (Madrid, 1775,) cap. 84.--His annual revenue is computed by Perez de Guzman, at 100,000 doblas of gold; a sum equivalent to 856,000 dollars at the present day. [63] The former of these two sums is equivalent to $438,875, or £91,474 sterling; and the latter to $526,650, or £109,716, nearly. I have been guided by a dissertation of Clemencin, in the sixth volume of the Memorias de la Real Academia de la Historia, (Madrid, 1821, pp. 507-566,) in the reduction of sums in this History. That treatise is very elaborate and ample, and brings under view all the different coins of Ferdinand and Isabella's time, settling their specific value with great accuracy. The calculation is attended with considerable difficulty, owing to the depreciation of the value of the precious metals, and the repeated adulteration of the _real_. In his tables, at the end, he exhibits the commercial value of the different denominations, ascertained by the quantity of wheat (as sure a standard as any), which they would buy at that day. Taking the average of values, which varied considerably in different years of Ferdinand and Isabella, it appears that the ducat, reduced to our own currency, will be equal to about eight dollars and seventy-seven cents, and the dobla to eight dollars and fifty-six cents. [64] The ample revenues of the Spanish grandee of the present time, instead of being lavished on a band of military retainers, as of yore, are sometimes dispensed in the more peaceful hospitality of supporting an almost equally formidable host of needy relations and dependants. According to Bourgoanne (Travels in Spain, vol. 1. chap. 4), no less than 3000 of these gentry were maintained on the estates of the duke of Arcos, who died in 1780. [65] Mendoza records the circumstance of the head of the family of Ponce de Leon, (a descendant of the celebrated marquis of Cadiz,) carrying his son, then thirteen years old, with him into battle; "an ancient usage," he says, "in that noble house." (Guerra de Granada, (Valencia, 1776,) p. 318.) The only son of Alfonso VI. was slain, fighting manfully in the ranks, at the battle of Ucles, in 1109, when only eleven years of age. Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. i. p. 565. [66] The northern provinces, the theatre of this primitive independence, have always been consecrated by this very circumstance, in the eyes of a Spaniard. "The proudest lord," says Navagiero, "feels it an honor to trace his pedigree to this quarter." (Viaggio, fol. 44.) The same feeling has continued, and the meanest native of Biscay, or the Asturias, at the present day, claims to be noble; a pretension, which often contrasts ridiculously enough with the humble character of his occupation, and has furnished many a pleasant anecdote to travellers. [67] An elaborate dissertation, by the advocate Don Alonso Carillo, on the pre-eminence and privileges of the Castilian grandee, is appended to Salazar de Mendoza's Origen de las Dignidades Seglares de Castilla, (Madrid, 1794.) The most prized of these appears to be that of keeping the head covered in the presence of the sovereign; "prerogativa tan ilustre," says the writer, "que ella sola imprime el principal caracter de la Grandeza. Y considerada _por sus efectos admirables_, ocupa dignamente el primero lugar." (Discurso 3.) The sentimental citizen Bourgoanne, finds it necessary to apologize to his republican brethren, for noticing these "important trifles." Travels in Spain, vol. i. chap. 4. [68] "Los llamaron fijosdalgo, que muestra a tanto como fijos de bien." (Siete Partidas, part. 2, tit. 21.) "Por hidalgos se entienden _los hombres escogidos de buenos lugares é con algo_." Asso y Manuel, Instituciones, pp. 33, 34. [69] Recop. de las Leyes, lib. 6, tit. 1, leyes 2, 9; tit. 2, leyes 3, 4, 10; tit. 14, leyes 14, 19.--They were obliged to contribute to the repair of fortifications and public works, although, as the statute expresses it, "tengan privilegios para que sean essentos de todos pechos." [70] The knight was to array himself in light and cheerful vestments, and, in the cities and public places his person was to be enveloped in a long and flowing mantle, in order to impose greater reverence on the people. His good steed was to be distinguished by the beauty and richness of his caparisons. He was to live abstemiously, indulging himself in none of the effeminate delights of couch or banquet. During his repast, his mind was to be refreshed with the recital, from history, of deeds of ancient heroism; and in the fight he was commanded to invoke the name of his mistress, that it might infuse new ardor into his soul, and preserve him from the commission of unknightly actions. See Siete Partidas, part, 2, tit. 21, which is taken up with defining the obligations of chivalry. [71] See Fuero Juzgo, lib. 3, which is devoted almost exclusively to the sex. Montesquieu discerns in the jealous surveillance, which the Visigoths maintained over the honor of their women, so close an analogy with oriental usages, as must have greatly facilitated the conquest of the country by the Arabians. Esprit des Loix, liv. 14, chap. 14. [72] Warton's expression. See vol. i. p. 245, of the late learned edition of his History of English Poetry, (London, 1824.) [73] See the "Passo Honroso" appended to the Crónica de Alvaro de Luna. [74] The present narrative will introduce the reader to more than one belligerent prelate, who filled the very highest post in the Spanish, and, I may say, the Christian Church, next the papacy. (See Alvaro Gomez, De Rebus Gestis a Francisco Ximenio Cisnerio, (Compluti, 1569,) fol. 110 et seq.) The practice, indeed, was familiar in other countries, as well as Spain, at this late period. In the bloody battle of Ravenna, in 1512, two cardinal legates, one of them the future Leo X., fought on opposite sides. Paolo Giovo, Vita Leonis X., apud "Vitae Illustrium Virorum," (Basiliae, 1578,) lib. 2. [75] The contest for supremacy, between the Mozarabic ritual and the Roman, is familiar to the reader, in the curious narrative extracted by Robertson from Mariana, Hist. de España, lib. 9, cap. 18. [76] Siete Partidas, part. 1, tit. 6.--Florez, España Sagrada, tom. xx. p. 16.--The Jesuit Mariana appears to grudge this appropriation of the "sacred revenues of the Church" to defray the expenses of the holy war against the Saracen. (Hist. de España, tom. i. p. 177.) See also the Ensayo, (nos. 322-364,) where Marina has analyzed and discussed the general import of the first of the Partidas. [77] Marina, Ensayo, ubi supra, and nos. 220 et seq. [78] See the original acts quoted by Sempere, in his Historia del Luxo, tom. i. pp. 166 et seq. [79] Lucio Marineo Siculo, Cosas Memorables de España, (Alcalá de Henares, 1539,) fol. 16. [80] Navagiero, Viaggio, fol. 9.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 12.-- Laborde reckons the revenues of this prelate, in his tables, at 12,000,000 reals, or 600,000 dollars. (Itinéraire, tom. vi. p. 9.) The estimate is grossly exaggerated for the present day. The rents of this see, like those of every other in the kingdom, have been grievously clipped in the late political troubles. They are stated by the intelligent author of "A Year in Spain," on the authority of the clergy of the diocese, at one-third of the above sum, only; (p. 217, Boston ed. 1829;) an estimate confirmed by Mr. Inglis, who computes them at £40,000. Spain in 1830, vol. i. ch. 11. [81] Modern travellers, who condemn without reserve the corruption of the inferior clergy, bear uniform testimony to the exemplary piety and munificent charities of the higher dignitaries of the church. [82] Marina, Teoría, part. 2, cap. 2, 5, 6.--A remarkable instance of this occurred as late as the accession of Charles V. [83] The earliest example of this permanent committee of the commons, residing at court, and entering into the king's council, was in the minority of Ferdinand IV., in 1295. The subject is involved in some obscurity, which Marina has not succeeded in dispelling. He considers the deputation to have formed a necessary and constituent part of the council, from the time of its first appointment. (Teoría, tom. ii. cap. 27, 28.) Sempere, on the other hand, discerns no warrant for this, after its introduction, till the time of the Austrian dynasty. (Histoire des Cortès, chap. 29.) Marina, who too often mistakes anomaly for practice, is certainly not justified, even by his own showing, in the sweeping conclusions to which he arrives. But, if his prejudices lead him to see more than has happened, on the one hand, those of Sempere, on the other, make him sometimes high gravel blind. [84] The important functions and history of this body are investigated by Marina. (Teoría, part. 2, cap. 27, 28, 29.) See also Sempere, (Histoire des Cortès, cap. 16,) and the Informe de Don Agustin Riol, (apud Semanario Erudito, tom. iii. pp. 113 et seq.) where, however, its subsequent condition is chiefly considered. [85] Not so exclusively, however, by any means, as Marina pretends. (Teoría, part. 2, cap. 17, 18.) He borrows a pertinent illustration from the famous code of Alfonso X., which was not received as law of the land till it had been formally published in cortes, in 1348, more than seventy years after its original compilation. In his zeal for popular rights, he omits to notice, however, the power so frequently assumed by the sovereign of granting _fueros_, or municipal charters; a right, indeed, which the great lords, spiritual and temporal, exercised in common with him, subject to his sanction. See a multitude of these seignorial codes, enumerated by Asso and Manuel. (Instituciones, Introd., pp. 31 et seq.) The monarch claimed, moreover, though not by any means so freely as in later times, the privilege of issuing _pragmáticas_, ordinances of an executive character, or for the redress of grievances submitted to him by the national legislature. Within certain limits, this was undoubtedly a constitutional prerogative; But the history of Castile, like that of most other countries in Europe, shows how easily it was abused in the hands of an arbitrary prince. [86] The civil and criminal business of the kingdom was committed, in the last resort, to the very ancient tribunal of _alcaldes de casa y corte_, until, in 1371, a new one, entitled the royal audience or chancery, was constituted under Henry II., with supreme and ultimate jurisdiction in civil causes. These, in the first instance, however, might be brought before the _alcaldes de la corte_, which continued, and has since continued, the high court in criminal matters. The _audiencia_, or chancery, consisted at first of seven judges, whose number varied a good deal afterwards. They were appointed by the crown, in the manner mentioned in the text. Their salaries were such as to secure their independence, as far as possible, of any undue influence; and this was still further done by the supervision of cortes, whose acts show the deep solicitude with which it watched over the concerns and conduct of this important tribunal. For a notice of the original organization and subsequent modifications of the Castilian courts, consult Marina, (Teoría, part. 2, cap. 21-25,) Riol, (Informe, apud Semanario Erudito, tom. iii. pp. 129 et seq.) and Sempere, (Histoire des Cortès, chap. 15,) whose loose and desultory remarks show perfect familiarity with the subject, and presuppose more than is likely to be found in the reader. [87] Siete Partidas, part. 2, tit. 26, leyes 5, 6, 7.--Mendoza notices this custom as recently as Philip II.'s day. Guerra de Granada, p. 170. [88] Mariana, Hist. de España, lib. 15, cap. 19, 20. [89] Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. p. 399.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. pp. 234, 235.--Pedro Lopez de Ayala, chancellor of Castile and chronicler of the reigns of four of its successive monarchs, terminated his labors abruptly with the sixth year of Henry III., the subsequent period of whose administration is singularly barren of authentic materials for history. The editor of Ayala's Chronicle considers the adventure, quoted in the text, as fictitious, and probably suggested by a stratagem employed by Henry for the seizure of the duke of Benevente, and by his subsequent imprisonment at Burgos. See Ayala, Crónica de Castilla, p. 355, note, (ed. de la Acad., 1780.) SECTION II. REVIEW OF THE CONSTITUTION OF ARAGON TO THE MIDDLE OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. Rise of Aragon.--Ricos Hombres.--Their Immunities.--Their Turbulence.-- Privileges of Union.--The Legislature.--Its Forms.--Its Powers.--General Privilege.--Judicial Functions of Cortes.--The Justice.--His Great Authority.--Else and Opulence of Barcelona.--Her Free Institutions.-- Intellectual Culture. The political institutions of Aragon, although bearing a general resemblance to those of Castile, were sufficiently dissimilar to stamp a peculiar physiognomy on the character of the nation, which still continued after it had been incorporated with the great mass of the Spanish monarchy.--It was not until the expiration of nearly five centuries after the Saracen invasion, that the little district of Aragon, growing up under the shelter of the Pyrenees, was expanded into the dimensions of the province which now bears that name. During this period, it was painfully struggling into being, like the other states of the Peninsula, by dint of fierce, unintermitted warfare with the infidel. Even after this period, it would probably have filled but an insignificant space in the map of history, and, instead of assuming an independent station, have been compelled, like Navarre, to accommodate itself to the politics of the potent monarchies by which it was surrounded, had it not extended its empire by a fortunate union with Catalonia in the twelfth, and the conquest of Valencia in the thirteenth century. [1] These new territories were not only far more productive than its own, but, by their long line of coast and commodious ports, enabled the Aragonese, hitherto pent up within their barren mountains, to open a communication with distant regions. The ancient county of Barcelona had reached a higher degree of civilization than Aragon, and was distinguished by institutions quite as liberal. The sea-board would seem to be the natural seat of liberty. There is something in the very presence, in the atmosphere of the ocean, which invigorates not only the physical, but the moral energies of man. The adventurous life of the mariner familiarizes him with dangers, and early accustoms him to independence. Intercourse with various climes opens new and more copious sources of knowledge; and increased wealth brings with it an augmentation of power and consequence. It was in the maritime cities scattered along the Mediterranean that the seeds of liberty, both in ancient and modern times, were implanted and brought to maturity. During the Middle Ages, when the people of Europe generally maintained a toilsome and infrequent intercourse with each other, those situated on the margin of this inland ocean found an easy mode of communication across the high road of its waters. They mingled in war too as in peace, and this long period is filled with their international contests, while the other free cities of Christendom were wasting themselves in civil feuds and degrading domestic broils. In this wide and various collision their moral powers were quickened by constant activity; and more enlarged views were formed, with a deeper consciousness of their own strength, than could be obtained by those inhabitants of the interior, who were conversant only with a limited range of objects, and subjected to the influence of the same dull, monotonous circumstances. Among these maritime republics, those of Catalonia were eminently conspicuous. By the incorporation of this country with the kingdom of Aragon, therefore, the strength of the latter was greatly augmented. The Aragonese princes, well aware of this, liberally fostered institutions to which the country owed its prosperity, and skilfully availed themselves of its resources for the aggrandizement of their own dominions. They paid particular attention to the navy, for the more perfect discipline of which a body of laws was prepared by Peter the Fourth, in 1354, that was designed to render it invincible. No allusion whatever is made in this stern code to the mode of surrendering to, or retreating from the enemy. The commander, who declined attacking any force not exceeding his own by more than one vessel, was punished with death. [2] The Catalan navy successfully disputed the empire of the Mediterranean with the fleets of Pisa, and still more of Genoa. With its aid, the Aragonese monarchs achieved the conquest successively of Sicily, Sardinia, and the Balearic Isles, and annexed them to the empire. [3] It penetrated into the farthest regions of the Levant; and the expedition of the Catalans into Asia, which terminated with the more splendid than useful acquisition of Athens, forms one of the most romantic passages in this stirring and adventurous era. [4] But, while the princes of Aragon were thus enlarging the bounds of their dominion abroad, there was probably not a sovereign in Europe possessed of such limited authority at home. The three great states with their dependencies, which constituted the Aragonese monarchy, had been declared by a statute of James the Second, in 1319, inalienable and indivisible. [5] Each of them, however, maintained a separate constitution of government, and was administered by distinct laws. As it would be fruitless to investigate the peculiarities of their respective institutions, which bear a very close affinity to one another, we may confine ourselves to those of Aragon, which exhibit a more perfect model than those either of Catalonia or Valencia, and have been far more copiously illustrated by her writers. The national historians refer the origin of their government to a written constitution of about the middle of the ninth century, fragments of which are still preserved in certain ancient documents and chronicles. On occurrence of a vacancy in the throne, at this epoch, a monarch was elected by the twelve principal nobles, who prescribed a code of laws, to the observance of which he was obliged to swear before assuming the sceptre. The import of these laws was to circumscribe within very narrow limits the authority of the sovereign, distributing the principal functions to a _Justicia_, or Justice, and these same peers, who, in case of a violation of the compact by the monarch, were authorized to withdraw their allegiance, and, in the bold language of the ordinance, "to substitute any other ruler in his stead, even a pagan, if they listed." [6] The whole of this wears much of a fabulous aspect, and may remind the reader of the government which Ulysses met with in Phaeacia; where King Alcinous is surrounded by his "twelve illustrious peers or archons," subordinate to himself, "who," says he, "rule over the people, I myself being the thirteenth." [7] But, whether true or not, this venerable tradition must be admitted to have been well calculated to repress the arrogance of the Aragonese monarchs, and to exalt the minds of their subjects by the image of ancient liberty which it presented. [8] The great barons of Aragon were few in number. They affected to derive their descent from the twelve peers above mentioned, and were styled _ricos hombres de natura_, implying by this epithet, that they were not indebted for their creation to the will of the sovereign. No estate could be legally conferred by the crown, as an _honor_ (the denomination of fiefs in Aragon), on any but one of these high nobles. This, however, was in time evaded by the monarchs, who advanced certain of their own retainers to a level with the ancient peers of the land; a measure which proved a fruitful source of disquietude. [9] No baron could be divested of his fief, unless by public sentence of the Justice and the cortes. The proprietor, however, was required, as usual, to attend the king in council, and to perform military service, when summoned, during two months in the year, at his own charge. [10] The privileges, both honorary and substantial, enjoyed by the _ricos hombres_, were very considerable. They filled the highest posts in the state. They originally appointed judges in their domains for the cognizance of certain civil causes, and over a class of their vassals exercised an unlimited criminal jurisdiction. They were excused from taxation except in specified cases; were exempted from all corporal and capital punishment; nor could they be imprisoned, although their estates might be sequestrated for debt. A lower class of nobility styled _infanzones_, equivalent to the Castilian _hidalgos_, together with the _caballeros_, or knights, were also possessed of important though inferior immunities. [11] The king distributed among the great barons the territory reconquered from the Moors, in proportions determined by the amount of their respective services. We find a stipulation to this effect from James the First to his nobles, previous to his invasion of Majorca. [12] On a similar principle they claimed nearly the whole of Valencia. [13] On occupying a city, it was usual to divide it into _barrios_, or districts, each of which was granted by way of fief to some one of the ricos hombres, from which he was to derive his revenue. What proportion of the conquered territory was reserved for the royal demesne does not appear. [14] We find one of these nobles, Bernard de Cabrera, in the latter part of the fourteenth century, manning a fleet of king's ships on his own credit; another, of the ancient family of Luna, in the fifteenth century, so wealthy that he could travel through an almost unbroken line of his estates all the way from Castile to France. [15] With all this, their incomes in general, in this comparatively poor country, were very inferior to those of the great Castilian lords. [16] The laws conceded certain powers to the aristocracy of a most dangerous character. They were entitled, like the nobles of the sister kingdom, to defy, and publicly renounce their allegiance to their sovereign, with the whimsical privilege, in addition, of commending their families and estates to his protection, which he was obliged to accord, until they were again reconciled. [17] The mischievous right of private war was repeatedly recognized by statute. It was claimed and exercised in its full extent, and occasionally with circumstances of peculiar atrocity. An instance is recorded by Zurita of a bloody feud between two of these nobles, prosecuted with such inveteracy that the parties bound themselves by solemn oath never to desist from it during their lives, and to resist every effort, even on the part of the crown itself, to effect a pacification between them. [18] This remnant of barbarism lingered longer in Aragon than in any other country in Christendom. The Aragonese sovereigns, who were many of them possessed of singular capacity and vigor, [19] made repeated efforts to reduce the authority of their nobles within more temperate limits. Peter the Second, by a bold stretch of prerogative, stripped them of their most important rights of jurisdiction. [20] James the Conqueror artfully endeavored to counterbalance their weight by that of the commons and the ecclesiastics. [21] But they were too formidable when united, and too easily united, to be successfully assailed. The Moorish wars terminated, in Aragon, with the conquest of Valencia, or rather the invasion of Murcia, by the middle of the thirteenth century. The tumultuous spirits of the aristocracy, therefore, instead of finding a vent, as in Castile, in these foreign expeditions, were turned within, and convulsed their own country with perpetual revolution. Haughty from the consciousness of their exclusive privileges and of the limited number who monopolized them, the Aragonese barons regarded themselves rather as the rivals of their sovereign, than as his inferiors. Intrenched within the mountain fastnesses, which the rugged nature of the country everywhere afforded, they easily bade defiance to his authority. Their small number gave a compactness and concert to their operations, which could not have been obtained in a multitudinous body. Ferdinand the Catholic well discriminated the relative position of the Aragonese and Castilian nobility, by saying, "it was as difficult to divide the one, as to unite the other." [22] These combinations became still more frequent after formally receiving the approbation of King Alfonso the Third, who, in 1287, signed the two celebrated ordinances entitled the "Privileges of Union," by which his subjects were authorized to resort to arms on an infringement of their liberties. [23] The _hermandad_ of Castile had never been countenanced by legislative sanction; it was chiefly resorted to as a measure of police, and was directed more frequently against the disorders of the nobility, than of the sovereign; it was organized with difficulty, and, compared with the union of Aragon, was cumbrous and languid in its operations. While these privileges continued in force, the nation was delivered over to the most frightful anarchy. The least offensive movement on the part of the monarch, the slightest encroachment on personal right or privilege, was the signal for a general revolt. At the cry of _Union_, that "last voice," says the enthusiastic historian, "of the expiring republic, full of authority and majesty, and an open indication of the insolence of kings," the nobles and the citizens eagerly rushed to arms. The principal castles belonging to the former were pledged as security for their fidelity, and intrusted to conservators, as they were styled, whose duty it was to direct the operations and watch over the interests of the Union. A common seal was prepared, bearing the device of armed men kneeling before their king, intimating at once their loyalty and their resolution, and a similar device was displayed on the standard and the other military insignia of the confederates. [24] The power of the monarch was as nothing before this formidable array. The Union appointed a council to control all his movements, and, in fact, during the whole period of its existence, the reigns of four successive monarchs, it may be said to have dictated law to the land. At length Peter the Fourth, a despot in heart, and naturally enough impatient of this eclipse of regal prerogative, brought the matter to an issue, by defeating the army of the Union, at the memorable battle of Epila, in 1348, "the last," says Zurita, "in which it was permitted to the subject to take up arms against the sovereign for the cause of liberty." Then, convoking an assembly of the states at Saragossa, he produced before them the instrument containing the two Privileges, and cut it in pieces with his dagger. In doing this, having wounded himself in the hand, he suffered the blood to trickle upon the parchment, exclaiming, that "a law which had been the occasion of so much blood, should be blotted out by the blood of a king." [25] All copies of it, whether in the public archives, or in the possession of private individuals, were ordered, under a heavy penalty, to be destroyed. The statute passed to that effect carefully omits the date of the detested instrument, that all evidence of its existence might perish with it. [26] Instead of abusing his victory, as might have been anticipated from his character, Peter adopted a far more magnanimous policy. He confirmed the ancient privileges of the realm, and made in addition other wise and salutary concessions. From this period, therefore, is to be dated the possession of constitutional liberty in Aragon; (for surely the reign of unbridled license, above described, is not deserving that name;) and this not so much from the acquisition of new immunities, as from the more perfect security afforded for the enjoyment of the old. The court of the _Justicia_, that great barrier interposed by the constitution between despotism on the one hand and popular license on the other, was more strongly protected, and causes hitherto decided by arms were referred for adjudication to this tribunal. [27] From this period, too, the cortes, whose voice was scarcely heard amid the wild uproar of preceding times, was allowed to extend a beneficial and protecting sway over the land. And, although the social history of Aragon, like that of other countries in this rude age, is too often stained with deeds of violence and personal feuds, yet the state at large, under the steady operation of its laws, probably enjoyed a more uninterrupted tranquillity than fell to the lot of any other nation in Europe. The Aragonese cortes was composed of four branches, or arms; [28] the ricos hombres, or great barons; the lesser nobles, comprehending the knights; the clergy, and the commons. The nobility of every denomination were entitled to a seat in the legislature. The ricos hombres were allowed to appear by proxy, and a similar privilege was enjoyed by baronial heiresses. The number of this body was very limited, twelve of them constituting a quorum. [29] The arm of the ecclesiastics embraced an ample delegation from the inferior as well as higher clergy. [30] It is affirmed not to have been a component of the national legislature until more than a century and a half after the admission of the commons. [31] Indeed, the influence of the church was much less sensible in Aragon, than in the other kingdoms of the peninsula. Notwithstanding the humiliating concessions of certain of their princes to the papal see, they were never recognized by the nation, who uniformly asserted their independence of the temporal supremacy of Rome; and who, as we shall see hereafter, resisted the introduction of the Inquisition, that last stretch of ecclesiastical usurpation, even to blood. [32] The commons enjoyed higher consideration and civil privileges than in Castile. For this they were perhaps somewhat indebted to the example of their Catalan neighbors, the influence of whose democratic institutions naturally extended to other parts of the Aragonese monarchy. The charters of certain cities accorded to the inhabitants privileges of nobility, particularly that of immunity from taxation; while the magistrates of others were permitted to take their seats in the order of hidalgos. [33] From a very early period we find them employed in offices of public trust, and on important missions. [34] The epoch of their admission into the national assembly is traced as far back as 1133, several years earlier than the commencement of popular representation in Castile. [35] Each city had the right of sending two or more deputies selected from persons eligible to its magistracy; but with the privilege of only one vote, whatever might be the number of its deputies. Any place, which had been once represented in cortes, might always claim to be so. [36] By a statute of 1307, the convocation of the states, which had been annual, was declared biennial. The kings, however, paid little regard to this provision, rarely summoning them except for some specific necessity. [37] The great officers of the crown, whatever might be their personal rank, were jealously excluded from their deliberations. The session was opened by an address from the king in person, a point of which they were very tenacious; after which the different _arms_ withdrew to their separate apartments. [38] The greatest scrupulousness was manifested in maintaining the rights and dignity of the body; and their intercourse with one another, and with the king, was regulated by the most precise forms of parliamentary etiquette. [39] The subjects of deliberation were referred to a committee from each order, who, after conferring together, reported to their several departments. Every question, it may be presumed, underwent a careful examination; as the legislature, we are told, was usually divided into two parties, "the one maintaining the rights of the monarch, the other, those of the nation," corresponding nearly enough with those of our day. It was in the power of any member to defeat the passage of a bill, by opposing to it his _veto_ or dissent, formally registered to that effect. He might even interpose his negative on the proceedings of the house, and thus put a stop to the prosecution of all further business during the session. This anomalous privilege, transcending even that claimed in the Polish diet, must have been too invidious in its exercise, and too pernicious in its consequences, to have been often resorted to. This may be inferred from the fact, that it was not formally repealed until the reign of Philip the Second, in 1592. During the interval of the sessions of the legislature, a deputation of eight was appointed, two from each arm, to preside over public affairs, particularly in regard to the revenue, and the security of justice; with authority to convoke a cortes extraordinary, whenever the exigency might demand it. [40] The cortes exercised the highest functions whether of a deliberative, legislative, or judicial nature. It had a right to be consulted on all matters of importance, especially on those of peace and war. No law was valid, no tax could be imposed, without its consent; and it carefully provided for the application of the revenue to its destined uses. [41] It determined the succession to the crown; removed obnoxious ministers; reformed the household, and domestic expenditure, of the monarch; and exercised the power, in the most unreserved manner, of withholding supplies, as well as of resisting what it regarded as an encroachment on the liberties of the nation. [42] The excellent commentators on the constitution of Aragon have bestowed comparatively little attention on the development of its parliamentary history; confining themselves too exclusively to mere forms of procedure. The defect has been greatly obviated by the copiousness of their general historians. But the statute-book affords the most unequivocal evidence of the fidelity with which the guardians of the realm discharged the high trust reposed in them, in the numerous enactments it exhibits, for the security both of person and property. Almost the first page which meets the eye in this venerable record contains the General Privilege, the Magna Charta, as it has been well denominated, of Aragon. It was granted by Peter the Great to the cortes at Saragossa, in 1283. It embraces a variety of provisions for the fair and open administration of justice; for ascertaining the legitimate powers intrusted to the cortes; for the security of property against exactions of the crown; and for the conservation of their legal immunities to the municipal corporations and the different orders of nobility. In short, the distinguishing excellence of this instrument, like that of Magna Charta, consists in the wise and equitable protection which it affords to all classes of the community. [43] The General Privilege, instead of being wrested, like King John's charter, from a pusillanimous prince, was conceded, reluctantly enough, it is true, in an assembly of the nation, by one of the ablest monarchs who ever sat on the throne of Aragon, at a time when his arms, crowned with repeated victory, had secured to the state the most important of her foreign acquisitions. The Aragonese, who rightly regarded the General Privilege as the broadest basis of their liberties, repeatedly procured its confirmation by succeeding sovereigns. "By so many and such various precautions," says Blancas, "did our ancestors establish that freedom which their posterity have enjoyed; manifesting a wise solicitude, that all orders of men, even kings themselves, confined within their own sphere, should discharge their legitimate functions without jostling or jarring with one another; for in this harmony consists the temperance of our government. Alas!" he adds, "how much of all this has fallen into desuetude from its antiquity, or been effaced by new customs." [44] The judicial functions of the cortes have not been sufficiently noticed by writers. They were extensive in their operation, and gave it the name of the General Court. They were principally directed to protect the subject from the oppressions of the crown and its officers; over all which cases it possessed original and ultimate jurisdiction. The suit was conducted before the Justice, as president of the cortes, in its judicial capacity, who delivered an opinion conformable to the will of the majority. [45] The authority, indeed, of this magistrate in his own court was fully equal to providing adequate relief in all these cases. [46] But for several reasons this parliamentary tribunal was preferred. The process was both more expeditious and less expensive to the suitor. Indeed, "the most obscure inhabitant of the most obscure village in the kingdom, although a foreigner," might demand redress of this body; and, if he was incapable of bearing the burden himself, the state was bound to maintain his suit, and provide him with counsel at its own charge. But the most important consequence, resulting from this legislative investigation, was the remedial laws frequently attendant on it. "And our ancestors," says Blancas, "deemed it great wisdom patiently to endure contumely and oppression for a season, rather than seek redress before an inferior tribunal, since, by postponing their suit till the meeting of cortes, they would not only obtain a remedy for their own grievance, but one of a universal and permanent application." [47] The Aragonese cortes maintained a steady control over the operations of government, especially after the dissolution of the Union; and the weight of the commons was more decisive in it, than in other similar assemblies of that period. Its singular distribution into four estates was favorable to this. The knights and _hidalgos_, an intermediate order between the great nobility and the people, when detached from the former, naturally lent additional support to the latter, with whom, indeed, they had considerable affinity. The representatives of certain cities, as well as a certain class of citizens, were entitled to a seat in this body; [48] so that it approached both in spirit and substance to something like a popular representation. Indeed, this arm of the cortes was so uniformly vigilant in resisting any encroachment on the part of the crown, that it has been said to represent, more than any other, the liberties of the nation. [49] In some other particulars the Aragonese commons possessed an advantage over those of Castile. 1. By postponing their money grants to the conclusion of the session, and regulating them in some degree by the previous dispositions of the crown, they availed themselves of an important lever relinquished by the Castilian cortes. [50] 2. The kingdom of Aragon proper was circumscribed within too narrow limits to allow of such local jealousies and estrangements, growing out of an apparent diversity of interests, as existed in the neighboring monarchy. Their representatives, therefore, were enabled to move with a more hearty concert, and on a more consistent line of policy. 3. Lastly, the acknowledged right to a seat in cortes, possessed by every city which had once been represented there, and this equally whether summoned or not, if we may credit Capmany, [51] must have gone far to preserve the popular branch from the melancholy state of dilapidation to which it was reduced in Castile by the arts of despotic princes. Indeed, the kings of Aragon, notwithstanding occasional excesses, seem never to have attempted any systematic invasion of the constitutional rights of their subjects. They well knew, that the spirit of liberty was too high among them to endure it. When the queen of Alfonso the Fourth urged her husband, by quoting the example of her brother the king of Castile, to punish certain refractory citizens of Valencia, he prudently replied, "My people are free, and not so submissive as the Castilians. They respect me as their prince, and I hold them for good vassals and comrades."[52] No part of the constitution of Aragon has excited more interest, or more deservedly, than the office of the _Justicia_, or Justice; [53] whose extraordinary functions were far from being limited to judicial matters, although in these his authority was supreme. The origin of this institution is affirmed to have been coeval with that of the constitution or frame of government itself. [54] If it were so, his authority may be said, in the language of Blancas, "to have slept in the scabbard" until the dissolution of the Union; when the control of a tumultuous aristocracy was exchanged for the mild and uniform operation of the law, administered by this, its supreme interpreter. His most important duties may be briefly enumerated. He was authorized to pronounce on the validity of all royal letters and ordinances. He possessed, as has been said, concurrent jurisdiction with the cortes over all suits against the crown and its officers. Inferior judges were bound to consult him in all doubtful cases, and to abide by his opinion, as of "equal authority," in the words of an ancient jurist, "with the law itself." [55] An appeal lay to his tribunal from those of the territorial and royal judges. [56] He could even evoke a cause, while pending before them, into his own court, and secure the defendant from molestation on his giving surety for his appearance. By another process, he might remove a person under arrest from the place in which he had been confined by order of an inferior court, to the public prison appropriated to this purpose, there to abide his own examination of the legality of his detention. These two provisions, by which the precipitate and perhaps intemperate proceedings of subordinate judicatures were subjected to the revision of a dignified and dispassionate tribunal, might seem to afford sufficient security for personal liberty and property. [57] In addition to these official functions, the Justice of Aragon was constituted a permanent counsellor of the sovereign, and, as such, was required to accompany him where-ever he might reside. He was to advise the king on all constitutional questions of a doubtful complexion; and finally, on a new accession to the throne, it was his province to administer the coronation oath; this he performed with his head covered, and sitting, while the monarch, kneeling before him bare-headed, solemnly promised to maintain the liberties of the kingdom. A ceremony eminently symbolical of that superiority of law over prerogative, which was so constantly asserted in Aragon. [58] It was the avowed purpose of the institution of the Justicia to interpose such an authority between the crown and the people, as might suffice for the entire protection of the latter. This is the express import of one of the laws of Soprarbe, which, whatever he thought of their authenticity, are undeniably of very high antiquity. [59] This part of his duties is particularly insisted on by the most eminent juridical writers of the nation. Whatever estimate, therefore, may be formed of the real extent of his powers, as compared with those of similar functionaries in other states of Europe, there can be no doubt that this ostensible object of their creation, thus openly asserted, must have had a great tendency to enforce their practical operation. Accordingly we find repeated examples, in the history of Aragon, of successful interposition on the part of the Justice for the protection of individuals persecuted by the crown, and in defiance of every attempt at intimidation. [60] The kings of Aragon, chafed by this opposition, procured the resignation or deposition, on more than one occasion, of the obnoxious magistrate. [61] But, as such an exercise of prerogative must have been altogether subversive of an independent discharge of the duties of this office, it was provided by a statute of Alfonso the Fifth, in 1442, that the Justice should continue in office during life, removable only, on sufficient cause, by the king and the cortes united. [62] Several provisions were enacted, in order to secure the nation more effectually against the abuse of the high trust reposed in this officer. He was to be taken from the equestrian order, which, as intermediate between the high nobility and the people, was less likely to be influenced by undue partiality to either. He could not be selected from the ricos hombres, since this class was exempted from corporal punishment, while the Justice was made responsible to the cortes for the faithful discharge of his duties, under penalty of death. [63] As this supervision of the whole legislature was found unwieldy in practice, it was superseded, after various modifications by a commission of members elected from each one of the four estates, empowered to sit every year in Saragossa, with authority to investigate the charges preferred against the Justice, and to pronounce sentence upon him. [64] The Aragonese writers are prodigal of their encomiums on the pre-eminence and dignity of this functionary, whose office might seem, indeed, but a doubtful expedient for balancing the authority of the sovereign; depending for its success less on any legal powers confided to it, than on the efficient and constant support of public opinion. Fortunately the Justice of Aragon uniformly received such support, and was thus enabled to carry the original design of the institution into effect, to check the usurpations of the crown, as well as to control the license of the nobility and the people. A series of learned and independent magistrates, by the weight of their own character, gave additional dignity to the office. The people, familiarized with the benignant operation of the law, referred to peaceful arbitration those great political questions, which, in other countries at this period, must have been settled by a sanguinary revolution. [65] While, in the rest of Europe, the law seemed only the web to ensnare the weak, the Aragonese historians could exult in the reflection, that the fearless administration of justice in their land "protected the weak equally with the strong, the foreigner with the native." Well might their legislature assert, that the value of their liberties more than counterbalanced "the poverty of the nation, and the sterility of their soil." [66] The governments of Valencia and Catalonia, which, as has been already remarked, were administered independently of each other after their consolidation into one monarchy, bore a very near resemblance to that of Aragon. [67] No institution, however, corresponding in its functions with that of the Justicia, seems to have obtained in either. [68] Valencia, which had derived a large portion of its primitive population, after the conquest, from Aragon, preserved the most intimate relations with the parent kingdom, and was constantly at its side during the tempestuous season of the Union. The Catalans were peculiarly jealous of their exclusive privileges, and their civil institutions wore a more democratical aspect than those of any other of the confederated states; circumstances, which led to important results that fall within the compass of our narrative. [69] The city of Barcelona, which originally gave its name to the county of which it was the capital, was distinguished from a very early period by ample municipal privileges. [70] After the union with Aragon in the twelfth century, the monarchs of the latter kingdom extended towards it the same liberal legislation; so that, by the thirteenth, Barcelona had reached a degree of commercial prosperity rivalling that of any of the Italian republics. She divided with them the lucrative commerce with Alexandria; and her port, thronged with foreigners from every nation, became a principal emporium in the Mediterranean for the spices, drugs, perfumes, and other rich commodities of the east, whence they were diffused over the interior of Spain and the European continent. [71] Her consuls, and her commercial factories, were established in every considerable port in the Mediterranean and in the north of Europe. [72] The natural products of her soil, and her various domestic fabrics, supplied her with abundant articles of export. Fine wool was imported by her in considerable quantities from England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and returned there manufactured into cloth; an exchange of commodities the reverse of that existing between the two nations at the present day. [73] Barcelona claims the merit of having established the first bank of exchange and deposit in Europe, in 1401; it was devoted to the accommodation of foreigners as well as of her own citizens. She claims the glory, too, of having compiled the most ancient written code, among the moderns, of maritime law now extant, digested from the usages of commercial nations, and which formed the basis of the mercantile jurisprudence of Europe during the Middle Ages. [74] The wealth which flowed in upon Barcelona, as the result of her activity and enterprise, was evinced by her numerous public works, her docks, arsenal, warehouses, exchange, hospitals, and other constructions of general utility. Strangers, who visited Spain in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, expatiate on the magnificence of this city, its commodious private edifices, the cleanliness of its streets and public squares (a virtue by no means usual in that day), and on the amenity of its gardens and cultivated environs. [75] But the peculiar glory of Barcelona was the freedom of her municipal institutions. Her government consisted of a senate or council of one hundred, and a body of _regidores_ or counsellors, as they were styled, varying at times from four to six in number; the former intrusted with the legislative, the latter with the executive functions of administration. A large proportion of these bodies were selected from the merchants, tradesmen, and mechanics of the city. They were invested, not merely with municipal authority, but with many of the rights of sovereignty. They entered into commercial treaties with foreign powers; superintended the defence of the city in time of war; provided for the security of trade; granted letters of reprisal against any nation who might violate it; and raised and appropriated the public moneys for the construction of useful works, or the encouragement of such commercial adventures as were too hazardous or expensive for individual enterprise. [76] The counsellors, who presided over the municipality, were complimented with certain honorary privileges, not even accorded to the nobility. They were addressed by the title of _magníficos_; were seated, with their heads covered, in the presence of royalty; were preceded by mace-bearers, or lictors, in their progress through the country; and deputies from their body to the court were admitted on the footing, and received the honors, of foreign ambassadors. [77] These, it will be recollected, were plebeians,--merchants and mechanics. Trade never was esteemed a degradation in Catalonia, as it came to be in Castile. [78] The professors of the different arts, as they were called, organized into guilds or companies, constituted so many independent associations, whose members were eligible to the highest municipal offices. And such was the importance attached to these offices, that the nobility in many instances, resigning the privileges of their rank, a necessary preliminary, were desirous of being enrolled among the candidates for them. [79] One cannot but observe in the peculiar organization of this little commonwealth, and in the equality assumed by every class of its citizens, a close analogy to the constitutions of the Italian republics; which the Catalans, having become familiar with in their intimate commercial intercourse with Italy, may have adopted as the model of their own. Under the influence of these democratic institutions, the burghers of Barcelona, and indeed of Catalonia in general, which enjoyed more or less of a similar freedom, assumed a haughty independence of character beyond what existed among the same class in other parts of Spain; and this, combined with the martial daring fostered by a life of maritime adventure and warfare, made them impatient, not merely of oppression, but of contradiction, on the part of their sovereigns, who have experienced more frequent and more sturdy resistance from this quarter of their dominions, than from every other. [80] Navagiero, the Venetian ambassador to Spain, early in the sixteenth century, although a republican himself, was so struck with what he deemed the insubordination of the Barcelonians, that he asserts, "The inhabitants have so many privileges, that the king scarcely retains any authority over them; their liberty," he adds, "should rather go by the name of license." [81] One example among many, may be given, of the tenacity with which they adhered to their most inconsiderable immunities. Ferdinand the First, in 1416, being desirous, in consequence of the exhausted state of the finances on his coming to the throne, to evade the payment of a certain tax or subsidy customarily paid by the kings of Aragon to the city of Barcelona, sent for the president of the council, John Fiveller, to require the consent of that body to this measure. The magistrate, having previously advised with his colleagues, determined to encounter any hazard, says Zurita, rather than compromise the rights of the city. He reminded the king of his coronation oath, expressed his regret that he was willing so soon to deviate from the good usages of his predecessors, and plainly told him, that he and his comrades would never betray the liberties entrusted to them. Ferdinand, indignant at this language, ordered the patriot to withdraw into another apartment, where he remained in much uncertainty as to the consequences of his temerity. But the king was dissuaded from violent measures, if he ever contemplated them, by the representation of his courtiers, who warned him not to reckon too much on the patience of the people, who bore small affection to his person, from _the little familiarity with which he had treated them_ in comparison with their preceding monarchs, and who were already in arms to protect their magistrate. In consequence of these suggestions, Ferdinand deemed it prudent to release the counsellor, and withdrew abruptly from the city on the ensuing day, disgusted at the ill success of his enterprise. [82] The Aragonese monarchs well understood the value of their Catalan dominions, which sustained a proportion of the public burdens equal in amount to that of both the other states of the kingdom. [83] Notwithstanding the mortifications, which they occasionally experienced from this quarter, therefore, they uniformly extended towards it the most liberal protection. A register of the various customs paid in the ports of Catalonia, compiled in 1413, under the above-mentioned Ferdinand, exhibits a discriminating legislation, extraordinary in an age when the true principles of financial policy were so little understood. [84] Under James the First, in 1227, a navigation act, limited in its application, was published, and another under Alfonso the Fifth, in 1454, embracing all the dominions of Aragon; thus preceding by some centuries the celebrated ordinance, to which England owes so much of her commercial grandeur. [85] The brisk concussion given to the minds of the Catalans in the busy career in which they were engaged, seems to have been favorable to the development of poetical talent, in the same manner as it was in Italy. Catalonia may divide with Provence the glory of being the region where the voice of song was first awakened in modern Europe. Whatever may be the relative claims of the two countries to precedence in this respect, [86] it is certain that under the family of Barcelona, the Provençal of the south of France reached its highest perfection; and, when the tempest of persecution in the beginning of the thirteenth century fell on the lovely valleys of that unhappy country, its minstrels found a hospitable asylum in the court of the kings of Aragon; many of whom not only protected, but cultivated the _gay science_ with considerable success. [87] Their names have descended to us, as well as those of less illustrious troubadours, whom Petrarch and his contemporaries did not disdain to imitate; [88] but their compositions, for the most part, lie still buried in those cemeteries of the intellect so numerous in Spain, and call loudly for the diligence of some Sainte Palaye or Raynouard to disinter them. [89] The languishing condition of the poetic art, at the close of the fourteenth century, induced John the First, who mingled somewhat of the ridiculous even with his most respectable tastes, to depute a solemn embassy to the king of France, requesting that a commission might be detached from the Floral Academy of Toulouse, into Spain, to erect there a similar institution. This was accordingly done, and the Consistory of Barcelona was organized, in 1390. The kings of Aragon endowed it with funds, and with a library valuable for that day, presiding over its meetings in person, and distributing the poetical premiums with their own hands. During the troubles consequent on the death of Martin, this establishment fell into decay, until it was again revived, on the accession of Ferdinand the First, by the celebrated Henry, marquis of Villena, who transplanted it to Tortosa. [90] The marquis, in his treatise on the _gaya sciencia_, details with becoming gravity the pompous ceremonial observed in his academy on the event of a public celebration. The topics of discussion were "the praises of the Virgin, love, arms, and other good usages." The performances of the candidates, "inscribed on parchment of various colors, richly enamelled with gold and silver, and beautifully illuminated," were publicly recited, and then referred to a committee, who made solemn oath to decide impartially and according to the rules of the art. On the delivery of the verdict, a wreath of gold was deposited on the victorious poem, which was registered in the academic archives; and the fortunate troubadour, greeted with a magnificent prize, was escorted to the royal palace amid a _cortège_ of minstrelsy and chivalry; "thus manifesting to the world," says the marquis, "the superiority which God and nature have assigned to genius over dulness." [91] The influence of such an institution in awakening a poetic spirit is at best very questionable. Whatever effect an academy may have in stimulating the researches of science, the inspirations of genius must come unbidden; "Adflata est numine quando Jam propiore del." The Catalans, indeed, seem to have been of this opinion; for they suffered the Consistory of Tortosa to expire with its founder. Somewhat later, in 1430, was established the University of Barcelona, placed under the direction of the municipality, and endowed by the city with ample funds for instruction in the various departments of law, theology, medicine, and the belles-lettres. This institution survived until the commencement of the last century. [92] During the first half of the fifteenth century, long after the genuine race of the troubadours had passed away, the Provençal or Limousin verse was carried to its highest excellence by the poets of Valencia. [93] It would be presumptuous for any one, who has not made the _Romance_ dialects his particular study, to attempt a discriminating criticism of these compositions, so much of the merit of which necessarily consists in the almost impalpable beauties of style and expression. The Spaniards, however, applaud, in the verses of Ausias March, the same musical combinations of sound, and the same tone of moral melancholy, which pervade the productions of Petrarch. [94] In prose too, they have (to borrow the words of Andres) their Boccaccio in Martorell; whose fiction of "Tirante el Blanco" is honored by the commendation of the curate in Don Quixote, as "the best book in the world of the kind, since the knights- errant in it eat, drink, sleep, and die quietly in their beds, like other folk, and very unlike most heroes of romance." The productions of these, and some other of their distinguished contemporaries, obtained a general circulation very early by means of the recently invented art of printing, and subsequently passed into repeated editions.[95] But their language has long since ceased to be the language of literature. On the union of the two crowns of Castile and Aragon, the dialect of the former became that of the court and of the Muses. The beautiful Provençal, once more rich and melodious than any other idiom in the Peninsula, was abandoned as a _patois_ to the lower orders of the Catalans, who, with the language, may boast that they also have inherited the noble principles of freedom which distinguished their ancestors. * * * * * The influence of free institutions in Aragon is perceptible in the familiarity displayed by its writers with public affairs, and in the freedom with which they have discussed the organization, and general economy of its government. The creation of the office of national chronicler, under Charles V., gave wider scope to the development of historic talent. Among the most conspicuous of these historiographers was Jerome Blancas, several of whose productions, as the "Coronaciones de los Reyes," "Modo de Proceder en Cortes," and "Commentarii Rerum Aragonensium," especially the last, have been repeatedly quoted in the preceding section. This work presents a view of the different orders of the state, and particularly of the office of the Justicia, with their peculiar functions and privileges. The author, omitting the usual details of history, has devoted himself to the illustration of the constitutional antiquities of his country, in the execution of which he has shown a sagacity and erudition equally profound. His sentiments breathe a generous love of freedom, which one would scarcely suppose to have existed, and still less to have been promulgated, under Philip II. His style is distinguished by the purity and even elegance of its latinity. The first edition, being that which I have used, appeared in 1588, in folio, at Saragossa, executed with much typographical beauty. The work was afterwards incorporated into Schottus's "Hispania Illustrata."--Blancas, after having held his office for ten years, died in his native city of Saragossa, in 1590. Jerome Martel, from whose little treatise, "Forma de Celebrar Cortes," I have also liberally cited, was appointed public historiographer in 1597. His continuation of Zurita's Annals, which he left unpublished at his decease, was never admitted to the honors of the press, because, says his biographer, Uztarroz, _verdades lastiman_; a reason as creditable to the author as disgraceful to the government. A third writer, and the one chiefly relied on for the account of Catalonia, is Don Antonio Capmany. His "Memorias Históricas de Barcelona," (5 tom. 4to, Madrid, 1779-1792,) may be thought somewhat too discursive and circumstantial for his subject; but it is hardly right to quarrel with information so rare, and painfully collected; the sin of exuberance at any rate is much less frequent, and more easily corrected, than that of sterility. His work is a vast repertory of facts relating to the commerce, manufactures, general policy, and public prosperity, not only of Barcelona, but of Catalonia. It is written with an independent and liberal spirit, which may be regarded as affording the best commentary on the genius of the institutions which he celebrates.--Capmany closed his useful labors at Madrid, in 1810, at the age of fifty-six. Notwithstanding the interesting character of the Aragonese constitution, and the amplitude of materials for its history, the subject has been hitherto neglected, as far as I am aware, by continental writers. Robertson and Hallam, more especially the latter, have given such a view of its prominent features to the English reader, as must, I fear, deprive the sketch which I have attempted, in a great degree, of novelty. To these names must now be added that of the author of the "History of Spain and Portugal," (Cabinet Cyclopaedia,) whose work, published since the preceding pages were written, contains much curious and learned disquisition on the early jurisprudence and municipal institutions of both Castile and Aragon. FOOTNOTES [1] Catalonia was united with Aragon by the marriage of queen Petronilla with Raymond Berengere, count of Barcelona, in 1150. Valencia was conquered from the Moors by James I., in 1238. [2] Capmany, Mem. de Barcelona, tom. iii. pp. 45-47.--The Catalans were much celebrated during the Middle Ages for their skill with the crossbow; for a more perfect instruction in which, the municipality of Barcelona established games and gymnasiums. Ibid., tom. i. p. 113. [3] Sicily revolted to Peter III., in 1282.--Sardinia was conquered by James II., in 1324, and the Balearic Isles by Peter IV., in 1343-4. Zurita, Anales, tom. i. fol. 247; tom. ii. fol. 60.--Hermilly, Histoire du Royaume de Majorque, (Maestricht, 1777,) pp. 227-268. [4] Hence the title of duke of Athens, assumed by the Spanish sovereigns. The brilliant fortunes of Roger de Flor are related by count Moncada, (Expedicion de los Catalanes y Aragoneses contrá Turcos y Griegos, Madrid, 1805) in a style much commended by Spanish critics for its elegance. See Mondejar, Advertencias, p. 184. [5] It was confirmed by Alfonso III., in 1328. Zurita, Anales, tom. ii. fol. 90. [6] See the fragments of the _Fuero de Soprarbe_, cited by Blancas, Aragonensium Rerum Commentarii, (Caesaraugustae, 1588.) pp. 25-29.--The well-known oath of the Aragonese to their sovereign on his accession, "Nos que valemos tanto como vos," etc., frequently quoted by historians, rests on the authority of Antonio Perez, the unfortunate minister of Philip II., who, however good a voucher for the usages of his own time, has made a blunder in the very sentence preceding this, by confounding the Privilege of Union with one of the Laws of Soprarbe, which shows him to be insufficient, especially as he is the only, authority for this ancient ceremony. See Antonio Perez, Relaciones, (Paris, 1598,) fol. 92. [7] Dodeka gar kata daemon aripretees Basilaees Archoi krainonsi, triskaidekatos d' ego autos. Odyss. O 390. In like manner Alfonso III. alludes to "the ancient times in Aragon, when there were as many kings as ricos hombres." See Zurita, Anales, tom. i. fol. 316. [8] The authenticity of the "Fuero de Soprarbe" has been keenly debated by the Aragonese and Navarrese writers. Moret, in refutation of Blancas, who espouses it, (see Commentarii, p. 289,) states, that after a diligent investigation of the archives of that region, he finds no mention of the laws, nor even of the name, of Soprarbe, until the eleventh century; a startling circumstance for the antiquary. (Investigaciones Históricas de las Antiguedades del Reyno de Navarra, (Pamplona, 1766,) tom. vi. lib. 2, cap. 11.) Indeed, the historians of Aragon admit, that the public documents previous to the fourteenth century suffered so much from various causes as to leave comparatively few materials for authentic narrative. (Blancas, Commentarii, Pref.--Risco, España Sagrada, tom. xxx. Prólogo.) Blancas transcribed his extract of the laws of Soprarbe principally from Prince Charles of Viana's History, written in the fifteenth century. See Commentarii, p. 25. [9] Asso y Manuel, Instituciones, pp. 39, 40.--Blancas, Commentarii, pp. 333, 334, 340.--Fueros y Observancias del Reyno de Aragon, (Zaragoza, 1667,) tom. i. fol. 130.--The _ricos hombres_, thus created by the monarch, were styled _de mesnada_, signifying "of the household." It was lawful for a _rico hombre_ to bequeath his honors to whichsoever of his legitimate children he might prefer, and, in default of issue, to his nearest of kin. He was bound to distribute the bulk of his estates in fiefs among his knights, so that a complete system of sub-infeudation was established. The knights, on restoring their fiefs, might change their suzerains at pleasure. [10] Asso y Manuel, Instituciones, p. 41.--Blancas, Commentarii, pp. 307, 322, 331. [11] Fueros y Observancias, tom. i. fol. 130.--Martel, Forma de Celebrar Cortes en Aragon, (Zaragoza, 1641,) p. 98.--Blancas, Commentarii, pp. 306, 312-317, 323, 360.--Asso y Manual, Instituciones, pp. 40-43. [12] Zurita, Anales, tom. i. fol. 124. [13] Blancas, Commentarii, p. 334. [14] See the partition of Saragossa by Alonso the Warrior. Zurita, Anales, tom. i. fol. 43. [15] Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. p. 198.--Blancas, Commentarii, p. 218. [16] See a register of these at the beginning of the sixteenth century, apud L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 25. [17] Zurita, Anales, tom. ii. fol. 127.--Blancas, Commentarii, p. 324.-- "Adhaec Ricis hominibus ipsis majorum more institutisque concedebatur, ut sese possent, dum ipsi vellent, a nostrorum Regum jure et potestare, quasi nodum aliquem, expedire; neque expedire solum, _sed dimisso prius, quo potirentur, Honore_, bellum ipsis inferre; Reges vero Rici hominis sic expediti uxorem, filios, familiam, res, bona, et fortunas omnes in suam recipere fidem tenebantur. Neque ulla erat eorum utilitatis facienda jactura." [18] Fueros y Observancias, tom. i. p. 84.--Zurita, Anales, tom. i. fol. 350. [19] Blancas somewhere boasts, that no one of the kings of Aragon has been stigmatized by a cognomen of infamy, as in most of the other royal races of Europe. Peter IV., "the Ceremonious," richly deserved one. [20] Zurita, Anales, tom. i. fol. 102. [21] Zurita, Anales, tom. i. fol. 198.--He recommended this policy to his son-in-law, the king of Castile. [22] Sempere, Histoire des Cortès, p. 164. [23] Zurita, Anales, lib. 4, cap. 96.--Abarca dates this event in the year preceding. Reyes de Aragon, en Anales Históricos, (Madrid, 1682-1684,) tom. ii. fol. 8. [24] Blancas, Commentarii, pp. 192, 193.--Zurita, Anales, tom. i. fol. 266 et alibi. [25] Zurita, Anales, tom. ii. fol. 126-130.--Blancas, Commentarii, pp. 195-197.--Hence he was styled "Peter of the Dagger;" and a statue of him, bearing in one hand this weapon, and in the other the Privilege, stood in the Chamber of Deputation at Saragossa in Philip II.'s time. See Antonio Perez, Relaciones, fol. 95. [26] See the statute, De Prohibità Unione, etc. Fueros y Observancias, tom. i. fol. 178.--A copy of the original Privileges was detected by Blancas among the manuscripts of the archbishop of Saragossa; but he declined publishing it from deference to the prohibition of his ancestors. Commentarii, p. 179. [27] "Haec itaque domestica Regis victoria, quae miserrimum universae Reipublicae interitum videbatur esse allatura, stabilem nobis constituit pacem, tranquillitatem, et otium. Inde enim Magistratus Justitiae Aragonum in eam, quam nunc colimus, amplitudinem dignitatis devenit." Ibid., p. 197. [28] Martel, Forma de Celebrar Cortes, cap. 8.--"Bracos del reino, porque _abraçan_, y tienen en si."--The cortes consisted only of three arms in Catalonia and Valencia; both the greater and lesser nobility sitting in the same chamber. Perguera, Cortes en Cataluña, and Matheu y Sanz, Constitucion de Valencia, apud Capmany, Práctica y Estilo, pp. 65, 183, 184. [29] Martel, Forma de Celebrar Cortes, cap. 10, 17, 21, 46.--Blancas, Modo de Proceder en Cortes de Aragon, (Zaragoza, 1641,) fol. 17, 18. [30] Capmany, Práctica y Estilo, p. 12. [31] Blancas, Modo de Proceder, fol. 14,--and Commentarii, p. 374.-- Zurita, indeed, gives repeated instances of their convocation in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries, from a date almost coeval with that of the commons; yet Blancas, who made this subject his particular study, who wrote posterior to Zurita, and occasionally refers to him, postpones the era of their admission into the legislature to the beginning of the fourteenth century. [32] One of the monarchs of Aragon, Alfonso the Warrior, according to Mariana, bequeathed all his dominions to the Templars and Hospitallers. Another, Peter II., agreed to hold his kingdom as a fief of the see of Rome, and to pay it an annual tribute. (Hist. de España, tom. i. pp. 596, 664.) This so much disgusted the people, that they compelled his successors to make a public protest against the claims of the church, before their coronation.--See Blancas, Coronaciones de los Serenisimos Reyes de Aragon, (Zaragoza, 1641,) Cap. 2. [33] Martel, Forma de Celebrar Cortes, cap. 22.--Asso y Manuel, Instituciones, p. 44. [34] Zurita, Anales, tom. i. fol. 163, A.D. 1250. [35] Ibid., tom. i. fol. 51.--The earliest appearance of popular representation in Catalonia is fixed by Ripoll at 1283, (apud Capmany, Práctica y Estilo, p. 135.) What can Capmany mean by postponing the introduction of the commons into the cortes of Aragon to 1300? (See p. 55.) Their presence and names are commemorated by the exact Zurita, several times before the close of the twelfth century. [36] Práctica y Estilo, pp. 14, 17, 18, 30.--Martel, Forma de Celebrar Cortes, cap. 10.--Those who followed a mechanical occupation, _including surgeons and apothecaries_, were excluded from a seat in cortes. (Cap. 17.) The faculty have rarely been treated with so little ceremony. [37] Martel, Forma de Celebrar Cortes, cap. 7.--The cortes appear to have been more frequently convoked in the fourteenth century, than in any other. Blancas refers to no less than twenty-three within that period, averaging nearly one in four years. (Commentarii, Index, _voce_ Comitia.) In Catalonia and Valencia, the cortes was to be summoned every three years. Berart, Discurso Breve sobre la Celebracion de Cortes de Aragon, (1626,) fol. 12. [38] Capmany, Práctica y Estilo, p. 15.--Blancas has preserved a specimen of an address from the throne, in 1398, in which the king, after selecting some moral apothegm as a text, rambles for the space of half an hour through Scripture history, etc., and concludes with announcing the object of his convening the cortes together, in three lines. Commentarii, pp. 376-380. [39] See the ceremonial detailed with sufficient prolixity by Martel, (Forma de Celebrar Cortes, cap. 52, 53,) and a curious illustration of it in Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 313. [40] Capmany, Práctica y Estilo, pp. 44 et seq.--Martel, Forma de Celebrar Cortes, cap. 50, 60 et seq.--Fueros y Observancias, tom. i. fol. 229.-- Blancas, Modo de Proceder, fol. 2-4.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iii. fol. 321. --Robertson, misinterpreting a passage of Blancas, (Commentarii, p. 375,) states, that a "session of Cortes continued forty days." (History of Charles V., vol. i. p. 140.) It usually lasted months. [41] Fueros y Observancias, fol. 6, tit. Privileg. Gen.--Blancas, Commentarii, p. 371.--Capmany, Práctica y Estilo, p. 51.--It was anciently the practice of the legislature to grant supplies of troops, but not of money. When Peter IV. requested a pecuniary subsidy, the cortes told him, that "such thing had not been usual; that his Christian subjects were wont to serve him with their persons, and it was only for Jews and Moors to serve him with money." Blancas, Modo de Proceder, cap. 18. [42] See examples of them in Zurita, Anales, tom. i. fol. 51, 263; tom. ii. fol. 391, 394, 424.--Blancas, Modo de Proceder, fol. 98, 106. [43] "There was such a conformity of sentiment among all parties," says Zurita, "that the privileges of the nobility were no better secured than those of the commons. For the Aragonese deemed that the existence of the commonwealth depended not so much on its strength, as on its liberties." (Anales, lib. 4, cap. 38.) In the confirmation of the privilege by James the Second, in 1325, torture, then generally recognized by the municipal law of Europe, was expressly prohibited in Aragon, "as unworthy of freemen." See Zurita, Anales, lib. 6, cap. 61,--and Fueros y Observancias, tom. i. fol. 9. Declaratio Priv. Generalis. [44] The patriotism of Blancas warms as he dwells on the illusory picture of ancient virtue, and contrasts it with the degeneracy of his own day. "Et vero prisca haec tanta severitas, desertaque illa et inculta vita, quando dies noctesque nostri armati concursabant, ac in bello et Maurorum sanguine assidui versabantur; verè quidem parsimoniae, fortitudinis, temperantiae, caeterarumque virtutum omnium magistra fuit. In quá maleficia ac scelera, quae nunc in otiosâ hac nostrâ umbratili et delicatâ gignuntur, gigni non solebant; quinimmo ita tunc aequaliter omnes omni genere virtutum floruere, ut egregia haec laus videatur non hominum solum, verum illorum etiam temporum fuisse." Commentarii, p. 340. [45] It was more frequently referred, both for the sake of expedition, and of obtaining a more full investigation, to commissioners nominated conjointly by the cortes and the party demanding redress. The nature of the _greuges_, or grievances, which might be brought before the legislature, and the mode of proceeding in relation to them, are circumstantially detailed by the parliamentary historians of Aragon. See Berart, Discurso sobre la Celebracion de Cortes, cap. 7.--Capmany, Práctica y Estilo, pp. 37-44.--Blancas, Modo de Proceder, cap. 14,--and Martel, Forma de Celebrar Cortes, cap. 54-59. [46] Blancas, Modo de Proceder, cap. 14.--Yet Peter IV., in his dispute with the justice Fernandez de Castro, denied this. Zurita, Anales, tom. ii. fol. 170. [47] Blancas, Modo de Proceder, ubi supra. [48] As for example the _ciudadanos honrados_ of Saragossa. (Capmany, Práctica y Estilo, p. 14.) A _ciudadano honrado_ in Catalonia, and I presume the same in Aragon, was a landholder, who lived on his rents without being engaged in commerce or trade of any kind, answering to the French _propriétaire_. See Capmany, Mem. de Barcelona, tom. ii. Apend. no. 30. [49] Blancas, Modo de Proceder, fol. 102. [50] Not, however, it must be allowed, without a manly struggle in its defence, and which, in the early part of Charles V.'s reign, in 1525, wrenched a promise from the crown, to answer all petitions definitively, before the rising of cortes. The law still remains on the statute-book, (Recop. de las Leyes, lib. 6, tit. 7, ley 8,) a sad commentary on the faith of princes. [51] Práctica y Estilo, p. 14. [52] "Y nos tenemos á ellos como buenos vassallos y compañeros."--Zurita, Anales, lib. 7, cap. 17. [53] The noun "justicia" was made masculine for the accommodation of this magistrate, who was styled "_el_ justicia." Antonio Perez, Relaciones, fol. 91. [54] Blancas, Commentarii, p. 26.--Zurita, Anales, tom. i. fol. 9. [55] Molinus, apud Blancas, Commentarii, pp. 343, 344.--Fueros y Observancias, tom. i. fol. 21, 25. [56] Blancas, Commentarii, p. 536.--The principal of these jurisdictions was the royal audience in which the king himself presided in person. Ibid., p. 355. [57] Fueros y Observancias, tom. i. fol. 23, 60 et seq., 155, lib. 3, tit. De Manifestationibus Personarum.--Also fol. 137 et seq., tit. 7, De Firmis Juris.--Blancas, Commentarii, pp. 350, 351.--Zurita, Anales, lib. 10, cap. 37.--The first of these processes was styled _firma de derecho_, the last, _manifestation_. The Spanish writers are warm in their encomiums of these two provisions. "Quibus duobus praesidiis," says Blancas, "ita nostrae reipublicae status continetur, ut nulla pars communium fortunarum tutelâ vacua relinquatur." Both this author and Zurita have amplified the details respecting them, which the reader may find extracted, and in part translated, by Mr. Hallam, Middle Ages, vol. ii. pp. 75-77, notes. When complex litigation became more frequent, the Justice was allowed one, afterwards two, and at a still later period, in 1528, five lieutenants, as they were called, who aided him in the discharge of his onerous duties. Martel, Forma de Celebrar Cortes, Notas de Uztarroz, pp. 92-96.--Blancas, Commentarii, pp. 361-366. [58] Ibid., pp. 343, 346, 347.--Idem, Coronaciones, pp. 200, 202.--Antonio Perez, Relaciones, fol. 92. Sempere cites the opinion of an ancient canonist, Canellas, bishop of Huesca, as conclusive against the existence of the vast powers imputed by later commentators to the Justicia. (Histoire des Cortès, chap. 19.) The vague, rhapsodical tone of the extract shows it to be altogether undeserving of the emphasis laid on it; not to add, that it was written more than a century before the period, when the Justicia possessed the influence or the legal authority claimed for him by Aragonese writers,--by Blancas, in particular, from whom Sempere borrowed the passage at second hand. [59] The law alluded to runs thus: "Ne quid autem damni detrimentive leges aut libertates nostrae patiantur, judex quidam medius adesto, ad quem a Rege provocare, si aliquem laeserit, injuriasque arcere si quas forsan Reipub. intulerit, jus fasque esto." Blancas, Commentarii, p. 26. [60] Such instances may he found in Zurita, Anales, tom. ii. fol. 385, 414.--Blancas, Commentarii, pp. 199, 202-206, 214, 225.--When Ximenes Cerdan, the independent Justice of John I., removed certain citizens from the prison, in which they had been unlawfully confined by the king, in defiance equally of that officer's importunities and menaces, the inhabitants of Saragossa, says Abarca, came out in a body to receive him on his return to the city, and greeted him as the defender of their ancient and natural liberties. (Reyes de Aragon, tom. i. fol. 155.) So openly did the Aragonese support their magistrate in the boldest exercise of his authority. [61] This occurred once under Peter III., and twice under Alfonso V. (Zurita, Anales, tom. iii. fol. 255.--Blancas, Commentarii, pp. 174, 489, 499.) The Justice was appointed by the king. [62] Fueros y Observancias, tom. i. fol. 22. [63] Ibid., tom. i. fol. 25. [64] Ibid., tom. i. lib. 3, tit. Forum Inquisitionis Officii Just. Arag., and tom. ii. fol. 37-41.--Blancas, Commentarii, pp. 391-399. The examination was conducted in the first instance before a court of four inquisitors, as they were termed; who, after a patient hearing of both sides, reported the result of their examination to a council of seventeen, chosen like them from the cortes, from whose decision there was no appeal. No lawyer was admitted into this council, lest the law might be distorted by verbal quibbles, says Blancas. The council, however, was allowed the advice of two of the profession. They voted by ballot, and the majority decided. Such, after various modifications, were the regulations ultimately adopted in 1461, or rather 1467. Robertson appears to have confounded the council of seventeen with the court of inquisition. See his History of Charles V., vol. i. note 31. [65] Probably no nation of the period would have displayed a temperance similar to that exhibited by the Aragonese at the beginning of the fifteenth century, in 1412; when the people, having been split into factions by a contested succession, agreed to refer the dispute to a committee of judges, elected equally from the three great provinces of the kingdom; who, after an examination conducted with all the forms of law, and on the same equitable principles as would have guided the determination of a private suit, delivered an opinion, which was received as obligatory on the whole nation. [66] See Zurita, Anales, lib. 8, cap. 29,--and the admirable sentiments cited by Blancas from the parliamentary acts, in 1451. Commentarii, p. 350. From this independent position must be excepted, indeed, the lower classes of the peasantry, who seem to have been in a more abject state in Aragon than in most other feudal countries. "Era tan absolute su dominio (of their lords) que podian mater con hambre, sed, y frio á sus vasallos de servidumbre." (Asso y Manuel, Instituciones, p. 40,--also Blancas, Commentarii, p. 309.) These serfs extorted, in an insurrection, the recognition of certain rights from their masters, on condition of paying a specified tax; whence the name _villanos de parada_. [67] Although the legislatures of the different states of the crown of Aragon were never united in one body when convened in the same town, yet they were so averse to all appearance of incorporation, that the monarch frequently appointed for the places of meeting three distinct towns, within their respective territories and contiguous, in order that he might pass the more expeditiously from one to the other. See Blancas, Modo de Proceder, cap. 4. [68] It is indeed true, that Peter III., at the request of the Valencians, appointed an Aragonese knight Justice of that kingdom, in 1283. (Zurita, Anales, tom. i. fol. 281.) But we find no further mention of this officer, or of the office. Nor have I met with any notice of it in the details of the Valencian constitution, compiled by Capmany from various writers. (Práctica y Estilo, pp. 161-208.) An anecdote of Ximenes Cerdan, recorded by Blancas, (Commentarii, p. 214,) may lead one to infer, that the places in Valencia, which received the laws of Aragon, acknowledged the jurisdiction of its Justicia. [69] Capmany, Práctica y Estilo, pp. 62-214.--Capmany has collected copious materials, from a variety of authors, for the parliamentary history of Catalonia and Valencia, forming a striking contrast to the scantiness of information he was able to glean respecting Castile. The indifference of the Spanish writers, till very recently, to the constitutional antiquities of the latter kingdom, so much more important than the other states of the Peninsula, is altogether inexplicable. [70] Corbera, Cataluña Illustrada, (Nápoles, 1678,) lib. 1, c. 17.--Petrus de Marca cites a charter of Raymond Berenger, count of Barcelona, to the city, as ancient as 1025, confirming its former privileges. See Marca Hispanica, sive Limes Hispanicus, (Parisiis, 1688,) Apend. no. 198. [71] Navarrete, Discurso Histórico, apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. v. pp. 81, 82, 112, 113.--Capmany, Mem. de Barcelona, tom. i. part. 1, cap. 1, pp. 4, 8, 10, 11. [72] Mem. de Barcelona, part. 1, cap. 2, 3.--Capmany has given a register of the consuls and of the numerous stations, at which they were established throughout Africa and Europe, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, (tom. ii. Apend. no. 23.) These officers during the Middle Ages discharged much more important duties than at the present day, if we except those few residing with the Barbary powers. They settled the disputes arising between their countrymen, in the ports where they were established; they protected the trade of their own nation with these ports; and were employed in adjusting commercial relations, treaties, etc. In short, they filled in some sort the post of a modern ambassador, or resident minister, at a period when this functionary was only employed on extraordinary occasions. [73] Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, (London, 1825,) vol. i. p. 655.--The woollen manufacture constituted the principal staple of Barcelona. (Capmany, Mem. de Barcelona, tom. i. p. 241.) The English sovereigns encouraged the Catalan traders by considerable immunities to frequent their ports during the fourteenth century. Macpherson, ubi supra, pp. 502, 551, 588. [74] Heeren, Essai sur l'Influence des Croisades, traduit par Villers, (Paris, 1808,) p. 376.--Capmany, Mem. de Barcelona, tom. i. p. 213, also pp. 170-180.--Capmany fixes the date of the publication of the _Consulado del Mar_ at the middle of the thirteenth century, under James I. He discusses and refutes the claims of the Pisans to precedence in this codification. See his Preliminary Discourse to the Costumbres Maritimas de Barcelona. [75] Navagiero, Viaggio, fol. 3.--L. Marineo styles it "the most beautiful city he had ever seen, or, to speak more correctly, in the whole world." (Cosas Memorables, fol. 18.) Alfonso V., in one of his ordinances, in 1438, calls it "urbs venerabilis in egregiis templis, tuta ut in optimis, pulchra in caeteris aedificiis," etc. Capmany, Mem. de Barcelona, tom. ii. Apend. no. 13. [76] Capmany, Mem. de Barcelona, Apend. no. 24.--The senate or great council, though styled the "one hundred," seems to have fluctuated at different times between that number and double its amount. [77] Corbera, Cataluña Illustrada, p. 84.--Capmany, Mem. de Barcelona, tom. ii. Apend. no. 29. [78] Capmany, Mem. de Barcelona, tom. i. part. 3, p. 40, tom. iii. part. 2, pp. 317, 318. [79] Capmany, Mem. de Barcelona, tom. i. part. 2, p. 187.--tom. ii. Apend. 30.--Capmany says _principal nobleza_; yet it may be presumed that much the larger proportion of these noble candidates for office was drawn from the inferior class of the privileged orders, the knights and hidalgos. The great barons of Catalonia, fortified with extensive immunities and wealth, lived on their estates in the country, probably little relishing the levelling spirit of the burghers of Barcelona. [80] Barcelona revolted and was twice besieged by the royal arms under John II., once under Philip IV., twice under Charles II., and twice under Philip V. This last siege, 1713-14, in which it held out against the combined forces of France and Spain under Marshal Berwick, is one of the most memorable events in the eighteenth century. An interesting account of the siege may be found in Coxe's Memoirs of the Kings of Spain of the House of Bourbon, (London, 1815,) vol. ii. chap. 21.--The late monarch, Ferdinand VII., also had occasion to feel, that the independent spirit of the Catalans did not become extinct with their ancient constitution. [81] Viaggio, fol. 3. [82] Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 183.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iii. lib. 12, cap. 59.--The king turned his back on the magistrates, who came to pay their respects to him, on learning his intention of quitting the city. He seems, however, to have had the magnanimity to forgive, perhaps to admire, the independent conduct of Fiveller; for at his death, which occurred very soon after, we find this citizen mentioned as one of his executors. See Capmany, Mem. de Barcelona, tom. ii. Apend. 29. [83] The taxes were assessed in the ratio of one-sixth on Valencia, two- sixths on Aragon, and three-sixths on Catalonia. See Martel, Forma de Celebrar Cortes, cap. 71. [84] See the items specified by Capmany, Mem. de Barcelona, tom. i. pp. 231, 232. [85] Idem, tom. i. pp. 221, 234.--Capmany states, that the statute of Alfonso V. prohibited "all foreign ships from taking cargoes in the ports of his dominions." (See also Colec. Dipl., tom. ii. no. 187.) The object of this law, like that of the British Navigation Act, was the encouragement of the national marine. It deviated far, however, from the sagacious policy of the latter, which imposed no restriction on the exportation of domestic produce to foreign countries, except, indeed, its own colonies. [86] Andres, Dell' Origine, de' Progressi, e dello Stato Attuale d' Ogni Letteratura, (Venezia, 1783,) part. 1, cap. 11.--Lampillas, Saggio Storico-Apologetico della Letteratura Spagnuola, (Genova, 1778,) part. 1, dis. 6, sec. 7.--Andres conjectures, and Lampillas decides, in favor of Catalonia. _Arcades ambo_; and the latter critic, the worst possible authority on all questions of national preference. [87] Velazquez, Orígenes de la Poesía Castellana, (Málaga, 1797,) pp. 20- 22.--Andres, Letteratura, part. 1, cap. 11.--Alfonso II., Peter II., Peter III, James I., Peter IV., have all left compositions in the Limousin tongue behind them; the three former in verse; the two latter in prose, setting forth the history of their own time. For a particular account of their respective productions, see Latassa, (Escritores Aragoneses, tom. i. pp. 175-179, 185-189, 222, 224, 242-248; tom. ii. p. 28,) also Lanuza, (Historias Eclesiásticas y Seculares de Aragon, (Zaragoza, 1622,) tom. i. p. 553.) The Chronicle of James I. is particularly esteemed for its fidelity. [88] Whether Jordi stole from Petrarch, or Petrarch from Jordi, has been matter of hot debate between the Spanish and French _littérateurs_. Sanchez, after a careful examination of the evidence, candidly decides against his countryman, (Poesías Castellanas, tom. i. pp. 81-84.) A competent critic in the Retrospective Review, (No. 7, art. 2,) who enjoyed the advantage over Sanchez of perusing a MS. copy of Jordi's original poem, makes out a very plausible argument in favor of the originality of the Valencian poet. After all, as the amount stolen, or, to speak more reverently, borrowed, does not exceed half a dozen lines, it is not of vital importance to the reputation of either poet. [89] The abate Andres lamented fifty years ago, that the worms and moths should be allowed to revel among the precious relics of ancient Castilian literature. (Letteratura, tom. ii. p. 306.) Have their revels been disturbed yet? [90] Mayáns y Siscár, Orígenes de la Lengua Española, (Madrid, 1737,) tom. ii. pp. 323, 324.--Crescimbeni, Istoria della Volgar Poesia, (Venezia, 1731,) tom. ii. p. 170.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. i. p. 183.-- Velazquez, Poesía Castellana, pp. 23, 24. [91] Mayáns y Siscár, Orígenes, tom. ii. pp. 325-327. [92] Andres, Letteratura, tom. iv. pp. 85, 86.--Capmany, Mem. de Barcelona, tom. ii. Apend. no. 16.--There were thirty-two chairs, or professorships, founded and maintained at the expense of the city; six of theology; six of jurisprudence; five of medicine; six of philosophy; four of grammar; one of rhetoric; one of surgery; one of anatomy; one of Hebrew, and another of Greek. It is singular, that none should have existed for the Latin, so much more currently studied at that time, and of so much more practical application always, than either of the other ancient languages. [93] The Valencian, "the sweetest and most graceful of the Limousin dialects," says Mayáns y Siscár, Orígenes, tom. i. p. 58. [94] Nicolás Antonio, Bibliotheca, Hispana Vetus, (Matriti, 1788,) tom. ii. p. 146.--Andres, Letteratura, tom. iv. p. 87. [95] Cervantes, Don Quixote, (ed. de Pellicer, Madrid, 1787,) tom. i, p. 62.--Mendez, Typographia Española, (Madrid, 1796,) pp. 72-75.--Andres, Letteratura, ubi supra.--Pellicer seems to take Martorell's word in good earnest, that his book is only a version from the Castilian. The _names_ of some of the most noted troubadours are collected by Velazquez, Poesía Castellana, (pp. 20-24.--Capmany, Mem. de Barcelona, tom. ii. Apend. no. 5.) Some extracts and pertinent criticisms on their productions may be found by the English reader in the Retrospective Review. (No. 7, art. 2.) It is to be regretted that the author has not redeemed his pledge of continuing his notices to the Castilian era of Spanish poetry. [Illustration: GENEALOGY OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA.] PART FIRST. 1406-1492. THE PERIOD WHEN THE DIFFERENT KINGDOMS OF SPAIN WERE FIRST UNITED UNDER ONE MONARCHY, AND A THOROUGH REFORM WAS INTRODUCED INTO THEIR INTERNAL ADMINISTRATION; OR THE PERIOD EXHIBITING MOST FULLY THE DOMESTIC POLICY OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA. CHAPTER I. STATE OF CASTILE AT THE BIRTH OF ISABELLA.--REIGN OF JOHN II., OF CASTILE. 1406-1454. Revolution of Trastamara.--Accession of John II.--Rise of Alvaro de Luna. --Jealousy of the Nobles.--Oppression of the Commons.--Its Consequences.-- Early Literature of Castile.--Its Encouragement under John II.--Decline of Alvaro de Luna.--His Fall.--Death of John II.--Birth of Isabella. The fierce civil feuds, which preceded the accession of the House of Trastamara in 1368, were as fatal to the nobility of Castile, as the wars of the Hoses were to that of England. There was scarcely a family of note, which had not poured out its blood on the field or the scaffold. The influence of the aristocracy was, of course, much diminished with its numbers. The long wars with foreign powers, which a disputed succession entailed on the country, were almost equally prejudicial to the authority of the monarch, who was willing to buoy up his tottering title by the most liberal concession of privileges to the people. Thus the commons rose in proportion as the crown and the privileged orders descended in the scale; and, when the claims of the several competitors for the throne were finally extinguished, and the tranquillity of the kingdom was secured, by the union of Henry the Third with Catharine of Lancaster at the close of the fourteenth century, the third estate may be said to have attained to the highest degree of political consequence which it ever reached in Castile. The healthful action of the body politic, during the long interval of peace that followed this auspicious union, enabled it to repair the strength, which had been wasted in its murderous civil contests. The ancient channels of commerce were again opened; various new manufactures were introduced, and carried to a considerable perfection; [1] wealth, with its usual concomitants, elegance and comfort, flowed in apace; and the nation promised itself a long career of prosperity under a monarch, who respected the laws in his own person, and administered them with vigor. All these fair hopes were blasted by the premature death of Henry the Third, before he had reached his twenty-eighth year. The crown devolved on his son John the Second, then a minor, whose reign was one of the longest and the most disastrous in the Castilian annals. [2] As it was that, however, which gave birth to Isabella, the illustrious subject of our narrative, it will be necessary to pass its principal features under review, in order to obtain a correct idea of her government. The wise administration of the regency, during a long minority, postponed the season of calamity; and when it at length arrived, it was concealed for some time from the eyes of the vulgar by the pomp and brilliant festivities, which distinguished the court of the young monarch. His indisposition, if not incapacity for business, however, gradually became manifest; and, while he resigned himself without reserve to pleasures, which it must be confessed were not unfrequently of a refined and intellectual character, he abandoned the government of his kingdom to the control of favorites. The most conspicuous of these was Alvaro de Luna, grand master of St. James, and constable of Castile. This remarkable person, the illegitimate descendant of a noble house in Aragon, was introduced very early as a page into the royal household, where he soon distinguished himself by his amiable manners and personal accomplishments. He could ride, fence, dance, sing, if we may credit his loyal biographer, better than any other cavalier in the court; while his proficiency in music and poetry recommended him most effectually to the favor of the monarch, who professed to be a connoisseur in both. With these showy qualities, Alvaro de Luna united others of a more dangerous complexion. His insinuating address easily conciliated confidence, and enabled him to master the motives of others, while his own were masked by consummate dissimulation. He was as fearless in executing his ambitious schemes, as he was cautious in devising them. He was indefatigable in his application to business, so that John, whose aversion to it we have noticed, willingly reposed on him the whole burden of government. The king, it was said, only signed, while the constable dictated and executed. He was the only channel of promotion to public office, whether secular or ecclesiastical. As his cupidity was insatiable, he perverted the great trust confided to him to the acquisition of the principal posts in the government for himself or his kindred, and at his death is said to have left a larger amount of treasure than was possessed by the whole nobility of the kingdom. He affected a magnificence of state corresponding with his elevated rank. The most considerable grandees in Castile contended for the honor of having their sons, after the fashion of the time, educated in his family. When he rode abroad, he was accompanied by a numerous retinue of knights and nobles, which left his sovereign's court comparatively deserted; so that royalty might be said on all occasions, whether of business or pleasure, to be eclipsed by the superior splendors of its satellite. [3] The history of this man may remind the English reader of that of Cardinal Wolsey, whom he somewhat resembled in character, and still more in his extraordinary fortunes. It may easily be believed, that the haughty aristocracy of Castile would ill brook this exaltation of an individual so inferior to them in birth, and who withal did not wear his honors with exemplary meekness. John's blind partiality for his favorite is the key to all the troubles which agitated the kingdom during the last thirty years of his reign. The disgusted nobles organized confederacies for the purpose of deposing the minister. The whole nation took sides in this unhappy struggle. The heats of civil discord were still further heightened by the interference of the royal house of Aragon, which, descended from a common stock with that of Castile, was proprietor of large estates in the latter country. The wretched monarch beheld even his own son Henry, the heir to the crown, enlisted in the opposite faction, and saw himself reduced to the extremity of shedding the blood of his subjects in the fatal battle of Olmedo. Still the address, or the good fortune, of the constable enabled him to triumph over his enemies; and, although he was obliged occasionally to yield to the violence of the storm and withdraw a while from the court, he was soon recalled and reinstated in all his former dignities. This melancholy infatuation of the king is imputed by the writers of that age to sorcery on the part of the favorite. [4] But the only witchcraft which he used, was the ascendency of a strong mind over a weak one. During this long-protracted anarchy, the people lost whatever they had gained in the two preceding reigns. By the advice of his minister, who seems to have possessed a full measure of the insolence, so usual with persons suddenly advanced from low to elevated station, the king not only abandoned the constitutional policy of his predecessors in regard to the commons, but entered on the most arbitrary and systematic violation of their rights. Their deputies were excluded from the privy council, or lost all influence in it. Attempts were made to impose taxes without the legislative sanction. The municipal territories were alienated, and lavished on the royal minions. The freedom of elections was invaded, and delegates to cortes were frequently nominated by the crown; and, to complete the iniquitous scheme of oppression, _pragmaticas_, or royal proclamations, were issued, containing provisions repugnant to the acknowledged law of the land, and affirming in the most unqualified terms the right of the sovereign to legislate for his subjects. [5] The commons indeed, when assembled in cortes, stoutly resisted the assumption of such unconstitutional powers by the crown, and compelled the prince not only to revoke his pretensions, but to accompany his revocation with the most humiliating concessions. [6] They even ventured so far, during this reign, as to regulate the expenses of the royal household; [7] and their language to the throne on all these occasions, though temperate and loyal, breathed a generous spirit of patriotism, evincing a perfect consciousness of their own rights, and a steady determination to maintain them. [8] Alas! what could such resolution avail, in this season of misrule, against the intrigues of a cunning and profligate minister, unsupported too, as the commons were, by any sympathy or co-operation on the part of the higher orders of the state! A scheme was devised for bringing the popular branch of the legislature more effectually within the control of the crown, by diminishing the number of its constituents. It has been already remarked, in the Introduction, that a great irregularity prevailed in Castile as to the number of cities which, at different times, exercised the right of representation. During the fourteenth century, the deputation from this order had been uncommonly full. The king, however, availing himself of this indeterminateness, caused writs to be issued to a very small proportion of the towns which had usually enjoyed the privilege. Some of those that were excluded indignantly though ineffectually remonstrated against this abuse. Others, previously despoiled of their possessions by the rapacity of the crown, or impoverished by the disastrous feuds into which the country had been thrown, acquiesced in the measure from motives of economy. From the same mistaken policy several cities, again, as Burgos, Toledo, and others, petitioned the sovereign to defray the charges of their representatives from the royal treasury; a most ill-advised parsimony, which suggested to the crown a plausible pretext for the new system of exclusion. In this manner the Castilian cortes, which, notwithstanding its occasional fluctuations, had exhibited during the preceding century what might be regarded as a representation of the whole commonwealth, was gradually reduced, during the reigns of John the Second and his son Henry the Fourth, to the deputations of some seventeen or eighteen cities. And to this number, with slight variation, it has been restricted until the occurrence of the recent revolutionary movements in that kingdom. [9] The non-represented were required to transmit their instructions to the deputies of the privileged cities. Thus Salamanca appeared in behalf of five hundred towns and fourteen hundred villages; and the populous province of Galicia was represented by the little town of Zamora, which is not even included within its geographical limits. [10] The privilege of a _voice in cortes_, as it was called, came at length to be prized so highly by the favored cities, that when, in 1506, some of those which were excluded solicited the restitution of their ancient rights, their petition was opposed by the former on the impudent pretence, that "the right of deputation had been reserved by ancient law and usage to only eighteen cities of the realm." [11] In this short-sighted and most unhappy policy, we see the operation of those local jealousies and estrangements, to which we have alluded in the Introduction. But, although the cortes, thus reduced in numbers, necessarily lost much of its weight, it still maintained a bold front against the usurpations of the crown. It does not appear, indeed, that any attempt was made under John the Second, or his successor, to corrupt its members, or to control the freedom of debate; although such a proceeding is not improbable, as altogether conformable to their ordinary policy, and as the natural result of their preliminary measures. But, however true the deputies continued to themselves and to those who sent them, it is evident that so limited and partial a selection no longer afforded a representation of the interests of the whole country. Their necessarily imperfect acquaintance with the principles or even wishes of their widely scattered constituents, in an age when knowledge was not circulated on the thousand wings of the press, as in our day, must have left them oftentimes in painful uncertainty, and deprived them of the cheering support of public opinion. The voice of remonstrance, which derives such confidence from numbers, would hardly now be raised in their deserted halls with the same frequency or energy as before; and, however the representatives of that day might maintain their integrity uncorrupted, yet, as every facility was afforded to the undue influence of the crown, the time might come when venality would prove stronger than principle, and the unworthy patriot be tempted to sacrifice his birthright for a mess of pottage. Thus early was the fair dawn of freedom overcast, which opened in Castile under more brilliant auspices, perhaps, than in any other country in Europe. While the reign of John the Second is so deservedly odious in a political view, in a literary, it may be inscribed with what Giovio calls "the golden pen of history." It was an epoch in the Castilian, corresponding with that of the reign of Francis the First in French literature, distinguished not so much by any production of extraordinary genius, as by the effort made for the introduction of an elegant culture, by conducting it on more scientific principles than had been hitherto known. The early literature of Castile could boast of the "Poem of the Cid," in some respects the most remarkable performance of the middle ages. It was enriched, moreover, with other elaborate compositions, displaying occasional glimpses of a buoyant fancy, or of sensibility to external beauty, to say nothing of those delightful romantic ballads, which seemed to spring up spontaneously in every quarter of the country, like the natural wild flowers of the soil. But the unaffected beauties of sentiment, which seem rather the result of accident than design, were dearly purchased, in the more extended pieces, at the expense of such a crude mass of grotesque and undigested verse, as shows an entire ignorance of the principles of the art. [12] The profession of letters itself was held in little repute by the higher orders of the nation, who were altogether untinctured with liberal learning. While the nobles of the sister kingdom of Aragon, assembled in their poetic courts, in imitation of their Provençal neighbors, vied with each other in lays of love and chivalry, those of Castile disdained these effeminate pleasures as unworthy of the profession of arms, the only one of any estimation in their eyes. The benignant influence of John was perceptible in softening this ferocious temper. He was himself sufficiently accomplished, for a king; and, notwithstanding his aversion to business, manifested, as has been noticed, a lively relish for intellectual enjoyment. He was fond of books, wrote and spoke Latin with facility, composed verses, and condescended occasionally to correct those of his loving subjects. [13] Whatever might be the value of his criticisms, that of his example cannot be doubted. The courtiers, with the quick scent for their own interest which distinguished the tribe in every country, soon turned their attention to the same polite studies; [14] and thus Castilian poetry received very early the courtly stamp, which continued its prominent characteristic down to the age of its meridian glory. Among the most eminent of these noble _savans_, was Henry, marquis of Villena, descended from the royal houses of Castile and Aragon, [15] but more illustrious, as one of his countrymen has observed, by his talents and attainments, than by his birth. His whole life was consecrated to letters, and especially to the study of natural science. I am not aware that any specimen of his poetry, although much lauded by his contemporaries, [16] has come down to us. [17] He translated Dante's "Commedia" into prose, and is said to have given the first example of a version of the AEneid into a modern language. [18] He labored assiduously to introduce a more cultivated taste among his countrymen, and his little treatise on the _gaya sciencia_, as the divine art was then called, in which he gives an historical and critical view of the poetical Consistory of Barcelona, is the first approximation, however faint, to an Art of Poetry in the Castilian tongue. [19] The exclusiveness with which he devoted himself to science, and especially astronomy, to the utter neglect of his temporal concerns, led the wits of that day to remark, that "he knew much of heaven, and nothing of earth." He paid the usual penalty of such indifference to worldly weal, by seeing himself eventually stripped of his lordly possessions, and reduced, at the close of life, to extreme poverty. [20] His secluded habits brought on him the appalling imputation of necromancy. A scene took place at his death, in 1434, which is sufficiently characteristic of the age, and may possibly have suggested a similar adventure to Cervantes. The king commissioned his son's preceptor, Brother Lope de Barrientos, afterwards bishop of Cuença, to examine the valuable library of the deceased; and the worthy ecclesiastic consigned more than a hundred volumes of it to the flames, as savoring too strongly of the black art. The Bachelor Cibdareal, the confidential physician of John the Second, in a lively letter on this occurrence to the poet John de Mena, remarks, that "some would fain get the reputation of saints, by making others necromancers;" and requests his friend "to allow him to solicit, in his behalf, some of the surviving volumes from the king, that in this way the soul of Brother Lope might be saved from further sin, and the spirit of the defunct marquis consoled by the consciousness, that his books no longer rested on the shelves of the man who had converted him into a conjuror." [21] John de Mena denounces this _auto da fe_ of science in a similar, but graver tone of sarcasm, in his "Laberinto." These liberal sentiments in the Spanish writers of the fifteenth century may put to shame the more bigoted criticism of the seventeenth. [22] Another of the illustrious wits of this reign was Iñigo Lopez de Mendoza, marquis of Santillana, "the glory and delight of the Castilian nobility," whose celebrity was such, that foreigners, it was said, journeyed to Spain from distant parts of Europe to see him. Although passionately devoted to letters, he did not, like his friend the marquis of Villena, neglect his public or domestic duties for them. On the contrary, he discharged the most important civil and military functions. He made his house an academy, in which the young cavaliers of the court might practise the martial exercises of the age; and he assembled around him at the same time men eminent for genius and science, whom he munificently recompensed, and encouraged by his example. [23] His own taste led him to poetry, of which he has left some elaborate specimens. They are chiefly of a moral and preceptive character; but, although replete with noble sentiment, and finished in a style of literary excellence far more correct than that of the preceding age, they are too much infected with mythology and metaphorical affectations to suit the palate of the present day. He possessed, however, the soul of a poet; and when he abandons himself to his native _redondillas_, delivers his sentiments with a sweetness and grace inimitable. To him is to be ascribed the glory, such as it is, of having naturalized the Italian sonnet in Castile, which Boscan, many years later, claimed for himself with no small degree of self- congratulation. [24] His epistle on the primitive history of Spanish verse, although containing notices sufficiently curious from the age and the source whence they proceed, has perhaps done more service to letters by the valuable illustrations it has called forth from its learned editor. [25] This great man, who found so much leisure for the cultivation of letters amidst the busy strife of politics, closed his career at the age of sixty, in 1458. Though a conspicuous actor in the revolutionary scenes of the period, he maintained a character for honor and purity of motive, unimpeached even by his enemies. The king, notwithstanding his devotion to the faction of his son Henry, conferred on him the dignities of count of Real de Manzanares and marquis of Santillana; this being the oldest creation of a marquis in Castile, with the exception of Villena. [26] His eldest son was subsequently made duke of Infantado, by which title his descendants have continued to be distinguished to the present day. But the most conspicuous, for his poetical talents, of the brilliant circle which graced the court of John the Second, was John de Mena, a native of fair Cordova, "the flower of science and of chivalry," [27] as he fondly styles her. Although born in a middling condition of life, with humble prospects, he was early smitten with a love of letters; and, after passing through the usual course of discipline at Salamanca, he repaired to Rome, where, in the study of those immortal masters whose writings had but recently revealed the full capacities of a modern idiom, he imbibed principles of taste, which gave a direction to his own genius, and, in some degree, to that of his countrymen. On his return to Spain, his literary merit soon attracted general admiration, and introduced him to the patronage of the great, and above all to the friendship of the marquis of Santillana. [28] He was admitted into the private circle of the monarch, who, as his gossiping physician informs us, "used to have Mena's verses lying on his table, as constantly as his prayer-book." The poet repaid the debt of gratitude by administering a due quantity of honeyed rhyme, for which the royal palate seems to have possessed a more than ordinary relish. [29] He continued faithful to his master amidst all the fluctuations of faction, and survived him less than two years. He died in 1456; and his friend, the marquis of Santillana, raised a sumptuous monument over his remains, in commemoration of his virtues and of their mutual affection. John de Mena is affirmed by some of the national critics to have given a new aspect to Castilian poetry. [30] His great work was his "Laberinto," the outlines of whose plan may faintly remind us of that portion of the "Divina Commedia" where Dante resigns himself to the guidance of Beatrice. In like manner the Spanish poet, under the escort of a beautiful personification of Providence, witnesses the apparition of the most eminent individuals, whether of history or fable; and, as they revolve on the wheel of destiny, they give occasion to some animated portraiture, and much dull, pedantic disquisition. In these delineations we now and then meet with a touch of his pencil, which, from its simplicity and vigor, may be called truly _Dantesque_. Indeed, the Castilian Muse never before ventured on so bold a flight; and, notwithstanding the deformity of the general plan, the obsolete barbarisms of the phraseology, its quaintness and pedantry, notwithstanding the cantering dactylic measure in which it is composed, and which to the ear of a foreigner can scarcely be made tolerable, the work abounds in conceptions, nay in whole episodes, of such mingled energy and beauty, as indicate genius of the highest order. In some of his smaller pieces his style assumes a graceful flexibility, too generally denied to his more strained and elaborate efforts. [31] It will not be necessary to bring under review the minor luminaries of this period. Alfonso de Baena, a converted Jew, secretary of John the Second, compiled the fugitive pieces of more than fifty of these ancient troubadours into a _cancionero_, "for the disport and divertisement of his highness the king, when he should find himself too sorely oppressed with cares of state," a case we may imagine of no rare occurrence. The original manuscript of Baena, transcribed in beautiful characters of the fifteenth century, lies, or did lie until very lately, unheeded in the cemetery of the Escurial, with the dust of many a better worthy. [32] The extracts selected from it by Castro, although occasionally exhibiting some fluent graces with considerable variety of versification, convey, on the whole, no very high idea of taste or poetic talent. [33]. Indeed, this epoch, as before remarked, was not so much distinguished by uncommon displays of genius, as by its general intellectual movement and the enthusiasm kindled for liberal studies. Thus we find the corporation of Seville granting a hundred _doblas_ of gold as the guerdon of a poet who had celebrated in some score of verses the glories of their native city; and appropriating the same sum as an annual premium for a similar performance. [34] It is not often that the productions of a poet laureate have been more liberally recompensed even by royal bounty. But the gifted spirits of that day mistook the road to immortality. Disdaining the untutored simplicity of their predecessors, they sought to rise above them by an ostentation of learning, as well as by a more classical idiom. In the latter particular they succeeded. They much improved the external forms of poetry, and their compositions exhibit a high degree of literary finish, compared with all that preceded them. But their happiest sentiments are frequently involved in such a cloud of metaphor, as to become nearly unintelligible; while they invoke the pagan deities with a shameless prodigality that would scandalize even a French lyric. This cheap display of school-boy erudition, however it may have appalled their own age, has been a principal cause of their comparative oblivion with posterity. How far superior is one touch of nature, as the "Finojosa" or "Querella de Amor," for example, of the marquis of Santillana, to all this farrago of metaphor and mythology! The impulse, given to Castilian poetry, extended to other departments of elegant literature. Epistolary and historical composition were cultivated with considerable success. The latter, especially, might admit of advantageous comparison with that of any other country in Europe at the same period; [35] and it is remarkable, that, after such early promise, the modern Spaniards have not been more successful in perfecting a classical prose style. Enough has been said to give an idea of the state of mental improvement in Castile under John the Second. The Muses, who had found a shelter in his court from the anarchy which reigned abroad, soon fled from its polluted precincts under the reign of his successor Henry the Fourth, whose sordid appetites were incapable of being elevated above the objects of the senses. If we have dwelt somewhat long on a more pleasing picture, it is because our road is now to lead us across a dreary waste exhibiting scarcely a vestige of civilization. While a small portion of the higher orders of the nation was thus endeavoring to forget the public calamities in the tranquillizing pursuit of letters, and a much larger portion in the indulgence of pleasure, [36] the popular aversion for the minister Luna had been gradually infusing itself into the royal bosom. His too obvious assumption of superiority, even over the monarch who had raised him from the dust, was probably the real though secret cause of this disgust. But the habitual ascendency of the favorite over his master prevented the latter from disclosing this feeling until it was heightened by an occurrence which sets in a strong light the imbecility of the one and the presumption of the other. John, on the death of his wife, Maria of Aragon, had formed the design of connecting himself with a daughter of the king of France. But the constable, in the mean time, without even the privity of his master, entered into negotiations for his marriage with the princess Isabella, granddaughter of John the First of Portugal; and the monarch, with an unprecedented degree of complaisance, acquiesced in an arrangement professedly repugnant to his own inclinations. [37] By one of those dispensations of Providence, however, which often confound the plans of the wisest, as of the weakest, the column, which the minister had so artfully raised for his support, served only to crush him. The new queen, disgusted with his haughty bearing, and probably not much gratified with the subordinate situation to which he had reduced her husband, entered heartily into the feelings of the latter, and indeed contrived to extinguish whatever spark of latent affection for his ancient favorite lurked within his breast. John, yet fearing the overgrown power of the constable too much to encounter him openly, condescended to adopt the dastardly policy of Tiberius on a similar occasion, by caressing the man whom he designed to ruin, and he eventually obtained possession of his person, only by a violation of the royal safe-conduct. The constable's trial was referred to a commission of jurists and privy counsellors, who, after a summary and informal investigation, pronounced on him the sentence of death on a specification of charges either general and indeterminate, or of the most trivial import. "If the king," says Garibay, "had dispensed similar justice to all his nobles, who equally deserved it in those turbulent times, he would have had but few to reign over." [38] The constable had supported his disgrace, from the first, with an equanimity not to have been expected from his elation in prosperity; and he now received the tidings of his fate with a similar fortitude. As he rode along the streets to the place of execution, clad in the sable livery of an ordinary criminal, and deserted by those who had been reared by his bounty, the populace, who before called so loudly for his disgrace, struck with this astonishing reverse of his brilliant fortunes, were melted into tears. [39] They called to mind the numerous instances of his magnanimity. They reflected, that the ambitious schemes of his rivals had been not a whit less selfish, though less successful, than his own; and that, if his cupidity appeared insatiable, he had dispensed the fruits of it in acts of princely munificence. He himself maintained a serene and even cheerful aspect. Meeting one of the domestics of Prince Henry, he bade him request the prince "to reward the attachment of his servants with a different guerdon from what his master had assigned to him." As he ascended the scaffold, he surveyed the apparatus of death with composure, and calmly submitted himself to the stroke of the executioner, who, in the savage style of the executions of that day, plunged his knife into the throat of his victim, and deliberately severed his head from his body. A basin, for the reception of alms to defray the expenses of his interment, was placed at one extremity of the scaffold; and his mutilated remains, after having been exposed for several days to the gaze of the populace, were removed, by the brethren of a charitable order, to a place called the hermitage of St. Andrew, appropriated as the cemetery for malefactors. [40] Such was the tragical end of Alvaro de Luna; a man, who, for more than thirty years, controlled the counsels of the sovereign, or, to speak more properly, was himself the sovereign of Castile. His fate furnishes one of the most memorable lessons in history. It was not lost on his contemporaries; and the marquis of Santillana has made use of it to point the moral of perhaps the most pleasing of his didactic compositions. [41] John did not long survive his favorite's death, which he was seen afterwards to lament even with tears. Indeed, during the whole of the trial he had exhibited the most pitiable agitation, having twice issued and recalled his orders countermanding the constable's execution; and, had it not been for the superior constancy, or vindictive temper of the queen, he would probably have yielded to these impulses of returning affection. [42] So far from deriving a wholesome warning from experience, John confided the entire direction of his kingdom to individuals not less interested, but possessed of far less enlarged capacities, than the former minister. Penetrated with remorse at the retrospect of his unprofitable life, and filled with melancholy presages of the future, the unhappy prince lamented to his faithful attendant Cibdareal, on his deathbed, that "he had not been born the son of a mechanic, instead of king of Castile." He died July 21st, 1454, after a reign of eight and forty years, if reign it may be called, which was more properly one protracted minority. John left one child by his first wife, Henry, who succeeded him on the throne; and by his second wife two others, Alfonso, then an infant, and Isabella, afterwards queen of Castile, the subject of the present narrative. She had scarcely reached her fourth year at the time of her father's decease, having been born on the 22d of April, 1451, at Madrigal. The king recommended his younger children to the especial care and protection of their brother Henry, and assigned the town of Cuellar, with its territory and a considerable sum of money, for the maintenance of the Infanta Isabella. [43] FOOTNOTES [1] Sempere y Guarinos, Historia del Luxo, y de las Leyes Suntuarias de España, (Madrid, 1788,) tom. i. p. 171. [2] Crónica de Enrique III., edicion de la Academia, (Madrid, 1780,) passim.--Crónica de Juan II., (Valencia, 1779,) p. 6. [3] Crónica de Alvaro de Luna, edition de la Academia, (Madrid, 1784,) tit. 3, 5, 68, 74.--Guzman, Generaciones y Semblanzas, (Madrid, 1775,) cap. 33, 34.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, en Anales Históricos, (Madrid, 1682,) tom. i. fol. 227.--Crónica de Juan II., passim.--He possessed sixty towns and fortresses, and kept three thousand lances constantly in pay. Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS. [4] Guzman, Generaciones, cap. 33.--Crónica de Don Juan II., p. 491, et alibi. His complaisance for the favorite, indeed, must be admitted, if we believe Guzman, to have been of a most extraordinary kind. "E lo que con mayor maravilla se puede decir é oír, que aun en los autos naturales se dió así á la ordenanza del condestable, que seyendo él mozo bien complexionado, é teniendo á la reyna su muger moza y hermosa, si el condestable se lo contradixiese, no iria á dormir á su cama della." Ubi supra. [5] Marina, Teoría de las Cortes, (Madrid, 1813,) tom. i. cap. 20.--tom. ii. pp. 216, 390, 391.--tom. iii. part. 2, no. 4.--Capmany, Práctica y Estilo de Celebrar Cortes en Aragon, Cataluña y Valencia, (Madrid, 1821,) pp. 234, 235.--Sempere, Histoire des Cortès d'Espagne, (Bordeaux, 1815,) ch. 18, 24. [6] Several of this prince's laws for redressing the alleged grievances are incorporated in the great code of Philip II., (Recopilacion de las Leyes, (Madrid, 1640,) lib. 6, tit. 7, leyes 5, 7, 2,) which declares, in the most unequivocal language, the right of the commons to be consulted on all important matters. "Porque en los hechos arduos de nuestros reynos es necessario consejo de nuestros subditos, y naturales, _especialmente de los procuradores de las nuestras ciudades, villas, y lugares de los nuestros reynos._" It was much easier to extort good laws from this monarch, than to enforce them. [7] Mariana, Historia de España, (Madrid, 1780,) tom. ii. p. 299. [8] Marina, Teoría, ubi supra. [9] Capmany, Práctica y Estilo, p. 228.--Sempere, Hist. des Cortès, chap. 19.--Marina, Teoría, part. 1, cap. 16.--In 1656, the city of Palencia was content to repurchase its ancient right of representation from the crown, at an expense of 80,000 ducats. [10] Capmany, Práctica y Estilo, p. 230.--Sempere, Histoire des Cortès d'Espagne, chap. 19. [11] Marina, Teoría, tom. i. p. 161. [12] See the ample collections of Sanchez, "Poesías Castellanas anteriores al Siglo XV." 4 tom. Madrid, 1779-1790. [13] Guzman, Generaciones, cap. 33.--Gomez de Cibdareal, Centon Epistolario, (Madrid, 1775,) epist. 20, 49.--Cibdareal has given us a specimen of this royal criticism, which Juan de Mena, the subject of it, was courtier enough to adopt. [14] Velazquez, Orígenes de la Poesía Castellana, (Málaga, 1797,) p. 45.-- Sanchez, Poesías Castellanas, tom. i. p. 10.--"The Cancioneros Generales, in print and in manuscript," says Sanchez, "show the great number of dukes, counts, marquises, and other nobles, who cultivated this art." [15] He was the grandson, not, as Sanchez supposes (tom. i. p.15), the son, of Alonso de Villena, the first marquis as well as constable created in Castile, descended from James II. of Aragon. (See Dormer, Enmiendas y Advertencias de Zurita, (Zaragoza, 1683,) pp. 371-376.) His mother was an illegitimate daughter of Henry II., of Castile. Guzman, Generaciones, cap. 28.--Salazar de Mendoza, Monarquía de España, (Madrid, 1770,) tom. i. pp. 203, 339. [16] Guzman, Generaciones, cap. 28.--Juan de Mena introduces Villena into his "Laberinto," in an agreeable stanza, which has something of the mannerism of Dante. "Aquel claro padre aquel dulce fuente aquel que en el castolo monte resuena es don Enrique Señor de Villena honrra de España y del siglo presente," etc. Juan de Mena, Obras, (Alcalá, 1566,) fol. 138. [17] The recent Castilian translators of Bouterwek's History of Spanish Literature have fallen into an error in imputing the beautiful _cancion_ of the "Querella de Amor" to Villena. It was composed by the Marquis of Santillana. (Bouterwek, Historia de la Literatura Española, traducida por Cortina y Hugalde y Mollinedo, (Madrid, 1829,) p. 196, and Sanchez, Poesías Castellanas, tom. i. pp. 38, 143.) [18] Velazquez, Orígenes de la Poesía Castellana, p. 45.--Bouterwek, Literatura Española, trad. de Cortina y Mollinedo, nota S. [19] See an abstract of it in Mayans y Siscar, Orígines de la Lengua Española, (Madrid, 1737,) tom. ii. pp. 321 et seq. [20] Zurita, Anales de la Corona de Aragon, (Zaragoza, 1669,) tom. iii. p. 227.--Guzman, Generaciones, cap. 28. [21] Centon Epistolario, epist. 66.--The bishop endeavored to transfer the blame of the conflagration to the king. There can be little doubt, however, that the good father infused the suspicions of necromancy into his master's bosom. "The angels," he says in one of his works, "who guarded Paradise, presented a treatise on magic to one of the posterity of Adam, from a copy of which Villena derived his science." (See Juan de Mena, Obras, fol. 139, glosa.) One would think that such an orthodox source might have justified Villena in the use of it. [22] Comp. Juan de Mena, Obras, copl. 127, 128; and Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Vetus, tom. ii. p. 220. [23] Pulgar, Claros Varones de Castilla, y Letras, (Madrid, 1755,) tit. 4.--Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Vetus, lib. 10, cap. 9.--Quincuagenas de Gonzalo de Oviedo, MS., batalla 1, quinc. 1, dial. 8. [24] Garcilasso de la Vega, Obras, ed. de Herrera, (1580,) pp. 75, 76-- Sanchez, Poesías Castellanas, tom. i. p. 21.--Boscan, Obras, (1543,) fol. 19.--It must be admitted, however, that the attempt was premature, and that it required a riper stage of the language to give a permanent character to the innovation. [25] See Sanchez, Poesías Castellanas, tom. i. pp. 1-119.--A copious catalogue of the marquis de Santillana's writings is given in the same volume, (pp. 33 et seq.) Several of his poetical pieces are collected in the Cancionero General, (Anvers, 1573,) fol. 34 et seq. [26] Pulgar, Claros Varones, tit. 4.--Salazar de Mendoza, Monarquía, tom. i. p. 218.--Idem, Orígen de las Dignidades Seglares de Castilla y Leon, (Madrid, 1794,) p. 285.--Oviedo makes the marquis much older, seventy-five years of age, when he died. He left, besides daughters, six sons, who all became the founders of noble and powerful houses. See the whole genealogy, in Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 8. [27] "Flor de saber y cabellería." El Laberinto, copla 114. [28] Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Vetus, tom. ii. pp. 265 et seq. [29] Cibdareal, Centon Epistolario, epist. 47, 49. [30] See Velazquez, Poesía Castellana, p. 49. [31] A collection of them is incorporated in the Cancionero General, fol. 41 et seq. [32] Castro, Biblioteca Española, (Madrid, 1781,) tom. i, pp. 266, 267.-- This interesting document, the most primitive of all the Spanish _cancioneros_, notwithstanding its local position in the library is specified by Castro with great precision, eluded the search of the industrious translators of Bouterwek, who think it may have disappeared during the French invasion. Literatura Española, trad. de Cortina y Mollinedo, p. 205, nota Hh. [33] See these collected in Castro, Biblioteca Española, tom. ii. p. 265 et seq.--The veneration entertained for the poetic art in that day may be conceived from Baena's whimsical prologue. "Poetry," he says, "or the gay science, is a very subtile and delightsome composition. It demands in him, who would hope to excel in it, a curious invention, a sane judgment, a various scholarship, familiarity with courts and public affairs, high birth and breeding, a temperate, courteous, and liberal disposition, and, in fine, honey, sugar, salt, freedom, and hilarity in his discourse." p. 268. [34] Castro, Biblioteca Española, tom. i. p. 273. [35] Perhaps the most conspicuous of these historical compositions for mere literary execution is the Chronicle of Alvaro de Luna, to which I have had occasion to refer, edited in 1784, by Flores, the diligent secretary of the Royal Academy of History. He justly commends it for the purity and harmony of its diction. The loyalty of the chronicler seduces him sometimes into a swell of panegyric, which may he thought to savor too strongly of the current defect of Castilian prose; but it more frequently imparts to his narrative a generous glow of sentiment, raising it far above the lifeless details of ordinary history, and occasionally even to positive eloquence. Nic. Antonio, in the tenth book of his great repository, has assembled the biographical and bibliographical notices of the various Spanish authors of the fifteenth century, whose labors diffused a glimmering of light over their own age, which has become faint in the superior illumination of the succeeding. [36] Sempere, in his Historia del Luxo, (tom. i. p. 177,) has published an extract from an unprinted manuscript of the celebrated marquis of Villena, entitled _Triunfo de las Doñas_, in which, adverting to the _petits- maîtres_ of his time, he recapitulates the fashionable arts employed by them for the embellishment of the person, with a degree of minuteness which might edify a modern _dandy_. [37] Crónica de Juan II., p. 499.--Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, (1679,) tom. ii. pp. 335, 372. [38] Crónica de Alvaro de Luna, tit. 128.--Crónica de Juan II., pp. 457, 460, 572.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 227, 228.--Garibay, Compendio Historial de las Chrónicas de España, (Barcelona, 1628,) tom. ii. p. 493. [39] Crónica de Alvaro de Luna, tit. 128.--What a contrast to all this is afforded by the vivid portrait, sketched by John de Mena, of the constable in the noontide of his glory. "Este caualga sobre la fortuna y doma su cuello con asperas riendas y aunque del tenga tan muchas de prendas ella non le osa tocar de ninguna," etc. Laberinto, coplas 235 et seq. [40] Cibdareal, Centon Epistolario, ep. 103.--Crónica de Juan II., p. 564.--Crónica de Alvaro de Luna, tit. 128, and Apend. p. 458. [41] Entitled "Doctrinal de Privados." See the Cancionero General, fol. 37 et seq.--In the following stanza, the constable is made to moralize with good effect on the instability of worldly grandeur. "Quo se hizo la moneda que guarde para mis daños tantos tiempos tantos años plata joyas oro y seda y de todo no me queda sine este cadahalso; mundo malo mundo falso no ay quien contigo pueda." Manrique has the same sentiments in his exquisite "Coplas." I give Longfellow's version, as spirited as it is literal. "Spain's haughty Constable,--the great And gallant Master,--cruel fate Stripped him of all. Breathe not a whisper of his pride, He on the gloomy scaffold died, Ignoble fall! The countless treasures of his care, Hamlets and villas green and fair, His mighty power,-- What were they all but grief and shame, Tears and a broken heart,--when came. The parting hour!" Stanza 21. [42] Cibdareal, Centon Epistolario, ep. 103.--Crónica de Alvaro de Luna, tit. 128. [43] Crónica de Juan II., p. 576.--Cibdareal, Centon Epistolario, epist. 105. There has been considerable discrepancy, even among cotemporary writers, both as to the place and the epoch of Isabella's birth, amounting, as regards the latter, to nearly two years. I have adopted the conclusion of Señor Clemencin, formed from a careful collation of the various authorities, in the sixth volume of the Memorias de la Real Academia de Historia, (Madrid, 1821,) Ilust. 1, pp. 56-60. Isabella was descended both on the father's and mother's side from the famous John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster. See Florez, Memorias de las Reynas Cathólicas, (2d ed. Madrid, 1770,) tom. ii. pp. 743, 787. CHAPTER II. CONDITION OF ARAGON DURING THE MINORITY OF FERDINAND.--REIGN OF JOHN II., OF ARAGON. 1452-1472. John of Aragon.--Difficulties with his Son Carlos.--Birth of Ferdinand.-- Insurrection of Catalonia.--Death of Carlos.--His Character.--Tragical Story of Blanche.--Young Ferdinand besieged by the Catalans.--Treaty between France and Aragon.--Distress and Embarrassments of John.--Siege and Surrender of Barcelona. We must now transport the reader to Aragon, in order to take a view of the extraordinary circumstances, which opened the way for Ferdinand's succession in that kingdom. The throne, which had become vacant by the death of Martin, in 1410, was awarded by the committee of judges to whom the nation had referred the great question of the succession, to Ferdinand, regent of Castile during the minority of his nephew, John the Second; and thus the sceptre, after having for more than two centuries descended in the family of Barcelona, was transferred to the same bastard branch of Trastamara, that ruled over the Castilian monarchy. [1] Ferdinand the First was succeeded after a brief reign by his son Alfonso the Fifth, whose personal history belongs less to Aragon than to Naples, which kingdom he acquired by his own prowess, and where he established his residence, attracted, no doubt, by the superior amenity of the climate and the higher intellectual culture, as well as the pliant temper of the people, far more grateful to the monarch than the sturdy independence of his own countrymen. During his long absence, the government of his hereditary domains devolved on his brother John, as his lieutenant-general in Aragon. [2] This prince had married Blanche, widow of Martin, king of Sicily, and daughter of Charles the Third, of Navarre. By her he had three children; Carlos, prince of Viana; [3] Blanche, married to and afterwards repudiated by Henry the Fourth, of Castile; [4] and Eleanor, who espoused a French noble, Gaston, count of Foix. On the demise of the elder Blanche, the crown of Navarre rightfully belonged to her son, the prince of Viana, conformably to a stipulation in her marriage contract, that, on the event of her death, the eldest heir male, and, in default of sons, female, should inherit the kingdom, to the exclusion of her husband. [5] This provision, which had been confirmed by her father, Charles the Third, in his testament, was also recognized in her own, accompanied however with a request, that her son Carlos, then twenty-one years of age, would, before assuming the sovereignty, solicit "the good will and approbation of his father." [6] Whether this approbation was withheld, or whether it was ever solicited, does not appear. It seems probable, however, that Carlos, perceiving no disposition in his father to relinquish the rank and nominal title of king of Navarre, was willing he should retain them, so long as he himself should be allowed to exercise the actual rights of sovereignty; which indeed he did, as lieutenant-general or governor of the kingdom, at the time of his mother's decease, and for some years after. [7] In 1447, John of Aragon contracted a second alliance with Joan Henriquez, of the blood royal of Castile, and daughter of Don Frederic Henriquez, admiral of that kingdom; [8] a woman considerably younger than himself, of consummate address, intrepid spirit, and unprincipled ambition. Some years after this union, John sent his wife into Navarre, with authority to divide with his son Carlos the administration of the government there. This encroachment on his rights, for such Carlos reasonably deemed it, was not mitigated by the deportment of the young queen, who displayed all the insolence of sudden elevation, and who from the first seems to have regarded the prince with the malevolent eye of a step-mother. Navarre was at that time divided by two potent factions, styled, from their ancient leaders, Beaumonts and Agramonts; whose hostility, originating in a personal feud, had continued long after its original cause had become extinct. [9] The prince of Viana was intimately connected with some of the principal partisans of the Beaumont faction, who heightened by their suggestions the indignation to which his naturally gentle temper had been roused by the usurpation of Joan, and who even called on him to assume openly, and in defiance of his father, the sovereignty which of right belonged to him. The emissaries of Castile, too, eagerly seized this occasion of retaliating on John his interference in the domestic concerns of that monarchy, by fanning the spark of discord into a flame. The Agramonts, on the other hand, induced rather by hostility to their political adversaries than to the prince of Viana, vehemently espoused the cause of the queen. In this revival of half-buried animosities, fresh causes of disgust were multiplied, and matters soon came to the worst extremity. The queen, who had retired to Estella, was besieged there by the forces of the prince. The king, her husband, on receiving intelligence of this, instantly marched to her relief; and the father and son confronted each other at the head of their respective armies near the town of Aybar. [10] The unnatural position, in which they thus found themselves, seems to have sobered their minds, and to have opened the way to an accommodation, the terms of which were actually arranged, when the long-smothered rancor of the ancient factions of Navarre thus brought in martial array against each other, refusing all control, precipitated them into an engagement. The royal forces were inferior in number, but superior in discipline, to those of the prince, who, after a well contested action, saw his own party entirely discomfited, and himself a prisoner. [11] Some months before this event, Queen Joan had been delivered of a son, afterwards so famous as Ferdinand the Catholic; whose humble prospects, at the time of his birth, as a younger brother, afforded a striking contrast with the splendid destiny which eventually awaited him. This auspicious event occurred in the little town of Sos, in Aragon, on the 10th of March, 1452; and, as it was nearly contemporary with the capture of Constantinople, is regarded by Garibay to have been providentially assigned to this period, as affording, in a religious view, an ample counterpoise to the loss of the capital of Christendom. [12] The demonstrations of satisfaction, exhibited by John and his court on this occasion, contrasted strangely with the stern severity with which he continued to visit the offences of his elder offspring. It was not till after many months of captivity that the king, in deference to public opinion rather than the movements of his own heart, was induced to release his son, on conditions, however, so illiberal (his indisputable claim to Navarre not being even touched upon) as to afford no reasonable basis of reconciliation. The young prince accordingly, on his return to Navarre, became again involved in the factions which desolated that unhappy kingdom, and, after an ineffectual struggle against his enemies, resolved to seek an asylum at the court of his uncle Alfonso the Fifth, of Naples, and to refer to him the final arbitration of his differences with his father. [13] On his passage through France and the various courts of Italy, he was received with the attentions due to his rank, and still more to his personal character and misfortunes. Nor was he disappointed in the sympathy and favorable reception, which he had anticipated from his uncle. Assured of protection from so high a quarter, Carlos might now reasonably flatter himself with the restitution of his legitimate rights, when these bright prospects were suddenly overcast by the death of Alfonso, who expired at Naples of a fever in the month of May, 1458, bequeathing his hereditary dominions of Spain, Sicily, and Sardinia to his brother John, and his kingdom of Naples to his illegitimate son Ferdinand. [14] The frank and courteous manners of Carlos had won so powerfully on the affections of the Neapolitans, who distrusted the dark, ambiguous character of Ferdinand, Alfonso's heir, that a large party eagerly pressed the prince to assert his title to the vacant throne, assuring him of a general support from the people. But Carlos, from motives of prudence or magnanimity, declined engaging in this new contest, [15] and passed over to Sicily, whence he resolved to solicit a final reconciliation with his father. He was received with much kindness by the Sicilians, who, preserving a grateful recollection of the beneficent sway of his mother Blanche, when queen of that island, readily transferred to the son their ancient attachment to the parent. An assembly of the states voted a liberal supply for his present exigencies, and even urged him, if we are to credit the Catalan ambassador at the court of Castile, to assume the sovereignty of the island. [16] Carlos, however, far from entertaining so rash an ambition, seems to have been willing to seclude himself from public observation. He passed the greater portion of his time at a convent of Benedictine friars not far from Messina, where, in the society of learned men, and with the facilities of an extensive library, he endeavored to recall the happier hours of youth in the pursuit of his favorite studies of philosophy and history. [17] In the mean while, John, now king of Aragon and its dependencies, alarmed by the reports of his son's popularity in Sicily, became as solicitous for the security of his authority there, as he had before been for it in Navarre. He accordingly sought to soothe the mind of the prince by the fairest professions, and to allure him back to Spain by the prospect of an effectual reconciliation. Carlos, believing what he most earnestly wished, in opposition to the advice of his Sicilian counsellors, embarked for Majorca, and, after some preliminary negotiations, crossed over to the coast of Barcelona. Postponing, for fear of giving offence to his father, his entrance into that city, which, indignant at his persecution, had made the most brilliant preparations for his reception, he proceeded to Igualada, where an interview took place between him and the king and queen, in which he conducted himself with unfeigned humility and penitence, reciprocated on their part by the most consummate dissimulation. [18] All parties now confided in the stability of a pacification so anxiously desired, and effected with such apparent cordiality. It was expected that John would hasten to acknowledge his son's title as heir apparent to the crown of Aragon, and convene an assembly of the states to tender him the customary oath of allegiance. But nothing was further from the monarch's intention. He indeed summoned the Aragonese cortes at Fraga for the purpose of receiving their homage to himself; but he expressly refused their request touching a similar ceremony to the prince of Viana; and he openly rebuked the Catalans for presuming to address him as the successor to the crown. [19] In this unnatural procedure it was easy to discern the influence of the queen. In addition to her original causes of aversion to Carlos, she regarded him with hatred as the insuperable obstacle to her own child Ferdinand's advancement. Even the affection of John seemed to be now wholly transferred from the offspring of his first to that of his second marriage; and, as the queen's influence over him was unbounded, she found it easy by artful suggestions to put a dark construction on every action of Carlos, and to close up every avenue of returning affection within his bosom. Convinced at length of the hopeless alienation of his father, the prince of Viana turned his attention to other quarters, whence he might obtain support, and eagerly entered into a negotiation, which had been opened with him on the part of Henry the Fourth, of Castile, for a union with his sister the princess Isabella. This was coming in direct collision with the favorite scheme of his parents. The marriage of Isabella with the young Ferdinand, which indeed, from the parity of their ages, was a much more suitable connection than that with Carlos, had long been the darling object of their policy, and they resolved to effect it in the face of every obstacle. In conformity with this purpose, John invited the prince of Viana to attend him at Lerida, where he was then holding the cortes of Catalonia. The latter fondly, and indeed foolishly, after his manifold experience to the contrary, confiding in the relenting disposition of his father, hastened to obey the summons, in expectation of being publicly acknowledged as his heir in the assembly of the states. After a brief interview he was arrested, and his person placed in strict confinement. [20] The intelligence of this perfidious procedure diffused general consternation among all classes. They understood too well the artifices of the queen and the vindictive temper of the king, not to feel the most serious apprehensions, not only for the liberty, but for the life of their prisoner. The cortes of Lerida, which, though dissolved on that very day, had not yet separated, sent an embassy to John, requesting to know the nature of the crimes imputed to his son. The permanent deputation of Aragon, and a delegation from the council of Barcelona, waited on him for a similar purpose, remonstrating at the same time against any violent and unconstitutional proceeding. To all these John returned a cold, evasive answer, darkly intimating a suspicion of conspiracy by his son against his life, and reserving to himself the punishment of the offense. [21] No sooner was the result of their mission communicated, than the whole kingdom was thrown into a ferment. The high-spirited Catalans rose in arms, almost to a man. The royal governor, after a fruitless attempt to escape, was seized and imprisoned in Barcelona. Troops were levied, and placed under the command of experienced officers of the highest rank. The heated populace, outstripping the tardy movement of military operations, marched forward to Lerida in order to get possession of the royal person. The king, who had seasonable notice of this, displayed his wonted presence of mind. He ordered supper to be prepared for him at the usual hour, but, on the approach of night, made his escape on horseback with one or two attendants only, on the road to Fraga, a town within the territory of Aragon; while the mob, traversing the streets of Lerida, and finding little resistance at the gate, burst into the palace and ransacked every corner of it, piercing, in their fury, even the curtains and beds with their swords and lances. [22] The Catalan army, ascertaining the route of the royal fugitive, marched directly on Fraga, and arrived so promptly that John, with his wife, and the deputies of the Aragonese cortes assembled there, had barely time to make their escape on the road to Saragossa, while the insurgents poured into the city from the opposite quarter. The person of Carlos, in the mean time, was secured in the inaccessible fortress of Morella, situated in a mountainous district on the confines of Valencia. John, on halting at Saragossa, endeavored to assemble an Aragonese force capable of resisting the Catalan rebels. But the flame of insurrection had spread throughout Aragon, Valencia, and Navarre, and was speedily communicated to his transmarine possessions of Sardinia and Sicily. The king of Castile supported Carlos at the same time by an irruption into Navarre, and his partisans, the Beaumonts, co-operated with these movements by a descent on Aragon. [23] John, alarmed at the tempest which his precipitate conduct had roused, at length saw the necessity of releasing his prisoner; and, as the queen had incurred general odium as the chief instigator of his persecution, he affected to do this in consequence of her interposition. As Carlos with his mother-in-law traversed the country on their way to Barcelona, he was everywhere greeted, by the inhabitants of the villages thronging out to meet him, with the most touching enthusiasm. The queen, however, having been informed by the magistrates that her presence would not be permitted in the capital, deemed it prudent to remain at Villa Franca, about twenty miles distant; while the prince, entering Barcelona, was welcomed with the triumphant acclamation due to a conqueror returning from a campaign of victories. [24] The conditions on which the Catalans proposed to resume their allegiance to their sovereign were sufficiently humiliating. They insisted not only on his public acknowledgment of Carlos as his rightful heir and successor, with the office, conferred on him for life, of lieutenant-general of Catalonia, but on an obligation on his own part, that he would never enter the province without their express permission. Such was John's extremity, that he not only accepted these unpalatable conditions, but did it with affected cheerfulness. Fortune seemed now weary of persecution, and Carlos, happy in the attachment of a brave and powerful people, appeared at length to have reached a haven of permanent security. But at this crisis he fell ill of a fever, or, as some historians insinuate, of a disorder occasioned by poison administered during his imprisonment; a fact, which, although unsupported by positive evidence, seems, notwithstanding its atrocity, to be no wise improbable, considering the character of the parties implicated. He expired on the 23d of September, 1461, in the forty-first year of his age, bequeathing his title to the crown of Navarre, in conformity with the original marriage contract of his parents, to his sister Blanche and her posterity. [25] Thus in the prime of life, and at the moment when he seemed to have triumphed over the malice of his enemies, died the prince of Viana, whose character, conspicuous for many virtues, has become still more so for his misfortunes. His first act of rebellion, if such, considering his legitimate pretensions to the crown, it can be called, was severely requited by his subsequent calamities; while the vindictive and persecuting temper of his parents excited a very general commiseration in his behalf, and brought him more effectual support, than could have been derived from his own merits or the justice of his cause. The character of Don Carlos has been portrayed by Lucio Marineo, who, as he wrote an account of these transactions by the command of Ferdinand the Catholic, cannot be suspected of any undue partiality in favor of the prince of Viana. "Such," says he, "were his temperance and moderation, such the excellence of his breeding, the purity of his life, his liberality and munificence, and such the sweetness of his demeanor, that no one thing seemed to be wanting in him which belongs to a true and perfect prince." [26] He is described by another contemporary, as "in person somewhat above the middle stature, having a thin visage, with a serene and modest expression of countenance, and withal somewhat inclined to melancholy." [27] He was a considerable proficient in music, painting, and several mechanic arts. He frequently amused himself with poetical composition, and was the intimate friend of some of the most eminent bards of his time. But he was above all devoted to the study of philosophy and history. He made a version of Aristotle's Ethics into the vernacular, which was first printed nearly fifty years after his death, at Saragossa, in 1509. He compiled also a Chronicle of Navarre from the earliest period to his own times, which, although suffered to remain in manuscript, has been liberally used and cited by the Spanish antiquaries, Garibay, Blancas, and others. [28] His natural taste and his habits fitted him much better for the quiet enjoyment of letters, than for the tumultuous scenes in which it was his misfortune to be involved, and in which he was no match for enemies grown gray in the field and in the intrigues of the cabinet. But, if his devotion to learning, so rare in his own age, and so very rare among princes in any age, was unpropitious to his success on the busy theatre on which he was engaged, it must surely elevate his character in the estimation of an enlightened posterity. The tragedy did not terminate with the death of Carlos. His sister Blanche, notwithstanding the inoffensive gentleness of her demeanor, had long been involved, by her adhesion to her unfortunate brother, in a similar proscription with him. The succession to Navarre having now devolved on her, she became tenfold an object of jealousy both to her father, the present possessor of that kingdom, and to her sister Eleanor, countess of Foix, to whom the reversion of it had been promised by John, on his own decease. The son of this lady, Gaston de Foix, had lately married a sister of Louis the Eleventh, of France; and, in a treaty subsequently contracted between that monarch and the king of Aragon, it was stipulated that Blanche should be delivered into the custody of the countess of Foix, as surety for the succession of the latter, and of her posterity, to the crown of Navarre. [29] Conformably to this provision, John endeavored to persuade the princess Blanche to accompany him into France, under the pretext of forming an alliance for her with Louis's brother, the duke of Berri. The unfortunate lady, comprehending too well her father's real purpose, besought him with the most piteous entreaties not to deliver her into the hands of her enemies; but, closing his heart against all natural affection, he caused her to be torn from her residence at Olit, in the heart of her own dominions, and forcibly transported across the mountains into those of the count of Foix. On arriving at St. Jean Pied de Port, a little town on the French side of the Pyrenees, being convinced that she had nothing further to hope from human succor, she made a formal renunciation of her right to Navarre in favor of her cousin and former husband, Henry the Fourth, of Castile, who had uniformly supported the cause of her brother Carlos. Henry, though debased by sensual indulgence, was naturally of a gentle disposition, and had never treated her personally with unkindness. In a letter, which she now addressed to him, and which, says a Spanish historian, cannot be read, after the lapse of so many years, without affecting the most insensible heart, [30] she reminded him of the dawn of happiness which she had enjoyed under his protection, of his early engagements to her, and of her subsequent calamities; and, anticipating the gloomy destiny which awaited her, she settled on him her inheritance of Navarre, to the entire exclusion of her intended assassins, the count and countess of Foix. [31] On the same day, the last of April, she was delivered over to one of their emissaries, who conducted her to the castle of Ortes in Bearne, where, after languishing in dreadful suspense for nearly two years, she was poisoned by the command of her sister. [32] The retribution of Providence not unfrequently overtakes the guilty even in this world. The countess survived her father to reign in Navarre only three short weeks; while the crown was ravished from her posterity for ever by that very Ferdinand, whose elevation had been the object to his parents of so much solicitude and so many crimes. Within a fortnight after the decease of Carlos, the customary oaths of allegiance, so pertinaciously withheld from that unfortunate prince, were tendered by the Aragonese deputation, at Calatayud, to his brother Ferdinand, then only ten years of age, as heir apparent of the monarchy; after which he was conducted by his mother into Catalonia, in order to receive the more doubtful homage of that province. The extremities of Catalonia at this time seemed to be in perfect repose, but the capital was still agitated by secret discontent. The ghost of Carlos was seen stalking by night through the streets of Barcelona, bewailing in piteous accents his untimely end, and invoking vengeance on his unnatural murderers. The manifold miracles wrought at his tomb soon gained him the reputation of a saint, and his image received the devotional honors reserved for such as have been duly canonized by the church. [33] The revolutionary spirit of the Barcelonians, kept alive by the recollection of past injury, as well as by the apprehensions of future vengeance, should John succeed in reestablishing his authority over them, soon became so alarming, that the queen, whose consummate address, however, had first accomplished the object of her visit, found it advisable to withdraw from the capital; and she sought refuge, with her son and such few adherents as still remained faithful to them, in the fortified city of Gerona, about fifty miles north of Barcelona. Hither, however, she was speedily pursued by the Catalan militia, embodied under the command of their ancient leader Roger, count of Pallas, and eager to regain the prize which they had so inadvertently lost. The city was quickly entered, but the queen, with her handful of followers, had retreated to a tower belonging to the principal church in the place, which, as was very frequent in Spain, in those wild times, was so strongly fortified as to be capable of maintaining a formidable resistance. To oppose this, a wooden fortress of the same height was constructed by the assailants, and planted with lombards and other pieces of artillery then in use, which kept up an unintermitting discharge of stone bullets on the little garrison. [34] The Catalans also succeeded in running a mine beneath the fortress, through which a considerable body of troops penetrated into it, when, their premature cries of exultation having discovered them to the besieged, they were repulsed, after a desperate struggle, with great slaughter. The queen displayed the most intrepid spirit in the midst of these alarming scenes; unappalled by the sense of her own danger and that of her child, and by the dismal lamentations of the females by whom she was surrounded, she visited every part of the works in person, cheering her defenders by her presence and dauntless resolution. Such were the stormy and disastrous scenes in which the youthful Ferdinand commenced a career, whose subsequent prosperity was destined to be checkered by scarcely a reverse of fortune. [35] In the mean while, John, having in vain attempted to penetrate through Catalonia to the relief of his wife, effected this by the co-operation of his French ally, Louis the Eleventh. That monarch, with his usual insidious policy, had covertly despatched an envoy to Barcelona on the death of Carlos, assuring the Catalans of his protection, should they still continue averse to a reconciliation with their own sovereign. These offers were but coldly received; and Louis found it more for his interest to accept the propositions made to him by the king of Aragon himself, which subsequently led to most important consequences. By three several treaties, of the 3d, 21st, and 23d of May, 1462, it was stipulated, that Louis should furnish his ally with seven hundred lances and a proportionate number of archers and artillery during the war with Barcelona, to be indemnified by the payment of two hundred thousand gold crowns within one year after the reduction of that city; as security for which the counties of Roussillon and Cerdagne were pledged by John, with the cession of their revenues to the French king, until such time as the original debt should be redeemed. In this transaction both monarchs manifested their usual policy; Louis believing that this temporary mortgage would become a permanent alienation, from John's inability to discharge it; while the latter anticipated, as the event showed, with more justice, that the aversion of the inhabitants to the dismemberment of their country from the Aragonese monarchy would baffle every attempt on the part of the French to occupy it permanently. [36] In pursuance of these arrangements, seven hundred French lances with a considerable body of archers and artillery [37] crossed the mountains, and, rapidly advancing on Gerona, compelled the insurgent army to raise the siege, and to decamp with such precipitation as to leave their cannon in the hands of the royalists. The Catalans now threw aside the thin veil, with which they had hitherto covered their proceedings. The authorities of the principality, established in Barcelona, publicly renounced their allegiance to King John and his son Ferdinand, and proclaimed them enemies of the republic. Writings at the same time were circulated, denouncing from scriptural authority, as well as natural reason, the doctrine of legitimacy in the broadest terms, and insisting that the Aragonese monarchs, far from being absolute, might be lawfully deposed for an infringement of the liberties of the nation. "The good of the commonwealth," it was said, "must always be considered paramount to that of the prince." Extraordinary doctrines these for the age in which they were promulged, affording a still more extraordinary contrast with those which have been since familiar in that unhappy country! [38] The government then enforced levies of all such as were above the age of fourteen, and, distrusting the sufficiency of its own resources, offered the sovereignty of the principality to Henry the Fourth, of Castile. The court of Aragon, however, had so successfully insinuated its influence into the council of this imbecile monarch, that he was not permitted to afford the Catalans any effectual support; and, as he abandoned their cause altogether before the expiration of the year, [39] the crown was offered to Don Pedro, constable of Portugal, a descendant of the ancient house of Barcelona. In the mean while, the old king of Aragon, attended by his youthful son, had made himself master, with his characteristic activity, of considerable acquisitions in the revolted territory, successively reducing Lerida, [40] Cervera, Amposta, [41] Tortosa, and the most important places in the south of Catalonia. Many of these places were strongly fortified, and most of them defended with a resolution which cost the conqueror a prodigious sacrifice of time and money. John, like Philip of Macedon, made use of gold even more than arms, for the reduction of his enemies; and, though he indulged in occasional acts of resentment, his general treatment of those who submitted was as liberal as it was politic. His competitor, Don Pedro, had brought little foreign aid to the support of his enterprise; he had failed altogether in conciliating the attachment of his new subjects; and, as the operations of the war had been conducted on his part in the most languid manner, the whole of the principality seemed destined soon to relapse under the dominion of its ancient master. At this juncture the Portuguese prince fell ill of a fever, of which he died on the 29th of June, 1466. This event, which seemed likely to lead to a termination of the war, proved ultimately the cause of its protraction. [42] It appeared, however, to present a favorable opportunity to John for opening a negotiation with the insurgents. But, so resolute were they in maintaining their independence, that the council of Barcelona condemned two of the principal citizens, suspected of defection from the cause, to be publicly executed; it refused moreover to admit an envoy from the Aragonese cortes within the city, and caused the despatches, with which he was intrusted by that body, to be torn in pieces before his face. The Catalans then proceeded to elect René le Bon, as he was styled, of Anjou, to the vacant throne, brother of one of the original competitors for the crown of Aragon on the demise of Martin; whose cognomen of "Good" is indicative of a sway far more salutary to his subjects than the more coveted and imposing title of Great. [43] This titular sovereign of half a dozen empires, in which he did not actually possess a rood of land, was too far advanced in years to assume this perilous enterprise himself; and he accordingly intrusted it to his son John, duke of Calabria and Lorraine, who, in his romantic expeditions in southern Italy, had acquired a reputation for courtesy and knightly prowess, inferior to none other of his time. [44] Crowds of adventurers flocked to the standard of a leader, whose ample inheritance of pretensions had made him familiar with war from his earliest boyhood; and he soon found himself at the head of eight thousand effective troops. Louis the Eleventh, although not directly aiding his enterprise with supplies of men or money, was willing so far to countenance it, as to open a passage for him through the mountain fastnesses of Roussillon, then in his keeping, and thus enable him to descend with his whole army at once on the northern borders of Catalonia. [45] The king of Aragon could oppose no force capable of resisting this formidable army. His exchequer, always low, was completely exhausted by the extraordinary efforts, which he had made in the late campaigns; and, as the king of France, either disgusted with the long protraction of the war, or from secret good-will to the enterprise of his feudal subject, withheld from King John the stipulated subsidies, the latter monarch found himself unable, with every expedient of loan and exaction, to raise sufficient money to pay his troops, or to supply his magazines. In addition to this, he was now involved in a dispute with the count and countess of Foix, who, eager to anticipate the possession of Navarre, which had been guaranteed to them on their father's decease, threatened a similar rebellion, though on much less justifiable pretences, to that which he had just experienced from Don Carlos. To crown the whole of John's calamities, his eyesight, which had been impaired by exposure and protracted sufferings during the winter siege of Amposta, now failed him altogether. [46] In this extremity, his intrepid wife, putting herself at the head of such forces as she could collect, passed by water to the eastern shores of Catalonia, besieging Rosas in person, and checking the operations of the enemy by the capture of several inferior places; while Prince Ferdinand, effecting a junction with her before Gerona, compelled the duke of Lorraine to abandon the siege of that important city. Ferdinand's ardor, however, had nearly proved fatal to him; as, in an accidental encounter with a more numerous party of the enemy, his jaded horse would infallibly have betrayed him into their hands, had it not been for the devotion of his officers, several of whom, throwing themselves between him and his pursuers, enabled him to escape by the sacrifice of their own liberty. These ineffectual struggles could not turn the tide of fortune. The duke of Lorraine succeeded in this and the two following campaigns in making himself master of all the rich district of Ampurdan, northeast of Barcelona. In the capital itself, his truly princely qualities and his popular address secured him the most unbounded influence. Such was the enthusiasm for his person, that, when he rode abroad, the people thronged around him, embracing his knees, the trappings of his steed, and even the animal himself, in their extravagance; while the ladies, it is said, pawned their rings, necklaces, and other ornaments of their attire, in order to defray the expenses of the war. [47] King John, in the mean while, was draining the cup of bitterness to the dregs. In the winter of 1468, his queen, Joan Henriquez, fell a victim to a painful disorder, which had been secretly corroding her constitution for a number of years. In many respects, she was the most remarkable woman of her time. She took an active part in the politics of her husband, and may be even said to have given them a direction. She conducted several important diplomatic negotiations to a happy issue, and, what was more uncommon in her sex, displayed considerable capacity for military affairs. Her persecution of her step-son, Carlos, has left a deep stain on her memory. It was the cause of all her husband's subsequent misfortunes. Her invincible spirit, however, and the resources of her genius, supplied him with the best means of surmounting many of the difficulties in which she had involved him, and her loss at this crisis seemed to leave him at once without solace or support. [48] At this period, he was further embarrassed, as will appear in the ensuing chapter, by negotiations for Ferdinand's marriage, which was to deprive him, in a great measure, of his son's co-operation in the struggle with his subjects, and which, as he lamented, while he had scarcely three hundred _enríques_ in his coffers, called on him for additional disbursements. As the darkest hour, however, is commonly said to precede the dawning, so light now seemed to break upon the affairs of John. A physician in Lerida, of the Hebrew race, which monopolized at that time almost all the medical science in Spain, persuaded the king to submit to the then unusual operation of couching, and succeeded in restoring sight to one of his eyes. As the Jew, after the fashion of the Arabs, debased his real science with astrology, he refused to operate on the other eye, since the planets, he said, wore a malignant aspect. But John's rugged nature was insensible to the timorous superstitions of his age, and he compelled the physician to repeat his experiment, which in the end proved perfectly successful. Thus restored to his natural faculties, the octogenarian chief, for such he might now almost be called, regained his wonted elasticity, and prepared to resume offensive operations against the enemy with all his accustomed energy. [49] Heaven, too, as if taking compassion on his accumulated misfortunes, now removed the principal obstacle to his success by the death of the duke of Lorraine, who was summoned from the theatre of his short-lived triumphs on the 16th of December, 1469. The Barcelonians were thrown into the greatest consternation by his death, imputed, as usual, though without apparent foundation, to poison; and their respect for his memory was attested by the honors no less than royal, which they paid to his remains. His body, sumptuously attired, with his victorious sword by his side, was paraded in solemn procession through the illuminated streets of the city, and, after lying nine days in state, was deposited amid the lamentations of the people in the sepulchre of the sovereigns of Catalonia. [50] As the father of the deceased prince was too old, and his children too young, to give effectual aid to their cause, the Catalans might be now said to be again without a leader. But their spirit was unbroken, and with the same resolution in which they refused submission more than two centuries after, in 1714, when the combined forces of France and Spain were at the gates of the capital, they rejected the conciliatory advances made them anew by John. That monarch, however, having succeeded by extraordinary efforts in assembling a competent force, was proceeding with his usual alacrity in the reduction of such places in the eastern quarter of Catalonia as had revolted to the enemy, while at the same time he instituted a rigorous blockade of Barcelona by sea and land. The fortifications were strong, and the king was unwilling to expose so fair a city to the devastating horrors of a storm. The inhabitants made one vigorous effort in a sally against the royal forces; but the civic militia were soon broken, and the loss of four thousand men, killed and prisoners, admonished them of their inability to cope with the veterans of Aragon. [51] At length, reduced to the last extremity, they consented to enter into negotiations, which were concluded by a treaty equally honorable to both parties. It was stipulated, that Barcelona should retain all its ancient privileges and rights of jurisdiction, and, with some exceptions, its large territorial possessions. A general amnesty was to be granted for offences. The foreign mercenaries were to be allowed to depart in safety; and such of the natives, as should refuse to renew their allegiance to their ancient sovereign within a year, might have the liberty of removing with their effects wherever they would. One provision may be thought somewhat singular, after what had occurred; it was agreed that the king should cause the Barcelonians to be publicly proclaimed, throughout all his dominions, good, faithful, and loyal subjects; which was accordingly done! The king, after the adjustment of the preliminaries, "declining," says a contemporary, "the triumphal car which had been prepared for him, made his entrance into the city by the gate of St. Anthony, mounted on a white charger; and, as he rode along the principal streets, the sight of so many pallid countenances and emaciated figures, bespeaking the extremity of famine, smote his heart with sorrow." He then proceeded to the hall of the great palace, and on the 22d of December, 1472, solemnly swore there to respect the constitution and laws of Catalonia. [52] Thus ended this long, disastrous civil war, the fruit of parental injustice and oppression, which had nearly cost the king of Aragon the fairest portion of his dominions; which devoted to disquietude and disappointment more than ten years of life, at a period when repose is most grateful; and which opened the way to foreign wars, that continued to hang like a dark cloud over the evening of his days. It was attended, however, with one important result; that of establishing Ferdinand's succession over the whole of the domains of his ancestors. FOOTNOTES [1] The reader who may be curious in this matter will find the pedigree exhibiting the titles of the several competitors to the crown given by Mr. Hallam. (State of Europe during the Middle Ages, (2d ed. London, 1819,) vol. ii. p. 60, note.) The claims of Ferdinand were certainly not derived from the usual laws of descent. [2] The reader of Spanish history often experiences embarrassment from the identity of names in the various princes of the Peninsula. Thus the John, mentioned in the text, afterwards John II., might be easily confounded with his namesake and contemporary, John II., of Castile. The genealogical table, at the beginning of this History, will show their relationship to each other. [3] His grandfather, Charles III., created this title in favor of Carlos, appropriating it as the designation henceforth of the heir apparent.-- Aleson, Anales del Reyno de Navarra, contin. de Moret, (Pamplona, 1766,) tom. iv. p. 398.--Salazar de Mendoza, Monarquia, tom. ii. p. 331. [4] See Part I. Chap. 3, Note 5, of this History. [5] This fact, vaguely and variously reported by Spanish writers, is fully established by Aleson, who cites the original instrument, contained in the archives of the counts of Lerin. Anales de Navarra, tom. iv. pp. 354, 365. [6] See the reference to the original document in Aleson. (Tom. iv. pp. 365, 366.) This industrious writer has established the title of Prince Carlos to Navarre, so frequently misunderstood or misrepresented by the national historians, on an incontestable basis. [7] Ibid., tom. iv. p. 467. [8] See Part I. Chap. 3, of this work. [9] Gaillard errs in referring the origin of these factions to this epoch. (Histoire de la Rivalité de France et de l'Espagne, (Paris, 1801,) tom. iii. p. 227.) Aleson quotes a proclamation of John in relation to them in the lifetime of Queen Blanche. Annales de Navarra, tom. iv. p. 494. [10] Zurita, Anales, tom. iii. fol. 278.--Lucio Marineo Siculo, Coronista de sus Magestades, Las Cosas Memorables de España, (Alcalà de Henares, 1539,) fol. 104.--Aleson, Anales de Navarra, tom. iv. pp. 494-498. [11] Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 223.--Aleson, Anales de Navarra, tom. iv. pp. 501-503.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 105. [12] Compendio, tom. iii. p. 419.--L. Marineo describes the heavens as uncommonly serene at the moment of Ferdinand's birth. "The sun, which had been obscured with clouds during the whole day, suddenly broke forth with unwonted splendor. A crown was also beheld in the sky, composed of various brilliant colors like those of a rainbow. All which appearances were interpreted by the spectators as an omen, that the child then born would be the most illustrious among men." (Cosas Memorables, fol. 153.) Garibay postpones the nativity of Ferdinand to the year 1453, and L. Marineo, who ascertains with curious precision even the date of his conception, fixes his birth in 1450, (fol. 153.) But Alonso de Palencia in his History, (Verdadera Corónica de Don Enrique IV., Rei de Castilla y Leon, y del Rei Don Alonso su Hermano, MS.) and Andrés Bernaldez, Cura de Los Palacios, (Historia de los Reyes Católicos, MS., c. 8,) both of them contemporaries, refer this event to the period assigned in the text; and, as the same epoch is adopted by the accurate Zurita, (Anales, tom. iv. fol. 9,) I have given it the preference. [13] Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 3-48.--Aleson, Anales de Navarra, tom. iv. pp. 508-526.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 105. [14] Giannone, Istoria Civile del Regno di Napoli, (Milano, 1823,) lib. 26, c. 7.--Ferreras, Histoire Générale d'Espagne, trad. par D'Hermilly, (Paris, 1751,) tom. vii. p. 60.--L'Histoire du Royaume de Navarre, par l'un des Secrétaires Interprettes de sa Majesté, (Paris, 1596,) p. 468. [15] Compare the narrative of the Neapolitan historians, Summonte (Historia della Città e Regno di Napoli, (Napoli, 1675,) lib. 5, c. 2) and Giannone, (Istoria Civile, lib. 26, c. 7.--lib. 27. Introd.) with the opposite statements of L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, (fol. 106,) himself a contemporary, Aleson, (Anales de Navarra, tom. iv. p. 546,) and other Spanish writers. [16] Enriquez del Castillo, Crónica de Enrique el Quarto, (Madrid, 1787,) cap. 43. [17] Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 97.--Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Vetus, tom. ii. p. 282.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 106.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 250.--Carlos bargained with Pope Pius II. for a transfer of this library, particularly rich in the ancient classics, to Spain, which was eventually defeated by his death. Zurita, who visited the monastery containing it nearly a century after this period, found its inmates possessed of many traditionary anecdotes respecting the prince during his seclusion among them. [18] Aleson, Anales de Navarra, tom. iv. pp. 548-554.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 251.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 60-69. [19] Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, ubi supra.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 70-75.--Aleson, Anales de Navarra, tom. iv. p. 556. [20] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 108.--Zurita, Anales, lib. 17, cap. 3.--Aleson, Anales de Navarra, tom. iv. pp. 556, 557.--Castillo, Crónica, cap. 27. [21] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 108, 109.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 252.--Zurita, Anales, lib. 17, cap. 45.--Aleson, Anales de Navarra, tom. ii. p. 357. [22] Aleson, Anales de Navarra, tom. ii. p. 358.--Zurita, Anales, lib. 17, cap. 6.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 253.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 111. [23] Zurita, Anales, lib. 17, cap. 6.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 111. [24] Castillo, Crónica, cap. 28.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, fol. 253, 254. --L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 111, 112.--Aleson, Anales de Navarra, tom. iv. pp. 559, 560.--The inhabitants of Tarraca closed their gates upon the queen, and rung the bells on her approach, the signal of alarm on the appearance of an enemy, or for the pursuit of a malefactor. [25] Alonso de Palencia, Crónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 51.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 114.--Aleson, Anales de Navarra, tom. iv. pp. 561- 563.--Zurita, Anales, cap. 19, 24. [26] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 106.--"Por quanto era la templança y mesura de aquel principe; tan grande el concierto y su criança y costumbres, la limpieza de su vida, su liberalidad y magnificencia, y finalmente su dulce conversacion, que ninguna cosa en el faltava de aquellas que pertenescen a recta vivir; y que arman el verdadero y perfecto principe y señor." [27] Gundisalvus Garsias, apud Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Vetus, tom. ii. p. 281. [28] Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Vetus, tom. ii. pp. 281, 282.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. p. 434. [29] This treaty was signed at Olit in Navarre, April 12th, 1462.--Zurita, Anales, lib. 17, cap. 38, 39.--Gaillard, Rivalité, tom. iii. p. 235.-- Gaillard confounds it with the subsequent one made in the month of May, near the town of Salvatierra in Bearne. [30] Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom., vii. p. 110. [31] Hist. du Royaume de Navarre, p. 496.--Aleson, Anales de Navarra, tom. iv. pp. 590-593.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 258, 259.-- Zurita, Anales, lib. 17, cap. 38. [32] Lebrija, De Bello Navariensi, (Granatae, 1545,) lib. 1, cap. 1, fol. 74.--Aleson, Anales de Navarra, ubi supra.--Zurita, Anales, lib. 17, cap. 38.--The Spanish historians are not agreed as to the time or even mode of Blanche's death. All concur, however, in attributing it to assassination, and most of them, with the learned Antonio Lebrija, a contemporary, (loc. cit.,) in imputing it to poison. The fact of her death, which Aleson, on I know not what authority, refers to the 2d of December, 1464, was not publicly disclosed till some months after its occurrence, when disclosure became necessary in consequence of the proposed interposition of the Navarrese cortes. [33] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 51.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 98.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 256.--Aleson, Anales de Navarra, tom. iv. pp. 563 et seq.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 114.--According to Lanuza, who wrote nearly two centuries after the death of Carlos, the flesh upon his right arm, which had been amputated for the purpose of a more convenient application to the diseased members of the pilgrims who visited his shrine, remained in his day in a perfectly sound and healthful state! (Historias Ecclesiásticas y Seculares de Aragon, (Zaragoza, 1622,) tom. i. p. 553.) Aleson wonders that any should doubt the truth of miracles, attested by the monks of the very monastery in which Carlos was interred. [34] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 116.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 51.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 113. The Spaniards, deriving the knowledge of artillery from the Arabs, had become familiar with it before the other nations of Christendom. The affirmation of Zurita, however, that 5000 balls were fired from the battery of the besiegers at Gerona in one day, is perfectly absurd. So little was the science of gunnery advanced in other parts of Europe at this period, and indeed later, that it was usual for a field-piece not to be discharged more than twice in the course of an action, if we may credit Machiavelli, who, indeed, recommends dispensing with the use of artillery altogether. Arte della Guerra, lib. 3. (Opere, Genova, 1798.) [35] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, c. 51.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 116.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 113.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 259. [36] Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 111.--Another 100,000 crowns were to be paid in case further assistance should be required from the French monarch after the reduction of Barcelona. This treaty has been incorrectly reported by most of the French and all the Spanish historians whom I have consulted, save the accurate Zurita. An abstract from the original documents, compiled by the Abbé Legrand, has been given by M. Petitot in his recent edition of the Collection des Mémoires relatifs à l'Histoire de France, (Paris, 1836,) tom. xi. Introd. p. 245. [37] A French lance, it may be stated, of that day, according to L. Marineo, was accompanied by two horsemen; so that the whole contingent of cavalry to be furnished on this occasion amounted to 2100. (Cosas Memorables, fol. 117.) Nothing could be more indeterminate than the complement of a lance in the Middle Ages. It is not unusual to find it reckoned at five or six horsemen. [38] Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 113-115.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 1. [39] In conformity with the famous verdict given by Louis XI. at Bayonne, April 23d, 1463, previously to the interview between him and Henry IV. on the shores of the Bidassoa. See Part I. Chap. 3, of this History. [40] This was the battle-ground of Julius Caesar in his wars with Pompey. See his ingenious military manoeuvre as simply narrated in his own Commentaries, (De Bello Civili, tom. i. p. 54,) and by Lucan, (Pharsalia, lib. 4,) with his usual swell of hyperbole. [41] The cold was so intense at the siege of Amposta, that serpents of an enormous magnitude are reported by L. Marineo to have descended from the mountains, and taken refuge in the camp of the besiegers. Portentous and supernatural voices were frequently heard during the nights. Indeed, the superstition of the soldiers appears to have been so lively as to have prepared them for seeing and hearing anything. [42] Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. p. 390.--Alonso de Palencia, MS., part. 2, cap. 60, 61--Castillo, Crónica, pp. 43, 44, 46, 49, 50, 54.--Zurita, Anales, tom. ii. fol. 116, 124, 127, 128, 130, 137, 147.--M. La Clède states, that "Don Pedro no sooner arrived in Catalonia, than he was poisoned."(Histoire Générale de Portugal, (Paris, 1735,) tom. iii. p. 245.) It must have been a very slow poison. He arrived January 21st, 1464, and died June 29th, 1466. [43] Sir Walter Scott, in his "Anne of Geierstein," has brought into full relief the ridiculous side of René's character. The good king's fondness for poetry and the arts, however, although showing itself occasionally in puerile eccentricities, may compare advantageously with the coarse appetites and mischievous activity of most of the contemporary princes. After all, the best tribute to his worth was the earnest attachment of his people. His biography has been well and diligently compiled by the viscount of Villeneuve Bargemont, (Histoire de René d'Anjou, Paris, 1825,) who has, however, indulged in greater detail than was perhaps to have been desired by René, or his readers. [44] Comines says of him, "A tous alarmes c'estoit le premier homme armé, et de toutes pièces, et son cheval tousjours bardé. Il portoit un habillement que ces conducteurs portent en Italie, et sembloit bien prince et chef de guerre; et y avoit d'obéissance autant que monseigneur de Charolois, et luy obéissoit tout l'ost de meilleur coeur, car à la vérité il estoit digne d'estre honoré." Philippe de Comines, Mémoires, apud Petitot; (Paris, 1826,) liv. 1, chap. 11. [45] Villeneuve Bargemont, Hist. de René, tom. ii. pp. 168, 169.--Histoire de Louys XI., autrement dicte La Chronique Scandaleuse, par un Greffier de l'Hostel de Ville de Paris, (Paris, 1620,) p. 145.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 150, 153.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 17.-- Palencia swells the numbers of the French in the service of the duke of Lorraine to 20,000. [46] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 139.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 148, 149, 158.--Aleson, Anales de Navarra, tom. iv. pp. 611-613.-- Duclos, Hist. de Louis XI., (Amsterdam, 1746,) tom. ii. p. 114.--Mém. de Comines, Introd., p. 258, apud Petitot. [47] Villeneuve Bargemont, Hist. de René, tom. ii. pp. 182, 183.--L. Marineo, fol. 140.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 153-164.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. rey 29, cap. 7. [48] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 88.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 143.--Aleson, Anales de Navarra, tom. iv. p. 609.-- The queen's death was said to have been caused by a cancer. According to Aleson and some other Spanish writers, Joan was heard several times, in her last illness, to exclaim, in allusion, as was supposed, to her assassination of Carlos, "Alas! Ferdinand, how dear thou hast cost thy mother!" I find no notice of this improbable confession in any contemporary author. [49] Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. pp. 459, 460.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 151.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., cap. 88. [50] Villeneuve Bargemont, Hist. de René, tom. ii. pp. 182,333, 334.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 142.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, part. 2, cap. 39.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 178.--According to M. de Villeneuve Bargemont, the princess Isabella's hand had been offered to the duke of Lorraine, and the envoy despatched to notify his acceptance of it, on arriving at the court of Castile, received from the lips of Henry IV. the first tidings of his master's death, (tom. ii. p. 184.) He must have learned too with no less surprise that Isabella had already been married at that time more than a year! See the date of the official marriage recorded in Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Apend. no. 4. [51] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 29, 45.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 180-183.-Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, rey 29, cap. 29. [52] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 144, 147.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 187, 188.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 1. CHAPTER III. REIGN OF HENRY IV., OF CASTILE--CIVIL WAR.--MARRIAGE OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA. 1454-1469. Henry IV. disappoints Expectations.--Oppression of the People.--League of the Nobles.--Extraordinary Scene at Avila.--Early Education of Isabella.-- Death of her Brother Alfonso.--Intestine Anarchy.--The Crown offered to Isabella.--She declines it.--Her Suitors.--She accepts Ferdinand of Aragon.--Marriage Articles.--Critical Situation of Isabella.--Ferdinand enters Castile.--Their Marriage. While these stormy events were occurring in Aragon, the Infanta Isabella, whose birth was mentioned at the close of the first chapter, was passing her youth amidst scenes scarcely less tumultuous. At the date of her birth, her prospect of succeeding to the throne of her ancestors was even more remote than Ferdinand's prospect of inheriting that of his; and it is interesting to observe through what trials, and by what a series of remarkable events, Providence was pleased to bring about this result, and through it the union, so long deferred, of the great Spanish monarchies. The accession of her elder brother, Henry the Fourth, was welcomed with an enthusiasm, proportioned to the disgust which had been excited by the long-protracted and imbecile reign of his predecessor. Some few, indeed, who looked back to the time when he was arrayed in arms against his father, distrusted the soundness either of his principles or of his judgment. But far the larger portion of the nation was disposed to refer this to inexperience, or the ebullition of youthful spirit, and indulged the cheering anticipations which are usually entertained of a new reign and a young monarch. [1] Henry was distinguished by a benign temper, and by a condescension, which might be called familiarity, in his intercourse with his inferiors, virtues peculiarly engaging in persons of his elevated station; and as vices, which wear the gloss of youth, are not only pardoned, but are oftentimes popular with the vulgar, the reckless extravagance in which he indulged himself was favorably contrasted with the severe parsimony of his father in his latter years, and gained him the surname of "the Liberal." His treasurer having remonstrated with him on the prodigality of his expenditure, he replied, "Kings, instead of hoarding treasure like private persons, are bound to dispense it for the happiness of their subjects. We must give to our enemies to make them friends, and to our friends to keep them so." He suited the action so well to the word, that, in a few years, there was scarcely a _mara-vedi_ remaining in the royal coffers. [2] He maintained greater state than was usual with the monarchs of Castile, keeping in pay a body-guard of thirty-six hundred lances, splendidly equipped, and officered by the sons of the nobility. He proclaimed a crusade against the Moors, a measure always popular in Castile; assuming the pomegranate branch, the device of Granada, on his escutcheon, in token of his intention to extirpate the Moslems from the Peninsula. He assembled the chivalry of the remote provinces; and, in the early part of his reign, scarce a year elapsed without one or more incursions into the hostile territory, with armies of thirty or forty thousand men. The results did not correspond with the magnificence of the apparatus; and these brilliant expeditions too often evaporated in a mere border foray, or in an empty gasconade under the walls of Granada. Orchards were cut down, harvests plundered, villages burnt to the ground, and all the other modes of annoyance peculiar to this barbarous warfare put in practice by the invading armies as they swept over the face of the country; individual feats of prowess, too, commemorated in the romantic ballads of the time, were achieved; but no victory was gained, no important post acquired. The king in vain excused his hasty retreats and abortive enterprises by saying, "that he prized the life of one of his soldiers more than those of a thousand Mussulmans." His troops murmured at this timorous policy, and the people of the south, on whom the charges of the expeditions fell with peculiar heaviness, from their neighborhood to the scene of operations, complained that "the war was carried on against them, not against the infidel." On one occasion an attempt was made to detain the king's person, and thus prevent him from disbanding his forces. So soon had the royal authority fallen into contempt! The king of Granada himself, when summoned to pay tribute after a series of these ineffectual operations, replied "that, in the first years of Henry's reign, he would have offered anything, even his children, to preserve peace to his dominions; but now he would give nothing." [3] The contempt, to which the king exposed himself by his public conduct, was still further heightened by his domestic. With even a greater indisposition to business, than was manifested by his father, [4] he possessed none of the cultivated tastes, which were the redeeming qualities of the latter. Having been addicted from his earliest youth to debauchery, when he had lost the powers, he retained all the relish, for the brutish pleasures of a voluptuary. He had repudiated his wife, Blanche of Aragon, after a union of twelve years, on grounds sufficiently ridiculous and humiliating. [5] In 1455, he espoused Joanna, a Portuguese princess, sister of Alfonso the Fifth, the reigning monarch. This lady, then in the bloom of youth, was possessed of personal graces, and a lively wit, which, say the historians, made her the delight of the court of Portugal. She was accompanied by a brilliant train of maidens, and her entrance into Castile was greeted by the festivities and military pageants, which belong to an age of chivalry. The light and lively manners of the young queen, however, which seemed to defy the formal etiquette of the Castilian court, gave occasion to the grossest suspicions. The tongue of scandal indicated Beltran de la Cueva, one of the handsomest cavaliers in the kingdom, and then newly risen in the royal graces, as the person to whom she most liberally dispensed her favors. This knight defended a passage of arms, in presence of the court, near Madrid, in which he maintained the superior beauty of his mistress, against all comers. The king was so much delighted with his prowess, that he commemorated the event by the erection of a monastery dedicated to St. Jerome; a whimsical origin for a religious institution. [6] The queen's levity might have sought some justification in the unveiled licentiousness of her husband. One of the maids of honor, whom she brought in her train, acquired an ascendency over Henry, which he did not attempt to disguise; and the palace, after the exhibition of the most disgraceful scenes, became divided by the factions of the hostile fair ones. The archbishop of Seville did not blush to espouse the cause of the paramour, who maintained a magnificence of state, which rivalled that of royalty itself. The public were still more scandalized by Henry's sacrilegious intrusion of another of his mistresses into the post of abbess of a convent in Toledo, after the expulsion of her predecessor, a lady of noble rank and irreproachable character. [7] The stream of corruption soon finds its way from the higher to the more humble walks of life. The middling classes, imitating their superiors, indulged in an excess of luxury equally demoralizing, and ruinous to their fortunes. The contagion of example infected even the higher ecclesiastics; and we find the archbishop of St. James hunted from his see by the indignant populace in consequence of an outrage attempted on a youthful bride, as she was returning from church, after the performance of the nuptial ceremony. The rights of the people could be but little consulted, or cared for, in a court thus abandoned to unbounded license. Accordingly we find a repetition of most of the unconstitutional and oppressive acts which occurred under John the Second, of Castile; attempts at arbitrary taxation, interference in the freedom of elections, and in the right exercised by the cities of nominating the commanders of such contingents of troops as they might contribute to the public defence. Their territories were repeatedly alienated, and, as well as the immense sums raised by the sale of papal indulgences for the prosecution of the Moorish war, were lavished on the royal satellites. [8] But, perhaps, the most crying evil of this period was the shameless adulteration of the coin. Instead of five royal mints, which formerly existed, there were now one hundred and fifty in the hands of authorized individuals, who debased the coin to such a deplorable extent, that the most common articles of life were enhanced in value three, four, and even six fold. Those who owed debts eagerly anticipated the season of payment; and, as the creditors refused to accept it in the depreciated currency, it became a fruitful source of litigation and tumult, until the whole nation seemed on the verge of bankruptcy. In this general license, the right of the strongest was the only one which could make itself heard. The nobles, converting their castles into dens of robbers, plundered the property of the traveller, which was afterwards sold publicly in the cities. One of these robber chieftains, who held an important command on the frontiers of Murcia, was in the habit of carrying on an infamous traffic with the Moors by selling to them as slaves the Christian prisoners of either sex whom he had captured in his marauding expeditions. When subdued by Henry, after a sturdy resistance, he was again received into favor, and reinstated in his possessions. The pusillanimous monarch knew neither when to pardon, nor when to punish. [9] But no part of Henry's conduct gave such umbrage to his nobles, as the facility with which he resigned himself to the control of favorites, whom he had created as it were from nothing, and whom he advanced over the heads of the ancient aristocracy of the land. Among those especially disgusted by this proceeding Were Juan Pacheco, marquis of Villena, and Alfonso Carillo, archbishop of Toledo. These two personages exercised so important an influence over the destinies of Henry, as to deserve more particular notice. The former was of noble Portuguese extraction, and originally a page in the service of the constable Alvaro de Luna, by whom he had been introduced into the household of Prince Henry, during the lifetime of John the Second. His polished and plausible address soon acquired him a complete ascendency over the feeble mind of his master, who was guided by his pernicious counsels, in his frequent dissensions with his father. His invention was ever busy in devising intrigues, which he recommended by his subtile, insinuating eloquence; and he seemed to prefer the attainment of his purposes by a crooked rather than by a direct policy, even when the latter might equally well have answered. He sustained reverses with imperturbable composure; and, when his schemes were most successful, he was willing to risk all for the excitement of a new revolution. Although naturally humane, and without violent or revengeful passions, his restless spirit was perpetually involving his country in all the disasters of civil war. He was created marquis of Villena, by John the Second; and his ample domains, lying on the confines of Toledo, Murcia, and Valencia, and embracing an immense extent of populous and well-fortified territory, made him the most powerful vassal in the kingdom. [10] His uncle, the archbishop of Toledo, was of a sterner character. He was one of those turbulent prelates, not unfrequent in a rude age, who seem intended by nature for the camp rather than the church. He was fierce, haughty, intractable; and he was supported in the execution of his ambitious enterprises, no less by his undaunted resolution, than by the extraordinary resources, which he enjoyed as primate of Spain. He was capable of warm attachments, and of making great personal sacrifices for his friends, from whom, in return, he exacted the most implicit deference; and, as he was both easily offended and implacable in his resentments, he seems to have been almost equally formidable as a friend and as an enemy. [11] These early adherents of Henry, little satisfied with seeing their own consequence eclipsed by the rising glories of the newly-created favorites, began secretly to stir up cabals and confederacies among the nobles, until the occurrence of other circumstances obviated the necessity, and indeed the possibility, of further dissimulation. Henry had been persuaded to take part in the internal dissensions which then agitated the kingdom of Aragon, and had supported the Catalans in their opposition to their sovereign by seasonable supplies of men and money. He had even made some considerable conquests for himself, when he was induced, by the advice of the marquis of Villena and the archbishop of Toledo, to refer the arbitration of his differences with the king of Aragon to Louis the Eleventh, of France; a monarch whose habitual policy allowed him to refuse no opportunity of interference in the concerns of his neighbors. The conferences were conducted at Bayonne, and an interview was subsequently agreed on between the kings of France and Castile, to be held near that city, on the banks of the Bidassoa, which divides the dominions of the respective monarchs. The contrast exhibited by the two princes at this interview, in their style of dress and equipage, was sufficiently striking to deserve notice. Louis, who was even worse attired than usual, according to Comines, wore a coat of coarse woollen cloth cut short, a fashion then deemed very unsuitable to persons of rank, with a doublet of fustian, and a weather-beaten hat, surmounted by a little leaden image of the Virgin. His imitative courtiers adopted a similar costume. The Castilians, on the other hand, displayed uncommon magnificence. The barge of the royal favorite, Beltran de la Cueva, was resplendent with sails of cloth of gold, and his apparel glittered with a profusion of costly jewels. Henry was escorted by his Moorish guard gorgeously equipped, and the cavaliers of his train vied with each other in the sumptuous decorations of dress and equipage. The two nations appear to have been mutually disgusted with the contrast exhibited by their opposite affectations. The French sneered at the ostentation of the Spaniards, and the latter, in their turn, derided the sordid parsimony of their neighbors; and thus the seeds of a national aversion were implanted, which, under the influence of more important circumstances, ripened into open hostility. [12] The monarchs seem to have separated with as little esteem for each other as did their respective courtiers; and Comines profits by the occasion to inculcate the inexpediency of such interviews between princes, who have exchanged the careless jollity of youth for the cold and calculating policy of riper years. The award of Louis dissatisfied all parties; a tolerable proof of its impartiality. The Castilians, in particular, complained, that the marquis of Villena and the archbishop of Toledo had compromised the honor of the nation, by allowing their sovereign to cross over to the French shore of the Bidassoa, and its interests, by the cession of the conquered territory to Aragon. They loudly accused them of being pensioners of Louis, a fact which does not appear improbable, considering the usual policy of this prince, who, as is well known, maintained an espionage over the councils of most of his neighbors. Henry was so far convinced of the truth of these imputations, that he dismissed the obnoxious ministers from their employments. [13] The disgraced nobles instantly set about the organization of one of those formidable confederacies, which had so often shaken the monarchs of Castile upon their throne, and which, although not authorized by positive law, as in Aragon, seemed to have derived somewhat of a constitutional sanction from ancient usage. Some of the members of this coalition were doubtless influenced exclusively by personal jealousies; but many others entered into it from disgust at the imbecile and arbitrary proceedings of the crown. In 1462, the queen had been delivered of a daughter, who was named like herself Joanna, but who, from her reputed father, Beltran de la Cueva, was better known in the progress of her unfortunate history by the cognomen of Beltraneja. Henry, however, had required the usual oath of allegiance to be tendered to her as presumptive heir to the crown. The confederates, assembled at Burgos, declared this oath of fealty a compulsory act, and that many of them had privately protested against it at the time, from a conviction of the illegitimacy of Joanna. In the bill of grievances, which they now presented to the monarch, they required that he should deliver his brother Alfonso into their hands, to be publicly acknowledged as his successor; they enumerated the manifold abuses, which pervaded every department of government, which they freely imputed to the unwholesome influence exercised by the favorite, Beltran de la Cueva, over the royal counsels, doubtless the true key to much of their patriotic sensibility; and they entered into a covenant, sanctioned by all the solemnities of religion usual on these occasions, not to re-enter the service of their sovereign, or accept any favor from him until he had redressed their wrongs. [14] The king, who by an efficient policy might perhaps have crushed these revolutionary movements in their birth, was naturally averse to violent, or even vigorous measures. He replied to the bishop of Cuença, his ancient preceptor, who recommended these measures; "You priests, who are not called to engage in the fight, are very liberal of the blood of others." To which the prelate rejoined, with more warmth than breeding, "Since you are not true to your own honor, at a time like this, I shall live to see you the most degraded monarch in Spain; when you will repent too late this unseasonable pusillanimity." [15] Henry, unmoved either by the entreaties or remonstrances of his adherents, resorted to the milder method of negotiation. He consented to an interview with the confederates, in which he was induced, by the plausible arguments of the marquis of Villena, to comply with most of their demands. He delivered his brother Alfonso into their hands, to be recognized as the lawful heir to the crown, on condition of his subsequent union with Joanna; and he agreed to nominate, in conjunction with his opponents, a commission of five, who should deliberate on the state of the kingdom, and provide an effectual reform of abuses. [16] The result of this deliberation, however, proved so prejudicial to the royal authority, that the feeble monarch was easily persuaded to disavow the proceedings of the commissioners, on the ground of their secret collusion with his enemies, and even to attempt the seizure of their persons. The confederates, disgusted with this breach of faith, and in pursuance, perhaps, of their original design, instantly decided on the execution of that bold measure, which some writers denounce as a flagrant act of rebellion, and others vindicate as a just and constitutional proceeding. In an open plain, not far from the city of Avila, they caused a scaffold to be erected, of sufficient elevation to be easily seen from the surrounding country. A chair of state was placed on it, and in this was seated an effigy of King Henry, clad in sable robes and adorned with all the insignia of royalty, a sword at its side, a sceptre in its hand, and a crown upon its head. A manifesto was then read, exhibiting in glowing colors the tyrannical conduct of the king, and the consequent determination to depose him; and vindicating the proceeding by several precedents drawn from the history of the monarchy. The archbishop of Toledo, then ascending the platform, tore the diadem from the head of the statue; the marquis of Villena removed the sceptre, the count of Placencia the sword, the grand master of Alcantara and the counts of Benavente and Paredes the rest of the regal insignia; when the image, thus despoiled of its honors, was rolled in the dust, amid the mingled groans and clamors of the spectators. The young prince Alfonso, at that time only eleven years of age, was seated on the vacant throne, and the assembled grandees severally kissed his hand in token of their homage; the trumpets announced the completion of the ceremony, and the populace greeted with joyful acclamations the accession of their new sovereign. [17] Such are the details of this extraordinary transaction, as recorded by the two contemporary historians of the rival factions. The tidings were borne, with the usual celerity of evil news, to the remotest parts of the kingdom. The pulpit and the forum resounded with the debates of disputants, who denied, or defended, the right of the subject to sit in judgment on the conduct of his sovereign. Every man was compelled to choose his side in this strange division of the kingdom. Henry received intelligence of the defection, successively, of the capital cities of Burgos, Toledo, Cordova, Seville, together with a large part of the southern provinces, where lay the estates of some of the most powerful partisans of the opposite faction. The unfortunate monarch, thus deserted by his subjects, abandoned himself to despair, and expressed the extremity of his anguish in the strong language of Job: "Naked came I from my mother's womb, and naked must I go down to the earth!" [18] A large, probably the larger part of the nation, however, disapproved of the tumultuous proceedings of the confederates. However much they contemned the person of the monarch, they were not prepared to see the royal authority thus openly degraded. They indulged, too, some compassion for a prince, whose political vices, at least, were imputable to mental incapacity, and to evil counsellors, rather than to any natural turpitude of heart. Among the nobles who adhered to him, the most conspicuous were "the good count of Haro," and the powerful family of Mendoza, the worthy scions of an illustrious stock. The estates of the marquis of Santillana, the head of this house, lay chiefly in the Asturias, and gave him a considerable influence in the northern provinces, [19] the majority of whose inhabitants remained constant in their attachment to the royal cause. When Henry's summons, therefore, was issued for the attendance of all his loyal subjects capable of bearing arms, it was answered by a formidable array of numbers, that must have greatly exceeded that of his rival, and which is swelled by his biographer to seventy thousand foot and fourteen thousand horse; a much smaller force, under the direction of an efficient leader, would doubtless have sufficed to extinguish the rising spirit of revolt. But Henry's temper led him to adopt a more conciliatory policy, and to try what could be effected by negotiation, before resorting to arms. In the former, however, he was no match for the confederates, or rather the marquis of Villena, their representative on these occasions. This nobleman, who had so zealously co-operated with his party in conferring the title of king on Alfonso, had intended to reserve the authority to himself. He probably found more difficulty in controlling the operations of the jealous and aspiring aristocracy, with whom he was associated, than he had imagined; and he was willing to aid the opposite party in maintaining a sufficient degree of strength to form a counterpoise to that of the confederates, and thus, while he made his own services the more necessary to the latter, to provide a safe retreat for himself, in case of the shipwreck of their fortunes. [20] In conformity with this dubious policy, he had, soon after the occurrence at Avila, opened a secret correspondence with his former master, and suggested to him the idea of terminating their differences by some amicable adjustment. In consequence of these intimations, Henry consented to enter into a negotiation with the confederates; and it was agreed, that the forces on both sides should be disbanded, and that a suspension of hostilities for six months should take place, during which some definitive and permanent scheme of reconciliation might be devised. Henry, in compliance with this arrangement, instantly disbanded his levies; they retired overwhelmed with indignation at the conduct of their sovereign, who so readily relinquished the only means of redress that he possessed, and whom they now saw it would be unavailing to assist, since he was so ready to desert himself. [21] It would be an unprofitable task to attempt to unravel all the fine-spun intrigues, by which the marquis of Villena contrived to defeat every attempt at an ultimate accommodation between the parties, until he was very generally execrated as the real source of the disturbances in the kingdom. In the mean while, the singular spectacle was exhibited of two monarchs presiding over one nation, surrounded by their respective courts, administering the laws, convoking cortes, and in fine assuming the state and exercising all the functions of sovereignty. It was apparent that this state of things could not last long; and that the political ferment, which now agitated the minds of men from one extremity of the kingdom to the other, and which occasionally displayed itself in tumults and acts of violence, would soon burst forth with all the horrors of a civil war. At this juncture, a proposition was made to Henry for detaching the powerful family of Pacheco from the interests of the confederates, by the marriage of his sister Isabella with the brother of the marquis of Villena, Don Pedro Giron, grand master of the order of Calatrava, a nobleman of aspiring views, and one of the most active partisans of his faction. The archbishop of Toledo would naturally follow the fortunes of his nephew, and thus the league, deprived of its principal supports, must soon crumble to pieces. Instead of resenting this proposal as an affront upon his honor, the abject mind of Henry was content to purchase repose even by the most humiliating sacrifice. He acceded to the conditions; application was made to Rome for a dispensation from the vows of celibacy imposed on the grand master as the companion of a religious order; and splendid preparations were instantly commenced for the approaching nuptials. [22] Isabella was then in her sixteenth year. On her father's death, she retired with her mother to the little town of Arevalo, where, in seclusion, and far from the voice of flattery and falsehood, she had been permitted to unfold the natural graces of mind and person, which might have been blighted in the pestilent atmosphere of a court. Here, under the maternal eye, she was carefully instructed in those lessons of practical piety, and in the deep reverence for religion, which distinguished her maturer years. On the birth of the princess Joanna, she was removed, together with her brother Alfonso, by Henry to the royal palace, in order more effectually to discourage the formation of any faction adverse to the interests of his supposed daughter. In this abode of pleasure, surrounded by all the seductions most dazzling to youth, she did not forget the early lessons that she had imbibed; and the blameless purity of her conduct shone with additional lustre amid the scenes of levity and licentiousness by which she was surrounded. [23] The near connection of Isabella with the crown, as well as her personal character, invited the application of numerous suitors. Her hand was first solicited for that very Ferdinand, who was destined to be her future husband, though not till after the intervention of many inauspicious circumstances. She was next betrothed to his elder brother, Carlos; and some years after his decease, when thirteen years of age, was promised by Henry to Alfonso, of Portugal. Isabella was present with her brother at a personal interview with that monarch in 1464, but neither threats nor entreaties could induce her to accede to a union so unsuitable from the disparity of their years; and with her characteristic discretion, even at this early age, she rested her refusal on the ground, that "the infantas of Castile could not be disposed of in marriage, without the consent of the nobles of the realm." [25] When Isabella understood in what manner she was now to be sacrificed to the selfish policy of her brother, in the prosecution of which, compulsory measures if necessary were to be employed, she was filled with the liveliest emotions of grief and resentment. The master of Calatrava was well known as a fierce and turbulent leader of faction, and his private life was stained with most of the licentious vices of the age. He was even accused of having invaded the privacy of the queen dowager, Isabella's mother, by proposals of the most degrading nature, an outrage which the king had either not the power, or the inclination, to resent. [26] With this person, then, so inferior to her in birth, and so much more unworthy of her in every other point of view, Isabella was now to be united. On receiving the intelligence, she confined herself to her apartment, abstaining from all nourishment and sleep for a day and night, says a contemporary writer, and imploring Heaven, in the most piteous manner, to save her from this dishonor, by her own death or that of her enemy. As she was bewailing her hard fate to her faithful friend, Beatriz de Bobadilla, "God will not permit it," exclaimed the high-spirited lady, "neither will I;" then drawing forth a dagger from her bosom, which she kept there for the purpose, she solemnly vowed to plunge it in the heart of the master of Calatrava, as soon as he appeared! [27] Happily her loyalty was not put to so severe a test. No sooner had the grand master received the bull of dispensation from the pope, than, resigning his dignities in his military order, he set about such sumptuous preparations for his wedding, as were due to the rank of his intended bride. When these were completed, he began his journey from his residence at Almagro to Madrid, where the nuptial ceremony was to be performed, attended by a splendid retinue of friends and followers. But, on the very first evening after his departure, he was attacked by an acute disorder while at Villarubia, a village not far from Ciudad Real, which terminated his life in four days. He died, says Palencia, with imprecations on his lips, because his life had not been spared some few weeks longer. [28] His death was attributed by many to poison, administered to him by some of the nobles, who were envious of his good fortune. But, notwithstanding the seasonableness of the event, and the familiarity of the crime in that age, no shadow of imputation was ever cast on the pure fame of Isabella. [29] The death of the grand master dissipated, at a blow, all the fine schemes of the marquis of Villena, as well as every hope of reconciliation between the parties. The passions, which had been only smothered, now burst forth into open hostility; and it was resolved to refer the decision of the question to the issue of a battle. The two armies met on the plains of Olmedo, where, two and twenty years before, John, the father of Henry, had been in like manner confronted by his insurgent subjects. The royal army was considerably the larger; but the deficiency of numbers in the other was amply supplied by the intrepid spirit of its leaders. The archbishop of Toledo appeared at the head of its squadrons, conspicuous by a rich scarlet mantle, embroidered with a white cross, thrown over his armor. The young prince Alfonso, scarcely fourteen years of age, rode by his side, clad like him in complete mail. Before the action commenced, the archbishop sent a message to Beltran de la Cueva, then raised to the title of duke of Albuquerque, cautioning him not to venture in the field, as no less than forty cavaliers had sworn his death. The gallant nobleman, who, on this as on some other occasions, displayed a magnanimity which in some degree excused the partiality of his master, returned by the envoy a particular description of the dress he intended to wear; a chivalrous defiance, which wellnigh cost him his life. Henry did not care to expose his person in the engagement, and, on receiving erroneous intelligence of the discomfiture of his party, retreated precipitately with some thirty or forty horsemen to the shelter of a neighboring village. The action lasted three hours, until the combatants were separated by the shades of evening, without either party having decidedly the advantage, although that of Henry retained possession of the field of battle. The archbishop of Toledo and Prince Alfonso were the last to retire; and the former was seen repeatedly to rally his broken squadrons, notwithstanding his arm had been pierced through with a lance early in the engagement. The king and the prelate may be thought to have exchanged characters in this tragedy. [30] The battle was attended with no result, except that of inspiring appetites, which had tasted of blood, with a relish for more unlicensed carnage. The most frightful anarchy now prevailed throughout the kingdom, dismembered by factions, which the extreme youth of one monarch and the imbecility of the other made it impossible to control. In vain did the papal legate, who had received a commission to that effect from his master, interpose his mediation, and even fulminate sentence of excommunication against the confederates. The independent barons plainly told him, that "those who advised the pope that he had a right to interfere in the temporal concerns of Castile deceived him; and that they had a perfect right to depose their monarch on sufficient grounds, and should exercise it." [31] Every city, nay, almost every family, became now divided within itself. In Seville and in Cordova, the inhabitants of one street carried on open war against those in another. The churches, which were fortified, and occupied with bodies of armed men, were many of them sacked and burnt to the ground. In Toledo no less than four thousand dwellings were consumed in one general conflagration. The ancient family feuds, as those between the great houses of Guzman and Ponce de Leon in Andalusia, being revived, carried new division into the cities, whose streets literally ran with blood. [32] In the country, the nobles and gentry, issuing from their castles, captured the defenceless traveller, who was obliged to redeem his liberty by the payment of a heavier ransom than was exacted even by the Mahometans. All communication on the high roads was suspended, and no man, says a contemporary, dared move abroad beyond the walls of his city, unless attended by an armed escort. The organization of one of those popular confederacies, known under the name of _Hermandad_, in 1465, which continued in operation during the remainder of this gloomy period, brought some mitigation to these evils by the fearlessness with which it exercised its functions, even against offenders of the highest rank, some of whose castles were razed to the ground by its orders. But this relief was only partial; and the successful opposition, which the Hermandad sometimes encountered on these occasions, served to aggravate the horrors of the scene. Meanwhile, fearful omens, the usual accompaniments of such troubled times, were witnessed; the heated imagination interpreted the ordinary operations of nature as signs of celestial wrath; [33] and the minds of men were filled with dismal bodings of some inevitable evil, like that which overwhelmed the monarchy in the days of their Gothic ancestors. [34] At this crisis, a circumstance occurred, which gave a new face to affairs, and totally disconcerted the operations of the confederates. This was the loss of their young leader, Alfonso; who was found dead in his bed, on the 5th of July, 1468, at the village of Cardeñosa, about two leagues from Avila, which had so recently been the theatre of his glory. His sudden death was imputed, in the usual suspicious temper of that corrupt age, to poison, supposed to have been conveyed to him in a trout, on which he dined the day preceding. Others attributed it to the plague, which had followed in the train of evils, that desolated this unhappy country. Thus at the age of fifteen, and after a brief reign, if reign it may be called, of three years, perished this young prince, who, under happier auspices and in maturer life, might have ruled over his country with a wisdom equal to that of any of its monarchs. Even in the disadvantageous position, in which he had been placed, he gave clear indications of future excellence. A short time before his death, he was heard to remark, on witnessing the oppressive acts of some of the nobles, "I must endure this patiently, until I am a little older." On another occasion, being solicited by the citizens of Toledo to approve of some act of extortion which they had committed, he replied, "God forbid I should countenance such injustice!" And on being told that the city in that case would probably transfer its allegiance to Henry, he added, "Much as I love power, I am not willing to purchase it at such a price." Noble sentiments, but not at all palatable to the grandees of his party, who saw with alarm that the young lion, when he had reached his strength, would be likely to burst the bonds with which they had enthralled him. [35] It is not easy to consider the reign of Alfonso in any other light, than that of a usurpation; although some Spanish writers, and among the rest Marina, a competent critic when not blinded by prejudice, regard him as a rightful sovereign, and as such to be enrolled among the monarchs of Castile. [36] Marina, indeed, admits the ceremony at Avila to have been originally the work of a faction, and in itself informal and unconstitutional; but he considers it to have received a legitimate sanction from its subsequent recognition by the people. But I do not find, that the deposition of Henry the Fourth was ever confirmed by an act of cortes. He still continued to reign with the consent of a large portion, probably the majority, of his subjects; and it is evident that proceedings, so irregular as those at Avila, could have no pretence to constitutional validity, without a very general expression of approbation on the part of the nation. The leaders of the confederates were thrown into consternation by an event, which threatened to dissolve their league, and to leave them exposed to the resentment of an offended sovereign. In this conjuncture, they naturally turned their eyes on Isabella, whose dignified and commanding character might counterbalance the disadvantages arising from the unsuitableness of her sex for so perilous a situation, and justify her election in the eyes of the people. She had continued in the family of Henry during the greater part of the civil war; until the occupation of Segovia by the insurgents, after the battle of Olmedo, enabled her to seek the protection of her younger brother Alfonso, to which she was the more inclined by her disgust with the license of a court, where the love of pleasure scorned even the veil of hypocrisy. On the death of her brother, she withdrew to a monastery at Avila, where she was visited by the archbishop of Toledo, who, in behalf of the confederates, requested her to occupy the station lately filled by Alfonso, and allow herself to be proclaimed queen of Castile. [37] Isabella discerned too clearly, however, the path of duty and probably of interest. She unhesitatingly refused the seductive proffer, and replied, that, "while her brother Henry lived, none other had a right to the crown; that the country had been divided long enough under the rule of two contending monarchs; and that the death of Alfonso might perhaps be interpreted into an indication from Heaven of its disapprobation of their cause." She expressed herself desirous of establishing a reconciliation between the parties, and offered heartily to co-operate with her brother in the reformation of existing abuses. Neither the eloquence nor entreaties of the primate could move her from her purpose; and, when a deputation from Seville announced to her that that city, in common with the rest of Andalusia, had unfurled its standards in her name and proclaimed her sovereign of Castile, she still persisted in the same wise and temperate policy. [38] The confederates were not prepared for this magnanimous act from one so young, and in opposition to the advice of her most venerated counsellors. No alternative remained, however, but that of negotiating an accommodation on the best terms possible with Henry, whose facility of temper and love of repose naturally disposed him to an amicable adjustment of his differences. With these dispositions, a reconciliation was effected between the parties on the following conditions; namely, that a general amnesty should be granted by the king for all past offences; that the queen, whose dissolute conduct was admitted to be matter of notoriety, should be divorced from her husband, and sent back to Portugal; that Isabella should have the principality of the Asturias (the usual demesne of the heir apparent to the crown) settled on her, together with a specific provision suitable to her rank; that she should be immediately recognized heir to the crowns of Castile and Leon; that a cortes should be convoked within forty days for the purpose of bestowing a legal sanction on her title, as well as of reforming the various abuses of government; and finally, that Isabella should not be constrained to marry in opposition to her own wishes, nor should she do so without the consent of her brother. [39] In pursuance of these arrangements, an interview took place between Henry and Isabella, each attended by a brilliant _cortège_ of cavaliers and nobles, at a place called Toros de Guisando, in New Castile. [40] The monarch embraced his sister with the tenderest marks of affection, and then proceeded solemnly to recognize her as his future and rightful heir. An oath of allegiance was repeated by the attendant nobles, who concluded the ceremony by kissing the hand of the princess in token of their homage. In due time the representatives of the nation, convened in cortes at Ocaña, unanimously concurred in their approbation of these preliminary proceedings, and thus Isabella was announced to the world as the lawful successor to the crowns of Castile and Leon. [41] It can hardly be believed, that Henry was sincere in subscribing conditions so humiliating; nor can his easy and lethargic temper account for his so readily relinquishing the pretensions of the Princess Joanna, whom, notwithstanding the popular imputations on her birth, he seems always to have cherished as his own offspring. He was accused, even while actually signing the treaty, of a secret collusion with the marquis of Villena for the purpose of evading it; an accusation, which derives a plausible coloring from subsequent events. The new and legitimate basis, on which the pretensions of Isabella to the throne now rested, drew the attention of neighboring princes, who contended with each other for the honor of her hand. Among these suitors, was a brother of Edward the Fourth, of England, not improbably Richard, duke of Gloucester, since Clarence was then engaged in his intrigues with the earl of Warwick, which led a few months later to his marriage with the daughter of that nobleman. Had she listened to his proposals, the duke would in all likelihood have exchanged his residence in England for Castile, where his ambition, satisfied with the certain reversion of a crown, might have been spared the commission of the catalogue of crimes which blacken his memory. [42] Another suitor was the duke of Guienne, the unfortunate brother of Louis the Eleventh, and at that time the presumptive heir of the French monarchy. Although the ancient intimacy, which subsisted between the royal families of France and Castile, in some measure favored his pretensions, the disadvantages resulting from such a union were too obvious to escape attention. The two countries were too remote from each other, [43] and their inhabitants too dissimiliar in character and institutions, to permit the idea of their ever cordially coalescing as one people under a common sovereign. Should the duke of Guienne fail in the inheritance of the crown, it was argued, he would be every way an unequal match for the heiress of Castile; should he succeed to it, it might be feared, that, in case of a union, the smaller kingdom would be considered only as an appendage, and sacrificed to the interests of the larger. [44] The person on whom Isabella turned the most favorable eye was her kinsman Ferdinand of Aragon. The superior advantages of a connection, which should be the means of uniting the people of Aragon and Castile into one nation, were indeed manifest. They were the descendants of one common stock, speaking one language, and living under the influence of similar institutions, which had moulded them into a common resemblance of character and manners. From their geographical position, too, they seemed destined by nature to be one nation; and, while separately they were condemned to the rank of petty and subordinate states, they might hope, when consolidated into one monarchy, to rise at once to the first class of European powers. While arguments of this public nature pressed on the mind of Isabella, she was not insensible to those which most powerfully affect the female heart. Ferdinand was then in the bloom of life, and distinguished for the comeliness of his person. In the busy scenes, in which he had been engaged from his boyhood, he had displayed a chivalrous valor, combined with maturity of judgment far above his years. Indeed, he was decidedly superior to his rivals in personal merit and attractions. [45] But, while private inclinations thus happily coincided with considerations of expediency for inclining her to prefer the Aragonese match, a scheme was devised in another quarter for the express purpose of defeating it. A fraction of the royal party, with the family of Mendoza at their head, had retired in disgust with the convention of Toros de Guisando, and openly espoused the cause of the princess Joanna. They even instructed her to institute an appeal before the tribunal of the supreme pontiff, and caused a placard, exhibiting a protest against the validity of the late proceedings, to be nailed secretly in the night to the gate of Isabella's mansion. [46] Thus were sown the seeds of new dissensions, before the old were completely eradicated. With this disaffected party the marquis of Villena, who, since his reconciliation, had resumed his ancient ascendency over Henry, now associated himself. Nothing, in the opinion of this nobleman, could be more repugnant to his interests, than the projected union between the houses of Castile and Aragon; to the latter of which, as already noticed, [47] once belonged the ample domains of his own marquisate, which he imagined would be held by a very precarious tenure should any of this family obtain a footing in Castile. In the hope of counteracting this project, he endeavored to revive the obsolete pretensions of Alfonso, king of Portugal; and, the more effectually to secure the co-operation of Henry, he connected with his scheme a proposition for marrying his daughter Joanna with the son and heir of the Portuguese monarch; and thus this unfortunate princess might be enabled to assume at once a station suitable to her birth, and at some future opportunity assert with success her claim to the Castilian crown. In furtherance of this complicated intrigue, Alfonso was invited to renew his addresses to Isabella in a more public manner than he had hitherto done; and a pompous embassy, with the archbishop of Lisbon at its head, appeared at Ocaña, where Isabella was then residing, bearing the proposals of their master. The princess returned, as before, a decided though temperate refusal. [48] Henry, or rather the marquis of Villena, piqued at this opposition to his wishes, resolved to intimidate her into compliance; and menaced her with imprisonment in the royal fortress at Madrid. Neither her tears nor entreaties would have availed against this tyrannical proceeding; and the marquis was only deterred from putting it in execution by his fear of the inhabitants of Ocaña, who openly espoused the cause of Isabella. Indeed, the common people of Castile very generally supported her in her preference of the Aragonese match. Boys paraded the streets, bearing banners emblazoned with the arms of Aragon, and singing verses prophetic of the glories of the auspicious union. They even assembled round the palace gates, and insulted the ears of Henry and his minister by the repetition of satirical stanzas, which contrasted Alfonso's years with the youthful graces of Ferdinand. [49] Notwithstanding this popular expression of opinion, however, the constancy of Isabella might at length have yielded to the importunity of her persecutors, had she not been encouraged by her friend, the archbishop of Toledo, who had warmly entered into the interests of Aragon, and who promised, should matters come to extremity, to march in person to her relief at the head of a sufficient force to insure it. Isabella, indignant at the oppressive treatment, which she experienced from her brother, as well as at his notorious infraction of almost every article in the treaty of Toros de Guisando, felt herself released from her corresponding engagements, and determined to conclude the negotiations relative to her marriage, without any further deference to his opinion. Before taking any decisive step, however, she was desirous of obtaining the concurrence of the leading nobles of her party. This was effected without difficulty, through the intervention of the archbishop of Toledo, and of Don Frederic Henriquez, admiral of Castile, and the maternal grandfather of Ferdinand; a person of high consideration, both from his rank and character, and connected by blood with the principal families in the kingdom. [50] Fortified by their approbation, Isabella dismissed the Aragonese envoy with a favorable answer to his master's suit. [51] Her reply was received with almost as much satisfaction by the old king of Aragon, John the Second, as by his son. This monarch, who was one of the shrewdest princes of his time, had always been deeply sensible of the importance of consolidating the scattered monarchies of Spain under one head. He had solicited the hand of Isabella for his son, when she possessed only a contingent reversion of the crown. But, when her succession had been settled on a more secure basis, he lost no time in effecting this favorite object of his policy. With the consent of the states, he had transferred to his son the title of king of Sicily, and associated him with himself in the government at home, in order to give him greater consequence in the eyes of his mistress. He then despatched a confidential agent into Castile, with instructions to gain over to his interests all who exercised any influence on the mind of the princess; furnishing him for this purpose with _cartes blanches_, signed by himself and Ferdinand, which he was empowered to fill at his discretion. [52] Between parties thus favorably disposed, there was no unnecessary delay. The marriage articles were signed, and sworn to by Ferdinand at Cervera, on the 7th of January. He promised faithfully to respect the laws and usages of Castile; to fix his residence in that kingdom, and not to quit it without the consent of Isabella; to alienate no property belonging to the crown; to prefer no foreigners to municipal offices, and indeed to make no appointments of a civil or military nature, without her consent and approbation; and to resign to her exclusively the right of nomination to ecclesiastical benefices. All ordinances of a public nature were to be subscribed equally by both. Ferdinand engaged, moreover, to prosecute the war against the Moors; to respect King Henry; to suffer every noble to remain unmolested in the possession of his dignities, and not to demand restitution of the domains formerly owned by his father in Castile. The treaty concluded with a specification of a magnificent dower to be settled on Isabella, far more ample than that usually assigned to the queens of Aragon. [53] The circumspection of the framers of this instrument is apparent from the various provisions introduced into it solely to calm the apprehensions and to conciliate the good will of the party disaffected to the marriage; while the national partialities of the Castilians in general were gratified by the jealous restrictions imposed on Ferdinand, and the relinquishment of all the essential rights of sovereignty to his consort. While these affairs were in progress, Isabella's situation was becoming extremely critical. She had availed herself of the absence of her brother and the marquis of Villena in the south, whither they had gone for the purpose of suppressing the still lingering spark of insurrection, to transfer her residence from Ocaña to Madrigal, where, under the protection of her mother, she intended to abide the issue of the pending negotiations with Aragon. Far, however, from escaping the vigilant eye of the marquis of Villena by this movement, she laid herself more open to it. She found the bishop of Burgos, the nephew of the marquis, stationed at Madrigal, who now served as an effectual spy upon her actions. Her most confidential servants were corrupted, and conveyed intelligence of her proceedings to her enemy. Alarmed at the actual progress made in the negotiations for her marriage, the marquis was now convinced that he could only hope to defeat them by resorting to the coercive system, which he had before abandoned. He accordingly instructed the archbishop of Seville to march at once to Madrigal with a sufficient force to secure Isabella's person; and letters were at the same time addressed by Henry to the citizens of that place, menacing them with his resentment, if they should presume to interpose in her behalf. The timid inhabitants disclosed the purport of the mandate to Isabella, and besought her to provide for her own safety. This was perhaps the most critical period in her life. Betrayed by her own domestics, deserted even by those friends of her own sex who might have afforded her sympathy and counsel, but who fled affrighted from the scene of danger, and on the eve of falling into the snares of her enemies, she beheld the sudden extinction of those hopes, which she had so long and so fondly cherished. [54] In this exigency, she contrived to convey a knowledge of her situation to Admiral Henriquez, and the archbishop of Toledo. The active prelate, on receiving the summons, collected a body of horse, and, reinforced by the admiral's troops, advanced with such expedition to Madrigal, that he succeeded in anticipating the arrival of the enemy. Isabella received her friends with unfeigned satisfaction; and, bidding adieu to her dismayed guardian, the bishop of Burgos, and his attendants, she was borne off by her little army in a sort of military triumph to the friendly city of Valladolid, where she was welcomed by the citizens with a general burst of enthusiasm. [55] In the mean time Gutierre de Cardenas, one of the household of the princess, [56] and Alfonso de Palencia, the faithful chronicler of these events, were despatched into Aragon in order to quicken Ferdinand's operations, during the auspicious interval afforded by the absence of Henry in Andalusia. On arriving at the frontier town of Osma, they were dismayed to find that the bishop of that place, together with the duke of Medina Celi, on whose active co-operation they had relied for the safe introduction of Ferdinand into Castile, had been gained over to the interests of the marquis of Villena. [57] The envoys, however, adroitly concealing the real object of their mission, were permitted to pass unmolested to Saragossa, where Ferdinand was then residing. They could not have arrived at a more inopportune season. The old king of Aragon was in the very heat of the war against the insurgent Catalans, headed by the victorious John of Anjou. Although so sorely pressed, his forces were on the eve of disbanding for want of the requisite funds to maintain them. His exhausted treasury did not contain more than three hundred enriques. [58] In this exigency he was agitated by the most distressing doubts. As he could spare neither the funds nor the force necessary for covering his son's entrance into Castile, he must either send him unprotected into a hostile country, already aware of his intended enterprise and in arms to defeat it, or abandon the long-cherished object of his policy, at the moment when his plans were ripe for execution. Unable to extricate himself from this dilemma, he referred the whole matter to Ferdinand and his council. [59] It was at length determined, that the prince should undertake the journey, accompanied by half a dozen attendants only, in the disguise of merchants, by the direct route from Saragossa; while another party, in order to divert the attention of the Castilians, should proceed in a different direction, with all the ostentation of a public embassy from the king of Aragon to Henry the Fourth. The distance was not great, which Ferdinand and his suite were to travel before reaching a place of safety; but this intervening country was patrolled by squadrons of cavalry for the purpose of intercepting their progress; and the whole extent of the frontier, from Almazan to Guadalajara, was defended by a line of fortified castles in the hands of the family of Mendoza. [60] The greatest circumspection therefore was necessary. The party journeyed chiefly in the night; Ferdinand assumed the disguise of a servant, and, when they halted on the road, took care of the mules, and served his companions at table. In this guise, with no other disaster except that of leaving at an inn the purse which contained the funds for the expedition, they arrived, late on the second night, at a little place called the Burgo or Borough, of Osma, which the count of Treviño, one of the partisans of Isabella, had occupied with a considerable body of men-at-arms. On knocking at the gate, cold and faint with travelling, during which the prince had allowed himself to take no repose, they were saluted by a large stone discharged by a sentinel from the battlements, which, glancing near Ferdinand's head, had wellnigh brought his romantic enterprise to a tragical conclusion; when his voice was recognized by his friends within, and, the trumpets proclaiming his arrival, he was received with great joy and festivity by the count and his followers. The remainder of his journey, which he commenced before dawn, was performed under the convoy of a numerous and well-armed escort; and on the 9th of October he reached Dueñas in the kingdom of Leon, where the Castilian nobles and cavaliers of his party eagerly thronged to render him the homage due to his rank. [61] The intelligence of Ferdinand's arrival diffused universal joy in the little court of Isabella at Valladolid. Her first step was to transmit a letter to her brother Henry, in which she informed him of the presence of the prince in his dominions, and of their intended marriage. She excused the course she had taken by the embarrassments, in which she had been involved by the malice of her enemies. She represented the political advantages of the connection, and the sanction it had received from the Castilian nobles; and she concluded with soliciting his approbation of it, giving him at the same time affectionate assurances of the most dutiful submission both on the part of Ferdinand and of herself. [62] Arrangements were then made for an interview between the royal pair, in which some courtly parasites would fain have persuaded their mistress to require some act of homage from Ferdinand; in token of the inferiority of the crown of Aragon to that of Castile; a proposition which she rejected with her usual discretion. [63] Agreeably to these arrangements, Ferdinand, on the evening of the 15th of October, passed privately from Dueñas, accompanied only by four attendants, to the neighboring city of Valladolid, where he was received by the archbishop of Toledo, and conducted to the apartment of his mistress. [64] Ferdinand was at this time in the eighteenth year of his age. His complexion was fair, though somewhat bronzed by constant exposure to the sun; his eye quick and cheerful; his forehead ample, and approaching to baldness. His muscular and well-proportioned frame was invigorated by the toils of war, and by the chivalrous exercises in which he delighted. He was one of the best horsemen in his court, and excelled in field sports of every kind. His voice was somewhat sharp, but he possessed a fluent eloquence; and, when he had a point to carry, his address was courteous and even insinuating. He secured his health by extreme temperance in his diet, and by such habits of activity, that it was said he seemed to find repose in business. [65] Isabella was a year older than her lover. In stature she was somewhat above the middle size. Her complexion was fair; her hair of a bright chestnut color, inclining to red; and her mild blue eye beamed with intelligence and sensibility. She was exceedingly beautiful; "the handsomest lady," says one of her household, "whom I ever beheld, and the most gracious in her manners." [66] The portrait still existing of her in the royal palace, is conspicuous for an open symmetry of features, indicative of the natural serenity of temper, and that beautiful harmony of intellectual and moral qualities, which most distinguished her. She was dignified in her demeanor, and modest even to a degree of reserve. She spoke the Castilian language with more than usual elegance; and early imbibed a relish for letters, in which she was superior to Ferdinand, whose education in this particular seems to have been neglected. [67] It is not easy to obtain a dispassionate portrait of Isabella. The Spaniards, who revert to her glorious reign, are so smitten with her moral perfections, that even in depicting her personal, they borrow somewhat of the exaggerated coloring of romance. The interview lasted more than two hours, when Ferdinand retired to his quarters at Dueñas, as privately as he came. The preliminaries of the marriage, however, were first adjusted; but so great was the poverty of the parties, that it was found necessary to borrow money to defray the expenses of the ceremony. [68] Such were the humiliating circumstances attending the commencement of a union destined to open the way to the highest prosperity and grandeur of the Spanish monarchy! The marriage between Ferdinand and Isabella was publicly celebrated, on the morning of the 19th of October, in the palace of John de Vivero, the temporary residence of the princess, and subsequently appropriated to the chancery of Valladolid. The nuptials were solemnized in the presence of Ferdinand's grandfather, the admiral of Castile, of the archbishop of Toledo, and a multitude of persons of rank, as well as of inferior condition, amounting in all to no less than two thousand. [69] A papal bull of dispensation was produced by the archbishop, relieving the parties from the impediment incurred by their falling within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity. This spurious document was afterwards discovered to have been devised by the old king of Aragon, Ferdinand, and the archbishop, who were deterred from applying to the court of Rome by the zeal with which it openly espoused the interests of Henry, and who knew that Isabella would never consent to a union repugnant to the canons of the established church, and one which involved such heavy ecclesiastical censures. A genuine bull of dispensation was obtained, some years later, from Sixtus the Fourth; but Isabella, whose honest mind abhorred everything like artifice, was filled with no little uneasiness and mortification at the discovery of the imposition. [70] The ensuing week was consumed in the usual festivities of this joyous season; at the expiration of which, the new-married pair attended publicly the celebration of mass, agreeably to the usage of the time, in the collegiate church of Sante Maria. [71] An embassy was despatched by Ferdinand and Isabella to Henry, to acquaint him with their proceedings, and again request his approbation of them. They repeated their assurances of loyal submission, and accompanied the message with a copious extract from such of the articles of marriage, as, by their import, would be most likely to conciliate his favorable disposition. Henry coldly replied, that "he must advise with his ministers." [72] * * * * * Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdés, author of the "Quincuagenas" frequently cited in this History, was born at Madrid, in 1478. He was of noble Asturian descent. Indeed, every peasant in the Asturias claims nobility as his birthright. At the age of twelve he was introduced into the royal palace, as one of the pages of Prince John. He continued with the court several years, and was present, though a boy, in the closing campaigns of the Moorish war. In 1514, according to his own statement, he embarked for the Indies, where, although he revisited his native country several times, he continued during the remainder of his long life. The time of his death is uncertain. Oviedo occupied several important posts under the government, and he was appointed to one of a literary nature, for which he was well qualified by his long residence abroad; that of historiographer of the Indies. It was in this capacity that he produced his principal work, "Historia General de las Indias," in fifty books. Las Casas denounces the book as a wholesale fabrication, "as full of lies, almost, as pages." (Oeuvres, trad. de Llorente, tom. i. p. 382.) But Las Casas entertained too hearty an aversion for the man, whom he publicly accused of rapacity and cruelty, and was too decidedly opposed to his ideas on the government of the Indies, to be a fair critic. Oviedo, though somewhat loose and rambling, possessed extensive stores of information, by which those who have had occasion to follow in his track have liberally profited. The work with which we are concerned is his Quincuagenas. It is entitled "Las Quincuagenas de los generosos é ilustres é no menos famosos Reyes, Príncipes, Duques, Marqueses y Condes et Caballeros, et Personas notables de España, que escribió el Capitan Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdez, Alcáide de sus Magestades de la Fortaleza de la Cibdad é Puerto de Sancto Domingo de la Isla Españiola, Coronista de las Indias," etc. At the close of the third volume is this record of the octogenarian author; "Acabé de escribir de mi mano este famoso tractado de la nobleza de España, domingo 1730; dia de Páscua de Pentecostes XXIII. de mayo de 1556 años. Laus Deo. Y de mi edad 79 años." This very curious work is in the form of dialogues, in which the author is the chief interlocutor. It contains a very full, and, indeed, prolix notice of the principal persons in Spain, their lineage, revenues, and arms, with an inexhaustible fund of private anecdote. The author, who was well acquainted with most of the individuals of note in his time, amused himself, during his absence in the New World, with keeping alive the images of home by this minute record of early reminiscences. In this mass of gossip, there is a good deal, indeed, of very little value. It contains, however, much for the illustration of domestic manners, and copious particulars, as I have intimated, respecting the characters and habits of eminent personages, which could have been known only to one familiar with them. On all topics of descent and heraldry, he is uncommonly full; and one would think his services in this department alone might have secured him, in a land where these are so much respected, the honors of the press. His book, however, still remains in manuscript, apparently little known, and less used, by Castilian scholars. Besides the three folio volumes in the Royal Library at Madrid, from which the transcript in my possession was obtained, Clemencin, whose commendations of this work, as illustrative of Isabella's reign, are unqualified. (Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 10,) enumerates three others, two in the king's private library, and one in that of the Academy. FOOTNOTES [1] "Nil pudet assuetos sceptris: mitissima sors est Regnorum sub rege novo." Lucan, Pharsalia, lib. 8. [2] Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 8.--Rodericus Sanctius, Historia Hispanica, cap. 38, 39.--Pulgar, Claros Varones, tit. 1.--Castillo, Crónica, i. 20.--Guzman, Generaciones, cap. 33.--Although Henry's lavish expenditure, particularly on works of architecture, gained him in early life the appellation of "the Liberal," he is better known on the roll of Castilian sovereigns by the less flattering title of "the Impotent." [3] Zuñiga, Anales Eclesiasticos y Seculares de Sevilla, (Madrid, 1667,) p. 344.--Castillo, Crónica, cap. 20.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. pp. 415, 419.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 1, cap. 14 et seq.--The surprise of Gibraltar, the unhappy source of feud between the families of Guzman and Ponce de Leon, did not occur till a later period, 1462. [4] Such was his apathy, says Mariana, that he would subscribe his name to public ordinances, without taking the trouble to acquaint himself with their contents. Hist. de España, tom. ii. p. 423. [5] Pulgar, Crónica de los Reyes Católicos, (Valencia, 1780,) cap. 2.-- Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 1, cap. 4.--Aleson, Anales de Navarra, tom. iv. pp. 519, 520.--The marriage between Blanche and Henry was publicly declared void by the bishop of Segovia, confirmed by the archbishop of Toledo, "por impotencia respectiva, owing to some malign influence"! [6] La Clède, Hist. de. Portugal, tom. iii. pp. 325, 345.--Florez, Reynas Cathólicas, tom. ii. pp. 763, 766.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 1, cap. 20, 21.--It does not appear, however, whom Beltran de la Cueva indicated as the lady of his love on this occasion. (See Castillo, Crónica, cap. 23, 24.) Two anecdotes may he mentioned as characteristic of the gallantry of the times. The archbishop of Seville concluded a superb _fête_, given in honor of the royal nuptials, by introducing on the table two vases filled with rings garnished with precious stones, to be distributed among his female guests. At a ball given on another occasion, the young queen having condescended to dance with the French ambassador, the latter made a solemn vow, in commemoration of so distinguished an honor, never to dance with any other woman. [7] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., cap. 42, 47.--Castillo, Crónica, cap. 23. [8] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., cap. 35.--Sempere, Hist. del. Luxo, tom. i. p. 183.--Idem, Hist. des Cortès, ch. 19.--Marina, Teoría, part. 1, cap. 20.--part. 2, pp. 390, 391.--Zuñiga, Anales de Sevilla, pp. 346, 349.--The papal bulls of crusade issued on these occasions, says Palencia, contained among other indulgences an exemption from the pains and penalties of purgatory, assuring to the soul of the purchaser, after death, an immediate translation into a state of glory. Some of the more orthodox casuists doubted the validity of such a bull. But it was decided, after due examination, that, as the holy father possessed plenary power of absolution of all offenses committed upon earth, and as purgatory is situated upon earth, it properly fell within his jurisdiction, (cap. 32.) Bulls of crusade were sold at the rate of 200 maravedies each; and it is computed by the same historian, that no less than 4,000,000 maravedies were amassed by this traffic in Castile, in the space of four years! [9] Saez, Monedas de Enrique IV., (Madrid, 1805,) pp. 2-5.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., cap. 36, 39.--Castillo, Crónica, cap. 19. [10] Pulgar, Claros Varones, tit. 6.--Castillo, Crónica, cap. 15.-- Mendoza, Monarquía de España, tom. i. p. 328.--The ancient marquisate of Villena, having been incorporated into the crown of Castile, devolved to Prince Henry of Aragon, on his marriage with the daughter of John II. It was subsequently confiscated by that monarch, in consequence of the repeated rebellions of Prince Henry; and the title, together with a large proportion of the domains originally attached to it, was conferred on Don Juan Pacheco, by whom it was transmitted to his son, afterwards raised to the rank of duke of Escalona, in the reign of Isabella. Salazar de Mendoza, Dignidades de Castilla y Leon, (Madrid, 1794,) lib. 3, cap. 12, 17. [11] Pulgar, Claros Varones, tit. 20.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 10, 11. [12] At least these are the important consequences imputed to this interview by the French writers. See Gaillard, Rivalité, tom. iii. pp. 241-243.--Comines, Mémoires, liv. 3, chap. 8.--Also Castillo, Crónica, cap. 48, 49.--Zurita, Anales, lib. 17, cap. 50. [13] Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. ii. p. 122.--Zurita, Anales, lib. 17, cap. 56.--Castillo, Crónica, cap. 51, 52, 58.--The queen of Aragon, who was as skilful a diplomatist as her husband, John I., assailed the vanity of Villena, quite as much as his interest. On one of his missions to her court, she invited him to dine with her _tête-à-tête_ at her own table, while during the repast they were served by the ladies of the palace. Ibid., cap. 40. [14] See the memorial presented to the king, cited at length in Marina, Teoría, tom. iii. Apend. no. 7.--Castillo, Crónica, cap. 58, 64.--Zurita, Anales, lib. 17, cap. 56.--Lebrija, Hispanarum Rerum Ferdinando Rege et Elisabe Reginâ Gestarum Decades, (apud Granatam, 1545,) lib. 1, cap. 1, 2.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 1, cap. 6.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 9. [15] Castillo, Crónica, cap. 65. [16] See copies from the original instruments, which are still preserved in the archives of the house of Villena, in Marina, Teoría, tom. iii. part. 2, Ap. 6, 8.--Castillo, Crónica, cap. 66, 67.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 1, cap. 57. [17] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 1, cap. 62.--Castillo, Crónica, cap. 68, 69, 74. [18] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 1, cap. 63, 70.--Castillo, Crónica, cap. 75, 76. [19] The celebrated marquis of Santillana died in 1458, at the age of sixty. (Sanchez, Poesías Castellanas, tom. i. p. 23.) The title descended to his eldest son, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, who is represented by his contemporaries to have been worthy of his sire. Like him, he was imbued with a love of letters; he was conspicuous for his magnanimity and chivalrous honor, his moderation, constancy, and uniform loyalty to his sovereign, virtues of rare worth in those rapacious and turbulent times. (Pulgar, Claros Varones, tit. 9.) Ferdinand and Isabella created him duke del Infantado. This domain derives its name from its having been once the patrimony of the _infantes_ of Castile. See Salazar de Mendoza, Monarquía, tom. i. p. 219,--and Dignidades de Castilla, lib. 3, cap. 17.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 8. [20] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 1, cap. 64.--Castillo, Crónica, cap. 78. [21] Castillo, Crónica, cap. 80, 82. [22] Rades y Andrada, Chrónica de Las Tres Ordenes y Cavallerías, (Toledo, 1572,) fol. 76.--Castillo, Crónica, cap. 85.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 1, cap. 73. [24] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 154.-Florez, Reynas Cathólicas, tom. ii. p. 789.-Castillo, Crónica, cap. 37. [25] Aleson, Anales de Navarra, tom. iv. pp. 561, 562.--Zurita, Anales, lib. 16, cap. 46, lib. 17, cap. 3.--Castillo, Crónica, cap. 31, 57.-- Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., cap. 55. [26] Decad. de Palencia, apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. p. 65, nota. [27] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., cap. 73.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. p. 450.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. p. 532. This lady, Doña Beatriz Fernandez de Bobadilla, the most intimate personal friend of Isabella, will appear often in the course of our narrative. Gonzalo de Oviedo, who knew her well, describes her as "illustrating her generous lineage by her conduct, which was wise, virtuous, and valiant." (Quincuagenas, MS., dial. de Cabrera.) The last epithet, rather singular for a female character, was not unmerited. [28] Palencia imputes his death to an attack of the quinsy. Corónica, MS., cap. 73. [29] Rades y Andrada, Las Tres Ordenes, fol. 77.--Caro de Torres, Historia de las Ordenes Militares de Santiago, Calatrava, y Alcantara, (Madrid, 1629,) lib. 2, cap. 59.--Castillo, Crónica, cap. 85.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., cap. 73.--Gaillard remarks on this event, "Chacun crut sur cette mort ce qu'il voulut." And again in a few pages after, speaking of Isabella, he says, "On remarqua que tons ceux qui pouvoient faire obstacle à la satisfaction ou à la fortune d'Isabelle, mouroient toujours à propos pour elle." (Rivalité, tom. iii. pp. 280, 286.) This ingenious writer is fond of seasoning his style with those piquant sarcasms, in which oftentimes more is meant than meets the ear, and which Voltaire rendered fashionable in history. I doubt, however, if, amid all the heats of controversy and faction, there is a single Spanish writer of that age, or indeed of any subsequent one, who has ventured to impute to the contrivance of Isabella any one of the fortunate coincidences, to which the author alludes. [30] Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decades, lib. 1, cap. 2--Zurita, Anales, lib. 18, cap. 10--Castillo, Cronies, cap. 93, 97.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 1, cap 80. [31] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica MS., cap. 82. [32] Zuñiga, Anales de Sevilla, pp. 851, 352.--Carta del Levantamiento de Toledo, apud Castillo, Crónica, p. 109.--The historian of Seville has quoted an animated apostrophe addressed to the citizens by one of their number in this season of discord: "Mezquina Sevilla en la sangre bañada de los tus fijos, i tus cavalleros, que fado enemigo te tiene minguada," etc. The poem concludes with a summons to throw off the yoke of their oppressors: "Despierta Sevilla e sacude el imperio, que faze a tus nobles tanto vituperio." See Anales, p. 359. [33] "Quod in pace fore, sen natura, tune fatum et ira dei vocabatur;" says Tacitus, (Historiae, lib. 4, cap. 26,) adverting to a similar state of excitement. [34] Saez quotes a MS. letter of a contemporary, exhibiting a frightful picture of these disorders. (Monedas de Enrique IV., p. 1, not.--Castillo, Crónica, cap. 83, 87, et passim.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. p. 451.--Marina, Teoría, tom. ii. p. 487.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 1, cap. 69.) The active force kept on duty by the Hermandad amounted to 3000 horse. Ibid., cap. 89, 90. [35] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., cap. 87, 92.--Castillo, Crónica, cap. 94.--Garibay, Compendio, lib. 17, cap. 20. [36] Marina, Teoría, part. 2, cap. 88. [37] Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decad., lib. 1, cap. 3.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 1, cap. 92.--Florez, Reynas Cathólicas, tom. ii. p. 790. [38] Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decad., lib. 1, cap. 3.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. vii. p. 218.-Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, part. 1, cap. 92.--part. 2, cap. 5. [39] See a copy of the original compact cited at length by Marina, Teoría, Apend. no. 11.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 1, cap. 2. [40] So called from four bulls, sculptured in stone, discovered there, with Latin inscriptions thereon, indicating it to have been the site of one of Julius Caesar's victories during the civil war. (Estrada, Poblacion General de España, (Madrid, 1748,) tom. i. p. 306.)--Galindez de Carbaja, a contemporary, fixes the date of this convention in August. Apales del Rey Fernando el Católico, MS., año 1468. [41] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 4.--Castillo, Crónica, cap. 18.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. pp. 461, 462.-- Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 1, cap. 2.--Castillo affirms that Henry, incensed by his sister's refusal of the king of Portugal, dissolved the cortes at Ocaña, before it had taken the oath of allegiance to her. (Crónica, cap. 127.) This assertion, however, is counterbalanced by the opposite one of Pulgar, a contemporary writer, like himself. (Reyes Católicos, cap. 5.) And as Ferdinand and Isabella, in a letter addressed, after their marriage, to Henry IV., transcribed also by Castillo, allude incidentally to such a recognition as to a well-known fact, the balance of testimony must be admitted to be in favor of it. See Castillo, Crónica, cap. 114. [42] Isabella, who in a letter to Henry IV., dated Oct. 12th, 1469, adverts to these proposals of the English prince, as being under consideration at the time of the convention of Toros de Guisando, does not specify which of the brothers of Edward IV. was intended. (Castillo, Crónica, cap. 136.) Mr. Turner, in his History of England during the Middle Ages, (London, 1825,) quotes part of the address delivered by the Spanish envoy to Richard III., in 1483, in which the orator speaks of "the unkindness, which his queen Isabella had conceived for Edward IV., for his refusal of her, and his taking instead to wife a widow of England." (Vol. iii. p. 274.) The old chronicler Hall, on the other hand, mentions, that it was currently reported, although he does not appear to credit it, that the earl of Warwick had been despatched into Spain in order to request the hand of the princess Isabella for his master Edward IV., in 1463. (See his Chronicle of England, (London, 1809,) pp. 263, 264.)--I find nothing in the Spanish accounts of that period, which throws any light on these obvious contradictions. [43] The territories of France and Castile touched, indeed, on one point (Guipuscoa), but were separated along the whole remaining line of frontier by the kingdoms of Aragon and Navarre. [44] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 8.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 10. [45] Isabella, in order to acquaint herself more intimately with the personal qualities of her respective suitors, had privately despatched her confidential chaplain, Alonso de Coca, to the courts of France and of Aragon, and his report on his return was altogether favorable to Ferdinand. The duke of Guienne he represented as "a feeble, effeminate prince, with limbs so emaciated as to be almost deformed, and with eyes so weak and watery as to incapacitate him for the ordinary exercises of chivalry. While Ferdinand, on the other hand, was possessed of a comely, symmetrical figure, a graceful demeanor, and a spirit that was up to anything;" _mui dispuesto para toda coga que hacer ginsiese_. It is not improbable that the queen of Aragon condescended to practise some of those agreeable arts on the worthy chaplain, which made so sensible an impression on the marquis of Villena. [46] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 5. [47] See ante, note 10. [48] Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. p. 391.--Castillo, Crónica, cap. 121, 127.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 7.--Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decad., lib. 1, cap. 7. [49] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 7.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 7. [50] Pulgar, Claros Varones, tit. 2. [51] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 154.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 162.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 7.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 9. [52] Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 157, 163. [53] See the copy of the original marriage contract, as it exists in the archives of Simancas, extracted in tom. vi. of Memorias de la Acad. de Hist., Apend. no. 1.--Zurita, Anales, lib. 18, cap. 21.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. vii. p. 236. [54] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 12.--Castillo, Crónica, cap. 128, 131, 136.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 162.--Beatrice de Bobadilla and Mencia de la Torre, the two ladies most in her confidence, had escaped to the neighboring town of Coca. [55] Castillo, Crónica, cap. 136.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 12.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 69. [56] This cavalier, who was of an ancient and honorable family in Castile, was introduced to the princess's service by the archbishop of Toledo. He is represented by Gonzalo de Oviedo as a man of much sagacity and knowledge of the world, qualities with which he united a steady devotion to the interests of his mistress. Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 2, dial. 1. [57] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., cap. 14.-The bishop told Palencia, that "if his own servants deserted him, he would oppose the entrance of Ferdinand into the kingdom." [58] Zurita, Anales, lib. 18, cap. 26.--The enrique was a gold coin, so denominated from Henry II. [59] Zurita, Anales, lib. 18, cap. 26.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. p. 273. [60] Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. p. 78, Ilust. 2. [61] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 14.--Zurita, Anales, loc. cit. [62] This letter, dated October 12th, is cited at length by Castillo, Crónica, cap. 136. [63] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 15. [64] Gutierre de Cardenas was the first who pointed him out to the princess, exclaiming at the same time, "_Ese es, ese es_," "This is he;" in commemoration of which he was permitted to place on his escutcheon the letters SS, whose pronunciation in Spanish resembles that of the exclamation which he had uttered. Ibid., part. 2, cap. 15.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 2, dial. 1. [65] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 182.--Garibay, Compendio, lib. 18, cap. 1.--"Tan amigo de los negocios," says Mariana, "que parecia con el trabajo descansaba." Hist. de España, lib. 25, cap. 18. [66] "En hermosura, puestas delante S. A. todas las mugeres que yo he visto, ninguna vi tan graciosa, ni tanto de ver corao su persona, ni de tal manera e sanctidad honestísíma." Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS. [67] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 201.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. p. 362.--Garibay, Compendío, lib. 18, cap. 1. [68] Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. p. 465. [69] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1469.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 16.--Zurita, Anales, lib. 18, cap. 26.--See a copy of the official record of the marriage, Mem. de la Acad., tom. vi. Apend. 4. See also the Ilust. 2. [70] The intricacies of this affair, at once the scandal and the stumbling-block of the Spanish historians, have been unravelled by Señor Clemencin, with his usual perspicuity. See Mem. de la Acad., tom. vi. pp. 105-116, Ilust. 2. [71] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 16.--A lively narrative of the adventures of Prince Ferdinand, detailed in this chapter, may be found in Cushing's Reminiscences of Spain, (Boston, 1833,) vol. i. pp. 225-255. [72] Castillo, Crónica, cap. 137.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 16. CHAPTER IV. FACTIONS IN CASTILE.--WAR BETWEEN FRANCE AND ARAGON.--DEATH OF HENRY IV., OF CASTILE. 1469-1474. Factions in Castile.--Ferdinand and Isabella.--Gallant Defence of Perpignan against the French.--Ferdinand Raises the Siege.--Isabella's Party gains Strength.--Interview between King Henry IV. and Isabella.--The French Invade Roussillon.--Ferdinand's Summary Justice.--Death of Henry IV., of Castile.--Influence of his Reign. The marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella disconcerted the operations of the marquis of Villena, or, as he should be styled, the grand master of St. James, since he had resigned his marquisate to his elder son, on his appointment to the command of the military order above mentioned, a dignity inferior only to the primacy in importance. It was determined, however, in the councils of Henry to oppose at once the pretensions of the princess Joanna to those of Isabella; and an embassy was gladly received from the king of France, offering to the former lady the hand of his brother the duke of Guienne, the rejected suitor of Isabella. Louis the Eleventh was willing to engage his relative in the unsettled politics of a distant state, in order to relieve himself from his pretensions at home. [1] An interview took place between Henry the Fourth and the French ambassadors in a little village in the vale of Lozoya, in October, 1470. A proclamation was read, in which Henry declared his sister to have forfeited whatever claims she had derived from the treaty of Toros de Guisando, by marrying contrary to his approbation. He then with his queen swore to the legitimacy of the princess Joanna, and announced her as his true and lawful successor. The attendant nobles took the usual oaths of allegiance, and the ceremony was concluded by affiancing the princess, then in the ninth year of her age, with the formalities ordinarily practised on such occasions, to the count of Boulogne, the representative of the duke of Guienne. [2] This farce, in which many of the actors were the same persons who performed the principal parts at the convention of Toros de Guisando, had on the whole an unfavorable influence on Isabella's cause. It exhibited her rival to the world as one whose claims were to be supported by the whole authority of the court of Castile, with the probable co-operation of France. Many of the most considerable families in the kingdom, as the Pachecos, [3] the Mendozas in all their extensive ramifications, [4] the Zuñigas, the Velascos, [5] the Pimentels, [6] unmindful of the homage so recently rendered to Isabella, now openly testified their adhesion to her niece. Ferdinand and his consort, who held their little court at Dueñas, [8] were so poor as to be scarcely capable of defraying the ordinary charges of their table. The northern provinces of Biscay and Guipuscoa had, however, loudly declared against the French match; and the populous province of Andalusia, with the house of Medina Sidonia at its head, still maintained its loyalty to Isabella unshaken. But her principal reliance was on the archbishop of Toledo, whose elevated station in the church and ample revenues gave him perhaps less real influence, than his commanding and resolute character, which had enabled him to triumph over every obstacle devised by his more crafty adversary, the grand master of St. James. The prelate, however, with all his generous self-devotion, was far from being a comfortable ally. He would willingly have raised Isabella to the throne, but he would have her indebted for her elevation exclusively to himself. He looked with a jealous eye on her most intimate friends, and complained that neither she nor her husband deferred sufficiently to his counsel. The princess could not always conceal her disgust at these humors, and Ferdinand, on one occasion, plainly told him that "he was not to be put in leading-strings, like so many of the sovereigns of Castile." The old king of Aragon, alarmed at the consequences of a rupture with so indispensable an ally, wrote in the most earnest manner to his son, representing the necessity of propitiating the offended prelate. But Ferdinand, although educated in the school of dissimulation, had not yet acquired that self- command, which enabled him in after-life to sacrifice his passions, and sometimes indeed his principles, to his interests. [9] The most frightful anarchy at this period prevailed throughout Castile. While the court was abandoned to corrupt or frivolous pleasure, the administration of justice was neglected, until crimes were committed with a frequency and on a scale, which menaced the very foundations of society. The nobles conducted their personal feuds with an array of numbers which might compete with those of powerful princes. The duke of Infantado, the head of the house of Mendoza, [10] could bring into the field, at four and twenty hours' notice one thousand lances and ten thousand foot. The battles, far from assuming the character of those waged by the Italian _condottieri_ at this period, were of the most sanguinary and destructive kind. Andalusia was in particular the theatre of this savage warfare. The whole of that extensive district was divided by the factions of the Guzmans and Ponces de Leon. The chiefs of these ancient houses having recently died, the inheritance descended to young men, whose hot blood soon revived the feuds, which had been permitted to cool under the temperate sway of their fathers. One of these fiery cavaliers was Rodrigo Ponce de Leon, so deservedly celebrated afterwards in the wars of Granada as the marquis of Cadiz. He was an illegitimate and younger son of the count of Arcos, but was preferred by his father to his other children in consequence of the extraordinary qualities which he evinced at a very early period. He served his apprenticeship to the art of war in the campaigns against the Moors, displaying on several occasions an uncommon degree of enterprise and personal heroism. On succeeding to his paternal honors, his haughty spirit, impatient of a rival, led him to revive the old feud with the duke of Medina Sidonia, the head of the Guzmans, who, though the most powerful nobleman in Andalusia, was far his inferior in capacity and military science. [11] On one occasion the duke of Medina Sidonia mustered an army of twenty thousand men against his antagonist; on another, no less than fifteen hundred houses of the Ponce faction were burnt to the ground in Seville. Such were the potent engines employed by these petty sovereigns in their conflicts with one another, and such the havoc which they brought on the fairest portion of the Peninsula. The husbandman, stripped of his harvest and driven from his fields, abandoned himself to idleness, or sought subsistence by plunder. A scarcity ensued in the years 1472 and 1473, in which the prices of the most necessary commodities rose to such an exorbitant height, as put them beyond the reach of any but the affluent. But it would be wearisome to go into all the loathsome details of wretchedness and crime brought on this unhappy country by an imbecile government and a disputed succession, and which are portrayed with lively fidelity in the chronicles, the letters, and the satires of the time. [12] While Ferdinand's presence was more than ever necessary to support the drooping spirits of his party in Castile, he was unexpectedly summoned into Aragon to the assistance of his father. No sooner had Barcelona submitted to King John, as mentioned in a preceding chapter, [13] than the inhabitants of Roussillon and Cerdagne, which provinces, it will be remembered, were placed in the custody of France, as a guaranty for the king of Aragon's engagements, oppressed by the grievous exactions of their new rulers, determined to break the yoke, and to put themselves again under the protection of their ancient master, provided they could obtain his support. The opportunity was favorable. A large part of the garrisons in the principal cities had been withdrawn by Louis the Eleventh, to cover the frontier on the side of Burgundy and Brittany. John, therefore, gladly embraced the proposal, and on a concerted day a simultaneous insurrection took place throughout the provinces, when such of the French, in the principal towns, as had not the good fortune to escape into the citadels, were indiscriminately massacred. Of all the country, Salces, Collioure, and the castle of Perpignan alone remained in the hands of the French. John then threw himself into the last-named city with a small body of forces, and instantly set about the construction of works to protect the inhabitants against the fire of the French garrison in the castle, as well as from the army which might soon be expected to besiege them from without. [14] Louis the Eleventh, deeply incensed at the defection of his new subjects, ordered the most formidable preparations for the siege of their capital. John's officers, alarmed at these preparations, besought him not to expose his person at his advanced age to the perils of a siege and of captivity. But the lion-hearted monarch saw the necessity of animating the spirits of the besieged by his own presence; and, assembling the inhabitants in one of the churches of the city, he exhorted them resolutely to stand to their defence, and made a solemn oath to abide the issue with them to the last. Louis, in the mean while, had convoked the _ban_ and _arrière-ban_ of the contiguous French provinces, and mustered an array of chivalry and feudal militia amounting, according to the Spanish historians, to thirty thousand men. With these ample forces, his lieutenant-general, the duke of Savoy, closely invested Perpignan; and, as he was provided with a numerous train of battering artillery, instantly opened a heavy fire on the inhabitants. John, thus exposed to the double fire of the fortress and the besiegers, was in a very critical situation. Far from being disheartened, however, he was seen, armed cap-a-pie, on horseback from dawn till evening, rallying the spirits of his troops, and always present at the point of danger. He succeeded perfectly in communicating his own enthusiasm to the soldiers. The French garrison were defeated in several sorties, and their governor taken prisoner; while supplies were introduced into the city in the very face of the blockading army. [15] Ferdinand, on receiving intelligence of his father's perilous situation, instantly resolved, by Isabella's advice, to march to his relief. Putting himself at the head of a body of Castilian horse, generously furnished him by the archbishop of Toledo and his friends, he passed into Aragon, where he was speedily joined by the principal nobility of the kingdom, and an army amounting in all to thirteen hundred lances and seven thousand infantry. With this corps he rapidly descended the Pyrenees, by the way of Mançanara, in the face of a driving tempest, which concealed him for some time from the view of the enemy. The latter, during their protracted operations, for nearly three months, had sustained a serious diminution of numbers in their repeated skirmishes with the besieged, and still more from an epidemic which broke out in their camp. They also began to suffer not a little from want of provisions. At this crisis, the apparition of this new army, thus unexpectedly descending on their rear, filled them with such consternation, that they raised the siege at once, setting fire to their tents, and retreating with such precipitation as to leave most of the sick and wounded a prey to the devouring element. John marched out, with colors flying and music playing, at the head of his little band, to greet his deliverers; and, after an affecting interview in the presence of the two armies, the father and son returned in triumph into Perpignan. [16] The French army, reinforced by command of Louis, made a second ineffectual attempt (their own writers call it only a feint) upon the city; and the campaign was finally concluded by a treaty between the two monarchs, in which it was arranged, that the king of Aragon should disburse within the year the sum originally stipulated for the services rendered him by Louis in his late war with his Catalan subjects; and that, in case of failure, the provinces of Roussillon and Cerdagne should be permanently ceded to the French crown. The commanders of the fortified places in the contested territory, selected by one monarch from the nominations of the other, were excused during the interim from obedience to the mandates of either; at least so far as they might contravene their reciprocal engagements. [17] There is little reason to believe that this singular compact was subscribed in good faith by either party. John, notwithstanding the temporary succor which he had received from Louis at the commencement of his difficulties with the Catalans, might justly complain of the infraction of his engagements, at a subsequent period of the war; when he not only withheld the stipulated aid, but indirectly gave every facility in his power to the invasion of the duke of Lorraine. Neither was the king of Aragon in a situation, had he been disposed, to make the requisite disbursements. Louis, on the other hand, as the event soon proved, had no other object in view but to gain time to reorganize his army, and to lull his adversary into security, while he took effectual measures for recovering the prize which had so unexpectedly eluded him. During these occurrences Isabella's prospects were daily brightening in Castile. The duke of Guienne, the destined spouse of her rival Joanna, had died in France; but not until he had testified his contempt of his engagements with the Castilian princess by openly soliciting the hand of the heiress of Burgundy. [18] Subsequent negotiations for her marriage with two other princes had entirely failed. The doubts which hung over her birth, and which the public protestations of Henry and his queen, far from dispelling, served only to augment, by the necessity which they implied for such an extraordinary proceeding, were sufficient to deter any one from a connection which must involve the party in all the disasters of a civil war. [19] Isabella's own character, moreover, contributed essentially to strengthen her cause. Her sedate conduct, and the decorum maintained in her court, formed a strong contrast with the frivolity and license which disgraced that of Henry and his consort. Thinking men were led to conclude that the sagacious administration of Isabella must eventually secure to her the ascendency over her rival; while all, who sincerely loved their country, could not but prognosticate for it, under her beneficent sway, a degree of prosperity, which it could never reach under the rapacious and profligate ministers who directed the councils of Henry, and most probably would continue to direct those of his daughter. Among the persons whose opinions experienced a decided revolution from these considerations was Pedro Gonzalez de Mendoza, archbishop of Seville and cardinal of Spain; a prelate, whose lofty station in the church was supported by talents of the highest order; and whose restless ambition led him, like many of the churchmen of the time, to take an active interest in politics, for which he was admirably adapted by his knowledge of affairs and discernment of character. Without deserting his former master, he privately entered into a correspondence with Isabella; and a service, which Ferdinand, on his return from Aragon, had an opportunity of rendering the duke of Infantado, the head of the Mendozas, [20] secured the attachment of the other members of this powerful family. [21] A circumstance occurred at this time, which seemed to promise an accommodation between the adverse factions, or at least between Henry and his sister. The government of Segovia, whose impregnable citadel had been made the depository of the royal treasure, was intrusted to Andres de Cabrera, an officer of the king's household. This cavalier, influenced in part by personal pique to the grand master of St. James, and still more perhaps by the importunities of his wife, Beatriz de Bobadilla, the early friend and companion of Isabella, entered into a correspondence with the princess, and sought to open the way for her permanent reconciliation with her brother. He accordingly invited her to Segovia, where Henry occasionally resided, and, to dispel any suspicions which she might entertain of his sincerity, despatched his wife secretly by night, disguised in the garb of a peasant, to Aranda, where Isabella then held her court. The latter, confirmed by the assurances of her friend, did not hesitate to comply with the invitation, and, accompanied by the archbishop of Toledo, proceeded to Segovia, where an interview took place between her and Henry the Fourth, in which she vindicated her past conduct, and endeavored to obtain her brother's sanction to her union with Ferdinand. Henry, who was naturally of a placable temper, received her communication with complacency, and, in order to give public demonstration of the good understanding now subsisting between him and his sister, condescended to walk by her side, holding the bridle of her palfrey, as she rode along the streets of the city. Ferdinand, on his return into Castile, hastened to Segovia, where he was welcomed by the monarch with every appearance of satisfaction. A succession of and splendid entertainments, at which both parties assisted, seemed to announce an entire oblivion of all past animosities, and the nation welcomed with satisfaction these symptoms of repose after the vexatious struggle by which it had been so long agitated. [22] The repose, however, was of no great duration. The slavish mind of Henry gradually relapsed under its ancient bondage; and the grand master of St. James succeeded, in consequence of an illness with which the monarch was suddenly seized after an entertainment given by Cabrera, in infusing into his mind suspicions of an attempt at assassination. Henry was so far incensed or alarmed by the suggestion, that he concerted a scheme for privately seizing the person of his sister, which was defeated by her own prudence and the vigilance of her friends. [23]--But, if the visit to Segovia failed in its destined purpose of a reconciliation with Henry, it was attended with the important consequence of securing to Isabella a faithful partisan in Cabrera, who, from the control which his situation gave him over the royal coffers, proved a most seasonable ally in her subsequent struggle with Joanna. Not long after this event, Ferdinand received another summons from his father to attend him in Aragon, where the storm of war, which had been for some time gathering in the distance, now burst with pitiless fury. In the beginning of February, 1474, an embassy consisting of two of his principal nobles, accompanied by a brilliant train of cavaliers and attendants, had been deputed by John to the court of Louis XI., for the ostensible purpose of settling the preliminaries of the marriage, previously agreed on, between the dauphin and the infanta Isabella, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, then little more than three years of age. [24] The real object of the mission was to effect some definitive adjustment or compromise of the differences relating to the contested territories of Roussillon and Cerdagne. The king of France, who, notwithstanding his late convention with John, was making active preparations for the forcible occupation of these provinces, determined to gain time by amusing the ambassadors with a show of negotiation, and interposing every obstacle which his ingenuity could devise to their progress through his dominions. He succeeded so well in this latter part of his scheme, that the embassy did not reach Paris until the close of Lent. Louis, who seldom resided in his capital, took good care to be absent at this season. The ambassadors in the interim were entertained with balls, military reviews, and whatever else might divert them from the real objects of their mission. All communication was cut off with their own government, as their couriers were stopped and their despatches intercepted, so that John knew as little of his envoys or their proceedings, as if they had been in Siberia or Japan. In the mean time, formidable preparations were making in the south of France for a descent on Roussillon; and when the ambassadors, after a fruitless attempt at negotiation, which evaporated in mutual crimination and recrimination, set out on their return to Aragon, they were twice detained, at Lyons and Montpelier, from an extreme solicitude, as the French government expressed it, to ascertain the safest route through a country intersected by hostile armies; and all this, notwithstanding their repeated protestations against this obliging disposition, which held them prisoners, in opposition to their own will and the law of nations. The prince who descended to such petty trickery passed for the wisest of his time. [25] In the mean while, the Seigneur du Lude had invaded Roussillon at the head of nine hundred French lances and ten thousand infantry, supported by a powerful train of artillery, while a fleet of Genoese transports, laden with supplies, accompanied the army along the coast. Elna surrendered after a sturdy resistance; the governor and some of the principal prisoners were shamefully beheaded as traitors; and the French then proceeded to invest Perpignan. The king of Aragon was so much impoverished by the incessant wars in which he had been engaged, that he was not only unable to recruit his army, but was even obliged to pawn the robe of costly fur, which he wore to defend his person against the inclemencies of the season, in order to defray the expense of transporting his baggage. In this extremity, finding himself disappointed in the cooperation, on which he had reckoned, of his ancient allies the dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, he again summoned Ferdinand to his assistance, who, after a brief interview with his father in Barcelona, proceeded to Saragossa, to solicit aid from the estates of Aragon. An incident occurred on this visit of the prince worth noticing, as strongly characteristic of the lawless habits of the age. A citizen of Saragossa, named Ximenes Gordo, of noble family, but who had relinquished the privileges of his rank in order to qualify himself for municipal office, had acquired such ascendency over his townsmen, as to engross the most considerable posts in the city for himself and his creatures. This authority he abused in a shameless manner, making use of it not only for the perversion of justice, but for the perpetration of the most flagrant crimes. Although these facts were notorious, yet such were his power and popularity with the lower classes, that Ferdinand, despairing of bringing him to justice in the ordinary way, determined on a more summary process. As Gordo occasionally visited the palace to pay his respects to the prince, the latter affected to regard him with more than usual favor, showing him such courtesy as might dissipate any distrust he had conceived of him. Gordo, thus assured, was invited at one of those interviews to withdraw into a retired apartment, where the prince wished to confer with him on business of moment. On entering the chamber he was surprised by the sight of the public executioner, the hangman of the city, whose presence, together with that of a priest, and the apparatus of death with which the apartment was garnished, revealed at once the dreadful nature of his destiny. He was then charged with the manifold crimes of which he had been guilty, and sentence of death was pronounced on him. In vain did he appeal to Ferdinand, pleading the services which he had rendered on more than one occasion to his father. Ferdinand assured him that these should be gratefully remembered in the protection of his children, and then, bidding him unburden his conscience to his confessor, consigned him to the hand of the executioner. His body was exposed that very day in the market-place of the city, to the dismay of his friends and adherents, most of whom paid the penalty of their crimes in the ordinary course of justice. This extraordinary proceeding is highly characteristic of the unsettled times in which it occurred; when acts of violence often superseded the regular operation of the law, even in those countries, whose forms of government approached the nearest to a determinate constitution. It will doubtless remind the reader of the similar proceeding imputed to Louis the Eleventh, in the admirable sketch given us of that monarch in "Quentin Durward." [26] The supplies furnished by the Aragonese cortes were inadequate to King John's necessities, and he was compelled, while hovering with his little force on the confines of Roussillon, to witness the gradual reduction of its capital, without being able to strike a blow in its defence. The inhabitants, indeed, who fought with a resolution worthy of ancient Numantia or Saguntum, were reduced to the last extremity of famine, supporting life by feeding on the most loathsome offal, on cats, dogs, the corpses of their enemies, and even on such of their own dead as had fallen in battle! And when at length an honorable capitulation was granted them on the 14th of March, 1475, the garrison who evacuated the city, reduced to the number of four hundred, were obliged to march on foot to Barcelona, as they had consumed their horses during the siege. [27] The terms of capitulation, which permitted every inhabitant to evacuate, or reside unmolested in the city, at his option, were too liberal to satisfy the vindictive temper of the king of France. He instantly wrote to his generals, instructing them to depart from their engagements, to keep the city so short of supplies as to compel an emigration of its original inhabitants, and to confiscate for their own use the estates of the principal nobility; and after delineating in detail the perfidious policy which they were to pursue, he concluded with the assurance, "that, by the blessing of God and our Lady, and Monsieur St. Martin, he would be with them before the winter, in order to aid them in its execution." [28] Such was the miserable medley of hypocrisy and superstition, which characterized the politics of the European courts in this corrupt age, and which dimmed the lustre of names, most conspicuous on the page of history. The occupation of Roussillon was followed by a truce of six months between the belligerent parties. The regular course of the narrative has been somewhat anticipated, in order to conclude that portion of it relating to the war with Prance, before again reverting to the affairs of Castile, where Henry the Fourth, pining under an incurable malady, was gradually approaching the termination of his disastrous reign. This event, which, from the momentous consequences it involved, was contemplated with the deepest solicitude, not only by those who had an immediate and personal interest at stake, but by the whole nation, took place on the night of the 11th of December, 1474. [29] It was precipitated by the death of the grand master of St. James, on whom the feeble mind of Henry had been long accustomed to rest for its support, and who was cut off by an acute disorder but a few months previous, in the full prime of his ambitious schemes. The king, notwithstanding the lingering nature of his disease gave him ample time for preparation, expired without a will, or even, as generally asserted, the designation of a successor. This was the more remarkable, not only as being contrary to established usage, but as occurring at a period when the succession had been so long and hotly debated. [30] The testaments of the Castilian sovereigns, though never esteemed positively binding, and occasionally, indeed, set aside, when deemed unconstitutional or even inexpedient by the legislature, [31] were always allowed to have great weight with the nation. With Henry the Fourth terminated the male line of the house of Trastamara, who had kept possession of the throne for more than a century, and in the course of only four generations had exhibited every gradation of character from the bold and chivalrous enterprise of the first Henry of that name, down to the drivelling imbecility of the last. The character of Henry the Fourth has been sufficiently delineated in that of his reign. He was not without certain amiable qualities, and may be considered as a weak, rather than a wicked prince. In persons, however, intrusted with the degree of power exercised by sovereigns of even the most limited monarchies of this period, a weak man may be deemed more mischievous to the state over which he presides than a wicked one. The latter, feeling himself responsible in the eyes of the nation for his actions, is more likely to consult appearances, and, where his own passions or interests are not immediately involved, to legislate with reference to the general interests of his subjects. The former, on the contrary, is too often a mere tool in the hands of favorites, who, finding themselves screened by the interposition of royal authority from the consequences of measures for which they should be justly responsible, sacrifice without remorse the public weal to the advancement of their private fortunes. Thus the state, made to minister to the voracious appetites of many tyrants, suffers incalculably more than it would from one. So fared it with Castile under Henry the Fourth; dismembered by faction, her revenues squandered on worthless parasites, the grossest violations of justice unredressed, public faith become a jest, the treasury bankrupt, the court a brothel, and private morals too loose and audacious to seek even the veil of hypocrisy! Never had the fortunes of the kingdom reached so low an ebb since the great Saracen invasion. * * * * * The historian cannot complain of a want of authentic materials for the reign of Henry IV. Two of the chroniclers of that period, Alonso de Palencia and Enriquez del Castillo, were eye-witnesses and conspicuous actors in the scenes which they recorded, and connected with opposite factions. The former of these writers, Alonso de Palencia, was born, as appears from his work, "De Synonymis," cited by Pellicer, (Bibliotheca de Traductores, p. 7,) in 1423. Nic. Antonio has fallen into the error of dating his birth nine years later. (Bibliotheca Vetus, tom. ii. p. 331.) At the age of seventeen, he became page to Alfonso of Carthagena, bishop of Burgos, and, in the family of that estimable prelate, acquired a taste for letters, which never deserted him during a busy political career. He afterwards visited Italy, where he became acquainted with Cardinal Bessarion, and through him with the learned George of Trebizond, whose lectures on philosophy and rhetoric he attended. On his return to his native country, he was raised to the dignity of royal historiographer by Alfonso, younger brother of Henry IV., and competitor with him for the crown. He attached himself to the fortunes of Isabella after Alfonso's death, and was employed by the archbishop of Toledo in many delicate negotiations, particularly in arranging the marriage of the princess with Ferdinand, for which purpose he made a secret journey into Aragon. On the accession of Isabella, he was confirmed in the office of national chronicler, and passed the remainder of his life in the composition of philological and historical works and translations from the ancient classics. The time of his death is uncertain. He lived to a good old age, however, since it appears from his own statement, (see Mendez, Typographia Española, (Madrid, 1796,) p. 190,) that his version of Josephus was not completed till the year 1492. The most popular of Palencia's writings are his "Chronicle of Henry IV.," and his Latin "Decades," continuing the reign of Isabella down to the capture of Baza, in 1489. His historical style, far from scholastic pedantry, exhibits the business-like manner of a man of the world. His Chronicle, which, being composed in the Castilian, was probably intended for popular use, is conducted with little artifice, and indeed with a prolixity and minuteness of detail, arising no doubt from the deep interest which as an actor he took in the scenes he describes. His sentiments are expressed with boldness, and sometimes with the acerbity of party feeling. He has been much commended by the best Spanish writers, such as Zurita, Zuñiga, Marina, Clemencin, for his veracity. The internal evidence of this is sufficiently strong in his delineation of those scenes in which he was personally engaged; in his account of others, it will not be difficult to find examples of negligence and inaccuracy. His Latin "Decades" were probably composed with more care, as addressed to a learned class of readers; and they are lauded by Nic. Antonio as an elegant commentary, worthy to be assiduously studied by all who would acquaint themselves with the history of their country. The art of printing has done less perhaps for Spain than for any other country in Europe; and these two valuable histories are still permitted to swell the rich treasure of manuscripts with which her libraries are overloaded. Enriquez del Castillo, a native of Segovia, was the chaplain and historiographer of King Henry IV., and a member of his privy council. His situation not only made him acquainted with the policy and intrigues of the court, but with the personal feelings of the monarch, who reposed entire confidence in him, which Castillo repaid with uniform loyalty. He appears very early to have commenced his Chronicle of Henry's reign. On the occupation of Segovia by the young Alfonso, after the battle of Olmedo, in 1467, the chronicler, together with the portion of his history then complied, was unfortunate enough to fall into the enemy's hands. The author was soon summoned to the presence of Alfonso and his counsellors, to hear and justify, as he could, certain passages of what they termed his "false and frivolous narrative." Castillo, hoping little from a defence before such a prejudiced tribunal, resolutely kept his peace; and it might have gone hard with him, had it not been for his ecclesiastical profession. He subsequently escaped, but never recovered his manuscripts, which were probably destroyed; and, in the introduction to his Chronicle, he laments, that he has been obliged to rewrite the first half of his master's reign. Notwithstanding Castillo's familiarity with public affairs, his work is not written in the business-like style of Palencia's. The sentiments exhibit a moral sensibility scarcely to have been expected, even from a minister of religion, in the corrupt court of Henry IV.; and the honest indignation of the writer, at the abuses which he witnessed, sometimes breaks forth in a strain of considerable eloquence. The spirit of his work, notwithstanding its abundant loyalty, may be also commended for its candor in relation to the partisans of Isabella; which has led some critics to suppose that it underwent a _rifacimento_ after the accession of that princess to the throne. Castillo's Chronicle, more fortunate than that of his rival, has been published in a handsome form under the care of Don Jose Miguel de Flores, Secretary of the Spanish Academy of History, to whose learned labors in this way Castilian literature is so much indebted. FOOTNOTES [1] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 21.--Gaillard, Rivalité, tom. iii. p. 284.--Rades y Andrada, Las Tres Ordenes, fol. 65.-- Caro de Torres, Ordenes Militares, fol. 43. [2] Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 23.--Castillo, Crónica, p. 298.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 24.-- Henry, well knowing how little all this would avail without the constitutional sanction of the cortes, twice issued his summons in 1470 for the convocation of the deputies, to obtain a recognition of the title of Joanna. But without effect. In the letters of convocation issued for a third assembly of the states, in 1471, this purpose was prudently omitted, and thus the claims of Joanna failed to receive the countenance of the only body which could give them validity. See the copies of the original writs, addressed to the cities of Toledo and Segovia, cited by Marina, Teoría, tom. ii. pp. 87-89. [3] The grand master of St. James, and his son, the marquis of Villena, afterwards duke of Escalona. The rents of the former nobleman, whose avarice was as insatiable as his influence over the feeble mind of Henry IV. was unlimited, exceeded those of any other grandee in the kingdom. See Pulgar, Claros Varones, tit. 6. [4] The marquis of Santillana, first duke of Infantado, and his brothers, the counts of Coruña, and of Tendilla, and above all Pedro Gonzalez de Mendoza, afterwards cardinal of Spain, and archbishop of Toledo, who was indebted for the highest dignities in the church less to his birth than his abilities. See Claros Varones, tit. 4, 9.--Salazar de Mendoza, Dignidades, lib. 3, cap. 17. [5] Alvaro de Zuñiga, count of Palencia, and created by Henry IV., duke of Arevalo.--Pedro Fernandez de Velasco, count of Haro, was raised to the post of constable of Castile in 1473, and the office continued to be hereditary in the family from that period. Pulgar, Claros Varones, tit. 3.--Salazar de Mendoza, Dignidades, lib. 3, cap. 21. [6] The Pimentels, counts of Benavente, had estates which gave them 60,000 ducats a year; a very large income for that period, and far exceeding that of any other grandee of similar rank in the kingdom. L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 25. [8] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 70. [9] Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 170.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., cap. 45. [10] This nobleman, Diego Hurtado, "muy gentil caballero y gran señor," as Oviedo calls him, was at this time only marquis of Santillana, and was not raised to the title of duke of Infantado till the reign of Isabella, (Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 8.) To avoid confusion, however, I have given him the title by which he is usually recognized by Castilian writers. [11] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 3.--Salazar de Mendoza, Crónica de el Gran Cardenal de España, Don Pedro Gonzalez de Mendoza, (Toledo, 1625,) pp. 138, 150.--Zuñiga, Anales de Sevilla, p. 362. [12] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 4, 5, 7.--Zuñiga, Anales de Sevilla, pp. 363, 364.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 35, 38, 39, 42.--Saez, Monedas de Enrique IV., pp. 1-5.--Pulgar, in an epistle addressed, in the autumn of 1473, to the bishop of Coria, adverts to several circumstances which set in a strong light the anarchical state of the kingdom and the total deficiency of police. The celebrated satirical eclogue, also, entitled "Mingo Revulgo," exposes, with coarse but cutting sarcasm, the license of the court, the corruption of the clergy, and the prevalent depravity of the people. In one of its stanzas it boldly ventures to promise another and a better sovereign to the country. This performance, even more interesting to the antiquarian than to the historian, has been attributed by some to Pulgar, (see Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. p. 475,) and by others to Rodrigo Cota, (see Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Veins, tom. ii p. 264,) but without satisfactory evidence in favor of either. Bouterwek is much mistaken in asserting it to have been aimed at the government of John II. The gloss of Pulgar, whose authority as a contemporary must be considered decisive, plainly proves it to have been directed against Henry IV. [13] See Chap. II. [14] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., cap. 56.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. p. 481.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 191.--Barante, Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne, (Paris, 1825,) tom. ix. pp. 101-106. [15] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., cap. 70.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. p. 482.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 148.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 195.--Anquetil, Histoire de France, (Paris, 1805,) tom. v. pp. 60, 61. [16] Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 196.--Barante, Hist. des Ducs de Bourgogne, tom. x. pp. 105, 106.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 149. --Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., cap. 70, 71, 72. [17] Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 200.--Gaillard, Rivalité, tom. iii. p. 266.--See the articles of the treaty cited by Duclos, Hist. de Louis XI., tom. ii. pp. 99, 101.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., cap. 73. [18] Louis XI. is supposed with much probability to have assassinated this brother. M. de Barante sums up his examination of the evidence with this remark: "Le roi Louis XI. ne fit peut-être pas mourir son frère, mais personne ne pensa qu'il en fut incapable." Hist. des Ducs de Bourgogne, tom. ix. p. 433. [19] The two princes alluded to were the duke of Segorbe, a cousin of Ferdinand, and the king of Portugal. The former, on his entrance into Castile, assumed such sovereign state, (giving his hand, for instance, to the grandees to kiss,) as disgusted these haughty nobles, and was eventually the occasion of breaking off his match. Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 62.--Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. p. 392. [20] Oviedo assigns another reason for this change; the disgust occasioned by Henry IV.'s transferring the custody of his daughter from the family of Mendoza to the Pachecos. Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 8. [21] Salazar de Mendoza, Crón. del Gran Cardenal, p. 133.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 46, 92.--Castillo, Crónica, cap. 163.--The influence of these new allies, especially of the cardinal, over Isabella's councils, was an additional ground of umbrage to the archbishop of Toledo, who, in a communication with the king of Aragon, declared himself, though friendly to their cause, to be released from all further obligations to serve it. See Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. lib. 46, cap. 19. [22] Carbajal, Anales, MS., años 73, 74.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, p. 27. --Castillo, Crónica, cap. 164.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 75.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 23. [23] Mendoza, Crón. del Gran Cardenal, pp. 141, 142.--Castillo, Crónica, cap. 164.--Oviedo has given a full account of this cavalier, who was allied to an ancient Catalan family, but who raised himself to such pre- eminence by his own deserts, says that writer, that he may well be considered the founder of his house. Loc. cit. [24] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 70.--This was the eldest child of Ferdinand and Isabella, born Oct. 1st, 1470; afterwards queen of Portugal. [25] Gaillard, Rivalité, tom. iii. pp. 267-276.--Duclos, Hist. de Louis XI., tom. ii. pp. 113, 115.--Chronique Scandaleuse, ed. Petitot, tom. xiii. pp. 443, 444. [26] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 83.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. vii. p. 400.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. lib. 19, cap. 12. [27] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 150.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. lib. 19, cap. 13.--Chronique Scandaleuse, ed. Petitot, tom. xiii. p. 456. --Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 91. [28] Of the original letters, as given by M. Barante, in his History of the Dukes of Burgundy, in which the author has so happily seized the tone and picturesque coloring of the ancient chronicle; tom. x. pp. 289, 298. [29] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 10.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 74.--Castillo, Crónica, cap. 148. [30] This topic is involved in no little obscurity, and has been reported with much discrepancy as well as inaccuracy by the modern Spanish historians. Among the ancient, Castillo, the historiographer of Henry IV., mentions certain "testamentary executors," without, however, noticing in any more direct way the existence of a will. (Crón. c. 168.) The Curate of Los Palacios refers to a clause reported, he says, to have existed in the testament of Henry IV., in which he declares Joanna his daughter and heir; (Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 10.) Alonso de Palencia states positively that there was no such instrument, and that Henry, on being asked who was to succeed him, referred to his secretary Juan Gonzalez for a knowledge of his intention. (Crón. c. 92.) L. Marineo also states that the king, "with his usual improvidence," left no will. (Cosas Memorables, fol. 155.) Pulgar, another contemporary, expressly declares that he executed no will, and quotes the words dictated by him to his secretary, in which he simply designates two of the grandees as "executors of his soul," (_albuceas de su anima_,) and four others in conjunction with them as the guardians of his daughter Joanna. (Reyes Cat. p. 31.) It seems not improbable that the existence of this document has been confounded with that of a testament, and that with reference to it, the phrase above quoted of Castillo, as well as the passage of Bernaldez, is to be interpreted. Carbajal's wild story of the existence of a will, of its secretion for more than thirty years, and its final suppression by Ferdinand, is too naked of testimony to deserve the least weight with the historian. (See his Anales, MS., año 74.) It should be remembered, however, that most of the above-mentioned writers compiled their works after the accession of Isabella, and that none, save Castillo, were the partisans of her rival. It should also be added that in the letters addressed by the princess Joanna to the different cities of the kingdom, on her assuming the title of queen of Castile, (bearing date May, 1475,) it is expressly stated that Henry IV., on his deathbed, solemnly affirmed her to be his only daughter and lawful heir. These letters were drafted by John de Oviedo, (Juan Gonzalez,) the confidential secretary of Henry IV. See Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 235-239. [31] As was the case with the testaments of Alfonso of Leon and Alfonso the Wise, in the thirteenth century, and with that of Peter the Cruel, in the fourteenth. CHAPTER V. ACCESSION OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA.--WAR OF THE SUCCESSION.--BATTLE OF TORO. 1474-1476. Isabella proclaimed Queen.--Settlement of the Crown.--Alfonso of Portugal supports Joanna.--Invades Castile.--Retreat of the Castilians.-- Appropriation of the Church Plate.--Reorganization of the Army.--Battle of Toro.--Submission of the whole Kingdom.--Peace with France and Portugal.-- Joanna takes the Veil.--Death of John II., of Aragon. Most of the contemporary writers are content to derive Isabella's title to the crown of Castile from the illegitimacy of her rival Joanna. But, as this fact, whatever probability it may receive from the avowed licentiousness of the queen, and some other collateral circumstances, was never established by legal evidence, or even made the subject of legal inquiry, it cannot reasonably be adduced as affording in itself a satisfactory basis for the pretensions of Isabella. [1] These are to be derived from the will of the nation as expressed by its representatives in cortes. The power of this body to interpret the laws regulating the succession, and to determine the succession itself, in the most absolute manner, is incontrovertible, having been established by repeated precedents from a very ancient period. [2] In the present instance, the legislature, soon after the birth of Joanna, tendered the usual oaths of allegiance to her as heir apparent to the monarchy. On a subsequent occasion, however, the cortes, for reasons deemed sufficient by itself, and under a conviction that its consent to the preceding measure had been obtained through an undue influence on the part of the crown, reversed its former acts, and did homage to Isabella as the only true and lawful successor. [3] In this disposition the legislature continued so resolute, that, notwithstanding Henry twice convoked the states for the express purpose of renewing their allegiance to Joanna, they refused to comply with the summons; [4] and thus Isabella, at the time of her brother's death, possessed a title to the crown unimpaired, and derived from the sole authority which could give it a constitutional validity. It may be added that the princess was so well aware of the real basis of her pretensions, that in her several manifestoes, although she adverts to the popular notion of her rival's illegitimacy, she rests the strength of her cause on the sanction of the cortes. On learning Henry's death, Isabella signified to the inhabitants of Segovia, where she then resided, her desire of being proclaimed queen in that city, with the solemnities usual on such occasions. [5] Accordingly, on the following morning, being the 13th of December, 1474, a numerous assembly, consisting of the nobles, clergy, and public magistrates in their robes of office, waited on her at the alcazar or castle, and, receiving her under a canopy of rich brocade, escorted her in solemn procession to the principal square of the city, where a broad platform or scaffold had been erected for the performance of the ceremony. Isabella, royally attired, rode on a Spanish jennet whose bridle was held by two of the civic functionaries, while an officer of her court preceded her on horseback, bearing aloft a naked sword, the symbol of sovereignty. On arriving at the square she alighted from her palfrey, and, ascending the platform, seated herself on a throne which had been prepared for her. A herald with a loud voice proclaimed, "Castile, Castile for the king Don Ferdinand and his consort Doña Isabella, queen proprietor (_reina proprietaria_) of these kingdoms!" The royal standards were then unfurled, while the peal of bells and the discharge of ordnance from the castle publicly announced the accession of the new sovereign. Isabella, after receiving the homage of her subjects, and swearing to maintain inviolate the liberties of the realm, descended from the platform, and, attended by the same _cortège_, moved slowly towards the cathedral church; where, after Te Deum had been chanted, she prostrated herself before the principal altar, and, returning thanks to the Almighty for the protection hitherto vouchsafed her, implored him to enlighten her future counsels, so that she might discharge the high trust reposed in her, with equity and wisdom. Such were the simple forms, that attended the coronation of the monarchs of Castile, previously to the sixteenth century. [6] The cities favorable to Isabella's cause, comprehending far the most populous and wealthy throughout the kingdom, followed the example of Segovia, and raised the royal standard for their new sovereign. The principal grandees, as well as most of the inferior nobility, soon presented themselves from all quarters, in order to tender the customary oaths of allegiance; and an assembly of the estates, convened for the ensuing month of February at Segovia, imparted, by a similar ceremony, a constitutional sanction to these proceedings. [7] On Ferdinand's arrival from Aragon, where he was staying at the time of Henry's death, occupied with the war of Roussillon, a disagreeable discussion took place in regard to the respective authority to be enjoyed by the husband and wife in the administration of the government. Ferdinand's relatives, with the admiral Henriquez at their head, contended that the crown of Castile, and of course the exclusive sovereignty, was limited to him as the nearest male representative of the house of Trastamara. Isabella's friends, on the other hand, insisted that these rights devolved solely on her, as the lawful heir and proprietor of the kingdom. The affair was finally referred to the arbitration of the cardinal of Spain and the archbishop of Toledo, who, after careful examination, established by undoubted precedent, that the exclusion of females from the succession did not obtain in Castile and Leon, as was the case in Aragon; [8] that Isabella was consequently sole heir of these dominions; and that whatever authority Ferdinand might possess, could only be derived through her. A settlement was then made on the basis of the original marriage contract. [9] All municipal appointments, and collation to ecclesiastical benefices, were to be made in the name of both with the advice and consent of the queen. All fiscal nominations, and issues from the treasury, were to be subject to her order. The commanders of the fortified places were to render homage to her alone. Justice was to be administered by both conjointly, when residing in the same place, and by each independently, when separate. Proclamations and letters patent were to be subscribed with the signatures of both; their images were to be stamped on the public coin, and the united arms of Castile and Aragon emblazoned on a common seal. [10] Ferdinand, it is said, was so much dissatisfied with an arrangement which vested the essential rights of sovereignty in his consort, that he threatened to return to Aragon; but Isabella reminded him, that this distribution of power was rather nominal than real; that their interests were indivisible; that his will would be hers; and that the principle of the exclusion of females from the succession, if now established, would operate to the disqualification of their only child, who was a daughter. By these and similar arguments the queen succeeded in soothing her offended husband, without compromising the prerogatives of her crown. Although the principal body of the nobility, as has been stated, supported Isabella's cause, there were a few families, and some of them the most potent in Castile, who seemed determined to abide the fortunes of her rival. Among these was the marquis of Villena, who, inferior to his father in talent for intrigue, was of an intrepid spirit, and is commended by one of the Spanish historians as "the best lance in the kingdom." His immense estates, stretching from Toledo to Murcia, gave him an extensive influence over the southern regions of New Castile. The duke of Arevalo possessed a similar interest in the frontier province of Estremadura. With these were combined the grand master of Calatrava and his brother, together with the young marquis of Cadiz, and, as it soon appeared, the archbishop of Toledo. This latter dignitary, whose heart had long swelled with secret jealousy at the rising fortunes of the cardinal Mendoza, could no longer brook the ascendency which that prelate's consummate sagacity and insinuating address had given him over the counsels of his young sovereigns. After some awkward excuses, he abruptly withdrew to his own estates; nor could the most conciliatory advances on the part of the queen, nor the deprecatory letters of the old king of Aragon, soften his inflexible temper, or induce him to resume his station at the court; until it soon became apparent from his correspondence with Isabella's enemies, that he was busy in undermining the fortunes of the very individual, whom he had so zealously labored to elevate. [11] Under the auspices of this coalition, propositions were made to Alfonso the Fifth, king of Portugal, to vindicate the title of his niece Joanna to the throne of Castile, and, by espousing her, to secure to himself the same rich inheritance. An exaggerated estimate was, at the same time, exhibited of the resources of the confederates, which, when combined with those of Portugal, would readily enable them to crush the usurpers, unsupported, as the latter must be, by the co-operation of Aragon, whose arms already found sufficient occupation with the French. Alfonso, whose victories over the Barbary Moors had given him the cognomen of "the African," was precisely of a character to be dazzled by the nature of this enterprise. The protection of an injured princess, his near relative, was congenial with the spirit of chivalry; while the conquest of an opulent territory, adjacent to his own, would not only satisfy his dreams of glory, but the more solid cravings of avarice. In this disposition he was confirmed by his son, Prince John, whose hot and enterprising temper found a nobler scope for ambition in such a war, than in the conquest of a horde of African savages. [12] Still, there were a few among Alfonso's counsellors possessed of sufficient coolness to discern the difficulties of the undertaking. They reminded him that the Castilian nobles on whom he principally relied were the very persons who had formerly been most instrumental in defeating the claims of Joanna, and securing the succession to her rival; that Ferdinand was connected by blood with the most powerful families of Castile; that the great body of the people, the middle as well as the lower classes, were fully penetrated not only with a conviction of the legality of Isabella's title, but with a deep attachment to her person; while, on the other hand, their proverbial hatred of Portugal would make them too impatient of interference from that quarter, to admit the prospect of permanent success. [13] These objections, sound as they were, were overruled by John's impetuosity, and the ambition or avarice of his father. War was accordingly resolved on; and Alfonso, after a vaunting, and, as may be supposed, ineffectual summons to the Castilian sovereigns to resign their crown in favor of Joanna, prepared for the immediate invasion of the kingdom at the head of an army amounting, according to the Portuguese historians, to five thousand six hundred horse and fourteen thousand foot. This force, though numerically not so formidable as might have been expected, comprised the flower of the Portuguese chivalry, burning with the hope of reaping similar laurels to those won of old by their fathers on the plains of Aljubarrotta; while its deficiency in numbers was to be amply compensated by recruits from the disaffected party in Castile, who would eagerly flock to its banners, on its advance across the borders. At the same time negotiations were entered into with the king of France, who was invited to make a descent upon Biscay, by a promise, somewhat premature, of a cession of the conquered territory. Early in May, the king of Portugal put his army in motion, and, entering Castile by the way of Estremadura, held a northerly course towards Placencia, where he was met by the duke of Arevalo and the marquis of Villena, and by the latter nobleman presented to the princess Joanna, his destined bride. On the 12th of the month he was affianced with all becoming pomp to this lady, then scarcely thirteen years of age; and a messenger was despatched to the court of Rome, to solicit a dispensation for their marriage, rendered necessary by the consanguinity of the parties. The royal pair were then proclaimed, with the usual solemnities, sovereigns of Castile; and circulars were transmitted to the different cities, setting forth Joanna's title and requiring their allegiance. [14] After some days given to festivity, the army resumed its march, still in a northerly direction, upon Arevalo, where Alfonso determined to await the arrival of the reinforcements which he expected from his Castilian allies. Had he struck at once into the southern districts of Castile, where most of those friendly to his cause were to be found, and immediately commenced active operations with the aid of the marquis of Cadiz, who it was understood was prepared to support him in that quarter, it is difficult to say what might have been the result. Ferdinand and Isabella were so wholly unprepared at the time of Alfonso's invasion, that it is said they could scarcely bring five hundred horse to oppose it. By this opportune delay at Arevalo, they obtained space for preparation. Both of them were indefatigable in their efforts. Isabella, we are told, was frequently engaged through the whole night in dictating despatches to her secretaries. She visited in person such of the garrisoned towns as required to be confirmed in their allegiance, performing long and painful journeys on horseback with surprising celerity, and enduring fatigues, which, as she was at that time in delicate health, wellnigh proved fatal to her constitution. [15] On an excursion to Toledo, she determined to make one effort more to regain the confidence of her ancient minister the archbishop. She accordingly sent an envoy to inform him of her intention to wait on him in person at his residence in Alcalá de Henares. But as the surly prelate, far from being moved by this condescension, returned for answer, that, "if the queen entered by one door, he would go out at the other," she did not choose to compromise her dignity by any further advances. By Isabella's extraordinary exertions, as well as those of her husband, the latter found himself, in the beginning of July, at the head of a force amounting in all to four thousand men-at-arms, eight thousand light horse, and thirty thousand foot, an ill-disciplined militia, chiefly drawn from the mountainous districts of the north, which manifested peculiar devotion to his cause; his partisans in the south being preoccupied with suppressing domestic revolt, and with incursions on the frontiers of Portugal. [16] Meanwhile Alfonso, after an unprofitable detention of nearly two months at Arevalo, marched on Toro, which, by a preconcerted agreement, was delivered into his hands by the governor of the city, although the fortress, under the conduct of a woman, continued to maintain a gallant defence. While occupied with its reduction, Alfonso was invited to receive the submission of the adjacent city and castle of Zamora. The defection of these places, two of the most considerable in the province of Leon, and peculiarly important to the king of Portugal from their vicinity to his dominions, was severely felt by Ferdinand, who determined to advance at once against his rival, and bring their quarrel to the issue of a battle; in this, acting in opposition to the more cautious counsel of his father, who recommended the policy, usually judged most prudent for an invaded country, of acting on the defensive, instead of risking all on the chances of a single action. Ferdinand arrived before Toro on the 19th of July, and immediately drew up his army, before its walls, in order of battle. As the king of Portugal, however, still kept within his defences, Ferdinand sent a herald into his camp, to defy him to a fair field of fight with his whole army, or, if he declined this, to invite him to decide their differences by personal combat. Alfonso accepted the latter alternative; but, a dispute arising respecting the guaranty for the performance of the engagements on either side, the whole affair evaporated, as usual, in an empty vaunt of chivalry. The Castilian army, from the haste with which it had been mustered, was wholly deficient in battering artillery, and in other means for annoying a fortified city; and, as its communications were cut off, in consequence of the neighboring fortresses being in possession of the enemy, it soon became straitened for provisions. It was accordingly decided in a council of war to retreat without further delay. No sooner was this determination known, than it excited general dissatisfaction throughout the camp. The soldiers loudly complained that the king was betrayed by his nobles; and a party of over-loyal Biscayans, inflamed by the suspicions of a conspiracy against his person, actually broke into the church where Ferdinand was conferring with his officers, and bore him off in their arms from the midst of them to his own tent, notwithstanding his reiterated explanations and remonstrances. The ensuing retreat was conducted in so disorderly a manner by the mutinous soldiery, that Alfonso, says a contemporary, had he but sallied with two thousand horse, might have routed and perhaps annihilated the whole army. Some of the troops were detached to reinforce the garrisons of the loyal cities, but most of them dispersed again among their native mountains. The citadel of Toro soon afterwards capitulated. The archbishop of Toledo, considering these events as decisive of the fortunes of the war, now openly joined the king of Portugal at the head of five hundred lances, boasting at the same time, that "he had raised Isabella from the distaff, and would soon send her back to it again." [17] So disastrous an introduction to the campaign might indeed well fill Isabella's bosom with anxiety. The revolutionary movements, which had so long agitated Castile, had so far unsettled every man's political principles, and the allegiance of even the most loyal hung so loosely about them, that it was difficult to estimate how far it might be shaken by such a blow occurring at this crisis. [18] Fortunately, Alfonso was in no condition to profit by his success. His Castilian allies had experienced the greatest difficulty in enlisting their vassals in the Portuguese cause; and, far from furnishing him with the contingents which he had expected, found sufficient occupation in the defence of their own territories against the loyal partisans of Isabella. At the same time, numerous squadrons of light cavalry from Estremadura and Andalusia, penetrating into Portugal, carried the most terrible desolation over the whole extent of its unprotected borders. The Portuguese knights loudly murmured at being cooped up in Toro, while their own country was made the theatre of war; and Alfonso saw himself under the necessity of detaching so considerable a portion of his army for the defence of his frontier, as entirely to cripple his future operations. So deeply, indeed, was he impressed, by these circumstances, with the difficulty of his enterprise, that, in a negotiation with the Castilian sovereigns at this time, he expressed a willingness to resign his claims to their crown in consideration of the cession of Galicia, together with the cities of Toro and Zamora, and a considerable sum of money. Ferdinand and his ministers, it is reported, would have accepted the proposal; but Isabella, although acquiescing in the stipulated money payment, would not consent to the dismemberment of a single inch of the Castilian territory. In the mean time both the queen and her husband, undismayed by past reverses, were making every exertion for the reorganization of an army on a more efficient footing. To accomplish this object, an additional supply of funds became necessary, since the treasure of King Henry, delivered into their hands by Andres de Cabrera, at Segovia, had been exhausted by the preceding operations. [19] The old king of Aragon advised them to imitate their ancestor Henry the Second, of glorious memory, by making liberal grants and alienations in favor of their subjects, which they might, when more firmly seated on the throne, resume at pleasure. Isabella, however, chose rather to trust to the patriotism of her people, than have recourse to so unworthy a stratagem. She accordingly convened an assembly of the states, in the month of August, at Medina del Campo. As the nation had been too far impoverished under the late reign to admit of fresh exactions, a most extraordinary expedient was devised for meeting the stipulated requisitions. It was proposed to deliver into the royal treasury half the amount of plate belonging to the churches throughout the kingdom, to be redeemed in the term of three years, for the sum of thirty _cuentos_, or millions, of maravedies. The clergy, who were very generally attached to Isabella's interests, far from discouraging this startling proposal, endeavored to vanquish the queen's repugnance to it by arguments and pertinent illustrations drawn from Scripture. This transaction certainly exhibits a degree of disinterestedness, on the part of this body, most unusual in that age and country, as well as a generous confidence in the good faith of Isabella, of which she proved herself worthy by the punctuality with which she redeemed it. [20] Thus provided with the necessary funds, the sovereigns set about enforcing new levies and bringing them under better discipline, as well as providing for their equipment in a manner more suitable to the exigencies of the service, than was done for the preceding army. The remainder of the summer and the ensuing autumn were consumed in these preparations, as well as in placing their fortified towns in a proper posture of defence, and in the reduction of such places as held out against them. The king of Portugal, all this while, lay with his diminished forces in Toro, making a sally on one occasion only, for the relief of his friends, which was frustrated by the sleepless vigilance of Isabella. Early in December, Ferdinand passed from the siege of Burgos, in Old Castile, to Zamora, whose inhabitants expressed a desire to return to their ancient allegiance; and, with the co-operation of the citizens, supported by a large detachment from his main army, he prepared to invest its citadel. As the possession of this post would effectually intercept Alfonso's communications with his own country, he determined to relieve it at every hazard, and for this purpose despatched a messenger into Portugal requiring his son, Prince John, to reinforce him with such levies as he could speedily raise. All parties now looked forward with eagerness to a general battle, as to a termination of the evils of this long-protracted war. The Portuguese prince, having with difficulty assembled a corps amounting to two thousand lances and eight thousand infantry, took a northerly circuit round Galicia, and effected a junction with his father in Toro, on the 14th of February, 1476. Alfonso, thus reinforced, transmitted a pompous circular to the pope, the king of France, his own dominions, and those well affected to him in Castile, proclaiming his immediate intention of taking the usurper, or of driving him from the kingdom. On the night of the 17th, having first provided for the security of the city by leaving in it a powerful reserve, Alfonso drew off the residue of his army, probably not much exceeding three thousand five hundred horse and five thousand foot, well provided with artillery and with arquebuses, which latter engine was still of so clumsy and unwieldy construction, as not to have entirely superseded the ancient weapons of European warfare. The Portuguese army, traversing the bridge of Toro, pursued their march along the southern side of the Douro, and reached Zamora, distant only a few leagues, before the dawn. [21] At break of day, the Castilians were surprised by the array of floating banners, and martial panoply glittering in the sun, from the opposite side of the river, while the discharges of artillery still more unequivocally announced the presence of the enemy. Ferdinand could scarcely believe that the Portuguese monarch, whose avowed object had been the relief of the castle of Zamora, should have selected a position so obviously unsuitable for this purpose. The intervention of the river, between him and the fortress situated at the northern extremity of the town, prevented him from relieving it, either by throwing succors into it, or by annoying the Castilian troops, who, intrenched in comparative security within the walls and houses of the city, were enabled by means of certain elevated positions, well garnished with artillery, to inflict much heavier injury on their opponents, than they could possibly receive from them. Still, Ferdinand's men, exposed to the double fire of the fortress and the besiegers, would willingly have come to an engagement with the latter; but the river, swollen by winter torrents, was not fordable, and the bridge, the only direct avenue to the city, was enfiladed by the enemy's cannon, so as to render a sally in that direction altogether impracticable. During this time, Isabella's squadrons of light cavalry, hovering on the skirts of the Portuguese camp, effectually cut off its supplies, and soon reduced it to great straits for subsistence. This circumstance, together with the tidings of the rapid advance of additional forces to the support of Ferdinand, determined Alfonso, contrary to all expectation, on an immediate retreat; and accordingly on the morning of the 1st of March, being little less than a fortnight from the time in which he commenced this empty gasconade, the Portuguese army quitted its position before Zamora, with the same silence and celerity with which it had occupied it. Ferdinand's troops would instantly have pushed after the fugitives, but the latter had demolished the southern extremity of the bridge before their departure; so that, although some few effected an immediate passage in boats, the great body of the army was necessarily detained until the repairs were completed, which occupied more than three hours. With all the expedition they could use, therefore, and leaving their artillery behind them, they did not succeed in coming up with the enemy until nearly four o'clock in the afternoon, as the latter was defiling through a narrow pass formed by a crest of precipitous hills on the one side, and the Douro on the other, at the distance of about five miles from the city of Toro. [22] A council of war was then called, to decide on the expediency of an immediate assault. It was objected, that the strong position of Toro would effectually cover the retreat of the Portuguese in case of their discomfiture; that they would speedily be reinforced by fresh recruits from that city, which would make them more than a match for Ferdinand's army, exhausted by a toilsome march, as well as by its long fast, which it had not broken since the morning; and that the celerity, with which it had moved, had compelled it, not only to abandon its artillery, but to leave a considerable portion of the heavy-armed infantry in the rear. Notwithstanding the weight of these objections, such were the high spirit of the troops and their eagerness to come to action, sharpened by the view of the quarry, which after a wearisome chase seemed ready to fall into their hands, that they were thought more than sufficient to counterbalance every physical disadvantage; and the question of battle was decided in the affirmative. As the Castilian army emerged from the defile into a wide and open plain, they found that the enemy had halted, and was already forming in order of battle. The king of Portugal led the centre, with the archbishop of Toledo on his right wing, its extremity resting on the Douro; while the left, comprehending the arquebusiers and the strength of the cavalry, was placed under the command of his son, Prince John. The numerical force of the two armies, although in favor of the Portuguese, was nearly equal, amounting probably in each to less than ten thousand men, about one-third being cavalry. Ferdinand took his station in the centre, opposite his rival, having the admiral and the duke of Alva on his left; while his right wing, distributed into six battles or divisions, under their several commanders, was supported by a detachment of men-at-arms from the provinces of Leon and Galicia. The action commenced in this quarter. The Castilians, raising the war-cry of "St. James and St. Lazarus," advanced on the enemy's left under Prince John, but were saluted with such a brisk and well-directed fire from his arquebusiers, that their ranks were disconcerted. The Portuguese men-at- arms, charging them at the same time, augmented their confusion, and compelled them to fall back precipitately on the narrow pass in their rear, where, being supported by some fresh detachments from the reserve, they were with difficulty rallied by their officers, and again brought into the field. In the mean while, Ferdinand closed with the enemy's centre, and the action soon became general along the whole line. The battle raged with redoubled fierceness in the quarter where the presence of the two monarchs infused new ardor into their soldiers, who fought as if conscious that this struggle was to decide the fate of their masters. The lances were shivered at the first encounter, and, as the ranks of the two armies mingled with each other, the men fought hand to hand with their swords, with a fury sharpened by the ancient rivalry of the two nations, making the whole a contest of physical strength rather than skill. [23] The royal standard of Portugal was torn to shreds in the attempt to seize it on the one side and to preserve it on the other, while its gallant bearer, Edward de Almeyda, after losing first his right arm, and then his left, in its defence, held it firmly with his teeth until he was cut down by the assailants. The armor of this knight was to be seen as late as Mariana's time, in the cathedral church of Toledo, where it was preserved as a trophy of this desperate act of heroism, which brings to mind a similar feat recorded in Grecian story. The old archbishop of Toledo, and the cardinal Mendoza, who, like his reverend rival, had exchanged the crosier for the corslet, were to be seen on that day in the thickest of the _mêlée_. The holy wars with the infidel perpetuated the unbecoming spectacle of militant ecclesiastics among the Spaniards, to a still later period, and long after it had disappeared from the rest of civilized Europe. At length, after an obstinate struggle of more than three hours, the valor of the Castilian troops prevailed, and the Portuguese were seen to give way in all directions. The duke of Alva, by succeeding in turning their flank, while they were thus vigorously pressed in front, completed their disorder, and soon converted their retreat into a rout. Some, attempting to cross the Douro, were drowned, and many, who endeavored to effect an entrance into Toro, were entangled in the narrow defile of the bridge, and fell by the sword of their pursuers, or miserably perished in the river, which, bearing along their mutilated corpses, brought tidings of the fatal victory to Zamora. Such were the heat and fury of the pursuit, that the intervening night, rendered darker than usual by a driving rain storm, alone saved the scattered remains of the army from destruction. Several Portuguese companies, under favor of this obscurity, contrived to elude their foes by shouting the Castilian battle-cry. Prince John, retiring with a fragment of his broken squadrons to a neighboring eminence, succeeded, by lighting fires and sounding his trumpets, in rallying round him a number of fugitives; and, as the position he occupied was too strong to be readily forced, and the Castilian troops were too weary, and well satisfied with their victory, to attempt it, he retained possession of it till morning, when he made good his retreat into Toro. The king of Portugal, who was missing, was supposed to have perished in the battle, until, by advices received from him late on the following day, it was ascertained that he had escaped without personal injury, and with three or four attendants only, to the fortified castle of Castro Nuño, some leagues distant from the field of action. Numbers of his troops, attempting to escape across the neighboring frontiers into their own country, were maimed or massacred by the Spanish peasants, in retaliation of the excesses wantonly committed by them in their invasion of Castile. Ferdinand, shocked at this barbarity, issued orders for the protection of their persons, and freely gave safe-conducts to such as desired to return into Portugal. He even, with a degree of humanity more honorable, as well as more rare, than military success, distributed clothes and money to several prisoners brought into Zamora in a state of utter destitution, and enabled them to return in safety to their own country. [24] The Castilian monarch remained on the field of battle till after midnight, when he returned to Zamora, being followed in the morning by the cardinal of Spain and the admiral Henriquez, at the head of the victorious legions. Eight standards with the greater part of the baggage were taken in the engagement, and more than two thousand of the enemy slain or made prisoners. Queen Isabella, on receiving tidings of the event at Tordesillas, where she then was, ordered a procession to the church of St. Paul in the suburbs, in which she herself joined, walking barefoot with all humility, and offered up a devout thanksgiving to the God of battles for the victory with which he had crowned her arms. [25] It was indeed a most auspicious victory, not so much from the immediate loss inflicted on the enemy, as from its moral influence on the Castilian nation. Such as had before vacillated in their faith,--who, in the expressive language of Bernaldez, "estaban aviva quien vence,"--who were prepared to take sides with the strongest, now openly proclaimed their allegiance to Ferdinand and Isabella; while most of those, who had been arrayed in arms or had manifested by any other overt act their hostility to the government, vied with each other in demonstrations of the most loyal submission, and sought to make the best terms for themselves which they could. Among these latter, the duke of Arevalo, who indeed had made overtures to this effect some time previous through the agency of his son, together with the grand master of Calatrava, and the count of Urueña, his brother, experienced the lenity of government, and were confirmed in the entire possession of their estates. The two principal delinquents, the marquis of Villena and the archbishop of Toledo, made a show of resistance for some time longer; but, after witnessing the demolition of their castles, the capture of their towns, the desertion of their vassals, and the sequestration of their revenues, were fain to purchase a pardon at the price of the most humble concessions, and the forfeiture of an ample portion of domain. The castle of Zamora, expecting no further succors from Portugal, speedily surrendered, and this event was soon followed by the reduction of Madrid, Baeza, Toro, and other principal cities; so that, in little more than six months from the date of the battle, the whole kingdom, with the exception of a few insignificant posts still garrisoned by the enemy, had acknowledged the supremacy of Ferdinand and Isabella. [26] Soon after the victory of Toro, Ferdinand was enabled to concentrate a force amounting to fifty thousand men, for the purpose of repelling the French from Guipuscoa, from which they had already twice been driven by the intrepid natives, and whence they again retired with precipitation on receiving news of the king's approach. [27] Alfonso, finding his authority in Castile thus rapidly melting away before the rising influence of Ferdinand and Isabella, withdrew with his virgin bride into Portugal, where he formed the resolution of visiting France in person, and soliciting succor from his ancient ally, Louis the Eleventh. In spite of every remonstrance, he put this extraordinary scheme into execution. He reached France, with a retinue of two hundred followers, in the month of September. He experienced everywhere the honors due to his exalted rank, and to the signal mark of confidence, which he thus exhibited towards the French king. The keys of the cities were delivered into his hands, the prisoners were released from their dungeons, and his progress was attended by a general jubilee. His brother monarch, however, excused himself from affording more substantial proofs of his regard, until he should have closed the war then pending between him and Burgundy, and until Alfonso should have fortified his title to the Castilian crown, by obtaining from the pope a dispensation for his marriage with Joanna. The defeat and death of the duke of Burgundy, whose camp, before Nanci, Alfonso visited in the depth of winter, with the chimerical purpose of effecting a reconciliation between him and Louis, removed the former of these impediments; as, in good time, the compliance of the pope did the latter. But the king of Portugal found himself no nearer the object of his negotiations; and, after waiting a whole year a needy supplicant at the court of Louis, he at length ascertained that his insidious host was concerting an arrangement with his mortal foes, Ferdinand and Isabella. Alfonso, whose character always had a spice of Quixotism in it, seems to have completely lost his wits at this last reverse of fortune. Overwhelmed with shame at his own credulity, he felt himself unable to encounter the ridicule which awaited his return to Portugal, and secretly withdrew, with two or three domestics only, to an obscure village in Normandy, whence he transmitted an epistle to Prince John, his son, declaring, "that, as all earthly vanities were dead within his bosom, he resolved to lay up an imperishable crown by performing a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and devoting himself to the service of God, in some retired monastery;" and he concluded with requesting his son "to assume the sovereignty, at once, in the same manner as if he had heard of his father's death." [28] Fortunately Alfonso's retreat was detected before he had time to put his extravagant project in execution, and his trusty followers succeeded, though with considerable difficulty, in diverting him from it; while the king of France, willing to be rid of his importunate guest, and unwilling perhaps to incur the odium of having driven him to so desperate an extremity as that of his projected pilgrimage, provided a fleet of ships to transport him back to his own dominions, where, to complete the farce, he arrived just five days after the ceremony of his son's coronation as king of Portugal. Nor was it destined that the luckless monarch should solace himself, as he had hoped, in the arms of his youthful bride; since the pliant pontiff, Sixtus the Fourth, was ultimately persuaded by the court of Castile to issue a new bull overruling the dispensation formerly conceded, on the ground that it had been obtained by a misrepresentation of facts. Prince John, whether influenced by filial piety, or prudence, resigned the crown of Portugal to his father, soon after his return; [29] and the old monarch was no sooner reinstated in his authority, than, burning with a thirst for vengeance, which made him insensible to every remonstrance, he again prepared to throw his country into combustion by reviving his enterprise against Castile. [30] While these hostile movements were in progress, Ferdinand, leaving his consort in possession of a sufficient force for the protection of the frontiers, made a journey into Biscay for the purpose of an interview with his father, the king of Aragon, to concert measures for the pacification of Navarre, which still continued to be rent with those sanguinary feuds, that were bequeathed like a precious legacy from one generation to another. [31] In the autumn of the same year a treaty of peace was definitively adjusted between the plenipotentiaries of Castile and France, at St. Jean de Luz, in which it was stipulated as a principle article, that Louis the Eleventh should disconnect himself from his alliance with Portugal, and give no further support to the pretensions of Joanna. [32] Thus released from apprehension in this quarter, the sovereigns were enabled to give their undivided attention to the defence of the western borders. Isabella, accordingly, early in the ensuing winter, passed into Estremadura for the purpose of repelling the Portuguese, and still more of suppressing the insurrectionary movements of certain of her own subjects, who, encouraged by the vicinity of Portugal, carried on from their private fortresses a most desolating and predatory warfare over the circumjacent territory. Private mansions and farm-houses were pillaged and burnt to the ground, the cattle and crops swept away in their forays, the highways beset, so that all travelling was at an end, all communication cut off, and a rich and populous district converted at once into a desert. Isabella, supported by a body of regular troops and a detachment of the Holy Brotherhood, took her station at Truxillo, as a central position, whence she might operate on the various points with greatest facility. Her counsellors remonstrated against this exposure of her person in the very heart of the disaffected country; but she replied that "it was not for her to calculate perils or fatigues in her own cause, nor by an unseasonable timidity to dishearten her friends, with whom she was now resolved to remain until she had brought the war to a conclusion." She then gave immediate orders for laying siege at the same time to the fortified towns of Medellin, Merida, and Deleytosa. At this juncture the infanta Doña Beatriz of Portugal, sister-in-law of King Alfonso, and maternal aunt of Isabella, touched with grief at the calamities, in which she saw her country involved by the chimerical ambition of her brother, offered herself as the mediator of peace between the belligerent nations. Agreeably to her proposal, an interview took place between her and Queen Isabella at the frontier town of Alcantara. As the conferences of the fair negotiators experienced none of the embarrassments usually incident to such deliberations, growing out of jealousy, distrust, and a mutual design to overreach, but were conducted in perfect good faith, and a sincere desire, on both sides, of establishing a cordial reconciliation, they resulted, after eight days' discussion, in a treaty of peace, with which the Portuguese infanta returned into her own country, in order to obtain the sanction of her royal brother. The articles contained in it, however, were too unpalatable to receive an immediate assent; and it was not until the expiration of six months, during which Isabella, far from relaxing, persevered with increased energy in her original plan of operations, that the treaty was formally ratified by the court of Lisbon. [33] It was stipulated in this compact, that Alfonso should relinquish the title and armorial bearings, which he had assumed as king of Castile; that he should resign his claims to the hand of Joanna, and no longer maintain her pretensions to the Castilian throne; that that lady should make the election within six months, either to quit Portugal for ever, or to remain there on the condition of wedding Don John, the infant son of Ferdinand and Isabella, [34] so soon as he should attain a marriageable age, or to retire into a convent, and take the veil; that a general amnesty should be granted to all such Castilians as had supported Joanna's cause; and, finally, that the concord between the two nations should be cemented by the union of Alonso, son of the prince of Portugal, with the infanta Isabella, of Castile. [35] Thus terminated, after a duration of four years and a half, the War of the Succession. It had fallen with peculiar fury on the border provinces of Leon and Estremadura, which, from their local position, had necessarily been kept in constant collision with the enemy. Its baneful effects were long visible there, not only in the general devastation and distress of the country, but in the moral disorganization, which the licentious and predatory habits of soldiers necessarily introduced among a simple peasantry. In a personal view, however, the war had terminated most triumphantly for Isabella, whose wise and vigorous administration, seconded by her husband's vigilance, had dispelled the storm, which threatened to overwhelm her from abroad, and established her in undisturbed possession of the throne of her ancestors. Joanna's interests were alone compromised, or rather sacrificed, by the treaty. She readily discerned in the provision for her marriage with an infant still in the cradle, only a flimsy veil intended to disguise the king of Portugal's desertion of her cause. Disgusted with a world, in which she had hitherto experienced nothing but misfortune herself, and been the innocent cause of so much to others, she determined to renounce it for ever, and seek a shelter in the peaceful shades of the cloister. She accordingly entered the convent of Santa Clara at Coimbra, where, in the following year, she pronounced the irrevocable vows, which divorce the unhappy subject of them for ever from her species. Two envoys from Castile, Ferdinand de Talavera, Isabella's confessor, and Dr. Diaz de Madrigal, one of her council, assisted at this affecting ceremony; and the reverend father, in a copious exhortation addressed to the youthful novice, assured her "that she had chosen the better part approved in the Evangelists; that, as spouse of the church, her chastity would be prolific of all spiritual delights; her subjection, liberty,--the only true liberty, partaking more of Heaven than of earth. No kinsman," continued the disinterested preacher, "no true friend, or faithful counsellor, would divert you from so holy a purpose." [36] Not long after this event, King Alfonso, penetrated with grief at the loss of his destined bride,--the "excellent lady," as the Portuguese continue to call her,--resolved to imitate her example, and exchange his royal robes for the humble habit of a Franciscan friar. He consequently made preparation for resigning his crown anew, and retiring to the monastery of Varatojo, on a bleak eminence near the Atlantic Ocean, when he suddenly fell ill, at Cintra, of a disorder which terminated his existence, on the 28th of August, 1481. Alfonso's fiery character, in which all the elements of love, chivalry, and religion were blended together, resembled that of some paladin of romance; as the chimerical enterprises, in which he was perpetually engaged, seem rather to belong to the age of knight-errantry, than to the fifteenth century. [37] In the beginning of the same year in which the pacification with Portugal secured to the sovereigns the undisputed possession of Castile, another crown devolved on Ferdinand by the death of his father, the king of Aragon, who expired at Barcelona, on the 20th of January, 1479, in the eighty-third year of his age. [38] Such was his admirable constitution that he retained not only his intellectual, but his bodily vigor, unimpaired to the last. His long life was consumed in civil faction or foreign wars; and his restless spirit seemed to take delight in these tumultuous scenes, as best fitted to develop its various energies. He combined, however, with this intrepid and even ferocious temper, an address in the management of affairs, which led him to rely, for the accomplishment of his purposes, much more on negotiation than on positive force. He may be said to have been one of the first monarchs who brought into vogue that refined science of the cabinet, which was so profoundly studied by statesmen at the close of the fifteenth century, and on which his own son Ferdinand furnished the most practical commentary. The crown of Navarre, which he had so shamelessly usurped, devolved, on his decease, on his guilty daughter Leonora, countess of Foix, who, as we have before noticed, survived to enjoy it only three short weeks. Aragon, with its extensive dependencies, descended to Ferdinand. Thus the two crowns of Aragon and Castile, after a separation of more than four centuries, became indissolubly united, and the foundations were laid of the magnificent empire which was destined to overshadow every other European monarchy. FOOTNOTES [1] The popular belief of Joanna's illegitimacy was founded on the following circumstances. 1. King Henry's first marriage with Blanche of Navarre was dissolved, after it had subsisted twelve years, on the publicly alleged ground of "impotence in the parties." 2. The princess Joanna, the only child of his second queen, Joanna of Portugal, was not born until the eighth year of her marriage, and long after she had become notorious for her gallantries. 3. Although Henry kept several mistresses, whom he maintained in so ostentatious a manner as to excite general scandal, he was never known to have had issue by any one of them.--To counterbalance the presumption afforded by these facts, it should be stated, that Henry appears, to the day of his death, to have cherished the princess Joanna as his own offspring, and that Beltran de la Cueva, duke of Albuquerque, her reputed father, instead of supporting her claims to the crown on the demise of Henry, as would have been natural had he been entitled to the honors of paternity, attached himself to the adverse faction of Isabella. Queen Joanna survived her husband about six months only. Father Florez (Reynas Cathólicas, tom. ii. pp. 760-786) has made a flimsy attempt to whitewash her character; but, to say nothing of almost every contemporary historian, as well as of the official documents of that day (see Marina, Teoría, tom. iii. part. 2, num. 11), the stain has been too deeply fixed by the repeated testimony of Castillo, the loyal adherent of her own party, to be thus easily effaced. It is said, however, that the queen died in the odor of sanctity; and Ferdinand and Isabella caused her to be deposited in a rich mausoleum, erected by the ambassador to the court of the Great Tamerlane for himself, but from which his remains were somewhat unceremoniously ejected, in order to make room for those of his royal mistress. [2] See this subject discussed _in extenso_, by Marina, Teoría, part. 2, cap. 1-10.--See, also, Introd. Sect. I. of this History. [3] See Part I. Chap. 3. [4] See Part I. Chap. 4, Note 2. [5] Fortunately, this strong place, in which the royal treasure was deposited, was in the keeping of Andres de Cabrera, the husband of Isabella's friend, Beatriz de Bobadilla. His co-operation at this juncture was so important, that Oviedo does not hesitate to declare, "It lay with him to make Isabella or her rival queen, as he listed." Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 23. [6] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 10.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 75.--Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 93.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 155.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 2, dial. 3. [7] Marina, whose peculiar researches and opportunities make him the best, is my only authority for this convention of the cortes. (Teoría, tom. ii. pp. 63, 89.) The extracts he makes from the writ of summons, however, seem to imply, that the object was not the recognition of Ferdinand and Isabella, but of their daughter, as successor to the crown. Among the nobles, who openly testified their adhesion to Isabella, were no less than four of the six individuals, to whom the late king had intrusted the guardianship of his daughter Joanna; viz. the grand cardinal of Spain, the constable of Castile, the duke of Infantado, and the count of Benavente. [8] A precedent for female inheritance, in the latter kingdom, was subsequently furnished by the undisputed succession and long reign of Joanna, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, and mother of Charles V. The introduction of the Salic law, under the Bourbon dynasty, opposed a new barrier, indeed; but this has been since swept away by the decree of the late monarch, Ferdinand VII., and the paramount authority of the cortes; and we may hope that the successful assertion of her lawful rights by Isabella II. will put this much vexed question at rest for ever. [9] See Part I. Chap. 3.--Ferdinand's powers are not so narrowly limited, at least not so carefully defined, in this settlement, as in the marriage articles. Indeed, the instrument is much more concise and general in its whole import. [10] Salazar de Mendoza, Crón. del Gran Cardenal, lib. 1, cap. 40.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 155, 156.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 222-224.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, pp. 35, 36.--See the original instrument signed by Ferdinand and Isabella, cited at length in Dormer's Discursos Varios de Historia, (Zaragoza, 1683,) pp. 295-313.--It does not appear that the settlement was ever confirmed by, or indeed presented to, the cortes. Marina speaks of it, however, as emanating from that body. (Teoría, tom. ii. pp. 63, 64.) From Pulgar's statement, as well as from the instrument itself, it seems to have been made under no other auspices or sanction, than that of the great nobility and cavaliers. Marina's eagerness to find a precedent for the interference of the popular branch in all the great concerns of government, has usually quickened, but sometimes clouded, his optics. In the present instance he has undoubtedly confounded the irregular proceedings of the aristocracy exclusively, with the deliberate acts of the legislature. [11] Alonso de Palencia, Corónica, MS., part. 2, cap. 94.--Garibay, Compendio, lib. 18, cap. 3.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 10, 11.--Pulgar, Letras, (Madrid, 1775,) let. 3, al Arzobispo de Toledo.--The archbishop's jealousy of cardinal Mendoza is uniformly reported by the Spanish writers as the true cause of his defection from the queen. [12] Ruy de Pina, Chrónica d'el Rey Alfonso V., cap. 173, apud Collecçaö de Livros Inéditos de Historia Portugueza, (Lisboa, 1790-93,) tom. i. [13] The ancient rivalry between the two nations was exasperated into the most deadly rancor, by the fatal defeat at Aljubarrotta, in 1235, in which fell the flower of the Castilian nobility. King John I. wore mourning, it is said, to the day of his death, in commemoration of this disaster. (Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. pp. 394-396.--La Clède, Hist. de Portugal, tom. iii. pp. 357-359.) Pulgar, the secretary of Ferdinand and Isabella, addressed, by their order, a letter of remonstrance to the king of Portugal, in which he endeavors, by numerous arguments founded on expediency and justice, to dissuade him from his meditated enterprise. Pulgar, Letras, No. 7. [14] Ruy de Pina, Chrónica d'el Rey Alfonso V., cap. 174-178.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 16, 17, 18.--Bernaldez states, that Alfonso, previously to his invasion, caused largesses of plate and money to be distributed among the Castilian nobles, whom he imagined to be well affected towards him. Some of them, the duke of Alva in particular, received his presents and used them in the cause of Isabella.--Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. pp. 396-398.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 230-240.--La Clède, Hist. de Portugal, tom. iii. pp. 360-362.-Pulgar, Crónica, p. 51.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 156.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 2, dial. 3. [15] The queen, who was, at that time, in a state of pregnancy, brought on a miscarriage by her incessant personal exposure. Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 234. [16] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 75.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, pp. 45-55.-- Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. vii. p. 411.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 23. [17] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 18.--Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. pp. 398-400.--Pulgar, Crónica, pp. 55-60.--Ruy de Pina, Chrón. d'el Rey Alfonso V., cap. 179.--La Clède, Hist. de Portugal, tom. iii. p. 366.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 240-243. [18] "Pues no os maravilleis de eso," says Oviedo, in relation to these troubles, "que nó solo entre hermanos suele haber esas diferencias, mas entre padre é hijo lo vimos ayer, como suelen decir." Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 2, dial. 3. [19] The royal coffers were found to contain about 10,000 marks of silver. (Pulgar, Reyes Catól. p. 54.) Isabella presented Cabrera with a golden goblet from her table, engaging that a similar present should be regularly made to him and his successors on the anniversary of his surrender of Segovia. She subsequently gave a more solid testimony of her gratitude, by raising him to the rank of marquis of Moya, with the grant of an estate suitable to his new dignity.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 23. [20] The indignation of Dr. Salazar de Mendoza is roused by this misapplication of the church's money, which he avers "no necessity whatever could justify." This worthy canon flourished in the seventeenth century. Crón. del Gran Cardenal, p. 147.--Pulgar, Reyes Catól. pp. 60- 62.--Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. p. 400.--Rades y Andrada, Las Tres Ordenes, part. 1, fol. 67.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 243.-- Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 18, 20. Zuñiga gives some additional particulars respecting the grant of the cortes, which I do not find verified by any contemporary author. Annales de Sevilla, p. 372. [21] Carbajal, Anales, MS., años 75, 76.--Ruy de Pina, Chrón. del Rey Alfonso V., cap. 187, 189.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 20, 22. --Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, pp. 63-78.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 156.--Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. pp. 401, 404.--Several of the contemporary Castilian historians compute the Portuguese army at double the amount given in the text. [22] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, pp. 82-85.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 252, 253.--Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. pp. 404, 405.-- Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos. MS., cap. 23.--Ruy de Pina, Chrón. d'el Rey Alfonso V., cap. 190. [23] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 76.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 158.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, pp. 85-89.--Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. pp. 404, 405.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 23.--La Clède, Hist. de Portugal, tom. iii. pp. 378-383.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 252-255. [24] Faria y Sousa claims the honors of the victory for the Portuguese, because Prince John kept the field till morning. Even M. La Clède, with all his deference to the Portuguese historian, cannot swallow this. Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. pp. 405-410.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 8.--Salazar de Mendoza, Crón. del Gran Cardenal, lib. 1, cap. 46--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, pp. 85-90.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 158.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 76.-- Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 23.--Ruy de Pina, Chrón. d'el Rey Alfonso V., cap. 191.--Ferdinand, in allusion to Prince John, wrote to his wife, that "if it had not been for the chicken, the old cock would have been taken." Garibay, Compendio, lib. 18, cap. 8. [25] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, p. 90.--The sovereigns, in compliance with a previous vow, caused a superb monastery, dedicated to St. Francis, to be erected in Toledo, with the title of San Juan de los Reyes, in commemoration of their victory over the Portuguese. This edifice was still to be seen in Mariana's time. [26] Rades y Andrada, Las Tres Ordenes, tom. ii. fol. 79, 80.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 48-50, 55, 60.--Zurita, Anales, lib. 19, cap. 46, 48, 54, 58.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. vii. pp. 476-478, 517-519, 546.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 10.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 8. [27] Gaillard, Rivalité, tom. iii. pp. 290, 292.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 76. [28] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 27.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 56, 57.--Gaillard, Rivalité, tom. iii. pp. 290-292.--Zurita, Anales, lib. 19, cap. 56, lib. 20, cap. 10.--Ruy de Pina, Chrón. d'el Rey Alfonso V., cap. 194-202.--Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. pp. 412- 415.--Comines, Mémoires, liv. 5, chap. 7. [29] According to Faria y Sousa, John was walking along the shores of the Tagus, with the duke of Braganza, and the cardinal archbishop of Lisbon, when he received the unexpected tidings of his father's return to Portugal. On his inquiring of his attendants how he should receive him, "How but as your king and father!" was the reply; at which John, knitting his brows together, skimmed a stone, which he held in his hand, with much violence across the water. The cardinal, observing this, whispered to the duke of Braganza, "I will take good care that that stone does not rebound on me." Soon after, he left Portugal for Rome, where he fixed his residence. The duke lost his life on the scaffold for imputed treason soon after John's accession.--Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. p. 416. [30] Comines, Mémoires, liv. 5, chap. 7.--Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. p. 116.--Zurita, Anales, lib. 20, cap. 25.-- Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 27. [31] This was the first meeting between father and son since the elevation of the latter to the Castilian throne. King John would not allow Ferdinand to kiss his hand; he chose to walk on his left; he attended him to his quarters, and, in short, during the whole twenty days of their conference manifested towards his son all the deference, which, as a parent, he was entitled to receive from him. This he did on the ground that Ferdinand, as king of Castile, represented the elder branch of Trastamara, while he represented only the younger. It will not be easy to meet with an instance of more punctilious etiquette, even in Spanish history.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 75. [32] Salazar de Mendoza, Crón. del Gran Cardenal, p. 162.--Zurita, Anales, lib. 20, cap. 25.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 79. [33] Ruy de Pina, Chrón. d'el Rey Alfonso V., cap. 206.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 166, 167.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 85, 89, 90.-- Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. pp. 420, 421.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. vii. p. 538.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 79.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 28, 36, 37. [34] Born the preceding year, June 28th, 1478. Carbajal, Anales, MS., anno eodem. [35] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 168.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 91.--Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. pp. 420, 421.--Ruy de Pina, Chrón. d'el Rey Alfonso V., cap. 206. [36] Ruy de Pina, Chrón. d'el Rey Alfonso V., cap. 20.--Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. p. 421.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 92.--L. Marineo speaks of the _Señora muy excelente_, as an inmate of the cloister at the period in which he was writing, 1522, (fol. 168.) Notwithstanding her "irrevocable vows," however, Joanna several times quitted the monastery, and maintained a royal state under the protection of the Portuguese monarchs, who occasionally threatened to revive her dormant claims to the prejudice of the Castilian sovereigns. She may be said, consequently, to have formed the pivot, on which turned, during her whole life, the diplomatic relations between the courts of Castile and Portugal, and to have been a principal cause of those frequent intermarriages between the royal families of the two countries, by which Ferdinand and Isabella hoped to detach the Portuguese crown from her interests. Joanna affected a royal style and magnificence, and subscribed herself "I the Queen," to the last. She died in the palace at Lisbon, in 1530, in the 69th year of her age, having survived most of her ancient friends, suitors, and competitors.--Joanna's history, subsequent to her taking the veil, has been collected, with his usual precision, by Señor Clemencin, Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 19. [37] Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuguesa, tom. ii. p. 423.--Ruy de Pina, Chrón. d'el Rey Alfonso V., cap. 212. [38] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 79.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 42.--Mariana, Hist. de España, (ed Valencia,) tom. viii. p. 204, not.-- Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 295. CHAPTER VI. INTERNAL ADMINISTRATION OF CASTILE. 1475-1482. Schemes of Reform.--Holy Brotherhood.--Tumult at Segovia.--The Queen's Presence of Mind.--Severe Execution of Justice.--Royal Progress through Andalusia.--Reorganization of the Tribunals.--Castilian Jurisprudence.-- Plans for Reducing the Nobles.--Revocation of Grants.--Military Orders of Castile.--Masterships annexed to the Crown.--Ecclesiastical Usurpations Resisted.--Restoration of Trade.--Prosperity of the Kingdom. I have deferred to the present chapter a consideration of the important changes introduced into the interior administration of Castile after the accession of Isabella, in order to present a connected and comprehensive view of them to the reader, without interrupting the progress of the military narrative. The subject may afford an agreeable relief to the dreary details of blood and battle, with which we have been so long occupied, and which were rapidly converting the garden of Europe into a wilderness. Such details indeed seem to have the deepest interest for contemporary writers; but the eye of posterity, unclouded by personal interest or passion, turns with satisfaction from them to those cultivated arts, which can make the wilderness to blossom as the rose. If there be any being on earth, that may be permitted to remind us of the Deity himself, it is the ruler of a mighty empire, who employs the high powers intrusted to him exclusively for the benefit of his people; who, endowed with intellectual gifts corresponding with his station, in an age of comparative barbarism, endeavors to impart to his land the light of civilization which illumines his own bosom, and to create from the elements of discord the beautiful fabric of social order. Such was Isabella; and such the age in which she lived. And fortunate was it for Spain that her sceptre, at this crisis, was swayed by a sovereign possessed of sufficient wisdom to devise, and energy to execute, the most salutary schemes of reform, and thus to infuse a new principle of vitality into a government fast sinking into premature decrepitude. The whole plan of reform introduced into the government by Ferdinand and Isabella, or more properly by the latter, to whom the internal administration of Castile was principally referred, was not fully unfolded until the completion of her reign. But the most important modifications were adopted previously to the war of Granada in 1482. These may be embraced under the following heads. I. The efficient administration of justice. II. The codification of the laws. III. The depression of the nobles. IV. The vindication of ecclesiastical rights belonging to the crown from the usurpation of the papal see. V. The regulation of trade. VI. The pre-eminence of royal authority, I. The administration of justice. In the dismal anarchy, which prevailed in Henry the Fourth's reign, the authority of the monarch and of the royal judges had fallen into such contempt, that the law was entirely without force. The cities afforded no better protection than the open country. Every man's hand seemed to be lifted against his neighbor. Property was plundered; persons were violated; the most holy sanctuaries profaned; and the numerous fortresses scattered throughout the country, instead of sheltering the weak, converted into dens of robbers. [1] Isabella saw no better way of checking tins unbounded license, than to direct against it that popular engine, the _Santa Hermandad_, or Holy Brotherhood, which had more than once shaken the Castilian monarchs on their throne. The project for the reorganization of this institution was introduced into the cortes held, the year after Isabella's accession at Madrigal, in 1476. It was carried into effect by the _junta_ of deputies from the different cities of the kingdom, convened at Dueñas in the same year. The new institution differed essentially from the ancient _hermandades_, since, instead of being partial in its extent, it was designed to embrace the whole kingdom; and, instead of being directed, as had often been the case, against the crown itself, it was set in motion at the suggestion of the latter, and limited in its operation to the maintenance of public order. The crimes, reserved for its jurisdiction, were all violence or theft committed on the highways or in the open country, and in cities by such offenders as escaped into the country; house-breaking; rape; and resistance of justice. The specification of these crimes shows their frequency; and the reason for designating the open country, as the particular theatre for the operations of the hermandad, was the facility which criminals possessed there for eluding the pursuit of justice, especially under shelter of the strong-holds or fortresses, with which it was plentifully studded. An annual contribution of eighteen thousand maravedies was assessed on every hundred _vecinos_ or householders, for the equipment and maintenance of a horseman, whose duty it was to arrest offenders, and enforce the sentence of the law. On the flight of a criminal, the tocsins of the villages, through which he was supposed to have passed, were sounded, and the _quadrilleros_ or officers of the brotherhood, stationed on the different points, took up the pursuit with such promptness as left little chance of escape. A court of two alcaldes was established in every town containing thirty families, for the trial of all crimes within the jurisdiction of the hermandad; and an appeal lay from them in specified cases to a supreme council. A general junta, composed of deputies from the cities throughout the kingdom, was annually convened for the regulation of affairs, and their instructions were transmitted to provincial juntas, who superintended the execution of them. The laws, enacted at different times in these assemblies, were compiled into a code under the sanction of the junta general at Tordelaguna, in 1485. [2] The penalties for theft, which are literally written in blood, are specified in this code with singular precision. The most petty larceny was punished with stripes, the loss of a member, or of life itself; and the law was administered with an unsparing rigor, which nothing but the extreme necessity of the case could justify. Capital executions were conducted by shooting the criminal with arrows. The enactment, relating to this, provides, that "the convict shall receive the sacrament like a Catholic Christian, and after that be executed as speedily as possible, in order that his soul may pass the more securely." [3] Notwithstanding the popular constitution of the hermandad, and the obvious advantages attending its introduction at this juncture, it experienced so decided an opposition from the nobility, who discerned the check it was likely to impose on their authority, that it required all the queen's address and perseverance to effect its general adoption. The constable de Haro, however, a nobleman of great weight from his personal character, and the most extensive landed proprietor in the north, was at length prevailed on to introduce it among his vassals. His example was gradually followed by others of the same rank; and, when the city of Seville, and the great lords of Andalusia, had consented to receive it, it speedily became established throughout the kingdom. Thus a standing body of troops, two thousand in number, thoroughly equipped and mounted, was placed at the disposal of the crown, to enforce the law, and suppress domestic insurrection. The supreme junta, which regulated the counsels of the hermandad, constituted moreover a sort of inferior cortes, relieving the exigencies of government, as we shall see hereafter, on more than one occasion, by important supplies of men and money. By the activity of this new military police, the country was, in the course of a few years, cleared of its swarms of banditti, as well as of the robber chieftains, whose strength had enabled them to defy the law. The ministers of justice found a sure protection in the independent discharge of their duties; and the blessings of personal security and social order, so long estranged from the nation, were again restored to it. The important benefits, resulting from the institution of the hermandad, secured its confirmation by successive cortes, for the period of twenty- two years, in spite of the repeated opposition of the aristocracy. At length, in 1498, the objects for which it was established having been completely obtained, it was deemed advisable to relieve the nation from the heavy charges which its maintenance imposed. The great salaried officers were dismissed; a few subordinate functionaries were retained for the administration of justice, over whom the regular courts of criminal law possessed appellate jurisdiction; and the magnificent apparatus of the _Santa Hermandad_, stripped of all but the terrors of its name, dwindled into an ordinary police, such as it has existed, with various modifications of form, down to the present century. [4] Isabella was so intent on the prosecution of her schemes of reform, that, even in the minuter details, she frequently superintended the execution of them herself. For this she was admirably fitted by her personal address, and presence of mind in danger, and by the influence which a conviction of her integrity gave her over the minds of the people. A remarkable exemplification of this occurred, the year but one after her coronation, at Segovia. The inhabitants, secretly instigated by the bishop of that place, and some of the principal citizens, rose against Cabrera, marquis of Moya, to whom the government of the city had been intrusted, and who had made himself generally unpopular by his strict discipline. They even proceeded so far as to obtain possession of the outworks of the citadel, and to compel the deputy of the _alcayde_, who was himself absent, to take shelter, together with the princess Isabella, then the only daughter of the sovereigns, in the interior defences, where they were rigorously blockaded. The queen, on receiving tidings of the event at Tordesillas, mounted her horse and proceeded with all possible despatch towards Segovia, attended by Cardinal Mendoza, the count of Benavente, and a few others of her court. At some distance from the city, she was met by a deputation of the inhabitants, requesting her to leave behind the count of Benavente and the marchioness of Moya, (the former of whom as the intimate friend, and the latter as the wife of the alcayde, were peculiarly obnoxious to the citizens,) or they could not answer for the consequences. Isabella haughtily replied, that "she was queen of Castile; that the city was hers, moreover, by right of inheritance; and that she was not used to receive conditions from rebellious subjects." Then pressing forward with her little retinue, through one of the gates, which remained in the hands of her friends, she effected her entrance into the citadel. The populace, in the mean while, assembling in greater numbers than before, continued to show the most hostile dispositions, calling out, "Death to the alcayde! Attack the castle!" Isabella's attendants, terrified at the tumult, and at the preparations which the people were making to put their menaces into execution, besought their mistress to cause the gates to be secured more strongly, as the only mode of defence against the infuriated mob. But, instead of listening to their counsel, she bade them remain quietly in the apartment, and descended herself into the courtyard, where she ordered the portals to be thrown open for the admission of the people. She stationed herself at the further extremity of the area, and, as the populace poured in, calmly demanded the cause of the insurrection. "Tell me," said she, "what are your grievances, and I will do all in my power to redress them; for I am sure that what is for your interest, must be also for mine, and for that of the whole city." The insurgents, abashed by the unexpected presence of their sovereign, as well as by her cool and dignified demeanor, replied, that all they desired was the removal of Cabrera from the government of the city. "He is deposed already," answered the queen, "and you have my authority to turn out such of his officers as are still in the castle, which I shall intrust to one of my own servants, on whom I can rely." The people, pacified by these assurances, shouted, "Long live the queen!" and eagerly hastened to obey her mandates. After thus turning aside the edge of popular fury, Isabella proceeded with her retinue to the royal residence in the city, attended by the fickle multitude, whom she again addressed on arriving there, admonishing them to return to their vocations, as this was no time for calm inquiry; and promising, that, if they would send three or four of their number to her on the morrow to report the extent of their grievances, she would examine into the affair, and render justice to all parties. The mob accordingly dispersed, and the queen, after a candid examination, having ascertained the groundlessness or gross exaggeration of the misdemeanors imputed to Cabrera, and traced the source of the conspiracy to the jealousy of the bishop of Segovia and his associates, reinstated the deposed alcayde in the full possession of his dignities, which his enemies, either convinced of the altered dispositions of the people, or believing that the favorable moment for resistance had escaped, made no further attempts to disturb. Thus by a happy presence of mind, an affair, which threatened, at its outset, disastrous consequences, was settled without bloodshed, or compromise of the royal dignity. [5] In the summer of the following year, 1477, Isabella resolved to pay a visit to Estremadura and Andalusia, for the purpose of composing the dissensions, and introducing a more efficient police, in these unhappy provinces; which, from their proximity to the stormy frontier of Portugal, as well as from the feuds between the great houses of Guzman and Ponce de Leon, were plunged in the most frightful anarchy. Cardinal Mendoza and her other ministers remonstrated against this imprudent exposure of her person, where it was so little likely to be respected. But she replied, "it was true there were dangers and inconveniences to be encountered; but her fate was in God's hands, and she felt a confidence that he would guide to a prosperous issue such designs as were righteous in themselves and resolutely conducted." Isabella experienced the most loyal and magnificent reception from the inhabitants of Seville, where she established her head-quarters. The first days of her residence there were consumed in _fêtes_, tourneys, tilts of reeds, and other exercises of the Castilian chivalry. After this she devoted her whole time to the great purpose of her visit, the reformation of abuses. She held her court in the saloon of the alcazar, or royal castle, where she revived the ancient practice of the Castilian sovereigns, of presiding in person over the administration of justice. Every Friday, she took her seat in her chair of state, on an elevated platform covered with cloth of gold, and surrounded by her council, together with the subordinate functionaries, and the insignia of a court of justice. The members of her privy council, and of the high court of criminal law, sat in their official capacity every day in the week; and the queen herself received such suits as were referred to her adjudication, saving the parties the usual expense and procrastination of justice. By the extraordinary despatch of the queen and her ministers, during the two months that she resided in the city, a vast number of civil and criminal causes were disposed of, a large amount of plundered property was restored to its lawful owners, and so many offenders were brought to condign punishment, that no less than four thousand suspected persons, it is computed, terrified by the prospect of speedy retribution for their crimes, escaped into the neighboring kingdoms of Portugal and Granada. The worthy burghers of Seville, alarmed at this rapid depopulation of the city, sent a deputation to the queen, to deprecate her anger, and to represent that faction had been so busy of late years in their unhappy town, that there was scarcely a family to be found in it, some of whose members were not more or less involved in the guilt. Isabella, who was naturally of a benign disposition, considering that enough had probably been done to strike a salutary terror into the remaining delinquents, was willing to temper justice with mercy, and accordingly granted an amnesty for all past offences, save heresy, on the condition, however, of a general restitution of such property as had been unlawfully seized and retained during the period of anarchy. [6] But Isabella became convinced that all arrangements for establishing permanent tranquillity in Seville would be ineffectual, so long as the feud continued between the great families of Guzman and Ponce de Leon. The duke of Medina Sidonia and the marquis of Cadiz, the heads of these houses, had possessed themselves of the royal towns and fortresses, as well as of those which, belonging to the city, were scattered over its circumjacent territory, where, as has been previously stated, they carried on war against each other, like independent potentates. The former of these grandees had been the loyal supporter of Isabella in the War of the Succession. The marquis of Cadiz, on the other hand, connected by marriage with the house of Pacheco, had cautiously withheld his allegiance, although he had not testified his hostility by any overt act. While the queen was hesitating as to the course she should pursue in reference to the marquis, who still kept himself aloof in his fortified castle of Xerez, he suddenly presented himself by night at her residence in Seville, accompanied only by two or three attendants. He took this step, doubtless, from the conviction that the Portuguese faction had nothing further to hope in a kingdom where Isabella reigned not only by the fortune of war, but by the affections of the people; and he now eagerly proffered his allegiance to her, excusing his previous conduct as he best could. The queen was too well satisfied with the submission, however tardy, of this formidable vassal, to call him to severe account for past delinquencies. She exacted from him, however, the full restitution of such domains and fortresses as he had filched from the crown and from the city of Seville, on condition of similar concessions by his rival, the duke of Medina Sidonia. She next attempted to establish a reconciliation between these belligerent grandees; but, aware that, however pacific might be their demonstrations for the present, there could be little hope of permanently allaying the inherited feuds of a century, whilst the neighborhood of the parties to each other must necessarily multiply fresh causes of disgust, she caused them to withdraw from Seville to their estates in the country, and by this expedient succeeded in extinguishing the flame of discord. [7] In the following year, 1478, Isabella accompanied her husband in a tour through Andalusia, for the immediate purpose of reconnoitring the coast. In the course of this progress, they were splendidly entertained by the duke and marquis at their patrimonial estates. They afterwards proceeded to Cordova, where they adopted a similar policy with that pursued at Seville, compelling the count de Cabra, connected with the blood royal, and Alonso de Aguilar, lord of Montilla, whose factions had long desolated this fair city, to withdraw into the country, and restore the immense possessions, which they had usurped both from the municipality and the crown. [8] One example among others may be mentioned, of the rectitude and severe impartiality, with which Isabella administered justice, that occurred in the case of a wealthy Galician knight, named Alvaro Yañez de Lugo. This person, being convicted of a capital offence, attended with the most aggravating circumstances, sought to obtain a commutation of his punishment, by the payment of forty thousand _doblas_ of gold to the queen, a sum exceeding at that time the annual rents of the crown. Some of Isabella's counsellors would have persuaded her to accept the donative, and appropriate it to the pious purposes of the Moorish war. But, far from being blinded by their sophistry, she suffered the law to take its course, and, in order to place her conduct above every suspicion of a mercenary motive, allowed his estates, which might legally have been confiscated to the crown, to descend to his natural heirs. Nothing contributed more to re-establish the supremacy of law in this reign, than the certainty of its execution, without respect to wealth or rank; for the insubordination, prevalent throughout Castile, was chiefly imputable to persons of this description, who, if they failed to defeat justice by force, were sure of doing so by the corruption of its ministers. [9] Ferdinand and Isabella employed the same vigorous measures in the other parts of their dominions, which had proved so successful in Andalusia, for the extirpation of the hordes of banditti, and of the robber-knights, who differed in no respect from the former, but in their superior power. In Galicia alone, fifty fortresses, the strongholds of tyranny, were razed to the ground, and fifteen hundred malefactors, it was computed, were compelled to fly the kingdom. "The wretched inhabitants of the mountains," says a writer of that age, "who had long since despaired of justice, blessed God for their deliverance, as it were, from a deplorable captivity." [10] While the sovereigns were thus personally occupied with the suppression of domestic discord, and the establishment of an efficient police, they were not inattentive to the higher tribunals, to whose keeping, chiefly, were intrusted the personal rights and property of the subject. They reorganized the royal or privy council, whose powers, although, as has been noticed in the Introduction, principally of an administrative nature, had been gradually encroaching on those of the superior courts of law. During the last century, this body had consisted of prelates, knights, and lawyers, whose numbers and relative proportions had varied in different times. The right of the great ecclesiastics and nobles to a seat in it was, indeed, recognized, but the transaction of business was reserved for the counsellors specially appointed. [11] Much the larger proportion of these, by the new arrangement, was made up of jurists, whose professional education and experience eminently qualified them for the station. The specific duties and interior management of the council were prescribed with sufficient accuracy. Its authority as a court of justice was carefully limited; but, as it was charged with the principal executive duties of government, it was consulted in all important transactions by the sovereigns, who paid great deference to its opinions, and very frequently assisted at its deliberations. [12] No change was made in the high criminal court of _alcaldes de corte_, except in its forms of proceeding. But the royal audience, or chancery, the supreme and final court of appeal in civil causes, was entirely remodelled. The place of its sittings, before indeterminate, and consequently occasioning much trouble and cost to the litigants, was fixed at Valladolid. Laws were passed to protect the tribunal from the interference of the crown, and the queen was careful to fill the bench with magistrates whose wisdom and integrity would afford the best guaranty for a faithful interpretation of the law. [13] In the cortes of Madrigal (1476), and still more in the celebrated one of Toledo (1480), many excellent provisions were made for the equitable administration of justice, as well as for regulating the tribunals. The judges were to ascertain every week, either by personal inspection, or report, the condition of the prisons, the number of the prisoners, and the nature of the offences for which they were confined. They were required to bring them to a speedy trial, and afford every facility for their defence. An attorney was provided at the public expense, under the title of "advocate for the poor," whose duty it was to defend the suits of such as were unable to maintain them at their own cost. Severe penalties were enacted against venality in the judges, a gross evil under the preceding reigns, as well as against such counsel as took exorbitant fees, or even maintained actions that were manifestly unjust. Finally, commissioners were appointed to inspect and make report of the proceedings of municipal and other inferior courts throughout the kingdom. [14] The sovereigns testified their respect for the law by reviving the ancient, but obsolete practice of presiding personally in the tribunals, at least once a week. "I well remember," says one of their court, "to have seen the queen, together with the Catholic king, her husband, sitting in judgment in the alcazar of Madrid, every Friday, dispensing justice to all such, great and small, as came to demand it. This was indeed the golden age of justice," continues the enthusiastic writer, "and since our sainted mistress has been taken from us, it has been more difficult, and far more costly, to transact business with a stripling of a secretary, than it was with the queen and all her ministers." [15] By the modifications then introduced, the basis was laid of the judiciary system, such as it has been perpetuated to the present age. The law acquired an authority, which, in the language of a Spanish writer, "caused a decree, signed by two or three judges, to be more respected since that time, than an army before." [16] But perhaps the results of this improved administration cannot be better conveyed than in the words of an eye- witness. "Whereas," says Pulgar, "the kingdom was previously filled with banditti and malefactors of every description, who committed the most diabolical excesses, in open contempt of law, there was now such terror impressed on the hearts of all, that no one dared to lift his arm against another, or even to assail him with contumelious or discourteous language. The knight and the squire, who had before oppressed the laborer, were intimidated by the fear of that justice, which was sure to be executed on them; the roads were swept of the banditti; the fortresses, the strong- holds of violence, were thrown open, and the whole nation, restored to tranquillity and order, sought no other redress, than that afforded by the operation of the law." [17] II. Codification of the laws. Whatever reforms might have been introduced into the Castilian judicatures, they would have been of little avail, without a corresponding improvement in the system of jurisprudence by which their decisions were to be regulated. This was made up of the Visigothic code, as the basis, the _fueros_ of the Castilian princes, as far back as the eleventh century, and the "Siete Partidas," the famous compilation of Alfonso the Tenth, digested chiefly from maxims of the civil law. [18] The deficiencies of these ancient codes had been gradually supplied by such an accumulation of statutes and ordinances, as rendered the legislation of Castile in the highest degree complex, and often contradictory. The embarrassment resulting from this, occasioned, as may be imagined, much tardiness, as well as uncertainty, in the decisions of the courts, who, despairing of reconciling the discrepancies in their own law, governed themselves almost exclusively by the Roman, so much less accommodated, as it was, than their own, to the genius of the national institutions, as well as to the principles of freedom. [19] The nation had long felt the pressure of these evils, and made attempts to redress them in repeated cortes. But every effort proved unavailing, during the stormy or imbecile reigns of the princes of Trastamara. At length, the subject having been resumed in the cortes of Toledo, in 1480, Dr. Alfonso Diaz de Montalvo, whose professional science had been matured under the reigns of three successive sovereigns, was charged with the commission of revising the laws of Castile, and of compiling a code, which should be of general application throughout the kingdom. This laborious undertaking was accomplished in little more than four years; and his work, which subsequently bore the title of _Ordenanças Reales_, was published, or, as the privilege expresses it, "written with types," _excrito de letra de molde_, at Huete, in the beginning of 1485. It was one of the first works, therefore, which received the honors of the press in Spain; and surely none could have been found, at that period, more deserving of them. It went through repeated editions in the course of that, and the commencement of the following century. [20] It was admitted as paramount authority throughout Castile; and, although the many innovations, which were introduced in that age of reform, required the addition of two subsidiary codes in the latter years of Isabella, the "Ordenanças" of Montalvo continued to be the guide of the tribunals down to the time of Philip the Second; and may be said to have suggested the idea, as indeed it was the basis of the comprehensive compilation, "Nueva Recopilacion," which has since formed the law of the Spanish monarchy. [21] III. Depression of the nobles. In the course of the preceding chapters, we have seen the extent of the privileges constitutionally enjoyed by the aristocracy, as well as the enormous height to which they had swollen under the profuse reigns of John the Second, and Henry the Fourth. This was such, at the accession of Ferdinand and Isabella, as to disturb the balance of the constitution, and to give serious cause of apprehension both to the monarch and the people. They had introduced themselves into every great post of profit or authority. They had ravished from the crown the estates, on which it depended for its maintenance, as well as dignity. They coined money in their own mints, like sovereign princes; and they covered the country with their fortified castles, whence they defied the law, and desolated the unhappy land with interminable feuds. It was obviously necessary for the new sovereigns to proceed with the greatest caution against this powerful and jealous body, and, above all, to attempt no measure of importance, in which they would not be supported by the hearty co-operation of the nation. The first measure, which may be said to have clearly developed their policy, was the organization of the hermandad, which, although ostensibly directed against offenders of a more humble description, was made to bear indirectly upon the nobility, whom it kept in awe by the number and discipline of its forces, and the promptness with which it could assemble them on the most remote points of the kingdom; while its rights of jurisdiction tended materially to abridge those of the seignorial tribunals. It was accordingly resisted with the greatest pertinacity by the aristocracy; although, as we have seen, the resolution of the queen, supported by the constancy of the commons, enabled her to triumph over all opposition, until the great objects of the institution were accomplished. Another measure, which insensibly operated to the depression of the nobility, was making official preferment depend less exclusively on rank, and much more on personal merit, than before. "Since the hope of guerdon," says one of the statutes enacted at Toledo, "is the spur to just and honorable actions, when men perceive that offices of trust are not to descend by inheritance, but to be conferred on merit, they will strive to excel in virtue, that they may attain its reward." [22] The sovereigns, instead of confining themselves to the grandees, frequently advanced persons of humble origin, and especially those learned in the law, to the most responsible stations, consulting them, and paying great deference to their opinions, on all matters of importance. The nobles, finding that rank was no longer the sole, or indeed the necessary avenue to promotion, sought to secure it by attention to more liberal studies, in which they were greatly encouraged by Isabella, who admitted their children into her palace, where they were reared under her own eye. [23] But the boldest assaults on the power of the aristocracy were made in the famous cortes of Toledo, in 1480, which Carbajal enthusiastically styles "cosa divina para reformacion y remedio de las desórdenes pasadas." [24] The first object of its attention was the condition of the exchequer, which Henry the Fourth had so exhausted by his reckless prodigality, that the clear annual revenue amounted to no more than thirty thousand ducats, a sum much inferior to that enjoyed by many private individuals; so that, stripped of his patrimony, it at last came to be said, he was "king only of the highways." Such had been the royal necessities, that blank certificates of annuities assigned on the public rents were hawked about the market, and sold at such a depreciated rate, that the price of an annuity did not exceed the amount of one year's income. The commons saw with alarm the weight of the burdens which must devolve on them for the maintenance of the crown thus impoverished in its resources; and they resolved to meet the difficulty by advising at once a resumption of the grants unconstitutionally made during the latter half of Henry the Fourth's reign, and the commencement of the present. [25] This measure, however violent, and repugnant to good faith, it may appear at the present time, seems then to have admitted of justification, as far as the nation was concerned; since such alienation of the public revenue was in itself illegal, and contrary to the coronation oath of the sovereign; and those who accepted his obligations, held them subject to the liability of their revocation, which had frequently occurred under the preceding reigns. As the intended measure involved the interests of most of the considerable proprietors in the kingdom, who had thriven on the necessities of the crown, it was deemed proper to require the attendance of the nobility and great ecclesiastics in cortes by a special summons, which it seems had been previously omitted. Thus convened, the legislature appears, with great unanimity, and much to the credit of those most deeply affected by it, to have acquiesced in the proposed resumption of the grants, as a measure of absolute necessity. The only difficulty was to settle the principles on which the retrenchment might be most equitably made, with reference to creditors, whose claims rested on a great variety of grounds. The plan suggested by Cardinal Mendoza seems to have been partially adopted. It was decided, that all, whose pensions had been conferred without any corresponding services on their part, should forfeit them entirely; that those, who had purchased annuities, should return their certificates on a reimbursement of the price paid for them; and that the remaining creditors, who composed the largest class, should retain such a proportion only of their pensions, as might be judged commensurate with their services to the state. [26] By this important reduction, the final adjustment and execution of which were intrusted to Fernando de Talavera, the queen's confessor, a man of austere probity, the gross amount of thirty millions of maravedies, a sum equal to three-fourths of the whole revenue on Isabella's accession, was annually saved to the crown. The retrenchment was conducted with such strict impartiality, that the most confidential servants of the queen, and the relatives of her husband, were among those who suffered the most severely. [27] It is worthy of remark that no diminution whatever was made of the stipends settled on literary and charitable establishments. It may be also added, that Isabella appropriated the first fruits of this measure, by distributing the sum of twenty millions of maravedies among the widows and orphans of those loyalists who had fallen in the War of the Succession. [28] This resumption of the grants may be considered as the basis of those economical reforms, which, without oppression to the subject, augmented the public revenue more than twelve fold during this auspicious reign. [29] Several other acts were passed by the same cortes, which had a more exclusive bearing on the nobility. They were prohibited from quartering the royal arms on their escutcheons, from being attended by a mace-bearer and a bodyguard, from imitating the regal style of address in their written correspondence, and other insignia of royalty which they had arrogantly assumed. They were forbidden to erect new fortresses, and we have already seen the activity of the queen in procuring the demolition or restitution of the old. They were expressly restrained from duels, an inveterate source of mischief, for engaging in which the parties, both principals and seconds, were subjected to the penalties of treason. Isabella evinced her determination of enforcing this law on the highest offenders, by imprisoning, soon after its enactment, the counts of Luna and Valencia for exchanging a cartel of defiance, until the point at issue should be settled by the regular course of justice. [30] It is true the haughty nobility of Castile winced more than once at finding themselves so tightly curbed by their new masters. On one occasion, a number of the principal grandees, with the duke of Infantado at their head, addressed a letter of remonstrance to the king and queen, requiring them to abolish the hermandad, as an institution burdensome on the nation, deprecating the slight degree of confidence which their highnesses reposed in their order, and requesting that four of their number might be selected to form a council for the general direction of affairs of state, by whose advice the king and queen should be governed in all matters of importance, as in the time of Henry the Fourth. Ferdinand and Isabella received this unseasonable remonstrance with great indignation, and returned an answer couched in the haughtiest terms. "The hermandad," they said, "is an institution most salutary to the nation, and is approved by it as such. It is our province to determine who are best entitled to preferment, and to make merit the standard of it. You may follow the court, or retire to your estates, as you think best; but, so long as Heaven permits us to retain the rank with which we have been intrusted, we shall take care not to imitate the example of Henry the Fourth, in becoming a tool in the hands of our nobility." The discontented lords, who had carried so high a hand under the preceding imbecile reign, feeling the weight of an authority which rested on the affections of the people, were so disconcerted by the rebuke, that they made no attempt to rally, but condescended to make their peace separately as they could, by the most ample acknowledgments. [31] An example of the impartiality as well as spirit, with which Isabella asserted the dignity of the crown, is worth recording. During her husband's absence in Aragon in the spring of 1481, a quarrel occurred, in the ante-chamber of the palace at Valladolid, between two young noblemen, Ramiro Nuñez de Guzman, lord of Toral, and Frederic Henriquez, son of the admiral of Castile, king Ferdinand's uncle. The queen, on receiving intelligence of it, granted a safe-conduct to the lord of Toral, as the weaker party, until the affair should be adjusted between them. Don Frederic, however, disregarding this protection, caused his enemy to be waylaid by three of his followers, armed with bludgeons, and sorely beaten one evening in the streets of Valladolid. Isabella was no sooner informed of this outrage on one whom she had taken under the royal protection, than, burning with indignation, she immediately mounted her horse, though in the midst of a heavy storm of rain, and proceeded alone towards the castle of Simancas, then in possession of the admiral, the father of the offender, where she supposed him to have taken refuge, travelling all the while with such rapidity, that she was not overtaken by the officers of her guard, until she had gained the fortress. She instantly summoned the admiral to deliver up his son to justice; and, on his replying that "Don Frederic was not there, and that he was ignorant where He was," she commanded him to surrender the keys of the castle, and, after a fruitless search, again returned to Valladolid. The next day Isabella was confined to her bed by an illness occasioned as much by chagrin, as by the excessive fatigue which she had undergone. "My body is lame," said she, "with the blows given by Don Frederic in contempt of my safe-conduct." The admiral, perceiving how deeply he and his family had incurred the displeasure of the queen, took counsel with his friends, who were led by their knowledge of Isabella's character to believe that he would have more to hope from the surrender of his son, than from further attempts at concealment. The young man was accordingly conducted to the palace by his uncle, the constable de Haro, who deprecated the queen's resentment by representing the age of his nephew, scarcely amounting to twenty years. Isabella, however, thought proper to punish the youthful delinquent, by ordering him to be publicly conducted as a prisoner, by one of the alcaldes of her court, through the great square of Valladolid to the fortress of Arevalo, where he was detained in strict confinement, all privilege of access being denied to him; and when, at length, moved by the consideration of his consanguinity with the king, she consented to his release, she banished him to Sicily, until he should receive the royal permission to return to his own country. [32] Notwithstanding the strict impartiality as well as vigor of the administration, it could never have maintained itself by its own resources alone, in its offensive operations against the high-spirited aristocracy of Castile. Its most direct approaches, however, were made, as we have seen, under cover of the cortes. The sovereigns showed great deference, especially in this early period of their reign, to the popular branch of this body; and, so far from pursuing the odious policy of preceding princes in diminishing the amount of represented cities, they never failed to direct their writs to all those which, at their accession, retained the right of representation, and subsequently enlarged the number by the conquest of Granada; while they exercised the anomalous privilege, noticed in the Introduction to this History, of omitting altogether, or issuing only a partial summons to the nobility. [33] By making merit the standard of preferment, they opened the path of honor to every class of the community. They uniformly manifested the greatest tenderness for the rights of the commons in reference to taxation; and, as their patriotic policy was obviously directed to secure the personal rights and general prosperity of the people, it insured the co-operation of an ally, whose weight, combined with that of the crown, enabled them eventually to restore the equilibrium which had been disturbed by the undue preponderance of the aristocracy. It may be well to state here the policy pursued by Ferdinand and Isabella in reference to the Military Orders of Castile, since, although not fully developed until a much later period, it was first conceived, and indeed partly executed, in that now under discussion. The uninterrupted warfare, which the Spaniards were compelled to maintain for the recovery of their native land from the infidel, nourished in their bosoms a flame of enthusiasm, similar to that kindled by the crusades for the recovery of Palestine, partaking in an almost equal degree of a religious and a military character. This similarity of sentiment gave birth also to similar institutions of chivalry. Whether the military orders of Castile were suggested by those of Palestine, or whether they go back to a remoter period, as is contended by their chroniclers, or whether, in fine, as Conde intimates, they were imitated from corresponding associations, known to have existed among the Spanish Arabs, [34] there can be no doubt that the forms under which they were permanently organized, were derived, in the latter part of the twelfth century, from the monastic orders established for the protection of the Holy Land. The Hospitallers, and especially the Templars, obtained more extensive acquisitions in Spain, than in any, perhaps every other country in Christendom; and it was partly from the ruins of their empire, that were constructed the magnificent fortunes of the Spanish orders. [35] The most eminent of these was the order of St. Jago, or St. James, of Compostella. The miraculous revelation of the body of the Apostle, after the lapse of eight centuries from the date of his interment, and his frequent apparition in the ranks of the Christian armies, in their desperate struggles with the infidel, had given so wide a celebrity to the obscure town of Compostella in Galicia, which contained the sainted relics, [36] that it became the resort of pilgrims from every part of Christendom, during the Middle Ages; and the escalop shell, the device of St. James, was adopted as the universal badge of the palmer. Inns for the refreshment and security of the pious itinerants were scattered along the whole line of the route from France; but, as they were exposed to perpetual annoyance from the predatory incursions of the Arabs, a number of knights and gentlemen associated themselves, for their protection, with the monks of St. Lojo, or Eloy, adopting the rule of St. Augustine, and thus laid the foundation of the chivalric order of St. James, about the middle of the twelfth century. The cavaliers of the fraternity, which received its papal bull of approbation five years later, in 1175, were distinguished by a white mantle embroidered with a red cross, in fashion of a sword, with the escallop shell below the guard, in imitation of the device which glittered on the banner of their tutelar saint, when, he condescended to take part in their engagements with the Moors. The red color denoted, according to an ancient commentator, "that it was stained with the blood of the infidel." The rules of the new order imposed on its members the usual obligations of obedience, community of property, and of conjugal chastity, instead of celibacy. They were, moreover, required to relieve the poor, defend the traveler, and maintain perpetual war upon the Mussulman. [37] The institution of the knights of Calatrava was somewhat more romantic in its origin. That town, from its situation on the frontiers of the Moorish territory of Andalusia, where it commanded the passes into Castile, became of vital importance to the latter kingdom. Its defense had accordingly been entrusted to the valiant order of the Templars, who, unable to keep their ground against the pertinacious assaults of the Moslems, abandoned it, at the expiration of eight years, as untenable. This occurred about the middle of the twelfth century; and the Castilian monarch, Sancho the Beloved, as the last resort, offered it to whatever good knights would undertake its defense. The emprise was eagerly sought by a monk of a distant convent in Navarre, who had once been a soldier, and whose military ardor seems to have been exalted, instead of being extinguished, in the solitude of the cloister. The monk, supported by his conventual brethren, and a throng of cavaliers and more humble followers, who sought redemption under the banner of the church, was enabled to make good his word. From the confederation of these knights and ecclesiastics sprung the military fraternity of Calatrava, which received the confirmation of the pontiff, Alexander the Third, in 1164. The rules which it adopted were those of St. Benedict, and its discipline was in the highest degree austere. The cavaliers were sworn to perpetual celibacy, from which they were not released till so late as the sixteenth century. Their diet was of the plainest kind. They were allowed meat only thrice a week, and then only one dish. They were to maintain unbroken silence at the table, in the chapel, and the dormitory; and they were enjoined both to sleep and to worship with the sword girt on their side, in token of readiness for action. In the earlier days of the institution, the spiritual, as well as the military brethren, were allowed to make part of the martial array against the infidel, until this was prohibited, as indecorous, by the Holy See. From this order branched off that of Montesa, in Valencia, which was instituted at the commencement of the fourteenth century, and continued dependent on the parent stock. [38] The third great order of religious chivalry in Castile was that of Alcantara, which also received its confirmation from Pope Alexander the Third, in 1177. It was long held in nominal subordination to the knights of Calatrava, from which it was relieved by Julius the Second, and eventually rose to an importance little inferior to that of its rival. [39] The internal economy of these three fraternities was regulated by the same general principles. The direction of affairs was entrusted to a council, consisting of the grand master and a number of the commanders (_comendadores_), among whom the extensive territories of the order were distributed. This council, conjointly with the grand master, or the latter exclusively, as in the fraternity of Calatrava, supplied the vacancies. The master himself was elected by a general chapter of these military functionaries alone, or combined with the conventual clergy, as in the order of Calatrava, which seems to have recognized the supremacy of the military over the spiritual division of the community, more unreservedly than that of St. James. These institutions appear to have completely answered the objects of their creation. In the earlier history of the Peninsula, we find the Christian chivalry always ready to bear the brunt of battle against the Moors. Set apart for this peculiar duty, their services in the sanctuary only tended to prepare them for their sterner duties in the field of battle, where the zeal of the Christian soldier may be supposed to have been somewhat sharpened by the prospect of the rich temporal acquisitions, which the success of his arms was sure to secure to his fraternity. For the superstitious princes of those times, in addition to the wealth lavished so liberally on all monastic institutions, granted the military orders almost unlimited rights over the conquests achieved by their own valor. In the sixteenth century, we find the order of St. James, which had shot up to a pre-eminence above the rest, possessed of eighty-four commanderies, and two hundred inferior benefices. This same order could bring into the field, according to Garibay, four hundred belted knights, and one thousand lances, which, with the usual complement of a lance in that day, formed a very considerable force. The rents of the mastership of St. James amounted, in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, to sixty thousand ducats, those of Alcantara to forty-five thousand, and those of Calatrava to forty thousand. There was scarcely a district of the Peninsula which was not covered with their castles, towns, and convents. Their rich commanderies gradually became objects of cupidity to men of the highest rank, and more especially the grand-masterships, which, from their extensive patronage, and the authority they conferred over an organized militia pledged to implicit obedience, and knit together by the strong tie of common interest, raised their possessors almost to the level of royalty itself. Hence the elections to these important dignities came to be a fruitful source of intrigue, and frequently of violent collision. The monarchs, who had anciently reserved the right of testifying their approbation of an election by presenting the standard of the order to the new dignitary, began personally to interfere in the deliberations of the chapter. While the pope, to whom a contested point was not unfrequently referred, assumed at length the prerogative of granting the masterships in administration on a vacancy, and even that of nomination itself, which, if disputed, he enforced by his spiritual thunders. [40] Owing to these circumstances, there was probably no one cause, among the many which occurred in Castile during the fifteenth century, more prolific of intestine discord, than the election to these posts, far too important to be intrusted to any subject, and the succession to which was sure to be contested by a host of competitors. Isabella seems to have settled in her mind the course of policy to be adopted in this matter, at a very early period of her reign. On occasion of a vacancy in the grand-mastership of St. James, by the death of the incumbent, in 1476, she made a rapid journey on horseback, her usual mode of travelling, from Valladolid to the town of Ucles, where a chapter of the order was deliberating on the election of a new principal. The queen, presenting herself before this body, represented with so much energy the inconvenience of devolving powers of such magnitude on any private individual, and its utter incompatibility with public order, that she prevailed on them, smarting, as they were, under the evils of a disputed succession, to solicit the administration for the king, her husband. That monarch, indeed, consented to waive this privilege in favor of Alonso de Cardenas, one of the competitors for the office, and a loyal servant of the crown; but, at his decease in 1499, the sovereigns retained the possession of the vacant mastership, conformably to a papal decree, which granted them its administration for life, in the same manner as had been done with that of Calatrava in 1487, and of Alcantara in 1494. [41] The sovereigns were no sooner vested with the control of the military orders, than they began with their characteristic promptness to reform the various corruptions, which had impaired their ancient discipline. They erected a council for the general superintendence of affairs relating to the orders, and invested it with extensive powers both of civil and criminal jurisdiction. They supplied the vacant benefices with persons of acknowledged worth, exercising an impartiality, which could never be maintained by any private individual, necessarily exposed to the influence of personal interests and affections. By this harmonious distribution, the honors, which had before been held up to the highest bidder, or made the subject of a furious canvass, became the incentive and sure recompense of desert. [42] In the following reign, the grand-masterships of these fraternities were annexed in perpetuity to the crown of Castile by a bull of Pope Adrian the Sixth; while their subordinate dignities, having survived the object of their original creation, the subjugation of the Moors, degenerated into the empty decorations, the stars and garters, of an order of nobility. [43] IV. Vindication of ecclesiastical rights belonging to the crown from papal usurpation. In the earlier stages of the Castilian monarchy, the sovereigns appear to have held a supremacy in spiritual, very similar to that exercised by them in temporal matters. It was comparatively late that the nation submitted its neck to the papal yoke, so closely riveted at a subsequent period; and even the Romish ritual was not admitted into its churches till long after it had been adopted in the rest of Europe. [44] But, when the code of the Partidas was promulgated in the thirteenth century, the maxims of the canon law came to be permanently established. The ecclesiastical encroached on the lay tribunals. Appeals were perpetually carried up to the Roman court; and the popes, pretending to regulate the minutest details of church economy, not only disposed of inferior benefices, but gradually converted the right of confirming elections to the episcopal and higher ecclesiastical dignities, into that of appointment. [45] These usurpations of the church had been repeatedly the subject of grave remonstrance in cortes. Several remedial enactments had passed that body, during the present reign, especially in relation to the papal provision of foreigners to benefices; an evil of much greater magnitude in Spain than in other countries of Europe, since the episcopal demesnes, frequently covering the Moorish frontier, became an important line of national defence, obviously improper to be intrusted to the keeping of foreigners and absentees. Notwithstanding the efforts of cortes, no effectual remedy was devised for this latter grievance, until it became the subject of actual collision between the crown and the pontiff, in reference to the see of Taraçona, and afterwards of Cuenca. [46] Sixtus the Fourth had conferred the latter benefice, on its becoming vacant in 1482, on his nephew, Cardinal San Giorgio, a Genoese, in direct opposition to the wishes of the queen, who would have bestowed it on her chaplain, Alfonso de Burgos, in exchange for the bishopric of Cordova. An ambassador was accordingly despatched by the Castilian sovereigns to Rome, to remonstrate on the papal appointment; but without effect, as Sixtus replied, with a degree of presumption, which might better have become his predecessors of the twelfth century, that "he was head of the church, and, as such, possessed of unlimited power in the distribution of benefices, and that he was not bound to consult the inclination of any potentate on earth, any farther than might subserve the interests of religion." The sovereigns, highly dissatisfied with this response, ordered their subjects, ecclesiastical as well as lay, to quit the papal dominions; an injunction, which the former, fearful of the sequestration of their temporalities in Castile, obeyed with as much promptness as the latter. At the same time, Ferdinand and Isabella proclaimed their intention of inviting the princes of Christendom to unite with them in convoking a general council for the reformation of the manifold abuses, which dishonored the church. No sound could have grated more unpleasantly on the pontifical ear, than the menace of a general council, particularly at this period, when ecclesiastical corruptions had reached a height which could but ill endure its scrutiny. The pope became convinced that he had ventured too far, and that Henry the Fourth was no longer monarch of Castile. He accordingly despatched a legate to Spain, fully empowered to arrange the matter en an amicable basis. The legate, who was a layman, by name Domingo Centurion, no sooner arrived in Castile, than he caused the sovereigns to be informed of his presence there, and the purpose of his mission; but he received orders instantly to quit the kingdom, without attempting so much as to disclose the nature of his instructions, since they could not but be derogatory to the dignity of the crown. A safe-conduct was granted for himself and his suite; but, at the same time, great surprise was expressed that any one should venture to appear, as envoy from his Holiness, at the court of Castile, after it had been treated by him with such unmerited indignity. Far from resenting this ungracious reception, the legate affected the deepest humility; professing himself willing to waive whatever immunities he might claim as papal ambassador, and to submit to the jurisdiction of the sovereigns as one of their own subjects, so that he might obtain an audience. Cardinal Mendoza, whose influence in the cabinet had gained him the title of "third king of Spain," apprehensive of the consequences of a protracted rupture with the church, interposed in behalf of the envoy, whose conciliatory deportment at length so far mitigated the resentment of the sovereigns, that they consented to open negotiations with the court of Rome. The result was the publication of a bull by Sixtus the Fourth, in which his Holiness engaged to provide such natives to the higher dignities of the church in Castile, as should be nominated by the monarchs of that kingdom; and Alfonso de Burgos was accordingly translated to the see of Cuenca. [47] Isabella, on whom the duties of ecclesiastical preferment devolved, by the act of settlement, availed herself of the rights, thus wrested from the grasp of Rome, to exalt to the vacant sees persons of exemplary piety and learning, holding light, in comparison with the faithful discharge of this duty, every minor consideration of interest, and even the solicitations of her husband, as we shall see hereafter. [48] And the chronicler of her reign dwells with complacency on those good old times, when churchmen were to be found of such singular modesty, as to require to be urged to accept the dignities to which their merits entitled them. [49] V. The regulation of trade. It will be readily conceived that trade, agriculture, and every branch of industry must have languished under the misrule of preceding reigns. For what purpose, indeed, strive to accumulate wealth, when it would only serve to sharpen the appetite of the spoiler? For what purpose cultivate the earth, when the fruits were sure to be swept away, even before harvest time, in some ruthless foray? The frequent famines and pestilences, which occurred in the latter part of Henry's reign and the commencement of his successor's, show too plainly the squalid condition of the people, and their utter destitution of all useful arts. We are assured by the Curate of Los Palacios, that the plague broke out in the southern districts of the kingdom, carrying off eight, or nine, or even fifteen thousand inhabitants from the various cities; while the prices of the ordinary aliments of life rose to a height, which put them above the reach of the poorer classes of the community. In addition to these physical evils, a fatal shock was given to commercial credit by the adulteration of the coin. Under Henry the Fourth, it is computed that there were no less than one hundred and fifty mints openly licensed by the crown, in addition to many others erected by individuals without any legal authority. The abuse came to such a height, that people at length refused to receive in payment of their debts the debased coin, whose value depreciated more and more every day; and the little trade, which remained in Castile, was carried on by barter, as in the primitive stages of society. [50] The magnitude of the evil was such as to claim the earliest attention of the cortes under the new monarchs. Acts were passed fixing the standard and legal value of the different denominations of coin. A new coinage was subsequently made. Five royal mints were alone authorized, afterwards augmented to seven, and severe penalties denounced against the fabrication of money elsewhere. The reform of the currency gradually infused new life into commerce, as the return of the circulations, which have been interrupted for a while, quickens the animal body. This was furthered by salutary laws for the encouragement of domestic industry. Internal communication was facilitated by the construction of roads and bridges. Absurd restrictions on change of residence, as well as the onerous duties which had been imposed on commercial intercourse between Castile and Aragon, were repealed. Several judicious laws were enacted for the protection of foreign trade; and the flourishing condition of the mercantile marine may be inferred from that of the military, which enabled the sovereigns to fit out an armament of seventy sail in 1482, from the ports of Biscay and Andalusia, for the defence of Naples against the Turks. Some of their regulations, indeed, as those prohibiting the exportation of the precious metals, savor too strongly of the ignorance of the true principles of commercial legislation, which has distinguished the Spaniards to the present day. But others, again, as that for relieving the importation of foreign books from all duties, "because," says the statute, "they bring both honor and profit to the kingdom, by the facilities which they afford for making men learned," are not only in advance of that age, but may sustain an advantageous comparison with provisions on corresponding subjects in Spain at the present time. Public credit was re- established by the punctuality with which the government redeemed the debt contracted during the Portuguese war; and, notwithstanding the repeal of various arbitrary imposts, which enriched the exchequer under Henry the Fourth, such was the advance of the country under the wise economy of the present reign, that the revenue was augmented nearly six fold between the years 1477 and 1482. [51] Thus released from the heavy burdens imposed on it, the spring of enterprise recovered its former elasticity. The productive capital of the country was made to flow through the various channels of domestic industry. The hills and the valleys again rejoiced in the labor of the husbandman; and the cities were embellished with stately edifices, both public and private, which attracted the gaze and commendation of foreigners. [52] The writers of that day are unbounded in their plaudits of Isabella, to whom they principally ascribe this auspicious revolution in the condition of the country and its inhabitants, [53] which seems almost as magical as one of those transformations in romance wrought by the hands of some benevolent fairy. [54] VI. The pre-eminence of the royal authority. This, which, as we have seen, appears to have been the natural result of the policy of Ferdinand and Isabella, was derived quite as much from the influence of their private characters, as from their public measures. Their acknowledged talents were supported by a dignified demeanor, which formed a striking contrast with the meanness in mind and manners that had distinguished their predecessor. They both exhibited a practical wisdom in their own personal relations, which always commands respect, and which, however it may have savored of worldly policy in Ferdinand, was, in his consort, founded on the purest and most exalted principle. Under such a sovereign, the court, which had been little better than a brothel under the preceding reign, became the nursery of virtue and generous ambition. Isabella watched assiduously over the nurture of the high-born damsels of her court, whom she received into the royal palace, causing them to be educated under her own eye, and endowing them with liberal portions on their marriage. [55] By these and similar acts of affectionate solicitude, she endeared herself to the higher classes of her subjects, while the patriotic tendency of her public conduct established her in the hearts of the people. She possessed, in combination with the feminine qualities which beget love, a masculine energy of character, which struck terror into the guilty. She enforced the execution of her own plans, oftentimes even at great personal hazard, with a resolution surpassing that of her husband. Both were singularly temperate, indeed, frugal, in their dress, equipage, and general style of living; seeking to affect others less by external pomp, than by the silent though more potent influence of personal qualities. On all such occasions as demanded it, however, they displayed a princely magnificence, which dazzled the multitude, and is blazoned with great solemnity in the garrulous chronicles of the day. [56] The tendencies of the present administration were undoubtedly to strengthen the power of the crown. This was the point to which most of the feudal governments of Europe at this epoch were tending. But Isabella was far from being actuated by the selfish aim or unscrupulous policy of many contemporary princes, who, like Louis the Eleventh, sought to govern by the arts of dissimulation, and to establish their own authority by fomenting the divisions of their powerful vassals. On the contrary, she endeavored to bind together the disjointed fragments of the state, to assign to each of its great divisions its constitutional limits, and, by depressing the aristocracy to its proper level and elevating the commons, to consolidate the whole under the lawful supremacy of the crown. At least, such was the tendency of her administration up to the present period of our history. These laudable objects were gradually achieved without fraud or violence, by a course of measures equally laudable; and the various orders of the monarchy, brought into harmonious action with each other, were enabled to turn the forces, which had before been wasted in civil conflict, to the glorious career of discovery and conquest, which it was destined to run during the remainder of the century. * * * * * The sixth volume of the Memoirs of the Royal Spanish Academy of History, published in 1821, is devoted altogether to the reign of Isabella, It is distributed into Illustrations, as they are termed, of the various branches of the administrative policy of the queen, of her personal character, and of the condition of science under her government. These essays exhibit much curious research, being derived from unquestionable contemporary documents, printed and manuscript, and from the public archives. They are compiled with much discernment; and, as they throw light on some of the most recondite transactions of this reign, are of inestimable service to the historian. The author of the volume is the late lamented secretary of the Academy, Don Diego Clemencin; one of the few who survived the wreck of scholarship in Spain, and who with the erudition, which has frequently distinguished his countrymen, combined the liberal and enlarged opinions, which would do honor to any country. FOOTNOTES [1] Among other examples, Pulgar mentions that of the alcayde of Castro- Nuño, Pedro de Mendana, who, from the strong-holds in his possession, committed such grievous devastations throughout the country, that the cities of Burgos, Avila, Salamanca, Segovia, Valladolid, Medina, and others in that quarter, were fain to pay him a tribute, (black mail,) to protect their territories from his rapacity. His successful example was imitated by many other knightly freebooters of the period. (Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 66.)--See also extracts cited by Saez from manuscript notices by contemporaries of Henry IV. Monedas de Enrique IV., pp. 1, 2. [2] The _quaderno_ of the laws of the Hermandad has now become very rare. That in my possession was printed at Burgos, in 1527. It has since been incorporated with considerable extension into the Recopilacion of Philip II. [3] Quaderno de las Leyes Nuevas de la Hermandad, (Burgos, 1527,) leyes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 16, 20, 36, 37.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 51.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 160, ed. 1539.--Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 4.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 76.--Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decades, fol. 36.--By one of the laws, the inhabitants of such seignorial towns as refused to pay the contributions of the Hermandad were excluded from its benefits, as well as from traffic with, and even the power of recovering their debts, from other natives of the kingdom. Ley 33. [4] Recopilacion de las Leyes, (Madrid, 1640,) lib. 8, tit. 13, ley 44.-- Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 379.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 51.--Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 6.--Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decad., fol. 37, 38.--Las Pragmáticas del Reyno, (Sevilla, 1520,) fol. 85.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 160. [5] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 76.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 59.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. viii. p. 477.--Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decad., fol. 41, 42.--Gonzalo de Oviedo lavishes many encomiums on Cabrera, for "his generous qualities, his singular prudence in government, and his solicitude for his vassals, whom he inspired with the deepest attachment." (Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 23.) The best panegyric on his character, is the unshaken confidence, which his royal mistress reposed in him, to the day of her death. [6] Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 381.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 65, 70, 71.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 29.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 77.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 162; who says, no less than 8,000 guilty fled from Seville and Cordova. [7] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 29.-Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 283.-Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 382.-Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decades, lib. 7.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, ubi supra.-Garibay, Compendio, lib. 18, cap. 11. [8] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 30.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 78. [9] "Era muy inclinada," says Pulgar, "á facer justicia, tanto que le era imputado seguir mas la via de rigor que de la piedad; y esto facia por remediar á la gran corrupcion de crímines que falló en el Reyno quando subcedió en él." Reyes Católicos, p. 37. [10] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 97, 98.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 162. [11] Ordenanças Reales de Castilla, (Burgos, 1528,) lib. 2, tit. 3, ley 31. This constitutional, though, as it would seem, impotent right of the nobility, is noticed by Sempere. (Hist. des Cortès, pp. 123, 129.) It should not have escaped Marina. [12] Lib. 2, tit. 3, of the Ordenanças Reales is devoted to the royal council. The number of the members was limited to one prelate, as president, three knights, and eight or nine jurists. (Prólogo.) The sessions were to be held every day, in the palace. (Leyes 1, 2.) They were instructed to refer to the other tribunals all matters not strictly coming within their own jurisdiction. (Ley 4.) Their acts, in all cases except those specially reserved, were to have the force of law without the royal signature. (Leyes 23, 24.) See also Los Doctores Asso y Manuel, Instituciones del Derecho Civil de Castilla, (Madrid, 1792,) Introd. p. 111; and Santiago Agustin Riol, Informe, apud Semanario Erudito, (Madrid, 1788,) tom. iii. p. 114, who is mistaken in stating the number of jurists in the council, at this time, at sixteen; a change, which did not take place till Philip II.'s reign. (Recop. de las Leyes, lib. 2, tit. 4, ley 1.) Marina denies that the council could constitutionally exercise any judicial authority, at least, in suits between private parties, and quotes a passage from Pulgar, showing that its usurpations in this way were restrained by Ferdinand and Isabella. (Teoría, part. 2, cap. 29.) Powers of this nature, however, to a considerable extent, appear to have been conceded to it by more than one statute under this reign. See Recop. de las Leyes, (lib. 2, tit. 4, leyes 20, 22, and tit. 5, ley 12,) and the unqualified testimony of Riol, Informe, apud Semanario Erudito, ubi supra. [13] Ordenanças Reales, lib. 2, tit. 4.--Marina, Teoría de las Cortes, part. 2, cap. 25. By one of the statutes, (ley 4,) the commission of the judges, which, before extended to life, or a long period, was abridged to one year. This important innovation was made at the earnest and repeated remonstrance of cortes, who traced the remissness and corruption, too frequent of late in the court, to the circumstance that its decisions were not liable to be reviewed during life. (Teoría, ubi supra.) The legislature probably mistook the true cause of the evil. Few will doubt, at any rate, that the remedy proposed must have been fraught with far greater. [14] Ordenanças Reales, lib. 2, tit. 1, 3, 4, 15, 16, 17, 19; lib. 3, tit. 2.--Recop. de las Leyes, lib. 2, tit. 4, 5, 16.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 94. [15] Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS.--By one of the statutes of the cortes of Toledo, in 1480, the king was required to take his seat in the council every Friday. (Ordenanças Reales, lib. 2, tit. 3, ley 32.) It was not so new for the Castilians to have good laws, as for their monarchs to observe them. [16] Sempere, Hist. des Cortès, p. 263. [17] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, p. 167.--See the strong language, also, of Peter Martyr, another contemporary witness of the beneficial changes in the government. Opus Epistolarum, (Amstelodami, 1670,) ep. 31. [18] Prieto y Sotelo, Historia del Derecho Real de España, (Madrid, 1738,) lib. 3, cap. 16-21.--Marina has made an elaborate commentary on Alfonso's celebrated code, in his Ensayo Histórico-Crítico sobre la Antigua Legislacion de Castilla, (Madrid, 1808,) pp. 269 et seq. The English reader will find a more succinct analysis in Dr. Dunham's History of Spain and Portugal, (London, 1832,) in Lardner's Cyclopaedia, vol. iv. pp. 121- 150.--The latter has given a more exact, and, at the same time, extended view of the early Castilian legislation, probably, than is to be found, in the same compass, in any of the Peninsular writers. [19] Marina (in his Ensayo Histórico-Crítico, p. 388) quotes a popular satire of the fifteenth century, directed, with considerable humor, against these abuses, which lead the writer in the last stanza to envy even the summary style of Mahometan justice. "En tierra de Moros un solo alcalde Libra lo cevil e lo criminal, E todo el dia se esta de valde For la justicia andar muy igual: Alli non es Azo, nin es Decretal, Nin es Roberto, nin la Clementina, Salvo discrecion e buena doctrina, La qual muestra a todos vevir communal." p. 389. [20] Mendez enumerates no less than five editions of this code, by 1500; a sufficient evidence of its authority, and general reception throughout Castile. Typographia Española, pp. 203, 261, 270. [21] Ordenanças Reales, Prólogo.--Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 9.--Marina, Ensayo Histórico-Crítico, pp. 390 et seq.--Mendez, Typographia Española, p. 261.--The authors of the three last-mentioned works abundantly disprove Asso y Manuel's insinuation, that Montalavo's code was the fruit of his private study, without any commission for it, and that it gradually usurped an authority which it had not in its origin. (Discurso Preliminar al Ord. de Alcalá.) The injustice of the last remark, indeed, is apparent from the positive declaration of Bernaldez. "Los Reyes mandaron tener en todas las ciudades, villas é lugares el libro de Montalvo, _é por él determinar todas las cosas de justícia para cortar los pléitos_." Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 42. [22] Ordenanças Reales, lib. 7, tit. 2, ley 13. [23] Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 44.--Sempere notices this feature of the royal policy. Hist. des Cortès, chap. 24. [24] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 80. [25] See the emphatic language, on this and other grievances, of the Castilian commons, in their memorial to the sovereigns, Apendice, No. 10, of Clemencin's valuable compilation. The commons had pressed the measure, as one of the last necessity to the crown, as early as the cortes of Madrigal, in 1476. The reader will find the whole petition extracted by Marina, Teoría, tom. ii. cap. 5. [26] Salazar de Mendoza, Crón. del Gran Cardenal, cap. 51.--Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 5.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 95.--Ordenanças Reales, lib. 6, tit. 4, ley 26;--incorporated also into the Recopilacion of Philip II., lib. 5, tit. 10, cap. 17. See also leyes 3 and 15. [27] Admiral Enriquez, for instance, resigned 240,000 maravedies of his annual income;--the Duke of Alva, 575,000;--the Duke of Medina Sidonia, 180,000.--The loyal family of the Mendozas were also great losers, but none forfeited so much as the overgrown favorite of Henry IV., Beltran de la Cueva, duke of Albuquerque, who had uniformly supported the royal cause, and whose retrenchment amounted to 1,400,000 maravedies of yearly rent. See the scale of reduction given at length by Señor Clemencin, in Mem. de la Acad., tom. vi. loc. cit. [28] "No monarch," said the high-minded queen, "should consent to alienate his demesnes; since the loss of revenue necessarily deprives him of the best means of rewarding the attachment of his friends, and of making himself feared by his enemies." Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 1, cap. 4. [29] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, ubi supra.--Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. loc. cit. [30] Ordenanças Reales, lib. 2, tit. 1, ley 2; lib. 4, tit. 9, ley 11.-- Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 96, 101.--Recop. de las Leyes, lib. 8, tit. 8, ley 10 et al.--These affairs were conducted in the true spirit of knight-errantry. Oviedo mentions one, in which two young men of the noble houses of Velasco and Ponce de Leon agreed to fight on horseback, with sharp spears (_puntas de diamantes_), in doublet and hose, without defensive armor of any kind. The place appointed for the combat was a narrow bridge across the Xarama, three leagues from Madrid. Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 23. [31] Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. vii. pp. 487, 488. [32] Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 80.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 100. [33] For example, at the great cortes of Toledo, in 1480, it does not appear that any of the nobility were summoned, except those in immediate attendance on the court, until the measure for the resumption of the grants, which so nearly affected that body, was brought before the legislature. [34] Conde gives the following account of these chivalric associations among the Spanish Arabs, which, as far as I know, have hitherto escaped the notice of European historians. "The Moslem _fronteros_ professed great austerity in their lives, which they consecrated to perpetual war, and bound themselves by a solemn vow to defend the frontier against the incursions of the Christians. They were choice cavaliers, possessed of consummate patience, and enduring fatigue, and always prepared to die rather than desert their posts. It appears highly probable that the Moorish fraternities suggested the idea of those military orders so renowned for their valor in Spain and in Palestine, which rendered such essential services to Christendom; for both the institutions were established on similar principles." Conde, Historia de la Dominacion de los Arabes en España, (Madrid, 1820,) tom. i. p. 619, not. [35] See the details, given by Mariana, of the overgrown possessions of the Templars in Castile at the period of their extinction, in the beginning of the fourteenth century. (Hist. de España, lib. 15, cap. 10.) The knights of the Temple and the Hospitallers seem to have acquired still greater power in Aragon, where one of the monarchs was so infatuated as to bequeath them his whole dominions,--a bequest which, it may well be believed, was set aside by his high-spirited subjects. Zurita, Anales, lib. 1, cap. 52. [36] The apparition of certain preternatural lights in a forest, discovered to a Galician peasant, in the beginning of the ninth century, the spot, in which was deposited a marble sepulchre containing the ashes of St. James. The miracle is reported with sufficient circumstantiality by Florez, (Historia Compostellana, lib. 1, cap. 2, apud España Sagrada, tom. xx.) and Ambrosio de Morales, (Corónica General de España, (Obras, Madrid, 1791-3,) lib. 9, cap. 7,) who establishes, to his own satisfaction, the advent of St. James into Spain. Mariana, with more skepticism than his brethren, doubts the genuineness of the body, as well as the visit of the Apostle, but like a good Jesuit concludes, "It is not expedient to disturb with such disputes the devotion of the people, so firmly settled as it is." (Lib. 7, cap. 10.) The tutelar saint of Spain continued to support his people by taking part with them in battle against the infidel down to a very late period. Caro de Torres mentions two engagements in which he cheered on the squadrons of Cortes and Pizarro, "with his sword flashing lightning in the eyes of the Indians." Ordenes Militares, fol. 5. [37] Rades y Andrada, Las Tres Ordenes, fol. 3-15.--Caro de Torres, Ordenes Militares, fol. 2-8.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. pp. 116-118. [38] Rades y Andrada, Las Tres Ordenes, part. 2, fol. 3-9, 49.--Caro de Torres, Ordenes Militares, fol. 49, 50.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. pp. 100-104. [39] Rades y Andrada, Las Tres Ordenes, part. 3, fol. 1-6.--The knights of Alcantara wore a white mantle, embroidered with a green cross. [40] Rades y Andrada, Las Tres Ordenes, part. 1, fol. 12-15, 43, 54, 61, 64, 66, 67; part. 2, fol. 11, 51; part. 3, fol. 42, 49, 50.--Caro de Torres, Ordenes Militares, passim.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 33.--Garibay, Compendio, lib. 11, cap. 13.--Zurita, Anales, tom. v. lib. 1, cap. 19.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 2, dial. 1. [41] Caro de Torres, Ordenes Militares, fol. 46, 74, 83.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 64.--Rades y Andrada, Las Tres Ordenes, part. 1, fol. 69, 70; part. 2, fol. 82, 83; part. 3, fol. 54.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 2, dial. 1.--The sovereigns gave great offence to the jealous grandees who were competitors for the mastership of St. James, by conferring that dignity on Alonso de Cardenas, with their usual policy of making merit rather than birth the standard of preferment. [42] Caro de Torres, Ordenes Militares, fol. 84.--Riol has given a full account of the constitution of this council, Informe, apud Semanario Erudito, tom. iii. pp. 164 et seq. [43] The reader will find a view of the condition and general resources of the military orders as existing in the present century in Spain, in Laborde, Itinéraire Descriptif de l'Espagne, (2d edition, Paris, 1827-30,) tom. v. pp. 102-117. [44] Most readers are acquainted with the curious story, related by Robertson, of the ordeal to which the Romish and Muzarabic rituals were subjected, in the reign of Alfonso VI., and the ascendency which the combination of king-craft and priest-craft succeeded in securing to the former in opposition to the will of the nation. Cardinal Ximenes afterwards established a magnificent chapel in the cathedral church of Toledo for the performance of the Muzarabic services, which have continued to be retained there to the present time. Fléchier, Histoire du Cardinal Ximinès, (Paris, 1693,) p. 142.--Bourgoanne, Travels in Spain, Eng. trans., vol. iii. chap. 1. [45] Marina, Ensayo Histórico-Crítico, nos. 322, 334, 341.--Riol, Informe, apud Semanario Erudito, pp. 92 et seq. [46] Marina, Ensayo Histórico-Crítico, nos. 335-337.--Ordenanças Reales, lib. 1, tit. 3, leyes 19, 20; lib. 2, tit. 7, ley 2; lib. 3, tit. 1, ley 6.--Riol, Informe, apud Semanario Erudito, loc. cit.--In the latter part of Henry IV.'s reign, a papal bull had been granted against the provision of foreigners to benefices. Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. vii. p. 196, ed Valencia. [47] Riol, in his account of this celebrated concordat, refers to the original instrument, as existing in his time in the archives of Simancas, Semanario Erudito, tom. iii. p. 95. [48] "Lo que es público hoy en España é notorio," says Gonzalo de Oviedo, "nunca los Reyes Cathólicos desearon ni procuraron sino que proveer é presentar para las dignidades de la Iglesia hombres capazes é idoneos para la buena administracion del servicio del culto divino, é á la buena enseñanza é utilidad de los Christianos sus vasallos; y entre todos los varones de sus Reynos así por largo conoscimiento como per larga é secreta informacion acordaron encojer é elegir," etc. Quincuagenas, MS., dial. de Talavera. [49] Salazar de Mendoza, Crón. del Gran Cardenal, lib. 1, cap. 52.--Idem, Dignidades de Castilla, p. 374.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 104.--See also the similar independent conduct pursued by Ferdinand, three years previous, with reference to the see of Taraçona, related by Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 304. [50] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 44.--See a letter from one of Henry's subjects, cited by Saez, Monedas de Enrique IV., p. 3.--Also the coarse satire (composed in Henry's reign) of Mingo Revulgo, especially coplas 24-27. [51] Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 64.--Ordenanças Reales, lib. 4, tit. 4, ley 22; lib. 5, tit. 8, ley 2; lib. 6, tit. 9, ley 49; lib. 6, tit. 10, ley 13.--See also other wholesome laws for the encouragement of commerce and general security of property, as that respecting contracts, (lib. 5, tit. 8, ley 5,)--fraudulent tradesmen, (lib. 5, tit. 8, ley 5,)-- purveyance, (lib. 6, tit. 11, ley 2 et al.--Recopilacion de las Leyes, lib. 5, tit. 20, 21, 22; lib. 6, tit. 18, ley 1.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 99.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 312.--Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 11.)--The revenue, it appears, in 1477, amounted to 27,415,228 maravedies; and in the year 1482, we find it increased to 150,695,288 maravedies. (Ibid., Ilust. 5.)--A survey of the kingdom was made between the years 1477 and 1479, for the purpose of ascertaining the value of the royal rents, which formed the basis of the economical regulations adopted by the cortes of Toledo. Although this survey was conducted on no uniform plan, yet, according to Señor Clemencin, it exhibits such a variety of important details respecting the resources and population of the country, that it must materially contribute towards an exact history of this period. The compilation, which consists of twelve folio volumes in manuscript, is deposited in the archives of Simancas. [52] One of the statutes passed at Toledo expressly provides for the erection of spacious and handsome edifices (_casas grandes y bien fechas_) for the transaction of municipal affairs, in all the principal towns and cities in the kingdom. Ordenanças Reales, lib. 7, tit. 1, ley 1.--See also L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, passim,--et al. auct. [53] "Cosa fue por cierto maravillosa," exclaims Pulgar, in his Glosa on the Mingo Revulgo, "que lo que muchos hombres, y grandes senores no se acordaron á hacer en muchos años, _sola una muger_, con su trabajo, y gobernacion lo hizo en poco tiempo." Copla 21. [54] The beautiful lines of Virgil, so often misapplied, "Jam redit et Virgo; redeunt Saturnia regna; Jam nova progenies," etc. seem to admit here of a pertinent application. [55] Carro de las Doñas, apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 21.--As one example of the moral discipline introduced by Isabella in her court, we may cite the enactments against gaming, which had been carried to great excess under the preceding reigns. (See Ordenanças Reales, lib. 2, tit. 14, ley 31; lib. 8, tit. 10, ley 7.) L. Marineo, according to whom "hell is full of gamblers," highly commends the sovereigns for their efforts to discountenance this vice. Cosas Memorables, fol. 165. [56] See, for example, the splendid ceremony of Prince John's baptism, to which the gossipping Curate of Los Palacios devotes the 32d and 33d chapters of his History. CHAPTER VII. ESTABLISHMENT OF THE MODERN INQUISITION. Origin of the Ancient Inquisition.--Retrospective View of the Jews in Spain.--Their Wealth and Civilization.--Bigotry of the Age.--Its Influence on Isabella.--Her Confessor, Torquemada.--Bull authorizing the Inquisition.--Tribunal at Seville.--Forms of Trial.--Torture.--Autos da Fe.--Number of Convictions.--Perfidious Policy of Rome. It is painful, after having dwelt so long on the important benefits resulting to Castile from the comprehensive policy of Isabella, to be compelled to turn to the darker side of the picture, and to exhibit her as accommodating herself to the illiberal spirit of the age in which she lived so far as to sanction one of the grossest abuses that ever disgraced humanity. The present chapter will be devoted to the establishment and early progress of the modern Inquisition; an institution, which has probably contributed more than any other cause to depress the lofty character of the ancient Spaniard, and which has thrown the gloom of fanaticism over those lovely regions which seem to be the natural abode of festivity and pleasure. In the present liberal state of knowledge, we look with disgust at the pretensions of any human being, however exalted, to invade the sacred rights of conscience, inalienably possessed by every man. We feel that the spiritual concerns of an individual may be safely left to himself as most interested in them, except so far as they can be affected by argument or friendly monition; that the idea of compelling belief in particular doctrines is a solecism, as absurd as wicked; and, so far from condemning to the stake, or the gibbet, men who pertinaciously adhere to their conscientious opinions in contempt of personal interests and in the face of danger, we should rather feel disposed to imitate the spirit of antiquity in raising altars and statues to their memory, as having displayed the highest efforts of human virtue. But, although these truths are now so obvious as rather to deserve the name of truisms, the world has been slow, very slow, in arriving at them, after many centuries of unspeakable oppression and misery. Acts of intolerance are to be discerned from the earliest period in which Christianity became the established religion of the Roman empire. But they do not seem to have flowed from any systematized plan of persecution, until the papal authority had swollen to a considerable height. The popes, who claimed the spiritual allegiance of all Christendom, regarded heresy as treason against themselves, and, as such, deserving all the penalties, which sovereigns have uniformly visited on this, in their eyes, unpardonable offence. The crusades, which, in the early part of the thirteenth century, swept so fiercely over the southern provinces of France, exterminating their inhabitants, and blasting the fair buds of civilization which had put forth after the long feudal winter, opened the way to the Inquisition; and it was on the ruins of this once happy land, that were first erected the bloody altars of that tribunal. [1] After various modifications, the province of detecting and punishing heresy was exclusively committed to the hands of the Dominican friars; and in 1233, in the reign of St. Louis, and under the pontificate of Gregory the Ninth, a code for the regulation of their proceedings was finally digested. The tribunal, after having been successively adopted in Italy and Germany, was introduced into Aragon, where, in 1242, additional provisions were framed by the council of Tarragona, on the basis of those of 1233, which may properly be considered as the primitive instructions of the Holy Office in Spain. [2] This ancient Inquisition, as it is termed, bore the same odious peculiarities in its leading features as the Modern; the same impenetrable secrecy in its proceedings, the same insidious modes of accusation, a similar use of torture, and similar penalties for the offender. A sort of manual, drawn up by Eymerich, an Aragonese inquisitor of the fourteenth century, for the instruction of the judges of the Holy Office, prescribes all those ambiguous forms of interrogation, by which the unwary, and perhaps innocent victim might be circumvented. [3] The principles, on which the ancient Inquisition was established, are no less repugnant to justice, than those which regulated the modern; although the former, it is true, was much less extensive in its operation. The arm of persecution, however, fell with sufficient heaviness, especially during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, on the unfortunate Albigenses, who from the proximity and political relations of Aragon and Provence, had become numerous in the former kingdom. The persecution appears, however, to have been chiefly confined to this unfortunate sect, and there is no evidence that the Holy Office, notwithstanding papal briefs to that effect, was fully organized in Castile, before the reign of Isabella. This is perhaps imputable to the paucity of heretics in that kingdom. It cannot, at any rate, be charged to any lukewarmness in its sovereigns; since they, from the time of St. Ferdinand, who heaped the fagots on the blazing pile with his own hands, down to that of John the Second, Isabella's father, who hunted the unhappy heretics of Biscay, like so many wild beasts, among the mountains, had ever evinced a lively zeal for the orthodox faith. [4] By the middle of the fifteenth century, the Albigensian heresy had become nearly extirpated by the Inquisition of Aragon; so that this infernal engine might have been suffered to sleep undisturbed from want of sufficient fuel to keep it in motion, when new and ample materials were discovered in the unfortunate race of Israel, on whom the sins of their fathers have been so unsparingly visited by every nation in Christendom, among whom they have sojourned, almost to the present century. As this remarkable people, who seem to have preserved their unity of character unbroken, amid the thousand fragments into which they have been scattered, attained perhaps to greater consideration in Spain than in any other part of Europe, and as the efforts of the Inquisition were directed principally against them during the present reign, it may be well to take a brief review of their preceding history in the Peninsula. Under the Visigothic empire the Jews multiplied exceedingly in the country, and were permitted to acquire considerable power and wealth. But no sooner had their Arian masters embraced the orthodox faith, than they began to testify their zeal by pouring on the Jews the most pitiless storm of persecution. One of their laws alone condemned the whole race to slavery; and Montesquieu remarks, without much exaggeration, that to the Gothic code may be traced all the maxims of the modern Inquisition, the monks of the fifteenth century only copying, in reference to the Israelites, the bishops of the seventh. [5] After the Saracenic invasion, which the Jews, perhaps with reason, are accused of having facilitated, they resided in the conquered cities, and were permitted to mingle with the Arabs on nearly equal terms. Their common Oriental origin produced a similarity of tastes, to a certain extent, not unfavorable to such a coalition. At any rate, the early Spanish Arabs were characterized by a spirit of toleration towards both Jews and Christians, "the people of the book," as they were called, which has scarcely been found among later Moslems. [6] The Jews, accordingly, under these favorable auspices, not only accumulated wealth with their usual diligence, but gradually rose to the highest civil dignities, and made great advances in various departments of letters. The schools of Cordova, Toledo, Barcelona, and Granada were crowded with numerous disciples, who emulated the Arabians in keeping alive the flame of learning, during the deep darkness of the Middle Ages. [7] Whatever may be thought of their success in speculative philosophy, [8] they cannot reasonably be denied to have contributed largely to practical and experimental science. They were diligent travellers in all parts of the known world, compiling itineraries which have proved of extensive use in later times, and bringing home hoards of foreign specimens and Oriental drugs, that furnished important contributions to the domestic pharmacopoeias. [9] In the practice of medicine, indeed, they became so expert, as in a manner to monopolize that profession. They made great proficiency in mathematics, and particularly in astronomy; while, in the cultivation of elegant letters, they revived the ancient glories of the Hebrew muse. [10] This was indeed the golden age of modern Jewish literature, which, under the Spanish caliphs, experienced a protection so benign, although occasionally checkered by the caprices of despotism, that it was enabled to attain higher beauty and a more perfect development in the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, than it has reached in any other part of Christendom. [11] The ancient Castilians of the same period, very different from their Gothic ancestors, seem to have conceded to the Israelites somewhat of the feelings of respect, which were extorted from them by the superior civilization of the Spanish Arabs. We find eminent Jews residing in the courts of the Christian princes, directing their studies, attending them as physicians, or more frequently administering their finances. For this last vocation they seem to have had a natural aptitude; and, indeed, the correspondence which they maintained with the different countries of Europe by means of their own countrymen, who acted as the brokers of almost every people among whom they were scattered during the Middle Ages, afforded them peculiar facilities both in politics and commerce. We meet with Jewish scholars and statesmen attached to the courts of Alfonso the Tenth, Alfonso the Eleventh, Peter the Cruel, Henry the Second, and other princes. Their astronomical science recommended them in a special manner to Alfonso the Wise, who employed them in the construction of his celebrated Tables. James the First of Aragon condescended to receive instruction from them in ethics; and, in the fifteenth century, we notice John the Second, of Castile, employing a Jewish secretary in the compilation of a national Cancionero. [12] But all this royal patronage proved incompetent to protect the Jews, when their flourishing fortunes had risen to a sufficient height to excite popular envy, augmented, as it was, by that profuse ostentation of equipage and apparel, for which this singular people, notwithstanding their avarice, have usually shown a predilection. [13] Stories were circulated of their contempt for the Catholic worship, their desecration of its most holy symbols, and of their crucifixion, or other sacrifice, of Christian children, at the celebration of their own passover. [14] With these foolish calumnies, the more probable charge of usury and extortion was industriously preferred against them, till at length, towards the close of the fourteenth century, the fanatical populace, stimulated in many instances by the no less fanatical clergy, and perhaps encouraged by the numerous class of debtors to the Jews, who found this a convenient mode of settling their accounts, made a fierce assault on this unfortunate people in Castile and Aragon, breaking into their houses, violating their most private sanctuaries, scattering their costly collections and furniture, and consigning the wretched proprietors to indiscriminate massacre, without regard to sex or age. [15] In this crisis, the only remedy left to the Jews was a real or feigned conversion to Christianity. St. Vincent Ferrier, a Dominican of Valencia, performed such a quantity of miracles, in furtherance of this purpose, as might have excited the envy of any saint in the Calendar; and these, aided by his eloquence, are said to have changed the hearts of no less than thirty-five thousand of the race of Israel, which doubtless must be reckoned the greatest miracle of all. [16] The legislative enactments of this period, and still more under John the Second, during the first half of the fifteenth century, were uncommonly severe upon the Jews. While they were prohibited from mingling freely with the Christians, and from exercising the professions for which they were best qualified, [17] their residence was restricted within certain prescribed limits of the cities which they inhabited; and they were not only debarred from their usual luxury of ornament in dress, but were held up to public scorn, as it were, by some peculiar badge or emblem embroidered on their garments. [18] Such was the condition of the Spanish Jews at the accession of Ferdinand and Isabella. The _new Christians_, or _converts_, as those who had renounced the faith of their fathers were denominated, were occasionally preferred to high ecclesiastical dignities, which they illustrated by their integrity and learning. They were intrusted with municipal offices in the various cities of Castile; and, as their wealth furnished an obvious resource for repairing, by way of marriage, the decayed fortunes of the nobility, there was scarcely a family of rank in the land, whose blood had not been contaminated, at some period or other, by mixture with the _mala sangre_, as it came afterwards to be termed, of the house of Judah; an ignominious stain, which no time has been deemed sufficient wholly to purge away. [19] Notwithstanding the show of prosperity enjoyed by the converted Jews, their situation was far from secure. Their proselytism had been too sudden to be generally sincere; and, as the task of dissimulation was too irksome to be permanently endured, they gradually became less circumspect, and exhibited the scandalous spectacle of apostates returning to wallow in the ancient mire of Judaism. The clergy, especially the Dominicans, who seem to have inherited the quick scent for heresy which distinguished their frantic founder, were not slow in sounding the alarm; and the superstitious populace, easily roused to acts of violence in the name of religion, began to exhibit the most tumultuous movements, and actually massacred the constable of Castile in an attempt to suppress them at Jaen, the year preceding the accession of Isabella. After this period, the complaints against the Jewish heresy became still more clamorous, and the throne was repeatedly beset with petitions to devise some effectual means for its extirpation. [20] A chapter of the Chronicle of the Curate of Los Palacios, who lived at this time in Andalusia, where the Jews seem to have most abounded, throws considerable light on the real, as well as pretended motives of the subsequent persecution. "This accursed race," he says, speaking of the Israelites, "were either unwilling to bring their children to be baptized, or, if they did, they washed away the stain on returning home. They dressed their stews and other dishes with oil, instead of lard; abstained from pork; kept the passover; ate meat in lent; and sent oil to replenish the lamps of their synagogues; with many other abominable ceremonies of their religion. They entertained no respect for monastic life, and frequently profaned the sanctity of religious houses by the violation or seduction of their inmates. They were an exceedingly politic and ambitious people, engrossing the most lucrative municipal offices; and preferred to gain their livelihood by traffic, in which they made exorbitant gains, rather than by manual labor or mechanical arts. They considered themselves in the hands of the Egyptians, whom it was a merit to deceive and plunder. By their wicked contrivances they amassed great wealth, and thus were often able to ally themselves by marriage with noble Christian families." [21] It is easy to discern, in this medley of credulity and superstition, the secret envy, entertained by the Castilians, of the superior skill and industry of their Hebrew brethren, and of the superior riches which these qualities secured to them; and it is impossible not to suspect, that the zeal of the most orthodox was considerably sharpened by worldly motives. Be that as it may, the cry against the Jewish abominations now became general. Among those most active in raising it, were Alfonso de Ojeda, a Dominican, prior of the monastery of St. Paul in Seville, and Diego de Merlo, assistant of that city, who should not be defrauded of the meed of glory to which they are justly entitled by their exertions for the establishment of the modern Inquisition. These persons, after urging on the sovereigns the alarming extent to which the Jewish leprosy prevailed in Andalusia, loudly called for the introduction of the Holy Office, as the only effectual means of healing it. In this they were vigorously supported by Niccoló Franco, the papal nuncio then residing at the court of Castile. Ferdinand listened with complacency to a scheme, which promised an ample source of revenue in the confiscations it involved. But it was not so easy to vanquish Isabella's aversion to measures so repugnant to the natural benevolence and magnanimity of her character. Her scruples, indeed, were rather founded on sentiment than reason, the exercise of which was little countenanced in matters of faith, in that day, when the dangerous maxim, that the end justifies the means, was universally received, and learned theologians seriously disputed whether it were permitted to make peace with the infidel, and even whether promises made to them were obligatory on Christians. [22] The policy of the Roman church, at that time, was not only shown in its perversion of some of the most obvious principles of morality, but in the discouragement of all free inquiry in its disciples, whom it instructed to rely implicitly in matters of conscience on their spiritual advisers. The artful institution of the tribunal of confession, established with this view, brought, as it were, the whole Christian world at the feet of the clergy, who, far from being always animated by the meek spirit of the Gospel, almost justified the reproach of Voltaire, that confessors have been the source of most of the violent measures pursued by princes of the Catholic faith. [23] Isabella's serious temper, as well as early education, naturally disposed her to religious influences. Notwithstanding the independence exhibited by her in all secular affairs, in her own spiritual concerns she uniformly testified the deepest humility, and deferred too implicitly to what she deemed the superior sagacity, or sanctity, of her ghostly counsellors. An instance of this humility may be worth recording. When Fray Fernando de Talavera, afterwards archbishop of Granada, who had been appointed confessor to the queen, attended her for the first time in that capacity, he continued seated, after she had knelt down to make her confession, which drew from her the remark, "that it was usual for both parties to kneel." "No," replied the priest, "this is God's tribunal; I act here as his minister, and it is fitting that I should keep my seat, while your Highness kneels before me." Isabella, far from taking umbrage at the ecclesiastic's arrogant demeanor, complied with all humility, and was afterwards heard to say, "This is the confessor that I wanted." [24] Well had it been for the land, if the queen's conscience had always been intrusted to the keeping of persons of such exemplary piety as Talavera. Unfortunately, in her early days, during the lifetime of her brother Henry, that charge was committed to a Dominican monk, Thomas de Torquemada, a native of old Castile, subsequently raised to the rank of prior of Santa Cruz in Segovia, and condemned to infamous immortality by the signal part which he performed in the tragedy of the Inquisition. This man, who concealed more pride under his monastic weeds than might have furnished forth a convent of his order, was one of that class, with whom zeal passes for religion, and who testify their zeal by a fiery persecution of those whose creed differs from their own; who compensate for their abstinence from sensual indulgence, by giving scope to those deadlier vices of the heart, pride, bigotry, and intolerance, which are no less opposed to virtue, and are far more extensively mischievous to society. This personage had earnestly labored to infuse into Isabella's young mind, to which his situation as her confessor gave him such ready access, the same spirit of fanaticism that glowed in his own. Fortunately, this was greatly counteracted by her sound understanding, and natural kindness of heart. Torquemada urged her, or, indeed, as is stated by some, extorted a promise, that, "should she ever come to the throne, she would devote herself to the extirpation of heresy, for the glory of God, and the exaltation of the Catholic faith." [25] The time was now arrived when this fatal promise was to be discharged. It is due to Isabella's fame to state thus much in palliation of the unfortunate error into which she was led by her misguided zeal; an error so grave, that, like a vein in some noble piece of statuary, it gives a sinister expression to her otherwise unblemished character. [26] It was not until the queen had endured the repeated importunities of the clergy, particularly of those reverend persons in whom she most confided, seconded by the arguments of Ferdinand, that she consented to solicit from the pope a bull for the introduction of the Holy Office into Castile. Sixtus the Fourth, who at that time filled the pontifical chair, easily discerning the sources of wealth and influence, which this measure opened to the court of Rome, readily complied with the petition of the sovereigns, and expedited a bull bearing date November 1st, 1478, authorizing them to appoint two or three ecclesiastics, inquisitors for the detection and suppression of heresy throughout their dominions. [27] The queen, however, still averse to violent measures, suspended the operation of the ordinance, until a more lenient policy had been first tried. By her command, accordingly, the archbishop of Seville, Cardinal Mendoza, drew up a catechism exhibiting the different points of the Catholic faith, and instructed the clergy throughout his diocese to spare no pains in illuminating the benighted Israelites, by means of friendly exhortation and a candid exposition of the true principles of Christianity. [28] How far the spirit of these injunctions was complied with, amid the excitement then prevailing, may be reasonably doubted. There could be little doubt, however, that a report, made two years later, by a commission of ecclesiastics with Alfonso de Ojeda at its head, respecting the progress of the reformation, would be necessarily unfavorable to the Jews. [29] In consequence of this report the papal provisions were enforced by the nomination, on the 17th of September, 1480, of two Dominican monks as inquisitors, with two other ecclesiastics, the one as assessor, and the other as procurator fiscal, with instructions to proceed at once to Seville, and enter on the duties of their office. Orders were also issued to the authorities of the city to support the inquisitors by all the aid in their power. But the new institution, which has since become the miserable boast of the Castilians, proved so distasteful to them in its origin, that they refused any co-operation with its ministers, and indeed opposed such delays and embarrassments, that, during the first years, it can scarcely be said to have obtained a footing in any other places in Andalusia, than those belonging to the crown. [30] On the 2d of January, 1481, the court commenced operations by the publication of an edict, followed by several others, requiring all persons to aid in apprehending and accusing all such as they might know or suspect to be guilty of heresy, [31] and holding out the illusory promise of absolution to such as should confess their errors within a limited period. As every mode of accusation, even anonymous, was invited, the number of victims multiplied so fast, that the tribunal found it convenient to remove its sittings from the convent of St. Paul, within the city, to the spacious fortress of Triana, in the suburbs. [32] The presumptive proofs by which the charge of Judaism was established against the accused are so curious, that a few of them may deserve notice. It was considered good evidence of the fact, if the prisoner wore better clothes or cleaner linen on the Jewish sabbath than on other days of the week; if he had no fire in his house the preceding evening; if he sat at table with Jews, or ate the meat of animals slaughtered by their hands, or drank a certain beverage held in much estimation by them; if he washed a corpse in warm water, or when dying turned his face to the wall; or, finally, if he gave Hebrew names to his children; a provision most whimsically cruel, since, by a law of Henry the Second, he was prohibited under severe penalties from giving them Christian names. He must have found it difficult to extricate himself from the horns of this dilemma. [33] Such are a few of the circumstances, some of them purely accidental in their nature, others the result of early habit, which might well have continued after a sincere conversion to Christianity, and all of them trivial, on which capital accusations were to be alleged, and even satisfactorily established. [34] The inquisitors, adopting the wily and tortuous policy of the ancient tribunal, proceeded with a despatch, which shows that they could have paid little deference even to this affectation of legal form. On the sixth day of January, six convicts suffered at the stake. Seventeen more were executed in March, and a still greater number in the month following; and by the 4th of November in the same year, no less than two hundred and ninety-eight individuals had been sacrificed in the _autos da fe_ of Seville. Besides these, the mouldering remains of many, who had been tried and convicted after their death, were torn up from their graves, with a hyena-like ferocity, which has disgraced no other court, Christian or Pagan, and condemned to the common funeral pile. This was prepared on a spacious stone scaffold, erected in the suburbs of the city, with the statues of four prophets attached to the corners, to which the unhappy sufferers were bound for the sacrifice, and which the worthy Curate of Los Palacios celebrates with much complacency as the spot "where heretics were burnt, and ought to burn as long as any can be found." [35] Many of the convicts were persons estimable for learning and probity; and, among these, three clergymen are named, together with other individuals filling judicial or high municipal stations. The sword of justice was observed, in particular, to strike at the wealthy, the least pardonable offenders in times of proscription. The plague which desolated Seville this year, sweeping off fifteen thousand inhabitants, as if in token of the wrath of Heaven at these enormities, did not palsy for a moment the arm of the Inquisition, which, adjourning to Aracena, continued as indefatigable as before. A similar persecution went forward in other parts of the province of Andalusia; so that within the same year, 1481, the number of the sufferers was computed at two thousand burnt alive, a still greater number in effigy, and seventeen thousand _reconciled_; a term which must not be understood by the reader to signify anything like a pardon or amnesty, but only the commutation of a capital sentence for inferior penalties, as fines, civil incapacity, very generally total confiscation of property, and not unfrequently imprisonment for life. [36] The Jews were astounded by the bolt, which had fallen so unexpectedly upon them. Some succeeded in making their escape to Granada, others to France, Germany, or Italy, where they appealed from the decisions of the Holy Office to the sovereign pontiff. [37] Sixtus the Fourth appears for a moment to have been touched with something like compunction; for he rebuked the intemperate zeal of the inquisitors, and even menaced them with deprivation. But these feelings, it would seem, were but transient; for, in 1483, we find the same pontiff quieting the scruples of Isabella respecting the appropriation of the confiscated property, and encouraging both sovereigns to proceed in the great work of purification, by an audacious reference to the example of Jesus Christ, who, says he, consolidated his kingdom on earth by the destruction of idolatry; and he concludes with imputing their successes in the Moorish war, upon which they had then entered, to their zeal for the faith, and promising them the like in future. In the course of the same year, he expedited two briefs, appointing Thomas de Torquemada inquisitor-general of Castile and Aragon, and clothing him with full powers to frame a new constitution for the Holy Office. This was the origin of that terrible tribunal, the Spanish or modern Inquisition, familiar to most readers, whether of history or romance; which, for three centuries, has extended its iron sway over the dominions of Spain and Portugal. [38] Without going into details respecting the organization of its various courts, which gradually swelled to thirteen during the present reign, I shall endeavor to exhibit the principles which regulated their proceedings, as deduced in part from the code digested under Torquemada, and partly from the practice which obtained during his supremacy. [39] Edicts were ordered to be published annually, on the first two Sundays in lent, throughout the churches, enjoining it as a sacred duty on all, who knew or suspected another to be guilty of heresy, to lodge information against him before the Holy Office; and the ministers of religion were instructed to refuse absolution to such as hesitated to comply with this, although the suspected person might stand in the relation of parent, child, husband, or wife. All accusations, anonymous as well as signed, were admitted; it being only necessary to specify the names of the witnesses, whose testimony was taken down in writing by a secretary, and afterwards read to them, which, unless the inaccuracies were so gross as to force themselves upon their attention, they seldom failed to confirm. [40] The accused, in the mean time, whose mysterious disappearance was perhaps the only public evidence of his arrest, was conveyed to the secret chambers of the Inquisition, where he was jealously excluded from intercourse with all, save a priest of the Romish church and his jailer, both of whom might be regarded as the spies of the tribunal. In this desolate condition, the unfortunate man, cut off from external communication and all cheering sympathy or support, was kept for some time in ignorance even of the nature of the charges preferred against him, and at length, instead of the original process, was favored only with extracts from the depositions of the witnesses, so garbled as to conceal every possible clue to their name and quality. With still greater unfairness, no mention whatever was made of such testimony, as had arisen in the course of the examination, in his own favor. Counsel was indeed allowed from a list presented by his judges. But this privilege availed little, since the parties were not permitted to confer together, and the advocate was furnished with no other sources of information than what had been granted to his client. To add to the injustice of these proceedings, every discrepancy in the statements of the witnesses was converted into a separate charge against the prisoner, who thus, instead of one crime, stood accused of several. This, taken in connection with the concealment of time, place, and circumstance in the accusations, created such embarrassment, that, unless the accused was possessed of unusual acuteness and presence of mind, it was sure to involve him, in his attempts to explain, in inextricable contradiction. [41] If the prisoner refused to confess his guilt, or, as was usual, was suspected of evasion, or an attempt to conceal the truth, he was subjected to the torture. This, which was administered in the deepest vaults of the Inquisition, where the cries of the victim could fall on no ear save that of his tormentors, is admitted by the secretary of the Holy Office, who has furnished the most authentic report of its transactions, not to have been exaggerated in any of the numerous narratives which have dragged these subterranean horrors into light. If the intensity of pain extorted a confession from the sufferer, he was expected, if he survived, which did not always happen, to confirm it on the next day. Should he refuse to do this, his mutilated members were condemned to a repetition of the same sufferings, until his obstinacy (it should rather have been termed his heroism) might be vanquished. [42] Should the rack, however, prove ineffectual to force a confession of his guilt, he was so far from being considered as having established his innocence, that, with a barbarity unknown to any tribunal where the torture has been admitted, and which of itself proves its utter incompetency to the ends it proposes, he was not unfrequently convicted on the depositions of the witnesses. At the conclusion of his mock trial, the prisoner was again returned to his dungeon, where, without the blaze of a single fagot to dispel the cold, or illuminate the darkness of the long winter night, he was left in unbroken silence to await the doom which was to consign him to an ignominious death, or a life scarcely less ignominious. [43] The proceedings of the tribunal, as I have stated them, were plainly characterized throughout by the most flagrant injustice and inhumanity to the accused. Instead of presuming his innocence, until his guilt had been established, it acted on exactly the opposite principle. Instead of affording him the protection accorded by every other judicature, and especially demanded in his forlorn situation, it used the most insidious arts to circumvent and to crush him. He had no remedy against malice or misapprehension on the part of his accusers, or the witnesses against him, who might be his bitterest enemies; since they were never revealed to nor confronted with the prisoner, nor subjected to a cross-examination, which can best expose error or wilful collusion in the evidence. [44] Even the poor forms of justice, recognized in this court, might be readily dispensed with; as its proceedings were impenetrably shrouded from the public eye, by the appalling oath of secrecy imposed on all, whether functionaries, witnesses, or prisoners, who entered within its precincts. The last, and not the least odious feature of the whole, was the connection established between the condemnation of the accused and the interests of his judges; since the confiscations, which were the uniform penalties, of heresy, [45] were not permitted to flow into the royal exchequer, until they had first discharged the expenses, whether in the shape of salaries or otherwise, incident to the Holy Office. [46] The last scene in this dismal tragedy was the _act of faith_, (auto da fe,) the most imposing spectacle, probably, which, has been witnessed since the ancient Roman triumph, and which, as intimated by a Spanish writer, was intended, somewhat profanely, to represent the terrors of the Day of Judgment. [47] The proudest grandees of the land, on this occasion, putting on the sable livery of familiars of the Holy Office and bearing aloft its banners, condescended to act as the escort of its ministers; while the ceremony was not unfrequently countenanced by the royal presence. It should be stated, however, that neither of these acts of condescension, or, more properly, humiliation, were witnessed until a period posterior to the present reign. The effect was further heightened by the concourse of ecclesiastics in their sacerdotal robes, and the pompous ceremonial, which the church of Rome knows so well how to display on fitting occasions; and which was intended to consecrate, as it were, this bloody sacrifice by the authority of a religion, which has expressly declared that it desires mercy, and not sacrifice. [48] The most important actors in the scene were the unfortunate convicts, who were now disgorged for the first time from the dungeons of the tribunal. They were clad in coarse woollen garments, styled _san benitos_, brought close round the neck, and descending like a frock down to the knees. [49] These were of a yellow color, embroidered with a scarlet cross, and well garnished with figures of devils and flames of fire, which, typical of the heretic's destiny hereafter, served to make him more odious in the eyes of the superstitious multitude. [50] The greater part of the sufferers were condemned to be _reconciled_, the manifold meanings of which soft phrase have been already explained. Those who were to be _relaxed_, as it was called, were delivered over, as impenitent heretics, to the secular arm, in order to expiate their offence by the most painful of deaths, with the consciousness, still more painful, that they were to leave behind them names branded with infamy, and families involved in irretrievable ruin. [51] It is remarkable, that a scheme so monstrous as that of the Inquisition, presenting the most effectual barrier, probably, that was ever opposed to the progress of knowledge, should have been revived at the close of the fifteenth century, when the light of civilization was rapidly advancing over every part of Europe. It is more remarkable, that it should have occurred in Spain, at this time under a government which had displayed great religious independence on more than one occasion, and which had paid uniform regard to the rights of its subjects, and pursued a generous policy in reference to their intellectual culture. Where, we are tempted to ask, when we behold the persecution of an innocent, industrious people for the crime of adhesion to the faith of their ancestors, where was the charity, which led the old Castilian to reverence valor and virtue in an infidel, though an enemy? Where the chivalrous self-devotion, which led an Aragonese monarch, three centuries before, to give away his life, in defence of the persecuted sectaries of Provence? Where the independent spirit, which prompted the Castilian nobles, during the very last reign, to reject with scorn the proposed interference of the pope himself in their concerns, that they were now reduced to bow their necks to a few frantic priests, the members of an order, which, in Spain at least, was quite as conspicuous for ignorance as intolerance? True indeed the Castilians, and the Aragonese subsequently still more, gave such evidence of their aversion to the institution, that it can hardly be believed the clergy would have succeeded in fastening it upon them, had they not availed themselves of the popular prejudices against the Jews. [52] Providence, however, permitted that the sufferings, thus heaped on the heads of this unfortunate people, should be requited in full measure to the nation that inflicted them. The fires of the Inquisition, which were lighted exclusively for the Jews, were destined eventually to consume their oppressors. They were still more deeply avenged in the moral influence of this tribunal, which, eating like a pestilent canker into the heart of the monarchy, at the very time when it was exhibiting a most goodly promise, left it at length a bare and sapless trunk. Notwithstanding the persecutions under Torquemada were confined almost wholly to the Jews, his activity was such as to furnish abundant precedent, in regard to forms of proceeding, for his successors; if, indeed, the word forms may be applied to the conduct of trials so summary, that the tribunal of Toledo alone, under the superintendence of two inquisitors, disposed of three thousand three hundred and twenty-seven processes in little more than a year. [53] The number of convicts was greatly swelled by the blunders of the Dominican monks, who acted as qualificators, or interpreters of what constituted heresy, and whose ignorance led them frequently to condemn as heterodox propositions actually derived from the fathers of the church. The prisoners for life, alone, became so numerous, that it was necessary to assign them their own houses as the places of their incarceration. The data for an accurate calculation of the number of victims sacrificed by the Inquisition during this reign are not very satisfactory. From such as exist, however, Llorente has been led to the most frightful results. He computes, that, during the eighteen years of Torquemada's ministry, there were no less than 10,220 burnt, 6860 condemned, and burnt in effigy as absent or dead, and 97,321 reconciled by various other penances; affording an average of more than 6000 convicted persons annually. [54] In this enormous sum of human misery is not included the multitude of orphans, who, from the confiscation of their paternal inheritance, were turned over to indigence and vice. [55] Many of the reconciled were afterwards sentenced as relapsed; and the Curate of Los Palacios expresses the charitable wish, that "the whole accursed race of Jews, male and female, of twenty years of age and upwards, might be purified with fire and fagot!" [56] The vast apparatus of the Inquisition involved so heavy an expenditure, that a very small sum, comparatively, found its way into the exchequer, to counterbalance the great detriment resulting to the state from the sacrifice of the most active and skilful part of its population. All temporal interests, however, were held light in comparison with the purgation of the land from heresy; and such augmentations as the revenue did receive, we are assured, were conscientiously devoted to pious purposes, and the Moorish war! [57] The Roman see, during all this time, conducting itself with its usual duplicity, contrived to make a gainful traffic by the sale of dispensations from the penalties incurred by such as fell under the ban of the Inquisition, provided they were rich enough to pay for them, and afterwards revoking them, at the instance of the Castilian court. Meanwhile, the odium, excited by the unsparing rigor of Torquemada, raised up so many accusations against him, that he was thrice compelled to send an agent to Rome to defend his cause before the pontiff; until, at length, Alexander the Sixth, in 1494, moved by these reiterated complaints, appointed four coadjutors, out of a pretended regard to the infirmities of his age, to share with him the burdens of his office. [58] This personage, who is entitled to so high a rank among those who have been the authors of unmixed evil to their species, was permitted to reach a very old age, and to die quietly in his bed. Yet he lived in such constant apprehension of assassination, that he is said to have kept a reputed unicorn's horn always on his table, which was imagined to have the power of detecting and neutralizing poisons; while, for the more complete protection of his person, he was allowed an escort of fifty horse and two hundred foot in his progresses through the kingdom. [59] This man's zeal was of such an extravagant character, that it may almost shelter itself under the name of insanity. His history may be thought to prove, that, of all human infirmities, or rather vices, there is none productive of more extensive mischief to society than fanaticism. The opposite principle of atheism, which refuses to recognize the most important sanctions to virtue, does not necessarily imply any destitution of just moral perceptions, that is, of a power of discriminating between right and wrong, in its disciples. But fanaticism is so far subversive of the most established principles of morality, that, under the dangerous maxim, "For the advancement of the faith, all means are lawful," which Tasso has rightly, though perhaps undesignedly, derived from the spirits of hell, [60] it not only excuses, but enjoins the commission of the most revolting crimes, as a sacred duty. The more repugnant, indeed, such crimes may be to natural feeling, or public sentiment, the greater their merit, from the sacrifice which the commission of them involves. Many a bloody page of history attests the fact, that fanaticism, armed with power, is the sorest evil which can befall a nation. * * * * * Don Juan Antonio Llorente is the only writer who has succeeded in completely lifting the veil from the dread mysteries of the Inquisition. It is obvious how very few could be competent to this task, since the proceedings of the Holy Office were shrouded in such impenetrable secrecy, that even the prisoners who were arraigned before it, as has been already stated, were kept in ignorance of their own processes. Even such of its functionaries, as have at different times pretended to give its transactions to the world, have confined themselves to an historical outline, with meagre notices of such parts of its internal discipline as might be safely disclosed to the public. Llorente was secretary to the tribunal of Madrid from 1790 to 1792. His official station consequently afforded him every facility for an acquaintance with the most recondite affairs of the Inquisition; and, on its suppression at the close of 1808, he devoted several years to a careful investigation of the registers of the tribunals, both of the capital and the provinces, as well as of such other original documents contained within their archives, as had not hitherto been opened to the light of day. In the progress of his work he has anatomized the most odious features of the institution with unsparing severity; and his reflections are warmed with a generous and enlightened spirit, certainly not to have been expected in an ex-inquisitor. The arrangement of his immense mass of materials is indeed somewhat faulty, and the work might be recast in a more popular form, especially by means of a copious retrenchment. With all its subordinate defects, however, it is entitled to the credit of being the most, indeed the only, authentic history of the modern Inquisition; exhibiting its minutest forms of practice, and the insidious policy by which they were directed, from the origin of the institution down to its temporary abolition. It well deserves to be studied, as the record of the most humiliating triumph, which fanaticism has ever been able to obtain over human reason, and that, too, during the most civilized periods, and in the most civilized portion of the world. The persecutions, endured by the unfortunate author of the work, prove that the embers of this fanaticism may be rekindled too easily, even in the present century. FOOTNOTES [1] Mosheim, Ecclesiastical History, translated by Maclaine, (Charlestown, 1810,) cent. 13, p. 2, chap. 5.--Sismondi, Histoire des Français, (Paris, 1821,) tom. vi. chap. 24-28; tom; vii. chap. 2, 3.--Idem, De la Littérature du Midi de l'Europe, (Paris, 1813,) tom. i. chap. 6.--In the former of these works M. Sismondi has described the physical ravages of the crusades in southern France, with the same spirit and eloquence, with which he has exhibited their desolating moral influence in the latter. Some Catholic writers would fain excuse St. Dominic from the imputation of having founded the Inquisition. It is true he died some years before the perfect organization of that tribunal; but, as he established the principles on which, and the monkish militia by whom, it was administered, it is doing him no injustice to regard him as its real author.--The Sicilian Paramo, indeed, in his heavy quarto, (De Origine et Progressu Officii Sanctae Inquisitionis, Matriti, 1598,) traces it up to a much more remote antiquity, which, to a Protestant ear at least, savors not a little of blasphemy. According to him, God was the first inquisitor, and his condemnation of Adam and Eve furnished the model of the judicial forms observed in the trials of the Holy Office. The sentence of Adam was the type of the inquisitorial _reconciliation_; his subsequent raiment of the skins of animals was the model of the _san-benito_, and his expulsion from Paradise the precedent for the confiscation of the goods of heretics. This learned personage deduces a succession of inquisitors through the patriarchs, Moses, Nebuchadnezzar, and King David, down to John the Baptist, and even our Saviour, in whose precepts and conduct he finds abundant authority for the tribunal! Paramo, De Origine Inquisitionis, lib. 1, tit. 1, 2, 3. [2] Sismondi, Hist. des Français, tom. vii. chap. 3.--Limborch, History of the Inquisition, translated by Chandler, (London, 1731,) book 1, chap. 24.--Llorente, Histoire Critique de l'Inquisition d'Espagne, (Paris, 1818,) tom. i. p. 110.--Before this time we find a constitution of Peter I. of Aragon against heretics, prescribing in certain cases the burning of heretics and the confiscation of their estates, in 1197. Marca, Marca Hispanica, sive Limes Hispanicus, (Parisiis, 1688,) p. 1384. [3] Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Vetus, tom. ii, p. 186.--Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. pp. 110-124.--Puigblanch cites some of the instructions from Eymerich's work, whose authority in the courts of the Inquisition he compares to that of Gratian's Decretals in other ecclesiastical judicatures. One of these may suffice to show the spirit of the whole. "When the inquisitor has an opportunity, he shall manage so as to introduce to the conversation of the prisoner some one of his accomplices, or any other converted heretic, who shall feign that he still persists in his heresy, telling him that he had abjured for the sole purpose of escaping punishment, by deceiving the inquisitors. Having thus gained his confidence, he shall go into his cell some day after dinner, and, keeping up the conversation till night, shall remain with him under pretext of its being too late for him to return home. He shall then urge the prisoner to tell him all the particulars of his past life, having first told him the whole of his own; and in the mean time spies shall be kept in hearing at the door, as well as a notary, in order to certify what may be said within." Puigblanch, Inquisition Unmasked, translated by Walton, (London, 1816,) vol. i. pp. 238, 239. [4] Mariana, Hist. de España, lib. 12, cap. 11; lib. 21, cap. 17.-- Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. chap. 3.--The nature of the penance imposed on reconciled heretics by the ancient Inquisition was much more severe than that of later times. Llorente cites an act of St. Dominic respecting a person of this description, named Ponce Roger. The penitent was commanded to be "_stripped of his clothes and beaten with rods by a priest, three Sundays in succession, from the gate of the city to the door of the church_; not to eat any kind of animal food during his whole life; to keep three Lents a year, without even eating fish; to abstain from fish, oil, and wine three days in the week during life, except in case of sickness or excessive labor; to wear a religious dress with a small cross embroidered on each side of the breast; to attend mass every day, if he had the means of doing so, and vespers on Sundays and festivals; to recite the service for the day and the night, and to repeat the _pater noster_ seven times in the day, ten times in the evening, and _twenty times at midnight_"! (Ibid., chap. 4.) If the said Roger failed in any of the above requisitions, he was to be burnt as a relapsed heretic! This was the encouragement held out by St. Dominic to penitence. [5] Montesquieu, Esprit des Loix, liv. 28, chap. 1.--See the canon of the 17th council of Toledo, condemning the Israelitish race to bondage, in Florez, España Sagrada, (Madrid, 1747-75,) tom. vi. p. 229.--Fuero Juzgo (ed. de la Acad. (Madrid, 1815,) lib. 12, tit. 2 and 3,) is composed of the most inhuman ordinances against this unfortunate people. [6] The Koran grants protection to the Jews on payment of tribute. See the Koran, translated by Sale, (London, 1825,) chap. 9. [7] The first academy founded by the learned Jews in Spain was that of Cordova, A. D. 948. Castro, Biblioteca Española, tom. i. p. 2.--Basnage, History of the Jews, translated by Taylor, (London, 1708,) book 7, chap. 5. [8] In addition to their Talmudic lore and Cabalistic mysteries, the Spanish Jews were well read in the philosophy of Aristotle. They pretended that the Stagirite was a convert to Judaism and had borrowed his science from the writings of Solomon. (Brucker, Historia Critica Philosophiae, (Lipsiae, 1766,) tom. ii. p. 853.) M. Degerando, adopting similar conclusions with Brucker, in regard to the value of the philosophical speculations of the Jews, passes the following severe sentence upon the intellectual, and indeed moral character of the nation. "Ce peuple, par son caractère, ses moeurs, ses institutions, semblait être destiné à rester stationnaire. Un attachement excessif à leurs propres traditions dominait chez les Juifs tous les penchans de l'esprit: ils restaient presque étrangers aux progrès de la civilisation, au mouvement général de la société; ils étaient en quelque sorte moralement isolés, alors même qu'ils communiquaient avec tous les peuples, et parcouraient toutes les contrées. Aussi nous cherchons en vain, dans ceux de leurs écrits qui nous sont connus, non seulement de vraies découvertes, mais même des idées réellement originales." Histoire Comparée des Systèmes de Philosophie, (Paris, 1822,) tom. iv. p. 299. [9] Castro, Biblioteca Española, tom. i. pp. 21, 33, et alibi.--Benjamin of Tudela's celebrated Itinerary, having been translated into the various languages of Europe, passed into sixteen editions before the middle of the last century. Ibid., tom. i. pp. 79, 80. [10] The beautiful lament, which the royal psalmist has put into the mouths of his countrymen, when commanded to sing the songs of Sion in a strange land, cannot be applied to the Spanish Jews, who, far from hanging their harps upon the willows, poured forth their lays with a freedom and vivacity which may be thought to savor more of the modern troubadour than of the ancient Hebrew minstrel. Castro has collected, under Siglo XV., a few gleanings of such as, by their incorporation into a Christian Cancionero, escaped the fury of the Inquisition. Biblioteca Española, tom. i. pp. 265-364. [11] Castro has done for the Hebrew what Casiri a few years before did for the Arabic literature of Spain, by giving notices of such works as have survived the ravages of time and superstition. The first volume of his Biblioteca Española contains an analysis accompanied with extracts from more than seven hundred different works, with biographical sketches of their authors; the whole bearing most honorable testimony to the talent and various erudition of the Spanish Jews. [12] Basnage, History of the Jews, book 7, chap. 5, 15, 16.--Castro, Biblioteca Española, tom. i. pp. 116, 265, 267.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. i. p. 906;--tom. ii. pp. 63, 147, 459.--Samuel Levi, treasurer of Peter the Cruel, who was sacrificed to the cupidity of his master, is reported by Mariana to have left behind him the incredible sum of 400,000 ducats to swell the royal coffers. Tom. ii. p. 82. [13] Sir Walter Scott, with his usual discernment, has availed himself of these opposite traits in his portraits of Rebecca and Isaac in Ivanhoe, in which he seems to have contrasted the lights and shadows of the Jewish character. The humiliating state of the Jews, however, exhibited in this romance, affords no analogy to their social condition in Spain; as is evinced not merely by their wealth, which was also conspicuous in the English Jews, but by the high degree of civilization, and even political consequence, which, notwithstanding the occasional ebullitions of popular prejudice, they were permitted to reach there. [14] Calumnies of this kind were current all over Europe. The English reader will call to mind the monkish fiction of the little Christian, "Slain with cursed Jewes, as it is notable," singing most devoutly after his throat was cut from ear to ear, in Chaucer's Prioresse's Tale. See another instance in the old Scottish ballad of the "Jew's Daughter" in Percy's "Reliques of Ancient Poetry." [15] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 43.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. pp. 186, 187.--In 1391, 5000 Jews were sacrificed to the popular fury, and, according to Mariana, no less than 10,000 perished from the same cause in Navarre about sixty years before. See tom. i. p. 912. [16] According to Mariana, the restoration of sight to the blind, feet to the lame, even life to the dead, were miracles of ordinary occurrence with St. Vincent. (Hist. de España, tom. ii. pp. 229, 230.) The age of miracles had probably ceased by Isabella's time, or the Inquisition might have been spared. Nic. Antonio, in his notice of the life and labors of this Dominican, (Bibliotheca Vetus, tom. ii. pp. 205, 207,) states that he preached his inspired sermons in his vernacular Valencian dialect to audiences of French, English, and Italians, indiscriminately, who all understood him perfectly well; "a circumstance," says Dr. McCrie, in his valuable "History of the Progress and Suppression of the Reformation in Spain," (Edinburgh, 1829.) "which, if it prove anything, proves that the hearers of St. Vincent possessed more miraculous powers than himself, and that they should have been canonized, rather than the preacher." P. 87, note. [17] They were interdicted from the callings of vintners, grocers, taverners, especially of apothecaries, and of physicians, and nurses. Ordenanças Reales, lib. 8, tit. 3, leyes 11, 15, 18. [18] No law was more frequently reiterated than that prohibiting the Jews from acting as stewards of the nobility, or farmers and collectors of the public rents. The repetition of this law shows to what extent that people had engrossed what little was known of financial science in that day. For the multiplied enactments in Castile against them, see Ordenanças Reales, (lib. 8, tit. 3.) For the regulations respecting the Jews in Aragon, many of them oppressive, particularly at the commencement of the fifteenth century, see Fueros y Observancias del Reyno de Aragon, (Zaragoza, 1667,) tom. i. fol. 6.--Marca Hispanica, pp. 1416, 1433.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iii. lib. 12, cap. 45. [19] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 43.--Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, préf. p. 26.--A manuscript entitled _Tizon de España_, (Brand of Spain,) tracing up many a noble pedigree to a Jewish or Mahometan root, obtained a circulation, to the great scandal of the country, which the efforts of the government, combined with those of the Inquisition, have not been wholly able to suppress. Copies of it, however, are now rarely to be met with. (Doblado, Letters from Spain, (London, 1822,) let. 2.) Clemencin notices two works with this title, one as ancient as Ferdinand and Isabella's time, and both written by bishops. Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. p. 125. [20] Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. p. 479.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 77. [21] Reyes Católicos, MS., cap, 43. Vol. I.�21. [22] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, ubi supra.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 77.--Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 386.--Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. p. 44.--Llorente, tom. i. pp. 143, 145. Some writers are inclined to view the Spanish Inquisition, in its origin, as little else than a political engine. Guizot remarks of the tribunal, in one of his lectures, "Elle contenait en germe ce qu'elle est devenue; mais elle ne l'était pas en commençant: elle fut d'abord plus politique que religieuse, et destinée à maintenir l'ordre plutôt qu'à défendre la foi." (Cours d'Histoire Moderne, (Paris, 1828-30,) tom. v. lec. 11.) This statement is inaccurate in reference to Castile, where the facts do not warrant us in imputing any other motive for its adoption than religious zeal. The general character of Ferdinand, as well as the circumstances under which it was introduced into Aragon, may justify the inference of a more worldly policy in its establishment there. [23] Essai sur les Moeurs et l'Esprit des Nations, chap. 176. [24] Sigüenza, Historia de la Orden de San Gerónimo, apud Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 13.--This anecdote is more characteristic of the order than the individual. Oviedo has given a brief notice of this prelate, whose virtues raised him from the humblest condition to the highest posts in the church, and gained him, to quote that writer's words, the appellation of "El sancto, ó el buen arzobispo en toda España." Quincuagenas, MS., dial. de Talavera. [25] Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 323. [26] The uniform tenderness with which the most liberal Spanish writers of the present comparatively enlightened age, as Marina, Llorente, Clemencin, etc., regard the memory of Isabella, affords an honorable testimony to the unsuspected integrity of her motives. Even in relation to the Inquisition, her countrymen would seem willing to draw a veil over her errors, or to excuse her by charging them on the age in which she lived. [27] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 2. cap. 77.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 43.--Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. pp. 143-145.--Much discrepancy exists in the narratives of Pulgar, Bernaldez, and other contemporary writers, in reference to the era of the establishment of the modern Inquisition. I have followed Llorente, whose chronological accuracy, here and elsewhere, rests on the most authentic documents. [28] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., ubi supra.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 77.--I find no contemporary authority for imputing to Cardinal Mendoza an active agency in the establishment of the Inquisition, as is claimed for him by later writers, and especially his kinsman and biographer, the canon Salazar de Mendoza. (Crón. del Gran Cardenal, lib. 1, cap. 49.--Monarquía, tom. i. p. 336.) The conduct of this eminent minister in this affair seems, on the contrary, to have been equally politic and humane. The imputation of bigotry was not cast upon it, until the age when bigotry was esteemed a virtue. [29] In the interim, a caustic publication by a Jew appeared, containing strictures on the conduct of the administration, and even on the Christian religion, which was controverted at length by Talavera, afterwards archbishop of Granada. The scandal occasioned by this ill-timed production undoubtedly contributed to exacerbate the popular odium against the Israelites. [30] It is worthy of remark, that the famous cortes of Toledo, assembled but a short time previous to the above-mentioned ordinances, and which enacted several oppressive laws in relation to the Jews, made no allusion whatever to the proposed establishment of a tribunal, which was to be armed with such terrific powers. [31] This ordinance, in which Llorente discerns the first regular encroachment of the new tribunal on the civil jurisdiction, was aimed partly at the Andalusian nobility, who afforded a shelter to the Jewish fugitives. Llorente has fallen into the error, more than once, of speaking of the count of Arcos, and marquis of Cadiz, as separate persons. The possessor of both titles was Rodrigo Ponce de Leon, who inherited the former of them from his father. The latter (which he afterwards made so illustrious in the Moorish wars) was conferred on him by Henry IV., being derived from the city of that name, which had been usurped from the crown. [32] The historian of Seville quotes the Latin inscription on the portal of the edifice in which the sittings of the dread tribunal were held. Its concluding apostrophe to the Deity is one that the persecuted might join in, as heartily as their oppressors. "Exurge Domine; judica causam tuam; capite nobis vulpes." Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 389. [33] Ordenanças Reales, lib. 8, tit. 3, ley 26. [34] Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. pp. 153-159. [35] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 44.--Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. 1, p. 160.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 164.-- The language of Bernaldez as applied to the four statues of the _quemadero_, "_en que_ los quemavan," is so equivocal, that it has led to some doubts whether he meant to assert that the persons to be burnt were enclosed in the statues, or fastened to them. Llorente's subsequent examination has led him to discard the first horrible supposition, which realized the fabled cruelty of Phalaris.--This monument of fanaticism continued to disgrace Seville till 1810, when it was removed in order to make room for the construction of a battery against the French. [36] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 164.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 44.--Mariana, lib. 24, cap. 17.--Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, ubi supra.--L. Marineo diffuses the 2000 capital executions over several years. He sums up the various severities of the Holy Office in the following gentle terms. "The church, who is the mother of mercy and the fountain of charity, content with the imposition of penances, generously accords life to many who do not deserve it. While those who persist obstinately in their errors, after being imprisoned on the testimony of trust-worthy witnesses, she causes to be put to the torture, and condemned to the flames; some miserably perish, bewailing their errors, and invoking the name of Christ, while others call upon that of Moses. Many again, who sincerely repent, she, notwithstanding the heinousness of their transgressions, _merely sentences to perpetual imprisonment_"! Such were the tender mercies of the Spanish Inquisition. [37] Bernaldez states, that guards were posted at the gates of the city of Seville in order to prevent the emigration of the Jewish inhabitants, which indeed was forbidden under pain of death. The tribunal, however, had greater terrors for them, and many succeeded in effecting their escape. Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 44. [38] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 164.--Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 396.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 77.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 18, cap. 17.--Paramo, De Origine Inquisitionis, lib. 2, tit. 2, cap. 2.--Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. pp. 163-173. [39] Over these subordinate tribunals Ferdinand erected a court of supervision, with appellate jurisdiction, under the name of Council of the Supreme, consisting of the grand inquisitor, as president, and three other ecclesiastics, two of them doctors of law. The principal purpose of this new creation was to secure the interest of the crown in the confiscated property, and to guard against the encroachment of the Inquisition on secular jurisdiction. The expedient, however, wholly failed, because most of the questions brought before this court were determined by the principles of the canon law, of which the grand inquisitor was to be sole interpreter, the others having only, as it was termed, a "consultative voice." Llorente, tom. i. pp. 173, 174.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 324.--Riol, Informe, apud Semanario Erudito, tom. iii. pp. 156 et seq. [40] Puigblanch, Inquisition Unmasked, vol. i. chap. 4.--Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. chap. 6, art. 1; chap. 9, art. 1, 2.--The witnesses were questioned in such general terms, that they were even kept in ignorance of the particular matter respecting which they were expected to testify. Thus, they were asked "if they knew anything which had been said or done contrary to the Catholic faith, and the interests of the tribunal." Their answers often opened a new scent to the judges, and thus, in the language of Montanus, "brought more fishes into the inquisitors' holy angle." See Montanus, Discovery and Playne Declaration of sundry subtill Practises of the Holy Inquisition of Spayne, Eng. trans. (London, 1569,) fol. 14. [41] Limborch, Inquisition, book 4, chap. 20.--Montanus, Inquisition of Spayne, fol. 6-15.--Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. chap. 6. art. 1; chap. 9, art. 4-9.--Puigblanch, Inquisition Unmasked, vol. i. chap. 4. [42] Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. chap. 9, art. 7.--By a subsequent regulation of Philip II., the repetition of torture in the same process was strictly prohibited to the inquisitors. But they, making use of a sophism worthy of the arch-fiend himself, contrived to evade this law, by pretending after each new infliction, of punishment that they had only suspended, and not terminated, the torture! [43] Montanus, Inquisition of Spayne, fol. 24 et seq.--Limborch, Inquisition, vol. ii. chap. 29.--Puigblanch, Inquisition Unmasked, vol. i. chap. 4.--Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, ubi supra.--I shall spare the reader the description of the various modes of torture, the rack, fire, and pulley, practised by the inquisitors, which have been so often detailed in the doleful narratives of such as have had the fortune to escape with life from the fangs of the tribunal. If we are to believe Llorente, these barbarities have not been decreed for a long time. Yet some recent statements are at variance with this assertion. See, among others, the celebrated adventurer Van Halen's "Narrative of his Imprisonment in the Dungeons of the Inquisition at Madrid, and his Escape in 1817-18." [44] The prisoner had indeed the right of challenging any witness on the ground of personal enmity. (Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. chap. 9, art. 10.) But as he was kept in ignorance of the names of the witnesses employed against him, and as even, if he conjectured right, the degree of enmity, competent to set aside testimony, was to be determined by his judges, it is evident that his privilege of challenge was wholly nugatory. [45] Confiscation had long been decreed as the punishment of convicted heretics by the statutes of Castile. (Ordenanças Reales, lib. 8, tit. 4.) The avarice of the present system, however, is exemplified by the fact, that those who confessed and sought absolution within the brief term of grace allowed by the inquisitors from the publication of their edict, were liable to arbitrary fines; and those who confessed after that period, escaped with nothing short of confiscation. Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. pp. 176, 177. [46] Ibid., tom. i. p. 216.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 324.--Salazar de Mendoza, Monarquía, tom. i. fol. 337.--It is easy to discern in every part of the odious scheme of the Inquisition the contrivance of the monks, a class of men, cut off by their profession from the usual sympathies of social life, and who, accustomed to the tyranny of the confessional, aimed at establishing the same jurisdiction over thoughts, which secular tribunals have wisely confined to actions. Time, instead of softening, gave increased harshness to the features of the new system. The most humane provisions were constantly evaded in practice; and the toils for ensnaring the victim were so ingeniously multiplied, that few, very few, were permitted to escape without some censure. Not more than one person, says Llorente, in one or perhaps two thousand processes, previous to the time of Philip III., received entire absolution. So that it came to be proverbial that all who were not roasted, were at least singed. "Devant l'Inquisition, quand on vient à jubé, Si l'on ne sort rôti, l'on sort au moins flambé." [47] Montanus, Inquisition of Spayne, fol. 46.--Puigblanch, Inquisition Unmasked, vol. i. chap. 4.--Every reader of Tacitus and Juvenal will remember how early the Christians were condemned to endure the penalty of fire. Perhaps the earliest instance of burning to death for heresy in modern times occurred under the reign of Robert of France, in the early part of the eleventh century. (Sismondi, Hist. des Français, tom. iv. chap. 4.) Paramo, as usual, finds authority for inquisitorial autos da fe, where one would least expect it, in the New Testament. Among other examples, he quotes the remark of James and John, who, when the village of Samaria refused to admit Christ within its walls, would have called down fire from heaven to consume its inhabitants. "Lo," says Paramo, "fire, the punishment of heretics; for the Samaritans were the heretics of those times." (De Origine Inquisitionis, lib. 1, tit. 3, cap. 5.) The worthy father omits to add the impressive rebuke of our Saviour to his over- zealous disciples. "Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. The son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them." [48] Puigblanch, vol. i. chap. 4.--The inquisitors, after the celebration of an auto da fe at Guadaloupe, in 1485, wishing probably to justify these bloody executions in the eyes of the people, who had not yet become familiar with them, solicited a sign from the Virgin (whose shrine in that place is noted all over Spain) in testimony of her approbation of the Holy Office. Their petition was answered by such a profusion of miracles, that Dr. Francis Sanctius de la Fuente, who acted as scribe on the occasion, became out of breath, and, after recording sixty, gave up in despair, unable to keep pace with their marvellous rapidity. Paramo, De Origine Inquisitionis, lib. 2, tit. 2, cap. 3. [49] _San benito_, according to Llorente, (tom. i. p. 127,) is a corruption of _saco bendito_, being the name given to the dresses worn by penitents previously to the thirteenth century. [50] Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. chap. 9, art. 16.-- Puigblanch, Inquisition Unmasked, vol. i. chap. 4.--Voltaire remarks (Essai sur les Moeurs, chap. 140) that, "An Asiatic, arriving at Madrid on the day of an auto da fe, would doubt whether it were a festival, religious celebration, sacrifice, or massacre;--it is all of them. They reproach Montezuma with sacrificing human captives to the gods.--What would he have said, had he witnessed an auto da fe?" [51] The government, at least, cannot be charged with remissness in promoting this. I find two ordinances in the royal collection of _pragmáticas_, dated in September, 1501, (there must be some error in the date of one of them,) inhibiting, under pain of confiscation of property, such as had been _reconciled_, and their children by the mother's side, and grandchildren by the father's, from holding any office in the privy council, courts of justice, or in the municipalities, or any other place of trust or honor. They were also excluded from the vocations of notaries, surgeons, and apothecaries. (Pragmáticas del Reyno, fol. 5, 6.) This was visiting the sins of the fathers, to an extent unparalleled in modern legislation. The sovereigns might find a precedent in a law of Sylla, excluding the children of the proscribed Romans from political honors; thus indignantly noticed by Sallust. "Quin solus omnium, post memoriam hominum, supplicia in post futuros composuit; _quîs prius injuria quàm vita certa esset_." Hist. Fragments, lib. 1. [52] The Aragonese, as we shall see hereafter, made a manly though ineffectual resistance, from the first, to the introduction of the Inquisition among them by Ferdinand. In Castile, its enormous abuses provoked the spirited interposition of the legislature at the commencement of the following reign. But it was then too late. [53] 1485-6. (Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. p. 239.)--In Seville, with probably no greater apparatus, in 1482, 21,000 processes were disposed of. These were the first fruits of the Jewish heresy, when Torquemada, although an inquisitor, had not the supreme control of the tribunal. [54] Llorente afterwards reduces this estimate to 8800 burnt, 96,504 otherwise punished; the diocese of Cuença being comprehended in that of Murcia. (Tom. iv. p. 252.) Zurita says, that, by 1520, the Inquisition of Seville had sentenced more than 4000 persons to be burnt, and 30,000 to other punishments. Another author whom he quotes, carries up the estimate of the total condemned by this single tribunal, within the same term of time, to 100,000. Anales, tom. iv. fol. 324. [55] By an article of the primitive instructions, the inquisitors were required to set apart a small portion of the confiscated estates for the education and Christian nurture of minors, children of the condemned. Llorente says, that, in the immense number of processes, which he had occasion to consult, he met with no instance of their attention to the fate of these unfortunate orphans! Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. chap. 8. [56] Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 44.--Torquemada waged war upon freedom of thought, in every form. In 1490, he caused several Hebrew Bibles to be publicly burnt, and some time after, more than 6000 volumes of Oriental learning, on the imputation of Judaism, sorcery, or heresy, at the autos da fe of Salamanca, the very nursery of science. (Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. chap. 8, art. 5.) This may remind one of the similar sentence passed by Lope de Barrientos, another Dominican, about fifty years before, upon the books of the marquis of Villena. Fortunately for the dawning literature of Spain, Isabella did not, as was done by her successors, commit the censorship of the press to the judges of the Holy Office, notwithstanding such occasional assumption of power by the grand inquisitor. [57] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 77.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 164.--The prodigious desolation of the land may be inferred from the estimates, although somewhat discordant, of deserted houses in Andalusia. Garibay (Compendio, lib. 18, cap. 17,) puts these at three, Pulgar (Reyes Católicos, part. 2, cap. 77,) at four, L. Marineo (Cosas Memorables, fol. 164,) as high as five thousand. [58] Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. chap. 7, art. 8; chap. 8, art. 6. [59] Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Vetus, tom. ii. p. 340.--Llorente, Hist. de l'Inquisition, tom. i. chap. 8, art. 6. [60] "Per la fè--il tutto lice." Gerusalemme Liberata, cant. 4, stanza 26. CHAPTER VIII. REVIEW OF THE POLITICAL AND INTELLECTUAL CONDITION OF THE SPANISH ARABS PREVIOUS TO THE WAR OF GRANADA. Conquest of Spain by the Arabs.--Cordovan Empire.--High Civilization and Prosperity.--Its Dismemberment.--Kingdom of Granada.--Luxurious and Chivalrous Character.--Literature of the Spanish Arabs.--Progress in Science.--Historical Merits.--Useful Discoveries.--Poetry and Romance.-- Influence on the Spaniards. We have now arrived at the commencement of the famous war of Granada, which terminated in the subversion of the Arabian empire in Spain, after it had subsisted for nearly eight centuries, and with the consequent restoration to the Castilian crown of the fairest portion of its ancient domain. In order to a better understanding of the character of the Spanish Arabs, or Moors, who exercised an important influence on that of their Christian neighbors, the present chapter will be devoted to a consideration of their previous history in the Peninsula, where they probably reached a higher degree of civilization than in any other part of the world. [1] It is not necessary to dwell upon the causes of the brilliant successes of Mahometanism at its outset,--the dexterity with which, unlike all other religions, it was raised upon, not against, the principles and prejudices of preceding sects; the military spirit and discipline, which it established among all classes, so that the multifarious nations who embraced it, assumed the appearance of one vast, well-ordered camp; [2] the union of ecclesiastical with civil authority intrusted to the caliphs, which enabled them to control opinions, as absolutely as the Roman pontiffs in their most despotic hour; [3] or lastly, the peculiar adaptation of the doctrines of Mahomet to the character of the wild tribes among whom they were preached. [4] It is sufficient to say, that these latter, within a century after the coming of their apostle, having succeeded in establishing their religion over vast regions in Asia, and on the northern shores of Africa, arrived before the Straits of Gibraltar, which, though a temporary, were destined to prove an ineffectual bulwark for Christendom. The causes which have been currently assigned for the invasion and conquest of Spain, even by the most credible modern historians, have scarcely any foundation in contemporary records. The true causes are to be found in the rich spoils offered by the Gothic monarchy, and in the thirst of enterprise in the Saracens, which their long uninterrupted career of victory seems to have sharpened, rather than satisfied. [5] The fatal battle, which terminated with the slaughter of King Roderic and the flower of his nobility, was fought in the summer of 711, on a plain washed by the Guadalete near Xerez, about two leagues distant from Cadiz. [6] The Goths appear never to have afterwards rallied under one head, but their broken detachments made many a gallant stand in such strong positions as were afforded throughout the kingdom; so that nearly three years elapsed before the final achievement of the conquest. The policy of the conquerors, after making the requisite allowance for the evils necessarily attending such an invasion, [7] may be considered liberal. Such of the Christians, as chose, were permitted to remain in the conquered territory in undisturbed possession of their property. They were allowed to worship in their own way; to be governed, within prescribed limits, by their own laws; to fill certain civil offices, and serve in the army; their women were invited to intermarry with the conquerors; [8] and, in short, they were condemned to no other legal badge of servitude than the payment of somewhat heavier imposts than those exacted from their Mahometan brethren. It is true the Christians were occasionally exposed to suffering from the caprices of despotism, and, it may be added, of popular fanaticism. [9] But, on the whole, their condition may sustain an advantageous comparison with that of any Christian people under the Mussulman dominion of later times, and affords a striking contrast with that of our Saxon ancestors after the Norman conquest, which suggests an obvious parallel in many of its circumstances to the Saracen. [10] After the further progress of the Arabs in Europe had been checked by the memorable defeat at Tours, their energies, no longer allowed to expand in the career of conquest, recoiled on themselves, and speedily produced the dismemberment of their overgrown empire. Spain was the first of the provinces which fell off. The family of Omeya, under whom this revolution was effected, continued to occupy her throne as independent princes, from the middle of the eighth to the close of the eleventh century, a period which forms the most honorable portion of her Arabian annals. The new government was modelled on the eastern caliphate. Freedom shows itself under a variety of forms; while despotism, at least in the institutions founded on the Koran, seems to wear but one. The sovereign was the depositary of all power, the fountain of honor, the sole arbiter of life and fortune. He styled himself "Commander of the Faithful," and, like the caliphs of the east, assumed an entire spiritual as well as temporal supremacy. The country was distributed into six _capitanías_, or provinces, each under the administration of a _wali_, or governor, with subordinate officers, to whom was intrusted a more immediate jurisdiction over the principal cities. The immense authority and pretensions of these petty satraps became a fruitful source of rebellion in later times. The caliph administered the government with the advice of his _mexuar_, or council of state, composed of his principal _cadis_ and _hagibs_, or secretaries. The office of prime minister, or chief hagib, corresponded, in the nature and variety of its functions, with that of a Turkish grand vizier. The caliph reserved to himself the right of selecting his successor from among his numerous progeny; and this adoption was immediately ratified by an oath of allegiance to the heir apparent from the principal officers of state. [11] The princes of the blood, instead of being condemned, as in Turkey, to waste their youth in the seclusion of the harem, were intrusted to the care of learned men, to be instructed in the duties befitting their station. They were encouraged to visit the academies, which were particularly celebrated in Cordova, where they mingled in disputation, and frequently carried away the prizes of poetry and eloquence. Their riper years exhibited such fruits as were to be expected from their early education. The race of the Omeyades need not shrink from a comparison with any other dynasty of equal length in modern Europe. Many of them amused their leisure with poetical composition, of which numerous examples are preserved in Conde's History; and some left elaborate works of learning, which have maintained a permanent reputation with Arabian scholars. Their long reigns, the first ten of which embrace a period of two centuries and a half, their peaceful deaths, and unbroken line of succession in the same family for so many years, show that their authority must have been founded in the affections of their subjects. Indeed, they seem, with one or two exceptions, to have ruled over them with a truly patriarchal sway; and, on the event of their deaths, the people, bathed in tears, are described as accompanying their relics to the tomb, where the ceremony was concluded with a public eulogy on the virtues of the deceased, by his son and successor. This pleasing moral picture affords a strong contrast to the sanguinary scenes which so often attend the transmission of the sceptre from one generation to another, among the nations of the east. [12] The Spanish caliphs supported a large military force, frequently keeping two or three armies in the field at the same time. The flower of these forces was a body-guard, gradually raised to twelve thousand men, one- third of them Christians, superbly equipped, and officered by members of the royal family. Their feuds with the eastern caliphs and the Barbary pirates required them also to maintain a respectable navy, which was fitted out from the numerous dock-yards that lined the coast from Cadiz to Tarragona. The munificence of the Omeyades was most ostentatiously displayed in their public edifices, palaces, mosques, hospitals, and in the construction of commodious quays, fountains, bridges, and aqueducts, which, penetrating the sides of the mountains, or sweeping on lofty arches across the valleys, rivalled in their proportions the monuments of ancient Rome. These works, which were scattered more or less over all the provinces, contributed especially to the embellishment of Cordova, the capital of the empire. The delightful situation of this city, in the midst of a cultivated plain washed by the waters of the Guadalquivir, made it very early the favorite residence of the Arabs, who loved to surround their houses, even in the cities, with groves and refreshing fountains, so delightful to the imagination of a wanderer of the desert. [13] The public squares and private court-yards sparkled with _jets d'eau_, fed by copious streams from the Sierra Morena, which, besides supplying nine hundred public baths, were conducted into the interior of the edifices, where they diffused a grateful coolness over the sleeping-apartments of their luxurious inhabitants. [14] Without adverting to that magnificent freak of the caliphs, the construction of the palace of Azahra, of which not a vestige now exists, we may form a sufficient notion of the taste and magnificence of this era from the remains of the far-famed mosque, now the cathedral of Cordova. This building, which still covers more ground than any other church in Christendom, was esteemed the third in sanctity by the Mahometan world, being inferior only to the Alaksa of Jerusalem and the temple of Mecca. Most of its ancient glories have indeed long since departed. The rich bronze which embossed its gates, the myriads of lamps which illuminated its aisles, have disappeared; and its interior roof of odoriferous and curiously carved wood has been cut up into guitars and snuff-boxes. But its thousand columns of variegated marble still remain; and its general dimensions, notwithstanding some loose assertions to the contrary, seem to be much the same as they were in the time of the Saracens. European critics, however, condemn its most elaborate beauties as "heavy and barbarous." Its celebrated portals are pronounced "diminutive, and in very bad taste." Its throng of pillars gives it the air of "a park rather than a temple," and the whole is made still more incongruous by the unequal length of their shafts, being grotesquely compensated by a proportionate variation of size in their bases and capitals, rudely fashioned after the Corinthian order. [15] But if all this gives us a contemptible idea of the taste of the Saracens at this period, which indeed, in architecture, seems to have been far inferior to that of the later princes of Granada, we cannot but be astonished at the adequacy of their resources to carry such magnificent designs into execution. Their revenue, we are told in explanation, amounted to eight millions of _mitcales_ of gold, or nearly six millions sterling; a sum fifteen-fold greater than that which William the Conqueror, in the subsequent century, was able to extort from his subjects, with all the ingenuity of feudal exaction. The tone of exaggeration, which distinguishes the Asiatic writers, entitles them perhaps to little confidence in their numerical estimates. This immense wealth, however, is predicated of other Mahometan princes of that age; and their vast superiority over the Christian states of the north, in arts and effective industry, may well account for a corresponding superiority in their resources. The revenue of the Cordovan sovereigns was derived from the fifth of the spoil taken in battle, an important item in an age of unintermitting war and rapine; from the enormous exaction of one-tenth of the produce of commerce, husbandry, flocks, and mines; from a capitation tax on Jews and Christians; and from certain tolls on the transportation of goods. They engaged in commerce on their own account, and drew from mines, which belonged to the crown, a conspicuous part of their income. [16] Before the discovery of America, Spain was to the rest of Europe what her colonies have since become, the great source of mineral wealth. The Carthaginians, and the Romans afterwards, regularly drew from her large masses of the precious metals. Pliny, who resided some time in the country, relates that three of her provinces were said to have annually yielded the incredible quantity of sixty thousand pounds of gold. [17] The Arabs with their usual activity penetrated into these arcana of wealth. Abundant traces of their labors are still to be met with along the barren ridge of mountains that covers the north of Andalusia; and the diligent Bowles has enumerated no less than five thousand of their excavations in the kingdom or district of Jaen. [18] But the best mine of the caliphs was in the industry and sobriety of their subjects. The Arabian colonies have been properly classed among the agricultural. Their acquaintance with the science of husbandry is shown in their voluminous treatises on the subject, and in the monuments which they have everywhere left of their peculiar culture. The system of irrigation, which has so long fertilized the south of Spain, was derived from them. They introduced into the Peninsula various tropical plants and vegetables, whose cultivation has departed with them. Sugar, which the modern Spaniards have been obliged to import from foreign nations in large quantities annually for their domestic consumption, until within the last half century that they have been supplied by their island of Cuba, constituted one of the principal exports of the Spanish Arabs. The silk manufacture was carried on by them extensively. The Nubian geographer, in the beginning of the twelfth century, enumerates six hundred villages in Jaen as engaged in it, at a time when it was known to the Europeans only from their circuitous traffic with the Greek empire. This, together with fine fabrics of cotton and woollen, formed the staple of an active commerce with the Levant, and especially with Constantinople, whence they were again diffused, by means of the caravans of the north, over the comparatively barbarous countries of Christendom. The population kept pace with this general prosperity of the country. It would appear from a census instituted at Cordova, at the close of the tenth century, that there were at that time in it six hundred temples and two hundred thousand dwelling-houses; many of these latter being, probably, mere huts or cabins, and occupied by separate families. Without placing too much reliance on any numerical statements, however, we may give due weight to the inference of an intelligent writer, who remarks that their minute cultivation of the soil, the cheapness of their labor, their particular attention to the most nutritious esculents, many of them such as would be rejected by Europeans at this day, are indicative of a crowded population, like that, perhaps, which swarms over Japan or China, where the same economy is necessarily resorted to for the mere sustenance of life. [19] Whatever consequence a nation may derive, in its own age, from physical resources, its intellectual development will form the subject of deepest interest to posterity. The most flourishing periods of both not unfrequently coincide. Thus the reigns of Abderrahman the Third, Alhakem the Second, and the regency of Almanzor, embracing the latter half of the tenth century, during which the Spanish Arabs reached their highest political importance, may be regarded as the period of their highest civilization under the Omeyades; although the impulse then given carried them forward to still further advances, in the turbulent times which followed. This beneficent impulse is, above all, imputable to Alhakem. He was one of those rare beings, who have employed the awful engine of despotism in promoting the happiness and intelligence of his species. In his elegant tastes, appetite for knowledge, and munificent patronage he may be compared with the best of the Medici. He assembled the eminent scholars of his time, both natives and foreigners, at his court, where he employed them in the most confidential offices. He converted his palace into an academy, making it the familiar resort of men of letters, at whose conferences he personally assisted in his intervals of leisure from public duty. He selected the most suitable persons for the composition of works on civil and natural history, requiring the prefects of his provinces and cities to furnish, as far as possible, the necessary intelligence. He was a diligent student, and left many of the volumes which he read enriched with his commentaries. Above all, he was intent upon the acquisition of an extensive library. He invited illustrious foreigners to send him their works, and munificently recompensed them. No donative was so grateful to him as a book. He employed agents in Egypt, Syria, Irak, and Persia, for collecting and transcribing the rarest manuscripts; and his vessels returned freighted with cargoes more precious than the spices of the east. In this way he amassed a magnificent collection, which was distributed, according to the subjects, in various apartments of his palace; and which, if we may credit the Arabian historians, amounted to six hundred thousand volumes. [20] If all this be thought to savor too much of eastern hyperbole, still it cannot be doubted that an amazing number of writers swarmed over the Peninsula at this period. Casiri's multifarious catalogue bears ample testimony to the emulation, with which not only men, but even women of the highest rank, devoted themselves to letters; the latter contending publicly for the prizes, not merely in eloquence and poetry, but in those recondite studies which have usually been reserved for the other sex. The prefects of the provinces, emulating their master, converted their courts into academies, and dispensed premiums to poets and philosophers. The stream of royal bounty awakened life in the remotest districts. But its effects were especially visible in the capital. Eighty free schools were opened in Cordova. The circle of letters and science was publicly expounded by professors, whose reputation for wisdom attracted not only the scholars of Christian Spain, but of Prance, Italy, Germany, and the British Isles. For this period of brilliant illumination with the Saracens corresponds precisely with that of the deepest barbarism of Europe; when a library of three or four hundred volumes was a magnificent endowment for the richest monastery; when scarcely a "priest south of the Thames," in the words of Alfred, "could translate Latin into his mother tongue;" when not a single philosopher, according to Tiraboschi, was to be met with in Italy, save only the French pope Sylvester the Second, who drew his knowledge from the schools of the Spanish Arabs, and was esteemed a necromancer for his pains. [21] Such is the glowing picture presented to us of Arabian scholarship, in the tenth and succeeding centuries, under a despotic government and a sensual religion; and, whatever judgment may be passed on the real value of all their boasted literature, it cannot be denied, that the nation exhibited a wonderful activity of intellect, and an apparatus for learning (if we are to admit their own statements) unrivalled in the best ages of antiquity. The Mahometan governments of that period rested on so unsound a basis, that the season of their greatest prosperity was often followed by precipitate decay. This had been the case with the eastern caliphate, and was now so with the western. During the life of Alhakem's successor, the empire of the Omeyades was broken up into a hundred petty principalities; and their magnificent capital of Cordova, dwindling into a second-rate city, retained no other distinction than that of being the Mecca of Spain. These little states soon became a prey to all the evils arising out of a vicious constitution of government and religion. Almost every accession to the throne was contested by numerous competitors of the same family; and a succession of sovereigns, wearing on their brows but the semblance of a crown, came and departed, like the shadows of Macbeth. The motley tribes of Asiatics, of whom the Spanish Arabian population was composed, regarded each other with ill-disguised jealousy. The lawless predatory habits, which no discipline could effectually control in an Arab, made them ever ready for revolt. The Moslem states, thus reduced in size and crippled by faction, were unable to resist the Christian forces, which were pressing on them from the north. By the middle of the ninth century, the Spaniards had reached the Douro and the Ebro. By the close of the eleventh, they had advanced their line of conquest, under the victorious banner of the Cid, to the Tagus. The swarms of Africans who invaded the Peninsula, during the two following centuries, gave substantial support to their Mahometan brethren; and the cause of Christian Spain trembled in the balance for a moment on the memorable day of Navas de Tolosa. But the fortunate issue of that battle, in which, according to the lying letter of Alfonso the Ninth, "one hundred and eighty-five thousand infidels perished, and only five and twenty Spaniards," gave a permanent ascendency to the Christian arms. The vigorous campaigns of James the First, of Aragon, and of St. Ferdinand, of Castile, gradually stripped away the remaining territories of Valencia, Murcia, and Andalusia; so that, by the middle of the thirteenth century, the constantly contracting circle of the Moorish dominion had shrunk into the narrow limits of the province of Granada. Yet on this comparatively small point of their ancient domain, the Saracens erected a new kingdom of sufficient strength to resist, for more than two centuries, the united forces of the Spanish monarchies. The Moorish territory of Granada contained, within a circuit of about one hundred and eighty leagues, all the physical resources of a great empire. Its broad valleys were intersected by mountains rich in mineral wealth, whose hardy population supplied the state with husbandmen and soldiers. Its pastures were fed by abundant fountains, and its coasts studded with commodious ports, the principal marts in the Mediterranean. In the midst, and crowning the whole, as with a diadem, rose the beautiful city of Granada. In the days of the Moors it was encompassed by a wall, flanked by a thousand and thirty towers, with seven portals. [22] Its population, according to a contemporary, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, amounted to two hundred thousand souls; [23] and various authors agree in attesting, that, at a later period, it could send forth fifty thousand warriors from its gates. This statement will not appear exaggerated, if we consider that the native population of the city was greatly swelled by the influx of the ancient inhabitants of the districts lately conquered by the Spaniards. On the summit of one of the hills of the city was erected the royal fortress or palace of the Alhambra, which was capable of containing within its circuit forty thousand men. [24] The light and elegant architecture of this edifice, whose magnificent ruins still form the most interesting monument in Spain for the contemplation of the traveller, shows the great advancement of the art since the construction of the celebrated mosque of Cordova. Its graceful porticoes and colonnades, its domes and ceilings, glowing with tints, which, in that transparent atmosphere, have lost nothing of their original brilliancy, its airy halls, so constructed as to admit the perfume of surrounding gardens and agreeable ventilations of the air, and its fountains, which still shed their coolness over its deserted courts, manifest at once the taste, opulence, and Sybarite luxury of its proprietors. The streets are represented to have been narrow, many of the houses lofty, with turrets of curiously wrought larch or marble, and with cornices of shining metal, "that glittered like stars through the dark foliage of the orange groves;" and the whole is compared to "an enamelled vase, sparkling with hyacinths and emeralds." [25] Such are the florid strains in which the Arabic writers fondly descant on the glories of Granada. At the foot of this fabric of the genii lay the cultivated _vega_, or plain, so celebrated as the arena, for more than two centuries, of Moorish and Christian chivalry, every inch of whose soil may be said to have been fertilized with human blood. The Arabs exhausted on it all their powers of elaborate cultivation. They distributed the waters of the Xenil, which flowed through it, into a thousand channels for its more perfect irrigation. A constant succession of fruits and crops was obtained throughout the year. The products of the most opposite latitudes were transplanted there with success; and the hemp of the north grew luxuriant under the shadow of the vine and the olive. Silk furnished the principal staple of a traffic that was carried on through the ports of Almeria and Malaga. The Italian cities, then rising into opulence, derived their principal skill in this elegant manufacture from the Spanish Arabs. Florence, in particular, imported large quantities of the raw material from them as late as the fifteenth century. The Genoese are mentioned as having mercantile establishments in Granada; and treaties of commerce were entered into with this nation, as well as with the crown of Aragon. Their ports swarmed with a motley contribution from "Europe, Africa, and the Levant," so that "Granada," in the words of the historian, "became the common city of all nations." "The reputation of the citizens for trust- worthiness," says a Spanish writer, "was such, that their bare word was more relied on, than a written contract is now among us;" and he quotes the saying of a Catholic bishop, that "Moorish works and Spanish faith were all that were necessary to make a good Christian." [26] The revenue, which was computed at twelve hundred thousand ducats, was derived from similar, but, in some respects, heavier impositions than those of the caliphs of Cordova. The crown, besides being possessed of valuable plantations in the vega, imposed the onerous tax of one-seventh on all the agricultural produce of the kingdom. The precious metals were also obtained in considerable quantities, and the royal mint was noted for the purity and elegance of its coin. [27] The sovereigns of Granada were for the most part distinguished by liberal tastes. They freely dispensed their revenues in the protection of letters, the construction of sumptuous public works, and, above all, in the display of a courtly pomp, unrivalled by any of the princes of that period. Each day presented a succession of _fêtes_ and tourneys, in which the knight seemed less ambitious of the hardy prowess of Christian chivalry, than of displaying his inimitable horsemanship, and his dexterity in the elegant pastimes peculiar to his nation. The people of Granada, like those of ancient Rome, seem to have demanded a perpetual spectacle. Life was with them one long carnival, and the season of revelry was prolonged until the enemy was at the gate. During the interval which had elapsed since the decay of the Omeyades, the Spaniards had been gradually rising in civilization to the level of their Saracen enemies; and, while their increased consequence secured them from the contempt with which they had formerly been regarded by the Mussulmans, the latter, in their turn, had not so far sunk in the scale, as to have become the objects of the bigoted aversion, which was, in after days, so heartily visited on them by the Spaniards. At this period, therefore, the two nations viewed each other with more liberality, probably, than at any previous or succeeding time. Their respective monarchs conducted their mutual negotiations on a footing of perfect equality. We find several examples of Arabian sovereigns visiting in person the court of Castile. These civilities were reciprocated by the Christian princes. As late as 1463, Henry the Fourth had a personal interview with the king of Granada, in the dominions of the latter. The two monarchs held their conference under a splendid pavilion erected in the vega, before the gates of the city; and, after an exchange of presents, the Spanish sovereign was escorted to the frontiers by a body of Moorish cavaliers. These acts of courtesy relieve in some measure the ruder features of an almost uninterrupted warfare, that was necessarily kept up between the rival nations. [28] The Moorish and Christian knights were also in the habit of exchanging visits at the courts of their respective masters. The latter were wont to repair to Granada to settle their affairs of honor, by personal rencounter, in the presence of its sovereign. The disaffected nobles of Castile, among whom Mariana especially notices the Velas and the Castros, often sought an asylum there, and served under the Moslem banner. With this interchange of social courtesy between the two nations, it could not but happen that each should contract somewhat of the peculiarities natural to the other. The Spaniard acquired something of the gravity and magnificence of demeanor proper to the Arabian; and the latter relaxed his habitual reserve, and, above all, the jealousy and gross sensuality, which characterize the nations of the east. [29] Indeed, if we were to rely on the pictures presented to us in the Spanish ballads or _romances_, we should admit as unreserved an intercourse between the sexes to have existed among the Spanish Arabs, as with any other people of Europe. The Moorish lady is represented there as an undisguised spectator of the public festivals; while her knight, bearing an embroidered mantle or scarf, or some other token of her favor, contends openly in her presence for the prize of valor, mingles with her in the graceful dance of the Zambra, or sighs away his soul in moonlight serenades under her balcony. [30] Other circumstances, especially the frescoes still extant on the walls of the Alhambra, may be cited as corroborative of the conclusions afforded by the _romances_, implying a latitude in the privileges accorded to the sex, similar to that in Christian countries, and altogether alien from the genius of Mahometanism. [31] The chivalrous character ascribed to the Spanish Moslems appears, moreover, in perfect conformity to this. Thus some of their sovereigns, we are told, after the fatigues of the tournament, were wont to recreate their spirits with "elegant poetry, and florid discourses of amorous and knightly history." The ten qualities, enumerated as essential to a true knight, were "piety, valor, courtesy, prowess, the gifts of poetry and eloquence, and dexterity in the management of the horse, the sword, lance, and bow." [32] The history of the Spanish Arabs, especially in the latter wars of Granada, furnishes repeated examples not merely of the heroism, which distinguished the European chivalry of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but occasionally of a polished courtesy, that might have graced a Bayard or a Sidney. This combination of Oriental magnificence and knightly prowess shed a ray of glory over the closing days of the Arabian empire in Spain, and served to conceal, though it could not correct, the vices which it possessed in common with all Mahometan institutions. The government of Granada was not administered with the same tranquillity as that of Cordova. Revolutions were perpetually occurring, which may be traced sometimes to the tyranny of the prince, but more frequently to the factions of the seraglio, the soldiery, or the licentious populace of the capital. The latter, indeed, more volatile than the sands of the deserts from which they originally sprung, were driven by every gust of passion into the most frightful excesses, deposing and even assassinating their monarchs, violating their palaces, and scattering abroad their beautiful collections and libraries; while the kingdom, unlike that of Cordova, was so contracted in its extent, that every convulsion of the capital was felt to its farthest extremities. Still, however, it held out, almost miraculously, against the Christian arms, and the storms that beat upon it incessantly, for more than two centuries, scarcely wore away anything from its original limits. Several circumstances may be pointed out as enabling Granada to maintain this protracted resistance. Its concentrated population furnished such abundant supplies of soldiers, that its sovereigns could bring into the field an army of a hundred thousand men. [33] Many of these were drawn from the regions of the Alpuxarras, whose rugged inhabitants had not been corrupted by the soft effeminacy of the plains. The ranks were occasionally recruited, moreover, from the warlike tribes of Africa. The Moors of Granada are praised by their enemies for their skill with the cross-bow, to the use of which they were trained from childhood. [34] But their strength lay chiefly in their cavalry. Their spacious vegas afforded an ample field for the display of their matchless horsemanship; while the face of the country, intersected by mountains and intricate defiles, gave a manifest advantage to the Arabian light-horse over the steel-clad cavalry of the Christians, and was particularly suited to the wild _guerilla_ warfare, in which the Moors so much excelled. During the long hostilities of the country, almost every city had been converted into a fortress. The number of these fortified places in the territory of Granada was ten times as great as is now to be found throughout the whole Peninsula. [35] Lastly, in addition to these means of defence, may be mentioned their early acquaintance with gunpowder, which, like the Greek fire of Constantinople, contributed perhaps in some degree to prolong their precarious existence beyond its natural term. But, after all, the strength of Granada, like that of Constantinople, lay less in its own resources than in the weakness of its enemies, who, distracted by the feuds of a turbulent aristocracy, especially during the long minorities with which Castile was afflicted, perhaps, more than any other nation in Europe, seemed to be more remote from the conquest of Granada at the death of Henry the Fourth, than at that of St. Ferdinand in the thirteenth century. Before entering on the achievement of this conquest by Ferdinand and Isabella, it may not be amiss to notice the probable influence exerted by the Spanish Arabs on European civilization. Notwithstanding the high advances made by the Arabians in almost every branch of learning, and the liberal import of certain sayings ascribed to Mahomet, the spirit of his religion was eminently unfavorable to letters. The Koran, whatever be the merit of its literary execution, does not, we believe, contain a single precept in favor of general science. [36] Indeed, during the first century after its promulgation, almost as little attention was bestowed upon this by the Saracens, as in their "days of ignorance," as the period is stigmatized which preceded the advent of their apostle. [37] But, after the nation had reposed from its tumultuous military career, the taste for elegant pleasures, which naturally results from opulence and leisure, began to flow in upon it. It entered upon this new field with all its characteristic enthusiasm, and seemed ambitious of attaining the same pre-eminence in science, that it had already reached in arms. It was at the commencement of this period of intellectual fermentation, that the last of the Omeyades, escaping into Spain, established there the kingdom of Cordova, and imported along with him the fondness for luxury and letters that had begun to display itself in the capitals of the east. His munificent spirit descended upon his successors; and, on the breaking up of the empire, the various capitals, Seville, Murcia, Malaga, Granada, and others, which rose upon its ruins, became the centres of so many intellectual systems, that continued to emit a steady lustre through the clouds and darkness of succeeding centuries. The period of this literary civilization reached far into the fourteenth century, and thus, embracing an interval of six hundred years, may be said to have exceeded in duration that of any other literature, ancient or modern. There were several auspicious circumstances in the condition of the Spanish Arabs, which distinguished them from their Mahometan brethren. The temperate climate of Spain was far more propitious to robustness and elasticity of intellect than the sultry regions of Arabia and Africa. Its long line of coast and convenient havens opened to it an enlarged commerce. Its number of rival states encouraged a generous emulation, like that which glowed in ancient Greece and modern Italy; and was infinitely more favorable to the development of the mental powers than the far- extended and sluggish empires of Asia. Lastly, a familiar intercourse with the Europeans served to mitigate in the Spanish Arabs some of the more degrading superstitions incident to their religion, and to impart to them nobler ideas of the independence and moral dignity of man, than are to be found in the slaves of eastern despotism. Under these favorable circumstances, provisions for education were liberally multiplied, colleges, academies, and gymnasiums springing up spontaneously, as it were, not merely in the principal cities, but in the most obscure villages of the country. No less than fifty of these colleges or schools could be discerned scattered over the suburbs and populous plain of Granada. Seventy public libraries, if we may credit the report, were counted within the narrow limits of the Moslem territory. Every place of note seems to have furnished materials for a literary history. The copious catalogues of writers, still extant in the Escurial, show how extensively the cultivation of science was pursued, even through its minutest subdivisions; while a biographical notice of blind men, eminent for their scholarship in Spain, proves how far the general avidity for knowledge triumphed over the most discouraging obstacles of nature. [38] The Spanish Arabs emulated their countrymen of the east in their devotion to natural and mathematical science. They penetrated into the remotest regions of Africa and Asia, transmitting an exact account of their proceedings to the national academies. They contributed to astronomical knowledge by the number and accuracy of their observations, and by the improvement of instruments and the erection of observatories, of which the noble tower of Seville is one of the earliest examples. They furnished their full proportion in the department of history, which, according to an Arabian author cited by D'Herbelot, could boast of thirteen hundred writers. The treatises on logic and metaphysics amount to one-ninth of the surviving treasures of the Escurial; and, to conclude this summary of naked details, some of their scholars appear to have entered upon as various a field of philosophical inquiry, as would be crowded into a modern encyclopaedia. [39] The results, it must be confessed, do not appear to have corresponded with this magnificent apparatus and unrivalled activity of research. The mind of the Arabians was distinguished by the most opposite characteristics, which sometimes, indeed, served to neutralize each other. An acute and subtile perception was often clouded by mysticism and abstraction. They combined a habit of classification and generalization, with a marvellous fondness for detail; a vivacious fancy with a patience of application, that a German of our day might envy; and, while in fiction they launched boldly into originality, indeed extravagance, they were content in philosophy to tread servilely in the track of their ancient masters. They derived their science from versions of the Greek philosophers; but, as their previous discipline had not prepared them for its reception, they were oppressed rather than stimulated by the weight of the inheritance. They possessed an indefinite power of accumulation, but they rarely ascended to general principles, or struck out new and important truths; at least, this is certain in regard to their metaphysical labors. Hence Aristotle, who taught them to arrange what they had already acquired, rather than to advance to new discoveries, became the god of their idolatry. They piled commentary on commentary, and, in their blind admiration of his system, may be almost said to have been more of Peripatetics than the Stagirite himself. The Cordovan Averroes was the most eminent of his Arabian commentators, and undoubtedly contributed more than any other individual to establish the authority of Aristotle over the reason of mankind for so many ages. Yet his various illustrations have served, in the opinion of European critics, to darken rather than dissipate the ambiguities of his original, and have even led to the confident assertion that he was wholly unacquainted with the Greek language. [40] The Saracens gave an entirely new face to pharmacy and chemistry. They introduced a great variety of salutary medicaments into Europe. The Spanish Arabs, in particular, are commended by Sprengel above their brethren for their observations on the practice of medicine. [41] But whatever real knowledge they possessed was corrupted by their inveterate propensity for mystical and occult science. They too often exhausted both health and fortune in fruitless researches after the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone. Their medical prescriptions were regulated by the aspect of the stars. Their physics were debased by magic, their chemistry degenerated into alchemy, their astronomy into astrology. In the fruitful field of history, their success was even more equivocal. They seem to have been wholly destitute of the philosophical spirit, which gives life to this kind of composition. They were the disciples of fatalism and the subjects of a despotic government. Man appeared to them only in the contrasted aspects of slave and master. What could they know of the finer moral relations, or of the higher energies of the soul, which are developed only under free and beneficent institutions? Even could they have formed conceptions of these, how would they have dared to express them? Hence their histories are too often mere barren chronological details, or fulsome panegyrics on their princes, unenlivened by a single spark of philosophy or criticism. Although the Spanish Arabs are not entitled to the credit of having wrought any important revolution in intellectual or moral science, they are commended by a severe critic, as exhibiting in their writings "the germs of many theories, which have been reproduced as discoveries in later ages," [42] and they silently perfected several of those useful arts, which have had a sensible influence on the happiness and improvement of mankind. Algebra and the higher mathematics were taught in their schools, and thence diffused over Europe. The manufacture of paper, which, since the invention of printing, has contributed so essentially to the rapid circulation of knowledge, was derived through them. Casiri has discovered several manuscripts of cotton paper in the Escurial as early as 1009, and of linen paper of the date of 1106; [43] the origin of which latter fabric Tiraboschi has ascribed to an Italian of Trevigi, in the middle of the fourteenth century. [44] Lastly, the application of gunpowder to military science, which has wrought an equally important revolution, though of a more doubtful complexion, in the condition of society, was derived through the same channel. [45] The influence of the Spanish Arabs, however, is discernible not so much in the amount of knowledge, as in the impulse, which they communicated to the long-dormant energies of Europe. Their invasion was coeval with the commencement of that night of darkness, which divides the modern from the ancient world. The soil had been impoverished by long, assiduous cultivation. The Arabians came like a torrent, sweeping down and obliterating even the land-marks of former civilization, but bringing with it a fertilizing principle, which, as the waters receded, gave new life and loveliness to the landscape. The writings of the Saracens were translated and diffused throughout Europe. Their schools were visited by disciples, who, roused from their lethargy, caught somewhat of the generous enthusiasm of their masters; and a healthful action was given to the European intellect, which, however ill-directed at first, was thus prepared for the more judicious and successful efforts of later times. It is comparatively easy to determine the value of the scientific labors of a people, for truth is the same in all languages; but the laws of taste differ so widely in different nations, that it requires a nicer discrimination to pronounce fairly upon such works as are regulated by them. Nothing is more common than to see the poetry of the east condemned as tumid, over-refined, infected with meretricious ornament and conceits, and, in short, as every way contravening the principles of good taste. Few of the critics, who thus peremptorily condemn, are capable of reading a line of the original. The merit of poetry, however, consists so much in its literary execution, that a person, to pronounce upon it, should be intimately acquainted with the whole import of the idiom in which it is written. The style of poetry, indeed of all ornamental writing, whether prose or verse, in order to produce a proper effect, must be raised or relieved, as it were, upon the prevailing style of social intercourse. Even where this is highly figurative and impassioned, as with the Arabians, whose ordinary language is made up of metaphor, that of the poet must be still more so. Hence the tone of elegant literature varies so widely in different countries, even in those of Europe, which approach the nearest to each other in their principles of taste, that it would be found extremely difficult to effect a close translation of the most admired specimens of eloquence from the language of one nation into that of any other. A page of Boccaccio or Bembo, for instance, done into literal English, would have an air of intolerable artifice and verbiage. The choicest morsels of Massillon, Bossuet, or the rhetorical Thomas, would savor marvellously of bombast; and how could we in any degree keep pace with the magnificent march of the Castilian! Yet surely we are not to impugn the taste of all these nations, who attach much more importance, and have paid (at least this is true of the French and Italian) much greater attention to the mere beauties of literary finish, than English writers. Whatever may be the sins of the Arabians on this head, they are certainly not those of negligence. The Spanish Arabs, in particular, were noted for the purity and elegance of their idiom; insomuch that Casiri affects to determine the locality of an author by the superior refinement of his style. Their copious philological and rhetorical treatises, their arts of poetry, grammars, and rhyming dictionaries, show to what an excessive refinement they elaborated the art of composition. Academies, far more numerous than those of Italy, to which they subsequently served for a model, invited by their premiums frequent competitions in poetry and eloquence. To poetry, indeed, especially of the tender kind, the Spanish Arabs seem to have been as indiscriminately addicted as the Italians in the time of Petrarch; and there was scarcely a doctor in church or state, but at some time or other offered up his amorous incense on the altar of the muse. [46] With all this poetic feeling, however, the Arabs never availed themselves of the treasures of Grecian eloquence, which lay open before them. Not a poet or orator of any eminence in that language seems to have been translated by them. [47] The temperate tone of Attic composition appeared tame to the fervid conceptions of the east. Neither did they venture upon what in Europe are considered the higher walks of the art, the drama and the epic. [48] None of their writers in prose or verse show much attention to the development or dissection of character. Their inspiration exhaled in lyrical effusions, in elegies, epigrams, and idyls. They sometimes, moreover, like the Italians, employed verse as the vehicle of instruction in the grave and recondite sciences. The general character of their poetry is bold, florid, impassioned, richly colored with imagery, sparkling with conceits and metaphors, and occasionally breathing a deep tone of moral sensibility, as in some of the plaintive effusions ascribed by Conde to the royal poets of Cordova. The compositions of the golden age of the Abassides, and of the preceding period, do not seem to have been infected with the taint of exaggeration, so offensive to a European, which distinguishes the later productions in the decay of the empire. Whatever be thought of the influence of the Arabic on European literature in general, there can be no reasonable doubt that it has been considerable on the Provençal and the Castilian. In the latter especially, so far from being confined to the vocabulary, or to external forms of composition, it seems to have penetrated deep into its spirit, and is plainly discernible in that affectation of stateliness and Oriental hyberbole, which characterizes Spanish writers even at the present day; in the subtilties and conceits with which the ancient Castilian verse is so liberally bespangled; and in the relish for proverbs and prudential maxims, which is so general that it may be considered national. [49] A decided effect has been produced on the romantic literature of Europe by those tales of fairy enchantment, so characteristic of Oriental genius, and in which it seems to have revelled with uncontrolled delight. These tales, which furnished the principal diversion of the East, were imported by the Saracens into Spain; and we find the monarchs of Cordova solacing their leisure hours with listening to their _rawis_, or novelists, who sang to them. "Of ladye-love and war, romance, and knightly worth." [50] The same spirit, penetrating into France, stimulated the more sluggish inventions of the _trouvère_, and, at a later and more polished period, called forth the imperishable creations of the Italian muse. [51] It is unfortunate for the Arabians, that their literature should be locked up in a character and idiom so difficult of access to European scholars. Their wild, imaginative poetry, scarcely capable of transfusion into a foreign tongue, is made known to us only through the medium of bald prose translation, while their scientific treatises have been done into Latin with an inaccuracy, which, to make use of a pun of Casiri's, merits the name of perversions rather than versions of the originals. [52] How obviously inadequate, then, are our means of forming any just estimate of their literary merits! It is unfortunate for them, moreover, that the Turks, the only nation, which, from an identity of religion and government with the Arabs, as well as from its political consequence, would seem to represent them on the theatre of modern Europe, should be a race so degraded; one which, during the five centuries that it has been in possession of the finest climate and monuments of antiquity, has so seldom been quickened into a display of genius, or added so little of positive value to the literary treasures descended from its ancient masters. Yet this people, so sensual and sluggish, we are apt to confound in imagination with the sprightly, intellectual Arab. Both indeed have been subjected to the influence of the same degrading political and religious institutions, which on the Turks have produced the results naturally to have been expected; while the Arabians, on the other hand, exhibit the extraordinary phenomenon of a nation, under all these embarrassments, rising to a high degree of elegance and intellectual culture. The empire, which once embraced more than half of the ancient world, has now shrunk within its original limits; and the Bedouin wanders over his native desert as free, and almost as uncivilized, as before the coming of his apostle. The language, which was once spoken along the southern shores of the Mediterranean and the whole extent of the Indian Ocean, is broken up into a variety of discordant dialects. Darkness has again settled over those regions of Africa, which were illumined by the light of learning. The elegant dialect of the Koran is studied as a dead language, even in the birth-place of the prophet. Not a printing-press at this day is to be found throughout the whole Arabian Peninsula. Even in Spain, in Christian Spain, alas! the contrast is scarcely less degrading. A death-like torpor has succeeded to her former intellectual activity. Her cities are emptied of the population with which they teemed in the days of the Saracens. Her climate is as fair, but her fields no longer bloom with the same rich and variegated husbandry. Her most interesting monuments are those constructed by the Arabs; and the traveller, as he wanders amid their desolate, but beautiful ruins, ponders on the destinies of a people, whose very existence seems now to have been almost as fanciful as the magical creations in one of their own fairy tales. * * * * Notwithstanding the history of the Arabs is so intimately connected with that of the Spaniards, that it may be justly said to form the reverse side of it, and notwithstanding the amplitude of authentic documents in the Arabic tongue to be found in the public libraries, the Castilian writers, even the most eminent, until the latter half of the last century, with an insensibility which can be imputed to nothing else but a spirit of religious bigotry, have been content to derive their narratives exclusively from national authorities. A fire, which, occurred in the Escurial in 1671, having consumed more than three-quarters of the magnificent collection of eastern manuscripts which it contained, the Spanish government, taking some shame to itself, as it would appear, for its past supineness, caused a copious catalogue of the surviving volumes, to the number of 1850, to be compiled by the learned Casiri; and the result was his celebrated work, "Bibliotheca Arabico-Hispana Escurialensis," which appeared in the years 1760-70, and which would reflect credit from the splendor of its typographical execution on any press of the present day. This work, although censured by some later Orientalists as hasty and superficial, must ever be highly valued as affording the only complete index to the rich repertory of Arabian manuscripts in the Escurial, and for the ample evidence which it exhibits of the science and mental culture of the Spanish Arabs. Several other native scholars, among whom Andres and Masdeu may be particularly noticed, have made extensive researches into the literary history of this people. Still, their political history, so essential to a correct knowledge of the Spanish, was comparatively neglected, until Senor Conde, the late learned librarian of the Academy, who had given ample evidence of his Oriental learning in his version and illustrations of the Nubian Geographer, and a Dissertation on Arabic Coins published in the fifth volume of the Memoirs of the Royal Academy of History, compiled his work entitled "Historia de la Dominacion de los Arabes en España." The first volume appeared in 1820. Bat unhappily the death of its author, occurring in the autumn of the same year, prevented the completion of his design. The two remaining volumes, however, were printed in the course of that and the following year from his own manuscripts; and although their comparative meagreness and confused chronology betray the want of the same paternal hand, they contain much interesting information. The relation of the conquest of Granada, especially, with which the work concludes, exhibits some important particulars in a totally different point of view from that in which they had been presented by the principal Spanish historians. The first volume, which may be considered as having received the last touches of its author, embraces a circumstantial narrative of the great Saracen invasion, of the subsequent condition of Spain under the viceroys, and of the empire of the Omeyades; undoubtedly the most splendid portion of Arabian annals, but the one, unluckily, which has been most copiously illustrated in the popular work compiled by Cardonne from the Oriental manuscripts in the Royal Library at Paris. But as this author has followed the Spanish and the Oriental authorities, indiscriminately, no part of his book can be cited as a genuine Arabic version, except indeed the last sixty pages, comprising the conquest of Granada, which Cardonne professes in his Preface to have drawn exclusively from an Arabian manuscript. Conde, on the other hand, professes to have adhered to his originals with such scrupulous fidelity, that "the European reader may feel that he is perusing an Arabian author;" and certainly very strong internal evidence is afforded of the truth of this assertion, in the peculiar national and religious spirit which pervades the work, and in a certain florid gasconade of style, common with the Oriental writers. It is this fidelity that constitutes the peculiar value of Conde's narrative. It is the first time that the Arabians, at least those of Spain, the part of the nation which reached the highest degree of refinement, have been allowed to speak for themselves. The history, or rather tissue of histories, embodied in the translation, is certainly conceived in no very philosophical spirit, and contains, as might be expected from an Asiatic pen, little for the edification of a European reader on subjects of policy and government. The narrative is, moreover, encumbered with frivolous details and a barren muster-roll of names and titles, which would better become a genealogical table than a history. But, with every deduction, it must be allowed to exhibit a sufficiently clear view of the intricate conflicting relations of the petty principalities, which swarmed over the Peninsula; and to furnish abundant evidence of a wide-spread intellectual improvement amid all the horrors of anarchy and a ferocious despotism. The work has already been translated, or rather paraphrased, into French. The necessity of an English version will doubtless be in a great degree superseded by the History of the Spanish Arabs, preparing for the Cabinet Cyclopaedia, by Mr. Southey,--a writer, with whom few Castilian scholars will be willing to compete, even on their own ground; and who is, happily, not exposed to the national or religious prejudices, which can interfere with his rendering perfect justice to his subject. FOOTNOTES [1] See Introduction, Section I. Note 2, of this History. [2] The Koran, in addition to the repeated assurances of Paradise to the martyr who falls in battle, contains the regulations of a precise military code. Military service in some shape or other is exacted from all. The terms to be prescribed to the enemy and the vanquished, the division of the spoil, the seasons of lawful truce, the conditions on which the comparatively small number of exempts are permitted to remain at home, are accurately defined. (Sale's Koran, chap. 2, 8, 9, et alibi.) When the _algihed_, or Mahometan crusade, which, in its general design and immunities, bore a close resemblance to the Christian, was preached in the mosque, every true believer was bound to repair to the standard of his chief. "The holy war," says one of the early Saracen generals, "is the ladder of Paradise. The Apostle of God styled himself the son of the sword. He loved to repose in the shadow of banners and on the field of battle." [3] The successors, caliphs or vicars, as they were styled, of Mahomet, represented both his spiritual and temporal authority. Their office involved almost equally ecclesiastical and military functions. It was their duty to lead the army in battle, and on the pilgrimage to Mecca. They were to preach a sermon, and offer up public prayers in the mosques every Friday. Many of their prerogatives resemble those assumed anciently by the popes. They conferred investitures on the Moslem princes by the symbol of a ring, a sword, or a standard. They complimented them with the titles of "defender of the faith," "column of religion," and the like. The proudest potentate held the bridle of their mules, and paid his homage by touching their threshold with his forehead. The authority of the caliphs was in this manner founded on opinion no less than on power; and their ordinances, however frivolous or iniquitous in themselves, being enforced, as it were, by a divine sanction, became laws which it was sacrilege to disobey. See D'Herbelot, Bibliothèque Orientale, (La Haye, 1777-9,) voce _Khalifah_. [4] The character of the Arabs before the introduction of Islam, like that of most rude nations, is to be gathered from their national songs and romances. The poems suspended at Mecca, familiar to us in the elegant version of Sir William Jones, and still more, the recent translation of "Antar," a composition indeed of the age of Al Raschid, but wholly devoted to the primitive Bedouins, present us with a lively picture of their peculiar habits, which, notwithstanding the influence of a temporary civilization, may be thought to bear great resemblance to those of their descendants at the present day. [5] Startling as it may be, there is scarcely a vestige of any of the particulars, circumstantially narrated by the national historians (Mariana, Zurita, Abarca, Moret, etc.) as the immediate causes of the subversion of Spain, to be found in the chronicles of the period. No intimation of the persecution, or of the treason, of the two sons of Witiza is to be met with in any Spanish writer, as far as I know, until nearly two centuries after the conquest; none earlier than this, of the defection of Archbishop Oppas, during the fatal conflict near Xerez; and none of the tragical amours of Roderic and the revenge of count Julian, before the writers of the thirteenth century. Nothing indeed can be more jejune than the original narratives of the invasion. The continuation of the Chronicon del Biclarense, and the Chronicon de Isidoro Pacense or de Beja, which are contained in the voluminous collection of Florez, (España Sagrada, tom. vi. and viii.) afford the only histories contemporary with the event. Conde is mistaken in his assertion (Dominacion de los Arabes, Pról. p. vii.), that the work of Isidoro de Beja was the only narrative written during that period. Spain had not the pen of a Bede or an Eginhart to describe the memorable catastrophe. But the few and meagre touches of the contemporary chroniclers have left ample scope for conjectural history, which has been most industriously improved. The reports, according to Conde, (Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. i. p. 36,) greedily circulated among the Saracens, of the magnificence and general prosperity of the Gothic monarchy, may sufficiently account for its invasion by an enemy flushed with uninterrupted conquests, and whose fanatical ambition was well illustrated by one of their own generals, who, on reaching the western extremity of Africa, plunged his horse into the Atlantic, and sighed for other shores on which to plant the banners of Islam. See Cardonne, Histoire de l'Afrique et de l'Espagne sous la Domination des Arabes, (Paris, 1765,) tom. i. p. 37. [6] The laborious diligence of Masdeu may be thought to have settled the epoch, about which so much learned dust has been raised. The fourteenth volume of his Historia Crítica de España y de la Cultura Española (Madrid, 1783-1805) contains an accurate table, by which the minutest dates of the Mahometan lunar year are adjusted by those of the Christian era. The fall of Roderic on the field of battle is attested by both the domestic chroniclers of that period, as well as by the Saracens. (Incerti Auctoris Additio ad Joannem Biclarensem, apud Florez, España Sagrada, tom. vi. p. 430.--Isidori Pacensis Episcopi Chronicon, apud Florez, España Sagrada, tom. viii. p. 290.) The tales of the ivory and marble chariot, of the gallant steed Orelia and magnificent vestments of Roderic, discovered after the fight on the banks of the Guadalete, of his probable escape and subsequent seclusion among the mountains of Portugal, which have been thought worthy of Spanish history, have found a much more appropriate place in their romantic national ballads, as well as in the more elaborate productions of Scott and Southey. [7] "Whatever curses," says an eye-witness, whose meagre diction is quickened on this occasion into something like sublimity, "whatever curses were denounced by the prophets of old against Jerusalem, whatever fell upon ancient Babylon, whatever miseries Rome inflicted upon the glorious company of the martyrs, all these were visited upon the once happy and prosperous, but now desolated Spain." Pacensis Chronicon, apud Florez, España Sagrada, tom. viii. p. 292. [8] The frequency of this alliance may be inferred from an extraordinary, though, doubtless, extravagant statement cited by Zurita. The ambassadors of James II., of Aragon, in 1311, represented to the sovereign pontiff, Clement V., that, of the 200,000 souls, which then composed the population of Granada, there were not more than 500 of pure Moorish descent. Anales, tom. iv. fol. 314. [9] The famous persecutions of Cordova under the reigns of Abderrahman II. and his son, which, to judge from the tone of Castilian writers, might vie with those of Nero and Diocletian, are admitted by Morales (Obras, tom. x. p. 74) to have occasioned the destruction of only forty individuals. Most of these unhappy fanatics solicited the crown of martyrdom by an open violation of the Mahometan laws and usages. The details are given by Florez, in the tenth volume of his collection. [10] Bleda, Corónica de los Moros de España, (Valencia, 1618,) lib. 2, cap. 16, 17.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. i. pp. 83 et seq. 179.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, Pról., p. vii. and tom. i. pp. 29-54, 75, 87.--Morales, Obras, tom. vi. pp. 407-417; tom. vii. pp. 262- 264.--Florez, España Sagrada, tom. x. pp. 237-270.--Fuero Juzgo, Int. p. 40. [11] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, part. 2, cap. 1-46. [12] Ibid., ubi supra.--Masdeu, Historia Crítica, tom. xiii. pp. 178, 187. [13] The same taste is noticed at the present day, by a traveller, whose pictures glow with the warm colors of the east. "Aussi dès que vous approchez, en Europe ou en Asie, d'une terre possédée par les Musulmans, vous la reconnaissez de loin au riche et sombre voile de verdure qui flotte gracieusement sur elle:--des arbres pour s'asseoir à leur ombre, des fontaines jaillissantes pour rêver à leur bruit, du silence et des mosquées aux légers minarets, s'élevant à chaque pas du sein d'une terre pieuse." Lamartine, Voyage en Orient, tome i. p. 172. [14] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. i. pp. 199, 265, 284, 285, 417, 446, 447, et alibi.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. i. pp. 227-230 et seq. [15] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. i. pp. 211, 212, 226.-- Swinburne, Travels through Spain, (London, 1787,) let. 35.--Xerif Aledris, conocido por El Nubiense, Descripcion de España, con Traduccion y Notas de Conde, (Madrid, 1799,) pp. 161, 162.--Morales, Obras, tom. x. p. 61.-- Chénier, Recherches Historiques sur les Maures, et Histoire de l'Empire de Maroc, (Paris, 1787,) tom. ii. p. 312.--Laborde, Itinéraire, tome iii. p. 226. [16] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. i. pp 214, 228, 270, 611.-- Masdeu, Historia Crítica, tom. xiii. p. 118.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. i. pp. 338-343.--Casiri quotes from an Arabic historian the conditions on which Abderrahman I. proffered his alliance to the Christian princes of Spain, viz. the annual tribute of 10,000 ounces of gold, 10,000 pounds of silver, 10,000 horses, etc., etc. The absurdity of this story, inconsiderately repeated by historians, if any argument were necessary to prove it, becomes sufficiently manifest from the fact, that the instrument is dated in the 142d year of the Hegira, being a little more than fifty years after the conquest. See Bibliotheca Arabico-Hispana Escurialensis, (Matriti, 1760,) tom. ii. p. 104. [17] Hist. Naturalis, lib. 33, cap. 4. [18] Introduction à l'Histoire Naturelle de l'Espagne, traduite par Flavigny, (Paris, 1776,) p. 411. [19] See a sensible essay by the Abbé Correa da Serra on the husbandry of the Spanish Arabs, contained in tom. i. of Archives Littéraires de l'Europe, (Paris, 1804.)--Masdeu, Historia Crítica, tom. xiii. pp. 115, 117, 127, 131.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. i. cap. 44.--Casiri, Bibliotheca Escurialensis, tom. i. p. 338. An absurd story has been transcribed from Cardonne, with little hesitation, by almost every succeeding writer upon this subject. According to him, (Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. i. p. 338,) "the banks of the Guadalquivir were lined with no less than twelve thousand villages and hamlets." The length of the river, not exceeding three hundred miles, would scarcely afford room for the same number of farm-houses. Conde's version of the Arabic passage represents twelve thousand hamlets, farms, and castles, to have "been scattered over the regions watered by the Gaudalquivir;" indicating by this indefinite statement nothing more than the extreme populousness of the province of Andalusia. [20] Casiri, Bibliotheca Escurialensis, tom. ii. pp. 38, 202.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, part. 2, cap. 88. [21] Storia della Letteratura Italiana, (Roma, 1782-97,) tom. iii. p. 231.--Turner, History of the Anglo-Saxons, (London, 1820,) vol. iii. p. 137.--Andres, Dell' Origine, de' Progressi e dello Stato Attuale d'Ogni Letteratura, (Venezia, 1783,) part. 1, cap. 8, 9.--Casiri, Bibliotheca Escurialensis, tom. ii. p. 149.--Masdeu, Historia Critica, tom. xiii. pp. 165, 171.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, part. 2, cap. 93.--Among the accomplished women of this period, Valadata, the daughter of the caliph Mahomet, is celebrated as having frequently carried away the palm of eloquence in her discussions with the most learned academicians. Others again, with an intrepidity that might shame the degeneracy of a modern _blue_, plunged boldly into the studies of philosophy, history, and jurisprudence. [22] Garibay, Compendio, lib. 39, cap. 3. [23] Zurita, Anales, lib. 20, cap. 42. [24] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 169. [25] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. ii. p. 147.--Casiri, Bibliotheca Escurialensis, tom. ii. pp. 248 et seq.--Pedraza, Antiguedad y Excelencias de Granada, (Madrid, 1608,) lib. 1.--Pedraza has collected the various etymologies of the term _Granada_, which some writers have traced to the fact of the city having been the spot where the _pomegranate_ was first introduced from Africa; others to the large quantity of _grain_ in which its vega abounded; others again to the resemblance which the city, divided into two hills thickly sprinkled with houses, bore to a half-opened pomegranate. (Lib. 2, cap. 17.) The arms of the city, which were in part composed of a pomegranate, would seem to favor the derivation of its name from that of the fruit. [26] Pedraza, Antiguedad de Granada, fol. 101.--Denina, Delle Rivoluzioni d'Italia, (Venezia, 1816,) Capmany y Montpalau, Memorias Históricas sobre la Marina, Comercio, y Artes de Barcelona, (Madrid, 1779-92,) tom. iii. p. 218; tom. iv. pp. 67 et seq.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 26.--The ambassador of the emperor Frederic III., on his passage to the court of Lisbon in the middle of the fifteenth century, contrasts the superior cultivation, as well as general civilization, of Granada at this period with that of the other countries of Europe through which he had travelled. Sismondi, Histoire des Républiques Italiennes du Moyen-Age, (Paris, 1818,) tom. ix. p. 405. [27] Casiri, Bibliotheca Escurialensis, tom. ii. pp. 250-258.--The fifth volume of the royal Spanish Academy of History contains an erudite essay by Conde on Arabic money, principally with reference to that coined in Spain, pp. 225-315. [28] A specification of a royal donative in that day may serve to show the martial spirit of the age. In one of these, made by the king of Granada to the Castilian sovereign, we find twenty noble steeds of the royal stud, reared on the banks of the Xenil, with superb caparisons, and the same number of scimitars richly garnished with gold and jewels; and, in another, mixed up with perfumes and cloth of gold, we meet with a litter of tame lions. (Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. pp. 163, 183.) This latter symbol of royalty appears to have been deemed peculiarly appropriate to the kings of Leon. Ferreras informs us that the ambassadors from France at the Castilian court, in 1434, were received by John II. with a full-grown domesticated lion crouching at his feet. (Hist. d'Espagne, tom. vi. p. 401.) The same taste appears still to exist in Turkey. Dr. Clarke, in his visit to Constantinople, met with one of these terrific pets, who used to follow his master, Hassan Pacha, about like a dog. [29] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 28.--Henriquez del Castillo (Crónica, cap. 138,) gives an account of an intended duel between two Castilian nobles, in the presence of the king of Granada, as late as 1470. One of the parties, Don Alfonso de Aguilar, failing to keep his engagement, the other rode round the lists in triumph, with his adversary's portrait contemptuously fastened to the tail of his horse. [30] It must be admitted, that these ballads, as far as facts are concerned, are too inexact to furnish other than a very slippery foundation for history. The most beautiful portion perhaps of the Moorish ballads, for example, is taken up with the feuds of the Abencerrages in the latter days of Granada. Yet this family, whose romantic story is still repeated to the traveller amid the ruins of the Alhambra, is scarcely noticed, as far as I am aware, by contemporary writers, foreign or domestic, and would seem to owe its chief celebrity to the apocryphal version of Cinés Perez de Hyta, whose "Milesian tales," according to the severe sentence of Nic. Antonio, "are fit only to amuse the lazy and the listless." (Bibliotheca Nova, tom. i. p. 536.) But, although the Spanish ballads are not entitled to the credit of strict historical documents, they may yet perhaps be received in evidence of the prevailing character of the social relations of the age; a remark indeed predicable of most works of fiction, written by authors contemporary with the events they describe, and more especially so of that popular minstrelsy, which, emanating from a simple, uncorrupted class, is less likely to swerve from truth, than more ostentatious works of art. The long cohabitation of the Saracens with the Christians, (full evidence of which is afforded by Capmany, (Mem. de Barcelona, tom. iv. Apend. no. 11,) who quotes a document from the public archives of Catalonia, showing the great number of Saracens residing in Aragon even in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the most flourishing period of the Granadian empire,) had enabled many of them confessedly to speak and write the Spanish language with purity and elegance. Some of the graceful little songs, which are still chanted by the peasantry of Spain in their dances, to the accompaniment of the castanet, are referred by a competent critic (Conde, De la Poesía Oriental, MS.) to an Arabian origin. There can be little hazard, therefore, in imputing much of this peculiar minstrelsy to the Arabians themselves, the contemporaries, and perhaps the eye- witnesses, of the events they celebrate. [31] Casiri (Bibliotheca Escurialensis, tom. ii. p. 259) has transcribed a passage from an Arabian author of the fourteenth century, inveighing bitterly against the luxury of the Moorish ladies, their gorgeous apparel and habits of expense, "amounting almost to insanity," in a tone which may remind one of the similar philippic by his contemporary Dante, against his fair countrywomen of Florence.--Two ordinances of a king of Granada, cited by Conde in his History, prescribed the separation of the women from the men in the mosques; and prohibit their attendance on certain festivals, without the protection of their husbands or some near relative.--Their _femmes savantes_, as we have seen, were in the habit of conferring freely with men of letters, and of assisting in person at the academical _séances_.--And lastly, the frescoes alluded to in the text represent the presence of females at the tournaments, and the fortunate knight receiving the palm of victory from their hands. [32] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. i. p. 340; tom. iii. p. 119. [33] Casiri, on Arabian authority, computes it at 200,000 men. Bibliotheca Escurialensis, tom. i. p. 338. [34] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, p. 250. [35] Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. p. 169.--These ruined fortifications still thickly stud the border territories of Granada; and many an Andalusian mill, along the banks of the Guadayra and Guadalquivir, retains its battlemented tower, which served for the defence of its inmates against the forays of the enemy. [36] D'Herbelot, (Bib. Orientale, tom. i. p. 630,) among other authentic traditions of Mahomet, quotes one as indicating his encouragement of letters, viz. "That the ink of the doctors and the blood of the martyrs are of equal price." M. OElsner (Des Effets de la Religion de Mohammed, Paris, 1810) has cited several others of the same liberal import. But such traditions cannot be received in evidence of the original doctrine of the prophet. They are rejected as apocryphal by the Persians and the whole sect of the Shiites, and are entitled to little weight with a European. [37] When the caliph Al Mamon encouraged, by his example as well as patronage, a more enlightened policy, he was accused by the more orthodox Mussulmans of attempting to subvert the principles of their religion. See Pococke, Spec. Hist. Arabum, (Oxon. 1650,) p. 166. [38] Andres, Letteratura, part. 1, cap. 8, 10.--Casiri, Bibliotheca Escurialensis, tom. ii. pp. 71, 251, et passim. [39] Casiri mentions one of these universal geniuses, who published no less than a thousand and fifty treatises on the various topics of Ethics, History, Law, Medicine, etc.! Bibliotheca Escurialensis, tom. ii. p. 107. --See also tom. i. p. 370; tom. ii. p. 71 et alibi.--Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 22.--D'Herbelot, Bib. Orientale, voce _Tarikh_.--Masdeu, Historia Crítica, tom. xiii. pp. 203, 205.--Andres, Letteratura, part. 1, cap. 8. [40] Consult the sensible, though perhaps severe, remarks of Degerando on Arabian science. (Hist. de la Philosophie, tom. iv. cap. 24.)--The reader may also peruse with advantage a disquisition on Arabian metaphysics in Turner's History of England, (vol. iv. pp. 405-449.--Brucker, Hist. Philosophiae, tom. in. p. 105.)--Ludovicus Vives seems to have been the author of the imputation in the text. (Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Vetus, tom. ii. p. 394.) Averroes translated some of the philosophical works of Aristotle from the Greek into Arabic; a Latin version of which translation was afterwards made. Though D'Herbelot is mistaken (Bib. Orientale, art. _Roschd_) in saying that Averroes was the first who translated Aristotle into Arabic; as this had been done two centuries before, at least, by Honain and others in the ninth century, (see Casiri, Bibliotheca Escurialensis, tom. i. p. 304,) and Bayle has shown that a Latin version of the Stagirite was used by the Europeans before the alleged period. See art. _Averroes_. [41] Sprengel, Histoire de la Médecine, traduite par Jourdan, (Paris, 1815,) tom. ii. pp. 263 et seq. [42] Degerando, Hist. de la Philosophie, tom. iv. ubi supra. [43] Bibliotheca Escurialensis, tom. ii. p. 9.--Andres, Letteratura, part. 1, cap. 10. [44] Letteratura Italiana, tom. v. p. 87. [45] The battle of Crécy furnishes the earliest instance on record of the use of artillery by the European Christians; although Du Cange, among several examples which he enumerates, has traced a distinct notice of its existence as far back as 1338. (Glossarium ad Scriptores Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis, (Paris, 1739,) and Supplément, (Paris, 1766,) voce _Bombarda_.) The history of the Spanish Arabs carries it to a much earlier period. It was employed by the Moorish king of Granada at the siege of Baza, in 1312 and 1325. (Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 18.--Casiri, Bibliotheca Escurialensis, tom. ii. p. 7.) It is distinctly noticed in an Arabian treatise as ancient as 1249; and, finally, Casiri quotes a passage from a Spanish author at the close of the eleventh Century, (whose MS., according to Nic. Antonio, though familiar to scholars, lies still entombed in the dust of libraries,) which describes the use of artillery in a naval engagement of that period between the Moors of Tunis and of Seville. Casiri, Bibliotheca Escurialensis, tom. ii. p. 8.--Nic, Antonio, Bibliotheca Vetus, tom. ii. p. 12. [46] Petrarch complains, in one of his letters from the country, that "jurisconsults and divines, nay his own valet, had taken to rhyming; and he was afraid the very cattle might begin to low in verse;" apud De Sade, Mémoires pour la Vie de Pétrarque, tom. iii. p. 243. [47] Andres, Letteratura, part. 1, cap. 11.--Yet this popular assertion is contradicted by Reinesius, who states, that both Homer and Pindar were translated into Arabic by the middle of the eighth century. See Fabricius, Bibliotheca Graeca, (Hamb. 1712-38,) tom. xii. p. 753. [48] Sir William Jones, Traité sur la Poésie Orientale, sec. 2.--Sismondi says that Sir W. Jones is mistaken in citing the history of Timour by Ebn. Arabschah, as an Arabic epic. (Littérature du Midi, tom. i. p. 57.) It is Sismondi who is mistaken, since the English critic states that the Arabs have no heroic poem, and that this poetical prose history is not accounted such even by the Arabs themselves. [49] It would require much more learning than I am fortified with, to enter into the merits of the question, which has been raised respecting the probable influence of the Arabian on the literature of Europe. A. V. Schlegel, in a work of little bulk, but much value, in refuting with his usual vivacity the extravagant theory of Andres, has been led to conclusions of an opposite nature, which may be thought perhaps scarcely less extravagant. (Observations sur la Langue et la Littérature Provençales, p. 64.) It must indeed seem highly improbable that the Saracens, who, during the Middle Ages, were so far superior in science and literary culture to the Europeans, could have resided so long in immediate contact with them, and in those very countries indeed which gave birth to the most cultivated poetry of that period, without exerting some perceptible influence upon it. Be this as it may, its influence on the Castilian cannot reasonably be disputed. This has been briefly traced by Conde in an "Essay on Oriental Poetry," _Poesia Oriental_, whose publication he anticipates in the Preface to his "History of the Spanish Arabs," but which still remains in manuscript. (The copy I have used is in the library of Mr. George Ticknor.) He professes in this work to discern in the earlier Castilian poetry, in the Cid, the Alexander, in Berceo's, the arch-priest of Hita's, and others of similar antiquity, most of the peculiarities and varieties of Arabian verse; the same cadences and number of syllables, the same intermixture of assonances and consonances, the double hemistich and prolonged repetition of the final rhyme. From the same source he derives much of the earlier rural minstrelsy of Spain, as well as the measures of its romances and seguidillas; and in the Preface to his History, he has ventured on the bold assertion, that the Castilian owes so much of its vocabulary to the Arabic, that it may be almost accounted a dialect of the latter. Conde's criticisms, however, must be quoted with reserve. His habitual studies had given him such a keen relish for Oriental literature, that he was, in a manner, _denaturalized_ from his own. [50] Byron's beautiful line may seem almost a version of Conde's Spanish text, "sucesos de armas y de amores con muy estraños lances y en elegante estilo."--Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. i. p. 457. [51] Sismondi, in his Littérature du Midi, (tom. i. pp. 267 et seq.), and more fully in his Républiques Italiennes, (tom. xvi. pp. 448 et seq.), derives the jealousy of the sex, the ideas of honor, and the deadly spirit of revenge, which distinguished the southern nations of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from the Arabians. Whatever be thought of the jealousy of the sex, it might have been supposed that the principles of honor and the spirit of revenge might, without seeking further, find abundant precedent in the feudal habits and institutions of our European ancestors. [52] "Quas _perversivnes_ potius, quam _versiones_ meritó dixeris." Bibliotheca Escurialensis, tom. i. p. 266. CHAPTER IX. WAR OF GRANADA.--SURPRISE OF ZAHARA.--CAPTURE OF ALHAMA. 1481-1482. Zahara Surprised by the Moors.--Marquis of Cadiz.--His Expedition against Alhama.--Valor of the Citizens.--Desperate Struggle.--Fall of Alhama.-- Consternation of the Moors.--Vigorous Measures of the Queen. No sooner had Ferdinand and Isabella restored internal tranquillity to their dominions, and made the strength effective which had been acquired by their union under one government, than they turned their eyes to those fair regions of the Peninsula, over which the Moslem crescent had reigned triumphant for nearly eight centuries. Fortunately, an act of aggression on the part of the Moors furnished a pretext for entering on their plan of conquest, at the moment when it was ripe for execution. Aben Ismael, who had ruled in Granada during the latter part of John the Second's reign, and the commencement of Henry the Fourth's, had been partly indebted for his throne to the former monarch; and sentiments of gratitude, combined with a naturally amiable disposition, had led him to foster as amicable relations with the Christian princes, as the jealousy of two nations, that might be considered the natural enemies of each other, would permit; so that, notwithstanding an occasional border foray, or the capture of a frontier fortress, such a correspondence was maintained between the two kingdoms, that the nobles of Castile frequently resorted to the court of Granada, where, forgetting their ancient feuds, they mingled with the Moorish cavaliers in the generous pastimes of chivalry. Muley Abul Hacen, who succeeded his father in 1466, was of a very different temperament. His fiery character prompted him, when very young, to violate the truce by an unprovoked inroad into Andalusia; and, although after his accession domestic troubles occupied him too closely to allow leisure for foreign war, he still cherished in secret the same feelings of animosity against the Christians. When, in 1476, the Spanish sovereigns required as the condition of a renewal of the truce, which he solicited, the payment of the annual tribute imposed on his predecessors, he proudly replied that "the mints of Granada coined no longer gold, but steel." His subsequent conduct did not belie the spirit of this Spartan answer. [1] At length, towards the close of the year 1481, the storm which had been so long gathering burst upon Zahara, a small fortified town on the frontier of Andalusia, crowning a lofty eminence, washed at its base by the river Guadalete, which from its position seemed almost inaccessible. The garrison, trusting to these natural defences, suffered itself to be surprised on the night of the 20th of December, by the Moorish monarch; who, scaling the walls under favor of a furious tempest, which prevented his approach from being readily heard, put to the sword such of the guard as offered resistance, and swept away the whole population of the place, men, women, and children, in slavery to Granada. The intelligence of this disaster caused deep mortification to the Spanish sovereigns, especially to Ferdinand, by whose grandfather Zahara had been recovered from the Moors. Measures were accordingly taken for strengthening the whole line of frontier, and the utmost vigilance was exerted to detect some vulnerable point of the enemy, on which retaliation might be successfully inflicted. Neither were the tidings of their own successes welcomed, with the joy that might have been expected, by the people of Granada. The prognostics, it was said, afforded by the appearance of the heavens, boded no good. More sure prognostics were afforded in the judgments of thinking men, who deprecated the temerity of awakening the wrath of a vindictive and powerful enemy, "Woe is me!" exclaimed an ancient Alfaki, on quitting the hall of audience, "the ruins of Zahara will fall on our own heads; the days of the Moslem empire in Spain are now numbered!" [2] It was not long before the desired opportunity for retaliation presented itself to the Spaniards. One Juan de Ortega, a captain of _escaladores_, or sealers, so denominated from the peculiar service in which they were employed in besieging cities, who had acquired some reputation under John the Second, in the wars of Roussillon, reported to Diego de Merlo, assistant of Seville, that the fortress of Albania, situated in the heart of the Moorish territories, was so negligently guarded, that it might be easily carried by an enemy, who had skill enough to approach it. The fortress, as well as the city of the same name, which it commanded, was built, like many others in that turbulent period, along the crest of a rocky eminence, encompassed by a river at its base, and, from its natural advantages, might be deemed impregnable. This strength of position, by rendering all other precautions apparently superfluous, lulled its defenders into a security like that which had proved so fatal to Zahara. Alhama, as this Arabic name implies, was famous for its baths, whose annual rents are said to have amounted to five hundred thousand ducats. The monarchs of Granada, indulging the taste common to the people of the east, used to frequent this place, with their court, to refresh themselves with its delicious waters, so that Alhama became embellished with all the magnificence of a royal residence. The place was still further enriched by its being the _dépôt_ of the public taxes on land, which constituted a principal branch of the revenue, and by its various manufactures of cloth, for which its inhabitants were celebrated throughout the kingdom of Granada. [3] Diego de Merlo, although struck with the advantages of this conquest, was not insensible to the difficulties with which it would be attended; since Alhama was sheltered under the very wings of Granada, from which it lay scarcely eight leagues distant, and could be reached only by traversing the most populous portion of the Moorish territory, or by surmounting a precipitous sierra, or chain of mountains, which screened it on the north. Without delay, however, he communicated the information which he had received to Don Rodrigo Ponce de Leon, marquis of Cadiz, as the person best fitted by his capacity and courage for such an enterprise. This nobleman, who had succeeded his father, the count of Arcos, in 1469, as head of the great house of Ponce de Leon, was at this period about thirty- nine years of age. Although a younger and illegitimate son, he had been preferred to the succession in consequence of the extraordinary promise which his early youth exhibited. When scarcely seventeen years old, he achieved a victory over the Moors, accompanied with a signal display of personal prowess. [4] Later in life, he formed a connection with the daughter of the marquis of Villena, the factious minister of Henry the Fourth, through whose influence he was raised to the dignity of marquis of Cadiz. This alliance attached him to the fortunes of Henry, in his disputes with his brother Alfonso, and subsequently with Isabella, on whose accession, of course, Don Rodrigo looked with no friendly eye. He did not, however, engage in any overt act of resistance, but occupied himself with prosecuting an hereditary feud which he had revived with the duke of Medina Sidonia, the head of the Guzmans; a family, which from ancient times had divided with his own the great interests of Andalusia. The pertinacity with which this feud was conducted, and the desolation which it carried not only into Seville, but into every quarter of the province, have been noticed in the preceding pages. The vigorous administration of Isabella repressed these disorders, and after abridging the overgrown power of the two nobles, effected an apparent (it was only apparent) reconciliation between them. The fiery spirit of the marquis of Cadiz, no longer allowed to escape in domestic broil, urged him to seek distinction in more honorable warfare; and at this moment he lay in his castle at Arcos, looking with a watchful eye over the borders, and waiting, like a lion in ambush, the moment when he could spring upon his victim. Without hesitation, therefore, he assumed the enterprise proposed by Diego de Merlo, imparting his purpose to Don Pedro Henriquez, _adelantado_ of Andalusia, a relative of Ferdinand, and to the alcaydes of two or three neighboring fortresses. With the assistance of these friends he assembled a force which, including those who marched under the banner of Seville, amounted to two thousand five hundred horse and three thousand foot. His own town of Marchena was appointed as the place of rendezvous. The proposed route lay by the way of Antequera, across the wild sierras of Alzerifa. The mountain passes, sufficiently difficult at a season when their numerous ravines were choked up by the winter torrents, were rendered still more formidable by being traversed in the darkness of night; for the party, in order to conceal their movements, lay by during the day. Leaving their baggage on the banks of the Yeguas, that they might move forward with greater celerity, the whole body at length arrived, after a rapid and most painful inarch, on the third night from their departure, in a deep valley about half a league from Alhama. Here the marquis first revealed the real object of the expedition to his soldiers, who, little dreaming of anything beyond a mere border inroad, were transported with joy at the prospect of the rich booty so nearly within their grasp. [5] The next morning, being the 28th of February, a small party was detached, about two hours before dawn, under the command of John de Ortega, for the purpose of scaling the citadel, while the main body moved forward more leisurely under the marquis of Cadiz, in order to support them. The night was dark and tempestuous, circumstances which favored their approach in the same manner as with the Moors at Zahara. After ascending the rocky heights which were crowned by the citadel, the ladders were silently placed against the walls, and Ortega, followed by about thirty others, succeeded in gaining the battlements unobserved. A sentinel, who was found sleeping on his post, they at once despatched, and, proceeding cautiously forward to the guard-room, put the whole of the little garrison to the sword, after the short and ineffectual resistance that could be opposed by men suddenly roused from slumber. The city in the mean time was alarmed, but it was too late; the citadel was taken; and the outer gates, which opened into the country, being thrown open, the marquis of Cadiz entered with trumpet sounding and banner flying, at the head of his army, and took possession of the fortress. [6] After allowing the refreshment necessary to the exhausted spirits of his soldiers, the marquis resolved to sally forth at once upon the town, before its inhabitants cpuld muster in sufficient force to oppose him. But the citizens of Alhama, showing a resolution rather to have been expected from men trained in a camp, than from peaceful burghers of a manufacturing town, had sprung to arms at the first alarm, and, gathering in the narrow street on which the portal of the castle opened, so completely commanded it with their arquebuses and crossbows, that the Spaniards, after an ineffectual attempt to force a passage, were compelled to recoil upon their defences, amid showers of bolts and balls which occasioned the loss, among others, of two of their principal alcaydes. A council of war was then called, in which it was even advised by some, that the fortress, after having been dismantled, should be abandoned as incapable of defence against the citizens on the one hand, and the succors which might be expected speedily to arrive from Granada, on the other. But this counsel was rejected with indignation by the marquis of Cadiz, whose fiery spirit rose with the occasion; indeed, it was not very palatable to most of his followers, whose cupidity was more than ever inflamed by the sight of the rich spoil, which, after so many fatigues, now lay at their feet. It was accordingly resolved to demolish part of the fortifications which looked towards the town, and at all hazards to force a passage into it. This resolution was at once put into execution; and the marquis, throwing himself into the breach thus made, at the head of his men-at- arms, and shouting his war-cry of "St. James and the Virgin," precipitated himself into the thickest of the enemy. Others of the Spaniards, running along the out-works contiguous to the buildings of the city, leaped into the street, and joined their companions there, while others again sallied from the gates, now opened for the second time. [7] The Moors, unshaken by the fury of this assault, received the assailants with brisk and well-directed volleys of shot and arrows; while the women and children, thronging the roofs and balconies of the houses, discharged on their heads boiling oil, pitch, and missiles of every description. But the weapons of the Moors glanced comparatively harmless from the mailed armor of the Spaniards, while their own bodies, loosely arrayed in such habiliments as they could throw over them in the confusion of the night, presented a fatal mark to their enemies. Still they continued to maintain a stout resistance, checking the progress of the Spaniards by barricades of timber hastily thrown across the streets; and, as their intrenchments were forced one after another, they disputed every inch of ground with the desperation of men who fought for life, fortune, liberty, all that was most dear to them. The contest hardly slackened till the close of day, while the kennels literally ran with blood, and every avenue was choked up with the bodies of the slain. At length, however, Spanish valor proved triumphant in every quarter, except where a small and desperate remnant of the Moors, having gathered their wives and children around them, retreated as a last resort into a large mosque near the walls of the city, from which they kept up a galling fire on the close ranks of the Christians. The latter, after enduring some loss, succeeded in sheltering themselves so effectually under a roof or canopy constructed of their own shields, in the manner practised in war previous to the exclusive use of fire-arms, that they were enabled to approach so near the mosque, as to set fire to its doors; when its tenants, menaced with suffocation, made a desperate sally, in which many perished, and the remainder surrendered at discretion. The prisoners thus made were all massacred on the spot, without distinction, of sex or age, according to the Saracen accounts. But the Castilian writers make no mention of this; and, as the appetites of the Spaniards were not yet stimulated by that love of carnage, which they afterwards displayed in their American wars, and which was repugnant to the chivalrous spirit with which their contests with the Moslems were usually conducted, we may be justified in regarding it as an invention of the enemy. [8] Alhama was now delivered up to the sack of the soldiery, and rich indeed was the booty which fell into their hands,--gold and silver plate, pearls, jewels, fine silks and cloths, curious and costly furniture, and all the various appurtenances of a thriving, luxurious city. In addition to which, the magazines were found well stored with the more substantial and, at the present juncture, more serviceable supplies of grain, oil, and other provisions. Nearly a quarter of the population is said to have perished in the various conflicts of the day, and the remainder, according to the usage of the time, became the prize of the victors. A considerable number of Christian captives, who were found immured in the public prisons, were restored to freedom, and swelled the general jubilee with their grateful acclamations. The contemporary Castilian chroniclers record also, with no less satisfaction, the detection of a Christian renegade, notorious for his depredations on his countrymen, whose misdeeds the marquis of Cadiz requited by causing him to be hung up over the battlements of the castle, in the face of the whole city. Thus fell the ancient city of Alhama, the first conquest, and achieved with a gallantry and daring unsurpassed by any other during this memorable war. [9] The report of this disaster fell like the knell of their own doom on the ears of the inhabitants of Granada. It seemed as if the hand of Providence itself must have been stretched forth to smite the stately city, which, reposing as it were under the shadow of their own walls, and in the bosom of a peaceful and populous country, was thus suddenly laid low in blood and ashes. Men now read the fulfilment of the disastrous omens and predictions which ushered in the capture of Zahara. The melancholy _romance_ or ballad, with the burden of _Ay de mi Alhama_, "Woe is me, Alhama," composed probably by some one of the nation not long after this event, shows how deep was the dejection which settled on the spirits of the people. The old king, Abul Hacen, however, far from resigning himself to useless lamentation, sought to retrieve his loss by the most vigorous measures. A body of a thousand horse was sent forward to reconnoitre the city, while he prepared to follow with as powerful levies, as he could enforce, of the militia of Granada. [10] The intelligence of the conquest of Alhama diffused general satisfaction throughout Castile, and was especially grateful to the sovereigns, who welcomed it as an auspicious omen of the ultimate success of their designs upon the Moors. They were attending mass in their royal palace of Medina del Campo, when they received despatches from the marquis of Cadiz, informing them of the issue of his enterprise. "During all the while he sat at dinner," says a precise chronicler of the period, "the prudent Ferdinand was revolving in his mind the course best to be adopted." He reflected that the Castilians would soon be beleaguered by an overwhelming force from Granada, and he determined at all hazards to support them. He accordingly gave orders to make instant preparation for departure; but, first, accompanied the queen, attended by a solemn procession of the court and clergy, to the cathedral church of St. James; where Te Deum was chanted, and a humble thanksgiving offered up to the Lord of hosts for the success with which he had crowned their arms. Towards evening, the king set forward on his journey to the south, escorted by such nobles and cavaliers as were in attendance on his person, leaving the queen to follow more leisurely, after having provided reinforcements and supplies requisite for the prosecution of the war. [11] On the 5th of March, the king of Granada appeared before the walls of Alhama, with an army which amounted to three thousand horse and fifty thousand foot. The first object which encountered his eyes was the mangled remains of his unfortunate subjects, which the Christians, who would have been scandalized by an attempt to give them the rites of sepulture, had from dread of infection thrown over the walls, where they now lay half devoured by birds of prey and the ravenous dogs of the city. The Moslem troops, transported with horror and indignation at this hideous spectacle, called loudly to be led to the attack. They had marched from Granada with so much precipitation, that they were wholly unprovided with artillery, in the use of which they were expert for that period; and which was now the more necessary, as the Spaniards had diligently employed the few days which intervened since their occupation of the place, in repairing the breaches in the fortifications, and in putting them in a posture of defence. But the Moorish ranks were filled with the flower of their chivalry; and their immense superiority of numbers enabled them to make their attacks simultaneously on the most distant quarters of the town, with such unintermitted vivacity, that the little garrison, scarcely allowed a moment for repose, was wellnigh exhausted with fatigue. [12] At length, however, Abul Hacen, after the loss of more than two thousand of his bravest troops in these precipitate assaults, became convinced of the impracticability of forcing a position, whose natural strength was so ably seconded by the valor of its defenders, and he determined to reduce the place by the more tardy but certain method of blockade. In this he was favored by one or two circumstances. The town, having but a single well within its walls, was almost wholly indebted for its supplies of water to the river which flowed at its base. The Moors, by dint of great labor, succeeded in diverting the stream so effectually, that the only communication with it, which remained open to the besieged, was by a subterraneous gallery or mine, that had probably been contrived with reference to some such emergency by the original inhabitants. The mouth of this passage was commanded in such a manner by the Moorish archers, that no egress could be obtained without a regular skirmish, so that every drop of water might be said to be purchased with the blood of Christians; who, "if they had not possessed the courage of Spaniards," says a Castilian writer, "would have been reduced to the last extremity." In addition to this calamity, the garrison began to be menaced with scarcity of provisions, owing to the improvident waste of the soldiers, who supposed that the city, after being plundered, was to be razed to the ground and abandoned. [13] At this crisis they received the unwelcome tidings of the failure of an expedition destined for their relief by Alonso de Aguilar. This cavalier, the chief of an illustrious house since rendered immortal by the renown of his younger brother, Gonsalvo de Cordova, had assembled a considerable body of troops, on learning the capture of Alhama, for the purpose of supporting his friend and companion in arms, the marquis of Cadiz. On reaching the shores of the Yeguas, he received, for the first time, advices of the formidable host which lay between him and the city, rendering hopeless any attempt to penetrate into the latter with his inadequate force. Contenting himself, therefore, with recovering the baggage, which the marquis's army in its rapid march, as has been already noticed, had left on the banks of the river, he returned to Antequera. [14] Under these depressing circumstances, the indomitable spirit of the marquis of Cadiz seemed to infuse itself into the hearts of his soldiers. He was ever in the front of danger, and shared the privations of the meanest of his followers; encouraging them to rely with undoubting confidence on the sympathies which their cause must awaken in the breasts of their countrymen. The event proved that he did not miscalculate. Soon after the occupation of Alhama, the marquis, foreseeing the difficulties of his situation, had despatched missives, requesting the support of the principal lords and cities of Andalusia. In this summons he had omitted the duke of Medina Sidonia, as one who had good reason to take umbrage at being excluded from a share in the original enterprise. Henrique de Guzman, duke of Medina Sidonia, possessed a degree of power more considerable than any other chieftain in the south. His yearly rents amounted to nearly sixty thousand ducats, and he could bring into the field, it was said, from his own resources an army little inferior to what might be raised by a sovereign prince. He had succeeded to his inheritance in 1468, and had very early given his support to the pretensions of Isabella. Notwithstanding his deadly feud with the marquis of Cadiz, he had the generosity, on the breaking out of the present war, to march to the relief of the marchioness when beleaguered, during her husband's absence, by a party of Moors from Ronda, in her own castle of Arcos. He now showed a similar alacrity in sacrificing all personal jealousy at the call of patriotism. [15] No sooner did he learn the perilous condition of his countrymen in Alhama, than he mustered the whole array of his household troops and retainers, which, when combined with those of the marquis de Villena, of the count de Cabra, and those from Seville, in which city the family of the Guzmans had long exercised a sort of hereditary influence, swelled to the number of five thousand horse and forty thousand foot. The duke of Medina Sidonia, putting himself at the head of this powerful body, set forward without delay on his expedition. When King Ferdinand in his progress to the south had reached the little town of Adamuz, about five leagues from Cordova, he was informed of the advance of the Andalusian chivalry, and instantly sent instructions to the duke to delay his march, as he intended to come in person and assume the command. But the latter, returning a respectful apology for his disobedience, represented to his master the extremities to which the besieged were already reduced, and without waiting for a reply pushed on with the utmost vigor for Alhama. The Moorish monarch, alarmed at the approach of so powerful a reinforcement, saw himself in danger of being hemmed in between the garrison on the one side, and these new enemies on the other. Without waiting their appearance on the crest of the eminence which separated him from them, he hastily broke up his encampment, on the 29th of March, after a siege of more than three weeks, and retreated on his capital. [16] The garrison of Alhama viewed with astonishment the sudden departure of their enemies; but their wonder was converted into joy, when they beheld the bright arms and banners of their countrymen, gleaming along the declivities of the mountains. They rushed out with tumultuous transport to receive them and pour forth their grateful acknowledgments, while the two commanders, embracing each other in the presence of their united armies, pledged themselves to a mutual oblivion of all past grievances; thus affording to the nation the best possible earnest of future successes, in the voluntary extinction of a feud, which had desolated it for so many generations. Notwithstanding the kindly feelings excited between the two armies, a dispute had wellnigh arisen respecting the division of the spoil, in which the duke's army claimed a share, as having contributed to secure the conquest which their more fortunate countrymen had effected. But these discontents were appeased, though with some difficulty, by their noble leader, who besought his men not to tarnish the laurels already won, by mingling a sordid avarice with the generous motives which had promoted them to the expedition. After the necessary time devoted to repose and refreshment, the combined armies proceeded to evacuate Alhama, and having left in garrison Don Diego Merlo, with a corps of troops of the hermandad, returned into their own territories. [17] King Ferdinand, after receiving the reply of the duke of Medina Sidonia, had pressed forward his march by the way of Cordova, as far as Lucena, with the intention of throwing himself at all hazards into Alhama. He was not without much difficulty dissuaded from this by his nobles, who represented the temerity of the enterprise, and its incompetency to any good result, even should he succeed, with the small force of which he was master. On receiving intelligence that the siege was raised, he returned to Cordova, where he was joined by the queen towards the latter part of April. Isabella had been employed in making vigorous preparation for carrying on the war, by enforcing the requisite supplies, and summoning the crown vassals, and the principal nobility of the north, to hold themselves in readiness to join the royal standard in Andalusia. After this, she proceeded by rapid stages to Cordova, notwithstanding the state of pregnancy, in which she was then far advanced. Here the sovereigns received the unwelcome information, that the king of Granada, on the retreat of the Spaniards, had again sat down before Alhama; having brought with him artillery, from the want of which he had suffered so much in the preceding siege. This news struck a damp into the hearts of the Castilians, many of whom recommended the total evacuation of a place, "which" they said, "was so near the capital that it must be perpetually exposed to sudden and dangerous assaults; while, from the difficulty of reaching it, it would cost the Castilians an incalculable waste of blood and treasure in its defence. It was experience of these evils, which had led to its abandonment in former days, when it had been recovered by the Spanish arms from the Saracens." Isabella was far from being shaken by these arguments. "Glory," she said, "was not to be won without danger. The present war was one of peculiar difficulties and danger, and these had been well calculated before entering upon it. The strong and central position of Alhama made it of the last importance, since it might be regarded as the key of the enemy's country. This was the first blow struck during the war, and honor and policy alike forbade them to adopt a measure, which could not fail to damp the ardor of the nation." This opinion of the queen, thus decisively expressed, determined the question, and kindled a spark of her own enthusiasm in the breasts of the most desponding. [18] It was settled that the king should march to the relief of the besieged, taking with him the most ample supplies of forage and provisions, at the head of a force strong enough to compel the retreat of the Moorish monarch. This was effected without delay; and, Abul Hacen once more breaking up his camp on the rumor of Ferdinand's approach, the latter took possession of the city without opposition, on the 14th of May. The king was attended by a splendid train of his prelates and principal nobility; and he prepared with their aid to dedicate his new conquest to the service of the cross, with all the formalities of the Romish church. After the ceremony of purification, the three principal mosques of the city were consecrated by the cardinal of Spain, as temples of Christian worship. Bells, crosses, a sumptuous service of plate, and other sacred utensils, were liberally furnished by the queen; and the principal church of Santa Maria de la Encarnacion long exhibited a covering of the altar, richly embroidered by her own hands. Isabella lost no opportunity of manifesting, that she had entered into the war, less from motives of ambition, than of zeal for the exaltation of the true faith. After the completion of these ceremonies, Ferdinand, having strengthened the garrison with new recruits under the command of Portocarrero, lord of Palma, and victualled it with three months' provisions, prepared for a foray into the vega of Granada. This he executed in the true spirit of that merciless warfare, so repugnant to the more civilized usage of later times, not only by sweeping away the green, unripened crops, but by cutting down the trees, and eradicating the vines; and then, without so much as having broken a lance in the expedition, returned in triumph to Cordova. [19] Isabella in the mean while was engaged in active measures for prosecuting the war. She issued orders to the various cities of Castile and Leon, as far as the borders of Biscay and Guipuscoa, prescribing the _repartimiento_, or subsidy of provisions, and the quota of troops, to be furnished by each district respectively, together with an adequate supply of ammunition and artillery. The whole were to be in readiness before Loja, by the 1st of July; when Ferdinand was to take the field in person at the head of his chivalry, and besiege that strong post. As advices were received, that the Moors of Granada were making efforts to obtain the co-operation of their African brethren in support of the Mahometan empire in Spain, the queen caused a fleet to be manned under the command of her two best admirals, with instructions to sweep the Mediterranean as far as the Straits of Gibraltar, and thus effectually cut off all communication with the Barbary coast. [20] FOOTNOTES [1] Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. pp. 467-469.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 32, 34. [2] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 51.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 34.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, p. 180.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 171.--Marmol, Historia del Rebelion y Castigo de los Moriscos, (Madrid, 1797,) lib. 1, cap. 12. Lebrija states, that the revenues of Granada, at the commencement of this war, amounted to a million of gold ducats, and that it kept in pay 7000 horsemen on its peace establishment, and could send forth 21,000 warriors from its gates. The last of these estimates would not seem to be exaggerated. Rerum Gestarum Decades, ii. lib. 1, cap. 1. [3] Estrada, Poblacion de España, tom. ii. pp. 247, 248.--El Nubiense, Descripcion de España, p. 222, nota.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, p. 181.-- Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 12. [4] Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, pp. 349, 362. This occurred in the fight of Madroño, when Don Rodrigo, stooping to adjust his buckler, which had been unlaced, was suddenly surrounded by a party of Moors. He snatched a sling from one of them, and made such brisk use of it, that, after disabling several, he succeeded in putting them to flight; for which feat, says Zuñiga, the king complimented him with the title of "the youthful David." Don Juan, count of Arcos, had no children born in wedlock, but a numerous progeny by his concubines. Among these latter, was Doña Leonora Nuñez de Prado, the mother of Don Rodrigo. The brilliant and attractive qualities of this youth so far won the affections of his father, that the latter obtained the royal sanction (a circumstance not infrequent in an age when the laws of descent were very unsettled) to bequeath him his titles and estates, to the prejudice of more legitimate heirs. [5] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 52.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 171.--Pulgar computes the marquis's army at 3000 horse and 4000 foot.--Reyes Católicos, p. 181.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 34. [6] Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decades, ii. lib. 1, cap. 2.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1482.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 52.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 315.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. pp. 252, 253. [7] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., ubi supra.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, cap. 34.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 172. [8] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, ubi supra.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, pp. 182, 183.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. pp. 545, 546. [9] Bernaldez, Reyes. Católicos, MS., cap. 52.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, ubi supra.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. p. 254. [10] "Passeavase el Key Moro For la ciudad de Granada, Desde las puertas de Elvira Hasta las de Bivarambla. Ay de mi Alhama! "Cartas le fueron venidas Que Alhama era ganada. Las cartas echó en el fuego, Y al mensagero matava. Ay de mi Alhama! "Hombres, niños y mugeres, Lloran tan grande perdida. Lloravan todas las damas Quantas en Granada avia. Ay de mi Alhama! "Por las calles y ventanas Mucho luto parecia; Llora el Rey como fembra, Qu' es mucho lo que perdia. Ay de mi Alhama!" The _romance_, according to Hyta, (not the best voucher for a fact,) caused such general lamentation, that it was not allowed to be sung by the Moors after the conquest. (Guerras Civiles de Granada, tom. i. p. 350.) Lord Byron, as the reader recollects, has done this ballad into English. The version has the merit of fidelity. It is not his fault if his Muse appears to little advantage in the plebeian dress of the Moorish minstrel. [11] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 172.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 34.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1482.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. pp. 545, 546. [12] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 52.--Bernaldez swells the Moslem army to 5500 horse, and 80,000 foot, but I have preferred the more moderate and probable estimate of the Arabian authors. Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 34.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, loc. cit. [13] Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. lib. 18, cap. 23.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, pp. 183, 184. [14] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 52. [15] Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 360.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 24, 172.--Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decades, lib. 1, cap. 3. [16] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, pp. 183, 184. Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 53.--Ferreras, Hist. d'Espagne, tom. vii. p. 572.--Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, pp. 392, 393.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. p. 257. [17] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, pp. 183-186.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 28. [18] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 53, 54.--Pulgar states that Ferdinand took the more southern route of Antequera, where he received the tidings of the Moorish king's retreat. The discrepancy is of no great consequence; but as Bernaldez, whom I have followed, lived in Andalusia, the theatre of action, he may be supposed to have had more accurate means of information.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, pp. 187, 188. [19] Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 28.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 54, 55.--Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decades, lib. 1, cap. 6.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, cap. 34.--Salazar de Mendoza, Crón. del Gran Cardenal, pp. 180, 181.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 12. During this second siege, a body of Moorish knights to the number of forty succeeded in scaling the walls of the city in the night, and had nearly reached the gates, with the intention of throwing them open to their countrymen, when they were overpowered, after a desperate resistance, by the Christians, who acquired a rich booty, as many of them were persons of rank. There is considerable variation in the authorities, in regard to the date of Ferdinand's occupation of Alhama. I have been guided, as before, by Bernaldez. [20] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, pp. 188, 189. CHAPTER X. WAR OF GRANADA.--UNSUCCESSFUL ATTEMPT ON LOJA.--DEFEAT IN THE AXARQUIA. 1482-1483. Unsuccessful Attempt on Loja.--Revolution in Granada.--Expedition to the Axarquia.--Military Array.--Moorish Preparations.--Bloody Conflict among the Mountains.--The Spaniards force a Passage.--The Marquis of Cadiz Escapes. Loja stands not many leagues from Albania, on the banks of the Xenil, which rolls its clear current through a valley luxuriant with vineyards and olive-gardens; but the city is deeply intrenched among hills of so rugged an aspect, that it has been led not inappropriately to assume as the motto on its arms, "A flower among thorns." Under the Moors, it was defended by a strong fortress, while the Xenil, circumscribing it like a deep moat upon the south, formed an excellent protection against the approaches of a besieging army; since the river was fordable only in one place, and traversed by a single bridge, which might be easily commanded by the city. In addition to these advantages, the king of Granada, taking warning from the fate of Alhama, had strengthened its garrison with three thousand of his choicest troops, under the command of a skilful and experienced warrior, named Ali Atar. [1] In the mean while, the efforts of the Spanish sovereigns to procure supplies adequate to the undertaking against Loja had not been crowned with success. The cities and districts, of which the requisitions had been made, had discovered the tardiness usual in such unwieldy bodies, and their interest, moreover, was considerably impaired by their distance from the theatre of action. Ferdinand on mustering his army, towards the latter part of June, found that it did not exceed four thousand horse and twelve thousand, or indeed, according to some accounts, eight thousand foot; most of them raw militia, who, poorly provided with military stores and artillery, formed a force obviously inadequate to the magnitude of his enterprise. Some of his counsellors would have persuaded him, from these considerations, to turn his arms against some weaker and more assailable point than Loja. But Ferdinand burned with a desire for distinction in the new war, and suffered his ardor for once to get the better of his prudence. The distrust felt by the leaders seems to have infected the lower ranks, who drew the most unfavorable prognostics from the dejected mien of those who bore the royal standard to the cathedral of Cordova, in order to receive the benediction of the church before entering on the expedition. [2] Ferdinand, crossing the Xenil at Ecija, arrived again on its banks before Loja, on the 1st of July. The army encamped among the hills, whose deep ravines obstructed communication between its different quarters; while the level plains below were intersected by numerous canals, equally unfavorable to the manoeuvres of the men-at-arms. The duke of Villa Hermosa, the king's brother, and captain-general of the hermandad, an officer of large experience, would have persuaded Ferdinand to attempt, by throwing bridges across the river lower down the stream, to approach the city on the other side. But his counsel was overruled by the Castilian officers, to whom the location of the camp had been intrusted, and who neglected, according to Zurita, to advise with the Andalusian chiefs, although far better instructed than themselves in Moorish warfare. [3] A large detachment of the army was ordered to occupy a lofty eminence, at some distance, called the Heights of Albohacen, and to fortify it with such few pieces of ordnance as they had, with the view of annoying the city. This commission was intrusted to the marquises of Cadiz and Villena, and the grand-master of Calatrava; which last nobleman had brought to the field about four hundred horse and a large body of infantry from the places belonging to his order in Andalusia. Before the intrenchment could be fully completed, Ali Atar, discerning the importance of this commanding station, made a sortie from the town, for the purpose of dislodging his enemies. The latter poured out from their works to encounter him; but the Moslem general, scarcely waiting to receive the shock, wheeled his squadrons round, and began a precipitate retreat. The Spaniards eagerly pursued; but, when they had been drawn to a sufficient distance from the redoubt, a party of Moorish _ginetes_, or light cavalry, who had crossed the river unobserved during the night and lain in ambush, after the wily fashion of Arabian tactics, darted from their place of concealment, and, galloping into the deserted camp, plundered it of its contents, including the lombards, or small pieces of artillery, with which it was garnished. The Castilians, too late perceiving their error, halted from the pursuit, and returned with as much speed as possible to the defence of their camp. Ali Atar, turning also, hung close on their rear, so that, when the Christians arrived at the summit of the hill, they found themselves hemmed in between the two divisions of the Moorish army. A brisk action now ensued, and lasted nearly an hour; when the advance of reinforcements from the main body of the Spanish army, which had been delayed by distance and impediments on the road, compelled the Moors to a prompt but orderly retreat into their own city. The Christians sustained a heavy loss, particularly in the death of Rodrigo Tellez Giron, grand-master of Calatrava. He was hit by two arrows, the last of which, penetrating the joints of his harness beneath his sword-arm, as he was in the act of raising it, inflicted on him a mortal wound, of which he expired in a few hours, says an old cronicler, after having confessed, and performed the last duties of a good and faithful Christian. Although scarcely twenty- four years of age, this cavalier had given proofs of such signal prowess, that he was esteemed one of the best knights of Castile; and his death threw a general gloom over the army. [4] Ferdinand now became convinced of the unsuitableness of a position, which neither admitted of easy communication between the different quarters of his own camp, nor enabled him to intercept the supplies daily passing into that of his enemy. Other inconveniences also pressed on him. His men were so badly provided with the necessary utensils for dressing their food, that they were obliged either to devour it raw, or only half cooked. Most of them being new recruits, unaccustomed to the privations of war, and many exhausted by a wearisome length of march before joining the army, they began openly to murmur, and even to desert in great numbers. Ferdinand therefore resolved to fall back as far as Rio Frio, and await there patiently the arrival of such fresh reinforcements as might put him in condition to enforce a more rigorous blockade. Orders were accordingly issued to the cavaliers occupying the Heights of Albohacen to break up their camp, and fall back on the main body of the army. This was executed on the following morning before dawn, being the 4th of July. No sooner did the Moors of Loja perceive their enemy abandoning his strong position, than they sallied forth in considerable force to take possession of it. Ferdinand's men, who had not been advised of the proposed manoeuvre, no sooner beheld the Moorish array brightening the crest of the mountain, and their own countrymen rapidly descending, than they imagined that these latter had been surprised in their intrenchments during the night, and were now flying before the enemy. An alarm instantly spread through the whole camp. Instead of standing to their defence, each one thought only of saving himself by as speedy a flight as possible. In vain did Ferdinand, riding along their broken files, endeavor to reanimate their spirits and restore order. He might as easily have calmed the winds, as the disorder of a panic-struck mob, unschooled by discipline or experience. Ali Atar's practised eye speedily discerned the confusion which prevailed through the Christian camp. Without delay, he rushed forth impetuously at the head of his whole array from the gates of Loja, and converted into a real danger what had before been only an imaginary one. [5] At this perilous moment, nothing but Ferdinand's coolness could have saved the army from total destruction. Putting himself at the head of the royal guard, and accompanied by a gallant band of cavaliers, who held honor dearer than life, he made such a determined stand against the Moorish advance, that Ali Atar was compelled to pause in his career. A furious struggle ensued betwixt this devoted little band and the whole strength of the Moslem army. Ferdinand was repeatedly exposed to imminent peril. On one occasion he was indebted for his safety to the marquis of Cadiz, who, charging at the head of about sixty lances, broke the deep ranks of the Moorish column, and, compelling it to recoil, succeeded in rescuing his sovereign. In this adventure, he narrowly escaped with his own life, his horse being shot under him, at the very moment when he had lost his lance in the body of a Moor. Never did the Spanish chivalry shed its blood more freely. The constable, count de Haro, received three wounds in the face. The duke of Medina Celi was unhorsed and brought to the ground, and saved with difficulty by his own men; and the count of Tendilla, whose encampment lay nearest the city, received several severe blows, and would have fallen into the hands of the enemy, had it not been for the timely aid of his friend, the young count of Zuñiga. The Moors, finding it so difficult to make an impression on this iron band of warriors, began at length to slacken their efforts, and finally allowed Ferdinand to draw off the remnant of his forces without further opposition. The king continued his retreat without halting, as far as the romantic site of the Peña de los Enamorados, about seven leagues distant from Loja; and, abandoning all thoughts of offensive operations for the present, soon after returned to Cordova. Muley Abul Hacen arrived the following day with a powerful reinforcement from Granada, and swept the country as far as Rio Frio. Had he come but a few hours sooner, there would have been few Spaniards left to tell the tale of the rout of Loja. [6] The loss of the Christians must have been very considerable, including the greater part of the baggage and the artillery. It occasioned deep mortification to the queen; but, though a severe, it proved a salutary lesson. It showed the importance of more extensive preparations for a war, which must of necessity be a war of posts; and it taught the nation to entertain greater respect for an enemy, who, whatever might be his natural strength, must become formidable when armed with the energy of despair. At this juncture, a division among the Moors themselves did more for the Christians, than any successes of their own. This division grew out of the vicious system of polygamy, which sows the seeds of discord among those, whom nature and our own happier institutions unite most closely. The old king of Granada had become so deeply enamored of a Greek slave, that the Sultana Zoraya, jealous lest the offspring of her rival should supplant her own in the succession, secretly contrived to stir up a spirit of discontent with her husband's government. The king, becoming acquainted with her intrigues, caused her to be imprisoned in the fortress of the Alhambra. But the sultana, binding together the scarfs and veils belonging to herself and attendants, succeeded, by means of this perilous conveyance, in making her escape, together with her children, from the upper apartments of the tower in which she was lodged. She was received with joy by her own faction. The insurrection soon spread among the populace, who, yielding to the impulses of nature, are readily roused by a tale of oppression; and the number was still further swelled by many of higher rank, who had various causes of disgust with the oppressive government of Abul Hacen. [7] The strong fortress of the Alhambra, however, remained faithful to him. A war now burst forth in the capital which deluged its streets with the blood of its citizens. At length the sultana triumphed; Abul Hacen was expelled from Granada, and sought a refuge in Malaga, which, with Baza, Guadix, and some other places of importance, still adhered to him; while Granada, and by far the larger portion of the kingdom, proclaimed the authority of his elder son, Abu Abdallah, or Boabdil, as he is usually called by the Castilian writers. The Spanish sovereigns viewed with no small interest these proceedings of the Moors, who were thus wantonly fighting the battles of their enemies. All proffers of assistance on their part, however, being warily rejected by both factions, notwithstanding the mutual hatred of each other, they could only await with patience the termination of a struggle, which, whatever might be its results in other respects, could not fail to open the way for the success of their own arms. [8] No military operations worthy of notice occurred during the remainder of the campaign, except occasional _cavalgadas_ or inroads, on both sides, which, after the usual unsparing devastation, swept away whole herds of cattle, and human beings, the wretched cultivators of the soil. The quantity of booty frequently carried off on such occasions, amounting, according to the testimony of both Christian and Moorish writers, to twenty, thirty, and even fifty thousand head of cattle, shows the fruitfulness and abundant pasturage in the southern regions of the Peninsula. The loss inflicted by these terrible forays fell, eventually, most heavily on Granada, in consequence of her scanty territory and insulated position, which cut her off from all foreign resources. Towards the latter end of October, the court passed from Cordova to Madrid, with the intention of remaining there the ensuing winter. Madrid, it may be observed, however, was so far from being recognized as the capital of the monarchy at this time, that it was inferior to several other cities in wealth and population, and was even less frequented than some others, as Valladolid for example as a royal residence. On the 1st of July, while the court was at Cordova, died Alfonso de Carillo, the factious archbishop of Toledo, who contributed more than any other to raise Isabella to the throne, and who, with the same arm, had wellnigh hurled her from it. He passed the close of his life in retirement and disgrace at his town of Alcalá de Henares, where he devoted himself to science, especially to alchymy; in which illusory pursuit he is said to have squandered his princely revenues with such prodigality, as to leave them encumbered with a heavy debt. He was succeeded in the primacy by his ancient rival, Don Pedro Gonzalez de Mendoza, cardinal of Spain; a prelate whose enlarged and sagacious views gained him deserved ascendency in the councils of his sovereigns. [9] The importance of their domestic concerns did not prevent Ferdinand and Isabella from giving a vigilant attention to what was passing abroad. The conflicting relations growing out of the feudal system occupied most princes, till the close of the fifteenth century, too closely at home to allow them often to turn their eyes beyond the borders of their own territories. This system was indeed now rapidly melting away. But Louis the Eleventh may perhaps be regarded as the first monarch, who showed anything like an extended interest in European politics. He informed himself of the interior proceedings of most of the neighboring courts, by means of secret agents whom he pensioned there. Ferdinand obtained a similar result by the more honorable expedient of resident embassies, a practice which he is said to have introduced, [10] and which, while it has greatly facilitated commercial intercourse, has served to perpetuate friendly relations between different countries, by accustoming them to settle their differences by negotiation rather than the sword. The position of the Italian states, at this period, whose petty feuds seemed to blind them to the invasion which menaced them from the Ottoman empire, was such as to excite a lively interest throughout Christendom, and especially in Ferdinand, as sovereign of Sicily. He succeeded, by means of his ambassadors at the papal court, in opening a negotiation between the belligerents, and in finally adjusting the terms of a general pacification, signed December 12th, 1482. The Spanish court, in consequence of its friendly mediation on this occasion, received three several embassies with suitable acknowledgments, on the part of the pope Sixtus the Fourth, the college of cardinals, and the city of Rome; and certain marks of distinction were conferred by his Holiness on the Castilian envoys, not enjoyed by those of any other potentate. This event is worthy of notice as the first instance of Ferdinand's interference in the politics of Italy, in which at a later period he was destined to act so prominent a part. [11] The affairs of Navarre at this time were such as to engage still more deeply the attention of the Spanish sovereigns. The crown of that kingdom had devolved, on the death of Leonora, the guilty sister of Ferdinand, on her grandchild, Francis Phoebus, whose mother, Magdeleine of France, held the reins of government during her son's minority. [12] The near relationship of this princess to Louis the Eleventh, gave that monarch an absolute influence in the councils of Navarre. He made use of this to bring about a marriage between the young king, Francis Phoebus, and Joanna Beltraneja, Isabella's former competitor for the crown of Castile, notwithstanding this princess had long since taken the veil in the convent of Santa Clara at Coimbra. It is not easy to unravel the tortuous politics of King Louis. The Spanish writers impute to him the design of enabling Joanna by this alliance to establish her pretensions to the Castilian throne, or at least to give such employment to its present proprietors, as should effectually prevent them from disturbing him in the possession of Roussillon. However this may be, his intrigues with Portugal were disclosed to Ferdinand by certain nobles of that court, with whom he was in secret correspondence. The Spanish sovereigns, in order to counteract this scheme, offered the hand of their own daughter Joanna, afterwards mother of Charles the Fifth, to the king of Navarre. But all negotiations relative to this matter were eventually defeated by the sudden death of this young prince, not without strong suspicions of poison. He was succeeded on the throne by his sister Catharine. Propositions were then made by Ferdinand and Isabella, for the marriage of this princess, then thirteen years of age, with their infant son John, heir apparent of their united monarchies. [13] Such an alliance, which would bring under one government nations corresponding in origin, language, general habits, and local interests, presented great and obvious advantages. It was however evaded by the queen dowager, who still acted as regent, on the pretext of disparity of age in the parties. Information being soon after received that Louis the Eleventh was taking measures to make himself master of the strong places in Navarre, Isabella transferred her residence to the frontier town of Logroño, prepared to resist by arms, if necessary, the occupation of that country by her insidious and powerful neighbor. The death of the king of France, which occurred not long after, fortunately relieved the sovereigns from apprehensions of any immediate annoyance on that quarter. [14] Amid their manifold concerns, Ferdinand and Isabella kept their thoughts anxiously bent on their great enterprise, the conquest of Granada. At a congress general of the deputies of the hermandad, held at Pinto, at the commencement of the present year, 1483, with the view of reforming certain abuses in that institution, a liberal grant was made of eight thousand men, and sixteen thousand beasts of burden, for the purpose of conveying supplies to the garrison in Alhama. But the sovereigns experienced great embarrassment from the want of funds. There is probably no period in which the princes of Europe felt so sensibly their own penury, as at the close of the fifteenth century; when, the demesnes of the crown having been very generally wasted by the lavishness or imbecility of its proprietors, no substitute had as yet been found in that searching and well-arranged system of taxation which prevails at the present day. The Spanish sovereigns, notwithstanding the economy which they had introduced into the finances, felt the pressure of these embarrassments, peculiarly, at the present juncture. The maintenance of the royal guard and of the vast national police of the hermandad, the incessant military operations of the late campaign, together with the equipment of a navy, not merely for war, but for maritime discovery, were so many copious drains of the exchequer. [15] Under these circumstances, they obtained from the pope a grant of one hundred thousand ducats, to be raised out of the ecclesiastical revenues in Castile and Aragon. A bull of crusade was also published by his Holiness, containing numerous indulgences for such as should bear arms against the infidel, as well as those who should prefer to commute their military service for the payment of a sum of money. In addition to these resources, the government was enabled on its own credit, justified by the punctuality with which it had redeemed its past engagements, to negotiate considerable loans with several wealthy individuals. [16] With these funds the sovereigns entered into extensive arrangements for the ensuing campaign; causing cannon, after the rude construction of that age, to be fabricated at Huesca, and a large quantity of stone balls, then principally used, to be manufactured in the Sierra de Constantina; while the magazines were carefully provided with ammunition and military stores. An event not unworthy of notice is recorded by Pulgar, as happening about this time. A common soldier, named John de Corral, contrived, under false pretences, to obtain from the king of Granada a number of Christian captives, together with a large sum of money, with which he escaped into Andalusia. The man was apprehended by the warden of the frontier of Jaen; and, the transaction being reported to the sovereigns, they compelled an entire restitution of the money, and consented to such a ransom for the liberated Christians as the king of Granada should demand. This act of justice, it should be remembered, occurred in an age when the church itself stood ready to sanction any breach of faith, however glaring, towards heretics and infidels. [17] While the court was detained in the north, tidings were received of a reverse sustained by the Spanish arms, which plunged the nation in sorrow far deeper than that occasioned by the rout at Loja. Don Alonso de Cardenas, grand-master of St. James, an old and confidential servant of the crown, had been intrusted with the defence of the frontier of Ecija. While on this station, he was strongly urged to make a descent on the environs of Malaga, by his _adalides_ or scouts, men who, being for the most part Moorish deserters or renegadoes, were employed by the border chiefs to reconnoitre the enemy's country, or to guide them in their marauding expeditions. [18] The district around Malaga was famous under the Saracens for its silk manufactures, of which it annually made large exports to other parts of Europe. It was to be approached by traversing a savage sierra, or chain of mountains, called the Axarquia, whose margin occasionally afforded good pasturage, and was sprinkled over with Moorish villages. After threading its defiles, it was proposed to return by an open road that turned the southern extremity of the sierra along the sea- shore. There was little to be apprehended, it was stated, from pursuit, since Malaga was almost wholly unprovided with cavalry. [19] The grand-master, falling in with the proposition, communicated it to the principal chiefs on the borders; among others, to Don Pedro Henriquez, adelantado of Andalusia, Don Juan de Silva, count of Cifuentes, Don Alonso de Aguilar, and the marquis of Cadiz. These nobleman, collecting their retainers, repaired to Antequera, where the ranks were quickly swelled by recruits from Cordova, Seville, Xerez, and other cities of Andalusia, whose chivalry always readily answered the summons to an expedition over the border. [20] In the mean while, however, the marquis of Cadiz had received such intelligence from his own _adalides_, as led him to doubt the expediency of a march through intricate defiles, inhabited by a poor and hardy peasantry; and he strongly advised to direct the expedition against the neighboring town of Almojia. But in this he was overruled by the grand-master and the other partners of his enterprise; many of whom, with the rash confidence of youth, were excited rather than intimidated by the prospect of danger. On Wednesday, the 19th of March, this gallant little army marched forth from the gates of Antequera. The van was intrusted to the adelantado Henriquez and Don Alonso de Aguilar. The centre divisions were led by the marquis of Cadiz and the count of Cifuentes, and the rear-guard by the grand-master of St. James. The number of foot, which is uncertain, appears to have been considerably less than that of the horse, which amounted to about three thousand, containing the flower of Andalusian knighthood, together with the array of St. James, the most opulent and powerful of the Spanish military orders. Never, says an Aragonese historian, had there been seen in these times a more splendid body of chivalry; and such was their confidence, he adds, that they deemed themselves invincible by any force which the Moslems could bring against them. The leaders took care not to encumber the movements of the army with artillery, camp equipage, or even much forage and provisions, for which they trusted to the invaded territory. A number of persons, however, followed in the train, who, influenced by desire rather of gain than of glory, had come provided with money, as well as commissions from their friends, for the purchase of rich spoil, whether of slaves, stuffs, or jewels, which they expected would be won by the good swords of their comrades, as in Alhama. [21] After travelling with little intermission through the night, the army entered the winding defiles of the Axarquia; where their progress was necessarily so much impeded by the character of the ground, that most of the inhabitants of the villages, through which they passed, had opportunity to escape with the greater part of their effects to the inaccessible fastnesses of the mountains. The Spaniards, after plundering the deserted hamlets of whatever remained, as well as of the few stragglers, whether men or cattle, found still lingering about them, set them on fire. In this way they advanced, marking their line of march with the usual devastation that accompanied these ferocious forays, until the columns of smoke and fire, which rose above the hill-tops, announced to the people of Malaga the near approach of an enemy. The old king Muley Abul Hacen, who lay at this time in the city, with a numerous and well-appointed body of horse, contrary to the reports of the adalides, would have rushed forth at once at their head, had he not been dissuaded from it by his younger brother Abdallah, who is better known in history by the name of El Zagal, or "the Valiant;" an Arabic epithet, given him by his countrymen to distinguish him from his nephew, the ruling king of Granada. To this prince Abul Hacen intrusted the command of the corps of picked cavalry, with instructions to penetrate at once into the lower level of the sierra, and encounter the Christians entangled in its passes; while another division, consisting chiefly of arquebusiers and archers, should turn the enemy's flank by gaining the heights under which he was defiling. This last corps was placed under the direction of Reduan Benegas, a chief of Christian lineage, according to Bernaldez, and who may perhaps be identified with the Reduan that, in the later Moorish ballads, seems to be shadowed forth as the personification of love and heroism. [22] The Castilian army in the mean time went forward with a buoyant and reckless confidence, and with very little subordination. The divisions occupying the advance and centre, disappointed in their expectations of booty, had quitted the line of march, and dispersed in small parties in search of plunder over the adjacent country; and some of the high-mettled young cavaliers had the audacity to ride up in defiance to the very walls of Malaga. The grand master of St. James was the only leader who kept his columns unbroken, and marched forward in order of battle. Things were in this state, when the Moorish cavalry under El Zagal, suddenly emerging from one of the mountain passes, appeared before the astonished rear-guard of the Christians. The Moors spurred on to the assault, but the well- disciplined chivalry of St. James remained unshaken. In the fierce struggle which ensued, the Andalusians became embarrassed by the narrowness of the ground on which they were engaged, which afforded no scope for the manoeuvres of cavalry; while the Moors, trained to the wild tactics of mountain warfare, went through their usual evolutions, retreating and returning to the charge with a celerity that sorely distressed their opponents and at length threw them into some disorder. The grand master, in consequence, despatched a message to the marquis of Cadiz, requesting his support. The latter, putting himself at the head of such of his scattered forces as he could hastily muster, readily obeyed the summons. Discerning on his approach the real source of the grand master's embarrassment, he succeeded in changing the field of action by drawing off the Moors to an open reach of the valley, which allowed free play to the movements of the Andalusian horse, when the combined squadrons pressed so hard on the Moslems, that they were soon compelled to take refuge within the depths of their own mountains. [23] In the mean while, the scattered troops of the advance, alarmed by the report of the action, gradually assembled under their respective banners, and fell back upon the rear. A council of war was then called. All further progress seemed to be effectually intercepted. The country was everywhere in arms. The most that now could be hoped, was, that they might be suffered to retire unmolested with such plunder as they had already acquired. Two routes lay open for this purpose. The one winding along the sea-shore, wide and level, but circuitous, and swept through the whole range of its narrow entrance by the fortress of Malaga. This determined them unhappily to prefer the other route, being that by which they had penetrated the Axarquia, or rather a shorter cut, by which the adalides undertook to conduct them through its mazes. [24] The little army commenced its retrograde movement with undiminished spirit. But it was now embarrassed with the transportation of its plunder, and by the increasing difficulties of the sierra, which, as they ascended its sides, was matted over with impenetrable thickets, and broken up by formidable ravines or channels, cut deep into the soil by the mountain torrents. The Moors were now seen mustering in considerable numbers along the heights, and, as they were expert marksmen, being trained by early and assiduous practice, the shots from their arquebuses and cross-bows frequently found some assailable point in the harness of the Spanish men- at-arms. At length, the army, through the treachery or ignorance of the guides, was suddenly brought to a halt by arriving in a deep glen or enclosure, whose rocky sides rose with such boldness as to be scarcely practicable for infantry, much less for horse. To add to their distresses, daylight, without which they could scarcely hope to extricate themselves, was fast fading away. [25] In this extremity no other alternative seemed to remain, than to attempt to regain the route from which they had departed. As all other considerations were now subordinate to those of personal safety, it was agreed to abandon the spoil acquired at so much hazard, which greatly retarded their movements. As they painfully retraced their steps, the darkness of the night was partially dispelled by numerous fires, which blazed along the hill-tops, and which showed the figures of their enemies flitting to and fro like so many spectres. It seemed, says Bernaldez, as if ten thousand torches were glancing along the mountains. At length, the whole body, faint with fatigue and hunger, reached the borders of a little stream, which flowed through a valley, whose avenues, as well as the rugged heights by which it was commanded, were already occupied by the enemy, who poured down mingled volleys of shot, stones, and arrows on the heads of the Christians. The compact mass presented by the latter afforded a sure mark to the artillery of the Moors; while they, from their scattered position, as well as from the defences afforded by the nature of the ground, were exposed to little annoyance in return. In addition to lighter missiles, the Moors occasionally dislodged large fragments of rock, which, rolling with tremendous violence down the declivities of the hills, spread frightful desolation through the Christian ranks. [26] The dismay occasioned by these scenes, occurring amidst the darkness of night, and heightened by the shrill war-cries of the Moors, which rose around them on every quarter, seems to have completely bewildered the Spaniards, even their leaders. It was the misfortune of the expedition, that there was but little concert between the several commanders, or, at least, that there was no one so pre-eminent above the rest as to assume authority at this awful moment. So far, it would seem, from attempting escape, they continued in their perilous position, uncertain what course to take, until midnight; when at length, after having seen their best and bravest followers fall thick around them, they determined at all hazards to force a passage across the sierra in the face of the enemy. "Better lose our lives," said the grand master of St. James, addressing his men, "in cutting a way through the foe, than be butchered without resistance, like cattle in the shambles." [27] The marquis of Cadiz, guided by a trusty adalid, and accompanied by sixty or seventy lances, was fortunate enough to gain a circuitous route less vigilantly guarded by the enemy, whose attention was drawn to the movements of the main body of the Castilian army. By means of this path, the marquis, with his little band, succeeded, after a painful march, in which his good steed sunk under him oppressed with wounds and fatigue, in reaching a valley at some distance from the scene of action, where he determined to wait the coming up of his friends, who he confidently expected would follow on his track. [28] But the grand master and his associates, missing this track in the darkness of the night, or perhaps preferring another, breasted the sierra in a part where it proved extremely difficult of ascent. At every step the loosened earth gave way under the pressure of the foot, and, the infantry endeavoring to support themselves by clinging to the tails and manes of the horses, the jaded animals, borne down with the weight, rolled headlong with their riders on the ranks below, or were precipitated down the sides of the numerous ravines. The Moors, all the while, avoiding a close encounter, contented themselves with discharging on the heads of their opponents an uninterrupted shower of missiles of every description. [29] It was not until the following morning, that the Castilians, having surmounted the crest of the eminence, began the descent into the opposite valley, which they had the mortification to observe was commanded on every point by their vigilant adversary, who seemed now in their eyes to possess the powers of ubiquity. As the light broke upon the troops, it revealed the whole extent of their melancholy condition. How different from the magnificent array which, but two days previous, marched forth with such high and confident hopes from the gates of Antequera! their ranks thinned, their bright arms defaced and broken, their banners rent in pieces, or lost,--as had been that of St. James, together with its gallant _alferez_, Diego Becerra, in the terrible passage of the preceding night,--their countenances aghast with terror, fatigue, and famine. Despair now was in every eye, all subordination was at an end. No one, says Pulgar, heeded any longer the call of the trumpet, or the wave of the banner. Each sought only his own safety, without regard to his comrade. Some threw away their arms; hoping by this means to facilitate their escape, while in fact it only left them more defenceless against the shafts of their enemies. Some, oppressed with fatigue and terror, fell down and died without so much as receiving a wound. The panic was such that, in more than one instance, two or three Moorish soldiers were known to capture thrice their own number of Spaniards. Some, losing their way, strayed back to Malaga and were made prisoners by females of the city, who overtook them in the fields. Others escaped to Alhama or other distant places, after wandering seven or eight days among the mountains, sustaining life on such wild herbs and berries as they could find, and lying close during the day. A greater number succeeded in reaching Antequera, and, among these, most of the leaders of the expedition. The grand master of St. James, the adelantado Henriquez, and Don Alonso de Aguilar effected their escape by scaling so perilous a part of the sierra that their pursuers cared not to follow. The count de Cifuentes was less fortunate. [30] That nobleman's division was said to have suffered more severely than any other. On the morning after the bloody passage of the mountain, he found himself suddenly cut off from his followers, and surrounded by six Moorish cavaliers, against whom he was defending himself with desperate courage, when their leader, Reduan Benegas, struck with the inequality of the combat, broke in, exclaiming, "Hold, this is unworthy of good knights." The assailants sunk back abashed by the rebuke, and left the count to their commander. A close encounter then took place between the two chiefs; but the strength of the Spaniard was no longer equal to his spirit, and, after a brief resistance, he was forced to surrender to his generous enemy. [31] The marquis of Cadiz had better fortune. After waiting till dawn for the coming up of his friends, he concluded that they had extricated themselves by a different route. He resolved to provide for his own safety and that of his followers, and, being supplied with a fresh horse, accomplished his escape, after traversing the wildest passages of the Axarquia for the distance of four leagues, and got into Antequera with but little interruption from the enemy. But, although he secured his personal safety, the misfortunes of the day fell heavily on his house; for two of his brothers were cut down by his side, and a third brother, with a nephew, fell into the hands of the enemy. [32] The amount of slain in the two days' actions is admitted by the Spanish writers to have exceeded eight hundred, with double that number of prisoners. The Moorish force is said to have been small, and its loss comparatively trifling. The numerical estimates of the Spanish historians, as usual, appear extremely loose; and the narrative of their enemies is too meagre in this portion of their annals to allow any opportunity of verification. There is no reason, however, to believe them in any degree exaggerated. The best blood of Andalusia was shed on this occasion. Among the slain, Bernaldez reckons two hundred and fifty, and Pulgar four hundred persons of quality, with thirty commanders of the military fraternity of St. James. There was scarcely a family in the south, but had to mourn the loss of some one of its members by death or captivity; and the distress was not a little aggravated by the uncertainty which hung over the fate of the absent, as to whether they had fallen in the field, or were still wandering in the wilderness, or were pining away existence in the dungeons of Malaga and Granada. [33] Some imputed the failure of the expedition to treachery in the adalides, some to want of concert among the commanders. The worthy Curate of Los Palacios concludes his narrative of the disaster in the following manner. "The number of the Moors was small, who inflicted this grievous defeat on the Christians. It was, indeed, clearly miraculous, and we may discern in it the special interposition of Providence, justly offended with the greater part of those that engaged in the expedition; who, instead of confessing, partaking the sacrament, and making their testaments, as becomes good Christians, and men that are to bear arms in defence of the Holy Catholic faith, acknowledged that they did not bring with them suitable dispositions, but, with little regard to God's service, were influenced by covetousness and love of ungodly gain." [34] FOOTNOTES [1] Estrada, Poblacion de España, tom. ii. pp. 242, 243.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 317.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. p. 261. [2] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 58.--Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii, pp. 249, 250.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. pp. 259, 260. [3] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 173.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, p. 187.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 316, 317. [4] Rades y Andrada, Las Tres Ordenes, fol. 80, 81.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 173.--Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decades, ii. lib. 1, cap. 7.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. p. 214.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1482. [5] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, pp. 189-191.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 58.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. pp. 214-217.-- Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. pp. 260, 261. [6] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 58.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. pp. 214-217.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, ubi supra.-- Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decades, ii. lib. 1, cap. 7.--The _Peña de los Enamorados_ received its name from a tragical incident in Moorish history. A Christian slave succeeded in inspiring the daughter of his master, a wealthy Mussulman of Granada, with a passion for himself. The two lovers, after some time, fearful of the detection of their intrigue, resolved to mate their escape into the Spanish territory. Before they could effect their purpose, however, they were hotly pursued by the damsel's father at the head of a party of Moorish horsemen, and overtaken near a precipice which rises between Archidona and Antequera. The unfortunate fugitives, who had scrambled to the summit of the rocks, finding all further escape impracticable, after tenderly embracing each other threw themselves headlong from the dizzy heights, preferring this dreadful death to falling into the hands of their vindictive pursuers. The spot consecrated as the scene of this tragic incident has received the name of _Rock of the Lovers_. The legend is prettily told by Mariana, (Hist. de España, tom. ii. pp. 253, 254,) who concludes with the pithy reflection, that "such constancy would have been truly admirable, had it been shown in defence of the true faith, rather than in the gratification of lawless appetite." [7] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. pp. 214-217.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. pp. 262, 263.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib, 1, cap. 12.--Bernaldez states that great umbrage was taken at the influence which the king of Granada allowed a person of Christian lineage, named Venegas, to exercise over him. Pulgar hints at the bloody massacre of the Abencerrages, which, without any better authority that I know of, forms the burden of many an ancient ballad, and has lost nothing of its romantic coloring under the hand of Cinés Perez de Hyta. [8] Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, ubi supra.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, ubi supra. Boabdil was surnamed "el Chico," _the Little_, by the Spanish writers, to distinguish him from an uncle of the same name; and "el Zogoybi," _the Unfortunate_, by the Moors, indicating that he was the last of his race destined to wear the diadem of Granada. The Arabs, with great felicity, frequently select names significant of some quality in the objects they represent. Examples of this may be readily found in the southern regions of the Peninsula, where the Moors lingered the longest. The etymology of Gibraltar, Gebal Tarik, _Mount of Tarik_, is well known. Thus, Algeziras comes from an Arabic word which signifies _an island_: Alpuxarras comes from a term signifying _herbage_ or _pasturage_: Arrecife from another, signifying _causeway_ or _high road_, etc. The Arabic word _wad_ stands for _river_. This without much violence has been changed into _guad_, and enters into the names of many of the southern streams; for example, Guadalquivir, _great river_, Guadiana, _narrow_ or _little river_, Guadalete, etc. In the same manner the term Medina, _Arabicè_ "city," has been retained as a prefix to the names of many of the Spanish towns, as Medina Celi, Medina del Campo, etc. See Conde's notes to El Nubiense, Description de España, passim. [9] Salazar de Mendoza, Crón. del Gran Cardenal, p. 181.--Pulgar, Claros Varones, tit. 20.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1483.--Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. p. 11, ed. 1766.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., epist. 158. [10] Fred. Marslaar, De Leg. 2, 11.--M. de Wicquefort derives the word _ambassadeur_ (anciently in English _ambassador_) from the Spanish word _embiar_, "to send." See Rights of Embassadors, translated by Digby (London, 1740,) book 1, chap. 1. [11] Sismondi, Républiques Italiennes, tom. xi. cap. 88.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, pp. 195-198.--Zurita, Anales, tom iv. fol. 218. [12] Aleson, Annales de Navarra, lib. 34, cap. 1.--Histoire du Royaume de Navarre, p. 558. Leonora's son, Gaston de Foix, prince of Viana, was slain by an accidental wound from a lance, at a tourney at Lisbon, in 1469. By the princess Magdeleine, his wife, sister of Louis XI, he left two children, a son and daughter, each of whom in turn succeeded to the crown of Navarre. Francis Phoebus ascended the throne on the demise of his grandmother Leonora, in 1479. He was distinguished by his personal graces and beauty, and especially by the golden lustre of his hair, from which, according to Aleson, he derived his cognomen of Phoebus. As it was an ancestral name, however, such an etymology may be thought somewhat fanciful. [13] Ferdinand and Isabella had at this time four children; the infant Don John, four years and a half old, but who did not live to come to the succession, and the infantas Isabella, Joanna, and Maria; the last, born at Cordova during the summer of 1482. [14] Aleson, Annales de Navarra, lib. 34, cap. 2; lib. 35, cap. 1.-- Histoire du Royaume de Navarre, pp. 578, 579.--La Clède, Hist. de Portugal, tom. iii. pp. 438-441.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, p. 199.-- Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. p. 551. [15] Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decades, ii. lib. 2, cap. 1. Besides the armada in the Mediterranean, a fleet under Pedro de Vera was prosecuting a voyage of discovery and conquest to the Canaries at this time. [16] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, p. 199.--Mariana, tom. ii. p. 551.-- Coleccion de Cédulas y Otros Documentos, (Madrid, 1829,) tom. iii. no. 25. For this important collection, a few copies of which, only, were printed for distribution, at the expense of the Spanish government, I am indebted to the politeness of Don A. Calderon de la Barca. [17] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 58.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, p. 202. Juan de Corral imposed on the king of Granada by means of certain credentials, which he had obtained from the Spanish sovereigns without any privity on their part to his fraudulent intentions. The story is told in a very blind manner by Pulgar. It may not be amiss to mention here a doughty feat performed by another Castilian envoy, of much higher rank, Don Juan de Vera. This knight, while conversing with certain Moorish cavaliers in the Alhambra, was so much scandalized by the freedom with which one of them treated the immaculate conception, that he gave the circumcised dog the lie, and smote him a sharp blow on the head with his sword. Ferdinand, say Bernaldez, who tells the story, was much gratified with the exploit, and recompensed the good knight with many honors. [18] The _adalid_ was a guide, or scout, whose business it was to make himself acquainted with the enemy's country, and to guide the invaders into it. Much dispute has arisen respecting the authority and functions of this officer. Some writers regard him as an independent leader, or commander; and the Dictionary of the Academy defines the term _adalid_ by these very words. The Siete Partidas, however, explains at length the peculiar duties of this officer, conformably to the account I have given. (Ed. de la Real Acad. (Madrid, 1807,) part. 2, tit. 2, leyes 1-4.) Bernaldez, Pulgar, and the other chroniclers of the Granadine war, repeatedly notice him in this connection. When he is spoken of as a captain, or leader, as he sometimes is in these and other ancient records, his authority, I suspect, is intended to be limited to the persons who aided him in the execution of his peculiar office.--It was common for the great chiefs, who lived on the borders, to maintain in their pay a number of these _adalides_, to inform them of the fitting time and place for making a foray. The post, as may well be believed, was one of great trust and personal hazard. [19] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, p. 203.--L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 173.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 320. [20] Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 36.--Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decades, ii. lib. 2, cap. 2. The title of _adelantado_ implies in its etymology one preferred or placed before others. The office is of great antiquity; some have derived it from the reign of St. Ferdinand in the thirteenth century, but Mendoza proves its existence at a far earlier period. The adelantado was possessed of very extensive judicial authority in the province or district in which he presided, and in war was invested with supreme military command. His functions, however, as well as the territories over which he ruled, have varied at different periods. An adelantado seems to have been generally established over a border province, as Andalusia for example. Marina discusses the civil authority of this officer, in his Teoría, tom. ii. cap. 23. See also Salazar de Mendoza, Dignidades, lib. 2, cap. 15. [21] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 60.--Rades y Andrada, Las Tres Ordenes, fol. 71.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 320.--Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, fol. 395.--Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decades, ii. lib. 2, cap. 2.-- Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 36. [22] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. p. 217.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. pp. 264-267.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 60. [23] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. p. 217.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, p. 204.--Rades y Andrada, Las Tres Ordenes, fol. 71, 72. [24] Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. pp. 552, 553.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, p. 205.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 321. [25] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, p. 205.--Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. p. 636. [26] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 60.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, ubi supra.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. pp. 264-267. [27] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, p. 206.--Rades y Andrada, Las Tres Ordenes, fol. 71, 72. [28] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, loc. cit.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 60. [29] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, p. 206. Mr. Irving, in his "Conquest of Granada," states that the scene of the greatest slaughter in this rout is still known to the inhabitants of the Axarquia by the name of _La Cuesta de la Matanza_, or "The Hill of the Massacre." [30] Oviedo, who devotes one of his dialogues to this nobleman, says of him, "Fue una de las buenas lanzos de nuestra España en su tiempo; y muy sabio y prudente caballero. Hallose en grandes cargos y negocios de paz y de guerra." Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 36. [31] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii, p. 218.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. fol. 321.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1483.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, ubi supra.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 60.-- Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. pp. 266, 267.--The count, according to Oviedo, remained a long while a prisoner in Granada, until he was ransomed by the payment of several thousand doblas of gold. Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial 36. [32] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 60.--Marmol says that three brothers and two nephews of the marquis, whose names he gives, were all slain. Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 12. [33] Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, fol. 395.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., ubi supra.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, p. 206.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 38.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 12. [34] Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 60. Pulgar has devoted a large space to the unfortunate expedition to the Axarquia. His intimacy with the principal persons of the court enabled him, no doubt, to verify most of the particulars which he records. The Curate of Los Palacios, from the proximity of his residence to the theatre of action, may be supposed also to have had ample means for obtaining the requisite information. Yet their several accounts, although not strictly contradictory, it is not always easy to reconcile with one another. The narratives of complex military operations are not likely to be simplified under the hands of monkish bookmen. I have endeavored to make out a connected tissue from a comparison of the Moslem with the Castilian authorities. But here the meagreness of the Moslem annals compels us to lament the premature death of Conde. It can hardly be expected, indeed, that the Moors should have dwelt with much amplification on this humiliating period. But there can be little doubt, that far more copious memorials of theirs than any now published, exist in the Spanish libraries; and it were much to be wished that some Oriental scholar would supply Conde's deficiency, by exploring these authentic records of what may be deemed, as far as Christian Spain is concerned, the most glorious portion of her history. CHAPTER XI. WAR OF GRANADA.--GENERAL VIEW OF THE POLICY PURSUED IN THE CONDUCT OF THIS WAR 1483-1487. Defeat and Capture of Abdallah.--Policy of the Sovereigns.--Large Trains of Artillery.--Description of the Pieces.--Stupendous Roads.--Isabella's Care of the Troops.--Her Perseverance.--Discipline of the Army.--Swiss Mercenaries.--English Lord Scales.--Magnificence of the Nobles.--Isabella Visits the Camp.--Ceremonies on the Occupation of a City. The young monarch, Abu Abdallah, was probably the only person in Granada who did not receive with unmingled satisfaction the tidings of the rout in the Axarquia. He beheld with secret uneasiness the laurels thus acquired by the old king his father, or rather by his ambitious uncle El Zagal, whose name now resounded from every quarter as the successful champion of the Moslems. He saw the necessity of some dazzling enterprise, if he would maintain an ascendency even over the faction which had seated him on the throne. He accordingly projected an excursion, which, instead of terminating in a mere border foray, should lead to the achievement of some permanent conquest. He found no difficulty, while the spirits of his people were roused, in raising a force of nine thousand foot, and seven hundred horse, the flower of Granada's chivalry. He strengthened his army still further by the presence of Ali Atar, the defender of Loja, the veteran of a hundred battles, whose military prowess had raised him from the common file up to the highest post in the army; and whose plebeian blood had been permitted to mingle with that of royalty, by the marriage of his daughter with the young king Abdallah. With this gallant array, the Moorish monarch sallied forth from Granada. As he led the way through the avenue which still bears the name of the gate of Elvira, [1] the point of his lance came in contact with the arch and was broken. This sinister omen was followed by another more alarming. A fox, which crossed the path of the army, was seen to run through the ranks, and, notwithstanding the showers of missiles discharged at him, to make his escape unhurt. Abdallah's counsellors would have persuaded him to abandon, or at least postpone, an enterprise of such ill augury. But the king, less superstitious, or from the obstinacy with which feeble minds, when once resolved, frequently persist in their projects, rejected their advice, and pressed forward on his march. [2] The advance of the party was not conducted so cautiously but that it reached the ear of Don Diego Fernandez de Cordova, _alcayde de los donzeles_, or captain of the royal pages, who commanded in the town of Lucena, which he rightly judged was to be the principal object of attack. He transmitted the intelligence to his uncle the count of Cabra, a nobleman of the same name with himself, who was posted at his own town of Baena, requesting his support. He used all diligence in repairing the fortifications of the city, which, although extensive and originally strong, had fallen somewhat into decay; and, having caused such of the population as were rendered helpless by age or infirmity to withdraw into the interior defences of the place, he coolly waited the approach of the enemy. [3] The Moorish army, after crossing the borders, began to mark its career through the Christian territory with the usual traces of devastation, and, sweeping across the environs of Lucena, poured a marauding foray into the rich _campiña_ of Cordova, as far as the walls of Aguilar; whence it returned, glutted with spoil, to lay siege to Lucena about the 21st of April. The count of Cabra, in the mean while, who had lost no time in mustering his levies, set forward at the head of a small but well-appointed force, consisting of both horse and foot, to the relief of his nephew. He advanced with such celerity that he had wellnigh surprised the beleaguering army. As he traversed the sierra, which covered the Moorish flank, his numbers were partially concealed by the inequalities of the ground; while the clash of arms and the shrill music, reverberating among the hills, exaggerated their real magnitude in the apprehension of the enemy. At the same time the _alcayde de los donzeles_ supported his uncle's advance by a vigorous sally from the city. The Granadine infantry, anxious only for the preservation of their valuable booty, scarcely waited for the encounter, before they began a dastardly retreat, and left the battle to the cavalry. The latter, composed, as has been said, of the strength of the Moorish chivalry, men accustomed in many a border foray to cross lances with the best knights of Andalusia, kept their ground with their wonted gallantry. The conflict, so well disputed, remained doubtful for some time, until it was determined by the death of the veteran chieftain Ali Atar, "the best lance," as a Castilian writer has styled him, "of all Morisma," who was brought to the ground after receiving two wounds, and thus escaped by an honorable death the melancholy spectacle of his country's humiliation. [4] The enemy, disheartened by this loss, soon began to give ground. But, though hard pressed by the Spaniards, they retreated in some order, until they reached the borders of the Xenil, which were thronged with the infantry, vainly attempting a passage across the stream, swollen by excessive rains to a height much above its ordinary level. The confusion now became universal, horse and foot mingling together; each one, heedful only of life, no longer thought of his booty. Many, attempting to swim the stream, were borne down, steed and rider, promiscuously in its waters. Many more, scarcely making show of resistance, were cut down on the banks by the pitiless Spaniards. The young king Abdallah, who had been conspicuous during that day in the hottest of the fight, mounted on a milk-white charger richly caparisoned, saw fifty of his loyal guard fall around him. Finding his steed too much jaded to stem the current of the river, he quietly dismounted and sought a shelter among the reedy thickets that fringed its margin, until the storm of battle should have passed over. In this lurking-place, however, he was discovered by a common soldier named Martin Hurtado, who, without recognizing his person, instantly attacked him. The prince defended himself with his scimitar, until Hurtado, being joined by two of his countrymen, succeeded in making him prisoner. The men, overjoyed at their prize (for Abdallah had revealed his rank, in order to secure his person from violence), conducted him to their general, the count of Cabra. The latter received the royal captive with a generous courtesy, the best sign of noble breeding, and which, recognized as a feature of chivalry, affords a pleasing contrast to the ferocious spirit of ancient warfare. The good count administered to the unfortunate prince all the consolations which his state would admit; and subsequently lodged him in his castle of Baena, where he was entertained with the most delicate and courtly hospitality. [5] Nearly the whole of the Moslem cavalry were cut up, or captured, in this fatal action. Many of them were persons of rank, commanding high ransoms. The loss inflicted on the infantry was also severe, including the whole of their dear-bought plunder. Nine, or indeed, according to some accounts, two and twenty banners fell into the hands of the Christians in this action; in commemoration of which the Spanish sovereigns granted to the count of Cabra, and his nephew, the alcayde de los donzeles, the privilege of bearing the same number of banners on their escutcheon, together with the head of a Moorish king, encircled by a golden coronet, with a chain of the same metal around the neck. [6] Great was the consternation occasioned by the return of the Moorish fugitives to Granada, and loud was the lament through its populous streets; for the pride of many a noble house was laid low on that day, and their king (a thing unprecedented in the annals of the monarchy) was a prisoner in the land of the Christians. "The hostile star of Islam," exclaims an Arabian writer, "now scattered its malignant influences over Spain, and the downfall of the Mussulman empire was decreed." The sultana Zoraya, however, was not of a temper to waste time in useless lamentation. She was aware that a captive king, who held his title by so precarious a tenure as did her son Abdallah, must soon cease to be a king even in name. She accordingly despatched a numerous embassy to Cordova, with proffers of such a ransom for the prince's liberation, as a despot only could offer, and few despots could have the authority to enforce. [7] King Ferdinand, who was at Vitoria with the queen, when he received tidings of the victory of Lucena, hastened to the south to determine on the destination of his royal captive. With some show of magnanimity, he declined an interview with Abdallah, until he should have consented to his liberation. A debate of some warmth occurred in the royal council at Cordova, respecting the policy to be pursued; some contending that the Moorish monarch was too valuable a prize to be so readily relinquished, and that the enemy, broken by the loss of their natural leader, would find it difficult to rally under one common head, or to concert any effective movement. Others, and especially the marquis of Cadiz, urged his release, and even the support of his pretensions against his competitor, the old king of Granada; insisting that the Moorish empire would be more effectually shaken by internal divisions, than by any pressure of its enemies from without. The various arguments were submitted to the queen, who still held her court in the north, and who decided for the release of Abdallah, as a measure best reconciling sound policy with generosity to the vanquished. [8] The terms of the treaty, although sufficiently humiliating to the Moslem prince, were not materially different from those proposed by the sultana Zoraya. It was agreed that a truce, of two years should be extended to Abdallah, and to such places in Granada as acknowledged his authority. In consideration of which, he stipulated to surrender four hundred Christian captives without ransom, to pay twelve thousand doblas of gold annually to the Spanish sovereigns, and to permit a free passage, as well as furnish supplies, to their troops passing through his territories, for the purpose of carrying on the war against that portion of the kingdom which still adhered to his father. Abdallah moreover bound himself to appear when summoned by Ferdinand, and to surrender his own son, with the children of his principal nobility, as sureties for his fulfilment of the treaty. Thus did the unhappy prince barter away his honor and his country's freedom for the possession of immediate, but most precarious sovereignty; a sovereignty, which could scarcely be expected to survive the period when he could be useful to the master whose breath had made him. [9] The terms of the treaty being thus definitively settled, an interview was arranged to take place between the two monarchs at Cordova. The Castilian courtiers would have persuaded their master to offer his hand for Abdallah to salute, in token of his feudal supremacy; but Ferdinand replied, "Were the king of Granada in his own dominions, I might do this; but not while he is a prisoner in mine." The Moorish prince entered Cordova with an escort of his own knights, and a splendid throng of Spanish chivalry, who had marched out of the city to receive him. When Abdallah entered the royal presence, he would have prostrated himself on his knees; but Ferdinand, hastening to prevent him, embraced him with every demonstration of respect. An Arabic interpreter, who acted as orator, then, expatiated, in florid hyperbole, on the magnanimity and princely qualities of the Spanish king, and the loyalty and good faith of his own master. But Ferdinand interrupted his eloquence, with the assurance that "his panegyric was superfluous, and that he had perfect confidence that the sovereign of Granada would keep his faith as became a true knight and a king." After ceremonies so humiliating to the Moorish prince, notwithstanding the veil of decorum studiously thrown over them, he set out with his attendants for his capital, escorted by a body of Andalusian horse to the frontier, and loaded with costly presents by the Spanish king, and the general contempt of his court. [10] Notwithstanding the importance of the results in the war of Granada, a detail of the successive steps by which they were achieved would be most tedious and trifling. No siege or single military achievement of great moment occurred until nearly four years from this period, in 1487; although, in the intervening time, a large number of fortresses and petty towns, together with a very extensive tract of territory, were recovered from the enemy. Without pursuing the chronological order of events, it is probable that the end of history will be best attained by presenting a concise view of the general policy pursued by the sovereigns in the conduct of the war. The Moorish wars under preceding monarchs had consisted of little else than _cavalgadas_, or inroads into the enemy's territory, [11] which, pouring like a torrent over the land, swept away whatever was upon the surface, but left it in its essential resources wholly unimpaired. The bounty of nature soon repaired the ravages of man, and the ensuing harvest seemed to shoot up more abundantly from the soil, enriched by the blood of the husbandman. A more vigorous system of spoliation was now introduced. Instead of one campaign, the army took the field in spring and autumn, intermitting its efforts only during the intolerable heats of summer, so that the green crop had no time to ripen, ere it was trodden down under the iron heel of war. The apparatus for devastation was also on a much greater scale than had ever before been witnessed. From the second year of the war, thirty thousand foragers were reserved for this service, which they effected by demolishing farmhouses, granaries, and mills, (which last were exceedingly numerous in a land watered by many small streams,) by eradicating the vines, and laying waste the olive-gardens and plantations of oranges, almonds, mulberries, and all the rich varieties that grew luxuriant in this highly-favored region. This merciless devastation extended for more than two leagues on either side of the line of march. At the same time, the Mediterranean fleet cut off all supplies from the Barbary coast, so that the whole kingdom might be said to be in a state of perpetual blockade. Such and so general was the scarcity occasioned by this system, that the Moors were glad to exchange their Christian captives for provisions, until such ransom was interdicted by the sovereigns, as tending to defeat their own measures. [12] Still there was many a green and sheltered valley in Granada, which yielded its returns unmolested to the Moorish husbandman; while his granaries were occasionally enriched with the produce of a border foray. The Moors too, although naturally a luxurious people, were patient of suffering, and capable of enduring great privation. Other measures, therefore, of a still more formidable character, became necessary in conjunction with this rigorous system of blockade. The Moorish towns were for the most part strongly defended, presenting within the limits of Granada, as has been said, more than ten times the number of fortified places that are now scattered over the whole extent of the Peninsula. They stood along the crest of some precipice, or bold sierra, whose natural strength was augmented by the solid masonry with which they were surrounded, and which, however insufficient to hold out against modern artillery, bade defiance to all the enginery of battering warfare known previously to the fifteenth century. It was this strength of fortification, combined with that of their local position, which frequently enabled a slender garrison in these places to laugh to scorn all the efforts of the proudest Castilian armies. The Spanish sovereigns were convinced that they must look to their artillery as the only effectual means for the reduction of these strong- holds. In this, they as well as the Moors were extremely deficient, although Spain appears to have furnished earlier examples of its use than any other country in Europe. Isabella, who seems to have had the particular control of this department, caused the most skilful engineers and artisans to be invited into the kingdom from France, Germany, and Italy. Forges were constructed in the camp, and all the requisite materials prepared for the manufacture of cannon, balls, and powder. Large quantities of the last were also imported from Sicily, Flanders, and Portugal. Commissaries were established over the various departments, with instructions to provide whatever might be necessary for the operatives; and the whole was intrusted to the supervision of Don Francisco Ramirez, an hidalgo of Madrid, a person of much experience, and extensive military science, for that day. By these efforts, unremittingly pursued during the whole of the war, Isabella assembled a train of artillery, such as was probably not possessed at that time by any other European potentate. [13] Still, the clumsy construction of the ordnance betrayed the infancy of the art. More than twenty pieces of artillery used at the siege of Baza, during this war, are still to be seen in that city, where they long served as columns in the public market-place. The largest of the lombards, as the heavy ordnance was called, are about twelve feet in length, consisting of iron bars two inches in breadth, held together by bolts and rings of the same metal. These were firmly attached to their carriages, incapable either of horizontal or vertical movement. It was this clumsiness of construction which led Machiavelli, some thirty years after, to doubt the expediency of bringing cannon into field engagements; and he particularly recommends in his treatise on the Art of War, that the enemy's fire should be evaded by intervals in the ranks being left open opposite to his cannon. [14] The balls thrown from these engines were sometimes of iron, but more usually of marble. Several hundred of the latter have been picked up in the fields around Baza, many of which are fourteen inches in diameter, and weigh a hundred and seventy-five pounds. Yet this bulk, enormous as it appears, shows a considerable advance in the art since the beginning of the century, when the stone balls discharged, according to Zurita, at the siege of Balaguer, weighed not less than five hundred and fifty pounds. It was very long before the exact proportions requisite for obtaining the greatest effective force could be ascertained. [15] The awkwardness with which their artillery was served, corresponded with the rudeness of its manufacture. It is noticed as a remarkable circumstance by the chronicler, that two batteries, at the siege of Albahar, discharged one hundred and forty balls in the course of a day. [16] Besides this more usual kind of ammunition, the Spaniards threw from their engines large globular masses, composed of certain inflammable ingredients mixed with gunpowder, "which, scattering long trains of light," says an eye-witness, "in their passage through the air, filled the beholders with dismay, and, descending on the roofs of the edifices, frequently occasioned extensive conflagration." [17] The transportation of their bulky engines was not the least of the difficulties which the Spaniards had to encounter in this war. The Moorish fortresses were frequently intrenched in the depths of some mountain labyrinth, whose rugged passes were scarcely accessible to cavalry. An immense body of pioneers, therefore, was constantly employed in constructing roads for the artillery across these sierras, by levelling the mountains, filling up the intervening valleys with rocks, or with cork trees and other timber that grew prolific in the wilderness, and throwing bridges across the torrents and precipitous _barrancos_. Pulgar had the curiosity to examine one of the causeways thus constructed preparatory to the siege of Cambil, which, although six thousand pioneers were constantly employed in the work, was attended with such difficulty, that it advanced only three leagues in twelve days. It required, says the historian, the entire demolition of one of the most rugged parts of the sierra, which no one could have believed practicable by human industry. [18] The Moorish garrisons, perched on their mountain fastnesses, which, like the eyry of some bird of prey, seemed almost inaccessible to man, beheld with astonishment the heavy trains of artillery, emerging from the passes, where the foot of the hunter had scarcely been known to venture. The walls which encompassed their cities, although lofty, were not of sufficient thickness to withstand long the assaults of these formidable engines. The Moors were deficient in heavy ordnance. The weapons on which they chiefly relied for annoying the enemy at a distance were the arquebus and cross- bow, with the last of which they were unerring marksmen, being trained to it from infancy. They adopted a custom, rarely met with in civilized nations of any age, of poisoning their arrows; distilling for this purpose the juice of aconite, or wolfsbane, which they found in the _Sierra Nevada_, or Snowy Mountains, near Granada. A piece of linen or cotton cloth steeped in this decoction was wrapped round the point of the weapon, and the wound inflicted by it, however trivial in appearance, was sure to be mortal. Indeed, a Spanish writer, not content with this, imputes such malignity to the virus that a drop of it, as he asserts, mingling with the blood oozing from a wound, would ascend the stream into the vein, and diffuse its fatal influence over the whole system! [19] Ferdinand, who appeared at the head of his armies throughout the whole of this war, pursued a sagacious policy in reference to the beleaguered cities. He was ever ready to meet the first overtures to surrender, in the most liberal spirit; granting protection of person, and such property as the besieged could transport with them, and assigning them a residence, if they preferred it, in his own dominions. Many, in consequence of this, migrated to Seville and other cities of Andalusia, where they were settled on estates which had been confiscated by the inquisitors; who looked forward, no doubt, with satisfaction to the time, when they should be permitted to thrust their sickle into the new crop of heresy, whose seeds were thus sown amid the ashes of the old one. Those who preferred to remain in the conquered Moorish territory, as Castilian subjects, were permitted the free enjoyment of personal rights and property, as well as of their religion; and, such was the fidelity with which Ferdinand redeemed his engagements during the war, by the punishment of the least infraction of them by his own people, that many, particularly of the Moorish peasantry, preferred abiding in their early homes to removing to Granada, or other places of the Moslem dominion. It was perhaps a counterpart of the same policy, which led Ferdinand to chastise any attempt at revolt, on the part of his new Moorish subjects, the Mudejares, as they were called, with an unsparing rigor, which merits the reproach of cruelty. Such was the military execution inflicted on the rebellious town of Benemaquez, where he commanded one hundred and ten of the principal inhabitants to be hung above the walls, and, after consigning the rest of the population, men, women, and children, to slavery, caused the place to be razed to the ground. The humane policy, usually pursued by Ferdinand, seems to have had a more favorable effect on his enemies, who were exasperated, rather than intimidated, by this ferocious act of vengeance. [20] The magnitude of the other preparations corresponded with those for the ordnance department. The amount of forces assembled at Cordova, we find variously stated at ten or twelve thousand horse, and twenty, and even forty thousand foot, exclusive of foragers. On one occasion, the whole number, including men for the artillery service and the followers of the camp, is reckoned at eighty thousand. The same number of beasts of burden were employed in transporting the supplies required for this immense host, as well as for provisioning the conquered cities standing in the midst of a desolated country. The queen, who took this department under her special cognizance, moved along the frontier, stationing herself at points most contiguous to the scene of operations. There, by means of posts regularly established, she received hourly intelligence of the war. At the same time she transmitted the requisite munitions for the troops, by means of convoys sufficiently strong to secure them against the irruptions of the wily enemy. [21] Isabella, solicitous for everything that concerned the welfare of her people, sometimes visited the camp in person, encouraging the soldiers to endure the hardships of war, and relieving their necessities by liberal donations of clothes and money. She caused also a number of large tents, known as "the queen's hospitals," to be always reserved for the sick and wounded, and furnished them with the requisite attendants and medicines, at her own charge. This is considered the earliest attempt at the formation of a regular camp hospital, on record. [22] Isabella may be regarded as the soul of this war. She engaged in it with the most exalted views, less to acquire territory than to re-establish the empire of the Cross over the ancient domain of Christendom. On this point, she concentrated all the energies of her powerful mind, never suffering herself to be diverted by any subordinate interest from this one great and glorious object. When the king, in 1484, would have paused a while from the Granadine war, in order to prosecute his claims to Roussillon against the French, on the demise of Louis the Eleventh, Isabella strongly objected to it; but, finding her remonstrance ineffectual, she left her husband in Aragon, and repaired to Cordova, where she placed the cardinal of Spain at the head of the army, and prepared to open the campaign in the usual vigorous manner. Here, however, she was soon joined by Ferdinand, who, on a cooler revision of the subject, deemed it prudent to postpone his projected enterprise. On another occasion, in the same year, when the nobles, fatigued with the service, had persuaded the king to retire earlier than usual, the queen, dissatisfied with the proceeding, addressed a letter to her husband, in which, after representing the disproportion of the results to the preparations, she besought him to keep the field as long as the season should serve. The grandees, says Lebrija, mortified at being surpassed in zeal for the holy war by a woman, eagerly collected their forces, which had been partly disbanded, and returned across the borders to renew hostilities. [23] A circumstance, which had frequently frustrated the most magnificent military enterprises under former reigns, was the factions of these potent vassals, who, independent of each other, and almost of the crown, could rarely be brought to act in efficient concert for a length of time, and broke up the camp on the slightest personal jealousy, Ferdinand experienced something of this temper in the duke of Medina Celi, who, when he had received orders to detach a corps of his troops to the support of the count of Benavente, refused, replying to the messenger, "Tell your master, that I came here to serve him at the head of my household troops, and they go nowhere without me as their leader." The sovereigns managed this fiery spirit with the greatest address, and, instead of curbing it, endeavored to direct it in the path of honorable emulation. The queen, who as their hereditary sovereign received a more deferential homage from her Castilian subjects than Ferdinand, frequently wrote to her nobles in the camp, complimenting some on their achievements, and others less fortunate on their intentions, thus cheering the hearts of all, says the chronicler, and stimulating them to deeds of heroism. On the most deserving she freely lavished those honors which cost little to the sovereign, but are most grateful to the subject. The marquis of Cadiz, who was pre-eminent above every other captain in this war for sagacity and conduct, was rewarded, after his brilliant surprise of Zahara, with the gift of that city, and the titles of Marquis of Zahara and Duke of Cadiz. The warrior, however, was unwilling to resign the ancient title under which he had won his laurels, and ever after subscribed himself, Marquis Duke of Cadiz. [24] Still more emphatic honors were conferred on the count de Cabra, after the capture of the king of Granada. When he presented himself before the sovereigns, who were at Vitoria, the clergy and cavaliers of the city marched out to receive him, and he entered in solemn procession on the right hand of the grand cardinal of Spain. As he advanced up the hall of audience in the royal palace, the king and queen came forward to welcome him, and then seated him by themselves at table, declaring that "the conqueror of kings should sit with kings." These honors were followed by the more substantial gratuity of a hundred thousand maravedies annual rent; "a fat donative," says an old chronicler, "for so lean a treasury." The young alcayde de los donzeles experienced a similar reception on the ensuing day. Such acts of royal condescension were especially grateful to the nobility of a court, circumscribed beyond every other in Europe by stately and ceremonious etiquette. [25] The duration of the war of Granada was such as to raise the militia throughout the kingdom nearly to a level with regular troops. Many of these levies, indeed, at the breaking out of the war, might pretend to this character. Such were those furnished by the Andalusian cities, which had been long accustomed to skirmishes with their Moslem neighbors. Such too was the well-appointed chivalry of the military orders, and the organized militia of the hermandad, which we find sometimes supplying a body of ten thousand men for the service. To these may be added the splendid throng of cavaliers and hidalgos, who swelled the retinues of the sovereigns and the great nobility. The king was attended in battle by a body-guard of a thousand knights, one-half light, and the other half heavy armed, all superbly equipped and mounted, and trained to arms from childhood, under the royal eye. Although the burden of the war bore most heavily on Andalusia, from its contiguity to the scene of action, yet recruits were drawn in abundance from the most remote provinces, as Galicia, Biscay, and the Asturias, from Aragon, and even the transmarine dominions of Sicily. The sovereigns did not disdain to swell their ranks with levies of a humbler description, by promising an entire amnesty to those malefactors, who had left the country in great numbers of late years to escape justice, on condition of their serving in the Moorish war. Throughout this motley host the strictest discipline and decorum were maintained. The Spaniards have never been disposed to intemperance; but the passion for gaming, especially with dice, to which they seem to have been immoderately addicted at that day, was restrained by the severest penalties. [26] The brilliant successes of the Spanish sovereigns diffused general satisfaction throughout Christendom, and volunteers flocked to the camp from France, England, and other parts of Europe, eager to participate in the glorious triumphs of the Cross. Among these was a corps of Swiss mercenaries, who are thus simply described by Pulgar. "There joined the royal standard a body of men from Switzerland, a country in upper Germany. These men were bold of heart, and fought on foot. As they were resolved never to turn their backs upon the enemy, they wore no defensive armor, except in front; by which means they were less encumbered in fight. They made a trade of war, letting themselves out as mercenaries; but they espoused only a just quarrel, for they were devout and loyal Christians, and above all abhorred rapine as a great sin." [27] The Swiss had recently established their military renown by the discomfiture of Charles the Bold, when they first proved the superiority of infantry over the best-appointed chivalry of Europe. Their example no doubt contributed to the formation of that invincible Spanish infantry, which, under the Great Captain and his successors, may be said to have decided the fate of Europe for more than half a century. Among the foreigners was one from the distant isle of Britain, the earl of Rivers, or conde de Escalas, as he is called from his patronymic, Scales, by the Spanish writers. "There came from Britain," says Peter Martyr, "a cavalier, young, wealthy, and high-born. He was allied to the blood royal of England. He was attended by a beautiful train of household troops three hundred in number, armed after the fashion of their land with long-bow and battle-axe." This nobleman particularly distinguished himself by his gallantry in the second siege of Loja, in 1486. Having asked leave to fight after the manner of his country, says the Andalusian chronicler, he dismounted from his good steed, and putting himself at the head of his followers, armed like himself _en blanco_, with their swords at their thighs, and battle-axes in their hands, he dealt such terrible blows around him as filled even the hardy mountaineers of the north with astonishment. Unfortunately, just as the suburbs were carried, the good knight, as he was mounting a scaling-ladder, received a blow from a stone, which dashed out two of his teeth, and stretched him senseless on the ground. He was removed to his tent, where he lay some time under medical treatment; and, when he had sufficiently recovered, he received a visit from the king and queen, who complimented him on his prowess, and testified their sympathy for his misfortune. "It is little," replied he, "to lose a few teeth in the service of him, who has given me all. Our Lord," he added, "who reared this fabric, has only opened a window, in order to discern the more readily what passes within." A facetious response, says Peter Martyr, which gave uncommon satisfaction to the sovereigns. [28] The queen, not long after, testified her sense of the earl's services by a magnificent largess, consisting, among other things, of twelve Andalusian horses, two couches with richly wrought hangings and coverings of cloth of gold, with a quantity of fine linen, and sumptuous pavilions for himself and suite. The brave knight seems to have been satisfied with this state of the Moorish wars; for he soon after returned to England, and in 1488 passed over to France, where his hot spirit prompted him to take part in the feudal factions of that country, in which he lost his life, fighting for the duke of Brittany. [29] The pomp with which the military movements were conducted in these campaigns, gave the scene rather the air of a court pageant, than that of the stern array of war. The war was one, which, appealing both to principles of religion and patriotism, was well calculated to inflame the imaginations of the young Spanish cavaliers; and they poured into the field, eager to display themselves under the eye of their illustrious queen, who, as she rode through the ranks mounted on her war-horse, and clad in complete mail, afforded no bad personification of the genius of chivalry. The potent and wealthy barons exhibited in the camp all the magnificence of princes. The pavilions decorated with various-colored pennons, and emblazoned with the armorial bearings of their ancient houses, shone with a splendor, which a Castilian writer likens to that of the city of Seville. [30] They always appeared surrounded by a throng of pages in gorgeous liveries, and at night were preceded by a multitude of torches, which shed a radiance like that of day. They vied with each other in the costliness of their apparel, equipage, and plate, and in the variety and delicacy of the dainties with which their tables were covered. [31] Ferdinand and Isabella saw with regret this lavish ostentation, and privately remonstrated with some of the principal grandees on its evil tendency, especially in seducing the inferior and poorer nobility into expenditures beyond their means. This Sybarite indulgence, however, does not seem to have impaired the martial spirit of the nobles. On all occasions, they contended with each other for the post of danger. The duke del Infantado, the head of the powerful house of Mendoza, was conspicuous above all for the magnificence of his train. At the siege of Illora, 1486, he obtained permission to lead the storming party. As his followers pressed onwards to the breach, they were received with such a shower of missiles as made them falter for a moment. "What, my men," cried he, "do you fail me at this hour? Shall we be taunted with bearing more finery on our backs than courage in our hearts? Let us not, in God's name, be laughed at as mere holyday soldiers!" His vassals, stung by this rebuke, rallied, and, penetrating the breach, carried the place by the fury of their assault. [32] Notwithstanding the remonstrances of the sovereigns against this ostentation of luxury, they were not wanting in the display of royal state and magnificence on all suitable occasions. The Curate of Los Palacios has expatiated with elaborate minuteness on the circumstances of an interview between Ferdinand and Isabella in the camp before Moclin, in 1486, where the queen's presence was solicited for the purpose of devising a plan of future operations. A few of the particulars may be transcribed, though at the hazard of appearing trivial to readers, who take little interest in such details. On the borders of the Yeguas, the queen was met by an advanced corps, under the command of the marquis-duke of Cadiz, and, at the distance of a league and a half from Moclin, by the duke del Infantado, with the principal nobility and their vassals, splendidly accoutred. On the left of the road was drawn up in battle array the militia of Seville, and the queen, making her obeisance to the banner of that illustrious city, ordered it to pass to her right. The successive battalions saluted the queen as she advanced, by lowering their standards, and the joyous multitude announced with tumultuous acclamations her approach to the conquered city. The queen was accompanied by her daughter, the infanta Isabella, and a courtly train of damsels, mounted on mules richly caparisoned. The queen herself rode a chestnut mule, seated on a saddle-chair embossed with gold and silver. The housings were of a crimson color, and the bridle was of satin, curiously wrought with letters of gold. The infanta wore a skirt of fine velvet, over others of brocade; a scarlet mantilla of the Moorish fashion; and a black hat trimmed with gold embroidery. The king rode forward at the head of his nobles to receive her. He was dressed in a crimson doublet, with _chausses_, or breeches, of yellow satin. Over his shoulders was thrown a cassock or mantle of rich brocade, and a sopravest of the same materials concealed his cuirass. By his side, close girt, he wore a Moorish scimitar, and beneath his bonnet his hair was confined by a cap or headdress of the finest stuff. Ferdinand was mounted on a noble war-horse of a bright chestnut color. In the splendid train of chivalry which attended him, Bernaldez dwells with much satisfaction on the English lord Scales. He was followed by a retinue of five pages arrayed in costly liveries. He was sheathed in complete mail, over which was thrown a French surcoat of dark silk brocade. A buckler was attached by golden, clasps to his arm, and on his head he wore a white French hat with plumes. The caparisons of his steed were azure silk, lined with violet and sprinkled over with stars of gold, and swept the ground, as he managed his fiery courser with an easy horsemanship that excited general admiration. The king and queen, as they drew near, bowed thrice with formal reverence to each other. The queen at the same time raising her hat, remained in her coif or headdress, with her face uncovered; Ferdinand, riding up, kissed her affectionately on the cheek, and then, according to the precise chronicler, bestowed a similar mark of tenderness on his daughter Isabella, after giving her his paternal benediction. The royal party were then escorted to the camp, where suitable accommodations had been provided for the queen and her fair retinue. [33] It may readily be believed that the sovereigns did not neglect, in a war like the present, an appeal to the religious principle so deeply seated in the Spanish character. All their public acts ostentatiously proclaimed the pious nature of the work in which they were engaged. They were attended in their expeditions by churchmen of the highest rank, who not only mingled in the councils of the camp, but, like the bold bishop of Jaen, or the grand cardinal Mendoza, buckled on harness over rochet and hood, and led their squadrons to the field. [34] The queen at Cordova celebrated the tidings of every new success over the infidel, by solemn procession and thanksgiving, with her whole household, as well as the nobility, foreign ambassadors, and municipal functionaries. In like manner Ferdinand, on the return from his campaigns, was received at the gates of the city, and escorted in solemn pomp beneath a rich canopy of state to the cathedral church, where he prostrated himself in grateful adoration of the Lord of hosts. Intelligence of their triumphant progress in the war was constantly transmitted to the pope, who returned his benediction, accompanied by more substantial marks of favor, in bulls of crusade, and taxes on ecclesiastical rents. [35] The ceremonials observed on the occupation of a new conquest were such as to affect the heart no less than the imagination. "The royal _alferez_," says Marineo, "raised the standard of the Cross, the sign of our salvation, on the summit of the principal fortress; and all who beheld it prostrated themselves on their knees in silent worship of the Almighty, while the priests chanted the glorious anthem, _Te Deum laudamus_. The ensign or pennon of St. James, the chivalric patron of Spain, was then unfolded, and all invoked his blessed name. Lastly was displayed the banner of the sovereigns, emblazoned with the royal arms; at which the whole army shouted forth, as if with one voice, 'Castile, Castile!' After these solemnities, a bishop led the way to the principal mosque, which, after the rites of purification, he consecrated to the service of the true faith." The standard of the Cross above referred to was of massive silver, and was a present from Pope Sixtus the Fourth to Ferdinand, in whose tent it was always carried throughout these campaigns. An ample supply of bells, vases, missals, plate, and other sacred furniture, was also borne along with the camp, being provided by the queen for the purified mosques. [36] The most touching part of the incidents usually occurring at the surrender of a Moorish city was the liberation of the Christian captives immured in its dungeons. On the capture of Ronda, in 1485, more than four hundred of these unfortunate persons, several of them cavaliers of rank, some of whom had been taken in the fatal expedition of the Axarquia, were restored to the light of heaven. On being brought before Ferdinand, they prostrated themselves on the ground, bathing his feet with tears, while their wan and wasted figures, their dishevelled locks, their beards reaching down to their girdles, and their limbs loaded with heavy manacles, brought tears into the eye of every spectator. They were then commanded to present themselves before the queen at Cordova, who liberally relieved their necessities, and, after the celebration of public thanksgiving, caused them to be conveyed to their own homes. The fetters of the liberated captives were suspended in the churches, where they continued to be revered by succeeding generations as the trophies of Christian warfare. [37] Ever since the victory of Lucena, the sovereigns had made it a capital point of their policy to foment the dissensions of their enemies. The young king Abdallah, after his humiliating treaty with Ferdinand, lost whatever consideration he had previously possessed. Although the sultana Zoraya, by her personal address, and the lavish distribution of the royal treasures, contrived to maintain a faction for her son, the better classes of his countrymen despised him as a renegade, and a vassal of the Christian king. As their old monarch had become incompetent, from increasing age and blindness, to the duties of his station in these perilous times, they turned their eyes on his brother Abdallah, surnamed El Zagal, or "The Valiant," who had borne so conspicuous a part in the rout of the Axarquia. The Castilians depict this chief in the darkest colors of ambition and cruelty; but the Moslem writers afford no such intimation, and his advancement to the throne at that crisis seems to be in some measure justified by his eminent talents as a military leader. On his way to Granada, he encountered and cut to pieces a body of Calatrava knights from Alhama, and signalized his entrance into his new capital by bearing along the bloody trophies of heads dangling from his saddlebow, after the barbarous fashion long practised in these wars. [38] It was observed that the old king Abul Hacen did not long survive his brother's accession. [39] The young king Abdallah sought the protection of the Castilian sovereigns in Seville, who, true to their policy, sent him back into his own dominions with the means of making headway against his rival. The _alfakies_ and other considerate persons of Granada, scandalized at these fatal feuds, effected a reconciliation, on the basis of a division of the kingdom between the parties. But wounds so deep could not be permanently healed. The site of the Moorish capital was most propitious to the purposes of faction. It covered two swelling eminences, divided from each other by the deep waters of the Darro. The two factions possessed themselves respectively of these opposite quarters. Abdallah was not ashamed to strengthen himself by the aid of Christian mercenaries; and a dreadful conflict was carried on for fifty days and nights, within the city, which swam with the blood that should have been shed only in its defence. [40] Notwithstanding these auxiliary circumstances, the progress of the Christians was comparatively slow. Every cliff seemed to be crowned with a fortress; and every fortress was defended with the desperation of men willing to bury themselves under its ruins. The old men, women, and children, on occasions of a siege, were frequently despatched to Granada. Such was the resolution, or rather ferocity of the Moors, that Malaga closed its gates against the fugitives from Alora, after its surrender, and even massacred some of them in cold blood. The eagle eye of El Zagal seemed to take in at a glance the whole extent of his little territory, and to detect every vulnerable point in his antagonist, whom he encountered where he least expected it; cutting off his convoys, surprising his foraging parties, and retaliating by a devastating inroad on the borders. [41] No effectual and permanent resistance, however, could be opposed to the tremendous enginery of the Christians. Tower and town fell before it. Besides the principal towns of Cartama, Coin, Setenil, Ronda, Marbella, Illora, termed by the Moors "the right eye," Moclin, "the shield" of Granada, and Loja, after a second and desperate siege in the spring of 1486, Bernaldez enumerates more than seventy subordinate places in the Val de Cartama, and thirteen others after the fall of Marbella. Thus the Spaniards advanced their line of conquest more than twenty leagues beyond the western frontier of Granada. This extensive tract they strongly fortified and peopled, partly with Christian subjects, and partly with Moorish, the original occupants of the soil, who were secured in the possession of their ancient lands, under their own law. [42] Thus the strong posts, which may be regarded as the exterior defences of the city of Granada, were successively carried. A few positions alone remained of sufficient strength to keep the enemy at bay. The most considerable of these was Malaga, which from its maritime situation afforded facilities for a communication with the Barbary Moors, that the vigilance of the Castilian cruisers could not entirely intercept. On this point, therefore, it was determined to concentrate all the strength of the monarchy, by sea and land, in the ensuing campaign of 1487. * * * * * Two of the most important authorities for the war of Granada are Fernando del Pulgar and Antonio de Lebrija, or Nebrissensis, as he is called from the Latin _Nebrissa_. Few particulars have been preserved respecting the biography of the former. He was probably a native of Pulgar, near Toledo. The Castilian writers recognize certain provincialisms in his style belonging to that district. He was secretary to Henry IV., and was charged with various confidential functions by him. He seems to have retained his place on the accession of Isabella, by whom he was appointed national historiographer in 1482, when, from certain remarks in his letters, it would appear he was already advanced in years. This office, in the fifteenth century, comprehended, in addition to the more obvious duties of an historian, the intimate and confidential relations of a private secretary. "It was the business of the chronicler," says Bernaldez, "to carry on foreign correspondence in the service of his master, acquainting himself with whatever was passing in other courts and countries, and, by the discreet and conciliatory tenor of his epistles, to allay such feuds as might arise between the king and his nobility, and establish harmony between them." From this period Pulgar remained near the royal person, accompanying the queen in her various progresses through the kingdom, as well as in her military expeditions into the Moorish territory. He was consequently an eye-witness of many of the warlike scenes which he describes, and, from his situation at the court, had access to the most ample and accredited sources of information. It is probable he did not survive the capture of Granada, as his history falls somewhat short of that event. Pulgar's chronicle, in the portion containing a retrospective survey of events previous to 1482, may be charged with gross inaccuracy. But, in all the subsequent period, it may be received as perfectly authentic, and has all the air of impartiality. Every circumstance relating to the conduct of the war is developed with equal fulness and precision. His manner of narration, though prolix, is perspicuous, and may compare favorably with that of contemporary writers. His sentiments may compare still more advantageously in point of liberality, with those of the Castilian historians of a later age. Pulgar left some other works, of which his commentary on the ancient satire of "Mingo Revulgo," his "Letters," and his "Claros Varones," or sketches of illustrious men, have alone been published. The last contains notices of the most distinguished individuals of the court of Henry IV., which, although too indiscriminately encomiastic, are valuable subsidiaries to an accurate acquaintance with the prominent actors of the period. The last and most elegant edition of Pulgar's Chronicle was published at Valencia in 1780, from the press of Benito Montfort, in large folio. Antonio de Lebrija was one of the most active and erudite scholars of this period. He was born in the province of Andalusia, in 1444. After the usual discipline at Salamanca, he went at the age of nineteen to Italy, where he completed his education in the university of Bologna. He returned to Spain ten years after, richly stored with classical learning and the liberal arts that were then taught in the flourishing schools of Italy. He lost no time in dispensing to his countrymen his various acquisitions. He was appointed to the two chairs of grammar and poetry (a thing unprecedented) in the university of Salamanca, and lectured at the same time in these distinct departments. He was subsequently preferred by Cardinal Ximenes to a professorship in his university of Alcalá de Henares, where his services were liberally requited, and where he enjoyed the entire confidence of his distinguished patron, who consulted him on all matters affecting the interests of the institution. Here he continued, delivering his lectures and expounding the ancient classics to crowded audiences, to the advanced age of seventy-eight, when he was carried off by an attack of apoplexy. Lebrija, besides his oral tuition, composed works on a great variety of subjects, philological, historical, theological, etc. His emendation of the sacred text was visited with the censure of the Inquisition, a circumstance which will not operate to his prejudice with posterity. Lebrija was far from being circumscribed by the narrow sentiments of his age. He was warmed with a generous enthusiasm for letters, which kindled a corresponding flame in the bosoms of his disciples, among whom may be reckoned some of the brightest names in the literary annals of the period. His instruction effected for classical literature in Spain what the labors of the great Italian scholars of the fifteenth century did for it in their country; and he was rewarded with the substantial gratitude of his own age, and such empty honors as could be rendered by posterity. For very many years, the anniversary of his death was commemorated by public services, and a funeral panegyric, in the university of Alcalá. The circumstances attending the composition of his Latin Chronicle, so often quoted in this history, are very curious. Carbajal says, that he delivered Pulgar's Chronicle, after that writer's death, into Lebrija's hands for the purpose of being translated into Latin. The latter proceeded in his task, as far as the year 1486. His history, however, can scarcely be termed a translation, since, although it takes up the same thread of incident, it is diversified by many new ideas and particular facts. This unfinished performance was found among Lebrija's papers, after his decease, with a preface containing not a word of acknowledgment to Pulgar. It was accordingly published for the first time, in 1545 (the edition referred to in this history), by his son Sancho, as an original production of his father. Twenty years after, the first edition of Pulgar's original Chronicle was published at Valladolid, from the copy which belonged to Lebrija, by his grandson Antonio. This work appeared also as Lebrija's. Copies however of Pulgar's Chronicle were preserved in several private libraries; and two years later, 1567, his just claims were vindicated by an edition at Saragossa, inscribed with his name as its author. Lebrija's reputation has sustained some injury from this transaction, though most undeservedly. It seems probable, that he adopted Pulgar's text as the basis of his own, intending to continue the narrative to a later period. His unfinished manuscript being found among his papers after his death, without reference to any authority, was naturally enough given to the world as entirely his production. It is more strange, that Pulgar's own Chronicle, subsequently printed as Lebrija's, should have contained no allusion to its real author. The History, although composed as far as it goes with sufficient elaboration and pomp of style, is one that adds, on the whole, but little to the fame of Lebrija. It was at best but adding a leaf to the laurel on his brow, and was certainly not worth a plagiarism. FOOTNOTES [1] "Por esa puerte de Elvira sale muy gran cabalgada: cuanto del _hidalgo moro_, cuánto de la yegua baya. * * * * * * "Cuánta pluma y gentíleza, cuánto capellar de grana, cuánto bayo borceguf, cuánto raso que se esmalta, "Cuánto de espuela de oro, cuánta estribera de plata! Toda es gente valerosa, y esperta para batalla. "En medio de todos ellos va el rey Chico de Granada, mirando las damas moras de las torres del Alhambra. "La reina mora su madre de esta manera le habla; 'Alá te guarde, mi hijo, Mahoma vaya en tu guarda.'" Hyta, Guerras de Granada, tom. i. p. 232. [2] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 36.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. pp. 267-271.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 60.--Pedraza, Antiguedad de Granada, fol. 10.-- Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 12. [3] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, part. 3, cap. 20. The _donzeles_, of which Diego de Cordova was alcayde, or captain, were a body of young cavaliers, originally brought up as pages in the royal household, and organized as a separate corps of the militia. Salazar de Mendoza, Dignidades, p. 259.--See also Morales, Obras, tom. xiv. p. 80. [4] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 36.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 302.--Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 1483.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 61.--Pulgar, Crónica, cap. 20.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 12. [5] Garibay, Compendio, tom. ii. p. 637.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, ubi supra.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 61.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 36.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. pp. 271-274. The various details, even to the site of the battle, are told in the usual confused and contradictory manner by the garrulous chroniclers of the period. All authorities, however, both Christian and Moorish, agree as to its general results. [6] Mendoza, Dignidades, p. 382.--Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 4, dial. 9. [7] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 36.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, pp. 271-274. [8] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 23.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 12. Charles V. does not seem to have partaken of his grandfather's delicacy in regard to an interview with his royal captive, or indeed to any part of his deportment towards him. [9] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, ubi supra.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, cap. 36. [10] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, loc. cit.--Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, cap. 36. [11] The term _cavalgada_ seems to be used indifferently by the ancient Spanish writers to represent a marauding party, the foray itself, or the booty taken in it. [12] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 22.--Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 6. [13] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 32, 41.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv lib. 20, cap. 59.--Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decades, ii. lib. 3, cap. 5. [14] Machiavelli, Arte della Guerra, lib. 3. [15] Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 6. According to Gibbon, the cannon used by Mahomet in the siege of Constantinople, about thirty years before this time, threw stone balls, which weighed above 600 pounds. The measure of the bore was twelve palms. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. 68. [16] Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 6. We get a more precise notion of the awkwardness with which the artillery was served in the infancy of the science, from a fact recorded in the Chronicle of John II., that at the siege of Setenil, in 1407, five lombards were able to discharge only forty shot in the course of a day. We have witnessed an invention, in our time, that of our ingenious countryman, Jacob Perkins, by which a gun, with the aid of that miracle- worker, steam, is enabled to throw a thousand bullets in a single minute. [17] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 174.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 44. Some writers, as the Abbé Mignot, (Histoire des Rois Catholiques Ferdinand et Isabelle, (Paris, 1766,) tom. i. p. 273,) have referred the invention of bombs to the siege of Ronda. I find no authority for this. Pulgar's words are, "They made many iron balls, large and small, some of which they cast in a mould, having reduced the iron to a state of fusion, so that it would run like any other metal." [18] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 51.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 82. [19] Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, (Valencia, 1776,) pp. 73, 74.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. lib. 20, cap. 59.--Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. p. 168. According to Mendoza, a decoction of the quince furnished the most effectual antidote known against this poison. [20] Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 304.--Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decades, ii. lib. 4, cap. 2.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 76.-- Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 12. Pulgar, who is by no means bigoted for the age, seems to think the literal terms granted by Ferdinand to the enemies of the faith stand in need of perpetual apology. See Reyes Católicos, cap. 44 et passim. [21] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 75.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 21, 33, 42.--Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decades, ii. lib. 8, cap. 6.-- Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 13. [22] Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., tom. vi. Ilust. 6. [23] Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decades, ii. lib. 3, cap. 6.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 31. [24] After another daring achievement, the sovereigns granted him and his heirs the royal suit worn by the monarchs of Castile on Ladyday; a present, says Abarca, not to be estimated by its cost. Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 308. [25] Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, ubi supra.--Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., lib 1, epist. 41.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 68.--Zurita, Anales, tom. iv. cap. 58. [26] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 31, 67, 69.--Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decades, ii. lib. 2, cap. 10. [27] Reyes Católicos, cap. 21. [28] Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., lib. 1, epist. 62.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 78. [29] Guillaume de Ialigny, Histoire de Charles VIII., (Paris, 1617,) pp. 90-94. [30] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 75.--This city, even before the New World had poured its treasures into its lap, was conspicuous for its magnificence, as the ancient proverb testifies. Zuñiga, Annales de Sevilla, p. 183. [31] Pulgar. Reyes Católicos, cap. 41. [32] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 59.--This nobleman, whose name was Iñigo Lopez de Mendoza, was son of the first duke, Diego Hurtado, who supported Isabella's claims to the crown. Oviedo was present at the siege of Illora, and gives a minute description of his appearance there. "He came," says that writer, "attended by a numerous body of cavaliers and gentlemen, as befitted so great a lord. He displayed all the luxuries which belong to a time of peace; and his tables, which were carefully served, were loaded with rich and curiously wrought plate, of which he had a greater profusion than any other grandee in the kingdom." In another place he says, "The duke Iñigo was a perfect Alexander for his liberality, in all his actions princely, maintaining unbounded hospitality among his numerous vassals and dependents, and beloved throughout Spain. His palaces were garnished with the most costly tapestries, jewels, and rich stuffs of gold and silver. His chapel was filled with accomplished singers and musicians; his falcons, hounds, and his whole hunting establishment, including a magnificent stud of horses, not to be matched by any other nobleman in the kingdom. Of the truth of all which," concludes Oviedo, "I myself have been an eye-witness, and enough others can testify." See Oviedo, (Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 8,) who has given the genealogy of the Mendozas and Mendozinos, in all its endless ramifications. [33] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 80.--The lively author of "A Year in Spain" describes, among other suits of armor still to be seen in the museum of the armory at Madrid, those worn by Ferdinand and his illustrious consort. "In one of the most conspicuous stations is the suit of armor usually worn by Ferdinand the Catholic. He seems snugly seated upon his war-horse with a pair of red velvet breeches, after the manner of the Moors, with lifted lance and closed visor. There are several suits of Ferdinand and of his queen Isabella, who was no stranger to the dangers of a battle. By the comparative heights of the armor, Isabella would seem to be the bigger of the two, as she certainly was the better." A Year in Spain, by a young American, (Boston, 1829,) p. 116. [34] Cardinal Mendoza, in the campaign of 1485, offered the queen to raise a body of 3000 horse, and march at its head to the relief of Alhama, and at the same time to supply her with such sums of money as might be necessary in the present exigency. Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 50. [35] In 1486, we find Ferdinand and Isabella performing a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James of Compostella. Carbajal, Anales, MS., año 86. [36] L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 173.--Bernaldez, Reyes. Católicos, MS., cap. 82, 87. [37] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 47.--Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 75. [38] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 37.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, tom. iii. pp. 276, 281, 282.--Abarca, Reyes de Aragon, tom. ii. fol. 304. "El enjaeza el caballo Be las cabezas de fama," says one of the old Moorish ballads. A garland of Christian heads seems to have been deemed no unsuitable present from a Moslem knight to his lady love. Thus one of the Zegries triumphantly asks, "¿Que Cristianos habeis muerto, O escalado que murallas? ¿O que cabezas famosas Aveis presentado a damas?" This sort of trophy was also borne by the Christian cavaliers. Examples of this may be found even as late as the siege of Granada. See, among others, the ballad beginning "A vista de los dos Reyes." [39] The Arabic historian alludes to the vulgar report of the old king's assassination by his brother, but leaves us in the dark in regard to his own opinion of its credibility. "Algunos dicen que le procuro la muerte su hermano el Rey Zagal; pero Dios lo sabe, que es el unico eterno e inmutable."--Conde, Domination de los Arabes, tom. in. cap. 38. [40] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. cap. 38.--Cardonne, Hist. d'Afrique et d'Espagne, pp. 291, 292.--Mariana, Hist. de España, lib. 25, cap. 9.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 12. "Muy revuelta anda Granada en armas y fuego ardiendo, y los ciudadanos de ella duras muertes padeciendo; Por tres reyes que hay esquivos, cada uno pretendiendo el mando, cetro y corona de Granada y su gobierno," etc. See this old _romance_, mixing up fact and fiction, with more of the former than usual, in Hyta, Guerras de Granada, tom. i. p. 292. [41] Among other achievements, Zagal surprised and beat the count of Cabra in a night attack upon Moclin, and wellnigh retaliated on that nobleman his capture of the Moorish king Abdallah. Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 48. [42] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 75.--Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 48.--Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decades, ii. lib. 3, cap. 5, 7; lib. 4, cap. 2, 3.--Marmol, Rebelion de Moriscos, lib. 1, cap. 12. END OF VOL. I.